#god its been so long since i posted any kind of art anywhere

[lonesomenecromancer]

i havent drawn in five hundred years, have this random weaver drawing i did (the quality is so bad omg))

also have this lol

[zarla-s]

Man it's been a long time since I've done an ask cluster! Let's see if I can get some down...

He's an extremely fun character to write for and play with! So in that sense I'm fond of him, haha. He's such a huge disaster of a person, there's always something fun to do with him. Well "fun" in a relative sense.

I don't have anything to forgive him for, he didn't hurt me. |D He hurt the brothers!

I do have an idea for a cute feature inspired by Six-Eared Macaque! I should really sit down and do that already... and finish the one I half started but never finished...

I don't think my opinion on any of them changed! I love them all, haha. Which ones I drew comics about just depends on which ones I get ideas for really. Sometimes I get Alphys ideas and sometimes I get Goatparents ideas! Inspiration is fickle!

I don't have any solid plans or anything. :B Just gonna keep chugging along with silly comics and art! Work on Defrag and such. I'd like to finish a Ladyverse comic I've had lying around forever, and I had vague plans for doing a doujin for them too I could work on... and also seeing if I could format Handplates into a book format... I've always got a bunch of projects, haha.

It works on that level! It wasn't intentional though. |D

I do enjoy speculation! I don't really have much of my own though, I didn't predict anything in chapter 2 so now I'm assuming I can't predict anything in the future chapters either, haha.

Emesis Blue is great! Some really beautiful visuals in there, very striking! Love the mood of it too and a lot of the surreal imagery. I think it helped spur me back into TF2 again, haha. Medic and Scout's relationship was so cute.

I have thought about this! It has its share of challenges though... I outlined them more in this post. A pdf would be more doable though... could even include some extra stuff as well! Hmm...

I can see that! He'd probably spend as much time out in the rain as he could just doing whatever to stay outside.

It was pretty much always going to end like that. I always wanted it to end on a hopeful note! Which might seem weird with how dark it is at the beginning. I DID for a brief period at the very beginning of Handplates think about stopping with the Pacifist run, but that was only because I thought going where I wanted to go would take too long and already the project seemed so dauntingly huge at the time, haha. But it was always going to end in a positive way!

Gaster talks about what he originally intended to create here, and he explains a bit about the physical experiments he runs on the brothers here. They aren't really a solution in and of themselves so much as tools to try and find a way to break the barrier. Really though, Gaster got stuck in the sunk-cost fallacy lol.

I don't really have opinions about what canon Gaster would be like. |D Handplates Gaster is his own thing really. Canon Gaster, who knows! Deltarune Gaster, who knows! I will say I hope Gaster stays a mystery in Deltarune and never actually shows up but I think the odds of that are really low at this point.

I thought about doing a script along those lines! I did a few rough drafts of one, but it never really went anywhere... it'd end up dead-ending or kind of meandering off. I might see if I can get an actual script down for a side-comic or something in the future... it might be better suited for a fic.

I was just thinking about this lately! I was picturing Gaster totally forgetting about that until he sees Papyrus squinting and is like OH GOD YOUR EYES THAT'S RIGHT D: and goes to get him looked at lol.

I couldn't come up with a good idea for Flowey which is a shame, I do like him, haha. If one comes to me though I might make a little side comic about it!

Gaster's LV is complicated... his stats in-game are ludicrous if I recall correctly. Did he carry the damage from his murders into the void, even if those murders weren't his in the new timeline? Deep thoughts.

He fed them anything he could find, haha. Which is why sometimes they just ended up with chocolate bars (which he intended as dinner for himself). He probably fed them more often than he fed himself lol. He did feed them fairly regularly though.

Not about skeletons, probably. |D

Man I know I had an explanation for this but it was so long ago... it's hard for me to remember. It could be that the Riverperson is just weird and has weird insight into elements of things, had a prophetic dream... I don't know! It bugs me now that I can't remember this, haha.

[tehuti88-art]

10/1/24: r/SketchDaily theme, "Drawlloween: Finders, Creepers." Finders, creepers.

TUMBLR EDIT: I actually forgot about Drawlloween this year. Got rather put off of it the past year or so after getting absolutely zero interaction with it on platforms other than Reddit despite tagging all my posts. I thought it was last year, but the official account seems to have vacated Twitter before then, I just remember seeing them like and retweet others' work, including a literal pencil doodle, while I never got a single like, much less a retweet. That's nothing new…look at my note history here, for example!…yet I dunno…it just really hurts after being at it so many years. I've been doing Drawlloween since 2018 when I first started digital art, just kind of sucks that no matter how long I keep at this or try to improve my "style" (whatever it is) that digital art is yet ANOTHER medium at which I've failed to gain an audience. Just like my fiction writing, poetry, song lyrics, jewelry making, journal making, online blogging, product reviews, photography, videos, and I'm pretty sure macrame too now that I'm starting to get into that. (At least I'm heading into it with the full expectation this time that I'll never be very good at it and nobody will ever care about it. After 30+ years of trying to gain an audience, any audience, gotta keep them expectations low. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

ANYWAY…after being reminded of Drawlloween's existence I almost decided not to bother with it for the first time in…what, six years? I suck at math. I also don't like how theme weeks/months mess with my character portraits (yet another passion project that's failed to attract notice). But meh, whatever I'd draw in its place would be just as ignored, so, here we go yet again, although with rather less enthusiasm than previous years, as I'm not bothering to cross-post it anywhere else official Drawlloween is this year. (I checked out the Threads account they set up since leaving Twitter and granted, this was right before the event's start so maybe I was too early, but the official account was really inactive looking…just one post like from last year's event, yikes.) I don't like going to the time and trouble of posting on multiple platforms if I'll get absolutely nothing to show for it but bots (hello, Instagram 🙄 ), I get enough nothing here on Tumblr. And really the only reason I keep at it here, TBH, is because of the relative ease of posting image + long-form text entries to spill my thoughts, and all the "real" blog communities seem to have died. God do I miss journal/blog communities. 😞

But nobody's reading this so, I guess that's it! Here goes Drawlloween. Again. "Enjoy." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Finders, Creepers [‎Tuesday, ‎October ‎1, ‎2024, ‏‎12:00:14 AM]]

[deadbeandrop]

hello! i'm syd of @lyril 🎉 and i do all kinds of stupid and gay shit

welcome to a VERY long over-due side blog! i got into camp lazlo on joe murray's birthday in 2020 and for some god foresaken reason it's stuck in my brain enough to have yearly months-long revisiting sessions, so, here we are at the moment!

this will be an archive of old and new art, misc. commentary, and my ramblings about the ideas i have, that, at this point, are sort of a retool/continuity reboot/whatever of the show in my head... this is mostly a space to get out all the stuff that's been marinating in my brain forever cus i never finish anything, and just whatever other low effort stuff that isn't going anywhere else any time soon. one day, i will finish the big folder of documents i've been working on and share them here and everything will make sense ❤️

nice and finished art will eventually go on my main art blog @vizabel (probably)

i also have the blogs @scoutmaster-lumpus and @slinkman that i will return to one day as well if my team finishes workshopping the Situation

more info (about what i do and how i approach things) under the cut!

QUICK GENERAL NOTES

i can be known to take some Creative Liberties on occasion, but most of the time, a lot of what i do is still heavily based in what the show's given us, just a little more Modern-Cartoon-Esque in tone and emotionally complexity. at any given time i will either be expanding upon, re-arranging, or taking what's actually in the show a little too seriously OR completely making shit up, occasionally in the pursuit of something else/more expansive. if i don't like how something is or it just doesn't happen to work any more, there's a good chance i might just toss it out, considering the show is also no stranger to keeping an inconsistent continuity and freely retcon-ing stuff. so, while the sense of "canon" is still to be malleable here, i will note i am usually a big stickler for paying close attention to "canon" in the first place and have spent the past while just trying to make what we have in the show make sense and i am only now just sort of branching off into my own thing. in practice, i still want to maintain the overall vibe, cartoonishness, and other elements of everything that make the show what it is! i want the majority of these characters to still feel and to speak as close to they do in the show... as best as i can, at least. even so, it's best to still consider it all to have a personal flair to it in the end, of course :)

as such, i don't really consider all of this (or at least the individual parts) an "AU" even if you could definitely still consider it one, mostly because i am approaching this to at least some degree like i am actually on a Project here (aside from my own boughts of self-indulgence!)

and do still take the stuff i say here with a Grain of Salt for now (especially if its tagged as old art — a lot of my approach has changed and is in progress since then) because it's not always set in stone when in such an early stage, and i'm frequently adjusting things... the art here will not always be up to par, mostly due to the fact that a lot of it is quite a bit old at this point and because a lot of the time i just need to get the concepts out and share them, and i'm trying to relax more about that exact thing, so please excuse me in my momentary stress about doing so... i'm trying to just have this be apart of my little Exercise Zone is all!

in terms of focus, Overall, i am thinking up what's basically a re-imagining of the actual series, except with more of a sense of clearly defined character arcs and development for some of the cast, exploring underutilized characters and dynamics, and occasionally re-doing certain concepts in a better way. however, one of my favorite areas to play around in is the Pre-Story and Post-Story concepts, which can include anything from backstory to what the characters will be like in the future, as well as concepts for everyone's family! i find that stuff fun to explore as well as important to getting a grasp on the characters

currently, i'm in the process of working on a ton of documents full of scattered ideas for the majority of the characters. at the moment, i have a priority on lumpus and slinkman, but also in the process are jane, chef mcmuesli, and edward, with others in the future if the ideas strike me one day! if you have a specific character you're wondering about let me know...

do keep in mind that the adult characters are my favs, and i am also an adult myself — and this is a blog for a children's television program from nearly 2 decades ago, so while there isn't anything crazy going on here, i might be a little unwell or make a crude/suggestive joke here and there. furthermore, i'm not all that into shipping the kids, but that's not really got much to do with anything, it's just not my personal focus outside of a very few exceptions :) (i might have more interest in "future" stuff in that sense)

i choose to Ignore the finale (and have since day one) just cus i think it's stupid and unsatisfying and its agonizing when its the Only thing people ever bring up in regards to the show aaand i'm doing my own thing anyway (no hate to tom kenny for thinking it up though LOVE YOU KING ❤️) let's all hate the finale... together! 🤝

and, finally, PLEASE send me asks if you wanna...! about what i draw or plans for characters or the show or what you're curious about yourself or whatever else that's on your mind. i will THROW up. i'm NICE and i LOVE TO TALK and i am ALWAYS STARVING FOR CAMP LAZLO INDULGENCE... i have thousands and thousands of words i've got to get through, and i have no problem talking about some of it early if prompted. alternatively, you may absolutely send to me (or talk to me about) your OWN ideas and headcanons if you are fine with me playing along with them too! i work best by absorbing bits of other people's ideas first, so i would be glad to hear or bounce off of them. i can get a little bit carried away talking about my own ideas, but, please, don't take that for not wanting to hear anything from the outside — i still need sustenance to live!

QUESTIONS THAT ARE NOT FREQUENTLY ASKED BUT COULD BE!

"HOW DID YOUR INTEREST START?"

my Honest answer: i got shown chef mcmuesli and thought he was Cute. and for some reason watching the show revolutionized my friend group, so here we finally are a few years later

"WHY CAMP LAZLO OF ALL THINGS?"

i think camp lazlo is a really funny cartoon that has a lot of good episodes, and even though i don't quite think it's the best one in the world, or even that i've seen in my own limited pool of media, i do still believe it's a painfully underrated show anyway and the "personal attachement" and "fun" factors are always the best sort of measure in that sense!

it's a little bit ("a little bit") of a Playground Area for me as well, where most of all i like the huge potential and the aesthetics of everything, but i also just disproportionately love some of these characters! which is partially my own fault. so i'm overall fine with just sort of fucking around... joe murray was talking about how the summer camp setting already provided an infinite supply of ideas, and i think that's really true! i LOVE the setting to Death and while i don't remember a lot of it, i feel VERY lucky to have been a girl scout as a kid

as you soon may notice, i am Way too invested in lumpus and slinkman and they are my wives for some reason ❤️ so, unfortunately, a good chunk of the stuff on here will likely be focused on them specifically because they have clung to me like a leech

"HAVE YOU WATCHED ROCKO'S MODERN LIFE OR LETS GO LUNA?"

i've only seen a couple episodes of each! if i ever watch some of them though i figure i'll post about them here too. the classic icon of my art blog is a minor/background character from RML with a couple lines!

"SO WHY DO YOU LIKE SLINKMAN AND LUMPUS SO MUCH ANYWAY? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING TO THAT MOOSE AND SLUG???"

that's just how it goes sometimes, isn't it?

i actually have a history of enjoying similar pairings of characters — lumpus and slinkman, burns and smithers, dedede and escargoon... every single one of these is a boss and assistant who are voiced by the same person, which is Wild!

but, i've accidentally dug myself into a very deep investment hole on account of All That Shit I Just Made Up, and just have a lot of fun playing around with them as characters. dysfunctional and complicated dynamics are some of my favorites to explore, and they have a lot going on — two characters i'm already super into individually, a childhood friends to life partners dynamic, potential to explore both ends of the health spectrum and the story i can play with there character-development wise for both of them while still keeping it interesting to me, some weird gay shit going on, and two characters who just bounce off each other well. at this point i just like to see them Exist in the Same Vicinity at All 🫶 for a long time now i've felt like there's been an empty space here to fill with focus of them!

i really do just like character analysis so the bigger documents i'm working on are sort of an idealized writing guide/story outline for myself. it's a very long process (the document i started chipping away at is like... over 20k by now, but its been a few years in the making) and after i finish laying it all out, i might turn it into a fic one day! for now, i've just got too much else on my hands to finish up first, so you'll get to see some of it in its raw conceptual form, while i try to get myself to work on cleaning it all up, at least

and here's a gay little timeline JUST FOR YOU of the Main stuff i have going on. i will make a bigger post(s) explaining things in the future

(i'm still playing with the exacts of this too so several time frames on here are subject to change, as per usual)

"DO YOU HAVE A TOYHOU.SE OR ANYTHING FOR YOUR OCS?"

i do, but since i take so long to finish and finalize anything, i have most things of that nature shut down until i revisit them. and if there's any interest i might work on getting the finished stuff i have back online at least. either way, any information about any characters will be in my DocumentsTM and talked about on here when i clean it up either way

"WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THE SLUG WOMEN BANNER?"

i made it for the slinkman blog, i just think it's annoying when non-mammals have tits and i have a love-hate relationship with camp lazlo character design ❤️ and it's just really funny to put it there tbh

[sometipsygnostalgic]

adventure time wizard city liveblog

 well here we go

my last adventure time liveblog, i havent actually done one of these in MANY years... probably not since 2014

this takes place at the same time as obsidian?

DID-- DID CHOOSE GOOSE JUST DIE

DID BUFO JUST KILL CHOOSE GOOSE

yeah i know that’s bufo, they only made it enormously obvious, tsk tsk

@spaceacepearl​ joked about us seeing choose goose get sent to hell but i diDNT EXPECT IT TO HAPPEN

This music is i assume by one of the many musical artists Adam Muto listed on twitter, it rocks. It’s not as hardcore as Obsidian’s intro, but it’s suitably chill for the scene. 

“get offa my bus kid”

Those wizards in the left and far right groups appear to be new! 

OH MY GOD--

HELP?????? NEW PROFILE PIC TIME

HAHAHAHAH

THE MUSICAL CON DID ME GOOD, I DID REALLY LOUD AUDIBLE LAUGHTER

i bet hanna and co had fun making these signs

my favourite is the cat with “FAMILIARS HAVE RIGHTS”

cadorka..... wow

We’re not even four minutes into the ep and peppermint butler has already killed someone in front of a large group of witnesses

“this smells of DARK MAGIC” “yall kids know thats illegal right” peps watches the other kids nod before later joining in, LOL

i cant believe pep started the great gum wars and got killed by golb

SOMEONE has been playing Overwatch... 

i-- i still cant believe choose goose is fucking dead

how long was he stuck in hell for, or was that recent to together again after new death showed up 

i have to admit im not a big fan of spader, too perfect, and not in that funny way either. i hope they give him some characteristics that make him stand out. 

im getting flashbacks to OK KO and Owl House here...

Cadebra using music is a reference to Abracadaniel’s love of interpretetive dance in Play Date. 

“they only laugh because youre different” “i know” “SO STOP BEING DIFFERENT” oh my god it’s like talking to my own parents cadebra is actually... a LOT like me, less in her hyperactivity but more in her nonchalant enthusiasm and almost acceptance of the inevitable bullying because it means more time in people’s consciousness

ahhh - it’s quietly revealed here that she is responsible and a skilled magician, she is just bored of magic! i like that she parents abracadaniel instead of being downtrodden by his ramblings. 

PEP NO--- oh i see the problem, he hasn’t got his Bug Milk... sorry Martin Olsen fans, no Hunson today. At least we get one more Phil Face for the road! 

candy people in their natural habitat

Ahhh that’s Doctor Calidoneus! The voice actor was at the recent Distant Lands panel alongside Pep and Blaine’s actors. 

“pretty sure hes just trashcandy” - i like you, sassy antler lady

the mystery of how he gets clothes

and once again spader is proving to be the most irritating distant lands character of the lot, there is no subversion here. where is the subversion?  

NANI

what is going on here? are pep and peppermint the same person or not? im sure they must be, but there is something going on here with peppermint butler’s soul being trapped in the body of his child self who hasn’t got the same memories. 

OH, HYNDEN WALCH DID A NEW LINE yes this is what im here for, special over 

peppermint butler cursed himself... of course he did - Shado was correct!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WHAT THE FUCK

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

ROCK STUDENT, BLESSED ROCK STUDENT, WAS THAT POOR GUY WHO LOOKS LIKE A JAWBREAKER

love the reference to astral plane, of course pep cant astrally project because cursed pep is still inside of him 

wow, blaine, wow

they have a crush

LITTLE DUDE! COLE SANCHEZ!

i love the dynamic between cadebra and abracadaniel, imo so far it’s the heart of the special. im not really gripped by peppermint butler’s school troubles. i imagine someone else probably will be but i want to run past that shit as far as possible. 

TRDGFYGHJH

WE

WE MADE  A PREDICTION THAT WAS JUST LIKE THIS

PEPPERMINT BUTLER GETTING TURNED INTO THE FOUR COMPONENTS OF PEPPER MINT BUTT LURE WAS IN THE WIZARD CITY PREDICTIONS ART DRAW THAT HASNT BEEN POSTED YET

ILL SHOW YOU WHEN NICK POSTS THE VIDEO and then ill tell you who made the prediction because i... think it was nick himself, insanity 

who plagiarized finn’s signature???

turns out pep really DID take over wizard city!!!!

i love this band

i understand your pain peps

you probably have a bit too much in common with your mother, and i imagine it isn’t easy being turned into a kid and not being able to do stuff that came so easy. you’re disappointing yourself! (he’s literally disappointing himself)

I’m less than halfway through the special, what the fuck. I wasn’t wrong when I said Wizard City had a lot on its plate. It’s noit that I’ve been particularly gripped up to this point, though to be fair I didn’t pause at all during the other specials barring Obsidian. 

that... that poor kid is still a rock

and then the preview happened and bufo casually revealed to the audience that, yes, he killed choose goose

i dont know whats happening with pep but it seems he needs to be exorcised of... pep. which is a shame. i hope they learn to coexist. 

i have to say the background work in this special is really good! like, really damn good. 

WH

WHAT

DID SPADER JUST DIE

IS THIS WHY PEOPLE THINK PEPBUT KILLED HIM 

oh thats right - abracadaniel is cadebra’s uncle! this must be abracadniels sister. sorry, folks, he doesn’t fuck. 

Where are they? Is this anywhere near Wizard City? It’s an unpopulated prewar wasteland. 

THESE ARE JUST HUMANS

OF COURSE SHE WANTS TO PERFORM TO MILQUETOAST HUMANS

my child

is this an art style choice or did they get the people from that one studio to make this

HANNA FINALLY GETS TO FULFIL HER DREAM OF INSERTING KANEDA INTO ADVENTURE TIME

the red jacket he wears and his head pill shape is a big kaneda reference actually, which i suppose makes sense considering he’s a rival to our protagonist, but it’s a bit on the nose

bufo killed one of his own students? but why????

“MY UNCLE’S A COP”

“no one likes a rat”

i actually really like blaine, though im confused. did their VA change halfway through the special?

HOW NATURAL, NO WASTE, IT IS AN ENDLESS CHAIN

did doctor caledonius steal the trophy,,,? 

EVIL SNAIL EVIL SNAIL

MONMSTER HUNJTER DISCOVERY NOISE, this time it’s a tetsucabra

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I HAVE QUESTIONS

god i wish this is what this special was about, i miss adventure time

these remind me of the comics with their art style :) i wonder who designed them? the one on the right with pb and pep, in particular, very comics-y. 

fdgfhgf because he’s like 500

“pep can be kind of a jerk but he wouldn’t kill anyone”

sorry, cadebra, i have news for you

is doctor calednoius the true villain? if bufo’s out of the picture, she MUST be, 

ANTS

oh no, he might gbe stuck in wizard city :( 

HELP

the writing on the wall...

SPADER LITERALLY FUCKING DIED OH YM JESUS CHRIST

PEPPERMINT BUTLER’S OWN CULT????

THIS IS JUST OK KO NOW

okay im not surprised all the teachers at wizard city are cultists in worship of peps, maybe they killed spader and bufo because they bullied peps T_T

wait no, they thought spader had the potential, but sadly not

HE FUCKING KILLED HIMSELF

sorry, i was distracted by the pretty dope fight sequence and now the special is over????

fucking jesse, hes probably at least partly responsible for the cult nonsense

This credits art is by Maya Petersen!!!! Holy shit it’s adorable!

LRETGFDRGTFGMHGFHFG

LEAF MAN

DO YOU THINK THEY PUT HIM IN RETROSPECTIVELY

DO YOU THINK MAYA PETERSEN DREW THIS AND ADAM PUT IT IN THE EP RETROSPECTIVELY

HE LIVES

MAYBE THIS IS WHY CHOOSE GOOSE WENT TO HELL

okay, it’s over :) 

first thoughts out of the way: not a big fan of this special. it’s like watching a completely different show. it’s not got the PZSHAHH of the normal wizard city stuff and there weren’t a lot of funny jokes or even hearty moments in the thing. 

it suffers from a lack of invested character interactions, much like BMO did. there was not a single main cast member in the whole thing! and like i said before, much of peppermint butler’s character in the show is based on his very sweet relationship to his mother, princess bubblegum, so when they showed a single (hilarious) photo of them together it made me sad we didn’t get any scenes with them together. it would have STOLEN this episode. and they teased the hunson golf photo, and death!!! and jake appeared in a photo T_T last jake appearance. 

it also suffers because Peppermint Butler is clearly not himself, imo he was way more entertaining in the Together Again special, where we seem him back to his “normal” self. 

i dont think peps being a dark wizard was something to “kill off” exactly. i wonder what was going on there? was that actually peps, or was that a spirit he cursed himself with based on himself? we at least know in the future he does become a dark wizard again, and even princess :) this special didn’t answer those questions but lol. 

THE GOOD STUFF, because yes, there was a lot of good stuff! 

God, I’m with Aracle and Maya on this - I LOVE Cadebra and her relationship to Pep. I wish she was even in more of this - I would love to watch the adventures of Cadebra and Pepbut in their first year of school, like in the end credits.

That, imo, is where the heart of the special lay - Peppermint Butler’s attempts to impress himself, versus Cadebra’s self acceptance and desire to follow her dreams of being a goofy goober, no matter what other people thought of her. 

It turned out that Cadebra is a responsible student and family member. I really liked that. Her scenes with Abracadaniel were, somehow, my favourite in the entire special! 

I like that theres a lot of cool magic towards the end of this special, and a lot of HORRIFYING DEATH. It wouldn’t be adventure time if you didn’t randomly kill off child characters. Poor Spader, I hated you but damn, what a grim fate. 

I like that Bufo and Caledonius had this crush/hatred thing going on, but they were part of the same cult in the end. 

I didn’t like the giant peps scene at the end, the monster was extremely milquetoast compared to the madness we usually get in AT. Obsidian, for example, had the awesome Larvo design. Nemesis had some INSANE dark magic!!!!  I wish they drew more from that episode. 

Considering how much Steve Little appears in this special, I do feel bad for Mace (little Peps). He said he would have really benefitted from coaching, but recieved none. He had to re-record his lines 3 times! Judging from his description of events, Wizard City was a hard time for him. 

The wizard school did remind me, heavily, of both The Owl House and OK KO. Personally I was hoping AT would offer me something more insane, but I do love both of those shows, and I know Wizard City was on a really tight schedule. 

I think they should have spent less time on the school bullying plot, and skipped straight to MURDER. 

We did have a cold opening, not on par with Together Again’s at all, but damn!

I am wondering where I would put this in the watch list? I do think it should sit after Obsidian as the third special. The intro scene makes it clear this takes place at the same time as Obsidian!!!

Well, that was it, the last ep of AT for the next few years at least T_T

i think together again was the better finale, definitely. but wizard city feels pretty detached from AT for me, despite the familiar characters it tonally isn’t like the show other than the awesome brutal death scenes. I thought the last 11 minutes was easily the best in the special! Which, honestly, is how it should be, though I do wish it gripped me more. Maybe I’m just not the target audience for Wizard City? It feels like something I would find very compelling if I was a bit younger! 

[chiseler]

Great Zilches of History

Film is light. There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call film noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.

Early, nitrate-based film stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe's crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe's singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one's mind. A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight such as illumines Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, a little dupey degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation.  Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out the corner of a building, or is it the blackness of the building which is eating into the sky? 

As with many such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply to watch as the characters smudge. As their shadows pulsate and flicker, emanate out beyond themselves. But if Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes existential dread as a given.

God, a vague and unseen deity, died at the moment cinema was born, replaced by a new celestial order. Saints and prophets made poor film characters, giving off the feeling of having stepped out of a stained glass window, flat, Day-Glo icons moving uncomfortably through three-dimensional space. Movies rather rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lacklustre clown easily outperformed all the icon messiahs. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest feature films, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorts, it’s a beautiful snooze. A different execution climaxes his Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants. Or maybe the events of 1901, cinematic and otherwise, allow “the public” to define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The year brings Victoria Regina’s propitious death. And with her passing, Edgar Allan Poe’s pronunciamento on celebrity, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque," comes to new and anarchic fruition as an incendiary schnook, one of history’s finest.

When he shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901, the currents of fear and vengeance unleashed by Leon Czolgosz would carry him on a journey from reflexive beatings at the hands of police and a post-Victorian mob – ladies in bustles shedding all restraint, transformed from well-honed symbols of middle-class decorum into yowling banshees, screaming “GIVE HIM TO US!” – straight to the electric chair, from whence his corpse would be taken for additional punishment, a process where ghoulish prison authorities at Auburn separated the head from the body, and then poured sulfuric acid on what remained, before secreting the sorry residue of America’s anarchist son into an unmarked grave.

Despite attempts to erase Czoglosz from history, a visual document survives, oozing with pathos and bitter recrimination. It is impossible, looking into those eyes, not to feel unnerved and, yes, sympathetic with him – his desperate act, after all, was as critical a part of America’s greed-engorged industrial fantasia as the near daily spectacle of peaceful strikers, his friends among them, being slaughtered in the name of profit. 

Cinema’s misspent childhood years in late-Victorian fairgrounds are followed by a grimy adolescence in Edwardian nickelodeon parlours. The medium, which finally comes of age amid gaudy palaces built in its honor, morphs many times. However, All Talking Pictures are the final death knell for the Victorian standard, belching from the screen a thousand inbred tongues that invade the ear willy-nilly. They remind us that when Queen Victoria breaths her last Naturalism sheds decorum, taste, breeding, good table manners.

Edgar Allan Poe essentially owns motion pictures via ongoing necrophilic obsession, since celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. Film is bona fide illumination — as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind – representing the supremacy of alchemy and necromancy over sackcloth and ashes. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in their own image.  Both Church and State with their blunt instruments of repression proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto.

Holy men were unceremoniously defrocked, their doctrine of abject compliance to class-based norms re-written into storylines enriched by grease-painted floozies, costumed villains, and snooty dowagers brought down a notch by the drunk hobo in her drawing room. Amidst widespread labour unrest and mass poverty, followed soon by the Great Depression, filmgoers of the silent era had a front row view of the plutocracy’s helplessness against a swelling tide of restless humanity. Charlie Chaplin’s itinerant laborer may have accidentally thwarted a plutocrat’s plan for world domination and/or a house renovation, just as Groucho Marx seemed to have spontaneously derailed a social climbing matron’s equally fierce ambitions.

All hail the magic mirrors! Celestial mandalas! Giant eggs and butterfly women! Segundo de Chomón’s The Red Spectre (1907) ruthlessly assaults our eyes with a wraith-magician dissolving through his coffin lid in a red, hand-tinted, flame-flickering hell. His presence, caped, skull-masked, was to herald a new thespic truth, that from this moment forward the art of acting would be reduced to how you respond to light, and how light responds to you. The Specter of Chomon’s dark bauble is in every element Poe’s Red Death — japing and performing tricks for us, his adoring fans and welcome guests, before announcing our doom — literary metaphor slammed against a literal backdrop of amber stalactites, pellucid as an ossuary.

That was a long time ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, before artifice and studios and the commercial paradigm of stardom finally swallowed cinema in one ravenous bite. It was a period when one could see, if one paid close attention, the dreariness of ordinary life at the centre and around the edges of every motion picture brought forth. It lived onscreen in film’s early days, exposing the pretense, however fitful, of opulence or period as simply that: pretense, a fundamental desire to escape reality. But this “escapism” had always been erroneously attributed to the audience’s needs, when in fact it was rather those bankrolling the nascent medium not yet sufficiently in control of itself to impose any order.

The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed. 

Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance and necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich is channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the horror noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, lunatics taking over bedlam? Jean Epstein, who adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, complained that Baudelaire’s translations fundamentally mistook Poe’s innocence for ghastliness. 

The dead in Poe, writes Epstein, are “only slightly dead.”  

To the extent that Epstein was correct, the whimsy that Poe bequeaths to cinema finds itself absorbed in almost material terms — not as sensibility but as a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted names. In Mesmeric Revelations a voluntary subject is quite near physical death and under the ministrations of his mesmerist, answering precise questions about the nature of God. Before dying, he says God is “ultimate or unparticled” matter: “What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion”. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays. 

Deep within the 18 hours of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a moment that, on its incandescent surface, could have been lifted weightless from the great post-war dream of material deliverance; as if the zeitgeist of the mid 20th century had somehow got lost and ended up in this one: Daytime, the top on the convertible is down, the radio tuned, The Paris Sisters singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky.  Within this tapestry of an early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally evocative of Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knows well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a siren sound from the American Beyond, or a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt.  We don’t know.  We’ll never know.

In this oneiric echo chamber, Poe smiles down upon American blondness, muscle cars soaked in sunlight, candy for eye and ear; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion and immortality.

If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America's music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to devastate, be it the existential kind which inspires the malevolence everyone paid the price of a ticket to have vicarious transit with; or the mere victimisation of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence, of any variety, was so lavishly examined, toyed with, killed.  The free floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart.  Adoring such guilt-free teenage odes to sleep, death and sexual desire, David Lynch finds a muse in Amanda Seyfried. Specifically her visionary eyes melting Phil Spector’s dark edifice of sugar in a deathless, Sternbergian close-up — iridescent search lights, ever more urgently scanning the sky above, waiting for the sun to swallow her whole. We can only bear witness, and internalize this shimmering ingenue, this angel in a red convertible, trading places with Old Sol; as if whatever she just snorted has entered our system through hers.  But in that ephemeral instant she achieves oneness with all things; the transcendence of stardom — true, temporal stardom  — shorn of fame and the imperatives of show-business.

To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion; the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita. Fellini, he states, "manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner." Even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — this seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies of both men as they developed through time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 1/2 and throughout much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Any good cinephile might be tempted to resolve the disparities and move toward a brighter, less subterranean comprehension. But, ultimately, such understanding would be a didactic burden no moviegoer needs. For here, in these conflicting dialects, you have a fleeting taste of ideologies swirled together like ribbon candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past regional splendor into that fraternity of man: the socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.

Careening from one via to another at harrowing, white-knuckle speed, Fellini was once heard to lament that “Some of the neo-realists seem to think that they cannot make a film unless they have a man in old clothes in front of the camera.” George Bluestone, recording these words for the pages of Film Culture in 1957, was sitting in the literal passenger seat of that ideal metaphor for post-war ebullience in action: expert, 20th century precision hurtling them through Roman streets with graffiti-scrawled churches proudly bearing the hammer and sickle; that famous Black Chevy skirting the Italian Scylla (the Vatican) and its equally dogmatic Charybdis (the Party). At that velocity, anything could make sense.

“Appearances aside" Bluestone wrote, "the Chevrolet is at every moment under Fellini’s control. He weaves in and out of traffic, misses pedestrians by inches, swerves away from Nomentana’s interminable monuments, dodging yellow traffic blinkers as if he were trying out a darkened slalom.” It is every bit a performance. Rome, after all, is the land of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne — marble-cum-flesh, even as flesh itself gives way to forms that leave the viewer in terrified awe. While reliving his own mythic, carbureted experience, Bluestone does some weaving of his own, quoting Genevieve Agel’s one-line pronunciamento (and, in the process, defining what would soon be labelled 'Felliniesque'), “Fellini is a visionary of the real”, as the passenger positions his driver somewhere between corporeal reality and ecstatic truth while the big man (no old clothes for this maestro) drives and drives. “As one hand lightly guides the wheel, the other gestures — it acts.”

Spirits of the Dead is one of those compendium films, with voguish directors (Malle, Vadim, Fellini) entrusted with bringing to the screen a Poe story each. Only the Fellini episode, Toby Dammit, is notable, but it's very notable, a hallucinatory yarn owing as much to Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill! as to Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head, its ostensible source. The title character, played by Terence Stamp with white-blond hair and dark roots and constant beads of witch hazel perspiration, is in Rome to attend an awards ceremony and to play Christ in a western, but he's fatally distracted by his new sports car and a vision of the devil in the form of a little girl. Toby's ride through a hellscape of nocturnal Rome seems lifted from Jules Dassin’s 10.30 p.m. Summer (1966), but works even better for Fellini than it did in the Duras adaptation. An oppressively subjective film, Toby Dammit narrows down to the view in the Ferrari's headlights, a ghastly floodlit interzone where human forms are gradually replaced with mannequins and cut-outs, as the city becomes unreal, an elaborate movie set, an uncanny valley laid out for the staging of an epic stunt/snuff film.

Fellini and Lynch celebrate bodily extremes in intriguing if differing ways, which should, in our time, naturally gallop beyond the pale, but nevertheless become wholly, weirdly digestible. It is perhaps the innocent glee of these artists, their wonderment at the vast variety of shapes the human body can assume; an innocence which suspends toward erasure our awareness the way physical representation functions in the 21st century. Lynch presents the disabled as childlike, mysterious, magical beings without ever worrying about lending them agency (The Elephant Man’s John Merrick functions both as passive whipping boy and chic spectacle for the whole of Victorian London), or the mendacity of adult sophistication (the latest Twin Peaks iteration includes a pint-sized hitman who whines like a puppy when his icepick is broken). Is it any wonder Lynch evolved a style which placed them front and center in unmoving shots, without irony or pity? 

Poe, while certainly a pioneer of fake news, also had a way of vindicating the lumpen masses of humanity (to the middle-brow’s abiding chagrin).  

The Mystery of Marie Roget, a Parisian murder mystery, presented as a fictional sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was simultaneously trumpeted as a correct solution to the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York. When a news article presented fresh evidence while the story was still being serialised, Poe made minor changes to the final instalment to keep his fiction in line with the facts.

He later published a story about an Atlantic crossing by balloon, accomplished in three days, in The New York Sun in 1844. "Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason's Flying Machine!!!"  The piece was presented as truth, and only revealed as "The Great Balloon Hoax" a couple of days later. “The more intelligent believed," wrote Poe, "while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain.” He saw this as a new development: “20 years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic.” 

What had changed? Perhaps the acceleration of scientific and social progress meant that the more literate and scientifically-minded had become inured to startling new developments, so the most surprising events now seemed credible. And since these same technological leaps were always presented as social benefits, the working class was growing skeptical, since they rarely saw any improvement in their condition.

by Daniel Riccuito, R.J. Lambert and David Cairns

Special thanks to Richard Chetwynd

[hillbillyoracle]

My Complicated Feelings on Waking Witcblr

I've been posting less on Tumblr as I try to figure out what direction I want to take my work. It became pretty clear to me at the end of last year that I wasn't putting out as much work that I was proud of and didn't really know where to go next. It seems like a lot of folks were going through a similar reevaluation as I saw less and less of blogs I really loved.

I've been seeing more Waking Wichblr content rolling across my dash and I've been having some really conflicted feelings on it. On the one hand, I understand the impulse and I love that folks are organizing around it. On the other, I think it fails to grapple with some deep issues the community has and a fallow period could be really fruitful. Let me explain.

Witchblr Hinges on Consumption, Not Conversation

As it currently stands, much of Witchblr hinges on consumption. People reblog things like they're collecting things. I feel like a lot of my pieces wind up being put on a shelf and not much happens with them. There's often not a lot of interaction when I post.

The conversations around pieces tend to happen on other platforms like Discord and y'all I cannot stand most Witchblr discords so I'm not privy to those conversations. I've noticed a marked drop in comments on my work over the last year. One of the reasons I started posting my work on Tumblr was to get feedback and as that's dropped off, I've turned my attention to longer form works. And the strange things is, I kind of get the same level of interaction. It's incentivized me to put more of my energy into creating workbooks, zines, and a support group.

I'm not mad about that at all. I feel very neutral about it. But it is a factor. If the conversation is going to take place away from where authors can benefit from hearing about it, the platform becomes less engaging and less valuable to those producing content.

Witchblr Often Wants to Consume With Paying

After watching several communities connected to Tumblr collapse because leadership got worn thin or didn't have enough money to keep it going on their own, I'm pretty jaded about how much a lot of folks actually want to keep the communities going.

Folks who genuinely don't have money - I'm not talking to you. You're great, you're doing what you can, you can skip this. But I am talking to folks who will drop $50-$100 on "witchcraft supplies" per month but balk at spending $5 to keep a server going on Mastadon or support a writer they love on Patreon.

It says a lot about what those folks value. Content, education, resources - those are expected to be free. Which means those of us who are trying to do it have to take time away from creating content to productize our work in hopes of making any money from it at all.

If there's one thing I wish Witchblr would take from Christianity, it's the concept of the tithe. Of setting aside a percentage of income each month to support the community. It doesn't have to be 10%, it can be 1% for all I care, but just that sense that its our duty as members of a spiritual community to monetarily support those who are following their calling of teaching.

Witchblr Needs to Stop Consuming and Start Documenting to Survive

I'm seeing calls to revive Witchblr by encouraging folks to make more posts which I think is an extremely bad idea. I've said this in other places but the big issue Witchblr has is that so many folks are new. And new people are trying to teach new people how to do things neither of them has much experience with. It's made Witchblr an echo chamber of people spouting the same lines with very little sourcing or evaluation. A lot of what gets passed around winds up being not very high quality.

So are new folks just supposed to lurk? Not at all. New folks can serve two super important roles that benefit everyone, experienced and new, can benefit from - documentation and curation.

For folks who are truly just starting out, documentation is hands down the most important and valuable thing you can offer the community. Do not instruct folks to do what you've done. Instead document what you tried, what sources you used, and whether it was successful or not successful and why. There's so much value in being an artful observer at any stage of development.

For folks who are a little more experienced but still new - hands down one of the best things you can do is the painstaking work of curation. People who make master posts of resources that helped them are gods I tell you. Shout people out. Boost the work that's helping you. It's invaluable.

Tumblr's Policies Have Driven Folks Away and They Will Again

I think it's important to remember that the one of the first mass exoduses of Witchblr blogs happened with the anti-sex media policies Tumblr instituted in 2018. Many people migrated onto their own platforms after the announcement was made in solidarity with people who would be put out of business or needlessly flagged because of the policies. Many of those independent blogs unfortunately petered out and I can't find many of those writers anywhere anymore. I'm still mourning that loss and miss them greatly.

For those who have the time and the spoons to do so, what I would love to see is a network that connects independent blogs with Tumblr blogs (if this is already happening, let me know). A roundup style blog that curates posts both on tumblr and off would be amazing. Without something that, we're likely to fall prey to more exits as Tumblr makes changes. There's always the chance that Tumblr could go away entirely! Having hubs that can connect folks with blogs that isn't entirely based on one platform would go a long way to keeping folks engaged in the long term.

If Witchblr Can't Figure These Things Out, A Fallow Period Could Be Great Actually

For folks who've not been through a community fallow period, this may seem like dire straights. I remember when I was seeing some of my favorite communities dwindle in 2010, I felt scared I was going to lose people I cared about and resources I depended on. But what wound up happening is that many of those communities survived. The people who were the most devoted kept coming back and contributing. Or they'd come back when they could and leave when they couldn't.

People need time to process and practice all the information that's been given to them. If Witchblr does wind up winding down (again, because I've been on the platform since 2008, it's done this at least 3 or more times now) it will likely come with the added benefit of more people synthesizing the material they're reading, practicing it, and having genuinely valuable notes of their own to add. I think it could go a long way toward enriching the community.

I think of it a little like compost. Sometimes the community has to break down a little before it can be fertile ground again. It needs an off season. Even in parts of the world where the weather could technically support year round agriculture, there's a deep understanding that the ground needs to rest. So if Witchblr does slow down, don't fret. Keep practicing, keep processing. And then, when you're ready, tell us about it.

Conclusion

These are just some thoughts I've had knocking around and wanted to get out in words. They're a bit messy but I wanted to see if they resonated with anyone else. Communities are cyclical. Low periods are needed and helpful. They tend to kick back in pretty organically if the foundation is laid properly (and even when it's not). I hope folks are well out there!

[cherryrogers]

➸ eye candy

pairing: bucky barnes x reader | office au

warnings: swearing, mostly fluff.

word count: 3.7k

synopsis: Being Tony Stark’s receptionist was hard. Working alongside the most gorgeous salesman you’d ever seen was even harder. Actually talking to said salesman? Well, that was just insane.

a/n: so this is sorta based of the show ‘the office’,,, we love a good office romance :) please enjoy and feedback is always appreciated !!

“Good morning, (Y/N). All of these papers need photocopied, signed and posted to all of our clients by twelve o’clock, sharp.”

Tony Stark was going to be the death of you.

Hesitant eyes landed on the enormous pile of paperwork that your boss had just slapped on your desk. There was no way all of that was getting done in the next two hours.

“I’m a receptionist, Tony. Not a miracle worker.” You shrugged, looking up to meet his eyes. “I can’t get all of this finished by lunch on my own. Can’t you help me out?”

“You see,” The man sighed. “These papers are now on your desk. That means the responsibility of them has been passed on to you. Not my problem anymore. I’m sure you can find yourself another happy helper.”

He started to walk away, causing you to lean over your desk and try to grab back his attention. “But Tony-”

“Can’t hear you, already walking away.” Tony called behind him, quickly pacing towards his office. “And now I’m opening the door to my office, and now I’m entering...”

The man’s voice faded as he swiftly closed the door to his office, leaving the headache-inducing pile of paperwork to sit hauntingly on the edge of your desk. Sitting back in your leather chair, you let out a quiet huff.

This was going to be a long day.

Becoming a receptionist hadn’t always been the plan. The plan was to work your ass off after you graduated high school so that you had enough money to go travelling around the globe, gaining work experience in different countries and making memories along the way. Maybe even not returning back to America, but going on to live a quiet life in the South of France or maintaining the busy work life in Japan.

However, it’d been a while since graduation, and you still hadn’t stepped foot out of the state of New York.

Working for Stark Industries was only meant to last a few months, it was only meant to be a temporary job until you found something that paid a little better. For some reason, however, you were still handling everything at the reception desk a year later.

Stark Industries was a small tech company developed by the man himself, Tony Stark. He’d had high hopes for the company, insisting that as soon as clients started rolling in, the company would be worth six figures in no time. You weren’t exactly sure what his definition of ‘no time’ was, but it’d been kind of a long time since the company was up and running.

You had to hand it to the guy, though. Tony built every piece of tech he sold himself from scratch. While there were workers in the warehouse who eventually aided in the development of the products, it all started with Stark. There was a part of you that deeply hoped Stark Industries would take off, finally fulfilling Tony’s dream.

But when the guy decided to hand you a ton of paperwork to do in an impossible amount of time, that hope was soon retracted out of frustration.

The main door to the office clicking open caught your attention, and a grin immediately made its way onto your lips.

“Hey, Sam.” You greeted your co-worker as he walked past your desk.

Turning his head to you, he quirked a questioning brow. “You seem weirdly smiley for a Monday morning. D’you want somethin’?”

“Well, since you asked...” You let out a laugh, patting your hand on top of the pile of paperwork you had yet to move. “All of this needs copied and signed and-”

“Nope, no way.” Sam shook his head. “I’m already behind on sales. Stark will have my head if I don’t make some today, and you know how much I love avoiding that guy at all costs.”

The grin fell off your lips easily. “But I can’t do it all myself!”

“Ain’t my problem, girl.” The man shrugged, beginning to try and get away from your desk, and your pleading.

“You sound just like Tony.” You called after him, resulting in him turning around and giving you a glare.

“How dare you.”

After that encounter, Sam stayed glued to his computer all morning, trying to sell as many products to clients as he could. Meanwhile, you were still stuck with a bunch of work that you hadn’t started yet.

Your eyes scanned the office. It was rather small, the only rooms being Tony’s office, the kitchen, the break room, and the main office area.

Natasha and Clint sat in the far corner of the room, usually never doing what they were meant to. You weren’t quite sure how they still had their jobs, considering you never saw either of them pick up a phone or touch their computer mouse. The redhead was currently grasping a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in one hand, and throwing them over her monitor in an attempt to make one land in Clint’s mouth with the other.

Through the glass of the door leading to the kitchen, you could see a tall blond taking his sweet time making himself a coffee. Steve hated working here, anyone with eyes could tell he’d rather always be anywhere else. He wanted something more than just a nine-to-five office job. Steve wanted to make an impact on the world, and he wasn’t so sure he could do that from a run down office building just outside the city.

Maybe you could convince him to help you.

Within thirty seconds, you had pushed yourself out of your desk chair and hurried over to the kitchen, giving Steve an innocent smile as you entered the small room.

“Hey, blondie. You’re not busy, are you?”

“If you’re asking on behalf of Stark, then yes, I’m incredibly busy.”

“Certainly looks like it.” You motioned towards the coffee he’d been stirring for the past five minutes. “Must be one hell of a coffee if it took you ten whole minutes to make.”

Steve narrowed his eyes at you. “Making coffee is an art. I would expect you to understand.”

“I understand that you’re not being at all productive right now, and I could really use some help with all the paperwork that needs sent out to clients-”

“Oh my god.” The blond groaned. “Did you come in here just to ask me to do work? I’m just tryin’ to make coffee here-”

“Steeeeve.” His name came out in a whine. “I’m desperate here.”

“Can’t you ask Sam to help?”

“Already did.”

“Natasha?”

“Too busy pelting Clint with candy.”

“What about Bucky?” At the mention of his friend’s name, a blush rose in your cheeks. Oh, fuck. Steve instantly smirked. “Aw, you don’t wanna ask him, do you? Does he make you nervous?”

You rolled your eyes, crossing your arms over your chest. “Stop it; I- I haven’t seen him this morning. Haven’t had the chance to ask him.”

“Well, he’s at his desk now. Doesn’t look occupied.” Steve nudged your arm with his elbow. “I’m sure Buck will help you out.”

“You think?”

“Oh, he will.” He let out a laugh, causing you to raise your brow at him curiously. How could he be so sure?

Steve noticed you eyeing him. “What?”

“How do you know that he’ll help me?”

“Just do.”

“If you and Sam won’t help, what makes you think Bucky will?”

“Nothing. Go ask him.”

“But you seemed so sure-”

“He knows that you have a crush on him.”

“He- he what?” You gaped, confused as to why Steve was acting so casual about it. Bucky knew? Oh no, oh god. Your life was officially over.

Since you started at the company, you’d always had an eye for the salesman that was directly in your line of sight from your seat behind the reception desk. Originally, Bucky was just good eye candy for when you got bored in the middle of any work you were supposed to be finishing. That was going great. You didn’t mind that you’d never had a conversation with the guy before, because if he turned out to be perfect inside and out, you knew there’d be an issue.

So when he first made conversation with you one morning when the both of you were early to work, you came to the conclusion that you were fucked. He complimented your hair that morning, offered to make you coffee, shot you a cheeky wink before strolling over to his desk. After that came the issue. The issue that you’d developed this stupid crush on him which he probably didn’t reciprocate.

Steve obviously noticed - how could he not notice the receptionist practically drooling over his best friend every time he looked up from his desk? When he actually sat down and did his work, of course.

“Did you tell him?” You pouted up at the blond, who found amusement in your panic. “I swear, Steven Grant, if you told him-”

“Calm down, woman.” He raised his hands in defense. “I didn’t tell him anything... except that you’re single and that you have a thing for man-buns.”

“Oh my- I’m gonna have to quit. This is your fault, Steve. I’ve quitting my job and changing my name.”

“C’mon, (Y/N) - you’re being dramatic.”

“That’s not my name anymore.” You shook your head, putting your hands on your hips. “I’m now going by... Anastasia.”

“Why Anastasia?”

“This sort of thing would never happen to a girl called Anastasia.”

Steve scoffed, leaning his back against the counter and finally sipping his coffee. “I don’t get what you’re freaking out about. You want him to know you’re available, right?”

“Available, yes. Not specifically desperate for men that can tie their hair up in a bun, of which there’s only one of in this building, and that’s him, Steve. That one man is Bucky, and now he’s gonna think I’m weird.”

“(Y/N)-”

“We discussed this, Steve. It’s Anastasia now. Oh yeah, I’ve gotta go and tell Tony I’m resigning and that (Y/N) not longer exists-”

“He likes you too, okay?” Steve suddenly raised his voice, before pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “God, you two are the worst.”

There’s a short silence between you and the blond. Bucky... liked you back? Uh, what? This was seriously news to you. Holy- what if you were his eye candy too? Never mind, scrap the quitting idea. If Bucky liked you back, this was your time to shine. The ball was in your court now. Hell yeah.

“Bucky likes me?” You asked quietly.

“Mhm.” Steve replied reluctantly, his lips against the edge of his coffee cup.

“So... I should go and ask him to help me with the paperwork?”

“Yup.”

“And he won’t mind because he likes me?”

“No, he won’t.”

A satisfied smile crept onto your lips, and you resisted the urge to just grab Steve and pull him into a victory hug. Instead, you opted for a friendly pat on the chest.

“Blondie, you should’ve just led with that.”

“For the love of- just... go get your man, Anastasia.”

You caught the corner of his lips upturning before you spun around, heading for the door that lead back into the main area.

“Screw that Anastasia girl. This is (Y/N)’s time to thrive.”

Steve only rolled his eyes as you exited the kitchen, a new, confident glow radiating off you as your eyes landed on your favorite bun-wearing tech salesman. Not that you knew many tech salesmen that wore buns in their hair, but you know.

He was slowly tapping away at his keyboard, tired eyes glancing around his computer screen and you couldn’t help but swoon. God, he was the epitome of perfection. How could such a man be working alongside you for a super small tech company? Shouldn’t he be a model or something? A swimwear model, fuck; that would be a sight-

“(Y/N)?”

It was at the sound of your name being called that you realized you were standing completely still in the middle of the room, staring Bucky down like an utter weirdo. The man smiled softly at you as you let out a nervous laugh, trying to hide your blatant embarrassment.

That glowing confidence? Definitely gone. You were not thriving anymore... and that would sure never have happened to Anastasia. Never. Maybe changing your name was still on the cards.

However, in that moment, you were you. And Bucky was sitting only a meter away from you, probably wondering what the hell was wrong with you.

“Uh, hi.” You finally mustered out, approaching his desk. Uh, hi? Uh, hi?! Oh, lord...

“Hey.” He chuckled. “You alright?”

“I’m great!” You answered, perching yourself on the side of his desk. “I, uh, I like your bun.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck-

“Thanks.” Bucky tilted his head to the side, leaning back in his seat. “Steve told me you liked man-buns.”

You were definitely going to have to talk to Steve about his wing-man skills after this was over. “Is that why you’re wearing one today?”

“Maybe.”

Oh, you weren’t expecting him to actually respond to that. Fuck, this was actually going kind of well.

Bucky had his bottom lip between his teeth, watching as you fumbled for any sort of words to leave your mouth. Any would do.

“It suits you. Not that I don’t like your hair down as well. I think it looks great either way, honestly. I’m sure even if you had short hair, you’d be able to pull that off too...”

Heavens above, please stop me from rambling and sounding like a complete idiot, you thought to yourself.

Bucky didn’t look phased, as his gorgeous smile only widened. “I guess that’s something we have in common then.”

“What?”

“Lookin’ good all of the time.”

Shit. Your cheeks were definitely tomato red after his comment. Why did he have to be so damn charming?

“So, did you come over here just to give me a confidence boost?” Bucky teased. “If being a receptionist doesn’t work out, you’d be a pretty good motivational speaker.”

You playfully glared at him. “Being a receptionist wasn’t my ultimate career goal, you know.”

“What was it then?”

“I mean, I don’t really know. Something to do with travelling, though - where I could see the world and everything it has to offer.” You let out a sigh. “I just don’t wanna be cooped up in an office forever, you know?”

You worried that you’d started rambling again, but by the interested expression on Bucky’s face, it seemed like he was listening intently. “Yeah, I get it. Salesman wasn’t always my goal either.”

The corner of your mouth upturned. “Can I guess what yours was?”

“You can try.”

As you furrowed your brows in thought, Bucky couldn’t help but skim his eyes over your features. Your eyes slightly squinted in focus, soft lips pursed, jaw locked. Despite his outgoing demeanor, he’d always been nervous to just start up a conversation with you in the office. He saw you five days a week, for eight hours a day, and he still got butterflies whenever you walked his way.

“A firefighter.” Your voice snapped him out of his daze.

“Nope.”

“A college professor?”

“No.”

“Hmm... a hair stylist?”

“No, funnily enough.”

“It’s a swimwear model, isn’t it?”

“(Y/N), that couldn’t be more far from the right answer.”

You sighed internally. It was worth a shot.

“Alright, what was it?” You chuckled.

“A chef.”

A chef, huh? You probably would’ve never guessed that. You didn’t know a lot about Bucky, so you didn’t realize that he even had an interest in cooking. It did explain why he always brought his own lunch, though, rather than slumming it with the rest of the office who just grabbed some chips from the vending machine and whatever fruit was left in the kitchen.

“You like to cook?”

“I love to cook.” He grinned, making your heart ache at how pretty his smile was. “Have done since I was a kid. I’ve been told I make a mean beef bourguignon.”

“Sounds fancy; I’d like to try it.”

“Maybe I can make it for you some time.”

Talking to Bucky became easier with every minute you were sat on his desk, trying not to get lost in his blue eyes as he spoke passionately about his ambitions. He told you about how he’d always wanted to open his own restaurant, but he’d never had the money to do so. His favorite dish to eat was admittedly a classic cheese and tomato pizza, but a homemade one that wasn’t doused in oil and salt, which was fair enough... even though you secretly lived for the Domino’s pizza you ordered every couple of weeks to treat yourself.

And after falling into a long, comfortable conversation with the man you used to barely be able to utter out a ‘hello’ to, the realization later hit you at eleven fifty-nine, that the work that was meant to be finished in one minute still hadn’t been completed.

After the whole conversation with Steve about asking Bucky for help, you didn’t even do the one thing that you were planning to do.

In a panic, you darted your eyes towards the area on your desk where Tony had slammed the stack of papers on your desk, confused as to why the large stack wasn’t actually still sitting there.

Before you could come up with a logical explanation, your boss flung open the door of his office, quickly making a beeline over to where you were still sat next to the monitor on Bucky’s desk.

“(Y/N), my number one receptionist.” He greeted you.

“I’m sure I’m the only receptionist you know, Tony, but I guess I’ll take the compliment.”

The man slapped his hands together enthusiastically. “So, did you get all the paperwork posted? I know it was a lot, but it’s important that our clients get those forms.”

You quickly glanced back to your desk, making sure that the paperwork really wasn’t there anymore and that you weren’t just seeing things. Where could it have disappeared to? Unless some form of higher power knew how pissed Tony would be if it wasn’t done and somehow did it all for you, you were pretty slumped for a rational explanation.

“Uhh...”

“Yep, (Y/N) got the paperwork all posted. Just like you asked.” You heard the voice of a certain blond next to you. “Sam and I gave her a hand.”

Sam and Steve gave you a hand? But how- wait.

“Fantastic.” Tony beamed, pointing a finger towards you. “I knew I could count on you, kid. Keep doing what you’re doing, and I might give you a raise.”

As the receptionist, you knew Stark Industries wasn’t yet making enough money for anyone to earn a raise. But you didn’t want to ruin the guy’s moment.

After sending him a thankful smile, you watched as Tony walked away, and once he was out of sight, you slowly turned your attention to Steve.

“You,” You gave him a warning look, before turning to Sam who had also decided to make an appearance. “And you, Sam. This was all planned, wasn’t it?”

The two men nodded proudly, as if they’d just pulled off the greatest scheme of the century. They were idiots. Smart, but still idiots. Did there really need to be a whole plan to bring you and Bucky together?

“Sam and I are dedicated wing-men, you know.” Steve shrugged. “We’re not complete assholes - we would’ve helped you with the paperwork when you asked, but we thought that this could be a good opportunity to get you two to actually converse.”

“Yeah, Bucky sure needed the push. Poor dude gets nervous from just looking at you.”

“Alright, Sam.” Bucky glared at his friend. “I think the joke’s on you guys, though - considering we got to have a nice conversation and you were left with all the paperwork.”

“Like I said,” Steve replied nonchalantly. “Dedicated wing-men.”

Before you could ask any more questions, a stern cough stopped your from doing so. “I’m sorry to interrupt your mothers’ meeting, but I’m trying to run a business here, guys. Wilson, you’re behind on sales, and don’t think I don’t notice you hiding out in the kitchen every morning, Rogers.”

Steve sighed. He really thought that was working for him.

“Barnes, you’re doing great.” Tony patted his shoulder reassuringly, making the salesman smile smugly up at his two frustrated friends. “(Y/N), I need some papers organised, and could you use those pastel highlighters to color-coordinate them? You know I love those highlighters - they really liven up the boring work, you know?”

“Sure thing, boss.” You nodded as Sam and Steve began to make their way back to their desks, leaving you and Bucky alone again after Tony returned to his office.

“I guess I’ve got some color-coordinating to do.” You pushed yourself off Bucky’s desk, standing up straight.

“Wait,” Bucky stopped you from straying any further from his desk. “Would you... wanna do somethin’ tonight? After work?”

A smirk played on your lips. Bucky fucking Barnes was asking you out. Once again, screw that Anastasia girl. Would Bucky Barnes ever ask her out? Nope, because he was asking you out. Okay, stop talking to yourself. The guy needs an answer.

“Sure, I’d like that. You gonna make some of your beef bargain john for me?”

“Bourguignon, sweetheart.” The man let out a hearty laugh. “If you can pronounce it right, I’ll make it for you.”

You scoffed. “That’s just mean... bourg- bourg-on... crap.”

“S’not really close enough, sorry.” Bucky shrugged, knowing that he’d end up making it for you anyway.

“Whatever.” You muttered, slowly walking back over to your desk only a few feet away from Bucky’s. You could see the guy biting back a smile as he pretended to return to his work. Fuck, you really did like him. And you were going on a date with him. That night. Perhaps that higher power really was on your side.

“Bourg-a-non!”

“Not quite.”

“Dammit.”

Maybe the office wasn’t so bad after all.

[tearlessrain]

30 questions tag game

Tagged by: @mercurypilgrim (thanks!)

Rules: Answer 30 questions and tag 5 blogs you are contractually obligated to know better.

Name/nickname: I’ve been going by tearless/tearlessrain for so long that a friend once called me that in person and I did not notice that it wasn’t my name until they said something. but I also have a lot of other names, only two of which have legal relevance.

Gender: male

Star sign: virgo, but I’ve been told by the local astrology gays that I’m also an aquarius moon and that it “explains a lot”

Height: 5′2

Birthday: a secret. I do not like being the center of attention.

Time: it’s like 3:40am. I will experience deep regret tomorrow, and I will learn nothing from this.

Favorite bands: queen feels like a cop out but like I’m never really not in the mood to listen to queen. linkin park, unironically. and all the different permutations of the crosby/stills/nash/young/simon/garfunkle cloud.

A few I am currently listening to, though: I can’t really call out specific bands/artists because I’m mostly listening to my oc playlists lately (I literally can’t stay in a bad mood listening to riska’s playlist and that’s just the energy I need in my life right now).

Favorite solo artists: (all together now) david bowie. also hozier and joni mitchell.

Song stuck in my head: O Come All Ye Faithful, in latin, for some fucking reason. it’s been there for days. send help.

Last movie: Kung Fu Panda, discord server was having a movie night.

Last show: WandaVision but I’m behind on it (loved the first two episodes but now I can feel the Marvel-ness looming again and I dread it)

When did I create this blog: god I don’t even remember, I’ve been here since the first age and never changed accounts/urls so like. around ten years now I think.

What do I post: whatever the hell passes through my brain from moment to moment, I can’t believe anyone follows me. lately a lot of rambling about my swtor ocs, sometimes it’s tolkien/silmarillion content, sometimes I liveblog terrible movies on purpose, sometimes it’s isaac asimov hours, sometimes just shitposting or unsolicited opinions about completely random things I’m not qualified to talk about. the only thing I can be relied on to provide is reblogs of ocean and horse photos, but not on any kind of consistent schedule.

Last thing googled: celtic invasion of portugal. I got slightly sidetracked from something else I was doing.

Other blogs: I’ve got art over at @tearlessrainart, horny art over at @a-world-of-osha-violations, and a little pile of extremely specific sideblogs I rarely use.

Do I get asks: not often, but those I do get are appreciated. except you, ray bans bot. I don’t appreciate you.

Why I chose my url: I originally used it as a deviantart handle (still there) because it wasn’t taken and I liked the overall way it sounded, and kept it because it’s rarely taken anywhere. and now it’s been ten years so like it’s stuck at this point.

Following: 305

Followers: 1392 which is far more than I deserve given my wildly inaccessible blogging style

Average hours of sleep: 7-8 hours usually but my actual sleep schedule skews late. I’ve never been one of those people who can skate by on 5 hours and be functional, if I get less than 6 hours I am absolutely useless and was that way even in high school/college when everyone else was pulling all nighters and shit.

Lucky number: I honestly have never understood lucky numbers, and how much I like any given number is solely dependent on how appealing its colors are according to my synesthesia. if anyone’s wondering, 420 is a hideously tacky blue/orange clusterfuck, but 69 is pleasantly greyscale.

Instruments: I play the flute, in that I own a flute that I was pretty good at playing in high school and can, if I choose, still play notes on it. I also own a melodica but I cannot play it, which to be clear does not stop me from playing it.

What am I wearing: pajama pants and a sith cloak. which sounds like a joke but I do actually own a set of sith robes and the cloak happens to be warm and very comfortable so I just kinda. wear it around the house sometimes in the winter.

Dream job: ornamental lighthouse hermit who may or may not be a wizard.

more realistically though I’m hoping to go into sfx makeup and cosmetology (I was like a week away from getting my license when the apocalypse hit)

Dream trip: I’d love to visit australia and new zealand, would also very much like to go back to scotland and possibly just not leave scotland.

Favorite food: sushi, specifically good salmon nigiri. god it’s so good. smeagol was right.

Nationality: regrettably, american.

Favorite song: god I have no idea. uh. I really like the boy in the bubble by paul simon. something about the visuals in that song speak to me.

Last book read: rereading The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov, which is a terrible book that I nonetheless subject myself to periodically because I like all the books around it a lot. I need to start on Robots and Empire but shit’s been going down recently so I haven’t been reading much.

Top three fictional universes I’d like to live in:  

okay LIVE IN is a very different question from “universes I think are neat” because like. I love the whole thing firefly has going on but I wouldn’t survive it for more than five minutes. so with that in mind:

1. middle earth but like, the shire during the third age specifically.

2. I think I would enjoy being a legend of zelda npc. I could just be a weird little potion seller who lives in a tree or something. or maybe an inexplicably sexy fish man. or better yet, the inexplicably sexy fish man’s husband, who sells potions. yeah I’ve got my fictional life here completely figured out now, this is good. I would also own an extremely chonky horse.

3. one of the ones I made up, specifically the one that involves a lot of gryphons and interdimensional bullshit. more specifically the origin universe of said gryphons, which exists at the heart of an extremely complicated multiverse that includes both earth and at least one fantasy world but is part of neither. anyway it’s a nice place.

Tagging: @raemanzu @sith-nb @vampiraptor @nyriad @crypticspren

(only if you want to of course)

[mikkock]

Hey hi your murder mystery art is super totally cool and amazing and I'd like to Extra! Extra! hear all about it *rattles bells*

haha wow i cant believe ud ask me THIS! unbelievable! now im gonna have to make a long post!

all info under the cut cause im kind like that ♥

For reasons I felt like making a Fancy Ass murder mystery story, with you know, hella complex secret storylines and everyone having drama and shit, and one person died but the more the story goes the less people care about who did the murder and the more they want tHE JUICY DETAILs. X and Y had an afFAIR you say!!! well that’s thousands time more interesting than that murder that happened, who cares about the culprit its not like any of us are going anywhere anyway! tell me more about the marital issues!

The ultimate Vibes are Clue (the game, ya kno, it had a movie too, and that movie was shot with three different endings -fun fact- so that movie theatres could play one alternatively that way people wouldnt get spoiled or even if they did they would not get the ending they were spoiled or even if all three were spoiled you couldnt know which ending you were getting anyway, big dick move, cause its an old movie and film is expensive, also that movie stupid and campy, ALSO I ONLY LEARNED MAKING THIS AU THAT IN ENGLISH THE GAME’S CALLED “CLUE” wE CALL IT CLUEDO therefore my wip playlist is called cluedo. because. fuck it.)(i just have an emotional attachment to that game i even had a cd rom video game version and it was the spookiest shit for a 6 years old, trust me, i played it so much tho i didnt even understand the rULES i was just making scenarios like gathering the characters in rooms n making conversations outloud cause honestly the banter is the best part of a murder mystery) ANYWAY that sure is a whole paragraph of tangent. 

BUT YE the inspo from the Clue game. you can tell it from the Colours obviously, everyone’s colour codded.(even everyone’s name is colours as well you’ll see it’s real dang fancy! im just remaking that game but with 2932020 characters and more behind the scenes drama and also for gay people.)

So BASIC PLOT!

Sir Belyy, the dude in white, is The Rich Powerful Respected Fancy Boss, and he throws a Fancy Reception Party with his closest friends and associates to celebrate the opening of a new branch of his business. All the lads gather in his wonderful little very isolated mansion in the middle of nowhere, like ok he got a death wish or something or he’s very trusting of his business partners, but not a good move, cause in the middle of the reception, as A Phat Storm Starts (for plot convenience, we going with a campy vibe if you couldnt tell), his body is found, it’s awful, there’s a killer on the loose! All the guests gather, and attempt to maybe contact the authorities, to not avail, since The Storm ya know, phone lines are Broken my dude. Its clear that the culprit is among them, since no one could have entered the house, or left it (cuz once again, ThE sTORm). And then it’s all about interrogating each other, distrust, alliances and betrayal, revealing one’s deepest secrets when they form an alibi and revealing someone else’s deepest secret for they could be a motive! Meanwhile there’s a dead body in the mansion just chillin there. 

.

So as I mentioned, I changed everyone’s name to be colour related (or ya know, food or flowers of that colour cause sometimes a colour in a language would not work as a name given the way names work in that culture all that jazz) which is the trippiest thing cause tHATS NOT YALLS USUAL NAMES but its fun (also changed so many ages hgfhs it was a trip)(still no one’s really old i guess i got boomerphobia). The “Cast” is clearly the most important part, and if ur a True “My OCs” Connaisseur (hdfghd the most useful skill to have, knowing *MY* Charactersdshgd) you may have recognised some faces and can already read some vibes and predict who will be progressing the plot and who will be yelling at people throwing accusations ghdfgd.

(god i wish i hadnt slacked off making the portraits of everyone in that AU i only have 3 tho that’s so sad so ill just make little sketches just cause <3 only text??? i got too many hoes with no attention span for that)

.

Sir BELYY (the one who dIEs lmao)

(bust shot missing the fact that this man is the tallest beefiest lad around)

Intimidating, powerful, composed, wealthy, carries the name of a family who has generations of control to it’s reputation, he’s The Man that hoes who believe in the economy wishes they were. As in, the “self made” man who only just happened to benefit from having a wealthy background to uplift his plans. In his youth, he wanted to prove his worth, seperated himself from his father, started a business, that business became big, then got attached to the family’s business, bam back to square one but with Reputation now. There seemed to be VERY big tension between him and The Father, some speculate it had to do with his unknown mother, and some family drama there, and it never got resolved as old man Belyy died quite young (the jUICY speculations are that current sir Belyy mURDEREd old man sir Belyy, fucked up if true!). People love him though in general, as he has that reputation of “Cold Lad With a Gold Heart” aka he takes people under his wings, donates, doesnt treat his employees like the absolute worst garbage etc... you know, he’s rich and a half decent person, so obviously he’s an angel on earth. But does it matter though, he’s dead! that’s the concept of the story!  

Mr.GRAY (the grey guest)(who could have guessed from the name)

He’s one of Sir Belyy’s oldest employees, and benefits from a high rank in the company. But, sadly for him, he’s been stagnating lately, as newer, youngest employees seem to have Belyy’s favours, and are his prefered associates for important tasks and positions. Therefore he has Some Bitterness, Some Salt, Some Distaste, some unbriddled but professionally muted hatred for Specific people in the company. He can be an antagonistic figure, but the amount of time he spent in Belyy’s circle grants him an immense quantity of information about the man, but mostly, about his business. Anything about the company’s history, dealings, operations, he’s aware of, either having been told of them, or having snooped around to obtain, immune to being questioned due to his legitimacy in the company.

Mr.LIM (the green guest)

Remember when it was said that Gray had beef with some employees cause they were younger and rose to high ranks faster than him and became Belyy’s favourite over him? Yeah well here comes the one he hates the most for that (ofc he’s belyys fave cuz he’s Mine <3) Our lad caught Belyy’s attention for his Exploits in like, em fancy high school tournaments of smart people, it’s a thing its ridiculous, making kids compete on Smart stuff for the pride of their schools n shit, well homie Lim got clout when doing that, and Belyy was extremely interested cause that kid’s main thing was how “this young lad got mad strategic skills tf are u a war general or smth how fancy”, and that’s a coveted skill for ruthless business. So as soon as the kid is an adult, bam, join the company my dude. And because he’s just that Cool n Sexy ofc he met the expectations Belyy had, and old man Belyy got attached cuz it do be such a young lad, a kid, mentally i am adopting. That’s how you get a youngas employee becoming the right hand man of one the phatest CEO in a few years, and even make your way into being a Good Lad on top of a business partner. And that’s how you get Gray to hate your ass too. Now though, fine lad with mad strategic skills, rising to power that fast, and even infiltrating Belyy’s private life? If I were Gray I’d call suspicion there’s surely some shady stuff going no way we’re just dealing with a nice fella who just happens to work good and be friendly to the boss right?

Herra MUSTA (the black “guest”)

Belyy’s newest butler, assistant, house keeper, he multitasks. His family has been tied to Belyy’s for generations, fullfilling roles of help, but also of confidents. He’s been the head butler since only a short time, after his mother passed, and as such is still “in training” you could say, despite having served the family his whole life. There are rumours going around that the contract tying his family to the Belyys may end on his generation and need to be resigned. He known the manor by heart, and carries all keys to any locked room (and mostly, The Master Key, cause in an old house, some doors may be locked beyond all still existing keys). He also knows secrets of the family that no one else knows, but good luck getting em out of him, he’s under contract not to divulge em bro.

Mr. HASSEL (the brown guest)

Belyy’s childhood friend. They grew up together, pictured their dreams together, sworn to flourish together, worked together when starting the company, and then Hassel felt he should create his own thing instead of depending on his friend’s existing wealth, and while Belyy’s business went wild, his never took off. They still stayed very close, despite the massive difference in wealth. Belyy considers him his closest friend, the one person he can trust (fucked if hassel did the murder lemme tell u). So of course, he’s still always invited to the Prestigious meet ups where’s he’s free to feel uncomfortably out of place amongst all the rich and powerful people that he could have been a part of had he had a tiny bit of luck and a small loan from a wealthy relative...People LOVE saying he’s still hanging out with Belyy so much to leech off his wealth, cause of course they do! His bestie status means he has a whole different brand of information of Belyy than his butler does, the Most Intimate Stuff, the Childhood Stuff. The Juicy stuff ya kno...But Bro Code, its all secrets...

Sir RUZH (the red “guest”)

Deep dive into Belyy’s personnal history, the man has many employees working at his house keeping it working, clean, ya know the vibe. They live on the premice, one has a kid who’s just a Joy to be around, all the employees just vibe with that lad, he’s just a born socialite you know? Belyy gets to meet the kid, and also hella vibes with him. And because human are influenced by their feelings, he gives the kid’s mum a bit of a preferencial treatment, in the tasks she fullfils and all, til he gives her an important-as mission, and then there’s an accident n mama dies, and now Belyy got guilt and there’s this kid who just Vibes. So naturally the move is to take the kid in, and play on how his vibes are just so clean, and raise him to be the Perfect Entertainer for guests, bam, its soft power propaganda, if everyone loves your now son’s vibes, they associate them with you too. And also that’s kind of a clean rep, the selfless man who adopted his employee’s son to not have him fall to the streets, how heartwarming. Not at all traumatising for the kid too I bet! But anyway now the lad is just the most charming young adult, mission accomplished. He’s always present at any reception, ready to work his people-pleasing magic, and then going back to a gigantic empty manor to wait for the next and curate the perfect vibes to meet the expectations of dad. On the plus side, he knows everyone, and those who don’t know him cannot wAIT to, he’s just got that aura ya know. People skills for miles, and the insider knowledge that comes with being the son of the CEO, all this hidden behind the personna of the fresh innocent bashful party lad. 

Dr.FEN (the pink guest)

Do not get mistaken by the title, he’s no doc, he will not diagnose you with anything, he just studied long enough to get the sexy title. Study in what? Haha. Nothing shady. Just toxicology. He’s a world reknown poison expert basically, that’s his main thing. Oh but don’t worry, of course studying substances that may kill people is only for finding out how to cure them from it of course. What brings him in this circle? Simple, Belyy may or may not have started to suffer some weird illness that no doctor has been able to find the source, let alone cure, of. Him and Dr.Fen had met previously on some event, cause some rich man also love flexing how smart they are and attending sciencey shit, and he was contacted as sort of a shot in the dark. The lad does know how to treat some things, maybe he can treat The Mysterious Unwellness, since no traditional doctor was able to. He knows science, he’s trustworthy, bam, you’re hired to work on My Case Exclusively. Thanks to this, Dr.Fen has access to the whole health history of Belyy and his family, to many mANY dangerous substances, and also has The Respect of the hoes at the party. He HAS a doctorate after all. Epitome of knowledge. And he’s a kind to people and he wears pink like dang how can you nOT pour your wHOLE trust in him. 

Sir MOREVITCH (the blue guest)

Youngest son of an affluent family, who used to be close the the Belyys. The two families fell slightly appart after the death of the previous head of the family on the Belyy side, as they do nOT vibe with the current one (well current, til the first night of the story ig). But, unbeknownst to all, one strong link had been kept, between the youngest of the Morevitch, who dislikes his family and wishes to emancipate himself from them while also assuring his depart will not throw him basically in the streets, and our beloved Sir Belyy, who also dislikes the Morevitches but loves to see the rebellious energy of the young one (and ya know, my enemy’s enemy’s my friend or however you say that). So Belyy’s basically offering tips and helping Morevitch plant himself safely out of his family’s grasp, but it’s all taking quite some time isn’t it, slow and steady is fine until your parents try to arrange a wedding to secure more political power, and suddenly it is all quite urgent that you escape that situation because No Thank You Parents I Do Not Want A Wife I’m Too Young And Also Huh <3 Stuff You Won’t Like Hearing For Sure <3. The people who know they’re working together also know that it’s a big point of argument between them, the difference in vision between “you have to go slow and steady to be safe” and “I have very limited time to get to that safety anyway so I gotta risk it” “hell no you cant i can’t follow through if we’re going that quick that’ll put me at risk and you’re family’s gonna send gunmen to take me down”. A mess, it’d be much quicker to just obtain a few million bucks out of nowhere and bolt for sure...

Mr.GANG (the orange guest)

Morevitch’s trusted assistant. He hears the concerns, he helps the secret businesses, he lies to the parents about the whereabouts, and mostly, he’s basically a budget spy. The lad got that talent where people just don’t notice him popping behind them and catching all their dirty laundry as they confess it to someone they trust, and he always manages to break into places, get the intel he was looking for, and escape, putting everything back into place as if no one was ever there (wonder where he got all those skills from damn!). But what he’s even better at is being sneaky not only to benefit his boss, but himself as well <3. If he can catch all the info in the world, go any places, nothing’s stopping him from playing double agent and also going behind Morevitch’s back. After all the assistant life isn’t the most glamourous and rewarding, who can blame him from going and using his talents to build his own little exit route, right? Everybody sort of knows he cannot be trusted, but also no one managed to really incriminate or stop him, and as much as he has tea on many people, no has it on him, but bet once found that would be heeeella juicy.

M.MOUTARDE (the yellow guest)(this one is straight up the name of the yellow player in the french edition of clue too when i say its my main vibe)

Moutarde was an influential celebrity. He had a big break acting in a movie that the whole country stanned so hard they basically turned the script into their national anthem (they would have if it was a true democracy where the people really decide), he was so handsome and elegant, everyone’s dream husband. And then the fame fiddled out because it’s how fame is, one moment you’re the sexiest dish on the table and the next someone brings in dessert and baam, its all about that fresh cake, and no one pays any mind to your delightful aroma anymore, you’ve gone cold, they had a bite, their interest is somewhere else. Belyy really admires his work though, and mostly finds his image fits with the brand of his company, therefore the two are working on a collaboration to make Moutarde a representative. This WOULD boost Moutarde’s reputation, for his ads would be displayed on every imaginable surface of the country, and it would also benefit the company cause being represented by thAT sexy motherfucker? clearly that’s a deal. The freshness of the partnership means Moutarde is a newcomer in the guests, a fresh face, with no reputation, no relationships, no unfair biases against him. He’s just the new handsome charismatic lad with a squeaky clean image. Emphasis on “image”. After all, no one really knows anything of his background, right?

Kun.LAWENDER (the purple guest)

Private investigator, very useful to be around at a party it’s almost like it was expected there’d be a body to investigate, he’s a very close associate of Belyy, as there’s nothing more important to business than investigating the rivals and finding dirt on them to make them fall through infamy. He’s not exactly the PI who goes look for justice to be served, he’s just here for cash bro. He’s got intel on everyone, and will only let it out if offered the right thing in return (money, or sometimes other pieces of very secret intel, trade is good). Wouldn’t advise letting him and Gang team up tbh but they probably wouldnt, as Lawender is really more of a lone wolf player, going on his own for himself. The one thing that negates his usefulness as a PI on an accidental crime of scene is that even if he knew the whole truth of the event he would not spit it out unless he benefitted from saying it. He sure is a polarising lad, but at the same time, an untouchable one, he’s too knowledgeable to be taken down. Rather than sneaky, he’s extremely observant, noticing the tiniest details and engraving them in his memory, ready to be linked up to other details to deduct the big picture. He’s the upfront tea gathered basically (as opposed to Gang’s shadow tea gathering if you will, they are similar forces but using opposite methods)(also one of em got a licence n the other does not hAH).

~~~~

Now the secrets, all of em have them. One of em at least got the secret of having KILLED Belyy that’s that. But that’s to be kept for later (for if i ever use this story for more than daydream material gfhjgh) bet you can imagine what some of em may be just out of Knowing what i do, from having seen the characters in other contexts, or just because you’re a genius and reading the character profiles immediatly lit up the bulbs in your head forming the perfect theory, props to you, mad genius.

Honestly my thoughts are just how lit of a game that would be, you get to pick one hoe (maybe sum are locked til u find their secrets for juicy purposes) and you do your invetigation using your character’s perks and disadvantages, and maybe there could even be Multiple scenarios and outcomes, to spice it up, give replay value, i just think it’d be a game id spend hours on. tryin to get the spicy details of everyone’s life. walking around n digging through a rich man’s stuff, witnessing the drAMA of people fighting cause they’re locked in with a murderer and that’s stressful ngl. That or a long ass show @ netflix wanna give me a show maybe? give me hella budget we’re making it animated cause im too cultured for live action. 

whatever i make of it though, i hope i can make this story Flourish, just so that i can lay down all those secret backstories i’ve written. i want the satisfaction of throwing out the craziest secret drama between character n seeing peeps loose their minds, it just is a tasty experience.

also i gotta say, i plug the hell out of Clue for an inspo but when i was building the basics of the story my mind immediatly went “oH MY GOD THE VIBES,, THE BACKSTABBING AND tEAMING UP and all,,, its The Genius, that one tv show where peeps have to do the wildest games that require strategy n they’re in that fancy set that looks like a rich ppl mansion oh god the vibes” so yeah, i rewatched the whole first two seasons cause they’re my faves and that had an impact if only minimal in the aesthetic.

Anyway hope that quick presentation gave you a lil taste of the story, and maybe,,,, got you curious,,, craving to learn more like you never did before (im exaggerating the only real question we all got is just “so who’s fuckin with whom then how many of yall secretly dating” this the real deal)

[thedragonslibrary]

Is it possible to be blocked like magick or energy wise? I do not know how to put it in words but sometimes I feel like there is something that i should connect to or should be able to do but I am not. Maybe I am not idk well practiced enough but it sometimes feels like I am running against a glass wall. Maybe I Idk man. I am just really frustrated. I cant really give examples just everytime I do something magick related it feels like running against a wall and it makes me wanna cry. Sorry

Yes, of course it’s possible to be blocked!  

To clarify, your first statement about feeling as though you should be able to “connect” to something is a common beginner issue.  It may simply be that you haven’t found the thing you’re supposed to connect to yet - whether that’s opening your third eye and being able to talk to your guides, finding the deity and/or pantheon you connect most to in a religious manner, or simply opening your psychic awareness fully enough to feel the energies around you.  The best advice I can give is to experiment.  Try everything, and don’t hold yourself back!  

When I was a beginner witch, I tried everything from Wicca to demonolatry to Christian witchery, from reiki to hexing and cursing, from psychopomp work and shadow work and light work and everything you can imagine.  If you can think of it, I probably tried it in some way.  Only by putting yourself out there in as many avenues and paths as you possibly can, will you find what works for you.  If something doesn’t work, doesn’t fit or “feel right,” put it away and move on.  Read everything you can - on Tumblr, in books, in every single resource you can find.  It took me probably five or six years of exploration to figure out what generally “worked” for me, and I still feel like I’m learning and discovering new outlets for my magical expression.

An extra “something” is not for everyone.  Often in magical practices, you are the source of your own power.  Sure, crystals and herbs and grounding and gods help, but ultimately the magic is coming from you.  You might not necessarily need an extra “thing.”  Let your magic be intuitive, don’t let books or Tumblr bloggers tell you how to do your thing step-by-step.  Take spells or rituals and modify them to fit your needs - that is how they’ll be most powerful and useful for you.

But back to the topic of blockages, if you have already had magical abilities previously: I have gone through blockages myself, and they are exactly what you described here: frustrating, like hitting a wall.  Sometimes it feels as though all your “power” has been taken away, and you’re left without your previous magical agency.  You might have the thought that perhaps you were just making everything up all along, that maybe you’ve been deluding yourself.  Trust me, you didn’t, and things will get better!  

In my experience, there are two general types of blocks you can have.  I’ll outline them for you and how they can be worked through.  

The first is a bit simpler, and is more like an art block.  Lots of magic-users go through periods of this softer, mental blockage at some point or another on their path.  It can be sometimes referred to as a Fallow Period, which comes from a similar phrase in farming used to refer to when a partition of soil is meant to rest for a season or two to regain its fertility.  

A Fallow Period can arise from burnout, especially from outside sources creating stress in your life.  

Magic, especially psychic and spirit work, is infinitely more difficult when you are stressed, going through a rough mental health period, or when you are physically ill.  

Fallow Periods can also be caused through divine intervention - your spirit guides or deities may have decided that you need to take a break to focus on real life, or to focus on taking care of yourself for a little while.

Blockages of this nature eventually right themselves, but it can take time - it can last anywhere from a few months to over a year.

The best thing to do when you’re experiencing a fallow period like this is to not force it.  You are only going to frustrate yourself if you continue to attempt to perform magically and have little to no results.  Additionally, you’re going to create a deadly cycle of feeling disappointed in yourself, and eventually burn out so hard you won’t want to do magic at all anymore.

Instead, take some time to create: write poetry, draw, or paint.  Write devotional poetry.  If you want to do magical work, work on your grimoire or book of shadows.  Focus on practical magic you can do with your hands - cooking, creating items with intent, cleansing and clearing your home.

Take time to meditate and perform self-care.  Perform practical, easy meditations like the simple, free ones in the Headspace app, or find guided meditations for free on YouTube that bring you into fun, brightly colored astral spaces.  Take baths and imagine all of your troubles washing away down the drain when you’re finished.  Give yourself room to heal and just feel good about yourself.

When you feel ready to move out of your Fallow Period, it will come very naturally.  Like an urge to pick up a witchcraft book or to astral travel suddenly.  Don’t worry about easing back into it - while taking it slow might be good for some, it’s not for everyone.  If you’re really excited to get back into magic, and you’re being urged to do it right now, go ahead and do it!

The other type of blockage is a physical, energetic blockage.  These are usually sudden-onset conditions.  If one day you are performing just fine magically, and the next you wake up and you can’t feel any of your sixth senses, and you are not physically sick or particularly more stressed out than normal, you probably have a physical energetic blockage.

Ensure first that it’s an energetic blockage.  Perform a reading on yourself, check your energy centers, figure out how you’re feeling physically.  Meditation goes a long way here, as well as visualizing your energy moving through your body.  Does it seem to stop anywhere?  Likewise, do you feel extremely hopeless and drained energetically for no discernible, tangible reason (i.e. depression or a recent traumatic experience)?  Can you not even muster up the motivation to check yourself?  Then you probably have an energetic blockage.

Find an energy healer in physical proximity to you.  Trust me when I say that it is not enough to go to the local Hand & Stone and ask for a reiki massage (I have tried this for you already, and please believe me when I say it’s not going to solve your problems).  Distance healings do work and are worth it, but in my personal experience physical healings tend to be much more powerful when it comes to dismantling blockages in this way.

Ask around at your local metaphysical stores.  Find someone who is a reiki master or another type of energy healer, who has great reviews outside of what’s posted on their website and who has a great deal of experience.  Ask them if they have unedited testimonials anywhere they can share with you (such as Google reviews).  

Ask what their process is, ask to see their healing space, ask them what physical tools they use in their session.  Ask them if they’d be willing to charge a small fee for them to examine you and figure out what’s going on (don’t expect them to do something like that for free).  Remember that they should never suggest that they can heal physical ailments or claim that their services replace allopathic medicine - they should only focus on your energetic issues.  

Explain to them that you feel blocked energetically and that this is exactly what you are looking to be treated for - psychics and healers are not mind readers, and they cannot help you if they’re not told what they need to fix.  

Pay attention to your gut and what feels right.  Even in a blocked state, you always have decent access to your intuition.

I won’t lie, you will likely need to shell out a good amount of money for this.  A good healer worth their salt most likely won’t charge you less than $60 for an hour session.

If you don’t feel some kind of energetic release during your healing session, mention that to your healer.  Since you’ve already told them about your issue, they may be able to give advice as to why you didn’t feel any specific change, as everyone’s process is different and the healer you’ve chosen to work with is going to have the best understanding over the situation, after you.  Again, pay attention to your gut.  Give the healing a couple of days to set in, and make sure to drink plenty of water and pay attention to how you feel.

When I personally dealt with my own physical energy blockage, when it was finally healed it felt like a dam breaking and all of my energy flowing back into my body.  It felt like I had had one of my senses shut off, and for the switch to finally be turned back on.  Not everyone is going to feel this way, but if you’ve been blocked for a particularly long time, it may feel very strong and overwhelming to have yourself be un-blocked.

Whatever your situation is, I hope this post was helpful!  Good luck on finding your solution!

[diveronarpg]

We’ve arrived at day four, everyone! Today, the admin team would like to take a moment to appreciate one another. Running a group for two years comes with many moments of excitement and joy. It’s incredible to see the plot make leaps and bound forwards, and watch characters that first began in our heads flourish into the player’s own on the dash. It also, admittedly, comes with its challenges; challenges we embrace with enthusiasm as a team, relying on one another and encouraging one another when life gets demanding.

For a DiVerona admin history lesson — Rosey and Jen first opened the group together in August 2018, preparing diligently to launch DiVerona and bring it to Tumblr after a few years of hiatus. Minnie acted as an invisible admin beginning August 2018, offering advice when requested, and came on as an official admin in MAY, 2019. Julie joined our team as the graphics admin in JULY, 2019 and ushered in a beautiful era and graphics revamp for Act II. Last, but certainly not least, Rogue was welcomed to the admin team in APRIL, 2020 to create stunning, heart-wrenching characters and continue building on the momentum of the plot.

Below, you will find a little love letter each admin wrote for one another. For this particular day, we will not be requiring any activity from our members. Feel free to take a break! If you’d like to show admin appreciation, you are free to do so, but we are not expecting it and hope you do not feel pressured to do so.

Thank you all for a wonderful two years of being admins of an incredible group like DiVerona!

JEN

My fire sign soulmate, my BITCH. As an admin, you bring aLL of the Montague spirit and heart and fire, and it shows in how passionate you are when guiding DiVerona’s story and development. Your creativity? Your flair for drama that inspires the most game-changing plot drops and the most iconic line in this group’s history? I mean, who else could have come up with infant king? For me, Jen, you embody the creative and collaborative spirit of DiVerona, and I treasure the fun you bring to the group and to the team. On a personal level, you have shown up for me time and time again. For that, I am so, so thankful for you. Your honesty is invaluable to me, whether you’re telling me I’m being impulsive or need to calm the hell down. You’re the sense of humor when we need it most, the ride-or-die who both starts adventures and cleans up the messes after, and my dear friend. — MINNIE

I’ve never met someone as passionate as you. You stick to your guns the whole way down and there’s something so deeply admirable in that -- you take such great pride in the things you do and how hard you work and what you bring to the table both as a writer and as an admin. We have exactly the same sense of humor and I love sending you memes and text posts through Discord at like, four in the morning, and seeing a reply from you when I wake up. It’s like taking a shot of orange juice right after rolling out of bed. Wakes me right up! You’re dedicated to the end, even when you’ve struggled, and I think that spokes both to your character and who you are as a friend. You’re like a sister to me in the sense I feel like we see right through each other, and I couldn’t be happier to know someone like you and get to work with you, even on opposite sides of the world. Our calls together are one of my favorite things to do -- we just click. <3 -- JULIE

Getting closer to you, Jen, has been one of my favorite parts of coming online as an admin. I have always admired you, I’ve always loved writing with you, but being your friend is one of the most rewarding things in the world. You have such fierce passion for things, all this burning intensity inside of you and an unflinching way of confronting the world that leaves me in absolute awe. The way you can always see around the corner to what a character needs (rather than what they want or what they might say) gives you such a great ability to build masterful plots and expand our world. Our shared weird insomnia has led to so many absolutely insightful, ridiculous, very hazy conversations, and I am shocked the team has put up with us for this long, but also more glad than anything in the world. Every word you write is precious to me, in character or out, and I’m going to save all of them forever so I can drag you within an inch of your life at ANY moment. Like a clingy little barnacle. I treasure both the experience of working creatively with you and of getting absolutely nothing done with you, and I love you with all my heart!! — ROGUE

to my idiot jen, sometimes i really can’t believe how we found each other again. i truly believe that it was no less than fate (and my utter disregard for any sense of self-preservation) that we would come into each other’s lives right when we did. i have never really questioned why or thought too much on how - because truly i cant really recall a moment where i didn’t know everything about you. there are so many things that i love about you: your tuna sandwiches and food pictures, our really really extensive aus, sharing with me every little frightening piece of your heart, forcing vulnerability and honesty and unconditional LOVE and being so very patient with me...over the past two years there has been so much that i’ve learned about you and still so much that there is still left to learn and love. i adore you to the moon and back you idiot. - ROSEY

JULIE

Hopefully you're not cringing too hard over this Very Formal Approach that I'm taking but trust me, if I could throw a meme in here somewhere I WOULD. Anyway, ever since you came on board, you've been nothing but a blessing to the team, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Your graphics and aesthetic vision for the group have inspired us in amazing ways, and beyond that you've lifted the team up with your pragmatic sense of judgement and gentle sensitivity to things. You really represent both sides of the same coin, dude, like… IT BLOWS MY MIND. I'm so happy to be sharing this anniversary with you, and I'm so proud of you and how far you've come ever since I met you, not just when it comes to the growth of your incredible talents but also when it comes to your writing and your maturity and pretty much everything about you. Thank you for being part of this amazing journey with us. I wouldn’t want to share it with anyone else. — JEN

Goosie, I really think you’re the closest thing to a renaissance woman I’ve met, not just in ability but also in who you are. Our entire admin team is pretty creative and original, but you are I think the true artist among us! And while your graphics are truly godlike and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the RPC before, it’s in your writing I see it most. You’re the most versatile member on the admin team, Goosie, and I think you ground us in so many ways. Not just in doing major graphic makeovers or writing the single most iconic plot drop of DIVerona, but also with your kindness, compassion, intuition and self-awareness. I really would feel a little lost without you, Goosie - not only as an admin, but as a person! Every time you speak, I want to listen; every time you create anything, I want to frame it in a museum. I love you to fucking BITS, and I am genuinely so proud to call you buddy. (I thought about using friend instead, but buddy felt more accurate for us…) — MINNIE

Where would I begin? How can I even write a note when I feel like everything I do and every act I take is part of how much I love you, because it’s like, an entirely indelible part of me? Julie, you’re one of the most talented people in the world. Literally. Your writing is so piercing, so emotionally intelligent and brave and just vulnerable in a way I’ve never seen. Your graphics and art have such a passion to them; I think I love them because they’re beautiful, but I know I love them because I see little parts of you in them that delight me every time. I would crawl across broken glass to be a part of anything you do; I feel so lucky that I’m someone who often gets to see your works in progress, the messy edges of things, the half-finished projects. You bring such warmth to the team and such a grounded, different perspective; there have been so many times where we would entirely miss things if you hadn’t pointed them out when we were blind. You are our cornerstone, the one who anchors and glues us all together in so many ways, and I want to bask in that warm glow of your sunlight forever. — ROGUE

to my dearest julie, i wish i could just put a cody ko meme here but i am ABSTAINING EVEN THOUGH I FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHICH CODY KO MEME I WOULD PUT HERE. whenever i think about the times that i dragged you back into my life...like there are so many things in life i thank god i did but keeping you in it EVEN WHEN YOU TRIED TO ESCAPE MY CLUTCHES - that is number 1. having late night conversations with you about literally everything and anything makes my heart feel so full. you have been so much to me and trying to put it into words is really really difficult because none of them feel like they’re ever going to be enough. i love you for so many reasons: your humility, your determination to be there whenever, every single video and podcast you send me, your ability to listen and make people feel heard. you are special and if we are to take on this world i thank god i get to take it on with you. i love you. -- ROSEY

MINNIE

We complete each other and THAT'S JUST THE TEA. I admit, I can be a little over the top and just Too Much sometimes, but you always get me, and it's something that I appreciate more than I can put into words. You're the rock of this team, Minnie, and even though it's a pretty lame way of saying it, it feels right. I truly don't know where the team would be without you, but I know it wouldn't be anywhere near where it is now. You have a way of holding us together, of keeping us steady when we're weighed down or doubtful, with your kind heart, endless calm and unconditional support. I honestly don't know what to thank you for because it feels like there's way too many things and I wouldn't even know where to begin… but thank you for being here and being at our side through everything. I'm so proud of you and the amazing, one of a kind person that you are, and I wouldn't wanna share such a special moment with anyone else. — JEN

When it comes down to it, I think the best word to describe you would be a powerhouse. I’ve never met a woman in my life who works quite as fucking hard as you do -- and if not harder, then smarter, y’know? This past year I’ve spent getting to know you more and more, slowly wheedling you into opening up (motherfucker! We are Known in this house!) and sharing bits and pieces of myself, I’ve come to admire you just for who you are as a person. I’ve learned so much from you in standing my ground and not letting the wind blow me over. You’re funny and witty and sharp as a knife when it comes to your style of prose, and your love not just for Maeve and Paola but for the group shine through everything you do. You’ve held us all together like glue when we needed some extra assistance and let us know when we needed to pick things up, too. You’re open and honest with your feelings and I value that so much about you, knowing I can come to you and lay the cards down and ask your opinion on things and you’ll give it to me straight. I’ve never really had someone “at my back” in the sense of friendship, but oh man, Minnie, you make me feel safe, and I think you’ll know how much that means when I say it. -- JULIE

Oh, no, I’ve already been so embarrassing about how much I love you Minnie!! I suppose it’s only right I do it on main as well. I genuinely feel like I haven’t had another friend in my life who balances with me so well. When we’re united and on our peak shit, we complete each other, shoring up the places where we’re both insecure, making us both feel safer with each other nearby. I’ve written some of my favorite dynamics in RP with you, here at DV, and I don’t think I’d have grown half so much in my outside life or my rp life without you there to talk to. You are also the absolute rock of this team, to steal Jen’s words. When we’re all freaking out and afraid to act or worried about getting stuff wrong, you cut through everyone’s bullshit and get right to the heart of the matter. Your direct and straightforward way of speaking and of loving is a force for good in the world and on the team, and you are also maybe one of the funniest people alive, or at least in my acquaintance. I love your laugh, I love how open you are with your heart when you’re with us, I love you so very much. I want to write with you and talk to you for as long as you let me. — ROGUE

to twin-flame minnie, i wish you could see my face as i type this because this amount of vulnerability is making me like...ew. but minnie your soul resonates with me so much - never would i have ever thought in the time that we’ve known each other (it really did start with a conversation about glitter and then somehow just expanded from there and tbh i am not at all surprised) that i would bare myself to you as much as i have and felt completely and totally understood without having to say things in so many words. i cannot wait for the day when i can sweep you into my arms in a great big hug and i probably will cry when i do because i love you so much. there are too many things to love about you: from your signature giggle, to your ability to take on the world, to your conscientious growth as a person...you give me so much hope. and i don’t think it’s necessary to say anything more than that. i love you. -- ROSEY

ROGUE

When you first joined, you fit into the team so naturally, Rogue, it honestly felt as though you had always been a part of it. I remember being SHOOK AS FUCK at all the incredible things that you were doing in NO TIME, like, right from the start, you crafted the most amazing bios, offered the most rich and intriguing input for the plot, and helped us when it comes addressing issues and concerns in a way that made it all so much easier to tackle over time. Not to mention your sunny presence and the unconditional support that you offer, which never fail to brighten everything when we hit a bump in the road or things get a little tough. It's amazing to consider all that you've achieved and all the ways you've uplifted the team despite being with us for the least amount of time. In my eyes, you've always been with us, and I'm SO fucking proud of you and happy to be sharing all of this with you. Thank you for being a part of this team, and a part of this journey with me. — JEN

Maybe it’s a little cheesy to say, but I think the universe meant for us to meet, and having you on the team with us is a gift. We all mesh together so well and you pull things up out of nowhere on the fly, whether it be individual character plot development or actually writing The Most Iconic Plot Drop Of All Time(TM) and letting me tack on a little flourish at the end. You’re like... the cheese to my cracker, the whipped cream to my slice of pie, the biscuit with my coffee. We complete each other, and you listen to me when I really need to just word vomit all over the floor about something either entirely related or all too related, from time to time. I know if I need to call you anytime I can, and maybe my favorite memory of 2020 so far has been us watching Cats together and just suffering the entire time, but getting through it together. You’re funny, smart, endlessly endearing, work harder than the devil when it comes to threads and replies, and I’m grateful as all get out to have you with me in life!! -- JULIE

ROGUE, YOU REALLY CAME IN HERE AND SAID YEAH, I’M GOING TO SHAKE SHIT UP FROM DAY ONE. Whew, I remember one week you knocked out like four bios back-to-back and I just stood there trying to stop myself from booking a flight to your city and camping out in front of your house like the stan that I am. Sometimes, I still can’t believe there was a day you weren’t on the admin team because you not only fit seamlessly, but you also are just so essential now. Everything you’ve done in the few months since you joined our team, Rogue, has been *chef’s kiss* flawless. From the characters that I’m ANXIOUS to see on the dash to the ways you’ve helped guide our decisions and responses, I can’t imagine DiVerona and the admin team without you anymore! You brighten my day on a daily basis, and I love brainstorming with you, screaming with you, and I just love YOU! — MINNIE

to baby rogue, you see and know my True Sinner Nature rogue and the fact that you, in turn, have shared yours with me makes me feel so warm and bubbly inside - as well as makes me giggle. we really do have this habit of taking little smidgens of inspiration and connections and growing them into something extraordinary. geeking out about anything and everything within that encyclopedic brain of yours is one of my favorite things - our late night conversations, watching cursed together, plucking characters and plots from each other’s names as if they were already written in the stars...i dont know how to live without. there are so many things that i love about you: how you want to make everyone feel seen, how inclusive you are and kind, how you foster such creativity to others...i love and treasure you so very much. and we have so many more characters and worlds to explore together. -- ROSEY 

ROSEY

I don’t think I'll ever forget the day that you asked me if I'd like to be an admin and offered me a spot on the team. It was just you, me and Bree back then and I was way in over my head, but you made me feel at home without even trying, honestly. DV is my first longstanding admin experience and truly the best one I've ever had, and it’s all thanks to you, which is something that I'll always cherish and keep close to my heart. I've looked up to you, learned a lot from you and felt inspired by you over the years, not just because everything was so new to me at the start, but because you're a guiding light for anyone who's lucky enough to have you in their life and share with you the experiences that I have. I'm so incredibly proud of everything we've done together, and proud of you most of all. Thank you for being the one to bring me along for this amazing journey, Rosey, and thank you for going through it with me for two amazing, unforgettable years. — JEN

I think, sometimes, that people think I’m joking when I tell them you saved my life, Rosey Ro, but you did, in a way that I would never have guessed. I felt utterly alone, coming fresh out of a physically and mentally abusive relationship, juggling court dates and other things that seemed impossible to conquer. I’d left Diverona unsure of my present, what I’d considered my past, and my future, but I happened to log into Discord one day and came upon that good ole’ 9+ messages notification. All of them were from you. Every single one. It felt like a sign, of some kind, and so, as I scraped my life together, we chatted and I re-apped for DV, and in spite of tumultuous times on both our ends, I don’t regret a fucking minute of it. You have truly helped me in figuring out who I am as an individual person, where I fit in the world, and with every crisis and “OH SHIT” moment, you’ve been there for me, whether it was in your writing, your jokes, late night calls with you, messages over Whatsapp knee-deep in irritation or excitement. You’re the older sister I never got to have. Without Diverona, my life wouldn’t be the same. Without you, my life wouldn’t be the same. I love you so much. -- JULIE

How far we’ve come since we talked about Greek life parties and glitter… Rosey, my sister sign and my mirror, the mother to my father, I love you very much. Your creativity is – as we all can tell from DiVerona’s success – UNMATCHED, and your heart goes even deeper than I think most people realize. For someone who writes some of the scariest and evilest characters, you are one of the most considerate, thoughtful and empathetic people I’ve yet to meet. Thank you for creating this space and reminding us time and time again that we’re more than just admins; we’re individuals with Big Feelings as well as Big Brains. You did an amazing job, Rosey. It doesn’t get said enough, and if I could, I would tattoo it to your brain if it meant it would stick: you created a beautiful group, and no one can take that away from you. — MINNIE

Rosey, Rosey, Rosey. All of this is your fault. I never thought I would join any kind of mafia RP, always having been prone to more fantastical settings in my preferences, but when you asked me to look around at the bios, how could I say no? How could I have known it would entirely change my life? Before DV and in DV, you and I have written some of my favorite relationships to work on, some of my favorite threads of all time. You pull out such creativity from me that I never would’ve imagined existed in my brain. I love you such a ridiculous amount. I could, would, and do talk to you about anything and everything. I want to spend like 50 years of my life fighting with you over whether Hope from Legacies is hot and indulging in our weird shared white boy thirsts. You are so funny, so talented, so bright, so interesting and I don’t know how I got so lucky as to be your friend. If you and I aren’t writing together when we’re 80 it’s because I died early and tragically and you wore a sexy fascinator to my funeral. — ROGUE

[jawllines]

"Its a bit dark I suppose," she admitted, waving her hand around lamely, "And the ceiling lights are more ominous than comforting at night and it feels more like an evil lair than a cozy bookstore."

His smile only grows bigger, "See? M'not an all gloomy, knife on the wall, grunge monster -- got me soft gooey spots too. Have a few art pieces I think you might like t--"

"Oi, don't get too big for your britches, I don't need an interior designer." She nips him off but he doesn't take any hurt from her words, only getting closer to her and raising the chair, moving it over a good chunk before setting it back down and holding onto it, nodding towards the chair and her face twists in confusion, "What?"

"Get on the seat then," he pats on it, "If you won't use me for my wonderful vision yet, then you can use me for my chair steadying hands."

Y/N's heart warms some, "Yet?" She repeats, plucking another nail out of the box and taking hold of the hammer again.

Harry shrugs, "Got hope you'll come to your senses."

or

Y/N has a bookstore and Harry owns the shop next door

i.

Y/N's had it.

Absolutely had it!

When everyone told Y/N she shouldn't open up a bookstore beside a tattoo parlor, she let their worries float in through one ear and right out the other. She'd figured that they were just worried she was looking into opening up a business and the part of town she was on could be a bit shoddy at sundown, but the rent out for space was cheaper than anywhere else and it was right across from a bakery and café! Who didn't want to go to a bookstore after a nice cupcake and a half decent latte, to pretend they knew the first thing about Ernest Hemmingway in front of their smart friends and ultimately leave with a book that'll sit on their shelf for a total of five hours (they'll come back eventually, asking for a refund, and she could persuade them with a book more suited to them -- it's happened more times than she could count, honestly)? It was the perfect place to start out small, then escalate bigger and bigger. She had total faith in it!

But how was she supposed to do that when there was metal playing top volume at 9AM in the fucking morning?

There was always smoke clouding the outside of her shop, ashes in her flowerbeds, and men with piercings and tattoos all over their faces looming around. It wards people away like bug repellent. . .the days that the parlor is open are the days business can be ridiculously slow, yet the days that they're closed -- well, the door’s bell is chiming so often she questions whether or not she should take it down for her ears sake. It's those days that keep her running both moneywise and physically since she's running it primarily herself. It's those days that let her know that its the gremlins next door that keep people from even trying to come over.

Y/N loved books. She loved the intricate stories, interwoven plot lines, and unique writing styles. She loved being so enveloped within a universe that she's been reading for hours and it's felt like a blip of thirty minutes,  not wanting it to ever end, and endlessly searching to see if there was a sequel (or if there was going to be one). Falling in love with the characters, hating others, rooting for none of them and all of them simultaneously. Being so stressed out that she has to stop herself from reading a few lines ahead to makes sure everything was okay (failing terribly), changing positions about twenty-seven times, reading as she walked to the bathroom to pee and barely wanting to put it down to wash her hands. She loved feeling immersed like she was completely involved in the story, and she knows she's not the only person who feels that way.

So she majored in business, got a loan from the bank, and opened up a bookstore. If she could spend the rest of her life helping people find the book that does that for them, then she would be happy -- it'd always been her dream.

Which is why this was so frustrating -- for them to be so careless around a dream of hers. She'd written several polite letters that she posts up on the door in the morning before they open, but even though they're not still on the door by afternoon, her politeness is being blatantly ignored. It's so frustrating. So absolutely frustrating, that she could scream!

Y/N had tried everything. Had brightened up the storefront with more posters, changing the awning above the doors and windows, added more art and posters, planted more flowers so that looked welcoming and bright even despite the dark, blacked out windows and ashtrays right next door. Nothing could deviate the noticeable decline in sales on the days the tattoo parlor is open as well.

So when she finds more ashes in her hydrangea, she's had just enough. Stomped her way over next door, even though it was about five minutes to open, and shoved her way through the parlor door. She'd never been in here before, so she wasn't quite certain of the layout, but right up front was a small counter with a smooth granite finish atop of it, and a gruff looking man sitting behind it, two large gauges in her ears and a swirly tattoo decorating his forehead. The entire essence of this place was dark; all broody and deep shades of purples, reds, and blacks. Their stores might be connected by one wall but couldn't have appeared more different -- Y/N was trying to lure people in with a muted olive hue, and here they were with a massive knife glistening and dripping with a jam shade of blood painted on their front wall.

"Listen," she began immediately, pointing her finger directly at him and wishing she'd worn something more intimidating like an exaggerated satin lapel Armani suit tailored to fit, but she doubted that would fair well heaving boxes around all day so she had to settle for a worn tee, The Great Wave sketched out on it in black ink, "I know you guys are running a business and I know being rough and rugged is your aesthetic and you were here first! I get that! But I'm running a business too and my business is books and reading and quiet not loud, blaring Black Sabbath at top volume for the whole block to here. And if I find one more cigarette ash in my god damn hydrangeas I'm going to fucking --"

"Hello," a voice rings from behind her, startling her to a jump and she sees the eyes of the man who she'd been yelling at (who seemed rather unfazed) flicker over behind her, "What do we have here? Riktor here cheat on you? The naughty devil can never keep it in his pants."

When Y/N turns around to confront the face, she takes in a deep breath. The guy before her is pretty. . .maybe too pretty to be working here and the only indication of him possibly working here is the shirt he wears that sports the logo and the ink running up and down his arms, plus a tattoo gun that he's polishing with what looks like a scrap piece of cloth, massaging it diligently across the stainless steel tip. . His eyes are a very clear, light green like what one might expect to be the jewels of a mermaids earrings, and lips that didn't even look kind of chewed up -- like he'd never known stress in his life. Two perfect, smooth shades of pink skin to a strawberry milkshake that pullback in a simper, watching her closely and waiting for her next move but her brain had slowed trying to process that a could have been the cute boy next door archetype was for some reason in a very grungy shop such as this.

The words he'd said to her finally set in her head, however, and her brows reset in their irritation, "I'm Y/N and I own the shop next door and --"

"So you're our little book bee? The hydrangeas are beautiful."

She pauses for a moment, taken aback, "Yes," she decides, "Yes, they are beautiful, but they can't be beautiful when there are ashes in them."

The man pouts his lips, own face looking disgruntled by this, "Well that won't do. We've got ashtrays right out front for a reason, but I'll see about moving them to the back and changing the smoking area around there."

"Yeah," she says, maybe a little to forcefully, still geared up for a fight but she was bewildered by the very sudden change in tune. Y/N had kind of been expecting a huge argument and yelling and maybe her storefront to be spray painted, but he was -- this boy was. . .being very suspiciously understanding, "That would. . .that would be good." Her shoulders relax, dropping, "And the music --"

"Far too loud," he nods slowly, raising his hand, "I tell them but they never listen to me. Long as I'm here it'll be down but when I'm gone they crank it right up. However, you have my full permission to come over here and yell at them. Say Harry sent ya, they should put it at a suitable volume."

Y/N's pointing finger lowers slowly, and she wonders if her face conveys how truly alarmed she is that he's being so approachable and considerate. While there is always the possibility that he's doing it to get her off of his back and back to her shop so they can get to work, his face suggests he's being sincere, so she lowers another defensive barrier that she'd boarded up to get herself to come over here. She gives one final nod, "Okay, good -- um -- thank you very much."

"Anytime," he shifts the cloth and tattoo gun to one hand, holding out the other, "Nice t'a finally meet you neighbor."

"Nice to meet you." She took his hand in her own, giving one firm shake before turning on her heel and hot tailing it out of there. Had she been around him any longer, she's sure she would've said something stupid given the chance, because he was way too fucking cute and she was not having that. She doesn't like when talking to someone makes her feel nervous -- Y/N actually makes a point to not feel nervous when she's speaking with someone -- but this boy. Well, fuck sake, she's still a little jittery as she reenters her own store.

She doesn't know if she could ever face him again, actually.

                                                                          .                                .                             .

"You need to find another person to work here," Ayla saddles up on the front counter next to the register, one leg on either side, swinging them back and forth obnoxiously while Y/N was crouched over thumbing through a box of The Devil All the Time's hardbacks. She was counting them because she was fairly sure they'd shorted her by four books which would not have been a problem if hardbacks weren't the price of a limb. Ayla had come over to "help" but as always, her definition of help resorts to chatting with her with one of the bakery cookies held in her hand, watching while Y/N heaved and huffed big boxes of books around, "Get 'em to do all the grunt work and have yourself a latte while you read in the back room."

Y/N rolled her eyes, pausing on 26 to answer her, "M'good by myself for right now," she responded, looking up from the box to set her gaze on Ayla, watching her pick the dirt from beneath her fingernail, "Besides, teaching 'em how to do things the way I want them is such a bother, I'd rather do it myself."

"Still, you gotta be lonely," she shakes her head, "It can get so quiet in here even when there are customers, and y'know too much silence can drive you mad, I read."

She opens her mouth to respond, when a very distinct sound of a guitar riff floods muffled into their ears and her face sets into a deep frown, "How could it be quiet when I've got a shop neighbor who won't turn the music down?" Her voice escalates in sound every word, shaking her head slowly, "Y'know, I thought maybe the owner was actually genuine and really nice, but m'positive he's working today and the music's still blaring! How can they even focus on that going on? Won't the vibrations of the damn soundwaves fuck them over? They've got needles to people's skin, they should be focused."

It'd been a week since she'd gone over there and it was good for a few days; he stuck to his word about the smoking, putting the ashtrays in the back but that didn't really stop the few stragglers who were walking up to the place with a cigarette, so there were still buds on the sidewalk but it definitely had been better. However, the music was still loud and grating and nobody wanted to look at books when there were muffled rumbles of what she's certain is Led Zeppelin shaking her walls.

"They've got amazingly steady hands I heard," Ayla throws one last glance towards the vibrating wall before lulling her gaze back to where Y/N is squatted, "I dated a girl -- remember Rita? She used to be at tattoo artist and her hands were incredibly durable. . .she could go for hours knuckles deep inside me."

Y/N goes back to her counting, her finger on the binding of the book she'd left off on but she couldn't find the number she'd left off on, "I do remember Rita," Y/N murmurs, wracking her brain and tapping at the binding with the tips of her fingers, "She called me Prude Pringle for three weeks 'cos I refused a drunken threesome with you lot."

"A threesome?" Her face skewers, "When was that? Why'd you say no?"

"Back in August. Said no 'cos I was the only sober one and a little birdie once told me she couldn't partake in a threesome because she's too jealous for it."

Ayla nods, leaning back, "Good call -- 've I ever told you-you're a great friend."

Y/N opens her mouth to tell her to say it again but it's in that moment she realized that she definitely lost count and she's almost positive that the music got even louder! So instead of that, she slams her palm down against the bindings, "Fuck sake!" She nearly shouts, shoving herself up from the ground and dusting off her pants, "I'll be right back."

She charges over to the door, "Wait, shouldn't you jus' call and complain?"

Her suggestion is lost in the chime of her door's bell, again wishing she'd worn something more gruff and grungy than what she has but such is life she supposes. So she bursts through their open door in a shirt with a realistic gray octopus sat on a pile of books, surpassing the front desk man -- Riktor -- and heading towards the back, where the music was coming from.  There's a low, throaty voice of someone trying to stop her but she ignores it, coming past the curtain threshold, and there she finds herself with a group of. . .well, of tattoo artists. There's about three hunched over bodies -- one working on adding an additional flower onto an arm's sleeve, another inking what looks like a balloon on someone's hip, and another who's giving an ankle tattoo, what looks like a hammer and a nail. A few other people are just sitting about, on their phones, combing their fingers through their hair, another throwing a whole bottle of water in one go.

All of them ignoring that she'd stormed in. . .all of them listening to music at top volume.

"Excuse me," she tries over the music, and when she barely gets a flicker of a glance, she goes louder, "Excuse me!" Again, there's no response, so she scans the room for the stereo, spotting it in the corner beside a man with black inked all up his neck. She goes for it without thought, twisting and winding around stools and chairs, taking the volume dial and spinning it low. That catches their attention, and the resounding noise of the tattoo gun's needle cuts off completely, "Excuse me," she finally states with a huff, "Could you please keep the volume a little lower? It vibrates the walls when it's up so high."

She gets a lot of blank stares. . .a lot. . .and wordlessly, the man who was sitting beside it leans over and turns it right back up, even louder than it had been before, everyone going back as they had before she'd come through. Y/N is infuriated! She asked so fucking nicely, how the hell could they just ignore that? Was it the octopus shirt?

In the next few moments, she doesn't think. Instead, she turns back towards the stereo, leans down and reaches behind the speaker before yanking the plug from the wall and the music cuts off completely.

When she lifts back up, she deadpans the lot of them.

"Harry sent me." She snaps before walking out, slipping beneath the curtain, sparing a glance at Riktor who has his brows raised and when she pushes through the door, almost running into a body. A body that is very much Harry, who has his fingers curled around the top of two bakery bags, brows furrowed.

"Y/N?" He looks concerned, and she wonders if it's written all over her face that she's irritated, "What's wrong?"

She looks at him, and his stupidly gorgeous eyes, and his way too pretty mouth, and just shakes her head, "Nothing's wrong, I took care of it."

She leaves it at that.

                                                                              .                               .                               .

Y/N feels a little guilty later on. Not entirely guilty, because it felt good to shut it off entirely and she hadn't heard a peep from them otherwise, but guilty enough that she had thought about writing a note suggesting that they just switch the stereo to a wall that they're not sharing, but she stops herself. They'd probably just roll it in a ball and toss it in the trash anyway, so instead of writing a note, she worked on setting up the new display for The Devil of All Time and throws around a few ideas about how to draw people in with a poster or something detailing that this was going to be a movie soon.

Ayla had gone home after praising her for being a badass, leaving Y/N to her thoughts. A good amount of customers flowed in but it was a Monday and Mondays were always pretty slow (business picks up as the week goes on so she'd been expecting as much. So she does some housekeeping and wonders if she should hire someone to at least speak to when she's bored, but the thought of another person in here kind of gives her the willies. This store was her baby. . .her cute little, chubby fingered, drooly, bed wetting baby and the thought of letting a stranger step a foot near her innocent little baby to destroy it with their grubby hands got right under her skin. Y/N's better at working alone, she thinks, and she doesn't know how much she'd fair as a leader if she felt a teensy bit bad about taking initiative yelling at a ton of grungy tattoo artists.

She's suckling on her bottom lip, staring at a blank poster board and figuring she should probably take her little art project home rather than stay here any later than need be, when there's a jingle of her door's bell, and she looks up to see none other than Harry. Harry who looks very. . .very guilty, lips drawn downward, and Y/N opens her mouth to ask what he was doing but he holds one hand up, the other preoccupied with a rolled bag similar to the one from the bakery he'd had earlier in the day, "Before you rip me a new one, I just want to apologize. I had them turn it down all this morning and I leave for lunch and I don't doubt they twisted the knob all the way up again. I told 'em I would take the damn stereo away if they kept it up." He tears the beanie from his hat, combing his fingers through his hair, shaking out the curls, and waving the bag he'd brought,  " So I brought you a piece of Boston Cream Pie. Told 'em they better be nice to you too, 'cos you're our neighbor and they ran off the last cute little boutique we had and. . ." he looks around, gaze fluttering about the room, "S'kinda dark in here, Pet, you should get some more lights -- ooh, do those yellow fairy ones, isn't that what they're called?"

Y/N's head tilts to the side, brows furrowing as she takes the bag from him, "Excuse me?"

"Sorry, sorry, off topic I know,  I just thought this is a college town and y'know how they're suckers for fairy lighting; innocent little things, as soon as they get out they tear 'em down and pretend nothing happened."

Y/N tries not to show on her face that she definitely has fairy lights strung up in her flat, as she responds, "S'fine, um -- yeah, I'll look into that," she shakes her head, placing the bag to the side and unrolling it, reaching in for the pie and the fork, "Sorry about tearing the plug from the wall, hope it didn't short circuit or anything."

His eyes go wide, "No, no! No apologies told you to tell them arseholes I sent ya and that you did." He lowers himself before her familiarly and Y/N's brows raise, not expecting him to go ahead and make himself comfortable but not terribly turned off that he did. Though she was quite. . .taken by him -- enough so that she was sort of dry-mouthed as he stretched his leg out, leaning back and holding himself up with the palm of his hand behind his back. The ripped holes in his blue jeans pucker up, the cuffs of his jeans pinch rolled down to a very clean pair of pink socks and loafers. Once she sees the bottom half of him, she focuses then on the top, seeing him in a worn Pink Floyd shirt and he's just so. . .boyish, she can't get over it. "What're you staring at? Have I got croissant on me face?"

While he reaches up to swipe away at nonexistent crumbs, she shakes her head, "No, no," she reassures him, "No, s'just -- um. . .you don't look much like you'd be a tattoo artist. Or be the boss for that matter," her brows dip in, "Not like that's a bad thing, its just compared to the aesthetic of your parlor you kind of. . .stray from the part."

For a moment she wonders if that was rude but Harry doesn't seem all too bothered by her statement, poking at first his eyebrow and then his lip and nose, "Had a few piercings believe it or not. But I was with a girl a while back who absolutely hated them and I had 'em out so long that the holes closed up." He sighs, waving his hand over his face, "Would've gotten them pierced again but I found people find me much more approachable without them in, so I didn't bother."

Y/N's face skewers, shaking her head as she caps the sharpie she'd been working with, "That's shit," she mutters without thinking, finally popping open the plastic container with the pie, "You shouldn't have changed yourself for a girl's sake. If she really cared for you, then she wouldn't mind the piercings." She's digging the fork into the pie, wondering why it felt so easy to talk to him. . .he had a sort of charming way about him that sucked her in easily -- or maybe it's because she had nobody to talk to for hours on hours, being left with her own thoughts for way too long makes her rather susceptible to speaking without really being prompted to, "I mean, if I was crazy about a guy and he had like. . .like Nirvana's entire discography tattooed on his face, I wouldn't care if it made him happy, y'know? S'a shame thinking the world and all its people are s'pposed to bend at your will." She slips the pie into her mouth, realizing that maybe he didn't technically ask for her input at all, and her heart almost drops to her stomach because the last thing she'd want to do is make enemies with the one person who's on her side, "I'm sorry, that's none of my business."

She looks up expecting him to look pissy, gathering his things to leave, but instead, he's smiling, looking pleasantly surprised, "No, no, don't apologize. Wish I would've had you 'round when it was happening to me, would've done me some good."

And if she's honest. . .maybe she really should hire somebody, because she also (apparently) becomes very pushy and involved in other people's lives because she goes on to ask, "Well, what happened between you two? If you don't mind me asking." She pushes some of the whipped cream off the top of the pie, "I love a good romance story."

Snorting, Harry chuckles, "You're a bloody trip, y'know that? Just sat down and you wanna know all my nitty gritty feelings," He doesn't make any move to leave, "Your blatant and unapologetic interest is refreshing, however, so I'll give you it. I'm more or less an open book but  this "romance" was more like a dark drama -- was the farthest from healthy." He shakes his head, "Would've brought a beer with me if I'd known I'd be getting into it, but basically, I met her when she'd come in for a tattoo on her ankle -- a little boat on her ankle -- and we sort of clicked right off the bat. She gave me her number at the end of the tattoo, kissed my cheek, and I was proper swooning. Everything was really good for a while too, like we would go on these cutesy little dates and then elaborate ones and when we had sex that was nice too but after like the second-month things kind of went to shit."

"She told ya to take out the piercings?" She guesses and he nods, a somber smile starting at his mouth.

"Started there, sure. Told me to take them out because they looked dumb or summat -- made me seem like a brooding teen punk is what she said, but I was so moony-eyed for her I took 'em right out without a second thought. At first, she loved haring what tattoos people got, and then she said I talked about work too much, but when I stopped she accused me of cheating on her instead of going to work. After convincing her I wasn't and I would never, we'd sleep together, cuddle to sleep, wake up in the morning and it'd start all over again. Started feeling like she wanted me to quit work altogether, stay with her at home all the time. . .would suggest it in the morning then cry when I left and blow up my phone all day." He shakes his head, "Won't say I was a saint, 'cos I definitely wasn't. Started ignoring the calls and messages after a while until I finally told her I couldn't do it anymore."

Y/N frowns for him, tutting her tongue, "A right mess. You were right to end things, 'cos if you don't have trust what do you have?"

"It's like I walked in and opened up a Nicholas Sparks book," he jests and she furrows her brows at him, "Like y'know just what to say, huh?"

"I'm very smart," she gives a fake gloat, "S'why I bought a shop next to an incredibly loud tattoo artist's whose customers like ashing in my flowerbeds. I'm full of grand ideas."

The jab makes Harry's lips stretch wide around a grin.

                                                            .                                      .                                    .

If someone had told Y/N while she was in high school, that her job would entail strolling in at seven in the morning, when the sky had just barely mottled a lavender, hazy dawn and wearing her cheap bear slippers -- she'd say they were crazy. Yet there she was, equipped with a box of nails (because they were much cheaper than command hooks), a hammer, and ten boxes of fairy lights so that she could lighten up the essential essence of the store. No matter how much she didn't want to admit that Harry was right about the lighting, he was, and she wasn't dumb enough to pass up an opportunity to make this place feel more home-y.

Harry was. . .interesting, Y/N thought. While she's ambling over the juniper colored rug (one she'd splurged on at the furniture store off main street, wool with a cotton-latex backing -- the man who had sold it to her somehow convinced her it was okay to spend the extra money for it to be 100% real and for a frazzled, newly bank loaned Y/N, she decided that wool was cool), she thinks about the time they'd spent together. He'd stayed a little while after he'd told her the story of him and his ex, waited for her to finish off the pie and reached for the container and stuffed it into the bag he'd brought it in. "As much as I'd love to stay, I really gotta hit the hay. M'right knackered," he'd stretched out his body with a loud, groaning hum and his eyes even watered some with the gratifying burn of it, "You should go get some sleep too since it's only you working here." 

"How'd you know that?"

He'd snorted and rolled his eyes as he gathered his things, "Please, you're the only one I ever see coming in and out of here every morning and night, plus you just spent an hour talking to your obnoxious neighbor like we're old friends," he shook his head, "Need someone to talk to throughout the day or you'll go mad -- thought I could tattoo by meself and now I've got more than five knob heads working for me."

Y/N isn't sure what kind of weird mentor/mentee relationship was beginning to germinate between the two of them but she had no idea how to feel about it. On one hand, it's nice to have because while college does a well enough job of teaching you how to run a business theoretically,  stepping into it on your own was a whole new world. Harry had been through the trials and tribulations of opening a shop, starting something, getting people there, and finding an aesthetic for his own store -- he could help her with some things, she's sure of it, and she knows that if she ever had a problem regarding being an owner, he'd most likely be the first person she sought out for advice. There was something undeniably charming about him, it made it easier to hear his ideas rather than wanting to tell him to shut the hell up and let her run her own store, hence the reason she's here so early hanging up string lights.

On the other hand, she fears he's only buttering her up so she doesn't file some complaint regarding his employees. Did he think she'd really go to the police? Or was last night him trying to feel out what kind of person she was and how far they might be able to push her before she does? She'd like to think that he was a hundred percent innocent in her intentions but she just couldn't ignore the flitters of doubt in her mind. Someone as winsome as he is doesn't not know that they could get what they want if they played their cards right and she wonders if he was pulling out all the stops on her -- bringing her pie, sitting with her on her rug, and entertaining her with a story knowing full well she'd be a sucker for it because, well, she owned a damn bookstore.

Despite all that, he was good company at the very least, and not too terrible on the eyes, so she figures -- even if this is him doing some sly buttering -- she'd let him come around. At least until he started to annoy her.

While Y/N lugs an old kitchen chair from the supply closet, she reckons that she needs to buy something of a small ladder for her endeavors such as this. There were a few stepstools she had placed strategically around the store, but they only went high enough for the bookshelves rather than for above them and along the junction of the ceiling and wall. She slides the chair up against the wall after spotting an outlet and prays that it's not wobbly as she plucks a nail from the box and holds it between her fingers, keeping the hammer secure against her palm as she hoists herself up. A small squeak leaves her in alarm when she thinks the chair is about to tip but the leg had only left the ground a fraction of a millimeter so she was fine for now.

The prospect of someone working for her was continuing to feel more and more like a good' she'd have someone holding the chair steady for her as she finally stopped tricking herself out and slowly pushed herself upward, straightening out her legs and positioning the nail just a few centimeters down from the ceiling. She pinches it loosely with her finger as she taps the blunt end of the hammer against it in gentle taps, seeing no need in wailing on it, especially when she wanted it at a slight incline so the chances of the wires slipping off and her having to get back up on this chair were slimmer.

Once she's finished the first, she's proper proud of herself. Is taking a minute to admire her work when the very sudden and alarming sound of her bell chiming and the sound of her squawking cry as she jumps and clutches onto the wall masks over the intruder, until she looks over and sees none other than Harry himself with wide eyes, "Oh, my bad Love, didn't mean to scare you."

"Could you at least knock?" she groaned, brows furrowed with a hand limply covering her chest, "We're closed, go home."

Harry snorts as he watches her dismount from the chair, catching herself on the wall once again, "Well, I was just coming 'round to open up, and I saw you nailing into the walls while standing on a very wobbly chair in what appears to be slippers and I came to offer my aid, if you'd like it."

"I'm fine," she told him, pushing the loose strands of hair that tickled at her face backward, trying desperately not to stare at him for too long. He looked like he just woke up and it was cute; he had sleep puffy eyes, fluffy, noticeably freshly washed hair pushed back by a pair of unnecessary sunglasses, swamped in a hoodie much too large for him and a yawn stretches his mouth out, "Why are you here so early anyway? Do people get tattoos at seven AM?"

Shaking his head, Harry sets down the sketchbook that she just now realized had been in his hand and a few different pencils, including a pencil sharpener and it only just hits her that Harry must draw and design a lot of that tattoos that he does, "Trying to do a few new designs for the wall but I get too distracted when m'at home, so I come 'round here before it opens. The vibe is. . .like, good for the brain, y'know?" Y/N nods, even though she doesn't know and she watches as he looks from the nail to the hammer on the seat, to the boxes of lights she'd ordered online, and a grin pulls at his mouth, "You took me advice, ey?" He looks proud of himself and Y/N can't decide if it's really cute or really annoying.

"Its a bit dark I suppose," she admitted, waving her hand around lamely, "And the ceiling lights are more ominous than comforting at night and it feels more like an evil lair than a cozy bookstore."

His smile only grows bigger, "See? M'not an all gloomy, knife on the wall, grunge monster -- got me soft gooey spots too. Have a few art pieces I think you might like t--"

"Oi, don't get too big for your britches, I don't need an interior designer." She nips him off but he doesn't take any hurt from her words, only getting closer to her and raising the chair, moving it over a good chunk before setting it back down and holding onto it, nodding towards the chair and her face twists in confusion, "What?"

"Get on the seat then," he pats on it, "If you won't use me for my wonderful vision yet, then you can use me for my chair steadying hands."

Y/N's heart warms some, "Yet?" She repeats, plucking another nail out of the box and taking hold of the hammer again.

Harry shrugs, "Got hope you'll come to your senses."

She gives him a soft shove to his shoulder only to find he's incredibly sturdy and she doesn't know how to feel about that either.

"Just don't stare at my ass, yeah?" She tells him, pushing herself up onto the chair again with no squeak required because the chair doesn't shift.

He gives a mocking, exasperated sigh, "Damn, the only reason I offered my help was so I could objectify you a little eensy bit."

Y/N laughs harder than she should and when she looks down at him, she can noticeably see his ego being stroked, and yeah, he's far too cute right now. She can't tell if she wanted more to coddle him to her chest and shield him from the world, or to be the one who is coddled, but she sweeps the idea of it from her mind just as quickly as it'd come. She wasn't looking to pursue the idea of any crush her mind and heart decided to concoct in an effort to finally do her in. Plus she's got no time for a relationship anyway. When it came to being with someone, she believed that it was something that took time and care -- like gardening almost. Planting the seed was the easiest part, but then you had to tend to it; water it daily, stroke it's petals tenderly, assure it that it's going to blossom so beautifully and once it does, you have to work even harder to not let it wilt.

How could she give the proper love and care to anyone when she's trying to work the garden of her bookstore? Nobody deserved to be second to that of a store when it came to their significant other, and from how mindful, thoughtful, and sweet Harry was. . .well, that wouldn't be fair to him either.

That's to say if he even liked her in the first place.

She shakes her head at herself -- why is she even thinking like that? Probably because he was looking all soft swallowed up in his hoodie and sweatpants, and he's helpful and kind and it's not often you meet boys like that. Usually, there's a catch and she's waiting for Harry's -- for him to be a closeted asshole who's magnanimity only scraped the surface but deep down he was nothing but molten, murderous evil. Maybe he was a homicidal maniac worming his way close to her so he could get her alone, lock her in a cage, and starve her out? Or he'd get her from behind, bludgeon her with a hardcover book just for the irony of it.

But then she looks down, sees that he's watching her hands and not her bum, his gaze flickering to her own before the corner of his lips draw back in a cordial gleam, "Your handy work is top caliber," he remarks, nodding towards where she's left the nail in the wall, "Bet your fingers are strong and skilled from all the page turning."

A huffed laugh comes from her nose, chest puffing out with it.

He couldn't hurt a fly.

                                                          .                                     ��     .                                          .

Y/N needs to hire someone.

She knows she does, and Ayla nor Harry would let her forget it, but she's too proud! Told herself she could start and run a business with no help and had intended to keep it that way, but there was so much that was entailed regarding all of this it was going to drive her up the wall. Like when she's finally gotten taken off hold with Baker & Taylor's helpline to let them know they sent her forty copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and it's predecessors when she most certainly did not, but she has to step away from the phone because someone can't reach a copy of Dean Koontz's latest novel. Or when she's trying to multitask cleaning up someone's spilled coffee off the rug (assuring through a myriad of their apologies that it was fine, it's why she had purchased the industrialized carpet cleaner met for the tracked stains of a Great Mastiff's colossal muddy paws in the first place), setting up an automatic payment for the electricity (which had sparked in price considering the lights lining the walls but with this came more night time visitors so it evened out), and realizing that there were three people waiting patiently in line for her to check them out.

Having at least one other hand would be beneficial, but again, she could only stress how hard it would to find someone she trusted with her snotty nosed baby of a bookstore. Who would she feel comfortable leaving alone if she had to run errands? To run the store when she was home sneezy and feverish? To open up the books and not damage their binding with the box cutter like she'd almost did a handful of times (before specifically requesting they put a protective wrapping over the shipments so she didn't have to play the surgeon game of "let's not nick an artery" book-edition). The only person she could even kind of imagine was Harry of all people, and he was busy running his own thing next door!

She guesses she could put a help wanted sign up front, but she would draft up the application herself, and including a questionnaire seemed necessity at this point. At the very least so she could feel out what kind of person they'd be and whether or not they'd be able to click, or if they would share her intense and immense love for books and reading. If they're to work here, she wants it to be to their enjoyment as much as it's for their paycheck, which is a lot to ask from some people, especially in a college town.

Hiring someone seems worth it until she imagines the first time they manage to do something like knock an entire bookshelf over, and then she thinks she'd rather work around the clock 24/7 than dare let anyone who isn't her do anything ever.

All of this is weighing like two fifty pound dumbbells on her mind as she's sat on the ground, starting a new project rather than actually dealing with the problem at hand. A few weeks ago she had bought a decently large basket but had nothing to do with it so it'd just been sitting collecting dust in the corner of her room until an idea struck her of its purpose. She'd put books in it, sure, but books that are wrapped up all nice and neat, with only a short description of it scrawled out over the paper. There's one thing she's come to learn to be a reader herself, and that is no matter how hard someone might try, they will always judge a book by its cover. The story could be exactly what someone was looking for -- the right amount of suspense or romance, horror or comfort, a plot that would keep you intrigued, and a page-turner that you'll never want to end -- but you could pass it right up because you don't like the fruit bowl on the cover. Y/N reckons that every time you're in a bookstore or in the library, you're bound to pass what could've been your all-time favorite book, just because the cover hadn't had you arsed enough to pick it up.

So she bought all the supplies for it and waited until closing, as always, to set herself up on that green rug. She'd moved the display table on it (strategically moving the books atop of it on the checkout counter) off to the side to give her the maximum amount of space for the thick brown recycled wrapping paper, her four rolls of scotch tape, the bumblebee printed scissors she'd brought from home, and starting with twenty random books she'd plucked off her shelf as to not overwhelm herself.  Y/N had successfully completed three books with a permanent furrow in her brow before she heard the gentle rapping of knuckles on glass, looking up to see Harry's silhouette and his face pressed against the glass, mouthing let me in and point at the knob.

Her mood almost lightens immediately at the sight of him, placing her palms flat on the ground to push herself up on wobbly legs (she'd been sitting cross-legged for at least an hour) and walk to the door, unlocking it with the keys in the deadbolt and twisting the knob. "Jesus, are you ever home?" He questions as he steps in, "When did I help you with the lights? Two weeks ago? Don't think you've left since."

"You're not the only one who gets distracted when you're at home," she responds, relocking the door before retreating to her makeshift craft center in the middle of the floor, "Why wrap books when a bowl of popcorn and endless movies are at my disposal?"

"And the popcorn is far too buttery for you to be doing both," he adds thoughtfully.

Y/N snaps her fingers and points at him, "Bingo," she holds the edge of the paper down with her socked toes as she grabs for the tape dispenser, running the sticky side against the sharp teeth and nicking at the pad of her thumb in the process, "Why're you always wearing a beanie?" She asks him, referring to the olive green knit that's tucked atop his head, "You've got such pretty soft curls, don't hide them."

It takes him back some, she can tell, and she starts to wonder if she should've said it at all but a soft smile worms onto his lips and he manages to look way too cute like that, reaching up to pull at the top of the beanie, letting his hair fall about freely. It wasn't particularly unruly -- just soft brown tufts, that must be killer to run fingers through -- curls sprout around his ears, growing down towards his shoulders. She'd never seen hair like his; it was clear he took care of it and she'd reckon he'd used a hair mask or two, because it appeared healthy and clean, "Thank you," he murmurs sincerely, "Didn't think people much liked them -- get told to get a cut about every other day."

Y/N scoffs, "Well tell 'em to shove it. I like them, they suit you and I don't lie. Only cut your hair if you want to, but if you like it, who gives a rat what people think?" She shakes her head, ridding herself of the frustration building within her at the prospect of someone being rude enough to tell Harry to get a haircut when he clearly likes it long, trying to soothe the way she'd grumbled over by moving on with, "Anyway how was tattoo-ing today? Any fun stories."

Harry settles his keys down on the ground where he soon places his coat after slipping it off his shoulders, leaving it in a heap that he then sits beside, "I would tell you if I didn't think you were deflecting, but I got this aching feeling that there wasn't a furrow in your brow jus' 'cos you were wrapping books."

She wonders how he does that -- he's got an eye for people, she guesses, and she thinks having a secret that you have to keep from him was probably akin to one of the layers of hell. Y/N had never felt so cut open around him; like he'd pried her apart from the inside out, looking inside, knowing everything before she had a chance to even voice it aloud at all if she even knew it herself yet. Hell, she could make a book metaphor but it seemed a little on the nose as she's sat amongst a shit ton of them.

"Hey," he hums, catching her gaze with his own, and he looks so. . .gentle -- concerned and soft and sweet, "Y'know, you can rant and vent to me about stuff, yeah? Owning a business can be rough and not many people know the actual tribulations of it; never see past the whole, "you're your own boss!" aspect of it so I get it." He puts a finger in the air though, "However, if you're about to say something poor on yourself, I'll have you know that you're doing very well thus far from the amount of people leaving here with paper bags full of books, and to come to a college town that's absent of any small, homey little bookstores when they're discovering their comfort in things that are cozy was a well-planed move. You've accomplished so much already and you should definitely be proud of yourself."

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth, her free hand going to tuck the hair behind her ear, "Thank you," she responds, "That means a lot." And it does! For someone to say that you're doing good when you've started something so much bigger than you -- it feels nice. Like the hug of your favorite sweater, or the way it feels to place your head against a feather filled pillow. Y/N couldn't believe how easily Harry has nearly resorted her to mush, so much so that she nearly forgot her problem at hand, "I just. . .I think I need to hire someone but I don't really want to." She takes the permanent marker from underneath her knee, before writing on the copy of Kathleen Hale's No One Else Can Have You:

Awkward Teenage Disappearing Mystery

Very Creepy

She pushes it off to the side as she continues, "Like, the help would be nice, but then I have to like them, and trust them 'cos this place means so much to me and I've put so much work into it that I can't just let any old stranger come in! And what if it's a college student and they invite their stupid drunk friends over before close? I can just see my lamp being destroyed and then I'd have to scold them, but I'm shit at yelling at anyone, I don't think anybody takes me seriously and its not like I could dox their pay even if I really, really wanted to but I can't fire them either for one little mess up. Like what if they need the money y'know? On those Myer Brigg's type tests I always get stuck on the one where it asks if you'd have trouble firing an employee who was shit at their job but loyal and I had always imagined it really could go either way, but how am I supposed to decide whether or not someone has a job?" Pausing, she knuckles worriedly at her eyes, shaking her head, "But I shouldn't even be thinking about that because I don't even have a fucking employee yet, so. . ."

Once he's certain that she's not going to say anymore, Harry speaks up, "This is the stuff they don't really tell you when you get a business degree, yeah? It's hard. . .working by yourself is hard and working with people is hard, and it sucks trying to find who suits you best as your first employee. My first was Riktor. . .proper hated the bugger," he leans backward on his palms, tilting himself sideways so he could stretch his legs outward, "He had a fouler mouth than mine and I thought he was a prick, if m'honest, but when I saw him do a full sleeve of the most beautiful work I'd ever seen, got a chance to really talk to him, and found out that him n'I have loads in common. You just have to give whoever you hire a chance, pick their brain a little, you'll understand them more as a person so if they do make a mistake it isn't just some mindless bumbling idiot."

A frown tugs at her mouth, "Why do you always know what to say?" She grumbles and he laughs brightly, warm, wiggling down in her gut and fluttering butterfly wings lick and tickle her insides.

"M'bloody smart, s'why," he drops his lid down in a wink, "Now, explain to me what you're doin, so I can help," he tells her, "For the time being, I'm your employee, I work for five cents an hour and require constant affirmation that I'm wrapping correctly."

Harry helps her, even though he's shit at wrapping (they both find this out at the same time) and even though he asks a lot of questions and worms the endings out of her despite how much she both simultaneously loves and loathes ruining books for people. But it was nice -- he was nice -- and it makes her feel quite soft. Softer than she likes to feel in the presence of anyone. . .Y/N prides herself on not losing herself in the thoughts of a relationship, putting herself first in all things, and it can't be seen as selfish because who would she be putting second if she was alone?

But Harry was like a pest. A squirmy little bug that has settled in her, and planted imagery of them going home together rather than leaving each other after this. To continue their conversations. . .laughing and teasing and cuddling and maybe Y/N could be held one night instead of falling asleep buried beneath her covers trying to keep warm.

Though she eventually remembers that she likes having the bed to herself and she'd probably get too sweaty anyway, so she shakes the idea from her brain.

Harry brought her from these thoughts though when he had plucked the last book from her pile, looking at it with brows raised before turning it to face her, "On Dublin Street, ey? This looks pretty saucy," he peers at the back, eyes scanning over the description, immediately lighting up as he reads from it, "Braden Carmichael is used to getting what he wants, and he's determined to get Jocelyn into his bed." He flickers through a lump of pages with his thumb, bending the book backward some as he does, "Didn't know you were into such filth, Pet."

Y/N rolls her eyes, "I haven't read it, but Ayla swears up and down that it's the best thing she's ever read in her life so I figured I'd put it in."

He holds it in his hands, front to back, before digging into his pocket  and pulling out a handful of bills, "I'll buy it off you."

"What?" She tilts her head but he's leaning forward, placing the money into her hand and closing her fingers around it, "Oi -- what're you --"

"Let's start a book club," he remarks decisively, a short nod of his head, "Just you and me. We'll read a few chappies, talk about it, and we'll start with this book right here."

Her mouth falls open, shaking her head, "Harry, I don't even have time to read books that I want to read, much less --"

"Then make time," he cuts her off, shaking his head some, "You love reading, don't you? Don't let what made you start up this store in the first place get swept under the rug. We'll read however many chapters we decide on and meet up for coffee on Sundays to discuss. This will kick it off, then we can move to books that we are actually interested in, but for now, we'll do a tester. Have you got another one around here?"

She doesn't really get a chance to tell him that yes she does, it's on the third shelf over from the desk on the erotica shelf (a cute little sticker labels it), because he's already stood up and ventured it out himself. It was true -- Y/N hadn't been able to read much since she initially got this place up and running, and she missed it terribly but it felt like it would be a chore more than anything some nights. It'd be easier to just turn off her brain than get invested in the stories she grows to love so much. And that's rubbish! Absolute rubbish, because she should be making time for the one thing that has always been her thing. She doesn't want to end up resenting this bookstore or books in general, just because she lost sight for what made her want to do this in the first place.

Y/N wonders aloud why Harry has made a habit of fixing problems she didn't even know she had yet, "I need you to start having problems too," she tells him, half joking, half serious, "Then I can start helping you out and this isn't so one-sided."

Harry grins at her, shaking his head.

"You help me," he responds, "You just don't notice when you are."

                                                                       .                              .                                   .

Y/N doesn't know why she feels so anxious. She and Harry had spent plenty of nights together, sat on her carpet and chatting with one another for hours into the night, pursuing her random projects and brightening up the store. He even stops by during his lunch breaks -- will bring some food for her even, mostly because she rarely leaves for lunch herself and sometimes forgets to pack her own. It had been routine almost, and she'd never felt nervous when he appeared at her door, smiling wide.

But now, when it comes to them meeting at the café to discuss this book though, she feels all types of tense and nervy. Y/N had left twenty minutes early, sucking her bottom lip into her mouth and nibbling on it hard as she made her way to the café. She briefly considered calling Ayla to soothe her nerves, but she knows Ayla would merely gas her up thinking this was a date when it wasn't. So she just tries to shake off her jitters and treat it like she's going to work, only instead of turning right on Grand, she keeps straight along the cobblestone path to the Mud Mugs café she had suggested as their meeting spot.

(It was a cute little nonprofit shop with killer lattes and milkshakes that she's been trying to wheedle the recipes out of one of the baristas for at least a year but he won't budge.)

Once she pulls the door open, she first scans the area for an empty spot for them to go to, before she realizes that Harry was already there, tucked away in a booth in the far corner with a mug of his own and one that's full across from him. Her heart feels full as she walks up to him, letting her purse slip from her shoulder down to the inside of her elbow, and towards her hand with her fingers curling around the straps. Harry looked incredibly pretty, which she is beginning to realize is a trend with him. His shirt is worn and black, light washed blue jeans cuffed at the ankles, and plain white shoes with baby pink socks, a pink beanie that matches it tucked on his head. She wonders if she should ask him to go shopping with her because she's feeling like a walking toddler in her overalls, but when he notices her arrival he grins at her, looking her up and down, "Well, aren't you just the cutest thing?"

Y/N rolls her eyes, taking her seat across from him, "Shut up," she grumbles, before leaning over the table, taking the top of his beanie and pulling it upward, "What'd I say about these, huh?" She settles the mussed curls with her hands, patting it down and rearranging them until they sat less messy on his head, leaving it all soft and washed, "They're cute, let them breathe."

"Okay, okay boss," he pats at his hair, making sure it felt at least partially how he wanted it to, patting at the beanie and slipping it over to the side, "I ordered you a white chocolate latte, but if you want something different I can get that."

"No, no, thank you these are my favorite," she assesses the situation, seeing that he's got the book out, bright post-its stuck out of the pages, his own latte half gone already. His hand is palm down to the table, fingers splayed, showing off the big brassy rings decorating his fingers and she tries not to let her mind wander someplace filthy. Especially when his fingers curl up, knocking on the laminate tabletop decisively before starting.

"Let's get right to it then, what are your thoughts?"

The look he gives her is one that reads I already know what you're going to say but she says it anyway, "I'm just. . . just so confused," she shakes her head, like she's trying to rearrange her thoughts, "Like are they sixteen years old? Why is it so important that he saw her naked?" Her brows furrow, and he's listening carefully like she's making an analytical thought and he's drinking it in, "It's not like he saw her pussy out, he at most saw her tits and they're acting like he walked in with her bent over, cheeks spread an all."

It makes Harry chuckle, "So you don't find it super, completely, totally wild and embarrassing when someone walks in you naked?"

"I mean it's embarrassing but not over two pages embarrassing," she leans back into her seat, "Like back in college, this boy I was kinda friends with kinda just worked together in class with walked in on me while I was changing and all he did was squeal, went back to my living room and we pretended that it didn't happen. Easy as pie."

Harry snaps his fingers, "That's because your guy wasn't a prick, but this Braden character seems like an asshole. I hate him already, the cocky bastard." He shakes his head, "S'like he was created just to be a creepy bloke."

Y/N all but slaps her hand down on the table, "Right! He's liked an Edward Cullen without all the charming vampire bits."

"Crazy thing is, tha's exactly what I was thinking."

They continue on for a little over an hour and its fun -- a whole lot of fun, actually. Y/N wonders why she had even been dreading this in the first place because she should know to trust him by now. He had good ideas and good thoughts and a good everything, really -- or at least that's what it surely felt like. The two of them just fell into things so easily, she was having trouble remembering that they'd only met a month or so ago because the way they moved and spoke in sync almost, was something that could take years for two people to accomplish it. To add on to all of it, he felt like the kind of person where she'd be able to sit in silence with him and not want to crawl out of her skin because of it, which is a very damning feat for most, given Y/N can find reasons to be uncomfortable in almost every situation.

In these moments with him, she wasn't stressed about work, or bills, or anything really, and she could only hope he felt the same.

"This is a blast," Harry had spoken with his vocabulary joking but the meaning behind them sincere, dragging her from her reverie, and apparently dragging the thoughts directly from her head, "We'll keep doing this yeah? And we'll have to hang out other than this too -- the guys at the parlor would love you, I can feel it in my bones." For a moment he pauses, quiet like he's thinking, then remembering, and then suddenly, with a click of his thumb and forefinger the excited gleam on his face when he'd first suggested this appeared, "Come to the club with us this Friday."

Y/N's mouth opens, almost closing but she just barely gets out an, "I -- I don't know Harry, that's not really my um. . .don't think m'very good at clubbing, is the thing. Not really my scene."

"You don't have to be good, you just have to have fun, and I'll be there, so it'll be fun" he informs her, and she thinks he may be hypnotizing her with the soft green gaze of his, feeling as if he'd cracked her open and begun peering into her soul -- his eyes were too damn mesmerizing, she's almost certain that he was something out of a story. Certainly not human, but a mystical being with promises of magic and dust that turns you all shades of pink and purple and the absence of all worries that you could ever think to have. If eyes were windows to the soul, then Harry's soul is all types of alluring and compelling. She had half the mind to wonder if he were a vampire or summat. . .he'd suit the role nicely. "And since you'll be there, then it'll be even more fun."

Though she's uncertain, she doesn't dismiss him right off the bat. Maybe it would be good for her -- she could invite Ayla, who's always complaining how she's no fun anymore. It might be fun even. . .outside of her otherwise natural habitat and she had kind of wondered what Harry was like around his real friends. Not just his weird, work neighbor friend who she's fairly certain he only talks to her because he can spread some of his wisdom that would otherwise be bottled up inside him. They were kind of in the same spot job-wise, so it must be good to relinquish some of the aches and pains he's experiencing with someone who also does, or even just to see that she's doing a little worse off in sorting some stuff out -- he probably finds solace in the fact that he's not at that point in his career anymore.

This makes her worry though -- what if he likes her just as a work friend? She'd definitely had friends like that, where they do better justice in the setting that you met them in, opposed to the outside world. Like that one really good friend in your math class that you would never, ever in your life think to go to the mall with. Or the boy that helps you pass time at your part-time retail job in the mall, where both of you barely bat an eyelash at each other when you pass one another on campus. What if they go out together and he finds that she is much better as just his work friend? Or she finds the same? What if he's a raging asshole in a club and the glorious image of him is crushed to smithereens? The thought of it bums her out.

But then he's looking at her with this tender, warm gaze, words coming from his mouth like little caresses as he says, "Of course, ys don't have to if you don't want to, but know that I'd enjoy your company." He puts his elbow on the table, his hand pressed to his cheek, looking at her in an almost dreamy like manner and she's about a hundred percent sure it's unintentional which is twice as aggravating as it would've been otherwise, "I think we'd have a good time together."

He's got her, "I'll think about it," she responds, which always means yes, and the smile that she tries to suppress must give her away because Harry bursts into a full-blown grin.

"Thank god, I've been wanting to spice these club visits up for a while now," he rolls his eyes, "Can only handle Eliza and Zig's melodramatic blackout breakups so many times before they start becoming humdrum and prosaic -- I'd like to see your reaction to it actually," Harry twists the ring on his middle finger with the pad of his thumb, "And I've kind of been wondering what a clubbing Y/N would be, if m'honest. Can't decide if you'd be the quiet, contemplative author type in the corner people studying or summat or if m'g'na be seein' you on the high tables in one shoe, an obscure song on, singing every word."

Y/N pushes the heels of her palms into her eyes, shaking her head as a distant memory threatens to prickle her brain from a very disappointing night in college junior year, "I was one of them once and it was an ugly night all around," she admits.

"Well, you've got t'a tell me now." He leans in but she shakes her head adamantly.

"Maybe if you get me drunk enough Friday."

                                                                          .                              .                                   .

Y/N is a little drunk.

Not too drunk; she could still walk by herself and she was fairly sure she would remember this night tomorrow morning at the very least, but it was just enough that she felt like she was floating on the tips of her toes spindling through the atmosphere on cloud nine. She was sober enough to be very aware of Harry's presence at her side all night but far gone enough to not overthink it too badly. It was a happy middle that she very seldom got to experience at any given point of her week.

The night had started off well enough-- Harry came around to pick Y/N up, simultaneously complimenting and giggling at her choice of attire (she brought out a different pair of overalls just to humor the both of them, "Let's get drinkin', at this here club, I've got t'a be back at the farm by cock's crow!"), and drove them to his place, where she got to stay all of three seconds because his mate had come to pick them up. She was only able to experience the messy trough of his living room, littered with clothing and soda cans for a moment in which he uttered bashfully,  "I sort of forgot to clean up."  And when she was opening her mouth to tell him it was fine, there was a honk outside.  

A man called Zig picked them up in a car a little worn for wear, with a loud clanking engine that she would have most definitely side eyed zooming down the road had she been walking somewhere, but he was nice enough. He had got out of the car and pulled the back seat forward, waving a dramatic mocking hand in swivels with a bow, "Your chariot awaits you," he'd gruffed out, voice mixed with an indistinct accent (like he might be Danish or Norwegian in root but Y/N didn't know enough about either to decipher it).

"Oh, Zig, m'honored," Harry tuts his tongue, a gentle hand on the small of Y/N's back as he helps her climb in, "It's not a trashcan for once."

Zig's face skewered up like the words stung, "Well, you said the book bee was coming and I figured the last thing she needed was to ride in a messy car," he closes the door when Harry climbs in beside her, helping her yank the seatbelt across her chest and clicking it in before his own, and when Zig opens the car back up on his side, "Especially when she has to spend a night with us max volume music listeners."

Y/N felt herself flush warm, "I'm sorry about that --" she had begun but Zig held his hand up, turning to face her some as he shifted the gear into drive.

"Ah, don't apologize. We were pricks and Harry gave us quite the upbraiding for it too."

This made  Y/N feel both good and bad simultaneously. Good because Harry had been telling the truth, and the fact that he had somewhat had her back before they even got to properly know one another made her feel warm. Bad because that means she was about to go hang out with a handful of people who got yelled at by their friend/boss for listening to their music too loud. What if they all resented her for it? Sure, Zig didn't seem to care but she had worried about everyone else claiming her to be annoying or summat.

She ended up worrying for naught though because everyone proved to be very kind to her, despite their past grievances. When they'd got to the club, her, Harry and Zig were both greeted with an exuberance that she had never encountered before. They had reserved a booth in the far back left of the club, at a sweet spot where the music wasn't overpowering their conversation and there weren't drunk college students clearly underage falling all over them. The lights were muted purple and blue hues, with spots of red that cast down in random spots, and while all of it was colorful and intriguing, Y/N had never felt more out of her element in the beginning. They were all nice enough, poking and prodding at her brain some, figuring out what kind of person she was, and a few times she was even able to make them laugh (whether it be with her or at her she couldn't be sure but she soaked it in none the less and booked on it being with her because she can be damn funny when she wants to be). She'd been sat beside Harry, who was sweet as ever, checking in on her every so often with a firm squeeze to the thigh that sends tingles up her leg.

Y/N hadn't been planning on really getting drunk at first. Had been content with a few drinks until she was on the pleasant side of tipsy -- but it had spiraled fast when Harry had left her side. She'd never felt more like she needed a security blanket more, eyes widening when he is whisked off to the dance floor before he could make it back to their table after using the loo and she realized that she was with a group of people she'd only just met. Zig was still chatting with her but part of her felt it was because he and Eliza (his girlfriend) had just had a nasty little argument in front of everyone and she was the only other person sat beside him. It's when Y/N looks out to the floor and sees Harry either courting or being courted by a brunette in a sparkly slip dress that things take a turn for her.

This feeling began to fatten inside her; like dark black ink staining her insides, the foul taste of jealousy on her tongue. She doesn't know why she feels jealous even -- she thought she'd been doing a semi-decent job reminding herself that they were merely friends and this wasn't anything more than that. That he had invited her so that she could have a good time, not because he had this secret, fiery love for her that he was too fearful to admit aloud and hoped a little liquid courage would push him towards it. This wasn't a book she was reading, this was real life, and boys don't think in real life. Most of them turn a certain age and bulldoze through people in pursuit of finding their person. . .barely any genuine heartfelt men out there that could compare to the likes of any romance novel written.

So she took Zig's offer up on another shot. And then another. And another. By the time Harry had ventured back to the table, absent of his new friend and slipping back into the empty space beside her, she was floating and her insides were warm from the alcohol. Harry seemed a bit drunker himself, grinning wide and loopily at her, "Hi beautiful," he'd hummed amiably, "Are you having fun?"

"Mhm," she nodded to him, "Riktor thinks that whale noises to sleep are very soothin' but I've convinced 'im that blizzard noises are good too." Her brows furrowed with a thought, "Hey, who was supposed to want to be my employee? Didn't you say he'd be here t'night?"

That's when Y/N was introduced to Niall, whose deep Irish accent explained why he didn't even seem touched by the three pints he'd downed in their time there. He had maybe gone a little too in depth as to why he needed a job (he lost his, can't tattoo for shit so Harry's parlor was out of the question, and his girlfriend kicked him out after a messy breakup) but Y/N still asks if he'd fill out an application for her because it was her first time doing this and she wanted to do it by the books and he had agreed, "I look forward to workin' with ya, if ya pick me," he had told her and she decided then that she probably definitely would (but she was also drunk and is just proud of herself for not offering him the job right there).

Throughout the night, Y/N felt that they liked to poke fun at Harry a lot, whom took it lightly but she's beginning to realize more why he wears beanies or is a little blushy face when she compliments him in any way. They can surely rip him one when they want to, from the slow way he talks sometimes like he's tasting his words before he says them, to his favored pink socks in his loafers, and above all, they tease him for his soft, curls. It almost enrages her to some degree, when they tell him he needs to cut it, or that the manbun wasn't "it", and while she knows its just some teasing between friends, she can see even through her drunk brain when Harry stops enjoying the jests and is resorting to soft little smiles and halfhearted chuckles until they finally move on to a different topic.

It's when he's begun fidgeting with his head and asking people if they had an extra hair tie or beanie perhaps that Y/N decides that she's had enough of it. Pushes her mixed drink to the side and pats on Harry's thigh, "Budge up, then," she urged him, "Going to the toilet." Harry slips from the booth but instead of heading off in the direction of the restrooms alone, she grabs him by the wrist, pulling him along with her. He lets out a few confused noises but ultimately letting her lead him with trusting ease. The bathrooms are tucked in a dim lit hallway with predominantly red lighting and for some reason the marbled black floors that they had been on changes to a stain mottled carpet. Instead of taking him into the bathroom, she instead pushes him down some, up against the wall and looking at him seriously.

"Are they hurting your feelings?" She questioned him, talking in an octave higher than she normally would due to the booming speakers on the other side of the wall and he feigned confusion, tilting his head.

"With what?" He asked in return and she rolled her eyes, shaking her head.

"You know what," she pushed and he curled within himself, looking down shyly because he did know what and that makes her heart feel like cracking in her chest. She reaches up, cupping his face in an overly affectionate manner before starting a reel of drunken affirmations, using both hands to tilt it up to face her, "D'ya like your hair?" She asks him, and when he does legitimately look confused this time she reiterates, "Do you like it long?" He barely thinks it over for a second, nodding his head gently and she hiccups, "Then don't listen to them. Same goes with your socks or how you speak. They're things that make you, you and if you like them then who gives a rat's ass what they think about it?" Adding a loving cheek pat, she leaves it with one more thought, and another soft hiccup, "They're only teasin' and they're your friends but teasin' can hurt sometimes too. Let 'em know when they're taking it too far, okay?"

Harry stared down at her with a certain look oozed from his eyes. She couldn't place her finger on what it was exactly, but it's the same look he gives her when she spits out a fact to a question that had just popped into his mind, or when she explains in detail the elaborate plots of some of the books she's read. Its soft and carries warmth -- close to adoration or a fondness but she wouldn't want to put herself on a pedestal with that -- and it makes her want to kiss him. Plant one on his sweet, pink pouty mouth and taste the bitterness of the dark liquor he'd thrown back just a few moments prior to her pulling him off.

"Thank you," he leaned forward, pushing their foreheads together for a moment, "Thank you." He repeated again.

The rest of the night, Harry was planted at Y/N's side and decided he seldom wanted to go anywhere without her. They were leaning into one another comfortably, relaxed, still chatting as a part of the group but also their own sector of thought and stories and jokes that made them a mess of eye-watering giggles. When a joints being passed around and Y/N doesn't take a hit with a polite, "I don't do that much anymore," (instead of going into an in-depth discussion on how she'd read a book solely about the lungs front to back and panicked to the point she'd handed the rest of hers off to her college roommate to do as she wished with it), Harry patted her thigh and gave it a small squeeze.

"Good," he'd murmured, just low enough for her to hear, "You're a good girl, yeah? Don't need this stuff," It had resonated deep within her, threatening a shiver down her spine at the slow syrupy way he'd said them and when she laughs a huff through her nose with a small nod, he grins, "Need'a just be me and you more, m'lungs would be aces."

"Your lungs are already aces," Eliza responds (at this point having made amends with Zig), passing the joint to Harry, "You don't inhale any bloody smoke."

Harry declines it this time around (though he had taken a puff earlier on when they first lit it up), in favor of tucking further into her side, "You smell too good to be around these heathens. . .like cupcakes or summat." A laugh leaves her, shaking her head and she wants to tell him no, that he's the one who smells so good. Wants to tell him how his scent is so lovely and so prominent that she thinks about it before bed sometimes, and in the least creepy manner, it soothes her weary mind to sleep -- but the words lock up in her throat. Instead, she only smiles gently and revels in the warmth of him glued next to her.

At some point his fingers had begun to play with strands of her hair (after asking her permission first), marveling at it and speaking to her softly, like he wasn't doing it. Had they been at home somewhere and not in a smoky club she would have filed this way in a book of sweetest moments she's ever had. He's looking at her like she was made of glitter, a soft gaze as he whispers how he thinks she's doing wonderfully with the bookstore and going on an anecdote of how she was handling running a business much better than him in his first few months. He tells her several times in several different ways that she was basically "kickass" and it's just too sweet. Especially when he begins gloating to Zig, Niall, and Eliza that he gets to see her almost every day. "Nice, pretty face," he hums, "I could only wish to have a face like that, yeah?"  She turned, hiding her face some in where his armpit and chest meet, feeling his chest vibrate with a laugh.

By the time everyone was ready to leave, there were a handful of designated drivers, one of which being Riktor who was much sweeter than he had originally seemed. He held her hand, helping her step off the small drop from the booth they'd been in, and guided her and Harry (who had his arms secured around her shoulders) to his car. He drives them both to Harry's and Y/N's too tired and floaty to panic about the fact that she'd brought nothing to sleep in, or how Harry probably only had one bed and not a particularly comfortable looking couch. Would sleeping beside him be so bad though? She doesn't think so. Thinks it might be quite nice to share a bed with him, dipping her nose into the covers and breathing his scent in deeply.

Harry makes a game of getting them inside, running his fingers up her sides in a tickling manner that makes her shriek and scamper ahead of him. He seems to love that though, the drunken stumbling bound of his feet close behind her until she made it to his door and realized that she didn't have the means to get inside before he did. Swinging around she bats away his playful hands, "Fuck off, fuck off!" She laughs and he flashes her a big old grin, turning around to wave at Riktor as he drove off before unlocking the door and letting them in.

This time Y/N gets to look a little bit more at her surroundings. It was a bit messy but not a pigsty, just some tidying could be done to the living room and it'd be good as new she reckons. He's got two lamps on either side of his three seater couch, a beaten plain navy with a small tear in the arm, a shaggy rug that is large enough to cover most of the hardwood flooring, and a small coffee table top of it. His TV is rather large and it looks like he'd been watching something on Netflix but forgot to turn it off when they'd left, its tucked in the corner on an entertainment center diagonal from the couch. Her eyes flicker along his walls -- a large tapestry of dark, intricately woven vines into some atypical design her brain couldn't conceptualize as anything at the moment, a few art pieces that she'd never seen before and upon closer inspection, she sees his name written in the corner of the most beautiful designs.

"Harry," she all but gasps, leaning in, gently touching her fingers to the edge of the frame it was in, tentacles opened up like the petals of a flower, so realistic it looks as if she could reach out and feel the slimy texture of it beneath her fingers, "This is amazing! I -- I've never seen anything like this before."

"Thank you," he murmurs happily, "I only hang up the ones I'm proud of."

She only fawns over his paintings a little more before she ends up following Harry to his bedroom, where he flops down onto the mattress with a umph and slings his arm underneath his head. Y/N shuffled awkwardly on her feet, standing in the doorway, unsure of what she was to do with herself. It's not until his head lulls to face her, that he waves her over, "Hop on in, Pet, don't have a queen size just so you can stare at it."

"You're sure you're okay sharing a bed with me?" She asks him and his face scrunches up.

"Are you a blanket hog?" He inquires seriously and when she shakes her head, then he nods, "Then of course I am. Now get your cute bum over here."

A fire is sparked to life in her veins as she makes her way over to him. The thought of sharing a bed with Harry was something that crossed her mind more than she'd like to admit it did, and she shivers when the intrusive ideas of something more happening in this bed try to swamp her mind filthy. She ambles over to the other side nervously, crawling in beside him, lying atop of the soft down comforter in her overalls, shuffling some to get comfortable. It may be a queen size mattress but she finds that there's very little space between them, especially when Harry flips over onto his side and beckons her to do the same, "So what'd you think of everyone?" He prods, like a teenager at a sleepover, hair splayed out on the white pillow cover, "Did they treat you well?"

Y/N nods quickly, "They were all very nice. I like Zig most I think, he was sweet. Pretty talkative."

A confused look warps Harry's face, "When were you talking with Ziggy? I don't remember that."

"S'when you were off getting courted on the dance floor," she responded, maybe a little too quickly and perhaps with a little too much fire under her bum. She hadn't meant to come off as jealous as she had felt in that moment, but she's almost certain that she did if his telling smirk was anything to go by.

"Oh, Y/N," he murmurs, reaching out for her hand and bringing it to his mouth in a very gentle graze of his lips against her knuckles and she thinks she might have gone slack-jawed as the next words leave him, "You're jealous?"

She opens her mouth to respond but her minds beginning to resort to mush, the words getting lodged, unlodged, and relodged in her throat until she can finally respond with, "I -- I don't know." Because she doesn't. . .she doesn't know because she thinks she likes him but she's been convincing herself that she didn't and it's all just fucked. Fucked because of course, when she wasn't looking for anyone she would find Harry, and fucked because she wants them to be something, and fucked that all of everything is being presented to her right now when her brain is drenched in Absolut and him and his scent and his sea foam eyes and raspberry mouth.

"Don't need t'a be," he assures her quietly, "Only got room in my heart for you, I reckon."

Y/N doesn't intend to lean forward but she does. Scooting so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath leaving his nose unto her upper lip, her vision unfocused as she gets closer to him until her eyes flutter shut and their mouths meet together tenderly. It's innocent and soft. . .the first kiss everyone imagines when they're growing up, she was experiencing (minus the being drunk and having already had her first kiss) here with Harry. She almost didn't want to sully the moment by pursuing it further but her mind renders lustful as she pushes further, scooting herself closer to him, and a whimper muffled against his mouth when his hand, decorated in those beautiful, brassy rings, lies gently on her cheek. Cradling it carefully like she was akin to the frail petals of a flower, and once she deepens it, pushing closer to his body feeling as his fingers slip from her face down the slope of her shoulder, tickling as they skim against her sides and ending at the round of` her hip, where his grip tightens. It stirs something deep in her abdomen when his fingers dig roughly into her flesh, feeling as she pulsates around nothing when he gives her a rough tug closer towards him, urging her leg around his hip and she feels his cock, firming from beneath his zipper and against her.

Harry moans against her mouth before she draws away, feeling lightheaded as air finally gusts back into her lungs, and her eyes flutter open to see that he's staring at her.

"Y/N," he murmurs, a soft snuffle from his nose as he wiggles, "You taste too sweet, you know? Don't know how m'gonna think about anything but your mouth from here on out."

Y/N thinks that will be a problem for her too.

[anyrchyangel]

Permission to post this work was granted by the artist; please do not repost anywhere else!

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Dance of the Eclipse

This is a short little sns ficlet I came up with after seeing that amazing piece of art above

Summary: A ritual as old as time, a dance fated from ages on, and two idiots in love who don’t know it yet.

Or, alternatively, a short little fic I came up with when I got bit by the Inspiration Bug while scrolling through Twitter 😂

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It was a tradition passed down since time immemorial—a ritual practiced for as long as memory had even existed. On this day, the sun would dance with the moon and together they would cast a shadow on the Earth; they would bring a moment of silence and awe to this chaotic world for no reason other than that it was their duty. Naruto had prepared for this moment for years, had known this day would come since he could first understand language. He was the son of the god of light and the goddess of fire—it was his sworn duty to perform this ritual and he took great pride in that responsibility.

There was just one problem.

One, tiny, insignificant problem.

He fucking hated his dance partner.

Sasuke “mister perfect” god of the moon was such an annoying, rude, condescending asshole and Naruto could not stop himself from arguing with him every second they were forced into the same space.

So, Naruto was not surprised on the day of the ritual to find that after five whole minutes, his dance partner was already getting on his nerves.

“You’re offbeat, again!” The furious heat in Sasuke’s glare would have fit better coming from Naruto’s mother—the goddess of fire herself—not the literal incarnation of the moon. As the son of the god of darkness and goddess of the night, Sasuke shouldn’t have been able to glare at him with that much fiery wrath. Then again with everyone else, Sasuke was the embodiment of cold indifference—perhaps it was a compliment in Naruto’s favor that he could bring out the anger in the moon god. After all, the very same moon god pissed Naruto off so much he couldn’t see straight.

“Well maybe I wouldn’t be off if you were in the right fucking place!” Naruto yelled, his temper fraying at the edges. There wasn’t much time before the sun would be at its zenith and the moon would cross its path—the eclipse would only happen once, so it’s not like they could just try again. What Naruto didn’t mention was the fact that Sasuke was not actually in the wrong place, but he wasn’t about to admit that he’d gotten slightly distracted by the other god’s soft pale skin, so fair that it gleamed like starlight. They had practiced in costume hundreds of times, so why was it that Naruto couldn’t ignore the tight, dark blue pants Sasuke wore? Or the way his abs glistened with the slightest shimmer of sweat as the moon god glanced up at the sun? Naruto was dumbstruck as he watched Sasuke shadow his eyes as he tried to gauge how much time they had left, his silky ebony black hair perfectly framing his features. He groaned and forced his eyes off of Sasuke—unlike his partner, he knew exactly where the sun was at any given moment, so he was keenly aware of the fact that they were running out of time.

“What is it going to take for you to get this right?” Sasuke growled at Naruto, his voice deep yet silvery, like the sweet sound of a crystal-clear bell on a still night.

“I’m not the one messing up!” He was—he really, really was, but after so many years at each other’s throats, it was second nature to contradict Sasuke.

The moon god just continued to glare, his dark eyes roving over Naruto. “You’re distracted. What the hell is going through your head right now?”

Naruto refused to answer that question—he wouldn’t even admit to himself that he was distracted by his shirtless dance partner so there was no way in hell he’d admit it to Sasuke of all people.

“I’m not distracted!” Naruto glared at the ground, hoping that the earth would open and swallow him whole so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge whatever the hell was wrong with him. Despite not looking at the moon god, he was hyper-aware of Sasuke stepping closer. When his dance partner snatched his chin and forced Naruto to meet his gaze, he completely froze.

Naruto felt like he was drowning in those bottomless ebony eyes, so dark they were comparable only to the empty space between stars in the endless night sky. Sasuke was the god of the moon, known throughout the world for his luminous beauty, but Naruto had never noticed the way his brows were arched so perfectly or the way his lips were just plump enough to tease, or the way his silky hair fell over his gorgeous eyes. No, that wasn’t true; Naruto had always known how beautiful the moon god was, had always seen Sasuke for exactly who and what he was.

Wait…what? Naruto’s brain short-circuited as he realized he sounded just like the groupies that worshiped Sasuke; the same maniacs who thought Sasuke was some kind of gentle, benevolent little angel. Naruto always liked to remind those foolish worshipers that the term lunatic derived from the word lunar.

Naruto jerked his chin out of Sasuke’s grasp and reigned in his temper before he set the moon god on fire with his wrath—Naruto might have looked most like his father, but he had thoroughly inherited his mother’s temperament.

Sasuke’s derisive snort had flames filling his veins. He didn’t even have to think too hard to picture the moon god rolling his eyes; before he could stop himself, he whipped his head back and stepped into Sasuke’s space.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Naruto growled as he crowded Sasuke; there were few beings, divine or human, that could withstand being in the sun god’s presence when his temper was this out-of-control, yet Sasuke didn’t bat an eyelash at his sudden outburst. The fact that Sasuke actually inched closer, hedging into Naruto’s personal space only infuriated him further.

He opened his mouth to take a deep breath before releasing the flurry of insults he kept stored just for Sasuke, but what happened next was something neither of the gods could have predicted. For an eon, Naruto would claim that his foot slipped—that his shoe broke and unbalanced him or that the earth god had decided to play a prank on them or…Naruto would literally spend eternity coming up with excuses for what happened, but the truth was something else entirely.

Naruto, the only child of the god of light and goddess of fire, the god of the sun himself, could not precisely remember what happened in the moment before his lips met Sasuke’s; he couldn’t even remember exactly what he was thinking in that moment, and he certainly could not recall what went through his head as his lips met the moon god’s. The only thing Naruto could really remember about the whole ordeal was being flooded with the sense of rightness, of the pleasure that melted his entire being. To this day, Naruto had no fucking clue who used their tongue first, but he did know that he lost all sense of shame and propriety as he tried to swallow Sasuke’s tongue down his throat, as their teeth clacked in their haste to devour one another.

Naruto had always been good at telling time; after all, humans had used him to gauge the length of the day for eons, yet as Sasuke cupped his cheek and kissed him, Naruto couldn’t even begin to guess at how much time they spent wrapped up in each other. It wasn’t until Sasuke pulled back and whispered against his lips that Naruto even remembered how words worked. Even then, it took him longer than he was proud of to decipher what Sasuke had said.

“The eclipse…” They were both lightly panting, their eyes slowly widening as they realized what exactly just happened.

“The eclipse,” Naruto repeated, the words feeling heavy on his tongue—the very same tongue that had been wrapped around the moon god’s only moments ago—his thoughts still hazy from the fog of pleasure that had crashed through him.

“Yes, dobe, the eclipse,” Sasuke hissed, his breath whispering across Naruto’s lips; if it hadn’t been for the old insult the moon god had used, Naruto would have melted again.

“The eclipse…THE ECLIPSE!” Naruto screamed and jumped back, moving so quickly he almost toppled over—the fact that he was a divine being was the only thing that kept him from being an undignified mess of limbs sprawled out on the ground.

“We have to go—we have to—we only have a few—the eclipse is starting!” Naruto was all but hyperventilating as he tried to process what was happening and failing miserably.

“Calm down. You know the steps; we’ve practiced them every day for our entire lives. Just breathe, usuratonkachi.” Sasuke sighed and rolled his eyes, glancing up again at the sun and moon that was all too quickly moving into place.

Naruto released a wordless scream—whether it was out of frustration, anger, nerves or a glorious mixture of it all, he could never properly recall. He pointedly ignored the way his gaze was drawn to Sasuke’s lips—still moist and swollen from their kiss despite his divinity. As to why that thought gave Naruto a rush of pleasure was absolutely beyond his capabilities of comprehending at the moment. Naruto focused on breathing as they ascended to where they were meant to dance and as they settled into their starting positions, Naruto knew he was screwed.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I am so fucked! He couldn’t even remember the first step, or the transition or the sequence that came after that or the—the only thing that pulled him out of his spiral of anxiety was that crystal-clear, deep voice Naruto knew as intimately as he knew his own.

“Naruto!” When Naruto’s eyes met those ebony black irises, his heartbeat settled and his breathing evened out; as the music started his body moved on its own, flowing into the steps that he had engraved on his soul. His divinity flared, the power of the sun coursing up and through his veins as he danced, and the surge of the power he felt at his side had never felt so right before. The sun and the moon danced as two pieces of a whole—two halves finally come together.

For centuries, the humans would speak about the beauty of that day, the glory of the sun and the moon as they moved together. However, the names of those auspicious deities would eventually fade from human memory, as all things eventually must; the humans who had seen and heard of the moon and sun’s dance would give to the deities their own names, their own titles; but for eternity, for them, they were always Naruto & Sasuke.

Thanks for reading! Please follow the artist on Twitter and Tumblr  and give her all the love! ❤️ Also, feel free to come tweet with me on Twitter 🤗 

Oh read it on my AO3 page: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23522818 I post all my works there first ☺️

ALSO this piece was edited by the amazing, stunning, fantastic spadebrigade; so please go check out my name twin’s page ❤️ 

[brightbeautifulthings]

MAYHEM BY ESTELLE LAURE BLOG TOUR & CHAPTER EXCERPT

The Lost Boys meets Wilder Girls in this supernatural feminist YA novel.

Available July 14th, 2020

It's 1987 and unfortunately it's not all Madonna and cherry lip balm. Mayhem Brayburn has always known there was something off about her and her mother, Roxy. Maybe it has to do with Roxy's constant physical pain, or maybe with Mayhem's own irresistible pull to water. Either way, she knows they aren't like everyone else.

But when May's stepfather finally goes too far, Roxy and Mayhem flee to Santa Maria, California, the coastal beach town that holds the answers to all of Mayhem's questions about who her mother is, her estranged family, and the mysteries of her own self. There she meets the kids who live with her aunt, and it opens the door to the magic that runs through the female lineage in her family, the very magic Mayhem is next in line to inherit and which will change her life for good.

But when she gets wrapped up in the search for the man who has been kidnapping girls from the beach, her life takes another dangerous turn and she is forced to face the price of vigilante justice and to ask herself whether revenge is worth the cost.

From the acclaimed author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back, Estelle Laure offers a riveting and complex story with magical elements about a family of women contending with what appears to be an irreversible destiny, taking control and saying when enough is enough.

About the Author:

Estelle Laure, the author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back believes in love, magic, and the power of facing hard truths. She has a BA in Theatre Arts and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and she lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her family. Her work is translated widely around the world. 

Twitter | Instagram | Get Your Copy

Read on for a special chapter excerpt of Mayhem!

three Santa Maria

“Trouble,” Roxy says. She arches a brow at the kids by the van through the bug-spattered windshield, the ghost of a half-smile rippling across her face.

“You would know,” I shoot.

“So would you,” she snaps.

Maybe we’re a little on edge. We’ve been in the car so long the pattern on the vinyl seats is tattooed on the back of my thighs.

The kids my mother is talking about, the ones sitting on the white picket fence, look like they slithered up the hill out of the ocean, covered in seaweed, like the carnival music we heard coming from the boardwalk as we were driving into town plays in the air around them at all times. Two crows are on the posts beside them like they’re standing guard, and they caw at each other loudly as we come to a stop. I love every- thing about this place immediately and I think, ridiculously, that I am no longer alone.

The older girl, white but tan, curvaceous, and lean, has her arms around the boy and is lovely with her smudged eye makeup and her ripped clothes. The younger one pops some- thing made of bright colors into her mouth and watches us come up the drive. She is in a military-style jacket with a ton of buttons, her frizzy blond hair reaching in all directions, freckles slapped across her cheeks. And the boy? Thin, brown, hungry-looking. Not hungry in his stomach. Hungry with his eyes. He has a green bandana tied across his forehead and holes in the knees of his jeans. There’s an A in a circle drawn in marker across the front of his T-shirt.

Anarchy.

“Look!” Roxy points to the gas gauge. It’s just above the E. “You owe me five bucks, Cookie. I told you to trust we would make it, and see what happened? You should listen to your mama every once in a while.”

“Yeah, well, can I borrow the five bucks to pay you for the bet? I’m fresh out of cash at the moment.”

“Very funny.”

Roxy cranes out the window and wipes the sweat off her upper lip, careful not to smudge her red lipstick. She’s been having real bad aches the last two days, even aside from her bruises, and her appetite’s been worse than ever. The only thing she ever wants is sugar. After having been in the car for so long, you’d think we’d be falling all over each other to get out, but we’re still sitting in the car. In here we’re still us.

She sighs for the thousandth time and clutches at her belly. “I don’t know about this, May.”

California can’t be that different from West Texas.

I watch TV. I know how to say gag me with a spoon and grody to the max.

I fling open the door.

Roxy gathers her cigarettes and lighter, and drops them in- side her purse with a snap.

“Goddammit, Elle,” she mutters to herself, eyes flickering toward the kids again. Roxy looks at me over the rims of her sunglasses before shoving them back on her nose. “Mayhem, I’m counting on you to keep your head together here. Those kids are not the usual—”

“I know! You told me they’re foster kids.” 

“No, not that,” she says, but doesn’t clarify. “Okay, I guess.”

“I mean it. No more of that wild-child business.”

“I will keep my head together!” I’m so tired of her saying this. I never had any friends, never a boyfriend—all I have is what Grandmother calls my nasty mouth and the hair Lyle always said was ugly and whorish. And once or twice I might’ve got drunk on the roof, but it’s not like I ever did anything. Besides, no kid my age has ever liked me even once. I’m not the wild child in the family.

“Well, all right then.” Roxy messes with her hair in the rear- view mirror, then sprays herself with a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and runs her fingers over her gold necklace. It’s of a bird, not unlike the ones making a fuss by the house. She’s had it as long as I can remember, and over time it’s been worn smooth by her worrying fingers. It’s like she uses it to calm herself when she’s upset about something, and she’s been upset the whole way here, practically. Usually, she’d be good and buzzed by this time of day, but since she’s had to drive some, she’s only nipped from the tiny bottle of wine in her purse a few times and only taken a couple pills since we left Taylor. The with- drawal has turned her into a bit of a she-demon.

I try to look through her eyes, to see what she sees. Roxy hasn’t been back here since I was three years old, and in that time, her mother has died, her father has died, and like she said when she got the card with the picture enclosed that her twin sister, Elle, sent last Christmas, Everybody got old. After that, she spent a lot of time staring in the mirror, pinching at her neck skin. When I was younger, she passed long nights telling me about Santa Maria and the Brayburn Farm, about how it was good and evil in equal measure, about how it had desires that had to be satisfied.

Brayburns, she would say. In my town, we were the legends. 

These were the mumbled stories of my childhood, and they made everything about this place loom large. Now that we’re here, I realize I expected the house to have a gaping maw filled with spitty, frothy teeth, as much as I figured there would be fairies flitting around with wands granting wishes. I don’t want to take her vision away from her, but this place looks pretty normal to me, if run-down compared to our new house in Taylor, where there’s no dust anywhere, ever, and Lyle prac- tically keeps the cans of soup in alphabetical order. Maybe what’s not so normal is that this place was built by Brayburns, and here Brayburns matter. I know because the whole road is named after us and because flowers and ribbons and baskets of fruit sat at the entrance, gifts from the people in town, Roxy said. They leave offerings. She said it like it’s normal to be treated like some kind of low-rent goddess.

Other than the van and the kids, there are trees here, rose- bushes, an old black Mercedes, and some bikes leaning against the porch that’s attached to the house. It’s splashed with fresh white paint that doesn’t quite cover up its wrinkles and scars. It’s three stories, so it cuts the sunset when I look up, and plants drape down to touch the dirt.

The front door swings open and a woman in bare feet races past the rosebushes toward us. It is those feet and the reckless way they pound against the earth that tells me this is my aunt Elle before her face does. My stomach gallops and there are bumps all over my arms, and I am more awake than I’ve been since.

I thought Roxy might do a lot of things when she saw her twin sister. Like she might get super quiet or chain-smoke, or maybe even get biting like she can when she’s feeling wrong about something. The last thing I would have ever imagined was them running toward each other and colliding in the driveway, Roxy wrapping her legs around Elle’s waist, and them twirling like that. 

This seems like something I shouldn’t be seeing, some- thing wounded and private that fills up my throat. I flip my- self around in my seat and start picking through the things we brought and chide myself yet again for the miserable packing job I did. Since I was basically out of my mind trying to get out of the house, I took a whole package of toothbrushes, an armful of books, my River Phoenix poster, plus I emptied out my underwear drawer, but totally forgot to pack any shoes, so all I have are some flip-flops I bought at the truck stop outside of Las Cruces after that man came to the window, slurring, You got nice legs. Tap, tap tap. You got such nice legs.

My flip-flops are covered in Cheeto dust from a bag that got upended. I slip them on anyway, watching Roxy take her sunglasses off and prop them on her head.

“Son of a bitch!” my aunt says, her voice tinny as she catches sight of Roxy’s eye. “Oh my God, that’s really bad, Rox. You made it sound like nothing. That’s not nothing.”

“Ellie,” Roxy says, trying to put laughter in her voice. “I’m here now. We’re here now.”

There’s a pause.

“You look the same,” Elle says. “Except the hair. You went full Marilyn Monroe.”

“What about you?” Roxy says, fussing at her platinum waves with her palm. “You go full granola warrior? When’s the last time you ate a burger?”

“You know I don’t do that. It’s no good for us. Definitely no good for the poor cows.”

“It’s fine for me.” Roxy lifts Elle’s arm and puckers her nose. “What’s going on with your armpits? May not eat meat but you got animals under there, looks like.”

“Shaving is subjugation.”

“Shaving is a mercy for all mankind.” 

They erupt into laughter and hug each other again.

“Well, where is she, my little baby niece?” Elle swings the car door open. “Oh, Mayhem.” She scoops me out with two strong arms. Right then I realize just how truly tired I am. She seems to know, squeezes extra hard for a second before letting me go. She smells like the sandalwood soap Roxy buys sometimes. “My baby girl,” Elle says, “you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to see you. How much I’ve missed you.”

Roxy circles her ear with a finger where Elle can’t see her.

Crazy, she mouths. I almost giggle.

[mcrmadness]

I really shouldn’t do this. Just thinking about people who are no longer a part of my life either because they decided to stop talking to me or because I decided it was better to part ways. And it’s making me sad and I hate it. Mainly because I’m again starting to feel invisible and lonely and apparently I then tend to torture myself even more by making me go and do things that I then associate with these people.

But I also hate it how I feel like I don’t have a normal concept of human relation(ship)s at all. Sometimes I wonder if I have played just too much The Sims games in my life (I started when I was 9 so I have played these games for 20 years) because I feel like the way I see the relationships is exactly how it is in the sims games. Don’t interact in a while and soon you get a message “you are no longer friends with X”. That’s literally how I feel friendships in my head. I feel like whenever there’s a long pause, that will mean that the friendship will be automatically reset back to 0 by time. Whenever there’s something we both like and have in common, it’s immediate green plus marks on the friendship and a positive moodlet. When we disagree or don’t have something in common, it will give red minus marks. And maintaining relationships feels as difficult as it is in the sims games too - tell them the same thing twice and it will be minus points. Tell them a thing they don’t like and it’s minus points, if you’re too close to 50%, maybe it drops from friends to acquintances. If you tell a succesful joke, you’re friends again. And right now I’m feeling like I’m “losing” all my friends because there’s been too huge pause with everyone and I feel sad about anything I associate with them because I feel like a friendship is over even when no one has said anything like that. It’s all in my head and it’s like a delusion because the second someone talks to me again, I forget ever even having such feels. But when the next pause comes, I again start to prepare myself for the moment where I’m left alone and never talked to again. Maybe I just have had this kind of situations so often in my life that I’m already preparing myself for that moment so that it won’t be that big of a shock when it happens.

I know it’s not healthy and it’s not RIGHT towards my friends to constantly be like this but can I change? Is there anything I could do to change this? I don’t always even recognize when I’m doing this, only lately I have woken up to this and it makes me feel bad because, like that one post I made several weeks ago, I’m really concerned that am I one of those unstable friends that will drive everyone around them into exhaustion eventually. Are people getting out of my life only to protect themselves? I feel like I’m always just too much to everyone and that I’m left alone in the end because I’m the only one who cannot escape me. I have to live with my brains and listen to all the shit it comes up. I’d love to cancel myself too if I could, but I can’t.

When my depersonalization/derealization was at its worst, I acually felt like I was invisible. Some days I was legit wondering if I was even alive. I was wondering if I was a ghost or idk, in a coma but just had no clue. I felt like people did not see me anywhere, I still can remember being to a grocery store and almost being run over by someone with a shopping cart and so many people almost walked against me and I just remember that moment so well as I got really frustrated and I was almost certain that I must be invisible, how else would people almost run over me with a shopping cart and they did not even look at me, as if I was not even there! Some days I thought maybe my minor car crash in 2010 put me into coma (yeah, Life On Mars uk much???) because I haven’t felt like the time would have passed AT ALL since that. I still feel like I’d be 19 and I’m supposed to be 29. Like, HOW???

And now I’m starting to have that feel of being invisible again. I have a nice amount of followers on Tumblr and this is something that I don’t really want to address at all because I appreciate every single one there and I could not care less about the number itself. But I’m starting to feel like... how could I gain more followers who would be interested in my stuff too? Like, I feel like talking to walls here. I bet no one is reading this post either. I so often feel like venting and writing down my thoughts but then I feel like there’s no point in that because I could as well write in a diary, which I hate, because as many people are going to read these as there’s people who can read my diary. Aka none. Not even me. I don’t like reading my diary and usually I also do not come back to these posts I put in Tumblr. Sometimes I browse my posts and am like “wtf have I been writing???” but I guess that’s the main point too, just to get it out of my system and I don’t need them back, mainly because they never really leave, they just evolve into new stuff I will vent here sooner or later too.

I am an attention whore who is afraid of being the center of attention. Sure if I tagged my posts more I might get more people to find me but I’m also afraid of being found or that my personal posts get reblogged. I don’t really want these to be on anyone’s dash except when it’s my original post. My social anxiety is afraid of notes and my HSP is afraid of the reactions I might get because of notes. But whenever I do something that I wish would get notes, I get none. And every time that happens, my perfectionism feels violated and I feel like a failure and that I suck at everything ever. Sometimes I am even shocked by the fact I post something like this and then suddenly remember that I have no idea how many people out these even is seeing these on their dash. What do they think? Do they see these and be like “oh god again that pathetic creature is whining some shit *eyeroll*” or do they just skip because idc.

I have so many times in my life felt like I am less than everyone else. It’s because when I was 13, my best friend turned out to be a narcissist (if that is possible for a 13-years-old) and we stopped being friends and eventually I made everyone else mad at me too and was alone, lonely and hated by everyone for a couple of years and your teens is the worst time for that to happen. I still don’t know if I was the villain or those girls. So I start feeling like a failure and worse than everyone very easily. AT some point I tried to get attention with my art but I didn’t succeed and I always felt like a failure then. “I should be better at arts, maybe I’d then be seen and approved.” During my worst time I actually thought I was relating to Garfield’ Jon so much and I legit thought I exist in this world only so that everyone else can feel a little bit better about themselves because there’s always at least one person who is worse than them. I literally felt like the meaning of my life was to make others feel better just because of how much of a loser I am. That’s why I feel sad when I see people getting asks all the time. I’m not really jealous or angry, I’m just sad because it just makes me remember how useless I am and how boring my life is and how bring absolutely nothing to this world and how... just invisible I am. I bet all ask posts have been on people’s dashes but no one just find me interesting enough to send questions. But I can’t blame them, because would I send myself asks if I was someone else and saw me on their dash? No. (Well, soon I will if no one else does, let’s see how out of my mind I will look for other people then lol.) I’d probably just unfollow my user because of what a pain in the ass I really am after all.

So whatever, a long post and useless blabber and just letting out some steam. I’ll go to watch some TV now and try to get over this. I’m also feeling like I hate Tumblr, I don’t want to come here to be disappointed because no one wants to know anything about me but I also can’t keep myself away from here because I want to know if I’ve got any asks because that would be some interesting stuff to do for my brains. So it’s like I have my hopes high only to be crushed in a minute and I keep doing this cycle every 5 minutes because I can’t decide if I should be a pessimist or an optimist.

Gosh, am I being selfish or what? I hate being selfish and I hate selfish people. But why am I still constantly talking about myself? Hypocrite much??? I wish I could unfollow the “blog” in my brains.