#but we all know that would turn into a bottle . and then half a litre of vodka

[usedtobemygirl]

2 months 7 days of no alcohol and cocaine ….

[goomens]

I've had an idea but I won't get around to writing it think.. I imagine Crowley being drunk on wine, taking to Nina after *the event* and just word vomiting, telling her everything about who he is. And then Nina ist like "so when you said 'angel' you actually meant..." maybe you can do something with that? 😂

such a cute idea!!! fic under the cut <3

It’s nine in the morning and Nina is jolted from her sleepy reverie by the violent tinkle of the front door bell; a figure in black slithering into a nearby seat and thunking his head down onto the table. Crowley, she thinks, watching him carefully from behind the counter. Without Mr. Fell in tow, tense around the shoulders, and creating quite a sad display, she feels a pang of something like pity inside her chest.

“Gretel,” Nina calls quietly to one of her newer baristas after a moment of consideration, “Take over for a bit, please?” And she makes her way over to Crowley, not bothering to say hello as she pulls out the other chair and sits down in it. He doesn’t lift his head. By all means, he seems lifeless. Completely still. Eerie, like he isn’t breathing. Her heart stutters in fear for a second, thinking he’s just up and died in her coffee shop, but—

“Oh, calm down.” Crowley retracts his forehead from the cold plastic table with a grunt and glares at Nina—she thinks, at least—through the impenetrable black lenses of his sunglasses. “I would like a mug of coffee with four measures of vodka, please and thank you.”

“It’s not even half nine yet, you know,” She scolds him, not really meaning it, but not willing to serve him alcohol so early either. He’s a bit of an odd fella (or, whatever) but Nina draws the line at serving a customer four units before noon. “No boozy breakfasts here. You’ll have to wait ‘til later—on Saturdays we have a boozy brunch. There’ll be cocktails.”

Crowley doesn’t speak for a moment. Then, “Pity.” He sighs. Snaps his fingers for some reason. He reaches into his blazer, pulling out an entire litre bottle of ABSOLUT and uncapping it. Nina opens her mouth, ready to tell him off, but he holds a finger up and guzzles down half of it before she can get the words out. When he sets the bottle down, she raises a questioning eyebrow.

“Thirsty?”

He ignores her, choosing to scowl instead, and looks off out the window of the shop looking a bit lost. “Your advice was shit. You and that—that vinyl seller. Thought you should know. Don’t go trying to influence anyone else’s ‘love’ lives, eh?” His words are full of forced humour, but his voice shatters a bit at the end, and suddenly Nina feels like some kind of villain. She looks at Crowley and sees someone in mourning. He’s grieving. He’s heartbroken.

“Fuck,” She says with feeling, and motions for Gretel to bring over two mugs.

Hours later—in the midst of Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death’s boozy brunch—Crowley is drunkenly taking Nina step-by-step through his and Aziraphale’s extremely long history. They go back much, much further than she ever thought. Than she ever thought possible, actually. It’s all quite strange. And sweet, and sad, the way he talks about Aziraphale. “He’s so smart,” He says. “He’s good. He’s lovely. He’s the one I love. He’s only gone and returned to Heaven and left me on my own.” He also says, “I’m a Demon, I know I don’t deserve him,” and “He’s an Angel, he doesn’t want me. He could never want me.” And Nina is suddenly putting the pieces together, making sense of it all, her stomach—full of the buttered bagel she’d had for breakfast, half a bottle of vodka, and not much else—turns and swoops, threatening to expel its contents.

Crowley watches her then bursts into a startling laugh. It’s low and surprised. “There’s no way—no way—you’re just now realising what I am. What he is.” She just blinks and stares, and his laugh dies down but the lines of amusement remain etched on his face. “Oh, brilliant. You humans are brilliant. So bloody obtuse.”

“Oi!” She protests, reaching out to push at his shoulder. But she misses on account of being a bit more tipsy than she thought, and he laughs at her again. “I am not obtuse! ‘M quite clever, actually.”

There’s a smile on his—the Demon’s—face now, which is nice, much better than the frown he sported earlier, but when he gestures to his face and grins fiendeshly, she only stares confused for a second before realising that, ah, maybe she is a bit obtuse. His eyes are bright and a little bit playful, without the sunglasses. Big and yellow and snake-like, and oh, that’s what the Eden story had been about. It hadn’t been a metaphor or a weird figure of speech, but the truth. She’d been so busy listening to him she hadn’t noticed the moment he’d pocketed his sunglasses.

Instead of crippling fear or mortal terror, Nina just laughs and laughs. She orders them both a creamy coffee and some malt biscuits, even at his weak protests, and she lets him tell her all about the planets and the stars, Mesopotamia, the crucifixion, the Seven hills of ancient Rome, the burning of witches in the fifteenth century, the Armageddon-That-Wasn’t…

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Chieftain tanks are my happy place

I grew up in Germany in the 1980s, a time of the cold war, Chernobyl and the Chieftain tank. Sadly, only one of these things has turned into something fun to play with at the weekend.

I have loved the Chieftain tank since childhood and had more than one chance to crawl across one, while still an overly excited pre-teen, visiting the Tank Museum in Bovington. Obviously, as soon as I hit my teenage years, I immediately stopped loving something as loud, obnoxious and heavy as a tank and instead got into music, namely Heavy Metal music.

Along with my love of Heavy Metal music, came my delight in the peace movement and even now aged horribly close to fifty, I am still involved in the peace movement, albeit, while wishing that I had the disposable income and large area of unused farmland upon which I could dabble in my interest in Chieftain tanks.

As we all know, the venerable old Chieftain had something of an Achilles heel out back, in the form the Leyland L60 engine. However, when it did work, the nineteen litre, opposing piston, two stroke multi-fuel engine had a glorious howl to it, despite being chronically underpowered for the vehicle it was propelling. Luckily the pack was easy to pull out and replace while in the field... Every cloud etc.

You can now buy your own Chieftain tank, providing that you have £60K to play with. However you also need a thousand pounds to fill the tank, every time you want to go for a drive of more than half a mile. If you want to know more about this kind of thing, why not go and have a look at the Mr Hewes YouTube channel. If you love tanks, you will not be disappointed.

Now of late, I have of course got into my art in a big way and when I say a big way, I now have a room in the house entirely dedicated to my making art. I have some of my art displayed in our home and the wife even likes some of it! However, I have wanted to make a Chieftain Tank Diorama for a while now and always put it off because of the cost of a decent sized set. Now obviously, the kindly folk at Google would never listen in to my conversations through their monitoring devices in my phones and computers, so it was by pure chance that they displayed to me one day, a whole host of cheap model tanks... It would have been rude to ignore it, so I snapped up a Tamiya 1/35 scale model set for a penny short of £17. The bastard Post Office added their own stab in the back for delivery and four days later, it arrived in my disgustingly sweaty paws. Thus, the plan came together and I got my magic bucket out of the shed. I cut the wood for a base and dropped it in the bucket. I also slapped in some ripped up newspaper and a bottle of glue, then tickled the lot with a paintbrush and then dropped in the bits of tank. I put the lid on the bucket, gave it a hearty shake as I said the magic words (do you really think that I am going to tell you my magic words?) and what do you know? A load of spilled paint, sticky glue, broken plastic and ripped up newspaper fell out of the bucket!

So with a new model set delivered to my desk and the magic bucket on toilet cleaning duty, I set about doing it properly. The base was a piece of off cut chipboard donated by a friend. The newspaper came from my Mother in law, while Wifypoozles supplied the PVA glue. Knowing the dimensions of the tank, I was able to map out the diorama and then start designing the landscape. I knew that I wanted a rocky bank and a drainage ditch either side of the vehicle, with a fence and some grass. Using a cardboard tube and flower arranging foam, I quickly modelled the bank and then using a drill and a Dremel I cut the ditch into the base board.

The base board was then coated with newspaper and a mix of paint and PVA, sealing the tube and foam into place. I also placed a couple of pretty stones and a larger rock into place to give me a rocky bank with an exposed rock face.

With the base dry, it was time to add the soil and substrate, for which I used a mix of builders sand, gravel and pebbles, mixed with PVA. It took a couple of days to dry, but when it did, it was as hard as rock. Using my airbrush, I gave it a quick coat of burnt umber paint, which just deepened the already very brown of the sand and gravel. I used some lichen that had fallen from one of our trees to simulate bushes and shrubs and used some sheet grass from a model railway to make the grassy tufts I wanted at the edge of my gravel road.

I used cocktail sticks and super glue to knock up a fence and then found the measurements for a stile and added one of them too. A quick on line check sourced an army range sign warning about the dangers of picking up used ordnance.

With the base done, I turned to the model tank and began the construction with painting and building of twelve road wheels, two front guide wheels, two rear sprockets and six return rollers. Five hours later, each wheel was assembled, painted and ready for fitting to the bogies. By the end of day one on the tank build, I had assembled the lower hull, with tracks.

Day two saw me make a start on the upper section of the tank, also known as the Glacis Plate and engine deck. This took barely more than an hour and the boxes looked great assembled and fitted. Moving onto the turret was where things got complicated as several tiny parts needed to be located and fitted. The crew doors had to be functional, so that if I decided to use them, I could add the figures for a heads out driving of the vehicle. I also had to fit the barrel lock, which again had to be functional to allow the main gun to be locked into the rearward position. With all of these parts functional, it was fun to add the first coats of paint, a dark green acrylic ink designed for use with an air brush. With the dark green base coat of the plastic, it needed only thin coverage to give the wanted effect, however as the paint dried, it took on the usual glossy finish, totally unsuitable for NATO camouflage. Luckily, when I bought the model set, I also purchased a bottle of clear mat varnish.

Some parts of the set were extremely well made and thus it went together beautifully, not needing anything more than a light sanding to remove moulding marks. Sat on the shelf behind me in my room was two jars of experimental spru-goo and not once did I need it. However some parts were quite poorly made. Actually, that is unfair. The plastic tow cables were brittle and did not lay like real steel cable, so I raided the mountain bike spares and pulled out a stainless steel brake cable, which I unwound to find the wire core. At point eight of a millimetre, this was the exact size to replace the plastic tow cables. However the eyelets that connect the cable to the tank were another story. Using some of the spru-goo, I attempted to model some eyelets. However at the time of writing, the spru-goo has not yet reached full hardness. So with a heavy heart, I cut the eyelets off of the plastic tow cable and with a micro-drill, made a 0.5mm hole and then enlarged it to just under one millimetre. This was just big enough for take a tight fitting steel cable and thus the tow cables were made.

The final pieces to be assembled were the crew and in the instruction guide, all three of the crew are to be painted as white European men. This grated against my more egalitarian heart and so when I started to paint the figures, I painted the tank Commander with a skin tone that matched a photograph of Grand Tour level cyclist, Biniam Girmay, the first Black African cyclist to win a stage in a grand tour. The young man is an extremely talented professional cyclist, who was unfortunately taken out of the 2022 Gyro d'Italia after winning a stage, when the cork from a podium celebration bottle hit him in the eye.

With my crew painted, I fitted them and then decided that they needed a back story, so here it is. The Driver is a Gay man, out and proud. The Gunner is a Trans Man, brave and strong and then the Commander is a young Black man. The sad truth is that during the years of service for this vehicle, it is extremely unlikely that such people would ever get into the army, let alone command of a main battle tank.

Thus my project came to an end, with a large stone holding the tank hull down to the base board as I waited for the glue to dry. So while I wait for the glues, paints and resins to harden, I must find another project to distract me from the unending pain I suffer every day. I know, I will design and scratch build from paper stock an entire model of my motorbike! I am a fucking idiot.

[wizkiddx]

Blurb req- Tom and the reader on a private jet hungover? just pure fluff?

fluffy requests are well and truly open ( bcos I adored writing this ahah) and let me know what u think , I am deff not a writer so any feedback or tips would be v appreciated :))

summary: tomhollandxactress!reader - a wrap party followed by an early morning flight and a grumpy Harry, what could possibly go wrong?

warning: mentions of alcohol and sickness

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The remorse. The regret. It only made the pounding in your head even worse. Why those two 1.5 litre bottle of Bacardi had been brought out was beyond you. Why the you six of you had then decided to empty said bottle was even more of a mystery. It wasn’t like any of you had needed it, you’d all been more than ‘merry’ prior to the cheap rum and coke. 

Hence the state of you, Tom and Harry as well as your manager Davey and Tom’s team of Rachel and Andrew. All having made very little effort with your appearance - joggers and hoodies all round, with you and Rachel also sporting sunglasses because you were simply smarter than the boys. Thankfully, this wasn’t a big trip that fans knew about, this was you and Tom moving location under cover  - the studios didnt want anybody to know that either of you made a feature in this film, so everything was under the cover of darkness. Which to be honest you were not complaining about. However, you were complaining about the fact the flight had been scheduled to leave at 7 am the night after your wrap party though.

The two of you had just wrapped your most recent and most ambitious movie to date - hence the massive celebrations last night for just surviving and getting it done. It had been the most intense 3 months of your life, there had been times you’d cry for hours on end, times you just wanted to quit fully knowing you’d never be hired again for leaving a multimillion dollar company in the lurch.But you all, somehow, had survived. So celebrations were in order of course but perhaps not as far as you all managed last night?

Your whole convey appeared to have travelled to the airfield in absolute silence, no one particularly fancied hearing anyone else’s voice- which to be honest seemed quite fair. You’d ridden in a car with Tom and Harry, with you resting your head on Tom’s broad shoulder - which had obviously made Harry gag, rolling his eyes. Bless Harry, really he was the only reason you and Tom had got together, after getting sick of the mutual pining he’d been forced to live with during the previous 2 projects you’d worked on together. But now, having had to put up with the two of you being so ridiculously loved up for the past 3 months - understandably a bit of distance from you and his brother was overdue. 

One of the flight attendants busied themselves loading your luggage, whilst the pilot asked you and Tom for a photo. Of course, you weren’t going to say no however you did have to cringe at how rough you both looked. His teenage daughter certainly would be less excited to see that her Dad hadn’t met Tom Holland and Y/n Y/l/n. Instead he’d met the zombified, undead and rougher frauds. Still you smiled as much as you could, wincing when you removed the glasses and the early morning sun pierced your restricted pupils. God it wasn’t your day. 

The guy didn’t seem to mind though, excitedly hurrying off onto the plane to settle in the rest of you - leaving just you and Tom outside on the tarmac. 

“Poor guy, we look like shit.” You murmured while taking a step closer to lean slightly into his side. 

“Speak for yourself love.’Tom snickered into the top of your head, after pulling you completely into his chest. This wasn’t normally allowed, your relationship still wasn’t public and both of you intended on keeping it private for as long as possible. But you were in an otherwise empty field in the middle of nowhere (somewhere in Georgia) before 8 am. It was actually quite nice to feel your boyfriends arms round you in the outside world, especially when you felt this shit. After a few moments you pulled away, arching back at Tom’s pouty face as you motioned it was time to get on the plane. 

“’S too late you know.” Your brows furrowed at his half formed sentence, facial expression only demanding him to explain more. “They all have already taken the good seats… Harry basically sprinted on so he can hog the bed thing.” In response it was your turn to pout, groaning as you fell back into his chest again. Yes, this was a complete first world issue, a private jet paid completely by your bosses was not something a lot would moan about. Truly you were grateful for everything you had in life, but with the worst hangover of your life when the opportunity of lying down for 6 hours instead of being stuck in a chair had manifested itself… well of course you felt robbed by your almost brother Harry. 

Chuckling at your reaction, he gave you an extra squeeze before leading the both of you up the stairs to the cabin. Sure enough Harry had completely and totally claimed the longer couch at the far end of the plane, lying on his stomach with his face hidden in the crook of his elbow. Rolling your eyes at the predictable situation, you didn’t miss Davey laughing at your sorry state - nmaking you throw daggers at him in your eyes. 

Davey was your second father, the relationship between the two of you far transcended any professional working one. Which is why the two of you acting like this was very much a norm and not rude at all. He had also got the next best seat in the corner with the most leg room which he clearly loved to show off. 

Unsurprisingly then you and Tom ended up squashed into the corner with your legs crumpled up together in the small space floor space. The brunette opposite you didn’t seem to mind so much but that was because he had an adaptational advantage. He could sleep anywhere and everywhere , whenever he wanted. On set if he was tired? Just take a ten minute power nap on the floor. Bored of a long car journey? Just conk out against the window. It absolutely infuriated you, as no matter how hard and how exhausted you were - it was rare you could get any further than a light doze. Even before the two go you got together, having a best mate that could skip all the boring bits and was immune to jet lag… you can see how that makes you want to punch him square in the face.

After a short safety talk from the pilot and flight attendant, the plane whirred into life and you were up in the air. Although in your current state, it would be reasonable to assume the beauty of flying had somewhat rubbed off - you were certain it never would. No matter how many flights you took across country ,and in fact continents, for work; you’d never get sick of watching the view below you. It was perfect and breathtaking and took your mind off the pounding in the back of your head for the first 20 minutes.

Until the need for sleep took over as either you need to be unconcious or you were going to vomit - which you really didn’t want to do at 40,000 feet in a tin box. Trying to rearrange your limbs to get comfier you accidentally knocked Tom’s leg rather forcefully, causing him to jump half out his seat, heavy eyes blinking quickly as he tried to get his baring as to what was attacking him - quickly answered by your guilty look. 

“You okay love?” His voice was slurred, sounding almost sleep drunk - but perhaps was just actually still a little drunk. You’d only headed to bead last night at 4 am and had to be up at 6 - which isnt very long for your poor kidneys to try and process the stupid amount of alcohol you’d both  happily been chugging the night before.

“Feel shitty and cant sleep.” You weren’t in the mood to white lie - honestly some sympathy from your beautiful boyfriend seemed like a dream at the moment. Tom’s idea was better though.

“C’mere then.” His arms outstretched, you immediately jumped into his lap - the two of you shifting about to get comfortable till you were sat side on to him, your bum and back leaning against the arm rest of the chair with your legs going over his thighs and pressing against the wall of the plane. Pulling you closer to his chest, Tom took a deep breath as he pressed his chin against the crown of your head; your face now nested into his chest. 

Nothing needed to be said as the two of you melted into each others bodies, the slow and deepening breathing enough to prove to each other you were both incredibly contented in that moment. More than that you felt safe- you’d admitted to Tom some weeks ago that you had never ever slept better than when he was beside you. Yeh it was cringey but sometimes that’s allowed right? 

… well not to Harry. Because as the plane was about to begin it’s descent, the pilot had tasked Harry (who had slept off the worst of the hangover and had spent the last 30 minutes of the flight scoffing at how adorable the two of you looked fast asleep together) - even after Rach had scalded him and had taken a photo of the two of you on her phone. 

Causing Harry to ,ever subtly, wake the two of you up by throwing his half empty water bottle over your heads. 

Safe to say, Harry very nearly didn’t leave that jet alive.

[sigmaleph]

@serinemolecule asked me for hot takes on this 2006 article on Argentinian food, which I am now reorganising into a proper post for y'all's consumption. you're welcome.

First of all: the titular thesis that you should eat two steaks a day. I am forced to clarify that as 'should's go you should eat zero steaks a day, but this is ethical rather dietary advice and I don't follow it as well as I should, so, y'know. I would engage with this on the level it was stated, but I actually have no opinion on it. Moving on...

Argentine beef really is extraordinary. Almost all of this has to do with how the cows are raised. There are no factory feedlots in Argentina; the animals still eat pampas grass their whole lives, in open pasture, and not the chicken droppings and feathers mixed with corn that pass for animal feed in the United States.

This is, as it happens, completely false. There absolutely is plenty of feedlot beef being eaten in Argentina, and this was also the case back when this article was written. There's grass-fed beef too, and maybe the writer structured their life around only eating those, but the claim that there are no feedlots is just not true.

if you let them make the call, you get a two-inch thick of meat[...]The Argentine steak stands alone, towering three inches over the plate,[...]This gorgeous specimen is called a lomito; it's a standard lunchtime steak, clearly so thin that the Argentines are embarrassed to send it out into the world without a protective wrapping of ham and cheese

I have no idea what their obsession with steak thickness is; meat exists at various levels of thick and thin to suit various tastes. If you like yours thick that's fine but quit the projecting, y'know.

As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. One's diet will accordingly lean heavily on pastas, gnocchi, salads, and (for the less squeamish ) fish. Vegans will not survive in Argentina.

This is, unfortunately, true (well, hyperbole, but). Rinna had a rather bad time trying to find vegan food when fae came over for visits. The situation is improving slowly, at least.

The homemade cookies bought in the minimarket downstairs taste of steak. [picture of alfajores de maicena[

Jesus. Find somewhere better to buy your snacks.

It should be no surprise that the land of beef also has excellent milk and butter. The milk comes in plastic bags that would give any American marketing department a heart attack. They proudly advertise "GUARANTEED 100% BRUCELLOSIS AND HOOF-AND-MOUTH FREE". One brand even brags that its bacteria count never exceeds 100,000 per mL, and prints daily statistics to prove it (only 82,000 bacteria/mL on Monday! mmm!).

Are you under the impression American milk doesn't contain bacteria and that when it spoils it's because of the molecules' sheer willpower? Or do you just object to the reminder that they exist?

This menu is delicious, but with rare exceptions it is all you are going to get. People coming for more than a few weeks are advised to bring a discreet bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Eat at better restaurants.

With any order from the master menu comes the Bread Basket, which should be treated as you would treat a basket of wax fruit, that is, as a purely decorative ornament. It is considered bad form to actually eat anything from Bread Basket

What are you talking about. Do all your dining companions just suck, eat some bread.

Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says "save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives". This cloying dessert tar is so impossibly sweet that you wish you were ten years old again, just so you could actually enjoy it. It is everywhere. There is a special dulce de leche shelf in the supermarket dairy case, and the containers go up to a liter in size. Even the churros are stuffed with it - the churros, Montresor!

It is rare that I feel insulted for the sake of my country, but this? How dare you.

Yes, of course we fill churros with dulce de leche; the real question is why anyone doesn't, short of dietary restrictions. Finding out that people do otherwise was like learning that in other countries, "sandwich" just means two slices of bread. Live a little. Eat a real godsdamned churro.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how meals work in Argentina, and they remain a mystery to me. Dinner is clear enough: people tend to go to restaurants beginning at ten o'clock (for those with small children), with the main rush around eleven, and dinner is pretty much over at one or so in the morning. And breakfast - or rather, its absence - follows as a logical consequence of eating a steak the size of a beagle at midnight. But I have yet to figure out whether people eat some kind of meal in the afternoon, and if so, when.

At... noon? Like. We eat lunch. Usually somewhere around 12:00. I am eating lunch right now, and I have done so essentially every day of my life. This is just baffling.

I've come to think the culprit in the missing Argentine lunch scene is yerba mate.

how.

Where the ignorant foreigner may see just another kind of herbal tea (yerba mate is a very unassuming shrub that grows in the northern parts of the country) the Argentine sees a taste treat of unimaginable subtlety, and a tonic for all his problems. The Wikipedia article on proper mate preparation should give you a warning of the level of obsessiveness attainable here (the Urugayans are even worse). To the virgin palate, mate tastes like green tea mixed with grass clippings. The beverage is traditionally drunk out of a little gourd, through a metal straw called a bombilla, with hot (but not boiling!!) water poured into it (without wetting the surface!! clockwise!!) from a thermos.

Yeah, this is accurate. Well, not the clockwise part, never heard anyone complain about that and I can't imagine it mattering.

What distinguishes mate from coffee and tea is the social context - two or more people share a gourd, with a designated pourer in charge of refilling it with hot water after each turn. The ritual is low-fuss but indispensible. You can buy mate gourds and thermoses in any grocery store, and get your thermos filled with hot water at any convenience store or gas station, but you will never see mate served in restaurants or sold in little disposable paper gourds, to go. it's not that people refuse to drink mate alone - anyone working a solitary shift will have a gourd in hand - but that the concept of being served mate by someone who does not share it with you seems impossible.

This is also true. Attempts have been made to sell to-go mate but it's never very popular, the social ritual is important. Also unfortunately a disease vector, I haven't had any mate in a year and a half.

Mate aficionados will tell you that mate contains a special compound, mateine, that serves as a tonic and mild stimulant, promoting alertness without making it hard to sleep, reducing fatigue and appetite, helping the digestion and serving as a mild diuretic. Scientists will tell you that mateine bears a suspicious resemblance to a chemical called caffeine. Mate aficionados will then grow indignant, explaining that mateine is really a stereoisomer (mirror image) of caffeine, with different effects, which will in turn irritate the scientists, who will snap that caffeine doesn't have a chiral center, so it can't have a distinguishable mirror image, and why don't the mate aficionados just put a sock in it.

The first part of this is true; some people definitely think "mateine" is different from caffeine and it absolutely isn't. Never heard the stereoisomer claim before but googling it does confirm some people say so.

still have no idea what any of this has to do with lunch, though. I promise you nobody skips lunch because mate is just too filling.

The wine here is very good (something has to stand up to that steak), but Argentina has no liquor to call its own, relying on whiskies like Old Smuggler and the low-maintenance Don Juan cognac to carry the flag.

There's a fundamental omission from this list and it's called fernet.

Beer is ubiquitous and comes in a bewildering variety of sizes, although there is a skittishness about the full-on liter. Things level off at 970 mL. In my case, it means I end up drinking 1940 mL of beer as a kind of personal protest, and all is well with the world. To make up for the abundance of sizes, beer comes in only one variety, Quilmes, which inevitably comes served with a tripartite platter of snacks - nuts, salty cylinders, and aged potato chips.

I never had trouble buying beer by the litre, but I confess I never tried to do so in 2006 on account of being under 18 at the time.

Anyway, beer comes in a lot more varieties today, thankfully, because Quilmes sucks. I'll never be a beer person, but at least these days there's options I tolerate.

[original post]

[wondersofdreaming]

Something Brewing

Characters: Henry Cavill x female reader

Word count: 1.243

Warnings: Alcohol consumption. Wet clothes. Brewing beer. Overall fluff and overload of cuteness.

Author’s note: I have been brewing a few beers during lockdown, so why not write a little something of the sort.

A big thanks goes to the angel from the heavens, @radaofrivia​, the story wouldn’t have been this good without you <3 Go read her stories here

Divider by @firefly-graphics​

I do not own any characters in this short story, except the reader who is a figment of my imagination.

MASTERLIST

Feedback is appreciated.

(GIF Credit to @henrycavilledits​ - find the post here)

A strong scent of warm grain was spreading through the rented house. Luckily the house was out in the English countryside, far away from the bustling city of London.

“You’re sure it has to be at 65C for over an hour, my love?” Henry asked, his face scrunching in utter concentration as he stirred the porridge looking thing in the pot.

“65 minutes to be exact,” you told him, “Keep stirring, darling. We don’t want the grains to burn at the bottom.”

“Yes madam,” he smiled, the one that made your knees weak and your heart race. You giggled at him and went to kiss his scruffy cheek. Your lips lingered a bit longer than usual, as you wanted to keep inhaling the scent that was uniquely Henry, a scent you had become addicted to ever since you started dating.

Kal was fast asleep on his doggy bed by the door. His ears were down and he was sleeping on his back with his paws in the air. That was his way of saying that he was 100% comfortable and relaxed.

The quarantine had lasted for over a month already, and you had already made a sourdough starter, baked loaves of bread, Julia Child’s cookbook and cooked all the recipes, played all the board games you had brought with you at least four times, and you had even talked Henry into playing God of War on your Playstation 4, which had taken a lot of energy, but you had continued to play the game in his presence and shown him why you loved the game. Then one day you came across a youtube video of people brewing beer at home. A week later you had received all the necessary ingredients and equipment to brew your very own beer.

“We should save a few bottles for Jason,” Henry commented, while you read the instructions once more.

“Of course, my love. To repay him for sending you 100 bottles of the beer he made with Guinness, and while you’re at it, throw in a dozen of No. 1 Rosemary water as well.”

You thought back to the day a delivery man had rung the doorbell and needed a signature for the boxes. You had thought that Henry had finally ordered the parts for the computer he wanted to build, so you didn’t open them. The delivery guy unloaded them in your kitchen after you signed the papers. Then you had waited for Henry to come home. The look on his face had been of amusement. He had laughed without pause for 10 whole minutes before he face-timed his Guinness-loving friend, to thank him for the gift and have a long chat.

The relaxed look Henry had sported after the talk with Jason was something he only showed to his closest friends and you. Whenever you visited him at work or standing backstage at an interview, he would give off an aura of concentration. He would be in work-mode. It was like a switch he could turn on and off whenever he walked out the front door. Only in the four walls of your home, he would be completely himself. The dork, the nerd, and the passionate man you knew and loved.

The timer went off, jolting you out of your trip down memory lane, and you started to pour the grain mixture into a colander on to of another pot to separate the grains from the liquid. You added 78C water until you had about 6,5 litres of grain-brew, then you brought it up to a boil, before adding the first set of hops.

Henry sniffed the hops before you dumped them into the hot liquid.

“What now?” Henry looked into the pot that was slowly starting to smell of faintly of beer. 

“Now we let it be at boiling point for 45 minutes, then we add another kind of hops for flavouring.”

“How long before we can try the finished product?” He asked and wrapped his strong arms around your torso. His lips leaving peppering kisses on your neck and shoulder.

“From what Mark told me, we… we need to let it sit in the tank for a week… then pour it into another tank with a tap and let it ferment for another week be… before we have to bottle them with a little bit of sugar so… so the yeast can make carbon dioxide, which will take approximately two weeks and then they should be ready for drinking…” you tried to tell him. You couldn’t form a coherent sentence as his lips touched your ear, his large palms caressing your sides and he pulled you closer to him.

“That is almost a month of waiting,” Henry sighed, looking a bit disappointed by the fact he had to wait so long for a taste.

“All good things come to those who wait, puppet. But maybe we can find something to do while we wait for it to ferment,” you giggled.

A slow smirk formed on his lips. He knew exactly what you were talking about, and he was looking forward to when you gave him the green light.

A month passed and you were finally going to give your homebrew a taste. The bottles had been sitting in the garage where it was dark and cool.

Henry opened one and the liquid spewed all over the kitchen, making his white T-shirt soaking wet, and you didn’t know whether to help him or roll on the floor laughing. You opted for the second option.

“Bad idea, babe,” Henry whispered while he silently tiptoed towards you. You were holding your stomach, gasping for air while you kept laughing, not noticing your beloved coming closer.

It was too late for you to move away from him, to late to save yourself from the outpouring of the rest of the beer from the bottle.

“Henry!” you squealed. Your own shirt glued to you like a second skin.

“Revenge is sweet, not what I can say about this beer,” Henry smacked his lips together, tasting the beer.

You licked your lips tasting the lingering liquid there.

“I can’t taste much, we should open another one,” you said and walked over to grab another bottle. You half-opened the beer in the sink, and it overflowed from the edge. There was beer foam all over your hands and it was slowly going down the drain. When it stopped you took a swig and handed the bottle to Henry. You spit out the mouthful you had taken and tried rinsing the awful taste.

“Yuck, that was absolutely horrendous,” you said. Henry looked a little pale but he swallowed the beer.

“We should… eh, remove this foul-tasting thing and never talk about it again,” he said. Henry turned on his heels towards the bedroom to change.

After you both had taken a shower together, as Henry’s excuse was to save water, and thrown out the remaining bottles of home-brew, you sat in the living room with your computer.

Henry sat down next to you with two cans of real Guinness. He looked over your shoulder to see what you were doing.

“What is that?”

“Our next project. We are going to make a Kal amigurumi doll.”

“You think my big hands can make something so nimble?” Henry asked perplexed, taking a look down at his impressively large hands.

“Darling, if you can paint Warhammer figurines, you can crochet your best friend.”

[aching-tummies]

Quiet in the Library!

I think I lived out a kink-scenario again completely on accident today (note, this was written a couple of days before posting due to a busy schedule).

My area is currently experiencing an unprecedented heat wave. We're normally a colder climate so built-in AC units are not a thing in our area. Older houses come with ways to heat one's house, but nothing to cool it down because our climate is normally either cold or freezing. On my day off from work I decided that I wanted to go out somewhere with AC to kill time. I had some stuff I needed to work on and some things I needed to print off so I made plans to head to a public library and work/chill for a couple of hours.

I discussed my plan with family members. Some family members are going through medical treatments and stuff, so the entire household has been wary of going outside and potentially bringing germs and other stuff back home with them. I'd be going out for "recreational" purposes. We have a printer at home but it is only connected to someone else's desktop...so if I absolutely had to print something off I'd have to hop onto that computer...which I have done in the past...so the library trip was more for the idea of spending a couple of hours in a building with AC going. I wanted to let family know of my plans so that they wouldn't plan for me to be at home...and also offered the idea of someone tagging along with me if they wanted to beat the heat in the library too.

Turns out someone else was toying with the idea of going on a grocery run but they were on the fence because of the heat wave. I suggested that I'd tag along with them on the grocery trip, help them carry items and all, and then they could drop me off at the library and save me one trip on transit...I'd take transit home when I was ready. With that plan, I suggested that we eat breakfast at home because I had plans to buy lunch outside while on my library trip and I did not want to have to buy or eat two fast-food meals in one day. This was all discussed the night before my day off, fyi.

Plan made, upon waking up we worked together to put breakfast on the table. Unfortunately, my first task upon waking was to chug some ice-cold water out of the fridge. It was hot and I was sweating not even 10 minutes after waking up. The shock of cold water so soon after waking gave me cramps. Imagine how you'd react to being rudely woken up by someone dumping a bucket of ice-water on you...yeah, that's exactly how my stomach reacted. I hid in my room, doubled over with cramps, and left the rest of breakfast prep to family members.

Something went wrong with breakfast, apparently, that resulted in half of the food being inedible so I ended up eating about three mouthfuls of food and leaving the rest for other family members. The spoiled breakfast put other family in a bad mood so they reneged on our plans. Timing-wise, it resulted in a mad dash to the bus stop for me after swallowing my third mouthful of food because I had decided I'd be in the library today. The little food I had eaten was only barely enough to whet my appetite and my stomach was grumbling and snarling for more by the time I reached the bus stop. I rubbed my tummy a little to try to calm it because part of it was still griping over the ice-wakening.

When I got to the area with the library, I had a choice to make: walk further in the heat, by-pass the library, to find food at a nearby food-court first...or hit the library as intended, spend a few hours there, and then search for food hours later. The heat made my decision for me...looking for food first would have resulted in double the amount of walking in the heat because I'd be bypassing the library only to return to it after getting food. My stomach had calmed down on the bus ride (thanks to some discreet tummy rubs) and was no longer grumbling at me.

I hunkered down in the library with my earbuds in. It's been over a year since I set foot in a library due to the pandemic shutting them down for in-person services. I missed this. My favorite thing to do in the summer in previous years was to bring my laptop to a library and enjoy the ambience and the air-conditioning. It doesn't cost anything but transit fare so I did this often before the pandemic hit. I was enjoying myself. I felt a little self-conscious though because people that walked by my table gave me strange looks...and I don't know why. I had my mask on, other people at other tables were doing the same as I--had their laptops out and were working on Word-Processing documents. I'm at the age where I can totally blend in as a post-secondary student...so I couldn't fathom why I was getting strange looks and I kept on checking if my hair was out of place or if I had something on my clothes.

When I wrapped up my work, I shut down my computer and pulled by earbuds out...that's when I realized that the rumbling I felt throughout my three hours at the library was not due to my music being too loud. The grumbles had come back with a vengeance and apparently had been going for at least two and a half hours. Something about tables always seems to act as an echo chamber for stomach growls and these ones were audible...so...yeah...my best guess as to why people were giving me odd looks: my tummy was growling and they heard it.

To add to my embarrassment, a stunningly attractive person was in the table behind me. There was no way he didn't hear my growling tummy. I packed up, printed off my stuff, and left the library in a rush in order to spare myself further embarrassment.

Onto food. I stopped by a nearby convenience store to hunt for drinks. Pro-tip when eating at a food court or going to the movies or something: drinks and snacks are cheaper if you get them from a grocer or a convenience store or something than if you were to get them at the food court or theatre. I know, it's bad to do that to a theatre, but most of the people I know working in theatres tell me that they don't mind if you bring outside food as long as you don't leave evidence...don't throw out your own wrappers and zipper bags in their trash bins and don't leave bottled drinks and stuff lying around. You shouldn't do that sort of thing if you bought concessions at the theatre either...but yeah.

The convenience store here almost always has a "3 for $5" sale on drinks...it's just a matter of which brand/flavors are on sale when I go. I lucked out and it was on 500mL bottles of lemonade that day...so I trudged over to the food court carrying 1.5 litres of drinks. I was hungry and it was hot, so I ended up buying some of those premade sushi platters. It wasn't a big one...8 pieces or so. I bought a small bento box as well that basically just had some meat on top of the rice and a side of vegetables. I was hungry, so I was sure that this amount of food was alright for me to finish in one sitting. In previous trips I'd bought a 2-item large bento and the same sushi platter...I'd be able to finish the bento and maybe eat 2 of the rolls before being full in previous trips, so I was sure that what I had bought would fit comfortably in my stomach.

I forgot to factor in thirst. It was a hot day and all, so I ended up drinking more lemonade than I otherwise would have. I drank 2 of the bottles during my meal...so an entire litre of drink went into my stomach along with the food. By the end of my meal all that was left on my plate was one roll from the sushi platter. I brought it to my lips but my stomach definitely didn't want it and it was too hard to swallow.

My gut was packed. The litre of lemonade (as well as about half a cup worth of water from a waterbottle) filled up my tummy and brought me to 'stuffed' rather than simply 'full', The food alone would have comfortably brought me to 'full' as I usually only have my waterbottle with me for meals so I don't drink too much.

I was wearing a loose button-up shirt over top of a camisole and pants that day. The clothes were very flattering and highlighted my slimmer waist. I've got a higher BMI than is considered normal/healthy...but my figure is basically on the bigger end of average rather than into full blown obese territory...and most of my fat distribution goes toward my bust, arms, and thighs so my stomach was flat in those clothes. Not after lunch, that's for sure.

My stuffed tummy was aching, stretched and fit to bursting. The glut of food and drink had rounded out my stomach and I was immensely glad for the loose button-up hiding the evidence. I sat at the table for a while, unwilling and unable to stand up because my stomach felt so heavy and there was pressure at the base of my esophagus from all the food. I was terrified that I'd throw up if I moved and jostled my tummy. I spent a few minutes discreetly rubbing my tummy under the table as I flipped through headlines on my phone. I wasn't paying attention to my phone, mentally begging my stomach to start digesting so that I could finally move.

When I finally got up, I opted to walk around the mall for a bit in hopes of coaxing faster digestion. My stomach churned and sloshed the whole time. Surprisingly, there wasn't really any gas in my guts. It was all liquid and solid food. The rice must have absorbed some of the liquid because everything felt like it had swelled up inside of my belly. The stretch was intense. Thanks to my clothes, I felt like some of those "surprise inspection" fanarts I've seen floating around. If I had a partner and a discreet/private setting, I wouldn't have minded playing out a "surprise inspection" scenario. I was alone in public and terribly shy and embarrassed about my tummy though. If anyone tried to press their palm into my tummy at that moment I'm sure I would have been embarrassed and that I would have thrown up from all of the pressure in and on my tummy. I was stuffed to the point it hurt--my stomach felt like it was on the verge of a rupture.

[caxsthetic]

I Am Fine

Miya Osamu x F!Reader

A Whisper: I am sorry, I never want to hurt someone, let alone you who always be there for me. I am sorry, for every time I take a look at you — I saw him instead.

Akagi’s ⇚ Through Her Eyes

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *. GRAND MASTERLIST .* :☆ﾟ. ───

To you, having someone that you could love until the end of time was surely a blessing. For the past years of your life, you had that. For the past years of your life, you were blessed by the existence of someone that made you feel complete, that made you feel so alive every time you woke up with him by your side.

His touch was so gentle. His fingers always tucked the strands of your hair behind your ear. The reason for that was simple — he wanted to see you more clearly. He wanted to gaze at your eyes, the gentle, silvery warm orbs that filled with affection.

The love that you had for him was something out of this world. Something that even his twin brother and teammates get jealous of. You dropped everything, your long time dream which, if you had pursued it, would take you thousands of kilometres apart from him. Why? Because you wanted to be with him — and every dream that he had was bound to be yours in the end.

So you couldn’t really blame them if he would be treated differently after what he had done to you.

Sometimes you asked yourself what would happen if you didn’t fall in love with him, you wanted to know another scenario that could have unfurled in your life if only he was not the one who had your heart. Would it be the same? Would you still feel this immense pain that kept hurting you with every breath that you take?

Or would you get your happily ever after?

You eyed two bottles of sleeping pills in your hand. One that felt like hope since the dose was lowered, a sign that you were starting to get better. But the other one, you needed to lie to get the other one.

Your upperclassmen was sharp, you could see the hesitation on his face as he got the sleeping pills for you. You shouldn’t have asked him, you shouldn’t have lied and given him hope that you would be fine. Saying that you would be there standing tall at the wedding venue of your brother and someone that you loved.

It was all a lie, you had lost in this game of life as it brought you nothing but guilt and heartbreak. So you opened up the two bottles simultaneously.

“I am sorry, Akagi-san.”

Because now, falling into a deep slumber until someone woke you up, sounded like the best decision that you could take.

“Slow down or you will choke yourself, dumdum.” Hearing the nickname made you roll your eyes. You didn’t hear him out though, and kept shoving the quiche in front of you without resting. “(Y/n), oi!”

As if on cue, you swallowed a little too fast and choked at the food. The blonde setter could only shake his head in disappointment on seeing you like this, but the way his lips quirked up in amusement could make everyone see how the man was not really disgruntled by your action. “I told you so.” He opened up a bottle of mineral water and handed it to you.

You snatched the drink from his hand and gulped it all down in one take. The second you slammed the bottle on the table, you eyed the expression that belonged to your company. His amber orbs looked at you with shock written all over his face, mouth agape as he couldn’t believe you just gulped down half a litre of water.

“What?”

“You are one crazy bitch.” He chuckled before his fork took the last bite of your quiche and threw it inside his mouth. And before you could protest, he opened up his lips once again. “I am the one who paid.” He said it with his mouth still full with the bite, making some of the crumbs spills all over the table.

Grimacing, you dusted away all the grains with a tissue. Somehow wondering why you agreed to go out with him in the first place.

“Ugh, fine.”

You groaned and averted your gaze outside the window, occupying yourself while waiting for him to finish his own meal. You remembered that he was the one who treated you today, saying that it was a celebration since it was the first time you were out of your hours after weeks swallowing yourself with pain and tears all alone.

There was something about Atsumu that somehow gave you warm feelings that you thought you would never have again. The night you stepped outside your home without a ring band adorning your finger, you were sure that you left all the love and joy inside that place.

You were sure that you would never have a chance to feel the same warmth that you used to share with the black-haired man.

Yet you felt it, you didn’t know what kind of miracle happened every time the blonde setter popped out in front of your house, but you felt like your heart was never shattered in the first place — as if it was always intact, as if all of the pain that you felt was just a nightmare that was gone the second you wake up.

You kept falling deep into his eyes, the beautiful shape of orbs that captivated you every time his gaze fell on your face. It was filled with affection and care, a gaze that you were addicted to. Since sometimes you could see him looking at you with — fondness.

He was the one who you usually saw in the morning, he was the one who offered you his embrace for you to cry on, he was the one who kept putting a smile on your face even without him trying. And somewhere along the line, you felt like he always owned your heart.

“Hey, (Y/n).”

You smiled as you peered outside the window and noticed the dark skies. Then again, even though the freezing rain started to fall outside, you were sure that it would not make you feel any less warm as long as you were with him.

“(Y/n)?”

“Yes, love?”

And then there was silence.

His orbs blinked as he could not believe to hear such nicknames coming from your lips. It was so natural the way you said it, as if you practised that for hours in front of the mirror. No, not like that. It was as if you had called him like that for the past years of your life.

Your whole body tensed as you saw something else inside his orbs. There was something — yearning, lingering there as his face lit up. But it was amber, the gaze that now met with yours was amber. Not silver, not the greyish stone colour that you always ended up staring at for hours.

You inhaled sharply as your mind tried to tell you something, something so wrong that you were now disgusted with yourself as the realisation sunk in.

Without wasting another second, you immediately grabbed your bag and stood up, striding towards the exit and kept your head hanging low. You kept your gaze to the front and just barged into the heavy rain, not caring at how he shouted out your name from inside the cafe.

You really wanted to take another look at him, just to lock the realisation deep inside your soul. You wanted to be selfish, just for once.

But you couldn’t.

You felt someone gripped on your wrist, so tight as if they knew you would be gone if they let you go. It was so rough, calloused fingers wrapped around your wrist to remind you that he was not the same person that broke your heart — yet it was the same contact that you used to feel.

You missed this kind of touch, the sign of hard work that for the past year you couldn’t find from someone who was once your lover, Miya Osamu. Ever since he was focused more on the business and spending more time with you, his hands became so different. It became — soft.

From cutting ingredients on the kitchen, to typing away reports inside the office. From spending time on different kinds of branches, to lazing around inside the house that you two shared. From having you in his embrace, to getting into bed with another person.

And right now as you turned your head to face the man who had been trying to pick up all of your shattered pieces, you couldn’t look at him the same anymore.

Because when you looked at his amber eyes, you could only think of the silvery one.

“Hey, what happened?” His voice was so soft, filled with worry as he tried to pull you to shelter, yet you didn’t budge. “(Y/n), I am sorry. Did I do something wrong?”

It was not fair, not fair to him. All this time you have been looking at him while thinking of someone else. Every time you saw him smile at you as he greeted you in front of your door, it was his twin that always popped out in your mind. And yet he was here right now, gazing at you with the same look that he always gave to you.

“N-No, you didn’t say or do anything wrong.” Your mind tried to utter any words that could make him understand. “It was me, A-Atsumu. Not you, I am the one who did something.”

“Alright, we can talk it out.” His grip was now loosened, eyes begging for you to follow him back inside. “You can always talk to me about anything, I will listen.”

“You won’t like this one.” You snorted as your empty heart now started to get filled with something else. “You will hate me, Atsumu.” Something else called guilt.

The blonde setter cocked one of his eyebrows in confusion, eyes scanning yours in search of some kind of sign. You looked so scared, and he wanted nothing more than to pull you into his embrace. But as he took another step toward you, you immediately took a step backwards.

“I could never hate you, (Y/n).” He whispered under his breath. So low, yet enough for you to hear. “From all things that I have ever seen in life, you are one that I could never hate. Even if I tried to.”

There was sincerity lingered on his voice, and it made you feel even worse for every second passed he stood here with you under the rain. “Nothing, there’s nothing you could do to make me hate you.”

“Because you don’t know what’s inside my head, Atsumu.”

“Still, I am sure that—”

“I see Samu in you for god sake!”

And when you could not feel his hand wrapped around your wrist anymore, you knew that your confession was so much more impactful than it was supposed to.

From the ten years of knowing Miya Atsumu, you could see that he was a man full of pride. He refused to be acknowledged as the same as his twin brother. The two of them were always so competitive, almost about anything that they encountered. Even if they cared for each other, even if they always had each other’s back, they never liked to be seen as the other twin.

“What? What do you mean?”

He knew, of course he knew what that meant. But he didn’t want to believe that as he wanted to embrace the tingle inside his heart when you looked at him. Atsumu wanted to believe that when your orbs glimmered with love every time your eyes fell on his figure, it was him that you saw — not Osamu, not his twin brother who already wrecked your heart apart.

“I always see him, Atsumu.” You continued your words as you wrapped your hands up and down on your arms. “When you smiled at me, it was the same smile that he always gave me.” Your voice wavered as you stared at the man who had done nothing but care for your wellbeing. “And when I look at your eyes, Atsumu, I—”

I see love.

Your lips parted, not caring anymore as the droplets of rain made its way inside your mouth. The reason why you thought he was the answer to your prayer, why you thought he was the miracle that God bestowed upon you, why you thought maybe he could be the end of your suffering — it was not because he was the cure to your heart.

But it was because you saw someone who owned your heart and soul inside of him.

Because the amber orbs looked at you like how the black-haired man used to look at you — one gaze filled with love.

You found one expression dominating his facade right now. Hurt. It was shown all over his face as he realised what you were trying to say. It was as if he could read your mind as you took some steps backward, shaking your head softly, begging him not to follow you this time.

When your eyes lingered on his figure, shoulders slumped with remorse evident on his face, you wondered if that was how you looked the night Osamu confessed the things that he had done. Nothing but pain and betrayal that he couldn’t seem to shake. Atsumu had given you the love that you lost, trying to aid your heart little by little.

But it wouldn’t work, you knew your own heart — it would never work. You could never see him without seeing someone else, you could never see him without the shadows of his twin brother. So you had to leave, you needed to stop showing him something that you could never give.

You needed to stop giving him your love, one that was never meant for him.

Throwing the bottles of pills into the sink, you gulped down lots of water before letting your feet bring you towards the tub. You gently took off the bathrobe that wrapped around your figure, shielding you from the shivering atmosphere of winter.

Your orbs fell on the milky white water that filled your bathtub, caused by the bath bomb which you bought all those months ago. You remembered your love told you about how the aromas smelled like home. Like it was a fine morning where the two of you huddled up in the arms of each other.

He tended to love his coffee with milk, so one thing that you always did when you woke up first, was to make him a cup of coffee just how he likes it. A spoonful of sugar, a half-cup filled with black coffee, and the rest with full cream milk.

If you calling out his name couldn’t even wake him up, the aroma of the freshly brewed coffee was enough. His nose would twitch as the smell fulfilled the entire room, and seconds later, his eyes would open and show off the beautiful silvery orbs that you could never get tired of.

And now as you rested your head at the edge of the tub, gazing at the ceiling, you wondered if it felt the same — every morning that he woke up to.

Your mind kept flickering back and forth to the twins. How one of them had your heart yet didn’t need it anymore, while the other wanted your heart yet you could never give it to. It frustrated you beyond anything to know that someone held out his heart for you to take, yet you knew you couldn’t do the same to him, since once you loved someone it was meant to last forever.

There would always be a trace, no matter how many years went by. Maybe once upon a time, you did love the blonde setter. But you never invested yourself in the feelings, making it difficult to make bloom the same kind of love like what you had for the black-haired man.

It was still engraved into your mind, the look on Atsumu’s face as you confessed about how he was just a lookalike. That no matter how much effort that he did to you — at the end of the day everything about him only reminded you of his twin brother.

And you couldn’t bear it anymore.

It was alright, to be the one who got hurt. To be the one who felt the pain of losing someone you loved until death came knocking at your door. It was alright to know that everything wouldn’t be fine, as long as it was just you, it was fine, you could take it.

But to meet a pair of amber eyes, filled with hope as it asked for your love — it broke you beyond repair once you realised it would never be him that your heart wanted. Because when you gazed at those warm eyes, a flicker of someone else took over in an instant.

When you reached for Atsumu, you were reaching for his twin brother. When you laughed with him, you felt like you were laughing with the love of your life instead of him. And you knew damn well it was wrong, you knew that your existence became a curse.

You didn’t bother to wipe the tears that slowly cascaded down your cheek. It dripped, one by one, mixed with the milky white substance that enveloped your whole body.

Surely you never thought that someone like Miya Osamu would do something as low as cheating. To betray the love that you have given to him for the majority of your life. You had given everything to him, mustering all of your energy to make sure that you win in this life �� together.

But he let go of your hand, leaving you alone as you get lost in the dark, aching for his hand to guide you back to life.

And when you could finally stand all alone, it was not tall and mighty like how it used to. Since every time you turned around you were haunted by him and how his hand held another. Someone that was not you, someone that tragically — you had given everything too.

“The superior twin is here!”

You bit your lips as his voice ranged through the entire room. How could he still sound so cheery, so carefree even though he must have known too well that you could never give him what he asked you to. “I am serious though, I am older, therefore I am superior.”

He didn’t deserve it, to be seen as someone else. He had his own halo, shone so bright as everyone could see that he was the sun while his twin brother was the moon. Yet there you were, always comparing, always seeing the black-haired man instead of him.

“I don’t know where you got that way of thinking, but I will let it slide for you.” You answered, cringing at your own voice as it sounded weak. Right now you hope that he couldn’t hear the splash of water as you tried to be as still as ever.

“Ah, miss (Y/n), always so humble.” He chuckled a little. It was contagious, how his laugh could make your lips shaped into a genuine smile. “Say, what have I done to get such privilege hearing your voice?”

You sighed softly, feeling that you were the one who had the privilege hearing his voice for the past few weeks. He could have gone to practice sooner, but he decided to check up on you first. He could have gone somewhere with his teammates, but he thought spending time with you was important.

He prioritised you more than anything, just like how you always prioritised his twin brother above anything else.

“I just need company, Atsumu.” You breathed out softly, hands accidentally knocked the bottle of soap off to the tub. “Are you busy helping around the wedding?”

“No, I am not busy. Not at all.” From how quiet the other line was, you knew that he was probably not going to the wedding. You really wanted to scold him, telling him that he should have gone there and supported his twin brother — but you didn’t have the energy to do so. “I am here, (Y/n). I am always here if you need me.”

“Yeah?” You purse your lips when the words rolled down his tongue. So honest as he gave you a flicker of warm that makes you feel wanted. “Then, would you tell me a story? Anything? I just want to listen to your voice.”

His voice was a little more pitched than Osamu, intonation always went up and down, never once steady. But there was this similarity that you loved to hear as he talked to you. You felt like you were wanted, as if when he had a conversation with you he was talking to someone that he wanted to keep in his life.

And you were so disgusted with yourself all over again, for even when the countdown started, you still hoped for the love that you had lost from your brother.

“Since you asked so nicely.”

He made you feel at peace. As you closed your eyes and listened on and on to his voice. Just like how you predicted, his intonation went up and down as he blurted out all random things that he could collect from his mind.

It made you remember all those beautiful high school days. Atsumu always jogged towards you the second you walked into the gymnasium with your brother and his twin. He loved to snitch Osamu so bad, making the poor younger twin tense up and pout since now you and the others knew all the embarrassing things that he had done.

Though you always stole a little bit of his time before practice started. Your hand interlaced with the silvery eyed man as you reassured him that no matter how many embarrassing things that he did, it could never change the way you looked at him.

The setter would boo at the two of you for sharing PDA inside the gymnasium, while your brother would mostly send a glare to the blonde for interrupting such a thing. You and him just chuckled at this, and he would give you a soft kiss on your lips — to tell you that he loves you — before finally running towards the court where the others were waiting.

Each one of them was your everything. So you knew it was the right thing to do to call someone that could bring you back to the happiest year of your life.

When life just seemed so perfect, when everything felt so right.

“Hey, Atsumu.”

“Hm?”

“Thank you.”

And you wished, that someday when God permits you to meet them again,

Everything would be just — fine.

Tagged Lovelies:

@muffins-puffins​ @quirksandbreaths @vlovers-world @blacckdiamondposts @atsunflower @hihiq @the-fandom-ness @murasakibaraa @verbluehte @simp4tsukkii @ladyalicevii @evermorehaikyuu @clowninfortodoroki @koutaroulovebot @fitriiaw @mistypoison @aquariarose @greenleaf-fantasy @t-amajiki @kuraomi @haikyuuwithadashofart @starbybokuto @shiningstar-byulxx @nerdyphantomlady @raequii @akasuns @sugawsites @macaronnv @spicyfoodboi @killuaking @edvigelacivetta + @yoitsseulgi @hhwangguttu @aurorahoneybuns​

[enbysiriusblack]

I keep posting non marauder content and I apologise (no i dont, you just have to deal with it)

BUT HERE GO, THE CONTENT YOU ACTUALLY WANT FROM ME (probably)

A lil Jily story of angst and fluff kind of:

(its not lil,, its pretty darn long)

tw. brief physical violence and stalking

Lily hated the summer holidays. Her sister always complaining about her return, her parents struggle with keeping Petunia calm while still spending time with Lily, and Severus' change of character once they were back in the muggle town.

But this summer, she had more to worry about. Severus still hadn't left her alone after their fall out. He had started waiting for her in the library, following her in between classes, and and watching her hanging out with her friends at Hogsmeade.

And now without her friends and the separate common rooms in the way, it would be even harder to avoid him and she was worried for her own safety.

So as she stepped off the train, said goodbye to her friends and walked towards her family. She was miserable.

And as the days of summer ticked by, Lily had locked herself in her bedroom. Not wanting to go downstairs in order to avoid the endless arguments and shouting of Petunia, and not wanting to go outside to avoid Severus stalking her and pleading with her to forgive him.

But after a few weeks, her parents urged her to get some sunlight and got her to go to the shop round the corner to grab a few things.

Carrying 2 bags, filled with milk, bread, toilet roll, laundry detergent, the daily newspaper, and a litre bottle of fanta; Lily left the shop. Only to spot Severus a few feet away, and hurriedly following her.

She started walking faster towards her house, but only a few metres a way from home, a hand sharply attached itself to her shoulder.

"Lily!! I'm trying to talk to you!!" He yelled.

Lily shook her shoulder, flinging his hand off it and back to his person.

"I've told you a million times!! Leave me alone!!" She yelled back.

"But I'm in love with you" he said, stepping forwards and about to touch her cheek.

She took a step back and scoffed, "you can't love someone while hating who they are"

"It's not your fault who you're born as, it doesn't matter to me. It's like a curse being put on you, but you can still overcome it. The dark Lord himself is a half blood like me! But we know we're better than that, we just have to overcome that set back." He replied, stepping closer and closer to Lily.

A loud crack sounded and blood ran down Snape's nose. He lifted a hand to his face and felt the blood pouring out. Her grocery bags fell to the floor.

"Being muggleborn is not a setback to overcome. Don't ever come near me again" she replied, before picking up her bags and heading back to her house without looking back once more.

.

The next morning, she looked out her window to see Snape standing outside, holding a bouquet of lilies.

She shut her blinds and hid in her room. As the days ticked by, she never left the house and Snape stood there hour after hour, bringing different assortments of gifts to compensate his inability to actually care about her.

She decided she had to leave for the rest of the holiday. But Mary was visiting family outside the country, Marlene and Dorcas were in Italy together to celebrate their anniversary. Then she remembered Remus was at home.

She owled Remus straight away and got a reply from him fairly quickly, accepting her request of staying at his till the holidays had ended.

So the next morning she packed her things, said goodbye to her mum, and drove with her dad to the train station around 7 am, before Snape arrived at the house.

It was a long, confusing train journey to Wales. But once she got there after hours on different trains, she spotted Remus and his mum sitting outside one of the station cafes.

Remus looked up as she walked towards them, and he moved over a piece of chocolate cake and his cup of tea to make more room for her on the small metal table.

Lily grabbed a seat from an empty table nearby and sat it down. Hope passed a menu over to Lily and she ordered a cup of tea and a a hot sausage roll. The three of them ate and drank before getting to Hope's yellow volkswagen van to get back to the Lupin cottage.

Once they got to the cottage, Hope showed Lily around the house and brought her stuff to Remus' bedroom.

"We don't have any spare rooms I'm afraid so I hope you don't mind sharing with Remus?" Hope asked her.

"No it's fine thank you" she replied.

"Alright, oh also I need to get some more herbs and plants for my stocks so I was going to go foraging tomorrow, would you two like to join me?"

Remus looked towards Lily to see her thoughts, she nodded at him in acceptance.

"Yeah we would" Remus said.

Hope lifted her hand to affectionately stroke Remus' curls before leaving the room.

.

The next day the Lupin's and Lily set out to the forest, Lyall deciding to join them as it was his day off work. All four were carrying small handmade baskets, Lyalls was full of picnic food for lunchtime, while the other's were empty for foraging.

Remus and Lily went ahead in a different direction, agreeing to meet up at the usual spot at lunch time.

As Remus and Lily went through the woods, Remus sometimes picking up certain plants and flowers and putting them in his basket, while Lily (not knowing much about foraging or what Hope needed) only picked flowers she liked and had decided to make a nice bouquet for Hope with them.

The two chatted as they walked, talking about what topics they're studying in their classes next year, about Snape, about their what they had been up to for the last few weeks.

Once they got back to the house, Remus started writing a letter to James and Sirius, who had run away to James' a few weeks ago. While Lily and Hope were downstairs talking, after Lily had given her the bouquet.

Around an hour later, all four were sitting on the lounge for dinner, the bouquet was placed on the middle of the wooden table as a centre piece inside a tall mug with a picture of Phil Bennett on.

After dinner, Lily and Remus went out. There wasn't much to do in the small village in the evening so they ended up in the middle of someone's field. The two sat on the hill for a few hours, stargazing and mindlessly talking about whatever came to mind.

The days went by, with Lily staying at Remus' place. The duo found themselves spending most of their time in a small bookshop cafe and walking through the woods, Remus smoking his weed and Lily sometimes Lily would take a hit but she wasn't as fond of it as Remus was.

With only a week and a half till school started again, Remus and Lily planned to go to hogsmeade together tomorrow.

But midday, two figures appeared walking towards the Lupin cottage just as Remus and Lily got back from their walk in the woods.

As the got closer to the two, they saw it was James and Sirius.

Remus dropped his joint to the floor and ran to the two standing by the door to his home.

He wrapped his arms around Sirius, but felt them freeze up at the touch. So Remus moved to stop the hug, but at that withdrawal, Sirius wrapped his own arms around Remus tightly with no sign of letting go.

The two stood there for a few minutes, wrapped in an embrace while Lily and James stood awkwardly nearby them.

"... hi" James said, waving at Lily, but since they were near each other, Lily had to move backwards to avoid getting hit by his hand.

James quickly withdrew his hand, and stepped back. He looked down at his hand for a few seconds, before bringing it up again and saluting Lily.

As he was half way through saluting her, he realised what he was doing and quickly brought it straight down to his side, and froze at Lily with unblinking eyes like a deer stuck in headlights.

She started laughing, affectively ending the hug between Remus and Sirius, who turned to look between Lily and James.

At that moment, Hope came inside, calling Lily for something and waved in greeting to James and Sirius.

After Lily had walked into the house, James grinned widely.

"She laughed at me!! She thinks I'm funny!"

"She was laughing AT you, cause she thinks you're a wanker" Remus corrected.

Sirius grinned slightly at the retort and grabbed Remus' hand.

Remus looked to Sirius and James realised Sirius would talk to Remus and Remus could help Sirius, even just slightly.

"I'll go see if Hope needs some more help" James said before turning to the cottage and giving Remus and Sirius some time alone.

Inside the cottage, James and Lily were setting up cutlery around the table and helping Hope with the dinner.

James noticed the flowers in the mug, "wow, these look really nice Hope, my mum keeps trying to make some nice flower arrangements for around the house but she's not very good at it. I made this red and gold one, go gryffindor!! for her birthday a few weeks ago but it was no where near as good as this one!!"

Hope came out of the kitchen carrying a saucepan of curry.

"Oh no honey, I didn't make that, that was all thanks to Lily" she said coming round the table and softly touching Lily's arm in gratitude.

"Oh" James said, freezing again as he stared back at Lily. "Its.. um.. its really good.. I like the uhh,, its good."

Lily raised an eyebrow at him, "thank you?"

James nodded, and tapped the table, trying to think of something else to say.

His eyes glanced over the the window, spotting Remus and Sirius sitting on the edge of the woods on a small bench, still talking and holding each others hand.

"I should probably go get them for dinner" he said, about to get out of his seat.

Hope waved her hand absentmindedly, "oh leave them its fine, the lovebirds can eat later"

A few minutes later, Lyall came back from work and sat at the table with them.

The four ate in fairly comfortable silence, sometimes having small conversations.

.

The next day they went to Hogsmeade.

Sirius waringly looking out for any of their family members as they walked around doing their shopping. Remus stood by xyr side the whole time, with James and Lily awkwardly leading the group together.

Peter found them a few hours later, he was shopping with zir mum but stayed with his friends for a while.

In Flourish and Blotts, Sirius and Remus seemed to have disappeared together in a fiction section, bonding over their mutual love of books packed with monsters and adventures and swordsmen.

Lily gazed at books on the shelf closest to her, sometimes bringing one up to her eye line and reading the blurb before putting it back on the shelf again.

James stood there with Peter, who he was very glad of, Peter acting as a distraction of the awkward silence between Lily and James.

So as Peter rambled about how he's so glad ze doesn't have to do potions anymore, James took his mind of trying to impress Lily and put his focus on listening to Peter.

However in the next moment, Peter made a very tactical decision of engaging Lily into the conversation.

"So Lily, I'm guessing you're still taking Potions this year?" Peter asked.

Lily turned around, one hand still lightly touching one of the books on the shelf.

"Yeah, but it sucks that none of my friends are taking it. I tried to get Remus to change his mind and take it for weeks.. and then he blew up half the kitchen trying to make pasta sauce and realised my efforts were futile."

James laughed, "thats Remus, alright"

Lily looked over at him, contemplating. Before nodding her head and smiling slightly as she turned back to the bookshelf.

After around five minutes, Peter chiped up.

"Oh!! James is taking Potions still aren't you? You said you're dad really wanted you to get a Potion Newt. You two can hang out in class"

James sent Peter a 'what the hell' glare before Lily nodded again and clearly said the words,

"I guess we could, its better than the chance of getting stuck with Sev- Snape for the rest of the year... are you any good?"

James froze, "um.. yeah, yeah.. well no, not really to be honest"

Lily smiled again, "thats fine, I'm hood enough for the both of us"

She took a book off the shelf and kept it in her arms for the first time. And then walked back to James and Peter.

"If I'm helping you in Potions though, you've gotta help me with transfiguration."

She lifted up the book in her arms to show the cover, the transfiguration book they needed this year.

"I skimmed this a little, and it barely made any sense at all."

James lifted a hand to his hair, ruffling it up on a nervous habit.

"Minnie gave me a group of younger years to tutor last year, maybe you could come to those? .. not that I think you're as dumb as first and second years, far from it, you're one of the smartest people I know. But I just mean that a lot of our topics this year our ones that we did in first and second year but with more context and more advanced. So I thought that if you revised the basics then the more advanced parts would make more sense to you.. if you wanted?"

"Yeah that sounds great" she said, before moving to another bookshelf and flicking through it.

The rest of the day, the two of them talked and talked. And back at Remus' cottage Lily walked up to him before he had to leave with Sirius.

"Today was fun, friends?" She asked.

James nodded, "friends"

As him and Sirius left, Sirius hit his shoulder.

"What were you and Lily talking about? Declaring your undying love for her?"

James shook his head, "We're just friends, I need to just... move on i guess, friends is as best as it'll get. And its enough for me."

[seat-safety-switch]

There is a spectre haunting humanity. This spectre has caused untold waste, environmental damage, and anxiety. I speak, of course, of our collective inability to get that last little bit of liquid out of a container.

Have you ever thrown away a paint can even though there were a few drips left at the bottom? Maybe tossed a bottle of beer that you just can't seem to get that last little bit of dregs out of? Of course you have. And if you take the small amount that you wasted, and multiply it by the number of people on the planet, then we got a real problem on our hands.

When I took over NASA at the start of the year with those fake junk bonds and "Bytecoins," this was the exact kind of problem I wanted to solve. Humanity would be extinct within a few generations if we didn't get off the extractive treadmill, and what better way to do it than to use the entire buffalo, as it were?

Once we built a couple of working prototypes, I had some interns go out into the community to look for examples of "leftovers" that we could use as examples when we applied for more government funding. One of the interns came back with like a good-sized jerry can of stinky gasoline. He was laughing his ass off, hysterical as only a man who has defeated The Man could be.

Turns out gas stations can't get the last little bit out of their tanker trucks and filler hoses, either, and he ended up driving up and down the Strip, filling up his little can with free gasoline that was just going to get thrown away. Free gasoline! I immediately swore him to secrecy, then told security to lock his ass up until we could draft a good PR strategy for breaking this to the oil industry. It was too late.

Some black-suited oil industry goons had been having a lunch break at one of the Kum 'N' Gos that my humble intern chose to raid. After figuring out what he was up to, they decided to tail him all the way to the NASA offices. They wanted our invention, so that it could be destroyed! I offered to show them another invention that the lab engineers had been working on: the front end of my Volare, spit-polished with so much care that concours judges would now declare it "badly tarnished."

Did you know how much blood is left over in the human body after most folks would declare it "exsanguinated?" It's a good half-litre or so, just going to waste. And you can turn that blood in for money!

[vipclifford]

Wildflower

Soulmate AU where things in your life appear as flowers tattooed on your skin, each with their own meaning. Inspired by this enjoltaire fic because it bangs and a little bit of skam s2.

Chapter One

Calum set his neatly wrapped gift for Michael upon the designated table deep into the living room, conveniently placed next to what was to become the drinks table. He turned around upon hearing a thud behind him only to find Luke watching the bottles roll away from his feet, hand still gripping the handles of a ruptured plastic bag.

“For fucks sake, Luke,” Calum chuckled as he strolled over, an amused smile on his lips. “What made you think that carrying ten litres worth of drinks in a plastic bag would be a good idea?”

“I didn’t think,” he confessed with a small laugh, his unbuttoned shirt showing the place where the green carnation met the bold amaryllis on his chest.

Luke had grown so much since the small carnation bloomed on his chest while watching ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in his english class, aged thirteen. He was confused when everyone began to whisper something he could clearly tell was about him when getting changed for PE. He was confused when someone yelled “Luke’s a faggot!” while pointing to where he felt a tingling sensation a few hours prior. He was confused until he looked down at his chest, realisation finally dawning on him. That same day a second flower appeared on his ribcage. A geranium, symbolising true friendship, as Calum defended him to the class. Calum’s ankle bloomed the same flower too. It took years before the proud amaryllis bloomed by its side, Luke finally ready to show the world his pride.

Calum carried the bottles to the table two by two while Luke unloaded the mixers from the other bag with angelica covered hands. Inspiration.

The birthday boy finally walked in with a wide grin, arms excitedly dropping over his two friends’ shoulders in an attempt to hug them simultaneously while they wished him a happy birthday.

“Thank you, and thanks for helping boys,” Michael told them cheerfully, breath exposing the celebratory shot he had already taken before the party had even started. “I think we ought to put half of these outside so it’s not too crowded in here, don’t you think?” He asked the pair, arm going over Luke’s head to clutch the vodka.

Michael’s forearm was covered from wrist to elbow in pale blue forget-me-nots, the soulmate flower that represented true love. He got it on that trip to Bali all those years ago when he met Charlotte and greeted her with a one armed hug, forget-me-nots blooming where his arm met her back. Luke’s left shoulder was also decorated by the same flower from when Adrián, his current boyfriend, tapped it to grab his attention, returning the wallet he had oh-so-conveniently left upon the table.

Calum didn’t have forget-me-nots.

“I think that your wish is my command, birthday boy,” Calum agreed, grabbing two bottles by the neck to take them outside. That’s where he found Ashton, lining the edge of every surface with LED lights.

Ashton couldn’t bloom. No friendly geraniums, no innocent daisies, no humble bluebells. No flower, no matter how deeply he felt any emotion, decorated his skin. He cried in Calum’s arms the day his soulmate bloomed the forget-me-nots under his touch. He cried because he thought he wouldn’t have a soulmate; cried because a part of him hoped that if any flower was powerful enough to etch his skin, it would be the one to represent the truest and deepest of loves. Tattoos of any flower were illegal so Ashton always hid the skin he was ashamed of beneath long-sleeved clothes. As much as Calum hated his flowers, he was glad he wasn’t like Ashton. He would hate to be an outcast.

“Who’s up for a duet?” yelled a voice where the karaoke machine was set up, a few hours into Michael’s birthday bash. Something deep within him compelled Calum to leave his beer in Luke’s hand and join in, taking a microphone from the stranger’s hand.

He had never seen anyone like her.

Flowers were etched into every bit of skin Calum’s eyes could reach. Chrysanthemums, lavenders, lilacs, bluebells and peonies, and that was only what he could see on the arm she had extended towards him. Joy, distrust, confidence, humility, shame. She lifted a brow at his looming gaze, equal parts accustomed and displeased, before hitting start.

There was a three second countdown before Calum sang the opening of ‘The Time Of My Life,’ encouraging the surrounding crowd to cheer. He smiled watching Michael pull Charlotte into his arms to dance with him. Smiled as everyone else paired off to sway to the music or sang along. Smiled at the girl when he faced her to harmonise in the chorus, eyes subconsciously dropping to the pink camellia on her collarbone. Longing and desire. She turned away with a frown to face the lyrics instead, away from Calum’s curious eyes. She refused to meet his eyes again until the song ended with the cheers from Michael’s friends.

“I’m sorry,” Calum said as he chased behind the girl, her eye on the drinks table. “I didn’t mean to offend you in any way, I’m really sorry.”

“You can’t be that sorry if you did it twice,” she replied with an air of false carelessness, grabbing an empty cup. He had to lean close to hear her, close enough to smell the sweetness of her perfume. She was quick to pull away before he accidentally grazed the colourful skin of her shoulder, refusing to let him into her personal space. “Here’s a quick tip: you’ve got a couple neurons and muscles to control where your eyes go, might wanna try using them sometime.” The malice in her voice struck deep into Calum’s marrow who was left there dumbfounded, watching her curls bounce as she walked away with a fresh rum and coke.

He didn’t see her again for the rest of the party.

Calum traced over the pink carnation on his wrist: the symbol of motherly love. Apparently he bloomed it at age two on a hot summer’s day at the pool. Being the mischievous toddler he was, he took advantage of his parents being distracted while looking for his snack to run off towards the big pool and hop into the water. His mother’s heart dropped once she noticed his little legs running away. He was only submerged for a few seconds before a nearby swimmer hoisted him up and out, the poor toddler crying from the shock. His mother told him off as she held the tearful boy to her chest, not letting Calum out of her arms once for the rest of their day out. A smile pulled at her lips when she noticed the flower later on in the evening, one of the first since the careless incident. She was happy that his first bloom was something he would be able to treasure for the rest of his life.

“Pass me the silver one,” ordered Michael, snapping Calum out of his thoughts. He nodded, pulling the requested tinsel from the cardboard box to give to his friend. It was the first week of december, a week closer to partying like crazy as the clock strikes twelve, and Calum found himself helping Michael decorate his christmas tree.

“Shouldn’t you be doing this with Charlotte?” Calum couldn’t help but ask as he untangled the blue tinsel, “just seems like a very coupley thing to do.”

“Are you insinuating that we’re not a couple?” teased his friend as he spun around the tree, strategically wrapping the silver tinsel around the leaves. “And no, because apparently I turned into a bossy little bitch last year and she doesn’t feel like dealing with that again.”

“And yet she still married you, bossy little bitch and all,” Calum commented as they chuckled.

“That’s what soulmates are for.”

Calum hummed, the topic of soulmates and love always being the one to silence him. It’s not that he didn’t believe in love, he saw it every day. He saw the love Michael felt for Charlotte when he teared up as she walked down the aisle. He saw the love Luke felt for Adrián whenever he’d surprise Luke with whatever flower he picked on his way to see him, ready to tuck it into his curls. He could see the love Ashton felt for Rosie when he couldn’t seem to let go of her hand, no matter where they were. Calum couldn’t deny the existence of love. What he could deny however was the existence of his own soulmate, someone who’s character complimented his own in every aspect. Someone who would be willing to deal with his ups and downs and love him every step of the way. The concept just seemed too unrealistic to the pessimistic man.

“Cheer up, you’ll find her,” Michael reassured him with a comforting squeeze to the shoulder, knowing exactly where his friend’s mind had run off. Calum offered him a tight-lipped smile as he placed the final bauble on a branch, stepping back to watch Michael place the star up top. The doorbell rang a few seconds later, eliciting a delighted cheer from the pair.

“I’ll get the pizza, try not to fall off of the stool while I’m gone,” Calum joked as he made his way towards the door.

That’s when he saw her.

The flowers that filled every inch of her arms were covered by a woollen jumper this time, but it was still her. She looked surprised too, not expecting him to be the one to receive her at the door. Her surprised expression only lasted a few seconds it morphed into a displeased demeanour.

“Are you going to let me in, or what?” she asked him coldly, clearly unamused by his presence. Calum muttered an apology under his breath as he moved out of the doorway, shutting the door once she was in Michael’s apartment. He shot his friend a confused look as he watched him engulf her in a hug.

“Rory didn’t have anything to do this evening so I just invited her to hang out with us. That’s fine with you, right?” Michael told Calum quietly when she had gone to grab them some beers from the kitchen, earning an approving hum from Calum. Unlike Rory, he didn’t have a grudge against her.

Something made Calum feel out of place as he sat with them on the sofa, silently eating his pizza as they made comments about the film he didn’t choose to watch. He’d occasionally hum in agreement with Michael’s opinions regarding the scene. He wasn’t expecting Rory, or anyone for that matter, to show up and spoil the time he wanted to spend with his friend. He hated feeling out of control of the situation. He hated feeling like an outsider.

“I looked for you, you know?” Calum muttered when Michael went to answer Charlotte’s call, knowing they’d have a good few minutes to themselves.

“You’re stalking me?” Rory questioned with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, giving him a quick glance.

“I meant at the party,” Calum explained, holding back a ‘dumbass’ while running a hand through his blonde locks. “I wanted to apologise to you again.”

“Look, Cam,” she said, turning to face the apologetic man. “I don’t need your apology. You saying sorry does literally nothing, so save it. Everyone else manages to stare at my shitty blooms without repenting. I doubt it’ll be hard for you to learn to do the same.” There was that malice again, the same poison she spoke with last time. Calum was taken aback by how coldly Rory treated him. He didn’t understand the reason behind her harsh words, nor why she wouldn’t just accept it and move on. At this point, he didn’t want to either.

“What’s wrong with you?” frustration forced Calum to ask, aggravated with her behaviour. “I know your blooms are personal and I know I shouldn’t have stared at them, but that doesn’t justify you acting like a bitch towards me. What happened that made you have such an inferiority complex that you just have to be rude to people who try to be nice to you to feel cool?” Calum spat, arms folding over his chest. “Were you never validated as a child, or what? Did mommy never compliment your drawings? Or did daddy never come to any of your ballet recitals? You were still wearing an A cup 8th grade and you were bullied for it?” He questioned replicating the tone she had used to talk to Cal. “Whatever it is, you have to seriously get over it and start behaving like a normal fucking person. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and grow up.”

Suddenly, Calum began to feel a tingling sensation on his hip, cutting off his furious speech. Rory watched in confusion as he lifted up his shirt to see his new bloom, horror painting his features as he realised what flower he will be tainted with forever. A petunia. Anger. Neither of them spoke as Calum slowly let go of the fabric, hoping to calm down as soon as possible. And then he left. Calum just stood up and walked out of the room, out of the apartment, out into the streets. He sat in his car, staring blankly at the steering wheel. Nobody wanted a bad bloom. And Calum now had two.

Calum’s phone buzzed in his pocket, probably Michael asking for an explanation for his sudden departure. But it wasn’t Michael. It was a message from an unknown number.

“I’m sorry.”

[iceslushii]

Shattered Glass

*inspired by vanoss-luigi's 'footage' fanfic*

chapter: 10

word count: 5,803

characters: BasicallyIDoWrk, BigJigglyPanda and Moo

tw: none that i know of (!!if i forget to put a warning for anything please let me know as i'm not very good at knowing what trigger warnings to include!!)

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

For the next three days, Panda, Moo and Basically had no idea what to do. They wanted to go back and try and save what could potentially be their friends, but at the same time didn't know how. On the fourth day, however..

"Not answering it." Basically said as someone knocked on the door. "I don't think any of us will." Panda sighed as he stacked the papers- which had been left in the radio room for at least 2 days- back up, making sure to check for the most important ones to bury at the bottom. "..I'll do it." Moo nervously made his way to the door, and when he opened it, nobody was there. He unknowingly stepped on a piece of paper on the floor moments later, so when he realised there was something under his feet, he picked it up and rolled it up like a newspaper before bringing it inside. "What's that?" "It's a piece of paper I found outside. Nobody was there, so I'm worried about it." He spread it out onto the coffee table that separated the sofas from a fireplace that hadn't been used in who knows how long, and after Panda got downstairs, the three read it: 一: Gather 3 mushrooms, at least 2 have to be red. 二: Also collect 4 bits of glass. 三: Thorns are too a mandatory ingredient. 四: Mix them all together, making sure to chop the mushrooms into small pieces. 五: Add exactly half a litre of water. 六: Let it stand for at least half an hour. "..what is this?" "More importantly, what is it for?" Basically, Panda and Moo looked at each other in confusion before standing up pretty much at the same time. Moo picked up the piece of paper and turned it around, where he found the following: (Guérir un de vos amis avec cette recette) "Wait.. look at the bottom.." Panda pointed out, Moo's attention now on something that was barely readable: (Cure one of your friends with this recipe) "If I squint hard enough.. it says cure one of your friends with this recipe." "Oh? Should we trust it?" "I think so." The three decided to group up and begin collecting the items needed for whatever they had discovered. After nearly a day, they had scrounged up everything but 2 red mushrooms. "Where do we find red mushrooms?" Moo began pondering as the 3 arrived back at their cabin. "Who knows, perhaps we can find some tomorrow." Panda said as he went upstairs, exhausted, Basically and Moo following not long after. The next day arrived and Basically was the first awake. He started preparing breakfast and began planning what the 3 remaining should do. "Hey, Marcel." Moo came downstairs, putting his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Morning, Brock." Basically finished flipping a pancake and placed it on a plate nearby before handing it to Moo. "Oh, thank you!" Moo smiled before going over to the sofas. "Yeah, no problem!" Basically began making another one for when Panda arrived. "Hey." Panda stole the pancake Basically was flipping as soon as he put it on another plate, Marcel laughing as he did so. "Thank you!" He yelled as he sat next to Brock, Marcel joining them moments later. "The only time I'm never nervous is when we do things like this." Moo mentioned after roughly a minute of silence. "Me too." Panda responded. "I think everyone else would agree." Basically had the recipe from yesterday out on the coffee table. "Still need 2 red mushrooms." "Don't start discussing without us!" Panda exclaimed, placing his plate next to the paper. After a few minutes, both Moo and Panda were helping Basically figure out where to get the final ingredient, and not long after they headed out in search for it. "Not over here." Moo called to his friends. "Yeah, can't find any here either." Panda responded. "Oh, found some!" Basically collected 2 red mushrooms and the three grouped up together, hoping to get their friends back. "Let's hope this works.." Panda said as they returned. Basically grabbed a bowl from one of the kitchen cupboards as his friends gathered the materials they'd obtained. "So.. the recipe said 3 mushrooms, two have to be red." Moo started reading the instructions out. "Then 4 bits of glass." "Okay, okay.. what next?" Basically asked after putting those ingredients in. "Thorns.. doesn't say how many, but thorns nonetheless. Uh.. chop the mushrooms into small pieces and mix all those ingredients together somehow." "Yep.. done! Is there anything else?" "Mhm. Add exactly half a litre of water.. then let it stand for at least half an hour." "..alright! So, I guess we wait for.. an hour, I guess." Basically ruled as he put the bowl on the coffee table. For the next hour, they read the notes Panda had stacked in the radio room, then they went outside for a little bit, and waited the last 15 minutes out by talking about everyone who'd gone missing. "I think it's been about an hour now." Panda declared. "Yeah.. feels like its been about 6, though. There isn't much to do anymore.. not saying you guys were boring, though." Moo sighed as Basically poured the bowl into a bottle. "I understand what you mean, Brock. I feel that way too.. wait, this is way runnier than I remember." "Oh? Maybe leaving it for an hour did something to make it that way." "Could be.. anyway, what do we do now?" "Leave it outside their hideout? Or outside our house?" "Yeah. I'll do it." Basically left the house, leaving his friends worried. "I wonder what's gonna happen?" Panda told Moo. Before they knew it, Basically had come back. "That was quick. Where'd you put it?" "Near the hideout.. but not directly at the door.. I ran as soon as I put it down.." Basically sat down between Panda and Moo as he spoke. "Oh, okay. Well.. all we can do is wait at this point." Panda said, curious.

"What is this? Did one of the three remaining leave it here? ..guess I'll try it." ..Footsteps headed towards the cabin could be heard, followed by a knock seconds later. "Hello?"

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

this one is rather long but its probably my favourite chapter so far its really descriptive imo shattered glass is getting more attention than i expected-

[susiequaz12]

Whumptober 28- Such Wow. Many Normal. Very Oops.

Alrighty- day 28 of whumptober, and part 10 of Ira the bird boi’s story. The rest of his story can be found here. @imagination1reality0 @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whump-me-all-night-long 

Prompt: Accidents. CW: restraints, whumpee sold for parts, needles needles needles, also blood, some medical whump maybe? (Ira’s blood is magical so they’re taking it to be sold), whumpee treated like an object- nonhuman whumper. (I won’t be offended if yall’s don’t read this cause of needles- I don’t like them either but it makes for good whump sometimes.)

- - -

“How many orders did we get in?” The man in the white coat was pacing down the hallway as Sir fiddled with a stack of papers.

“About 25 so far. Each wants at least an ounce, but there are a few asking for more. They’re willing to pay double what’s asked for the extra ounces so fill those orders first, got it?”

Sir handed the stack of papers to the doctor and walked with him down the hall where a few other people were standing. A few of them had boxes filled with small bottles and the others had packaging supplies- bubble wrap, postage stickers- boxes and things.

“Okay- extract it right into the vials and get it addressed and sent to shipment as soon as possible. The more fresh it stays- the better.” Sir helped the doctor go over the orders and amounts that each person wanted as the people began filing into the small room. “We’ve had a few people pay in advance- so their orders go out first. We don’t ship the orders until payment has been received, understand?”

The doctor nodded. He made a few scribbles across the paper and then filed into the room after all the other workers.

The creature lied still on a medical chair- like one that you would find in a dentist’s office. It’s wrists and ankles were restrained and larger bands wrapped around it’s upper legs, torso, and neck. It was barely dressed in anything- and shivered where it lay- eyes wide open with the fear and the cold. The man could see the dark feathers underneath its back from where its wings were curled up underneath him. 

“Alright- let’s get started.” The man commanded.

Ira didn’t know what was happening.

He only knew that he had been pulled out of his cage that morning and tied up in this chair. He couldn’t move- couldn’t wiggle- and he was so scared.

So scared of what they were going to do to him. 

The man had a tray full of small, shiny things. Things that looked sharp- and others that were brightly colored and strange.

Ira flinched as something scratchy was wrapped around his arm. He squeezed tightly and he winced- flinching again as a second one was tied around his other arm.

The man gripped his arm in his hand- and Ira realized how little he was- the man’s entire hand dwarfed Ira’s forearm- he could have snapped it like a twig if he wanted to…

But instead his fingers poked and prodded, turning and twisting the limb to inspect it further.

“Funny- the veins are so dark against its skin- they stand out so clearly.” The man said.

Then there was cold on the crook of his arm- and then pain.

It wasn’t too much pain- but a slight pinch nonetheless that made him whimper as it prodded his arm.

And then he felt it inside of him.

He gasped and cried out as the man fussed, wiggling the obtrusive item around his arm, before it was pulled out.

“Okay- they’re visible, but apparently they don’t want to be punctured- interesting…”

The man was talking to himself- and Ira wished he had had more time with Nola to learn more of these strange words that he still didn’t understand.

And then the pain came again. 

It was harsher this time- the sharp thing digging- moving around inside of him and Ira cried.

“Stop- it hurts- just stop- please-”

But then it stopped moving. He still felt it inside of him- but it had stopped moving.

But it was still inside of him.

And then it happened all over again on his other arm.

He sat there- fists clenched with these things inside of him, tears pouring down his face as the man collected other supplies- hustling and bustling around him. 

Other things were attached the needle in his arm- and soon his blood was being withdrawn.

Ira could literally feel the tools and items pulling the blood out of his veins- and he panicked.

“No! That’s mine- stop- my blood- I- I need that!”

But they didn’t stop.

His blood was emptied into vials that were stuck with labels that were wrapped in styrofoam that were packaged in boxes. To be given to people- that were not him.

People who it didn’t belong to- people who didn’t need Ira’s blood as much as Ira needed his own blood.

His limbs grew weaker as they continued- and he worried how much they were going to take. He found himself unable to even wiggle a finger or move his head as he felt that liquid slowly draining from him.

They had a few boxes ready to be shipped- and Ira was getting concerned- they showed no sign of stopping.

“Please, my- I need that- that’s my blood, I need-”

And then he did something he didn’t think he’d have the courage to do.

He spoke- their words.

“Stop.” he issued the single word as clearly as his body would let him. “Stop- p-please. No-”

And the room did stop. 

Every hand dropped, every head turned, and every eye stared.

One quiet voice piped up.

“I- I didn’t think he could-”

“Shut up and get back to work.” The man in charge stated. All eyes and heads turned away and the hands returned back to their duties.

Ira’s mouth closed as well as the man came to look him in the face. 

“I better not hear anything else out of you understand? Keep that puny little mouth shut or I’ll make you be quiet.”

Ira barely had the strength to nod- so he closed his mouth tightly instead.

Several rounds of blood later, Ira had stayed quiet.

Almost too quiet.

The doctor looked up from his work and cursed.

He looked clammy- at least what clammy would be for someone with already natural white/grey skin. But he was sweating down his forehead, his eyes had drooped closed, and his breath was nearly nonexistent.

“Hey! How many bottles do we have?” The doctor asked. People mumbled about trying to get a concise number.

“How many bottles do we have!”

“43.” Someone shouted back.

The doctor struggled to do the quick math in his head. An ounce per bottle- how many ounces per litres- and with however much blood this thing had in it’s body- it-

They’d taken almost half of all his blood supply.

No wonder he looked dead.

The doctor swore again- just as Sir walked into the room to check up on everything.

“How’s it going-” Sir stopped. “What’s wrong with it?”

The doctor stumbled over his words as he tried to remove the needles and tubes from the creature.

“We- I- was trying to fill the orders and I accidentally- took- withdrew- I withdrew too much blood Sir- it should be- it-”

His stuttered attempts at words were cut off as the man struck him to the ground. The doctor gripped his face and scrambled backwards to his feet.

“You accidentally. Drew. Too. Much. Blood.” Sir cowered over the other man as the workers sat there in silence. “Hmm? How do you accidentally draw too much blood? I asked you to fill a couple of orders, not to kill it! How can I run a business if the source of income is dead because of someone’s accident?”

Sir grabbed him by the collar and dragged him over to the door.

“Get out! You’re accident has cost you your job- leave.”

“But sir- I- I, please-”

Sir threw him fiercely out of the door and he tumbled into the hallway.

“I said, leave.”

Shivers went down everyone’s spine as Sir issued the command. His voice stern- but quiet. With a fierce calm to it light the wind before a storm.

“Everyone else- leave.”

No one hesitated to do as he asked.

As soon as the room was empty the man approached the creature- still tied down to the chair. He loosened the bands around his neck and wrists and pulled the needles out of his arms.

The man looked at it gently, and then placed a hand atop of its head- running fingers slowly through the pale blue hair.

Sir shook his head and let out a concerned chuckle.

“You’re either going to be the death of me- or the saving grace to this company.”

[cottonwoolsocks]

Jump In, The Water’s Fine

AO3 | Masterlist

Summary: A beach trip on which Roman forgets the drinking water, Patton gets an injury, Virgil wants ice-cream, and Logan blames himself for everything that goes wrong.

Word Count: 8025 Genre: Human AU, hurt/comfort Characters: Logan, Virgil, Roman, Patton Relationships: platonic LAMP

Warnings: minor injury description, the ocean, sharks, sensory overload, panic attack

If I need to tag anything else, let me know!

———

Every page of Logan’s prized copy of How to Be A Stoic was now soiled with a fine layer of sand that burrowed into the spine, nestling itself there for the rest of the book’s existence—which would be a long time, if he had anything to say about it. Sand had a funny habit of managing to creep into every space except those where it was supposed to be.

At least Patton and the others seemed to be having fun.

The beach trip had been Patton's idea, but Roman had been quick to agree and Virgil appeared to be enjoying himself, Roman and Patton adding the finishing touches to a magnificent sandcastle as Virgil paused to wipe his brow. A shovel was in his hand and a large mound of sand sat to one side, courtesy of his last half-hour of labour and the foot-wide moat now encircling the design. Spotting Logan watching them, he waved, Logan half-heartedly raising a hand in response. Virgil motioned him over to them, a question hanging in the air, but Logan was quick to shake his head. Virgil nodded, giving a gesture of understanding before planting his shovel in the sand and turning to help Roman in decorating the castle the eclectic mix of seashells Patton had just returned with.

Logan sighed.

At least they were all enjoying themselves, even if he was feeling more uncomfortable than the time he’d had to sleep in the backseat of a car lodged deep in the middle of a muddy field while Roman attempted to choreograph a particularly violent sleep-dance routine—and he’d had the bruises to show for it.

His book had been a far shorter read than he had hoped, and he had not brought his second book by Patton’s request: they had already packed enough beach bags for a small orchestra, perhaps Logan could forgo his second book in lieu of Virgil’s sun top and a deflated beach ball, rather than adding another to their dowry? Logan had been skeptical, especially since Roman had still managed to sneak in his sketchbook, and neither the beach ball nor the sketchbook had been more than glanced at longways since they had arrived.

But, he supposed, they had only been there for—he checked his watch—two and a half hours. He frowned, checking again and wondered if he had forgotten to replace the batteries—but, he supposed, his perception of time did seem to travel faster when he was enjoying a particularly stimulating book. He had already drunk most of his water bottle, making sure to stay adequately hydrated in the stifling heat, but noted with concern that all but one of the other bottles in the box remained untouched.

Glancing over to the others on the sands, he weighed his options as Patton celebrated the completion of the castle by attempting to clamber on top of it and sending half the east wall tumbling into the moat, and Logan ultimately decided the others’ health was more important than his own comfort. Rolling his eyes a little at their lack of concern for their own wellbeing, he gathered the three other bottles from the lunch box, made sure the towel he was laying on was suitably held down by a multitude of left sandals, and braced himself for the heat.

It was always hotter than he expected.

The heat, which only felt skin-deep in the shade, now seemed to penetrate all the way through his body and then out of the other side, only to hit the sand and bounce back again. Figuratively, of course; there was no way for heat to actually travel in such a manner. That said, had Logan not known the science behind heat and reflection, he would have assumed his previous conclusion to be correct.

The soles of Logan’s feet burned on the sand as he bounced an odd hopping jog towards the others whilst juggling a precarious armful of sloshing water bottles, one sandal holding down a corner of his towel and the other awol, and wondered not for the first time what it was about a large, heat-reflective expanse of crushed seashells that was so very attractive to such a huge number of people.

“Lo!” called Patton as he spotted him approaching and waved excitedly, white sundress billowing with the movement. “We made a castle!” He giggled as he gestured proudly to the sandy mound, which more closely resembled a forlorn pile of sludge than a deliberate structure now it was missing most of the east side.

“I’m pleased you're enjoying yourself. However, you have all been neglecting your own health. It is vital to stay hydrated, moreso when in direct heat.” He nodded to the water bottles in his arms.

“Thanks, Specs,” called Roman from where he had tumbled into the castle’s moat on the other side in an attempt to stop Patton from tripping over earlier. He raised his hand, palm open and facing Logan. “Toss me one!”

Logan could feel the sun beating down onto the back of his neck, and the warmth warned him he'd be getting sunburn soon if he didn't retreat to the shade. His arms were sticky with suncream as he shuffled the bottles around, handing one each to Patton and Virgil—

“Thank you, Lo!”

“Thanks.”

—and tossing the other over the top of the sandcastle and into Roman’s waiting hand.

“Wanna come swim with us, Lo?” asked Patton, screwing the lid back onto his now half-emptied water bottle and giving it an experimental swish.

Logan shook his head, already taking half a step back. Even the thought of the salty water, the unknown creatures waiting within, and the inevitability of wet sand sticking to him was making his skin prickle with discomfort. “No, thank you, Patton. I would— I have my book to finish.”

He could feel Virgil’s hard stare digging into him, but dared not turn to meet it. He could tell he knew he was holding something back, but there was nothing Logan could do but hope it would remain unmentioned, left alone. Surely, the others would get bored soon. Surely, as the height of the afternoon approached, they would begin to feel the heat.

“Suit yourself!” said Roman, tossing a handful of sand towards Patton’s knees and rocketing off towards the ocean waves—but not before making sure to massage a wet clump of sand from somewhere in the depths of the moat into Virgil’s as-yet clean hair.

Patton shrieked gleefully and tore after Roman, and whatever Virgil had been going to say was evidently less important than his revenge as he offered naught more than a farewell gesture and a third pair of footprints joined those already gone.

Logan watched them run for a moment, wistful, as the wind caught in their hair and Patton clutched his sunhat to stop it blowing away. Roman reached the waves first, running in as far as he could before dropping to his chest and beginning to swim, treading water as first Virgil and then Patton caught up with him, out of breath. Virgil kicked a wide arc of water towards Roman, who spluttered as the water washed over his face, but he didn’t seem to mind the salt as he retaliated with a sweeping wake of his own. Patton stood to one side, out of the way of the salty battle, sundress bundled in his hands as he hopped over the smaller waves and cheered.

Logan had half a mind to join them after all, but then he noticed the three water bottles abandoned at his feet, water warming as the temperature continued to climb, and the cloudless sky, their unsupervised bags, the opacity of the water—and banished the thought from his mind. Someone had to be responsible, after all. 

So, he gathered the bottles from amongst the discarded buckets and shovels, feet burning on the dust of seashells, and hurried back to the umbrella.

Logan felt a little consolation in the fact they had found this little alcove. The more popular beaches had been a considerably shorter drive, but the four of them much preferred somewhere with a little more peace and room to build sandcastles. Most of this beach was spotted with visitors, but they were generously interspersed, families relaxing in little spots along the sands as children played alongside, and the ocean was free enough of people that Logan was actually able to determine which of the little figures were his friends.

Deciding he may as well make use of his time now that the others seemed thoroughly occupied with their next activity, he packed the bottles neatly back into the insulated lunch box to keep them cool, and cast around for the cool box containing the refill bottles. Not spotting it on the sands, he moved to root around in the two larger duffel bags they had brought for the rest of their things, wondering if Roman had perhaps put the cool box inside one of them so as to lessen the number of items they had to carry down.

Moving aside yet another of Roman’s untouched sketchbooks—how did he manage to get all of these past Patton?—and an assortment of towels, he dug all the way to the bottom, and was unsurprised to see the layer of sand lining the material despite Logan’s certainty that this bag had never, even once before, been near a beach. He didn’t think it had even been opened since they got here, and yet the granules had worked their way into the seams, the towels, even between the pages of the sketchbook.

Logan had no doubt there would have been sand in the cool box, too, had there been a cool box to speak of.

Frowning, he moved onto the second of their bags, despite having been sure this one was only for the more delicate items, like the croissants, and the butter, and Virgil’s insulin pack—definitely not the sort of place you would put a heavy cool box with eight litres of water.

Just as expected, there was no box in sight, and he huffed in annoyance. This had been Roman’s responsibility, but clearly he had been too preoccupied with squeezing as many sketchbooks into as many bags as he possibly could, without even an intent to use them.

But— no, that wasn’t fair. Logan should have checked—it was his responsibility, too, to make sure they had everything they needed. He’d been negligent, and their health would suffer as a result. He should have been more thorough; he would make a note of that, for next time.

Perhaps it was back in the car? It wasn’t impossible. Logan had only made sure of the two large bags coming down to the beach, and hadn’t checked the car for anything forgotten—another lapse in judgement, on his part. 

He cast around for his sandals and was not surprised to see neither of them as he resigned himself to two left sandals belonging to Roman and Virgil respectively, folding the towel so it wouldn’t blow away and zipping the bags closed again. The others were still down at the water, facing away from him, Roman having swum a little ways out as Virgil and Patton played chicken with the waves. Logan observed them for a moment, shading his glasses from the sun so the light wouldn’t reflect, and once satisfied they would cope in the few minutes he would be gone, grabbed the keys and set a brisk pace towards the cars.

The sand still managed to work its way between his toes and he could physically feel the heat waves bouncing onto his exposed legs, sweat making his glasses slip down his nose incessantly until he gave up trying to right them and simply held them in place. The long line of parked cars grew steadily closer, heat distorting the air around the metal, and Logan was not looking forward to having to root around inside their very own microwave oven. Somehow, the number of vehicles just kept increasing as families and groups of friends arrived to enjoy the summer heat; Logan could not understand why they had all chosen the height of the afternoon to spend their time here, when the sun was at its hottest and the beach at its busiest, but all the same, there they were, inflating beach balls and unfolding parasols.

Sidestepping a bearded man pushing a double stroller, Logan fumbled for the keys in his pocket, clammy hands almost dropping them as he tried to find the button.

The lights flashed as the vehicle unlocked and he pulled the door open, wrenching his hand away with a hiss as it clicked and the metal seared his skin. He eyed his hand disdainfully, the skin already tinged darker. Balling up his fist, he shoved it into the pocket of his shorts to worry about later as he waited for the more intense heat to circulate out of the body of the car, hoping it would be just a little less overbearing when he had to dive in in a moment.

Satisfied he had allowed as much aeration time as was plausible, he rested one knee on the inside seat, careful to avoid the hot metal of the car’s body as he cast around for anywhere one might stash a cooler box—but every foot space was as empty as the seats themselves and he could only hope that the boot would grant him more luck.

The boot, it turned out, was just as bare, save yet another of Roman’s sketchbooks half-hidden under a blanket they had chosen not to bring down to the beach itself. Logan sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and biting his tongue as he tried not to let his frustrations get the better of him.

That said, this had been Roman’s responsibility, and he was very much intrigued to hear what the other man had to say about it.

Slamming the boot and double-checking the door was locked properly, he stalked back to their little encampment, nodding a greeting to the bearded man who seemed to have just realised that a stroller like the one he was pushing was less than ideal for a beach excursion as he handed the two excited children to his husband nearby and began the lengthy process of packing it away in such a way that it would not immediately break when they next tried to open it.

Logan, forgetting the necessity of holding his glasses onto his face, felt them slip, landing in the white sand as sweat and condensation mingled with the grains and created a sticky, sandy shadow over the lenses. Snatching them from the ground, granules crunched in the mechanics as he sorted them back onto his face and continued to march seaward, greatly anticipating the shade and comparative serenity of his blanket oasis beneath the umbrella.

He flopped back down in his pool of shade, eyes closing as he sighed deeply and took a moment to truly appreciate how good it felt to not be stood in direct sunlight. The sand was cool, the shade was deep, and he did not feel as if his internal organs were steadily being fried.

Bliss.

Deciding he would give it a few more minutes before reprimanding Roman, Logan was just preparing to properly unfold his towel again and return the odd sandals to their respective corners when the sound of his name reached his ears.

He looked up curiously, and his heart reared in his chest as his eyes took in the three others, Roman and Virgil supporting either side of a limping Patton, one foot held upright away from the sand and his lower lip wobbling. He offered Logan a shaking smile and an attempt at a wave with the hand looped over Virgil’s shoulder.

Logan’s frown deepened, all thoughts of water shortages forgotten as he moved to rearrange their little alcove, repositioning the towel and dusting away as much sand as he could as the other two arrived and set Patton down.

“What happened?”

“Stood on a shell,” Patton replied through gritted teeth. “It’s— I’m okay, I think. Just stings.”

Nodding, Logan leaned forwards to examine the base of Patton’s foot. There was a small cut—nothing serious, but the positioning left Logan unsurprised by how painful it seemed to be. Taking the first aid kit Virgil offered him—at least they hadn’t forgotten the first aid kit—Logan rooted around for the necessary items and, satisfied that he had what he needed, shooed the other two away. They would only pose a distraction, and Logan preferred to work in peace without them hovering over his shoulders.

Roman protested, but at Patton’s reassurance and a subtle nudge from Virgil, the pair headed back towards the waves to leave him be.

“Is it bad?” asked Patton once they had gone, eyes darting anywhere but his injured foot— Roman and Virgil by the waves, the family building sandcastles to their left, the woman walking her dog along the sands. Patton, despite how much fulfilment he received from helping others, had never been particularly good with objective injuries and blood.

“Not at all,” Logan reassured him, because it was the truth. Frankly, he was more concerned about the fact that, “I will have to clean the sand off before I can treat it properly,” reaching for his still-half-full water bottle and trying not to let his face betray his frustration.

Patton nodded, fingers brushing the cover of Logan’s book. “Can I read this?”

Glancing up, Logan nodded, Patton’s need for a distraction not foreign to him under such circumstances. Besides, he might learn a thing or two, and would perhaps get through enough of it for them to talk about the book at a later date. His heart fluttered at the thought—his reading habits rarely aligned with the others’, and it would be a change he welcomed.

Despite trying to keep the water usage to a minimum, by the end of the process his bottle was almost empty, only a few centimetres of liquid left waiting in the bottom. Logan knew he would have to make it last. He was doing the least physical exertion, Roman would complain of headaches, Patton was now injured, and of the four of them it was most important for Virgil to keep his fluids up lest his health suffer the consequences. It only made sense.

“That should be sufficient for now,” Logan said, brushing off his hands as he pulled the zipper on the first aid bag closed. “You shouldn’t go back in the water, though, and be mindful of the sand. You don’t want to contaminate the wound.”

Patton nodded, setting down the book and thanking Logan. Glancing at the pages, Logan’s heart fell as he saw Patton had only just breached the first page—but no matter. Patton was injured, and now was most definitely not the time to be feeling let down by something so trivial.

Stretching his arms, Patton stood and rummaged in one of their bags, pulling out a second towel and laying it down in the sun alongside Logan’s.

“Would you like to share the shade?” asked Logan, skin prickling at the thought of sitting in direct sunlight and wanting to offer Patton an escape, but also aware that the current location of the sun meant their shade pool would not be getting any bigger, hardly housing one person as it was.

“Oh, no, I’m going to sunbathe for a bit; give you back your shade. Thank you, though!”

“Alright. Make sure to reapply your sunscreen after being in the ocean.”

Patton nodded, reaching for the bottle as Logan smoothed the creases in his towel and settled back down. He could hope that Patton’s injury would hasten the other two to leaving, but judging from how carefree Patton seemed, and that Virgil and Roman were both happily swimming down in the ocean, it didn’t seem likely. Logan’s shoulders curled inward at the thought of the waves, but he supposed that as long as the others were having fun, it was alright.

As long as they left soon, it would be alright.

They had been relaxing—well, Patton had been relaxing, Logan had been baking in uncomfortably languid silence—for the best part of half an hour when Logan heard his name being called. He blinked, reaching for his glasses and drawing the sunhat from his face as he sat upright, trying to blink through the stickiness that had gathered in his eyes as he peered towards Patton to ask what he could help with.

The call came again as he realised it was not Patton trying to get his attention as the other man was sitting up just as groggily, and Logan’s head snapped up to see Virgil speeding towards him, one hand raised urgently and the other cupped around his mouth as he shouted again.

Logan was scrambling to his feet in an instant, eyes scanning Virgil for any signs of injury and, finding none, beginning to scan the ocean line for Roman.

Reaching him, Virgil skidded to a halt, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

“What happened?” asked Logan urgently, still trying to locate the Roman on the coastline amongst the sea of bodies. “Are you injured? Where’s Roman?”

Virgil gestured falteringly back to the ocean as he tried to heave in enough oxygen to form a sentence, managing to break out stuttered words, Roman, swimming, too far.

And Logan was sprinting, leaving Virgil and Patton alone by the bags as he spotted the little splodge of colour that must be Roman, too far out, too distant, and why did he have to swim so far away from everyone else?

His feet pounded against the sand, each beat bringing with it a new thought as he heard Virgil call from behind him and a second pair of footsteps match his own, growing closer as Virgil hurried to catch up despite how much his lungs were already burning. But Logan didn’t have time to think about him. Roman was in trouble: Roman was in need of help. Logan was responsible. Logan should have been watching him.

But it was the ocean. Logan couldn’t go in the ocean. Logan didn’t like the ocean.

It was vast, unforgiving, and filled with all manner of creatures as equally terrifying as they were fascinating.

His footsteps beat against the sand, and he was almost there, but as the edge of the water grew nearer Logan was realising he didn’t even know what he was going to do when he got there. He couldn’t go in the water; he couldn’t help Roman. All manner of strange creatures lurked just below the surface, just out of sight, watching, waiting, searching for their first meal in millenia, some horrid, undiscovered species that would slink away again before they could even identify it.

But he knew he would go in. He knew he had to. He knew he didn’t have another choice.

Thoughts beat through his mind with every step, sand under his toes becoming more solid as it became heavy with water, with salt, with the ground shells and bones and teeth of a billion creatures from aeons past, sea creatures from decades of research bouncing through his mind.

The black swallower, a species of deep sea fish capable of swallowing creatures two times its length and four times its mass.

Chironex fleckeri, or sea wasp, a near-invisible jellyfish with venom capable of killing an adult with a dose of no more than a grain of salt.

The bull shark, among the most likely of sharks to attack humans—aggressive, and often found in Florida, in shallow coastal waters such as this bay.

And even with all of the uncomfortable discoveries scientists had already made, there was still 95% of the ocean left to explore.

...This was why Logan preferred space.

Virgil drew up beside him, chest heaving, face blotchy with exertion. “He’s not— In trouble, sorry—” Virgil huffed, letting his knees collapse under him as he tried to catch his breath on the sand. “The— The inner tube floated out— He went— He went after it. But I’m worried he’s gone too far. He— Can’t hear us, and that got me worried. I— I overreacted. Sorry.”

The grip on Logan’s heart loosened as he processed these words, trying to work himself down from the adrenaline rush as his mind fought to catch up with his body. It was a false alarm. Roman was not injured, or about to be swept out into open ocean, or sinking beneath the waves as he fought for breath.

“I see.” Logan flexed his fingers, trying to regain control of his breathing as the thundering of his heartbeat in his ears quietened, just a little. “My apologies, then. It seems I, too, assumed the worst.”

Fixing his gaze on Roman out in the sea, Logan sank to the ground, kneeling on the sand so as to get as few of the grains on his shorts as possible. He would greatly prefer it if he wasn’t picking sand from the lining of his pockets for the next decade. Virgil sprawled out beside him, chest still heaving as he tried to catch his breath, dyed hair mixing with the sand.

A breeze washed over them, providing a welcome relief from the overbearing heat that so far had not let up even a little. Roman appeared to have almost reached the inflatable, and while Logan was still largely apprehensive of the whole ordeal, his heartbeat seemed to be settling.

Virgil spluttered as sand was blown into his mouth by the breeze, shielding his face with a hand as he jerked upright and scowled, ruffling grains from his hair. “Stupid wind.”

The breeze died down, and Logan was once again reminded of the unforgiving heat beating down on him from every side. The ocean waves rolled, a seagull called, and Virgil prodded him pointedly in the shoulder.

“Hey, so, what’s up?”

Logan frowned, thinking he probably should have reapplied his sunscreen before coming to sit stationary in direct sunlight. “I’m not following.”

“You’ve been sitting under the parasol the whole time. I saw you finish your book, like, at least an hour ago. Not like you to be so...reclusive?” He paused, scratching absently at his shoulder. “That’s not the right word.”

Logan rubbed a pinch of sand between his fingertips, feeling each grain trickle away, returning to the mass of brown and white and gold stretching away all around them.

“I do not particularly enjoy spending time at the beach.”

Virgil eyed him for a moment before sighing gently and ruffling his hair. Sand grains spewed out, pattering onto his sun top and lining the creases. “Shit, Teach, I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“It’s not,” Logan retorted as he squinted towards the small figure of Roman who appeared to have finally reached his goal. Still too far out for comfort. Still too far out to hear them. “It’s nothing. I dislike the heat. It is uncomfortable.”

Virgil squinted. “Alright. Well, I don’t think we’ll be hanging around much longer anyway. Think I’ve used up most’ve my energy for today.”

Logan nodded gratefully as he watched the family of the bearded man he had seen by the cars begin to unpack their things, the two children running circles around each other in some invented game of tag. The girl with the pigtails, the older of the two, had a clear advantage, but the younger one was young enough that she didn’t realise this and was utterly committed to catching her sister despite the power imbalance. Logan winced as she tripped, scraping both knees and palms against the sand, but in a moment she was up again, teetering around the wind guard one of her dads was setting up.

They looked happy.

“Kids, huh?” said Virgil, tilting his head back as he followed Logan’s gaze. “So much energy. Such little anxiety. The golden days.”

Logan barked a laugh. “Back when exploring the galaxy was but the first in a great list of adventures, and you were still home in time for bed.”

“Nerd.”

“Virgil, I have just finished a modern philosophy book; I believe that was rather well established.”

Virgil hummed good naturedly as Logan gave him a soft smile. “Glad to have you around, Teach.”

They sat quietly as they watched Roman edging back to the shore. Every now and again, he raised an arm to wave and shout something excitedly, but his words were lost over the rolling of the ocean and the delighted giggles of the siblings playing on the sand. Virgil commented and Logan agreed noncommittally, mind elsewhere as his skin started to prickle with discomfort and heat and moisture.

He brushed a damp mass of hair away from his forehead, but even the smallest of movements was sticky and humid and gross so he settled for sitting still, doing his best not to breathe too deeply so he didn’t feel his skin unsticking from itself, trying to focus on the way the sand glittered under his knees and not the heat drumming against his neck and the grittiness between his toes and the constant, droning noise of the waves underneath crying seagulls and screeching children. His glasses kept steaming up but he couldn’t move to clean them because that just made everything sticky and clammy and worse so he settled for the half-vision he did have and shivered at the sweat drops rolling down his back, and the way the backs of his knees felt like pools of their own.

He blinked as Virgil’s hand scuffed his shoulder and he saw Roman wading out of the waves, inner tube clasped under one arm as he gabbled on about something Logan didn’t quite have the headspace to comprehend. He shook his head to Virgil’s outstretched hand, finding his own way upright and trying not to shiver in disgust at the way everything stuck to everything else as he moved, and all his senses seemed suddenly amplified.

“I saw a shark!” was the first thing Logan heard upon tuning back in. 

“Sure you did, Princey,” Virgil replied disparagingly, offering Roman a pat on the shoulder. “Now, come on, we’ve been waiting for you for ages.”

Roman shoved him back with the inner tube, sending Virgil stumbling a few steps before he righted himself. Virgil looked to be about to shove Roman back, but then his eyes passed over Logan and back to where Patton was waiting by their things, and he thought better of it. For now, at least. Roman would surely pay the price at some later date.

“Hey, Teach!” Roman exclaimed as he properly registered Logan’s presence and slung a damp arm over Logan’s shoulders. His arm was warm but only in that muted, slightly clammy way that arms were when they were wet and you were dry and everything was already far too hot and sticky and humid. “Finally making the most of our beach excursion?”

“Don’t touch me,” Logan said, because he couldn’t think about anything other than the uncomfortably moist weight over his shoulders and the clammy heat and the muddled, overlapping sounds of the water and the birds and the people. And then, “please,” tacked on the end as an afterthought, because he didn’t want Roman to think he was being rude or that he was annoyed at him for it, because he wasn’t, but he really didn’t have much space in his head right now for pleasantries. The sand burned under his toes, the waistband of his shorts chafed against his skin, he couldn’t lift his eyes because everything was white and bright and burning and he still needed to address the fact that they were practically out of drinking water.

Roman’s arm retracted immediately as he stepped a little closer to Virgil to give Logan more space. “Of course.”

Logan’s eyes were fixed onto the sand as he walked, half-listening to Roman’s description of the bull shark that he claimed had swum not ten feet from him in the water, and half trying not to focus on the heat beating against every inch of his body and the way damp hairs stuck to the back of his neck no matter how he pushed them away. 

He kept trying to ground his mind, concentrating on the feeling of sand under his feet and the murmur of his friends’ conversation, but with the relentless heat on his face he couldn’t focus on anything else, and anything he tried to latch onto immediately became overwhelming. So he tuned it out, retreating into his mind as he felt the cogs inside begin to lock differently as they shifted onto a different track, making space for him to cope by pushing aside the things that had always required more effort like seemingly trivial social niceties, maintaining an expression of mild contentedness, ensuring he stuck to the ideal eye-contact to no eye-contact ratio for regular conversation.

Patton sat up as they arrived at their things, some of the items that had been strewn about now organised neatly into their bags and the sandals which had been holding down various towels now arranged in pairs. 

“Think we’re heading out,” said Virgil, moving to gather up some of the towels to go and rid them of sand in an area less densely populated. “Ready to go, Pat?”

“Yeah, just about! I figured we’d be going soon, so I already started packing up some of the bags. Logan, I left your towel, sandals and book in a little pile there.”

Logan immediately made a beeline for the little pile, towel folded neatly with sandals and book propped on top. He thanked Patton tersely, brushing off as much sand as he could from the soles of his feet before fitting the sandals, then clasping his book carefully to his chest. The whole situation was not great for his book, really, because he couldn’t put it in the bags lest it bend and crease, but the sweat on his fingers was already sullying the cover. Not that it would matter much anyway, he supposed, because every crevice was already ingrained with sand.

The others were at work dismantling the umbrella and tidying items into bags, Roman attempting to let the air out of the inner tube so it would fit back into the car, and so Logan propped himself atop his little folded towel and watched, not quite sure where he could fit in to assist and hoping that if anyone needed anything they would ask him outright.

“Logan, do you know where the water bottles are?” asked Virgil a little while later, running the back of his hand across his forehead. Roman was still wrestling with the inner tube, and Patton was in the process of folding the towels Virgil had beaten out to pack them away.

Logan felt his stomach drop, but it wasn’t like he could deny Virgil water, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get all the words out to explain the whole situation properly anyway without coming across incredibly condescending.

“I packed them into the furthest away of the two duffel bags from me. They are inside a blue lunch box. Patton may have moved them since then.”

“Perfect, thanks, Logan,” Virgil replied, shooting him a smile and finger guns as he turned to find the bag Logan had instructed him towards. Logan mentally cringed at how robotic his words had sounded, everything he said at the moment entirely unfiltered against anything that could potentially be read as demeaning or patronising as he did not currently have the mental space or energy to affix things to their regular societal standards—but Virgil understood. Logan hoped he did, anyway; he had certainly seemed to. Not that Logan wouldn’t still bring it up with Virgil within the next few days, just to assure him that he had not meant to come across unfavourably.

He pushed the thought aside. It would serve him no benefit to become caught up in such things right now, when what he really needed was somewhere cool, and quiet, and familiar, where nothing unexpected could or would happen, and he could let his brain unwind, safe in the confines of structured predictability.

Behind his eyes, the familiar throb of a headache began to beat. 

As a result of dehydration, stress, or feeling generally overwhelmed, he wasn’t sure, but there it was nonetheless, beating against his skull in time with the heat on his skin. He wound a hand around his arm, digging in his fingers as he tried to focus on anything but the heat and the headache and the sweat drops creeping down his neck as the waves rolled and children shrieked and seagulls screamed. The sound of his heartbeat joined the beating of the sun’s rays and the throbbing of his headache, all three dancing over one another like some sort of crazed percussion piece as the shade from the parasol vanished as it was packed away and the light drilled into his eyes, bright sounds and loud colours pulsing around him every which way.

He wasn’t sure when he closed his eyes, but hardly a moment later Virgil was calling him to leave and Logan was shuffling along the sands just behind his friends, book and towel clutched to his chest, blinking rapidly as he tried to focus on where he was going while not looking at any of the bright and loud and omnipresent everything everywhere that seemed to dance even behind his eyelids when he screwed them closed again. 

And there was sand grinding between his toes, and moisture pooling on his back, and a hundred thousand seagulls flying circles around his head and squawking, screaming, shrieking as children jostled each other and tripped and water roared past itself and snapped back again and Logan’s heart beat into his mouth as people swam out too far and sharks circled inches from his knees and his ears rang with adrenaline.

Fingers scarcely brushed against his elbow, sending prickling fire unfurling as Logan snatched his arm away and his vision flared white, blinking and squinting ahead as he tried not to let his breaths shake as a thousand tiny fire ants stung time and again as they scuttled over his skin, nausea rolling in his stomach and venom pulsing in his veins.

He just about identified Virgil in front of him before he was screwing his eyes closed again, arms locked around his book no matter how much he wanted to cover his ears and block out the cacophony of squawking and rushing and chattering all around him because he didn’t want to cause a scene, didn’t want to draw attention to himself, didn’t know where he would put his book and his towel because his hands were sandy but so was the floor and so were the bags and so was the car and they didn’t have any water and his headache was pounding like a drum, trying to get his attention, trying to split his skull.

“Logan,” came Virgil’s voice, but Logan could only shake his head because the words wouldn’t come, the words wouldn’t come, the words wouldn’t come. There was a stopper in his throat, forcing the words to stay inside, and he could force it out, probably, but he was doing so would make him throw up or cry or both. “Logan, can you walk with me to the car or would you like to do something else? It’s just up the steps in front of us. Roman and Patton are turning on the air conditioning inside the car. Do you want to come with me to the car or would you prefer to do something else?”

“Car,” Logan tried to say, gaze swivelling past Virgil and towards the collection of vehicles lined up on the sands, and even though no sound came out Logan still felt the nausea swirling in his throat, threatening to erupt. Just the thought of cool air conditioning was enough to prompt him forwards, following the dizzying shape that was Virgil as he tried to focus on the book in his hands and not the way the sweat prickled at his neck and the sickly thoughts of the others worrying after him and the sound of car tyres screeching as they ground shells and corals into dust.

He could feel one thousand pairs of eyes drilling into him from all sides, judging, criticising, laughing behind hands and beach bags. He could feel the heat rising in his cheeks, dying his face and ears and neck in a wave of panic until he could feel the embarrassment coursing through his veins, a beacon of amusement for every passerby to watch and mock and ridicule which in turn only fueled it more. He could feel the sun bouncing against his back and his heartbeat thundering in his chest and he knew, somewhere, deep down, that this was all just an overreaction, he should have better control over himself, he shouldn’t be making such a scene, but this thought was crushed under the stampede of disjointed sounds and sights and words rampaging in every direction, looping around and around and around in a sickly pirouette that was only spinning faster.

And then the door to their car was open and he was clambering inside and pulling the towel over his head as sand grains showered into his hair and eyes and over the seats and into his book but he only grasped the material more tightly as he melted into the sharp chill of the aircon and pressed his head against the seat in front and finally, finally plugged his ears.

And his mind kept racing, kept rolling and diving and snapping back for a while after that, but he could feel the rubber bands starting to loosen, elastic unwinding and cool air snaking into the cracks and crevices, cooling the metal still hot from overuse. And that freed space to consider other things, like releasing the tension in his shoulders and taking a breath to the bottom of his lungs which didn’t falter or cut off and feeling the texture of the seat under his legs and the way the skin stuck just a little too long when he moved. Cool air washed over his face and he took off his glasses, massaging the indents on his nose and relishing in the cool touch as his senses came back to him in their more typical, controlled amounts.

He could hear murmured voices from outside the car and as he sat upright and ironed out the creases in his back and neck, he realised for the first time that the others were not in the car with him.

That was, to put it candidly, rather sweet of them. Logan couldn’t imagine having to sit outside in the parching heat for even a second longer than necessary, and yet there they were, relaxing by the car bonnet just to give him some space. Roman wasn’t even wearing a sunhat or top to lessen the blow.

With that thought in his mind, their concerning lack of drinkable water suddenly made itself known once more as Logan’s headache began to hammer against his skull. He should get out of the car and usher the others inside before they all got too dehydrated, but that meant going outside, and going outside meant facing the heat, which meant going back to feeling all clammy and muted and wrong. Moreso, he would have to open the door, and to open the door he would have to take the towel off from his head, and quite frankly it was the only thing holding him together. And taking off the towel meant moving his book from his knee, which meant he had to put it somewhere else, but everywhere was sandy and the others needed seats to sit in and he couldn’t remember where he had put his glasses and he needed to move and find his glasses before he did anything else but he couldn’t find his glasses without his glasses.

And all these thoughts snowballed, tumbling atop one another to form a writhing heap of Things from which Logan concluded that getting out of the car was too complicated, after all, requiring too many steps and too many choices, and he was far more partial to Not Doing That.

Luckily, Virgil had always been perceptive, so Logan simply watched as he excused himself from the others and became steadily blurrier as he approached the car. And with the simple and straightforward, single goal of finding his glasses without all the other things weighing on top, Logan scanned the nearby area and found them sitting on the chair beside him, folded neatly just where he had left them a few minutes prior.

The outline of the purple blur opening the driver’s side door became rather more defined as his vision returned and Virgil perched on the chair, shutting the door softly behind him so as not to let too much of the warm air inside.

“Feeling better?”

“I am much less overwhelmed now. Thank you, Virgil. I apologise for my unexpected reaction.”

“Don’t sweat it, ‘t’s not something you need to apologise for, anyway. We can talk about it more later, if you want?”

Logan nodded. “I would like that. My words at the moment are rather...robotic, for lack of a better term. Following that, I apologise if I say anything that comes across cold or condescending. It is...not intentional.” 

He just didn’t have the extra head space required to edit his words right now.

“I know,” Virgil assured him, nose scrunching as the corner of his mouth twitched upward. “And actually, talking to you is pretty cool because you don’t dance around your words or make them all fancy schmancy just ‘cause you can, unlike somebody we know. Besides,” he continued, throwing a thumb over his shoulder to gesture to Roman and Patton through the windshield, “Prince in question just admitted he forgot to pack the cool box, so you’re doing way better than him.”

“Yes,” said Logan, frowning. “And I had to use the last of my water to clean Patton’s injury, so I am now dehydrated and have had a headache since we were on the beach. But you have all been doing far more physical exertion than I have, and it is important for you to drink enough water, Virgil, so I am happy to forfeit the little left in my bottle to that end.” And then, because Logan was suddenly aware of how sour he sounded, “Not that I am blaming any of you. I was just trying to say that it is not imperative I drink the rest of my water and that one of you may drink it, despite my headache. I mean— I don’t— You can have it. I am not frustrated with you. I apologise.”

Virgil’s brow creased as he shifted his grip on the headrest. “I know you aren’t frustrated with me, it’s okay. I’m honestly impressed you thought that far ahead already, I’m still sour that it means we don’t have the alcohol I snuck into the cool box.” He laughed, fingers tapping a rhythm as he continued, “Patton says there’s a convenience store next to that ice cream place we stopped at on the way in, so Roman’s gonna hop out when we get there and buy us some water. I’m hoping I can convince him to buy us more ice-cream, too.”

Logan could feel the tension bleeding out from his shoulders, instead relaxing into a deep appreciation for his friends, and for Virgil.

“Thank you.”

“Anytime.” He spun around, drumming experimentally on the wheel. “Ready to go?”

At Logan’s nod, Virgil rapped three times on the windshield and popped open the door. Patton and Roman looked up at the sound, Patton offering Logan a little wave as they made eye contact, and Roman grinning widely.

“Get in, losers, we’re getting ice-cream!”

—x—END—x—

taglist to follow!

and here are some links to interesting info/where i found some cool facts: The Black Swallower Venomous Jellyfish Bull Shark 

[50scentsofsoap]

Forever

Jung Hoseok has always been there for you, after all he has been your best friend for years. A lot can change during that time...

word count: 4.2k genre: smut tw: drinking, reckless behaviour

author’s note: I wrote this oneshot instead of writing my university application essays, just uploading all my old material before I move on to fresher ideas.

You’re pinned against the wall, both arms above you and locked tight as if you had handcuffs on your wrists. Your body being attacked at every inch your skin was showing. Face. Neck. Shoulders. You just closed your eyes and took in every sensation. The clenched hand holding your wrists. The sharp drop of oxygen from your lungs. The vibrations of his mouth against yours. The struggle against gravity to keep on standing, when your knees were ready to give way. 

He pulled away, leaving both of you to gasp for air.

“How come you never told me you liked me?” He asked with a puzzled look.

“How come you could never take a hint?” You reply with a cocky attitude.

He pushed his torso onto yours, locking your back onto the wall. “Oh, is that any way to talk to your best friend?”

✎ 10 years ago

“HI! Looks like we’re locker buddies! My name’s Hoseok, what’s yours?” he asked with a smile so bright, its brightness could illuminate any moonless night.

“Um… Y/N.” A blunt reply. You hoped he’d get the hint and wouldn’t talk to you any further.

“Nice to meet you Y/N! Want a cookie? My Mom always packs me two cookies for lunch. I think she puts in molasses instead of brown sugar...”

He continued to ramble on. You figured he wasn’t going to leave you alone anytime soon, so you learned to just ignore him or reply in short phrases. This went on for a couple of months, but your cold attitude didn’t bother him at all. Every morning, he would always find something new to talk about, and it was getting annoying.

Your birthday soon rolled around, and you invited everyone in your homeroom class to come to your 13th birthday party, including Hoseok. Everyone liked him… except you. He was just too happy, and it annoyed you how sickly giddy he could be. Still, he wasn’t a bad person so you had no reason to hate him.

“Hey, Hobi… come on it’s time for cak- Are you ok?” You stepped out of your kitchen to the patio. He was sitting there alone. His eyes glistening, shit the kid’s crying.

He quickly wiped his eyes as soon as he saw you. “Hey Y/N, need a hand with opening your presents?” His smile had returned. Like a light switch, he just… stopped being upset.

“No thanks, but it’s time for cake. You coming in?”

“Ooh cake, yes please!” With that he darted into the house.

From that day onwards, you kept an eye on him, and you knew his secret. No matter how hurt he was, he was always smiling.

✎ ✎

Hoseok picked you up, lips still locked in a deep kiss. You wrapped your legs around his waist and hands around his neck. He held your thighs as he carried you towards your bed. For that moment, it seemed as if there was no-one else in the world but you and him. It was as if this was a novel and you two were the main characters, with everyone else blurring into the background. He placed you on your duvet, your lips never breaking contact. He pulled away first, trying to catch his breath. You sat up, and looked at him with questioning eyes.

“You know,” he began. He leaned against your chest of drawers. “If we do this, we can’t go back to what we were.” He spoke cautiously, as if he were treading on eggshells.

“What do you mean?” You cock an eyebrow at him.

“I mean, if we do this, we can’t go back to being friends. We might be able to, but to me it will be as if we’re pretending to be friends for old time’s sake.”

You stand up, directly in front of him. You have to tilt you head quite high to meet his eyes. “Ok, what did you say half an hour ago?”

He gulped, “I’ve been in love with you since I can remember.”

“Good, and what did I say?” 

“Fuck off?” He grinned. There it was, that smile to hide anything he didn’t want to show.

“No.”

“You’ve loved me since we became best friends.”

“Exactly. Now…” You took off your sweatshirt and shirt at the same time, leaving you only in your lacy balcony bra, “we’ll always be best friends, nothing will change that.”

Hobi stared at your chest then at your gaze. You noticed a hungry look that you’d never seen before. His mouth parted just slightly, in awe, perhaps, of you taking off your clothes without hesitation. “You’ve seen me semi naked before,” you lifted his chin to look into his eyes, “what’s changed?”

He licked his lips. “Maybe the fact you’re taking your clothes off for me?”

“Hmm. I guess so, but that shouldn’t chang-”

He crashed his supple lips onto yours, taking you by surprise. “Are you sure about this?”

You look at him with your endearing eyes, a hand caresses his cheek as a coy smile spreads across your face. “Absolutely.”

✎ 7 years ago

“Hey, are you even listening? What’s the nucleus of an atom made out of?” You exclaimed with annoyance.

“Protons and neutrons. Look, I’m fine on chem, there’s no need to quiz me.” Hobi replied while styling his hair with his mother’s straighteners. 

“You got 95% in the last test, it’s obvious you have to study.” 

“Look Y/N,” he put down the straighteners and sat on his bed “you don’t have to get 100% in everything. It’s only the end of year exams that actually count towards your score.”

“I know that, but I’ve got a reputation to keep up. Plus, people think your scores are slipping because…” 

“Because…?”

You sigh. “Because we’re too busy ‘dating’. I mean, where do these rumours come from?”

“Well, you’re always in my house, that’s one thing”

“Fuck off, it’s only because both my parents are usually out and I want to save on our heating bills.”

“Oh, so you’re mooching off me for warmth?”

“That, and your Mom’s snacks. Since you moved next door, I’ve had her cookies everyday. Are you sure she doesn’t put weed in them?”

“What? No. They just taste really good. I’m surprised your teeth haven’t rotted yet. Come on, no more Chemistry. We have a party to go to.” He put on his jacket and threw you yours.

“I’m only going so I can keep an eye on you, and remember, chugging down a two litre bottle of coke with mentos is not a fun experience.” You slip on your coat and flick your hair out so it hangs over your neck.

“Don’t remind me.” 

Pretty much everyone was around 15 to 16 years old, there were 8 people in total. Pizza boxes stacked on top of the dining room table, fizzy drinks surrounding it. It was a gaming party and an intense game of monopoly was in session. Of course, you and Hobi were the winning team. Board games soon got boring, and so a round of spin the bottle took place. This was the age to pretend to be mature and try ‘adult’ games. Of course, no one wanted to kiss anyone in particular, so it became a hybrid version of truth or dare. 

You stare at the bottle intently as the first round lands on you. 

“Wooh! It’s Y/N’s go. Ok, truth or dare?” asked John. 

“Well I’m not good with dares, so truth.” 

“Are you and Hoseok actually dating?” 

“Have you two kissed?” Another party-goer chimed in. 

“What the fuck, no! We’re not dating.” You yelled in frustration. You could feel the blush creep up on your face, but prayed no one noticed because the bottle had already begun to spin again. Soon after, it landed on Hobi. 

“Truth for me!” He chirped. 

“I have one,” you note. “The day of my 13th birthday party, you looked upset. Why?” 

“What the heck Y/N, that was like 3 years ago no one remembers shit from that long ago!” John proclaimed. 

“No it’s ok,” Hobi continued, “That was the day my goldfish died.” You looked at him with a confused look. 

“Alright, good enough, let’s go.” The bottle landed on more people until is was nearly 10pm, the time to leave. John began to spin the bottle. “For the last round, we’re going to spin it twice. The two people it lands on, they have to kiss. Whether it’s boy-boy or girl-girl, you still have to kiss.”

The bottle spins and lands on you and… fuck… Hobi. You two just look at each other with an expression of concern, but then just go for it, to get it over and done with. It was an awkward lip-touch kiss, neither of you dared to use tongue. Soon enough 5 seconds were up, and it was the time to leave. Of course, everyone would be talking about your kiss with Hoseok at school for the next month, but you couldn’t care less. You had Chemistry on your mind.

“Hey Y/N,” Hobi starts as you two walk the familiar path home. “Sorry about the kiss.”

“It’s fine, fuck what people say, right?” 

“Yeah.” He let out a long sigh. “I lied. My goldfish didn’t die that day.” 

“So why were you sad?” 

“I was feeling lonely.” Your heart sank. “I’ve always been friendly with people, but I’ve never really had friends. I only realised it that day.” 

You stopped in your tracks and turned to him. He paused too. You wrapped your arms around him and pulled him into a tight hug. “Listen to me motherfucker, you’re my best friend. If you ever feel lonely, I’ll be right over with ice cream and Twilight. Also, if any bitch breaks your heart, tell me and I will wreck her.” You let him go and continued walking as if nothing had happened.

You felt protective of him, but as a friend right? You surely weren’t falling in love with him.

✎ ✎

You lay on your bed in only your bra and underwear. Hoseok was also stripped down to his boxers, with a little help from you. You saw both your clothes mingle into a messy pile in the corner of your small bedroom. You’d been living in this apartment in the city since you ran an up and coming company. It was tiny, but it was your own place. It was home. Hoseok lived close, his dance studio was next to your office. Everyday, you’d get a perfect view of the zumba ladies in the morning, the little kids learning hip hop in the afternoon and his dance crew in the evenings. After work, you two would usually get dinner together and walk home. Old habits from your high school days. 

Hoseok picked up his jacket and took out a condom from his inside pocket. He took the wrapper and put it down on the bedside table. “Now before all that, I have to make you wet.”

His head disappeared in front of your legs. He bent your knees and propped your hips up with a pillow, then he slid his fingers into your underwear and slowly took them off, past your thighs, knees, calves, until they were at your ankles. He took them off and added it to the pile of clothes. You took a deep breath, not knowing what to expect. That’s when he hit the spot. His tongue expertly slid along your folds. You let out a gasp, out of both shock and pleasure. He was now at your core, you were exposed to him. He slid his tongue into you as far as it would go, and back out. He continued this endless assault until you could contain it no longer and moaned his name. 

“Wow, it feels quite hot when you say my name like that.” He returned to his position. “How long has it been since you’ve been laid?” His hot breath hit your entrance like dragon smoke. You were getting wet with every second his tongue lay on your spot. 

“I think… around… 4 years?” You finally manage to get out.

“Wow since Uni? Have you just been touching yourself to satiate your urges?” He presses on.

“Of course. I’ve been busy, I didn’t have time to really screw anyone.”

Without warning, he slid a finger into you. You arched your back in response to the hormones coursing through your veins. “Your fingers have always been so slender, but I’m sure you’ve never felt like this when you did it by yourself.” 

He pumped his fingers in and out of you at a painfully slow pace. Your hips travelled forward, for more of him, but he wouldn’t let you. He curled his finger inside you, touching your delicate walls. You thought you would go crazy if you didn’t climax soon. The teasing was becoming too much for you. 

“Hoseok, if you make me come in the next 5 minutes,” you sat up and looked directly at his dark eyes. You seductively licked your lips and gave him a wink. “You know what I’ll do, now stop playing around.”

He slipped another finger inside you and started pumping at a steady rhythm. He put his thumb on your bundle of nerves and rubbed small circles into it. After ten circles, he would take his thumb off and suck on it for about two seconds. This torturous repetition continued until you felt a familiar presence in your lower abdomen. Soon enough, your mind, body and soul shattered. The high was nothing like you had experienced before, it was more carnal, almost animalistic in nature.

Hoseok removed the pillow from your hips. You were breathing heavily from your orgasm. He removed his boxers and began slowly pumping himself. “So, that took me four minutes and 12 seconds.” You looked up to see him palm his length. You wondered for a second if he would even fit inside you. “It’s time to keep up your end of the bargain.”

Hobi laid on the bed whilst you got onto all fours, still pretty shaken up from your first real orgasm in god knows how long. You had thought of the various positions and things you’d like to try with Hobi; against a wall, in the shower, blindfolded, the lot. You didn’t even know you wanted him in a way that’s more than a friend until you thought of him during one of your ‘relaxation’ sessions. The thought of him touching you everywhere just excited you, something which you’d never felt before. Now here he was, in front of you, naked. With the thought that you had been victorious in your mission in mind, you took his manhood into your mouth and began to move your head up and down.

✎ 4 years ago

“Why did you drive an hour and a half from your house to pick me up? I told you I was fine.” You exclaimed trying to keep your vision clear.

“Fine?! Bullshit Y/N. If I didn’t come when I did… Jesus, who knows what could have happened!” Hoseok was driving his car well above the speed limit, but he didn’t care about breaking the law. He did care about happened to you.

You had gone to a house party with a couple of other people from your University. While you were off pursuing higher education, Hoseok began apprenticing under dancers from ballet to popping, to become a choreographer. You two promised each other to talk everyday, and you did however you could. Calls, Facebook, Twitter and Skype,. He always informed you about his daily life, as did you. You thought this party would be like any other, some booze, weed and messy makeout sessions… but you overdid it on all three. 

You had drunk way past your limit and gotten so faded it was difficult to even stand up. The number of people you kissed whilst inebriated was well over the half century mark, both guys and girls. You were just about to get frisky with another boy when your phone rang. It was Hoseok. You declined the call and continued your with your antics. It was only after you had stripped your underwear and was about to lose your virginity in someone else’s bedroom, when Hobi came bursting through the door. He picked you up and carried you and your belongings to his car.

“I told you I was going to a party! Why did you have to cockblock me?! Gosh you’re such an asshole!” You scream at him.

“Excuse me for being a good friend! You were going to have unprotected sex… while drunk! And… wait are you high as well?! Fuck Y/N, this isn’t like you at all.” Hoseok replied sternly.

“Well what am I like? A straight-A student who’s got her whole life sorted out. Well guess what, I’m not who you think I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I’m saying is that I’m sick of everyone expecting me to be this perfect embodiment of success. I mean… maybe I do want to smoke weed Mum. Or even fail my classes Dad. Or maybe I do want to get an STD from unprotected sex Hobi!”

“I get that you’re pissed off at me, but you’ll thank me one day. You’re just going through a rebel phase, it’ll pass don’t worry.”

“Thank you?! I was going to lose my virginity to.., whatever his name was!” You throw your hands up in defeat and slump into the passenger seat. You can feel the tears well up in your eyes, “Hobi, is there something wrong with me?”

“What? No. Nothing at all.”

“Then why can’t I get a boyfriend? Don’t give me all the bullshit about not finding the right guy! I mean, I do have guys as friends but they never like me as more than friends.”

“Maybe because they’d rather value their friendship to you than a relationship? Look, if you’re so desperate to get laid, make the first move. Only while you’re sober, understand?”

Your emotions switched from lonely to hopeful, damn you were totally drunk. You looked at Hobi as if he cracked the code to an impenetrable safe. “You’re an actual genius, Hoseok,” with that you passed out.

 After that, you could only remember waking up to find yourself in Hoseok’s bed, with him next to you, accompanied by a killer hangover.

✎ ✎

Hobi grabbed your hair tight and pulled your mouth from his cock to his lips. The kiss was rough, needy, desperate. You could feel his tongue invade your mouth, trying to fight for dominance. Both of you had been warmed up sufficiently by all this foreplay, and now it was time for the real deal. Hobi slipped on the condom with ease. This is it, after all these years.

“Ok, I need you on all fours, but with your chest on the bed. Keep your hips up in the air, ok?” Hoseok guided you.

“Fine, but this feels like an awkward pose to start with.” You chimed, but doing as you were told. 

“I know what I’m doing. Just wait until I’m inside you babe.” You can feel Hobi smirk as he says it.

You can feel the tip of his cock at your entrance, painfully teasing you. Your cheeks are burning red, from the stimulation and the annoyance that he’s making you wait. You just wanted him in you already, and your patience was beginning to wear thin.

Suddenly, Hoseok grabbed both sides of your hips and put his whole length in, hilt-deep. The sensation of being filled so quickly made you draw out a deep guttural moan. A string of curse words soon followed, which made him chuckle.

“You’re so cute when you swear Y/N.”

You kneel upright so your back is flush against Hobi’s chiseled abdomen, and turn your head to plant a small kiss on his lips. “Shut up and make me feel good, sunshine.” You grind against him, while his dick is still deep in you. You didn’t recall sex feeling this good. You felt Hoseok’s small smile drop and he starts nibbling on your neck.

He puts a hand on your nape and pushes you down, so you’re back to the position you started in. He puts a pillow right in front of you and raises your hips higher with his hands. “You see, what I like about this position... “ You feel him kneel forward until he’s right by your ear, “is that I can... Fuck. You. Hard.” He pronounce every syllable in a harsh tone. “Hold on tight, babe. You’ll feel like you’ve never done before.”

You do as instructed and place your hands on your small headrest, mildly excited for Hoseok to get on with it. He pulls out slowly, until he’s only a few inches in, and pounds into you with enough force to jolt you forward.

✎ 1 hour ago

“Ok ok, I have a really juicy secret!” You shout out. “When I was 11 years old, I drew dicks in the girls’ loos and the teachers thought one of the boys would do it. Turns out, my desk partner was caught with going to the girls’ toilets and he got blamed for the dicks.”

There weren’t many people around on the streets at this time of night, but this didn’t faze you. You had pepper spray in your purse and a knife tucked in the hidden compartment of your coat. Usually Friday nights were when you two went to the small Vietnamese place that was quite far away. You had just missed the last bus and now had to walk the 2 miles home, in the freezing cold.

“Shit, that must have taken guts.” Hobi responded to your statement. “Ok, um… you know when I told you I was dating Jennifer Griggs?”

“Yeh?” You answer cautiously.

“Well, turns out she was a lesbian who was only dating me to convince her parents that she was straight.” 

“No way! That’s actually so sad, I feel bad for her. I called her a bitch once because she took my cookie by accident.” 

“Don’t you mean my cookie? You always stole my food.” 

“Not always, if you’re not looking, it doesn’t count as stealing, duh!” 

“You’re such a douche.” 

“Ooh I’ve got one. At Uni, I joined the BDSM society and pretty much attended orgies every week.” 

“Holy hell, seriously? Is this when you would tell me you’re off to go swimming?!” 

“Yes, I’ve never step foot inside the swimming pool there. Although I was actually a weird one, because I would only join in like once a month but I only became a watcher about a year in.” 

“How come?” 

“Because none of them were you.”

Shit. You should not have said that. 

“Ok it’s my turn.” Hoseok began after a long pause. He let out a deep sigh, “I’ve been in love with you since I first laid eyes on you.”

You stopped dead in your tracks and stood to face him. You stood on your tiptoes to reach his ear. “My place is closer.”

✎ ✎

You were so close to climaxing, you thought you would pass out if you didn’t reach your orgasm soon. Somehow, Hobi sensed that you were close and began thrusting into you at a faster and harder pace. His hips rolled into yours effortlessly, you expected nothing less of the fantastic dancer. Your heart felt as if it would tire from beating too fast, and your hands balled fistfuls of your bedding. Soon enough, one final body roll was all it took for you to reach your high at an altitude beyond the heavens. You felt as if you had left the astral plane and ascended beyond comprehension and bodily existence. Whilst descending, you realised that Hobi was still pounding into you, using your high to fuel his own when later he too reached his limits. He collapsed on top of your back, using his forearms to stop himself from crushing you underneath his weight. 

You wince at the feeling of him pulling out but you’re so exhausted, only sleep is on your mind. As Hobi goes to clean himself up, you curl up under your duvet, wearing your birthday suit. You’re sweaty and sticky from all the activities and wonder if you ought to shower now, but that thought soon leaves your head when Hobi slips in next to you. His arm snakes around your waist and brings it closer, so your hair tickles his chin. You slip a leg around him and hook your arm over the side of his chest.

“You know,” you begin as you lift your head to face him, “We’re merging with Google next week, I’ll get a raise and y’know… maybe you can live with me? I’ll get a bigger bed and maybe decent sheets and we can move closer to your studio, but I don’t think I can cook dinner every night because I can only boil pasta.” You rattle on faster than your speed of thought.

“Y/N…” Hobi begins with a bright smile. “Are you asking me to be your sugar baby?”

“Well, maybe. Unless you’re not down for that, which is totally cool with me.” You reply with exasperation.

“No, I’m fine to be whatever you need me to be. Sugar baby, husband, boyfriend, one night stand.” He listed.

“Well tonight… will you be my best friend?” You ask inquisitively.

“Forever.” He kisses your forehead as the two of you merge into each other, drifting off into a blissful slumber.

[writeyouin]

Swerve X Reader – Changes - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - Whispers in the Silence

A/N – After a very successful vote in which Swerve won out, here is the next chapter. As always, a great thanks to @rocksinmuffin​ for continuing to inspire this story with their amazing imagines.

Warnings – None.

Rating – T

As a rule, the Lost Light was a ship that prided itself on noise, adventure and laughter, but with you in sick bay, under the careful operation of three medics and two scientists, the ship held nothing but a deep and terrible silence. It didn’t matter that Swerve was quietly sobbing outside the operating theatre; the ship was still a static void in which no sound mattered.

If you were beside him, Swerve knew you would make the best of such a situation, probably saying something like, ‘Huh, I guess in space, nobody can hear you scream. Who’d’ve guessed?’

When Swerve was in the operating theatre all that time ago, you left him a message to listen to until he got back. He had listened to it over seventy-two times while you were in the medics’ servos, if only to hear your voice again. Primus, it wasn’t fair! Swerve couldn’t leave you a message because you weren’t Cybertronian, and worse than that, he wasn’t even allowed to be in the same room as you because Ratchet had thrown him out when he started to get in the way.

Swerve looked up when he heard a door open, but it wasn’t the operating theatre, it was only the waiting room entrance that led to the decks. Tailgate waved awkwardly at Swerve, soon lowering his servo out of respect. He and Cyclonus simply made their way to the right-hand wall and left two small vials of their innermost energon before leaving to stand with the bots in the corridor; that made exactly ninety-seven vials of innermost energon thus far. Swerve was glad that none of the others tried talking to him upon leaving their energon; for once, he was in no mood to talk. He also appreciated that the bots outside were staggering their queue times in leaving their innermost energon. One or two bots would come in every half hour or so to leave their vials, and before the day was through, Swerve was sure there would be almost two-hundred vials for you. It seemed everyone loved you, almost as much as he did.

Another round of sobbing racked Swerve’s body. He pulled out his locket with your hair in it, clutching it close to his spark, as if it might will you back to full health. The two of you had only been married one year, how could the universe be so cruel as to threaten that so soon?

“Swerve?”

Swerve shook his head, as a memory of your voice surfaced, followed closely by a visual feed of the event in his processor’s optic.

“(Y/N)?” Swerve beamed, repeating your confused tone, even though he was well-aware of what you were going to ask.

“I um- I know we said we were going to re-decorate the hab-suite, but why… why does it look like the friends set?”

“You don’t like purple?” He asked all too innocently.

You jumped as a laugh-track played aloud, “Oh my God…. You didn’t. Swerve, tell me you didn’t add a laugh track to the apartment.”

Swerve looked far into the background, winking at nothing, “Maybe.”

The laughter briefly continued, only escalating when you face-palmed.

“Why are you like this?”

At that, Swerve only chuckled and splashed you with paint, triggering the first of what he hoped would be many paint fights along your life together.

Coolant sprung from Swerve’s optics and he choked out another sob. That memory was from April Fool’s Day and he had re-decorated the apartment with you properly the day after. Swerve prayed to both Primus and every deity he knew of on Earth that you would come out of this okay and that he wouldn’t have to live with the weight of his mistake forever.

He needed you. Couldn’t the universe see that? He needed you to reassure him that everything would be okay. He needed you to come in the bar every day and lean over to kiss him, no matter what anyone else muttered under their breaths about him. He needed you to waylay the fears and doubts from his mind that he wasn’t good enough.

More than that, he wanted to be there for you as-well.

“(Y/N)! ARE YOU SICK? PLEASE, TELL ME WHAT’S WRONG!”

Swerve scrunched his optics shut as another memory hit him like a tonne of bricks.

You were curled up in pain, hugging yourself and groaning. You forced yourself to shake your head, shuddering as you breathed out slowly. “Shark week,” You winced.

“SHARK WEEK?” Swerve cried. You had already forewarned him of this, but he didn’t think it would hurt you so badly. Hurriedly, he ran to your tiny cupboards, bringing out extra blankets, a two-litre bottle of water, several boxes of pills (one of which surely had to be the right one), a large bar of synthetic chocolate, and a heat pad. After you mentioned shark week the first time to him, Swerve had visited Ratchet to learn what would help you and Ratchet had given him these supplies.

“Which do you need?” Swerve asked frantically.

You could tell he was about to go into full-blown panic mode, as he usually did when he first encountered some new experience of organic life that he hadn’t seen before. Before you were married, you had generally avoided him when this happened to save him from any embarrassment, but now the two of you were married, you knew he wouldn’t be awkward about organic matters; well, not that awkward anyway.

Sitting up slowly, you took a few sips of water, smiling when the nausea passed, “Good job sweetie. I’m all better now.”

Swerve pointed an accusatory finger at you, “No! that’s your placating smile, not your happy smile. Tell me the truth, do you need Ratchet? Are you still in pain? If so, how much pain? Should I get Rodimus to stop on a nearby planet? I could-”

For once, you left Swerve to rant on, while you simply went to sleep. In retrospect, that wasn’t your best idea as he gasped and sped of to the medical bay, dragging Ratchet back with him, but honestly you were too tired at the time to answer his questions. After giving you the once-over, Ratchet gave Swerve a stern-talking to about heeding his research into humans before wasting his time.

“If (Y/N) says she’s fine, she’s fine,” Ratchet glowered, walking out of the hab-suite. “Next time, listen to her before you come to me.”

Swerve chewed his lip anxiously, before approaching you again. Now you were well-rested, you were sat under a blanket with the heating pad over your stomach.

“You’re really okay?” he asked.

“With you to take care of me? Always.”

Swerve stared at the operating theatre door. That was the problem; he wasn’t there for you now. Granted, Swerve was smarter than most bots gave him credit for, but he wasn’t a doctor or a scientist. He didn’t have healer’s hands. He was a barman. Why in Primus’ name had you married him instead of somebody useful? You could have been with somebody who listened to you when you told him not to cross that bridge. You could have been with someone who hadn’t got you shot.

The hall door swished open again and Rung came quietly in to leave his innermost energon. He looked like he wanted to say something to Swerve, perhaps even comfort him, but he knew the protocol was to stay quiet when somebody's Conjunx Endurae was in in fate’s servos. Swerve could have invited him over, giving Rung permission to comfort him. After all, Rung was almost like a creator to you, but quite frankly, Swerve didn’t think he deserved to be comforted when all of this was his fault.

“What are you doing married to Swerve anyway? Don’t you know there are better mechs onboard this ship?”

Swerve could hear the cheesy 70’s music playing in his bar as if it was yesterday. He had briefly left you to grab some supplies from the back but when he heard Getaway say that, he remained hidden, knowing it was wrong to listen in on you like this, but needing to hear your response all the same.

“Please don’t talk about my husband that way,” You said, giving the overcharged mech a chance to back off and apologise before you ripped into him.

“Come on, he’s not even here right now,” Getaway guffawed, admittedly somewhat jealous that you loved Swerve instead of him, even though the two of you had hardly spoken before; Getaway always coveted that which he did not have. “He won’t hear what you really think about him.”

‘If only that were true,’ Swerve thought, though he still continued to eavesdrop.

“I mean, who would really notice if you and I just kind of slipped away right now to have some fun. You’ve got to have wondered what it would be like with another, more charming mech right?”

Swerve gulped, sure he was going to purge his tanks out of nervousness. He knew for a fact that most mechs considered Getaway to be charming and none considered him to be.

“Hmm,” you said thoughtfully. “You’re really good at sex?”

Swerve fell against the wall, wanting to claw out his audials, but frozen in place as the conversation continued.

“The best.”

“Good, then go fuck yourself, and never ever talk about my husband like that again. Swerve is ten times the mech you are.”

Giddy elation filled Swerve up and he rushed out from the supply closet, pretending he hadn’t heard a thing. He could have waited a little bit longer to compose himself, but he was afraid Getaway might be just overcharged enough to hurt you if you injured his pride any more than you already had. Getaway left irately and you turned your attention to Swerve who pretended he hadn’t heard a thing.

“What’s his problem?” Swerve asked casually, though he could hardly keep the giggle out of his vocaliser.

You shrugged, “Small man syndrome.”

“Huh? Okay, whatever you say, (Y/N).”

Before any more memories could torture him, the med-bay door finally opened and Ratchet stepped out, looking grimmer than ever. Swerve wanted to blurt out a million questions, but fearing for your life and knowing every second counted, he waited through the agonising seconds for Ratchet to speak.

“I have sent the medical team into the back so you and (Y/N) can spend some time alone, but I hope you are ready to face the consequences of what you have done Swerve. The lies you’ve told her – to everyone on this ship – will not go unnoticed.”

Swerve swallowed fearfully, “But she’s alive? She’s going to be alright?”

Ratchet considered the question before answering, “Physically, yes. Mentally however… Only time will tell. If you will excuse me, I’m going to join my team in med-bay two, where we will wait until you are ready.”

Swerve waited momentarily for Ratchet to back-track though the medical bay; it gave him a few minutes to compose himself and think of what he would say when he saw you. Then, forgetting his composure, he ran into the medical bay, stopping short when he saw you, in your new Cybertronian body. He knew there was a chance this would happen, but he had told Perceptor and Brainstorm to wait until they were sure your organic body couldn’t be saved.

Swerve looked to the bed across from you, where a sheet covered the corpse of your previous organic body. Why hadn’t he immediately told you about the mini-bot shell he’d had made? If he had, he knew the conversation ahead would be easier. All the same, your optics were offline and Swerve knew by instinct that Ratchet and the others had left them off to give him the chance to explain before you saw yourself.

Before he approached you, he took a few silent steps over to the organic corpse. He held the corner of the sheet that covered it, hesitating before he lifted it to look into your cold dead eyes. He needed to see this, to burn it into his memory of what his mistakes brought on. Granted, your mind and memories were still alive, but this mess of a cadaver that had been stitched up by servos inexperienced with organics, that still had patches of dried blood caked around the sealed wound, was his cross to bear.

Finally, when he could look at it no longer, Swerve covered the corpse with a sheet again, and moved to your side.

“(Y/N),” Swerve whispered.

You moved your head frantically to your left where he was standing, “SWERVE?! I- I CAN’T SEE- I CAN’T-”

Swerve grabbed your servo, “Shh, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m going to explain everything. What- What do you remember?”

You went quiet for a long time, thinking back to the bridge. Almost silently, you spoke, “I was shot.”

Swerve nodded affirmation, speaking aloud when he remembered you couldn’t see, “Yeah… That was it. (Y/N), I’m so, so sorry this happened to you. It was all my fault. I never should have put you through that. Uh- (Y/N), the docs here, they’ve been working on you for a really long time.”

“Swerve… Am I blind?”

“No sweetheart, that’s only temporary, I promise you’re not blind.”

“Then are you- are you in holoform? You hand feels so small, but it doesn’t feel like skin. Swerve, what’s wrong with me? Nothing feels right. I don’t feel real. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I feel all wrong inside.”

“Yeah, about that… (Y/N), I need to tell you something… Something I should have told you when we got married, and I need you to listen okay.”

“Okay,” You shivered, and coolant leaked from your offlined optics.

Swerve pressed his helm to your servo. “From the moment we wed, I was so scared something like this might happen… That you’d get hurt and I’d lose you. So, I had Perceptor and Brainstorm work on something, a- a new body of sorts. I- I was scared that you would think I was trying to change you, so I didn’t warn you about it, but now- Well, now you’re different.”

“Swerve,” You whimpered, “You’re not making sense.”

“I know… (Y/N), I’m going to sort out your eyes, make them work right, y’know. Please trust me, okay?”

It seemed you weren’t focusing on what he was saying, as you groaned, “My head hurts.”

Swerve sighed solemnly, then opened your head panel to reveal your processor. From there, he connected the wire that would allow you normal control of your optics. As your optics flickered to life, you caught a reflection of yourself and Swerve in the chrome wall across from you. Your previously human mind tried and failed to connect with the newer faster Cybertronian processor. You couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Swerve had his servos inside your head and all you could feel was numbness where you should have felt pain. Everything from your past and present crashed together in a way you couldn’t handle. Then, you screamed.

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