#but there's a certain point where like. this is your job. you spent hours workshopping this joke.

[klysanderelias]

I do agree and I don't really want to derail the point that OP was making but I do feel like sometimes people underplay just how weird the wife thing came across too. and y'know, I don't think it's worse than the transphobia platforming, but it's...

I mean, the core of it to me will always have been the joke about his wife being a bitch, partially because he starts that joke off saying 'i'm going to be (playfully) racist' and then of course in that joke he says basically 'the one thing my wife asked me not to do was call her a bitch' and then he calls her a bitch? And specifically brings up that she's Jewish?

It's the problem of like, it's not good in hindsight, and there's something so irritating to me about the guy who wants so badly to be branded as the Wife Guy and yet feels like a marvel movie the way he keeps winking and nodding to the audience like it's a sin to be sincere.

And part of it's like... when I was younger, I listened to a lot of Christian music (which was generally bad for my health) but one of the artists I really loved was very much the Wife Guy, he wrote a bunch of songs about how much he loved his wife, about how he dropped everything and moved states just to get closer to her before they even started dating, etc etc, and the culmination was an album titled 'I was wrong, I'm sorry, and I love you' that kind of continued the trend. He also wrote a lot of songs about how the church (and believers) are Christ's bride and shit like that, lyrics like "I am a whore I do confess, I'll put you on just like a wedding dress and I'll run down the aisle"

Where it's just... when you find out he was cheating on his wife, especially during writing the album I was wrong I'm sorry and I love you, it's hard not to start making connections, y'know?

And I think we should allow people to be messy and make mistakes etc etc but I really don't like that the guy had a famous joke calling his wife a jewish bitch, and I really don't like it that then him and his wife got a divorce. It makes me start asking questions like 'was this actually a workshopped joke that his wife agreed to?' and 'even if it WAS, did she agree to it because she genuinely thought it was funny and a good joke or because she felt like she had to?'

And I don't like asking those questions because that's a personal and private thing, and I don't like that 'John Mulaney Loves His Wife So Much (And She's A Bitch)' became marketing. It's a problem with stand-up comedians to a certain extent where it's like 'haha funny joak' and then the truth comes out, y'know? Like haha louis ck sure had a bunch of jokes about masturbating in front of people... haha bo burnham sure had a lot of jokes about how he hates the audience and performing...

And again like, is it worse than the transphobia? Absolutely not. Am I avoiding putting all this on OP's post because I don't want them to feel like I'm saying 'but actually I still hate him for getting a divorce'? Absolutely.

Marriages don't always last, and I'm genuinely grateful that both divorce is an option that people are allowed, and one that has become more normalized (and should be even more normalized), but there is a certain point where, when Talking About How Much You Love Your Wife becomes content, when it becomes something you sell, it makes me really uncomfortable. I can't help but draw lines between like, family vloggers who exploit their children for content, or tradwife shit where inherently they have to be happy and perfect wives as part of the Brand.

And y'know, partially I wish we as audiences were less parasocial, that we didn't put people on a pedestal like 'damn I wish I could find a love like that', I think we should stop giving a shit who Taylor Swift is dating (and instead care more about her taking a private jet for every errand), but also we need to stop making this shit Content. People need to stop selling themselves, stop marketing themselves, as 'guy who really loves his wife.'

At the end of the day, I don't hate john mulaney for getting a divorce, or for cheating on his wife or not, I hate that he got paid a lot of money to stand up on stage and say to a huge audience 'aren't I so cool and good for being able to love my bitch jew wife.'

I hate that every time I think about it I think about what it must have felt like to be his wife watching it.

[pumpumdemsugah]

Do you have any advice on how to hang onto hope and keep your spirits up when job hunting?

Don't apply for lots of jobs. You should try to stick to applying to certain types of jobs. It might help to take time out to figure out what that is and have a shortlist of the types of jobs you want

Restrict job hunting to select periods of the day or certain days. Job hunting all day is a waste of time. Don't spread yourself thin

Don't look for jobs for long periods of time

Go for a walk and take yourself out to places ( libraries, the market etc )

Do your hobbies

Job hunting is a skill and if you really find yourself struggling it may help figuring out what job skills you can improve to help yourself

See if there's any free job hunting, CV building or interview skills workshops. Even if it's not helpful, or you know those skills, the point is to get outside feedback to get you out of your head and have human interaction. Half the battle of job hunting is knowing the titles of the jobs you're qualified for and these workshops can introduce you to more career options

The content online by job coaches on Instagram is very good

When applying for a job, check Glassdoor or YouTube to see if anyone has posted anything about the application process or what the job is like

Before you start job hunting, fix up your CVs and cover letters and create a document where you list answers to scenarios you might be asked to write for job applications

Job hunting shouldn't take up most of your time

When I was looking for my current job I spent maybe 20 to 30 minutes job hunting every other day BUT I had money so I wasn't in a massive rush lol. You can spend lots of time applying if you're very desperate but you should always be strategic

Sometimes you might need to not apply for jobs for a few days or a week

Once you understand the job hunting process, you can be really laid about it. Usually I will only apply for jobs that fit my criteria and commute time. I'm not commuting for more than an hour lol nor do I take jobs that force me to use the Central Line in London lol but London is well connected enough that you can usually find a way around.

Most job hunting is about effective research and getting enough sunlight and sleep

[jimmylustig]

Signs That Your Workplace Priorities Are Changing

Signs That Your Workplace Priorities Are Changing https://ift.tt/ft6Fvgl Have you ever felt like something’s different at work, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? The vibe in the office has shifted, or your boss is suddenly interested in projects they never cared about before. These subtle changes could be hints that your workplace priorities are evolving. Let’s explore some telltale signs that things might change at your job. When fresh blood joins the management team, new faces in leadership roles often bring new ideas and goals. Look for unfamiliar faces in high-level meetings or announcements about new hires in key positions. These newcomers might shake things up and introduce different priorities. The sudden focus on specific metrics: If your team meetings suddenly revolve around numbers or KPIs rarely mentioned before, it’s a clear sign of shifting priorities. Customer satisfaction scores are now the hot topic, or everyone’s obsessing over cost-cutting measures. This new emphasis hints at changing company goals. Changes in budget allocations: Money talks and where it’s being spent can tell you a lot about what’s essential to your organization. Are specific departments getting more funding while others are tightening their belts? This could indicate a shift in focus and priorities. Reorganization of teams or departments: When companies shuffle their organizational charts, it’s usually because they’re trying to align their structure with new objectives. If you notice teams being combined, split up, or moved around, it’s a good bet that priorities are changing. New training programs or skill development initiatives: Has your company suddenly started offering workshops on topics it’s never covered before? Or is it pushing everyone to learn a new software or methodology? This investment in specific skills shows what the company values and where it’s headed. Shift in company communication: Pay attention to the language used in company-wide emails, meetings, or even casual conversations with higher-ups. If a new buzzword or phrase is frequently used, it might point to evolving priorities. Changes in performance evaluations: When the criteria for success at your job start to look different, it’s a clear sign that priorities have shifted. You may suddenly be graded on teamwork more than individual output, or innovation is trumping efficiency. Altered meeting schedules or attendees: Are you invited to (or cut out of) meetings you weren’t invited to before? Changes in who’s in the room and what’s being discussed can signal new directions for the company. Different treatment of clients or customers: If you notice a shift in how your company interacts with clients – focusing more on certain types of customers or changing service levels – it could indicate new priorities regarding growth or market focus. Adjustments to work schedules or policies Sometimes, changing priorities show up in the day-to-day details of work life. A sudden push for more remote work or a shift in core hours might reflect new company values or goals. Recognizing these signs can help you stay ahead of the curve and adapt to your company’s evolving needs. It’s always wise to keep your finger on the pulse of your workplace – after all, being in tune with your company’s priorities can help you thrive in your role and grow in your career. So keep your eyes and ears open, and you’ll be well-prepared for whatever changes come your way. The post Signs That Your Workplace Priorities Are Changing first appeared on Jimmy Lustig | Denver, Colorado. via Jimmy Lustig | Denver, Colorado http://jimmylustig.com September 04, 2024 at 04:40AM

[mosswillow]

Your room (Dark!Peter Parker x Reader)

Word count 3.3k

!!!!! This is dark! And explicit 18+ only !!!!!

Warnings: Noncon/Dubcon, oral (female receiving), spankings, punishment, kidnapping, Stockholm syndrome, unprotected sex, smut, vaginal intercourse.

Summery: Your life is bland and boring but not for long. What happens when you catch the eye of a certain super hero?

Your room has always reflected you as a person. In highschool you haphazardly filled the walls with quotes and posters. Your room was messy in the typical way teenagers rooms tend to be, but also like a typical teenager was filled with feeling and hope. In college you filled your space with pictures of you and your friends taken on a polaroid camera. Everywhere you looked had your life staring back at you. Now as an adult the pictures from college are tucked away in a box. Your room is simple and boring. Most people think of you as minimalist but you don’t do it to be trendy, you just have no passion. You’ve spent the years after graduating college working a job you hate in a lab, running the same tests over and over again. You’ve always wanted to be a scientist, working on something new and exciting. You’ve applied everywhere but you rarely even get an interview. Your dreams, unfortunately, will never happen for you. Sometimes you wish for someone to swoop in and take you for your bland life but you know that will never happen. Watching your friends get dream jobs and buy homes while you waste away has crushed your spirit. You’re tired.

---

“Hey Y/N, we’re going out tonight.”

“I don’t know…”

“Come on, you never come with us.”

“Ok sure.”

Your coworker is right that you never go out anymore and so several hours later you walk into a bar, grabbing a drink and finding your coworkers. The bar is bustling with activity and you lose track of time. You usually curl up in bed with a book on a friday night but you’re glad you came. You used to go out all the time in college and miss being social. Going out is good for your mental health and you decide to make more of a point to spend time with people.

You say goodbye to your still partying co-workers and head home a little past midnight. You start your walk and cut through an alleyway, wanting to get home before you vomit from the alcohol.

“Hey sweetheart. What are you doing all alone out here?”

A large man steps out of the shadows and walks toward you. You ignore him, keeping your eyes focused ahead and pick up the pace.

“Oi, I’m talkin’ to you,” He lunges forward and grabs your arm.

“Let me go.” You try to walk away but he holds onto you still, pushing you against the wall and landing a bruising kiss on your lips. His breath smells rancid and you feel bile rise in your throat. You cry out for help and the man is suddenly pulled away from you. You watch with disbelief as Spider man throws the stranger against the opposing wall.

“She said to go away buddy.”

The man slowly stands up and runs away. Spider Man shoots a web at the running stranger and he falls over, immobilized.

“You ok?” Spider Man turns to you, cocking his head.

“Yes, thank you Spider Man.”

“I’ll come check on you tomorrow”

You watch spider man pick up the stranger like he’s nothing and swing away. You walk the rest of the way home and lie in bed, unable to fall asleep. The next morning there’s a tap on your window and you look out to see Spider Man on your fire escape. You briefly wonder how he knows where you live but quickly brush off the thought and open your window.

“You sure you’re ok?” He steps towards you, looking you over.

“Just a little shaken up.”

He walks to your kitchen, filling a glass of water and handing it to you.

“This is too much, really I’m fine. You already saved me.”

“Drink the water,” He commands.

You sigh and drink it.

“That’s a good girl. Now get back to bed.”

You set the glass down and stare at the stranger you let in your home. Alarm bells start ringing.

“I’d like you to leave.”

“I’ll leave once I know you’re doing as you're told.”

Your heart beats rapidly and you take a step back.

“I appreciate that you saved me and came to make sure that I’m fine but I’m now asking you to please go.”

Spider man crosses his arms.

“I’ll call the cops” you say.

“And say what?”

“That there’s an intruder.”

Spider man sighs and walks to your window, standing at it.

“Get in bed and I’ll go.”

You walk to your bed and get under the covers.

“Good girl. I’ll be back to check on you later.”

As soon as he’s through the window you jump out of bed and lock every door and window, double checking your work. You get back in bed and let out a sigh of relief, finally able to sleep.

You wake up to tapping on your window. Spiderman is back. You make your way to the window but don’t open it.

“Let me in.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with you in here.”

Spider Man shakes his head and leaves without a word.

The next few weeks are filled with anxiety. You see flashes of red in your peripheral vision everywhere you go. Spider man is stalking you. You consider telling police but don’t think they’ll believe you. It sounds crazy, even to you. If it weren't for the bruises from the assault in the alleyway you would think you had imagined the whole thing. You stop leaving your apartment unless necessary and never go out after dark.

You get a voicemail one day.

“HI, this is Rebecca Johnson from Stark Industries. We’re looking for someone to fill a position in one of our labs. You had submitted an application previously and we wanted to reach out and see if you’d like to interview for the position. Please call back at your earliest convenience.

You squeal in delight, doing a celebratory fist pump. Stark industries is a dream job. You immediately hit redial and set up the interview. This would change everything. Just one year working at Stark would open up endless possibilities for you and that’s if you ever want to leave. You could afford a nicer apartment with more security. Maybe you will finally feel safe. You remind yourself that it’s just an interview and you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself.

---

You look up at the tower and take a deep breath. It’s intimidating, going for an interview at Stark tower. It’s been so long since you’ve interviewed anywhere let alone somewhere so big. You tug at your blouse, second guessing your outfit, maybe you should have worn something different. It’s too late to go back home and change. You walk in, mustering up all the courage you can and talk to the woman at the front desk.

“Hi, I’m here for an interview. Y/N Y/L/N”

“Oh yes, they’re expecting you. Here’s a temporary badge. Go to the 80th floor and take a seat.”

You take the badge and follow the instructions. You’re surprised to find yourself in what looks like private quarters. There’s a small couch near the elevator and you sit and wait.

Tony Stark himself appears in front of you and your mouth flies open. You stand quickly and hold your hand out.

“Mr. Stark, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Tony looks you up and down, clicking his tongue.

“Likewise, follow.”

You half walk, half run behind him, getting in the elevator and taking it down a floor. You arrive at a state of the art lab and workshop and Tony leads you to a desk.

“The whole workshop will be open to you. This is your desk.”

He starts walking again and you keep following him back to the elevator and to another floor.

“Here’s where you’ll live. I’ll leave you with the contract and you can call my assistant if you have any questions.”

He hands you a tablet and walks out.

You look around the room dumbfounded. You thought you were just here for an interview. You guess this means you got the job. You swipe through the contract and your eyes widen at your salary. There are a few things that make you uncomfortable though. You’re required to live on site and there’s a curfew. You have to sign a NDA about anything you see in the tower. You also can’t decide to quit without permission, which you’re not sure is even legal. You call the number to Tony’s assistant.

“This is Rebecca.”

“Hi, this is Y/N. I’m looking through this contract and it says I have to live on site and there’s a curfew?”

“Yes. That is non negotiable. Living on site will give you access to the workshop 24/7. There will be times when you will work through the night. The curfew is for security as the tower is locked down every night.”

You would rather have your own place where you can come and go as you please but you’re willing to live here if you have to and the reason for a curfew makes sense. The tower has top of the line security, which is something that’s really important to you. You don’t usually go out late anyway and if you do decide to be out late you can crash at a friends house or get a hotel room.

“And the avengers? Will I have to work closely with them?”

“You might meet them or see them at some point but most likely not.”

“I know this sounds weird but I don’t want Spider man to know I’m working here.”

“Mums the word.”

“What exactly will the job entail? I see there’s a NDA.”

“You’ll be an assistant in Tony Stark's personal workshop and will work closely with him. He appreciates privacy.”

“I see, and the part where I’m not allowed to quit?”

“He just wants to make sure you’re serious. Tony picks his assistants personally and requires loyalty.”

“Ok, thank you.”

You hang up and sign the screen. When you open the door there's a man standing outside. He’s not a tall man, standing a few inches taller than you. However, he is muscular and something about him commands attention. You feel an immediate pull towards him.

“Oh, hi I’m Peter Parker.” He holds out his hand.

“I’m Y/N”

“I also work with Tony and live right next to you. I’ll be your direct boss.”

“It’s nice to meet you Mr. Parker.”

“Peter is fine. I won’t keep you any longer, I just wanted to introduce myself.”

You immediately get to work rearranging your life. By the end of the weekend you’re completely moved into your new place and on monday you start your first day on the job. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamed of, full of state of the art technology and free reign to do whatever you want. You walk into work every day with a smile.

You work alone most of the time, Tony and Peter working awkward, sporadic hours but you enjoy it when you do get to work with them. Tony is funny and brilliant, you learn more from him than from any college class. Peter is smart and sweet. He helps you with your work and makes sure you’re always taken care of, sending you back to your room if you’ve been working too long or making you take breaks to eat. You find yourself starting to develop feelings for Peter and your heart swells when he asks you on a date. Life is good and only getting better.

You meet Peter outside of your door and he takes your hand. The two of you walk to a little italian restaurant and Peter takes your menu, ordering your food for you. It’s very forward for a first date but you like the confidence. After dinner he walks you back to your door and kisses you. You see something in his eyes when he pulls away, possessive and dark. It makes you feel uncomfortable but also excited. Nobody has ever looked at you like that.

Over the next few weeks Peter becomes more and more comfortable around you, becoming more physical. It’s small things, like pushing your hair back when talking or touching you gently as he walks past. He asks you out again, this time wanting to cook you dinner and you decline, suggesting a coffee date instead. You don’t feel comfortable enough with him to be alone in his room. He clenches his jaw when you tell him, obviously upset you won’t come over but agrees.

A few days later you decide to go out with some old friends and crash on one of their couches. When you get home the next day Peter is standing outside your door.

“You missed curfew.”

“I know, I went out with friends and crashed on one of their couches.”

Peter clenches his jaw.

“Don’t let it happen again.”

“It shouldn't matter if I want to stay the night somewhere else.”

“Well it does.”

You roll your eyes and unlock your door quickly, locking it behind you. The two of you have only been on one date. His behavior is a red flag and you decide to take things slowly.

The next day you decide to go out for coffee, pulling on a simple tee shirt dress and some flip flops. The elevator won’t let you down.

“Your privileges have been revoked.” Peter says from behind you.

You jump. “Why?”

“You know why.”

He stalks toward you, pushing you up against the elevator.

“I don’t feel comfortable with this Peter. You need to back away from me now.”

Peter takes a step back.

“I’m sorry but right now I don’t want any sort of relationship outside of work.”

“That’s not going to work for me.”

Something in Peter's eyes terrifies you. You need to get out of here. You try the elevator again but it still won’t open.

“I quit.” you yell at the elevator, feeling more danger every second you’re stuck in the hallway with Peter.

“You can’t quit baby.”

“There’s no way it’s legal to force me to keep working even if it’s in the contract.”

“There’s nowhere to go. You’re not getting out of this building and even if you did you’d have to find a lawyer to take your case.”

“You can’t do this, I'll tell Tony.”

“Who do you think suggested this in the first place? Most of the Avengers have gotten their partners this way. I was waiting for the right person and I knew you were them the moment I saw you.”

“Why would Tony help you trap me here? You’re just a lab assistant.”

“Oh no honey, I’m much more than that.”

He steps toward you, caging you in.

“You think it’s a coincidence I saved you in that alleyway?”

“Spider man?”

Peter gives a grin. He leans in and smells your hair.

“No.”

“I’m sorry it’s happening this way, I wanted to break you down slower. You’ll have a really good life, we’ll live together and work together. You’ll have everything you could need or want.”

“I want to leave.”

“You’ll change your mind, you just need a little motivation.”

Peter pulls you to his room and opens the door, pushing you into his apartment. You try to run but he easily catches you, picking you up and throwing you on his bed.

“Why are you doing this? Why me?” you scrabble to the far side of the bed.

“You’re mine.”

Peter's phone rings and he picks it up.

“Hey, yes I did... I know It wasn’t the plan, I had to improvise… Ok, see you in a few weeks.”

He hangs up and gets on top of you. you spit in his face.

“I’m not yours freak. Let me go.”

“You won’t be allowed to act like that moving forward. Now lie still.”

“Get off of me.”

Peter gets off briefly, flipping you over his lap and pulling up your skirt. He lands a smack on your bottom.

“You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to do this. You’ve been so bad baby.

“Not letting me in your apartment.”

Smack.

“Telling Rebecca you didn’t want me to you started working here.”

Smack

“Staying out all night.”

Smack.

“Shutting the door in my face.”

Smack.

“I liked you Peter, If you had just acted like a normal person we could have continued a relationship.” You say through tears.

“I don’t want a relationship, I want to own you.”

He lands another blow on your bottom and grabs your underwear, pulling them down and off of you. You try to wiggle away but he’s so strong and easily holds you down with one arm. He moves his hand between your legs and towards your sex, pushing a finger in and out.

“You’re wet for me.” He says smugly.

You close your eyes and turn your head away. You’ve stopped resisting and he lets go.

“There you go.”

He kisses your neck and cheek then grabs your chin moving your face and kissing you gently, pushing his tongue into your mouth. He pulls back and you hear him unbuttons his pants, pulling them down. You open your eyes and move away from him, pushing your back against the headboard. You watch as he holds his erection, slowly moving his hand up and down. He moves towards you and grabs your ankle, pulling you down the bed and positioning himself in between your legs. He holds onto your hips and kisses your inner thigh, moving toward your mound until his mouth is on your clit, kissing and licking. You arch your back and throw your head back, fighting against the rising orgasm. Right before you come he pulls back, smiling up at your dazed face. He rises up and slowly pushes his dick into you until you’re full. You whimper as he brings his hand down to your clit, stimulating it.

“That’s right baby,I know what you like.”

You can’t think about anything else anymore, only the orgasm that threatens to take over.

“Come Baby”

You reach out, grabbing his arms as you come. He grabs your shoulders and thrusts deep, filling you with cum before collapsing next to you, pulling you into the crook of his arm.

“Can I go back to my room now?” you ask.

“You won’t be leaving this room until I can trust you.”

“I won’t say anything. You won. You got what you wanted so just let me go.”

“You still don’t get it Y/N. You’re mine now. I know this is a hard adjustment but everything will be fine as long as you follow what I say.”

“And if I don’t obey you?”

“You’ll be punished.”

“Fuck you.”

Peter sits up next to you, grabbing his pants off the floor and pulling his belt out of the loops.

“I guess your first lesson starts now.”

---

You look around the room you live in. It’s no longer the empty minimalist space it was before you met Peter. Now it’s filled with him. Everywhere you look there are reminders of him. The shower has his body wash and razor. There are pictures of him hanging on the walls. Everything you own has been bought for you by Peter. He dictates what you’re allowed to wear, where you’re allowed to go, who can talk to. It’s all him. Every part of your life revolves around Peter to the point where you don’t know what you would do without him. You wake up to him, go to sleep to him, think about him constantly. You’re even sometimes woken up in the middle of the night to him touching you, wanting you. At some point you stop pretending you don’t want him back. You hate it but it’s true.

Your room has always been a reflection of you as a person.

[yslkook]

#alignment (2)

#corporate part 2

summary: the announcement of a new project brings you closer to jungkook. also, you see jungkook at the gym, and your grandma tells you for the millionth time that you should marry seokjin.

word count: 3938

warnings: cursing, parental death, discussion of mental health

a/n: omg ok i know i said this was going to be enemies to lovers but it’ll probably be softer than that because i’m me. enjoy!!

***

For once in the workplace, you’re excited and thrumming with anticipation. It had been determined months ago that a submission for one of your new products would be occurring soon, and now it was time for those plans to come to fruition. Preparing for submissions to the country’s approval authorities was an arduous, but enticing task. Enticing for you at least.

This is where you thrive. This is where the half sown seeds you had planted in the ground come to full bloom. You’re good at telling people what to do, having the tough conversations and you’re good at navigating through tough problems. It’s why your boss had assigned you to this project months ago. Even if you resented your boss and he likely resented you, he was smart enough to play your strengths.

After all, it would only make him look good when you were successful.

Over the last few years, you’ve saved up enough money for exactly three designer pantsuits. Today was not the occasion to bring out your black Balmain pantsuit or your Dior heels. The power that your Balmain pantsuit and Dior heels gave you was reserved for special occasions. Only when powerful players were involved and you needed to bring your A game to the table. And when you needed to make a statement- that none of them should even dare to undermine you.

You were a contributing team member, not the lead. You wanted to be, though. You wanted to be the submissions lead, but that was almost always given to the regulatory department. Since they had knowledge of the regulations and adherence to them.

You’re sucked into a daydream where you would start one of these kickoff meetings in your Balmain pantsuit. You would need every single one of these people to know exactly who was in charge. Your painted lips would leave no room for jokes. Not in your conference room.

Namjoon looks at you and you nod. This isn’t your first time being part of a major submission, but you won’t be caught making a fool of yourself.

But still, you pack on a saccharine smile dripping with honey. You need to come across as approachable. They need to trust you, and you need to trust them. You put aside your disdain for your manager and his manager for the entirety of the day and the smile feels much less forced as the morning goes on.

Your manager who sits three seats away from you. And another young woman on your team sits next to you. She’s new, and looks at her in the same way that Jeon looks at you. Wide eyed and innocent. As if you’re meant to guide her through the inner workings of capitalism.

Even Jeon Jungkook, sitting two seats away Namjoon’s boss, doesn’t bother you. Not today. Not when you’re in your element. The sight of him still sends your blood into a rage, but not today. You hardly think about the fact that he’d garnered the attention of all of the higher ups in the regulatory department, and he’s only been here for two months. 

You’d graduated from flat out ignoring him to at least offering him a small nod of acknowledgment. He still can’t understand your dislike of him. You pretend to ignore the questions in his sparkling eyes.

You could command the entire room with well-timed jokes earning chuckles from your audience, as they would listen intently as you explain the project timelines and what each team is designed to do.

It’s only a dream, a whisper of a future that you’re torturing yourself over.

“We’re anticipating submission in November of next year. That gives us fourteen months to prepare,” Namjoon says, pointing to the slide being projected on the screen, “We’ll need to go to Tokyo at least three times in the next fourteen months. Two workshops will be scheduled in Tokyo to bring them up to speed and go over a detailed risk management plan. And then we’ll be in Tokyo for the submission itself, where the approval authorities will assess our data. Tokyo in November is beautiful, so let’s be ready for it.”

There are murmurs within your audience, buzzing with anticipation of the next fourteen months. 

Tokyo in November is beautiful, you think wistfully.

As Namjoon instructs each person’s role in the team and what the deliverables are, you let your gaze float over to Jungkook. You haven’t truly seen him in the few months he’s been here, unable to reconcile the fact that he was fresh meat and had more of a rank than you. He was doe eyed, naive and a kid with his tail between his legs.

And yet, he was anything but. His hair was dark and fluffy, almost wavy. A stark contrast from the different colors his hair would be week to week when you were in graduate school. He had such a baby face back then, but even then, you thought he was cute. In an adorable, awww look at you, sort of way.

Now, you think, now- with his ears pierced and tattoos on his knuckles, dressed in all black. Filling his clothes out. Now, with his boyish charm, he looks like the man you knew he’d grow up to be. His lips are pink and pouty, slightly parted in concentration as he listens to Namjoon.

It’s only been five years. Only five years and you feel like much more time has passed. He had been more than a mentee to you- one of your good friends, always protective of him over mean girls but not afraid to tell him when he was being stupid. Jeon Jungkook was all bright eyes and bunny smiles, and he still is. 

He catches you looking at him, offering you a wide smile as his eyes glitter at you. You can’t help but smile back, giving him more than your usual thin-lipped smile.

You nearly scoff when you take in his tattoos and his earrings. Of course he wasn’t reprimanded for that, in the name of inclusivity and freedom of expression. The corporate world has come such a long way, and yet some things are still the same.

Like you not getting the recognition you certainly deserved, in favor of it going to your male counterparts and superiors

It’s not his fault. It’s not his fault.

Jungkook’s smile fades when your fleeting smile turns into a small frown as you glaze over him. You swivel your chair and he watches your eyes land on your boss. A thinly veiled look of irritation blooming into something similar to disdain flashes across your face when your eyes land on him. It comes and goes swiftly, your dark eyes reverting to a perfect palette of blankness.

You’re a far cry from the person he knew all those years ago, and yet you still feel so familiar. He wonders if there’s a specific reason that you seem to hate him, but he tries not to dwell on it. On you. On the past. 

You were a mere blip in his twenty-six years of life, and he’s certain the feeling is mutual. But he wants to catch up with you again, see how you’ve been over the last few years. But it seems you could care less about him. That’s okay. 

You had been his dream girl, once upon a time. At least in his mind. He had been just a kid, only twenty-one, and he’d only known you for a few months before you left graduate school abruptly. You were older than him, unattainable even. He and his friends had chalked it up to a stupid crush on an older girl and his own rose-tinted glasses.

But then you had left without so much as a goodbye, and it hurt a little more than a crush. 

Jungkook catches steel and ice curling in your brown eyes and he wonders if he knew you at all.

***

Anyone who wasn’t part of the core team had been dismissed, only leaving you with Sana, Jungkook, Namjoon and a few others. It was a total of six people. You agreed with that approach- the less was better. If more people got involved, it would become impossible to move forward. You even thought that only one person from your team and Namjoon’s team should be involved. But you didn’t voice it, knowing that Namjoon had put a lot of thought into the strategy and approach.

With your input as well. You had spent at least two hours a week for the last few weeks with Namjoon, and sometimes by extension with Jungkook to help with the strategy and planning of the project.

Namjoon was always good about giving you credit where credit was due, almost as if it was second nature. Which you appreciated. It was much more than you could say for your own boss.

Working with Namjoon was one of your favorite parts of your job. You both worked well together, like two puzzle pieces that smoothed each other’s edges out. You both had strategic foresight in different ways, and it just worked.

You wish, not for the first time, that you were in the regulatory department. Rather than your own. But it was common knowledge that it was an unspoken requirement that everyone in the regulatory department had a graduate degree. And you did not.

Seokjin would often joke that he was worried that you’d leave him for Namjoon. To which you would tell him to stop being stupid. After all, at the end of the day, Namjoon was just a work colleague and Jin was your friend.

Jungkook had watched and listened intently to you and Namjoon during those meetings, taking notes to summarize. Without warning, you’d turn your eyes to him and ask him what his thoughts were.

In the beginning, he would stutter at the sudden question. And you’d move on quickly with a flash of your eyes, a nonverbal confirmation that he had failed your not so explicit test.

But he’s a quick learner, and he’s perceptive. And he knows you remember, from the fond way your eyes shine at him and the way you give him a small smile when he does speak up. When he’s not thrown off by your sudden brusqueness.

Jungkook thought he misheard you when you had even complimented him-

“Well, we might be getting rusty. The new kid thought of this and we completely overlooked it,” You snort, but throw Jungkook a rare smile.

“I’m not a kid,” Is all Jungkook can choke out.

But then you had gone back to barely acknowledging him in the hallways and anywhere that wasn’t Namjoon’s office, so Jungkook let it go. Again.

Jungkook shifts his eyes to you, centering himself. Your pen scratches lightly as you take notes in your neat, black notebook. You never go anywhere without that thing.

“I can set up the biweekly meetings,” Jungkook offers, already looking for an available time for the five of you on his laptop.

“Thanks, Jungkook,” Sana says, “Beat me to it.”

Jungkook shrugs with a smile, “it’s no problem.”

The four of you pack up, putting away your laptops, pens and notebooks into your respective bags. You’re in a good mood today, happy to be part of something important. You felt like you belonged somewhere, and even if it was temporary and for work reasons... It was still nice to be needed.

You were in a good enough mood to walk with your group to their desks, something you rarely ever did. You were mostly the first one in and out of conference rooms, not really waiting up for anyone. Unless it was Seokjin or even Namjoon.

“Have a good rest of your day, Jungkook,” You murmur, meeting his eyes as you pass him to head to your own cubicle. You offer him another smile as you look at him from over your shoulder, one that he returns. Once you walk away, he sits in his chair, leaning backwards and looking up at the ceiling.

Jungkook has whiplash. He stretches his arms before checking his email and deciding to call it a day.

***

Jungkook gathers his gym duffel bag in his hands and cleans up his desk to head to the gym, located just downstairs on the other side of the building. It’s about a four minute walk, and then another few minutes to change into his gym clothes,

There were plenty of perks of working here, but the gym was his favorite one. It had been newly renovated only six months before he had joined. Everything is pristine and new and it’s everything he wants in a gym.

He plugs his wireless headphones into his ears and allows himself to get lost in the music and the rhythm of his feet thumping against the treadmill.

He pays no mind to you sliding onto the elliptical, five machines away from him. He’s too engrossed in his own workout, allowing the adrenaline and music to flow through his veins. Once he’s done with the treadmill, Jungkook heads over to the weights, mats and body bars to do a quick upper body workout.

His eyes are trained on himself in front of the mirror, mentally keeping track of his reps. Jungkook doesn’t even notice you standing a few feet away, with your own weights. 

You can’t help but sneak a few glances at him. A few more than you probably should. Despite the way his gym clothes are incredibly loose on him, nearly hanging off of his shoulder… You can still tell that he takes his gym routines seriously.

You slide your eyes towards his form once more in the mirror and see the deepening furrow between his eyebrows as he huffs through his reps.

For someone who internally claims that the sight of him disgusts you, you sure can’t keep your eyes off of him.

Rolling your eyes at yourself, you decide to change the song and start your lifting regimen. Thoughts of Jeon Jungkook fade away as you concentrate, eyes centered on your form and your form only. Beads of sweat from your cardio workout merge with fresh beads of sweat pooling on your forehead, your neck, your chest, your armpits.

You’ve recently started coming to the gym more frequently as a means to expel some pent up negative energy. Over the last year or so- maybe even two or three years, or maybe this energy has been with you for much longer and you had failed to realize it- you’ve tried to make it a point to come to the gym at least three or four times a week. You came here to clear your mind, and if you were losing inches and becoming toned because of it… Well, that was just a plus.

It wasn’t a permanent fix, of course. It wasn’t a permanent fix to your laundry list of issues that you knew you had and that you knew you were running away from. But for the hour that you were in the gym, it felt like nothing else existed. Your mind was off and the only thing you heard was the pounding of your heart.

The last time your laundry list of issues had been discussed out loud, Jin had recommended seeing a therapist. That conversation had ended up in a big fight and lots of tears from both of you. You weren’t ready to admit to yourself, much less someone else, that you needed help. That you needed so much help.

The idea has been popping up more and more recently ever since Jin mentioned it. And honestly, you’re surprised it took you this long to think about it seriously.

You’ll table the thought for later. 

You audibly wince as your shoulders nearly give out at the end of your set. By then, Jungkook has noticed your presence only five feet away from him. He wants to correct you on your stance to tell you to straighten your back and tell you that the way you’re holding the kettlebell is too loose.

But he bites his tongue. After all, it had taken two months just to get a simple ‘have a nice day’ out of you and he won’t ruin that.

However. He sees the strain on your face and the way your knees aren’t bent. You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t correct your posture.

Jungkook pulls his earphones out and calls your name. The first time he does, you don’t hear it. Then, you hear your name faintly and it startles you.

“Didn’t see you there,” You lie through your teeth, wondering if he caught you checking him out not even fifteen minutes ago.

He did, but he keeps that to himself.

“Uh,” Jungkook starts, his hand raised in an awkward hand wave.

You roll your eyes.

“You’re the one who called my name, Jungkook. What is it?” You ask impatiently, with narrowed eyes.

Right.

“Your posture isn’t right. You’re gonna hurt your back if you don’t widen your legs and straighten your back,” Jungkook explains, hoping you don’t take it the wrong way.

Annoyance washes off of your face quickly.

“Oh. Thanks,” You reply, “Like this?”

You heed his instructions and pointedly look at him for approval.

“Yeah,” Jungkook says, ignoring the stutter of his heartbeat, “Yeah, exactly like that.”

“Were you a personal trainer in a past life?” You ask.

You chalk up the small talk to the rush of endorphins. Not an actual sense of curiosity. Your body betrays your inner thoughts, as she usually does.

“Nah, not officially. I got into working out in college and would help out friends wherever we could,” Jungkook says, placing his weights back on the rack.

“Friends?” You scoff apprehensively, “So are we friends now?”

“I guess I should’ve let you injure your lower back then,” Jungkook replies, meeting your eyes in the mirror.

You can’t help the surprised laugh from escaping your lips.

“Have a good rest of your workout,” Jungkook says and doesn’t wait for your reply before turning around and walking back to the locker rooms. 

He leaves the gym the same way he entered, casting a gaze over you as you bend over to pick up your weights on the mat in front of you. Jungkook looks away quickly, ignoring the heat in his cheeks.

***

Home is your grandma’s cottage, in between Seoul and Incheon. It’s closer to Incheon than it is to Seoul, but it’s still not terribly far from work. 

Home has been your grandma’s cottage since your Appa passed away. Even before. The pale green walls and the seemingly random scattering of plants have always reminded you of that familiar, cozy feeling that comes with home. Many of your best memories are in this cottage.

After you shower, cleanse, tone, and moisturize your skin, and change into a sweater and shorts, you head downstairs to see if your grandma has returned from her evening walk with her friends.

“How was your walk, grandma?” You ask, heading into the kitchen to see what to warm up for dinner.

“It’s getting colder,” She says, rubbing her hands close together.

“Where’s your scarf?” You chastise gently, encasing her hands in yours, “Go change into something warm. I’ll set the table.”

Grandma gives you a smile, her eyes bright and identical to your Appa’s eyes. And your eyes. You had never met your mother as far as you can remember, but you think that there’s hardly a trace of her in you. You’re close to the spitting image of your grandmother from when she was younger.

She comes downstairs in one of your Appa’s old sweaters and flannel pants, looking warmed up. You wordlessly hand her a glass of water and curl into yourself on the chair.

“You came home late,” She says, scooping food onto her plate.

“Been working out a few times a week, remember?” You reply after a mouthful of rice and wipe the corner of your lips.

Grandma rolls her eyes at you and you grin sheepishly.

“Maybe you’ll meet a nice boy at the gym. Or a girl. Ji-yoo told me that her grandson’s friend’s sister met someone at the gym-”

“Grandma!” You whine, “Really?”

“Well, you have Seokjin right there. But you refuse to date him,” She says pointedly, giving you a teasing smile.

Grandma loves Seokjin, a fact that she’s never hidden from you. From the first time you had introduced Seokjin to her, she had been relentless in telling you that he was your soulmate. 

Maybe your platonic soulmate. But not your soulmate in the romantic sense. He knows everything about you, and you know everything about him.

You had never told her that in college after a night out that you were both too sober for, you had tried hooking up. Just to see what it would be like. You were both lonely, and wondering if your close friendship could or should be something more. His lips had touched yours for all of five seconds, his tongue slipping into your mouth quickly and then you had both pulled away instantly. It was too weird, and you both had burst into laughter right after. Seokjin had been your first kiss, but as weird as it was- you wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Oh, stop it, that ship has long sailed,” You wave her off.

“You know him more than married couples know each other.”

“I can’t marry him. He’s my only friend, I’ll lose him if I marry him,” You joke but your grandma’s eyes turn sad at your words.

“Maybe if you let yourself accept love, you’d have it. You’d have that, instead of having to hang out with your grandma on Friday nights.”

Appa used to always say that your sarcasm had been an inherited trait from your grandma. And it had apparently skipped over him.

“And what do you know about Friday nights?”

“I was young once. I met your grandfather on a Friday night,” Grandma says knowingly, with a bold wink.

“He swept you off of your feet,” You say, “Somethings are just meant to be.”

“Yes,” She says fondly, “They are.”

You both eat in silence, you noisily shovel rice and vegetables into your mouth and Grandma watches you fondly.

“I met a kid from school at work,” You say off-handedly, “I mean, I didn’t just meet him. He’s been working with us for two months.”

“School?” Grandma raises an eyebrow. You talking about school is rare.

“Yeah. I used to mentor him. Before… before I left and before Appa died,” You say bluntly, trying to keep your voice even.

Grandma’s eyes grow even softer when she catches the hitch in your breath. 

“What’s his name?”

“Jeon Jungkook. He only just graduated and he’s got a position two fuckin’ levels higher than me! Two!” You groan in exasperation, “I hate that guy. What does he have that I don’t?”

“A dick,” Your grandma says wryly and you burst into laughter.

“Yeah, pretty much. We’re on a big project together, so I’ll have to deal with him. Sometimes when I see him, it just… makes me so mad. He’s fresh out of school and landed such a great position. Meanwhile, I’ve given them everything and they won’t even fuckin’ promote me. God. I hate them and I hate him, too,” You rant, crossing your arms across your chest petulantly.

Grandma only gives you a small, all-knowing smile.

“I’m sorry, honey. You deserve better,” She offers.

You sigh and rub the side of your face tiredly.

“Yeah. I know.”

[ohwereusingourmadeupnames]

Rubber Ducky

Pairing: Peter Parker/Tony Stark Rating: Explicit (E) Word Count: ~6.3k Notes: I was totally inspired by RDJ’s latest insta post! Between the motorcycle, gray hair, big ole’ combat boots, and the rubber ducky - it was hard not to write about it. Add on S’s insatiable need for that silver fox goodness and here we are! Warnings: There’s some smut in here, but that’s about it. Summary:

Born to old money, Tony is in the limelight simply because he exists. After a misunderstanding caught on video, he's personified as a spoil socialite & no matter what he does, he can't escape the title. Instead of letting it get him down, Tony uses it to his advantage - if anyone were to find out what he really did with his life, his reputation would be ruined. No one needed to know that he threw clay for a living or that one of the most successful ceramic business belongs to him.

When things become to much to handle on his own, Tony reluctantly takes on a personal assistant by the name of Peter Parker.

Preconceptions are a funny thing - Peter finds out just how nefarious they can be when he gets to see the real person behind the Tony Stark public persona.

Or: the one where RDJ and a rubber ducky serve as the best muse.

Read it on AO3 here.

In hindsight, Tony should’ve known his reputation would come from a spectacular misunderstanding.

In the early years, Tony was not nearly as schooled in maintaining his composure – especially when he deemed himself correct. One misunderstanding caught on camera later and he was officially known as “Manhattan’s Spoiled Brat” to every major gossip rag and tabloid that could get their hands on information to print about him; true or otherwise.

From that point on, no matter what he actually did, Tony’s movements in the media were always framed with the perception of spoiled, outlandish, and in some circles, downright rude. It didn’t matter that before the paparazzi ambushed him outside of his apartment, he spent the morning setting up some private dog walking for the local shelter dogs. He couldn’t ever pull the trigger on actually adopting one – but he digressed. Those out for a story and a story only took their photos, heckled him, and reported half-truths and words taken out of context.

Despite the initial turmoil over it, Tony found himself with a lot more free time in the sanctity of the space he called his own. Other socialites didn’t want anything to do with him – the mere thought of being out papped drove them all mad. To avoid too much attention, Tony took his peer[s dismissal and ran with it – if a bad reputation got him the privacy that he sought, why wouldn’t he take advantage of it.

It all seemed to work out in his favor, because if his fellow socialite peers ever found themselves privy to his actual occupation, Tony knew he could count himself on the list of social outcasts that no one talked about – in fact, the few people he knew like that weren’t even spoken about in the circles he was forced to affiliate himself with. Being old money had so many advantages, but in the long term, Tony could have easily done without it.

Never one to care about the money, unless it was supposed to be caught on camera in some way shape or form, Tony enjoyed his solitude and the time he had to chase after his one true passion – pottery.

The addiction started halfway through his time at MIT. Desperate to escape the confines of his dorm and the information that didn’t interest him in the least, Tony found himself wandering the streets of Cambridge, his eyes wide and peeled for the bright shine of cameras being clicked. In his slow meanderings, Tony caught the sight of an interesting looking woman, the dreads in her hair and the big pot in her hands dragging him in. And when she felt his presence, instead of getting upset, she shot him a smile and slowed her step – the woman obviously not afraid of Tony’s attention.

He ended up walking half a mile a couple of steps behind the unnamed woman, the pot in her hands becoming more and more interesting the longer he got to look at it. The workmanship of it was obvious, the lines were neat and the dip of the pot perfectly symmetrical around the rim. Not for the first time, Tony marveled at the intense beauty of handmade work – he longed to work with his hands in the creation process. His father wanted him to put that energy into machines and technology that would further their wealth. Tony, on the other hand, he just wanted to create – no pressure, no expectation… just creation.

The building they stopped in front was all open space with big windows. Locking eyes with the woman, Tony rushed ahead of her and opened the door, holding it and his breath as she walked through the door. Upon entering, Tony noticed the multiple rows of what he knew to be pottery wheels, each one of them gleaming in the wash of sunlight that flowed in from the streets. Sucking in a breath, Tony had to stop himself from gravitating towards one.

A soft voice turned him around, his heart beating wildly – in the moments since walking in, Tony completely forgot the woman was there. “The dedication you showed in following me here is more than enough for me. Do you want to learn?” the still unnamed woman asked, her cheeks crinkling in the corner as a smile overtook his face.

It didn’t take but an extra second for the excited ‘yes’ to slip out of his mouth. He understood an opportunity when it was presented to him and didn’t want to squander it.

Without saying anything else, the woman walked by him, sat down at one of the wheels and looked expectantly at the one next to her.

From there, Tony found in himself natural talent and a burning desire to learn all he could about the craft. Despite having the means to buy his own wheel and supplies, Tony returned to Nona’s, the old woman insisting he call her nothing but. Over the course of the last two years of his undergraduate degree, Tony split his time between uninteresting studies and the maddening obsession of wet clay and the never-ending possibilities the potters wheel could bring.

The art brought him joy and when he graduated and Nona gifted him his very own wheel and her blessing of finally being ready, Tony took to it with a passion he never experienced before. No one in his circle would understand the desire to get his hands dirty or create something that could easily be bought at some auction, or fancy gallery opening. So, he kept it a secret – the thing he treasured most in the world was his and his alone.

That trend continued for many years after that. In order to keep up his expected persona, Tony put himself in the public’s eye a few times a year to cause a ruckus, whether it was with scandalous photos he manipulated himself, or a random appearance in a place he was supposedly blacklisted from. And between those times, Tony threw clay and created a whole line of masterpieces that culminated into a pretty popular business.

As his talent and the demand for his work grew, Tony let the smallest bit of pride settle deep within him. Despite not being satisfied with the way the world saw him, his most favorite piece of himself was flourishing – and on his own merit, nonetheless. Making something out of himself away from his father’s money meant so much and each step he took towards that brought him a peace he wasn’t sure would ever exist for him.

After almost 10 years of being in business, Dirty’s Pottery was finally unmanageable by himself – especially if Tony wanted to keep the anonymity of the business. No matter how much he didn’t want to bring in another person into the folds of his life, Tony knew he needed the help.

Which is why, when Peter Parker walked into his life, Tony was thrown so off guard. For most of the morning leading up to the interview, he felt a sliver of dread start to worm its way into the confines of his chest. Just seeing someone for a position like this took an amount of trust that Tony had not ever given to anyone – ever – in his entire life. The need for it was the only reason he forced himself to get his shit together and actually give the guy a chance at actually getting the job.

His entire attitude changed when he caught the glance of milk chocolate eyes that shone, well-kept facial hair, and a smile that so obviously hid a beautiful personality behind the lengths of it. In that moment, Tony wondered about so many things – where did this guy come from, how did he walk around in those pants without getting hit on with every step, and his favorite – what could he do to get this person to stick around. All of that without a single word being exchanged between them.

When Peter finally did start to speak, Tony couldn’t help but get lost in the interesting human sitting in the chair next to him. Instead of making it a formal affair, Tony poured them coffee and nestled into the remaining chair in the small office Tony kept slightly clear in his workshop. He went so far as to start the conversation with a question totally off the wall, which Peter answered with ease and kickstarted what turned out to be a couple hours’ worth of back and forth between the two of them.

It was obvious, in the way it took Peter a little while to open up to him, that his reputation proceeded him. Before Peter even walked in the door, he was looking at him a certain way – and Tony couldn’t wait to do everything in his power to prove that perception wrong. In true Tony Stark nature, Tony started by finishing their conversation out in the main room of the studio, his hands covered in red clay, the length of his hair pushed back with a bandana he’d taken to wearing over the last few months. The interested eyes that watched his hands with fascination brought a smile to his face and the job offer to the tip of his tongue.

“The job – it’s yours if you want. You’re smart, capable – the experience you came in with is amazing. I’d be pretty stupid to not snatch you up while I have the chance. But hear this now,” Tony said, his voice dipping. “If you fuck with me, I’ll ruin you. Understood?”

An awkward chuckle was his answer, Peter’s eyes flashing with some sort of feeling as he nodded his head. “Understood, Mr. Stark. This is a big opportunity for me – I wouldn’t screw that up for 5 minutes of media attention.”

And just like that, Tony was sold. He extended a clay covered hand out, a challenging quirk to his brow as he looked up, his own cognac colored eyes meeting Peter’s after a moment. “Cut the Mr. Stark shit, it’s just Tony.”

Grinning, Peter returned the handshake, his soft hand wrapping around Tony’s like it fit there, like if he let himself think about it, Tony could’ve sworn it’d been there his whole life. The contrast of wet clay and pale skin did something to him – something that, after 45 years of life, Tony couldn’t remember experiencing ever before.

----

It took a while, coaxing Peter from whatever picture he painted in his head about Tony and what he knew about him. The first few months together were tense – when they attempted their first staged photo for the public eye, Peter looked at him skeptically, as if the entire situation was crazy. Then, Tony stepped in front of the camera and pulled his mask on, his expression and demeanor changing to suit the air and attitude needed to portray the spoiled persona he’d been keeping up for years now.

The click of the camera was rapid, like the change in Tony was just as eerie for Peter as it was for the man himself. He turned and smiled and smoldered enough to make sure he had a few pictures to play with over the next few weeks, then dropped the whole act the second he could – Tony more than glad to be done with this part of his act until the next need for it came to be. Shrugging his shoulders and letting the conceded air rush from him, Tony shot Peter a smile – his assistant’s facial expression telling him much more than he needed to know.

“It is just an act, isn’t it? I’ve never seen someone put on another skin like that before,” Peter mumbled, his ears a little red from the blush that slowly spread down his cheeks with every word. His long fingers fiddled with the dial of the camera, brown eyes down casted in what Tony could only assume was apprehension or embarrassment.

“Everyone does it, Pete. Sometimes, it’s just more necessary than others. I had one little mishap and all of the sudden, I was painted as something that I’m not – something that I never will be. No matter what I did after that, things didn’t change. So, I use it to my advantage. Put a little chum in the water for the sharks every now and again and live my life the way I want it in between.” Tony shrugged then, his hands already working to take off the stupid jacket that pinched between his shoulders.

Peter was quiet for a few minutes, the two of them moving around each other in the slightly uncomfortable silence. “I’m just a kid from Queens. I couldn’t even imagine what that’s like. I probably would’ve taken the opportunity you did, too. It sucks you have to be someone different, but I get it.” A soft smile could be seen on his face, the look one of Peter’s that Tony quickly became enamored with – the shine of it hitting him in the gut, supplying him with his next bit of energy from all the goodness hidden within it.

Though it wasn’t monumental, things between them changed. While Peter used to come and go without much fanfare, Tony was surprised when he started to stick around a little longer after their work was done for today. Where the conversation could easily be described as stilted before, words started to flow between them easily – now that the damn was broken, it was like there was no stopping the conversations that could so easily exist.

And they did, flow easily. Peter graduated from Columbia with an Economics degree – a career field he quickly understood was not for him after two years in a job that he absolutely hated. The shared hatred for what they studied in college opened up the door for actual passions, ones in which Tony quickly came to find that Peter had many of. Including pottery, though he never did anything aside from buying it until coming to work for Tony.

“Your coffee cups are actually why I wanted this job,” Peter admitted out of the blue, the two of them settled on the soft couch in Tony’s living room after a long day of boxing and shipping orders. “When I first started college, I was dirt pour – living the dream, you know. I got the short end of the stick in housing and ended up having to find my own apartment. It was a shit hole, but I had a Dirty coffee mug to drink out of every day – so things couldn’t have been as glum as they really were. For some reason, I thought of that when I saw the ad – felt compelled to apply.”

Shifting a little, Tony let their shoulders brush – the physical contact between them also flourishing now that Peter didn’t think he was such a piece of shit. He leaned in, applying the slightest bit of pressure to the firm deltoid he felt through Peter’s shirt. “And now you get to drink out of them whenever you want,” Tony remarked, the joking tone of his voice pulling a smile from them both. “Never thought you’d run into me when you signed up for this gig, did you?”

“I didn’t. Honestly, when I saw it was you, I almost turned around and walked right out the door. If it wasn’t for the way you look sitting behind the potters wheel, I might’ve done exactly that.”

A chuckle fell from Tony’s lips, the tightness in his chest that’d been building up from that first day finally loosening, whatever happened in the minutes between stepping in front of the camera and that moment obviously winning him a bit of favor.

“I do look good behind the wheel, don’t I?” Tony answered, a shit eating grin on his face.

Peter reached over, swatting his thigh in joking exasperation. “Shut up.”

That exchange stayed with him after that, a subtle reminder of the distance between them narrowing. Tony didn’t even know if Peter liked anything about him other than the way he looked, or the way his mugs held coffee – but a small bit of hope sat in his chest, regardless. Things were so different now, all smiles and laughing, inside jokes between the two of them that didn’t cease to be funny, no matter how many times they stopped dead in their tracks to deal with the chuckling fits that spontaneously occurred at the thought of any of them. It had to mean something, even if it wasn’t the sort of intensity that Tony wanted.

Like most things in his life, Tony got his answer in the form of a shout, or at least, the closest a kiss could come to the form. About a year and a half into their working relationship, Peter was finally comfortable, so comfortable in fact, he allowed himself to fall asleep in the many different spaces he’d been invited into in Tony’s home and workshop. That particular day, Tony walked into his office to find Peter passed the fuck out, a cute string of drool lulling from the side of his mouth. His eyes were moving behind his eyelids, hands clenching by his sides.

For a second, Tony thought to wake him up, what he thought was distress making him want to take care of Peter in the only way he knew how. Resisting, Tony walked around his office quietly, grabbing his smock and the most recent designs before trying his best to sneak past Peter without waking the sleeping beauty up. He was about to step away from the edge of the couch when a hand shot out, grabbing his wrist.

“Pete, what – “ Tony started to exclaim, his body falling towards Peter stopping the rest of the words from coming out of his mouth. Without being able to suck in another pull of breath, Tony’s lips were covered, all of Peter pressing fully against him, lips and obviously interested cock, included. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, Tony kept himself still, the need to flatten Peter out and press into the contact so close to winning out, despite knowing it probably wasn’t his best course of action.

A gasp of breath against his lips alerted Tony to Peter’s conscious state, the man pulling back from him in the next second.

“Tony?” Peter gasped; the words still tinged with sleep. “Is this real? I was just dreaming – “ He stopped then, realization of what he just said grinding everything else to a halt. “Oh god.”

Putting a finger across Peter’s lips to stop any other words from spilling out, Tony leaned back into his space, their faces mere inches away from each other. “I dream about it, too.” Tony mumbled as he closed the distance and pressed their lips together – this kiss one they were both conscious and aware of.

The fingers slipping into his hair were the only sign that he needed. In a desperate attempt to get more skin right in that very moment, Tony climbed onto the couch, his knees pressing into the cushions bracketing Peter’s hips. His own hands moved to grasp whatever skin he could reach, Peter’s nap on the couch affording him stomach and back from a ridden-up shirt.

Plush lips were such a distraction, the thickness of Peter’s bottom lip ridding him of any thought other than right that second and skin and more kisses that felt like straight heat touching him. Peter’s fingers dug into his scalp, blunt nails cutting into the skin in the most tantalizing way possible.

An annoying need for oxygen pulled them apart, Tony panting into the skin of Peter’s neck as he continued to explore the long planes of skin there. If this dream haze was the only way he got what he’d been wanting since he first laid eyes on Peter, Tony would take it – simply because he never let himself and he really, really, really wanted this; wanted Peter.

Hands on the side of his face stopped his assault, Tony pulling  away with so much reluctance – his entire being shouting against the disparity of the action. Peter brushed their noses together, his fingers caressing Tony’s face, cupping behind his ears – each digit moving restlessly.

“I want you,” Peter said plainly, the seconds of silent stares and heavily panted breaths already forgotten – the words already enough to change the way the world tipped on its axis. “I want you. Have wanted you for so long. Please, Tony – “

Whatever was going to come next, Tony cut him off – their lips sealing back together now that they were both on the same page, both ready for the next step – both wanting each other.

Not in any frame of mind to do anything other than kiss, be kissed, and pull at clothes in hopes that they came off, Tony did just that – his fingers slipped under the soft t-shirt covering Peter’s chest, the pads of them tracing the smooth skin of rippling abs, and the slightest bit of chest hair just starting to coat over trim pecs. He pushed the shirt up until it rested under Peter’s arms, his brain unwilling to allow him to pull away from their kiss to actually take it off.

Peter, like he did so well over the past few months, took the matter into his own hands. He pulled away from Tony to yank his shirt up and over his head, eager fingers doing the same to Tony’s once he got the memo and shifted so Peter was able. Soft hands found the thick patch of hair covering his upper chest and the straight path down his abdominals that trailed down into the confines of his now too-tight boxer briefs. The touch was like electricity, each inch of perusal like a shock rolling across the surface of his skin.

Moaning, Tony let his hips drop, the bulge in his pants pressingly deliciously against Peter’s erection, the slide of his jeans against his passion both tantalizing and harsh – the perfect combination. In an attempt to gain more friction and a better position, Tony climbed off of Peter’s thighs, slotting himself between muscled legs, instead. Instantly, Peter wrapped his thighs around Tony’s hips, using his strength and leverage to pull him close, closer than either ever thought they would ever get.

The next few minutes were a flurry of kisses against bare skin and hands wandering all the inches they could – Tony focusing on the softest little swell of Peter’s stomach, the roundness of it only enhancing the strength the rest of him portrayed. They fumbled and thrust, erections grinding through several layers of jean and fine clothed underwear. It was glorious and not enough all in one breath. Tony forced himself to create space between them in hopes of furthering things along, his shaky hands making quick work of Peter’s pants and then his own.

Completely naked in front of him, Tony was surprised to not feel a single shred of self-consciousness. In all of his imaginings, he thought he might curl in on himself – there weren’t many people that knew the real him; baring himself this way to Peter, Tony no longer had the pleasure of anonymity, the barrier of protective shell he tried to keep with him at all times. A grinning Peter brought him away from those thoughts, his own lips turning up in a smoldering smirk.

“Reach behind you – I think there’s something in the side table we can use for lube.”

The words came out panted, like Tony needed every shred of oxygen in his body to deliver them, yet, he couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed – Peter fumbled over himself to get to the drawer, his upper body twisting to reach, despite Tony pinning his legs down into the cushions of the couch below them. A sound of triumph left them both when Peter righted himself, a small bottle of lube in his grasp.

“Any reason why you have lube in your workshop office?” Peter asked through a chuckle, his hands already moving to grip Tony’s bare skin, the lube sitting on his stomach in offering.

Ignoring the question for the moment, Tony reached up to grab the bottle, his lips busy tracing the lines of Peter’s abs until he found himself face to face with a delectable erection, the tip of it glistening with the tangible exertions of their efforts. He brought his eyes up to glance at Peter, the usual honey-hazel completely overtaken by black pupil and want – so much want.

His tongue peaked out to sop up the leaky moisture, Tony letting a moan slip from his lips before redoubling his efforts, his lips wrapping around Peter tightly. It was erotic, bobbing up and down on the most beautiful erection while maintaining such intense eye contact. The state of Peter’s eyes matched his own, the glassy nature of them making his own cock throb – the smear of precum he felt himself thrusting into a tell-tale sign of what this did to him; what Peter could so easily drag from him.

“Jerking off, of course,” Tony finally answered, his lips pulling away from Peter’s cock with a loud pop that echoed around the small office. “I practically lived here before you came to my rescue. I’m not a saint.”

To emphasize the point, Tony snapped open the cap of the lube, his eyes flashing as that sound too seemed to bounce off the walls. A weak moan left his lips when he turned the tube over to dump a good amount of lube over his fingers, the implication of what came next and the frigid cold of the lube doing something to him. Peter grinned up at him, his hips rolling up in the most obvious form of permission.

Taking Peter’s cock back into his mouth, Tony let two of his fingers slip between the crease of firm butt cheeks, the tip of one tracing a tight rim. With the thought of distraction, Tony sucked hard and pressed his finger in, breaching the muscle with a kind of ease that had him moaning around the thick cock in his mouth. The boil of heat and arousal felt like it was consuming him – he’d feel lucky if he actually got to the point of slipping inside Peter without completely embarrassing himself.

Long fingers dug into thick, salt and pepper locks, Peter’s grip tight and flexing rhythmically with the bob and pull of his mouth around the most luscious erection. Slowly, Tony opened Peter up, his fingers working in tandem with his cleverly talented mouth. Little by little, he felt the muscle around his fingers relax, Peter easily able to take three fingers after his careful ministrations.

The grip in his hair tightened, forcing Tony to look up to gauge the situation. The sight he was met with caused his cock to throb again, the tip now completely covered with pre-cum and weepy, each second passing filling out the appendage more and more, Tony feeling so fucking close to burning already.

Peter’s pupils were completely blown, the glassy nature of them from before overtaken by a sort of heat that Tony didn’t know existed. His hair was in disarray, the obvious toss of it back and forth showing in the tangled strands. Sweat covered him, the tiny drops on Peter’s forehead the only indication that he too was physically straining himself, desperately trying to hold himself off.

“Fuck me, Tony. I need it – need you,” Peter gasped out, his fingers tightening in Tony’s hair even more. “Please.”

Not one to deny himself or those he cared about, Tony pulled himself up and away, Peter’s pulsing erection slapping against his chin for the effort.  A laugh left his lips as he sat up completely, nervous hands moving to grab the lube. The snick of the cap opening made them both jump, each man completely wound up and ready to go off at any moment. Dumping a generous amount of lube onto his cock, Tony reached down to spread it, smearing the last little bit of it around Peter’s entrance – the thought of the sticky-slick slide pushing him into position faster than he thought imaginable.

Nudging Peter’s thighs, Tony settled further between them, the muscles there clenching with the subtle pressure of a cock head against the relaxed rim; the feeling jolting them both. He sucked in a quick breath, his chest expanding with the long pull of air. Breathing back out, Tony pressed forward, thrusting his hips without hesitation until they were pressed soundly together, Tony’s pelvis to the warm flesh of Peter’s ass.

“Oh, fuck –“ Tony babbled, his head hanging between his shoulders as he held himself above Peter, giving them both a moment to adjust to the heat and tightness – the overall feeling of their connection blazing up between them.

Peter’s answer came in the form of a swift clench of muscle around Tony’s cock, the heat of it all burning any ounce of self-control Tony might’ve had. His hips snapped forward, the sound of skin slapping against skin pulling a groan from the depth of his chest. If this was what just being wrapped up in Peter felt like, Tony couldn’t even begin to fathom what the end result of their joining would be like.

A little bit desperate, Tony dropped down until their chests were pressed together, hands moving to urge Peter to wrap his thighs a little higher up his chest to better the angle. With that done, he nestled his face into the side of Peter’s neck and let go.

Every thrust was accompanied by the sweetest sounds, both men contributing to the groundbreaking symphony of passion and connection. The slap of skin on skin and breathy moans were the only thing that could be heard around the room, each crescendo of sound driving Tony that much closer to the edge he never wanted to reach – staying there, in that moment, it would’ve been the best thing in the world.

Yet, he found himself chasing the feeling of jumping over the peak, anyway. Peter was clamping down around him hard, the constant press of Tony’s dick against his prostate creeping him towards the edge – the man’s cock was slick between them, each thrust pulling yet another pulse of pre-cum from the tip to guide the way. Their stomachs provided the friction to Peter’s cock that Tony couldn’t, his attention completely consumed by thrusts and sweat and the heat surrounding him.

With his orgasm impending, Tony picked up his pace, the rhythmic strokes from before completely gone, replaced with an animalistic push and pull that was quickly driving him towards completion. He didn’t want to reach it until Peter did, however; the clench of muscles around his touch sensitive cock a good indicator of how close Peter was, too.

After another few hard thrusts, Peter wailed, his hand slipping into Tony’s hair to pull at the locks.

“I’m gonna cum – oh god, Tony!”

Holding on just long enough to see the look of pure ecstasy on Peter’s face, Tony thrusted once, twice, three times before letting himself go – his orgasm washing over him deliciously, the feel of it like passing out and coming to all in one shot.

Tony felt his arms give way, his body crashing heavily into Peter’s. They were covered in sweat and semen, both physically exerting their bodies to the point of exhaustion, but completely sated, nonetheless. Pressing a kiss to Peter’s neck, Tony let himself relax, not giving two shits about the sweaty stickiness between them.

“We should have been doing that for ages now,” Peter whispered, his voice deep and wrecked sounding, a sort of pleasure radiating from him as the words left his lips.

Chuckling softly, Tony wrapped Peter up, his arms squeezing him tightly to his chest, the two of them settling into the gentle comfort surrounding them in that moment.

“Well, you’re definitely not getting rid of me, now.”

----

Loosening the reins on the idea of his public image got a little easier the longer Tony spent in Peter’s arms. Without much to rely on in the personal life Tony cultivated throughout his existence, his image was really the only thing he had. Even if that image was one that wasn’t the best – at least the world knew something of him. Yet, the closer he got to Peter and the effortlessness of their relationship, the less he cared about what people thought of him – of his sassy, diva, socialite attitude that he’d been cultivating for so long.

Instead, Tony felt the need to let little pieces of himself shine through as the months past. It became clear that being his genuine self was important to Peter – the man seemed to like all the pieces of him and wanted the world to see him in all of his glory.

It’d been too long for him to completely pour his public persona completely down the drain – there were too many people that came to expect a certain sort of thing from him. And he wasn’t anywhere close to being comfortable with a public reveal of his face in conjunction with his pottery business, but – they were slowly making progress.

Several months after finally coming together as a couple, Tony and Peter were back where things started to change for them – Peter behind the camera, watching as Tony put on his mask to face the public. This time, they were camped in front of a sleek, all black motorcycle – the bike one of Tony’s most recent glutinous purchases (he happened upon it a week or two after Peter mentioned how sexy he thought it would be, Tony on the back of a bike like that). Tony let Peter pick out the outfit he was sporting, the straight black pants and stiff collared jacket one of his absolute favorites.

After several of these over their time together, Tony understood Peter’s feelings on the smolder he let free when posing for these types of photos – there was a love-hate relationship with the particular faces he made throughout the process. On one hand, Peter hated the reason for the false look – pleasing people was never something he became accustomed to, even after spending so much time with Tony. On the other hand, Tony knew that Peter found it irresistible – the fact that he could kiss it off of him now only adding to that feeling.

Peter let it go on for a while – they shot several different poses in, on, and around the bike. Directing him from behind the camera, Peter made comments here and there, most of the time allowing Tony to do what he wanted. When his limit was reached, Tony found himself slapped across the face with a rubber duck, the toy hitting him before he could even see it coming.

“I can’t take that look anymore. I want to pull you off that bike and ravage you. But I can’t – because we’re in public.”

Peter’s eye caught his, the truth of his words existing in the small space between them. Grinning, Tony let the rubber duck rest against his thigh, a smirk slipping across his lips. He heard a series of clicks before Peter was staring him down again, a mix between lust and hilarity playing across his face.

Later, when he downloaded the pictures, Tony couldn’t stop the big bust of laughter that fell from his lips, a huge smile slipping across his cheeks. He quickly opened up the one he would post and did the customary touch ups in Photoshop before sending it to himself, anticipation and excitement sitting in his chest at his most recent idea. Tony didn’t hesitate, bringing up Instagram and posting the photo without a second thought.

The thunk of a phone hitting the ground in the other room, followed by fast footsteps coming his way was the clear sign that Peter saw the picture – his boyfriend appearing in the doorway of their room a moment later with the most affectionate look on his face making Tony feel like he was about to burst open at the seams.

“All of those pictures and that’s the one you post?” Peter questioned, his long legs carrying him over until he was inches from Tony. “That rubber duck can’t be all that good for your image.”

Reaching out, Tony pulled Peter until they were chest to chest, his boyfriend’s arms wrapping around his shoulders to narrow the space down even further. “Someone told me it needed a change,” Tony mumbled, his words somewhat muffled by the press of his lips against Peter’s as he spoke. “Thought it might be a step in the right direction.”

Peter’s answer came in the form of a desperate kiss, their tongues and teeth clashing in the best of ways. “I love you, you fucking dork.”

Pressing back in for another kiss, Tony let himself revel in the feeling taking him over in that moment. After so long, it felt good to take the tiniest step out of the closet – there were many more to take, but at least he knew the effort was appreciated. He let himself stay lost in the kiss for a while, the desperate caress of soft lips and eager hands the only thing that really mattered.

[badartfriend]

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”



Image



Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real.

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

[comeoncomeout41]

I just watched the Elf episode of The Holiday Movies That Made Us on Netflix after remembering that I started writing an Elf supercorp AU for Christmas in 2018 (don’t judge me) and found my old notes app first draft so Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! MAYBE I’ll finish it this year... (she said as a lying liar who lies.)

*The fic in which Kara’s pod crash landed at the North Pole, 13 years later her adopted elf mother Eliza and her elf sister Alex tell her about her cousin Kal now Clark Kent and she decides to go to Metropolis to meet the only other person like her. She meets Lena “naughty list” Luthor. And Clark and Lois are Jewish.

🔥🎄🎄🎄🧝‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

Some elves are born to work in Santa’s workshop. Kara Zor-El, however, was not born an elf or even from this earth for that matter.

When her pod crash landed at the North Pole thirteen years ago, she had no memory of a lost planet, no recollection of a cousin she was sent to protect who had already grown up to become Superman, and no idea how to be an alien living with elves. Santa was perturbed as to what to do with a skittish teenaged alien who cringed at the sound of tiny hammers building toys.

The elf doctor, Eliza Danvers, having a daughter around Kara’s age, naturally stepped in to help raise her, teach her elf culture, and attempt to control her powers. There were several mishaps of course.

Kara’s eyes lit up the first time she saw a Christmas tree. Literally. The green pine was burned to a crisp with her heat vision. But she quickly uprooted another tree from outside the elf village and helped Alex redecorate the new tree. And spent several hours carefully placing the new lights and ornaments, after breaking several of the glowing strings of light and the ornate red and blue colored bulbs. When Alex had trouble reaching the top of the tree, Kara swooped her up under her arms to help her place the star on the tree. And she managed to only break one of Alex’s ribs in the process.

After years of being at the North Pole, Kara was actually a wonderful toy maker once she learned to control her strength. When other elves managed to meet their five hundred toy quotas, Kara would have five thousand toys completed. The workshop wouldn’t need any teddy bears for another century, but finding storage for all of the toys Kara built was becoming difficult.

So from there, Kara’s primary job became Elf Master of Letters. She spends several hours each day answering letters for Santa as Santa’s tight schedule and the millions of letters he received each year became too much for the old bearded man. And although she always needed a little proofreading as the different Earth languages were sometimes difficult and much different than her native alien tongue, she enjoyed writing and speaking to children all over the world, bringing them the joy of Christmas.

Alex read over the letter Kara had just finished typing. Her younger but much bigger sister looked to her with a twinkle in her eyes and waited patiently. When Kara saw the red ink marked all over Kara’s letter she cooed and gasped, “That red is so pretty Alex. I know Raymond in Denver will love it! He told me red was his favorite color. I wanted to tell him that’s Santa’s favorite color too! But I didn’t want to give all of the big man’s secrets away, you know?”

Alex sighed and rested her hand on her sister’s shoulder, “Kara, these are your typos. Look here.”

Alex pointed to the last line, “Beleiving isn’t singing. Singing is beleiving.”

“He asked if he could see what the North Pole looks like. I set him straight. Believing isn’t singing. Singing is believing. That was in that one Santa Claus movie you had me watch, which I know isn’t historically accurate or based on true events, but I still,”

“Kara, remember your English spellings. I before e except after c? And it’s seeing not singing.

“Except in some cases like neighbor and weigh. And I just thought! It’s a play on words because ‘the best way to spread Christmas cheer, is singing loud for all to hear!’”

Alex smiled at her then, “You’ll get the hang of it.“

“Yeah, okay so I can’t spell that great, but the writing was good right?” Kara looked hopeful.

Alex shoved her shoulder, “You know you have more Christmas spirit than any other elf. Now come on and fix these typos, so we can go drink hot chocolate with Mom.”

That night when Kara had gone to bed, belly full of twelve drumsticks, eleven pickled peppers, ten cups of hot chocolate, nine hams glazed, eight glasses of milk, seven strudel pastries, six white chocolate goose eggs, five onion rings, four carrot cakes, three French bagels, two turtle chocolates, and a chocolate pecan pie, she curled up on her elf sized bed. Eliza had knit a fourth blanket onto her elf quilt the previous month when her toes started peeking out at the bottom. Alex had tucked her in tonight, making certain she was snug as a bug in a rug in the tiny bed, wishing sweet dreams of sugarplums dancing in her head.

She was content, happy, home and tomorrow would be her thirteenth birthday at the North Pole. What more could her life possibly be, what could be more rewarding than being apart of the magic that brought Christmas to children all over the world? And still Kara thought of that world and all of the little lights that wrote those letters to Santa, the gleaming eyes of all who opened presents on Christmas morning, and she wondered if any of them were like her. If they could hear the faintest sounds of snow falling or reach up and touch the clouds. If they could roast chestnuts with their eyes or see through all those pretty presents wrapped neatly under the tree. If the people of this world could believe that Santa would come every year to bring them gifts, then she had to believe that somewhere out there, there was someone else who was just like her.

That night Kara dreamed of a beautiful red sunset and little baby boy named Kal. It all felt so real, seeing him jet across the sky in a similar pod to the one Kara had found in an abandoned workshop years ago, knowing it must have been how she found her home. She wrote a letter to Santa as soon as she woke up, asking him to find a home for Kal for Christmas.

_____

Kara had been in trouble a bit, always an accident, because really how was it her fault if Blitzen couldn’t keep up with her? He could have flown faster if he hadn’t eaten all of that maple syrup and maybe then he wouldn’t have been left behind! She carried him back the whole way anyway! After she found him three days later in the Swiss Alps.

But this time when she was called to Santa’s office and Eliza and Alex sat patiently waiting for the charges from the big boss, Kara didn’t know why she was here at all, or rather, now she was on the floor with wood debris around her rear because the little chair was a lot lower than she had anticipated. That was the tenth one this month.

Santa cleared his throat and rubbed his white bearded chin, “I read your letter, and I spoke to your mom and sister. I think they have something they’d like to tell you.”

Kara widened her eyes and looked to her mom, “Are we going to adopt Kal? Like you adopted me? Please say we can Eliza. I promise I’ll teach him myself how to control his powers, and I can build him a crib myself. I’ll even chop down the tree for the wood and we can,”

Eliza cupped Kara’s face and kissed her forehead, a tear prickling at the corner of her eye, “Do you remember Kal now sweetie? Do you remember Krypton?”

Kara blew out her breath in bewilderment, “Krypton? What’s that? Is that where I’m from? Is it in Canada? I’ve always felt I was probably a Canadian because I don’t get cold at the North Pole, and I make the best maple syrup every year during the elf Christmas party.”

Santa nodded, “Its true, you really do.”

Alex gasped, “you know you’re not an elf?”

Kara chewed at her fingernails, “Well I’m not, am I? I’m bigger than all of you and I can lift a Christmas tree over my head like it’s mistletoe and fly with reindeer and all sorts of stuff. I’ve known for awhile I’m not from here, but this is still my home. You two are still my family.”

Alex held back all her unshed tears, “But you have other family out there, and we can’t keep you from knowing about Kal anymore.”

So that day Kara cried when Santa showed her the picture of Kal, or Clark Kent as he was called on Earth, glasses askew and a beautiful woman on his arm. Clark without the glasses bearing what she was told was her family crest, the House of El, taking up the mantle of Earth’s greatest hero, Superman. She had crafted thousands of figurines of her only living blood relative, and yet she hadn’t the faintest idea that she had been sent to protect him for all of these years. He had grown up, not alone at least. He was raised in Kansas on a farm, and now he lived in Metropolis with his wife Lois Lane and their son Jonathan Kent.

“Does he even know I exist?”

_____

Kara changed into her best elf attire and her bright red boots that Eliza had made her for Christmas, letting her open one present before she left. Today was the day that she would fly to Metropolis and meet her cousin for the first time. She couldn’t wait, but the dread at leaving Alex and Eliza settled deep in the pit of her stomach. And all of the letters to Santa she still wanted to respond to sat neatly at her desk in her room.

She was leaving behind her entire life at the North Pole. She told herself she wasn’t losing her home, but it still felt like it. Santa’s workshop, Eliza and Alex, it was all she had ever known or could remember. Would it be the same when she came back? Would her room still smell like a gingerbread house and would her stocking still hang by their chimney with care? Would Kal come with her or would she split her time between Kal and Alex and Eliza like some children who get double presents when their parents divorce?

Alex knocked on her door and waltzed in, “Hey Kara, mom made you something to take to Kal. There’s a winter storm over Greenland, you should probably get going soon.”

Kara wiped the tears from her eyes and her sister rushed to hug her. She had to bend down a little and lift Alex off the ground, but no way was she leaving without giving her sister a proper hug.

“I’m going to miss you and mom so much, Alex. I’ve never been away from home for more than a few hours, how am I going to make it to Christmas without you both? Will you even still want me back?”

Alex nuzzled closer, “You better come back because I don’t want to imagine this place without you. Who’s going to lift the fridge so mom can sweep under it hmm? Who’s going to change all of the light bulbs in the workshop when they blow out? Who’s going to drink hot chocolate with me and watch Hallmark movies in July?”

Kara laughed, shaking her head and deposited Alex on the floor, “I thought you hated the Hallmark channel.”

Alex simply rolled her eyes, “But I love spending time with my sister, and I love you, you big sap. I swore I wasn’t going to cry.”

Feeling slightly better Kara shoves her sister’s shoulder, a little too hard and catches her before she falls, “I love you too, dork. Don’t open the present I got you until you get back, pinky swear?”

Alex locks pinkies with Kara and kisses her thumb, “I’ll miss you. Please be safe. No breaking the sound barrier, watch out for pigeons because there’s a lot in Metropolis or so I’ve read. And when you see Kal remember to call him Clark Kent.”

“Got it, and don’t eat anything I don’t buy myself or anything not given to me by Clark, Lois, or Jonathan because there’s a high chance it’s not candy.”

Kara hugged Eliza for thirty minutes after that, and then Alex for another ten minutes before waving goodbye to Santa and all of the elves at his workshop. Metropolis wasn’t so far for her to fly, and she’d be home in no time.

She coasted through the peppermint sparkled glaciers, touched the northern lights, sailed through the skies above the Arctic Ocean, grazed the top of the Daily Planet, and landed atop the small two bedroom apartment building on the rent controlled side of town. Inside the windows of the corner apartment on the top floor, Kara saw Kal with his family, lighting candles, looking happy and calm. She decided to wait until morning to meet Kal, Clark, alone.

She listened into the city around her, all of the heartbeats like a million tiny hammers beating together, all except one. Kara flew the city, pinpointing the sound, admiring all of the lights on all the trees in all of the buildings and all the shining multicolored bulbs lining the streets. And it was there, in the tallest tower of the tallest building, one light shone through the wall to wall window, a small desk lamp in the large office. At the desk a woman with jet black hair and skin as white and fair as snow sat, typing away at her computer, nibbling on the pen in her mouth. She strained her long elegant neck, and stretched her arms above her head before getting back to work.

Kara glanced below the balcony to the street corner, finding what she knew the young woman needed. She floated down to the alley and walked into a coffee shop, took some time figuring out how to pay for a cup of coffee with the paper and coin money that Santa had given her before she left. Smiled and thanked the cashier for helping her, put one of the bills in his tip jar (it was a hundred.) She quickly flew into the woman’s office, left the coffee on her desk, and flew out of sight, feeling a little like Santa herself in the moment.

The woman grabbed the coffee absentmindedly and sipped, not expecting it to be so hot Kara sees her fanning her mouth and frantically searching the room with her eyes. When she turns to peer out her balcony, Kara sees her face, hard jaw line, soft endearing green eyes. She smiles as the woman screams and locks her balcony door as the windows go pitch black.

[abundanceofsoph]

SkyFire 3: Chapter 2

New York & Saturday Night Live: April 2017    

Word count: 4.8k

SkyFire 3 MASTERLIST

Sorry it's been so long since the last chapter but I'm finally back at work after 75 days in lockdown. Updates will probably be a bit more spaced out than they were in Parts 1 & 2 but please know that I am still working away at it and I already have so many future chapters planned out that I'm really excited for.

This chapter is a bit of a long one and I thought about splitting it in half but figured you deserved the treat after waiting patiently.

Don't forget to leave a comment if you're enjoying the series and let me know what you think.

>Instagram posts

By the time Aurora woke up Monday morning, Harry’s side of the bed was cold, and he had long since left for the day. Since he would be appearing in multiple sketches on the upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, he was needed for rehearsals all week. Aurora was thankful that she and the rest of the band weren’t needed until Friday and instead she was able to sleep in. Their flight had arrived in New York well after midnight and by the time they made their way to the tower they had both decided to head straight to bed. Aurora was fairly certain her father would have still been awake, working in his lab but she was far too tired for a reunion after hours on a plane.

Once she managed to roll herself out of bed and get dressed for the day ahead, Aurora made her way down the hall to the open plan kitchen/living area of the penthouse with its wide, floor to ceiling wall of windows looking out over the sprawling expanse of Central Park. Both Tony and Steve were sitting on the stools at the kitchen’s island bench, waiting for their daughter to wake up. Steve had seen Harry earlier that morning as he was leaving, and Steve had been coming back from his early morning run. Both he and Tony were eager to have their daughter home for an entire week and while Steve was happy to sip on his tea and read the morning while they waited, Tony was practically vibrating in his seat with barely contained excitement. Steve’d had to stop him twice from having JARVIS ‘accidentally’ wake Aurora up, so Tony was unsurprisingly the first out of his seat when she finally appeared.

Aurora was grinning widely and broke into a fit of giggles as her father rushed over and lifted her off the ground in a crushing hug. Despite having seen each other only two weeks ago, the craziness of the wedding hadn’t really allowed them much time to just hang out together and prior to the wedding they had spent a solid 5 months apart given the last minute changes to their Christmas plans in the wake of Johannah’s death.

“Missed you Dad,” she said, returning the tight hug.

“Missed you too Kiddo,” Tony replied, finally setting her back on her feet and allowing her to cross the room and fall into Steve’s arms.

The small family spent the entire day together, watching a movie and then moving down to Tony’s workshop in the afternoon so that he could work on a prototype for Stark Industries while Steve and Rori sketched on the sofa. It was reminiscent of how they had spent many evenings shortly after Rori first came to live with her fathers, the memories of those long nights brought a soft smile to her face as she sketched Dumm-e and Butterfingers, where they were attempting to help Tony, but instead were causing more problems than they were able to solve. Harry found them all there when he arrived back to the tower later that evening, grinning excitedly as he launched into his recounting of his first day with the SNL cast.

xXx

Since first meeting her father’s childhood best friend, James ‘Bucky’ Barnes, three years ago, Aurora had slowly come to see him as a member of the family. For the first year that they had both lived in the tower together, they had coexisted amicably but had been far from friends, nothing close to the way Aurora was with the rest of the team. Even as her relationship with Sam had flourished quickly as he acclimatized to life as an Avenger she had struggled to be around Bucky. He hadn’t held her distant behaviour against her, knowing that while most of the team had been able to separate the actions of the Winter Soldier from Bucky himself, Aurora had struggled to accept into her home the man who had tried, on several occasions, to assassinate one of her fathers. Following the Columbia Shooting, she had surprised him by seeking him out during her recovery and their friendship had bloomed after her amputation surgery. Now, many years later Bucky easily filled the role of another uncle in Aurora’s life, a shift that had made Steve overwhelmingly happy.

It was late Tuesday afternoon and Steve went in search of his daughter, having not seen her since they’d shared lunch together. He expected to see her in the workshop with Tony, however his husband said he hadn’t seen her since breakfast. With the help of JARVIS he finally found her on one of the lower floors, the one shared by Sam, Bucky and Rhodey when he was in town. She was in the living room sitting across the table from Bucky, a game of Battleship between the pair. Steve suppressed a chuckle as he joined the pair, well aware by now of how much his best friend and his daughter enjoyed playing a variety of tabletop games together. Many arguments had been started over a game of backgammon or canasta.

“Who’s winning?” he asked, pulling up a chair beside Aurora and throwing an arm around her shoulders.

“I’m kicking his ass,” she smiled.

“She’s getting cocky,” Buck replied, “and it’s going to backfire on her in a minute.”

“Of course it is,” Aurora said, her tone dripping in sarcasm.

The game continued for a while, Aurora cheering and taunting when she sunk another of Bucky’s ships, mocking him mercilessly when he continued to miss her own turn after turn.

“I don’t understand why you always beat me,” he moaned when she won. “I mean surely your luck has to run out eventually.”

“It’s not luck, Bucky,” Rori laughed. “It’s about strategy and reading your opponent and I hate to tell you, but you are entirely predictable.”

“I’ll have you know I’m an excellent battle strategist,” Bucky retorted.

“Apparently you’re not,” Aurora bit back, a wide smile gracing her face. Steve let out a loud peel of laughter at their bickering.

“Excuse me,” JARVIS interrupted. “Miss Stark, you requested that I alert you when young Mr Styles returned to the tower.”

“Thanks J,” Rori replied, kissing her fathers’ cheek and jumping to her feet, ready to head towards the elevator.

“Miss Stark?” Steve asked.

“He said that Dad programmed him to call me that and no marriage certificate is gonna change it,” Rori explained with a roll of her eyes. “Dad could probably get him to stop but honestly I like it. I didn’t get to be a Stark for very long so it’s nice to be one when I come home.”

“You’ll always be a Stark, bug,” Steve promised, returning the kiss on her cheek and watching as she left the room in search of Harry on the upper floors of the Tower.

“Enjoying having her home?” Bucky asked.

“Absolutely,” Steve answered. “I miss her when she’s not here. Tony does too, even if he won’t admit it. She grew up too fast on us.”

“Can’t have been easy not meeting her until she was practically all grown up,” Bucky pointed out.

“No, you’re right,” Steve agreed. “Sometimes I wish we’d got to raise her, but I’d also never want to have taken away any of the time she got with her mom.”

“You and Tony ever think of having another kid?”

“We’ve talked about,” Steve said. “It’s not very easy process. The worlds come a long way since the 40’s Buck, but it’s still hard for two men to adopt. It certainly doesn’t help that we’ve got such dangerous jobs.”

“Guess that makes sense,” Bucky replied. “Never known you to back down from something just because it’s hard or because someone tells you no, though.”

“You might have a point there. Seems we’ve managed to accidently adopt Peter over the years so maybe we’re just meant to keep collecting teenagers.”

xXx

Something Aurora loved about the city was the way that New Yorkers didn’t care about anyone around them. Everyone was busy getting from one place to another and had very little time or care to look at those surrounding them on the crowded sidewalks. Aurora could easily wander the streets without being hassled as she went about her day. Occasionally a tourist would recognize her, but more often than not, a large pair of sunglasses and a hat pulled low would hide her enough to avoid all but the most astute fan. She wore a loose oversized cardigan which hung over the tips of her fingers completely concealing her prosthetic hand as she headed through the streets of midtown Manhattan, her hands full of shopping bags as she walked back towards Avengers Tower. She could have halved the time to get home by taking the subway, but the weather was nice, so she enjoyed the walk, reaching the towers lobby a little after 2 in the afternoon.

By the time she stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse, she noted Steve, Clint and Bucky sprawled out on the sofas in front of the tv. She dropped her shopping bags onto the floor and launched herself onto the sofa cushion next to Steve, curling herself into his side as his arm fell around her shoulders, hugging her tightly against him.

“Where’ve you been all day?” he asked.

“Went shopping,” Rori explained.

“Do I want to know?” he asked with a soft chuckle.

“I bought wigs.”

“Why on earth are you buying wigs?” Clint butted in.

“Because with the tour coming up,” Rori said, “I want to try out some different hair colours, but I’ve never bleached my hair before and I’m honestly terrified of ruining my hair. So, wigs.”

“Do we get a fashion show?” Steve asked.

“Maybe later,” she mumbled, yawning widely before resting her head back against Steve’s shoulder and staring, glazed eyes at the tv.

xXx

The following day, Sam found Rori sitting alone against one of the large windows, hugging her knees tightly against her chest as she stared out over the city.

“Hey, you,” he said as he took a seat next to her on the floor. “You ok?”

“Yeah I’m good,” she replied, her voice soft and a little distant, her gaze remaining on the view spread out beneath them.

“Remember when you promised me you wouldn’t lie about how you were feeling,” Sam reminded her.

She sighed, her shoulders sagging and her head leaning forward to rest against the cold glass. “I had a panic attack last week,” she mumbled.

“When you got home to London?” he asked.

She shook her head. “On the last day of our honeymoon. This thunderstorm came rolling in out of nowhere the day before we flew home, and I just freaked out and ruined everything. I thought I was getting better.”

“You are getting better,” Sam argued. “This is the first panic attack you’ve had in months. That’s a huge improvement.”

“But I thought they were gone,” Rori sobbed. “I was just starting to feel normal again but I’m never going to be like I was.”

“No, you’re not,” he agreed. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but PTSD isn’t something you just get over. It’s going to be with you for the rest of your life, but that doesn’t have to mean there’s anything wrong with you and I’m sure Harry didn’t think you ruined the trip.”

“Of course he didn’t, he’s Harry,” she said. “He’s always so supportive and just wants to help me through it. It’s not even really about last week,” she admitted. “It’s more about what it says about the rest of the year. The rest of my life. When Harry asked me to join his band, I was terrified that somehow, I would do something to ruin it all, like that somehow my prosthetic would malfunction, and I’d ruin a show. Now I’m wondering what will happen if I have a panic attack at a show? There are so many things that can go wrong, and he’s worked so hard for all of this. I’ll never forgive myself if I do anything to damage that.”

“What happens if Mitch slips over in the rain and breaks his hand and can’t play the guitar? What if Sarah gets the flu and has to sit out a few shows? What if something happens with Adams kids and he has to leave the tour?” Sam asked. “There are so many what ifs and things that can go wrong but did you notice how none of those things had anything to do with anyone’s disabilities? There are things in your life that are going to be more challenging for you than they would have been if you hadn’t been shot. You can’t let that stop you from living. I’m sure Harry and Jeff have all kinds of plans in place for what happens if one of you gets sick and can’t perform, so maybe you should talk to them about your concerns and you can have some plans in place and that will help with the anxiety of it all.”

“You know I really hate when you’re right Sam,” Aurora mumbled, the corners of her lips twitching.

“I know,” he smirked. “But one of these days you’ll learn to accept that I’m never wrong.”

Aurora stuck her tongue out at him before letting out a tired sigh. “I’m just so exhausted. Like, my brain just never stops stressing over these tiny little things and it’s so exhausting to constantly be worrying about everything. I mean Christ, I chipped my nail polish at lunch and it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the last few hours which is ridiculous because who cares if my nail polish is chipped, but I’m going to be on live tv in two days and what if they want a shot of my hands while I’m playing and it’s not like I have time to go get them redone now.”

“Why not just tell the camera operators not to set up that shot?” Sam asked, always the rational voice.

“Yeah,” Rori nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Having said his piece, Sam stood up after giving her shoulder a quick squeeze and then walked away, leaving her to think about what he’d said. She was still sitting on the floor beside the window deciding how to bring her anxieties to Harry without adding to his already full plate when Nat appeared beside her. “Heard you could do with a manicure,” she said.

She extended her hand, helping Aurora up off the floor and then led her to the elevator and down to her personal floor. Nat didn’t press Aurora to talk as they settled down in her living room and set about removing the chipped polish from the nails of her right hand. Rori was grateful for the silence, not sure that she had the energy to carry a conversation but also glad that she wasn’t alone. Where others in the tower felt that they needed to distract her from her anxiety, it was always Nat that provided what she needed without her ever having to ask. Her thoughts whirled in her head as Nat applied the new pale yellow polish to her nails in slow, methodical strokes, Sam’s advice echoing in Aurora’s ears.  

“You seem stressed,” Nat finally said as she finished the topcoat on the last nail.

“Just nervous about the show on Saturday,” Rori replied softly. “Live TV doesn’t leave any room for error.”

“I’m sure you’ll all do great,” Nat promised with a warm smile. “Now lay back and I’ll do a face mask and help you relax. You’re way too tense for a 22 year old.”

Aurora did as she was told without argument, laying back and closing her eyes as Nat spread the cool clay over her face and then she started massaging her long fingers into Rori’s scalp. Once the mask was finished and Nat had cleaned it away with a warm cloth, she set about rubbing moisturizer onto Rori’s face, soothing the pinched muscles between the younger woman’s brow until she fell asleep under Nat’s hands.  

When Harry arrived back at the tower a little over an hour later he found most of the team in the penthouse, however his wife was conspicuously absent from the group. He asked JARVIS if she was downstairs in either of the studios, his brow furrowing when the AI informed him that she was in Agent Romanoff’s private quarters and he headed for the elevator.

Nat was sitting on the other sofa across from where Rori was sleeping peacefully, a book in hand when JARVIS’ voice filled the room and she was thankful that she had asked the AI to lower its volume when Aurora had fallen asleep.

“Mr. Styles is requesting access to your floor Agent Romanoff,” JARVIS announced in a hushed whisper.

“Tell him to come in,” Nat replied in an equally soft tone.

A few moments later, the elevator doors opened at the end of the hall and Harry strolled into the room, his eyes immediately falling to his sleeping wife. “Hey,” he whispered to Nat. “Everything ok here?”

“She was getting a bit anxious about Saturday, so we had a bit of a spa day to help her calm down,” Nat explained.

Harry nodded and then headed over to the sofa, sitting on its edge next to Aurora’s hip and reached out to trace his hand along her cheekbone. “Rors?” he soothed. “Time to wake up love.” As she began to stir, Nat left the room allowing the couple to have some privacy.

“You’re home,” Rori mumbled, her voice thick with sleep and a soft smile lifting the corners of her lips. “Missed you today.”

“Heard you had a bad day,” Harry said, pulling her up and into a tight hug. “Sorry I wasn’t here.”

“S’ok,” she replied as she pressed her face into the crook of his neck. “Just got in my head a bit and spiralled.”

“Feeling better now?”

“Much,” she promised. “Always feel better when you’re here.”

“Mitch text me about 20 minutes ago that their flight landed so they’ll be here soon. Wanna come upstairs with me? Think Steve’s cooking a massive dinner.”

Aurora nodded her head and laced her fingers through Harry’s as the headed for the elevator doors.

xXx

Aurora tried to hold back her anxiety as she walked through the door with Harry, Jeff and the rest of the band Friday morning. She knew she was doing a poor job of it when Harry squeezed her hand tightly in an attempt to comfort her. She was angry at herself for her nervousness, knowing that she had performed on bigger stages in front of live audiences in the past, but she couldn’t seem to overcome the fear that she would make a mistake that would make Harry look bad. She could always deal with embarrassing herself, but the idea of screwing up everything that Harry had worked for was what truly made her terrified.

The set was a blur of activity and Harry led them down the halls towards the set where their equipment had been set up. Sarah headed straight to her drum kit and the boys picked up their guitars while Rori and Harry walked over to where the keyboards where a grand piano was waiting for her.  

“You look like you’re going to be sick babe,” Harry said. He kept his voice low, whispering in his wife’s ear as she sat down on her bench seat, not wanting draw anyone’s attention to their conversation. “I know you’re going to nail this. Just gotta trust me.”

“I know,” she replied. “God anxiety is such a bitch.” Harry chuckled at her little outburst and then he kissed the top of her head before walking over towards the microphone stand.

They spent the rest of the day running through the two songs they would perform the following evening. They discussed the lighting and camera set ups, making sure that everyone in the band and the crew knew exactly where they would stand and which way the equipment would move during the live broadcast. Occasionally they would take breaks for Harry to go work on the sketches he would be appearing in or they would stop so that Aurora could remove her prosthetic for a while. In the year since she had started wearing the prosthetic hand, Tony and Peter had redesigned the original many times, constantly upgrading and improving it’s coding to make it easier for her to wear for longer periods of time. Despite these upgrades, she still found it hard to wear for too long and after about 4 hours of prolonged use she would start to get horrible tension headaches from the transmitting device she wore behind her left ear. It was for this reason that the majority of their soundchecks were happening on Friday so that Aurora wouldn’t be required to play before the show was ready to go to air. She was always uncomfortable whenever plans had to change in order to accommodate her disability, but Harry had  assured her repeatedly over the course of the week that it was not a big deal and that they wouldn’t have been needed much on Saturday afternoon anyway, so it wasn’t even that much of a change to the schedule.

By the end of the day, Aurora was exhausted. They had taken plenty of breaks throughout the day, but she knew that she had definitely pushed herself, never wanting to be the one to call for a break and know she was paying for it. She had her prosthetic off and stuffed into her bag before they even reached the car that would take them all the few short blocks back to the tower.  She sat in the back seat beside Harry and let her head fall against his shoulder, closing her eyes for the quick 10 minute drive.

“You alright love?” Harry asked quietly as they pulled up in the underground carpark of the tower.

She hummed in response, letting him lead her out of the car and into the waiting elevator. “Just tired,” she promised. “It was a long day.”

“It was,” Harry agreed, his arm wrapped tightly around her waist. “Went great though. Think tomorrow’s going to be amazing.”

Aurora wasn’t the only one who was tired and after such a long day of rehearsals, everyone in the band was happy to return to the tower, the inviting smells of dinner greeting them as they stepped out of the elevator to see the entire team crowded around the dining table, waiting for them. Aurora’s eyes lit up as she saw Peter at the table and immediately rushed over to him, pulling him out of his seat and into a hug, her exhaustion evaporated in the wake of seeing him again for the first time since they’d arrived back in town.

“God, where have you been all week?” she asked.

“Sorry been busy with school and patrols,” Peter replied. “I usually only have time to come over Friday nights and on the weekends.”

“Lucky we’re not leaving till Monday then,” Rori smiled. “Otherwise I wouldn’t get to spend any time with you at all. Now talk to me, how’s it feel to almost be finished with High School?”

Harry watched them with an amused smile as they sat next to each other, talking excitedly about Peter’s upcoming graduation and which colleges he had been accepted to. They barely stopped talking throughout the entire meal, completely oblivious to anyone else at the table. Harry hadn’t spent a great deal of time around Peter, given how much time he had spent on the road with One Direction or off filming Dunkirk while Aurora had still been living in the tower full time, but it didn’t really take a lot of time to understand why Tony, Steve and Rori had all rushed to absorb Peter into their little family. He was such a nice kid, always energetic and excited about anything going on everyone’s lives and he was joy to be around. He had so seamlessly fit into the family dynamic that everyone considered him a Stark in all bar name. Harry had once asked Rori about his place in the team, and she had smiled brightly, explaining how happy she was that while she and Steve had always had their art to bond over, she was relieved that Tony now had someone that could keep up with him in the lab and that he could teach Peter and watch him improve. She’d always wanted a little brother and now she had one in Peter. Tony and Steve had already experienced the emotional minefield of establishing parental roles without stepping on the memory of Rori’s mother, to it had been so easy for them to find a way to fill those same roles with Peter over the last few years without diminishing May’s place in his life or erasing the importance of Peter’s parents. The Avenger’s had always been a messy, happy, found family, and with the addition of Peter and May, and then with Mitch, Adam and Sarah, the family just seemed to keep expanding and Harry could see how much Aurora loved having each and everyone of them crowded into the penthouses dining room.

xXx

Saturday was a blur of activity and rushing around, and before Aurora realised someone was yelling that they were going live in 10 minutes. She was sitting out of the way with Sarah on one side of her and Adam on the other, waiting for their time to perform. Harry was off getting ready for the first sketch and they had a small tv hanging on the wall nearby so that they could watch the show while they waited. The first half of the show went off without a hitch and all four of them simply tried to keep out of everyone’s way until a technician came over to heard them towards the set. They were all situated behind their instruments by the time Harry joined them and he quickly ducked over to Rori for a good luck kiss before taking his place at the mic stand and waiting for the signal to start. One of Aurora’s knees was bouncing beneath the piano and there was a slight tremor in her right hand as she closed her eyes and took a few deep breathes on the darkened set. She tuned out the camera’s and the studio audience, her attention narrowing down to her instrument and Harry a few steps in front of her as she began the opening chords of the song. For a few brief seconds her piano was the only sound as the lights began to lift, and Harry’s voice rang out through the studio. As they hit the pre-chorus Rori and Sarah added their voices to the mix and then all of the other instruments joined as they entered the chorus. All of Aurora’s nerves disappeared as Harry belted out the lyrics of the chorus, and in the brief moment right before the second verse he turned, catching her eye and winking before returning to the microphone. In the final lines of the song, right in the middle of the most difficult notes, Aurora heard Harry’s voice falter and he missed a line. She tried to hide a grimace, knowing that he would be kicking himself for slipping at the end of the song. The moment the camera’s cut away she was at his side, arms wrapped tightly around his waist and he pecked her lips quickly. She attempted to comfort him before he was quickly whisked away to change into the costume for the next sketch.

By the time they returned to their little set for their second song Harry appeared to have shaken off the slip up and everyone, including Aurora, was buzzing with adrenaline and ready to go with their second performance. This time the grand piano was gone, and Aurora’s keyboard was positioned behind Harry’s spot at the centre of the stage. With all the sketches out of the way, Aurora watched happily as Harry allowed himself to enjoy the performance. As they finished the song and the audience cheered, Harry quickly pulled his guitar strap over his head and walked over to where Rori was seated behind the keys. He cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her softly. “That one was for you my love,” he whispered as their lips separated.

“So proud of you,” she whispered in reply. “You absolutely killed it tonight.”

NEXT CHAPTER

OR CONTINUE READING ON AO3

[museum-spaces]

I was wondering where you got an MA in Museum Studies? And if you'd recommend an MA over one of the college museum studies programs (I live in Canada if that differs from where you studied). I'm working on my BA in archaeology and have been considering museum studies as I find the field interesting but am a bit unsure where to start

Woohooy! Finally got back into my inbox! Tumblr wouldn’t let me in for about a week so sorry about the delay Nonny.

Just a quick reminder that I am currently on an extended mental health break but I do my best to check this blog at least somewhat regularly.

I got my MA at the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies in Leicester UK (Pronounced Lester). I’ve never been to a Canadian college so I cannot compare the two (for any non-Canadians reading: colleges and universities are not interchangeable up here in the Great White North. Though the distinction is fuzzier now, colleges are sort of the equivalent to a trade school. It used to be you went to University to be a Doctor or College to be A Nurse. Now colleges are leaders in tech development, library and museum sciences, archival studies, as well as trades... where most nursing students attend a combined college-university course. You also don’t get degrees the same way at colleges - you get certificates etc but to get a “BA” or “MSc” you have to be in an accredited university.)

I suggest you start by volunteering at your local museum (when it is safe)... (assume everything in this answer is followed by “when it is safe”).

I absolutely love museum work and want to do it for the rest of my life when I am back and fighting fit but the truth of the matter is, it is an area of academia that is difficult to ‘break into’ without prior experience. So volunteer! Your local small town museum or art gallery will always need volunteers and if you point out that you are thinking of a career, then the good ones will help you by mentoring you and/or letting you explore roles. This will help you decided if museums are the career you want to go into or if maybe some other aspect of academia will work better.

I will never not recommend higher education because I am a nerd and a perpetual student and Leicester is where I want to do my PhD as well... so that is my endorsement of it. This next bit will be a bit about how my degree was set up, feel free to skip if you want!

My degree took almost exactly 12 months straight to complete. I arrived in the UK at the end of September in 2017 where I attended lectures with 67 of my closest friends in a tiny, hot, first floor (second floor for us Canadians) classroom until mid December. After that I attended workshops with about 34 of my closest friends alternating between that classroom and a near by church as well as smaller seminars with 10-15 of my cohort until February. Then we spent March and April doing our “specialisms” my specialism was 7 of us including our academic leader.

After the conclusion of our specialism we worked on our “mini dissertation” it was technically too short to be a proper dissertation by UK standard but by far the longest, most involved bit of research I’ve ever written. there were no lectures or projects other than that at the time

Dissertations were due in early July and directly after that our placement started. Placement ended after a certain number of work hours (150 I think) but roughly 2 months of full time work. The last day of placement was the last day of the degree. (early to mid Sept. Mine was done on the 6th or something  but I stated at my placement for another week to volunteer at a conference)

Placement at leicester is basically an internship. Its called LUMIN (Leicester University Museum Internship or something like that) and it is a relationship cultivated between the school and the museum. You still apply to it like a job but you can’t just choose to intern at the ROM or RBCM or something, you need to set up a relationship between those museums and the school (office lady is very nice and willing to help with this if you want to do it).

At the end of all that you can graduate with either an MA (about 99%) of my cohort did that or an MSc (only two people did that but both worked in science museums, one was a geologist and I think the other was specializing to paleontology but not 100% sure of that). The class work is exactly the same for both, but the MScs tend to go for the science museum placements.

I hope that helps! Feel free to ask more questions! I love answering them.

[spencerjdnw263]

The Actual Price Of Contracting Out Application Advancement In 2020

Content

Is Contracting Out Mobile App Advancement Worth It?

Constructing The App.

Smart Device Sensing Units For Health And Wellness And Health Mobile Apps: An Explainer.

How To Keep A Remote Growth Group Productive?

Where To Discover Outsource Agencies?

Others do the growth as well as coding, however post-launch maintenance is thought about to be an extra expense. If your application calls for a back-end, not all workshop designers consist of that in their services.

If you work with the ideal developers, you'll get full control of the advancement procedure along with transparency. As an example, we offer accessibility to a wide range of tracking devices such as Jira, Harvest, RedMine, etc

Is Outsourcing Mobile Application Advancement Worth It?

This makes the procedure become an investment as opposed to a one-off IT expenditure. The mobile app economic climate was valued at around $108 billion in 2016, and also it is forecast to be worth a shocking $311.25 billion by 2023. If you want to outsource iOS advancement, you should seek experts with experience as well as a deep understanding of the iphone os.

In addition, the task outcome additionally depends on the backlog the outsourcing business has. Readymade mobile applications are the least expensive alternative offering very little attributes and also standard UI/UX. The expense of custom applications, on the various other hand, relies on a variety of factors, consisting of the intricacy of the application, platform, features, as well as a lot more. For example, a simple application can cost as much as $50,000+ whereas intricate apps can rank as high as $300,000+. Additionally, if you outsource app development to freelancers instead of a firm, your study is much more indispensable. Miscommunication will certainly lead to the creation of an app totally various from your expectations.

Application development expense relies on lots of factors, consisting of the app's complexity, attributes, platform, tools made use of, as well as extra. At the beginning of the cooperation, there is an opportunity to also see each other and also talk about all essential issues. Additionally, try to capitalize on overlapping working hours when they converge with your service provider. You can even transform time differences into advantages-- when the app development team finishes its day, you have a day to check their job. This is one of the most adaptable and also preferred technique to IT outsourcing, as the consumer will pay biweekly or monthly costs based on time spent on the job. The provider reviews the next iteration projecting the spending plan-- so the customer will know the quantity that needs to be paid and also for what.

Developing The Application.

To begin with, it deserves specifying that this isn't to make you really feel better about your decision by having something "aesthetic" to support your suggestion. A visual model remains in truth the most affordable method to get your idea right into the hands of real customers, and it offers a way to both test out as well as verify your presumptions. Based on how individuals reply to and also interact with your model, the designer can iterate the design as well as attempt to expand a winning item. Even though a small financial investment is called for to find up with a model, this first amount will certainly constantly be much more affordable (as in 80-90% more affordable) than the coding part. Industry app like nTrust or Etsy can vary from $90,000 to $2,00,000.

The option of company or consultant you work with will certainly determine just how smooth your experience selects application advancement. In addition, with in-house hiring, you require to purchase a team of designers and the innovation to create an app. The total price of hiring brand-new staff members, making plans for their workspace as well as the equipment for advancement is greater than the cost of employing an offshore firm. Additionally, you can contract out apple iphone application growth or Android development to a single advancement company.

Smartphone Sensing Units For Health And Also Health Mobile Applications: An Explainer.

An additional advantage of outsourcing is that you can discover all the latest innovations for app growth under one roofing. Additionally, there should not be too big time void since after that you will not have the ability to communicate-- unless you outsource to a business that works 24/7. Contracting Out to Eastern Europe, where prices of living are lower, implies you can save a great deal of your budget plan. And time effectiveness is connected to the pointed out swimming pool of professionals. When you have a huge team working on your task, you can anticipate much faster progression. He has substantial experience in producing innovative and also scalable software products.

In stating that, you have to go for a firm with a design team that has a wealth of experience, expertise, and understanding of exactly how fantastic UX is accomplished. However, not all agencies are enthusiastic concerning applications as well as what they supply. As you recognize them keep in mind to dig up as much details about what they do, the solutions they supply, and their method to the mobile application dev. The following ideas are made to make the picking process very easy so you can select the excellent agency for your advancement needs.

A solid communicator will set practical assumptions such as "within 2 hrs". , we're not leaders for fintech (yet!) where we don't have as much experience as in health care. If a prospect claims they're based in the UNITED STATE, the first thing to do is to proceed with care and demand a video call. Upwork does give identification confirmation currently, but they also enable people to be on the system without it, and that's most important to note. By insisting on a telephone call prior to you speak store, you can save yourself a lot of time.

Just How To Maintain A Remote Development Group Effective?

These are generally the least expensive choice and quickest to release but such remedies are difficult to customize as well as transition from if there will be a requirement to transfer to another system. Additionally, off-the-shelf solutions don't suggest quick updates as well as modifications in reaction to the market needs, which is not versatile within company needs. We'll select relevant innovation items for your application to make it secure and very easy to scale up and also preserve. It's either a lie or implies that the developer is not concentrated enough on the actual work.

The cost to outsource an Go to this site application varies in the range of $2000-$ 300000.

The myriad interaction and productivity tools available today make it less complicated than ever before to collaborate with groups in different time areas, cities or nations.

One more important aspect is working with an overseas app programmer, yet you need to have the needed funds to deal with that.

Greater the number of employees, even more significant is the need for staffing and also other resources. Nevertheless, the larger obstacle is guaranteeing retention of the whole team to stay clear of hold-up in the growth. Additionally, once the task is over, it can be hard to find the group relevant job within your company. As a local business owner, you have the ability to identify the certain competence of your resources.

This process is what's called mobile application growth outsourcing. It is the plan you make to work with a third-party company to do the development of your mobile app. As well as right here's how one must not contract out mobile app growth. These are the 5 most spread errors individuals succumb to, particularly employing offshore developers for the very first time. A mobile app development company has the human capital and also specialized experience to do the job swiftly. An in-house developer may be pulled in to work with several development tasks, where your specialized company can focus entirely on providing high quality work within the assured duration. Not every service needs or intends to employ a full-time application programmer when they might only need that skill set for minimal tasks.

[urmomsstuntdouble]

if you’re okay with hetalia! I would love anything with the nyo!nordics they are absolutely my guilty pleasure. it can be shippy or familial or whatever else. I’m partial to stupid AUs like “they all work at the mall but don’t match their stores at all” and “iceland is into vocaloid” but you could also go the complete opposite direction and I’d be just as happy with high fantasy or whatever inspires you :)

here ya go i guess. sorry this took so long, i sort of got carried away with it and now it is Lorge. is it good? in character? who knows. anyway, i hope you enjoy :)

December 19, 20XX

After five years of living together, there were certain things Ylva had come to expect of her roommates. Harassment at work was nearly a given when one of them had a problem, whether it was Runa needing a place to sleep for the night or Maija needing to workshop material for her latest gig. Thankfully, Ylva worked at a Color Me Mine instead of a bank or something serious. And today was no exception to the Workplace  Harassment Rule. At 7:32, Maija burst through the front door and charged over to where Ylva was filling bottles of glaze. If she were any other customer, someone might have something to say about it, but by now, every staff member was acquainted with her and found her charming. Some had even been disappointed to hear she was taken, though Ylva couldn't imagine why. Her girlfriend was a fucking nightmare.

“I need to paint some mugs,” Maija demanded, tossing the end of her scarf over her shoulder. Ylva didn't look up, didn't even take her headphones out of her ears.

“Cool.”

“For Tuli and Astrid. For Christmas.” 

“There have been enough Color Me Mine presents circulated within our apartment already,” Ylva said. The bottle of glaze had been filled, and it was time to move on to the next one. It was butter yellow, almost the same shade as Maija’s hair. 

“Okay, you’re not wrong, but if I order on Amazon, it’s not gonna come on time. Also, you’ll get paid this way.” Maija moved a clump of hair away from her forehead with delicate fingers, as though it were made of glass. Ylva snorted, cracking open the yellow glaze.  

“My knight in shining armor,” She said, “It’s not like this place is going under.” Quite the contrary, in fact. This close to Christmas, the place was packed as people scrambled to make gifts for their loved ones. Dumbasses. When they rushed the place, it was nearly impossible to get everyone’s stuff through the kiln in time for Christmas. 

“Okay, well, have you considered that I’m your girlfriend?” Maija said, giving her best puppy dog eyes. Ylva rolled her eyes, trying to suppress the warmth she felt inside, and shrugged. 

“I’d like to not pay rent next month,” She said, “Make that your Christmas present to me. Instead of paying my share of the rent, I get to pay off my student loans.” Maija rolled her eyes, but shifted closer to Ylva. 

“Done, if I can make them mugs.” 

“Fine.” Ylva glanced up at Maija. “Your hair looks cute today.” 

“Oh, thanks! I’ve actually been wearing a hat all day, so I was worried it would look ugly, but…Anyway. So, I sent Runa some tickets to my show on Saturday, but I haven’t heard back from her. Do you know if she’s, like, alright?” Once again, Ylva had to shrug. 

“Runa’s a big girl, she can handle herself.” 

“I know, but I get so worried about her. Like, what if some handsome boy seduces her and she runs away from home, and-”

“My sister? Run away with a boy?” Ylva had to laugh. “Are you high?” Of all the reasons Runa had to run away from their mother’s house, a boy was not one of them. She’d be more likely to start her own brand of sweaters or write a TV show for Netflix, but never once had Runa talked about boys. 

“Whatever. Is she doing okay?” 

“I think so. I’ve been sending her money for a couple weeks, so I know she’s not starving.” Ylva had to take comfort in that. The truth was, she hadn’t heard from her sister in a while, and it was becoming unnerving. But if she got anxious about it, so would Maija, and an anxious Maija was no fun to deal with.

“Besides, when has she ever missed one of your shows?” Runa made it a point to go whenever one of them had a gig. She was always in the front row when Ylva’s band, Lithium, was playing, and always somewhere in the room when Maija was doing “comedy.” Cringing along with the rest of the audience. 

“That’s true. I just wanna make sure she’s safe, you know?” Ylva nodded. It was a feeling she knew all too well. Looking after Runa defined her middle school career. 

“What sort of mugs do you want?” She asked, changing the subject. She was tired of talking about her sister, tired of thinking about all the ways Runa could end up dead in a ditch. Or dead some other way, like drugs or if she ate scallops, which she was allergic to, or if she got too close to some birds while trying to take a picture and got hit by a car. 

“Oh, um, I think Tuli likes the round ones.” 

“All mugs are round,” Ylva snorted. Her manager probably wouldn’t notice if she wandered away to paint mugs with Maija. She stopped pretending to fill bottles of glaze and stowed the refills under the table, where they usually lived, and guided Maija over to the selection of paintable ceramics. 

“This is what I mean,” Maija said, grabbing a mug from the top shelf. Ylva enjoyed the way her hoodie moved, how the fabric straightened against her waist while she rose to her toes. The mug in question was wide at the bottom, but the sides slowly curved up to the top, not unlike a sugar pot. It was cute, and exactly the sort of mug Tuli would like. 

“Oh,” Ylva said, “That’s cute. I think Astrid would like that one.” She pointed at another mug on the top shelf, and took pleasure in watching her girlfriend stretch to reach it. Over the next few hours, Maija painted the mugs. Her efforts to be artistic were sincere, but it was clear she didn't have the attention span. As always, Maija never stopped rambling and never stopped making jokes out of everything. By now, Ylva was immune to most of it, although she did laugh at the occasional joke while picking bits of clay dust out from under her fingernails. Once most of the customers had left, she kicked up her boots on the table, which was mostly an excuse to show off her fishnet leggings to Maija. 

“I think I’m done,” Maija said a couple hours later, paintbrush between her teeth as she stared down at her work. Both mugs were sloppily painted, but Ylva could see what they were supposed to be. Astrid’s was a reference-less portrait of her dog on one side, with cherry blossoms covering the rest of the mug, and Tuli’s had a rainbow painted along the handle and a bunch of Pokemon adorning the outside. Well, Pokemon via the brush of an ill-experienced painter. There were some that erred more to the side of horrific than cute, but Ylva knew what Maija was going for. 

“They look like shit,” She said, “They’re gonna love them.”

“Hey!” 

“You can’t tell me this is supposed to be Eevee,” She said, tapping what looked like a bear on the side of Tuli’s mug. Maija’s face fell, a pout gracing her lips. 

“It was supposed to be a Pikachu.” 

“That’s talent, I guess,” Ylva said, “Or lack thereof. Don’t worry, you’re talented in other areas.” She tacked on at the end, when Maija’s pout increased. 

“Well, that’s rude. Can we go do the glaze now?” 

“They’re already glazed,” Ylva said, “The next coat is just to protect them when they go in the kiln. But you can come.” The pair stood up, and made their way to the back room, where Ylva removed her fishnet gloves and dunked each mug in the pre-kiln glaze, then set them aside to dry. Before she could put her gloves back on, Maija snatched one of her hands.

“I need my hand,” She complained, but allowed Maija to press a kiss to her knuckles and pull her into a hug. It was nice, after a day on her feet, to lean against someone she loved.

“This is nice,” Maija murmured, breath warm against her neck. Ylva shivered at the feeling, and though she wanted to rub her face further into Maija’s shoulder, she couldn’t walk out of the back room with smudged eyeliner, so she stayed put.

“How was your day today?” Ylva asked, her voice muffled somewhat by the hoodie.

“Long,” Maija said, “Feels like yesterday was years ago, and I didn't do anything the whole time. You?”

“I’ve been at work,” Ylva said, closing her eyes. She could almost ignore the ache in her feet when she focussed on how warm Maija was and the pressure of arms on her back. 

“Mm,” Maija hummed, “When do the mugs go in the kiln?” 

“When they’re dry,” Ylva mumbled, swaying slightly. She missed this. Even though she was done with school, no one else in the apartment was. Finals week was almost done, though- Which reminded her, Maija really needed to be studying. She had a test tomorrow. Eh, she’d already spent two hours painting mugs. A few more minutes spent hugging wouldn't hurt. 

“That’s annoying,” Maija said, her voice high and soft. Her sentence was punctuated with a yawn, and Ylva was glad her face was hidden, because how dare someone make a sound so cute. The smile on her face would become a target for mockery, and go straight to Maija’s ego. 

“My shift ends soon,” Ylva said, clenching her fingers in the back of Maija’s hoodie. 

“Yeah.” 

“The car’s not far.” 

“Thought Tuli took the car to school today,” Maija mumbled, straight into some of Ylva’s hair. 

“Astrid got them an Uber,” Ylva said. This was where it was at, even though Maija was insufferable most of the time. Conversations that meant nothing, hugs, and the comfortable familiarity of someone she’d loved for a long time. But, technically, she was still on the job. So she pulled away, gave Maija’s hand a quick squeeze, and left the back room feeling energized.

December 20, 20XX

“Do you think I should dye my hair?” Maija asked, leaning heavily against the shopping cart. 

“Mm. It could look cute. What color are you thinking?” Tuli asked, not pausing in her examination of the supermarket’s selection of spices. Maija clicked her tongue, and ran her hand through some heavily gelled hair. 

“Oh, you know. Blue and pink are the classic colors, but what if I got, like, green or something? That would be pretty neat.” Tuli plucked something from the shelf and returned to the cart. 

“But: Are you biased to dye it green right now because green is a Christmas color?” Hm, that was a good point. 

“I don't think so?” Maija said, “I mean, green’s a nice color.” 

“That it is,” Tuli agreed, and laid a hand on the shopping cart. “What else did they tell us to get?” Maija pulled a crumpled up list of ingredients out of her back pocket, and read over them. From the looks of the shopping cart, most of it had already been gathered. 

“Uh, craisins. And…those sprinkles that are actually eyes?” 

“Oh!” Tuli smiled, “I put that. I wanted to put them on cupcakes, but then I didn't really plan anything else, so…I guess I’ll just end up eating a bunch of eyeball sprinkles. Or maybe someone else will do something with them.” Tuli shrugged, and brushed some hair out of her eyes. “So. Craisins.” 

“Craisins ahoy,” Maija replied, though she wasn't sure what Craisins ahoy actually meant. To her knowledge, most Christmas meals did not include craisins, but when Ylva and Astrid were in the kitchen, she did not question them. They were magicians of the culinary persuasion, except for when Astrid tried to say that bananas on pizza were good. No, Maija hadn't tried it, she would not try it, and it was not good. End of discussion.

“Craisins,” Tuli agreed, and turned away to search for them, leaving Maija to follow behind with the cart. Though they were out for craisins, both of them had a habit of picking up interesting foods, sharing it with the other, and deciding if it was actually worth buying. Jalapeno chocolates? Yes, but we can't tell the others it’s spicy. Mango flavored tea? Not actually that interesting, but the box was pretty. 

“Hey, Tuli,” Maija asked while they were waiting in line at the checkout. 

“Mm?”

“Do you like Pokemon?” 

“Oh, yeah! I was super competitive on the Pokemon scene in middle school. I was one of, like, three kids who actually knew how the card game worked,” She said. 

“I didn't know I was in the presence of royalty,” Maija teased. Tuli gave a soft laugh, and adjusted her hoodie. 

“Plot twist,” Tuli said, “I’m actually both Jessie and James, smashed into one body.” She laughed at her own joke, though it wasn't funny. Maija gave her a pity laugh though. 

“Oh, move the cart up,” Maija said, and Tuli did, pulling the cart after her. The store was super crowded today- Probably not the wisest idea to save the shopping until this close to the holiday, but oh well. At least Maija had gifts for everyone this year. She was rather proud of that. It was worthy of straightening her bow tie- If she had been wearing a bow tie, that is. She should get more of those. Insufficient bow ties was an excellent description of her wardrobe. Unfortunately. 

All in all, the trip to the store lasted about two and a half hours. Not too shabby for a pre-Christmas haul, if Maija had anything to say about it, and soon enough, they were back home. Ylva was out at work, and Astrid was busy working on her thesis, so the pair set about to silently put all the new groceries away. Once that was done, they traipsed off to their respective rooms. Maija knew she had to work on her new set, but couldn't think of anything funny. Literally, hours went by and she was still staring at the same blank screen. How fun. 

Eventually, she got bored and sent Astrid the link to a YouTube video called i sword fight my ex gf in a denny’s parking lot with the caption omg this is so us!!1!. A couple minutes later she was rewarded with the word Blocked, despite not actually getting blocked. Love you too bab <3. No response. At least Ylva thought she was sort of funny. Or at least, funny enough to go to her shows. Did Ylva actually think she was funny? As if they hadn't had that conversation before. But, Ylva was on her mind, so Ylva she would text. babe. A couple minutes passed before the response of what.

am i funny

You’re the courtiest of court jesters. i lose my spleen laughing every time i go to one of your shows. 

Though Ylva still had her spleen, the message was reassuring. 

should i dye my hair

Idc, its not my hair. A pause. also i got your dumb mugs

yay! 

Ah, punctuation. Noice. Ttyl. Maija sighed at that, and returned to staring blankly at her laptop. Maybe she could write some jokes about her weird, not-quite-rivalry with Astrid. Or her relationship? Something didn't sit right with her about mocking her girlfriend on stage. It was only funny when Ylva could mock her back. And that was how Maija wound up watching clips of various comedians until the evening rolled around and Ylva came home. 

“Hey,” Maija said, “Tell me what to write about.” Ylva paused for a second, taking off her coat and boots. 

“How girls always dye their hair blond but do it so you can see their roots.” 

“What?” 

“‘Cause they’re, like, into beauty but half ass it when it comes to their hair,”

Ylva said, “It’s irony or whatever.” Maija didn't think the idea was that good, but stowed it away in her mind, just in case. 

“Thanks, luv,” She said in her poshest English accent. 

“Nobody with that accent says luv,” Ylva told her, “It’s not an upper class Londoner thing.”

“Upper class London can suck my dick,” Maija mumbled, “And thanks. Love.” Apparently saying the word “love” in her regular voice was enough to tinge Ylva’s cheeks pink. That was cute. 

“Whatever,” She muttered, and brushed past Maija into their room. Ylva crashed on their bed, face down. 

“Tired?” Maija asked, and she nodded. 

“But the M-U-G-S are in my backpack.” 

“That word is too short for you to spell out like that.” Ylva only stuck out her tongue. 

“I’d fuck this bed if I could,” she mumbled, “So soft.” 

“Consider yourself kinkshamed,” Maija said, taking a seat beside her. She wound one hand into Ylva’s hair, combing it out with her fingers. Ylva had such pretty hair. It was already blond, but with a liberal application of dye, she was silver-haired. Except for the side of her head that was shaved, where little golden tufts reigned supreme. 

“There are worse kinks to shame, but alright,” Ylva said, “But I don't need to tell you about that.” Maija choked on her breath, heat rising to her cheeks. 

“I- What?! What are you trying to say?” Ylva tilted her head to the side. Somehow she was both exhausted and playful, and the combination was not doing great things for Maija’s heart. 

“Oh, nothing,” Ylva teased, kicking one leg in the air. “I just know you, is all.” Maija withdrew her hand and gave Ylva a light shove, only for Ylva to drag it back. 

“No, just…Just stay here,” She mumbled, so Maija did, though not without workshopping her material until Ylva was no longer in the mood to fuck the bed. Although she could feel Ylva getting annoyed, at least she was laughing.

December 21, 20XX

Tuli scanned the room once again, wondering if she had gone to the right place. Maija’s shows were always at the same comedy club, but what if things were different this time? What if she made a mistake by ordering a cocktail? If this was the wrong place, it was probably too late to make it to the actual one. Would Maija be mad if she missed the show? Probably not, right? Yeah, it was just a simple misunderstanding. She checked her phone again, and it sure looked like she was in the right place, but what if-

“Tuli,” A voice said from behind, and when she glanced up, she was relieved to see Astrid behind her. 

“Oh, Astrid! Sorry, I didn't see you come in.” She stood up, and pulled a chair away from the table for her wife. Astrid flashed her a tiny smile, and sat down, though she scooted herself in. 

“There’s nothin’ to be sorry for,” Astrid said, her voice rolling over Tuli in a calming wave. 

“Yeah. Anyway, do you want something to drink?” Astrid shook her head, causing her long hair to shimmer in the low light. One of her jobs was modelling, and for her most recent shoot, pink hair had been in order. Where her hair was usually a pale golden shade, it was now a faded bubblegum color at the ends, and Tuli loved it. She had suggested dying all of it pink, but apparently that was more than Astrid was willing to do. It was a bit of a commitment for someone with hair as long as her’s. Still, her wife looked cute enough with pink hair that Tuli was considering dying her own blond locks. 

“Not two nights in a row.” The previous night, Astrid had attended a Christmas party for work, and had more to drink than was wise. 

“You’re such a grandma,” Tuli teased, running one foot up Astrid’s leg under the table. Astrid’s slight shiver made her smile, though she tried to hide it by taking a long sip of her drink. 

“Hey,” Another voice said from her other side, breaking the soft air between the two women. Ylva had arrived, it seemed, decked out in leather and fishnets, with only the most extreme eye makeup on. 

“Hey, how are you?” Tuli greeted her with a warm smile, though Ylva did not return it. 

“I’m alright. Don’t really want to see Maija embarrass herself again, but it seems to be her passion.” 

“Oh, don’t say that!” Tuli gasped, “She’s not that bad!” 

“She’s not that good either,” Astrid mumbled, leaning forward to rest her chin on her hand. 

“You guys are so mean!” Tuli said, mocking offense. In her heart, she knew Maija wasn’t particularly good at delivering a joke, but she didn’t want to be rude about it in a space where Maija could hear. 

“I’m allowed to be mean to her, she’s my girlfriend,” Ylva said, and kicked her legs up on the table. Tuli rolled her eyes, letting the meanness thing slide. 

“You should be wearing pants right now,” She said, “You’ll freeze!” Though she wore knee high boots, fishnets and red denim shorts couldn’t protect her from the cold. 

“I drove here, it’s fine. Relax, mom,” Ylva said. 

“Okay, but if you get too cold-”

“It’s a great time for you to get preachy,” Astrid mumbled. Tuli blushed, though she wasn’t wrong. Her dress was better suited for the warmer seasons. 

“I have a flannel in my purse,” She mumbled. 

“That’s gay,” Ylva deadpanned, scrolling through her phone. Tuli rolled her eyes. At least one of them had the sense to dress for the weather. Astrid had on knee high boots that looked like they belonged to a high fantasy video game, olive green jeans tucked into her boots, and a gray sweater dress that hugged her narrow frame. She was lovely, or at least Tuli thought so. 

For the next couple minutes, the three sat in relatively comfortable silence. Tuli had to wonder how Ylva was comfortable sitting with her knees in her chest, but she let it go. Astrid pulled her laptop out of her backpack and got started on some of her homework. Tuli had always liked the idea of grad school, but after seeing the toll it took on her roommates, she began to second guess it. Astrid would be paying off her student loans for the rest of time, and Maija would be saddled in debt after the heat death of the universe. At least the loans made for good comedy on occasion. 

By the time the lights dimmed and the first comedian took to the stage, Tuli had grown bored, and was watching Astrid work over her shoulder. She was working on her thesis. It wasn't due until May, but she’d already started over from scratch twice since she started. When the lights went down, Astrid paused her typing, then lowered the brightness and started typing. She worked all through the first comedian’s set. He had some funny things to say, and some things that were more offensive than humorous. Overall, Tuli was more invested in her drink and checking over her shoulder to see if Runa was there yet. 

When Maija came on, as the third act of the night, Astrid moved her laptop away from herself on the table, paying more attention. While Ylva didn’t set her phone down, she did look up from it. 

“Has she already done this set in public?” Astrid asked, and Ylva shook her head. 

“No, it’s fresh. She calls it a Christmas special. Must be why there’s so many stupid Santa jokes.” 

“I like the Santa jokes,” Tuli said, though she wasn't really paying attention to Maija. She was listening, but tracing circles in the condensation on her glass. 

“She might just be bombing,” Ylva said, a slight upturn in her lips. “You suck!” She shouted, interrupting the show. Maija paused, the smile dropping from her face as she looked out at the crowd. Her eyes were wide for a minute, then when she noticed Ylva, a smile crossed her face. 

“Says the emo in the corner. Hey, did anyone tell you it’s not 2006 anymore? My condolences, but My Chemical Romance is dead.” That brought on a couple laughs, and Maija launched into a whole spiel about Hot Topic, all while staring straight at Ylva. Tuli shook her head- The whole thing was ridiculous. How Maija was funnier when she was improvising, how she needed Ylva’s help to do that. But Ylva didn't seem to mind, as she hugged herself and grinned up at the stage, saying nothing as her girlfriend dragged her through the mud. Not long after Maija began to deviate from the emo jokes, someone stomped over to their table and plopped down in an empty seat, then buried her shaved head in her arms. Ylva’s attention was immediately diverted from the stage, and onto the girl next to her. 

“Runa?” She whispered, and laid her hand on the girl’s arm. The girl looked up, and holy shit, it was Runa. Tuli tried not to eavesdrop when they began speaking in hushed whispers, but couldn’t help but overhear a couple things. Failure, mother, homeless? And also college, driver’s license, weed. All that set her heart racing, but she tried to pay attention to Maija anyhow. Astrid, who was also peering over at Runa, took her hand, and gave a comforting squeeze. 

When her set was over, Maija gave a dramatic bow and tipped her hat, then scurried off the stage. She returned a moment later to put the microphone back on it’s stand, which got a couple laughs. Tuli wondered if that had been on purpose. Shortly after, Maija made her way over to the table. She spun around the last empty chair and sat down, crossing her arms over the back. 

“Hey guys,” She said, a little breathless, “How’d I do?” 

“No better or worse than usual, I think,” Astrid said, pushing her glasses further up her nose. 

“You were fine,” Ylva said, reaching across the table to pat her arm. The table was too wide, though, and her arms were too short, so she only managed to swipe at the air. 

“Thanks,” Maija said, “Hey, Runa, glad you could make it.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Runa said, her voice tiny. She had her arms crossed, and seemed to shrink in on herself a little. “You were cool.” 

“Cool.” Maija smiled, “How’re you doing? Haven’t seen you in a while. And you cut your hair!” Runa shrugged, one hand coming up to her head, almost as if to tuck some hair behind her ear before she realized it was no longer there. 

“Yeah, I guess I wanted a new look.” 

“Well I like it,” Maija said, “It’s cool.” 

“It’s a little messy,” Ylva said. 

“Someone else is on stage, guys,” Astrid piped up, gesturing forward. All five of them looked up, dumb expressions on their face. They were, in fact, talking over someone’s set. 

“Shit,” Maija said, not lowering her voice at all, “Do you guys wanna get out of here?” 

“Can we?” Runa asked, looking hopeful. 

“But we just got here,” Tuli complained, “Wouldn’t it be rude to-”

“Well, as we have just noticed, we are talking over someone’s set, so I think we should have this conversation in the lobby,” Ylva said, and that was something they could all agree on, so the group packed up their things and left the main area of the comedy club. 

“Sorry to make you guys leave,” Runa mumbled, balling her fists in the ends of her sleeves. 

“It’s okay,” Ylva said, “I can drive you home if you want.” 

“I don't want to go back to mom’s house,” Runa said. 

“Well, you’re always welcome at our apartment,” Maija said, playing with a piece of hair that had fallen into her face. “Can I ask who cut your hair? It’s so cute, and-”

“I did,” Runa said, “Thanks.” Though Maija was entertaining her with discussions of her hair, Tuli couldn't help but worry. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, and began typing out a message to Astrid. Do you think she’s ok? Astrid glanced down at her upon checking her phone. Idk. No way for me to know. She paused for a moment, then began typing again. Also, I watched you type that. Tuli shifted so she could get a better look at Astrid, and sent her a goofy expression. She was rewarded with a smug smile and a hand on her shoulder. Tuli shifted closer to her, until they were almost touching, with the hope that Astrid might put an arm around her shoulder, but to no avail. That was what she got for not asking, but it didn't seem appropriate with Ylva and Maija vying for Runa’s attention. 

“I’ll talk to her later, okay?” Runa said, “I just need a place to stay for Christmas, and after that I’ll be out of your business forever.” 

“I never said I wanted you out of my business forever,” Ylva said, her voice betraying some anger. 

“Okay,” Runa said, though the indication of her tone was that it was not, in fact, okay. 

“Okay,” Tuli butted in, “Runa needs a place to stay, and we have one, so that’s the problem solved. Let’s go home, I can make dinner, and-”

“‘S my turn,” Astrid said, “I’ll make dinner.” 

“Sure, whatever,” Ylva said, “Is that okay with you, Runa?” Her sister shrugged, but nodded, in the ultimate mixed message. 

“Dope! Alright, so you guys wanna go?” Maija said, gesturing to the door. As that was the general consensus, the group began to make their way out. Just as they were on their way out, a man came up to the group. 

“Hey, I saw your set,” He said, talking only to Maija. “Maija, right?” 

“Yep, that’s me!” She said, putting on a voice eerily similar to Tuli’s customer service voice. 

“Well, you’re really funny, and I was wondering if you might like to go out with me sometime.” Maija’s face went a deep red, and her fists clenched at her sides

“Um, thanks, but-”

“Have you ever heard of a straight woman with a rat tail?” Ylva asked, and threw her arm around Maija’s waist. 

“If you have, I’d actually like to meet her.” Neither of them noticed, but Runa seemed to wince, pulling her arms even tighter around herself. Her cheeks had gone red, but the door hadn't been open long enough for it to be attributed to the cold. 

“Oh, shit. Sorry, uh, you don't look gay.” 

“I’m-” Maija sputtered, “This is my girlfriend. But I’m sure you’re- You’re very sexy to some. Thanks- Thanks for coming to my show, bye!” Tuli felt bad for laughing, but Ylva clearly didn't. She cackled, in fact, as they filed out the door and away to their car. 

“But you should really get rid of the rat tail,” She told Maija, and Tuli couldn't agree more. 

“It’s a part of my look!” Maija whined, running a hand through her hair. Though she had employed copious amounts of gel to preserve a coiffed look, it was mostly falling apart by now. 

“Yer look is…You should change it,” Astrid said snidely. 

“What’s wrong with it?” Maija asked, walking backwards so she could face Astrid, although she kept one hand firmly in Ylva’s. 

“The rat tail, f’r one. Yer hair’s a mess, clothes never match, and-”

“We can't all be models, Astrid.”

“She’s got a point,” Ylva said. 

“You’re all bullies!” Maija whined, turning back around. “I can't believe my own lover would betray me like this.” 

“I said what I said,” Ylva said, seeming unbothered, though she yelped when Maija attacked her with a side hug. 

“You guys are so loud!” Runa whined, hands now in her pockets. 

“It never ends,” Tuli warned, though her tone was jovial, “You’re lucky Ylva’s already graduated.” 

“Don’t remind me,” Astrid said, her cheeks paler than usual. Tuli chuckled softly at the memories- Ylva was probably the worst student out of the lot of them, and college had been a stressful time for her. Where Tuli wanted to rip out her hair sometimes, Ylva actually had. It was actually concerning how many times someone had found Ylva crying with fists full of blond hair. Not that college hadn't been stressful for all of them. Tuli was set to graduate in May, and her experiences had made her question grad school. 

Though she was only a year younger than Astrid, she was further behind in school, due to her gap years. They had known each other for a long time, and had been together since high school, but Tuli had never seen Astrid more stressed out than when she was applying to PhD programs. Stress remained simmering ever since, but Tuli wasn't sure if she was willing to put herself through that. She would probably be fine getting a job at a museum or something, given her major of theology. 

The group reached the car, only for Ylva and Maija to break out into an argument over who would drive home. Both claimed the car to be theirs, even though it was actually Astrid who paid for most of it. Ylva won out in the end, and she continued arguing with Maija the whole time. Runa seemed mortified by the whole ordeal, but Tuli didn't want to prod. Once they got home, Astrid fulfilled her promise of cooking dinner, and they enjoyed a round of extremely loud conversation, as was typical of their household, before Maija started drinking to celebrate her set. Though the air in the room was jovial, everyone was tired, and they somehow managed to get to bed before the time became ungodly.

December 22, 20XX

Saturdays. There should have been more stuff on Twitter, given that it was a Saturday. More people- Ylva, Maija, Tuli, Astrid- should have been out, given that it was a Saturday, but no. Weren’t you supposed to go out and party every night when it was a Saturday night? Four college kids sitting around the living room drinking wine and knitting and watching TV wasn't what Runa had expected when she crashed with Ylva. Weren't there places to go, things to do? 

Instead, she had a pillow under her chest and her phone clenched in her hand as she laid on the floor, watching the nth consecutive episode of Sense8. How was there so much of a show that only went on for two seasons? 

“So wait, is he actually there?” Maija asked. Ylva sighed, and paused the show to explain every detail of the situation. That was how, Runa thought. She turned her face into the floor, scraping her nose against the rug. Her neck thanked her for relieving it of the odd position she had been in previously. As Ylva prattled on about the ins and outs of Sense8, Runa brought a hand up to stroke her newly shorn head. She couldn't stop touching it- Although she sort of wanted to, it was getting greasy. Her hair had never been so short, and she didn't know what to think of it. It wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but she didn't know how to feel now that her hair didn't rest against her shoulders. 

But it didn't matter. Her hair didn't matter, right? All that mattered was that she got into Princeton. She was smart, and she was going to Princeton, and she had a place to stay until Christmas. What am I doing? Sleeping on her sister’s couch while avoiding her mom wasn't something to be proud of, but it was all she had. But a song she liked was part of the soundtrack, so she turned onto her side, and watched the show. Maija was right, it was really confusing, but at least the soundtrack was alright. 

Eventually, Runa redirected her attention to social media, blindly scrolling through various apps until there was nothing left to scroll through. Finally, she resorted to scrolling through her own Instagram page. She only had twenty posts, and eleven of them were of birds, with eight of those being pictures of her pet parakeet, named Puffin. Ylva teased her about it when they were kids, but it wasn't her fault puffins were the only bird she knew. Fortunately, since then, Runa had become more educated on the dopeness of birds. Scrolling through her own page didn't help, though. She was only reminded of how Puffin was dead. Maybe she could get another bird when she was at Princeton, if they let students have birds. 

“Runa?” The sound of her name caught her attention, and she jolted into a sitting position. Ylva stood at the end of the couch, staring down at her with a blank expression. 

“Where’s everyone else?” 

“Maija’s in the shower, and we’re out of toilet paper, so Tuli went to get some. Astrid’s right there.” Astrid was, indeed, right there. She sat cross legged in an armchair, brows furrowed as she worked on some knitting, though there was a half empty glass of wine next to her. As if on cue, Astrid looked up. 

“Hi, Runa,” She mumbled, and went back to her knitting. 

“Hey,” Runa said, “What’s up?”

“Can I talk to you in the other room?” Ylva asked, by which she meant her bedroom. Runa couldn't really say no, so she got up and followed Ylva to the bedroom. 

“Are you okay?” Ah, the age old question. Would she ever learn how to answer it in a way that didn't launch a whole discussion? Experts remain puzzled. 

“I guess,” Runa shrugged, “I had a fight with mom. But it was really stupid,” Runa mumbled, and it really was. Things hadn't been going her way lately was all. She was eighteen, and every day her mom dropped hints that she’d be kicked out soon. But apparently, being eighteen didn't mean she could smoke weed or hug a boy- Even though she wasn't sure she even liked boys. And then she got to learn that her best friend was moving to a whole different country, because apparently it was Oxford or bust for her mother, and she was leaving over break- Everything was so much. And, as any responsible adult could tell you, sex won’t solve any of your problems. So why did Runa think it would work? 

“I don't care how stupid it was. You’re my little sister, I care about you.” Runa couldn't help but cringe at that. 

“Half sister,” She reminded her.

“Half sisters are still sisters. What happened?” Ylva pressed, crossing her arms. She adopted a stern look, and even rose to her toes to appear more intimidating. 

“It’s really nothing-” 

“Bullshit, tell me the truth.” 

“I just- I did something stupid, and…Will you hate me?” Runa asked. It felt irrational, but what if her sister saw her as some sort of…traitor? She wasn't even sure what she was scared of. Why did Ylva’s approval even matter? Even if Ylva decided she hated her, Maija liked her enough to let her stay…Right? 

“I am legally not allowed to hate you,” Ylva said, and though it was meant to be a joke, Runa didn't feel comforted. The law was just a bunch of words, after all. 

“Well, um. Mom and I got in a fight. I did something, she didn’t like it. I guess I knew she’d be mad, but I didn't think she’d be that mad. I deserved it, but-” 

“Until I know what you did, it’s going to be hard for me to have an opinion,” Ylva said, finally coming down from her toes. Runa supposed she was right. It would probably be better to say something, but she didn't know how. Would it even be safe? Who knew. 

“I smoked a lot of weed…” 

“Everyone smokes weed.” 

“I, um. Please never repeat this,” Runa asked. Once again, her arms came up to hold her body. It was almost protective. Ylva nodded, and reached out to grab one of her hands. She refused to be okay with limply holding Runa’s hand between her own, and squeezed so hard that Runa had to squeeze back, as a form of revenge. 

“Um. My friend and I were smoking, you know, and…In the basement. And I sort of, um. I sort of did...” She paused, remembering. “You know.” Ylva’s eyes went wide, and she started nodding. That, coupled with what she’d just confessed to, had Runa’s cheeks burning.  

“Alright. Getting it, that’s cool.” 

“No it’s not!” Runa yelled. Absolutely none of it was cool. “Our friendship is over! Mom said she’d leave us alone, but then she came downstairs, and we were just- She wouldn't stop yelling, and I was- I was still on the floor, and, and-” She could feel tears welling up in her throat, but refused to acknowledge them. She wouldn’t cry. She hadn't cried when her mom was yelling, or during any argument since then. Or before it, for that matter. No, Runa Stelisdottir didn't cry. Except now she was, and Ylva was watching her. 

“I hate Mom.” Runa wiped her nose, because she couldn't cry over this. 

“Me too,” Ylva said, and it really ticked Runa off how calm she could stay about the whole thing. 

“You don't get it,” She said, though she despised sounding like a teenager.

“You don't understand! Your life is so perfect, with your girlfriend and your apartment-”

“My life isn't perfect just because I have a girlfriend and an apartment,” Ylva said, but Runa wasn't listening at that point. 

“Mom was always so nice to you, and- And you have so many friends! You don't get it, you can't get it, and mom’s not gonna let me come home, and I don't have anywhere to go, but you won't-” Runa hiccupped, and she couldn't. She started crying harder, sobs shaking her body. 

“Runa-” Ylva’s hand came down on her shoulder, and though her touch was gentle, it was even more unnerving. 

“Don't touch me!” She shook Ylva’s hand off her shoulder, and ran. Her hiding place seemed to be the laundry closet, where the washer and dryer hummed away in their neat little stack and color coded baskets- Blue, yellow, black, and red- almost filled the rest of the room. Runa sank to the floor, phone clenched in her hand. It wasn't her fault, she told herself. It was all her mom’s fault. If she didn't want her daughters to act out, she should’ve raised them not to.

Knowing that didn't stop her from crying, though, and cry she did. She was an embarrassment, having a temper tantrum like a little baby. But eventually, she cried herself to sleep. Uncomfortable, cramped sleep, with her neck resting at an unnatural angle against the dryer, but sleep nonetheless. 

She woke hours later to the faint hum of the dryer and the muffled sound of hushed voices. 

“I think she’s depressed,” said one woman. Ylva. 

“Really? That’s pretty bad.” Maija. 

“Yeah. I mean, she’s got parental issues out the ass and doesn’t even trust me when I’ve been more of a mom than our literal mother.” 

“Well, I mean, maybe that’s part of why? And it doesn’t automatically mean she’s depressed.” 

“She’s on her phone all day. And I know, I know I sound like a boomer, but that shit’s not good for you. She doesn't talk to anyone, and…you know, maybe you were right about her running away with a boy.” 

“I thought she was, you know…”

“I did too, but I guess not.” Runa choked at that, pressing her ear against the door. Was this a regular occurrence, that they just- just gossiped about her?

“Eh, it doesn't matter. I just hope she doesn't get into anything harder than weed.” 

“You know that thing about weed being a gateway drug is bullshit, right?” Maija said, “They just say that to scare kids out of doing drugs-”

“Is it really that bad of me to want her sober? I mean, I’m not, like, saying you should never do drugs, but-”

“No, it makes sense. It would really suck if she got arrested or something.” 

“Yeah,” Ylva murmured, and the conversation seemed to pause for a minute. “I just- Why wouldn't she tell me about the shit she clearly has going on?” Runa cringed at that, and she wanted to cover her ears, but there was something inside her that demanded she keep listening. 

“Well, you said yourself that she doesn't really trust you,” Maija said. Runa wanted to rip her hair out. No! That wasn't it at all- Did they really think that poorly of her? Of course she trusted Ylva! It was Ylva who didn’t trust her, and only played the sisters card when things were going badly. 

“She doesn't,” Ylva agreed, “And I sort of get it, ‘cause high school sucks, but since she doesn’t talk to me, I have to assume the worst.” Oh, come on. She talked to Ylva plenty. 

“Yeah,” Maija hummed, “Do you think-”

“Runa doesn't care what I think.” 

“I’m sure she does. But I’m not Runa.” 

“It would be pretty weird if you were,” Ylva said, then paused. “I’m glad you’re not.” At that point, Runa couldn't keep listening. Her hand came up to the doorknob, and she was about to open it when Maija spoke again. 

“Hey, it won't be that long before she’s out of your hair.” 

“Yeah.” Ylva sighed, and the tone she said it in made Runa shiver. Like she was a temporary form of entertainment, or an obstacle, or- “At least I’ve got you.” She burst out of the laundry closet to find Maija sitting on the counter, one arm around Ylva, both with mugs in hand. 

“Stop talking about me!” Runa shouted, and took a moment to relish in their surprise before she spun around and ran out of the apartment- A terrible idea, since she didn't really know the area. Her wallet and phone charger were in her backpack, which she had left behind. But she wasn't here to make good choices, apparently. No, she was there to anger her sister then leave all her shit behind after she had pissed off her mom. 

Runa made her way into the lobby of the building, ready to leave, but the snow falling from a pitch black sky made her pause. Maybe she could find some storage room to spend the night in. According to her phone, though, she'd already spent most of the night in Ylva’s laundry room. And it was technically Sunday, so most people probably wouldn't be up and about for a while. So Runa set about wandering the first floor of the building- Not that there was much to wander- until she came across a door labelled T. It housed a dumpster and a recycling bin, both of which were empty. Sure, Runa thought, I can stay here. Besides, she was tired, and what harm was there in sitting down for a couple minutes? So she did, hiding behind the dumpster. Eventually, she managed to fall asleep, although her new position was no more favorable to her neck than the last.

December 23, 20XX

There was a certain sort of silence that came the morning after a heavy snowfall. It was a silence that Astrid found very peaceful, when accompanied by the correct lighting. Unfortunately, this morning was not one of them, which made waking up a lot easier. Though it would be more fun to stay in bed all day, there were things to do. Okay, she was getting up…now. Now. Okay, hug Tuli a little tighter, then…Awake! She reached across Tuli, still asleep, and felt around the nightstand for her glasses. Once she grabbed them and shoved them up her nose, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. There, Astrid combed her fingers through her hair, contemplated braiding it, but ultimately decided she could do that later, and rolled out of bed. 

Upon emerging from the room she shared with Tuli, she spotted two things. One, the couch was empty, and two, her knitting basket was out of place. Instead of dealing with either of those things, though, she meandered over to the kitchen and pulled some mugs from the cabinet. She liked her own coffee black, so she didn't touch it before pouring her own mug, but for some reason, her roommates liked theirs with all sorts of flair. She left the remaining mugs on the counter and leaned against the sink. While she waited for her coffee to cool to a drinkable temperature, Astrid removed the filter from the coffee maker and tossed it in the garbage can. I should probably take out the trash, it’s getting kind of full. But then she’d have to put pants on…Eh, it would give her coffee time to cool off. 

Astrid returned to the room, threw on a hoodie and a pair of running shorts, and after a moment’s thought, grabbed her phone. She grabbed the trash, replaced the bag, and slid into their Community Crocs, which were generally used for getting the mail or taking out the trash when nobody felt like putting on actual shoes. She checked her phone, saw that Maija had sent her a series of deep fried memes, and clicked away from Instagram. Maija sending her memes at four am was the least of her worries when it came to online harassment- Yet it somehow managed to be the most annoying. Astrid did modelling work as one way of paying for her degree, and apparently the rainbow flag and diamond ring in her bio weren't enough to deter the advances of the general public. 

The elevator reached the first floor, and Astrid shuffled out, blinking in the bright lights of the lobby. With the trash bag slung over her shoulder, she felt like a woman on a mission- And she was, sort of, but in her head it was more along the lines of Stealth and Adventure. Maybe it could be, in her head. In an alternate world where spies take out the trash…

Or. In the regular world, where there might have been a dead body next to the dumpster. That was fun, and also the beginning of a cop show. Astrid dropped the bag in the dumpster, and kneeled down to get a better look- Or, in the regular world, where Runa was hopefully sleeping next to the dumpster. 

“Runa?” She asked, shaking the girl on the floor. “Runa, are ya okay? Alive?” After a moment, the girl became awake, yelping and leaping away. 

“Whatthefuckareyoudoing!?” She shrieked, then seemed to notice Astrid. “Oh. Uh. Hey, Astrid.” She made a move with her hand, as if to adjust her hair. Her cheeks only grew a deeper pink when she remembered she had none. 

“Hey, Runa,” Astrid echoed, “What the fuck ‘re you doin’?” 

“Oh, um.” Runa stared at the ground, her knuckles going white as she gripped her cell phone. 

“Are ya okay?” Astrid asked once again, adjusting her glasses. Runa shrugged. 

“I mean- I don't know.” She paused. “Can I tell you something?” Astrid nodded.

“Well, I, um. I kind of eavesdropped on my sister and Maija talking about me. Rudely.” 

“Maija’ll do that. Ylva too, but less,” Astrid said. She sat back, leaning against the wall. “D’ya wanna talk about it?” Runa shrugged, leaning back against the dumpster. 

“What even is there to say?” 

“Not talkin’ about it is horse shit,” Astrid said, “Stuff happens, usually not great.” 

“I think Ylva hates me,” Runa murmured. She ran a hand through her hair, and tipped her head back against the dumpster. “And our mom.” 

“Why?”

“Well, mom hates me because I like getting high, I like to drive, and because I, um. Will you judge me if I tell you about something I did?” Astrid shook her head. Not because she wasn't judgemental, but because she didn't really care. From the way Runa was talking, it was just regular problems that seemed so much bigger to her because she was young. And everyone had those sorts of problems, so who was Astrid to judge?

“Don't really care ‘bout your probl’ms. No offense, but I’ve got my own issues to worry ‘bout.” Runa nodded, seeming to understand, then launched into an explanation. 

“So, I have this friend, Li, and she’s pretty cool, but she’s moving away. To London. For college. ‘Cause of some weird custody battle that I don't really get. But then it’s like…She’s leaving me behind! And I’m- I don't- It’s weird, okay?” Runa spoke defensively, yet Astrid didn't know a single teenage girl named Li. Let alone one who was moving to London. “And we have this other friend, Noah. And his family’s also kind of weird, but that’s mostly his sister. Anyway, um. I don't know, there was this weird tension, and now Li’s gone, so I, um. Made out with Noah?” 

“Why?” 

“I don't know!” Runa said, “Why did I tell you that?” Astrid shrugged.

“Because 'm quiet, therefore ’m not a gossip, therefore ’m trustworthy?” Runa’s face scrunched up as she considered the possibility. 

“Huh. But then my mom walked in on us, and Noah left, and we had a fight. Then his sister said we weren't allowed to hang out anymore, and my mom took my driver’s license away. And then I shaved my head, and we had another fight, and…Well, then it was now.” 

“So ye’ve been busy,” Astrid said, “Sorry. ‘Bout your friends.” 

“Thanks, I guess,” Runa said. “I still don't get why I told you that?” Astrid shrugged. 

“Ye don't have to. But ye probably should tell yer sister.” 

“That would be humiliating,” Runa complained, hugging her knees. “She makes me feel dumb.” 

“Yer not dumb,” Astrid said. “Ya know, I’ve got some little nieces ‘round your age ya might like to be friends with.” 

“Oh, um. Cool?” Runa said, though her tone indicated she couldn't care less. Perhaps Astrid hadn't presented it the right way. Whatever. Her nieces were menaces to society anyhow. 

“D’ya want me to talk to Ylva for ya?” She suggested. Hopefully that didn't make her sound like a poser, or whatever. But Ylva was probably concerned, and she could probably help with whatever mommy issues had arisen, so. Yeah. And did it make Astrid a bad person if she was thinking through the psychology course she had to take as part of her teaching certification? No, this was something she’d have to deal with when she became an actual teacher. It was fine. 

“I guess,” Runa said, “Can I, um, can I come back to the apartment now? I’m cold.” As anyone would be, after spending the night on the floor of the trash room. Astrid hoped she’d be a better mother than Runa’s when and if she and Tuli decided to have kids. 

After a few more minutes, Astrid helped Runa off the floor. 

“You’re um, you’re really tall,” Runa commented, having to tilt her head back to make eye contact with Astrid. 

“Yes, I know,” Astrid said as they walked. Her feet slid around in the Community Crocs- somehow. How was it possible that they were too big for her? How did Ylva survive in these? “Yer kinda short.” 

“I’m not that small,” Runa bit out, and the conversation ended. Typical short person response. Though Astrid amused herself, the air between them remained tense on the elevator ride up. When they got to the apartment, Astrid unlocked the door and slid off the crocs. 

“Took the trash out,” She announced to the now heavily populated main room. Tuli sat on the floor, head in one hand, eyes shut, but perked up at hearing Astrid’s proclamation. A sleepy smile crossed her face and god, she was so cute. Warmth flooded Astrid’s chest, before she remembered the Runa she had in tow. “Also, Runa’s here.” She stepped aside, revealing Runa. Ylva, who sat on the counter, slammed her mug down. 

“Runa,” She said, voice neutral. “Hey.” 

“Ylva,” Runa said, shoving her hands in her pockets. She shuffled to the side, allowing Astrid to block her from view once again. 

“Hi, Runa!” Maija said, and took a sip of her coffee. “How are you?” 

“I’m ok,” Runa mumbled. Astrid made her way across the room to join Tuli on the floor next to the refrigerator- Her wife liked iced coffee year round, and when she could not buy iced coffee, she made iced coffee. The only drawback was how long she had to wait for the coffee to chill. Astrid kept telling her it was easier to pour warm coffee over ice, but Tuli wanted to do it her way, so Tuli got to do it her way. 

“Hi,” Astrid whispered, joining Tuli on the floor, trying to be quiet so as not to disturb the family drama going on around them. 

“Mornin’” Tuli yawned, “Thanks for taking the trash out.”

“No probl’m,” Astrid replied. Tuli hummed, and leaned her head back against the fridge. She didn't incite any further conversation, so it seemed they’d just be listening to Ylva and Runa attempt to talk to each other about their mother. Awesome. Well, more like really bad parenting and a control freak mother- Which, actually, explained a lot of Ylva’s personality. And life choices. And taste in music. And women. 

Though she did try to tune them out, Astrid was unable to ignore the pair forever. Mostly because Runa called on her to arbitrate the conversation, which was dreadfully boring, seeing as it turned out that not much had actually happened. Runa was acting rebellious, whatever that meant, and their mom didn't approve. Ylva sent her money, which Runa had allegedly spent on bus fare and food. She actually spent it on weed, until their mom took her license away for Bad Behavior, which was apparently the lying but mostly the Noah thing. Which was somehow related to the hair thing. If Astrid had to comment, which she didn't, Runa was just confused about a lot of things. Unfortunate, really. But! She was now staying with them until she had to go back to school, so that was cool. Maybe during that time she would become less confused- Although Tuli taking a coffee mug out of the freezer surely didn't help. 

“Why was your coffee in there?” Runa asked, pulling Tuli into the limelight. 

“Oh, I like iced coffee,” She said. She set her mug down on the counter, grabbed some milk from the fridge, and then honey from another cabinet. A generous amount of both went into her mug. 

“But it’s winter,” Runa said, dumbfounded. Tuli only chuckled. 

“Yeah, but I still like iced coffee. It just tastes better,” She said, taking a sip. 

“It’s a seasonal beverage,” Maija butted in. She managed to stay silent while Runa and Ylva talked about what had happened, but it seemed that was over now. 

“How is iced coffee a seasonal beverage?” Ylva asked, “It’s literally just coffee with ice in it.” 

“It’s got summer vibes,” Maija explained, “Like how you wouldn't get, like, a peppermint latte in July.” 

“I could if I wanted to,” Ylva snapped back, “If I liked peppermint.” 

“Okay, but you not liking peppermint doesn't mean it’s not a Christmas drink,” Maija said, “I think you just lack fun.” 

“Here’s the thing, though,” Ylva said, tapping Maija’s chest with every word.

“Peppermint exists all year round, so it’s not a goddamn seasonal drink.” 

“Yes it is!” Maija shouted, “They only have it in the winter, how is that not seasonal!” 

“You can ask Starbucks to make you a peppermint latte in the summer, it’s just not advertised as much.” Astrid, along with Maija, and at least Runa, rolled her eyes. If there was one thing the inhabitants of their apartment were good at, it was pointless arguments. Most of them broke out between Ylva and Maija- Hopefully Runa didn't take the wrong message from that. 

“Welcome to our apartment,” Tuli said, almost drily, then turned her attention to Astrid. “I’m gonna go get ready, alright?” Astrid nodded, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. She’d probably wander back to their room soon enough- She had so much work to do, it wasn't even funny. But for now, the greatest entertainment in town was watching Ylva scream at her girlfriend about the seasonality of peppermint lattes. 

“Are they- Are they always like this?” Runa asked, once again clutching her phone to her chest. 

“Ye get used to it,” Astrid confirmed, “Nd, for what t’s worth, your sister ‘sn’t that bad.” 

“I know,” Runa sighed, “Thanks.” Astrid flashed her a slight grin. 

“Not a probl’m.” After all, who would she be if she didn’t look out for her friends?

[muertawrites]

Muggle Magic (George Weasley x Reader)

Summary: George Weasely hires a squib to help him out in the shop, only to learn that magic doesn’t always require a wand. 

Word Count: 3,100

Author’s Note: Remember when I said I was gonna post this a few days ago? lmao that was clearly a lie. But it’s finished! And I’m actually really proud of it and I promise I’m not gonna delete this one like the last couple fics I’ve posted because I’m convinced that this one doesn’t suck! I might also be posting more regularly now since I started a new antidepressant that actually makes it so that I want to do productive things with my time and constant need for escapism. I hope you like my first Wizarding World fic because there will be more, considering its the one fandom I let myself get somewhat obsessive about. Enjoy, dearies~ 

                                             ~ 💀🌸 Muerta 🌸💀

( masterlist )

Working for George Weasley brought magic back into your life. 

He hired you a little over two years ago, and to say he took a chance on you was an understatement; you were a squib - come to London to get a master’s degree in the hopes of becoming a muggle historian - who had stumbled into Diagon Alley in an attempt to reconnect with your magical roots. You’d stepped into Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes during a rare moment of calm when the shop was empty and, noticing the history books peeking out of your bag, George struck up a conversation with you, mentioning his father’s long-lived love of muggle culture. 

Despite the stigma you carried, your first conversation with George offered him a shortened version of your life’s story; how you convinced your family to send you away to a muggle boarding school when your letter to a magical institution didn’t arrive by the time you turned eleven, spending your teenage years learning everything there was to know about living outside the magical world. He enjoyed your wit and passion, your lively intelligence, the comfort you had with yourself in the face of discretion, and, deciding that keeping anyone else around would be a bore after making your acquaintance, offered you a part-time position in the shop to help pay your way through grad school. 

Of course, your adjustment to the magical world after years separated from it was a challenge.

George kindly let you live in the apartment above the shop, taking rent out of your pay so that you didn’t have to bother converting such a large portion of your income into muggle money every month. Work, however, was a much more significant struggle; having no wand to help you manage the store and its immense inventory, you had to arrive early to most of your shifts in order to organize and replace product by hand, often putting yourself in danger traversing the stock room’s stories-tall ladder. After a particularly terrifying fall in which you narrowly avoided death, George took it upon himself to get you some help where genetics had failed you; he enchanted about a thousand paper cranes to pull stock for you, retrieving and storing anything you needed on command. 

“With them around, what do you need me for?” you’d teased him, quietly thankful for his care to ensure no loss of life or limb would befall you under his watch. 

“Eh,” he’d grinned, “they could never agitate me quite as well as you do.” 

Though it was odd returning to a world you could never fully be part of, working for George Weasley made the vertigo of reassociation fun. He always had some sort of funny little trick up his sleeve, be it something malicious, like slipping sugar cubes into your tea that made your hair turn into ostrich feathers or jinxing the cash register to shoot fireworks at random when opened, or something winsome, like making it snow inside as the winter holidays approached or enchanting your textbooks so that their lessons leapt off the page, playing out before you in a theater of paper mache. He engaged you in his own work, inquiring your aid in developing new products, and was deeply interested in yours, enraptured with your retellings of a history he was unaware took place so near to his own. He even brought you books on magical history from Flourish and Blotts, stopping weekly on his way into work, suggesting you consider taking up the practice of teaching the subject.

“Seriously, you should look into it,” he told you. “If I’d had you instead of Professor Binns, I might’ve actually cared enough to pass a class.” 

During slow hours, you and George would sit at the counter and eat lunch together, talking about everything and nothing and anything else in between. You told George about your childhood; how, growing up, you dreamed of doing things you would never be able to do, the horror you felt having your life’s path ripped from under you at such a young age, how you managed to find yourself again through art and history and literature. He told you about his own youth; the boisterous years of his life spent at Hogwarts, the incredible fantasies and ambitions he and his brother would dream up during late nights spent awake in their shared bedroom, the gaping hole his twin’s absence left in his soul the night he died. George was fourteen years your senior, but you were able to laugh and grieve with him as easily as if you’d been born a day apart. 

You loved working with George. Being a part of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes gave you a sense of belonging you’d never felt before; You often felt caught between the magical and muggle worlds, standing in the threshold between the two but never able to set foot into either. In the shop with George, however, you could exist without conflict - the halves of your universe were indistinguishable from one another, and for once in your life you finally felt whole. You’d found your home in the last possible place you ever expected to.

As much as you loved the shop and your employer, there were certain things about your job that drove you absolutely insane - namely, the parchment bookkeeping system. It was true that all things ancient and antique were your area of expertise, but trying to keep track of a business with nothing but quills, ink, and a stack of heavy, leatherbound volumes was what you envisioned was similar to experiencing the ninth circle of Hell. Opening and closing every day took ages, and George’s office was so cluttered with paperwork that finding anything amongst his things required a full-fledged expedition into every cabinet in the building. Fed up with the chaos, you decided it was time to bring the wizarding world (at least the corner of it you occupied) into the Twenty-First Century. 

“What the hell’s all this?” 

George furrowed his brow in bewilderment as he traversed the stairs into his office, where you were seated at his desk in front of a shiny new Mac. 

“A computer!” you told him, grinning. “We’re going to use it to help run the books. I sent an owl to your dad asking if he had anything like it laying around his shed; he sent this over last night.”

“So it’s a muggle thing,” George assumed, setting his briefcase beside the monitor as he pulled up a chair beside you. 

You nodded. 

“I’ll teach you how to use it. I’ve been here since six scanning files into it; we’ll be able to access and keep the books in order much easier now.” 

You opened the spreadsheet you’d made outlining the last quarter’s numbers, smiling proudly as George’s eyes widened in awe. 

“That’s incredible,” he said, leaning in to inspect the screen. “But what about our ledgers? How can this thing hold all of that information?” 

You giggled at his curiosity, thinking it a bit adorable how out of touch he was. 

“I’ve kept the ledgers so we still have physical records of everything,” you explained, “but having it all at hand on the computer will make the boring parts of the business a lot easier. I’ve got everything matched up with my laptop, too, so I can open and close quicker and all the numbers will be sent right to you.” 

George quirked a brow. 

“Laptop?” 

“It’s a small version of a computer,” you told him. “The screen and the keyboard” - you pointed each of these parts out - “fold together like a notebook so I can take it with me wherever I go.” 

George shook his head, clearly baffled by the complexity and convenience of muggle technology. 

“Blimey,” he mused. “I never would’ve guessed muggles could do all this without magic. It’s bloody brilliant.” 

You rolled your eyes, smiling to yourself as you gathered one of the volumes you’d been searching through and returned it to its place on the wall of shelves overlooking George’s desk. 

“You need to give us more credit,” you bantered. “Muggles are a lot more magical than you’d think.” 

The rest of the morning was spent digitally organizing documents and giving George a crash course in computer science, by the end of which he considered himself an expert in the subject. When the shop opened at noon, you could barely pull him away from his desk. 

Aside from the morning’s excitement, the rest of the day ran as usual. You spent the afternoon fluttering around the building, keeping and moving inventory while George used the weekday calm to hole himself up in his workshop and concentrate on new product. By the time evening rolled around you were adequately exhausted, deciding to settle behind the counter with a book and a cup of tea while you waited to close. 

“You said something earlier,” George announced as he finally returned down the stairs - the first time you’d seen him in hours - “about muggles and magic. I can’t seem to figure out what you mean.” 

“Good evening to you, too,” you greeted him, glancing up from your book and shooting him an amused grin. “What’s got you confused?” 

George hoisted himself up onto the counter, turning so he faced you and folding his legs beneath him. For someone fresh into his early forties, he still acted much like you imagined he did as a teenager. 

“You said that muggles were magical,” he reminded you, “but you can’t be, really. Not without… well, y’know, magic. I can’t see what can be so magical about a world that doesn’t have what ours has.” 

You shut your book, setting it in your lap as you searched for the right words to describe what you were thinking. 

“It’s not… magic in the magical sense,” you attempted, earning a strange look from George. “Muggle magic is more about… defying the odds than doing the impossible. It’s also about how things make you feel. Things people have done and created… situations and experiences that inspire awe; that make you feel like you’re living outside the regular world.”

George continued to gaze at you, his eyes narrowing as he attempted to process what you were trying to convey. 

“Like what?” he wondered. 

You thought for a moment, folding your arms over your chest and leaning back into your chair. 

“... Cathedrals,” was the first thing that came to mind. “When you stand in the center of a cathedral that’s been standing for hundreds of years, and you think about how incredible it is that something so lasting and beautiful could have been created by people who had so little in resources compared to what we have today. 

“Or music. Like, how does something as simple as sound cause us to feel so much emotion? A good song can make you feel joy or bring you to tears and can connect strangers to each other in such an intimate way. I think it’s the most magical thing we have.”

George smirked at you. You noticed a new brightness in his eyes when your gaze met his, and you watched, bemused, as he slid off the counter and onto his feet, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“What else?” he asked. 

“Medicine,” you replied. “We can cure things most people died of fifty or sixty years ago. We can replace our organs if they’re not working properly - there are even labs that are working to grow organs outside of the human body or replace those that don’t work with artificial ones. We can even change the way we look if we want.

“And,” you stood up, pulling a pen out of the vase you used to hold quills beside the register, “there’s technology. Muggles have incredible technology! I mean, look at this - millions of people in this world who possess the ability to perform magic and yet you’re all still using quills you have to re-dip in ink.” 

George chuckled at you, leaning in as he took the utensil from your hand, his fingers brushing against yours and leaving a delicate tingle in their wake. You couldn’t help but blush, glancing down at your feet before looking back up at him. 

“I appreciate your sentiment, love,” he teased, “but I don’t think a pound store pen is going to inspire awe in anyone - magical or otherwise.” 

You scoffed, rolling your eyes.

“You know what I mean,” you said, taking the pen back from him and returning it to its place. “Muggles are incredible, and we’re incredible without magic making everything so easy for us.” 

George, who still loomed close above you, placed a hand against his chest in feigned shock, his jaw dropping and eyes growing dramatically wide. 

“Easy?” he taunted, his expression brightening ever so slightly as you grinned amusedly up at him. “You think magic makes everything easy? I’ll have you know, I nearly blew us to smithereens today trying to perfect our latest Whizbangs design. Bringing joy to people’s lives is extremely difficult and dangerous work, which you should respect me for, little darling.” 

You smirked at him, letting out a soft chuckle as you crossed your arms and leaned back against the counter.

“Your stupidity with pyrotechnics is no one’s fault but your own, Georgie,” you joked, to which he gave you a tickling pinch in your side and scooped you over his shoulder as you bent down to fend him off. You squealed with laughter as he spun you around, setting you down atop the stairs when he felt you’d had enough. He sat on the step below you, giving your knee an affectionate pat. 

“... You know, I do think there’s a type of magic we wizards share with muggles,” George said after a period of comfortable silence. “That is, if you muggles feel human emotion like the rest of us.” 

You playfully shoved his shoulder, and he grinned mirthfully as he slouched comfortably into the side of your body. 

“And what is that?” you inquired. 

“Joy,” George answered matter of factly. He leaned closer into you, looking out over the empty, dusk-lit shop as he allowed his thoughts to guide his voice. “I don’t think… I’ve ever felt joy like I used to since Fred died. Not until you showed up, anyway. Having a laugh with you almost feels the same as it did with Freddie. I’ve missed that feeling… and no magic could ever replace it.” 

You hummed thoughtfully, wrapping an arm around his broad shoulders as a gesture of comfort. 

It was odd, you thought to yourself, working with George. He was your boss, but you had a hard time seeing him that way; Ever since he helped you move in upstairs, you’d seen him as a friend, and you knew simply by the way he looked at you that he saw you the same. You could hardly call what you had with him a business relationship - it hadn’t started that way, even from the moment you met him, and the more time you spent in his company, the more its trajectory changed into something much deeper and more significant. 

It suddenly dawned on you that you loved him - in a way no one should ever love their much older employer and landlord. 

As if sensing the way your heart dropped, fluttering wildly, into the pit of your stomach, George pulled away from you, taking your hand gently in his and stroking your knuckles with his thumb. 

“You went silent,” he noticed. “You never go silent.” 

You grinned a little, shame creeping into your features as a hot, blistering blush. 

“I was just thinking,” you told him. “... Do you think love is another type of magic?” 

George blinked, pondering the idea. 

“Of course,” he finally answered. “Love is what won the war.” 

You nodded, looking down at his fingers wrapped around your palm and twining them with yours. 

“Your love for Fred is what keeps him alive,” you said. “I never met him but I always feel him here because of you. He’d be proud.” 

George swallowed heavily; you could hear the tension in his throat, could feel the weight of hesitation pressing in the small space between you. You peered back up at him, meeting his brown eyes that watched you intently. 

“Your passion is what gives you magic,” he murmured. “You don’t need a wand or any kind of innate ability to do it for you. I’ve realized… that’s the reason I love you. Among all else.” 

Though you sensed the words were coming, they still hit you like a speeding lorry. 

You stared at him, shaken, the last breath you took trapped in your chest. You had no idea how to respond. Should you tell him that you loved him, too? Should you be rational and tell him that this was inappropriate for a business owner and his subordinate? Should you kiss him? Every part of you wanted to kiss him; had been wanting to for a very, very long time. 

You raised the hand that wasn’t twined with his up to his cheek, grazing your thumb over the warm, tender flesh there. Your fingers grazed the scar where his ear used to be, getting twisted in the tendrils of his amber red hair that framed the sides of his handsome, familiar face. You leaned forward and kissed him, the sensation of his lips at last touching yours causing an explosion throughout every nerve of your body. Despite the beauty of the moment, you couldn’t help but wonder to yourself, My god, if kissing him feels like this, I can’t wait to feel what sex with him is like. 

George pulled away after what felt like equally too long and not long enough, giving you a dopey, lidded-eyed smile that made your heart combust all over again. You hated the feeling, but never wanted it to stop. 

“Would you kiss me like that every day if I asked you?” George wondered, sounding so dreamy and unlike himself it took you somewhat aback. 

You nodded, squeezing the hand that was still wrapped so intimately around his. 

“Every day,” you assured him. “It’s the best kind of magic you could ever show me.” 

George grinned, playfully tapping his finger against the tip of your nose which - in a testament to how far your relationship had already crossed the line - he knew you would hate, chuckling as he watched you flinch away from him. 

“Just wait ‘til I perfect those Whizbangs,” he told you. “Then we’ll talk.” 

[lwjstiletto]

wangxian au where lwj is a popular hand model and wwx is an independent jewellery maker [Part 2]

[Part 1]

their monthly sibling catch-up jenga ruins wwx’s plans to mope for the foreseeable future.

jc is concentrating very hard on wiggling a piece out and wwx would usually make fun of him but he can only conjure enough energy to pull out the easy looking pieces today so he has no high ground.

“name 3 good things that happened to you.” jc frowns as he reads the wooden cuboid, “like ever? or in the last month?”

jyl doesn’t quite give him a look, but a slight downturn of her lip still gets the point across.

jc sighs, “an old student of mine opened a gallery, xichen and i went for brunch and wei wuxian hasn’t bothered me in a while. what’s up with that by the way?”

“my turn.” wwx says unenthusiastically and pulls a loose jenga piece. ‘how is your love life?’ it reads. can jenga be rigged? it has to be rigged.

“you know we’re allowed to ask questions outside the jenga right?” jc snaps.

wwx knows. wwx also knows that the jenga questions were only introduced by jyl to stimulate conversation between an angry jc and a stubborn wwx when he’d come back two years ago from his apprenticeship abroad.

but wwx also doesn’t want to talk about his humiliating interaction with the man who his brother had called ‘wangji’. he even has a nice name. why is wwx’s life so hard?

“a-xian,” jyl starts, “are you alright?”

wwx looks at her with a pout, “how can i be when we’ve not seen each other for weeks? i missed you.”

jyl smiles indulgently, “i missed you too. next time you should come with me, lotus pier seems empty without you two.”

jc looks like he wants to prod wwx more but then he looks over at wwx’s jenga piece and starts to laugh. wwx hates it here.

—•—

lwj wears gloves when he’s not working to shield his hands from things like tanning, small scratches, drying out etc. any normal person would overlook these as minuscule imperfections but it could put him out of his job for weeks

he has custom made moisturising cotton gloves that he wears during the night; and thicker cotton or leather gloves for the day, depending on the weather

at first, he had found this incredibly bothersome. a month or so into it he stopped noticing them and suffered through various incidents where he tried to eat with gloves on or, on a particularly horrifying occasion, wash his hands with them.

but now, he has begun to indulge. he buys gloves in materials which are impractical, which he can only wear when he has nowhere to go and nothing to do.

there are the pastel lace gloves that draw patterns from his fingers up to his elbows, the white satin ones with frills, and finally the fingerless black gloves made of supple, soft leather.

(for ref)

they make him feel a certain type of way that he is too embarrassed to put in words, so he doesn’t.

he puts them away in a drawer on the furthest corner in his wardrobe that he only opens when he needs a confidence boost or after a particularly tiring shoot

today happens to be the latter, except it has been multiple tiring shoots and while his muscles aren’t aching anymore, he still feels like he deserves something nice.

he retrieves a new pair of leather gloves that have an adjustable belt at the wrist. he tightens the strap to the point that he can’t move his hand too much without it hurting. he hums, a pleased sound escaping his lips, and finally lets himself go

—•—

wwx has spent the last hour answering nhs’ questions about his business, future plans and why he wants to work with lan wangji (who is apparently a hand model? and a super successful one at that???)

wwx answers to the best of his abilities as his head spins from the turn of events and the recent information that has come to light. it’s- a lot.

finally nhs nods and picks up his phone to call someone.

“not presentable... what does that- it doesn’t matter, i’m not calling you here for a shoot. just come here and i will explain.” with that nhs hangs up the phone as if someone would have jumped through it otherwise

wwx, who has finally managed to absorb everything, asks, “was that lan wangji?”

nhs just smiles cryptically. wwx’s question is answered soon enough though, as lwj walks into the office twenty minutes later. he blinks at wwx but does not show any other outword reaction as he takes a seat

nhs begins to speak, “i have spoken to wei-xiong and come to the conclusion that he is not stalking you.”

lwj looks at wwx and then back at nhs, not quite an eyebrow-raise but as close to it as it gets.

“wei-xiong wants you to model for him. i will let you two speak for a while. there is no pressure, just a light discussion.” nhs says and then skips out before any of them can stop him

the air in the room gets significantly more tense. lwj’s expression is blank and when wwx can’t look at it anymore, he decides to look at his crossed arms instead

“holy shit dude, are you ok?” wwx shouts, alarmed at the bruised red marks lining lwj’s wrist where it pokes out of his long sleeved sweater

lwj looks down at it, seemingly horrified, and pulls his sleeves down before wwx can get a better look.

“are you... hurt?” wwx asks gently.

lwj shakes his head. “i’m fine.”

he sounds like he’s telling the truth. this immediately short circuits wwx’s brain because.. why else are there bruises on his wrists... what else could possibly... oh my god he likes to be tied up, wwx’s brain supplies

thankfully he manages to keep the thought to himself this time. lwj still looks at him like he heard it all the same.

“you are not stalking me.” lwj states.

“not really? i mean not for the reasons you think.” wwx cringes at himself. but lwj hasn’t walked away yet which means he must be willing to hear him out this time.

“to be honest i’ve been in a bit of a slump these past few months. i saw you at the university and wanted to work with you, i had no idea you were a hand model. i didn’t even know that was a thing.” wwx says.

lwj scrutinises him for a few seconds then nods. “thank you for explaining.”

lwj clearly sees this as the end of the conversation but wwx doesn’t want him to leave again so he starts to talk about the hand chains he has been working on the past few weeks, pulling out his phone to show lwj pictures of a few.

wwx is with his jewellery how new parents are with their babies. he has been gushing about the complicated silver work that he plans to refine over the next few days when he looks up to see lwj’s face inches from his.

lwj is looking at his phone, seemingly absorbing his words, because when wwx pauses lwj looks at him as if to ask him to continue. wwx gulps. being on the receiving end of such undivided attention, no less from such a beautiful man, is almost intimidating.

then lwj blinks again and the spell is broken.

wwx straightens up, “ah sorry for rambling.”

“if we were to work together,” lwj starts, “what would it entail?”

the implication that lwj is seriously considering working with him, a small business beneath his usual collaborations, is both flattering and slightly unreal.

“i would need you to come in to take measurements, maybe a couple of photographs so i can have refrence to your skin tone and bone structure when designing.” wwx says, voice professional.

“my... are you making these specifically for me?” lwj tilts his head, a gesture so adorably confused that wwx wants to coo.

wwx rubs his nose, “more like i’m using you as a reference? having a clear picture in my head helps kickstart my creations. once i have cohesion within my designs it’s easy to expand my range from there if that makes sense.”

lwj nods, looking contemplative. “won’t you need me to try them?”

wwx nods, seeing them on someone is usually important. after all, jewellery is made to be worn. “you’ll need to come to my workshop for that though, so i can make minor adjustments on the spot. my thoughts tend to run away from me sometimes and i forget half my observations as i work. it won’t be often though, i’ll only call you in when necessary. and if you’re too busy then we can always reschedule.” wwx says.

“you are too accommodating.” lwj says, “in this industry, you shouldn’t be.”

wwx feels a little stricken by the statement. he laughs nervously, “it’s not like i can have you sit there for hours while i work.”

“if it makes it easier for you, then you should. i’m used to holding still.” lwj says, serious.

“is that an offer?” wwx raises an eyebrow. because this whole discussion certainly sounds like they’re making a deal.

lwj turns his head to the side and the loose strands of his hair swish with the movement. it’s such a graceful motion that wwx thinks he has surely practiced this before.

when he turns back, wwx notices he’s holding a business card out towards wwx. “you can contact my agent about my scheduling. my number is only for emergency appointments in case you need them.”

wwx is speechless. he cannot believe he actually pulled this off what the fu—

he’s still feeling thunderstruck when he gets home. with numb fingers, he has managed to program lwj’s number into his phone because he knows he’ll lose the card sometime soon. his contact name is just ‘💅🏻’

it’s both because wwx thinks lan wangji is too formal, and because he has an undeniable urge to see his nails painted.

it’s just so he can know what colours and gemstones would suit him of course. the thought that probably everything would suit lwj is firmly shut down and pushed at the back of wwx’s head.

—•—

lwj gets a call at 6am the next morning. he doesn’t know why but he immediately thinks of wwx. it turns out to be nmj

“wangji, have you been well?” nmj asks.

“yes.” lwj says, unsure of why nmj is calling him so early in the morning. isn’t he supposed to be at the gym at this hour?

“that is good to hear. are you busy?”

“no. i have five hours until my shoot.” lwj says, still confused. a feeling of dread settles in his stomach.

“let’s go for coffee then. i want to treat you.” nmj says.

lwj is silent for a few seconds then, “why?”

“i need to discuss an urgent matter with you.” nmj says.

if lwj wasn’t alarmed before, he definitely is now. he agrees to meet nmj in a cafe he visits regularly.

when he gets there, nmj is waiting for him at the door, attracting every passerby’s attention with his muscles bulging out of his grey t-shirt.

when lwj comes to a stop before him, nmj gives him a small smile and opens the door for him, gesturing him to go in.

people look as they walk over to a table in the back and keep looking as they take a seat. lwj makes nmj sit with his back to the cafe so he hides lwj completely from their eyes.

“wangji,” nmj starts seriously, then pauses, pushing a glass of water towards him.

lwj doesn’t touch it.

nmj sighs, “i was at huaisang’s office the other day and bumped into a man. he came there looking for you so i asked who he was. luckily huaisang had told me about him before, su she?”

lwj takes the glass of water and chugs it. nmj looks at him with concern.

“i turned him away but i’m worried about you wangji.” nmj says, pushing his own glass of water towards lwj.

lwj doesn’t frown but it’s a close call. “i do not know what he wants.”

nmj’s face hardens. “clearly nothing good. huaisang stopped me from punching him but if you ever need me to, feel free to call me.”

lwj shakes his head, “it’ll be okay. possibly.”

this makes nmj frown even more. “i’m serious, call me if he dares follow you. we cannot press charges until he portrays to be an actual threat but i will protect you.”

“i do not need protection.” lwj’s grip tightens on his glass.

“i know that.” nmj says, “but i will offer my protection either way. it’s good to know someone has your back.”

lwj wants to fight him on this, they barely know each other outside work and lwj does /not/ need someone to do his dirty work. he doesn’t though, because he is tired of carrying the fear of being recognised/followed all by himself. it’s not like he can burden nhs or lxc.

and nmj is neither judging, nor underestimating him. he is just offering to have his back should he ever need it, and it’s not... a bad thing. it’s almost like having a friend in the industry, and maybe he needs some of those.

so he nods. even nmj seems surprised by this but gives him a smile and orders him a coffee, true to his word.

nhs emails lwj a document containing his schedule for the next month and wwx is nestled comfortably in the only free hours he gets on fridays. he’s not as upset about it as he thought he would be

at 4pm friday, lwj drives to wwx’s ‘workshop’ which is simply an extension of his untidy living space. lwj doesn’t know how someone so meticulous with their handiwork could be so in a borderline hazardous workspace.

wwx conjures up a beanbag and gestures for lwj to sit down. lwj looks at the purple monstrosity and then at wwx, dubious.

“aiyah i’m just trying to make your comfortable!” wwx says, “graphing out your measurements will take a while.”

lwj doesn’t remember the last time someone cared for his comfort when he was at work. he has to stand for hours when only his upper body is in frame, and bend his fingers in unnatural ways as per the director’s requirements. discomfort is his status quo

he has never complained. it’s part of his job to hold still and not draw anyone’s focus to the less important parts of him, i.e. his face, by voicing his discomfort. it hardly bothers him anymore.

“are you sure you wouldn’t rather have me sit upright?” lwj asks, because while wwx seems like a considerate person lwj does not want to compromise the quality of his work.

“it’s gonna take an hour,” wwx says scandalised, “i’m not cruel. besides, i already received the photographs i needed for reference so you can just chill out till i do my work.”

lwj doesn’t mention how an hour is nothing compared to the time he had stood with his hands outstretched for seven hours. with an internal sigh, he gingerly sinks down on the beanbag. he hates to admit it, but it is actually comfortable.

wwx smirks at him like he knows, then gathers his measuring tools and approaches lwj. lwj removes his cotton gloves and places them on his knees.

once wwx is close enough, he takes lwj’s proffered wrist and winds a measuring tape around it. lwj doesn’t want to stare straight at wwx’s.. ehm yeah so he looks up.

this is just as bad of an idea, because where lwj has noticed wwx is attractive, seeing him from this angle is just... too much. he can’t close his eyes either, because that will make it look like he’s— enjoying this or something.

he decides to look to the side instead, spotting a framed picture of wwx and a toddler.

“is he your son?” he asks, because he feels the need to fill the silence for the first time in his life.

wwx looks at the picture, then laughs, “no, that’s my nephew, jin ling. he’s three and already spoiled rotten by my family.”

“do you have a big family?” lwj asks. asking personal questions is both unlike him and probably very unprofessional.

wwx, however, smiles indulgently. “it’s just my shijie, her husband jin zixuan, jin ling and my brother jiang cheng. well those are the nearest and dearest ones.”

“jiang cheng?” lwj asks.

wwx frowns, “yeah. do you know him?”

“he and my brother are close friends.” lwj says.

“wait, xichen is your brother?” wwx asks, then cringes at his informality, “i guess that’s lan xichen huh? i never knew his family name.”

“and what about wen qing? how do you know her?” wwx asks as he starts to try different sizes of measurement rings to see what fits lwj’s fingers.

it takes lwj a few seconds to answer. “wen qing drew studies of human anatomy for her final project.”

“let me guess,” wwx grins, placing a ring on his middle finger, “were you the hand section of her anatomy?”

lwj feels his ears burn for some reason. “yes. it’s how i got discovered.”

“discovered? like you got scouted for hand modelling based on a painting?” wwx pauses in his movements.

“nie huaisang was present at the final display at the university’s gallery, he’s fond of art.” lwj says.

wwx looks impressed, “just like that?”

“it is common for hand models.” lwj says.

“okay, so in your professional opinion, could i sell-“ wwx pauses, “could i be a hand model?”

he wiggles his fingers in front of lwj’s face.

“no.” lwj says.

“oh wow, blunt but effective.” wwx pouts

“you have callouses.” lwj explains, taking a closer look at wwx’s hands, “and dents from using your tools. things like cuticles, tanning and nails are fixable, but the others will remain permanent if you plan on still making jewellery and doing other strenuous work.”

when he looks up, wwx’s face is unreadable. thinking that he has offended the man, he draws back. “i apologise.”

that seems to snap wwx out of it, “don’t! you don’t need to apologise. it’s just– i don’t think anyone has ever answered a silly question of mine so sincerely. i’m still absorbing it.”

“i’m just being honest,” lwj says, “you have a good bone structure. you could have considered this line of work were it not for your existing business.”

wwx drops lwj’s hand and places both of his own on his cheeks, “i’m pretty sure that you’re messing with me but i can’t prove it so i’m gonna let it go.”

lwj suppresses a smile. maybe he doesn’t need the free hours on fridays.

[Part 3]

[tell-me-when-ur-ready]

This Thing Called Love (part seven)

Summary: When Shawn meets dancer Kellie in Toronto, he falls for her—hard. But Kellie has an invisible disability and thinks it’s impossible that someone could really love her the way she is.

Author’s note: PHEW things are getting good. The usual disclaimer: I have multiple chronic illnesses that are similar to Kellie’s, but not the exact same health conditions she has, so I apologize if I get anything wrong.

Warnings: language? just once lol

Word count: 2k

Kellie and Shawn didn’t talk to each other for two full weeks. It wasn’t for lack of trying on his part; Shawn continued texting her and calling her and trying to connect with her, but Kellie thought it was better to just make a clean break. It would be better in the long run for both of them.

Shawn had gotten Mackenzie’s number at some point during the summer (something Mackenzie had been way too excited about at the time), and he was using it now. Each evening, Mackenzie would show Kellie the latest texts.

Can you tell Kellie to call me?

Has Kellie said anything to you?

Ask Kellie what I did wrong.

“That boy’s in loooooove,” Mackenzie said, delighted, at first. But she got a little more exasperated as the days dragged by and the summer started to wane. “Kellie, this is just cruel,” she finally said. “Why won’t you date him? Because you think he’ll be scared away if he sees your health issues up close?”

Kellie shrugged uncomfortably and looked away.

“You could at least tell him that instead of just leaving him hanging. See what he says,” Mackenzie said, pursing her lips disapprovingly. But Kellie just shrugged again.

Shawn wasn’t the only one who was suffering. Stress affected chronic migraines, making them worse, and Kellie got so sick during those two weeks she almost forgot about Shawn altogether. The second week, she was only able to go to work one day; the other four days, she was at home in the darkness, lying in bed and periodically running to the bathroom to throw up.

 She’d gotten used to texting Shawn when she felt bad. But that wasn’t an option anymore. At least, that’s what Kellie kept telling herself.

 “I can’t do this,” she sobbed on the phone to her mom one Friday night. “I’m going to lose my jobs.”

 “Slow down,” her mom said. Kellie’s family lived an hour away, more north of Atlanta, so Kellie’s mom could no longer help take care of her when she flared up. Mackenzie had brought home groceries that day and Shelby had gotten Kellie’s prescriptions for her, but they were out with friends now. And Kellie didn’t want to burden them any further, anyway. She’d been upfront with them about her health issues when they decided to all move in together, but they weren’t obligated to babysit her.

 “But I am,” Kellie said. She wiped at her eyes. “Going to lose my jobs, I mean. I can’t work, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything.”

 “Is this at all related to Shawn?” her mom asked. “You haven’t mentioned him lately.”

 Kellie sighed. She’d told her mom (who had never heard of Shawn) about the music video, of course, and had vaguely said that she was staying in touch with Shawn and liked him a lot. But that was all her mother knew.

 “I mean, we haven’t talked in a couple of weeks. But it’s not a big deal.” That second part was a lie. “I’m way more worried about how I can pay rent. I can only call out of work sick so many times.” That, unfortunately, was the truth.

 But somehow, she woke up the next morning feeling better. She was able to keep breakfast down; her migraine was almost completely gone. Kellie rested all day Saturday anyway, to get her energy back up, and went into the dance studio Sunday.

 When she got home, exhausted but feeling a little happier after a few hours of teaching a lyrical workshop, she started pulling ingredients for a smoothie out of the cabinets. Someone knocked on the door, and she wiped her hands and went to get it; Mackenzie and Shelby were both at work, and she didn’t think they were expecting anybody.

 The door swung open and Shawn was standing there.

 Kellie’s first thought was that she looked awful, sweaty and tired with her hair in a messy bun (not the cute kind, but the actually-messy kind). Her second thought, which she said out loud, was, “Mackenzie.”

 Shawn shoved his hands in his pockets and smirked a little. “I like Mackenzie,” he said conversationally.

 “Well, she’s not here,” Kellie snapped, moving to shut the door. She didn’t know if she would have actually closed it in his face, but before it was halfway shut, he had reached out to stop her.

 “Can I come in?” he said, his face serious now. Reluctantly, Kellie nodded.

 Thankfully, the apartment was relatively clean at the moment. Their squishy couch was covered in pink pillows and the kitchen island held a stack of books and a pair of pointe shoes; out the window, you could see the hanging plants Shelby had installed on the balcony, green leaves swinging in the breeze.

 “Cute,” Shawn said, looking around. He slung his backpack to the ground and turned and looked at her, leaning against the counter. “Hi,” he said, his eyes going soft.

 “I’m sorry,” Kellie blurted out. But before she could get anything else out, the door opened again and Mackenzie came flying in.

 “Shit, he’s already here? I thought I was going to get home first,” she exclaimed, breathless. “I was going to prepare you—” She looked at Kellie apologetically.

 “I should have known you would do something like this,” Kellie said with a heavy sigh, glaring at her. Secretly, something inside her had lit up at the sight of Shawn’s face—but she didn’t really want him here, because now she had to face the reality of all her complicated, messy emotions and the things those emotions had made her do.

 “Sorry,” Mackenzie said, not sounding sorry at all. She held up her hand for Shawn to give her a high five.

 “Nice to finally meet you,” he said, sounding amused.

 “Go fix all of your problems,” Mackenzie said. She waved her hands at them in a shoo-ing motion.

 Kellie frowned at her. “Life is not a rom-com. It’s not always that easy.”

 Mackenzie shrugged, patted Shawn on the back, and disappeared into her bedroom with one last bright smile over her shoulder.

 There was a moment of awkward silence. Then Shawn said, “Are you feeling okay today? Do you wanna—go somewhere and talk?”

 “Yeah,” Kellie said shyly, figuring there was no way around it now. “I guess so.”

 She slid her feet into flip-flops and they went down to the parking lot of her apartment complex. On the sidewalk, Shawn rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and said, “Uh, so I might not have totally thought this through. I caught an Uber from the airport and they didn’t stay. Do you… feel well enough to drive?”

 She did giggle then, a real one, and Shawn smiled, obviously encouraged.

 “I guess so,” she said, and she was fishing out her keys when Shawn stopped her with a hand on her arm.

 “Really?” he asked seriously. “Because I don’t want you to feel like you have to say that. And I have a little self-interest here, too, since I’ll be in the car…”

 It was so different from what others said. If Kellie was starting a migraine or getting over one, she didn’t feel as if she could drive safely because of the pain and disorientation the migraines caused. Her friends didn’t always understand that. With Shawn, though, it was like he truly understood what her disability and her life were like—or at least, he was really trying. For the first time, Kellie felt like this might actually work.

 “Yeah,” she said softly, and nodded.

 She drove them to a park ten minutes away, trying not to be embarrassed about her dirty old Toyota, most of the drive spent in silence except for a few questions from Shawn about places they were passing. When they got to the park, they sat down on a picnic bench overlooking the baseball fields where teams were beginning to warm up for a late afternoon game; Shawn sat on the opposite side of the bench from Kellie and twisted the rings on his fingers.

 “So,” he said after a moment. “I want you to talk to me. Really talk to me. Mackenzie told me—some—”

 “Probably too much,” Kellie said with a rueful smile. Her voice sounded hoarse and strange and she cleared her throat. Her stomach was feeling fluttery, but for once that had nothing to do with Celiac.

 “But I want to hear it from you,” he finished. He stopped fidgeting and set his hands flat on the table, looking straight at her. His gaze was a little frantic and a little wistful, but there was a certain steadiness to it, too. “Please.”

 Above them, the wind blew through the leaves; from down the hill came faint yelling and the clang of a baseball hitting a composite bat.

 “Okay,” Kellie said slowly. She licked her lips and looked down at the rough wooden table, then looked back up, latching onto the steadiness in his eyes. “I just—okay. It’s not that I don’t want to see you. I do want to; I want to so badly. But I feel like I can’t. Because…”

 And she went on, describing how she felt as if it was unfair to the other person to try to be in a relationship, because she was constantly canceling plans and resting in bed and too busy caring for herself to think about anybody else. She talked about how she was scared to be with somebody because she thought, even if they said they didn’t care, they would see the real her—Celiac and chronic migraines included—when they started dating, realize everything that entailed, and wouldn’t stay. She explained how her life was unpredictable and how sometimes her physical problems affected her mental health and how she was so used to being alone in her pain she just didn’t know what it would look like to have someone by her side.

 When she finished, Shawn was silent for a moment. Kellie swallowed and wished she’d brought along a bottle of water for her dry throat.

 “You know the thing you left out in all that?” Shawn said softly. Kellie shook her head.

 “I love you,” Shawn said frankly. Kellie stared at him, mute, feeling her eyebrows draw together in something like shock or maybe disbelief.

 “Or, I think I would,” he added, “if I had the chance. And I think love makes all that other stuff not matter. I think, I mean I know, you can’t help that you have health problems, and I think everyone is afraid for someone to see the real them. But I think the real you is what someone should want in a real relationship. And I think… I mean, I know… if you give me a chance, I won’t leave. I’ll stay.”

 Kellie felt tears prick at the back of her eyes and turned away slightly, bringing a hand to her face.

 “Are you upset?” Shawn asked, his voice full of concern. An entire baseball team was walking by them, metal cleats crunching on the sidewalk, but Shawn never took his eyes off of her.

 “No,” she choked out. “I’m happy. I—no one’s ever said anything like that to me before. But I’m still scared.”

 He reached out and gently pried her hand away from her face, taking it in his own.

 “Do you think I’m not scared?” he said, laughing a little, almost incredulous. “Kell, I’m scared too. I’m scared for you to discover the real me. I’m scared my anxiety will get bad again and I’ll shut everyone out. I’m scared of what it might be like to have a relationship that’s inevitably going to be very public. I’m scared because you’re really pretty and I don’t want to say something stupid and sound dumb.”

 Kellie laughed through the tears that were now dropping on her face. She brought her other hand up to wipe them away and cover her eyes, but he captured that one too, not letting her hide.

 “But I think,” he said, low, “we can’t let fear dictate our lives.”

 There was a long moment of silence while all the things they’d said hung in the air.

 “Okay,” Kellie whispered finally, and Shawn looked at her steadily.

 “Okay?” he repeated, and she nodded. He smiled. And then she asked, “Do you have a tissue?”

Taglist: @rosiemercy@ @learning-howto-be-myselfx3 @evibesss @tnhmblive (let me know if you want to be added/removed)

[mollymauk-teafleak]

Black Coffee (part five)

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4

If you like this, please consider leaving a comment on Ao3, reblogging this post or even donating to my ko-fi!

Huge huge thanks to my lovely beta readers, @minky-for-short and @spiky-lesbian

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Percy hadn’t known it was possible to feel this tired.

It wasn’t the relieved, letting go kind of tired he felt when he’d step into the building’s elevator at the end of a long day at the office and know another day was over. It wasn’t the proud, warm glow kind of tired when he stepped back from his workshop bench and saw his latest project, whatever had been driving him insane for the past few weeks, fully completed and polished until the gears shone. It certainly wasn’t the smug, sweet, achy tired when he’d lie back and hold Vax in his arms or be held by him, the elf’s strained, wanton cry of his name still echoing in his ears, their heaving chests pressed against one another, panting breaths the only sound in the room.

This was a different kind of tired. This tired made him feel like he’d been taken apart systematically, opened up like one of his own machines, everything picked and turned and examined. Everything he’d ever tried to hide had been dug out, the dark, grimy, neglected bits of him on display and undeniable.

But they’d come back feeling cleaner. It came back, but it somehow found a place inside him where it fit better. Where it was easier to bear.

He supposed that was the point of therapy. It was exhausting and damn near broke him sometimes but he could feel the benefits of it as soon as he stepped back out into the waiting room.

“Same time again next week, Mr de Rolo?” the receptionist asked politely as he approached the desk.

“Please,” he nodded and smiled back at him.

Once it was all signed off, Percy left the building, shouldering his jacket rather than bothering to put it on. It was getting colder by the day but he had a thick jumper on and he didn’t mind the bite in the air, he never had.

Vax clearly didn’t agree with him.

He was sitting on a bench on the other side of the street, shivering even in the massive, puffy coat he was wearing. The hat, gloves and scarf didn’t seem to be doing much either, to judge by his expression. Trinket, however, was doing his best, stretched across his feet to warm up his toes.

The dog saw Percy first, jumping up and straining at the lead to greet him, making the half elf jump with how fiercely he was suddenly having to cling to it to keep from being yanked into traffic. Percy crossed as quickly as he could and greeted him eagerly, bending down so he could put his forepaws on his shoulders, hugging and kissing him and laughing as a large, wet tongue returned the kindness.

“Hey!” Vax yelped, “It’s my job to lick his face, not yours. Get down, you big rug.”

“You know I don’t mind,” Percy protested weakly as Trinket obediently sat back.

“I mind. Cos now I want to kiss you but you’re all gross,” Vax huffed, his breath a puff of white in the air, settling for a kiss to the top of Percy’s head. His manner gentled a little, “How was it?”

“Just the same really,” Percy straightened up, “Exhausting but...helping. You know, you don’t have to wait outside, you can sit in the waiting room.”

Vax wrinkled his nose, “Doctors offices give me the heebie jeebies. Too much time spent in them myself.”

Percy gave a short, little laugh. Now it meant even more to him that Vax came and met him after every session, bringing Trinket whenever he could because he knew Percy loved him, just being there so Percy could have a set of arms to fall into if he needed it.

“Well then, you need a hot chocolate,” Percy took Trinket’s lead and Vax’s hand, “Come on, we’ll take this guy through the park and go get some.”

“Percival, take me now,” Vax said, with all apparent seriousness, making Percy snort.

“Gods, don’t call me that. Especially sexually.”

They walked for a while, trading comments when there was something to say, lapsing into a comfortable, companionable silence when there wasn’t. Percy found himself stealing glances over at Vax, fixing on his eyes, his mouth, his nose in turn like he wanted to commit every inch of his face to memory.

It was impossible to put a value on just how much Vax had helped Percy over the last month or so. He just knew it was a hell of a lot. Deciding to go to therapy, navigating the maze of doctors appointments and referrals that lead there, finding the energy to actually go on mornings when it had disappeared, all of that had happened with Vax holding his hand.

And now whenever Percy tried to imagine his life without Vax, he just drew a blank.

That didn’t feel like a relationship built solely on exchange, on one person needing an income and one person simply needing companionship. When had it stopped feeling like that?

“Oh hell yes!” Vax suddenly yelped, darting away with Trinket hot on his heels, his target the bundles of autumn leaves pushed to the sides of the path by the winds, carelessly discarded bronze and gold in heedless piles.

Percy could only watch in awe as he playfully kicked his way through the piles of fallen leaves like a child would, laughing loudly as they arced over his head and not caring who turned and saw, his dog running around him in circles and barking fit to bust, trying to snag them in his jaws.

Percy smiled softly, not even hesitating before he ran to join them, seizing fistfuls of muddy leaves and sending them careening overhead, whooping loudly. Vax laughed in delight, joining in until they were lost in their own snowglobe of leaves, just the two of them and their enraptured dog, lost in the reckless, heart bursting joy of making a mess just for the sake of it.

Once nature’s inherent neatness was utterly destroyed the two of them were left panting, Percy wincing as he extracted the leaves Vax had shoved down the front of his jumper, their bodies unable to decide if they were overheating with the exertion or freezing from the cold.

“That was fun,” Percy wheezed, finally leaf free and turning to look for Trinket and get him back on his lead.

And suddenly, just for a moment, he realised Vax had been staring at him. The eye contact was broken after a heartbeat, so quick it could never have been there at all but Percy was certain.

Because Vax had been looking at him the same way Percy had been looking at Vax just moments before. A little shocked, a little helpless, with the exact same question in his eyes.

When did this start feeling like something real?

Percy let the moment go willingly, though a hope had been sparked in his chest that wouldn’t be fading any time soon.

“Odd choice of tactic, to shove leaves down the shirt of the guy thats buying your drinks,” he hummed, brushing down his jumper.

“I’m banking on my offer of sex when we get back to your place to get me back in your good books,” Vax grinned shamelessly.

“Ah, you know me so well,” Percy grinned, kissing one cold blushed cheek.

The apartment was of course empty when they tumbled through the door, already practically climbing each other in their eagerness to get at one another.

Trinket pushed past them, heading straight for the sofa that was wide enough for even a gentleman of his stature to lounge with impunity, happy to have his post walk snooze and get his hairs all over some very expensive leather. He’d been in this position many times, he seemed to understand that his uncle and his uncle’s nice smelling friend didn’t want to be disturbed for the next hour or so.

Vax’s discarded layers formed a haphazard path from the door to the bedroom where, impatient, he’d just pressed Percy up against his desk in the corner. He was already on his knees, working open the button on his jeans and yanking the fabric, still chill with the outside air but warming quickly as Percy’s skin took fire, down to his thighs.

“Vax…” Percy murmured, words a little foggy and distant as his brain tried to speak through the all encompassing want.

“Hush,” Vax murmured, focused on the prominent bulge in Percy’s boxers, straining against the fabric. He kissed at it teasingly, just wanting to hear the ragged gasp and feel the pull of curling fingers in his hair, “Like I said, I’m getting back in your good books.”

And he did a pretty fantastic job of it. He lost himself in the act, in making someone else feel good, enjoying the pull of tense muscles under his skin, in the taste of Percy’s skin and sweat mixed with the lingering taste of the hot chocolate on his tongue, in having Percy slump helplessly against the desk under the careful attention of his lips, his tongue and the none too light scraping of his teeth.

Percy tried to warn him before he orgasmed, stammering helplessly but he couldn’t make the words work. Vax didn’t mind, he’d felt the closeness in how Percy gasped and bent over him, legs trembling. He’d been ready, gulping down the heat that flooded his mouth, a little running from the side of his mouth.

Once Percy was done screaming his name, a sound Vax would replay over and over again in his mind to great satisfaction, the hands turned from tense to gentle, stroking back his hair and pushing back his fringe, away from his sticky forehead. A thumb collected the spill down his chin and he accepted it past his lips, licking it clean with a grateful whimper.

“Vax, I…” Percy’s voice was raspy, chest going like a bellows.

Vax looked up, smiling innocently, “Yeah?”

Percy seemed to pause a moment, shaking himself and smiling a little more coherently, “You’re just wonderful. You know that?”

“I’ve heard people mention it,” Vax chuckled, accepting Percy’s hand to help him to his feet, “Was that worth two hot chocolates?”

“It was worth ten thousand,” Percy’s legs had enough strength in them to get him collapsed on the bed, no further.

“Don’t send that to my place, my sister will go nuts no matter how many times we walk her dog.”

Percy snorted, dragging Vax down with him until they were both sprawled together, half dressed, letting themselves feel their tiredness. Vax was soon dozing contentedly, letting his mind wander through delightfully filthy daydreams about what he was going to do with the various exciting purchases Percy had been buying lately.

Percy lay there fully awake, looking up at the ceiling, thinking about the things he could have said.

Vax had realised long ago the best place to do his stretches- the only place, really, once he’d realised there was next to no available space- was the living room. With Vex and Trinket out, he was free to get into his sweats, pile his hair loosely on top of his head and stretch to his heart’s content.

He sat with his legs perfectly split, humming contentedly as he folded himself across his knees one after the other. He enjoyed reminding himself what his body could do; he took comfort from knowing that even though he and it had definitely had some arguments, he could still exert control over it, that they could work harmoniously.

As often happened when his body was occupied with exercise, his mind went for a stroll. Quiet times scared Vax’ildan, as a rule, times where his brain had no distractions and he was at the mercy of his thoughts. But when he was working on his routines, dancing or stretching, moving smoothly in time with music, he wasn’t scared of his own mind. He got to taste something close to being relaxed.

What he thought about now was Percy.

As nice as their days always were together, something was starting to worry him. A few things actually. Such things rarely came neatly individually packaged and ready to deal with.

As much as he’d been trying to shove his ridiculous crush to the back of his mind where it could happily gather dust and eventually fall apart as all his unrequited feelings had done, he found it pushing back in ways he didn’t want it too. The absolute last thing he wanted to do to Percy was put pressure on him, ask him for more than he was willing to give. As much as he put on a brave face, he was dealing with so much right now, only just starting to heal old, festering wounds. The last thing he needed was to realise the comfortable, contented relationship he thought he had was now awkward and sticky and unmanageable.

Vax felt he knew what Percy needed of him. And a pointless, puppy dog infatuation was not on that list.

So Vax was just going to have swallow it and keep smiling.

His music, playing softly from his phone,  was interrupted suddenly by the chime of his text alert. Vax sighed irritatedly, drawing his legs back to a more natural position, losing his comfortable headspace but keeping his unpleasant thoughts. Exactly what he didn’t want.

But when he saw the name on his phone screen, an enormous smile spread across his face.

Shaun Gilmore.

It had been so long since Shaun was in town, he’d been all over the country, opening up new branches of the store he’d turned from a gamble into one of the most treasured, depended upon fonts of anything and everything in the whole city. The two of them had fooled around a fair bit, one of the many playful, easy hook ups he’d maintained after he’d first moved to the city and tasted freedom.

He’d always loved the simple, uncomplicated happiness Shaun brought him. He was the kind of man who, when he told you something was going to be okay, you fully believed it. He laughed loudly, dressed brightly and spoke effusively. He was sunshine personified.

In short, he was exactly what Vax needed to get his mind off his stupid feelings.

Guess who's back in the city for the weekend! It’s not for long, mind, but I’ll be damned if I don’t see my little bird while I’m home. Dinner and drinks, Saturday? My treat Xxx

Vax smiled and fired off a quick, whole hearted acceptance. It was only after he’d exchanged a few messages back and forth with Shaun, after he’d been teased with all his fun stories from his travels and showered with compliments in every other sentence, that he remembered. He was supposed to be getting dinner with Percy on the same night.

Vax chewed his lips forlornly for a while before shaking himself. He needed to do this. He needed to prove to his ridiculous, confused heart that Percy wasn’t an option, that Percy wasn’t anything real. He had a very real, very available Shaun Gilmore offering him pleasantly distracting sex with no awkwardness or hidden feelings.

Time to stop being an idiot. Or at least be less of one.

Vax flicked up his text history with Percy, making sure he did it before he could change his mind.

Hey, going to have to cancel Saturday. Old flame in town so I’m going on a date. We’ll reschedule, yeah?

He didn’t notice until nearly an hour later that he didn’t get a reply.

Percy lay on his side on the sofa, listening to the rain hit the windows. His phone lay where he’d thrown it, like it had suddenly grown hot enough to burn him.

He stared out onto the grey world, the sheets of water coming down as they had been doing for hours without any let up. All that could really be seen past the glass was a scattering of lights, miniscule windows and tiny cars coming and going. Everything going past him like he wasn’t even there.

He had no right to be upset. Percy knew that.

Which just made it all the worse that he was.

Angry tears burned behind his glasses and pooled in the bottom of his lenses, his stomach roiling with bitter anger at himself.

He’d had it planned out. Saturday morning, back to the Blooming Grove, back to where they’d first met, take his hands from across the mosaiced table and just...tell him. And whatever happened would happen. But the weight on his chest would be gone, he’d have an answer to the question he’d only realised recently had been growing inside him like a flower growing from a lost seed.

It had been Kiki who helped him work it out. Well, she’d flicked his nose as they watched the Great British Baking Show and told him of course he’d fallen for Vax’ildan, you could see it from space. But it had certainly helped. It had made him just brave enough to imagine the words coming out of his mouth, to get the gears turning and take the risk.

For all the good it had done him.

And least he hadn’t made a total arse of himself. At least he hadn’t had to see the expression on Vax’s face, the pity and discomfort and awkwardness. At least he was spared that.

At least he was allowed the dignity of crying on his own.

Of course Vax would never feel the same way as Percy did. He’d been a complete idiot to even hope. He’d been paying him for the facsimile of a relationship, for crying out loud, how had he thought anything real could come from that? What he’d felt whenever Vax would smile, would say his name in that soft way, would touch him and make him feel like he’d finally woken up...all of that was just him doing a good job.

That was all Percy had asked for. He was an idiot to expect more.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, “Shut up. Stop crying, stop being so pathetic.”

The tears didn’t want to stop but he forced them, scrubbing at his eyes until they ached. He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t. He refused to be angry at Vax either, the bitter tasting resentment burning at the back of his throat was only directed at himself. For thinking he deserved anything more than what he had.  

That’s what he told himself, over and over again as he blindly snagged his phone and finally typed out a response.

Don’t worry about it. I’ll message you.

The restaurant was lovely, one of those vibrant places bubbling with light, music and scents, somewhere Vax would never have imagined existed in his own city and instantly resolved to go to more often.

Not that he took much of it in, he spent too much time laughing and talking with Shaun, hearing his stories from Marquet and Tal Dorei and the Menagerie Coast, stories of colourful people and exciting conversations.

It made him smile, Vax had always known Shaun was meant for something more than most people. But right here, for now, he could pretend they were both still barely out of their teens and  living by the skin of their teeth in the most fun way that could be done, Shaun running his tiny little store and selling all kinds of fantastical products straight out of storybooks, doing things with magic that no one had ever seen before, both of them spending their days working and nights dancing, kissing just because they could.

They were currently both howling with laughter after Vax had tried some of Shaun’s meal on a dare, knowing fine well it would be far too spicy for him. Sure enough it left him panting and drinking nearly the full ewer of water on the table.

“Now don’t think giving yourself heartburn will change the subject,” Shaun chuckled, wiping a tear from the corner of his amber eye, “Tell me more about this Percival character.”

Vax would have blushed if he hadn’t been already scarlet in the face from an excess of chili powder, “Yeah...I get paid to wear lingerie and suck a handsome guy’s dick, can you believe it? My dream job.”

Shaun gave a good natured bark of laughter but he pressed gently, “And is he? Handsome, I mean.”

“Oh, he's a dreamboat,” Vax shrugged, “In a nerd kind of way, I mean.”

“And nice? He treats you well?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t hang around if he didn’t,” Vax hesitated, “I guess I just saw my dad and assumed having lots of money automatically made you a festering, pustulant bag of bollocks. But...I guess not.”

Shaun hummed, taking a long sip of wine, “And have you told him how you feel about him?”

“I...wait, what?” Vax’s suddenly jerking elbow nearly sent his own glass flying, “I...I never...all I said was that he wasn’t a dick!”

“Yes, that’s all you said then,” Shaun smiled fondly, knowingly, “But the other forty or so times you’ve mentioned him, despite insisting that there’s nothing special about him, you said a lot more.”

Vax spluttered, suddenly realising the night had gone crashing off in the opposite direction than the one he wanted, “Come on, Shaun…it’s just a stupid crush...”

“Listen,” Shaun put his much larger hand over Vax’s, patting comfortingly, “Stupid or not, it’s clearly affected you. You can’t fight these kind of feelings, believe me.”

“But…” Vax looked down, biting his lip. If he couldn’t trust one of his best friends, who was left? “There’s no way he’d ever feel the same way about me. He just sees me as a friend he pays for sex. What kind of start is that for a relationship, even if there was any way in hell he’d ever be interested in me?”

“Stranger things have happened, little bird,” Shaun frowned gently, “And I’d thank you to stop being so cruel about my best friend. You’re a catch, as I can personally attest to. You’re fun, you’re resilient, you’re gorgeous...and from what you’ve told me, it seems clear that Percy’s noticed all that too.”

“What do you mean?” Vax looked up, startled.

“Love, he brought you soup when you had a cold! Does it need to be on a ten foot tall marquee for you to realise he’s into you?” Shaun laughed at the expression on his face.

“Apparently so,” Vax pouted, “Seeing as this is news to me who spends nearly every day with the guy.”

“Precisely why,” Shaun gestured at him with his glass, close to spilling some on the tablecloth though he’d never do that, “It’s hard to see what’s right at the end of your nose. Especially seeing how you’re- no offence, my little bird- one for seeing the darker side of things.”

Vax slumped back in his chair. He so desperately wanted to believe what Shaun was saying but gods, there were some knots you couldn’t undo in a hurry…

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Shaun tilted his head, the light catching in the gold bands accenting his hair, “Listen, you’re one of the bravest people I know and it’s time to use a little of that. Tell him how you feel. I’m nearly positively sure he’ll feel the exact same way but even for the miniscule chance I’m wrong...Vax, keeping this in his so clearly killing you. Surely anything is better than this?”

Vax gave a long exhale, fighting the urge to just let his forehead hit the table, “Fuck you, Shaun. Fuck you for being so goddamn right. I just hope you’re right about all of it.”

Shaun shrugged, making his abundant jewellery ring out, “If you want an apology, you’re not getting one. And, hey, if I am wrong and your feelings aren’t reciprocated, I’ll always be here. We’ll run away to Marquet together.”

Vax’s face fell at that, realising the implication behind his words, “Oh. Sorry. This night probably isn’t going to end the way our dates usually do…”

Shaun waved him away, squeezing his hand, “Little bird, in another universe, you and I are very much in love and we never leave our bed. But right here, right now, all that truly matters to me is that you have the happiness you always deserved. If Percy can give that to you, he’s my new second favourite person in the world after your good self.”

Vax smiled through his blushing, squeezing Shaun’s fingers back. They were rough and scarred from his work, the only parts of him that weren’t perfectly polished, the only parts that showed how much he’d fought to live his life how he wanted. Vax had always loved his fingers.

“Hey, chin up. He might reject and totally humiliate me yet.”

Shaun laughed heartily, finishing his wine and signalling for more, “There’s always hope, isn’t there?”

Vax knew the concierge in Percy’s apartment building well enough to give her a wink and a wave by now. They made him seem a lot more confident than he actually was.

Once he was safely alone in the elevator, he let his nervousness show through, sinking shakily into one of the breathing exercises Vex shared with him sometimes when she knew he was in a rough patch.

He didn’t have to do it today. Not if the moment wasn’t right. But still, knowing it was coming, knowing his ridiculous pulled grenade of a brain could blurt it out at any moment was terrifying. But, as in most things aside from how much velvet should be included in a day to day outfit, Shaun was right. Anything was better than swallowing down his feelings and feeling them poison him.

Though it didn’t help his nerves that something seemed decidedly up with Percy. He hadn’t actually gotten in contact to rearrange their date; Vax had been the one who’d announced he was coming over after a few days of exchanging Trinket pictures for strings of rainbow emojis and not much else.

He knew Percy had a patent application coming up for his new engine design, something that made Vax’s brain hurt but he understood involved a lot of finalising and polishing and complicated forms. He just hoped he hadn’t lost himself in that, doing that thing where he got a handful of hours of sleep if he was lucky and had to set reminders on his phone to eat. Every time that had happened before, it had taken a lot to pull him out of that cycle.

The elevator pinged as it reached the top floor and Vax stepped into Percy’s apartment, ready to steal the keys to his workshop and throw them out of the window if he had to. Percy hadn’t been happy the last time he did that but it sure as hell worked.

His heart sank when he saw the living room empty but then his voice came from the bedroom, “Vax’ildan?”

“Percy!” relief brightened his voice and he left his jacket on the sofa and shoes in the hallway, following that voice eagerly, not realising it was a little heavier than usual, “What, have you just woke up or something? I expected to find you bent over your workbench like the Phantom of the Opera.”

The laugh that came in reply was a little limp but, when Vax actually entered the bedroom and saw Percy, everything about him looked a little limp. His hair was unbrushed, his glasses were smudged and not sitting right on his nose, he was in bed but he didn’t look like he’d gotten a wink of sleep any time recently.

“Is everything okay?” Vax asked, blinking, his smile flickering out, “Are you sick?”

“No, no, no,” Percy said quickly, jumping like he was only now aware of how he looked, smoothing his hair down and straightening his glasses as if it wasn’t too late, “No, I just… I’m fine.”

Vax frowned, “Have you been in your workshop today?”

“Uh, no,” Percy patted the blankets, trying to straighten them out and look like they hadn’t been tossed and turned in all day, “Not today.”

Vax finally tipped over the edge into worried. He clearly hadn’t been to the office. He hadn’t even been tinkering.

“Listen, if you don’t want to have sex right now, we can just hang out? Seems like you’re having a bit of a rough day…”

“No,” Percy shook his head, getting to his feet, staggering a little though he caught himself on the edge of his desk, “This is what you come here for, after all.”

Vax stopped in the step he’d been taking forward, ready to put his arm around Percy, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dark rimmed eyes fixed on him, looking like he’d said something he hadn’t meant to, “Nothing? I just...it’s been a while, right?”

Something didn’t taste right but Vax let it go, “As long as you’re sure…”

Percy answered by closing the distance between them, finishing the action Vax had left behind, pressing his lips to Vax’s. Vax was surprised, for a moment, but soon found himself melting into the strong hands that came up to hold him at the small of his back and between his shoulder blades.

“Freddy…” he gasped, pupils wide and black enough to nearly fill his elven eyes. He couldn’t remember being kissed like that before.

“Just...just let me, Vax,” Percy pressed him back gently but insistently, making sure he fell gently onto the bed, “Let me take care of it.”

Chest heaving, a fire burning low in his chest but ready to leap upwards at a moment’s notice, Vax could only nod eagerly.

Percy moved purposefully, making Vax hopeful that he’d been imagining anything had ever been wrong. He removed Vax’s clothes in a frantic rush, like he resented them for getting in the way of what he wanted, tossing them aside carelessly. And then his mouth was everywhere and it was burning hot. He kissed hard enough to mark, everywhere that was in his reach, only spurred on by how Vax cried out throatily every time. His hands weren’t shy either, their scar tissue knotted fingers tracing everything they could, opening his legs.

“I...I want your hands,” Vax panted, well aware he was in no position to make requests or demands and loving that fact, “In me. Please?”

The possessive darkness in Percy’s eyes faded a little, remembering that wasn’t a request Vax often made, “Are you sure?”

Vax nodded, blushing fiercely, “Please...sir.”

Percy’s breath stumbled a little and his eyes flickered back to pure want, pure need, “Then that’s what you get.”

He kissed him again, somehow managing to be even harder, more encompassing, his teeth closing around his bottom lip briefly. His hands kept going, sliding further into the valley of Vax’s thighs, feeling the skin get warmer and warmer until they found the epicentre. Vax moaned into Percy’s mouth as his fingers opened him up, parted him and cracked him open like he was ripe fruit in his hands. Within moments there was enough slick to run down Percy’s wrist, following the sharp lines of his tendons, pulling and snapping as he worked him over with a precision and deft he normally reserved for his projects. He searched deep and found the ridge of skin within Vax that made him buck and cry out, working it over with the pads of his fingers.

He was well rewarded with Vax’s ragged panting, his voice high and breaking as he stammered out pleas for more, his legs wrapping around his hips and gripping tight as a vice.

Before long he was fighting to marshal enough of his brain to make words, “Percy...fuck, I’m close…”

Percy could feel it, in the trembling of his legs and the slur in his voice. He pulled him in again for another searing kiss, feeling everything else close off as soon as their lips met, like they’d been dragged underwater. And in that hollow, echoing moment, Vax came, hard.

Vax came up for air, gasping and trembling and moaning, hair falling across his face and sticking to his forehead.

But Percy still felt disconnected, like he’d been left behind still floating, unable to care as his lungs burned for want of oxygen.

Unable to care as he ruined things yet again.

As felt only natural, moving where his heart called out for, Vax rolled and reached for Percy. He did love this part, going blissfully boneless and relaxed, listening to his lover’s heartbeat gradually slow and gentle into its usual rhythm. All he wanted right now was to hold and be held.

But Percy wasn’t there. He was back in the position he’d been before, hunched on his side and turned away, eyes cast out at the grey, drizzly day the city had been locked in since dawn. Though Vax couldn’t see his face, there was a tension in his shoulders, something cold and unyielding like in the instant he’d been turned away, his love had been replaced by a marble statue.

“Percy?” he frowned, his voice suddenly feeling like it was echoing in the slight space between them, “What’s wrong?”

“Hmm?” Percy turned a little, enough to see the sharp lines of his face traced out in the low light, “Nothing?”

“You seem...off. If something’s wrong, you can tell me,” Vax reached over, making to trace between his shoulder blades, something soft and soothing, something to bring those blue eyes back to his own.

But that was when Percy muttered, “I just don’t want to keep you here for long. I don’t want you to miss any more dates.”

Vax froze solid in less than a second.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Percy flinched, like he hadn’t meant for that come out of his mouth, let alone be heard. But he still didn’t turn, only curling in tighter on himself like he was trying to disappear entirely.

“I didn’t...I only mean you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be. I’m not trying to…to... “ Percy sounded lost, trying to staunch a gushing wound with a scrap of tissue.

Vax drew away, sitting up, eyes dark and angry, “Percy, I actually cancelled plans to be here with you today. You know that?”

“I never asked you to do that,” Percy shot back, anger flooding in to fill the emptiness guilt chewed out, “I said right at the start…”

“Then why are you pissed off now?” Vax scowled, his own anger rising quickly as it always did, burning hot and filling him right to the tips of his fingers. Everything he’d been holding inside him, all the anticipation and love and wanting, it was all fury with the snap of his fingers, “You have no right to be.”

“I’m not… I know…” Percy’s voice grew thicker, “Vax, look, I can’t do this right now.”

Vax sat stunned for a moment. No please, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“Fine. Whatever. I don’t care. Like you said, got what I came for, right?”

He dressed faster than he ever had, yanking on his clothes, eyes burning as he waited for Percy to take it all back, to say it was a mistake, to say they could start again. And when he was finally dressed, nothing left to do but actually leave and no words had come from him, his heart finally broke in his chest.

Only when the elevator doors slid shut did Vax feel safe enough to cry.

Only when he heard the mechanism of the elevator sink lower and lower down the spine of the building did Percy feel safe enough to cry.