#does the possibility of someone walking into the walker some day and be like holy smokes that's the car my dad was driving haunt you?

[gregdotorg]

"If ghosts existed, would they haunt the actual substance of a place or object? Or would the object’s topology, geometry, or shape be enough to hold the ghost? Unpainted Sculpture began as an investigation into the nature of a haunting. I studied many automobiles that were involved in fatal collisions. Eventually I chose a car that I felt held the presence of its dead driver."

Charles Ray made Unpainted Sculpture in 1997, a monochrome light grey (primer) replica in fiberglass of a wrecked Pontiac Grand Am. It's in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but it's his thing about ghosts that reminded me of it.

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

Top 5 GOOD Things About Season Two

Oh, season two... how you hurt me so. 

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about this game-- S2 of TWDG is my least favorite of all five games. I could probably give you a top TEN things that I hate about season two, but... while I don���t love it, I do believe that there is good to be found in it. That’s what I want to discuss today. 

I did have some help brainstorming ideas for this list, so big thanks to @pi-creates, @kaylee-wolf, @taurusicorn2400, and @daisystarss for bouncing ideas around with me! :D

5. The Lee dream sequence.

This scene is super well done. The only reason that it’s so low on the list is because I tend to forget about it due to all the bullshit surrounding it. It usually isn’t until Arvo shoots Clementine that I remember Lee’s gonna show up and make me cry. Then he leaves all too quickly, and it’s back to the Kenny/Jane bullshit train. 

But pushing aside the shitshow, I love this scene. Of course, emotions are all over the place seeing Lee again given the state he was in at the end of s1. Plus there’s something about seeing baby Clementine again after being an older version of her that gets me. 

Their talk is interesting, too, calling back to your choices about Lilly and Carley/Doug, plus discussing Duck being bit. The part that’s always stood out to me, and I’m sure everyone else, is when Clementine asks Lee why people do the things they do.

And Lee’s response is one that doesn’t just apply to s2, it applies to several characters over the course of the series: “Clem, people don't always make sense... 'Cause bad things happen to everyone. And it's hard to keep bein' yourself after they do.”

As the conversation goes on, he also says, “Well, it's not like math, Clem. Sometimes there just isn't a right answer... but part of growing up is doing what's best for the people you care about...even if sometimes...that means hurting someone else.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“...It’s not that easy.” 

Ugh, it’s so good. It ends with Lee asking what he can say to make Clementine feel better, and it really just hurts because y’know it’s not real, y’know that Clementine’s dreaming all of this and Lee’s going to go away.

Overall a powerful scene that gets me every time. 

4. Clementine walking through the snowstorm

Okay look.... I adore this scene. Everything about it. 

Like okay, we have the stupid bullshit that is Kenny and Jane being literal children in the truck, then we nearly crash. Kenny leaves to look for gas, Jane gets Clementine to drive which dumb idea Jane and she crashes. 

That part sucks, but then the actual greatness begins. Jane runs off with AJ, and Clementine’s left alone with nothing but her gun as she begins her walk through the terrible blizzard. 

It has such a sense of loneliness to it-- hearing Clementine shiver and walk around calling out for help before going silent, the song ‘It’s Out There’ that plays while the wind whips and whistles, and then seeing all the frozen walkers standing around like statues really gives you a sense that something terrible is going to happen. It’s this weird calm before the storm kind of thing that also happens to take place during a harsh snow fall? if that makes sense? 

It’s a beautiful scene but it’s also sad, y’know? Sad because once again, Clementine is all alone. She’s been through so much bullshit, and this bullshit train isn’t even at it’s final stop. She’s alone, she’s still injured from when Arvo shot her, she’s gonna freeze to death if she doesn’t keep moving, she has no idea where the fuck Kenny, Jane, and AJ are, and just... it’s a lot. 

But damn it, it’s so good. 

3. AJ is born

AJ being born is one of the best things to happen in S2, and not just because AJ is a super interesting character himself in S2 or even what his being born does for the story. 

If AJ wasn’t born here, then we wouldn’t have had him in TFS where he finally got to become this compelling character and player in the overall story. Don’t get me wrong, his birth does bring an cool aspect to S2 when you willfully ignore how the hell he’s managed to stay alive and healthy the entire time.

Not only that, but we get to see the start of Clementine’s relationship with him. It doesn’t matter what choices you pick, Clementine shows time and time again that she cares about AJ. She nearly breaks down when she believes he died in the snow before the Kenny and Jane fight, then cries again when she discovers he’s alive. 

I enjoy the big sister aspect they went with for Clementine [it definitely beats ANF’s mom nonsense] and I like the growth it shows with her relationship to Rebecca as well... even though that could’ve been written a lot smoother. Rebecca just kind of does a 180 and they blame it on pregnant hormones which.... eh, okay sure. 

For all it’s flaws, this season gave us the start of AJ and I can’t hate it for that, y’know? 

2. Carver is a pretty great antagonist

I like Carver. I think he’s a great antagonist and I really wish they hadn’t killed him off as early as they did.

I find him to be a fascinating character study, y’know? 

From the very beginning, even before we get to physically meet him, we’re told that Carver is a threat. The cabin group are running from someone, and we can easily put the pieces together that Rebecca might be pregnant with his baby rather than Alvin’s.

Then we actually get to meet him when he comes to the cabin and it’s well executed. From Sarah having a panic attack at seeing a glimpse of him through the window, to his friendly and charismatic nature, to the way he talks to Clementine and just... it’s unsettling.

He’s clever, and he knows that Clementine’s covering for the cabin group, but he’s trying to trick her into giving him info. I also hate how smug he gets when he finds the photo of Sarah, but then he just looks at her, and asks, “You have no idea who these people are, do you?” or whatever and just... something about that, y’know? 

Then his “You have a nice day,” as he leaves and you know he’s coming right back with more people, so the group has gotta go. 

Then of course comes his later scenes where he shows up with his people to the lodge, murders Walter while saying he didn’t want to do it but Kenny left him no choice, and he can possibly murder Alvin if Kenny keeps shooting which is a huge holy shit moment because of how Rebecca reacts. 

Ugh, y’know just the way Carver talks to Rebecca and is so matter-of-fact about the baby being his and how he justifies his actions. Like, we can’t forget Reggie and how Carver threw him off the roof only to turn around like “I liked Reggie, he was chill, but he was weak.”

I dunno man, it’s super well done!

I truly believe Carver could’ve gone down as the best antagonist in the series if the writers hadn’t killed him off so damn early to make more room for Kenny to become the new antagonist of the season. Ugh.

I don’t even have an issue with how he died, either. Having Kenny kill him the way he did makes sense and it’s brutal, it was just premature.

Anyway, Carver’s pretty great. One of the best parts of S2. 

1. Clementine 

I mean, are we really surprised? Clementine is what makes this game playable. She’s the best written, most consistent character [which I know is a bit iffy because we do make choices for her but ya get me] and her growth over the season is the most compelling compared to the other characters. 

Hell, of the four Clementine’s we get across the series, this Clementine is my second favorite! She’s fantastic! 

I also love how self-aware she is that her group is just a bunch of morons and she’s gotta do everything around here, but then the same group underestimates her time and time again even though she’s proven herself to be the most competent. 

And on top of that, she goes through so much bullshit. Right from the start, Christa’s still cold to her after what happened to Omid and the baby, then she gets separated from Christa and nearly drowns in a river, then she comes across a dog that attacks and nearly killing her, forcing her to fight back which kills the dog, and then when she finds some decent people, she passes out and this group thinks it’s a walker bite because their “doctor” is incompetent. They lock her up in a shed because ??? so she has to break in and steal supplies to sew up her own arm, which she does and you feel the pain of it the whole way through, BUT THEN she gets attacked by a walker and has to fight it off before the dumb dumb crew come in to help her. 

And that’s just the first part of episode one. 

It’s like the writers were like “Hey, let’s torture Clem so that we can get easy sympathy points from the audience” and then dialed it back a bit because if you look at some of the initial concepts for this season... oof.

But really, S2 in a nutshell is basically “Clementine does anything and gets punished for it.” 

However, it’s not all bad and a lot of it does make her story all the more interesting as it progresses. She goes from a young girl who needs a group to survive, to a survivor herself who is capable of taking care of herself and those she loves. 

This part pertains to my personal ending for this game-- So, by the time we reach the shit show that is the Kenny and Jane fight, I want Clementine to get as far away from both of them as fucking possible. For me, the best endings Clementine can have is to either go alone, or to go to Wellington. 

Wellington’s my personal favorite because I like the idea of Clementine being in a community with strong walls and people to help with AJ. I mean, we gotta throw out the logic when it comes to AJ surviving because in every single endings, he should be dead. 

Honestly, that’s the only thing that keeps me from shooting Kenny. Hell, in my opinion, walking off into the woods with him instead of staying at Wellington is the worst ending in the entire game-- I’d rather go with ding dong dingus Jane than stick around with Kenny, but for me, neither of those are a good conclusion to Clementine’s story and character in S2

Anyway, endings aside, Clementine is the only part of the story that doesn’t make me side eye the writers the way I do for everything else... well, I side eye them sometimes but S2 as a whole is such a mess that it takes a lot to not straight up glare at them and the amount of fuck ups they had here. 

Clementine is hands down the best part of S2.

--- Honorable Mentions

-Big brother Luke in the first couple episodes -This game does have a bunch of different endings that you can get, which is pretty neat until you realize that they mean practically nothing come ANF and they’re totally unbalanced sooo... nice try? -Uncle Pete is pretty cool -The setting of the ski resort is super nice and cozy until murder happens. -In fact, the snowy nature is visually pretty and the skyboxes are some of the best in the series. 

---

So what do you think? Do you agree with this list? What are some of your favorite parts of Season 2? Are you looking at this and asking where the Kenny entry is? Well, I’m sure if you scroll up just a wee bit, you’ll find your answer. 

Have any suggestions for future T5F’s? Feel free to send ‘em in! :D

Next week’s T5F Top 5 Character Deaths That Made Me Side-Eye the Writers 

[ygo5dsmonth2020]

YU-GI-OH! 5DS MONTH 2020

We’re back! It’s that time of the year! The mods are excited to announce this year’s themes for YU-GI-OH! 5DS MONTH 2020. 

Bored during quarantine? Say no more. We hope you join in this year!

Day 1 (July 7th): Stardust Acceleration

Accelerate! We’re kicking off into overdrive by starting this month off with our hero of the hour! Rev it up by showing us how YOU celebrate Yusei Fudo’s birthday!  

Day 2 (July 8th): Sink or Sail

As good captains, we all have a ship we’d set sail on. Which is yours?

Day 3 (July 9th): Story to Story

Our tale begins with a fast-paced story that takes us through the city’s tournament with the Fortune Cup, the Satellite’s peril with the Dark Signer’s, to Crash Town, to once again Neo Domino City’s action with the World Racing Grand Prix to the conclusion with the Ark Cradle. Which arc was your favorite?

Day 4 (July 10th): Songs to Fix a D-Wheel To

Let the music play! Do you have a playlist you wanna share? It can be for a character, a ship, an overall arc, or a fanfiction! Come on Eileen, show us what you got!

Day 5 (July 11th): Bloom of the Black Rose

Pitch dark flower, set to bloom! Today we celebrate the Black Rose, Aki Izayoi! How will you choose to celebrate our loyal psychic?

Day 6 (July 12th): As Above, So Below

Heaven or hell. Signers or Dark Signers. The Crimson Dragon vs the Earthbound Immortals. Whose side are you on?

Day 7 (July 13th): This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Yeehaw! Bring out your ponchos, set your guns to duel, and show us what all Satisfaction Town has to bring? Is it a character? The city itself? A duel? Satisfy us!

Day 8 (July 14th): Power Play

Further Turbo Dueling King, the Master of Faster, lover of ramen, and one hell of a (jack)ass. Today we’re celebrating the King Himself: Jack Atlas!

Day 9 (July 15th): Fly Your Colors

The World Racing Grand Prix! Today is all about Teams, whether it be Team 5ds, Team Unicorn, or even somewhere out of the WRGP- Like Team Satisfaction! Which Team are you on?

Day 10 (July 16th): Free Day I/Introduction Day

Our first free day! Use this day to either introduce yourself to the crowd or feel free to leave it open! It’s up to you!

Day 11 (July 17th): Fly, Blackbird!

This Satellite bird is our man of the hour! Our favorite hardworking, lovable, mother hen for kids, and unbeatable duelist, but what else is there? Show us! Give your love for Crow Hogan!

Day 12 (July 18th): Star-Crossed Lovers

Have you ever wanted to see the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh 5ds paired up with someone from another show entirely? Wanna see Yusei Fudo in a relationship with Dawn from Pokemon? Now’s your chance! Anything is possible today!

Day 13 (July 19th): Flip the Script

We all have a favorite alternative universe we’d like to see Team 5ds in. Whether it be a coffee shop, college, or maybe even a glimpse of the timeline Z-ONE came from! Anything is on the table for this day!

Day 14 (July 20th): Words Have Power

Like the Heart of the Cards, there are many signature catchphrases within the world of 5ds. What’s your favorite quote?

Day 15 (July 21st): Spirit World Walker

The holy light of protection, now cross and become eternal life! She may be small, but she sure is mighty! Bow down to the protector of the Spirit World- Rua/Luna! Today’s day is all about her!

Day 16 (July 22nd): Me and My OC

Most of us out there think of an original character to place into the world of 5ds. For many of us, it’s the start of friendships, self-journeys, or just fun and self-exploration into another world! Show us your OC today!

Day 17 (July 23rd): Polar Opposites

The modern-day story of light vs dark. A tale of contrasts. Ying-Yang. What two opposites do you want to showcase?

Day 18 (July 24th): Heart of the Dragon

Envoy of love and justice! This energetic machinist has as big of a punch as his heart! Today is all about Rua/Leo!

Day 19 (July 25th): Flex Your Canon

We all have our different headcanons about the characters or story. What are yours? It can be anything from changing canon to implementing your own ideas!

Day 20 (July 26th): Free Day II/Support Fellow Creators

Our second free day! You can use this day to submit whatever you wish, or you can shout out your favorite artist, fanfiction author, or just your favorite character! Give someone else some well-deserved love.

Day 21 (July 27th). Spin the Wheel, Throw a Dart

Story tropes! This could be anything from a day on the beach, a sleepover episode, or anything in between! What trope do you wish to see in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh 5ds?

Day 22 (July 28th): Tech Genius

The android with a supercomputer for a brain, Bruno stole our hearts as Antimony and continued until the bitter end. Today’s day is all about Bruno!

Day 23 (July 29th): Bad Guy Syndrome

The series had its swarm of enemies: whether it be Divine, Ruder/Roman, Rex, or Z-ONE. Which is your favorite?

Day 24 (July 30th): We’re Here Too!

Out of all the characters in the entire series, who do you feel is under-appreciated, or deserves more attention? Show us!

Day 25 (July 31st): Dead Guy Walking

Former Dark Signer, leader of Team Satisfaction/The Enforcers, and a brooding man looking for some satisfaction. Today’s day is all about Kalin Kessler/Kyosuke Kiryu!

Day 26 (August 1st): In the Z-ONE

Z-ONE is the man behind the madness. What kind of man do you think he is? A man trying to save the world, or destroy it? Tell us!

Day 27 (August 2nd): Pain vs Puff Pieces

Angst vs Fluff. Do you prefer a fairytale ending or a bittersweet tragedy? Pick one and show off!

Day 28 (August 3rd): Tale of Two Stories

We now have seven Yu-Gi-Oh series! What would happen if one of our heroes from Team 5ds happened to meet someone from the past, or perhaps the future? Whether you prefer to rev it up, high five the sky, or get your game on, show us what you got!

Day 29 (August 4th): You Can See Them Too?

The world of the Duel Monsters is filled to the brim with spirits. Showcase either your favorite duel monster or a moment within the Spirit World!

Day 30 (August 5th): Free Day III

Our last free day! Share with us anything your heart desires!

Day 31 (August 6th): Going My Way!

Today is the last day, but we still have the road to tomorrow. What does the future hold?

[putflowersinmyhair-callmepretty]

The fate of a nun (Finan x OFC); part 6

GENERAL A/N: Hi there! This story is my first attempt to write a fanfiction. English is not my first language, so feel free to let me know how to improve my writing/language skills 😊 I will try and post a chapter per week, let’s see how it goes! The story takes place in season 3 and you will notice that I have used some of the sequences and dialogues from the tv series, changing them to include my OC. I did try not to be too colloquial and informal with my writing -giving the time of the story- but I preferred to make it more enjoyable than realistic, same goes for Finan’s accent. I’m nervous and excited to share my work, hope you enjoy! Bacini, Cate. A/N: Hi sweeties! Writing this chapter has been hard, looooot of feelings in this one :( Hope you like it, bacetti! Summary: The life of the young novice Aoife completely changes when the Lady of Mercia arrives to the Abbey of Wincelcumb. Oaths, battles and love will turn her in a warrior. General warnings: Violence, Blood, Strong Language, Smut, Fluff, Graphic description of violence Chapter’s warning: Angst-ish Words: 3937

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six: Leaving

Aoife was happy to see that Finan was back to his old cocky self now that Uthred had come back. Aoife had stepped back against the wall, careful not to interfere with the celebration of Uthred’s return. She had watched him hug Finan, with a wide smile on his handsome face and the Irish warrior seemed utterly light-hearted for the first time since Uthred had left. But it was fleeting moment because when gave him the news of Sithric departure with the Dane prisoners, cloud covered his honey-eyes. The Lord didn’t looked particularly surprised. Hurt, yes, but after all it was his last order for Sithric to leave. He quickly dismissed the issue, turning around to greet the young monk. “You still alive?” he asked, hugging him tightly. “Of course.” Osferth answered, and the Dane’s eyes found Aoife, sending her a grateful smile. She had saved his friend’s life, all in all. And ask quick as he smiled, his attention was diverted and captured by Aethelflaed. She had entered the hall and was looking at him with the widest smile on her face,. “You are back.” She stated happily. “I told you I would.” Food was brought for the Lord. Aoife was sitting between Aethelflaed and Osferth, while Finan was sitting in front of her with a fur wrapped around his broad shoulders. They all were discussing how to recover Skade and Uthred seemed confident in the success of the plan, even if there wasn’t an actual plan yet. He looked happier than before and Aoife would have liked to ask him if he had found peace for his brother. She surely hoped so, but she could not ask such question; Finan had told her that Uthred’s brother, the great Dane warrior Young Ragnar, had been brutally murdered by an unknown companion, without his sword in hand, which meant that he was stuck in the cold, Dane hell, the Niflheim, and not feasting in the Valhalla. How could people be so cruel, Aoife could not understand, but if Uthred’s smile meant that he had found the solution he was searching and had help Ragnar to enter the Valhalla, she was pleased with the ending. Her streamed of thought was interrupted by Aethelflaed who stood up to leave the room, not without ordering Uthred, with a sly smile on, to walk with her after he was done eating. She patted Aoife on her back, a silence demand to go with her, and the maid followed her outside with a last smile to Finan and a little bow to Uthred. “Are you humping her, Finan?” Uthred asked and the other choked on his ale. “ ‘M not, Lord.” he mumbled shily, gasping for air. “You’re a fool, then. She surely has desire behind her eyes, might as well fulfil them myself.” Finan’s hands open and close frantically, he knew Uthred was making fun of him,  but he was also known for desiring every beautiful woman and for winning their love back most of the time. He could not even imagine losing Aoife for his Lord. Uthred laughed loudly at his rage “I’m mocking you, Finan.” he slapped the back of his head lightly “But you should act on it before someone else does.” “You, insolent woman!” Aoife laughed, entering Aethelflaed’s room. Their relation had developed to a point of friendship where Aoife felt free to tell her Lady whatever she wanted, without fearing the consequences; likewise, when they were alone, Aethelflaed dropped her serious stance of Lady of Mercia and acted as the girl she still was inside. The Lady shot a shameless smile “I had to take advantage of the moment.” She jumped on her bed, not very lady-like, and started brushing her hair emphatically “And he look so handsome. Even more handsome than before, don’t you think?” “Stop that, you’ll bald in moments.” Aoife screamed exasperated, snatching the brush from her hands and working on her hair more delicately, the free hand place on the top of her, careful not to pull her hair. “And you’re the one talking!” the Lady continued, raising her voice “Walking around my estate hand in hand with Finan!” Aoife blushed intensely “He’s my friend” she tried to explain herself. “You’re lying, and you know that.” She was right, Aoife knew that, what she was feeling wasn’t friendly at all, nor holy if she had to be entirely honest, but she also knew that if Finan would have felt those same feelings, he would have acted upon them. They were only friends who held each other’s hand. It was that easy. “So, what do you want to tell Uthred?” she changed subject, and Aethelflaed let her do so. “For once, I will not share my thoughts with you, Aoife.” She answered and her friend hit her playfully with the brush “Rude.” Aoife had left Aethelflaed with Uthred and was now walking around the town with Osferth. He was recovering well, no longer limping. “So, when are you expected to leave?” “Very soon. Uthred is eager and wants his seer back.” “I don’t understand, he could have Aethelflaed and he is risking his life for that… that witch.” Osferth laughed heartily “It’s not that easy, lady.” he stated “He believes he is cursed by Skade until he lays with her.” Aoife twitched her nose “Disgusting.” The monk nodded “Indeed. it would never lay with Aethelflaed, anyway, as much as he wants to. He believes he would corrupt her.” Aoife shot him a questioning look “What does it even mean?” “It means that she is a Lady, he is a heathen. He does have feeling for her but cannot act upon them because it wouldn’t be right for her. Adultery is a sin, and it would mean a great deal both for Wessex and Mercia. He does not want to endanger her for his selfish desires. Which, funnily enough, is also what Finan thinks about you.” She really needed to learn how to not blush “Hush, Osferth. He does not.” “You like to think that you know him to the core, Aoife. But you do not. I’m confident you will end up together, one day or the other.” She didn’t know what to answer, but luckily Finan forced his way between them and wrapped his arms about their shoulders. “What are we talking about?” “Your departure!” Aoife answered quickly, raising her voice to cover Osferth possible answer. He did not speak, however, and repressed a smile. Finan didn’t seem to notice the weird interaction, and pinched Aoife’s cheek “You’ll miss me, lady?” he asked playfully. “Very much so.” She answered, sarcastic her tone, not her words. They walked around town until Uthred and Aethelflaed returned with a guest. They had been attacked by a group of Danes and the man with them was an hostage and one of Aethelwold’s man, Uthred had recognised him instantly. They went back to the hall, Aoife standing next to Aethelflaed in a corner of the room, following Finan’s every move, while he was heating the pliers over the fire. She wasn’t sure she was ready to watch a man being tortured, or better yet, she wasn’t ready to watch Finan do such a cruel thing. However, she was well aware that he would not enjoy it either, but he was doing what was needed to guarantee the safety of his people. After all, the hostage that now seemed harmless and afraid had tried to kill her Lady and his Lord. Deep in her guts, she was feeling guilty for leaving her Lady’s side; her job was specifically to keep her safe and she had failed miserably. Nonetheless Aethelflaed didn’t seem to mind and she was gripping her hand tightly, earnest, resolute and vigilant. She had never looked more threatening. Torture was not necessary, however, because the men spoke immediately. He was sent to kill Uthred. “Why did Lord Aethelwold send men to kill Lord Uthred?” Aethelflaed walked closer to the prisoner, slowly and dangerous as a wolf, Aoife followed closely, she would not leave her alone for a moment more. “Because Uthred is Alfred’s sword and shield.” He answered truthfully as if it was the most obvious answer. Uthred was inscrutable: calm, almost bored. Aoife was watching him in amaze, and a fire of desire started in her heart, she wanted to serve him as a warrior. As quickly as the idea came, it was gone, leaving her guilty towards her Lady. Uthred offered to spare his life if he would carry a message to the Danes, which was weird and honestly reckless. “You will return to Aethelwold, Haesten, Cnut and Bloodhead and you will tell them that Uthred of Bebbanburg is coming as a shadow walker and they will die as my brother died. I will send them all to Niflheim.” The man accepted, a gaze of fear and admiration in his light eyes, and Uthred turned around to address his warriors, Finan standing at his side as the good second in command he was “Like Sithric, some of you might doubt me. I understand why. There have been times, of late, when I have doubted myself. Those times are behind me, now.” Aoife, from the corner of her eyes, saw Aethelflaed watch him in adoration. In any other moment, she would have made fun of her, but now her too, like everyone in the room, was captivated by him, by his words. “I am a Lord without wealth. Without land. I cannot offer you silver nor the wall of a fortress behind which you can grow fat and lazy. Follow me and I will take you down a hard, brutal path. But it is a path that leads to the one thing every true warrior desires: reputation. Follow me and you will have my sword and my oath. For what that you are Dane or Saxon, I swear I will die to protect each and anyone of you. My mind is clear about what must be done, though I cannot do it without you.” One after the other, all the men stood up without hesitation. It was a matter of second and so impressive that Aoife desired to be sitting on the chair, just so she could stand up with the others. As the most violent of rivers, Aoife felt the desire of join Uthred’s army hit her soul once again. It was just a moment, though, because she turned around to watch Aethelflaed, who was already watching her, and she immediately felt guilty, for she loved her friend and Lady and she had oath to her. That woman had given her protection, love, the freedom to be herself, happiness; and she had only asked for her loyalty, and yet, Aoife was craving another life, which would mean leaving her. But which would also mean being what she had wanted to be for a long time now. And moreover, it would mean living side by side with Finan. Was her desire for a man enough to betray her Lady? It was not. She followed Aethelflaed up to her room and help her out of the dress. The Lady was unusually silent, and Aoife feared it was because of her. Aethelflaed could easily read emotions on her face and she would have surely noticed the shine of desire in her eyes. She decided not to address the issue, let that moment of weakness slip, as if it had never happened; but Aethelflaed was thinking otherwise. “You should go with him, Aoife.” She casually stated, after a long silence. Aoife decided that the right thing to do was to pretend she doesn’t know what was going on “I am lost.” Aethelflaed rolled her eyes and gestured for the maid to sit on the bed with her and turned to face her “You should ask Uthred to let you go with them.” She smiled sweetly, holding her hands “I know you want to.” “I do not.” Aoife kept lying “I have sworn my sword to you, and I am more than happy at your side. It is what I want.” “No, it is not.” Aethelflaed insisted “And I know that you would stay, should I ask you to, because you’re my friend and a very loyal maid.” She gripped her hands tightly “But that’s not what you are, deep down. You’re a warrior. I have watched you training, you are never as happy as when you’re fighting.” Aoife’s eyes where already filled with tears “I promised you that you would live as a free woman and by letting you be my guard, I am breaking my promise. I have many guards, Aoife. And you know that I am safer here than anywhere else. I do not need you. But I think that Uthred needs you, both as a warrior and as a healer. And you need Uthred to be free.” She then smiled sheepishly “And I don’t think that neither you nor Finan are ready to let go of each other. Aoife was already weeping, and the Lady’s eyes too were filled with tears, so they hugged each other and cried, all night long, knowing that, should Uthred accept Aoife’s oath, they would risk to not see each other for a very long time, if not forever; for Aoife it felt like losing her only family. They fell asleep when the sky was already starting to clear, holding each other as if it was the last night in the world. The next morning, the air was cold on Aoife face, and she woke up alone in the Lady’s bed. She knew she was looking miserable when she rolled down the stairs. She was wearing her weapons, and, on her shoulder, she was carrying a small sack that contained her few belongings: some clothes and silver Aethelflaed had given her, a book and a wooden rosary. “You look horrible.” Aethelflaed commented, joining her at the entrance. “You don’t look much better, my Lady.” She joked with a sad smile, eyes wet. “You should be happy, new adventures await!” Aethelflaed tried to ease the tension. “We don’t know, he might refuse my oath.” “Trust me, he will not.” the Lady ruffled her hair “You’re a gifted woman.” Uthred was standing with Finan and Osferth when the women joined him. “You healed him well.” Uthred said to Aoife, pointing at Osferth “I have never seen him leaving for battle so willingly.” Aoife smiled, at loss of words. It was Aethelflaed who addressed the situation. “Aoife here wishes to fight for you, Uthred.” Aoife could feel Finan’s questioning look burning the side of her face. “And why should I let you fight, Aoife? The battlefield is a dangerous place, especially for a woman.” the Lord was staring at her with an amused smile on, he was not taking her seriously. So, Aoife straighten her back, ready to plead her case. She felt braver because he hadn’t said no just yet and she could tell by his face that he was at least willing to hear her reasons. “I know it is, Lord. I would be a fool not to understand the danger I would face, but I have worked hard with Finan to improve my fighting skills and, excuse my arrogance, I am a better warrior that half of yours.” “She is.” Osferth admitted. “And she is also a healer.” Aethelflaed added “And what happened to Osferth proves that you are in desperate need of one.” “I know my way around wound, yes.” Aoife smiled to her friends, then watched back to Uthred, who was staring at her with a curious and pleased look on his face. “Look. Let me try at least. Should I fail you, I will find my way back to my Lady.” She took Aethelflaed’s hand “Because one thing must be clear. My sword shall be yours as long as you desire, but I will forever be a woman of the Lady of Mercia.” Uthred was thinking about it, Aoife could see him reflecting behind those beautiful eyes of him, then with a sudden movement, he gripped at the back of her head and pushed her forehead against his. They stand there in silence, eyes closed, for what seemed like the eternity, Aoife’s heart was beating violently against her chest. Was it a yes? Was it a no? What was it, in God’s name? Then he stepped away with a huge smile on his face. “Go get your horse. You’re my warrior now.” Saying goodbye to Aethelflaed was the hardest part, but they had already said everything the night before. “I shall meet you soon, Aoife.” The Lady said, “Try not to get yourself killed.” Aoife laughed while tears rolled down her face “I will try my best, Lady.” She then pulled the rosary out of her sack “Keep it safe until I’m back, would you?” “I sure will.” Aethelflaed put the rosary around her neck and hugged her tightly “I will miss you greatly, Aoife.” “Nun!” Uthred screamed from the gate “We are to leave!” She got on her mount swiftly. Godiva, her beautiful black horse, neighed happily. She was once used to great adventures, but since Cenric had left her with Aoife she hadn’t done much more than some walk. “I know my love.” The woman said, patting her neck “You’re free now.” “You stubborn woman.” Finan had guided his horse closer to her and he did not look happy. Stretching her right leg, she could easily touch him. “You’re not happy to see me?” she joked, and he did crack a smile. “I am, trust me.” He mumbled, and she could swear he was blushing “But I know I’m being selfish, Aoife. Being a warrior… it’s dangerous, lady.” She was flattered that he cared, of course she was, and she understood why he was worried. However, it was her choice and only hers to make and even if she had chosen impulsively, she felt it was the right thing to do. She stretched her hand, and he met her halfway, their finger intertwining in the empty space between their horses. “I’m a woman, Finan. I’m always in danger.” They rode all day long and Uthred ordered then to stop only when the sun disappeared, and they could not see past the nose of their mount. Aoife was exhausted, her back was aching, and the humidity of the wood gotten to her bones and she was shivering. Yet it had been one of the best days of her life. She had never been much in the open and she had spent the entire ride stretching her neck as far as possible to look at everything she could. It was all covered in snow. When the night had come, she had almost fell from her horse, raising her gaze to the sky. She had never seen that many stars in just one night. Osferth had laughed of her and she had come back to reality. They had stopped soon after to rest for the night and she just then realised that she had to sleep in a tent, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by man. “Don’t worry Aoife” Uthred turned around to smile at her “You can trust these men. And if not, you must believe I will kill them, shall they even try to touch you.” his eyes diverted on the Irishman, who was working on Aoife’s tent “And he would too.” he patted her on the shoulder, strong enough to make her stumble, and then left her alone. The tents were soon set up, the food cooked, and Aoife realised she was starving when the soup was placed in front of her. Ale was drank – just a cup each, they had to be sober the day after – and while some men made themselves as comfortable as possible for the first turn of guard, the others went to sleep. Aoife left the group too, but she wasn’t tired, she walked around the camp for a while, to stretch her sore muscles. The night was dark, but she was feeling safe, maybe too safe. Finan was watching her from the shadow and silently slipped behind her and wrapped his hand around her mouth, pushing the tip of his blade against her ribcage before she could even turn around. “You should never let your guard down, Aoife.” he whispered in her ear, and was pleased to see her shivering against his chest. He could feel every curve of her body against his, despite the layers of clothes and weapons. She mumbled something in his palm and kicked him lightly on the shin and he quickly let her go. She spun to face him, red her cheeks for their proximity “I have you keeping an eye on me all the time, I’m not worried.” she joked, but seeing his stern look she added before he could scold her “You’re right, thought, and I apologise. I’m just enjoying the freedom. I’ve dreamt about it for so long.” He was still angry at her lack of caution but couldn’t repress the smile. He had spent the ride watching her admiring landscape and the night sky, he had seen how happy she was, how good the freedom tasted. He had also come to terms with the reality that all he seemed to notice, those days, concerned Aoife. He hadn’t even thought about the mission yet, he hadn’t thought about his possible encounter with Sithric, what would he do if he had to fight him. He hadn’t thought yet about how Uthred’s plan was doomed to fail. All he could think about was Aoife, where was she, how was she feeling, how happy yet worry he was to have her at his side. Sweet Jesus Christ, was his feelings deeper than those of a friend? “We can stay here for a while, if you want.” They stood there for a long time, in complete silence, Aoife savouring the clear air, the smell of snow and pine, Finan watching her, with a small smile. They was called to guard duty and sat around the fine, facing each other. “We should talk” Finan said “to keep each other awake.” “Tell me something, then.” Aoife smiled lazily, she was not used to be awake at night, but she would fight the tiredness until the end of the guard. She wanted to prove to Uthred – and to herself – that she was, indeed, a warrior. “I told you much about me, lady.” Finan laughed “And I know nothing about you.” “I have been a nun most of my life, I have no memories of the life before. You know everything.” “I do not.” She put her chin on her hand “What do you want to know, then?” “Who gifted you the horse, Aoife?” He didn’t even have to think about a question, it was something he had been curious about since the day they rode to Winchester. He had guessed that whoever had left her the horse was the same person that had gifted her the weapons and taught her how to fight; and then there was that comment from the Abbess: “I will not let it happen again.” What should not happen again? Had it have something to do with a man like Finan? “You had that question ready, hadn’t you?” Aoife laughed but he could tell that she was uncomfortable. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.” She took his hand in hers, they were cold and soft “You had trusted me with your past, Finan. I shall trust you with mine.” Chapter Seven.

[thetorturerwrites]

Lamb: Ch 2 - Someone Like You

***This amazing artwork was gifted to me by @elmidol​​. Please do not re-use or re-post it without permission from them and/or myself. Don’t be a dickbag.

Previous Chapter

Summary:  “You need someone in the middle—not dead, not alive.” You arched upwards, trying to get even a bit of slack, just enough to speak. “Someone like me.”

C/N:  Look - If you’re new here, this is adult shit. If you’re not new here, you know what my C/Ns are about. Be warned. 

Word Count: 3.7k

A/N: Did I ever think I would be writing about Kylo and babies? No. No, I did not.  Am I writing about Kylo and babies? Maybe.  Its a crazy, crazy world, y'all.

Special thanks to @kylorengarbagedump for helping me edit this asshole of a chapter.

***

“Retribution.” 

The word sounded ludicrous on his lips, infantile and irresponsible. Abruptly, you had a clearer picture of what was happening. In this mesmerizing nirvana, his encapsulated kingdom, you were a child, stumbling into an adult’s arena to demand attention.

Your senselessness laid bare, you stared at him, adrift in the gleam of irises that never settled on one color. The pregnant moon overhead framed him, adorning his breathtaking face with a perfect, glowing halo. He was unnaturally beautiful, the kind of king women wept for. 

“Father...”

He met your whisper with a sneer, and you recoiled. He, too, thought your trek here was juvenile; you were just a witless woman wrestling with her emotions. Your heart sank at his judgment, disappointed that he thought you naïve.

Ashamed, you fixed your eyes upon a creeping succulent. You traced thick, tear-shaped leaves and winced at inch-long thorns. You could all but feel the phantom pinpricks. The red and pink blooms made for a variegated shroud to decorate the otherwise plain shrine.

It was lovely in its lethality, a fitting summation of this place.

“The Resistance slaughtered my planet, my ENTIRE family.”

You licked your lips and tugged at his sleeve, pulling yourself up to sit. Recognizing what you had just done, you wrung your hands, as though he was a walking electric current. Even so, he was the only bit of warmth in this melancholy vale, and you subconsciously leaned into it.

“You’re a fool.” He rose to an obscene height and moved away. “I care less than a whit for your holy wars. You murder on fantasy, not truth.”

The absence of his body was nearly as painful as his lack of understanding, and the resultant shout erupted before you could stop it.

“IT WAS NOT OUR WAR!”

Your exclamation bounced off shedding trees to die away in spongy, mossy hills. Sniffling, you pressed the heels of your hands into exhausted eyes. Yelling at men was an awful idea; yelling at this specific man was the epitome of lunacy.

How were you going to explain the hole in your soul to a creature who had none? To Ren, your mourning and loss were just specks in eternity, but he didn’t spend his days loving the living only to lose them. If your grandmother's stories were true, he had been this walking void since his creation.

And the brothers made themselves a land with a great vault separating light from dark. In their wisdom, they decreed the living would gather under golden sun, and the dead would gather under silver moon.  Grandfather Sky Walker gave his blessing: Let them rule over these lands through all ages. Let there be day and night, and let them usher in The Balance.

He was here. It was true.

That cast his indifference into an unusual shade of acceptance. Like this place, he existed outside of the universe’s organic stream. It wasn’t a lack of feeling; it was one colored by millennia of demise.

You were struck by the understanding that he made everything here in his image, all of it immaculate, alluring, and fatal. Just as he was.

“The Resistance decimated my planet on a rumor—a rumor that we were a First Order cult.”  Your voice was steadier than you expected. “But my family, my friends and everybody I knew...We were just ordinary people.”

You lifted your eyes and found him examining you, a curious look playing across his striking features. You huffed a pained breath and looked away again, fearing you would shatter under his scrutiny.

“My grandmother believed in the Balance, not in some notion of wiping the Galaxy clean of Soloists.”

His silence was deliberate, aimed to unnerve, and you crumpled forward, bending as though you could implore his aid into reality. When he moved, it was to stalk a circle around the altar.  His head cocked to assess your every angle.  Captured prey, you could do nothing but watch, wait, wonder.

“Belief in the Balance will not return your family. Nor will I.”

His glorious voice had bite; but where there should be an echo, there was none. Every lilting tree, every swaying vine, even the very air enveloped him, moved with him, absorbed his energy.  

Hugging yourself, you fought down your apprehension.

“No, it won’t.”

You looked past him to fat carmine leaves and marveled at how they turned their faces towards The Ren, their master. 

He only understood in terms of the absolute. 

“I came to ask you to kill them—the people who murdered my family. The Resistance.”

His circuitous pacing ended at your front, and he speared you with such a look you felt conquered. If he was the next crusade, the holy war renewed, you would fight for him, lay down and die for him. 

His long fingers slid you to the altar's precarious edge. So near to him, your comatose heartbeat increased, thudding against ribs his knuckles skimmed.

“All of them?”

You nodded, meek and uncertain. He stepped in, spreading your legs wide just by his body’s substantial design. He was the epitome of domineering, his shape meant to terrorize the weak, to endure immortality. 

Uncertain if you were allowed to put your hands on him, you braced against the slab, leaning slightly away.

The scent of this place, misty and piny and richly floral, was powerful, distilled to purity in his body. It seeped from his pores, the sumptuous belladonna curling around you like tainted tendrils.  He obscured what scant light there was and blotted out your senses, filling your light head with dread and longing.

With one finger under your chin, he lifted your face and beckoned you into such a trance you didn’t notice how he lazily caressed your outer thigh. One by one, he tugged upon the plum, plump bows keeping the rest of you hidden. 

“What price are you willing to pay for genocide, lost lamb?”

It was hypnotic—the timbre of his voice, the delicate dance of his fingertips, the starry shine of his eyes.  You blinked at his question, too caught up in the slow drag of his knuckles along your sternum and down between your breasts.

Your lips worked feebly, discarding every suggestion your brain made. What could you offer a being such as this? Prayers? He would condemn them. Offerings? Paltry trinkets. Blood? You’d already given it. Pleasure? You weren’t sure he was capable. 

It was a cruel game, and the realization burst over you like icy water, flooding your addled mind and shocking you back from stupidity.

You had nothing. Purposefully divested of everything, you sojourned here a destitute fool. 

“There it is.” He brushed a thumb across your lips, smirking. “She understands now that she has nothing, is nothing, of value with which to bargain.”

He collected your silent tears and fed them to you, salt in the wound. Chidingly, he wrapped stiff fingers around your quivering neck and squeezed until you felt your supernaturally sustained pulse drumming in your ears. 

“It is as I said. The dying lamb has no value to the shepherd.”

Fear licked at your nape, clamoring into the rational parts of you. Your mind whirred, desperately trying to unearth some kernel that would serve your purpose. There had to be something.

The memory struck you suddenly and at full velocity.  Careening, your breath stopped. The lineage of Soloists was a pastime for your brother, who made you sit through innumerable sessions and lectures.

And Solo took himself a wife, making her flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. Their union was prosperous, and she begat him many sons, the first being...

Your body shot into motion, vacating all self-preservation. You grasped his hand and pulled it to your chest. You were even so bold as to thread your smaller fingers through his. On instinct, both legs wrapped around his hips, heels digging into his legs in a feeble hold. 

You were unwilling to renounce your argument without a fight. Hastily, the words spilled out, a wishful wine you weren’t sure he would drink.

“NowaitIcanbeyourvessel!”

A perfectly sculpted black brow rose over his eye. He untangled his fingers from yours, scoffing. Your face burned, impossible beads of sweat forming at your pounding temples. Not knowing what to do with your hands, you pressed them to your flaming cheeks and tried to calm yourself.

“Choose your next words carefully.” 

Entertained by the toddler, he was indulging your delusions, but there was a limit to his patience. Sturdy hands slid beneath your thighs, parting and lifting them so he could draw your hips further into his. You couldn’t argue; you were the one who stopped him from leaving. 

Was that an erection you felt there? Was this proof to your curiosity? The possibility sent goose flesh tingling to every inch of your skin.

“Your brother... Ah!” 

Athame in hand, he gouged the tip into your unblemished thigh, raising a lone drop of blood. 

“Your brother has many children; does he not? There are stories about his prolific family.”

Out sized, you spiraled into anxious desire. When he tired of your nonsense, pulverizing your bones would be little more than a snap of his fingers. Yet, here he was, still wedged between your thighs and feeling a lot like a man who could make you forget your name. 

“Reminding me of my brother is not the way to make your case, lamb.”

He dragged warm lips over your pulse, lathing it with his tongue. His wide palm wrapped around your generous hip, and every single thought fled on bated breath. He was woefully seductive, a wolf in shepherd's clothing.

You licked your lips and shook your head, trying to agree and clear away cobwebs, but his hands and nipping kisses befuddled you so much you could only sputter half-formed words. Switching your concentration to the blade, you valiantly tried to keep track of it and tied yourself to it's path like a lifeline. 

“But you don’t.” You splayed your fingers out wide, palms flat on the altar. "Your seed will kill a living woman, yes? But a woman already crossed over cannot carry a child."

You were about to launch yourself from the proverbial cliff. Regardless of what came next, you would be a splatter at its bottom.

“I- I can.” You begged the endless midnight sky to strengthen your resolve. “You can have me.”

He had been rubbing you up and down his rigid length, your body no more than an instrument to appease his ardor; but at your declaration, he gripped your hips painfully tight and bit your shoulder. 

Attuned to his mood, the stars dimmed to a faint radiance. It was the one detail your brain could latch onto, the way even the greatest of them conformed to his will. 

“You think that’s a novel gesture? That you’ll be the first person I’ve fucked here?” His voice was low but no less edgy. “How many would you wager have died screaming at the end of my dick?”

A pathetic whimper escaped your open mouth, and hunger set it to watering. The idea of him fucking you here, in this open clearing under his meticulously curated twilight, was salacious, tantalizing.

“Countless.” You couldn’t stop yourself from rolling your hips, trying to jump start his back into rhythm. “But I would wager very few of them have been willing to bear your children.”

He growled, a vicious, threatening promise. His soft touch turned angry, coiling into your hair and yanking your head back. Your throat seized, elongated by his grip and fully bared for execution. What had been a grazing scratch of your blade turned again to a harsh point dug into the skin. 

You could hardly speak, reduced to gaping at his flashing onyx eyes. They blazed with a fiery hatred, and you knew it was because you were right. It wasn’t easy for him like it was his brother. He had spent eons alone whereas his brother wanted for nothing.

It infuriated him.

“You need someone in the middle—not dead, not alive.” You arched upwards, trying to get even a bit of slack, just enough to speak. “Someone like me.”

He curved around you so tight you could smell the deadly nightshade on his breath, every single part of him designed to snuff out life. You chewed the inside of your cheek, wondering how each part of him tasted. 

“Someone like you?” He spat the words, fingernails digging into your scalp. “Impure? Spoiled by how many men in your lifetime? Cowed by a little death and stupid enough to make demands of me?”

He was so close to snapping your neck, and you itched for it. You would gladly die at his hand, reunite with your family. All of these morose colors blended with the sorrow in your heart, and you pictured your bones rotting to dust, anchoring you here forever.

But he held off, glaring down at you in barely-checked contempt. 

Caught between wanting to die and wanting to murder, your breathing tilted into erratic, skirting panic so closely a fallen eyelash would detonate the bomb in your chest. 

He looked at you in such a way, though, that your apprehension settled. He was angry because he didn’t know how to feel things. He was intended, to his very marrow, to only ever take. Anything else was uncomfortable and worthy of destruction. 

You nudged his nose with yours, a mirror to his earlier gesture.

“Someone willing.” It was less than a whisper, barely a breath. 

His calculating gaze roamed your face, judging the depth of your commitment. In seconds, the pointed extension of his anger sliced down your supple thigh, cutting open a large gash.  

But pain wasn’t his target.

His aim was true. The rogue missile was expertly guided. And when the thing forced into your cunt, you screamed in unmitigated horror.

“I’m no gentle lover, and this is not your marriage bed. Willing or not, the lamb is meant to be slaughtered.”

You splintered into a wrecked and blubbering mess, heaving and howling. You clung to his shoulders, gouging little crescents into his neck. You had expected to die today but not by the blade cleaving apart your pussy. Offering him your womb seemed to make him only want to carve it from your body, a trophy to mark your idiocy.

“You should not offer things that don’t belong to you, lamb.” The vibration tickled your earlobe, drawing you down from your mania. “Your body was mine the moment you crossed into my land.”

You felt it then, the shift and nudge inside your cunt. Where you were certain there had been a sharp edge, there was only an ornately ridged column, handcrafted and safe.

It was the hilt. 

The wave of frenzy crested, and you opened puffy, red eyes onto a lucent, luminous moon.

He had buried the knife’s handle into your cunt and was pumping it slowly. He held the traitorous blade without even a single red cell shed. 

You wailed a halfhearted objection because this was a profane corruption of a consecrated relic. A particularly long drag of the makeshift phallus countered and shook loose a vulgar moan, and you squeezed tight around it.

It was shameless and sacrilegious.

And it felt so, so good.

You whimpered when he licked your lower lip, barely making contact. Your thighs splayed wide, eager, and an appreciative noise rumbled in his throat. He rewarded your responsiveness with another slow, deep plunge of the weapon, and your head lolled back.

“How is your religion serving you now, lamb?”

He shoved the handle as far into you as the guard would allow and worked it back and forth, rubbing the ridges and pommel against the sensitive spots inside. You moaned sinfully loud, and grasped at him. 

He was ruthless, prodding the elusive bumpy patch until you bucked against his hand and watching you float through this immoral delirium.

You wished it was him. His mouth, his fingers, his cock. Anything but this false idol ramming into your pussy.

Your whimpers turned to pleasured cries. Your calves tensed and shook. Looking down on his blasphemous claim, you yelped and pushed at his arms, the torrent of blood splashed over your thighs and sex wrenching you from your high.

In your hysteria, you’d forgotten that he’d sliced open your leg. 

“Father, please…”

He dug his thumb firmly into the wound, gripping nearly your entire thigh in the one tremendous hand. For a moment, the throb in your pussy traveled up to swirl around the intrusion, and you writhed to get away.

“If you call me that again,” he bit your jaw, raising a welt, “I will slit you open from cunt to crown.”

He played in the plasma, coating his fingers with it. You whined and grimaced, caught between salvation at your cunt and persecution at your leg. When his tacky thumb connected with your clit, you shouted, wracked with tremors. Like a savage, he masturbated you with your own blood, rubbing fast circles.

Rapture barreled down the length of your spine, working its way through every extremity. You were going to cum for him, at the end of your family's treasured athame, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. 

It was indecent, and you drowned in it. You collapsed back onto the altar, arching up into a delicious bow. Your knees drew up higher, and your hips worked for him, chasing what he dangled but never quite delivered. Your fingers scrambled against the uneven stone and fisted the velvet garment.

Your insides coiled, churning terror and thirst together until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Inching closer and closer to that crack of lightning, your cries built, a tumultuous, hoarse crescendo.  You thought he would make you tow that line forever, so close to bliss but never allowed to feel it.

But finally, mercifully, it came.

A blistering exaltation slid over your every nerve. Your cunt clenched and quaked, gushing a lewd prayer. The knife in his hand was the center of all gravity, and every part of you swiveled around it, rolling and bucking and shaking. You hurled a string of curses no priestess should ever know, earning a derisive chuckle.

“Such filth from that pretty mouth.”

Spent, your back finally met the slab beneath, and you fought for breath, chest stinging and throat crackly. A pained whine escaped when his torture implement departed from your slick center, but he gave you only a brief reprieve. 

He climbed above you, dropped his heavy knee onto your sensitive mound, and shoved the sullied hilt into your mouth. Your eyes flew open, but he captured your jaw and kept it in place, ensuring that you held the thing upright. 

Copper tang pooled on your tongue and wafted under your nose. On a muffled whinge, your eyes rolled back into your head. Automatically, obediently, you rocked your hips under his trap. 

“No less than you deserve.” He was all spite and venom. “Swallow.”

You couldn’t look at him, the stars in his eyes daunting and demonic.  Your tongue moved around the hilt, licking away the remnants of your vulgar display. You curled your fingers into the hem of his shirt, exhaled slowly through your nose, and complied, gulping the taste down. 

A timid glance found him studying you, but you didn’t know what he was seeking. Obedience? Passion? Reverence? The gravity of the moment was inescapable. He was deciding if you died here and now, and he gagged you from making any further entreaty.

Lithe for his size, he slid from the perch and pulled the athame from your mouth. Silently, he lifted you from the slab and dropped you on the ground. Not knowing if any of the flora was poisonous, you squealed, shot to your feet, and clutched the abused blade to your heart. A second later, you nearly impaled yourself with it when he threw the hefty book at you. 

Grateful that he didn’t destroy your remaining link to your family, you sunk to the ground and dug aching fingers into the dirt. It was cool and soothing, and you wanted nothing more than to lie down in it and die. 

Instead, you watched, benumbed and mute, as he punched a large hole straight through the center of the altar.  It should have been alarming; the crash of rubble should have scared you, but your senses were far past overstimulated.

Silently, he manipulated a chunk of the altar into a slender loop. 

It was astonishing. He was literally creating something from stone that should have been unyielding. Crouching beside you, he pushed your chin up to lengthen your neck. It was then you understood what was happening.  The thing he was fashioning out of the imbrued marble was for you.

Without a word, he molded it around your neck, cementing it with a pinch of his mighty fingers.

His masquerade as a man fell away. That shrine had stood for a thousand years, likely more, and he demolished it as though it was parchment. He had desecrated the altar to enslave you, spinning an infinite bondage into existence with his very will alone. 

The strength, the unfathomable power unleashed a yearning you weren't prepared to address. He was something wholly beyond what you'd been taught. He was profound, unknowable.

You ran your fingertips along the jagged edges and discovered his collar was perfectly measured to your size.  His fingers would fit between it and your skin, but nothing more.

Every story you ever heard about this place rang in your ears, a raucous chorus of warnings. The living could not stay here, nor could they take anything from here. 

But it was too late.

By your own hand, you now existed between life and death, trapped here by this pillaged, obsidian tether and it's king.

You didn’t know if he would do as you asked or if he would make you bear his children.

You did know that you would never be leaving.

[larryssunflower]

The Non-Royal Romance, part nine

Read past parts to catch up!

one   two   three   four   five   six   seven   eight

Tagging usuals but if you wish to be removed or added let me know <3 

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The following night with Drake replays in my head as my mother and I ascend into the bright sky in our jet. I bite my lip, looking out the window. Drake was someone different last night... he was so possessive, passionate... it makes me shiver just thinking about the way he touched me. After our makeout sesh, I had heard my name being called and reluctantly returned to the party. When the party eventually came to an end, I went to my room to find a note from Drake on my dresser which said, in scribbled handwriting which seemed to suit him well,  ‘Had to leave for rounds otherwise I would be here with you. Can’t wait to see you soon, D’. Which was alright, it gave me some time to celebrate alone.

I still sense that he is uncertain about us. He is clearly an ethical person and I can tell he doesn’t think that much of himself. But the fact that he ignored all that because he needed to be with me last night makes my heart flutter. “Alana? Are you okay? You haven’t spoken much,” my mother comments, making me jump slightly. “Oh, sorry, just thinking,” I say with a smile. She smiles back knowingly. “Big night tonight,” she says with a teasing tone, making me blink in surprise. It’s come so soon. My coronation ball. “Yeah! It’s crazy,” I nod with a hopefully not noticeably fake tone. My mother moves from her seat to sit across from me, taking my hands in hers.

“Alana,” she says, her tone serious, making my blink my eyes at her in surprise. “I know it’s a very big decision. But your family before you have done it for many years. I did it. You can do it too,” She pauses for a moment, a certain look in her eyes as she seems to stare into my soul. “It is a tough and monumental decision, but I can tell you’ve already found your love,” She says confidently, taking me by surprise. “It’s obvious, you are glowing just thinking about him,” my mother grins, taking me aback. I didn’t realize I was being so transparent. “I-I mean-“ I stutter, and she just laughs lightly. “No need to explain anything, I can wait until tonight, just like everyone else,” Mother says with a wink, getting up and heading to the restroom near the back of the plane.

As she walks away my smile disappears. I take in a deep breath, rubbing my temples. What am I going to do?

All I want is to be with Drake again. To feel the electricity between us and kiss those lips again. It seems insane to even think about being with someone else when what seems to be my soulmate is standing right in front of me. There is just so much shit stacked up against us. 

Then there is Liam. Liam is safe. Stable. Sweet. He‘s a good kisser and cares about me. Also a noble, so no issues with tonight. He just- isn’t Drake. Liam doesn’t consume my thoughts. He doesn’t kiss me the way Drake does, or make my stomach do backflips the way Drake does.

But I have to choose someone.

A deep feeling of dread starts to eat away at my chest. I have no option. But I should, right? I deserve to be with the man I want, not the man I feel obligated to be with.

As I glance out the window at the sparse clouds and bright sparkling ocean, a recurring insecurity rises in me. The ever-present doubt in my mind that I'm not supposed to be royalty. I can barely connect with my country in the way a ruler should, I haven’t spoken directly to the Cordonian public before, and it doesn't help that the idea of actively running this country makes me want to run away as fast as possible.

Obviously an amazing thing to panic about the day of my coronation.

I sink into my seat, burrowing my face in my hands. Fuck.

Our plane touches down on the tarmac and slows to a stop, prompting a group of workers to push a flight of stairs up against our jet. A limousine pulls up at the end of the stairs to take my mother and me to the palace and our press conference. We step into the dignified limousine and I start to feel myself sweat with anxiety. 

The drive to the palace is short, thanks to the police escort. I haven’t spoken to the Cordonian public directly before. I have indirectly, through reporters, but that is the extent. The nearer we come to the palace, the quicker my heart hammers in my chest. As we pull up to the back entrance, I can hear the crowd, a sick feeling fall over me. My hands start to feel slick and I rub them on the fabric of my dress. I wish Drake was here and I could feel that reassuring hand like I did that one night in the blizzard. Even just having him by my side would send a wave of reassurance over me. A memory of him opening my door, and holding his hand out to me to help me out of the car flashes as the door to the limo opens. I take the unfamiliar hand of some guard, smiling through the sadness. I miss him.

My mother and I walk through the palace, making our way to the entrance for the press conference. We eventually reach the podium and the sheer number of people gathered makes my knees weak. They cheer loudly as my mother and I stand together, and my heart hammers unpleasantly. I try to keep a calm look and clasp my hands tightly in front of me to hide the shaking. My eyes dart around the crowd, trying to calm myself down by memorizing faces when I reach a familiar face staring right at me. My heart skips a beat and that wave of calmness washes over me as I look into his deep brown eyes. An unfamiliar feeling falls over me as I look at him. The only way to describe it is an overwhelming feeling of appreciation and adoration. My lips part in shock at the feeling. Drake nods at me encouragingly, a smile on his lips. I reciprocate his smile, looking down for a moment to breathe. What was that?

My attention switches to my mother as the clapping slows and she begins to talk. “Dear Cordonains, thank you for being here today. As many of you know, tonight is the coronation of my dear eldest daughter, Alana,” She says gesturing a hand to me, and the crowd cheers. I smile to them with a polite wave, my gaze lingering on Drake’s face. As usual. “Alana has a big decision to make tonight and following the coronation ceremony, she will become your Queen.” Drake looks down at those words, making my heart sink. My mother continues with her speech and I try to concentrate on the words coming out of her mouth but all I hear is the blood rushing in my ears making her words muffled. I am going to be queen tonight. Holy shit. How am I supposed to do this? It was easy to pretend that this night wasn't going to come eight weeks ago, but now it has gotten serious. I am not prepared for this. 

Before I know it, the press conference is over, and my mom is gently leading me inside. 

---- 

I numbly stand under my showerhead, my mind wandering. Could I just run away? Create a whole new identity, and live my life like a normal person? I’m certain there are more qualified people who would do a much better job than me. I shake my head at myself and rinse out my conditioner. I need to be responsible and carry out my duties as needed. I would break my mother’s heart if I ran away. I turn off the water and dry myself off and wrap my bathroom across my body. I can do this.

After my shower, a small group of makeup artists come in, plop me in a chair, and start to primp me up. One pair works on my hair, drying and styling it into an intricate updo, topping it off with my tiara which I have despised my whole life. The other pair work on my makeup and nails, doing a great job and talking excitedly to me and each other. I try to be happy about all this because I should be right? I should be looking forward to being primped and the object of attention for an entire night, but the idea gives me hives. Luckily the group working on making me look prim and proper are finished, I thank them gratefully and they walk out the door, still talking in raised and excited voices.

Once they leave I shut my door, leaning against it for a second to calm myself down. I then pace my room in my robe, my feet padding on the wooden floors. What the hell am I supposed to do? How am I going to go out there, choose a husband, leave Drake, and become the leader of a country in one night? I collapse onto my bed, urging myself not to cry and ruin the work my makeup team worked hard on. This was a mistake. This whole thing.

A knock sounds and I jump up. Gingerly, I walk over to the door, unrealistically hoping that Drake is on the other side, ready to comfort me. I open the door and instead see Allie standing there, a huge grin on her face and a large garment bag. “Heyyy!” She sings, holding the bag up happily. I smile and let her in. “Oh my god, you look so hot!” She exclaims, hugging me. I laugh. “Heh, thanks. Not my work though, that makeup team surely is something,” I say, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “He will love it,” Allie gleams. I frown for a second. I never told her about Drake and I. At least not yet. “Who?” I ask and she laughs as she delicately places the garment bag on my bed. “Liam,” She says, confused. “You are picking him, aren't you?” She asks, turning to me.

I sigh and shake my head. “I don't think I can,” I say uncertainly. “What? Why? You guys seemed so close at the Beaumont Bash and Max told me he adores you.” Allie gushes, making me sigh. That makes it so much worse. “I just don't feel for him the way I should. I- I think I'm falling in love with someone else.” I say before my brain can even process it, my voice cracking. That's what I felt earlier. I am falling in love with Drake. “Who?” Allie asks, shocked. “Drake. My old bodyguard. At the Applewood Manor, he kissed me after saving me from that Tariq situation, and at the Bash, we kissed again. I- I don't know Allie. There is just something about him that I care so much about. He fills me with this overwhelming appreciation and calmness when I look into his eyes.  I have never felt this way about anyone. When we are together, my heart starts pounding relentlessly in an incredible way. His smile brings butterflies to my stomach and his touch is electric. I don't know how I'm supposed to choose someone else when I know I only want him,“ I finish talking, taking a breath and looking down slightly embarrassed by my over-sharing. 

I look back up to see Allie looking at me with a look of amazement. “Damn. Alana you cannot let him go. You have never spoken about anything or anyone that way before,” Allie says, starting to unzip my garment bag. “You need to get into this dress, go to that ball, and fuck it, choose who you love. Who gives a shit what anyone else thinks, this is your life,” Allie finishes confidently, making me smile. “You have no idea how much I needed that,” I grin breathlessly. She smirks, pulling out my dress, a Cordonian baby blue ballgown with ornate golden designs around the hem and chest. “Woah,” I say, impressed gently stroking the designs. “Let's get you dressed lovebird,” Allie laughs, making me chuckle, feeling excited for the first time today. 

Allie helps me into my gown and tightens it for me. Before I know it, its time for the ball to begin. Maxwell barges in excitedly to escort us to the ball. Once he sees me, he tears up, patting his eyes dramatically like an elderly woman. “Oh Alana, you look amazing!” He gushes, running over to hug me. “Careful of the dress and hair!” Allie exclaims, but I hug him tightly anyway. “God, you two are a nightmare,” Allie mutters. We break the hug and Maxwell turns to Allie, caressing her cheek. “A hot nightmare I hope,” He grins, making Allie roll her eyes, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Whatever Fabio, we need to get Alana to her ball so get out of the way,” Allie orders, making Max back up, smirking. “Bossy, mhm I like it,” He comments with a wink, making Allie groan, grabbing my arm and practically dragging me out the door. I watch amusedly as Max rushes after us. 

---

Eventually, the three of us make it to the doors of the ball. Allie kisses my cheek and then Max’s. “I'll see you guys after, good luck!” She says and I stop her. “Oh hell no, I need you in there,” I say, my eyes wide. “Alana, I'm not on the list, I only got to come in because I was giving you your gown,” She says quietly. I roll my eyes and turn to the guard by the entrance. “Hey, Milligan, this is Allie, and she is not on the list by mistake. She will be back shortly dressed appropriately, then you shall let her in, no questions asked.” I order in a dignified tone. “Of course, your highness,” He says, bowing slightly. 

“Alana,” Allie says, but I stop her. “I want you there, and you can keep Maxwell company. Just go up to my room and borrow one of my dresses, I don’t mind. Just hurry!” I say with a smile, making her grin widely. “Thanks, Al,” She says, giving me a hug. “Also it will probably piss Bertrand off, so I'm all for it. I would never object to spending a whole night with you,” Max smiles, making Allie give him a quick kiss. “I swear I love you even more. Okay, see you guys soon!” She says, before rushing away to my room. “Thanks for that Alana,” Max says and I shake my head. “Oh it was purely selfish I assure you,” I say with a wink, and he just nods with a grin, facing towards the main doors of the ballroom. I back slightly to the side as the doors open and announce him into the ball. He gives me a thumbs-up before heading in. The doors close again, and my mother appears. “Ready Darling?” She asks, looping her arm in my elbow. I smile, nerves eating away at me. I ignore them and focus on my mother. 

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say, and she smiles widely, leading me gently to the doors. They suddenly open, the bright lights blind me for a moment, the only thing holding me down being my mother’s arm as she leads me in. As my eyes adjust, I scan the decadent ballroom. They didn’t spare any expense that's for sure. Ornate chandeliers I have never seen before loom above the large crowd of nobles and suitors. They watch as we enter, making the uncomfortable feeling of being watched overcome me yet again. I don't think I will ever get used to it. We find our way to our thrones, and I try to sit delicately, even though I feel like collapsing onto it in dread. After we settle down, the music starts up again, and people begin to dance while others socialize and drink various cocktails and liquors. I watch the dancers for a minute as it has always calmed me down. 

I enjoy observing dancers as they sway, spin, and twirl to the music. It’s truly an art form and a great way to people-watch. A majority of my childhood was spent people-watching outside palace windows and sneakily around a corner while my mother held parties. Wondering what lives they held, who they loved, hated, what their deepest secrets were. Dancing is a vulnerable and beautiful form of expression. You can tell someone’s mood, their thoughts, just by the way they waltz. The way they hold themselves, how they look at their partners, etc. It's compelling. My eyes wander from couple to couple, observing how they look at each other. I see Neville dancing with some poor girl, his nose in the air, not even glancing at her as he swings her violently around the dancefloor. I try to hold a snigger. I spot Liam dancing with one of my younger cousins, Elaine. She is around 8 and standing on his feet. He grins as he swings her around, making her shriek with laughter. A group of women watches, swooning and talking about him to each other. He is definitely the charmer, that's for sure. He notices my staring, winking and flashing his grin. I smile politely before looking away. Guilt eats away at my chest. He probably thinks I will choose him.

As I glance around the room, and the main doors open. Allie walks in, wearing one of my dresses, a black dress which elegantly falls on her figure. I make a mental note to give it to her as it never fit right on me. I smile as Max sees her and rushes over to capture her in a kiss. They really are perfect for each other. As I watch them, I notice a smaller door opening on another empty looking wall. The security guard beside it turns and switches places with... Drake. They nod to each other, and the other guard goes through the door, closing it behind him. 

Drake clasps his hands in front of him, scanning the room, a searching look on his face. His eyes Immediately find mine and he stops. His gaze softens as he takes me in. ‘Beautiful’ he mouths, making my heart flutter and my cheeks heat up. I bite my lip as I smile at him. God, I definitely love him. He tries to surpress his smile, trying to be professional, as always. He looks down and gradually the smile fully fades. He clenches his jaw and looks back up at me, a vulnerable look on his face. Dread. My face falls as I remember the situation at hand. I blink back tears, forcing myself to look away. I take a deep breath and sutuate myself. I have to make a plan. I can’t leave Drake and I need to figure out how I can make it possible for us. 

Tonight will be monumental, thats for sure.

---

Sorry if this is a cliffhanger! I cannot wait for the next chapter hehe! This social isolation/ quarantine thing is great for my writers block. I apologize for how long this took me but my life has been crazy and im looking forward to spending this break writing! I hope you all are doing okay in this crazy time and this could possibly make your day better! Love you all and see you again for another chapter! Also sorry for the lack of Drake but there will be more than enough next time ;)

[zoequeenz]

Won’t Get Fooled Again (Part 3)

A/N: I would like to apologize for the 3rd Person POV that dominate this chapter. I feel to get the whole story you must know everything you can and sometimes that includes when Percy is not present. I am sorry in advanced. But please enjoy the few moments with her and let me know if I need to figure a better way to write said moments. Also, Tumblr readers, would you prefer I change Persephone to (Y/N)? I know I enjoy those fanfics much better on Tumblr. Please let me know! Thanks, Zoe.

MASTERLIST

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

3rd Person POV at Aimee and Emily’s House

As Agent Jennifer Jareau gives her press statement, young mom Aimee is busy stocking the fridge while her daughter draws at the table. Though she is busying herself, Aimee is listening to what the agent says. The details of the package and label it would have. Her daughter, Emily, asks when her dad will be home. Aimee tells her soon and that he needs to clean up the beach home for the next renters. Aimee asks Emily to unpack her suitcase.

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3rd Person POV at U.S. Penitentiary

Jason sits down.

“You were more ruthless than I expected. If you hadn’t pushed that button, you might’ve had a chance at parole someday.” Gideon tells Bale.

“Yeah. You know, I’ve thought a lot about that day, and there’s one thing I still can’t understand. You trusted me. Why?” Bale asks.

“I never trusted you.” Gideon counters.

“You listened to me.” Bale responds just as quick.

“I made an error.” Gideon tells him.

“I calculated you wouldn’t do it, and you did. Whatever you think, I’m gonna walk outta here, and you never will.”

“Here’s what I think.” Bale starts.

“Sending those agents into that warehouse, it just doesn’t make sense. I mean, I’ve read your books. I had all those things, what did you call it? Um… a homicidal triad. I even came from a broken family, classic sociopath, so when I had the chance to kill six agents plus a hostage, I mean, just because I gave myself up doesn’t mean that I was finished with those people. I still had the remote. You...you should’ve known that. And the emotional release I would feel by pressing that button...well, that was just a little too overwhelming to pass up. Why didn’t you search me before sending those agents in? Why didn’t you do your job, Agent Gideon?”

Bale smirks and turns away.

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3rd Person POV at Aimee and Emily’s House

“Mommy, there’s a present for you.” Emily calls out.

“A present? What does it look like?” Aimee asks back.

“It’s brown with blue letters. Can I bring it to you?” the little girls asks.

The look of horror washes over Aimee’s features as she realizes it was the very same package as the one the blonde lady had just spoken about. Aimee screams out a “NO!” as she runs to the door where her baby girl is standing with the package in hand. Aimee calls the police then goes to Emily, who is now crying. She puts her hands under the package to help her support it. It was getting heavy and if Emily dropped it the poor girl would not survive. When the police show up Aimee tells her daughter to keep holding on. Aaron Hotchner, who just arrived on the scene tells the ATF men to get the mother out of there and tells the person he is on the phone with to avoid bringing armed officers. They do not want to scare the little girl. As the ATF workers approach the mother and daughter, Emily complains about the package being heavy again and Aimee tells her to keep holding on and that she is doing a good job. Tracy, the ATF worker, assures the girl that it will only be a few more minutes as he slides a table-like instrument under their hands. When Emily makes another remark about the weight of the package her mother assures her she can hold on. Tracy asks Aimee to step back. Of course, she is reluctant. He asks for her trust and tells Emily not to move. As Tracy reassures, Aimee does too. Only a few more seconds. Everyone holds their breath as Aimee removes her hands and the table is slowly lifted to under the package. They were safe. Aimee grabs Emily and they are ushered away.

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Persephone Chase’s POV

While Hotch went to the house Elle and I stayed back at the station and continued to look through evidence. It didn’t seem too long before Hotch came back. He was on the phone with Gideon. As Hotch approached Elle and I told him of some new information we had found.

“We might have something. Barbara Keller was having trouble insuring some coins she bought.” Elle starts.

“The insurance company thought they might be fake.” I finished.

“So the insurance company’s blowing up annoying clients?” Hotch asks, confused.

“What if someone sold her the fake coins? She’s on to him...he shuts her up.” Elle responds.

“Were these coins valuable enough to kill over?” Hotch asks another question.

“She told the insurance company she thought they might be worth $12,000.” I tell him.

“All right. Do you two have any idea who sold her the coins?” Hotch questions.

“No, but she had an appointment with a coin dealer scheduled, I’m guessing to challenge the insurance company’s appraisal.” Elle answers. “A guy named David Walker.” I add.

“So maybe he can help us figure out who sold her the coins.” Hotch says.

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3rd Person at U.S. Penitentiary

Spencer Reid makes a phone call to Penelope Garcia for information on Bale and who he may have been in contact with.

“Office of supreme genius puzzle solver. Do you have a riddle for me?” Garcia greeted.

“I found out Bale has been accessing the internet by getting around a firewall that’s set up on a prison library computer. The guy even has an email address.” Reid explains walking through the prison.

“Wow. Sneaky bastard.” Garcia responds.

“Yeah. He’s headed to the library right now, maybe to contact the unsub. Now, is there a way to possibly monitor his keystrokes while he’s online?” Spencer asks.

“I can send him a virus, but he’ll have to open the email for it to work.” Garcia explains.

“Let’s do it.” Spencer answers.

“What do you want in the subject line?” she asks.

“Hm, let’s think.” he responds.

“Something that’ll make him open it.” she explains.

“Yeah. He’s impotent, something that’ll make him feel in control.” Reid answers.

“I got something.” the woman says with a wicked smile growing across her features.

And she did. When Bale went to the computer to check his inbox he had an all too interesting email waiting for him. What man could pass up a hot willing woman who is looking for an inmate.

“You got this guy’s number, he’s visited six porn sites in the past half hour.” Garcia informs Reid.

“Anything else?” he asks.

“Hold on. He’s posting to a message board. Naughtyhobbies.net. Looks like some sort of website for bomb enthusiasts. “To all my friends out there, beware, they are onto you.” she read.

“We need the names of everyone who’s been on that message board in the past month.” Reid tells her.

She begins working her magic. Reid then calls Gideon. He tells him all he and Garcia have been able to find while going through Bale’s computer. He says that the people he had been talking to weren’t from Palm Beach. Gideon asks about the occupations. Reid tells him it wasn’t required so most don’t have it listed. Gideon says the unsub would fill it in because of the pride in his work. Reid agrees. He then lists off the known occupations. Gideon stops him when he mentions an antiquities dealer. Why?

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Persephone Chase’s POV

Elle and I made our way to the Walker residence. When we got there we met up with David’s wife.

“Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more boring than coins and old papers.” she says.

“Are you two single?” she asks us.

“Yes.” we both reply.

“I have a word of advice. Don’t marry the first guy that proposes.” she says.

“I wanted a pool table back there, but David insisted on making it his workshop.”

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3rd Person at Palm Beach Police Station

Aaron Hotchner was at the station waiting for agents Chase and Greenaway to get back to him about the meeting with David Walker when he got a phone call from Reid. He is given a name. David Walker, a potential suspect. He stops writing when he realizes that two of his agents are currently at Walker’s residence and don’t know he is who they are looking for.

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Persephone Chase’s POV

We were about halfway to the garage when Elle’s phone began ringing and a car was starting up.

“Oh what’s he up to now?” Mrs. Walker asks aloud.

“It sounds like a car.” Elle says.

“I hope he’s not committing suicide.” Mrs. Walker says.

I won’t be able to collect life insurance.”

Elle answers her phone and I lean in to hear.

“Elle, it’s him.” Hotch says.

“It’s Walker.”

Just as Hotch finishes, the garage door opens. David’s car comes speeding out.

“GET OUT OF THE WAY!” Elle screams, moving and taking me with her.

When I look up from where I am on the ground I see him hit his wife. Holy shit, he hit his poor wife. Only stopping to get her off his car. Elle and I collect ourselves and ready our guns to shoot at the car. He speeds off without a single hit to it. It was only a few minutes later that Hotch, The EMTs, and the police showed up. I was still kind of shaken from seeing Mrs. Walker get hit and really needed Spencer but he was at the prison with Bale.

“You two okay?” Hotch asks.

“I’ll be okay.” I answer.

“Yeah, I’m all right. But Mrs. Walker…”Elle starts.

“Yeah. Guy’s a real peach.” Hotch responds.

“Morrison’s got a county-wide search out for the car, uniforms are gonna try to find out where his haunts are, and ATF should be here any minute.”

“You sure you’re alright?” he asks again.

We nod.

“Mrs. Walker said her husband spent most of his time in the garage.” I say.

“Let’s check it out.” Hotch responds.

We all head over to the garage. It looked like a typical garage. Tools on the wall. Plywood walls. However, it wasn’t as messy as normal garages.

“Well, we got the organized part right.” Hotch said.

“What’s this?” Elle asks pointing to a contraption.

It looked like a battery type thing with jumper cables attached connecting to a dime.

“I’ve seen these. It’s for electroplating.” Hotch says.

“Look at the date on the coin.”

“It’s half gone.” I say.

“He was using this to build up the metal so he could change the dates on the coins.” Hotch explains.

“To increase the value.” Elle says.

“Exactly.” Hotch responds.

“Like what he did with Barbara Keller’s coins.” Elle says.

“Look over here. Check this out.” an officer says.

We all go over. It was a cork board of newspaper clippings. He was keeping track of who made the best bombs. Surprise surprise it was Bale.

“So this is why he chose to use Bale’s design.” Hotch says.

“He was working on something.” Elle says, pulling away a sheet.

Under it was materials for a bomb. On the board, clippings from the explosion Bale caused that killed the six agents.

“Make sure Morrison tells your officers that this guy is smart, dangerous, and he has absolutely nothing to lose.” Hotch says to the officer.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

3rd Person POV at FBI Headquarters

As Penelope Garcia lays out her lunch and gets ready to eat Derek Morgan throws down a big stack of papers.

“You ready to do some work?” he asks.

“Why not? I haven’t slept this week. I might as well give up eating, too.” she answers, defeated putting her sandwich down.

“Oh, poor baby. Try not to let the tears hit the paper. It gets a little messy.” Derek teases.

“Hmm. What are they?” she asks.

“These are emails from Bale’s account. Reid forwarded them to me.” he tells her.

“What are we looking for?” she asks again.

“Well, right now, this guy Walker’s in the wind, so we gotta look at him from every angle, see if we can figure out his next move.” Morgan explains.

“Signature behavior. If Walker got bomb making tips from Bale, then maybe he got tips on staying clear of the cops.” Garcia says.

“Uh-oh somebody’s been taking notes.” Derek says teasingly.

“Medical school, schmedical school.” Garcia responds.

“Ha, ha, well, don’t hurt yourself, Garcia.” he laughs.

“Now find me something.”

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Persephone Chase’s POV

We made it back to the station. Gideon is now with us and Morrison tells us they have yet to find Walker.

“What do we know about Walker?” Gideon asks.

“He’s a quiet career criminal. Spent four years in prison for a series of forged checks when he was in his early 20s. He’s now 46. Past 18 years, he owned a store which sold coins, maps, and historical documents. We raided the place as soon as you gave us Walker’s name. Most of his inventory was fake, forgeries valued in the millions.” Morrison explained.

“But the walls started to close in on him. We talked to some of his clients, and he was in debt up to his ears. And promising stuff he didn’t have time to forge.” Hotch adds.

“The Barbara Keller found out that the coins he had sold her were fake. She threatened to out him.” Elle adds.

“And if she had, all the forgeries would have been discovered. He would have done 20 years.” I say.

“So he had to shut her up?” Gideon asks.

Hotch nods.

“He planted all those bombs just to kill one little, old lady?” Gideon asks, confused.

“Yeah, and to throw us off, he made it look like it was much bigger than it was.” Hotch adds.

“You hear me? I said stop now!” an officer yelled, grabbing everyone’s attention.

It was a man with a bomb around his neck.

“Please...help me.”

“Everyone back...Now. We need bomb squad in here.” Morrison says as he and the other officers pull out their guns.

“Please...it’s not me.” the man pleads.

“Don’t come any closer.” Morrison warns.

“Put your hands up and walk slowly back out.”

“I can’t. He’ll kill me.” he says.

“Who will?” Gideon asks.

“I don’t know. He held a gun to me…put this on me. He said...you’ll know who he is.” the man explains.

Gideon shrugs. “Well, what does he want?”

“A helicopter. A passport. He’s watching.” the man tells us, motioning his head towards the door.

“Once he gets what he wants, he’s got instructions to defuse the bomb.”

“Walker’s close by.” Gideon says.

Morrison orders for snipers around the perimeter. Gideon tells the man we understand and we won’t leave him. He pleads again to get it off. Gideon explains we need to know how it is built first then we can get it off. Tracy came in and quickly took a picture. The room was at a standstill. The poor man whimpered. Let’s hope we can figure this out, saving this man may help wash the imagine of Mrs. Walker out of my head.

NEXT CHAPTER

[justjessame]

A Little Ass and A Lotta Sass Chapter 32: We're Back...Home That Is, and We're at the Mercy of a Tiny Tyrant...

Our little girl. She was precious, and perfect. Her eyes held me captive, and her hair drew Negan’s hand like it was magnetized. I didn’t notice when Laura faded away, or when the doctor followed after cleaning me up following the exit of the placenta, and making sure that I was safe from infection and giving me a few stitches for a slight tearing that occurred.

Alone with her, allowing her to finally have her first meal, I watched in awe as she suckled the milk my body provided. How could I love someone so completely and effortlessly? Negan’s hand cradled her tiny head, smiling down at the two of us as our daughter drank her fill. We didn’t speak, I wasn’t sure I could, but the silence was reverent. This little girl held us captive and we couldn’t break the spell.

When she seemed finished, I held her up and repeated the burping procedure I’d perfected with my baby sister. Negan watched, clearly learning what to do, because I could see he was twitching with the need to hold her again. She gave a delicate burp and I smiled at her, with her little spit up, her tiny lips pursed.

“Here, Daddy,” I whispered, wiping her mouth with the slip of sheet that the doctor had given me for my modesty, and smiling as his huge hands dwarfed her small body. He was a natural. Holding her tiny head so carefully, and tucking her close against him. “She’s beautiful.”

His smile was breathtaking, as were his eyes, shining with unshed tears. “Of course she is, look at her mommy.” I smirked, thinking that right about now her mommy looked like she’d been to war and lost. “God, Callie, how can something this tiny fucking be real?”

I chuckled, “she didn’t feel so damn tiny when she was forcing her way out of me.” His chuckle was quiet as she’d drifted off. “So?”

And he knew the most important question we had to answer today. Which name was the right one?

While we’d waited for our tiny precious girl to appear, Negan and I had tried to find just the right name for her (or him). He’d been sure that our baby would be ALL me, so he wanted red themed names with green tinges. And I’d been absolutely fucking certain that our baby would be a miniature of him, boy or girl, and so I’d given the very opposite. I wanted gothic darkness with a hint of his hazel eyes that could change on a whim. And here she was a little of both of us.

We settled, finally, on her name as Dr. Carson came back and told us that if I felt well enough I could go back to our apartment. I honestly don’t know how long we’d been in the infirmary. How long the three of us were wrapped up together.

Our little princess. Negan’s precious bundle. Rick Grimes’ first grandchild. She needed a name that was as powerful as the two most dominant men in my life. Or at least made me think of their power, their convictions for their people. And most certainly that suited her tiny, captivating being.

And so, we named her Kiara Jade. Negan insisted that she should go by her middle name, since the name came from the color of my eyes. And I wanted her to be called by her first, because that’s how we picked it. It was actually settled by the women who guarded us, who would not hesitate to keep Negan and I safe, and now she was included. And that’s how our little girl became KJ, to them at least.

To be fair, only those outside our threesome used her name or initials at all. To us, she was ‘Princess’, ‘Angel’, and the one I used most ‘Pooh Bear’.

Back in our own apartment, Negan was fast learning that our little one was quite the demanding ruler. And yes, she ruled our home with a far heavier hand than I’d ever thought to. She demanded her food. She expected no hesitation in the delivery of her wants, which aside from food were the absolute necessity to be clean and dry at all times. She’d allow no hesitation in being bathed, diapered, fed, or cuddled. She expected both Daddy and Mommy to come to heel with her every whim. And for a newborn, she sure had a lot of whims.

First off, Kiara Jade did NOT like our sleeping schedule. At all. She also wasn’t fond of the bassinet. Or our bedroom. Or being put down. She expected to be held, coddled, rocked, and complimented. And if she was denied, then NO ONE would get any rest. And I mean NO ONE.

Negan, after the very first diaper that he’d changed (after the very first of hers that I did), realized that baby’s poop bears a horrifying resemblance to mustard, pudding, or as he was gagging, vomit. And he was absolutely flabbergasted by getting it out of all of her nooks and crannies.

“How the hell does someone so fucking small make this much fucking shit?” He asked, having procured a clothespin from the marketplace or laundry. And yes, he had the damn thing on his nose. Such a fucking baby, I swear. “And how the holy hell are you supposed to fucking clean it all out of her little fucking wrinkles?”

I’d laugh, because honest to fucking God he was killing me. “Just keep wiping until the last wipe you use comes out without anymore on it.” I advised as I made our dinner.

He took the task seriously. So seriously that I was waiting for him to give in to temptation and just fucking shower with her every diaper change. He hadn’t thought of it yet, but I felt sure that soon he’d figure it out.

Once he called the situation taken care of, and boy did he look like he’d had to run through a field of Agent Orange to get to the end, he’d act like he’d just fucking cured the plague. And she’d be cradled in his arms and his nose clip would be set aside and the baby talk would begin.

“Look at Daddy’s little princess.” He’d coo, and I’d roll my eyes. If only the Saviors and rest of the Sanctuary could see their fearful leader now. “Isn’t she just the tiniest, widdlest, thing in the whole fuckin’ world?”

Yes, Negan said the word ‘widdlest’. And yes, it was ridiculous. I’d watch him, walking around the room, rocking her in his arms as he treated her like the most precious thing in the world. And no, I wasn’t jealous. I felt the exact same way about her.

We tried, and I kept insisting on trying to lay her down while we ate. And she’d scream as though we’d tossed her ass out to the walkers to defend herself alone. After a few minutes, Negan and I would glance at one another in challenge, who would break? We both did at different attempts, but he broke more often. Pushover.

“She’ll never get used to being laid down, Negan.” I’d argue, as he ate with one arm and held her in the other. “And if she doesn’t get used to being in her bassinet, or her crib, then guess how long that six weeks is going to extend?” It was my last stand. And yes, I was using his absolute fucking NEED to have me sooner than later that I was bargaining on.

At first he acted like he could live with a few extra days or weeks even. But as the weeks stretched out, and she was STILL not having the alone time she needed, and WE needed for our own sanity, he started to hold out longer. And longer. And longer. Until, like a fucking miracle, she allowed herself to be put down in her bassinet with only a few moments of tantrum before she quieted, resigning herself to her fate.

I was smug. Abso-fucking-lutely I was smug. Negan was a natural at many parts of parenthood, but he’d forgotten that I had actual fucking experience.

He grew jealous of my breastfeeding her. NOT for the reason most people would assume, or the onesie she wore most often would infer. Actually he was jealous because he COULDN’T feed her. I couldn’t pump my milk, so he couldn’t bottle feed her, and he felt left out. Until I came up with a compromise. I’d be the cow, he could be the burper. That way we both got to cuddle her and participate in her mealtimes.

After the initial adjustment period of figuring out her patterns, then shoehorning her into a schedule, we actually managed to sleep. Before we knew it, she was sleeping mostly through the night, and she slept in the bassinet that she’d fucking detested on first contact. Once she crashed, so did we. Curling together, as tight as possible without breaking our six week rule, exhausted from our tiny terror’s rule we’d pass out.

Since we couldn’t actually have freaky deaky fun times, mornings became just as fucking irritating as they’d been before we came together. I’m sure that there was some form of intimacy we could try, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to know how fucked up my nether regions were after Kiara ripped free. What if it was damaged? What if I was loosey goosey? What if Negan took a look or a touch and thought ‘ew, not doing that again’?

And since I wasn’t ready for him to touch me, he abstained from any attempt I initiated to pleasure him. He martyred his own fucking pleasure, forgetting I’m pretty damn sure how fucking much I enjoyed it, because I wouldn’t let him reciprocate. And let me tell you, between the few too little hours of rest, the stress he had at juggling our family life and his role as the leader in our community, and NO fucking sexual release, we were both about as pleasant as one could imagine.

Clearly, all that stockpile of orgasms and penetration we’d tried ahead of time wasn’t fucking working. Not even a little bit. I lost track of time, honestly, and had no fucking clue how close to the end of our six weeks we were. Negan had too, apparently, because Dr. Carson and to remind HIM that Jade and I had a six week check up the next morning.

Negan’s eyes met mine over our dinner. Shit. I knew that look. That dark gaze, that lip licking. Fuck. Like truly, fuck, because I was fucked. Damn it. I wondered how to fucking ask the good doctor to be sure that I wasn’t destroyed and disgusting down there. Without my absolutely fucking raging at the bit husband hearing. Just fucking great.

[teamhook]

CS Pupstravaganza ~ Our Love’s Melody

Hello all! Well, who can say not to puppies? I can't. This is my contribution to the @cspupstravaganza

The song I used is Start of Time by Gabrielle Aplin. If any of you happen to ship Stydia as well, you'll recognize it.

Thanks to the pupper moderator, the lovelies over at Discord, and my Beta- @gingerchangeling

I've had this story in my drafts for a while, I just needed an excuse to really get into it. Thanks for the push.

Gotta tag a few people.

@searchingwardrobes @revanmeetra87 @ilovemesomekillianjones @hookedonapirate @seriouslyhooked @snowbellewells @kmomof4 @let-it-raines @shireness-says @profdanglaisstuff  @xhookswenchx @kymbersmith-90​

  AO3

FFN

In their prime, The Scoundrels were a fan favorite selling out stadiums sadly that was 10 years ago. Now they play small engagements. Reunions, bridal showers, birthday parties and whatever event Liam could find.

Killian, however, would sneak away and play hole-in-the-wall bars or what might be considered dive bars. He wanted to get inspired to write one more hit. At least. He wanted to prove to all the critics that called him a "has been" that he was still pertinent. But that was proving to be an elusive goal.

Killian kept declining offers from all different types of reality shows including Dancing With the Stars to The Bachelor. His brother Liam would simply say, "Killy, you are an amazing dancer, You would win, and it would be good publicity for your comeback." Killian's simple response, "I don't need a bloody reality tv show to become relevant my music will show that."

The brothers talked for hours and Liam finally agreed to back off about Killian doing any sort of reality show. At least for now.

"Brother, tell me what I can do to help," Liam asked in defeat.

Killian smirked, "Do what you do best. I want to focus on writing for a while, can you get me some help with Jolly and maybe make sure my plants don't die?"

Liam ponders for a second, "I could get a dog sitter and maybe ask if watering plants would be an added bonus."

"Aye, sounds like a plan. Liam, doesn't that blonde have a dog walker for Olaf?" Killian reminded his brother of the icy blonde he may have a crush on.

Liam blushed at the mention of Elsa, his brother was right. She had mentioned she was going to get one. "I'll ask her if she has any recommendations."

It turns out that Olaf's dog walker was a close friend and had enough time to walk Jolly too. The plants were not a deal-breaker.

Through Elsa, Liam hired Emma to be Killian's dog sitter.

First day on the job. Emma arrived promptly to take Jolly on his walk. She used the key that Liam had left for her in the lobby. She walked in and is soon met with an adorable black labrador/spaniel mix. She scratched behind his ears and looked for his leash. He jumped around full of energy. "You are a cutie aren't you? Yes, you are." She thought his owner would have at least been more organized and left her what she needed to do her job.

She sighed exasperatedly at the inconvenience to have to search for it. She walked further into the loft. It was beautiful and she couldn't help but admire the decor and the personal touches.

She noticed the Grammy awards and as she leaned over to read the name she heard someone clearing their throat. Shit! She got caught snooping. Just her luck.

She slowly turned around to face the music.

"Hello. I'm Emma Swan, Jolly's new pet sitter." She quickly introduced herself. She really hoped that she hadn't overstepped. "I was looking for Jolly's leash to take him to the park." She looked at him and noticed he had fetched his leash. The traitorous dog's tail excitedly tapped on the floor.

"I'm sorry, Miss. Swan. I'm Liam Jones. I meant to arrive before you but I got stuck in traffic." He smiled for a brief second.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have looked for it myself. You must think I'm unprofessional."

"The fault is mine. I should have been here to show you around. Would you like a tour?"

"I think Jolly is ready for his walk and maybe a little playtime. Would you still be here in about an hour?"

"I will be. I need to discuss something with my brother."

"Okay, come on Jolly." She smiled nervously and she left to the nearby doggy park, with a happy dog beside her.

Sixty minutes later she returned with a very tired and happy Jolly.

Emma knocked on the door this time while holding Jolly's leash. The door flew open shortly after. Liam smiled fondly at her and the dog. "So did Jolly behave?" He reached to pet the dog.

"He is a very well behaved dog."

Liam smiled in agreement, "Lass, I'm happy you got along well. My brother was worried about Jolly, but he really needs to focus on his writing."

Emma responded, "Oh, so I will not be meeting him?"

Liam smiled, "you will, but he will not be around much. He needs to focus on this new music."

Emma smiled and looked at Jolly, "I have no problem with that. I will gladly take care of this cutie. That is… if the job is still mine?"

Liam locked eyes with the young girl, "It is, Jolly has taken to you." He eyed his brother's canine. The dog happily wagging his tail in excitement.

Emma hesitantly, "Your brother was some kind of big shot musician from the awards I saw earlier, is there anything I might have heard recently?"

"I'm afraid not. He hasn't written anything in a while." Liam slowly walked past Emma. He stood for a second and returned his attention to her. "Miss Swan please follow me." He guided her further into the spacious loft. Emma walked quietly behind him, admiring the view of the space.

*Days Later*

Killian left his private studio to take a break and spend a little time with Jolly. He was walking around his apartment in search of his dog. He stopped at the sound of an angelic voice. The only person other than his brother that had a key to the apartment was that dog sitter Liam had hired. He had a feeling it was more about having some sort of interaction with the pretty blonde he was smitten with. Killian couldn't understand why Liam was so hesitant about asking the girl out. "Bloody git."

He was transfixed by the lovely melodic voice. The song was nothing he had heard of before. He liked to be familiar with the new sounds and artists. Once he reached the source of his piqued interest he was captivated by the image in front of him. A blonde lass was watering his plants as she sang to her heart's content. She hummed a melody as she inspected the plants to have the correct amount of water. She was walking towards her charge to ensure he had enough water as her day was almost over. She got ready for her grand finale in front of Jolly, the furball kept wagging his tail in excitement. Killian had followed the girl as she flowed oblivious to her uninvited audience. Her song came to an end as she pets Jolly goodbye for the day.

Killian stood in place his eyes focused on the door that had just closed.

"Mary Margaret, what are you doing?" Emma asked her older sister as she entered the bedroom.

"Uh, nothing." Mary Margaret closes down her computer and blushes at being caught. She sits up straight on her bed.

"Oh my god, are you still trying to vote for that show "Then and Now" to do a special on your favorite band, the Scrounges?" Emma giggled at her sister's antics as she dropped down next to her sister on the bed.

"Ems, first of all," she sighed,"It's The Scoundrels and yeah, I am. I don't get it. There is no activity in their social media accounts and I would love it if I could hear them sing at my wedding." Mary Margaret gasps in excitement, "Do you think I can get them?"

"MM, I love you but do you really think David wants a boy band to play at his wedding. It's not just your wedding you know?" Emma says with a raised eyebrow.

"It's not a boy band, and besides Killian Jones has the best voice ever. It's so dreamy and sexy." Mary Margaret sighs contently.

"I guess if that's what you want. It's your wedding, your special day." Emma smiled fondly at her sister.

"Enough teasing and tell me about your first week at work." MM prodded as she focused all her attention on Emma.

"MM, it's not a big deal. Just dog walking and watering some plants for some big shot singer." She shrugged.

"Do you know who it is?" MM asked excitedly.

"I saw some Grammys but I didn't get a chance to read the name, the guy that hired me said it was his brother's place." Emma shrugged.

"Didn't you ask?" MM asked confused.

"I'm curious but on my first day I was caught snooping. I just didn't want to push my luck." Emma confessed blushing.

"Oh, Emma." MM hugged her sister.

"Then the awards were moved. I haven't seen them since. So I took the hint." Emma continued.

"That was unnecessary!" MM said upset.

"I understand, they have a total stranger coming into their home. I'm not mad." Emma smiled at her sister.

"What did Elsa say? Did she give any details when she mentioned the job?" MM asked.

"Elsa just said she was helping her friend Liam out," Emma answered.

"Liam is the one that hired you? And he did it so his brother could write new songs?" MM confirmed as she started putting some things together.

Emma answered slowly. "Yes."

MM gasps, "Oh my gosh! Hold on, I have to double-check something." MM grabs her computer, opens it and does some frantic typing, while Emma watches her. "Ems, is this Liam?" MM points at an old image of a guy that resembles Liam standing next to her sister's teenage crush, Killian Jones. Emma stares at the image trying to read the caption below the photo, Liam Jones brother of Killian Jones singer/writer of The Scoundrels.

"Holy shit! How did you know?" Emma squints at the image as she asks MM.

"Liam is not that common of a name and how many Liam's can possibly have Grammy award-winning brothers?" MM is jumping off the bed excitedly. "Emma you have to introduce me or at the very least get me his autograph!" MM squees with excitement.

"MM, I haven't met him yet. I don't even know if I will. He is always in his studio working." Emma answers her sister.

"Ems, please, please, I'm begging you!" MM begs.

"MM, I can't promise anything." Emma stares at her sister.

"OMG, tell me he still has the tight leather pants! He used to fill them up perfectly." MM sighs contently at the memory.

"MM, I have no idea. You make it sound like I go snooping around. I just take Jolly out and feed him. That's it." Emma's glare brings her sister out of her happy memories.

Routine is not a bad thing per se. Emma likes it that way. No surprises, she had given up on ever meeting Jolly's owner. Liam had said his brother was busy, and she had witnessed the locked studio door. What she doesn't know is that he has seen her once or twice.

Killian Jones has caught himself spying on the lovely dog walker a few times. While she hums to Jolly, she is completely unaware of his presence. He's still not sure if he should be insulted or not about that. However, he can't help but be entranced by her as much as Jolly is. He considers introducing himself a few times, but quickly decides right now is not the time to dwell. He needs to write one more hit song. His time in the studio is proving to be a waste of time.

He hasn't used a lyricist since Milah. They had worked so well together, and fallen in love. At least, he had. He was just a meal ticket for her. As soon as she got a better offer she left him behind. No amount of pleas on his behalf made her reconsider. She was gone. He didn't want to give another the same kind of power again, but he might have to. He was going to ask Liam to put out feelers, but the new lyricist had to be a man. That is the safest way- no temptation.

Emma opened the front door expecting to be greeted by her charge ready to go wagging his tail, but Jolly is not in sight. She started to panic, what if something happened to him? She tried to calm down, and strained her ears...for a second...then she heard faint whimpers. She hurried to find the source.

He could hear scattered barks and some whining. Bloody hell his head hurts. Jolly pressed his cold nose on his clavicle for a second and then the pressure is gone. Killian tried to open his eyes, all he could do is peek. He sees Jolly being pulled away by an angel. Sunshine engulfed the room as he realizes that he's sprawled out on the black leather sofa he had fallen asleep on after indulging in one too many rum glasses. He could faintly hear a soft voice call out for his dog. "Jolly, come on boy. Let your papa rest." The dog whimpered it's response, "I know, baby, we are running late for your walk. I'm sure you need to pee." Jolly finally relented and followed her to the door wagging his tail.

Emma and Jolly left the apartment. "Okay, Jolly let's see what you got buddy." She released the leash and Jolly trotted away to smell everything he could get his nose on but stayed close to her. He was very well trained. She had been surprised by how well he behaved. He must be very loved by his person. Hm. What an interesting way to meet your boss she thought. He looked slightly older than the posters her sister had, but she had to admit he was good looking. She could see some chest hair peeking out of his shirt. He must have taken a break from the studio because every time she picked up Jolly the door was closed with a light on meaning to not disturb. That light was always on. Her attention returned to Jolly. He was chasing a butterfly. She giggled because that dog was simply adorable. She feared she was getting too attached. What was going to happen when her services were no longer needed? After an hour or so Jolly got tired. He'd done his business enjoyed a treat or two. His head resting on her lap.

"Alright, let's take you home. Daddy should be ready for some love from you."

They return to Jolly's home and are greeted with a sour-faced man exiting the apartment.

Emma turned to Jolly who simply tilted his head. She opened the door and let Jolly enter. She was putting away Jolly's leash and filling his bowl with fresh water. She filled the watering pot and went to water the plants. She heard music coming from the living room. It was odd since usually, the place was quiet. It was a catchy melody. Without thinking she started singing softly…

It's like the sun came out

And the day is clear

My voice is just a whisper

A throat clearing made her turn her attention away from the plants to the source. There he stood, dark-haired with an unkempt scruff. A smile showing his teeth. Faded jeans with an old loved band t-shirt. He was scratching behind his ear.

"Hello, lass." with a crinkled smile, "I didn't mean to interrupt such a lovely performance."

Emma blushed, and gently put down the watering pot. "I'm sorry-"

"That was good. A lot better than that git my brother got. The best lyricist, my bloody arse."

"Oh, I didn't mean to overstep."

"You didn't. Listen to this and tell me what comes to mind, or you can sing it," he smiles as he picks up his guitar and starts playing.

She is still with closed eyes and she can't stop herself…

Louder than the screams you hear

It's like the sun came out

Emma pauses for a second to keep listening…

There's a ghost upon the moor tonight

Now it's in our house

She can feel his eyes on her but the music is still flowing through her…

Oh, today I'm just a drop of water and I'm running down a mountainside

Come tomorrow, I'll be in the ocean

I'll be rising with the morning tide

He is just staring at her, her words are perfect. "Lass, Where are my manners, we haven't been formally introduced, Killian Jones at your service." He bowed his head in an attempt to be charming.

She rolls her eyes, she guesses he has no idea she saw him earlier laid out on his couch drunk as a skunk, but she couldn't stop herself, "I know who you are."

"Ah, so you've heard of me. You haven't even told me your name." He smiles.

"I'm Emma, Jolly's walker."

He walks towards her and extends his hand for her to shake. As her hand lands on his, he pulls it to his lips and gently kisses it.

Emma's lashes flutter, and she slowly pulls her hand away from him. "Nice to meet you." She turns to leave.

"Emma, I have a proposition for you."

She pauses then turns to face him, "what kind of proposition?"

"Lass, I imagine you saw the idiot that left the apartment as you arrived?"

"Yes-"

"He was the lyricist my brother got for me. He is supposed to be the best but I beg to differ. He had no soul."

"I don't understand. What does that have to do with me?"

"Well, that verse was lovely, just perfect. I can't help but ask, have you done any writing?"

Emma looks around, "Hasn't everyone?"

"I would like for you to consider writing some lyrics for a song. I've never been very good with them myself."

"Yeah, I don't think so. I don't write lyrics."

"Lass, all I'm asking is for us to kick some ideas around."

"I'm sorry. I just can't." Emma bolts out of the apartment leaving a speechless Killian.

[pug-bitch]

That’s not why I’m going (38)

Keep it together

Book: The Royal Romance

Pairing: Drake Walker x Amara Suarez

Rating: some foul language, some extremely suggestive. This is absolutely NOT appropriate for people under 18.

Word count: around 5,000 (oops) (I am on the app right now on my iPad and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add a ‘keep reading’! If anyone knows, that would be super helpful, if not, I’ll add it when I’m on my desktop :))

Notes: This picks up pretty much where we left off, the day of the Decision Ball, starting with Drake’s POV.

*****

Drake watches Amara as she frantically tries different pairs of shoes to go with her red gown. She looks so beautiful in this color, her dark hair down on her shoulders, curls everywhere. He can’t help but smile.

‘What?’ she asks, grinning too.

Drake shrugs. ‘You’re beautiful. Can’t help it.’

She smiles a little wider. ‘You’re beautiful too. I can’t believe you got ready so fast. I’m already a record breaker, but you have me beat!’

He runs his hand through his hair, his smile stuck on his face. He wishes he could stop time, right now. Just be with her now, and for always.

But she’s right. They have to face the world. She has to show them that she won’t be broken. How could she be, she’s Amara Suarez! Detective Badass.

A knock on the door pulls Drake away from his thoughts. As Amara applies her lipstick, he walks towards the door and unlocks it.

‘Hey guys,’ Maxwell says with exaggerated caution, his hand on top of his eyes and a smiley Michael behind him. ‘Just checking in to see if you’re doing alright. Are you decent?’

Drake rolls his eyes and gives Michael a shrug as if to say Sorry man, he’s always like that, gotta get used to it. Michael laughs. Drake says, ‘Max, uncover your eyes, I wouldn’t open the door if we weren’t decent.’

Max obliges and comes into the room. Upon seeing Amara in her red gown, he gasps. ‘OMG babe. You’re gorgeous! And that hair… As Bertrand would say, Yass Kween!’

Michael chuckles. Maxwell looks at him in all seriousness. Michael’s eyes widen. ‘Wait, you’re serious? Bertrand says Yass Kween? Your brother Bertrand, with the long swimming shorts?’

Amara lets out a throaty laugh that makes Drake’s heart flutter. She says, ‘He saw the light when he discovered Queer Eye, but his closet didn’t get the memo.’ She turns to Michael. ‘You look amazing, Michael. Max’s tux suits you!’

Maxwell beams. ‘Right? I told him he can keep this one. He pulls it off better than I ever did. He gives out some James Bond vibes.’

Michael blushes. ‘Oh please. You all look great, by the way. I feel so intimidated right now, you’re all so comfortable with all this fancy stuff…’

Drake leaps in right away, ‘Oh, don’t be fooled, Mike. I’ve been at court basically my whole life and I’m still super uncomfortable in any fancy setting. It’s just a lot better when you have loved ones around you, to help you through it.’ He glances at Amara. ‘Hey guys, maybe I could take a picture of you to send Amara’s dad? He’d probably love seeing his daughter look so regal and happy, and of course, seeing you two together.’

Maxwell’s face lights up. ‘OMG how have we not thought about it?? Let’s show Jorge how hot his daughter is.’

Amara grimaces uncomfortably. ‘Not sure it’s the point, Max. Plus, it’s a little gross, when you say it like that. But it’s a great idea, Drake. Michael, what do you say?’

Michael’s grin can’t lie. ‘Let’s do it.’ He places himself right next to Amara while Drake takes out his phone. ‘Let’s do the prom pose,’ Michael says. ‘Plus, it’s a nice callback to your actual prom date, who was also a gay man.’

Amara gasps in mock shock and nudges Michael’s elbow. ‘How dare you talk about Adrian?’ She says in an exaggerated manner. They both laugh. ‘Well,’ Amara adds, ‘at least I look less like a cream puff than I did on my quinceañera…’

Drake glances at Maxwell and they share a knowing look, both happy and relieved to see Amara and Michael reunited, and acting like siblings. ‘Alright guys,’ Drake says, ‘smile!’

*****

Jorge is busy painting with his granddaughter, and he barely hears the ping of his phone. Callie is growing up so fast, and she looks so much like her father, that Jorge wants to soak up every second with her. The little girl is not one for staying inside the lines, but Jorge is a patient grandpa. He shows her how to follow the curve of the puppy drawing with her crayon, again and again, until she’s happy with what she’s colored.

‘Jorge!’ Nancy cries out. ‘Your phone is beeping!’

He rolls his eyes in an exaggerated manner, making Callie laugh. ‘Grampie, your eyes are crazy,’ she says through giggles.

He sighs and gets up, his back bothering him slightly. ‘Alright, let me go see what’s going on, sweetheart!’

He meets Nancy halfway and she hands him his phone. ‘I think it’s Amara,’ she says with a wide grin.

Jorge puts on his reading glasses, forced to admit that they do help him see better. He opens his texts.

Papi, Michael surprised me in Cordonia! All is well, we talked, we love and miss you. Give our love to Callie and Nancy. Attached is a picture of us, getting ready for a ball! Xo Amara and Michael.

Before he knows it, a light sob escapes his body. He didn’t mean for it to come out, he really didn’t. Now Nancy is looking at him worriedly. Fat tears are forming in his eyes as he stares at the picture of his kids who have forgiven each other. Unable to say anything yet, he gestures for Nancy to come look at the picture too. She gasps.

‘Honey, they look adorable. This is so great!’ she says, tears in her eyes.

Jorge takes a deep breath and kisses his wife on the cheek. How blessed is he? His Sergio must be so happy, watching over them. ‘Callie, sweetie,’ Jorge finally says. ‘Wanna see a picture of Daddy and Auntie?’

*****

Amara is sitting in the back of Bertrand’s car, with Drake next to her, and Hana in the front. Olivia is riding with Maxwell and Michael.

‘Is everyone doing ok?’ Bertrand asks, probably perturbed by the silence.

Hana responds first. ‘I’m fine, thank you Bertrand. Just anxious to see the end of tonight!’

Amara is too. She nods and turns to Drake, who offers her a smile. They agreed to stick around Ramsford and possibly the cabin in Portavira once the evening is over, for a few more days, while Michael is still in Cordonia. Then, they’ll keep a low profile and travel around Europe, away from the spotlight, the time for everyone to forget all about her and any impact she ever had on Liam. They will try to find Savannah. Then, when things have calmed down, they will resurface and tell Liam about their relationship. Drake told her earlier that he’s not sure there’s anything to salvage in terms of his friendship with Liam, but Amara doesn’t want to jeopardize it. After all, they have been friends for a long time, there’s always something to salvage.

After all, she didn’t think there was anything to salvage between Michael and herself. Look at them today.

Amara silently hopes Hana will stick around, too, although she’s pretty sure her friend will be headed to London to see a certain someone again.

As much as Amara is happy that the competition is almost over, a bittersweet feeling invades her. What if it’s the last time they’re all together, here, bitching about the court and its politics?

She shakes her head. No, this isn’t helpful. Her eyes meet Drake’s again, and he gives her a reassuring smile, as if he’d been in her head, reading her thoughts. She takes his hand, briefly, and squeezes it.

‘Here we are!’ Bertrand proudly announces.

Amara takes a deep breath and gets out of the car, after one last longing look shared with Drake.

*****

‘Holy shit,’ Michael whispers. ‘It’s even more opulent than yesterday.’

Maxwell smiles. ‘Yeah, they really went all out for the Decision Ball. Hey, have some champagne!’ He hands a flute to Michael, and one to Amara, before swiping one for himself.

Amara drinks hers nervously. She should mingle, but her heart’s not in it.

‘Hello, Maxwell,’ she hears an unknown voice behind her. ‘Long time no see, you old bitch!’

Maxwell’s eyes widen. ‘Leo! Hi! I had no idea you were here!’ The two men hug. Amara has heard so much about Leo, Liam’s older brother, that she feels like she should have recognized him solely from the way he greeted Max. Also from his looks - Leo seems to be chiseled from bronze, from head to toe. Wavy golden hair, sort of like a young Hercules, and a smile that has probably made a lot of panties drop.

Leo pats Maxwell on the back. ‘I heard about your coming out. It was really badass, man, congrats!’

Maxwell smiles. ‘Thanks, Leo. I appreciate it. Hey, let me introduce you--’

‘Amara Suarez, right?’ Leo interrupts, offering her his hand to shake. She complies.

‘Um, yes, nice to meet you.’

He brings her hand to his lips and kisses it. Amara has to stop herself from grimacing. ‘VERY nice to meet you,’ he says in a voice that is supposed to be sexy. ‘My brother did not lie about your beauty. You’re stunning.’

‘Hi, I’m Michael,’ Michael says, holding out his hand. Leo takes it.

Amara grins. Michael is obviously nervous and overwhelmed by the Palace and the whole thing, but he’s in big brother mode right now, sensing that Amara needed rescuing from a creep. The three men exchange pleasantries that Amara does not pay attention to, until Leo changes the subject. ‘Where’s Walker?’ he asks.

Maxwell stops in his tracks for a split second, and responds, ‘He’s over there with Rashad. Why do you ask?’

Leo smiles broadly. ‘I haven’t seen the son of a bitch in a while, so I want to say hi. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.’ He turns to Amara and winks at her. ‘And lovely lady. I hope to see more of you later.’

He walks away. Amara frowns. ‘More of me? What does he mean, more of me?’

Maxwell grimaces. ‘Ew. He has become even sleazier, and I didn’t think it was possible. Little Blossom, I have some Purell for your hand if you want. He almost licked it.’

Michael snorts, ‘So I’m not crazy, right? For a second, I thought it was a local custom and I wondered, should I have kissed that woman’s hand when you introduced me? Then I thought, no, he’s just a creep.’

Amara shakes her head. ‘I guess Liam doesn’t seem so bad now...Why do you think he wants to see Drake?’

Maxwell puts a reassuring hand on Amara’s arm. ‘Honey, it’s fine. He just wants to say hi. Besides, Drake can hold his own.’

*****

‘Father, can we talk?’ Liam whispers to Constantine, who is helping himself to a seltzer water.

Constantine sighs. ‘Sure, son. What is it?’

Liam smiles nervously. ‘I’ve thought long and hard about it. I’ve made my decision. I’d like to run something by you, now. Can we go outside?’

Constantine reluctantly agrees. He tries to limit his amount of walking in public, to avoid being perceived as sickly. He can’t control his movements as well as he could, just a few weeks ago. He can feel himself become weaker physically, and he can’t stand it. He certainly doesn’t want his subjects to see him as weak. But his son insisted, so now he’s wobbling around, trying to keep it together until they’re out of the ballroom.

‘So?’ he asks Liam impatiently.

Liam clears his throat. Constantine has always hated when he does that. ‘Father, you’ll be pleased to know that I’m going with your suggestion.’

Constantine can feel his whole body relax. Finally, his son has heard the voice of reason. Maybe he can even cancel what he had planned for later. Maybe it’s no longer necessary. ‘Good,’ he says, remaining completely calm and trying not to appear too excited. ‘I’m happy you changed your mind, Liam. This is the right decision.’

Liam gives him a weak smile. ‘That’s not all, Father. I have a non-negotiable condition to this.’

The King has to make a superhuman effort not to roll his eyes. What, now? And to think he was this close to being proud of his son’s decision. Now he’s about to ask for something. As if it wasn’t enough to have to watch his other son running around the ballroom, winking his way through all the ladies present. King Constantine loves his sons, but he wishes he could punch them sometimes. He sighs. ‘What is your condition, Liam?’

Liam adjusts his ascot. ‘Father, I am making this decision for Cordonia, because I am aware that I can’t follow my heart on this one. But I don’t want to give up on true love.’

True love. Constantine can’t believe his ears. But he has to keep listening, after all, Liam is meeting him halfway by making the right decision. ‘What do you propose we do, Liam?’

He continues. ‘I want to give Valtoria to Amara.’

Constantine’s face falls. Valtoria? To a Mexican whore? Over his dead body. Which, for the record, might happen sooner rather than later. ‘That’s preposterous,’ he whispers, outraged.

Liam stands his ground. ‘Well, whatever you may call it, it’s non-negotiable. I have feelings for her, Father, and I know she doesn’t...yet. But if she can’t stay close, she’ll leave without having given us a chance. At least, if she stays in Valtoria, she’ll be able to get to know me. It will be a lot less scandalous if I have a Cordonian arrangement with a noblewoman. Plus, she has made a great impression on the press, she has made a lot of effort to learn about Cordonia and our history, and let’s not forget that a lot of the nobles have already taken a liking to her, even Olivia—‘

‘Oh, you mean the woman who fornicates with her servants? What a great endorsement.’ Constantine spits out.

‘Father,’ Liam says calmly, ‘I’m not asking for the moon. I’m asking for your approval. The duchy is unclaimed, it would just mean that I have to make her a Duchess. It’s been done before.’

Constantine remains silent. It’s worse than he thought. And to think he was about to call off what he’d planned for after the ceremony… No way he’s doing that now. Not a chance in hell. His son needs to see for himself what he really wants to bring to court. He shakes his head vigorously. ‘Liam, this is ridiculous. Everyone will see through this, everyone will see it’s a whim.’

‘Valtoria needs a Duke or Duchess, and I found you one,’ Liam says firmly. ‘I don’t think it’s that much to ask for you to just say yes. Once you pass over the crown to me, once I choose a spouse, we can work through the details. Like I said, it’s non-negotiable.’

Constantine snorts. If he says no, Liam might not honor his end of the deal. So, for now, he has to make it seem like he’s open to it. ‘If you say it’s non-negotiable, then let’s leave it on the table. We’ll talk about it again after the ceremony.’

Liam beams. ‘Thank you, Father. I can give you more compelling arguments later, too.’

Oh, so can he. He smiles and walks away from his son, slowly but surely. Bastien is standing near the door, waiting for Constantine to make his way back to the ballroom. As he passes his bodyguard, the King whispers to him, ‘Please make sure that what we planned happens after Liam has chosen his spouse. I want it out there for everyone to see.’

Bastien nods curtly. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

Constantine gets back to his original spot, silently seething. Yes, he will show his son how terrible his judgment is.

*****

Drake sips his whiskey slowly, next to Leo. Sure, it’s nice to see him again, but he can’t help but think that Leo’s excitement over spending alone time with him rings a bit false. Like he’s trying to milk him for information on behalf of Liam.

Leo’s known for a lot of things, and subtlety is not one of them.

‘So,’ Drake risks, ‘How was your trip?’

Leo gives him a dashing smile. ‘It was awesome! I went all around Europe on a cruise, and since it’s ended, I’ve been in Morocco, and then Brazil… Just having a lot of fun.’

Drake nods and takes another sip. ‘That’s awesome. It’s nice of you to come back for your brother’s ball.’

Leo’s smile falters. ‘Yeah, I gotta say, I’m a bit worried about this little bastard.’

Here it is, Drake thinks. This is a lecture on friendship. Oh well, he’s not all innocent in this whole thing, so the least he can do is stick around and listen. ‘Oh, really?’ Drake asks in a falsely nonchalant tone.

Leo nods. ‘Yeah. You know he’s completely fooled by Madeleine’s newly found niceness, and he feels very isolated from everyone. The pressure of being King is getting to him, and believe me when I say I understand why.’

Drake bites his lip, trying not to say what he wants to say, along the lines of Leo, you are the very reason why Liam has to go through this pressure. But this wouldn’t help anybody right now, so he just nods. ‘I get it. But you gotta know that he’s been hard to support, these days. The Liam we both knew is difficult to see, through the mask of Courtly Liam.’

‘Drake, can you blame him? He has new responsibilities, and for God’s sake, our father is sick! Liam needs friends and support right now, not the cold shoulder.’

Drake takes a deep breath. ‘So, I take it you’ve heard that Liam and I have had tough times, huh?’

Leo shrugs. ‘Yeah. He told me that you didn’t like the way he acted with this woman, Amara.’

Drake has to try really hard to remain expressionless. ‘Yes, well, Amara is a friend, and I don’t like to see women being preyed on by entitled men. That’s all. If you had seen the whole thing, you’d understand.’ Maybe, he thinks. He would probably not understand, but it was worth saying it.

Leo raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re telling me you’re picking sides, and you’re choosing a chick you barely know, over your best friend?’

Drake sighs. Of course he didn’t get it. ‘No, Leo, that’s not what I’m telling you. It was just the starting point of our differences, but there’s more to it than that.’ He stares into his glass. ‘Plus, I don’t think you understand the whole ‘picking a side’ thing. If I see someone doing something wrong, I’m gonna call them out on it, whether they’re my best friend or a complete stranger.’

Leo nods. ‘I guess. But Liam needs you. Now more than ever. Think of all he’s done for you.’

Drake’s heart sinks. Of course he thinks about it, all the time. Of course it kills him. Of course he owes Liam so much… But is it a reason to close his eyes on the different person he’s become? Is it a reason to let go of the best thing that’s ever happened to him? Once again, he can’t count on Leo to understand. ‘I know,’ he says sadly. ‘I owe him everything.’

Leo’s stare hardens. ‘Yes, you do. He took you in, Drake. He includes you in everything. Hell, he considers you as more of a brother than me. Don’t forget that.’ He pauses. ‘He needs a brother.’

Drake frowns. ‘Got it. Good talk, Leo.’ He walks away, a knot in his throat.

*****

‘Hey guys,’ Drake says as he approaches Max and Michael.

They both smile, and Maxwell greets him warmly. ‘Hey Drake, where did you disappear to? We’ve been looking for you! Come have some of these amuse bouches, you’re gonna love them.’ He hands Drake a tray of little canapés.

Drake smiles. ‘Did you swipe that from a staff member?’

Maxwell nods enthusiastically, his mouth full of puff pastry.

Drake and Michael chuckle. ‘I just had a chat with Leo,’ Drake says. ‘He came on really strong. Told me I need to be there for Liam. It messed with my head.’

Maxwell sighs and smiles. ‘Don’t let him get to you. He basically licked Amara’s hand like a cartoon wolf, earlier, right, Michael? You can’t trust a guy like that. Don’t humor him.’

Drake nods. He’s still painfully uncomfortable, but he did the right thing coming to Max. The guy’s crazy, but he has a way of supporting his friend like Drake has never seen before. Even the way he immediately took Michael under his wing is remarkable. ‘Thanks, Max,’ he says as he pats his friend on the back.

‘Oh shit,’ Maxwell says, ‘speak of the devil, here comes Liam, everyone smile!’

Drake turns around, and sure enough, Liam is coming towards them, his fake smile plastered on his face.

Michael whispers, ‘Should I bow? What should I do?’

Maxwell whispers back, ‘Relax. Follow our lead, I’ll introduce you.’

‘Hello, gentlemen,’ Liam says enthusiastically. ‘How is everyone doing on this fine afternoon?’

Drake has to force himself not to roll his eyes. ‘Good to see you, Liam,’ he manages.

Maxwell chimes in, ‘You probably remember Michael Hansen-Suarez. Michael, this is Prince Liam of Cordonia!’

Michael awkwardly curtsies, which he probably has seen on The Crown or some other show. ‘Pleasure, Your Highness,’ he says, his head bowed down.

Liam holds out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Michael. I’m happy to see you back here again, I feel terribly about the way that you were introduced last night! Please accept my most sincere apologies.’ He does not even wait for Michael to respond, and turns to Drake. ‘Drake, do you have a second? I want to talk to you about something.’

Drake nods, looks at Max and Michael and excuses himself.

Once the two men are out of earshot, Liam’s smile drops. ‘Jeez, this is stressful,’ he says.

Drake nods understandingly. ‘I can imagine. How are you holding up?’

Liam nods. ‘I’m ok. Not completely happy about my decision, but it’s the best I can do, with what I’m given at the moment.’

Drake raises an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me—‘

Liam shrugs. ‘What am I supposed to do, Drake? Father is dying. It’s his wish.’

Drake remembers Leo’s words. He needs to be supportive right now, especially since he may disappear after the ceremony and not be there when Constantine actually dies. ‘I understand, Liam. I just hope you can find happiness in any way you can. Honestly.’

Liam gives him a sad smile. ‘Leo talked to you, huh?’

Drake chuckles. ‘Yeah. He made me feel like shit, which I probably deserve. I—I didn’t mean to abandon you. At all. I was just really put off by some things. You know me, I don’t change my mind easily. I should have supported you more.’

Liam sighs. ‘It means a lot, Drake. Thank you. For the record, I didn’t ask Leo to come to you. He told me he might, and I told him not to.’ He snorts. ‘Ironic, huh? My notoriously flaky brother, giving you shit for not being there? It’s fucked up.’

Drake chuckles earnestly. ‘I guess. But you know you can count on me, right? Even if we’ve had our differences…’

Liam smiles. ‘I know. Plus, I’ve come to realize that you were truly right about how I behaved with Amara. And this whole thing with her brother-in-law...how is she doing, by the way?’

Drake nods, stunned that Liam is asking him that when he hasn’t checked on her once since last night. ‘She and Michael talked, she’s doing ok.’

Liam smiles. ‘Good. Let me tell you, something wasn’t right with that speech I was given. I need to look into it. Between this and the way I’ve behaved with her...I owe her, now.’ He clears his throat. ‘Which is why I negotiated with Father, and I’m going to offer her Valtoria.’

Drake tries to speak, but the words are stuck in his throat. ‘Wh—what?’

Liam gestures to stay quiet. ‘Shh, no one knows yet, and no one will until after this is all over. But she’s been a great person through and through, she has made a lot of connections here, and I just thought as a symbolic gesture—‘

‘You are giving her a duchy?’ Drake’s head spins. What’s Liam’s angle? Does he simply want to keep her close? Is that his way of apologizing for trying to fucking grab her?

Liam nods excitedly. ‘Yes. Well, if she accepts. But, from what I gather, she doesn’t have much to tie her to her life in New York. So… Fingers crossed.’

*****

Amara has been hanging out with Hana and Liv, safely away from all the drama around. The three women are enjoying light chit chat and beverages, all three of them choosing to remain blissfully ignorant about the rest of the world, and the rest of the evening.

‘What do you mean you’ve never been skinny dipping?’ Olivia says, a frown on her face.

Hana shrugs. ‘No I haven’t. I’m not saying I’m opposed to ever trying, but I have to say, I don’t see the point.’

Liv snorts. ‘True. Unless there’s someone in the crowd you’re trying to see naked, there’s no point at all.’

Amara is looking at her two friends, a goofy grin on her face.

‘What?’ Liv spits out.

Amara laughs. ‘Nothing. I’m just enjoying the banter. You guys are the best.’

Hana squeals. ‘Aww, you’re the best, honey!’

Liv chugs her drink. ‘You girls are gross.’ She turns her head towards Drake, who is walking towards them. ‘Walker, long time no see! Where did you put Domvallier? Wasn’t he with you?’

Drake gives her a faint smile. ‘He had to take a phone call, but he’ll be back. He said he wants you to save him a dance.’

Amara smiles broadly at the thought, and is about to tease Olivia about her budding romance, when she notices Drake’s pale face. ‘Drake, are you okay?’ She says worriedly.

He nods. ‘I’m fine. I’m just—thrown for a loop. Can I tell you guys something and we all remain calm? I don’t want to attract attention by going outside—‘

Hana puts a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘Of course. Tell us, Drake, don’t worry.’

*****

Drake feels slightly better after telling the ladies about what Liam just announced. He had asked him to keep it to himself, but it’s impossible. The thought of Amara being stuck at court because Liam wants her close… he doesn’t know what to think, how to react, but his gut instinct is sadness. Court always had made him feel inferior. It’s full of sharks. Of people like Madeleine, like the new version of Liam, like the Duke of Karlington, and so many more people who thought commoners were lesser than. Of course, on the flip side, there’s good people like Maxwell. Bertrand. Even Liv. Rashad. But would that life make Amara happy? He’s too afraid of studying her face to see the answer. He stares at his feet instead.

Olivia is the first to speak. ‘Okay,’ she says softly, but firmly. ‘It’s obvious that Liam is doing that to keep her at hand, huh? So the intention is already...not fucking great. But…’ she trails off. ‘I mean… that would give you an opportunity to stick around, and it could be your out,’ she says to Amara. ‘You manage the duchy for a while, you’ll be near Drake and near...us.’

Hana chimes in, ‘You don’t have to accept, though. If you want your freedom over the title and the rest, you can absolutely say no, and I’m sure Maxwell and Bertrand will find a way to have you stay in Cordonia, if that’s what you want. Amara?’ She asks her friend, who is still silent.

Drake finally raises his eyes to her level. God, she’s so beautiful. Her face looks just as lost as his own, which somehow reassures him. They’re on the same page. He wants to take her hand so badly, and out of habit he almost does, but stops himself.

‘This is nuts,’ she says, a nervous smile on her lips. ‘I do love being here, I love you all, but doing it this way…’ she chuckles. ‘It’s fucking crazy. I’m not a noble, I’m a cop, and I’m a bartender.’

Olivia laughs. ‘There’s a first for everything.’

Amara shakes her head. ‘No, if he really does offer it to me, I’ll have to turn it down. Let’s stick to the plan.’

Drake can breathe again.

*****

‘Shit, look at these flowers,’ Michael whispers. ‘And these picture frames. And do you think the sword over there is real?’ He asks Maxwell.

Max laughs and nods. ‘Yeah, it is. I opened a bottle of champagne with it once. I can vouch for its sharpness.’

Michael smiles. He has to make a true effort in order to keep his shit together and not squeal. He wonders how Amara does it. He’s been observing her all day, and she is right in her element, she looks like she was made to mingle with nobles.

He smiles wistfully as he thinks back of the young woman Amara was when he met her, ten years ago, when she was just graduating high school, ready to go to college and take on the world.

Nope, not the best way to keep it together.

‘You okay?’ Maxwell asks, concerned.

Michael takes a deep breath and tries to will the tears to go back to where they came from. ‘Yeah, just overwhelmed.’

Maxwell smiles. ‘I get it. You have your sister back, and you’re in a foreign court, it’s a lot to process.’ He pats his back. ‘Take your time.’

He’s about to open his mouth and thank Maxwell yet again for understanding him so well, but he’s interrupted by a change in the music. There is, all of a sudden, a violin solo coming from the orchestra, which silences everyone, until the King is the center of the attention.

‘People of Cordonia,’ he says, ‘The time has come for my son, Prince Liam of Cordonia, to make his decision.’

*****

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[chariotwellness]

Is This Happening to Us or For Us?

Is this happening to us or for us? I know, I know… (insert finger in throat) Barf! In all seriousness for a moment, we all have had our world turned upside down by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve connected with so many dear friends and family I haven’t spoken to within years. Some have been impacted way more than others and the anxiety levels are through the roof! All in all, even the people whose lives may already be in the location of the home on a daily basis, homeschooling their children, the world has come to a standstill for us all. Our axis has quit spinning. While we have stopped with the globe, we are still watching everything around us swirling in the air waiting to see where it will all land.

I’ll tell you, in the matter of a single week, my mind has gone from sipping a glass of wine with my feet up after a long day’s work (which I greatly appreciate hard work right now, by the way) thinking, “This is looking slightly concerning” to “Holy %$&*! I’m going to be shuffling under I35 with a cardboard box in hand soon!” to “Ah well… I’m gonna enjoy the stillness of this journey.”

In no way am I saying any of this mentality is correct or best. What I am saying is in a matter of a week, I have found a little peace in solitude. A tiny piece of peace. I mean A. Very. Tiny. Minuscule. Piece.

I cried for a couple of days, called some loved ones and sobbed in their ear, dramatically grieving the loss of the world as I once knew it. A variety of things big and small, meaningful and not… everything I think about is being affected. For instance, I’ve never even been to SXSW. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy the heck out of it, but as long as I’ve lived in Texas (my whole life) I’ve never been. I have no idea why. Maybe never found the time or desire. However, I did find myself weeping tears for SXSW, as it feels it has been a part of my existence. I’m a Texas girl. It’s a part of my roots of where I’m from. The fact that it has lost so much money from canceling and it’s future is in question is absolutely heart-breaking. I want to go more now than ever. It’s a funny thing… we, humans, really value life and it’s existence after it stops.

I rarely cry or even get teary, but I found myself getting a bit choked up watching this sweet elderly couple languidly walking by, both their posture was a bit hunched. The older gentleman with a typical cardigan and the older woman with buttoned up cotton blouse with an embroidered pattern. She carried a little grocery list in hand. Sticking by one another’s side, looking around gathering things up slowly in their cart to prepare for what could be a long time indoors. I have felt eerie when I hear a cough in the next aisle over from me at the grocery store. I even got mildly teary after a sweet teen-aged cashier apologized to me with wide eyes at the checkout after he had touched his nose briefly during our transaction. The empathetic being in me wanted to jump across the counter, hug him and tell him it was okay. That he would be okay and I would be okay and we all will be okay and please do not apologize to me for such a regular humanly action. But that would be weird. Plus we’re supposed to stay 6 feet apart.

I have taken many deep breaths and found appreciation for the quiet streets. I am an avid walker in the neighborhood that I reside. I have found much appreciation for a daily walk more than ever right now. I think a lot of us equate being outdoors with rejuvenation, fresh air, freedom, a sense of ease, empowerment. Boy, does that ever ring true right now. I need this walk everyday.

Being the extrovert I am, it has forced me to get creative with connection. I have face-timed and talked on the phone with many people. It’s been nice. I’m normally an avid texter. I’m guilty of looking at my phone of even loved ones calling and completely ignore it. Engaging takes a lot out of me and I tend to be all or nothing. I don’t weather talk.

I appreciate opportunity for solitude, but I’d normally be dying right now after five days of being cooped up. The acceptance of not knowing a new norm yet can naturally produce anxiety to say the least. We are still watching things unfold. On the flip side, sitting with complete utter uncertainty and the unknown could actually be quite liberating. My anxiety has definitely gone through the roof and I’ve coped in numerous ways these last few days. Some more healthy than others.

However, throwing my hands in the air giving it to God and the Universe can give a sense of freedom in letting go of control. In being very intentional about letting go from here on out is vital to my emotional well-being. Ironically, letting go is such a balance. Finding the control to let go of control is quite the mind-f&#k! (that should be a bumper sticker.) Once you can get ‘there’ and actually stay ‘there’ is where one can find solitude and peace. One might say it’s being connected with your inner being, your true essence. Some might say that’s easier said than done. I hear ya! I find it’s very hard to stay ‘there.’ I have found the mystery of ‘getting there’ and not slip away from my inner being is nearly impossible at times like these, especially when some government official is announcing some huge impact on our everyday life and livelihood every single day.

How to get there is another story. It’s different for everyone. Sometimes I take a walk outside and listen to a podcast. Sometimes, it’s meditation, sometimes it’s talking to a friend. Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” Maybe ask yourself, “During the duration of this historical time of a global pandemic… if it serves a purpose in my life in any way, what would that be? What could it possibly be for?”

I have been greatly impacted this past week, as I am currently unable to work. My daily job of doing hair has naturally come to a screeching halt. Absolutely no fluidity of income flowing in. Bills still have to be paid. I keep reminding myself to ask, “Why is this happening for me?”

I realize I am certainly not alone and usually I find solace and comfort in knowing I am not alone while walking through a dark time. However, I find myself with more of a heavy heart thinking of all the other hairstylists and people who serve a community face to face are most likely unable to work. It is just unreal and I find myself filled with the most empathy and compassion I’ve ever felt in my entire life. It’s like watching those Sarah McLachlan commercials with the abused dogs and your heart squeezes and aches. I would immediately change the channel to get relief instead of doing something about it. Yes, I realize that could possibly set off a chain reaction of animal rights activists. In no way am I saying we, as humans, are being abused. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that as much as I would love to, I can’t save everything and everyone. One, I’d be broke, and two, taking care of myself and my immediate world around me can be overwhelming and I admire those who can do so much more. Turning off the channel gives my heart instant relief, as shoddy as that sounds. Right now I can’t do that. I can’t change the channel. We are hearing of and/ or seeing how someone is affected all day everyday. It’s heart wrenching.

The world is changing. I am in no way saying death and sickness are for the betterment of anyone. Simply, that our world is being significantly impacted… all of us together. Maybe in due time, it is for us. Why is this happening for you?

[scarrow]

“When I was pregnant with my first daughter, she would kick responsively, and then she would take naps. It seemed logical. This baby never stopped moving, but she never did anything responsive, either. The movements were so random…

“Because of that worry, at 35 weeks, my midwife sent me for a “peace of mind” ultrasound...

“I know [the nurse] said the words “Dandy-Walker,” which I know now is a brain syndrome that has varying degrees of severity. I remember asking, “Are babies with this ever normal?” and she said that sometimes they were. She told me they couldn’t know the severity of the situation until after I had an MRI. That’s how they would determine if my baby would be OK or if she would be “incompatible with life.” Those are the words they used. Incompatible with life…

“Waiting was awful. I imagined every possibility: What would it be like to have the miracle baby who was OK and exceeded all expectations? What if she died at birth? What if she lived only a couple of years? What does it mean to get a DNR (a do-not-resuscitate order), for an infant? Hospitals are legally protected from trying to save a baby and not legally protected from letting a baby die…

“The neurologist, who told us that our baby had Dandy-Walker malformation, [said it was] the most severe presentation of the syndrome. It basically meant there were holes in her brain. She also had agenesis of the corpus callosum, which meant the bridge between the two hemispheres of her brain didn’t grow. So we had two malformations, each of which had a wide range of outcomes, but, combined, had a horrible prognosis. The doctor said, “We expect your baby to have moderate to severe mental retardation; she’s going to have moderate to severe physical disability; she is probably never going to walk or talk; she will possibly never be able to lift her head; she is going to have seizures all of the time.” At first, I was thinking, “This doesn’t make sense, she’s always moving,” and then he mentioned seizures, and I understood…

“In that moment, I had to shift my thinking. I was hoping for special ed, and had been focusing on questions like: How much should you save to know your special-needs daughter will be OK after you die? I was thinking about long-term care and mild to moderate disability. Instead, I had to think about a baby who was probably not going to live very long, and the longer she lived, the more pain she would be in. That realization – that I was more scared of her living than of her dying — is what made the choice for me…

“The doctor asked if we had any questions, and I said, ‘What does a baby like this do? Does she just sleep all day?’ The doctor looked so uncomfortable. He said, ‘Babies like this one are not generally comfortable enough to sleep.’ 

“[at the abortion] After the injection, he asked how I was feeling, and I just said,  “I feel so sad. I’m going to miss her…

“Then on the fourth day, they induced my labor. I got Pitocin, and it was actually a very natural birth. It was quite healing for me. I couldn’t do anything for this baby — I couldn’t fix her brain or make her well, but I could deliver her from my body. I chose to view her, so they cleaned her up and brought her in and she looked a lot like my older daughter. She was beautiful and she was whole. I got her footprints and had her cremated and they sent us her ashes in the mail a few days later. We wanted to name her after a flower, so we called her Rose.”

A few things strike me about all these late-term abortion stories. When the potential parents learned their child would have a disability, they weren’t angry. They may have been sad, but they started planning and researching how to give a disabled child a good life. The only people who chose late-term abortions are those who believe there is no good life possible: that the baby’s suffering will only increase more and more until an early death. 

But, again, here’s a sampling of the comments this story received… they were vastly negative. 

“Pro-Life Comments”

Those medical problems aren’t that bad.

“Apparently medical necessity doesn't matter anymore. It's just a matter of if it feels right to abort or not. This is an appalling story. That baby had unique, unrepeatable DNA and this was her one chance at life. Now she's been erased.”

“Very sad story for many reasons! Of course, I can't help but wonder what the child's life might have been like had mom had the will to allow him/her to be born. Perhaps the child would have overcome many of the disabilities and had a reasonable life, or perhaps the medical problems would have been so severe, the child would have died. But, did mom had the right to decide whether the child lives or dies? I still don't think so.”

“This article has not swayed my opinion on late term abortions in any way. Everything about the story from the way the doctors informed the patient to the concerns of the parent were fairly biased and selfish. Even with the severe malformation, the child could have lived a very fulfilling life. My brother has lived a full life (he's now in his 40's) with a similar condition. Sure, he's never going to be a neurosurgeon or complete college, but he has held down a job for the last 25 year, owns a home and even got married to someone with a similar condition. He does require some home care, which the family provides, but it was far from a burden.”

The parents wanted a “perfect” baby

“She murdered a baby because it wasn't perfect? She murdered Rose. MURDERER ! ! !”

“Sorry but I don't agree with this mother's decision. She got pregnant and when she found out that it was not perfect, she had this poor little baby euthanized. that was so selfish of her. If this baby was not viable, her little heart would have stopped on its own… Many children have medical problems & live well with support of family who LOVE then UNCONDITIONALLY. I'm sure some one with a huge heart would have loved to adopt and love Baby Rose. These parents stole that opportunity of that life option away. And who said she died peacefully. I'm sure it was a quiet and very painful death. Shame on these parents. They never gave Rose the chance at life, all because she wasn't perfect.” 

“This is heartless and she is trying to make it sound like she's not selfish. She is sending her [older] daughter the message that if your aren't perfect, healthy, you don't deserve to live. This is sort of sick. Probably a shallow pretentious woman and husband who can't be bothered with ‘less than.’”

You should count on a miracle/God/Nature instead:

“I was told at 6 months [pregnant] that my daughter would be very sick and disabled. That she would never walk, and most likely would die after 3 weeks and if she lived, she would never be able to take care of herself…. Sometimes you have to trust yourself that you can handle it, and trust GOD that is will all work out. I did not trust these doctors and I am so HAPPY I didn’t, or I wouldn’t have my beautiful daughter.” [I’m happy for you too! But miracles don’t happen every time.]

“Don't even TRY to normalize this. Being a nurse in my younger years, I saw babies born that would not have a chance These mothers knew that, and carried to term, delivered, and held their precious babies until they passed. Don't even try to act like this 8 month termination is anything but murdering the poor baby. Let NATURE take its course. Barbarians.” [Author was certain she wouldn’t be allowed to hold her dying baby; that the hospital would work hard to extend her painful life.]

Murder

“You murdered your baby just in time to celebrate your birthday... selfish.”

“Just pretty much another Mother destroying a new life! The value of life does not stop and start on an liberal ideological timeline!”

“What in the name of everything good and holy is wrong with these sick SOB's? They actually believe they can chop up an infant child as "their" body. These people are monsters of the worst kind in human history, Hitler, Stalin, Pal Pat had nothing on these despicable women and those that butcher children. Get an education, look at what you are doing before you comment or do anything. How does anyone make it OK to butcher a baby with no pain killer, NOTHING!” [reminder that in this case, the fetus was given a single shot and died peacefully, then was delivered whole vaginally.]

[therichonnewritingnetwork]

Spirit of Confusion 

written by: charrrmed read more of @mayyoualways​ ‘s works at FFN 

The smell of their abject fear always alerted him to their presence. The odor barged into his nostrils and gave him a taste of how they’d felt that violent day outside of St. Sarah’s Church, watching as their fellow congregants succumbed to the undead, some attempting to help to their own demise and others running for their lives. He always smelled them before he saw them, and the smell always lingered after they left.

But they hadn’t left tonight. They were still roaming, and sitting in the pews, and going through the walls, and lining up for Holy Communion. Sometimes they forced him to hold mass. Those times, he truly felt like he was in hell, sermonizing to the people he had essentially killed, his voice trembling as he promised them heaven, feeling nauseous as he talked about the devil. In those times, he felt like the devil, preaching to those who were now bound to him, mocking them.

The church itself reeked of rage, fear, blood, and death. There was blood on the pews, the walls, floors, bibles, and hymn books. Inside of the bathroom once frequented by the female members of the congregation, blood flowed from Michonne’s hands and drained down the sink. She had long become numb to the sight. It didn’t repulse her, and the smell no longer made her want to retch.

Illuminated by faint candlelight, she rubbed her hands together like they were coated in soap instead of what used to be a life source. She shook her head as she cleaned her hands. “Doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “They deserved it.”

“You deserve it.”

Her stomach dropped to her feet at the familiar voice, and she spun around. A gaunt corpse lunged for her, and she screamed. She scurried around the sink to put distance between her and the walker while reaching behind her for the katana.

In the blink of an eye, the walker was gone. Vigilant, she scanned the room, heart booming in her chest.

She reached behind her with a steady hand and lifted the candle from the sink. “Hey,” she called out, voice strong.

Nothing. No walker reacting to the sound of food.

Maybe Father Gabriel was in the room. Maybe a final straggler from Terminus. Maybe a human. She crept to all four corners of the room.

Nothing. No one.

Father Gabriel’s unfortunate words echoed in her ears. This is the Lord’s house.

“It’s four walls and a roof,” Tyreese said slowly. “Now, I’m sorry, but that was disrespectful.”

“You’re thinking about that right now?” Sasha asked as they walked back from the graveyard they’d just created behind the church. Her eyes were unfocused on the light that Tyreese shined to guide their way.

“Better than thinking about the bloody church we ‘gon be sleeping in tonight. We just massacred a bunch of people in a church. That’s what we did!”

“I have a headache, Ty. I don’t care. No, I’m not looking forward to this, not the smell, not seeing it, not cleaning it. Goddamn, why does everything have to be so hard? Can’t we ever run into a fucking hotel? What’s the W lookin’ like?”

Tyreese snorted then openly laughed. Sasha started laughing as well, her shoulders shaking. Laughing made her feel even more tired, however. She had so little energy left for the rest of the night.

They fell into a contemplative silence, only interrupted by the leaves and sticks crunching under their feet.

“You still pray?” Sasha asked with a curious glance.

“Of course,” Tyreese answered.

“Of course,” she mocked. “None of this has shaken your faith, not even a little?”

Tyreese had an answer for that, but he waited a beat before sharing it. “When Karen died.”

Sasha stopped walking and faced him.

“When we got close…” he shrugged. “It made me feel like God still made good things happen, the small things, you know? Clearly, fixing this shit is gonna be on us. We probably caused it, you know? When I realized she’d been killed, and how she was killed, man, I didn’t want anything to do with that: God, faith, belief, none of it. I felt like if something was gonna happen, if she was gonna get justice, then it was up to me. Things weren’t just gonna happen.”

Karen’s burnt corpse was one that he still couldn’t shake from his memory. He still had nightmares about it. He still despised Carol. More than anything, he despised that he wasn’t capable of matching Carol’s savagery. He’d plotted to get back at her after his fight with Rick, but his conscious had gotten in the way.

“I’m really sorry,” Sasha said.

He regarded his younger sister carefully and then asked, “Did you enjoy what you had with Bob?”

“Uh, I don’t wanna talk about that,” Sasha answered. She resumed walking to discourage further conversation about Bob.

“I’m just saying: all you can do is enjoy the present for what it is,” Tyreese said as he followed after her.

“I said stop,” Sasha commanded, an edge in her tired voice. “I had it right the first time. I shouldn’t have bothered, shouldn’t have…cared. And now he’s…fucking dying. I prayed after we lost the prison,” she shared, stopping again. “I did, for the first time in a long time, because I wanted you to be okay. Even if I never saw you again for the rest of my life. I wanted you to be okay. And now I’m…back at square one.”

She wanted to feel nothing about Bob dying. At this exact moment, she hated his passivity. Because he was still in a good mood. Even though his hours were numbered.

She stared at the outline of the small church against the night sky. This would be Bob’s final resting place. Him and the Terminus savages. Did he care that he wasn’t going to be buried among illustrious company?

Probably not. He was probably just happy that he had made it this far.

Suddenly, she wondered how she would feel when it was her time to go. She wondered if she even wanted time to think about it or would quick and dirty be best?

Rather than contemplate further, she chose to address Tyreese’s reaction to the dismissive comment that Maggie had made earlier. “You know White folks tend not to be religious,” she said as she stared at the cross.

“Actually, my daddy was very religious.”

Tyreese yelled as he spun to shine the light on the newcomer.

Sasha whirled around and raised the bloody dagger in her fist. “Shit!” she cursed between clenched teeth. Her eyes flitted down to make sure that Maggie’s feet were actually touching the ground, because she had not heard anyone walking behind them.

“He always made sure we were in Sunday school,” Maggie said stoically. Her eyes drifted up to the steeple.

“Hey, we didn’t mean---” Tyreese began.

Maggie slowly lowered her eyes to him. She walked around the pair and continued to the church.

Sasha focused on Maggie’s feet. Her eyes widened. 

It was a calm night, for all intents and purposes. Hands on his hips, Rick stared at the trees that stood like some kind of barricade for the church. He could only make out the ones that were immediately in front of him. It was so dark that if someone were taking aim at him right now, he would have no idea.

The thought made his stomach quiver in fear. He had come to despise the darkness. Darkness meant cover for people who wished him and his family harm. Like Gareth and his people.

Why do it, he wondered? Why seek them out for a fight? Why not just gather their broken pieces and rebuild somewhere else? That was what his group was striving to do.

His group was made of a few, but it was mighty. They’d decimated an entire community in a matter of minutes. He was beyond proud of that.

He couldn’t pinpoint what would make Gareth and his team seek them out. Revenge? Arrogance?

Every possible motivation seemed stupid to him. Gareth’s group had lost despite the many weapons that had been at their disposable.

The leaves in the trees rustled, and his stomach clenched again.

What a strange place to build a church. For the first time, it occurred to him that there was no parking lot. How far away had people parked to come here? Then again, it was still entirely possible that Father Gabriel was a fraud. Maybe he’d found this place after the fall. Maybe his cassock and clerical collar were costumes.

Maybe the real Father was buried on these grounds.

“Rick,” Michonne called as she touched his shoulder.

The hairs on the back of Rick’s neck stood sharply on end, and he spun around and grabbed her wrist in defense, his heart racing.

His sudden movement made Michonne gasp. “Goddamn it!” she exclaimed as she tried to twist her hand out of his vice grip. It was to no avail.

Rick let her go. “You scared the hell out of me,” he said. He began walking back and forth to disperse the rush of adrenaline.

“You scared me! Damn it, that’s what I’m trying to get away from,” Michonne said, frowning and indignant that he’d startled her when she was the one who’d walked up on him.

“I didn’t hear you coming.” Then he realized what she’d said. “Why are you scared?” he asked, his eyes cutting sharply at the church, his thoughts on Father Gabriel.

“I don’t know,” Michonne said as she rubbed her arms, trying to get rid of the goosebumps. “It just got…strange in there. I…” She sighed. “I’m pretty sure I saw a walker in the bathroom, but…there was nothing there.”

“We just need more candles and flashlights in there,” Rick surmised. Ceasing his pacing, he refocused his attention on the trees, hoping no one was lurking among them.

Michonne watched him closely. Really, she was debating whether she should tell him all that had happened in the bathroom, about the voice she’d heard.

Rick looked at her, and she quickly looked away. Rick frowned. “You alright?”

Michonne inhaled, staring into the distance herself. After the screams inside of the church earlier, things felt too quiet now. “Why are you out here?” she asked suddenly.

Rick frowned again. “I was burying some of the bodies, and then…I just wanted to be out.”

Michonne lifted one of his hands. She could barely see it, but she did see clumps of something. She felt it, too. Blood and dirt. “Wash your hands,” she said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”

Her hands looked clean to Rick, so he wasn’t sure what she was alluding to.

Michonne blew out a breath as she looked at the trees. Slowly but surely, her stomach began to tighten. She started to feel like she was waiting for something to happen. Something was coming. She wasn’t sure what. It was as if the land itself was holding its breath.

“Do think there’s anyone out there?” she asked.

Rick shook his head. “We swept the area. There shouldn’t be.”

Michonne looked at him. “But you’re not sure.”

“I…I was more sure before I came out here.”

“Should we do another sweep?”

“Maybe.”

A cool breeze flirted by, rustling the trees, and Michonne felt a strong urge to hide behind Rick, so strong that she took a step back.

Rick looked her way.

“What?” she asked.

“You tell me,” he said as he angled his body to face her. “You…honestly…you’re making me uncomfortable.”

“I’m making you uncomfortable?”

Rick tilted his head. Something felt off. Their communication was off, which felt…uncomfortable. He felt like something was going unsaid. Something was dangling between them. He realized then that even in times when they weren’t on the same page, when they had different approaches to a problem, they always knew what the other was saying.

In this moment, he didn’t know what she was saying. He hadn’t since she’d stepped out. He looked beyond her to the church.

Michonne raised her shoulder to ward off a sudden chill. Now, she wanted to move closer to Rick. She wanted his warmth. He looked like he would be very warm, very comfortable, a giver of good hugs.

Rick looked at her again, and her heart dropped, overpowered by dread.

“I hate the way you’re looking at me,” she said.

Rick didn’t blink. However, of all of the things he’d fantasized about her saying to him that one was not on the list. “Sorry,” he said.

She wanted to say that it wasn’t him. She didn’t know why she felt that was true.

Rick looked at the church again.

“Hey, can you…can you stop doing that?” Michonne asked.

“What?” he asked as he focused on her.

“Looking behind me.”

Rick smiled. “You hate the way I look at you. But I can’t look behind you. Should I look at the front?” he asked, pointing at the trees.

Unfamiliar sadness slowly crept up on Michonne and hugged her from behind. Rick pointing out her contradiction made her feel silly, low, like he didn’t think much of her.

She walked forward and hugged him, tying her arms around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes and tried to feel something familiar. She was always so sure when she spoke to Rick. His presence usually made her feel good. Now, there was a disconnect that she could not pinpoint. It made her feel alone, even as she hugged him.

Sadness made more room for itself, extending to envelop Rick and downplay Michonne’s contact. Instead of the comfort that Rick always imagined when he fantasized about hugging Michonne, he felt the urge to cry, confused about what she was doing. He closed his arms around her back. He registered her small frame, but he couldn’t find the comfort. He pressed his head against hers, searching for it to no avail. It made him sadder.

“I heard a voice,” Michonne said, her voice small like Rick had never heard before.

“A voice?”

“Yeah. I heard Mike, my ex-boyfriend,” she explained as she straightened to look at him, her arms still around his waist, his still around her back.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure I heard him, but…the walker I saw was a woman. She was wearing a dress. And then she wasn’t there.”

“Tell me you’re not losing it,” he said as he pulled her in flush against his body, protective.

“I don’t know.” Michonne turned her head back to look at the church. “It looked different”

“The walker?”

“Yeah.” Turning to Rick, her face slack, she asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Ghosts?” Father Gabriel asked from the small attic of St. Sarah’s Church. “You don’t honestly believe in ghosts, do you?”

He was leaning against the wall and staring out of the window, at Rick and Michonne. Rick’s mouth moved only when his mouth moved. He wanted to flee but he was unable. Tonight, he was in hell. The spirits were going off script. He had been ready to sacrifice Rick’s group to them, like always. But then Gareth’s group had arrived. He didn’t yet know whether or not this month’s due had been paid.

Next to him stood the woman from the bathroom. She swayed as she watched Rick and Michonne, her long dress swishing around her gnarled ankles. She was enjoying the opportunity to move again, to feel again, taking up space between Rick and Michonne, unevenly weaving in and out.

Father Gabriel’s mouth moved only when her mouth moved.

Never miss a post! Follow Us, @therichonnewritingnetwork for new Richonne Fanfiction Treats! 

[killingthebuddha]

“All of us become pilgrims at one time or another, even though we may not give ourselves the name.” –Richard Niebuhr

PJ, who presides over Dublin’s dusty shop Sweny’s, has read Joyce’s Ulysses 51 times in 6 different languages. Over a dark pint of Guinness, with the mist from the glass melting on his fingertips, PJ speaks about the lines from the book that are making his pulse race that minute. He doesn’t try to persuade you of their sacredness or its genius. He just smiles slightly, revealing coffee-stained and wayward teeth, and nods as he cites whole paragraphs. PJ loves Joyce. To PJ, Sweny’s, the shop where Leopold Bloom bought lemon soap for his wife Molly in Joyce’s epic, is an invaluable relic of Joyce’s Dublin, and he would do anything to protect its legacy. Even as rent steadily increases, PJ continues to sell bars of lemon soap in the chemist’s shop, now cluttered with old photographs, various editions of Ulysses, and hundreds of small glass bottles. PJ says with a wry smile, “the soap cleans the body while the book corrupts the mind.” 

Every year on June 16, the same date that marked Leopold Bloom’s walk around Dublin in 1904, a host of literary pilgrims visit the city to pay tribute to Joyce. Sweny’s was a sacred stop on the tour for people I met last Bloomsday, people who came from Australia, Japan, Bosnia, South Korea, the United States, Germany, Spain, Argentina, England, France, and Switzerland. 

In the Catholic tradition of pilgrimage, a location that is considered sacred is often referred to as a “thin place,” a place where the space between heaven and earth wanes, and becomes rarefied or thin. Such places typically mark the site of a saint’s ascension, a miraculous act, or some epiphanic moment. In other religions, places may be considered sacred because they have been saturated with meaning by God. What might a thin place be in a conversation about literary pilgrimage? Perhaps where the distance between an author’s imagination and a reader’s lived reality narrows and eventually collapses. And where the human being who generated meaning in the place—the author, the artist, the genius—begins to acquire divine status. Joyce certainly seems to assume deific qualities every year on Bloomsday as devotees travel to Dublin and re-enact the events from Bloom’s life, visit the places he walked, and read excerpts of Ulysses aloud.

In the home I grew up in, we consider all books sacred, and one of my family’s South Indian traditions has become practically reflexive for me. When someone accidentally drops a book or grazes one with a foot, we place our hand on the cover and gently touch our closed eyelids. We thus symbolically ask forgiveness for treating a book with inadvertent disregard. My parents instilled in me a deep appreciation for written words. Literary pilgrimage provides an opportunity to reflect on that appreciation, and on what happens when it extends beyond an individual gesture to a collective expression of reverence. Why do people become dedicated to one author, or one text? And how does that dedication evolve from fleeting infatuation to persistent devotion? 

Last summer, on a quest to reckon with these questions, I attended the Bloomsday festival, which is primarily organized by the James Joyce Center on Dublin’s North Great George’s Street. Deirdre Ellis-King, the chair of the board of the James Joyce Center, notes that the center is committed to providing “different points of entry” into the text, be it “music and song, drama, costume, or food.” The entry points Ellis-King referred to are visible throughout Dublin on Bloomsday. As I walked down North Great George’s Street, people were dressed for the trends of 1904—most men sported black top hats, and carried walking sticks, while women donned petticoats, lace gloves, and parasols. One man even tipped his hat, saluted me, and said with a melancholic tinge, “what a shame, poor fellow, Paddy Dignam,” referencing the character whose funeral in Ulysses occurs on June 16. 

When I arrived at Davy Byrne’s, a central pub in the novel, I witnessed a joyful uproar of Irish anthems and songs from the book. There were productions of Ulysses all over Dublin, from the Abbey’s adaptation of the entire epic to the Bewley Café’s staged reading of Molly Bloom’s monologue, and her famed finale, “and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” There were pub crawls across Dublin, not to mention food tours that took visitors down Bloom’s bizarre trajectory of consumption, from kidneys for breakfast to gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy for lunch. All these events were meant to challenge the notion that Ulysses ought to be abstruse and abstract for readers. Bloomsday participants come with varying levels of Ulysses knowledge, but even if you haven’t read the book, you can still down a pint or digest a kidney. 

Sam Slote, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, who has organized an academic symposium on Ulysses, cites Joyce’s remark, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.” Slote comments that in order “to get to the heart of Dublin, Joyce represents the city in all its specificities.” In this way, he “gets to everywhere else and all their specificities.” Deirdre Ellis-King agrees, remarking that “Joyce and Dublin are synonymous, it’s any-man and every-man, you could be in any city in the world and enjoy the same kind of experiences of the streetscape.” Paradoxically, by being so precise, the text becomes universal. This stylistic technique is analogous to the character of Bloom. “It’s not that every man likes kidneys for breakfast, but every man has his particularities,” Slote says. It is in this way that Ulysses speaks to any reader, any person in motion, any pilgrim—not in the specifics of every human being, but in the specificity with which any human being can be represented. No one is special. Everyone is special. Stephen Dedalus, the other main character in the novel, has a line, “every life is many days, day after day.” This could be the motto for not only the epic, but also the festival commemorating June 16—any day, in any life, could be Bloomsday. The annual convergence of time and place restores significance to every ordinary and individual encounter, to every overlooked dollop of time. 

Jessica Yates, who oversees the Bloomsday festival and manages the James Joyce Center, tells me she “converted” to Joyce (her word) because of Bloomsday.  Unlike people who embark on a pilgrimage to honor the text they love, Yates casually went out to a pub on Bloomsday eleven years ago without any prior knowledge of Ulysses. It was there that she met “someone special,” and they set out on a project to read Ulysses before their first anniversary. She says with a trill of laughter, “I got so into Bloomsday.”      

She recommends I sit in on one of the storied reading circles at Sweny’s. I do, and am struck by the variety of voices present. Some readers sit with a cane or walker leaning against theirs chairs, and others sprint over to the shop after class. As Joycean phrases echo in the small confines of Sweny’s, I hear accents from Argentina, South Korea, and France. One Dubliner named Paddy has been attending the reading circle on and off for about a decade. Paddy wears long trousers, a light blue button down shirt, and round reading glasses. He seems serious, but he also has a toothy grin. While some wanderers came into the bookshop after one or two beers, Paddy arrives early, eager to pour over the text he deems so valuable. He has read the book in 6-month cycles about ten or eleven times—he can’t recall exactly. He views Ulysses as a vessel through which he can access his own ancestors, a thin place with miraculous possibility. He explains, “I am from Dublin. My parents, my grandparents too. I have no non-Irish connections. I think I am deeply of Dublin, and there are few books deeply of Dublin. Ulysses is one of them.” He explains why the book resonates with him emotionally by pointing to its melodic qualities: “There is a music in the language, a rhythm in the speech. I can hear my parents who are now dead, my grandparents who are now dead, I can hear them talking, when I read it, I can hear their voices.” 

Yet another regular at Sweny’s is Finon, a former student at Trinity College. He has been attending readings of Ulysses for four years, and he loves how Sweny’s regulars move “in a loop,” how the book itself is like a “carousel, no fun unless you get to do the whole thing.” “After all,” he chuckles, “if you haven’t finished, it’s not worth the money.” Like many sacred texts, Ulysses contains philosophical reflections, surprising imagery, and beautiful poetry. And like many religious holidays, which draw pilgrims from all over the world to a holy site, Bloomsday too, according to Finon, becomes a “spawning day,” to which “a lot of people return.” Both re-reading and pilgrimage are rituals of returning.

Attempts to disavow the sacred aspects of the festival sometimes sound inadvertently religious. When Finon describes the goal of Bloomsday, he seems a bit like a defensive missionary: “The attempt to popularize the text is really an attempt to create an invitation into it. I mean nobody’s looking to actively spread it onto people, but to keep it as welcoming as possible.” Similarly, Jessica Yates says she wants to get people excited about the text, but she insists, “I don’t want to impose it on everyone.” They are enthusiasts who hesitate to proselytize.

Indeed, Professor Slote of Trinity College Dublin notes with a hint of smug amusement that many people were asking him what he thought of Bloomsday from a scholarly perspective and he was “about to say something,” until he realized, “I’m not going to be this guy.” It would be understandable, from an academic standpoint, to scoff at some of what unfolds. For starters, many of the most devoted participants have never read the book. Take John, the James Joyce lookalike who has stood outside the James Joyce Center every June 16 for the last seven years. He carries a cane, and wears a black top hat, a suit, a healthy gray moustache and a tiny square beard. He peers through large circular spectacles, and takes photographs with tourists. Originally a hat-maker, John grew up in Dublin. He explains the mass of people at the James Joyce Center in an assured tone: “People don’t have to be readers to enjoy Bloomsday, people just like the association.” When I asked John what he thought when he read Ulysses for the first time, his eyes stretched open, and he raised his brows: “Read it? I wrote it!” I smiled, and he conceded, “I’m afraid I didn’t read it.”

For Joyce, a writer who said that if “Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living,” John’s confession could be considered blasphemous. But returning to Professor Slote’s less judgmental perspective, it’s unnecessary to “be that guy” who reads and analyzes Ulysses in order to have a genuine relationship with the text. Slote analogizes criticism of Bloomsday to what “we have in America—the [rhetoric of the] war against Christmas … the secularization of Bloomsday is not a bad thing.” 

Is Bloomsday a sign that the religion of Joyce is somehow being compromised, challenged, thinned out in the public’s touristic, commercial and dangerously superficial imagination? Or is Bloomsday’s existence reaffirming the sacredness of Ulysses to its readers? After all, not everyone who travels to Lourdes has read the Bible, and not everyone who journeys to Mecca has read the Qur’an. The mastery of a text is not necessary, or at the very least, not a prerequisite for meaningful motivations. Pilgrimage provides a different kind of proof of faith.

As Slote elaborates on not wanting to be the Grinch of Bloomsday, he says, Bloomsday “is not a bad thing—usually it falls on nice, sunny weather,” and it’s “a pleasant excuse to have a bit of a lark.” He concurs with the organizers of the Bloomsday festival that it’s good to get people interested, and even though he says “my job is generally not to think about popularizing Ulysses,” he believes offering various points of entry for readers is noble. He elaborates on Joyce’s mission with Ulysses: “While it is a book that is studied at universities, it’s not just for those people. It has a wider audience. The way culture has moved, these things tend to be more academicized, [and] something like [Bloomsday] is a good counterbalance.”

Leslie Daugherty, from the North Side of Dublin, plays Leopold Bloom in the James Joyce Center productions of Ulysses, and he agrees that the so-called “secularization” of Joyce is a good thing. He describes the text as “a fabulous read,” but takes issue with some of the academics who treat Ulysses with the wrong kind of “reverence,” effectively “making Ulysses unattainable.” He objects to the notion that Ulysses is for “the posh people,” and shook his head as he said, in a throaty voice, “No. Ulysses is for everyone who has a mind of his own.” 

 Marty, a man from Donegal, Ireland, who is a marketing and events coordinator at the James Joyce Center, first encountered Joyce when he read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he says with a chuckle that “a lot of teenage Catholic dudes in Ireland identified with it.” He describes being deeply moved by the part where Stephen is called to the priesthood but says, instead, that he is an artist. The tensions between religious tradition, devotion, expectation, and the inclination towards the life of an artist resonate with Marty. 

Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, and Bloomsday itself are all fraught with similar tensions. Bloom is a man who loves his wife and preaches love but deceives her and behaves disloyally. Ulysses contains styles that contradict and challenge one another—clean prose, experimental stream-of-consciousness, advertisement jargon, and saccharine romantic-novel satire. Bloomsday has attendees who have read the text 51 times and people who have never heard of Joyce. The idea of “literary pilgrimage,” too, brims with ambiguity. Are books meant to be read, or to be revered? And does a book find its meaning in an isolated experience, or in a collective celebration? 

In 1996, Jonathan Franzen revised an essay initially published as “The Harper’s Essay” and retitled it “Why Bother.” In it, Franzen laments the demise of a reading-culture, and describes his “despair about the American novel.” He writes about one novel he read in reverent prose, marking his gratitude “that someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side—that Fox’s book had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.” The experience of literature, of reading as an act of worship, is often seen as an individual one, as it is in this passage. Indeed, the collection for which Franzen revised his essay is called How to be Alone. 

 Yet Bloomsday’s beauty is in its social activity. As many literary pilgrims have pointed out, Joyce wanted his text to be democratic. The point of Bloomsday is for “any man and every man,” and the text is about bringing reverence to our everyday. Ulysses itself, in various bodily and granular descriptions elevates the profane to an esteemed status. For example, in one instance, Joyce satirically describes a man seated at the foot of a large tower as a “broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, frank-eyed, red-haired, freely-freckled, shaggy-bearded, wide-mouthed, large-nosed, long-headed, deep-voiced, bare-kneed, brawny-handed, hair-legged, ruddy-faced, sinew-armed hero.” And just as Joyce plays with his characters, gifting them gallant qualities (albeit in a sardonic tone), so does Bloomsday toy with its visitors and their expectations, until people find communion in a collective, at times gimmicky, at times reverent experience. Ulysses motivates its readers enough that they want to change their physical circumstances, embark on an embodied passage, and develop another vantage-point—beyond the systems of logic and reason that we so often subscribe to. The book inspires people to find one another, to derive solace and soul, from an admittedly kooky community. This somewhat paradoxical combination of the sacred and the irreverent is what permeates Dublin on Bloomsday. There are pub crawls and exclamations of Joycean passages made shriller by grand glasses of Guinness. But there is also something reminiscent of what we see in churches and memorials—pilgrims, persons in motion—seeking answers, inspired by something that has no neat ending, maybe realizing as they wander, that they too, will never be complete. 

Despite all the ambiguity and insecurity that is present when one sets out on a pilgrimage, there is also a yearning. People embark on a pilgrimage in search of something, be it healing, obligation, or understanding. And whether it is religious or literary pilgrimage, we can discover havens in vagrancy the way we do in words. As Franzen puts it, “to write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?” There are not often clear answers in literature, but when paragraphs protect you, it doesn’t so much matter, does it? There are not clear lines drawn between the drawbacks and merits of Bloomsday either. Tourist Destination or Holy Site? One could easily say that the merits of Bloomsday are inits campiness, its accessibility, and its rendering a “thin place” palpable to readers. Franzen ends his essay with the image of a character discovering in a broken ink bottle “both perdition and salvation.” He writes, at peace without real resolution, “The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.”

Finon, one of the regular members of the Sweny’s reading circle, also embraces contradiction in Bloomsday. He believes that the festival is meaningful, but remarks with a knowing smirk that “on Bloomsday people like to drink and eat strange meat … [but] no one’s really talking about metempsychosis” (a concept of great significance in the novel). Finon asks if I had read Station Island by Seamus Heaney when I press him on the benefits and caveats of literary pilgrimage. I answer that I have not. He is keen to explain, “it’s a poem about revisiting a Catholic pilgrimage site, a catholic shrine …based on the idea that St. Patrick had a vision of purgatory there.” Finon outlines the context of the poem. “He was revisiting the place as a secularized figure … returning to a place he no longer believed in.” This raises an interesting question within a framework of literary pilgrimage. Is it possible to have a jarring return to a place you have lost faith in if all you have lost faith in is the sanctity of the literature (and not, for instance, the existence of God?) 

In Heaney’s poem, various characters appear from disparate significant moments in the history of Ireland. And at the “dead center,” Finon narrates in a thrilled whisper, “he meets the ghost of the dead James Joyce.” Heaney doesn’t name him. He refers only to the storied image of Joyce that impersonators and photographers and readers and writers have memorialized for a century: a tall man with a cane, and the voice of a singer. Heaney writes that the figure held out his hand— “whether to guide or be guided I could not be certain,” because the man seemed blind. In this poem, an itinerant soul reckons with the loss of meaning in a formerly faithful location. That a hero of literature, a genius, artist, poet, is ambiguous in his leadership—that it is unclear whether he wants to lead or be led, demonstrates the deterioration and dismantling of Joyce as an idol, of Joyce as a God. Here Joyce’s hand is “fish-cold and bony,” and the onlooker knows him “in the flesh …wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.” This is a weathered, human being, a worn body, tired, old, nothing divine or eternal-seeming about him. 

In many ways, this encounter could represent the ultimate challenge, a revisiting and reckoning with the sacred ground on which a metaphorical shrine to Ulysses was erected. In Station Island the character of Joyce does not seem wholly self-assured. He says, “your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite. / What you do you must do on your own … You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.” In this imagination of Joyce, the source of Ulysses’s genius, is not, on the surface, a divine force, because he feels entirely human. Yet, isn’t there something god-like in the command to strike out alone, to stop “listening,” and to embrace a new “rite”?

Considering Joyce as a simultaneously godly and ghostly figure is pertinent to the paradoxes of Bloomsday. Finon notes some logical dilemmas he observed on June 16 every year: “It’s a strange map in itself. I came to the real pub where a fictional character didn’t set foot. I came to the place where nobody bought the bar of soap. (laughs) It’s quite odd.”

Nonetheless, it seems hard to contend with the fact that Ulysses renders Dublin “a thin place.” It is the destination for wandering minds and bodies to relish and find refuge in words that feel mimetic of reality: the ugly, disturbing, devastating, and remedial stories that make up most of our lives. Letting Bloomsday be a thin place extracts communal joy from that solitary act of reading (or even of not-reading!) which can at times be isolating, and that private worship of Joyce, which can at times be embarrassing. A shared human soul pieced together from infinitely complex and individual particularities. One may plumb the mundane for miracles. 

Niebuhr describes pilgrims as people “passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well.” I was passing through a territory not my own, and when I walked the streets of Dublin on Bloomsday, I felt both spiritual and giddy. 

My very first interview, in the early morning of June 16, 2018, was with a couple from Trieste, and it felt like a moment of grace. I saw them loitering by the James Joyce Statue on the main street of the north side of Dublin. They were smiling and taking photos. It turned out that the man had read Ulysses as a young academic forty years ago. He matter-of-factly stated, “It was the text that inspired me to become a professor of literature.” As he spoke, his wife started laughing. I turned to her quizzically. She said, “Oh I’m sorry, it’s just my husband is really downplaying what this book means to him.” I asked her what she meant. “Well, when my first son was born—when I went into labor, what does my husband take along to the hospital? The thick fat book—Ulysses! He read it to me for twelve hours.” I turned to the man, now in his late 70s, a small smile playing on his lips, while a plum flush spread across his cheeks in patches. “Well,” he stuttered, “it’s sizzling…and brilliant…and so human.” This man wanted the very first words his son heard to be those of Joyce. What better anecdote could I have to demonstrate worship of this text? Yet, when I asked if he believed visiting Dublin for Bloomsday would lead to a more intimate understanding of��Ulysses, he said, as his forehead creased slightly, “that would be too much, too big a claim.” His wife nodded knowingly. He added, “We’re here for more profane reasons.” 

Literature enables both profane pleasure and reverence. On Bloomsday, no one has to choose. 

[borrovved]

Another Side

Word count: 3,988

yoongi x reader

Disclaimer: mentions of depression, and suicide

Min Yoongi. Min Yoongi wasn't really an outside person, meaning- he just didn't go outside. Except for photography or the occasional outing with his friends or to play basketball, but that's it. So when it was summertime he didn't party almost everyday and get hangovers, he hunched over his computer screen and dwelt on what to write. Fresh out of college, majoring in English and literature, basic writing stuff, and minoring in music.There wasn't a lot of stability in finding jobs. Jobs that can be careers anyway. He just wanted to write stories, do his hobbies, and enjoy life. “Be the better you than you were yesterday” he likes to say. Which is fucking tricky, when he has depression.

College stressed him out so much. He always had blue rings under his eyes, a slight slouch from bending over his desk late at night to finish those damn essays, falling asleep on his desk, wondered if he should drop out, wondered if this was worth it.

Now a man with a degree, he doesn't know if he's the one that is worth it. He has those pesky thoughts linger in his mind. And tonight, they wouldn't leave. It's pissing him off, with each thought clouding his mind as he's lying on his couch. "Your stories aren't going to fucking sell. They're filled with shit." He tells himself. The music he plays and writes himself just feel like sounds with no meaning behind them. These thoughts are driving him mad, so he gets up, says "fuck it" and is on his merry way to drink his sorrows away.

1:13 am, June 12th

You're driving around aimlessly on a summer night, and it's drizzling. You got into those moods again where you're bored, alone, hella fucking sad, and need to get out of the your place because you've become a hermit. Summer is your absolute, favorite time of the year. No school, no deadlines, no stress. Shorts, tank tops, off the shoulder blouses are totally appropriate to wear. Sun's out, buns out, right? Fucking wrong.

It's been raining for a week straight. Your mood changes when the season changes. (Drastically, too.) You love summer so damn much, but it's probably the worst you've ever felt each time in the year, for the past two years. It's because you don't have a routine to stick to. You get out of bed whenever, eat whenever, get off the internet, whenever and however you want. This unfortunately leads to awful sleep schedules and a lethargic body. Unhealthy, tired, lonesome even. Plus, you hate the rain. You got out of your apartment, showered, ate, and even got dressed up a little for no reason, because pampering yourself is self-care. That small inkling of happiness builds, which brings you closer to a better routine.

Blasting music and driving in solitude was so exhilarating, and liberating to you. You're more of a walker than a driver, but people shouldn't really be listening to music with headphones in at night, walking alone at 1 am. So the car, it shall be. No direction to really go to, but you pay close to mind on where you're going, because you get lost easily. You never really venture out unless it's work, home, the store, or a friend's house. You're not all good at reading maps either. Driving at night at this hour isn't practical, but who said you led a practical life?

You don't venture far, just drive around in circles, take a turn here and there, and suddenly you're driving past a bar and realize you drove a little too far from home and never heard of these street names before. You turn around, and try to retrace your steps, because you can't be that far off from home. You drive slowly and see a man with his thumb up pointing in the air. He doesn't look menacing looking, just..a tad tipsy by the way you look at his stance. He's actually kinda cute when you look closer, with the way the little drops of rain start to gather and roll against his nose, his sleepy eyes making him more innocent, the way he's doing the sweater paw thing while his thumb is in the air and holy shit your car is parked right in front of him now.

He looks more wide awake now, with the loud noises of your windshield wipers swishing around. He blinks once or twice. You blink twice or three times. He's walking, you have your eyes on every move he makes, and he gets in. He just casually clips his seat belt and looks at you.

You've picked up a hitchhiker before. You saw a grown man holding his little son's hand. The little boy was wearing a backpack, and the father had his thumb in the air. Of course, you were scared it was some sort of sick scam and that you might get your car jacked because it was the slightly less nice part of town, but you figured you would give this a chance. You parked by them and immediately got your pepper spray out as a warning because you really can't afford to be naive. You drove the boy to school, and his father insisted on walking himself home. This is a different situation, because you left your pepper spray at home. Also, this is even more shady, because it's night time and why the hell did this guy just not get an Uber? God, you're really stupid for letting this guy in.

All this time you were staring at him and letting your thoughts run wild, when you hear him say "You're not a serial killer, are you?"

You've always had a smart mouth, to which you answered, "The chances of two serial killers in the same car is astronomical." He's unfazed by this response, and he just smirks. He really can't be a murderer when he's sporting sweater paws in his lap, can he?

"So uh..where are you heading?" You ask sheepishly.

"Home. I can type in the address into your phone if you want." He's a soft talker. You turn down your music.

"Yeah, you can do that. Here." You hand him your phone, and he's staring at it blankly.

"Hey, is there something wrong?" You ask.

"...this is an android." Jesus. Christ.

"Is that a problem sir?" You deadpan.

"No, simple observation. First time I actually hitch a ride, and my driver is an android user. This is a lot to take in." This time he's smiling, and it's noticeable.

"Are you sure you're not a serial killer? This much boldness and conversation on your end is freaking me out." You say as you start driving. The destination is approximately 16 minutes, not bad.

"I swear. Whenever I get drunk I'm just this outgoing." He chuckles.

"Because I have a complete stranger next to me now, I gotta interrogate you. Why didn't you just call an Uber? Or a friend?" You say.

"My phone died. I don't like the music that plays at the bars so I brought my ear buds, and I didn't charge my phone before I left my place. I was at the bar drinking for a couple hours. I'm one of the oldest out of all my friends, so they're still living on campus at the opposite end of town, any other friends aren't close around here, nor family. So no one can take me anywhere, and I'm not dumb enough to drink and drive regardless of how clear the roads are." He says that relatively fast for someone who's not sober and articulates it in a way that throws you off a bit.

"You just answered all my questions and I haven't even asked the rest of them yet. Are you sure you're not drunk? Or is this just a creatively weird way to pick up girls?" You inquire.

"I've figured I owed you a good explanation because you're practically my savior at this point. Plus, I'm not into chicks who picks up guys on the side of the road. I like cautious, sensible girls. No offense." This guy sure has the balls to be this mouthy at you.

"How are you going to call me your savior when you also just insulted me in one go, man? Gimme a break. I wasn't even planning on stopping for you, I was making a u-turn while slowing down and I stopped without thinking." He turns his whole body to face you.

"So you're telling me you didn't even think about letting a stranger in? You just..let it happen? This really is a fortunate day for me." He leans back in the seat, closing his eyes with yet another dumb smirk. It's not that you weren't thinking at all, you were just checking him out. No way in hell does he have to know that though.

"Hey, don't fall asleep on me now. You gotta make sure I'm going the right way." You nudge him with your right elbow lightly. He opens his eyes and now you feel them on you. You grip the steering wheel a little tighter because his gaze is making you tense, you can just feel it piercing you.

"Well, what about you? Why are you driving into the night like this? Getting home from a party?" Part of you is contemplating whether to overshare or tell him to mind his own business. Seeing as you are on some sort of high after picking up a hot stranger and most likely never seeing him again, and you can't possibly push him away or turn him off by your upcoming venting session because it's not like you guys are gonna screw, and he's in your car, so he's forced to listen. Plus, spilling it to someone you'll never cross paths again is better than venting to a friend that will just end up worrying about you and just saying the same thing again: it will get better.

"I needed to get out of my place. Depression has been kicking my ass so I'm just trying to piece myself together again by going out for a drive and fixing myself up. I've been in bed all day on my phone swiping and typing away, barely eating. My apartment is barely recognizable. There was so much shit going on in my head, I needed to get out. I'm not going anywhere, just driving in circles really. Then my dumb ass got lost and I found you." For a moment he doesn't say anything, but just sighs and says,

"That's a decent way of coping with it. On rare occasions I drink to forget about my depression." A soft "oh" escapes your lips.

"I was about to say sometimes but then I figured it would make me sound like an alcoholic. I swear I'm not." He says. "It's just been a really bad couple of weeks. So bad, I kinda don't care what happens to me at this point. That's why I decided to hitchhike tonight. Things like this happened before, if I walk to my place it will take about an hour and a half. I sober up, think more clearly, and go back to bed."

"You already sound like you're sobering up. I think you're halfway there to feeling better. Even if you feel better temporarily, it's still good." You say.

"Oh babe, I'm most definitely not sober right now." Even in the darkness you're worried he saw you blush after saying that. The conversation is flowing nice even though you literally met less than twenty minutes ago. You don't want it to stop yet, and try to talk as much as you can.

"What are your coping skills for when you feel like this? Do you like music? Maybe you could play it and drive like how I'm doing." You said.

"That's a nice idea, and I love music. It's one of my hobbies. Although I don't like the idea of wasting gas, I'm not really made out of money to do that. I write in a journal about how I'm feeling. Maybe play basketball. I try to surround myself by people who love me, but it gets overwhelming when they see you like that, like this." He points at himself. You notice how he has earrings. Pretty silver hoops. Always had a soft spot for piercings.

"I get it, I usually pace around my room with earbuds in to listen to music. Or outside and do that..but seeing as it's late I can't really do that. Also, your happiness matters. Nothing is ever a waste if it will make you feel better." You say, eyes still straight ahead.

"I like your way of thinking, I wish I was more positive. I'm actually way better compared to how I was a few years ago but sometimes you have a shit day. Or month. I'll keep that in mind, though." He says, sounding a little defeated.

In your car you were playing a pretty mellow playlist. It's all songs that you liked recently. A lot of them were sad though. Some old favorites here and there for added nostalgia too. What you forgot what you usually did though, was adding one song that was incredibly energetic and random from the rest of your playlist, so you wouldn't be sad the whole time it was playing. One minute you're listening to a symphonic ballad, and then you hear Super Bass blasting from your speakers. You're about to change it when you hear him laugh, pretty hard too.

"Oh god. This song reminded me of a really funny story. In high school I had a bad episode where I came pretty close to offing myself but then fucking SUPER BASS came on shuffle after my sad music ended, and I just remember laying on my bathroom floor thinking 'I can't kill myself to this song, it's Super Bass' so I just went to sleep." He finished saying while holding his stomach, not trying at all to contain his laughter.

You were about to ask what "offing yourself" meant and then replayed the story he told you in your head, and almost swerved the damn car from laughing so hard. After the laughter simmers down, you ask,

"So you said music was your hobby, what did you mean by that?" You ask.

"Well, I write songs. I make music, I produce. Just a bunch of underground stuff. That doesn't really pay the bills so I work a side job too." He says.

Not much is said after that. Words exchanged here and there like, "this is a good song." There was one moment where both of you said it at the same time and laughed some more. You want to pat yourself on the back in your choice of clothes and doing your makeup on a whim, because you're almost sure he was checking you out too.

You don't know why you haven't realized this before, but this person lives in the same apartment building as you, as you start parking in your spot. You were so caught up in the conversation that you didn't realize you ended up driving here on your own without really looking at the map on your phone. The stranger unbuckles his seat belt and turns to you.

"Hey uh, thanks for the ride. I hope you don't live too far away or anything." You turn off the car and unbuckle your seat belt, which makes him a little apprehensive.

"Calm down, I live here too." You start getting out of the car and walking towards him. You can see how flushed his cheeks are under the streetlamp.

"I've never seen you around though." You said.

"Well, I've never seen you around either. Maybe we are both serial killers." He has a very lovely smile.

"Thanks." Well, shit.

"Oh god you weren't supposed to hear that." You start playing with the hair tie on your wrist and looking down on the ground, seeing yourself in a little puddle separating between the two of you. He just starts smiling wider, and changes the subject. Thank God.

"We should get inside, before it starts pouring." It's almost 2 am, and you can feel yourself get worn out. Both of you walk inside the building and go into the elevator.

"What floor are you?" He asks.

"Third."

"Maybe that's why I never see you, I'm on the second." He says. You lean back on the wall and evaluate how your day went. You did the dishes at least. The whole place is still a mess. You took a shower, that's good, right? And you brought someone back to their home safely. Good karma is always needed. Your attention is on him now. He's about to step off on his floor.

"Later, stranger." You say. He's out of the elevator now, and says,

"Yoongi. Min Yoongi is my name." The doors start closing but before it does, you see him getting into his apartment. It feels good opening up your feelings and leaving your home for once. You finally get on your floor, and get inside your place. You head straight for your bed and stare at the ceiling. You remember all the dumb stuff you did tonight (and said) and remember the words exchanged between that guy, Yoongi. Now, you could just let this guy be and remain as acquaintances, or scheme ways to run into him more. It doesn't take long to try to find ways to run into him though. You have no choice because it's him, that runs into you.

Part two, coming whenever the hell that is

[prowrestling-trash]

[Ruined Shirt - Jeffrey Dean Morgan x Reader]

A/N: okay, i really hate this one-shot i wrote. it’s super cringey, and i normally dont like real life people x reader one shots, but i like character one shots. so, im trying this to see if people actually like it, and if so i will make more. ps, this is sorta long, and i didn’t realize how long it was gonna be x’D. and, yes - there is smut at the end of it. just giving you a warning because it is very cringey hah x’D.

-

Today was the day that I, [Y/N] was going to finally meet the one and the only Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I know what you’re probably thinking - why would you want to meet the  guy that played Negan in The Walking Dead? Well, that’s simple. He’s really hot and just an adorable little muffin (that sounded probably really weird, oh well).

My friend [Y/F/N] and I got in the car, and she was driving. I didn’t want to drive - I got to work the radio and torture [Y/F/N] by playing ‘Easy Street’ the whole way to Walker Stalker Con. It’s quite a drive, let me tell you.

“Why do you wanna meet Jeffrey Dean Morgan so much? He’s really old - old enough to be your dad.” [Y/F/N] laughed as [He/She] focused on driving. I blushed deeply when [He/She] said that Jeffrey was old enough to be my dad. That’s quite true, but it’s hotter when you call him daddy (sorry I had to).

“I am well aware of his age, and I don’t give two fucks. He’s hot,” I laughed lightly as I turned up the radio. I had plugged in my aux chord and actually played ‘Easy Street’. After a while, it does get annoying, but it is actually a good song (don’t attack me Daryl!). “We’re on Easy Street! And it feels so sweet!” I yelled the lyrics, trying to be as obnoxious as I can to annoy the shit out of [Y/F/N].

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We arrived at Walker Stalker Con, and it was packed. I probably won’t be able to meet Jeffrey Dean Morgan after all. Damn. I sighed as I got out of the car, [Y/F/N] followed behind. [He/She] locked the car and shut it off before we made our way inside the huge place. There was a lot o people in here.

“Are you sure we will be able to meet Jeffrey?! There’s a lot of damn people in here!” [Y/F/N] yelled, trying to talk over everyone’s loud talking. I shrugged my shoulders as we showed the security guard our tickets and stuff, and then we entered the holy domain.

“Man, this sucks!” I belted, trying to look over the crowds of people. It sucks being so short, you can’t see shit. “Where would Jeffrey be?! Do you have any idea?!” I shouted at [Y/F/N] who shrugged [His/Her] shoulders as we kept slowly walking around the place.

“No idea!” [Y/F/N] shouted back at me before I sighed. I was kind of hungry, maybe we should go get something to eat or drink. “Hey, whose that?! He looks familiar!” [He/She] suddenly said, pointing at someone. I followed [His/Her] finger, to see that it looked like Chris Hardwick if I was correct but I didn’t really know. I haven’t watched The Talking Dead or The Wall in a while. I’d be lucky if I even see a celebrity because of how damn short I was. Oh, and there was the crowd.

“I don’t know! He looks an awful lot like Chris Hardwick!” I yelled back as I looked over to notice the snack bar and stuff. “Hey, let’s go get something to snack on!” I yelled at [Y/F/N] who nodded with a grin. We walked to the snack bar before getting in line. Thank God, there was hardly anyone here except for a man in front of us who was getting food - meaning it was quiet.

“This sounds a lot better.” [Y/F/N] laughed as I nodded, waiting for this guy to take his time getting his shit. It looked like he had a lot though, so I just waited patiently. Maybe I should suggest help? Nah, I don’t that man and he could lead me to a place that isn’t where he really needed to go. Hey, don’t judge my overthinking, it is very possible.

Finally, the man quickly grabbed his stuff and started walking away, but he accidentally ran into me and basically threw all of the shit on me. I gasped and glared at the man, to now see his full face. It was none other than Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Or it was his fucking twin. My eyes widened as I didn’t give a fuck about the shit that was all over my clothes. I just kept my stare on the guy in front of me, my mouth gaping open.

“Shit, I’m so sorry,” The man said as he quickly ran to get napkins and started to help wipe the shit off of my shirt. I felt my face burn a deep red when he wiped some of it off of my chest. “Um.. My name’s Jeffrey. I kinda had a shit load of stuff my buddies wanted to give them and well.. it went all over your damn shirt.” He chuckled at this as my eyes widened even more. This really was him- this was Jeffrey fucking Dean Morgan.

“I-It’s.. F-Fine,” I said as I just watched him wipe off even more shit from the ground too. I probably should help just in case he thought I was weird or something. I glanced over to see [Y/F/N] pretending to not look my way, and then [He/She] just walked away. I glared at my so called friend before running to grab some napkins and helped Jeffrey wipe some of the spilled shit all over the floor. “I’m sorry. I-I was in the way, I guess I should have.. a-at least got out of the way.” I said with a small laugh, my stomach still flipping and I was just trying to be calm and chill. It was a challenge, that was for sure. 

“No, don’t apologize. I should have made my buddies walk their own ass over here to get their shit,” Jeffrey laughed as I laughed too, finally getting the last bit of shit off the floor. We both stood up and I almost fell to the floor, my knees going weak. I quickly sauntered to the trash and throw the napkins in my hand away. I want to ask him for a picture or an autograph, but I don’t want him to leave after that. And he might think I’m a stuck up fan for just wanting an autograph and a picture. “So, you a fan of The Walking Dead?” He asked as I nodded furiously, pretending that I was just talking to some stranger as if it really wasn’t Jeffrey fucking Dean Morgan in front of me.

“Definitely! It’s been my favorite show for as long as I can remember. I remember my cousin watching it whenever I went to my aunt’s house, and he always told me that ‘it was too inappropriate’,” I started to tell my story, a small grin placed on my face. “I was like.. Ten I think and I sneaking out into the front room to watch it. But you only heard it from me.” I laughed before looking back up at Jeffrey, totally forgetting that it was actually him. I quickly blushed as my palms started to sweat and I heard him give a small chuckle.

“You��re such a badass,” Jeffrey said with a laugh. I sighed as I scanned the place in search for my friend, but to not avail. “Did your friend leave you or what?” He asked with a small chuckled as I gave a small shake of my head, knowing exactly why [He/She] did this. [He/She] knows that I hate being alone with certain people, and well.. [He/She] figured out that pertained to celebrities too. 

“Yup. Just what I need.” I laughed before turning back to look at Jeffrey. His brown orbs danced from the light that was giving off, and his smile was just.. just the fucking best. He had the best features a 51 year old would kill to have.

“I suppose you can hang out with me, seeing your friend is selfish,” Jeffrey suggested as my mouth went wide. Was he being serious? Or was he just.. joking around? “That is you want to. You can go and-” He said with a smile as I quickly interrupted him with a furious nod.

“Yes, yes, yes! I want to hangout with you!” I said, smiling wide as I knew my face was a scarlet red and it hurt from smiling so much. “S-sorry.. I got a little c-carried away there..” I laughed lightly, rubbing the back of my neck as I looked down at the ground.

“That was adorable. Come on,” Jeffrey said as he started to walk somewhere. My eyes widened as I just realized that Jeffrey fucking Dean Morgan just called me adorable. OHMYFUCKINGGOD. Okay, it is time to keep your chill. I quickly caught up with Jeffrey and I tried my best to stay at his side at all times. There were a bunch of fans screaming to get Jeffrey’s attention, but he just kept walking. “Normally, I’d give them a hug or something, but you’re here and I don’t want you to get lost or feel like you’re being dragged along.” He said as I blushed, practically running to catch up with him at this point. It wasn’t my fault that he was so tall and i was so short. 

I was 19 years old, as I grew up in [Your State]. I currently lived in Georgia but no where near Atlanta so it was a pretty long drive for me and [Y/F/N]. I think we are going to stay at a hotel or something tonight. Anyways, I’m pretty young, but old enough for consent ;) (IM JUST KIDDING DONT HURT ME). But it is true.

“It seems like you’re struggling, do you want up on my shoulders or something?” Jeffrey offered with a chuckled, as my eyes went large. HE WAS OFFERING ME A SHOULDER RIDE. NO FUCKING WAY. “I just don’t want to lose in this crowd of people is all.” He laughed again as I couldn’t believe how genuine this man was.

“O-Okay. As long as y-you’re fine with it..” I said as Jeffrey laughed at this. “What? I j-just don’t want you to feel like y-you’re uncomfortable or som-something..” I blushed with a small giggle escaping my lips.

"Of course, I'm fine with it - I offered," Jeffrey said as he suddenly stopped and turned to face me. He held his arms out and grabbed my waist, placing me on top of his shoulders in one swift move. He was so strong, like how can you so this? "You're light. How old are you?" He asked as my stomach flipped. Should I tell him my age? Of course I should, it's not like he's gonna hurt me or something.

 "N-nineteen," I said as I held tightly around his neck. I don't really know what to do in this position, but he was right. I am no longer struggling and the world looks so peaceful up here. Damn, I wish I was tall. "Am I.. Um.. Hurting your n-neck?" I asked him as he shook his head with a small chuckle. 

"No, not at all," Jeffrey said as I looked out into the crowd. All I saw were the tops of people's heads and their bald line. Those hairdos remind me of Simon from The Walking Dead. I laughed lightly at the thought as I noticed we were nearing some booths. "What's so funny?" He asked me as I shook my head.

"I-it's nothing. Just me being stupid," I stated with a small smile before Jeffrey insisted I told him what I was talking about. "Well... There are a lot of people here with a bald line as it reminds me of Simon from The Walking Dead." I laughed as Jeffrey nodded his head, too. 

"Makes sense," Jeffrey said, laughing loudly. "Whose your favorite character from The Walking Dead?" He asked me as my eyes widened. Would he mind if I said him indeed, or would he feel kind of freaked out? I don't know. I DONT KNOW. I don't wanna fuck up this moment. I'm just gonna say it. 

"Well, i-it's you," I said as I blushed deeply, looking out into the crowd of people. "Um.. Some people ask me why in the fuck is Negan my favorite, and well.. I don't really know. I-it's weird. I guess.. His confidence and his cockiness? I don't r-really know..." I laughed, knowing the exact reason why. He was hot, like. REALLY HOT.

"That's Negan." Jeffrey chuckled before I noticed we arrived at the booth. He rounded the table and I saw all of the people that came to see Jeffrey. I guess I wouldn't have even go the chance to meet him. It's a good damn thing that he ruined my fucking shirt then. He took me off his shoulders and sat me down, starting to meet his fans. The way he loved taking pictures and loved giving autographs made me fan girl even harder than I thought was possible. Maybe I'll get a souvenir or something like an autograph or a picture by the end of the night. 

I watched in pure enjoyment Jeffrey taking pictures with fans and giving autographs as I felt my phone go off. I grabbed it from my pocket and answered it, it obviously being [Y/F/N]. "Where the fuck are you? I got lost," [Y/F/N] said with an embarrassed laugh as I laughed as well. I'm actually very glad that [He/She] left because I wouldn't have been able to hang out Jeffrey.

"I'm at Jeffrey's booth - can you fucking believe it?" I said into the phone as I heard [Y/F/N] gasp on the other line. "What? Did you see Norman Reedus or something?" I asked [Him/Her], knowing that he was [His/Her] favorite actor. 

"Actually, yeah. Ill text you in a bit." [Y/F/N] said info the phone before [He/She] hung up the phone, a sigh escaping my lips. Great. Thanks for that, friend.

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[A/N: now here is the best part of the whole fic, and it obviously includes smut. so if you weren't here for the smut, i was so im sorry. if you were here for the smut, well here it comes. *smut writing skills activated.*] 

It was the last fan and the end of the night, and I just sat in my chair, watching how adorable Jeffrey was. I also of a couple of good pictures for my new lock screen. "Well, that was the last day and last fan. Where's your "friend" at?" Jeffrey asked as he turned around to face me, security grabbing the chairs and the table. I shrugged before I took out my phone. 

"I honestly have no fucking idea. Last thing I heard was that she saw Norman Reedus." I laughed lightly as Jeffrey laughed too. I stood up from my chair so the security guards could get it.

So your friend betrayed you for Norman? That's fucked up," Jeffrey stated as I laughed, shrugging my shoulders. It was getting awkward now, I don't know what to do. Was I supposed to go and call my friend to figured our where [He/She] was? Of was I supposed to just stand here and wait for Jeffrey to say something? "So, do you know if your friend is here or what? Cause if [He/She] is not, then we should go to the Hotel I'm staying in. Just until your friend gets there, that is. And if you want to go at all." He said as I felt my throat dry up. 

I nodded with a small smile before realizing I ate nothing at all today. Hopefully Jeffrey maybe has something in his small fridge on the room or something, because I need some water or something. "Okay. Cool, lets go then." Jeffrey said with a smile as I blushed deeply, feeling my stomach turn. I can't actually believe I was going in Jeffrey fucking Deans hotel room. This shit made me feel weird an I liked it. It was the feeling of ovaries exploding I think. That's what it felt like anyways. 

Jeffrey lead me out to his car which was a nice black BMW. He walked over to the passenger door and opened it for me. I smiled and nodded at him before crawling into the passenger seat and putting on my seat belt. Not 2 seconds later, Jeffrey got in the driver seat and also placed on his seat belt. 

"Um.. Tell me a bit about yourself," Jeffrey said as he clicked his seat belt on placed and started the car. The radio blasted some great classic rock music before he laughed nervously. "Sorry bout that. I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to classic rock." He said as I laughed. 

"It's okay- I LOVE classic rock and heavy metal rock and just about any type of rock out there," I said as Jeffrey smirked, putting on some Metallica. It was 'Enter Sandman', obviously one of my favorite tracks. I nodded and sat back in the seat, listening to the lyrics as Jeffrey pulled out of the parking lot as made his way to the hotel room.

Jeffrey was wearing a red and black plaid shirt with some denim jeans. He wore some regular black shoes, and kept his hair slicked back. He was shaved, back you could tell he was still scruffy. "Exit light, enter night." I heard Jeffrey sing lightly as I smiled and looked out the window. I couldn't believe that I was in a car with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, on our way to his hotel room, listening to one of my favorite bands. We arrived about 5 minutes after we left the venue. My mouth was wide when we pulled up in the parking lot. It was fucking huge - it was like a castle. Like, how can a person have so much time in the world to make such a huge ass hotel? They just have had some time on their hands. I was interrupted by the opening of my door, Jeffrey standing there with a smile on his face and holding open the door. I unhooked my seat belt and sauntered out of the car, still in complete shock that this is happening. Should I pinch myself to see if if really was a dream or just let it be? 

"Welcome to my home for the last 2 nights," Jeffrey said as he led me into the hotel, my eyes beaming wide at the site of how pretty it was. Would I die to spend one night in one of these rooms. "My rooms on the 3rd floor, lets go." He said as he led me to one I the elevators and I couldn't believe that I was even breathing the same fucking air as this man.

We walked in the elevator, us being the only two inside. It took every inch in my body to not make a move on THE Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It was a challenge. As we stood there in silence the elevator started going up. Should I just kiss him? No, are you fucking crazy? You just met your favorite celebrity and you're not gonna fuck this up. 

As we reached the 3rd floor, the elevator let off a ding and let us off. I got out first and I heard Jeffrey follow behind me. I stopped for a quick second, but not before I got pinned to a wall, and Jeffrey faced me with his brown orbs. 

"Do you want me as much as I want you?" Jeffrey asked me with a small smirk before kissing my neck softly. He sucked down my neck, my moans becoming slightly audible and this excited him. "I'll take that as a yes." He huskily said as I felt myself getting wet. Um.. I hope he is gentle because I'm a virgin.

"Before we get too carried away, I'm a.. um virgin. And would like to use protection please?" I asked Jeffrey who pulled away for a second before he grinned, his grip becoming lightly and nodded. 

"Of course," Jeffrey said before he lifted me up with his arms, grabbing my thighs. He carried me as he kept kissing my neck, and thankfully his room was not too far from the elevator. "One second," He chuckled before I nodded and he at me down. He got his key from his pocket and swiped it across, the door immediately unlocking. He opened the door and let me in order before shutting it behind him. "Now, where were we?" He said in a husky voice, slowly starting to kiss me on the lips. I gave him access, as he started to explore my whole mouth. Jeffrey picked me up and set me on the bed softly as he never stopped kissing me. He was making sure my first time was remember able, and he didn't want it to be just some quick sex. I could tell this because he wasn't rough at all, and he was soft and gentle with me.

Jeffrey slowly started to take off my ruined shirt. He broke the kiss so I could quickly take off my shirt, revealing my white bra. Feeling embarrassed, I tried covering it up but Jeffrey held my hands so I didn't cover myself up. 

"It's okay," Jeffrey said with a small smile. "It's all beautiful." He said as I let my hands fall down on the bed. He kissed my neck an made his way down to my chest. I rested fully on the bed, feeling pleasure. I wanted my first time to be remember-able to. And I'm pretty sure I am going to remember this whole day. Jeffrey kissed my collarbone before I felt his hands go to unhook my bra. He unhooked it and the white fabric fell off of me, exposing my breasts. My cheeks flustered as I looked up at him with wide eyes, completely embarrassed. He grinned as he went back to sucking and such, kissing down my breasts before he reached my stomach. I moaned and moaned, clearly audible of the pleasure he was giving me.

I was too busy kissing him. He tasted really nice too, and I hoped we can do this again. Before we kissed anymore, he broke up the kiss before he started to unbutton his red and black plaid t-shirt. 

"Stop teasing meee," I whined as Jeffrey smirked, unbuttoning his shirt slowly even more. I rolled my eyes with a giggle, pushing his hands away before unbuttoning the shirt myself. He smirked and started at me. "What?" I asked him as I got the shirt and threw it by where our clothes were. 

"You're just so goddamn beautiful." Jeffrey said as he put a strand of my hair behind my ear. I blushed as I looked up at him and we continued to kiss yet again. We moved in sync as I took the honors and take off his pants. He rested me on the bed flat as he kissed my tenderly, I finally getting his pants off.

I pulled Jeffrey's pants off completely, seeing his manhood already sprung up, indicating me that he was definitely ready. I read too many fanficion that I know what everything practically is. Jeffrey smirked with a laugh as he kissed me too and I didn't realize you do all that while you are fully making out with someone. We were both naked and Jeffrey got a condom from he dressed. He slipped it on himself before he looked down at me with tender an login eyes. It's like if I look into his eyes, I can trust him with anything - especially this. 

"Are you ready? I don't want to rush you," Jeffrey said as I nodded with a small breath. I closed my eyes before I felt it. Jeffrey thrusted into me very slowly and I thanked him for that. It was very painful, and I almost screamed the first couple of times. I also started to form tears but Jeffrey looked at me the whole time and told me that it was going to be all right. He rocked me as we kissed softly and deeply, my moans increasing. After a while, it wasn't as painful anymore, and it started to feel good.

"J-Jeffrey.." I moaned, closing my eyes tightly as Jeffrey rocked me back and forth. Good thing I'm having sex with Jeffrey right now or else I would have called someone 'Jeffrey' and they probably wouldn't have been too happy about that. "Shit, [Y/N]," Jeffrey said into my ear, moaning along with me. I moaned way louder than him though because it was my very first time. "Are you close?" He whispered in my ear as he left marks on my neck and started to pick up his speed. "Y-yes.." I moaned loudly, as Jeffrey kissed up my neck and on my lips before looking into my eyes. I looked right back at his and smiled lightly before I felt it. I was gonna reach my climax. "F-fuck!" I screamed, feeling my sudden juices releasing.

"Fuck, [Y/N].." Jeffrey mumbled as I felt him release into the condom, his thrusts in ally turning sloppy and his thrusts stopped completely. We both opened our eyes to look at each other before he smiled, giving me one last passionate kiss. "Did you enjoy it? That's all that matters." He said practically out of breath. 

"I loved it, Jeffrey. Thank you." I said with a smile, breathing furiously as I was out of breath as well. He kissed my forehead before he sat up and we both started dressing ourselves.