#but that those learnings came with an acute fear of saying too much and driving people away 😭 so all i can do when i hurt is withdraw

[suddencolds]

/personal

[veliseraptor]

So this is in NO WAY PRESSURING, get to this whenever you're bored and have nothing better to do, but I (have still not watched The Untamed) would love to hear any disorganized rambles around your fic 'Punitive Measures', like your thoughts while writing it, how you view Xue Yang's fight/flight/freeze instinct, and/or where you would take the plot if you ever came back to it (again, not pressuring, I'm not asking for a sequel, I'm asking for director's commentary. Also I know the mysterious flute was implying Wei Wuxian, I know that much and not much more.) It's a really fun, quick fic that I enjoy reading through while I keep circling around your longer, more intimidating stories. I aspire to write like you.

oh boy, well, I don't know that I ever have nothing to do but here I am answering this ask anyway, because I like talking about my fic even if I get self-conscious about it.

this entire fic falls solidly into the genre of fic I write that is legitimately just “I’m gonna fuck up this character I love because it’ll be fun and I love to do that” and then just kinda...went for it. actually harder than I was initially planning! my vague sense of what I was going to do with this fic didn’t have Xue Yang down an eye at the end of it.

but when inspiration strikes, what’s a girl to do, etc.

I actually thought recently about writing a sequel to this fic (or, well, continuing into the AU it started, more like) because the concept of Wei Wuxian and Xue Yang being bloodthirsty vengeance brethren is a very good one for me, personally, and at the point their paths would be intersecting in this AU a more plausible one than it would be at pretty much any other time (I would argue, at least in CQLverse). And that’s where I think this would be going. Because Xue Yang would see Wei Wuxian, in his bloodiest frame of mind, powered up with a gorgeous flute of bad vibes and go “fuck yes” even if he wasn’t in a place where he really needed the help.

The question I had was whether Wei Wuxian would be interested in accepting company, and I feel like Xue Yang on that front could be convincing. And the way that the latter would both enable and egg on all the former’s darkest fantasies and impulses...I’m just saying, Wen Chao and everyone he has ever known is in for a very bad time, possibly even worse than they already were.

I invite you to picture in this AU the part where Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji find not just darker and edgier Wei Wuxian at the end of their scavenger hunt but darker and edgier Wei Wuxian with a friend. A familiar friend! Now down an eye and practically picking his teeth with Wen Chao’s finger bones. :D

since you asked for disorganized rambling I went back to reread and I’ll give you some director’s commentary on a few things

And he’d kind of hoped Wen Ruohan would be too busy figuring out how to deal with his brewing war to dedicate much attention to looking for one absent retainer. And even if he did, Xue Yang had sort of figured that finding him would fall to Wen Chao, who’d probably struggle to find his own ass with two hands.

kicking off this director’s commentary with Xue Yang’s brutal assessment of the competency of Wen Chao.

tbh one of my favorite things about CQL’s involving Xue Yang in the whole Sunshot storyline, despite the merry hell it plays with timeline stuff later, is how obviously little regard Xue Yang has for the Wens, even when they’re at the height of their power. He shows Wen Ruohan himself very little respect, and I can’t imagine anyone else getting more (except maybe Wen Qing, because Wen Qing is competent and if nothing else Xue Yang can respect competency).

and he just like. ditches them. walks out! promises to deliver very powerful magical artifact, and then gets what he wants and is like “smell ya later, peace” and they never catch him.

that’s just a kind of gutsiness and casual disregard for very powerful people that I really both love and respect about Xue Yang. and also that he has in common with Xiao Xingchen, tbh. and Song Lan (though him I think to a slightly lesser degree, partly because he has a little more tact and sense of societal norms as something relevant to be thinking about)! they can all vibe on that.

They took Jiangzai. Well. One of the Wen disciples took Jiangzai in the stomach and Xue Yang didn’t get it back.

this isn’t an important line or anything. I just like it a lot.

Wen Chao gestured again and he went down in a hail of fists and feet. Xue Yang tucked his chin down to protect his throat, curled his hands into his chest, and drew up his knees to guard his stomach.

He knew how this worked. Sure, it’d been a while since someone had beat him like this, but the lessons stuck. It was almost boring, really. If Wen Chao was going to play torture games then he could at least do Xue Yang the favor of trying to be creative.

He checked out the part of his brain that registered pain as anything other than a thing that was happening and focused instead on opportunities. Weaknesses in his assailants. Escape routes. Getting away would be the first thing. Nice if he could take a piece of Wen Chao with him on the way out - arm, or maybe even a head - but the priority was freedom and survival.

okay, this I feel like cuts into some of what you were talking about regarding Xue Yang’s fight/flight instinct, and also a lot of what if, I was feeling pretentious, I feel like this fic is digging into on a level under “what if I just tortured Xue Yang a whole bunch,” which is something about the relationship Xue Yang has to (a) pain and (b) his own body. Specifically, the relative indifference he has toward both. Or...not indifference, exactly, because it’s not like he’s enjoying himself, it still hurts. It’s just...expected.

unremarkable.

which is a lot of what I was trying to convey with Xue Yang’s narration during the whole torture sequence, with the commentary on methodology and how things are mundane or boring, because the suffering itself is mundane! as far as Xue Yang is concerned that’s exactly what suffering is! other peoples’, for sure, which is part of why it doesn’t matter, but also his own.

the world hurts and that’s just how it is and you learn how to cope with that. pain as...a thing that [is] happening.

I also, since you mentioned the fight/flight instinct, think a lot about how Xue Yang is, while he’s very proud and very stubborn, absolutely not someone to pick fights (in general) that he knows he can’t win. Xue Yang will almost always be on the side of “run and come back another day” over “stand and fight when all is lost.” survival, first and foremost.

which feeds into the weird paradox that I kind of hint toward at the end of this fic about Xue Yang as someone who has a definite death drive, who is profoundly obsessed with his own death in a lot of ways, and simultaneously is attached to staying alive above pretty much all else.

“Snap and snarl all you want,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere. And the only part of you I need intact is your tongue, so you can tell me where you hid the Yin Metal you promised. Everything else is optional.”

A prickle of fear rolled down Xue Yang’s spine and he flicked it away, baring his teeth.

I actually do think that, even before they get around to hand-specific trauma, permanent mutilation is one of those things that still scares Xue Yang. which is a short list! there isn’t much that actually either gets to or scares him, but I think the prospect of (further) mutilation does, because I think Xue Yang is very...acutely aware of the fact that his physical capability is a major factor in what has kept him alive and what, in all likelihood, is going to keep him alive moving forward. anything that threatens that capability, that limits him in terms of strength or mobility or otherwise has a disabling effect, is consequently going to be a short road to death, and Xue Yang would much rather die painfully fighting than die as a consequence of not being able to take care of himself.

for Xue Yang, the idea of a return to the kind of helplessness that is tied to his trauma is one of the worst possible prospects to contemplate. in my head this is exacerbated further by the fact that I figure Xue Yang didn’t get much if any medical care post hand incident, meaning that the recovery period was absolutely nightmarish and a whole stretch of time beyond the event itself where Xue Yang was struggling to survive because he’d been damaged.

in some ways I think that period of time probably did more to shape Xue Yang than the moment itself.

Wen Chao grabbed one of the branding irons from a disciple’s belt and pressed it to his stomach. That hurt. More. He clamped his back teeth together so he didn’t make any sound, absorbed the burn, owned it. His. You only hurt if you were alive. And anything you survived made you stronger.

Not that this was actually going to make him stronger. It was probably just going to make him dead. But then again, the worse this went the more resentment he’d have built up. He could use that. Would.

Dead didn’t have to mean finished.

obviously this is pulled almost direct from what Wei Wuxian himself says to Wen Chao. deliberate echoes based on character parallels! we love those.

and yeah, again here about Xue Yang and his relationship to pain, but in a less mundane way this time where it’s about pain as a tool, pain as something he can use. which is another thing about coping, I think - when pain and suffering are a regular part of your life, one way to deal with that can be to convert it into having some kind of purpose or benefit.

which in this case it definitely can. Xue Yang is definitely someone who, I think, has thought a lot about trying to arrange it so he becomes a ghost after he dies. or at least has thought a lot about what he’d do after dying to the person who killed him. 

and when you’re a necromancer by trade death really isn’t the end of the line anymore, just the start of a something new. Xue Yang’s relationship to life itself: about as jacked up as his relationships in general.

He felt the snap of bone in his teeth. Pain shooting up the side of his hand, all the way to his wrist, and Xue Yang couldn’t keep himself still enough not to try to wrench himself away. He swallowed his scream and turned it into a laugh. It was funny, wasn’t it? Funny, that he was back here, again. It wasn’t as bad, though. He knew how to take pain, how to breathe it in, make it part of himself, later turn it outwards magnified tenfold. They were old friends. Practically lovers. 

two things here:

1. the thread throughout this fic of Xue Yang making things funny so he can deal with them, here brought to you by reliving trauma! because it’s funny! right? laugh about it! just fucking hilarious.

I have a thing about characters basically deciding for themselves to make very unfunny situations funny because it makes them less awful.

2. and look, now he can deal with it better this time! he’s Learned. :) :) :)

Everything splintered. Splintered like bones under a wheel, and first thing he tried to struggle to get away but that just hurt worse and then old old old instincts kicked in and he went still, limp, dead.

“Did he faint?”

Someone nudged him with their foot. One part of him roared to grab that foot and rip it off along with the leg it was attached to. Immediately the same thing that’d made him play dead told him to wait.

at an end point where fighting is impossible and running is also impossible, the only thing left to do is play dead and wait it out. this is very much, in my head, a reversion to a tactic Xue Yang hasn’t used in a very long time and does not want to be using now, because it is absolutely the recourse of the extraordinarily helpless with no way out.

which he has been! and is now, but he really really really doesn’t want to be. Xue Yang has built his life around not being that, ever again.

but here it’s not a move he makes planning to turn it around the way he does, not at first. he gets there, but when he first does it I think it is literally just instinct that goes enough is enough and shuts down.

Wen Chao, Wen Chao, Xue Yang thought. My body’s going to give out before I do.

someone should remind me at some point maybe (or not) to write something coherent about my Xue Yang vs. his own body thoughts. specifically the way that, while Xue Yang is very physical and very grounded, I think he has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with his own body, actually. not completely! he definitely respects what it can do for him! but I think he also treats it a little as a slightly separate entity that’s capable of betraying him rather than as a fully integrated part of himself.

not always! but it’s a little bit there. this idea that sometimes his body, and its capacity to be hurt or damaged, is a weakness that he’d like to be able to forgo entirely, if only it wouldn’t mean losing all the good things about having a body. and that’s present here in this line, for me, where he thinks about himself and his body as slightly separate, and his body as something weaker than its Xue Yang core.

[minghaoss-archive]

when we were young• sicheng (m)

summary : it’s the year 2000 and you fall in love for the first time.

warnings : implied smut, angst.

dong sicheng x gender neutral reader

Sicheng. His name is the first and the last thing that you think about. His face you find in between old newspapers, photographs and the honeyed scent of Beijing’s rain.

You remember the day you met the boy. Just a few days after he moved to the area. In that little local market of the rather vast city, with music tucked away in your ears. The ruby tent towered over a line of vegetables fencing around a newly built, rather little store. Amongst the dirty, dilapidated wooden boxes people have been lounging in for years and years, the shiny white of the storefront stood out like a sore thumb. And if the sore thumb could be deemed more sore, it would be because of the grinning boy standing before it.

Sicheng, at first sight, was still, albeit unintentionally, a very shockingly beautiful being. Every little thing about him, even the pearly raindrops caught in his lashes , his face alight, peachy, childish, his coal black eyes, which found yours suddenly. Through a wall of dotted raindrops. A reminder of how you had been staring at him all too long. "You should come in." said he, aloud, ringing, muting the soft plops of rain sloshing and splashing about.

He was the best at mathmatics in your class and you the worst. He was the least expressive, least talkative and you the most: he was the best liked and you the least. Sicheng was classified as the teacher’s pet, the perfect son, the perfect everything, he was kind and intelligent and the boy who blushed peachy when you as asked for a pen.

He was the boy your grandmum gushed about at the dinner table. People who love you always remember. He was the boy who made you deep fried tofu because you liked it better than soggy, he was the boy who had unravelled and even learned religiously, every little thing about you, from something as secretive, acute as your fear of drowning to something as open, trivial as your hate for porridge. He could name your favorite song, the entire CD, the bought for you on your birthday. He was your best friend and he remembered. The littlest of things, the biggest of things. He was your best friend, your first love and last love.

And you remembered, how well he sang, how his face shone, buttery honey, in the sun, you remember his scent, like something sweet, earthy, something real. You remember admitting to him, on your toes, in your uniform, sweaty hands pressed behind your back, when he stared back at you with wide eyes, in his khaki shirt, with surprise spreading all over his face before he smiled that smile of his, he told you he likes you too.

The feeling of his hand, the way those lithe fingers held yours still remains engraved in your bones. Sicheng excelled at riding the bicycle. One day he made you sit behind his bike, the w pavement wet , the sky darkening and the droplets rain sat against your clothes. You remember stopping by the footpath, with him spotting your favorite sweet dish, two steamed sweet potatoes, bought from a street corner shop.

That day, the smell of mud, the whooshing wind in your hair, Sicheng hooked his umbrella’s holder to his bike, leant it against a tree so it would shelter the two of you from the bullet like raindrops. That day you recall, how you two shared songs from his mp3 player, two beating hearts, bodies leaning close so the earphones don’t strain.

Sicheng had a peculiar look in his eyes, like he was the happiest boy, like he’d waited a long long time to be yours, like he were diving head first into an endless sea of his dreams. Passion. Love.

He brushed a loose strand from your face. Lost in the color of your pupils. Cool fingers travelled along the curve of your jaw and cradled the shape.

His fingers brushing against the little wisps of hair curling along your neck. Teeth and tongue. A loving peck which sent ten million electric bolts travelling all over your body. And the boy smiled after, the kind of smile he always smiled when he was genuinely, the kind of smile which reached his eyes, a smile which widened and widened when he spotted the nervous tap of your feet and the fluster evident on your face.

Sicheng was your first kiss.

And he bought you a violin, something you can’t play so well. Something he taught you by the beach, something which helps you aid your fear of the waves gobbling you up.

Your toes sunk into the wet sand and you supposed it would be convenient if it swallowed you whole. See, the sea had always been a petrifying monster. Blue and nipping and enormous. Foamy waves arrived at your toes and pleaded to wash all fears away, little by little. But it wasn't enough, of course. The spark of courage would always dim down you gazed upon the battling blues ahead. It isn't enough.

Not until he joins you.

“Hey, wait,”He sneaked his thin fingers into yours and held them like you'd slip away, had he not. When you looked up at him, his lips briefly curled up in a grin. The pink specks of dimming coloured his face.

It touched his plump, bitten lips first and spread across his cheeks, reached his golden orbs. Quartz sky, and the scarlet sun melted into the blue sea, like lovers who’ve been apart for too long. The horizon turned purple. The sun departed. Take away with her, your fears. You told yourself it’s not so bad a day to fall in love with Sicheng. The blue and the nipping isn't a bad thing.

Sicheng was your first love.

Your relationship was sweet, saccharine and all too perfect, the ride all too nice, euphoric even, but you think, it's funny how you'd forgotten, how happy things have a horrendous way of becoming unhappy, how sweet things rot and how rides could come to a screeching halt.

Sicheng’s university application sparked a new phobia in you. He told you there’s no way foreign universities would take him in with so much competition. Though, it’s only a temporary consolation because you knew, just as anyone in school, that his grades were one of the best in class. Still, you buried your kicking subconscious deep under layers of laughable expectations.

What is buried alive will find a way to claw itself out.

Your conversations with him became shorter. Visits rare. You asked him what the cause of his hollowed cheeks and reddened eyes was. You asked him why he kept pushing you away. And a mouthful of words, nothing short of horrific, Sicheng remains silent.

That day, in mid May of 2000, a season of battling winds, came the breaking, the crumbling, the smelly rotting point.

You desperately reaching out for him. It felt like Sicheng was a phantom. Standing across from you, with the same face and the body and the same hands and the same smile. Only bitter words. A stranger.

You drove yourself away from him, driving your bike at an inhuman speed. Sicheng had been dragging his fingers through his hair in a frustated manner. Suppressing the urge to tear it all out. Alone, he was. On the same pavement you’d kissed for the first time.

You had cried a good amount. Home alone with the rain threatening to make its way into your room. Thunder rumbled overhead and the yellow glow of your room finally burnt out, followed by a knock. A candle sat on your table and streaks of its light crawled before you, defeating the dark. “Great.”

You sniffled, dubiously opening the door to a rather drenched Sicheng. A Sicheng who pathetically attempted to catch his breath. His greenish brown shirt has turned a dark brown.

“What are you doing?" You asked coolly, moving aside to let him in. And Sicheng kissed you with his hands around your face, like he always did, except this time the kiss is urgent, craving, greedy and ravenous. Feet shuffle into your home and the door closes with your back against it.

He pulled away to catch his breath and kissed you again, as if enough was a foreign word in his vocabulary. He begun to kiss your face, your eyes, your nose, you cheeks. Arms wrapped around your waist. Bodies pressed tightly against each other. “I got into Harvard, my parents are forcing me to go. I was upset..I didn’t know how to tell you.”

"You're going to leave me?" You asked, lines of searing tears rolled down your heated cheeks. You remember how he touched you, holding your head against his chest. You remember how his arms brought you closer, closer and closer till there were no gaps between you two. You peeled wet tee shirt off of his body and placed your fingers against his abdomen.

Sicheng doesn't answer.

"I want to be your first." Said you, you hope Sicheng never forgets you.

A desire in him blazed so fiercely in him that he got to kissing you again. Hungry, desperate, needy. He touched you like he might lose you. Like he wanted to leave fresh scars, an open wound, a gaping split, everywhere he touched you. The sea. The battling waves.

A rut of his lips. The rush of losing. A goodbye.

Sicheng had always told you that he loved you. And you remained silent, as if to say I can't love anyone else. You can't love anyone else.

Sicheng was your first time.

Love is an awful. Disgusting. And cruel.

Especially when it slips right through your fingers.

See you hugged him close. But the tug of fate, the ugly yellow taxi, a flight and two continents had sworn to pull you apart. You hadn't cried, you couldn't cry. You dug your nails into his shirt instead. You breathed in his scent instead. You wanted to forget him instead.

Sicheng promised you he'd always love you. Sicheng promised you that he'd always think of you. Sicheng promised and promised and promised. But never does he crack your skull open and pour honeyed dreams in. Never an I will come back and always an I love you.

(Sicheng never makes promises he can't keep.)

So you'd watched his face, behind the shield of a splattered rear window. His face youthful, his smile curled, that smile of his. His smile, pearly raindrops, caught in his lashes, young, you wanted to remember him like that.

Sicheng dragged away into the wet roads of China, turning to a mere dot against the background of awful traffic and undulations of ageing buildings.

Sicheng was your first heartbreak.

Sicheng.

His name is the first and the last thing you think about. Somewhere in between dusty books, fading ink and forgotten poetry, you find bitter truths you'd rather not see. You'd read goodbyes are forever, they are syllables for people who never meet again, these words followed you around like reminders, to cinemas, to the library, like the ghost of his promises. An absence more apparent than it should be. An atrocious trick the universe had played on you.

You find yourself wishing those words, a goodbye, too many years and a heartbreak away,

were words you'd forgotten to say.

[elisaenglish]

How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

John Updike wrote in his memoir, “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” And yet even if we were to somehow make peace with our own mortality, a primal and soul-shattering fear rips through whenever we think about losing those we love most dearly — a fear that metastasises into all-consuming grief when loss does come. In The Long Goodbye (public library), her magnificent memoir of grieving her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection woven of extraordinary emotional intelligence. A poet, essayist, literary critic, and one of the youngest editors the New Yorker has ever had, she tells a story that is deeply personal in its details yet richly resonant in its larger humanity, making tangible the messy and often ineffable complexities that anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows all too intimately, all too anguishingly. What makes her writing — her mind, really — particularly enchanting is that she brings to this paralysingly difficult subject a poet’s emotional precision, an essayist’s intellectual expansiveness, and a voracious reader’s gift for apt, exquisitely placed allusions to such luminaries of language and life as Whitman, Longfellow, Tennyson, Swift, and Dickinson (“the supreme poet of grief”).

O’Rourke writes:

“When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

[…]

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

[…]

When we talk about love, we go back to the start, to pinpoint the moment of free fall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.”

In the days following her mother’s death, as O’Rourke faces the loneliness she anticipated and the sense of being lost that engulfed her unawares, she contemplates the paradoxes of loss: Ours is a culture that treats grief — a process of profound emotional upheaval — with a grotesquely mismatched rational prescription. On the one hand, society seems to operate by a set of unspoken shoulds for how we ought to feel and behave in the face of sorrow; on the other, she observes, “we have so few rituals for observing and externalising loss.” Without a coping strategy, she finds herself shutting down emotionally and going “dead inside” — a feeling psychologists call “numbing out” — and describes the disconnect between her intellectual awareness of sadness and its inaccessible emotional manifestation:

“It was like when you stay in cold water too long. You know something is off but don’t start shivering for ten minutes.”

But at least as harrowing as the aftermath of loss is the anticipatory bereavement in the months and weeks and days leading up to the inevitable — a particularly cruel reality of terminal cancer. O’Rourke writes:

“So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for “procedures.” And waiting, more broadly, for it—for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop.”

The hallmark of this anticipatory loss seems to be a tapestry of inner contradictions. O’Rourke notes with exquisite self-awareness her resentment for the mundanity of it all — there is her mother, sipping soda in front of the TV on one of those final days — coupled with weighty, crushing compassion for the sacred humanity of death:

“Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.”

Then there was the question of the body — the object of so much social and personal anxiety in real life, suddenly stripped of control in the surreal experience of impending death. Reflecting on the initially disorienting experience of helping her mother on and off the toilet and how quickly it became normalised, O’Rourke writes:

“It was what she had done for us, back before we became private and civilised about our bodies. In some ways I liked it. A level of anxiety about the body had been stripped away, and we were left with the simple reality: Here it was.

I heard a lot about the idea of dying “with dignity” while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn’t actually feel it was undignified for my mother’s body to fail — that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn’t want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn’t want to pretend she wasn’t going to die.”

Among the most painful realities of witnessing death — one particularly exasperating for type-A personalities — is how swiftly it severs the direct correlation between effort and outcome around which we build our lives. Though the notion might seem rational on the surface — especially in a culture that fetishises work ethic and “grit” as the key to success — an underbelly of magical thinking lurks beneath, which comes to light as we behold the helplessness and injustice of premature death. Noting that “the mourner’s mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders,” O’Rourke captures this paradox:

“One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss. This sturdy belief system has a sidecar in which superstition rides. Until recently, I half believed that if a certain song came on the radio just as I thought of it, it meant that all would be well. What did I mean? I preferred not to answer that question. To look too closely was to prick the balloon of possibility.”

But our very capacity for the irrational — for the magic of magical thinking — also turns out to be essential for our spiritual survival. Without the capacity to discern from life’s senseless sound a meaningful melody, we would be consumed by the noise. In fact, one of O’Rourke’s most poetic passages recounts her struggle to find a transcendent meaning on an average day, amid the average hospital noises:

“I could hear the coughing man whose family talked about sports and sitcoms every time they visited, sitting politely around his bed as if you couldn’t see the death knobs that were his knees poking through the blanket, but as they left they would hug him and say, We love you, and We’ll be back soon, and in their voices and in mine and in the nurse who was so gentle with my mother, tucking cool white sheets over her with a twist of her wrist, I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn’t walk anymore and a voice in my head said: Do you see this love? And do you still not believe?

I couldn’t deny the voice.

Now I think: That was exhaustion.

But at the time the love, the love, it was like ropes around me, cables that could carry us up into the higher floors away from our predicament and out onto the roof and across the empty spaces above the hospital to the sky where we could gaze down upon all the people driving, eating, having sex, watching TV, angry people, tired people, happy people, all doing, all being—”

In the weeks following her mother’s death, melancholy — “the black sorrow, bilious, angry, a slick in my chest” — comes coupled with another intense emotion, a parallel longing for a different branch of that-which-no-longer-is:

“I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was — as the expression goes — flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things.”

But the embodied presence of the loss is far from trivial. O’Rourke, citing a psychiatrist whose words had stayed with her, captures it with harrowing precision:

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

In another breathtaking passage, O’Rourke conveys the largeness of grief as it emanates out of our pores and into the world that surrounds us:

“In February, there was a two-day snowstorm in New York. For hours I lay on my couch, reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside… the sky going gray, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief’s moods: melancholic; estranged from the normal; in touch with the longing that reminds us that we are being-toward-death, as Heidegger puts it. Loss is our atmosphere; we, like the snow, are always falling toward the ground, and most of the time we forget it.”

Because grief seeps into the external world as the inner experience bleeds into the outer, it’s understandable — it’s hopelessly human — that we’d also project the very object of our grief onto the external world. One of the most common experiences, O’Rourke notes, is for the grieving to try to bring back the dead — not literally, but by seeing, seeking, signs of them in the landscape of life, symbolism in the everyday. The mind, after all, is a pattern-recognition machine and when the mind’s eye is as heavily clouded with a particular object as it is when we grieve a loved one, we begin to manufacture patterns. Recounting a day when she found inside a library book handwriting that seemed to be her mother’s, O’Rourke writes:

“The idea that the dead might not be utterly gone has an irresistible magnetism. I’d read something that described what I had been experiencing. Many people go through what psychologists call a period of “animism,” in which you see the dead person in objects and animals around you, and you construct your false reality, the reality where she is just hiding, or absent. This was the mourner’s secret position, it seemed to me: I have to say this person is dead, but I don’t have to believe it.

[…]

Acceptance isn’t necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Instead, researchers now think that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with “integrity” (their word, not mine), while others are primed for “despair.” Most of us, though, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of those in the middle learn to accept their deaths? The answer has real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved.”

O’Rourke considers the psychology and physiology of grief:

“When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity is wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the mental work.

The first systematic survey of grief, I read, was conducted by Erich Lindemann. Having studied 101 people, many of them related to the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, he defined grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tracing the history of studying grief, including Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous and often criticised 1969 “stage theory” outlining a simple sequence of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, O’Rourke notes that most people experience grief not as sequential stages but as ebbing and flowing states that recur at various points throughout the process. She writes:

“Researchers now believe there are two kinds of grief: “normal grief” and “complicated grief” (also called “prolonged grief”). “Normal grief” is a term for what most bereaved people experience. It peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. “Complicated grief” does not, and often requires medication or therapy. But even “normal grief”… is hardly gentle. Its symptoms include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.”

One of the most persistent psychiatric ideas about grief, O’Rourke notes, is the notion that one ought to “let go” in order to “move on” — a proposition plentiful even in the casual advice of her friends in the weeks following her mother’s death. And yet it isn’t necessarily the right coping strategy for everyone, let alone the only one, as our culture seems to suggest. Unwilling to “let go,” O’Rourke finds solace in anthropological alternatives:

“Studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. In China, for instance, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study demonstrated that the bereaved there “recovered more quickly from loss” than bereaved Americans do.

I wasn’t living in China, though, and in those weeks after my mother’s death, I felt that the world expected me to absorb the loss and move forward, like some kind of emotional warrior. One night I heard a character on 24—the president of the United States—announce that grief was a “luxury” she couldn’t “afford right now.” This model represents an old American ethic of muscling through pain by throwing yourself into work; embedded in it is a desire to avoid looking at death. We’ve adopted a sort of “Ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but as my dad had said, the mourner quickly figures out that it shouldn’t always be taken for an actual inquiry… A mourner’s experience of time isn’t like everyone else’s. Grief that lasts longer than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence to those around you. But if you’re in mourning, three months seems like nothing — [according to some] research, three months might well find you approaching the height of sorrow.”

Another Western hegemony in the culture of grief, O’Rourke notes, is its privatisation — the unspoken rule that mourning is something we do in the privacy of our inner lives, alone, away from the public eye. Though for centuries private grief was externalised as public mourning, modernity has left us bereft of rituals to help us deal with our grief:

“The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.

[…]

Such rituals… aren’t just about the individual; they are about the community.”

Craving “a formalisation of grief, one that might externalise it,” O’Rourke plunges into the existing literature:

“The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the author of Death, Grief, and Mourning, argues that, at least in Britain, the First World War played a huge role in changing the way people mourned. Communities were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead that the practice of ritualised mourning for the individual eroded. Other changes were less obvious but no less important. More people, including women, began working outside the home; in the absence of caretakers, death increasingly took place in the quarantining swaddle of the hospital. The rise of psychoanalysis shifted attention from the communal to the individual experience. In 1917, only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” defined it as something essentially private and individual, internalising the work of mourning. Within a few generations, I read, the experience of grief had fundamentally changed. Death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. By the 1960s, Gorer could write that many people believed that “sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as... masturbation.” Today, our only public mourning takes the form of watching the funerals of celebrities and statesmen. It’s common to mock such grief as false or voyeuristic (“crocodile tears,” one commentator called mourners’ distress at Princess Diana’s funeral), and yet it serves an important social function. It’s a more mediated version, Leader suggests, of a practice that goes all the way back to soldiers in The Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus.

I found myself nodding in recognition at Gorer’s conclusions. “If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,” Gorer wrote. “At the moment our society is signally failing to give this support and assistance... The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair and maladaptive behaviour is very high.” Maybe it’s not a coincidence that in Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report more physical ailments in the year following a death.”

Finding solace in Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful meditation on our humanity, O’Rourke returns to her own journey:

“The otherworldliness of loss was so intense that at times I had to believe it was a singular passage, a privilege of some kind, even if all it left me with was a clearer grasp of our human predicament. It was why I kept finding myself drawn to the remote desert: I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life.”

Reflecting on her struggle to accept her mother’s loss — her absence, “an absence that becomes a presence” — O’Rourke writes:

“If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.”

She later adds:

“After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally.”

Among the most chilling effects of grief is how it reorients us toward ourselves as it surfaces our mortality paradox and the dawning awareness of our own impermanence. O’Rourke’s words ring with the profound discomfort of our shared existential bind:

“The dread of death is so primal, it overtakes me on a molecular level. In the lowest moments, it produces nihilism. If I am going to die, why not get it over with? Why live in this agony of anticipation?

[…]

I was unable to push these questions aside: What are we to do with the knowledge that we die? What bargain do you make in your mind so as not to go crazy with fear of the predicament, a predicament none of us knowingly chose to enter? You can believe in God and heaven, if you have the capacity for faith. Or, if you don’t, you can do what a stoic like Seneca did, and push away the awfulness by noting that if death is indeed extinction, it won’t hurt, for we won’t experience it. “It would be dreadful could it remain with you; but of necessity either it does not arrive or else it departs,” he wrote.

If this logic fails to comfort, you can decide, as Plato and Jonathan Swift did, that since death is natural, and the gods must exist, it cannot be a bad thing. As Swift said, “It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.” And Socrates: “I am quite ready to admit… that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good.” But this is poor comfort to those of us who have no gods to turn to. If you love this world, how can you look forward to departing it? Rousseau wrote, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.”

And yet, O’Rourke arrives at the same conclusion that Alan Lightman did in his sublime meditation on our longing for permanence as she writes:

“Without death our lives would lose their shape: “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Or as a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise says, “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need?” It’s not clear that DeLillo means us to agree, but I think I do. I love the world more because it is transient.

[…]

One would think that living so proximately to the provisional would ruin life, and at times it did make it hard. But at other times I experienced the world with less fear and more clarity. It didn’t matter if I was in line for an extra two minutes. I could take in the sensations of colour, sound, life. How strange that we should live on this planet and make cereal boxes, and shopping carts, and gum! That we should renovate stately old banks and replace them with Trader Joe’s! We were ants in a sugar bowl, and one day the bowl would empty.”

This awareness of our transience, our minuteness, and the paradoxical enlargement of our aliveness that it produces seems to be the sole solace from grief’s grip, though we all arrive at it differently. O’Rourke’s father approached it from another angle. Recounting a conversation with him one autumn night — one can’t help but notice the beautiful, if inadvertent, echo of Carl Sagan’s memorable words — O’Rourke writes:

“The Perseid meteor showers are here,” he told me. “And I’ve been eating dinner outside and then lying in the lounge chairs watching the stars like your mother and I used to” — at some point he stopped calling her Mom — “and that helps. It might sound strange, but I was sitting there, looking up at the sky, and I thought, ‘You are but a mote of dust. And your troubles and travails are just a mote of a mote of dust.’ And it helped me. I have allowed myself to think about things I had been scared to think about and feel. And it allowed me to be there — to be present. Whatever my life is, whatever my loss is, it’s small in the face of all that existence… The meteor shower changed something. I was looking the other way through a telescope before: I was just looking at what was not there. Now I look at what is there.”

O’Rourke goes on to reflect on this ground-shifting quality of loss:

“It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”

In one of the most beautiful passages in the book, O’Rourke captures the spiritual sensemaking of death in an anecdote that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s account of a “transcendent experience” and Alan Watt’s consolation in the oneness of the universe. She writes:

“Before we scattered the ashes, I had an eerie experience. I went for a short run. I hate running in the cold, but after so much time indoors in the dead of winter I was filled with exuberance. I ran lightly through the stripped, bare woods, past my favourite house, poised on a high hill, and turned back, flying up the road, turning left. In the last stretch I picked up the pace, the air crisp, and I felt myself float up off the ground. The world became greenish. The brightness of the snow and the trees intensified. I was almost giddy. Behind the bright flat horizon of the treescape, I understood, were worlds beyond our everyday perceptions. My mother was out there, inaccessible to me, but indelible. The blood moved along my veins and the snow and trees shimmered in greenish light. Suffused with joy, I stopped stock-still in the road, feeling like a player in a drama I didn’t understand and didn’t need to. Then I sprinted up the driveway and opened the door and as the heat rushed out the clarity dropped away.

I’d had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. What I knew as “life” was a thin version of something larger, the pages of which had all been written. What I would do, how I would live — it was already known. I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.”

A non-believer who had prayed for the first time in her life when her mother died, O’Rourke quotes Virginia Woolf’s luminous meditation on the spirit and writes:

“This is the closest description I have ever come across to what I feel to be my experience. I suspect a pattern behind the wool, even the wool of grief; the pattern may not lead to heaven or the survival of my consciousness — frankly I don’t think it does — but that it is there somehow in our neurons and synapses is evident to me. We are not transparent to ourselves. Our longings are like thick curtains stirring in the wind. We give them names. What I do not know is this: Does that otherness — that sense of an impossibly real universe larger than our ability to understand it — mean that there is meaning around us?

[…]

I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn’t necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be “remixed” into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.

[…]

I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely, gone.”

The Long Goodbye is a remarkable read in its entirety — the kind that speaks with gentle crispness to the parts of us we protect most fiercely yet long to awaken most desperately. Complement it with Alan Lightman in finding solace in our impermanence and Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (9th June 2014)

[lostinfic]

I couldn't decide on the kiss prompt so I will share both I was thinking of and you can pick if one strikes your fancy between Hardy/Hannah 34. to pretend orrrrrrrr Ten/Rose 26. as an apology.

A kiss to pretend

Hardy x Hannah. 1920s/Gangsters AU. Hardy is working undercover and infiltrated a criminal gang. Hannah is the mistress of the dangerous gang leader. 

2700 words. 

A/N: For UK folks, by “suspenders” I mean braces, the kind that hold up trousers, not the lingerie type.

➙ Kiss prompts

London, 1922

They both pretend to be other people. He pretends to be Emmett Carver, henchman for Enzo “The Ruby” Crawford, an infamous gangster. She goes by Belle and pretends to love Enzo.

In reality, he’s Alec Hardy, an undercover detective investigating the East End gang’s activities.

In reality, she’s… well, Hardy doesn’t know her real name and doesn’t want to learn it. That way, he can’t betray her. But he knows she’s friendly and smarter than she pretends to be. He knows she fears Enzo.

Hardy went undercover a year ago. The Metropolitan police needed a copper from outside London to investigate the corruption amongst their own officers. Enzo’s gang has contacts in every police station, every branch of the government, every bank. Blackmail and bribery are the bricks and mortar of his criminal empire. He deals in illegal betting, protection rackets, black market weapons and opium. He built his reputation on cruelty: as far as Enzo’s concerned, everyone is fair game, even women and children. His nickname “The Ruby” is a reference to the colour of blood. The story goes that he loves to keep the stains on his clothes after a murder.

In the name of public protection and justice, Hardy replaced his suit and tie with rolled up shirtsleeves and steel-capped boots. Traded his police badge for the dark red suspenders symbolic of Enzo’s gang.

They told him he’d have to work his way up the ranks of the criminal organization. It could take months, years even, before Enzo trusted him with sensitive information. So for now, he’s relegated to menial tasks: surveillance, deliveries, dodgy transactions. Hardy’s not built for intimidation, but his accent alone forestalls backtalk.

Most policemen fear retaliation against their loved ones if their cover is blown. It’s not a problem for Hardy anymore. He came back from the Great War to find out that, while he was fighting for his life in the trenches of France, Tess had fallen in love with another man. They tried to put it all behind them and rebuild a life, they had a baby, but it only delayed the inevitable: Tess left and took their daughter with her. After that, for Hardy, becoming another person didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

One task he didn’t expect was driving the boss’s floozie to and from his home.

Chauffeur to the flapper.

These days, so many young women wear short dresses and makeup, at first he can’t tell whether Belle is a prostitute or fashionable. On the drive back, she counts bills, but it doesn’t mean anything either. Enzo sees other girls, of course, but Belle is his favourite, the only one he sends a car for.

Hardy watches her in the rear-view mirror. A cloche hat sits low over her blond bob and obscures her kohl-rimmed eyes. She gnaws at her bottom lip, wrings her hands in her lap. He escorts her to the fourth floor of the hotel, in the lift, she takes deep breaths. When the doors open with a ping, a smile springs on her lips.

“Honeybear!” she says, running into Enzo’s arms.

She arrives with bright red lipstick and returns home without it, as if Enzo himself drained the colour out of her.

Hardy wonders if she once cared about Enzo. Is he blackmailing her? What does she need the money for? Does she have other clients? And he wonders why he wonders about her so much.

They’re long car rides; she lives on the other side of town. But he comes to appreciate these moments more than any others. She sits in the back and therefore cannot see his face. He can relax. Somewhat.

She’s friendly to everyone from members of the gang to the hotel staff. Hardy’s grumpy attitude doesn’t deter her. It starts with small things, a kind smile, a funny comment on the latest Chaplin movie, a snack shared. “Did you bake those scones yourself?” he asks. She laughs and it fills the whole car. The tunes she hums that haunt him all day (“Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?”). The shine of her sequined dress against the drab backseat of the model T’s interior.

One day, he finds out she’s lying about where she lives. She forgets a novel in the car, but when he tries to return it to her, he finds she’s not a tenant in the building where he drops her off. He doesn’t try to find out her real address. The less he knows and all that… She doesn’t want anyone in the gang to know where she lives. Smart lass.

He gives her the book back later, and she immediately notices he’s read it. “What did you think of Poirot?”

For a second there, he panics, thinks she’s asking because she knows he’s a detective. “Too intelligent,” he answers carefully.

“I hope this Agatha Christie will write other books. Have you read Evelyn Waugh?”

They begin exchanging novellas and paperbacks, a book club of their own with little notes in the margins like coded messages. He tells himself it’s innocent, yet he hides the books carefully.

He eats some of her taffies. She drinks from his flask.

When she’s in a hurry, she changes outfits while he drives. She adjusts her garter straps when she knows he’s watching in the rear-view mirror.

He pays her a compliment. Her hand brushes against his in the elevator.

“Laters,” she says with a wink when they part ways. And he watches her hips sway, heart in his throat, as she walks down the hotel corridor to meet Enzo.

Theirs is a friendship built on things unsaid, on averted gazes, on lingering nothings. It’s fog. Unsubstantial, yet it can swallow the whole city.

Maybe it’s a test. A trap. Set up by Enzo himself. It’s plausible. More than. But he’s pretending to be another man, so he might as well pretend he’s the kind of man Belle could be attracted to.

Every day, he awaits the request to fetch her with a knot in his stomach: dread or eagerness, he can’t tell.

He drives slower. Stops fully at every sign. Offers to wait if she has errands along the way.

Now, when he stops in front of her fake house, he kills the engine. They share a cigarette and companionable silence.

He never invites her to sit at the front. He needs the physical barrier between them. To keep rumours at bay. To control his own yearnings.

It’s one of those days, when it seems winter will never end, that she tests the boundary. She leans forward, elbows atop the back of the front seat, chin rested on her hands. Very close. He keeps his eyes on the road and his hands firmly on the wheel, but he’s acutely aware of her proximity. Her perfume isn’t light or floral or sweet, it’s tangy, raw cocoa and smoke, linens tangled in heated bodies. It’s raspy like a tongue along his scruffy jaw. He swallows thickly, squirms on his seat. She brushes something off his shoulder. Her fingers linger on the worn out cotton. The first human touch in months that’s not a shove or a jab. His blood fizzles.

“Sit back, it’s not safe,” he says.

“If you really cared about my safety, you wouldn’t take me to him.”

Her anger isn’t directed at him. It’s unwarranted, but it cuts him deep. He halts the car on the side of the road.

“You only have ask,” he says, eyes trained on the windshield.

He’d lie for her. He knows it with blinding clarity.

“But if I didn’t go, then I wouldn’t see you,” she says.

He arm dangles over, on his side of the car. An offer. An overture.

His heart pounds in a way it hasn’t since the trenches. A flush creeps up his neck. He brushes the back of his fingers down her skin, from elbow wrist. He grazes her palm. Their little fingers wrap around each other.

If he drove away, who would find them?

“Emmett,” she says softly.

She doesn’t even know his real name. None of this is real, he tells himself. Then why is it so hard to let go of her hand?

“Maybe another time,” she says. “Keep driving or we’ll be in trouble.”

He hates himself for pressing on the gas pedal.

She leans over every time now. Always near, forgiving.

Hardy’s superiours at the Metropolitan police think she’s valuable. She might know something, sensitive information overheard or confessed by Enzo in a moment of post-orgasmic weakness. “Befriend her,” they say. He doesn’t want to use her, doesn’t want her mixed up in this. If the police act on knowledge revealed by Belle, and the leak is traced back to her, she would pay the price dearly. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her,” they say. But he has no faith in their words.

Inevitably, she does reveal something to him.

The car is parked in front of the house that’s not her house. She smokes the last of their shared cigarette and flicks it out the window. Normally, she’d leave now, but she stays. She runs a finger under his collar, as if smoothing it. He slopes down, rests his cheek on top of the seat, mirroring her position. She’s so close, his vision blurs, but he’s too tired to make his eyes focus.

“I won’t see you next week,” she says.

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“I mean, ‘cause Enzo will be in Bristol.”

“Right.”

“It’s like a vacation for me.”

“What will you do?”

She shrugs. He wonders if she’ll propose they meet. There’s a moment of silence, a pregnant pause, a crossroad of possibilities.

“Anyway.” She chuckles nervously. “Maybe I’ll learn to cook.”

“Lord have mercy.”

It’s only the next day, when the effect of her touch and smile has somewhat faded, that he realizes the significance of her words. If Enzo is in Bristol, he may be trying to create an alliance with the gang up there. He should warn the police right away. Yet he waits. Waits for someone else to mention the trip, but no one at his level seems aware the boss is out of town.

The next day, he’s asked to fetch Belle, and he thinks it’s too late to alert his colleagues now. But when she comes out of the hotel, her hair and lipstick are intact. She got paid to sit by herself in an empty hotel room. Obviously, they’re doing everything to keep the illusion the big boss is still in London. If word gets out, they’ll narrow down the list of suspects real fast.

Unaware of Hardy’s inner turmoil, Belle is in a great mood. As soon as they round the corner, out of sight, she wraps her arms around his neck from behind. Her breath brushes his ear when she says, “take the scenic route”.

Driving by Hyde Park is the closest thing to a scenic route London has to offer. They stay in the car, they can’t risk meeting someone they know. He drives around three times, and, through the window, they watch springtime London blooming to life: sheep graze on the lawn, children run, pushing old tires with sticks, young female factory workers stroll arm-in-arm.

Belle’s hand slips inside his shirt. His heart drums under her touch. He nearly crashes into another car.

He drives until the sun descends on the horizon.

It’s the happiest he’s been in a long time, but the dilemma eats at him. An alliance between London and Bristol means a wider network of criminal activities— wider than ever before— and more innocent bystanders caught in that web. But they’re faceless, anonymous bystanders whereas Belle is so very real. She’s flesh and bones and loveliness. Her life would be on the line. His too, he realizes belatedly.

In the end, his conscience wins. He’s a cop, not a crook. He sends the superintendent a coded message and waits with fear in his heart.

The next week, he’s sent to fetch Belle again. As usual, he escorts her to the fourth floor, but he keep his hand poised near the butt of his revolver. This time, Enzo shows up to welcome her.

“Hello, Babydoll.”

She jumps in his arms. “Honeybear! I missed you.”

Hardy grits his teeth and ignores the pang in his heart. He’d have preferred a bullet.

Rather than go back to the pub that doubles as the gang’s HQ as he usually would, he stays nearby. He sits in the service stairwell, attentive to any sound out of the ordinary.

A few hours later, she comes out, and one glance from her tells him she’s unwell. A tense silence fills the elevator, it’s not the place to talk.

In the car, she rests her forehead against the window and follows the path of raindrops with her finger.

Did they question her? Threaten her?

“You alright?”

“Yeah… I liked my little vacation.”

“What happened?”

“Enzo was pissed. Something happened, and he thought I’d said something I shouldn’t.”

Hardy gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles turned white.

“I didn’t even know what he was talking about. What could I have said?”

He hates the hint of doubt that creeps up his spine. The paranoid voice that asks: does she really not remember what she revealed about Bristol or is it a test?

“After a while, he believed me. I think. But then he wasn’t… as nice as usual.” Her voice is thin, vulnerable.

Anger flares in Hardy’s chest, and he punches the car horn. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not exactly. But I’m just, really—” She rubs up and down her own arms. “Can I come to the front?”

He parks the car in the shadow of a tall oak tree. She’s out and back in in a flash.

His whole body is still taut with anger. She slides closer on the seat, and it’s restraint now tensing his muscles.

“It’s okay, Emmett, don’t be shy.”

It’s not shyness, it’s survival. Full of hesitation, he stares at her. She’s so beautiful, and she needs him. A lump rises in his throat.

“Can I get a cuddle? Please.”

He thinks of the hand-grenades he used during the war.

He breathes out slowly, and opens his arms. He’s pulled the pin, there’s no going back now.

Seven seconds before the explosion.

She snuggles up to him, head on his chest, arm around his torso. His blood sparks to life.

Six.

He tightens his embrace around her. Holds on to her. Protects her.

Five.

His thawed heart swells against his ribs. Warmth spreads out from his chest.

Four.

Belle tilts her head back, gaze searching his face. She gently wipes the hair off his eyes and cups his cheek.

Three.

He rests his forehead on hers. Ragged breaths mingle between them.

Two.

Her lips brush against his.

One.

He captures her mouth.

Zero.

And they kiss. Desperately. And they pretend this can end well.

[0335am]

long personal post under the cut if ur interested

So I just wanted to make a post that may seem generic or cliche, but I think it’s necessary to make people understand where I am at - even if nobody reads it, I just want to have this somewhere as closure.

I’ve suffered for years from... body dysphoria? Of course, I have not been diagnosed, but this will be something I seek to do in possibly the coming weeks. I essentially became a slave to social media some five years ago, but I didn’t care about my body image until some three years ago. I was someone who didn’t have to work hard to sustain an adequate body image, I ate junk all the time and refused to participate in PE all through my schooling. But I met someone three years ago that taught me many valuable lessons. One such -- he introduced me to sports and exercise, getting me out there and around December, 2016, was  when I really started to obsess. I started work experience at a kitchen that had some scales outside for what I’d believe to be for weighing food items, or something of the sort. I saw an employee hop onto the scales before entering the kitchen - and monkey see, monkey do - I did it too. At this time, I also witnessed an illustration on Facebook of a woman weighing herself - the scales read ‘65kg’ and she bunched her fat into her hands and wondered why she couldn’t be skinnier. Through these scales came my obsession, I believe. I was working out more than I ever had before, and constantly checking my weight on the scales and at home.

I don’t know if you have ever seen this in schools or media - the way that social media impacts young teens’ psychological states, often negatively. But I didn’t really feel those effects, at least not consciously, until I was forced to face the scales. Sometimes, I’d obsess over Instagram or Facebook, these ‘perfect people’, with these ‘perfect lives’. You see it everywhere - workout routines, dieting tips, ways to get a slim stomach or abs fast... When I was younger, I was diagnosed with acute anxiety. On top of being a natural perfectionist, I started working hard to tone myself up. Sometimes, I look in the mirror and I go, ‘yeah, you’re alright’. But it’s only recently that I came to terms with the lack of reality that comes with social media. I had a conversation with a friend one day when we were out driving, and I said-

‘i wish i was more like girls like (x) and (y). they’re so much skinnier than me.’

and he said something to me I’ll never forget - ‘yeah, but that one smokes weed, and that one uses ice’

Now of course I’m not saying every skinny person uses drugs. Some have fast metabolisms, some work really hard every day. To some degree, most social media posts have a lack of reality tied to them. I decided I was running my head into a wall constantly, so I decided to distance myself from what was psychologically tormenting me. The models, the ripped and toned friends pasted on my social medias... And I also decided working myself that hard isn’t for me. So instead, I decided to turn to exercise for mentally healing purposes instead. I find I’m very neurotic and a way to relieve great amounts of stress and mental burden would be to exercise. I find it’s rewarding.

It was only tonight that I decided to rid myself of some of the huge social media apps that are limiting my progress and extending my self-hatred. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that fear makes us motivated consumers, so I am deciding to begin the journey that is breaking free and enjoying my own company.

Thank you, everyone. I hope you all remain by my side. 

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

DOTW 45 - full - ya'll welcome

Levi was in a bad state. Floch had tracked down the real Marcel Galliard, only to find the man dead and locked in his own chest freezer. The house had been recently abandoned, and clues were running dry. Being unable to work, he had all the time in the world to drive himself insane. All the time in the world to play out every possible scenario of Eren's abduction. They'd found that the "heart attack" victim, had been paid to call in the emergency. He'd thought it a prank. A stranger having approached him and paid him $100 just to make a simple call to prank his friend. The man didn't even know Levi and Eren both lived in the building, and he'd already spent the cash so there was no way of tracking down the bills he was paid with. The ambulance used to transport Eren was found on the outskirts of the city, the same night Levi had come home. There'd been blood at scene, though it hadn't been Eren's, it was enough to drive the spike of fear deeper into his heart. If Eren had fought, his boyfriend could be out there somewhere in a critical condition. Levi couldn't even sleep without seeing Eren. His dreams never once being kind to him, as Eren blamed him for his death, over and over... For the first month after Eren disappeared, he, Hanji and Anna, and Erwin had all been living together in a "safe" house that Floch had organised. They hadn't had access to the outside world. He'd nearly gone crazy from Hanji mothering him, and Erwin trying to father him. He wasn't a fucking child. He didn't need the guilt of their concern on top of his own guilt. Titan had hated the safe house, so the moment one month was up, Levi had returned back to his apartment. If Eren was out there and trying to get home, then he'd be there waiting for him. Even if it took the rest of his life. * Drenched in blood, Eren stumbled down the dirt road. His body was shaking with shock, his hair wild from lack of care and his bottom lip chewed to something resembling a bloody pulp. The cold night wind seemed to rip through his near naked body, while the knife in his right hand seemed to be the only thing he was acutely aware of. The day he'd been taken from the apartment, his world had been turned upside down. In that moment, it was like someone spinning a mirror in its stand. As it gradually slowed, he was left looking at a sight that disgusted him, as much as it confused him. His father was standing there. His father who'd walked out and left him, was now the one coming for him. He'd thought the man dead, yet he showed up, screaming at him that they had to leave. Bertholdt and Reiner were the ones who were the ones who'd supposed to come for him. He'd say there, through the night and watched the door. The largest and sharpest knife in the house was his only protection. But his father. His father hadn't been expected. The desire to kill the man where stood was only bested by his need to know. And now, he'd give almost everything not to. Still. He'd left with him. He'd written what he needed to Levi, praying that his boyfriend would understand the things he was trying to say. The things he'd written just that little bit bigger without making it too obvious. Given the degree of shock he'd been in, and that he'd had to pull himself out of an impending panic attack, he'd been proud he'd been able to write anything at all. Taken down by elevator, Bertholdt joined them in the narrow space. Again. He didn't understand. Bertholdt had blamed the whole thing on his father. He'd cursed him, and told him end up dead, just like him. So why was the alpha now sullenly following his father's orders? The thoughts in his head wouldn't stop. His breathing ragged, as if he'd already done the runner he was planning too. For nearly fucking decade, he'd thought he was dead. He'd thought the man had forgotten he'd even existed, and that's why he'd up abandoned. Just having his father next to him was enough to make him physically ill, to the point when the elevator doors opened to the ground floor, he'd fainted. Waking up, he was in a small room. It was basic. Very basic, but he counted his blessings that it wasn't a basement. Sitting on the end of his bed, his father was reading... like he was some fucking right to be there. Trying to find his voice, nothing came forth. He wanted to scream, or at least tell his father to let him go. With a heavy sigh, the man closed the book he'd been reading. The look on his face unreadable as he turned to him. This was the face of the man who'd hurt him. Who'd killed his mother and beat him for being an omega. The face of the man who wanted to sell him off. Who considered him defective and dirty for having a second dynamic he couldn't help. The face of the man who'd fucking ruined his life "Eren, I hoped we wouldn't meet like this. I'm sure you must have some questions" Yeah. Like how the fuck did he get out of here?! And where was here? That was about it. He didn't want to know what his father had been doing, and he didn't care to know. The man had left him when he'd needed him the most "You're right. There are some things words cannot say alone. Not when those are listening. Perhaps it would be easier to show you" Eren wanted to protest, but again, nothing came out. His father rose from the end of the bed, walking to stand next to where he sat. Reaching out his hand, Eren recoiled from touch. His face filled with disgust. Just the scent of his father was enough to have him vomiting in his mouth "Eren, either you come with me, or we have you moved to less agreeable accomodations until you learn your place" Learn his place? He knew his fucking place. It was in Shinganshima, with Titan and Levi. It was waking up in Levi's arms, and cuddling on the sofa. This place. Was not his place "You have until three to decide, then I'll be deciding for you. One. Two..." Not giving him any time to think, Eren scrambled from the bed before his father could say three "Excellent. Zeke's training was effective, I see" Eren's throat tightened at the mention of Zeke's name. How did his father know about that? Or how Zeke had trained him... "You will follow me. You will be silent and if you run, we will chain you. Do I make myself understood?" Unable to speak, Eren nodded "Come along then" Blinded as the excited the room, he found himself in some kind of world that looked like it'd been lifted from a movie. The whole area was set in a wide circle, various people coming and going from the stark white buildings. Moving towards the building opposite them, Eren followed. There was something about this whole place that scent a chill through him. This wasn't good place. It felt cold and empty. Like everyone was here, didn't want to be. Trailing after his father, his bare feet froze against the damp grass. Trust Grisha to ruin everything he could for him, grass now included. Despite the humble outside of the building, Eren smelt disinfectant as he walked into what seemed to be some kind of laboratory. Once again, everything was too white, and the glass was just way too clean. With no time to stop and take it all in, he followed blindly until they reached a set of heavy dark doors, the silver handles looking imposing as fuck. He definitely wasn't supposed to be here. Taking two steps back, his heart was pounding hard enough for him to hear it. Turning and catching sight of him, Grisha covered the distance between them, grabbing him by the arm and yanking him forward "You will obey me, or they will kill you" What the fuck. Whoever "they" were, made plenty of empty fucking threats and promises. He was supposed to be dead already, not in some kind of fucked up dream world where his father was alive. Gripping his arm so hard that it hurt, he was pulled to the doors, Grisha giving a single knock before entering. Inside the room was decked in black. Even the plants either side or the desk seemed to be black. The space feeling so heavy and oppressive, it was hard to remain standing. Seated at the long oval table that filled most of the room, 11 sets of eyes were on him as he pulled over and manhandled down into a chair, his father taking the seat next to him "Eren Yeager" His name was said like it was a hair ball being coughed up. The old man at the end of the table looked slightly familiar, but he couldn't place it. Seated to his left, were Reiner and Bertholdt, both alphas looking like scared rabbits, rather than killers "Eren. We understand you've been causing some problems for all of us. Under your father's recommendation, we have decided to liberate you from your current life. Do you understand?" He understood nothing. Glaring back at the man seated directly opposite him, he crossed his arms "Grisha. You assured me the boy would talk" "And he will" "You know the penalty if he does not" Under the table, his father kicked him. What were they? 12? "It has come to our attention that you have been communicating with the Shinganshima Police Department, and with a certain officer Floch Forster" Floch had a last name? Dah. Of course people had last names "Eren, you seem to be under the impression we are bad people. We are not, and we hope that in time, you will see the mistakes you have made. Grisha, return him to his room" That was it? He was dragged up here, for that? Fucking seriously? He had more questions that fucking answers, and he still had no idea where the fuck he was. Was this a cult? Had his father really abandoned him, to join this fucking cult? He'd seen enough TV to know cults were filled with weirdos, and that these things never worked out well for anyone involved. In the movies, everyone always ended up dead with a lone survivor walking off into the distance as the place burned to the ground. Is that what he'd been caught up in? Escorted back to his room, his father didn't stay. Maybe he got that Eren wanted absolutely nothing to do with him... or more likely, he had to go grovel to whoever those people in that room had been... If the alpha thought he was simply going to take all of this, without a word of real explanation, he was sadly mistaken. For the first week Eren was kept isolated from everyone. His father brought him meals, and took him to what seemed to be a communal shower block. The number of omegas in the place took him by surprise, as did the number of children. It didn't look like a place for children, and none of them looked happy about it. No one talked either. Normally a pregnant omega took comfort in being with other omega's, but here, everyone tried to avoid everyone else. Something was going on here and he didn't like it. Nor was he going to let things keep going like this. His own omega was distraught from their smells, leaving him constantly on edge. He still hadn't been able to find his voice, but he had found that his door locked from the outside, which was useless, but his window. His window was wonky in its frame. That he might be able to use. His plans were dashed when he was moved into the same room as his father. Ninety percent of the room was filled from floor to ceiling with medical technology that meant nothing to him. Two small beds sat at the rear of the room, once covered with books. Locked in with his father, the first thing Grisha did was throw his arms around him, holding him tight like a loving father would "It's safe to talk here. I never meant to get you involved with any of this" Well that was a load of shit. If he hadn't wanted him involved, he could have fucking left him with Levi "Look, you may not believe me, but all I wanted was to keep you safe. What happened with your mother... I wish it could have been avoided. And then with Zeke. Zeke did well. He kept you safe and hidden..." Shoving his father off him, he bared his teeth as he snarled "Eren..." Trying to form his words, nothing happened. Instead he stood there like the angry idiot he was "Eren, it's ok. I know you must have a lot of questions, but for now, know that I had to drive you away. I had to make sure you wouldn't track me down, or come after me. I'm sorry for what happened. I was a fool. I was a coward. I tried to find a way out of this all... but now... no. Never mind. Just know, that if you do as they say, things will go much smoother... this... this was all I could do to keep you alive. Read the books on your bed, then you'll understand" Eren ignored the books for as long as he could. He couldn't calm down with his father acting so "normal" around him. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing about this place was normal. On the dresser that sat between his and his father's bed, were photos. Photos Eren felt Grisha had no right to have. Not only were they of his mother, but also of Zeke and Zeke's mother. It was bad enough that they were on display, but out of all the photos in the small collection, most of them were of him. Including recent photos of him with Levi. He'd suspected they were being watched, but there was no real evidence, other than Bertholdt working with Levi, and he hadn't known about that until months after it'd first started. Photos of him coming out of Krista's office. In Paradis. At the hospital. At Moblit's wake. The most recent was of him at the Charity Ball with Levi on his arm. It was sickening. He didn't want anything to do with Grisha. He'd rather... he'd rather be trapped in a room with Reiner and Bertholdt than sharing this room with his father. At least he knew the pair wanted him dead. He knew what they wanted from him, and who they were. His father on the other hand was a stranger from his nightmares. He probably wished Eren had been wasted across the sheets rather than ever be conceived. His father noticed that he hadn't read the books on his bed almost immediately. The man held off saying anything, until Eren was woken in the middle of the night. His father already awake, but the knocking on their door couldn't be ignored. Beckoned to follow, Eren was freezing in the thin white clothes he'd been gifted. He didn't even have time to slide his shoes on before he was being lead through the central courtyard area. Yeah. They were definitely in some kind of cult. Called to deliver a pup, Eren nearly bolted from the room the moment he realised what was going on. The poor woman had been left to ordeal everything alone, while two stocky alphas stood guard outside her room. Directed to hold her hand, and support her, he was grateful he didn't have to be down the other again. Birth might be a miracle, but staring at people's private parts was gross. Just because everyone had them, didn't mean they needed to show them off or anything... and he had no idea how people could work with those areas... it was not for him. Having been left until nearly the final moment, the female omega was a mess, the birth over in three pushes, and the baby a healthy girl. He was so fucking angry. The girl was taken from the mother with one of the waiting alphas like it was a normal thing to do. The woman was crying for her pup and he couldn't fucking do anything about it. Once his father had made sure he was alright, they'd been escorted back to their room, and his father had pushed the books he'd been ignore into his hands. He didn't know why he needed to read them, not when the moment he figured out how to get out of wherever he was, he was gone. He'd done some fucked up things in his life, but whatever this was... he didn't want any part of this. * Levi may have overindulged with his drinking the previous night. Though, he didn't know if was classed as overindulging, when he was still drinking. Erwin had decided he was fucking moving in 7 weeks after Eren's disappearance. It wasn't like Levi was still falling apart. He would have had to stop falling apart for that to happen. He'd plastered as many missing posters of Eren as he could onto their social media accounts, as well as printing physical copies, and distributing them everywhere he could. Each day got harder. Waking up without Eren by his side. Without his sleepy smile. His soft purrs and messy bedhead. The way he reached out for him if Levi moved away. The way Eren would smile as he snuggled into him, and would mumble his name in his sleep. His phone was constantly by his side in case Eren found a way to called him. Floch was still looking for Eren, without making things too obvious. He'd been sideswiped while driving, barely able to prevent his car from rolling, shortly after the discovery of Marcel's body. Floch was now working personally under Dot Pixis as an internal review was being conducted through the precinct. Being on the outside, he had no way of knowing what had been discovered, and the daily calls to the man in the hopes of news, had become weekly instead. Every time a dead body was found and reported on the news, Levi's heart would break a little more. He didn't want to find Eren dead. He just wanted to find him. He wanted things to go back to how they'd been... his apartment resembled more of a pigsty than a abode. The dishes sitting in the sink for days at a time, while the only actually shopping he did was for Titan, or printer ink when he'd run out from printing missing person flyers. Eren's room was just the way he'd left it. Erwin was sleeping on the sofa, with the hopes that he'd just fuck off back home. A fine layer of dust had settled over everything, but if he washed Eren's blankets, he'd be washing away Eren's scent, and he wasn't strong enough to do that. He needed his omega. Or he needed to make enough noise that Reiner and Bertholdt would come for him. He'd named and shamed them on social media, and still, nothing had happened. Eren had said they'd be after him once he was dead, yet it seemed more like once they'd gotten Eren, they couldn't give two fucks about everyone else... Erwin was at work, leaving Levi home with Titan and the bottle of scotch he'd been sipping on since the night before. There was only one benefit to Erwin being in the apartment and that was when he left. When he left, Levi could stay in bed, remembering Eren. He'd been looking forward to getting Eren out of that dress. They'd touched a little during Eren's post heat, when Eren had needed the physical contact to soothe his fears, but that was so long ago, it felt like he'd forgotten the heat of Eren's body against his. Rolling so his facing his phone, he ignored the device as it started to ring. People had called about Eren, some even texting him messages of abuse. Calls were worse though. Some where just heavy breathing, and some where people simply telling him he was disgusting or possessive and should let Eren be happy without him. The only calls he answered were Hanji's, because she'd show up in person if he didn't. He couldn't bare the look of pity in her eyes. Nor could he stand her lectures. He knew what he was doing wasn't healthy. He knew he needed to stop. He needed to rethink the situation, and formulate a new plan, but as soon as he'd start thinking about Eren... it was like something broke a little more inside of him. Eren was in his thoughts constantly, as he tried to remember every detail of every moment they'd spent together. The way Eren would light up when he learned something new, or the way he'd rush to hug him when he came home from work. He desperately didn't want to forget him. Letting the call ring out, two chimes dinged from his phone. Usually a missed call would only mean one, unless a message was left. With an exaggerated groan, he reached out and picked his phone up. His notifications informing him that there was indeed a message left. Whatever. He might as well listen to whoever had decided he needed to abused. Maybe it'd be a fucking joke. He could use a laugh. The moments of laughter in his apartment had been few and far between, without Eren there. Eren was the warmth and sunlight in his life, while Levi felt like he was sucking the life from everything as he continued his half life. Opening the message, he closed his eyes and hit play "Good Afternoon, this is Leah from Karanes Psychiatric Hospital. I am trying to contact Levi Ackerman, in regards to Eren Yeager. If you could please give me a call back on..." Karanes. He'd never even been there, let alone known anyone there. They had no reason to be calling, and he severely doubted Eren would be there... so why was his thumb hovering over the message? She hadn't said Eren was a patient. And Eren didn't need the kind of help those places usually offered... Anger flared in the emotionally exhausted alpha. This obviously had to be a prank call. It always fucking was. Erwin had urged him to remove the missing posters online, especially after Eren started getting all kinds of friend requests. He'd removed it on Eren's, but until Eren came home, he'd keep it online on his. Deciding Leah could go fuck herself, he called the number back with the intention of doing just that... only, it wasn't Leah who answered, and his mind panicked. He hadn't thought anyone else would. Shit. Fuck. He was fucking alpha, he wasn't supposed to get flustered like this "E-Eren Yeager..." He sounded like a retarded parrot as he stuttered the words out "Hello? Sir? I'm afraid I don't understand. Are you calling to talk with Eren Yeager?" God. She was still fucking talking to him. If he was her, he would have hung up or yelled at him for wasting her time "Yes..." "Eren is currently not able to respond. He is allowed visitors. Our visiting hours are between 10am and 2pm, Monday to Friday. And 9am and 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. If you would like to leave a message for him, we are able to pass it on" "Wait. You have a patient named Eren Yeager there?" The woman seemed confused "Yes? Weren't you calling to speak with him? Sir, why don't you give me your name..." Levi hung up his phone. His heart racing as he scrambled out of bed. For the first time in 9 fucking weeks, he had news of Eren. And not just Marcel was dead in his freezer. Shit. Fuck. He needed to get to Karanes. He needed to pack. He needed to shower. Did Eren need clothes? Should he take clothes or a blanket? Eren loved his blankets. Eren couldn't wear a blanket. He should take both. And what about Titan? No. He couldn't take their cat... Titan would have to stay. Eren could see him when he came back. The energy that flooded his body dropped as his feet came to a stop. The "what ifs" of the situation hitting him. The woman said Eren wasn't taking calls. What if he couldn't take calls? What if he got there and Eren didn't want him? What if he got there and Eren wasn't himself? What if they'd done something to him? What if he never wanted to see him again? What if he was dying... No. if he was dying, he'd be in a proper hospital. Why wasn't Eren in a proper hospital? Was he ok? Did he even remember him? He was too intoxicated for this. He needed a shower. He needed to cook his head and calm back down. Shower. He should shower and then pack. His hair needed a cut... and he'd have to message Erwin to say he was going away for a few days... he didn't want Erwin near Eren. Not when he didn't know the full extent of Eren's injuries, and not when this could be a wild goose chase. It could be Reiner or Bertholdt using Eren's name. Fuck. He should have asked for a description. If it was Reiner or Bertholdt, he'd have to do something. Get them out of there. And then? Then what did he do? Kill them? Actually... He didn't trust himself not to... but they could know where Eren actually was... Fuck. Why the fuck did he have to be dealing with this while drunk? This was his own fucking fault. He should have taken better care of himself. For Eren's sake. For Eren's sake he should have remained strong. Stronger than this. He was an alpha. Top of the dynamic hierarchy. Not some stupid beta... Too drunk to drive, Levi booked a plane ticket to Karanes, being a last minute flight, it'd cost him a small fortune. He had no idea why. He'd never been to Karanes, but the cost of the flight to Karanes was the same as two tickets out to Paradis Beach... even when the flight was shorter. Having shit, showered and shaved, he'd felt more human than he had in days, until he was forced the enjoy the not so lovely recycled air of the flight. The wet smell seemed to cling to him, even once he'd gotten off the plane and made his way outside the airport, and into the first available taxi. Everything he needed had fit into his carry on luggage. Though it had been extremely tempting to pack Eren's whole wardrobe so his boyfriend would be comfortable. * It was well after hours when the taxi finally pulled up in front of Karanes Psychiatric Hospital. Levi hadn't even considered booking a hotel or anything, his mind too preoccupied with the possibility of Eren waiting for him. Gathering his bag and Eren's backpack from the taxi, he climbed from it with a sigh. The place didn't look the nicest... at least not nice enough for Eren. The tall grey building looked like a prison, so much so, that even the sad excuse of a garden didn't inject any happiness into the environment. Walking up to the front door, he frowned at the fact it was locked. Pressing the intercom, he could almost imagine the grumpy woman on the other end "Visiting hours are over" "I was contacted by Leah regarding a patient. Eren Yeager?" There was a buzz, followed by a click and the door opened. Grabbing the handle before she could change her mind and lock him out again, Levi stepped into the foyer. The place stank of lavender, whoever cleaned or whatever was being sprayed, some shitty arsehole needed to learn moderation. Carrying his and Eren's bags over to the reception, the woman behind the counter gave him a bored look "Leah will be down shortly. I need you to fill this in. Any personal belongings will need to be left here. No phones. No laptops. No electronics. And you will be monitored for the duration of your visit" This definitely wasn't the right place for Eren to be. His boyfriend would be fucking terrified. Angered at the lack of empathy shown, and the lack of acceptable conditions. He nearly snapped the pen given to him to fill in the forms. The woman taking photo copies of his ID, then giving him a box to dump both his bags in. Ignoring him, it was a long wait before another woman appeared. Smiling, her brown-grey hair was piled up in a messy bun "Are you Levi?" Rising to his feet, Levi nodded. His arse long since numb from the single plastic chair available "Levi Ackerman. And I assume you're Leah?" "Yes. It's lovely to meet you. Now, I'm sure you must have a lot of questions of how Eren came to be in our care, but the first thing you need to know is that he is currently sedated. He was quite distressed when he was first brought in, so sedation was necessary in order for him to get some rest" Levi hated the fact his lover was sedated, but he could understand it "He has PTS, depression and severe anxiety. He also has a history of self harming without consciously realising what he is doing" Leah nodded, her smile didn't waver "The first thing he did when he settled was provide your name and number" That was his omega... he'd remembered... Levi's alpha swelled with pride "I'm his alpha. He lives with me in Shinganshima" "Shinganshima? That's quite a journey" "That's very true. Look. Are you sure this is Eren?" Leah sighed "To be honest, I saw one of your posts of social media. Eren is currently non-verbal, and other than your details, he hasn't made any other attempts to communicate. If he hadn't provided your name or number, I most likely would have ignored the post. The number of alphas who track down their omega partners..." Non-verbal was never good, Eren had said he was non-verbal before and that was after being fucking tortured. Ok. He'd need to be prepared for that... it was just... having his post ignored. That pissed him off. He was perfectly alright person, at a distance and not when people were trying to hurt Eren... or making a mess. Ok. He was short and shitty. But Eren brought out the best in him "I used to work as a paramedic. I know all about that" Leah kept up the small talk until they finally reached a plain grey door "This is it. He may be sleeping, we've administer his medication for the night" 5pm seemed way too early for night meds. Part of him wanted Eren to be sleeping, but the bigger part was shaking with fear. His omega... his omega was supposed to be behind that door, but what if he wasn't? What happened then? Laying on his side, with his back to the wall, the omega was snoring softly. A mass of messy brown hair poking up from under the edge of the blanket. Sniffing the air, he found he couldn't smell any of Eren's telltale scents, and for a moment, his heart dropped "Go on. Technically I'm supposed to wake him, but we haven't even been able to confirm his name. He asked for you, so he must have known you'd come" Feeling oddly jittery, Levi nearly tripped over his own two feet as he crossed to the sleeping omega. Gently brushing the hair back from the man's face, a smile formed on his lips at Eren's sleeping features, as his knees gave out. Wrapping an arm around Eren, he started to sob earnest tears. His brat was so warm and alive. Being so close, he could catch just the faintest traces of his scent, rousing the deep instinct to protect. It was his Eren. Beneath his hold, Eren gave a sleepy groan, turning in confusion, before bright green eyes opened wide. His boyfriend's happiness was overwhelming "Hey, brat" Reaching out, he cupped Eren's face. Eren immediately nuzzling into the touch, letting out a rumbling purr as he did. Opening his mouth, the omega's smile turned to sadness. Fuck. He didn't want Eren to start crying. He didn't want his omega to think he thought any less of him "It's ok. I know, and it's ok. We'll figure this out, but for now, what matters most is that you're ok" Nodding as he nuzzled, Eren kissed his palm, closing his eyes as if drinking in the touch. Fuck. He couldn't help himself. Leaning in Levi's lips found Eren's, the kiss soft and followed by a second and third. His beautiful boyfriend was back, and alive. The circumstances behind Eren's return would have to wait for another day. All that mattered was that he was back with him. Back where he belonged "I fucking love you" Eren snorted, throwing his arms around him as he nuzzled his cheek enthusiastically "This is the most active I've seen him since he was admitted" "Yeah. He's a ball of energy usually. When can I take him home?" Leah sighed softly "I'm sorry, we cannot discharge patients without the director's approval, and he won't be in until tomorrow morning" Tomorrow. Tomorrow meant leaving Eren here for another night and he wasn't ok with that. Eren didn't seem ok with it either, his boyfriend tensing "Shhh. I'm here. It's going to be ok..." Eren clung to him like there was no tomorrow. Levi's knees were starting to ache from the cold concrete floor, his right knee especially protesting the rough treatment "Let me lift you. Ok? Here, up we go" Lifting Eren, Levi's knees groaned as he repositioned him, his omega hiding his face against his shoulder. Without thinking, Levi's hand moved down Eren's side, before resting in his boyfriend's lap. Brushing against Eren's thin shirt, he noticed the slight amount of stomach. Frowning in confusion, Eren sucked in a shuddering breath as Levi slid his hand across his stomach. The smallest of bumps beneath his fingers. Eren was pregnant? Levi's stomach dropped, the change in his scent obviously upsetting Eren as the omega started to sob against him. His alpha roared in anger. This was their omega. No one else had the right to be touching him... not like that. Not to impregnate him with their pup. That was Levi's right, and his alone. His anger shook his whole frame, taxing his alcohol taxed brain as he tried to rein it back in. This was his Eren. He loved Eren... even if Eren was now carrying a pup. He could never hurt him, or abandon him for something like this. Not that he could do either anyway "And this. We'll get through this. This doesn't make me love you any less" He'd have to make an appointment with Eren's doctor and organise an ultrasound. The last time they'd had sex... was what? 11 weeks. 11 weeks ago in the shower... Eren had been having a rough night with his post heat depression. His love had woken up a crying wreck... it was just before the Ball... They'd taken a shower together, so he could take care of Eren and get him calmed again. It hadn't been the best sex, Eren had cried and kind of put a dampener on the mood, but his lover had settled when knotted... If Eren was around the ten to eleven week mark, then there was a fair chance the child was his... Fuck... Eren was pregnant. This... was a thing. A big thing. He didn't know what to do for a baby! Anna slept like crazy. Did all babies do that? And what if it wasn't his? Would Eren want to keep it? His lover desperately wanted a child, and he wasn't going to take that from him... but if another alpha had sired the pup, it wasn't exactly likely to have been consensual. He was going to have to find some way for Eren to communicate with him. They could share a phone... and fuck... Eren hated flying and he was going to have to organise flights back... unless Erwin drove up to collect them. Eren would like that. He liked watching the world when they'd go for a drive. He'd probably have a million missed calls from Erwin. Fuck. That wasn't a conversation he was looking forward too "Levi, I'm sorry, but visiting hours are over for the day. And with Eren now having a name to his face, there are a number of forms we'll need you to fill in" Eren wasn't having it. The hold on him turning painful as the omega's finger tips dug in "Is there anyway I can stay with him longer?" He wasn't ready to let him go. Even if it was overnight. That was way too long "Well..." He understood she was just trying to do her job. But this was Eren. His Eren. His Eren who'd been missing 11 fucking weeks "I'm sorry. I'm already bending the rules as it is. We can do the bulk of the discharge paperwork tonight, that way you'll be able to take him earlier in the morning. There will still be a wait, but if everything is in order, you should be able to have him out of here before lunch" Lunch was 18 odd hours away. He didn't want to wait 18 fucking hours. But Leah was going out on a limb. He'd done patient transfers to places like this before, and they really didn't appreciate after hour visitors "Ok... Eren. Eren, I have to go. But I promise, first thing tomorrow. First thing tomorrow I'll be back" Shaking his head, Eren started whimpering "You know me. I promise you. I promise I will be back for you" Shit. Eren was melting down. He probably thought he was going to abandon him because he was pregnant "Eren, hey. Here, take my shirt. It's got my scent all over it... and probably some of Titan's fur. He's missed you like crazy" "Levi..." "The shirt's cotton. There's no buttons, rips, tears, zips or ties" He'd been through this before. Though this time he was on this side of the rules, not watching during patient transfers. He'd always gotten annoyed by the sight of those trying to break the rules, and now he understood "Alright. I'll give you two a moment" Trying to pry a clinging Eren off was near on impossible and wouldn't have been able to be accomplished without the sedatives in his system. Losing strength halfway through his fight to hold on, it was a shit feeling to lift Eren off his lap. Taking Eren's thin top off, he couldn't help but stare at the small swell. Eren was too exhausted to do much but blink at him sadly, before Levi manhandled him into his shirt, and replaced the one Eren had been wearing over it "I will be back tomorrow. Very first thing. I don't care what they say, or what they do. I'm taking you home. You're my omega. I love you. I love you and you're coming back home with me. You and the pup. Ok? And no. I don't want to leave you. But Leah has to do her job, and if I cause trouble right now, they might stop me from taking you. I promise, I'll stay. I'll be with you until you fall asleep" Eren growled, but it was completely adorable. Laying him down, his boyfriend tried to fight sleeping. Levi finding his way back to kneeling, kissing and nuzzling into Eren's face as his fingers played with the omega's soft hair. He didn't want the moment to end. Slowly, Eren fell asleep. Dragging his thin blankets back up, he tucked Eren in. Ready to face the paperwork to get Eren the fuck out of here.

[softforimjaebum]

3. warm sunsets full of love

Im Jaebum x Reader

Word Count: 2.7k

Genre: Fluff (So much sweetness your teeth will probs rot)

Author’s Note: Inspired by a post made by a blog that no longer exists, this was so long overdue, but wow, I finished a series!! (sort of, let me just have my moment here). Hope you enjoy the cheesiest three part series I will ever write, and thanks for reading!

First in the series: sweet raspberry lemonade in the summer Second in the series: fleeting goodbyes and hasty kisses

Music Recommendation

Time has a strange habit of passing too quickly when you aren’t noticing. And Jaebum didn’t want to waste any more time, god knows he had done that enough. 

He had realised it during an extremely cheesy Bollywood movie that Jackson was hell bent on making him watch. The movie had said something along the lines of ‘if you don’t respect time, it leaves you behind’. He didn’t want to regret not doing this when he was so sure of it.

He had been beating around the bush long enough, wondering how to ask you, whether you would even agree to it. He know you loved him, but he still felt scared. He was, after all, only human and some days his insecurities got the best of him.

Jaebum knew he was still young, as were you. But with his work, there would always be weeks he would have to go without seeing you even if you were in the same city. He would have to go back to the dorm, sleep for a couple of hours and rush back to work, whether it was practice or the studio. He knew how you put up a tough front week after week when he couldn’t meet you, barely getting the time to text you sometimes. He knew you did that for him, so he could keep going without feeling guilty.

But he was acutely aware of things like this could take a toll on the relationship, how it could make anyone compromising as much as you did bitter about always being the one compromising and sacrificing. And it had started to take a toll on the both of you, the magic was lost somewhere between the missed calls, unanswered texts and cancelled date nights.

He yearned to be near you but phone calls and texts just weren’t cutting it anymore; he wanted you, not your texts on his phone. He wanted to watch you talking about a particularly funny part of your day with a slightly animated voice and he wanted to hear the sarcasm dripping from your voice as you told him just how much you loved and appreciated that one girl in office who had the biggest poster of Im Jaebum stuck to her cubicle wall.

It had been such a long time since he had the time to just breathe, to take a moment to appreciate what his life was now. It had been a successful year for the boys and for him, as GOT7 and as individuals. But they were all drained. They all felt exactly how they had felt before that near-impromptu Jeju vacation; the vacation when Jaebum had first told you he loved you.

Jeju would always be a special place to the two of you, and in the two years had that passed since that trip, you had often talked about how amazing it would be to go back there. And it didn’t hit Jaebum that it would be the perfect place to ask you this question that was eating him up alive until Jackson said it. 

When he admitted to Jackson how he hadn’t even thought of this and what a great idea this was, Jackson had taken his shoes off and sent it hurling towards Jaebum with a screech of ‘how can you be so dumb Im Jaebum?’. His shoes had only missed Jaebum’s head by an inch, but he wasn’t angry. Jackson was right, this was such a perfect idea waiting right in front of his eyes and he had missed it.

Jaebum had talked to the company executives weeks in advance, making sure it wouldn’t be cancelled. He had asked for time off over the New Years for all the boys, about making his relationship public, and about moving out of their dorm. While the talk about making his relationship public had only earned him scoffs, everything else had been agreed to. He planned everything; took the number of the owner whose house they had rented last time from Jackson, booked the flight tickets discreetly, arranged for his friends to take care of his cats over the couple of days he would be out of town. He had told you to pack for a small vacation, but he was adamant on not telling you where he was taking you.

“Come on baby, you have to tell me where we’re going. How else would I know what to pack? What if I pack bikinis and you take me to a snowy place?” you had argued.

“Absolutely not. You take normal clothes, and if I am taking you to the snow, I’ll pack warm clothes for you” he’d replied.

In the end, he had only settled on telling you how many days you were going to be out of town for.  It wasn’t until they were standing at the boarding gates that you knew where you were going.

“You’re taking me to Jeju?” you whispered, trying to not draw too much attention to the two of you. A mask and a hat weren’t much of a disguise but it was enough as long as no one’s eyes lingered on him for too long.

He simply looked at you, winked and then looked forward again.

Your boyfriend was impossible. You knew he wanted to surprise you, but he just wouldn’t tell you any of the details and the curiosity was driving you crazy. You had asked him over the course of the past week what he had planned, and all he had told you was that you would find out in “due time”. It was safe to say, you were already plotting your revenge.

About an hour and a half later, you were sitting inside the car, in Jeju City, on your way to god knows wherever Jaebum had planned. The drive wasn’t too long, and the car was soon pulling into an oddly familiar driveway.

You could never forget this place.

“Jaebum……” you managed to whisper, too scared to speak any louder in the fear of your voice cracking. “Did you…are we really…-”

Jaebum put his arm around you, pulling you closer and kissing the top of your head.

“I thought this would be a nice getaway place after the year we’ve had”

You looked up at him, smile so wide your jaw would start hurting any moment.

“This is wonderful. You…you are wonderful” you said, quickly placing a kiss on his lips before jumping out of the car and running inside.

The house was exactly how you remembered it to be, barring the new couch and the bigger T.V. But it felt exactly the same. You could almost hear the clattering of your friends in the kitchen, and almost see them huddled around each other in the living room while you and Jaebum were outside.

“Hey babe” Jaebum called out behind you.

You turned around to see Jaebum walking towards you and out of sheer habit you open draped your hands around his waist.

“Let me cook you some lunch” he said, ushering you towards the kitchen.

Jaebum cooked for the two of you, refusing to let you get up off the bar stool he had led you to once you were both in the kitchen. You watched him as he moved around the kitchen gracefully. Every time he looked at you, still watching him just as intently as the time before, he huffed out a little laugh and went back to work. It was probably the most adorable thing you had ever witnessed.

While the two of you ate, Jaebum told you about the past couple of weeks he had had, mostly about meeting all his friends at the year end shows. It had been such a long time since the two of you had just sat down and talked your hearts out without the impending doom of a schedule he had to leave to attend. You were still just a little bit skeptical at Jaebum’s grand gesture of love; after all, he was the least bit grand gestures in anything, let alone in love.

You had learned, after a couple of dates with him, that he was as lowkey as they came. Instead of pulling you to sit on his lap in front of his friends, his hands would just simply always linger on yours. If he was taking you out on a date. If you were sick, he wouldn’t drop work and come to your rescue, but he would make sure he got to your apartment in the evening to cook you dinner, and then without telling you, stock your fridge with breakfast for the next morning. It was always the little things.

And you liked it that way. He was romantic in his own thoughtful ways and as long as that was there, you weren’t one to complain. Fairytale romances, you had come to accept, were best left in fictional stories. This was real life, and you didn't want a Prince Charming, you just wanted someone to spend your life with.

So as skeptical as this felt, you kept your mouth shut and you enjoyed his gesture of love anyway. Your best guess was he felt awful about how busy the last few months had been, how he never had any time for your relationship, and hence wanted to compensate for it.

It wasn’t until both of you had showered, spent a couple of hours in front of the T.V that Jaebum suggested you both go outside to watch the sunset. Jaebum and you were cuddled inside a blanket you had stolen from your bedroom, courtesy of the 10° C temperature, and watching the hues of the sky turning warmer by the minute.

 It wasn’t odd; your fondness for sunsets had definitely rubbed off on Jaebum over the years. You would often find him sending you pictures of sunsets from where he was in the world, to which you would send him sunset pictures of your own. It had become a way of saying ‘I miss you and I wish you were here with me�� without actually saying those words.

Why didn’t you just say those words? Well, for one admitting just how much you missed him would only make things worse for the both of you. And you were hell bent on not making this any more difficult than it was. Your personal analogy for this situation, and for never going to visit him on tour (barring the one time he puppy-eyed you into it) was that it was like someone hands you your favourite pizza but as soon as you take a slice and bite into it, cherishing the taste, they take the pizza away and say you can’t have it again for 3 months.

Admittedly it was a strange analogy, but it got you through lonely nights without Jaebum by your side.

“You remember the first time we were here?” Jaebum asked, diverting your attention from your thoughts.

“How can I not remember?” you grinned. “You chose the near perfect moment to tell me you loved me. Im Jaebum, chic and sexy leader of GOT7, turned all soft for tiny, old me. How can I ever forget!”

Jaebum shot you a look of feigned annoyance and snickered at your comment afterwards.

“Well, dummy, not that day” he teased. “You remember our first evening in Jeju when we watched the sun set while the kids were still in the water?”

You could tell by his voice that he had gotten serious, so you leaned in to kiss his cheek, “Of course babe”

“That is when I realised I loved you. Before that it was always ‘yeah sure, I really like her’ but I saw the sun setting alongside you, and honestly, I wanted to spend the rest of my life watching sunsets with you. And cuddle you through every possible sun rise” he chuckled, remembering just how mad you had been when Jackson had once woken you up to see a sun rise.

You knew exactly why he had chuckled at the last part.

“Will you ever let me live that down?” you questioned, ducking your head down in embarrassment.

“Never” he joked, before continuing. “I know these past couple of months have been tough. So it got me thinking about something, and I didn’t know when the right time or place to ask you”

“Is that why we’re here?”

“Well, yes. I know you always talked about coming back here. So I thought it was a good place, kind of like a full circle for us”

“Jaebum, you’re scaring me just a little” you laughed nervously.

“Move in with me”

“What?”

You weren't sure if you had just heard him say ‘move in with me’.

“My three cats and I, all four of us want you to come live with us in our new apartment”

“Jae….-” you began.

“I want to come home to you, at least sleep besides you even if I don’t get to talk to you all day. You know that I planned to move out of the dorm, but I realised I don’t just want to move out. I want us to have a home together”

You paused to think; did he really want this? Or was he just tired of not seeing you as often as he would like? And even if he was tired of that, was that really such a bad thing?

“Are you sure, Jaebum? This….this is an awfully big step. And I don’t want you to regret this decision. I’ve lived with roommates and I’ve lived alone, believe me when I tell you there are joys in both. Are you sure you want to move out of a dorm with roommates who at least sleep in their own rooms into a house with a roommate who is going to be pretty much all up in your space, all the time?” you worried.

“Baby, this is the most sure I have ever been in my life” he confessed. “Believe me, I have been thinking about asking you this for a while but with how busy I was, I didn’t want to propose this and then leave you to set up what will be our home all alone. I wanted to ask you this when I was sure we could…build a home together”

You were at a loss for words. You were a whirlwind of emotions you couldn't figure out; you were excited at the thought of waking up to him, of having a home with him, but you were also scared out of your mind. You were just going  to have to trust that Jaebum wouldn’t break your heart like others had, even if every fibre in your body told you there was always a chance he could. And that was a chance you were willing to take with him. 

Unsure of what to say, you simply leaned in to kiss him. You could feel him smiling as he kissed you back, knowing that this meant you were saying yes. The sun had almost disappeared beneath the horizon, the sky having turned darker, the temperature dropping even lower. But Jaebum was right there, kissing you like he wanted to never let go, and the wind didn’t feel so chilly anymore.

“For the record, when I say I want you to move in with me, it also means I want you all up in my space….dummy” Jaebum teased, pulling away from the kiss.

You narrowed your eyes at him, slyly grabbing the blanket just a bit tighter. You huffed at him, placing a quick kiss on his lips before you yanked the blanket away from him, taking him by surprise.

“Dummy back at you” you said, grinning from ear to ear as you ran back towards the living room as fast as your cold limbs would allow.

[1921designs]

My daughter and God

FOUR YEARS AGO, driving home from picking up our twelve-year-old daughter from summer camp, my wife reached into her purse for a tissue and lost control of the car. This occurred on a stretch of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio, near the town of Gonzales. The accident occurred as many do: a moment of distraction, a small mistake, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. My wife and daughter were in the midst of a minor argument over my daughter’s need to blow her nose. During high-pollen season, she is a perennial sniffer, and the sound drives my wife crazy. Get a Kleenex, Leslie said, for God’s sake, and when Iris, out of laziness or exhaustion or the mild day-to-day defiance of all teenagers, refused to do so, my wife reached for her purse, inadvertently turning the wheel to the left.

In the case of some vehicles, the mistake might have been rectified, but not in the case of my wife’s—a top-heavy SUV with jacked-up suspension. When she realized her error, she overcorrected to the right, then again to the left, the car swerving violently. They were on a bridge that passed above a gully: on either side, nothing but gravity and forty vertical feet of air. That they would hit the guardrail was now inevitable. In moments of acute stress, time seems to slow. The name for this is tachypsychia, from the Greek tach, meaning “speed,” and psych, meaning “mind.” Thus, despite the chaos and panic of these moments, my wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

This didn’t happen, although the accident was far from over. The car did not break through the guardrail but ricocheted back onto the highway, spinning in a one-eighty before flopping onto its side in a powdery explosion of airbags. It struck another vehicle, driven by a pastor and his wife on their way home from Sunday lunch, though my wife has no memory of this. For what seemed like hours the car traveled in this manner, then gravity took hold once more. Like a whale breaching the surface, it lifted off the roadway, turned belly-up, and crashed down onto its roof. The back half of the car compacted like an accordion: steel crushing, glass bursting, my daughter’s belongings—clothes, shoes, books, an expensive violin—exploding onto the highway. Other cars whizzed past, narrowly missing them. A final jolt, the car rolled again, and it came to a halt, facing forward, resting on its wheels.

As my wife tells it, the next moment was very nearly comic. She and my daughter looked at each other. The car had been utterly obliterated, but there was no blood, no pain, no evidence of bodily injury to either of them. “We’ve been in an accident,” my wife robotically observed.

My daughter looked down at her hand. “I am holding my phone,” she said— as, indeed, she somehow still was. “Do you want me to call 911?”

There was no need. Though in the midst of things the two of them had felt alone in the universe, the accident had occurred in the presence of a dozen other vehicles, all of which had now stopped and disgorged their occupants, who were racing to the scene. A semi moved in behind them to block the highway. By this time my wife’s understanding of events had widened only to the extent that she was aware that she had created a great deal of inconvenience for other people.

She was apologizing to everyone, mistaking their amazement for anger. Everybody had expected them to be dead, not sitting upright in their destroyed vehicle, neither one of them with so much as a hair out of place. Some began to weep; others had the urge to touch them. The cops arrived, a fire truck, an ambulance. While my wife and daughter were checked out by an EMT, onlookers organized a posse to prowl the highway for my daughter’s belongings. Because my wife and daughter no longer had a car to put them into, a woman offered to bring the items to our house; she was headed for Houston to visit her son and was pulling a trailer of furniture. The EMT was as baffled as everybody else. “Nobody walks away from something like this,” he said.

I was to learn of these events several hours later, when my wife phoned me. I was in the grocery store with our six-year-old son, and when I saw my wife’s number my first thought was that she was calling to tell me she was running late, because she always is.

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to say hello, “where are you?”

Thus her first tender steps into explaining what had occurred. An accident, she said. A kind of a big fender-bender, really. Nobody hurt, but the car was out of commission; I’d need to come get them.

I wasn’t nice about this. Part of the dynamic in our marriage is the unstated fact that I am a better driver than my wife. I have never been in an accident; my one and only speeding ticket was issued when the first George Bush was president. About every two years my wife does something careless in a parking lot that costs a lot of money, and she has received so many tickets that she has been forced to retake driver’s education—and those are just the tickets I know about. The rules of modern marriage do not include confiscating your wife’s car keys, but more than once I have considered doing this.

“A fender-bender,” I repeated. Christ almighty, this again.“How bad is it?”

“Everybody’s fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“I get that. You said that already.” I was in the cereal aisle; my son was bugging me to buy a box of something much too sweet. I tossed it into the cart.

“What about the car?”

“Um, it kind of . . . rolled.”

I imagined a Labrador retriever lazily rotating onto his back in front of the fireplace. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me.” “It’s okay, really,” my wife said.

“Do you mean it rolled over?”

“It happened kind of fast. Totally no big deal, though.”

It sounded like a huge deal. “Let me see if I have this right. You were driving and the car rolled over.”

“Iris wouldn’t blow her nose. I was getting her a Kleenex. You know how she is. The doctors say she’s absolutely fine.”

“What doctors?” It was becoming clear that she was in a state of shock.

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. It’s very small. I’m not even sure you’d call it a hospital.

Everybody’s been so nice.”

And so on. By the time the call ended, I had some idea of the seriousness, though not completely. Gonzales was three hours away. I abandoned my grocery cart, raced home, got on the phone, found somebody to look after our son, and got in my car. Several more calls followed, each adding a piece to the puzzle, until I was able to conclude that my wife and daughter were alive but should be dead. I knew this, but I didn’t feel it. For the moment I was locked into the project of retrieving them from the small town where they’d been stranded. It was after ten o’clock when I pulled into the driveway of Gonzales Memorial Hospital, a modern building the size of a suburban dental office. I did not see my wife, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out over the empty fields behind it. I raced inside, and there was Iris. She was slender and tan from a month in the Texas sunshine, and wearing a yellow T-shirt dress. She had never looked more beautiful, and it was this beauty that brought home the magnitude of events. I threw my arms around her, tears rising in my throat; I had never been so happy to see anybody in my life. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn’t know; one of the nurses directed us outside. I found myself unable to take a hand off my daughter; some part of me needed constant reassurance of her existence. I saw my wife standing at the edge of the lot, facing away. I called her name, she turned, and the two of us headed toward her.

As my wife tells the story, this was the moment when, as the saying goes, she got God. Once the two of them had been discharged, my wife had stepped outside to call me with this news. But the signal quality was poor, and she abandoned the attempt. I’d be along soon enough.

She found herself, then, standing alone in the Texas night. I do not recall if the weather was clear, but I’d like to think it was, all those fat stars shining down. My wife had been raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, but a series of intertribal squabbles had soured her parents on the whole thing, and apart from weddings and funerals, she hadn’t set foot in a church for years. Yet the outdoor cathedral of a starry Texas night is as good a place as any to communicate with the Almighty, which she commenced to do. In the hours since the accident, as the adrenaline cleared, her recollection of events had led her to a calculus that rewrote everything she thought she knew about the world. Until that night, her vision of a universal deity had been basically impersonal. God, in her mind, was simply too busy to take an interest in individual human affairs. The universe possessed a moral shape, but events were haphazard, unguided by providence. Now, as she contemplated the accident, mentally listing the many ways that she and our daughter should have died and yet did not, she decided this was wrong. Of course God paid attention. Only the intercession of a divine hand could explain such a colossal streak of luck. Likewise did the accident become in her mind a product of celestial design. It was a message; it meant something. She had been placed in a circumstance in which a mother’s greatest fear was about to be realized, then yanked from the brink. Her future emerged in her mind as something given back to her—it was as if she and our daughter had been killed on the highway and then restored to life—and like all supplicants in the wilderness, she asked God what her purpose was, why he’d returned her to the world.

That was the moment when Iris and I emerged from the building and called her name, giving her the answer.

Until that night we were a family that had lived an entirely secular existence. This wasn’t planned; things simply happened that way. My religious background was different from my wife’s, but only by degree. I was raised in the Catholic Church, but its messages were delivered to me in a lethargic and off-key manner that failed to gain much traction. My father did not attend mass—I was led to believe this had something to do with the trauma of his attending Catholic grade school—and my mother, who dutifully took my sister and me to church every Sunday, did not receive communion. Why this should be so I never thought to ask. Always she met us at the rear of the church so that we could make a quick exit “to avoid the traffic.” (There was no traffic.) We never attended a church picnic or drank coffee in the basement after mass or went to Bible study; we socialized with no other families in the parish. Religion was never discussed over the dinner table or anyplace else. I went to just enough Sunday school to meet the minimum requirements for first communion, but because I went to a private school with afternoon activities, I could not attend confirmation class. My mother struck a deal with the priest. If I met with him for a couple of hours to discuss religious matters, I could be confirmed. I had no idea why I was doing any of this or what it meant, only that I needed to select a new name, taken from the saints. I chose Cornelius, not because I knew who he was but because that was the name of my favorite character in Planet of the Apes.

Within a couple of years I was off to boarding school, and my life as a Roman Catholic, nominal as it was, came to an end. During a difficult period in my midtwenties, I briefly flirted with church attendance, thinking it might offer me some comfort and direction, but I found it just as stultifying and embarrassing as I always had, full of weird sexual obsessions, exclusionary politics, and a deep love of hocus-pocus, overlaid with a doctrine of obedience that was complete anathema to my newly independent self. If asked, I would have said that I believed in God—one never really loses those mental contours once they’re established—but that organized religious practice struck me as completely infantile. When my wife and I were married, a set of odd circumstances led us to choose an Anglican priest to officiate, but this was a decision we regretted, and when our daughter was born, the subject of baptism never came up. Essentially, we viewed ourselves as too smart for religion. I’ll put it another way. Religion was for people who wanted to stay children all their lives. We didn’t. We were the grown-ups.

In the aftermath of the accident, and the event that I now think of as “the revelation of the parking lot,” all this went out the window. I was not half as sure as my wife that God had interceded; I’m a skeptic and always will be. But it was also the case that I was due for a course correction. In my midforties, I had yet to have anything truly bad happen to me. The opposite was true: I’d done tremendously well. At the university where I taught, I’d just been promoted to full professor. A trilogy of novels I had begun writing on a lark had been purchased for scads of money. We’d just bought a new house we loved, and my daughter had been admitted to a terrific school, where she’d be starting in the fall. My children were happy and healthy, and my newfound financial success had allowed my wife to quit her stressful job as a high school teacher to look after our family and pursue her interests. It had been a long, hard climb, but we’d made it—more than made it—and I spent a great deal of time patting myself on the back for this success. I’d gone out hunting and brought back a mammoth.

Everything was right as rain.

In hindsight, this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away, and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does. In version one, the universe is a stone-cold place. Life is a series of accumulations—friends, lovers, children, memories, the contents of your 401(k)—followed by a rapid casting off (i.e., you die). Your wife is just somebody you met at a party; your children are biological accretions of yourself; your affection for them is nothing more than a bit of well-engineered firmware to guarantee the perpetuation of the species. All pleasures are sensory, since nothing goes deeper than the senses, and pain, whether psychological or physical, is meaningless bad news you can only endure till it’s over.

Version two assumes that life, with all its vicissitudes, possesses an organized pattern of meaning. Grief means something, joy means something, love means something. This meaning isn’t always obvious and is sometimes maddeningly elusive; had my wife and daughter been killed that afternoon on the highway, I would have been hard-pressed to take solace in religion’s customary clichés. (It is likely that the only thing that would have prevented me from committing suicide, apart from my own physical cowardice, would have been my son, into whom I would have poured all my love and sorrow.) But it’s there if you look for it, and the willingness to search—whether this search finds expression in religious ritual or attentive care for one’s children or a long run through falling autumn leaves—is what is meant, I think, by faith.

But herein lies the problem: we don’t generally come to these things on our own. Somebody has to lay the groundwork, and the best way to accomplish this is with a story, since that’s how children learn most things. My Catholic upbringing was halfhearted and unfocused, but it made an impression. At any time during my thirty-year exile from organized religion, I could have stepped into a Sunday mass and recited the entire liturgy by heart. For better or worse, my God was a Catholic God, the God of smells and bells and the BVM and the saints and all the rest, and I didn’t have to build this symbolic narrative on my own. My wife is much the same; I have no doubt that the image of the merciful deity she addressed in the parking lot came straight off a stained-glass window, circa 1975. Yet out of arrogance or laziness or the shallow notion that modern, freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for themselves, we’d given our daughter none of it. We’d left her in the dark forest of her own mind, and what she’d concluded was that there was no God at all.

This came about in the aftermath of our move to Texas—a very churchy place. My daughter was entering the first grade; my son was still being hauled around in a basket. Houston is a sophisticated and diverse city, with great food, interesting architecture, and a vivid cultural life, but the suburbs are the suburbs, and the neighborhood where we settled was straight out of Betty Friedan’s famous complaint: horseshoe streets of more or less identical one-story, 2,500square-foot houses, built on reclaimed ranchland in the 1960s. A neighborhood of 2.4 children per household, fathers who raced off to work each morning before the dew had dried, moms who pushed their kids around in strollers and passed out snacks at soccer games and volunteered at the local elementary school. We were, after ten years living in a dicey urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, eager for something a little calmer, more controlled, and we’d chosen the house in a hurry, not realizing what we were getting into. Among our first visitors was an older woman from down the block. She presented us with a plate of brownies and proceeded to list the denominational affiliations of each of our neighbors. I was, to put it mildly, pretty weirded-out. I counted about a dozen churches within just a few miles of my house—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ—and all of them were huge. People talked about Jesus as if he were sitting in their living room, flipping through a magazine; nearly every day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read, Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned. Stapled to the local religious culture was a socially conservative brand of politics I found abhorrent. To hear homosexuality described as an “abomination” felt like I’d parachuted into the Middle Ages. I couldn’t argue with my neighbors’ devotion to their offspring—the neighborhood revolved around children—but it seemed to me that Jesus Christ, whoever he was, had been pretty clear on the subject of loving everybody.

This was the current my daughter swam in every day at school. Not many months had passed before one of her friends, the daughter of evangelicals, expressed concern that Iris was going to hell. Those were the words she used: “I don’t want you to go to hell, Iris.” The girl in question was adorable, with ringlets of dark hair, perfect manners, and lovely, doting parents. No doubt she thought she was doing Iris a kindness when she urged her to attend church with her family to avoid this awful fate. But that wasn’t how I saw the situation. I dropped to a defensive crouch and came out swinging. “Tell her that hell’s a fairy tale,” I said. “Tell her to leave you alone.”

The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing view of creation—less hell, more heaven—and over time my wife and I tried to do just that. But when you’re seven years old, “love your neighbor as yourself” sounds a lot like “don’t forget to brush your teeth”—words to live by but hardly a description of humanity’s place in the cosmos. As the playground evangelism continued, so did my daughter’s contempt, and why wouldn’t it? She’d learned it from me. I don’t recall when she announced she was an atheist. All I remember was that she did this from the back seat of the car, sitting in a booster chair.

After the accident, my daughter spent the better part of a week in her closet.

From time to time I’d stop by and say, “Are you still in there?” Or “Hey, it’s

Daddy, how’s it going?” Or “Let me know if you need anything.”

“All good!” she said. “Thanks!”

There were things to sort out: an insurance claim to file, a replacement vehicle to acquire, arrangements to make for our summer vacation, for which we’d be leaving in two weeks. My wife and I were badly shaken. We had entered a new state: we were a family that had been nearly annihilated. Every few hours one of us would burst into tears. Genesis 2:24 speaks of spouses “cleaving” to each other, and that was what we did: we cleaved. We badly wanted to comfort our daughter, but she had made herself completely unreachable. Of course she’d be confused and angry; in a careless moment, her mother had nearly killed her. But when we probed her on the matter, she insisted this wasn’t so. Everything was peachy, she said. She just liked it in the closet. No worries, she’d be along soon.

A day later we received a phone call from the pastor whose car my wife’s had struck. At first I thought he was calling to get my insurance information, which I apologetically offered. He explained that the damage was minor, nothing even worth fixing, and that he had called to see if my wife and daughter were all right. Perfectly, I said, omitting my daughter’s temporary residence among her shirts and pants, and thanked him profusely.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “I saw the whole thing. Nobody should have survived.”

He wasn’t the first to say this. The M-word was bandied about freely by virtually everyone we knew. The following afternoon we were visited by the woman who had collected Iris’s belongings: two cardboard boxes of books and clothes covered with highway grime and shards of glass, a suitcase that looked like it had been run over, and her violin, which had escaped its launch into the gulley unharmed. We chatted in the living room, replaying events. Like the pastor, she seemed a little dazed. When the conversation reached a resting place, she explained that she couldn’t leave until she’d seen Iris.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

A minute later she appeared with our daughter. The woman rose from her chair, stepped toward Iris, and wrapped her in a hug. This display made my daughter visibly uncomfortable, as it would anyone. Why was this stranger hugging her? The woman’s face was full of inexpressible emotion; her eyes filmed with tears. My daughter endured her embrace as long as she could, then backed away.

“God protected you. You know that, don’t you?”

My daughter’s eyes darted around warily. “I guess.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful life. I just know it.”

We exchanged email addresses, knowing we would never use them, and said our goodbyes in the yard. When we returned to the house, Iris was still standing at the base of the stairs. I had never seen her look so freaked-out.

“God had nothing to do with it,” she said. “So don’t ask me to say he did.” And with that she headed back upstairs to her closet.

The psychologist, whom Iris nicknamed “Dr. Cuckoo,” told us not to worry. Iris was a levelheaded girl; hiding in the closet was a perfectly natural response to such a trauma. The best thing, she said, was to give our daughter space. She’d talk about it when the time was right.

I doubted this. Levelheaded, yes, but that was the problem. Doing a double gainer with a twist at 70 miles an hour, without so much as dropping your iPhone, was nothing that the rational mind could parse on its own. The psychologist also didn’t know my daughter like I did. Iris can be the most stubborn person on earth. This is one of her cardinal virtues when, for instance, she has a test and two papers due on the same day. She’ll stay up till 3:00 A.M. no matter how many times we tell her to go to bed, and get A’s on all three, proving herself right in the end. But she can also hold a grudge like nobody I’ve ever met, and a grudge with the cosmos is no simple matter. How do you forgive the world for being godless? When she declared her atheism from the booster seat, I’d thought two things. First, How cute! The world’s only atheist who eats from the kids’ menu! I couldn’t have been more charmed if she’d said she’d been reading Schopenhauer. The second thing was, This can’t last. How could a girl who still believed in the tooth fairy fail to come around to the idea of a cosmic protector? And yet she didn’t. Her atheism had hardened to such a degree that any mention of spiritual matters made her snort milk out her nose. By inserting nothing in its stead, we had inadvertently given her the belief that she was the author of her own fate, and my wife’s newfound faith in a God-watched universe was as much a betrayal as crashing their car into the guardrail over a minor argument. It was a philosophical reversal my daughter couldn’t process, and it left her feeling utterly alone.

My wife and I felt perfectly awful. In due course our daughter emerged, with one condition: she didn’t want to discuss the accident. Not then, not ever. This seemed unhealthy, but you can’t make a twelve-year-old girl talk about something she doesn’t want to. We left for Cape Cod, where we’d rented a house for the month of July. I’d just turned in a manuscript to my editor and under ordinary circumstances would have been looking forward to the time away, but the trip seemed like too much data. Everyone was antsy and out of sorts, and the weather was horrible. The only person who enjoyed himself was our son, who was too young to comprehend the scope of events and was happy drawing pictures all day.

The school year resumed, and with it life’s ordinary rhythms. My wife began looking around for a church to attend. To say this was a sore spot with Iris would be a gross understatement. She hated the idea and said so. “Fine with me,” she said, “if you want to get all Jesus-y. Just leave me out of it.”

It didn’t happen right away. God may have shown his face to my wife in the parking lot, but he’d failed to share his address. We were stymied by the things we always had been: our jaundiced view of organized religion, the conservative social politics of most mainline denominations, the discomfiting business of praying aloud in the presence of people we didn’t know. And what, exactly, did we believe? Faith asks for a belief in God, which we had; religion asks for more, a great deal of it literal. Christian ritual was the most familiar, but neither of us believed that the Bible was the word of God or that Jesus Christ was a supernatural being who walked on water when he wasn’t turning it into wine. Certainly somebody by that name had existed; he’d gotten a lot of ink. He’d done and said some remarkable stuff, scared the living shit out of an imperial authority, and given humanity two thousand years’ worth of things to think about. But the son of God? Really? That Jesus was no more or less divine than the rest of us seemed to me the core of his message.

We wanted something, but we didn’t know what. Something with a little grace, a bit of wonder, the feeling of taking a few minutes out of each week to acknowledge how fortunate we were. We decided to give Unitarianism a shot. From the website, it seemed safe enough. Over loud objections, we made Iris come with us. The service was overseen by two ministers, a married couple, who took turns speaking from the altar, which seemed about as holy as the podium in a college classroom. After the hokey business of lighting the lamp, they droned on for half an hour about the importance of friendship. There were almost no kids in the congregation, or even anybody close to our age. It was a sea of whitehaired heads. After the service, everyone lingered in the lobby over coffee and stale cookies, but we beat a hasty retreat.

“Well, that was awkward,” Iris said.

It was. It had felt like sitting in the audience at a talk show. We tried a few more times, but our interest flagged. When, on the fourth Sunday, Iris found me making French toast in the kitchen in my bathrobe and asked why we weren’t going, I told her that I guessed church wasn’t for us after all. “Thank God,” she said, and laughed.

In the end, as in the scriptures, it was a child who led us. To our surprise, our son, Tuck, had become a secret Episcopalian. His school is affiliated with an Episcopal parish, and students attend chapel once a week. We’d always assumed this was the sort of wishy-washy, nondenominational fare most places dish out, but we were wrong. One day, apropos of nothing, as I was driving him home from school, he announced that he believed in Jesus.

“Really?” I said. “When did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “It just makes sense to me. Pastor

Lisa’s nice. We should go sometime.”

“To church, you mean?”

“Sure,” he said. “I think that would be great.”

Just like that, the matter was settled. We now go every week—the three of us. St. Stephen’s is located in a diverse neighborhood in Houston, and much of the congregation is gay or lesbian. There are protocols, but very loose ones, and the church has open communion and a terrific choir. Pastor Lisa is a woman in her fifties with a gray pageboy who wears blue jeans and Birkenstocks under her robe and gives a hug that feels like falling into bed. She knows I was raised Catholic, and she laughed when I told her that I didn’t mind that she “got some of the words wrong.” I have my doubts, as always, but it seems like a fine church to have them in. My son finds some of the service boring, as all children do, but he likes communion, which he calls his “force field for the week.” He has asked to be baptized next fall.

Will Iris be there? I hope so. But it’s her choice. She has yet to go with us. I know this makes her sad, and it makes me sad, too. It’s the first thing the three of us have ever done without her.

Three years after the accident, in spring 2012, I failed a blood test at my annual physical, then failed a biopsy and found myself, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, facing a surgery that would tell me if I was going to see my children grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe not. We were spending the summer on Cape Cod, where we’d bought a house, and in late July my wife and I flew back to Texas for my operation. When I awoke in the recovery room, my wife was standing over me, smiling. I was so dopey with painkillers that focusing on her face felt like trying to carry a piano up the stairs. “It’s over,” she said. “The margins were clear. You’re going to be okay.”

Two days after my surgery, I was instructed to walk. This sounded impossible, but I was determined. With my wife holding my arm, I shuffled up and down the hall of the ward, gritting my teeth against the discomfort of the catheter, which was the weirdest thing I’d ever felt. The last two months had pummeled me to psychological pieces, but the worst was over. Once again the car had rolled and we had walked away.

From the far end of the hall, a woman was approaching. Like a pair of ocean liners, we headed toward each other in slow motion. She was very thin and wearing a silk robe; like me, she was pulling an IV stand. Some greeting was called for, and she was the first to speak.

“May I give you something?”

We were within just a few feet of each other, and I saw what the situation was. Her body was leaving her; death was in her face.

“Of course.”

She gestured downward, indicating the pockets of her robe. “Pick one.”

I chose the left. With an uncertain hand she withdrew a wad of white cotton, tied with a bow. She placed it in my hand. It was an angel, made from a dish towel. To this she’d affixed a heart-shaped piece of laminated paper printed with these words from the Book of Numbers:

The Lord bless and keep you;

The Lord make his face shine upon you,

And be gracious to you;

May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you; And give you peace.

When I first learned about my illness, a very smart man told me that I should select an object. It could be anything, he said. A piece of jewelry. A spoon. A rock. Since I was a writer, maybe something to do with writing, such as a pen. It didn’t matter what it was. When I was afraid, he said, and thinking that I was going to die, I should take that object in my hand and put my fear inside it.

Wise as his counsel was, I’d never managed to do this. I’d tried one thing and then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

“Bless you,” I said.

Two weeks later I returned to the Cape to complete my recovery. There wasn’t much I could do, but I was glad to be there. A few days before my diagnosis, I had bought a ten-year-old Audi convertible and shipped it north. Iris had just gotten her learner’s permit, and after a week of lounging around the house, I asked her if she’d take me for a drive. The day was sunny and hot. We put the top down and sped north, bisecting the peninsula on a rolling, two-lane road. From the passenger seat, I watched my daughter drive. In the past year a startling change had occurred. Iris wasn’t a kid anymore. She was taller than my wife, with a full, womanly shape. Her facial features had organized into mature proportions. Her hair, a honeyed red, swept away from her face in a stylish arc. She could have been mistaken for a college student, and often was. But the difference was more than physical; to look at my daughter was to know that she was somebody with a private, inner existence. She was standing at the edge of life; everything was ahead of her. All she had to do was let it come.

“How’s it feel?” I asked. She had perfect motorist’s manners: hands at ten and two, shoulders pressed back, eyes on the road. She was wearing large tortoiseshell sunglasses that would have been perfectly at home on Audrey Hepburn’s face. “Okay.”

“Not scary?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

Our destination was a beach on the Cape’s north side, called Sandy Neck. From there, on the clearest days, you can see all the way from Plymouth to Provincetown. We parked and got out of the car and walked to the little platform built to take in the view. I knew we couldn’t stay long; even standing was an effort.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said.

Iris was looking away. “You didn’t. Not really.”

“Well, I was scared. I’m glad you weren’t.”

She thought a moment. “That’s the thing. I knew I should have been. But I wasn’t. I actually feel kind of guilty about that.”

“There’s no reason you should.”

“It’s just . . .” She hunted for the words. “I don’t know. You’re you. I just can’t imagine you not being okay.”

She was wrong. Someday I wouldn’t be. Time and chance would do its work, as it does for all of us. But she didn’t need to hear that from me on a sunny summer day.

“Do you remember the accident?” I asked.

She laughed, a little nervously. “Well, duh.”

“I’ve always wondered. What were you doing in the closet?”

“Not much. Mostly watching Project Runway on my laptop.”

“And being mad at us.”

She shrugged. “That whole God thing really pissed me off. I mean, you guys can believe whatever you want. I just wanted Mom to feel the same way I did.”

“How did you feel?”

She didn’t answer right away. Boats were creeping across the horizon.

“Abandoned.”

We were silent for a time. I had a sudden vision of myself as old—an old man, being taken to the beach by his grown daughter. The dunes, the ocean, the rocky margin where they met—all would be the same, unchanged since I was boy. It was a sad thought, but it also made me happy in a way that seemed new. These things were years away, and with any luck, I would be around to see them.

“Are you doing all right? Do you need to go back?”

I nodded. “Probably I should get off my feet.”

We returned to the car. Three steps ahead of me, Iris moved to the passenger side, opened the door, and got in.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked around. “Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “I’m the driver, aren’t I?”

She was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go. “Yes,” I said. “You are.”

MEGHAN DAUM

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

DOTW 45 - update...

Levi was in a bad state. Floch had tracked down the real Marcel Galliard, only to find the man dead and locked in his own chest freezer. The house had been recently abandoned, and clues were running dry. Being unable to work, he had all the time in the world to drive himself insane. All the time in the world to play out every possible scenario of Eren's abduction. They'd found that the "heart attack" victim, had been paid to call in the emergency. He'd thought it a prank. A stranger having approached him and paid him $100 just to make a simple call to prank his friend. The man didn't even know Levi and Eren both lived in the building, and he'd already spent the cash so there was no way of tracking down the bills he was paid with. The ambulance used to transport Eren was found on the outskirts of the city, the same night Levi had come home. There'd been blood at scene, though it hadn't been Eren's, it was enough to drive the spike of fear deeper into his heart. If Eren had fought, his boyfriend could be out there somewhere in a critical condition. Levi couldn't even sleep without seeing Eren. His dreams never once being kind to him, as Eren blamed him for his death, over and over... For the first month after Eren disappeared, he, Hanji and Anna, and Erwin had all been living together in a "safe" house that Floch had organised. They hadn't had access to the outside world. He'd nearly gone crazy from Hanji mothering him, and Erwin trying to father him. He wasn't a fucking child. He didn't need the guilt of their concern on top of his own guilt. Titan had hated the safe house, so the moment one month was up, Levi had returned back to his apartment. If Eren was out there and trying to get home, then he'd be there waiting for him. Even if it took the rest of his life. * Drenched in blood, Eren stumbled down the dirt road. His body was shaking with shock, his hair wild from lack of care and his bottom lip chewed to something resembling a bloody pulp. The cold night wind seemed to rip through his near naked body, while the knife in his right hand seemed to be the only thing he was acutely aware of. The day he'd been taken from the apartment, his world had been turned upside down. In that moment, it was like someone spinning a mirror in its stand. As it gradually slowed, he was left looking at a sight that disgusted him, as much as it confused him. His father was standing there. His father who'd walked out and left him, was now the one coming for him. He'd thought the man dead, yet he showed up, screaming at him that they had to leave. Bertholdt and Reiner were the ones who were the ones who'd supposed to come for him. He'd say there, through the night and watched the door. The largest and sharpest knife in the house was his only protection. But his father. His father hadn't been expected. The desire to kill the man where stood was only bested by his need to know. And now, he'd give almost everything not to. Still. He'd left with him. He'd written what he needed to Levi, praying that his boyfriend would understand the things he was trying to say. The things he'd written just that little bit bigger without making it too obvious. Given the degree of shock he'd been in, and that he'd had to pull himself out of an impending panic attack, he'd been proud he'd been able to write anything at all. Taken down by elevator, Bertholdt joined them in the narrow space. Again. He didn't understand. Bertholdt had blamed the whole thing on his father. He'd cursed him, and told him end up dead, just like him. So why was the alpha now sullenly following his father's orders? The thoughts in his head wouldn't stop. His breathing ragged, as if he'd already done the runner he was planning too. For nearly fucking decade, he'd thought he was dead. He'd thought the man had forgotten he'd even existed, and that's why he'd up abandoned. Just having his father next to him was enough to make him physically ill, to the point when the elevator doors opened to the ground floor, he'd fainted. Waking up, he was in a small room. It was basic. Very basic, but he counted his blessings that it wasn't a basement. Sitting on the end of his bed, his father was reading... like he was some fucking right to be there. Trying to find his voice, nothing came forth. He wanted to scream, or at least tell his father to let him go. With a heavy sigh, the man closed the book he'd been reading. The look on his face unreadable as he turned to him. This was the face of the man who'd hurt him. Who'd killed his mother and beat him for being an omega. The face of the man who wanted to sell him off. Who considered him defective and dirty for having a second dynamic he couldn't help. The face of the man who'd fucking ruined his life "Eren, I hoped we wouldn't meet like this. I'm sure you must have some questions" Yeah. Like how the fuck did he get out of here?! And where was here? That was about it. He didn't want to know what his father had been doing, and he didn't care to know. The man had left him when he'd needed him the most "You're right. There are some things words cannot say alone. Not when those are listening. Perhaps it would be easier to show you" Eren wanted to protest, but again, nothing came out. His father rose from the end of the bed, walking to stand next to where he sat. Reaching out his hand, Eren recoiled from touch. His face filled with disgust. Just the scent of his father was enough to have him vomiting in his mouth "Eren, either you come with me, or we have you moved to less agreeable accomodations until you learn your place" Learn his place? He knew his fucking place. It was in Shinganshima, with Titan and Levi. It was waking up in Levi's arms, and cuddling on the sofa. This place. Was not his place "You have until three to decide, then I'll be deciding for you. One. Two..." Not giving him any time to think, Eren scrambled from the bed before his father could say three "Excellent. Zeke's training was effective, I see" Eren's throat tightened at the mention of Zeke's name. How did his father know about that? Or how Zeke had trained him... "You will follow me. You will be silent and if you run, we will chain you. Do I make myself understood?" Unable to speak, Eren nodded "Come along then" Blinded as the excited the room, he found himself in some kind of world that looked like it'd been lifted from a movie. The whole area was set in a wide circle, various people coming and going from the stark white buildings. Moving towards the building opposite them, Eren followed. There was something about this whole place that scent a chill through him. This wasn't good place. It felt cold and empty. Like everyone was here, didn't want to be. Trailing after his father, his bare feet froze against the damp grass. Trust Grisha to ruin everything he could for him, grass now included. Despite the humble outside of the building, Eren smelt disinfectant as he walked into what seemed to be some kind of laboratory. Once again, everything was too white, and the glass was just way too clean. With no time to stop and take it all in, he followed blindly until they reached a set of heavy dark doors, the silver handles looking imposing as fuck. He definitely wasn't supposed to be here. Taking two steps back, his heart was pounding hard enough for him to hear it. Turning and catching sight of him, Grisha covered the distance between them, grabbing him by the arm and yanking him forward "You will obey me, or they will kill you" What the fuck. Whoever "they" were, made plenty of empty fucking threats and promises. He was supposed to be dead already, not in some kind of fucked up dream world where his father was alive. Gripping his arm so hard that it hurt, he was pulled to the doors, Grisha giving a single knock before entering. Inside the room was decked in black. Even the plants either side or the desk seemed to be black. The space feeling so heavy and oppressive, it was hard to remain standing. Seated at the long oval table that filled most of the room, 11 sets of eyes were on him as he pulled over and manhandled down into a chair, his father taking the seat next to him "Eren Yeager" His name was said like it was a hair ball being coughed up. The old man at the end of the table looked slightly familiar, but he couldn't place it. Seated to his left, were Reiner and Bertholdt, both alphas looking like scared rabbits, rather than killers "Eren. We understand you've been causing some problems for all of us. Under your father's recommendation, we have decided to liberate you from your current life. Do you understand?" He understood nothing. Glaring back at the man seated directly opposite him, he crossed his arms "Grisha. You assured me the boy would talk" "And he will" "You know the penalty if he does not" Under the table, his father kicked him. What were they? 12? "It has come to our attention that you have been communicating with the Shinganshima Police Department, and with a certain officer Floch Forster" Floch had a last name? Dah. Of course people had last names "Eren, you seem to be under the impression we are bad people. We are not, and we hope that in time, you will see the mistakes you have made. Grisha, return him to his room" That was it? He was dragged up here, for that? Fucking seriously? He had more questions that fucking answers, and he still had no idea where the fuck he was. Was this a cult? Had his father really abandoned him, to join this fucking cult? He'd seen enough TV to know cults were filled with weirdos, and that these things never worked out well for anyone involved. In the movies, everyone always ended up dead with a lone survivor walking off into the distance as the place burned to the ground. Is that what he'd been caught up in? Escorted back to his room, his father didn't stay. Maybe he got that Eren wanted absolutely nothing to do with him... or more likely, he had to go grovel to whoever those people in that room had been... If the alpha thought he was simply going to take all of this, without a word of real explanation, he was sadly mistaken. For the first week Eren was kept isolated from everyone. His father brought him meals, and took him to what seemed to be a communal shower block. The number of omegas in the place took him by surprise, as did the number of children. It didn't look like a place for children, and none of them looked happy about it. No one talked either. Normally a pregnant omega took comfort in being with other omega's, but here, everyone tried to avoid everyone else. Something was going on here and he didn't like it. Nor was he going to let things keep going like this. His own omega was distraught from their smells, leaving him constantly on edge. He still hadn't been able to find his voice, but he had found that his door locked from the outside, which was useless, but his window. His window was wonky in its frame. That he might be able to use. His plans were dashed when he was moved into the same room as his father. Ninety percent of the room was filled from floor to ceiling with medical technology that meant nothing to him. Two small beds sat at the rear of the room, once covered with books. Locked in with his father, the first thing Grisha did was throw his arms around him, holding him tight like a loving father would "It's safe to talk here. I never meant to get you involved with any of this" Well that was a load of shit. If he hadn't wanted him involved, he could have fucking left him with Levi "Look, you may not believe me, but all I wanted was to keep you safe. What happened with your mother... I wish it could have been avoided. And then with Zeke. Zeke did well. He kept you safe and hidden..." Shoving his father off him, he bared his teeth as he snarled "Eren..." Trying to form his words, nothing happened. Instead he stood there like the angry idiot he was "Eren, it's ok. I know you must have a lot of questions, but for now, know that I had to drive you away. I had to make sure you wouldn't track me down, or come after me. I'm sorry for what happened. I was a fool. I was a coward. I tried to find a way out of this all... but now... no. Never mind. Just know, that if you do as they say, things will go much smoother... this... this was all I could do to keep you alive. Read the books on your bed, then you'll understand" Eren ignored the books for as long as he could. He couldn't calm down with his father acting so "normal" around him. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing about this place was normal. On the dresser that sat between his and his father's bed, were photos. Photos Eren felt Grisha had no right to have. Not only were they of his mother, but also of Zeke and Zeke's mother. It was bad enough that they were on display, but out of all the photos in the small collection, most of them were of him. Including recent photos of him with Levi. He'd suspected they were being watched, but there was no real evidence, other than Bertholdt working with Levi, and he hadn't known about that until months after it'd first started. Photos of him coming out of Krista's office. In Paradis. At the hospital. At Moblit's wake. The most recent was of him at the Charity Ball with Levi on his arm. It was sickening. He didn't want anything to do with Grisha. He'd rather... he'd rather be trapped in a room with Reiner and Bertholdt than sharing this room with his father. At least he knew the pair wanted him dead. He knew what they wanted from him, and who they were. His father on the other hand was a stranger from his nightmares. He probably wished Eren had been wasted across the sheets rather than ever be conceived. His father noticed that he hadn't read the books on his bed almost immediately. The man held off saying anything, until Eren was woken in the middle of the night. His father already awake, but the knocking on their door couldn't be ignored. Beckoned to follow, Eren was freezing in the thin white clothes he'd been gifted. He didn't even have time to slide his shoes on before he was being lead through the central courtyard area. Yeah. They were definitely in some kind of cult. Called to deliver a pup, Eren nearly bolted from the room the moment he realised what was going on. The poor woman had been left to ordeal everything alone, while two stocky alphas stood guard outside her room. Directed to hold her hand, and support her, he was grateful he didn't have to be down the other again. Birth might be a miracle, but staring at people's private parts was gross. Just because everyone had them, didn't mean they needed to show them off or anything... and he had no idea how people could work with those areas... it was not for him. Having been left until nearly the final moment, the female omega was a mess, the birth over in three pushes, and the baby a healthy girl. He was so fucking angry. The girl was taken from the mother with one of the waiting alphas like it was a normal thing to do. The woman was crying for her pup and he couldn't fucking do anything about it. Once his father had made sure he was alright, they'd been escorted back to their room, and his father had pushed the books he'd been ignore into his hands. He didn't know why he needed to read them, not when the moment he figured out how to get out of wherever he was, he was gone. He'd done some fucked up things in his life, but whatever this was... he didn't want any part of this. * Levi may have overindulged with his drinking the previous night. Though, he didn't know if was classed as overindulging, when he was still drinking. Erwin had decided he was fucking moving in 7 weeks after Eren's disappearance. It wasn't like Levi was still falling apart. He would have had to stop falling apart for that to happen. He'd plastered as many missing posters of Eren as he could onto their social media accounts, as well as printing physical copies, and distributing them everywhere he could. Each day got harder. Waking up without Eren by his side. Without his sleepy smile. His soft purrs and messy bedhead. The way he reached out for him if Levi moved away. The way Eren would smile as he snuggled into him, and would mumble his name in his sleep. His phone was constantly by his side in case Eren found a way to called him. Floch was still looking for Eren, without making things too obvious. He'd been sideswiped while driving, barely able to prevent his car from rolling, shortly after the discovery of Marcel's body. Floch was now working personally under Dot Pixis as an internal review was being conducted through the precinct. Being on the outside, he had no way of knowing what had been discovered, and the daily calls to the man in the hopes of news, had become weekly instead. Every time a dead body was found and reported on the news, Levi's heart would break a little more. He didn't want to find Eren dead. He just wanted to find him. He wanted things to go back to how they'd been... his apartment resembled more of a pigsty than a abode. The dishes sitting in the sink for days at a time, while the only actually shopping he did was for Titan, or printer ink when he'd run out from printing missing person flyers. Eren's room was just the way he'd left it. Erwin was sleeping on the sofa, with the hopes that he'd just fuck off back home. A fine layer of dust had settled over everything, but if he washed Eren's blankets, he'd be washing away Eren's scent, and he wasn't strong enough to do that. He needed his omega. Or he needed to make enough noise that Reiner and Bertholdt would come for him. He'd named and shamed them on social media, and still, nothing had happened. Eren had said they'd be after him once he was dead, yet it seemed more like once they'd gotten Eren, they couldn't give two fucks about everyone else...

[schaaadenfreude]

give me a love

sixx: a.m. is a very Julian kind of band. this is a direct continuation of missing you; part 2 of ???.

content warning: blood and descriptions of injury and death.

Shuttered windows and locked, warded doors greeted Julian when he got to Kye’s shop. He had almost expected for Asra to be there, and was grateful that wasn’t the case. Since meeting Kye, the urgency of his pursuing their witch-friend had waned; and right now, he was not in the mood for a confrontation. Not with Asra. He paused outside the back door of the shop and considered taking Kye’s advice to leave Vesuvia altogether. Pasha might still be here, but with Kye… without them, he didn’t know he could bear to stay where there were so many memories.

When Julian touched the knob of the back door, the magical ward tingled even though his glove, then faded. He let himself smile while he withdrew the key they had given back to him right after, as they’d called it, ‘introducing him’ to the shop wards. He’d been so shocked that Kye had returned it. Even more shocked that they had made it so the wards let him through as they did the two magicians who made this shop their home.

Once he’d gotten the back door open, Zenobi pushed off his shoulder. He had been aware of the raven’s unhappy presence the whole way back from the palace. Not that Zenobi had been an unpleasant passenger; he’d nudged Julian’s cheek or muttered a warning into his head whenever something came up on his blind side that he needed to avoid. But every time Zenobi had put words into Julian’s mind, they had come flavored with fear and anxiety. He recognized that feeling, too; it always gripped him when he knew something earth-shatteringly painful was about to happen.

It made him wonder what would happen to a familiar whose human bondmate died. Would Zenobi die, too? Had that been the case, he thought Kye would have kept their familiar with them. That they had sent Zenobi away made him think maybe not. Would the raven feel what Kye felt, even if he didn’t die of it? Julian found himself following Zenobi upstairs; trailing after the last connection he had to Kye. But all Zenobi did was perch miserably in the rafters, all his feathers slicked back and eyes shut.

That left Julian standing in the middle of the empty room, staring blankly at the overstuffed bed and trying not to think of the times, few but clear in his memory, he’d woken up in it next to Kye. If he could be grateful for anything, it was that he hadn’t taken any of those wakings for granted. He’d been acutely aware that any interaction with Kye might have been the last. He’d tried to burn every kiss, every playful nip, every heated caress, into his mind. Every time they called him petnames in Sulmani. Every time his birth-name had fallen from their lips.

He would drive himself mad if he stayed here. Not that Julian wasn’t already mad. He was fairly certain that threshold had been passed years ago. But he’d go madder if he stayed. Go beyond any semblance of normalcy. But really, what was the harm of that now? The purpose that had driven him to the ends of the known world was moot. He was acquitted of the crime he still didn’t know he hadn’t actually committed; there was no need to flee the law. And if he really wanted to confront Asra, all he had to do was stay here. Something told Julian that, after this, the witch wouldn’t be running anywhere anymore.

Before Julian could decide to leave, Zenobi, whom he’d been watching in the corner of his eye, snapped his head up. The raven made a queer gurgling sound that quickly increased to a frantic croak as he launched from the rafter and threw himself at the shuttered window. Black-flecked white wings beat at the shutters, dark talons scrabbling.

That’s it, then, he thought, reeling. The pain did not immediately rise up to take him, as half expected; that was, until Zenobi’s cries cut off abruptly and he collapsed into a boneless heap on the windowsill. It wasn’t until Julian’s knees hit the floor that he even realized they had given out; the ache was inconsequential, compared to the tidal wave of grief that roared up in him. And since there was no one, not even Zenobi, there to see, he wept.

He’d thought himself broken before. And he had been, but then Kye had appeared in his life and begun piecing him back together with relentless care. He’d been so worried about hurting them, about ruining their life, that he hadn’t realized what they were doing to his. Hadn’t realized until too late whose heart would be the one broken. Julian wondered with a twist of self-deprecation if he would ever learn his lesson. Or would he just keep falling in love until there was nothing left to him but shreds.

It was almost a disappointment when the tears ran dry and his breath steadied. It was not an end to the pain, not at all, but his accursed body refused to vent any more of his sorrow. It left his mind fogged and numb, unwilling (or maybe just unable) to think clearly. Probably it was that all thought and emotion left in him was drawn into the jagged pit that had opened in his soul. It was a familiar void, one that had haunted him for years; Kye had begun mending it, but now all their carefully-placed stitches had torn free and it gaped wider than ever. It was a wonder his entire being did not just implode on itself.

Go.

Julian lifted his head slowly, blinking to clear his vision, and was nonplussed to see Zenobi standing again. All the raven’s feathers were roused, looking almost like a caricature of a bird; it would have been comical under other circumstances.

When all Julian did was look at him bleakly, Zenobi bobbed urgently up and down and repeated, Go. Must go. Let’s go!

“Whe–” Julian’s voice was as rough as Zenobi’s own cries. He cleared his throat. “Where?”

Hurt. Need help. Must go!

“There’s no help for me,” he told the raven.

Impatiently, Zenobi snapped his beak. Not you!

What? He frowned at Zenobi. He couldn’t mean… could he? A little anger stirred the apathy that had begun to fall across Julian’s mind like a blanket of snow. If this was a symptom of whatever happened to familiars shorn from their bondmates, he wished Zenobi wouldn’t bother Julian with it.

Suddenly, Zenobi stilled. When he spoke into Julian’s mind again, it was in a very different voice. Come quickly, please. Zenobi can lead you. Hurry.

Chills broke out across Julian’s skin. That couldn’t mean what it seemed. It couldn’t. He took a breath that sliced like glass shards and asked, “Where?”

In answer, Zenobi took off from the windowsill. He circled the room while Julian struggled to his feet, then swooped down the stairs again. Julian followed like a man possessed, heedless of anything except the fluttering white shape ahead of him. Heedless until Zenobi banked sharply down an alley, anyway, and the familiar sound of many boots marching in synchrony registered. He flattened himself against the alley wall and watched the guards pass with a narrowed eye.

Hardly a beat passed after the guards were gone before someone deeper into the alley hissed, “Ilya!”

Julian whipped around to face the sound. A stranger stepped out of the shadows that clung to the alley walls even in broad daylight, and which thickened with the falling dark. Before Julian could do more than tense in preparation to either fight or flee from this stranger who knew his name, the stranger became Asra between one breath and the next. It was all Julian could do to blink in shock – as much because he could barely tell it was Asra as because of the witch’s sudden appearance. Dirt – soot, something – smudged Asra’s face, which wore a ravaged expression. His hands were smeared with something more liquid. Blood, they were covered in blood. And as the witch limped up to him, Julian caught a whiff of scorched fabric.

“Kye?” The name escaped Julian’s lips before he was even aware he’d begun to speak. Asra didn’t stop, just pressed on until he was close enough to grab Julian by the arm.

“This way,” the witch said tightly.

Ahead, the alley dead-ended in a wooden fence. But Asra paid no attention to the fence, just plowed right on and passed through the wooden planks. Julian had no time to balk; Asra’s grip on his arm was as tight as ever that serpent of his could squeeze. He passed through the barrier as well with only a faint tingle of magic over his skin to show for it. Illusion, of course. He should have known.

But there was no time to consider the witch’s tricks. Julian barely noticed the fence a few feet beyond that was nearly identical to the illusory one; barely noticed the glowing ball of silver-blue light that hovered at shoulder height, attached to nothing. He only really noticed Kye. Not that it was any easier to recognize them than it had been to recognize Asra.

“I healed a little bit,” Asra was saying in a hurried whisper. “But I don’t have enough magic to heal and keep us hidden at the same time.”

Julian was stripping off his gloves and dropping to one knee in front of Kye’s crumpled form before Asra was done speaking. As he did, he smelled burned hair again, flavored with an acrid tang he hadn’t smelled in years, not since –

And then he was on the battlefield again. The battle was hours over, and he’d been sent out with other apprentices to find any of their wounded worth saving. Most of them weren’t. The enemy’d had mages in their corp, and those had lobbed some kind of exploding fireball that had taken out, as far as the older medics could tell, as many of the enemy’s own people than it had of theirs. Julian thought he’d never be able to get the smell of burning flesh and hair out of his nose.

“Ilya!” Asra’s hand clamping down on his shoulder roused Julian from the flashback, leaving him gasping like a landed fish. The faintest echoes of the groans of mortally wounded men left to die in the mud rang in his ears for a moment longer.

Turning his attention to his current patient took an effort that made his gut churn. He’d seen head trauma worse than this before; not even a good helm could protect from a mace or axe swung hard enough. But seeing the right side of Kye’s head splattered with blood made a queer buzzing fill his head, putting everything at a distance that was as unsettling as it was necessary. He couldn’t break down, not now. Kye needed him to be strong – to be stronger than he really was. But for them, he’d do the impossible. He cradled their face gently between his hands.

He expected pain. He accepted it; accepted the broken ribs that threatened to puncture a lung, accepted the stabbing pain that nearly hamstrung his right leg. But the agony that crawled over his skull put those pains to shame. It had been a few years since he’d seen anything out of his right eye, but an aura of scintillating red swirled in his mind from it.

Something cool and smooth like a brook fed by snowmelt coursed through him. He was on his back, Asra hovering over him with a desperate expression that just did not belong on his face. What had Julian just been doing?

“I’m sorry, Ilya,” Asra whispered. Julian only realized that what he felt was Asra’s magic when that comforting coolness fled as the with took his hand off Julian’s forehead. “I should have figured that would happen. Can you sit up?”

Memory returned as he sat up – more accurately, as Asra pulled him up. Julian looked around wildly for Kye and felt no better when he finally laid eye on them. They were in the same place he’d seen them last. The only visible improvement was that their right eye was closed, rather than bulging bloodshot out of its socket.

“Come on,” Asra said, shifting his grip so he had one hand under Julian’s elbow.

“Did I – is Kye–”

“Kandá we, Ilya,” Kye muttered. “Erim dhavan.”

It took him a second to realize they were speaking Sulmani, their voice was so slurred, and another second to figure out what they had said. “Thank me when this is over and we’re all alive,” he told them. Later, he would be ashamed of the way his voice broke.

[go-redgirl]

For McConnell, virus carries echo of his boyhood polioBy LISA MASCARO April 10, 202

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitch McConnell’s earliest childhood memory is the day he left the polio treatment center at Warm Springs, Georgia, for the last time.

He was just a toddler in 1944, when his father was deployed to World War II, his mother relocated the family to her sister’s home in rural Alabama and he came down with flu-like symptoms. While he eventually recovered, his left leg did not. It was paralyzed.

Two long years later, after shuttling young McConnell to and from the center where then-President Franklin Roosevelt received polio care, his mother was told that day that her young son would be able walk into his life without a leg brace.

She immediately took the 4-year-old shopping for a new pair of shoes.

More than 70 years later, Senate Majority Leader McConnell walked into the U.S. Senate to pass a sweeping coronavirus rescue package — and shutter the chamber for the forseeable future — as another dangerous flu-like virus fills the nation with anxiety, quarantines and unimaginable disruptions to American life.

“Why does this current pandemic remind me of that? I think No. 1 is the fear,” said McConnell in an interview with The Associated Press.

“And the uncertainty you have when there’s no pathway forward on either treatment or a vaccine and that was the situation largely in polio before 1954.”

The two crises now bookend McConnell’s years, making the Kentucky Republican an unexpected voice of personal experience and reflection in what he calls these “eerie” times.

It’s an unusual role for the famously guarded leader, who rarely says more when less will do, and relishes an image as a sly political tactician. But as more than 16,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus, the echoes are all too familiar. So too is the solution, as he sees it, to care for the nation’s sick and produce treatments, and an eventual vaccine.

“There’s hope that we’re going to get on top of this disease,” he said, “within a year, year and a half.”

Polio ignited a dreadful fear across the U.S. in those years, especially in summertime. The virus particularly struck children, forcing swift closures of schools and playgrounds and, in the sweltering heat, swimming pools. Towns shuttered, families isolated. Thousands died, others were hospitalized and some left permanently paralyzed or with post-polio syndrome. The Salk vaccine was still years away.

“It was a scary virus,” said Stacey D. Stewart, president & CEO of March of Dimes, which started as FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis but quickly took on the name that reflected the public service call for Americans to donate their dimes for a polio solution.

“You didn’t understand how you got it,” she said, and because it impacted so many young people, for “so many parents, what’s worse for a parent than having your child get sick?”

As a toddler, McConnell was taught to stay off his feet. His mother understood if he tried to walk too soon after the illness he might require a leg brace for the rest of his life. She began taking him on the hour drive each way to Warm Springs where Roosevelt’s condition was a warning sign to Americans the disease spared no one. Back home, she would would run through the physical therapy with her son “like a drill sergeant,” he said.

McConnell doesn’t remember much from those earliest days. Much of it he knows from his mother’s retelling and his own reading of books of the era.

Full Coverage:

Virus Outbreak

But he does remember what happened in the years after she bought him those saddle oxfords on their last trip home from Warm Springs.

He couldn’t run as fast as the other kids. When he put on a swimsuit, his left leg had a narrower circumference, leaving him embarrassed. Even now, he says he has trouble climbing stairs.

“I was lucky,” he said, choking up as he recalls his mother, “who was determined to see me walk again.”

Of “tenacity, hard work and not giving up,” he said, ”My mother instilled all that in me before I was 4 years old and I think it’s been a guiding principle in how I lead my life.”

One of the first things McConnell did when he was elected to public office in Kentucky, he writes in his memoir, was buy a new pair of shoes.

In the Senate last month, McConnell began linking past to the present “just as soon as it became clear that we were actually endangering each other to be together.”

Senators were self-isolating and one, Rand Paul, announced he tested positive.

With the Capitol all but shuttered, the Senate raced to approve the rescue package. The votes tallied, McConnell adjourned the Senate.

“Let’s continue to pray for one another,” he said. “And for our country.”

Now from a quiet Capitol Hill -- he is working from the second floor of his townhouse, his wife Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on the third — the two suddenly find themselves like other Americans stumbling through the new stay-at-home normal.

“We’re soldiering all through,” he said.

It’s also bringing time for reflection.

A year ago, he returned to Warm Springs for the first time. At what is now a historic site, he reviewed files about his condition, his visits. He learned he sometimes received treatments when Roosevelt did, including the week the former president died.

Asked how his mom afforded his own medical care, he was stumped. Were there bills? “Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. He said he would try to find out.

One memory that does stand clear is the arrival of the polio vaccine, and the relief it brought a weary populace.

As Congress considers the next aid package, he said he wants more money for health care.

“I’ve had a normal life, but I’ve been acutely aware of the disease that I had and the relief that the country had when they found the vaccine,” he said.

“We’re going to get that relief.”

In this image provided by the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, Mitch McConnell sits with his parents, Julia "Dean" and A.M. McConnell in this image from the mid 1940's in Five Points, Ala. As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flashes back to an earlier crisis that gripped the nation, and his own life, when he was a boy. He was struck with polio. (McConnell Center at the University of Louisville via AP)

[southernmamaspeaks]

“All’s Well That Ends Well” and Other Pandemic Ponderings

My college-aged daughter has asthma. More specifically, she was diagnosed with severe, acute-onset, pediatric asthma as a child.

She is my first born child, and on top of all the normal first-time mommy feels, I was terrified because she barely made it through her first couple months. Less than a month after her winter-time birth she contracted RSV, a respiratory illness normally associated with premature infants. Two weeks later, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. I remember watching her little body struggle to get air in the Emergency Room, as the doctors hooked her up to IVs, and willing myself not to cry because I did not want to upset her.

The annual winter cycle of her being in, and out of the hospital continued for the first several years of her life. Always colds that turned into bronchitis that turned into pneumonia that turned into trips to the hospital. It was overwhelming, and scary. However, it was also our normal. I once braved driving in Hurricane Isabel to take her to the ER due to respiratory complications. I remember thinking it was funny I was more scared about whether the hospital was going to be open, than if we were going to get there safely during a Category 4 catastrophe.

Over time I learned what to look for- knew when that rattle in her chest was moving away from something I could care for at home into something that would require serious medical treatment. We seemed to rack up frequent flyer miles at the local pediatrician’s office. While all the doctors agreed she had asthma, we were told most doctors did not like to render the official diagnosis until after five or six years of age. So we stayed on our carousel, going round and round with illness every time cold and flu season hit our community.

We have tried the gambit of treatments: allergy shots, dietary restrictions, Corticosteroids, preventatives, rescue inhalers. So. Much. Medicine. I have also tried social distancing before it was posh. Exhausted by the inevitable illnesses her body would experience, I became hyper-vigilant. I would ask if there were smokers or pets in a home before birthday parties; I would make extended family wash hands, and change clothes if they smoked before being around her. I drove her to school because second hand smoke on children’s clothes on the school bus would cause an asthma attack. I would stay home from family gatherings if other kiddos were sick. Pets inside the house were forbidden; and do not even get me started about the pony Santa brought when she was four. However, no matter what we tried, she would always get that one respiratory illness per year which would throw us into needing significant medical intervention. To say those times were scary would be an understatement. I have stayed awake nights listening to the cadence of my daughter’s breath more times than I can possibly count.

However, I also remember very clearly speaking to an asthma specialist in my hometown who said it was useless to live in fear of the next big sickness. Her lungs were deficient, most certainly. In fact, once a spirometry test came back that my daughter’s lungs were functioning like a 70 year old with COPD. But we effectively had two choices, our doctor said: live like the living, or live like the dead. To date, there are no known cures for asthma. Doctors work to care for symptoms, and try to treat underlying triggers, but the inflammatory reaction and constriction itself that is asthma cannot be cured even with modern medicine. So we made a choice to live with the living.

While significant illness was a part of our life, so was limiting its effect on our lifestyle. I still carried epi-pens, and inhalers, and baby wipes, and eye drops, and Benadryl, and tissues wherever we went. But those items went to sporting events, birthday parties, dance classes, sleepovers, and field trips. I monitored her closely. I was well-educated and even more well-prepared for her medical issues. Yet I quit letting those things dictate our life.

When she started playing field hockey competitively in middle school I was worried it would be too much. However by time high school rolled around, she was managing her care on her own. Make no mistake, there have been frustrations along the way. I held her in my arms many times after practice as she cried because she wished her breathing came as easy as some of the other girls. She often played her season through at least one bout with bronchitis. And she had to walk that fine line between caring for her illness at practice, and not using it as a crutch to excuse herself from finishing the required physical conditioning.

Despite my worries for her on the pitch, I was more concerned as she decided on her life’s path. In high school she took a hard left turn into theatre. Musical theatre. I watched as she worked to overcome her asthma to sing onstage in front of hundreds of people. We worked hard to keep her fit, and healthy to support her voice. I worried about her choice, but sat back in awe over the last few years as she learned to negotiate her strengths to overcome what I always worried would be weakness. Currently she is pursuing her BFA in Theatre Performance at Virginia Commonwealth University, and has earned casted roles as a Freshman at Virginia Repertory Theatre in Richmond, Virginia. She dreams big dreams about who she wants to be, and where she wants to go; and I have no doubts any longer that she will achieve them.

What I do, perhaps, doubt is the current measure to distance ourselves from all life due to the possibility of illness which intensely affects the mortality of so few of the population. I have lived 19 years with a child who arguably could die from complications during flu season. And while I highly (I repeat, Highly) recommend packing our individual bags of preparedness, I do not at all recommend living as if we have already forsaken life. Constraining our rights to life, liberty, and happiness because of possibility seems to fly in the very face of the infinite variables of our existence. We are never promised tomorrow, dear friends. And knowing such information should precipitate the necessity of seizing our todays. I pray that each of you stays happy, and healthy in our new reality. My words are but a sounding brass in the cacophony playing out upon the world stage. And I understand intimately there will be losses, and sorrows during this time.

For our family ‘the curve’ will always be a reality. Yet time has taught me we also face inherent choices as a family as to whether we allow the curves of our lives to dictate our mode of living. In the propheticly titled All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare writes, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” The current pandemic plaguing the world tangles the good, and ill of our earthly existence, and our terrestrial compatriots. There are many questions about the current state of affairs which must be answered by heads more sound than my own. But viewed outside of itself, this time of hardship is one of many that will be known in each of our lives. And when our lives have run their compass, we must be able to answer if we set our course and followed it straight on till morning, or veered with every fear-filled distraction.

May each of you find a balance in the noise. And may each of you find a Well-Made ending which empowers you to “love all, trust a few, and do wrong to none.”

Love,

Mama

[greyias]

FIC: Unsent Correspondence (10/10)

Title: Unsent Correspondence Fandom: SWTOR Pairing: Theron Shan/f!Jedi Knight Synopsis: Before he starts something new, Theron needs to finish something he started years ago. Warnings: See Part 1. Author’s Notes: In which I switch narrative styles to wrap everything up, and Theron proceeds to kill my word count, as per usual.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Crossposted to AO3

The whisky stung as it came in contact with the split in his lip. It had only recently scabbed over on the long flight, but had opened up again right as he had ordered the drink from the bartender. The metallic tang of blood mixed with the smokey, almost sweet alcohol. He tried not to wrinkle his nose at the taste, still acutely feeling every still healing bruise. His sorry state only earned the briefest of looks, as most of those who either took up residence or conducted business on Asylum had found themselves on the wrong side of trouble at least once. No one really came to the freeport for the sightseeing.

Someone dropped onto the stool next to him. Theron saw the bartender look up and nod an acknowledgement to the newcomer.  “I’ll have what he’s having.”

The barkeep grabbed a bottle and glass. “Anything else? Roast gorak is our specialty.”

“After seeing his face, I think I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Ha ha,” Theron sneered, and then dropped his voice. “Where’s Lana?”

“She couldn’t make it.”

“And why didn’t she tell me that?”

“Something about planet scouting, Force alignment mumbo jumbo. You got me. I just do what I’m told at this point.”

Theron arched an eyebrow at the Zakuulan deserter, but decided to not comment on the irony of that statement, and instead took another sip of his whisky. He could feel the other man’s eyes taking in the colorful mosaic that was Theron’s face, which was a far sight prettier than his mottled blue and purple chest thankfully hidden by his standard attire.

“So… exactly what happened?” Koth asked, trying very desperately to not sound as curious he obviously was.

“I ran into a door,” Theron stated flatly before taking another sip.

That was a lie. It wasn’t so much a door, as another guy’s fists. Well, that and an entire side of a building that he had slammed into during a controlled dive after the Centurybloom extract had been knocked off the edge of the platform. Things had gotten a little out of hand during that final scuffle with the Twi’lek mercenary, Skyvthe, that had started that whole mess on Nar Shaddaa. But no matter what Hylo said, Theron most definitely did not fall off a building.

“Well, I hope you got the door as good as it got you.”

Theron couldn’t help the satisfied smirk that spread across his face, which pulled at his split lip. “You could say that.”

He’d gotten in more than just a few good punches during their fight, which had been immensely satisfying. If the Twi’lek hadn’t stolen the final cure ingredient, sliced into all of Theron’s communications, nearly killed him several times over, threaten half the population of the Smuggler Moon with Baradium bombs, and in general be the worst asshole this side of Hutta, Theron might have felt sorrier for him. Even if the guy survived that fall, Skyvthe would undoubtedly face some very grisly fallout for crossing both the Shroud and the Hutt Cartel.

“Right.” Koth managed to draw the single syllable out into three, hiding a grimace as he took a sip from his own glass. “You have it?”

Theron withdrew a small case from his jacket pocket and gently set it on the bar next to a datapad with a cracked display, trying not to wince as the motion pulled at his injuries. Although to be fair, every motion seemed to jar them. The bartender had moved to the other end at this point, still trying to hawk his roast gorak to unsuspecting customers. No one seemed to take notice of the appearance of the innocuous looking box that was just big enough to contain one single hypospray.

“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t really look like you should be here. More like floating in a kolto tank.”

“I do mind,” Theron said tersely. “I can rest later, this is more important. There’s only enough for one shot, so tell Lana to make it count.”

“Yeah, okay,” Koth said hesitantly, and then reached for the case.

Theron didn’t remove his hand from the case, and speared the Zakuulan with a look. “You will bring her back.”

It was not a question, but an order. Both men sized each other up, eyes narrowing as if trying to interpret each others’ intent. Their acquaintance had only been brief — Lana liked to keep things in separate spheres. Less interaction meant less chance of personality conflicts and clashes to derail their long term goals. Among other things.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Koth finally said, “I’m not letting Lana go through this crazy scheme on her own.”

“You bring Lana back too,” Theron clarified, jaw tight as he stared down the other man.

It took Koth a few moments before he finally parsed the statement, and then frowned. “Right. Your Outlander. What is it with you guys? Never seen two people so ready to throw their life away for some assas—”

Whatever he was going to say next died on his lips as Theron made an angry noise in the back of his throat, eyes blazing with a suppressed fury. The Zakuulan had the grace to look a little sheepish and muttered a quiet sorry.

“What I meant to say,” he said after a moment, “is that I’m having a hard time believing any one person is really worth all this risk. No way anyone can do what you say she can.”

“You haven’t met her,” Theron threw back. And she’s worth everything, the words rose in the back of his mind, but he didn’t dare say them aloud. He didn’t know Koth that well, and was already fighting an internal war with himself to just lift his hand off the box that contained her only salvation. Just because Lana trusted this guy didn’t mean Theron had to.

“You’re going to have to let me take that box if I’m ever going to meet this woman and be wowed by her.”

“Just to be clear,” Theron said, “if for any reason, this does not make it to its intended recipient, that Zakuulan enforcer hunting you down will be the least of your concerns.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Just clarifying.” Theron didn’t raise his voice, and in fact it dropped an octave as he stared at the other man unblinkingly. “There is no seedy corner of this galaxy that I can’t find when properly motivated. And if you come back without her, I guarantee you I won’t have motivation for anything else.”

“You must be great at parties.” The chuckle that left Koth was threaded with nervousness and he tried to cover it by tossing back the entire contents of his glass. 

Theron didn’t say anything, didn’t move his hand from where it was still resting protectively on top of the box. He just continued to stare a hole into the Zakuulan. Eventually Koth let out a heavy sigh and nodded his understanding. Satisfied, Theron lifted his hand, and the box was quickly slipped into one of the deep pockets of the pilot’s long coat.

“What I don’t get is — your fight with a ‘door’ aside — if you feel this strongly, why aren’t you coming?”

“Someone has to manage the recruitment drive while you and Lana are off playing prison break,” Theron muttered, as if that was the only thing that mattered.

It wasn’t. It was just that Lana was a paragon of practicality, never letting personal feelings get in the way of the larger goal. She would do whatever was necessary to see that the job was done. Theron now knew that he might not be able to do that, and yet he simultaneously feared that he might even do something that was unnecessary. The one job that he wanted to do more than anything else in his entire life, he was uniquely unsuited for — and it had nothing to do with his skillset or any injuries he might currently have.

“You really think this is going to work?”

Theron just shrugged, immediately regretting the action when a ribbon of pain flared up his side. He pressed his lips together tightly until it passed, pretending that he was thinking about what to say next. “The alternative is to do nothing. Let Arcann keep twisting the Galaxy to his will. Which do you prefer?”

“Doing something,” Koth said without hesitation, and then shot Theron a grin. “Hey, you might be better at this recruitment stuff than you let on with talk like that.”

“I learned from the best.” When he smiled, this time it reached his eyes, without so much of a hint of the darkness from before.

Koth narrowed an eyebrow, not quite understanding, but apparently not curious enough to ask who “the best” was. He'd find out soon enough. “Uh huh. Well, would love to stay and chat, but I’ve got a flight to catch.”

“Aren’t you the pilot?”

“Yep.” He tossed a credit chip on the bar and rose from his seat. “And I know it’s not any of my business, but maybe you ought to see a medic or something before you start handing out recruitment pamphlets.”

“Maybe I will,” Theron muttered, staring into his glass. Out of his periphery he watched as the Zakuulan began to retreat. “Oh, and Koth?”

He paused midstep, but didn’t turn back to face the bar or its occupant. “Yeah?”

“I wasn’t joking. They don’t come back, I’m holding you accountable.”

“You’re a scarily intense guy — but I’ll bring them back. Don’t worry.”

With nothing left to do, Theron continued to stare at the half-empty glass in his hand, watching idly as the amber liquid sloshed back and forth as he swirled its contents over and over. He was deliberately not looking at the worn datapad that still sat on the bar, waiting for its owner to pick it back up. The stool that had been vacated was suddenly filled, and a yellow hand grabbed the glass from him, gently setting it down on the bar.

“You sure you don’t want to go, kid?” Hylo’s voice was soft, as if she was talking to a spooked equus. “Still time to go after him.”

“I’ll just slow them down.”

“That all it is?” He didn’t need to look up to feel the Mirialan’s scrutiny, and she didn’t bother hiding the doubt in her voice.

“What else would there be?” he muttered.

When he reached for the glass, it was moved just out of his reach, and he finally looked up to see a knowing smirk on Hylo’s face. He wrinkled his nose at her in annoyance, just as he had every time she had attempted to broach this subject since they had struck up their quasi-partnership on Nar Shaddaa. All this earned him was her ruffling his hair, morphing the wrinkled nose into a full glare as he tamped down on the immediate urge to smack her hand away. 

“You already know I’ve got other promises to keep,” he muttered, carefully trying to smooth his hair back into place. “That cure didn’t come free.”

“And yet you didn’t mention any of that. Or your own little 'prison break'.”

“Eavesdropping now?”

“More like making sure you don’t keel over and die, you idiot.” She leaned back on the stool, and tossed her head to indicate the bustling freeport. “And maybe I was listening in because this place is boring. I like to be entertained.”

“That was entertaining?”

“I wanted to see if you were going to make him cry with that tough guy act. Guess he’s made of sterner stuff.”

Theron thought about correcting her, telling her it wasn’t an act, but decided against it. It would get a little too close to admitting the truth, and he liked Hylo — but not that much. There really was only one person he liked that much. And she was frozen in carbonite.

“He and Lana have enough to worry about.” Redirecting the subject was probably the safest tactic at this point. “Besides, my ‘prison break’ is just a Republic lab, not an impenetrable fortress. It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“‘I’? Don’t you mean ‘we’, kid?”

“Thought you said you were done after we pissed off the Hutt Cartel. The ride out here was a final courtesy.”

“You pissed off the Hutt Cartel,” she corrected, “I was just an innocent bystander. My name isn’t on the no clearance list.”

He let out a silent chuckle, remembering the look on those slimy worms faces over the holo. “You had fun, admit it.”

“Most I’ve had in years. Figure I might stick around for a while, seems like trouble’s always following you around.”

“I’m oddly touched.”

“Don’t be. Where there’s trouble, there’s usually credits to be found.” She gave him a light shove on his shoulder, somehow in the one place he wasn’t bruised. “Come on, finish up your drink. I’ve got the ship refueled. Let’s see if your Bothan buddy really can help bust that gabby Hutt out of that joint.”

The glass was deposited back in front of him, and she arched a dark brow at him. He ducked his head, but couldn’t completely suppress the corners of his lips threatening to quirk up into something resembling a smile. He quickly took a shallow sip of his drink, mostly as an excuse to cover his reaction. 

“Yeah, uh, I’ll be with you in a minute.” One hand briefly strayed to the datapad, before he forced it back to the bar surface. “There’s just one last thing I have to do.”

Hylo’s cocksure grin faded to something a bit softer, more knowing. “Take your time.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She pushed herself to her feet. “It looks like I’m going to need to pick up some extra kolto packs anyway. I’m not listening to you groaning and carrying on the entire trip back to Coruscant.”

“I did not groan. Or carry on.”

“Whatever you need to keep telling yourself, Spyboy.”

He waited until he’d heard her footsteps fade away before even looking at the datapad that had seen better days. A thin crack ran across the screen, and one of the corners was nearly broken off. It had been in his pocket when he had smashed into the wall during his mad dive to save the cure. The sturdy little device had been with him since he’d resigned from the SIS, and while it technically still functioned, he probably needed to let it retire in peace. And he would — just as soon as he finished what he had started on it over two years ago.

He flicked it on, carefully navigating the menus, until he pulled up his inbox. There was no new mail for him, of course. He’d had to scrub his entire digital footprint after their escape from Nar Shaddaa, and had carefully investigated every nook and cranny of the device while waiting for Oggurobb to make up his miracle cure. When it came to the Shroud, one could never be too careful. He let out a long breath, before he finally pulled up the composition screen.

He sipped from his glass, letting the smoky whisky linger on his tongue as the blank message stared up at him. After all this time, after everything he had gone through, he had no idea what to say. Once he stepped foot off of Asylum he was going to need his entire focus to be on his next mission. If Lana was successful — when Lana was successful — they were going to need all the help they were going to get. Not just to get the Galaxy back to some semblance of sanity, but also to make sure that Arcann didn’t get a chance to retake his favorite frozen wall hanging — or worse. Now that this was actually happening, the new beginning finally here, Theron no longer had the luxury of being distracted. He needed to say something so he could move on.

It took him a good five minutes before he finally filled out the subject line. Something simple, but to the point. “For when you wake up”. Because she would. He'd made good on the promise he had never sent.

The cursor continued to blink at him impatiently as he stared at the cracked screen. After five years apart, what could he say? What would she want to hear? She would want to hear from him… right? He swallowed another sip of whisky, and then another. He was nearing the bottom of the glass, ice cubes nearly melted when his fingers slowly started typing. The words weren’t easy, they never were, but as he forced them out, one-by-one, it became a little less difficult. Soon his fingers seemed to be moving on their accord, and what he really wanted to say appeared on the screen:

I’ve written this message twice now. Okay, more than twice.

[oneweekoneband]

“And if not I’ll take my spoons, dig out your blue eyes, swallow them down to my colon, they’re gonna burn like hell tonight.”

While Can’t Slow Down garnered Saves some local attention, it was their sophomore album, 1999’s Through Being Cool, that served as their breakthrough, the release that made them a major name within the scene. Listening to it even now, it’s easy to see why -- Saves’ musical skill had grown significantly in the year since Can’t Slow Down, incorporating a more varied range of sounds and tones, and even Conley’s voice had grown more distinct and confident after a year of practice. And while Can’t Slow Down was surprisingly fully-formed when it came to many of the themes that would come to define Saves’ career, there’s one signature technique that didn’t emerge until Through Being Cool -- the use of grotesquely violent, often hyperbolic imagery.

Nowhere is this more clear than in “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” [embedded above]. Although it’s technically about the tumultuous relationship between the narrator and an ex-girlfriend, the spark that powers the song is violence. Tonally it’s one of the heaviest songs on the album, opening on a riff so angry it practically growls and closing with a driving, pulsating outro. Conley’s layered, almost choral chant of “You and I are like when fire and the ocean floor collide” gives the outro an especially epic feel, not just sonically, but in the sense that it’s equating the narrator and his ex’s relationship to a natural disaster, making them forces of nature who can’t even meet without causing major damage to each other and everyone around them. In every sense this is a violent song.

Despite the force of nature comparison, though, the narrator mostly just comes across as unstable, still hung up on his ex even as he hates her with an incomparable passion. He fondly reminisces of Saturdays they spent on the boardwalk, yet says if they were there now he’d throw lemonade in her face and watch her cry; he opens the song essentially saying that he wants to hurt her with a saw, but also carry a piece of her with him always. The narrator implies that his ex was a real piece of work, but I also can’t blame her for wanting to leave him/not going back.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with this song’s use of violence that I’ve always had a difficult time articulating. Other Saves the Day songs (such as “My Sweet Fracture” or “Through Being Cool,” which we discussed yesterday) fantasize about violent revenge but then rise above, or use violence as a metaphor for painful emotions, but “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” plays its violence completely straight. I don’t think Saves is condoning hurting others (and the violence in this song would be almost impossible for a normal person to replicate in the first place), and I actually quite like plenty of songs featuring harmful actions and attitudes (“Factories,” “Desert,” “No One Else”), but those songs all also make it fairly clear that their narrator is in the wrong, while “Rocks’” narrator is a bit too close to the narrator of any other Saves the Day song for comfort.

There’s also the fact that the violence in “Rocks” is specifically directed towards a woman. Again, I do not for a moment think Saves has ever advocated for or condoned violence against women, but playing “Rocks’” violence so straight in a scene that already has a fraught relationship with women’s safety in the first place is a risky move. Even just within the past few months, there’s been stories of male “fans” trying to force themselves on female musicians on stage, or bands within the scene making inappropriate advances towards women or even drop-kicking female fans off the stage, and I’m sure things were even worse in 1999.

Thankfully, Saves the Day seemed to realize that they may have made a misstep here. “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” is one of their more popular songs and still sees regular play at live shows, but Conley has been known to sometimes begin the song with a speech about how the violence in his songs is never meant to be taken literally and how Saves doesn’t condone violence. More importantly, they’ve since avoided making more songs in this vein, directing their violent lyrics back towards themselves instead of towards women.* The best example of this on Through Being Cool comes from “You Vandal.”

As far as I’m concerned, Conley’s penchant for poetically violent imagery hits harder when directed back at himself anyway. In “You Vandal” it’s used to represent the narrator’s pain, the emptiness he feels while his girlfriend is gone on a long trip overseas. His loneliness is so painful that it’s metaphorically manifesting as open wounds; his ribs part, no longer willing to protect his heart. “I hope that you’re okay, even though I’m dying,” he tells her, saying that her absence is so profound that it might as well be killing him.

Yet, despite his own pain, the narrator still wants her to have a killer time on her trip. “Go see the volcanoes, go see the rainforests, I’ll be fine by myself, yeah I’ll be fine without these bones,” sings Conley, without a hint of sarcasm. By building up the narrator’s pain so acutely through gorey imagery, Conley has made his kindness and love for his girlfriend all the more powerful. It’s the sweetest song about organs dripping from open wounds that I’ve ever heard in my life.

Personally, though, my favorite “violent” Saves the Day song came a few years later.

“Bones” (from 2006’s Sound the Alarm, which we’ll dig more into on Thursday) starts off with jagged, off-kilter notes, becomes oddly happy in its middle (complete with beautiful harmonies), and concludes with a blistering outro -- the almost schizophrenic nature of the music echoes the scattered, pained headspace of the narrator, whose paranoia is outlined more clearly in the lyrics.

The narrative does this, not by telling a literal story, but a metaphorical one. This is a story that takes place completely within the narrator’s head, a situation where the actions of the townspeople are meant to be horrific, because the narrator is afraid that this is what everyone around him is really like: violent, hateful, and out to get him. Their grotesque actions show the toll the narrator’s paranoia is taking on him -- he’s afraid that this dark fate awaits him, but his own paranoid reactions may be negatively affecting the people around him in the first place. This is quite possibly the apex of violent imagery as a storytelling device in a Saves the Day song; Conley doesn’t tell us a single detail about the narrator’s life, but we’re able to learn so much about what he’s going through just because of this one dark fantasy.

Although Saves the Day have mostly shied away from violent imagery in their most recent albums, these kind of lyrics have still become one of the most well-known trademarks of the band. It makes sense -- Saves have made it their mission to talk about the pain they feel and the pain they share with their fans, and violence and pain go hand-in-hand. When used properly, a few grotesque lyrics can convey the kind of pain, fear, and longing that might take another band an entire album to hash out.

*The only real exception to this is “As Your Ghost Takes Flight,” from 2001’s Stay What You Are. “Ghost” is, in some ways, an even more violent song than “Magic,” but it’s also a much less popular one that rarely, if ever, sees live play. Other than that, though, Saves has never returned to writing songs like “Magic,” and have outgrown or largely avoided altogether the kind of misogyny that’s sadly come to define many of their contemporaries.

[soobadnoonecanstopher]

I Give Up - part 28 FINAL (A Baekhyun Series)

Genre: Fluff / Smut (18+)

Characters: Baekhyun X You

A/N: warning slight cumplay. OMG guys this is the end of this story. I will most likely write an epilogue after the grieving period is over. THANK YOU for all the love you have given me for this story. BH & HD will always be the number one OTP in my heart.

I Give Up -  part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 , part 6 , part 7 , part 8 , part 9 , part 10 , part 11 , part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 23, part 24, part 25, part 26, part 27, part 28 FINAL,

I Give Up Deleted Scenes Masterlist

The Notebook Kinks 1   Pink Heart Days

“The pictures are out.”

Those four words held so much power. You felt a definite tremor inside your chest as you watched Baekhyun’s face closely. He had looked up into your eyes when he said it and his hand gripped his phone. It jumped around as he waited for something to load, staring down at the small screen with his eyes darting around and his bottom lip held tightly between his teeth.

His mouth opened when his eyes stopped their dancing around the screen and he focused on what he saw on front of him.

He saw it.

A small puff of air exhaled through his parted lips and he closed his eyes as he dropped the phone away from his face. He was breathing louder now, noisy puffs of air came out of his lungs and he sighed one deep long sigh as he threw his head back, his chin lifted high in the air and eyes closed tight. What was that look on his face? Why wasn’t the showing you? He was driving you crazy with nerves.

“Baek–” you pleaded and sat up higher in the hospital bed you were sitting in. You felt the tug against your IV in the back of your hand and you ignored the sting.

His face changed slowly and you heard his breathing even out as the corners of his lips pulled into a smile. The smile grew wider and you felt something wash over you, something you almost didn’t dare to hope for, as you reached for his hand that still held his cell phone. The screen was still illuminated and you felt him give in to you, releasing the phone into your hand you scrambled for it, needing to see with your own eyes what had him smiling and sighing out in deep relief.

The image on his screen was of low quality and it was an image of a couple taking a selfie. Someone had put a digital sticker over the woman’s face, covering her identity entirely but the man in the picture was….a different member of EXO. It wasn’t Baekhyun.

You stared at the silly face Kim Jongdae, known to his fans as Chen was making in the picture with his arm around the shoulders of the unknown woman and you moved your finger over the screen, finding one more picture that looked nearly identical. The feeling of relief washed over you, making you sigh out loud just as Baekhyun has done moments earlier.

At the top of the screen was a screenshot of the article that read “EXO member Chen’s Dating Scandal”. The first lines captured in the screenshot mentioned how the pictures had been released from the friend of an ex that dated the idol.

“B-But…” You said quietly as you looked up into his face with a slightly confused feeling inside you, “I thought Young–”

“Don’t say his name–” Baekhyun interrupted you with his finger pointed in your direction and a stern look on his face and your lips snapped shut. “That name doesn’t deserve to be on your lips.”

“The note said he had pictures.” You said quietly after a moment and you felt Baekhyun’s hand reach for your own, linking his fingers between yours. He watched you as you found your words, sitting back down in stiff chair that sat next to your bed.

“Let’s not worry about him anymore huh? He will be taken care of. I’m not going to let him or anyone hurt you ever again.” His eyes held the kind of sincerity that you could believe. That you would have believed over and over again. You knew he meant the words he was saying and you nodded after a moment. Vowing inside that you would do the same for him as best as you could. You would protect him as well, even if that meant protecting this beautiful heart you had fallen so in love with.

His phone buzzed a few times and you glanced down seeing messages pop up in the EXO group chat. He glanced down briefly but ignored the rapid flow of words from members discussing the latest issue.

A knock sounded on the door and He sat up straighter in the chair, expecting a nurse or doctor to come in doing their usual rounds.

The door opened slowly and you saw the top of your Dad’s head peak through the doorway.

Baekhyun stood up right way, straight and proper with his hands to his side, you watched as he bowed a deep greeting to your father who slowly walked through the door carrying what seemed to be food from home. Food you mom must have packed up and sent with him. He set the bundle down at a table near the door and Baekhyun stepped back and away from the bed, giving the man plenty of room to pass by.

Your dad. Your sweet dad who taught you the value of hard work. The man who showed you what it meant to be loved and respected by another human being. The man who, although he didn’t speak a whole lot, always found the words to tell you that he loved you, and made sure you knew it. He always made you promise you would never forget that fact. As sure as you were certain of various unchangeable facts about the world…the sky was blue, the earth was round, your daddy loved you, trusted you and would always be there to protect you…or so he had always told you.

Perhaps the hardest part of growing up is learning this part, that sometimes…sometimes he couldn’t protect you from everything.

His eyes were on you as he made his way inside the room and you could feel the lump that formed in your throat when he reached you. He looked tired and frail. Something you didn’t usually notice in you dad. He was the strongest person you knew and you liked to think you got much of your strength from him. But his shoulders were slumped down and as if he carried the weight of a thousand loads of laundry on his back as he made his way, taking step after agonizing step until he reached his destination.

The look in his eyes is what did it. Worry, pain, confusion, relief and you swallowed all few times, willing the burning in your eyes to subside. You sniffed at your nose, trying to calm the storm of emotions that threatened to burst through.

“Mom sent me with some food for you both,” his voice was gruff sounding and you could hear the emotion as he inhaled a trembling breath, trying to control his emotions and act strong for you.

But his eyes were wet and the fluttering way he wouldnt quite hold your eye contact pulled at your heart.

“Dad, I’m okay–” You felt a tear slip out, despite your efforts and he cleared his throat noisily as he reached forward and cupped your cheek, eyes glancing over your body as if to verify that you were as uninjured as you claimed to be. His gaze lingered over the tubes that led to the IV stuck in your hand and the various bandages on your other arm where the nurses had taken blood throughout the night.

“Shh, don’t cry or I’ll cry too. You don’t want to make your daddy cry do you?” He leaned down and you felt the soft kiss he placed on your forehead with a tremble in his lips and the sniffle of his nose as he rose up.

“Well–” he took a step back, nodding his head lightly at what he had verified with his own eyes. You were alive. You were unharmed despite the trauma of the attack which was likely to leave a mark and the man wasn’t usually much for useless waiting around. He would be ready to leave soon.

”–I’d better head back home.”

Your dad…he was a man of few words and a man of even less free time or so he liked to claim as sat on his sofa in front of his soccer game complaining about the length of the commercials

He spun, ready to leave with his usual quickness and you saw him take a few steps before he stopped walking suddenly. You saw Baekhyun’s head tick in his direction, alert and acutely aware of the man’s presence in the room.

Your dad’s journey to the exit stalled and he turned in Baekhyun’s direction. Your boyfriend had been standing at near attention with his hands behind his back, trying to not witness your dad’s moment of weakness yet unable to actually leave the room out of respect for the man. He couldn’t just run away, that would have been worse. Baekhyun’s eyes widened as your dad took another step in his direction and his whole body stiffened up when you dad reached where Baekhyun stood like a statue. Frozen in surprise and uncertainty. You could see the questions written all over Baekhyun’s face and you even wondered what would come of this. Would your dad be upset? Possible having heard the details of the threat against you, a threat against Baekhyun and his valuable career, having used his girlfriend to somehow get to him? He couldn’t have possibly misunderstood the situation and would now blame Baekhyun would he? Surely not, your dad was more sensible than that. It had been clear that the man who did this…who tried to hurt you was after you, not Baekhyun.

Your dad reached for Baekhyun with both arms outstretched, moving past the wide eyes and the look of panic on his face and he wrapped big arms around his shoulders as he pulled him in for a tight hug.

You heard a startled gasp from your boyfriend’s lips when it happened.

The hug was as quick as expected and when your dad released Baekhyun from his grip he looked into his startled face, lifting a hand to pat his cheek once softly and sweetly. You saw the smile on your dad’s face and the softening of Baekhyun’s expression as it changed from fear to a soft smile with lips parted and a quiet exhale of breath. Relief mingled with the emotions that flashed across Baekhyun’s face and he bit down on his bottom lip to keep his face controlled. You knew what that rapid blinking of his eyes meant.

“Thank you…for being there.” Your dad whispered to him, his hand still resting over his sweet face and Baekhyun watched your dad’s face for a moment.

“I’m thankful I was able to, Sir.” He said in a quiet voice.

“Dad,” the older man corrected your boyfriend and his eyes widened a hair as he glanced in your direction. You noticed the pink in his cheeks and he looked back at your dad as he patted his face a few more times and dropped his hand.

“D-Dad.” The sacred word, brand new and delicate, said in in Baekhyun’s own voice echoed out like a bell through your mind and you both watched in silent awe as your father turned and silently left the room.

The silence of his departure lingered long after the door closed and your attention was pulled to Baekhyun, who stared at the closed door for a long while before shaking his head clear of the daze and turning to walk back to you.

He was looking down at the floor and when he finally pulled his eyes up to look at you his lips pulled into a tiny smile that you returned.

“Hey–” he spoke suddenly after a few moments of thought.

“What do you think about taking a trip with me?” He was fidgeting with your blanket with the tips of his fingers, working the seam of the blanket between his thumb and middle finger over and over as his eyes watched the fabric move. His top lip was pulled in between his teeth and the casual tone in his voice sounded just a bit false.

“Sure,” you said instantly and his eyes shot up straight into yours with your quick and easy response.

“Sure?” His eyebrows were up in surprise as he pulled his chin down. “No…’Where? When?….How?’…just ‘Sure.’?”

“I trust you.” You shrugged and his amused smile widened against his will as he puffed out a small laugh.

“Okay…sure,” he said.

———

The trip didn’t come for a while. The sub unit debut happened and then there was a christmas album released by EXO and you began to lose all hope that he would get any stretch of time off to be able to get a full night’s sleep let along steal away with you on a secret romantic getaway, but just when you’d nearly forgotten that he had even mentioned it you got a string of text messages from him. Messages asking you if you preferred sun or snow. You chose sandy beaches over cold snow covered mountain tops and he told you to make sure you passport was up to date because the trip was on. He was getting a solid week and a half off after the christmas album promotions were finished.

You were a little bothered that you had to fly alone, but he had promised Chanyeol he would snowboard with him at some ski resort for the first two days of their time off and you videos they posted on Instagram for the fans to see made you smile to see them having some well deserved fun together.

The flight out of the country was uneventful and you landed in some foreign country for your connecting flight to your final destination, some small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea that you only half paid attention to during high school geography class. You boarded your connecting flight, finding your seat easily enough and you sat down in the comfy first class seat with plenty of legroom and you said a silent word of thanks to him for paying the extra cost for the comfort, despite the fact that you put up a bit of a fuss for him spending so much money on this trip. What could you do about it though? He had already bought the tickets before you even began to ask if he was going to be splurging on unnecessary things like first class when you were perfectly fine with flying coach. He did what he wanted when it came to his money and the fancy ass brand spanking new laptop he gave you for christmas was evidence of that fact.

Passengers shuffled in, walking mostly past your section toward the back of the plane and you eyed the seat next to you, secretly hoping it would stay empty and you wouldn’t have to worry about trying to communicate with someone in a language you didn’t speak well. Those hopes were dashed when someone stopped in front of your row, paused as if checking their seat number on the ticket and then noisily plopping down into the empty seat with a loud sigh.

A loud sigh that you felt inside your bones because that sigh was … it was…

He turned to face you. Hood up, black facemask over his face and his eyes smiled at you as he arched a single eyebrow at your surprised face.

You covered your mouth to try and stifle the loud laugh that left your chest. You were genuinely surprised. Baekhyun had told you that he would meet you at the airport in Cyprus, not on your connecting flight in Hong Kong. You had no reason to doubt him, he even mapped out the Cyprus airport with a little heart drawn in the exact location where you would find him waiting for you.

“Excuse me Miss, is this seat taken?” His flirty voice broke through the noise of the airline engine and you giggled harder as you shook your head, suddenly very excited about the next 10 or so hours until your destination.

The flight departed and Baekhyun was your favorite travel companion. He was very used to long flights and had a bag full of things to keep you and him entertained, but your favorite was when he pulled out a deck of cards to play poker.

If there was one thing you knew about him, it was than when playing games, Byun Baekhyun was a filthy cheater. At first everything was going well and you even found yourself up. He used his phone to keep track of the “winnings”, playing with small amounts, a few cents here and there to keep things from bankrupting you, but the longer you played the more you noticed the man seemed to be full of aces. Literally you actually caught him pull one out from under his leg and after that all bets were off. You were done playing sweet and you decided to up the stakes. His maniacal giggling during your body search for more hidden cards only made you want it more.

Instead of betting money, you graduated to small punishments, little things like a flick in the forehead or having to ask the flight attendant an embarrassing question.

You had to cover your head with your blanket when he asked the sweet woman if she had any diarrhea medicine and you felt his hand slipping below the blanket to pinch at your leg when your laughter became too loud.

Once his hand found its way below your blanket, the hours and hours you both still had to spend in these comfy airline seats seemed like some sort of a test in self control, of which Baekhyun didn’t have a whole lot of. His tickling fingers inched higher and higher up your thigh until you had to shoot him a dirty look, reminding him in a close whisper into his ear that although these fully lay-flat fancy seats gave the illusion of privacy, you were exactly the quietest partner once he got his hands on you and this was a flight full of strangers who would not hesitate to have you both arrested for indecent behavior.

This threat seemed to work a little bit but you could still see it in his eyes every time he looked at you.

The game changed after that. Not even about the cards or even placing bets, it was only about winning and the dares changed and grew riskier as the look in his eye grew darker.

You’d just lost a round and you looked down at his three queens and your pair of kings with a grumpy frown as you waited for him to decide.

“Let me see your bra. Lift up your shirt.” He whispered his prize and you looked at him with wide eyes and a slack jaw.

“Baek, there are like 200 people on this flight.” You said in a harsh whisper and you saw him lift his shoulders and drop them with a ‘not-my-problem’ look on his face. “Hey-” he pointed his long finger at you with accusing eyes, “–you just made me describe….in improvised song…what it feels like when I cum. You have to do this.” You snorted into your hand remembering the way his eyebrows screwed together and his face grew pink as he tried to rework the chorus for the song Transformer, changing the words after the surprisingly fitting tick tick boom boom ‘bout to blow to fit the description of a male orgasm. You had give it to him…his musicality was impressive. He pulled it off well and didn’t even laugh as he sang. He did whisper the some of the riskier words like dick and cum.

“You can do it under the blanket but I get to use my phone as a flashlight. And I get a nipple.” You heard the excited amusement in his voice now and you crossed your arms over your chest in defiance.

“I’ll tell you what, when we get land I’ll give you something better for winning but I’m not doing this. I don’t want to get arrested in a foreign country.”

This got his attention and he turned to look at you, suddenly interested in your offer.

“Something better? Like what? What better?”

You looked into his eager eyes as you considered.

“Okay, I will let you pick one,” you began and he shuffled the cards noisily and expertly as if he had been dealing blackjack in a casino for ten years. These cards looked well worn and broken in and you wondered how many games they had seen on long flights. “You can say to me…what you’ve been dying to say to me about Kim Youngshik. That thing I made you swore you wouldn’t say to me. ”

The cards stopped moving and he looked into your face with a serious expression behind his eyes that told you he had absolutely no doubt about what four words he was absolutely dying to tell you since it happened. You could feel them in his eyes as he watched you and as soon as the charges were filed against Youngshik and the evidence list grew and grew you could see the great efforts it had taken to keep his mouth shut about it.

“Or?” He lifted an eyebrow as he waited. “Or, I’ll give you a blow job.” You said flippantly looking down at the new hand he was dealing already as he gave you the cards one by one.

“Here?” He said in a scandalous tone and you shot him a look he should have known very well by now.

“At the hotel Baekhyun.”

He was biting down on his lip as his eyebrows wrinkled over his eyes and you saw him flipping through his cards as he half paid attention to his hand, and half considered his choices.

“I want to say the thing,” he said after a few moments and you could hear the confidence behind his choice. “I’ll win a blow job on my next hand.” He added and you laughed as you shook your head and looked down at the best hand you’d had the entire flight.

“Can I do it now?” He said suddenly and you shrugged, setting down your awesome flush carefully so the cards wouldn’t show. You nodded your head. He could do it. You were ready and you knew it was true anyway.

“I told you so.” His eyes were on your now. “I was right about that asshole. I fucking knew it. I told you so.”

You had braced for it, and honestly it wasn’t that bad now that it was out. Because he was right. He had told you again and again and you denied it and doubted the gut feeling he had about the guy.

You sighed, feeling the tension leave your shoulders now that the words were out of him because honestly he had been on the verge of those words for quite a while now and it was starting to drive you crazy.

“I mean… the clues were all over the place. But I saw through him right away. The way I picked that note apart, I mean…can I call myself a genius or is that too much?” He was still talking and you looked at your cards with the flush that would surely beat anything he had in his own hand.

“–at least I’m a great detective. People say Batman is the world’s greatest detective…but Baekman is the true greatest detective. I wonder if I can get this on a shirt…OH we can get couple shirts. Baekman–” You began to zone out as he rambled and you laid your cards back down on your lap as you waited for him to finish, momentarily nodding your head to let him know that yes, he was right all along and yes he had told you so all along.

When he finally stopped talking you looked back into his face, with his cheeks a little pink from having gotten worked up about his little speech and he had stopped talking suddenly as he watched you nod your head and agree with him. His eyebrows furrowed and he pouted his lips.

“This doesn’t feel satisfying enough. Agree with me.” You nearly spit your water that you sipped out when you laughed and you quickly nodded your head at him.

“I do agree with you. You absolutely told me so.” Your voice was casual and he narrowed his eyes at you.

“And I was right, say that part.” You sighed before you could continue. His pettiness was unmatched by anyone else in this entire world.

“Oh great genius detective Baekman, you were right all along. If only I had trusted you and believed in you none of this mess would have happened.” You tried your very hardest to keep the sarcasm out of your voice but he didn’t buy it and he scoffed as he looked away for a moment and he pulled at the blanket that had been sitting on your lap.

Your cards went flying onto the floor in front of you and you gasped as you watched your flush land face up for him to see.

His eyes flew down and he quickly reached for the cards, he recognizing their value you watched in horror as he stacked the deck of cards up quickly and declared the poker game over.

The rest of the flight passed with watching movies together, holding hands and quiet chitchat under blankets as you both tried in vain to get some sleep.

By the time you finally drifted off you were almost instantly roused to prepare for landing.

The walk through the airport made you nervous. Your heart pounded and you looked around nervously for any sign that he was recognized. He wore his hoodie, a black cap and a facemask pulled tight around his face and you were sure to keep a few steps behind him all the way to baggage claim. Your flight had landed late at night and perhaps the weariness of the day had made everyone less aware, or perhaps EXO wasn’t popular here. Hardly anyone paid any attention to him at all and you eventually began to relax when you noticed a young blonde girl wearing a familiar looking shirt. Sure enough, you noticed her white sweater with the EXO logo and the letters D.O. on the back above the number 12.

From your advantage you could see her walking slowly and perpendicular to where he was walking just beyond a pillar next to the baggage claim and she seemed to be glued to her cell phone. Baekhyun was walking fast and if he kept this pace the two would definitely collide with each other. You moved your legs faster and jumped in front of where he walked, holding your hand out behind your back with your finger pointed to the left as a signal to him. He instantly took a turn and walked on the other side of another pillar just as the fan passed by their previous crossing spot.

You kept your eyes out for any other problems as you both retrieved your own bags and waited for a cab to take you to the hotel.

The hotel, was not a hotel at all, but it seemed that Baekhyun had rented out a beach home. A luxurious only a few meters from the sandy shore complete with a covered patio, swimming pool and beautiful accommodations inside to surely spoil you rotten. The weather was perfect, neither too hot nor too cold and you appreciated the cool night breeze floating in off the sea.

“There’s a carnival in town. Maybe we could go tomorrow.” Baekhyun was leafing through a local magazine left on the kitchen counter of the rental home as you unpacked your clothes and shook out the light dresses you brought along for the beachy weather. He watched you out of the corner of his eyes as he leafed through the magazine, hardly glancing at the pages as they flew by. Simply watching didn’t quite describe the eagle-eyed focus he had on you as you tried to unpack. You could tell something was up with him. Perhaps this was leftover from the flight.

“Are you sure you won’t be recognized?” You couldn’t help the worry in your voice. The two of you couldn’t go out at all back home. Public was always a danger where he was concerned.

“It’ll be fine. There are probably a total of two EXO fans on this whole island. If we go during the day it’ll most likely just be older folks.” You shook your head in understanding and bent over to reach the open bag on the floor, being sure you do it in front of where he was staring at you. If he was going to stare, he should be given something to look at. You pulled off the outer sweater you wore, knowing that the shirt you wore beneath it was sheer and fitted. He had wanted to see your bra after all. It was easy to see through this shirt. You wore the black lacy one for him today.

“Besides…I want to see you in the sunlight for once.” He was speaking casually but his voice sounded just a bit lower and thicker.

You pulled your toiletries out of your bag and moved to the bathroom to set them out for the week and Baekhyun followed you to the doorway of the bathroom. He was still watching you as you moved with an unreadable expression that seemed to be darkening the longer he stared and when you turned to look at him holding a shampoo bottle in your hand you saw him bite down on his lip.

“I think you’re doing this on purpose,” he said.

“Doing what?” You lifted a single brow and tried to keep your grin hidden. He didn’t buy your false innocence.

“Asking me to fuck you without asking me to fuck you,” he said and you had to close your eyes. This man could always read you too well.

He moved suddenly, taking the bottle out of your hand quickly he set it down on the counter and grabbed your face, his hands on both of your cheeks he pulled you into him, into his mouth and you felt his lips descend on yours.

You were only slightly surprised by it and you gave in, feeling the leftover effects of the plane ride and the tension you had felt then. When you couldn’t touch him all you wanted. His hands were around your waist and he pulled you out of the bathroom. His lips still on yours, his kiss was needy and hungry and you were walking forward as he pulled you into the bedroom with the huge glass windows that overlooked the moonlit sea. You were spun around by the strong arms of a demanding man.

You felt the backs of your knees reach the foot of the bed and his arms wrapped around your waist pulling your shirt up over your head in one swift motion and his hands were at the waist of your pants, pushing them down. The faster his hands moved the more you felt the urgency in this and you moved just as quickly slipping your hands inside his waistband to rid him of his clothes as well.

You felt the rough push he gave into you that sent you falling down on your back on the plush bed. In a flash of movement he was crawling over your body as you fell backwards. His hands moved up your legs between your thighs which parted greedily. You needed him to touch you, you wanted it so badly you felt like begging and he smirked as you whined and writhed below him on the bed.

“Do you have any idea how good you smell? I couldn’t touch you or kiss you or fuck you for 10 whole hours. I thought I was going to go crazy.” His words were a growl that went into your ear and send a jolt of arousal down your spine.

He hovered over you and you angled your hips upward reaching for where he kept just out of reach.

“Do you want this? Because I’m not going to be nice.” You were beyond pretending at this point and you nodded your head quickly, feeling the desperation hit you hard.

When he rolled this hips you felt his warmth and harness against your thigh where his hands had been rubbing agonizing circles just out of reach of your center. You whined in complaint and he chuckled once before he gave in to you and you felt his finger reach the space between your legs where you were the wettest.

His fingers were followed by hardness and he ran the head of his cock within your folds before he pushed inside in one fluid motion that nearly made your head spin. You screamed and he pulled out and pushed inside again, fast enough to make you lurch up on the bed with his powerful thrusts. You felt his hands grip your thighs and he pulled you back down each time you were pushed upward.

The love was hasty, noisy, needy and demanding. The results of a long flight and stretched out frustrations from being apart for so long. Where his lips touched your skin his teeth bit down hard. Where his moans reached your ear you heard the animalistic growls and when he pushed inside of your wetness he did it fast and rough, making you cry out in surprise at his unyielding pace.

Flesh slapped against flesh, punctuated by the slick sounds of your wetness, your arousal heightened by his mood. You clawed at his back with your nails as he fucked you, urging him to go faster and harder despite the pain. Leading him with the the pain you caused in his skin that you were sure would leave red marks.

The wave that came over you hit you all at once and when you squeezed around him you felt him stiffen and cry out loud, quickly pulling out so he could cum of your belly, sticky white stands flew up higher, landing in drops over your breasts that rose and fell with your deep breaths and he grunted with each burst until he went still hovering over you, panting hard through parted lips as his eyes took in the mess. The darkness lingered in those eyes, making your skin feel hotter the longer he looked at you.

You lifted a finger, trailing it over the wetness on your belly and brought it up to your lips for a taste…the bitter taste of his cum hit your senses and his eyes watched you move, his breath puffing out in bursts through his open mouth.

“You like that?” He asked in a low whisper and you nodded your head as you held onto the darkness in his eyes.

You felt him move, maddened by the sight of what you had done he dipped his head and you felt his tongue lapping up the sticky drops of his cum that had landed on your breasts, taking the liquid onto the tip of his tongue and his mouth was on yours, pushing deep into your mouth, bitterness flooded your tongue and you sucked on him, swallowing away what he offered until you only tasted his mouth. You heard a soft whimper that echoed against your face as you did it and his eyes opened above you, staring into your own for a long while as his breathing slowly settled down and evened back out.

He rolled onto his back, off of you, with a noisy grunt and he reached for his boxers that had landed somewhere on the bed, quickly wiping your stomach free of the rest of his mess before he tossed them onto the floor of the room.

You reached for him and he reached for you at the same time as he laid down and you could feel the sleepiness overcoming you. Satisfied at last and tired from the trip you felt yourself drifting to the steady sounds of his breathing which sounded so even already. Was he sleeping? So fast?

You didn’t fight it either.

When you awoke, the sun was up and there was a soft singing in your ear that pulled you out of your sleep. The song was familiar and slower than usual and when you opened your eyes, temporarily blinded by the bright sun shining through the windows, you finally focused on Baekhyun’s face. His eyes were closed and he was resting on the pillow right next to your head and his lips were moving as he sang slowly. ’–oh baby baby baby–’ the words were different now. ’–everytime you’ve got me horny–’ They were dirtier than before and he definitely looked less embarrassed to be saying them.

“Tick tick boom boom–” his voice sang out slowly and sweetly and you saw the corners of his mouth pull into the smile he couldn’t at all keep controlled.

“–’bout to blow,” you whispered in response and you heard a snort as he laughed louder and his chest vibrated with the giggles that overtook him and shook the bed.

———-

The carnival was more like a traveling fair. The vendors all spoke just enough English for you to be able to communicate just enough to get by and Baekhyun’s English was heavily accented but better than you thought it would be. When he didn’t understand something he had this cute way of grinning widely with exaggerated blinking eyes until the other person just gave up and you died each time he did it. There were stands with food, delicious things that were fried and terrible for you and you shared everything with him. The crowds were thin and not a single person gave him a second glance. You felt relieved and excited all at the same time, to actually be out with him in a public place, having fun like this.

There were stands selling drinks, some alcoholic, some not and you noticed the majority of people walked around with something to drink, either beer or what seemed to be a fruity wine. The day was young and Baekhyun shrugged and bought a couple of drinks, commenting that you would both probably walk for a long time here and would just burn it off.

The drinks were good, and strong. You felt the effects of the alcohol right away and you felt the mood lifting significantly as his giggles seemed to intensify along with your own.

The carnival games you both played seemed to be getting harder and harder the more you drank, and did you have a fresh one in your hand? You wondered where that came from. But not for long because Baekhyun had just won you a stuffed hippopotamus while playing some ring toss game that you were sure would have been rigged. It was cute and had a crooked nose and you hugged it tightly with a wide smile. You named him Pippo the Hippo and Baekhyun repeated the name at least ten times quickly trying to get the pronunciation right.

He must be been drunk. You definitely were by this point.

You stumbled upon a new game, getting caught up by the shiny lights and pink hearts that decorated the entire entrance. Lover’s Lane the sign read and you grabbed his arm as he nearly walked past it.

“Look–” you pointed with excitement on your face and he looked up at the sign with curious eyes. When you turned back toward the game you felt the world spin just a bit and you stumbled when he was pulling you into the entrance. Was it a game, or a ride? You couldn’t be sure because its was dark inside and the world was too spinny.

There was a small old woman inside who looked at both of your faces and your eyes adjusted catching her sweet smile as she grabbed both of your arms.

“Welcome,” she said in a slow voice and you looked up into Baekhyun’s face as he stared ahead into the woman’s eyes. He was blinking harder, trying to focus.

“Are you lovers?” The woman asked and Baekhyun nodded his head once, understanding her question. She looked at you and you nodded with a shy smile.

“Is this a game?” Baekhyun said after a moment and she smiled wider in response, pulling him by the arm into a back room and leaving him behind. When she returned, your head was swimming and you found yourself thrust into a different room with dresses. All white, all frilly and lacy and you understood suddenly. The cameras in the front, the threshold. It was a pretend wedding. For pictures as souvenirs. You quickly threw on the first dress that fit, picking out a silly hat and a huge bouquet of flowers and you emerged anxious to greet your groom.

His tux was bright green and he wore a top hat and a fake moustache that had you doubling over in laughter when you saw it. The man looked ridiculous and he reached for your hand and twirled your around in circles too fast, making you yelp at the sudden nausea that hit you from the alcohol and the spinning.

You felt dazed. The woman shouted instructions at you as if she were a professional and you were employees and you did your best to follow her instructions. It was harder to do when you were so drunk and Baekhyun kept dropping his mustache until he gave up and left it off. The camera was out and pictures were snapped and you were both out the door as soon as you returned the clothing. The game had been silly but strangely fun and fulfilling in its own weird way and the pictures would be a fun reminder of today.

With Pippo the Hippo under your arm you returned to your temporary home with Baekhyun. The place that would be all yours to share for the next week. The buzz from the alcohol was slowly fading and he was on his phone looking for somewhere to order food from. Thankfully the delivery game in this country was strong and you were greeted with hot meals that took the last of the drunkenness from your mind.

You excused yourself to the bathroom to clean up and when you came out Baekhyun was standing at the kitchen counter with a crumbled up folded sheet of paper in his hands as he read it very closely.

He didn’t look up at you when you came back into the room and you wondered what had drawn his attention so completely.

“Umm..” he spoke up while still holding the paper and you noticed his cheeks looked pinker than usual.

It must have been the paper in his hands. What was that?

You heard a sigh and he ran a hand through his hair and you noticed the tremble as he cleared his throat loudly.

“Uhh…You–” he said again, sounding very nervous all of a sudden. “–you need to look at this.” There was an exhale from his mouth and you felt your stomach drop at the sudden seriousness you heard in his voice. His face was flushed, his hands were shaking and he sounded terrified right now.

You walked up next to him, needing to see what he was seeing, yet terrified all of a sudden of seeing for your own eyes what had shaken him up so much.

His hand was shaking too much for you to read what he was holding in front of your face so he dropped it quickly and it fluttered to the kitchen counter. His hands were on the edge of the counter and he leaned forward with a loud groan from deep within his chest.

Why was he moaning like that?

“Baek–what?”

He stood up with a shaking finger, pointing at the sheet of paper that was crumbled up and torn at the bottom.

“R-Read that.” He looked like he was about to be sick.

You looked down and you saw the words on the sheet of paper. A receipt from “Lover’s Lane”, the carnival game with the pretend marriage photoshoot, was stapled to the top of the sheet he had been reading. On the paper were signatures. Yours, his and the old woman’s only the wording was weird.

And the title at the top that read “Marriage Certificate” with legal sounding words swearing the witnessing of yours and his marriage in front of the woman who seemed to be some sort of a Priestess. The bottom of the paper was torn off and missing. Where was the rest of the paper? Your fingers carefully unfolded the very very bottom, reading the beginnings of the statement you saw there. There was something important down there that you saw, but it was legal speak and it seemed like maybe your answer to what in the fuck was going on was down there.

”This is a carnival game and this marriage is not legally binding un–” you read it outloud. Where was the rest? You flipped the paper over to the back, hopping yet knowing that there was nothing there. Definitely not the missing part of that sentence. He was watching you out of the corner of his eyes as he gripped the counter with his hands.

“Un…Un–what Baekhyun Un-what? Did we just get married?”

He saw the missing section you were referring to and the search was on. His pockets and your pockets were emptied and you began searching the floor of the kitchen. You got desperate when the rest of that paper was nowhere to be found and you went to the trash can. The remains from the lunch you had eaten were in there and you dug through searching for any small scrap of paper that matched the missing piece of that very scary, very legal looking document on the kitchen counter.

Baekhyun’s voice shouted out in what sounded like a whiney scream from somewhere in the livingroom.

“Ahhh– UNNN–ntil this certificate is filed with the appropriate county clerk’s office the next business day, after which the marriage is legally binding and the married couple are entitled to equal rights during marriage and its dissolution.–Jesus we’re married. Oh my God we got drunk and we got married.”

You were crawling around the kitchen counter to the living room where you heard his voice coming from and you found him curled up on the floor holding the tiny piece of paper up to his face as he read the words.

“What? Its real?” Your voice sounded too high and he whined on the floor, kicking his feet a few times as he threw a fit.

“Why did you let this happen? Baby, you know that I’m the dumb one, you’re supposed to stop things like this from happening.”

You pulled the piece of paper from his fingers to see what it said for yourself. You saw the words that he saw but there was more to it. There was a phone number below with the name of the Officiant, the woman who had performed the ceremony on two very obviously, very drunk people, and a message that said she could be contacted before the certificate was filed to void the document if both parties agreed.

The longer you focused on the tiny words on the paper the more it came back to you. Flashes of him, flashes of you and the words you were speaking to each other as she ordered you around.

“You said ‘I do’…I remember now.” You said quietly as you watched his face flatten out and take on a dull lifeless look. As he registered your words you saw his eyebrows scrunch along with his nose as he stared at the ceiling.

“You said it too. She said ‘do you take this man to be your husband?’ and you were laughing and laughing and you said ‘I do’ so damn cutely, it made me laugh too.” His voice was flat and lifeless and he wasn’t looking at you as he spoke.

“We were so drunk,” you said with a small laugh and he sighed out loud as he closed his eyes. “Baek, it says here it can be voided. We just have to call her if we both agree.” You knew he didn’t know that part yet and his eyes flashed toward you when you said it, instantly sitting up on his elbow to look down at the paper in your hands.

“We have until Monday. Today is Friday so we have the whole weekend. We just have to call her before Monday.”

His mouth opened and he looked at you as if he was about to speak, but the words were stuck. He closed his mouth without saying a word and he laid back down on the floor with a long sigh.

It was a sigh of relief.

You felt it too. Relief. This wasn’t real, this had happened sure, but it could be undone very easily without anyone in the world finding out about it.

But…

But why did you feel so sad?

He was staring ahead at the ceiling, blinking his eyes in silence as his mind worked.

“It’s not that–” he spoke quietly, his words getting caught again, he twisted his eyebrows and licked his lips before he continued.

‘–its not that I don’t want to be married to you. I do. You are the only one I want to see every day for the rest of my life. You know that right?” He had turned his head and was looking at your face now.

You forced a small smile and nodded your head once.

He didn’t return your smile. And his eyes watched your face too closely. Seeing too much.

“This isn’t how I want to do it. I don’t want it to be some drunken accident that neither of us remember.” His hand reached for yours and you nodded your head again, feeling the warmth of his arms as he moved closer and wrapped himself around you, pulling you into his arms.

“I know,” you said, because it was the truth. You did know. He was right. You were both too young to be married and in his current situation with his job and his fame you wouldn’t even be able to tell anyone about it. But with his arms around you squeezing you with the love and the warmth you felt inside him cascading over you, you felt the tear slip down your cheek. Just a bit upset about this, either way.

Because it wasn’t real. Well, it was real now but on Monday morning when he made that phone call it wouldn’t be real any more.

“Don’t be sad my love,” he heard your sniffles and you felt his lips kissing away the tears that had fallen on your cheeks, “this is no way to feel on your wedding day.”

“I don’t even remember my wedding day.” You let out a small bitter laugh and you heard him laugh too.

“I remember your hat was too big and it kept knocking off my moustache. And I remember how sexy you look in ruffles and lace…and bows and beads and sequins, that dress was…something…” He was laughing loudly now and you laughed harder, remembering just how heavy it was to try and walk around in.

“We will fix it on Monday morning. Let’s be happy now, no more crying okay? We just got married!” His smile was wide and believable and you honestly saw the excitement behind his eyes with his words.

He was right, no matter what had to be done for the sake of your responsibilities, you were married…for now.

Married life with Byun Baekhyun was glorious. You spent your weekend going to various shops around town, walking hand in hand like a couple in love, sharing meals and inside jokes and the sex…the sex seemed to have changed during the weekend. If that was something that was even possible, the level of intimacy you felt with him was different. His eyes held something in them that felt…more.

The way he held onto you, as if you were the most precious thing in the world to him and molded to you, showering you with sweetness and words and the songs, dear lord the songs, in your ear. For you, about you, to you. The man was unstoppable. You hadn’t thought it was possible to feel more in love with him, but it was definitely happening now that you were married to him.

You practiced calling him your husband a few times and you heard him respond in kind, introducing you as his wife to the shop owner who rang up the purchase he made. She smiled at the sweet newlywed couple and gave him a discount.

Saturday was a dream. Sunday morning was sweet over breakfast in bed with your husband, Byun Baekhyun. Lunch was delightful with a tinge of something in the back of your mind that was peeking through. You knew what it was. It was a timer. The countdown began after lunch and you caught yourself looking at the clock, doing the math to see exactly how many more hours you would be his wife and he would be your husband.

The love you made after lunch felt just a bit more desperate than the day before and as you drifted off to sleep you heard his voice, telling you he was going out for a quick walk and would be back before you woke up.

When you woke up he still wasn’t back and you busied yourself with cleaning up the kitchen from the meal you shared. Washing the dishes you had both used, smiling at the memory of pushing a shopping cart around the local market with him next to you. You’d insisted that you had to cook for him instead of ordering out. You were running out of time as his wife by now and you swore you had to do it at least once before this was over.

Your eyes glanced at the clock and you wondered how long he was going to be out. You wondered where he went and what he was doing and you hoped he was okay. You looked at the spot where you both had agreed to keep the marriage certificate. You both signed a written agreement to void the document right away and left the agreement and the certificate there on the kitchen counter, ready to meet the woman on Monday to cancel the marriage and your eyes sought it out.

Only it was gone.

The space where it had been set down carefully was empty and you opened the kitchen drawers trying to find it. Where was it? Had there been a breeze that maybe blew it off the counter?

You looked down onto the floor around the kitchen, not finding any trace of the precious document and you had a realization.

Baekhyun was gone..for hours now.

Was it possible that he took it to meet the woman on his own? To cancel the marriage right away before taking the risk that something would happen before Monday came around?

Had he done it on his own? Armed with your signature and the form that he had taken, there was nothing to stop him.

You looked down at the dishes you had just washed from lunch and the kitchen that shined with your efforts to keep it clean.

Somehow, not knowing was worse. You didn’t know if you were still married to him and you felt a weird upset inside your stomach at this unknown information.

You went to the bathroom to take a shower. You needed to wash away this silly mood you found yourself in. You had no reason for this. You had both talked about it already and staying married was…tempting, but ultimately…it was…it was…impossible.

The shower helped and you took your time getting ready. You knew you had a dinner with him later that he had texted you about when he was out and you shaved your legs, putting on some nice smelling lotion and did your hair and makeup before you pulled out the fancy dress you brought.

It was a formal thing, delicate silk with a low cut neckline in the front, the sleeves hung off your shoulders, making you feel sexy and feminine. You had your phone in the bathroom as you got ready and you found a text message waiting for you from Baekhyun.

“My wife~~ Are you in there getting ready for our date? I smell something pretty.” You smiled down at your phone, holding your arm up to your nose to smell the lotion. It was new and you picked it with him in mind. You knew the kinds of scents he liked by now and this was sure to hit all the right notes.

“I’m almost ready, baby ^^” You could not bring yourself to type the word ‘husband’.

When you came out from the hallway, walking lightly in the dress that hugged your curves your eyes looked for him. Would he be ready to go already? You hoped you hadn’t taken too long getting ready.

You heard a soft gasp and you spun, spotting him in an instant as he leaned against the wall of the living room, his arms crossed over his chest, he wore a crisp, well fitted black suit. His hair was styled up and with the cut of the suit you could make out the shape of his arms, the muscles that you knew were there, the broadness of his shoulders and his chest filled out the jacket and you honestly had to have a moment because the man looked too beautiful to be real.

And he was staring at you. His eyes raked over your body with his mouth open and you couldn’t quite understand what that look was about.

“Wow,” he finally spoke in a soft breath. A whisper that tickled against the back of your neck, bringing a slight blush along with it.

“D-Do I look okay?” You asked, unsure of the dress choice. It was a bit more revealing than you usually dared to wear with such a low front, and the shoulders completely bared.

His eyes were wide and he was walking now, moving slowly and effortlessly to close the distance between you both and you heard a small laugh.

“Perfect,” he whispered and the look in his eyes magnified the closer he came to where you stood. “You look perfect.”

The ride to the restaurant was unexpected. When you came out from the home you stood in front of a black limousine and you looked into the face of your boyfriend, or husband, or whatever it was this man was to you right now, with the sneaky looking smile on his face as he waited for you to climb inside the open door of the giant vehicle.

You rode to the place in near silence and Baekhyun seemed nervous. He was usually chatty at all times and in all situations but now he was silent as he stared out the window at the buildings that flew by. He was fidgeting with his own fingers and you noticed he twirled the couple ring around his ring finger again and again, catching your eyes a few times with a small smile.

You wondered if perhaps he was upset that the marriage was over already.

The car stopped and you looked around at the buildings. The neighborhood looked nice, more downtown than where your beach home was located and the door opened.

Baekhyun was gone and his hand appeared at the opening of the door, waiting for you to accept it.

When you came out of the car you noticed the restaurant in front of you was fancy. Like, really fancy a women in a stiff coat held the door open for you both to enter.

The inside was like nothing you had ever seen. The soft sounds of music wafted through the room and you caught sight man playing of a grand piano in the center of the big dining room. An impressive chandelier hung from the ceiling and the walls were decorated with fine art. Tables were well spaced out with clean white linens and crystalware on the tables. The place was not very busy, only one or two couples sharing a quiet meal together and you were led to a table near the piano.

The food was delicious and as you ate you found your mind wandering as you remembered the weekend with him. The meals you shared as a married couple were some of the most delicious meals you had ever had in your life and you found your smile difficult to keep from your face as you remembered.

When you looked up you caught him watching you with a curious look, smiling in response to your smile you suddenly felt content. With it all, with him, with the trip, with the drunken accident, with the love, with all of it. It was perfect. He was perfect and you were satisfied with whatever happened after this because you knew, regardless of what was written on some piece of paper, you were his and he was yours and nothing could change that.

He was done with his food and he played with the stem of his wineglass as he watched your face, blinking and smiling slowly the way he did when he was particularly deep in thought. The silence was comfortable.

“I’m going to the restroom. I’ll be right back love.” His hand was over your own on the table and you nodded once before he left.

The music played on, steadily behind you where the piano player sat and you waited for him to return to his side of the table.

Your attention was pulled when the music stopped and changed. Mid song it seemed and you rotated in your seat, curious about the change. A new song was playing and the old man who had been playing the piano stood in front of you, blocking your view of the big instrument.

Yet the music was playing on. A different melody. Something slow and romantic and you couldn’t quite understand how this was happening with the piano player gone from his station.

The old man took a step aside and you heard a voice that you knew in your soul.

Your heart raced and echoed through your ears, competing for an audience and you shoved the distraction away because Baekhyun was seated at the piano as his fingers flew expertly over the keys …and he was singing.

His head was thrown back, his voice was clear and beautiful and the song was…

It was a love song. He turned to you as he sang and met your eyes and his voice echoed out loud and confident. He was a professional and it showed and you felt the lump form in your throat the longer you listened to the words to his song.

A song about being so young but so in love. A song about beating the odds. A song full of emotion and promises for the future, promises to share your home, promises to share your love and to start a family.

Something was changing in his voice the longer he sang and you heard something you had never heard from him. You heard an instability in that voice and you saw his eyebrows furrow in concentration as he tried to hold it back. The emotion he felt from the words he sang to you….the emotion from your song, this song was for you, it was yours, he took that emotion that threatened to overcome him and he put it into the words. You saw the wetness on his cheek, a single tear escaped and ran down his face as he sang and his eyes closed, unable to keep the eye contact with you and keep the song going.

You were powerless to stop your own tears that ran down your face. Probably ruining your makeup, you didn’t care.

His voice slowed down as the song neared its end and his fingers stopped playing the keys. He was standing up now, but he kept singing the words. When the music faded and disappeared the words seemed magnified. Or maybe it was because he was walking toward you.

You looked around the room, as he moved in closer and you noticed the attention was on him. He was such a good performer you were sure they were powerless to look away. Staff members, waiters, diners, everyone watched in silent awe at the beauty of his song. His voice was so powerful.

When you looked back at him expecting to find him directly in front of you he wasn’t there and you caught movement at the floor below you.

Your hands felt it first. The tremble of nerves when you saw him on the floor in front of you. His eyes were on yours and in his hand he held a small black box with a ring. He was shaking nearly as badly as you were and he closed his eyes with a deep inhale to steady himself.

The room was completely silent and your heart raged inside your chest, threatening to overcome every last bit of sense you had in your head.

You heard him speak. He whispered your name and his voice was thick and affected.

“Before I ask you anything I have a confession to make–” his hand was in his pocket and he pulled out a handful of pieces of paper to show you, “–I went a little crazy and I tore up our agreement to void the marriage, so if you say no we will have to make another one.”

He took another deep breath.

“W-Will you…stay married to me?”

You felt the answer in your bones. You knew the answer to completely inside your soul that your head was nodding in earnest long before your mouth found the words to say ‘Yes.’

You saw him sigh and this one was definitely a sigh of relief. His hand dropped the torn up bits of paper and he was reaching for you just as you got your brain to cooperate with the word.

“Yes,” you said and his smile was in front of you. His lips were on yours before the final sounds were out and his kiss cut you off to the noise of applause and cheers from the people in the restaurant echoed out around you.

He was laughing with his arms around your shoulders and you wiped at the tears you saw on his face. His hands on your own face held you close and he kissed your lips again, sweetly, as if he couldn’t help it. In front of all these people and everything, he was powerless against it.

“We are in so much trouble when we get home.” His laughter echoed over your head and you nodded your head in complete agreement because he was right.

But in this moment, this moment colored with so much happiness and so much love you couldn’t find an ounce of energy inside you to care.

You had given up long ago. He was yours and you were his. For life.

THE END

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The song Baekhyun sang to Hot Dog is Perfect by Ed Sheeran

I Give Up Deleted Scenes Masterlist

The Notebook Kinks 1   Pink Heart Days