#god this has been in my drafts for MONTHS thanks to my dash for finally reminding me to post this hsdfdfs

[minzis]

When You Know

Art Credits: Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova

•┈୨A Soap One-Shot୧┈•

♡Summary: You and Soap take one final trip together in a last ditch effort to rekindle your crumbling relationship.

♡Tags: sfw, Angst, 3.5k words.

♡A/N: This soap fic has been in my drafts for god knows how long but here it is! The song I mainly listened to while writing this was ‘Margaret’ by Lana Del Rey! Apologies for those who might have been waiting for this fic my last few months have been out the ass busy, I’ve recently moved along with getting sick as well but hopefully I’ll get to writing more :3

•┈୨♡୧┈•

The car hummed as Johnny continued the drive down the seemingly never ending road the occasional thumps from his finger tapping at the wheel. The same sound that’s been repetivte throughout the entire dreadful drive. Another huff fell from your lips as the sound slowly began to aggravate you once more.

He muffled a groan spilling another sorry you scoffed lightly, “Is that what you said to the girl you’ve been texting about not being able to meet up?” you muttered flipping through the magazine you picked up at the last pit stop. The reminders of the stupid texts you accidentally read when coming across his phone plaguing your mind. It meant nothing to him you knew it didn’t for him, but it did to her.

“Christ y/n how many times have I said it was nothing like that,” he rebutted his own annoyance growing. “Yeah I’m sure every girl trying to be friends constantly bombards you with an ensue of constant compliments, gifts, texts and calls.” You exclaimed sarcastically staring harshly at the magazine despite never actually looking at it.

“She said she didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yeah and I’m sure she feels the exact same about that statement.”

“Y/n-” he cut himself off letting out a deep sigh, “look I love you and only you I would never in my life run off with some other woman I barely know?!?” he responded glancing over at you briefly.

“I know,” you grumbled.

He smiled a bit towards the end, you rolled your eyes at the words as they hardly softened any worries you had. Your eyes fell on to the road making eye contact with deer in the middle of the road you barely managed to scream out the warnings.

“Oh my god deer, a deer?!” You yelled out throwing your hands up, the magazine flying out your hands as you pointed at the road. His head snapped forward narrowly swerving out the way of the deer before slamming on the breaks.

You exhaled exasperated hands firm on the dash as the seatbelt clung onto you, thankful for once about his adamant complaining about buckling up.

“Told ya seat belt.”

“Fuckin’ hell just watch the road,” you sighed leaning back in the seat face in your palms a deep sigh following after your motions. He chuckled slightly as you both gathered yourselves before he started driving again.

His fingers pulled at a cigarette from the pack. A quick flick to his lighter before placing the lit cigarette between his lips. He didn’t used to smoke before, you wondered when he started doing that but you stopped knowing a lot of the things about him. It made you think of all the things you were missing like the new wrinkle between his brows that was starting to form.

One that only appeared when you argued. It filled you bits of sadness as it seemed you two could never argue but now it seemed all you two could ever do. Thoughts of the days when us meant something, maybe that’s why he dragged you on this god forsaken trip. Some way it was a plead, an ask to try again before there was no fix for what was left of a deteriorating relationship. Of course you loved him probably more than yourself at this point, the man you knew like the back of your hand. You were sitting in the same car but it felt like you couldn’t be further apart.

“Fuckin hell,” you yelled out as the tent collapsed once more on you. You were already tired from the long drive but now this tent was going every which way but the right damn way. Johnny set off to the side in his chair simply watching the situation unfold with his feet propped up, a few snickers coming from his direction every now and then. You insisted you could do it yourself still upset from the conversation ealier. You tossed down one of the small pipes in frustration crouching down to your knees as you sigh in defeat.

You took a few breaths calming down a bit before looking back up at the mess of a tent you had long loss the instructions to, and not enough service to Google the manual. You glared over at Johnny as he smirked a bit, you groaned knowing he more then likely knew the instructions by heart. You wouldn’t be surprised if the man memorized them just so you’d be forced to ask for his help. You rubbed your face with your hands another sigh following before standing upright hesitantly making your way over to him.

“Help me,” you muttered folding your arms as you glanced around standing infront of him.

“Sorry what?”

“Can you help me?” You spoke slightly louder through gritted teeth.

“I can’t really hear you love?” He spoke with his same shit eating grin he had as he watched you struggle the past thirty damn minutes.

“I said can you help me, please,” you mustered out an annoyed please as his grin grew wide.

“Oh of course honey why didn’t you just say so!” He cooed, his amused tone far from hidden as he waltzed over to the chaos you had going on.

You sat down in his seat watching him leaning your head in your hand as he slowly pieced the tent together properly. He was muttering some silly jokes, probably teasing as he began hammering some stakes into the ground. Your eyes flicked over him playing the conversation in the car over in your head. You wanted to get over it but it was stuck in your head like some parasite.

You’d feel worse for not saying anything but even worse for saying something at all.

Surely he’ll be tired of hearing the same issue over and over again? What if he’d grown tired of you in general? Your eyes followed his moments as he continued building the tent, he briefly glanced over at you pausing as he stood up right. He dusted his hands off on his pants walking over and bending down in front of you.

He stared at you for a moment watching your flickering expressions, “baby what’s wrong?” He asked with a slight laugh in his voice but mostly of concern as he grabbed one of your hands rubbing the back of it with his thumb. His soft reassuring smile nearly already had you crying as you sniffled. You shrugged wiping the stray tear as he left out a sigh kissing the palm of your hand, “I can’t help you unless you tell me what’s wrong.” He whispered softly folding your hand in his as he waited for your response, patiently as always.

“It’s nothing I swear,” you muttered curtly staring down at your hands. You briefly looked up at him and he looked obviously upset, your heart immediately sunk regretting every word you had spoken. Surely he’s upset now, if you had just happily accepted his help he wouldn’t be upset. You should’ve just kept quiet about it to begin with.

“If you want me to leave tell me,” he sounded broken like he was at his wits ends of what to do, what more would make you happy. “Tell me to anything ‘n I’ll do it, tell me to go or apologize give me a list…please.”

“Just tell me whatever you wish and I’ll do it.”

You shook your heading shrugging unsure what to say, “I don’t know.” Your eyes focused on his as you wondered why you were so angry with him. Why were you upset? When any problematic situation arose the only common denominator you could find was you and yet he still asked if he had done something wrong.

“Baby I can’t help you if you don’t tell me anything,” his voice was soft his hand reaching to cup your face. He nodded, gently pulling you into a hug. “I’m sorry for being mean,” you spoke head resting against his chest.

“I wasn’t angry with you I was angry with myself, You were just the outlet I took it out on,” you added on as his hands raked through your hair.

“I know love, I know,” the words almost made you sob he was being so patient and you had nothing to say or give for it.

“I just thought one day you’d change your mind about loving me like I tricked you into it or something,” you chuckled lightly eyes watering as you began emptying all the thoughts.

“You’re too good, it’s more than I’ll ever deserve.”

It felt terrible as if it had been wrong to feel this way. He was as perfect as any man could get and here you were finding issue after issue. His face looked shocked and heartbroken at the revelation, “you’re so friendly open you could probably have any woman you want with no problem. A better woman.”

“But I already have the one I want,” he softly replied with a reassuring tone. “I know you love me and I love you too, I just can’t help this terrible persistent feeling I’d lose it one day, lose you.” You trailed off the beating of his heart echoing in your ears companied by the sounds of his breathing.

“Just ask me then,” he spoke abruptly. “If I have to say I love you a hundred times for you to feel better I’ll do it, all you have to do is ask.” He kissed at the top of your head as you wiped at your tears nodding appreciatively.

“I missed you love.”

“I missed you too.”

The rest of the trip felt absolutely amazing, you’d never have considered enjoying nature as much as you do now. The tall trees lining every direction you looked. The unkempt grass with wild flowers and weeds mixed it. It was truly stunning no matter where you chose to look. None of it felt real, the view was simply stunning.

“I see why you dragged me out here now,” you laughed looking towards Johnny’s direction as he walked beside you.

“Yeah despite all your complaints about how ‘I’m not doing anything that requires more than the bare minimum,’ if I recall that correctly?” He spoke with a smug tone raising an eyebrow.

“Okay well to be fair the campsite you originally showed me looked like shit.”

“Have you never heard of a surprise?”

“No I haven’t,” you replied sarcastically turing your nose upward and he let out a laugh pinching one of your cheeks. “Stubborn as always,” he muttered as he continued down the trail.

You looked over him admiring him for a moment. “Thank you,” you spoke suddenly as he turned around understandably confused.

“For what?”

“For being with me, just for everything really,” you smiled softly as he immediately pulled you into a tight hug. He pulled away feeling your forehead, “well you aren’t sick thought someone might’ve taken over your body for a second.” He stared you down suspiciously as you giggled.

“Oh absolutely, I’m an ailen and I shall taken you back to my people on Mars!” You exclaimed as he looked at you in shock.

“Ah I knew it was too good to be true!”

You probably missed this more than anything, the small moments with him. That made you feel like a mischievous child being with him and feeling like this made it all worth it. Worth any deal of pain if it meant a moments like this. They always say it’s the little things right?

But this moment wasn’t little it was damn dear the most important event in your life up to now as Johnny knelt down on one knee. A ring-box in hand your birthstone reflecting the moonlight with a light sparkle. You felt stupid falling for his dumb trick of pointing out something in the sky that wasn’t even there. Of course you looked back confused ready to bombard him with questions but there he was on one knee.

You felt a mixture of emotions wash over you all at once, you were already crying and he hadn’t even started speaking yet. Your hands moving rapidly wiping at your never ending tears. This was more than enough proof you’d ever need. What would there be to debate when the ring would be a light in the darkness to guide you.

“I didn’t fall in love you at first sight, I fell in the with you the moment you told me I was worth it. Worth the pain, the sorrow but also the joy, the laughter and for the love. You were the one who built me back up even when I couldn’t do it myself so will you give me the greatest honor and privilege to marry you and spend the rest of our lives together?”

Maybe it was then under the moonlight and stars that you knew, knew by the tone in his voice from the stumble in his step to the light that lit up his face as he knelt on one knee. That no fight or argument would be enough to take that away. Not your love and not his because you just knew how much you love and would love him for the rest of your life.

“Com’n now lass my knees ain’t what they used to be,” a laughter echoed from you through shining tears of joy that told him of your love. A love he hoped to see in the messes of chaos your future children would leave. Like the breath of fresh air in the cold night to the crackle of the fire. Glimmer of the moonlight in his bright eyes that spoke of a million ways how he could love you just right, in a soft whisper you spoke, “Yes I will.”

“Good thing you said yes.”

“Why?”

“Cause that uppercut from the ground would’ve knocked you on yer ass.”

“Is it too late to say no?”

“Yes Miss MacTavish it is you’re stuck with me till death do us part,” a childish laugh escaped from him as he threw an arm around you tugging you into a hug. Despite the amount of times the man had hugged you it felt just like the first time after your first date a nice blissful comfort, as if you just knew he was the one.

The hug was only seconds yet felt as if it was the first time someone truly hugged you, wanted you and you alone. Despite the darkening night sky you still held onto his hand subconsciously not wanting him to leave yet. You smiled at him hesitantly releasing his hand taking a step back, “so..” You trailed fiddling with your hands as you glanced over his eyes.

“Let me buy you a drink?” He spoke softly returning the smile as you nodded excitedly, “absolutely!” And like that one date turned into dozens before you knew it he was moving in.

He huffed from beside you drawing you out of your thoughts as he stood up in-front of you his hand outstretched towards you. “Would you like to dance?” you looked at him confused staring at his hand before back up at him.

“I don’t know how to dance?”

“I can teach you.”

“There’s no music?”

“Then we’ll sing.”

He always had an answer whenever you were in doubt. If he had said you could concur the world you’d whole heartedly believe him. He spoke with passion and emotion you hadn’t felt before that showed he meant every word. He’s always believe in you even when you didn’t believe in yourself. But that’s just who Johnny is, optimistic to a point you’d almost call him stupid for it. The world needed more people like him, gentle and kind with a warmth that made everything feel okay.

As if it would always be okay.

He insisted on dancing under the midnight sky his eyes reflecting a brightness only the angels get to gleam. You would’ve felt embarrassed from your terrible skills but he was just as awful as you possibly even worse. You couldn’t help the laughter as you teased him for his idea when he couldn’t even dance himself.

His arm outstretched to spin you around before taking you in his arms aiming for a dip but he trampled on his own feet tumbling you both right over. He flopped right onto you as the laughter only grew. His laughing died down as he stared at your smiling face as you giggled.

“What?” you asked out of breath.

He is what beauty feels like, pure unfiltered beauty and it’s exactly what he calls you beautiful. He’d say it with every ounce of his being without a hindrance of dismay.

“God damn you’re so beautiful,” he kissed at the top of your nose with that childish smile of his.

“I love you too Johnny.”

It had been a few weeks since the trip. You hummed mindlessly preparing your usual pick-me-up box for Johnny. You’d been excited for weeks to send it as you held the positive pregnancy test in your hand. It took everything in you not to spill the beans but held out waiting a few weeks to be sure it was still positive.

You wondered who the baby would resemble, though you already wished they would resemble Johnny. Hoping they would take after him and his kidness take every good thing you two would have to offer and become the best version of either of you. He’ll be a wonderful father that much you knew for sure.

If they are loved what else could possibly matter?

You couldn’t wait for the excited call you’d receive as he would probably insist on coming home immediately to prepare the baby’s room. Even already bought a cute baby crib you two could build together since he’d more than likely insist you’d have to sit it out but just watching him didn’t seem all that bad.

“You’re carrying for two now not just one anymore,” he’d probably say and the thought already had you smiling. You remember off handedly asking him if he’d ever want kids one late night in bed. His face scrunched up in thought before his playful smile grew, “if it’s with you I’d have at least fifteen.”

You snorted punching at his chest, “In your damn dreams Mr. MacTavish, we’ll have maybe two at most and have a nice house by the seaside.” You continued rambling endlessly about the cute family you two would have someday as he simply smiled and hummed in agreement at every word.

The phone rung a bit before your usual call time, almost deciding to ignoring the call seeing the random number but the first few numbers looked familiar. You picked up the phone the familiarity of Price’s voice filled your ears. You smiled instinctively, “Price it’s been awhile!” A light laugh exited from you as he took a deep breath following a pause.

“Is something wrong?” you asked another long pause as he groaned lightly.

When you know, you know like the feelings that reside deep in your gut. The ones you can’t shake no matter how hard. Not when you feeling with ever fiber of your being so much so it consumes you. Not when it fills your veins almost already telling you the truth and you just know.

“I’m sorry but Johnny didn’t make it, he was K.I.A,” you almost asked for him to clarify like he was playing a horribly stupid joke but Price never joked not like this. A strong wave of nausea over came you as you softly spoke gagging at the words you could hardly bare to form.

“My Johnny?”

He stifled a yes before an ensue of apologies and everything people say when someone dies. Someone else not Johnny because he said he’d come home. He promised didn’t he? So why wasn’t he here? Not your Johnny it couldn’t be because he said he’d make it back. Things like this happen to other people they don’t happen to him because he’s good and kind so of course it couldn’t be him, right?

His smile, his voice, even just his presence a feeling you’d never get to feel again. What did you even say to him last? Had it been enough to convey how deeply in love with him you were? Did he know how much you loved him? Your hands shook as you long dropped the phone. Your hands threw the box off the counter the items scattering along the ground.

And you screamed eyes watering as an awful overwhelming feeling of dread washed through you, you didn’t just cry, you wailed. Wailed for him to come back or some form of explanation as to why. Why did it have to be him when it could’ve been anyone else. The grief wasn’t just emotional it was physical like your entire body was responding to the gaping hole left behind by its missing piece.

A piece of you that you’ll never be able to get back.

[fandxmslxt69]

Cute Library Boys

Steven Grant x f!Reader

Warnings: Steven being too goddamn cute and fluff!! Some swearing, absolutely tooth rotting dorky-ness.

A/N: Oh my god this has been sitting in drafts for so long but I finally finished editing ahahah. Idk how I feel about it ngl, its cute and has me giggling but !!!! idk. Anyway this IS inspired by a prompt: "Going for the same book at the library" taken from @creativepromptsforwriting (Mona sent me a prompt list literally like 2 months ago thank you @whatthefishh you are too cute for this world.) ANYWAY I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY this is a peace offering before I pour my heart out into the most gut wrenching angst and coochie killing smut <3

-Clem

Synopsis: All you wanted was to have a quiet day browsing books in the library. Who knew you'd manage to find the cutest man to spend your day with right there in the history aisle?

Word count: 3541 (omg.)

Walking through the library, you gently ran your finger over the spines of the book, feeling worn out paper and leather on your fingertips. It was always relaxing, being surrounded by so many stories, real or not, lives and adventures. You skimmed through a history section, looking for a book that might be of interest, and your eyes landed on one just up ahead, with a pretty spine and a title written in gold. Your fingers jumped to it, but bumped with another hand outstretched to grab it.  “Oh sorry, love! Didn’t see you there,”  “Oh no it’s alright!” You grinned up to the cute man with the cute British accent. “You can have the book, I don’t mind,” “Oh no,” He shook his head.  “Really, you can take it,”  “No it’s fine, really, I can just order another from the system,” He grabbed the book off the shelf, handing it to you. “Love, please. I’ve already read it anyway. It’s all yours,” He smiled, a bright breathtaking smile that lit up his whole face.  You hesitated but took the book from his hand, adding it to the (very heavy) bag you carried. “Memorised and all?” He chuckled. “I wish,”  You grinned at him, and an awkward silence fell as you scanned the rest of the shelf. “Uh,” You cleared your throat. “Anyway. Thank you, a lot, for-” “The book,” He finished. “Yes! The book. Thank you,”  He nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing.  “Alright well uh…I’ll, go, thank you, again,” You rushed to say before quickly dashing off, trying not to think about how pretty he was, or how soft his eyes looked, or his beautiful curls, his soft yet clear features…

No. 

You weren’t sure what the hell urged you to turn right back around and down the aisle again, but your feet carried you there anyway, and you found yourself standing right in front of the gorgeous stranger again. “Um. Hi.” You mumbled. Maybe he didn’t hear, maybe you could run be- “Hi! You’re back,” He grinned and you could feel the sunshine radiating off of him.  “Yeah. Um..I don’t know I just…yknow…You seem to know your books,” You gestured to the growing pile by his feet. “So I was just..wondering if you had any recommendations? I’m in a bit of a slump, so I wanted to try something new. I mean only if you’re cool with it, if I’m bothering you I’ll just go-”  He laughed, a quiet small chuckle that put a huge ass sappy smile on your face. It was contagious, his bubbly energy and cute laughs and smiles. “No it’s alright love, I’d be more than happy to give you a few suggestions, though it might just turn out to be a big ramble,” You shrugged. “Nothing beats a good book ramble,” “Wholeheartedly agree. Now,” He turned to the shelves, his soft eyes scanning the spines of the dozens of books, and he just started rambling- exactly like he said he would. On and on and on, grabbing a few books at a time and talking about them all at once, he looked over the moon to share all this knowledge with someone, you didn’t have the heart to tell him that you could barely keep up with him. You just stood there watching him, probably grinning like an idiot, adding every book he put down to the growing pile in your bag. Whether the book was actually interesting or not, you didn’t care. When a cute man excitedly tells you about his favourite books in an aisle in the library, you grab every damn one of those books and you take them home. 

By the time he finished going through at least a dozen books, he paused, biting his lower lip to hide a shy smile. “Sorry. Got carried away there,” 

Ah shit.

“No no! It’s okay, no apology needed at all. You- it’s cute. You’re cute. When…you do the ramble thing. Cute. Yeah.” You cleared your throat, feeling your cheeks heat up.  There was a beat of silence, before he blurted out, “Steven.” “Sorry?”  “Steven…my name. Is Steven. Grant. Steven Grant. It kind of just hit me that I didn’t introduce myself,”  “Oh. Oh! Oh right. Oh my god.” You fumbled with your bag, trying to get yourself back in control. “This is embarrassing. I’m so sorry. I’m Y/N. It’s very nice to meet you Steven,” He laughed again. “It’s very nice to meet you too,”  You nodded. How many times are you going to nod. Quit it.  “So…um,” you cleared your throat, wondering if it was too late to ask for a hole to open up and swallow you whole. “Yknow..there’s um…this cafe, right down the street, and it’s really nice and they’ve got pretty decent coffee and food. I was wondering if…you know, if you’re free anyway, and not too busy or if you have something better to do I totally get it-” “I’d very much like to go to the cafe down the street with you,” Steven interrupted, and you stared at him, jaw hanging open slightly as you took in his shy smile and the light rose of his cheeks.  “I mean, if that’s what you’re asking-” He rambled quickly to add. “Yes! Ah, uh, yes, that is what I’m asking,” You grinned widely, cheeks starting to hurt from how damn much you were smiling at this cute stranger in the history aisle of your local library.  “Great! Wonderful, amazing. I- uh…I’ll…go check out my books? Get settled while you do yours and…” “...we can meet by the front doors?” You finished for him. He nodded quickly, his hair bouncing with each bob of his head. You nodded too, fiddling with the strap of your bag. “Okay. Okay cool. I’ll…go do my thing. And I’ll see you soon?” “Yes, absolutely, 100% yeah,”  You chuckled, a few butterflies taking flight through your stomach with all his nervous blabbering.

He’s cute. Real cute, with the nicest warm eyes and a precious crooked smile, and the cutest mop of curls on his head that you desperately wanted to play with. Not to mention his adorable outfit..the cute earth brown pants and the soft sweater that definitely hugged his body in a comfy yet pleasing way. 

Screwed. Absolutely, royally screwed. 

After awkwardly staring (analysing) him for a solid minute as he grabbed the rest of his books, you turned and dashed to the check out desks, fumbling and mumbling about stupid cute library boys the entire way through the checkout process. 

*                                           *                                          *

As you both left the library, a light silence falling between you, he couldn’t help but take a few glances at you, his heart picking up pace, a giddy laugh building up in his throat- this was new. All of it was so new yet welcomed. He’d be damned if he let it go to waste, whether it be a chance to make a friend, or maybe a little more. 

By the time you had reached the shop, his shoulder ached from carrying his bag of books, and you looked ready to drop dead on your feet. 

“I can carry your bag if it’s getting you tired,” Steven suggested softly as you entered the cafe. You frowned, hugging your bag tightly to you. “What, no. It’s okay, I like carrying my bag. Makes me feel close to my books,” You pointed to a table by the window. “Here?” He laughed, then nodded. “Yeah this works,” He took a seat, lifting his bag off of him and placing down beside him. “What do you like to read anyway?” “Oooh,” You slid into the seat, you could feel the ache in your lower back start to build. Who even had back problems at this age. “I like a good fantasy novel, and I am guilty of reading way too much romance. I also like poetry. Not a very big person in non fiction though.” “Romance huh?” He raised an eyebrow, a playful smile on his lips. “Scandalous romance?” You laughed, shrugging. “What, a woman has her needs, and those needs happen to be pretty men with cute accents,”  “Ah right,” He nodded again, then paused. “Wait. I have an accent,” You chuckled, smiling widely. “Yes you do. A cute one too. And you’re cute. Pretty, dare I say,” His eyes widened, a blush creeping up his neck and his ears started turning red too as he looked away, averting his eyes and biting at his lower lip. Your heart did a little flip at how cute he looked when he was flustered.  “What kinda books do you like, Mr. Grant?”  “Hmm,” He flipped aimlessly through the menu, his eyes scanning the millions of different ways they make frappuccinos and espressos. He didn’t even drink coffee that much, he was more of a tea guy. “I like history, big fan of mythologies and stuff,”  You sat up, grinning widely. “I love mythology. I was a huge sucker for them in middle school. Still kinda am, honestly,” His heart did a little thing. “Really? What kind of mythology?” You shrugged. “I was really into the Greeks, they were pretty fun and it was a good time. I like the Romans a bit too, but they’re a little boring, yknow? The Norse are wack too, which makes it funny,” You grinned. “I was just a bit obsessed. I had an Egypt phase too for quite a bit,”  You could see the way his face lit up, how his eyes widened and a big smile started spreading across his face. “Egypt huh? That’s cool.” He nodded, deciding not to make a further comment lest it come off as too strong. You raised an eyebrow. “Cool? Oh come on, you totally had an Egypt phase,” “Did not!” “You so did. C’mon, tell me. I promise I won’t judge! I never could, I had attachments to those guys. You definitely know a thing or two,” He waved you off. “No..I mean, a little maybe. I’ve studied their mythologies and tales, aspects of culture and society, that’s sorta stuff, it’s not interesting really,” “Not interesting?” You scoffed. “Well I find them interesting. C’monnnn,” You nudged his leg under the table. “Who’s your favourite god?” He shook his head, a playful smile on his face. “I’m fond of Taweret. Hippo goddess, resides in the underworld and stuff. She’s nice,”  “Yeah? Know her personally?” “Oh yeah, obviously. We have chat over tea all the time,”  No way he was this funny. “Really? Wait, hang on,” You leaned in, “if she resides in the underworld, does that mean you’ve died before, Steven Grant?”

He liked it, he decided. The way you said his name, how it rolled off your tongue and out of your mouth so easily, and not the sarcastic way everyone else said it. Heaven, at least you remembered his name, not when half the staff at the old museum couldn’t even get Steven right.  He scrunched up his face, thinking deeply. “Hmm. Let’s see. I think I might have, yeah. A few times now actually,” There it was again, the laugh that filled the entire cafe, as your shoulders shook and you threw your head back in joy. “No way, you did not,” You finally said.  “I absolutely did! It’s not a good experience obviously, but yknow, an adventure,”  “So you’ve like- met Osiris and stuff?” He shrugged. “Maybe,” “Oh come on. Tell me! I’ve always liked him. Given, I always like every death god, so it’s no different,” “He’s alright. Very stiff though, no personality at all, he’s all business serious,” “Well duh, he’s a king,” Steven rolled his eyes. “Doesn’t mean he’s got to be so boring,”  You chuckled again, shaking your head in disbelief as you went back to the menu. “Any other gods you’ve met?” “Hmm.” He tapped his chin a few times, and brushed a curl of hair out of his eye. “I’ve met some night gods. They look like big ugly birds, with a big temper and zero compassion or kindness. Dress in old rags and stuff,”  “You’re lying, I swear you’re lying,” “I am not! It’s true. I see one quite often actually, he’s a pain in the ass, right psycho.”  “Yeah? He your best friend?” He snorted. “Absolutely not.”  You tsked. “Aw, that’s so sad,” “No it’s not. I told you, he’s not right in his mind,”  “Yeah but isn’t that all gods?” Steven sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Okay, you make an excellent point, but I’m telling you, this one is bloody psycho. Murderous and whatnot.” He smiled, a big goofy smile that showed his cute dimples.  You shook your head again, trying to fight back a stupid sappy grin. “You’re too funny,” “Too funny? Is that bad?” He frowned. “No! No, absolutely not. It’s nice, your jokes are actual..well, yknow, jokes. And it’s kind of nerdy.” “Oi!” He leaned in, pointing a finger at you with an air of amusement. “You just said nerdy was cute,” “It is!! It’s very cute!”  “Bloody right. ‘Cause if you came for sports jokes, I’m not your guy,” You laughed. “Nope, no sports jokes for me. I just like an extra side of nerdiness,”  He narrowed his eyes, fighting back a smile. “You are horrible,”  “Horribly cute, yeah, definitely,” He exploded with laughter, his face all happy smile lines and precious dimples. You smiled widely, your heart doing a little skip with how gorgeous he looks, so full of laughter. 

Thankfully though, before he caught you grinning like an idiot at him and trying to memorise his face, a waiter came to your table, and you managed to order your drinks without acting crazy or too dorky. 

*                                                         *                                                                *

“What about Bastet? You know her?” 

Okay so maybe you were still a little dorky. 

“The cat lady? I mean you see her everywhere don’t you? In all the nice cat ladies by your flat or in the market!” “Okay fine Mr. Poetic, I’m asking about the goddess,” 

He grinned, fiddling with the strap of his bag as you both made your way to a bus stop. “I haven’t met her, no. But I know of her,” 

“Right, of course,” You weren’t sure why you humoured this idea; the possibility of divinity walking amongst man. But the ease of pretending, of imagining with him, with Steven, was something you came to realise you enjoyed too much to give up.  “What about Zeus?” He frowned. “Wrong civilization,”  “Oh come on, so you’re telling me you can believe the idea of gods with bird heads from the times of pyramids, but you can’t humour me with the idea of wackoo’s living on top of a mountain?”  “I just don’t like them. Too chaotic,”  “That’s exactly why everyone likes them,”  “Okay fine, I just stay in my territory,” You shook your head, shrugging your bag back into place on your shoulder. “Okay, that’s fair, they probably don’t like each other anyway,”  “Nope, definitely don’t,” 

You both fell into a silence after, continuing your walk to the bus stop. “You don’t have to go all the way with me to the bus stop yknow-” You started but he just shook his head.  “I don’t mind, love. Really, it’s a nice day out for a walk,”  You nodded. “Okay.”

Silence fell again, and you couldn’t help but look up a little to look at him. Him with his pretty eyes and flushed cheeks. Him with his easy going smile on those nice lips. Him with the nice jawline and cheekbones that are just the right amount of sharp you just want to run your finger over it. 

By the time the both of you had made it to the bus station, you had made up your mind; You were going to ask him for his number. 

Only problem is…how do you ask a cute guy for his number?

You could feel the nerves start to set in as the minutes tick by, and more people pile around the bus stop. It was going to be here soon, and you’ll hop on, and probably never get his number and-

Okay calm down. You fiddled with your bag as the minutes passed, occasional small glances and nervous chuckles with Steven as he waited too, and it felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders just to ask for a series of stupid numerals.  When you glanced back up at Steven for what had to be the millionth time so far, you noticed in the far distance that the bus was heading this way. Steven turns the other way then too, noticing you staring and he sighed softly. “Ah, there’s your bus,”  “Yup,” He looked back at you, a soft smile on his lips. He picked at his nails, a feeling of anxiety bubbling inside of him. “So…” “So…” You continued for him, and you both laughed awkwardly.  “Can I-” “Can-” You stopped, chuckling awkwardly as Steven shook his head.  “Sorry love- didn’t mean to speak over you-” “No no it’s okay! My bad,” You reassured him. “Go ahead,”  “No really-” He rubbed the back of his neck, smiling. “You start,” “Steven-” You started to protest (why were you even doing that) but he set you with a firm look and you sighed. “Okay. I was…yknow…going to ask. If-” You trailed off. “Yknow…” “If…? Unfortunately love, I’m very bad at guessing games. You’ll have to specify,” You sighed, rubbing a hand down my face. You took a deep breath and right as the bus stopped at your station, you blurted quickly, “Can I have your number?!” It came out in one breath, a quick sentence and Steven’s browns furrowed. You panicked, thinking maybe you had read this wrong? What if he doesn’t want to give you his number? 

But then his face exploded in a wide smile, and his eyes lit up adorably and his cheeks filled with a soft blush. “Oh. My number!” He laughed, soft and clearly full of anxiety. “Yes- right yes, of course you can. Sorry it took a minute there-” He muttered, quickly digging through his bag and pulling out his phone. “Right then, quick quick before you miss your bus-” 

“It’s okay,” You mumbled quickly, steering him away from the growing bus line so you could plug in his number. You did it painfully slowly, double checking each number and going over the series at least 5 times. By the time you finished exaggerating and actually putting the number into your contacts, Steven was tapping his foot anxiously on the ground as he watched the last person board the bus.  “You have to hurry it’s going to close, love,” You looked up and glanced at the bus. “Oh crap-” You quickly fumbled to put your phone away and return his, but by the time you took a step towards the bus, it dinged and the door closed as it slowly started back up to drive away.  "Shit,” Steven tugged at his curls. “Oh god love, I’m really sorry- maybe if we run we could catch its next stop?” Didn’t people always say make the best out of a bad situation? The bus is gone, another won’t be coming for probably another half hour, and you were not running. 

But maybe…maybe this was a good thing? 

You shrugged, trying to sound as upset as you could possibly gather, but even to your own ears it sounded fake. “Oh no….the bus is gone. This is horrible. What do I do now?”  Steven started to say something, but then stopped, frowning a little, before his eyes widened and a smile grew across his face. “Hang on-” He stepped closer to you, his eyes glittered with humour. “You planned that, didn't you?” You gasped. “What? Me? Why would I ever want to miss my bus?”  “Hmm….” He tapped a finger to his chin, thinking loudly. He leaned down then his face barely inches away from your face. “Maybe because you wanted to spend more time with me?” He has no right being cute and nervous one second and then sexy  and all mischief the next.  Your eyes widened, you felt your skin heat and your cheeks flush pink with how close he was. His eyes looked even prettier up close, and his lips looked so kissable.  “Really?” You managed to breathe out. “You think I’m that captivated by you?” He shrugged. “Maybe.” He paused, biting his lower lip. 

Fuck. 

“Are you? Captivated by me?” He asked.  “Hmm. Let’s see…I think your nerdiness and awkward attitude and shy personality has definitely captivated me, Mr. Grant,”  His face explodes into a bright and beautiful smile. “Really? So if I asked to go on a walk right now, you’d say yes?” I hum, pretending to think it over. “I think…yes, I would absolutely say yes,” The look on his face made it seem as if he just experienced heaven. Your heart fluttered, and you knew then that you’d never ever get tired of seeing him this happy. “Brilliant. Great, alright then um..” He stood up straight again, looking around. “Let’s go?” 

You smiled, gesturing to the roads bustling with people. “Lead the way,” 

[nofliight]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

tagged by: stole it from @sternenteile​ and honestly others tbh tagging: TAKE

my muse is:  canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO. [ for better or for worse, he’s THE face of kid icarus, after all. he’s a dork and funny and likeable and even if the fandom tends to get him WRONG (thanks smash bros) there’s no denying his popularity ]

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. [ i don’t??? think so??? most people are too busy talking about how they think he’s like 5 ]

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. [ EVEN THE FANDOM AIN’T GONNA MESS THIS UP. MAN FIGHTS GODS. CALL THAT WEAK. ]

Are they underrated?  YES / NO / IDK. [ make no mistake - pit’s got fans and plenty of them but he’s so MISTREATED by the fandom. his character is a lot more complex than he gets credit for and smash bros in particular is a big reason people think he’s just Big Dumb Baby Man ]

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO. [ HE’S THE MAIN CHARACTER, THE CENTRAL FIGURE UPON WHOM THE NARRATIVE IS STRUCTURED AROUND, YEAH HE’S PRETTY RELEVANT. Uprising is literally made to tell the story of a war exclusively through the perspective of a single side and Pit (and Palutena) are the EMBODIMENT of that whole side. ]

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. [ and a perfect one at that. he’s literally a perfect protagonist don’t tell me i’m wrong cause i’m not ]

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO. [ pit is beloved by humans... and mocked by the Gods. seen by most as a spineless extension of palutena’s will, most “respect” of any variety goes to palutena while he gets treated as a joke 99% of the time... and it’s not like Palutena gets too much respect either ]

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. (????) [ Uhhhhhh... it’s an odd one. Short answer is that Pit’s a good samaritan who’s done a lot of good BUT most of the gods think protecting humanity is a Folly and a Joke and that Pit’s just a pawn of Palutena’s and while the humans do hold a lot of respect for him, uh............. let’s just say, some humans on the surface have reasons not to be too happy with him. ]

How strictly do you follow canon?  —  about as much as I need to to respect one of my favorite video games of all time. while kid icarus uprising is a comedic game most of the way through it has a lot more nuance and depth to itself, its world, and its characters than one can see at first glance, even after a full playthrough. if you let yourself get invested in the characters, take a closer look at the dialogue it provides, and acknowledge the central, core storytelling message of the game for what it is, there’s a lot more to pull out than one would think. that being said, it’s still a comedic video game and one that I think could use some more expansion. though the game is inconsistent there seems to be the consensus that pit is like a child and I’m not into that, mine’s a bit more showing in his cynical and snarky side after all he’s been through and overall there’s a lot of expansion on the base while building it into something unique.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.  —  imagine your typical bootstrapped anime protagonist. someone who, when younger, was a runt who couldn’t meet the expectations of others, was looked down on, and found himself crushed and hurt and near-killed by a great tragedy that he was forced to claw his way out of to make himself stronger. Now imagine all of that with a character who comes out still able to have a very real smile and ultimately comes out of it a self-assured, chipper goofball with a good heart. now put that together with all of the darkness and depth you would have expected to be there, but scattered realistically throughout the attitude of someone who does genuinely want to keep a positive attitude. someone who is sincerely an optimist who’s grown past his weaker days, but isn’t quite so simple as he’d like to believe. all of that combined with someone who can’t read, is willing to eat ice cream off the floor in times of duress, is extremely easy to fluster and can channel his goddess’ power to slay GODS? you got one strong man.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  his positive attitude is what most people will see when speaking to him, because for what it’s worth, he’s not actively lying about his depth. he’s a cheerful, jovial man with a big smile and a love of the world around him - which is all well and good, but his depth is something you have to find, even if it is reasonably clear if you’re willing to look. he’s also portrayed as a bit unreasonably dumb at times, and though I personally justify the worst of it with proper explanations, I can understand reducing some of the value of the character in favor of seeing all of his Jokes

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  i made my original pit blog, flightlesswarrior, on a total whim after playing kid icarus uprising. cute character, fun premise, why not? but over time, and with numerous plots I was able to take part in exploring the serious, not so serious, shipping, tragedy, and going back through the game to keep my muse rolling, it occurred to me more and more with time just how nuanced and interesting pit and co. really are. pit embodies many of the things i really, truly love in a protag, falling firmly on the side of good, having a heart of genuine gold, and having nuances and parts of his personality that are less than savory without making him seem like a contradiction. he’s got depth, he’s got story, there’s a lot to explore and flesh out... and he’s also just a nice, friendly guy who gets along well with others. plus, i’m drawn to dorks.

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  a) love for Kid Icarus: Uprising. a game that helped me gain a deeper and more insightful understanding of character development, subtle storytelling, optimism still tinged with legitimate and healthy cynicism, and overall something that changed my understanding of character development and storytelling forever. and b) spite. the fandom treats him like an idiot baby and smash DOES NOT help matters so i have to remind others that he is a veteran of a war, a socially inept loser with few real friends, and someone who’s kindness and optimism was shaped and molded by its hardships in a way that doesn’t require a near-breaking point or a reminder that “this guy could be evil you know” to show how someone can still keep a positive attitude in spite of all the shit life throws at him.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO [ i’d like to think i have?? but i also acknowledge that he’s become something of his Own in some ways that do intentionally diverge from sakurai’s intentions. ultimately though, even though i may not play him completely true to text, i try to be as loyal as i can be to the spirit of the character. ]

Do you frequently write headcanons?  YES / NO / SORT OF? [ when i can!! but??? the problem is my mind really, really likes to reiterate the Same Damn Points i have to make with characters that draws me to them - and you know, writing the same hcs over and over is generally considered poor form?? ngl i also prefer to let the writing do the talking unless it’s something that’s not gonna show so 90% of the time pit’s open enough that all but the darker sides of his mind are lain out before you. ]

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO [ maybe??? once or tWICE???? but i need to write more ]

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO [ I REALLY DO, HOO MAMA. i have a lot of thoughts about him, his depth, potential relationships, goofy thoughts, more serious fanfic ideas im never gonna write and don’t get me started on how many SHIPS i have to think about for him ]

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO [ my portrayal is made out of spite for portrayals in the fandom and some supplementary material that gets him wrong - it’s kinda hard to do that without the confidence ]

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO / ??? [ it’s uhh........ complicated??? i don’t think writing is my expertise, tbh. but it is the best way i have to show the passion i have for characters, by putting their nuances into actions, by allowing them to shine from who they are their core, by exploring relationships and scenarios and struggles and hope and everything that can flesh a character out. whether or not i’m a good writer is something i’m still sorting out - but i’m proud of my ability to develop a character, and to that end i feel like i’m doing fine ]

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / NO. / SORTA. [ on one hand......... very. i have a tendency to overthink everything i do and look back at moments i made an ass of myself that keep haunting me throughout my day - they haunt me. i only have two fears: what my immediate friend group thinks of me and the crushing existential weight of worrying one day i’m gonna ruin everything i am SOFT. that being said, i’m also hardheaded and stubborn and i’m not afraid to go off on someone i don’t have much respect for if it comes down to it. i’m easy to anger when it comes down to it you know i guess that proves the point huh i’m not stonefaced at all ]

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  i try to? it’s a bit touchy for me I admit just because I do take portrayals and try to make them my own, but i am willing to listen if someone has any points they’d like to make that i haven’t acknowledged properly. if criticism IS had, lemme know, i do wanna hear it!

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —   Y  E  S

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  not that everyone who disagrees with my opinions has to explain themselves of course, but i do sincerely like the chance to learn if something i’m doing doesn’t quite feel right. even if it’s one-sided and i’ll come to disagree, i’m happy to listen! even if i don’t agree with the disagreement head-on, i like to keep them in mind and see what i can shift around to acknowledge them if necessary

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  — neutral?? i mean don’t be mean about it, but if you just think my pit doesn’t seem right or it doesn’t click right with your muse i’m not gonna throw a fit about it. everyone’s allowed to view a character in their own way - and even if i may get salty about those who oversimplify him, it IS anyone’s right to view him how they will.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  — agree to disagree tbh. i can’t pretend it wouldn’t disappoint me, but it’s not like, worth ending a friendship over or anything. everyone’s got their own viewpoints to run on

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  sure, within reason! i take pride in my grammar but i know that with my fast typing and often running on only a few hours of sleep some problems do slip in through the cracks. while i generally either catch them or just Die with them i’m all ears if i mess up

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  uhhhhhhhhhh well i’m?? kind of a socially anxious mess honestly which DOES make being easy going a bit difficult BUT i do try and be friendly and sociable as i....... can. i’m too scared to talk to people and CAN say some dumb things but i’m not a hardass or anything!! i like to talk and Yell and shitpost and pretty much do anything but write tbh DHFLKSJDF

[aomine-ryo]

Kind of late, but I had an idea for a fic that’s been in my drafts for a while and I wanted to post it for Kise’s birthday but it wasn’t quite done yet. But it is now, so here it is, hope you like it!

Scenario: New kid, Kise Ryouta ends up falling for the reader

gender neutral reader

It’s not particularly easy being the new kid at school. Especially if you were Kise Ryouta. Being a well known athlete and model, it was difficult for him to be able to find friends in a new place that didn’t have ulterior motives. However, Kise learned to deal with it. He was cold to people until he himself learned to respect them and understand their motives.

But the problem with him was not in the friendship category, but rather the romance one.

Kise had a tendency to fall for the first person that was nice to him in a new place, and that almost always ended in the other person using him. So this time, he promised himself that he was not going to hurt himself yet again.

On his first day, Kise stood at the front of the class and introduced himself. “Um, hi, nice to meet you, I’m Kise Ryouta. I look forward to getting to know you all and well, I don’t really know what else to say,” he said, turning to the teacher for some help. The class filled with a small chatter once he stopped talking, and he could already faintly hear comments about how ‘cute’ he looks.

“It’s alright Kise. You can take that empty seat next to Y/N over there,” the teacher said, pointing.

Your head snapped back to the front of the class from gazing out the window at the sound of your name. Of course the new kid got stuck in the seat next to you. He was cute, you couldn’t disagree. However, that only meant that everyone else was going to be swarming around your desk for a while.

The teacher went on with the regular announcements until the bell for first period rang. “Oh right, before I forget, Y/N, can I trust you to show Kise around the school during your break?” she added.

You held back a sigh as you nodded. “Sure,” you replied curtly, glancing over at Kise and giving him an awkward smile.

As expected, once the teacher left, he was soon surrounded by girls asking him questions that were borderline invasive. How do they do it? How do they simply have the courage to speak to people like that? In a way, you envied them for their confidence, but it was also quite pathetic.

Eventually, the break came around and Kise approached your desk with a polite smile. Why did he get stuck with you out of all people? You were the first one that caught his eye and Kise could already see himself catching feelings for you. But he made a promise to himself and he was going to keep it. He wasn’t going to get played with again.

“Hey, um, Y/N, right?” who was he kidding? He knew your name. It was stuck in his head ever since the teacher instructed him to sit next to you.

“Yeah, just give me a second, I just have to organise this mess and we’ll be on our way,” you said, fumbling with the stationery that was cluttering your desk.

“Oh, you don’t really have to give me that tour if you don’t want to. I don’t want to be a burden— I can probably figure things out myself,” Kise said.

“It’s alright, I don’t mind helping out. If you end up getting lost at some point I’ll feel bad,” you insisted, finally putting the last of your things away and standing up. “Okay, we’re all good. Shall we?”

Kise hesitated for a moment. He really didn’t want to do this, but he didn’t have any more excuses so he simply walked by your side.

You showed him all the classes that he would regularly be attending, adding a few tips that you learned through the years whenever you could. This was the most you’d ever spoken to someone who wasn’t a close friend and yet Kise remained rather silent. Did he think you were boring? Were you talking too much? God, why did you have to be assigned this task?

“Oh right, I almost forgot. Are you joining any clubs?” you asked him as you walked through the halls.

“Yeah, I’ll be joining the basketball club,” Kise nodded.

“Right, I figured,” you mumbled, making Kise let out a small chuckle.

“Hey, you might have made the right judgement this time, but don’t judge a book by its cover,” Kise joked.

“It was more of an intuition thing rather than judging you, I swear,” you replied defensively, holding back a giggle.

“Mhmm I’m sure it was,” he said sarcastically. He hated how bright your smile was. It was so warm and gentle, he could look at it all day. He barely even knew you, but he was already obsessed with your smile. Just his luck.

“Well, unfortunately for you, I’m the manager for the basketball team so you’ll be seeing a lot more of me.”

This had to be some sort of cruel joke. “Really? That’s great. So I could probably just tail behind you and not get lost by the looks of it.”

“Maybe,” you shrugged. You hoped he was joking. The last thing you needed was a bunch of fangirls trailing you around campus. “Let me show you the way to the basketball gym though, just in case I manage to escape you.”

“Escape me? Tired of me already huh?” Kise teased, dramatically pretending to be offended.

“Absolutely,” you joked.

Kise clasped a hand over his heart as though he got shot in the chest. “I am hurt, Y/N. What did I ever do to deserve this?” he recited.

“You know, the drama club is probably also looking for new members— I should show you their club room instead,” you retorted.

“Ha ha very funny,” Kise rolled his eyes. How were you two already joking around like this? He tried not to speak to you much, but it was like his charisma was forced out of him. Maybe he was overthinking it. You seemed nice. Maybe the two of you could be good friends.

And well, that’s pretty much exactly what happened. With the sheer amount of times you two see each other, it was no surprise that you’d become friends. It started with witty banter and random comments but soon, the two of you became close. After about three months, you were hanging out with each other every other day, going out for a bite after practice, going to the movies, walking to school together— the list goes on. And somehow, you never got tired of each other.

“Hey, Y/N-cchi, are you going for the field trip?” Kise asked you in between classes, referring to the yearly trip your school organises to a selected place in the country with a rich history.

“I’ll go if you do. But to be honest, I’d rather stay at home,” you replied.

“Well, we’re going then. It’ll be fun. There’s probably cute places to take pictures for Instagram,” Kise said.

“So I’m basically going to be your photographer?” you sighed.

“Precisely.”

“Sounds like a blast,” you groaned.

“I’m kidding, I will find a way to make this worthwhile. I heard that there’s a nice restaurant near the hotel we’re staying at, so we should pay that a visit,” Kise said.

“I’m exhausted just thinking about it,” you replied, resting your head on your palm.

“Shhh it’ll be fun, trust me,” Kise said, eyes softening up when he noticed how the sunlight that shone through the window landed on you like some sort of natural spotlight. His mind was about to wander off into a daydream when the teacher walked into the classroom, snapping his attention away from you.

The field trip finally rolled around and you found yourself in a fresh hotel room with a gorgeous view of the beach. Unfortunately, you didn’t get assigned to room with Kise, but it was alright since he was just a few doors down. As promised, Kise did his best to make sure you were having fun. You did have to take an awful lot of pictures of him, and sometimes he’d force you to take pictures with him, but Kise was always good company so you didn’t mind too much.

On the last night, Kise took you to that restaurant for dinner. “It’s kind of a fancy restaurant so we should dress up,” Kise informed you that afternoon.

“But that’s so tiring. Let’s just go to McDonalds instead,” you suggested.

“We are not going to McDonalds. I will dress you up myself if I have to,” Kise said firmly.

So in the end, you did end up dressing up, but you didn’t pack any nice shoes so you had to go with your sneakers. Of course, Kise patronised you for it, but you just replied with the wittiest comment you could think of, like always.

“Hi, I made a reservation here, for Kise Ryouta,” Kise said to the hostess.

The place was nicer than you expected it to be. It was a strange feeling being here with a reservation. It felt less like a hang out with your friend and more like a date. And for some reason, you were now nervous.

“Ah yes, right this way Mr Kise,” she said with a polite smile as she led you two to your table. “A window seat, just as you requested.”

“Perfect, thank you,” Kise said, glancing at the view of the night sky and the twinkling city lights below.

“Here are your menus, a waiter will be with you shortly. Enjoy your date,” she smiled.

“Oh, uh, it’s not a—” you began, but she walked off before you could correct her.

“Well that’s awkward,” Kise chuckled.

You simply sighed in defeat as you took a moment to admire your surroundings. There was a clean white cloth spread across your table with a candle and flowers as a centrepiece. It was a bit too romantic for your comfort, but you tried to shake it off. “Someone went all out for a simple dinner. You even requested a table by the window. How picky can you get?” You said teasingly.

“I just made a reservation in case this place would be busy. You wouldn’t want to wait in line would you?” Kise explained and you shook your head in response. “Exactly. And I got the window seat because I know you like to stare out sometimes. I figured you wouldn’t wanna stare at me all night long, so I got you a better view.”

You felt your stomach turn as your mind’s immediate thought was how Kise was enough of a view on his own. You had to admit, he looked fantastic that night— when he said he was going to dress up, he wasn’t kidding. It was a simple white button up shirt with a red tie, but he still looked dashing. Perhaps it was the fact that he rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, showcasing his toned forearms that pulled the look together. Either way, you didn’t like the fact that you were viewing your friend in such a way.

“Oh my, what is this self deprecation? I thought I was hanging out with model and Generation of Miracles member, Kise Ryouta, not some emo teenager,” you said, your tone resembling Kise’s dramatic one that you’ve heard a thousand times before.

“Well, if you’re not going to appreciate my effort of getting us these seats, I can just ask them to move us away from the window,” Kise huffed.

“No, no,” you tracked back almost immediately. “I like the window. Thank you.”

“That’s what I thought,” Kise grinned triumphantly.

That night was absolutely lovely. But no matter now hard he tried, Kise couldn’t take his eyes off you. As expected, you’d rest your chin on your palm and gaze out the window with a faraway look in your eyes, and Kise could do nothing but admire how beautiful you looked. He couldn’t believe that he knew someone as amazing as you were. Moreover, he couldn’t believe that he told himself that he wouldn’t fall for you. What a dumb decision. But he was already this far in, maybe it was just that fact that he can’t have you that made him want you more. These feelings will pass, right?

As the two of you walked back to the hotel that night, a cool salty breeze flowed through the air. Kise had made you laugh yet again, and his heart filled with joy as the bright smile returned to your face. He could stay in this moment forever.

“I can’t believe this is our last night here,” Kise sighed once you simmered down.

“Yeah, this trip was actually kinda fun. I wish it didn’t end so soon,” you said, gazing up at the bright full moon.

“You think we can squeeze in one final adventure tomorrow morning?” Kise questioned.

“Where to?”

Kise shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“Well then, I’d rather stay in and sleep thank you very much,” you said.

“Are you tired yet?”

“Not really.”

“Then let’s go walk along the beach,” Kise suggested.

“But the sand gets everywhere, it’s so annoying,” you frowned.

“It’s our last night. Come on,” Kise said, grabbing your wrist and dragging you towards the empty beach.

The two of you walked by the water where the sand was firmer so that it less tedious. It was quite peaceful hearing the waves crash against the shore as the water glimmered under the moonlight.

“You know, when I first met you, I really didn’t wanna be your friend,” Kise said out of the blue.

“How rude,” you faked a gasp as you playfully whacked his arm, making him chuckle. “But to be honest, me neither.”

Kise looked at you with a dumbfounded expression. “Seriously, Y/N-cchi? But why?” he whined, seeming much more offended than you were.

“Because you always had people following you around and I didn’t want to be caught up in that,” you explained, kicking a pebble around as you walked.

“Oh,” Kise said, realising he probably shouldn’t have said anything because he couldn’t explain his reason as rationally as you did. “That’s fair, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you wanna be friends with me? Was I annoying?”

“What do you mean, you still are annoying,” Kise joked, earning himself another whack on the arm. “I’m kidding, no you weren’t annoying.”

“Then what was it?”

“Okay, this might sound really stupid, but I told myself that I wouldn’t go after the first person that’s nice to me, because that always ended up with people using me for something or the other,” Kise explained, stopping in his tracks to pick up a smooth pebble.

“That’s fair,” you said, trying not to overthink what he meant by ‘go after’ as you watched him skip the pebble over the waves.

Kise looked out at the horizon, seemingly lost in thought for a moment before turning back to face you. “You know, you caught my eye almost immediately and that was a red flag to me for the longest time, but you actually turned out to be pretty cool.”

It was strange seeing Kise like this. It was like he was possessed. He never speaks in such a serious manner with you. “Well duh, because I’m awesome like that,” you joked, trying to lighten the mood.

A gentle smile spread across Kise’s face. “I told myself I wouldn’t fall for the first person I had a crush on, but here I am,” Kise let out a heavy sigh, glancing back out at the ocean for a moment.

“Crush? You had a crush on me?” you asked, your stomach doing twists and turns that made you feel as though you were going to throw up all the delicious food you had earlier.

“Yeah,” Kise muttered. What was he saying? Why was he complicating things? “I hate myself for it.”

“Oh. Um, it’s okay,” you said, unsure what to say. He clearly didn’t want to like you, so you didn’t want to bring up how you felt about him. “We can stay friends if you want, nothing has to change.”

Kise looked back at you, finding comfort in the warmth of your eyes. There was no dramatic outburst like he expected. You seemed to be considerate of his feelings. You genuinely did care for him. “I don’t mind staying friends. But is it okay if I do this?”

Before you could think twice about it, Kise had his soft lips pressed against yours. Even though your mind hadn’t fully wrapped itself around the situation, you found yourself kissing him back. Kise felt you melt into his touch as his heart skipped like pebbles on the water. God knows how much Kise had been longing for this moment. To have his arms around your waist, your body pressed against his, and his lips on yours. He could finally get a taste of you and it was better than any meal he could imagine. This just felt right.

After a few moments, Kise pulled back to catch his breath, his mind racing with thoughts that he couldn’t even keep up with. “I’m sorry,” was the only thing he could muster.

“Don’t apologise,” you shook your head, taking his hand in yours and squeezing it tightly. “I am absolutely okay with that.”

A wide smile spread across Kise’s face as his mind slowly began to clear up. Maybe his instincts were right this time. You were perfect to him the moment he laid his eyes on you, even though he tried to deny it. And as you stood in front of Kise with the moonlight glittering in your eyes, you were just as perfect as the day he met you.

[starlightxsvt]

Hellion

pairing: Jeonghan x female reader

genre: fluff, suggestive, idk what this is

warnings: cursing

word count: around 1.5k

A/N: Firstly, happy birthday to the Jeonghan, our con man. I know I'm a day late so forgive me for that. Secondly, I've no idea what the hell I wrote. I've cancelled two other drafts I wrote for his birthday cause none of them were coming together and in the end I've decided to post this shit. Anyway, your feedback would be really appreciated in this mess of a story :').

"What's Jeonghan doing here?" You hiss to Mingyu who has a hard time prying his eyes off of Chaeyeon. "I invited him. I never thought he'd actually come. I'm surprised too." He replies.

"Wha- why would you invite Jeonghan to my birthday party!" You glare at him to which he rolls his eyes, "Come on now, he's in our friend group. And college is almost over. You don't know when you'll see him again. Ogle him while he's still here." He smirks.

"What did you just s-"

"Oh come on, don't act like I don't know that he's your secret crush. Maybe make up with him and if you're lucky you'll get some good dick as a birthday present." Mingyu chuckles at your open mouth before scurrying away to avoid your wrath. You glare at his retreating figure before inhaling sharply. And before you can stop yourself, you start to look for him.

You spot Jeonghan at the large porch in the back of Mingyu's house, sitting in one of the porch seats while sipping beer. He looks dashing as always, his black hair messy, his pale skin glowing in the moonlight, his cheekbones getting a prominent shine. You sigh.

Jeonghan was an exhausting person to be around and maybe, he'd say the same for you. You've known him since highschool and after a particular incident of him spilling his banana milk all over your brand new scarf, you decided to call it war. To this day you believe that he did it on purpose because you told your homeroom teacher that he slept during his class.

After that it was like an unspoken rule- you two would bicker whenever you were in the same space. It only infuriated you that he was so good looking, smart, famous and the fact that you had some feelings developing for him. Each time you saw him with a girl you'd feel a bitter feeling all over and you could only hope that those feelings would pass over time. But no they didn't, they only grew- the small branches had formed a tree now, the roots planted deep in your heart.

"How long are you going to stand there and stare at me?" Jeonghan calls, without turning behind. You clear your throat before walking to him, "Didn't expect to see you here, fuck face."

"Can you not call me names for a day please? You're just jealous I'm good looking." He remarks drowning the can of beer.

You snort, "Haha. You wish, loser." You plop down beside him. "I see you've finished quite a few cans. What's up? Got ditched?" You poke him.

"What do you care?"

"You're ruining the mood here with all these sad aura around you. Go drink your sorrows away somewhere else, this is my party."

"Yet you are sitting with me and my sad auras."

"I came to tell you that," you scoff, crossing your arms over.

"Parties are not your thing, I know. And Mingyu wasn't shy on inviting people. It feels more like his birthday than yours." Jeonghan comments, still staring ahead. His words are true and they infuriate you. You can't help but get defensive, "What do you know, sad boy? I'm enjoying myself just fine."

"And yet you are sitting with me and-"

"Stop saying that, will you!" You snap. Jeonghan chuckles before looking at you. He unabashedly eyes you up and down, heating your cheeks up in the process.

"Nice dress," he murmurs. His words catch you off guard and you glare at him, "Stop staring at me, pervert."

"You were staring at me earlier."

"Seriously? Can you stop for one goddamn second?"

"You're the one who started it."

"That's it. I shouldn't have come here," you stand up to leave but to your utter surprise Jeonghan grabs your hand, sending your heart to a frenzy. "Wait."

You swallow nervously, heart thudding loudly in your chest as Jeonghan lets go of your hand and meets your eyes, "Sit down, I've a gift for you."

You frown, "You have a gift for me?" Jeonghan nods before sitting straight, setting down his can. "Before that, I need you to know something."

"W-what?"

"I really didn't spill my milk all over you intentionally that day." He meets your eyes.

You can't help but laugh out loud partially because he's still concerned about that and partially because you believe he's lying.

"Listen here, sad boy, I've put that well past me. And I know for a fact you did it on purpose so don't-"

"You didn't, ___. We've been fighting over that for our whole goddamn lives. And no, I'm not lying. I've no reason to. I never cared if you told our teacher shit or not." His chocolate orbs bore into yours and you swallow. The air surrounding you suddenly becomes thick and you start to feel jittery and maybe a slight amount of guilt. Is he really speaking the truth?

"W-whatever, I don't care anymore." You say, sitting down gently beside him.

"And yet you still hold a grudge against me," Jeonghan sighs. "Besides you're not even fun to fight with."

"What did you say?"

He laughs, his eyes forming crescents and the sweet melody echoing in the air. You quickly look away before he catches you staring, "I don't have all day. Where's my gift?"

"Yeah, right." From beside him he produces a bag that you didn't notice before. He hands it to you and you tentatively peek in, half expecting a bug to jump out.

To your utter surprise, a scarf that looks identical to the one he ruined lies there. A small gasp leaves your mouth.

"I bought it that day after I stained yours. I was going to give this to you as an apology but dear lord, you were on my ass the second I got to class next day." Jeonghan speaks and a blush coats your cheek leaving you feel vulnerable all of a sudden.

"I don't know what to say," You whisper more to yourself. Jeonghan chuckles, "I know, you're touched. It's okay, we're even finally."

You bite your lip and exhale loudly before meeting his eyes, "Thanks." Jeonghan moves his hand in a dismissive wave. "I thought I'd finally give it you, call it a truce. We'll probably never see each other again after this month and I wanted to depart on good terms."

Your throat constricts, an overwhelming sadness enveloping you. He's right, you two would probably never see each other again. His dad owns a huge business and he'd probably go abroad to manage it.

"You're right, let's call it a truce," you whisper staring at the scarf in your lap.

"Come on now, don't look so sad, sad girl," Jeonghan teases you and you roll your eyes. He's still the same.

He hands you a beer, "Have a drink with me to sign the truce." You quietly laugh, taking the can from him. You two share a comfortable silence, staring at the night sky, the music from the party fading into the background until Jeonghan decides to break it.

"I know you like me, ___." The words slip past his lips like it's the most casual thing ever. You choke on your beer before looking at him eyes wide like saucers, "W-what!"

Jeonghan slightly turns to face you, his features calm, "You don't have to act. I've known all along."

Oh. My. God.

Heat spreads all over your face like wildfire. Your first thought is that Mingyu told him. You chew your lip as you see no way out. "W-who told you?" You squeak.

"I've figured it out myself," He says nonchalantly, resting his head on his hand as you stares at you.

"You-you did?"

"Mhmm."

You fumble with the hem of your dress before murmuring out, "I-I should get going." You need to escape him. Forever.

But Jeonghan isn't done. He casually goes on, "I've always thought you were pretty. Even when you get red after losing an argument." You blush furiously as your palms sweat.

"You know I really had no intention of picking a fight with you but you...you were so desperate to bring me down. You always speak too much and I often think about the many ways I could shut your loud mouth. Such a shame, we would've made a great couple."

Your face feels like it's on fire by now. You swallow before nervously laughing, "I s-see what you're doing here...You're trying to p-prank me, asshole."

Jeonghan runs a hand through his hair, sighing, "See? There you go again, running that damn mouth." Your lips press together as you clench your fists, thinking of a way out. In the blink of an eye Jeonghan scoots closer to you and leans in to capture your lips in a kiss.

A squeak leaves your mouth as Jeonghan tilts your head, cupping your cheek. You want to pull back, smack him, call him names but you can only moan as his mouth slots against yours perfectly. Your tongues clash as you grab a fistful of Jeonghan's shirt, moaning.

When you pull back for air, you're mortified, wanting to be swallowed up by the ground. Jeonghan is totally calm as he takes in your messy state licking his lips.

"Do you want to continue?"

"W-wh-what?"

"I said do you want to continue this? If you don't want to I'll leave. If you do then you're coming home with me. Which one is it gonna be, ___?"

You bite your lip. Oh my God. This can't be happening.

You grit your teeth as every ounce of your resolve disappears, "I...I want you."

The smile on Jeonghan's face is victorious, a smile you've seen million times before, a smile that makes you week in the knees. "Good girl." He says encasing your lips in another kiss before standing up holding out his hand. "Come along, sweetheart. I'm gonna ruin you for any other man. Even when it's morning you'll only be thinking about me," he whispers in your ear before tugging you out of the porch- your heart hammering in your chest as you squeeze the scarf on your hand.

Fuck, you owe Mingyu a fruit basket or some shit now.

A/N 2: Also, that video of Jeonghan exercising made me 🥵🥵 this man is so infurating. I was literally dehydrated from watching that video.

[flowered-mp3]

2021 tumblr year end review game

tagged by @aglassofpinkchampagne (thanks love <3)

rules: post the top 5 works you’re most proud of that you released this year (not necessarily your most popular), your top 4 current WIPs that you’re excited to release in the new year, your top 3 biggest improvements in your writing over the past year, your top 2 resolutions (ways you wish to improve your writing/blog) for the new year, and your number 1 favorite line you’ve written this year!

i wrote alot so i’m adding a cut to spare your dash lmao:

top 5 works i’m most proud of:

relevé: i’m sure you all know that this series is my BABY. my actual baby. i think that i started it in april 2021 and i have one part left. i didn’t think that anyone would read it because the genre is kinda specific imo, but i’m so happy to see that others are enjoying it as well! someone (ie. myself lol) has to compensate for the lack of yugyeom series on this platform smfh

flower-(ed): another fic that’s my baby. i worked so, so hard on this one. it was one the hardest fics i’ve ever written because of the amount of detail i wanted to include, but it was so worth it. i still remember the sweetest, kindest dm about this fic was sent by someone that i’ve been following for forever. i was really stressed out at the time and that single message got me to open up a word doc and start writing again. sometimes, i reread parts of that fic and i’m like damn. i kinda snapped on this one ngl lmao

covert: now this one. THIS ONE. i absolutely fucking love. i think that maybe the inspiration (the gambler mv) is why it’s my favourite. writing it was also relatively painless, and i just love how it came out. kihyun stans rise <3

nerves: ok so this one was born from a clip that i saw. i just. love how cute it is. not my longest piece of work but i really enjoy how i wrote the setting of it... just a warm and fuzzy read. great job @ myself lmao

duty: oh my fucking god i love this one. i reread it last week and i need to edit it again because the flow is kinda strange and the word choices could be better BUT i still love it. especially the beginning. yeah.

top 4 current WIPs i’m excited to release this year: (only mentioning two because i literally only have two wips, so i’m going to mention fic ideas for the last two points)

vermillion: ok i am so excited to get the first part out. i am so, so excited. i love everything about the premise. the setting. the delicious cliche tropes. just a chef’s kiss overall. i’ve wanted to write something like this for so long. at the beginning i thought that would be too ambitious for a rookie writer like me BUT for the last couple of months i’ve just been like, fuck it, you know? 

dawn: a hyungwon bday drabble because capricorn solidarity. that’s it

i want to write a regency au so bad. maybe for hyungwon or kihyun. perhaps, a secret dating trope for that one but nothing is drafted lol

a drabble about shownu enlisting. i’ve been missing him so much that i want to write one, but i have nothing drafted up :(

i’m also gonna add the finale of relevé. can’t wait to get that out for u all.

my top 3 biggest improvements in my writing over the past year:

flow: god, my writing used to be so fucking choppy, dawg. i still want to go back and edit my older stuff. i compare it to my writing now (like. distraction to vermillion pt. 1) and the improvement is just honestly? staggering in just the span of 10 months lol. 

consistency in using tenses: for some reason, i had so much trouble with deciding the tense for my fics at the beginning. i now write primarily in present tense because my brain hurts when i switch too much.

not relying on dialogue for story progression: i felt like i used to think that dialogue was the most effective way to make a story progress but i think that i’ve learnt to rely on it much less. because of this, i’m much more comfortable in writing a series now.

my top 2 resolutions when it comes to my blog/writing:

increase my word repetoire: stop. using. the. same. damn. words. have. some. variety. tbh i’m thinking of getting a dictionary app to give me a word of the day to fix this habit of mine lmao

consistency: i think that you guys probably know this by now, but i can go months of not writing and posting, then suddenly i post like, 2 to 3 things within a short amount of time. yeah i want to be more consistent.

my favourite line i’ve written this year:

from flower-(ed) pt. 3 (hard to pick because i love this this scene so much): Akin to a sharp stab of a freshly sharpened knife, it hits him in the chest without any warning. He’s unable to bear the sight of you so upset when he can’t do anything. The sensation spreads through him, indiscriminate and without regard; the urge to protect you and to care for you and to have you in his arms; wholly consuming his heart to such a degree that he can’t help but lean in, capturing your lips for a kiss.

tagging: @prettywordsyouleft @bruh-changbin ​ <3

[zmartiarty]

I saw "reunion" and I am already readying my clown hat because there are so many ways this could go but I guarantee I'm wrong XD

I want you to know that seeing your art put me in such a spin that it pretty much destroyed my art block. I've been sketching a whole bunch since then, and even got to start draft designs for a butterfly fairy DNF WIP I had in the works, because I saw that Dream's cloak was based on one. Thank you so much, I've wanted to mess with that idea for so long!!

I did have a question about your au though! I've seen so many George's in your style and thought they were from different aus but now I'm not so sure? I've seen mushroom George, "Dragon/Magpie" George and HD. I feel a bit lost though.

I know Dream's transformations are from the corruption but don't know what causes George's change from normal dude to cool ass angel.

Yay!! I'm very happy I could inspire you and sprinkle you with a dash of the magical mystical fairy dust of motivation :] <3

===

Ah yes, the many Georges.

Ok so, starting in May of this year I began working for 3 months straight on an entire c!George character design sheet, chronicling c!George's evolution as a character.

-The first in the lineup will be "Early dsmp George"

-The 2nd in the lineup is "King George" /w his Knight Dream

-The 3rd is "Forgotten King, Mushroom George"

-Then "Leader George" (He finally becomes the main character and steps up into c!Dream's former role as a leader.... like c!Dream always wanted) (I call George the 'Magpie' because HD's design is based on a magpie :D)

-And Finally, "GeorgeeeHD", the fated Dragonslayer...

In my hc, z!c!George's god form is awoken with the help of Angel!XD.

How this occurs is very slow, and very subtle. There isn't one particular incident that brings z!c!George back into godhood.

But with every lore-stream we get from George, I feel a bit of his mortality is chipped away, leaving behind the server god and operator HD.

---

This design sheet has been on hiatus as of late because of college, but it is 70% done. And I hope to have it finished by the end of the year, if not early 2022.

---

(Also I will try to use z!c!(insert character here) when referring to my hc versions of the characters)

[goose-books]

goose-books productions: a 2020 review

view the image in higher quality here! (open the image in a new tab to zoom in.) thank you to my dearest @yvesdot for the template

transcripts and month-by-month details under the cut! for reference, you can find my projects here :-) overall, new and old followers, thank you for another good year over here! [holds your hand] [holds your hand] [holds your hand] [holds your h

january

i spent late 2019-early 2020 working on 2019’s nano project, quark, aka the speculative fiction thing about new york city and prophets and dissections of the chosen one trope and gay people. quark is my second-oldest project (five years!), but it’s also probably the most ambitious, so it’s been... difficult to wrangle into place, and i didn’t end up finishing a first draft. oh, well.

enjoy a snippet that is devastatingly emblematic of everything about quark. the tone. the homoerotic tension. the ensemble cast all talking over each other. the fact that caelum has spent pretty much this entire scene crying. fun autopsy report meeting.

Marble stares at the notebook in Shade’s hands. Or maybe he’s staring at Shade’s hands. Dawn feels a little voyeuristic, so she does what she does and says a dumb and unrelated thing: “Augustus, I think this pizza-on-the-floor thing is hurting my ass.”

Augustus flutters his hands. “Sometimes nonconformity is painful.”

“At least we’re originals,” Caelum mumbles into his sleeve.

“Exactly,” Augustus says.

“True originality doesn’t exist,” Marble says.

“Oh,” Shade deadpans, “it’s going to be a fun autopsy report meeting.”

It isn’t.

february

in january i stressed myself out trying to make the plot of quark work. so in february, i decided to take some time and write something Entirely For Fun. like, entirely for fun, no rules. and. my god. how do i explain the project i started calling “third eye for the bad guy.”

it was an unholy mashup of many of my past hyperfixations, including the gone series, a tale of two cities, warrior cats, and the left hand of darkness. one of the characters was a canon scalie and one was a canon fictionkinnie. it centered around a polycule of wannabe-evil-overlord high schoolers. i only wrote like three chapters but i was lost in the sauce for all of february and then i just… like… wiped it from my mind and moved on? somehow??? one character was a werewolf and that literally wasn’t relevant at ALL

I.

Someone was going to die on these steps.

This had been Ivy Lee Palomo’s thought last year during the all-school photo, and it rose in her mind again now. The one hundred marble stairs leading up to the great double doors of Saint Constantine Academy were the school’s pride and glory, steep as the mountain, sharp as the blade under Ivy Lee’s skirt. With the cutting wind and snow glazing the stone more often than not, with the freshmen wild and wired on their first day of their first year, it was really only a matter of time before someone slipped and cracked their fucking head open.

It wasn’t going to be her. Not when she had Doc Martens and reflexes like an electric coil. Still. Ivy Lee didn’t want to watch someone die. She didn’t get along with dead people.

march

in march, i got back to the project i’d started in 2019 - AMT, my podcast! it’s a shakespeare retelling set in a modern high school; this excerpt is funnier and also more unnerving in context. (double, double, toil and trouble...)

INDRAJIT: What the hell are you doing?

[PAUSE.]

DEE (like she’s lying): Making pasta.

[ALL THREE OF THEM LAUGH.]

NONA: That’s right.

MORA: We have the keys to Mab’s office.

DEE: We’re using her stove.

NONA: To make pasta.

DEE: Do you want some?

[A TENSE PAUSE.]

INDRAJIT: No.

april

and darkling rears its head! all of my other projects have existed for at least a year; darkling (specfic king lear retelling) is... special. it was conceived in april, when i started hyperfixating on king lear, and i still managed to write an absolutely ridiculous amount of content for it. it was like the power of hyperfixation let me speedrun the entire process. which. okay.

iv: control

They say Cressida Stayer was nine years old when she turned her hair to gold. They laid her down in bed blonde, and the next morning, the waves cascading down her shoulders were solid metal, glinting harshly in the sunlight, weighing her down, creating that odd head-cocked expression she still wears now. Nine years old. Two or three years before most people develop enough magic skills to dye a single curl. Much less transfigure their hair into precious metal.

People also say Leovald Stayer’s immediate reaction was to hack it off her head and melt it down for cash. But generally they say that part a lot quieter.

may

in may i wrote AMT episode 15, by which i mean that in may there was a day when i sat in my room with the door shut for literally five straight hours listening to the same three songs on loop as i wrote the climax of one of the plotlines of AMT. so. that sure was… a day.

ISAAC: Do you want… do you want someone to drive you home? Hawk, you’re worrying me -

HAWK (almost cutting him off): Don’t. Don’t say that. I’m here to help. With your… thing.

ISAAC (quietly): I… don’t know if you should be here to see this.

HAWK (a little louder, more audibly upset): Well - what else am I going to do? Go home and - and have my dads talk at me and - and not be able to answer them? Because I can’t? I can’t. I don’t know what to say.

[PAUSE.]

ISAAC (V.O.): I wonder if this is what he feels like, on the outside, looking in at me. Watching someone else hurting. Helpless and afraid.

He still fits perfectly in my arms. I rest my chin on top of his head and pull him close to me, like I can stop him from shaking, like I can stop anything from happening the way I know it’s going to. I bury my face in his hair. He smells so familiar. He’s so warm.

God, Hawk. I love you so much. You shouldn’t be here to see this. Something bad’s gonna happen. And you’re not the kind of person who belongs in a tragedy.

june

okay, honestly, i should talk about “night shift” here, because in june i wrote a whole short story in one night (and then foamed over it for a week), but i am still in the process of submitting it places! so i am terrified to put even a sentence of it online. instead: the other thing i did this month was to finish AMT! (sixteen episodes and somewhere around 175k, iirc, but don’t quote me.) these lines are the opener to the final episode!

RAHMA (V.O.): The combined series of sophomore year disasters stretched through November. It’s June now. It’s taken me… a long time to get this all put together. I was going to make a vlog about it, initially - well, calling it a vlog sounds frivolous. I was going to make a video recounting the whole deal. All of it. From when I kissed Avery Fairchilde to the very last night. I scripted dozens of drafts; I put together dozens of bullet-pointed lists of what to cover… and it was never enough. Because Avery and I weren’t the only ones involved. Even if I was only focused on the two of us, it wasn’t just the two of us.

So… I gathered up everyone else. The whole town of Ellisburg is still talking about the week the town went crazy, but it wasn’t just a week. There was a lot leading up to it. And I think if anyone’s going to talk about it, it should be us. The people who lived it. So here we are. The most ambitious Rahma Ashiq production of all time - at least so far.

july

every july i pause whatever else i’m doing to celebrate the birthday of aurum & argentate, twins from my oldest and dearest WIP The Mortal Realm. july fifteenth! mark your calendars. they’re princes, though argentate would really rather not be; you can read the full birthday piece here.

“Do you… plan to get dressed?” A bit of the usual humor crept back into Aurum’s voice. “Although if you want to speak to the kingdom in your underthings, by all means, you have my full support.”

Argentate scrubbed at his face. He wasn’t dressed, no, but the usual malaise hung over his shoulders like a cloak. Guilt. Nerves. The sick sense that he hadn’t done something he was supposed to. The numb knowledge that it was too late to change a thing.

“I meant to,” he said. “Get dressed, I mean.” The rest went unsaid: I have just been sitting here. On the floor. Thinking about how I should get dressed.

“Ah,” Aurum said, extending his hand. “The traditional route. We’ll save the nude speeches for the future, then.”

Argentate took his hand, stumbling a little as Aurum pulled him to his feet. He steadied himself on the closest wall, taking a few deep breaths. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. His hands found their way to the cross, again and again.

august

this summer, i wrote an entire draft of Valentine Van Velt is Dead, AKA “holden caulfield goes to exposure therapy,” AKA the weird little personal side project i keep tucked into my coat. interesting features include second-person narration from a narrator who doesn’t like the main character all that much. so reading it is kind of like the book wants to kill you? with an added dash of general melancholy.

You used to live here. That’s the thing that’s got you feeling so off.

You didn’t recognize your old house. I mean, you kind of did. You remembered that the road was on a hill. That hill felt like a goddamn forty-five degree angle when you were a kid. But if you didn’t have the address written down you wouldn’t have known it at all. It would have been just another little suburban house in rows of perfect little towns that make your skin crawl.

So now you’re in this diner looking out a gross smudgy window trying to block out the elevator music pumping through the speakers in the ceiling or whatever. I don’t know how speakers work. You’re trying to tune that shit out. The waitress comes over and catches you by surprise so you just point at some coffee thing on the menu so she’ll go away. For the record: you don’t drink coffee.

There’s a public library across the street. A little square building. You probably used to go there. The lady comes over and thunks your coffee on the table and gives you a kind of look, like she wants to know what in the goddamn hell you think you’re doing here and not at school. You sip your coffee and look out the window until she leaves you alone again. And then you spit it back into the cup because, for the record: you don’t drink coffee.

september

i spent september and october prepping for nano, so i was mostly working on darkling...

It’s late spring; still, at this time of night, on a rooftop, there’s a chill. The wind plays with the end of Ruby’s coat, with her hair. She hands the bottle off to Jasper, stares up at the fogged-over sky, wishes she were lying in Dany’s arms in Dany’s bed instead of here. Wishes, even, that Dany were the one on the roof with her. At least then they’d be cold together. At least then she wouldn’t have to imagine what Dany would say; she could just listen, and watch Dany’s flashing smile and her flinty eyes.

(She cuddles. This is another thing Dany does that Dany probably shouldn’t do, based on everything about Dany; it’s not like rattlesnakes cuddle. But Dany likes to nuzzle into Ruby’s side and rest her head on Ruby’s collarbones and toss an arm over Ruby’s chest, and hold her down like she’s worried she’ll float off somewhere. She’ll card her fingers through Ruby’s hair and hum. Even though they could get caught, even though she’s probably got better places to be - Dany cuddles.)

Ruby imagines it, momentarily, both of them on the roof together, sprawled like horrifyingly beautiful gargoyles, sharp teeth flashing, blood running hot. Up here - it’d be like they ruled the world.

But whatever. Jasper’s fun. He’s hot. He’s got a sharp tongue in a lot more ways than one. And she likes when he lets the mask down. She likes seeing the soft bits underneath. She wants to sink her teeth and nails into them so hard she draws blood. Masks don’t bleed. Ruby would know; that’s why she is what she is.

october

...though i was also in creative writing class in school, and thus ended up writing a bunch of poems of varying quality (my teacher had a real thing for poetry) and also one darklingverse short story where rory and cressida hold hands! which you can find here.

Lorelai Rory Flowers is afraid of thunder.

This is a bit of an embarrassing thing to admit, as they’re seventeen (“at least seventeen,” they like to tell people, “maybe two hundred, who’s to say?”) and generally wise beyond their years, or whatever it is that adults say about kids with too much psychological baggage. Being afraid of thunder is not a very wise-beyond-one’s-years trait. And yet the state of affairs remains: loud noises make Rory want to melt into the earth. Back when they still went to school, even the fire alarm sent them scuttling under their desk to hide.

Right now, in the elevator, all they can do is shrink into their sweater.

They haven’t let go of Cressida’s hand yet.

november

and then november of course was nano which was an adventure all the way through. (opening tumblr on the fifth day of nano to find out about d*stiel... was something.)

“Apologize to me. Or get out of my house.”

Gracen’s voice is very, very low. For a moment she thinks he hasn’t heard her at all. Then he spins, eyes blazing. “What did you say?”

Gracen watches her own chest heave. She pushes herself up off the desk, stands with the effort of pushing a mountain off of her back. Leovald is six-foot-four. Gracen is six-foot-two. In her heels, in the heels she must wear to be a professional woman, to be a lady - they are the same height.

Gracen wipes her nose. When she lowers her arm, there’s a streak of blood across the back of her hand. Fire shivers in her chest; her heart rings in her ears; her voice could cut steel.

“I said,” she says, low, slow, volume building, “apologize to me. Or get. Out. Of. My. House.”

december

and finally, the poem i posted this year! it’s called the beast sonnet, and you can find it in its own post over here (with commentary! how sexy.)

i kill the beast and drop down to my knees, my blade stained dark with blood of stygian hue, and for a moment these scarred hands shake free, and hold a world unfurled for me anew. but once-mourned victims, victors, vices find; fear winged me; now its absence strips me bare. my sword now dulls, my legs, my voice, my mind; the beast, pried from my throat, leaves no skill there. and still i hear it laugh, O DEVOTEE— O CHILD DEAR, NO GLORY WITHOUT ME.

i was quite productive this year; i have to think it was because i was avoiding things... the peak of my productivity happened over the summer and in november, AKA, college app hell. (almost done with the last applications! pray for me.)

a general breakdown of what occupied me this year:

(no, i don’t know why the “various other things” category ended up so large... i blame all the one-off projects i wrote a single page for, and also whatever the fuck happened in february. yes, i do know why it looks hideous; it’s because each of my WIPs has a theme color

thank you once again for spending some time at goose-books dot gov this year! what to expect for next year: well, i very much hope i can produce AMT... also hoping to get darkling ready for beta readers, so keep your eyes out!

[mimiscappinisideblog]

I've got this idea for sometime now and I know I'll never gonna do anything with this so I'll share it with you all.

If any of you wants to do something with this shit be my guest. Btw this is some selfindulgent shit.

This has been in my drafts for months.

_________________

A friday night out with your friends. Just your average group of people in a bar drinking and enjoying eachothers company.

This bar was one of your favorites because of the ambient, not too classy and just enough of that calmly home feeling to make you feel warm and welcome.

Not to mention the live music playing every night. Each artist bringing a little of their soul to play off on that stage where all the patrons were able to see and listen.

You suggested this specific bar to your friends because of one thing, the drinks were really good and not too expensive, and maybe also because friday nights a certain musician came in to play it's a posibility. Okay, it was only for him who are you kidding.

You frequented that bar enough times to know that he came every friday to sing a couple of songs then he'd have one or two beers before leaving.

By this time you already knew who he was, the barman told you he teaches music in an after school program that originated from Horace Green. The barman already knew of your little crush on him and was trying to get you to try and talk to him but you were too shy of a loser to actually go and say hi to him.

One of your friends shooked you out of your thoughts and handed you your drink, she saw your distant stare.

"You alright there dub? You seem distracted." she asked with concern in ver voice.

"Which is funny considering you were the one that bring us here. You wanna leave already or something?" another one chimes in.

"No, no. I'm fine." you said trying to compose yourself for them "I was just thinking, nothing to worry about." you hope they buy it and not press more on the matter that you were expecting someone intenly watching the front doors. "what were you guys talking about?"

You try to jump in the conversation but out of the corner of your eye you see the doors open.

And then you see him.

Dewey Finn, the man who's been running on your mind the whole day in anticipation for this moment. The man who sends you a thousand buttlerflies everytime you hear his melodic voice singing. He's fanally here.

He goes to do a little chat with the barman. Your eyes focus on him for a little too long. Long enough for you not to notice that your friends were also looking at you and thanks to your staring they noticed Dewey as well.

They all excange knowing looks that were only confirm by every second that passed and you were still staring at the poor unsuspecting guy.

A witress blocks your view of the musician bringing your table some food.

"So..." your friend adressed you after the waitress was gone and you started to dig in "Were you going to go talk to him or just stare at his back whole night?"

Taking in the question you suddently notice you're the center of attention, all eyes were on you "What are you talking about?" you said trying to play dumb.

"Come on, everybody saw the way you were undressing the guy at the front bar. A little bit more staring and you'd drill holes on the back of his neck"

"Please. She was totally looking at his butt. No way the holes were going to end up in his head" your face was aflame, pretty sure they all could see your red blush even with the caramel lights of the place.

"No I wasn't" you insist "I was just looking at the different drinks they have on the menu posted on tbe wall. Might wanna try something new"

"Something new... Like the guy with the guitar at the front bar?" They kept at it.

There was no escape, they won't let you go out of this. You know very well they'll keep it up until you confessed to them, which you were known to avoid at all costs.

With a deep breath you finish the glass you were still holding onto and stood up "I wasn't staeing at him, if you don't believe me I don't care. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to the bathroom" you really needed some cold water on your hot-red face.

Meanwhile Dewey went on stage to get his things ready, so when the barman was free he took a stroll to the table you and your friends were at.

He told your friends all they needed to know about your little 'dilema' with Dewey and that he tried effortlessly to get you two together.

He left your table after that and went back to work. Your friends were estatic, comming up with ideas of what to do with you.

And they got one, you were fucked... Well they hope you get fucked at least.

Just as you came back from the bathroom the sound of guitar strings being played sorrounded you. Sweet honey filled your ears and your heart fluttered when Dewey started to sing.

You were so dumb stroked you didn't even notice your friend on your right gave you a full glass of beer.

So entranced with the music and musician you downed the whole thing before the song was over.

Dewey usually sang three songs each night.

By the time he finished you were three full glasses down.

You were, by no means, drunk you had enough acohol in your sistem just to be in a "overconfident" mode.

So overconfident that you let out a "That guy is so fucking cute" loud enough for your friends to hear.

They all wore matching grins.

The plan comming into play.

"You know, you should go an tell him" one friend on your right tells you.

"Haha I can't do that" you said laughing at the idea of just going and talk to him.

"What's the matter? Are you scared?" everybody howls at that.

Oh they did not just implied that you are scared of something like that. Overconfident you was scare of nothing!

"I am not scared!" you kind of shout.

"Oh yeah? Go and tell him you think he's cute then!"

"Fine I will!" and you march for were Dewey was.

He was sitting on a bar stool looking at his phone while drinking.

At the middle of the way your shy self rised up over your overconfident one and scramed at you. What were you doing?! How do you talk to him? How in the world are you going to tell him he's cute?? This was a bad idea.

While your mind was debating your feet didn't seem to care and continued on their way.

By the time you finally decided you were going to turn around and go back to your table a voice surprised you.

"Hi. Can I help you with anything?" you look up and see. See him.

You never got this close to him before, barely two feet away. He had beautiful brown eyes. Eyes that were looking right at you waiting for an answer. Oh shit you had to answer! Your brain scattered and was looking for what to say. Think of something!

You felt eyes on your back too. Then you remembered your friends. Your friends. They fucking knew! Oh, shit they knew. How?

Making up a lie you answer Dewey "Oh, hi! Yeah, I- I'm just here because my friends kinda made me? Would you fake talking to me for a while until they calm out?" you shoot him a smile you hope seals the deal and he believes you.

"Of course. I mean, I wouldn't have to "fake it" if we just small talk, right?" oh my god his smile was brigth enough to lift your worries and made you forget everything around you.

You just smile like a dork at him, standing in front of him not sure what to do with your hands.

Everything was going okay, mindless banter of the wheater, music. It was perfect!

But your friends weren't buying it, they knew you were staling. So one of them shouts at Dewey "SHE THINKS YOU'RE CUTE!"

You freeze. Well this is it. I'm going to die after I kill my friends.

You were going to make a run for it when you hear "Is that true?"

Looking at Dewey you felt silent for a minute.

"Do you really think I'm cute?" that genuine smile catched you off guard.

Enough to make you speak without thinking "Of course I do! You're hella cute" Were did that come from?

He just giggles at that. Is he... Is he dashful? This man is going to be the death of you!

"Why, thank you!" he takes a good look at you "You're pretty cute too" and he sends you a wink.

Now you think he's gonna be the death of you.

How fucking dare he make your heart stop for a second. And that wink made your legs tremble. You were so fucked.

"Wow, um. Thanks a lot! I'm gonna go now. My friends are waiting-" right when your body started to move he speaks.

"Wait! Won't you like to sit with me for a bit? I mean if it's no trouble. I understand if you don't, it's okay" just when you thought he couldn't get any cuter here he is, trying to make you stay. You were going to die.

"You're so kind but my friends-" you can't finish because of a voice shouting over you again.

"GO SIT WITH HIM! YOU WILL BE FINE!"

Dewey laughs at that and your reaction.

Whe you get your hands on your friends they'll!!-

"I guess you'll be staying with me for a while" Dewey says with a smile, beckoning you to sit next to him. And you do.

_____________

That's all I got. I don't know how to continue.

The plot was that he also noticed you when he performed at the bar. Then the sexy times happens.

But I can't write so all I have is this

Okay, bye.

[fistsoflightning]

stories you want to write...

...but for some reason haven’t yet.

tagged by: @to-the-voiceless​!!! thank you cyan for giving me the opportunity to dump out my slightly dusty idea doc onto everyone’s dash sdgsndfnsdfn

tagging: hmmm... @windupnamazu​ (double tag yes yes) @whitherliliesbloom​ @windup-dragoon​ @heirsofdiscord​ @ancientechos​ and you! as you can see, i like fic concepts >:3c

1) okay, so. there’s a section of my idea doc that’s labeled ‘azim steppe shenanigans’ because i Can and Will rewrite as much of the azim steppe MSQ as i please including characterization (yes i’m looking at magnai) ANYWAYS. top idea of the list, which is also the one i want to write The Most, is the naadam duty rewrite! catch me on the ‘why is the wol the khagan of a land they probably don’t even belong to’ train, more news on how zaya and oktai beat up hien at 11. or whenever i get around to writing it since it has Combat and i’m. not the best at it. honorable mentions to the pre-canon sadu, magnai, and zaya tearing through bardam’s mettle fic and the solar eclipse remix that i don’t currently have the energy for ;W; sorry oktai and magnai you’ll have to reside in “are we actually. dating.” hell for a bit longer

2) second on this list is the ‘ysayle lives’ fic!!! honestly there is a whole ass series sitting in my idea doc that also includes moenbryda, papalymo, and maaaybe bad-end flavored minfilia lives? but the ysayle one is like. 60% done but i need to trash and restart since i don’t. like it that much. highlights include: ysayle but a little more dragon flavored, separation of iceheart vs. ysayle, and gratuitous earth imagery versus the ice of coerthas

oh god okay im sticking the rest under a cut this got. Long

3) there is also a section of my doc labeled ‘angst elie isn’t allowed to have as a treat’ because at this point all of mom squad deserves to swing a bat straight for my head, buuut the idea i’m looking at is lightwarden au related! funtimes. ehsk al, anyone? (yes that means either promised love or love’s promise in dragonspeak. yes there’s a reason for this.) the line keeping this idea’s spot is: “ thancred climbs up mt. gulg one final time to meet the mourning dragon.” :)))

4) i want to go more into the various different cultures of my wols!!! i detest the lack of ala mhigan lore (monk lore too. i’m Salty about SB) which is why i haven’t gone into dewah’s family that much but i have an idea and some minor worldbuilding in the making? there’s also lumelle, whose emotions on ishgard are (as all emotions are) complicated, and zaya, who hasn’t been home in a literal decade give or take. i have to think real hard for it tho sdgnsdfsd that’s why they’ve been collecting dust for months.

4.1) the amount of hrothgar and viera lore is also criminal. don’t make me homebrew more lore squeenix give us Actual Lore. duscha and valdis deserve More.

5) okay i. i am very embarrassed by this but i have a longfic draft for a fic that at this point legally has to be tagged “slow burn, if by slow burn you mean 18 years” whenever i finish enough to be able to start posting it and YES ITS ZAYA AND THANCRED. 

yeah. i know. this has been haunting me since ffxivwrite last year-ish. it is also very D U S T Y but it has about 15 different ideas i’ve just mass dumped into it and i despise it and myself. additionally some ardbert feelings slipped into the SHB bits and i’m. maybe unrequited ardbert/zaya.... mayhaps

6) i love carbuncles and i love dt’s writing about the carbuncles which may have led to the thought bunny “what if: black opal carbuncle for zaya’s nameday” and it has haunted me but since zaya’s nameday in real time was a day off from the 5.3 drop it promptly got buried under all the ideas i got from 5.3

7) SPEAKING OF 5.3 CONTENT: carmela predicted correctly that i would like the ‘you’re a long way from home, moogle’ interaction you get if you choose the option that has kupo when talking with thancred and i’m possessed. i want to write something surrounding zaya’s honorary postmoogle title and thancred finding out they spent three weeks delivering eorzea’s mail.... there’s a bunch of canon rewrites but for multiple WOLs i’d like to do but i’m Tired

8) rhmrhrr.... AU time! main street au is still haunting my bones and i want to write more because mom squad spent like. an hour talking about how it’s just like dime store romance fiction amassed into an entire au and there’s a certain flowershop romance i need to write >:3 there’s also the ol’ CHB AU hanging around Somewhere and a very small part of me that craves to keep writing hanahaki au which is just slowburn 2.0

9) OH WAIT. i have Exactly One idea that’s mostly npc-based which is just me having feelings about the going-ons of norvrandt before the WOL is summoned, mostly revolving around ryne/baby-filia which i think? will have four parts? it’s really just me worldbuilding with norvrandt and having a great time. i scribbled down a beginning to try and shake off some rust (it did not really work) but:

10) honorable mention goes to the ‘zaya, thancred, and co. give ryne a nameday celebration despite her not really having a nameday’ idea and to this, which never fails to give me a chuckle when i read it in my idea doc:

[writers-hes]

falling -- sequel to cherry

based on a request by anon ! i decided to make a sequel / prequel thing for cherry and this fic will definitely be confusing with the time jumps and etc ! the story takes place in harry’s point of view, three months after you broke up. the dashes will help as guide. 

please don’t forget to leave a feedback! 

if you haven’t read cherry yet, you can read it here.  if you want to be a part of my taglist, like/reblog this post. 

don’t forget that requests are open! this may be the final instalment to the cherry universe but i can make a third instalment if i get enough requests. 

thank you so much and enjoy !

WARNING: unedited + cussing + mentions of alcohol

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

it’s been three months since Harry decided to break things off with you. It was a mutual decision but it still hurt knowing that you could be out there, with a new man. That was always you—trying to use the remainder of the love that you had for someone on someone else. He regretted it and he wanted you back. He wanted nothing more but for you to call him, telling him you wanted he back and if you did—if the universe permitted it, if you called, he would go to you, in france and knock on your door with his knees on the floor. 

he never believed in signs but he was asking for one now—he was so fucking desperate. he missed you and loved you. if it was possible, his love grew more and more each day even if you were gone. it was impossible to think that you would love him more. the thought of you with someone else under the sheets, you kissing somebody else that wasn’t him, sent him into overdrive. he’s been writing songs about you since you called things off and it’s too much—he would always go to the studio in tears and leave in tears. he was so hurt, so fucking hurt. he ruffled his hair. he was currently in his london home, a place where you once were. his living room was reeking of alcohol and his back hurt from staying idle on his sofa the whole day. he just got back from shang ri-la malibu. jeff and mitch told him to take a break and he agreed.

he opened his phone and opened his messages app. he scrolled until he found your name, clicking on it and reading the unsent text message he’s been dying to send you. he can’t, though. you seemed to be looking at your best, your friends posting photos of you. your smile was still beautiful, it will always be.

hello. i thought of you today but i’ve been think about you everyday and will probably do so till i die. 

i just got back home here in london and i noticed that your things are here anymore. it seems like it’s just me, harry all alone again. the room is barren of you ever being here. i tried to smell the bedsheets in hopes to smell you but there wasn’t any. i also rummaged through my closet, wanting to find one of your old shirts that i could put over your favourite pillow just to feel you here but i didn’t find any. the only proof that you were here was your letter to me and i’m still hurt. still hung up over you, still drowning my senses in alcohol. 

i love how you made sure i wasn’t home when you packed your bags. anyway, the keys to my house will still be where you know it was, under the welcome mat, so you know that you’re always welcome here. 

tears cascaded from his eyes and he couldn’t stop sobbing. should he press send and wait for you to call back? was it worth the risk? was it worth the humiliation if you decided not to call? he had to take a breather first. he’s drunk and all he wanted was for you to scold him about the dangers of alcohol poisoning. all he wanted in that moment was for you to give him a glass of water and light up your favourite lavender candle so he could slowly drift off to sleep but he couldn’t even fucking find the candle. you took it with him and he wishes to be sober so he could remember that particular lavender scent that you loved dearly. 

he hated you, suddenly. how dare you compare him to adrien? how could he ever compare? you told him you loved him but still managed to tell him you loved adrien too? was this all a joke to you? he drifted to sleep, embraced by the brown liquor on the coffee table. he just wanted you back, was that too much to ask? 

he wasn’t thinking clearly the next day. the sunlight that streamed through his window was too bright. there was a pounding in his head and he knows that if you were here with him, you’d fix him your favourite hangover breakfast. his shoulders slumped, if there was a way for it to be even more slumped. your favourites became his favourites and his favourites became yours. why couldn’t you be where he was? all he wanted that morning was your açai bowl but he couldn’t have that because you weren’t there to freeze the bananas. he was so dependent on you and it was killing him knowing that you would never be in his arms again. tears running down his face he decided he wanted to go to versailles and ask for your forgiveness. do you still love him even after three months? 

———

it was the day after and he was in versailles, staying at a hotel near your apartment. he could still remember your floor and your room number. he just had to make sure that you were home. he was tired and dull from the flight but knowing that you’d be with him in a few hours was enough for him. the excitement and the anxiety that courses through his veins was more powerful than coffee. how have you been? did you cut your hair? did you change your hair colour? did you change the way you dress or do you still dress the way harry does? do you still like your coffee sweet and milky? what about your tea? do you still like it with a slice of lemon and a teaspoon full of honey? 

as he was unlocking his phone, he noticed a huge amount of notifications that bombarded his phone. it was usually like this but he had more than usual and he didn’t post anything for three months. so what was this? he decided to check it out, only to see pictures of you with another man. your lips was touching his lips and for a moment, harry was dumbfounded? did you really move on that fast? 

HARRY STYLES’S EX-GIRLFRIEND HAS MOVED ON! 

words that made him see red. words that he didn’t know was coming so quickly. did you even love him? he opened his imessage app and erased the draft that he was about to send you last night? god, he couldn’t believe he was about to profess his love for you last night while you were probably out and about fucking another man. 

mon bébé: Hey, y/n. Where are you love?

lovie: hi im at my apartment right now.. why?

mon bébé: Do you think I could come over? I need someone to talk to. 

lovie: what??

mon bébé: I’m here in Versailles. Please. 

lovie: okay sure…i’ll wait for you. 

mon bébé: Okay. I love you. 

his heart ached when you didn’t reply to his message. he immediately dressed himself in your favourite shirt of his—a shirt that you got him while you were studying abroad for an exchange student program. he was hoping that maybe, by seeing a shirt that you got him, you’d break up with your beau and have him back instead. he was hurt, angry, and perhaps, it was pride that was making him get out of the hotel and go to you. he wanted to hurt you the way you hurt him and as he arrived at your door in less than an hour later, hurting you was his only goal. 

he knocked on your door three times and lo and behold, there was you. you smiled at him and opened the door wider. he went inside, removing his shoes before entering your apartment. he observed that there were no changes around the place but he did feel out of place.

“heard you moved on, huh?” he asked. you were shocked. “wha—“

“i saw the pictures, y/n,” “harry, if you’re here to shit on my decisions…stop it, please,” you whispered. you didn’t want to let him know this way.

“no, no…it’s only been three months! who is he? how did you two meet?” he asked you. he was fuming. how could you move on so quickly?

“harry, stop—“

“i. want. to. know.” he breathed. there was finality in his voice and you couldn’t help but mutter his name. “vincent? shit name, yeah?” he asked. 

“harry, please. stop it,” you begged. he wasn’t listening and perhaps you deserved this. perhaps he was right but you needed someone and vincent just managed to be there for you. 

“remember when…remember when you told me you loved me, y/n? was that even true? how can you move on so quickly? please…please tell me. tell me how you did it because i’d love to do it, too,” he was crumbling in front of you and you reached out to him. he scoffed and your attempt and backed away. 

“it was true, harry. i still love you—always have, always will but…” “but what? can’t we fix what we had? i miss it, lovie. i miss you. do you call him bébé too? please, don’t do this to me, please.” he cried. “there’s no stopping us now. i’m not on tour anymore and i’m willing to be better for you…” “i’m with him, harry. he…asked me to be his girlfriend yesterday and i said yes,” you whispered. he looked at you so fast you were afraid he was about to get a whiplash. tears were coming out from both of your eyes and you were so close to opening that stupid fucking phone and breaking things off with vincent but it was unfair for him. 

“break up with him.” he said. you looked at him with a gaping mouth. how could he just ask that of you? the break was a mutual decision but he was the one who insisted it. 

“harry—“

“break up with him, y/n or i’ll—“

“what, harry? what will you do?”

“i’ll hate you,” he looked down at his hands, ashamed of what he even said. he was hurt and he could tell that you were torn and that you were hurting. a sadistic part of him loved it. he wanted to hug you and say that he was sorry and that he didn’t mean it but peeking through his long hair, seeing that you were closing and opening your mouth like that, he loved it. he liked it. 

“you—you don’t mean that, harry. please tell me you don’t hate me, please.” you begged. harry heard it and you heard it too. it was obvious that you were choosing vincent over him. 

“i’ll see myself out, then,” he smiled sadly. he got up from where he was sitting and you immediately stood up.

“harry, please. don’t leave like this. please, don’t hate me…i still love you,” you begged. you loved him but you couldn’t be with him right now. 

“that’s the fucking thing, y/n!” he fumed. “you tell me you love me and that you’ll be there for me whenever i needed you but where were you? i was drunk in london last night trying to figure out the brand of your candles just so i could feel closer to you. i booked a flight here in versailles just to see you and beg for you to come back but you left me with that fucking letter. that’s all there is. you didn’t leave anything for me to remember you by. i wanted to have your shirt last night so i can put it over your pillow so i could pretend that you were still there, with me, under the sheets. you—let go of us so easily,” he sobbed. he was tugging on his hair and you reached for it. touching his hands ever so slightly but he pushed you away. “don’t.” he warned. “i hate you so much…so, so much,” he cried. he loved you but he had to convince himself otherwise. it would make all of this easier. 

“we can still be friends, harry.” you offered. tears were running down on your face and you wiped them. 

“i can’t…hurt myself like that, y/n. i’m leaving the hotel tomorrow at 9 a.m. you can come by our place before that if you still want to be with me. until then, i will be waiting.” he mumbled. he walked until he was right in front of you. he cradled your face with his right hand, rings cold against your hot skin. “i love you,” he reminded as he pecked your lips softly for one last time before leaving your room. 

———

harry said that he would be leaving his hotel at 9:00 am to be at your place—a little nook in the busy streets of versailles that served his favourite macarons. he was lying, though. he got up at 6 am and left the hotel at around 7:30 am. it was currently 8 and he was anxiously waiting for you. until what time should he stay? he wouldn’t be leaving france in another two days. he was hoping you’d come back and spend more time with hime but that plan’s down the drain now. he got you your favourite box of macarons and looking at it, he remembered the first time you took him here so vividly. 

———

“ah! i can’t believe you’re here, harry!” you gushed. he had a short break before touring again and he decided to surprise you with some of the souvenirs he got you from his touring. it’s only been two months since you both started dating but you both knew that whatever the feeling was was real. 

“where are you taking me?” he chuckled. you were currently dragging him onto the streets of versailles. he was wearing a mickey mouse sweater and some jeans paired with some old skool sneakers. you loved seeing him off-duty and he knew that. 

“i’m taking you to my favourite place in all of france!” you exclaimed. he smiled at you and he knew in that moment that he loved you. you walked around for a few minutes until you arrived at a lesser-populated area in versailles. you went inside one of the buildings and was immediately greeted by the smell of the concoction made from almond flour, fruits, cream, and chocolate. 

“sit over there, baby. i’ll go get us some food,” you told harry. he nodded and let go of your hand. you watched as he sat somewhere secluded. you went over to the counter and immediately and smiled at the old lady. “bonjour! i would love to get…ah, two cafe au lait and then one tea macaron, cherry macaron, lemon meringue macaron, chocolate macaron, and rose macaron,” the lady nodded and you smiled, taking out some loose cash from your messy purse. a few minutes after and the lady gives you your order. you smiled at her and mumbled a “merci” after paying for the bill. you immediately made a beeline towards harry and set down the food and coffee you got him. 

“what’s all this?” he asked, looking at the assortment of deliciousness in front of him. “macarons! when my mother and my father first moved here in versailles from their hometown, she said that my father took her here on their first date. when she found out she was pregnant with my older brother, oliver, my dad got her some macarons here, same when she was pregnant with me. buying macarons here became a family tradition and it’s really special to me and i want to show it to you,” you smiled softly. you watched him smile even wider. “i bought my favourite flavours for you to try! i like dipping it in coffee but it’s just a personal preference,” you told him. 

harry was really happy that time. he remembered how you spent the afternoon just talking about your plans for the future as he ate macarons. 

“harry?” you called. “hm?” he mumbled through his second lemon meringue macaron. “i took you here because i wanted to tell you something,” you blushed. harry was confused. were you about to break up with him? it’s been wonderful between the both of you so he doesn’t get it. why would you break up with him? “w-what is it?” he asked, clearly anxious to hear what you were about to say. “well, you see, the thing is my mother always told me to bring those who are special to me in this place, bébé. and well, uh—i guess what i want to say is that…i love you.” 

“look, y/n, please don’t break up with—what? what did you say?” he started to ramble, realising what you just told him so late. “i said, i love you,” you shyly admitted. you looked at his face to find a big smile creeping up on his face. “really? i was thinking about it on my way here and i—i love you too, y/n.” he declared. it was a nice day after that—a day you won’t forget. 

———

“harry!” you panted. you ran from your apartment to the macaron shop. you hair was sticking on your face. when you arrived, you observed harry—it was a natural thing to do and he looked like he was about to cry. you knew why. this was the place where you first declared your love for each other. harry already ordered your favourite lemon meringue macarons and your usual cafe au lait. you smiled sadly. harry looked up to you and offered you a little wave. you walked slowly to him, scared that he would tell you that he hated you again. 

“y/n,” he breathed as you approached him. you sat in front of him and he hated how much he loved you in that moment. he will love you always. “harry—please, please don’t hate me,” you cried. it was obvious that you were crying since he left you last night. you looked like a mess, dark circles were under your eyes, and your eyes were swollen from crying yourself to sleep. before you got to harry, you cried a little bit more. 

“baby, i could never hate you. i’m sorry if i told you those things last night. but…i just wanted another chance. i want another chance, please.” he told you. the sweetness of the macarons wafting in the air was a stark contrast to how the both of you were feeling. he was torn—he didn’t want to be a selfish prick but he wanted you all to himself. “harry, you know i can’t. not right now,” you told him. it was unfair to vincent and it was unfair to you.

“why not? i know you have vincent right now…but do you really love him more than you love me? i’ve been with you for more than a year….you just met him,” he reasoned. “it was you who wanted things to be over between us, remember?” you reminded him. he was sat in his chair, mouth agape. “i said i was okay with it because it seemed to be the right thing for you, harry. you were so set on it because we were just hurting each other and i get that—i really do but i just started to pick myself up…” you cried. “well, i take it all back! you can move in with me in london so you wouldn’t have to worry about me cheating on you and…and i forgive you, please just—i don’t know how to fix this, y/n. just tell me what to do, please…” he begged. he was crying, too. how could he do this to you? how could he put you in such an unfair situation? you only told him about adrien because he cheated on you. after that night, the both of you were just trying to mince your words, walking on eggshells. 

“we weren’t being honest after that night, harry. when you cheated on me and i said things, i was hurt and so were you. you were guilty and so was i but we tried to make it work because we loved each other,” you told him. you reached out for his hand on the table and he allowed you to caress it, just like how you did. “you still love me right?” he asked. you nodded. “i still love you…that’s enough, isn’t it? i love you and you love me…right? love, please…” “harry, you can’t do this to me. not right now, not like this,” you backed. “love isn’t enough sometimes, harry…”

“fuck, y/n! then what the fuck am i supposed to do? tell me? i miss you everyday and love you always. i’m always missing you and there’s nothing i could do about it. every time i go somewhere to forget you, i see someone who looks just like you and then, i miss you again,” he sobbed, clinging on to your hand—clinging on to you in hopes for you to come back. “i hate you, i hate you so much…” he repeated over and over again. “y—you don’t mean that, harry. take it back,” you begged. you were crumbling in front of him. you knew it wasn’t true but it still hurt. the possibility of harry hating you was too much pain. “i don’t want to be your friend, y/n. i don’t want to hear you talk about how great that fucking prick is. if you can’t be with me then don’t be with me at all,” he scoffed. 

“please, don’t tell me you hate me,” you begged. “you know what, y/n? actually, i do. i hate you so much…” he said, the four letter-word leaving a bad taste in his mouth. he was trying to convince himself that he did, even though he thought of you as the only thing binding his world together. he was so hurt because you were getting better and he was selfish. he wanted you to be as miserable as him. he wanted you to cry over him the way he cried over you. he watched as you fall apart, rubbing your eyes furiously, as you tried your best to stop the tears from falling. he wanted nothing more than to kiss your pain away but he couldn’t. you had vincent and he had no one. he used to have you but how could he have you if you have somebody else now? you stood up from the chair trying your best to run away from harry. how could he be so cruel to you? 

you were making your way through the door hastily without acknowledging the prying eyes around you. you were so set on leaving, not caring if harry ran after you or not. perhaps he wouldn’t, perhaps he would. 

harry was at your usual table, wiping his tears away, covering his eyes with the sunglasses you bought him. did you even notice that he was wearing what you gave him? did you notice that he was wearing your sunglasses? or were you too preoccupied with how he hurt you? he decided to stay in his seat until you were out of sight. 

only then, did he decide not you. he immediately followed after you until he saw you, cradling your phone in your hands. you were sitting at a bus stop, waiting for whatever, probably to get as far away as possible from your ex-boyfriend. he wanted to approach you but he didn’t when he heard you say his name. 

“vincent, please pick me up…i’m at the bus stop near le fatalité macaron, please. nothing big, i’m just upset, something came up and no, no, i want to get away here as soon as possible, mon cherie. please.”

perhaps you were better off without him. 

———

the album finally dropped. did you listen to it? what do you think of it? as he lay down in the hotel where he stayed in versailles, he wanted nothing more than to call you and ask for your opinion. yours was the only opinion that mattered. he reached over the table until he took a hold of his phone. he looked at your name longingly before he decided to press ‘call’. he was staring into space when he heard your voice. 

“cou cou! harry?” 

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

sorry for the french, i asked my friend to translate it,,,, don’t forget, a christmas-themed fluff fic will come out next week! 

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@giitterysuits @bree082 @dezzym17 @bouncebackbyers @lolapuffs @belleamoree @demolition-lovers-blog

[magicalhideoutengineer]

Nobody expected Johnny Depp to send those photos, though in retrospect they probably should have.

Director David Yates was finishing filming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when the images arrived in his email. Depp had yet to shoot his climactic scene: Magizoologist hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) reveals that the fugitive dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald has been hiding in plain sight the entire film, disguised as dapper auror Percival Graves (played by Colin Farrell). The Farrell-to-Depp switcheroo was to be the film’s biggest shock when it came out in theaters, but first it was the director’s turn to be surprised.

Much like Depp had done when crafting his takes on Willy Wonka and Capt. Jack Sparrow, the actor huddled together with a makeup team to design his own creative look for J.K. Rowling’s villain.

“I had an image in my head of the guy,” explains Depp, who felt emboldened in his creative choices by a Skype chat with Rowling about the role. “She said, ‘I can’t wait to see what you do with him.’ It was beautifully left as this open gift.”

So Depp sent photos of himself as Grindelwald to Yates. His first-draft makeover was “slightly more extreme” than where Grindelwald ended up, the director recalls. “We saw this character as a combination of poet, rock star, visionary, and sociopath, beguiling but lethal,” says Yates, who also helmed the final four Harry Potter films.

After some back-and-forth (at one point a “foppish, romantic look” was considered and rejected), the production embraced Depp’s concept of Grindelwald as a pre-WWII vision of Aryan fascism — an ultra-white, pasty-faced platinum blond, with an undercut haircut and pale mismatched eyes.

“I almost felt like he’s maybe two people,” Depp says. “He’s twins in one body. So a gamy eye is more like the other side of him — a brain for each eye, and he’s somewhere in the middle.”

When Depp’s Grindelwald was unveiled in the final moments of Fantastic Beasts, fans were indeed stunned, but also concerned. The dark wizard looked so strange. Was he supposed to be comedic? So for the second title in the planned five-film franchise, The Crimes of Grindelwald, the evil wizard’s appearance was “softened and refined,” made to look more natural. Judging by the enthusiastic fan reactions to the film’s final trailer at the end of September, the tweaks worked.

Grindelwald’s evolution was just a small example of how the Fantastic Beasts team leveled up for the sequel. Where to Find Them bore the burden of launching a new Wizarding World franchise with a different cast, setting, time period, and characters. While the movie was largely a success — with solid reviews and $814 million worldwide at the box office — members of the filmmaking team quietly felt that the sequel could (and should) be an improvement over its predecessor.

“When we made the first film [the actors] all thought it was great,” recalls Ezra Miller, who plays troubled young wizard Credence Barebone. “But the department heads — Yates, [production designer] Stuart Craig, [costume designer] Colleen Atwood — were all like, ‘It’s not good enough, it has to get better, it has to get way better, and here are all the things that were wrong with it.’ [Crimes] is a serious push by some of the greatest artists in the game to elevate in a way that’s inspiring to watch and be around.”

That elevation began with Rowling’s script, which largely shifts the action from New York to Paris — a new locale, sure, but returning to Europe feels more Potter-esque. And while the first film was focused heavily on Newt, the sequel is more of an ensemble piece that deepens returning characters, introduces several new ones, and plays like a life-and-death, wartime noir thriller (no whimsical three-minute scenes of Newt demonstrating a mating dance at the zoo with a horny Erumpent).

The setup is that Grindelwald escapes while being transported to a new prison and rallies an army of supporters with his pledge to unify the Wizarding World and rule Muggles. That leaves Hogwarts professor Dumbledore (Jude Law), the dark wizard’s former childhood friend (and perhaps more?), to enlist his expelled former student Newt and, by extension, his American friends — rebellious auror Tina (Katherine Waterston), her telepathic sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), and affable No-Maj Jacob (Dan Fogler). But that’s only the beginning.

“The script is labyrinthian,” says Redmayne, whose introverted beast-wrangler is a bit more comfortable in his own skin this time around. “You’re going down this maze, and Jo [Rowling] is weaving the stories together with such intricacy. Along the way, connections to Harry Potter and secrets are falling at your feet. And there is one…” The Oscar winner pauses, knowing he’s treading into heavy spoiler territory. “I got to the end and my jaw dropped. There was one thing I didn’t see coming.”

“Darker” is a word the cast uses a lot. “Complex” and “fast-paced” are others. The film is more, well, adult — The Crimes of Grindelwald may be the most grown-up of all the Wizarding World titles.

EW caught up with Fogler shortly after he saw the completed film for the first time, and he was as excited as any fan stepping out of a cineplex. “It reminds me a lot of The Empire Strikes Back,” he says. “The first movie is so positive. It’s sweet and lovely. But this time everybody is really put under fire. People are gonna see this, like, a hundred times just to get everything. They’re going to be going nuts that they have to wait for the next one. And Jude Law, oh God, he’s perfect.”

Ah, yes. From the moment that first photo was released of Law as a dashing Dumbledore, even the most discriminating Potter purists admitted he was spot-on as the beloved wizard (and some are rather hot for teacher, with hashtags circulating like #Dumbledaddy and #Dumbledamn). Adding Dumbledore to this prequel pleased Rowling, too, who spent more time visiting the set during this shoot than the first film.

You might assume Dumbledore would be the least mysterious part of this tale since we already know so much about his past and future. Not so. “There are things to resolve from Albus’ life, some of which we know from the story, some of which we don’t know about yet,” Law says, and then comes up with an even better tease: “This is a good riddle. One of the reasons Dumbledore trusts and likes Newt so much is Newt understands and forgives beasts and monsters. And there’s a part of Dumbledore — only a part — that sees himself as a bit of a beast.”

The friendship between Newt and Dumbledore might feel a bit wistful for Harry Potter fans: It’s like a glimpse into what might have been if the future Hogwarts Headmaster had somehow been able to carry on his friendship with the Boy Who Lived into adulthood. Yet Newt, unlike young Potter, can quickly spot Dumbledore’s “for the greater good” manipulations.

“One of the things I love about Newt is he has this naivete and gentleness on the surface, but he’s got quite a steel core,” Redmayne says. “He adores Dumbledore, but he also knows when Dumbledore has crossed a line and isn’t afraid to call him on it.”

Newt’s whip-smart Auror love interest Tina is back as well, going on a mission to hunt down Credence in Paris. “She’s more confident this time. No one is questioning her intellect and instincts,” Waterston says. Yet her character’s love life is a mess thanks to some long-distance-relationship misunderstandings. While fans know Newt and Tina eventually end up together, the duo clearly have no idea. “It’s fun to play something out where the audience is one step ahead and Newt and Tina are the clueless ones,” the actress says.

Newt also has a tense relationship with his older brother, Theseus, played by Callum Turner, who broke his wand during his first day on set during an enthusiastic screen test. Theseus is an uptight careerist and Head of the British Ministry of Magic’s Auror Office, who’s pressuring the rebellious Newt to fall in line with the wizarding government’s plans.

“Theseus wants his brother to stand up and fight [Grindelwald],” says Turner, but the two have conflicting ideas on how to #resist. That Theseus is engaged to Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz) — Newt’s schoolboy crush — complicates matters as well.

Yet perhaps the most intriguing new character is the one fans only discovered last month: Nagini, a circus performer who gives customers one heckuva transformation act as she morphs into a massive snake. South Korean actress Claudia Kim wasn’t told which character she was playing until she arrived for her last audition. A Harry Potter fan since sixth grade, Kim instantly realized Nagini was cursed to eventually become Voldemort’s murderous serpent.

“I was speechless,” she recalls, and then was told that for this final test, she had to pretend to transform into a snake — on the spot. “I instantly felt the heartburn, a lot of insecurity, but you have to empty your head and let your instincts take over,” she says. “If I find [the audition tape] I will destroy it!”

Once on set, Kim worked with a contortionist to perfect her act, infusing her performance with varying degrees of snake-ness. “David would give directions like ‘Can you do 2 percent more snake?'” she says, laughing.

Since her casting was announced, however, some have objected to a person of color playing a character doomed to subservience. Those close to the production disagree with that perspective and note that Kim simply gave the best audition for a standout role. “Claudia Kim is a living god,” Miller declares. “You’re about to get your head blown off. Prepare yourselves for Nagini. This is a tragic and beautiful story.”

Miller should know, as it’s his character, Credence, who teams up with Nagini to form a power couple of sorts: two lost souls with unique magical abilities they can’t entirely control. “Credence has joined the circus, as one does when you’ve killed your foster mom and fled the country,” Miller says glibly. “He’s trying to figure out who he is. They’re two people who don’t really trust anyone who are learning trust for the first time.”

Another challenged couple (actually, every major character in Crimes of Grindelwald is arguably part of a couple, and that’s why the Paris setting is so apt) are Jacob and Queenie, who flee America due to its strict policy against No-Maj/wizard relationships. And guess which charismatic politician is surprisingly in favor of such unions?

“Grindelwald actually sounds like he’s all for love — if you love a Muggle, you should be allowed to be with them, and you should be allowed to marry,” Fogler reveals. “But wizards, he feels, should be on a pedestal. This is very tantalizing to some.”

So hold up. Could the nicest couple in this story, Jacob and Queenie, join Team Grindelwald? They’re not saying, of course, but Sudol notes: “Grindelwald’s like staring at the sun — you’re not supposed to, but he’s hard to look away from. He does very, very bad things.”

And he does them with flair. One of Depp’s improvisational additions was giving the wand-waving Grindelwald a conductor-like rhythm during a key sequence. “When Johnny conducts a barrage of spells he’s like a conductor guiding an orchestra — except instead of creating music he’s effectively creating fiery mayhem and death,” Yates says.

Indeed, the film’s title promises crimes. And that this dark wizard’s deeds are wrapped in divisive rhetoric at rock-concert-style rallies peppered with populist appeal sounds kind of, well, familiar. Is Rowling making — unintentionally or not — some kind of modern political point? Sudol certainly sees one.

“The film is terrifying that it’s so relevant,” she says. “We really need to focus on trying to find commonalities amidst the instability of the world’s climate. When a lot of crazy things are happening, it’s very easy to lose true north.”

Which brings us, quite appropriately, back to Newt, the story’s moral compass. At one point in the movie, Newt tells his brother, “I don’t do sides.” That’s almost a revolutionary stance in hyper-partisan times. But it’s also one that, given the forces at play, is perhaps unsustainable. “You really get the sense that Newt’s always gonna make the right choice,” Fogler says. “In this day and age, that’s very refreshing.”

[ginnyzero]

Success is a Journey, Not a Destination

Last Friday, my father called me before he left work. I have a fairly close and adult relationship with my dad. He's the one I talked to before deciding to self-publish. He's a pretty non-judgemental guy with a out of left field sense of humor. We are often told we share a brain, which when it comes to working together can be detrimental because we really don't. I can't read his mind. It can't be frustrating.

But, I don't talk to him about my creative endeavors. I didn't talk to him about my fashion projects or my creative writing. I sat in the office of his shop and between screens loading with his old accounting and job building software frantically typed the first draft of the Lone Prospect and an office manual for said software. So, I was pretty happy when I published the Lone Prospect in paperback that he actually bought it even though he knows I only get 34 cents from the sale. He's not an ebook reader type of guy. I wasn't even sure if he'd read it.

My dad's reading taste is pretty eclectic. He works a lot so seeing him read anything other than the Bible or machinist magazines was pretty rare when I was growing up. When I was a teenager, his reading habits were whatever book you left laying unattended in the living room. I learned quickly not to leave my books unattended. He had the ability to flip open a book I was reading (and may not have even finished yet) and find the one sex scene in the book (that I hadn't gotten to and didn't know existed.) Embarrassing. As a teenager I didn't want him to know I was reading about sex, just as much as I didn't want to know that he and mom still had sex. (Oh the stories from my sister and cousin whose bedroom was over my parents.) When I was in college, I didn't really want to know that my father knew I wrote sex scenes. When I found out from my mother that he'd found my fan fiction LJ accounts and had looked into what I was doing online, I f-locked the accounts. (I was in my early twenties for God's sake.)

So far, sex hasn't come up in anything I've published. I can put off this dilemma for another day. (Thank Goodness.)

Last month, he told me he was reading Honor Harrington. Hard political science fiction mixed with hard core space battles. I was pretty floored. Not what I expected. Friday, he told me that he'd read my book and was actually reading it again. I asked him outright if he liked it because he won't tell me these things unless I do. (Working for him was a pain because I never was sure I was doing a good job.) He did. (He also found grammar errors and missing words in the first 70 pages that have been through three Microsoft products, two format changes and then adobe products and losing words is what happens when too many software formats collide and I refuse to touch it again or else I'll scream. But he notices these things! Engineers.) His approval and enjoying my book made me really happy. Because I want my father's love and approval. In fact, he wanted to know if there were more books.

If this was the pinnacle and definition of success, then I'd reached that goal. Success achieved.

Of course, that's not really where my goal of success lays. But it's a good, life affirming step.

Being a successful published author isn't easy no matter if you're a self published author or if you're a traditionally published author. You end up doing a lot of the marketing work yourself. You aren't just a writer. You're an entrepreneur of your own brand. And it's work. It's a journey, a road, an experience not for the faint of heart. Because you can spend hours and hours writing something, publish it, grind your tailbone flat marketing and promoting and get no response, and then spend an hour dashing off a meaningless dribble and be an overnight sensation. You just don't know how it's going to play out.

I'm at the beginning (2020 here, STILL at the Beginning it feels like) of this original work self-publishing journey. I published my first book in August of 2016 and I know that it may be years before I get more than drips of sales. I'm still on the "what type of promoting is going to work best for me" stage. (Especially since I have no money to put into it.) It doesn't make me a failure. It means I don't know where I'm going yet. I'm at the fork in the road and trying to determine which way looks the best. (I may look back at this in a few years and go, oh Ginnikins, you naive little sod.)

Everyone's journey is different. Everyone has their own realizations about themselves, their writing, creative process and what is important to them at different times. Sometimes, the first step of the journey as a writer is to realize that you can't stop writing. Then the next is whether or not it's important to you to share that writing. The journey is about yourself, the inner you and while other people may come into this journey, they aren't the stars of it. Trying to make someone else the star of your journey is at least a very big distraction. During the journey, you can grow or you can stall and stay the same.

Eighteen years ago, I started writing in order to connect with a friend. Fifteen years ago, I was writing fanfic. Where the hardest thing after having a successful story was writing the next story and trying to duplicate that success. Ten years ago, I was a big name fan (BNF) running a pairing community and hosting awards. Nine years ago, I burnt out. I switched fandoms. I stopped posting WIP. I stopped posting stories all together. I faded out of fandom. No one looked for me. Six years ago or more, I said I'd never publish an original book. Because I didn't want to lose creative control of my characters, plots and writing style. Four or five years ago, I finally had an emotional breakthrough and came up with my ideas for the Lone Prospect. Two years ago, I looked at my health and faced reality that I needed to try to get another source of income that I could get while sitting on my couch, writing. I started querying agents. Six to eight months ago, I decided to self-publish because even if I got an agent to look at my writing, it'd be another two years before I was published by a publisher. And in two years, I could publish 5 books myself plus whatever short stories I wanted.

Who knows where I'll be in two years? I don't.

Even if I'm not getting a lot of sales. Even if I'm working part time jobs or as a consultant or whatever I need to do to keep a roof over my head and food in my fridge. I won't be a failure. I will just be at another part of my journey. As long as I don't give up and I keep writing. (I can't stop writing. I get frustrated and depressed if I stop writing.) Then I'm still a success because I'm moving forward slowly, one step at a time.

One of the major realizations I had in this journey is that I don't need outside affirmation that my writing is good, that I have good stories to tell. I know I'm a good writer. I know I'm a creative person. There are stories I write, that I only share with one person because I know she'll like them too and she wants them. And if I didn't have her, I wouldn't have to share the stories with anyone else. Because they are for me. (Self indulgent character driven stories of properties I don't own and one or two I do.)

The stories I write and that I do share, they're for me too. I share them because I hope others will also enjoy them. I hope that others will find meaning in them even if it is a few hours of entertainment. But it took a great deal of time for me to come to this realization and that if people have problems with the stories I write and the way I write them (outside of technical things like grammar and missing words) then they aren't the audience for my stories. Their opinions don't have to sway me from doing what I love to do.

I don't say this out of arrogance or hubris. I say this out of confidence. I know what I do well and while I may stretch myself in order to grow and improve, it won't change my style and method of writing. There are things I can't do and don't need to do in order to tell my stories. And I acknowledge those things and move on. There are enough people out there that could and would tear me down and shred me apart that I don't need to do it to myself. (And there are lots of lovely people out there too that could build me up.)

I say this because the moment I let an outside opinion define my success, then that person has power over me. That lack of power can undermine my confidence, make me second guess myself. It takes way from me being single minded in my goals to write. This leads to fear of not being good enough, of being rejected and of being a failure. Fear leads to depression. Depression leads to being paralyzed.

And then I'd be stuck on my journey, not willing to go forward, unable to go backwards. And even if you're just taking that first step in your journey by opening a document and writing the first sentence, you've come too far to stop now.

As long as you keep going, as long as you stay on your journey, then you can't be a failure. There may be mountains and molehills or turning molehills into mountains. There will be flat spaces where it's happy and easy and storms when it's hard and you're anxious and stressed and not sure if getting out of bed in the morning is worth it. There can be twists and turns. Sure, maybe your journey will veer away from writing. Maybe there will be a new passion and a new place to put your energy. But that doesn't mean you're a failure as a writer or a person. It just means that there is a new exciting path ahead of you.

Please, don't give up on it.

[artificialqueens]

at dusk beneath a diabetic moon (trixya) 1/4 - beanierose

AN: i am enormously grateful as always to mattepinkallshades, joanneelizabeth and connyhascontrol for being so supportive and encouraging, and letting me talk their ears off about this iteration of our girls. i feel very blessed to have you. and stutter, i will never be able to thank you enough. for cheering me on, for making me a playlist, for beta reading, for being such a bright spot of joy in my life. thank you, thank you, thank you.

(read on ao3) | (find me at katiehoughton)

a buzzfeed unsolved/x files au. katya hunts cryptids. trixie doesn’t believe in them, but she believes in katya. | 5,145 words

Katya feels at her absolute sexiest and most gay sitting in the Wrangler with her elbow propped against the window frame, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Trixie. She will get off work at the salon in just a few minutes. Katya has her own duffel and Trixie’s pink hard-shell suitcase in the trunk, and a stack of cassettes for Trixie to choose from. It’s the sacrifice she has to make in order to enjoy the aesthetic of the vintage Jeep, that she can’t annoy Trixie with endless playlists of 90s Russian pop on Spotify. They make do, and she doesn’t mind letting Trixie choose what they listen to.

While she’s waiting, Katya replies to a few tweets asking for a hint about her next investigation. People are still sending her memes from the last time, grainy, crazy-looking ones, the ones Trixie tells her are called deep fried. She doesn’t super understand them, not always, but she listens when Trixie tells her how important it is to engage. How that will help to grow her audience.

Trixie is kind of bossy, and Katya likes it a lot. She’s her best friend, since college, and when Trixie graduated and Katya was two years out of school and still just working in the costume store, she didn’t hesitate to follow Trixie out west. All of this was Katya’s idea, but they wouldn’t be where they are without Trixie pushing, Trixie organising, Trixie taking moody, verdant photographs of the back of Katya’s head for Instagram.

Katya keeps her replies as cryptic as she possibly can, and when people start tweeting at Trixie as well to ask her for details, she locks her phone again and puts it away. She drums her fingers against the outside of the car and watches people walking by, some of them looking at her. A man walking a dog goes right past the Jeep, only a couple inches away from her, and Katya almost topples headfirst out of the rolled down window to get to scratch the puppy’s snout. After he’s gone, Katya lifts her hand to her nose and breathes in the dog-smell of her fingers, lives there in that secret shame for a little while.

All of the girls come out of the salon at the same time at the end of each day, and Katya likes so much to watch them. Trixie is a head taller than everybody else and there are cute little wisps of hair escaping her ponytail to frame her round, lovely face. She’s laughing with one of her colleagues, her mouth open so wide that Katya can see all of her back teeth even from the other side of the street. When Trixie turns around and sees the car she gives Katya a small wave and comes across the street with a little bounce in her step, her ponytail swishing behind her. Katya picks up the Del Taco bag from the seat so that Trixie can sit down, and hands it to her once she has her seatbelt fastened.

“Oh, my god. I literally love you. Thank you. Hi.” Trixie is always starving when she gets off work and she begins rummaging through the bag right away.

Katya starts the engine and the car rumbles to life beneath them. “Hello, hi, hello, how are you, how was your day?”

“It was just okay. That WASP woman came in again, you remember from last month?” Katya hums a small noise of confirmation. “She won’t let anybody else wash her hair. I had to do it, even though I told her that I’m a senior fuckin’ stylist.” Trixie stuffs a handful of fries in her mouth and chews politely, swallows them down before she finishes talking. “I’m supposed to supervise and delegate.”

“Uh-huh,” Katya says. “Trixie, honey, you gotta stop trying to convince people that you’re a top.”

Trixie shrieks and strains against her seatbelt like she wants to lunge across the centre console and finally throttle Katya. Her mascara is coming off in little flakes underneath her eyes, and the pink tip of her nose is showing through her foundation. She’s tired, Katya knows, and she’d love to go home and sink into a warm bath, her skin made slippery and soft by all of the special products she puts into the water. Instead she’s here, in Katya’s beat-up old car, already rummaging through the shoebox of cassettes in the passenger footwell.

She chooses Kate Bush, and she has another couple of tapes picked out for when this one finishes that she’s keeping tucked underneath her thigh like she thinks Katya might take them from her. Trixie fishes around in the glove compartment for a pencil and sticks it through the sprocket to wind the tape back to the start, the tip of her tongue just poking out because she’s concentrating so hard.

After she’s done and the staticky voices of Dan Brandenstein and NASA fill the car, Trixie offers Katya one of her crinkle cut fries. Katya munches on it cheerfully while she checks her mirrors and pulls out of their parking spot. Trixie is eating her veggie burrito with one hand and taking the scrunchie out of her hair with the other.

Katya hasn’t yet grown tired of Trixie’s whole post-work routine. After she’s done eating, Trixie wriggles out of her black blouse and slacks in the passenger seat. She had left a change of clothes for herself neatly folded on top of her suitcase, and Katya had let herself in to Trixie’s apartment with her spare key earlier today to collect everything. She saw a pepto-bismol Post-it tacked to the door of the refrigerator to remind Trixie’s roommate, Kim, that she needs to give the chinchilla food and fresh water every day that Trixie is away. Katya likes Trixie’s writing, how she dots the i in Kim’s name with a little heart. Her own is scrawling and messy as chicken scratch.

It isn’t a graceful production for Trixie to get dressed again, and Katya focuses very hard on the road ahead so Trixie doesn’t get all embarrassed and grumpy. She doesn’t put her boots on after she’s dressed, instead propping her feet up on the dash in their wool socks. She pushes her toes against the glass of the windshield until they crack and she moans loudly. Katya is so grateful that Trixie comes with her at all for these trips, and especially after ten hours on her feet.

After some time spent massaging her arches and groaning, Trixie takes her iPad out of her backpack and starts scrolling around in their shared Google document. They’ve been researching and collecting information. Katya has been reading everything she can get her hands on and making notes for Trixie, highlighting the parts that she thinks are especially interesting.

“You know,” Trixie says, and taps two fingers against her chin. “This might be the first time that I kinda believe in the thing that we’re looking for.”

Katya turns her head for just a moment to glance at Trixie. The sun is setting on Katya’s left, and she likes the idea of Trixie looking back at her and seeing the sky peach-pink and luminous behind her. “You do?”

“Yeah! Bigfoot is meat and bone, Katya.”

She sounds so emphatic that Katya laughs out loud, a small sharp thing that reverberates around the inside of the car for long enough that she almost winds down the window again to let it back out. That would be less than wise; it’s raining. And it’s begun to get dark. Katya doesn’t like driving very much, likes it even less in these conditions. When it’s sunny and dry and warm, she will hold the wheel down at six in just one hand and rest the other on the window frame or sometimes along the back of Trixie’s seat. Tonight she has a firm grip with both hands and she’s focusing so hard on the road she keeps catching herself leaning forward.

“I know this,” Katya says. “I didn’t think that you did. I was super ready to have to persuade you with all my extensive and incredibly scientific and — Trixie, and — one hundred percent factual research.”

Trixie has elongated in the seat as they’ve been driving. She’s reclined it way back and she still has her feet propped up on the dash. The blood is definitely not reaching them correctly, and when she gets out of the car later she’s going to whine and hop around like a little sparrow until her circulation comes back. She has the iPad resting against the slope of her thighs and she scrolls back up to the top of the document again.

“Like how the earliest recorded sightings are from the fifteenth century? And how lots of cultures have different names for the same idea? Hmm? Those facts?”

“Those are facts!” Katya starts, and then sees Trixie right at the edge of her vision, barely suppressing a smirk. Her cheeks have hollowed with the effort and her eyes are wide. “Wow, I hate you so much.”

Trixie reads a little more of their research out loud, like Katya wasn’t the one who compiled all of it. Like she hasn’t already drafted her tweets for later with the most important details. She hardly minds; she likes the way Trixie’s voice sounds. She’s turned the volume down on the cassette player a bit, so that she can tell Katya about how there have been sightings in almost every state, how that lends credence to the idea that Bigfoot is a species, rather than a singular creature.

“Well yeah, honey. You look in the mirror lately?”

Trixie screams and drums her heels against the dashboard, squirming around in her seat. Katya’s laughing too, and she relaxes her grip on the steering wheel a bit. Just having Trixie next to her in the car always makes her feel safer, which doesn’t make any sense at all because she has on more than one occasion lunged across the centre console and put her hands around Katya’s throat while they’ve been driving.

“That’s so mean. You’re so mean. I can’t believe I’m friends with you.” She’s taken her sunglasses off now that it’s gotten darker, and she folds the legs in neatly and puts them away in their pink case, stows it in the glove compartment.

Katya grins. “Well, I am a cryptid hunter. I’m one of the few people that believe you exist. So you don’t really have another option.”

“Okay, I got it, thanks so much,” Trixie says.

She gets into a bit of a snit and draws her legs up onto her seat, folds them beneath herself instead. There’s only twenty more minutes or so until they get to where they’re going, so Katya leaves her to work through it by herself in furious silence. It’s unkind to provoke her after a long work day. Katya should have known better; she does know better.

“Hey,” she says, after a handful of minutes in which she has to be very careful not to turn her head towards Trixie. “You’re very pretty.”

“I know.” It comes out sharp, but then her face softens into a smile. She uncrosses her arms and stretches them up above her head, as high as the roof of the Wrangler will let her.

They’re driving along the main street through the town now. Even in the dark and the rain it’s pretty cute, the street lined with trees and low, single-storey buildings. Behind them, the mountains sweep upward so steeply that it makes Katya dizzy when she leans forward towards the windshield to try and see the top.

“This place is kinda charming. If you’re into like, mildew and cheap beer,” Trixie says.

Katya swings a right into the parking lot of the motel and cuts the engine. “You know those are my two main interests. You think we’ll have time to go apartment hunting while we’re here?”

“Since when do you want to live like a person?” Trixie lifts both eyebrows. She always looks so pleased with herself whenever she gets a chance to tease Katya, and her mouth is turned up at the corners so the dimple in her left cheek is more pronounced. “We’ll get you a nice tarp and an extra pair of wool socks.”

“Oh wow, two pairs? A life of true decadence.”

Trixie doesn’t respond; she’s begun rummaging in her footwell, collecting all of her belongings. It usually takes less than five minutes of her being in Katya’s car before her stuff is scattered everywhere, but she is always courteous, always careful to take everything with her when she gets out. While she’s occupied, Katya jumps down without using the step and rounds the front of the Jeep to open Trixie’s door for her and offer her a hand. She doesn’t need it — she’s taller than Katya is — but she never refuses.

“We can’t stay someplace nice?” Trixie says, looking over the top of Katya’s head. The red neon Vacancy sign is making her face look warm and pink and sweet. “Just one time?”

“You wanna pay?” Katya says back.

Trixie squawks in distaste and Katya leaves her there, leaning against the side of the Wrangler and shifting her weight in agitation while the blood comes back into her feet. She gets their luggage out of the trunk and takes everything inside, Trixie trailing a few paces behind with just her little pink backpack.

Katya is the kind of person who says thank you to Siri whenever she asks a question, and Trixie is the kind of person who giggles at her every time for doing it. Because of this, Katya is always the one to speak with the person at the front desk and smile politely and collect their room keys, while Trixie busies herself a few feet away. She thumbs through the racks of leaflets advertising things to do in the surrounding area. Almost all of it is Bigfoot-adjacent, and Trixie certainly won’t find anything interesting enough to make her actually pick one out.

The moment they get into their room, Trixie unzips her suitcase and heads straight for the bathroom with a thing of Clorox wipes. She does this every time, and Katya can hear her singing cheerfully to herself while she scrubs the sink or whatever, so she leaves her to it. It gives her a minute to stretch out after the drive. Katya sits down right on the floor, even though it will make Trixie click her tongue in disgust, and moves easily through a few simple poses.

It feels good; she likes the way that it kind of burns when she pushes her hip flexors as far as she can. Her hair is spilling down all over her face and getting into her eyes, and she has a red scrunchie around her wrist but she doesn’t want to shift out of downward-facing dog to tie it up. After a couple minutes her legs start tingling and she brings them down and sits up, gathers as much of her hair up as she can. It only skims the top of her shoulders and it always wants to fall down and stick in sweaty tendrils to her cheeks and neck.

“Get off the floor,” Trixie says when she comes out of the bathroom. “You’re gonna get hepatitis.”

Katya lifts her head from her plow pose to look at Trixie. “I think that would be very sexy of me. Will you nurse me, Trixie? Will you tenderly pat my forehead with a cool facecloth?”

“I’ll smother you with a pillow.”

Sweat is beginning to prickle between Katya’s shoulder blades and make her back feel all itchy and unpleasant. She flops down flat onto the floor and Trixie steps carefully over her and sits herself primly on the end of one of the twin beds. She has a way of always, immediately, making the places they stay feel more like home. It’s not like she brings a bunch of scented candles, although Katya doesn’t doubt that she would if she thought she could get away with it. Just her presence in a space is enough to make it feel warmer and cosier and more pink.

Everything in Trixie’s suitcase is organised carefully into packing cubes, and when Katya opens her duffel and things start falling out onto the ground Trixie sighs loudly. Katya rummages around until she finds her dopp kit and she holds it aloft, victorious.

“I’m gonna shower. I am feeling extremely gross from the drive.”

“You’re extremely gross from who you are as a person.” Trixie has taken her boots off and wriggled up the bed so that she’s leaning against the headboard now. Her hair is a bit matted at the back from their long drive, and her makeup is smudged and wearing away. “I’m gonna call and check in with Orville.”

Katya’s knees both crack loudly when she straightens up and she winces. “Cool. Say hello to our son from me.”

“He’s not your son, Cruella,” Trixie fires back at her before Katya closes the bathroom door.

The spray from the showerhead is lacklustre, and Trixie is definitely going to be unhappy about that when she washes her hair tomorrow. It makes Katya laugh just thinking about it and some of the water gets into her mouth.

Freshly dressed, she comes out of the bathroom to see Trixie laying on her stomach on her bed, grinning at the screen of her phone. She’s on FaceTime, and Kim has propped her own phone up against the chinchilla’s cage so that Trixie can watch Orville eat. Katya likes that Trixie doesn’t stop her soft voice or her goofy smile when she comes into the room. She leans down over Trixie to put her face in the frame as well. When Trixie first announced one day that she was going to get a chinchilla and dragged Katya to the pet store to help carry everything, she hadn’t really understood the appeal. She gets it now. Orville sits on his hind legs and holds a grass pellet in his front paws to nibble at delicately, and Katya and Trixie watch him eat.

Katya had been with Trixie the day she got Orville from the rescue center. She’d been the one to drive back to Trixie’s apartment, and she’s pretty sure that was the closest she’ll ever come in her life to the feeling of driving home from the hospital with a newborn in the car seat. Trixie had cradled the carrier in both arms and sung softly to the chinchilla, so that he could get used to her voice. Now he’s inquisitive and goofy, and he likes to ride around on Katya’s shoulder whenever she’s over at Trixie’s place.

After a little while, Kim comes back into frame and tells them she has to hang up now but that she’ll check in later, before she goes to bed. “You’re a really good dad,” Katya says, and then darts rapidly off the bed and out of range so that Trixie can’t smack her.

She sits up and gathers all of her hair up off her neck in both hands, rolls her head on her shoulders. “You’re his dad. I’m a MILF. Can we get snacks?”

“Really?” Katya sits at the end of her own bed to start putting her Docs back on. “Watching him eat those nasty-ass dried-up pellets made you hungry, Trix?”

“No, being in a confined space with you for multiple hours made me hungry. Come on, there’s a gas station down the street.”

Katya trots obediently along behind Trixie on their way to the gas station. She looks like a confection, like something made of fondant or marzipan. She’s totally out of place in a town like this. It’s still raining, and it’s hovering right around forty degrees. Trixie’s wearing a white down jacket and she’s got her hands shoved inside the pockets and her chin tucked into the neck of the coat. When she put it on Katya told her she looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and she stuck her tongue out.

“Trixie, you know, you really shouldn’t dress like a snack when we’re out looking for enormous carnivorous beasts.” Katya quickens her pace to catch up to Trixie and hooks her arm through hers.

Trixie scoffs. “He’s not carnivorous, is he? Has there been one single confirmed report of a Bigfoot attacking a person? Ever?”

“Well no, but-”

“Mhmm.” Trixie stops them walking in front of the door to the gas station and Katya lets go of her arm so she can open it and hold it for Trixie.

Inside, several people turn to look at them. Trixie reaches blindly behind herself and circles her wrist until Katya takes her hand and allows herself to be led over to the snack aisle. She likes how every decision Trixie makes is properly considered, how she bends at the waist to assess their options before she picks anything out. She passes things to Katya one at a time for her to hold, until she’s satisfied. She started with the biggest thing of Skittles the store carries, which Katya is cradling against her stomach while she waits. Katya follows Trixie over to the registers and dumps everything out on the counter; a Red Bull can starts rolling and Trixie catches it as it drops off the edge and sets it down securely again.

“You girls in town for the squatch?” the older man at the register asks as he starts ringing them up. His gaze lingers on Trixie for a little while. She unzipped her jacket because it’s warm in the store, and underneath she’s wearing a pink roll neck sweater. She doesn’t much look like a typical amateur cryptozoologist.

It makes her let out a small disgruntled noise and she wanders away a bit. Katya bounces on her toes a couple times and clasps her hands together. “We sure are! You got any insider information?”

“Just don’t getcha selves lost in the forest,” he sighs. “Bring plenty’a supplies, water, nineteen forty-seven, and cell phones don’t work so you need’a use short-wave radio.”

Katya blinks at him a couple times and then says Oh! and rummages in the back pocket of her pants for her wallet. It was a gift from Trixie a few years back and the leather has been made soft and buttery with use. Inside, there’s a Polaroid of the two of them. They’re at the beach in it, Trixie in a vintage one piece and an enormous straw sunhat. Katya’s wearing a bikini with a shark print and she’s tucked beneath the brim of Trixie’s hat, leaning in to kiss her cheek. It sends a little sting of pleasure through her each time she sees it; Trixie had gifted the wallet to her with the photograph already inside.

“Here you go,” she says cheerfully, and hands the guy her card to swipe. “We’ve got radios and rations, don’t worry. We’ve put some thought into this. I guess you guys must have folks getting themselves stuck and needing rescued all the time, huh?”

The guy makes a gruff noise and passes her the receipt to sign. She can feel Trixie’s eyes on her, feel how she’s itching to get out of here. Trixie uses all of her reserves of small talk for her job and generally doesn’t enjoy engaging with people outside of work. Katya is honoured that Trixie feels comfortable enough with her to be grouchy and quiet, that it doesn’t drain her energy when they spend time together.

“You ever see any signs yourself?” Katya asks the clerk as he’s packing up their stuff. He passes the paper bag over to her and she holds it against her chest in both arms and waits for an answer.

The guy gestures behind himself to a few blurry photographs tacked up on a corkboard with push pins in different colours. “You hear about that hoax that was uncovered over in Bluff Creek?” He says it like that wasn’t almost twenty years ago, and Katya nods enthusiastically.

“I did!” She listens as he tells her to check out the museum in town, and that they should be careful not to find themselves in the forest after dark. He’s growing more and more animated as Katya lets him ramble, and she has to shift the weight of the grocery bag to her other arm.

Trixie has circumnavigated the store while she’s waited for Katya to get done talking to the guy, and she comes back to touch her fingers to Katya’s bent elbow and say her name very quietly and urgently. When they first met, Katya repeated Trixie’s name back to her and cracked it in half over her knee like a glow stick, and Trixie added an extra syllable to hers. Kah-tee-yuh. She likes the way that it sounds, especially when Trixie is getting annoyed or whiny.

“Okay, just a minute,” she says back calmly, as if she were trying to placate a child.

Katya thanks the guy at the register again and gestures with her head for Trixie to lead the way out of the store. She’s getting kind of stompy, so Katya trails a couple of steps behind on the way back to the motel. Trixie’s hands are balled into fists at her sides, but she’ll be okay once she eats a few Oreos and changes into her pajamas.

In their room, Katya unpacks the grocery bag and lays everything out on the dresser while Trixie changes in the bathroom. She likes pottering around and listening to the water running and the quiet hum of Trixie’s toothbrush, likes how Trixie’s face is bright and gleaming with lotion when she comes out.

“Par-tay,” Katya says, and shakes the bag of Skittles in Trixie’s direction.

She wrinkles her nose and collects a couple things to take with her when she gets beneath the sheets. Hers is the bed furthest away from the door, like always, and she props herself up against the headboard. Great clouds of freshly brushed-out curls cascade over her shoulders. Her hair is very soft; Katya knows this from the handful of times Trixie has gotten frustrated trying to do her own french braids and had Katya do them for her instead. Katya thinks she looks sort of like an earthworm, pink and shiny and moist, but knows better than to ever say that out loud.

“Hey, you know, that’s very Bigfoot of you,” she says as she comes over to sit on her own bed across from Trixie’s.

Trixie has arranged the various packages of junk food neatly across the sheets, in order of size from smallest to largest. She does the same thing with gifts, Katya remembers from her birthdays and that one Christmas neither of them could afford to go home and they spent the day on Trixie’s couch watching movies and eating until they were too bloated and uncomfortable to move.

“What is?”

“Arranging stuff all orderly like that.” Katya isn’t beneath the sheets yet, she’ll go out for a last cigarette, but she does reach down to unlace her boots. “You want me to go find you some rocks to stack?”

“I want you to never talk to me again,” Trixie says sweetly, and she rips open her Oreos and gets right to work twisting the cookies in opposite directions to separate the sandwich.

It doesn’t seem like the best idea to eat a whole bunch of sugar right before bed. Katya wants them to be up early to make the most of the daylight and she knows Trixie’s going to grumble, even though she’ll get at least an extra hour of sleep. Katya likes getting to wake Trixie with the wet ends of her hair dripping and her body pleasantly sore from a run, likes watching her come all grumpy and confused into the day. She is not about to tell Trixie to take it easy with the snacks, especially when she looks so cute munching on her cookies.

“I’m gonna go smoke,” Katya says, and Trixie makes a noncommittal noise.

She gathers her lighter and the pack of Camels from the pocket of her jacket and heads out the door of their room. They have a little patio area in the front with two Adirondack chairs and a small table and she settles herself down to light a cigarette. If she turns her head she can look in their window through the gap in the voile panels and see Trixie, scrolling through her phone and still eating.

They’re not far enough away from civilisation that she can see all of the stars, but there are way more than in the city. It’s so beautiful and so still, the rain coming down much lighter now. Katya likes the noises of the frogs very much. She would like to stay out here in her chair and listen to them until time stands still, and then maybe a little longer after that.

Her hair got damp again when they were walking back to the motel and she takes it down from the scrunchie so it can dry off a bit. It’s not even close enough to being warm enough for her to sit out like this, and she regrets not wearing a jacket. For a little while Katya inspects her own arm, fascinated by the way all of the blonde hairs are standing on end and how her skin feels like it’s on too tight.

After a while the light goes out in the room behind her. Katya isn’t usually the last one awake, but she really likes the idea of tiptoeing around and doing her best not to wake Trixie, maybe sneaking glances over at her. She’s on her second cigarette, and she’s trying so so hard, but she’s barely smoked at all today and she’s so content in the moment that she doesn’t want to go inside just yet. They’re so lucky to do this. She is so lucky, to have a best friend who will come along with her on these trips and take pictures and listen to her rambling and be the person she gets to turn to and say did you see that?

Their room faces away from the main street and she can almost make out the shape of the mountains. They seem much closer than she knows they really are, a huge hulking mass of deeper, more solid darkness. A little shiver goes through her thinking about how Bigfoot could be up there right now, maybe peering down, watching the lit end of her cigarette weave around in the dark like a firefly.

[kaito-yuki]

Shout Out Thank Yous!

Alrighty I can already tell that this is going to be a long ass post, so I’m just going to say general things here first. I will then address each mun under the Read More (there’s 20+ of you!), so search for your blog mentioned to find my message to you! 

This Fairy Tail OC blog is my 3rd most popular blog by follower count, just under my Vegeta (DBZ) blog which is popular because of the muse itself over the RPing. Kaito is the opposite, which is why I especially find it important to address and thank each and every mun who’s interacted with me through this blog. For actual posts made it is only second to my personal, which just affirms  that this blog has earned its popularity (and bronze medal) here in my opinion. 

I put in my all and beyond to this blog especially, how it’s navigated, organizing the threads and tags as much as I can so me (and you) can read back on things whenever we want, will use it as a template for my other muses/blogs too haha. Kaito (and my other OCs) have grown as characters thanks to the interactions here, especially when it comes to ships! I also have done the most mun/muse vs muse posts here (Shiro has his own tag FFS lmao), which I’m pleased that many of you are a fan of (the posts, not Shiro!) 

To all my followers, thank you for following and sticking with me, esp those from the beginning! To the other RP blogs I haven’t interacted with yet, I’d love to, especially you OCs! I want to also use this blog to advocate for other similar (OC) blogs, that they can also be great and relevant as canon ones with enough hard work!  Now onto the special thanks!

@crystaldragonslayer: Oh looks like the Queen Pixie has returned, the timing couldn’t have been better with your RP comeback! You are just one of the best RP partners out there, I am very grateful for the time and effort we combined together on our RPs/ships. Vivienne is just awesome and probably the main reason why Kaito is too, creating a OTP that deserves it’s own paragraph gdi!

+KaiVi: Kaito & Vivienne have a total of 69 threads by my count atm (I hope I miscounted lmao). I just love this OTP of ours to bits, it is a pleasure and honour working with you on them so far. I can’t wait to start exploring the next stage of their lives and beyond! You know what they say, ’First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes-”-mouth gets frozen by Kaito coz spoilers!- I’m so happy that KaVi has got at least a couple of fans too! Then there’s the AUs, and interactions with them with/and our other muses, so much to look forward to! It’s just really fun to just crossover this ship with others, with other muses ours and our RP partners! Highlights: Battle of Fairy Tail (Thread) | Song | Promo | Wedding (Art)

@starlightxveins​: I usually ship Kaito with Lucy romantically, I never would have thought they’d be the BrOTP too! Your Lucy is a delight and fun to interact with, crossing over the KaiVi, ShiroAqua, GraLu, JerZa and WendyCookies ships is just fabulous and I look forward to more of them (crack) [group] interactions lmao. Can’t wait to start on the other ships we discussed as well!

@celestial-weirdo-lucy: We may only have one thread on here, but I love it! Your Lucy is great, and it’s awesome I get to make a spin on KaiLu by having Kaito have a crush on her already lmao. Then there’s our other ships that I’m excited to develop too! Our KaiLu bodyguard AU is probably my favorite AUs which I look forward to sharing, I’m excited for our other  AUs too (like Gods and Bleach) and ships with our other muses, damn there’s lots to RP!

@celestial-keys-princess​: The Lucy that started it all, Ava you are first mun I approached in the FT RP community and became my guide to others. KaiLu is awesome and I thank you for going through plots and headcanons with me for them! Look forward to continuing their interactions when we do! 

I appreciate you also helping me expand Kaito’s Sabertooth verse with Minerva. Kaito’s ship verse with Tori is still the only one where it’s Shiro and the female teaming up against Kaito, which is so hilarious that I will keep it there lmao. Then there’s our other interactions/ships I’d be happy to get into again like Rukia/Aizen, Laxus/Tori, GraLu (with modern band AU) and Lucy/Jackal, who is atm growling at Lucy behind me because of and/or for her ear rubs lmao Highlights:  A Prayer in the Rain (Thread) | Song | KaiLu (Art/Promo)

@pitchblacksteel: Akira I just love your Gajeel, especially your ships with Lucy and Mira! I look forward to more interactions with him and muses on your multi (like Natsu and Erza!) Kaito still feels bad over the crap Shiro has dragged Gajeel (and Natsu) into lmao.

@poisonouslightslayer: Your Sting is the Sting me (and Kaito) think of whenever Sting is mentioned, you portray him with such depth, it’s really nice to read the posts I see from you! Our interactions also helped inspire me to add a Guild Master addon/verse for Kaito, would love to explore that too!

@itashiro-hitsuchiha​: Thank you for helping me expand Kaito’s Sabertooth and Kingdom Hearts verses, I look forward to continuing our threads with Harumi and Perix!

@dxvilishgrin: Our Kaiio/Mira ship started on Discord, so I’m happy we could also expand upon on it on Tumblr too! Also enjoyed the interactions with your other muses, canons and OCs alike!

@stellcrblossom: Rin I appreciate you and your OCs so much, you gave Kaito a [adoptive] daughter (Ember) and sister (Kamui), and pretty much helped extend his family and my OCs too. Also this helped me branch into going through the next generation of FT, got me working on my other ship’s children too which is appreciated! Can’t wait to RP as Issei (KaiVi’s son) when I’m done with his info! +SakuEm: Sakurai x Ember is one of my favourites and is awesome to see them upgraded to an OTP, and that we created a whole plot/saga/arc/war around Ember’s kidnapping. Can’t wait to continue that and crossover it with my other ships, it’s going to be awesome! Don’t get me started on our AUs, excited for them too! Highlights: Ember Fading (Thread) | Asterius Arc Promo & Graphic

@gureixfurubasuta: Your Gray is great, and I just love their brotherly (gay according to Shiro lmao) bond esp with their shared ties to Ul. Thank you for inspiring me to start my own Gray blog, even though it’s just so I don’t force anyone (like you) to RP Gray for Kaito, and look how that turned out haha. Your Gray (and Juvia) will always by my main for Kaito, and my Gray’s more angsty twin lmao. I’d be happy to interact more through our other muses too!

@sky-dragon-slayer-wendy: Your Wendy is so precious (and a rebel GDI lmao), I loved our thread together and would be happy to continue interactions when you’re free enough again! 

@broken-memories-and-silent-tears: Alice is great and I’m happy to crossover this with our Gralice ship, Kaito and Alice have a great sibling bond with my Gray (and Shiro) between them haha. I’d be happy to add Alice into my fan game as we discussed before way back too, esp now things are better on my end!

@imaginaryserver: Me and (my muses) miss you and your Mavis! Our Cards Against Humanity game is still a memorable time for me from way back, I’m still waiting for an artist to draw it!

@shrimps-variety-garden: I just adore your Levy and her ship with Kaito, the modern AU is especially interesting since it’s based on song lyrics haha. Looking forward to us RPing though to the endgame! Our ship also has helped me develop a more antagonistic version of my Gajeel which is awesome too.

@scythe-rps: Hiroshi is a better guy (and muse) thanks to his best friend Gyrain! it’s good that we can bring more focus onto the usually underappreciated Blue Pegasus! I look forward to when Lyon & Gyrain finally clear the air about their relationship lmao, and thanks for helping me develop Masaru more through their interactions! 

@sunaarashii: Thank you for interacting with Hiroshi, his ship with Cari is just precious with the thread we have currently, can’t wait to RP out what comes next!

@bunnysmultimuse: The thread with Sorano was fun, so I’d like to continue interactions (esp with the headcanons discussed) if you’re still up for it! That goes for Jellal with Meredy too!

@ultecr: Still have your post in my drafts, I know you said to take my time but even I know taking months is ridiculous lmao. I look forward to starting the Kaito/Ultear ship once I do reply, love your portrayal of Mavis too!

@herhorns:  I love seeing your Mira on my dash, especially her ships with Gajeel and Gray! Looking forward to interacting with Ravyn when we get to it, your art is awesome too!

@angelsoffiore: Welcome back man! Mizumi is a great OC and is why I approached you in the first place, so appreciate you still continuing our thread after so long. Hope to interact more with Mizumi, your other OCs, and your Laxus too!

[dcarhcarts]

regarding recent absences

And other such updates!

If you want the tl;dr, here it is: my mental health isn’t in the greatest place right now, and I figured I ought to explain why I must ask you for continued patience for the snail speed on this blog. I’m not announcing official hiatus, but just know that I...might continue to be pretty scarce, but I’m trying my best to be here and to be writing here. To hopefully get me more active here, I plan on dropping a few threads and cleaning out my dash re: people who follow me but aren’t writing with me. You’re more than welcome to keep following me if I unfollow you, and if you want to write with me and just haven’t gotten the chance and would like me to re-follow you, pls just go ahead and shoot me an im. I will be making a separate post about both those things, it’s just that I can’t deal with how fast my dash is moving at the moment.

If you care for the long version, under the cut so as to not bother everyone else!!! Be warned that it’s uh...it’s l o n g. TW for depression and anxiety and the general things my brain does to me lolol. 

Wow I haven’t used the post title function in a l o n g time. Anyway, hi, it’s me, Ro, your friendly neighborhood mun of a 20+ muse mumu. Don’t let the kind-of-serious format scare you - nothing bad is happening. I just have a few things that I felt the need to address that have been happening either in my life or just in my screwed up brain :D Buckle in and get ready for the ride, I guess?

Starting with something y’all already know about - I’ve not been here a lot recently. I joke about that a lot, but really, if you catch the pattern, my activity here is: exclusively after 10 pm, 2 drafts at most a day, inbox straight up clogged from like a month ago. IMS basically desolate, because I haven’t worked up the courage to pick them back up since I last forgot about them in the endless stream of things I had to do about a month ago! (that being said, uh, if you want to talk to me your best bet is probably through discord. Ro#6782 - pls, mutuals only, and tell me who you are!)  

And - because I h a t e being that mun that reblogs memes and asks for for them and then never answers their askbox / puts out starter calls when she has 10000 drafts / puts out plotting calls when she has unanswered ims, (no problem at all when other people do this but somehow when it’s m e I’m like “no you’re a terrible person”???? hmmm), I’ve also been avoiding t h o s e. If you’re new and you followed me in the last month, I’ve been putting out n o t h i n g that indicates a willingness to interact with new/more people, while the opposite is true. I’m always willing to interact - if I follow back, I want to write with you, only, well, aforementioned issue aside, I also have m o r e problems.

Namely, IRL and the fucked up thing called my brain. 

As most of you know, I got a job ~end of may or early juuuune~ and....well it’s pretty damn time consuming. I can’t have my phone during the course of my job - by the way, 4 hours - and so in those 4 hours (from 4 pm to 8 pm) I can basically get nothing done here. Then there’s also the fact that the time my shift is placed mentally and physically drains me a lot. Because it starts at 4, most of my morning is spent thinking “god I don’t wanna go to work” and because it ends at 8, most of my evening is spent trying very hard not to doze off. It also drains me a lot socially - I work at a call center, and all day I’m basically calling people who don’t want me to call them and are very irate even when they pick up, and uh, that already doesn’t do well for my anxiety haha. 

The other thing, of course - is my sort-of-seasonal depression. Winter tends to equate to anxiety for me, and summer tends to equate to depression. Again, I think I’ve joked about this a lot, but I apparently can only do drafts when I have 3 finals tomorrow and I haven’t studied for any of them. When it’s break, I get into a really weird slump - when i wake up in the morning, I don’t really want to wake up, and sometimes just stare at the wall for like, an hour. Nothing that I enjoyed during the other months, I seem to enjoy doing now. There’s too much time and too little time. It’s like i spent the whole day doing absolutely nothing meaningful but I can’t break myself out of the cycle so I keep doing that, rinse and repeat day after day, and sometimes my definition of spending time is just lying down in bed again and doing nothing for an hour randomly in the middle of the day. I feel guilty for wasting time as much as I am clueless as to how to fill it in a fulfilling way. “But Ro, you could do drafts!” A Concerned Person May Say. “You like writing!” Well, Kind Person, on some of these days, absolutely n o t h i n g Sparks Joy. 

“But Ro, I follow you on your other blog too!” The Concerned Person might continue.“You’re kind of active there, aren’t you?” And the answer, Kind Person who supported my career even if that blog is mostly obscure af fandoms - is yes.  I am kind of active on my other blog, @storyblcd. This brings us to the third and final reason why I’m.....moving at snail’s speed here, and that, my good friend - is anxiety. Well, mixed with a certain amount of mental exhaustion, of course. Note: this is n o t anyone’s fault. People’s interactions with me have not been negative - and they are not responsible for how my brain chooses to reaact to it. 

I’ve not lost muse for the muses on this blog, per se - but I’m getting burned out really fast writing them, for multiple reasons. First, muse imbalance. Now I know, I definitely k n o w - that sometimes people like one muse more than another, or have more interest in writing with one or the other, and I get that. I’ve said multiple multiple times that that is p e r f e c t l y fine. But honestly the reason I’ve lasted so long on a multimuse is because I can pick which muse I have muse for when, and I can respond accordingly / ask for interactions accordingly. But when I get so many people coming at me at once for the o n e muse when I have t w e n t y it sometimes gets a little? Discouraging? It makes me question whether or not only that one muse is popular for a reason. It also exhausts me re: the portrayal of that muse, because I”m putting out so many replies for that muse in a lot of sort of similar plots/scenarios that I just get burnt right out. And then I get scared that if I keep going I’ll want to drop the muse, so I’m staying away from those threads a little bit.

Second, I’m at a point in my portrayal of certain muses where I feel like there’s a certain expectation for how it’s going to be. My personal feelings aside, I think every mun expects their own portrayal to be different and unique and exciting - and it’s not different for me, only now I feel like the expectation and the pressure of coming up with something good and meaningful outweighs the feeling of exploration as I’m “discovering” the muse. Like most writers - I still crave validation, though more and more lately, I’m at a place in my writing where I f e e l like me from 2 months ago could have probably done a better job. While it’s not necessarily true, and these pressures are coming from m e and not any outside source, I f e e l like I have to consistently Make Good Writing, and simultaneously feel like some days I sit down and I try to do drafts and all I write is garbage. It just - doesn’t feel the same? So - more and more, I’m staring at the empty drafts page and then closing it - because if I don’t w r i t e I don’t have to admit I peaked two months ago.  

Both of these reasons have made me rather a bit avoidant of my muses here / this blog. Now, I’ve been struggling with anxiety for long enough that I know that a lot of this is - well, p r o b a b l y just my brain lying to me. See even as I’m writing this post now, my anxiety is saying “haha guess what n o one cares you’ve been gone” and my rational Anxiety-is-a-stupid-asshole voice is saying “nahhhhhh your brain is probably just lying to you.” But! In the battle, anxiety is kind of pummeling me now. I will r i s e again and win the war, most likely - but for now it’s anxiety: 1 and ro: 0.

AND finally - if you made it all the way down here, you’re a c h a m p. The solution! Well, as much of a solution as I’m hoping to get anyway - we’ll have to see if it implements well. I’m going to unfollow a few blogs so I can get my dash cleaner/more organized/less fast-moving and b r e a t h e. I’m going to drop a couple of threads, I might make a couple more muses request only/exclusive only for the like 2 people that have threads with them, I might drop a couple muses (though I don’t think this will really happen, Idk tho). There will be separate posts on those things coming soon, this is just to notify y’all. Thank you for all of your patience, thank you for all the wonderful people who’ve allowed me to write with you, I love all of you!!!!