#hand drawn typeface

[nieuwe-secession]

[saboteursupply]

FREE Thin Letter Forms and Numbers Pack

Experience the meticulously crafted letters and numbers in this asset pack, all hand-painted and ready for your creative endeavors. These assets are perfect for enhancing any design, elevating your Photoshop projects, unleashing your creativity in Photoshop, or simply for playful experimentation. Craft your own words and relish the process.

[studiopapierchiffon]

Andromeda is a handmade font that can be used for branding or illustrations. You can purchase it in my etsy shop

[ryetoons]

Rise and Grind.

[dailyletterings]

The Handwriting Bundle Font

DOWNLOAD

[warrenwoodhouse]

FANE CIC Creative Corner Logo by Warren Woodhouse (Artwork)

Logo that I’ve made for the art class that me and the Friends Action North East CIC have set up. Also a potential upcoming font, stay tuned to this blog post for further updates next year.

Artwork by @warrenwoodhouse

✏️ Number 2 Pencil - Banner Brand

📃 A4

✋ Hand-Drawn

🗓 9th November 2016

💿 Warren Language Font

📍 Friends Action North East CIC, Ouseburn Farm, 1 Ouse Road, Ouseburn, Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear, North East, England, United Kingdom.

[marauder-misprint]

Hii, congrats on 200 followers! I was wondering if you could do prompt 47, “I was already yours.” w/ Remus? (No pressure) Thanks! Ur amazing! <3<3

Thank you for the request! ❤︎ I rewrote this in like four different ways. Finally got something I'm happy with! Hope you like this little bit of fluff!

Magnetic

Remus Lupin x fem!reader

1.0k words

cw: fluff

Remus felt like a magnet. He attracted friends who were the opposite of him. He first noticed it with James and Sirius. Their boisterous personalities contrasting his more mellow one. Their ability to be so carefree while he struggled under the weight of how much he cared. And then there was you. Bold. That’s how he would describe you. Like bolding a typeface. You were very ‘in your face’ in a lot of ways. So naturally, he was drawn to you while you seemed to repulse James and Sirius. They didn’t hate you but they didn’t get why Remus liked you so much. You were a magnet in your own sense. The boys from other houses liked to hang you like flies to honey. There was always one who was flirting away with you. You liked the attention but you’d always walk away from them. In all the years Remus knew you, you’d never had a boyfriend. From what he witnessed, you turned down anyone who made a move on you. 

And that was enough for Remus to hold back his feelings for you. If you didn’t give any other boy a second look, why would you give Remus one? The only thing he felt he might have over them was a deep friendship with you. But that’s all it was: friendship. 

You sat down next to him on the couch in the common room. It was just him left as James and Sirius had gone to bed. 

“You know, I’m tired of guys thinking a little flirting is enough to get into my pants.”

Remus raised his eyebrows and looked over at you. You were slumped into the cushions, slouching far enough down that your butt almost hung off the couch. Your grumpy expression shouldn’t have made him smile but it did. He thought it was cute on you. 

“Another suitor turned away?” He asked teasingly. 

“Please, Pickett is anything but a suitor. I do have standards.”

“Impossible ones,” he mumbled, looking away from you. 

Part of him had hoped you hadn’t heard his little comment, but the way you sat up and turned your body toward him said otherwise. 

“What do you mean ‘impossible ones’?”

Remus sunk a little bit into the couch. He was regretting saying anything but he couldn’t take it back now. 

“I’ve known you since first year. You haven’t had a boyfriend and it isn’t like boys are lacking. I’ve never seen you dance with a boy for longer than one song. And… I doubt you’ve even kissed anyone.”

Remus tried to read the look on your face before it shifted to something more like indifference.

“I don’t see why I should waste my time on boys I know won’t make me happy,” you said defensively. “Why should I humor someone to a second dance if they made me want to gag the entirety of the first one?”

Remus shrugs. “Maybe a bad first impression?”

You laughed and squeezed Remus’s cheeks with your hand. 

“You’re cute when you’re optimistic about the boys at this school.”

Trying not to focus on your hands on his face, Remus couldn’t help the heat rising to his face when you called him cute. 

“They can’t all be bad!”

You paused for a moment, letting your hand fall from his face and back into your lap. 

“No, you’re right… Shocker, right?” you laughed. “They aren’t all terrible. But a lot could be better. You can’t argue with me on that.”

Remus draped an arm over the back of the couch so he could turn his body more toward you. 

“Okay, so humor me, okay?”

“Okay…” 

He didn’t miss the hint of hesitancy in your voice.

“What if you gave one of the decent guys a chance?”

You laughed and it made Remus’ heart race. Then you leaned forward.

“The decent guys don’t like me.”

“What makes you think that?”

“They just don’t act interested in me at all. Like they don’t flirt with me. The decent guys don’t like me like that.” 

“That can’t be right,” Remus said, his facial features scrunching in disbelief. “Who do you think is decent? Maybe I’ve heard something that you haven’t.”

“You can’t judge me if I tell you.”

“I’ll judge you if you say Sirius.”

You smiled at him. You wondered how someone so smart could be so dumb sometimes. 

“You’re a decent guy, Remus.”

Time stood still for a moment. You were trying to read each other’s expressions. Remus couldn’t tell if you were being sincere; was there a possibility that you liked him? You tried to understand where his confusion was coming from. Had he not heard you? 

“Remus?” you asked, your voice wavering in a way Remus wasn’t familiar with. “Say something.”

“I’m a decent guy?” he echoed your sentiment quietly.

You let out an amused scoff. “You’re more than a decent guy, Remus. You’re like the whole package… except…”

You looked away from Remus.

“Except?”

“Except you don’t like me like that.”

You felt Remus’ hand on your chin, bringing your face to look at his. He had moved closer to you. 

“Except I do.”

“You do?” you breathe. “But you’ve never flirted with me?”

“I saw you turn away every bloke. What chance did I have?”

“Every chance, you idiot.”

Hoping that he wasn’t playing a joke on you, you leaned in and kissed him. You weren’t one to be cautious, but you were at this moment. You pulled back after a few seconds when your second-guessing thoughts got the better of you, but then Remus chased your lips with his own. His own head was spinning; he couldn’t believe that this was actually happening, that you had kissed him. He couldn’t believe that you confessed to liking him when he had believed he would be taking his crush on you to his grave. When he pulled back this time, you rested your forehead against his.

“So you’ll be mine?” you ask in a whisper.

“I was already yours,” Remus said softly. “I just wasn’t brave enough to let you know.”

[pursued-by-the-squid]

iv. cop out

pairing: gi-hun x gn!reader x in-ho

word count: 6.5k

ao3 | masterlist

1 Year Later, May 2024

“I have my final exam next week and no classes today, so I’m gonna be at the library for a while. Let me know when you want to do dinner.”

The voice message goes through with a little hum and a chirp, showing that it’s been delivered to Gi-hun before you have the chance to turn the screen off. You scan the apartment a few extra times, patting down your pockets and double checking your backpack for your charger because you are not doing a repeat of last week and leaving the study session early because your laptop died. While you’re at it, you snag a few bags of chips, some fruit, and refill your water bottle to keep you energized for the rest of the day.

Hefting your backpack onto one shoulder, you grab your keys and open the door, only to catch the tail end of a piece of paper as it flutters to the floor. Huh, it must have gotten caught in the door jamb. Knowing your luck, it’s probably an advertisement or some weird pastor coming to proselytize, so you have every intention of tossing it in the trash later. You nudge the paper with the toe of your shoe so it slips inside – it’s a later problem and you are very much trying not to be late for your bus – only to stop when you spot something familiar.

There are numbers on the back, a phone number, though you don’t recognize it. But there’s something about the typeface and the background they’re stamped on… Kneeling down to pick it up, you turn the card over in your hand and are instantly flooded with nostalgia of the worst kind. The businesswoman, the ddakji, Gi-hun in all his righteous anger. Three simple shapes shouldn’t have this much power over you, but the instant you see it, you’re awash with fear.

Trembling hands go scrambling for your phone. “Pick up, pick up, dammit.”

You dial a second time and he answers after only two rings. “[___]-?”

“It’s them,” you gasp, your throat raw from the effort of holding your screams in. “The ddakji people, t-the business card! I opened my door and there was a card jammed in there.”

Even from across the city, you can sense the change in Gi-hun’s mood. It permeates the air until it’s vibrating between the atoms separating you both. “Are you safe?”

A quick scan of the surrounding hallway confirms that you are alone. “I’m okay. I’m still at my apartment, I haven’t left yet.”

“Lock your door and stay inside until I get there.”

“Okay,” you nod, already dragging yourself to your feet to follow his instructions. “D’you want me to–”

“Listen to me,” he grits out, and it’s achingly familiar to the night he had first come to your apartment, all his hardened edges and quiet desperation. “Grab whatever you need – clothes, homework, anything. Just be ready to go when I get there.”

Your breath stutters in your chest for a second. “Ready for what? What are you talking about?” As if you don’t already have an inkling nudging at the back of your mind, as if this is all just a bad dream that you can talk yourself out of.

“I’m getting you out of there.”

It should have been me.

But he was the one who put you in harm’s way, wasn’t he? Thinking he could swoop in and save you from a life of poverty and misery, patting himself on the back all the while because he had done a good deed. He had done what Oh Il-nam could not and helped someone who couldn’t help themselves.

The tires lose their traction for a few moments, accompanied with the high-pitched scream of the brakes when he slams on them. He very nearly takes out a street sign and another vehicle, but he doesn’t. Neither does he care. There is only one thing in the forefront of Gi-hun’s mind and until he sees you with his own eyes, safe and unharmed, he will not rest. He can’t. Because it should have been him.

He barges into your apartment minutes later with his pistol drawn, his heart slamming itself against his ribcage, his throat so tightly constricted that he thinks he might actively be choking, and your name is already breaching his lips.

“What are you doing?” he hears you screech. Immediately drawn to the sound, he turns his head, searching and searching until finally he sees you, curled up into a ball on your sofa with your things gathered around you just as he’d asked.

You had said that the apartment was empty, that there was no way anyone could have gotten inside while you were sleeping, and he knows that’s probably true. He trusts you’ve been using all the proper safety precautions. But that doesn’t change the facts – you are not safe and you never have been.

“Where is it?” he demands, already stuffing the pistol into his coat pocket as he surges toward you, but you cower before him. You’re afraid of him. You don’t know, you don’t understand, not yet, and he doesn’t have time to explain it to you. “The card, [___].”

“I-I tore it up,” you stammer. Your eyes are wide and wild and so painfully afraid, and it guts Gi-hun to the bone. “It’s in the trash–”

His fingers close around your wrist and pull. “Good. We need to go.”

And while you do stand at his beckoning, you don’t allow him to pull you further. Your feet dig into the carpet until you’re able to tear yourself free, and Gi-hun wishes that you would’ve chosen any other time to fight him, any other place except here and now.

“[___]–”

“You’re scaring me.” And he can see when he looks in your eyes that you mean it with every fiber of your being. “Why do you have a gun?”

Because the only power these monsters respect is the power of a bullet. But you don’t even know what kind of monsters you’re running from, do you? He never told you.

He never wanted to.

Gi-hun swallows the despair lodged in his throat. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”

Your eyes flicker from his face to the ominous swell of fabric in his pocket, the gun that presses into his hipbone. “Okay. So, why do you have a gun.” This time, it isn’t a question.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” You don’t actually think he’s capable of that, do you?

“I… I didn’t think you were,” you answer, but he can see the uncertainty on your face, tainting your trust until it grows murky like blood in the bath water. “But you can’t just run into someone’s apartment with a gun in your hands. What if someone saw you?”

His teeth grind painfully together when he grimaces. You have so many questions, and you have a right to each of them, but now is not the time! “It’s alright. I’ll explain in the car, yes?” Your hesitation is reasonable, he has to remind himself. He can’t blame you for it. But oh, how badly he wants to shake you, how badly he wants to drill into your skull that every minute of hesitation is another mark on your death warrant. “Now, [___].”

He doesn’t let his shoulders unwind from around his ears until after he has you in the car, your bags stuffed into the back seat and the boot, your apartment far, far behind the both of you. You don’t look at him and Gi-hun tells himself, pretends, that it doesn’t bother him. You don’t understand yet, but you will. He’ll take you to the motel and tuck you into a room where you’re safe from the recruiters, from the game runners, from the world, and he will make you understand why this is so important, why you have to trust him.

Your head tips back when he pulls to a stop in front of the motel. Your confusion is as blatant as your uncertainty, both growing steadier and stronger with every passing moment. “What is this place?”

He shoulders one of your bags, a reusable canvas tote overflowing with clothes. One leg of your favorite trousers, the dark ones you always wear when it’s cold, is hanging over the side between the loops of the handle. It slaps harmlessly against his ribs when he walks.

“Pink Motel,” he offers. The gesture feels as useless as he does.

You furrow your brows at him and finally, he sees a glimmer of something other than fear in your eyes. He’s not terribly fond of you being angry with him, but he supposes it’s better than the alternative. Like your tear-stained face or your bloodied, lifeless body.

“Yeah, I see that.”

The padlock on the front doors clicks open. He decidedly doesn’t notice how your movements suddenly still when the security chains shudder and clank against the metal, heavy in his hands and even heavier in his heart.

“I just mean… why are we here?” The midday sun casts a shadow on your face. He tries not to notice that too. “How is this safer than my place?”

If he didn’t feel so guilty about being the reason you’re in danger in the first place, Gi-hun might have found it in himself to smile. He doesn’t, of course, but he thinks about it. Because there is some twisted piece of him that festers deep within the rotting cavern of his ribcage and it delights in knowing, in protecting, in providing, even in circumstances such as these.

He offers you his hand to help you up the single step. “I live here.”

“You don’t have an apartment?” You’re trying so hard not to sound surprised and to instead be polite about asking.

He guides you through the empty lobby, across dusty floors and rubbish leftover from an unfinished renovation, to the elevator, his hand hovering over your back. Not quite touching except in the spaces between moments when he thinks he can get away with it.

“The motel is mine,” he says, waiting until the elevator doors close to do so. He stares at the floor numbers, watching them tick by like seconds counting up, like money pouring into a display case, and he reminds himself to breathe. “I’ve been searching for the recruiters from here, keeping track of things.” Keeping track of you, too. Another fraying thread in the tapestry he has tried to weave out of bloodstained won and bullet casings.

“How long?” It seems a strange thing to ask until he realizes what you’re really wondering – how long has he been living out of an empty building where the lights rarely come on and no one is allowed entry except by the virtue of their discretion?

Since I met you. “A few years.”

Your knuckles tighten around the straps of your backpack. “Why?”

The elevator dings. The doors open to reveal a long hallway, painted in shades of pink and maroon and almost-black, dimly lit, and he suddenly realizes how just miserable he’s made his life. He hadn’t thought much of it before. But that changes the instant the light hits your face.

You don’t belong in a place like this. For as long as he has known you, Gi-hun has seen only hope and vitality in your eyes. You are the very thing he’s fighting for, the part of the world that he wants so desperately to protect from the predators running the Games. Bringing you here dampens that light. The illumination is cold and the walls are barren – a far cry from the warmth and welcome of your cozy apartment.

There’s no hope for a rundown old motel with no lights on inside, he thinks, with no guests to keep it warm, no hospitality to speak of beyond a few worn mattresses, a single functioning bathroom, and an entire armory tucked into the cracking walls. Yet this is all he can give. This is the only thing he can offer you.

It has to be enough. It will be.

“Sit,” he says, though he doesn’t even give you the time to respond. He grips you by the shoulders and directs you to the edge of his bed, pushing you down until your legs give way and the mattress accepts you with an undignified squeak.

“Gi-hun–”

He stops you with a raised hand, palm out and definitely not shaking. Not at all. “Do you remember what I told you about the recruiters?”

There’s a lump in your throat that bobs when you swallow and it makes Gi-hun feel uncomfortably warm, so he distracts himself, allowing you both the distance to think. The wooden chair by the coffee table is pulled out so he can sit across from you. His fingers curl around the slope of his knees while he waits.

The red glow behind the frosted glass of his only window casts a strange sort of halo around you from behind. “You said they were dangerous. That you were tracking them or something, right?”

He nods. “Yes. Them, and the people that they work for.”

“What kind of people do they work for?” The light from the bathroom, a faint yellow-orange, glints in the depths of your pupils. Like starlight, perhaps, or fire. Or the glow of a plexiglass pig, half-full with stacks of won and shining obnoxiously in the back of his mind whenever he sleeps.

Squeezing his eyes shut is the only thing he can do to keep from screaming.

“The recruiter I met was different. A man.” Tall and broad shouldered. He had smiled once or twice, in a way that wasn’t entirely threatening, but then he’d seen him after the airport. Then the smile had changed. “They approach people in need of money. Gamblers, fraudsters, unemployables – the vulnerable. They let you play a bit of ddakji, let the money sit in your pocket, and then they give you a card and tell you to call the number you see. That you can play even more games for even more money.”

If only he’d known then what he knows now.

“All that card will bring you, [___], is death.” He can feel it still – the blood on his hands, the marbles in his palm, the glass beneath his bare feet. And he can see them all, even with his eyes wide open. “They take you somewhere no one can find you and they make you kill other people for money. Every death is worth something. Every life is a dollar amount.”

Sang-woo’s face swims before him, filling the space that your body takes up in his vision. The knife in his throat, the rain in his face, the pain – the pain. That could have been you. If he’d never stepped in to save you from your own debts and student loans, would the recruiters have found you? Would you have found yourself trapped inside those arenas as he once was? Would you have died alone and afraid?

“I watched 455 people die before my eyes. My friend… My friend killed himself. He almost killed me.” He killed Sae-byok. Ali. The glassmaker. And perhaps, if you had been there, Sang-woo would have killed you too. He’s grateful that he’ll never have the chance to prove himself right or wrong. “I won’t let the same thing happen to you.”

Silence hangs between you for a long few minutes, thick enough to suffocate. In your eyes, Gi-hun sees the same horror he had once felt reflected back at him. You’re doubtful, of course, wary. He understands it. That had been him too, three and a half years ago.

He takes your hand in his, the one that’s been clutching at your bag like it’s the only lifeline you have left, and he smooths his thumb over the bones that shift beneath your skin. “I am trying to stop the Games. That’s why I live here, why I track the recruiters, why I told you that it was safer not to know me at all. I was afraid they would hurt you.” They haven’t yet, but tracking you to your apartment and shoving a recruitment card into your door jamb is a step too far. “But I can protect you here, [___]. Do you understand?”

You don’t respond and Gi-hun doesn’t like that. You can be quiet sometimes, yes, but rarely ever with him. He doesn’t want you quiet. He wants you alive, he wants you curious and clever like you always are.

He squeezes your hand and ducks his head down to catch your drifting eyes. “[___].”

Trust me.

Your head shakes after a moment, your expression distant in all the wrong ways. “I-I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you understand.” Say you trust me. Because he’s doing this for you. Don’t you trust me?

Long eyelashes flutter in Gi-hun’s shadow as he leans in, his silhouette falling across your face. “I’m trying to.”

He tries so hard to make his space comfortable for you, the effort is clearly carved into every line on his face. He gives you his room. He lays out the cleanest sheets and blanket that he has – you’re at least 75% sure they’ve been washed within the last month – and carries the rest of your things in from the car. He switches his pillow out for yours, though the difference in theme and color between your bedding and his is enough to make both of you laugh, and that is blessing enough. He crawls behind the bedframe to plug your charger into the wall. He encourages you to arrange the bathroom to your liking and swears that no matter how desperate he is, he won’t wake you in the middle of the night if he has to take a leak.

He tries and you love him dearly for it, but it’s impossible to turn this place into a home when it feels like the entire world is falling out from under your feet. You lay in a strange bed that night, your mind ablaze with images of ddakji games and bodies scattered in a formless void. You picture a faceless man, his unnamed friend, bleeding out and Gi-hun crying, screaming for help. You picture greed and rage mixing until they become indistinguishable from one another, and then you think of the man you’ve come to know these past few years, and you find the broken pieces of his kind heart and anxious mind suddenly come into focus.

455 people. How could such mindless death go unnoticed by the police? 455 people all worth a handful of cash. You’re not even sure how much money could go into such a thing, but if the cash flow Gi-hun has been supplying you with is anything to go by, it’s a lot. Hundreds of millions of won worth, maybe even more. And anyone with the power and money to design modern day gladiator games of that scale would surely be able to bribe whichever police department or federal jurisdiction they pleased.

And Gi-hun wants to stop it all.

It’s hard to imagine Gi-hun stopping much of anything apart from a crying college student in a back alley on Christmas night. But then, you’ve never seen him hold a gun before today. The gun changes things. So does the calling card.

You turn over onto your side, placing the expanse of the room behind you so you can stare at the red glow emanating from the other side of the window. You try very hard not to think about the blood of 455 lives. Instead, you focus on the things you can feel, the things you can sense, the things you know to be true beyond a shadow of a doubt.

You are alive. You are as safe as you can be, for the time being. You are in a strange place and a strange bed. It smells faintly of Gi-hun. You don’t usually like the smell of sweat and stale cologne, but in the midst of such uncertainty, you find that the familiarity of his scent is soothing. Pleasant, even. If you close your eyes, you can almost pretend he’s in bed with you. Not that you would ever want to, of course, because that would be weird, but is it so wrong to crave the comfort of an arm around your shoulders or the warmth of another soul after the day you’ve had?

You’re in the middle of trying to decide whether or not you should be chastising yourself when your phone buzzes. Glancing over your shoulder, you just catch the tail end of a name in your notifications before the screen goes dark again, and your heart leaps into your throat.

Rolling over onto your opposite side, you unlock the screen and read through the text. ‘Missed you for coffee earlier. Everything alright?’

Shit. You were so distracted by the business card and Gi-hun coming to whisk you away that you hadn’t even thought to warn Young-il that you weren’t coming. ‘Sorry, had a bit of an emergency at home. I hope I didn’t make you wait too long??’

‘Not at all.’

Your phone vibrates again a moment later, and you curse yourself for the way your face flushes and your pulse quickens. He’s just being polite, that’s the only reason he’s asking. That’s all this has ever been – polite – and truthfully, you’re not even sure you want it to be more than that, but sometimes his attentiveness makes you feel a bit gooey inside. He has this uncanny ability of always sensing when you’re upset and knowing exactly how to make you feel better… It’s endearing, to say the least, and a welcome distraction.

‘I’m okay, promise.’ You pause for a moment to find a believable excuse, Gi-hun’s earlier warning not to tell any of your friends about your temporary relocation ringing in your ears. ‘Family drama, you know how it is. I’m really sorry I ditched you though :(’

‘Will I see you tomorrow?’

The words turn over and over in your mind until the screen finally goes dark. He wants to see you – to make up for the lost time? To check on you? Yes, you want to say. I don’t want to be trapped in here like a rabbit in a cage. But then you think of the card wedged into your doorframe and the gun in Gi-hun’s hand, and you think of the 455 lives lost so that he might live, and you think that maybe the outside world can wait one more day.

‘Probably not, unfortunately. Next week might be better.’ Next week, you might have the courage to go outside without fearing for your life, among other things.

Young-il’s response warms your heart more than it probably should. ‘Keep me updated. If there’s anything I can do to help, please tell me.’

Well unless he can magic away the impending threat of a series of death games, there’s not much he can do to help you. The thought is still appreciated.

You sleep fitfully, waking every couple of hours in a dead sweat, heart racing, and terror in your bones. There’s so much you don’t understand. Too many unknowns crowd your mind and leave you restless, shaky, and paranoid. Did Gi-hun kill people? He must have in order to make it out of those games alive. Does he feel guilty for it? Is that why he chose you, to atone somehow? Old anxieties from the first year of your friendship are starting to creep back in, tinted in shades of violence. You trust Gi-hun, really you do, but the gun, the padlocked motel, the wall of security cameras blinking at you from across the room – none of it inspires any confidence.

Normal people don’t do this kind of thing. Normal people don’t burst into your apartment with a pistol in hand and wild, blazing eyes. Normal people don’t stalk strangers in business attire. Normal people make you feel safe, they take you out for coffee and smile when you crack a joke.

But perhaps you lost the right to normality the day you decided to accept several thousand won and a phone number from a stranger.

It’s been years since he last shared his bed with anyone. There was the occasional winter night where it was too cold to sleep alone and he’d crawled under the blanket beside his mother, huddled together in their shared apartment like children. Before that, he’d shared a bed with his wife. Sometimes Ga-yeong would climb in to sleep between them and he’d soothe his hand over her face, chasing her nightmares away with promises of her favorite dumplings and a bad scolding for the monsters in her closet.

After the Games, it was a concept that made little sense in the context of his new normal. He knew he would never share his bed, let alone his life, with another soul for however long he managed to stumble through this mortal coil. So sharing a bed with you is… difficult. Strange. Not that he is truly sharing the bed with you – it’s yours now, for as long as you’re here, but the memory of that bed is all him. His sweat and tears have stained its fabric for years now. The ashes from a few of his cigarettes have burned spots into the edges. His dreams have overpowered him in that bed. His anger, his fears, his carefully constructed plans all formulated on that bed. And now you’re sleeping on it, unconsciously sharing every piece of him that has soaked into the mattress.

Some invisible hand squeezes around his heart. The sudden need to shift the waistband of his trousers confuses him, but he’s careful to turn his back when he does. The last thing he needs is for you to wake up and catch him doing something inappropriate while you sleep. Not that he’s actually doing something wrong, because he’s not. It’s muscle memory, he tells himself. A remnant of a life he can no longer live come back to haunt him at the most inopportune of moments and nothing more.

He takes the opportunity to study the security cameras, as had been his original intent, and is pleased to see that everything looks normal. No pink soldiers laden with guns, no game runner and no sleek limo parked out front. No recruiters breaking the door down to get at you.

Gi-hun sighs. He’s content to have you under his eye because it means he can keep you safe, but it comes with a price he’s hesitant to pay. The recruiters are still out there. Jeong-rae is a capable man, of that he has no doubt, but paranoia prickles at the base of his skull when he isn’t out on the front lines himself.

But he can’t just leave you here. Locking the front doors wouldn’t be enough to convince him that you would be safe in his absence and he isn’t about to padlock you in like a prisoner. He can’t give you a gun, either, not yet. He’s not even sure you know how to use one and you may not want to learn.

Then he remembers you sitting in the car yesterday, your backpack clutched against your chest, your face pinched with confusion. He swallows the pressure rising in his throat. He could always take you with him. He isn’t terribly fond of welcoming you into his world because it’s not meant for someone like you, that’s the entire reason why he’s kept you at arm’s length for so long, but the longer he ponders, the more he realizes that a compromise needs to be reached. The recruiters are his priority, but so are you. Can he truly manage both?

“I want to show you what I do,” he says when he extends the offer some hours later, already far beyond his usual starting time. He hadn’t had the heart to wake you any sooner. The offer is also the most blatant lie he’s ever told you. It’s the very last thing he wants to do, but he knows that making you choose between glorified house arrest and a chaperoned car ride isn’t going to endear him to you. “So you can understand.”

Your responding frown is remarkably unencouraging. “Is it dangerous?”

“No,” he lies. The handgun tucked into the back of his waistband burns against his spine.

This time your face shifts and it makes something in Gi-hun’s stomach twist. “Do I have a choice?”

“You are not a prisoner here,” he says, and that, at least, is true. He would never force you into anything you didn’t want. If it came down to your safety, though, he thinks he might be inclined to be more persuasive than he usually is. He doesn’t want to think about that, but the potential of your betrayal lingers in his head and his heart. “I’m sorry if I made you think that you were.”

How he wishes he could turn back the clock and do things over. He wouldn’t have rushed you with a gun in his hands. He wouldn’t have frightened you. He would have made sure none of this ever happened. Until he learns to bend the shape of reality to his will, however, he will settle for this – your hand within his, warm and pliant and safe.

It takes you a few minutes to come out of your shell, but Gi-hun is grateful for the effort. He’s unaccustomed to your shyness. He much prefers you when you’re like this – asking questions, eyes alight with curiosity, daring to smile in the moments when you think he can’t see.

“Four cell phones is a lot, you know. I really think you just need one.”

Gi-hun feels the corner of his mouth twitch. “I’m trying to be thorough.” He flicks the ash off his cigarette and watches it catch on the wind for a moment before taking a long drag.

“Thorough is… certainly a word.”

You think he’s obsessed. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out and maybe you aren’t wrong. Maybe this stopped being a mission a long time ago and it’s turned into something more severe.

He flicks his cigarette again.

An obsession. A gamble, even. Perhaps so, but it’s a gamble he’s willing to take if it means he can sleep at night, if it means that you and every other vulnerable person walking the streets of Korea are safe.

“So… you do this every day?” There’s a notable vulnerability to your voice, like you’re hesitant to ask and even more hesitant to know the answer.

“Most days,” he nods.

“And you haven’t found them yet?”

Ironic, isn’t it? The recruiters always seem able to find him at their leisure, but Gi-hun can pour millions and millions of won into his search and still turn up empty handed after two and a half fucking years.

He scans the five screens displayed across his dash, checks and double checks each chat box, surveys the map of the subway system that he’s sure, by now, is burned into his retinas. Nothing. Time is running out and still, there’s nothing. If you hadn’t awakened to find a business card stuffed into your door, he might almost think that the Games have ended. Too little funding, maybe, or too few players, but he knows that’s a fool’s hope. The Games are alive and he has to put a stop to it.

“What will you do when you find them? The recruiters, I mean.” Your foot taps lightly on the belly of the car.

Honestly? He isn’t entirely certain. Sometimes he fantasizes about drawing blood – one life in exchange for the 455 lost. Sometimes he thinks he’ll use them as a hostage. He could get the game runner’s attention and demand something. Sometimes he thinks about meeting his recruiter on the squid game field, defeating the man who had doomed Gi-hun to either a brief existence or a tortured one, and finally exacting his revenge.

Right now, though, he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t even know if there’s a point in hoping or fighting anymore.

“I want to find the ones responsible for the Games,” he says finally. Smoke burns in his lungs and the sun warms his skin until he’s sweating, and he’s glad for it because it means this indecisive, in-between existence isn’t some kind of waking nightmare. “I’m going to put a stop to this, one way or the other. And their recruiters are the only way I know how.”

You can’t seem to find anything to say to that, and Gi-hun doesn’t know what more he can add that hasn’t already been uttered. Silence settles between you, uneasy perhaps, but not entirely unwelcome. It allows Gi-hun the chance to think, to plan and plot and strategize. With you by his side, no matter how temporary, he finds that the drive to continue fighting comes a bit easier. The memories don’t weigh on him so heavily.

He will find them. It’s no longer a question of if or when. If it takes the rest of his life, he will fight to uncover the corruption and the greed and the sick, twisted desires of men far less tortured than he is. And until that day comes, Gi-hun is going to protect you. He’ll even teach you how to protect yourself so that when he dies with a bullet in his brain, you can keep fighting for all the things he sees in you, all the light you bring to his windowless world.

“Like this,” he instructs, twisting his arms so you can see the shape of his hands and the gun nestled between them. “Keep your finger on the outside of the trigger. If you keep it inside, you might fire before you’re ready and hurt yourself.” He’d learned that lesson the hard way when he almost shot his own foot off about a year ago.

Your mouth is twisted in concentration, your eyes laser focused on his hands as you attempt to copy his position. Your trigger finger carefully shifts and then the butt of the gun is readjusted so it fits more snugly in your palm.

Gi-hun nods approvingly. “Good. How does it feel?”

“Heavy.”

His chest tightens. “Too heavy?”

“No. It’s just different, is all.” The light glances off the cool, matte black exterior as you tilt your hands one way, then the other. “I thought it’d be lighter.”

You’re probably fine – in fact, he knows that you are, but he can’t help the spike of anxiety, the burning need to make things perfect for you, easy for you. “There are smaller ones,” he says as he drops his weapon, already turning his attention to the makeshift arsenal and the array of pistols, revolvers, and derringers on the wall.

You shake your head as he passes. “I’m okay.”

A derringer might be better suited for you. It’s much lighter than the pistol already in your hand, so the recoil won’t be as intense.

“Gi-hun. Gi–”

He steps back into the bathroom, toggling the light switch as he surveys the variants. Which one would fit in your hands just right? The derringers are small, yes, but he worries they won’t be powerful enough to stop an advancing attack. A revolver instead, then. He’s just about to pick one when he hears your gun go off.

His blood runs cold, then violently hot. He damn near trips over himself, nearly throwing himself through the wall, in his rush to find you, too preoccupied with the thought of you hurting yourself because you were too impatient and too stubborn to wait for him, too preoccupied to think of anything more than the gush of your blood and the panic in your eyes.

He sees the smoke trailing from the mouth of your gun, then the slight wobble of your hands. He calls your name, and then you fire three more rounds, each one carefully aimed and measured between by the steady rise and fall of your chest.

Four shots in total. Two of them made it onto the target and close enough to the center of each shape that Gi-hun might have been mildly impressed were he not already struggling to breathe. You, on the other hand, are elated. It’s clear in the way your shoulders unwind and your chin tilts up, how your eyes flicker excitedly in his direction.

“Can I try again?” you ask, and he’s bowed over by the weight of your breathless enthusiasm.

In the years he’s known you, not once could Gi-hun have ever guessed you might actually enjoy this. But you do. With every round fired, your aim grows sharper and your confidence stronger. Pride settles within your chest and flares out across your shoulders. He has to correct you a couple times – “feet like this,” he’ll urge you with a quick demonstration; “shoulders back,” he murmurs, tapping you lightly on the upper curve of your arm – but you take to each direction with a nod or a hum and you transfer it into a hundred rounds buried in the splinters of the far wall. He's never been prouder in his life.

It becomes a new habit, even after you’ve convinced him to return you to your apartment and your scent has faded from his bed. You go about your life, doing whatever it is young people like you do in the summers between courses, and he goes about his, tracking a man who doesn’t want to be found, but the weekends are yours and his. He picks you up in the morning (or early afternoon, more often than not), buys you a cheap cup of ramyeon from the corner store, and drives you to the motel so you can practice your aim.

He doesn’t have to keep correcting you by this point, but he still does sometimes. He likes being close to you, likes watching the way your hair shines in the light and your jaw sets in determination, how your body stills when he touches you. He likes it so much that he thinks about it when he can’t sleep (which is most nights), or when he’s out on his watch and can’t focus (which is most days now), or when he studies the photos Jeong-rae sends him each week to confirm that you are, in fact, alive and safe within the walls of your apartment.

For so long he had feared tainting you, carving your kindness from your bones if he so much as looked at you and you caught a glimpse of all the death that hides behind his eyes. What would happen to the too-trusting and unassuming college student he met on the street, crying to an alley cat about your troubles, if he let you see the misery that’s been eating him alive? The violence?

But you aren’t tainted. It’s strange to say it, but Gi-hun thinks he might actually prefer the person you’ve become. Fear doesn’t come to you as readily. You still won’t accept any weapons from him, and he still hesitates to offer them, but you’ve become familiar enough with their presence to no longer worry over what-if’s and might-be’s.

So no, he hasn’t tainted you. Perhaps he has somehow managed to make you stronger. And perhaps he can learn to be okay with that.

[the-midnight-blooms]

till death do us park | psh

pairing: yandere!park seonghwa x wife!reader AU: modern au word count: 7.9k warnings: yandere themes, mentions of a miscarriage

masterlist

Obsession (n) : the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire. Obsessive (adj) : being, pertaining to, or resembling an obsession.

Her fingers ran down the brown page of the old dictionary, reeling in the words typed in classic typefaces of the past, the primitive vanilla scent reaching out to her. Gently she leaned her forehead against the window; the sway of the leaves, billowing, with the howl of the wind. The thin branches always reached out for her, and she wanted to grab onto them, allow it to ensnare its coarse body around her frame. To transgress from one form of entrapment to another. Moving between one space to another was to honour the mere notion of liberation. Freedom was her ecstasy, to get intoxicated on the thought had her stumbling down the hallways hands gripping onto the walls as the doors flung open. The void beckoned her, called for her, summoned her. She'd heed its call if only it wasn't for the shackles tied to her feet. Or for the demon that could penetrate his hand through her skin and ensnare his slender fingers around her spine; staggering her movements through the room he called his home. Under the guise of what he deemed: love.

"All you have to do is feel my love for you. Then you'll love me back all the same." Those words from the night after she married him, echoing within the pits of a dark chasm beneath her soul. Loving was a difficult emotion when she never had the privilege of experiencing it before. All this pent up sentiment and with nowhere to put it, loneliness was something she had to get used to.

Then there came Park Seonghwa.

He took that conviction without asking.

Seonghwa first saw her in a park, sat on a red and white checked blanket sketchbook on her laps, pencils scattered around her. One behind her ears, one between her puckered lips as she nimbly rubbed away at whatever mistake she had made. Alone, she came. Nothing but the comfort of herself to entertain her with no friends to listen to her, no husband to ease the persisting empty ache in her heart, not even a child to make her laugh with their extraordinary antics. Nothing but a vast emptiness contempt to haunt her. Thus she had the park with the rustle of the bushes, the laughter of children to cease the war roaming within her soul. Even the saccharine scent of the flowers eased the loneliness gnawing away at her. Seonghwa, too, was sat alone with a book spread across his laps enjoying the cool wind tousle his long hair. His wide eyes latched onto the shape of her perfect eyes, the smooth round of her cheeks, the curvature of her pink lips- her head snapped up feeling a pair of eyes burning into her. Searching the grass, high on some delusion that someone would willingly want to look at her, they finally bored into another's. Her muse. The man drawn on her sketchbook. Unbeknownst to Seonghwa, she had been hypnotised by his presence ever since she saw him. The face to the blurry man of her dreams, his sweet demeanour was enough to keep her intoxicated. She was an idiot for thinking that a man as gorgeous as himself would want anything to do with her.

To an extent it was concerning for herself to have a drawing of a stranger sitting in her notebook. Peering over at him through her lashes, he looked as if he wasn't going to leave anytime soon. Packing up her utensils and throwing them into her bag, she slung it over her shoulders sketchbook in hand. The beat of her heart quickened, as she approached him. Clearing her throat, his wide brown eyes piqued up. A pleasant smile rested upon his features as she timidly plucked up the courage to piece her words together.

"Hi, I actually drew you." Great start, that's not weird at all. Hastily, she handed over the piece of cartridge paper. Gently, he took it from her hands a small gasp escaping from his lips.

"It's great, thank you so much." Nodding, gratefully. “I- it’s very accurate.” He complimented, his beam so adorable it swayed her heart.

That’s all it took, didn’t it? He was a dream; eyes studded with stars scintillating in their wake. His name itself: “to be a star”. His soul, an unmapped constellation. There was something particular about him, like a magnet drawing her to his depths. Falling into his arms as if he was a safety net, enamouring her befallen entity. If only she knew not get trapped by a man’s insatiable beauty. Didn’t they say? A pretty face doesn’t mean a pretty heart.

Where she had adored Seonghwa, the man had become fully infatuated with her. After work, he found himself outside her home peering through her window as she carried out mundane chores: folding and ironing laundry, vacuuming and dusting the home after her own working hours. Then on the weekends, like clockwork, she woke up at 9am, and left the house by 9:30 to walk to the supermarket and collect groceries. Occasionally she’d meet up with her ‘friends’, people she’d agree to hang around in hopes of having someone to talk to even if it wasn’t allowed to be about the way her mind was collapsing in on itself. Sometimes Seonghwa was present himself- just at the back of the coffee shop, in another aisle of the grocery store staring between the space in the shelves, head down staring at a book as they exchanged whispers in a bookshop.

When he had finally plucked the courage to talk to her, he’d bumped into her in the convenience store after work-where she was rendered under contemplative thought over which drink she wanted. Through her peripheral vision she caught Seonghwa staring at her from where he was stood with a few snacks in hand. A friendly smile dawned on her, giving him a wave to which Seonghwa issued as a sign to engage in a conversation.

“Hi! How are you?” She asked, almost a little too enthusiastically for her own liking.

“I’m great, how have you been?”

“I’m good. How is the drawing?” She teased, almost a failed attempt at a joke.

“I actually got it framed, it’s on my wall.” She laughed at him, but god knew Seonghwa was not joking. He indeed did get it framed, and it was proudly sitting on the wall of his study. Her arms outstretched from the door of the fridge, pulling it open to release a massive gust of cold air. Reaching for the coffee, Seonghwa subtly shook his head in dismay. He was concerned about her coffee consumption, she averaged about four to five cups of strong coffee a day. He’d change that. “Listen, I- I was wondering if you’d like to go on a date with me?”

Her first biggest mistake was agreeing to the date. So destitute of attention she latched onto the idea of being with a handsome man at that-whose unfathomable beauty was what other's may have labelled as 'way out their league'. But how was she to know how insane the man was for her? On their first date, Seonghwa took her to an art museum.

"Who's your favourite artist?" she asked. It came as a surprise to her when he proposed the idea of going to an art museum. Out of all places, she didn't think art was Seonghwa's forte but his extensive knowledge of art movements had astounded her. His sweet honey voice was delightful, when he spoke it was almost as if flowers were falling from his lips.

"Michelangelo Buonarroti." The infamous obsessed artist himself. She gasped in surprise.

"He's my favourite too!" she chirped. But Seonghwa already knew, because he saw the art books aligned next to her anatomy books and pieces of Buonarroti's work on her messy worktop, littered with unscrewed paint bottles, pencils, paintbrushes and charcoal. At first he felt repulsed at her untidiness, but when he watched her clean up after herself afterwards he felt a swell of pride in his heart.

That’s my girl. She is so much like me and me, her.

“Do you draw?” She quizzed.

“Not really. I’d love to be your muse, I can sit perfectly still.” She giggled at him, shaking her head as she strolled further into the museum. At the end of their date, Seonghwa offered to walk her home as darkness befell among them.

“Will I see you again?” He questioned, as they stood outside her front porch.

“I think you will, as my muse.”

That was her second biggest mistake. Meeting up in cafe’s, parks, each other’s homes with hours filled with silence as she drew him. He learnt to draw from her, translating some of her tips and tricks for a true likeness. Instantly, she had become his muse. Gradually, the art dates had blossomed into something more. She’d come to terms with her feelings for him.

At this point, having her as his girlfriend wasn’t enough for him. He wanted all of her, every last part that existed. He wanted to come home to her every evening, her arms outstretched for him and only him. He wanted her to bear his children, to begin a family with him. He became so fanatic with this domestic fantasy, he began to start plotting ways to plaster her at his side. Especially when he came home one evening, and she was baking in his kitchen. Her hands, dusted with flour reached towards the Windsor knot. Pulling his tie, she leaned in pressing her lips to his to which he reciprocated. He smiled, placing his hand on her lower back, deepening the kiss.

“Welcome home, husband.” She joked, before shooing him out, to get changed for dinner. Slightly dazed, from the deep kiss, Seonghwa smiled to himself in the bathroom.

She wants me too.

“Here.” He placed a cup of tea in front of her, a frown complacent. “No, no coffee for you madam. Too much coffee is not healthy, then you complain about not being able to sleep.” He nagged, repressing a smile she rolled her eyes playfully raising the hot beverage to her lips.

“Hold on, I need the bathroom. I’ll be back.” He nodded, occupying himself with the cookies. She skipped out of the kitchen and up the stairs of his home. Before she ambled down the steps, a door creaked open swaying back and forth; parrying against the push of the wind. Sauntering to the door, it hauled itself open the light from the hallway spilling into the room.

The sheets of paper littered upon the desks grabbed at her attention, allowing curiosity to get the best of her she inched forward. They were pictures of her. Pictures of her going to the grocery store, coming home from work, doing the laundry. Pictures of her bedroom, her sketchbooks, her work. Frantically, her hands gathered through every page dissolving the sight of every little thing about her sprawled across the pages. Copies of her birth certificate, her passport, bank details. Where had he obtained these? Tears rushed to the brim of her eyes, her mouth slapping her lips shut to prevent any sounds from escaping.

“Nae sarang! Are you ok?” He called from the bottom of the stairs. Holding back her tears, she left the sheets as they were rushing out of the room- closing the door, but not fully shut to raise suspicion. She descended down the stairs, her pale face raised Seonghwa’s attention. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I feel a bit unwell. My head is pounding.” She proclaimed, the truth nonetheless. She could barely even look into his eyes now, feeling vulnerable and stripped bare. He knew everything possible about her that there was to know. And for what reason?

“Have you started your period? You’re not due yet, you always start at the end of the month.” Her cheeks flushed red with embarrassment, god he knew that too? “Ach, don’t be shy you told me.” She didn’t remember telling him, ever.

“You know I keep sanitary towels in the cupboard if you need-,”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just exhausted.” He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. She was full of energy when she first arrived at his home. What had happened that all of it had dissipated within a few minutes?

“Take some rest-,” she’d interrupted him once more, a sense of irritation fulfilling him.

“I’m going home.” Without a word more, she grabbed her bag from the kitchen and fled from the door as fast as she could. Seonghwa’s heart sunk in his chest, a pang settling deep as she left without kissing him- like she always did.

She didn’t call him once, after that night. Not even a message to ask him how he was. Sitting on her bed, with her knees tucked up and pressed against her chest, she pondered on what to do next. What was there even left to do? He knew everything about her, what were the chances he was still watching her in this very moment? She couldn’t go back to her hometown, he’d know where to look first. She didn’t have a friend’s house she could go to. She could move, but to where? There was the matter of her job, moving all of her personal belongings, then having to change her billing address on all legal documentation. That was fine, she could suppose, the real problem lay in how she was going to execute all of this without him knowing.

A ferocious knock on her door snapped her out of her thoughts. Darting to the window, her eyes carefully peered outside to find the devil himself on her front step. As if he could sense her fixation, he looked up sending a patronising wave. Dear god, help me. Tentatively, the door unlocked Seonghwa teared through the open space; stumbling backwards as he strode to her. His pale hand settled on her cheek, bringing her closer to him.

“What’s wrong, baby? Why have you been ignoring me?” Words lodged in her front, pathetic stutters escaped her- unable to construct together a rational sentence.

“I’ve not been well, and I’ve been wanting to be alone.” Her reasoning was good enough, yet he knew that there was something brewing beneath the surface. After all, he found that the pictures in his office were not in the exact order that he’d had them in. He was particularly meticulous about that sort of thing.

“You could at least return my calls, no? What’s on your mind?” His soft voice no longer soothed the pervasive yearning that existed for centuries.

“I think we should break up, Seonghwa.” She stated, attempting the control her quivering voice. Balling up her palms into tights fists at her side, she avoided gazing into his eyes for they were wrought with such brutality.

“Why? What did I do wrong? What did you see?” Squeezing her eyes shut, her bottom lip began to tremble as he bombarded her with those treacherous questions. What did I do wrong? Everything and anything that was humanely possible for a man to do wrong. “WHY? WHY DO YOU WANT TO LEAVE ME?” He roared, tears burst through the banks, pitiful cries echoed into the home.

“The pictures!” She shouted, “The pictures, the birth certificate, the passport, everything. The way that you know things about me that I haven’t even told you, the way that you’ve thrown yourself into every aspect of my life and have left nothing for myself. The way that you attach yourself to me, its suffocating.” Heaving breaths infiltrated the empty space, pearl drops slid down her cheeks, the tears tickling her jawline as they gracefully blessed the floorboards beneath them. The objects in her line of sight all began to bleed together, her head pounding with an incessant pain.

“I need you to leave, Seonghwa. Before I file for a restraining order.” It was sheer stupidity that she had not gone and done that first, yet with the persisting fear and delusional hope that it had all just been some sick dream- she refused to go to the police station. Beads of sweat lined upon her brow, her body convulsing under his despotism.

“I’m not leaving.” He ordered, a cunning smirk falling on his perfect features. "You don't understand, my dear, how long I have wanted you. Do you think that now that I have you in the palm of my hand, I'm going to let you go?" Her heart began to palpitate, as the shaking of her body cultivated a booming agony that seemed to exponentialise.

"Took you long enough, do you feel it now?" He tutted, the dissonance jarring in her ears. "Poison takes too long but I am a patient man." Black dots clouded her vision, the walls were caving in on her. Stumbling backwards her, the ground slipped from beneath her feet-meeting the floor with a distasteful grunt she glissaded into unconsciousness.

The throbbing at her temples persisted, as her eyes fluttered open finding herself in a dark room with the curtains drawn. The room was particularly large, painted in a navy blue yet adorned with light coloured furniture, including the soft, white blanket that was thrown over her. With a heavy grunt, she sat up blinking rapidly so her eyes could accustom to the surroundings. Getting out of the bed, she staggered out of the room and out of the steps, the surroundings completely different than what she knew. This wasn't Seonghwa's home, but a completely different one at that. To begin, she remembered the stairs being on the right of his room in his home. Here, the were built on the left. The kitchen was still across from the stairs, his slender figure was fixed by the kettle. Upon seeing her, he rushed to her side helping her settle at the table in the kitchen.

"How are you feeling?" He brushed the hairs from her face, paying no attention to her disorientation.

"Seonghwa, what am I doing here? Where are we?"

"This is our home now, just you and me and nobody else for miles." He spoke with a dreamy face, oblivious to her apprehension. "Never mind that. Here, sign this." He placed a sheet of paper in front of her to which her eyes reeled over the page sinking in the words. A marriage certificate. Snickering, she gritted her teeth in resentment.

"A marriage certificate? Have you gone mad?"

"What do you mean? We both love each other, what more do you want? We should just get married."

"Seonghwa, I used to love you. Until you decided to be a creep and fucking steal my personal documents. I used to love you until, you poisoned and kidnapped me to a house, god-knows-where." Her chest suspired furiously, he looked back at her as if she had just said something cursed. "This isn't love, this is obsession, and you need help." Grabbing the neck of her dress, her body gravitated towards his.

"Sign. The. Sheet." He ordered. A consternation stormed within her, his face like an angel, heart of a devil. Her hands trembled as the ink pierced through the paper, indenting the sheet. With a smirk on his face, Seonghwa looked over her shoulder only to cock his face head to the side as his tongue poked the inside of his mouth in annoyance.

‘F U C K Y O U’

Roughly, he grabbed her wrist her body falling over the chair bare feet slapping against the floor. She wrestled for hand back, as he dragged her up the steps but his strength overpowered hers. He shoved her into a bedroom, scrambling backwards until her spine hit against the foot of the bed, convulsing as he edged closer.

“Maybe you’ll learn the hard way.” He whispered, “but a pretty face shouldn’t say such hideous words.” Storming out of the room, his arms grabbed for the door handle, door narrowing the space. Clambering to her feet, she darted to the door, twisting the handle only for it to be locked in place. Her fists pounded against the wood an panicked breaths escaped her.

"Seonghwa! Let me out!" Please.

He returned at evening around six o’clock, like clockwork, with a tray of food in hand. Ignoring the pathetic rumble of her stomach, the lethargy of her muscles, the tugs and pains all digging into her heart, she denied herself his food. Because Seonghwa was a madman and even the act of accepting his morsel would give him a glimmer of hope that she’d sign the wretched document. On some days he’d sit on the chair in the corner of the room, to see if she’d eat but she never did. With her body tucked up in the bed, her face sunk into the pillow-the dim of the dusk light spilling into the room. Suppressing a groan, her fist was buried into her stomach as if it would cease its cries for food.

“If you don’t eat, then I don’t eat. How does that sound?” He provoked, getting off the chair to sit on the edge of bed where she was aimlessly drawing patterns over the bedspread.

“Delightful.” She croaked out, her throat parched, begging for a sliver of water.

“You don’t want me to fall ill, do you? If I fall ill then I can’t go to work. If I can’t go to work, how am I going to provide for you and our children?” Thwack. Her hand collided with his cheek, sending a stinging jolt through his pale flesh. Weakly she grasped at his formal shirt collar, his body oscillating back and forth.

“How dare you? I am not your wife, Seonghwa.”

“But how could you not understand that I am so in love with you?” He pushed her hands away from his collar, locking her wrist within his tight grip to place them at his chest. “I’ll tolerate all of this, just for you. Know that it hurts me to see you like this.” Tears rushed to the front of her eyes. She could not bargain with him, she could not ask for help since he deprived her of any source; having locked her in this bedroom. Whether it was days or weeks she’d been isolated, her knowledge was indifferent with her perception of time being distorted. The only option was to sign that goddam marriage contract, but even then, self-annihilation seemed preferable. She was just waiting for her body to deteriorate and one day when Seonghwa would walk into her room, he’d find her stone cold dead. With an exhausted huff he got up from the bed, still clad in his work attire. Closing the curtains, he walked out of the room shutting the door behind him. But the lock did not click in place.

A sense of hope entered her as adrenaline flooded through her veins. Silently, she got up from the bed, resting her ear against the door. When she heard no sound, carefully the door swung open the vast hallways empty as the door to Seonghwa's bedroom was fixed shut. Hurriedly, she scuttled out of the room descending down the steps-darting straight to the kitchen; the emptiness catalysing a surge of disconcerting emotions within her. Twisting the lock on the kitchen door, she sped out feeling the soggy grass beneath her feet as she headed straight for the mass of trees.

It hadn't occurred to her that the house was isolated in the middle of the woods, with at least no other home for about three miles. But she knew that the nearest town could not be too far away as Seonghwa still made his way to work every morning and to the shops on the weekends. He heavily prioritised work being a commutable distance from where he lived. She fled down the woodlands-the abrasive bark lacerating her bare feet the cold mud clenched around her toes manifesting feelings of disgust. Whilst her body ached, with no fuel but adrenaline to keep going she spared a look behind to find the dark obscuring her view of the home in the distance. Nevertheless she dashed through the woodlands.

Seonghwa realised that he hadn't actually locked the door to her room. Shit. Stalking out of his room, he twisted the handle to her room swinging it open to find it completely desolate. Releasing a tired sigh, he shook his head casually wandering out of his home to find his lover.

Sinking to the floor, the sizzling of her throat sent an abiding anguish through her the leaves crackling under her weight. Her name echoed through the trees, being carried through the wind, its entrails infiltrating her ear. Every octave raising like the pulse of her agitated heart. Picking herself up again, heavy pants penetrated the woods as panic flooded through her veins— the night carrying her through. Weighty footsteps had caught up behind her, breaths quickened as her pace accelerated tiredness tugging at her aching muscles. Her throat burned as blood hammered through the arteries, ventricles contracting. A biting grip wrapped itself around her wrist her body jerking backwards towards the perpetrator, a small weight settled on her waist as he manoeuvred her body to face his.

"Where do you think you're going?" His husky voice whispered into her ear. Exhaustion domineered her, with her legs giving out she collapsed to the earth defeated tears rushing down her face. Squatting down to her level, he grabbed the bottom of her cheek, her neck snapped back, cheeks paining from the intensity of his brutish grip- as if she wasn't subdued to enough pain already. "I asked you a question." His patience was wearing thin.

"Let me go, Seonghwa. I won't tell anyone what you did. Please-." His palm connected violently against her cheek.

"How dare you even suggest that. Get up. We're going home." Remaining settled on the ground, she wrapped her arms around herself to generate a sense of warmth to parry against the biting winds burning her supple skin. "Fine, I'll drag you there." Balling up her hair in his fist, he turbulently hauled her body in the direction of the home; her hands flinging to his to push away his tight grip.

"Seonghwa, please stop." Her cries were futile, he paid no attention to her. Upon entering the home, he lugged her up to her bedroom; her ankles hitting harshly against the edge of the stairs. Throwing her into the room, as if she was a doll, her body fell against the floor, incessant cries persisted in the haunting atmosphere.

With no option left for her, she tiredly picked her body up from the floor crawling towards the nightstand. Her hands shook as she picked up the pen, resting her cheek against the cold surface of the tabletop. The nib scratched against the crisp, clean sheet forming the outline of her signature.

“I knew you’d sign it. Thank you, jagi.” He pressed his lips to her forehead, tucking the stray strands of hair behind her ear. He had sewn the strings to her back, the day that he met her. Every limb of hers beckoned to his command.

The car parked in the parking lot of the supermarket store, her face pressed up against the glass almost repelled against the sight of so many people present at this time of day. How long had she gone without seeing so many people in one space? She was just used to herself and her husband at home. Opening up the door, a gust of wind followed them through the automatic doors, her eyes travelled up to the tall ceilings of the store gratified by large shelves packed with all sorts of comestibles. He grabbed a basket from the entrance, looping his arm through the handles-strictly adhering to his list whilst his wife reeled in the endless sight of jars which seemed to stretch out for miles.

“Do you remember what else we needed? I’ve got all the vegetables, the pasta, the jam you wanted. Need anything else for the cake?” He quizzed. Her lips pursed in deep thought.

“Ah yes! I need double cream and…light brown sugar. I’ll go get it.”

“It’s just here, I’ll go with you.” He offered. Oh, there goes my freedom. They moved to the following aisle drifting their eyes over the reams of sugar packets. “If you see the 1.5 kilo pack get that, it’s cheaper.” Humming in agreement, she inched away from him grabbing the pack of sugar from the shelf.

“KCN followed by dilute acid, it’s the reagent needed for the reaction.” She smiled, as flashbacks from chemistry lessons in college flooded back to her.

“CN?”

“Yes, you know C triple bond N. Cyanide.” The girl rolled her eyes as if her brother should have known the answer. It gave her a sense of nostalgia, knowing it was the exact same way she used to react with her own brother.

“Is there anything else we need? I got the double cream.” Seonghwa’s voice snapped her engrossment away from the siblings’ conversation.

“Can we get cherries?” He nodded, a loving smile gracing his lips. Their hands entwined moving back in the direction of the fruit aisle.

Hand rested meekly upon her belly, he urged himself closer in her direction- pressing a gentle kiss on her bare shoulder. They laid on their shared bed; the afternoon light swallowing them whole, nothing but the comfort of each other. Rubbing it softly, a small warmth generated from the friction easing the cramps in her stomach. He didn’t know yet. He still very much thought that there was a child, his child, growing in her womb. How did she submit under his despotism?

He was so excited, jumping all over the place when she revealed the news of her pregnancy to him. So much so, he spared her his anger for slipping out of the house to see the doctors without telling him. One evening he came home to her laying in bed, wracked with exhaustion. Her head picked up at the sight of him, hiding something under his coat. Raising a questioning eyebrow, he sat himself next to her—the head and arm of a bunny peeking out of his coat. Moving the arm of a bunny as if it was waving at her, she snorted nudging him with her knee.

“I got it for the baby.” Her fingers ran down the white fur, the softness relaxing the tension in her muscles. “What should we name it?” He asked.

“That’s not for us to decide. Our baby can name it.” Our baby. Our, the pronoun shocking them both. There was a prescience of acceptance that lay beneath that word; a notion that the crazed obsession he had with her was worthy of her forgiveness. Perhaps she had gone mad, tipped over the edge—her hands kicked over the precipice.

When she had asked her mother, “Why do some married couples still have children even though they don’t love each other?” Her mother laughed in her face, more mocking than it was endearing.

“You think if I didn’t love your father, I would let him get close to me?” She shrugged, was it lust that they were drawn by? Was she drawn by lust, the temptation to have her husband in all the ways no woman had ever had him before? To feel the heat of his bare skin pressed against hers, body moving in swift rhythm pumping her desire. His passion cut deeper than a knife cut through skin, bestowing his wild emotions through littering kisses as if it would seal the rupture of her soul. Mine. Mine. Mine. “I loved your father when I was having your brother, when we had you? Not so much. We just had another child, so I could separate myself from the fact that I may have been falling out of in love with him.” She often thought where her mother was now. Her brother had moved out with his wife a long time ago, severing any forms of contact. She thought they loved each other, as siblings did. They spent their nights sneaking into the kitchen, raiding their pantry, comparing each other to the ugliest, fattest people they’d seen on the internet. Perhaps it was their mother. When she had moved out for university, her mother told her not to speak to her again. At the time she thought her mother was just upset over her leaving, refusing to talk to her- barely engaging in a conversation when she came back home for the holidays.

It wasn’t until, the last year of her degree- perhaps the most stressful time of her life she had ever faced; trying her hardest to balance academia and job interviews. Eventually, she tore through the burden completing her final exams, leaving her shared dorms for the last time to go back to her home.

Except it wasn’t. For when she knocked on the door, confused as to why the key wouldn’t fit through the lock, the door opened to reveal a man she had never seen before. Toddlers were scuttling up and down the stairs behind him, a woman (who she could only assume to be his wife) worked diligently in the kitchen taking the dishes out of the cupboard. Who was this man and what was he doing in her home?

It only seemed he could ask her the same question.

“I live here, this is my property.” He demanded.

“I’m really sorry Sir, but I’m the daughter of the woman who previously owned this home. I wasn’t aware that she was selling this property.” A look of pity fulfilled his features, his once stern face softened under her statement. “If you could just let me know, if you do by any chance, where I can reach her, where she might possibly be now?” It was a desperate attempt, but here she was looking like a fool with a suitcase in hand, her small car parked behind her loaded with boxes of her University material. Hungry, exhausted and just wanting nothing more than to crawl into bed; she was deprived of that now, refused that.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I can contact the estate agents and ask for you.”

“That’s fine, I’ll give you my number. Please reach out to me if you have any news.” Taking a scrap piece of paper and a pen from her bag, she scrawled her number across the page; handing it over to him. Bidding him goodbye, she displaced her luggage back into the car; driving off and away from her childhood home, knowing it was the last time she’d ever see that street again.

It was safe to say that the subsequent years had been the most difficult years of her life. Living alone was never the problem, but she was already wrought with so much university debt and finding apartments with reasonable rent was difficult. She wasn’t proud to admit that for two weeks she had to live with a friend who was beginning to despise her, work a few jobs during the summer where she was supposed to relax in order to cultivate enough money to rent an apartment. Even after she managed to land a good job at a revered company, the struggle persisted with wanting to maintain a good image in front of her superiors. There was no money to spare for herself, a majority had been lost to rent, the remainder for food and basic necessities.

It was a punishment from her mother, she was so sure of it. A punishment for being born, a punishment for unknowingly making her life the misery that it was. She wasn’t struggling as much, especially now that Seonghwa was the primary breadwinner. He earned good money from his corporate job, enough so that he stopped her from going to work.

At the end of the day, Seonghwa was right. Nobody in her life cared about her as much as he did.

“I’m so sorry for the way that I hurt you, Hwa. You don’t deserve that.” She choked out as her body wracked with sobs. An endless stream of tears ran down her face, her husband encircling her in his arms peppering gentle kisses over her face. He wiped away her tears, before lifting her face up with a single finger to stare deeply into her eyes.

“It’s ok my love, I know why you did it.”

“No, you don’t understand. I am not a good wife to you, I lost our baby.” His face had dropped, bottom lip culminating into a quiver that ached her heart more than it should have. “I’m such a failure.” She sunk her head further into the pillow, letting her tears consume her. Slipping his hands around her waist, he brought her closer to him, her entire figure almost dissolving into him. With gentle hushes, he wiped away her tears, again, easing her wails.

“You are not a failure, these things just happen.”

Things like being poisoned and kidnapped by your ex boyfriend just didn’t happen. Things like being forced to marry him just didn’t happen. Being pressured to have his child just didn’t happen. Yet here she was, in the same situation her mother had been prior to her birth thinking that a child could be an escape from this hell hole, and the universe snatched it from her hands, mocking her desperation for emancipation.

If she went any further, she knew she’d feel obliged to slit her own throat in front of him. It was either his life or hers. Wasn’t the number one rule to prioritise your life over anybody else’s?

"Honey, I'm home!" He called out into the foyer. Ambling into the kitchen, he sought his wife pulling a cake tin from the oven. Leaning against the fridge door, he drunk in her impalpable beauty. Her hands reached for his tie, pulling his fabric, she pressed her lips to his to as she did once ago.

"Are you thirsty?" She pondered. Handing him the glass of cold squash perched on the countertop, he gratefully took it from her hands. He shot her smile, gulping the drink. Resting her head on his shoulder, he draped his hand around her pulling her closer to his body. Her eyes darted to kitchen clock, the hand circulating dreadfully slow as it usually did. Finishing the rest of the drink, he settled the glass in the sink.

Hoarse coughs had disrupted her from her slumber, her bleary eyes shot open twisting to find Seonghwa's body shaking as he violently coughed into a tissue. Beads of sweat began to form on his forehead, skin paling significantly. With squinted eyes, she sat up-he jumped out of the bed swinging the door open. Hastily, she followed after him. Light from the bathroom illuminated the dim hallway, treading closer she sought him hunched over the toilet, vomiting. When his sickness ceased, a painful gasp released from his lips- he began to wheeze slumped against the bathtub as his body continued to convulse.

"Hwa?" Lingering in the doorway of the bathroom, she questioned his dishevelled state. It was perhaps the first time she had ever seen him so ill and vulnerable. "Can you get up?" He sat up wearily, shaking his head no. His entire body wrought with agony, limbs limp as if they were tied down by shackles.

"Get me some water, please." His weak voice had barely travelled to her.

"Do you know what it feels like to be tied down, now?" With creased eyebrows, he stared at her bewildered. The objects in his line of sight were bleeding together, her figure wavering. Head pounding, he attempted to crawl to her but his arms felt heavy. Was this her doing? What had she done to him? At first, he thought it was food poisoning but he hadn't eaten anything from outside of this home. He had made sure to overlook all of the dates on the food packages, after all he could not have him or his wife eating expired food. "How long were you going to keep me here, trapped like a bird in a cage?"

It was her. His mind ran at a million miles a minute, barging through the barriers that blocked his rationality. Each thought was strained, as if a metal rod had pierced straight his head severing the nerves in his brain. It was the drink. She had poisoned him. His breaths quickened, as panic coursed through his veins.

"You deserve to suffer, Park Seonghwa." Malice present in her tongue, a humourless chuckle left her-she moved away from the door frame speeding back to her room.

"Help me, jagiya!" he shouted. The nerve of that man. To be in such pain and still dare to address her as if she was his. Grabbing the packed bag from her wardrobe, slipping her phone into her pocket she raced down the stairs. Slinging the jacket over her, she rushed out of the home shutting the door behind her. The slam of the door, silenced the voices in her head. Was that all it took? A low, soft hum propelled her away from the home, the light of the bathroom blaring into the woodlands. Birds chirping in the warmth of the morning air, lotus flowers blooming from the grass of his front lawn. Wind blew at the loose hair that sprung from the loose knot. The scent of liberation was as rousing as it could get.

It had taken over a year for her to not jump every time someone had approached her. She was so sure that Seonghwa was dead now, when she laced the cup with poison, she didn't expect the effects to kick in so quickly. Poison, usually took its effects several days after consumption. It was the cyanide inside the cherry seeds that had inspired her, the most deadly chemical compound capable of causing death within a few minutes or hours. She wasn't sure if she had extracted it carefully, having crushed the cherry pits or stored it since Seonghwa had the habit of rummaging through every cupboard in the house as if she was hiding things from him. Regardless, she prepared herself: packing a bag of essentials with rolls of cash and ID, and completely moved into a new city far away from Sacheon. Though her hand would freeze when filling out forms. Was she still a 'Mrs'? Were you still bound to your spouse in holy matrimony if they were dead? Is that why they said, 'Till death do us part'. Staying hidden in a city fearing that Seonghwa’s ghost would haunt her through the streets, was not enough to keep her alive and paying the bills. So, she took up a job at a college lecturing in Chemistry, it was more than enough to stop her from going insane. Despite the impartial pupils, the overachievers, and the lesson planning and marking that had accumulated, she enjoyed her job nevertheless. For a while it felt like she had freshly graduated University again, struggling to make ends meet. When the load lightened, it was as if mercy had finally been bestowed upon her.

Why did the grocery store never have anything when she needed it the most? No cocoa powder. No demerara sugar. Lemon juice? No, it seemed that they had run out of them too. Drifting down the aisle of supermarket, she huffed throwing the apples into her basket before drifting into the second aisle for jars of pasta sauce. With her mind elsewhere, her body collided with another's the poor shopper dropping the things from their hands. Apologising profusely, she knelt to pick up their items. Raising to lock her eyes with another familiar set.

"Mum?" She blinked, the cans plastered to her palms as her heart began to palpitate. Her mother's mouth was agape, an unreadable expression tightened across her features. "How are you?" Wasn't this the question that you'd ask over the phone, after a long day at work-followed by promise to see her when you had a day off? Not a question to be asked, as if you had bumped into an old friend from high school.

"I'm great. I saw you, a few years ago. In Sacheon, with a man."

"Yes, he was my husband."

"Was? I knew a handsome man like that wouldn't stick around with a woman like you." She bit her tongue in annoyance. Of course her mother never changed with the snide remarks. There didn't seem to a scent of an emotion on her face even having seen her daughter after a long time.

"He passed away, Mum." The remark faltered the smirk on her mother's face. Then when her mother asked if she had any children, she shook her head in dismay. "I miscarried. I lost my baby, the same way you lost yours."

“You’re still my baby.” The nerve of that woman to make that preposterous claim. Had she even felt the maternal bond each woman had felt to their child?

“Am I? Am I really? Because I wasn’t your baby when you left me abandoned outside my childhood home, leaving me to question if you were dead or alive. I wasn’t your baby when you told me you never wanted me. I was never your baby. But you were always my Mum. And that means more to me than me being your child does.” A tear slid down her mother’s face, under the dim lights in the empty aisle of the grocery store where she poured out her soul. “I never had, and perhaps never will, have the privilege of being a mother. Regardless, I swear that if I ever neglect my child the way you neglected me, I would let them kill me in cold-blood. Such is a death that is deserved for a woman like me.” Dropping the cans into her mother's basket, she looked down at her feet.

"I don't even want to know why you became estranged from me. I just want to know if you regretted it." An uncomfortable solicitude hung in the suffocating air. Tragic. Refusing to let the tears escape from her own eyes, she stalked off in the opposite direction ignoring her mother's melancholic call for her name.

When she entered her home again, she dropped the bags onto the kitchen worktop-walking to her bedroom to tear the jacket and scarf off her body. A bunny was perched on the bed, encrusted between the two pillows encased in a cotton light blue cases. She froze. Her breaths accelerated, fear pulping through her.

It couldn't be.

It wasn't possible.

"I've missed you, jagiya." A single tear slipped down from her eyes, her sobs lodged in her throat. His warm breath tickled her ears from behind her, he pressed his lips to the nape of her exposed neck.

“How?” She whispered, refusing to look around and stare him in the eye. As if that would take back the fact that he wasn’t dead, stood behind her in a home she’d built far away from him.

“I knew what the cherries were for. I saw the poison, I just replaced it with something less toxic.” He whipped her body around, her body hitting roughly against his chest. “You’re mine, and you belong to me.” He sang, sliding his hands down to her waist, he swayed their bodies to the rhythm of his saccharine hums which serenaded the air, tantalising her ears. Once again, he attached the strings to her back, controlled the movements of her body. Resting his face in the crook of her neck, he fluttered his eyes close in the night. “You’re mine, until death do us part.”

•••

All Right Reserved © the-midnight-blooms

DO NOT REPOST, TRANSLATE, REPURPOSE, OR PLAGISRISE ANY OF THE WORK HERE

A/N: yes, I am inherently deranged for using such a cutie pop banner for this fic. BIG thank you to the loml @n0v4t33z for helping me decide on the name of this fic!

let me know if you’d like to be added to the tag list for any future fics I post!

[towns-end-bindery]

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

My second time rebinding Babel, this time for a commission! I was grateful to have been given creative freedom with the design.

It’s heavily inspired by The Locked Library’s special edition of Babel. The image in the gothic window is part of a steel plate engraving. It depicts a 19th century view of the City of Oxford which was drawn and engraved by William Westall A.R.A. and Edward Finden, and was published in Great Britain Illustrated. All other design elements come from Canva. The typeface used is called Lovelace.

I printed my design directly onto plain white Wooqu bookcloth using an inkjet printer. The case was made using the three-piece bradel method. The end papers are green marbled paper from Two Hands Paperie.

[alextir-creates]

Welcome to Top Chef Tural!

Another piece for my wonderful friend @thesecondbatgirl, who requested Zoraal Ja and Bakool Ja Ja in aprons and following the level 94 Dawntrail MSQ quest "The Feat of Repast." I've never drawn mamool ja before, nor do I have much experience drawing anything remotely anthro, so I'm touched that I was trusted with this work. It was also a really fun anatomical challenge!

If you want to get the same font for Eorzean script that I used here, I used karaipsum on GitHub's "Augmented Neo-Eorzean" typeface.

Image ID Under the cut!

[Image ID: A digital drawing of Zoraal Ja an Bakool Ja Ja from FFXIV: Dawntrail wearing green aprons. Zoraal Ja, a purple mamool ja, stands to the left with a dour expression. He is wearing a simplified version of his in-game armor, sans the crown and rings. His apron reads "The Resilient Chef" in Eorzean typeface. His hands are in fists at his sides. Bakool Ja Ja, a two-headed mamool ja, stands to the right with his hands on his hips. His apron reads "Ba-Kiss the Cook" in Eorzean typeface. Bakool Ja Ja the Mighty (left head) looks peeved, while Bakool Ja Ja the Mystic (right head) looks smug.

They are set against a rectangular teal background with their shadows cast in a darker teal. Above Zoraal Ja's head is text reading "Top Chef TURAL" in Eorzean typeface. The text also has a shadow.

A square, stamp style logo reading “Alex Tir Zeng” in red watermarks the image in the lower right corner. /End ID]

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

ERIC VAN BLOKLAND & JUST VAN ROSSUM

This week we present two typefaces by Dutch designers Eric van Blokland (b. 1967) and Just van Rossum (b. 1966), co-founders of the design firm, LettError. Both studied at The Hague Royal Academy (KABK) and were influenced by Dutch typeface designer Gerrit Noordzij. After graduation, they worked in Berlin at Erik Spiekermann's MetaDesign. They founded LettError in 1989.

Both eschew traditional design approaches and rely on computer models and digital expression. As they say, "a font is a software instruction to a printer to perform a task." Together they designed the typeface Beowolf in 1990 and in 2002 van Blokland designed Kosmik, both of which are shown here. For Beowolf, they hacked Adobe's PostScript by adding a new function named "freakto," and the result was Times New Random, later renamed Beowolf, a typeface that changes while it is being printed. No two shapes are identical.

Kosmik is based on the hand-drawn letters van Blokland used in his comic strips. For this typeface, the designer used a new digital invention, the "flipperfont," a tiny program embedded in the font that ensures the printer randomly selects one of three available versions of each character.

These images come from our 2005 book Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classic and Contemporary Letterforms by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, and Friedrich Friedl, and published by Thames & Hudson.

View another post from Creative Type.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[ferronickel]

Lettering Tips for Comics Artists!

Lettering is an easy to overlook aspect of comics creation, partially because good lettering is designed to be invisible, but bad lettering can ruin an otherwise well crafted project.

Now, I'm not a letterer by trade, I'm a colorist who thinks too much about comics craft, but I've picked up on a few common mistakes I've seen new webcomic artists making, and I thought I'd share my tricks.

#1: Get a Dialog font

Sorry, despite Comic Sans having the word comic in the name, it's not actually good for lettering comics. Comic book letterers usually use specially designed fonts when they're lettering comics, and they often have websites where you can get these typefaces for a reasonable fee (or sometimes even free!)

What makes dialog typefaces special?

The barred-I! (and other contextual options)

This one is subtle, but generally, you want to only use the barred-I for the personal pronoun "I" or for roman numerals. It helps clarify that what you're looking at is an I and not an L, but it takes up more space in the word, and we're trying to reserve as much space as possible for the art on the page.

Specially made comic book fonts will also be custom designed to be legible at a distance, have multiple bold/italics options, and might even include special versions of individual letters for when you type multiple of the same character in a row! It'll give your lettering a personal touch that you won't get from typefaces designed for other things.

Blambot is a great resource for all your lettering needs. Here I'm using Backissues and Nightmark

#2: Dialog Stacking

Dialog should always be stacked such that your longest line of text is in the middle. The block of text itself should have a sort of diamond shape <>. Sometimes this is difficult to do, especially if you have any long words at the beginning or end of a sentence. You can't always get it to work (and if you're unwilling to rewrite your dialog so it fits), so sometimes it might not be perfect, but if your text block is more hourglass shaped >< that's a good indication that you should try putting your line breaks somewhere else. Basically try to make your text as round as possible if it's in a balloon.

#3: Balloon Shape

One of the more common mistakes I see webcomic artists making is using perfectly elliptical balloons. It's actually kind of difficult to fit text into balloons that are perfectly elliptical; there ends up being a lot of uneven space around the text, and it looks kind of cheap. Making your balloons slightly more rectangular is going to give you more bang for you buck, they'll fit the text block a little better. I like a hand drawn balloon, I tend to think they add variety.

One thing you definitely shouldn't do is this:

This might be a personal preference thing more than any kind of hard and fast rule, but these lettering styles give me the impression that the text is pasted on top of the art, and that no real thought was put into arranging it thoughtfully with the art. These are probably more appropriate for captions, not so much for dialog

Lettering is a part of the medium we're working with, the dialog should be approached as a part of the artwork, and treated as such.

#4: Balloon Placement

The number one, most important rule of lettering, is that the placement of your balloons should never confuse your reader. The goal of balloon placement is to guide your reader around the page, each one should naturally lead your reader towards the next thing they should read. Here's an example of something I see a lot:

While yes, it is true that on a comics page, people read left-to-right top-to-bottom, if two balloons are connected with a line, I am going to read them one after another. Readers are not going to intuitively assume they should jump to the other side of the page just because the #2 balloon is slightly above #3. In this situation the balloons should be interwoven.

It should not be possible to look from one balloon to another and skip over intermediate dialog. If your reader misses a part of the conversation and has to double back to figure out what they missed, you've broken the flow and immersion of the page.

Like I said, lettering is all about guiding your reader around the page, it should be a part of your composition from the beginning, don't forget to incorporate lettering into your work when you're first laying out your page. Put yourself in the place of your reader and see how your eyes track across the page.

Hope these help! Like I said, I'm no expert; it took me a while to learn a lot of this. I would have found these tips super useful when I was first starting out. If you're interested in the technical side of lettering, I highly recommend The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos. It's one of the most useful reference books I own, and I learned most of this from that book.

[tzanos]

This is a tribute to Ancient Greece, its spectacular architecture and the wise words of some of the greatest philosophers the world has ever seen. I created naive, hand drawn illustrations of some of the grandest temples that still stand tall and strong after some 2000 years. I then created a hand drawn font based on the classic Baskerville typeface to resemble the carvings of the scripts on the temples.

These two elements were then intertwined to create intricate patterns .

[dailyfont-com]

North Port is a hand-drawn all caps brush typeface with 2 versions offering 4 sets of capitals, perfect for logo design, video titles, and more.

Link: https://l.dailyfont.com/hJnps

[jcmarchi]

20+ Free Pixel Fonts for Creatives – Speckyboy

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20+ Free Pixel Fonts for Creatives – Speckyboy

Everyone loves a retro aesthetic. Pixel fonts offer a great way to add this old-school techno look to your projects. They prompt memories of classic video games, computer systems, and plenty of pop culture references.

They’re also more flexible than you might imagine. App development is a natural fit. Or use them as a headline font for your gaming blog. They also add a touch of fun to print materials, digital artwork, and video presentations.

Pixel fonts also feature a wide range of styles. Like other fonts, you’ll find both serif and sans-serif options. However, there are also different levels of thickness and character spacing. Each brings a unique personality to the table.

In this article, we’ve rounded up over twenty free pixel fonts available for download. Find your favorites, add them to your collection, and bring on the retro vibes!

Enjoy the fun look of this video game-inspired pixel font. Look closely, and you’ll find a delightful mix of squares and rectangles – just like the arcades and consoles of old. The relatively thin weight also keeps things legible.

Here’s a familiar font for fans of a certain classic game series. The package includes a full slate of characters, including punctuation. It’s an excellent choice for adding a bit of nostalgia to your project.

Inspired by old-school fighting games, this typeface features an action-packed look. Its bold and italicized text would be great for headlines and banners. Just don’t get too carried away with your street-fighting and knock over a lamp!

Bitroad is a mashup of styles representing the 1980s and 2000s. The font makes a bold statement while staying easy to read. It includes multiple typestyles and is available in several popular file formats.

Bold retro stylings are a hallmark of Sheko. Use it in places where you want to make the most impact. It features tight kerning that’s perfect for headlines and titles.

This all-caps pixel font will do wonders for your retro-themed designs. Each character features a variable outline that adds authenticity. It looks great in any size, and its low-contrast style offers a unique touch.

Add some slanted perspective to your project with this 8-bit typeface. Dotemp is a serif font that faithfully recreates the look of classic computing apps. It’s a variable font with regular and pixel styles.

Here’s a font that mixes elements of the old and new. It’s a pixelated font, for sure. However, it’s highly legible and includes some anti-aliasing. This one is a great fit when a more subtle approach to retro is in order.

Talk about unique, here’s a hand-drawn pixel font. The result is a fun typeface with classic looks and a decidedly modern charm. It also includes plenty of special characters to make it a versatile pick.

Travel back to the days when arcades ruled with this classic typeface. You won’t find any fancy effects here. The look is simple – a good representation of what once was. Sometimes, that’s all you need to make a statement.

Here’s a font with a twist on the pixelated style. It features a rounded look to soften those sharp edges. It’s a nice alternative to the more brutalist options on this list.

Tiny5 goes all out when it comes to pixelation. The characters are chunky, and the shapes are free of anti-aliasing. There’s simply no compromise. Therefore, reserve this one for use on headlines and banners.

Silver was built with game developers (and gamers) in mind. The multi-language font includes gamepad buttons with full keyboard and mouse prompts. Use it in your apps to give users an authentic experience.

Be bold and tell a story with this thick pixel font. It’s aimed at game developers but is also a natural fit for website hero areas. It’s another handy choice for your typography toolbox.

Pixelify Sans is a no-nonsense typeface that comes in four distinct font weights. That provides more flexibility than your average pixel font. It can be used in both large and small sizes and maintain readability.

You may notice that Dogica is easier on the eyes than most pixel fonts. It offers monospaced and kerned versions. Either way, you’re getting a legible font that can be used at the tiniest sizes. That makes it an all-purpose winner.

Silkscreen is a cross-platform pixel font built for websites and online apps. It’s an all-caps font with extra spacing between characters. It would work beautifully for the text headers on your tech blog.

Need a pixel font fit for smaller sizes? This one fits the bill with the ability to stay legible no matter how low you go. You might use it for those little design accents on websites and print documents.

Give your projects a subtly pixelated look with this display font. It features a distorted style that will help your designs stand out. It’s proof that pixel fonts don’t have to be harsh.

Here’s a style that looks like it comes from another galaxy. Pigxel brings a lot of curves to the pixel font playbook. Use it to create titles meant to send users far, far away.

This minimalistic font’s origins can be traced to an iOS pixel art app. Thus, you can be confident in displaying it on any screen. It also includes plenty of symbols for added flexibility.

PICO-8 is available in several flavors, including monospaced, all-caps, and wide. That makes it a good option for niche use cases. Beyond that, this True-Type font is a fun way to spice up your designs.

This pixel font adds extra pizzaz with blocky glyphs and thick sizing. It’s reminiscent of the systems we saw in sci-fi movies from the 1970s and 80s. Perfect for transporting your designs into hyperspace.

Write code the way our ancestors did – with a pixel font! Pixel Code is a monospaced font designed for use in code editors. It aims to maximize readability and includes a complete set of programming ligatures.

Here’s a collection of 20 pixel fonts – all with a public domain license. You’ll find a variety of styles to choose from. There are great options for fantasy gamers, along with more conventional typefaces.

The Power of Pixelation

Pixel fonts are one of the more fun typographic categories. You’ll find basic similarities. But the details are often what separates them. The font’s weight, shape, and letter spacing are defining factors. You can use them to create different moods and aesthetics.

So, choose your favorites and create something awesome!

More Free Fonts

From clean sans-serifs to elegant serifs and everything in between, there’s something here for every project type. Whether you need something simple and minimal or more striking, like bold or stencil fonts, you’ll find fonts ready to improve your typography.

More Free Fonts

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