#anyway this post has been in my drafts for too long. be released my child
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
marshmellowtea · 3 days ago
Text
celia hates basically all of chris's friends by virtue of them Being Chris's Friends (it personally offends her that there are people who love him better than she ever could in his life), but she has a special distaste for sandra, who she not only dislikes for being a dirty whore promiscuous, but she's also openly accused her of trying to steal chris from her, an accusation that held no weight when it was first leveled at her cuz sandra hadn't thought she cared about chris like that but it slowly became a self fulfilling prophecy as she spent more time with him and his parents and decided "yeah, actually, i am going to steal your son from you and your creep husband you piece of shit, fuck you celia fuck you fuck youfuck you"
#sandra starts noticing the way chris wilts with embarrassment and shame when celia insults either of them#or the way he flinches when raymond gets too close to him#and promptly chooses to take her accusation as a challenge because haha wow this is not a safe household for him is it celia!#for the record i think celia also detests that raymond clearly likes sandra but she's more concerned about her taking chris away from her#it's normal for husbands to get a wandering eye after all. it doesn't necessarily mean anything. not if she ignores it hard enough.#chris however...........that's her loyal little lapdog whom she hates but can't stand to not be around her#and sons *are* meant to leave eventually as much as celia dislikes the idea of him being free to make his own choices and embarrass her#she just needs to make sure that he goes to someone who'll help her keep that tight leash she has on him. someone who'll let her intervene#in his life if he veers off the path she wants him on. a path that constantly changes with her whims because it's more about being able to#control him than having any coherent end result#and she knows for a fact that sandra will help chris loosen that leash if she gets too close so she's immediately on the defensive the#second she meets her. she knows she'll be an Issue#the thing is though is it's partly her own fault because sandra might not have have gotten so invested if celia hadn't egged her on lol#i like her being a spite motivated person under the right circumstances. hehe#the goes wrong show#chris bean#sandra wilkinson#celia bean#chrissandra#chris&celia#abuse tw#misogyny tw#? idk if that's the best tag to use here just lmk i guess#marshy speaks#gotta say btw writing celia's fucked up patriarchy ridden inner monologue is so fun she has so many issues and problems#horrible woman. i hate her <3#i'm such a yapper i did not mean for these tags to get so long ghldkjsafkadsf#could've been their own post. but also. no they couldn't have. y'know#anyway this post has been in my drafts for too long. be released my child
13 notes · View notes
pyrrhocorax · 1 year ago
Note
4 10 20 35 !
OKAY I know you asked this a bit ago sorry i got busy!!! work!!! turtle took a tiny chunk out of my finger!! the usual! y'know What's a headcanon you need to work out? i am blanking real hard with this but i Guess what i consider to be estonia's true name b/c von bock is von bullshit has been a constant Thought of mine for a long time. sme goes for a lot of nations that have bad canon names or no canon names like what the FUCK would i name them. it takes so much effort for me to decide. How long have you been in the fandom? What's your lore? i've been around a while! i can't date exactly when i started but it was at least sometime in 2008. i Think it was in the late fall of 2007, i've been trying to do the backwards math and i think this makes sense timeline wise, but my memory isn't exactly great. i figured out yesterday i am Pretty sure i was into hetalia before den/nor/ice were released?? which is. wild to me. anyway the story is that i occasionally saw hetalia fanart in passing and i was like. what the fuck is this but i don't care enough to investigate. and then i watched darker than black and was like wow i gotta tell my (now ex-)friend about this new cool anime darker then black b/c i am enjoying it a lot and i think she would too! and then my friend was like "i am going to totally ignore you. watch this thing called hetalia instead. you like other countries and history and languages and shit you should like this it's so funny" and i watched it and i didn't find it as funny as she claimed but i thought the concept itself was utterly Fascinating and i became Obsessed. my initial favs were japan/prussia/estonia initially, all for radically different reasons. i can elaborate on that if prompted it's just more text than i care to put here. then the den/nor/ice dropped and we had some comics with the nordic 5 and i was like oH FUCK these character dynamics between them are So Fun!!! and i have been in Hell every since. this is my third time getting back into hetalia after swearing it off for good and uhhh i think i have just been in denial this entire time that i am stuck here forever. Favorite Hetalia relationship dynamic? Any combination of the Anko Trio without question. they're such an interesting little complicated group. Post a Hetalia sketch or draft you want an excuse to share i am not very good at drawing and draw from the perspective of a more refined 8 year old child or something (positive). but i also don't have anything currently drafted writing wise that feels complete enough either so i am gonna share a dumb doodle i did and also share some upcoming things i plan on doing.
Tumblr media
one of the chapters of the SOS sequel is going to be called "The Joy Machine" and i am. very excited about that.
also have a neat NorAus idea i am obsessed with and will probably write soon-ish. once i sleep and think a bunch
5 notes · View notes
unkownknowledge · 4 years ago
Text
This post is a sort of collaboration with @golden-wingseos who is kindly letting me use their toxic traits post as a base for writing some Fluff! Check 'em out! Hope you enjoy.
Warnings: Albedo might be a OOC. This is my first attempt at more serious writing. And of course you should always remember that problems in a relationship might need more than a short talk.
Edit: request are open, if anyone reading this likes it feel free to request. Rules are pinned.
Now onto my post:
_____________________
Albedo: your heart is real
_____________________________
-you knew Albedo's secret, you knew his feelings, you knew enough to know he didn't want to love you.
-yet he did.
-you also believed he shouldn't be chained to someone else's wishes, especially when it wouldn't bring him happiness.
You were sitting in Albedo's lap, your head on his shoulder as you gently played with his hair.
"I'm going to destroy monstadt you know," he said, like he always does in an attempt to push you away, "that includes the people"
"Then I'll just stop you." You reply calmly.
"Then I'll have to kill you."
"So then you won't destroy monstadt."
Albedo was confused, you usually told him you would stop him but you've never said he wouldn't do it to begin with.
Albedo grabbed your shoulders and made you look at him, "what does that mean? Why wouldn't I destroy monstadt?"
"Because you would have to kill me." You said smiling.
'That damn smile' he thought, "why would I not destroy monstadt, not fulfill my master's wish, just because you would need to die?"
"Because you love me."
Albedo pushed you off and got on top of you, holding a knife to your throat, "would someone who loved you so this?"
"Yes" you never stopped smiling at him.
"Exa-wait what?" Albedo was dumbfounded, not comprehending what you meant.
"You're trying to push me away," you grabbed his shaking hands and pushed them down, causing him to release the knife, "because you don't want to feel any remorse, because you don't want to hurt me."
"Who says-"
"And I know you don't want to destroy monstadt," you grabbed his head and brought him closer, "because you love it there."
"I'm not real, I'm just a tool my master made to carry out their dreams. Stop treating me like a person."
"But you are a person, and as a person you can choose what you want."
"Well I want monstadt destroyed!"
"Even if that meant killing me?"
Albedo was shocked, he never felt conflicted before. Not in following his master's wishes, but now? At your words? He doubted every desire he's had.
You placed his hand on his heart, "feel that?"
"That's my heart..."
"So your heart is real. Now tell me, what does a tool need with a heart?"
Albedo didn't answer.
"Your master might want to destroy monstadt, but who says they want you to? Why give a weapon a heart?"
You didn't give Albedo time to respond before you kissed him.
"Your heart is real. Just like your love for me."
Albedo sat up and pulled you back into his lap, "you're an anomaly you know that? No one else can make me feel this way." He looked into your eyes and put his hands on your cheeks, "I guess I can hold off on destroying monstadt, atleast until I conclude my research on you."
"Well, let's start experimenting."
_____________________________
Hope that didn't suck.
_____________________________
Diluc: you'll get hurt if you love me
_____________________________
-Diluc has been avoiding you for a month now, he hasn't even gone out to do his darkknight hero duties.
-he's just locked himself away in his manor, ordering his servants to not let you in.
-Diluc, however, forgets that you met because you tried stealing from his house.
You were fed up with Diluc, he kept pushing you away and now he has CROSSED THE LINE! You're going to break into his room and make him explain why he's been avoiding you, it's been a year since you and him went on a date and now this? Something is seriously wrong.
You climbed up to the window sill and lock picked your way in, you walked over to Diluc's bed and sat down, waiting for him to return.
Diluc entered the door and, without looking, fell on his bed right next to you.
"You look tired, almost like you took the long way home just to avoid the route I take."
Diluc shot up and looked at you in shock.
You crossed you arms over your chest, "I want an explanation."
"(Y/n) what do you m-"
"You know full well! And don't call me (y/n)! You always call me 'dearest' or 'honey's, in fact you do a lot of things you seem to have forgotten about, like dinners, and tea times, and DATES!"
"Please I-"
"No! No running away, no excuses!" You grabbed his shoulders and turned him to you, "why the hell are you avoiding me!?"
Diluc looked up and saw you were crying. This isn't what he wanted, this is the opposite of what he wanted!
Diluc looked away, unable to face you, "Because I want you to hate me."
Your eyes widened, "w-what?"
"I want you to leave me, in a way that won't make you sad to leave me."
"Why!?"
"BECAUSE YOU'LL GET HURT IF YOU LOVE ME!"
You jumped at him and held him close, and yourself closer, "idiot."
"What?"
"I said," you managed between sobs, "your an idiot, Diluc. I knew full well what I was doing when I fell in love with you, and I did it anyway. What-what gi-gives you the right t-to abandon me now?"
Diluc was shocked to say the least, he didn't know what to say.
"I know how dangerous being near you is, how many enemies you have, how likely I am to die, but Diluc," you look up at him with tear stained eyes, "I won't be able to live another day, not without you in it."
Diluc pulled you onto his lap and held you, enveloping as much as he could.
"(Y/n)- honey, I'm sorry," he cried in your hair, "I'm so sorry, so very very sorry. I just wanted to protect you, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you got hurt because of me."
"But you did hurt me, you hurt my heart."
"I know.. but please," he tilted you head so your eyes would meet his, "let me heal it."
_____________________________
Kaeya: no more secrets
_____________________________
I wrote this perfectly but the draft didn't save. If it's bad blame my rage.
_____________________________
Another day without you.
Another day spent drinking.
Kaeya remembered that day clearly, more clearly than he wanted.
Kaeya was happily walking home to you.
He was always happy on the way home, but he was happiest when he saw your smile. Lately though you've been acting strangely, he was going to talk to you about it today.
"Honey I'm home-" he stopped, it was quiet.
You were never quiet.
He decided you were just out, so he waited.
And waited.
And wait-
"Where are you?"
Kaeya reached for his drink, but he couldn't find it.
"Eh Dilc, wers meh ferkin dernk!?"
Diluc sighed, "sober up."
Kaeya slammed his hands on the bar and grabbed Diluc by the collar, "WAH SHELD AH BEH SURBER!? WAHTS DA FEKEN PEINT IB TAY AIN ERE WID MEH!?"
Kaeya fell backwards and cried, "wad tay lev meh Dilc?"
Diluc sighed and walked around the bar to his brother, "sober up," he picked Kaeya up, "and I'll tell you."
Diluc carried Kaeya to the winery.
Next day
Kaeya woke up with a scream, "(Y/N) WAIT!"
He looked around and saw he was in an unfamiliar bedroom.
Diluc walked in with water and breakfast, "are you sober?"
Kaeya held his head, "I wish I wasn't."
"Well you'll want to be," Diluc set his brother's breakfast down on the nightstand, "I'm going to tell you how to get (y/n) back."
Kaeya jumped at his brother, knocking them both to the ground as he held the red head's throat, "WHERE ARE THEY?!"
Diluc calmly pushed Kaeya off, who was weak as hell right now, "calm down, you need you to understand why they left or they'll just leave you again."
Kaeya just laid there.
"Good. Now listen because this is something it took me a long time to realize too: communication is key to a relationship."
"What?"
"Did you ever tell (y/n) anything about your work? About your dealings in the dark? About your 'off the clock projects'?"
Kaeay didn't speak.
"I thought so. Kaeya you need to talk to them about your life, if you don't you'll just drive them away."
"BUT I ALREADY DID!" Kaeya shouted as he slammed his fist on the ground.
"True, but I can bring you to them. But you have to swear you'll tell them EVERYTHING."
Kaeya nodded.
Diluc and Kaeya took a trip to Liyue, to a remote village you were living in.
"They're in here. Remember Kaeya, no secrets."
You opened the door at Kaeya's knocking, before immediate closing it.
"Go away Kaeya."
"(Y/n) please, I want to make amends."
"How? Batting your eyelashes? A kiss on the cheek? Sex? Well? What have you come up with as a substitute to trust this time?"
"No. No substitute, no lies, none of that. I'm here to tell you the truth (y/n)."
You opened the door, "no more secrets?"
"No, darling, no more secrets."
_____________________________
Childe: you give me strength
_____________________________
Childe met you when you first joined the fatui, and from the first day he was smitten. You always strived to get better, never once did your lack if vision keep you from being powerful nor keep you from getting more powerful. You were his ideal person for him.
But you didn't feel like it.
You always worried, 'what if I lost? What if I can't get stronger? What if I'm weak?' Were constant thoughts going through your head. You knew Childe was greedy for power, how he wanted nothing but power, how he would do anything for it, and as far as you were aware he cut off anything that held him back.
Even you.
You pushed yourself to far everytime you trained, to the point you were getting weaker by how little time you took to recuperate. But you never realized nor did you let anyone know out fear for what Childe would do if he saw you being so insecure in yourself.
You realized you were getting weaker and weaker, and that scared you, scared you to the point you decided to take drastic measures.
You decided you would prove how strong you are.
With Childe
Childe sighed as he wrote yet another debt collection warrant, he was tired from the month long mission he just got back from and now he had to do this. He decided he would indulge himself and pamper you when he got home, after all nothing pleased him more than seeing your constantly stern face blush and smile as he showered you in gifts and affection. And while he wasn't exactly good at reading people in an emotional sense, even he could tell you were insecure about something so he wanted to talk to you about it, maybe even introduce you to his family.
He wad actually getting lost in happy thoughts when a collector ran in, "HARBINGER! I HAVE URGENT NEWS!"
Childe glared at him, "what is it, I was thinking about my snow flower!"
"IT'S ABOUT THEM SIR!"
Childe snapped the pen between his fingers and stoop, "what happened."
"Sir they-"
"WHAT HAPPENED!"
"SIR! (Y/N) HAS GONE OFF TO TRY AND SLAY A GEO REGISVINE!"
Childe immediately bolted over his desk and sped through the bank, out of the harbor, and across the country of Liyue at speeds lost would think belonged to Baal themself.
He got to the regisvine just in time to block an attack that would have killed you.
It took him mere seconds to completely demolish it.
Childe approached your crumpled form, you could barely move and your bones were probably all broken.
"Ch-chi-lde..." you got out before blacking out from pain.
Next day
You woke up, everything below your chin was in a caste and you felt about as bad as you looked.
"Let me through!" You heard the one voice you didn't want to hear right now.
"Sir please they have to r-"
"DID I FUCKING STUTTER!"
A doctor was flung through the door and Childe charges right at you.
'This is it,' you thought, closing your eyes, 'he's going to cast me away, like I always knew-'
Your thoughts were interrupted by the feeling of lips against your own, and a wet feeling against your cheeks.
You opened your eyes in time to see Childe pull away from you, "what were you thinking you idiot?"
You looked at Childe, dumbfounded.
"WHY DID YOU DO SOMETHING THAT STUPID!?"
"W-what?"
"Why did you try and kill a regisvine on your own?!"
You looked away.
"WHY (Y/N)!? WHY!?"
"Because I don't want you to leave me..."
Childe recoiled at that, what did you mean you didn't want him to leave you?
"Why in the world would I want to leave you? Your my snow flower."
"Yes but..." you didn't want to say it.
"Come on, snow flower," Childe put his fingers under your chin and gently made you meet his gaze, "you can tell me anything."
"You...you only care for power...and I could tell I was only getting weaker no matter how much I tried, I was....I was afraid....afraid you would leave me...."
"(Y/n)," Childe said lovingly, yet with obvious sadness, "please, I dont want power just for power's sake.... I'm so sorry that I seemed that way to you."
"But you always seem so...dedicated to getting power..."
"Yes, but power is simply a means to an end," Childe chuckles, "I have a family, with a lot of siblings, and I care about all of them. I do so much for them, and every bit of power: be it with more, status, or pure power they are what drives me to get it. I'll admit though that it has developed into a bit of a....addiction, I guess you could call it, to battle and by extension to getting stronger. I-I didn't realize how much I let that take over-"
"No!" You shout, "no! Don't apologize for that. That's why I love you: your drive for power, your willingness to never settle, everything you do you do for power. I don't care if it's because you like battle or you like your family, because I love it. I love you. And I don't want to hold you back, and because of that I didn't want to be so weak that you had to....dispose of me..."
Childe kneeled besides you, "(y/n). You never have to worry about holding me back. Remember what you said? Even if I do, granted in a much smaller part than I originally stated, want power to protect my family, it is also very true that I want power for nothing more than to have it. But you could never hold me back from that, in fact you give me strength, (y/n)."
You chuckled, "that's so cheesey Childe."
"Well it's true, and the only thing more true is this:" Childe leans towards you, "I. Love. You."
129 notes · View notes
jinxthequeergirl · 4 years ago
Text
Ghost of The Past
Michael myers x reader (Ending 1)
Tumblr media
Summary: Halloween always brings back memories from your child hood, turns out memories aren't the only thing coming back
Warning: swearing, this ending involves lots of death and murder
So this has just been sitting in my drafts cause its kinda bad but its been so long since i posted writing so here
~~~~~~
"Michael!? Where'd ya go!?" You yelled into the open door, you huffed after a few seconds and pulled up the skirt of your princess costume to make your journey up the house steps easier.
 "Michale come on! All the good candy is gonna be gone if we do go nooww!" You whined stomping your foot, now yelling up the staircase for your friend. Suddenly there was a scream from upstairs, it startled you for a moment.
"Judy!? Michale!?" You quickly ran up the stairs to investigate. Stopping at the top of the stairs when you found him standing in the door frame of his sisters bedroom with a kitchen knife dripping with a dark red liquid. 
"M...m...mich...michale!?" You stuttered nervously, stumbling backward away from him slightly. 
"This isn't a fun...fun game anymore...tell judy to stop it....Stop it michael!" He slowly moved twoard you before slashing at you. you yellped just barely dodging the blade, it caught the sleve of your costume ripping it. "MICHAEL!" he slashed at you again you slid and fell down the stairs face first. "Y/n!? Oh my god!" You looked up seeing mister and misses myers running up the drive way through the still open door.
Miss Myers scooped you off the floor holding you close checking you for injury and clearing your tears. "Michael what have you done!?"
You sat up in bed quickly trying to shake the memory. It was dark now, the only light coming from the tv filling the room with dim blue light.
The phone rang,pulling you from your half sleep filled brain. "Roofus, scram!" You shooed the cat away from the table the phone sat on and answered it. "Bout damn time."
"Hello to you too PJ." You said sarcastically.
"Yea yea hello, good evening,all that crap listen throw on some clothes that slightly resembles a costume and be ready in the next half hour we've got a party to go to!"
You rolled your eyes.
"No thank you, I don't do that shit remember?"
"C'mon!!! Just one halloween party, I promise you one hour and we can leave and I dunno do whatever boring thing you want to do."
"I appreciate the offer but no thanks."
"Ugh Fine, can you at least switch with Jamie? Shes watching her neighbors kids tonight and she would much rather go."
You sighed. "Sure whatever."
"You're the best, listen I'll be there in like 20 to come get you and make the switch be ready!"
Rolling your eyes again you hung up the phone.
Briefely catching what the news was saying about an escaped mental patient before shutting it iff and going up to change.
Carefully walking up the stairs so that you didnt trip in the dark your sock stuck to something wet and sticky at the top.
"Oh god! ROOFUS how many times Have I told you! To take your kill...out..side…" you trailed off when you looked up at your bedroom door to see the said cat dead and pinned to the door.
It's blood dripping down the door and pooling below it.
"Oh fuck!" You yelped, slipping back onto the floor.
You scooted back slightly hitting something that wasn't the wall.
You let out a frightened whimper and slowly turned to see what you had hit.
You looked up to see a white faced mask starting down at you. You let out a scream and scrambled back almost slipping down the stairs but the masked stranger caught your ankle.
"No stop! Get off of me!" He slid you across the floor away from the stairs, dragging you through the blood. Nervous and fearful tears spilled down your face as he did so. He was about to reach down and grab you but you kicked him back giving yourself the advantage to stand up and run down the hall.
The kick only phased the man momentarily, maybe for a second at the least because he had stood to his full height again and was wedging himself in the doorway of the room you were attempting to lock yourself in.
"Go away!" You screamed pushing your back against the door to attempt and stop him. "Please leave me alone!" He stuck a hand in trying to gain leverage but couldn't reach anything.
Finally he  pushed his way through the door sending you across the room, you hit your head on the end of the bed post but crawled over to your parents nightstand grabbing the letter opener that sat there and holding it up in an attempt to defend yourself.  
The man stood towering over you tilting his head in amusement and curiosity at you.
"What do you want!?"
He gave no answer, only stared. Your sobbing racked through your body as you shakily held up the small weapon.  "Please go away!" You said losing your edge.
He approached you slowly causing you to stumble back into the nightstand, tipping the lamp over.
He grabbed both your wrists and lifted you up off the ground. "No,no,no! Let me go!"
You thrashed and kicked in his hold accidently losing the letter opener.
Despite your struggling he stayed grounded and barely moved, still only tilting his head at you.
He seemed to get annoyed with you and released one of your wrists but still held you up by the other. His now free hand reached out and grabbed your face stopping it from moving and forcing you to look at him.
Your cries were muffled as he pinched your cheeks together and your hair, slick with blood covered your face as well.
He made an almost Displeased sound and set you down firmly but still held your arm tightly, grounding you almost so you couldn't escape, it didn't matter you were too scared too anyways. His hand released your face and moved to swipe away the hair, then gingerly brushed against the bloody bruise on your forehead. You hissed in pain and pulled back.
That upset him, because he grunted and tightened his grip on your arm, you clenched your jaw in pain but refrained from doing anything else in case it upset him further and he broke it.
His fingers trailed from your head injury down your face and rubbed away a few tears.
You allowed it to happen because, what else were you to do? But your eyes looked everywhere but him. Suddenly you felt him pull you closer and wrap his arms around you in a hug of sorts.
It wasn't very comfortable, he was too strong for something like this and dumbly unaware of it because you almost couldn't breath.
You felt him shuffle with you still pinned against him.
He adjusted so that he was sitting on the bed and you were in his lap. You gulped slightly once he finally freed you from the hug now he simply just stared at you and pet your hair.
"W….who...who are...who are you?" You shakily stuttered out, your eyes glancing up at him before quickly turning to look out the window.
The man gave no reply but simply cupped your cheek before taking one of your hands and placing it on his masked cheek.
"Do...do...you want me to take it o..off?.." He nodded slightly and you did so ever so carefully, Gasping a little when you saw his face.
"Michale?" You drew back slightly causing him to grab your waist and pull you closer.
"How...wh…" Your head was spinning more than before as you looked at him.
His face was rouged and stern looking but the moonlight that came through the window gave it a softer look.
"I'm...I'm sorry." You offered as your hand traced the scar across his eye. "I didn't...know….you scared me!" His head leaned into your touch the same way a cat would when you pet it. You felt a smile form at the corner of your mouth as he did so.
It must've felt nice, to have human touch after so long of being locked away.
"Yo! Y/n!?" The loud booming voice and knock on the door startled him causing him to grab your hand and rip it away from his face.
You glanced out the window seeing some of Pj's friends parked outside they banged in the door. "Y/n!? Pj sent us over here! Where are you!?"
You screamed as he tossed you off of him angrily.
"Michale, no! Stop!" He pulled a shiny butcher knife from the back of his jump suit and held it tightly.
"Michale please!please don't do this!" You got up and ran as he swiped at you, only making it a foot out the door before he grabbed you, covering your mouth and muffling your scream and he plunged the knife into you.
You fell back into his arms looking up at him, you choked on the air and looked up at him.
He scooped you up and placed you on the bed, you reached your hand up to his face one last time and kissed his cheek. You wheezed as he pulled the knife from you, he stood beside the bed watching you bleed out. "Goodbye Michael..." Feeling every part of you grow heavy, and darkness consumed your vision. The last thing you could see was him placing the mask back on before everything was completely black.
82 notes · View notes
val-aquenta · 4 years ago
Text
I’m on fire posting these fics. They have mostly been languishing in my drafts, so I really just have to spruce them up a tad to post them ahahah. 
Here on ao3
 Qui-Gon is the first to call him Ben. Obi-Wan is a name that is too long for him to yell, so he is nicknamed Ben. At least, that’s what he said. Obi-Wan thinks otherwise, obviously. 
“Why Ben? What’s wrong with Obi-Wan?” He wonders, not noticing he’s said it out loud until he hears Qui-Gon chuckle. “What?” He flushes, affronted by the cheeky grin on his Master’s face. It is a look that screams trouble.
“A little long, Obi-Wan, huh?” Qui-Gon pauses for a moment from where he is preparing for flight. “Not exactly perfect for yelling when I need your attention.”
Obi-Wan puffs up a bit, not dissimilar to a loth cat Qui-Gon notes with amusement. “Obi-Wan is a good name.” The boy defiantly tries not to pout while saying this. ���It’s not like I call you… John.” He mutters softly, voice sounding put off.
“John?” The older man’s wrinkles crease around his eyes as he smiles. He shrugs. “Ben is a good name regardless.” He defends.
“Obi-Wan’s better.” He opposes tetchily, eyebrows furrowing. “What’s so special about Ben anyways?” He asks with curiosity, always eager for new information.
“Well, Ben technically means son of my right hand, a phrase from my homeworld’s main religion.” Qui-Gon murmurs, willing to try and satisfy Obi-Wan’s need for answers. “The religion is… complex. I don’t even understand it completely, but I do understand the meaning of the phrase.” He pauses.
“Well… what’s the meaning of the phrase?” Obi-Wan fiddles with his hands, eyes alight with interest. He flushes self-consciously when Qui-Gon lifts his eyebrows as though proving a point. He ducks his head, a hint of red on his cheeks. 
“Well, in the religion, there is an entity called God. And the phrase to be at the right hand refers to being in a space of special honour, the right hand, of God.” He explains, enjoying the way Obi-Wan seems to brighten with the new information. “Being the son of the right hand should mean that you will grow into this space of importance. Rather fitting, don’t you think?”
“Oh…” Obi-Wan flushes, freckles disappearing into the deep red colour. Qui-Gon swears the tips of the boy’s ears are red. “That is kind of you to say, Master.”
“It is the truth, my Padawan.” Qui-Gon smiles, clapping a large hand on his shoulder and tugging the boy in for a hug. Obi-Wan startles, tensing for a couple of seconds until he relaxes, shorter arms just barely managing to reach around Qui-Gon. 
::::
Satine was the next to call him Ben. You see, Bant never truly latched onto the name that Qui-Gon christened him with, preferring to stick to her shortened form, Obi. Therefore, Satine is the next. She hears it once when they’re getting shot at and Qui-Gon has a plan that has an 80% chance of ending up with all three of them dead, but it’s better than their current odds. Qui-Gon yells it at him to get the boy to pay attention. 
At first, Satine is startled, thinking a new ally has joined them but is surprised that it’s just a nickname for Obi-Wan. Granted, she doesn’t call him Ben for that long because she, like Bant, prefers to call him Obi.
She does call him Ben when they’re parting ways, and Obi-Wan’s chest aches something fierce. Qui-Gon watches, eyes somewhat sympathetic as they follow Obi-Wan. He pretends not to notice as they share one small, sweet, innocent kiss. It’s everything Obi-Wan wants, but he hesitates and glances back at his Master, and then pulls away from the embrace, head bowed. It is almost everything he wants, and that makes all the difference. If he stayed, he would abandon his Master and his family in the Temple. More than that, he would abandon his path as a Jedi. Even Satine, for all he cares about her, is not enough to sway him from his path. The Force whispers in his mind, sorrow and apologetic, thankful for his sacrifice. The choice cements and he lets go of Satine.
“Ben…” Satine whispers, the word almost lost in the wind. “I… good luck.” Her blonde hair, carefully arranged on her head, moves as she bows. “Thank you, Master Jedi, for your protection.” Obi-Wan bows back, though his head remains tilted down, not willing to look at the woman.
“It was our pleasure,” Qui-Gon responds, sending a little pang of comfort down the growing bond with his Padawan.
“Do be careful.” She says, deviating from her formal script. “Farewell, Master Jinn, Padawan Kenobi.” The names fall easily onto her tongue as though she hadn’t spent almost a year calling them something else with much more familiarity. 
“May the force be with you, Duchess Kryze,” Obi-Wan murmurs, and he walks away from Satine, from the comfort of that life, and into the Jedi transport, his Master, a steady and strong pillar in the Force, ahead of him.
“… Ben?”
“Yes, Master.” Qui-Gon looks as though he wants to say something, wants to spill some secret, but he thinks better of it, instead closing his mouth and opening his arms, catching Obi-Wan as he falls into them. 
“I’m sorry.” He murmurs into the pale ear, his hand stroking circles into Obi-Wan’s shoulders. The boy, because that’s what he is, does not respond, only tightening his grip and inhaling the comforting scent of his Master.
::::
Mace is the third Jedi off the transport ship. He is also the third to call Obi-Wan Ben, though that happened a while back on a joint undercover mission with Qui-Gon. He reverted to calling him Obi-Wan, but then he reverts once more. He’s older and wiser, and, has been a friend ever since Obi-Wan was a small young child of the creche. 
“Obi-Wa… Ben.” Obi-Wan’s heart cracks just a bit more. Never again will he hear that familiar voice whispering that name to him. The deep baritone voice rumbling it. It hurts worse than leaving Satine, Cerasi, or Siri, or losing Reeft had. “Sit down with me and let’s talk.”
“Yes, Master Windu.” The response is immediate, drilled into him with years of training.
“Tell me how you feel, Ben.” Mace rumbles, voice not as deep as Qui-Gon’s, but very close. Obi-Wan is certain that if he were to press his ear to the bald Jedi’s chest, he would feel the voice vibrating.
“Fine…” That response is nailed into him out of fear. Fear of not being good enough. 
“Really?” Mace murmurs disbelievingly, leaning forwards and taking in the red-tinged eyes. A hand reaches out and takes one of Obi-Wan’s hands, feeling the slight chill that seems to emanate from him. “You don’t look fine to me.” He says in a frank manner that only he can pull off without sounding overly rude. 
“Well, what do you want me to say?” Obi-Wan responds, more exasperated than he thought it was going to sound. 
“Ben… you’re not wrong to be sad. It isn’t wrong to feel loss or to grieve.” Mace says, voice closer to whispering than to speaking. The man scoots closer to Obi-Wan who, in the eyes of the Republic is also a man but, in reality, still feels like the thirteen-year-old being sent to Bandomeer, or the sixteen-year-old who left Satine, or the- “You’ve just lost a man who has been by your side for twelve years. It will hurt.” Obi-Wan laughs, but it is more cracked and painful than any laugh Mace has heard. He desperately scrubbing at his eyes as though he wishes to scour them away.
“I know it hurts, Master. Force, my chest feels as though I was the one who was run through with a lightsaber, not Qu-” His voice breaks around the name, and he devolves into small sobs. Mace observes the boy being thrust into Knighthood with something close to helplessness. He had lost Cyslin in a less brutal manner and yet it had hurt all the same. All Mace can do is offer some comfort to the man. “There’s a hole where he was and I can’t-” Obi-Wan's voice cuts off as he cradles his head in his hands. 
“Ben,” Mace says it curtly, as though fully taking advantage of how short it is. Qui-Gon dragged it out a bit, seemingly relishing the way the name made his mouth shape. Satine’s lips always made the name sound sweet. Short and filled with emotions. “Observe and release your emotions.”
“I can’t,” Obi-Wan admits. He tries to look at his emotions. He can understand, but he can’t release and make them go away. There’s just too much. He says as much to Mace. 
“Let me help, Ben.” And it is as though Obi-Wan is a youngling once more, trailing behind Padawan Windu in cream coloured corridors. As though they’ve been transported to a time when Mace’s forehead did not have the stressed wrinkles it does now. As though Obi-Wan hasn’t just had a piece of his heart carved out with a sith lightsaber. Together they sink into meditation, aware of each other, and acknowledging one another. With a little flick from Mace, Obi-Wan begins to reveal his mind warped by guilt and self-loathing and anger and pain and… it’s too much, Mace admits to himself. So, he starts small. A small statement, I was too slow, is given to him, and they watch it together, understand it together, and accept it together. Then, he moves to another, unwanted. And to the dozens that remain. Mace does not judge, and his heart aches at the knowledge of the burdens Obi-Wan is thrusting upon himself, but he says nothing about it, only reaching for the boy… man after their meditation and bringing him into a hug that lasts a full minute.  
::::
Cody is a really good researcher. Sure, he’s great with a blaster, and hand to hand combat, and anything to do with the military really. He was trained under Jango Fett and the Kaminoans. But, one of his greatest strengths is his efficient diving into the Holonet. He can splice information from different databases, even the Jedi Temple’s database. Technically, he could just go to the Archives and find the information, but he could be seen there, so he doesn’t. Instead, he sits at the main console of his barracks and begins to get information regarding his new General. The Jedi, Kenobi, seems nice enough, but looks can be deceiving. In this case, however, it seems that they’re not. The little ginger seems to have a kind streak about the size of Ryloth. 
“What in the world…” He mutters as browsers pop up. Multiple mission reports that he skims through to reveal another thing. Apparently, the General has a penchant for injuries. A really bad one if the reports are not a joke. He digs through one that was co-written by one Qui-Gon Jinn, and he spots some errors. At least, he’s sure they are errors because he’s pretty sure the General’s called Obi-Wan… not Ben. However, he doubts that the General would let that slide.
“Ben.” He forms the name under breath, making some multi-syllable word from it. “Ben.” He says it curtly. It is more efficient than to say General Kenobi or, Force forbid, Obi-Wan. The Jedi have the oddest names.
“Commander…” He jumps, turning to look at the man in question as he walks into the barracks completely unannounced. “I was, ah, wondering if you would like-” He squints at the console’s screen. Cody flushes deeper than before, the crimson stain spreading around his neck and up to his ears. Caught researching his General by the General in question. Rex will never let it go. 
“General Kenobi, sir.” He plants his feet and straightens his back. Obi-Wan looks at the report and then at Cody and then back to the report. 
“Did you… hack into the Temple?” He questions curiously. 
“Well… I do have the access codes…” He trails off. 
“Is this… the mission to Joonta?” The General strokes his beard, leaning forwards to read his report. “Force, my diction was horrible back then. So was Qui-Gon’s.” He scrolls down.
“Sir…”
“Yes, Cody.” He seems oddly enthralled by the report, scrolling rather quickly through the pages. 
“Is your name Ben?”
“Sometimes.” Obi-Wan… Ben? Hums. Reading through the report absently. Noticing the silent prompting from Cody, the General shakes himself a bit. “Oh. It’s a nickname given by my Master. Almost no one uses it.” 
“Ah.”
“Cody… you can call me Ben if you’d like. I don’t mind.” He stops the frantic scrolling to look at Cody.
“The vod will better understand if I call you General Kenobi, sir,” Cody says while ticking the name onto the General’s name. General Obi-Wan ‘Ben’ Kenobi. Jedi and their names. 
“If that is your wish.” Obi-Wan smiles. “Now, I came here to offer you tea in my quarters. Would you like to come?” 
::::
Ahsoka’s always heard of the famous Master Kenobi or Padawan Kenobi or Knight Kenobi in pairs. Padawan Kenobi was always paired with Master Jinn, Knight Kenobi was paired with Padawan Skywalker, and Master Kenobi is paired with Knight Skywalker. Knight Skywalker is now obviously paired with Padawan Tano, so they're all connected. Contrary to what Anakin would think, Padawan Kenobi is the term she’s much more familiar with, and therefore is more familiar with the pairing of Master Jinn and Padawan Kenobi. Even though she knows so much about Anakin and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are within all the stories that the Crechemasters say. She knows of the most interesting missions that the duo took and is somewhat embarrassed to admit the amount of hero-worship she has for the two.
“Master Obi-Wan, is it true that you had to drink pirates under the table to rescue Master Jinn?” She asks out of the blue one day, noticing the way Anakin’s hand tightens ever-so-slightly, blue eyes dashing to Obi-Wan’s pinched expression. She’s new to her apprenticeship and she still feels overwhelmed if she thinks too hard about the fact that she’s the Padawan of The Anakin Skywalker, and is part of the famous lineage. 
“… Yes. Where did you hear that, Ahsoka?” He frowns while stroking his beard, a habit he can’t seem to break. He doesn’t look too annoyed by the question. Instead, he looks amused and rather curious.
“Ages ago, Master, in the creche.” Obi-Wan shrugs and continues, waving off Anakin’s worried words. The smile on his face is nice to see. Ahsoka thinks it looks bad when the Frown is in place, and that is all that has been in place since the invasion of Ryloth began. She’s happy that she could coax a smile out of the typically austere looking man.
A few months later while they’re travelling through hyperspace on Obi-Wan’s ship, Ahsoka blurts another question. Obi-Wan had offered to teach Ahsoka some jar’kai during the hyperspace travel, and Anakin had assented, remaining on his ship while Ahsoka trained with her other Master. “Master Obi-Wan, is it true that you once were eaten by a large squid and then spat out?” She asks at the mess hall. Cody, who was rather peacefully eating his meal thank you very much, chokes on the ration’s he was chowing on. Stitches, the medic, appears to have swallowed water down the wrong pipe and is sending a concerned look at Obi-Wan. The man in question deflates, shrugs, and answers quietly. 
“Yes, Ahsoka. On Fuleya. Master Jinn thought I was dead for two minutes. Nearly screamed his throat raw trying to cut me from the beast's stomach.” He shrugs and then proceeds to tap on his datapad as though the clones in the immediate vicinity aren’t looking as though they’re having heart attacks. They’re very… protective of their General sometimes. Ahsoka shrugs as well, turning back to her meal. “Was this also heard in the creche?” He asks with the very amused glint in his eyes. The smile also seems to brighten his face. 
Ahsoka feels a warmth in her stomach at having brought another smile to the man’s face, especially considering the stress he seems to be under with the war. “Yes. I heard lots about you.” He shakes his head fondly. She thinks that the smile on his face is worth the possibility that the clones might wrap him in blankets and lock him on the ship. Not that that would be a bad idea thinking about it… 
“Master Obi-Wan,” She starts, her head tilted in wonder. This time, they’re alone. They are at the Temple, in Obi-Wan’s living room, sharing some tea. Anakin, ever the disliker of tea, had opted out, likely going off to see Padmè. “Is it true that your second name is Ben?” At this, Obi-Wan chokes on his tea, spraying the liquid around the room as he coughs.
Ahsoka startles, putting her own cup down and scooting closer to offer some assistance. “What?” He asks weakly, bringing a hand to his chest. This has been the most intense reaction so far. She rubs her hand softly on his back. Humans are ever so slightly warmer than togruta, and she delights in feeling the warmth through his Jedi robes.
“Barriss told me that Master Unduli told her that Master Windu told her that your second name is Ben.” Ahsoka chatters, looking curiously at the man who lies on the couch.
“Technically, Ben is not my second name. I don’t have one.” Obi-Wan runs a weary hand down his face. “Ben is a nickname given to me by my Master.” 
Ahsoka perks up. “Oh, really? Like I’m ‘Snips’ to Anakin?” She questions, excited to learn more of the rather mysterious Master. 
“Well, I suppose? Ben probably has more thought put into it than Snips.” He smirks playfully. 
“How so?” At this Obi-Wan flinches. Ahsoka casts him another worried look but he waves it off.
“It’s a name meaning that I‘ll be special, essentially. It’s native to Qui-Gon’s homeworld.” He smiles softly at Ahsoka. “Much better than ‘Don’t get snippy with me.’” She laughs, happy to once more bring another smile to his face.
“Maybe.” She concedes. “I like Snips though.” Obi-Wan lifts an amused brow.
“I like Ben too.” They smile at each other.
::::
Luke never knows Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan. The thing is, Obi-Wan is dead before Luke is even born. In his place, Ben Kenobi is there. He knows the rough and weathered hand of Ben, not the smooth hand of Obi-Wan. He listens to the voice of Ben, not Obi-Wan. Because of that, there is no need for Luke to call Ben anything but Ben. 
“Ben… why are you called Ben?” He asks one day. Owen is feeling in a more forgiving mood and Beru probably took pity on the sad old man, and they have allowed Ben to visit for a bit.
“The same reason you’re called Luke. I was named Ben.” He responds with a slight smile. 
“Your Mom named you Ben?” Luke asks head tilted in curiosity much like another youngling tilted her head while asking about the name Ben. He wonders where the young togruta is, or even whether she’s still alive.
“No. My… father named me Ben." He swears that there is the gentle hum of laughter in the deep rumbling voice of his Master floating through the air. He looks around, but just the typical homestead surrounds him.
“Oh. That’s cool.” And that’s that. The boy runs away to the deeper parts of the house, a smile on his face. In his hands, a soft blue blanket flies in the wind.
::::
Vader knows who Obi-Wan Kenobi is. He is the man who took everything from him. He took his unborn child, his wife, his limbs, and his potential. Vader is sure that most of his problems stem from this Obi-Wan. Vader, however, does not know who Ben Kenobi is. You see, Anakin never knew Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan together long enough to know of the nickname. He wasn’t there as Qui-Gon whispered the name softly before his death. He never listened to Master Windu sigh his name as the two were chatting as they walked the halls. He never listened to the now-dead Duchess whispering nicknames into the ear of his former Master. He never listened to Cody jokingly calling the ginger, Ben. He never noticed how Ahsoka would whisper to Master Ben sometimes. Because of this, he misses the Jedi Master in his hiding spot. 
“Darth Vader. Have you found your former Master as I asked?” Sidious sits on his throne of lies and steeples his fingers, wretched features obscured by his long, dark robe.
“No, my Lord.” The man bows stiffly at the waist, metal limbs not allowing anything truly graceful. “Kenobi is elusive, but he is old. Soon, he will be dead.” 
Unknown to the two, Ben Kenobi, not Obi-Wan because that man died alongside the thousands of Jedi in the Purge, watches as a boy, the son of his fallen brother, plays in the sand, a toy spaceship in hand. Ben sits on the tip of a dune, smiling at the happiness the boy unknowingly projects as he wooshes the ship around above him. Ben’s hands are busy, carving a new ship for the child. He plans to make a Nubian for the boy. 
“Ben!” The boy shouts across the desert, waving his hand. “Hello!” Ben smiles, and waves his hand in a silent greeting before he stands, joints creaking as he does, and turns back to his hut. Another day and the boy is safe. Cocooned in the silence of Tatooine, Ben takes comfort in the setting suns.
“Ben.” He hears the wind whisper, joining the deep baritone of Qui-Gon, the dulcet tones of Satine, the curt voice of Mace, the kind voice of Cody, and the young voice of Ahsoka. Luke’s toddler voice adds itself to the litany of voices, and Ben grins, watching the ever-changing dunes. Today was a good day. Seeing Luke usually makes his day, and this is one of those instances. A visit from his Master would do him good, he thinks. Soon, he will be too old for the lessons that the man has planned, but he plans to enjoy them while they last. Ben walks into the dunes, towards his hut. He might only have the ghost of one of the people who called him Ben, but he carries the other four close to his heart, carefully adding one more to that collection. The newest addition has a clear voice that is destined to deepen as he ages.  
“How was your day, Padawan?” Qui-Gon is standing in front of the hut, serene as he was in life. Perhaps even more so. 
Obi-Wan smiles wryly, feeling at peace for one of the first times in a while, “Quite nice, Master.”
Qui-Gon smiles indulgently, pleased that Obi-Wan still finds some joy in his life, “That is comforting to hear, Ben.”
42 notes · View notes
pianostarinwonderland · 4 years ago
Text
Birthday Azul Story Details and Thoughts
I think I’m finally calm enough to be able to relay my thoughts on the lore we got from Azul’s story. So we’ll go through the details in order that they were brought up, and in bullet points, I may detail my thoughts ranging from pure keysmash to actual questions and theories.
I will place most of the post under a cut because this may get a bit long. Do note also that this contains spoilers for his birthday story so take caution.
Azul’s birthday parties are celebrated with the family and the staff. The restaurant would close for a day or two, and they will have a celebration where all of his favorite foods are laid out onto a table. While now, he thinks it may have been too much, as a child, this made him very happy.
First off, I FEEL SO SOFT OVER THIS;;; before his birthday card got released, I always thought Azul might not like his birthday because what if he associated it with the bullying he endured and maybe his bullies managed to ruin it. But nO, he actually had a happy birthday... no, multiple happy birthdays, and I’m just so fucking glad because HE CAN AT LEAST ENJOY HIS BIRTHDAY UEUEUEUEUE
It’s also very sweet how the staff would join in the celebration!! It’s so cute, and the way Azul talks about them gives that idea that he includes them as family;;;
Azul’s mom manages the restaurant. Her business started out small, but by the time Azul was able to understand the world around him more (I’m going to guess at least around 8 years old), the restaurant is now the most famous in the Coral Sea and many of the staff are professionals. Furthermore, she is not only an excellent cook, but also a genius manager. She’s also invested in the Mostro Lounge.
First off, I stan his mom
No wonder why Azul’s so good with what he does, he has a really successful and badass mom
It’s actually sweet that Azul calls her a genius cook and manager and includes the staff as family despite having an apparent dislike for the restaurant itself.
Also like, the fact his mom apparently helps him with the lounge?? Like brooo that mother-son relationship is sexy
As someone who would lean to mom more for help than dad, this really makes me feel so... is happy even a perfect word to describe it? I guess it’s just, wow more similarities to share with Azul I guess. 😳
This actually made me remember an essay I had to do in grade 7 HAHAHAHA it was about women leaders. I forgot what exactly I wrote, but part of my research was centered on how women were better in business than men. A quick Google search will lead you to an article that states that women are more honest, more empathetic and collaborative, and more resilient (having faced discrimination and all that), and the article also shows that women-run businesses generate more revenue than men-run businesses. I say take those details with a grain of salt unless you can prove that all of it is true. It’s not to say there aren’t successful men. Anyway, some people have a business-y mind and others don’t. I really just brought this up because it was funny how I remembered this. 😆
And I thought I would never use my school essays again.
I doubt she knows about the shadier side of the deals xD no matter how mature Azul tries to be, teenagers will be teenagers and will hide stuff from their parents
Azul’s father... is not actually his biological father but his stepfather. He is a lawyer who met his mom when she was filing for her divorce. While he is a kind and sincere man in general, in his work ethic, he is very thorough and flawless. He’s the one who taught Azul all about contracts and law.
Now here is the explanation as to how Azul knows about drafting contracts xD his dad knows about the law!
Even if he’s not his actual dad, I’ll still refer to him as dad because the kanji says stepfather but Azul calls him father. At least, that’s what my JP friend said. Point is, Azul respects him enough to include him as part of the family, and I actually really like that?? Not many media would depict characters liking their stepparents, but here, Azul is actually comfy with him. It’s like taking in a fresh breath of air.
I find it amusing that his mom probably married her divorce lawyer. xD I say probably because it technically wasn’t stated and for all we know, she had an entirely different lawyer and she just saw him around lmao though then again, idk how the divorce process works 💀
This puts a lot of things into perspective, both in regards to Azul’s mom and Azul himself. First off, his mom literally raised her son (who was being bullied in school) while filing a divorce and managing a business that was small. She’s gone through so much man, and now look at her! Her business is successful, her new husband is a kind man who is accepted by her son, and she’s got all this good staff.
As for Azul himself, this is more focused on the bullying side. From the way he talked, it seemed like he was already there when the divorce occurred... actually, even before that. Obviously, there’s a reason why his mom filed a divorce. Could it be that his household environment was toxic because his parents often argued? Possibly, it could be worse...
And it could be because of that that he couldn’t share his problems to his parents. Actual dad seemed like a jackass and his mom was probably stressed out because of him. Having these things in mind, he would shy away from them because he didn’t want to get either of them mad or anything.
I wonder if the business got successful when his mom remarried or after she remarried because that’s the idea I’m getting, but it’s all based on assumption. And if I am correct, that means by the time his mom remarried, Azul’s already pretty much deep into the spite he feels for his bullies. Which is sad if ever my theories on this are right;;; had Azul have a better home life earlier on... well, who knows?
Everyone in the family can use magic, but Azul’s grandmother is especially talented with magic. She uses them to help others.
Jeez, what’s with all the grandmas in Twst being so magically talented? At this rate, they’re going to be the final bosses of the game.
But seriously, Malleus has his grandmother who is the Queen of the Valley of Thorns. Now we have Azul’s grandmother, whom he described as someone benevolent... and take note, this is how he describes the Sea Witch often.
Definitely, the grandma and the Sea Witch are not the same person because Azul is a fanboy of the Sea Witch lmao and he’d have called her his grandma kek (plus idk if the Sea Witch is still alive). But just... the similarities are uncanny.
Plot twist: Azul is related to the Sea Witch because his actual dad is a direct descendant of her— shot
In the Mostro Lounge, Azul is very particular about the tableware because to him, the presentation is just as important as the taste. No matter how delectable the dish, it’s going to be ruined if the presentation is ugly. Because of this, their tableware comes from a high-quality brand. Despite this, Floyd sometimes breaks the tableware.
Holy shit, I never really thought about the tableware playing a role. But he really does have a point. Imagine eating something like beef wellington using a plastic spoon and fork. 💀
Ok, that is an exaggeration. But like, say you use the simple spoon and fork to eat your everyday meals. You’re not going to use those utensils when you have guests over, no, you’re going to use your nice tableware.
Damn, the few people I know who manage a restaurant are very particular about food presentation, but I think caring about it is a sign of a good manager. Azul cares about what he’s serving to the customers, and he isn’t about to give them something subpar. He may scam your ass, but he will make sure that customers enjoy the experience.
I’d be pissed off too if Floyd broke the tableware. That shit is expensive. 🗿 Don’t break things just because you’re moody smh
Azul also implies that the teacups are pricey, saying that we wouldn’t be holding the cup so carelessly if we knew the price. Guess that’s why the place is so damn expensive.
Azul brings up how difficult it was setting up. They had to research on famous restaurants, send staff to the suppliers, etc.
Ngl, I had to ask my dad about how difficult setting up a restaurant was because he used to run a restaurant. It’s just so I can get a good perspective of things, even if Azul’s business is essentially a student-run business.
He said that it really isn’t all that difficult, as long as you “know the numbers”. So I guess as long as you have your basic foundation, then you can go off from that. He also emphasized the importance of having good business partners.
I think what made it difficult for Azul was that he was pretty much running a fancy restaurant that isn’t just being bought from another brand, so it required a lot more research on how other famous restaurants worked, as well as who are the best suppliers around.
Ngl, I could kinda imagine how it looked like. Having to see the construction work, having to consult with a lot of people, having to ask for a lot of help...
But it really highlights Azul’s perserverance and determination. Despite the difficulties, he was able to open up a restaurant at 17, which may be mainly for NRC, but it also opens up to the public on some occasions. Damn, I stan that.
Azul takes breaks by reading autobiographies of businessmen he finds in the library in the dim lights of his room. His room also relaxes him because it contains his tastes in design and collectables.
I lowkey wanna clown him for reading autobiographies because damn, how do you find relaxation from reading about the lives of businessmen?
And then I proceed to clown myself because in a sense, I am analyzing his life and he is a businessman... but hey, at least we have pictures and voices. 🗿
Okay but I’m actually relieved that he does take breaks?? He does give that idea that he continuously does his work and has to be yanked out of his office to rest but no, he actually knows how to take a damn break... granted, he’s still trying to pursue business by reading up on those people, but hey, if it’s a passion, it’s not work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also like that this implies that he isn’t so conceited as to think that he’s already the best he can be. No, if anything, this shows that he’s aware that he has so much more to learn, and he can learn from reading up on the lives of others who have gone before him. Learn from their mistakes. He’s striving to improve, and that is so inspiring;;;;
Also can I just say this does fulfill one of the things I rot about because he definitely would visit the bookstore to read a book, and I used to visit the bookstore to read and imagine if we meet there aha ahahaha just kidding,,, unless,,,,,,
Azul’s hobby is coin collecting. When he was a child, he discovered a coin in a sunken ship. He thought it didn’t mean much, but after studying it, there’s only 100 of those made. While its face value was 100 madols, for a collector, it may as well be worth 500,000 madols. Currently, he has about 200 coins collected, and the ones he’s especially interested in, he frames them.
Damn, and I thought he likes coins because octopuses are into shiny things. I like that there’s more to it. Granted, it’s still Azul being Azul, but we love him nonetheless.
He said something about how the economy doesn’t affect the value of the coins? To be honest, my brain works so horribly with things related to economy that even simple business and economic jargon just fly over my head. It’s frustrating. 😔
I wonder if he wandered off into the sunken ship because he was running away from his bullies;;;
Furthermore, this also gives him a similarity with Ariel: they find things around and collect them lmao
Another hobby Azul has is board games. When he first started school, he was looking for a club to join when he stumbled upon the board game club and met Idia... though it’s more like he met Idia’s brother, Ortho. Ortho showed him a game that simulates business, and Azul thought that this would benefit him in the business world so he signed up immediately for it. He adds that he loves to defeat people in games of intellect.
Ortho, what have you done 💀 why did you show him Monopoly—
Damn, he really tries to apply business into everything, but I can’t blame him. XD
Okay, but wow, that’s sexy of him to love defeating people in intellect 😳😳 like bruh . I feel him??? I love planning on how to secure my victory in games. It’s especially fun during EBG. 😆 @twstpasta can attest to this. :)
I don’t know if I ever mentioned this here, but I love that he does have board games as a hobby. Even if it’s because of business, it’s at least a way for him to relax and actually have something that makes him feel like a teenager. 😭
All in all, Azul’s birthday story gave us so much food, and I’m so happy about it. Honest to God, it makes me look up to him even more because he continues to learn, he doesn’t give up on his passions, and he knows how to take it easy when he should.
Maybe it’s my bias for him, but the feeling I felt when taking all this in is indescribable. It’s like I enter a buffet expecting to have a good meal, or I enter a Catholic mass and expect to be enriched by a good homily, or even I enter a Ludovico Einaudi concert and expect to be touched at the heart. Then I partake in all three, and I come out of the buffet having the best meal of my life, or I come out of the church, hearing the best homily I ever had in my life, or I leave the concert, feeling the most light and whole I’ve ever felt in my life. I’m just so inspired after reading that, rot aside.
And with this, I end with a happy birthday to Azul, you’re such an amazing person even if you’re not real. I really hope you have an enjoyable birthday. 🥺
103 notes · View notes
tanoraqui · 5 years ago
Note
Grave dirt baby... 🥺✨
me, procrastinating my actual fic? no... GRAVE DIRT BABY A-YUAN
HEY TUMBLR FUCKED UP ALL MY BULLET POINTS ON THIS THE SECOND I HIT POST BUT IT’S 4AM SO I’M LEAVING IT UP ANYWAY. STUPID GODDAMN WEBSITE.
Wei Wuxian has been in the Burial Mounds for like 2.5 months out of what he doesn’t yet know will be about 3. He’s not even sure he’s going to survive yet. But he has managed to manifest an evil sword - the evil sword - out of the aether/ambient resentful energy/an attunement set with an unwise touch in the belly of an evil turtle
and he does know that he’s not going to survive if he doesn’t get the power of the Burial Mounds under some sort of control
so he cuts his arm and with blood running down the blade, draws something adjacent to the first demon-summoning flag but as an array in the dirt. He stands in the middle and - keep in mind that he more or less hasn’t slept in 2.5 months - plunges the sword into the center, still coated in his blood, and draws in all the resentful energy of the Burial Mounds
was it supposed to go into the sword? Into himself? Into just the single 4ft diameter array area, a column of bound death? who knows, not Wei Wuxian! it’s pure gut instinct
u know what else works on gut instinct, thought? Fairy tales.
And in a fairy tale, why, clay of the earth plus iron enough for a blade plus still-warm blood to show the way...
There’s an implosion and Wei Wuxian is standing - somehow still standing - in a small crater where the array used to be, and his evil sword is plunged into the belly of a baby
He yanks it out in horrified reflex, and realizes a moment later that the baby seems unfazed by this. If there was even a wound, it closes before his eyes, and the glimpse he had showed something more bloody clay than flesh beneath the skin
the iron sword crumbles as he pulls it away, as though rusted a thousand years. the baby turns its head from the iron shavings that falls on it, but then reaches up for Wei Wuxian with a cheerfully demanding cry
he picks it up, of course. (he’d think he was hallucinating if he wasn’t absolutely and utterly aware that he’s not)
it is, as far as he can tell, with physical and spiritual resentful inspection, an absolutely normal baby
oh, except when he looks really closely. Then he can sense the neutron star–dense knot of resentful energy where a golden core might (but will definitely not have room to) form. Also, it can command the dead, and when he holds it, so can he. He’s not sure if it’s a proximity-based power share or if he’s passing his desires through the baby, but even Wei Wuxian, at about 3 months with no food save the rage of the dead and no rest save the promise of final release, has to stop investigating at some point. He has things to do!
specifically, he has Wens to kill
so instead of the iconic shot of the dark flautist in the moonlight, we get the dark, uh...man singing a very spooky lullaby to his baby in the moonlight. It is still deeply creepy. It’s a making-it-up-as-he-goes tune based on a Yunmengi lullaby that he certainly learned from neither of his foster parents, and the lyrics are along the lines of, “let them remember what they did, sweet little potato, let them remember why they’re dying”
yeah he’s been calling this child “Little Potato” for 2 weeks 
why
is that not how you name a child
sometimes when he’s more annoyed at it, he calls it “Little Radish”, or even less appetizing root vegetables
by the time he walks in, the baby is asleep in his arms and he’s not singing anymore, just letting the dead do his will. This is what Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji see. The subsequent conversation, Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu at their feet, goes like this:
LWJ: Wei Ying. You have a baby.
WWX: Oh, uh...
PLAY DUMB!
WWX: What baby?
NOT THAT DUMB!
WWX: Oh, this baby! Haha yeah. I...found it.
JC: What the fuck
WWX: Yeah, weird, right? Right near the, uh...
LWJ: They said you were in the Burial Mounds
WWX: Yyyyup. Yes that is. I found this baby by the side of the road after I walked out of the Burial Mounds.
JC, briefly too morbidly fascinated to think about either the demonic cultivation they just watched or the fact that he wants to hug his brother like he’s never wanted to hug another being in his life: What did you name it?
WWX: ....
JC, desire to hug intensifying together with exasperation: oh my god
Sometime in the next couple days - after sleeping a bit, maybe - it occurs to Wei Wuxian that his raw instincts were right and things will go very badly for little A-Yuan (his siblings insisted he name it) if anyone finds out that he’s a not-yet-walking, not-yet-talking little neuron star of resentful energy. So he takes the iron shavings that are all that remain of the Stygian Turtle Sword and forges them into a Tiger-shaped Seal. He also carves a bamboo flute, like he’d been thinking about before the whole...baby thing. He loudly proclaims both to be dark and terrible weapons
(it really is helpful. The sword was...kind of A-Yuan’s other parent, after all, in addition to their third partner, the Burial Mounds. Chenqing gives him finer control of whatever stray resentful energy he chooses to pick up, and the Stygian Seal lets him channel A-Yuan’s power at need, even when not touching him. Which is good - a battlefield is no place for a baby)
even if that baby thinks ghosts and ghouls exist to pick him up and rock him or toss him around (babies like to be tossed)
Wei Wuxian puts so many goddamn spirit-repelling charms on that child, and lets it be marked down to the paranoia of a survivor
using whatever resentful energy he picks up is generally more effective, actually. Less strong, but it quickly becomes clear that the way this works does, in fact, involve Wei Wuxian communicating his desires through A-Yuan, or at least A-Yuan has to put up with the loan of power. There’s nothing quite like abruptly losing control of a field of corpses because the baby got abruptly uncooperative with anything that wasn’t barfing
the baby does eat, for the record. As far as Wei Wuxian can tell, he doesn’t actually need to, but once WWX fed him once, when they first left the Mounds, he wanted it all the time
he still takes A-Yuan with him when he can. That is the paranoia of a survivor. A-Yuan is...
“A battlefield is no place for a baby, A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli says gently, as he sets out from Carp Tower after another stolen visit, another failed attempt to convince Jin Guangshan off his ass. “And you are...so busy. LanlingJin takes in orphans, you know...”
“A-Yuan...he’s my blood,” Wei Wuxian says quietly. He’s never been good at lying to his shijie
Whatwherewhenhowwho, he’d see on her face if he was looking at it. But he isn’t. It’s not shame, though, she can see (it really never is, with Wei Wuxian). Fear of disappointing her, slight resignation...but mostly acceptance. Determination. Something almost like contentment.
(When Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangj first took him back to whatever resembled a base camp - somewhere in Qinghe, probably, or maybe Lanling - he had to let a trained healer look at A-Yuan, physical and spiritual examination, and he held his breath and calculated how many people he’d have to kill to get out of here, how fast he’d have to move to not hurt his brother or any particular friends; thought, oh, he’s mine, in a way he hadn’t before - as a child, a son, not just a very strange weapon - 
“He’s quite healthy,” said the doctor, mildly surprised, bouncing A-Yuan on one knee. A-Yuan gurgled happily. “About three months old?”
the longer Wei Wuxian took to answer, the more disapproving her stare got. But that did make sense)
Then all else can be dealt with later. “You should still leave him here,” Jiang Yanli says firmly. “You need to look after yourself and A-Cheng out there. I can look after A-Yuan.”
It takes a bit under two years to win back the lost and burnt territories, scour the Wens out of every crevice, corner Wen Ruohan in his precious Nightless City and bring it tumbling down. Nobody will know the timing but A-Yuan sleeps through the final battle, smiling at dreams that would make a grown man weep in horror. Somewhere, his father is playing a lullaby
About a week later, Jiang Cheng stalks into Wei Wuxian’s bedroom, which he shares with A-Yuan. One of the first rooms rebuilt in the new Lotus Pier. A-Yuan is there, too, playing with blocks while Wei Wuxian idly drafts talismans
“A-jie said the kid is yours,” he says, crossed arms. “Like, yours-yours. When the fuck did you do that?”
(Wei Wuxian has thought about this, by now; gone over the pros and cons of every possibility, the politics and potentials and maybe even the giddy possibility of telling something like the truth)
(the guiding principle is: he has no interest in drawing on the “Stygian Tiger Seal” ever again. The Sunshot Campaign is over. His loved ones are safe, and he sees no reason why they shouldn’t all live long, happy, normal lives)
(also/though, he will burn Jin Sect, Carp Tower, and all of Lanling to the ground before the new Chief Cultivator should touch his son)
“In Caiyi,” he lies. “Right before I got kicked out. I, uh, snuck out a lot more often than you noticed.”
His brother squints at him suspiciously. But Wei Wuxian can also watch him do the math in his head and reluctantly admit that it works.
“So are you claiming him or what?” he challenges. “’Wei Yuan’? You have a courtesy name - wait, no, you are not naming that kid again. You’re going to make his courtesy name be Carrothead or something.” 
“Should I let you pick it, oh wise and noble shidi - no, shushu?!” Wei Wuxian teases, as A-Yuan gets tired of his blocks and starts climbing up him like a jungle gym
Jiang Cheng sighs like the north wind - gusting long and hard, with just the faintest chill to suggest that the skies will be weeping, soon
But...
Despite some evidence to the contrary, Wei Wuxian is generally fully aware of when he’s about to cross a line that cannot be backtracked over. So he meets Wen Qing in the city, and before going to Lanling, he nips into Lotus Pier and picks up A-Yuan
He might leave A-Yuan with Wen Qing in the city when he goes to Glamour Hall, but Qiongqi Pass happens with a toddler watching silently from Wei Wuxian’s hip. Does Wei Wuxian tell him to look away, bury his face in baba’s shirt, or does he not bother, knowing the sort of song that makes up A-Yuan’s sweet dreams?
The Wens become the second through 51st or so people who learn what A-Yuan is. Wei Wuxian briefly considers trying to hide it, but, honestly, there are dead things everywhere on the Burial Mounds, and despite his genuine efforts, he cannot convince A-Yuan that a fierce corpse is anything but the ideal patty-cake companion. (They’ll play with him for hours! It’s a two-nearly-three-year-old’s dream!)
(he doesn’t want to convince him, not really. The last thing he wants to do ever is give A-Yuan anything to be scared of)
nor could he possibly wish that A-Yuan not be...obviously hale and hearty, running rosy-cheeked and strong around these hills of death that slowly seep the energy from any humans, animals, or even sturdy root crops
“So, uh, this is actually my demon baby,” said Wei Wuxian as they all settled in
“this day has been so weird already, this might as well goddamn happen”, said the Wens collectively
“You created a living child out of dead earth, so I’m going to take that as a yes that you can bring my brother back,” said Wen Qing specifically
“...fuck. I mean, yes. I mean - fuck,” said Wei Wuxian. “I- of course I will.”
(it doesn’t work like that, though)
The 52nd person to find out what A-Yuan is is Lan Wangji. Wei Wuxian very much does not tell him. They have a pleasant toy-shopping trip and lunch in town, and then the alarm talisman goes off and Wei Wuxian grabs A-Yuan and Lan Wangji tugs them both onto Bichen and when they arrive, Wen Ning is roaring. Lan Wangji knows what’s important; he takes A-Yuan so Wei Wuxian’s hands are free and he doesn’t have to worry about his son
except Wen Ning, black-eyed with rage, throws Wei Wuxian into a tree hard enough to crack a rib, and even as Lan Wangji raises Bichen, A-Yuan shouts,
“Uncle Ning, stop!”
and Wen Ning stops
(as a rule, Wei Wuxian can’t take over with himself and Chenqing anything A-Yuan is controlling, unless A-Yuan lets him, and vice versa. To eliminate variables, Wei Wuxian had made sure that any reins on Wen Ning were his (Wei Wuxian’s) alone. But in that moment, before Wen Ning came fully back to himself, his reins were swinging free - and they were back within the bounds of the Burial Mounds, where A-Yuan was always strong)
and Lan Wangji puts several pieces together at once and prays to every single god in heaven and every ancestor he’s disappointing right now that this was a miracle of love and a very cute child piercing through a fierce corpse’s mindless rampage. That he simply...hallucinated the burst of resentful energy he just felt from the child in his arms
but he’s absolutely, utterly aware that he didn’t
Wei Wuxian explains, stilted and awkward at the bottom of the hill. Challenging and terrified. Holding on to A-Yuan. 
Lan Wangji promises to keep the secret. 
Wei Wuxian takes Hanguang-jun’s word
Remember, oh, remember, that Wei Wuxian walks A-Yuan back up the hill until A-Yuan gets tired and Wei Wuxian picks him up, on their one-and-a-half–man plank bridge through the dark. Remember remember remember that before he can finish speaking that line, there is light - the clearing is lit with lanterns and secret-keepers 2 through 51, and I suppose 53 now that Wen Ning is awake, are waiting with dinner and warmth and welcome. Reader, remember this.
But then...
Aunt Qing and Uncle Ning had gone, and then, with a terrible expression on his face, so had A-Yuan’s baba. Now his baba’s anger and sadness is so strong that the weight of it makes A-Yuan cry from hundreds of miles away, and he curls into Granny’s arms and sends his baba everything he can. Will everything be okay, then? Will everyone come home; will they be able to smile again?
(oh, A-Yuan...)
(No.)
A-Yuan - Wei Yuan, Little Potato (when he’s good for baba or bad for Aunt Qing) or Little Radish (inverse); one day to be Lan Yuan, Lan Sizhui - was born in the good old fairy tale way of earth and iron and blood. It’s a hard thing for any child to lose even a single parent - in one day, in one minute, A-Yuan loses two of three, as the father of his blood burns away in hand the last shreds of Stygian iron, and promptly loses control of his own resentful energy
(the Tiger Seal does nothing like explode, in this world. It was never more than a prop - but a vital one. the benefit of proving it destroyed would be worth the loss of a parent, if only a second didn’t follow on its heels)
A-Yuan has been a dead thing (or close enough) come to life all his life, and both dead and living have been his friends and family. But he’s never felt the transition the other way: from life to death
It’s no wonder, really, that he can’t remember it afterward. No wonder that even on the land that was the last part of him, he was feverish and barely conscious when Lan Wangji stumbled, bleeding, off of Bichen, and took in his arms. No wonder that he remembered very little at all, including the dead. 
But he would be okay. Under physical and spiritual inspection, he’s a perfectly normal boy. He may not be able to form a golden core (there's something in the way), but there are...workarounds. He’ll grow up in one of the most heavily spiritually warded enclaves in the world, safe and loved as he relearns (mostly in secret) what he can do
(For the sake of this story, and A-Yuan’s survival as something close to canon, let’s say there are some truly dark things in the forbidden section of the Lan Library, that could only be used for nefarious purposes - though, I suppose we already knew that. Let’s say there are talismans that will disguise the very nature of qi, so resentful energy may appear spiritual. Let’s say, Lan Xichen becomes the 53rd to know the truth, because his brother needs help - and it’s Wei Wuxian’s child, okay? It’s just Wei Wuxian’s child, quiet and unsure rather than laughing as he always was. If you were in the inner circle of leaders of the Sunshot Campaign, you have absolutely met this child, probably held him and bounced him on one knee)
(What keeps Lan Xichen up at night isn’t the concealing amulet he helped his brother make, which Lan Yuan wears at all times around his neck. It’s the silence he keeps every time he meets Jiang Wanyin’s eyes over a diplomatic table. If anyone had the right to know Wei Yuan survived... But Sandu Sengshou killed Wei Wuxian, everyone knows that, and now he hunts demonic cultivators - what might his pride drive him to do to his nephew, if he ever learned the truth? (Selfishly, Lan Xichen know that if Lan Wangji lost A-Yuan, even just to living at Lotus Pier, Lan Xichen might lose his brother. That fear ebbs with time passing, but the the longer he hasn’t spoken, the worse it would be to do so...))
They don’t restrict Lan Yuan to the Cloud Recesses, no more than any other novice. For memory of their mother, neither of them could bear that. Jiang Cheng does eventually see him at a conference, and stops dead. Years have passed, but that is an entire goddamn nephew, right there. But - how? No, it can’t be. That’s...everyone knows Lan Wangji hated Wei Wuxian. It’s just...and someone would have told him. The Lans value propriety above all, after all.
Anything that can be done with spiritual cultivation can be done with demonic cultivation, save heal. Lan Sizhui makes up for it with an encyclopedic knowledge of undead and monsters, and a prodigal talent for Inquiry
On their first night hunt, the young juniors face ghosts. Unfortunately, this is when Lan Jingyi learns that he’s terrified of ghosts. He’s hiding behind Lan Sizhui and panic is contagious, and the senior accompanying them is in a different room of the abandoned house, and Lan Sizhui forgets that he’s holding a sword and just shouts, “Stop! Go away!” 
the ghost, of course, obeys
Lan Jingyi peeks out form behind him. “Did- did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Lan Sizhui admits (except that he’s absolutely sure he did)
There’s another flicker of movement, just the wind blowing ashes but Jingyi whips around with wild eyes. “Can you do it again?”
[friendship. my point is, he’s a demon baby but he has family and friends who love and accept him.]
And one day, some absolute fucking morons are going to bring him back home, where he can never be anything but strong, and threaten his friends and family? And the threat is an army of his old playmates, commanded by an attempt at recreating some combination of Chenqing and the Tiger Seal? He couldn’t manage it in Yi City, but now A-Yuan, Wei Yuan, Lan Sizhui stands on earth that has never stopped being part of him, or maybe he’s never stopped being part of it. If he closed his eyes he could feel every foot on it, living and restless dead. And they’re threatening his baba - who he remembers, as the earth remembers its old partner, even though the blood is changed - and his father Hanguang-jun, and his extended family and friends?
No.
166 notes · View notes
cannibal-wings · 5 years ago
Text
One of the upsides of being probably one of the oldest fans of Outlast still participating in the fandom, is that I remember or have saved really old pieces of canon or subcanon.
In the latest update of my fic, I mentioned an article that Miles wrote about Murkoff before the games took place. It’s about a water scandal involving Murkoff in Ghana. Originally it was a bit of promotional material released before Outlast came out in 2013, if I’m remembering right Red Barrels had a mock webpage for it containing the article, but I could be remembering that bit wrong and it was just sent out as a general bit of promotional material.
Anyways, way back in 2013 when I started drafting Survivors I saved this article to my reference document, and some people in the comments expressed that they wanted to read it for themselves. So I’m going to post the article in full and link this post in the comments and in the author notes of the fic. The wiki used to link to the article, or at least mention it, but it seems to have been long deleted, maybe it’s not “canon” enough, though I don’t see why it can’t go in the trivia section. Or maybe perhaps the webpage it was hosted on is also, long deleted. 
“THE DEVIL’S BARGAIN How Murkoff Turned the Global Water Crisis into a Billion Dollar Revenue Stream By Miles Upshur
May 9, 2013 2:19pm ACCRA, GHANA
Nine-year old Akosua stands before the water-vending machine with its bright “ALSAB” logo, a few bills clutched in her small hand. You can still see the blank place on the machine’s hull where the words “Freeflow Global Charities” was pried away last year.
She explains that 2 cedis (about $1) will buy her five liters of purified water, which her Cholera-afflicted mother desperately needs. But 17 cedis at the Worldfree Clinic would buy her mother the course of antibiotics that would shorten the disease’ course and possibly save her life. It’s a terrible choice for a child to make, and one facing more and more of the world’s 1.6 billion inhabitants without access to clean drinking water.
More than a quarter of Accra’s citizens buy their water from Wellspring Industries, either monthly through their taps, or directly from the ubiquitous, bright yellow Alsab machines. What few Ghanians know, however, is the hidden connection between Wellspring Industries, Alsab, Freeflow Global Charities, and Worldfree Clinics.
All of them are subsidiaries of the multinational Murkoff Corporation.
In an increasingly clear partnership between Western Capitalism and Third World corruption, the Murkoff Corporation has used its dozens of subsidiaries to open back doors into selling the source of life to drought-starved populations in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.
Here’s how it works: a newly-started charity, fueled largely by donations, establishes a water supply and sewage systems for communities whose well water has been rendered non-potable by industrial runoff. Murkoff gets the tax write-off for charitable spending, while their subsidiary Alsab gets the profits for building and installing the system. When the cost of running the system becomes too great, the charity (in Ghana’s case, Freeflow Global) declares bankruptcy and abandons the project. Then Murkoff subsidiary Wellspring Industries (or another Murkoff shell company) steps in and offers the local government completion and maintenance of the project in return for the construction fee and complete deregulation of the water supply, allowing Wellspring/Murkoff to name the price of the population’s water.
As Murkoff is also the owner of the three most active pharmaceutical manufacturers to the Third World, they’ll profit nicely whether the locals choose clean water or cholera.
It’s only the latest in Murkoff’s near-century long history of playing both sides against the middle, maximizing profits at the cost of human rights. Whether licensing aggressively pollinating, genetically-modified rice with a built in “suicide gene” to India, flipping blood diamond real estate in Angola and Sierra Leone, or peddling amphetamines to the Nazis in World War II, you can’t swing a dead cat in an arena of human suffering without knocking over a Murkoff piggy bank.
Water is fast becoming the new oil, an issue largely ignored by the developed world, by wealthy Americans and Europeans comfortable with their hot showers and iced drinks.
But earlier this year Murkoff subsidiary Heartland Springs Charity began construction of three Alsab-built water purification plants in Detroit. Welcome to New World Water.”
86 notes · View notes
theoriginalladya · 4 years ago
Text
WIP Wednesday
Since I know there are a few people out there interested, and since the first draft ended up turning out remarkably good for a first draft (or so I think), have a bit of fluffier Caleb Shepard and Kaidan post-war, post adventure (this comes at the end of my planned story for them) after the Reaper War.  (last night’s Reaper War angst is still bugging me so I’m feeling generous.  Under the cut for length)
This goes with my previous post about them.
~~~
(setting: Western Irish coast)
“Do you ever think we might have missed our calling?” Caleb asks.
Kaidan’s eyebrow arches.  Taking a knee, he picks up a stone, bounces it in his hand for a moment then hefts it into the air, throwing it toward the sea.  The winds are strong, however, and before Caleb can blink, just a hint of bluish dark energy envelops it, guiding it out to the waves beyond.  “What are you thinking?” he counters after a moment.  “That we should have become prothean experts like a certain asari friend of ours?”
It’s difficult not to laugh, and Caleb doesn’t even try.  “Something like that.  Maybe,” he agrees.  He stares out to the horizon, nothing but churning waves and water as far as the eye can see.  The height of the cliffs offer a bit of drama to the scene.  It’s a much better setting than he could ever have hoped for; if only he could find the words.
Kaidan moves up next to him, his eyes as sharp and searching as Caleb’s.  “Not English Bay,” he admits with a hint of a smile and a quick grin, “but a beautiful view nonetheless.”
Caleb sighs and nods.  Pulling his gaze from the Atlantic, he glances just to their north. These days, the ruins are barely discernible from the cliffs, but he knows they’re there.  “Come on, I want to show you something.”
They walk for a while in silence, carefully navigating the craggy landscape.  It’s strange to see; there’s barely any sign that the Reapers made it out this far. Finally, they reach the spot. Here, the ruins are a bit more noticeable, but still blend in if you aren’t looking for them.  Caleb leans on the cane, thankful for it in these past few minutes.  Lifting his right hand, he traces the outline in the air.  “See it?”
Kaidan is beside him again.  “Yeah,” he breathes, astonishment clear.  “Wow.  How old is that?”
Caleb shrugs.  “Built in the 1400s, so the stories say,” he explains.  “To protect us from invasion by the sea.”  Silence falls again; Caleb’s thoughts fall to the past.
“Nothing could have stopped the Reapers,” Kaidan says after a moment.
Caleb stirs from his thoughts.  “Hmm?  Oh, I wasn’t thinking of them, but the Greystones.”  Which, he knows, is just as ironic as their background was filled with repelling enemies from the sea as well.  Ireland never had the same luck.  
The wind gusts in off the sea and toys with his hair, mussing it up and casting it about wildly to tickle along his cheek and forehead.  It reminds him of his younger years, too.  “Anyway, my point is, despite everything that’s happened – time, war, Reapers – it still lives on, in some shape or form.”
Kaidan gives him a skeptical side-glance. “You’ve been talking to Liara again, haven’t you?”
“What?”  With a half laugh, Caleb pushes his hair out of his eyes.  “No.  I’ve told you before, we Irish are sentimental bastards at best.”  A grin turns upward at the right corner of his lips.
Kaidan’s smile matches it.  “That you have.”
His eyes drifting back to the ruins, Caleb asks, “You ever wonder about leaving some kind of legacy of your own behind?”
Kaidan is silent for a minute, and it’s enough to drive Caleb to distraction so he hobbles forward a few steps.  As he does, he notices something wedged in between some rocks.  Crouching carefully, he retrieves it … a flutter in his chest leaving him speechless. Rising once more, he half turns to look over at Kaidan.
“If you’re asking if I’m as determined as Henry Lawson was, the answer is no,” Kaidan finally replies.
“No,” Caleb insists with a grimace, “not like that.” The loss of Miranda at the hands of her father is still surprisingly sharp after all these weeks and months.  While they had never been close, she had been a friend, of a sort.  
Another gust of wind kicks up, this time leaving Kaidan shivering slightly.  “I guess I never really thought about it,” he admits as he walks over to join Caleb. “Ever since Eden Prime, everything’s been focused on the Reapers …”
Their eyes meet, but as usual, Caleb cannot decipher what he sees there.  “And now that they’re gone?”
“A lot more possibilities are available.”  
Possibilities.  Caleb swallows convulsively.  Possibilities he can work with, but he needs to be sure … “Look,” he says quietly, his left hand gesturing with the cane as a reminder, “if I’m just going to hold you back –.”
Kaidan moves with a speed Caleb has seen rarely outside of battle, and when he has, it’s been focused on far more pleasanter things.  Before Caleb can even catch his breath, Kaidan’s hand wraps around his good wrist and tugs gently, pulling him close.  The kiss that follows is fierce, possessive, and leaves Caleb’s belly flipping more wildly than before, if that’s even possible.  “You don’t,” he insists when he pulls back a pace; but his hand remains securely around Caleb’s.  “Don’t ever think that.”
It takes Caleb a long minute to catch his thoughts and refocus, but the vehemence in the order helps.  “Right.”  With effort, he pulls his gaze from Kaidan’s – he has to or he isn’t going to be able to go through with this – and stares back at the ruins again.  The vaguest hint of pressure around his hand as he draws in a deep breath is the deciding factor.  Tucking the cane under his left arm, he uses his now free hand to fish out the small box from his jacket pocket.  At the same time, a silent prayer of thanks to his friends who were able to make this happen is sent forth; to Liara whose connections cut through red tape like a hot knife through butter, to Coats whose unending, if teasing, support had him sneaking off on his own a couple of days ago to retrieve them, to Athair whose faith in him never wavered from the moment he helped rescue the small child who wandered into St. Senan’s so many years ago.
When he pulls his hand from the pocket, he looks back over at Kaidan.  The chilling bite of metal against the skin of his palm helps provide clarity for the moment; the winds off the Atlantic slow, the sun peeks through fluffy white clouds and shines down upon them, and in Kaidan’s eyes he sees … curiosity. Caleb laughs softly.  Always curious.  “So,” he starts, then pauses to clear his throat.  “So, if you really mean that –.”
“I do.”
The smile widens a fraction.  The wind teases at the edges of Kaidan’s hair now, a testament to just how strong it blows in off the coast, and Caleb reaches over to push it out of his eyes.  The hint of exasperation in Kaidan’s eyes pulls yet another chuckle out of Caleb. But, as he lowers his hand, his forefinger caressing down Kaidan’s temple to his jaw, he brings it to rest between them, open, palm up.  The sun flickers brightly, glancing off the mixture of gold and silver resting there, woven together in a pattern as familiar to Caleb as breathing.  In silence, he watches Kaidan’s gaze shift down, notes the surprise that follows … and morphs into shock before darting back to his.  
“Is this …?” he chokes, eyes wide and unable to hide anything from Caleb now.
A sudden moment of peace and calm fills Caleb, and the nerves that have plagued him for days now settle.  “I’ve told you the story,” he says.  “I was thinking, if you are agreeable –.”
“Agreeable?”  
The amount of disbelief in Kaidan’s exclamation chases away the last of the lingering concerns.  With a twist of his wrist, he moves the rings between his fingers, holding them a bit higher for Kaidan to see.  “Friendship,” he murmurs, his eyes locked onto Kaidan’s now. “Loyalty.  Love.  I’d say that describes us, wouldn’t you?”
Kaidan opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out; all Caleb sees is a few convulsive swallows.  Leaning in, he rests his forehead against Kaidan’s.  “I didn’t want to say anything until the Reapers were dealt with,” he whispers, eyes closing to hide momentary grief and pain at the loss all that entailed.  “But, now that they’re gone, I can’t imagine going back to a life where you aren’t a part of it.”
Kaidan’s free hand slides up Caleb’s back, coming to rest at the back of his head.  He shifts just a bit, enough to tilt his head to the side so their lips can meet, and the moment their lips connect, Caleb knows he has his answer.  It’s rare he can catch Kaidan off guard to the point of speechlessness, but it seems he’s succeeded; a moment he’ll always remember.
When they break apart, gasping for air as the wind buffers gently around them, Kaidan manages, “How … did you even …?”
Caleb laughs softly, releasing some of the nervous energy.  “I’m Commander Fucking Shepard, according to James, remember?  I can get anything done.”  He concludes with a wink as his lips slide back into a grin.
Kaidan, finally, joins in.  “Well, he’s sure got you figured out.”
Taking one of the rings, Caleb holds it between his thumb and forefinger.  He eyes Kaidan with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.  “I can’t wear both of these, you know.”
There is still the tiniest tremor in Kaidan’s hand as he lifts his hand.  Caleb slides the ring onto his finger; perfect fit.  Then he offers the other and the process is repeated.  Caleb isn’t unaffected, and by the time they exchange another kiss, he drops the cane back into place and leans heavily upon it.
“So,” Kaidan says after a while, his eyes focused on the ring on his hand, “should I assume if you figured this part out you have something else in mind for what follows?”
Caleb nods.  “I don’t want to steal any thunder from your mother,” he explains, “but I thought before we left … something small and private.”  
For just a moment, Kaidan stills and stares at Caleb.  “That’s why you snuck off to the church the other day, isn’t it?”
One brow arches and Caleb gives his best, Who, me? look which only draws a laugh.  “Maybe,” he agrees.  “I guess he thought if we aren’t staying here, we might as well have something better to remember my home by.”
Kaidan’s laughter is refreshing.  “I’m not likely to forget,” he replies.  “With you and the kids, I’ll be the odd one out, remember?”
Caleb reaches over to run his thumb along Kaidan’s stubbled cheek.  “You’ll sound like one of us soon enough.”
“God help us all.”
22 notes · View notes
alarawriting · 4 years ago
Text
The Cold At The Heart of the Light: Chapter One
I’ve decided I’ll post probably the first three chapters of this as I work on it. There’s currently six chapters written and the seventh is started; I have been planning about twelve of them.
This is gonna have to be edited a lot when I finish the whole thing -- it’s too goddamn long, for one thing -- but I can’t spend too much time editing the first draft when I’m not done with it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
As soon as the maid led me to the living room and I got my first look at the little girl, I could tell the child was dying.  She was sitting on an overstuffed, white suede couch with brown fringy pillows all around her, at the back of a living room that looked like something out of House Beautiful, all tall wide windows and understated elegance in brown and beige and gold and white. She was maybe about seven, if her disease hadn’t undersized her, feet dangling off the couch and not moving. When children whose feet are dangling are not kicking those feet, and there is neither a book nor a TV nearby to explain the discrepancy, I can generally tell something is wrong. Her blonde curly wig was as expensive as the décor of her parents’ living room, but I’m an expert in these matters – I could tell the chemo had taken her hair. And her skin was dull and dry looking, her eyes vague and unfocused, her expression indrawn and blank, her small limbs painfully skinny.  She showed all the signs of either being abused, drugged, or severely ill, and given that her father had called me in, I knew that at least it was the last. Probably the second as well.  The pharmaceutical industry has never solved the problem of stopping children’s pain to my satisfaction (or, for that matter, the children’s.)
Her mother would have been an elegantly plastic politician’s wife if she hadn’t been sitting tensely at the edge of the sofa, arm around her daughter, clutching the child. Fear and anxiety make even women with $500 haircuts and botoxed foreheads seem human. I’d already forgotten the woman’s name; after checking over the daughter with a quick glance, I turned to focus on her father. Senator John Lightman, one of those politicians who manages to look “boyish” simply by being a thin dark-haired man in his prime when everyone else in the Senate is somewhere between 60 and dead, was walking toward me, reaching out a hand as if to shake it. I saw the look of puzzlement cross his face as he got a good look at me. “Are you…”
“Dr. Mystery?” I filled in the blank. “Yes, of course, I apologize. You couldn’t possibly recognize me like this.”  I had arrived in a stock form, a middle-aged woman of average height, weight and appearance with blonde graying hair in a short fluffy do.  I couldn’t very well drive around town in my working form, but now that I was here, it was time to shock and awe the mundanes.  With a thought, I transformed.
When I first adopted this as my working form, it used to take me ten or twenty minutes in front of a mirror to get it just right, because it doesn’t look human enough for me to use DNA as a model anywhere – I have to brute-force it. But by this time I’d been doing it for so many years, it took only a few seconds. Changing doesn’t hurt – it feels like having a really good stretch, actually.  
In a moment, I was six feet tall, simultaneously busty and thin, with the golden skin of an Academy award, iris-less purple eyes with cat pupils, and flame-red hair down to the small of my back.  I wore a skin-tight black leather catsuit with no shoes, and modified pelvis and leg muscles so I looked like I was wearing high heels even though I was barefoot – an anatomic impossibility for other women, but there’s no point in having total control over your own flesh if you can’t use it to show off a little.  To complete the costume I grew a white cotton labcoat over the catsuit; not exactly a cape, but the name is Doctor Mystery, not Ms. Mystery or Lady Mystery or Sexy Chick I’d Like To Do Mystery.  
Being a supervillain’s all about the power and the respect.  Back when my working form wasn’t quite so do-me hot, I actually used to get less respect as a villain, as if a woman couldn’t possibly really be all that mad, bad and dangerous to know if she doesn’t look like a supermodel.  But when I do the catsuit without the lab coat, I get respect as a badass with dangerous powers and incredible fighting skills, not as a biomedical genius.  Not that I’m not a badass with dangerous powers and incredible fighting skills, but I’m not a teen thug for hire anymore, I’m a bona fide mad scientist and I want people to remember that, dammit.  
Mrs. Lightman’s eyes went wide, and she made a tiny little yelping noise and clutched her little girl… who rather than looking frightened, actually looked mildly interested for the first time since I’d arrived.  Her dad was trying to hide it, but his lips had compressed as if he were trying not to bite them and there was just the tiniest tremor in his hands.  I expected Mrs. Lightman’s reaction, but the Senator could have gone one of two ways – men usually react to me with fear or lust, or a combination.  I didn’t think I saw lust in Senator Lightman, and when I took his hand and shook it, I confirmed it.  He was on the verge of peeing his pants.  I might have believed he wasn’t reacting with any lust because he really had eyes only for his wife, if he weren’t a politician.  But I’ve known very few male politicians to be faithful, and even they couldn’t avoid being lustful.  Senator Lightman was terrified of me because I was a Proxima and he was a Sapien-centric bigot.  Also, probably, because I was a supervillain and a killer and I could drop him dead in a second, turn him inside out, make the skin melt off his flesh or give him cancer, just from the touch of his hand in mine.  But I suspected I’d have gotten the same reaction if I’d been a member of the Peace Force, or even a Girl Scout with purple eyes and gold skin trying to sell him cookies.  He hated my kind, but he needed me today.
And I intended to use his need to my people’s advantage.
“Introduce me to your family, Senator,” I said.
I felt his adrenaline spike through the skin connection of our clasped hands, but he managed not to show it.  He let go of me.  “This is my wife, Dot, and our daughter Mindy.  She’s eight.”
I walked over to Mindy and knelt down in front of her, prompting more tension and white knuckles from her mother clasping her.  “Hello, Mindy,” I said.
“Hi,” she mumbled.
“Do you know who I am?”
“My daddy says you’re some kind of super doctor.”
Super doctor. I liked that.  “He’s right.  I’m here to help you.  I imagine you’ve gotten real tired of being sick.”
She smiled wanly.  “Yeah.”
“Let me have your hands.”
“Will it hurt?”  Her tone was tired and apathetic, as if it didn’t really matter if it was going to hurt or not.  I suspected it was more resignation than apathy.
“Not at all.”  I smiled at her.  “I’m a super doctor, remember?  It doesn’t hurt if I don’t want it to.”  
She gave me her small hands and I clasped them in mine.  I can’t entirely describe what I feel when I examine a living creature, not in terms that refer to the senses everyone else has.  It’s like feeling a symphony or hearing a tapestry.  Everything is very complex and interrelated, and I get signals from thousands of processes in the body, but it all melds together into a single big picture.  The big picture here was that Mindy’s body was attacking itself.  Her bone marrow was busily churning out cancerous white blood cells that didn’t work, filling her bloodstream with useless cells that crowded out and starved the working, useful ones.  The pain signals were overwhelming even with the drugs trying to mask them, and the drugs themselves were dulling her mind as much as the fatigue and weakness from the disease.
Like many terminally ill children, she was quiet and accepting, which is constantly mistaken in glurgy human interest stories about terminally ill children for bravery.  Children who go out with scarves on their bald heads and run lemonade stands to raise money to research and cure their own illnesses are brave.  Children who are too tired to feel fear and have been living with a disease too long to cry about it are just normal human beings.  Mindy was a normal human being, and her leukemia was also perfectly normal, something I’d dealt with a hundred times before.  
I closed my eyes so I could focus better on Mindy’s internal world.  First I triggered the release of endorphins into her bloodstream to mask any pain caused by what I was about to do.  The human body rebels against my power, seeing my authority as a violation of its autonomy, and frequently reacts by tattling to the brain about it in a way that the mind perceives as agonizing, but unspecific, pain.  As I told Mindy, though, no one feels pain in my hands unless I allow it.  As soon as her body was saturated with endorphins and I’d shut down most of the internal sensory trunk lines to the brain, making her internally numb while leaving her ability to sense anything touching her skin, I swept my concentration through her body and killed every immature white blood cell she had.  I then targeted the surviving mature white cells and forced them to rapidly replicate and mature, until she had almost a normal white blood cell count and they all worked correctly.
To finish off, I blocked the drugs that hadn’t been working so well anyway, turned the internal nerves back on, and filled Mindy with a combination of endorphin and oxytocin, and other hormones designed to make people feel good.  This particular cocktail wouldn’t have sexual effects – Mindy’s brain lacked some of the structures needed to process that, yet, and I always took great care with children not to do anything inappropriate to their age.  After what my own father did to me… well, I may be a supervillain, but I am not a child molester, and that makes me better than he was.  What I was going for – what I always gave the children I treated – can be best described, if you remember being a kid, as the excitement from knowing you’re about to go to an amusement park, coupled with the pleasure you get from eating ice cream, and all that combined with the warm snuggly feeling you get when you’re cuddled with your parents.  Mindy wouldn’t know why, in the future, she looked forward to my visits and felt very warm and positive emotions toward me.  She would just know that seeing Dr. Mystery would be the coolest thing ever, and just my presence would be more fun than any doctor’s office lollipop ever was.
Combine such warm and pleasant emotions with the freakish physical appearance of an obvious Proxima, and Mindy would not grow up to share her dad’s bigotry, even if he tried to teach it to her.
“Mindy?” Dot Lightman asked, her voice trembling slightly.  “Are you all right?”
Mindy lifted her head.  Her skin didn’t look any better, of course – I hadn’t done any cosmetic work – but her eyes were refocusing, turning bright and engaged.  “Mommy?  I feel good, Mommy.  I think the doctor fixed me!”
With my endorphin cocktail chasing away her fatigue temporarily, she leapt to her feet.  “Thank you, Super Doctor Mystery!  I feel all better!”  She twirled around, perhaps to prove to all of us that she was fully healed… and stumbled.  “Whoa, dizzy!”
“Slow up there, kiddo,” I said.  “You’re not cured.  You feel a lot better and you’re going to be a lot better, but you’ve spent a couple of years being sick and you’re not going to be back to your full strength overnight.  Take it easy.”
“Is she—is she going to be cured?” her mother asked, looking at me, her lower lip trembling.
“She’s much healthier, right now.  But no, as I said, I haven’t cured her yet.  I triggered a temporary remission and bolstered her immune system to compensate for what the disease did to it, so she needn’t suffer while she’s waiting for a full cure.”  I turned to Senator Lightman.  “To cure her, I’ll need to perform three treatments, about two months apart.  The cost will be $8,000 per treatment.  When we’re done, not only won’t she have leukemia, but the genetic potential for cancer will be purged from her system, so it will be very, very unlikely that she ever get any cancer-like disease again.  Short of living on top of a radioactive landfill, of course, but you understand what I mean.”
“Oh, God….” Mrs. Lightman started to cry.  “Oh, God, thank you…”
“Don’t cry, Mommy,” Mindy said, and gave her mom a hug.  “It’s good news. Don’t cry.”
“I’m crying because I’m so happy,” Mrs. Lightman said.
“I—I don’t know what to say, Doctor.  You have a deal.  I’d pay anything to save Mindy’s life, and your prices… well, they’re much more reasonable than I was led to assume.  I’d pay more than that for hospital treatments, even with the insurance.”  I was pretty sure this was a fib – Senators get damn good health insurance.  But of course Lightman belonged to the party that thought that health insurance was a privilege, not a right, and downplaying the high quality of his own state-sponsored insurance was probably a reflex by this point.  
I smiled at him.  “That’s because most of my payment is non-monetary.”
“Non-monetary?”
“Let’s go have a discussion, Senator.  I imagine you must have a private office in this house somewhere?”
His wife gave me a hard-eyed look. I returned her look with an “oh, please” expression, just the slightest of eye rolls and sardonic smile.  “There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of my wife,” Lightman said, his voice hardening.
“Yes, there is,” I said, pleasantly.  “You want to tell her all about it when we’re done talking, that’s your prerogative.  But I am here to negotiate with a United States Senator, not a husband or a father.”
He stiffened.  “All right,” he said slowly.  “We can go downstairs to the den.”
“Is it—is it going to be all right?” Dot Lightman asked her husband.
“I don’t see that I have much choice, Dot,” he said.  “She’s the only hope Mindy has.  You know that.”
“Mommy? Can I play outside?”
“Sure.  Sure thing,” Dot said, her voice breaking again.  “I’ll play with you.”
“Don’t let her overexert herself,” I said.  “As I said, she’s better, not cured, and even if she were cured she’d still need time to recover her energy. She wants to run around and play now because she’s not in pain, but she actually still does need to save her strength.”
“We’ll go for a walk,” Dot said.  “How’s that sound, Mindy?”
“Sure, Mommy. We can do that.”
“The den is this way,” Senator Lightman said.
It was a typical suburban finished basement, not nearly as fancy looking as the living room, if you didn’t count the huge projection television.  I perched on the still-nice-but-obviously-worn couch, sitting on the back of it.  “Let’s get down to it, Senator,” I said.  “You’re a member of the Committee to Analyze Parahuman Activity.  You’re aware as well as I am that the United States government has been investigating or implementing various techniques to control or eliminate the Proxima population, including laws to create a registry for us as if we’re sex offenders, black ops soldiers with power suits to hunt us down, attempting to find cures for us like we’re a disease, secret databases being maintained in an attempt to identify us in the absence of a registry law… so on and so forth.”  I didn’t mention the biowarfare; people who didn’t live through being imprisoned in a government research facility and watching others being injected with various tailored viruses have a tendency to assume that government biowarfare is the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories, and I doubted anyone had actually let Congress know what was going on there.  The others, I was pretty sure he’d been briefed on, if not actively involved with.  “And you’re an active supporter of the Human Definition Amendment, which would deprive us of any human rights whatsoever on the basis of junk science.”
The faintest beading of sweat broke out on his forehead.  “The United States government hasn’t taken any illegal actions to ‘control’ the Proxima population, as you put it, and certainly not to eliminate you.  You must understand, however, that we do have the right and the duty to protect normal humans from people like…”
He hesitated just a moment too long. “Me?”
“I was going to say, people like Caesar Primus or Optometron.  But if the rumors about your activities are true, then yes, you.  Weren’t you some sort of assassin?  An enforcer for a drug lord?”
While technically the description was almost true, the idea of describing David as a “drug lord” almost made me laugh.  Almost.  I don’t actually have a lot of a sense of humor when it comes to David.  “And I was rehabilitated by the Peace Force and today I’m a fine, upstanding citizen who cures little girls of leukemia,” I said.  
“That isn’t a lot of comfort to the families of the people you killed.”
“Maybe not.  But if I’d been killed by American soldiers in power suits then, your daughter would be out of luck now, wouldn’t she?”  I slid off the back of the couch and paced around him.  “And this isn’t about me.  How many people were saved when the Irregulars stopped that second plane from crashing into the Trade Towers?  When they held up the collapsing building so the firefighters could get out?  When the Peace Force shored up the levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina so the city didn’t flood, or when Maui’s volcano went active and they shut it down again?”  The Senator didn’t actually need to know that was a plot of Professor Octohedron’s, if he didn’t already. The Peace Force hadn’t actually broadcast the fact that the disaster had been caused by a Proxima in the first place; I only knew about it because Octohedron continued to believe that he could get into my pants if only he could impress me enough, and he hadn’t actually ever managed to figure out that I wasn’t impressed by grandiose plots to take over the world by threatening to activate volcanoes.  “You might owe your life to a Proxima. You are about to owe your daughter��s life.  So I want your support for our basic human rights.  Oppose the Parahuman Registry, oppose the research to kill us or break us of our powers, and oppose the Human Definition Amendment.”
“The Human Definition Amendment isn’t designed to take away your human rights,” he said.  “It’s designed to clarify the rights you do have.  I mean, there have to be different ways to handle you people vs. the rest of us.  Remember when the ACLU sued on behalf of the Heat Miser?  They said that it was cruel and unusual punishment to keep him continuously drugged in prison. And as soon as they won and the drugs were withdrawn, his powers came back and he burned the prison down. 700 people were killed, over 100 guards and the rest of them human inmates, who’d been sentenced to serve time in jail for their crimes, not to burn to death.”
“Then you redefine cruel and unusual punishment to state that methods intended to block Proximas from using superhuman powers to escape from prison are not cruel and are perfectly usual.  Passing an amendment to the Constitution that declares that Proximas aren’t human is overkill.”
“It actually declares that humans belong to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, and that the law should not be automatically extended to grant human rights to people who can destroy our entire planet with a thought just because some bleeding heart doesn’t think they deserve to go to jail for killing hundreds of people.”
“Yes, and by declaring that Homo sapiens promixus does not automatically count as human, it effectively says that we’re not, and we can be shot on sight with no one but the ASPCA to worry about our murders, let alone suffer discrimination in every part of our lives.  You do not live with the reality of what being defined as non-human means, Senator.  I do.”
“And you, Doctor, don’t live with the reality of inhabiting a world filled with creatures who can kill you with a thought, steal everything you own, destroy your home without even touching it, or make you believe that up is down and black is white.”  
I could argue that last point, if I wanted to be a smartass – I lived in the world where there was conservative talk radio, and it had convinced any number of people that up was down and black was white.  But that would be sidetracking.  “True.  But you’re so focused on perceiving yourself as a victim of the existence of Proximas that you’ve given no thought to what it would be like to be one of us. And you really should.  Because you have a child, Senator, and she is too young to be confirmed as Sapien or Proxima.  You don’t know what she is, and you’re just assuming she’s Sapien.  What if she’s Proxima?”
He blinked.  “Well, of course I—but she doesn’t have anything in her background – I mean neither her mother nor I have anything unusual, genetically—“
“No one knows what’s causing the sudden explosion in powered humans, Senator, but we do know that it’s some type of mutation.  90% of Proximas have parents who were Sapien.  And the number is that low only because some of us have started having kids.  If your daughter was a Proxima with two fully Sapien parents, she’d be in the same boat as most Proximas. Including me.  So you really need to think about it.”
“Well, I – I certainly wouldn’t treat Mindy any differently if she were – but if she were, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“I didn’t check for it.  But I could, yes.”
“Well, if she turned out to be, you could just fix it, right?  As part of the treatment?”
I stared at him as if I’d just found him on my shoe.  “Of course I could. And if she was black, I could make her white and blonde and blue-eyed. And I could change her into a boy if you decided you really wanted a son.  Have you any idea how offensive what you just said is?”
“I – I didn’t mean to give offense.  I just want Mindy to have a normal life.”
“Most Proximas do. I don't look like this all the time, Senator.  When I'm not treating hopeless cases, I live in a nice little townhouse, with two cats and a cockatiel.  I go dancing with men friends on weekends, I buy groceries, I do my laundry.  I choose to look like this when I'm treating people like your daughter, because I have no desire to be kidnapped and pressed into the service of crime lords or the government."
"Why would the government kidnap you?  Proximas have rights.  If you’ve served your time for your previous crimes, and committed no new ones--"
"--I would still have the power to make old men young, cure impotence and infertility, heal disease and scarring, change people's appearances... come on now, Senator, don't be naive.  If you had a way to make me heal your daughter without paying my price, you'd do it.  And I think you're basically a good man, who’s concerned for the child he loves.  Can you say none of your colleagues would want me to heal them?  To restore lost youth, or whatever they had lost?"  I thought of the white room then, the snipers with guns outside ready to blow my head off if the important old men screaming under my hands didn’t get up and walk free completely healed when I was done. Never again.  
"I... suppose power corrupts.  There are some bad elements in any system, but that doesn't mean the system is evil."
"I didn’t say the system was evil.  I said it’s not designed to protect people like me.  And if you and your fellows have their way, it’ll be even harder for me to live a normal, safe life.”  I shook my head.  "We're sidetracking.  If Mindy turns out to be a Proxima, she could still have an entirely normal and happy life, so long as you didn't reject her for it and the government didn't kill her for it."
"I would never reject Mindy.  No matter what.  If-- if she was a parahuman--"
"Then your opinions on appropriate treatment of Proximas would be rather different, wouldn't they?"
He sighed.  “Look, I have a constituency, Doctor Mystery.  They elected me into office to protect them and serve them, and they have ideas as to what constitutes doing that.  If I do something that they don’t approve of, I won’t have the power they’ve given me for very long.”
I flopped down on his couch again.  “Oh, baloney.  You mean that if you can’t fearmonger about hidden Proximas living among us and the draconian measures the Daddy State will take under your watch to protect the poor scared soccer moms and NASCAR dads, you can’t get elected.”  I sat up and leaned forward.  “It’s all bullshit. The tide of history always favors greater human rights, greater freedoms, greater protections for minorities vs. mobs.  And it always works out better in the end that way.  I understand that you have to protect yourself from lunatics who shoot death rays out of their elbows, but you know, you also have to protect yourself from lunatics who break into the McDonalds’ with a gun and start shooting people, and somehow it was your party who decided it was an unacceptable infringement on your freedom to hunt, shoot intruders, and generally feel like manly men to make people undergo background checks to get assault weapons.”
“The Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.”
“The Constitution wouldn’t say that if you passed an amendment redefining a ‘well-regulated militia’ as the National Guard.  Which I’m not saying you should.  I’m in favor of your right to protect yourself with a gun. I’m in favor of your right to shoot animals for fun if you feel like it; I’m a Darwinist and you’re a predator.  It’s in your genes.  Go shoot deer if you want.  But the Constitution currently states that I am a human being, because it doesn’t say that I’m not, and I was born in the United States to two human beings, share 99.9% of my DNA with you, speak your language, look like you, and have sex with you.  Well, not you personally, but Sapiens men.  So if it’s so vitally important to preserve the right to bear arms, because it’s in the Constitution, that it’s okay to let sociopaths get guns and shoot up college campuses, then it is vastly more important to make sure that every child born in this country to human parents is defined as human.  
“If you pass this Definition of Humanity amendment in order to protect your constituency, and Mindy turns out to be a Proxima, then she can be raped and her rapist could be charged with bestiality at best, because she wouldn’t be legally a child who can be molested, she’d be legally an animal. She could be killed, and the most her killer could be charged with is animal cruelty. No school would have to take her, no hospital would have to treat her diseases, no restaurant would have to let her in to eat with you.  You would have to fight a battle to get her treated in a way that you humans take for granted, every time.  Want her to die in a car accident because the paramedics didn’t want to treat a Proxima?  Want her to die in a fire because the firefighters didn’t want to risk themselves going into a burning building for someone who isn’t even human?  There are better ways to defend Sapiens than making it legally open season on us.”
“But you’re against those too. The Parahuman Registry would allow us to track dangerous people without having to deprive any of you of basic civil rights.”
“Except I’ve never heard of a version of it suggesting that only parahuman criminals be added to the registry.”
“Well, dangerous parahumans haven’t necessarily committed crimes yet.  But for instance, if your next door neighbor turns up dead of a heart attack and everyone knows you were fighting with him, isn’t it important that the police know you have the power to stop people’s hearts by touching them?”
“If your next door neighbor has a gun, isn’t it important that you know about it so you can keep your daughter from playing in his yard?”
“Most gun owners are law abiding citizens, and if someone is killed with a gun we already have laws on the books to help the police track down the killer.  If someone is killed with a superpower, we wouldn’t even necessarily know to look for a superpower.”
“So educate the cops better on superpowers.  Most Proximas are law abiding citizens.  If you kill your neighbor by hitting him over the head with a frying pan, does that mean you needed to be on some sort of registry of frying pan owners?”  I started pacing again.  “It’s irrelevant in any case.  I don’t care what your personal beliefs are.  I care that you love your daughter and want her to be healthy.”
“So you’re blackmailing me.”
“Blackmail?  I’m demanding payment.  When your campaign contributors give you money for re-election, they’re not blackmailing you to expect that you’re going to show them some quid pro quo. I’m offering you something far, far more valuable than a few dollars in your re-election coffers; I’m offering you your daughter’s life and health.  I think expecting a little quid pro quo is not unreasonable.”
“And what if I refused?  Would you let her die?”
At one point that would have been a tough one; in this line of work you have to appear to be compassionate, but you also have to be tough or the patients will walk all over you.  I had had plenty of experience dealing with this particular conundrum, though.  “Do you know what I did for Mindy today?  Do you understand her disease at all?”
“I don’t know what you did, no. You keep saying you made her better but you didn’t cure her.  But I do know something about her disease.  The doctors tell me that she’s making too many white blood cells, and it’s crowding out and killing the rest of her blood.”
“Close.  They’re immature, cancerous blood cells, so they don’t work to protect her from disease the way mature white blood cells would.  This lowers her general immunity, and yes, it clogs up her bloodstream and takes resource away from working cells.  What I did today was to kill all the immature cells and regenerate some of the mature ones.  She still has leukemia; she’s still making too many immature cells.  Without a full treatment that will never stop.  What I’ve done is to ease her symptoms.  Until she builds up too many immature cells again, she’ll feel better.”  I leaned on the wall, arms folded.  “I’m perfectly capable of doing this every six months and never actually curing her.  She’ll feel better, and she’ll have a happy, normal life, as long as she gets her treatments on time.  The one time she misses a treatment, though – maybe because the government kidnapped me, arrested me, killed me or took my powers away – she’ll have full-blown leukemia again, and within a year or two she’ll die.”  I pushed off the wall.  “So you can support me up front because it’s the right thing to do for the person who gave you back your daughter’s life, or you can hedge and haw and refuse to get with my program, and if so your daughter will be well for exactly as long as I am able to continue treating her.  The very laws you want to pass that will harm me, will block my ability to heal her sooner or later, and then she’ll die, and it’ll be your fault.”
“And how do I know that if I promise to do as you ask, you really will heal Mindy and you won’t just do what you just said?”
“How do I know that if I really heal Mindy, you won’t go back on your word and start pushing for the Human Definition Amendment again?  It’s a matter of trust, Senator.  You trust me, I trust you.  Or you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you.  Tit for tat.  What’s it going to be?”
He took a deep breath.  “I’m not going to just rubber stamp your suggestions.  Even if that was the right thing to do for my constituency, and it’s not.  I’m going to study the situation and try to do the best thing to protect my people and yours.  You can accept that or not.”
“All right, I’ll accept that, with one caveat.  The Human Definition Amendment is totally off-limits.  You can switch your support to the Inclusive Humanity Amendment, or just drop your support of Human Definition, but if you don’t publicly do one or the other within the month Mindy does not get fully cured.  The other stuff, do the studies you want to do, but I think you’ll find that when you look at Proximas as if we are people and not weird animal things with superpowers, you’ll find it a lot easier to come up with ways to help protect your kind without harming mine.”
Lightman nodded.  “All right, Doctor.  Then we have a deal.  When do you want to perform the first treatment?”
“If you’ve got $8,000 lying around in a checking account, we can do it today.”
“I do.  Who do I make the check out to?  I don’t imagine you can cash a check made out to Doctor Mystery.”
“Make it out to Miracle of Life, LLC.”  I had about twenty-seven of these shell companies I used to funnel my various payments through, since even Senators typically had a hard time coming up with $8,000 in small unmarked bills on short notice, and a girl’s gotta eat.  Playing politics is all well and good, but I needed to cover the mortgage and the gas money for my various trips to clients, plus the funds for my various Activities of Mad Science.  Just because you can manipulate any organic tissue with a touch, doesn’t mean you get your beakers and retorts and Petri dishes for free.  “Let’s go upstairs.  I’m sure Mindy is eager to begin freeing herself from this disease.”
“Of course.”
At the top of the stairs, I reached out for his hand.  Too afraid of giving offense to refuse me, he took it, and I shook with him.  “Pleasure doing business with you, Senator.  Go call your daughter in, give me a check and we’ll do this thing.”
“Thank you, Dr. Mystery.  I may not entirely approve of your politics, but thank you for giving my daughter back her life.”
He wouldn’t be thanking me so much if he had known I’d just planted a tiny clump of slow-growing cancerous cells deep in his brain.  It’d be a year from now before he started feeling any symptoms, and that would land in the middle of his re-election campaign.  If he did what I wanted after I finished healing his daughter and we were on good terms, I’d find some excuse to come by and heal him or prune it down again.  If not… there was a reason I was a feared supervillain even though most people knew me, if they knew me at all, as some kind of uber-doctor.  You didn’t double-cross Dr. Mystery and survive it.  Ever.
Well, unless you were Dr. Suryabati Chandrasekhar.  Then you got any number of free passes.
***
The truth was, I was being something of a hypocrite.
I was offended at Lightman’s suggestion that I make his daughter a Sapiens if she turned out to be a Proxima, but not for the reason I told him.  The difference between a Proxima becoming a Sapien and a Sapien becoming Proxima isn’t the difference between black changing to white or male changing to female.  The difference was described by Plato as a man raised in the darkness leaving the cave to see the light of the sun, vs. a man raised in the sunlight doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cave.  Making a Proxima a Sapiens is like giving someone a lobotomy, or a clitoridectomy, or binding her feet until she can’t walk.  It’s an obscenity, a Harrison Bergeron nightmare of breaking the best down to the level of the mediocre, taking away a birthright one was born with.  
Making a Sapien a Proxima is, on the other hand, one of my great callings in life.
Mindy Lightman wasn’t a Proxima before I touched her.  But she would be, before I was done.  I did a preliminary assessment of her DNA while I was performing the first treatment, and I stored a small amount of her cellular matter in a pocket under the skin of my hand, to study at length later. I’d determine how much energy her mitochondria could supply her and which latent powers-complex genes she had, and which powers they were likely to ignite into.  If she had something distressing, like death touch or world-shattering TK or the gene for turning blue, I’d edit the complex over the next two sessions into something more palatable for the child of a public figure, something frilly and unthreatening.  Maybe the ability to make pretty light shows, or fly.  Most flyers loved it, and it didn’t seem to frighten Sapiens as much as some other powers did.
When I left the Lightmans’, now back in my middle-aged lady persona, I headed first to the bank to deposit the check.  Senators whose daughter’s lives are on the line don’t give me checks that bounce, but they do take time to clear, so the sooner I got it in, the better.  And then I dumped the rental car at the airport, changed form in the bathroom, and got on the Metro to head back home.
****
Science fact: There is only one gene that determines the difference between a Sapiens and a Proxima.
To most people this seems insane.  Proximas come in an entire extra range of colors besides the human norm, have powers ordinary humans can only dream of, and get energy to fuel these powers from a source that is frankly incomprehensible.  We just have to be a separate species, in most people’s minds.  When Proximas were first discovered, there was a huge push to label us a fully separate species – Homo superior (thankfully, that one got shot down real fast) or Homo proximus, “the man who comes next.”  Scientists – not me at the time, since I was too young, but reputable geneticists and biologists – had to constantly point out that the definition of a species is that they cannot viably interbreed.  The children of superpowered and ordinary humans were themselves perfectly fertile. Ergo, we cannot be a separate species.
But we hadn’t mapped the genome then, and we didn’t know exactly why Proximas had powers.  So scientists made, in my opinion, a mistake.  They agreed to classify us as a separate sub-species.
You’ve grown up being told that you are Homo sapiens.  What you might not know is that technically, if you’re not a parahuman, you are actually Homo sapiens sapiens.  There were several other subspecies of humans, all extinct, such as Homo sapiens idaltu (elderly wise man).  It is still scientific nonsense to call us a subspecies, when we’re only different by one gene – to put this in perspective, parents and children differ by many, many more than one gene – and in fact the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature keeps debating changing it to Homo sapiens sapiens proximus or dropping the designate proximus entirely. But the scientific evidence that we aren’t even a separate subspecies gets even less play in the media than studies that show that men and women are alike, if such a thing is possible.  And at least the Homo sapiens proximus nomenclature reinforces that we are of the human species.
The trouble is, most people don’t know that the true name of Homo sapiens is actually Homo sapiens sapiens.  So when they hear the short designators – Sapiens vs. Proxima – they assume that our species is Homo proximus.  We’re widely believed to be an entirely separate species, and it doesn’t help that high-profile supervillains like Caesar Primus (who is 2,000 years old and knows as much as any Roman gladiator about science, which is to say, diddly jack), or Professor Octohedron (a brilliant physicist and inventor, but he knows about as much biology as I know about fixing my car, and let me put it this way, the last time I ended up dead on the side of the road I needed a friendly dude passing by to tell me I’d run out of oil) are constantly spouting off about how we are a new, superior species.  Informed laypeople and doctors usually know better, but the truth – that we are different by only one gene – is so appallingly counterintuitive that you almost need to be a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist to get it.
But here’s the truth.
The human genome is packed with genes that don’t do anything.  Most come from our evolutionary history. You may have heard that we are less than 1% genetically different from chimpanzees.  That 1% consists mostly of control genes, which govern when, how and if the other genes turn on.
It turns out that some of those genes generate superpowers, under the right conditions.  One of them turns melanin, the brown pigment of humans, blue in the presence of a hormone called catalysine.  Others use catalysine to activate superhuman abilities.  All humans carry some of these genes.  But only a very, very tiny number – about 1 in 10,000 – have the gene that codes for the creation of catalysine.
Like testosterone, catalysine has two surges in a person’s life cycle.  One is pre-natally.  The amount generated is small and doesn’t pass the placental barrier, so no, pregnant women do not manifest superpowers when carrying a Proxima baby.  That’s an urban myth.  The surge pre-natally does little, usually, except to prepare the brain to control superpowers someday, creating a brain nucleus and appropriate wiring.  In cases where the child has two Proxima genes – for example, the child of two Proxima parents-- the amount of catalysine created pre-natally might be enough to distort the child’s appearance, begin converting melanin into azurin, or awaken a low level of superpower.
When the child hits puberty, the same genes that turn on sex hormones turn on catalysine production.  The superpowers appear, and wire up to the brain structures created in utero.  If the child has the gene for azurin conversion, their pigment changes from brown to blue – so pale red-haired and blonde white children suddenly develop purple, green or blue hair, while brown-skinned children turn blue all over.  (Azurin is also rare.  Only about 5% of all people carry the gene for azurin production, and only Proximas ever display it.  Non-Proximas with the azurin mutation never express it, and end up creating perfectly normal melanin, because they are never exposed to catalysine.)
The “power mitochondria” are another pan-human phenomenon that only expresses itself in Proximas.  All living cells on Earth contain tiny organelles called mitochondria – practically separate living things, with their own DNA, they use oxygen and sugar to generate the chemical that powers all life, ATP.  Power mitochondria vastly overproduce ATP, and no one knows where they get the energy to do it – it’s like they suck potential energy out of the universe and convert it to life force.  But they do this only when activated by catalysine within the cell.  About 1/3rd of humans have power mitochondria.  In the presence of the Proxima gene, these people generate energy above and beyond what they take in from food and air, which is then consumed by their superpowers.  Without power mitochondria, a Proxima must draw from their own life force to fuel their superpower, which makes their powers pretty weak.  The exact same genes for telekinesis can code for a person that can lift 70 lbs with their mind with effort vs. a person who can lift an aircraft carrier out of the water and break it in half, depending on the presence and output of the power mitochondria.  Since mitochondria are passed by the mother, Proximas who inherit their power from a powerful mother will always be very powerful themselves, whereas Proximas who inherit from a powerful Proxima father depend entirely on the hidden status of their mother for their own strength.  
(Funny fact, here: when Proximas were first discovered, male Proximas freely dated, married and fathered children on human women, because our entire society says it’s okay for men to have wives who are weaker than they are. Proxima women, on the other hand, mostly stuck to their own kind.  In the seven years since we discovered the role of the power mitochondria, we have seen a dramatic reversal in which powerful Proxima men will not marry or get serious with human women unless they consider themselves “childfree” or have had the human woman’s mitochondria analyzed for power status, and more and more Proxima women are dating Sapiens men.)
So most of what goes into making a Proxima is actually in a vast percentage of the human population – 30% have power mitochondria, pretty much all of them have powers-complex.  It’s the presence of the single gene that codes for catalysine production that makes a person Proxima as opposed to Sapiens.  My belief was that Proximas would not be safe from the fear and envy of Sapiens unless we were normalized.  The more Proximas there were, the more the law would adapt to and accommodate us and our needs and the less we’d need to fear the mob of Sapiens out to kill or control us.  So my primary work, since I became Dr. Mystery, had been to increase the number of Proximas by giving as many Sapiens the Proxima gene as I can.
In my early experiments, when I used uncontrolled methods like retroviruses to mutate people, there were high casualty rates.  Sapiens adults whose brains have not been exposed to catalysine in utero can’t control whatever superpowers they develop if they suddenly start making catalysine.  So I started working primarily with children, usually terminally or chronically ill children that I could get direct access to.  My power can create new brain pathways, and in a child or teen, with a developing brain, I can do it transparently, with no one noticing.  Adults cannot experience sudden brain growth and change without noticing that something’s wrong – memories suddenly becoming lost, well-developed skills becoming weaker, mood swings, etc—so I only alter adults into Proximas if they request it.  I often modify women of child-bearing age so that all their eggs carry the Proxima gene, ensuring that they’ll give birth to Proximas if they ever have kids.  It’s harder with men, because men are generating new sperm all the time – I’d have to alter the spermatogonia, and since they’re part of the body, the body’s immune system might notice that they are genetically different from the other cells and attack them, making the man infertile.  So I only make men into Proxima-fathers if I have plenty of time to work with them and tweak their immune systems, if necessary – and if they’re likely to have kids.  Gay men coming to me to save them from AIDS and 70-year-olds who don’t want to get Alzheimer’s are usually not worth modifying reproductively.  
The Peace Force were aware of my work, and opposed it.  They believed it was wrong of me to change people’s genes without their consent.  Technically, maybe they were right, but come on, what sane person would object to having superpowers?  The only reason anyone would not want to be a Proxima is the prejudice against us, and I was working on that too.  So I had to maintain a low profile because every so often the Peace Force would take it into their heads to try to capture me.  I’m pretty sure this wasn’t fully legal – I was pardoned for my activities as Megamorph by Bill Clinton (did you know that Hillary Clinton once had breast cancer? No?  Well, neither does anyone else), and nothing illegal I’d done as Dr. Mystery could be proven in a court of law.  But the law hadn’t caught up with Proxima abilities, so the Peace Force never overly concerned themselves with whether they could prove wrongdoing or not.  Their mentor and leader, Dr. Suryabati Chandrasekhar, aka Doctor Sun, was a telepath, and if she said, “Bad guy! Go fetch!” they would jump like puppydogs after a thrown stick.
So I lived in Baltimore, in a townhome in the Woodberry neighborhood, on Television Hill, because living directly under the broadcast tower generated enough interference that Suri couldn’t find me telepathically.  I’d have preferred Little Italy, or better yet, a real city like New York or Philly (and I’d come way down in the world, admitting that Philly is a real city), but New York was far too close to Suri, whose base of operations was in Manhattan, and a lot of my work was done with politicians, making Baltimore or DC more convenient than Philly.  And DC had the Special Service, human police in power suits who patrolled to protect the Capitol from parahuman attack.  I never felt safe in DC.  My Woodberry home had civilians living on both sides and a children’s day care across the street, ensuring that the Peace Force couldn’t attack me in force – they’d know the threat to civilians from a power battle would be too great to risk it politically for my sake (and to be fair, most of them are goody-two-shoes hero types who wouldn’t risk civilians, especially preschool children, even if they had perfect political cover for the operation.)  So I figured that if Suri ever found me, she’d still think twice about siccing her dogs on me.
Also, the Light Rail, Baltimore’s sad and pathetic substitute for a subway, had a stop near my home.  I didn’t learn to drive until I was 28, and I still hated it with a passion.  I was a Brooklyn girl – give me a city with buses and subways and railways, so I wouldn’t have to dodge hurtling chunks of death metal just to get where I was going.  From DC’s Metro, after I dropped my rental car at the airport, I changed at Union Station to the Camden line, took it to the baseball stadium in Baltimore, and changed there for the Light Rail.  This took far longer than a car would have, but didn’t involve me being isolated in a tiny box with no source of living organic matter other than my own flesh and facing careening metal boxes coming right for me.  It also didn’t involve traffic jams, which are brutal on the DC Beltway.  A short walk from my stop later, and I was home.
As I unlocked my front door, Brian the cockatiel chirped at me wildly, flapping his wings in his cage.  I’m really proud of Brian – in some ways he’s my greatest work.  He used to be a man, or the head of a man, who attempted to rape me once.  The truly pathetic thing was that Brian had been a good-looking guy, wiry and blond, the way I like them, and if he’d been willing to wait half an hour I would happily have had sex with him.  But he hadn’t wanted sex, he’d wanted rape – the only reason he dated women and went back to their houses with them, rather than jumping out of the bushes with a knife, was that he was a lawyer and knew that a handsome man with money who date rapes a woman will basically never, ever be convicted.  People think rapists have to be hard up for sex, or have to somehow look evil – the idea that a handsome, charming guy who could get any woman he wanted would actually prefer to hold screaming women down and force them when he could get consensual sex with the exact same woman instead breaks people’s brains.  They assume the woman must be lying, because what man who could get mutual fun would prefer to commit rape?  No one wants to admit how common misogynistic sadists actually are or how normal they look.
I found out from Brian that he’d date-raped ten women before me, that only two had tried to press charges, and the cops had refused to take the charges in one case and upset the other one so badly with their disbelief that she’d dropped the charges.  I found this out while I had him paralyzed but still able to feel sensation, his voice made too hoarse to do more than whisper no matter how much he suffered, on a cot in the basement.  Over the course of the two weeks that I used him in experiments, he told me his entire life story, amidst lots of self-justifications, begging, pleading and promising to change his ways.  Then I started turning his body parts into animals, bit by bit.  The rats and mice I made of his arms and legs didn’t come out right, and they died.  The cockroaches who used to be his testicles were actually very robust, but after the cat knocked over the terrarium I was keeping them in, I had to get an exterminator to kill them because who wants cockroaches in their house?  I was actually quite sad when the puppy I made out of his guts wouldn’t wake up and live – sometimes they just won’t come alive no matter what I do.  Living things are very complex, and it’s more an art than a science to do things like make life into different life.  
Since at that point, Brian had no way to digest food or ingest water, and he was therefore only a day or two away from death, I finally put him out of his misery by turning his head into a cockatiel and his torso into an iguana, a gecko, and a handful of tropical fish.  Nothing lived longer than a week except the cockatiel, which so far had lasted three years.  I often wondered, since I’d used some of the original brain tissue in making Brian’s new cockatiel brain, if he had any dim sense that he used to be human.
I fed Brian a cracker, re-absorbed my shoes into my flesh, and took back my original human form before plopping down on the couch to relax and await my cats.  My actual body was permanently frozen at about age 22 or so; I changed it so often, I’d never really had the opportunity to let it naturally age.  I could have forced it up to 36, where I really was, if I had to, but why bother?  No one was going to see me and think less of me for looking too childish.  My natural form is about 5’4” and built like a gymnast – tiny breasts, thickly muscled legs and arms, a rounded and balanced body with a low center of gravity and nothing sticking way out of line with the rest of it.  For gymnastics – my childhood passion – and for combat, it was a fantastic body, and I used it for years as Megamorph before it occurred to me that maybe I should hide my true face if I was going to be a criminal.  For instantly commanding respect, making men drool and women envy, or sending the signal “I AM A SERIOUS CRIMINAL MASTERMIND”, it wasn’t so good.  It was short, the face looked too young and soft (and too much like a young, soft Gillian Anderson – people in med school actually used to call me “Scully”), and a body perfectly proportioned for gymnastics or martial arts isn’t all that attractive by the psycho standards of our culture.  But it was my body, and in my home, with the shades drawn and the security system on, I went back to it because it was me.  
As I wiggled my toes on my shag carpet and then propped my feet up on my coffee table, I wondered where my cats were.  They were well-fed cats, but their heightened metabolisms made them constantly hungry, and they knew I was a sucker for giving them treats when I’d first come home.  Normally, they’d be leaping on me minutes after my arrival.  This worried me.  If I had accidentally shut them in the bedroom, Angelkitty would probably pee on my ceiling to express her displeasure and Pikachu might have destroyed my furniture with a few good lightning blasts by now.  
My cats were also experiments.  I’d been curious to see if the genetic structures I’d observed in other mammals that seemed related to the human powers-complex were in fact superpowers, so I got myself a pair of abandoned newborn kittens and in between the droppers of kitten formula (I really drew the line at making cat milk in my own breasts; those little things have teeth very early), I modified them to generate catalysine.  The female promptly grew bird wings (which didn’t attach to the right spot on her back and were too small; she’d never have flown if I hadn’t heavily modified them for her), and the male developed the ability to shoot lightning out of his paws, so I named them Angelkitty and Pikachu.  (Technically, if you have seen the Pokemon cartoon, which I admit I have, Pikachu is a mouse that shoots electricity, or something rodentlike anyway, but come on, there aren’t exactly any mythological figures of cats that shoot electricity.)  Angelkitty’s a Siamese and Pikachu is mostly white with some orange. They don’t have power mitochondria – that does appear to be a human thing – so they eat like pigs.  I could feed six ordinary cats off what my two eat, but they remain extraordinarily svelte, almost feral in their slimness.  And so if they weren’t here to pester me for fish treats, something was wrong.
I got up and went out to the kitchen.  To my relief, my cats were still noshing on their tuna fish, which amazingly it looked like they had barely touched before I came home.  (I always fed them human food.  Why not?  I had the money to keep them in canned tuna rather than cat food, and they loved the stuff.)  Pikachu looked up at me, gave me a meow that I interpreted as “Oh, you’re home, good,” and then went back to his meal.
Wait a minute.  There was more food in the bowl than there had been when I said good-bye to them this morning.  And it was beyond the realm of possibility that they’d left so much food untouched for so long, anyway.  And the tuna looked fresh out of the can.  So how—
“I was wondering when you were going to get home,” a woman’s voice said behind me.  I was already spinning to face her, preparing to leap at her, but as soon as I saw her I realized it was hopeless.  “Don’t you ever feed these cats?  They look like they’re starving.”
Ciana Kim, aka Sapphire, my once-classmate and current dire nemesis, was standing – well, floating—above my stairs in her traditional blue bubble, her features slightly obscured by the blue distortion and concealed behind her mask.  The combat leader of the Peace Force was in my house.
I backed up.  I couldn’t take Sapphire directly.  Her power was to generate spherical or toroid magnetic fields, which glowed blue due to the way they bent light, hence her name.  I needed organic channels to send my power through—behind her force field, Sapphire was totally safe from me, because I couldn’t touch her.  I wasn’t safe from her, though.  She could generate a force field around me, trapping me, any time she wanted.  
There was a switch by the door to my basement, labeled “FURNACE – DO NOT TOUCH,” that would actually activate an EMP.  All the computer and electronic equipment I had in my house outside the Faraday cage of the basement would fry, but Sapphire’s power would fail as well, and I could leap on her before she could reset her power.  Or, if I didn’t really want to replace my MP3 player, phones, and the laptop in the bedroom, perhaps I could grab Pikachu and throw him at her.  He’d be startled enough to discharge a bolt, and the electrical surge should pop her field like a soap bubble.  I knew I had a faster reaction time than Sapphire – after years of modifying and tuning up my nervous system, I’m faster than anyone who doesn’t have super-speed as a specific power – so I should be able to grab her and neutralize her power or knock her out before she could get a force field back up again.  I was reluctant to do that because Pikachu was my kitty and throwing him at superheroes seemed kind of mean, even though I knew he wouldn’t be hurt, but the EMP generator could theoretically blow out TV Hill, and then I’d have to dodge swarms of reporters trying to find out why they suddenly couldn’t get on the air anymore.  
I stalled for time.  “They’ve got very fast metabolisms.  I feed them all the time, but they’ll pester anyone they meet for more.”
Sapphire rolled her eyes.  “Oh, stand down, Meg. If I was here to capture you or beat you up, I’d have done it before you knew I was here.”
She had a point. Sapphire wasn’t stupid, and she had completely gotten the drop on me, to the point that I was actually really embarrassed about it.  “So what do you want?  Cooking advice?  I always prefer to replace the generic vegetable oil with olive or canola, it’s easier on the heart.”  The last time I’d been in the same household as her, Ciana Kim had refused to learn to cook, for very similar reasons to her refusal to learn hand-to-hand combat.  
She ignored my jab. “Doctor Sun sent me.  She needs your help and she asked me to ask you.”
I blinked.  Doctor Sun wanted my help?  Cold day in hell.  But it’d have to get a lot colder before I’d say yes.  “She wants my help?  And she actually thinks I might agree?  Excuse me, but the last time I interacted with any of you people you wrecked my lab, ruined four years of work and set me back half a million dollars.”
“You were infecting children’s vaccines with a retrovirus.  Did you seriously think we’d let you just get away with it?”
“All it would have done was make them into Proximas.  What do you think I am?”
“Someone who mutates people against their will.  And how do you know that’s all it would have done?  Retroviruses mutate. Besides, it’s still wrong to change people without their consent.  How do you know those kids would even have wanted superpowers?”
“Oh, be real.  Who wouldn’t want superpowers?”
“If I wasn’t a Proxima, I might have been an Olympic gold medalist.”
She was telling the truth.  One of the things that annoyed me so much about Ciana was how close her life had been to mine, minus the dysfunctional family.  I, too, had had Olympic dreams once, and my coach had told me when I was 11 that I might seriously make it as a contender.  But no matter how good I’d been, I’d never really had a chance; if my parents hadn’t died when I was 13, some other aspect of my family’s screwed-up-ness would have ruined it for me.
Ciana Kim, however, had had a good and loving family who’d pushed her hard in the belief that she could achieve anything.  She was a third-generation Korean American from California and her parents were doctors or something like that, and they’d stood behind her every step of the way.  Even after everything had fallen apart in my life and I’d basically become a thug for hire, I had followed the Olympic gymnastic news, so I’d known all about this as it was happening.  
Ciana was originally to be the USA’s representative to the Olympics in Seoul for women’s artistic gymnastics.  Much was made in the media of a Korean American going to Seoul to represent America, but Ciana had been very photogenic and full of great soundbites about how she was as American as apple pie and she was honored to represent our great country and she was so looking forward to bringing a medal home for the US and she was following in Mary Lou Retton’s footsteps and blah blah blah.  And then, a week before the Olympics, it had come out that she was a Proxima.  They’d finally figured out that doing a blood test for catalysine would find any Proxima with an active power.
The truth is that even now, twenty years later, as an experienced superhero who uses her powers all the time, Ciana still can’t use her powers invisibly.  There’s always a shiny blue blob there. And she had no training with her powers when she was 16, so it would have been even more implausible that she could have somehow used her powers to secretly cheat.  I would be disqualified from a Sapiens competition in gymnastics in any sane world because of what my powers actually are, but Ciana was disqualified solely from anti-Proxima prejudice (and, to be fair, probably some anti-Asian prejudice from the Americans whose job it would have been to advocate for her).  The Americans paid for their prejudices when Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union took home all the women’s gymnastics medals (I don’t like Ciana, but I’m pretty sure she would have won at least a silver in something, if not a gold.) Ciana was recruited by Dr. Chandrasekhar to learn how to use her powers and eventually join the Peace Force, Dr. Chandrasekhar’s UN-supported superhero team.
So it wasn’t that I had no respect for Ciana’s loss, but it irritated me that she saw the problem as being that she was a Proxima rather than that the Olympic committee was scared of Proximas.  And also, that being an Olympic medalist was better than being a superhero.  “Yeah yeah, you could have had your moment of glory, and nowadays you’d be selling sneakers and breakfast cereal to pay the bills, assuming anyone even remembered you at all.  What’s Mary Lou Retton doing with her life?”
“She’s been an Olympics commentator, and she’s a motivational speaker who supports physical fitness.”
Trust Ciana to actually know this.  “And that’s better than being a superhero how?  You save lives, you have an action figure, millions of little girls look up to you—“
“—I wear a mask when I save lives because otherwise supervillains or stalkers might hunt me down, no one knows my real name, my family aren’t allowed to tell anyone what I do for a living, I’ll probably never have a normal life with a husband and kids—“
“--You could marry some guy and quit the superhero business any time you wanted to, it’s just your overblown sense of responsibility that says you can’t quit your job to have babies until your powers give out on you, because you think the world needs you, and if that’s the case where would they have been if you hadn’t been a Proxima?”
“Someone else would have taken my place if I hadn’t been a Proxima.  And all of this is besides the point; no matter how great you or even I might think it is to have superpowers, the fact is that you were planning to infect helpless babies with a retrovirus that would have mutated them.  Some of them might have died of it.  Some might have been killed by their families for being Proximas once they manifested.  You don’t have the right to play God that way.”
“Nobody would have died of my virus,” I retorted.  “I tested it thoroughly ahead of time.  But you also notice, I haven’t done it again.”
“Because you know we’ll stop you.”
“Because I listened to your arguments that retroviruses are unstable and highly prone to mutation, and I decided that maybe you have a point.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“You didn’t even try to just persuade me.  You just blew up my lab!  Do you know how many vials of vaccine I hadn’t modified yet you destroyed?”
“All of this is pointless,” Sapphire snapped.  “I’m wasting time arguing with you when Doctor Sun is dying.  Are you coming or not?”
Wait, what?  Dying?  
I had been a half-crazed killer with no self-esteem, no sense of myself being able to be or do anything good, no belief that anyone could ever care about me – at least not without dying for it – after David died.  Dr. Chandrasekhar had taken me in and taught me that I could have a better destiny than being a tool for monsters to use to kill each other with; that I didn’t have to be a monster myself.  I could use my powers for good.  I could help people.  I could be a decent person.
Viewed from her perspective, I suppose, it didn’t last – I freely admit I am a supervillain and I do highly unethical things, up to and including killing people.  But I do it for a cause I believe in.  I do it to save my people from the bio-engineered diseases I was forced to participate in creating at Sonnebend.  I do it so girls with superpowers who are going to medical school to learn how to save lives will not be kidnapped, stripped of their powers except when convenient for their captors, raped, tortured and forced to use their powers to heal enemies and kill their own kind, by agents of their own government.  I do it so my people can enjoy the same rights and privileges as every other human on this planet.  And the fact that I can fight for a cause, that I can see myself as a person with a noble goal of my own… I owe that entirely to Doctor Sun.
No matter what she does to me, no matter what she orders her Peace Force to do, I can’t ever get away from that.
“Dying of what?”
“She was kidnapped and raped by Caesar Primus.  When she escaped, she was two months’ pregnant, but the doctors say it seems more like six months.  The child is growing too rapidly for her to handle it, and it’ll kill her.”
Oh, God.  
My heart started pounding, my throat went dry.  I could feel the adrenaline surging, my sympathetic nervous system revving up for a totally inappropriate fight-or-flight response.  I couldn’t stop imagining the reality behind Sapphire’s words.  It didn’t help that I’d once had sex with Primus myself – consensual, sort of, but I could entirely too easily imagine what it’d be like to be raped by him, without powers to protect you.  And Primus was immune to telepathy, so effectively Suri would have been helpless.  God, no.  I didn’t want to think about that.  
So I was flippant, and cold.  “Doctor Sun’s a woman of the world.  You’re telling me she’s never heard of an abortion?”
“She doesn’t want an abortion.  She says she won’t compound Primus’ act by taking an innocent life.”
“When did Doctor Sun turn into a pro-lifer?”
“She says the baby has a mind and she won’t kill it.”  Sapphire floated herself down onto my dining room floor, still surrounded by a protective bubble but no longer on my stairs.  “Are you going to help, or not?”
“I’m a feminist Darwinist.  I’m morally opposed to letting a fetus conceived in rape live.  It lets dangerous genes persist in the population.  Suri knows that.”
Sapphire sighed explosively.  “Fine.  I knew you weren’t going to be any help, but Doctor Sun believed in you.  I’ll just go tell her I was right and she was wrong.”
“What is this supposed to be, reverse psychology?”
“Nothing reverse about it. I knew before I got here that I would be wasting my time.  You’re a killer with no conscience; why Doctor Sun ever thought you might help, I have no idea.”
“Because she knows me better than you.”  I stepped forward.  “If this is reverse psychology bullshit, it isn’t necessary. I’ve known I was going to agree to help you since you told me she was dying.  And if you really believe what you’re saying, then nyaah nyaah nyaah.  I’m a doctor; everything I do, I do to save lives.  And at least I have to try to persuade Doctor Sun to abort the thing.  Besides, if she was raped by Primus she might have injuries she could need my help with.”  Primus had hammered at me like he was trying to break my pelvis, and without my powers he might actually have done so.  And I’d voluntarily gone to bed with him.  What he’d do to a woman he was raping, I really really didn’t want to imagine.
I didn’t mention to Sapphire that this was partly my fault anyway.  When I’d met her, Suri (Dr. Suri to me in those days, but I feel I have the right to call her by her first name now) had been dying slowly of multiple sclerosis.  She had met me on a good day; she’d only needed crutches and braces to move.  On bad days she’d been confined to a wheelchair, and on really bad days she’d had to stay in bed.  I’d healed her, and in the process I’d turned her from a forty-something woman approaching menopause back to a woman in her prime, young and healthy, physically in her 20’s.  It had been almost 20 years since I’d done that; Suri would be approaching menopause again, but obviously wasn’t there yet.  By now she’d be well past childbearing if I hadn’t de-aged her when I’d healed her disease.
I didn’t know whether Primus had raped her to torture her, to express domination over her, to really make the Peace Force mad at him, or to impregnate her, but I knew he had enough control over his body that if he hadn’t wanted to impregnate her, it wouldn’t have happened.  It was entirely possible that the goal of the whole thing had been to force her to carry his child; Suri was an enormously powerful Proxima with high output power mitochondria, and most women with such energy-full mitochondria would have had a power they could use to fight back against Primus.  Blocking a Proxima woman’s powers while she was pregnant carried high risk to the fetus if it too was a Proxima; it could prevent the fetus from developing the ability to control its powers as an adult.  Suri was rare in that she was incredibly powerful but only telepathic, with no telekinetic abilities, and with Primus’ immunity to telepathy, she’d have had no way to fight back against him even at her full power.  If Primus had wanted a powerful woman to pass her mitochondria to his child, and he hadn’t cared about her consent, there were few Proximas who’d make a better target for him.  And if that was the case, then the whole thing wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her younger, sixteen years ago.
Sapphire blinked.  “Wait.  You are coming?”
“I just said so.  But we have to bring my cats.  They need to eat more than the average cat – they’d starve if I left them without food for three or four days, and obviously I can’t ask the neighbors to come feed them.”
“Fine.  Sedate them; I don’t need a cat flying all over my car, or meowing and moaning in his carrier the whole time.  We’ll put them in one of the suites and make sure they get fed.”
I took my cell phone – it had all of my appointments and contacts in it, and I’d have to call them all to reschedule once I knew how long this was going to take.  If I could talk Suri into aborting the fetus, this could probably go very quickly, but I knew how stubborn she was.  If I had to save the baby too, I could possibly have to take a few weeks.
Damn Suri.  Why the hell was I taking time off my work and spending four hours in a car with one of the people who most annoyed me in the entire world to go save my greatest opponent anyway?  From a problem she could just fix herself if she wasn’t so damn stubborn?
But I already knew.  I couldn’t let Suryabati Chandrasekhar die; not under any circumstances, and most especially not if she’d asked for me specifically.  Our differences were ideological; what she’d done for me went beyond ideology.  I would fight her and her people when I had to, but if she was dying and she needed me, I had to go.
9 notes · View notes
btswrckd · 5 years ago
Text
Not Afraid Anymore
Tumblr media
Jeon Jungkook x Reader
Summary: You didn’t think Jungkook could you want you in any way other than friendship but it seems you were wrong.
Warnings: Idol au, unprotected sex, fingering, dirty talk, poorly written smut
A/N: I’m not going to lie to you guys, I have no title (literally, it’s just the song I was listening to when I wrote it) and no real summary for this, but I found it sitting in my drafts and remembered that I had promised this long before I started working on Hunting a Hybrid. Also, it’s not going to stay this way, I have much bigger plans for this fic but I wanted to post it because I neglected it for so long. Hope you enjoy anyways!
P.S. If you’re curious about the song, it’s Not Afraid Anymore by Halsey for the Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack.
--------------------------------------
“It's too early for this.” You groaned while bundled up in Jin's hoodie and dropped your head to Taehyung's shoulder. “How do you guys constantly get up at the ass crack of dawn like this?”
“You learn to get used to it.” Taehyung kissed your temple and chuckled at the way you flailed your arms about in a small tantrum. “I told you to get some rest but no, you had to---.”
“Don't say it.” You warned and pinched his arm. “Why do I always have to remind you guys to be careful with what you say when we're in public?” 
“Taehyung, behave,” Jin strode up to the two of you, leaning down to brush a kiss to your forehead. “Y/N's right. We're around all kinds of people everyday and we never know who’s recording what. Not everyone will understand our relationship. We’re lucky the team we have now tolerates our actions.”
“Sorry, hyung,” Taehyung bowed his head in apology before being called away for his change of clothes. 
You let out a long sigh and sank into the cushions of the couch. Watching the multitude of people swarm around the room, you always wondered how the 7 men got used to the bumbling and bustling.
“Remind me again why I agreed to be part of this music video.” You asked Jisoo, the longest makeup artist to stick with the company and your best friend when she held up a black bag. 
“Because you love the guys.” She giggled as you took the bag from her. “And because their management team has something pretty juicy up their sleeves for this comeback. Can you imagine all the theories the fans will come up with?”
“You mean can I imagine all the fans finally figuring out I'm sleeping with 6 members of Bangtan and then roasting me alive? Yes, yes I can.” 
“Oh my god,” Jisoo rolled her eyes and pushed you in the direction of the dressing room. “You're being dramatic. The guys would never let that happen to you and the fans will be knee deep in wondering why BigHit put out a music video with a more adult theme than the guys have ever had. So the fans pick up on something going on between you and the guys, that's what good actors do.”
“And the trophy for number one fan of Bangtan goes to...” You snorted as she shoved you for teasing her and you fell into a solid chest.
“Ah, noona, are you okay?”
You blinked up at Jungkook and somehow lost the ability to speak. His large hands clasping your hips tight and keeping you steady left you a stuttering mess. Jungkook had been the only member to never sleep with you, never even try to sleep with you. You couldn't say you weren't a little offended, but you also knew it was quite selfish of you to want him in that way when he had no interest in you. 
“Kook.” You blushed at his fingers dipping underneath your shirt to keep a firm grip on you. Your hands curled into the fabric of the leather jacket he had just changed in to. “Um, hi.”
“Hi, noona,” He shook his head, his lips curling up into a teasing smile. He really did love to get a rise out of you, it was easily his favorite way to pass the time. He tilted his head to the side, a seemingly innocent gesture to anyone not frequently hovering around him.
To you it was his way of making you feel like a child when you would sputter and huff out a frustrated breath at not being able to string together an intelligent sentence. Truthfully, you wondered how Namjoon put up with you most of the time. 
“Are you okay?” Jungkook repeated, breaking you from your thoughts. “Did you not sleep well? You were up pretty late.”
“Jeon Jungkook!” You hissed and stepped out of his hold. You weren't too sure why you were embarrassed at having been heard by him the previous night. Maybe it was because when he was in the house, you did your best not to disturb him when you were being intimate with another member. 
But he was home last night, he heard everything, and you wished the ground would open up and swallow you whole. 
“Can you please go get dressed?” Jisoo ushered you away and into a nearby dressing room. “We're running behind schedule.”
Jungkook watched you go, letting his eyes drop to the sway of your hips. Of course he wanted to be with you. He'd have to be an idiot not to. But there was a lingering fear that he wouldn't be enough for you. He was the youngest member and while he was by no means a virgin, he wasn't as experienced as his elders. 
“Could you be anymore obvious?” Jisoo’s voice had him jumping, not having realized she was still standing next to him. 
“You scared the life out of me.” He put his hand to his racing heart and sighed while she laughed and patted his back. “What are you talking about? Obvious about what?”
“You like Y/N,” She clarified as she tugged on his sleeve to bring him to her makeup station, sitting him in her chair to touch up his hair. “Don’t deny it, Jeon Jungkook, it’s written all over your face. Why don’t you tell her?”
“Because what if I’m not good enough.” Jungkook mumbled. “My hyungs are more...experienced. I wouldn't want to disappoint her.”
She rolled her eyes and swept some hair from his face, “You've seen her drool over you. I very highly doubt you'll disappoint her.”
Just as he was about to speak, you emerged from the room Jisoo had ushered you into and his breath hitched at the sight of you; Jisoo had picked out a gorgeous black dress that left little to the imagination. He watched you tug at the hem as if that was going to make it grow longer. 
“Oh my god, you look amazing!” Jisoo squealed, running over to you and hauling into a chair next to Jungkook. “I told you a lace bodice would look good on you miss 'it's gonna be too tight'.” She turned to Jungkook with a smirk as he took a sudden interest in his own reflection. “It looks good, right Jungkook?”
“Mmhmm, yeah, looks great.” He scratched at the back of his neck and let out an awkward cough. 
You slumped in your chair, any hopes of getting a compliment out of him long gone. Crossing your knees, you grumbled at having to repeatedly pull on the end of your dress to keep it from riding up your thighs. You hated dresses, they were a pain and the way the lace clung to your frame was not appreciated. You could barely move in the material. How the hell were you supposed to get through the choreography? 
You wiggled around in your chair as Jisoo tried her best to keep you in place to apply your makeup. The foundation felt heavy on your skin even when she swore it was only a thin layer, teasing you for trying to swat her hand away as she brought a shade of red lipstick to your mouth.
“Honestly, if you're not going to hold still then I'm going to tie you down.” She nudged your shoulder, whispering in your ear, “And I'll get Jungkook to help.”
A blush crept up your collarbone and cheeks, resembling a tomato as she laughed and stalked off to find a curling iron. It was official, you hated your best friend. 
A sudden weight on your knees caught your attention and you glanced at your lap to find Jungkook's leather jacket draped over your legs. You looked up in time to find his face right in front of yours, his eyes boring into yours and you swore he could hear the rapid beating of your heart. 
“Kook?” Your breathed fanned across his face and he smiled at you, his bunny teeth breaking through and you squeezed your thighs together as an unexpected pang of arousal shot through you. You were mortified as he raised a brow, having noticed the action.
“You seem uncomfortable in your dress, noona.” He observed. “Doesn't Jisoo have another one picked out just in case?”
“I uh,” You toyed with the leather of his jacket and focused on the mirror behind him. Which was clearly a mistake as you saw the muscles of his back flex beneath his dress shirt. “Th-This one is fine. I mean I can't really move as freely as when I'm in sweatpants, but…”
“You look really gorgeous,” Jungkook backed away when Jisoo approached your chair, curling iron in one hand and a hair brush in the other. 
“I've been waiting forever to finally get ahold of you long enough to curl your hair,” She pulled the elastic band from your ponytail and began brushing it out. She eyed Jungkook after seeing his jacket on your knees, “Did you get cold or something?”
-------------------------------------------------------
It took a good 20 minutes for Jisoo to release your final curl from the iron, hairspray following soon after. She grinned and fluffed your curls with excitement. 
“You look so good!” She squealed, shaking your shoulders and you laughed at her enthusiasm. “Oh, we have some other backup dresses in the next room if you want to take a look. I know that one must feel a little short.”
“Thank you!” You stood from her chair and stretched your hands above your head, hearing your back pop in the process and you let out a satisfied moan. Forgoing the heels picked out for you, you stepped into a pair of slippers and made your way to the room next door.
The most expensive of dresses lined a clothing rack right next to the boys’ outfits. A beautiful ballet halter dress caught your eye, the white starting at the neckline flowing down into an aqua blue color as it reached your calves. Taking it off the rack and stripping from the current dress you had on, you pulled on a pair of spandex shorts before slipping the new dress over your head. The material flared out more and more after it reached your hips, giving you a lot more room to work with and you smiled. 
Hearing the click of the door behind you had you spinning around to face whoever walked in. A small laugh made its way out of your mouth at Jungkook admiring the new dress. “Hey. You scared me, Kookie.”
“Sorry, noona,” He chuckled and let his eyes roam your face, jaw clenching when you tucked your bottom lip between your teeth. “I um, was coming to see if you were okay. You didn’t look comfortable in Jisoo-noona’s chair earlier.”
“I’m okay,” You nodded, grabbing the material of your dress and swaying the material to show how easy it was to move in. “Much better actually. Did you see how tight that other one was? I love Jisoo’s sense of style but I like this one a lot more.”
“Of course,” Jungkook gave you a warm smile and took the time to scan you from head to toe while you were preoccupied with looking through the duffel bag you’d brought with you.
You were intent on finding your jazz flats; heels weren’t going to be much help in the type of choreography Hoseok had taught you in the last few weeks. Finally finding your split-soles, you gestured for Jungkook to come closer and he obeyed silently, debating on whether or not it was a good idea to be close to you when he was already half hard from your earlier dress.
He stood tall next to you, watching as you clamped a hand on his shoulder to keep your balance as you slipped the shoes on. His mouth parted in awe as you tested them for flexibility, bouncing from one foot to the other, stretching your leg as far back behind you as you could, and standing on the tips of your toes as if to break the shoes in some more. He always marveled at your dance skills that easily rivaled or sometimes even dominated Hoseok’s.
“What do you think, Jungkookie?” You managed to snap him from his thoughts, blushing when his dark eyes ventured from your breasts to your face. “Does it...look okay?”
“You’re beautiful as always. There’s not a day you look anything but, noona.” His eyes focused on the small blotch of lipstick staining your chin.
“Oh, um, you’ve got…” Jungkook gestured to the side of his mouth, smiling when you wiped away at your own face but missing the small stain.
“No, here,” He stepped close and lifted his hand to skim his fingers across your face. “How is it that you managed to smudge your lipstick right after Jisoo applied it?”
“Ah, you know I fuss a lot when she does my makeup.” You wrapped your fingers around his wrist and turned away from his gaze, leaning against the empty table behind you. “The stylists are going to kill you for barging in on me, you know? You should head back out there. I’ll be done in a minute.”
Jungkook didn’t move for a solid minute before deciding ‘fuck it’ and pressed his hips to yours, crowding you and planting both palms on either side of your body to keep you in place. “I’ll just tell them I came to check on you. Since your face was all red back there.”
“Right.” You attempted to sound as normal as possible, but you knew that was a lost cause when he chuckled and used one hand to brush the hair from your face. “I just, um---.”
“Why do you always blush around me, noona?” Jungkook leaned close to plant a soft kiss to your cheek, your body stiffening at the sudden act of affection. If it weren't for all the times he'd caught you staring at his every move when you thought you were being subtle, he would have backed away. Panic would have washed over him and he'd try to play it off as his awkward attempt at joking if he didn't know you inside and out. “Do you still see me as just a kid?”
“What? O-Of course not, Jungkook. I---.”
“Then can I kiss you?” He was closer than before now, his nose and lips brushing against your own and you found yourself chasing after his almost kiss when he pulled back. “Please?”
You could only nod wordlessly, your knees buckling at the first press of his lips and he had to wrap one arm around your waist to keep you from falling. One of your hands came off the table to press against his chest while the other slid its way up to tangle in his hair. 
Your lips were soft and warm as they moved in sync with his, the smallest of moans miffed by the sudden prodding of his tongue. He coaxed your mouth open with small licks and nips of his teeth on your bottom lip. 
“Kook,” You broke away from him as breathing was soon becoming a problem. His mouth instead moving down your jaw to decorate the expanse of your neck in purple bruises. “You know Jisoo's going to kill you for marking me up.” 
“Jisoo's not as scary as she likes to think.” Jungkook reached down to cup the back of your thighs and lift you onto the table, burying his face into your neck and inching his fingers up higher until they met the hem of your spandex shorts. 
“Jungkook,” You breathed against his ear before he pulled back to peel the material down to pool at his feet, “are you sure? You know your hyungs and I never pushed---ah!”
His thumbed pushed past the lace of your panties and thrummed against your clit before he slipped a finger past your wet folds, slowly adding another. “I know. I know you did your best to make me comfortable, noona. Your relationship with my brothers was always your business. But, fuck, I can't help it anymore. You're so gorgeous, noona, and you sound so pretty when you moan. Won't you make those sounds for me too?”
You gasped, looping your arms around his neck and tugging on his hair. Your legs crossed behind his back and you rocked your hips up to meet the thrusting of his fingers. “God, Jungkook.”
“Just like that, baby.” Jungkook groaned at your juices coating his fingers while his other hand worked on undoing his belt.  
You pulled back to untuck his shirt from his pants, undoing the buttons quickly. “This isn't how I'd imagined being with you for the first time.”
“I know, noona,” He pressed a gentle kiss to your lips, deepening it while your hands worked at the zipper of his jeans. “I promise we have plenty of time to go slow later. I just need to be inside you right now.”
“Mmm I don't know, Kookie,” You slipped your hand into his boxers, running your fingers along the length of his cock. Your mouth went dry at how thick he was, your forefinger having trouble touching your thumb. “Do you deserve it? You did make me wait all this time, after all. Maybe I should make you wait until we get back to the dorms.”
A growl made its way up Jungkook's throat as he hit a particular spot inside of you, making you arch your back. “That's not a game you want to play with me, sweetheart.” 
“Ah, Jungkookie,” You giggled and pumped your hand slowly, your thumb coming around to swipe at the precum pooling on the head of his cock. You smirked as his head fell forward to your shoulder and his hips rocked into your touch, thrusting into your hand while your grip tightened slightly. “I think I’d win that game pretty easily.”
He moaned at the feel of your lips against his neck, sucking pretty bruises into his skin and his fingers curled inside of you, a small whimper leaving you. He knew you wanted to be able to control the situation, and any other day he would gladly let you if time was something to be spared. Today though, you were all on a schedule and were already running late, he didn’t want anyone barging into the room in search of you.
Jungkook pulled his fingers away and lifted you up, turning and sitting on the table while pulling you onto his lap. Bunching your dress up and gathering both of your wrists in one hand, he pulled your chest flush against his. 
“We've both waited long enough, noona,” He used his free hand to pull his cock free from his jeans, using the head to run along your folds and coat himself in your juices. Pushing your panties to the side, he felt your thighs tremble before sheathing himself fully inside. 
“Fuck!” You whimpered and dropped your head to his shoulder. His size took much more time adjusting to than the 6 other members. “W-why...how are you so...big?”
He gripped your hips roughly and rocked you back and forth on his lap. Your breath hitched with every movement, feeling the sweet drag of his cock against your walls. “All those nights I had to listen to you and my brothers,” he bucked his hips up to meet your thrusts, “all this time I had to listen to you beg for them to touch you. How do you think I felt?”
You turned your head to brush your lips against his neck and listened to the lewd sounds of skin slapping against skin. Chewing on your bottom lip, you tried your best to conceal your moans but it was proving to be difficult with the way he slammed into you. “You know I wanted you too, Kookie. You know how much I wanted you to touch me too.”
“Yeah? How bad did you want me, Y/N?” Jungkook cupped the back of your head and pulled your mouth up to his. “Did you think of me when you were with my brothers? Like last night when Jimin-hyung fucked you in the shower?” 
“Y-Yes,” You admitted because their shared bathroom was right next to Jungkook's room and you knew he could hear everything so there was no sense in denying it. “I w-wanted you to hear.”
“Oh? Why is that?” He planted his feet firmly, grinding up into you as hard as he could, almost like punishment. “Does hyung know I was on your mind when he had you on your knees for him?”
“Yes!” You cried out at a particularly harsh thrust, hissing when his fingernails dug into the skin of your neck, your knees burning red from rubbing against the plastic table, “Yes, Jimin knew. It wa-was his idea. Said he wanted you to kn-know what you were missing. Fuck, Kook!”
“You want to cum, baby?” He felt your walls clench around him, making a mental note to kill Jimin later. The sudden ringing of his phone didn't phase him as he let go of your neck and dug into his pocket, answering with a growl. “Hyung?”
“Where the hell are you?” Namjoon asked through grit teeth. “And where is Y/N? Jisoo is looking for her and let me tell you---.”
Namjoon's rant was cut off by Jungkook's groan and your accompanying moan. His eyebrows shot up in surprise and he had to scan the room to make sure no one was too close to overhear him. “Are you guys…? Jeon Jungkook, you better not have hauled her off for some quickie right before we're about to shoot.”
“Sorry,” Jungkook let out a breathless chuckle and dropped his head back as you rolled your hips, lifting yourself up and dropping back down at an achingly slow pace. “She just looked so good, hyung. So pretty and the way she clenched her thighs together when I got near her...ugh, fuck, she feels so good.”
“Yeah, only took you long enough.” Namjoon snorted and tried to discreetly adjust himself. He always did get off to the sounds of you and one of his members. “Maybe here and now of all places wasn't the best timing. Are you even listening?!”
“No,” Jungkook moved his free hand down to rub circles on your clit, not even bothering to lie. “Are you close, baby? You look so beautiful when you cum and it's going to be all for me, right pet?”
Namjoon took in a deep breath and tried to focus on something other than your whines and instead hearing the rustling of fabric. “You better not be messing up her dress, Kook, you hear me?”
Jungkook wrapped an arm around your waist and held you steady, grinding his hips up and hissing as you dug your nails into his shoulders. “Don't worry, hyung, I'm not going to dirty her dress. Our little pet is going to let me cum inside, right baby?”
You nodded as a choked sob left your mouth, clinging to his shoulders and combing your fingers through his hair. 
“Use your words.” Jungkook demanded with grit teeth and moved his free hand up to your back, splaying his fingers between your shoulder blades. “Where am I gonna cum, baby? Say it. Say it loud enough for Namjoon-hyung to hear.”
“Inside, Jungkook, pl-please cum inside me.” You were breathless and struggling to form coherent sentences but years of sleeping with someone as dominant as his older brothers taught you that when they ask, you answer. 
“Fuck,” Namjoon groaned from his side of the phone. “You better be careful, Jungkook, I'm not kidding. None of us have ever...we always wear condoms.”
“She's been a good girl, hyung,” Jungkook panted and felt your walls clench around him once more, a curse falling from his lips. “She's been taking her birth control pills.”
“Ah, Jungkook!” You cried when he pulled you close and bit down on the skin of your neck, decorating it in purple. 
“She knows how much I've wanted to be inside her like this, right sweetheart? Tell hyung how much you want it.”
You whimpered as he put the phone to your ear and you heard Namjoon's ragged breathing. “Yes! Yes, I want it. Please, Joon, please can I have it?”
“Goddamnit,” Namjoon cursed and had to turn away from the crowd of stylists surrounding him to put the finishing touches on his face and hair. “Yes, princess, you can have it. Take all of Kookie's cum like a good girl.”
Dropping his phone to the floor, Jungkook shot up from the table to press you flat against it and he pushed your legs up to your chest while his cock sank deeper, hitting that spot that had you keening.
Your own hand came up to clamp over your mouth in hopes of muddling the cries that accompanied his harsh thrusts, the coil that formed long ago in the pit of your belly finally snapping and your back arched up with the intensity of your orgasm. 
“Shit,” He leaned his forehead against yours where your lips met in a kiss made of nothing but teeth and tongue. The small press of your fingers against his abdomen had him slowing his hips until he was simply fit snug inside of your cunt. “Please, noona, just a little more.”
“I just…” You whimpered as he shifted his weight impatiently, “I need a second, Kook.”
Jungkook nodded, little droplets of sweat dripping onto your cheek as he peppered your neck and collar bone with kisses and little nips of his teeth. He felt your hands ghosting across his chest as if familiarizing yourself with every muscle, his body shuddering when one hand snuck its way underneath his shirt and your nails dug into his skin. Your fingers caressed up the length of his neck, to his jaw, and then to his cheek where he turned and kissed the palm of your hand lovingly. 
Propping yourself up on one elbow forced Jungkook to give you some space and let your legs dangle on either side of his. You were too lost in the way his eyes held yours to notice when he gave an experimental thrust. Then two, then three and before you knew it, he had set another pace that had your toes curling. 
“You can give me one more, can't you noona?” Jungkook straightened his back and hitched your thigh over his hip to give him a different angle, his pace relentless. “You'll be a good girl and cum again for me, won't you?”
“Shit, shit, shit!” You chanted as another orgasm washed over you, triggering his own and he painted your walls white with ropes of cum. Feeling his fingers grip your chin, his lips were on yours to muffle his groans while he rocked against you gently.
Your heavy breathing and his filled the room as he rode out his orgasm, your chest rising and falling heavily and you let out a small laugh, “Kookie, the stylists are going to kill you.”
“Mmm,” He scrunched his nose up in a smile, “then I'd die happy.”
“You're a brat.” You teased and slapped his shoulder, pushing him away gently, a mix of your juices and his trickling down your thigh. 
He snorted and reached under your dress to collect it and used two fingers to push his cum back inside your sensitive folds. “This stays in you, Y/N. Not a drop spills or Namjoon-hyung will punish you.”
You nodded with a blush dusting across your cheeks and readjusted your dress to look as presentable as possible. 
Jungkook ran a hand through his hair and knew he was going to catch hell for messing up the clothes that had been laid out for the both of you. He tucked his now soft cock back into his pants and cupped your face to leave a small peck on your lips. “I love you, noona.”
Your stomach flipped, butterflies fluttering like you were a teenager again and hearing those words for the first time ever. “I love you too, Jungkookie.”  
He pulled back to let you stand and smooth down your dress before he took your hand in his, lacing your fingers together to guide you back to the awaiting crew.
“Everyone's staring.” You mumbled as you stepped out of the dressing room and immediately caught the attention of the 6 other boys. 
“What the hell?!” Jisoo seethed and stormed up to the two of you, poking Jungkook in the chest. “Have you lost your mind, Jeon Jungkook? Do you know how long it took me to do her makeup and now I have to cover up more hickies? Your hyungs are bad enough.”
Jungkook ducked his head in apology and let her take you back to her makeup chair. He stalked over to his seniors and blushed when Namjoon clapped him on the back. 
“What's gotten into you?” Namjoon chuckled while Hoseok pinched his cheek. “You know you didn't even hang up the damn phone. Jimin's ready to burst.”
“Hyung,” Jimin pouted and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans in attempt to hide his arousal.
“Our Jungkookie's becoming a man, Namjoon.” Hoseok cooed as Jungkook slapped his hands away.
“Pet,” Namjoon repeated in a teasing tone, “sweetheart, baby. Someone's been listening in on us.”
“Well the walls aren't exactly soundproof!” Jungkook looked away from his seniors as another makeup artist approached them, using a makeup wipe to clean his neck and face, ridding him of the red lipstick stains.
“Our little Kookie's finally grown up.” Taehyung put a hand to his chest and wiped away an invisible tear. “We're so proud.”
“Stop it,” You warned, approaching them with a fresh coat of lipstick and the hickies nowhere to be found thanks to Jisoo.
“How are you feeling, baby?” Namjoon took you in his embrace and kissed the top of your head.
“Sore.” You whispered in hopes of not embarrassing Jungkook more. “The hell have you guys been teaching him?”
“He learned all that on his own.” Namjoon smirked down at you. “It was pretty hot though.”
“Oh my God, shut up.” You pushed away from him and crossed your arms. “Can you be any more embarrassing?”
“Oh Jungkook! Oh Kookie! Please can I have it?! I want it!” Namjoon mocked and laughed as your jaw fell in horror before your fist reared back and came forward to connect with his stomach. He doubled over in pain as his other members laughed and Jungkook tried to sink in on himself to disappear.
“You know what? Just for that,” You huffed and glanced around to see if anyone was listening, “Kookie's the only one who can touch me for the next week.”
“What?!” The 6 other members gaped at you.
“Why am I being punished?!” Taehyung whined. “I didn't even do anything!”
You crooked your finger at Jungkook and wrapped your arms around his neck when he got close enough. You smiled as his bunny teeth broke through his grin and you really wanted to give him another kiss but one look from Jisoo had you pouting and stepping away before you got into any more trouble.
3 Days Later:
You didn't remember how you ended up flat on your back on the kitchen counter with Jungkook buried balls deep inside you but you were pretty sure it was his intention to be so just as his older brothers walked through the door. 
Yoongi was the first to spot you two, stopping dead in his tracks and barely budging as each member behind him ran into his back. His pupils blowing out at the sight of your naked body clinging to Jungkook's like your life depended on it and your breasts bouncing against the maknae's chest with each harsh thrust. 
His hands curled into fists, his blunt nails digging into the skin as a way to keep himself from hauling you off. They were being punished for teasing Jungkook and now they all had to watch Jungkook's lips suck at your skin greedily and your fingers tugging on his hair. 
Yoongi figured that you used this time to familiarize yourself with Jungkook's likes and dislikes, and to your surprise and his seniors, you quickly learned that Jungkook was not a fan of condoms. He was the first of the members to fuck you without one and you both knew that it meant Taehyung probably gathered every condom in the house and threw them out.
“Kookie,” You gasped out as your other hand brushed down his back, your nails biting into his skin. You heard the sounds of the keypad and tapped Jungkook's shoulder to try and get his attention but it was useless as his mouth worked at your neck. It was when Namjoon rounded the corner to catch your eye that you braced your hands against Jungkook's chest to push him away. 
“No, no, princess,” Namjoon's firm command didn't deter Jungkook, who instead wound his arm beneath your knee. “It's okay, baby, let Jungkookie make you feel good.”
You could have cried if it felt any better. Jungkook was long and thick, leaving you to wonder how the hell he could wear such tight pants. “Fuck!”
Jungkook grunted in agreement as he buried himself to the hilt, making you come undone. His lips moved lower to your chest to feather kisses along your heaving breasts. You were both sweaty and spent but he really had no care in the world as he took his time coaxing you to relax with small brushes of his lips.
“You look tired, baby,” Namjoon frowned and reached over to push your sweat soaked hair from your face. “Jungkookie, did you make sure your noona was alright?”
Jungkook only nodded while trying to catch his breath, decorating your chest in love bites and glancing up at his senior.
“Are you still hard, Kook?” Namjoon shot him a glare. Of course the little devil would time it just right so his brothers could catch a glimpse of what they were missing.
“Yes,” Jungkook panted into your bruising skin, “But I'm okay noona, I don't have to---.”
“Kookie, relax,” You soothed him with a soft kiss, “it's okay.”
“Ah, but you're tired and I---.”
“Need a cold shower.” Taehyung piped up from the living room and Jungkook blushed a deep shade of red.
You smiled gently at him, running your hands down his chest and admiring his tanned skin. “I'm okay, Jungkook. Keep going. Please.”
“Can you even still handle it, baby?,” Hoseok was suddenly next to Namjoon, Yoongi not far behind. “You look exhausted. Jungkook-ah, how long have you…?”
“Since you left.” You hummed as if you hadn't been out of breath a moment ago. 
“What?” Yoongi blanched, trying to decide if he should be impressed with Jungkook’s stamina or pissed that there was still a whole 4 days left before he could get his hands on you. 
“That's the appeal of a younger man, hyung,” Jungkook teased, rolling his hips gently and hoping he wasn’t overstimulating you.
“Yah, you little brat!” Yoongi lunged for the maknae but was held back by Hoseok wrapping his arms around Yoongi's shoulders. “I could kill you right here, kid!” 
“Okay, we're just gonna,” Hoseok struggled to pull Yoongi to the front door, nodding his head for the rest to follow, “take a walk.”
Namjoon patted Jungkook's shoulder with a smile, “He's going to murder you when we get back.”
Jungkook buried his face into the crook of your neck to hide his smile while you giggled at Yoongi’s outburst, knowing full well that he couldn’t stay mad at you. He felt your soft kisses against his temple to coax him into looking back at your face to kiss him properly, your fingers pulling at his black locks. Your other hand skimmed up his shoulder to join the already tangled fingers in his hair, tugging to expose the column of his throat and he moaned as your lips travelled to his jaw line then lower. 
Teeth sinking into his soft skin ever so gently, you gasped when his hips rocked into yours to start a wonderfully quick pace before you guys had been interrupted. You could hear the small grunts of effort whispered against the shell of your ear and you dropped back against the counter to admire the way his jaw clenched and the veins pop out against his neck. 
With your head lolling from side to side, Jungkook sped up his thrusts and nearly smirked at the way your eyes rolled into the back of your head but your fourth orgasm of the night triggered his own, hips colliding with yours once more before filling you to the brim with his cum. 
“Holy shit,” You breathed and reached up to run your fingers through your hair, “you’re so much work, Kookie.”
“Hey,” Jungkook whined and tried his best to keep from collapsing onto you, “I’m the one that did all the extra work this time.”
“Oh? And earlier when you made me ride you in your gaming chair wasn’t extra work?” You pinched his cheek, biting your bottom lip as he pulled out, your juices leaking along the insides of your thighs. Your legs felt like jelly and you were almost embarrassed to admit you couldn’t even stand because the last thing you needed was to stroke his already too big ego.
“Come on, noona,” He chuckled and tucked his arms underneath your limp body to carry you to the bathroom where he gently sat you in the tub and ran a warm bath for the both of you. He slid into the ceramic tub behind you, pulling your back flush against his chest and resting his chin on your shoulder. He felt you hum in content and brought his hands up to twine his fingers with yours, placing a small kiss to the back of your head. “I love you, noona, you know that right?”
“Of course,” You frowned and turned your head to look at him, searching his features for any sign of doubt. “I love you too.”
“Good because Yoongi hyung is gonna kill me when he gets back and I needed to hear that.”
229 notes · View notes
grisdidthis · 4 years ago
Text
CHAPTER ONE: FIRST SIGHT
AKA, blessed fucknuggets, why do these fools feel the need to put themselves through high school, my sources tell me that the US school system isn’t all that to begin with, what gives?
PREVIOUS ENTRIES
(Warning: this got long. Looooong. Hence, cut, so that I don’t murder your dash like Edward doesn’t murder Bella in this chapter.)
Welcome to the first entry of a live-read that no one asked for, in which I’ll go through the first chapter of Midnight Sun, i.e. a retelling of the first Twilight book from Edward Cullen’s POV. Not to be confused with Grey, a retelling of the first volume of a Twilight fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, or the Life and Death edition, a retelling of the first Twilight book in which Bella Swan is genderbent into a dude called Beau, who utters the immortal line “I knew I must look like a gorilla on a greyhound.” Which still tickles my humerus to this day.
I’ve waited for this novel to drop so long that at some point I’d stopped waiting. If by some freaky turn of chance you stumbled on this without knowing about the hoopla surrounding the publication, here’s a Wikipedia link. The gist is that the first few chapters of the WIP got leaked, the author got upset, the book got shelved until ??? and no further information about it was forthcoming until a while ago, when out of the blue arrive the news that it’s getting released in August.
My first thought was “Oh, yay, something actually NICE is happening this year!”
My second thought was “Please let it be good, so that I can laugh outrageously at [name redacted] for mocking my enjoyment of this series!” And. Look. I know what’s said about Twilight with regards to its literary merit and Stephenie Meyer’s abilities as a writer. A lot of it is admittedly accurate. However, the metrics by which I measure the value of a book are a) did it entertain me? and b) did I gain anything by having read it? And yeah, those are personal and subjective items, but objectivity is a lie, Jesus enjoys using toasters to take selfies, and if ten years ago I hadn’t been looking for a place to post my 50k+ epic Renesmee-centric fanfic, I wouldn’t have met the people who are currently my best friends.
Which is to say: I’m too attached to this series to give a fig what color the prose is. Deal.
And yet. Me hoping that Midnight Sun would be good, in a way that people who don’t have my level of emotional investment might acknowledge, wasn’t… that farfetched?  Because the last book Meyer released before this one, The Chemist? Is an improvement on all her previous work. A huge improvement! It’s competently written! The characters read like they were intended to be flawed, messy people.
The main romance isn’t the kind of fucked up that Bella and Edward’s is, where you can pen treatises on why they’re omg so unhealthy. It’s the kind of fucked up where five seconds after meeting her love interest, the protagonist drugs him unconscious, kidnaps him, sticks a urinary catheter up his ding dong, straps him to a table and tortures him for information until the guy’s ex-CIA identical twin drops a plane on the barn they’re in and crashes through the ceiling all “HANDS OFF MY BABY BROTHER YOU DISCOUNT MATA HARI!”
Then they all make friends and go on a road trip together because a shady government organization is after them.
That’s not a fucked-up relationship that you write an essay analyzing the fucked-up-ness of. It’s something you stare at, stunned and, if you’re me, torn between thinking “Holy shit, this is so my brand of heroine!!!” and “How much crack was Auntie Steph on when she wrote this?” And it’s beautiful. I want ten more like it. So my hopes for Midnight Sun are tempered by the knowledge that, being a retelling of an established narrative, it can’t go all-out with the batshit. But I’m still optimistic that some part of it will give me that warm “Awww, you’ve come a long way from where we first met, author! Good on you!” feeling.
Now let’s (finally!) get started on the chapter proper.
…oh wait there’s an author’s note.
Tumblr media
…uhm. Yeah. My dreams. About those. *fixed stare at faraway bonfire* Actually, let’s not talk about those and just move on to Edward Not Liking High School, thank you. Yeah. That’s good.
Edward Cullen doesn’t like high school. Edward doesn’t like that people think. Edward doesn’t like that the human student body is beside itself with the arrival of some new chick. Edward thinks his adopted siblings are super basic. (Rosalie = shallow, Emmett = simple, Jasper = psycho two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage.) We don’t get to hear his utterly unbiased assessment of Alice, because she butts in and starts a one-sided telepathic convo about how Jasper is two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage. You know. Normal sibling stuff.
Tumblr media
WHY DO YOU PUT YOURSELF THROUGH THIS HASSLE, WHY!
(Let me take this opportunity to share my pet crack theory that Carlisle Cullen is secretly the most twisted, evil vampire in all of vampiredom, and that the sending the young ones to high school bit is something he does solely because he gets his evil fix by feasting on the emotional toil it inflicts on them. Also why he’s a doctor; he can ignore the call of blood, because being surrounded by the pain of patients and their loved ones already keeps him fed. I mean. He was chilling with the Volturi way back when, and Aro gives off a handsy vibe. No way he didn’t get his mind read in every which way, and if that happened - if he were reaaaalllyyyyy that nice, why would he still ping them as a threat of any kind?)
(This has holes in it, I know. And clashes with my other pet crack theory, which posits that the whole immortal child/Let’s Catch Them All: Cullen Edition was in fact the fallout of a Very Bad Italian Breakup, with Aro being the pissy ex who wants sole custody of the kids.)
Whatever. It still makes more sense than them going through “the inert state between active periods” when. My dudes! College is right there. Some places you can even sit out 90% of lectures and still get your diploma if you don’t feel like faking one, so Jasper would be all set! And you can pick different subjects! Diversify! Why must it always be med school rehashes, there are other worthy professions! And whole fields that are useless for getting-a-job purposes, but still interesting and enriching for those who have the luxury to pursue them. Let Emmett do Viking Studies, for fuck’s sake!
Tumblr media
This amuses me much more than it rightfully should. I’m a child.
The Cullen clan tries to pep talk Jasper into not getting his murder on. Jasper is like OMG WILL YOU GUYS LAY OFF, while Edward is busy doing his judgy Edward thing and thinking to himself that Jasper should accept his limitations, that it’s a bad idea to have him at school at all, blah blah bleh, and you know what, I’m with you there, Ed.
Although we all know that this is just setup for the irony that will ensue as soon as Bella the Delicious klutzes her way into his line of smell.
Tumblr media
Oh yah! Enter Bella. Edward can’t hear her thoughts. Jessica Stanley is a b-word. Edward wonders whether not being able to butt into the new girl’s head may be a red flag for vampire Alzheimer. Biology class next! The teacher is a man “of no more than average intellect” and, lord. It’s lucky that Edward is the mind reader in the family, because imagine if it were one of the others and they had to put up with listening to him bitch about the world at large, nonstop, at all hours of the day. And night, since these guys don’t sleep. Angela Webber is the only soul in the whole school whose thoughts have the Edward Cullen seal of approval. I feel sorry for her. I also feel this weird sense of hey, this all seems familiar in senses other than being a retelling, have I been here before?
Wait.
WAAAIIIIIITEEEEE.
*googles for the old version*
*runs first chapters through copyleaks*
Tumblr media
*kubrick stare* MEYER, YOU LAZY SO AND SO, HOW COULD YOU!
*slams head on desk*
Well. At least I know what I’m in for. HONESTLY! It’s been. It’s been THIS MANY YEARS since the leaked version appeared, and that was a first draft, how in the… she’s way better than this, now! Was this novel produced in a terminal state of $#%CARING#NOT?&FOUND?! Is half of it just going to be the same old thing with a thin veneer of polish? I’m.
*sigh* You know what, I’m okay. We’re just going to call this first part a re-read. It’s been ten years, so I remember not a whole lot of the specifics, so at least I won’t be bored. BUT COME CHAPTER 13 I EXPECT TO BE SWEPT OFF MY FEET, DO YOU HEAR ME?!
Biology. Bella walks in right past a fan and gives Edward a throbbing throat boner. How awkward. Then she goes and sits right next to him and saucily tosses her hair around like he’s not actively plotting her murder and that of the rest of the class. The cheek of the thing!
Fortunately, Bella’s tasty ass is momentarily saved by a stiff breeze.
Tumblr media
…I think we may have found the solution to Jasper’s control issues. The Cullens just need to start carrying air freshener around and spray the murder out of him every time he starts looking peckish. It would look weird if anyone else did it, but since they’re all pretty and rich, it’s more likely that the trend will catch on and cause Febreze sales to skyrocket.
Anyway. We’re not done victim-blaming Bella for…
Tumblr media
…at least another couple of pages, but at least Edward gets his head out of his ass long enough to recall that hey, vampire! Oxygen is optional! But he still spends another lot of words grumbling about what a hassle it is to be forced to hold his breath in order to dampen his murderous urges. This is why you are a virgin, Edward. No, I don’t mean the planning the assassination a classmate’s assassination, plenty of serial killers still manage to get laid heaps, consensually, even! It’s the fact that you’re this much of a buzzkill that’s the issue.
Live, laugh, love, you dumbass disco ball!
Yep, he’s still on about how he’s going to kill her, totes kill her, he feral dangerous vampire, rawr. The miracle of adequate indoor airflow only got him to railroad a quartet of brain cells into thinking up smarter ways of snuffing Bella out. Now he wants to lure her to the forest. No, he’s going to kill her at home! He hates her! No, he hates himself and is projecting!
So he flees to his car, plays some calming music, breathes in and out and thinks about his family and how disappointed they’d be in him if he were to help himself to a Swan shake. Well, I’m nobody to shit talk anyone’s self-soothing routine. I’d probably throw in a truck of food + a bath, but he’s had 100+ years to figure out what coping mechanisms work for him, so let’s just let him do his-
Edward.
EDWARD.
Tumblr media
…do you actually think this is an appropriate time to start a ginger-off with some random desk lady? Yes, we know you’re the One True Redhead To Rule Them All. (Though Kvothe from Name of the Wind may beg to differ, and I don’t know who would win that fight.) I mean, really? You pull this crap when you just barely talked yourself out of a murder? And then you call her eyes flat! What!
One of my favorite comic book series, Y the Last Man, features a scene where two characters discuss what it is that truly binds people together. One of them presents the argument that stronger bonds are formed not by shared love, but by shared hates. By which they mean not a kiss-kiss-slap-slap, enemies-to-lovers relationship dynamic, but like… you, being someone who really hates coleslaw, having a partner who likewise hates coleslaw, with whom you can indulge in tireless verbal roastings of coleslaw and who will never get tired of your complaining, because the fire of their loathing burns every bit as hot as yours.
I’ve always felt that this concept resonated with me deeply. And if you apply it to Bella and Edward, by its standards, they have the real deal. Go through the namesake chapter in Twilight-the-book, and you find Bella thinking similarly judgy thoughts, being irked by the same shit that no one normal would bat an eye to, going “Ugh!” and “Gah!” at everything that makes Edward wince internally. So their love will be eternal for sure. Perhaps not in an epic way. They’ll live boringly ever after, until they’re ancient and onion-skinned and lurking at passerby humans through the geraniums on their windowsill, exchanging “Holy crow, I can’t believe she bought a hydrogen engine car just to show off!” / “Awful! She should know that thinning the deer population so that they produce less flatulence is the most sound way of controlling toxic emissions!” And then probably gazing at one another like idiots for an ice age or two.
Edward wants to be moved out of Biology class. Goes back and forth with the desk lady, who obviously wants to tap that, because of course she does. Every hot-blooded woman within spitting distance must crave his alluring icicle, even as he mentally eviscerates every minuscule detail of their appearance.
Except Bella, because she’s soft, translucent, deep-eyed and edible. And, I mean. You can complain all you want about “you’re different from anyone else I’ve ever met, you’re SPECIAL, better, more beautiful, more everything!” being a dead horse of a trope so old and beaten that by all rights it should have turned to smelly glue, but. That pony is still kicking. And by kicking, I mean selling. And it sells because being made to feel special, even if it’s happening by proxy while you’re immersed into the thoughts of a fictional character, is nice. Readers enjoying that experience and seeking out fiction that provides it shouldn’t be considered so… mock-worthy as I’ve seen it be, in discussion of works that feature the trope prominently.
Which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nicer if Edward’s narration were focused solely on elevating Bella, instead of also viciously kicking down everyone in the vicinity. Man, we get the message, okay? You don’t need to act like you’ve swallowed a Simon Cowell before coming in for school.
Tumblr media
I swear, it’s almost a relief when Bella interrupts, heralding the triumphant return of the throat boner. Edward’s thoughts about the people around him are actually LESS gratuitously bitchy when he’s contemplating how to best murder them.
At least this time he is able to extract himself from the situation and flee speedily. (Which… in Biology, what exactly was preventing him from asking for a bathroom break? Or just saying he was feeling poorly and getting the fuck out of there?)
He meets the sibs. Only Alice has any clue of what is going on because visions, and she doesn’t explain anything to the others, who just stand there baffled while Edward decides to get his shiny ass in his shiny Volvo and run off to Alaska. Probably because it would ruin the serious mood of the scene if she told them and Jasper started doing happy cartwheels at the prospect of no longer being the only fuckup in the family.
Tumblr media
END CHAPTER. Same time tomorrow, hopefully, and I’ll TRY to be less longwinded. Try. 
3 notes · View notes
lavender-montgomery · 5 years ago
Text
Brahms: The Boy II (2020) - Thoughts [SPOILERS]
So I went to go see The Boy II within a few days of release. I mean, Monday is half price day AND I get someone in free with me due to disability, plus The Boy is one of my favourite movies, so how could I not? I’m writing this post a week after seeing it - not a good sign already. Also, I have a post in my drafts about something else I watched that I currently don’t have the heart to finish. So here I am writing about The Boy II.
I will start this by saying - what a disappointment. I absolutely adored the first movie. I loved the nanny, I loved the doll, I loved Brahms, I loved his parents. I loved how it looked like the doll was haunted by a dead child but turned out it wasn’t, it was unexpected and was different to the usual haunted doll we see so often. I respected that and that’s part of why I love the film so much. However, the sequel completely went against that and went against the whole point of the first movie. In the sequel, the doll IS haunted by Brahms. After the end of the movie, Brahms put the doll back together and eventually died. Doesn’t say when or how. Just that he died. The doll was haunted by him, it was centered around the house he was raised in and it was passed from family to family wreaking havoc. Why? The whole point was that he wasn’t haunted. That was the idea. Very disappointing that they went against that. I kinda understand, it woulda been a bit harder to incorporate the actual Brahms into it. But they coulda done so much with this and they just... didn’t.
I don’t want to talk badly about this movie, I really don’t. I’ve said how muh I loved the first, I’m considering customising my own Brahms doll and I was so, so excited for the second movie, more so when I found out it was in the cinema. But this movie was bad and bland. It relied too heavily on jump scares which is incredibly boring. 
So, let’s talk about the movie and go through the plot.
It started off with a theme that I believe wasn’t featured in the first movie. It reminded me a lot of the music in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Yeah. I just sighed to myself at that part, not off to a great start already - as much as I love his version of Sweeney Todd, it’s great but awful. The movie is based around a family of three - two parents and their son who is about eleven I’d say. Dad was British and quite attractive. Mum and son were american. One of the first things one of the parents said, I believe it was the dad, was ‘you’re too old to sleep with a teddy.’ Excuse me?! I am OFFENDED. I am 22 and I sleep with MANY teddies - with PRIDE. Hehe. 
It starts off with the dad being away for work, so mum Liza and her son Jude are home alone. She wakes in the night to sounds so goes to investigate - but not once turns a light or torch on - then son investigates, to be attacked by people who broke into the house. Both are traumatised, kid goes mute and mum is angry a lot and has vicious nightmares. They decide to take a break, spending some time away at a house a while away. Shockingly, it’s a house neighbouring the one Brahms grew up in. Within minutes of arriving at the house, Jude gets hold of Brahms. Didn’t take long at all. Most boys his age wouldn’t really want a doll as that’s ‘girly’, but Jude dug Brahms up out of the dirt. His mum cleans Brahms up and Jude is very quickly attached to him. Then things start to get weird. Jude communicates through a notebook - which Brahms also writes in. But what I don’t get is... No one sees Brahms moving, they only see him after he moved. Does Jude see Brahms write in the book? They are together 24/7. Brahms writes a note that says ‘take me to where you found me’, where Jude discovers Brahms’ belongings and the rules from the first movie. 
There is a caretaker character that I don’t like in the movie. He knows about the doll and Brahms from the start, yet when he sees Jude has the doll, he doesn’t tell Jude’s parents anything. Why? Surely knowing the truth about the doll he’d try and help them. The caretaker’s dog really doesn’t like Brahms, infact he barks at it whenever he sees him and he sits outside the family’s house. 
It takes a while for the parents to realise there’s something creepy about the doll. Only when the doll locks itself in a bedroom does the mum’s cogs start turning. Of course when she researches the house, learns the history and confronts the caretaker, she’s horrified yet STILL doesn’t do anything about the doll. So frustrating. Not even when Jude starts dressing like Brahms, when his cousin nearly dies, when the dog is murdered or when Jude draws himself killing his own parents, not even then does the mum properly take action.
There is a scene where Jude and Brahms Doll are back at Brahms’ home and the mum follows where they go inside the walls where human Brahms used to live, here I was hopeful that human Brahms would make an appearance, but he doesn’t. 
Two things I did like about this movie - the movement from the doll was minimal. Eyes shifting, head turning, every movement was slight. I also liked both scenes of Jude wearing the Brahms mask that human Brahms wore - once in his mum’s nightmare and once in the big house. 
It’s quite chilling how Jude was becoming Brahms, not quite a demonic possession but Brahms’ spirit was slowly becoming inside of Jude. It was creepy and the child playing Jude performed it incredibly well. It wasn’t at all over the top or underdone, he did it perfectly and this child was the best part of the whole movie. 
The part where Brahms was left outside and Jude told his mum everything made me sad. This poor child feared the doll, yet it seemed like he also loved him. 
Towards the end of the movie, the dad smashes Brahms’ head I think with a baseball bat. Inside he was a disgsuting, black, rotten fleshy... thing. Why? What was the point in that? It was creepy but didn’t really make sense. The doll had been smashed before and he didn’t look like that. After the doll was smashed, Jude returned and was no longer becoming Brahms. It was very quick and sudden. 
I didn’t like the ending, it was too predicatable. The doll being disposed of and Jude still being disturbed and keeping the Brahms mask was what I expected and sure enough that’s what happened. I wish something more exciting happened at the end, but with the final scene with the doll I suppose not much could have been done anyway. 
The spirit was in the mask that Jude kept. Will there be a third movie? I hope not, not if the second was anything to go by.
I wasn’t satisfied with this movie. The first movie was excellent. A gripping plot, lots of twists, an unexpected ending, spooky and didn’t rely on jump scares. They really milked the fanbase for the second movie and I feel it was too rushed and cheaped out on. I wouldn’t recommend this movie, especially if you haven’t seen the first installment, and I definitely won’t be watching it a second time. 
Was it really necessary to make Brahms doll a haunted doll, when the end of the first film really emphasised on the fact he wasn’t haunted? This second movie was deifnitley nothing but a rushed money maker, not contributing anything of value to the fanbase or first movie.
What a disappointment.
15 notes · View notes
caspian-skye · 5 years ago
Photo
Tumblr media
The Apoptosis Project, Chapter 1: Darkness Returns.
IT’S HERE! I’m not releasing it on fanfiction until New Years Day, but I thought I’d do a little trial run on here first. I’ve put it under the read more because it’s long and I’d rather not clog your feed. Anyway, I’ve been drafting this since the Summer of 2016 and I’m SUPER passionate about it, so let me know what you think! Likes/Reblogs are much appreciated.
(Cover art of characters is by Stygmatus on here)
Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!
On a clear night, sailors off Vale’s coast swore they could see the lights of Port Cyrreine from fifty miles away. A myriad of glimmering spires rose into the night sky. The rainbow of hues, from thousands of windows and holographic ads within the maze of skyscrapers, reflected in countless ripples upon the placid black waters off the city’s Southern shore. In front of the wall of light, a lively boardwalk; the vendors stands, restaurants, and crowds of people barely visible in the shadow of a ferris wheel lit bright blue for the night. From a distance, a muffled chorus of sirens could be heard.
Two airships jetted toward the city, the air in their wake tearing the water’s surface.
“Reports on the ground indicate an attack by the creatures of grimm,” a man’s voice scratched through the radio. “I repeat, eyewitnesses are reporting an attack by the creatures of grimm!”
“Grimm?!” Another voice repeated. “No way in hell, those things have been gone for, what? Thirty years now? You sure it’s not Sentinel’s animatronics?”
“We’ve established contact with Headmaster Skye of Sentinel. He was at the academy’s practice grounds when the incident began, and has confirmed all animatronics are in place,” a woman reported. 
“What do we know about the incident so far, then?”
“Just under a hundred port workers were laid off, and replaced with a couple dozen of Frontline’s organic androids. A peaceful protest turned violent when the Red Claw showed up. Right after that is when reports of grimm started coming in,” the woman replied.
“Griswold Baine has sent his son and a team of organds to help sort things out on the ground over there. ETA: less than five minutes,” the man on the radio concluded.
The two airships landed on a flat slab of concrete near the docks, lit by the shipyard cranes above. The door to one lifted to reveal a golden-haired warrior. His armor, fixed over a jet black bodysuit, was dozens of silvery white plates covering chest, shoulders, waist, hips, and legs; the edge of each plate gilded with a shining trim. His eyes were obscured by a knight-like visor, with a single light blue band to ensure vision. Behind him, a score of armored huntsmen.
“There have been reports of deaths in the area,” the man assessed. “All of you. Secure the entrances to each building. Search for survivors, and ensure their safety!”
“Yes, sir!” the huntsmen shouted in unison. They began to pour out onto the streets, save three.
“Desmond, Lavender, Nikole! You three are with me!”
“Yes, sir!” a broad-shouldered man, and two women confirmed.
The street before the huntsmen was a hellscape, far from the peaceful mundanity typical of the city’s port district. To each side of the street, flames leapt from shattered windows, dumpsters, and the hollowed-out remains of cars and shipping equipment. Smoke poured into the alleyways, shading the entire area an eerie shade of orange. 
The golden-haired warrior held his wrist out in front of him, projecting a holographic screen from his Holoband, a watch-like strap around his wrist. With two fingers, he zoomed in on a map of the area. A yellow marker indicated his position on the water’s edge. Several blocks away, a zone was highlighted a bright red. 
“Looks like the Red Claw’s taken control of a warehouse two blocks Northwest. Our mission is to clear them out, and secure the area. Move out!” 
“Midas! Look!” One of the huntsman’s allies interjected, pointing ahead.
He raised his head. Through the smoke, he could make out several black forms. Though on all fours, they stood nearly his height. Their claws scratched viciously at the pavement as they charged forward, their hungry snarls audible above the breaking of glass and crackling of flame.
“Beowolves.”
Without a second’s hesitation, Midas charged forward with Desmond, Lavender, and Nikole in tow. From his back he pulled a beautiful halberd, taller than he and crafted from the same steel as his armor. He plunged the tip of his weapon into the open jaws of the first beast, and flipped through the air. He flung the unfortunate grimm backward into a shield bash from Desmond, and brought the axe’s head down on the next beast as he landed. A pair of swift spins despatched two more grimm before he ducked, deflecting the swipe of another across the shaft of his weapon. Lavender, his teammate in purple, pounced with a pair of bladed tonfas.
The four continued on, clearing out a handful more grimm on the way to the warehouse. As Midas approached a corner, he held an arm out, indicating his teammates to stop. “The Red Claw’s stronghold is just ahead. Post up here, and defend my flank from grimm. I’ll be fine alone.”
The three filled into the street; Desmond in front, posted with his shield. Nikole and Lavender to his sides. Midas stepped forward. The smoke and uncanny glow of the main street grew more intense as he pressed on. From the fog came the scratching of countless feet, their claws impaling concrete with each heavy step.
A stark white pincer, as big as Midas himself, burst from the smoke. He held his weapon up to block the attack, but was forced backward by the power behind the strike. Another pincer attack was met with his weapon’s axehead, and forced into the ground. Two lines of beady red eyes glowed behind the pair of claws, and the creature scuttled into view. Its body was the length of a school bus, low to the ground and clad in bony spines for armor. The scorpion’s tail curled over its body, ending in a malicious golden stinger.
The deathstalker screamed with rage. Midas spun with the momentum of another blocked claw swipe, and thrust the tip of his halberd into the stinger as it bore down on him. He gripped his weapon’s handle as the beast hoisted him into the air.
He cracked a grin as the tip of his halberd unfolded, freeing him from the monster. His weapon’s shaft folded backward, until it had transformed into a bow. Still in mid-air, he pulled back on the string of hard-light dust. The vibrant arcs of electricity crackling around his body became one with the bolt of focused energy forming at his weapon, and he let fly. 
The deathstalker halted in sudden stiffness as the bolt shattered the armor at the back of its head, a shockwave rippling through the smoke. The beast’s tail uncurled and slammed to the ground next to the huntsman as he landed. It began to dissolve into the night.
The huntsman paused, eyes fixed ahead. He had only taken two labored breaths before two men leapt into view, blades prepared to kill. He swore, and electricity coarsed its way through his halberd just before he raised it to block a vicious overhead axe swing. Static worked its way down his enemy’s weapon. The faunus seized up, and Midas freed his weapon. Aura crackled around the assailant’s gut as the tip of Midas’s spear was thrust forward. Midas set his feet, once again transforming his weapon back into a bow. He let fly on his second enemy with a point-blank jolt of dust.  
The smoke began to clear. 
Two dozen feet ahead, a truck had been tipped onto its side, blocking most of the lane. On the edge of the trailer sat a bald-headed woman, clad in leather robes of black and white. As her eyes met his visor, a broad, serpentine tail pulled up from behind her, and settled in her lap.
“Red Claw commander!” Midas called. “Who are you working for? He’s here, isn’t he?!”
“And why would I tell you, prettyboy?” the commander mocked, her tail lashing once. “Although, by the way you asked that, you already know the answer.”
“C…. w..ke ..p,” a young woman’s voice faded in and out.
The morning light pouring in the window was far too bright. The plush bedcovers weighed the boy’s body down, sinking him deeper into his mattress. He groaned, and rolled over.
“Come on, get up. My breakfast is getting cold.”
“Go away, Lazula,” the boy mumbled, feebly shooing her away. He gathered his pillow in front of his eyes. 
“Lilly’s gonna be there…” the young woman teased, her voice softening. “Sleep much longer, and you won’t be able to shower.”
Lilly. Lilliane Corvis-Braun. The very image of beauty, kindness, and feminine grace, in the boy’s eyes. Sure, they had been friends for the longest time. She probably wouldn’t judge him for one morning of disheveled hair. But still. He couldn’t stand the thought of questionable hygiene on a day he would see her. He worked his way upright, shivering as the blankets fell to his waist. He turned to look at his sister with an exaggerated look of bitterness.
Though the two were twins, the young man and Lazula bore little resemblance. Lazula had inherited her father’s strong chin; dark, full brows; and long, straight nose. Her eye color was difficult to discern. Though mostly a green-heavy hazel, transient flecks of nearly every color seemed to come and go, by lighting and by the minute. Her hair, a vivid electric blue, was swept to one side in front, tied into a messy low bun in back. Caspian guessed she had snuck in some early-morning training. 
Between the young man’s soft, kind-looking face, large round eyes of a vivid blue, and button nose, he was quite obviously his mother’s child. His hair was coarse yet voluminous, falling in fluffy layers to eyebrow level in front, and chin level in back. His deep blue roots were visible at the crown of his head, but faded to silver further away.
“Good morning, Caspian. You slept for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes,” the automated voice of a woman reported from the headboard. “Would you like to see this morning’s top news stories?”
“Yes,” Lazula cut in. She nudged her brother as he began to doze off again.
A holographic screen flashed up across the foot of the bed, displaying an aerial view of a street near the docks. Between the stacks of shipping containers and open flames, three beowolves and a hulking, ursine form ran. “Darkness returns: eight are confirmed dead and fourteen have been wounded in a Port Cyrreine grimm attack overnight. Authorities confirm this is the first grimm attack in twenty-five years,” the voice stated. “Vytal Tournament champion Midas Baine was dispatched to the scene with his team and several organic androids, but was ultimately unsuccessful in apprehending the woman believed to be behind the attack.”
“Geez… Looks like Ichigo was right,” Caspian said, putting on the round lens, wire-framed glasses that rested against his bedside lamp. “He told me grimm were sighted, and I… well, was I supposed to just believe it?”
Lazula sighed. “Looks like this huntsman education will do us some good after all.” She stood, and walked to the door of Caspian’s room. She rested one hand on the doorknob and turned around. “We have to pass the entrance exam first. You should start getting ready.”
“Of course you’ll pass…” Caspian muttered, watching Lazula leave. He switched off the holographic screen, which had changed stories to show a bald, bearded man in a tailored suit giving a speech. After grabbing a bite to eat, throwing a few last-minute items into his suitcase, and grabbing  his pre-planned outfit of a blue knit sweater and khakis, he made his way to the shower.
The water scalded his back, but he paid no mind as it drained between his feet. “Today is the day,” he thought. He took a deep breath. The final entrance examination. His written scores, apparently, had been on par with the top percentage of Sentinel applicants. He scraped by the physical tests, but today… 
Every time he thought about it, it made him feel a little sick.
Caspian turned off the water. One typical morning routine later, and he opened the door, giving himself one last look in the mirror. Yet as he turned to the doorway, he started. 
His eyes locked with a colorless stare. Not silver, not even a light blue. Her irises  were entirely devoid of color. Her matching hair was styled neatly, bangs sweeping across her forehead and tucking under the locks that framed her doll-like face. Her hair in back tapered to a single point at the nape of her neck.
“Oh! Snow. Thank you, for the jumpscare,” Caspian said, grinning with embarrassment and holding a hand over his chest. 
Though Caspian’s heart was one beat from leaping out of his throat, the girl was entirely unperturbed. Her gaze followed him. “Your mother told me to tell you she would like to leave in twenty  minutes.” Her eyes cast downward, looking to the holoscreen she projected from the band at her wrist. “This was two minutes ago. Will you be ready in eighteen minutes?”
“Eighteen?” Caspian repeated. He pursed his lips, and grabbed several items from the bathroom counter. “I guess I’ll have to be. Oh, if you’re here, is Uncle Doug around?” he guessed.
“He’s working this morning. He said he will try to attend the Final Examination,” Snow said. Her voice was soft, hardly ever carrying much more strength than a whisper. Words followed each other in disengaged monotony. 
She turned, beginning to walk down the hall. Caspian admired her combat outfit, which she had already changed into. A snow white vest made of neoprene met her skirt at belt level, on which she holstered the handle of her weapon. The skirt was patterned into the interweaving fractal arms of a snowflake, layers underneath, visible in the gaps between the snowflake’s arms, a shade of light blue. She wore a collared shirt of the same shade beneath her vest, the tight sleeves coming down to her wrists. Black socks were the only hint of darkness to her outfit, starting at her knee and feeding into her glossy white boots.
The hum of the airship’s engines was all Caspian heard. It was the perfect background noise for his thoughts, all blending together into one monotonous drone. Snow sat beside him, her vacant gaze matching Caspian’s out the window. Lazula sat a few rows behind the pair, watching a video from her last tournament, playing and replaying to study each of her moves meticulously.
The city of Port Cyrreine was founded on two peninsulas, jutting out into the ocean like a massive pair of jaws. The Southern peninsula, further from the airship window, held the city’s downtown. Closer to the mainland, the skyscrapers tapered off into a maze of dingy mid-rise buildings, and area of town Caspian intended to avoid.
Toward the peninsula’s tip, a magnificent structure of glass and steel. The apexes of two black towers, one just half the height of the taller, skewered the sky. A golden ring circled the neck of the giant, holding an airship platform nearly a thousand feet above the ground below. A shell of smooth, silvery-white encased the Northern side of the structure, which loomed above the mouth of the bay. It was the Headquarters of Frontline Biomedical Technologies.
Snow’s eyes seemed intent on the building.
The Northern peninsula; the tract of land the airship carrying Caspian, Lazula, and Snow, descended over; was almost entirely residential. Frontline’s main hospital sat on the tip, directly North of corporate headquarters. 
“Perks of being the Headmaster’s kids,” Caspian noted, sticking a finger to the window and peering down. “We don’t have to sit in that.” 
Lazula appeared, leaning over Caspian’s seat and looking to the city below. Seacrest Bridge, the lone road between the two halves of Port Cyrreine, was packed bumper to bumper. 
“Lilly’s there, she said she’s with Rowan and Ichigo,” Lazula said. “Laurel’s on her way, but the traffic doesn’t look bad from the North. Still, I don’t envy whoever’s stuck in that mess.”
A few minutes passed, and Caspian looked away from the window and into his lap as the airship slowed to a stall. He felt it begin to descend upon a mile-wide cape that stuck into the bay from the city’s Northern half.
The campus of Sentinel Academy.
5 notes · View notes
ahopefuldoubt · 5 years ago
Text
River ways (a Prince of Egypt drabble)
first drafted nov. 2016, edited mostly aug. 2017, finished/posted sept. 28, 2017.  a not-quite drabble; partly an attempt to work out how, in the film's canon, miriam would have followed moses in the basket.  a family's complex emotions upon experiencing a heavy loss.  notes under the cut.
Yocheved and Aaron do not go home that morning, not right away.
Instead, they watch Miriam disappear into the rushes, and they wait; Yocheved holding her son tightly in prayerful silence, occasionally combing her fingers through his unruly hair.
Their uneasiness is shared: One child, one sibling, has gone, and behind him, another.  Before departing, Miriam had exchanged a look with Yocheved, who had inclined her head.
They wait for Miriam to come back.  Forever passes before she returns.  When she does, she pushes through the reeds, and folds, exhausted and muddy, to the ground beside her family.  Her eyes are bright, brows knit.
“He is safe!”
Upon hearing these words, Yocheved loosens her grasp on Aaron, but keeps an arm looped around him, and she reaches forward to gather her daughter into a full embrace.  She gives a cry and then cries, Miriam alongside her.  Yet, they’re smiling, too.  Caught edgeways in this hug, Aaron hesitates, concerned, unsure himself whether to mirror their tears or their smiles.  He knows that Miriam is here, though, even if their brother can’t be, and so he throws his arms around his mother first and then around his sister, resting a cheek against her shoulder.  She twists to the side to hug him, pressing her lips to the top of his head.  She says again, “He’s safe.”
This is something I drafted a year ago but didn’t finish until recently.  I’m not sure if I can call it a story; it was supposed to be a fic at one point, and in this form I’m just afraid that it’s lacking in a lot of places...  Still, it’s something of a sequel to “But now gone,” an actual drabble.  (And it’s been in my head all this time, which might be why this section is so long.)
Anyway, Aaron is three, while Miriam is seven (based on the source material [edit: Aaron should be four?  I can’t math.  2019 note: Aaron should be three; Miriam, six.  I still can’t math.]).  I’d wanted to try to work out a bit of the surrounding detail of how PoE Miriam would have followed Moses in the basket.  I read that, in the midrash, Yocheved and Amram (I think both?) place trust in their prophetess daughter to go and see what becomes of Moses after he’s set in the river.  So, I tried to maintain a similar spirit here.  In any case, surely it would have been too dangerous for Miriam to return to Goshen on her own, especially that day, and I don’t think she would have snuck off without Yocheved knowing where she went.  I wanted there to be an understanding between them, that perhaps they’d agreed beforehand that she would follow Moses.  I wanted to show Yocheved and Aaron waiting for her and being there for her when she came back; to establish and reinforce a core sense of faith for Aaron as well—he sees the trust between his sister and mother, sees Miriam leave and come back.  Also, “safe” is complicated, I think.  But, of course, it’s an important echo of Miriam’s own lullaby: “Brother, you’re safe now...”
The above provides only some background information.  The drabble probably doesn't capture enough emotion or enough of the situation, but... I was finding it really difficult to write about something that hits so close to home, as well as try to convey/balance the complexity of it all (grief, hope, trauma, worry, relief, love, etc.).  Switching perspectives between Yocheved, Miriam, and Aaron was very emotionally involving and I think I had to pull back a little for that reason too.  So, there's an intentional "tip of the iceberg," or "open," kind of feel.  For example, I wrote/interpret Yocheved's and Miriam's smiles as part shock, part release of adrenaline, part relief, etc. (a mess of emotions, basically), but people are of course welcome to read into this in other ways... I know I still do!
Last edited: 1/18/18
19 notes · View notes
gwoongi · 6 years ago
Text
𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 | teacher!hoseok
Tumblr media
𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 jung hoseok / reader teacher + expecting parents au! genre: fluff fluff fluff (and a lil baby bit of smut) + bullet fic version :) words: 26k (so maybe read this on a laptop but if you insist on a phone then don’t say i didn’t warn you!!!!)
warnings: graphic language, smidge of nsfw content, student/teacher relationship, jung hoseok being the best boyf and parent ever :(
a/n: y/n is legal !!! hoseok is the typical cliche young teacher !!! i love this story a lot (i plan to write it in full soon!!! just whenever i have time teeheehee) ((also im really sorry the balloons look demonic idk what happened and honestly. too lazy to edit it)) (((this fic is a MONSTER!!! i’m sorry in advance!!!)))
disclaimer: as per freaking usual, keep reading does not work on mobile. i am so sorry because this is SO LONG and big but its ok :( because it’s dad hoseok :( 
Tumblr media
(gif is not mine!)
Tumblr media
happy new year (as a starting note!) i was gone for a long, long time on this blog and did actually consider getting rid of it entirely, however, i’m back to share things that i love and hopefully, you can all enjoy the things i create also. i don’t usually write like this, but i saw a variety of writers adopt a “bullet-list-style” of writing, which i found to be quite efficient. i am the world’s slowest writer and so writing like this actually helps me publish a lot of my ideas without feeling the pressure of writing out like 300k word fics that honestly get ignored. regardless, here’s my first post (technically) of the new year. (this idea has been in my drafts since the “cosykims” days, and og followers will recognise the title.)
now i don’t care what you say, every single school, college or university has that one teacher who is just way too young to actually be a teacher
you briefly remember high-school, with your physics teacher who was just way too young- like borderline could be a student themselves, and yet here they were with their rainbow stationery set teaching you the speed that light travels
and it’s universally known that some people are like child geniuses and end up graduating university aged three or something really bizarre and crazy
(obvs sarcasm)
so, for the love of god...why was there no young hot professor for you to spy on during your lectures
you’re currently a second year uni student, studying visual arts
which, by the way, is awesome
you started off initially very interested in just drawing, but taking modules in sculpting was something you actually found yourself loving and, not to brag, but you’re also pretty good at photography
like as a kid you could probably be found eating crayons and snorting felt fumes like you were an art junkie
kids in your classes were asking for leapfrogs or action figures for christmas but here you were asking for a £300 pencil colouring set along with a “by numbers” colouring book
picasso is shaking rn
like...funny how leonardo da vinci hasn’t released any new artwork since you were born….hm inch resting
“y/n. you, me, some other people, smirnoff and dr pepper, house party, saturday night, is it a yes, or is it a yes?”
jeongguk has been your best friend since your first semester at university; he also took visual arts and does extremely well in all areas, particularly photography and cinema/media study. ever since you partnered together after both being the first ones to turn up to the first class, you’ve been stuck together like glue, even going as far as to rent out a flat together for your second year (along with three other people, just to make the rent easier)
“uh, actually, no, i can’t, as tempting as that whole ordeal sounds.”
“but then when am i gonna see you?”
“i literally see you every day, we LIVE TOGETHER..”
“it’s not the same thing!!”
every saturday for you is the “flat 18 party night” which literally translates to the day that your entire flat go out to any party they can get invited to and just get smashed
it started off as a you and jeongguk thing but then when you moved into flat 18 at the start of your second year, it became a you, jeongguk, haseul, jimin and seunghee thing, and by extension, a year 2 uni student party since the rest of your flatmates found the need to invite all their other friends
basically it was the only day of the week where you were really granted a day off
and jeongguk really fucking loved party night saturdays
“well, what’s the reason then?”- the two of you are currently on your way to your last class of the day; it’s a sort of orientation day for upcoming students who can’t attend the open days next weekend, and so your visual arts professor (who happens to be an actual BEAST) ended up cancelling afternoon classes to help another professor sort out the gym
“family wedding sort of thing,” you explain as you walk. “if i could get out of it, trust me, i wouldn’t. i don’t know if my kidneys can handle another night of drinking. i hadn’t recovered from saturday until wednesday!”
“i’m pretty sure it’s your liver that gets affected by alcohol, but go off i guess...”
“ANYWAYS so yeah i’m sort of maybe like head bridesmaid and i have to be there so….yeah….can't make it :(”
jeongguk then discovers that the wedding is for one of your cousins that you were always really close to, and so even when he’s still really bummed out about you not being there for the “big shindig” he lets it go
especially because he of all people knows that you’ve never been particularly close with all of your family members and it’s only very recently that you got back in touch with them all (just after your first year of uni, to be precise) and he knows how much it means to you
haseul is one of the only other person in your flat who is an “art” major
she actually studies theatre and performing arts but she likes to still be in on the art grind with you and guk
(fun fact: the trio of you called yourselves “art attack” as a funny joke and all have printed art attack door signs in the flat)
haseul always always always tries to wait for both of you after classes because the performance hall and practise rooms are like RIGHT THERE and she’s sort of a little creature of habit and after waiting once or twice it just became a natural thing
today though she’s not waiting because apparently seunghee is doing a biology project and needed help moving it and setting it all up in the labs and haseul was free and so offered her services
usually if you’re free, anyone of you will wait for each other after classes
haseul usually waits for you and guk and then sometimes you guk and haseul go to get seunghee and jimin, especially on thursdays and fridays since they are sort of the weekday party dates
“are we going to see the project after class?”
you glanced up from your canvas stained with reds and blues towards jeongguk who actually hasn’t even looked up from his own drawing, still painting the still life ugly ass vase in the middle of the room
class is actually really quiet today, which makes sense because it’s a friday and there’s always, you know for a fact, a student union get together on thursday evenings and half the uni abuse it and get hammered
and so uni is literally DEAD the next morning
“um yes of course I really wanna see her volcano in action okay i helped make that.”
“technically we all helped make it...”
“well nobody ASKED YOU FOR YOUR OPINION.”
eventually your class ends early because it’s literally just you guk and some other kid who doesn’t talk to anybody and so you and guk decide to head over to the biology labs in the science department
judging by the time, their class should actually be over but knowing seunghee and her stubbornness, her volcano is most definitely still there shooting little rocks onto the floor
rightly predicted because seunghee stands really proud next to her dodgy looking volcano that everyone in flat 18 helped make while off their rockers 
and haseul is awkwardly sitting on a stool to the other side, admittedly on her phone playing zepeto or whatever
“tell me it isn’t the best volcano you’ve ever seen!”
“seunghee, baby, it’s so cute, i LOVE the way it’s literally falling apart!!” jeongguk and seunghee have a super loving friendship, sometimes you sit back and think they’d be the cutest couple on planet earth and then you realise that its GUK and HEE and you wanna erase that thought from your head
guk takes a really quick pic on his phone so he can show jimin, who would definitely complain otherwise because “i literally painted the whole thing brown i think that deserves recognition!”
“please tell me it got a passing grade” 
you sort of need seunghee’s volcanic mess to have passed because you did not have to hear her talk about how excited she was to present her volcano that actually burned things if you put it close enough for six days straight, just for it to flop and get nothing
“i personally loved the reinvented cliche of the volcano model, so i actually gave it higher than passing.”
you turn almost embarrassingly quickly
because
well
you know that voice
everybody with brain cells knows that voice
cause like
professor jung is literally THE biology professor
like he’s the king of biology
you have to admit to yourself that you were secretly so happy when guk made friends with seunghee through jimin (a physics major) because you knew through the grapevine that seunghee was a student in professor jung’s class and everybody and anybody knows that professor jung is the Daddy of biology
like he’s so gorgeous and inventive and creative and passionate and sometimes you just sit there and think “why the fuck didn't i take biology??”
and then you remember that the only thing that helped you get through high school biology was the fact that seo youngho (god bless his soul) sat next to you and gave you all his answers on internal exams
he’s also one of THOSE professors
like he’s one of the cliche fanfiction Young Genius professors
granted he’s still a solid four years older but still, it’s in the legal age frame and he’s still remarkably young to be a uni professor and that’s what you tell yourself when you feel guilty about thirsting over him and the way he looks so damn sexy in that white lab coat and black turtleneck
ANYWAY
when you see him you kind of flush and look away
it’s not obvious that you like him tbh, because you’ve by now mastered to keep it under control unless around flat 18 and incredibly dangerously drunk
that of course doesn’t stop guk from smirking next to you and giving you little nudges which is, quite frankly, annoying as FUCK
tbh flat 18 know you thirst over professor jung and so they waste no time trying to bring it up deliberately, but you’re not obvious at showing you like him in front of him
cause he’s popular and definitely has a group of girls in seunghee’s class who like him a lot and giggle obnoxiously like its high school
you’re not THAT desperate
“oh, good, because i didn’t want it to be a waste of my time.”
he raises a brow
“...becAUse i had to listen to seunghee talk about how good her project was all week. HERS, that she worked on totally alone. like i didnt even know she was doing a project- wow, seunghee, did you make this volcano? wow hahah look at that guys!”
not that professor jung even cares that she got help
seunghee is the only student who respects his crazy biology analogies and jokes so she’s naturally one of his faves
“yeah, and, prof jung didn’t give us homework so im completely free for tomorrow’s big shindig.” seunghee says, still smiling really proudly
“first of all why is everybody saying shindig, second of all i cant go to that so im sorry please don’t post it on snapchat because it will hurt my feelings that you’re having fun without me” and everyones like :) and then like :O :(
bear in mind professor jung is literally still here, he’s just by his desk tidying up only half listening because kids are wild these days and he doesn’t remember having half as much fun when he was in university
“um. WHAT why???? you know saturdays are our days like those are the days we actually get to see you because you’re always in your room sleeping or working”
“that’s not true at all, that’s very inaccurate...”
“you literally watched all 7 seasons of game of thrones in less than three days two weeks ago and i dont think i saw you once during that time”
valid point
“im at a wedding :( and i cant miss it :( even for dr pepper and vodka :( im sorry :(”
at that point professor jung scares you all back into reality. “oh wow that’s so weird because i’m at a wedding too this weekend, actually. wouldn’t that be so weird if we were at the same wedding?”
please be at the same wedding as me “omg imagine that ahhaahha”
but then you realise that’s just not realistic
and even if it was realistic for professor jung hoseok to attend your cousin’s wedding then nothing would happen because weddings are big and busy and you like barely know professor jung beyond making small-talk with him when you’re waiting for seunghee to hurry up and pack away all three of her pencil cases after classes
you actually forgot how stressful weddings are
the last wedding you went to was your aunt’s wedding when you were like five and you were a little flower girl who ruined all the wedding photos by covering her ears and scrunching up her face because the church bells were really fucking loud
which as a kid you thought was perfectly valid, but now that you’re twenty turning twenty one you realise how annoying it must be to have a mongrel child pulling ugly faces at the front of your precious wedding photos
“remind me to never ever get married”
your mom kinda just looks at you and frowns
“i remember when i got married i had my maid of honour and bridesmaids do everything for me so i was actually really relaxed. maybe when you get wifed up you’ll be the same”
wise words from mrs l/n that you’ll probably forget within the next five minutes!
even though it’s so infuriating sorting out the brides big ass dress and making sure that the designated flower girl (who btw is not as good as you were aged 5 dressed in pink and wearing barbie trainers) doesn’t spill all the goddamn petals onto the floor before the aisle, you find that the ceremony is actually really kinda beautiful and touching and yES, maybe the vows made you tear up a little bit
and you bARELY remember the greeting ceremony afterwards which is basically another way of saying “wait for us to get back while we sign these papers” which is also another way of saying It’s time for all the guests to awkwardly wait around and not do anything
you literally haven’t met a single person from the groom’s side of the family and you’re not really interested in doing so until the after party
like most after parties this one is pushed up in a hired out room near the venue and it’s dark and slightly sweaty and hey, at least the food is nice and OMG they have baby sausage rolls
after obviously talking to your family for a little bit, you occupy your time by the snacks and the bar just kind of moving between the two
yknow just minding your own business
“woah, they have tiny sausage rolls, too?”
oh god
you instantly turn around like its deja vu or something
there is no way that professor jung is standing right there at your COUSINS wedding like its no big deal
“...prof JUNG?? omg what are you doing here??”
“i jinxed it! the groom is actually one of my family friends. yeah, he’s been like best friends with my sister since they were in school and so we were close growing up.”
it’s sort of a relief, somewhere deep down inside, knowing that professor jung isn’t like indirectly related to you through marriage
“and, please, y/n, we’re not at school!! please call me hoseok!”
you’re like tearing up inside,,,,on a first name basis with the hot biology professor.,,,,,.....,,, it’s a miracle
also
how does he know who you are
“i didn’t know you knew my name,” you sort of blurt it out as you think it and he starts laughing really cutely and takes like three sausage rolls off the plate on the table
“well, you’re seunghee’s friend! and uh, the bride literally said your name in the speech at dinner.”
“oh. okay well cool haha yeah. wow. this is so weird.”
you actually thought prior to this moment that talking to professor jung- HOSEOK- even when you’re with seunghee in the labs would be really awkward????
because you’re no biologist and the only thing you remember about biology was a video that scarred you for life about a whale's stomach exploding everywhere like the t-rex out of land of the lost
and plus because he’s cute and smart and also a teacher which was. pretty much a big deal...like a big big deal
“okay, but you’re also legally old enough to do it..it’s not like you’re fifteen and he’s thirty,” said the sadistic voice in your head. you liked to ignore that voice a lot
but contrary to popular belief hoseok is actually really really easy to talk to
it’s almost like he’s been your friend for like your entire life and it’s only a little bit weird for you to be laughing your ass off with your friends biology professor at your cousins wedding but hey anything can happen and at least you’re having fun !!!!
naturally…...fun can go…….well…….too far……….sometimes
it’s like quarter to midnight and the party is still going strong and your cousin is like really going for it on the dance floor with your mom and a few of your other family members and oh wow look at this at some point you’ve ended up smushed against hoseok’s side with another glass of smirnoff and dr pepper in honour of flat 18 having fun without you rn
and he doesn’t seem to mind about the way you lean up with your whole cleavage against his chest to talk to him bc its loud as fuck and he can’t hear you from up here
and haha. wow look!
at some point during this fine hour mr jung hoseok has slung an arm around your waist and has his nose in your hair with his lips by your ear because its LoUd As FuCk iN hErE and you won’t be able to hear him
“i said do you want to step outside? its really hot in here” he asks and you have to physically stop yourself from snogging his face off because there’s no way he’s actually looking that good rn
you probably look awful and flustered and sweaty
“oh yes sure yeah ok yeah lets go we can go out to the patio or something”
and of COURSE your poor mother has no idea that the man around your waist is a professor at ur university so she sees you...actually with somebody and smiles really wide and turns away
at this point she’s just shocked that you’re with somebody because lately you’ve only been with flat 18 or nobody at all
you discover very quickly actually that hoseok is stroking his hand up and down the side of your body which okay, alexa, this is epic
“it’s nice and cool out here i thought i was gonna roast to death inside of there.”
hoseok, again with his cute laughter that has apparently become throaty and deep and you almost have to double check it’s still him because it majorly caught you off guard
“right? too many people, it always makes me feel really hot and claustrophobic.”
you hummed. “yeah, and it’s so sweaty and sticky like [cousins name] really couldn’t have opened up a few windows huh.”
he nods and watches you as you just keep talking and talking and talking
“and, let me tell you, this dress is so uncomfortable”
he looks you over. “you look gorgeous. the dress- i mean, the dress looks gorgeous”
“yeah it’s just a shame it’s so itchy and tight”
“mm? wanna go and change?”
“honestly i kind of just want to get out of it.”
you sort of share a look for a solid three seconds
and there’s like a really brief moment where you regret saying it
maybe he hadn’t meant anything by stroking your body and staring at you with a darkened look and holding you tightly when one of your FAMILY MEMBERS said hi to you and smiled and brushing his lips by your ear like maybe all of that was platonic? maybe he remembered you’re a student (although not hIS student) but still!!!!
you’re 0.5 seconds away from blurting out an almost sober apology when he mutters a, “fuck it,” under his breath that you barely even register and then he’s holding your face with his hands and bringing you in for a fat smooch
at first you’re just really surprised because even though you wanted this to happen you weren’t necessarily expecting it to happen
hoseok pulls away sort of dejected because “why aren’t you kissing me back :(” and thats all it takes because you’re pulling him in for round 2 of smooching and it’s almost like you’re not in the courtyard by the patio directly near the windows of the party and it’s not as if people can see you smooching professor jung haha no way! That would be insane!
“i” kiss “really” kiss “shouldn’t” kiss “be” kiss “doing” kiss “this” and he pulls away and then kisses you really really deeply “but” kiss “itsokjustpleasedonttellanybody”
for a moment you both like ruin the mood by assuring each other you won’t say anything and most people at that point would have been like, alright let’s call it a night haha this was fun and awkward
but :( he’s already hard and ur already really in the mood to bone the Daddy of biology so it would be a waste if you didn’t just….continue
hoseok very quickly discovers the perks of being head bridesmaid because your suite is gorgeous and big
“wtf i’m sharing a room with my uncle this really isn’t fair!”
“the many pros of being related to the bride! look i even have a mini fridge and it’s got loads of strawberry milk in because like its my favourite and they really treated me here and-”
not that he doesn’t want to hear you talk because he’d love to but omg he’s hard as heck and would rather get down to it instead of talking about the excessive amount of strawberry milk in ur fucking mini fridge the size of his BED
surprisingly even though you’ve wanted to at least hold professor jung- HoSeOk-’s hand for like an entire year, you haven’t put THAT much thought into having sex with him
well
actually like finger fucking does not count
nor does him between your legs
no they do not count to you in your mind especially when he quite literally helps you out of your dress and strips you to just your underwear
which, BTW, thank FUCK you brought your sexy stuff just in-case the groom had any really hot friends
thankfully he had jung hoseok
y/n: 1 life: 0
rewind like 0.3 seconds
so. hoseok apparently knows this venue like the back of his hand because he manages to direct you to your wing within like three minutes which is pretty impressive considering it took you thirty to find it this morning
regardless he’s really gentle considering he wants nothing more than to plow you into a nearby hard surface and like you know when someone ghosts their fingers over your skin and it tickles but it’s a nice tickle and your whole body shudders
yeah
well
professor jung does that a lot
he takes a liking to sitting on the end of the bed, between the two posts, while you’re firmly seated on his laps with your legs on either side of him, which is the long way of writing You Are Straddling Seunghee’s Biology Professor
“you’re so pretty” his voice is sort of muffled by your hair and skin and you can barely even focus on his voice because there’s so many things happening rn it’s hard to process it all
do you focus on his voice? his one hand on your back? his other hand literally on your arse? his crotch against yours? the little guttural groan he does between kisses?
it all just feels surreal and amazing and oh WOW jung hoseok has a hand between ur legs
he loops his fingers around your underwear and moans (shudders? you can’t tell but whatever he just did like you need him to do it again cause WEEEWWWW) and like lets them go suddenly
and we’re back to before; hoseok moves to dip underneath your jaw and helps you out of your tight and uncomfortable but expensi-
“did. di-did you just . rip my dress?”
“....i swear i didn’t do it on purpose.”
“omg this dress was on loan oh my GOD”
“im SORRY the zip got stuck and so i tugged i didn’t know the whole dress was gonna rip in half this material must be cheap, honey you got SCAMMED”
you realise that you’re not actually going to be the one to pay for it since the bride said she’d cover the prices of dresses and you instantly sort of relax (although, sorry to your cousin that she’s gonna have to pay extra now lol)
“okay it’s fine just” and he clings to you really tightly and affectionately with his chin rested just above your boobs which is honestly cute and actually really weirdly hot “ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ ᵈᵒⁿᵗ ʳᶦᵖ ᵐʸ ᵘⁿᵈᵉʳʷᵉᵃʳ”
he has the nerve to giggle to himself “heeheehee okay baby i will be extra careful”
~~~
basically you make a mental note to tell guk and guk only that you rode professor jung to the stars and back
boi DEFINITELY put biology skills to use like this man must have aced human anatomy and sex ed because mans knows all the parts to look after and touch and kiss and it’s like he digitally downloaded every sex move possible because…..no way in hell u just snagged the best sexual partner in town
“mm fuck i wish i was a biology major” it just sort of comes out, bearing in mind you are like half sober
hoseok kind of laughs from his position and moves his hands to your thighs, “yeah?”
“yes i’m so jealous seunghee gets to see you all the time and i only get to see you when i pick her up”
“you can come and see me whenever, baby”
scoff “i’m an art student wouldn’t it be weird to turn up at a biology lab to see you?”
“i have an office yknow and it’s only open to super important people and i can make you one of them”
you realise shortly after like your second orgasm that hoseok is really good at making mediocre things sound really sexy
at long last you actually look down at him and just grin really widely and at first he’s like “yeah? you like that?” and then you start giggling really weirdly
“best.” down. up. “wedding.” down. up. “ever.”
you consider the possibility that last night was a big fat wet dream for at least four seconds until you open your eyes, see the window, roll over, and see professor motherfucking jung in bed next to you
he hasn’t opened his eyes yet and you think he’s asleep so you roll back over to grab your phone conveniently placed on the bedside table
as it turns out, mr jeon jeongguk has not listened to you and posted every nanosecond of the party last night, as well as leaving you several text messages, as he would, as your bff
from guk: are u having fun? i hope ur having fun. if not, then have fun
from guk: i guess ur dead lmao
from guk: sikegjsfkasljf i madmeout with both seujgehe and jikmin
from guk: ignore the above message
from guk: also good morning did you have fun did u get LAID was it a girl or a guy i need all the juicy details
you have to conceal a groan because you don’t want to wake up hoseok
you haven’t thought of something to say yet because worst case scenario, he could wake up and be like “wtf i slept with YOU??????” and that would not be chill for a sunday morning
to guk: im devastated bc of ur snapchat story that’s real snake behaviour
from guk: omg grow up
from guk: and answer my question horre
to guk: i will talk to you later because i am not talking to u about it over the phone bc knowing you and your monster thumbs and chaotic energy, you’ll screenshot and tell everyone in the flat and im not ready for them to know yet
there’s a few moments of silence
from guk: oh fuck tell me ur not pregnant im not ready to be an aunt or uncle yet (x)
you’re about to reply when
oh
wait
did you use a condom last night
you’ve been off the pill for a couple months because even though not getting periods or pregnant was pretty cool, your skin really suffered and oh hey look at that you’ve put on like 4 pounds overnight
and you can’t really remember if hoseok wore a condom or not
did he?
he must have
like he’s a biology teacher
surely
yeah
to guk: wtf no
to guk: and how would i even know that it hasnt even been 24 hours yet this isnt breaking dawn im not gonna show after like 12 minutes
from guk: you never know
“all i can hear is your nails tapping the screen and it’s literally amongst one of the most annoying sounds to wake up to”
oof
you drop your phone flat on your face
hoseok sort of both reaches to see if you’re okay whilst also laughing
“i’m sorry i didn’t know they were that loud”
he smiles and strokes the side of your face “mm it’s okay. woke up next to a pretty girl so it’s not so bad”
and it’s official he owns your heart
neither of you actually really address the fact that your whole...THING is really taboo until he’s like fishing around for his left sock and you’re moping over your ripped dress
“so like does this mean i can’t come to pick up seunghee anymore because it’ll be weird?”
he pauses. “why would it be weird?”
“idk cause like. idk. you’re a teacher?”
“really? fuck, i had no idea!!!”
“i’m being serious. i don’t wanna be the reason you LOSE your job!! and i’m so bad at keeping secrets what if i tell someone worse what if i tell my MOM”
he’s moved towards you as you were talking and he’s looking at you really closely with a really pretty look in his eyes
“y/n, i’m a teacher and i’m a professional. i can contain my...whatever, emotions, while i’m at work. and yes, please, come by and get seunghee because she’s one of my favourites and i don’t think i’ll see you often because you’re in visual arts and im always in my lab but my office! yes i have an office that you can always stop by when you’re bored and if i’m free i will happily see you :( it’s unfortunate that you happen to be a student but technically….like you’re old enough and it’s not that weird?”
pause
“okay it’s a little weird but if you want it can be just one night. we can ignore it happened.”
you really don’t want to ignore it
like you really don’t want to at all
hoseok easily was the best sex you’ve ever had and ugh he’s so nice and pretty and warm and caring and smart and yeah he made a joke about cells during sex but it was perfectly timed and funny and ugh he’s the perfect guy
but he’s also a professor at your university and above all else, you really don’t want him to lose his job that he worked his ass of for just because you couldn’t control yourself
so you sort of suck in a frown very poorly and you both agree to kind of...let it be pushed under the rug
it was a one time….two-time thing
because he definitely fucked you into the mattress one last time before you walked out the door and acted like teacher and student again
“you look...disgusting, give me all the gossip!”
you’ve barely been in flat 18 for five seconds and jeongguk is already at the door with a glass of water and a bag of what you can only pray is cookies
(nice attempt: it’s actually tiny meringues which is good enough)
as usual jeongguk cradles a hangover right into monday morning and thankfully for you, haseul and himself, arts lectures and classes don’t usually start until the afternoon on mondays
even though haseul is 77% sure she wont turn up because she’s way too comfy in her pjs on the couch in the living room
and honestly the pressure of telling jeongguk about what the hell happened on saturday night is intense because….haseul is there too now
which isn’t ideal to be very very honest
and haseul is literally your Girlfriend like she would be there to wipe your arse if you asked her nicely
but she can also be a little bit judgy and you’re feeling particularly sensitive today
but you also can’t not tell her because she’s one of your best friends and you’re probably definitely going to tell hee and jimin when they’re back so. might as well do it fast
you trust flat 18 with your entire heart and you know they’d never tell anybody
((this is not foreshadowing they are little angels))
“holy fuck you’re literally covered in hickeys, this story is gonna be so good, let me get a cup of tea before you start holy shit-” and so haseul makes three cups of tea and sits back down like ten minutes later
“okay im ready literally LAY it on me im ready”
deep breath
sip of tea
setting the cup down
“so i went to my cousins party. pretty normal right, not expecting much to go down at all like it’s a family wedding and there’s kids around”
“yeah, right, okay, AND”
“and so i’m minding my own business by the snack table and then somebody comes up to me and YOU’LL NEVER EVER GUESS WHO IT WAS”
they both sit there like “how am i supposed to know?”
deep breath
“i turn around and it’s only PROFESSOR JUNG”
pause
“wait wtf why was he at your cousins wedding?” haseul is so lost
“HE did say he was going to a wedding last week,” jeongguk adds. “that’s so weird omg he literally called it wow haha he’s so cool”
“right right, but like how is that the tea,” haseul frowns. “that’s like...cold stale tea. i wanted scorching hot tea. there’s GOT to be more to it”
you sit there awkwardly and wait for them to figure it out because haseul is looking at you really intently trying to figure it out
jeongguk is looking back and forth between you and haseul
he knows she’ll figure it out before him because out of the three of you, haseul has the brain cells
haseul literally just stares at your face until she kinda looks down at your neck
and remembers the hickies
and then looks back up at your face
and then back down
and them back up
...
“oh my fucking god you DIDN’T”
“wait what what what WHAT HAPPENED”
“oh my fuckING GOD. OMG. OH MY GOD??????/ NO, NO.”
jeongguk is like O_O “what omg tell me”
you’re holding your face in your hands rn
haseul is up off her seat and pointing a finger at you with her mouth so wide
she looks kinda like the pikachu meme
0o0
“Y/N SLEPT WITH PROFESSOR JUNG”
jeongguk laughs
“....wait WHAT THE FUCK”
chaos ensues
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SLEPT WITH PROFESSOR JUNG I LITERALLY CAN’T BREATHE”
“i didn’t say that!”
“what, so you DIDN’T sleep with professor jung?”
“...okay so maybe i did but you can’t tell ANYONE PLEASE”
jeongguk is literally laughing his ass off rn
because he’s your best friend and honestly that’s what best friends would do in this situation
haseul on the other hand is the responsible friend who’s thinking of the bigger picture
“holy shit, okay. um. wtf he could get sacked for this!”
“we talked it out and we promised to not tell anyone, and it’s not like we’re gonna hook up again so it’s fine!!!! which is why you both cant say anything PLS”
haseul moves to sit by you really comfortingly, “omg baby no i would never!!! it’s not my secret to tell and YES, i’m very surprised right now and i don’t really know what to do because what SHOULD i do??? this has never happened to me before omg this is insane. this is fuckING INSANE”
you end up having to explain the entire night in detail (missing a few details because let’s be real, you were hammered and dick drunk)
jeongguk has calmed down and now realises that this is sort of serious
mostly he’s just finding it funny that you actually ended up hooking up with professor jung, because you and him used to joke around about it all the time
even though he was initially quite childish about it, jeongguk knows that it’s serious and something that is clearly bothering you so he knows when to pack it in and be the supportive friend
because gukkie is a good friend and oh no we’re dropping all the uwus everywhere
“was it good?”
yes, haseul it was good
“was it SAFE?”
you’re about to answer jeongguk and then you pause
“....i don’t know”
and haseul’s off again
“holy mother of hell what do you MEAN you don’t know???”
“i can’t remember!!”
“and you didn’t ask the morning after???”
“im sorry he was too busy rearranging my GUTS it must have,,,crossed my mind”
now haseul has another thing to worry about on top of midterms
to flat 18: IAHUIIGJKSFDLIHGDJKSF Y/N SLEPT WITH PROFESSOR JUNG
from y/n: JEONGGUK WHAT THE FUCK
from y/n: WHY WOULD YOU TELL THEM OVER TEXT I WANTED TO TELL THEM IN PERSON
from guk: IM SORRY I THOGGHT WE WERE TELIJG THEM
from y/n: jesus christ
from jimin: um
from jimin: WHAT
from jimin: PLEATHE tell me its hot biology professor jung and not ugly middle aged literature professor jung because else my reaction is gonna be vERY different
from y/n: wtf why would i want to sleep with literature jung he’s like 50 and married
from guk: wait omg what if hot prof jung is married….did you ask
from y/n: let me move my bang and read that again,,,,
from jimin: i literally cant breathe MY LUNGSSSSS
from jimin: WHAT KINDA FANFICTION IS THIS RN how and when and why did u sleep with him i have SO MANY QUESTIONS i should be studying for my physics midterm rn but whatyueijgn this is too good
from y/n: this is why i wanted to tell u in person
from seunghee: WHATHGRJENS SJF WHAT THE FUCK
from seunghee: I JUST FUCKING SCREAMED IN MY BIOLOGY LECTURE AND HAD TO LEAVE
from seunghee: TELL ME UR JOKING RN
from y/n: :D heehee. um. haha. well haha. uh
from seunghee: I CANT LOOK AT PROF JUNG THE SAME WAY ANYMORE
from seunghee: omg….u had his PEEPEE inside of u….holy shit i need to sit down rn
from haseul: mood
from guk: she did THAT :’)
from seunghee: i mean…..when we joked around and said you should hop on professor jung’s dick i didnt think you’d DO IT FOR REAL
from y/n: it was the dr pepper u guys…..he made me do it
from seunghee: oh god professor jung came out to see if i was okay and i screamed i cant look at him i cant
from seunghee: omg he was in ur GUTS i cant im dropping biology
you dont immediately see professor jung
in fact you try and avoid him because even though you both agreed to not hook up again you’re afraid that the demon inside you will try and jump him and knowing you, a professor will probably end up catching you
and you like uni you dont wanna leave
and you like hoseok you don’t want him to leave and lose his job
flat 18 have calmed down from the initial shock and humour of the situation
i mean they’re all still in disbelief that it happened
and jeongguk and jimin make jokes about it sometimes
but it’s calmed down
it’s actually like a full week before you see him
because all of flat 18 for some reason offered to help on the open day for uni, party night saturday had to be cancelled >:(
seunghee shudders at the thought of being one of the only biology volunteers and having to pretend like she doesn’t know that her professor was balls deep inside her best friend last weekend
jimin and seunghee are together in the science department and haseul is happy performing for families checking out the performance department
jeongguk was asked to help promote the art department
and you were forced into giving campus tours :(
which sucks
because you have to try and pump out your best energy for the day
due to the amount of students doing tours on the same day, you’re only really expected to give one tour before going to your selected department
and you wouldn’t actually mind giving tours if it didn’t mean that you had to go everywhere on campus and by everywhere you mean having to go to the science department and inevitably seeing the brief love of your life
“..and right here is the art department! as an art student i sure have a lot to say about it- everyone is super duper nice and all-well, MOST of the professors are really helpful and critical and i’ve really improved drawing since i’ve been here. we do a lot of still life in this room but next door is the main drawing room and just off campus, we have the drawing labs!!! and oh, downstairs is the photography department; we have a red room and three studios and next door is the cinema”
“do you get to watch films?”
“technically no but when nobody is looking we do watch a film heeheehee i mean. what? no we would never break the rules..,,.”
you give jeongguk a cheeky bum shake before you leave and he laughs
yes an old man sees and scowls but it’s ok
“so yea like i said, the staff are friendly and mostly helpful. i mean, there are obviously some professors who aren’t amazing but hey we have a higher rating than other unis in this area so haha”
“mostly helpful?” a mom says. “can you elaborate on that?”
“not really, karen.”
after hurling your group around everywhere, you FINALLY make it to the science department
which you came to last because you were not prepared to see You Know Who
anyway
you step inside and start listing off things in the department
like Oh yes jackie look that’s called a bunsen burner
Oh michael sweetie don’t touch the gas taps we don’t wanna die now do we?
“our uni has some of the best science professors,” you explain. “they’re incredible and so dedicated to their profession and it’s really a great environment- two of my flatmates study science and they love their classes and lectures. professor min teaches physics and my friend jimin says he teaches it like no other- he’s amazing!”
“and what about professor jung?”
what
“ᵉˣᶜᵘˢᵉ ᵐᵉ?”
“what do you think of professor jung, hm?” WHY IS THE HM SOUNDING A LITTLE CONFRONTATIONAL
you stare at this mom like OoO because this is weird there’s no way she kNOWS how does this mom know omg did you say something dumb how does she--
“i heard he wrote books and went on tv! he also attended conferences at oxford uni,” the mom says, almost annoyed and your heart goes WOOOOOSH out your body. “my son wants to study biology and so we’re excited to see and hear about professor jung.”
“oH yes RIGHT well he’s...well he’s great.”
“can you elaborate-”
“no susan i can’t. let’s just go and meet him, yeah?”
inside the science rooms open for showing, you’re oddly relieved to see another tour group just finishing up meaning that half of the professors are preoccupied already
that includes hoseok in his cute ass lab coat talking to a group of students and parents
suddenly that female student is standing very close to him and you have to look away before you get annoyed for literally no reason
y/n: 1 life: 1
seunghee is actually free talking to jimin and professor min (jimins weirdly hot professor) sees you standing awkwardly in the doorway and he comes to the rescue with a small smile and nods his head at you
wow jimin never told you how pretty he was
scary as fuck
but pretty
“hi! welcome to the science department…”
you kind of step to the side because science is not your subject this is not your element and you dont wanna mess up
while seunghee is so happy showing off her booth and YES the volcano made an appearance, jimin is content with not doing his job and coming to stand with you
“is it just me or is prof jung looking delicious today?” jimin sort of nudges you in the side and you have to give him a sickeningly sweet smile that translates to You’re Getting Your Ass BEAT Later
“...and we do all sorts of projects to help us constantly develop our skills!!! and it’s actually a really good way at making friends and bonds-” a few parents laugh “-and actually, two of my flatmates are here over there--”
oh great eyes are on you and jimin :)
jimin smiles like :) hell yes :) thats me :)
and you’re flushing as fuck because 1) you don’t really do well with being the center of attention like having to speak and tour people around campus is BAD ENOUGh and 2) hoseok has just been made aware of your presence
you’re trying not to look at him like :) i’m not here :)
“-they helped me make this volcano!!!! and it’s so cute!!! look- it shoots rocks- oh, careful sweetie- look!!! it’s so cool y/n helped me a lot and i got a good grade and we do loads of this sort of stuff, haha, prof jung really works us to the bone but makes it super fun at the same time!!!”
braving a chance to look at him you clam up noticing that he’s already looking at you
he does that THING where he smiles and his eyes look really soft and warm and he ducks his head to look at the other parents and stuff
jimin contains a snort and seunghee is like o_o because she had to witness that LOOK as if she wasn’t trying hard enough to forget about what happened
professor min looks between you and hoseok like “-_-” and you wanna DIE
ALRIGHT MICHAEL PUT ON THE GAS TAPS BACK ON LET’S FUCKING DIE TONIGHT
hoseok manages to talk to you before you leave though which is smooth and you can feel your heart in your vagina literally pulsing as he approaches you and jimin
“having fun?”
you smile like :) how is giving tours :) fun :)
“i guess so!!”
“hey thats good!” he replies enthusiastically. “looks like people like the volcano you helped make.”
“....i didn’t make that. seunghee lied i did not help her on her graded project We did not help I don’t know why she would say that”
and he kind of laughs and forgets where he is and his hand touches your back
jimin chokes
you sort of look at him like OoO BRO
he pulls away so FAST like you’re on fire or something
“it’s okay. it’s a pretty volcano.” clears throat. “a-anyways. have a nice day guys.”
he looks like he wants to say something more but cant really afford to, so he sulks away and talks to more parents
“omg….he just had sex with you again” jimin said quietly. “omg. that was wild”
“he literally touched me what are you TALKING ABOUT”
“can’t believe you just did that….right in front of me….”
“literally SHUT UP RIGHT NOW OMG”
again you don’t see prof jung often
you see him a couple of times when you wait for seunghee
its been a hot minute, like a few weeks
he doesn’t speak much but when he does it’s like “oh hi y/n! waiting for seunghee?” or “you can come in for a bit while seunghee packs up” or “plans for the weekend?”
once you dumbly said “i miss you” before you left and both prof jung and seunghee are like “oh hoe you didnt”
“huh?” he asks.
“I said i’ll see you,” you say. “like...i don’t know. see you soon? i guess”
he knows what you really said
he raises his brow’s and laughs and’s like, “me too, y/n. i’ll see you both soon. enjoy your weekend!”
“you’re literally so dumb,” seunghee says whilst walking back to the dorm, “like really so fucking dumb. i MISS YOU??? REALLY? THAT’S ALL YOU SAID??? I’M LIVING OFF CRUMBS HERE”
“wtf do you MEAN???”
“yknow he always asks me, “how are your friends? y/n, the others?” like why would he ask about you...unless he missed you too….and wanted to see you…..omg you’re both really so dumb”
you think about that for a while
back at flat 18, everybody is out of classes for the weekend; jimin is finishing up an essay so he won’t have to do it last minute monday morning, haseul is watching vines on her phone and guk is currently eating the peaches that you were craving and wanted to eat so bought and stored away for later
later as in now
he offers you one but afterwards you feel like…?? weirdly nauseous
“do you need some water?” guk is on alert rn “i swear i didn’t poison you or anything!!!!!”
“i...literally didn’t even think you had but now that you’ve brought it up…”
like this sickness is so sudden you just wanna throw up all your internal organs
“you should go to bed,” haseul says and she’s like rushing to you to push you towards your room. “i will get a hot water bottle ready and blankets and oh- actually no, you can’t risk eating in-case it makes you feel worse. at least try and eat like these bland ass biscuits seunghee brought because then you’ll throw up something instead of nothing. are you okay, did i ask if you were okay? are you?”
the best thing about flat 18 is that they’re like a little tight family and if one of you is sick, they become worried parents and it’s so cute
anyway so you stay in bed for the rest of the day
and most of saturday morning
flat 18 are debating whether or not to really go out on saturday but you groggily tell them to just go and have fun and you’ll stay at home :( crying :( watching peaky blinders on netflix :(
haseul and seunghee decide to stay in with you for a girls night while jeongguk and jimin head to their friend taehyung’s dorm
at some point during a very intense sex scene between tommy shelby and some random woman you don’t care about currently, you feel a very intense wave of sickness
OFF TO THE BATHROOM YOU GO!!
as you’re throwing up you’re thinking over every possible reason for being sick
food poisoning?
flu?
and then you pause mid heave
could…..could you be pregnant?
omg no
wait omg yes you totally could be
you panic so much that you throw up again
seunghee and haseul are right outside the door asking if you need anything and haseul comes in to hold your hair and seunghee is rubbing your thigh like “honey please what do you need?”
sheepishly you look at her and squeak out, “i don’t think im sick.”
seunghee’s like “well obviously you are you’re throwing up like crazy right now, oh, yeah, okay baby yeah let it out let it all out” 
makes mental note to buy air-freshener
after throwing up you just hAVE to ask
“hee...i need you to go out and get me something”
“sure honey, anything. what do you need?”
“......i need you to get me a pregnancy test.”
haseul and seunghee share a look
“are you serious?” seunghee’s voice is really gentle and quiet
“yes i need to be sure,” your voice is croaky and you keep crying in between each word and seunghee just squeezes your thigh assuringly and nods
“y-yeah, of course, wow, oh my god, okay. i’ll go and get one- no, wait, haseul should i get three? is three the safe number?”
“yeah. three is safe. like, you do an experiment three times to get a fair result and the test could read wrong”
“please stop talking about science im actually really scared right now”
seunghee is already half out the flat with her keys when she says, “do you want me to call guk and jimin?”
and you debate it but knowing guk he’d have a meltdown and tell taehyung what’s going on and it’s supposed to be a private sort of thing
and what gives you might not Actually be pregnant
“have you missed your period?” haseul asks
“yeah but i thought” sniff “it was just late :( my periods are always irregular but if i did the math” hiccup “right then it should have come four days ago :(”
seunghee comes back with three pregnancy tests
(“the cashier said, ‘oh, good luck dear! you look like you’ll be a wonderful mother!’ like HONEY IM NOT LOOKING FOR KIDS I’M TOO YOUNG” “s-seunghee-eeEEEeee im also too young what am i gonna doOOooOoooo i cant do this”)
they both promise to be in there with you while you find out because you’re literally sobbing and shaking and lets be real, they’ve showered with you like ten times and they’ve seen all your bits and pieces and it’s just pee! everybody pees
you’re sitting down in a ball shape by the bathtub like TERRIFIED of looking at the little stick
“is it...professor jung’s?” seunghee asks quietly
“he’s the only person i’ve slept with in like three years, i’m positive it’s his,” you reply. “if im even pregnant, that is…”
haseul rubs your arm lovingly. “want to take a look? should be done by now.”
it takes you a few minutes and then eventually you nod
well
here goes nothing!!!!!
you peer over at the stick and like
your heart drops
maybe you wanna throw up again
all three sticks say: PREGNANT: 5 WEEKS
“what’s it say?” haseul asks gently and you set down one of the tests and look back at seunghee and haseul with an unreadable expression
“congrats. you’re gonna be an auntie.”
haseul is the first to crack
it felt weird to have friends excited?? about your second year of uni pregnancy? unplanned accidental pregnancy with a bIOLOGY PROFESSOR AT UR UNI????
but haseul brings you in for a hug with an excited laugh and seunghee braves taking a stick in her hand and looks at it for herself
yep, you’re having a baby all right!!!
everything is fine until you realise the big problem
how the hell are you going to tell hoseok you’re carrying his baby
does he want kids? probs not! and you never asked if he was married?? WHAT IF HE ALREADY HAS KIDS? WHAT IF HE HAS A WHOLE FAMILY??????
then you start crying
“omg, y/n, please don’t cry, it’s okay, we’re going to figure something out!”
“you don’t necessarily have to keep it if you dont want to,” haseul points out, even though you know she’s already planning dates to look after baby y/n when it’s been pushed out into the world
“h-how am i gonna tell h-hoseok that im having his baby….and i dont wanna get r-rid of it i dont wanna hurt this baby i love this baby i only just f-found out about it but i want this baby i wanna look after this baby this is my BABY?? im having a baby holy fuck you guys! im gonna be a mom this is so scary what the fuck am i gonna do????”
seunghee makes a call to jeongguk and jimin asking them to come back with ice-cream because they have things to talk about
jeongguk is worried like “oh god did i leave my underwear on the couch again? i said i was sorry and i thought id moved them this time”
and seunghee says, “um...no but now im going to double check the couch...dont forget the ice-cream BYEEEE”
needless to say that they’ve very VERY surprised to come home and discover that they’re gonna be uncles
and that the baby belongs to the Daddy of Biology
“i………..what did i miss while i was gone wtf you’re PREGNANT?”
“omg i’m gonna be an uncle??????? really?????? reAlly!!!”
of course the big issue right now is telling hoseok about it
like what are you supposed to do? go up to him and be like Hey hot stuff you’re gonna be a dad!! Happy Monday!!
“if he doesn’t want to help look after it, i would be happy being the adoptive dad of your baby,” jimin offers, staring at your stomach for the fifth straight hour. “because i love you and i also like babies.”
“aw, min, i love you too, but if hoseok doesn’t want to be the dad to this baby, i was already planning to ask guk because GOD KNOWS you would be the worst at looking after kids- dont look at me like that, i know you i CAN SEE THE TYPE OF PERSON YOU ARE!”
you decide to skip classes on monday and only head out when you need to
and by “need to” i mean you decided that today would be the day you told hoseok
you had the whole of sunday to think over it and seunghee helped you devise a plan
hoseok has office hours from around 3pm to 9pm on mondays and her class finishes at 2:45pm, and apparently people use his monday office hours on the evening so “you should probably come then, and you and him can talk in his office where it’s more private!”
and thank god seunghee has the brain cells in this friendship because you were about to announce it in the open and you doubt that mr min would be thrilled to hear his colleague knocked up a visual arts second year student
it’s 2:30pm and you leave the flat to make it to campus for around 2:37pm
it doesn’t take long at all to walk across campus to the science department and so you’re a little bit early to seunghee’s class because they’re still clearing up by the time you get there
the science department has chosen to smell like a hospital even more today and you shudder, already mulling over the idea that you could be going to a hospital soon to get baby scans and then eventually labour and holy fucking SHIT you’re gonna have to push this thing out of your vagi-
the class leaves at 2:45 on the dot (because hoseok likes to let his kids out early because he’s a cool teacher and apparently nothing like the grouchy art teachers in your department) and actually, today seunghee hasn’t turned up to class so you’re sort of waiting for nobody rn
just >:) as >:) planned
when everybody else has gone you head inside really quietly
hoseok hears you anyway and looks over really quickly and smiles so wide like :D
“y/n! how are you!”
“haha yeah im just great professor like really Uh yeah doing great”
“seunghee’s actually not here today. i thought you guys lived together, didn’t you know that?”
and you’re like like “uh yeah i knew. i’m, well, i’m actually not here for her. i’m here for you.”
hoseok is vERY VERY CONFUSED
“is everything ok?”
you smile at him as a way of reassuring him
on the inside you’re like oh hoseok sweetie you have no idea what’s coming
“yeah. i asked seunghee what time your office hours were and she said from around 3 to 9? and obviously, its like five to three and so i am early but. look i just- i really need to speak with you.”
he stands up quickly. “is something wrong?”
“i’m not sure yet,” you reply honestly. “shall we. um. can we go to your office?”
he blinks. “oh! yeah, sure, let me get- my coat and yeah let’s go. i’ll lead the way.”
along the way you just so happen to bump into professor min and he smiles at hoseok and then at you and he’s like “oh? miss l/n, what are you doing here? i didn’t know you took science?” (he only knows who you are because of the open day)
“Oh, no i don’t. um. well,” you pause. cause what are you supposed to say???? “i’m just getting some work for seunghee. she’s...sick and bedridden, so, here i am!”
professor min is just like “huh. okay well have fun i’m going to take a nap in my office :D” and leaves
hoseok’s office is surprisingly clean and cute and there’s flowers everywhere and a cute little yellow rug and you stop to just take in how this room is hoseok in Room Form
like a room has never looked so much like a person it’s him as a room and you love it
“i didn’t really clean up because i didn’t expect anybody- especially you- to be coming. uh, here, let me just close the door. want to sit?”
you take up the offer and sit on the couch opposite his desk and he sits on the desk looking at you really worriedly. “is...everything okay?”
he wants to ask if somebody found out, but at the same time, he really doesn’t want to make you think that he was like repulsed by having sex with you because it was The best sex of his life and he’s not afraid to admit that
“yes. i just” sigh. might as well get on with it. “how long has it been since the wedding?”
hoseok pauses. thinks. “well...i mean, like, probably six weeks? yeah, six weeks. why?”
“okay, and usually, what does it mean when a woman misses her period?”
“wha- well, sometimes it could be an irregular cycle. but it’s usually because they’re conceiving...”
hoseok really doesn’t wanna overthink but...like….he’s overthinking rn
“and how long does it take for them to start showing?”
“well someone can know that they’re pregnant as early as four weeks, usually. although 50% of women say they show at five, and 70% said they show symptoms at six weeks-”
there’s a beat of silence
you worriedly look at hoseok and he’s just. quiet
you can see the clogs moving in his head and his eyes are flitting up from your stomach to your face repeatedly and wow he’s gone a bit pale?
“i...what?”
“i’m...i’m pregnant.”
“i…” he starts to speak but literally stops and he’s just really quiet
you can feel your eyes filling up because oh god he doesn’t want the baby you’ve ruined his LIFE
but really he’s just thinking really hard rn
like
omg
a beautiful girl he likes is carrying HIS BABY
A BABY HE HELPED MAKE
and then he’s like but shes a student at my uni is this weird? its weird its wrong but i love babies and ‘im gonna be a dad????? and she’s really pretty????? and i like her?????? and that’s my kid??????????
you’re seriously about to cry and be like its ok if you don’t want it i can look after it alone and my flat are okay with it i just would want some help like maybe a little bit just for the first few months when he moves from the desk towards you and drops to his knees between your legs
“is- is it mine?”
“what- of course it’s yours!”
“i’m sorry! i didn’t want to assume!!!”
“i wouldnt be here if it wasn’t yours!”
he huffs out a laugh and then just starts smiling so wide
“omg are you actually pregnant? really?”
and then you start laughing like ��YES omg why would i lie here’s a test for proof i was crying a lot over the weekend.”
now that he has concrete evidence hoseok is getting a bit excited about this
above all circumstances he is gonna be a dad and wow he’s always wanted a family!!
you’re so relieved that he’s happy :)
but then he has to think realistically about this: you’re still a student, probably barely twenty one, and he’s a professor and things will be extremely complicated
he debates whether or not to tell professor min
because yoongi has been his friend forever and he actually helped him get the job at this uni and he probably wouldn’t judge him for it because he had seemed excited when hoseok told him about the wedding night (obviously spared of the details that the best Pussy of his life was miss y/n l/n)
“do...do you want to keep it?”
you look at him like OnO “yes :( is that okay”
“YES omg it’s okay!!! that’s our BABY!!!”
ok he’s so excited
“this is so weird and i never ever thought this would happen but!!!!!! i’m gonna be a dad???”
“yes!!!”
then
“wait fuck are you married or anything?” you have to ask it’s been bugging you all weekend. “because i’m happy with raising a baby with you but i don’t think i can handle telling ur wife or whatever that we had sex at a wedding.”
he finds this really funny
“no, i’m not married. i was drunk at the wedding but not drunk enough to cheat on someone :( i would never do that :(”
well. 
THAT COVERS IT THEN
now he has to make plans to like. get to know you because there’s no way in hell his baby is gonna grow up with complicated parents like he wants his kid to have the best life ever :(
hoseok now also has to come to terms with the fact that seunghee knows he had sex with her best friend and is having a baby with her and now he’s horrified
“you did wHAT”
hoseok decided against his better judgement to tell yoongi about what’s going on
since you told your entire flat about it he figured it was only fair that he could also tell somebody he trusted
he has a couple of friends outside the department who he really trusts, like namjoon and seokjin, two married professors who teach literature and creative writing, and sociology, respectively, who will eventually find out, whenever he’s figured out what he’s going to do
considering everything, yoongi isn’t that put off by the fact that he knocked up a student
i mean, yes he’s shocked that it was you of all students ever and then he pieces together you going into his office and the way he had literally described you as “artistic and fascinating” and fucking hell he should have realised sooner
“i...kind of got her pregnant. which- before you yell at me, isn’t the end of the world because we’re both willing to give it 110%!”
“yeah i dont give a fuck about that- i’m still on about the fact that you came back here after that wedding and told me all the raunchy details about you and y/n and i called it hOT and now i find out its a student i KNOW?????? oh my god i need to lie down again.”
(he takes it well, and congratulates him)
meanwhile you’re already making plans to tell your family about it but you want to do it after the first scan
seunghee has done so much research on pregnancy that she was worried the school would catch on by reading the wifi bill and seeing that all she ever googles is “how big is a baby at six weeks?” or “when should i go for a baby scan?”
she seems to think that twelve to fourteen weeks is a good time to get the baby scan and that you’ll probably start showing by then which is the PERF time to tell everybody about it
at the moment you’re not too worried about telling your family
your mom is pretty understanding and your dad has been out of the picture for a while now, and you’re the baby sibling so at least she still has an older daughter to brag about
because from now on it’s gonna be “yeah this is my eldest she’s a LAWYER and this is my youngest haha she fucked her biology professor”
not that she’d use those words
you’re actually more afraid of what people at uni are gonna think when you start showing because you’re not really up for missing out a whole 9 months just to be a year behind your friends
and morning sickness was so awful this morning that you just couldn’t be bothered to go in for class today
thankfully it was just a free sort of day where kids either did the art marathon or worked for their midterms so you could sort of afford to miss a day
guk went to class for an hour before coming back to the flat and haseul didn’t have classes that day so once again, art attack squad just had a nice day at home
haseul is most concerned about the baby and the baby’s health and so went through a crazy moment of trying to eliminate foods that are bad for you during pregnancy
“where’s all my chocolate gone?” “well i moved it so that you can limit yourself on what you eat! chocolate isn’t great for your skin and you should probably start eating healthy if you want the little honey to be nice and healthy when they arrive!”
haseul has money on it being a little girl
guk and seunghee want it to be a boy and jimin is the type of person to have no opinion until the baby is born and then proceeds to say, “see! i told you it would be a boy/girl!”
since you last saw hoseok, he hasn’t really decided what he’d like them to come out as yet; yoongi wants it to be a girl, though
seunghee actually went to class and ended up waiting behind afterwards to give him all the updates
“is she doing okay?” “yES she’s amazing and the baby is doing so well too!!! i mean it’s only been about seven weeks and so y/n is like barely showing, but he’s about the size of a blueberry! isn’t that cute?”
then she pauses and is like, “wait...we live off campus so like. do you want to maybe come round? and see her? i think she’d appreciate seeing you.”
“ᶜᵃⁿ ᶦ?” hoseok is really excited because yeah he does like you and he’d see you whenever he could but 1) he didn’t know how to contact you and 2) where do you even live because if its on campus he definitely can’t pop round and be like “wassup where’s my baby mama”
anyway he comes round with her and you’re very unprepared to see hoseok and seunghee step through the front door
jeongguk is like midway through kissing your tummy over and over and haseul is on amazon looking at baby clothes because she “has to be ready for any opportunity”
of course anything can happen and she’s praying that nothing bad happens because she just found the cutest bear onesie ever and OOPS its in her cart
“it’s,” gesturing to guk and his lips on your stomach, eyes wide, “not what it looks like!”
but hoseok just laughs and puts down his bag and is like, “hehe i know. how are you!”
guk clears out to another part of the couch and decides that he has to, before he dies, see a y/n and hoseok interaction and he can hardly contain his excitement when hoseok sits down next to you and looks at you with a fond ass expression
“good! i had a little bit of morning sickness, but i’m okay. how are you?”
and hoseok’s like well i’m not currently carrying a baby im fine of course i’m fine i want to know about you
because it came to his attention when he was with yoongi earlier that he really doesn’t know anything about you PERIODT
and he wants to know everything and anything
at that point guk takes his leave and he, haseul and seunghee go to the kitchen to give you and hoseok some of your own private space
“i cant believe professor jung is in my living room right now...”
“I WALKED ACROSS CAMPUS WITH HIM GUK I WAS FREAKING OUT THE ENTIRE TIME!!!”
meanwhile you and hoseok are taking the moment to get to know each other
because in about 9 months time or whatever you’re gonna be parents
so you gotta know everything
hoseok learns a lot of things about you: your love for chocolate, that strawberry milk is your favourite flavour, your favourite colours are natural colours like white and beige and browns, your favourite movie or your favourite song…….
and you learn quite a few things about him in return: growing up he always loved science, he wanted to go into dance during high school but it clashed with science club so he gave it up, his favourite flavour milk is banana and his favourite colour is yellow…...
“mm i knew the yellow already :)”
“oh yeah?” hoseok has an arm around your shoulders, one hand stroking the side of your face and the other brushing against your stomach. “how?”
“the rug in your office. and the fact you like banana milk,” you laugh.
“what? the banana milk has nothing to do with it.”
“it does, don’t lie.”
“okay, but it’s not the main reason!!!”
once again it begins to feel like you’ve known hoseok for years and wow it’s so easy to talk to him and he’s so gentle and nice You’re ready to donate your whole heart to him on the spot
“so i was thinking actually,” you propose suddenly, and at this point the gang have come out of the kitchen and are gathered in the living room (jeongguk said that he’s technically in-laws with hoseok now and so there’s no point avoiding it) “that we should go out together this weekend.”
hoseok grins: “are you asking me out on a date right now?”
“yes,” you nod with a firm look. “yes, i am. i am taking authoritative because you’re slow and i want to go on a date with you. i wanna get to know you and work on this.”
hoseok agrees and presses a warm kiss to your temple. “mm, okay then, honey. it’s a date.”
(jimin gets home late and kicks off his shoes by the door. “GUYS!!! YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO LOOKED MIGHTY FINE THIS MORNING!! If you guessed Professor Min, then you were RIGHT!! At this rate, Y/N won’t be the only person knocked up by a science professor cause I’m telling you, I’m ready for Professor Min to tell me the exact speed of light whilst balls deep in my a- OH. Uh. Hi, Professor Jung. Nice day?”)
((nobody knows how to move on from that.))
it’s been exactly 9 weeks since your little honey has been conceived :D
hoseok comes to visit more frequently and he now has your number and emergency contact details so whenever he can, he’s asking how you and the baby are and stuff
he texts asking about your day a lot
mostly about the baby though
from hoseok: what are naming it ^_^
to hoseok: hmm i believe we haven’t gone over the names yet :)
from hoseok: i meant like a nickname!!
from hoseok: yoongi has been calling them “squid” because when we became friends we bonded over someone calling a sperm cell a squid cell and i guess it kind of stuck
to hoseok: omg i dont wanna call them squid then :-(
from hoseok: hmm how about simply ‘baby’?
but i want u to call me baby…
from hoseok: but i wanna call YOU baby and it might get confusing...little one? little guy?
to hoseok: haseul thinks its a girl teeheehee
from hoseok: so i’ve been told
from hoseok: okay, how about honey? i know i call you honey sometimes but honey can be exclusively our baby name
to hoseok: hmm
to hoseok: honey is cute :3
from hoseok: haha okay baby, honey it is then!
you’re waiting until week 14 for an ultrasound
seunghee did more research and said 14 is a lucky number and so it just seemed right
and also most women go around 14 weeks and later because by then the gender will be revealed and that’s exciting!!
THANKFULLY you weren’t planning to visit family for christmas because they’re abroad visiting family and so at least you can surprise them when they’re back with a baby scan and hoseok :D
“did you also know that the baby is now the size of a cherry?” guk said suddenly one evening, as he lay next to you in his bed, by the way, WHY you were in his bed when he woke up he has no idea. “that’s so cute. little cherry all snug in there, huh.”
you find that jeongguk is now...abnormally nice
like you loved that you and jeongguk could be brutal to each other and still be fine in the next three minutes
but ever since you found out you were pregnant, he’s been toning it down a lot
truthfully he doesn’t want to overdo it and add any stress on you during the pregnancy, and he just wants to be supportive and be ‘the best uncle in the business’, to which jimin competes
haseul and seunghee are the ideal best friends in this situation: haseul is so ready to be an aunt it’s crazy and she already has an amazon cart full of cute things and seunghee already claimed dibs on helping you and hoseok set up a nursery for the baby
it’s still being decided but there’s a big chance you and hoseok will move in together to raise baby honey together
the house you were eyeing is relatively close to campus and to flat 18, which they’re planning to rent out for the next two years of uni after this one
so it’s close to honey’s aunts and uncles and also close for hoseok to get to work and for you to get to classes
jimin is the friend who still doesn’t really know what to do in this situation
he replaced jeongguk as the annoying younger brother type, even though he’s a few months older than both you and jeongguk, he’s such a brat lmao
10 weeks
“i’m convinced that my boobs have got bigger- haven’t they gotten bigger?”
so it is one of those days where hoseok is free to come and visit you at the Holy flat 18
it’s become his second home because he comes by so often
seunghee isn’t so weirded out by her professor being basically one of her friends, and in-fact she tries to abuse this by trying to get him to give her “in-law special treatment”
(“i gave you special treatment on your ugly volcano!” “OI the mother of your child helped make that volcano!!!”)
he really doesn’t give any bias tho he basically passes everybody
“i mean,” hoseok begins, and you move between his legs for him to get a good angle. considering you two haven’t been ‘together’ long, you’re incredibly comfortable around him. “yeah, actually. wow, they have!”
“rIGHT? none of my bras fit me anymore. oh god, i’m gonna have to start buying granny bras- do you think they’ll get that big?”
“it’s possible. all women increase in size during pregnancy. actually, some can lose weight instead of putting it on.”
“not me.”
“no, but you look healthy and gorgeous and i like it.”
you giggle- the same giggle he remembers you doing on the Big Night- and shuffle into some bigger trousers that you and haseul went to buy a few days ago
clothes just aren’t fitting anymore and so while you’re upgrading to trendy maternity-style clothes haseul and seunghee are super excited to go to town with outfits they can make from your wardrobe
“well, good! because you’re stuck with me for the next….like, nine months.”
“technically, it’s seven months now.”
you glare
“but i’m gonna still be here after those seven months!!!”
“good!!! you better be,” you shuffle over to sit next to him with your legs around him- one behind and one over his lap and he smiles down at you, “because i’m growing fond of you.”
“well that’s convenient, because i’m rather fond of you, too.”
outside the door, jimin starts laughing “wtf it’s 2018 who says fond anymore?”
12 weeks :)
this morning you realise
wow
i’m actually pregnant pregnant
you’re starting to show now and honestly...looking at it, you realise how creepy baby bumps are
“oh my GOD, seunghee come look at it now it’s gotten really big!”
it’s not even that big
but it’s bigger
seunghee is so excited about this fact
the flat have been taking pictures of the bump every week and printing it so they can keep a timeline for when honey is born
jeongguk and seunghee are still dead set on honey being a little baby boy but haseul is trying to convince them otherwise
“we’re calling her honey for now, right? so, what i have planned, is, we buy her a bee onesie. representing both bees AND the bee movie. worlds best dressed baby.”
you started to develop a fear of going to class because you’re unsure on how people will take the news that you’re pregnant
you’re not that much of a popular person but everybody in the class knows you well enough to know that you’re not the type to sleep around
so it would be a valid shock to hear that you’re pregnant
but you have to go because you can’t afford to miss anymore classes
and you also have to….break the news to your professors because at some point you’re going to have to have a lot of time off to pop out a human being
“he’s the size of a plum by now, isn’t he?”
jeongguk is particularly excited about honey this morning and he has literally not shut up about them since you got into class
“yes, THEY are about the size of a plum- did seunghee tell you that?”
“omg no im a good best friend and i did all my research!! it’s so cute that they compare honey to fruits online- next week he’s gonna be as big as a lemon!”
class is….just your luck, pretty busy today
most students are in the drawing rooms and a few are drawing a still life model
jeongguk gets right to work finishing his final project while you head to the office to speak to your professor, who is really lazy and sits in his office all day and doesn’t even supervise
professor choi, the lovely lady who ends up running all classes, is the dearest angel and you’re ready to chat to her next
professor bowen, your grouchy art professor, is literally so :| when you break the news
like he could not give two shits
he puts down his coffee and is like “oh. well, i couldn’t tell. congratulations, talk to the dean about your maternity dates. and shut the damn door behind you.”
like
damn sir okay
professor choi <3 is so <3 excited <3
she immediately goes to touch your stomach and then quickly stops herself like “oops, silly me! i remember when i had my first child i was so picky with who could touch my belly!! heeheehee how many weeks are you darling!!”
she’s already getting so excited and inviting herself to the birth
like please professor choi
we love you but please don’t turn up for the birth
PLEATHE
she keeps making invitations to bring the baby to classes when they’re born because “obviously im amazing with babies and ooh i just can’t wait to see them! jeongguk- don’t tell me you stepped up and did this all by yourself?”
jeongguk nearly throws up
“EWWWWWWW wtf i mean y/n babe i love you but EWWHJFHJKS why would i want to be with y/n she’s like my annoying sister! no the daddy is ho-”
and you’re like BITCH STOP!!!
“....honestly the best man on planet earth? you definitely don’t know him at all.”
14 weeks :)
“okay, miss l/n. it’s going to feel a little bit cold, but we’re going to put some ultrasound gel on your stomach now, is that okay?”
it’s the day of the ultrasound!!!
for you and hoseok this is the Big moment next to birth because it’s almost like final confirmation that there’s a baby in there
at this point you’re starting to show a lot
it’s big enough for you and flat 18 to know there’s a difference
but tbh if people didn’t know you they might just think you’ve got a few pounds on you and nobody cares at all at uni like literally nobody gives a fuck about what anybody else looks like
hoseok got permission of the dean to get the day off (he told them that his girlfriend was going for an ultrasound and so he just had to be there, and the dean, not knowing any better, was all smiles and said, “of course, professor jung! congratulations! i didn’t know you were expecting, or even dating!”)
because the best thing about being jung hoseok is the fact that he’s well known and it gets him out of trouble sometimes
thankfully the dean is old and dumb and didn’t clock on to the fact that you paid her a visit like a few weeks prior asking about maternity dates :)
PHEW!!!
jung hoseok’s job: saved
hoseok is holding your hand reassuringly and is sitting to your left, the other hand on your ankle and his leg is going cRAZY it’s just bobbing like heck next to the bed
a part of him is still really sort of insecure because even though the sonographer and nurse present don’t know that hoseok is a professor at your uni, he still feels really weird knowing who he is and how you could do better and could be doing better and more if it weren’t for stupid him not putting on a condom
he is so excited to have this baby but he thinks about that a lot, about how he’s basically ruined your life by putting a baby inside of you
you look incredibly excited though, lying on the bed with your eyes really wide and expectant because omg this is your baby!!!!
now that you’re here there’s some finality
ever since you found out you were pregnant there had been so many doubts but now that you’re here, with hoseok, about to see honey for the first time…
alexa play Despacito cause this is epic
“okay. let’s see what your baby is getting up to in there!”
this sonographer is really enthusiastic apparently
“alrighty. so, as you can see...oh! always a good sign- we have a confirmed heartbeat. usually that puts parents at ease, knowing their baby is all okay and healthy in there!”
and then she starts listing off various body parts but in all honesty you cant see a thing
hoseok is very interested in the screen and his smile gets wider at every body part she lists off
you really should be invested in the baby inside of you but when he smiles like that :( you just wanna grab him and kiss him really deeply
“everything seems to be perfectly fine with your baby, miss l/n. a very beautiful baby. they’re about the size of a peach right now, isn’t that just incredible?”
hoseok’s grinning like it’s his default facial expression
he squeezes your hand really tight and kisses it three times
“that’s our baby,” you say, still in motherly awe. “they’re real! we did THAT!”
“yeah, we did,” he replies, lips still pressed against your skin. “i’m proud of you.”
“i haven’t done anything yet!”
but really you have
to him you’re one of the bravest people he’s ever met in his entire life and he knows it must be so so hard for you to accept the fact that you’re having a baby aged 20 during uni
not that it’s uncommon but it’s just….not particularly ideal? at this moment in time?
“im so happy right now.”
“me too, baby.” you squeeze his hands, “me too!!!! our baby!!!! honey is the size of a peach already!!!”
he starts laughing
hoseok is just so overwhelmed with emotions he genuinely feels like he might cry rn
“i’m so happy it’s with you,” he says honestly and like the nurse is like :’) and you’re like :’o “it could have been anyone at any point in my life, but i’m so glad it’s with you.”
you look at him in awe
because that’s the most romantic thing anybody has ever said to you
like
ever
you tug him gently by the hand and he brings himself forward and
SMOOCH
you believe this is the first kiss he has given you since the “big shindig” (for some reason, flat 18 are obsessed with calling everything a shindig and so it just sort of stuck)
so it’s a big deal
and it’s also at the place where your pregnancy was confirmed
it’s perfect
the nurse is like AWWWWWWWWW
the sonographer is just like “anyways ! do you want to know the gender !!!”
you and hoseok have talked about maybe finding out sooner
it would put flat 18 at rest knowing if honey is a girl or a boy
but deep down it’s like...if honey is a boy or a girl for definite you don’t want the nickname honey to go away when you start referring to it as a name you both like...and plus like isnt it way too early
hoseok is happy with whatever choice you want because he likes the element of surprise
you two decided a couple of days ago that it could be super cute to have a reveal party
jimin was particularly excited about that idea (“I’M GONNA MAKE THE CUPCAKES”)
“um actually, can you like put it in an envelope!! we want to have a reveal party so it’s gonna be a surprise for now!”
the nurse and stuff are like “omg yes of course!!” and so it’s sealed away in a little envelope
“i can’t believe we’re actually like...almost parents,” hoseok says on the way back to the car.
“i know. it’s so weird. i can’t believe WE’RE having a kid together.”
hoseok helps strap you in because he’s one of THOSE expecting fathers who like as soon as he knows it’s happening he’s cautious about EVERYTHING
literally everything
falling out of bed when he’s staying over? not allowed, he’s making pillow barriers
tripping over rugs? the rug is being rolled up and put away
hotel? trivago
“it’s actually super funny to me because like i always fantasised about boning the Daddy of biology and look at where we are right now!!”
he starts the car- “the ‘daddy of biology’? what??”
and you’re like, “oh yeah oops haha basically i had a fat old crush on you and we all started calling you that.”
“i’m...honoured? well i knew you had a crush on me already, heehee”
as he pulls out of the hospital he glances over and grins to himself. “if it makes you feel better, i remember telling yoongi about the cute friend of seunghee who comes to my class every other day. yoongi made fun of me for weeks afterwards, and now look at us!!”
(yes it boosts your ego a little bit)
when christmas comes around hoseok makes an ultimate surprise
you end up showing off the baby scan like it’s a broken wrist in primary school because everybody wants to see the little honey
jeongguk is CONVINCED he can see a penis and so he’s like 98% sure it’s a baby boy
haseul tells him several times that it’s literally honey’s foot but he’s having none of it
you call your mom and tell her that you’re coming to see her in early january
(specifically january 4th)
she’s weirdly suspicious about it but nonetheless excited
hoseok has made plans for you to meet his family just afterwards so you’re going to be showing off the scan quite frequently
flat 18 don’t like doing gifts at christmas but jimin always bakes goodies for the flat
this year you’re particularly upset because you have yet to taste jimin’s christmas cookies and you already took your recommended amount of sugar by the time his cookies are done
“one cookie won’t hurt honey,” seunghee says
“i’m not taking aNY risks with it!!!”
hoseok makes a stop by the flat after you’ve had your first christmas dinner as a flat <3 aw
he shocks everybody when he walks in because he’s gone the extra mile and got gifts for everybody in the flat
“it’s just a way of me saying thanks for looking after my babies,” he says as he hands out the gifts
you can literally feel jeongguk’s smirk
and of course !!! he got you like three gifts because you’re secretly like the love of his life
even though it’s really not a secret but still
he mostly gets you the typical christmas things like things he knows you wanted (like that sailor moon designer ring that you don’t need really but omg its gorgeous and you want matching)
the last gift is really small and you’re like :O because the small gifts are usually the super thoughtful ones
it’s keys….
you’re almost like “HUH”
then it clicks
“oh...my...GOD?????”
hoseok bought the place you and him went to check out a few weeks back (the one just a few minutes away from the flat and campus)
AND IT DOESN’T END THERE
he’s all giggly and happy when you start BLUBBERING about how you own a house and now you can get a nursery and omg no more listening to jimin and jeongguk screaming over super smash ultimate in the living room
“because i think it’s time we live together, as a family, you know?” he says, holding you in his arms and kissing your face really sweetly. “it’ll be so good, living with my girlfriend and soon enough, my baby.”
“g-girlfriend?”
“well, yeah baby, of course. wanna be my girlfriend? please?”
you cry even more
“wtf yes of course i do :(”
(flat 18 are extremely territorial and are only settled and content with you leaving when hoseok takes them to the house and they’re like :D okay we’re coming over every weekend)
((haseul cries when she sees the room that’s gonna be the nursery))
15 weeks ^_^
“what if your mom beats my ass?”
today is january 4th which means it is the day that hoseok is going to meet your family
and also the day they are going to indirectly meet the little honey :’)
honey is now the size of a navel orange according to the website that everyone in flat 18 has pinned on their laptop chrome browser
which is really cute
jimin is the flat 18 member who likes to call honey everything but honey and recently started nicknaming them after the fruits on the website
so he’s like, “good morning little satsuma!” or “hello navel orange, how are you?” when he sees you around the flat
you’re probably going to be officially moved out by next week which is really exciting teeheehee
“she won’t….probably. my mom is really nice! she’ll like you!”
“will she still like me when she finds out i teach biology to seunghee?”
“yes probably, i don’t think she really knows what that means.”
“what, biology?”
“no, i don’t think she’ll realise that you’re a professor at my- you know what, never mind that. did you lock the car?”
since christmas and becoming hoseok’s official girly, you two have just been closer than ever
hoseok is still really cautious about the baby stuff because this is obviously his first baby ever
he’s that person who thinks having sex will like kill the baby
of course, he did try it once
just to say he’d had sex with a pregnant lady
“that’s one for the bois.”
“what bois, you don’t have any friends, baby.”
“NOT true i have like 3 friends!!”
when hoseok timidly knocks on your mom’s front door he’s so so nervous when a big buff man opens the door instead
inside he’s like wtf i thought y/n’s dad was like GONE
but then you’re like “oh hi daren! yeah, this is my boyfriend, hoseok, hoseok this is my mom’s boyfriend!”
you didn’t tell hoseok just because you got pleasure seeing him look so terrified at the thought of telling ur Dad that he knocked you up
thankfully you’re not close enough to daren for him to have any protective feelings for you
not like a close dad would anyway
when he meets your mom it’s literally like meeting an older You
like
your mom is so nice :(
she greets hoseok really really excitedly and is all for embarrassing you within 5 minutes of you coming home
“did you know that it’s been exactly four years and five months since y/n came home with a BOY? she never comes home with anybody!!! i thought she was joining a nunnery!!!”
like omg…..so funny…...really, like, joke of the year
your sister is also here and she’s looking at hoseok like -_o because…. “i’ve seen you somewhere…”
now you’re shaking
omg does she KNOW
“i mean, he was at [cousin’s name]’s wedding hahahha...that’s probably how u know him….small world.”
“ew what do you MEAN he was there- he’s not family is he?”
o.o
“wtf no he’s a friend of [groom’s name] wtf Why would i be dating him if he was family What is wrong with you?”
you guys have a nice little snack and tea together and hoseok starts to feel really comfortable
but then Mrs y/n puts down her tea and sits back in her chair, slapping her thighs: “alright then. so what’s this big surprise you have for us?”
oh
oh yeah he forgot about the fact that you’re having his kid and you’re about to drop the news
suddenly he wants to throw up the brownies he just ate
and your sisters blue shirt looks like a perfect place to throw up <3
“well, it’s kind of been a surprise to us all, actually,” you begin, and you take hoseok’s hands in your own and your sister narrows in on it and she knows like right away
she thought she saw the bump but didn’t want to mention it because You’re the sensitive sister and if it was just weight gain she didn’t wanna handle you crying everywhere
but now she knows and she sits back in her seat and starts to smile
she wants to say something but hoseok looks at her like owo please don’t say anything sis
(she doesn’t)
“but, me and hoseok are in a very...close relationship-”
“oh god you got married didn’t you.”
“um, no, but, i’m sure that’s in the future, right? y-yeah? right, yeah, um…”
“it’s not something we’re discussing right now,” hoseok blurts out. “but, i mean, i want to? soon? like later?”
your mom is literally there like “well what is it????”
“.....i’m pregnant.”
“...oh.”
...
...
“REALLY???????”
your mom is shook to the core
she really doesn’t believe you until you whip out the baby scan
and she starts sobbing
like full on sobbing like she’s just been punched in the face by bowser
daren is all smiles and is like “wow congrats!”
your sister hugs both you and hoseok and says to hoseok in his ear “can you please sign my copy of “ouch mitosis” because it’s my favourite book and i totally knew you were famous the moment you walked in” and pulls away and is like “im so excited to be an aunt!!! what’s the gender!!! when are they due!!! what are you gonna call them!!!!”
needless to say your sister leaves with a signed copy of hoseok’s big money book
and your mom is now 100% hooked on the baby being called honey
week 17 :-)
you and hoseok are now homeowners officially !!!!!
flat 18 have come down to visit as a sort of moving in house-warming party and hoseok invited his “three friends” (by friends he means work colleagues lmao)
jimin is still weirded out by the fact that professor jung heard him talking about his fantasy of having professor min inside his GUTS and so tries to avoid hoseok and yoongi when they are together
hoseok also cannot forget hearing that :-( his ears :-( are tainted :-(
it’s your first real time meeting hoseok’s friends
like you’ve never really met namjoon or seokjin but you know of them
because everybody knows about the married Gays of your uni like it made the news and everybody was invited to their after party last year
(yes you went but only like for fifteen minutes because you remembered that you had an art history essay due the next morning that hadn’t been done)
for the sake of you and honey, seunghee tries not to be weirded out by the fact that so many members of staff are at your house and wtf hi professor min WHY are you here again
“can i touch?” seokjin asks really suddenly after hoseok is showing yoongi and namjoon the room that will be the nursery
currently it’s empty with like one box and that one box is full of clothes haseul ordered on impulse
“um. yes!!”
“are you sure? i know some moms get really protective over who touches and i don’t wanna overstep-”
“put ur freakishly big hand on my belly right now!”
he does and he gets really excited touching because he’s never actually touched a baby belly before
namjoon is most excited about the nursery and he’s listing off things hoseok could get
like “OOOO you could totally get one of those really big stuffed bears if you’re going for neutral tones- wait, that’s such a good idea? i’ll order one.”
and hoseok’s like mm okay sweetie sure whatever spend your money on me it’s okay
yoongi is really just. in awe of the baby scan
like it’s not even his baby and he’s tearing up like wtf that’s his niece or nephew that’s his mf baby!!!!!! that’s gonna be the person he spends all his cash on!!!!! he’s so excited to be broke and baby whipped!!!
“and so what, you’re like seventeen weeks?”
“yep! i’m almost four months uwu!!! honey is as big as a pomegranate, how cute!! time flies when you’re having fun huh!”
seokjin pauses and asks the big question like “but like what are you going to do about maternity? are they letting you have days off school? because i can totally send one of my sociology kids to take notes in your lectures because i have authority apparently and you’re like. family? i could do that.”
and you’re like “omg pls no that kid needs their own education!!!” and you tell him that your professors and the dean let you have time off near the due date (which should probably be around june!! a summer babie)
“but it sucks because i wanted to have a gender reveal party and invite some people from uni but then they’re gonna find out that hoseok is the dad and he could like lose his job :(”
and then seokjin is like: “wait but you study art and not biology?”
… “what do you mean?”
“well, policy says that you can’t have a relationship between a teacher and their student. but if you’re in completely different departments….and he doesn’t teach you, therefore can’t have bias over your grades or anything like that…..then really you’re allowed to be with him.”
..
what
wHY DIDN’T YOU KNOW THIS????
“since when is that a thing????”
“since like. the day our uni was founded?????”
ob viously when hoseok finds out he’s like O____O “how did you know that omg??”
and seokjin is so done he’s just sitting there with his face looking like this -__-
“it’s literally in the Faculty Handbook that you’re supposed to read before you join the uni as a teacher…”
and hoseok scoffs and grins sheepishly, “yeah well yoongi got me the job so i didn’t read any of that.”
(from across the room jimin groans)
((“so i guess this means i can’t seduce yoongi at a family wedding huh.”))
week 20 :’)
you have somehow adopted the name of “campus milf”
which jimin doesn’t think is that bad of a nickname
“it could be worse, y/n. let that sink in.” and he’s right it really could be worse
nobody actually really cares that you’re pregnant like really they could care less
some students say weird things but it doesn’t really bother you bc like lmao? who even are you Jongin Get out of here!
people aren’t 100% familiar with hoseok being the father but it goes without saying that it will be around campus in less than 15 hours because majority of the art department were present for the gender reveal and oh look
jeongguk invited taehyung and taehyung invited his friends and now there’s a whole bunch of jocks at the gender reveal party?????
the party is obviously at your house
YOUR HOUSE!!!! YES MF THATS URS!!!!
you invited your close family and flat 18 of course and jeongguk invited taehyung who invited his girlfriend binnie and his roomie jackson and jackson, being part of the football team, invited some of the jocks
you would have cared if the jocks hadn’t brought gifts but half of them turned up with a gift or food and so you’re like “okay well come on in boys i’m y/n hi we’ve literally never ever met”
it looks really funny seeing jocks in their fucking JERSEYS (like they couldn’t have changed for this one occasion) standing around your backyard with glasses of wine
oK maybe jeongguk has a vodka and dr pepper but that’s because he did blow up all the balloons from his lungs alone and he deserved a reward
hoseok invited his family too and his friends and that’s about it
your art professor is also here too and she is technically half of the art department (or half of those you care about because weird quiet kid Jisung didn’t wanna show up which is honestly really rude and suddenly you’re not friends anymore)
even though this party technically reveals the gender, you both asked for “gender neutral” clothes and by gender neutral you meant any colour besides the stereotypical blue and pink
because what if honey really likes the colour green? what then
you and hoseok let jimin be in charge of the reveal party and he’s done a pretty good job
for some reason he’s wearing his hoodie up and you’re like “literally what the fuck it’s sunny today?”
and he’s all surrender hands: “that’s exactly why. i don’t...like the sun.”
“what do you mEAN??????? you love the sun don’t lie??!!”
a couple of weeks ago you and hoseok made another visit to the hospital to see if the gender was 100% accurate
the process was weirdly fast and the sonographer was like “lol yeah it’s right” and then dipped
so when you have jimin the envelope he has peeped and done the thing
“haha lol i knew it.”
“no you didn’t??????”
but he did a really lovely job; there’s a cluster of balloons and cakes decorated with the Blue and Pink and there’s like a cute game on like guess the gender or something you don’t really care much about
hoseok’s family really want it to be a boy <3
mrs y/n wants it to be a girl and so does your sister <3
you don’t really care just as long as the baby is okay and healthy <3
when it’s time to reveal the gender jimin has decided that a fantastic way to do that is by giving you and hoseok like one of those party poppers that when it pops it bleeds like coloured confetti and stuff
you actually really like the idea because it’s not as awkward as a cake where you cut and it’s awkwardly long and the reaction feels kind of forced (you youtubed reveal parties)
so this one is really like a quick reaction so hopefully it will feel a lot more genuine!
“are you ready, baby?”
hoseok has one arm wrapped firmly around your waist and oh LAWD
he’s doing the smile
you know the smile
you nod and grin at him like “yep! let’s see who honey really is!!!”
so everybody is ready
so excited
jeongguk is filming like he can feel it in his bones rn that this babie is gonna be a boy
like it’s gonna be his son...half son….almost son….technically his non biological son
everybody does a countdown
“three!”
hoseok smiles super excitedly
“two!”
he kisses your lips super fast and laughs quietly
he’s so excited
“one!”
POP
wait what
you can feel your stomach CHURNING when the party popper releases literally nothing but black and white confetti
what just happened?
what does black and white mean?
you’re looking desperately between hoseok and the popper and then back to jimin who’s faking a :O by the patio doors
jeongguk is like “aw fuck should i restart?”
“omg is it a dud? what happened is this a busted popper please say it is omg is there something wrong with honey? is honey okay? oh my god is honey dead? oh my god why would we party pop that?????”
hoseok’s like “omg calm down it’s just a dud omg it’s okay”
you’re literally like about to cry
then jimin steps forward
“guys!”
and everybody looks
“yall gonna stress me the fuck out”
and in a viral video like fashion
he yanks down his hoodie and
oh wow
his head is a giant mop of blue
blue
BLUE MEANS BOY
ITS A BOY
everybody starts screaming and clapping and jeongguk is laughing his ASS off like this shit about to be the blurriest gender reveal video ever
“omg a boy!!! a boy!!! y/n we’re having a son!!! omg y/n our baby!!! our little honey!!!”
hoseok is over the freaking moon
like he has not been this excited since the first baby scan
you actually start crying now
“i’m not CRYING it’s just the pregnancy…. ok fuck OFF IM CRYING IM SO HAPPY!!! i’m having a son!!!!”
time for haseul to be both happy and sad at the same time
seunghee and jeongguk are like sucking eachothers titties right now like they are so hyped
“TOLD YOU !!!! I KNEW IT!!!!!”
hoseok brings you in for the biggest and longest kiss Ever
like you haven’t had many long kisses with hoseok because it’s been trying to build up a relationship time for the past three months of your life
but this kiss is so loving you almost faint
he brings you in so gently and holds your head in his hands
one thumb rubs across your cheekbone and wow. this kiss...is so good like are those stars???
“i love you.”
alexa...ALEXA PLAY DESPACITO RIGHT NOW
“i love You more,” you whisper against his lips and he makes this really cute noise at the back of his throat (kinda like one of those whines you do where it’s like too good to be true) and he kisses you again
jeongguk zooms in
“look at this….ugh, no respect for any single people here.”
(for a brief moment jimin’s bleached blue scalp goes unnoticed until yoongi compliments him on it)
((he disappears for like fifteen minutes in the toilet and yoongi doesn’t wanna know what he was doing))
22 weeks!!!!
hoseok really probably shouldn’t find you sexy right now
you keep going on and on and on about how un-sexy you are with swollen ankles and stuff
in his opinion you’re looking really good considering and he won’t say it but the weight gain looks good on you and it gives you a nice natural #dewy look that he really loves
he remembers how cautious he was about having sex with you at like. what? 10 weeks
character development time
he’s very aware of the research and the facts and so when you shuffle over to him and huff and act all extra EXTRA touchy he’s just knows
“omg are you horny AGAIN”
“im SORRY IT JUST HAPPENS”
and he doesn’t really care that you’re big and pregnant and yeah actually your ankles are kinda swollen but it’s fine
hoseok discovers that he actually really likes pregnancy sex
pregnancy sex always scared him bc omg what if my dick touches my KID that would be all levels of weird
but he is like a biology professor and knows that’s not realistic (he thinks)
and like he was aware that at some point during pregnancy, your body is gonna be producing a lot more fluid
but my GOD
he nearly bust a nut after 3 seconds because he just slid right in
unlike the big shindig 22 weeks ago, hoseok is so so SO careful during pregnancy sex
like he’s extra loving and strokes your hair and kisses your face and arms and stomach
he loves kissing ur tummy :(
esp after sex because he’s like “im sorry honey :( i know you must be traumatised in there.”
but in the moment he really does take advantage of the fact that your hormones are going crazy and it’s not gonna last forever
you’re a talker in bed and he knows that
you’re very vocal about how things feel and some of the things you say really get to his ego like his head is so big rn
“oh...OH, omg, yep, you found it, oh fuck- yes! hoseok, yes, right there-”
and you sound so fucking hot but he can’t be rough bc like Honey is gonna be SCARRED FOR LIFE
your thing is saying i love you during sex
like a lot
hoseok finds it so endearing that you talk and whine with like every thrust and then spill out a thousand “i love you’s” in under thirty seconds as you cum <3 because <3 that’s his girl <3 that’s the love of his life <3 and she loves him back <3 heeheehee
his heart swells with pride
((hoseok also gets extremely turned on that one time you call him daddy during sex and he HAS to find out how to get rid of that kink before honey gets here))
23 weeks :P
as promised, you invite seunghee to help you and hoseok paint the nursery
jimin came too but he literally did nothing
all he did was sit on the floor looking at baby furniture like
jimin sweetie these walls aren’t gonna paint themselves
you have decided on a cream and beige coloured nursery
because it’s unisex and also makes the room feel really bright and clean and nice for when honey arrives
hoseok loves yellow and since the nursery is primarily your favourite colours, a lot of smaller accessories are yellow around the room
seunghee had so much fun looking for ~yellow~ items because “monkeys totally match the theme and omg this mobile is monkeys and bananas its already on its way i’ve just ordered it.”
the nursery takes roughly around a week to get done completely
alongside your studies, some other art students who are now very aware of the baby and the bump helped paint some of the furniture while you were catching up on some work
example a: you accidentally ordered a dark brown chester drawers and when it arrived you cried for like 45 minutes
jeongguk asked some kids from class to come by your house after class and help paint it so you didn’t feel so stressed and so you could actually finish your art assignments in prep for exams
hoseok and jeongguk helped put up the crib because “this is not a one man job, y/n, this...this is a test of skill.”
yoongi comes around often to look at the nursery and he’s the person who won’t buy anything until the baby is out and in the world
namjoon definitely does buy the huge stuffed bear for the corner of the room and often you catch seunghee asleep against it because she comes by the nursery so often to help you and hoseok make it perfect
because hoseok has a full time job that really requires all of his time and sometimes he can’t be working on the nursery and marking essays at the same time :(
“hee, can you pass me the blankets from that box over there?” you point to a collection of boxes by the wardrobe and seunghee nods, practically running over
you’re both working on the nursery (it’s friday afternoon and classes are over, but unfortunately hoseok had to finish a meeting and he’s currently in his office ((at home)) finishing these essays for the weekend)
yoongi called and said he’d be round later because he wants to check in on honey (and you of course) and he’s also coming for dinner because it’s normal to invite jimin’s physics professor around
it’s totally fine
at this point you sort of forget that he’s a professor
yoongi has become like a permanent figure in your life since hoseok and you moved in
like flat 18, he’s literally always over
seunghee fishes out like three blankets because lord knows you have about three hundred thanks to haseul and namjoon and their impulsive buying
the nursery is basically finished at this point
all you’re doing is adding blankets and a few cute little pillows to the crib and then
hey pasta
it’s done :)
“y/n, i really can’t wait for honey to be here.”
you turn slightly and see seunghee running her hands over the chester drawers, looking at the cute little decorations and pictures on the wall and the monkey mobile and, her favourite part, the little bee wall stickers that hoseok found and thought were cute (“we call him honey, it seems fitting!”)
“me too,” you reply super honestly, setting down the blanket. “if you had told me at the start of september that i’d be here right now, in a house i own, pregnant with jung hoseok’s baby...i would have seriously laughed in your face.”
“i’m just...so happy that everything is working out for you!”
it’s time for seunghee to get especially sappy
“and i know that having a baby at twenty can be really hard and it hasn’t been easy for you- but i’m 100% here for you whenever you need me and i’m so so so so happy that jimin introduced us as friends because i love having you in my life….even though you slept with my biology professor….it’s okay….i love you so much….you’re like my sister and i’m so excited for honey have i said that i’m excited yet? cause i am!!!”
you blame pregnancy hormones because you start sobbing when seunghee blurts out all these lovely things
like how she’s grateful to be helping you in the nursery and how she thinks you and hoseok are such a good match and how she misses having you around the flat <3
“seunghee…” you bring her in for such a tight cuddle
seunghee is definitely that friend who even though she’s older she feels like the little baby sister that you want to protect from all harm on earth
even though she’s the oldest out of the flat 18 gang, you all look to her as like a baby sibling
(minus jeongguk that ONE TIME he made out with her….yes you remember the text message)
so you’re just hugging her in the middle of the nursery
hoseok is just about finished with essays and he refrains from like screaming out of joy
he loves being a professor but fucking hell
some of the GARBAGE his students write because they know he’s the cool professor who takes it easy on his kids
so he’s already packing everything away when he pauses
...is that...SQUEALING??
what’s happening??????
he assumes the worst and ZOOMS out of the office towards the nursery where you and seunghee are
safe to say that he’s so thankful nothing bad is happening
you’re holding your stomach with the widest eyes and smile and seunghee is like SQUEALING LIKE A DAMN PIGLET
“is everything okay???? what happened???? is honey okay?????? are you okay?????”
he blinks so confused when you wave your hands at him and beckon him closer
“HE KICKED HE’S KICKING QUICK QUICK HOBI QUICK--”
HE CROSSES THE ROOM SO FAST
seunghee is like crying to the side of the room and hoseok has both hands on your stomach
honey stopped kicking when hoseok put his hands on there
and he was like :( oh
“maybe he went to sleep?” seunghee doesn’t want hoseok to feel bad about it
you put your hands over his and then stroke your tummy
“it’s okay, honey, it’s just daddy! say hi to daddy?”
hoseok’s like seconds away from crying
like omg R His Eyes Filling Up
but then
honey starts kicking again
VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY
and hoseok goes from :’( to :’D in like 2 seconds
“oh my god he knows it’s me!!! hi honey!!!! hi!!!”
he drops to his knees so that he can be level with the stomach and around about where honey is kicking
“hi honey! it’s your daddy,” he puts on this really cute cooing voice Like the typical baby talk voice
seunghee is texting the flat like HONEY KICKED ME
“he knows your voice,” you say with a little laugh, one hand on your tummy and the other threading through hoseok’s hair
“this is amazing,” he mutters, and then kisses your tummy and smiles, “did you feel that, honey? can you hear me?”
KICK KCIK CKICKCKCKCIC
“omg yes i think he can hear you holy SHIT-”
“don’t swear in front of honey!!!”
“he HURTS!”
everybody forgot that jimin was still here because he was napping in the living room and so he comes in really late and is like “OMG HONEY IS KICKING? WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME??”
honey seems to be familiar with a lot of voices
he obviously really likes mommy’s voice and when she talks to him he likes to kick every once in a while
honey really loves daddy’s voice because when hoseok does his daily chit-chat honey goes crazy
honey also knows jeongguk’s voice really well
jimin is afraid to go near honey because he kicked him when he went to kiss your tummy
he also kicked haseul but she was like “OOOH HE HEARD ME!!!!” and doesn’t let it bother her because!!! she felt the kick!!!! that’s her nephew!!!!
26 weeks (yawn)
it’s starting to hit
the Pregnancy Pains
up until now you’ve been pretty blessed and actually it’s been a nice pleasant journey
but good grief it’s 4:56am and everything hurts
you physically cannot stay in bed any longer
for a moment you actually get really panicked because oh GOD labour is gonna be so much worse than this
like this is nothing
girl you have no idea what’s coming
hoseok has learned to become a light sleeper
you have a really weird sleeping schedule during pregnancy and sometimes he’d wake up at 6am to go to work and you’re already up doing stuff and he gets home at like 6pm sometimes and you’re flat out, then waking up at 3am to continue the day because you were in agony
so when you wake up at (nearly) 5am on a SATURDAY he’s like already up
his body clock is so weird now thanks to you and your weird sleeping habits
“hurts?” hoseok asks rubbing your back as you’re slumped over the side of the bed. he barely catches a nod and kisses your temple and hugs you, “i read on that baby website that baths can help ease the pain sometimes. should i run one?”
you nearly CRY
“yes yes Yes please omg :(”
so that’s how he got to where he is right now
sitting on the bathroom floor running a bath
he’s so careful to get the temperature right and he spends a good three minutes deciding which lush bath bomb is going to be used
(he settles on “honey bee” which was actually a gift he got you on valentines day but you never got around to using) ((he was skeptical because of the colours but baby is called honey so he thought it would be cute)) (((you loved it)))
you hobble into the bathroom and he’s just about finishing it up, running his fingers in the water to make sure it’s not toooOOO hot
you love watching the colours fizz in the bath and so naturally you have to be there to see it happen
seeing all the yellows was pretty exciting and hoseok’s just like :D watching you get happy by the colours
hoseok helps you get undressed as you just talk on and on and on
honestly
how do you have so much energy at like 5am in the morning…
he can’t help but notice how much you are GLOWING
like he hasn’t really seen many pregnant women
if any at all besides you
but you really look so pretty and natural and just wow he’s full of love
as you sit down in the bath, you grip onto his hand as he moves to get more comfortable and you’re like “do you wanna get in with me!!!”
“baby, i don’t think i’m gonna fit.”
“you will i promise, get in here!”
he’s skeptical
“yea...i don’t think im gonna fit, love.”
oh he does
he fits
if he fits he sits and he FITS
he really underestimated how wide this bath was and he sits with his back near the taps and you’re facing him
you have enough room to put your legs on either side of him and you’re like sitting between his legs and in all honesty the tummy is the only thing between you and him and his dick
but like you’ve seen it before you don’t care
and he certainly doesn’t care about seeing any bits of you bc your his bABY thats his GIRL
“this smells amazing.”
“yeah, smells like-”
“honey!”
with hoseok being like. a full time professor and with you trying to make it to classes in between awful pregnancy pains, it’s hard to find time to spend with you because he’s really busy
sometimes you do actually go to class and end up like falling asleep on the desk and professor choi is like torn between letting you stay there or sending jeongguk to get you and take you home
“thank you for this, hoseok.”
:D “hey, hey, hey...anytime you need anything, i will do it, okay?”
“i know babe and you’ve been so so so so helpful these past few months and i know it must have been hard and a big adjustment but im just so glad you’re here and that we’re raising a family together like this means so much to me that you’re here with me and i just love you a LOT okay like a lot-”
“y/n l/n!” hoseok playfully cuts you off and holds your face in his hands (his signature pussy-throbbing move)
his hands are wet and now so is your face but you really don’t care
“you are,” he continues, “the love of my life. i couldn’t let you do this alone. meeting you, being with you- starting a family with you has been one of the best experiences of my whole life. and i wouldn’t change that for anything!!! i love you so much, and i love you even when you’re cranky, and i love you when you ask for really disgusting things to eat, and i love you when you sing to honey in the mornings. i’m just...so in love with you and honey, i can’t even put it into words!!!”
and he starts speaking so damn fast
like you BARELY catch it
“and you’re thebest thing that has ever happened to me and introducing you to my family was the proudest moment of my life and we’re gonna be the best parents ever and god i love you more than anything i would Die for you.”
i…
damn…
“...i think writing a best selling book is probably more worthy of pride than boring old me.”
“books are like a ten man job thing. you and me and honey are a two person job thing and i’m so proud of us, so proud of you :(”
he draws you in with a really soft kiss and its so. soft. and nice.
yep his dick is right up against honey right now
honey, sweetie, im so sorry oh god close your eyes baby close ur eyes
“we should get out soon bc this water is looking really ugly.”
“yeah i agree let’s get out”
30 weeks :3
<Y/N has created a new chat!>
from haseul: eye
from y/n: baby shower. 2 weeks time. my house. bring gifts or food
from y/n: preferably mustard sandwiches or sardines :)
from guk: thats fucking NASTY nobody bring that
from hoseok: last week she wanted meatballs and milk………….
from guk: do pregnant women deserve rights? be honest
from y/n: well looks like guk is no longer invited :)
from guk: NO PLS
from seunghee: YEAH BOIIIIII I HAVE SO MANY GIFTS
from yoongi: why did y/n just privately message me asking for blended sardines Hell nah pregnant women dont deserve rights
from y/n: WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN RN :(
from hoseok: so! bring cakes !!!!!!
from namjoon: i have the best gift ever Not To Brag
from jimin: hi professor min how do you like the weather today
<y/n has removed jimin from the chat>
from y/n: can you let taehyung know the date? i dont have his number but he gave really warm hugs when i last saw him and i want another one
from y/n: tell him to bring his girlfriend too she looks like she’ll bring me a good gift
from hoseok: omg im dating a gold digger….
32 weeks !!!!!!!
“baby showers are technically just a way for the mom to get gifts. this is technically baby exploitation-”
“oh my god jeongguk if you don’t shut up im gonna shove this stick of celery up ur ass”
not that you’re ready to admit it to anybody
but yeah you organised a baby shower just to get gifts
it’s really only small
in comparison to your gender reveal party which was quite large
and even though a lot of expecting moms like having “women only” baby showers
you realise that you really want hoseok to be there
he’s been as important in the process as you have and you wouldn’t want him to feel left out
so this baby shower is open to everybody
again it’s only small: attendees are hoseok, yoongi, namjoon, seokjin, flat 18, hoseok’s mom and sister, your sister and mom, taehyung and his gf and professor choi because she was so excited
that seems quite large but in comparison to the gender reveal party this is really quite small and humble
“i can’t believe it’s almost been 8 months already,” haseul says, already starting on the cupcakes
jimin has started baking things more frequently to keep himself busy during exam season
“mhm!!! not long now!!!”
thankfully hoseok’s mom and sister get on really well together with your family and professor choi is like boring yoongi to death talking about something art related
namjoon and seokjin are taking a look at the finished nursery because hoseok’s really proud of how it turned out
it’s time to open gifts uwu!!!
most of the gifts are for honey
thankfully everybody stuck to the cream theme and there’s a lot of cute cream things for honey to wear and use when he’s born
seunghee keeps buying monkey related things for honey meanwhile haseul is hung up on bees
namjoon buys a lot of bear things
you just hope that honey doesn’t grow up as a furry
jimin and jeongguk are the friends who buy those cringey weirdly inappropriate baby shirts that have quotes like, “daddy’s fastest swimmer!” or like onesies that say “my favourite food is titty!”
you sit there like what the FUCK is this
and jeongguk is like “it’s a shirt !!! honey will look so cute in it!!”
“hONEY IS NOT WEARING A SHIRT THAT SAYS THAT WHAT KIND OF MOM DO YOU THINK I AM??”
yoongi is weirdly fashionable with his baby clothes
like he has a thing for those teddy coats and he bought like eight in different colours
“honey might like red, you don’t know yet.”
namjoon and seokjin together :( give the cutest gift :(
“oK so most professors end up writing books and stuff-” side eye at hoseok - “and so i just thought that, well, honey is gonna wanna grow up reading and stuff so i made this book!!! well, we made this book. everyone helped somehow and jeongguk drew the pictures and it’s just a little something for honey to grow up with reading”
you wanna cry
hoseok wants to cry
haseul cries
it’s not even for her but she cries
“its JUST REALLY THOUGHTFUL OKAY?”
you think it ends there with everybody giving gifts
but oh no
no
hoseok has a gift??????????????
“this gift is for mommy” he says with a bright smile and out the corner of your eye yoongi is squirming with a smirk
...what does he know that you don’t….
your sister is also smiling……
where’s ashton kutcher…….
you unwrap this little box and open it and
wow
OOOOOOOOOF
you’re so still staring at this really gorgeously simple ring that you don’t even notice hoseok getting down on one knee
HASEUL IS REALLY CRYING RN
“with honey close on the way, i figured i ought to ask before things get crazy.”
omg you brave looking at him and hes got that look again
THE FOND LOOK
AND YOUR EYES START FILLING UP
“y/n l/n i love you and i wanna spend the rest of my life with you :’) will you marry me?”
there is not a dry eye amongst flat 18 right now
haseul actually has to go outside because omg she’s so happy for you
seunghee teared up a little bit and jimin cried but then started laughing
jeongguk is being so dramatic about it
he’s crying as if his pet dog just died
“i...cant believe….my girl is all grown up….i cant...breathe rn omg…..can someone get me a drink?”
35 weeks :o
finals are here
but since jeongguk and haseul are art (sort of) majors their finals were earlier than other subjects
and so you decide to brave life and visit flat 18 :’)
you see a bunch of people on the way there because apparently a lot of people live off campus and walk at the same time as you
like why is everybody here rn
at this point you get a few more stares because
omg is that y/n l/n she’s HUGE!!!!!
you’re genuinely past caring at this point
you’re huge and your pregnant and you’re confident
jeongguk and haseul are the only ones at flat 18 when you arrive
it feels weird being back but it’s nice because flat 18 was once your home
your room hasn’t really changed much and you discover that . sometimes taehyung stops round and crashes in YOUR ROOM???
and if it’s not taehyung then it can be any one of their friends they invite around
which you’re only slightly hurt about
“jesus CHRIST you’re massive!!!”
“thanks jeongguk that makes me feel soOoooO good about myself <3”
“NO, fuck,” and he pauses because there’s a No Swearing Policy around honey since it’s not apparent that since he can hear everything he can probably hear jeongguk swearing too. “i just meant that! wow honey got really big :D not long now!! five more weeks until due date!!!”
haseul plops down on the other side of you
“i can’t wait until he’s here,” she says. “little honey is already the size of a pineapple- which is really crazy to think about!!”
it’s nice to spend some time with your friends after like weeks of being with hoseok
and don’t get me wrong you LOVE hoseok with like every single cell inside your body
but it’s nice to have some You time
and You time has always involved flat 18 like they’re drugs and you’re the addict you genuinely can’t be away from them because it starts to hit you hard :-(
haseul is like halfway through telling you something when you Feel it
and it feels Disgusting
you freeze and look down at your stomach
and you watch as honey makes a grand appearance
honey sort of “rolls over” and for a moment everyone is like >:O as honey’s whole body is visible moving across your stomach and it’s literally like there’s an ALIEN inside of you
“OMG OMGOGG that was so beautiful!!! honey, do it again for me, we have to film this for your dada!!” haseul runs to get her phone
meanwhile guk is looking at your stomach like “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT”
“i dont know but it felt weird”
“IT LOOKED LIKE YOUR STOMACH WAS GONNA EXPLODE”
you bet that honey is like giggling inside
honey: 1 jeongguk: 0
39 weeks…
at 39 weeks, with the due date so close by, you start to feel like something is really wrong
you did some research and while contractions were normal, this pain doesn’t really feel like contractions?
“baby please talk to me, i need to know what hurts so i can call the hospital and let them know.”
hoseok has never ever had to take a call in lecture before but this time he had to
he is so frantic that he set the lecture to a task and really quietly answered the phone at the front of the class
nobody is stupid and they’re all aware that hoseok and yourself are having a baby and so they really don’t mind that their lecture is being paused by you crying on the phone
“i-i-i don’t know...my body hurts and i can feel h-honey moving but he feels stuck or something...hoseok s-something is wrong i think i need to go to the hospital right now”
hoseok goes into full blown panicked dad mode
seunghee is sitting at the front of the lecture like, “hose-i mean, professor jung, do you need me to go and get another professor?”
he doesn’t reply, obviously distressed, and so she ends up waking up yoongi from a nap saying that she thinks maybe you’re going into early labour???
yoongi lets the head of the department know that hoseok has go to like right now and he enters the lecture hall like, “hoseok you need to go and see if she’s okay, don’t worry, i’ll try and go through the rest of the slides, just go, everything is fine”
and so hoseok BOLTS out of the lecture hall
forgets to set homework
and runs across campus to the car-park whilst still on the phone
(yoongi lets the class go because he really doesn’t know SHIT about Behaviour and Physiology of Organisms)
when hoseok and yourself end up at the hospital you realise that it’s not labour like seunghee thinks but things are equally as worrying
honey is currently in the breech position
“most babies are supposed to have moved at around 36-37 weeks, so it is alarming that your baby is still in breech, miss l/n,” the nurse is particularly sympathetic as she lets you and hoseok know
you’re totally lost but hoseok is holding your hand so tight and is so so worried
it’s not really the end of the world that honey is feet first but it’s problematic and means that labour is gonna be a bit more difficult
“well what does this mean? is he okay?”
“your baby is fine, it’s his position that is concerning. it will be more difficult to birth the baby because of his position in the womb- what is more concerning is that we were aware of this at your last scan. last time we saw you, miss l/n, your baby was in the footling breech position. of course, it was possible that he might shift during the time away, but he is now in the flexed breech.”
“w-well….what does that mean? is he gonna be okay?”
“when you are in labour, we will have two options; we can either go through with a vaginal breech birth, or a caesarean birth, depending on how willing he is to come out.”
when hoseok squeezes your hand you just. cry a little bit
“i dont wanna hurt him omg i dont want to have a c section either wtf i thought i’d just have to push him out oh no”
hoseok is feeling awful :( because what is he supposed to do :(
“so what should we do?” he asks really timidly
the nurse frowns and cleans up her things, “i would only suggest going home and staying at home until due date. it really is not recommended that we induce labour naturally but you need to be very careful. your son is not willing to turn on his own or with our help, so we will see what the situation is like during your very early stages of labour and we can discuss what method we go through with. are we leaning more towards a vaginal birth, miss l/n?”
you’re all snotty and sniffly but you nod. “please :( i really don’t wanna be cut open i saw what bella had to go through and im not doing that”
hoseok scoffs “twilight is not a reliable pregnancy source, baby.”
“i do believe that bella had no real pregnancy equipment and that her vampire husband had to cut the baby out of her without any sort of painkillers. in a worse case scenario, you do have to go through with a caesarean birth, you will be safe and we will do our best to relieve the pain for you.”
well that’s reassuring
when you two get home after a long day of panicking you’re incredibly alarmed to find that flat 18, hoseok’s close friends and your sister are all at your house like ??????? what are YOU DOING HERE
it’s like the spiderman meme
“what am i doing here??? i LIVE HERE??? what are YOU DOING HERE????”
“seunghee and yoongi said you were in labour???”
“well im not!!??? why would you think i was in labour?”
seunghee gets really defensive “UM hoseok was like on the verge of a mental breakdown at the front of the classroom and so it made sense that you were in labour?? im sorry???? at least we’re all here???”
you end up having to explain to a whole bunch of people that you’re NOT about to birth a pumpkin sized baby yet
but it’s really hard telling them that honey is like the wrong way :(
surprisingly it’s jimin and the married kims who are most worried about it
jimin just thinks that this means honey is like in real bad danger and he’s like omg :( my son from another mum :( wtf is honey okay?
and the married kims are never going to go through birth like this and so they do feel really alarmed
after hoseok reassures them that everything is (hopefully) okay everyone is sitting there like
:) ok what now
“....shall we order chinese food?” guk suggests
and so you all end up piled in the living room in weird positions watching hell’s kitchen whilst eating chinese food because :) might as well :)
40 WEEKS
your due date is like 4 days away
and you’ve been lying awake with really bad contractions for like 2 hours
but you’re so indignant like you refuse to believe you could be going into labour
hoseok is awake too and omg he’s doing his best
like he just doesn’t know how to help besides hugging you
and he does hug you like so closely and his hands running up and down your side and he’s like humming in your ear to try and take your mind off it
“i feel like im gonna fucking SHIT myself wtf”
he cant help but laugh sometimes, “wanna try for the toilet, baby?”
and you’re like “yeah im not really in the mood for like POOPINg in our bed is that okay?”
he’s already up and getting ready to help you walk across the room
lately you’ve been really wobbly whilst walking and in a lot of pain so he does whatever he can to help
he’s at the bottom of the bed and you’ve just stood up
….
huh
“i think i just peed myself?”
“what? why?”
“i didnt mean to!!!”
and you glance down
and wow thats a lot of pee
OH
“OH MY FUCKING GOD MY WATER JUST BROKE”
and oh my god hoseok has NEVER MOVED SO FAST IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE
he rushes to get all his things and honestly your stuff has been in the living room for the past week just in case
all you need now is to spend at least fifteen minutes trying to decide which book to take because obviously you’re gonna have loooaaaads of time to read
“Y/N YOU DONT NEED THE BOOK COME ON HONEY IS COMING WE HAVE TO GOOOOO”
what makes hoseok more panicked is the fact that yOU’re panicked
“omg y/n please calm down i’m driving as fast as i can please please please omg”
“I CANT WHY IS HE COMING NOW HE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE YET”
hoseok crosses like 2 red lights and he’s freaking out double
“I JUST BROKE THE LAW”
“OKAY AND IM HAVING A FUCKING BABY SO KEEP DRIVING MISTER!!!”
you’re an angry birther
as he drives you decide to call jeongguk through the car because #technology
he answers like immediately
“hi babe whats up”
“JEONGGUK IM HAVING A BABY RIGHT NOW PLEASE COME TO THE HOSPITAL”
“what wha-WHAT OH MY FUCKING GOD HE’S COMING??”
“YES PLEASE TELL EVERYBODY- oh fuck hobi it hurtSSSS i wanna go home im not pushing him out yet-”
in the background guk has dropped his phone and is literally screaming around the house
in the back you can hear all of the flat screaming together because HONEY IS COMING
nobody is calm
when yoongi finds out he literally does not know what to do
when you hang up mid sentence he sits staring at the wall like “....omg”
quite literally everybody is a little stressed out when you’re at the hospital
your room is really nice and you’re like “oh wow hoseok you really spoiled me here, too bad i can’t enjoy it because im pushing out a WATERMELON”
obviously because honey is bum first instead of head first things are a little complicated
you’re actually really far in labour already like your mom said it took her like 5 hours to have your sister but turns out it’s been like 32 minutes exactly since your waters broke at home and the nurses seem to think you’re ready now
“NOW??? AS IN RIGHT NOW!!!”
“yep!! let’s bring your son into the world!!”
you discover by simply listening to the nurses that you’re going to be attempting an assisted breech vaginal birth and immediately you get panicked and flustered
you promised haseul and seunghee that they could be there during the birth :(
you had offered it to guk at first but he was like “i am nOT ready to see your vagina i’m sorry” and jimin said he wasn’t sure if he was up for seeing you in a lot of pain during the birth
and yoongi didn’t really want to be there for it because he’s a bit like both guk and jimin
hoseok didn’t mind at all that seunghee and haseul were asked to be there
in fact he was really encouraging of that fact
because both of them were there since the start
like
they watched u pee on those pregnancy tests
so you’re getting really anxious because what if honey comes before they’re here
“miss l/n i need you to breathe for me- please control your breathing! are miss l/n’s scheduled guests here?”
“...they’re in the lobby right now. they’re on their way, miss l/n. keep doing those breathing exercises- yes, there we go!”
hoseok is being nothing but supportive
he’s wiping down your head and holding your hand so tight
“you’re doing amazing, baby, you’re so so brave, i love you”
FINALLY haseul and seunghee bust through the doors
guk, jimin and yoongi are currently like milling around somewhere and your parents and hoseok’s parents have been told the news by guk and yoongi
you’re really fucking scared to have this baby
you did the stupid thing of googling what happens during a breech birth and it made you have a full blown panic attack after reading that honey could die during delivery
now that everything is ready for birth you’re really so scared that honey might not make it
before the midwives prop up your legs on the stirrups you take a good amount of gas an air
an epidural was suggested but hoseok knows that it’s not going to make that much of a difference for honey
and you just want to get him out of you quite honestly Nobody has time for an epidural like just get him out
hoseok feels AWFUL when you’re literally screaming in agony over honey
seunghee and haseul are being so encouraging but all hoseok can do is like stare with tears in his eyes because oh no WHAT HAS HE DONE
the midwives encourage you also with a hands off approach until honey’s bum and bottom half is out
their so vocal and warm like “you’re doing amazing, y/n, just keep pushing!! i can see his feet!!!”
and so you just go for it
you’re mentally praying you don’t like pass out from pushing too hard or worse, shit all over the bed because apparently THAT’S A THING
you’re too busy crying to notice that the midwives look really shocked when honey’s bottom half is out
hoseok gets curious and decides to make sure honey is okay
and he looks and is like “oh WHAT THE FUCK?”
only he doesn’t actually say that
actually he doesn’t say anything
“keep pushing, y/n, h-he’s almost out.”
why are they so hesitant
oh god it hurts so bad
you want to die
you don’t want to have a baby anymore
and then finally
RELEASE
you feel like you can’t breathe but oh my god
the sound of honey SCREAMING is like music to your ears because
HE’S OKAY
but why is everyone acting so WEIRD
you peer up over your legs and take a glance at honey like squirming in the midwives hands
and
oh
Oh WHAT THE FU-
“oh my god his penis fell off!!!!!!!”
honey is a GIRL???????????
HOW DID THIS EVEN HAPPEN???????
you don’t really care that it’s not a boy but like. YOU THOUGHT SHE WAS A BOY
regardless the midwives do their thing and hoseok is back next to you like :O
“you did so well i’m so proud of you i love you so much- you did it! you did it you’re okay honey is okay!”
“honey is a GIRL?”
haseul is torn between being sad and happy because she wanted it to be a girl she kNEW FROM THE START THAT HONEY WAS DESTINED TO BE A GIRL
it turns out that the sonographer was never 100% on it being a boy and all this time the “penis” was probably just a toe or something or a glitch
because honey is definitely a little girl
a precious beautiful little baby girl
hoseok’s baby girl
he totally cries
no
he WEEPS
there are no dry eyes in the birthing room rn
honey is so gorgeous
she definitely has hoseok’s features like she has his eyes and his nose and his ears :(
the midwives let mommy hold honey for a little while
“skin to skin is very important!!! she’s not a little boy like expected, but she’s a perfectly healthy baby!”
if she wasn’t covered in disgusting gloop you would have kissed her all over
but as a mother that instinct is there
you kiss her forehead and her hands and you’re looking up at hoseok like what the fuck we mADE THIS PRECIOUS LITTLE HUMAN
hoseok is crying as if he just had to endure twenty five minutes of agony and had his vagina ripped open
he’s just so happy right now
thats his kid
HIS
THATS HIS BABY GIRL
HIS TWO BABY GIRLS!!!!!
his emotions have been a big fat rollercoaster like it went from panic when your water broke to major panic when seunghee and haseul hadn’t arrived and then horror when you were like screaming in agony and then shock when he thought that honey’s penis has fallen off during BIRTH because NOBODY EXPECTED HONEY TO PULL THE BIGGEST PLOT TWIST OF THE YEAR
now he’s like over the moon he’s so so so so happy
the nurses help get the placenta out but honestly you’re just numbed like you barely register it shooting out
“okay daddy, wanna cut the cord?”
he’s like “no i really dont it looks like a big weird worm”
he still does it anyway
it’s a weirdly fulfilling experience
when it’s time to clean up little honey, you finally break the news to everyone outside
they’re in a mild state of utter confusion
guk is like “well what happened? did it like. grow inside? where did it go?”
and jimin’s like “oh. so it was just a toe or something”
guk is really a little bit disappointed because he wanted a boy so badly but !!! a baby girl !!! a niece!!!!!
(he figures honey will like dinosaurs and naruto all the same as what boy honey would have)
hoseok has made the bed his bed also
he’s snuggled next to you and you have honey on your chest and she’s sleeping so soundly :’)
“have you guys picked a name?”
guk is halfway through eating the fruit salad that haseul made before leaving to get here on time (“you were late because you were making A FRUIT BOWL?” “IM SORRY I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH MAKING IT AND I COULDN’T JUST LEAVE IT”)
you and hoseok hadn’t thought much about it to be honest
although you had talked about it a few weeks earlier
(“i like the name jiyun for a boy” hoseok had said one evening. the two of you had decided that honey should have a korean name like their daddy and you were a-okay with it!! for the sake of your family you were willing to give him or her an english name that you were still undecided on.
you tested out the name. “jiyun. jung jiyun. omg it sounds really cute! what does it mean!!”
“hmm it can mean many things usually, but its usually meaning happiness and posterity, soft sleekness.”
“oh, so it’s one of THOSE names where it has like three meanings.”
“yeah :D”
you laugh. “okay, and how about a girl?”
“how come I’M the one making the decisions???”
“i’m saying yes or no, i’m helping!!”
hoseok huffs and hugs you closer. “uhh, okay. well. me and yoongi had talked about this, and he agreed that yeojin is a cute name. jung yeojin. it means beautiful and precious.”
you...fall in love with that name
“ngl i kinda want honey to be a girl now.”
“omg just for the NAME??? thats cheap”)
you nod at guk sleepily
the room is actually sort of filled with people
because hoseok wrote a book and was on tv he’s Hashtag special
flat 18 are in the room rn because yoongi had to run to pick up namjoon and seokjin and your parents are still like. not ready or here
hoseok’s family couldn’t be here because they were vacationing in europe and their flight got cancelled
“jung yeojin!”
everyone is really satisfied with that name
“are you giving her an english name, too?” seunghee asks, sitting next to the bed with her finger tucked in yeojin’s grasp
you have this twinkle in your eye as you smile down at yeojin and then up at hoseok
“i think the name honey has quite a ring to it, don’t you think?”
hoseok can’t smile any wider holy fuck
“mhm. i couldn’t agree more.”
(seokjin and namjoon arrive later than expected, but seokjin cries as if he was there for the entire thing.)
this. took. so . long. to. upload. but. i . love /. it
+ for visuals and more info please visit here!!
296 notes · View notes