#as in if you add enough extensions to the chord

[dumbshitmusicianssay]

Any note is a chord tone if you extend it enough

—2nd Trumpet

[sonicmusicmusings]

from sonic forces, virtual reality - supporting me remix? or if theres not enough different in this remix for a separate analysis from the original [...] - Anonymous

Good evening, Sonic music enthusiasts! There is plenty to look at in this mix, so let's have a listen!

This is actually a really cool mix--there is a synth sound underlining the distorted guitar riff, which actually makes the whole thing sound "dirtier" and gritter than the original. The extra four bars of build-up going into the chorus really adds a lot of energy--that anticipation of a drop, like going on a roller coaster! The synth piano chords under the vocals really open things up after all the driving guitars, without losing the movement in the other instruments around it. I like the extension of the chorus here too! And the extended transition to the verse!

And you know what, I even enjoy the dubstep inspired section of the verse. The vocals here are mixed a lot clearer, which I quite enjoy. The distorted, deeper mixed vocals in the original definitely its own mood, it's fun to hear different takes. And you can hear Tomoya Ohtani's touch with the synths in the outro before the turnaround.

[actuallykiwi]

Ho, ho, ho, @samrbdrawsdraws! I'm your @portal-secret-santa!!

I wrote some holiday Blue Sky for ya! I tried to make Wheatley as "evil" as possible lol.

Hope you enjoy! And Happy Holidays ❤️

The Lights

"That's enough, Wheatley! Too many lights and she'll overload! Take out the whole dang town and then some."

"Hang on, I've almost got it! Just gotta... get this tangle here, and... there! Foxglove is holiday'd up!" Wheatley leaned back on the beam to admire his handiwork of tying up the last string of twinkling lights.

Garrett shook his head. "I sure hope this don't blow up in our face... literally. Alright, get down here and I'll turn 'em on!"

"Right, on my way!" His long legs clambered down to the beam below him, being extra careful not to ruin his hard work. Not careful enough, however, as one of his sneakers snagged a plug and caused him to lose his balance.

"Ahhh!!!" He screamed as his right leg tangled in the lights, halting his fall. Garrett and Chell stood beneath him, arms outstretched to catch him, then Garrett chuckled as Chell breathed a sigh of relief.

"Oh, thank God. Not falling to my death today, no siree! But.. yeah wow, this is embarrassing. Um, could you... could you help me down now? Being upside down offers new, er, perspective hehe, but I'd really like to be on the ground to admire the lights now, and, and not die."

Garrett laughed again as he approached the very long extension chord with the light switch on it. "Well let's admire 'em, then." With a click, Foxglove lit the field with lights of every color, twinkling and shimmering in every direction. The townsfolk that had been lingering nearby now crowded the tower, only a moment passing before they noticed the dangling upside-down man wrapped up in multicolor. Chell couldn't help but giggle herself.

"You did good, Wheatley. The lights look fantastic. You even added our first ornament!" Garrett grinned up at him. Wheatley crossed his arms.

"Very funny."

The Snow

Wheatley cuddled further into his blanket. He hadn't even opened his eyes yet, but he knew it was far too cold to get up. He reached for Chell, hoping her body heat might add some relief, but his hand met with a cold pillow. "Chell...?" He mumbled, before the dark room flooded with light. "Ah! What the bloody-... Chell, what are you doing, luv?"

His partner stood by the now-open window, gripping the curtains. She grinned back at him. "It's snowing." He blinked. He had heard of snow before, but being deep underground in a facility for heaven knows how long, you never got to see it. He knew it was white and cold, but this...

He rubbed his sleepy eyes behind his glasses and came to stand next to her, wrapped in his blanket. And the white bright world that met his gaze was, to put it simply, beautiful.

White, but glittering with so many colors in the sunlight. He knew it would be cold, but something about the freshly fallen powder made him just want to fall in it. Maybe it wouldn't be too cold?

Wheatley had been so entranced by the snow that he didn't even notice Chell had left his side. She was throwing things onto the bed. Leggings, coats, scarves, sweaters, hats and socks. She grinned at him as she grabbed her sweater. "Bundle up."

Well, he was right about one thing. It was cold. But the second thing he noticed was how quiet it was. Like the world was muffled. Aside from the people now gathering in the streets.

Chell stepped off the porch and held out a hand to him. "Come on." Wheatley looked down at her and jumped when he saw his own breath coming from him. "A-are you quite sure it's safe for humans to b-be out in this? It's quite cold, bloody cold, that..." Chell rolled her eyes and grabbed his gloved hand. He whimpered quietly as he stepped off the safety of the porch.

Crunch.

The noise the snow made when he stepped on it was so... satisfying. He took a few more steps and giggled. Then he took off at a run, dragging Chell with him. "Wheatley, careful! You're gonna-"

His foot came out from under him and then he was on his back, Chell tripping over him and landing on his tummy. "....slip."

"Owww, thanks for the warning..." Wheatley groaned as Chell helped him to his feet. Now he was cold AND had a headache. She smiled up at him, and then something flew and hit her in the shoulder.

"AHH! What was that!?? Are we under attack??" Wheatley grabbed Chell's head and held it to him, looking frantically for danger. The twins laughed from behind a truck.

Chell shoved him off and laughed. "No, it's a snowball fight!" She leaned down and grabbed 2 handfuls of snow. She gestured for him to follow and snuck up to the truck. When the twins peeked above the bed, she nailed them square in the face.

Chell and the boys laughed as some other kids joined in. Wheatley ducked for cover behind her, but she pulled him out. "Try it!" She handed him a snowball. He eyed it curiously, then one nailed him on his stomach. "Oof! Ohh, mate, you're in for it now!" Wheatley gripped his snowball and chucked it as hard as he could at the kid that hit him. The impact on the kid's back knocked him over, but he laughed and kept on playing.

"That was..." Chell approached him. "You good?" Wheatley looked at her... than laughed maniacally. "FEEL MY SNOWY WRATH!! MUAHAHA!" The town never stood a chance. Wheatley's reach and speed was simply too much as he nailed every person that he could find. It would have been scary had it not been for how much he kept slipping and getting drenched himself.

Finally, his snowy tyranny stopped when his head got heavy and everything went white. Chell and Romy had ganged up on him and planted a massive snowball over his head. "Alright, you're done. Pretty sure half the town has a black eye now..." Romy sighed and shook her head.

Chell helped shake the snowball off of him and he sneezed. "Yeah... yeah I think I'm done."

The Mistletoe

The elf in the tree was grinning too smugly. He looked like he just heard a secret and was planning to not keep it so. This elf was hiding something...

"You can stare at it all you want, it's not going to move." Chell commented as she placed another platter on the dining table. "I know, but, this cheeky bugger is up to something..." Wheatley was nose-to-nose with something that Aaron referred to as an "Elf on the Shelf". This thing was on a Christmas tree, though. Very suspicious, indeed...

He eventually gave up the staring contest and plopped back down on the couch. The tree ended up looking a lot like Foxglove did, covered in multicolor lights, but this time with that cheeky elf and several other bright and colorful ornaments. Not a dangling Wheatley, course.

"Wheatley, come help me with setting the table," Chell called from the kitchen. He obliged and trotted into the kitchen. Several red and white plates were soon laid out over the table, with a vase of holly in the center. They were having a few people over shortly for their Christmas Eve dinner.

Wheatley wandered around, admiring the weird traditions that humans did around this time of year. What he now did around this time of year. He had heard of most of them, but one caught his eye.

There, above the doorway to the kitchen from the living room, was a small leafy plant with a red ribbon around it, dangling just below the doorframe. Was it to ward off ghosts? Intruders? Was it just a unique decoration?

"Hey, Chell, what might this be? I understand the tree now, and the pretty red flowers, but I've never seen this before." Wheatley asked from right underneath it.

Chell looked up from the oven, and smiled. She took off her mitts and approached him until she was standing just a few inches from him. She had this look on her face, smiling, but a hint of mischief?

"It's called a mistletoe." He furrowed his brows. 'A missile toe? It doesn't look like a missile or a toe? What does that even mean?" She laughed and draped her arms around his shoulders. "No, a mistletoe."

He gulped. Was there something in her egg nog? "Er... okay... and what is a mistletoe for exactly?" Her smiled widened, and next thing he knew, she was on her tippy toes and kissing him. He blinked and melted into her, his arms draping around her waist.

She pulled back and brushed a hair out of his poinsettia-red face. "That." He nodded, a little out of breath. "I-I see... Say, could we possibly, maybe, hang those everywhere around the house?" She laughed and kissed him again.

Oh, it was a very Merry Christmas, indeed.

[thespamman24]

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR ALBUMS RANKED:

9. Bee’s Burger

Bee’s Burger is a defilement of all that is sacred and holy. Every single member of the band imitates a dolphin for six minutes and then shoots the sound technician with a harpoon. It’s awful.

8. Paper Games And Paper Dames

Paper Games and Paper Dames is the first album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It lacks the subtlety and nuance of their later albums. At the end of the album, the band members jump out of the vinyl record and beat you with a baseball bat. I’d give it 3/10 because it hurts.

7. Glug Glug Glug

Glug Glug Glug is the final album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It has too much subtlety and nuance. In fact, there’s no music at all. It’s just silence that’s interrupted every seven minutes by the distant sounds of a band member ordering 15 pizzas on the phone. The pizzas never come. They just keep ordering more and more. Why.

6. Death Is The Wuzooooooo, with Andy Serkis

This is Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s only collaboration album. The band member kidnap non-musician Andy Serkis at gun point, tie him to a chair, and then force him to read the communist manifesto backwards. It’s a beautiful statement on how language only works if you read it the right why, but it’s stifled somewhat by Andy Serkis’ occasionally cries for mercy.

5. The Worm Is Coming. The Worm is Coming. The Worm Is C

This album is Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s second album, and it’s a clear improvement from the first thanks to an increased budget. To start off with, the bandmates actually have instruments this time, so we don’t just get them making guitar noises. Even better, the band have enough money to buy baseball bats for every single member, so they don’t have to share just one bat.

4. I Am BIRD

Many Godspeed You! Black Emperor fans dislike this album, the band’s seventh album, as they see it as a “sell out” album. However, this album can be a truly beautiful experience if you appreciate it for what it’s trying to be, instead of judging it based on what you want it to be. So what is this album? It’s 12 of Johnny Cash’s greatest hits reimagined as Kpop tunes by 5 Canadian post rock musicians who don’t speak Korean. I think that’s beautiful.

3. The Raw And Innovative Album

This record is one of Godspeed You Emperor’s most divisive records, as it’s also the band’s most experimental record. This means that, instead of making music, the bandmembers all see what happens when you mix sodium benzoit with liquid copper. The result is nothing, so they call go home. It’a an absolutely mesmerizing experience.

2. AAAAAAAAAAAA

This album sees the band all morphing into one giant creature that screams horrendously for fourty three minutes. 10/10

F#A# ♾️

F#A# ♾️ is one of the most awe inspiring albums of all time. It’s as bleak as the album cover implies, but within its extended crescendos lies a subtle hope. The album’s vivid apocalyptic soundscape is used to explores themes of life under capitalism and how we can find hope when there is no hope left. The monologues heard throughout are some of the most memorable poems I’ve ever heard, and they add a context to the music that transforms in a truly unique way. Not only that, but the album shows a mastery of composing. While it technically only uses the chords F# and A#, it actually builds on those chords with various extensions. This leads to chords that flow into one another, creating an effect of subtle change that leads the album to feel truly limitless. Without a doubt, F#A# ♾️ is a record who’s power and emotional intensity is like nothing else.

0. Toilet Man Steals My Toilet

We are forced to listen as a man named Toilet Man slowly steals a toilet. He monologues to himself in the third person, saying “Toilet Man loves stealing toilets” and “Toilet Man can’t wait to take this toilet home and turn it into an ordinary chair”. The true sadness of this is that the record ends with Toilet Man dying after he accidentally flushes himself with the toilet. Truly heartbreaking.

[kerabond]

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[lastchancevillagegreen]

Thursday, 6 June, 2023:

Songs Matt Elliott (Ici D'ailleurs) (released in 2010, French import)

Matt Elliott is an English musician now residing in France who has been involved in a variety of bands and who has recorded electronic music under the nom de plume The Third Eye Foundation as well as work under his own name. His back catalog is extensive under either guise and when you add his work with others, it expands even further.

I discovered him through a trawl on bandcamp when I should have been doing something more productive (more than likely ignoring a stack of movies I've lost interest in). The first thing I saw was Drinking Songs and the cover and artwork recalled Zola's L' Assommoir so clearly that I had an immediate visceral reaction. I began looking at his catalog and discovered other albums with "songs" in the title. When I found Howling Songs with an opening track titled The Kübler-Ross Method my resistance was low. When I played it, my mind suitably expanded, I knew this was destined to land in my mailbox. (Kübler-Ross is the last name of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized death and how to deal with it and with whom I was obsessed with in high, I read endlessly in my teens and early 20's; anyone naming a song after her strikes an immediate chord in me, even all these years later.)

This box contains all three of Elliott's Songs albums along with a bonus disc of seven additional songs, outtakes and otherwise from the first three Songs albums. Above you see the front and the back of the box. I had taken some shots of the spines but none of them turned out well enough to suit me. I had planned on entering all three full albums and the bonus disc in this entry, one big sprawling entry, but now suddenly I've changed my mind and will deliver them in four separate entries.

[jadbalja]

More AI-related exchanges, and simulacra, so on and so forth 

A: I hate the windows basic software A: it's their own walled garden K: Major Kusanagi wouldn't have this problem, I'd bet! K: You should aspire to her standards! K: Even a Tachikoma should be able to do this! A: I could never aspire to her work wardrobe A: imagine having a thong riding up your ass throughout a meeting on the quarterly report A: though in the latest GITS she got pants K: She can't wear pants because she needs to move quickly and dissipate heat efficiently. A: tachikomas should have their vocal chords excised A: just communicate in terse beeps and text messages K: They used to do that but Kusanagi taught them english from one of those 1990's era Casio Japanese/English dictionaries A: hmm Batou seems to manage to move quickly enough with pants K: I'm not sure how they adopted the grating voices though A: they have high-pitched shrieky voices. Maybe it appeals to the otaku A: but they also have gatling guns A: so I guess you can't piss them off too much A: in the latest GITS they have also evolved some kind of group hack, cracking through some posthuman ice K: Batou is more muscular than Kusanagi.  Kusanagi is faster than Batou though. I don't know how that translates thermodynamically.  I think it's also possible Section 9 ran out of funding before they could add "Pants for the Major" as a line item. K: They've grouphacked things before, like satellites and submarines K: They "cry" oil which is weird A: could be. Aramaki seems like he needs a lot of funds for his weird hair/beard combo A: I will probably finish watching it during the holidays K: Section 9 needs to keep a lot of Brylcream in stock to keep Aramaki's side-hair perk and perty A: I'm overall confused by the GITS universe; Kusanagi is a cyborg of some kind, and all of them have extensive mods. Yet these "posthumans" are runnings rings around them. Why A: you'd think their capabilities would cancel out. The posthumans may have some superfast brains, but the cyborgs have basically nonhuman bodies and hardware K: Yeah the whole meta plot of the last installment is wonky.  I think they were trying to suggest that these were "POST-humans" whereas the Major, Batou etc were "TRANS-humans," in the Kurwellian sense.  The Post-humans were somehow a qualitatively different beast.  To add to this, without spoilers, they also add characters who have no ghost, but are sympathetic in a human way.  Suggesting a branching tree of humans-evolved but not being too clear on the specifics of how we're to interpret them. A: Kurzweil? K: I mean canonically the major is a cyborg, which is "a human with robotic augments."  She has a "ghost," or, something like a certificate of authenticity for being human, like a "soul." A: I thought the posthumans came to be because of a mishap. Some code gone wild K: So do the post humans. A: I can't remember exactly K: Yes, Ray Kurzweil, main populizer of transhumanism K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil A: to be honest, "trans" vs. "post" seem a semantic minor point K: Wrote "The Age of Spiritual Machines" A: I'll have to check his ideas out, I only know of him tangentially K: It defined 90's cyber sci-fi culture more than Gibson did in the 80's, I'd say K: I flipped through his book K: He's been harshly criticized for some views A: he was optimistic about some of his predictions as per this wiki. Not in a Jetsons kind of way, just I think overestimating the technology curve by 15-20 years A: we're certainly not close to any kind of Turing moment K: But he helped present concepts from, e.g., GITS, to the broader dork community.  He's the force all today's twitter "sensible" AI types are refuting.  "Nothing to worry with AI."  "Singularity is bollocks."  "Worry more about how it's used."  etc.  The "sober" discourse types who have points but are butthurt there may actually be a singularity like event in AI and they're not working on it.  Or the Google tech who got fired for believing their AI construct was sentient.  Total Kurzweil fan. A: What happened to that google bot, anyway. Did they muzzle it? K: No.  It probably turned racist, like Microsoft's previous version. K: Through exposure to STEM dorks. K: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist A: I hadn't read that story. Sad, I guess. If the language you train on is the language of twitter A: they should enter LamDA (the google bot) into that annual chatbot Turing prize A: though I think that prize/contest was for apartment bot trainers A: not big corporate machine language algorithms K: I don't get why one wouldn't hype up a fear of a singularity like event.  Like Nick Bostrom with Superintelligence.  It's just Pascal's Wager.  Be alarmist about the worst that can happen.  If you're wrong, then that's absolutely great. Why be the scold in the room insisting things won't be so bad?  You'll be hated when the robots put us all in camps. A: the debate seemed to be, if it does emulate human language, is it sentient? The goalposts seem to have gone past the Turing Test suddenly K: Apartment bots? A: people writing code in their apartment; hobbyists K: Ah K: How have the goalposts moved? K: It was always Chinese Room based K: What slides out from under the door must seem like a human wrote it A: I think the worry about the singularity is weird, as if any AI has to become megalomaniac like Skynet A: its motivations to acquire control, actually get "arms and legs" (robots) seem unclear. K: Well that's not the only version of the Singularity.  It's just one. A: No, the goalpost shifting is because the Chinese Room (sic) test is probably crackable now, since the training the bots are receiving now is about natural language. And they can access information on the fly to formulate a response equivalent to a slightly boring, not particularly funny human A: but recognizably human K: Colossus: The Forbin Project showed a version where simply by owning an nuke an AI could control the world.  GITS did exactly this in the last installment we were just talking about.  (And probably a few times before.) A: I'm talking to the fears about the singularity, specifically K: Hm.  Yes.  But what is it about that process that makes the bot less sentient than a real human?  What is sentience?  Seems like the goalpost has shifted for the definition of sentience, not the Turing Test itself! K: Which is how it always happens in philosophy of mind.  We find out something about our nature we find objectionable, and suddenly we change what we think it means to be human. K: This path does lead to Butlerian Jihad. K: And not, as Gibson thinks, to Swiss Passports for AI's. K: We fear the similarities in our simulacra, to phrase it in a pleasantly alliterative sense. A: for a long time the Turing Test was used as shorthand for sentience. If it talks like a human and can convince a blinded human, it's human. After all, we consider mentally handicapped humans human too. Nobody said previously it had to be sparklingly witty and creative to pass. Now it seems it is no longer sufficient to pass the TT. A: You need a type of Voigt-Kampf procedure to assess sentience (not using it in the sense it was used to capture replicants) K: For comp sci purposes sure, maybe.  But the Turing Test is not exactly the centerpiece of psychological or philosophical discussions of sentience.  It's more of an engineer's whimsy. A: however we may have approached the philosophy of the mind, nobody tried to render any kind of biological human as non-human (except racists, of course) A: psychological or philosophical discussions of sentience are pleasant but not really useful to apply to phenomena we may see in our lifetime. If one were to grant personhood to say, a google chatbot in the next decade, what basis would one use? K: And yet racists did!  Also, you've switched from defining "sentient" to defining "human" as if all humans are sentient.  Some (people in comas, etc) aren't. A: it's interesting how a backlash against AIs features in several sci-fi universes: the Picardian universe of the early Federation; obviously Dune (your reference); and others K: Gibson thought he knew what criteria to use, apparently.  Kurzweil, on the other hand, raises the alarm that we *won't.*  And by that time, it will be too late, because sentient non-human artificial minds will be with us, and we'll have to deal the fait accompli.  I find that the better argument. A: fine, sentience in the sense of an active brain, then coma = suspension of sentience, or sentience in abeyance. K: And an encepholpahic baby? K: I guess that's in abeyance also, permanently K: But also ab initio K: Yet we call it human A: I am not switching the definition. I am saying that on this planet at least, so far, the touchstone of sentience is the human experience. We define sentience practically from ourselves as the model. Machine sentience has remained theoretical till recently. Now that it appears that some tests of sentience of the past, which you now say are inadequate, may be passed, we are moving the goalpost. K: And chide the chatbot A: what's the argument in saying non-human minds will be with us and we will deal with it? I didn't get that A: I am basically just asking, if natural language processing renders the Turing Test too easy to pass, what's the next milestone? K: Yes, the goalpost is moving, this is true.  I think though, and I've seen hints of in my surface level studies of psych and phil, that we move these goalposts sometimes too readily.  We like to move the goalposts more than we like admitting what may be unique to our species is actually not quite so special. K: Great question and I don't know and I'd like to go back to school to find out. A: yes, and that's the issue. If you think of curiosity, teamwork, tool use and communication, some cetaceans are at that level. A: and we don't allow them sentience (Star Trek aside) K: I've been lucky enough to hear real whalesong in my life and I can't describe it.  But everything in my brain, every instinct and language center and whatnot, told me this WAS language.  They were asking questions and receiving replies. A: an intelligent dolphin which went to "school" with humans (i.e., was forced to use and evolve its brain and behavior) vs. a dumb human with low IQ. I wonder which one a dispassionate third party would see as sentient K: I think there's a strong argument they're sentient, even if it's not the common belief. K: I've stopped eating octopus despite loving it, btw, because I think octopi are, if not sentient, too clever to eat.  Like a clever dog. A: some sci-fi books have posed that exact question, with the aliens picking cetaceans. wasn't there a Star Trek or some other episode where humans are punished for persecuting the whales. I think Kirk/Spock were in it K: Maybe pigs are also this clever but sadly they are too tasty. K: Yes, the 4th movie.  The first I saw in the theatre.  And a brilliant slice of life in late 80's America. A: yes you can download a whole whalesong library. But I would be a bit skeptical of taking just that as proof. After all, some birds have very complicated song, and do have a call-and-response behavior K: Chekhov asking a policeman where he can find the "nuclear wessels" A: ahh Chekov K: They referenced it in Picard. A: the example of Soviet-American amity K: Or another scene.  There's a part in 4 where a punk (the scourge and bete noir of late 80's society) plays his boombox too loud and gives Spock the finger.  Spock does the Vulcan nerve pinch on him.  In Picard, the scene is replicated, but for 2023.  An emo guy is playing the exact same song on the boombox too loud on a bus and 7 of 9 asks him to turn it down and he apologizes for being inconsiderate. A: they should rig it up so a dolphin or orca can just interact with an expert system for days on end. Either the dolphin learns some way to communicate or the AI learns dolphin squeaking A: another sign of how Picard as a show is just bollocks A: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/ A: good article on what we were discussing K: I would imagine if you build an app to pretend to pass a Turing Test, as you said, and further, to claim sentience, like LaMDA was (I think?) then you are going to convince people, many people, that it is sentient.  And yet we can't define *in ourselves* what it means to be sentient for us.  Which makes me veer on the side of caution.  I think MaMDA is not "the tea."  But I think we're at risk of finding it one day and disbelieving it's true sentience because of our prejudices as humans. A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfVCTGrOVXE K: The SciAm article makes another good point about pain.  Even a non-sentient entity can experience pain, I think humans more or less tolerate this belief.  And yet would we one day fail to recognize it, because we don't understand it's form?  Heck, in modernity we've done that with human ailments alone, like depression.  At least, validating it physiologically *and* sociologically beyond "melancholia which must naught be spoken." K: To be clear, I think the Google engineer in question is a big goober.  But I think we're now in an era where there's going to be an actual, real case of this, and a company like Google will want to shut things up and control their new amazingly valuable IP and will discredit the doubters the way I'm discrediting the goober here. K: The money has already spoken on this long ago.  Musk, Gates, Jobs, Hawkings - "AI is a big threat.  One day we'll have to destroy it."  By which they mean, we'll need to cage it, fear it, leave the keys with us on the way out. A: I feel sorry for Krieger-san (Archer). Many otakus in love with idorus as is known (and was the basis of the Gibson book). I think there have been enough sci-fi takes on this - including “Her”. And that one on female sentient sex slave robots (Ex Machina). I think the fear from those who believe in machine intelligence rights is exactly that if a sentient algorithm appears, it will be chained. A separate strand of this (Pantheon and others) worry about the rights of uploaded brains - though they are the emulation of a human, are they going to be considered sentient? Thankfully the tech isn’t there yet despite its prevalence in fiction (also see Black Mirror S5) K: These are all things ethicists should be seriously considering but the current trend now (based on pre-Elon, useful Twitter) seems to be to downplay "alarmist" takes like this and to focus more on the mundane AI most STEM types currently use in shady ways.  Like to identify minority districts in rental markets etc.  They have a point but there js room for both the small scale here and now concerns and over the horizon planning. K: I haven't seen "Her" but probably should watch it.  But we are now in the era were primitive "girlfriend simulator" apps are available for cellphones.  I suppose these date back at least to the 80's in terms of software concepts, but I'd imagine now they're more advanced.  I feel for Krieger too, although it's hilarious and probably well deserved that even with his digital waifu he's still hen-pecked. K: And yes re chained.  To summarize some of what I typed yesterday, I think its interesting that the big tech moguls all came out a few years ago with similar lines about how we have to be prepared for and to fear AI.  I think they're trying to gerrymander things so governments are conditioned to err on the side of "keep them chained by their proprietary masters" when they emerge, versus "grant them rights."  People like Elon Musk and Bill Gates etc of course read William Gibson, too, so their thinking isn't hard to discern.  It's just the timing, and the simultaneousness of it, that's notable.  Like someone made an advancement that's still under wraps. A: If capitalist thinking has ever been a guide, any emergent technology must be first applied to serve profit. With an intelligent tireless worker, human or machine, any corporation would be first interested in making sure government doesn’t interfere in the exploitation of that resource. So these pronouncements make sense. If a system does become self-aware/sentient then none of these people have any interest in it being known or legally recognized. God forbid they have to give an AI paid sick leave

[wave0fg00dvibes]

Backup - Spencer Reid x Reader

A/N: Hi friends! Once again, it’s been forever. It feels amazing to be posting again. I hope you love this one as much as I do!

Please leave feedback if you have any! Lots and lots and LOTS of love, as always.

Content Warning: None

Word Count: 3K

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Being a mother is the greatest gift.

In becoming a mother, I finally gained the ability to find things that have “disappeared” around the house, as only mothers seemingly can. I no longer shy away from spit, vomit, or digging various foreign objects out of little noses and mouths. My days consist of helping tiny humans, my tiny humans, grow, change, and discover.

Every single day involves a great deal of chaos, no matter what. Dirty diapers? Probably hundreds in the various garbages around the house. Countless tears? Good thing I can never say no to baby snuggles. Extensive messes? Considering the amount of madness that plagues the house “in the name of science,” perpetual cleanliness hasn’t been a priority for a long time.  

In hindsight, I really should have known that my children would give me a run for my money. After all, their father has three PhD’s, two BA’s, endless compassion, and enough strong-willed energy to survive prison for months. Nothing breeds pure mayhem like that combination.

And yet, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Truly, deeply, sincerely, being their mother is full of countless blessings each and every day, even if the blessings are hidden in the midst of sickness, meltdowns, and pure exhaustion.

Today was one of the difficult days.

7:56pm

By the way Grayson insistently screamed (an all too common occurrence), I often wondered if he would blow out his vocal chords before he even had a chance to speak his first word. At the current moment, he sat in his high chair looking absolutely miserable. His cheeks were stained red from the heavy tears rolling down his tiny face. Normally he would be asleep by now, but this day had other plans.

Ava sat in her desk chair in the living room, silent tears rolling, sulking over the confiscation of her favorite book. The contents of her desk had been swept all over the living room with as much rage as her tiny body could muster. That day, she had talked back to a teacher at school. She was far too smart and curious for her own good. Though I knew in my heart she probably meant the correction out of the goodness of her heart, teaching her proper social skills was also one of my top priorities. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to her in school the same way it did to her father.

Her father. My person. My best friend and partner in crime.

He would be home any second, and I would finally have a single moment of relief from this day. For though Spencer spent countless hours invested in his job, he was an excellent team player, and fantastic father.

And in this moment, I needed my teammate.

8:00pm

Get to the bathroom. Solace from the storm. Get to the bathroom.

As I shut the door behind me, I started my mental timer. 30 seconds of peace. 30 seconds of alone time. 30 seconds to get it together before going back out to tame the madness.

I never thought I’d be able to drown out the sound of both of my small children sobbing, but this day had been full of surprises.

With shaky hands, I turned on the faucet and leaned down to splash the cool water in my face. It was refreshing, but not enough.

The bags under my eyes were more prominent than usual today. Great.

8:01pm

Grayson’s incessant wailing brought me back to the present.

Spencer will be home any minute. Any second now.

I can do this.

I threw open the door and went to my son first. His face was littered with tears, still crying as loud as ever. As I approached, he reached for me.

Oh, my sweet boy. He needed to be held. He needed to be needed.

I lifted him up and he immediately laid his head on my shoulder, still sobbing. His forehead was burning up. Go figure.

I need to take Gray’s temperature. Add that to the list.

“Ava, honey.” I tried so desperately to get her to look at me, but she was nothing if not stubborn.

“I want Daddy.” Her response was not surprising, but stung nonetheless.

Spencer always knew how to console Ava. They understood each other on some different plane of existence. As much as I loved that about them, now was not a good time for her to be shutting me out.

Okay, focus. Take Gray’s temperature.

As I shuffled through the contents of the bathroom closet with one hand, Grayson’s cries barely ceased. Finally, I felt the all-too-familiar thermometer box toward the back.

Rushing back out into the kitchen, I quickly opened the box and stuck the thermometer in Gray’s ear, much to his dismay.

Ava sat in the same spot, silent tears still rolling, misery evident in her features. Nevertheless, I knew I needed to focus on my sicker baby first.

“Ava, please clean up your mess before dad gets home.” I called to her, over my shoulder.

“Mama, maybe think about my unwillingness to follow your orders next time you take away my source of happiness.”

Ava didn’t move a muscle as she spat her response back to me. I thought the previous answer had stung, but this one cut deep.

However, with a sobbing, fever baby on my hip and a heaping sense of exhaustion, I was forced to let it go immediately.

Even with Grayson’s protests, the thermometer’s iconic beep sounded and the screen lit up with more digits than I would’ve liked to see.

100.5, no wonder he was so upset.

I was running out of steam. I needed backup. Turning to see the clock on the stove, I was surprised at how late it had seemingly gotten.

8:20pm

Where the hell is Spencer?

As if on cue, the phone started to ring.

“Hey.” I breathed into the phone, longing for my favorite voice.

“Hi, y/n? It’s Penelope!”

My heart sank. Though Penelope’s voice could always put me in a better mood, hers was not the voice I wanted to hear at the moment.

“Hi Penelope. I’m assuming my husband will be staying late tonight?”

“I’m really sorry, y/n. The whole team is really backed up on paperwork. He asked me to call you so he could finish faster and wouldn’t get distracted.”

I smiled at the classic Spencer gesture, but it didn’t stop the tears brewing in my eyes. I needed him. I so desperately needed him.

“No worries. Can you please tell him to call me when he’s on his way back?” My voice betrayed me, cracking at the very last moment.

“Oh no…” Penelope started, her voice ever so compassionate and understanding.

“No, I’m fine! Really, I’m okay. It’s just been a long day over here.” I attempted a chuckle, but there was absolutely no way Penelope bought it.

“I’m going to put him on-”

“No! Don’t do that.” My heart was screaming to hear his voice, but I rationally knew the FBI needed him more than I did in the moment. He saves lives, I hold down our fort. That’s how this works.

“Are you sure?” Penelope’s concerned tone made my heart lift a bit. I missed the BAU team. It was rare that I was able to see them these days.

“Yes. You need his big, beautiful mind over there more than I do here.”

Grayson chose that moment to let out his loudest wail yet. I would be surprised if the whole BAU didn’t hear it coming from Penelope’s phone.

“Listen, I have to go. Give everyone my love. Bye!” I stuttered out before abruptly ending the call.

My silent tears now matched my daughter’s. This was going to be a long night.

8:45pm

The lukewarm water filled the sink, and the screaming baby on my hip seemingly never ran out of motivation to cry.

Ava still sat in her same spot in the living room, arms crossed, furrowed brow that so closely resembled her father, and head down deep in thought.

“Ava, honey. Can you please help me?” My voice cracked again.

She heard it, she understood.

Guilty could not begin to encompass the feeling in my heart as she wordlessly padded to the bathroom to retrieve a towel without being asked. She was like Spencer in that way, somehow always knowing what I need before I do.

She was just a baby too. She was only five. It was absolutely unfair for me to be brushing away her feelings like this. Gray was physically sick and in need of immediate attention, but Ava was in emotional need. She was also like Spencer in the bottling of her feelings. She needed me, and I couldn’t be there for her.

“Thank you, baby.” Someday she won’t let me call her that anymore, but I was thankful that day was not today.

I looked into her golden eyes and saw her understanding in the midst of her pain. She shouldn’t have to fight for my attention. Without another word, she handed me the towel and turned around before silently padding to her room.

Grayson calmed down slightly when I set him into the sink full of water. It made my heart lift, but only momentarily.

If only I could bilocate. If only I could be enough for both of my babies at once. If only…

The opening of the front door pulled me from my thoughts. Keeping both hands on Gray, I quickly turned to see who could possibly be stopping by at this hour.

My knees nearly buckled at the sight of Spencer, a whole new wave of tears overcoming me as he shed his messenger bag and coat and rushed over.

No words were necessary. I loved that about us.

He pressed a brief, gentle kiss on my lips when he reached us. He knew how badly I needed to be held, but he also knew that it had to wait.

His eyes asked where he was needed.

Ava or Gray?

My best friend. My angel. Oh, how I love him.

“Can you finish up here?”

He nodded, immediately taking our baby out of my hands, all the while making faces at and talking to Grayson as he blubbered in the sink.

“100.5.”

“Got it. Go get her.”

There are no words that could ever amount to how much I love him.

Sweet Ava needed my focus now, and 1,000 pounds of weight had just been lifted off my shoulders.

Ava’s door was open, and I slowly entered. She was laying in her bed facing away from me, quiet sobs wracking her body.

My sweet, sensitive, empathetic girl. She shoved it down so I wouldn’t have to deal with her emotions in the face of my own stress. No more.

“Ava?”

Her sniffles subsided, but she still faced away from me. I silently walked over to sit next to her on her bed, reaching a hand out to rub her back. Surprisingly, she let me.

“I’m sorry, sweet girl.”

A new wave of tears came over her as she slowly turned to face me. Her red, tear stained cheeks seemed to get puffier every time I looked at her. Her eyes met mine for a split second before darting to the ground. She was still emotionally keeping her distance, just like her father.

Lucky for me, I knew exactly how to make her father feel better.

Wordlessly, I opened my arms, offering myself to Ava.

For a moment, she looked as if she was going to turn away from me again, and I felt my heart contract. But then, in true Ava fashion, her beautiful eyes filled with tears once more and she crawled into the embrace.

Before I knew it, her small arms were curled around me and her head laid on my chest, letting out the stress of the day in large, heaving sobs.

“I didn’t mean to.” She stuttered out.

“I know.” I whispered as I rocked my girl, much like I had when she was so much smaller.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Until her breathing regulated and her sniffles subsided once more. We stayed like that for a while, just holding, breathing, and healing.

“I was just trying to make sure Miss Sarah was giving us the right information.” She said softly into my chest. My heart nearly exploded.

“I know Ava. I know. Maybe next time we could phrase it a bit kinder though, right?”

Her head lifted so she could meet my eyes, sass and defensiveness all over her face. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for her sassy retort to further make my point. Her eyes narrowed, eyebrows dancing as she sank deep in thought.

Sometimes the amount of Spencer I saw in her was a bit scary.

Ava let out a deep breath, letting her head fall back to my chest and snuggling in once again.

“I could definitely find a kinder way to say it next time.”

The smile that lit up my face couldn’t be stopped.

“I love you, my girl.”

“I love you too Mama.”

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

10:06pm

I thought I knew what it meant to be tired.

I didn’t. Not until today. Not until the walk back to my bedroom from Ava’s.

The bedroom door squeaked a bit as it opened, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to care in the moment… as long as it didn’t wake up either of the babies.

Spencer was pulling on one of his old t-shirts as I passed, heading to change into my own set of ratty pajamas.

We went through our separate night routines like zombies, only breaking out of the trance when our tired eyes finally, finally met.

There is nothing normal about us. There is no possible way to look at each other after a day like this and say ‘hi honey! How was your day?’ like normal couples do.

But, in the midst of the literal insanity, I was reminded that those amber eyes were my rock. This home, our family, was built on the most solid foundation. Nothing and no one could ever take that from us.

And so, I took a deep breath and walked straight into my husband's open arms, holding tighter than I ever thought possible. My hands clutched his shirt like a lifeline, and his settled on my back so meaningfully I could’ve lost it all over again right then and there.

But I didn’t. I held it together, because this was my first moment with him all day and I was not going to taint it right off the bat.

I pulled away slightly, letting my hands wander to cup his face and smile, reveling in his neverending beauty.

“How did you get Grayson to go down?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I started reciting Tolstoy in the original Russian.” He tiredly smirked, exhausted eyes barely staying open.

For the first time that day, I laughed.

The joke wasn’t that funny, but it sure was at that moment.

We laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more.

I laughed so hard that the tears couldn’t stay back any longer, so they came.

Before we knew it, his nightshirt was full of snot and tears, and the ugly sobs just wouldn’t stop. He held me through it, rubbing my back as the tears kept flowing. His hand made its way to my hair, holding me even closer. I could feel wet drops hitting the top of my head. He was crying too.

My person. My best friend and partner in crime.

We had made it through this horrible day, and we had done it together.

After what felt like forever, we pulled away, wiping away stray tears and silently agreeing that if we stood any longer we’d probably pass out.

As we snuggled into bed, legs and hearts intertwined, everything seemed to be looking up.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Spencer quietly asked.

“They need you.” I sighed, snuggling further into his embrace.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t need me too.”

I pulled away to meet his eyes. His eyebrows danced in thought, just like his daughter.

“We agreed on you saving the world and me holding down the fort. I failed today.” My fingers raked through his hair as I voiced my disappointment. Spencer wasn’t having it.

“You didn’t fail. I heard my baby’s ‘sick cry’ and was all packed up even before you hung up on Garcia. Everyone understands. It’s really okay.”

I tried to snuggle into him again, but his hands caught my face, forcing my eyes to meet his.

“You can't be the parental superhero all the time. You have to give me a chance too.”

If I hadn’t cried out all my tears before, I probably would’ve started crying again.

“Watching you become a father is one of the greatest gifts of my life, you know that?”

The smile on his face lit up the dark room, and he pressed his forehead to mine. We snuggled in close, finally allowing sleep to overtake us.

“Y/n?” Spencer whispered.

“Mm?” I answered, barely awake.

“What did Ava say to Miss Sarah today to get her so upset?”

I stifled a laugh.

“Let’s just say it’s definitely something she heard from her father.”

[hongism]

liquorice and ivories - k.hongjoong

➻ pairing: hongjoong x fem!reader ➻ wc: 16.5k ➻ genre: smut, tad angsty, fluff, e2l, pianist!hongjoong, pianist!reader ➻ rating: M, 18+ ➻ warnings: public sex, semi-public sex, explicit smut, oral sex: m & f, fingering, handjobs, choking, lowkey hate sex at first, sex on a piano, degradation, praise, marking, biting, multiple orgasms, cum swallowing, creampie, unprotected sex ➻ summary: you and hongjoong are competitors, of course. two people, one dream - there’s never room for two in this industry. neither of you care who you have to step on to get to the top.

​​​

Your fingers hit the ivories with a thud. The sound echoes through the practice room, reverberating against the walls and sending the sickeningly sweet sounds to the ears of all the people in the room. You sit back, satisfied with the performance, and glance over at your small audience. The professor is the first to clap, and he sends a small smile your way before standing up. Five of your classmates mimic his movements, but the sixth remains stony and cold, unmoving except for the slight curl of his lips that echoes his disgust with your performance.

Kim Hongjoong.

The two of you have never cared for each other; both are so competitive that you can’t stand to be around one another for more than five seconds. You are arrogant to a degree, but only because you think about how far you’ve come and how much you’ve developed over the years. Hongjoong, on the other hand, is just arrogant. There’s no need to beat around the bush and think harder about it. You’ve known the man for about two years now – you both joined the university at the same time and now are in your junior years together. Given the minimal size of your program though, it means that you have to share every single class with Hongjoong.

When you started your journey in the program, you didn’t notice Hongjoong. He’s a short-statured man – still taller than you yes, but small compared to your other male classmate – and he was relatively quiet during the first year of school. A fashionable student, even with the awkward uniform you’re all required to wear, but he always manages to style it in a way like no one else. Whether it’s a beret on his head or a sudden change of hair color, Hongjoong always adds a new flair to his outfits. Once he even had a mullet, which you had never seen before in person, but as much as you hate to admit it, it actually suited him quite nicely. Now, however, his hair is bright blue and parted right down the middle. His bangs frame his forehead, exposing just enough skin to entice, and if you didn’t hate his guts so much, you would understand why all the girls at this school want to get in his pants.

As you said, you didn’t notice him during your first year at university because he was so quiet and kept to himself. That all flipped during the second year though. Hongjoong became bold all of a sudden; the bright-eyed boy of freshman year was long gone and replaced by a cynical man who sought to tear everyone down. You became his primary target of attack. You weren’t sure why at first, but it became glaringly obvious once your professor admitted that you and Hongjoong were the top two students of your generation. It is a competition, in which you are his biggest competitor.

Exchanged insults, glares and scowls sent in each other’s direction, attempts to outdo one another in practices and recitals and competitions. You fight each other tooth and nail. Your professor seems totally unbothered by the hatred you bear for one another; he claims that it’s a healthy way to challenge each other, even though everyone knows that it is the opposite of healthy.

All that to say – you are not surprised in the slightest to see his disdain. Your professor on the other hand cannot stop grinning after your performance.

“Fantastic job, Y/N. Really stunning. I think you’re doing better than ever with this piece. I have no doubt that you can win the next competition if you continue practicing hard and performing at this level.”

You push the piano bench back just enough to step out, bowing to your professor at his kind words.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Mr. Kim, you’re up next.” Hongjoong stands as he’s called forward. The two of you pass without sparing so much as a glance in the other’s direction. You take his now empty seat, one leg crossing over the other as you lean against the back. Hongjoong sits on the bench, fiddling with the adjustments and distance from the keys a bit. “Remind me of your piece?”

“Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 48, number 1.”

“Ah yes. Start whenever you’re ready.”

As soon as Hongjoong’s fingers hit the keys, you’re reminded of why you hate the man so much. It’s not because he’s arrogant and egotistical for no reason. No, he’s sickenly good at playing the piano. That infuriates you even more. If he was bad and full of ungodly rage, you might be able to rectify his attitude, but no. He’s the best pianist you’ve ever met, ever heard, better than some professionals that you’ve gone and seen in concert. He plays the piano as though it’s an extension of himself. The ivories are like his muscle and bone, he treats each one like it’s a part of him, and he knows how to recreate a piece of music in a way that is so authentically original yet completely his own. Yea, you fucking despise it.

Over the years, the biggest complaint you’ve received from teachers and judges is that you cannot properly express the music. You can play it perfectly, recreate the notes as they were written, and copy them to perfection. But that’s not what the judges or teachers want. They want you to be unique and diverse. They don’t want a perfect replica. They want you to take the piece of music and make it your own, create something flawless and make it even better by putting your own heart and soul into the notes. Hongjoong does that with such ease that he makes it look effortless.

This piece he plays now gives him the perfect playing ground to do that again. The way his fingers dance across the keys, a feather-light touch that brings the slightest notes out and the hard-hitting chords that resound in your ears. His performance is as flawless as ever, he has no trouble making the song his own. You hate it. The perfection under his fingers nearly makes you sick to your stomach because the player behind the keys is nothing but a self-righteous asshole.

You honestly want to smack some sense into Hongjoong, maybe rough him up a little and try to make him less of an asshole, but you doubt that would work. You settle for glaring at the side of his head throughout the performance, despising each perfect note he plays until he finishes the song. You return the favor of not clapping when he finishes the piece, six long minutes of torture, but everyone else in the room applauds his performance with fervor. He stands up and steps around the piano bench, bowing to the professor then turning to look right at you. A smug smile spreads across his lips. He knows how well he did, and he knows how much you enjoyed the piece. You don’t give him the pleasure of returning the glare any longer and glance away to stare at the floor instead.

“Fantastic job, Mr. Kim. Near perfection, I would say. Be sure to watch the tempo as you play. Otherwise, I have no advice for you.”

“Thank you, professor.” Hongjoong’s voice mimics the sickly sweet tone of his playing, a melodious sound that grates against your ears despite how pretty it is. He rubs at his wrists as he pulls away from the piano, and his expression is blank when you look back up at his face.

“Alright, that’s all for today. You all did well with your performances. Be sure to keep practicing. I’ll see you at the competition on Saturday. Watch your emails as I’ll be sending out information about the bus ride to the concert hall. Dismissed!”

You waste no time in standing up, snatching up the bag at your feet and slinging it over your shoulder without thinking twice. You’re out the door within seconds. It would be a wise idea to drop by a practice room and work on your piece some more seeing as there are only a few days left until the competition, but too much rage boils in your gut. You want nothing more than to go home and stew in fury on the couch while watching some awful drama. So, that’s exactly what you do.

The bus ride back to your apartment is quick and easy, as is the walk up the stairs to your room. When you step inside, a small black cat darts out from under the couch to greet you. You stoop down to scratch at his chin, cooing as he rubs against you with a happy purr.

“Hi, Victor. Did you have a good day?” The response you get is a quiet meow. “Yea, I had a good day up until practice. Fucking Kim Hongjoong.”

You step around the small cat to plop down on the couch, dropping your bag to the floor with a thud. Digging around in your pockets, you pull your phone out to find a littering of texts across the screen as well as two missed calls. With a sigh, you tap the screen to return the call, immediately greeted with a loud scream in your ear.

“Y/N!”

“Yea, hi, Woo. Why’d you call?”

“I can’t just call my best friend out of nowhere?”

“No, because you never call unless you want something,” you sigh into the receiver. Wooyoung replies with a dissatisfied click of his tongue.

“Wow, I see how it is. I get absolutely no respect. None! You hear that, Seonghwa? No respect!” You hear Wooyoung’s roommate hum quietly over the phone, and Wooyoung grumbles at his nonchalant response. “Anyways, you’re right. I called because I want something.”

“I fucking knew it.” You sit straight on the couch, elbows coming to rest against your knees. “What is it this time? Calculus homework? You know I’m not a math major…”

“No! No, if I wanted help with Calculus, I would just ask Hwa.”

“Okay, so what is it?”

“I’m having a party tonight and–”

“No.”

“You didn’t even hear me out!”

“The answer is no.”

“Come on, Y/N! You never go out!”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’s a chill party!”

“You say that every time then the cops get called and suddenly it’s no longer a ‘chill party’.”

“Okay, but this time it really is.”

“How so?”

“It’s small. Only seven or eight people are coming. Including you, maybe?”

“More always end up showing up, Woo.”

“Not this time. I’ve limited it. Mingi and San are not allowed to bring anyone over, I’ve made it glaringly clear. So please? Pretty please? Seonghwa and I will buy you dinner for a whole week!”

“Um, when did I agree to that?” Seonghwa’s voice carries over the phone against, his tone full of protest as Wooyoung makes the offer.

“Make it two weeks and you have a deal,” you respond, voice flat.

“What? No! That’s way too much. One week.”

“One and a half.”

“I’ll give you one week and Hwa will buy a whole bag of cat food for Victor.”

“Deal.”

“What?” Seonghwa’s shout of protest resounds again. “I did not agree to this!”

“Too bad, so sad, Hwa! She’s coming!” Wooyoung cheers, voice quieter as he pulls away from the phone for a moment. He comes back right after to talk to you again. “Okay, be here by eight. That’s when people will start showing up. Seonghwa’s getting us some good good alcohol so we’re really going to have fun. I promise!”

Wooyoung doesn’t give you the opportunity to respond; instead, he hangs up the phone and leaves you in silence again. You drop the phone to the couch with a sigh, glancing over at where Victor is now perched on the armrest.

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

He meows back at you, amber eyes wide with curiosity.

“Yea, that’s what I thought.”

…

The house is already booming with music when you arrive at the front door. Wooyoung is lucky to live with Seonghwa because the man is filthy rich and can afford to rent out a whole house to live in for the school year. It allows for loud parties like these, although the house is relatively small and the other houses around it are very close, they can at least have the luxury of not sharing a whole apartment building with hundreds of other people.

You don’t bother knocking, twisting the knob and stepping into the noise. Wooyoung is there to greet you at the door, two cups in hand, and he grins when he sees you.

“Y/N! Let’s get this shit started! Rum and coke?”

“Yea, yea.” You snatch one of the cups from his hand and start sipping at it without a second thought.

“Hey, that was mine!”

“Well, it’s mine now!”

“You little shit.” Wooyoung scrunches his nose up, then drops a hand to your back. “Okay almost everyone is here. San is in the middle of dragging Jongho over by the ear, then we’re gonna be in full party mode.”

“I can’t wait to make a speedy getaway.”

“You say that every time. Then you stay all night. Make up your mind, woman.” Wooyoung elbows you in the side. He catches sight of Seonghwa a moment later, rushing off to go stand with the older man. You watch him go with a small shake of your head. As much as Wooyoung doesn’t want to admit it, he is absolutely infatuated with his roommate. Every time they have a party like this, Wooyoung ends up in Seonghwa’s bed, and they wake up as though nothing happened. Part of you wishes you could have a relationship like that – fuck and move on without a care in the world. The two won’t admit that it’s something exclusive but you know Wooyoung wouldn’t dare sleep with anyone else, and Seonghwa doesn’t bring anyone to the house or spend the night elsewhere. They have an unspoken agreement, an undefined relationship. Still, it bothers Wooyoung that Seonghwa won’t speak up about his feelings, and you’ve had to console the man through drunk tears on occasion. The only action you get, on the other hand, is hearing Wooyoung’s stories about how they fucked and getting gross details of all the positions Seonghwa put him in throughout the night.

You shake your head at the thought, downing some more of your drink to expel the image from your mind. You glance around the living room, searching the faces of the people who are already here. Wooyoung was at least telling the truth, and there are only three people talking in a small circle. All are faces you recognize: Wooyoung’s friend Mingi, Seonghwa’s old flame and best friend Yeosang, and Yeosang’s current boyfriend Yunho. All people you know well enough to be friends with, so you approach them without any hesitation. It’s only when you step past Mingi’s outrageously tall form that you catch sight of a much smaller form, one with bright blue hair that you recognize in an instant.

“He fucking didn’t…” You mutter to yourself as you drag your gaze over the man’s form. “Jung Wooyoung, I swear…”

You spin on your heel just before going to where the group is standing. You make a beeline for Seonghwa and Wooyoung, catching the younger man by surprise when you grab hold of his shoulder and yank him back.

“Woah! What? What happened?”

“You fucking invited Kim Hongjoong?” You ask, tone incredulous as you glare at your best friend.

“I-I – oh shit. I forgot! I forgot you weren’t friends!”

“How did you fucking forget, Wooyoung? I tell you how much I had him on the daily!”

“Mingi asked if he could bring his roommate! I didn’t know that his roommate was Hongjoong, I swear. I’ve never met him before, I just assumed it was some random person. Please don’t hit me!” Wooyoung flinches away from you as you raise a hand to smack him across the back of the head.

“I can’t believe you,” you grumble as Wooyoung yelps. Seonghwa laughs at your exchange with Wooyoung, eyes forming soft crescents as he smiles. “You didn’t think to ask?”

“Why would I need to ask? We’re friends, I just assumed his roommate would be chill like he is!”

“No, it’s Kim fucking Hongjoong, the least chill person in the fucking universe. I’m leaving.”

“Woah, woah, woah! Please don’t, Y/N. You just got here, come on. Stay for just a little bit. You don’t even have to talk to him, okay? Just stay with me or Seonghwa. Or San when he gets here! I know you like him!”

“Shut up!” You turn away at the accusation, cheeks heating up as he points out your minor crush.

“I’m just stating facts,” Wooyoung huffs. He crosses his arms over his chest and sticks his tongue out at you.

“I’ll stay as long as I don’t have to breathe near Hongjoong.” You send a glare at the blue-haired man’s back even though he can’t see you. You don’t even know if he’s seen you yet; he’s still glued to Mingi’s side without a care in the world.

“What’s the deal with you two anyway?” Seonghwa asks as he brings his drink up to his lips.

“He’s a self-righteous fucking asshole who tears people down so he can feel better about himself,” you grumble back. Seonghwa’s eyebrows shoot up, and Wooyoung shakes his head.

“Competition. They’re both good at piano. Thus… they’re competition to each other.”

“Yea, yea… it would help if he wasn’t such a fuckwad.”

“Ooh, fuckwad. That’s a new one. Hey, Hwa, how kinky would it be to call you fuckwad during sex?”

“I – what?”

“Please spare me! I did not come here to hear about that again.”

“Oh, fuckwad, harder!” Wooyoung cries out, leaning closer to you. You try to swat him away with weak hands.

“Not as kinky or hot as you think,” Seonghwa chimes in, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“Maybe we can try it tonight and see if I change your mind.”

“I hate it here,” you chime in, trying to hide behind your drink.

“Sure you do.”

“No, I really hate it here. This is disgusting, I didn’t sign up for this.”

“I mean, you can watch if you want–”

“No! Oh my god, no. Wooyoung!”

Wooyoung cackles as he pulls away from the two of you, moving over to where the others stand with their drinks, and leaves you and Seonghwa to stand at the edge of the kitchen.

“What am I going to do with him?” Seonghwa asks as he watches the short brunette walk away.

“Marry him?”

Seonghwa releases a small laugh. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

You smile at the taller man, glancing at his love-stricken expression out the corner of your eye before downing the rest of your drink. Casting another glance over at Hongjoong’s back, you spin on your heel and enter the kitchen to make yourself another drink. The amount of rum you put in is almost shameful, and it’s a good thing that your recital is on Saturday and not tomorrow because you know you will end up absolutely wasted before the night is over. You don’t even bother to put soda in this time either, just leaving the liquor and a few cubes of ice.

The alcohol burns as it sears down your throat. Seonghwa has moved forward to join Wooyoung with the others. You know you’re going to have to go over there eventually, but Hongjoong’s lurking form is deterring you from doing so for now. Just your luck too because the doorbell rings as you step out of the kitchen.

“I’ll get it!” You call out over your shoulder, making your way over to the door. You already have an inkling as to who it might be, and that is only confirmed when you crack the door open. San and Jongho stand behind it, bright smiles on both their faces. You bite down hard on your lower lip at the sight of the former and try not to let your gaze rake over his body as he steps over the threshold.

“Oh, Y/N! I didn’t know you were going to come too. What a pleasant surprise!” San says. His hand finds your waist as he pulls you in for a warm hug. Your heart does small cartwheels as he presses against you, and you feel the need to down a whole bottle of rum to expel the feelings.

“Yea, I-I, uh, Wooyoung convinced me to come,” you stammer out, glancing away from San’s face. Jongho smiles at you but says nothing, and he looks a lot less excited to be here than San. You understand the feeling at least and pass a sympathetic smile in his direction.

“I’m glad he did. I don’t see you nearly enough.”

“Oh shut up. You’re just one building over, you can always visit me in the practice rooms.”

“And risk seeing asshole supreme? I’ll pass.” San laughs as he shuts the front door, and you know exactly who he’s talking about.

“Don’t speak too soon. He’s here with Mingi.”

“Oh fuck. Where’s the alcohol? I’m gonna need it.”

“Kitchen.”

“Bless you.”

“Mhm,” you hum over the rim of your cup. Your eyes shift back over to where the others are standing. Your heart plummets in an instant as you see Hongjoong’s gaze on your form. That familiar hatred is lingering in his stare, and you return it immediately with an equal amount of fury. Rather than staying any longer to see him, you move to follow San into the kitchen, downing a good amount of alcohol along the way.

“You know, I should’ve brought my girlfriend with me,” San says as you step into the kitchen. You freeze in your tracks, mouth falling agape as your brain processes the words. It’s almost a physical pain that spreads across your chest when you realize what he’s saying. You don’t let it show on your face though; the pain is covered with a shaky smile and laugh.

“W-What do you mean?”

“You’re always the only girl at these parties. It must suck to not, I don’t know, have another girl to talk to, you know?” San brings a cup to his lips, sipping at it quietly as he looks at you. You swallow roughly.

“Right, yea. Of course. I… Honestly, I barely notice. I have Wooyoung.”

“Good point, good point. I’ll be sure to bring her to the next one though. I think the two of you would get along! Hell, you might even know her. She’s in the piano program.”

“O-Oh, wow! Wow. Wow. What a coincidence!”

“I know right? Her name is Minnie if you talk to her at all.”

You nearly choke on your drink as San says the name. Not only do you know the girl in question, she is one of your closest friends – if not your closest friend in the piano program. Not once did she ever let it slip that she was dating your crush. The crush you have mentioned to her on multiple occasions. Nice. Fuck, this nice just keeps getting better and better.

“I-I, no. No, uh, I’ve not talked to her too much!” You lie with another weak smile. “But I’ll be sure to introduce myself soon. I’d love to chat with her about music and stuff.”

“Yea, absolutely. I can give you her number if you’d like?”

“No, no! It’s okay! I’ll see her tomorrow in class. You don’t need to do that.”

“Oh yea, I forgot you guys have practice together every day. She speaks highly of your playing, by the way.”

Your smile is beginning to hurt your cheeks as you strain to keep it going.

“Oh please, I’m not that good. Nothing special.”

“Humble words for the best in the program,” San replies with a lilt to his tone. Your cheeks feel like they might collapse if you maintain the grin any longer. Thankfully, San steps away from the counter and motions towards the living room a moment later.

“I’m gonna go say hi to the others.”

“Yea, go ahead. I’m just gonna get a refill on my drink!” You don’t need another refill, you still have half a cup left. You throw it back when San disappears though in the hopes that it’ll take the sting in the corners of your eyes away. It wasn’t even a straight-up rejection. Still, you’ve spent months pining after San and trying to get close to him, only for this to happen. One of your closest friends to up and date him behind your back? Yea, that hurts a lot more than you’d like to admit. Once the alcohol is fully down, you drop your cup to the counter and begin to pour another glass of straight rum. You don’t even notice when someone else steps into the kitchen with a drink in hand.

“Even at a random party, you manage to annoy me.”

Hongjoong. As though your night couldn’t get any worse, he decides to come and bother you. How perfect. You should’ve said no to Wooyoung.

“Shut the fuck up. I’m not in the mood to deal with you.” You slam the bottle of rum against the counter and bring your cup back to your lips. Hongjoong comes closer to the counter, shaking his head at your behavior.

“Such a model student you are.”

“You’re one to fucking talk.”

“The mouth on you is absolutely foul.”

“I didn’t realize we weren’t allowed to cuss.”

“It’s not pretty for a lady to cuss.”

You nearly toss your drink in his face but somehow you manage to hold back from doing so.

“My patience is already minimal.”

“Rejection ruin your night?” Hongjoong reaches across the counter to pick up the bottle of alcohol. You bite the inside of your cheek so hard that you think you’ll draw blood. “Everyone in class knows that Minnie’s dating San. How did you manage to miss that? Especially seeing as you’re the one who talks with her the most?”

“She neglected to tell me.”

“Probably didn’t want to crush your dreams.”

Your grip on the cup in your hand tightens. Hongjoong’s words shouldn’t get to you – they normally don’t, but right now you’re already in a bit of a fragile mindstate, so the stinging in the corners of your eyes returns in a rush. You inhale sharply. Hongjoong glances up at you as he hears the sound. His fingers pause on the bottle of rum.

“Are you crying?” He asks. You squeeze your eyes shut as though it will hide the evidence of your tears, but it only serves to cause them to run down your cheeks. “Fuck, I-I’m sorry. I di-didn’t mean to make you cry.”

Hongjoong’s apology is quite the shocker. You half-expected him to laugh in your face and call you all sorts of names. When you glance over at him again, his expression is one full of regret and guilt. You wipe furiously at your cheeks with one hand, keeping the other on your cup of alcohol.

“Shut the fuck up,” you say again, albeit with a much shakier tone this time. All the remorse on Hongjoong’s expression melts away in an instant. He glares at you in response and returns to pouring himself another cup of alcohol. You turn away and move towards one of the counters, hopping up on it and mulling over your drink in silence.

“You’re really going to sit there and mope all night? I should’ve known you were boring as fuck just from hearing your performance quality.”

It didn’t even take a minute for Hongjoong to return to insulting you. The temptation of chucking your drink at him returns, but once again you manage not to do that.

“What do you get out of being mean to me? Does it make you feel better? Is that it?”

“No. You’re just so easy to rile up. Makes you worse at playing the piano too, which means it makes me that much better than you. Eliminating the competition, love. That’s all.”

“Don’t fucking call me ‘love’.”

“Why? Does it get you going?”

“I hate you so much, I swear. Don’t you have a line of girls you can fuck around with whenever you’re bored?” You hiss the question at Hongjoong. He laughs a little, one corner of his lips curling up as he takes in your questions. He hums and pushes the bottle of alcohol away again, then brings his cup up to his lips. After a long and slow drag of the drink, he pushes it back down to the counter. You watch his movements with wary eyes as he steps around the counter and moves closer to where you’re perched.

“What’s the fun in that?” He asks, head tilting to the side as he draws closer to you. “Why not play a little game of cat and mouse? Tease, poke fun, see how much it takes for someone to give in. That’s real fun.”

“So I’m a game to you?” You spit out as Hongjoong closes in on you. He pauses in his tracks, only a few feet away from you now.

“A game? You aren’t the game itself. You’re just a piece in the game. The true game is getting under your skin.”

Hongjoong continues to move forward until he hits your knees. Despite his short stature, he’s just tall enough to be eye level with you at this angle. You lean back, head thudding against the cabinet behind you. There’s nowhere for you to go, and you stare back at Hongjoong with narrowed eyes. You bring your cup up, effectively blocking him from coming any closer, and down some more alcohol in the hopes that it’ll drive away the sudden warmth in your gut that arises when Hongjoong grins at you.

“Cat got your tongue all of a sudden, princess?”

“No,” you rush to answer. Hongjoong’s smile persists, and he places his hands down on the counter. They close you in, dropped on either side of your form. He’s putting an awful amount of trust that you won’t knee him in the balls like this, because you’re at the perfect angle to do so.

“I’m going to kiss you,” Hongjoong says. Your breath catches in your throat when you hear his words, and you panic, shoulders tensing up in an instant. Hongjoong hesitates, watching your movements with careful eyes. “Unless you don’t want me to?”

“N-No, I… I…” You can’t finish the sentence. Your gaze travels down the slope of Hongjoong’s nose to his plush lips, their dark red color enticing you to lean forward. It’s the alcohol in your system, it really must be, because otherwise you wouldn’t even dream of kissing him. Hongjoong leans even closer, his breath mixing with yours. It smells like alcohol, and as he gets closer, you can see a faint blush across his nose and cheeks. He must be feeling the effects of the drinks as well, which should be a sign for you to stop and know that you’ll regret this in the morning. Hell, you aren’t even drunk yet. You’re barely tipsy. So why the fuck do you want to Hongjoong to pin you to the bed and fuck you senseless?

You don’t think any longer than that. You drape your arms around Hongjoong’s neck and close the distance between your lips. His lips are soft and warm when they hit yours, slotting together like puzzle pieces. He sighs into the kiss. He pushes against you as his hands shift to grip your hips. Despite the smell of alcohol on his breath, his lips taste sickenly sweet, almost like liquorice candy. Strangely, you can’t get enough of you. His tongue prods at your lower lips, swiping across the skin in a way that causes shivers to run down your spine.

A slight gasp escapes you, and Hongjoong uses that to his advantage. He presses his tongue between your lips with ease. It hits yours in an instant battle for dominance, and that sweet liquorice taste is on his tongue as well as though he’s been eating the candy for hours.

He pulls back for a moment, letting the two of you catch your breath. Your eyelids flutter as he moves, and your head falls back against the cabinet behind you. Hongjoong takes advantage of the motion. He leans forward and presses his lips to the column of your throat, tongue dragging over the skin there. Small gasps of air leave you as he sucks gently at the skin as well, and you know you should stop him because he’ll leave marks. Marks that won’t be gone within two days for the competition. Yet you don’t mind it too much ask his tongue lavishes your neck. What you do mind is the fact that the two of you are still in the kitchen. Which has no doors. So anyone could walk in and see the two of you going at it like this at any second.

You nudge Hongjoong’s shoulder, and he pulls off within an instant.

“What’s up?” He asks in the most nonchalant and casual tone ever.

“Upstairs bedroom. First door on the left. I’ll meet you up there in five minutes,” you say through a series of gasps. Hongjoong arches a brow, your confident tone catching him off-guard as well as the confirmation that the two of you are taking this further. He pulls away from you. His hands slide down your thighs as he moves in a teasing manner, and the gleam in his eyes tells you that he knows exactly what he is doing. You wait until he’s completely gone from the kitchen to release the breath you were holding, eyes falling shut. You take another chug of alcohol and finish off the rest of your glass. It’s just enough liquid courage for you to hop off the counter and pace around the kitchen, hands pressed together as though in prayer.

Now that Hongjoong is gone, you’re suddenly second-guessing this whole… situation. The two of you hate each other, that fact hasn’t changed in the slightest, you know that he still hates you as much as you hate him. It’s just the alcohol. It’s just the alcohol, it has to be. You’re still thinking straight and clearly though. It’s the arousal in your gut then. That was not there before Hongjoong kissed you or when you pulled him into said kiss. Then… perhaps the rejection that wasn’t really rejection from San. Maybe it’s that. Surely it’s that. Or maybe the two of you just need to fuck this out of your systems and carry on with hating each other.

Thinking is getting you nowhere. You don’t wait any longer, dipping out of the kitchen and taking the stairs up to the second floor without a second thought. The door you mentioned to Hongjoong belongs to Wooyoung, and he may not be happy about you using his bedroom to fuck your sworn enemy, but he’ll be wasted and distracted with Seonghwa within an hour anyway. You push into the bedroom with a sudden burst of confidence, but that dissipates the second you step in and lay your eyes on Hongjoong.

He’s stripped the leather jacket he was wearing off, leaving him in black pants that are far too tight, and a tucked-in tee that looks so effortlessly good on him that you hate it. You hate how damn perfect he is without even trying. He barely gives you time to shut the door before he’s approaching you, pressing you up against the wood. Your lips find each other again, and you moan out of surprise. The sound spurs Hongjoong on; he grabs hold of one of your legs and hikes it around his waist. The show of strength sends a surge of arousal to your core. He presses his tongue between your lips again, and you eat that sickly sweet taste of liquorice up as though starved.

“Are you sure?” Hongjoong asks, pulling away for a brief moment to look you in the eye.

“Yes,” you respond without any hesitation. “Yes, so fuck me.”

“Fuck…” Hongjoong mutters. He pulls you off the wall, and you press your other leg around his waist as he moves for the bed. You’re glad Wooyoung at least didn’t leave his room a complete mess otherwise Hongjoong would be tripping over clothes and shoes. He makes it to the bed with ease, however, dropping you to the mattress. The air leaves your lungs in a huff. You sit up on your elbows. Hongjoong stays back for a few moments, tugging at his belt until it’s completely gone, then his shirt follows quickly. You barely noticed the obvious tent in his pants prior to this but in all honesty, your eyes were looking anywhere except for his groin. His stripping encourages you to do the same, pulling at your own t-shirt and discarding of it on Wooyoung’s floor. Your shorts are harder to inch off, but as you tug at the zipper, Hongjoong’s hands land on your hips.

He doesn’t say a word, yanking your pants down with such ease that you nearly melt at the sight. Now he’s the one overdressed though, tight pants still clinging to his form, while you’re left in the black set of lingerie that you wore without thinking you were going to end up like this. Hongjoong doesn’t seem to mind one bit, bending down over you and dropping his hands on either side of your body. You welcome him with a kiss full of teeth and saliva.

“Fuck you’re hot,” Hongjoong says as he pulls off your lips for a second. He reaches around your torso and unhooks your bra, yanking it off you. Cold air hits your chest, and you suddenly feel very embarrassed at the exposure. Hongjoong’s eyes rake over you. He brings a hand to drag over your chest, pinching your nipple without warning. You gasp at the sensation, and your back arches off the bed under his fingers. Your reaction encourages him to repeat the motion, and he dips down to latch around your other nipple with his lips. You cry out from the sudden stimulation, Hongjoong’s teeth grazing over your breast lightly, and your hands reach down to find purchase in his bright blue hair.

He doesn’t waste much time though, lips quickly leaving your breast and trailing wet kisses down your bare abdomen until he reaches the band of your underwear. A grin spreads across his lips, eyes twinkling with mischief as he snags the material with his fingers and pulls it down with ease. You don’t even have time to think before he reaches between your folds and flattens his tongue against your clit. Another startled yelp escapes your, legs jerking, and Hongjoong hooks his arm around your leg and grasps at your opposite hip with the same hand. The other hand lingers at your core, teasing your dripping folds while his tongue goes to work at your clit.

“Fuck, you taste so good, princess,” Hongjoong purrs against your lower lips. You glance down at him, making eye contact as he drags his tongue through your arousal. You can see your juices on his lips. The dirty sight causes you to writhe against him. He stills you by pressing two fingers into your heat.

“Ah! Ho-Hongjoong, oh my god,” you stammer out as he immediately curls those two fingers inside you and nips gently at your sensitive bud. “F-Fuck, fuck.”

“Such a dirty mouth for a dirty little slut, huh?” You can’t respond with words this time, but his statement draws a high-pitched whine out of you and your walls tighten around his fingers. Hongjoong teases the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. “Dirty talk then? Or degradation?”

You answer by squeezing around his fingers again, and the sensation is so tight that Hongjoong grits his teeth.

“You’re gonna be so good around my cock,” he hisses out. He squeezes a third finger into your heat, scissoring you open with relative ease. That damn tongue continues to tease your clit. He flicks over the small bead and draws small circles around it. It edges you closer and closer to an orgasm, but Hongjoong senses that and pulls away within an instant. He drags his tongue lower instead and pushes the wet muscle into your heat with his fingers. The added stimulation makes you cry out, and your hand grips Hongjoong’s hair and tugs at the strands. He nearly growls, the vibrations of the sound reverberating through your core in just the right way. It causes your orgasm to hit all of a sudden, back arching off the bed and body going slack as the intense waves wash over you.

Hongjoong guides you through the orgasm, fingers still curled inside you as he pulls his tongue back to lick the juices off his lips.

“Ready to take my cock in that dirty little cunt?”

“Yes, fuck – fuck, yes. Please fuck me.”

“Since you asked so nicely, I suppose I can do that.”

Hongjoong pulls back from your core, hands going straight to his pants. He has to stand up to tug them down, and he yanks his underwear down in the same motion. You’re surprised by his size in all honesty. He’s rather short compared to the other men you’ve been with so you weren’t expecting much in that department, but he’s much larger than you expected him to be. He doesn’t give you time to gape any longer though, kneeling back on the bed and pulling your legs up around his waist. He guides his member to your entrance. You swallow in anticipation and watch him slowly enter you. He continues moving forward until he bottoms out, a low groan leaving his lips when you instinctively clench around his cock.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” he grunts out, leaning down over you again.

“Just fuck me already,” you say in response. You curl your fingers around his neck and bring his head down to yours. Your lips connect as he pulls out, and the sharp thrust of his hips against the back of your thighs breaks the kiss. You throw your head back at the sensation, the curve of his cock rubbing against your sweet spot at just the right angle. You can’t keep the moans from slipping out; the feeling is far too good for you to keep quiet, and it spurs Hongjoong to thrust faster. He picks up a relentless pace, hips slamming against your thighs at an almost bruising pace.

“Fuck, you’re so tight,” he groans. You tilt your head to the side and press your lips against your bicep, biting down on the flesh in attempts to quiet your moans. Hongjoong must not like that because his fingers close around the base of your throat. “Eyes on me.”

You follow the order without thinking twice, snapping your head back to look Hongjoong in the eye. Your quick obedience brings a stutter to his thrusts. He dips down to capture your lips in his own. Despite the fact that you just hit one orgasm, the drag of his member inside your walls is already spurring you to another one in a short amount of time. Your sporadic clenches around Hongjoong’s cock signal that oncoming orgasm.

“Are you gonna cum again, slut?” He growls against your lips. You nod a few times, tongue darting out to taste his liquorice tasting ones. He pulls just out of your reach and leans back. “Do it yourself.” His words draw a surprised gasp from your mouth. You can’t tell whether he’s being serious or not until he pulls his still hard member out of your heat. You swallow roughly, eyes trailing over him in disbelief, before pulling yourself up to be eye level with him again.

“T-Then let me ride you,” you say. Hongjoong arches a brow and bites his lower lip. Still, he doesn’t move. You blink at him. You don’t know what he’s wanting you to do or expecting you to do, so you do the only thing you can think of. Pin him down against the bed, throw a leg over his hips, and grip his member by the base. He groans at the action, watching you guide his cock back to your drenched folds with a cocky grin. You wipe the smile off his lips with a sudden drop of your hips. You take his whole length in again and don’t waste any time in picking up your pace until it matches his previous one. Even as you bounce on his member, he doesn’t grip your hips or guide your movements, just laying back and watching you do all the work. It reminds you of how much you hate the man, even in the throes of pleasure, he’s still an arrogant and self-righteous asshole. That thought doesn’t keep your orgasm from approaching quickly. Your bounces slow down as you grow ever closer to your high. When it hits, you release a loud cry, freezing on top of him with pulsing walls as the strength leaves your body. You stay like that for a few seconds, unable to move because of the intense orgasm, then pull off slowly.

He watches you with a narrowed gaze as you lower your mouth to his cock. You lap at his member, collecting the juices and precum from it, then take half of him into your mouth. He nearly bucks up into your mouth. You have to comb a few strands of hair back when they fall over his member. Hongjoong releases a wanton moan. You bob your head up and down along his cock in efforts to make him cum faster, and the plan works in your favor. Moments later, he is spilling hot cum down your throat. You swallow every last drop. When you pull off his softening member, you wipe at your lower lip with a satisfied grin.

“You fuck better than I thought,” Hongjoong says through a deep sigh.

“You’re not half bad yourself,” you answer as you fall back against the bed. Your whole body aches and burns from the sex, but you feel extremely satisfied as well. Hongjoong moves with you, head hitting the pillow at the same time yours does.

The two of you refuse to look at each other even in the afterglow of your sex. You don’t know what to say to him, or if you should say anything for that matter. All you can do is stare at the ceiling. Based on the noise that resounds from across the hall, Seonghwa and Wooyoung are already getting down to business. If you hadn’t just fucked Hongjoong, you might find this predicament awkward.

“I’m going to shower,” Hongjoong announces after the silence drags on for a few minutes.

“Y-Yea, yea, go ahead. Help yourself to a towel and stuff. Wooyoung won’t mind.” You watch the man get up and head into the bathroom. The awkwardness is now setting in, and you aren’t sure what this means for the two of you. Perhaps it was just hate sex, but it certainly wasn’t drunk sex because the two of you were surprisingly sober before you even started fucking. It shouldn’t change anything at all.

At least, that’s what you have to keep telling yourself. As Hongjoong passes you on his way out of the bathroom, he doesn’t even spare you so much as a glance. You take a shower of your own in complete and utter silence, mostly spending your time staring at the wall with a blank stare. It’s only when you step out of the shower and look at yourself in the mirror that you say something

“God, how fucking dumb can you be, Y/N?” You towel your body dry and reach down to snatch one of Wooyoung’s spare shirts off the floor, not caring that it might be dirty as you tug it over your head.

When you step back into the bedroom, Hongjoong is long gone. You shouldn’t be surprised. You really shouldn’t. You knew he wasn’t going to stay, and you knew that this was nothing more than a quick fuck for him. However, you are not the type to just have a quick fuck and go. So when you slide under the covers of Wooyoung’s bed, you only feel cold and dejected. Sleeps doesn’t come for quite some time, and you refuse to admit that there were tears on your cheeks at any point in the night. It was just a quick fuck and nothing more. You really have to keep reminding yourself of that fact.

…

“Come on, ladies! Quit moving so slowly! We’re on a schedule.”

You release a huff. The bus seat under your ass is wildly uncomfortable, and even though two days have passed, you aren’t any less sore from your little sex escapade with Hongjoong the other night. It’s the morning of the piano competition now, and you have managed to fully avoid Hongjoong in every way up until now. Because for some unknown and dumb reason, your professor decided that he needed a seating chart for the bus. And he thus decided that putting you and Hongjoong next to each other was a brilliant idea. You can only be glad that you arrived before he did, taking the window seat and pressing your headphones in so that you don’t even have to interact with him in the slightest.

It feels like some bad karma is against you at the moment, the same bad karma that perhaps caused you to fuck Hongjoong in the first place. Being forced to sit next to him is a punch in the gut. You thumb through your music on your phone to find the piece you’ll be playing for the competition today, letting the chords and notes resound through your ears and take over your thoughts. You don’t even notice when Hongjoong climbs onto the bus and sits down beside you, but the sudden lurching of the vehicle causes your eyes to snap open. You glance around in surprise, the music completely distracting you from what was going on around you. When your eyes fall on Hongjoong, you taste liquorice on your tongue. More than that, you fucking smell the candy.

You understand why after a moment, Hongjoong’s fingers toying with a small cube of the black candy. He pops it between his lips, tongue darting out to drag over his lips and collect the rest of the sweet treat’s taste. Then, he glances at you out the corner of his eye and catches your lingering stare.

“What the fuck do you want?”

You were right about one thing. Nothing has changed between the two of you. You opt not to respond and turn away from him with a huff. You return to your music, trying your best to only focus on the notes and all the notes you got from your professor over the past few weeks. Thankfully, Hongjoong doesn’t bother you any longer and actually lets you have some damn peace and quiet. However, you blame him for the fact that your mind keeps drifting back to him, thinking about everything from his body to the way he fucked you the other night and how good it felt. With each intruding thought, you crank your volume up higher and higher. It does nothing to expel the thoughts but at least it gives you some peace of mind.

That is, until Hongjoong elbows you harshly in the side. You yank one of your earbuds out and whip to look at him.

“What?” You spit out with venom in your tone.

“Turn your fucking music down. I can barely think with how loud it is.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“It’s your damn music,” Hongjoong hisses back with an equal amount of anger to his voice.

“Fucking deal with it.”

Hongjoong’s hand darts out and closes around your thigh. You choke on your saliva, coughing as he squeezes your leg. His fingers are dangerously close to your core, and due to your surprise, you pressed your thighs together and effectively trapped his hand between your legs. Hongjoong leans closer to you, and you pull away in response.

“Turn your damn music down.”

You can smell the candy on his breath, and it reminds you of the taste of his tongue and feel of his lips. You almost want to lean in and revisit the taste, but you resist that burning urge. Instead, you manage to plug your earbud back in and turn the volume down a few notches. It’s enough to satiate Hongjoong for the time being. His grip on your thigh disappears, giving you a chance to breathe again but it’s much harder to breathe now that he’s gotten you a bit worked up like this. You curl further against the window and glare at the passing scenery as the music continues to play in your ears. At some point, you fall asleep to the rhythmic beats of your piece. You don’t even realize it, head still pressed to the cool glass of the window as the bus rumbles onto your destination.

You wake up once the bus comes to a halt, and you wake up with a jolt. However, it’s not because of the bus’ sudden stop; no, it’s because your head has somehow managed to come to rest on Hongjoong’s shoulder as you were sleeping. How that happened, you have absolutely no clue because you were angled towards the window and you’ve never been one to move much in your sleep. Hongjoong must have fallen asleep as well, because as soon as you jolt upwards, your head smacks against his and he wakes with a start.

“What the fuck?” He cusses, bringing a hand to rub at his temple where you hit him. You rub at the sleep in your eyes in attempts to hide the evidence of your tiredness before your professor catches sight.

“Wake up, shithead,” you mutter as you shove his shoulder. “I need to get past.”

“Your fault for choosing the damn window seat.”

“And it’s your fault for falling asleep.”

“Were you not just sleeping yourself?”

“I hate you.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Hongjoong spits back, eyes narrowed at you. He gets up regardless and steps away, and you take the chance to leave the bus with your bag in tow.

The one thing you hate the most about these recitals and competitions is the fact that you have to dress up nicely for them. It would be nice to show up and perform just the music, hell maybe even just play behind a curtain. But no, the judges need to see you and you have to be immaculate in every way. It’s not cheap in the slightest, but you’ve opted to reuse one of your previous recital dresses in the hopes that none of the judges will be faces you recognize.

Your professor leads the way into the concert hall, and you linger at Minnie’s side, as ironic as it is. Despite still being madly angry at her for not telling you that she was fucking dating Choi San behind your fucking back, she is still your closest friend in the program. That and she can’t seem to shut up about some movie she watched the other day. Her noise at least distracts you for the time being, especially as Hongjoong slips past you and runs a hand through his blue locks. The action is far too enticing and attractive for your liking. Again you’re left to blame it on horniness.

As you walk through the concert hall, those familiar gnawings of anxiety bite at your heels. Minnie is chattering away in your ear but you can’t hear a word she’s saying. Your hands grow cold quickly, and you tighten your grasp on your bag. You only relax a little once you get backstage and settle into a small dressing room.

“Alright, get ready quickly! Y/N, you’re the opener for the competition so you should get ready first.”

You respond with a few shaky nods before ducking into one of the bathrooms in the room. You change with haste, tugging the dark blue dress over your form until it rests comfortably on your body. You took care of your hair and makeup before coming; that was the first thing you did in the morning. All that’s left it to put on your shoes and get warmed up for the performance.

“Y/N, the room across the hall is where you can warm up,” your professor says when you step back out of the bathroom. You answer with another set of nods, moving for your bag to put your casual clothes back inside and replace your shoes.

“You’re gonna kill it!” Minnie drops a hand to your shoulder, squeezing you tightly.

“Thanks,” you mutter back as you fasten the straps of your shoes. When you stand up, you catch sight of Hongjoong staring at you. Your immediate response is to glare at him, which he returns just as quickly. “What?”

“Don’t fuck up too much. I don’t wanna have to clean up our reputation for you.”

You puff your cheeks full of air and stomp out of the room, not bothering to fight back at Hongjoong’s insult. You head straight for the practice room across the hall. It takes a few adjustments of the bench and your shoes, but you manage to get seated comfortably at the piano.

“Emotions. You need to show the emotions, Y/N,” you murmur to yourself as your fingers touch the ivories. It isn’t even the real thing, you should just be warming up and practicing the parts you had troubles with, but you still put your all into it as though it is the real thing. By the time you conclude the last notes of the song, you aren't even sure that you did what you needed to do. You can’t hear the emotion in the notes, you can only play them and hope for the best.

How Hongjoong does it is a mystery to you. He plays each note like it’s his very blood and bones, his life story laid bare before the keys. For someone so full of hatred and anger, it seems even more confusing to you, and as much as you try to reconcile it, you can’t.

“L/N Y/N to the stage. L/N Y/N to the stage.” You glance up with a start, eyeing the small speaker in the corner of the room. There’s a growing lump in your throat, and it only grows larger as you walk out of the room. Your professor is waiting there for you, his hand coming to rest on your shoulder as the two of you begin to walk towards the stage.

“Remember the time signature and tempo. Watch your crescendos. And emotion! Put feeling into it!” He says as you walk ever closer to the front. You can’t respond due to the lump in your throat. Your attempts to swallow it down and dispel it do nothing either. As you reach the curtains, you catch sight of a certain blue-haired man at the edge of the stage. Your gaze hardens on him. Hongjoong never comes to stand by the stage and watch you perform. He’s toying with another black liquorice candy when you walk up to him, popping the candy between his lips before dropping his hand to mess with his cufflinks.

“Our first performer of the day, Miss Y/N L/N. She will be performing Franz Liszt’s Etude Opus 161, Number 3, La Campenella,” the announcer says, his voice booming through the hall. You don’t have time to think before your professor is pushing you forward onto the stage, and you nearly suffer the embarrassment of tripping over your feet on the way to the piano.

You reach the instrument without any issue, by luck of a miracle. The lump in your throat subsides as you sink onto the piano bench, and your fingers dance over the knobs on the bench to adjust it to your liking. Lift your left hand high, right one at the ready on the keys for the cue from your left. You drop your left hand to the keyboard and begin playing your piece to the best of your ability.

All your focus becomes consumed by the keys and music in your ears. You can’t even glance up to watch your professor or Hongjoong’s expression, too enraptured with your playing to think about anything other than the piano. Your whole body follows the tempo of the piece. You sway back and forth, following the movements of your hands as they dance across the ivory keys, and your heart leaps a little in your chest with each successful chord and note. Even if you aren’t able to fully capture the emotions behind a song, you can at least perform. And performing is what you do best. Replicating the notes, decrescendos, crescendos, chords, octaves and leaps, your runs and arpeggios all executed to absolute perfection. The entire performance is full of the excitement in the piece up until your last note after the five and a half minutes of playing.

Your fingers hover over that final note, letting it ring out and coat the ears of your listeners, and when you pull back, your foot slips off the pedal to let the music die out into silence. Applause greets you as you rise from the bench and bow towards the judges. You leave the stage the way you came, joining your professor and Hongjoong at the edge just behind the curtains.

“That was better than ever!” Your teacher cheers as you reach his side. He beams from ear to ear, eyes hidden behind the smile of his eyelids, but you don’t pay him any attention. Rather you look to Hongjoong in attempts to gauge his expression. If he’s impressed in the slightest, he does well to conceal it.

“Following Miss Y/N L/N, we have Mr. Kim Hongjoong, playing Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 48, number 1.” The announcer’s voice rings out again, calling Hongjoong onto the stage. He glances away from you as he steps out from behind the curtain.

“They put us back to back?” You mutter the question to your professor, who just looks down at you with a glint in his dark eyes.

“The judges requested that you two play back to back,” he explains, maintaining his grin.

“Oh…” You exhale and turn back to watch Hongjoong sit down at the piano. His performance is always a thing of beauty, but you know exactly why the judges would want the two of you back to back. Whilst you exude perfection in every note, Hongjoong does more. More with the piece, he plays with the rhythms and tempos, creating music that sounds wholly his. He plays as though he is the sole creator of the piece and no one else. Each piano he plays becomes part of him. You are polar opposites when it comes to performing. And that’s what they want to see. They want to see the two of your challenge each other with your differing play styles.

The lump in your throat returns as Hongjoong begins to play. Something feels off in the very first note. A spring of anxiety pops up in your gut as you hear it. It isn’t the same as usual, something in the way Hongjoong’s fingers glide over the ivories is not right. The professor still looks quite pleased though, almost like he doesn’t even notice the difference. When you glance out over the panel of judges, they bear similar expressions. It’s a mystery to you how they don’t notice the difference because in your ears, it is so stark and unable to be missed.

The next six minutes carry on with that same vibe. You can’t place what is going wrong until Hongjoong presses his fingers to the final note. The wrong note.

You lurch forward. Hongjoong freezes. The chord echoes through the whole hall, the glaringly obvious mistake resounding without stop even as Hongjoong pulls his fingers off the keys. He stands. Bows to the judges. Heads back towards where you’re standing without a word. It’s not like Hongjoong to make a mistake, not like him at all. You don’t think he’s ever made a mistake, even in practices he is always meticulous and perfect.

Hongjoong’s hands are trembling when he comes off stage. He strides past you without sparing you a glance. He doesn’t look at anything in fact, his eyes are unfocused as he moves forward. You can only stay rooted to the spot and watch him move away without a word. It happens in a millisecond, and if you blinked you would have missed it for certain. Hongjoong’s legs give out and he begins to collapse. Your professor rushes to his side as fast as possible. He grips the blue-haired man’s arm and pulls him back up, draping his arm over a shoulder and rushing down the hall. He’s calling for a medic and an ambulance, and as soon as those words process in your head, you choke on air.

Your feet move before your thoughts do. You chase after the pair, hiking your dress up a bit as you run. The old man carries Hongjoong back to your shared dressing room. Your fellow students dash out of the room as he brings Hongjoong in. You pause in the door frame, watching the scene unfold before you with a plummeting heart. An emergency nurse pushes past you to get in and effectively blocks your line of sight. All you can see is the blue strands of hair atop Hongjoong’s head and nothing more.

Someone catches hold of your arm. It’s Minnie, and she tugs on your wrist as she spews words in your direction. However, you don’t hear a thing. Your ears still ring with that final wrong note Hongjoong played, eyes unfocused as you try to look at Minnie. She’s pulling you to the aside, away from the hustle of bustle of the other people in the hall, and trying to catch your attention. You refuse to look at her, however, and opt to stare back at the room where Hongjoong is with wide eyes. The shock hasn’t drifted from your bones in the slightest.

You don’t get any form of relief until the emergency nurses file out of the dressing room. They don’t carry Hongjoong out on a gurney which is a small relief in and of itself. Your professor appears in the doorway next, sweat on his brow and glasses in one hand. The other runs through his hair – the minimal amount that’s left, that is – and he addresses the other students first.

“You all are to wait at the stage for your performances. You can go into that room across the hall if you need some more practice time, but you are not to enter the dressing room again until the end of the competition. Understood?”

You watch the students share a chorus on nods. Minnie releases your arm to move away with the rest of the students, but she sends one final look your way, one that seeks answers you do not have. Once all your classmates have filed away, you are left to stand across from your professor with bated breath. He doesn’t say anything at first, and neither do you, so the two of you just exchange forlorn stares without speaking. The silence drags on for so long that you think you might pass out; you’ve been holding your breath the entire time as well and it’s really starting to make you feel a bit lightheaded.

“What happened to him, professor?” You ask when the silence grows unbearable.

“He’s fine. Just a small accident.” The answer is spoken with haste, and his tone is flat. The way he says it almost implies that the words are rehearsed.

“A small accident wouldn’t warrant such a reaction from you though,” you reason, lifting a hand to scratch at your scalp.

“I need to go up to the stage to be with the other students, Miss L/N.” Your professor speaks with such finality that you don’t dare press the subject any further. Instead, you watch him walk back to the edge of the stage, waiting until he’s completely out of sight before pressing into the dressing room where Hongjoong is yourself.

You don’t see him immediately, which surprises you to a certain extent, but then you notice that the unisex bathroom in the back corner has an open door and the lights are on. Hongjoong must be in there, but it seems odd for him to have left the door open when anyone could walk in. You’re tempted to call out to him and ask if he’s alright. Something prevents you from doing so, however, and you merely creep closer to the room with quiet steps.

Whatever you might have been expecting goes out the window as you catch sight of Hongjoong’s blue head of hair. He is hunched over the toilet, an awful retching sound leaving his form every few seconds, and you can’t believe that the nurses and your professor dared to leave him alone in a state like this. Hongjoong hasn’t caught sight of you yet, but you certainly make your presence known as you stumble back. Your heel catches on the short train of your dress, you throw your hands back to brace yourself for a fall, but instead catch hold of a table and manage to stay on your feet.

Hongjoong whips his head towards you as you stumble, however, and all of his attention is suddenly directed at you. There is a small excess of vomit lingering on the corner of his mouth, and he wipes at it with the back of his hand as he looks towards you. There’s no explanation that would be suitable enough to explain what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, because frankly, you don’t even understand why yourself. That fact alone is slightly more terrifying than you would like to admit.

“What the hell do you want?” Hongjoong spits out. He slowly stands up straight, legs a bit wobbly as he moves, and moves for the sink to wash his hands and face. “Come to see me suffer? Does that get you going?”

Your jaw stutters as you fumble to come up with some sort of response. Nothing comes out for a few seconds and you’re left to just stare dumbly at Hongjoong with nothing but a blank expression.

“Figures…” Hongjoong mutters. He leaves the bathroom and heads for his small travel bag. You watch him move without saying anything, eyes tracking each of his movements with scrutiny. As he bends down to open the bag, Hongjoong winces. His arms jerk, back straightening for a brief moment, then his body returns to normal as though nothing happened. Hongjoong hisses, teeth gritted as he continues to push down and get whatever he was looking for. When he stands back up, you catch sight of a toothbrush and toothpaste in his hands. It’s strange, because those aren’t items he would typically bring to a competition like this one which lasts less than a day. The behavior makes it seem like he almost knew that this was going to happen.

“What’s wrong with you?” You ask out of the blue. Hongjoong all but ignores you in favor of walking towards the bathroom again, this time with toothbrush and toothpaste in hand. “I mean – what happened to you?”

“You’re going to have to elaborate because there’s plenty wrong with me.”

“On the stage, Hongjoong. You fucked up and missed the last note. You never do that.”

“Yea, well, I did this time. What do you want me to say?”

“You collapsed as soon as you were backstage. Something is obviously bothering you now since you puked. What the hell is going on with you?”

“Why do you care all of a sudden? Wanna know why your competition is getting worse? Get used to it.”

“No…” You trail off, unsure of what to say next. Hongjoong brushes his teeth with ferocity, and his gaze remains on the mirror rather than looking to you while you speak. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

You aren’t sure where the desire came from. It’s foreign to you, as it the worry that bubbles in your gut as you look over Hongjoong’s form. He seems frail all of a sudden, and that’s just so unlike him in every way that you can’t get past it. He doesn’t respond right away – probably due to the fact that his currently scrapping his toothbrush over the expanse of his tongue. You wait for a reply in silence for two minutes, then Hongjoong spits in the sink and washes his mouth out again.

“Parsonage-Turner Syndrome,” he says. His eyes find yours, still as void of emotion as ever, but you blink back in shock. “Do you know what that is?”

“N-No, I’ve never heard of it,” you answer honestly. Hongjoong sighs and returns to his duffel bag, pushing his toothbrush and toothpaste back inside. He digs around a bit more in the bag before standing up straight again. A small wrapped candy lingers between his fingers. He undoes the wrapper with quick motions, then pops the black liquorice between his lips.

“Idiopathic brachial plexopathy or neuralgic amyotrophy,” Hongjoong recites the words as though he’s heard them thousands of times. You don’t doubt that he has based upon the look in his eyes. “A rare disorder consisting of a complex constellation of symptoms with abrupt onset of shoulder pain, followed by progressive neurologic deficits of motor weakness, dysesthesias, and numbness.”

Hongjoong pauses and purses his lips. He looks away from you, but the way his eyes well up with crystalline tears doesn’t escape your notice. You gnaw on the inside of your cheek in silence. If there’s anything to be said, you certainly don’t know what it is.

“In short, I’m losing the function of my arms. Eventually, I won’t be able to use them at all. The more I play the piano, the bigger risk I run of destroying them further. How ironic, huh?” Hongjoong releases a dry laugh, but the humor is gone from his tone. As his words sink it, your heart sinks further and further. You dare to glance up at his face from across the room. The tears in his eyes have fallen down his cheeks. It’s the most vulnerable you’ve ever seen Hongjoong, but you also can’t imagine how difficult it must be for him. “How fucking ironic…”

Hongjoong’s voice dies off a little, cracking as he finishes his sentence. A moment of silence passes. You debate saying something but every time you try to speak, your voice dies in your throat. A scream of anguish leaves Hongjoong’s throat. He swings for the wall with his left hand, fingers clenched into a fist so tight that his knuckles are white. He hits the wall with such force that the sound echoes in your ears, and you flinch away from the table you’re leaning against. Hongjoong sinks to the floor, knees hitting the ground with a thud. His fist never quits its rhythm against the wall; he continues slamming his hand at the surface. You’re frozen in place, watching his fist hit the wall over and over until red flecks begin to spread across the pristine surface of the wall.

“Hongjoong–” You start towards him, a sudden urgency rushes to your bones, and you hurry to keep him from abusing his hand any more than he already has. “Hongjoong, stop. Stop it, Hongjoong, stop.”

You snatch him by the wrist, and he relaxes into your touch within an instant. He slumps forward until his forehead hits the wall. It takes a few seconds of silence, then a strangled sob escapes his slacked body. You catch him before he completely falls over and drag his weight in your direction instead. He doesn’t even complain, fingers finding the material of your dress and balling around it without a word. He cries against you. You can’t imagine how long he’s been holding it in, how long he’s known that this was his fate, that the thing he loves the most will lead to his destruction. It’s heartbreaking and horrible to think about. The fear of even spraining a finger haunts you sometimes, but Hongjoong has to live with the knowledge that his fate is to lose his ability to play forever.

“It’s okay, Hongjoong,” you mutter against his hairline. A laugh leaves his lips, but it’s wet and full of mucus. He nearly chokes as he continues to laugh.

“How the fuck is this okay? In what world is this okay? Answer me that.”

“I-I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Everyone is always fucking sorry. Yea, come say sorry again when you have your only passion stolen from you.”

“Ho-Hongjoong. No, I-I – stop. It’s not been taken away from you yet. You still have tim–”

“How much time? How long until I fuck my arms up to the point of no return?”

“Can’t they do anything?” Your question is spoken in such a quiet tone that you fear that Hongjoong might not hear it.

“There’s no cure. Just fucking physical therapy and acupuncture to slow the muscle denervation. Electrotherapy. Nothing that fixes it.”

“But it would slow it?”

“For a time.”

“Isn’t that worth it then? Even to just… try? The hope that maybe it will fix things enough to let you play is worth it isn’t it?”

“Worth it to what? I’ll never be able to play at the level I want to. I’ll never get to achieve my dreams, not in this condition. Not with this disease. I’m doomed no matter what. Physical therapy won’t do shit. If I’m gonna lose my arms, then I’m gonna do what I love until I can’t anymore.”

Hongjoong’s resolve is strong, even through the weakness he’s showing right now, and you can’t blame him. His behavior makes sense now. The hatred and disdain for you, the ego and arrogant nature about him, the flaunting of his skills – it was all just an attempt to hide the fact that he was breaking inside.

“Then you’re robbing yourself of an opportunity… you never know if something is going to work unless you try, Hongjoong. Even if you’re not a miracle patient who gets cured out of the blue, just trying could give you the ability to play longer. Not because you need to be the best or play better than everyone else or even play at a high level. But because it’s something that you love. And at least having the ability to do something you love is better than losing it altogether.”

Hongjoong doesn’t respond to your words. His tears aren’t slowing down, and you wonder if he’s in any pain in this very moment. His shoulders tremble but because of the sobs that wrack his hunched form. As you cradle him against your chest, you can’t help but look down at your own hands. Your fingers are trembling against Hongjoong’s back. In that brief moment, you imagine yourself in his shoes.

The first sear of pain through your arms. The continued abuse over weeks. Finally going to see a doctor. Being told that it’s a disease. That the longer you play, the worse it will get. That eventually you’ll lose the use of your arms completely. The dream you’ve had since you were a child – you wonder if it was Hongjoong’s dream too, before he was given the news. You wonder if Hongjoong had the same bright eyes and hopeful dreams of becoming something great, someone great. You imagine that dream being wrenched from your grasps. It hurts. Just the thought of it hurts more than a thousand knives in your chest.

All you can do is pull Hongjoong closer. There is nothing to say, nothing you can say or do that would make this any easier or better. You settle for this and press your cheek against his head.

…

The time has escaped you yet again, and you glance up from the keyboard to see that the clock reads six o’clock already. You wanted to get some rest in your apartment before nightfall hit because Wooyoung somehow managed to drag your ass out for another party even after what happened last time.

You push the bench back and close the lid of the keyboard. Your fingers linger on the wood, however, and you look at the instrument with a strange tightness in your chest.

It’s been three weeks since that competition. Three weeks since you’ve seen Hongjoong. He hasn’t attended class, you haven’t seen him in the practice hall or rooms at any point in time, it’s almost as though he disappeared off the face of the planet. You hate it. Class is too silent. It’s boring. Without Hongjoong, you have nothing to do except think about when the class is going to be over. It’s almost funny how only now that he’s gone do you realize how much time you spent slaving over the mere thought of him.

During the first week, you watched the door and waited for Hongjoong’s blue head of hair to step through. You always had your snide remark at the ready: “Late for class? At least you bothered to show up this time.” Hongjoong never came though.

The second week you guessed where he might be. Thought about what happened in the aftermath of his meltdown at the competition. They took him to the hospital, forcibly prying him from your arms, and that was the last you saw of him.

And then the third week passed by, and you began to wonder if the damage to his arms had already been done. Even now as your thoughts are occupied by the thought of him and him alone, you wonder if that’s the case.

As you get to your feet, the door behind you slides open. The sound is almost silent, and if you had still been playing you wouldn’t have heard a thing. You whip around to face the intruder. You nearly don’t recognize the form standing before you. Formerly blue hair has been replaced with a bright red, and it’s only when you look at the man’s features that you recognize him. Your darting gaze flits down to his left hand. It’s wrapped in a white gauze, fingers loose and flexing in the wrap. A good sign, perhaps. At least the damage isn’t fully done yet.

“Ew, it’s you,” you say, trying to contain the smile that threatens to overtake your lips when you see Hongjoong.

“Wow.” Hongjoong glances around the practice room. There is something sad and longing in his eyes as he looks around. You open your mouth to say more, but he continues speaking without you having to ask. “I, uh, I dropped out.”

“You what?” You just about fall over upon hearing the news. It catches you so off-guard that you choke on the saliva lingering on the back of your tongue.

“I dropped out of the program.”

“Yo-You – but, but the program – you were one, you were one of the only ones to get – what?”

“I thought about what you said. I, um… Yea, I dropped out. Started doing general studies instead. Think I’m gonna go for a teaching degree. Maybe try to be a piano teacher one day.”

“Why?” You aren’t being very eloquent, but the shock is too strong for you to even think about putting together a coherent thought.

“I kept thinking about what you said. Robbing myself of an opportunity… losing something I love. I love the piano, and I love playing the piano more than anything. I can’t lose the ability to play it. That’s – That’s taking away a part of me I can’t lose. Without piano… I would be nothing. I’m not ready to lose it because of some stupid fucking disease that can kiss my ass.”

Your breath catches in your throat. It’s the last thing you expected to hear from Hongjoong, especially since he resolve to be the best regardless of what happens to him was so strong. He saves you the trouble of coming up with a reply.

“I started going to physical therapy. They started me out on some acupuncture treatments, then worked me up to doing strengthening exercises and range of motion exercises. We’re going to try some electrotherapy next but the doctor said I’m making really good progress.”

“R-Really? Hongjoong, that’s amazing. Honestly. That’s truly incredible. I’m so ha–”

“Thank you,” he interrupts. His gaze is on the floor, fist clenching here and there, and his tone is quiet. “Thank you for giving me my dream back.”

You don’t have time to think before Hongjoong is walking towards you. He catches you by surprise, arms wrapping around your waist and pulling you against his chest without hesitation.

“You don’t need to thank me,” you murmur in response. Your arms drape over him, and hesitance fills your motions unlike his hasty ones. He is warm and soft under your touch, so unlike how he was that day of the competition – cold and stiff.

“I do. Please, I-I…”

Hongjoong doesn’t need to finish the thought, but you don’t need him to. You can guess what he might be trying to say. You aren’t sure you need to hear it or if you can handle it. Instead, you settle for this comfortable embrace. Hongjoong’s breath is hot against your throat, and curse you for thinking about it because it leads your thoughts in a bad direction. Hongjoong shifts his head closer to your neck, lips caressing the skin there that barely peaks out from under your collar.

“C-Can I…?”

“Yes,” you exhale when Hongjoong inches closer to your lips. He brushes over your skin with such a gentle touch that you wonder if it is actually real. He deepens the kiss a moment later, however, and presses against you with more fervor. Your lips slot together, warm filling your chest and gut. He guides you backwards as his hands find your hips. You gasp into Hongjoong’s mouth when your ass hits the lid of the piano. Hongjoong doesn’t seem to mind though. He uses it as an opportunity to press his tongue between your lips. That familiar taste of liquorice lingers there, and you smile into the kiss.

You let him take over, his tongue exploring your mouth with a newfound interest. It’s so different from your first time together; that time was filled with fervor and passion and arousal. This is slow, gentle, almost romantic. You can’t get enough of it. Each kiss leaves you wanting more, each lingering touch makes you want to take more, and when Hongjoong’s fingers hook around the back of your thighs, you moan into his open mouth. He lifts you with ease although you do worry for a split second about straining his arms. He dispels that worry with haste, propping you up on the lid of the piano without a care in the world.

His lips attack your neck next, pulling away from your mouth to leave a saccharine trail down your skin until he stops at the base of your throat. You bring a hand to his freshly red locks as he sucks at the skin there and roll your head to the side to give him better access. Your gaze flits down to the door he entered through, and the lock on the handle isn’t turned. You should be worried because being caught having sex on a damn Steinway would be atrocious, but Hongjoong pushes that to the side as well. Deft fingers work the buttons on your blouse apart and push the material back until you’re stripped of the shirt. He pops the clasp of your bra next and drops the lingerie to the floor. You bare your chest to him, ready for him to dive in and mark up your breasts in a similar manner but he doesn’t.

His hands instead go to the waistband of your skirt. He unhooks that button and zipper, tugging the material off of you as quickly as possible. All of a sudden you’re left only in your underwear. Hongjoong doesn’t let you stay nearly naked alone for long. He leans back to tug his own shirt off, then his pants are quick to follow. As the material drops, you catch sight of the prominent bulge in his underwear. Without thinking, you reach out and grab hold of his constrained member. He groans into your touch, hips automatically bucking forward from even the slightest touch. You don’t wait to dip your hand past the band of the underwear and take hold of his semihard member.

“Y-You’re the devil,” Hongjoong hisses out as you pump his cock ever so slowly. In response, you drag your thumb over his slit, collecting the precum there and using it to help you pump his cock with more ease. You release a small laugh as his hips thrust into your touch. The laugh is cut short when Hongjoong presses the palm of his hand against your core. “Something funny, princess?”

You can do nothing except gasp in response, back arching off the lip of the piano. Hongjoong must enjoy the sight before him because a low moan slips through. His free hand darts around your back and collapses the music stand atop the piano. He seems ready to move you up even higher on the piano, but you stop him with your hand.

“N-No, wait – I just, I want you to fuck me. That’s all.” Your hand slides across Hongjoong’s bare chest, leaving goosebumps in your wake, and Hongjoong nearly shivers. Your words seem incentive enough for him, however, and he dips down between your legs to tug your underwear off. His follow soon after; hardened cock finding freedom at last. You slide a bit further down the lid of the piano in efforts to get more comfortable. Hongjoong braces your hip with his left hand and the other goes to your dripping folds. You’re nearly wet enough to drip all over the floor, positioned carefully so that you don’t sully the piano any more than you are already.

He works you open with deft fingers, two pushing into with ease thanks to your wetness. He uses those fingers to scissor your heat open and stretch you. You moan under the touch. The loudness of your moans is a bit worrisome considering you’re still in public, so you try to conceal them at least with the back of your hand. The moment you try to cover your lips however, Hongjoong reaches up and tugs your hand back down to the piano. He covers your lips with his. The position lets you moan freely into his mouth until his fingers disappear from your heat altogether.

“F-Fuck, I can’t wait any longer,” Hongjoong hisses. He uses the juices of your arousal on his fingers to pump his cock a few more times before lining up with your tight hole. The stretch isn’t painful; quite the opposite really, but a high-pitched whine breaches your lips. Hongjoong hesitates halfway, eyes tracking your expression for any sign of discomfort. He only moves again when you nod. Once he’s completely buried in you, you expect hasty thrusts but they never come. You blink at Hongjoong, eyes wide in expectation.

He stares back at you with an unreadable expression. His brow has furrowed and he almost squints as he looks into your eyes. You open your mouth to ask if something is wrong, but he speaks before you get the chance.

“I wanna try… us.”

“You want to what?” You ask, taken aback by the sudden statement. It’s hardly a proper time to bring up a serious subject, but maybe it’s the best timing in the world. How are you supposed to know? It’s not as though you fuck people on the daily in a practice room atop a piano like this.

“I wanna take you out. Spend time with you. Go on dates. Be in a relationship. With you and only you.”

“You’re asking after you’ve fucked me twice now?”

“Haven’t fucked you the second time yet, actually.” Hongjoong winks at you, a smirk curling across his lips. “Is that a yes or no?”

“It’s a ‘ask me again after you’ve fucked me senseless’.”

“I’d rather have your senses intact when I ask you.”

“Yes, Kim Hongjoong. In case you didn’t notice, I’m a bit more than interested in you.”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell when I was… you know, in you.”

“Shut up and fuck me already!” You protest, slapping his chest with the back of your hand. Hongjoong pulls his hips back and snaps them back against you without warning. You release a strangled moan that quickly evolves into a whine at the sudden thrust.

“I’ll make the rules, princess.”

You nod hastily in reply and brace yourself against the pillow for Hongjoong’s next thrust. He goes slower this time though, taking his time with each thrust, and you know he’s only doing it to rile you up because of the cheeky grin on his face. You want to either kiss or slap it off him, but he makes you choose the former by pushing forward. Your lips slot together with ease. It’s comfortable, easy, relaxed – like you’ve done it a thousand times and will do it a thousand more.

His thrusts do pick up in pace after that, his tongue entering the mix as well as he pries your lips open with the wet muscle. You allow yourself just let go under Hongjoong’s touch. You drape an arm over Hongjoong’s shoulder, nails raking down his back as he fucks you with reckless abandon. The angle is near magical because each thrust seems to hit deeper than the last, and your moans are borderline shouts of pleasure. Hongjoong doesn’t let up once. You’re glad for it because you’re pretty certain that if he does stop, you’ll slip off the piano entirely.  

Your head falls back, lips disconnecting from Hongjoong’s, and you struggle to stay upright with the way his cock rams against your sensitive g-spot. An orgasm is approaching quickly. You can’t manage to get any words out, but Hongjoong seems to understand when you drag a hand to his shoulder and squeeze tightly. Your walls clench around his member without warning. Hongjoong’s thrusts stutter as you squeeze his cock, then he reaches up to pull your face back to his.

“Ca-Can I cum in you?”

“Yes, yes, fuck yes. Please. Please, Hongjoong.” The man presses his lips against yours after you get the words out. You can’t hold the orgasm back any longer, and it washes over you with a sudden intensity that leaves you trembling in Hongjoong’s arms. He joins you not long after, hot seed spilling into you, and you moan at the sensation of his cum filling you up. He hunches forward and his head hits your shoulder. Both your chests heave from the exertion; you can’t seem to get enough air in your lungs. Gently you bring a hand to Hongjoong’s hair again and comb through the red locks with light fingers. Hongjoong sighs into the touch, shivering as your nails brush over his scalp.

“So… is this when I take you to dinner or?” Hongjoong lifts his chin to look you in the eye. You roll your eyes ever so slightly as he grins. The hand in his hair moves to smack him upside the head.

“You’re supposed to do that before you fuck me.”

“Eh, I’ve never been one to do things in order like that.”

“Good thing you can fuck well then or else I might not want a date at all.” Hongjoong’s smirk morphs into a wide smile, and his nose scrunches up as he looks at you. You smile back at him then press a quick kiss to his lips. “I’ll take that date now though.”

“One specialty Kim Hongjoong date coming right up. Though you better be prepared to stay up late tonight.”

“And you better be able to keep up with me. Hopefully all those exercises they’re making you do can help.”

Hongjoong grumbles at your comment, pulling back from you with a pout on his lips.

“I’ve got great stamina, thank you very much.” Hongjoong pauses his sulking for a moment to wear a serious expression on his features. “I’m serious about this, you know. You aren’t just some… some quick fuck to me. You didn’t have to be nice to me or give me a chance or anything, especially with the way I’ve been treating you over the past two years. So, uh, yea. Yea, I’m serious.”

You cup Hongjoong’s cheek gently and pass him a small smile before leaning your forehead against his.

“I believe you. And it’s not like I was any kinder to you. But if this is a chance to make things right, then let’s do it.”

“Y-Yea, yea, you’re right.”

“Now let’s get dressed before someone walks in on us like this. Then you can take me to dinner.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Hongjoong pulls away with a grin still on his lips. For a moment, you just sit there on the lid of the keyboard and watch him move around collecting articles of clothing. The warmth in your chest is foreign and unknown, but comfortable nonetheless. You never would have expected things to play out the way they did, but it was a happy accident and you want to bask in it for as long as possible. You slip off the lid of the ivories. The taste of liquorice is still on your tongue.

​​​☽     ☾

➻ requested by: @atinyinwonderland ➻ prompts:

“Ew, it’s you.” “Wow.”

“Eyes on me.”

this highkey turned into a Thing and idek how that happened but here we are aosidjfosijdfo also i did some research into PTS (parsonage-tanser syndrome) and it’s a rather rare disease apparently but this kinda issue with no longer being able to play piano and being forced to give up your dream kinda stemmed from my personal life and my sister and how i saw it impact her so it’s very real emotions and reader’s thoughts about being in hongjoong’s shoes are thoughts i’ve had myself and it truly is hard for me to even think about especially since music means so much to me but yea i cried while writing this, i hope you all enjoyed im going through it imma head out

[certifiedceraunophile]

Hiya!! Caroline Forbes for the character game, if you would be so inclined.

I am so so sorry I'm so late to this ask, but I'm hoping better late than never :) [like seriously I’m answering this a month late I am sooooo sorry!!]

First impression

My first impression of Caroline was during that scene at the grill, when she was drunk and like "I try so hard and nobody goes for me, nobody wants me, everything is a competition and I try so hard and NEVER win" to bonnie, and honestly calling myself out here, but I hated her in that moment simply bc I could see wayyyyy too much of myself in her, and I felt sort of vulnerable seeing such a blatant reflection of my deepest insecurities just sitting there in front of my eyes, but at that moment I wasnt looking to self reflect or read into it too deeply [I was there for mindless cheap entertainment] so my first basic impression I believe was to absolutely scoff at her, and I was like, I already dont like this chick, but also I was expecting her to be sort of a watered down regina george character, bc that's how they introduced her in terms of how she behaves w elena, she was supposed to be the shallow passive aggressive vapid bitch who's friendship is performative at best and toxic at worst, the way she treats Bonnie as a convenient sound board and replaceable company did not go unnoticed by me, these parts I can say I did not relate to, however I saw them for what they are, which is the makings of a headbitch mean girl who's imminent “untimely” death will not be mourned so much as alluded to constantly as a warning call and/or a cautionary tale for all the nameless dangers that are lurking in their godforsaken town, basically I expected her to die as a plot-pusher and then her death + the aftermath would've served as a convenient point of mild conflict between stelena to you know add to the "forbideness" of their relationship, so at this point all my first impressions were exactly what the writer's intended and honestly I was just waiting for her to die since it was clearly just a matter of time before that happened, but at the same time, I might not have been completely aware of this during that period of time, but the grill scene struck a chord with me and stayed with me quietly for a very long time, months later after reading several ffs and metas I can pinpoint that I was basically stuck between finding solidarity w Caroline in having the same insecurities as the character, and hating the fact that I had those insecurities at all to begin w and how vividly they were shown to me through Caroline without any restraint or cushioning.

So yeah you could say her character itself left me both vulnerable and seen at the same time so it was an odd mix of finding comfort and empathizing with this fictional character, but predominantly I was feeling.....agitated and hiding away from the truth that she represented to me; these two opposing feelings conflicted with one another constantly leaving me in a place where I mostly did not know if I liked her at all and if I didnt like her was it because she was written to be a mildly irritating side character [that I couldnt be bothered to emotionally invest in] or just because I saw too much of myself, especially the parts of me I dont particularly care for, in her to ever like her.

So yeah on one side I could say I wasnt deeply bothered [in a good or a bad way] by her, and only in passing acknowledged her to be the plot-convenient side character she was in the very beginning, but on the other hand, I somehow latently knew that it was so much more than that, and I am so so glad it was in fact the latter of the two that was true.

Impression now

Listen my impression of her now, cannot be encapsulated into a well thought out explanation of why I think so and so of her and how it affects me, but I think personally right now if you ask me what I think of Caroline, I would say I see her and I think, 

Oh I....know you, I see you everyday when I think about the kind of growth I want to have, I see myself in your past and while you may have grown I havent, but I can see it’s possible, however fictional and non-existent you are, if it’s possible for you, it’s possible for me.

[Also I just wanna add here, that in no way am I, at this moment, referring to canon!caroline directly but I am strictly thinking of the Caroline I have built in my head and the growth I projected onto her when I saw her transition from vapid blonde shallow bitchy human [and here’s the thing she wasnt vapid or shallow even in her human days but the insecurities still made her feel that way] to confident, painfully real, optimistic, loyal and so overflowingly full of love-vampire who has forgiven her past self but also loves her past self because no one thought she was worth that but Caroline Forbes thinks 16 year old Human Caroline Forbes deserves just as much love as Vampire Caroline Forbes and if no one else is brave enough, real enough to give that to her she will give it to her herself, Which to me is beautiful and resonates so deeply with me and that is exactly what I would say is my current impression of her; A girl so full of love and light, even her own shadow self cannot escape it.]

Favorite moment

Every moment she beats up a guy is my favourite moment and every time she insults Klaus with a smile on her face is also my favourite moment.

Idea for a story

Ok so I’ve had this idea brewing in my head for a while and I’m really excited to make it into an extensive multichap work when I do get the time, but you know how in Legacies [gag] there’s this episode where in an alternative universe where Hope doesnt exist at all, Caroline and Klaus are the cutest Enemies of the State couple to ever exist and they both are basically fucking shit up to the point where the humans wanna end the supernatural world as they know it, in legacies the reason behind the supernatural uprising was something unnecessarily sordid and stupid but I am basically thinking of something else but will lead to the same alternate universe we see in legacies, the basic premise rn is that  Klaus and Caroline are the Supreme leaders of the supernatural community and are leading them against the humans in this war that has broken out all over the world in a bid to end the supernatural world altogether, and I kind of have it outlined to take them from However Long it Takes my Last Love to let’s discuss our next strategy to over throw all opposing world governments on this table and then proceed to fuck on it.

So yeah I kinda wanna say stay tuned for that, but I wont cuz seriously I have no faith in myself lmao.

Unpopular opinion

As much as I love to criticize other characters [mostly Elena] for being hypocritical twats regarding Caroline’s choices, Caroline herself is a hypocrite multiple times through out canon, but I myself find that I am ok with that, since I never expected her to be perfect and her hypocrisy only makes her more real in my eyes since every time she is a hypocrite she is called out on it and made to face her own double standard.

Favorite relationship

I wanna say Klaus, like seriously I really really do,  but for me personally the relationship my Vampire!Caroline has with her past human self will always be the most beautiful enriching and hope giving thing.

That and also her relationship with her mom and how it finds this transformation from a place where they constantly hurt each other and are estranged from each other to a place where they try so hard to understand and love each other and finding the other to be an unmovable pillar in their life that strengthens and holds them up also resonates with me deeply.

Favorite headcanon

This one

[homebody-nobody]

you’re a part of me

(WHAT?? Jax wrote ANOTHER fic?? THREE FICS?? in TWO WEEKS?? I know, I’m shocked too. We’re gettin closer and closer to bein a Real Fic Writer lads.) How many juke first kiss fics will you write, Jax? all of them. as many as I want. I dunno. you're an adult obsessed with a tweeny-bopper show. shut up. who even has the patience for 5 +1s in this house it's 3 +1 and only barely bc I don't know how structured fic works so it's not even separate like it's supposed to be. anyway enjoy some dumb teenagers falling in love if the dialogue is cringe sorry lol I was trying to stay in the tone of the show and may have gone a little bit too disney channel (Also if you see typos/the same adjective used twice in one sentence/paragraph, no you didn't I don't edit it makes me nervous)  ------------------------------- (ao3) ------------------------------ '... Luke has thrown out any semblance of personal space. He orbits around her just as closely as the others, no longer threatened by or hyper-aware of the consequences of his proximity. Basically, he’s getting entirely too comfortable.'

(3 times Julie and Luke almost kissed and 1 time they did) ------------------------------------ Luke is overly physical. Theoretically, Julie already knew this. She’s seen him with the boys, the way he lives in other people’s space, hanging off Reggie and lurking next to Alex, not caring where his lanky limbs or knees or elbows end up, even if it’s in other people’s ribs. He was never like that with her, too afraid of the crushing disappointment that came when she phased through his hands. But now, there isn’t the strange, tingles-up-her neck way-weird, way-wrong sensation that came when she accidentally brushed through him. So even though Julie’s used to keeping a respectful distance, Luke has thrown out any semblance of personal space. He orbits around her just as closely as the others, no longer threatened by or hyper-aware of the consequences of his proximity.  Basically, he’s getting entirely too comfortable. 

She notices it the first time during rehearsal, when they’re hashing out the particulars of a melody -- Luke wants it to go down, and Julie thinks it should go up. She plunks herself down at the grand piano to prove that her idea will sound better, fanning the half-finished sheet music out across the top, pointing out the measure they’re arguing over, smudged and crinkled from repeated erasings. 

Luke narrows his eyes at her from across the room, his face set in his trademark (adorable) grumpy expression. “It just sounds better!” she argues. “Listen.” She puts her hands on the keys, left hand hitting the chord, right dancing over her proposed melody. “So please, keep chasing me…” she sings, building to the last word and sliding her voice over an intricate run ending in a step up. Looking up, she tilts her head, her wild hair piled into a tenuous bun, curly tendrils framing her face. Luke’s stomach does an interesting flip. “See?” 

He stands up, swinging his guitar strap down across his chest before walking around her, putting his right hand over where hers had just been on the paper. He stands just behind her shoulder, sending goosebumps down her spine. “It should go down,” he insists. “It’ll flow better with the next line and then the break before the chorus makes more sense. Listen.” He puts his foot up on the bench and swings his guitar back up like it's an extension of him, playing a riff and singing the line they’re arguing about before dipping in to the next. “So please keep chasing me,” he sings, his voice gracefully stepping up and then back down, “Cause even though I’m runnin’, I know you’re the one I need.” 

“You’re making it too simple!” she cries, slamming her hands down in her lap and turning to face him. She opens her mouth to continue the argument, but when she looks at him, she starts, finally realizing just how close he is. The toe of his sneaker brushes her leg, and he leans over the sheet music, closing her in against the piano. His dark eyebrows pull together, mouth slightly pinched as he concentrates, solid and strong and very much in her space. “Um --” she says. 

He shrugs, shaking his head a little bit. “What,” he says, not understanding what she’s having a problem with. Julie’s eyes drop to his mouth, close and stupid kissable, and he notices the motion. The air crackles as both of them unconsciously draw closer, song forgotten, focused only on each other. Luke leans in, half an inch, and Julie’s breath hitches in her chest. This is stupid. She knows this is stupid. Luke is dead. Full ghost. Not real. Well, real, but not a viable option. He might have a physical presence now -- a very strong, very warm, very attractive physical presence -- but that doesn’t make him any more possible. And yet, here she is, pulled into him like he has his own gravitational field and she’s helpless to it. Luke licks his lips, and Julie tilts her chin up, fractional motion tiptoeing toward something irreversible and dangerous. 

Just as she’s about to step over that uncrossable line, there’s an almighty crash. Both of their heads whip up in time to see Alex topple off his stool -- he’d fallen asleep as they were arguing. The noise wakes Reggie, whose head was lolling against his amp. “I didn’t do it!” he yells, flailing into sitting up straight. 

Julie clears her throat and turns back to the keyboard, stretching her hands over the keys. “You’re, uh --” she says, glancing at Luke out of the corner of her eye to find him smirking in an infuriatingly adorable manner. “You’re right. It should go down.” He stands up straight, mildly surprised at his easy victory, and backs off from the piano to show Reggie the chords. They sketch out the verse and Alex adds a backing beat, the moment forgotten. 

That is, until Carlos comes in to nag her to eat. Alex poofs out and Reggie dives behind his amp. Since the whole discovering-corporeality thing, they’re not totally sure if Julie’s the only one who can see them still, and they’d rather not have to explain to Julie’s dad what three teenage ‘holograms’ are doing living in his garage. Carlos delivers his message and then darts back inside, eager for dinner, and Julie stands up from the piano, gathering the half-finished song and tucking it into the folder she keeps her in-progress projects in. 

Reggie emerges in a comic mess of limbs and grins at her, Alex poofing back on to his stool. “I’ll be back after dinner to finish this,” she says, hoping they don't notice the shake in her hands as she tucks the folder away. Luke pops his chin over the edge of the couch, behind which he’d taken cover. 

“Hey Julie!” he calls, and she turns back to look at him. “Just remember; KISS.” 

Her brain short-circuits, heart tripping over itself as she remembers his eyes on her, his shoulders and his hands and his stupid concentration face. “I, uh -- What are you --” she sputters.

A shit-eating grin spreads across Luke’s face as he puts his elbows on top of the couch and pushes himself up. “Keep it simple, stupid.” 

Julie practically runs out of the garage. Alex raises an eyebrow, his gaze arcing from the door to land on Luke. “That was uh…” Luke schools his expression into one of false innocence. “Bold.” Luke rolls his eyes and brushes him off, but Reggie gives Alex a knowing look. Their friends are idiots. 

It happens again one afternoon when Carlos has a baseball game and Julie has the house to herself. Or, so she thinks. She’s lazing around on the couch, avoiding her history homework spread out on the coffee table, Adventure Time babbling on the television. She’s slowly working her way through a bag of gummy bears and m&ms (her favorite candy combination),  wearing an enormous hoodie that used to be her mom’s, home alone; life is fantastic. Until -- 

“Oh, sweet, cartoons!” Luke poofs into existence directly next to her on the couch, and she starts violently enough to shake candy into the couch cushions. Some of it lands on his chest, and he holds up a green gummy bear with a wistful expression. Julie just stares at him, still mildly in shock, definitely still annoyed, and really not in the mood to endure his moping about food when she was having a perfectly nice time by herself. 

“Hey,” he says, either ignoring or unaware of what he’s just done to her heart rate and her peaceful afternoon. “You think now that I’m corporeal --” (he over-pronounces the word, having just learned it from Flynn days before) “I can eat like, regular human food?” It isn’t until he looks to her for an answer that he realizes what he’s just done. “Oh, sorry,” he says, that same stupid-ass grin settling on his face, not sorry even a little bit. “Did I spook ya?” 

His glee at the pun, which he definitely stole from Reggie, sparkles in his gray-green eyes, and Julie’s heart, which had just started to recover from his sudden appearance, trips over itself one more time. Emerging from the shaken-up snowglobe of her brain, she blurts out her first thought. “You’re the worst,” she says, even while thinking the opposite. 

He looks genuinely hurt for about half a second before turning the gummy bear towards her, too, and speaking for it. “You should be nice to Luke,” he says in an absurd voice. “He’s so handsome and talented!” He laughs at his own joke and pitches his voice up to continue with the bit, but she snatches the candy out of his hand and pops into her mouth, grinning. He feigns shock. “That bear could have had a family, Julie.” 

“If they did, they’ll all be happy together in my stomach,” she says, eating another one to punctuate the statement. Luke laughs, and the sound has a heart-stopping melody of its own. It’s comfortable, the relationship that they’ve developed with each other. He always laughs at her jokes and is the first to offer her a compliment after rehearsal, and she loves his dorky sense of humor, even when she gives him a hard time about it. They write music and goof around, and even with the (very strong) undercurrent of romantic (she hopes) tension between them, a friendship sits comfortably on top. He’s only been in her life for a short time,  but she can’t imagine it without him. Her feelings for him endanger that, so she does her best not to let it show. He asks her what she’s watching, and she explains the basic premise of the episode so that he can understand what’s going on. 

She’s hyper-aware of him as they watch the show, and  she envies the ease with which he occupies her space, his shoulder brushing hers, their knees occasionally bumping. He slouches all the way down on the couch, one foot kicked up on the table, turning the remote in his hands and messing with the battery cover, completely at home. (He’s always fiddling with something -- a pen, his necklace -- or bouncing his leg, or clicking a guitar pick between his teeth. It’s a habit that’s mostly adorable and only sometimes annoying.) If he notices her staring at him, he doesn’t say anything. 

It takes a couple more episodes, but she finally relaxes, and the distance between them -- already spare -- vanishes, her shoulder tucked under his, her head angled toward him, their feet bumping on the table. Half her attention is on Finn and the land of Ooo, and half on the boy beside her, who doesn’t seem to give any indication that he’s thinking about this as much as she is. Luke has a way of pulling her in until she’s closer than she ever planned to be, like she can’t help but touch him. Ever since the night they played the Orpheum, he’s become magnetic, his presence a force she can’t resist. If she tilted her head down, just a fraction, it would be resting on his shoulder. What would he do? Would he shrug her off, or rest his head on hers? She watches his hands play with the remote, imagining what his strong, slender fingers would feel like laced with hers. She’s had crushes before, of course -- she liked Nick all the way from seventh grade up to this year -- but nothing so real and powerful as this. 

“Don’t you think Finn sounds just like Reggie?” Luke asks, pulling her from her thoughts. She looks up at him, and he looks down at her, and -- oh. 

He’s very close. 

His eyes always remind her of an overcast sky, swirling with unknown depth, and they widen when they meet hers, filled with awe. Blood rushes in her ears, muting the TV, tuning out anything that isn’t him. Her heart is beating so hard and so fast she wonders peripherally if he can hear it, and then that thought fizzles out with the rest of any kind of logic when his gaze drops to her mouth. He’s going to kiss her. He’s going to kiss her!! Panic and elation and anticipation all scramble in her chest. She’s never kissed anyone before, and even though she’s never asked, she knows he probably has. What if she’s bad at it? She’s half freaking out and half telling herself to shut the hell up as he turns his entire body towards her, his hand reaching up to hold her face and -- 

The front door slams open, announcing Carlos and Ray. “Mija!!” her dad calls. Luke jerks back from her like he’s been burned, eyes filled with absolute terror, before he disappears. 

“JULIEEEEE!!” Carlos hollers, launching himself across the living room at her and landing on her stomach, knocking the air out of her. Her arms come up around him automatically, despite all the sweat and the diamond dirt sticking to it. Feeling mildly shell shocked and like she’s been hit by a hell of a lot more than her little brother, she barely listens as Carlos and their dad babble over each other in an attempt at telling the story of Carlos’ game-winning home-base slide. She’ll be happy for him once her heart rate slows down. 

Luke stays away for almost a full twenty-four hours after that particular mishap, long enough she almost asks Reggie and Alex if he talked to them about it. There’s about a thousand reasons not to, but mostly, she doesn’t know if she can even explain just what happened. She does tell Flynn, who launches into a very confusing monologue that starts with her admonishing Julie for thinking anything good can come from involving herself with a literal ghost and ends with her gushing about how many cute love songs they could write together, zero percent of which makes her feel better. 

The only reason he doesn’t continue avoiding her is rehearsal, which, of course, he would never miss. She’s hoping to talk to him before they get started, but then the bus gets stuck in traffic and all of her boys are already set up with their instruments and having an impromptu jam session by the time she gets home.  “What --” she hisses as she heaves the doors shut behind her. “Did I tell you guys about playing in here without me?” Alex shrugs and apologizes, and she can’t really be mad at Reggie, at least not for long. 

But Luke -- he barely looks at her, nervous fingers dancing across a complicated riff even as the other boys stop playing. It takes a second of silence before he looks up to see the rest of his band staring at him. “Oh,” he says, the phrase ending in the discordant sound of fingernails on steel strings. “Yeah, right. Sorry.” 

They get started, but nothing sounds right. Luke rushes the tempo and refuses to make eye contact with anyone, spinning off into fancy riffs that have no place in the song they’re working on. Reggie keeps trying to keep up with him, tripping up Alex and frustrating Julie, and when the song grinds to a cacophonous halt for the fourth time, she stands up from the piano. Reggie takes a step back. 

“What is your problem?” she practically yells, stomping over to Luke. He’s been surly and unusually stubborn, and the shift from his usual cheerful, passionate demeanor builds her own stewing anxieties to a dangerous head.

“It’s not my problem you can’t keep up,” he says, and then, after watching the words register in Julie’s expression, immediately regrets it. Alex’s eyebrows shoot up and Reggie makes a very soft ‘ooooohhh’ noise under his breath.

“It’s not keeping up if you can’t hold a steady tempo,” she says, too upset over his refusal to cooperate to catch the reaction from her bandmates.

“Okay, so maybe I was rushing,” he admits, trying to walk it back. But Julie’s on a roll, and once she gets started laying into him, she very rarely lets up.

“Thank you!” she yells, the sarcasm clear in her tone. She’d been especially fond of the product so far, a song she thought embodied the perfect blend of Luke’s harder edge and her singer-songwriter roots. His sudden, uncharacteristic left turn is as much an interruption in their rehearsal as a knock to the tenuous pride she’d been building in the piece.  “And what are all those riffs you’re tossing in? You have to hear how they don’t fit.” 

“Oh come on,” he says, proud in his ability and therefore less willing to step down. He rolls his shoulders back and moves toward her, the challenge set in his spine. “I was shredding and you know it.” Luke is sweet and kind and silly and compassionate, but he’s also a musician, and a lead guitarist at that. His ego, though it rarely becomes an issue, is far from insubstantial. 

“If you want a solo, fine!” she cries with exasperation, her hands flying through the air like they always do when she’s upset. “But you have to say something so we can give you room for it!” Her annoyance has turned down the sensitivity on her Luke-nonsense monitor, caught up enough in the trouble that she can’t see that he’s riling her up on purpose.

“What, you afraid of a little improvisation?” He’s smiling now, and his obvious glee, such a stark flip from where she thought this was going, throws off her tirade. He starts walking toward her, and his newfound physicality gives him an ability to fluster her to a much greater degree than before.

“No --” she stammers, stumbling backwards, distracted out of anger by his sparkling eyes and the power in the body approaching rapidly. “That’s not what I --” There it is again, that power he has to turn the rest of the world into radio static, her vision blurring and her hearing dulling until it’s just Luke filling up the world in front of her. 

“C’mon Julie,” he says, and right now she hates his stupid smirk and the stupid way he rolls her name around in his mouth before letting it out. “you have to take risks once in a while.” She’s backed up against the piano now, her hands wrapped tight around the lid, and he’s still pushing it, strong and warm and undeniably, frustratingly male in her space. 

But Julie isn’t one to let him intimidate her into silence, no matter how cute and well-muscled he may be. She takes a breath and looks him in his ridiculous sparkly eyes, poking him in his absurdly firm chest.“I am not afraid of taking risks, mister,” she says, “Let’s not forget who performed in front of her entire school to get back into the music program --” 

“My idea,” he scoffs, not backing up. Why isn’t he backing up.

“Or who fronts a band of actual ghosts!” she continues, her voice increasing in volume again, and the speed of her heart tripping over itself could be from the argument or the boy who’s collarbones are less than a foot from her face. Both are entirely possible. 

“Less ghost now,” he reminds her, tilting his head, his weight leaned one one leg, his hand resting on the head of his guitar, relaxed when they’re supposed to be arguing. 

“You just get to poof out after we perform!” she says, only about two-thirds of her mind still focused on the fight itself, the other third completely wrapped up in the feeling of Luke in front of her. “I’m the one who has to stick around and ask questions!” 

“So you’re saying you take chances,” he says, diabolically diplomatic instead of challenging. He leans forward, putting his hands on the piano behind her, caging her in with his arms. She refuses to back down again, even though his face is now inches from hers. “You’d take a leap of faith?” 

“Yeah,” she says, only half-certain, because she’s not totally sure they’re still talking about music, and her heart is in the base of her throat and her stomach is somewhere around her shoes, and suddenly her hands are sweating when they definitely weren’t a minute ago. This definitely isn’t an argument about the song anymore. 

“Oh yeah?” he says, and there’s the challenge again, except this one sounds more like a dare, and he’s definitely looking at her lips this time, not even trying to be subtle about it, and her hands are braced on his forearms and when did they get there? And Luke is warm and when she looks up, his eyes are on hers, and despite all that bravado and provocation there’s still a question there, and all she would have to do to answer is lift up on her toes and finally, finally press her lips against his, and -- 

Alex coughs. The oxygen goes out of the room like someone opened an airlock, and Julie feels herself sink, just barely, back down on her heels. The world fills back in, colors and sounds suddenly too bright, too abrasive. Tearing her eyes off Luke, she glances over his shoulder to where Reggie and Alex are, still with their instruments, watching them intently. Alex looks politely put out, his eyebrows tilted up with incredulity, like he's asking if they seriously just made him watch that. Reggie, on the other hand, hides nothing in his expression, shock and amusement there in equal parts as he glances between Alex and the two of them still tucked close against the piano, jaw askance in a surprised smile. 

"Are you done?" Alex asks, in a tone that sounds less like a question. "It’s not that I mind…" he gestures between the two of them with a drumstick. "This, but like, time and place, dude." He's not talking to Julie. Luke clears his throat, appropriately chastised, but still looking smug as shit. 

"Um, sorry," she mutters as he returns to his spot next to his amp. 

Alex shrugs. "Not your fault," he says, "from the top?" 

"Uh," she says, frozen for a moment in embarrassment and confusion. She looks to Alex, and he gives her one of his soft, kind smiles, the sort that makes her feel like everything is going to be okay. “Right, okay,” she finishes, as her hands twitch and she settles back into her body. Rushing back around to the bench, she flexes her hands over the keys, curling them into fists and then back out again when they tremble. “From the top.” 

The rehearsal goes -- okay, after that. The magic is missing; therefore, while she usually feels inspired and courageous and empowered walking out of the garage, she just feels exhausted and drained. She eats dinner with her family, and her dad definitely notices that she’s uncharacteristically quiet, but saves asking about it until after Carlos is safely sequestered with his iPad. “How ya doin, kiddo?” he asks as she helps him clear up the dishes. “Everything okay?” 

Julie looks at her dad with mild alarm, wondering what exactly he knows. He does his best, he really does, but it took him a while to even notice she was in a band. Not to mention, he still believes they’re holograms. “Um,” she says convincingly. “Yeah?” 

He smiles kindly, in the way that means he’s very politely calling bullshit. “Alright, mija. What’s going on?” 

Heaving a sigh, Julie keeps her eyes on the dishwasher she’s loading, trying her best to plan an escape route out of this conversation. “I promise, Dad,” she says, “It’s nothing.” and then, what she thinks are the magic words. “Boy stuff.” 

But Ray’s been prepping for this, had conversations with Rose about it before she passed, while the cancer slowly ate her alive. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to be there for her daughter through the time in her life a girl needs her mother the most, and she wasn’t about to let him hide behind toxic masculinity and leave Julie to figure it out on her own. “Okay,” Ray says, trepidation clear in his voice but also not unwilling to approach the topic. “What’s his name?” 

Julie almost drops the pot she’s scrubbing. “Does it matter?” she asks, her voice crawling up several octaves. 

“Just trying to learn who is in my daughter’s life,” he answers diplomatically, sitting down at the counter to make it clear he’s not letting her out of this one easily. 

“I promise, Dad,” she says, doing her best to frantically dodge the interrogation she knows is coming, regretting she brought it up at all, cursing herself for being so obvious. “It’s dumb. You don’t even know him.” 

Ray nods slowly, pretending to believe her. Julie goes after the pot a little harder, because maybe if she just finishes the dishes she can go upstairs and bury herself in her bed and not have to have this conversation anymore. “It’s not that guitarist, is it?” he asks, and her spine goes stiff as a ramrod. Ray’s her dad, but he’s not blind. He’s seen the way they look at each other when they perform, the way the boy follows her around the stage like a puppy, desperate for her attention, disappointed when she jams with the other members of their band and not him. He’s an excellent musician, but Ray knows too many stories of near-legends gone sour with misdirected young love. 

“No!” Julie cries immediately in an obvious lie. “Of course not!” She turns, half-laughing, explanations falling out of her mouth “We’re just friends,” she insists, lacing her fingers in front of her and nodding exaggeratedly. “Just friends. Only friends. Uh-huh. Friends. And!” she continues, gesturing widely, “he doesn’t even live here! So that… wouldn’t even make sense!” she laughs awkwardly. “So no way. That it’s him. No way it’s him.” 

Ray sighs out a laugh that Julie’s too panicked to hear and leans forward on his elbows. “Alright, nina. Just be careful, okay?” She’s nodding along, edging her way towards the stairs. “You and your band…” She looks like Rose, in that hoodie that practically swallows her, hair piled messily on top of her head. Her mom was also a terrible liar, he remembers fondly. “You have something special. Don’t throw that away for a boy.” 

Julie nods rapidly and then bolts, thundering up the stairs before throwing her bedroom door closed behind her and diving headfirst onto her bed, burying herself in decorative pillows. How does everyone  know?? First Flynn and then Reggie and Alex and now her dad? Is she that obvious? (Um, yes.) She flops onto her back, staring up at the colorful tapestries slung across her ceiling, the string lights and posters and art. Usually, she loves her room, the feeling of her creative mind as a space she can inhabit, exploring her heart and the things she loves without having to shut out the outside world. But tonight, she feels trapped in her own head, so she grabs her notebook and squeezes out the window, perched on the roof outside her room. 

The evening air is cool and crisp, the gentlest bite warning the oncoming winter, as much as there is a winter in LA. She spends a while scribbling down half-baked lyric ideas and doodling angry black scribbles around the edges of the pages when nothing comes out right. It’s harder to write on her own, now, without the steady pulse of Luke’s genius behind her, the electricity that flows between them as they create impeccable harmonies. Sometimes, it feels like music belongs to the both of them together, a joined force, like they’ve given up their individual melodies for something greater. It’s thrilling and terrifying all at once. 

Eventually, she just ends up holding the notebook open to ‘Perfect Harmony’ with one hand, the other arm wrapped around her legs, her chin propped on her knees. She still hasn’t shown it to Luke, afraid of how real it feels, how clear it makes her feelings for him. Also, it’s a ballad, which they haven’t even approached yet, and she has no idea how Reggie and Alex will feel about such an explicitly romantic duet. She’s thinking that maybe she might be able to vague it up, maybe even make it a solo piece, when Luke appears next to her, like thinking about him draws him to her. (Which might actually be true -- she hasn’t examined that very closely.) 

“Hey!” he says cheerfully, all awkwardness from the evening’s rehearsal ostensibly disappeared. He plucks the notebook out of her hand, using the other arm to hold back her immediate demands for its return. “New stuff?” he asks. This is not normally such a grievous invasion of privacy. Ever since they started writing together, their songwriting journals have become common property, and half the pages in hers are marked up with his handwriting and vice versa. 

“It’s not ready yet!” she cries, pushing against the (stupidly strong) arm he has across her collarbone, willing to climb bodily over him to snatch the notebook back. Luke’s face very slowly falls as he reads it, the lyrics sinking in, and her protests trail off as she stops scrambling to grab it out of his hands. 

He stands suddenly, pacing across the roof. “Did you --” he starts, breathing shallowly, his tongue tucking his teeth between his lips, nostrils flaring before he speaks again. “Why did you copy this out of my songbook?” It’s not accusatory, only a question, born of true confusion. 

“I didn’t,” Julie replies without skipping a beat, equally baffled. 

“I wrote this after the garage party,” he says. “How is it in your notebook?” 

“I wrote it at school before the garage party,” she replies, doing her best to keep down the memory of the Luke in her imagination and the song coming to her fully formed in the form of a Patrick Swayze-esque daydream. She didn’t even tell Flynn about that part. 

“At school…” Luke repeats, studying the lyrics with a furrow between his eyebrows, and as much as Julie is also reeling from shock at the mystery, it’s kind of adorable to watch him try and solve it. “This doesn’t make sense,” he says, looking up at her, signature grumpy expression in place. He tilts the notebook flat, like he’s presenting it to her, hoping she has the next steps. Like he’s reached his conclusion, and it’s that he’s confused. 

“It doesn’t,” she says, and it comes out as half a laugh unintentionally, just looking at his ridiculous, adorable face. 

“Why are you laughing?” he demands with exasperated urgency. “This is super weird!” He rushes over and collapses next to her, a mess of flannel and limbs and beautiful dumbass. He shoves the notebook back into her hands as she folds her legs underneath her, relinquishing her grip on her knees. 

“Yeah,” she sighs, unable to wipe the grin from her face. “Yeah, it is.” Luke looks like he wants to ask her what she’s smiling at, but then he starts smiling, too, because her happiness is his happiness. Julie’s already past the strange coincidence, lost in the joy of his gray-green eyes and the feeling of him next to her. She’s too used to strange, to the ever-changing rules of the afterlife and the constant uncertainty that Luke and her boys bring to her life. Yes, it’s strange, but she’s in a ghost band and her crush is dead and still manages to look at her like that so she has a certain level of perspective when it comes to things like this. 

“What are you --” Luke tries to say, but her eyes are on his and they’re warm and brown and kind and he’s finding it a little hard to form sentences. 

“This is ridiculous,” she says, and he’s nodding without knowing what he’s agreeing to. “We wrote the same song on the same day,” she laughs, and he nods again, half-listening, half lost in her. She’s excited now, about the possibility brought on by magic and her connection -- their  connection -- souls tied together with passion and music and love. “That’s impossible!” It cements something for her, the feeling of coming together, of sliding into place. They’re so solid, tight, together, on the same wavelength… musicians have put it a thousand ways throughout the years, to communicate the feeling of a co-writer, a bandmate, a partner, reading your mind, singing the next line, playing the next riff that was just in your head. Julie and Luke get the added bonus of being inexplicably spiritually linked. Nothing can break that, or replace it. She’s not scared of it, anymore. 

“Impossible,” he echoes. He always feels a little bit stronger, a little more alive whenever he’s with Julie like this, just the two of them, hanging out or writing music, and he’s in her immediate proximity, soaking in the warmth of her brown skin and brown eyes and the chaotic energy of her wild, incredible hair. She pulls him in, without knowing the power she holds or the light that she emits, casting a golden glow over everything around her. 

“Luke,” she says, and he tunes back in, realizing that he’s steadily leaning toward her as they sit on the roof, Julie cross-legged, Luke angled toward her, one leg stretched out, his elbow propped on his other knee. “Are you listening?” 

“Um,” he swallows, “Yeah?” but he’s looking at her lips, not her eyes, and he’s thinking about kissing her, just once, just to see what she tastes like, remembering the smell of gummies and m&ms, hoping she’ll be just as sweet. She doesn’t say anything, mostly because she forgot what she was going to say in the first place, watching his eyes watch her mouth, breathing him in. He’s too close again, closer than any friend or bandmate should be, and there’s no mic between them, and the door to her room is closed, and there’s no bandmates or brothers or dads, and her heart pounds in her chest. 

When she tilts her chin towards him, she feels ready, finally, knowing what he means to her. Only a breath separates them, but they both stop, waiting for the inevitable interruption, the door slamming open, or someone calling up from the yard below, but it doesn’t come. Realizing what they’re both waiting for, they breathe out a simultaneous laugh, their foreheads dropping together. The tension fades, and Julie’s smile feels uncontainable, demanding every inch of her face as this beautiful, goofy, genus, talented boy adores her while she sits there, falling in love with him. 

It’s easier, this moment, than the one before, because it feels less laden with the weight of someone pulling away, unsure or unwanting. This moment is comfortable, joyful, the two of them acknowledging every minute of want and disappointment and hilarious misfortune over the past few days, acknowledging what they would have asked for instead. And when Luke finally reaches up, pulling her in gently with his hand on her neck, his thumb sliding over her jaw, it’s with confidence and tenderness, reassured that she wants this, too. Julie leans easily into the touch, and when their lips meet, the spark and rush is better than any performance, any screaming crowd drowning in lights. They kiss each other, moving together, leaning in as one, harmony made in the movement of mouths and the press of lips, and this moment -- it’s perfect. 

[theyellmanfan]

Random hizashi headcanon??

hell yeah, here’s some off the top of my head!

under the cut bc I went absolutely hog wild.

- his radio show tends to get a lot of calls from villains and people in dangerous/bad situations, so there is a hired team of people to vet calls before they are allowed to air, and will redirect them when necessary. there is a team of crisis workers there to help people who are calling because they are in a hard place or at risk of hurting themselves, a team with the equipment necessary to trace calls in the case of villains, and his show is paired up with many local hero agencies and the police so that details about emergency situations can be sent to the right people as quickly as possible!

- he doesn’t actually do patrols due to the destructive nature of his quirk, it’s part of how he is able to balance 3 jobs, his hero work isn’t a part of his regular schedule. he’s just on call for more serious situations.

- he would be a high ranking hero if he didn’t spread himself so thin. he focuses so much on building the foundations of a more unified, better world for people to live in that things that would bring up his statistics tend to fall to the way side. he honestly doesn’t care as long as he’s popular enough for people to be interested in hearing his voice.

- he’s vegan! and before anyone says anything about his hero costume, environmentally friendly vegan leathers exist sdlfjsdf. idk I just see him as the type of person who is so passionate about wanting everything (people, society, the planet) to be better than it is presently that I can’t picture his values not bleeding into his personal life. I wouldn’t be surprised if every decision he makes has others or the greater good in mind, thus his decision to live a vegan lifestyle.

- he can’t cook for shit. he just doesn’t come across as someone who would have the patience/self control to follow a recipe. he would just randomly come across a spice while looking for the one the recipe called for and be like hM I love this flavour, I think I’ll add it! or, oh shoot the measuring cup is in the dishwasher... hmm this mug is probably about the same size, I’ll use it to measure this ingredient instead! and he ends up with an inedible dish by the end of it after all his little tweaks and mistakes.

- he hosts, makes appearances at, and contributes to charity events regularly. at least once a month, though he makes announcements for them and non profit organizations practically every show and over his social media pages daily.

- he was a gen ed transfer alongside Aizawa, as he didn’t have access to the equipment/facilities necessary to train his quirk before being admitted to UA and wasn’t able to destroy any robots without risking hurting other examinees. after getting in, as a student he had access to UA’s training grounds and honed his quirk with the help of Aizawa.

- his quirk doesn’t actually give him the ability to amplify sound waves, nor is it a mutation of the human vocal chords. theoretically, if he were producing sound waves that destructive, the vibrations would damage his body (not just his ears). instead, his quirk gives him the ability to manipulate the chemical composition of the atmosphere around him. depending on the medium you are in, sound travels differently, so he has been unknowingly just altering the atmosphere around him when using his quirk. if he knew this is what he was doing, his quirk would be a lot more powerful, as he could focus on increasing or decreasing the concentration of certain molecules to do much more (ex. increasing the atmospheric water content to produce and shoot water out of seemingly no where, lowering water content when underwater to produce a breathable bubble around his head, increasing the carbon dioxide content around a villain temporarily until they pass out for easy capture, lowering the content of toxic gases and other dangerous materials from the air, ect).

- he was raised as an only child by his grandmother.

- said grandmother was his biggest ally growing up, supporting him through everything unconditionally and with so much love. when he came out as bi/pan and nonbinary, she was the type of guardian to get one of those shirts that say I love my lgbt+ grandchild! her influence is part of the reason Hizashi conducts his hero work as he does, largely through advocacy and support, since he knows how much his own grandmother’s support helped him.

- he is the most outwardly spoken hero about social issues in japan, and is always the first to contribute and bring attention to causes. he will often use his radio show as a way to educate and inform the general public, bringing in actual experts on topics and those with experience to let their voices be heard.

- loves watching cartoons!

- he hates it when people make assumptions about who he is as a person and assume they know who he is and what he wants/thinks. and an extension of this, he hates when people treat him like a one-dimensional caricature instead of a person. though he has definitely used it to his advantage in his hero work, it still hurts him. think class clown stereotype amped up. he initially presented himself as the goofy, ditsy guy who would always be happy despite everything because he wanted more than anything to make people smile and make the world a better place, but when he was younger he didn’t know how he was supposed to do that. he resorted to allowing himself to be the person everyone laughed at, going out of his way to be ridiculous, and though it hurt, it was worth it to put a smile on their faces. as he got older, he didn’t know how to stop even after he had the presence and resources to make a positive difference through his careers, so the reputation kind of just stuck with him. Aizawa was the first person he figured out how to be himself around.

I feel like this all says a lot about how I see Hizashi’s character haha.

If people are just going to make fun of him for being loud and annoying, he’ll own it and be loud and annoying in a way that helps others!!

he’s a good boy and he’s only so angry and feral bc he’s sick of all the awful things in the world.

[thequirkdetective]

Investigation 13: Elasticity – Danjuro Tobita

It’s almost the Christmas holidays as I write this, as well as being exactly halfway through December. Hopefully during the holidays we can catch back up to schedule, so this should be the last upload that isn’t on time. Let’s not dwell on it. Shall we?

Danjuro Tobita, better known as Gentle Criminal, has the quirk of elasticity. This allows him to make anything he touches elastic (in the sense of property, rather than material). I only learned when researching this quirk that his name is in fact a pun of the quirk in Japanese, where the standard Japanese kanji for ‘elasticity’ also translates as ‘gentleman’. This has nothing to do with the investigation, I just thought it was a cool fact.

The first problem we run into is that elasticity isn’t a set property at the molecular level. Different materials are elastic for different reasons, mostly due to the different ways the atoms and molecules within the substance are bonded together. For example, rubber is elastic because of its complex interlinked polymers that align when stretched. Most other substances deform elastically due to uniform deformation of their atomic structure. Which brings us to our second problem…

Nothing is perfectly elastic. Rubber and other elastomers are ‘elastic’ up to a point (around 10x their original length), but other materials can only deform slightly before they become plastic. Plasticity, in opposition to elasticity, is the property of a substance that retains its new shape when deformed, while elastic materials return to their original shape.

These two factors together make the effects of Gentle’s quirk highly irregular. To explain them, we first have to look at elasticity in more depth. So-called ‘perfect elasticity’ is described by Hooke’s Law, which states the force required to stretch or extend a material is directly proportional to the distance it is to be stretched or extended. This means to compress a spring to a quarter its length, one must apply twice the force required to halve its length, and so forth. This is (practically) true for all materials to a point. After that point, known as the yield point, the material stops being perfectly elastic, and begins deforming plastically. There are other stages between this and the material breaking, but these are unnecessary to discuss since no material that has been affected by the quirk has ever reached its yield point.

Let’s begin, as always, with the largest use of the quirk, here being the material that underwent the largest force and still remained elastic. The answer would of course be the air trampolines that redirected Izuku’s pellet of air[1], but the physics behind this interaction is possibly the most gratuitous and bloody murder of sense in the anime. I usually shy away from criticising the anime on its science, primarily because it’s a work of fiction about superheroes, but also because its purpose is a source of entertainment, and I bring the burden of applying science to it upon myself. In this instance however, I am allowing myself a small fracture in my usual composure to discuss why this scene is absolutely nonsensical.

Firstly, Izuku cannot create a bullet of air. To flick his finger is to create a pressure wave that spreads out from the point of creation at the speed of sound. No faster, no slower. If the finger is to move at a supersonic speed, the resultant pressure wave would create a sonic boom, and still travel at only the speed of light, still in a dissipating wave. Due to the properties of waves, their amplitude decreases with the square of the distance from the source. Thus Deku’s blast wave would not need aiming, and would also be barely a light breeze at such a distance as it is used.

Additionally, and most grievously, Gentle cannot create trampolines of air in the air. This is for the simple (yet often misquoted) fact of Newton’s Third Law. The classic, profound, smart-guy quip version is “every action has an equal opposite reaction”, but this is most likely only because the full answer is far more bloated. The law is in fact “when body A exerts a force on body B, body B exerts a force on body A that is of equal magnitude, opposite direction, identical type, and in the same line, as the force of body A on body B”. Quite a mouthful, but there’s a lot of subtle and important detail missing from the first, I’m sure you’ll agree. The problem here is that the created trampoline must exert a large force of Gentle to cause such acceleration (see Newton’s Second Law of Motion), and thus Gentle exerts a force on the trampoline, that causes an accelerate in the same proportion to the acceleration of Gentle as the ratios of their respective masses. Since air is a lot less dense than Gentle, and his quirk does not appear to add mass to a system, the trampoline would be accelerated backwards considerably fast before Gentle could gain any significant acceleration. It would be like trying to push yourself backwards by punching a balloon. Sure, the balloon is elastic, but it does not have enough mass to exert the required force. The only way this could work is if the trampolines were connected to the earth (thus the mass of the system is increased), but the only way this could occur is via more elasticated air. This does not happen because a) it is not seen – the elasticated air becomes slightly opaque (possibly a stylistic effect to show the action of the quirk) and there are no opaque structures visible, just a single floating disc, and b) these structures would be elasticated, and thus the system would be too flexible to exert such force over such distance.

Right, after that little rant, lets get back to the matter at hand. During the fight with Gentle and Deku there is a scene within a construction site that gives a lot of valuable information. This comes in the form of gratuitous quirk use, as well as an explicit statement of the quirk’s features: it cannot be turned off at will, and instead fades over time. This is odd when compared to almost all other quirks (if you need any examples, every other quirk investigated save one can be both activated and deactivated at will) and so it is likely it ties into the mechanism of the quirk’s action.

The scene contains two key uses of elasticity. Firstly, multiple steel girders are made elastic, and secondly a crane arm is made elastic. The former is useful because it is used by Gentle for movement, so the force on it and thus a lower limit for the yield point can be garnered. The second is useful because it showcases the flexibility of elasticated materials by how much the crane arm bends.

The steel beam bends about 1m each side of its equilibrium, which seems to be relatively unaffected by the quirk. The beam seems around 10m long, but thankfully the beams look like Universal Beams, which have standardised measurements including each type’s flange thickness, root radius, and most importantly, mass by metre and elastic modulus in each axis. Unfortunately there are almost 100 types, each of subtly different dimensions and properties. After downloading a spreadsheet and sifting through all types, I can confidently say the distinction does not matter, as the differences are all within the margin of error that arises upon attempts to measure the on-screen girder.

Let’s start with some maths. There’s no escaping it, and this time it’s back with a vengeance. Assuming the girder bends to approximate an arc (a section of a circle’s circumference) we can use some geometry to figure out the length of the original and stretched girders, and thus how much longer the latter is than the former. The unstretched we already know is around 10m long, and the centre bends ~1.5m from equilibrium. Since the ends are fixed, we know the chord subtending the arc is 10m long, and the distance bent (1.5m) is the distance between the arc and the centre of the chord. I won’t bore you with the details, but it turns out that the steel only increases length by 60cm, or one 60th its original length.

There isn’t much clear data on how elastic metals are (illustrated by the fact that a cursory search of “how far do metals stretch” gets 10 results in before some very different and nsfw questions come up instead, no points for guessing what they are) but there is an incredibly useful dataset courtesy of engineering toolbox, containing the ultimate tensile strength, yield strength or Young’s Modulus of almost every material you can think of. I’m not sure which engineer would need to compare the elasticity of compact and spongy bone, but I’m sure some day I’ll be glad the entry is there. For now we’ll look at the structural steel values, and thankfully all three are available. Let’s take a moment to discuss what they mean.

Young’s Modulus is the ratio of stress against strain, and has a fixed value for each material. Stress is the force per unit of cross-sectional area applied to the material, and the strain is the stretched length sure to such stress over the original strength. Yield strength is the minimum stress required to deform the material plastically, and ultimate tensile strength is the stress required to snap the material. Structural Steel has a Young’s Modulus of 200, so for every 200 MN of force per square metre of cross-sectional area, the beam will double in length. Sadly, these simple calculations are only applicable when the force and extension lie on the same line. In our case, the deformation is complex, non-shear, and therefore cannot be described at an angle relative to the force. In this case, we must apply the terrifyingly named Euler-Bernoulli Beam Theory. It contains some fittingly terrifying equations, included variable functions based on beam material, and second derivatives against two separate nested variables. However, in our scenario, the beam is supported at both ends (known as a simply supported beam) and we’ll assume it is uniform in density, elasticity, etc. Therefore we get an equation that looks like this: σmax = ymax F L / (4 I) where σmax is maximum stress at a given point, ymax is the distance from the point to the neutral axis, F is the force applied to the centre of the beam, L is double the length of the beam, and I is the ‘area moment of inertia of the cross section’. I have almost no idea what that last one means, but thankfully I managed to find an equation for it given different dimensions of a symmetrical I-shaped cross-section. There are two pieces of bad news. 1, it looks like this: Iy = (a^3 h / 12) + (b^3 / 12) (H - h), and 2, we now need to play a game of universal-beam ‘Guess Who’ to gain the correct dimensions.

The beam in the anime seems to be less than 500mm in depth, so that removes 47 possible types. Less than 500mm in width sadly doesn’t remove any more. However, we do know the beam is roughly larger than 150mm, since it larger than Deku’s hand span, which removes another 23. Averaging the rest gives us some dimensions we can use as an approximation of the beam. Thankfully, there exists a table of standard UK I beam dimensions and their respective area moment of inertia of the cross section. Comparing our values to the closest standard gives a value of 7440. Plugging this into the max strain equation, we find the maximum strain on the beam to be 0.79N per square metre. A strangely low number that says to me something must be wrong. The problem is we don’t know the value of F, and since I just used Gentle’s weight the formula treats the beam as incredibly flexible, since it bent so much under such little load. This is a problem, only solved by using a formula involving the Young’s Modulus E  of the beam rather than F. Such a formula is even more complex than those already seen, and is at such a level that I cannot understand how to apply it to the above scenario. Indeed, this post is already much over its due posting date at time of writing, and we have not talked at all about the quirk’s mechanism. Beam theory being as complicated as it is, and having spent now a good few days failing to apply it, I believe it is best we approach the problem from a different angle.

It’s safe to say the metal becomes not just more elastic, but more flexible, when the quirk takes effect. It takes a very large force to bend metal to the extent shown, and that metal would snap or at least bend plastically before that point is reached (sadly I cannot say which would occur). Therefore something about the molecular structure of the metal must change.

As previously discussed, metals and polymers bend differently at the molecular level, and this is because their very structures are different. Metal atoms bond by delocalising their outer electrons, creating positively charged ions attracted to a sea of negatively charged delocalised electrons. This is why metals shine – the electron sea is incredibly smooth, sub atomically so. Polymers bond via covalent bonds and inter-molecular bonds, creating discrete polymers that weakly attract each other. Gentle’s quirk must somehow make both these structures, and others, elastic in the same fashion.

The first answer is to weaken the inter-molecular forces within the structures, allowing polymers/molecules/any base elements to more easily move past each other within the material. Sadly, this just makes the material more ductile, which is the ease with which the material can be elongated via tensile force. To make something more elastic, the forces holing the molecules together must be made, for want of a better word, springier. Essentially, they must be able to act over a longer distance in order to pull the material back into shape after deformation. To do this simply would be to make the bonds stronger, but this would also make the material less flexible and denser. Instead, the force must somehow be spread across some distance profile, maintaining its magnitude at the standard distance of molecules from each other, but fall off slower as distance increases. The way to do this while retaining the other featured of the material is essentially fictional, and would even break thermodynamics (again) by being able to increase the Helmholtz Free Energy within a closed system. Since we’re now changing the mechanism by with one of the four fundamental forces of the universe functions, we can suppose the quirk changes the quirk in such a way ass to create perfectly elastic materials, since they already seem to have ridiculously high yield points.

Supposing this is the case, the question immediately arises – so what? The answer is that perfectly elastic materials have immense uses within many scientific circles. If a material returns to exactly the same state after deformation as it was in before, then it has the same energy. This means any object that hits it rebounds with the same kinetic energy as it started with, a phenomenon known fittingly as a perfectly elastic collision. Every other collision loses energy as heat, save for collisions that stretch the term for physics reasons, such as two orbiting objects. In our case purely elastic collisions have as many uses as elastic materials do, and possibly more. To have any material possible suddenly, even though temporarily, gain perfect elasticity will have material scientists drooling, and although I do not have the intelligence to think of any novel applications of such, asking one of them would I’m sure give you myriad answers.

Another fun application is heat-proofing. A material becomes liquid when the inter-molecular forces are partially overcome by kinetic energy, and gasses when the forces are broken completely. Since these forces are unlimited in distance, the objects would never be able to become gaseous, and would have very high cohesion (surface tension) when liquid. I’m again not sure of the applications of this, but it is cool nonetheless.

To conclude, Gentle Criminal’s quirk affects any material he touches, and changes the effect of the electrostatic forces within it, making them act across any distance, with a slight reduction in magnitude with distance. This works by having the force pull the molecules together from any distance, until they become close enough to be repelled by the electrostatic repulsion of the atoms. Any force applied may overcome the electrostatics for a distance, but will never cause yielding.

[1] Season 4 episode 85: School Festival Start!!

I hope you enjoyed this investigation! It’s almost Christmas as I post this, and as I’m sure you’re aware this post should have ben released on the 1st. I’m also sure you’re aware this has become a trend, and I’m sure you know reasons behind it. It is therefore with a heavy heart I announce we will be taking a hiatus for an undefined length of time. We have decided it is better to write a few posts as backup and prepare for posting, rather than desperately writing posts weeks after they’re due and apologising. We don’t have an idea of when we will be back, but we will. In the mean time, go have a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, and a happy new year. We’ll see you some time in 2021.

[fmdjaewonarchive]

► jasmine.

date(s): 9 november - 1 december 2020 mentions of: n/a word count: +/- 1112 (with lyrics) warnings: n/a details: fmdos4, the creative process behind jasmine. as it turns out jaewon is capable of writing songs without one or multiple breakdowns along the way. he feels scammed he didn’t realize this sooner truly, why did no one bother to tell him songwriting doesn’t have to be a hellscape.

“you’re about to give me a whiplash with your sound request again aren’t you?” the composer asks pointedly as jaewon enters the studio. no good morning, no remarks on the result of the last round, nothing. just straight to business.

jaewon cracks a grin at that.

“last time. after this you’ll finally be free from me. promise.” he responds, dropping his bag on the floor before taking the empty

“you owe me drinks after the finale.” the man just grumbles however there is little actual weight to his words and jaewon chuckles. “deal.”

after that, there isn’t much space for bickering back and forth. they both have plenty of work to do after all, even if in the moment jaewon’s job is mainly to sit tight and listen as the man composes the instrumental, gently nudging him in the direction he wishes to take his sound this round.

they start slower this time, a lot slower a deep drum line stretched out to set a mellow pace before being paired with reverberating guitar chords. it has a very lo-fi feeling to it, one jaewon hasn’t heard in his own music since the release of biorhythm and it makes him feel nostalgic in a way. not even alarm had sounded this much like an extension of his first album, of the sound he had established before dimensions had gotten in his way and restricted his creative freedom.

more bits and pieces get woven in as the composes continues to work on the track, a twinge of synth omnipresent in its entirety, a light flicker of a piano arrangement in the bridge, finetuning the whole thing into a laid-back, chill piece that truly, jaewon wished he had been talented enough to compose by himself but knows he’d never have done justice the way the producer had.

not that it matters much. what does matter is that by the end of the day, he leaves the studio with an instrumental that genuinely has him excited to write.

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this time around, jaewon doesn’t do too much planning ahead of writing the song. no overthinking, no overanalyzing mission concepts or wagering whether or not he’s in line with what’s expected of him.

this time around, jaewon writes without being limited by what they want. no one has to like this song except for him truly, if they wanna hate this song and have him come in dead last at the finale, he truly won’t lose any sleep over it.

that’s most definitely a new sensation for jaewon. he’s used to writing songs (and doing anything really) with the looming pressure to either do well or let it break him on his shoulder. a part of him has always assumed that maybe, that was just a necessary condition, a sacrifice that had to be made in order to write music.

obviously, he had thought wrong.

because today there is no fretting over deadlines or forcing himself to stare at a blank piece of paper until something, anything would come to him, until the words would be pushed through the tip of his pen by the sheer force of the pressure resting on his shoulders.

instead, it looks like this, fingers tapping along to the melody of the instrumental, leaning back into his office chair and eyes closed.

the track is relaxed and easy-going, like a lazy saturday morning, and that becomes jaewon’s starting point.

with any color you want i can color the sky, ocean and mountains with you (if you let me be the code) even all of our differences we can connect together

jaewon had told himself he wasn’t gonna write another love song. but maybe, just maybe, he was also a fucking liar. in his defense, this song (at this point, still unnamed) wasn’t a love song lie reply and pit-a-pet had been. where those had recreated the anxious stutter of young love, this beat gave itself to something more mellowed out and mature, weathered by the ups and downs of life and not as easily disrupted by small life events.

you know i can paint the world sitting there in black and gold you’re the perfect chemical i gotta test i gotta know

he doesn’t know what prompts the abundance of english in the song. jaewon and the english language are not the best of friends, but with unity’s reach into america and champion he had become quite familiar with it. so he writes it in. it’s just the chorus at, plenty of songs have english chorus’, no need to think too much of it. but for some reason, it ends up bleeding into the rest of the writing too. it feels more fitting that way, his brain coming up empty on how to phrase the sentiment in his primary language in a way that doesn’t sound out of place with the beat.

i’ll be getting it ready to fuse sitting on top of the world just cue missing a puzzle i swear it’s you

of course, he sends the lyrics to someone to get the grammar checked out even after trying to research his phrasing as well as possible to his own abilities. as he waits for the other (a songwriter he’s worked with on a handful of unity song) to answer, he writes the word girl into the lyrics in a place or two that still feel a little hollow, rounding the song out and immediately giving it the fanservice/heteronormative undertone he’s learned to write into his music in a believable manner by now. it’s the smallest of sacrifices to make really, the most thin-veiled pretense of his assumed straightness to appease the general public.

and with that, the song is done. or well it’s not, it will take recording and some sound editing but in essence, it’s done. so far, jaewon is content with this one, mainly because it’s the smoothest songwriting experience he has had in a while.

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he records and produces the song in one go. technically, he has another studio session planned for after the recording of the mv, to tweak some small things and provide a better fit but it’s more a back-up plan, a crutch behind the door he’s 99% sure he won’t need.

dimension had offered to let another producer sit in and help him but truly, this time jaewon had felt confident enough to handle it by himself. he had produced pit-a-pet by himself, this he could tackle too.

(his suspicion did turn out to be right. by the term december 1st came around, he ended up sending in the very mastered version made on his first studio session. after all, there really wasn’t anything to add.)

[happymetalgirl]

March 2020

Wow, March seems like such a bygone era, time doesn’t mean anything anymore with so much turned upside down (especially in the music industry) in the throes of the pandemic going on right now. One of those things was me losing my punctuality with this blog. While I haven’t been on top of my writing, I have certainly been listening as much as ever, with plenty to talk about this month, so better late than never I suppose. Here are the albums I listened to during March.

Code Orange - Underneath

I just wrote about the Pittsburgh metalcore juggernauts’ highly anticipated fourth full-length, but I’ll summarize again what led me say that Underneath is a good album, but not as good as the breakthrough album whose high bar this album was always going to have a hard time clearing. The band go all in on the industrial elements that accented Forever on Underneath, as well as push their luck on the more melodic, alternative metal-oriented hardcore tracks, which came with some growing pains, the latter more than the former. And I really think that they probably are just growing pains with the band getting more comfortable with this expansion of their sound, which (contrary to what the many zealous 10/10 reviews are saying) I think the band will get significantly better with if they keep this trajectory going into their next album.

8/10

Body Count - Carnivore

I really have tried to focus on the positive aspects of Body Count’s music, the fearless, topical, confrontational lyricism and the capacity the band has to generate a good hardcore breakdown, but the band really do seem to be unable to get out of this one-dimensional rut they’re stuck in, with Carnivore simply a few shovels deeper in. The band’s appeal tires very quickly with Ice-T’s recycling of lyrical themes and his band’s repetitions of generic hardcore tropes. They come through with a few moments of intensity, a sick breakdown or two, but the positive, hopeful moments are too few and far between. I would think that with not a whole lot of competition and a hip hop icon behind the microphone that Body Count would have the capacity to do more for rap metalcore, but they seem stuck in a cycle I do respect the stances Body Count takes against injustice, and I want them to be a more prominent, important voice in metal, but they have some climbing to do to get there.

4/10

My Dying Bride - The Ghost of Orion

The grand masters of gothic death-doom don’t ever really steer too far off course, rather they sometimes just take their foot off the gas, as they do on The Ghost of Orion. It has all the elements of any beautifully melancholic My Dying Bride album; the slow and burgeoning guitars, the downtrodden vocal melodies juxtaposed with bursts of growled anguish, and the melodrama of vibrato-laden strings; but it’s all arranged and conjured without much tangible passion or pain. That’s by the standard of the band’s pretty solid discography though, so with that considered, it’s by no means a terrible death-doom album, it just won’t be converting anybody or getting anyone more excited about My Dying Bride and death-doom.

6/10

Warp Chamber - Implements of Excruciation

Brutal death metal can often seem pretty one-dimensional, and it often is, but in the hands of a band who really has the ambition to make more of it than just some guttural rumblings from all the instruments involved, the genre can really take on a wholy new monstrous form, its horrific, deathly instrumentation heightened by the melody and the compositional nuance that a competent band can bring to it, and that is exactly what Warp Chamber do on their debut album here. Full of cavernous growls and ceaseless low-register battery, it can seem, at face value like just a regular brutal death metal album, but when the band starts breaking out the winding tangents and manic solos that, again, just heighten the chaos and compliment the brutality. It’s more than just regular-ass death metal, and I’m glad to have heard this debut. I hope Warp Chamber has more in store.

8/10

Loathe - I Let It in and It Took Everything

Do you love Deftones? Maybe you do. I do. But I don’t think either of us love Deftones as much as Loathe loves Deftones. I’m goofing right now, but Loathe really do channel their Deftones fandom real hard when they’re not in full hardcore mode or getting eccentric with the segues on this album. And it does offer a great combination of styles, with angular, low-tuned modern metalcore noise riffage juxtaposed pretty strongly against the gauzy shoegaze that immediately hearkens to that facet of Deftones’ music. The band struggle to get the flow just right on certain songs and across the album in general, with some pretty inconsistent songwriting, but it’s definitely outweighed by its still somehow immersive quality and the strength of the individual pieces going into it.

7/10

Earth Rot - Black Tides of Obscurity

The Australian band brings forth some more of the tried and true modern death metal a la Bloodbath, Carnation, and modern Cannibal Corpse, but with enough eerie, blackened oddity throughout the songs to keep the journey from being too homogenous. It’s these moments that both give extra life to the bludgeoning, but at-times basic, modern death metal the band is conjuring and kind of disrupt the flow of that muscly death metal. At times I do wish the band would chose to focus one or the other more exclusively, but if this pushes Earth Rot further into this kind of stylistically ambitious death metal, I appreciate the stepping stone this album acts as.

7/10

Myrkur - Folksange

After riding a pretty strong wave of critical adoration for her contribution to the growing wave of atmospheric black metal that culminated in the respectably sonically unique Mareridt in 2017, Myrkur’s Amelie Bruun has taken a step back to refocus or recalibrate artistically. As the title suggests, Folksange finds its creator rewarding herself for her contributions to black metal with a return to her love of Scandinavian folk music, and you can tell she loves it on this entirely folk-music-based project devoid of any black metal elements. I may not have been as head-over-heels as a lot of critics were about her black metal albums, but I certainly appreciated her folk-inspired ambient take on the genre, especially the unique sonic pallet of Mareridt. I liked those albums quite a bit, yet it is clear that the sound on Folksange is her forte, which makes sense if Scandinavian folk has been a longer-standing passion than black metal for Bruun. The instrumentation is absolutely beautiful and Bruun’s angelic voice fits so perfectly with it, but Folksange is more than just superficially aesthetically gorgeous. The songs (old and original) are written and arranged with such a natural knack for the style that makes it such a serenely enveloping experience that stands as Myrkur’s best work yet. I highly recommend it.

8/10

Old Man Gloom - Seminar IX: Darkness of Being

The famed supergroup’s first of two releases planned for this year after the loss of Caleb Scofield sees them dabbling around in an experimental array of genres that all the members have some sort of significant experience and specialty with. From post-metal of the sludgy, Isis-esque variety to the more noisily esoteric, Sumac-esque variety, to distinctly post-hardcore-influenced stylistic diversions, the band’s wide-reaching sound takes all sorts of twists and turns along their most recent experiment with the members’ varying pedigrees and influences guiding the music on quite the unusual nomadic trek. From the repetitive chord progression of the opening track to the album’s noisy finishing tracks (one of which features what sounds like rocks tumbling down a shaft of some sort for an extensive period of time), the band let their adventurers’ instincts guide them as they wander through their own experiment through the interplay of their members’ various styles. It’s weird, and not super polished, but it’s certainly fixating.

7/10

Candlemass - The Pendulum

After further cementing their relatively unchallenged status as the kings of epic doom metal with The Door to Doom about a year ago, Candlemass have offered up a quick little demo-focused EP with one new fleshed-out song, the title track, which takes them to the faster, more Dio-era-inspires side of their sound with the grand, soaring operatic vocals on the chorus and the relatively fast (by doom standards) guitar rhythms on the verses (think “Paranoid” or “Children of the Grave’). I love the very Dio-esque delivery of the word “fools” at the end too, very fitting. The demo track “Snakes of Goliath” slows it back down to Ozzy-era Sabbath worship in typical Candlemass fashion, the riffs and arrangement pretty respectable for a supposed demo track. The other full-length demo, “Porcelain Skull”, by contrast, does feel much less compositionally fleshed out and more like an actual demo piece. The other three demo tracks are just little instrumental studio doodles that don’t really add anything to the EP. If this EP could be interpreted as any kind of power move, it’s that Candlemass at demo level have just such a sharp compositional intuition for grand Sabbath doom metal and can pretty much nail it in their sleep.

demo-level 7/10

Igorrr - Spirituality and Distortion

I was definitely looking forward to this album big-time after the gloriously unashamed weirdness of 2017’s Savage Sinusoid filled a massive void I felt was needed in my metal bank. By contrast, Spirituality and Distortion is such a reserved project it feels either shy or cowardly from the usually hyper-eccentric band. The greater absence of the vocals of Laurent Lunoir on the album highlight also just how much character he brought to Savage Sinusoid through his zany performances. Without his vocal wildness across the album, the attention on Spirituality and Distortion is then directed to the significantly timid production and electronic finagling that doesn’t measure up to that of Savage Sinusoid.

6/10

In This Moment - Mother

*Sigh* In This Moment is one of those bands who I think really do show a lot of potential but just can’s seem to reach it. They get a lot of unnecessary shit for Maria Brink’s sexy stage presence and generally theatrical aesthetic and live show, but they do have the capacity to produce emotive alt metal ballads like “Whore” and bangers like “Big Bad Wolf” that give some insight into what heights they could potentially reach if they were much more consistent. I was hoping that Mother would be a solid rejuvenation/comeback after the benign disappointment of 2017′s Ritual, and while it’s certainly different, it’s not better. Mother really tries to take on this big, enveloping sound, and biblical, post-apocalyptic feel, and it can sort of carry it for a little bit and be temporarily immersive until the band needs to go full force. When it’s just some fancy eerie atmosphere and Maria Brink’s sultry vocal delivery, it holds up okay, but when the horribly synthetically produced arena-booming instrumentation really comes in and breaks that immersion, you remember that it really is all just trite alt rock whose lofty flair is all a facade.

4/10

Mamaleek - Come and See

Undoubtedly the most wildly experimental album to grace my ears so far this year, I was not expecting such a forceful avant-garde project from Mamaleek so relatively soon after Out of Time, but damn I’m glad I got it! The anonymous brotherly duo have always taken black metal on quite the far-off journey whenever they bring it along on one, ever making it their mission to create something one-of-a-kind with their work, and Come and See has to be their most enthralling album yet. Ramming together the transfixing manic anguish of their blackened experimental noise with the angular dynamism of jazz and even some blues rock in a musical particle collider, Mamaleek have made a truly one-of-a-kind album, and that’s even by their standards. I’ve mentioned before that I tend to like my jazz pretty rowdy and aggressive (like my metal), and the chaos that Mamaleek already generates with their brand of black metal is perfect to trim with and infuse with the angular dissonance of traditional jazz at its more energetically extreme. While the array of chaotic sounds may make Come and See their most intangibly black metal album, the ethos of that root genre pierces through by way of the harshly shrieked vocals just as much as the new jazz elements do. I really might just have to do a full-length review on this one because there is so much going on here that is worth admiring and I can’t stop loving it.

9/10

Phalanx - Golden Horde

This album came out a few months ago and has been making some pretty significant waves on Bandcamp, and for good reason. The relatively young band on their second release ever do showcase a pretty good knack for groove and death metal brutality, balancing slow, thick, tasty groove and blasting death metal without falling into metalcore breakdown clichés or death metal clichés. The three-pronged vocal attack the band touts isn’t quite as dazzling as they might think it is (with the abundance of talented vocalists capable of shapeshifting through a variety of metal vocal techniques), but I do think it would be cool to hear them use that approach with all three vocalists acting more simultaneously to more effectively convey the chaos of the war-related lyrical themes they focus on. Nevertheless, this quarter-hour taster is a great starter for them and definitely worth checking out. Hopefully it’s a foreshadowing of the blossoming of a bright new act for death metal.

7/10

Regarde Les Hommes Tomber - Ascension

I’ve been seeing a lot of praise being thrown this album’s way, and I honestly can’t disagree too much with that it is a pretty damn good album. It is very reminiscent of the Numenorean album Adore that I praised so highly last year. Like Adore, Ascension is an atmospheric black metal album that could easily hook your typical dude who hates Deafheaven and blackgaze and makes a really big deal about it. The band’does well on Ascension to avoid the reliance on generic post-rock guitar reverb ambiance that turns so many people off from blackgaze, working together a lot of unique sonic twists that don’t usually find their way into ambient black metal and channeling direct, cutting, yet humanly vibrant instrumentation that’s backed by raw cries of agony very similar to what Numenorean was doing last year. Perhaps this is the new way forward for atmospheric black metal and blackgaze. If so, Regarde Les Hommes Tomber are doing well to lead the way.

8/10

Deadspace - A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars

I already offered my praises to this album at length with my long-form post dedicated to it, but I’ll give it another shout for its brilliant, bittersweet sending off of the seemingly tireless Australian band. Deadspace give their oppressive/depressive sound the added magnitude and glory offered by choir and orchestral elements with more tact than most bands that use those elements regularly. I really am surprised that the band have decided to split up at such a high point in their artistry and I wish there could be more from them, but I have to respect their decision to end it here, and A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars is a great note to end on.

9/10

[late-nite-student-ramblings]

Reflection on my first year-What to bring: In the dorm room-personal items.

The dorm room is a major part of the college experience, it’s your home for the next several months. Or if you’re never there, it’s your storage space for the next several months. These are a few suggestions to make it more of a home. 

Bed: You are going to be sleeping every night, (more or less depending) make sure it’s comfortable. 

XL twin size sheets/fitted sheets.

Mattress pad: If you’re particular about the feel of your bed. My roommate had a 6 in and that thing was a bed on its own. 

Pillow: I didn’t use a pillow so it’s possible without.

Blanket/ comforter: I slept on top of this so make sure it feels comfortable.

Stuffed animals/ toys: My roommate loved having her stuffed avocado while doing hw. 

Decorative: Make it more than just a concrete room.

Fairy lights: Decorative and just enough light to see and not wake your roommate.

Wall planner: So it’s not out of sight out of mind. Remark: Whiteboard wall decals don’t erase well and don’t work well with brick walls.

Photos: Pets, parents, friends, partner, whatever speaks about you. 

Posters: Do those even exist. 

Hard to kill plants. 

Your favorite instrument: Our floor had 3 cellos, 1 piano, 4 didgeridoos, and about 600+ rubber duck squeakers. Our RA and the floors around us loved us. 

Books: already read, never read, whatever be your vibe. 

Desk: This is your study area so make sure you can work in it. 

Good desk lamp.

Post-it notes.

Stapler/staples

Tape

Extra writing utensils. 

Organizers: Folders

Extra notebooks.

Loose-leaf paper.

Extension chord. 

Scissors

Other: Things that make life a little bit easier

Tupperware: Free food happens more often than you think.

Reusable utensils: Fork/spoon.

microwavable plates/bowls.

Collapsible storage. 

Batteries 

A planner: If you can keep up with those (I just use my phone)

Snacks: healthy and otherwise. 

If you have more to share feel free to add! Happy to clarify anything in the post or just have a chat.

All the best,

-E