#but I just got my 01 brain blown by this moment

[firebirdsdaughter]

(Road59)

[technobladetimestamps]

Nov 16 Stream Timestamps

Timestamps from Technoblade’s “THE REVOLUTION (dream SMP)”

Link to my youtube comment with all of the timestamps x

Timestamps with hyperlinks below

02:13  “This is a surprise tool which will help us later” / thumbnail isn’t foreshadowing / video thumbnails have to be big / stream thumbnails can be detailed 05:17  “The traitor is actually Jschlatt” / firework crafting 09:50  “The ratio is impeccable” 13:23  “Dream’s in the game! My audience retention rate” / vc with Tubbo & Quackity / traitor Jschlatt theory / “Are you high?” “A little” 14:47  “You’re a bit of a wildcard” “I am the most consistent character on the entire server” / “What’s this about getting into power” / “We’ll burn this bridge when we get to it” 15:54  “You really are such an English major” / “You’re an idiom” / malaphor / “I’m actually speaking twice as much English as you guys” 18:07  “I think Thunder is overcompensating in the chat” / “Where can you see me” “In my heart” (Karl & Quackity) / Karl not leaving vc 20:33  vc with Niki / “Did Tubbo just leave me? I spaced out for 2 seconds” / “You can’t call everyone the traitor” “I can & will” 22:45  “You know it’s an event when Skeppy’s here” / “You know it’s a big deal when Georgenotfound wakes up” / “Everyone leaves me” 23:31  explaining the traitor thing to Niki / “Maybe I’m a sleeper agent” / had to kill Tubbo 25:03  nothing happened with that creeper / Fundy interrogating Niki / “Why did I train her for MCC” 25:54  “Even YOU’RE leaving me” / sad music / “I’m sitting here with 203k viewers & it’s not enough for any of these streamers to bear talking to me for more than 60 seconds” / Skeppy joins vc to immediately leave 28:50  Karl has a gift for Techno / Karl is just here for the animatic 32:21  “At least the chat won’t leave me” / pays for his music 35:01  “I’m going to destroy the government so bad” / “I hate all of the farming updates on skyblock” 37:45  joining a vc / “I just got stood up in like 4...conversations in rapid succession” / “My new years resolution was to make friends & it’s november & I’ve made zero headway” / Eret switches sides 41:53  Ender chest setup / worried about hotbar management / potions > shields   43:13  vc with allies / “Karl you are literally the biggest third wheel I have ever seen” 45:03  angering the dogs / trident combo 47:13  “D!ck with one ball” (Tubbo) 50:25  “Let’s hope Wil overslept like [George]” 53:09  recruiting Eret / “If you fight on our side we’ll make you the King of Burger King” / “He’ll be an executive citizen” / “I’m surrounded by idiots” 54:58  putting Schlatt on the allies list / “Schlatt is an alcoholic high on protein power” (Fundy) 56:47  can’t trust Eret / “I hate it when you’re right” (Tubbo) / Wilbur joins vc 59:50  having a moment with Hubert / “Not even the mobs like me” / sad music / “I just gained 8k subscribers the sadness is gone” / cow pit exp farm 1:02:57  vc with Niki / “I’m going to join the other vc AHHHHH” 1:05:02  “Once everyone meets up...I have something prepared” / “Technoblade when are you not ready?” “When I joined the server” 1:09:38  “Who do you take me for? Of course I’ve read the Art of War. It’s written by Mozart” / battle planning 1:12:18  “This is the betrayal...happening very slowly” 1:13:35  Pan1 / “This revolution is so doomed” 1:15:29  Dream attack / Quackity dies 1:18:07  “Agree Retweet” / “Violence is the only universal language” / “i have a supply” / “Why do you talk in upwards inflections constantly?” 1:19:57  Techno not getting to talk / “He took it all by force didn’t he” / “Fear into Ear” 1:23:50  Techno telling everyone he has a stash twice / distributing blue / mushroom the fox 1:26:49  Tommy talking over Techno again / “Stop going off on your tangents” “We have food at home” 1:29:30  vault reveal / Tubbo stealing emeralds / secret chest 1:32:40  “Shut up bro you are green as shit” (Tommy) / “Everyone give me back my stuff you don’t deserve it” 1:34:41  no netherite swords / “Who’s the traitor” “Promise we won’t be mad” 1:36:31  battle / Technoblade trident maneuvering / giving rocket launchers to Tubbo & Tommy 1:40:27  killing Karl / Dream bringing out the end crystals / fighting invis Dream / purpled switches sides 1:43:57  Dream wants to talk / 309k / group photos 1:46:08  vc with Dream / “But only if my enemy insists” / in the van with Schlatt / “What are you doing in my drug van? It better not be drugs” / Tommy preparing to shoot Schlatt 1:54:42  “We won” / “We killed an old man with heart problems! It only took 20 of us!” / President Innit / subscribe to Technoblade sign 1:55:57  Dream & Techno talk in chat / Tommy speech / “It was meant to be” / “I don’t think anyone is bowing to Tommyinnit” / “Karl don’t be weird” / Skeppy has a disc 1:59:06  Techno being apprehensive on mute / Tommy makes Wilbur President / “I’ll be the president” “I’m gonna veto that” / “Techno...you’ve taught me that government is not the way to go” / Wilbur makes Tubbo president 2:03:20  “I’m not sure I like where this is going x2” / “I’m not sure this is a good ending” / “Team chaos” “Perhaps” 2:06:20  Techno shoots Tubbo / Philza joins / “You think Schlatt was the cause of your problems? No. It was government” / speech gets interrupted / “The government ends here, I’ll kill it myself!” 2:09:23  Phil kills Wilbur / techno yelling for silence / “Tommy you just did a coup...& instilled yourself as president” 2:12:11  “If you want to be a hero THAN DIE LIKE ONE” / wither spawning / killing his former allies 2:15:09  post fight talks / “There will be no new government today. It will be over my dead body” / “Techno was not the traitor” 2:18:50  “I need to increase the crater that is L’Manberg so that no country can rise in its place” / “Mom says it’s my turn on the flame bow” 2:23:51  “What I’m doing right now is small scale. This is the work of an individual. This is nothing compared to the cruelty governments all around the world [inflict]...systematically” / “Llamas are the primary victims of war” / “I just wanna be apart of the explosion” (George) 2:27:06  Techno joins vc / connor joins the server / “I hope you’re proud of yourself Techno” “I kinda am” / Jack Manifold (Thunder) being broke / netherite armor 2:32:30  “Beach episode” / Techno accidentally joins the L’Manberg vc 2:35:16  the base is compromised / “There’s no way Technoblade would put a clock there if it didn’t mean anything” / got robbed 2:37:37  “If you’re going to ask me how I got all these emerald & arrows that’s a story for another day” / explaining the bedrock / “I can give everyone stuff & it’ll be such a flex” 2:40:24  Greek mythology 2:41:45  The Golden Apple / “They didn’t use discord back then they used skype, so can’t invite Eris” / “Zeus the god of feminism” 2:46:02  Eret recruiting Techno to kill George / joining vc / “Let’s stop him before he gets land” / Awesamdude proposing a fight 2:49:08  “No one can kill me I’m invincible” (logs out) / Dream literally names the turtle potions Sam thinks he hasn’t heard of / “I’m at soup” / “It’s not smack talk he just has that many items” 2:53:06  “Stab him Dream, I’ll shout encouraging words” / Techno fighting Bad & Ant 2:56:23  Dream wins / “I think there was this Dream guy attacking you with some sort of weapon” 3:00:11  turtle potions / Dream hyping up Techno about fighting BBH / Badlands negotiating with George 3:04:34  vc with Philza 3:07:00  spider farm afk’ing / lagging Quackity’s computer 3:09:06  smp earth / Phil only logged on to back Techno up 3:10:32  killing George / “I’m gonna drop his armor off don’t jump me” / not fighting Dream 3:13:00  vc with Karl & Phil / Karl definitely not starting a government / “Chat that was the boring part, don’t leave” / 320k / “Why do we keep scheduling these on Monday?” 3:16:18  “I don’t even want to think about how famous Tommy will be in the future” / “I get a tad bitter” / covid is good for youtubers but obviously bad / “I’m so good at socially distancing” 3:19:51  “Aren’t you tired of being nice Philza? Don’t you just wanna go crazy” / “You should be wary of the old in a profession where people die young” / vc with Eret 3:21:47  “What if you built a slightly larger throne next to it?” /  “How are they paranoid of a mole but the guy with a track record of being a traitor gets no questions asked” 3:25:47  “I’m gonna place a block at the bottom & kill you instantly” / reverse mlg /  emerald rich even with Tubbo’s theft 3:27:57  “I’ll allow it” / upstairs chests robbed / Eret disconnects with the book 3:32:04  armor sabotage bc he thought it’d be 1v5 / crystals are mutually assured destruction / Wilbur afraid of tnt getting blown up early 3:34:11  the diary was actually Eret’s / “He’s gonna tell everyone who I have a crush on. Nooo” / reading the 100 page book / “Can I not win here?” “No” 3:40:14  “This stream has released more serotonin in my brain than the last 6 months combined” / revolution was overcrowded / could improve the crater 2:43:09  “Awkward ten minute period where I’m just sitting there watching them set up a new government but I can’t kill them yet” / Carl is missing 3:44:34  “The one time Technoblade is gonna roleplay & they talk over him” / “CARL” / “As long as Sapnap isn’t the one that took him there’ll still be hope” 3:46:10  “Once you start using end crystals it’s the only pvp that matters & end crystal pvp is so lame” / Webtoons 3:49:10  “What’s going to happen to you & WIlbur now?” “I don’t know, I think I’m chill with Wilbur” / “The only thing that changed is my voice. Zero personal growth” / lines from the first speech that got interrupted / “King George is trending booo” 3:52:00  1 million twitter followers / “O god it’s been four hours...I am not built for this” / did a 13 hour stream once / sub growth goals 3:56:30  “What the heck is Phil watching”

[skia-oura]

Dipper’s Day Around the World

A/N: This is 21k written over the span of like 6 months, so buckle in folks.

ao3

_______________________________________________________________

December 4th, 5:58 AM EST

           Dipper didn’t exactly sleep, anymore, but he was close enough to rest and unconcern with the matters of the rest of the world, sandwiched between Torako and Bentley in their bed, that the sting of the summons—friendly, from a personal circle, not from the standard one that strangers used—startled him into a disgruntled moan. Torako, a lighter sleeper in the morning, the early bird between them, twitched and then hummed an inquiry. “Izza…summons,” Dipper mumbled back before he turned and pressed his face into the crook of her neck.

           “Mmm,” she said. After a while, she asked, “Someone you know?”

           He could hear her voicebox buzzing under the skin at his lips, could feel it vibrating lightly into the cartilage (manifested cartilage, yes, but cartilage as long as he wanted it to be) of his nose. A very dim part of him strengthened by still-waking awareness wanted to open his mouth and bite down into the flesh a little, just to feel it echo more directly into the not-bones of his teeth. The rest of him knew that it was a bad idea and was a sure way to get the heel of her palm slamming into his nose hard enough to break and hurt. It wasn’t even omniscience that told him this, just unfortunate prior experience.

           She still let him close, though, and so he nuzzled in. “Yeah,” he sighed, but he was mostly awake now. “It’s a friends and family circle. Even though it’s at—oh, look, it’s 6 AM,” he said.

           Torako reached over and up and ruffled at his hair. He sat up and smoothed it flat, glowering down at her. The motion dislodged Bentley’s arm from his waist but the Bentley that lived in this house was a deeper sleeper than the Bentley that returned to the apartment he’d been kidnapped from, and so he did nothing but scrunch up his nose (adorable) and sleep-mumble unintelligible noises before relaxing back into deeper sleep. Dipper sighed and relaxed shoulders he hadn’t even realized were tense.

           “Go gettem, Dips,” Torako whispered, eye cracked open in a half-awake smile. “We’re gonna have breakfast bout nine, ok? Ben’n I got busy days planned.”

           “Okay,” Dipper said. He bent down and pressed a kiss to Torako’s forehead. “Let Bentley know where I’ve gone when he wakes up, okay?”

           “Mmmkay,” Torako said, then yawned and snuggled back into the covers. “Later gater.”

           The summons stung him again. Dipper hovered above the bed for a moment, wings spread, then melted from comfortable (but elegant!!) pajamas into a more formal (but somewhat casual) suit before focusing on tracing the summons back to its locus, and slipping from bedroom on the East Coast to elsewhere.

December 4th, 11:01 AM BST

           Elsewhere turned out to be another bedroom, in front of somebody he knew (Soos, no—Olla, her name is Olla) in England. He also knew that her mother would destroy them if she found them together, and it was the middle of the day and wait, what was Olla doing home anyways?

           He blinked down at her. “Why are you even in your dorm? Don’t you have classes?”

           “Alcor,” Olla moaned. Her hair was a mass of messily plaited braids, ribbons bright but askew. “You gotta help me. You’re my only hope of passing this stupid chemistry class I decided to take with my friend but we’re both hopeless—not hopeless, but definitely for sure 100% in over our heads—and for some weird reason most of the people in class aren’t keen on talking to me long enough to do studying or they’re busy or they’re just pain rude, please save me.”

           Dipper sat down on her bed, which was next to the desk she was sitting at. Olla Sussally twisted the chair around in place, leaned forward to heave something up off the floor, then turned back around. In her hands—fingernails painted vivid, somewhat chipped colors that shifted weakly from hue to hue—was a very large tub, and in that tub was the biggest horde of candy Dipper had seen anywhere other than a grocery store. His mouth, despite any efforts to the contrary, began to fill with saliva.

           The memory of Olla’s mother was just terrifying enough to remind him that his skin was actually prickling with discharged magical energy. “Your mom changed the wards again, didn’t she? It’s a shame they didn’t work, but she’ll know you summoned me, she always does, and she’s always so pissed even if I didn’t technically approach you.”

           Olla moaned and tipped her head back for a moment. “I know I know, it’s so dumb and I hate it yet my mum really is the best and I love her n’all, but like, I have got to get this chemistry in the brain space as fast and fully as possible so can we talk about mum later? I have a candy bag per concept and you’re, like, supposed to be super smart, right? You’re supposed to know everything.”

           Dipper cocked his head at her. Olla wasn’t smiling, not even nervously. Well, Dipper thought to himself, Mrs. Sussally couldn’t be too mad if this meant Olla a) was less stressed, and b) passed chemistry.

           “Okay,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Deal.”  

           “Oh gosh oh thank you you’re the best,” Olla breathed out, then reached out and shook his hand vigorously with both of hers. Blue fire bloomed, then sputtered when she whirled around and pulled a textbook towards her—which, considering the fact that Olla was one of the most laid-back and calm people he knew, was concerning. “Okay, so, let’s start with chemical formulas, because hoo my man—my demon? I’ll have to ask you later—but, like, there’s molecular formula, and then there’s empirical formula is sometimes the same but sometimes different, and it has to do with math which is fine but I still don’t get why.”

           Dipper blinked at her, then reached forward and pulled a bag of malted biscuits from Olla’s candy stash. She had swiped several worksheets and class notes up to hover in the air between them. “It’s easier to deal with some chemical equations that way,” he said.　“Look—here, at this problem…”

_______________________________________________________________

           Halfway through explaining the Gillespie-Nyholm theory in regards to double and triple molecular bonds, Olla’s phone rang. Dipper stopped, stared at it. Olla looked down. The display read: ‘Mum <3 <3 <3.’ The hearts twirled in circles and threw off little digital glittery sparks.

           “Aw,” Olla groaned, tipping her head back. “It’s only been, like, an hour. Come on, mum!”

           “Maybe she hasn’t noticed yet?” Dipper ventured. He stuck his fingers in his mouth to lick off the sour sugar particles and eyed the still mostly-full tub of candy. “If she hasn’t, we could definitely get through another few concepts. I’ve only had four bags.” He wanted at least another three. Maybe five. Ten would be best.

           Olla stuck out her tongue at him, took a deep breath, and then answered the phone. “Hey, mum, what’s up, howsit going, what’s on, you at lunch or something, it’s so weird for you to call me now haha you know class just finished!”

           There was a muffled noise, the sound of somebody talking just out of earshot. Dipper tipped his head to the side. Would eavesdropping even be worth it?

           “Woah, that’s weird, the wards are juuuuust fine here!” Olla cast her eyes up at the ceiling. Dipper looked up as well, and winced a little at how almost soggy some of the wards looked, bent out of space from where he’d pushed his way through. Well, their cover was blown. He cast a longing look at the candy bags, and wished for a reality in which he could earn them. “I guess your alert app is just fritzing out again!”

           Silence. Then, several garbled words, Olla’s eyes widening and cutting to him. She laughed a little nervously. “What do you mean, mum? Sure, I wasn’t in Mid-Millenium Literature class, but that’s just because chem is kicking my ass into a sad bit of lumpy dough and I needed to take time—no, no, no tutors, just me and my cute little—wait you’re right outside the building??”

           Dipper froze again. He met Olla’s eyes. As Olla’s mother started talking again, Olla flapped her free hand at him frantically, mouthing go go go!! as she listened.

           If he really wanted to, he could take Olla’s mom. But a) he respected her, b) Olla really loved her, and c) Olla’s mother actually kind of just a little bit intimidated him when he wasn’t hopped up on anxiety and possessiveness and fear for his Mizar’s safety. So Dipper grimaced, lifted a hand in farewell, and blipped out of Olla’s dorm room with the fleeting thought of the next place he could go on such short notice.

 December 4th, 9:29 PM AEST

           It was, perhaps, not the best idea to suddenly appear on the couch right next to Tommy and Filara Hangar—they were a little jumpy—but Dipper wasn’t anything if not dramatic. He slung one leg over the other, slipped into something a little more formal mid-blip, and set his hands on top of his knee so that the fingers were curled a little over the kneecap. “Hello,” he said, pitched just high enough to be heard over the evening news.

           Next to him, Tommy Hangar screeched and nearly scrambled over the back of the couch. Filara Hangar seized a wineglass off the table and flung it at him with incredible accuracy. Taken off-guard, Dipper had only a split second to decide whether to let it land or whether to pluck it out of thin air. He hesitated, and the decision was made for him—the glass smacked into his nose and red wine splashed up and over his face. Blinking, liquid clinging to his eyelashes, Dipper said, “Well, that was rude but I get it, I guess.”

           Tommy wheezed from behind the couch. “What the fuck, you feathering fuckwit,” she said. “Holy shit you can’t do that to us without giving a ring or tapping out a coupla knocks first. I hate it when you do that! It freaks me the fuck out.”

           Filara, on her part, was staring at her outstretched hand, bewilderment blooming all over her aura like morning glories. “I threw a glass of wine at Alcor the Dreambender,” she said, a little faintly.

           “And hit,” Dipper groused. He materialized a stylish handkerchief from out of his vest pocket, snapped it open, and dabbed at his face just to emphasize his point. “You’re lucky that this suit is literally materialized out of the power I possess and isn’t actual fabric, because that would be a bitch to clean.”

           “Die mad about it,” Tommy said. Dipper opened his mouth to respond to that, but Tommy widened her eyes at him and he wisely shut his mouth. She hauled herself back up and over the couch to sit squarely between Dipper and her wife. “We wouldn’t pay for it anyways, it’s your own feckin fault for slipping in here out of thin air at—” she glanced at the news “—9:34 PM, what the hell and why are you even here?”

           Dipper waved the concern aside as though it were a physical thing he could clear the air of. He finished dabbing the wine off his face and snapped the handkerchief again to disperse it from its momentary existence. At the same time, the wine was pulled out of the non-fabric of his clothes and vanished. “My last appointment was cut very abruptly short, and I’d been meaning to check in on you two so I figured that now was as good a time as any. How are you?”

           Filara blinked at him. “I hit Alcor the Dreambender with a half-full glass of wine,” she said, a little glee in her voice and in her eyes.

           “Yes you did, honey,” Tommy said. She patted her wife’s hand and smiled. “It was a hot damn moment of glory and I love you even more than I already did.”

           “Didn’t you throw ice water on him a few months ago?” Filara cocked her head and looked Tommy up and down, lightning bright sparks of realization fading into soft ombre appreciation.

           Dipper frowned. There was no need to rub it in, he totally could have stopped that from happening—both the wine and the water. “Yes she did, and we’ve already covered the wine stuff, how are you?”

           “It’s 9:34 PM,” Tommy drawled, turning her attention away from her wife to glower. “What do you think??”

           “Now, now,” Filara said, rubbing at Tommy’s shoulders from behind. “I know it’s late, but we haven’t seen him in a while and I threw wine on him, so I think that it would only be fair to entertain him with a little conversation, don’t you think? I’m sure he’s a little lonely, aren’t you?”

           Filara smiled at him. She looked nothing like Lionel, but Dipper read him into the quirk at the corner of her mouth that said she was still smugly amused at her unintentional victory over him. The little heartache that came with the thought moved Dipper to look past it and the quite frankly presumptive opinion that he was lonely, he wasn’t lonely. He was fine.

           “No,” he said, “but Bentley and Torako are busy sleeping right now, and I’m awake and out so I wanted to talk to you.” The more he thought about it, though, the more tempting the thought of blipping back home and crawling into bed for snuggles was. He absolutely was not lonely.

           Tommy wrinkled her nose. “That’s right, it is stupid early over there still, isn’t it?”

           “Yeah,” he said, though stupid early was a relative term when it came to individualistic habits and sleep patterns. For some people in the same time zone, it was stupid late.

           Filara leaned over and propped her elbow on Tommy’s shoulder. Her near-invisible lenses flashed a little, and she grinned. “So how are Ms. Gorgeous and Mr. Sigils?”

           “Adjusting.” Dipper leaned back into the arm of the couch and twisted a saccharine drink out of nothing to sip at. “We just finished settling into the new house nine days ago. Torako or Bentley might have sent you pictures?”

           Tommy had been frowning at Dipper ever since he pulled out his drink. “Dude,” she said, slowly, “I know you’re a demon and all, but that’s rude, man, just ask for a drink.”

           “Oh, it’s quite all right,” Filara said, patting Tommy’s arm. “If he brings his own drink, that means that there’s more wine for me. And yes, Torako did send me pictures of the house. Bentley didn’t, but he made up for it by sending me updates on how things were going, and I very much appreciate it.”

           With a sigh, Tommy leaned back into the couch and crossed her arms.

           “Did she send you pictures of the tables?” Dipper drawled, swirling his drink around in its glass. “Mine was the best one.”

           “That’s not what she said.” Filara raised her eyebrows. “In fact, she said that you all voted hers the best, and that’s the solid truth there.”

           Dipper sniffed and took a sip of his not-beverage, mentally pulled together his arguments in favor of not Torako winning their unofficial competition, and launched into them with a passion that Bentley would have described as ‘overkill’ and Torako as ‘desperately in denial.’

_______________________________________________________________

December 4th, 8:39 PM PHT

           Dipper only burned through an hour before Tommy had enough and kicked him out during a lull in conversation, citing that she actually wanted to spend time with her wife, not the dude who came around to pick her wife’s brain and engage in furious debate over the most mundane things before turning around and treating the most abstract concepts with the same fervor. He’d relented and accepted a couple drinks—overly sugary and laden with alcohol that couldn’t affect his non-existent metabolism—and found himself having made off with one of the Hangars’ drinking glasses on accident. He shrugged, sent it off to the Mindscape Shack, and figured it would make a good excuse for another visit.

           In the meantime, it was time to visit somebody very new to their current life.

           Dipper closed his eyes and followed one of the faint bonds inside of himself to a small apartment of Cebu—Grand Courtyard Bldg 5, apartment 607, nursery with the window facing north-east—in the evening, when its sole occupant was sleeping soundly, parents in the other room finishing dinner and relaxing before the baby woke up again. There was a personalized cam-monitor in the corner, anti-tamper sigils that reminded Dipper of Bentley (and when he looked at them for more than a split second, he saw Bentley working on them as part of a senior project for undergrad, and how strange, how incredible to think that they’d gone so far from that point, blooming into existence under his fingertips), and Dipper only spared a single thought to artificially looping the input past the anti-tamper sigils (they were Bentley’s, of course he knew how to get around them) before drifting closer to the crib.

           Lloyd Remnit had not lasted long after their visit, after Dipper tore the information from his mind and Fantino had died as a result. Stan had always given everything for family, and it always hurt when he failed to protect them. (many Stans had summoned him over the years. Some paid the ultimate price for their loved ones. Some paid a different price, but it all fell to pieces around them anyways. Others, ones who hadn’t summoned him, had summoned others instead—one had given away her soul to be consumed. Dipper had torn that demon to pieces).

           This time around, given how his last incarnation had ended up at odds with Alcor, he was determined to have Stan on his side. Which meant—this.

           “Hey,” Dipper said softly, breathily. In her crib, María Elena ‘Inyang’ Dimayuga lay on her back, fingers curled into soft fists. He took a moment to take her in—a little on the large side, for a two-month-old, eyelashes dark and soft against her puffy cheeks, baby hair thin clouds across the crown of her skull. “Hey. I’m going to be your Uncle Dipper. Your parents don’t know yet, but they don’t know a lot of things about you yet either, do they? They’re still calling you Aweng. Don’t worry, they’ll figure it out eventually.”

           Inyang shifted in her sleep and scrunched her nose. Dipper stilled, but her eyes didn’t open, and her barely-there, underdeveloped aura didn’t shift suddenly in that telltale breath between sleep and wake that infants tended towards. After a few moments, he slid from stillness into careful motion, chin propped in the heart of his palm, elbows on the edge of the crib, ankles-crossed mid-air. His wings fluttered once or twice. He sighed a little.

           “It’s been a few years since I’ve interacted with somebody so young,” Dipper confessed. “Not since Lata, at least. Nobody’s been stupid enough to summon me with a newborn sacrifice recently, and the chances to meet babies like you are otherwise pretty slim in my line of work.” He laughed a little. Inyang let out a breathy sigh of an exhale. “But you’re family, you know? I should—I should stick around for you.”

           Inyang’s fingers tightened into fists, then relaxed. He looked at her nails. She probably needed them trimmed, soon. Dipper remembered sharp baby nails, and they were a somewhat discordant experience when the rest of them was so soft, so malleable, so easy to swallow—

           Dipper closed his eyes, breathed in and out, and chased the thought down into the deepest, most terrible part of him. Then he opened his eyes and looked back down at Inyang.

           Inyang looked back, dark eyes large in her small face.

           They stared at each other for a few seconds, Inyang frozen by the uncertainty of an unfamiliar face hovering over her, Dipper by the very human instinct of ‘maybe if I don’t move, this very small child will just go back to sleep instead of crying.’ Despite being a dream demon who didn’t need moist eyeballs, Dipper was the one who blinked first.

           Inyang’s aura twisted. She let out the start of a choking cry. Galvanized by memories of caring for babies over the years, Dipper started shushing her, reaching into her crib on reflex. His sharp talons faded into stubby nubs, his gloves melted away to materialized skin. “Hey, hey, no, it’s all right—”

           Footsteps outside the door. Moments before he managed to pick Inyang up, Dipper frantically twisted himself into the shadows under her crib. Seconds later, the door opened.

           “Oh, that’s odd,” the parent said. Dipper blinked, and there it was—Alisha Dimayuga, journalist, wife to Jolan Dimayuga, owner of a small clothing boutique that custom-sized for all its customers. “The camera didn’t pick up on you waking up—hush, hush, sweet little Aweng, here I am, it’s okay. Why don’t we go see your Zaza, hmm? Zi would love to hold you, love to kiss your precious little nose and all the pain away.”

           Dipper stared up at the bottom of the crib, seeing Alisha pick up Inyang and soothe her without physically seeing it. Alisha rocked from side to side with each step, murmuring about how hard it was to be a baby as she slowly made her way out the room, Inyang still crying pitifully in tired-sleepy-pain-overstimulation. She was going through one of her growth spells, Dipper knew suddenly, though he’d always known it. It hurt, to grow so much all at once and not understand anything, and thankfully it was knowledge that faded quickly. Dipper still remembered his second birth, how things changed and ached and felt like fire melting and reforging and melting his bones all at once. The pain of it, over and over, all at once after stretches of nothing.

           He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

           Dipper considered revealing himself to Alisha and her partner. He thought about introducing himself, but the thought of Alisha’s fear and Jolan’s terror-courage and the rift that would possibly set between him and Inyang made him hesitate, caught between the soft shadows of the nursery and the light spilling in through the open door. He stayed for a few moments, listening to Alisha and Jolan’s soft voices in the other room, hearing Inyang’s cries get quieter and quieter until she was silent.

           Maybe another time, Dipper told himself. He coalesced back into his humanoid form next to the crib, with its whale-patterned sheets and its pale linoliwood bars. He looked out the door, into the sliver of the hall he could see, and remembered other babies over the years that he had raised, or helped raise. Later, he told himself firmly. For sure.

           Dipper closed his eyes, breathed in deep, and blipped—

 December 4th, 8:54 AM EST

           —into his designated seat at the dining table, aka the chair that Torako had snatched for her temporary bedside table and kept falling out of bed for. Dipper might have—in the previous months—maybe on occasion scooted it just far enough out of reach that she would tumble out of the sheets. Just maybe on occasion, though. Not every night. That would just be suspicious.

           “Morning,” he chirped at Torako, who was sipping at a cup of coffee. He eyed it—hazelnut creamer, oof, she was anticipating a Day.

           “Hey,” Torako said. Across the table, Bentley’s forehead was flush against the wood surface. He groaned out something that Dipper interpreted as a greeting.

           “You never jump anymore,” Dipper complained. He crossed his arms and set them on the table, leaning forward. “It’s so disappointing.”

           “Dude, we’ve lived together for, like, eight years, of course I don’t jump anymore,” Torako said. Dipper hummed in absentminded agreement in order to hide the fact that he was as of that moment making plan after plan to startle the snot out of her. “Besides, now I have a Dipper-sensor as long as Bentley’s around—he moaned out something a second before you popped up.”

          Very kind of her to tell him what situation he needed to avoid in order to succeed. Torako really was her own worst enemy, because she should know by know that Dipper wasn’t nearly nice enough to not take advantage of such facts. “I had forgotten about that.” He actually almost had. “Bentley conscious yet?”

           Bentley groaned again. Torako picked up her fork, stabbed a sausage on her plate, and shoved it in her mouth. Dipper squinted his eyes at the remaining sausages and wondered if he could get away with sneaking one off her plate.

           “Kind of. I think he had a rough last hour of sleep; he was really groggy when I finally shook him awake.”

           Half-formed schemes of how he was going to make Torako scream in surprise fell to the back burner as he cast a more appraising eye over Bentley and his aura. Bentley kept saying that he didn’t want them to treat him like something fragile, like those delectable sugar cubes that were 90% air, 9% sugar and 1% flavoring and were so thin they fell apart the moment they touched your tongue, but Bentley was also dealing with PTSD among a host of other problems so Dipper was going to worry. Especially since, you know, exhaustion crept and shifted slow through his aura in a way that Dipper hadn’t seen since last week.

           “Hey, Ben. Looking tired there.”

           Bentley didn’t make a noise. Instead, he lifted his head up just enough to glare at Dipper. Dipper winced, both at the animosity and at the tiredness strung at the corners of his eyes and in the crease of his forehead. Bentley glared even more.

           Torako whistled. “I’m not sure, but it might have actually gotten worse?”

           “Shut up,” Bentley groused. He reached out and nearly knocked his mug of coffee over (and if it weren’t bad enough that he was drinking coffee, it was worse because even all the way across the table, Dipper’s teeth could feel the half-cup of sugar Bentley had poured in) before tugging it close and sipping. It must have tasted awful. Bentley didn’t blink an eye.

           Dipper looked at Torako. Torako glanced at him. They both decided that shuddering was probably not the wisest course of action, with Ben so grumpy. That being said, Torako still opened her mouth. Really, she was her own worst enemy.

           “So you’re…still going to work today?”

           Ben grunted and shifted his gaze to her, narrow-eyed. “I gotta,” he said. “There’s a new sigils company being built here, and there’s a…what’s the word…mandatory, right, there’s a mandatory meeting at 9:30 about it.”

           “What about a teleconference?” Torako speared another sausage. Dipper, momentarily distracted, looked down at her plate and stretched nonchalantly. If his hand was a little closer to her plate than before, well, that was just coincidence.

           Shaking his head, Bentley took another sip of his coffee before saying, “Confidential information. Gotta be in person.”

           Dipper, after a blink and a quick rush of information, thought that it might be more that Bentley was being stubborn about ‘earning his keep’ and less about ‘having to go to the meeting in person.’ Dipper was actually pretty sure that Karl Svinhish would happily come to visit just in order to fill Bentley in on the details. He considered the pros and cons of actually saying that, and decided to keep his mouth shut. Instead, Torako distracted, he set his fingers right at the edge of her plate.

           Torako snorted and pointed her fork at Bentley. “And Karl Svinhish wouldn’t bend over backwards for you, no, no he wouldn’t.”

           Bentley actually hissed at her and bared his teeth. Torako’s face went—not pale, no, but she had the expression of somebody who has just realized that they’re treading right at the edge of too far and should really go back before they’re mauled. She stabbed down for her sausages.

           Dipper, right on the edge of getting himself a tasty salty snack, howled as her fork stabbed right into the back of his hand.

           “Oh fuck,” Torako said, jumping out of her chair. “Oh fuck, how the fuck did your hand get there, what even—”

           Dipper felt torn between cackling and screaming. It really, really hurt in all the best and worst ways. “You stabbed me!”

           Bentley, at some point, had half-pushed himself out of his chair. He lowered himself down into it, lifted his coffee mug, and raised his eyebrows as Torako pulled the fork back out of Dipper’s hand. He sipped.

           “Shut up,” Dipper giggled at him, tears streaming down his face.

           “I’m too tired to be nice,” Bentley muttered. “You were asking for it.”

           Torako blinked. She looked down at her sausages. “Were you—trying to take my breakfast?”

           “No,” Dipper lied. He licked at the puncture holes in the back of his hand, then willed them to go away. His blood tasted almost like copper, today. “Of course not.”

           Torako glowered at him, and pointed the fork. “You were.”

           “Never,” he said. There was a tug somewhere in his gut, and he recognized family—friend—Batoor a split second before he said, “and you can’t prove otherwise, Batoor’s calling, see you guys later bye!”

           Torako threw her fork. He disappeared before it could reach him.

 December 4th, 4:09 PM GMT

             Dipper blipped back into physical space upside-down and in a pretty snazzy pair of electric blue ruffled slacks. He craned his neck back to look Batoor in the eye. “You called?”

           “Someday, I hope you realize how old you sound when you say that,” Batoor complained. He was sitting on his desk, a textbook in his lap and a pencil stuck behind his ear. His curtains were open, the dorm courtyard below empty but for the few students taking advantage of a clear afternoon to get some much-needed sun. Dipper tilted his head and pointed.

           “Is that kid stacking chips on her nose?”

           “Undoubtedly,” Batoor said, not even looking. “It’s a new fad. You wouldn’t understand them, being an old geezer.”

           Sometimes, Dipper regretted introducing Torako to Batoor. He extra regretted that Torako and Batoor had exchanged contact information, and that Batoor was picking up on some bad habits of Torakos, like bullying Dipper with no regard for how impressively powerful he was. No respect these days.

           “I understand fads,” Dipper grumbled.

           Outside, chip-stacking student made it to four chips high. Four chips wouldn’t be nearly so impressive if they weren’t being stacked corner to corner. Dipper was kind of jealous—he wasn’t sure he would be able to do that without taking advantage of his powers.

           “You keep telling yourself that,” Batoor said. “Anyways—I need help with this history paper. You know about history, right?”

           Dipper fancied that, if he’d never become a dream demon caught in the claws of near-eternity (he knew that he wouldn’t last forever, but it may as well be—it basically would be, as far as this universe was concerned, and more than that he couldn’t quite wrap even his demonically-altered brain around), he would have been a scientist, or a mathematician, or an over-qualified pizza store manager (which if it came with free pizza, wouldn’t be a half-bad gig.) At almost-thirteen, he hadn’t been as interested in history beyond conspiracy theories and supernatural stories. Now, though—“My middle name may as well be Historical Record,” Dipper said. He flipped over mid-air. His braid fell over his shoulder as well.

           Batoor blinked at him. “Those pants are…new,” he said, in English. Dipper narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

           “Not really,” he said. “What, you don’t like them?” Mabel had been the one who pestered him into conjuring them for himself in the first place. He’d gotten a whole cheesecake out of that deal, and the mortification of them had barely been enough for his young-demon ego to deal with. Now, though—they were ruffled, and bright, and Mabel’s, and that was enough.

           “And the braid is different,” Batoor said.

           Dipper looked down at it, pulling it further into view with his left hand. He flipped the end of it between his fingers. “ Yeah, I don’t usually go for this style. It’s fun, to change things up.”

           Batoor blinked. The scales around his eyes shimmered. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “I guess so. Anyways, I need help with the history paper. About history. In English. I am older so class is harder? It’s a high-level class.”

           “Okay,” Dipper said, easily enough. It wasn’t like Torako or Bentley would be better company now, and they were going to be busy anyways. “What you got to pay me, then?”

           Grinning, Batoor opened a desk drawer with his foot. Dipper perked up despite himself, shoulders dropping and eyebrows raising. “Candy,” Batoor said, “and snacks. From Kabul.”

           Not as easily obtained as gummy peaches, here in Ireland. “Oh,” Dipper said. “I see what you’re doing. You’ve been talking to Torako.”

           “Of course,” Batoor said, before switching back to Dashto. “She’s the only one that can handle you, other than Bentley, and she’s the one with the Demonology degree. She’s been very helpful in my studies.”

           Dipper stilled. He narrowed his eyes. “I thought you were doing a degree in Community-Building and Inter-Species Relations,” he said, slowly.

           “I am,” Batoor said. He reached inside the desk drawer and picked up a couple packages, one carefully-preserved mini gosh-e fil stuck in stasis, powdered sugar and chopped pistachios kept in place through the power of food-regulation preservation spells, and the other an assorted bag of koloocheh. A few of them were broken despite the spells, and Dipper knew they had to be good. Koloocheh were brittle cookies by nature, after all.

           “Oh,” Dipper said. He couldn’t look away from the treats for a second, then made himself because he could get a major deal out of these if by some small chance Batoor didn’t know any better. “They’re pretty good, but for a whole paper?”

           “And proofreading,” Batoor said. He smiled, as sweet as the sacrifice he was offering. “I know exactly how valuable these are. They’re not only delicious, they’re sentimental. My Oware bought them for my Transfer-Day. I haven’t had gosh-e fil since we left Afghanistan.”

           Oh fuck, Dipper thought. He felt a trickle of unease down the back of his neck a second before the realization hit him and he sunk to standing on the floor like a dumbass. “Oh,” he said again. “You’re doing a specialization in community law and advocacy, aren’t you.”

          Batoor grinned. “Demonology overlaps with law-writing classes a lot, you know. Anyways. For help finding relative articles about my history topic in both English and Dashto, assistance refining my arguments, and thorough proofreading of my English composition, I will give you both of these very valuable, sentimental treats, and maybe we can have some video game time together if my roommate doesn’t come back too early.”

           “That’s a big if,” Dipper said. “Do you have the new Red Rider game? The one that’s set in a magicless urban wasteland that you have to carefully scavenge tools and make intelligent allegiances in order to strategically rise to the top of the crime syndicate that’s taken over the city and make the ultimate choice whether to rule over all with an iron fist or transition to a better societal system?”

           Batoor stared for a moment. “Yes,” he said slowly. “You like that game?”

           “Well,” Dipper said. “I suppose I kind of do, yes, but not too much.” Dipper carefully did not mention that the open-story ending that mimicked the rewards and consequences of living a high-stakes human life scratched the same itch he had tried to, over and over and over in human skins that lasted not long enough. He also didn’t mention that the mathematics that went into calculating story paths from individual choices was jaw-droppingly incredible and he needed to see it in play for himself.

           Batoor nodded. Dipper narrowed his eyebrows in suspicion at the sparks of mirth and slowly unfurling anticipation in his aura.

           “Stop being amused,” Dipper said, pointing his lace-gloved finger at Batoor and scowling. “I kind of like it.”

           “Sure,” Batoor said with a perfectly straight face that was very at odds with the emotions that Dipper was reading. He held out his hand. “Anyways, I do have the game and we can play it if there is enough time. If there isn’t, we’ll play at the next opportunity feasible for both parties. Do we have a deal?”

           Dipper looked at the sweets. He tilted his head and thought about the promise of the game—which he was guaranteed to have a chance to play—and then about the difficulty of the task before him. He didn’t mind proofreading either, especially because English had cast off a bunch of the fiddly rules about punctuation that honestly Dipper thought were still needed. He could make sure that Batoor’s teachers weren’t teaching him too much that was wrong.

           Grinning wide, Dipper reached out and took Batoor’s hand. “Deal,” he said. Blue fire licked up from between their palms briefly, and Dipper felt himself get—sharper, smarter, stronger—for a brief flash as the deal lanced through him. Then he let himself slide into that state of mind where he was—not compelled to do a task, no, but it was similar.

           “Great,” Batoor said, grinning lazily. He leaned back against the desk and looked very self-satisfied. “Because my Red Rider game’s multiplayer option hasn’t been used since the time my roommate agreed to try it out with me.”

           Dipper tipped his head. Something niggled at him. “How long ago was that?”

           “Two months ago,” Batoor said. “The day I got the game.”

           Anticipation tingled up and down Dipper’s arms. He felt himself lift back off the ground. “Oh? Why not? It’s an excellent game.”

           “He said I was too intense.” Batoor picked under his fingernails at imaginary dirt, but Dipper could still see the grin on his face.

           “Oh,” Dipper said again. Then, he said, “Well, we should finish that paper as quickly as possible, shouldn’t we? I doubt that you’re more intense than I can be.”

           “We’ll have to see,” Batoor said, eyebrows raised.

 ________________________________________________________________

             They did not, unfortunately, get a chance to see. Writing papers was harder than Dipper remembered, and Batoor had chosen to write about anti-preter sentiment in Ireland two hundred years ago and the impact of the laws enacted during that time had in the centuries following. There weren’t too many papers on the matter in Dashto, and any articles that they could find were harder to understand the further back they were, so Batoor was stuck with English and translated Gaelic sources.

           Halfway into Presumption of Guilt: How Lawmakers Built a Sinister System in the Absence of Politically Powerful Preternatural Citizens that Resulted in the Summer Riots of 3784, Batoor’s dorm buzzed. They froze.

           “Hey, Batoor!” Dipper heard. He swung his head around to look at Batoor, who met his gaze. “Why you lock the door? You got company?”

           Batoor flushed. “No!” he yelled, voice cracking a little as he flapped his hand at Dipper. “I just was studying!”

           Dipper snatched what remained of the delicious snacks that Batoor had traded and stopped just short of blipping out. “When are we going to play Red Rider?” he hissed quietly in Dashto.

           Apparently Batoor’s roommate had very, very good ears. “Batoor?”

           Batoor leveled the nastiest glare that Dipper had been subject to from him. Dipper threw up his hands in frustration and tried to communicate, with his eyes, that he was just asking, no need to get pissy about it! To which Batoor shook a finger at Dipper, waggled his eyebrows in I-told-you-we’d-get-to-it-when-we-get-to-it, and gestured for Dipper to stay quiet for good measure.

“I was only talking to myself!” Batoor yelled back. “Let me get the door for you—”

           Dipper felt a tug in his gut. Thankfully, he let himself follow the summons, twisting out of existence from Batoor’s Irish University dormroom and—

 December 4th, 9:44 PM EAT

           —into a small bedroom with sparsely decorated walls, a pale tile floor worn right to the edge of minor neglect, and a small child sitting on a patterned rug right at the edge of his circle.

           Dipper swallowed back his customary greeting and instead asked, “What’s up, kiddo?”

           They hugged their knees closer to their chest, squashing what looked to be a very sentimental stuffed manticore. “Sshh,” they said, so quiet that Dipper had to readjust his hearing. “Aunty Adi is asleep.”

           “Oh,” Dipper said. He sat cross-legged a half-inch above the wobbly chalk lines. After a moment, he whispered, “I like your scentless candles.”

           The child ducked their face into their knees and the stuffed manticore’s fuzzy mane. “Thanks,” they said, but then said nothing else for a long time. Their aura shifted between embarrassment and hesitation and quick flashing bursts of smothered pride. Dipper made the decision to wait for them to speak, and instead cast out his senses more to assess his new surroundings. There was a small bed in the corner, third-hand but well maintained, a nice new desk bought at a bargain, temperature-regulated sheets, a little bookshelf that was crammed overfull, a tablet for children open to what seemed to be a digital copy of a centuries-old summoning how-to that had never been legally published but had found its way around anyways. Down the hall to one side there were three other signatures—two more children, one adult, each in separate rooms, and to the other seemed to be a living space complete with kitchen and a harmless little snake that curled up in a hole in the wall, sleeping off its latest meal. The night air was cool in such a way that suggested the previous day had been hot.

           “Are you really a demon?” The kid asked.

           “Yeah,” Dipper said, wiggling his claws at them. Their eyes were big and dark in the candlelight from right over their knees. “Alcor the Dreambender, at your service.”

           Another very long pause. Dipper waited.

           “The book said you were nice,” they said. Dipper tilted his head. The book had been distributed during one of his nicer, more mentally present phases. Fortunately for this child, he’d had over a decade of recent socialization with human beings, so he wasn’t super tempted to take advantage of what the kid thought.

           “Right now I am,” he said. “What you want, then, kiddo? People usually don’t summon me unless they have a deal in mind.”

           They looked away and buried themselves further into themselves. The minutes passed. Outside, bugs sang and small lizards rustled in pursuit. The candles flickered, burned wax into vapor that wafted away, slow and lazy but inevitable. Dipper kept himself breathing, steady.

           “…Aunty Adi doesn’t like me,” they said.

           Dipper blinked. “Oh?” he asked, and looked closer. No broken bones, a bruise on their knee (legitimately tripped and fell), short curly hair (useful for the heat), crooked fingers (an accident when they were two years old), missing tooth (their adult teeth were coming in). Whatever it was, it wasn’t overt physical abuse. Dipper narrowed his eyes. “What does she do? Where are your parents?”

           They shifted one foot over the other. “I act funny,” they said instead. “Mom and Dad are busy working in Lilongwe, so they left me with Aunty Adi.”

           There was a lengthy silence. Dipper had started getting that uneasy prickling along the back of his neck, the one he got when kids weren’t safe and happy, and he had to breathe in deep and out slow to stop himself from getting ‘intense,’ as Torako put it.

           “Other kids don’t like me either,” said the kid. “I don’t get it, I laugh when they want me to and follow all the rules, the ones they don’t say but are there anyways, but they still don’t like me.”

           Lonely crept over them like a purple shroud, heavy and dark and bruiselike. Dipper watched it settle and shift for a few moments, and turned the words over in his head. They waited.

           “Do you want a friend?” Dipper asked, finally.

           A heartbeat, two, and then a nod.

           “Do you want me to be your friend, tonight?”

           A double nod.

           “I’ll need something in exchange,” Dipper said, because it was true (though not really, no, he could totally absorb the backlash that came with spending a night playing with a kid but this wasn’t Mabel) and the kid should know that, but also— “maybe some candy? Kids have candy, right?”

           He’d really, really prefer the manticore. He almost asked for it. Then he thought of what Torako would say and do to him if she found out he’d taken a beloved stuffed animal from a lonely, friendless child and figured that stealing candy was a comparably minor offense.

           Their wide dark eyes stared into his, and then they very slowly nodded, and even more slowly pointed in the direction of their desk. “In the drawer,” they said. “Milk drops.”

           Dipper tilted his head over at the desk and blinked. “Okay,” he said and extended his hand. “Is it a deal?”

           After a short moment, they nodded and extended their hand over the shaky, weak chalk lines of their summoning circle. “Deal,” they said, their hand in his, blue fire flaring up between them for a second before dying down.

           Dipper tilted his head, blinked into something a little softer (more comfortable, something that would set the kid at ease) and asked, “So, kiddo, I’m yours to play with for a while. What you wanna do?”

           The kid didn’t smile, but hesitant happiness spread like frail roots through the heavy purple lonely in their aura. “Well,” they said, quietly, “there’s this—card game, that I got to play once…”

_______________________________________________________________

           It took several hours of very quiet playtime for the kid to finally get tired enough to fall asleep. Dipper tucked them—tucked Pili—into their bed, sang a slightly off-key lullaby until their tired eyes finally blinked shut and their chest rose and fell softly and their grip on their Manticore (Nadine) loosened. He thought for a moment, then summoned a Dream to curl up next to them and a Nightmare to stand guard until Pili woke in the morning.

           “You keep an eye on them, alright?” Dipper said. The dream baa’d and snuggled in close to Pili, who relaxed further. Himmwichlint, the Nightmare, blinked its five eyes independently and huffed out a derisive what, you think I wouldn’t at Dipper. Dipper huffed back and rolled his eyes.

           “I’m not saying you can’t or won’t,” Dipper complained, crossing his arms. He was wearing a very soft sweater that Pili had exclaimed quietly over before stroking for a solid five minutes. “I’m just saying what I want you to do.”

           Himmwichlint rolled its eyes back at him. The effect it had was really similar like those plastic googly ones that Belle had once used to bedazzle a pair of sneakers into a constantly-rustling horror show. She had worn them every day for a month to class. Dipper had ended up making a deal with Lionel to have them disappear.

           “No respect,” Dipper complained. “What is it with everybody in my life refusing to show me respect? I am a very powerful dream demon, you would think people would remember that more.”

           The Nightmare chuffed low in its gizzard, and its wool shook in laughter. Then it turned itself around to lay on the ground at the side of the bed, very purposefully looking away from Dipper.

           Dipper threw up his hands. “Unbelievable,” he whispered, turning around himself to leave the room. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

           He very quietly swung the door open and then stepped into the quiet hallway. Another step, and he shifted from the soft sweater and comfortable sweatpants he’d put on for Pili into a sharp black suit, dark and imposing and shadowy. He didn’t need to close his eyes for more than a few seconds to know that he wanted the room at the very end of the hall. He walked forward on the thin air just a hair off the ground, passing by several pictures on the walls and a totem lodged in an inset shelf near the ceiling. It was supposed to protect the inhabitants, but the spirit that was supposed to be there was missing. It had been missing for years at this point.

           Not that it could have done much of anything if it had been there, Dipper thought to himself with a little grin. It could not have stopped him from having a little chat with Auntie Adi. He doubted that it would have even tried.

           In moments, he reached her door. The insects outside had fallen silent. He pushed the door open, soundless, and entered her room.

           It was dark. A thin sliver of slightly-overcast moonlight drifted through the crack between the curtains. In the middle of the room was a wide bed, thin summer blankets draped over a sleeping figure. When he looked around, the room wasn’t overly different from Pili’s—the same well-cared-for furniture, clothing bought at a bargain and a few priceless treasures (gifts, or inheritances, or simply items loved to the point of powerfully tempting)—but there was something about it that cradled the sleeping figure. There had been a lot of love in this room. There was a lot of love, and care, and fondness. Pili’s room seemed so much emptier by comparison.

           Alcor made his way to the edge of the bed. He flicked out his cane, threaded his hair back into a ribbon-tied ponytail, and then sat down.

           Adi didn’t respond for several moments, still deep in sleep. No matter. He knew that the deep part of her responsible for living, for detecting danger and escaping from it was slowly waking up. With every breath, it was pulled closer and closer to the surface, a buoy rising to the surface of a wide dark sea, dragging consciousness up with it. Her brow started to furrow. The soft lines along the edges of her mouth began to deepen. Her eyes tensed. Inhale, exhale, and her eyes fluttered open.

           It took two breathing cycles for her to register that there was a strange person in her room, sitting on her bed and looking down at her. She jerked into motion, opened her mouth, and screamed.

           Alcor smiled into the silence. He had already borrowed—not stolen, he might still give it back—her voice. “Now, now,” he said, softly. “You shouldn’t disturb the children’s sleep. Let’s be quiet, all right?”

           Her eyes are wide. The sclera is bright against the darkness of the room. Her hand feels at her throat, which is bobbing with fruitless effort to speak.

           “I know this is frightening,” Alcor said. His grin widened. The fear shooting up from Adi in sparks set him on the most wonderful edge. It buzzed against him, just enough to turn his teeth a hair past sharp and blow his pupils a clawtip longer. “But really, this is quite important—can I trust you not to scream?”

           She nodded. What a fool—he already knew he couldn’t. He knew she would scream as loud as she could, and then her children would come in, and then Alcor would have to figure out how to deal with them in non-lethal ways. What a mess that would be. Instead, he chuckled before reaching out and tracing a claw against the bottom of her jaw. Adi froze. Her chest barely moved, quick and light.

           “Don’t worry,” he drawled, leaning in a little. Her eyes darted from his teeth to his eyes and then back down again to his teeth. “I already know I can’t. Anyways, this will be a far more productive conversation if you aren’t doing any of the talking.”

           With a sharp inhale, she clenched her fingers in the blanket pooled at her waist. Alcor tapped her chin. She nodded again, this time short and jerky. Her fear really was quite exhilarating, Alcor thought to himself absentmindedly. He’d have to make sure to milk as much out of her without compromising his position, or Pili’s.

           Ah, yes. Pili’s. A no-name soul that he hadn’t had any meaningful prior relationships with. But children were children, and no-name souls could earn names, couldn’t they? Lionel and Torako and Georgi were all excellent examples. He would have to keep an eye out for Pili—make sure that Adi didn’t do anything unfortunate.

           “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,” Alcor said, leaning back a little. Adi exhaled shakily, and nodded again. “Well, it has to do with your nibling. Did you know that they’ve managed to access quite the outdated collection of demonic academia? Their circle was a little wobbly, but it’s supposed to be simple enough for a child to draw with a bit of effort, if they’re desperate enough.”

           Alcor noted the sudden tension in Adi’s shoulders, the sourness of jealousy that rose up among misplaced gangrene anger, the mist-like waft of dark guilt that drifted off as quick as it drifted in.

           “You see,” Alcor said, crossing one leg over the other and wrapping his hands leisurely around his knees, “children have to be desperate enough to draw my circle. That’s not even taking into account the effort many go to in order to get the information needed to draw my circle, and say the incantation, and gather the necessary supplies. Children, you see, don’t often have the resources or freedom an adult does. Please, do me a favor and consider—how desperate must young Pili have been to go to the effort of all that?”

           Adi’s anger flashed and deepened. She lifted her chin, eyes narrowed, and opened her mouth to retort before she tried to speak and remembered exactly who it was she was talking to. Fear drowned out the anger. She curled back in on herself, shifting back on the bedsheets with a near-silent rasp.

           Yes. This was what he deserved. This was the respect he had earned, that he had been deprived of the last few hours. He breathed it in deep.

           “I know you haven’t laid a hand on them,” Alcor drawled. His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Trust me, we would be having a—different conversation at that point. Perhaps off in the desert, where you could scream and I could enjoy it without having to worry about your spawn ruining everything. But that’s also the problem, because—you haven’t laid a hand on them in love, either.”

           Silence. Her aura spoke volumes. He let it balloon up between them, bobbed his foot as she swallowed past a rabbit-quick heartbeat. The pale moonlight coming in through the crack in the curtains glinted off the shiny cap on the toe.

           “Your nibling summoned me because they were desperate for a friend,” Dipper said, very very quietly. “They wanted somebody to play with. To love them, even if that love wasn’t as real as what they really needed. Even just for a night. You, as their guardian, have failed them. You have neglected them, for terrible, petty reasons that have nothing to do with who Pili is, and have everything to do with who somebody else is—one of their parents, I’m assuming.”

           Adi bristled again, shoulders drawing up and back in indignation. Her sleeping cap shifted, exposing some of the kinked hair it was protecting. Alcor reached over. She stilled, heartrate jack-knifing as he pulled the cap back into place.

           “You don’t have to be their friend,” Alcor said. He smiled. “But it would be such a shame if you didn’t learn how to be kind to them and how to be supportive of them. Such a shame indeed. There are always…repercussions, you see, for these kinds of actions.” He leaned over, resting his chin in one palm, fingers curled in a precisely calculated mimicry of danger. Adi trembled, swallowed. Sweat tricked down her brow and along the lines of her slender neck. Dipper watched it drip down, and felt her terror spike.

           “What a shame indeed,” he said. He glanced up, still smiling, and caught her eye. The shallow inhale she was taking hitched. Her pupils shrunk despite the darkness. Alcor tilted his head to make sure the light glinted across his sharp teeth. Then, he drew back.

           “But I suppose it would be better for Pili and your other children if I actually gave you the chance to learn,” he said offhandedly, and looked at his claws. The next exhale broke out of her, ragged and loud in the silence. “I’m trying to be a better person, you see, and I suppose you haven’t done anything egregiously worthy of…such harsh retribution.”

           Alcor stood. He picked imaginary lint off his shoulder, pulled his eight-ball cane back into the physical realm, and leaned on it. “I don’t suppose I have to inform you that if things don’t get better, I will know,” he drawled. Adi’s hands were clutching at the fabric over her heart. “But, for the purpose of all transparency…if they don’t, I will know. I doubt you’ll enjoy what happens afterwards.”

           With a grin that was satisfyingly wide, Alcor bowed and faded out of sight. A moment later, he released his hold on Adi. He watched her place trembling hands over her mouth and hyperventilate for several minutes. She eventually calmed enough to slide out of bed and stand on shaking legs, though it took her a few tries to be steady enough to walk on her own. She checked her eldest son’s room, then her daughter’s, and then finally –with no little hesitation—her nibling’s.

           Alcor grinned as she stifled a gurgling scream at the sight of Himmwichlint curled up in front of Pili’s bed. Himmwichlint lifted its head, blinked its five eyes at Adi, and then yawned on purpose to show off its incomprehensible but terrifying teeth and its two whipcord tongues. Adi whimpered and stumbled back. Alcor, upside-down on the ceiling, hummed and grinned wider.

           Himmwichlint tilted its head up, made eye contact with him, and huffed.

           Alcor rolled his eyes back at Himmwichlint. He did not need to get out of here, not when this woman’s reactions were absolutely hilarious. He hadn’t been front-row seats to a horror show with so little blood in ages.

           Himmwichlint snorted, looked back at the woman, and nestled itself back in. On the bed, Pili sighed and snuggled the dream closer. The dream obliged.

           Aunt Adi dropped her fist, just a little. She stared at her nibling, eyebrows furrowing. Soft surprise echoed out in the spaces between her terror and horror. If he looked closely, he could see the beginnings of wonder peeking out from behind the residual film of jealousy and anger.

           Oh, he thought. Maybe she would learn. What a disappointment, almost to the point he was the slightest bit mad about it. He’d been looking forward to eking out some more terror from her, maybe indulging in snacking on a finger or two, possibly a kidney, nothing life-threatening. Her actually cleaning her act up was going to ruin things for him.

           Oh, he thought after another moment. Maybe—maybe he did need to go somewhere—else. Dipper closed his eyes and as quietly as possible, tessered into the mindscape, lay in the grass among his Nightmares and Dreams, and simply was.

________________________________________________________________

§¢ɷʘϠϰѬ  ҈۝†‡₰  ʯ͚:ͼǂ  Nightmare Realm

             It was nice, for an indeterminable amount of time, to let the manic buzzing energy and self-righteous anger and the hunger for justice (revenge, the kind that benefited him and him alone) seep out of the front of his mind and down into the back. A couple Dreams nestled up to his sides, and one had decided that his chest was the best place to curl up on. It chewed on his lapel absentmindedly. Dipper would have minded more if it a) wasn’t easy to fix, being made of thought, and b) weren’t the case that the Dream was in the top tenth percentile of cute Dreams—which were altogether adorable as it was.

           The Nightmare taking advantage of the situation to snuffle into his hair was another thing entirely.

           “Erschie,” Dipper said, eyes closed but eyebrows furrowed down. “What are you doing.”

           A pause, then Erschie snorted warm sulfuric air directly into Dippers mostly-made-up scalp. Dipper waited a few seconds for something else to happen, then opened his eyes. The moment he did, he felt Erschie’s fangs and sharp front teeth start to scrape at the top of his head.

         “Gross,” Dipper said, even as he felt the skin slice open just a little. “Disgusting.”

           Erschie paused, then withdrew. Dipper blinked. Erschie then licked at Dipper’s hair with all the gross slobber in Erschie’s dumb gross mouth.

           Dipper bolted upright, the Dream on his chest now in his arms and the other two left to flop into the grass and baa irately over the sudden lack of support. “ERSCHIE!” Dipper screeched. His hair stood up on end. He could feel the slobber starting to trickle down the back of his neck. “WHAT THE FUCK.”

           Erschie blinked up at him, closed its eyes, and then let out a wool-rustle throat-croak hoof-stomp that Dipper knew to indicate Erschie’s general amusement at being a nuisance in Dipper’s life. The Dream snuggled into Dipper’s arms. This, unfortunately, limited what response Dipper could take.

           In order to demonstrate to Erschie that he was a dangerous, serious, terrifying dream demon, Dipper opened his mouth, displayed all his rows of teeth, and hissed at Erschie. For some reason, that just made the Nightmare express Amusement more exuberantly.

           “You’ve been conniving with Himmie, haven’t you,” Dipper said. He resisted the urge to stamp his foot. “You’re both out to show me as much disrespect as possible.”

           Erschie clacked its teeth together and flicked its ears.

           “What do you mean it’s not hard?? I am Alcor the Dreambender, Devourer of Souls and Lord of Nightmares, King of Darkness, Destroyer of Light, the Infernal Star! I’m literally the Scourge of All Beings Living and Dead and you say it’s not hard to disrespect me??”

           With an exaggerated snort, Erschie dipped its head down and up twice before flicking its ears in succession.

           “I do not embarrass myself!!” Dipper howled, throwing his arms up in the air. The Dream previously occupying them fell to the grass with a disgruntled bleat, and glared up at him as ferociously as it could manage. Dipper looked down at the Dream and winced.

           Erschie performed its most vigorous Amusement dance yet.

           Dipper pointed at Erschie and glowered. “Shut up,” he said.

           Predictably, but disappointingly, Erschie did not listen. Erschie continued to do its best to convey its Amusement at Dipper, adding insult to injury by throwing in a mirthful head-shake.

           “Can’t get any respect around here,” Dipper grumbled, squatting down and papping the Dream to show his remorse as was only appropriate. “They’re all out to get me. But you won’t be like that if you ever become a Nightmare, will you? You’ll be appropriately respectful, unlike that ungrateful troll over there. Yes, I could eat it, but no, I am merciful and abstain like a good demon. And this is the thanks I get.”

           The dream looked up at him and blinked. It turned its head to take in Erschie, who was now turning around in a circle as it continued to mock Dipper. Then the dream looked back up at Dipper and flicked its ears just like Erschie was.

           Dipper stood and put his hands on his hips. “Wow,” he said. “The rebellion really does start early. I can see I’m not welcome here, in my own Realm.”

           Erschie blew a raspberry. All three Dreams watched Erschie in clear curiosity, then turned around to Dipper and did the same.

           “Rude,” Dipper growled, and pulled himself away into another place chosen on a whim.

________________________________________________________________

December 5th, 1:58 AM, AZT

             Dipper found himself outside a small home with a bright blue door. The outer walls were made of corrugated metal that had also been painted blue, and a birdhouse had been set between two of the windows. It was cold. Dipper breathed out, then in, then suffused heat into his next exhale just to see the condensation rise and dissipate into the air.

           He turned around, looked down the footpath that meandered down the slope the house was set into. There were more houses, roofs illuminated by moonlight, windows largely unlit. It was 2 AM in this small town of Laza, after all. There wasn’t very much to do, unless he really wanted to terrorize the inhabitants by tap-dancing on their ceilings or whispering traumatizing thoughts into their dreams. He thought maybe that might just possibly be a not great thing that Bentley would get quiet and frustrated with him over, though. Instead, maybe he could just eat some of the goats that one of the houses kept down below. Dipper hummed and tapped his finger on his chin.

           Eating goats was probably something he would get in trouble for, on second thought. He could just terrorize the goats. That was still fun, but didn’t hurt any people. Actually, Torako would get a kick out of some selfies, he could do that. Tempt her into another passport-less road trip, for the fun of it. They could take Bentley too, this time. It would be much lower stakes. Yes, a picture would be good. Dipper took a step forward, absentmindedly casting his mind around to count the souls in the vicinity, and then froze.

           He turned back around, looked at the blue house with the blue door and the birdhouse set into the side of it. A gust of wind blew through him, then around him as he made himself just a little more solid. In turn, he stared through the house and at the soul on a couch. The soul had dozed off while watching the news, which had turned off automatically an hour ago. Dipper stared, then—because he really didn’t have anything better to do—blipped from outside to just in the living room.

           She had become an old, old man, this time, Dipper realized. A very well-groomed and well-dressed old man, even in sleep. She didn’t seem rich this time, he thought to himself, taking in the heirloom table and the rugs worn with age and use, but then again, Pacifica tended to bounce up and down the economic scale from life to life.

           Dipper took a seat in the thin air above the table, on which there was a lone, empty cup that had held coffee at some point. He tilted his head at the old man, watched him breathe in (a little raspy) and then out (almost a snore) for several minutes. Dipper closed his eyes, and saw Pacifica’s death—

           Tunar, in a hospital bed, age 146, seven weeks and two days before his birthday. He breathes in, and then out, and then in, slower and shallower each time. The heartbeat monitor chimes weakly, but steadily. His nephew holds his hand, an old man himself, and his great-great-grandniece is smoothing down the sparse hair on Tunar’s head.

           Tunar does not open his eyes. He has already said goodbye, said it in the hour he was awake before he slept, said goodbye the same way he always did before falling asleep—with a soft ‘I love you,’ a kiss on the forehead or on the hand or on the cheek, and a small little sigh as he set his head into the pillows and closed his eyes again. His other grandnibling has gone with the rest of their family to get something to eat and bring food back for the two who stayed behind. This is probably for the best—there are nineteen of them, you see, because Tunar had loved well and was well-loved in turn.

           His death is slow, as easy as death is capable of being. Medicine has brought the human body far, but there will never be immortality. There never is immortality, not for humankind, not for the dayflies who are born at dawn and die at dusk, not for the oldest of vampires or the fairest of dragons or the coldest of yukionna. All things die, eventually. All things pass.

           Tunar takes a slow, slow breath in, lets it out, and does not inhale again.

—and opened them only to see that the old man had woken up, 137, still nine years left to him, and was looking right at Dipper.

           Dipper startled a little, but didn’t move. The old man did not startle, but instead stretched after a moment in the way that old people do to get stiff muscles to cooperate again.

           “Ah, I fell asleep on the couch again,” Tunar muttered. His hands shook a little as he clapped them once. The lights came on, dim. “I really should stop doing that, it’s very bad for my back and for my sleeping schedule. This face isn’t getting any younger, you know.”

           Dipper cocked his head. “Do you want it to?” he asked.

           Tunar scoffed and pushed himself to sit up straight before reaching for an elegant white cane. His hands, wrinkled and adorned with liver spots, wrapped thin fingers around the gently curved top of the cane. “You think you’re so smooth,” he said, narrowing thick eyebrows at Dipper. “I know better than to make a deal with you, Soul-Devourer.”

          After a brief pause that stretched on to the edge between acceptable and too long, Dipper said, “Actually, it was mostly curiosity.”

           “Mostly,” Tunar drawled, leaning back into the cushions and looking down his nose at Dipper. Dipper was reminded almost viciously of Pacifica and how she would stare at him, unimpressed, after whatever shenanigan he’d pulled recently that pissed her off. It froze Dipper for several long seconds, his heart in his throat as he couldn’t stop seeing her face over Tunar’s. Then Tunar sighed, and the spell was broken.

         “I suppose you’re not actually here to reap my soul for whatever reason, though.” Tunar tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “I know you caused a big hullabaloo a few countries over several months ago, but they’re saying that the river is purified and that there were minimal casualties, which really is quite surprising.”

           “Well, old man,” Dipper drawled, leaning over, “what makes you think that would stop me from taking what I want?”

           Tunar blinked, looked closely at Dipper, and said nothing for a long time. His eyes were dark, if a little clouded, but piercing in a way that had Dipper twitching his foot. The light buzzed overhead. The clock in the other room slid nearly-silently to the next minute. Outside, Dipper could hear grass rustling in the wind if he concentrated enough, or too little.

           A hum brought his attention back to the Pacifica in front of him. Tunar had leaned forward, placing his face and throat closer to Dipper, close enough he could reach out or lunge if he really wanted to.

           “Well then,” Tunar said, smiling, his prosthetic teeth shining somewhat brighter than the few natural ones he had left, “seems to me that you don’t want to eat me.”

           That wasn’t completely accurate—it never was—but it was accurate enough that Dipper found himself flushing. He withdrew and hunched his shoulders, looking at the pictures set into the wall as though he’d never seen anything like them before. Fingers wrapped around his knee, he managed to respond, “Says who?”

           Torako would have gleefully needled the truth out of him. Bentley would have stared at him, arched an eyebrow, and said “Says me,” with the slyest little grin on his face. Pacifica would have lifted fingers to her mouth and chuckled, eyes half-lowered in a kind of superiority-fueled amusement.

           Tunar snorted, eyebrows shooting up higher, and leaned back. “Can’t believe I thought you were some kind of suave, smooth-talking master-villain,” he said. “You’re a dumbass.”

           Dipper scowled at Tunar. Tunar grinned unapologetically, sharp at the edges. “You suck,” Dipper said, finally.

           With a cackle, Tunar finally lay his cane across the top of his legs. “I’m thirsty,” he said, finally. “Make me some coffee.”

           “Make—you have a demon in your living room, and you’re telling him to make coffee??” Dipper said, voice momentarily going shrill.

           “That’s right,” Tunar said, eyes creased in a self-satisfied smile.

           “I could—I’ve manufactured deaths for less offense,” Dipper said, even though it wasn’t much of an offense.

           “I’m a hundred and thirty seven years old,” Tunar said, archly. “Even if I thought you would do that, I wouldn’t be frightened. I’ve lived a long time.”

           Dipper stared. “Unbelievable,” he finally said. “I can’t believe it. I’ve been dealing with this kind of disrespect all day. You don’t even know me.”

           “You just have that kind of face.” Tunar reached out with his cane and poked Dipper in the arm. Dipper’s jaw fell open. “Now. Coffee. I like mine with heavy cream and a scant spoonful of cane sugar. Get to it.”

           It took Dipper several moments to get his jaw closed. Then, he stood up, feet firmly on the rug below the coffee table, and walked into the kitchen to do as Tunar said. He was never, he thought to himself, introducing Tunar to Torako or Bentley. Never.

________________________________________________________________

           In the middle of a story about the time that an acquaintance, unaware of the fact that Tunar wasn’t particularly interested in romantic or sexual entanglements, tried to set Tunar up with xir grandchild ten years Tunar’s senior when Tunar was 23, Dipper’s phone rang. The lyrics to Dancing Queen blared in the air between them before Dipper could answer it.

           Tunar tilted his head. “You have a phone?”

           Dipper sent a glower at Tunar, then answered the phone. “Yes?” he asked, in an approximation of what passed for English these days.

           “Oh, thank goodness you answered,” the voice on the other end of the line said. Dipper blinked and took a second to place the voice—Reynash, right. “Listen, Lata’s sitter dropped out on us again, he was supposed to pick him up from school today but we just got the call that he didn’t, could you—”

           “Yeah, yeah, no, give me five, ten minutes,” Dipper said, tipping his head and calculating the closest point to Lata’s new school that he could feasibly tesser to and remain anonymous. “I’d teleport right to him but that might be a bit—”

           Reynash laughed, a little too tight to be completely sincere. “Ahaha, yeah, no, we would appreciate—no, thank you, I’ll let the school know that Lata’s Uncle Tyrone will be coming to get him.”

           “Sounds good,” Dipper said. “I’ll message when I pick him up, okay?”

           “Thank you again,” Reynash said. “I’ll be home after five, maybe five-thirty, so if you could keep him company until then—”

           “Yeah, no problem at all!”

           “You’re a lifesaver,” Reynash said. “Thanks again, see you.”

           “See—” Dipper only managed to get out one word before the dial tone sounded. He looked down at the phone, and then said, “Well then, he really is busy I guess.”

           “Alcor the Dreambender has a mundane social life?” Tunar said, droll. Dipper relaxed, purposefully, then tilted his head at Pacifica’s latest incarnation. He looked at Tunar through half-lidded eyes, Stan held in the back of his mind—Pacifica did like her fame, he remembered absently. She liked being the center of attention, and what better way to be the center of attention than to have a juicy news scoop to sell to the highest bidding news agency?

           Tunar took one look at Dipper, humphed, and then smacked Dipper in the knee with his cane.

           “Hey!” Dipper protested. “What the fuck?”

           “Don’t you get snippy at me,” Tunar said, wagging a finger in Dipper’s face. Dipper was seized by the childish urge to snap his teeth at it. “I could see you getting all paranoid on me. On me! After I’ve spent the last unbelievable amount of time talking to you about my life and all the personal details in it. I even let you slide on reciprocating. The least you could do is let me have this.”

           Dipper narrowed his eyes at Tunar. “You going to tell anybody?”

           Tunar snorted. “Tell people that Alcor the Dreambender came by for coffee and a chat and ended up taking a phone call in my presence? I’d either end up with terrified Demonologists tearing up my house or being prescribed a variety of medication for hallucinations and fits of fantasy. Perhaps I would have been tempted in my youth, but these old bones are done with all that drama.”

           He watched Tunar’s aura, saw it peppered with the lightest of lies—Tunar was plenty tempted now—but it was enough that Dipper leaned back into the couch and took a final sip of his coffee. “Okay,” he said.

         There was a beat of silence. “So,” Tunar said, “you have to leave, I’m supposing.”

           “Yes,” Dipper said. He leaned forward, set the cup in its saucer with a light a clink as he could manage, and stood up. “My apologies for intruding.”

           With rolled eyes, Tunar set his cup on its saucer as well with far less care than Dipper had taken. “Bah, you’re not sorry. I expect to see you here next week—though possibly at a more reasonable hour. My Doctor says that I really need to keep myself on a better sleep pattern.”

           Dipper’s hands stuttered over where they were needlessly straightening out his collar. “Next…week?”

           “Of course,” Tunar said. He stood with the help of his cane and grunted with the effort. “What, you think I started that story with the intention of leaving it unfinished? No, you will be back next week. And—you have a phone. Call me before you come so that I am ready for company.”

           Dipper could only blink. “But I don’t know—”

           “It’s written on the stasis fridge, top left corner. Take a look at it when you bring the cups in to the dishwasher.”

           Spluttering, Dipper said, “I—you expect me to wash the cups?!”

           “And you can let yourself out, I assume,” Tunar said. He turned a genial grin on Dipper, but Dipper was savvy enough to see the slyness in the corners of it. Also, the amusement in his aura helped matters a lot. “Seeing as you let yourself in.”

           “...I am an all powerful demon, and you expect me to wash your cups for—”

           “That just means I am all the more assured you are capable of such a simple task,” Tunar said. He reached out a slightly shaking hand, patted Dipper on the shoulder, and then said, “Well, I am off to bed. Again, I expect you next week. Do try not to show up in the middle of the night again, it’s not good for my heart.”

           With that, Dipper watched Tunar shuffle off around the coffee table and down the hall beyond the other side of the television screen. He blinked a little, completely blindsided—though he probably shouldn’t be. Pacifica also had a tendency of bulldozing through most of her social interactions.

           Sighing, Dipper reached down, gathered up the teacups, gave them a little rinse with the sink tap before setting them in the washer, and entered Tunar’s number into his phone. He looked down at it, displaying up at him with deceptive innocence, and furrowed his eyebrows. Then, he saw the time, said, “Oh, crap,” and blipped out of the darkened kitchen.

December 4th, 4:13 pm, PDT

             Lata screeched with joy as he barreled into Dipper with all the force of an exuberant six year old, face pressed into Dipper’s waist and arms flung around Dipper’s legs. Dipper, dressed up in his nicest, most disarming and charming human persona, grinned down at Lata.

           “Hey buddy,” he said. “How are you doing?”

           “I was so bored,” Lata said, nearly yelling the last two words. “But now you’re here so I’m not! Can we go get ice cream?”

           “Ah,” Dipper said, before deciding fuck it and nodding his head. “Yeah, sure, but I have to sign you out first and let your dad know we got you, okay?”

           Lata appeared to have stopped listening after ‘sure,’ and released Dipper to go have a good old jump-and-punch-the-air-in-victory dance. Dipper re-evaluated the intelligence of giving this already hyper child more sugar, then shrugged because he wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout, would he?

           “Uncle Tyrone, I presume,” the secretary said, grinning a little. At first glance, she looked like an older middle-aged woman, but Dipper saw the fangs and the sunglasses and thought vampire. She tapped a few buttons, and a screen lit up in front of her window for Dipper. “Please verify your identity with this security question chosen by the child’s guardians and then sign.”

           Dipper peered down at the question. What did you suddenly yell at Reynash Pines that one time that had him scream, launch a full package of Choco Piecies into the air, and tumble back over his home office chair which meant he had to go to the hospital and get three stitches behind his right ear?

           He blinked, then toggled the keyboard to input, What U Cravin. The system thought for a moment, then blinked green before showing him the field to write in his signature. Dipper took hold of the stylus it materialized for him, signed, and then said goodbye to the secretary.

           Lata had, in the meantime, decided that he needed to be crawling around on his feet and hands like some kind of humpbacked bear cub. “Are you done?” Lata asked, turning around in a circle, still not standing. There was dirt on his hands. Dipper resolved to get Lata to wash them as soon as they could find a public restroom.

           “Yes, I’m done,” Dipper said. “You wanna ditch this lame joint?”

           “It’s not lame,” Lata said, twisting his head to look at Dipper in such a way that Dipper wondered how he wasn’t snapping his own neck. “School is really really awesome, it’s just that everybody’s already gone home and I could only just wait for people to come pick me up, and waiting is boring.”

           “That tracks,” Dipper said after a pause. Lata looked back down at the ground and then started walking forward, down to where the entryway doors were. “You gonna keep walking like that buddy?”

           “Yeah,” Lata said. “This is the bear walk! We learned it today in Activities. We also learned the frog leap –though I already knew it—and the lizard crawl, and the earthworm, and the kangaroo hop. Nobody believed me when I said I went to Australia to see the kangaroos, though. They said that you can’t just go to Australia, because there are big spiders.”

           Dipper paused a moment to take in that information. He opened the door for Lata, watched him crawl down the front step and onto the rougher—colder—pavement. Lata frowned at the ground, but kept going. “Your…teacher said this?”

           “No,” Lata said in his best are you stupid voice. Dipper felt affronted that he was turning it on Dipper, his most favorite Uncle Tyrone. “You and Mom and Dad all said not to tell any adults, so I didn’t! But kids don’t count, so I told them. And they didn’t even believe me!”

           Letting the door close behind him, Dipper politely ignored the person walking their dog that stopped in their tracks to first stare at Lata, then turn away with their hand over their mouth and their aura splashed all over with viridian amusement. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing,” Dipper said. “You don’t even have a passport yet.”

           “What’s a passport?” Lata asked. His steps forward were far more ginger than they were earlier, inside on the tile flooring of the hallway.

           “It’s, uh,” Dipper said, looking down at Lata’s animal-print backpack. It had shifted over entirely to one side of Lata’s back, unbalancing him a little. He reached down, adjusted it, and continued. “Well, it’s a special document—like a little book, I think, though maybe that’s changed—that they scan at Ports when you go from one country to another country.”

           “Huh,” Lata said. He took another step, stopped, and then stood up. At the sight of his hands, Dipper moved hand-washing even further up the list of priorities. If he’d thought inside was bad, it was nothing compared to the brief jaunt down the path up to the school. “Do you have a passport?”

           “No,” Dipper said.

           Lata looked up at him, tilted his head so that the leaves on his antlers bobbed a little. “But you have to, to go to another country, right?”

           “Most people have to,” Dipper amended. “It’s expected.”

           They passed by a couple arm-in-arm, a single long scarf wrapped across both their necks. Dipper looked down at Lata. “Where’s your scarf?”

           “In my bag,” Lata said, like that was the best place for it on a chilly December afternoon.

           “And your gloves?”

           “In my bag, duh,” Lata said, rolling his eyes.

           “Hey,” Dipper said. “You really want to pull an attitude with somebody who said they’d get you ice cream in such cold weather?”

           Lata hummed, his finger on his chin in thought. A cold breeze had him shivering a little before he answered, “Maybe?”

           Dipper sighed. “Well,” he said, really elongating the word in a way that immediately caught Lata’s attention. “Maybe we don’t need ice cream after all. It’s about 3 degrees Celcius right now, after all.”

           Lata gasped. “No, you can’t take it back! No take-backs! You said we’d go for ice cream!”

           They were now by the public bathroom that Dipper had initially blipped into. “Let’s wash our hands then,” he said, pointing, “in preparation for ice cream.”

           Lata screeched in victory, did a little dance, and then started running towards the bathroom. “First one there gets to eat as much as they want!”

           Reynash would demolish him if Dipper let Lata eat as much ice cream as he wanted. Dipper burst into a very graceless, very hasty run, and didn’t really consider that he wasn’t beholden to any deal he hadn’t verbally agreed to.

________________________________________________________________

           “I cannot believe I let you get all that ice cream,” Dipper said, having blipped them to a nice ice cream place down in New California before bringing Lata and their spoils to the Pines home.

           Lata giggled and stuck his spoon into his Custom Mouse Sundae, complete with five scoops of ice cream molded into the shape of a mouse and topped off with two round waffle cookies that made the mouse’s ears. He dug out the piece of chocolate that made up the eye and stuck it in his mouth, kicking his legs.

           “I would’ve beat you if you hadn’t used your superpowers,” Lata said, trying to pout but failing in the face of the massive, self-satisfied grin that kept breaking through. “You had to be nice to me. It’s only fair.”

           “Your parents would hate it if I had let you eat the Turtle Family Sundae, the Spaghetti Ice Cream Set, and the Mouse Sundae,” Dipper said, pointing his spoon at Lata from across the table. He had gotten a custom ice cream Mega Bowl, and had filled it with a variety of ice creams and toppings. Lata kept glancing at it with unashamed interest.

           Lata leaned back in his seat—Dipper reached across and pulled the chair back onto all four legs with his foot—and groaned. “But it would have been so delicious,” he said. “So worth it. It’s not like they can do anything to you! They can’t ground you, or take away TV privileges, or game privileges, or have you write letters of Recon-ciliation to exchange with each other.”

           Dipper blinked. “Letters of Reconciliation?”

           Lata carefully carved the tip of the mouse’s nose, cherry and all, off from the rest of the ice cream. “Yeah,” he said, before taking a break to stuff his mouth.

             “What’s that?”                

           “It’s when we have a disagreement, and I write a letter saying what I thought and how I felt about the thing, and Mom and Dad write a letter saying what they thought and felt about the thing, and we give them to each other and read them and then talk about it. It’s so boring.”

           Rain tapped against the roof and windows—rain might be a bit of a misnomer for the half-rain, half-ice slush that was falling from the sky, but nevertheless Dipper was glad they hadn’t been caught out in it before heading down to NewCal. That would have been super messy, and cold, and gross. Dipper scooped up a bit of ice cream, swallowed it almost immediately, and then responded. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” he said.

           “Ugh, you’re such an adult,” Lata whined. He leaned down and pulled one of the cookie ears out of the mouse with his mouth. When he bit down, the part of the cookie that wasn’t in his mouth fell onto the ice cream below, which was starting to melt a bit.

           “You’ve gotten sassy since entering Kindergarten,” Dipper said, narrowing his eyes at Lata. “Where’s the little monster that kept saying things like ‘rawr’ and ‘I’m a nibble monster’ and all? Also, I’ll have you know that I am essentially eternally twelve. That’s not an adult.”

           “But it’s still old!” Lata yelled, suddenly. He leaned back on the rear legs of his chair. Dipper reached out with his foot and pulled his chair back down with an ease that was somewhat frightening after so many years of not parenting. “You’re old! I asked Dad how old you were and he said you were thousands of years old! That’s so many years. I watched him write out all the zeros, and then we counted out rice and it was so much rice and took so long.”

           Dipper scowled and crossed his arms. “I bought you ice cream, and this is how you repay me?”

           “I’m just saying the truth,” Lata retorted. “It’s the truth, so you can’t be mad about it.”

           Dipper snorted. “Now that’s not how things work,” he said. “Plenty of people get mad about the truth. They do it all the time.”

           Lata blinked at him. “But why? It’s the truth. You can’t get mad at something that’s true. Hans told me so.”

           As Lata began licking the ice cream, hands fisted on either side of his take-out bowl, Dipper hummed and tapped the flat of his spoon against his own ice cream. He cycled through the examples in his head—everything died, but plenty of people sought immortality—it was true that if you caught a knife to the throat, you would not last long but people got so upset about that—people worshipped or didn’t worship in many ways, and yet there were those who decided that those ways were wrong and got mad—kids grew up, and there were some dumbasses who resented how those children grew up into their own skins with their own experiences and opinions instead of staying malleable, agreeable, naïve—preternatural citizens existed, and yet—governments weren’t perfect, but—and finally hit upon one he thought Lata would understand.

           “Well,” he said, slowly, “have you ever watched something on TV and gotten mad about it?”

           Lata maintained eye-contact while licking across the ice-cream-mouse’s head. Savage. “Mom says that we have to look up stuff that they put on the TV sometimes, because it’s not always right, and when it’s not right then of course I’m allowed to be mad about it. Because it’s not right.”

           Right then, maybe not that. Perhaps he ought to take a different approach here, let Lata provide the basic scenario. “Okay, buddy, how about you tell me all the things that make you mad.”

           With a hum, Lata took a huge bite right out of the scoop of Fudge Mountain Caramel Surprise in front of his mouth. Dipper watched and wondered how effective that technique actually could be. “Um,” he said, completely ignorant of the melted ice cream smeared over his nose and lips and even chin, “well, I guess I get mad whenever Ri-Ri lies to me about the places she goes with her parents. And when Toma writes on my papers when I tell zir not to. Or when the lady on International Animal Discovery Channel is absent and her coworker comes in and covers for her, because he’s stupid and gets stuff wrong all the time. And when I have to go to bed at eight thirty, even though all my friends get to go to bed later. It’s so stupid! Why do I have to go to bed earlier? It can’t just be because it’s good for me because I’m a kid, because if it was my friends would go to bed earlier too! And also when Mom says she can’t come pick me up at school because she has an emergency meeting, like today, because she goes to work before I go to school and I don’t get to see her until I get out of school. And—”  

           Dipper swallowed the entire scoop of classic mint before holding up his hand and waving it. “Okay, okay, I think I have enough to work with there, thank you. Let’s talk about bedtime, okay? You’re mad because you have to go to bed earlier than your friends, right?”

           Lata slumped and poked his ice cream with his index finger. “Yeah,” he mumbled, before sticking his finger in his mouth and sucking the melted ice cream off of it. “I guess.”

           “Right,” Dipper said. He paused, suddenly doubting that he was the right person to tell Lata about this part of life. This seemed like a very—very parent-to-child conversation, not an Uncle-to-nibling conversation. It was kind of heavy.

           He paused too long. “So?” Lata said. Dipper looked up to see that Lata had resorted to grabbing the ice cream with his full hand and was licking it out of his palm. What a mood, Dipper thought, but instead narrowed his eyes at Lata.

           “Hey, use your spoon, not your hands,” he said. “And actually—here, use this napkin to clean your hand off. If you put your hands on something, it’ll get dirty and then we’ll both have to deal with the consequences, aka your parents.”

           “Okay,” Lata said, reaching with his dirty hand to take the napkin Dipper had pulled out from the 100% biodegradable takeout bag he’d gotten at the ice cream shop.

           “Probably should get the ice cream on your nose and chin while you’re at it,” Dipper said absentmindedly, watching Lata scrub at his hand with the paper napkin. Lata was a good kid, Dipper thought to himself. Lata would understand what Dipper was trying to say. This wouldn’t be too hard.

           Lata wrinkled his nose, but got most of the ice cream off his face. Good enough, Dipper thought, and then he launched into his little speech.

            “Right, so, it is true the kids need a lot of sleep, because they’re still developing their brains and bodies. The reason that babies sleep so much is that they’re growing and learning so much, and everything is new, so it’s exhausting. You’re still learning a lot of new stuff, and your brain is,” Dipper squinted at Lata and tilted his head, “currently, it’s learning how to handle complex and somewhat abstract concepts such as time, numbers, is expanding its capacity for vocabulary, and is beginning to develop the pathways needed to understand things such as life and death and your place in the cycle. You already have a very good grasp on concentration and a decent awareness of places existing outside of your home and school, though, that’s pretty impressive at your age.”

           Lata’s eyes went a little unfocused. Dipper dialed it back. “Point is, your brain is working hard, and it needs that sleep to recharge, refresh, and retain—keep—all the information that you’ve been learning. Your friends should probably be going to sleep around the same time you are if they’re waking up when you are, though every kid is different and every family is different.”

           Slowly, Lata tilted his head at Dipper. “What?”

           “Your parents are right,” Dipper said after a short but deep inhale, “that you should go to bed at 8:30. Your friends also need the amount of sleep that you do. It’s the truth. Are you still mad at it?”

           Lata thought for a moment. “Kind of,” he mumbled.

           “Why?”

           Lata grumbled, “This is worse than Reconciliation Letters.”

           “Why thank you,” Dipper said, grinning a little, “So? What’s got you so mad then? It can’t be that your friends are right and your parents are wrong for sending you to bed early, right?”

           “I think you’re like all the wrong people on the TV,” Lata said, frowning, not meeting Dippers’s eyes. “I think if I look it up you’re going to be wrong.”

           “I’m an all-powerful omni—I mean, all-knowing demon,” Dipper drawled, quirking an eyebrow at Lata. “I know things that Ping never would, and I know all the things that Ping is wrong about. Wanna try again?”

           For a long time, Lata stayed quiet. He kicked his legs under the table and glowered at his ice cream. Resentment breathed slow, auburn in his aura, and frustration sparkled at the edges like dew on stinging nettle. Dipper sat on the urge to interject what he wanted Lata to learn, and waited.

           After a whole six minutes, twenty-three seconds and four-hundred ninety-eights of a millisecond, Lata said, “’Cause I wanna watch Seawitch Adventures like Ri-Ri and all the others get to.”

           Dipper had not known about Seawitch Adventures, but it made sense. He translated, “Because you don’t like it. It goes against what you want the world to be like.”

           Lata tilted their head in a shrug and papped at the dining table surface with their hands. There was still a residue of ice cream lingering on the one hand, but Dipper decided that was whatever and Reynash or Kanti could deal with it later. He was doing awesome at this conversation thing.

           “People don’t get mad when things are factually wrong. They get mad when things aren’t the way they want them to be. And that’s okay!” Dipper said, after a length of time. “Everybody does it. The problem is when you choose to take that anger out on other people, people who don’t deserve it.”

           Lata paused, and looked up. “Do you do it? Take it out on other people.”

           Dipper felt his heart stutter in his chest. “…Sometimes.”

           “Is that why Daddy and Mommy were afraid of you?”

           Dipper held a desperate lie against the back of his many teeth before closing his eyes and letting it melt away, unheard. “…yes.”

           “Don’t you know it’s a problem, though?” Lata asked.

         Dipper shies away from that truth. He gives a not-quite-lie. “I forget, sometimes.”

           Rain splashed against the roof, the windows. The stasis fridge hummed in the kitchen. Lata had stopped drumming against the table. Dipper felt almost compelled to pick it up in his stead.

           “…what did you do?”

           “A lot of things,” Dipper said, quietly. He opened his eyes. “A lot of very bad things that I forgot were bad.”

           Lata stared at him. His dik-dik horns, so much smaller than Henry’s, than Paloma’s, seemed to embody all of Dipper’s regrets and failures for a brief moment. Dipper felt the phantom slide of a soul down his throat. He swallowed, met Lata’s gaze and tried to push the feeling away. Lata’s eyes looked right into Dipper’s until Dipper looked away, a little scared of what Lata was reading in them. Scared, maybe, that Lata might just see his own soul between Dipper’s teeth, even though that was impossible. Anyways, the only soul Dipper had between his metaphorical teeth was—

           “Even now?” Lata asked, again.

           “No, no, now is better. I forget…less,” Dipper said after a beat. Thoughts of souls faded to the back of his mind. They never really left, though. The temptation was always there, like the background hum of a generator, or the near silent slide of the second hand of an analogue clock. “Now is—I can control how mad I am. I remember that it’s not right to take my anger out on innocent people. I understand that sometimes I’m mad at the wrong thing. Usually I can pull myself back. I never remember to pull myself back when I’m…when I’m like what your parents learned about.”

           “Oh,” Lata said. They were quiet for a long time, the two of them. The ice cream in their bowls continued to melt. Dipper stared at his, watched the strawzzleberry cheesecake ooze into the peanut butter fudge scoop.

           “I yelled at Mama when she made me go to bed,” Lata said, in a quiet voice. “I said I hated her.”

           Dipper winced. That had always hurt—his children, his sister, his niblings saying they hated him in fits of anger. He’d known they didn’t mean it, usually, but it still hurt. Sometimes it hurt more than others. Sometimes he’d lashed out in response. And sometimes, a very few sometimes, he had hurt them far more than they had.

           He shied away from the thought. “How—what did your Mama think of that?”

           Lata shrugged, poked his ice-cream soup with his spoon. “She frowned at me and said I was going to bed no matter that I hated her.”

           Dipper remembered putting on a strong front. He worried lightly on his bottom lip. “Ah,” he said.

           After a few moments, Lata looked up at him. “Do you think I hurt her?” he asked. He shifted in his seat, but kept looking Dipper right in the eye.

           Dipper opened his mouth to say yes, because he’d always been hurt (even if just a little bit), but Lata looked so small and worried, undertones of dark guilt hovering around his shoulders. He swallowed the yes, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. You—you have to ask her.”

           “Oh. Okay,” Lata said.

           They sat in silence. Rain hit the window, the roof. Dipper stared at his own ice cream soup for a while, colors having swirled into a muddy mess. He passed his spoon through it once, twice, a few more times, before sticking it in his mouth with a sigh. In his periphery, he saw Lata blink at him. Incredulity lanced over his head. Dipper stifled a grin and set down the spoon on the table with a light clack. Hyperaware of Lata staring at him, he sighed in exaggeration before picking up the ice cream cup and pouring the contents down his throat.

           “Ew, gross,” said Lata.

           Dipper swallowed and licked his lips, glancing up at Lata. “What? It’d be a waste to throw it out. You don’t want your own sugar soup? I’ll drink it for you.”

           Lata screwed up his nose at Dipper, then pushed the cup at him. His guilt was still present, but disgust and also amusement were sliding over it, burying it from the moment. Soon it would be nothing more than an aftertaste, something Dipper would have to concentrate to be able to sense. “All the flavors are mixed now, it’s so gross.”

           “Excellent,” Dipper said, before taking the ice cream and swallowing that, too. There are soggy chunks of cookie in it. It’s not particularly appetizing, but it’s also not a rule breaker, and the mixed flavor is a mystery on his tongue. He closes his eyes and tilts his head, swishing the last of the mixture around in his mouth to try to figure out what was in it.

           “Ewwww, what are you doing,” Lata said, giggling. “It’s not mouthwash!”

           Dipper swallowed. “Definitely Raspberry Crunch and Honeyed Alfalfa,” he said. “You got something chocolaty in there, right? Some kind of—fudge, fudge something, oh! Fudge Mountain Caramel Surprise, right?”

           “You can’t taste everything,” Lata accused.

           “If I work hard enough I can,” Dipper said, opening his eyes and smirking. There’s a tug at his navel that means summons, but honestly this is more important (and probably more fun). “Five scoops, right? And I’ve already figured out three of them.”

           Lata pushed himself to kneel on the seat of his chair, semi-sticky hands flat on the table and eyes wide. “You can’t,” he breathed.

           “Can so.” Dipper hummed and thought to himself. “There was a nutty kind of flavor in there, nutty and a little salty, but it wasn’t cashew, it was a little less fatty, it was—right, I remember you pointing to the Wonderful Salted Walnut.”

           “Noooo!” Lata leaned forward even further. Dipper cast an absentminded eye at the pressure that was placing on the front legs of the chair and whether they were likely to tip and smash Lata’s face into the table. It was pretty low, only 28%, so he let it be. “That’s still not all! There’s still one left!”

           Dipper cackled and spun the empty ice cream carton on one talon. With a nudge from his mind, it balanced perfectly and continued to spin unnaturally fast. The summons tugged again at his stomach, but he smothered it. It wasn’t anybody he knew. It wasn’t important. “I think you mean only one.”

           He closed his eyes to focus on the last flavor, and that can be the only reason that he only realized they weren’t alone when he heard, “And what are—did you have ice cream??”

           “Oh shit,” Dipper said without thinking, eyes flying open.

           Lata said, with the absolute worst timing known only to children under the age of ten, “Oh shit! Welcome home, Papa!”

           Reynash Pines leveled him with the most incredulous glare he’d seen in a while. “Ice cream and swearing?”

           Suddenly, the importance of the summons skyrocketed from rock bottom to very near the top of his priority list. Dipper dropped the carton on the floor. “Oh, hey, Reynash, buddy, how’s it hanging, uh, sorry to skip out but I actually just got a summons, you know how they are haha, can’t help that work life, on call twenty-four-seven, see you later hope you’re not mad byeeeee!”

           Reynash spluttered. Water dripped off his bangs and onto his forehead. “No, you can’t just bail on—Dipper!”

           But Dipper had already clenched the connection to the summons in one metaphorical hand, had tugged, and was gone.

 _______________________________________________________________

December 4th, 9:39 PM BRL

             The first thing Dipper noticed was that the candles were scentless. He billowed up from nothing in the most dramatic smoke he could think of, pulled the reverb in his throat to mild extremes, and said, “Who presumes to call upon Alcor the Dreambender?” into the dark of the blue-lit room.

           The second thing Dipper noticed were the chalk lines—exact angles, minimal differences in stroke width, painstakingly duplicated symbols. Its perfection was mathematically precise, and there were even three layers of binding spells woven into the circle. Dipper casually pulled his cane out of thin air, coalesced his top hat from residual smoke curling into the space above his head, and smiled to himself. Binding spells weren’t much more than a nuisance to deal with.

           The third thing Dipper noticed were the people in the room—elegantly dressed adults in formal suits and skirts, beautifully crafted silver masks over their faces, hair coiffed and pressed and sprayed. Their arms were uplifted, frozen in the moment they’d succeeded in summoning him. There were nine of them. Dipper glanced over them, saw their determination and hard-edged stubbornness and solid righteousness in their auras, the colors subtly different for each person.

           “Lord Alcor,” one of them said. Dipper blinked, and knew they were he. “We come to offer you an exchange: a solution to our troubles for a worthy sacrifice.”

           Dipper hummed, leaned on his cane, and didn’t let them in on the fact that he’d already surreptitiously snapped one of the binding circles. “Oh?” he drawled, a lazy little grin curled into the corners of his lips. “Tell me, what are your troubles?”

           “Our beloved country,” the Speaker said, “is being cast into ruin and shadows by those currently in charge. We seek only to remove the…obstacles facing our country’s future.”

           “I see,” said Dipper, and then he really did. He was in Brazil, in New Fortaleza, and the government was currently making social reforms that benefited those in the lowest economic tier. There were many people pushing for those reforms from places of influence—born into and risen up to alike. He raised his eyebrows. “And…what would your idea of a fair exchange be?”

           The Speaker turned his head and nodded to the woman next to him. She nodded back, then turned around to head away from the circle and towards the stairs at the edge of the wide space they had chosen for his summoning. Dipper watched her go, and did not blink. Absentmindedly, he slid his power around and under the second barrier spell. This one would be a little trickier—raw power would only alert them to its failure, so he would have to play a subtler hand.

           One of the summoning group shifted xir weight almost imperceptibly. Dipper blinked to look xir way. Xi made eye contact through the mask and flinched.

           “Be steady,” the Speaker said. “Lord Alcor, it would not go unappreciated were you to…refrain from any posturing or intimidation tactics.”

           Dipper chuckled, refocused back on the Speaker. “Condolences,” he murmured, pitching the tone so that it echoed off the far walls regardless of the volume. “I cannot control how much terror your…acquaintances feel. I am a demon. Instilling fear in those who look upon us is an unavoidable part and parcel of this existence, you understand.”  

           The Speaker said nothing, but swallowed. Dipper counted that as a victory in and of himself—he was getting the sense that this man enjoyed talking, and enjoyed even more than that the chance to hear himself talk.

           The soft whir-click-swoosh of a door being unlocked and opened echoed through the empty room. It whispered off the walls. Dipper watched the Speaker’s aura twist in uncertainty before determination smoothed it out, hot shmellow oozing over dirty blue-green until it was smothered. He held the Speaker’s gaze until the footsteps started echoing around the room too—the steady tread of the woman’s shoes, followed by a hesitant, uneven, sometimes scraping cacophony of quiet noise. The breath halted in Dipper’s useless lungs. Nobody seemed to notice; his chest had hardly been rising and falling anyways.

           Nine children followed the woman. He could hear their shallow breaths, their hitching hiccups, barely restrained tears. He could smell the acrid-sweet scent of fear, the way it spiked and swelled when he leaned back on thin air. The second barrier snapped, and he was just barely aware enough to stop it from flickering with bright thunder. He wanted this. He hated this.

           The Speaker waited for Alcor’s attention to shift to the children, but when he didn’t comply, he swept an arm out to call attention to the newcomers. “Nine lives, from nine of us, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to our country. We have learned that you…like…children, and their lives would be yours to do what you see fit with.”

           It was strange that these types always learned all the wrong lessons about children, he thought absentmindedly, almost vapidly. It was strange that they always dismissed the possibility of more ethical sacrifices, like candy or sentimental items or factories worth of ice cream. Dipper cast his gaze over the children, his face frozen in that way it was when he felt like he was on the cusp of something terrible. They were cleaned—recently, from the faint hint of chemically-recreated pomegranate on the air—but some of them had clearly had better care than others. He skipped from terrified face to terrified face. The youngest of them was—six, dark curly hair, bought from desperate parents like human lives were commodities, teeth digging into a bottom lip and eyes welling with tears. Then there was—seven and petit, ten and too tall for her age, eleven and barely scared enough the fear drowned out the anger, two eight-year-old twins with vitiligo on their palms (and no, Bentley didn’t have vitiligo, but the splotchy color difference was enough to make him burn colder, right in his chest), nine and born blind, six-and-a-half and missing a finger, and a twelve year old on the cusp of turning thirteen. Tomorrow was xir birthday.

           The Speaker’s voice turned soft. “Jamilla, come.”

           The twelve year old inhaled sharp and quiet, but went. Xir hands twisted in xir gold shift. Blue fingernail polish flashed in the light, like all the other children’s. Dressed up pretty, their individualism smoothed away as best as possible, for the very ends of their lives. “Papa?”

           The Speaker waited for Jamilla to come to him. Alcor kept his eyes on Jamilla every step of the way. He watched how xi quivered, how xi glanced over at him over and over. He thought about thirteenth birthdays and never reaching them, thought about his puffy blue vest and that stupid pine-tree hat that he had loved with all his heart, and how it was hard to even think about wearing things that casual for very long. His power rolled over to the third barrier and began to eat at it.

           “This is my own child,” the Speaker said, setting his hands on Jamilla’s shoulders. “Xi knows how important the future of our country is, and was willing to sacrifice xirself for it. While most of the children here are orphans, or as good as, this is a token of my dedication, of my seriousness.”

           “…I see,” said Dipper. He tilted his head. Jamilla shivered and averted xir gaze, but did not move otherwise. “Dedicated indeed, to sacrifice somebody you love. Very powerful.”

           He cast his eye, slowly and deliberately, over the other children. He tried to catch their gazes where he could. Everything around him felt—slow, almost. He stared into the eyes of the angry-scared eleven year old, whose name was Leilani and whose ambition was to become a child caretaker because children deserved people who protected them and nurtured them and loved them, whose anger had left silvery scars between her knuckles from how many times she’d split them over on somebody else’s face or gut or kidney, whose eyes were dark, furious brown and who could have lived to forty-one, dying young and tragic but not as young and tragic as this.

           “Indeed,” the Speaker said. “Now, do you agree to the terms laid out?”

           Dipper held Leilani’s gaze a moment longer, before breaking away to fix his attention on the Speaker and his child, his poor, youngest child (who had been loved and cherished but raised with the knowledge that this may happen someday, who had been prepared and taught to step into xir own death of xir own fledgling, undeveloped will). Dipper smiled.

           “Nine lives, from the nine of you, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to your beloved country, correct?” Alcor passed a whisper of blue flame between his fingers as he spoke.

           The Speaker waited a moment. His hands tensed over his child’s shoulders as he thought the words over. “The nine lives we offer you, to do with as you please, for the lives of those on this list.”

           Alcor looked down on the list. Two career politicians who had slowly turned over new leaves, a charismatic rabble-rouser, three underpaid and overworked lawyers with a talent for defending their wrongly-accused clients, a university professor whose lectures were widely distributed and widely influential, an old farmer with a penchant for speaking up loud and proud in defense of reforestation and traditional farming methods, and a janitor who had convinced their coworkers to unionize and strike for better wages. Influential in all the ways the Speaker and his cohorts disapproved of.

           As few as twenty years ago, Alcor would have taken advantage of the situation to cause as much carnage as possible while keeping the children safe. He would have gotten 18 souls and probably an additional nine life-debts from the children, to cash in as he pleased, when he pleased. Ten years ago, he would have settled for 9 souls, 9 bodies, and 9 traumatized children placed at the nearest orphanage.

           Today, Alcor remembered being angry, and terrified, and determined in the face of the world ending. He remembered the terror of being watched, the nightmares about rearranged faces and deer teeth. He remembered dying.

           “Like I said,” Alcor drawled, eyebrow raised. “Nine lives, from the nine of you, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to your beloved country. Or, if you want me to be a little more transparent, nine souls in here for nine lives out there and a whole lot of chaos thrown in.”

           The Speaker hesitated. “Chaos?”

           Alcor laughed, leaned on his cane a little more. The third barrier dissolved under his power at last with a flicker that he disguised by flaring his flames just a bit higher. Fury burned colder and deeper in his chest, at the very core of him. “What do you think nine people dying suddenly is going to cause?! Especially nine people as influential and high-profile as the ones on your list, and all at the same time! It’s going to be unbelievably chaotic. You might have a little trouble controlling the investigation that follows, but I’m sure you can squash things like freedom of the press and the people’s right to assemble in a jiffy, what with your very powerful positions. I’m all here for that, props to you!”

           “You’re taking their souls?” One of the other politicians said, a quiver of trepidation in their voice. Hesitation and guilt began to seep through their aura, dark and damp and almost physically heavy. “But I thought…”

          “Young souls are the best,” Alcor said. He had—he shied away from the thought, comforted himself with the many many times that other demons had spouted the same things he was now. “They’re very soft, not nearly as entrenched in their fleshvessels. Absolutely delicious.” He swallowed the drool that had begun to pool at the back corners of his mouth.

           “I…”

           “Enough,” the Speaker snapped, hands tightening on his child’s shoulders again. Xi was beginning to have terrified second thoughts. The only thing keeping xir where xi stood was xir father’s presence behind xir and years of conditioning convincing xir that this was the right thing to do. “Alcor the Dreambender, do we have a deal?”

           Alcor grinned, extended a hand that arched in a graceful, almost indolent line in the air. “I thought you’d never ask,” he purred.

           The Speaker flushed with a victorious, vicious kind of pride, then reached out to shake Alcor’s hand. The flames licked up between their palms, and Alcor grinned even wider.

           “It’s a deal,” Dipper said, before he took a step forward and plunged his hand down the Speaker’s throat and hooked his claws into the soul nestled at the base of the man’s neck, cradled in the hollow of his clavicle. As the others in the room started screaming, as fear saturated the air around them within seconds, Dipper looked into the Speaker’s confused and angry and terrified, determined eyes, lifted the soul up to his lips, and sunk his teeth into it.

           The Speaker screamed, physically, metaphysically, and collapsed as though suddenly boneless. His child screamed and went down with him, panic and terror readily apparent even if Dipper had been unable to see xir aura. The other children stumbled back, one twin tripping and scraping his palms against the ground, the eleven year old stepping in front of the seven year old with an angry snarl on her face. Dipper paid them no mind. He was too busy licking his fingers to catch any residual soul energy that had leaked out when he had bit down. After he had finished cleaning them off, he looked up to see that some of the summoners were making for the opposite door. He cocked his head. Energy thrummed through him. He laughed, high and maybe a little unhinged, before following.

           He had eight more souls to collect here before he could get to work, after all, and they’d gone to all the trouble of summoning him to fix their country in the first place! It would be—disrespectful, he considered as he tore open the ribcage of the closest summoner for no other reason than he could, if he wasn’t as diligent as possible.

________________________________________________________________

December 4th, 11:12 PM EST

           Dipper blipped into bed and shifted into elegant pajamas in one smooth motion, still a little buzzed from all the souls he had eaten and all the life debts he had collected over the past hour and a half. Finding the children suitable homes had been—difficult enough that he had burned off a lot of the energy gained from the deal, but he was still twitchy and half-guilty over how he had acted in the basement. Right after he had lectured Lata about acting out of anger! Lata was never finding out about what happened.

           Next to him, Bentley shifted from half-asleep to half-awake. “Huh? Dipper?”

           Dipper hummed. He wiggled so that he was curled up against Bentley, set a still-clawed hand against Bentley’s sleep sweater (he wore sleep sweaters now, it was terrifying that he kept being so cold even when he should be warm) and curled it so that the fabric was in his loose grasp. He had to fight to keep it loose. Everything was—too bright, too sharp, and he felt like he was balancing on the edge of that precipice again, that if he fell it would be too easy to go back to him half a century ago.

           “Dipper, you okay?”

           He felt an arm reach over him, a hand rub at his back. On Bentley’s other side, Torako snuffled in her sleep, snorted, but didn’t wake up. Dipper pressed his face into Bentley’s chest and nuzzled the fabric without giving a solid answer. The world dulled down to something almost manageable.  

           Bentley’s chest expanded and then contracted with a sigh. He wiggled down just enough that Dipper’s head fit under his chin. Something seemed—off, in that moment, because Dipper could swear that his feet should be below Bentley’s in this position, but when he reached out with his toes they brushed Bentley’s shins.

           “All right,” Bentley said, the sound of his voice reverberating against Dipper’s forehead. “All right, not tonight. It’s—it’s late anyways. You can tell me what happened tomorrow, okay?”

           Several moments passed before Dipper felt relaxed enough to nod. All the while, Bentley’s hand rubbed up and down his back.

           “Okay,” Bentley breathed out. Dipper didn’t want to see the relief in his aura, so he kept his eyes shut and just focused on the warmth surrounding him. Then, Bentley said, “You wanna sleep between me and Torako tonight? I can move you if it’s too much trouble.”

           There was something weird about that statement too, because Bentley was strong but it could be awkward for him to haul something larger over his own body, but Dipper thought about how nice it would be to be sandwiched between two souls he loved (one was his, the other may as well have been but he would never, ever, ever take it, because look at what happened to Henry even though he loved Henry?) and the weirdness of the situation melted away. He nodded again.

           “Right then,” Bentley murmured. Dipper felt him wriggle his left arm under Dipper’s chest to wrap around his back. There was a pressure at the spot right above the space between his wings, and then they were turning over, Dipper’s legs pinned lightly between Bentley’s. Seconds later, Dipper’s back was to Torako’s front, and his face was still smooshed up against Bentley’s chest. Dipper hadn’t even had to open his eyes. He let out a soft breath. His hand unclenched from Bentley’s sweater to curl up against it instead, knuckles brushing wool.

           “There we go,” Bentley said. He pressed a kiss to the top of Dipper’s head. There was a rustle, Bentley’s body shifting against his, and then he heard Torako groan a little before she was flush up against his back, breath fanning the back of his head. She was snoring lightly, and Dipper couldn’t help but smile a little.

           “There we go,” Bentley said again, a little quieter. He rubbed his hand up and down Dipper’s back for a long time before he finally fell asleep.

           Dipper listened to them. He took in a deep breath, let it out, and let himself be home.

[krystalkoya]

Paint Me Over | 01

Summary: Amateur writer Hoseok is in a slump. When his friend Taehyung drags him out to another one of his art shows, he can't help but be intrigued by a peculiar local artist he meets there...

Here’s something with Hoseok in the writer/english teacher role. The first chapter is titled 'Chicago Boy' after Ari Lennox's song (go check it out!). It describes the OC’s first impression of Hoseok, however this chapter is in his perspective (it makes sense if you read the lyrics, if it doesn’t oh well... enjoy!) 

read on ao3!

pairing: writer!hoseok x reader

genre: fluff, future angst, future smut 

rating: +18

word count: 4k

chapter warnings: none!

01 | 02

...

Chicago Boy

Hoseok’s starting to think he wasn’t cut out for this.

Granted, things haven’t been going great in his life lately, (they weren’t terrible, definitely not great) but for the life of him he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t put thoughts to words and type out the remainder of this scene.

He'd been staring at the computer screen for over an hour now, repeatedly starting a sentence only to delete it moments later because nothing. sounded. right.

An hour in and the most he’d accomplished was one measly paragraph - could three sentences even be considered a paragraph? As an English teacher he felt like he should know this. His grammar? Astounding. Word choice? Phenomenal. But It's a shame he'd written the same thing just in different words merely five sentences ago.

Hoseok sighed, leaning into the uncomfortable lumps of his sofa cushions and away from the laptop perched on his coffee table.

He was getting nowhere.

Running a hand over his face, he stared up at the dim lighting fixture on his ceiling. He really needed to replace that one blown-out bulb up there, maybe then he’d actually be able to see when he sat in the living room to grade papers. No use burning electricity when he didn’t even get any use out of it.

An incessant buzzing in his ears alerted him that his phone was ringing. It was inches away from vibrating right off the coffee table when he snatched it up and pressed to his ear.

He sighed into the receiver when he heard who it was.

“Hoseok, my man. You sound frustrated, why are you frustrated?”

Hoseok leaned into his couch cushions again, placing an arm behind his head to get comfortable, because there was no way he was getting back to work now that Taehyung was on the line. Not that he was making any progress before, but placing the blame his friend's incessant need to talk his ear off rather than his own lack of motivation to get anything done sounded nicer.

“I’d tell you, but I have a feeling you already know why.”

“Is it the book again? I told you to stop stressing. All that pent-up tension isn’t good for your creative flow. Relax—did you slow your breathing? Try meditation?”

“Have you been watching those spiritual healing DVDs again? You know that’s all just neatly packaged bullshit right?”

“Excuse me, the nice old woman at the holistic medicine shop said otherwise. Sure, the place was a little sketchy, I think she could’ve been a witch to be honest…" he trails off in thought. "But she said I could get a discount if I bought all three volumes! That’s a steal, I’d be an idiot if didn’t take it.”

“Right, not cause you okay…”

“Anyways, I was just calling to see if you wanted to come out with me tonight.”

“I’m not going to another one of your yoga sessions with you if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not what I—although you could use it, no. I called to see if you wanted to come to an art show with me.”

Hoseok pursed his lips. Tae had offered to take him to a couple art shows before, some he participated in, others just to view. He’d gone to a few and honestly enjoyed the work all made by a few of the local artists in town. He had no idea such talent existed in this city before he went to one of Tae's shows. And he would never tell him this of course, but Taehyung was kind of endearing when he was geeking out over all the art he was surrounded by.

“Come on, when was the last time you’ve been out? I’m not even asking you to the strip club or anything! This is perfectly tame. Although, fair warning, a lot of artists aren’t adverse to nudity in their works so...”

Hoseok chuckles, “Yeah I know. I would've appreciated the warning the first time you took me to one of your shows but sure I'll go. I mean, why not?”

There was silence on the other end for a moment, and Hoseok knew from prior experience that this was just the time it took for Taehyung to process even slightly shocking information.

“Really, that easy? Okay great! The gala starts at 7. I’ll text you the address and you can meet me there.”

As Hoseok and Taehyung finished up their call, Hoseok elongated his limbs for a much needed stretch after being seated for so long.

He perched his elbows back on his knees, staring at the word document that was mostly filled with blank white space. Realizing that nothing was going to come to him tonight he shut his laptop down, not before hitting save of course—he learned that the hard way one night that resulted in him losing over twenty pages of text. He shuddered. Never again ,he thought as he made his way to the small kitchen of his studio apartment to make himself a quick bite to eat before the gala.

Apparently staring at his computer screen willing words to come out of his brain and onto paper wasn’t going to accomplish anything. That was fine, all writer's hit a wall sometimes, he’d just have to wait until this slump passed. Either that or who knows, maybe he’d get inspired tonight. Wasn't there a saying that looking at art makes you feel more artistic? Perhaps he could channel that inspiration into his own work. He could only hope, he thought as he took a bite of an unappetizing turkey sandwich.

Surprisingly, the gala did not disappoint. It was interesting, for sure. Not in a bad way, just interesting as in... well it was all over the place for one. Much like the few others he's been to with Taehyung, there was a collection of artwork displayed around the room made by local artists for the audience to view and ask questions about at their discretion. Taehyung carted him around the room, bouncing from piece to piece as he chatted with the artists about their inspiration for their works.

There was one he remembers vividly, a collection of paintings by one artist. The first was a painting of a sunset over a horizon of water, but in grays and cool blue undertones. After striking up a conversation with the artist, or rather, Taehyung did, Hoseok came to find out that the she intended to emote sadness in the viewer, almost as if all the life had been sucked out of the image. She had been open enough to share that it was painted during a very dark place in her life.

The next piece in the collection was the same sunset, but painted in vibrant pinks and oranges and blues. This one was made right after the birth of her first daughter. Hoseok even saw a flock of birds flying high in a portion of the sky that hadn't been present in the first painting.

The last was the same image, in muted pastels, not as vibrant as the second, but still evoked feelings of warmth and content in his chest. The artist said this piece represented her now. She was at peace with herself and the direction her life had taken. A mother of two who was well on her way in life, glad she had been given a second chance to form a place for herself in this world. She said the goal of her collection was to show that even the most beautiful of sceneries could be distorted by your emotions at the time of viewing. If that wasn't inspiring, he doesn't know what was.

Hoseok was truly astounded by how much the artists were willing to share about themselves but he wasn't put off by it. He found the experience enriching, learning about people through the art they created.

There were others too. Artists whose messages centered around current events. One that caught his eye were cartoons of the current leaders of America, Russia, and North Korea. Except instead of having adult bodies their heads were attached to infants bodies, diapers and all. Try imagining a crying Donald because Vladimir stole his rattle, meanwhile baby Jong-Un played off to the side with toy 'rockets'. Fucking hilarious. Political satire, if it was done well, always got a chuckle or two out of Hoseok.

And that seemed to be just one in a series of political cartoons that Hoseok would've loved to stay by and read, if only Taehyung hadn't pulled him off to the next booth.

They were about halfway through the gallery when Taehyung stopped chattering away with strangers for a moment to ask him a question.

"So, what do you think?"

Hoseok could not for the life of him take him seriously with that painter's beret on. Why did Taehyung insist on dressing like a 1970s French erotica film star? Or you know, a millennial art hoe.

Hoseok tilts his head up in thought. "It's nice. There's a lot more variety than the last time I came with you. Significantly less nudity than I expected though."

"Yeah, I know. There was no theme this time. They kinda went for a... do whatever you want kind of vibe today. Why are you disappointed?" He asked with a smirk.

Hoseok plays along. "Absolutely. You know I can’t resist seeing all those sculpted men in their nude glory. One of my favorite pastimes is comparing one micropenis to the next. Some have bigger balls, others are girthier. Some made out of marble, others, stone.”

He laughs at his own joke when all Taehyung can muster is a shake of his head in amusement. trying, and failing to mask his boxy smile.

“So I take it you didn't want to participate this time around?" Hoseok asks him when they sober up.

"Nah. I wanted to, but I didn’t feel good about any of the photos I took lately. Glad I came to check things out though. These pieces are amazing."

They came to a stop in front of the next artist’s booth. Hoseok's eyes were drawn to a painting of what looked like a garden.

It was beautiful, simplistic, yet so realistic in the way it was painted that he was starting to wonder whether it was an actual photo instead.

But it wasn't. He could see the impressions of the brush strokes against canvas as he leaned in closer. The yellows and reds and purples of the flowers stood out against the forest greens of the bushes and grass that littered the page. There, off to the left, looked to be some children playing in the sun, smiling happily as they ran along. There were several tufts of flowers littered about the page but toward the right he noticed one lone sunflower resting under the shade of a tree. It was wilted, not as tall as the others, he assumed because of the lack of sunlight. A lone bird perched atop a high branch of the tree, almost as if it was surveying the land in search of something. For what, he didn't know.

"Wow, this is beautiful. What was the inspiration for it?" Hoseok looks up to see Taehyung observing the painting as well, that concentrated expression he always takes on when analyzing a new work of art on his face yet again.

But then his eyes are drawn in front of him when he hears a voice, presumably belonging to the artist. Come to think of it, you looked just like an older version of one of the little girls in the picture. You stand there, hands clasped behind your back as you peruse the two newcomers.

"No inspo. Just life I guess."

"Then wouldn't you say life is the inspiration?" Hoseok counters.

You shrug your shoulders.

Hoseok straightens up to view you better. "So... what's the meaning behind it?"

You narrow your eyes at him. "Meaning...?"

Hoseok is just a little put off by your behavior. What is he speaking a different language? Had he slipped into Korean unknowingly? No, Taehyung would have given him a weird look if he had (it's happened before, don't ask). He may be reading to much into things but it's almost as if you are bored with his conversation. And Hoseok prides himself on being a good conversationalist. What kind of English teacher would he be if he couldn't hold an intellectual conversation from time to time?

Hoseok explains hesitantly, "Yeah, the meaning. I mean, it can't just be a garden."

You relax back onto your heels. "Oh, that's exactly what it is. Just a garden." A loud pop of the gum in your mouth follows.

"It can't just be a garden." he deadpans.

"It certainly can be." You counter.

He scoffs, then looks at Taehyung who still looks deep in thought.

"I get it." Taehyung nods along, finally tearing his eyes away from the painting. "Yeah, I get it."

"See?" You point toward Taehyung, as if saying that 'if your friend gets it, you should too!'

"What do you get Tae?"

"Hey man, maybe it's just a garden."Hoseok looks at his friend incredulously, though he's not surprised he isn't taking his side. He shakes his head vehemently.

"It can't just be a garden. Look at it. There's too much to unpack here."

"What do you do?" The question catches him off guard.

Hoseok turns back to you. Something about you makes him feel like he shouldn't tell you anything. The way you are looking at him expectantly, with narrowed eyes as if you already know and are just waiting for him to prove you right gives him pause. But another voice in his head urges him to say it. At least just to see where this was all headed.

"Me? I'm an English teacher."

The twinkle in your eyes at as soon as the words leave his mouth lets him know that your suspicions were correct. And you were proud of that fact. "Figures." you laugh dryly.

Okay, ouch. Was he supposed to be offended? Yes, of course he was, you blatantly laughed in his face when he told you his profession.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, just you English majors always need to give everything a meaning. Everything isn't intentional. Sometimes a tree is just a tree."

"Again, you can't say nothing and then follow it up with something," is Hoseok’s only argument. A weak one, but it stopped you from getting the last word in nonetheless.

But to his dismay, you and Taehyung share a terribly stifled laugh over how riled up Hoseok seems to be over a silly painting.

Taehyung, who can barely control his laughter, places a hand on Hoseok's shoulder.

"Come on 'seok, we still haven't viewed the rest of the works yet."He pulls him along and you smile and wave off the pair while Hoseok, for some unknown reason, can't look away from your little booth or the mysterious woman who painted randomly with 'no message' in mind.

At the end of the gala Hoseok and Taehyung ended back at the front. Not too long after they arrived Taehyung wandered off to talk to some of his 'art buddies' which left Hoseok alone to wander around aimlessly. He walked around for a bit but to be honest he already saw all of the works here, and he did not feel like circling all the way through again. Luckily, near the entrance there was a refreshments table where Hoseok found himself gravitating towards the longer Taehyung was gone.

He grabbed one of the small plastic cups of punch off the table along with a one of those sugar cookies from the supermarket he liked so much, but never bought. After buying a tray and eating the whole of it by himself the first three nights he’d been too guilty to pick up another since.

"Jeez, they could've given us some bigger cups for this punch. Two sips in and I'm already done."

Your voice almost startles Hoseok enough to spill juice down the front of his shirt. Luckily, it wasn't a lot and he's glad he made the last minute decision to wear a black t-shirt instead of white under his jacket tonight.

He grabs a napkin and hastily dabs at the liquid before it can dry.

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to startle you." You say sincerely, but the poorly hidden smile on your face makes him question your genuity.

"It's fine, it'll come out eventually. Where'd you even come from anyway?"

You eye him over the rim of your cup. "Over there...?” you point vaguely in the direction of your booth. “Relax, I just left for a bit to check out some of the other artist's work. I'll be back soon to tell anyone else who has a question that's it's literally just. a. garden."

Hoseok squints his eyes at you unamused. "Haha, very funny."

"Glad you think so," You laugh into your drink. "Come on, lighten up. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. Art is subjective."

"Sure, I guess," he rolls his eyes. "But hear me out. I'm no expert but artist's usually have a message in mind that they want to send to their audience, at least the ones that want to be taken seriously. I mean, that's the theme I picked up from literally everyone else here." He gestures to the room around him.

"Okay, well. I had a message- I wanted you to see my tree as, get this...a tree."

Hoseok shakes his head in annoyance that you aren't getting it, downing the rest of his drink in one go. Which wasn't hard. You weren't wrong about the cups.

You laugh again, airily and the sound is a nice one, he thinks.

You perch on the wall beside him. "What's your name?" you ask him, eyes alight with interest and Hoseok thinks not for the last time that he shouldn't tell you. But again, for some reason he wants to.

"Jung Hoseok, your local 6th grade English teacher with a stick up his ass, according you."

There's that laugh again, and Hoseok likes that he gets to hear it because of something he said and not because you were making fun of him again.

"Hey now, I didn't say all that! But if you want to go there..."

"My students like me the most, just you know. They say I'm their favorite teacher. What about that says uppity snob to you?" You smile as you bite into your unfinished cookie.

"There you go again, putting words in my mouth."

"You were thinking it, don't lie." But his tone is less accusing now, more playful. Would you look at that, he was warming up to you.

"I was thinking that those students of yours just wanted a passing grade and had no qualms about kissing up to you to get it. But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night! I'm ___ by the way." You hold out your unoccupied hand for a shake.

He takes it, saying, "___, beautiful artwork but I suggest taking on a project with more meaning to you next time. It can be quite fulfilling."

Your smug nod in agreement, like you actually value his opinion wouldn't fool anyone. "Noted," you say. "But if you don't mind me asking, what makes you such an expert? Are you an artist as well?"

He thinks about it for a moment before nodding slowly. "Of a sort."

You hum in response, and he can see the way your eyes peak with interest. So it doesn't come as a surprise when you ask him what he does.

"I may or may not dabble in writing," he murmurs, rubbing the back of his neck hesitantly.

"Figures." You scoff.

Again with the scoffing. "There you go again. Clowning my profession, now my hobbies? How cold are you?"

You chuckle lightly but shake your head in denial. "Shut up, I'm not laughing at you. It's just... how typical, an English teacher who writes too? You should let me read some of your work sometime. Let me give you some pointers— so that way we'll be even."

"Maybe but you should know this, I don't let just anyone read my work."

You send a dazzlingly smirk his way as you say, "Is that so? Then I'll have to figure out a way to become 'not-just-anyone' now won't I?"

He's grinning down at you as you continue to stare him down with that same smug expression on your face.

If he wasn't mistaken, this was flirting right? He wasn't sure, he's been out of the game for so long now that he had to make sure before he said anything that would make himself look like a complete fool in front of you. But the way you quirk your head at him, as if anticipating his response in earnest has him thinking that yes... you were definitely flirting.

He's just finished formulating a response in his mind when he hears his name being called from across the room. He looks up to see Taehyung waving him over. He's surrounded by two other guys who are also looking his way, which can only mean that Tae is calling him over to meet some of his art friends.

You smile endearingly when you see Taehyung's exaggerated movements to get his attention. "It looks like your friend's summoning you," you giggle when Taehyung starts directing Hoseok like he's an airplane landing on a runway.

"I should get back to my booth anyway." you say. "Someone must be wondering why I decided to paint the grass green of all colors. See you around stick." You send him a smile and a wave goodbye. You're already walking away and he's left to wonder where the nickname 'stick' came from. He recalls his words from earlier and mentally face palms. He can only blame himself for that one.

When he gets home that night he still can't write. Not to say he wasn't inspired tonight. Seeing all those artists display a body of work they created themselves motivated him to finish his own.There was so much talent today that there was no way he didn't feel renewed enough to tackle the scene he couldn't seem to find the right words for earlier in the night.

So no, it wasn't that he didn't feel inspired. It was more-so the fact that his attention was completely elsewhere. For some unknown reason his mind was still stuck on a particular artist he met that night. Partly because he couldn't figure you out and your seemingly simplistic art that had no backstory, no motivation, no message behind the scene. He just knew there was something there. There always was.

Secondly, he really enjoyed his conversation with you at the end of the night. Which was shocking because after his first interaction with you, he wasn't so sure he could enjoy speaking to someone who literally lit his mind alight with a mix of confusion and frustration. But you were the first person to show interest in him since...since then. He didn't want to jump to conclusions now (because he did tend to do that) but your flirtatious smile cast in his direction had to have meant something, right? He'd never forgive Taehyung for dragging him away before he could see where your conversation was headed. Would he ever see you again? Probably not. It wasn't a big city, but it wasn't that small either.

He burrowed deeper into his blankets, trying and failing to get his mind off the puzzling woman from the gala. Well, he sighed, it was better this than falling asleep to all those sentences still left to write.

[omidettol]

haikyuu!! random scenario - 01

01: on the way home

genre • slice of life

summary • a journey of three friends in which they met so many new people in their life that revolved around volleyball clubs.

word count • 2,306 

author’s note • this first serie literally just started off of me and my homie’s imagination on things that’d happen to oc in haikyuu world! there may be a tiny spoiler in future chapters, and lowercase intended. hope you enjoy reading!

masterlist • next

“mizuki!” the setter shouted as she tossed the ball to the left quickly. a brown haired girl had run towards the net as the ball was approaching the top, then she jumped and stopped mid air for a moment. when the opposed blocker started falling down, she spiked a huge cross real hard, leaving everyone in the gym stunned. whistle blown, indicating the end of that 3 on 3 practice match.

a big smile plastered on oikawa mizuki’s exhausted face as she gave her teammates in that match a high five. kinoshita shinatsu, the libero, put her arms around mizuki shoulder and said, “that was such an awesome spike you got there, mizuki.”

“thanks, but that was because the toss haru sent to me is as good as ever,” she replied and sent a big smile in akaashi haru’s direction before they joined the others who had already gathered around their coach who started to give his feedback for today’s practice and for the upcoming spring interhigh qualifier. 

it took the coach around one hour to finally wrap it up. the sky outside was already dark when members of fukurodani academy girl volleyball club started to go home one by one. after changing into spare clothes, mizuki packed her bag and walked towards the bench where her two friends waited. it'd been their routine since middle school to go home together by train.

mizuki, shinatsu, and haru said goodbye to the others left in the gymnasium before getting their way out of school area. even though they still in their first year of high school, the three of them were trusted enough to be starter players considering their own ability in their main field: outside hitter, libero, and setter. on their way, they talked about so many things from school stuff, volley, even random things until shinatsu asked the brown haired girl who walked a bit behind, “so, have you finally talked to him?”

“huh?” mizuki asked her back, totally confused.

haru chimed in, “the boy you talked about months ago.”

“which one?”

both haru and shinatsu rolled their eyes. they had known each other since middle school. all the good sides and bad sides of each person had been shown throughout the years which didn't surprise them any longer to hear such things coming from mizuki's mouth. “the top three ace,” haru answered.

“oh, him,” mizuki muttered under her breath. her mind suddenly drifted into one particular boy with curly black hair. she looked at her friends who'd waited anticipatingly for her answer. “no, i haven’t. i mean, why should i? it’s not like he even knows me. and, i don’t have any business with him?”

shinatsu raised her eyebrows, “aren’t you curious about his technique in spiking balls?”

“not really,” mizuki shrugged. “besides, i could just ask my stupid cousin, tooru. or tobio, or kuroo, or bokuto, or maybe even your lovely brother, haru,” she turned to the black haired girl with glistening eyes that were completely ignored. 

“you ass,” shinatsu grinned.

mizuki laughed at both of her friends’ reactions. she remembered how long ago she thought shinatsu was a shy and quiet girl, but everything changed when they became close through playing volleyball together. as for haru, the first impression mizuki got from her and the result of their three years of friendship were not that different except the fact that she actually had such a unique taste and how she viewed anything was beyond. 

they didn’t talk much during the ride on the train and preferred to stare at their phone until they reached their own destination station. being the one whose house was the farthest from school, mizuki’s hand quickly reached her bag to find her earphone when shinatsu would get off the train at the next stop after haru had gotten off. 

“shit,” she muttered, earning a questioning look from shinatsu who was ready to get off the train. “just realized i forgot to bring my earphone today.”

“oh, i thought you lost something,” shinatsu said right before the train stopped at her destination. “anyways, i’m going. take care!”

“yeah, bye, see you tomorrow,” mizuki said as she slumped down on her seat only to sit up straight back seconds later when her eyes caught the curly black haired boy walking over to her place. she internally screamed when the boy with a white mask almost covering half of his face sat right across from her.

ever since mizuki entered fukurodani academy, she usually met this one particular boy on the train home after practice, right when all her friends had gotten off the train and just two stops away from home. at first, she didn’t recognize who he was. but after she came back from miyagi to visit her grandma, she knew him. she remembered seeing him in one of her cousin tooru’s volleyball magazines.

sakusa kiyoomi, the only second year student among the other two on the top three of all high schooler spiker in japan. mizuki took a glance at him, remembering words from her friends about his technique and such. deep down, her curiosity grew bigger. she’d never seen his school, itachiyama academy, played before. based on their encounters, she couldn’t even picture him playing volleyball especially with his fastidious tendencies.

she’d noticed he always put a mask on his face with both hands in the pocket of his jacket and would stand close to the door if the train were packed with loads of people; in fact, she had never actually seen him whenever she went home during rush hour. he’d only sit down if and only if the train wasn’t crowded like this evening. it was almost nine so the rush hour had long died down. 

when the train finally stopped at her destination, mizuki got off at the speed of light. she just wanted to get home as fast as possible and rested her body after a long day. but it was as if mother nature wouldn’t grant her wish that easily, a downpour stopped her right before the exit. her hand once again rummaged the inside of her bag, searching for the clear umbrella she brought in the morning—or so she thought. mizuki let out a heavy sigh when she couldn’t find the damn umbrella anywhere in her bag for five whole minutes and decided to just wait there until the rain stopped.

“why are you still here?” a deep voice came into her ear from the left after quite some time.

her whole body froze. there was a long pause. after regaining her control, mizuki turned to face the person next to her. “um, i forgot to bring my umbrella,” she said as her cheek turned slightly pink.

it was him. the famous ace she had been dreaded to talk to for the past few months was actually standing next to her and talked to her first. on the other hand, sakusa kiyoomi studied the girl carefully before finally offering, “do you want to walk together? it seems like the rain won’t die down for the next hours.”

no, he wasn’t kidding when he said that. afterall, he was the observant type. he’d studied people and things around him for such a long time until it became his second nature. and the girl who now stared at him in shock was one of the examples. since the starting of his second year, he usually met her on the train and although sometimes he’d be the last one to get off the train, he’d catch up with her and realized that their houses were just a block away from each other.

“if it’s okay with you, then yes, please,” mizuki said with a little desperate look after giving some thought about it. god knew how much she hated getting wet from rain, even a drizzle. and the last thing she wanted was to get home really late in drenched clothes.

without saying a word, kiyoomi opened up his black umbrella. they walked side by side under kiyoomi’s umbrella which perfectly fit for the two of them. there was an awkward silence engulfing them until mizuki broke the ice, “thank you.”

kiyoomi simply nodded as a response and another silence hit them again. mizuki racked her brains, trying to find something to talk about while they were walking. then a smile was plastered on her face as she said, “my name’s mizuki, by the way. oikawa mizuki.”

the tall boy glanced at her. “i’m sakusa kiyoomi.”

“i know.” mizuki automatically cursed herself silently for slipping it out of her mouth. kiyoomi, who heard what she said, sent a skeptical look towards her which made her quickly added, “i meant, i’ve seen you on many volleyball magazines before!”

“you read those magazines?”

“my cousin does, so i sometimes take a look at it whenever i pay him a visit,” she stated before blurting out, “honestly, though, you and ushiwaka-chan look great on those magazines. at first i couldn’t believe that it’s really you since i can’t see your face behind that mask. but your uniform confirmed it.”

“i see,” he replied while taking in everything she just said but then his eyes narrowed at her. “wait, did you just call wakatoshi-kun as ushiwaka-chan? do you know him?”

“um, i don’t really know him. met him once in sendai and all i know is how much tooru wanna beat his ass in official matches. and about ushiwaka-chan... that was what tooru called him, i just followed,” she explained, a little bit startled at his question. “why?”

kiyoomi shrugged, “oh, it’s nothing.”

the rest of their way was filled with nothing but silence in raindrops. as they were getting near to the mizuki’s house, the fukurodani girl spoke up, “and… there’s my stop. thanks for your help, kiyoomi. really appreciate it.”

the owner of the black umbrella raised his eyebrows, stopping in front of a typical townhouse that was pointed by her. “i don't think we’re close enough to be on the first name basis yet... but whatever.”

hearing that, mizuki laughed a little as she opened the gate and quickly stepped into her roofed yard. “sorry, habit. but you can call me anything, though. i couldn’t careless.”

he scoffed. “i prefer to not talk to you.”

“ouch, that hurts, omi-chan,” she decided to come up with a new nickname and pretended as if she was stabbed right in the heart, trying to tease him. but kiyoomi being himself just rolled his eyes at her and then turned back, starting to walk away from her with regret slowly creeping in. he started to regret his action today even more when mizuki exclaimed with voice nearly colliding with the sound of the heavy rain, “see you tomorrow, omi-chan!”

then he knew he fucked up.

on the following days, they kept stumbling upon each other on the train home. and compared to before, mizuki was becoming way more talkative although kiyoomi’d ignored her completely as if he never knew who she was. if he thought that would make her stop talking to him, then he was wrong. that didn’t stop mizuki even the slightest. instead, she took it as a challenge to make him acknowledge her.

for the n-th times that week, kiyoomi let out a heavy sigh while she was bugging him as they walked from the station. “stay away from me.”

“why won’t you talk to me?” her tone suddenly became serious. 

they both stopped walking on the empty road of their residential area, under a lamppost that’d been lit up. kiyoomi then turned to face her with his resting bitch face. “why should i?”

“why not?”

“’cause i don't want to? duh,” he said as he rolled his eyes before continuing his walk back home. “and don’t you have any friends to talk to? my ears are hurt from listening to your rants this whole week.”

the short brown haired girl ran to catch up with him then said dramatically, “omi-chan, you could stab me hundredth times with your words and i’d still talk to you.”

“such a drama queen,” he muttered under his breath.

hearing that, a smirk crept up on mizuki’s face. “oh? am i getting promoted from a nobody to a queen now?”

since he wasn’t in the mood of arguing, he didn’t respond a thing to her nonsense. he just simply quickened his pace, wanting to get away from the girl as soon as possible. and mizuki noticed this.

“hey, omi, slow down! i don’t have long legs unlike you!” she whined but wouldn’t let him go in peace either.

“slow down, kiyoomi,” she repeated and still no response from the certain boy. she’d lost counts on how many times she'd been ignored by him. this is getting pretty goddamn tiring, god please remind me again why i did this to myself, she thought to herself.

feeling irritated, she spoke in frustration, “oh, come on! why is it so hard for you to have a nice conversation with me like a friend?”

he stopped abruptly, looking annoyed and irritated just like her, then he hissed, “we’re not friends, mizuki.”

“let’s be one then,” she crossed her arms, ignoring the fact that she was called by her first name and staring at his black orbs intently instead.

there was a pause as they stared at each other. if kiyoomi could be honest, he actually wouldn’t mind to befriend her. honestly, her stories were quite fascinating despite the rants and curses she was throwing. his ears and head did get a little hurt by only listening, though. nevertheless, he thought it wouldn’t be any worse than what already happened in the past week.

sakusa kiyoomi took a deep breath before he finally muttered the word oikawa mizuki had been waiting to hear, “fine.”

***

fun facts!

kiyoomi almost left her at the station but he’d feel bad so he decided to let her use half of his umbrella after going through much deliberation within himself.

mizuki internally screamed and sobbed—even her brain literally stopped functioning for a moment—when kiyoomi finally gave in.

kiyoomi once saw her using her own hand sanitizer right after she used a vending machine at the station and then cleaned the can with a tissue before drinking it. that made him tolerate her a teensy bit though she got very talkative whenever he was around.

[d-noona]

THE MAKE OVER

SUMMARY: When Y/N L/N transformed herself into a striking redhead, the entire male population of Seoul stood up and took notice. But her make over was for Jung Hoseok’s benefit alone. He began to show interest in the new look but not in the way she wanted. Suddenly he was over-protective, perhaps a little jealous. It seemed that the idea of having a relationship with her couldn’t be further from his mind. The girl however wants more. So it was time for an ultimatum. If Hoseok didn’t want Y/N to lose her virginity to another admirer, he had no option but to make love to her himself.

WORDS: 3091

Jung Hoseok x Reader

M.List | Previous (Ch.01) | Ch. 03

CHAPTER 02 - Librarian

Y/N was standing at the library computer, running the wand over the first of the huge pile of returned books, when something caught her eye. Something bright and red. She glanced up through the glass door to see a shiny red car turning its brand-new nose into the empty parking space right outside the library. It brought no flash of recognition, despite being a memorable model. Not quite a sports car, it was stills stylish and expensive looking. A newcomer to the area, no doubt. Not knowing that this particular library branch was closed to the public on Wednesday morning. Y/N was about to return to the job at hand when the driver’s door opened and a heart-jolting familiar head of hair came into view, gleaming under the summer sun.

Hoseok.

Her heart leaped. So he had remembered her birthday. He’d even come in person. She could hardly believe it. Her happiness knew no bounds as she watched him close the car and stride up onto the pavement and across to the front doors. He smiled at her through the grass as he tapped on the wooden frame.

“Can’t they see were closed?” April complained from where she was sitting at her desk, flipping through one of the new publisher catalogs. She could not see who was knocking. If she had, she would not be so anxious to send the unwanted visitor away. Min April might be happily married to her husband Min Yoongi with three children, but she still had an eye for a good-looking man.

Hoseok was just that –and more. At twenty five, he was in his physical prime, his elegant body in perfect tune with his handsome face. His height was no joke either, his lean frame made him look even taller, and did his choice of clothing. In winter they range from soft suede numbers to tweedy sports coats. In summer he chose linen or lightweight wool in neutral colors, and teamed them with cool T-shirts. Ties rarely graced his neck. In fact, Y/N had never seen Hoseok dressed formally.

Today he was wearing stonewashed blue jeans, a navy shirt and a loose cream jacket with sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His black hair was longer than when she’d seen him last, falling to his ears from its side parting and flopping with its usual rakish charm across his high forehead. He looked slightly wind-blown and utterly gorgeous. Y/N immediately put her “moving on” decision on hold for a good seven years. Thirty, she decided a new, was soon enough to give up all hope. The fat that Hoseok was standing where he was at this very moment had to give her some hope. Fancy him abandoning his precious business on a working day to drive this long from Seoul to Gwanju, just to see her on her birthday.

“For pity’s sake!” April snapped when Hoseok knocked a second time. “Can’t they read? The library times are on the darned door!”

“It’s someone I know,” Y/N said. “I’ll just go let him in.” April jumped from her sit “But it’s almost…” The sight of Hoseok’s handsome-self stopped her in her tracks. “Mmm, yes by all means let him in,” she murmured, primping her glossy black straight hair as Y/N hurried out from behind the reception desk across the functional grey carpet. Y/N wasn’t worried that Hoseok would find April attractive. As pretty as she was, she was a married woman. Hoseok believed in keeping his sex life simple.

“One girl at a time,” he’d once confided in Y/N. “And never anyone else’s.”

It was surprisingly conservative attitude in this day and age, especially coming from a man who looked like Hoseok, who had women throwing themselves at him all the time. He had a similarly strict attitude to marriage. Only one per lifetime, which was why he’d always say he would not bother with marriage till he was in his thirties and financially secure. He didn’t want to make a mistake in finding his partner.

“In the meantime,” he joked to her one day, “I’m having a lot of fun auditioning possible future candidates for the position of Mrs. Jung Hoseok.” It had always terrified Y/N that one of those future candidates might capture Hoseok’s love as well as his lust. Fortunately, that hadn’t happened, and Y/N had taken heart from the failure of his various very beautiful girlfriends to last more than a few months. But his latest was a bit of a worry. A statuesque brunette who went by the name Tinashe, she’d already lasted six months –a record for Hoseok. He’d even brought her home with him for Christmas break, during which time Y/N had many opportunities to see Tinashe’s assets. What she could do for a bikini was incomparable.

But I’m not going to think about Tinashe right now, Y/N told herself as she turned the key and swept the open door. Today is my birthday and my very best friend has come to celebrate it with me. “Hoseok!” she exclaimed, smiling up into his dancing brown eyes. “Hi there, Y/n. sorry to interrupt. I know you’re working but I simply had to show you my new car. Picked it up this morning at one of those dealerships just the other side of town and couldn’t resist taking it for a spin. Before I knew it I was on the express way headed here. I thought what the hell Hoseok? You haven’t had a day off in ages. Drive up to Gwanju and visit your mom.”

He smiled a sheepish smile, showing perfect teeth and a charming dimple. “It wasn’t till I pulled up into the driveway that I remembered today is her golf day. Took all the wind out of my sails, I can tell you. But no way was I going back to Seoul without showing someone. Naturally, I thought of you. So...what do you think?” and he waved in the direction of the car. “It’s one of the new Mazda Eunos 800s. The Miller Cycle version. Great red, isn’t it?” he finished.

Every drop of joy drained out of Y/N. Hoseok hadn’t come for her birthday. He’d come to show her a pathetic car. Worse, she hadn’t even been his first choice of viewer. She’d run a very poor second. As usual. Something hard curled around her heart, setting in concrete and trapping her love for him deep inside. Y/N determined it would never see the light of day again. She glanced coldly over at the offending vehicle and shrugged dismissively. “If you’ve seen one red car Hoseok,” she said coolly, “You’ve seen them all.”

There was no doubt he was taken aback by the icy indifference of her tone, for his eyebrows shot up and he stared at her with bewilderment in his beautiful brown eyes. Y/N was disgusted with herself for instantly feeling guilty. So much for her first foray into hating Hoseok, but she was determined not to weaken this time. Enough was enough.

“You know me Hoseok,” she went on brusquely. “I’ve never been a car person.”

“That’s because you’ve never learned to drive, Y/N. You’d appreciate cars more if you were ever behind the wheel. Come on. Come for a short spin with me.” He actually took her arm and began propelling her across the pavement. “Hobi!” she protested, wrenching her arm away from his hold and planting her sensible shoes firmly on the pavement. “I can’t. I’m at work.”

“But surely the library’s not even open,” he argued. “Certainly they won’t miss you for a couple of minutes?”

“That’s beside the point,” she said sternly. “You might be your own boss, Hoseok, and come and go as you please, but most people can’t, me included. Besides, it’s almost morning tea and I have to be here for that.” The rest of the staff had all chipped in to buy her a cake. It was a tradition in the library whenever one of them had a birthday. No way was she going to run out on her real friends to indulge Hobi’s ego.

“I don’t see why,” he said stubbornly.

No you wouldn’t…

Y/N thought mutinously, and toyed with telling him, just so he could feel terrible for a full ten seconds. The decision was taken out of her hand when April popped her head out the door. “Come on birthday girl. Namjoon brought your cake along and all twenty-three candles are alight and waiting. So get in here and do the honors. You can bring your hunk of a friend, if you like,” she added, looking Hoseok up and down with saucily admiring eyes.

“We’ve got more than enough cake for an extra mouth” Y/N relished Hoseok’s groan. To give him some credit he did look suitably apologetic once April appeared. “God, Y/N, I had no idea it was your birthday. There I was, blabbering away about my new car, and all the time you must be thinking how damned selfish I was being.” Frankly, she was enjoying his guilt. It had a deliciously soothing effect on her damaged pride. “That’s all right Hobi. I’m used to your not remembering my birthday.” He winced anew. “Don’t make me feel any more rotten that I already do.” Y/N almost gave in. it was awfully hard to stay mad at Hoseok. He didn’t mean to be selfish. He was, unfortunately, the product of a doting mother and far too many God given talents. Brains and beauty did not make for a modest, self-effacing kind of guy.

Hoseok could be generous and charming when he set his mind to it, but in the main he was a self-absorbed individual who rarely saw beyond end of his own classically shaped nose. God know why I love him so much, Y/N though irritably. But then her eyes travelled slowly from his perfect face down over his perfect body, and every female cell she owned clamored to be noticed back.

But the only expression in his eyes when he looked down at her was remorse. When he forcibly linked arms with her, she glared her frustration up to him. “Don’t be mad at me, Y/N” he said with disarming softness. “I’m not mad at you,” she returned stiffly.

“Oh, yes, you are. And you have every right to be. But I’ll make it you to you tonight, if you’ll let me” says the man who is desperately clinging to your arms. “Tonight?” she echoed far too weakly. “Yes, tonight,” he said firmly. “But for now I think your colleagues are waiting for you to blow out those twenty-three candles.”

With typical Hoseok confidence he steered her into the library and proceeded to charm everyone in the place. It annoyed Y/N that he gave her openly curious workmates the impression that he was a boyfriend of sorts. He even extracted her promise in April’s goggle-eyed presence to go out with him later that evening. She initially refused dinner, no way was she going to disappoint her mother, but grudgingly agreed to after-dinner coffee somewhere.

Y/N told herself afterwards that she would never have agreed to go out with him at all if she’d been alone with him. She would have sent him on his way with a flea in his ear. She didn’t need his pity, or guilt. The moment his new red Mazda roared of up the road back in the direction of Seoul, April settled dryly knowing eyes on her.

“Well you’re a dark horse, Y/N, aren’t you?” she said as they walked together back into the library. “I’ve always thought of you as a quiet little thing and all this time you had something like that on the side.” Y/N silently cursed Hoseok to fell. All he ever caused her was trouble and heartache. “Hoseok’s mother lives next door,” she explained with more calm than she was feeling. “I’ve known Hobi for years. We’re just good friends.”

“Oh sure. He drove all the way up from Seoul to wish you a happy birthday because you’re just good friends. You know what? I’ll bet you’re one of those girls who go home from the office at night, and perform one of those ten-second transformations. You know the type. Off come the glasses and the straight laced clothes. Down comes the hair. On goes the sexy gear, make-up, and perfume, and –WHAM! Instant heat!”

Y/N had to laugh. It would take more than seconds to transform her. “You can laugh,” April scoffed. “But I’m no one’s fool. And you’re far prettier than you pretend to be. I always did wonder why you never seemed to be on the lookout for a fella. I was beginning to think all sorts of things till glamour boy arrived on the scene today. He gave me a case of instant heat, I can tell you. And I saw the way you looked at him when you didn’t think anyone was noticing. You’ve got it bad. I know the signs. So why haven’t I heard of this paragon perfection before? Why all the mystery and secrecy? Is he married? A womanizer? A bad boy? Look, you can trust me with your deep dark secrets” she whispered. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Y/N laughed a second time. “There’s nothing deep or dark to tell. I repeat… we’re just good friends. As I said before Hobi used to live next door. We went to school together, though not in the same class. He was two years ahead of me.”

“Well, there’s nothing remotely boy-next-door about him anymore” came April’s dry remark. “He has city written all over him. Not to mention success.” Y/N nodded to this “I am well aware of that, believe me. I’m not blind, but there’s never been any romance between us, and there never will be. He has a steady girlfriend. Goes by the name of Tinashe.”

“Tinashe,” April repeated, her nose wrinkling. “Don’t tell me. She’s stunning with boobs to die for, hair down to her waist and legs up to her armpits?” Y/N startled. “You know her?”

“Nope. Just guessed. Men like your Hoseok always seem to have girls like that on their arm” April smirks. “He isn’t my Hoseok” Y/N said tightly. “But you like him to be, don’t you?”

Y/N opened her mouth to deny it. But her tongue betrayed her when a thickness claimed it. Tears pricked at her back of her eyes.

Her Hoseok…

What a concept. What an improbable, impossible, inconceivable, unachievable concept. To keep clinging to it was not only demeaning to her personally but depressing in the extreme. “There was a time when I did” she said at last, her tone clipped and cold. “But not anymore. I have better things to do with my life than pine for the impossible.”

“Impossible? Why do you say impossible?” as April curiously asked. “For pity’s sake April, you’ve seen him. You yourself said men like Hoseok go for girls like Tinashe, not mousy little things like me.”

“You’d be far from mousy if you made the best of yourself. To be frank, Y/N, a little make-up wouldn’t go astray. And an occasional visit to the hairdresser.” Y/N stiffened, despite the criticism striking home. “I wouldn’t want a man who didn’t love me for myself” she said sharply. “That’s rubbish and you know it! I’m a married lady and I still have to work hard to keep my man. Now you listen to me, Y/N. When Hoseok comes to take you out tonight. Surprise him.”

“Surprise him?” Y/N asked dryly feeling nervous about April’s suggestion. “Yes, leave your hair down. Slap some make-up on. Use a sexy perfume. Wear something which shows off that great little figure of yours.” For a split second, Y/N was buoyed up by April’s compliment on her figure. But then she thought of Tinashe’s tall, voluptuous, sex-bomb body and her momentary high was totally deflated.

“I don’t have any sexy perfume,” she murmured dispiritedly. She didn’t own much make-up either. But she wasn’t about to admit that. April gave her an exasperated glare. “Then buy some at the mall during your lunch hour!” Their library was in a small regional center which boasted a few shops, a well-stocked chemist shop included. Y/N declined telling April that she only had five dollars in her purse. Sexy perfume was expensive, and she’d rather wear nothing than douse herself in a cheap scent.

Y/N actually contemplating asking April to lend her some money and reality returned with a rush. She could wear more make-up than a Japanese geisha and drown herself in the most exotic expensive perfume in the world and it would not make Hoseok fall in love with her. “Thank you for your advice April,” she said with a return to common sense “but I really rather just be myself. Now I’d better get back to these books.” Y/N resumed checking in the returns, blocking her mind to everything but the thought that at least she would not starve to death tonight after her mother’s special birthday meal. Hoseok could buy her something delicious and creamy to go with her after-dinner coffee.

Y/N gave no more thought to April’s advice about make-up and perfume, till she arrived home late that afternoon and opened her carryall to find a paper parcel sitting on top of her house keys. It contained a small but expensive-looking bottle of perfume.

And a note. “Happy birthday darling!” April had written in her usual extravagant hand. “This always worked for me. Well, sometimes. Still, what have you got to lose? Go for it!”

Y/N sprayed a tiny burst of perfume onto her wrist and lifted it to her nose. It was a wonderfully sensual smell, its heavy musk perfume bringing images of satin sheets and naked bodies and untold unknown delights. Y/N shook her head. To wear such a scent in Hoseok’s presence would be the ultimate torture, and let’s face it, Y/N told herself, wearing perfume, no matter how sensual, isn’t about to turn Hoseok into some kind of sex-crazed lunatic. With a girl like Tinashe in tow, no doubt he has all the sex he can handle. Y/N glanced at the perfume’s name and laughed.

SEDUCTRESS

Good Lord. It would’ve been a powerful potion to turn her into that. It was a nice thought of April’s, but a total waste of time and money. So was her advice. For Y/N she believed she did have something to lose. Her self-respect, and possibly Hoseok’s friendship.

[willow-bolton]

like a match in gasoline || a willow and riley mix (or how this was intended to be about their relationship and turned into a if they ever worked together they’d be hell to deal with mix- so basically badass bitches AU) (in no particular order, 21 tracks)

@rileymadden26​

01.  hell to pay- five finger death punch Feels like I'm running in place/A past I can't erase/I'm breaking, breaking apart/(I know they're after me)/It's like I'm fading each day/They took it all away/Left nothing, nothing but scars/(They make it hard to breathe)/Don't know where it went wrong/But my love for this is gone/I tried to numb the pain/But I can't get away/Hiding behind this disguise/The games I had to play/The hell I had to pay/Everything comes with a price

02. go to hell for heaven’s sake- bring me the horizon For the love of God, will you bite your tongue/Before we make you swallow it?/It's moments like this where silence is golden/And then you speak/No one wants to hear you/No one wants to see you/So desperate and pathetic, I'm begging you to spare me/The pleasure of your company/When did the diamonds leave your bones?/I'm burning down every bridge we made/I'll watch you choke on the hearts you break/I'm bleeding out every word you said/Go to hell, for heaven's sake/I'm burning down every bridge we made/I'll watch you choke on the hearts you break/I'm bleeding out every word you said/Go to hell, for heaven's sake

03. king of the world- porcelain & the tramps Keep your head down/Until I tell you to speak/And not giving me the run around/When you fall back into my coffin/No, you shouldn't stay in my way/Dare you test me/I'm the fucking king of the world/Get on your knees/I'm the fucking king of the world/Do as I please/So get up and get out and I'll show you/What it takes for me to control you/'Cause I'm the fucking king of the world

04. gasoline- porcelain & the tramps Don't get in my face/Don't invade my space/I'll put you in your place/I'll only tell you once/I'll never tell you twice/And this is me being nice/You cross me once and you'll see/It's like a match in gasoline/Gasoline'/Cause I'm highly flammable/A caged up animal/I will go off for you/You better take it back/I'm about to snap/I will go off for you, oh

05. love the way you hate me- like a storm I don't care if I'm not good enough for you/I don't care if I don't live the life you want me to/I don't care what you wanna think of me/'Cause all you are/Is everything/That I don't wanna be/You say/I'm a/Freak/I say/I am/Free/Come take a shot at me/I love the way you hate me/You say/I'm insane/I say/You're afraid/I get stronger from the pain/I love the way you hate me/Take another shot at me/I love the way you hate me

06. anti you- blue stahli Another command to succumb/To sucking you off with a smile/A vanity culture like a congregation/Identity dogmatism/The image is always in style/Stroking the ego with media masturbation/Conditioning to canonize/Gospel of this vox populi/Force feeding/Misleading/I'm burning the altar/And I'll pass right through/Erasing/Debasing/I want to be the anti you

07. fragile minds- silent theory Cut me open and you'll find/A brain, heart, liver, lungs/And a knife in the spine/It's chilling to know that the last place you go/Might be where the fat lady sings/Does it hurt? I don't know, and where do we go?/We don't tease fragile minds with such things/So sell me down the river/First help me sell my soul/It's something I know I can deliver/I think we've finally broke the mold

08. disarray- lifehouse I faced my demons/Wrestling these angels to the ground/And all that I could find Was a thin line between/All the saints and villains/It was crossed in my own mind/Someday I'm gonna find it/Wish I knew what I was looking for/Inside the disarray (inside the disarray)/I woke up this morning/Don't know where I'm going/But it's alright/I wouldn't have it any other way

09. the one who laughs last- downplay There's a war inside of me/And you watch it silently/Any idiot could see/That I killed all the hope that I had/There's a war inside of me/Burning red and honestly/And I wave it constantly/Like a flag, like a flag, like a flag/This knife that's in my back keeps twisting/Anxiety attacks/This is a battleground, I'm caught in the crossfire/My words are weaponry and I'm waiting patiently/You win the battle now but I will return the fire/'Cause I'd crawl on broken glass/To be the one who laughs last

10. i get wicked- thousand foot krutch I'm a beast came to rip this spot up/Stick to chords cause the devil wears prada/We want peace but we can make this rowdy, stop/We don't want to hurt nobody/You can't hate me cause my nature's nice/And my heart's for the people of the world tonight/If you got a problem with it take it up with life/Cause if you try to push me it ain't going to be nice/I get wicked, wicked/I get wicked/There's no escaping it/Wicked/You wanna kick it/Watch me get wicked/Step up and get it/'Cause I get wicked/I am not afraid of this mountain in my way/You can push me to my knees I believe/And I am now awake/Uncontrolled and not ashamed/When it washes over me I feel free

11. waste- seether Go unnoticed, let the freedom wash away./Losing focus, the pretense is second nature/It's a broken life that I cling too/Trying to make right/I feel dismayed, just like you do/I feel decayed../So find me a way, to leave this wasted life behind me. (this wasted life)/So find me a way, to leave this wasted life behind me after all/Yes, I see you surrounded by the hopeless/When they need you you're much to good and bloated/By the hopeless life that you cling too/Trying to make right.  

12. kill the lights- the birthday massacre This story's missing a wishing well/No mirror to show and tell/No kiss that can break the spell/I'm falling asleep/Every prince is a fantasy/The witch is inside of me/Her poison will wash away the memory/We kill the lights and put on a show/It's all a lie/But you'd never know/The star will shine/And then it will fall/And you will forget it all/And after midnight we're all the same/No glass shoe to bring us fame/Nobody to take the blame/We're falling apart

13. had enough- diamante I hate everyone that I meet/But I'm getting better/Think before I speak because I/I know I've got a temper/Think I've blown a fuse/There's blood on my knuckles/The smile on my face is fake/And the vein on my head suggests you get running/I've had enough, had enough/Had enough, had enough yeah/Cause I've had enough/I think I'm reaching the limit/You should keep your distance/Cause I've had enough/Take a deep breath and count to three/And then I'll be behavin'/I feel like people just don't get me/Maybe I'm crazy

14. paint it black- ciara I see a red door and I want it painted black/No colors anymore, I want them to turn black/I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes/I have to turn my head until my darkness goes/I see a line of cars and they're all painted black/With flowers and my love both never to come back/I see people turn their heads and quickly look away/Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day/I look inside myself and see my heart is black/I see my red door I must have it painted black/Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts/It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black/No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue/I could not foresee this thing happening to you/If I look hard enough into the setting sun/My love will laugh with me before the morning comes

15. curbstomp- meg myers I'm a sinner/I'm a liar/Want forgiveness/But I'm tired/I'm addicted to the fire/Let go, I'm ready for it/Let go, I'm ready/I'm a victim/I'm a coward/Try to wake up/Don't have the power/I'm a daughter in the choir/Let go, I'm ready for it/Let go, I'm ready

16. gasoline vs. savages- marina & halsey Is it running in our blood? Is it running in our veins?/Is it running in our genes? Is it in our DNA?/Humans aren't gonna behave as we think we always should/ Yeah, we can be bad as we can be good/Underneath it all we're just savages/Hidden behind shirts, ties and marriages/How could we expect anything at all?/We're just animals still learning how to crawl/We live, we die, we steal, we kill, we lie/Just like animals but with far less grace/We laugh, we cry like babies in the night/Forever running wild in the human race

17. moments- tove lo I, I'm not the prettiest you've ever seen/But I have my moments, I have my moments/Not the flawless one I've never been/But I have my moments, I have my moments/I can get a little drunk, I get into all the dont's/But on good days I am charming as fuck/I can get a little drunk, I get into all the dont's/But on good days I am charming as fuck

18. calm down- krewella Got all my keys don't you follow me, call on me/Ain't mood for no drama/Outta my face, didn't you read my policy/I do what I wanna/You ain't my therapist, ain't got the formula/So stay in your corner/Last thing I need is my head underwater/Didn't I warn' ya'/Wanna feel the good/Wanna feel the bad, feel it all/Got a human heart/I'ma let that fly and fall/When I feel insane/And I rap that pain/No doubt/I'ma spell it out/Don't tell me to calm down/I'm about to tear this fuckin' place down/Kinda like the way I let it go.../Don't tell me to calm down/I'm about to tear this fuckin' place down/No, I ain't afraid to let it go.../Don-don't tell me to calm down/Don't tell me to calm down

19. middle finger- bohnes You show me love then spit in my face/Making your money off all of my pain/You put an eagle inside of a cage/And you think I'm not strong enough to escape/But I refuse to let you make me feel like I can't fly/Not only will I soar again, I'll own the fucking sky, yeah/So I put my middle finger up/I'm done being your slave/My generation's had enough/And you should be afraid/Oh-whoa, oh, not your prisoner/Oh-whoa, oh, better listen when I say/I put my middle finger up/I'm done being your slave/You couldn't even look me in the eye/When you let me go and then left me to die/There was no question that I would survive/An artist on fire is one that's alive

20. dead af- krewella Throwing pretty pennies/Down a wishing well/We ain't fucking with you/But we wish you well/Wonder where your friends is/Are they heads or tails?/We ain't fucking with you/'Cause we see you/At the bottom of the party/With the silver spoon under your tongue (under your tongue)/You're all about the money/But your bullshit doesn't add up (doesn't add up)/Dancing with the skeletons out of all the graves you dug (graves you dug)/All your friends are Benjamins call 'em but they won't show up/'Cause everybody dead as fuck.../'Cause everybody dead as fuck.../'Cause everybody dead as (Brah! Brah!)/Dead as fuck

21. bones- ms mr Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone/Boy with a broken soul/Heart with a gaping hole/Dark twisted fantasy turned to reality/Kissing death and losing my breath/Midnight hours, cobble street passages/Forgotten savages, forgotten savages/Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone/Let her find a way to a better place/Broken dreams and silent screams/Empty churches with soulless curses

[marmelade-sky]

First time drunk Adam with the gangsey. Listen, its a loose evening and the atmosphere feels warm and safe and Adam decides he wouldn't mind if he lost a little control around his chosen family. knowing he would be safe around them and how they know he hates not being in control and would keep him safe. insert: giggling-kiddish-cute drunk Adam

Hello, thank you for the prompt! Enjoy :) ♥ with a side of pynch fluff

prompt me, guys! as I’ve already mentioned, aftg prompts are pausing rn, but trc prompts are open. Aftg prompts will be reopened. 

EDIT: this got out of hand, ofc. incapable of writing short fics, me.

EDIT2: FUCK GUYS I JUST SAW I HIT 500 FOLLOWERS WOW AMAZE I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ALL WANT TO SEE MY GARBAGE WOW THANK YOU SO MUCH WOW WOW I HAVE TO COME UP WITH SOME CUTE IDEA POSSIBLY INVOLVING THE NUMBER 5 thank you so much. ♥ I’m blown away.

Read here on ao3 or if you’re on mobile.

Adam, 3:41:i just put the letter into the mailbox. it’s done. Officially enrolled now.

Blue, 3:42:YAASSS you GO ADAM so happy for you! 

Gansey, 3:42:Adam, I am so happy for you and so proud of you. One of the first steps into the life you’ve always wanted. I’m tearing up a little bit to be honest. 

Henry, 3:43:HELL YES Parrish, congrats. 

Adam, 3:46:Thanks, guys ♥

Ronan, 4:01:party at the barns at 7 

“Yo, college boy.”, Ronan greets Adam when he arrives at the Barns, an hour early of course. His face is split with a genuinly happy grin that feels like a privilege to Adam every time. It’s beautiful. 

Adam himself grins as he meets Ronan by the steps of the front porch. “Hey, farm boy.” Ronan leans down to kiss Adam hello. It’s sweet and warm like the Henrietta late afternoon sun bathing them in her glow. 

Adam laughs when Ronan hooks his arm around his neck and drags him up the stairs, Adam stumbling after him and pawing at his sides and arms. “Behold, the smartest man of Henrietta! Adam fucking genius Parrish! Here he comes!” He imitates fanfares with his mouth and it’s so ridiculous and stupid and Adam has to laugh until his eyes water while trying to wrestle out of Ronan’s grip. They eventually land on the couch, Adam on top, and when Ronan finally lets go of him, Adam props himself up on his hands left and right to Ronan’s head. Ronan reaches up, wrapping his hands around Adam’s (by now, rather significant) biceps (- thanks, weight class), and the look in his eyes turns intense. Adam holds it. 

“…not to go Dick Gansey on you, Adam, but I’m also proud as fuck of you.” Ronan says it deliberately slow, as if he has to force himself to not speak fast and stumble over his words. 

“Thank you.”, Adam replies, voice sincere even though his eyes light up. 

Ronan nods once, and then he moves his hips, pushing Adam forward so he topples over the arm rest of the couch and falls off, and they’re laughing again. 

The rest of the gang arrives precisely at 6 (which is undoubtedly Gansey’s doing. Henry and Blue never get anywhere on time on their own). 

Until then, Ronan and Adam prepared food (chili) and Ronan mysteriously conjoured up drinks from somewhere. Possibly his dreams. Adam would rather not know. 

Adam stands on the porch as the three of them climb out of the Pig, and he can’t fight the huge smile on his face as Gansey actually runs to him, like Blue usually does, and pulls him in such a ferocious, all-out, 100% bear hug that Adam forgets to breathe for just a second. 

“I’m so freaking proud of you, Adam, really, you deserve it and…oh, gosh.” Adam rolls his eyes with a sheepish little laugh when Gansey pulls back and wipes at his eyes, cheeks flushed and smile still on his lips. 

“Gansey…”, Adam starts, but Henry interrupts them. 

“Sorry, man, Dick’s on his period.” He extends a hand to Adam, ignoring Gansey’s huffs, and when Adam takes it, pulls him into a surprisingly manly hug. “Congrats, dude.” 

Blue is last, and she just stand in front of him for a moment, beaming, hands pressed to her sternum. He looks back at her with a lopsided smile. The girl who started it all. Today she’s wearing denim dungarees over something that might have been one of Gansey’s polos once upon a time before she attacked it with scissors and rhinestones. She looks ridiculous, and Adam can’t help but think how he loves her. Differently than he thought he would when he first met her. But still. 

Blue steps forward and lifts her hands to Adam’s cheeks. “If you don’t come visiting us at least once a month, I’m gonna kick your ass.”, she says affectionately. 

“Is that a promise?”, Adam retorts softly. Blue does her best to mimick Ronan’s death stare and looks like a mad kitten. 

“You can bet your ass on that, Adam Parrish.” Her accent is strong enough to match his own when she says it, and then she stands on her tippiest tippy toes to kiss his cheek before slapping it lightly. 

Adam hasn’t felt this light in… ever. 

This is real, this is reality now. He’s going to college. Ronan Lynch is his boyfriend. Blue, Henry and Gansey are still his friends. Gansey is still alive. 

Cabeswater is still on his mind, still whispering, still demanding attention. But it’s as if, the more Adam acquires this peace within himself, the more does Cabeswater. They co-exist in harmony. Adam is slowly starting to learn to master his magic, leading it instead of letting it take over the reins. 

Everything is good. He’s relaxed.

They’re all drinking. Gansey is sipping wine, Henry went with some sort of unholy sugary pink mixed drink, Blue is alternating between stealing sips of Gansey’s wine and nursing her own beer. Ronan has emptied three bottles of beer already. Noone is asking Adam if he wants a drink, too, because usually, Adam Parrish doesn’t drink. Too many bad memories of beer on his father’s breath, and too many bad memories of him losing control after drinking. 

But that’s the old Adam. An Adam from another life that already seems unreal and distant. 

“Can I have some?”, he asks, pointing to Ronan’s beer. Ronan pulls up one eyebrow, but silently hands the bottle to Adam. 

The world is all spinny and Adam feels all warm and Ronan is all so fucking…hot. 

“You’re so fucking hot, Ronan.”, Adam tells him and Ronan laughs. “Thanks, Adam.” His voice is still so stable when he talks, how does he do that? Adam doesn’t know.

He reaches out and gently presses his finger into the dip right under Ronan’s adam’s apple. So soft, so smooth… 

Adam leans forward and lets his head rest against Ronan’s chest. So warm. 

He can feel the vibration of Ronan’s laughter.

“Who knew Parrish gets all adorable when he’s drunk.”, Ronan says, and Adam is a little bit sure that he said it to Gansey. But not completely sure so he looks up, turning around in his spot. 

Gansey is sitting cross-legged on the floor, Blue sitting behind him on the sofa, leaning down. Her boobs rest on top of Gansey’s head and he looks rather pleased about it. Henry’s not here. Where is he…?

“Has… has Henry gone…?”, Adam asks, and then yawns a big yawn, stretching a little. 

Blue chuckles. “…no, sweetheart, he just went to pee.” 

The ‘sweetheart’ makes him smile. “Okay… I thought he might…might have gone… I would’a been sad if he had… cause… cause Cheng’s just…” Adam clenches his fist with a wobbly movement. Ronan behind him laughs. “-just so… nice. So friggin’… nice. He- Cheng!”

Henry, reentering the room, grins at Adam. “Parrish!” 

“Come here… you and your…gloril… glorious hair.” 

Henry leans down as the others laugh, and let’s Adam pet his hair. It’s beautiful. 

“I’m gonna pack a suitcase… pack a…” Adam hiccups, and Ronan behind him wheezes of laughter, “pack a suitcase with all of you in it. All. Of. You.” He emphasizes the words by pointing at each one of them. 

“…gonna take aaaall of you with me to…to college.” He hiccups again and then falls backwards into Ronan’s arms. Ronan wraps them around him. 

“Adorable.”, he hears Gansey say, and Blue giggles. 

Adam loses himself in Ronan’s eyes. Ronan’s fingertips stroke up and down his arm and the feeling of it pulls Adam in, makes his mind focus on it, and only it. 

Ronan’s hands are so beautiful… and his arms… ever since he’s working more on the farm, they’ve become so… what’s the word… 

Adam forgets.

Ronan looks at him with that intense gaze again, and it’s just so hot. 

Adam pulls up, and tries to whisper. “…I really want to blow you right now.” 

Gansey, Blue and Henry all three start laughing when Ronan’s cheeks light up with a blush. Maybe his whisper wasn’t a whisper. 

“Oopsie…sorry, Ronan.” It sounds like ‘saaaaahry Ronan.’ with his accent. 

“Maybe it’s time to go to bed.”, Gansey suggests with amusement in his voice, dad mode on. 

Adam sits up and finger guns at him. “Maybe it’s time you…” He can’t think of a joke so he just shuts up. He falls back again. Ronan ‘oof’-es when Adam hits his chest. 

“I’m sleepin’ here. This is my bed. Good night.” 

The bed wraps his arms around him. “I’m not carrying you upstairs later.”, Ronan threatens, but at the same time, kisses Adam’s head. 

Adam falls asleep to the feeling of warm fuzz in his brain and veins, and his heart, too. 

[artdjgblog]

​Innerview: Sarah Benson / Kansas City Star - Ink Magazine

March 2010​

Video: DJG & PJC Note: ​Questions ​about David Seume’s Will Ya Be My Friend​ music video​.​

01) Is this the first music video you’ve ever done? Have you ever animated before?

This is my first music video. I’ve always wanted to do one and would love to venture more. It was a great opportunity and exercise in collaboration and in personal patience as I typically can’t allow art projects to take up a lot of my time per day job, life stuff and other art projects. I’ve never animated before per lack of resources and know-how, but my flat work has always been animated inside of me. It’s so nice to fully translate this in video form for everyone to see. But, it’s not just my video. My friend Philip James Cheaney is animator/co-director and additional artist on David Seume’s “Will Ya Be My Friend” video. This is Philip’s second full-length music video, the first being for The Winston Jazz Routine. I believe he has another one in pre-production for Joel Kraft. He also has several short films under his belt while stationed in Portland, OR. Currently, he is studying for a masters degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I hope this video lends him extra credit as he captured my insides, enhancing them greatly. We’ve known each other for over a decade and work well together, even completing each others sentences most of the time. And David’s wonderful song made it that much easier. David was so kind to let us pick the song that truly sung to us and it was a treat. Three years prior to working on this video with Philip, he and I actually swapped some fairly extensive brains on an animated short film starring Abe Lincoln that we look forward to getting to in the future. I hope to learn some tech or hands-on trickery by then. Philip also has two other short films featuring my art that are on the back burner. Our back burner is actually a bonfire. 02) How did the collaboration between you and David come about? David connected with me on email out of the blue in late November of 2008 while I was in Texas. We had never talked before and I didn’t know about him, but he somehow knew about me. Coincidentally, he was booked to play a set of music, as well as release his debut album “It Is What It Is”, the same night of my 6th annual December art exhibition at The Brick in Kansas City, MO. He commissioned me to make a poster for his show and I knew instantly via email and after meeting in the flesh at the show that we were on the same page in life and art. I believe it was the same night at The Brick that we talked a little about the prospect of a music video. So, it was only fitting we chose to have the “Will Ya Be My Friend” video premiere and video art production on display at The Brick…with extra special thanks to Sheri! 03) The video was released last weekend, right? The video was officially released on Friday, March 12, 2010 at The Brick and on the internet right away. It’s been fourteen months in the making, and apart from my production work online and a handful of news items on David’s site and my site, has been fairly tight-lipped/tight-eye’d. It’s really neat to finally get it out there, share with the public, and see our year-plus of work fly by in four minutes! Hopefully, it’s four minutes that people will come back to visit multiple times! Tell your friends! 04) How much of the imagery is drawn vs. found? There is a very large percentage of found imagery pieced together in collage. There are also some hand drawn elements and characters. The core landscape I made of multiple ink jet printed overlays of found medical/science and floral illustrations and photos. There are also blow-ups of actual locust wings that make lovely hills. The original landscape, which we call “the scroll”, is made from all these layered collage pieces. The scroll is roughly 22″ wide x 25′ long (give-or-take as it is hard to properly measure the length) , based on the landscape I had in my head and from early sketches that I drew/timed to the flow of the landscape of the song. At one time I thought about the prospect of shooting the video on a continuous scroll cranked by hand, sorta old-fashioned and in tune to how I like to do things, but I’ll save that for another something down the road. Going back to truly visualizing the music, I had a vision of the landscape going on one continuous shot with multiple zooms up ‘n’ down and back ‘n’ forth and with the ability for the viewer to see the entire landscape at once during certain moments to see the scope of the world, or at least the part of the world that we were showing. It was probably a little more adventurous and in-depth than what could have been done, but what we ended up with is great as Philip really captured it well and found great ways to compromise and add his own flavors. I’m very pleased! Once the art and my notes were in Philip’s hands, I didn’t worry about it because I have faith in his abilities. I just hope he gets well rested after this! 05) There are a lot of insects and anatomical drawings in the video. Where did that concept come from? In my initial video thoughts, and something I think about quite frequently, I wanted to not only visually stamp the song “Will Ya Be My Friend”, but what the music might sound like on the inside or outside. Whether it’s the soul or makeup of the song itself or any body or vessel in which the song is played into, anything, even that of the external, in-between or over yonder. The original idea actually incorporated a live-action scene that lead into what you see for the final. There was also an idea of capturing David in full body movement and inserting him into the video world. But, being a little limited, and with David and me in KCMO and Philip, our chief motion man being in NYNY, we slimmed our ideas down some. I did a simple action photo shoot of David and then got to work on the final art. Though, Philip did a great job with the introduction of David in the opening credits and a humorous fall into the video world, so he partially captured some of the initial blue print. In terms of conceptual makeup of the landscape, I love seeing split levels of earth layers and what might be under the surface. So, the medical/science/anatomical imagery just made sense with this and also with the idea of seeing the guts of the musical landscape, human landscape or in-between world landscape. I had a couple of underground or cave-like-dip-down moments in mind fused with an almost Super Mario Bros. feel and this idea of seeing more than what’s just on the surface worked well with it too. The insects included just made sense in complimenting the anatomy and floral arrangements. The introduction of “Will Ya Be My Friend” has locusts and I wanted to play off of that, not only with an animation of an actual one whose skid mark David is after, but a few others in interaction, so the insects and microscopic critters blown-up, worked well, as well as the skeleton hands that act insect and critter-like. The song also ends with the voice of a child singing along and we wanted to capture childlike innocence, wonder and discovery from many aspects of the journey. We wanted a video that would be seen as more than just a video for the song, but more like a personal adventure with an identity that anybody might attach to or become attracted towards. We also wanted to lay the foundation of creativity and imagination and a connection to something larger. In particular, that feeling of experiencing something that can live beyond borders, that can make a person wake-up at any point in a day and get wheels turning. Something that can keep breathing. Something all around us that we often overlook, even sometimes the most important elements of life. Even though online time goes by in a flash, and an overloaded four minutes of video time at that, maybe it will get people to come back for more or rewind to get a better view of something buried beneath the surface, or grab a friend to show them. Maybe even it will get people to be thinking or look at non-video life in new ways. Friendships, life, art, whatever, all have extra things and treasures buried beneath. Of course, there are always chances of the not-so special things lurking. But, faith in the extra good ones can cancel them out, we must hope. 06) Are those Paul McCartney’s eyes on that lion? Good question and shows you were watching and came back for more! No, those aren’t Paul’s eyes. Though, if I had to choose the eyes of a Paul, it would be Newman or Buzan. Actually, those are David Seume’s eyes! And actually, as David exits the cave, a picture of himself that makes up the landscape composition is in the ground. It’s the picture those eyes came from. Up until late in the production art I just had the regular “Lion Guy” eyes there, a frizzy-haired chap I came across in an old thrift store text book. I’m not sure what kind of book, maybe psychology, but this guy was chosen for something and then I chose him. He gave me a giggle with that lion mane hair of his and I found a frame to hang him and then drew a body. He makes for a good friend. I wonder who he is though. I’d like to meet him and hope he doesn’t sue me for extending his likeness because I just like him. 07) Have you found anything good recently? (I remember last time we met you had a cup that said “Your dumb” on it) I’m constantly walking with my head down for keepsakes that other people discard, or trash that turns into animals or art when I walk by, so my pockets always have things in them. There are some great weathered handwritten garage and estate sale signs out there left to dissolve. Also, since we’re finally all thawed out from the winter (maybe?) there is good pickings for pieces of cars that wrecked and weird pieces of trash that was chucked. Much of the stuff I’m finding will all fit well together in a singular piece of art, once I get it all spread out and find the right time for it. This town needs a good, hard rain to wash it up some, but it all makes up the city’s landscape. And for now I’ll take what I can get and make something pretty, at least to me. Thanks! -djg

[platinumjeon]

Ankle Biter | 06

pairing: taehyung x reader - single dad! au

warnings/genre: major fluff, major angst, smut eventually I’m sure because of my thirsty ass

summary: You swear that your job sucks, except for the guy who keeps coming in every morning to order himself a black coffee, and his kid a strawberry milk and chocolate muffin. When you and Taehyung have an awkward run-in at the cafe thanks to his kid, feelings start to emerge and so do the secrets.

words: 5.7k

playlist | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 07 | epilogue

moodboards: before & after

this chapter contains smut.

Two years prior:

“Hey, Taehyung! You made it.” Shouted a drunken Jimin from across the pounding music of the club. Taehyung responded with a devious smile as he moved through sweaty bodies entangled on the dance floor, jumping up and down at the music and splashing their drinks everywhere. Taehyung had never been comfortable at parties, but they were the best place to pick up supermodels willing to exchange a few favors, and at the moment he could use a pick-me-up.

He sat down next to Namjoon, who was quietly sitting on the bar stool working on a gin and coke while Jimin and Jungkook sat on the other side tipping back vodka shot after vodka shot and laughing their asses off after each one. Taehyung shook his head after a faint smile grew on his face. Jimin and Jungkook were fresh out of college and already insanely successful in the world of business, literal moguls of their own kind and they bathed in it. Taehyung met the two after they came to stay at the hotel, and as Taehyung stood there going through paperwork at the front desk one night the two came in and asked if Taehyung wanted to grab a drink. One drink turned into five, then ten, and that’s the night Jungkook met his girl and his future as a father. Taehyung remembers the day Jungkook called, paralyzed with fatherly fear because the baby dumped on his doorstep after months of a rocky relationship with the baby’s mother. Taehyung just laughed, telling Jungkook that Jungmi was “a minor bump in the road,” and that “if he really didn’t want her he could find her grandparents.” He would take that back if he realized who would be calling within the next year.

Jimin offered the drugs to Taehyung mere weeks before any children came into the picture. Jin stopped coming to the clubs with the others after he found Taehyung, Jimin, Jungkook and Yoongi in the VIP bathroom with rolled dollar bills and their brains higher than Seoul’s summertime clouds. Namjoon strayed but stuck around, and Hoseok didn’t even bother calling after Taehyung’s first bloody nose at a party one night.

He never thought it was wrong. He kept his personal life and hotel apart, until one morning he awoke next to a girl he’d never seen and his doorbell being pressed incessantly by reporters and paparazzi, begging him to give a statement or answer their questions. When Taehyung stepped out of his house with loose shorts that hung on his hips and a shirtless chest, the paparazzi all but went into a frenzy. “Is it true that you’ve been stealing from guests all this time?” One shouted, his camera flashing. Taehyung grimaced at the streak of light that left black dots swimming in his vision as another pap yelled, “One of your maids admitted to being sexually assaulted by another staff member, what are you going to do?”

Taehyung looked out onto the crowd of reporters with big cameras on his lawn, his private lawn, and walked back into his house to slam the door in the reporter’s faces. He ran his fingers through his hair, the first thought popping into his head being, “where did I put my shit?” Shit, as in drugs, was stuffed under the mattress this mysterious girl was laying on, still completely asleep. Her bare back was revealed and it's obvious what Taehyung had done with her last night, but without any remorse he woke her up and shooed her out of his house through the back door and promised to call a cab for her. As soon as he turned around though, calling a cab for the girl slipped his mind completely.

It was two years after that, that Taehyung got the call that changed his entire life.

“Kim Taehyung? Yes, this is Officer Park Hyungsik from the CSPD. Are you aware that your son is currently in the hospital and is being held by DCFS?”

Taehyung had laughed. He laughed. Maybe it was the fact that the euphoria from the cocaine he’d just taken up was all too strong, but Taehyung said, “What are you talking about, I don’t have a kid.”

The officer sighed, continuing, “DNA tests have stated that you are this boy’s father. Are you available to come to Seoul University Hospital and have a chat? Something happened early this morning and we’d like to..enlighten you on it.”

Taehyung hung up with instructions to go to the pediatrics ward of the hospital that afternoon. “The fuck?” He had said aloud, stepping into a business suit usually reserved for the hotel and walking out of his house. He was already itching for another fix, the thing that was once a one time thing had become a full blown addiction, but despite the annoying urges he never wanted to quit. He never thought even once about quitting and getting help, and he drove off towards the hospital in his Maserati with thoughts nowhere near what he should have been thinking about: his kid.

Present:

You stood in front of Taehyung, weary eyes searching his desperate face as he reached out to you. Your legs propelled you backwards, mind racing a hundred miles a minute as his hand kept trying to pull you to him. “Just fucking speak, Taehyung!” You shriek, panic rising in your chest as he moves back to sit against the back of the covered toilet.

Taehyung swallows, “It’s not what it looks like. Y/N, I promise, these happen to me all the time.”

You shake your head. “That’s not what I heard Namjoon saying,” you pause, then lift your hand in air quotes, “using.’” Are you on drugs, Taehyung?” You accuse, your voice going dangerously quiet.

“No, no! No, I’m not, Y/N. You have to believe me,” he says, and you arch your eyebrow. Taehyung sighs. “A long time ago I was and I guess there’s some damage to my nose or some shit because I get these on a weekly basis.”

“What did you use, exactly?”

Taehyung doesn’t meet your eyes as he answers. “Cocaine.” He mumbles, and at his words you move farther back to the edge of the door. His head snaps up and his eyes are glazed over. “Y/N, please, just stop. It was years ago. I haven’t done anything since!”

You tilt your head up, biting your lip. “I’m gonna get going, Taehyung.”

His eyes are on yours the entirety it takes you to back out of the bathroom, letting your hands slide down the wood of the door frame and plunge to your sides before you turned and started to slowly make your way down the hallway. The image of Taehyung’s eyes, blackened like the ash of a drowned fire, echoed through your brain like the sound of a bullet from a machine gun. You couldn’t decipher if he was telling the truth or lying - the one factor that scared you the most and something you always thought you were good at telling about people, but the way he spoke brought down yet another wall in front of the secret personality you knew he was hiding.

Who was he? This man who had overturned your stone heart and allowed flowers to grow amongst the grave of scars left by people who had no regard for anyone but themselves had all but betrayed your trust. A surge of guilt traveled through your spine to the pit that had grown in your stomach, wondering, what about Taeji? The image of the little boy flashed through your head next to the echoing of Taehyung’s words. How could you fight for his father when he could be using something he was teaching Taeji never to even think about?

Then again, you had never been addicted to something...besides Taehyung, your conscious piped, and you clutched the back of your head as a pounding headache ripped through your skull. Space was good, and space was going to have to happen because you couldn’t even picture Taehyung doing what he said. He must’ve been so out of his mind the days he hadn’t contacted you, and at this point that all made a lot more sense than it did before. At the time, you were hurt because you thought he had used you for sex; turns out, you weren’t the only thing he was using.

You stepped through the kitchen and cursed under your breath for having left your purse in the living room. Rounding the same corner Taehyung had on his dash to the bathroom, six pairs of eyes were already on you. Seokjin stepped forward.

“Let me give you a ride home.”

For an actor, you figured Kim Seokjin would have a fortress of expensive cars lined up in rows just like Taehyung, but it was surprising to see him round the bend of the back driveway in a silver pick-up truck. Undoubtedly the latest model, but you opened the door with a heavy heart and jumped into the ash-grey passenger seat. Jin looked up at you with a sincere look in his pretty, almond brown eyes but you cleared your throat, “Jin.”

He turns his head back to the steering wheel, his lips pursed, “Yeah. Um. Sorry.”

It was silent for a few moments as he drove through the moss tree adorned driveway and through the gates, and you could be comfortable in the silence if you hadn’t had so many questions brushing through your mind like the way Taehyung’s lips brushed yours just earlier this morning, his comfort the only thing you seek and the cracking sound you swear your heart makes when you remember that his comfort is also his poison.

Seokjin clears his throat, “Taehyung has been doing it for a long time.”

You purse your lips. “How long?”

“Years. Since before Taeji was even conceived, before Minsoo was ever in the picture. He’s been doing it for so long that nosebleeds are a regular thing because the nerves and veins in his nose are so damaged.” Jin said, and you notice that his grip on the steering wheel had tightened.

“God,” You laugh breathily, “and here I was putting my trust in him. I thought he was perfect. How stupid.”

Suddenly, your body flew forward as Jin slammed on the brake, agitated honking noises coming from behind the truck as cars flew by in protest.

“Y/N, you have to understand something. I’ve never seen him happier and as sober as he is now. Taehyung was a partier and he made mistakes, a lot of fucking stupid mistakes but he is so in love with you. It’s sickening, actually,” Seokjin said, shaking his head.

Of course, here come the tears, you think, every thought in your head completely jumbled into one huge knot of regret and sadness and guilt and love. You loved Taehyung. He had become a deciding factor in your life, a comfort, but he betrayed you like no one else has before. He betrayed your trust in him.

“Tell me something. If he had told you straight-up that he had done cocaine for a period of time before his son came into his life, would you have even given him a second glance?” Seokjin continued, his body now turned to yours as he reached out to hand you a tissue from the glove compartment.

You slowly shook your head.

“I know he loves you. The way he looked at you as you carried Taeji and sat in front of him and spoke to him as if he was your own, damn, I didn’t even know how to carry a baby before the girls came into my life. He sees something in you and dammit, I’m desperate to make you give him another chance because I know you love him too.”

Seokjin was out of breath by the time he finished, and the tears that had traveled down your face turned into sobs that wracked your entire body like volts of electricity, seizing your breathing as if the oxygen in the air wasn’t enough to sustain your throbbing lungs. You were slightly aware of Seokjin’s hand on your back, rubbing up and down and his voice echoing comforting words but the words weren’t Taehyung’s.

Maybe you should have listened; stuck around to let Taehyung explain what happened and give yourself a chance to believe him. But the hurt that still traveled through your veins over the possibility of Taehyung lying to you still stung.

“Y/N, I don’t know what Taehyung does with himself anymore but he’s trying to better himself for his son and you; he hasn’t been to a party in ages. He gave up partying all together once he realized that Taeji was more important than doing lines in the bathroom of a dirty club.”

You nod, unable to get the words out of your shriveling lungs, “Please take me home.”

It wasn’t long before you got the expected pounding on your front door, having rejected every call and ignored every text Taehyung had sent to you over the six, grueling hours that went by. You were drowning in uncertainty, having jumped out of Seokjin’s truck and mumbling a faint goodbye before stumbling into the stairwell of the apartment and having yet another break-down.

Why does he have this effect on you, you have no idea, and as you lay in bed at 7 PM that night listening to Taehyung’s voice puncture your eardrums from outside the front door, all you want is his arms around you.

“What, Taehyung? I’m trying to sleep,” You say, swinging the door open to see his wary face. His eyes aren’t as fiery was they were before, but now a dull, black sea of all the emotion reflecting in your own eyes as it spilled down his cheeks. “Y/N, I’m sorry.” He said, exasperated, but not taking any steps to get closer to you.

You sighed, rubbing a hand over your face and opening the door wider for him to step inside, ushering him to sit down on the couch.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been inside your apartment,” Taehyung said meekly, taking a seat on the plush, sea foam green couch. Buying your apartment was the best decision you had ever made to date, the little two-bedroom, two bathroom space on the outskirts of central Gangnam was perfect for you with a cozy, bright interior that made you happy.

You nod, sitting down across from him on the couch and the two of you stare awkwardly at each other for a few beats and finally Taehyung looks up.

“Where should I start?”

“Wherever you want,” You reply, moving to sit back and cross your legs.

“I’m not doing it anymore. I swear, I know if I did I couldn’t - I wouldn’t - I-I,” He stutters, fresh tears pooling in his eyes, and you’re compelled to sit up and move to the spot next to him, allowing an arm to reach over the expanse of his back in comfort.

“I believe you, Taehyung. I just don’t understand why you kept it from me this long.”

He turns his head and sniffs. “You know that you’re the first person I trusted with Taeji in a long time. I’ve never had a nanny for him because I felt like I couldn’t trust them. The day I got that call and went to the hospital I was out of my mind and when I saw Taeji lying in that hospital bed with a fat lip and bruised eyes, I knew I had fucked up. I fucked up because I let Minsoo leave that one day, and I fucked up because I let her go through a pregnancy alone. She was probably so scared, Y/N.” Taehyung quivered.

“I sobered up enough to talk to the cops who had no suspicion whatsoever, and they had me sign a few documents before throwing this little...sickly, terrified two year old at me. I didn’t realize what I had done until the nurse asked if I had brought a car seat in my fucking Maserati,” He said, a tearful chuckle following his words.

“I brought Taeji home and he was crying his eyes out the entire time. He kept asking m-me-” Taehyung said, stopping and choking up again. “He kept asking me where his mom was. God, I won’t ever forget when he’d scream for his mom in his sleep then wake up to me staring over him and trying to calm him down. I hope he never remembers getting into that accident, and he never remembers being scared of me because I was scared of him.

He just turned three, too. I remember I called Jimin and made him come and live with me for a few weeks because I wasn’t sure how to even be a parent. I didn’t know how to hold Taeji, or what to feed him. We went to a restaurant and I ordered him a double cheese burger and then Jimin swooped in with an applesauce pouch and a turkey sandwich cut in fours. I don’t know where I’d be without the seven of them, especially Jimin.

Minsoo’s parents came in the picture two weeks later and brought up the scandal. A maid at the hotel falsely confessed to one of the butler’s assaulting her but the entire staff knew she did it for publicity. Then it landed on me, and I was assumed to have kept the whole thing a secret and how I stole money from the hotel branches. I was arrested and taken to court and...Minsoo’s parents claimed I wasn’t a good parent. I was terrified to tell you about the drugs because then maybe you’d think I wasn’t a good parent, either, and it probably would have convinced me to give Taeji up.”

You were silent, looking at Taehyung with shiny eyes. “I’m sorry,” You whisper, leaning forward to wipe at his wet cheeks. “I’ve never thought of you as a bad parent. You’re better than mine were and there’s only one of you. I grew up without a mom and I think I turned out pretty okay, even though I remember her.” You said quietly, your tone hushed and calm.

Taehyung was something else. The past few weeks had truly been a whirlwind of emotion, but you don’t think you would trade it for anything. In fact, you thought of yourself as extremely lucky to have someone like Taehyung come into your life. Everyone has secrets, and the crumbling, struggling man in front of you is no different.

The love you have for him exceeds any of the love you had for past boyfriends. It began the first night you shared tangled in his bed and surged the next morning when you awoke nose-to-nose, watching his quiet breathing. It grew even bigger when Taeji found the two of you one morning wrapped around each other and jumped all over the place. You never considered yourself a morning person, but if there was one good way to wake up in the morning it would be with Taehyung and his little boy laughing and crawling all over the place.

Taehyung leans into you, his breath ragged and his eyes slowly blinking. You could feel the expanse of his soft lashes lapping against your cheek, and one of your hands reached out to grasp at his until they were locked together like a forbidden chest of treasure.

You moved to push him back gently against the couch and sat on the tops of his thighs, leaning forward to put your forehead against his once again and gently kiss his pretty, pink lips before settling your head against his shoulder and your arms wrapped around his lower waist.

The two of you were as close as you could get, with his own arms coming around to hug your body flush against himself. It was in this moment that two separate beings, living their own lives and brains racing with their own thoughts became one, single heart.

“I love you.”

Taehyung turns his head to look at you at your confession, a look in his eyes you hadn’t seen before. “Really? You do?”

You laugh breathily, “Yeah. I do.”

Taehyung shifts slightly until you’re sitting up again and looking straight at his face. He’s trying really hard to contain a grin, but it breaks out as soon as he says, “I love you, too.”

You awoke the next morning to the sunlight filtering in through the windows and the sounds of birds chirping. It was the beginning of spring, the streets of Seoul were beginning to get brighter and sunnier with each passing day. Cherry blossom trees began to grow their pink leaves, littering the ground beneath them with cheeriness and puncturing the air with the scent of promise.

The day of the trial was the day after today, the weeks having slid by without notice. Just yesterday you told Taehyung that you loved him, and he said the same, but truthfully, you had no idea where it came from. It bubbled up and spilled over from inside of you, and that night the two of you had splurged on each other until the sun started to peek over the horizon, slowly waking the city up for a brand new day. Despite not knowing where your confession came from, you feel it. You feel it as you watch Taehyung sleep, his eyes twitching with dream and his breath coming out in little puffs over your face.

You loved him for him - all his mistakes, his promises, his goals, his successes, his failures. The two of you said those three words a million more times the night before, getting lost in each other but also making sure to be on the quiet side so your neighbours wouldn’t ask if someone was moving in with you.

Your finger traced over his face, making feather-light patterns around his jaw and brushing slightly over his pouted lips. “Good morning,” you whispered, leaning forward to settle yourself closer into his chest. Taehyung hummed, and moved to place a kiss on the top of your head before moving his hand up and down over your back in greeting.

“Good morning to you, too.” He smiled sleepily, eyes still glued shut.

You grinned, pulling backwards and placing a chaste kiss on his lips, whereas he whined and gripped your waist to pull you back to him. You laughed, a surge of warmth filling your chest as his lips were on yours again before it was his turn to move backwards and place a peck on the tip of your nose.

You sit up slightly. “Is Taeji with his grandparents?”

“He’s staying with Jimin because neither sides are allowed to be with him as we meet with lawyers and stuff, and that’s okay with me because this needs to be fair. And I need to keep him.” Taehyung says, looking absolutely determined and ready to fight. It was a refreshing sight compared to how he was just yesterday, breaking down and sobbing as he talked about his past. But now, this image of Taehyung strengthened you.

“Are you nervous about being called to the stand?” Taehyung asked gingerly, his hand reaching out to pull at your arm. You laid back down against the pillow and his arm wrapped around you once again, his lips meeting your neck.

“No,” you said, “even if I was, Taeji is worth the anxiety.”

Taehyung looks up at you with a small smile and a lasting kiss to your jaw before he sits up and runs a hand through his hair like he always does in the morning, a big sigh coming out of his mouth.

“You can head to Jimin’s today, or do whatever you need to do. I have a ton of lawyer meetings and they’re boring.” Taehyung said, standing up and walking into the bathroom. You get up as well, pulling your hair into a ponytail as you trail behind him.

“I can come with, I don’t mind.” You murmur, wrapping him in a hug from behind. Taehyung smiles into the mirror, his toothbrush in his mouth and the foamy mint toothpaste dabbed on the sides of his mouth. His one free hand comes down to rub over yours.

“If you’re sure,” Taehyung says, leaning down and spitting into the sink before standing tall and walking out of the bathroom. He was nervous, you could tell by the way he absentmindedly mumbled to himself and checked his phone a thousand times as the two of you got dressed and began the drive downtown for the first meeting with his lawyers.

Before the two of you got out of the car, Taehyung was a jittering mess. You’ve never seen him in between like this; he was always either happy or sad, never in the middle and in a way it unsettled you. There was reason to be nervous, but the imminent fact that this trial could determine the rest of Taeji’s life - and Taehyung’s - was terrifying.

Your hand settled on his thigh as he was grabbing his folders with shaky hands. He looked incredible in this black suit of his despite the hand that kept running through his hair and the purple under his eyes, and you couldn’t help but wonder what may help him calm down..

A thought struck you, and as he was moving around papers your hand crept further up Taehyung’s thigh. He hardly noticed at first, rambling on about Taeji’s birth certificate and crumbled papers when he finally noticed where you were leaning.

“W-what are you doing?” Taehyung swallowed, his breath hitching in his throat as your hand came to palm him over his tight dress pants, and you grinned and leaned closer to his ear to kiss his neck and whisper, “You need to relax.”

Taehyung stays quiet as you continue to move your hand around, squeezing gently until you could feel how hard he was getting, his arousal coming to life under the calculated movements of your hand. He let out a breathy moan, his eyes squeezing shut then opening wide to watch as your other hand comes around to unbuckle his leather belt. His breath hitches again when you squeeze a little harder, another moan escaping his pretty lips.

Taehyung is bucking upwards, urging you desperately to hurry up and take it up a notch when you tug at his pants and let his member spring forward, immediately smiling evilly up at him through hooded eyelids to find him staring down at you with a dazed expression. “Relax, Taehyung,” You say, one hand curling around his member and the thumb of your other hand running repeatedly across his reddening tip. Taehyung was breathing harder and was bucking into your hands when you finally started to move your hand up and down, swiping your thumb over his slit. He moans loudly, his head falling back against the seat in pleasure. “Faster, baby,” he breathed out, opening his eyes momentarily to look down at you again when you finally place your mouth around his cock. “Fuck,” Taehyung whimpers, “God, this is hot as fuck.”

You swirl your tongue around the tip and let your hand brush along his shaft, eventually wrapping around what you couldn’t fit in your mouth. You hum in agreement to his words, the vibrations making Taehyung’s mouth go dry and his throat erupt in lewd moans of ecstatcy, only encouraging you to continue.

His hand comes around to rest on the back of your head, his fingers twisting fistfuls of your hair until he’s pushing you down on his cock, the sounds of you quiety choking on his length enough to make Taehyung’s eyes close and his hips to involuntarily thrust upwards into your mouth until he’s whining over the sensitivity.

“O-oh my G-god,” He chokes out as you hum and maneuver your hands to run up and down his shaft, gently squeezing as you continue to push his length farther in then back towards the front of your mouth. “Fuck, I’m gonna come - fuck-” Taehyung breathes, and with one last swipe of your tongue over his slit, he releases the hot liquid into your mouth and you choke slightly as it shoots against the back of your throat.

You sit back up, traces of Taehyung’s release evident on the sides of your mouth, but you swipe a finger over each corner and stick your finger in your mouth, eyeing Taehyung as he wearily looks you up and down. “I didn’t know you c-could - God, I w-want to fuck you so hard right now,” He stutters, still breathing hard from his orgasm.

You grin as he pulls his pants back up, inspecting his outfit for any signs of what just happened and then he looks at you with wide eyes, “God,” he muttered, shaking his head as he unlocks the car and begins to get out, gathering up his papers.

“Maybe I should do that more often, it sure does relax you,” You grin, and he shoots you devious little grin before he steps out, and you’re not far behind as the two of you walk into the glass building across the street.

“Mr. Kim, I think the best way to go is to have your closest defendant, Ms. Y/L/N-” The lawyer with thick, round glasses glanced up at you with a small smile, before continuing, “tell the judge exactly what Taeji’s routine is and what your thoughts of Taehyung are. The judge for this case is not tough to sway, but that could go both ways.”

You look over at Taehyung. Your sexual expedition seemed to have calmed his nerves slightly, but he still looked reserved as he turned to you. “Are you alright with that?”

Nodding, he smiles gratefully and places his hand on your thigh under the table, moving his thumb in small circles. You weren’t sure if he was doing this in an attempt to reassure you, or himself.

The lawyer continues, “Your in-laws have only a few defendants, and although we’re not sure who they are or what leverage they have, the more defendants you have, the better chance you have to sway the judge.”

Taehyung had asked all six of his closest friends, including you, to get on the stand and speak about his ability to parent. It was almost comical, how each boy had immediately volunteered to speak for Taehyung, and Jimin even admitted that Taehyung got a little teary-eyed at all the support. You were grateful for his friends, it was obvious that they cared for Taeji just as much as they cared for their own children.

When the lawyer excused himself to take a call, Taehyung turned to you.

“This isn’t too much, right? You’re feeling alright?” He asked, his eyebrows pulling together in concern.

You smile, reaching your hands out to adjust his tie, “I’m doing just fine. Are you?”

Taehyung nods. “I’m beginning to feel a lot more confident. It might be a placebo, but no matter how this goes, I know whatever is ruled will be best for Taeji.”

You shot him a weird look, turning your head. “What is best for Taeji is for him to stay with you, Taehyung..” You trail off.

Taehyung smiles sadly, “Well, yeah, but from an outsider’s perspective and opinion is what matters most here, right?” His smile falters and he looks down, “And maybe they’ll think Taeji is best with his grandparents.”

You’re confused - it’s almost as if Taehyung wants Taeji to go with his grandparents, what is he on about? He’s not as confident as he appears, you conclude, and it seems like Taehyung is trying to be the version of himself where he thinks everything will be alright. “Tae, that’s not how you’re supposed to think.”

“I’m just trying to keep an..open mind about it, okay, Y/N?” He snaps suddenly, standing up and straightening his jacket. “I have another meeting. Are you coming with?”

“Don’t snap at me, I know you’re upset,” You mumble, and stand to grab your purse.

Later that night, you’re lying in Taehyung’s bed staring at the wall. Normally, your head would be under his chin and his arms would be wrapped around you - the two of you were never really enjoyed spooning, because what was the point of sleeping next to each other if you couldn’t see the other person - but tonight, you were facing the window and listening to Taehyung’s breathing.

You knew he was awake. And it was weird, because the two of you were completely separate. It was terrifying, knowing that in a matter of hours things would be decided and it was obvious that Taehyung was a wreck. Apparently, your roadhead excursion wasn’t enough to rid Taehyung of all his nerves, which was understandable, but you wish he would let you scoot closer to him and hold him tight.

“Y/N?” His voice rang out in the darkness, and you turned slightly.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think Taeji will hate me if his grandparents end up winning?”

You turn completely, moving to face him as he does the same. You’re still not touching him at all, and you want to reach out so badly to brush your fingers through his hair and trace shapes on his bare chest but you keep to yourself, unsure how to act around him and his seemingly fragile state of mind.

You didn’t know how to answer him, either, how to assure him that in no way would Taeji ever be able to hate his father, his constant companion, so all you said was, “No way.”

Taehyung turns to you and you can see the outline of his nose in the darkness. “You don’t think so? I would if I were him,” he muttered, turning back to stare at the ceiling.

Your lips are still stuck together apparently, unable to formulate a proper response so you move to place your head on his chest tentatively, slowly, waiting for a possible outburst or reaction but it never comes. Instead, his hand comes around to mess with your hair, and your hand automatically moves to rest on his chest.

“He could never hate his best friend,” You say sleepily, planting a kiss on his shoulder before drifting off with your hand curled around the back of his neck, hanging on him as if your life depended on it.

[intentionswithnaomi]

08/01/2020 21:12

Things to grieve.

I think the one that has had the most impact on me is Holly. That’s because it’s entangled with so many parts of my being, or “issues” I have about myself.

Firstly, I loved her and her friends. I felt comfortable and a sense of belonging. That weekend at Green Man was one of the best from my time in UK. I had a crew, they were fun and it didn’t feel forced. I felt like they liked me and I wasn’t there as an addition.

Then, there was Jackie. She was complicated and hard to navigate. My feelings about her were complicated and hard to navigate. Holly was a good foundation to talk to. She understood these complicated emotions and was able to discuss them with me.

So when I discovered with Holly that Jackie had friend-zoned me, I had this extra trust and appreciation of Holly. Jackie has since asked me whether I had feelings for her, and you know, maybe I did. So when it was just me and her brother in a place, I attached all this appreciation and apparent closeness of Holly onto Chris.

My, wasn’t that a mistake. Apparently Chris said to Holly the next day that he couldn’t get rid of me. That I was a nuisance. I can tell you blow by blow that I was trying to protect myself from this very thing happening the whole time. I questioned what anything that me and him had would have on my relationship with Holly. He said he didn’t know but also that it didn’t matter.

Should I have lied to her? Should I have not told her what happened? No, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I pride myself on my honesty and in the end, I know it wasn’t me who fucked up in that situation it was him. But blood is thicker than water as they say. Chris is her brother, and what is she to do? Reject that relationship over someone who she barely even knows, who does seem to have a tendency to blow up? That appears to take drugs at every chance she gets? And yes, I know that my actions were quite self-destructive, but when you have come from a conservative background, and you have a new found sense of freedom, of course you’re going to run with it as far as you can.

So after that moment, for me everything was in efforts to makeup for the “bad thing” I’d done. But honestly, it wasn’t even a “bad thing”. All those outside factors that I wasn’t able to control, they worked against me. Who knows, if it wasn’t that thing that happened, maybe something else would’ve blown up in my face.

Yes, I miss Holly incredibly. She was my only best friend in London (apart from maybe Annie, but that was more of a work relationship, and I do still treasure that dearly). All the things that led to us not being friends, were not my fault. Sure, there were somethings if in the same situation again, I would do differently, but at the end of the day, everyone has their own life to live and path to take.

Holly, I do not hold this against you. The only thing that I will say, is that if you are to ever reach out to someone who you’ve blocked and ignored for months, don’t send them a weird “I haven’t not missed you” message. That’s fucked up and really not appreciated. If you don’t want to have anything to do with someone, stand by that decision and don’t play a game to save your own back.

Also, fuck you Chris. I do hold you responsible for this. You’re the one who lied to Holly the next day, told me all the right things just to get in my pants, and then ended up being the one who got off scot free. I don’t know what your relationship with your sister is now, but I’m sure it’s far better than the one I have with her, and also you have no idea how much pain you have caused me.

Goodbye to all of you. I hate that this has fucked me up so much. I think a lot of my reliance on Jackie was because of my inability to process what was happening with this situation. So it all became a messed up bag of dog shit in my brain.

Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

[battystumutchildren-blog]

-- decastichAmazifier [DA] began pestering piquantPicaroon [PP] at 22:34 --

PP: Hey, boss. How can I help you?

DA: three shakes and a trio os sloppy burgers i got some stress-eaters back home to feed

DA: and one nervous nibbler

PP: Hate to dissapoint a loyal customer, daddy-o but we're closed for renos.

PP: We'll be back up in a week plus one new deck for live bands.

DA: i got sad then crazy happy i'm here for live bands good luck with all that

DA: glad you're gettin it together though man

PP: It's a whole emotional rollercoaster, ain't it?

PP: That's real cool of you to say. Which one are you? Sure I've seen you around some seein as you know my menu back and forward.

DA: the pretty one

DA: you know the cute guy with the pretty spectacular ass?

PP: You're gonna have to be more specific. All my regulars are cherubim in my eyes, babe.

PP: Though if we're talkin ass you did narrow it down some.

DA: should i go into more description on the ass then?

DA: are you a dude leaning towards the rear

DA: spot your patrons a country mile away from the sway of that booty

PP: You've sure as shit got me pegged. Hehe.

PP: But that doesn't help me put a name to a face. Or in this case, an ass.

DA: oh gee he wants to know my name too? golly, Kavi Lalonde at your visual pleasure

DA: safe to assume you're the man behind the mask and not an intricately created order-takin AI right?

DA: also behind the counter

PP: You can cool it with that. I'm only half robot. And not in my brain parts, I promise.

PP: Nice to finally meet you, Kavi. Officially.

DA: nice to meet you too, robits and all my dude

PP: It's all good. But I feel somewhat responsible for your predicament.

PP: What are you gonna do for your nervous nibbler now?

DA: he might just have to be sad i guess :(

DA: but it's all good man

DA: these things happen

DA: i make a mean shake but yknow.... gettin stuff is a treat

PP: Well, I got a few illuminations if you're willin to hear 'em. For example, there's a pretty fat pizza joint on Skaia that a buddy of mine runs. They should be open. Unless the apocalypse happened while we was closed and I just ain't noticed.

DA: :S

DA: well i mean

DA: are you kinda fartin around or bein legit?

DA: because..... yeah kinda

PP: Uh oh.

DA: uh oh indeed my man

DA: shit doth hit the fan

DA: uh, i can try to help you make sure your bud is ok though

PP: That'd be keen. You're a sweet guy, Kavi.

PP: What exactly went down?

DA: more or less a shit show of "riots"

DA: lots of property damage

DA: lots of people making mistakes against their will

DA: and wits

PP: Aw, shit. Now that you're bringin it up, I did hear about it some from my little bro. Friend of his got all fucked.

PP: Didn't realize it was some widespread thing.

DA: yeah it was huge and fairly destructive

PP: Maybe I ought to go down there this week and help out.

DA: hot diggity i have some friends and a sibling working the rebuilding and volunteer shit

DA: if you need hands i got em

DA: my own included of course

DA: just call me a social media megaphone

DA: i can let folks know you're comin down

PP: It never hurts to be well connected. I'll cut out tonight and try to gather my supplies.

PP: Free meals for the volunteers and anybody who's left hungry.

DA: looks like my boys can get their goods another way, that's real nice of you man

DA: hmu for those hands also just plan hit me up

DA: tragic we never spoke before but better late than never

PP: I'm gonna say it was a eureka moment. Lady luck had it out for us.

PP: And come Saturday night, I'll reserve you a good seat.

DA: good seat for the best seat in the house ;P

PP: Hehe. Is this seat taken?

PP: Couldn't help myself.

DA: it's cool i understand when you see a seat that good you're like

DA: damn

DA: is it available?

DA: i just gotta know

DA: plush as hell prime realestate right there

DA: i need it

PP: Yeah. But when there's a purse on it, there's a purse on it and that's just life, flatter bum.

PP: I don't sweat it.

DA: life, a flat bum

DA: now i'm just sad

PP: That's a damn shame. I like to leave 'em laughin.

DA: how about sad, yet eager considering saturday?

PP: That's a little better. You should be excited. It's gonna flip your lid.

DA: flap my jack i'm ready to be blown away

PP: Spread the word, Mr. Megaphone.

DA: lol see you then ass man ;P

-- decastichAmazifier [DA] gave up trolling piquantPicaroon [PP] at 00:01 --

e