#can’t fucking deal with this today so I’m ranting into the void again

[puzzle-paradigm]

Can’t believe I have to say this but calling random Jews child mutilators is antisemitic, fyi.

[seohwang]

Flowers.

After your first time with Felix, you can’t help but feel anxious

Genre: fluff, a bit of smut at the beginning, very very slight angst

Word count: 1 605

Warnings: mentions of sex, reader has a slight fear of intimacy and a warped idea of the implications of losing your virginity

A/N: This is a fic I wrote on a whim a week or two ago and can’t stand seeing in my drafts anymore, so I’m just going to post it now. While I respect everyone that’s into corruption and that kind of stuff, I absolutely abhor the creeps who fetishize the fuck out of virgins, especially young girls. Nobody is ‘taking’ anything from you, you’re not ‘losing’ anything, etc. You’re fine. Whether you’re a virgin or not anymore, it’s not a big deal, so don’t let anyone use it against you.

A/N 2: Okay, rant over, lol. I hope you all enjoy this fic!! I don’t know if I’m the only one who’s ever struggled with this, but if this helps even one person just a little bit, I’ll be very happy ♥ (please don’t crucify me if this is bad i’m sorry)

“Fuck,” you heard Felix groan out as he thrusted into you one last time, riding out both of your orgasms. 

He laid his weight softly on top of your heaving chest, burying his face in the crook of your neck as he tried to calm his breathing. You were doing the same, rubbing small circles on his back as you slowly returned to reality.

The waves of your orgasm finally died down, leaving your body along with the slight fuzziness that had been clouding your head before. The sudden change felt a bit harsh on your mind though, both of you being so absorbed in the moment until now.

You winced a little as Felix pulled out of you, getting off the bed to discard the condom. Once he returned, he gently pulled the towel you’d put down from underneath you before throwing it in the hamper. He joined you back on the bed right after, lying down next to you with a small huff and pulling the covers over you both. You appreciated the gesture since the room was indeed starting to feel a bit cold after your bodies began cooling down again.

You heard Felix sigh contently next to you, draping one of his arms over your body as he brought you closer to him. 

“Are you feeling okay?” He asked, voice muffled a bit as his head was half-buried into his pillow. Looking at his sleepy face, you could tell he was ready to doze off any second now.

To be completely honest, you didn’t know. You wanted to say that yes, you were feeling amazing and were ecstatic that he was your first, but you genuinely weren’t sure. You knew that you wanted to do this, with him, today, and in the comfort of his bedroom, but you still couldn’t help but feel weird. Maybe it was the sudden new layer of intimacy between the two of you. Or maybe, it was the way Felix didn’t do much afterwards, just lying down next to you and asking you one question he already knew the likely answer to.

You knew that this was no big deal and that Felix obviously loved you and cared for you very much. He was very gentle and patient with you, after all. Yet you still felt this strange void slowly creeping into your heart as you laid in bed with him. Maybe it was your own mind, or maybe, it was the gross pressure society has put on losing your virginity, but you suddenly hated everything about the current situation you were in. It felt as though you had something taken from you, as if Felix himself stole something from you, and it felt horrible. 

You were suddenly all too aware of just how close the two of you were. How you were lying in someone else’s bed, completely naked with your equally bare boyfriend next to you, how-

“Where are you going?” Felix asked, already feeling a bit nervous from your lack of response to his previous question. He noticed the odd look on your face as you got off the bed, pulling your T-shirt and panties back on. “Y/N?” He called out to you again, making you finally stop and turn around.

“I’m just going to get something to drink, don’t worry,” you forced a smile, watching Felix’s brows furrow in slight concern before he let you go with a small ‘okay’.

You walked down the short hallway to the kitchen, already beginning to feel the soreness setting into your thighs, making everything feel that much worse.

As you poured yourself a glass of water and sat down at the table, your mind was already filling with negative thoughts. You recalled all of the weird, creepy remarks, all of the way too romanticized sex scenes in teenage movies, everything. How everyone described it as the girl ‘losing’ something, giving herself and her ‘innocence’ away to a man. You felt the pit in your stomach growing, almost to the point of being sick as you gripped the glass in your hand tighter.

Anxiety seeped into you as everything began to set in. You remembered each and every instance you could of men talking about ‘taking’ a girl’s virginity, about being the one to ‘deflower’ her with such excitement that it felt more repulsive than anything.

You couldn’t help but wonder: was Felix also like that? Did he see this as a weird power trip over you as well?

Speaking of Felix, you could hear the familiar sound of footsteps approaching the kitchen, making you whip your head around in the direction of the entrance.

There, you spotted your boyfriend, dressed in just his boxers and the blanket wrapped around his frame to keep warm. He leaned against the doorframe, giving you a small pout as he spoke.

“Why aren’t you coming back to bed?” He asked, slowly shuffling over to you with the blanket still around him.

You set the glass down on the table, letting out a small sigh as he finally reached your seat. Looking down at you with those big eyes of his, you could tell that he was worried. “Sorry. I just got a little lost in my own thoughts, I guess,” you said, hoping he wouldn’t pry into it any further.

But, of course, he did.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Felix asked again, leaning down to be at your level as he carefully put his hand on your back. “I wasn’t too rough or anything, was I?”

You couldn’t help but blush at the question, quickly dismissing it. “No, no, you were okay, it’s just that...” You trailed off, averting your eyes as you tried to think of how to properly explain what you were feeling.

Felix let out a quiet hum, signaling for you to continue. When you didn’t say anything, he spoke again instead. “Just what? You can tell me, it’s okay,” he reassured you, helping you find the courage to tell him.

Or, at least, blurt out your next question.

“Do you love me?” You suddenly asked, catching the boy completely off-guard. He let out a choked sound, his eyes widening at your question. “Y-yes? Why are you asking that all of a sudden?” He questioned back, chuckling in disbelief.

You felt yourself deflating, feeling kind of foolish as you explained everything. “I don’t know, I just...I feel weird. I’m happy that I...lost my virginity to you, don’t get me wrong. It just made me feel kind of uncomfortable, I guess,” you admitted, taking a deep breath before continuing. Felix’s eyes were on you the entire time, carefully listening to everything you had to say. 

“There’s always this pressure about having sex for the first time, and it just got to me all of a sudden. It made me feel weirdly...inferior? I don’t know how to put it. I didn’t feel like that during it, but afterwards, I just suddenly felt really vulnerable.”

There was a moment of silence as Felix processed your words, thinking of the right way to respond. In the end, he just sighed, helping you stand up before wrapping his arms around you in a warm hug.

“Baby,” he said in a hushed voice, making your cheeks warm a bit at the pet name. “There’s nothing to feel bad about. You didn’t lose anything, nor are you inferior to me in literally any way. I didn’t know you were feeling this way, so I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I’m sorry if I disappointed you, I just-” he let out a huff of frustration, unsure how to formulate all of his thoughts.

“Just know that I felt honored to take your- to be your first. It didn’t give me any power over you, nor did it make me feel like I was taking anything away from you. I was just happy you trusted me enough to be vulnerable with me like that, and let me be vulnerable with you as well. Sex is supposed to be a fun and intimate way of showing love, not some power trip for creepy losers, you know. Or at least I don’t see it that way at all.”

You let out a small giggle at his words, tightening your own hold on him as you rested your head on his shoulder.

A minute or two passed as you just stood there, enjoying each other’s presence.

Finally, you broke the silence again, pulling away to look at him shyly. “Thank you, Felix,” you told him sincerely, watching his own cheeks heat up at your words. 

He just smiled, giving you a quick peck. “Do you want to go back to bed now? I still owe you some post-sex cuddles, after all.”

You chuckled at his offer, but nodded nonetheless.

With your approval, he removed the blanket from his body, wrapping it around you instead. You were confused for a second until he suddenly picked you up, making you squeal in surprise, to which he giggled in return.

You let yourself be carried back into the bedroom, watching the tender look in his eyes as he gently lowered you onto the bed again. Pulling the blanket off of you, he straightened it back out before covering the both of you with it.

He wrapped an arm around you just like before, and this time, you happily let him.

Thank you for reading! And remember, any feedback is always appreciated! ♥

[voiceless-terror]

prompt request: JMart angst/hurt/comfort "you're not broken" + "i love you, no matter what your brain tells you"

Hey there friend! As requested, here is your prompt. I made it into a sort of season one/two au where Jon and Martin have already been dating. Hope you like! It can be a stand alone piece, but it is also the second in a series, the first of which is here: The Art of Conversation

“I was thinking…”

“As you do.”

Jon fixed Martin with a scowl. “Perhaps we could- that is, if you want-wouldyouliketospendthenightatmine?” 

“You’ll have to try again, love. Didn’t quite catch that.”

Jon sighed in the face of Martin’s open fondness as they strolled down the street, making their way back from lunch. Martin brought a happiness to his life that he never thought possible- a companionship built on mutual respect and love. He enjoyed every night he spent in Martin’s cozy flat, curled up on the couch drinking tea and talking about everything and nothing at all. That’s not to say they didn’t have their troubles- Martin was rather inexperienced with intimate relationships, and Jon didn’t have the greatest track record when it came to communication. But Martin held his hand the night he stuttered out his asexuality, patient and loving and kind. Jon wasn’t ashamed of who he was, never had been- but he knew that for others it was considered a deal breaker. He’d heard stories. But Martin nodded, thanked him for trusting him with his boundaries, and let him curl back into his side, as if it changed nothing.

If he could handle that, than why, for fuck’s sake, was he so worried about having Martin over?

His flat wasn’t that bad. In actuality, it was quite a bit bigger than Martin’s. He wasn’t dirty, he usually kept up with chores, kept it relatively tidy.

But there was something so intimate about it- there was a reason he never hosted any events. Martin saw glimpses of it when he picked him up for things, but he’d never actually been inside. It was just so...barren. Void of anything Jon-like. Sure, it housed his possessions, his favorite books, his grandmother’s salvageable furniture. But it was a peek into his mind that he didn’t like others seeing. What if the way he lived was wrong? What if he didn’t have the right things? Like the little things that Martin had- a proper strainer for loose-leaf tea, little jars of spices for cooking, a towel-rack instead of a plastic hook on the wall. A nice bed frame and headboard, a worn but cozy duvet. In comparison, Jon lived like a freshly-graduated college student. He should have his shit together by now, right?

But every time he thought of making it a bit more homey and lived-in, his mind blanked. Where were the lists of all the things you need to make a home yours? What would look best on the walls? And what if he bought all of those things and it just looked awkward, like puzzle pieces forced in the wrong place? So he kept his mismatched furniture and odd little piles of books. It’s easier to stick with what you know.

But it was about time he had Martin over- the man had accepted him in every possible way, this couldn’t be the thing that would make or break their relationship. That didn’t make it any easier, though.

“Would you like,” he started again, taking a deeper breath. “To spend the night at mine on Saturday?” That would give him enough time to prepare, it was only Wednesday. “I could- I dunno, fix dinner, we could watch that movie you wanted to see? Or whatever, really. I don’t mind.”

Martin beamed a bright, shining smile that always made Jon’s heart flutter when it was aimed his way. “I’d love that, Jon! I’ll bring over some wine, we’ll make a night of it.” His arm wound around Jon’s waist, bringing him closer. “Fix you an omelette in the morning.”

“With the green peppers?”

“Of course. Oh! We could go for a morning stroll; you’ve got that lovely park by your house, yeah?”

“Mhm.” It was nice seeing Martin so excited. His anxiety eased, though he still felt the need to qualify. “It’s- well, it’s not the nicest place, but I keep it clean and-”

“Jon,” Martin’s elbow nudged his side, and he bent down to give him a quick peck on the cheek. “Any place is nice if it’s got you in it.”

“Sap,” Jon rolled his eyes even as his face flushed red. 

He could probably do this. Right?

______

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Jon was twitchy and nervous the rest of the week, his mind spiraling as he considered every situation, even the most ridiculous. Martin’s not going to care if your flat is ugly. Martin’s going to take one look inside and suggest going back to his. Martin will like your cooking. It’s perfectly serviceable. Martin’s going to spit it out and-

“You alright there, boss?”

Jon jumped at the sound of Tim’s voice, almost dropping the mug he’d been preparing to wash. “Christ, Tim! Announce yourself next time, please.”

“That was me announcing myself,” he hopped up on the counter, giving him an easy smile. “What’s going on? You’ve been in your head all week.”

“I have not.”

“You asked me about the Ling statement twice today. It’s Friday. I finished researching it on Monday.”

Well then.

Jon sighed, putting the mug in the sink and turning to face Tim’s friendly concern. “It’s- hm. I’m having Martin at mine tomorrow, and- well, I’m a bit nervous.”

“Aw, that’s sweet.” Jon dodged the condescending pat to the back. “Seriously, that’s adorable. What’s there to be nervous about? You’ve been dating for three months, and pining for much more besides that.”

Jon’s hands gripped the counter with a renewed force. “I just want everything to be okay. I want him to think I’m a fully-functional human being, not someone who panics over having his boyfriend over. We’re always at his place, he’s always cooking for me. He deserves- he deserves everything.”

Tim hopped off the counter, face suddenly serious. “Jon, you’re quite literally Martin’s everything. It’s sickening with you two, honestly. You’ll be fine.” He threw an arm around his shoulder and Jon allowed it, just this once. “Now, what’re you cooking?”

“Well, there’s this pasta dish he loves at the Italian place on Third,” Jon began, his hands fidgeting nervously. “But it’s a bit...difficult to cook. I found a few recipes and I think I can recreate it, it’s just going to take some time and I’ve never worked with some of the ingredients and I might not have the right dishes for it and I don’t want to just substitute things-”

Tim cut off his rant. “That all sounds really lovely, but why don’t you just stick with something you know? That penne you brought to Sasha’s potluck last year- now that was good. And Martin liked it, right?”

“Well, yes,” Jon bristled. “But you think I can’t do it? It’s just a recipe, I should be able to follow basic instructions, I’m not stupid-”

“I didn’t say that, Jon,” Tim grabbed his shoulders and steered him into a seat. “I just think if you’re already this nervous about having him over, maybe you should minimize the stress, yeah? Lighten the load.”

“I can’t,” Jon argued. “I already bought all of the ingredients- I can’t just let them go to waste. I can do this.”

“Well, that’s the spirit!” Tim put a hand on his shoulder as Jon slumped over, leaning into the table. “Look, it’ll go over fine. Stop worrying. Martin will love whatever you make because you made it, alright? And if you need help, just give me a call. I’m not so bad in the kitchen myself, y’know.”

“Tim, you once set the toaster oven on fire because you left a cheese toastie in there for two hours.”

“Fuck’s sake, you set an oven on fire one time and no one lets you forget it-” 

_______

The day arrives without much fanfare, besides a text from both Sasha and Tim declaring that “he had this!” and to “relax, it’ll go great!” Tim wasn’t very good at keeping secrets.

And of course, a text from Martin.

Looking forward to tonight :) Love you!

He straightens up his apartment and then un-straightens it when it looks too clean. He moves furniture to make it more centered, he studies the recipe a couple more times so when four o’clock hits he’ll be ready to start cooking. It’ll be on the table by six, right when Martin’s supposed to arrive. And everything will be fine. Everything will be fine.

But his books look wrong today. Messy, ugly, no sort of order. There are little piles and big piles. Even the ones on the bookshelf look bad somehow. He’s got authors and genres all mixed up. It looks stupid, laughable. Jon’s got to fix this.

He starts unloading them one by one, first in alphabetical order then later by genre, because that makes more sense, right? He switches them back to alphabetical after much consideration- that’s the easier one, of course. But then he gets online, sees all of these nice color-coded displays and wouldn’t that look nice on his bookshelf? He grabs the older, leather-bound books he keeps in his bedroom and brings them out to the sitting area. Now these should be displayed, these look nice. But then there’s no room left over and he’s surrounded by paperbacks he couldn’t find room for and Christ the place is a mess-

And then the doorbell rings.

Fuck. Fuck!

Of course Martin would get here early. Martin always shows up at least fifteen minutes early, but two hours is kind of pushing it. Maybe he wanted to surprise Jon with something, Martin’s very kind like that. Jon opens the door, hands shaking.

Martin’s standing there, looking flustered and harried. “Sorry I’m late!” he begins, giving Jon a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug. Late? “The trains were running slow again and I practically sprinted down the street- hope I didn’t mess up your plans, love!”

Jon looks down at his phone, dumbfounded. It’s six thirty. 

It’s six thirty and there’s no dinner on the table. It’s six thirty and his living room’s a mess, books everywhere. It’s six thirty and Martin’s going to be so, so disappointed.

“Jon? Is everything alright?” He can barely make out Martin’s voice as his head swims; his arms wrap around his torso and dig into his body and all he can mumble is apologies.

“Sorry- I’m- fuck, I’m so stupid, I’m-”

“Hey, hey,” Martin’s voice immediately goes into that low, soothing tone that he uses whenever Jon’s upset. Whenever Jon makes everything about him when it should be about Martin for once. “None of that, now. Let’s go sit down, yeah?’ Martin immediately sets down his bag and his- oh God, he’s brought flowers and now Jon’s crying and everything’s wrong.

Martin’s steering him over to the couch with infinite care sits beside him, putting a hand on his knee and the other on his cheek, wiping his tears. It’s a gesture Jon loves but doesn’t deserve today. “It’s alright love, don’t cry. I’m here.”

“You’re- you’re here and I didn’t - I didn’t fix anything and nothing’s right, I’m so sorry-” Jon is well aware his words are barely intelligible, but that hardly matters now. Not five seconds in and he’s already ruined the night with his stupid, broken brain that just can’t fucking focus.

“You’re not broken, Jon,” He must have said the words aloud because now Martin’s got his face in his hands and is trying to make eye contact with him. “Don’t say that about yourself. You know it’s not true.”

“But it is,” Martin has to see that. What grown man can’t keep a schedule? What kind of adult loses three hours to a failed attempt at organizing books? Martin’s going to realize how messed up he is and he’s going to leave and Jon’s going to be alone again. “You- you deserve so much more than someone who can’t e-even make you dinner, can’t do one simple thing-”

“Jon, don’t- don’t say things like that. I know what I deserve, alright?” Martin pulls Jon to his chest and the pressure is good, stabilizing. “I love you, no matter what that brain of yours tells you. Okay?” He can only nod as the words bring on a fresh round of tears and he buries his face in Martin’s jumper.

It feels like hours before he calms down under Martin’s soothing hands and warm voice. He reluctantly pulls away to look the man in the eye. He deserves an apology that isn’t a breakdown. “I’m- I’m really sorry, though,” he sniffs, trying to keep his emotions in check. “It’s just- you’re always cooking for me and doing nice things and I wanted to pay you back.”

Martin’s brow furrows and Jon’s afraid he’s said the wrong words. “It’s not about paying me back, Jon. I cook for you because I want to, not because I have to. I like- well, it’s nice to finally have someone who appreciates it.”

Jon’s aware of Martin’s tempestuous relationship with his mother- he’s never brought Jon along on his visits, though he says that’s more to spare Jon than it is any judgment on their relationship. “She’s absolutely horrid sometimes, Jon. You don’t deserve that,” he said.

“Well, neither do you, Martin.” Jon never liked seeing Martin cry, though he insisted these were happy tears.

“You’ve got a lot of ingredients over there,” Martin murmurs, casting an appreciative eye over at the counter. “What were you planning on making?”

He pulls up the recipe on his phone, reluctantly handing it over to Martin. “I don’t think it would’ve turned out well, but I know how much you loved it when we-”

“When we went there on our first date,” Martin finishes. His eyes are watering- is he crying? “I’m sorry, it’s just- that’s so thoughtful, I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“Martin,” Jon says incredulously as he winds his arms around the man’s neck. “I didn’t even make it.”

“It’s the thought that counts, Jon!” His voice is nasally and tight. 

“Don’t- don’t cry Martin-”

“I can’t help it!”

“You’re going to make me cry again-” Martin chuckles at this and leans back on the couch, taking Jon with him in a mess of tears and laughter.  “What a pair we make.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, love. Maybe we can make it together, yeah? Bond n’ all that.”

“That sounds nice,” Jon’s response is muffled by Martin’s jumper. “Would require getting up, though.”

“We’ve got some time. This couch is heavenly- you’ve been holding out on me, Sims.”

Later that night, after a few mishaps but an all-around good dinner, he’s back on the couch and back in Martin’s arms. He runs his fingers through Jon’s hair, a touch that quiets his brain for the first time all week. 

As it turns out, the only thing his flat was missing was someone to share it with.

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27354958

Next in Series:

My Dearest

The Weight of Love

[mayfriend-archive]

Totally understand if you're not up for it and fully recognize the ronald mcdonald dom/sub anon vibes which is an AMAZING post btw but like...now i'm curious, what the hell did Lord of the Flies anon DO that got him blocked for the discourse? like...i just can't wrap my head around high school lit being...uh...that inflammatory i guess?

Okay so, I'll start by saying I've had a new anon from apparently the same anon saying they are NOT the person I blocked, just a rando making the same points, but I'll answer your question anyway just to set out why this person in particular got blocked, out of the several thousand who reblogged/commented on that very successful addition to the LoTF post I made.

First off, I added the 'real life Lord of the Flies' story because I thought it was a good story. I had read about it only a couple days beforehand in Humankind and, after reading out the entire chapter to my parents who weren't very interested, I was excited that there was not only a post where it would be relevant to post, but that I wouldn't be hijacking it, as it was already rejecting the widespread interpretation taught in many schools, that humanity is inherently savage.

When making the addition, I a) did not think it would get more than a couple reblogs, because the post was already at 50k notes and I figured anyone that might be interested would already have seen it, and b) I did not know the very specific context that prompted William Golding to write the book; all I knew was that he had been a teacher at a public school (basically, the poshest schools in the country - think Eton, Harrow, very 'old money' places that pump out Conservative politicians by the bucket-load 🤢) who hated his job and the boys he taught (which, valid), and new information I'd been given in Humankind - that Golding had said to his wife one day, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave?" - which had no mention of The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, which I have since learned was the text that Golding loathed enough to write an entire novel in refutation of - and included what I considered a very telling letter from Golding to his publisher, in which Golding wrote of his belief that 'even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it.' Another Golding quote that I believe portrays his belief in humanity's 'innate savagery' is that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

Obviously, the author of a book putting forward the case for humanity's inherent goodness was going to oppose Golding's hypothesis; Bregman not only noted Golding's literary accomplishments and beliefs, but his personal life.

When I began delving into the author's life, I learned what an unhappy individual he'd been. An alcoholic. Prone to depression. A man who, as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack each other. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." (Humankind by Rutger Bregman, p. 24-25)

I have bolded the part about him as a teacher, because it is incredibly relevant to the original post that I commented on, which begins with a comic of a teacher locking her class in to see them 'recreate' Lord of the Flies, something which the follow up comments before mine staunchly reject as both misunderstanding the point of the book, and the fact that it took the kids in Lord of the Flies a significant amount of time without adult supervision to go 'savage'. This misreading of the text is widespread enough that when Golding won the Nobel Prize for Lord of the Flies, the Swedish Nobel committee wrote that his book 'illuminate[s] the human condition in the world of today'. Whether or not they misread it is beyond my expertise - they do at least mention the factors of the outside world neglected by many when analysing the book, but still seem to believe it says something about human nature as a whole rather than just, to quote thedarkbutbeige 'British kids being rat bastards' - but Golding quite happily took his Nobel prize on this basis. Which, in fairness, I would too. It's a fucking Nobel prize.

It was with this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that I stated in my now very, very widely read comment that Golding 'wrote the book to be a dick', in response to the tags of the person I reblogged from. As I said, I now know that Golding did not write the book (solely) because he hated the kids he taught, but as a response to The Coral Island and the general idea that clearly the British were inherently civilsed, whilst the people they colonised and enslaved were inherently savage. So. That's the background.

The anon - or rather, the person I thought was anon - was the sole exception out of dozens of replies, who instead of telling me about The Coral Island politely decided it was time to go ALL CAPS and regurgitate points already made by thespaceshipoftheseus, and implied that the only reason that the real life Tongan castaways didn't go all Lord of the Flies was because they weren't British. Not because they weren't surrounded by violence like the boys in Lord of the Flies, or there wasn't a World War ongoing, or that they weren't the upper, upper, upper crust of a class-obsessed society like Britain - but because they weren't British. A complete inversion of the concept that Golding was trying to get across - now, instead of all of humanity being equally prone to savagery in the right conditions, it was solely nationality that determined it. As in, the British were inherently savage, but nobody else was.

I, trying for humour, made the terrible mistake of replying to them.

I won't lie, I was absolutely blown away that this was real life. What I think they were trying to do was be that Cool Tumblr Person who, after somebody's been shitty on a post, goes to their blog and sees something Damning in their about/description. In an ideal world, I imagine I'd have gone nuts or done something Unforgiveable. In what I can only call the rant that followed, they stated several times that I needed to go back to high school to get some 'proper literary analysis' skills and that the story of the Tongan castaways was completely unrelated to the point at hand which. I mean, I disagree, considering that I made the addition, but I couldn't get my head around how commenting on a post that was already rejecting the thesis that the 'point' of Lord of the Flies was that humanity was inherently savage and was, in fact, about how kids - British or otherwise - learn how to function from the adults around them, and that traumatised, terrified children aren't going to create a mini-Utopia, and put forward a real life example of how without the key additions of an ongoing world war, a colonial Empire and the subsequent mindset of thinking you are 'inherently civilised' and therefore can't do anything wrong, actually, people just want to take care of each other.

A friend has since asked me why I even have 'england' in my description. To be honest, it's a timezone thing - I talk to a lot of people online who don't share my timezone, and it generally makes me feel like if I don't reply immediately because it's 3am, they have the tools to see that I'm not in their timezone and not just ignoring them. I did consider changing it to 'british' or 'uk' after it was... 'used against me', I guess, simply because I didn't want to deal with it, but you know what. No. Not gonna do that. I am from England, and I have never hid that fact. I have a tag called 'uk politics', during Eurovision I refer to the UK's act as 'us' (even if I really, really don't want to. Because James Newman slaughtered that song and it was downright embarrassing), I regularly post stuff in my personal tag about where I live (and mostly complain about this piece of shit government). If people really think my nationality makes every point I make null and void, then they don't have to follow me or interact with my posts; tumblr is big, and I am one medium-small blog very easily passed over.

I did reply to them, trying to explain the above, but their next response really just doubled down. Because I used the word British instead of English - foolishly because the posts above mine focused on Britishness, and also because although Golding was English and taught English kids, the pro-Imperialism author of The Coral Island, R. M. Bannatyne was actually Scottish so, ding ding ding, falls into the 'British' category - they then decided that I was somehow trying to pretend I wasn't English and made all the same points, before ending with this doozy:

At this point, I knew there was nothing to be gained from replying, because if we're whipping out conditions like they're pokemon cards then there's no actual conversation anymore, and I'm not going to start mudslinging like an identity politician. They made up their mind, and I figured there could be no harm in letting them think that they 'won' by blocking them instead of replying.

Until the ask. INNATE ENGLISH SAVAGERY did, I'll admit, make me think it was them, back again. I even thought up a really good response approximately 12 hours after I replied, I was that sure. Until the second message came in, and said they were just someone who came from the post and made the same point by chance. So the saga draws to a close... for now.

It may have been them, it may not have been - the anon feature makes it impossible to be sure, but as the second message I got said, we're in a heatwave. It's too hot to argue. And I've just written a goddamn essay about a book I dislike anyway.

My pasty English ass is going to go melt. If there's Disk Horse, do not tell me. I am Done™

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Eccentricity [Chapter 11: You Don’t Come Around No More]

A/N: I apologize profusely for the long wait. Thank you all so, so, so much for your support. Every single reblog, message, comment, emotional rant, and/or screech of despair makes my day, and I couldn’t do this without you. 💜 Only THREE more chapters left!!!

Series Summary: Joe Mazzello is a nice guy with a weird family. A VERY weird family. They have a secret, and you have a choice to make. Potentially a better love story than Twilight.

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: “More To Life Than Baseball” by Petey. 

Chapter Warnings: Language, angsttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.

Word Count: 7.5k. 

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii​​​​ @bramblesforbreakfast​​​​​​​ @maggieroseevans​​​​​ @culturefiendtrashqueen​​​​​ @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark​​​​​ @escabell​​​​​ @im-an-adult-ish​​​​​​ @queenlover05​​​​​ @someforeigntragedy​​​​​ @imtheinvisiblequeen​​​​​ @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhyee​​​​​ @deacyblues​​​​​ ​ @tensecondvacation​​​​ @brianssixpence​​​​​ @some-major-ishues​​​​ @haileymorelikestupid​​​​ @youngpastafanmug​​​​ @simonedk​

The Rain

I wish I felt empty.

I’m supposed to feel empty, right? I’m supposed to feel steeped in grey, oceanic misery; I’m supposed to dip in and out of depressive naps all day and sob delicately over creased photos and fading, wistful memories. I always envisioned heartbreak as a soft and inherently feminine sort of affliction: the hems of nightgowns and bathrobes sweeping along hardwood floors, Kleenex boxes and concave couch cushions, weepy phone calls to friends and aunts and mothers, Queen Victoria wearing black for the rest of her life after Prince Albert’s death, Mary Todd Lincoln sinking into dark and hushed obscurity. Women, hollowed out by despair, cross the history of the earth like lines of latitude.

I don’t feel empty at all. I don’t even feel sad. I feel razored by sharp, red, ceaseless anxiety. I am consumed by thoughts of what I did wrong, what I said that started the wheels of doubt spinning in his mind, if he had known how it would end from the start. I dream of white, clawed hands dragging me down through cold waves. I hear words scream to me as I toss at night in my suddenly too-spacious bed, words that now hit me like knuckles to the gut: Shhh, hey, it’s just me, don’t get up, as Joe slipped beneath the Arizonan blankets, wrapped an arm around my waist, kissed my collarbone as I tumbled back into sleep; I love you to death, as his Subaru idled in Charlie’s driveway; Baby Swan, listen to me, nothing is supposed to hurt, okay, so if anything hurts, ever, at all, you tell me and we stop, deal? as we stood in the doorway of our hotel room at the Four Seasons in Chicago. And now...and now...

And now everything fucking hurts.

It doesn’t make any sense; and yet it does. Look at him. Look at me.

The Polaroid photo from Homecoming was still taped to the top of my full-length mirror. I peeled it free like a layer of translucent, friable reptilian skin, tore it straight down the center, burned both halves over a brand new three-wicked, lemon-scented Bath And Body Works candle—a gift from Renee and Paul—and closed my eyes like a child casting a wish over her birthday cake like a spell. I wished for my memories to vanish with the photograph. I wished to get hit by a truck and wake up in the hospital with no recollection of the past two and a half months. I wanted the Lees to dissolve into distant, enigmatic mystery; I wanted to join the rest of Forks in believing that they were nothing more than bewildering and yet harmless freaks, barely worth noticing, one of those glitches of the matrix that were better off ignored like liminal seconds of déjà vu. I wished to carve out every part of myself that they had ever touched.

And Joe’s voice came rushing back from where we stood by that star-lit fountain outside the Church of Saint Lawrence, accompanied by falling raindrops and a crooked grin: I can make wishes come true.

The three tiny flames flickered in the breeze that sighed through my open window. The bright, citrusy scent of the candle reminded me of Lucy. I couldn’t fucking win. What else is new?

I turned back to the mirror. I flinched when my gaze snagged on my reflection: bloodshot-eyed, swollen-faced, utterly unbeautiful, restless like a caged animal. Look at him. Look at me.

I ripped the last memento off the mirror—Official Citation!! No More Sad Spaghetti!!—and watched the yellow square of paper catch fire, curl up around the edges, become unrecognizable, turn to ash. And I wished over and over again, like a poem, like a prayer: Let me forget, oh god please let me forget.

Charlie keeps asking if I’m okay. The answer, of course, is no; but I can’t tell him that. So I wear a serene smile like clip-on fangs, a cheap polyester cloak, crimson smudges of lipstick like trails of spilled blood down the side of my neck. Every day is Halloween for me now. I dress up as someone who isn’t haunted, who hasn’t become a ghost.

And when Charlie turns up the World Series or I’d Do Anything For Love on his geriatric, staticky kitchen radio—the same radio he’s had since my mother was the one joining him for daybreak coffee and Pop-Tarts—I choke back tears like dragonfire.

Missing In Action (Revisited)

Joe wasn’t here. Neither was Ben.

Lucy, Rami, and Scarlett were sipping cups of tea at the Lees’ usual table, their eyes downcast, their voices low and murmuring, their pristine lunches neglected. Lucy and Rami were dressed in matching charcoal grey turtleneck sweaters; Scarlett had come from Fencing Club and was wearing royal purple yoga pants and a black tank top, her duffle bag of gear on the floor by her sneakered feet. Her hair was in a long fishtail braid. Archer hadn’t mentioned her since Joe broke up with me. That either meant that it was going blissfully and he didn’t want to injure me further, or that Scarlett had ended things as well.

Since Joe broke up with me. That sounds so fucking pedestrian.

I stared at the three present Lees, almost leered, commanding them to see me, to acknowledge me, to admit that I had once meant something to them, that this hadn’t all been some transitory delusion to fill the cavernous void of losing my home, my life as I knew it in Arizona. They took no notice whatsoever.

Jess kicked me beneath the lunch table. My attention snapped back to her.

“Sorry, what?”

“You want to go shopping with me and Angela tonight?” Jessica’s hands were folded just beneath her chin, her voice gentle, her eyes large and sympathetic and watery. This was her version of being supportive. I appreciated it...in a perpetually tormented and preoccupied sort of way.

“No thanks.” I forked my cold, sauceless spaghetti listlessly. I’d forgotten to pack a lunch. I didn’t have an appetite anyway. I had deleted the GrubHub app from my iPhone and had no intention of using it ever again in my comparatively short and calamitous human life.

“You could come to temple this weekend,” Jessica pressed.

“Uh.” Mingling with a churchful of sociable, wholesome, marriage-obsessed adolescent Mormons sounded like the absolute last thing I’d want to spend my evening doing. “That’s a really generous offer, but I’ll pass.”

“Well you have to do something,” Angela said. “You can’t just sit in your bedroom alone all weekend and stare at the wall and wallow in self-pity.”

We’ll see about that. I turned to Jess. “How’s Vodka Boy from your Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic class? Did he ever reappear? What’s his name again, Elmo? Ellington? El Chapo?”

“Ellsworth.” She frowned as she slurped her patron-drink-of-Mormons Sprite. “And no, he definitely failed out or overdosed or something, because he never came back.”

“Tragic,” I noted.

“But I’m pretty sure Mike’s coming over this weekend, so we’ll see if I can get some Netflix and chill action going.”

“Jess,” Angela chastised, widening her eyes and nodding to me subtly (but not quite subtly enough). No talking about getting lucky in front of the heartbroken single loser, that look said.

“I think I can be emotionally supportive without taking a goddamn vow of chastity, Angela!” Jessica hurled back.

“I gotta go.” I stood, threw on my backpack, discarded my nearly untouched lunch.

“You’ve barely eaten anything!” Angela protested. “You’ve barely eaten for a week!”

“I’ll live.” I picked my umbrella up off the slippery tile floor—peppered with muddy shoeprints and pearlescent drops of water fallen from coats and limp, sopping locks of hair—and headed out into the pouring rain. I hated the rain. I hated it. Maybe I had forgotten that for a while, but it all came hurtling back now like a hurricane, like a hand cracking across my face. I ached for the desert, for blatant and unapologetic heat, for palm trees and cacti and naked stars in the night sky. I had been researching marine biology graduate programs in the Southwest. There were good ones at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, Texas A&M, the University of Southern California, UCLA. I would miss Charlie and Archer—and maybe Jessica and Angela on occasion—and absolutely nothing else about Forks. At least, that’s what I promised myself.

This is a no-giving-a-fuck-about-Lee-boys zone, I thought morosely.

Ben was brooding at our table in Professor Belvin’s classroom. It was the first time he’d shown up to Chemistry since that day Joe met me on the beach at La Push, since the place I’d once occupied in his universe had closed like a wound. I took my seat beside Ben. The window was shut today, the downpour outside torrential. Ben recoiled, just enough for me to notice; he was wearing his oversized black hoodie and practicing his Welsh, his handwriting messy and unbalanced.

“You could have warned me,” I said.

Ben didn’t glance up from his notebook. “Would that have made it any easier?”

“No,” I realized in defeat. I guess it wouldn’t have. I pulled my own notebook, my favorite pen, and a can of Diet Coke out of my backpack.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ben said. “You really need to know that. It had nothing to do with you. And none of us are happy with the current situation. None of us.”

None of them. That included Joe. “Interestingly, that didn’t stop him from creating it.”

Ben was thoughtful, debating his next words. “We’re probably going to be moving soon.”

“What?” I startled; my turquoise blue pen dropped out of my grasp and rolled across the table. Ben snatched it up and returned it to me. “Really?”    

“Yeah.”

“And what, just redo this whole college thing?”

Ben shrugged. “We’ll probably start our junior years over again. Gwil will say there was some horrible family tragedy and we needed a few semesters off. I could use the extra time to figure out Calc anyway. Parametric equations make me want to kill myself.”

I just stared at him. It didn’t make any sense. “But...why would the whole family leave Forks? Because of me? One pathetic, aggrieved human? Do you all pack up and relocate every time Joe fucks and dumps someone? That must be exhausting.”

“It’s better for everyone if we get some distance. Put more space between our world and yours.”

“But...” I tried to imagine never seeing any of them again: no Mercy humming merrily as she tossed handfuls of homegrown carrots to the alpacas, no Dr. Lee dabbing away my blood with an ageless sort of patience, no Scarlett or Lucy or Rami, no brief glimpses of Joe as he avoided me in the campus library. It’s exactly what I wanted; and yet it wasn’t. It so, so, so, so wasn’t. It keeps getting worse. How is that possible? My voice was flimsy and quivering, absolutely pitiful. Disgustingly pitiful. “Who will be my lab partner?”

Ben peered over at me with wide, confused green eyes. And then—gingerly, awkwardly, like holding an acquaintance’s baby for the first time—he laid his hand over mine. “I’ll miss you too.”

Professor Belvin lectured about coordinate covalent bonds. I didn’t absorb a word. I conjugated Italian verbs with my turquoise blue pen, sketched disordered whirlpools of ink, tried not to think about whether this was my last-ever Chemistry class with Ben, whether it was my last-ever weekend sharing Forks with the Lees. Those rageful, frantic thoughts were back. What did I do wrong? What didn’t I do right? Why did he have to leave?

My nomadic gaze caught on a flier on the wall next to our misted window. I had assumed it was a leaflet for some club or protest or seasonal dance that I would definitely not attend, but it wasn’t. It was a missing poster.

Have you seen this student? the flier asked in bold, businesslike black font. It was urgent, but not quite despairing; not yet, anyway. I could hear a Dean of Student Affairs cajoling some affluent, strings-of-pearls-adorned mother over the phone: Yes ma’am, you have my full attention and I can assure you that we’re very concerned, but I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding...he’s probably gone backpacking or sailing with some friends and forgotten to call home. You know how college students can be. Beneath a large photo of a grinning blond kid—pink polo, flushed cheeks, clever crop job to nix a can of Natty Light clutched in one fist—was a name: Ellsworth Jonathan Griffin.

Ellsworth, I thought, my stomach plummeting. The guy from Jessica’s Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic class. He hadn’t failed out. He was missing. Missing like a 20/20 episode or a true crime podcast, missing like the pregnant stillness before a murder is confessed in some glaringly florescent-lit interrogation room, before a distended and bloodless corpse washes up on shore.

I turned to Ben. He noticed me eventually, crinkled his brow, shrugged in that way that seemed so petulant if you didn’t know him well enough to not be offended.

I pointed to the flier and raised my eyebrows. Ben twisted around in his chair to look. Then he sighed, scribbled a sentence in the corner of a piece of notebook paper, tore it free, and slid it across the table.

Ben’s note read, in atrocious penmanship: Are you seriously asking me if I ate that guy?

Maybe, I wrote back after a moment’s hesitation. Maybe that wasn’t exactly what I was asking; maybe I just wondered if he knew anything about it.

In either case, Ben’s reply was swift and resounding, and underlined three times: No.

Sorry, I wrote, abruptly remorseful. I am a jerk. And I added a frowny face for good measure. Ben chuckled when he saw it, shook his head, gave me a drawn little smirk. His words tiptoed around in my skull, leaving searing imprints like footprints in the sand. I’ll miss you too.

I have to forget about them. I drummed my turquoise blue pen against my notebook as Professor Belvin drew families of molecules on the whiteboard with squealing dry erase markers. I have to find a way to make myself forget.

Jessica was waiting for me in the hallway after class. It was part of her convince-Baby-Swan-not-to-jump-off-a-cliff initiative. “Hey.”

“Okay,” I told her with steely resolve. “I’m ready for you to set me up with one of those guys from your church or temple or whatever. I’m ready to be a nice wholesome wife, pop out like six kids, learn how to scrapbook, give up caffeine and horror movies, do the whole white picket fence thing. Sign me up.”

Jessica blinked at me. There were flecks of fallen mascara on her cheekbones like ashes. “What?”

“You’re a Mormon, right?”

“Girl, I’m not a Mormon,” Jessica said, puzzled. “I’m a witch.”

Lucille

I found Joe where he usually was these days: sprawled on the sofa, engulfed in the same blue Snuggie he’d been wearing for thirty-six uninterrupted hours, gazing catatonically at the big-screen tv. A 90 Day Fiancé marathon was on. Some rodentish guy named Colt was apologizing to his gorgeous, aspiring-green-card-holding Brazilian love interest for calling the cops on her during their last screaming match. He was also apologizing for the fact that they lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother. I didn’t need clairvoyance to see where their future was headed.

“Hey,” Ben said when he spotted me. He was sitting next to Joe and occasionally tried to shove pieces of popcorn into his mouth, which Joe accepted passively like coins plinked into a gumball machine. Ben had been his shadow for the past week; he was perhaps the best equipped of us to understand this degree of melancholy, of hopelessness.  

“Ciao.” And then, to Joe: “How are you?”

“Terrible,” he replied, not tearing his eyes from the tv.

“I figured.” I squeezed between them on the couch, curled up next to Joe, rested my chin on his shoulder. He ignored me completely. I could hear Mercy tapping at her laptop keyboard out in the dining room; she was browsing through Zillow listings in Portland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland. Dear god, please don’t let us end up in fucking Cleveland. “Guess what.”

Joe stared at the tv for a long time before he answered. “What.”

“I had a vision of you. Just now, as I was doing laundry. Crystal clear and very scenic too, I might add.”

“Fascinating,” Joe said flatly.

“What happened in this vision?” Ben asked, far more invested, which I was thankful for.

“It was pretty far away, maybe a year from now. I saw you in the desert at night, under a full moon. There were cacti everywhere. The shadow of the Milky Way was threaded through the sky, and the stars were very bright. I could make out the constellations Pegasus and Cassiopeia. You were filling up a tiny glass bottle with dirt.”

“That’s remarkably helpful,” Joe said.

“It is, a little bit,” I insisted. “It means you get through this. That you have a future. I get nervous when I go too long without a vision of someone in the family. But now I know you’re going to be okay.”

The reflections of the feuding 90 Day Fiancé couples danced in his glassy eyes. “Being alive doesn’t mean you’re okay.”

“That’s dark,” Ben said. “Even I think that’s too dark.” He pushed a handful of popcorn into Joe’s mouth. “Are you gonna hunt at some point or what?”

“No.”

“You’re just gonna sit on this couch and waste away?”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to bring you anything? Grizzly bear? Brown bear? Fuck it, I’ll get you a polar bear if that’s what you want. There’s probably some on the black market. Rami would know.”

“He what?” Mercy called from the kitchen. Her typing had stopped.

“Nothing, Mom!” I shot back.

“I don’t want anything,” Joe said. That was a lie, of course. We all knew what he wanted. Rami couldn’t stand to be around him; the thoughts were relentless, smothering.

I linked my arms around Joe’s neck, laid my head against his chest, sighed deeply and mournfully. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know that doesn’t fix anything. But I’m so, so sorry. And I’ll help however I can. We all will.”

And I had accepted that Joe wasn’t going to respond at all when he finally whispered: “I just wish I could forget.”

Cato

My rolling suitcase snagged on the cobblestone driveway. The tiny spinning wheels bashed against concrete as I scaled the front steps. As the taxi pulled away, I dug around in my suit pocket for my keys, found them, unlocked the enormous front door, stepped inside the palace as my suitcase trolled along the marble floor.

“Cato’s back!” Charity announced as she breezed down the nearest staircase, beaming and embracing me. She was a lovely, innately warm woman from Pointe-Noire, Congo; she still wore the silver cross necklace her mother had once given her around her neck. “Did you have a nice flight? Wait, let me check.” She pressed the fingertips of her right hand to my cheek. I felt the memories rush up like blood to a flushed face: the bite of sipped champagne against my tongue, the thin semi-transparent newspaper pages gliding between my fingers, the husky voice of the bearded, bearish naval officer who sat in the seat beside me, the misted silhouette of Vladivostok as it rose up out of the Pacific Ocean. “Uneventful, but pleasant enough. You flew commercial?”

“The jets were otherwise occupied, apparently.” Charity could see things with the predictability and precision that Lucy so often lacked, but only the past. I pushed her hand away. “Was that really necessary?”

“You’re not mad,” Charity declared, confident, impish, helping me shed my suit jacket and draping it over her arm. “You’re never mad.”

She was very nearly correct. “Where are the rest of the kids?”

“In the kitchen. Go say hello, they’ve missed you dreadfully.”

“I know the feeling.” I kicked off my Berlutis, ran a palm over the wiry fur of the Irish Wolfhounds that appeared to greet me before they resumed padding watchfully around the palace, and went to the kitchen, my black socks slipping a bit on the marble floors.

I could hear their voices before I reached the door: laughter, teasing, complaints, requests. The scents of pancakes and cold butter and maple syrup were thick in the air. Charity was one of our four newest recruits, and they all still had that energetic lightness of being human, a youthful enthusiasm, a relative normalness. I spent quite a lot of time with them. It was my job—to help with the transition, to keep them happy, to facilitate the welding of their individual parts into the beastly machine that was the Draghi—but oftentimes it felt more like a reprieve. Some would stay close to me as they matured, others would grow in different directions, like ambitious vines climbing the skeleton of a garden trellis. I usually missed them when they ‘grew up,’ so to speak...although there were exceptions. I had never liked Liesl. I had always liked Ben. I opened the door.

“Ah, you are home!” Ksenia cried from where she stood over the stove, a spatula in her right hand, bouncing excitedly in place on her small bare feet.

“Hey!” Max and Austin called together. They were both sitting with their shoes propped up on the unglamorous kitchen table. There was a massive formal dining room that could accommodate up to twenty-five guests, but we rarely used it.

“Good morning,” I said, aware that I was smiling for the first time in days.

Max groaned as he scrolled through his Google search results on a burner phone. “What the fuck. My name is one of the top five dog names again. I think I’m gonna have to change it.”

I ruffled his long blond hair, stealing a piece of bacon from his plate. Max had grown up a trust fund kid in Perth, Australia. His mother was old money; his father was a professional surfer. “Your name is fine.”

“Really, Kato Kaelin? Is it really? How am I supposed to intimidate people when I have a fucking dog name?”

“So make them call you Maximilian,” offered Ksenia in a heavy Ukrainian accent. She’d only been with us for eight months, but her English was coming along swimmingly. She flipped a massive A-shaped pancake on the sizzling griddle. That one was for Austin.

“Seriously?” Max said. “That is just way too many syllables. They’ll be halfway down the block by the time I’m done introducing myself. ‘Hey, come back mate, I haven’t killed ya yet.’”

“At least you aren’t stuck with a basic-white-boy-circa-1992 name for all of eternity,” said Austin Tyler McInerny, originally of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was chomping on a multicolored Fruit Roll-Up, which swung from his mouth like a lizard’s tongue. He’d been working at an ailing skatepark when Larkin found him. He still enjoyed showing off his kickflips, and kept insisting that he was going to teach me how to ollie. I didn’t have the faintest idea what an ollie was.

“Do you want a pancake, Cato?” Ksenia asked, passing Austin his plate and wiping her hands on her pink apron. Her black hair was tied in a high ponytail with a matching rose-colored ribbon. She looked so young. She was so young, actually. Nineteen. And she would be forever.

“No, thank you dear. I’m alright.”

“I like Alaric,” Max decided. “First king of the Visigoths. Alaric is a name fit for a vampire. Creepy, yet dignified. Or maybe Silas. Or Draco.”

Austin shook his head as he swirled a river of viscous maple syrup over his A-shaped pancake. “Definitely not Draco.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the Harry Potter connection is unfortunate. People will hear Draco and think of that obnoxious white-haired kid from the evil snake-people house or whatever.”

“Oh, right,” Max sighed. “Like I said. Alaric would work.”

“So many A-shaped pancakes!” Ksenia poured a K on the griddle for herself.

“It’s good for you,” Austin replied, pointing at her with his fork. “We’re practicing English.”

“Alaric Luther,” Max mused, scrolling through his phone. I didn’t think he’d find that on any list of trendy dog names. “Alaric Lothaire...Alaric Lucian...”

“I like your name, Max,” Larkin said from the doorway. None of us had heard him arrive. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, wearing a deep maroon suit and a ring on every finger, grinning hugely. He was exactly as I remembered him: stunning, captivating, terrifying. The kitchen fell quiet. I could smell Ksenia’s pancake beginning to burn.

At last Max chuckled nervously, pushing soggy pancake hunks around on his plate with his fork, averting his gaze. “Guess I’ll keep it then.”

“I thought I heard you come in,” Larkin told me.

“It’s always a pleasure to be home.”

He nodded out towards the hallway. “Come. Regale me with the stories of your travels.” Then his eyes flicked down to my socks, and he grimaced—slightly, briefly—before turning away. “And find your shoes.”

I followed him through the hallway, the living room, the grand front foyer with the crystal chandelier, into the elevator. Larkin did not speak, but he hummed as we ascended: House Of The Rising Sun.

It hadn’t always been like this. It was difficult for me to pick out the details of what had changed—the tone of his voice, the proportion of wonder and gratitude I associated with him versus fear, the way this palace (or the one in Reykjavik, or Juneau, or Ivalo, or Murmansk, or any of the others) felt when I stepped inside it—but I knew something had. It had begun before Ben left. It was much worse now. Older vampires, in my fairly learned opinion, are something like the stars. They mellow as they age, temper their character flaws, grow wise and patient like Nikolai or Honora or Gwilym Lee; or they rage until they burn away every last atom of humanity, until they destroy themselves and take entire solar systems down with them. Increasingly, I harbored fears that Larkin was a vampire of the latter variety. And we were all his planets.

In his study, Larkin dropped into the chair behind his desk, brought a hand to his forehead, surveyed a disarrayed flurry of papers: letters, notices, deeds and titles, meticulously managed accounts of finances and disciplinary actions. Larkin had a laptop and burner phone, of course, as we all did; but he liked to work in paper as much as possible. That’s how he’d done things for centuries, since long before the name of the inventor of the internet (or harnessed electricity, for that matter) was a whisper on his parents’ lips. The sky outside was clouded and seeping soft rain.

“Things have been busy?” I ventured.

He frowned, gesturing to the cluttered desk. “I’m in purgatory.”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that. Can I help?”

“The Lancaster coven says they’ll need an extension for their dues. That’s the second year in a row, now it’s not just an exception, it’s a precedent. If you let one coven bend the rules, others will follow. So something will have to be done. Then there’s Stockholm. Anders’ coven has eaten a few too many locals—including the mayor’s favorite niece—and now the city is launching an investigation. Fucking idiots. They’ll probably all have to relocate. There’s some new territory dispute in Lima between Alejandro’s coven and a group of strangers that just came out of the Andes. We’ll have to make their acquaintance, of course. And as if all that weren’t enough, Rigel accidentally fed on a heroin addict and he’s currently detoxing in a cell in the basement. Would you check on him for me? I’m sure your presence will be a...” He waved his hand distractedly, almost dismissively, searching for the words. “A comfort to him.”

“Of course.”

“How are the Lees?”

“Fine. Typical. Gwil’s putting in a lot of hours at the hospital. Rami’s planning to get another law degree. Ben is, uh, adjusting. Slowly, very slowly. He’s not particularly content. But he hasn’t murdered anyone that I’m aware of.”

“How nice.” Now his eyes darted up to catch mine: focused, luminous, unreadable. “Nothing new at all?”

And instantly, I wanted to tell him everything. I forgot why I had ever planned to blunt the girl’s existence, to conceal her talent entirely; I felt her name rising in my throat. And then I remembered again. I’m doing this for Gwil, for Ben.

I pretended to ponder Larkin’s question, as if it was so difficult to remember, as if there was nothing left to sift through but a trunkful of mundane details from the trip like a grandfather’s tattered correspondence and tarnished war relics. That was something an average family might have squirreled away in their attic, I assumed; I’d never met my own grandfather, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have had anything to leave me if I had. “Joe’s got some new girlfriend, but I don’t think it’s serious. I doubt she’ll be around long. You know how Joe is. Scarlett’s seeing someone too, actually. A Quileute kid.”

“Poor boy.” And Larkin grinned like a shark beneath burning eyes. “He’s in for a lifetime of disappointment. Who will ever be able to hold a candle to those memories?”

Larkin had a moderate preoccupation with Scarlett’s beauty, her...tenacity. Her lack of talent was a great disappointment to him, a somehow more egregious fault than Joe or Gwil or Mercy’s. What a shame, Larkin often said. And I believed I knew what came after in his mind, although never aloud: What a partner she could have been.

He was still grinning at me. His expression was hollow, vacuous. A shiver clawed down my spine. He was waiting for something. No, he was searching. I stared back, and I willed for that intangible, contagious harmony I carried around like a wedding ring to hit him like carbon monoxide or bromine: undetected and yet inexorable, knocking him off his path of inquisition.

What does he suspect? What does he already know?

“Anyway,” Larkin continued abruptly, turning his attention back to his paperwork. “I’m glad there’s nothing to worry about in Forks. Liesl will be back in the next few days, Rigel will be ready to work again, I’ll come up with a plan to handle all this and my mood will improve tremendously.”

And where has Liesl been? I almost asked; and then I didn’t. It was a good sign that she was coming home. I had looked for her once while I was in Forks. When I made up my mind to find someone—when that switch flipped in my skull or in the tangle of nerves of my solar plexus or wherever it lived—it wasn’t like poking around on Google Earth: zooming in here, scrolling over there. A goldish trail lit up on the floor, a ‘Yellow Brick Road’ Honora and I sometimes joked, and I followed it. And I had no way of knowing how far that trail might lead. A route heading dead east from the palace might stop in the next town over or continue across the Pacific Ocean; my search might last one day or a hundred. In Forks—as I perched in a soaring western hemlock tree in the forest outside the Lee residence on a cool October evening—Liesl’s trail had led north. North to Vancouver, to Victoria, to Dawson, to Alaska? Who the fuck knew. I was just relieved it hadn’t led to the tree next to mine.

“Well, as always, I’m happy to assist however I can,” I told Larkin. “Just let me know and I’ll be on the next flight out of Vladivostok.”

“I appreciate that, Cato.” He smiled, paternally this time. And then he spun his chair around to peer out the window into the episodic flares of lightning that illuminated great dark clouds like neurons in a celestial brain. I hate thunderstorms. They remind me of South Carolina. “But I think you’ve earned a rest.”

After checking in on Rigel—irritable, frenetic, pacing, and yet predictably pacified somewhat by my visit—I trotted up the main staircase to the second floor of the palace. I found her in our bedroom: sitting at her easel, a paintbrush held in one graceful hand, an image like a photograph on the canvas. I promptly pried off my Berlutis for the second time today and tossed them into the closet.

“Ciao, amore,” I said.

“Ciao!” Honora replied, beaming. Her curly brunette hair was pinned up and away from her face; wayward tendrils spiraled down to brush her bare shoulder blades, the back of her neck. “Just give me five minutes...I have to finish the shadow of this tree...”

There weren’t many in the Draghi who survived the transition from Nikolai’s leadership to Larkin’s, but Honora had. She was gentle to a fault, a hopeless warrior, turned into an immortal on her forty-fourth birthday when Rome was still an empire; and she was without any talents whatsoever, except for one which was useless in combat. Her paintings, drawings, and sculptures adorned every palace the Draghi owned. Each year, Larkin would ask her to paint all of us together, incorporating any new faces, erasing the memories of those who had proven themselves unworthy. One such portrait, I knew, hung in Gwilym Lee’s home office.

I went to the woman I called my wife, laid my palms on her shoulders, leaned down to kiss the top of her head. “Take your time, love.”

“Everything’s alright?” Honora asked, looking hopefully up at me with large, wide-set jade eyes. No, not just hopefully. Trustingly.

“Everything’s alright,” I agreed, not knowing if I believed it.

Shadows And Spells

“He just...just...disappeared?!” Jessica sputtered, scandalized, gaping at me as she held a Styrofoam cup of spiked apple cider in her clasped hands.

We were on a quilt near the outskirts of the sea of beach towels and blankets that circled the bonfire. Women—wearing flowing dresses or robes or tunics or not very much at all—flounced around the flames banging tambourines and reciting chants that I didn’t know the words to. Some carried torches, beacons of heat and light in the darkness. Jessica was wearing a short black shirt, fishnet tights, and a black crop-top turtleneck sweater; I had opted for a bohemian blue dress patterned with stars, an old thrift shop find and the closest thing I owned to Wiccan festivities apparel. I had a cup of hot apple cider as well, enhanced with a generous splash of Captain Morgan, but hadn’t quite conjured up the rebelliousness to drink it yet.

I suddenly recalled Mercy bringing me an endless supply of virgin autumnal sangrias as Joe and I swam in the hot tub on the Lees’ back porch. As soon as you turn twenty-one, you can have the real thing. I frowned, shuddered, took a bitter and burning sip.

“Yeah,” I replied. “He told his roommate he was going to a frat party or something and never showed up and never made it back home either. The parents are blaming the university, the university is insisting he must be off with a girlfriend or on some hipster soul-searching nature adventure or whatever, it’s a mess.”

“Jesus,” she murmured. “What does your dad say?”

“He’s been helping the state police with the investigation. There’s really no evidence of anything. No witnesses, no footprints, no surveillance footage, no handy anonymous tips...”

“No body,” Jessica finished.

“That’s morbid.” I downed the rest of my cider. Was the world already beginning to list like a ship on choppy waves, or was that just my imagination? I guess it would be possible. I’d barely eaten all day.

“You were thinking it.”

“Well, one’s mind does tend to wander towards homicide under such circumstances.”

“It is the season of the dead.” She grinned wickedly, then took my empty cup. “He’s probably fine. I bet he wants to drop out to become a weed farmer and hasn’t worked up the guts to tell his parents yet. You want another?”

“Sure.”

“Cool. I’ll be right back.” Jess rose to balance on black boots with five-inch heels and staggered off to the foldable table piled high with cans and bottles and snacks. I was getting the impression that her Wiccanism was more of a novelty than a spiritual commitment.

The season of the dead. Now that’s VERY morbid.

There were some guys laughing, smoking home-rolled cigarettes, and toasting glasses of red wine on a nearby mandala blanket, bespectacled intellectual types who were probably getting PhDs in Anthropology or Medieval Studies at the University of Washington. One of them—curly-haired, pale-eyed, wearing a sweater vest and a cautious smile—raised his wine glass in my direction. I waved back without much enthusiasm.

“He’s cute, right?” Jessica asked, plopping back down onto our quilt and shoving a full cup of spiked cider into my grasp. She motioned for me to drink. I did. “That’s Sebastian, but he likes to be called Bash. He’s twenty-three and speaks fluent German.”

“Charming.”

“He’s very...uh...gifted. I’m not saying I know from personal experience, but I’ve heard it from a very reliable source. And his parents own a beach house in Monterey. You could go skinny-dipping.”  

“In the ocean?” The world was definitely wobbling now. I was warm all over, numbed, fuzzy; it was becoming difficult to picture Joe’s face, to hear his voice. This was good. I kept drinking. “No thanks. Too many sharks. They have great whites down there.”

Jess tossed her long, loose hair and sighed impatiently. “I’m just saying that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. So you should pursue that.”

“I’ll totally consider it.” I lied. I would not consider it.

She smiled, sympathetically, fondly. “I can’t believe you thought I was a Mormon.”

“I can’t believe I’m out in the Washington wilderness commemorating the Gaelic festival of Samhain, but here we all are.”

Jess glanced over my shoulder. “Oh my god. He’s coming over here.”

“Ugh.” I craned my neck to see. Sebastian—whoops, my mistake, Bash—was approaching. “Please distract him. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Also I’m pretty sure I’m getting drunk and I don’t want to do anything humiliating, like sob uncontrollably about how much I miss my ex-boyfriend.”

“Don’t worry. I gotchu, Baby Swan.”

“Hey Jess,” Bash said, but he was looking at me. He pitched his cigarette off into the trees. What the fuck, who does that?

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” I told him in a woozy, mock-Smokey Bear voice.

“What?” he asked, baffled.

“Ignore her, she’s drunk,” Jess said quickly. “So what’s up? Come on, sit with me. Keep me toasty. Teach me some German...”

As they chatted and giggled and snuggled closer together—I’m starting to think that Jessica might have been her own reliable source—I studied the forest, watching to make sure the cigarette didn’t begin to smolder in the damp brush. The voices and crackling of the bonfire and sharp ringing of the tambourines faded into one muted, uniform drone. The trees reeled in the haze of the spiked cider; the cool wind moaned through them. And then, for only a second: a glimpse of something impossibly quick, something silvery and reedy and sunless.

What was that?

I blinked. It was gone. I blinked again, staring penetratingly. The swarming heat from the cider evaporated from my skin, my blood. There were goosebumps rising all over me.

What the hell was that?

I remembered how Calawah University students sometimes reacted to Ben: flinching, withdrawing, autonomically fearing him on some primal, evolutionary level. They knew he was a predator. They knew they were prey. It was chillingly similar to what I was feeling now.

I have to get out of here. I have to go home.

I shot to my feet. Oh, wrong move, that was too quick. I swayed, and Jessica reached up to steady me. “Are you—?!”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I gotta go home now.”

“What?! We just got here! Look, chill out, let me get you some vegan samosas or something—”

“No, seriously, I have to go.”

“Okay, okay,” Jessica conceded. “I’ll finish my drink and we’ll call an Uber, alright?”

“Really?” Bash asked, crestfallen.

“I’ll call an Uber,” I told Jess. “You stay, I’ll go.” Maybe she shouldn’t stay, I thought foggily, irrationally. Maybe it’s not safe.

“I can’t let you go alone. I got you drunk and now you’re a mess and if you end up murdered it would be my fault. There are unsolved mysteries going around, you know.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Girl, there’s no way I’m gonna—”

“I’ll call you as soon as I get in the Uber and I’ll stay on until I’m physically inside my house, okay?”

Jessica considered this. Bash leaned in to nibble her ear. I could smell the red wine and nicotine and animalistic lust sweating out of his pores. And unexpectedly, agonizingly: a biting flare, a muscle memory, Joe’s fingertips skimming down the small of my back and his scent like winter nights saturating the capillary beds of my lungs. Stop, stop, stop. “Okay,” Jess agreed at last.

“Awesome.” I was already opening the Uber app on my iPhone.

My driver was a Pacific Northwestern version of Santa Claus: wild grey beard, red flannel, L.L.Bean boots, rambling about his upcoming trip to hunt caribou in British Columbia. I honored my promise to Jessica and kept her on speakerphone for the duration of the twenty-minute drive. I rested my whirling head against the seat, let my eyes dip closed, watched the intermittent streetlights appear and disappear through my eyelids. I let myself into Charlie’s house when I arrived, wished Jessica goodnight (and reminded her not to get pregnant), and meandered clumsily into the kitchen for a glass of water and a cookie dough Pop-Tart to ward off a possible hangover. Charlie was snoring quietly on the living room couch. I watched him for a while, smiling and achingly grateful, before heading upstairs to my bedroom.

My window was wide open; that’s the first thing I noticed. I didn’t remember leaving it that way. I was always neglecting to lock the window, sure—I kept forgetting that there was no one to leave it unlocked for anymore—but I hadn’t left it open when I went to meet Jessica this evening. Icy night air flooded in. The stars were bright and furious in an uncommonly clear sky.

“You trying to give me pneumonia, old man?” I muttered, thinking of Charlie. I tossed my iPhone down onto my bed and crossed the room to close the window. And as it creaked and collided with the sill, I heard my closet door open behind me.

Someone’s here. Someone’s in this room with me.

I turned, very slowly; it felt like it took a lifetime. She was standing in the doorway of my closet, sinuous and white-haired, wearing black leather pants and stiletto heels and a long-sleeved lace blouse the color of blood, the color of her eyes. And she was harrowingly beautiful; not like Lucy or Mercy, not like Scarlett. She was beautiful like a prehistoric jawbone, like a serrated crescent moon, like a blade.

The owl. The goddamn albino owl.

I recognized her immediately. I heard Joe’s words as he introduced each vampire in the immense painting hanging in Dr. Lee’s upstairs office to me, though I desperately didn’t want to: She’s literally Satan, only blonder.

Her name tumbled from my trembling lips. “Liesl.”

“Wonderful, we can skip the introductions.” Her voice was like windchimes, cutting and brisk, with a hint of an Austrian accent like a shadow. Now she was at my bedside and picking up my phone, scrolling through it with lightning-quick and dexterous thumbs. “Hm. No texts from any of the Lees in the past week. So we don’t have to worry about them dropping by, I suppose. Joe got bored with you already, huh?”

“Evidently.” My own voice was brittle, anemic, weak; just like my ineffectual human body.

“That’s quick, even for him. How sad.” She sighed, tucking my iPhone into her red Chanel purse. “There’s a private jet waiting at the Forks Airport. Pack a bag. You have five minutes.”

“Please don’t hurt my dad,” I whispered, scalding tears brimming in my eyes.

“Of course not,” Liesl replied with a savage, saccharine smile. “Not yet, anyway.”

[haloshornsinkstains]

Other Side [Songfic, slight Dabi x F!Reader]

While I’m working on Kinktober stuff and my head is a mess, here have a songfic that wouldn’t leave my damn brain for the past few weeks after I saw an animatic based on this song (The Other Side from The Greatest Showman). It just works? Also, apologies on the quirk, I was rewatching Bungou Stray Dogs and <3

CW: Female reader, alcohol, swearing, mention of unwanted groping, Endeavour is a dick... otherwise, pretty SFW

You groaned, pressing your head against the bar and gesturing to the bartender for your usual. Hearing the glass set down beside you, you looked up and smiled, taking a long drink. “Thanks Ryu.” The bartender smiled sympathetically. “Boss still a dick?” “The biggest flaming dick in Japan.” You grumbled. “They’re still keeping me on office duty. I break one creeps jaw and they trap me inside. Mirko punched a reporter and she’s still a top hero.” “Hey, it could be worse. You could be not working under the number one hero.” “No, that makes it worse.” Ryu frowned. “How?” “I hate him. I always hated him.” “Then why don’t you just leave and work for someone else.” You scowled at your glass, left hand leaving dents in the wood of the bar where it rested. “Not allowed.” “Bullshit. And stop denting my bar.” “Truth. Believe me, I’d leave if I could. But I can’t.” You sighed, lifting your hand from the wood apologetically. “Sorry Ryu. If I left I wouldn’t get to be a hero any more, even if all I do is paperwork I worked my ass off for this.” Ryu shrugged, spotting another customer signalling him out of the corner of his eye and smiling apologetically. “Sucks I guess. I’ve got people to serve, shout if you want a top up.” “Believe me, I will.”

You heard a glass set down next to you, the unmistakable heat of a body taking up the seat to your right. "Hey there princess." The voice was gravelly but so familiar. "Nope. I've had more than enough Todoroki bullshit for one day." You growled, staring daggers at your drink.  "Sorry, you must be mistaking me for someone else." You turned, narrowing your eyes at the man sat next to you. "Dabi. You remember I've known you way too long to fall for your bullshit right? And I am so not in the mood." Dabi went to lift his glass, only to find it stuck to the bar, your skin giving off a faint red glow. "Come on princess, I only want to talk. We can bitch about that asshole like old times." You sagged a little, the glow fading and his glass suddenly much easier to lift. You knew he wanted more than to just talk, Dabi's talks always came with attempts to recruit you into the league or, if he was drunk or high enough on adrenaline, his bed. But he was an old friend, and one of the few people more than happy to join your Fuck Endeavour and Fuck The Hero Commission rants. Shaking your head you gestured to one of the darker tables in the back, this might have been a very shady bar but Dabi was well known enough now that even here someone might be dumb enough to try to call the pros. And you liked this place too much to see it turned to ash. 

  You both settled into your seats in the back, you nursing your whiskey with a frown. "So what did dear old dad do today?" "Existed?" You huffed. "Bitched me out for not downplaying the damage caused in one of his 'rescues' while I was writing his reports for him. Which turned into more general belittlement of my attitude, abilities as a hero, quirk… basically he covered all the bases." "You know they'll never let you leave there right? You'll be doing paperwork until you die." Dabi drawled, you glared at him. "They're keeping you there because you're too dangerous to them, you know too much and you were caught sympathising with a villain. He hates you, he won't hesitate to put you down at the first sign of defection. You're trapped." "I didn't sympathise with a villain. I just didn't disagree with all of his ideas regarding the behaviour of heroes. I didn't exactly agree with his methods, I liked Ingenium plenty thank you very much." You grumbled, swirling the amber liquid in your glass. “He was friendly, and fun.” "Still… you hit like a truck when we were kids, I'd love to see what damage you can do now." He hummed, eyes flashing bright for a second. "You could be very dangerous. So they lock you up in an office doing filing for a man that hates you like a good little minion." "You're alarmingly eloquent today." You took another sip, setting the glass down and closing your eyes with a deep sigh. "I worked my ass off to be a hero, why would I want to throw that away?" "Oh, so you enjoy being his little secretary?" Your eyes flashed, skin glowing red as his chair creaked under the sudden strain of the gravity increase. Dabi just smirked, that stupid smug look that told you he knew he'd won. "Just listen to my proposal?" You sighed, the oppressive pressure dissipating in an instant as you waved at him to continue. Maybe he'd put a new twist in the spiel this time.

"Right here, right now I put the offer out I don't want to chase you down I know you see it"  “We do this on a near weekly basis, you have quite literally stalked me to this bar, if that’s not chasing me down what is?” You scoffed and shook your head, eyes flicking to the bar while you debated how many more drinks you were going to need after this. "You run with me And I can cut you free Out of the drudgery and walls you keep in So trade that typical for something colorful And if it's crazy, live a little crazy" "Well at least you acknowledge your league is entirely batshit." "You can play it sensible, a king of conventional" "Conventional? Really? I'm wounded." "Or you can risk it all and see Don't you wanna get away from the same old part you gotta play 'Cause I got what you need, so come with me and take the ride It'll take you to the other side 'Cause you can do like you do Or you can do like me Stay in the cage, or you'll finally take the key Oh, damn! Suddenly you're free to fly" You drummed your fingers on the table, honestly the bird metaphors were a bit weird but he was starting to sound like he had a point, which was…. Alarming. You needed to shut this down fast or you’d break.

  "Okay, my friend, you want to cut me in Well I hate to tell you, but it just won't happen So thanks, but no I think I'm good to go 'Cause I quite enjoy the life you say I'm trapped in" Dabi scoffed. "Really? Didn't sound like it five minutes ago." You shot him a glare. "Now I admire you, and that whole show you do You're onto something, really it's something Don't you know that I'm okay with this uptown part I get to play 'Cause I got what I need and I don't want to take the ride I don't need to see the other side So go and do like you do I'm good to do like me Ain't in a cage, so I don't need to take the key Oh, damn! Can't you see I'm doing fine I don't need to see the other side"

Dabi laughed, gesturing at the dingy bar and the glass in your hands with possibly the most judgemental look on his face you’d seen in years.  "Now is this really how you like to spend your days? Whiskey and misery, and parties and plays"

You sighed again, but your shoulders were sagging now and he knew he was winning. You couldn't pretend you enjoyed this any more, restrictions and abuse breaking you down into someone much easier to tempt and mould.  "If I were mixed up with you, I'd be the talk of the town Disgraced and disowned, another one of the clowns"  You huffed, waving a hand vaguely in his direction.  

"But you would finally live a little, finally laugh a little Just let me give you the freedom to dream And it'll wake you up and cure your aching Take your walls and start 'em breaking Now that's a deal that seems worth taking But I guess I'll leave that up to you" He stood to leave only to find the gravity of your quirk forcing him back down. He knew then that he had won, they'd turned a hero. Shigiraki might take some convincing but that didn't matter right now. Your resolve was crumbling.

"Well it's intriguing, but to go would cost me greatly So what's in it for me?" "Freedom. You want to punch the next guy who touches you inappropriately through a building? The League won't question you for a second, and there's no paperwork." You shook your head. "You'll have to raise the price a bit more than that." "Its a big fuck you to Endeavour?" "That was weak even for you. Dick has hated me since I was, what, five? All I’m doing is giving him an excuse to come after me. He'll be after my head as soon as I leave, and as much as I’m loathe to admit it we both know he's powerful." "You get to spend all the time you want with your favourite childhood friend…" his smirk turned wicked and knowing. "No one to stop you, no questions, no hiding in the corner of a dingy bar. And I guess Shigaraki is okay.” "You play dirty, you know that right?" "Well, I am a villain." Rolling your eyes you knocked back the last of your whiskey and stood, holding out a hand to him. "Well, guess I'm pissed off enough not to care any more. Congratulations Touya, you win." Grinning Dabi took your hand, ignoring the use of his old name in favour of pulling you in for a hug. “Oh, you’re going to be amazing Princess.” “I’ve always been amazing.” You chuckled. “Take me to your leader before I change my mind.” Dabi grinned. “As you wish.” “And no burning down my favourite bar!”

The pair of you stepped outside, Dabi sending a quick message on his phone that was shortly followed by the appearance of a swirling black void. "No wonder I've never seen you on the subway." You joked, though your fingers tightened anxiously around his. "Time to move up in the world princess." He chuckled, tugging you forwards into the void. "You know I don't like...holy shit." You stepped out into a different dingy bar, several faces snapping up to look at you as you appeared. Dabi was a comforting presence at your back. “No more corners of dingy bars huh?” You murmured, shooting him a sideways glance. "Hey Dabi, what's with the midget?" You bristled. "I am not a…" "Shit, that's a pro!" The villain speaking launched at you, intent to kill flashing hot in his eyes. Already irritated and more than a little on edge you activated your quirk, watching him fall flat on his face as overwhelming gravity pulled him down. Dabi had crumpled to his knees behind you, the others struggling to move.  "Princess."  You just growled. "She's with me, with us." Dabi continued. "Princess?" With a huff you released your quirk, watching warily as the villain who'd gone to attack you pushed himself to his feet. Dabi's hand on your shoulder made you flinch but his grip was strong, somewhere between restraint and support in case wide scale use of your quirk had taken it out of you. It was hard not to appreciate the gesture, even if you felt fine. "Meet Graviton. She's… an old friend." "I didn't know you could make friends." Your head snapped around at the sound of the voice, focusing in on Shigaraki sat at the bar, watching you from between the fingers of the hand on his face. "I've got more than you creep." Dabi snapped back, fingers digging into your shoulder. You tipped your head back a little, raising an eyebrow at him.  Shigaraki scratched at his neck, eyes never leaving you. "Why is she even here? She could be a double agent."  You couldn't hold back the laugh that bubbled out at that. "Hah, no." "Why are you here?" You were glad for the dim lighting, the constant attention making a blush rise on your cheeks. "I had a really bad week, and Dabi asked nicely. Even said please." As much as you tried to be nonchalant you couldn't hide the slight tremble in your voice. Shigaraki scoffed and you finally looked away from him. "I'm sick of being stuck doing paperwork because the Heroes say so. I worked hard to get my license only to be told I'm not allowed to do anything except sit in a cage with someone I hate. Guess I finally had enough. I was told you'll let me use my power." "And she really wants to punch Endeavour in the face." Dabi added cheerfully. "Oh yeah, that too." "I trust her, and you should know by now I don't drag in just anyone." "Shigaraki, she could be useful. She has inside information and that power was impressive." The black void behind the bar spoke, startling you a little and pulling a quiet chuckle from Dabi.  "Fine. Make yourself useful, if you try to betray us I'll kill you." Shigaraki huffed, standing from his seat. "Kurogiri, I'm going back to my room." "Welcome to the League [name]."

[notgonnarememberthis]

Parasomnia

Malcolm isn't the only one haunted by nightmares

_______________________________________________________

I gotta admit for a long time I watched the prodigal son fandom from afar. Yet when there wasn't enough jessica and gil fics a girl has to take matters into her own hands. Hope y'all enjoy this snippet that I couldn't get out of my head bc I had an absolute blast writing it. I look forward to writing more here because I'm just so in love with all the characters and now that I've looped my friend into watching, they'll want a lot of content. Enjoy!

Truly this is a comedy of errors. Jessica Whitly was never late for a family dinner a day in her life and apparently she is starting today. First she’d been cornered by Cricket who’d insisted on catching up despite her desperate attempts to get away, then the car had broken down as Adolpho was coming to fetch her, and to round it all off she had to rely on an Uber in order to get home at a reasonable time. Not shocking that people weren’t too keen on offering rides to the ex-wife of a serial killer but it was rude nonetheless. 

Still she’d managed to charm two bottles of bourbon from the host who pitied her enough to offer so she counted that as a win. The two bottles can serve as an apology of sorts.

She checks her texts again as the man pulls up to her estate. Still nothing from Malcolm or Ainsley. She supposes she can’t be angry if neither of them are there or if they’re late themselves. Malcolm has shown up more than an hour off schedule so she’s used to it. However, she wishes they would at least text her back. She offers a polite thank you ignoring the eyes on her as she steps out. 

The walk feels like it takes forever but hearing the playful banter from her children coming from an open window puts her at ease. She strides through the house, her apology already thoroughly planned. She pushes open the dining room door with her hip, bottles raised in an offer of good will.

“Jessie! So lovely of you to join us.” The voice drops her heart to her stomach. Martin sits at the head of the table with a sickening grin on his face. His cardigan covers his psychiatric ward uniform, stained with spots of crimson.

Her eyes flash to Malcolm, then Ainsley. Both were sitting perfectly posed still facing each other, unaware of her arrival. She can tell from across the room that their skin is pale, colorless. Their eyes stare emptily at one another, sad and horrified.

“Why don’t you take a seat?”

She wakes with a start, her scream caught in her throat. She can only be thankful for that much as she feels the other person in her bed stir slightly before settling into sleep once again.

She sits up forcing her heart rate to slow as she stares at Gil’s sleeping form. Thank god the man sleeps like the dead.

Since he was released from the hospital she insisted that he stay with her and recover. That’d been almost a month ago now and they were actively sharing a bed. She’d been so good about taking her sleeping pills in order to stave off the nightmares so Gil wouldn’t see. Last night she’d just been exhausted after the benefit. She’d barely the energy to dress down before falling into bed where he’d already been set up reading. She had fallen asleep while he absentmindedly played with her hair. She’d hoped that she was so tired that she’d fall into a dreamless void. 

Clearly that had worked wonders.

She grabs her robe off the nearby chair slipping out of the room as quietly as possible. Dealing with Malcolm’s night terrors through his adolescent years had taught her well enough about sneaking around in the dead of night.

She finds herself in the kitchen, fingers hovering in front of the liquor cabinet. She badly craves a drink but since what had happened with Endicott, she’d regretfully taken the route of trying to have a clear mind. Between Ainsley having no memory of what happened and Malcolm’s distant insistence that she’d done it because he had a gun, she needed to at least be present if her children need her.

She ends up grabbing a glass of water instead, noticing the slight tremor of her hand. She places the glass down, flexing and shaking her hand in an attempt to gain control over the involuntary movement once again. Yet another trick she’d learned over the years of being strong for her children. Finally when she’s steady enough she takes slow sips allowing her mind to wander.

Martin being transferred from Claremont to Rikers, the riot, the transfer back. It’d all been a living nightmare. At least in Claremont she had some confidence that he wouldn’t weasel his way out somehow. He was secluded to his one room there. Rikers was a god damn shitshow from start to finish.

Between Gil’s injury and Nicholas she’d hardly even thought of Martin until recently when the other two seemed to be settling ok. Yet it leaves her processing too many unknowns at once. She can practically feel herself shutting down, she doesn’t even notice when Gil comes in the room. 

She can only bow her head and try to steady herself with the facts. Ainsley’s actions were in self defense, Martin is back in Claremont, Gil is alive, her children are safe. She repeats these words in her mind like a mantra rocking back and forth on the smooth tile.

“Jessie.” Two hands grab her by the shoulders and once again she’s back in her nightmare.

She’s pulled back immediately by the sound of glass shattering and the pain shooting through her hand.

“Fuck Jessica. Stay there.” She watches him helplessly as he grabs the broom and a dustpan, sweeping up the glass she’d broken. He’s more than familiar with where she keeps supplies during his stay and he navigates the home with ease. Once he deems it safe for her to walk again, he guides her gently to sit on the couch so he can tend to her hand.

“You didn’t have to… You should’ve called for…” The words simply seem to escape her. Not a single thought pieces together other than, “I’m sorry.”

Worry crosses over his face as tears involuntarily spill down her cheeks. He gathers her into her arms shushing as apologies spill from her lips. He shouldn’t have had to clean up the mess, she shouldn’t have woken him, and he shouldn’t be worrying about her when there’s so damn much to be worried about.

He holds her tighter as she crumbles into a sobbing mess. She finally allows herself to weep over the absolute chaos that gripped her life. He doesn’t let go until she calms herself once again.

He wants to ask her what happened, she knows he does. She steadies herself as he cleans her hand and wraps it. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” He denies, she can’t decide if it’s the truth or not. “I woke up to you not in bed and I came to find you.”

“I’m sorry.” This one was barely a whisper.

“You had a nightmare.” He sighs. She nods, eyes falling to the floor. “Why didn’t you wake me up? I could’ve helped.”

“You called me Jessie.” The nickname slips from her lips with venom. The nickname had been used by Martin innumerably throughout their marriage. He was the only one allowed to call her that. She’s had a disdain for it ever since.

“Fuck.” He drops his forehead against hers. “I was just worried and it slipped. I heard you crying and I couldn’t get your attention. Jess,”

“If you start saying you’re sorry we’re both in for it.” He chuckles and she brings up her good hand, tracing the edge of his smile with her thumb. “It was a slip up. But just like always you have poor timing.”

“Jess don’t.” She sighs knowing she was caught. Deflecting with sarcasm was her weapon of choice. It was easier than allowing herself to be so vulnerable, especially with him. “Talk to me.”

She breaks the embrace settling into the couch. Part of her wishes she could sink into the cushions and never surface again. “I was running late for dinner.”

“That’s a nightmare in and of itself.” She shoves him lightly but it worked; he managed to break down some of the tension threatening to strangle her.

“I came home and… he was here. Smiling, as if nothing were wrong in the world.” She chews on her lip forcing the tears not to start spilling over again. Malcolm and Ainsley they were…”

“Jess, he wouldn’t hurt them.” She nods, knowing he was telling the truth but the sight haunts her.

“They were so still.” He tugs her closer so she’s almost sitting in his lap. The feeling of him pressed into her grounds her to the present. He called me Jessie so when you did it-”

“I scared you. I’m-” He stops himself when she glares at him. “Martin is back in Claremont. There’s not a chance in hell of him getting out of there, not with his privileges that he had from Endicott being stripped. As for Malcolm and Ainsley, they’re working their way through their own issues but they’re safe.”

“For how long? All that can seem to come from Martin is horrific people. All looking to destroy us.”

“Am I hearing you doubt yourself?” He drops a kiss to her shoulder smiling against her skin as she rolls her eyes. “Malcolm was trained by the FBI; Ainsley can protect herself like no other; and their badass mother smashed a serial killer’s face with a plate, crashed my car into an assassin’s, dragged my ass out of the trunk, and got me to the hospital all in heels. Am I really hearing you doubt yourself?”

“I still owe you for the damages to your car.” He chuckles and she lets the sound wash over her. “Or I can at least get your Le Mans repaired for when my son fell onto it when I thought he was on vacation.”

“Remind me to never let Ainsley near my car. You Whitly’s are dangerous.” She smiles, the anxiety of the night finally fading. “Now, will you come back to bed before your son wakes us up at the crack of dawn to rant about the city’s latest murder?”

“Fair enough.” She lets him guide her back to the bedroom, thoughts of Martin far away.

[portals-to-a-new-world]

Shattered Glass

Who?: John Kennex x Reader

What?: YN and John fight, forcing both of them to realize some truths neither were willing to admit. 

Word Count: 4724

Warnings: Angst, Intrusive Thoughts, Self-Image Struggles, Portrayals of Depression and Anxiety, Language, Smut, Unprotected Sex (wrap it before you tap it, y’all), Semi-Public Sex, Fluff 

A/n: Hey y’all! This started out as a therapy fic for me after I’d had a bad day at work and just sort of snowballed lol. I’d just like to reiterate that this has portrayals of negative self image and anxiety/depression so please don’t put yourself at risk if that’s going to trigger you. I’d like to give yet another shoutout to the absolutely brilliant @bakerstreethound​, without whom this story couldn’t have happened. She kept me sane during the beginning and has been the bestest friend and partner anyone could ask for. Ace, I really don’t know what I’d do without you 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜 Finally, I’m not tagging in this one, simply because I’m currently trying to work out a way to organize my tags so that people only get tagged in what they want to be :). Keep an eye out for a post soon with further details, peaches. Oh just one more thing, I’ve been seeing a lot of blogs having their works reposted on other sites without permission, and I’d like to establish here that I do not give anyone permission to repost my works. I’m on AO3 under the same username, but any other sites are not me. 

Rough days were standard in your line of work. You'd think that after 3 years in the industry, the last 5 months of which being spent with your current employer, would have you used to the stress. Then again, you weren't sure anyone could get used to the bitch of a co-worker who was causing 80% of your issues. You were higher up in the company than her, but because she'd been with them longer, she seemed to think she could order you around. Going to your bosses achieved nothing, as she was apparently "invaluable" to the company, and didn't bother listening to them anyway. It wasn't a big deal at first, just one of those "ignore them, and they'll go away" situations, but as time progressed it got increasingly worse. Today you were forced to endure her screaming insults and ranting at you about a mistake your partner had made. Your day only seemed to get worse from there, and by the time you got off, you were about ready to blow a fuse. 4 bouts of road rage and a spilled coffee later, and you finally walked through the door to your apartment, slamming it shut behind you. John's head poked around the corner from the kitchen, noodles hanging from his lips. "Jesus. Is the door still standing?" He asked once he'd swallowed. You just huffed in response. He raised an eyebrow as you walked past without giving your usual greeting in the form of a kiss. "Hello to you, too, then." He mumbled. You waved your hand sarcastically over your shoulder.

"Hey," You said. John's concern was written all over his face as he followed you into the living room. He spoke as you plopped onto the couch, placing your head in your hands.

"I'd ask if you're okay, but clearly you're not so-"

"Sorry, Detective, but you must be losing your touch because I'm fine." You said, looking up to offer a strained smile, which was met with a skeptical eyebrow raise.

"Uh-huh, and Richard's being promoted to captain. Don't bullshit me, (Y/N/N). What's wrong?" He placed a hand on your shoulder as he finished. You shrugged it off and stood to your feet, ignoring the incredulous look on his face at your actions.

"I said I'm fine, John. Just let it go." You turned to walk away, but his hand shot out to grab ahold of your wrist. You tried to tug it free, which only served to draw him to his feet. He pinned your arm against his chest, pulling you in close. "Let me go." You said as you continued to struggle against him. Any other time you'd've found being pinned against such a handsome bastard incredibly sexy, in fact, that's probably why he did it in the first place. The notion was like throwing a match onto gasoline, igniting the rage that had been simmering under the surface into a full-on blaze.

"What the hell's gotten into you??" He demanded.

"I told you to fucking let it go, Kennex. In fact, you might as well go ahead and leave altogether, cause I'm not in the mood to fuck you tonight." He dropped your wrist as if scalded and took two steps back to search your face in angry disbelief before replying.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" You threw your hands in the air in exasperation.

"Oh, come on! I'm not stupid, John. There was never going to be anything serious between us. You're not capable of trusting, let alone loving, anyone after Anna, and even if you were, you'd never choose me." He opened his mouth to reply, but you cut him off. "No, you wouldn't. Put me in a line up with every woman you've ever been attracted to, and the differences are fucking painfully obvious." You took a deep breath before continuing. "I was not, and never will be, anything more to you than convenient, no matter how much I love you. Okay? So, you don't have to pretend to fucking care anymore, John."

"How dare you! I can't believe I'm standing here listening to this bullshit; matter of fact," He paused and gestured as if an idea just occurred to him. "I'm not going to!" He stormed over to his coat and yanked it off the counter before throwing it on. He stopped momentarily to look back at you, mouth open to speak before sighing roughly in frustration. "Fuck this." Without another word, he was going out your door, slamming it so hard behind him that the pictures on the wall fell and crashed on the floor. In a single moment, everything in you shattered like glass. You collapsed in a heap as sobs began to rip through your chest. It's for the best. He would have left eventually, anyway. Why would he want to stay with a useless, disgusting, pathetic thing like you? God, you can't even handle the basic stress of everyday problems, while he's out there still doing his job after everything he's been through. I mean, how weak can you be?? No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't stop the thoughts from invading your mind. Each one cut deeper than the last until you were numb. Eventually you stood to your feet, drained and feeling hopeless. Your body moved on autopilot, carrying you through your nightly routine and into bed. You slept in fits and starts, nightmares plaguing nearly every second. When your body finally gave in to the utter exhaustion, a tiny part of you had hoped that you would wake up to find it'd all been a dream. Most of you didn't want to wake up at all, though.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unfortunately, neither part of you got its wish. You did indeed wake up, and you woke up to an empty bed. Your heart broke as you realized just how badly you'd fucked up. You didn't have time to dwell on your failures, though, as your phone was ringing, and upon answering, you discovered you were over an hour late for work. You shot up out of bed and quickly threw some clothes on, rushing through your morning essentials. As you stepped out of your front door, you looked up and saw dark storm clouds rolling in. You flipped through the radio in your car and found out that the storms were supposed to last through the rest of the week. At least the weather matched how you felt inside. Unsurprisingly, your problematic co-worker was standing ready to lay into you the moment you stepped through the doors. It took every ounce of what little strength you had left not to break down right then and there. By some stroke of luck, she was called away by your bosses, and you quickly took off to your desk. Your day was almost typical, until around 2 pm, your phone buzzed with an incoming text. Your heart stopped as you looked at the name on the screen. John. Your hands were shaking as you unlocked the phone to read the message.

Come by my place when you get off. We need to have a serious talk. 

All of your fears came crashing down on you at once, punching through your chest like a bullet. You stumbled your way into the bathroom and latched onto the sink edge to anchor yourself. So this really was it. He was breaking up with you. Your hand flew up to press against your chest as the ache there blossomed into raw agony. At least he had the decency to do it in person. He could have just ghosted you. You continued to rub your chest as you typed out a simple 'okay' in response. A quick glance at the time revealed that you still had three hours left in your shift. You took a few deep breaths and splashed some cool water on your face. The last thing you needed was for someone to ask "what's wrong" and you end up breaking down in front of God and everyone. After you managed to calm down enough to return to your desk, time seemed to slow down, until the remaining three hours felt like twelve. You'd also discovered that you'd left your rain jacket at John's the last time you'd spent the night. Still, most of your body was numb by then anyway, so it didn't really matter as you stepped out into what had to be a freezing downpour at the end of your shift. In all honesty you were grateful for the numbness. You almost certainly would have never been able to drive had it not been for the near void that threatened to consume you as you drove through the crowded city. When you pulled up into the driveway, some of the emptiness cleared away, leaving panic in your chest and your whole body shivering as you sprinted to the door. You hardly registered John opening the door and pulling you inside. Your focus was locked on to the way his face moved while he spoke, committed to memorizing every detail while you still had the chance. Your gaze had fallen to his perfectly plump lips when you realized he was saying your name.

"Y/n, can you hear me, sweetheart?" You shook your head to clear some of the fog from your mind. Might as well get it over with.

"Yeah-" You cleared your throat. "Yeah, I can hear you. When do you wanna come by and get your stuff? Or would you rather me just drop it off here for you?" Confusion flooded his features as you finished.

"What are you talking about? Why would I need my stuff back?" Damn, was he so done with you that he didn't even want his stuff back? You dropped your eyes, knowing that you wouldn't be able to hold his gaze without breaking down completely.

"You're breaking up with me, right?" You cursed silently as tears began to stream down your face. Gentle fingers pressed up beneath your chin to tilt your face back up.

"You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?" You didn't respond, too caught up in the softness of his eyes, and he didn't bother waiting for one anyway. "I said I shouldn't have walked out on you last night. I had some excuse about being tired, but the truth is I was afraid because you were right. I didn't think I would ever be able to love anyone again after Anna." Your heart clenched and the tears began to fall even harder as breathing became difficult. Had you been watching his face, you would have seen the heartache ooze across his features as he watched you break down in front of him. As it were, your gaze had fallen back to the floor, and you jumped when his hand moved up to cradle your face softly. "I was so pissed at myself, and at you for being right, that it wasn't until this morning when I woke up without you in my arms, and it hurt that I realized just how wrong we both had been. You're wrong about me never choosing you. You're smart and kind, and so beautiful you take my breath away when you walk into a room." You hiccupped and fell apart as you processed what he was saying to you. He rushed to pull you into his arms as your knees threatened to give out, and just held you until you could breathe again. He pulled back far enough to look you in the eyes before he continued speaking. "And I was wrong. Because I do love you, and I'm sorry it took me so long to figure that out." You gasped deeply and threw your arms around his neck.

"I'm so sorry too. I never should have taken out my frustrations about work on you."

"It's alright. Do you wanna talk about it?" Part of you still felt stupid about the reason for your outburst, but you felt so safe in his embrace that you found yourself nodding in affirmation. He placed a kiss on the top of your head and let you go. The sudden lack of his warmth sent shivers up your spine.

"Jesus. Why's it so cold in here?" You asked, rubbing your arms. He reached out and took your hand with a grin.

"Part of your surprise." He said with a wink. "Come on. I'll show you." You followed him around the corner and into the main room. You came to a stop as your eyes fell on the mounds of blankets and pillows arranged on the floor. He turned to look back when you stopped, and he seemed disappointed when you just looked at him in confusion. "You mentioned a while back that you loved the sound of the rain on the roof here. I'd figured-" He cringed slightly as he stumbled over his words. "Well, I mean I'd hoped-" He began to rub the back of his neck nervously before he continued. "I'd hoped that we'd be able to work things out, so I went ahead and got everything set up. Since they're calling for the storms to last for so long and all." Deciding to put him out of his misery, you stepped forward and pulled him down into a kiss. All the tension left his body as your lips connected, and you couldn't help but grin as you broke apart.

"I promise to not tell Dorian that you're secretly a big ol teddy bear who remembers tiny details about his girlfriend." You joked. John rolled his eyes, but still had a small smile on his face as he pulled you back in for another kiss. Despite his closeness, another chill ran down your spine, reminding you of your original query. "Doesn't explain why it's so flippin cold in here, though." He looked at you and gestured as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"It's a pillow fort. And you've got the internal body temperature of a small space heater. I'd really prefer to not sweat my ass off." He said. You bit your lip to hide your grin as you nodded gravely before replying.

"That would be a tragedy." He also was fighting a smirk as he slightly tilted his head in agreement.

"Exactly. My ass is a national treasure," He said. You giggled and let your smile finally breakthrough as he gestured in a 'come hither' motion. You began to worry your bottom lip between your teeth as you stepped forward. He reached over and pulled the soaking wet towel from your shoulders, surprise in his eyes as if something had just occurred to him. You stepped forward in concern as his eyes seemed to zone out and darken.

"John? What's wrong?" He seemed to snap out of his trance, and he cleared his throat before gesturing to your body.

"Your shirt. It's soaked. You're gonna catch a cold." You followed his gaze to your chest to discover that his eyes had not darkened in anger or frustration, but in lust. He was right, your shirt was absolutely dripping wet. It was also white. Ah.

"Would you prefer me to take it off?" You joked. A smirk emerged on his lips, sending a shudder through you that had nothing to do with the cold. He nodded and closed the distance between you.

"Purely in the interest of your health, of course," He said lowly. You tilted your head in mock defeat and began undoing the buttons of your shirt slowly.

"Well, I'm sure you know best, Detective." You barely made it half-way down the line before his lips were crashing into yours and his hands taking over to speed through the remaining buttons. He paused before he could push the garment off of your shoulders.

"Is this- I mean I don't want to assume- Or make you think I'm only after-" You cut him off with another kiss and shrugged out of the sleeves. He still seemed hesitant, right up until you nipped at his bottom lip. He huffed out a breathless growl before returning the favor, his hands landing on your bare waist to pull you into him. He swiped his tongue across your lip in a silent request for entrance, which you happily granted. Your hands moved to grip at his shoulders while his own began an exploration of your body, sliding up your spine and across your stomach before dropping from your skin entirely. You whined at the loss of contact, but he quickly made up for it by reaching down and pulling his shirt over his head. He leaned back down and placed a soft kiss on your lips. "Just making things even," He murmured against you. His hands found your hips as he led you to the center of the room without breaking the kiss, but it was his turn to grunt in surprise when you gently pushed him down on the pillows. "What-" He stopped when your hands moved to play with the clasp of your bra.

"We're not even yet, Detective." You said coyly. You barely got the garment off before he was tugging you down on top of him and into another breathtaking kiss. A moan escaped your lips as he nibbled your ear, trailing kisses down your neck. You brought a finger up to his mouth, stopping his assault. "We're not done yet, detective." You were smirking and trailing your hands across every bit of his skin you could reach, but you were partly just trying to hide the way you were trembling at having him so close. Another part was just reassuring itself that he was really there, not believing that he was finally truly yours, that you had the broken-hearted detective beneath you. It all felt like a dream until he ground up against you and whispered in your ear.

"Please, (Y/n)," He didn't even finish his sentence before you were climbing off of him to quickly remove your pants and underwear. He followed your lead and, to your surprise, pulled you back down on top of him once he'd finished. You uttered a whimper as he brushed up against your soaked folds, but it turned into a full-fledged whine as he slowly guided you down onto his length. He cursed and his eyes fluttered closed once he was fully sheathed inside you. You both took a moment to breathe and adjust to the sensation, and he finally looked at you when his hands began to guide your hips. "I love you." You leaned down to claim his lips again, tears threatening to fall at the words you'd never thought you'd hear him say. 

"I love you too." You said, pulling back to meet his gaze once again. Such a small declaration, yet it made every movement, every touch, feel different. It was slow and passionate, so contrary to the fast and rough pace that was the norm with John. You couldn't bring yourself to look away from his deep hazel eyes, full of love and adoration, as you moved in perfect sync together. He rose with every fall, hitting so deep inside you that you knew you'd be feeling him for weeks. Your hips began to stutter as the sensations threatened to overwhelm you, and without missing a beat John flipped the two of you. A yelp escaped your kiss swollen lips as his nimble fingers slipped between the two of you to rub deliciously at your clit, and you could feel yourself rapidly approaching your orgasm. "John- please- don't stop!" He seemed more than happy to oblige, maneuvering to thrust impossibly deeper as his lips found your ear once again.

"You gonna cum for me, beautiful? I-" Whatever sweet nothing he had planned to say was choked off into a moan as your orgasm hit you. Your walls clamping down around him dragging him over the edge with you as he worked you through until you were whining with oversensitivity. He finally slid out of you and quickly retrieved a towel to clean you up. When he'd finished, he laid back down beside you and wrapped an arm around you, resting your head on his chest. You hummed in contentment as he began to stroke your hair, nearly drifting off before an idea occurred to you.

"John?" You mumbled against his chest.

"Yeah?"

"Do you still have any of that hot chocolate mix I gave you?" A small laugh rumbled in his chest as he responded.

"Yeah. You want some?" You lifted your head up to smile sweetly and nod your head.

"Yes, please!" John shook his head with a smile and placed a quick kiss to your temple before extracting himself from your embrace. You booed when he slid his boxers back on, earning another grin, this time accompanied by a wink before he headed off into the kitchen. Amongst the quiet, you finally registered the sounds of the rain still hammering against the building, the constant drumming a soothing backdrop to the cozy situation you found yourself in. You stood and slid back into your panties before moving to stand in front of the window. You also grabbed one of the blankets to protect against the chill that pervaded the air around the glass. Looking out, you could barely make out the disturbances the rain made to the surface of the water through the darkness, and yet you still found yourself mesmerized by the beauty of the view. You were drawn out of your reverie when John's voice sounded out behind you. "So, tell me about work. Is that woman causing problems again? What's her name, Kar-" He said as he entered the room. When his voice cut off you looked over your shoulder to find him staring at you with wonder in his eyes. You quickly looked out the window to see what he was staring at but couldn't spot anything particularly special.

"What are you looking at?" You asked, turning back right as he walked over to you. He didn't respond; instead, his hands found their way inside your blanket to grab your hips and push you back against the window. Mild panic set in before he finally spoke up. "John?"

"You're so beautiful." He said, dropping his head to kiss along your neck. You huffed in disbelief and reached up to push against his shoulders.

"You're crazy," Your pressing did little to dissuade him from his task, and you couldn't help but smile as he continued to mutter praises into your skin. "John," You chuckled as he continued to nuzzle into your neck. "Stop it, you're fogging up the glass," Your protests were growing half-hearted though, as his hands began to wander, and his lips trailed softly over your skin.

"And?" He questioned, pulling you back enough that your blanket fell to the floor before moving back forward so you were pressed against the icy cold glass. You yelped at the shock the temperature difference gave your system, trying to shove him back and pull him closer for warmth at the same time, both to no avail.

"I was enjoying the view," You said, breathlessly in a last-ditch attempt to persuade him. He pulled back to look you in the eyes before he responded.

"I've got a much better one right in front of me." His lips found yours and you melted against him. The kiss bordered on desperate, almost as if he was afraid you'd disappear. His hands left a trail of goosebumps behind as the heat of his skin emphasized the chill in the air, sliding up your arms and down your back before moving to play with the skin just beneath your waistband. A whine left you as he dipped his fingers inside to tease at your lips, sliding around and deftly avoiding everywhere you wanted him. Just as you were about to pull back and tell him to stop teasing, he thrust two fingers deep inside you, drawing a surprised gasp from you. "So wet for me," He mumbled against your lips as he began to thrust his fingers inside you. Each pass brushed up against your g spot until you were practically seeing stars and begging him for more. Suddenly, his fingers were gone, and you opened your eyes to find him licking your juices off of them. You let out a desperate whine.

"John, please, please fuck me." You said, reaching out to palm him through his boxers. His hand grabbed your wrist before you could touch him, though, and he spun you around. 

"As the lady wishes." He leaned in and said against your ear. He reached down and pulled himself free from his boxers. John didn't bother to remove your own underwear, instead just sliding them to the side before slowly working his length inside you. You groaned in relief as he began to thrust slowly, pulling out and pushing back in to make sure you were ready. His cock dragged perfectly against every sensitive spot you had, sending pleasure shooting through your body and making your toes curl. Seeming satisfied with your preparedness he began to pick up his pace, hitting deeper inside you with every push. You yelped as his fingers found your nipples, tweaking and pulling on the sensitive buds as you moaned out his name. A hand left your skin and reached up to swipe across the glass, revealing your reflection. "Look. Do you see how fucking gorgeous you are? So beautiful, and mine." He nipped at the skin beneath your ear as his hand moved down your front to rub harsh circles on your clit. You threw your head back against his shoulder, eyes falling shut at the added sensation, but a sharp bite made them shoot open again. "Eyes open, baby girl. I want you to watch as I make you fall apart around me." Your eyes found his in the reflection, and you moaned at the way his pupils were blown wide with lust.

"Please, John, I need more-" You gasped deeply as his thrusts began to pick up speed, knocking you up onto your toes and forcing you to throw your hands up against the glass for support. Your reflection revealed how utterly wrecked you were, and the sight sent you flying over the edge with a scream of John's name. He buried his face in your neck as he continued to thrust, chasing his own release and prolonging yours as you gasped and sputtered, unable to form words thanks to the electric waves of pleasure flowing through you. Just when you thought you couldn't handle anymore, John's thrusts faltered, and he came with a deep groan. He rested his forehead on your shoulder as he waited for his breathing to return to normal, mumbling 'I love you's and pressing kisses into your heated skin. Out of nowhere tears began to flow down your cheeks, a quiet sob escaping you. John immediately noticed, and carefully pulled out of you before turning you around to run his hands over you in concern.

"(Y/n), what's wrong? I didn't hurt you, did I? I'm so sorry, sweetheart-" The panic in his voice made the tears come harder, and you struggled to voice what was happening.

"No, you didn't hurt me-" You hiccupped. "I just- don't deserve you." Confusion crossed his face as he processed what you were telling him.

"What? You-" He seemed to come to a decision, and he went and grabbed his phone, quickly pulling up the dial pad. "Here. Call your work and tell them you're taking the rest of the week off. If they ask why then tell them police business."

"What? John, I can't just-" 

"You've got tons of time off saved up, right?" He cut you off, still holding the phone out.

"Well yes, but-"

"Then, by law, they can't stop you from taking it." You closed your eyes and took a deep breath, trying to control your breathing and stop the tears.

"Why are you doing this?" You asked, finally looking up at him.

"Because I want to spend the next 5 days showing you just how amazing you are." He said, so confident, so resolute, that you found yourself reaching out to grab the phone. 

[ellanainthetardis]

wait im confused what is wrong? new tumblr update or are you coming and seeing the ones they made not too long ago?

New tumblr update for destkop. 

Here’s what the tags look like now: (and unlike search, you can’t choose to put stuff in one column instead of this mess)

also apparently they don’t tell me when I have asks now. Because you now. Why make it easier for users? If I don’t check my activity or my asks I don’t know I have a message, the instant messaging notifications have been misfunctioning for weeks now (not just mine). Instead of fixing what’s broken, they push more updates we don’t want. 

Basically, they’re turning desktop tumblr into mobile tumblr and I don’t see the point. The tags thing mean we, creators, be it ff, fanart or giftmaker will AGAIN suffer from the update because, to be honest, the only practical way to find stuff in a fandom now will either be people’s dashboard or to search someone’s blog for the updates. (I’m not even talking about quality here, bc in other tags, I saw gifsets meants to be in two columns being squeezed in one column; if you click expand it expands in that tiny column thing instead of bringing you to the person’s blog etc.) And I’m sick of that because most people consume without even leaving a like, trust me I appreciate every note I get because I know those people were kind enough to leave a heart, or a reply. (although I get some other people are shy and don’t know what to say but a like doesn’t cost much and it goes a long way into making you feel like you’re not posting in a void.)

In short, the update means less visibility because statistically, people don’t reblog art/ff enough (and I get that because I personally tend to queue stuff instead of instant reblog and I rarely reblog fanfics myself, for instance, it’s not a criticism of reblogging habits because I stand on the opinion you should only reblog what you want; although likes are another thing bc it doesn’t really take much time if you actually enjoyed the post but to each their own) so it means they won’t be seen. Not being seen means less feedback. Less feedback means people will get tied of creating and leave the fandom. Ours in particular is already small so...  

Basically, I know I’m bitching and ranting and that’s annoying but you offer stuff to your fandom and it’s already complicated to get returns and then tumblr goes and does something that will make it even more complicated to get visibility or feedback (and I’m complaining but I already have a reader base, I’m lucky in that aspect; I’m also thinking about writers/artists,gifmakers who don’t necessarily have that and might go ignored or unseen because of this new system). 

Also, I guess I’m really getting fed up because I’ve been having troubles posting since the big update of a few weeks ago. Things won’t go in a tag, i have to edit the posts several times before it does etc. It’s time consuming and it’s a waste of a time I could employ better elsewhere. 

I will test posting a prompt today but if it doesn’t go to plan, I will look into alternatives for HADS. Or just cut it loose entirely. Idk. I’m tired. I barely get 2 review on HADS on ff, the whole feedback happen on tumblr so if tumblr fucking stabs me in the  back what do I do? Besides, they’re prompts FROM tumblr so... It’s logical it goes here and has more traction here... I guess I will move the collection on Ao3 instead. But then what do we do about the masterlist of tags? -_- See, anon, this is a conundrum and I do not deal well with either change OR stress. 

[ittakesrain]

a shitshow of a brain-dump

Even though I keep thinking this episode is over, it never is. Or, it hasn’t been yet. Eventually, it will be. Hopefully sometime fucking soon. But today is not that day, my friends.

I went to bed at 4:30pm last night. Like, the afternoon. Slept til 7 this morning, too, which I guess isn’t a bad thing. It certainly beats being conscious. But maybe that’s a bad way to look at it haha, like, I shouldn’t want to be unconscious. It’s just like…how else am I supposed to deal while just waiting this fuckin’ thing out?

I was asking myself what’s better. Crying for hours, tears saturated with anguish and discomfort and uncertainty and fear? Or all-consuming emptiness, nothing left to think or feel or experience, al emotion lost in the void? They both suck. But it’s been changing up nightly, so there’s at least some variety in the fucking depression.

I had therapy this morning, which always helps, and it did help, and I’m so relieved because I’m still kinda riding that high even though I needed my Klonopin (that I’ve been taking daily, because why suffer, I can’t take the suffering).

Anyway. I went in all mopey and folded into myself as usual but she eventually got me talking (damn, how does she do that?) and I was able to breathe for 45 minutes and have that time as a break from wanting to cease existing just to escape the torment. I could go on forever about the miracles that happen there, while we sit next to each other on the floor by the window, but more on that later.

I hung out with a friend after, a fellow mental health warrior, and it was a great distraction, and she totally understood that I needed to bolt outta there once I felt the oncoming, out-of-nowhere panic attack ready to pounce.

Came home. Ate fucking food (berries and cottage cheese, weird but healthy, I guess?). I actually ate something with my therapist today too, she gave me some of those breakfast biscuit things, and I ate them, go me.

I took all my fucking vitamins and supplements. Multi bc I’m not getting enough shit I need, biotin because since I’m not getting the shit I need my hair is falling out. Magnesium because it’s supposed to help with anxiety. PassionFlower extract because that is alsooo supposed to help with anxiety and I am desperate.

I also feel the need to say that I’m doing everything right. I’m taking the meds and stopping to inhale and exhale like a normal human, I’m tryinggggg to stay positive. I’m disheartened (and fucking furious) that this still happened.

Now for the brain-dump part that probably isn’t going to make any sense because it’s literally just random nonsense I typed up throughout the day.

I was thinking about what I want right now (an end to the torture, a plan of attack to kick back at this bullshit, some internal motivation that doesn’t dissipate abruptly and painfully) and about what I need (aside from a damn miracle). Like, how do I ask for help from people? What can I tell them I need? Basically I just need patience. Lots of love and affection (all the hugs and cuddles, please). I need work to be understanding about this. Which they are. It’s just ugh I’m still embarrassed.

Okay, now a word on understanding. I hate when people tell me they understand because unless they have bipolar, they most certainly do not and don’t insult me by saying that you do. I’m not gonna invalidate the pain other people feel, that’d be a shitty thing to do. But like, it’s insulting and upsetting. If I’m trying to explain how in my dark moments I literally CANNOT see clearly, I CANNOT fathom a time when I wasn’t in pain or a time when I won’t be in pain, I CANNOT function…and you tell me you’ve been there? Well then why can’t I just “be positive” and move on, like you apparently were able to do. I don’t wanna rant about this too much, but like. It’s on my mind.

I also had this random thought: I take one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward, one step back. I’m staying in the same place (cue bitter frustration seeping out of my brain). But I’m kinda dancing with it. Dancing in place. Like, what I mean by that is I’m trying. I’m doing new things and trying my best (when I am capable of it) and just. I dunno, is that a good perspective?

Lastly, I’m trying to find a way to love myself even with my malfunctioning, glitch-ridden brain. Even with my blossoming bouquet of mental illnesses. What I really mean by that is I’m trying to be proud of myself in spite of feeling like a total failure. I mean, yeah, surviving on a daily basis is a HUGE accomplishment for someone who’s got a mental illness. If you’re in that category of people, congrats and I’m so proud of you. But like gahhh I wanna be proud of myself and it seems to be a struggle for me. I’m gonna try being patient. I mean, nothing says I can’t get back up on the horse and try again. Actually, I’m gonna do that. Because I really have no choice, but because that’s how I like to think I am. Resilient, blah blah, we know. Bipolars are resilient. But, like. Yeah.

Some definitions:

Fail- to be unsuccessful in achieving one’s goals

Success- the accomplishment of an aim or purpose

Goal- the object of a person’s ambition or effort, the desired aim or result

Ambition- a strong desire to do or achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work

And some quotes:

“Failure is not a sin” –dunno who said it but my HS principal said this at our graduation

The only way to fail is to not try –again, dunno who said it, but we all know this basic idea, don’t we

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently” –apparently Henry Ford said this

Success is a journey, not a destination –I think of happiness the same way, interesting

“Ambition is believing in yourself even when no one else in the world does”

I’m just trying to convince myself that I’m worthy of the time it’s gonna take for me to get my shit to an acceptable level of “together.” The words I typed up there totally aren’t gonna make sense if anyone reads them, buuuuut maybe when I go back and read this thingggg later, it’ll jog something in my brain that helps.

Alrighty. Enough smashing this keyboard for the night.

[bookwormswillruletheworld]

Contains Far From Home spoilers

So I’m just going to yell out into the void here. Because ranting to my friends and having them sympathize is great and honestly I don’t know what I’d do without them, but the thoughts are still swirling around in my head so here goes.

I went to see FFH (again) with my dad and brother today. I went to see it a couple days ago with my friends and I wanted to go see it again just to see my brother’s face during the mid credits scene and how shook he would be (he wasn’t shook at all). So afterwards when we headed home, my dad starts talking. He said a couple of things that made me really mad.

1) he mansplained time travel in the MCU to me (I’ve spent more time and energy thinking about it than him. And I was trying to explain something the writers said)

2) He said anxiety should just be gotten over and conquered and anyone who said otherwise was doing a disservice 

3) He said SHIELD and Stark Industries were full of traitors and they should have vetted them more and then tried to mansplain behavior and how people act to me 

1) I am a huge nerd. I know random facts about a lot of topics but the MCU and Harry Potter are my forte. I have been trying to tell him stuff about the MCU since I got into it. I tried to tell him that Loki wasn’t evil but he didn’t believe me. He tried to explain it his own way. But look at the MCU now and the fact that Marvel has said he was Loki was under the control of Thanos. He wrote me off a fangirl who just didn’t want Loki to be evil. Now when I know what Marvel has said about timelines and the multiverse in the MCU and I’m being nerdy and talking about it and then he starts talking over me and telling me I’m wrong and how it works and all this bullshit and he doesn’t stop. tbh I’m tired of it.

2) We were talking about Evans and Peter having some anxiety in the movie and my dad starts saying that Evans is stupid for stopping being Cap over his anxiety. and how you just get over anxiety and conquer it and suppress it. that’s just wrong. you learn to deal with it and take some meds sometimes and you have bad days but you don’t just suppress it and pretend it will go away. Mental health is important. He doesn’t get stress either I talked about stress a while ago and he’s like you aren’t stressed. Yes I’m fucking stress. the level of stress I’m under was enough to have me committed 60 years ago. He doesn’t understand that the stress of not knowing how to do stuff but feeling like I need to know how to do it because I have to be THE BEST is enough to make me want to break down and cry. 

3) Stark Industries isn’t full of traitors. Mysterio isn’t a traitor per se he got fired before he turned on Tony. The others didn’t work for Tony during FFH. Not only that they fell for a con. They didn’t feel important and then Mysterio made them feel important. Mysterio was a psychopath with a narcissistic personality. Those people are a) really good at hiding it b) narcissists are generally charming and normal and people are attracted to them. My dad thinks that they should vet people more but you can’t predict how people will react. You can’t see how someone will react if you fire them and then their life comes crashing down around them. You can’t always see if someone has a narcissistic personality. You can’t always see if someone is a psychopath. And yeah these people are good so its hardly surprising that when you get a guy with so much anger and a group of people who have similar issues together they act together and he’s the leader. Don’t mansplain to me. 

This has been my rant thank you

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 019: Hey Google, Play “You Say Run”

Previously on BnHA: All Might plus ultraed a bunch of thugs but then the three Big Bads converged on him and nearly ripped him apart. Deku ran back to try to save him and nearly got his own self killed. Then Bakugou fucking Katsuki, Todoroki motherfucking Whatever His First Name Is, and Kirishima goddamn Same Deal as Todoroki showed up at the last fucking second to save the day.

Today on BnHA: Todoroki is a beast. Bakugou nearly gives me a heart attack. All Might is hurt and almost out of time and in no condition to be fighting the enemy. All Might fights the enemy anyway. All Might fucking demolishes the enemy, and sacrifices damn near everything to do it, and it’s the single most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my fucking life.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 31 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.) 

oh damn, Todoroki is so maddeningly excellent at life that he can control his quirk to the extent that he stopped just short of freezing All Might in addition to Noumu

mighty fine job there, Elsa

OH THANK GOD All Might took advantage of that to loosen Noumu’s grip and now he’s hopping out of there

but he’s still fucking hurt! the guy was fucking clawing at his old injury, and even before that happened he was already close to his limit. I really don’t like this at all

now everyone is just staring at Facepalm. like, fuck you, dude

“WE DON’T LIKE YOU”

Bakugou still has his hand on Kurogiri’s neck. just blow him the fuck up already. of course you pick now of all fucking times to go all lawful fucking heroic

Noumu’s just sitting there in Kuro’s void all

his expression literally has not changed once since his first appearance, but it’s amazing how all it takes is the right context, and just like that it becomes hilarious

“you’ve pinned down our way out” yes he has! but for whatever reason, he’s not going for a killing or even a disabling blow! and it’s making me fucking anxious!!

and now Bakugou is monologuing like fucking Peter Pan hlkhsakdh. “OH THE CLEVERNESS OF ME”

listen Baku, that’s great that you’ve figured all of that out and all, but I’m serious now, you had better blast this guy sometime today or this is all about to get extremely fucking dire again

now he’s recalling when he first tried to attack Kurogiri at the outset of the surprise attack, back when he nearly blasted him and Kuro was like “that was close.” except that as far as Bakugou’s concerned, he might as well have said “BOY THAT WAS CLOSE, IT SURE IS GOOD THAT HE DIDN’T HIT MY WEAK SPOT RIGHT OVER HERE.” apparently

it is pretty clever tbh but omg I just want him to stop dragging this out already. my heart can’t take

he’s telling Kuro that he’ll blow him up if he decides he’s doing anything fishy. I’m sure that’s going to pan out

seriously Bakugou, it’s football season now in the U.S. and I just watched the Packers come back from a 20-0 deficit, after their quarterback fucking died in the first half but was then somehow resurrected. I’m just not in a mood to underestimate anyone right at this moment, least of all a bunch of shounen villains whom the author has clearly invested a great deal of time and thought into, and who are thus quite unlikely to just die here a mere 8 chapters after their introduction

ughhh

Facepalm is acting entirely too calm for the heroes to not be on their fucking guard right now

aaaaaand now he’s telling Noumu to “take out the explosive brat”! :’D

haha! bitch if you fucking try anything I will go out and buy like 50 mouse traps and wait until you’re sleeping and then stick those things all over all fourteen of your creepy superfluous possessed fucking hands

so now Noumu is hauling his ass back out of the portal... and his arm and leg are literally crumbling, WOW

son of a bitch I’m glad Todoroki’s on our side

Deku and All Might are watching this and wondering what exactly Noumu even is, which is quite a reasonable thing to be asking yourself at this point

oh, great. apparently he has hyper regeneration too and can regrow his limbs and repair all of his injuries in an instant! so that’s just fucking great

does Todoroki have a limit to his ice powers? we don’t know of one yet, at least. hey bud, can you just. freeze him again real quick there

or if you really want to be a dear, maybe try freezing Facepalm since he’s clearly the ringleader in all of this??

now All Might is heroically leaping into the fray once more

and now it occurs to me that Bakugou and Todoroki (and Kiri) may in fact be acting so frustratingly complacent because they, unlike Deku, aren’t aware of just how close All Might is to his limit, and just how fucked they’ll be if that actually happens. as far as they know, All Might doesn’t have a limit. he’s fucking All Might. why would he?!

so in fact I can’t blame them, because they’re not aware of just how close to the knife’s edge they’re actually walking right now

nnnnnnnnngh something is happening with Bakugou, something or someone is approaching him and it’s probably Noumu!! 8|!!! I’ll have to scroll down in order to see but I’m worriiiied sob

[peeks through hands]

um. what the hell just happened

it looked like something was disintegrating for a second there in that FWSH panel but other than that? I got nothing

(ETA: I’ve read this chapter like 4 times and I still don’t know what was going on in that panel, honestly. everything else is pretty clear now though)

whatever it was, it was too fast for any of the kids to follow. even Kacchan has no idea how the hell he suddenly got where he is

I personally have a guess

MY GUESS IS CONFIRMED

ALL MIGHT IS SO FUCKING GLORIOUS. THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY SON’S LIFE!! PLEASE MARRY ME!!

now Facepalm is sarcastically praising him, as villains do

this is the second time he’s mentioned something like this now. I’m starting to get the feeling it has something to do with whatever his motivation/backstory is. you know, what with this being the first arc with bad guys, as of yet I have no idea what BnHA’s Villain Redemption Policy is. but I have to say, I can’t see myself ever liking this nutjob. so he’d better not try to pull any Vegeta/Byakuya/Itachi/Mukuro type of shit, that’s all I can say

and now he’s ranting about how it’s ~not fair~ because when bad guys do bad guy stuff violently, it’s bad, but when good guys do good stuff violently, it’s fine!

there are so many logical holes in this argument!! but!! it’s also one of the themes I was lowkey hoping the series would explore, and it looks like maybe it will, so this is pretty exciting!

but his argument here is just so fucking wrong, though. like dude, you really can’t see how All Might’s “violence” is just a little bit different from you and your friends’, Mr. “LET’S KILL SOME CHILDREN HAHAHA”?

lol now All Might’s calling him out on his bullshit and basically saying that he knows full well this psycho isn’t a Mukuro-type. I fucking love this

and now these four boy scouts are feeling empowered

I LIKE THEIR FIGHTING SPIRIT. THE ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE “WITH ALL MIGHT SUPPORTING US” PART IS SECRETLY FLAWED!!

and now All Might’s telling them to get out of there because he knows, sob

jesus christ Deku are you seriously pointing out all of All Might’s weaknesses right now in front of the fucking enemy

I get that he’s worried about him but dude!! some discretion, you know???

thankfully All Might cuts him off, but the damage is probably already done

Facepalm is now instructing Noumu and Kurogiri to go after All Might and says that he’ll handle the kids 8/

hey so Todoroki, maybe now you might want to try freezing this dude’s ass?? like what are you waiting for though??

fuck me, All Might has “barely a minute left” now. this had better be like one of those Dragonball Z minutes that’s actually 15 episodes long. or else we’re really in a bind

and now he seems to be powering up to do something...

oh my god

okay, can I just say, I’ve seen a LOT of anime eyes in my day. magical eyes, cursed eyes, eyes in all shapes and styles and every last color of the rainbow. but All Might just may have the coolest fucking eyes I’ve ever seen

and I’ve actually thought this ever since we first saw them in his Skinny Steve form. there’s just something so cool about the black eyes with blue irises combo. it doesn’t look like any other character I can think of, and it just works for him. I’m unfortunately at a complete loss for how to explain just why I like it so much, because I always read these chapters so late, and my brain’s not up to the task. but anyway! the point is that he’s awesome and this closeup is crazy intense and is giving me life right now

even everyone else watching is just blown the fuck away by the sheer badassery he’s suddenly radiating at this moment. THE SYMBOL OF PEACE IS ABOUT TO FUCK SOMEONE UPPPPPPPPPP

HE’S PUNCHING NOUMU AND HE DOESN’T SEEM TO BE CONCERNED AT ALL ABOUT THE SHOCK ABSORPTION, AS THOUGH HE HAS SOME SORT OF PLAN NOW

OH WOW

HE’S LITERALLY JUST PUMMELING THE EVERLOVING SHIT OUT OF HIM

WELL MORE LIKE THEY’RE PUMMELING EACH OTHER I GUESS

WOW. GOTTA SAY, THAT IS ONE OF THE MOST SHOUNEN THINGS I’VE EVER WITNESSED

ohh SHIT, All Might says that since it’s “absorption” and not “negation”, it implies that he must have a limit

and now he’s basically saying “oh, you built this thing to be badder than me? well then in that case I’ll just have to be EVEN BADDER”

ALL MIGHT IS FUCKING CRANKING IT UP TO ELEVEN AND IT IS GLORIOUS

BUT HE’S ALSO DYING STILL

DON’T DIE ALL MIGHT

A HERO’S ALWAYS READY TO SMASH THROUGH TROUBLE OH MY GOD

HE IS LIKE THE LIVING EMBODIMENT OF SHOUNEN

OH MY GOD NOW HE’S SAYING THE THING

THE NONSENSICAL THING THAT I’VE BEEN KIND OF ROLLING MY EYES AT THIS ENTIRE TIME BECAUSE IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE

AND TO BE HONEST IT STILL DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE

BUT...

...I THINK ALL MIGHT MAY BE STARTING TO WIN ME OVER ON THIS ONE

my GOD that was satisfying to see

(ETA: you guys. YOU GUYS. I watched this scene like a half a dozen times in the anime. it. was. so. cool. like honest to god one of the single coolest and most badass things I’ve ever fucking seen.

so what I didn’t realize is that BnHA is one of those newfangled anime that actually runs in seasons, instead of starting one day and then just never stopping ever again. I have seen so many good series brought to their knees by attempting the latter. it drains the budget, necessitates all kinds of obnoxious and pointless filler, and ends up forcing things to be unbearably dragged out. but by condensing BnHA’s first two arcs into one 13-episode season, the anime sidestepped all of these pitfalls entirely. the animation has been gorgeous, and they only animated what was in the actual canon! no fucking filler omg.

and the soundtrack. GUYS. I had no idea the OST was going to be this fucking good. and just, when it gets to this scene, and the production values just jump up ALL THE NOTCHES, and the music starts to swell, and All Might is being so cool and THROWING ALL THE PUNCHES, and the fucking SKY is getting dark for no reason at all except that EVEN THE SKY IS INTIMIDATED BY HOW BADASS HE IS, and there are all these wind effects and camera angles and I’m losing my mind, and then ALL MIGHT SAYS. THE. THING!!! and then KAPOOOOOW

just. it fucking floored me. like I wanted to cry almost. my adrenaline was so ramped up I was practically ready to do backflips. that shit made me want to go out and save the world.

I fucking understand plus ultra after that, man. I get it now. it’s like my third eye has been fucking opened. universe tell me your secrets. oh my god)

the kids are staring in shock

there is literally smoke clearing. from the flurry of punches. they were punching so furiously that somehow there was smoke

All Might punched him over 300 times in like, 10 seconds. damn, All Might. that sounds like the kind of hyperbolic thing I would say to describe something like what you just did. only you actually did it

goddamn

so now only Facepalm and his convenient friend with the convenient escape power are left. I wonder what will happen next chapter lmao

BONUS:

JIROU!! ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITES!

she has such a weird power and I fucking love it

unfortunately her power is incompatible with all iPhones manufactured since 2016

“she looks like she’d play bass” yessss

did I mention that I love her?? and I ship her with Momo lol

[tobythewise]

ABC Prompts Y- Yelling

Thank you so much for the prompt!! :) (my muse has been toying with this idea for awhile and I hope you enjoy it!!)

Dean walks out to his back deck and plops down into his chair. He takes a few gulps from the bottle of whiskey in his hand. He wishes the whiskey would make him numb faster.

“Fuck!” he yells into the void of his backyard, forever grateful he lives in the country where his only neighbor is the cute guy who lives across the street towards the front of his house.

Today’s been a shit day for Dean. First his brother called and canceled his trip to visit Dean last minute due to an unexpectant essay coming up. Dean understand, he isn’t mad just disappointed. Then, when Dean got to work he had to deal with every rude customer that came into the shop. It’s like they all planned on coming in on the same day and all decided they knew more about engines and cars than Dean did.

At lunch, Dean got into a disagreement with the new receptionist, Lisa. She told him that he couldn’t possibly be bisexual since he’s never actually dated a man before. Thanks for rubbing that one in.

Dean takes another few swigs of his whiskey, savoring the burn it causes his throat. Then to top it all off, he just got off the phone with his dad where the conversation ended again with ‘it’s not a phase, dad’. Dean rolls his eyes just thinking about it.

Dean looks up into the sky looking for some sort of answer as to why. He of course finds nothing which only seems to piss him off further.

“For crying out loud universe!!” Dean begins ranting at the stars. “Why can’t you just do me a freakin’ solid once in awhile?”

He stands up and points up at the clouds. “It’s your fault that I’m bisexual! I didn’t choose this! The least you could have done was have other people be a tad bit more understanding!”

“Fuck!” he screams at the top of his lungs before his ranting continues. “I’m Dean Winchester and I’m bisexual whether or not I’ve ever dated another dude before! And I don’t deserve to be everyone’s punching bag. I’m a nice fucking guy!”

Dean slumps back down into his chair and takes another drink before he starts yelling again. “And another thing, Universe. I practically raised Sammy! Where’s my good karma? Huh? When am I going to find the man or woman of my dreams to sweep me off my feet? What’s a dude gotta do to get laid around here?”

Dean takes a deep breath before screaming, “Well? Let me have it Universe! What’s your answer for all my life’s problems?”

Dean waits and suddenly he hears his answer. Apparently the Universe has a sexy, deep voice that yells right back. “Dean! Go the fuck to sleep!”

And that’s exactly what he does. Dean stumbles into his house and up into his bed where he proceeds to pass out as soon as his head hits his pillow.

The next morning, Dean stumbles down to his kitchen with a raging hangover. When he finally has his coffee he wander into his living room where he notices something sticking to the window on his front door. He opens the door to find a giant basket on his doorstep and a note taped to his door. The basket is filled with hangover necessities.

Dean takes both the note and basket inside with a small smile on his face. He opens the note.

Dean,

Since the universe won’t deliver I volunteer instead. Here’s everything you’ll need to get through the next twenty four hours. After that time and your head is cleared, I wouldn’t mind helping you out with your other complaints last night. Especially the one where you’ve never been on a date with a man. Tomorrow night I’ll be here to pick you up at seven. Be dressed to go out to dinner.

Signed, 

‘The Universe’ AKA your neighbor Castiel

[amandaelisablog]

A RANT THAT IS TMI

I need to vent because life gets heavy sometimes and it’s hard to be alone in your mind with these things. I’ve found that doing this gives me an outlet and hopefully finding others who feel as I do. So back in November I had a work injury and forgot to send in a report about it. I didn’t have insurance at the time due to how expensive it was which sucks because you get a penalty charge on your taxes for being uninsured. It’s an unfair thing to the hardworking folks who put in time for crap pay and even work under poor conditions or strenuous physical demands. Having your government say, hey you work, you pay your taxes but you fucked up by not being able to pay for insurance. Anyway, so I got through the whole process to get this checked out, find that it’s a sprain in my knee that hasn’t healed since November, it’s now March. They pay for the urgent care visit, the sports injury doctor, the MRI proving the injury and then deny the claim for physical therapy because I didn’t report it when it happened. What was the point of going through all of this for three months if you knew this and still paid for those tests? Not only that but my company told the worker comp that they called the family I work for (I’m a care provider for people with disabilities) and said that the family said they didn’t know anything about it. It’s all bullshit because the day it happened I told the parents, plus me and the mom are very close and she would have told me right away if someone had called her. She doesn’t hide or keep things from me, she considers me family.

It has put a bad taste in my mouth over my company and the way they deal with things like this. I am a hard worker, I even stayed that day on two twisted ankles, a messed up knee, hip and arm. I was there 8 hours and couldn’t do much with the child I work for due to all the pain I was in, so our activities were floor or table based. On normal days we play and work on habilitation which can be physically demanding and that wasn’t possible. So now after all of that I still have a messed up knee and three months of wasted time. If I had known that this was going to be the outcome of this I would have used my insurance, though I didn’t learn of this insurance until after I started the claim process. It had been active since December which would have been nice to know but again what can you expect from the way that Arizona department services are run.

If the can get out of spending any money on a person they will find a way, which is what Copper Pointe did, it was easy for them to deny it and for my company to throw it and lie about doing a more in depth search on my claims. I am a truly honest person and find that there isn’t a reason to lie about things, especially something like this. The only reason I had informed my manager was to find some information on what happens if I were to have surgery on my knee due to the extreme pain, as well as others in my life who had the exact same pain in that area. I wanted to know if they offered any kind of time off. I like to cover every base I can in order to avoid losing out on pay. I barely make it every month and each month is so anxiety inducing. If it came down to missing work for this or just living with it I would have just left it alone. This is how the world works and it’s your word against those of higher power. You will always be in the wrong because they get final say.

My second issue is this. Since I just got insurance I’ve established a PCP, OBGYN etc. First of all my PCP is making it real easy for me to drop her and find someone else with more consideration. I take medications for anxiety, depression and a mood disorder, which they can’t decide is bipolar or not. I need them badly and after a few days the effects are obvious. Pretty soon it will be hard for me to drive or get out of bed. My mood is very manic as I go through these cycles, it so disorientating and damaging to my job if it happens then. I still have to work and it’s hard, so hard. How the hell am I supposed to even get to work if I can’t drive a straight line or keep the fogginess at bay?

Anyways, so she told me any times since seeing her she would refill these medications. I even brought a paper from a free clinic I had been going to. It had all the information they needed in order to record this and the phone number to the place to verify. Two different people took this information down. The front desk girl took the paper and wrote it down as well as the doctor’s assistant who I watched type every single one into my file on the computer. I was there 7 days ago and told her I needed them refilled since I had one more left of each of them. She said she would send them out that day. I waited and waited but never got the text from my pharmacy saying they were filled so I called the pharmacy thinking maybe they didn’t send it yet. They had no record of it being sent over.

So called my doctor’s office and the girl I spoke to seemed like she didn’t know anything. I explained to her three times the situation and she claimed she couldn’t find any record of these medications, the ones I made sure to give them straight away to avoid this. I called every day since and still nothing, after the third day she magically found the medications and was waiting for doctor approval and for the quantity and mg, which had given the second day calling. I even called today and got the same damn thing from when I first called. I’ve been out of medications for about five days and feel like shit. It has really made me feel as though I made the wrong choice in a provider. I am considering finding someone different who will take things seriously and do their job. Luckily the family I work for is on vacation and I have this time to be in this depressed anxious state.

The last thing on my list here and this is going to get personal, a lot of tmi. I went to my new OBGYN and did all the fun tests you get to do that are both uncomfortable and awkward. After all the tests the doctor sat down with me and said matter of fact, you guys don’t plan on having kids I see. I was taken aback by this because we do plan on having kids just not right now as our money situation isn’t the best. I told her this and she look at me with concern and I didn’t understand what was going on. She explained to me that due to my age, weight and birth control that this factors are working against us conceiving. That was a huge punch to the gut and I wasn’t expecting to hear that. So she hooked me up with this woman who is helping me to lose weight and I’ve lost 6 so far which is a great feeling. But due to this whole business with my meds I am having a hard time not falling back to eating to fill that void. So far I haven’t but I want to.

Anyway, so I had another problem that had to be checked. This is where it gets personal. I got my nips pierced a few years ago, after a year they got infected, did the whole antibiotics thing and it seemed to have gone away. But about a year or so ago I started feeling pain and something hard inside of it. Because I didn’t have insurance it been a struggle to deal with this. On the pain scale it’s about a 7 to 8 some days. The doc didn’t find anything upon inspection but decided to send me to get an ultrasound. So did that and they found an abnormality inside? Just think if she hadn’t sent me and it got worse. I got sent to a specialist who gave me three options, 1 was to leave it alone, 2 was antibiotics and the last option is removing the damaged tissue, which is last because it’s the worst one on the list. So I’m on antibiotics for two weeks then I wait 3 months to make sure it’s gone before we visit the last option. So this is the last option, we remove the damaged tissue which will cause the nerves inside to die and cause the nip to cave in making it an unusable source of feeding a baby.

This all happened within two weeks and its weighing heavy on me. This is where I feel the most alone; no one knows or can understand this feeling I have. It feels like some kind of punishment from the universe or something. To know that I might not be able to have kids but even if I do I basically have a shutdown boob. I’m very old school and feel as though breastfeeding creates a bond with mother and child, it’s important. But it feels as though all my dreams are dashed and the only thing I can do is sit and watch. I’m trying though, to at least lose weight, this has been a great motivator for me to get on the ball. But who can say if this one thing will help in the end? I’m 30 which isn’t old but it is a concern, due to the fact that we might not even start until our mid to late 30s.

“The miscarriage rate is 11.7 percent. By age 30 your risk of having a baby with Down syndrome is 1 in 952, and a baby with any chromosomal abnormality, 1 in 385.” – parenting.com How can I do that to a child? Knowing this is a possibility? Now before you get all uppity there isn’t anything wrong with down syndrome or anything but with the knowledge I have on this how can I be selfish and not give my child a chance of being born healthy? This study is just for age 30, but considering when we decide to have children it probably won’t be until after 35 if that.

“This is the age when your doctor might recommend amniocentesis or some other prenatal screening—which for many women is anxiety-provoking while they await results—because the risks of having a baby with Down syndrome or another type of chromosomal disorder begin to rise significantly.” – parenting.com.

“The miscarriage rate rises after age 35 to close to 18 percent. Rates of stillbirths are about twice as high among older pregnant women than younger ones, according to recent studies, although the reasons are unknown.” – parenting.com

The above are my concerns and at that point do I even take that risk? I get tired of hear people say, well so and so had a healthy baby at 45. Good for her, but all woman’s bodies are different and you can’t base my situation on someone else. Based on my own body I feel like there is a greater chance of the above happening.

It’s been hard to accept this as a possible reality considering I’ve found a man I love who I want to have children with and grow old with. Before him I was so afraid to have children due to my upbringing with a destructive parental unit. I didn’t want to end up like my mother because I can see a lot of similarities in us that scare me.

Age is a big problem for me mainly because I don’t want to be too old to enjoy my children. I want that time when I’m still able to play with them and be involved and not be in my 60s when they are my age. I wish I had children in my 20s. You know how old my mom is right now? She’s 50! She’s young still and I’m 30 we are 20 years apart and she looks young, people used to think she was my older sister, not in that cheesy way but even at school functions they’d ask where our parents were.

So that’s been my past 2 weeks and it feels good to get some of this out.

[thedarkenedkeeper]

Glitched: Part 9 - No Strings Attached

Author's Note: *drags self along the ground, bloodied and beaten up, and hands over the newest chapter* I...I'm alive...barely...HOLY X_X

I'm not going to give anything away about this chapter, however, there will be an ending author's note, elaborating why this chapter is crucial to the story.

WARNING: This chapter is incredibly dark and graphic. For anyone who read Part 6, it's basically a lot like that. There is a horrible sense of dread and horror throughout the chapter. There is a detailed description of a surgical operation being performed, as well as the tools that are used. The patient who undergoes the surgery is conscious during the procedure, and as such, feels everything and is in horrible agony. There is bloodshed and a intensity here and there. There is also an overwhelming amount of angst - again.

Listen to this playlist while reading

Enjoy!

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock – 3:56 P.M. – four minutes remaining.

Tick tock, tick tock – Three minutes.

Tick tock – Two minutes.

With each subtle second that ticked by, the green-haired Irishman’s dread increased. There he sat on the stone-cold ground in the furthest corner of the cell, hugging his knees to his chest. The poor man was a quivering mess from both the cold and the fear creeping along his spine. His eyes were fixed on the watch that lay across from him, not batting an eye as he stared directly at it; lifeless eyes blown wide with horror. He had exactly two minutes left to live and then Anti was coming for him.

Two minutes and then death was coming for him in the flesh.

He tensed up, his grip tightening around his legs. He wasn’t ready to die. He may have been caged in this hell for nine whole months, all hope lost and gone forever. He may have been tortured both physically and mentally more times than he could count, and this room he was in may have been the reason for why he was rotting from the inside out. But no matter how bad it was getting, no matter how horrific and brutal, he was not ready for death. He was afraid of it, especially when it took on the form of an unhinged version of himself welding a large knife.

Jack had heard the scream for help – just barely, but he had made it out. Immediately, he had lifted his head to look off into the darkness, adrenaline and dread coursing through his veins. That scream had sounded an awful lot like it had belonged to Henrik, and if it had…the YouTuber couldn’t even begin to fathom the thought of what could’ve happened.

Jack shivered violently, a gust of cool air rushing past the back of his neck. The temperature had dropped sufficiently in the last hour, so much so to the point he was starting to see his own breath. Funny – when he had first found himself in the cage, the room had been sweltering hot, and now it was the exact opposite. He didn’t know which would’ve been worse – dying from the heat or from the freezing cold. He scoffed at the question. Death – that’s all he found himself thinking about lately. He didn’t want it, and yet his mind always managed to wander off into complete darkness. A weak nervous chuckle left his chapped trembling lips. Funny…

Tick tock, tick tock

Releasing a shaken breath, followed by a faint raspy gasp that almost came out as a whimper, the brows of the Irishman weaved out of distress at what the watch now read.

4:00 P.M – it was too late. It was time for his execution.

Without a second thought, Jack’s eyes shot up to the door off in the distance, all of the blood draining from his face as he made out loud stomping coming from out in the hall; storming towards the room. He gulped painfully, barely being able to swallow anything given just how dry and stale his throat was. He was going to die, Anti was going to kill him right here, right now. Tears were beginning to come back for the millionth time, his eyes stinging from how sore they had become. His time was up – he had had his chance to try and escape and he blew it. He and the others were all going to die today and there wasn’t a thing he could do. He truly was a dead man.

The poor man nearly jumped out of his skin and yelped when the door suddenly burst open violently with a bang; blinding white light flooding into the room for a brief moment as a figure stormed in. He knew who it was – he could tell given just how cold his blood had gone. Through the darkness, the green-haired man managed to make out the glitch pacing around the room, signature kitchen knife in his grasp, and he appeared to be angry – beyond furious, actually. Jack was already a broken man and couldn’t think clearly, but he honestly hadn’t the slightest idea what could’ve been causing the demon to be in such a horrible mood. The Irishman had seen him mad before and that had been truly terrifying, but this time…this time was so much different than the last.

Anti’s entire form was completely distorted, twitching and jerking in every which direction wildly. With each step he took, the ground at his feet would seem to pixelate and glitch spastically; the same went for any of the shadows surrounding his body. It was like parts of the void were breaking and struggling to stay intact like Anti was. The entity could not remain stable and in control of himself. Multiple projections of him came into view, all of which were incredibly demented and displaying manic behavior. They were all flickering by so fast Jack could barely make them all out, but a few caught his attention, in particular one dealing with the demon tugging his head back violently and slitting his already bleeding throat. He was cursing and growling repeatedly, his voice reaching a whole new level of unsettling intimidation. It was scratchy, deep, and completely laced with static. Anti had had his moments of sounding demonic and reminding Jack that he wasn’t human, but this did it in for the Irishman. Jack kept his eyes transfixed on the demon, not daring to say a word. Even if he wanted to, he didn’t think he could get anything out. He was paralyzed with fear, and at the moment, he was just waiting for his alter ego to come and finish him off once and for all.

“I DoN’t FUcKiNg BeLiEVe iT! THoSe FuCkERs cAn’T mAkE Up ThEiR DamN miNdS, CAn tHEy? CAN THEY?!”

The YouTuber cringed at hearing the unhinged creature. He watched as a patch of shadows morphed into pixels before materializing to reveal page after page of posts on the internet. He couldn’t fully make out what the posts were about – his vision was beginning to go in and out of focus due to how drained he was – but whatever it was, Anti did NOT like it.

“LOoK aT tHiS!” He scoffed, a smile flashing across his face briefly. “WhAt THe fUCk iS ThiS?!” A growl rumbled out from deep within him, a sinister laugh chasing after it. “Do THeY tHiNk THiS iS aLL sOMe SoRT oF JoKe? HoW fUCkiNg STuPiD aRe tHEy?! ArE tHeY brAiNDeAD?! WhAT, dO tHEy tHiNk tHEy cAn GeT riD Of ME, iS tHaT iT? THeY cAN’t GEt Rid Of mE! ThEy cAN nEVeR geT riD Of ME! I Am ETERNAL!” In a blurring motion, the unstable being drove his knife into the screen, causing it to momentarily glitch out and flicker; the darkness surrounding it also struggling to remain intact.

Jack jumped at the sudden action, a hitched breath getting pulled from his lips. Though Anti was standing still in front of the damaged screen that was now lined with cracks weaving out from where the blade was stuck, the Irishman could clearly tell he was tearing apart at the seams. His body was very much a blur given how intensely it was vibrating, jerking, and glitching out. That childish eerie giggle – the one that always instantly managed to drive fear into the Irishman – reverberated around the room, coming out more delighted than ever before.

“ThEy’Re MaKiNG a MOcKeRy Of ME! ThEY’rE tAkiNG mY WoRdS aNd MoRPhiNg ThEm iNTo OnE b-bi-i-iG J-JoKE!” His head seemed to lag for a moment, twitching to the right only to stutter and stop briefly before returning forward once again. He growled, clutching his head and tugging at his hair harshly. “ThAT dAmNEd NaME! ThAt FuCKiNg NaMe – I hAtE iT! I FUCKING HATE IT!” His body gave a fierce surge forward and he sent a fist flying into the screen, pixels cutting into his knuckles and damaging the screen further. It was barely even readable now; lines of static racing across it every few seconds.

Jack’s heart gave a painful pang in his chest. The community – he was talking about the community. Shifting his eyes to the broken screen, he squinted in an attempt to make out what was enraging the beast. From what he could tell, the posts were all in regards to a video Anti had uploaded, and it seemed the fandom had gone and taken bits and pieces of Anti’s rant and turned him into a joke. They were all mocking him. They weren’t afraid of him anymore, they weren’t taking him seriously, and at this realization, the green-haired man felt his stomach drop. If what they were doing was causing Anti to get this consumed by rage, there was no telling what the demon would do. He could snap at any given moment. The community had no idea who was truly in control here – who really held the power. Anti could easily wipe out all of the egos and Jack himself if he wanted to. With a snap of his fingers, they could all cease to exist.

Anti retracted his now bleeding hand from the screen, the torn skin materializing and piecing itself back together instantly. He began pacing the room again, strong vibrations from each step rippling through the room and causing the ground to tremble, only making Jack jump and curl in on himself. Even the cage he was locked in flickered for a brief moment.

“OnE mOMeNt tHEy WaNt mE, AnD tHe NeXT, thEy CLaiM tHeY dOn’T? WHicH iS iT?! Am I nOt gOoD ENoUgH fOr THeM?!” The violent entity screeched at the screen, arms flailing from left to right out of an ugly hybrid of annoyance and rage. And from where Jack was cowering in the corner, he could make out a hint of confusion as well. “ThEY mADe Me WhAt I aM! ThEy GaVe mE liFe, ThEy BrOuGhT mE iNTo tHiS GOdDamN FiLtHy WOrLd! ThEy LoVeD mE, tHeY WAnTeD mE tO Be A REaLitY, aND tHaT’s EXaCtLy WhAt tHEy gOt! I’m HeRe NoW, aNd THIS is HoW thEy TReAt mE?!”

His entire body flickered spastically, one second showing him yanking on his hair and screaming, another of him strangling himself horribly to the point his eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. The ground was quivering again, parts of the room cracking and materializing here and there. Jack’s eyes flew across the darkened hell, his breaths coming out as laboured gasps; heart racing with trepidation, afraid the void was going to somehow collapse in on itself. With Anti in control of Jack’s physical body, he also had full control over the void, and being how the entity was already an unstable mess, then the void would become the exact same way. If Anti couldn’t keep himself in control, there was no way of determining the fate of the void.

“I gAvE tHEm WhAt tHeY-eY w-wAnTeD!” The demon screamed, his head once again freezing up for a fleeting second. “THeY wAnTEd yOU gOnE aNd OuT Of tHe PiCtuRe,” Unexpectedly, his head gave an unnatural cringe-worthy jerk in Jack’s direction. His eyes were cloaked an inky black, staring furiously at his pathetic excuse of a host. The Irishman’s heart skipped a beat as he tensed up, holding his breath, “aNd I DiD eXActLy tHaT! I WaiTeD fOR mONthS oN enD, AloNe anD CoLd iN yoUr FuCkiNg EMptY sKuLL! I wAitEd, I gAvE thEm aLL a CHaNcE tO chAnGe tHeiR MinDS aND seT Me StRAigHt, aNd tHEy diD noTHinG!” The edges of his form rippled and jerked fiercely, a demented version of himself projecting forth; laughing manically, almost like he was finding the twisted humour in all of this. “I tHoUGhT thEY wAnTeD yoU loNg dEAd, aNd tURns oUt I mAy bE wrOnG? ThAT I’Ve beEn MAdE oUt tO bE a fOoL?!” One moment he was boring his eyes into Jack, the next his figure glitched out and he was glaring back at the screen. He flung his arms out at either side. “WHat Do YoU wAnT fRoM mE?!”

The green-haired man was almost tempted to open his mouth and question the demon about what was bothering him, but he froze up at what he saw and heard next.

Anti was standing still now – well, about as still as he could, anyway. His body was still very much glitching out and shaking all over, multiple versions of himself flashing before the Irishman’s eyes. He wasn’t lashing out anymore, but his inhuman eyes were fixed on the damaged screen, scanning through the posts that remained on display. He clenched his teeth, jaw locking up.

“You all made me like this – exactly how you envisioned me to be – aNd YoU’vE MaDe ME iNtO A jOkE!” He raised his left arm; hand balled up into a fist and ready to give the screen another blow…but it never came. He seemed to freeze up in position, his entire form lagging. His fist was trembling ever so slightly, and with a growl, he released it; dropping his hand at his side. He was glaring daggers at the endless cruel posts the community had made – all of which were poking fun at him. His shoulders were shaking horribly as he stared at the screen, not bating an eye.

“Your own creation…Your own son…” He hissed softly under his breath. His voice sounded a bit different now. It wasn’t nearly as loud, distorted, or monstrous, it was softer and almost sounded like he was hurt. He almost sounded human.

He shook his head in disbelief, a flicker of a smile flashing quickly across his face. “You’re all supposed to be my family, and yet…” A growl crawled out of his slashed throat, “and yet you treat me like I’m nothing…Do I mean so little to you all?” He read through each of the posts, his head giving a violent jerk to the right, trying hard to contain his growing hatred. “What am I to you? A joke? An ExPEriMeNt gOnE wROnG?!” He yelled, temporarily losing control and causing the ground to start shaking for a brief second.

Though he didn’t need to breathe, his breaths were coming out quick and a tad unsteady. He inhaled deeply, attempting to relax. If looks could kill, Anti’s would be the most deadly. The expression upon his face read pure unadulterated hatred…but it wasn’t just that. There was something else there, but Jack was having difficulty making out what it was. The demon trembled, hands balling up into fists at his sides.

“I gave all of you what you wanted…I was being a good boy…I thought you’d all be proud of me, I thought you’d all love me for what I did…but…” He was visibly quivering, biting down on his lip sharply. Why, Jack didn’t know. His vision was becoming blurry due to how lightheaded he currently was. He squinted, leaning forward a bit to try and make out Anti’s expression, “you don’t….And you never will, I see that now.”

Were…Were those tears coming to his eyes? Jack’s eyes widened at the sight. He couldn’t believe it. The glitching entity was actually in pain, and it was showing through both his words and the expression upon his face. The demon only ever wanted to be loved, Jack realized. He only ever wanted to be seen as an equal like all of the other egos, and no matter how many times he tried to get the community’s attention, they always shot him down. Yes, they would make so much fan art, fanfiction, theories, and posts involving him and it would give him a whole lot of power, but through the glitch’s eyes, whenever he was about to show his true self to them all, they saw him as an annoyance – a bother – and they wanted him gone as soon as he’d show up. It was almost like they liked him better as an idea versus an actual existing being. He was always having to act like someone he wasn’t – he was always having to pretend to be Jack and convince them all that the Irishman wasn’t gone. And they were happy. But God forbid if he himself showed his true face. As soon as he’d do that, everyone would freak out for a few moments before automatically demanding to have Jack return. They would never accept him for who he was, and it broke the creature’s black heart.

“You’re never going to view me as your son. You’ve all blinded yourselves from that truth, and instead you’ve chosen to see me as nothing more than a monster – something you want to put to the test over…and over…and over again.” He spat with distaste, his body shaking violently as a lone tear raced down his cheek. He shook his head slowly, glitching out momentarily to show a version of himself laughing like a lunatic. “You don’t care about any of us…You just want to see chaos. So who’s the REAL fucked up monster here?” He growled, digging his nails deep into his palms. “I HATE you.” He seethed venomously, the space around him rippling and zig-zagging fiercely.

Jack watched him through the bars of the glacial cell, taking in just how emotionally hurt the apparition truly was. He felt a bit empathetic towards the creature, almost wanting to comfort him somehow, even after everything he had done to him. But all of this was the least of the Irishman’s concerns. Licking his dry chapped lips, he forced himself to finally speak and make himself known.

“W-What did you do?” His voice – it was far worse than it had been before. It was so gravelly and rough; it wasn’t a surprise when he coughed harshly into his hand only to see spots of blood in his palm.

Visibly tensing up, the unhinged abomination turned his head to direct his attention onto his prisoner; the heartache and suffering immediately dissipating from his onyx eyes. He was staring directly at Jack like he had just realized that he had been in the room all this time. With trembling lips and feeling tears starting to come to his eyes out of worry, the Irishman continued.

“W-What did you do to Henrik?” His voice was so brutally scratched up; his question came out as a faint whisper, dread hanging off of each individual word.

At hearing this, a grin stretched across the demon’s face and he unexpectedly threw his head back with a gross crack emitting from his neck; an insidious spine-chilling laugh bubbling out him. It made the YouTuber flinch and hug himself tightly. He wasn’t expecting the creature to go from being so furious, to pained, and then to sudden cruel delight so quickly. It’s like a switch went off in the being – one minute getting taken over by hatred and sorrow, the next slipping right into his usual unsettlingly happy self. And that’s what worried Jack more than anything. Anti cocked his head, eyeing the Irishman with a cheeky smile.

“THAT’S what’s bothering you so much? You’re more concerned for that feeble-minded impersonator who has the audacity to call himself a doctor than you are for your own self?” His head twitched furiously, his form glitching out as another demonic laugh raced out of his vocal cords. “Have you completely forgotten what time it is, Jackaboy?” He instantly went for his knife, which was still embedded into the cracked static-laced screen, and grasped it; yanking it out with a glitch of his body. “In fact, I should be cutting you open right now.” And without another thought, he was storming towards the cage; knife getting strangled in his grasp and an eerie jack o’ lantern-like grin plastered on his sickly pale face.

Breathing hitching out of panic, the cowering Irishman curled up into a ball, pressing his back into the brick wall behind him. Tears were threatening to tip over the edge and cascade down his face as he stared at the horrifying entity charging towards him. He shook his head vigorously.

“N-No. No, no, no, no, please. P-Please!” He whimpered, lips trembling as he struggled to both speak and hold back his tears. “P-Please, no! Anti…A-Anti, don’t! Please!”

The man yelped and jumped with a start when the glitch materialized into the cell with him, immediately surging forth, grabbing the Irishman by the hair, and pulling him to his feet. He slammed him violently into the wall, blinding white pain throbbing through the back of Jack’s head and triggering him to cough up a small mouthful of blood. He spluttered as Anti wrapped his dead-cold fingers around his neck, hauling him off of the ground and keeping him pinned to the wall; his grip tight enough to start making the green-haired man see stars. Jack choked, raising his shaky cut-up hands to his throat in a poor attempt to try and get the demon to release his hold on him.

“A-An…A-An-ti…” He croaked, his eyes rolling back in his head for a moment as he struggled to breathe.

Anti ignored him, a large toothy smile reaching ear to ear as he watched the man squirm. He chuckled low in his throat as the hand holding the knife shot up, first pointing it at the YouTuber’s face threateningly before lowering it downward, hovering right over Jack’s chest.

“I should be killing you right now. I’ve waited long enough for this – I even told you I’d butcher you once it reached 4 o’clock,” He let out a sadistic giggle, “and I never break my promises, Jackie.” He focused his eyes onto him, the smile faltering as his voice dropped an octave. “Never.”

Jack was a horrible trembling mess, a few loose tears running astray, no longer being able to hold in his fear. He hacked and dry heaved, a few spots of blood spewing from his mouth as he weakly clawed at Anti’s hand.

“P…P-Ple..P-Please…A-An-ti…” He tried to shake his head. “Y-You…d-don’t…have to…d-do th-this.”

The demon only laughed at his words, finding amusement in them. He raised his brows at the notion.

“Oh really? I don’t, do I? Oh Jackaboy, how wrong you are.” He clenched his fingers, tightening his grip around the man’s throat. The green-haired man let out a choked gasp, the edges of his vision flashing red. “I have to do this. Don’t you see? Don’t you see what your ‘loving community’ has done? DoN’t YoU?!” He screeched, the shadows surrounding them both seeming to vibrate and become pixelated for a fleeting moment. “They made me like this. For so long, I tried to get them to love me – I tried SO hard to get their attention and make them proud – but do you think they noticed? Do you THINK they acknowledged me the way I had hoped they would?” His head spastically twitched from left to right as he cackled evilly. “They threw me aside like garbage, seeing me as a one-time thing! They don’t care! They’ve never cared! Not about you, not about those other useless fuckers, and not even about me – their own creation, ThEiR OwN SoN!” He snarled, slowly pressing the tip of the blade into Jack’s chest. The YouTuber sucked in a pained breath, trying to push himself away from the knife.

Jack whimpered and choked, tears cascading over his cheeks as he closed his eyes, fear finally consuming him fully. This was it. There was no way of reasoning with Anti now. He had to accept it – this was how he was going to die. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut; bracing himself for the stabbing pain that would burst through his chest…but strangely, it never came. He waited and waited, but there wasn’t anything. Hesitantly, the Irishman reopened his eyes to the sound of the entity chuckling, retracting his knife and lowering his prisoner to the ground. The demon’s dark eyes were transfixed on him, not blinking.

“But I can’t…I won’t. Not now. I know I said I’d kill you right now, but I’m going to put it off awhile longer.” The terrible, awful grin he’d had on his face a few minutes ago returned much more devious than before. “Those twisted fuckers clearly want a show – they want chaos – and if that’s what they want, I can easily make it happen. They want a monster,” His eyes flashed a piercing neon green. “then that’s what they’ll get. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I’m done trying to get them to love me.”

Jack tried to pry his hand off of his throat, eyes shining with desperation. “A-Anti, please, you d-don’t –.”

“It’S ToO LaTE!” The glitchy demon shouted, his body glitching out to show him clawing at his bleeding eyes. “They had their chance! Time and time again, I gave them a chance to redeem themselves, and they FuCkEd Up! I’M dOnE wiTh iT aLL! FoRgiVeNesS anD LoVE aRe nO lOnGEr oN tHe taBLe!” What started off as a high-pitched giggle ringing throughout the darkness got dragged out into a deep demonic laugh that sent chills up the Irishman’s spine. “I will expose them for the villains they really are, you’ll see. You’ll all see! You’ll all perish,” He smirked, “and they’ll only have themselves to blame.” With that, he finally released Jack, allowing the man to collapse to his knees and cough violently, spots of blood flying onto the ground.

Anti leered down at him, seething through his teeth. “They think they have a hold on me, that they’re the ones who pull the strings. They think I’m their puppet, that they can control me! Well no more! I told them all that there are no strings on me.” He slowly lifted a hand, his eyes shifting to it. He stared at his fingers, flexing them and feeling the psychic link he had to Jack’s physical body. He watched the tendons in his wrist move, a shaken breath leaving him. “It’s time to visit the good doctor once again.”

Jack struggled to sit up straight, but his ears perked up at hearing him mention the doctor. He jerked his head up in time to see Anti glitch out of the cage, heading directly for the exit.

“W-Wait…W-Wait, no! Please! A-Anti!” He scrambled to his feet, racing for the end of the cage. “Anti! Don’t! P-Please don’t! D-Don’t do this!” He cried out.

But the demon didn’t listen; he left the room and immediately stormed down the hall towards the doctor’s quarters.

“ANTI!”

* * * * *

Barging into the operating room, Anti startled the poor doctor horribly. Henrik, like Jack, was now chained in the room. Granted, only one of his ankles was shackled, but he was unable to leave the operating room; he was bound there like a helpless dog. Before the demon had come storming in, Schneeple had been sitting at a desk with his head down, crying out of fear for his life as well as the others. He hadn’t the slightest idea where Jack was or what Anti had done to him. For all he knew, the man was dead. He sprang out of his chair and stumbled backward, nearly tripping over his chain at the unannounced appearance of the glitching creature. As a reflex, he raised his arms up to cover his face, bracing himself for any act of violence that would come his way.

“P-Please. Please, don’t! I-I didn’t do anyzhing, I svear!”

“Shut up!” The demon snapped. “Where are those x-rays you took of me?” He demanded as he began to search the room, shoving things out of his way.

The German lowered his arms just enough to take a glance at the entity. “V-Vhat?”

“The x-rays, you idiot! The ones you took of my chest – where are they?!” And right as he said this, he caught sight of the x-ray illuminator off in the far corner.

The sheets were still up on display. Without a word, Anti headed over to the illuminator, bringing it to life with a jolt of his own energy. His eyes scanned over the images, looking for something in specific. Henrik dropped his arms, casting his attention over at the demon. He blinked with confusion.

“I-I don’t understand. V-Vhy do you care about zhose?” He inquired.

Anti ignored him, yanking one of the sheets off of the illuminator and materializing out of existence before very suddenly showing up right in front of the doctor. Henrik yelped and jumped back, once more lifting his hands out of defense. Anti shoved the x-ray into his hands and the quivering doctor, after taking a breather, took a long look at the image. Upon seeing the brows of the man weave together out of question, the glitching entity told him what he expected him to do. Almost immediately, the German’s eyes widened in horror and all of the blood drained from his face. He didn’t at all hesitate to move away from the creature, throwing the x-ray at him as he shook his head madly.

“N-No…No, no, no, NO! You cannot be serious. You cannot make me do zhat – I von’t!” He exclaimed, a few shaky breaths leaving him.

“Oh but you will. You WILL do it.” Anti ordered, taking one slow step after another towards the doctor. “You’re a doctor after all, aren’t you? Who better to do the procedure than you yourself?” He chuckled darkly, his head twitching to the left fiercely.

Schneeple shook his head again. “N-No…N-No, you d-don’t understand. Zee precautions I’d have to take – .” He stopped to try and even out his breathing. It wasn’t working out like he’d hoped. “I-I’ve never – I’ve never done such an operation on someone before, let alone somezhing inhuman.” He kept backing up, eyes never leaving the monster that was following him. “Y-Your anatomy, I-I don’t know how different it is. I-If you go zhrough vith z-zhis, I can’t – I can’t guarantee it’ll vork.” He bumped into something, taking a quick glance behind him to see he had run into a countertop. He turned back to the demon to realize he was trapped. He gulped and shrunk down, eyes blown wide. “Z-Zhere’s no telling v-vhat vould happen. Y-You could die!”

Anti only chuckled in amusement at the doctor’s stuttering words. He cocked his head to the right, leering down at the horrified man.

“And that’s when you need to remind yourself, Doctor.” His eyes flicked an abyssal black, his voice dropping an octave. “I’m not human. I can’t die. Look at me.” He pointed to his deeply slit throat. “Don’t you think that would’ve killed me already if I was human?” He lowered his hand, eyes returning back to the sickening green they were. “Think of it this way, Doctor, think of it as a revolutionary discovery. You’ll be operating on an inhuman creature with abnormal anatomy – something that has never been seen before. You’ll be the first ever doctor in existence to make such a discovery.” He grinned, trying to win the doctor over into going through with what he wanted. “You WILL perform the operation on me. You WILL do as I say.” He hissed. “And if you don’t,” A wicked cruel smirk played at his lips, “maybe I’ll go after your precious wife and kids. I’ll slit their throats open just like I did with my own.” He hummed with thought. “I think I’ll start with the kids first.”

“NO!” Henrik pleaded, tears coming to his eyes out of fear for his family. They may have left him and had little to no respect for him remaining, but that didn’t mean he himself didn’t care about them anymore. He loved them with all of his heart, and if anything were to happen to them…

He cringed, staring up at the glitching monster with horror, looking like a kicked puppy. “Please! Please, don’t hurt zhem!”

A sinister growl came out of the demon’s slashed throat as his head twitched violently. “If you care for what’s left of your pathetic family, then you WILL perform the operation. Refuse and I WILL disembowel your whore of a wife and those stupid brats before you even have the chance to change your damn mind.” He promised.

Fearing for his family and believing every word that slithered out of the abomination’s static-laced mouth, Schneeple reluctantly nodded his head, a few lone tears escaping his eyes. He sniffled.

“Al-Alright..Al-Alright, I’ll do it! I’ll do it. P-Please, just…” He sobbed, his shoulders shaking as he tried to hold himself back from crying. “Please just d-don’t hurt my f-family…P-Please. I-I’ll do v-vhat you say, I svear.” He looked up at him, vision blurred from the fear clouding his eyes.

At hearing this, an insidious grin flashed across the demon’s face before he whirled around and stormed over to the operating table. “Good. Now let’s get this over with.”

Henrik stood up straight, wiping away the tears from his eyes. He blinked in surprise. “V-Vait, vait! You – You vant to do it now?!” He asked in alarm.

Anti was already pulled off his shirt, chucking it off somewhere as he took a glimpse at the trembling doctor. He looked a tad bit agitated at the stupid question.

“Yes, I want to do it now! Why would I want to put this off for some other time? Now get over here, you fucking coward!” He snapped harshly, his body glitching out for a moment.

Gathering what little courage he had, Henrik nodded slowly before rushing to get his surgical smock, cap, and mask. He hurriedly slipped on everything, nearly tripping over his feet in the process. He walked over to where Anti was now laying down on his stomach on the operating table, putting on his glasses and snapping on a pair of vinyl gloves. He was about to start hooking him up to his monitors when he distinctly remembered how the creature didn’t have a heartbeat, let alone have a need to breathe to survive. Henrik forgot about that instantly and went to grab the anesthesia mask, ready to knock the demon out, when Anti suddenly lashed out and gripped his arm, stopping him. The abomination jerked his head, taking a look at the doctor.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Henrik blinked, swallowing hard before replying. “Y-You need anesthesia.”

The monster shook his head. “No I don’t.”

“But – But zee pain – .”

“I can handle it.” Anti insisted. “Besides, I don’t trust you. One wrong move, Doctor, and your family is as good as dead.” He let the doctor go before resting his head again. “Now get on with it.”

Looking worried beyond ever, Schneeple stared down at the demon uncertainly. “I-I don’t know about zhis.”

Anti’s demonic eyes locked onto the nervous doctor. “CuT mE oPEn, DaMn IT!” He seethed through his teeth, his body glitching out spastically; a twisted psychotic laugh ringing out of his vocal cords.

Gasping at the sudden outburst, the doctor nodded rapidly and pulled his stainless steel table over so it was right at his side; all of the necessary instruments already laid out, ready to use. Before continuing, Schneeple went over to the nearby counter and rummaged around until he came across a bottle – diethyl ether. He made out the amused distorted chuckle coming from his patient behind him as he grabbed the bottle, opened it, pulled down his mask, and took a good swig of the drug.

“Pathetic. The surgery hasn’t even commenced and the ‘good doctah’ is resorting to intoxication already.” He giggled with delight, as though it were some absurd joke.

Pulling the bottle away from his lips, the doctor staggered over to the operated table, setting the bottle down on the nearby table. He blinked, feeling the drug slowly but surely beginning to kick in. He readjusted his mask over his face, grabbing the overhead light and getting it into the right position.

“F-For vhat I’m about to do,” His breathing was coming out heavy and uneven. He scoffed nervously, “drugs are zee only zhing zhat’ll keep me sane.”

Without another word, Henrik proceeded with the operation. He stared down at the creature’s back, feeling along it to first indicate where he’d make the incision. His heart jolted when he felt faint movement under his fingertips, like something was squirming – throbbing – right beneath the surface of the entity’s skin. Swallowing hard, the good doctor reached for his scalpel. He knew that with an operation such as this, an electrocautery pen would normally be used to limit the blood flow, but he had no time to find that damned instrument. Besides, Anti wasn’t human – who knew how his biology functioned? Gently touching the entity’s back, before making the incision, Henrik eyed the demon’s head.

“Please…t-try to remain in control of yourself.” He begged. “One wrong slip and who knows vhat’ll happen.”

Anti only gave a soft growl in reply, taking a deep breath to try and stabilize his glitching form. Carefully, the doctor pressed the blade into the flesh of the demon, and slowly dragged it all along the length of his back, from the base of his spine up to where the cervical spine was located. A hiss was heard coming from the entity, but he surprisingly managed to stay still. Small lines of blood trailed out of the long cut, weaving down over the monster’s pale body and onto the table. If this had been any ordinary human being he was operating on, Schneeple would’ve most certainly been worrying right now. But seeing as Anti wasn’t human, he carried on with the procedure. Setting the scalpel aside and exchanging it for two sets of self-restraining retractors, the doctor proceeded to pull open the incision; slowly peeling back the skin and muscle of the demon’s back. Almost immediately, Anti tensed up all over, a growl rumbling out of him as he gripped the edges of the table tightly. He couldn’t hide it, he felt the pain, and it was excruciating, far worse than when he had slit his throat open. And although he was in great pain, he did not stop the doctor – he did not dare ask for anesthesia. He was going to go through with the agony, he WANTED to. Those heartless traitors he once thought were his family had created him, they had given him life, and they made him the way he was. They had been in control for so long, they could shape him any which way they wanted…but after this…no more.

Never again.

As Henrik pulled open the back of the demon, much blood began to gush out; washing over the pale flesh and flooding the table, some even managed to drip down onto the tiled floor at the doctor’s feet. He cursed repeatedly under his breath, a shaky breath leaving him at the amount of blood leaving the entity. It only seemed a lot worse when he noticed what looked like some sort of black slime-like substance leaking out along with the crimson. He gagged, turning his head away for a brief moment to collect himself. Anti had been right – he was going to see the abnormal insides of an inhuman creature, and he honestly didn’t know if he was going to be able to handle it. A soft chuckle came from the entity, knowing fully well how the doctor was reacting. Taking a small break, Henrik stopped and tugged down his mask to take a large gulp of the ether, needing the drug to kick in a bit faster. Slamming down the bottle, he adjusted his mask and returned to the operation, blinking a few times over since his vision was blurring in and out of focus thanks to the drug.

Using the retractors, he peeled back the flabs of flesh and muscle until the creature’s spine was exposed to him. The insides of the abomination were certainly nothing the doctor had seen before – everything was tinted green and black, lines of black weaving out in every which direction; pulsing with evil. There were small black spots all over the muscles, giving them the sickly appearance of being horrifically infected. His breathing beginning to pick up out of just how disturbed he was getting, the doctor grabbed for his Cobb elevator and surgical sponge and dug in deep, carefully pushing any muscle away from the entity’s bones to allow himself a better visualization. He nearly screamed when the muscular walls seemed to throb, only to then come upon what looked like wires and circuits deep down and lining the creature’s spine. Anti suddenly released a scream at feeling his muscles get pulled and stretched, his entire body glitching out spastically for a moment; the overhead light flickering as a result. The doctor jumped back in alarm, cursing in German as he stared in horror at the insides of the monster. Tears were beginning to come to the man’s eyes, both red and black substances coating his hands and staining his smock. The poor doctor was visibly trembling now, shaking his head.

“I-I can’t…I-I can’t do zhis…” A tear ran down his face. “Z-Zhis…Z-Zhis is so wrong – operating on a v-very much c-conscious inhuman…c-creature. I-I can’t.”

Anti suddenly whipped his head around, glaring daggers at the doctor. “YoU WiLL! NeEd I rEmiNd yOu oF yOUr dArLiNg family?” He spat harshly.

The reminder of his family’s lives on the line made Henrik’s poor heart constrict painfully, causing him to nearly keel over, gripping his chest tightly. Another tear fell from one of his eyes, his hands shaking as he nodded and stepped forth to continue with the surgery. He didn’t want to do any of this, he knew it was all so wrong and disturbing beyond words, but if it meant keeping his family alive and safe, he had to do it. He would do anything the demon would ask of him.

“I-I’m so sorry...p-please forgive me.” He muttered under his breath, hoping like hell his wife and kids wouldn’t ever find out about what he was currently doing. If they ever found out, he would truly lose them forever.

With the manifestation’s abnormal muscles pushed to the side to reveal the spine, Henrik let out an unsteady breath, eyes widening at what he was looking down at. All along the creature’s spine was what seemed like a giant throbbing root-like organ; coiled up securely around the entire length of the spine. It was an inky black, thin lines of moss green weaved out all along it; glowing brightly with each pulse. It was like the thing had a life of its own – like it was breathing – leeching onto Anti’s spine. There were both thick and thin black veins protruding from the organ, branching out in ever which direction; linking up to the creature’s organs, nerves, veins, and any of the wires and circuits that were intact. Inky ooze smothered the entirety of the organ, and when the doctor went to prod at it with a finger, he could’ve sworn he felt something slither underneath the tissue. His eyes scanned up and down the thing with equal parts horror and fascination.

“V-Vhat…V-Vhat is zhis?” He questioned, fear very much evident in his voice. He was greatly disturbed at what he was seeing. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, but whatever it was, Anti wanted it removed NOW.

“Tear it out.” The demon snarled, tensing up and bracing himself for the oncoming pain. “Go oN! RiP it OuT! RiP IT oUt NoW!”

Quickly downing a few gulps of ether and feeling woozy all of sudden, Dr. Schneeplestein steadied himself out against the table; bile rising in his throat as he watched the root-like organ throb, something squirming beneath the surface. Feeling beads of sweat coming to his forehead, the doctor reached over to the table with a trembling hand and grabbed a few nerve hooks; positioning them inside and very carefully maneuvering the entity’s nerves out of the way. Another hiss came from the glitchy manifestation, his grip tightening further on the bloody table he lay upon. As soon as Henrik was sure there weren’t any nerves in the way, he reached for a pair of forceps and his scalpel. His eyes drifted back to the demon’s head, his heart rate increasing to the point all he could hear was his blood rushing through his ears. He let out an unsteady breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in for the last few minutes.

“A-Are you sure about zhis?” He returned his gaze to the throbbing organ, noticing just how complex it was and how it was strategically wired up to anything and everything in the creature’s body. “Zee structure, it’s…i-it’s very complex...If I accidentally sever somezhing or…or you move…”

“JuSt dO iT! GeT it OuT of Me!” It almost sounded like there was trepidation in his voice, like he was afraid of what would happen. And yet, he still did not stop the doctor’s actions. The part of him that made him the community’s creation was lodged deep into his back – it’s how they managed to pull the strings on him. It was the source of how he was the way he was. And here he was, going through drastic measures to have it removed. The community had done this to him; they had driven him over the edge for the last time. And the sooner the strings were cut – the sooner this retched thing was taken out of him – the better.

Not daring to argue with the demon, Henrik proceeded to start cutting into the organ that was coiled around the creature’s spine. Using his scalpel, he carefully began to sever away at each individual vein that sprouted from the organ that was latched onto the rest of Anti’s inner anatomy. Blood and black sludge spewed out, flying into the doctor’s face; causing him to gasp and nearly choke on his own saliva. He sliced away at the veins, plucking at them like the strings on a harp; having them snap one by one. And with each cut, the demon released countless growls and whimpers of agony; his deathly pale fingers clinging to the table for dear life. He was struggling so hard to keep his form from glitching out; there was no way of ignoring the pain no matter how hard he tried. He was drowning in it.

Once all of the cords had been severed, it was time to take out the root of evil – the leech. Using his forceps, the doctor took hold of one end of the organ and slowly began to pull it back, using his scalpel to carefully detach the thing from the vertebra. Almost immediately, Anti arched forward and suddenly let out a bloodcurdling scream, one of which sounded incredibly inhuman. It was distorted and had a bit of a roar to it, and yet agony was evident in it. Normally, anyone would think a scream from Anti would sound enraged or frustrated, but not this one. This one genuinely made him sound like he was in excruciating pain.

As the doctor continued to tug and pull on the parasite latched onto the demon’s spine, scream after horrific scream left the entity’s lips; his grip so tight on the table that he was actually causing enough pressure to bend the edges. Henrik almost felt sorry for the creature – he couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of pain Anti was experiencing at that moment. He was a tad bit tempted to stop and pump him full of anesthesia just to put an end to the screams and agony, but he knew if he tried – if he made one move – it would be game over for his family, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk.

“I-I’m so sorry…” Tears flooded the doctor’s eyes, a horrendous abomination of disturbance, horror, nausea, regret, and guilt swimming in his gut. He felt sick, genuinely beginning to give the appearance of a corpse. His face was as white as a sheet, and he looked like he was going to faint at any second. “I-I’m so so sorry…”

 Anti could barely even hear the man’s words over his pained screams. He had his face pressed down hard into the operating table, eyes squeezed tightly shut and teeth clenched together, desperately attempting to hold in his shrieks. But the poor thing, he couldn’t hide the agony he was experiencing. Anti had always been a creature to withstand any sort of pain. Hell, he’d almost find some sort of sickening amusement out of it. He could cut himself open, get shot at, and even dismember a limb if he really wanted to. And none of it would bother him – he would laugh with a twisted sense of humour. Sure, he’d feel the pain, but it was more ticklish to him than it was agonizing. If he were human, it would most certainly be the exact opposite.

But fuck, what he was going through at that very moment was the most excruciating, most horrifying thing he had ever gone through in his entire existence.

 This leech was an actual physical part of his body, it was his very core and he was having it cut out of his body. All connections to the community were going to get stripped away, completely gone forever. This thing – it was NEVER going to regrow. He was never going to be a puppet again, a mockery to those callous deceivers he had once believed to be his family.

They weren’t his family…they never had been. The community had only ever seen him as their creation, never their son, and it took him this long to finally realize that.

Family didn’t do this. Family didn’t drive their loved one into having their body mutilated. Family didn’t stand by and not give a fuck about their own son.

If they had truly loved him, none of this would be happening. 

If they had truly loved him, they wouldn’t have hurt him so much to the point of breaking him apart.

Pain wasn’t just strictly radiating throughout his back now. His heart was constricting tightly in his chest, a cancerous growth of shame and hurt swelling up deep inside. He may have not required the need to breathe, and yet, he felt like he was suffocating – like there wasn’t any air in the room whatsoever. His nails dug into the steel table, his limbs trembling from the struggle of holding back his pain. Loud whimpers of a wounded animal rose out of his slashed throat as he felt his eyes beginning to water.

They had done this to him. He knew that this is exactly what they would’ve wanted. After all, he had failed them. He hadn’t given them what they wanted, he hadn’t pleased them. He was becoming a nuisance, a bore, a thorn in their sides. He wasn’t their son, he was a monster who deserved to be punished. He deserved this pain and suffering.

He winced and suddenly jolted, snapping his back forward and letting out an ear-piercing scream at feeling the root getting slowly ripped from his spine. The tendons were stretching in a way they shouldn’t have been able to, tearing apart and coming undone in black, bloody ribbons. A few lone tears finally escaped his eyes, running down his cheeks and onto the table as he screamed.

“I’M – I’M S-SOrRy!”

He cried out in anguish, clawing at the edges of the table as his mind tortured him with visions of the community.

All he could think about was how much of a failure he was, how he was a mistake. Was that what he was – a mistake? Had he never been planned? Is that why they hated him so much? Is that why they were making him do this? He wasn’t the “perfect, beautiful creation” they had wanted him to be, he was just an abomination, an experiment gone wrong and thrown aside. What had he done wrong? WHAT HAD HE DONE WRONG?! 

A few more tendons got stripped away from his spine, black sludge spewing out onto the doctor who was mutilating the glitch’s back. He arched as another pained scream was ripped from his lungs, his entire body glitching and jerking out spastically. A few versions of himself flickered by in seconds flat, none of which were happy, giggly, or enraged. Every single one was of him crying and hugging himself tightly, looking like a terrified child who was desperately longing for comfort from their mommy and daddy.  

“P-PLeAsE! I-I’M SoRRy!” He wailed, choking on his sobs as he endured the blinding-hot torture. His head twitched violently from side to side as he struggled to remain somewhat stable. Tear after tear left his cold soulless eyes, weaving lines of distress on his pale face. His being shook all over, raking his nails along the underside of the table. “MaKE It – It SToP!”

Poor Schneeple – he couldn’t handle hearing the glitching entity’s screams of gut-wrenching agony. He felt like he was butchering a weak, defenseless animal. This was taking a toll on him in the most horrendous way possible. It wasn’t just seeing Anti’s abnormal inner anatomy that was deeply disturbing him. It wasn’t the fact that he was currently removing some disgusting, leech-like parasite from the glitch’s spine that was sending him over the edge.

No, it was the fact that he was operating on a very much conscious patient, and though that patient was inhuman and could withstand pain, it was evident that the agony the creature was going through was genuine and not an act. Those screams, those tears, those pleas to put an end to the agony – none of it was fake. And it was absolutely killing the doctor.

What would his wife think if she knew what he was doing right then and there? Not only was he helping a devious being into getting what he wanted, he was performing surgery on a conscious individual who was writhing in unbearable pain. Oh God, if his wife knew about this…

Henrik felt a few tears run astray down his face as he momentarily stopped what he was doing to reach for his bottle of ether, his hand unsteady and covered in blood and inky residue. He yanked on his mask and gulped down the drug, inhaling and exhaling sharply as he downed more than half of the bottle. He didn’t give a fuck anymore; he honestly could care less how he was making a desperate attempt to fully intoxicate himself. He couldn’t bear with this horror; it was scarring him deeper than anything. As the last few drops of ether slid down his throat, he threw the empty bottle somewhere over his shoulder; a few ragged breaths expelling from his lips. His eyes were scanning over the butchered mess that was his patient lying in front of him. He raised a trembling hand to his mouth, not seeming to care how blood and sludge were now getting smeared over his face.

“S-Shite.” He stuttered under his breath, his stomach churning and nausea circling around in his head; tempting him to hurl right then and there. But he couldn’t stop now. He wanted to – God knows how he wanted to drop everything and run – but he couldn’t. Even if he did, where would he go? He was chained to the floor; there was absolutely no way of him getting free from that shackle. And if he didn’t continue with the procedure, his family would surely be next on the slab.

His vision was swimming now and he was having a bit of difficulty focusing. Clearly the drug was kicking in. His nerves felt like they were on fire, and though he was swaying slightly and feeling weak-kneed, his body was still trembling from the terror. Henrik lazily readjusted his mask before leaning against the table, poorly trying to keep himself upright. He grasped his forceps and scalpel and returned to the nightmare-inducing task, not missing the wheezing whimpers coming from the man upon the table.

Anti lurched and spastically thrashed around for a brief moment, belting out a shrill scream laced with nothing but agony. He tried to hide his face, not wanting the doctor to see how truly wounded he was, inside and out. He was a trembling, crying mess, begging for the pain to end already.

“P-PLeASe! M-MaKE It S-StOp!” He pleaded, not to Schneeple but to the community – his supposed “family”. He whimpered, sobbing and hissing through his teeth as more tendons were peeled away from his spine. His shoulders shook from the force of his crying.

“P-PLEaSe! I-I’LL bE A gOoD BOy! I-I’LL bE A gOoD BOy! I S-SwEAr – FuUuUuCk!” He arched, letting out another scream as he gripped onto the table as though his life depended on it.

Henrik breathed heavily and shakily, constantly cursing under his breath as he worked. Blood and inky sludge was gushing all over his hands, running down in gross sticky strings and globs as he tugged and pulled at the pulsing organ. He struggled to see clearly, what with the tears blurring his vision as well as the effects of the drug fogging up his brain.

“I-I’m s-sorry…” He whispered. “I-I’m d-doing…z-zee best I can.” He was saying this more to himself than he was to the crying, unstable manifestation. He shook his head sluggishly, head heavy from the ether.

“G-Good God, p-please…p-please forgive me.” He sobbed softly, a lone tear trailing down one of his cheeks. “I-I’m n-not…n-not a bad person, I s-svear. I…I j-just…” His lips were trembling under his mask, trying hard to keep himself from bawling his eyes out right then and there. “I-I just v-vant my family t-to be safe.”

Butchering away at the organ and extracting it from the spine, Anti’s form was struggling to stay stable. Every few seconds, he glitched out violently; different versions of himself flashing at a blurring speed. At one point, Henrik’s grip on the scalpel nearly slipped and he had almost thought he had cut a major artery or organ. Luckily he hadn’t. The thing was squirming as he pulled, a gross nauseating squishing sound emitting from the organ as a spray of black ooze splattered onto the doctor’s smock. The leech was hanging on only by a few strong tendons, keeping it firmly attached to the vertebra. The light above him flickered spastically like a strobe light, a few of the other lights in the room bursting unexpectedly. The screens on his nearby monitors were acting out, turning on and off suddenly; getting corrupted by static and pixels. Henrik’s breathing hitched when the demon let out a horrifying scream of pain. He knew all of the supernatural occurrences were because of him – he knew given the last two times he had operated on him, the exact same things had happened. Feeling tears running down his cheeks and his vision beginning to fade in and out, Schneeple severed the organ from the spine; finally extracting it from the demon’s body and tossing it onto a nearby slab. He watched as the green luminescent veins in the organ gradually died down, as did the throbbing of the organ until it was completely lifeless; lying dead and unmoving on the table. 

Panting shakily and feeling beads of perspiration on his forehead running down his temples, the good doctor stumbled backward, struggling to catch his breath. He was covered with blood and sticky black sludge, as was the operating table Anti lay upon. With his hands trembling, Henrik dropped his tools and tore his mask off, a few tears falling from his face at the horror he had just endured. He leaned against a nearby table and sobbed.

“Z-Zhere…Z-Zhere…I-I did…I did v-vhat you vanted…” He cried, stared at his gore-soaked hands. “I d-did it.”

For some time, the demon didn’t respond. He let out a few uneven breaths, but he didn’t reply to the doctor. Instantaneously, the glitching creature’s back closed up in seconds flat; his brutalized flesh and muscle materializing and piecing itself back together without the use of any medical treatment. His eyes flung open, blacker than black as he felt a surge of energy course throughout his body. A low growl came from deep within the bowels of his form, and in a blurring motion, he was off the table and looming over the broken doctor. And before Henrik could react fast enough, everything went black.

* * * * *

Slowly but surely coming to, Henrik’s eyes fluttered open to a blinding white light directly over him. He squinted and winced, moving to lift a hand to shield his eyes, only to realize he could barely move at all. Brows furrowing out of confusion and head throbbing from whatever had knocked him out, the doctor struggled to focus on anything around him.

“V…Vhat is…Vhat is going on?” He asked, slurring his words.

He managed to make out a petite bone-chilling giggle come from somewhere off to his left.

“Ah, zee good doctah is vaking up. Good, good.” He heard the entity speak in a distorted voice, mocking the doctor’s German accent.

Blinking groggily and shaking his head gently in an attempt to focus properly, Henrik turned his head to see Anti standing over him, who was now donning his own surgical attire, complete with cap and mask as well. Only becoming further confused, Schneeple made a move to try and sit up, but found that he wasn’t able to. He tugged at his wrists and ankles and with a pang of dread, the compromising situation he was in finally dawned over him. Glancing downward as his breathing increased, he saw how he was bound to the blood-soaked operating table that Anti had been laying on not too long ago. He jerked and yanked as hard as he could, having a sliver of hope that maybe the bonds would come lose, but they didn’t budge, not one bit. He heard Anti chuckle sadistically, which immediately caused him to jerk his head in his direction and look up at the creature with eyes wide with horror.

“V-Vhat is zee meaning of zhis?!” He demanded, though his voice was trembling with fear. “You vouldn’t hurt me! You said you’d leave us alone if I did vhat you asked!”

“Ah, ah, ah, Doctor. Not quite.” Anti tsked, clicking his tongue as his head twitched spastically. “You see, I said I wouldn’t hurt your family if you did what I said. And I keep my promises, Doctor. No harm will come to your precious wife and kids, I assure you.” He said even though the doctor could clearly hear the smirk in his voice, like he was trying not to burst out laughing.

Henrik shook his head. “N-No…No, no, please. Please don’t kill me!”

The glitch threw back his head and released the most fear-inducing maniacal laugh the German had ever heard, causing Henrik to tense up all over and flinch back.

“Kill you? Oh no, no, no, Doctor, why would I want to kill you? After everything you’ve done for me, you do not deserve death; you’ve proven to be rather useful.” The demon admitted. “That is why I feel the need to give you something in return. You helped me, now it only seems fitting I help you.”

Henrik quivered violently, his heart pummelling away at his ribcage; nerve-racking fear surging through his veins. His pupils were dilated, the horror glistening brightly in his eyes.

“V-Vhat?...H-Help me?” He gulped, hesitant to ask. “H-How? V-Vith vhat?”

A dark chuckle could be heard from deep in the slashed throat of the glitchy entity as he reached over to grab something. Anti looked down upon him, his eyes glowing a luminous green.

“Now now, Doctor, don’t play games with me. You and I both know what the problem is here.” He suddenly held an orbitoclast – the ice pick-like instrument used for lobotomies – right over the man’s right eye socket. He cocked his head, sadistic glee gleaming in the demon’s eyes. “You need a bit of fixing.”

Henrik could’ve sworn his heart had stopped beating for a couple of seconds at the realization of what was going to be done to him. This all seemed far too familiar to him all of a sudden. And with a blink of his eyes, a flashback to October 29th struck him – when he had been operating on Jack – or Anti, as he recently discovered – he had had multiple hallucinations, one of which had been so incredibly vivid and horrific that he had had nightmares for two weeks afterwards. Returning to reality, the poor doctor stared up at the sinister demon pretending to play doctor; fear taking a hold of him. He shook his head violently, now beginning to writhe upon the gore-stained table he was bound to.

“No. No, no, no, NO! NO! PLEASE! Please don’t!” He cried out, tears blurring his vision before falling free. “Please, don’t do zhis! I vant to see my family, zhat’s all I vant! Please!” He tugged away the bonds restraining him, not at all caring how they were digging into his skin. “Please, let me go!”

Blinding white pain erupted in the back of his head as Anti grabbed hold of his hair and slammed his head down on the table, momentarily putting an end to his pleas and struggles. Henrik’s vision was a distorted blurry mess as he tried to look up at the monster, watching as the pick was moved into position over his eye; Anti raising a small hammer over top of it.

“P…P-Plea…ssse..”

Though it couldn’t be seen due to his mask in the way, a terrifying toothy grin stretched across the expanse of the glitchy entity’s face.

“Now,” With a blink of his eyes, they flickered to their natural abyssal black; boring into the German’s soul, “let’s get inside that brain of yours’.”

Letting lose a laugh that would only belong to a deranged psychopath, Anti brought down the hammer. And all throughout the operating room, all throughout the hall leading out off into the deepest darkest parts of the void, a weakened Irishman heard the shrillest ear-piercing, bloodcurdling scream he had ever heard. With anguish tugging viciously at his heart, he too cried out into the darkness.

“ANTI!”

 Part 8 - Ze Good Doctah

Part 10 - Always Watching

Author's Note: About this chapter being crucial - it was already somewhat stated in the chapter how Anti was feeling towards the community, how through his eyes, we don't love him and we view him as anything else but a son. It's also stated in the chapter that he wanted to get the part of him that makes him our creation removed from his body so he's no longer under our control.

What I wanted to do with this chapter was show just how unhinged and damaged Anti truly is because of us. This chapter is his breaking point, this is what happened after "Kill Jack" and how he's no longer going to try and get us to love him, he's going to use fear. But first, he needed to get rid of the strings that connected him to us. In "Kill Jack", he said there were no strings on him, and in the story, I feel he said that more as something to scare us and make us change our ways. But given how we didn't change, if anything we made matters worse, he realized this and saw that he had to now go to drastic measures. We've gotten him to hate us so much that he got his body mutilated just so he couldn't be connected to us anymore. We drove our son into doing something that horrific and it's incredibly disturbing. That's what my goal was with this chapter - really show how far we've pushed Anti.

 @gridhorizon @fear-is-nameless @jse-fandom-protection-squad @septic-obsessed @darkcurious @butterlover328 @steffid101 @sketchy-scribs-n-doods @n-o-ra-xi @haveaverynicetime @golden-eyed-guardians @nightmarewolf133 @maybekatie @jack-a-yote @lil-gib @aeoix @lemonofweirdness @randomcrystals

[thefinny-d]

Sound The Alarm

Tagging: Finn & Rachel Location: Finn & Rachel’s Apartment Notes: When things go south between Rachel, Taylor and Jeremy, Finn is left feeling stuck in the middle of it all.

Finn sighed as he headed out of the hospital, done with work for the day. He had an insanely early shift and he knew that he just wanted to get home and make the most of the rest of the day before he headed to bed. When he glanced at his phone as he walked to his car, his brows immediately furrowed in confusion when he saw the texts he had recieved from both Taylor and Jeremy. Hate to put you in the middle man but tell Rachel we're done. I don't know what's going on with her but clearly her "fame" has gone to her head. What the hell was going on? Finn knew that the three of them had a meeting with their label that morning but it was obvious that something had gone very, very wrong. He quickly texted them back asking for more details before he got into his car and headed home, hoping that his fiance would be there when he arrived. Finn made his way into the apartment building, looking at his phone when he saw that Taylor had texted him back. Ask her. Look, me and Jeremy aren't mad at you but we're done with Rachel, okay? We'll fill you in when we see you for PUBG night on Friday. A sigh escaped Finn's lips and he rolled his eyes, knowing that whatever fight that had all gotten into that he really, really didn't want to deal with it. Especially when he was sure that it was over something stupid like one of them making a dumb joke. When he got back to the apartment, Finn headed inside slowly. "Rach?" he called out. "I'm home. I got some texts from Taylor and Jeremy... is everything okay?" While he really did hope it was just something stupid, he had a bad feeling that it was more than that. He had a bad feeling that this was a situation that wasn't just going to disappear overnight.

Rachel was more than confused. And the confusion just made way to frustration. She had no idea what the meeting was about before she had gone into it, and it wasn't her fault that the label wanted to take a completely different direction. She hadn't even said anything before Taylor and Jeremy were immediately jumping down her throat and they were causing havoc at the meeting. She tried to talk it out, she did, but her words kept getting twisted, and well, she wasn't going to say no to someone trying to get her involved in bigger projects with bigger artists, concentrating on her -- not the three of them. It was never about the three of them -- it started off as just her making her way through this and she had gone through many different band members. She could just as easily do it without Taylor and Jeremy if she wanted to. The meeting was horrible -- and she was just pissed off when they walked out of the meeting. "So, are you in or are you out?" Her manager asked, Rachel sighing as they pushed papers in front of her. "Yeah. Fuck them." She said, her reading over the paper in front of her. When she got home, she wasn't sure how long she had been pacing around the room, but she was pissed. And when Finn walked in the apartment, she moved more towards him, her just staring at him for a moment. "No. Everything isn't okay actually because they're assholes." She said a little too loudly, her anger still clearly built up. "They're jerks and they fucked themselves over, so it's their own fault that they did what they did. Fuck everything to do with them. I'm doing this shit on my own if they're going to be dicks about change happening. It's not my fault." She ranted, her groaning and rubbing her hand through her hair. "I'm so fucking pissed off. I'm happy for myself because I just agreed to a lot of amazing shit. But they had to fucking ruin it all."

Finn could tell immediately as he looked into Rachel's eyes that the fight with Taylor and Jeremy clearly wasn't something stupid - it was serious. God, he really hated being in the middle but he knew there was nothing he could do to avoid it in this case. As she began to rant, he could tell that she was getting worked up once more and he knew that whatever had happened was terrible. "I - okay, okay, baby, you need to slow down," he said softly as he moved his hands to rest gently on her shoulders, him rubbing them gently as he stepped closer to her. "First of all, I love you and you look really beautiful right now," he started, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to her lips before he pulled away. He ran his hands from her shoulders down along her arms before he took her hands in his, a small smile on his face as he looked into her eyes. "So... the change thats happening at the label - it's a good thing? I mean, a good thing for you is always awesome to me. But - what do Taylor and Jeremy have to do with this? What happened?" The last thing that Finn wanted to happen was for Rachel to fight with the two guys who were both of their closest friends. They had been there for Rachel for so much and he knew he would always be grateful for them, especially during the times when they had been struggling with all the Josh stuff. "What stuff did you agree to? And... and is this stuff that they're just going to have to go along with?" He didn't want Rachel to get even more angry talking about the situation but he needed to figure out what was going on so he could fix it. God, he needed to fix this because he knew being in the middle of this fight wasn't going to be fun whatsoever.

Rachel looked into his eyes as he complimented her and kept his hands on her shoulders, trying to calm her down. "I get you're trying to calm me down but I don't really think it's going to work right now." She said, her looking up at him. She was glad that he was trying to at least make sense of stuff -- she knew that things were bad and she was just rambling about stupid shit and he probably wanted to know exactly what was going on. "Well, I didn't know what the fuck the meeting was about so we just sat down and the label wants to go a different route and like... it's not about them. This whole thing started off because of me. I hired Taylor and Jeremy and I picked them because I thought they'd be a good fit for me and they were. So the label wants to go bigger and it's not like it's Taylor Jeremy and Rachel as the artist on the albums. It's me. Not them. So they wanted to go bigger and change it up so people don't get bored and we need to go more mainstream and pop and they just jumped down my throat like it was my idea. It wasn't mine." She said, looking up at him when she realized she was getting worked up again. "Sorry. They were giving me more of the pay because they're concentrating on me. Not them. They walked out and said I was a fame hungry bitch, which you have to be in this business to succeed and they said they were done so I signed my own contract." She said, looking away for a moment. "I'm not doing this shit with them if they don't want to. If they can't take the fact that they can't be right beside be forever, then it's not my fault. In my label's eyes they're replaceable so it doesn't matter anymore. It's done. Their contracts are void so they'll get whatever they're due and that's it. They're done and I'm going the way I want to go. Without them. And if they're going to be dicks about it, then I'm not fucking around with stupid shit."

Finn raised his eyebrows as Rachel spoke. Hearing her say that Taylor and Jeremy were replacable and that everything started because of her was something that made him completely speechless. While Rachel was insanely talented all on her own, her bond with Taylor and Jeremy and the musical chemistry that they all had together was something that made everyone notice them. It was what had gotten all of them to where they were. "Mainstream and pop?" he asked softly. While he knew she had always had some songs that were a bit more on the pop side, he also knew that she tried to do something original and stay true to herself. It worried him to think of her being forced to do mainstream music and having her label take too much control. "I understand that it wasn't your idea. I know that... that music labels have a lot of say in the situation but I - baby, I can understand why they're upset. I mean... they love you and they love working with you. It probably hurt their feelings to think that you would do this whole thing without them." Finn looked down for a moment and sighed and he knew that things in their lives were going to get crazy whether they wanted them to or not. "If this is the way you want to go then... then of course I support you. I'm proud of you for doing so well," he said softly. "It just sucks that this is causing the three of you to fight." Finn looked down at his hand that was holding Rachel's and sighed as he ran his thumb over her engagement ring before he brought his gaze back up to meet hers and forced a small smile. "Well, you signed your own contract today. So that's pretty cool," he said softly. "What's the next step? What do - what do they want you to do?" Finn knew this meant she was going to be recording and afterwards traveling and while he obviously was proud of her and in total support of her career, thinking of her going on a tour without Taylor and Jeremy concerned him more than he wanted to admit.

Rachel shook her head for a moment, looking tot he side. "This wasn't supposed to be me doing it without them. They were still going to be in the band but they were going to just not be in bigger things like interviews and they would be directly in music videos, it would be me. They just were taking a little backseat. That was all. They were getting less but we'd be doing so much with brand deals and with bigger artists and they'd get paid ten times more." She said, groaning as she felt herself getting annoyed again. "They're just being assholes. It's stupid that they're making some huge deal out of this when I'd still have them involved in everything. And yeah. I signed my own contract and I'm happy you're proud of me and everything but the good day I'm supposed to be having is fucking ruined because they're assholes." She said, looking down at their hands for a moment. "I don't know, they just want me to get more into my work. I've already been writing, they're just going to read over stuff and see what we can do. Put a single out really quickly and then put another one out and get an album recorded. I have another meeting in a couple of days. It's just going to be a lot of me working with other people. A lot of features. But we'll see what comes. It's just... this is really it for me, you know?" She said, looking up at him and sighing softly. "This is me making a real name for myself and yeah maybe... maybe it's more mainstream than I want to be but it'll get my name out there and then I can do whatever the fuck I want after I have that big fan base. It's just creating more opportunities. The label wants it to be big. Like... way bigger than before. Which I'm all for, obviously. I'll do whatever they want me to." She said, biting down on her bottom lip for a moment. "I know I already got my dream -- performing anywhere is enough for me. But this is really it. I know we have plenty of money to get a house and get out of this apartment but once we get this shit out and we have time we can just... we can have our own home and we'll be married and it'll just be everything we wanted. Then maybe things can calm down for a while."

Finn sighed softly. "I don't know, Rach. I can't tell you why they felt the way they did about everything. If you want me to, I can try and talk to them when I see them on Friday" he told her. As she spoke, saying that this was really it for her, Finn couldn't help but smile as he looked down at her. She had come so far from the days of singing in crappy little bars and he knew that this really was an opportunity that was going to change everything. He just hoped that change would be for the better. "Our own home and being married - I definitely like the sound of that," he said softly. Finn pulled away from Rachel slightly before he stepped further into the apartment, still processing everything that had happened all while he had been at work. "I know that... that today came with a lot of good and a lot of bad because of what happened with them but as long as you feel good about what you're doing with your career then I'm right here to support you," he said as he slipped off his shoes and undid one of the buttons on his shirt, relieved to just be home after work. Finn turned to face his girlfriend once more, him sitting on the arm of the couch and offering her a small smile. "The only thing that I want to make sure of is that your music stays yours, you know what I mean? I - I don't want this label to think that they can step in and change you. What makes you so special is your sound and your lyrics. Especially the ones about me." A teasing smile formed on his face, hoping that he was helping her feel better about everything somehow. A part of him knew that she was broken up about losing Taylor and Jeremy even if she wouldn't admit it and he knew he would make it his mission to repair it all. He would fix it, he knew he would. "Does this whole thing mean that I'm going to be waking up in the middle of the night to you writing again?" he asked her playfully. The small smile on his face fell, however, the second he thought about the whole tour thing again and he couldn't help but feel worried imagining his girlfriend on tour alone. In places with alcohol alone. God, he knew she had struggled with a relapse and he just hoped desperately that she could stay strong. "Are you gonna have to go on another tour again?" he asked her. "I know our relationship is like... built on reunion sex at this point but I was kind of really liking the whole normal every day couple stuff," he said with a soft laugh. "It's crazy how just thinking about you being away already makes me miss you."

Rachel simply shrugged at his words. "You can talk to them, but I really don't think they're going to be interested in figuring shit out. Like, I've seen them upset and mad before, but I've never really seen them like that. But it's their problem too. They're not even giving anything a chance. They just disregarded everything the whole entire team had to say." She knew that it was a huge change, but there was no way that she'd pass up an opportunity to get even bigger and to experience all of the new music and the new deals. "The music will stay mine. And if anything, it'll just be produced better. I know it'll sound a little different, but it's going to be so good. I know it is." She said as she looked over at him, a small smile rising on her lips. "And I promise, the songs will definitely still be about you," She teased gently. Rachel was sure that she'd be up at odd hours to be able to write, but she knew it was something that she actually enjoyed. The only thing she worried about was waking Finn, but she could remember nights where he was just laying there watching her write. Rachel moved to relax, her moving to sit down on the couch. Talking to Finn helped her relax, even if it was only her saying the same things as she was saying in her head. At least this way, she'd be able to vent to someone. As soon as Finn brought up a tour, she sighed. "Yeah, probably. And I'll probably have to go to different countries. At least places in Europe. I hate being away from you, but you know I love being on tour. If I end up going somewhere really cool, maybe you can see if you can get off a couple of days to come with me and explore for a little bit." She offered, shrugging gently. "It won't be for a couple of months, if I do. If anything, right now, I'm just going to be stuck in the studio recording all day. But I'll miss you, too. It's going to be so weird to be apart from you. I know we want to have the wedding and stuff, but I mean, at least we'll know soon exactly what I'm doing so we can plan a date and stuff, too. And then we'll have something to look forward to even if we have to be apart for a while."

Finn knew that he was going to try and fix things between Rachel, Taylor and Jeremy. Even if it didn't work he wanted to at least try. Whether they ended up still being a part of her music of not, he knew that she wanted them as friends no matter what she said or how annoyed she was with them at the moment. As Rachel moved to sit down on the couch, Finn moved to sit beside her and he was relieved that she was calming down as she spoke. Of course he understood why she was angry but he knew there was probably another side to the story - Taylor and Jeremy's side - and he wanted to hear that too. "Wow, other countries? That's - that's awesome, babe," he said softly. Finn was so, so proud of her but at the same time it scared him thinking about her being so far away. If she was in Europe and relapsed, he couldn't catch a quick flight or jump in his car and take care of her. God, this tour was going to drive him crazy, that much he knew for sure but he wasn't about to push his fears onto his girlfriend who was so excited about it all. "I'd love to visit you and spend some time with you on your tour. Maybe when you're there you can start thinking about places you'd wanna go on our honeymoon," he said with a small smile on his face. "Hey, don't worry about the wedding stuff, okay? We have plenty of time for all of that. What matters right now is focusing on our careers and getting where we need to be. I'm so proud of you, babe." Finn offered Rachel a smile before he leaned in to press a soft kiss to her lips. There really weren't any words to describe how much he loved her and while he was worried about the drinking and the drugs that were constantly around her career, he knew she was focused on staying sober. Plus, if she needed him, he also knew that he would be right there for her. "It's so crazy to think that you're famous," he said with a laugh. "I forget sometimes that I have to share you with the rest of the world." Finn moved to rest his hand gently on her knee before he squeezed it gently. "I know that things are going to get crazy busy for you with recording and I'm sure you'll have to do a ton of publicity stuff too but just - just remember that if you need to vent or talk about anything I'm right here for you always. I mean, I know you're not crazy like me when it comes to work but I know all of this can be overwhelming, especially without Taylor and Jeremy and I just want to make sure that you're taking care of yourself."

Rachel smiled gently, looking into his eyes as Finn moved to sit next to her. "Yeah. Other countries. I mean, it's obviously insane, but this will probably be it for a while. If things are still good, maybe I'll do something in a year. It's honestly been a while since my last tour but it feels like it was yesterday." Rachel knew that she always went a little crazy when she was on tour and she knew that there were so many temptations that she tried to avoid but it was impossible to. She had been high more times than she'd admit to Finn, but until she had come home, she did a good job of avoiding alcohol. She never went out with Taylor or Jeremy, and if she did, she was the designated driver so she just had a water or a soda. "I'll think about where I want to go. I'd obviously love to go somewhere tropical, but I could even do something like Rome or Mykonos or something. We'll see. We just need to sit down and plan it. We have the budget to do whatever we want, so we just will have to figure it out." She knew that her and Finn did just need to escape somewhere together. They were usually alone at home, but they needed to go away for a bit and just remember what it felt like to simply be together without any problems. As he spoke, Rachel just nodded gently and looked into his eyes. "I love you. I just... I'll talk to you, I promise. You know how I get when I get sucked into my work. I just... I push people out and I don't mean to. And I know you kind of learned not to take it personally, but if I get weird, just try and bring me back down to reality. It's just hard. You get the same way, you know? You just bury yourself in your work and don't look back. But that's probably why we work, you know?" Rachel smiled gently before she went to lean in to kiss him, looking at him as she pulled away. "I promise I'll try and keep in touch with you about everything but I just... I don't know. I don't want to deal with all of this shit all of the time and I'm going to be so far away from you and it's going to be hard. I know things have been better for us and I want to keep it that way. I just want to keep it that way. Or make it better. I just know it's going to be really stressful."

Finn knew that his and Rachel's honeymoon would be amazing. Between the two of them they made really good money and he was more than aware that they could go on the vacation of their dreams. As she spoke about how she got wrapped up into her work, he nodded understandingly. "Hey, you know I understand that for sure," he said softly before they shared a kiss. "Us being apart is always a little stressful but we'll be okay." Finn was definitely scared of the two of them being so far apart but he also knew that this was a part of her career and it was something they would just need to learn to deal with. Her music meant so much to her and to know that she had the opportunity to share that with the world? God, he was so proud of her. "The only thing I ask is that we just talk every day like we did last time you were away, you know? Because that - that really helped me," he said. "I just have a problem relaxing when I don't have you here to remind me." Finn laughed softly for a moment and shook his head before he looked back at his girlfriend. "For someone who's job it is to take care of people, I'm really shitty at taking care of myself, aren't I?" He knew that when he was left on his own that he got extremely wrapped up in his job. When Rachel was away he often spent more time than usual at the hospital and while he still went about his normal routine, he didn't really give his brain a chance to unwind. He figured that was exactly why he had such a bad anxiety attack while Rachel had been away on her last tour. "I can't wait to marry you," he breathed out as he looked at Rachel, a small smile on his face before he leaned in to kiss her. "You're my everything," he said softly as he pulled away. "We should celebrate you signing this new contract," he said, moving to get up from the couch. "Do you want me to make you something really nice for dinner? Or we - we can even go out somewhere if you want. Anything you want to do today, we can do. I know that everything didn't go the way you wanted it to with Taylor and Jeremy but we can still salvage the day so we can celebrate, right?" Finn didn't want to think about tours or him and Rachel being so busy with work that they barely spoke. All he wanted to do was focus on this moment with his girlfriend and he knew that everything would be okay.

Rachel loved being on tour because she loved the experiences and she loved doing what she always wanted to do. But unfortunately, she knew that being apart from Finn was also some of the worst times in her life. She hated being apart from him for too long and honestly, she could remember so many times she had almost flew home from the tour to see him for even just a day. "No, I mean, of course I'm going to call you. It helps me, too. I like calling you before I go to bed and stuff because it helps me relax and I know I need to keep you in line," She said teasingly, looking into his eyes. "But you do need help relaxing. You're not super shitty at taking care of yourself, you just put everyone else before you. And then things start getting bad." She said, smiling sadly. As Finn moved to get up from the couch, she looked over at him, a small smile rising on her lips. Celebrating definitely did sound like a good idea, plus, she really wanted to get her mind off of Taylor and Jeremy. Honestly, a part of her expected for them to come to the apartment and to apologize for acting insane, but she also knew that they really didn't have to apologize. If anything, she was the one who did something wrong and should have apologized. "We can stay in. I really don't want to go out. I don't think they'll say anything to anyone, but I don't want to go out in LA and have paparazzi be all over me. I don't know how people know, but when you sign contracts, people always find out." She said, running a hand through her hair. "We can cook something together. Nothing super fancy, I don't need you slaving over the stove all day. And then we can celebrate for real later. Because when you say celebrate, my mind doesn't go to a nice dinner, but I know you know that. But I am hungry and stressed out and those two things always make food a good option."

Finn knew that Rachel being away on tour again would be tough but he also knew that they could get through it. They could get through anything, that much he knew for sure. When she told him that they could stay in instead of going out, he nodded understandingly. "Yeah, we don't have to go anywhere. I forget that paparazzi are a thing we have to think about now. It's so weird," he said with a laugh. It was always strange when he was out with Rachel and noticed people taking photos of her but it was something that he knew they were just going to have to get used to since it came with the territory of fame. As she spoke, Finn couldn't help but smirk as their eyes met. "I promise that we can celebrate after we eat for as long as you want," he said teasingly. "Plus, I mean, if you're stressed out then that's really going to help out, I think." He couldn't help but laugh softly as he walked into the kitchen, opening up the fridge and trying to figure out what they could have. "We have stuff to make fajitas if you want something like that," he said before he turned his head to look back at her. There was something about just being home with her and things feeling so normal that made his heart swell with love and he knew it was one of the many reasons that he missed her so much when she went away. These simple moments were the ones that he craved, that ones that made him fall in love with her even more than he already was.

Rachel knew that the biggest reason she never was in steady relationships like this was because she thought that she would be horrible at it. And honestly, she wasn't that great, but she was at least trying. She could never imagine herself cooking dinner or cleaning up around the house but with Finn, everything just felt normal. It didn't feel weird to sit with popcorn or chips in front of the TV or make the bed in the morning or clean up after themselves. It just felt like it was meant to be and while marriage was a whole thing on its own, she knew it really wouldn't feel any different than what it did currently. Honestly, she was just looking forward to being with him all of the time and just having the wedding that they both wanted. "Good. Celebrating as long as I want sounds really, really good." She said softly, as she looked at him before starting to follow after him. She moved behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, hugging him tightly for a moment before pulling away. "That's fine, I don't really care what we eat." Rachel knew that it didn't matter -- she'd enjoy anything and she'd enjoy just being able to get to spend time with him. "I can help. I mean, I know I'm not the greatest cook, but I can follow directions. Whenever I make dinner for us, I literally find a recipe on my phone and I can't look away because I know I'll fuck up," Rachel laughed, her grabbing a couple of plates to put them onto the table for later so they could eat. As she was about to grab a couple of things from the pantry, she stopped when she heard a knock at the door. "Did you invite someone?" She asked as she looked over at Finn. "Can you get it? It's probably just some kid trying to sell pies or cookie dough or something for school and you know that I'm just going to say no and you're at least nice enough to say yes and buy the cheapest shit," She said, a soft laugh escaping her lips. "I mean, it could be my manager or something but they would have called me first so I don't think it's for me."

Finn smiled as Rachel wrapped her arms around his waist and when she pulled away, he turned around to face her. "Hey, I know you can help, Rach, I just like to cook for you. It's fun." As they both started grabbing things they would need to prepare their meal there was a knock at the door and he looked over at his girlfriend with confusion in his gaze. "Um, no, I didn't invite anyone over." He nodded when she asked if he could get the door and laughed softly at her words. "I can't say no if it's kids selling cookies, I feel bad," he told her. "The only other person that would just show up is Savannah but she's at work." When Finn opened the door and saw Taylor and Jeremy standing on the other side, his eyes immediately widened. "Guys, what are you doing here?" he said quickly, trying his best to block them from stepping into the apartment since he knew this conversation wouldn't go well. "I know you guys are pissed off, I can see it just by looking at you both but you need to go home and cool off and we can all sit down and talk about this another day." "No, we're talking about it now. I'm sorry, Finn, we're not pissed at you but we need to talk to your fiance. Move," Jeremy said before him and Taylor pushed past him. Finn sighed and shook his head, closing the door and walking back into the kitchen and over to Rachel. "I can't believe you signed that fucking contract," Taylor said. "Since when did you become a sellout, Rachel? They want you to feature on rappers songs and write shit that is nothing like your sound - nothing like our sound?" Finn moved to stand between the two of them and his girlfriend, hoping desperately that he could just calm the whole situation down. "Guys, look. I know you're all angry and upset right now but this really isn't the time, okay? I think that it would be best if all of you just - just cooled off before talking about any of this. It would just be better if - " "Finn, fuck off, this doesn't have anything to do with you," Taylor said, cutting him off. Finn looked at his friend in surprise and he could feel himself immediately getting uncomfortable. He hated fighting, he hated confrontation and he truly didn't know what to say to anyone to get them to calm down.

Rachel didn't want to deal with any random people at the door and Finn was honestly friendly to just about anyone. Unless it was his dad, he was so polite and respectful and he tried his best to get along with everyone. She figured he had to do it every single day at work with the hundreds of people he saw, so she knew why he was so good at it. Rachel was about to grab something off of the shelf when she heard Finn talking quietly at the door. Before she knew it, she heard footsteps walking further into the apartment, and she immediately felt her anger rise again when she saw Taylor and Jeremy. "A sellout? Fuck you. It's not my fault I'm making a smart move and you're too scared to sign the fucking paper." She said, moving out slightly from behind Finn, moving to the side. When Taylor cut Finn off, she rolled her eyes. "What crawled up your ass? Now you're being an asshole to your own friend, huh?" She said, putting down what was in her hands from the pantry. "Look, you don't-" She started, Jeremy speaking up. "You didn't even try and change their minds. It was always the three of us. And you're just letting them push us to the back like we're your backup dancers or some shit." Rachel knew that was a lie -- she tried to figure stuff out before Taylor and Jeremy had immediately freaked out and started to make a mess of the situation. "It was never about you!" She said loudly, looking at the two of them. "I had bandmates before you. It was Josh and I originally. Then it was me. And then Ifound you. Not the other way around. Just because you're getting less share of the band doesn't mean you'd be getting paid less. You'd be getting paid more. Do you know how much money you'd be making? Brands would fucking pay thousands for you to wear a pair of headphones in a music video. You were stupid to walk out of that meeting. We already were with big names when we sang with Ed. I don't know why you think this is going to be different. You're just being stupid." She saw Taylor about to speak up again, so she continued to speak. "So yeah, I signed the contract. And yeah, maybe I'm being a sellout but it's gonna feel so good when I'm doing all of the shit you could have been doing."

Finn didn't know how to feel about this whole situation. While he was proud of Rachel for finding success and choosing the path that was best for her, he also worried that maybe she did throw Taylor and Jeremy to the side along the way. They had been with her through so much and the fact that they felt useless to her made him upset for all of them. The second that Rachel said it had never been about them, his eyes widened as he looked between all three of them worriedly. "Guys, please stop fighting," he breathed out, knowing that his words were falling on deaf ears. "Wow, the truth comes out, then," Taylor said as he looked at Rachel, shaking his head before he exchanged a look with Jeremy. "So all along we were just on the Rachel train, huh? From the start it's been about you? It's not like the three of us wrote any songs together, right? It was all you. Your words, your voice and just our sound." Finn looked at Taylor and Jeremy sadly. He could tell that they were hurt and while he wanted to figure out a way to fix the whole situation, he really wasn't sure if it was going to be possible. "You know what the best part of being in this band was for me, Rachel?" Jeremy asked her. "It was getting to be with my best friends, getting to play music that we loved and getting to experience all this crazy shit together. But, you know what? If for you it was all about getting ahead then I hope you have a great fucking time when you're at the top and you're all alone." Taylor and Jeremy were both clearly seething and Finn bit down on his lip as he looked between all of them. "Why does this have to end your friendship? Why can't we all just - just sit down and figure something out?" he said softly. Taylor looked at him and offered him a small smile before he looked down and shook his head. "You're so selfish, Rachel," Jeremy said, laughing for a moment. "Who was there for you when you fucked up shit with Finn and Josh, huh? Me and Taylor. We've been there for you through fucking everything and you know it. How many times did I lie for you? How many times did I bring you home from a bar because you were a mess and I didn't want anything bad to happen to you? Then you go ahead and you sign this fucking contract because you're a money hungry bitch." "Don't call her that, Jeremy. Come on, man," Finn said as he looked at his two friends. "If this is the Rachel that you're gonna be then you're gonna lose everything, I hope you know that. You're gonna lose everyone who somehow still gives a fuck."  

Rachel knew that she was really being a bitch, but she had no interest in having this conversation right now. "Shut up, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that your names aren't on the fucking front cover of the album. It's mine. I'm not saying that it's not our sound. But you can't just put your trust in me for five seconds during a fucking meeting so we can talk about a contract, you just jump down my throat. They weren't fucking firing you guys, you should have just sat there and listened to what they had to say. But no, you have to make yourselves look like assholes." She spat, her looking at the both of them. "I'd rather be at the top alone than be with two people who apparently hate me and can't go along with some simple change." She knew that they were really her only friends other than Mia, but she had been without them before. They were just really the only healthy friends she had in a long time. As they continued to speak, she shook her head and looked off to the side before she heard Jeremy call her a bitch. "Get the fuck out." She said, pointing towards the door. "I'm not going to lose everything. And you know what? If this is the last album I ever get to produce, at least I'll fucking make a name for myself. And you know, you could have been there beside me if you would have given it a chance. I hope you enjoy your little time alone, because now you'll never escape me. I'll be everywhere you look. TV. The internet. And if I lose everyone, apparently they never gave a fuck to begin with," She spat, her pushing past Finn and past Taylor and Jeremy, hitting their arm with hers roughly as she walked towards the door. "What the fuck happened to you? These few months back from the tour really made you this much of a bitch?" "Did you not hear me before?" She said as she looked at them, opening the door and looking at them harshly. "Get out." She said again. "You should have never come here. If you ever want to talk to me again, don't bother. I won't answer and I sure as hell won't let you in this apartment again."

Finn could feel everything spinning out of control the more Taylor and Jeremy spoke and it scared him to think that they didn't want to be friends with Rachel anymore. The only other close friend she had other than them was Mia and while he liked Mia, she was a little crazy and he didn't like the idea of her not having Taylor and Jeremy as her support system the way she usually did. Especially while being away on a tour. When she pushed past all three of them, Finn looked at his girlfriend worriedly. "You think we'd want to talk to you again after this?" Jeremy said with a laugh as he looked over at her. "Now that I really know who you are, I can promise you that I'll never speak to you again. You know the funny thing about you, Rachel? You have this huge ego and think you're hot shit but the only reason anyone decent has ever stuck around in your life is because of him," Jeremy said, pointing and Finn and immediately making him feel even more uncomfortable. "So you can fuck yourself and when I see you on TV or wherever else you show up, I'll be happy knowing you're miserable inside." Jeremy glared at her before he stormed out of the apartment and Taylor hesitated for a moment before heading towards the door as well. "See you Friday for PUBG, Finn," he said awkwardly before he followed after Jeremy. Finn stood there silently for a moment, biting down on his lip as he looked down at the floor before he brought his gaze back up to his girlfriend. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to fix this and he hated that the three of them were fighting so badly. "Wow," he breathed out before he ran a hand through his hair. "I um - are you alright, baby?" he asked her softly. He knew he would try to fix this as he saw Taylor and Jeremy separate from Rachel but he could tell the three of them actually being in a room together would just end in disaster until they all managed to calm down.

Rachel rolled her eyes as Jeremy spoke, her looking off to the side as they started walking towards the door. She tried not to comment on his words, knowing that if she kept talking, they'd just have another argument or continue the same one, and she wasn't going to deal with it right now. She didn't want to even talk to them for at least a few days, and she hated that they even came here to talk knowing that it would just escalate immediately. "Fuck you, Jeremy. I don't see you running around with a group of friends following you, either. So stop acting like you're hot shit, too. You always think you're so amazing because you don't have baggage and shit but it doesn't make you perfect, so stop acting like it." She said, waiting for them both to head out of the door before she slammed it behind them, her locking it and staying facing it for a few moments before she turned towards Finn when she heard him speak. "Yeah, I'm fine." She said, ignoring the seriousness of his tone. "I'm not really hungry anymore." She said, grabbing something off of the counter and putting it back where she had gotten it from. Rachel wasn't interested in talking about anything, and she knew she was making it clear, but of course, Finn always thought it was necessary to talk about everything but he was usually good about having her wait to talk about it. She never used to talk about anything, and this was something that she definitely didn't want to talk about. "If you still want to cook, I don't care, I'll eat cereal for all I fucking care," She said, looking over at him as she leaned against the counter before looking off to the side, trying to block all of the thoughts out of her head.

Finn winced when Rachel slammed the door and when she said that she wasn't hungry anymore, he simply nodded. "That's okay, baby," he said softly. Finn started putting some things he had gotten out of the fridge away and when she told him that she would eat cereal for all she cared, he nodded. He could practically feel the rage radiating off of her and he knew that now was not the time for them to sit down and talk about this no matter how much he wanted to. "It's still early, we don't have to eat yet," he said as he looked over at her, a sad smile on his face. Finn walked over to Rachel and slipped his arms around her waist, his hands resting on her hips before he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. He knew that there was nothing he could say to fix this situation and while he most certainly was going to try, today just wasn't the day for that. "I know you don't want to talk," he said softly as he kept his hands on her hips, his fingers dipping beneath the hem of her shirt as he caressed her skin with his fingertips. "And I know if we try and do anything right now it'll be hard to just act like everything's okay." Finn bit down on his lip as he looked into her eyes, him stepping a bit closer to her and offering her a small smile. "But I can think of one thing that we can do that will distract you. And, I mean, I know you, Rachel Berry. I know how to get your mind off of things." Finn knew that sex wasn't the right answer to everything. He knew that it solved nothing. However, he figured there wasn't really anything they even could solve at this point. All they could do was make the most of the shitty situation that they were in right now and if that meant just focusing on each other then he figured it was the best way to go.

Rachel kept her gaze away from Finn as he spoke and moved closer to her, just nodding gently as he said that they didn't need to eat yet. The moment that his arms were around her waist, she felt herself relax slightly, only turning her head to look towards him as his fingers moved beneath her shirt. She really wasn't interested in talking at all, and she knew that there would be a time and a place to really talk about everything and figure it out. There were things wrong on both sides, but she was trying to just figure it out and move forward. Rachel bit down on her bottom lip as he continued to speak, knowing that his mind was exactly where hers was. She wanted him -- she always did -- and this was a good a way as ever to get rid of all of the stress and the anger she was feeling. "You do know how to get my mind off of things. You're pretty good at that." She murmured, her moving her hand to his cheek before she moved it to the hair at the nape of his neck, using her hand to guide him down to kiss her, her lips meeting his and kissing him slowly at first before she deepened the kiss, her pulling away for a moment to look at him. Rachel was a firm believer in sex solving everything. She could remember multiple times that she was fuming and just being able to be with Finn made everything ten times better. "I'm really glad you know me so well otherwise this wouldn't be nearly as good," She murmured softly, her hands moving down to his belt, undoing it before her fingers started to work on the button of his jeans.

Finn smiled when Rachel told him that he knew how to get her mind off of things. While he knew sex didn't fix anything, it was definitely a good distraction and he knew his girlfriend well enough to know that this was the only way to get her to cool off from her fight with Taylor and Jeremy. When she guided him down to kiss her, he smiled into the kiss before he responded eagerly, licking his lips when she pulled away. "I've known you since we were seventeen, baby. I better know by now," he said with a laugh. She quickly undid his belt before she started working on the button of his jeans and Finn smirked for a moment before he lifted her shirt over her head. He dipped his head down to press his lips back to hers as his hand slipped up along the smooth skin of her back, unclasping her bra quickly and tugging it off of her. "God, I love you, Rach," he breathed out between kisses. Already he could feel the angry tension that had been in the room beginning to be replaced by the sexual tension between them and he was relieved that he knew just how to get her mind off of everything. He quickly unbuttoned her pants and shoved them downwards, knowing that he just wanted his girlfriend naked as soon as possible at this point. Finn lifted Rachel up onto the counter so he didn't have to lean down so much before he began trailing kisses down along the curve of her neck, biting and sucking teasingly at her skin as he did so.

Rachel grinned slightly at Finn's words. "That's true. We've had a lot of time to perfect a lot of stuff," She said softly, looking up into his eyes. She knew that they had really been through so much and she knew that they weren't exactly finished going through things. Not even close. Tours were always hard for the both of them, but they made it through the last one without any major problems. They missed each other and Finn definitely had a few struggles and so did she, but she knew that they'd just have to work through it. She knew that having a ring or not having a ring didn't matter -- their bond was strong no matter what, but she knew that things were going to be better. As Finn lifted her onto the counter, a soft laugh escaped her lips, her smiling gently before she bit down onto her bottom lip when she felt his lips start to trail along her neck. "Mm. I've been waiting for this all day. Celebrating only sounds fun when sex is involved." She said, laughing gently before she moved to kiss him again, her arms wrapping around him before she pulled his shirt over his head, attempting to get closer to him. She wrapped one of her legs slightly around him, her trying to tug him closer. She kissed him again before pulling away, laughing softly. "You know, I think when I first started dating you, I thought that we'd have boring ass sex but I'm so glad I was wrong. Because it's really fucking hot," She laughed, her hand running along his arm as she looked at him. "I love you. And I love our totally not boring sex."

Finn smiled into the crook of Rachel's neck when she told him that she had been waiting for this all day. While he wasn't exactly happy about the fact that she had hurt Taylor and Jeremy, he was her fiance and he wanted to support her as best as he could. If that meant just standing by her side to support and celebrate with her, then that was what he was going to do. He loved her and if she felt leaving Taylor and Jeremy was the right choice then he wasn't going to fight her on that. "Isn't the whole point of celebrating the sex that comes along with it?" he asked her playfully before they kissed eagerly. They only separated briefly as she tugged his shirt up and over his head before they kissed once more and Finn moved his hands to her thighs as she guided him in closer to her. "I thought I was going to be terrible too, believe me," he said teasingly. "But, I mean, I learned how to have sex from you, you know. There's no way in hell in could be boring." Finn bit down on his lip as he looked into her eyes and he knew that he was so in love with her. The tension that was between them never failed to amaze him and he knew that he just wanted to make her feel good. "I love you too. And I love our not boring sex too. I don't think you'd ever let that happen." Finn laughed softly before he pressed his lips back to hers, kissing her eagerly before he brought his hands to the fabric of her underwear and quickly pulled it down her legs. He quickly moved his hand to her opening and smirked into their kiss as he felt her wetness on his touch. "You know what's really fucking hot?" he breathed out. "How wet you always get for me," he told her, his eyes dark with lust as he looked into hers. Finn rested his forehead against hers for a moment as he slipped two fingers into her, knowing that he enjoying teasing her and making her feel good in every way. "We're definitely not boring," he whispered, his eyes boring into hers as he fingered her, wanting to get her as worked up as he could.

Rachel let a soft laugh escape her lips as he spoke, knowing that she loved him more than she could honestly admit. She didn't want to leave him and she knew that she'd be totally overwhelmed with work for a little bit, but she knew that it was something that she couldn't exactly help. She had to get in the studio and get recording whatever she could, especially if they were trying to force out an album incredibly quickly. She didn't want to hide away in some dark studio, but it was also something that she loved to do. She loved singing and loved performing, and she couldn't complain if she was following her dream. "You did learn from me. I mean, we had a lot of practice when we were going out back in high school. I'm pretty sure that I was always trying to get in bed with you, especially because we weren't having sex for a while. But... believe me. I'm so glad we are the way we are now." She said, leaning forward to meet him for a kiss. "You're right though, I would never let us get boring. We're gonna be old as fuck and still be having hot ass sex," She smirked gently, looking at him before lifting her hips slightly so he could pull her underwear off. "Fuck," She breathed out softly as he spoke, her moving to keep one arm wrapped around him slightly while the other one rested on the counter to hold herself in place. "Mm." She moaned softly, biting down on her bottom lip. "You know I'm always gonna be this wet for you. I always want you, baby." She murmured, her hand that was still wrapped around him moving to the fabric of his boxers. "Are you gonna fuck me on this counter, too?" She murmured, looking into his eyes for a moment before she let her eyes shut, her leaning forward to kiss him.

Finn knew that in high school Rachel had definitely taught him a lot about sex. With her he had learned to feel confident in himself and he had memorized every inch of her body, more than determined to make her feel good. "I like the sound of that," he said with a laugh when she told him they were going to be old and still having hot sex. He was pretty sure with her it was impossible not to. Finn looked at Rachel with lust in his eyes when she moaned softly, knowing that watching the effects he had over her was the biggest turn on in the world for him. "I know you do, baby. Just like I always want you," he breathed out, biting down on his lip when she moved her hand to the fabric of his boxers. God, he wanted her. When she asked him if he was going to fuck her, he groaned softly before they shared a heated kiss. "Mm, I'm gonna fuck you so good, baby. I wanna make you cum," he breathed out between kisses. Finn gently pulled his fingers out of her before he shoved his boxers down his legs, knowing that he just wanted to be inside of her already. He pulled out of the kiss for a moment as he lined himself up at her opening, his tip teasing her gently before he pushed into her. "Fuck," he breathed out, knowing that the sensation of being inside of her was one that would never get old. Finn hooked his hands under her knees to tug her even closer to him as he started to thrust into her hard and fast before he crashed his lips back to hers. Being with Rachel like this was the best feeling in the world and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life making her feel good.

Rachel bit down on her bottom lip as he moved away from her slightly to push his boxers down his legs, her moving slightly on the counter in anticipation. She really did want him and she wanted more than anything to just get rid of all of the anger that was still built up inside of her from everything that had happened. She knew that she was in the wrong about a lot that was going on, but things had been blown way out of proportion and she knew that things weren't going to get fixed overnight. Things needed to get fixed, but she wasn't going to be the one to make the change. As soon as he moved her a bit closer to him, she let out a soft moan. Being with Finn the way she was always made her so incredibly happy. Their relationship was amazing and she was obsessed with the fact that they were able to do anything they wanted and it wasn't weird. They hadn't changed since they had been young and she loved that things were still so amazing and exciting. "Mm, you feel so fucking good." She breathed out before she moved her lips back to his, her hands moving to his cheeks as she went to kiss him again, moving her lips against his passionately. She was so happy that she was going to be able to be with him like this for the rest of their lives. All she wanted was him and she wanted more than anything to experience everything their relationship could offer.

Finn groaned softly as he thrust into Rachel, pleasure already coursing through his veins with each movement that he made. Everything between them always felt so good and he knew that while they had their ups and downs that they would always have this intense connection that they could only have with one another. It had been that way ever since they were in high school and he knew it would be that way for the rest of their lives. "Fuck, I love you, baby," he breathed out when she told him that he felt good. The two of them kissed eagerly as he continued to thrust into her and Finn moved one hand to rest on her thigh while the other slipped between them. He immediately started rubbing her clit to give her even more pleasure and he knew that he would never get tired of touching her and making her feel good. "Fuck," he groaned softly between kisses, his hand gripping onto her thigh a bit more before he increased the speed of his thrusts into her. "Are you gonna cum for me, Rach?" he breathed out, pulling out of their kiss for a moment and looking into her eyes. A smile pulled up at the corner of his lips before he started trailing kisses along her neck once more. He could feel the intensity growing between them with each passing moment and he increased the speed of his hand on her clit, wanting to drive her even closer to the edge.

Rachel bit down on her bottom lip for a moment before she felt Finn's lips against hers. She wanted more than anything to forget about everything that had happened throughout the day and concentrate on Finn and even if it seemed impossible previously, it was somehow working. She just wanted to worry about Finn because it was honestly the only person that she had right now who wasn't pissed at her. Other than Mia, but that was someone completely out of the picture of all of this drama. "I love you too." She breathed out, her moaning softly as he moved his hand between them. It was really honestly crazy how far they had come from just messing around in her bedroom at random hours of the day to actually being like this. As Finn pulled away from their kiss, she moaned softly, her letting her head fall back slightly as he started pressing kisses down her neck. "Fuck, I'm gonna cum." She breathed out. Rachel's hand that wasn't holding herself against the counter moved to run along his back slightly, her fingers trailing along his skin. After a few moments, she could feel herself building towards her orgasm and as she came, she let out a moan of Finn's name. She figured the only reason why she'd forget about anything else is because all she could do was concentrate on Finn, and that was her favorite thing to do on a daily basis anyway. "Fuck," She breathed as she started to calm down slightly, her letting out a deep breath.

Finn knew that he was driving Rachel crazy in the best way and he was happy to be able to help distract her a little bit. While he didn't completely agree with her decisions regarding Taylor and Jeremy, it didn't change the fact that he wanted to make his fiance happy. "Fuck," he breathed out when Rachel told him that she was going to cum, knowing that he wasn't going to last much longer either. When he felt her muscles clench around him as she went over the edge, Finn immediately came into her hard, a groan escaping his lips as pleasure surged through his body. Only when they both reached the end of their highs did he stop his thrusts and he bit down on his lip as he looked into her eyes. A small smirk pulled up at the corner of his lips as their gazes met and he moved one hand to rest on her thigh while the other moved up to brush a strand of her hair behind her ear. "I really fucking love you," he told her before he pressed his lips to hers, kissing her slowly and passionately before he pulled away. Finn leaned his forehead against hers and a soft laugh escaped his lips as he looked into her eyes. "I love celebrating with you, baby," he whispered. His fingers brushed gently against the smooth skin of her thigh and he knew that if he could, he would stay with her like this forever. Rachel was his everything and it made him so happy to know that he could make her feel so good. It made him so happy to know that everything between them was finally okay.