#he proposes by asking basic human questions of connection

[abby-the-druid]

Yes yes yes

And I imagine there’s *a lot* of clan specific courting that goes on but because he was little he only remembers like 0.2% of it and all of it is literally just normal things you do for another person, regardless of intent to marry. So like, he remembers his dad would ask his mom about her day, so he’s like sweating, panicked because that’s a “courting” thing and he just awkwardly asks how Sakura’s day went one evening over dinner; and she’s just excited because Sasuke-kun asked her and is interested in her so she tells him. But he’s like a whole ball of anxiety about it like brain rotting doing a “well now she knows, I asked about her day now it’s painfully obvious I’m deeply in love with her” and has no idea how ‘normal’ relationships are supposed to work.

And like Itachi and Kisame are of course stalking Sasuke (it’s what good older brothers do) and Itachi is also like “holy shit he may as well have screamed his love for her from the rooftops, they’re engaged now” and Kisame is like “Itachi what the fuck are you talking about, I ask about your day all the time?” And Itachi nearly falls out of whatever tree they’re standing in because he, too, was little when the entire murder happened and also had a very limited memory/understanding of clan courtship practices and had already assumed he and Kisame were married.

And so now Itachi and Kisame are politely arguing (like a married couple) loudly outside the house but Sasuke is entirely too burned out sharing his feelings (ie asking Sakura a singular question) that he doesn’t even notice them causing a whole commotion and Sakura notices but Sasuke doesn’t seem bothered so she just politely waved at them from the window before she leaves to go home.

Ino would be having an entire cow because her mother has taught her *all* of *all* the clans courting practices (comes with the flower shop ownership territory and what to and not to recommend based on clan customer and such) and so Sakura half mentions some of the things because they’re close again, she’s in the office and doesn’t have to prove herself anymore. And ino is like hyperventilating because Sakura doesn’t *know* but Ino can’t tell her that all of those things are courting things because then Ino definitely never has a chance and her mind is just exploded.

So when Sasuke eventually does decide to go to Oro, he has like a whole special meal planned and discusses it at length with Sakura, because that’s his future wife and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t include her because she’s an Uchiha goddamn it. And she’s obviously not super pumped about the idea of leaving Konoha, but Sasuke has for some reason decided to divulge all of this to her, and she notices he looks at her differently now, and she’s a fan of it so she agrees to go, but only on the condition they have like a billion backups plans in case anything goes wrong. And so they do, they plan and plan and plan and Kakashi and Naruto are confused at how much time the two are spending together and Kakashi nearly passes out when he sees that Sasuke had gifted her like a weapons pouch with the Uchiha symbol because he *knows* what that means.

So Kakashi is making hard eye contact with Sasuke who is just avoiding it and Sakura is just happy being with all her boys before they leave and Naruto is just Naruto and has no idea what’s going on at all. She indicates that they’re leaving the village but in no outright way and doesn’t give any indication to where. And Kakashi is nervous but he kind of reasons that if Sakura is with Sasuke he couldn’t actually get into too much trouble, because really she’s the reasonable one. She does the office work, she’s got a good head on her shoulders.

So Kakashi doesn’t say anything to anyone just kind of also vaguely says it would be cool to hear from them once in a while and offers to do a group sign up for his ninkins (I think I’m spelling that wrong) so they can secretly keep in communication and all the kids are obviously pumped about this because puppies.

So Sasuke and Sakura go to Oro. And Oro is not happy at first, that Sakura is there; but decides to let her stay because it seems like he could control Sasuke with her as collateral. But through some time, it turns out Sakura is the wild card because she didn’t come here with a purpose like Sasuke did, she came as support. So soon enough she’s like bitching out Kabuto for not keeping a clean enough lab space, and lectures him about the fact that half of his experiments are failing because he’s an idiot and letting infection happen. And he’s confused and mad about it but Oro just kind of raises an eye brow and lets her go. She criticizes kabuto’s chakra control and calls it messy one day; and he’s like you’re 12 you don’t know anything. And she huffs at him and reminds him she’s actually 13 and a half, thank you very much, and that she at least knows how to control her chakra. So he challenges her to do the fancy experiment. And she’s like, fine bitch bet.

And that’s how everyone at the base finds out Sakura is some kind of freak of nature who is *too good* at chakra control and has seemed to accidentally create her own version of medical ninjutsu. So Oro starts having her run the experiments when she turns 14 and Sasuke is just like dazed and happy in the background like ‘that’s my fucking wife.’ (They are not yet married) and Oro finds that he can neither control Sasuke or Sakura and that Sakura starts manipulating him and bullying him into doing things differently.

No longer are they conducting studies on children or kidnapped people; she creates a whole ward for mental health under the guise to Oro it’s just to understand the mind better. By this point he’s like just hands off because Sakura is scary when you question her. There is no option of Oro taking Sasuke’s body because she threatened to finish what the third hokage started and Oro laughs but she like pulls out this rare scroll that she had unearthed from deep within the lair that could undo like every one of his life saving/sustaining jutsus. And he’s like fine, you crazy girl, leave me alone.

So they graduate from Oro, both morally a little grey but way more level headed than cannon; and they go on the quest to find Itachi. They find him playing housewife in a little happy cottage with Kisame in the forest outskirts of fire nation. And before Sasuke can launch into an attack Itachi is just like ‘you have a lovely wife Sasuke’ and he’s like ‘yea I know’ and Sakura is like ‘when did you get married Sasuke-kun? We’ve been in an underground tunnel system for the better part of 3 years’ and Sasuke blushes and Itachi laughs and Kisame is like “let me talk to her, I’m the one who knows what she’s going through” so he finally explains to her that she and Sasuke have been engaged for about 4 years and her mind is blown and was like ‘but he’s never even held my hand!’

So Sasuke is kind of reconsidering beating his brother to a pulp but Itachi just ends up telling him everything and apologizing and a lot of brother angst/love happens. And they like team up and kick Madara’s ass, save Obito, before any tsukyomi can happen and they all settle in to just like start a new little Uchiha village in the forest; and Naruto visits and he’s not totally insane at not being able to save his friends because his ninkin and theirs have all kept up and Kakashi has been able to feed information to Tsunade and play Sasuke and Sakura leaving off as an infiltration mission and Danzo just has a terrible heart attack when he realizes all his evil plans are foiled just because some little pink haired girl had been placed in the office sector and like had the ability to talk to people.

There’s so much, so so much

desk nin sakura au in which, at like 13, she did too poorly on the physical part of the graduating exam and is given the choice to either repeat a year or to become a desk nin instead of a genin. she picks desk nin because at 13 she can imagine no greater embarrassment then being stuck in a class of 12 year olds and ino knowing she flunked an exam- at least this way she can pretend she wanted to be a desk nin. they're important! they do important work!

it actually turns out there aren't a ton of civilian kids in the desk nin business. if they don't make it as field shinobi they usually just drop out entirely, because they've got family businesses they could go back to instead, you know? most desk nin are from clan families whose family business is being a shinobi, but they weren't a big fan of murder at age 10 or are really big fans of making excel ninja spreadsheets. anyways what this means is they find sakura adorable and immediately adopt her. shes adorable! and shes got the filing system really quickly, how clever!

she gets put in charge of assigning the genin teams their low-ranking missions and gives ino-shika-cho the tora mission like 30 times in a row because she's a teensey bit mad with power. She initially gives team seven really nice missions to try and win over sasuke, but then he keeps showing up grumbling complaints because it wasn't a cool mission that would help him get revenge on his brother...eventually she snaps and starts giving them the tora mission instead. Be Humbled, You Brats!

she gets pissed with the hokage when he assigns team 7 the wave mission btw. and shes mad vindicated when they come back and they're like IT WAS A DISASTER. IT WENT TOTALLY ABOVE OUR PAYGRADE. she's like YEAH thats why PROFESSIONALS assign the missions not some old man whos trying to dote on his loser not-grandson!!!!!!

she uses her desk nin resources to find out where sasuke lives (forgive her the sins of being an unhinged 13 year old) and starts going to his house to bring him dinner half the week. shes not a great cook. at a certain point he takes over cooking duties and shes just there to hang out? and it takes him a month to be like. did i get tricked into dating sakura

kakashi talking to sasuke about how you need bonds with other people, with your team, and sasuke's like i HAVE bonds. me and naruto are rivals which is basically like being friends. and im somewhat engaged to sakura maybe

kakashi: who's sakura? is that the girl on our team bc i always forget her name

sasuke: no. she's this insane girl we went to the academy with who keeps giving us shitty missions to paint fences 'n stuff. i think she lives in my house now or something. naruto's in love with her

kakashi: and you're engaged?

sasuke: can we stop talking? if im late getting back she'll try to make dinner herself and i cannot have burnt rice with burnt fish for the third time this week

[harmonysanreads]

Hello there! 👋 I really like your al haitham fics and I was wondering...

if you could do a yan! al haitham with a reader who's sweet and friendly? (Basically a sunshine reader cause I like sunshine characters to balance out the cold characters)

(Hope your having a good day! :) )

Apricate

yandere alhaitham x reader

cw(s) : general yandere themes

no because I'm so soft for this pairing too (T▽T) Sunshine x Sunshine Protector so trueee

Alhaitham has found himself in a predicament as of late.

Well, ‘predicament’ as far as the time it's requiring him to decipher the case — which, if he was honest, has snowballed further than what he deems efficient of himself. Whenever Alhaitham finds himself in a pickle, his tactic is to assess the weakest link of the situation, so that it's solved with minimum energy and action. However this time, doing that had just resulted in him being stuck in his head for weeks, vacillating between the plethora of methods to integrate your existence with his — without any repercussions.

And by which, he means for your hand in marriage.

Now, this questionable phrasing appearing to be a misnomer for a rather harmless intention for someone of his age, would've sounded less absurd if the conditions for a proposal with such social importance were met — you know, if both parties were familiar and shared adequate affections to escalate to that stage. The Acting Grand Sage is not delusional, you and him barely know each other (or at least, you do) but does that stop him from planning ahead?

No, not when he's certain there'd be no such gap remaining once he's finally cracked the code.

If Alhaitham was being honest, he truly has achieved it all : academic accomplishments, a stable job with a handsome wage, a spacious house, his title as one of Sumeru's heroes and his looks as the cherry on top — the only thing lacking now, is someone to bring warmth to his house (and no, his leech of a roommate does not count). It's fairly recent that such an idea or need occurred to him, being most content with his own presence for all his life, he had thought that he could pass the rest just the same.

Had it been the images of lovers strolling along the streets of Sumeru hand-in-hand that he'd previously paid no heed to? Had it been the children coddled alongside their parents and the passing thought, could he have that, too? If he tried? Or was it just you, who'd become the challenger of his views?

He's well-aware of how he's seen at times ; an emotionless rock. Which is why his late-grandmother had been concerned at the earlier days, even the most self-sufficient human is bound to crave connection at one point and who would accept him, if he continued to be like this? Alhaitham had thought about it long and hard, does he need to change himself to be accepted by you, at least? Would his brooding bluntness dent your amicability?

Alhaitham has only talked to you thrice, but three times is all he needed to confirm that no, he needn't put on a facade when you can just become the flower blooming alongside the rock ; balance his flaws and in turn, he'll balance yours. And what better way to ensure that equilibrium than through the sacred bond of marriage?

Now, if only these other pests could stop leeching off of your attention.

Alhaitham watches from his peripheral, there is you, surrounded by a group of people again. It seemed as though you came to the library for something important but instead got swarmed by your ‘friends’ asking for help with this and that. Normally, you delightedly handle these crowds, solving each of their dilemmas with grace. Today though, it seemed your urgency weighed more.

Disappointing as it is admirable in a way, people of all kind seem to always flock around you. The Acting Grand Sage understands better why they do, your luminous countenance has drawn him to this pit as well. But unlike those fools, at least he isn't blind to your personal space. The predicament as a result, is like this : how can he form that connection with you if you're always surrounded by these self-serving idiots and achieve his greater plan of a peaceful, fulfilling life?

He notices your attention shift to his person at the corner of the library, you're quickly giving apologetic smiles to everyone surrounding you, pushing past the crowd and making your way to him. If you looked back, you'd be able to see the array of flabbergasted faces, some then morphing into distaste when they see who exactly you'd abandoned them for — but you don't, as per the Scribe's advice.

Alhaitham pretends to be taken aback when you sheepishly greet him and ask if you could sit with him, he responds in the positive and you heave a sigh of relief.

You did it.

“I did it. I did as you advised me.”

The corner of Alhaitham's lips curve slightly, his gaze flickers between the page of his book and yourself before him.

“And how do you feel?”

You halt for a moment, as if processing your very being from the inside out to answer that question.

“I...I feel free, strangely.”

This time the Scribe fully settles on the writings of the book, taking his quill and running it along the surface of the page in a crossing motion.

“I told you so.”

Alhaitham gains the solution at last ; he needn't get rid of them himself, he merely has to make you see the bad influences of your life and have you cut them off by yourself.

First step : achieved.

[redditreceipts]

so this is a kinda interesting post, because it seems to be an honest attempt at answering the question "What is a woman" in a non-circular and trans-inclusive way:

So OP says that this definition gets rid of the circularity, and he's right in that. Saying that a woman is "someone who identifies as female" is better than saying that a woman is "someone who identifies as a woman". But what he's kinda missing here is that the "circularity"-criticism of the standard definition is only one of the many criticisms we have. I mean, a definition not being circular is kinda the basic requirement that every definition should fulfill. But there are more criticisms that I have with the definition proposed by OP:

This definition doesn't help us to make sense of the world. If we want understand workplace discrimination, for example, it doesn't help us to ask "do you identify as female"? A person presenting as a man but identifying as a woman would not experience misogyny, but a person identifying as male and presenting as a woman would experience misogyny. We could not understand discrimination, because there is nothing that would connect women other than their female identity. It has close to no analytical value, and is therefore a bad choice in sociological discussions.

It leaves out a ton of trans people who recognise their biological sex. If you scroll my blog just a little bit, there is a ton of trans people telling me that they understand themselves as a "female man" or "male woman", and that they still recognise their biological sex and that it's important for their identity. A large percentage of trans people don't identify with the sex they are transitioning towards, and they would be excluded from your definition.

A large percentage of women don't identify with their sex any more than they identify with their hair color or their height. These people would be excluded from your definition. I, for example, don't really identify with my sex and I couldn't care less whether I was born male or female. Being female is not a part of my identity.

There are people who, due to illness or disability, don't identify as a certain sex. If I was for example in a coma, I wouldn't think anything and therefore not identify as any sex. Would I be agender for the time I'm in a coma? Or what if I'm dreaming and in my dream, I'm male? Would I be then a man for the time? Or would my dream-me be a man and the sleeping body still be a woman? Or do I have to be of sound mind for my identity to be valid? What about very dysphoric people? Would they be of a sound mind? And what about people with a severe disability, who can't move or speak? It is possible that they don't identify with any sex, maybe they don't even really understand the categories of "male" and "female". Would a thirty-year old biological female who has such a severe disability that she has never spoken nor reacted to a spoken word, and can't control her limbs to move, be considered a woman if we don't even know that she knows what the differences between the sexes are?

How can we call anyone a man or a woman if they never expressed an identification with any sex? For example, I don't know whether my great-grandmother has ever said that she identifies as a woman. Should I therefore not consider her to be a woman? What about Ötzi, the frozen man from the stone age that was found thousands of years later? We don't know what he identified as. How can we then refer to him?

How does the definition "a woman is someone who identifies as female" improve our understanding of the world in comparison to the former definition of "adult human female"? It has a lot of downsides, for sure.

I'm of course open for discussion! Tell me what you think :)

[boundinparchment]

Sway With Me

A clash of egos over the annual Winter Ball results in an attempt to display that, on occasion, the land of Cryo was capable of thawing every once in a while. Dottore x GN Reader || ArchiveOfOurOwn Dance Reference 1 Dance Reference 2

“Remind me again what this is for?”

“Charity,” Dottore spat, as if the word was the filthiest thing he’d ever said.  

It certainly wasn’t, at least according to the average person with average moral decency and a sense of humanity.  You would know.  After all, you were the most capable of his assistants in the past several years.  

All you knew was that Dottore’s latest round of funding (and therefore your paycheck) was contingent upon the next few weeks. 

It all started with an invitation for the Tsaritsa’s annual winter ball and a clash of egos.  Regrator, upon hearing the Knave once again take a verbal stab at her fellow Harbingers, proposed leveraging the social event as a chance for fundraising for House of the Hearth and to show that, perhaps, the nation of Cryo was capable of thawing every once in a while.

Dottore came back from that meeting, fuming.  Very rarely did you ever see him lose his temper as his younger Segments tended to but he proceeded to sweep his arm across his desk, ranting all the while about wastes of time and how far behind such antics would put him.  He’d ignored the first two notes sent to him regarding the event; he hadn’t even read them, simply tossed them without a second glance.

The third was hand-delivered by Pantalone himself with a very real threat on Dottore’s coffers and future funding.  The Ninth simply gave you a wave and a smile on his departure, leaving you to deal with the consequences of his actions.  

One of which was your presence.  Here.  In the ballroom.  Next to your boss.  In front of two dance instructors who were very clearly not expecting to be teaching a Fatui Harbinger.

Dottore hadn’t even asked for your help.  He’d simply demanded you come with him, dodging questions left, right, and center all the while.  You didn’t need to know; the answer was irrelevant; if you liked being paid, you would stop wasting energy on asking questions about the wrong things.

Not out of the ordinary for you.  

But this…

This situation was definitely outside of your job description.

But so was about a third of the tasks you managed ever since the Anemo Gnosis arrived.

The instructors introduced themselves and then shared a look you knew too well upon realizing who was standing in front of them.  Dottore made people uncomfortable by nature and although polite, he did not bother with pleasantries.  He wanted to be out of here as soon as convenient and he didn’t try to hide it.

“Every Harbinger will be showcasing a specific type of dance, according to the event plans of the Tsaritsa Herself,” one instructor said.  “You, Lord Harbinger, will be dancing bachata with a partner of your choosing.”

That meant you, apparently.

He really had to drag you up here for this?

They explained some of the basic technicalities of the style.  Partners could dance in an open position, connected only by hands, or a closed position with body support or contact with one another.  The actual dance style was a sequence performed in a full 8-count while moving in a square; three steps and then a tap with a pop of the hips or a step syncopation with the opposite foot of the last step.  Most of the movement was in the lower body, between hip motions and footwork, which allowed for better hand and arm communication to be conveyed, both for leading and in the expressiveness of the dance.

You were only familiar with a basic waltz, the occasional tango, but you got the sense that this would be vastly different than the usual styles you saw.  Glancing in your peripheral vision, you couldn’t make out Dottore’s expression (what else was new?) but you caught a twitch of his lips and a shift in posture that made him stand taller than he already was.

The instructors began their demonstration, speaking all the while, changing between open and closed position.  Some steps involved upper body contact not uncommon with a waltz but those were often paired with one’s leg between another's.  Legs and hips never stopped moving.

It was far more sensual than you were expecting.  

Your heart raced and you tried to steady your breathing.  Working closely with Dottore was one thing.  You could deal with brushing arms or him reaching over you to grab something or point out a specific section to focus on.

When work was involved, it was easy to ignore the hint of mint and slight musk that lingered, that your skin burned where he touched you.

This was going to be a disaster.

“I am going to strangle Regrator,” Dottore muttered as the instructors continued.

“He'll hear you coming.  I’ll lure him into a false sense of security and give you a window of opportunity.”

The low chuckle was music to your ears, the tension easing as amusement distracted both of you.  It was just work, you reminded yourself.  Another experiment.  That was all.

“I wouldn’t trust anyone else for this,” he said quietly.  “Regrator is using this as a chance to take everyone down a peg.  I need my best assistant so I don’t look like an absolute fool.”

It was the closest to a compliment you would get out of him, especially right now.  You could only nod before the instructors finished and pulled both of you aside to work independently and teach you the basics.  Music came from a gramophone nearby.  

You were paired with a lead, your body nudged this way and that to bend your knees and get you into position.  Slowly, you got used to the subtle communication required, feeling more than seeing, but you were still too stiff.  Your hips recognized the beat well enough but not as smoothly as the dance required.

And from what you could see, your boss seemed to be experiencing the same, although he was far more practiced.  Years of being a diplomat and having to put on graceful airs, you imagined.

“Footwork won’t be an issue,” your instructor said.  “Both of you understand the techniques and are on beat.  It means we can focus on other components.”

You stole a glance towards the other instructor who stepped back from the Harbinger and said, “Bachata doesn’t work well if the dancers don’t work together.  We’ll start with the basic steps.”

Oh.

Oh.

That meant…

It’s just work, you reminded yourself.  No different than a Ruin Guard construction or any biological research or…

Dottore took up the starting position with ease, taking your hands in his.  His leather gloves were warm, a sharp contrast given the temperatures down in the lab.  Maybe too warm.  

The music started up again and you followed his lead; it was easier this time, given you knew how to read him and anticipate the next motion.  His expression was unreadable, mouth flat, and from the angle of his head, you could only surmise he was shifting his gaze slightly from you to the rest of the room every now and again.  Like a student waiting to be dismissed.

Mentally, you counted the steps, tried to time the movement of your hips on the fourth.  Without his usual coat, you couldn’t help but admire his shirt, a rich deep blue, clearly tailored to him.  Were his shoulders always that broad?

Dottore squeezed one of your hands and you snapped out of your thoughts just as you misstepped a second too early several times.

“You’re off beat,” he said, as if he was simply making a passing comment about a lab methodology.  “I expected more focus from my best assistant.”

He corrected your rhythm and you were back on beat, mentally counting to yourself again all the while.

“I expected you to walk out of the room by now, bemoaning how much time you wasted.”

“And risk Pantalone dropping in and daring to further withhold funding?”  He scoffed.  “I think not.”

“You could have sent a Segment.”

You felt his hands tighten around yours and he pulled you a little closer, into a semi-closed stance, just enough distance between you to be proper.  You watched the corner of his lip twitch in displeasure at the idea.

“If you want something done correctly, you must do it yourself and handle the consequences accordingly.  A Segment would do me little good when I have to be the one to perform, after all.”

He had a good point.  A Segment could learn and he could memorize the associated memories but the muscle memory was a different story.  It was akin to watching someone fight and then assuming just based on that alone one knew what they were doing.

Before you could reply, the instructors intervened and the rest of the session was spent on building upon the foundation.  By the end, you managed a basic rendition of the dance, although more than once your thoughts trailed off and Dottore had to correct your timing.  The first time was passable but judging from how straight his shoulders were, he was frustrated once again.

Not exactly your fault, considering he didn’t even ask for your help and he simply assumed you would do well at this.

He stalked off far ahead of you when the session was over and you didn’t see him for the rest of the afternoon or evening.  The only indication that the whole thing wasn’t a fever dream was the scribbled note on your desk the next morning when you arrived in the lab after breakfast: you were to make room in your schedule for daily practice at the end of your day until further notice.

You were so filing for retroactive overtime when all of this was over.

And maybe submitting vacation time while you were at it.

____________________

It wasn’t that bad, provided Dottore was in a decent mood.  When the two of you were alone, it worked.  And after the first few days, your timing was far better and you managed to remain on-beat.  

Being closer to him down here, just the two of you, wasn’t as much of an ordeal for your nervous system.  Your pulse still raced and your stomach constantly felt as though it was a yo-yo but that was nothing new.  Simply inconvenient.

“You are too self-aware at times,” Dottore remarked on the third day, lifting the needle on the gramophone.  His back was to you.  “And it prevents you from honing in on the priority.  You are simultaneously too focused on making sure everything is correct and tailoring what others see from you.”

“How can I not be when I know that we have to do this in front of an entire crowd and the Tsaritsa Herself?” you shot back, frustration and exhaustion throwing the last of your patience out of the window.

It’d been a grueling day.  One of the long-term subjects had taken a turn for the worse with no indication and the autopsy Dottore performed yielded nothing of note.  The disease they came to Snezhnaya in an attempt to be rid of had finally consumed them and the project was back at square one.  Then, you were pulled away from the lab to be measured and fitted for an outfit for the ball.  You had been playing catch-up ever since.

His lecture was the last thing you needed.

“This whole thing isn’t even about me,” you continued.  “You said it yourself that you trusted me with this for the sake of your ego.  Why wouldn’t I—”

He glanced at you over his shoulder, his mask obscuring his eyes.  “If your mind isn’t present, your body won’t follow.”

“My point still stands, Dottore.”

I’m doing this for you.

Your heart was in your throat as the thought raced through your mind.  Not now.  Emotion wasn’t necessary.  

At this point, you had no doubt that he was at least aware that you held him in high regard for more than just professional reasons.  It was easier to hide when you had the guise of work to hide behind.

Not that this wasn’t work.

But dancing didn’t involve data and trial sets and various questionable substances.  It was outside of your realm of normality with him.  Dancing was emotion brought to life and in your opinion, there was a reason it was an art.  

He looked back down at the arm and needle he still held, the record spinning silently.  You couldn’t tell what he was thinking but you knew from his posture and the twitch of his mouth that he was considering something.

“I wish to test something,” he said at last.  “Humor me a little while longer.  I greatly dislike the choreography but I don’t believe there’s anything to be done about that until we’ve resolved something more immediate.”

Dottore placed the needle back and the gramophone gave a hiss of static before the track started again.  You found yourself back in the starting position, his hands in yours, falling into step with ease.  Your muscles knew the movement by heart by now.

“What you fail to realize is that it is about you, in the end,” he said softly.  “Your dedication to wanting to do your best is admirable, it’s certainly the envy of other Harbingers who have far less diligent individuals in their employ.”

One hand let go of you as you both stepped back, stepped forward again, and your joined hands raised, putting you into a spin.  Dottore caught you with ease, stepped off to the side, and used your joined hands to spin himself around in turn before coming back and catching your other hand again.

He continued, “I’ve given you a task that requires far more trust than what has been provided and I believe it is…resulting in you holding yourself back.”

You swore you felt your heart stop and simply drop down to your feet for a moment.  You tilted your head as you looked at him, curious, if not a little wary.  The Second Harbinger putting his ego aside for a moment was both endearing and incredibly dangerous.  

He paused for a moment, bringing the dancing to a sudden stop, and brought your hands up to his mask.  His fingers positioned yours to show you the release for the accessory, revealing the rest of his visage to you.

His eyes were the color of poppies and fresh blood, bright, shining and a little unnerving.  You couldn’t have imagined a better color, truthfully.  The skin around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose bore scars, deep slashes that healed poorly.  They were not clean cuts, not the kind you were used to seeing done by his hand; they must have been brutal to endure, let alone treat.

His hands pulled away for a moment, leaving you holding the mask, looking up at him.  Everything about him was already striking but to finally have the complete picture…

“I can hardly say that I trust you if I haven’t shown you my face, now can I?”

Everything that came to mind when you looked at him was hardly appropriate for a lab assistant to say.  You could stare into his eyes for hours, days even, lost in them.  A part of you had always been curious about his nose, what the rest of his face looked like.

You placed the mask on a nearby table, out of reach, and turned back to Dottore, the music playing quietly.  Although the skin looked as if it healed to the best of its abilities, you couldn’t help but wonder if it still caused him more discomfort than they seemed to.  

“Do they hurt?” you asked, stepping closer to him.

“No.  They haven’t in some time.”

He guided your hands carefully and placed your fingers across the marred flesh, silent permission for you to explore.  Gently, you traced each of them, his face warm beneath your touch.  He closed his eyes and you swore you heard a feather-soft sigh fall from his lips.

Did he like this?

“What happened?”

“Some in my village believed that my eyes were an omen.  After I grew past the age most receive a Vision, and as I grew more bold with my claims against the Divine after my expulsion, a careless individual took it upon themselves to rid me of my eyes in hopes of releasing whatever curse they thought I carried with me.  I ended his life before he could finish but by then, the damage was done.”

Your hand cupped his cheek and you watched as he leaned ever so slightly into your hand.

“They were fools,” you whispered.  “You’re incredibly beautiful, Dottore.”

“Zandik.”

Crimson eyes flickered open and watched you for a moment.  You felt as if you might combust and melt all at once from such a deep gaze.

“My name is Zandik,” he repeated.

You ran the syllables over your tongue and he corrected you on the inflection.  Once again, your heart jumped, pleased with the secret you now shared.  

“I take it, then, that this is one of those moments where you threaten to kill me if I tell anyone what you look like?” you teased.

A small smile tugged at his lips.  “I see little need for threats.  You know what I’m capable of.”

“My brain’s a little foggy.  Perhaps you should remind me.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t have a dance partner, now would I?”

Before you could reply, Zandik reset the record player and captured your hands again, pulling you into a semi-closed position this time, your bodies closer.

“I trust you.  Entirely.  Now…are you ready to try this again?”

You nodded, your eyes never leaving his, as you began to dance again, this time your head and your heart aligned.  Perfectly in-sync.

____________________

You’d never attended the Winter Ball before, at least not in this capacity.  Every Fatuus was required to attend but for the most part, the event was intended for the heads of state, important merchants, and foreign dignitaries more than it was the average member of the Fatui.  The Zapolyarny Palace’s ballroom had been transformed from the usual empty echo chamber into one of the most crowded rooms you could recall in recent memory.

Regrator had charged admission after initial invitations for appropriate guests had been sent out, which likely created an air of exclusivity.  All under the guise of fundraising, per the argument that sparked with Arlecchino.  Dottore scoffed when he saw the approved invitation and remarked that fundraising didn’t need to resort to such foolish antics.

As disgruntled as he was, however, you got the sense that he was enjoying the practice sessions.  After the first week, upon seeing his true face, you found yourself looking forward to such moments with him.  You lost count of the hours you spent on choreography, on tailoring the dance to suit both of you; you were a unit, two individuals working together to form one cohesive picture.  An experiment in motion.

Normally on such an occasion, you’d be dressed in your uniform and milling about with semi-familiar faces.  But this time, you were dressed in reflection of your Harbinger.  His white suit, immaculate in its tailoring and its pristine color, was accented with shades of blue; in turn, your outfit used the same colors as the main focus.  Both outfits were designed to complement one another and as you looked around, you saw this was the case for all participating Harbingers.  

The fine fabric was smooth and cool to the touch and the curious looks you received from other members of the noble class made you thankful for the mask that covered the top half of your face.  The anonymity was comforting among unfamiliar faces and hidden intentions.  No one needed to know who you were.

When it finally came time for the main event, you found yourself thankful for Dottore’s rank as Second Harbinger; you wouldn’t have to wait as long as the others to get this over with.  You tried to steady your hands as you were guided to the center of the room, hoping Dottore couldn’t sense that your nerves were truly beginning to get the better of you now that you saw the scale of the crowd.  The Tsaritsa, too, watched from above, her face impassive but her eyes alight, like candles spotted in windows during a blizzard.

You exhaled as you flicked your gaze up to Dottore’s masked face and you caught the smallest glimpse of a reassuring smile.

Before you could speak, the music began and your feet took the first steps of their own accord, right on beat.  Dottore’s left hand took yours as you draped an arm around his shoulder, his other hand pressed against your back, keeping you in a closed position as you spun around once.  His leg was between yours, only for a few seconds, both of your hips swaying to the beat with ease.  He let you go long enough to work in steps in an open position; you followed his lead as he raised your arm to spin you and bring you back into a closed position in one smooth motion.  

You could never get used to that, being pressed up against him like that.  As much as your mind tried to tell you it was work, your body and your heart knew otherwise.

A hand squeezed yours and you caught yourself before you moved off-beat.  

“The crowd is irrelevant.  Focus on me.  This is no different than what we’ve been rehearsing,” he said quietly.

“This was what we were working towards, Zandik,” you remarked.  “It’s very different.”

“In which case, I fully expect you to stop holding yourself back and give in to whatever you keep repressing.”

The smirk on his lips was a familiar one, the same as when he presented you with a challenging problem he already knew the solution to.  It was the same smirk that infuriated you almost daily.

So that’s how it was, then.  He did, after all, show you his true self; it would only be right to do the same, whatever came of it.

Your heart was in your throat the entire time and all you could focus on reading the subtle gestures and cues from Dottore as he led both of you.  Your hips moved a little more than usual as you were swept away by the beat and you swore you were dancing closer than usual whenever he pulled you in, as if he didn’t want to let you go.

You were so caught up that the crowd faded away and all you were left with was one another.  You weren’t sure if it was the outfit or the energy but your dips and sways were elegant, never stopping.  Each movement flowed into the next, as you’d planned, all of your focus honing in on the footwork and lower body motion required.  

Some were far more modern compared to what the instructors showed you; you would step away, hands still held but arms crossed, draped over one another’s shoulders, and then nudging the other’s head down and around, leveraging the motion to spin back to face one another.  

Other times, the gestures were classic, almost romantic in their fluidity and proximity.  He led you into a graceful dip as the song came to a close before bringing you back up, as intended, your faces far closer than before.  You could feel his breath mingling with yours and you dared, just once, to look down at his mouth and then back to where you knew his gaze would be.

“There you are,” he whispered before he leaned in, his lips dangerously close to your ear.  “I enjoy seeing this passionate side of you…perhaps you could show me more.”

The words barely registered before applause rang out, beginning with the Tsaritsa and working its way through the guests.  By then, Dottore had already pulled away, putting a professional distance between both of you again.  As you left the dance floor, you caught sight of another smirk, tantalizing in its promise, if you decided to take his offer.  

Tomorrow morning was going to be interesting.

[vvarriorheart]

☾ main ☾ bio ☾ face ☾ muse ☾ starters ☾ wishlist ☾

about:

This is a sideblog, and I follow back from my main @grimmusings. Please direct IMs there, since it's easier for me to keep all my messages on one blog. It's also easier to start interactions with me there, where I regularly post open starters and meme prompts. For a full list of rules, see my main. Honesty hour questions will largely be answered IC and treated as anonymous unless signed by a muse.

All details vary based on verse, and in general I'm happy to write Cassian into modern AUs or mash-ups with other fandoms. I most likely will not write threads that take place prior to ACOSF unless significant plot changes or AUs are proposed, since nothing gets old quicker for me in a thread than rehashing canon events as they happened.

Please note that he's not my easiest muse. I enjoy writing him, but true to character, he only talks when he wants to, and it may take me a bit longer to get back to his replies than it does for my other muses.

wanted connections:

This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I can roll with most muses as far as basic interactions. I’m happy to ship Cassian with other ACOTAR characters and OCs/fandom crossovers based on chemistry, but unless they’re on my OTP list, they need plotting and interaction first. There is never any pressure to ship with me, even if they’re on my list.

OTPs: Nesta Archeron NOTPs: Amarantha, Hybern, Tamlin Other: I'd love any ACOTAR muses or crossovers from Crescent City, along with any other fandoms or OCs based on faerie lore.

default verses:

canon (+/-): Any events that take place in the ACOTAR/Crescent City timelines or after.

multiverse!madness: Cassian and Nesta are fucking around with the Harp, and he accidentally lands himself in another universe and must adjust to the differences in magic and technology, while searching for a way home.

verses by request only:

I'm happy to write these, but since they're more specific AUs, I don't default on them for asks/memes. Please feel free to request them.

mafia!verse: A modern, no powers AU where Rhysand is a mob boss, and Cassian is his head enforcer.

ever!after: A modern AU where the human and fae worlds have always been blended, and Cassian is still the General Commander of the Night Court.

[hayleysayshay]

perc'ahlia au where Thordak doesn't kill Elaina and burn Byorden but Elaina does fall ill. Vex and Vax, who had run away to be with her eventually write to their father for money and help. He agrees if they promise to behave this time and stay with him. They do that and stay in Syngorn and be miserable, though they eventually find some sort of jobs.

Around nine months before Whitestone would fall to the Briarwoods, the eldest de Rolo siblings and Frederick visit Syngorn. Syldor proposes marriage between Percy and Vex because marrying off half elves to humans isn't a baaad use of half-elves in Syngorn, and in return Syngorn gets some white stone and Whitestone gets some elven money and connections (or something idk). The de Rolo's are honestly fairly pleased to be able to pair someone with Percy as he was definitely the odd one.

Vex is offended. Because she didn't ask for this, and also Percy is like five years younger than her so he's sixteen and she's twenty one and she hates the idea. But Percy argues that if they get married he's been promised that he can do basically whatever he wants by his family, even leave Whitestone. Basically he and Vex agree that they will marry, move to Emon, he will study and she will bring Elaina to live with them. Vax is not happy with any of this, but Percy promises that he isn't expecting anything.

They correspond over letters and Percy and Vex begin a friendship. She think he's a dweeb, and he thinks she seems pretty cool. They mostly just talk about mundane things and Vex is pretty convinced she made the right decision.

Vex and Vax stay in Syngorn instead of leaving for the more chill Whitestone as it's closer to their mother. However, their mother gets sick and Vex and Vax are devastated and stay a while in Byorden, and Percy just isn't replying to her letters. And then they finally go back to SYngorn and learn from Syldor that Percy and the whole de Rolo family are dead from disease. Devastated by the loss of Vex's friend, with Elaina gone and nothing keeping them there, and also knowing Syldor will try all this again and neither of them wanting to go through hearbreak again, the twins leave Syngorn and don't look back.

And then because i keep going down two different avenues:

a) she meets up with Percy, realises who he is and how he isn't the dweeb who she used to know. he's changed. and because Vex has questions, they figure out his history with the Briarwoods pretty early on. Percy and Vex would probably get together soon than they did in the show, I would say around where he titles Vex in front of Syldor because that would have happened when they were married and what was that marriage? where do they stand now? So much more intense feelings early on.

or b) Vex wants to pay her respects to the de Rolo family so they slowlyyyyy make their way to Whitestone over the course of a year or something. Once there, they realise shit is fucked up and somehow manage to free Cassandra and run away with her, hoping to raise awareness of (and an army for) Whitestone and one day take revenge for Percy, not realising he's still alive, and Cass becomes a little sister to them. And then eventually they meet up and then Vex basically goes through option A but with Cassandra there.

[juniorgman187]

Be Forever Young (Reid Fluff Fic)

Summary: After Penelope’s resignation from the BAU, she attempts to set up her tech protégé, Reader, with Reader’s intellectual match yet much older counterpart - Dr. Spencer Reid. 

A/N: The POV switches between Reader and Spencer, just use context clues to detect who the narrator is.  Pairing: Fem!Reader x Spencer Reid Content Warning: 21 year age gap, headcannon proposal Playlist: Cloud 9 by Beach Bunny Word Count: 6.1k

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 

Prologue

Events like these weren’t exceedingly rare. They weren’t anything like Halley’s Comet, by any means, where it only happens once in your lifetime - if you’re lucky. But they weren’t exactly sunrises - something that you can count on occurring every day without fail. 

The best celestial phenomenon I could compare it to are blue moons. Rare enough to still have an element of surprise when they came, but not so rare that I should never expect them. 

These ‘blue moons’ are actually the events in which I meet an intellectual match. 

It’s not too often that I find a mind quite like mine, so you’ll forgive me for the reaction it elicits to watch them transcend the physical level and connect with me on the psychological one. There’s only been a handful of people who’ve ever had the exact standard of aptitude to be permissible into this metaphysical world with me, but now - there’s a handful and one. 

The newest addition to the list is her. 

_ _ _

Getting a word in edgewise when it comes to a conversation with Penelope Garcia is nearly impossible. Getting a word in edgewise when it comes to a conversation with Penelope Garcia about Dr. Spencer Reid is impossible. 

I couldn’t tell you when the first time she brought him up was, but I could probably tell you just how many times since then she’s mentioned him. 

A trillion. At least. 

For months on end, he was the only thing she would talk to me about. Morning, noon, and night. Every single day she’d gush about him with the same unrelenting zeal as she had the day before and the day before that. It was both scary and impressive how she never seemed to run out of good things to say about him. 

“You would just die for his apartment. It’s got this super chic dark academia thingy going on. You’d be really into that,” she would say. Or something to that effect. I was never really listening. 

Not that I wasn’t interested in learning about Dr. Reid - I was very interested in him.

As a superior. 

I first learned of him when he taught my Psych 101 class. Freshman year me was simply enthralled with him as a speaker, probably due to the charm of his awkward humor. I found it eerily relatable and touching, in a way. That was probably my favorite class, minus the assholes who made it less than enjoyable at times. (That’s a story for later).

The next interaction I had with him happened not even a year later when he came back after temporarily teaching to sit in on a philosophy class. Even though he was only auditing the lecture, whereas I was enrolled in the course, he ended up sitting in the seat right beside me. Had he not been gifted with an eidetic memory - a fact I found out during one of my obsessive research sessions - I doubt he would’ve even remembered sitting next to me.

Our shared field of work helped to bring us back together repeatedly throughout college. I would run into him at seminars, workshops, once even at a library where we were both looking for the same book. 

But for the most part, our relationship was parasocial. It largely consisted of me learning from him at a distance. I would use his brilliant research to support my own assignments, read the books he recommended, audit the classes he would teach. 

Rather than accurately interpreting my very limited, very professional connection to Dr. Reid, Penelope was deliberately using it as ammunition for her arsenal of reasons why I should consider dating him. 

“You guys are basically already friends, and nothing is cuter than the friends-to-lovers trope!” Now that she actually did say, and the only reason I remember it verbatim was it was so outrageous I couldn’t not remember it. 

And probably because she just said it to me right now. 

“We’re not friends! We’re ... acquaintances. Colleagues, if you will.” My attempts to gain distance from Penelope and this topic of conversation were crashing and burning. The more I tried to walk away from her, the faster she would chase me. It was inconceivable how she managed to do that and continue to pelt me with her perky persistence. 

“Even better! You know I’m no stranger to workplace romances.”

That I did. One Derek Morgan or one Luke Alvez ring a bell?

“Dr. Reid and I don’t work together,” I reminded her, if only to burst her bubble of insanity. 

“Exactly my point! If you two don’t work together, then there’s nothing keeping you apart.” 

I was stopped dead in my tracks, almost causing Penelope to trip since she was right on my heels. 

“Nothing? Really? Try 21 years.” 

That surely kept us apart. 

Our age gap was one of those glaring disparities Penelope couldn’t wave away with her magic wand. Frankly, it wasn’t an age gap so much as it was an age Grand Canyon. He was a whole person of legal drinking age older than me!

Hell - our age gap itself was older than me!

Maybe there weren’t any contracts or agreements or supervisors to keep us apart, but there was still one significant thing doing that. 

Time. Arguably the most important thing you needed to get right for a relationship to work. 

If there were any chance that he and I were good together, that was squandered by our divergence in age. 

Right person, wrong time ... but wrong time by more than two decades.

I could see the smallest fragment of hope wither away in Garcia’s eyes, and it actually hurt to have known that I caused that. Her voice was more solemn when she said, “You don’t have to date him, I just want you to go on a date. Get to know each other better. Who knows? You might finally graduate from colleagues to BFF’s.” 

Not that I was seriously considering the possibility of growing closer to Dr. Reid, but there was one question lingering in my mind.

“Does he even want to go on this date? Have you asked him how he feels about it?” 

Part of why I was wondering was on the off chance that she’d tell me he had the same objections towards this that I did, which would be good news for me since it would mark my reluctance as a sound judgment. If there was anyone whose opinion was worth something, it was his, right? After all, he was the provable genius in the same compromising position as me. 

“Trust me, he’s been dying to do this.” In spite of her preface to trust her, I didn’t. I couldn’t be sure if she was suggesting that he’d been dying to go on a date with me or if he’d been dying to go on a date in general.

No offense to him, but I guessed it was the latter, and if that was the case, he was only being a team player because she hadn’t told him it was me she was setting him up with. Already suspecting that I’d probe further to navigate through her vagueness, she cut in with one last Hail Mary. “One date! That’s all!”

Whether you believe me or not, 100% the only reason why I said what I said next was to put an end to this madness. “Fine. I’ll go.”

Maybe 99.99%.

_ _ _

I never knew how I could lose so much time. Sure, if anyone asked, I could probably account for everything I’d done in my day, second by second. But still, there was this cloudiness, a fog, inhabiting my brain, casting this haze on whatever else dwelled in my mind, too. 

I couldn’t focus on anything for more than 4 seconds at a time, and while that wasn’t incredibly concerning for the average human, it was disconcerting for me. 

What was going on? 

What is going on?

“What’s going on?” 

Suddenly, a hand began to wave in front of my face. “Yoo-hoo? Anybody in there?” JJ wondered aloud, causing me to realize it was her voice that asked the question from before. 

“Yeah, sorry,” I shook my head to regain some clarity, but that did me no good. My foggy brain still remained. It goes without saying my words were worth nothing as well. JJ saw right through me in a way that never failed to scare me shitless. I could never conjure up a lie good enough to follow that look she’d give me. So I settled for the truth. The question that cast the haziness in my brain to begin with. 

“What do you think about me dating again?” 

If I thought that first look was bad, then the one she was giving me now was something of a nightmare. At least with the first, I knew what she was thinking. With this one, I hadn’t a clue. 

To relieve us from some of the insufferable silence, I found myself speaking again in my defense. “Garcia mentioned something earlier about setting me up with someone and it got me thinking.”

Thinking about Max that is. 

Being my most recent girlfriend, it made sense why she was freshest in my mind. That being said, we’ve been broken up for 14 months, which in any other context would seem like more than enough time to start dating again, but therein lies the catch. 

We didn’t just break up. She said “no” when I asked her to marry me, which, if you ask me, is one hell of a way to break up.

So from that perspective, it obviously begs the question: is 14 months too fast to move on from something like that? 

JJ sharply inhaled. “Well, are you ready to start dating again?”

I still didn’t have an answer for that myself. “I don’t know. There isn’t exactly a rulebook on how long you have to wait until it’s socially acceptable-”

“Lemme stop you right there, Spence,” She placed her hand on top of mine. “You can’t just do whatever statistics or studies or science say is right all the time. You not only need to be more in tune with your own needs but accepting of them, too. Screw what anyone else has to say about you dating again - including Socrates, including Einstein, including Aristotle ... including me. Do whatever you think is acceptable by your standards - not society’s. Do what you wanna do and I’ll support that.”

There was something special about having JJ’s approval. It was like getting permission to be excited, something I didn’t know I needed or wanted. 

“I’m ready.”

Born ready, as Penelope herself would say.

_ _ _

I was starting to get suspicious that maybe I had an invisible string attached to me and on the other end of that string was Penelope. It was the only explanation as to how she managed to trail behind me at an isochronal pace. Perfectly equidistant, perfectly equal intervals of time. Must’ve been some form of magic that she was able to synchronize that connection for as long as she did as we pranced around the office, basically chasing me.

“Okay, I know the date isn’t until Saturday, but I really think we need to amp up your wardrobe choices ... like stat.”

Hearing that I was seeing my superior still didn’t settle well with me. I don’t think I could ever get used to the thought. 

I should’ve been offended at her suggestion to change my clothing taste as it implied my stylistic choices weren’t up to par, but a part of me, a very small part of me, knew she was right. And just because I wasn’t keen on the idea of going on a date with Spencer didn’t mean I didn’t want to look nice for him for it.

“I’m assuming you’ve got some ideas in mind,” I said in a teasing voice, knowing that’s precisely why she brought it up.

“See! You are a genius! Exactly why you and Spencer are meant to be together!” Her exclamation was just as loud as it was outlandish. 

“Alright, calm down sparky,” I shot a warning look. “It’s just one date - we’re not soulmates.” 

Then, talking in the quietest voice I didn’t think Penelope was capable of speaking with, she said, “Not yet.” 

I knew the minute I showed even the littlest bit of interest in Penelope’s fashion guidance, I’d end up draped in ruffles, sequins, glitter, tulle, rhinestones, or all of the above. Nothing again Penelope’s personal style - it’s just not mine. 

I was scared to ask, but I had to know. “So what were you thinking?” 

Before my very eyes, Penelope’s constantly-there smile transformed, something akin to the mischievous grin of the Cheshire Cat. “I was thinking …” 

In a Mary Poppins-esque fashion, Penelope produced a dress that in no feasible reality should have been able to fit within that little Hello Kitty side bag. 

I suppose it must’ve been absolutely backbreaking for Penelope to refrain from choosing a multicolor or at least pattern-riddled dress, so as compensation for the fact that it was only one singular color throughout, it had to be a bold one. 

Red. 

“Not too shabby, right?” Her eyebrows jumped on her forehead, knowing she’d made a good choice. 

And a part of me actually died saying this, but it was pretty perfect. 

_ _ _ 

My life didn’t flash before my eyes, per se, the moment I finally arrived at the delicatessen. It was more like a very specific, singular memory had flashed before my eyes. 

That story for later? This is the one. 

Psych 101 was my best class in Freshman year ... by a long shot. Come rain, wind, or snow, I was always excited to go. It was a standout course on its own, but not because it was terribly spectacular or the most fascinating subject in the world, but more so because of how it changed my own person. It challenged me, like all worthwhile things do. 

There were more judgmental meatheads - boys, if you will - than not, who would jump down my throat for being a smart ass or a teacher’s pet if I so much as answered one of Dr. Reid’s questions. Par for the course, really. 

As a result, I had a proclivity to avoid raising my hand. It wasn’t that I was hyper-fixated on managing my reputation, just that participating wasn’t worth the eventual harassment from my dimwitted classmates. 

Nonetheless, one day, I felt compelled to answer Dr. Reid when he asked what our thoughts were about the sampled, pretense manifesto.

No one else was jumping at the chance to speak, perhaps they were just as cowardly as I was, and it was clear that he was going to stand there waiting until someone finally would. The silence was painfully awkward for everyone and so I felt obligated, as a student who was actually enrolled in the class for credit and not just to audit like 90% of the other girls here, to break it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, my hand hesitantly inched up into the air until it floated just high enough above the student in front of me’s head. As soon as I knew he saw it, I let it plunge straight back down. 

“Yes, Ms. (y/l/n)?”

I could already feel the dirty looks and snide comments coming before I even said a word. 

“I know we’re all collectively referring to this unsub as a man, and while that might just be a general assumption or Freudian slip perhaps ... I think the language is steeped in betrayal and contempt. And it would be ignorant not to notice how it reads more like the wrath of a woman scorned than your typical jilted male lover.” 

“Lover?” Someone two rows back snickered quietly, clearly to mock my choice of words. I didn’t even have to look to know it was Brad who had said that. Nevertheless, Dr. Reid was impressed with my answer. His lips curved into the faintest smile as he nodded his head. If he had heard the commentary of one Brad Sterling, he made no visceral reaction to it.

With an extended hand, palm facing up, he gestured for me to, “Please. Stand up.”

I fumbled my way up and out of my seat to possibly delay the shit I’d get for this mere action.

“That, ladies and gentleman, is what it looks like to have courage,” He underlined his words with a grand flourish of his hand in my direction. “Putting yourself on the line even in the event you’ll be mocked and ridiculed or deemed wrong. That’s something you’ll need if you are seriously considering being part of the BAU, or the FBI at any capacity.”

My face was flushed from the acclaim he was showering me with. Suddenly, I was glad I volunteered. 

Taking me completely by surprise, Dr. Reid wasn’t done yet.

“So, Mr. Sterling,” He began, directly calling out the boy in the back who without a doubt made the remark. I wouldn’t have had any reason to believe he heard it since his attention never diverted away from me long enough to catch the comment, much less the culprit. I wonder if he’d heard all the times Brad made jokes at my expense. Was he finally at his wits end with the sarcasm? “Make fun all you want, but might I suggest that if you like a girl, you do the opposite of that.” 

His sickly sweet drawl was followed by a short wink at me as if to say ‘I have your back’, and I was lucky to have already been in the process of sitting back down because my knees would’ve given out underneath me from the sheer exhilaration of his praise. 

The thought never once crossed my mind that Brad was so fixated on me because he had a crush, but it all made sense once it did. And if I didn’t know any better, Dr. Reid only humiliated him and brought it up because the realization dawned on him, too.

Was it possible that Dr. Reid was ... jealous?

In the spirit of complete transparency, that suspicion may have lit the tiniest wildfire imaginable in my chest. A wildfire that, even now, has yet to extinguish. Perhaps that little flame is the 0.01% of the reason I said yes. I could only imagine what kind of omnipotence it would soon gain if this date went well. 

If he could light such an enduring kindle with simple praise, think about what would happen if he smiled at me. If he laughed at my jokes. If he held my hand. 

If he kissed me.  

Dr. Reid’s validation would be something I actively sought from all walks of life, I knew that much. What I didn’t know was how far that desire would take me.

I would have never guessed it would lead me here. 

Standing in front of a fancy restaurant in a pretty red dress with the tenuous hope that the professor inside might just like it so much that he’ll end up liking the girl wearing it, too.

_ _ _ 

No matter how many times I adjusted the bouquet of poppies, they sat perpetually crooked on the table. Much like the dark gray tie around my neck that tightened around my throat with every passing second. I had to keep messing with it to loosen the noose-like grip it had on me. Who knew if it actually was becoming more restricting or it was the flourishing bundle of nerves in my stomach that made it harder to breathe. 

I was never very good at lying in wait patiently. Especially if I was expecting something. Now that I was expecting someone? I could say with perfect clarity - I was not good at waiting. 

I don’t wanna seem the way I do 

Every time the door opened, my eyes flashed to it instantaneously. And every time it wasn’t her, a little part of me was disappointed. It was still too early to say for certain that she was standing me up, but my mind was doing what it did best. It wandered. There was nothing else to do after all. 

Except maybe adjust those blood orange poppies one more time.

I’d picked them out specifically because Penelope slipped in a not-so-subtle comment about her dress being “a perfect match to the color of papaverales” - her words exactly. I thought if she went through that much trouble to find a color coordinated plant and say the scientific name for me to decode, it was worth picking up a bouquet of them on the way. 

It was only the most ironic occurrence in the world that when I went to rearrange them one last time, I devoted my full attention to the action, missing the very moment I was on the lookout for the past hour and a half. 

I didn’t even see her until the red poppies camouflaged into the identically colored setting of her dress. 

Then there she was.

All the disappointment in the world was worth that first time I saw her with fresh eyes. 

I was dumbstruck for a moment, long enough that it warranted an apology for not standing up sooner. 

“(Y/n)! Hi!” I accidentally squealed. I couldn’t control myself, let alone control the pitch of my voice apparently. 

I could see, in her, youthful naivete where, in others, I saw their age. She paradoxically had not aged a minute, and yet a new womanhood was piercing through her ultimately adolescent appearance. 

“Hi, Dr. Reid,” She said through a laugh and a smile, shaking my hand politely and professionally. She was greeting me like I was still her professor and she’d just happen to run into me on an errand. Next, she’d be attempting small-talk for as long as it took for me to let her go. 

Unfortunately for her, I had no plans for that. 

But I’m confident when I’m with you 

“Please, it’s just Spencer,” I reminded her, hoping to break down that governing image of me she surely maintained. 

“Spencer,” She tried again; doing it more to be obedient to my instruction than to satisfy her own desire. It sounded so unnatural to her, just as it did to me. I found it adorable, actually. It seemed like she was breaking this unspoken, and very much illusionary rule to say my first name. “It’s nice to see you again,” She added after I pulled out her chair for her.

“Is it?” I asked when I rounded the table to get to my seat. “I get the feeling you’re a little disappointed.” The only reason I pointed it out was that it was true, not just that I’d observed the notion grow more poignant in her face for the past minute.

“Not at all,” She shook her head, which luckily for me, drew a line of congruence between her body language and verbal language. At least, she was being truthful. “It’s just that I’m sort of embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?” I repeated in astonishment, unable to cultivate a list of reasons that would justify her feeling that way. I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d done to provoke that emotion, and it nearly broke me to consider her internal being substantiating it. 

“Embarrassed isn’t the right word, but I can’t find a more accurate one for what I’m feeling,” She shied away from my eyes when she lowered her head as she spoke. 

“You could try to explain it to me?” I offered gently. It took an overwhelming amount of self-restraint to not offer my hand with it. It would’ve been so easy to slide my hand across the threshold to enter her territory of the table, but who knows if doing so would just make her that much more uncomfortable. 

“Well for one thing, I don't really go on dates,” From this alone, I could already relate to her enough to laugh at the fact. “Don’t laugh at me! You know how dangerous first dates can be,” She swatted her hand in my direction to chastise me. 

“I do! I do! I think it’s really good that you’re protecting yourself to the point of avoiding dates,” I was teasing the implication that she wasn’t asked to go on very many, which was thankfully delivered well enough to make her laugh again. 

“Hey! Many people have wanted to go on dates with me, thank you very much. You included.” 

“Me included.” I nodded in approval. We sat in a short period of silence while we exchanged one soulful glance, borne from the insinuation of what I just said. 

“And for another ... I respect you too much as a figure of authority to see you in that way.” 

_ _ _ 

“In what way?” 

Rather than tossing me a lifeline, he was feeding me to the sharks. Forcing me to dive into the deep end. He wanted to see me struggle to stay afloat in the sea of his sticky toffee eyes. He knew I'd get suspended in them when he gave me that look. How much I’d be willing to get lost in them just so I could wander in the depths of his honeyed orbs for a little bit longer. 

That look ...

“You don’t find it weird?” This was the most honesty I could’ve demonstrated. 

“Find what weird?” For someone with such a high IQ, you’d think he’d be quicker on his feet. 

“This! You - me. On a date!” I gestured to the space between us. “You’re ... well frankly, Spencer, you’re old enough to be my father.” 

“Does that make you uncomfortable?” He genuinely cared about the answer.

“Only in theory. Not in actual life,” was the most precise response I could give.

“So what is making you uncomfortable?” Again, I could tell my answer mattered to him. 

“You were my professor once, and now I’m just supposed to go on a date with you and see you as my equal when I’ve spent the entire time I’ve known you, putting you on a pedestal? Do you know how much pressure that puts on me? To be perfect?”

“Who says you have to be perfect? Who says you’re aren’t already?” 

That one caught me off guard. I had to gulp down the lump of shock. 

“You think I’m perfect?” 

“That, or you’re pretty close to it.” 

Lately all I feel is bad and bruised

I could’ve smiled, I could’ve thanked him, I could’ve fallen at his feet and thrown my dignity down there along with it, but I just laughed. I laughed. 

“That’s ridiculous! You barely know me.” 

“You’re wrong,” He simply replied with a firm shake of his head and a cavalier sip at his drink. It showed just how confident he was in his answer. How cocky he was. 

“How am I wrong?” 

He cleared his throat as though he were preparing to deliver the world’s greatest speech. Then, he leaned forward, motioning with his fingers for me to do the same. 

“If I’m remembering correctly, which you know I am, you were the student who had the gall to raise your hand and correct me on my gender identification of the unsub, right?” 

The second the sentimental thought, ‘aww he remembered’, came into my head, it was soon followed by, of course, he did, idiot. Eidetic memory, remember?

Tired of tripping on my shoes

“What does that have to do with me being perfect? Or so you claim?”

He was piercing deep into my eyes now, his gaze overwhelming my senses and sending shockwaves akin to the feeling of butterflies everywhere … and I mean everywhere.

“Bravery is the audacity to be unhindered by failures, and to walk with freedom, strength, and hope, in the face of things unknown.” 

I recognized the quote as one of Morgan Harper Nichols, but the words went right to my chest like they were his own. 

That damn wildfire just got a whole lot bigger. 

“I’ve always thought about how if I could be unfazed by failure or even just the prospect of it, if I could just be strong enough or have enough hope to face what I couldn’t predict, I’d be set. I’d be golden,” He paused. “I’d be perfect ... but you? You, little one, have already got that figured out. So whether that means you’re perfect on your own because of your bravery or you're a perfect match for someone fainthearted like me, is up for you to decide. Whichever interpretation of being perfect you choose would be correct, but you should know - I meant both either way.”

But when he loves me I feel like I’m floating

When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody

Even when we fade eventually to nothing

You will always be my favorite form of loving

“Do you want to get out of here?” He asked when he finally refound his voice. 

“Since the minute I walked in.” I replied after refinding mine. 

_ _ _ 

“You always take girls to your apartment on the first date, Doctor?” Asking this in the name of taking a jab at him was the most clever way I could think to conceal my underlying motive of trying to gauge how giddy I could let myself feel about the fact that he’d taken me to his ‘super chic dark academia’ themed residence - Penelope’s words, remember?

“Well, in my abundant dating history,” He sarcastically began, “I can’t say I ever have, no. You’d be the first.”

That shot another quick bolt of lightning to the wildfire in my heart that I’m ashamed to admit made the heat reinvigorate. The flame must’ve been too much for my chest to contain so it had to relocate to my face, where my cheeks were left to burn under his gaze and thanks to his admission. 

I was the first. 

He must’ve seen the glint localizing on my countenance and decided to speak on it. “Why does that amuse you?”

“I don’t know,” I dumbly but truthfully replied. He didn’t need any more information to get his answer, though. Because even if I didn’t know what amused me about being his first, I never denied that it did, and that was more than enough confirmation for him. 

“You promise to be here when I come back?” He wagged a cautionary finger at me like it might persuade me to stay and hold me accountable if I didn’t. 

Spencer needed to go into his room to collect an item that ‘shall not be named’ but was apparently essential for our super secret plans tonight (secret to even me) and he was leaving me in the living room while he did so. I guess being the initial girl he took home on a first date was okay, but being the initial girl he took into his bedroom on a first date was crossing a line. 

That was alright with me, though. I was in this for the long haul.

“I promise I pose no flight risk, Your Honor,” I taunted with a coy tone. “But I can’t promise I won’t snoop around some.” Hey, at least I was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

“Snoop around all you want,” He laughed ruefully, demonstrating an openness I quite envied and admired. “You’ll probably learn a lot about me that way. And you won’t even have to talk to me to do that!” I knew he was only saying that out of self-deprecating tendencies he harbored, but I couldn’t help feeling that a small part of him actually believed that I wasn’t interested in talking to him.

“Spencer, you know I do like talking to you right?” I caught him just before he ran into his room. Already halfway in the door, I could still catch the megawatt smile on his face. 

“So stay then,” His smile grew impossibly bigger. “We can talk all you want when I get back.” 

The door closed, and then suddenly reopened to let just his face through, a face that said, ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

After a few minutes of loudly sorting through his room, I heard the sanctimonious cry of victory. “Found it!” 

I could hear the little pad of his feet and he happily trotted out of the room. “Ta-da! My stargazing kit.” He said it as though he were introducing the basket he was holding to me, and me to it. Like it was a real person he wanted me to know. I almost felt obliged to say, ‘Hi stargazing kit! It’s so nice to meet you. I’m (y/n)!’

“Let’s go,” He smiled, reaching for my hand. 

I unabashedly took it, because although it meant that I was truly leaving his apartment, I had a very strong feeling that I would be back here again one day. 

_ _ _ 

We were lying there on this big quilted comforter that was stashed away in that stargazing kit of his, staring up at the sky, drunk on the sound of our occasional fits of laughter. 

“It’s Earth Day, you know that?” I wondered aloud in a state of complete euphoria.

“I actually did,” He said through a sheepish laugh, almost as if he was admitting the knowledge of it against his own will to protect my fragility. 

From out of nowhere, there was a small tug on the skirt of my dress. I looked down to find Spencer’s hand there, playing with the fabric until it lay perfectly on my leg. 

I coughed to possibly relieve the tension brewing in my loins. “So then you know the Lyrid meteor shower is tonight,” I moved the tiniest bit closer to lean into his touch.

“At exactly 4:33 a.m,” He moved too.

“Is that why you brought me here? To watch the shooting stars? To make a wish?” I thought for a second that I would appear exceedingly childish - more so than I already did being 21 years his junior. But he didn’t judge me at all for the kid-like notion of making a wish on a shooting star or the implication that I still believed in those things. 

In fact, I piqued his curiosity, telling by the way he moved only his head to the side to watch my reaction. “Say I did. What would you wish for?” 

In the throws of dreamy elation, I softly murmured the only honest answer. “To be older. But not the unfulfilling 9 to 5, loveless marriage, ‘I do my taxes for fun’ older. I want to be old in the ways that the stars and the sky are old. I want to be infinite.” 

“...To be infinite.” He whispered my wish back, sounding sort of in awe of me. 

Just then, the overhead horizon grew larger. With no buildings or people to block the view, it was just us, the stars, and the sky. I could actually feel that I was lying on a planet. It was so wide. So infinite. 

“Can I hold your hand?” I asked softly, in a manner so vulnerable it scared me.

Without any words or hesitation, he put my hand in his.

“The universe seems so big right now. I just needed something to hold onto.” I explained quietly, practically with the hopes that he wouldn’t hear me. But he heard.

“I’m here.”

We didn’t know what was ahead of us then. We were just two people, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. We weren’t divided by power, or age, or space. We were ourselves and no one else. 

My eyes fluttered shut again and a smile stretched across my face. “Stargazing was a good idea.”

The world and the sky and the stars and I - we were all infinite. I couldn’t have felt bigger in my own body. In the best way possible, I was taking up so much space. I was occupying the earth. I was made up of matter. I mattered. 

Just as I began to open my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a fading shooting star. Though I had wished to be older, I still felt like a child. Then it hit me. I didn’t feel older because I wasn’t older.

I was infinite. 

Yes, I was a child, but not in the pinch your cheeks, bottles and pacifiers, babyish way. I was a child in the ‘you have a life full of possibilities ahead of you’ way.

You are young. He tells me with his eyes. And that is a good thing. Be forever young. 

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 

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[butterysalt]

Fun | Sherlock x platonic!Reader

Pairing: Sherlock x platonic!gender neutral reader

Request ( @a-paper-cut​ ): 

Word Count: 2,202

Contains: Mentions of child abduction, platonic fluffiness and banter :)

A/N: AAAAAAA thank you so much, lovely! This was my first request and I was SUPER excited to write it hehe. I’ve been on a slight creative block lately and I enjoyed writing this so much. I hope this fic does justice for what you wanted and I hope that you are doing amazingly 🧡🧡

It was an early, snowy winter morning in London. You and Sherlock Holmes have been mind-boggled by a puzzling case for the past week. The detective proposed that the two of you go on a walk to allow some fresh air in the brains again. This suggested that even his extensive mind palace and composing weren’t helping the genius. Not that you were complaining about sharing a nice stroll with Sherlock. It had been years after all since you two had spent any casual time together. Like what people normally did in their free time, anyway.

The two of you stepped side by side, feet planting in the thin sheet of snow on the ground in unison. You grinned a little at the matched body language. You and Sherlock always had special ways to subtly communicate with one another. It was like a part of your minds were connected.

“Anything yet?” the tall brunette questioned. Your lip twitched upward. “Don’t rush the process, Sherlock. Just enjoy the moment. Live in it a little.” Sherlock’s long drawl could be heard next to you. His walking strides were growing longer as his patience began to thin out. You could practically hear the subtle gnawing of his teeth.

“We’ve only been walking 5 minutes,” you flouted, “Loosen up a bit.” Sherlock snickered to himself, messing with his gloved hands. “You’re already trying to read me?”

“You’re walking like you’ve got a stick up your arse. It’s clear you’re agitated,” you jested. The curly-haired detective sneered at you and kicked a clump of ice out of the way. “I can’t think, Y/n. We have potential homicide to solve and we’re here drudging in the snow.”

“Remember, this was your idea, genius. Unless you can come up with something else, this is all we’ve got.” Sherlock went silent, chewing the inside of his cheek. His mind wandered to try and come up with something snarky to throw at you. Perhaps a witty comeback that would leave you in doubt. The headache he was dealing with was enough to strike him in his train of thought. He shook it off and his focus returned to the matter of urgency. Unsolved case.

Sherlock lifted his face to the sky, blowing a hot cloud of breath into the chilly London air. He tugged his scarf a little closer to his neck, shoving his gloved hands down into his thick coat. The breath cloud was a common habit of Sherlock’s during cold weather. It mimicked the effect of blowing cigarette smoke, just without the tar and nicotine. Fortunately, the only time the detective abused drugs anymore was when cases had him horribly stumped; thanks to you and John’s efforts, his drug use was much more controlled now.

“Five missing children. All between the ages of 7 and 9. We know that the connection is tied to their private schools. Three different religious private schools within a 10 kilometer radius — so, fairly close together. The parents reported their children coming home with expensive gifts from a mysterious donor shortly before they went missing. They referred to the perpetrator as ‘Ray’. Anyone handing out shiny trinkets to naive children is either a philanthropist or a predator. I’d like to bet on the latter.”

You sighed, mentally reviewing all of the evidence from the case in your head. “But all of the children knew basic safety protocols: don’t talk to strangers, never accept anything from strangers, the whole package. Their parents are terribly traditional. They never would have let any of them see the light if they broke any of those rules. So the chances are near impossible that they would have fallen for such typical child abduction tricks.”

“Near impossible, L/n. That means there’s still a possibility and possible is all we need to screw this up,” Sherlock tutted. He blew another large cloud of air, shaking some light snow off his curls. You frowned, “The suspects. We’ve interrogated the popes, teachers, parents… who are we missing?”

Sherlock stopped walking. You turned to check up on him, finding him with his eyes shut. “Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions…”

“Of course we’re asking the wrong questions! We have all the pieces in our hands but no instructions, Sherlock. We’re running in circles with this case,” you walked over to a public railing, leaning against it and looking out across the long white blanket that stretched to the horizon.

He joined your side shortly after, bending down to pick up some rocks to toss down the snowy hill and watch as they made skinny trails in the frosty powder. Sherlock sighed out, exasperated and worn out. “We’re not getting anywhere by mulling over it, are we?”

You smiled at him and shook your head. You pulled your coat a little tighter around yourself. “That’s why I’m here to keep you in check. It’s good to get some air, you know? Christ knows when’s the last time you did that simply because you wanted to.”

Sherlock’s eyebrow perked up and he faced you with a blank expression. “How do you mean?” Your eyes widened a little, unsure of how you should pick out your next words. “Well… you know, you don’t exactly, uh…” Nervously, your eyes flicked up to his. He was watching your expression very carefully.

“You don’t spend a lot of time for yourself,” you said simply. Sherlock frowned in disagreement. “I spend a lot of time by myself. I thought you knew me better than that,” he teased.

You rolled your eyes, leaning your back against the cold railing now, crossing your arms. “In your mind palace, Sherlock. I mean you don’t do things you enjoy.”

“Who said I don’t enjoy things?” he countered your query. You found yourself forming a cold sweat, debating on how to deliver your message. “Hobbies?”

“Violin.”

“Meh. Parties?”

“You disturb me.” Your best friend’s disgust made you cackle. “See, that’s my point! You don’t know how to have fun anymore. What happened to old Sherlock?”

Now this was a personal offense against Sherlock. “What? You don’t think I’m fun?” Sherlock sounded incredibly appalled by your claim. A hot cloud of air rose to the sky when you scoffed.

“Holmes, you are probably the farthest thing when it comes to the definition of fun!”

“Well, probability-wise, that’s highly improbable when Mycroft exists.”

“His poshness makes up for it. You’re just irritating.” Sherlock puffed out his red cheeks, nudging you playfully. “Oh, come on. You must admit that I’m at least an interesting character?”

You pondered in fake thought, scrunching your face together. “Interesting is debatable. Fun? That’s foreign territory, Sherlock.” The tall man grimaced deeply at your bluntness that he clearly had issues with. “What do you mean by ‘Old Sherlock’? What was good about the ‘old me’? I consider myself much more refined in the present day.”

Old memories of the two of you hanging out with one another as teenagers came back to you. A smile melted on your face from the warm feelings of nostalgia, the chilliness from the snowfall leaving your body.

“You used to prank Mycroft all the time. Everything was always a competition with you and me; we would go from racing down the neighborhood to reach my house first or rush to finish homework and claim the telly before the other could. Oh! We would always make up fake cases, too, trying to entertain a mystery that didn’t even exist,” you laughed to yourself, “Look at us now.”

Sherlock grumbled at the reminder of your old shenanigans. He wasn’t always the fondest of his younger self. But he had to admit he was reckless, even as a child. It was a simpler time and kids didn’t have much to fret or fear.

“Now you’re all enigmatic and stoic with your flipped up coat collar and scary cheekbones. The difference is so disappointing, it’s sickening,” you gagged. Sherlock slipped off his glove and jabbed his freezing hand against your neck, making you exclaim at the coldness and shove him backward. He wore a victorious smirk at your suffering. You pointed a hard finger at him, holding back your own laughter to prove a point.

“NO, that’s not being fun, Sherlock. That’s torture- sadism! You’re just an arse!” He threw his arms in the air, tossing his glove in your face. “It’s subjective! I can be fun,” he insisted.

“You’re predictable, Holmes. You don’t remember what good humor is and it shows in your actions. You pick everything up from books and telly. You can’t surprise me anymore,” you declared. Sherlock’s expression contorted into shock as he stared at you in disbelief. You had left the great Sherlock Holmes baffled. The silence was deafening — music to your ears.

When you thought you were winning this argument, a special glint quickly shone in Sherlock’s eyes. Your expression dropped and then you were pushed backward. There was no railing behind you anymore to catch you.

As you were falling, you naturally grasped for something to hold on to. In this case, Sherlock’s coat. The evil smirk on his face was immediately replaced with shock then fear as he was crashing hard into you. Gravity did the rest of the work. With the momentum you had already begun, dragging Sherlock down with you was one of the worst possible outcomes of the situation. A crude curse slipped past his lips and both of you latched onto each other because there was nothing else to brace with.

What was initially meant to be a playful fall down the snowy hill turned into a rolling battle full of frantic thrashing and screaming as both of your bodies thumped and tangled with each other. The two of you occasionally bounced a few inches off the ground and crashed back into the ground, knocking the breath out of both of you. The wild human avalanche down the hill was finally put to a stop when you rolled into a tree. With a loud OOMPH, you and Sherlock flopped into the ground, groaning and croaking in pain. Neither of you moved for the first passing moments, unable to process what just happened.

Your fall was broken when you landed on top of Sherlock, his body sprawled out in the cold snow, rasping heavily. Some snow fell off your form and your arms shook as you propped yourself up, no longer caring about the fact that you applied all the pressure in your friend’s ribs.

“You alright, mate?” you panted, checking up on Sherlock, eyes analyzing him for any serious injuries.

“You take my breath away.” You sputtered and shook your head at his ridiculous humor. “Aren’t you just romantic?” He squinted his eyes and flashed a sarcastic smile but groaned out, “No, really. Please get off my chest.”

“Oh God, sorry,” you scrambled off of him and he rolled over into the snow, gasping for air as he clutched his side in pain. You punched him in the shoulder. “You bloody twat, Sherlock Holmes! Pushing me down a hill by Jove’s sake!”

“I remember it being much more fun when we were younger,” he grunted out, pushing himself onto his forearms. And just then, his eyes burst wide open. His face slack-jawed as his brain computed at top speed. He was onto something.

“Sherlo-”

“FUN, Y/n,” he articulated, scrambling over to you and grabbing you by the shoulders. You stiffened and backed away, startled by his abrupt realization. 

“Oh, Y/n, you are brilliant! This is why we work together!”

“What?! What are you-”

“The kids were abducted because they were having fun! ‘Ray’ is Remus Stooge, another private school kid in the area. The Stooge family owns several of the land plots around this corner of London and they’re the ones funding all three schools — The Stooge’s are plenty wealthy. The children were going to Remus’s home, ditching class time to get a personal house tour of his daddy’s money. The fancy car rides, luxurious delights, shiny sneakers and tailored clothing… Who wouldn’t pass up on an opportunity like that? It only makes sense why they were lured in so easily! Their rich best pal Remus has been the one inviting them right into the trap!”

“What- Sherlock! Where is this all coming from?! How do you even-”

“Trust me, Y/n!! I have it figured out- It all makes sense!” he interjected again. The look on your faces was bizarre. You tossed a handful of snow at him as he blocked it with his hands. “NO?? It doesn’t! This is so sudden-”

Sherlock was on his feet in an instant, brushing off the powder from his coat and yanking you up. His eyes were gleaming with excitement. “We have to go tell Lestrade, now! Call John and get over to the Stooge’s place!”

“To arrest the kid?!”

“No, the butler!” He grabbed your gloved hand and dragged you up the steep white hill. You shook your head wildly, “Holmes, you better have a bloody good explanation for this in the cab or there will be hell to pay.” Sherlock smirked triumphantly and squeezed your hand.

“Come, L/n! The game is on!”

Requests are open! <3

[carelessannie]

how do you think peter and monster!Tony's first mating session went? was peter confused/scared?? was Tony just hungry for someone ;)

Ooo yes good questions!! With the ask I just answered here, I went into it briefly, but I can definitely give you a tiny bit more context in Tony’s POV when he first finds Peter!

Here’s the original piece for context!

Warnings: implied cross species smut, accidental asphyxiation, Tony’s just trying his best, Peter is dumb, possible hormonal drugging (feel good hormones)

---

Finally, all of the surface vessels are in their cages, and each human has wandered back inside. It helps Tony that he rests while it’s light and works when it gets dark, but he still hates that the humans choose to populate his home during mating season.

His arms slowly unfold out of his den as he goes to inspect the surface. Dark, still and steady— just how he prefers it. He takes his time to navigate his usual path around the perimeter, cataloging each change in surfaces and letting his arms search out new contours and crevices in the rock and sand.

He’s hungry, mildly, and catches a few fish while he swims, eating them absentmindedly as he moves slowly, steadily across the floor. There’s not much new to feel— a few nests here and there, debris and chemicals from the surface vessels that he filters mindlessly. When he returns back to his den to resume his work, there’s a ripple across the surface of the water.

Tony dismisses it at first. Land animals and flying animals will often touch down on his waters. But then there’s a violent splashing in the water, the surface disturbed as a creature, a human, kicks and swims a few clicks to the west.

With nothing better to do, Tony goes to investigate. He stops underneath the frantic current, watching as all four of the human’s limbs flutter, desperate to keep afloat.

There are a few wooden beams that anchor the nearby structure down into the ground, and Tony wraps a few arms around one of them, climbing slowly to get a better look at the intruder.

He wonders if this human is injured— his swimming is lopsided, and Tony can hear labored breathing above the loud splashing and flailing of his limbs. Every so often, the human’s smaller arms will lift out of the water to grab the metal anchors on the side, leaving his bottom arms to hang freely in the water below.

Oh, the human is learning to swim.

Tony has never interacted with a human before, but he suddenly feels sorry for this one. The tiny limbs and slight muscles need development before they would be able to swim long distances, but this one looks old enough to at least know basic technique.

He huffs, pulling himself closer to where the human is resting. It probably wouldn’t be best to scare the poor thing, so he hesitantly runs the tip of his forearm against a curved, bumpy foot.

The human jumps, kicking and yelling angrily. Tony rolls his eyes— so sensitive. He peaks over the surface of the water, blinking away droplets as his eyes readjust to the humid summer air. When he can see clearly, Tony is met with wide pools of brown eyes, surprised and... horrified.

There’s a noise spilling from the human’s lips— words Tony can’t understand. He moves closer and the human flinches, but doesn’t flee. The beautiful eyes and lips draw Tony closer and he reaches out another arm, this time wrapping it around the human’s foot and holding on.

Tony. Safe.

He tries to project those words, and watches the moment they register to the human. Curiosity. He can feel curiosity through their small connection, and it makes Tony hum in pleasure. Not scared then.

And then Tony pulls. Not physically, no— he pulls emotions, drawing a few pieces of information from... the man. The human is male. He’s young, untouched, and devastatingly alone. Filled with loss and self-doubt, despite his beauty.

Peter. His name is Peter.

Tony pushes back the same emotions: male, fertile, alone. His own thoughts permeate Peter’s mind, and the boy in front of him blinks slowly, unsteadily. His pink lips turn into a hesitant smile as he murmurs a few more words, extending a hand with delicate fingers in Tony’s direction.

Oh. Okay. Tony’s arms pale in embarrassment, and he can feel his cocks take notice of the proposal. He’s suddenly aware of how bare this human is, how vulnerable and sweet he smells.

He lets his instincts take over for a moment, and a few of his arms snake out, wrapping delicately over Peter’s wrists and ankles and neck, feeling his pulse thrum and race. With a tug, he pulls Peter flush against his body, letting the smaller male feel the aroused wiggle of his cocks peaking out of the slit between his limbs.

Mate.

Peter nods in agreement and it’s all the permission Tony needs. Den, den, den, his instincts scream, and he holds his mate close, diving beneath the surface and heading back to his den. There they will be safe, there his mate can carry his clutch and take care of them.

Safe. Mate. Peter.

It isn’t until he’s halfway back to his den that he feels his mate’s pulse slow down noticeably, and Tony feels his breathing stop. He jerks to a stop and looks down into his young mate’s face, horrified to find his expression slack, eyes closed, and body unmoving— no breath, no sign of life whatsoever.

Oh seas, what happened? He uses a thin arm to snake down Peter’s throat, alarmed to find his lungs full of water. Shit. Tony has never swam so fast in his entire life, racing back towards the pier and throwing Peter’s limp body up on the wooden deck. It takes some coordination, but Tony manages to climb the metal structure, leaning over Peter to turn his head to the side, sliding his arm deep into the boy’s mouth and coaxing the water out of his lungs.

Tony breathes a sigh of relief when his small mate coughs, expelling water and bile across the wooden deck as his body contracts in heaving breaths. He looks so lost, so tiny, and Tony lays one of his own hands across the boy’s back, sending waves of calm and peace to comfort him.

He gets a dopey smile in response and a few more muttered words, soft, content affection returning to him in a soothing wave. Good, he didn’t hurt his fragile mate.

It takes awhile for Peter to stand back up, but Tony stays nearby the whole time, watching and waiting. With wobbly steps, Peter makes his way back towards the land structure, covering his lower half with a piece of fabric as he goes.

Peter turns back once before he disappears up the hill. His face splits wide in a sweet smile, and he waves his hand back and forth, whispering a few words.

Tony has no idea what they mean, but he knows he hasn’t seen the last of his tiny, human mate.

[juliathephantom]

JATP Fanfic Recs: Multichapter Edition

* indicates complete

'Stupid Cupid, Stop Hitting On Me' by Bluefire510

Juke

Luke, a troublemaker cupid, meets Julie, who is also one of Love HQ's toughest cases to crack.

She claims to have no desire to fall in love.

But Luke is always up for a challenge.

Let's see if he could get Julie to fall for her Perfect Match by next Valentine's Day.... and maybe teach her all about love while he's at it.

*Operation Hashtag Rulie by where_you_go

Reggie/Luke/Julie

“Explain yourselves,” Caleb ground out.

“Uh…it’s not what it looks like?” Reggie tried, wincing.

“Oh really, Reginald? Because it looks like two of my most popular band members from a family-friendly band are fornicating in public!”

-

Julie and Reggie get caught up in a PR misunderstanding that leads to them "dating" for a few months. It's not a big deal, or at least it wouldn't be, if Luke would stop acting so weird.

*Unexpected by Phantom_Lover

Luke is determined to breeze through his senior year and onto mega stardom (which means avoiding school, and Principal Lessa, as much as possible). That is until he's forced to work side-by-side with quiet good-girl, Julie Molina, on the big end-of-the-year talent show. The two struggle to see eye to eye, and meeting the all-important deadline seems impossible until something unexpected happens between them.

keys to the cage (and the devil to pay) by HearJessRoar

Juke, Willex

Julie Molina has always thought it would be rather exciting to meet a pirate.

Unfortunately, she's right.

"Julie, Julie Patterson, I'm a maid here in the governor's household," she bluffs. And she wishes that Luke's name hadn't been the first that she'd come up with, because the long-haired pirate's eyebrows raise immediately.

"Luke got married?" he says, sounding oddly betrayed.

His blonde companion looks equally gutted. "He didn't even tell us."

Piss Off Your Parents (Date Me To Scare Them) by TheNameIsBritney

Willex

Alex Mercer doesn't want to go home for Christmas; but if he has to, he's certainly gonna raise a little hell. Enter: Willie, the cute guy in his history of English class who would be the perfect fake boyfriend candidate.

So if you wanna piss off your parents, date me to scare them, show them you're all grown up. If long hair and tattoos are what attract you, baby then you're in luck.

*i'll hold your music (here inside my hands) by musicals_musicals

"Your soulmate must love music just like you do”

Julie is 3 years old, enthusiastically playing a small plastic piano, the first time she sees her string.

It makes sense that music would connect her to her soulmate.

or

How Julie finds her way back to music, joins a band, falls in love, and meets Luke Patterson (not necessarily in that order)

*a masterpiece in motion, more beautiful every day by fairylightsandrainydays

Willex, Juke

Alex Mercer is a merboy with a fascination for the human world. Willie is a prince who he saves from a storm. And Caleb Covington is the sea witch who is going to make Alex's dream come true.

So long as Caleb gets what he wants.

*days go by and seasons change (lets try again next winter) by itsagamefortwo

Juke

julie's ready for a year away from home, studying and trying to re-find the magic in music. luke's about to start on a summer tour around europe opening for a band. they meet one night, sparks fly and emotions run high. now they've just got to try and see if they can maintain a long distance friendship.

Who Could Deny These Butterflies? by xxPrettyLittleTimeBombxx

Juke

“I know this is going to sound kinda crazy…but, could you maybe pretend to be in love with me for a few minutes?”

—

When Julie Molina approaches Luke Patterson at a bar and asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend, she never expects to find herself in a position where she and Luke have to keep up the ruse for longer than five minutes. Figures that out of all of the strangers she could have approached that night, she’d gone and picked the one guy who just so happens to be in a rock band that’s on the brink of blowing up.

*relight that spark by @ruzek-halstead

Juke

julie molina has had nothing but a tough life. after losing both her parents early on, she was left in the care of her step-monster karen and her two step-daughters. while working at her late father's diner, completing household duties and being at karen's beck and call at all hours, julie was well on her way to getting accepted into the college of her dreams and having enough money to move out.

and then one day she received a text message from an unknown number. it started out innocent, crossed wires based on a flyer she put up three years ago.

this is the story of julie molina and her prince charming, and everything in between.

i never saw you coming (and i'll never be the same) by ruzekhalstead (@ruzek-halstead)

Juke

julie molina, a new student to uc berkeley, secures a job at a tiny, run-down grocery store, where she meets a group of people who inadvertently become some of the most important people in her life.

there's nothing like suffering in the workplace with your co-workers to solidify a bond.

a look into julie's life in a brand new city, as told by the customer service experience throughout the months.

an oddly specific grocery store au that no one asked for but i'm writing anyway to satisfy my brain

*Love Drunk by captainkippen

Juke

Thirty-two missed calls. Fifty-eight texts waiting. Over one hundred various social media notifications. A deep sense of foreboding took over. Julie swallowed. Slowly, she lifted the phone back to her ear.

"Flynn… what happened last night?"

After a night out in Vegas, Julie and Luke wake up to find themselves married. Hijinks ensue.

*So that's how it happens by echocharm (@echocharm17618)

Juke

But it had to be today. Julie had this crazy feeling in her stomach. Not nervous butterflies. More like fireflies that were trying to zap her (Do fireflies electrocute people? She should google that). It felt like that moment her parents spoke about all the time. The day they met. And when they first spoke to each other. Her mom always says that an intense zap went through her whole body.

Are you new or nervous? Julie has been waiting a (short)lifetime to hear those words be said to her.

She walked down a few more steps in the auditorium and found a spot. It was one of the few seats left in the room that wasn’t all the way up in the back. She sat down and settled into the uncomfortable, hard, plastic chair and took a deep shaky breath. The prof was nowhere to be seen. But there was a cute boy in the seat next to her. He had sort of long brown hair that was covered with a grey toque. And he was wearing a cut off t-shirt and you could see his very nice arms. Julie’s breathing was still shaky, and his attractiveness wasn’t helping the situation.

*we're too young to know things like love by Ephemeral_Joy

(@lydias--stiles)

Juke

The various ways and situations people notice the connection between Julie and Luke, whether that be a close friend or a complete stranger.

(started as a 5+1 fic and then i kind of went rogue. oops.)

*and i know i've kissed you before, but i didn't do it right (can i try again?) by Ephemeral_Joy (@lydias--stiles)

Juke

Some things just can't be fixed with a song.

(Julie and Luke break up.)

*The Infamous Tale of Luke and Julie's Grand Trip Across America by Ephemeral_Joy (@lydias--stiles)

Juke

In any normal situation, Luke wouldn't let this random girl hitchhike with him across America.

Then again, he wasn't normal. And neither was she.

(or: the roadtrip!au no one asked for)

*We Found Wonderland by ICanSpellConfusionWithAK (@pink-flame)

At the end of season one Julie isn’t able to save the boys and they are jolted out of existence. But what if there was another way? Julie finds herself back in 1995 with a chance to stop the boys of Sunset Curve from ever dying at all. But will she be able to find her way home afterwards? Will she want to? Or has Alice really gone down the rabbit hole this time...

A Moment of Quiet Conversation by JackONeillisTheMan

Juke

Julie and Luke talk about how he was the one who introduced her to rock. Then just fluff, more and more fluff.

*Feels like I've opened my eyes again by ICanSpellConfusionWithAK (@pink-flame)

Juke

After the whirlwind her life has been since the boys showed up it’s not that surprising that Julie would be a little tired. But is it normal that she’s more exhausted than she’s ever been? With Nick acting weird, Alex and Reggie both wrapped up in their own problems and her relationship with Luke still a big question mark, she has her work cut out for her if she’s looking to sit back and relax.

Basically my ideas and speculation about what season 2 might hold, or at least some of the things I would like to see.

find the strength, find the melody by sunset_phantom

Juke

An AU in which the boys are alive, Julie has been kicked out of her music program, and she somehow ends up falling in love with Luke in three days while he simultaneously brings her back to her first love of all: music.

after silence, wake me up by Vargynja

Juke

Julie hasn't been able to make music after her mother's death. She lives in New York working as an assistant for Luke, working hard to move forward in her career.

Luke finds out he's about to be deported back to Canada. A panicked lie leads them to fake a relationship to get married so he can stay in the country. Despite working together for two years they aren't close but a trip to Alaska to visit Julie's family might change that

Based on the premise of The Proposal (2009)

[n1ghtw1ng-scp]

heres this scp essay I wrote to a (completely not scp related) discord server at 4am on a Sunday sitting on a stool in the kitchen. it's kinda long,,,

SCP 105 is Iris Thompson, the girl who can manipulate reality through photographs. In SCP 5000, the Foundation decides to destroy all humanity to save us from a much worse fate at the hands of the Entity, also known as IT. It just so happens to be that those are Iris Thompson's initials. That's not just a coincidence, as in SCP 3002, there is a girl that shows up in every person's memories in a single town. Recalling the memory is often a chaotic process, and sometimes causes the individual distress. They recall the girl from their childhood was Eastern European (same as Iris I think) who was new to their school. In all memories she was a pale, blond girl (also same as Iris) Lily Veselka, which can be translated and interpreted as Iris. Put simply, when you tell someone about the memory, whatever 3002 is gets access to that person's memory. FULL access. Capable of removing altering and replacing any memory, *it* can effectively change a person's actions and personality. Then, it can pretty much take over your mind. In this way it could easily create a MK Class EOTW scenario (end of human consciousness). Other GoIs have said about the anomaly "you should have seen this coming" and "we fear She is among us now." Now what does all of this have to do with 5000? The Entity, the 3002 entity, IT, Iris Thompson.... they're all suspiciously similar and I theorize that they are the same person. At the end of the 3002 document is a proposal for dealing with 3002, no description, and we don't know whether it was approved or not. But I think that it was, and furthermore it spawned Project PNEUMA from the 5000 article, where through PNEUMA research they connected the dots, just like I did here. (Probably not realizing it was Iris though.) So they decide to eliminate humanity themselves, instead of leaving IT (Iris) to mess with our consciousness at her will, possibly putting us through much worse than death. Why didn't IT just take over the world then? The 5000 process *did* take a long time, after all. Well it's because IT/3002 was put under an anti-meme, which limited its effects but only for a short period of time, allowing the Foundation to carry out their plan. All along IT had been playing along, with joining Alpha-9 and being docile and all that, only because it was under influence of the anti-meme. As you might know, in the end Pietro manages to stop the world from ending and resets reality back to the time before the Foundation decided on destroying humanity. But he also reset it back to a time where they had no idea what IT could do. Basically, after the reset, IT had free rein. The Foundation losing was the bad ending.

Well no one asked for this, but I wrote it anyway cause it makes me ✨️feel useful✨️- if anyone has any questions, or find something wrong with this (which true scp fans probably will) go ahead and tell me :)

[lightanddarklove]

SU - Connie's character development

I've been noticing in the SU tags that people have been pointing out that Connie should have or must have had therapy or some sort of counseling prior to future, and I agree. I've heard that others think she got limited development on screen from the later half of SU and basically all of Future, a point that is fair post Jungle Moon, but to me, it would make sense for her not to lean on Steven as much as she does before Sworn to the Sword, as she slowly gains confidence from being Steven's friend.

I'm only focusing on a few specific episodes here in an attempt at brevity (it’s definitely longer than I wanted). At some point I may reblog and add more, but I'd like to get this out there before the one year anniversary of the SU: Future finale.

At the beginning of the series, she is fairly introverted, shy but inquisitive and sensible. She doesn't show any interest in the people of Beach City until Steven protects her from the falling rocks near the temple and inadvertently traps her with his bubble. She asks questions about the townies, and writes the text of what they need on the bubble when they try to get help from Onion. When Steven's rollercoaster plan goes awry to free them, and they are knocked into the water, she is clearly very anxious. Once the chasm opens up beneath the water and they are further trapped, we see her standing up for herself for the first time, something that continues to increase in frequency over the course of the series. Upon the defeat of the corrupted Orange Spodumene, she is amazed by Steven's quick thinking that saved them.

We see her again in Lion 2, when they have an adventure on Lion that precedes their intended movie outing. Upon arriving outside the theatre, after the harrowing experience with the Robot Shooty Thing in Rose's Armory, she is discouraged, leading to Steven's frustration with messing up their original plans. Connie counters with her feeling that Steven shouldn't be involved with her, as she feels her life less interesting than his, and that her enjoyment of Dogcopter is nothing compared to the magical destiny Steven is encountering. This lack of self-confidence comes back several times until late in the series. After Steven points out that he very much enjoys Dogcopter, the Robot Shooty Thing returns, causing the duo to fight it using the sword pulled from Lion's mane. Working together, they conquer their foe using Connie's tennis moves, cheering both of them up.

In an Indirect Kiss, she clearly shows concern for Steven's glum mood, but is willing to push him a little in order to get him to open up about what's bothering him. We also see what would have likely been a romantic moment if the healing spit from their shared drink hadn't caused a sudden headache from her prescription no longer matching what she needed. After Steven excitedly goes to tell the gems about his newly discovered ability, we see Connie form some resolve in popping out the lenses of her glasses at the close of the episode.

I spent some time analyzing Alone Together for both perspectives on Kevin for my SU: Future fic, The Best Mother and Doctor I can be, but the development of Steven and Connie builds from them discussing dancing and fusion on the beach. After Steven covering his eyes at first to help Connie get more confident, the pair get into a rhythm, and eventually running circles around each other. This causes Steven to trip and Connie to unintentionally dip him in keeping him from falling. Connie's blush shows she reads the situation as romantic, but Steven smiles, seeing nothing wrong with her holding him up. In a moment of connection, they both start giggling and Stevonnie is formed for the first time. A bond is forged, their mutual consent to continue being fused through most of the rest of the episode. Once they start dancing at the rave they realize the attention on them is making them very uncomfortable, causing panic and hallucinating. Once they break through the panic attack, they stand up to Kevin when he invades their space and refuse to let him dictate how they spend time together. As these earlier episodes progress, we see both of them learning to be more confident when by each other's side.

The Return does lead into Full Disclosure, from Steven leaving a message on her answering machine thinking it my be his last chance to say goodbye. After Steven separates from his Dad in The Return, he has no human contact until Connie's call cuts into the scene in the wreckage of Homeworld's ship in Jailbreak, asking if he's ok before leading into the celebration of the Gems at the beginning of Full Disclosure. Steven's a bit astonished on the face of everything that happened in the past evening, and when his dad's van pulls up, he promises to call her back and cuts the call short. Once he sees his Dad's reaction to his harrowing ordeal, he is further hesitant to answer Connie's calls, for fear of worrying her. After a brief talk with Ronaldo, advising him that his story is one he must bear alone for normal people can't understand the burden of truth. After mulling it over and feeling she is better off without him, he declines her call. After this, Connie continues to call, but she makes her way to Beach City and is soon at his doorstep, as he tries to explain to the gems that he wants to cut ties with the humans in his life, Connie included. Pearl buys him a bit of time as he sneaks past them, and Connie tells her she's very worried. Once Connie goes to leave, she spots him fleeing, and calls out to him multiple times, questioning why he won't face her. After Steven tries to break off their friendship via text, Connie calls him, confused. Once he replies seriously, she calls out him choosing to do this through the phone, and demands he "say it to [her] face," refusing to accept losing him as her only friend if he can't do that. This builds from Indirect Kiss, where she isn't willing to let him hide his feelings or what happened that made him feel badly. Once he leaps from behind the wreckage, we see his resolve to keep her away has broken, tears streaming down his face. After she shows concern for his visible injury, and he claims wanting to protect her, she shuts that down and asks for him to tell her everything. After he explains, she makes it clear that being a part of his life is important to him, and the episode ends with Greg driving them back to the Maheswaran home.

In Sworn to the Sword we see the culmination of her bravery and resolve to this point. After Steven and Connie try to enjoy their Jam Bud snack, they're accosted by a small flock of seagulls, and Connie fends them off with her violin bow. Upon seeing this, he volunteers Connie to apprentice sword fighting with Pearl, and although both of them are surprised by this proposal, he praises Connie, and she talks of how she wants to be there for him for the dangers the future to fight beside him. Swelling with pride, Pearl agrees, and their training begins. After showing them the Sky Arena, Pearls delves into the training and hardships of battle in her past. Pearl's tutoring Connie seems to focus on breaking down her independence, and Connie's prior confidence shifts to disregard her well-being, as Garnet said Pearl had done during the war. As Connie had issues with self-esteem prior, it isn't long before she's repeating mantras of "I don't matter," to Steven's horror. This training isn't taking place over a day or two, it seems over the course of at least several weeks. Once he's determined to keep her from risking herself without a thought, he interrupts a training exercise where Connie faces stealth striking Holo-Pearls through cloud cover. He dismisses the idea that she needs to face these threats alone, and asks to fight beside her instead, which they are able to work together seamlessly. Once Pearl catches wind of the pair in the arena, she scolds Steven, declaring Connie needs to face her alone and he shouldn't be there, knocking the weapons from the duo's hands. Steven refuses to accept that he shouldn't be a part of the fight, declaring again his will to fight with her, dismissing the thought that "[he's] too important." After Pearl snaps back with a shout calling Steven Rose, she stumbles over her words and attempts to dismiss the duo. They approach her and Steven admits the reason he felt the need to tell Pearl how he felt about the training was the "you're nothing talk," which worried him. Connie posits if Pearl felt that way because of Rose's actions, but Pearl laughs it off, telling her she felt the opposite. Once she declares that their bond will only make them stronger, if they train hard together, and comes up with a new regimen as the episode fades out.   After the training Connie has received for several months Connie is asked to take part in her first mission with Pearl and Steven, which the Maheswaran family allows on the condition they take lots of pictures. Pearl guides them to a snowy area in the Great North as they seek out a corrupted Gem together. Upon facing one down, another appears, then splitting off in two directions and Pearl thinks about turning back before the duo convince her they can handle it. She agrees if they call her once they've found the corruption, as she worries about them fighting it alone. Steven and Connie track it, taking  break to warm up in a hollow tree as snow continues to fall. Steven posits possibly healing it as there are humanoid tracks in the snow along with the corruption tracks, and thinking the Gem may not be too far gone to save. Once they track it further, it has appeared to corner itself against a rock wall. Pearl checks in with the pair via walkie-talkie, which draws the Gem's attention to them. Steven tries to talk to it, but it has no significant affect. It attacks, and once it pops the bubble around the duo, they are separated. It moves to strike Steven, but Connie tries to draw it's attention with snowballs. Once it bears down on her, she freezes up and says she "wasn't prepared for this." Upon hearing Pearl speak through the walkie-talkie, her resolve returns and se snatches it from beneath the Gem, calling her for help. Jasper crashes into the corrupted Gem, shocking Connie and Steven. He regroups with her, protecting them both with a bubble as Jasper pummels the corruption, and poofs it without much struggle.  Pearl appears to help as Jasper shows off the gems she has captured, and Pearl is shocked. Jasper disappears into the snow and Pearl is relieved that the kids are ok, saying she wouldn’t have had them on this mission if she knew Jasper would be here. Connie is disappointed, feeling that she failed because she didn’t strike when she had the opportunity to fight the corrupted Gem. Pearl assures her that she followed the instructions of calling once they encountered the Gem, as she was instructed. Connie seems relieved by Pearl’s praise in the end, as they consider Jasper’s appearance as the episode closes.

After Jasper is freed in Super Watermelon Island, she poses a significant threat to the Crystal Gems, and now that they’ve encountered her in the prior episode, Pearl and Garnet set off to track her down. Amethyst watches over Steven and Connie and tries to distract them around Beach City, to keep their minds off Jasper. As the duo is playing in the water with Amethyst overseeing them, Jasper looms out of the water with a corrupted gem. As Amethyst faces off against Jasper, Connie and Steven fuse, and Stevonnie fights the corrupted gem while riding Lion. Amethyst is quickly dispatched and the fusion faces off against Jasper, defeating the corruption and saving Amethyst. Jasper gets away, but Stevonnie revels in their victory, despite Amethyst’s discouraged demeanor. When Steven and Connie unfuse, they are cheerful and Connie seems to have a confidence boost, which shows her competence that holds up through most of the rest of the series.

In Mindful Education, we see one of the last distinct shake-ups to Connie’s character up until Doug Out, which mostly just forms a stronger bond with her Dad. Steven and Connie are fusion training with Pearl and Garnet, and during their battle with Holo-Pearls, a distracting memory shakes Stevonnie so much they unfuse. Steven goes to comfort her as she runs out of the Sky Arena, and convinces her to talk about it to try and help. Upon hearing that she feels badly for accidentally hurting someone at her school, Garnet approaches them, suggesting a training option that may be help. The pair of fusions meet on the beach and are guided through meditation on how to work through their feelings about Connie’s most recent hard memory. In it, we see Connie bump into a boy at school and react suddenly by flipping him over her shoulder from his arm as a defensive reaction. Mortified, she flees and the memory ends. With breathing exercises, she is able to let the memory go, and we cut to another day where they attempt to train again. Once again, memories distract Stevonnie, but this time the thoughts come from Steven’s perspective. They reminding him of recent his battles with Bismuth, Eyeball Ruby and Jasper, causing the fusion to be overcome with tears and backs up to the edge of the Sky Arena, falling without warning. After they tumble over the edge, they unfuse and Steven is still overcome with emotions. Connie reaches out to him and tries to assure him that despite how badly he’s feeling to have to tackle these memories, he can’t run from them for good unless he faces them. Eventually, as they fall, they fuse again, and the memories pass, helping calm them enough so they can slow their decent.

[hyperg4my]

The Art of Public Speaking

What is the purpose of your speech?

▪ To inform

▪ To persuade

▪ To entertain

4 basic rules:

Know your audience

Know your subject

Know your speech

Know yourself

Know your audience

▪ Try to find out as much about your audience as possible

▪ Age range

▪ Gender

▪ Cultural and educational background

▪ Interests/ Hobbies/…

  → Try to form your speech in a way that your audience finds entertaining (if you talk to children or people with poor education, use easier words etc.)

▪ Connection to the audience is very important

→ Share personal experiences to make the audience feel closer

Know your subject

▪ Feel passionate about your subject

▪ Don’t just learn it, know it

→ There was a professor who held the same speech countless times and his assistant eventually proposed that he could hold the speech since he listened to it often enough to memorize it. They swapped places and everything went great until someone asked a question briefly related. That example shows the difference between memorizing a speech and actually understanding its content.

▪ Whatever your speech lacks, you can make up for it with passion.

 → You can fake information but you can’t fake passion.

Know your speech

▪ One main idea/ main intention

→ 3 examples to support that main idea are usually the best

▪ Everything should be centered around your main idea

→ A good way to bring the audience back to this is by repeating a certain phrase (using an anapher) throughout the speech (Martin Luther King did this)

▪ The introduction is the most important part

 → You can start with a joke but only if you’re confident that it will make your audience laugh

▪ Other options are rhetorical questions, provocative questions, story-telling etc.

▪ Final message should make the audience think about your speech

▪ Great Examples:

→ Steve Jobs: Stay hungry, stay foolish

→ John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address

Know yourself

▪ Make sure that your body language is coherent with your message

▪ Confident voice and body language, observe popular public figures

▪ Make a lot of gestures (an analysis of the most popular vs the least popular Ted Talks has shown a significant difference in hand gestures)

▪ Let your audience see your palms

→ openness, honesty, trustworthiness

▪ If you have a stage, use the space given to you and don’t stay in the same place continuously. However, do not constantly walk around either, that makes you appear nervous.

▪ Smile

▪ Eye contact with every part of the audience

SOLER

S mile

O pen gesture

L ean in

E ye contact

R elax

General

▪ Practice in front of other people

▪ Everyone in the crowd is a human being just like you

▪ Find a role model to observe and copy

Source: Jamila Musayeva; How To Be A Confident Public Speaker: Public Speaking Tips

[hotchocolatelovesyou]

A dumb analysis of OH3 well, of the chapters we have for now by a dumb person (aka me) if you might care idk

Alright. I've finished playing the available chapters for Open Heart. I'm glad I did because I've formed my own opinion. Let me know what you think because I'm curious.

Let's begin with the last sex scene.

It wasn't bad at all but I do understand why people would have found uncomfortable Ethan's proposition. Needless to say, if you don't romance Ethan and you still received such peculiar offer, I understand why you might have laughed at the screen. Pixelberry has a strong, strong, strong, strong preference for him and we all know this. They don't even try to hide it. But they probably have to contractually put every offer for diamond scene and for every LI even if you don't have a relationship with them.*** This connects to their huge preference for Ethan, since he has so much screen time, and well... basically, I'm very sorry for people that don't like dr. Ramsey because I'm sure they say no to him A LOT.

A thing that bothered me was that Ethan proposed something so intimate while still in the hospital. They could have at least went outside or in a more private area. You don't want coworkers or patients to hear this type of things. Especially since Ethan made clear many times that he doesn't mix private life with work. And he fails every time to separate the two things: Harper, MC, the shitty decision. He even made out with MC in his office and I'm sure at a certain point they'll offer a sex scene in there.

Didn't he have a dog? Did they die? Where the fuck is the dog. I ask this because if I remember correctly in the first book he said he had one but no one knows or has seen it. Was he hallucinating? What if he invented it because he was lonely?

I'm joking of course but I really wanna know where his dog is.

There are some "improvements" that I noticed.

Improvements that still need to be improved, that is.

So, they're giving more screen time to our friends. Slightly and slowly but they're doing it. It's still not enough, though.

And they're somewhat changing their personality, I kinda noticed? I'm not sure this is an improvement.

I can't represent people who have other characters as LIs (they are surely paying more attention to them so they'll be more adapt to speak about this, if they agree with me) but Jackie not saying how bad the intern was when she fucking fat-shamed a patient? Yo? Jackie what's going on?

Sienna is becoming slightly more "badass". She's always been a bad bitch, let me be clear, but she's showing her tough side a little bit more. I like it.

Keep in mind that I finished playing OH2 recently, so I still freshly remember her behaviour towards Mitch. In this book, I believe she is the one to have the least screen time of the whole gang.

Elijah is a sweetheart, really. Remember when I said that they're kinda "changing" the characters' personalities? With Elijah they're doing the opposite. They're fully going with sugar and optimism. This might be an unpopular opinion but it's like if he almost doesn't want to see that his boss might be a snake? It's okay though. Keep doing your research babes, I'll punch Bloom. And Ethan.

Bryce. The scalpel jokey has made a mistake. It's one of the few changes I like. Bryce has always been charismatic and confident but we also knew (more or less) that, even if he is obviously a pure talent, some of that confidence is a facade. I like that he, well, fucked up a little because it makes you remember that he's human. And I've always had a crush on Bryce, I mean how could you not. He will jump back on his feet, he always does.

I just wanna go back to Jackie for a moment. I know that some of you might object saying that she is taking care of her intern and being a bitch is not going to help, showing that she's human (the process that's going on with Bryce) too but idk, Jackie not calling you out on your bs? Why would she do that? And it wasn't just a small mistake, the intern already had difficulties with some medical procedures and lacked of some basic respect towards a patient. I don't know, I'm not convinced.

I honestly can't tell who has the least romantic scenes, if Jackie or Raphael.

I know Aurora's stans are laughing at me after reading this.

BUT why isn't Rafael coming to live with us? I mean, why not? What's stopping him?

I really like you Rafael.

Oh btw, if you think that the plot could have been better with Rafael's death, ding dong your opinion is wrong.

I'm happy we cyber-bullied PB about it.

I have another question: if you don't romance neither Bryce or Rafael, why couldn't they be a couple? They'd be so cute together, the Slytherin and Hufflepuff relationship we all need.

Idk, just think about it.

Aurora's stans I didn't forget about you.

How's life? How does it feel to work with your girlfriend's aunt?

This is another unpopular opinion: I don't like dr. Harper. But I'll glady marry her niece.

Who wouldn't marry Aurora, come on now

I feel bad because in the beginning I really didn't like her but now I'd beg her to step on me

Oh wait she's not our gf because PIXELBERRY IS A BITCH

Whatever, I don't care. She will be.

I'll write fanfictions about Aurora and I'll spam them to PB.

She's just so beautiful and perfect djksoso

Sorry, I got carried away.

ANYWAAAAYSSSSS, yeah I have not much to say about her. She's great. Not enough scenes like usual but yeah.

Are Kyra's stans still here?

I have no idea what's going on about Kyra because I let her travel away from that fucking hospital

So I'm not sure. If you asked her to stay, does the story change?

Oh, the thing about changing the characters' personalities obviously applies to Ethan too. To be honest, I'm not that surprised about him breaking the rules for his ideals but coherency is not his strongest suit, is it?

Book 2 was all about being cold and rational and blah blah blah. But he clearly didn't think enough about this. Oh well.

It happens, we've all been in front of a court because we might have fucked a patient's life in one way or another.

But you might have caused trouble to Elijah too man, and THAT'S where I cross the line.

Plus, dr. Harper immediately jumping to fire MC without even knowing if it was them but then admitting that if she'd known it was Ethan, she wouldn't have said shit.

I'm shaking my head. Really bitch? Whatever.

OH AND TOBIAS, RIGHT.

Tobias. I wouldn't exactly pick a diamond scene with him because it would feel like a betrayal (even if I know that other LIs wouldn't care) but I would be so tempted.

I really like him too. I hope PB won't make him a bad guy.

That's it for now. English is not my first language so I apologize for mistakes I didn't notice.

Let me know what you think because I really wanna speak about this book with someone and I hope someone feels the same lol

*** UPDATE: I'm not deleting that particular part just to help you have a better context about what I was thinking ("hey, this scene is coming, are you interested in spending diamonds for it even though it doesn't match the path you're choosing? Our company wants you to and we have to follow their rules") but after a few answers, I've been informed that THEY'RE NOT OBLIGED IN ANYWAY TO OFFER YOU PREMIUM CHOICES WITH LOVE INTERESTS YOU HAVE NOTHING TO DO so yeah, just letting you know lol

[bitchassbucky]

.eps (cut)

Word Count: 1.7k

Warning/s: dark!bucky x dark!reader, MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, blood mention, gore and dismemberment, murder, toxic/abusive relationship dynamics, sedation/drugging/use of sedative, stockholm syndrome-ish, one very special character reveal

A/N: this version of the epilogue is the 'clean cut' - there's a good chunk of it missing but it's not particularly important to the story. if you want to read the EXPLICIT version, there should be another one uploaded at the same time. (sorry, this is scheduled so i don't have the link yet lol)

follow the CTRL series:

i - .exe

ii - .avi

iii - .raw

iv - .png

v - .zip

CTRL playlist CTRL moodboard

Safeness, comfortability, warmth are all but a false sense of reality.

When a prey takes down its walls, the predator moves in. Camouflaged in familiar colors, in words that you’re used to hearing, in praises, in lies. Most predators use the mask of the night to move in darkness—unyielding and calculated. Come morning, there will be only one left alive, tainted with victory and bloodshed.

You and Bucky have been engaging in a dance for two—a battle of who’s willing to take the leap of faith and unleash hell upon the other.

Stifled smiles and pursed lips.

The air is filled with unsaid irritants, little things that ticked away like bombs.

There was no time for pleading, no time for mercy, no rest for the wicked.

Did you still love each other?

How far are you willing to go to keep up with his… complacency?

Bucky’s mundane life already taking a toll on you. The endless nightmares of him feeling you. The swirling vision of Bucky being with you every waking—and sleeping—moment: it grates your soul to shreds.

“We’ll be together forever, right?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What about the day after forever?”

“That too, honey.”

Where was the man you loved so deeply? The man that broke his morals just to be with you?

Was he under this hull of a Yes Man? A poor little thing that says ‘yes’ to everything like a puppy.

The man you held so dearly now slipping away, chipping his humanity, shedding the once-human.

“Would you marry me tomorrow if I asked you?”

“Of course, baby, why wouldn’t I?”

“Would you kill for me?”

“I’m meant to do the same for you.”

It’s irritating how Bucky gave up too quickly. Too fast, moving too fast. The gazelle let the lion tear its neck as it lay there, unmoving, letting the blood seep into its hide.

When you first met Bucky, it was your own fairytale unfolding before your eyes. Kismet, reality, forgiveness from above. He was soft and shy, passionate, lively.

Far from what you expected from a man his age—you blame Steve for forcing you into his narrative before. That all men are out to get you. They will hurt you. They will use you and leave you for good. But Bucky? Bucky came in like a knight. He saved you from the carcass of your past. He saved you from the sins that you prayed and knelt for.

Bucky taught you how to love.

Bucky taught you how to live for yourself.

Bucky taught you that being alone doesn’t mean you have to be lonely.

“It was an unspoken little thing, wasn’t it?”

“What thing, baby?”

“Our love.”

“Yes, honey, it was.”

He worships you.

He worships you like a fucking God and you hate it.

Suffocating, too suffocating. You dove straight for the water and now you’re drowning.

Do you still love each other? The question hangs in the air, heavy with its weight, light as a feather.

It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.

You stand there with a syringe half-filled with a horse sedative. It’s a concern how easy it is to waltz into a pet store and pick up a general anesthetic. You make a mental note to look at it later.

Bucky’s body slumps forward, his forehead meeting the edge of the table with a dull thud. If the overdose doesn’t kill him, the weeping crack in his head will.

Holy fuck, humans bleed a lot. And fast. Good thing you already have that clear tarp taped down. Even with the hush money stuffed down your throat, it would take a good nick to regrout the kitchen.

“What is that for, honey?”

“I’m painting the cabinets.”

“Okay, darling.”

So you let him bleed, surprised that the liquid is redder than what you thought it would be. A soft gurgling noise came from Bucky, the last of air escaping his dead body. You stood there, syringe in hand, as you thought how to dispose of a six-foot-tall man without arousing suspicion.

Not that he’ll be missed anyway: the local news and the internet already branded him as a psycho and you as a victim. You were both victims in this fairytale. They reported his case as “skipped the town like the sicko he is.” So, no—no one’s going to look for him.

The sun was high up in the sky and there was a dead body in your kitchen.

A butcher and a surgeon walk into a bar for a drink. “What do you do for a living?” Said the butcher, “I save lives! What about you?” The doctor answers. “I save animals from dying slowly. We’re basically the same. You’re just very clean.” You see, the butcher comes into the bar covered in blood, reeking of death. The surgeon, on the other hand, wears his white coat with pride even though he’s surrounded by death every passing second.

Today was the day you learned that you have the tools of a butcher and the precision of a surgeon. Unlike before.

You carefully take Bucky’s fingers off of his left hand, leaving a skin flap on the edge of the last knuckle for you to stitch close later. Four promises. Four goddamn promises and he broke all of them.

It was his fault that he’s dead. He made you do this.

Placing the body into the trunk of a rental, you begin your journey to the end of your fairytale. Off to the woods, where you buried your first love. In a town where not everyone who dies leaves.

The drive to and from the place was tiring, to say the least. The internet connection of the diners was spotty at best. Locals were overly friendly with the city folks who came passing through their towns. The roads reek of roadkill and manure from the farm animals that were left to roam for fresh grass.

At least you get to come home in a spotless apartment, alone once again.

But not lonely.

Your space is yours again. No trace of anyone anywhere. Immaculately yours.

—

Humans are social creatures.

No one can truly be alone, especially in today’s world where we’re connected to everyone—whether we liked it or not.

Leaving your wretched job behind was an easy feat to do. No one can say no to the victim of such a vile crime. That’s all they saw you: a helpless little thing. So off you went; saying half-assed goodbyes and sending emails of courage and hope and fucking resilience.

Your resignation meant that the company’s free of any dirt from you, Bucky’s disappearance quickly becoming a joke and a rumor blending in one.

They let you leave: in your bank account a fat check ensuring that you’d shut up about the scandal for months until you can’t feed yourself no more. So you packed your bags and jet off without looking back. You never liked that apartment anyway.

Nevertheless, you found yourself looking into another dead-end job in one of the towns you stopped over before. It’s a charming place like time froze in their plaza while the rest of the world went on. You found a small studio apartment in a street tuckered away from the main avenue, you settled there as days became nights and nights turned into days.

You woke up one morning craving a healthy serving of coffee and pancakes, luckily the town’s local diner wasn’t far from your new home.

The coffee was too hot, the pancakes were amazing, fluffy, and just right. You’re sitting in a sunny booth, the warmth doing its wonders.

“Hi, can I get today’s paper, please?” Your voice is sweet as you call your server, giving her a quick smile.

A pair of Raybans adorn your face, unconsciously hiding behind its darkened glasses. The waitress gives you a thick stack of newspapers, refilling your cup with black coffee.

Upon opening the paper, you ignore the town’s headlines and go straight for the job postings. The door jingled open as patrons come in and go, waving to familiar faces.

Job Vacancy Announcements

Secretary to the Town Sheriff

You skimmed over the rest of the details, only noting the address of the office. The job looks quite lucrative for someone who would only take messages and organize files for the sheriff.

Looking over the job posting again, you read over the words walk-ins only. That shouldn’t be hard enough.

The diner looked deserted save from the man sitting behind your booth. Leaning over and tapping his shoulder, you put on a polite smile, “Hi, sorry, do you know how to get to the sheriff’s office from here?”

“Hello, darling.” The man croons in an accent, he looks over to you, “join me in my booth, will ‘ya?”

You’re in no position to reject his proposal, you’re the one who needed an answer.

Taking your coffee cup, you slide into his booth, “hi.”

“Just the face I wanted to see.” Clean-shaven, a hint of mint and smoke, and something woody; a worn leather jacket and white button-up shirt hugging his soft frame. “Some folks over on the apartment complex were talkin’ about a city girl wanting to rent a studio all by herself. That happen to be you?”

You look over to him, trying to understand how that small of news spread like a wildfire, “yeah. I moved in a week ago.”

He leans over, smiling sweetly as he unabashedly lets his eyes roam your features, “What’s a city girl like you doin’ in a place like this? I hope we ain’t too boring for you, gal.”

Chatty—he’s way too chatty.

“Just wanted a change of pace, really. Away from the bustle of the city.” You rustle the paper, clearing your throat to get back on the matter on hand, “so the sheriff’s office? Is it too far from here?”

“What business are ‘ya bringing into the office?”

“A job, actually. Says here that they’re looking for a secretary.” You might as well tell him everything, he seems too chatty to be dismissed over and over again.

“Well, darlin’, today’s your lucky day. No need to drive down the old road.” He reaches down to his seat, pulling up a brown hat, “Hi, I’m Sheriff Bodecker. Now, to whom do I owe the pleasure?”

You bite back a giggle, you’ve always wanted to be involved with the law.

[isoraqathedh]

Using notation to understand the world

This post was originally an article in my Gemini capsule. You can read it in its gemtext form here. Note that since Tumblr does not like Gemini links this actually goes to the HTTPS mirror.

Notation is the idea that an arbitrary object can be represented by some other abstract object. A specific type of notation, which is the one most people would understand in the conventional sense of the word “notation”, is when the object doing the representing is written. Commonly seen examples of notation include those that represent maths, music, electrical circuits and even lists of key-presses. In this article I discuss how notation has shaped my understanding of things, and also propose a notation-oriented way of understanding something.

How to understand something

There was an xkcd comic that goes something like this:

My hobby:

Sitting down with grad students and timing how long it takes them to figure out that I'm not actually an expert in their field.

In the end, the protagonist of the comic managed to find a field of study where he successfully made inroads into a community by producing words in the right order to pass for genuine knowledge.

This made me think about how someone would go about successfully fake knowledge of something. Eventually, I came up with this two-step process:

Understand the language, and how to recognise something as a correct statement.

Understand how to combine statements together to form a correct third statement.

I brought this up with someone, and he noted that by the time you have done both of these things, you aren’t faking knowledge of something, you now understand it.

In my opinion that isn’t strictly true, but it does come a lot closer than other processes. A studied reader might recognise this as reminiscent of a Chinese room, where someone can fake knowledge by reading in written text (i.e. a question) and responding according to a translation book.

While it may look like a Chinese room at first, a critical difference is that in a Chinese room, the translation book is something external to the operator, whereas the situation I came up with requires you to memorise it. While a rote memorisation would result in something almost entirely identical, a common occurrence with human minds is that it like to take shortcuts, and it is there where the situation becomes markedly different, as the shortcuts are now a form of understanding where you can now produce correct statements without memorising any translation book.

Additionally, a second form of understanding is to be able to generalise from the words you are given. A translation book can give you some rules, but when a human reads it the experience is that he will try to generalise from the existing rules and make up new ones in the vein of the ones he was given. This is expressed in a number of ways – notably some of them are quite distasteful – but the key here is that there is a point where a human would try to expand the rules that he was given and apply it to something unrelated just to see if it works. (Though, in some cases, “just to see if it works” is replaced with “and assume it works”, leading to all kinds of consequences that are beyond the scope of this article.)

Let’s now move away from dry theoretical explanations and show how this applied to me by way of example.

Making your own – the C. C. F. D. N.

The problem statement

When I was 17 I was very bad at Chinese. I am still fairly bad at Chinese, which we’ll get to later.

The main problem with writing Chinese is that sinograms – what the language is written in – are taught badly to me. I could not really understand any of the logic behind writing these unusual things, and what real information was given to me was not well-organised. What that means effectively is that I was stuck writing in a language where I have to reason about strokes from first principles, and just like trying to write a program in assembly language, it means that I missed out in understanding other parts of the language, particularly the things that are in the curriculum, which means that I failed many tests.

Then one day a friend of mine started learning Japanese, and then he had to deal with sinograms as well. But since I’m familiar with them already, I decided to help a little bit. This amounted to looking up the character in Wiktionary and then reporting on its pronunciation and its graphic etymology, both of which are helpful in understanding why a character is written and pronounced (some of the time) the way it is. However, looking up many of these characters realise that a lot of the information is repetitive and redundant. So I then built a little notation to condense it down into something that cuts away all of that.

The notation itself

The result is the Chinese Character Form Description Notation. The exact form of the notation is not needed to make my point, but we’ll discuss it as an aside here anyway. The notation describes the graphic etymology of the character by breaking it apart into its components. For instance, the character “to think” 思 is derived by combining a meaning-carrying component of “heart” 心 with a sound-carrying component of 囟, which was later simplified into the unrelated character 田. Putting that together, the notation would write the above sentence as:

思 = <心|囟→田>

Which summarises all of what I just wrote in an appealing string of symbols. Additionally, this separates it from an existing notation in Unicode called the ideographic description sequence, which instead describes how a character can be broken down in its current form.

Consider now another character, “small, narrow, fine”, which is 細. If I now provide its C. C. F. D. N., you would easily be able to figure out what its graphic etymology is, even without me spelling it out, if I mentioned that the meaning-carrying component 糸 means “fibre, rope, string”:

細 = <糸|囟→田>

But look now that 細 and 思 don’t look too alike, as their corresponding IDS would make explicit. I had not expected that the two are related quite like this – their pronunciations are also quite a bit different – and now that I have made that connection I realised that I had something in my hands that is valuable.

Ultimately, the notation I have invented for myself made everything click together in my head, and it cleared up almost everything that had been blocking me from being able to move away from focusing on what I write and instead focusing on what the writing means on a more abstract level. It wasn’t enough to eventually make me pass my exams, but I feared the language a lot less than I had before I built the notation.

(In a sense, while it was helpful it would never have come on time; reflecting on what I did in my secondary school years it was fairly clear to me that this was a thing that would have troubled me for as long as it did no matter how I did it, and I would have rejected this notation if it was handed onto me the same way that all those other explanations have.)

How the notation changed the way I think

The key to the notation’s success is, in my opinion, the following:

First, it is general. It can break apart a large number of characters and describe their etymologies in a succinct manner. There are very few sinograms where it cannot handle it at all, and in those cases it is typically because the character has an unknown graphic etymology and therefore can’t be described, though undoubtedly there is going to be a couple that would slip behind the cracks. I can’t take full credit for this one, as it is based on an existing method of classifying sinograms.

I will however say that the way I designed (?) this notation allows me to grasp the recursive nature of this classification and furthermore allow me to gain a foothold in scripts that use things that resemble sinograms but are not, such as Sawndip.

Second, it is manipulable. What you can change and in what ways are easily read out by looking at the notation. Whether or not it describes an actual character is another question, but you can basically always produce a valid formula for generating a character and hint at its meaning and pronunciation using the notation. This will prove invaluable if I were to build a script that has similar properties to Chinese characters, this is exactly how I would start approaching it.

Third, it is not clever. The key to a proper notation is that it represents the thing that it does straightforwardly, in such a way that allows one to verify that it is in fact representing what it claims to. This allows me to hook onto it and adapt myself into seeing the notation at the same time I am presented with the character.

Finally, it is flexible. Notice that in the above examples the sinograms are described in terms of other sinograms. There’s no particular reason why those sinograms are chosen. In fact, you can replace those characters with their descriptions, allowing a full drill-down of the character and describing how every little bit came to be in a simple manner. This property allows you to hide away details when such detail is not needed but still permit an exhaustive description if it is.

Reading an existing notation

In real life sometimes an existing notation is already available, and if it is it would probably be better than any notation that you would be able to make when studying it, as it is referencing the entire body of knowledge that it is built on rather than just what a student might learn as he builds it for himself. With that in mind, if one were to understand something by its notation it is prudent to understand an existing notation first before trying to make one’s own.

To this end, I would say that it is helpful to learn something by referencing its notation. Specifically, the question to ask is “how do you write this down, and why do you choose to write it this way?” This question can be asked in multiple contexts and expect multiple answers. What “this” in the question is differs depending on the exact thing you are studying, and the “why” could be surface-level “why this symbol over another” or a deeper “why arrange the symbols in this way”.

Once you learn the notation, the next step is, as hinted at earlier in this article, to learn how to combine two true statements written in that notation into a third one also written in that notation. In a sense, this task is much harder than the other two; if we apply it to, say, English, the first is “reading and spelling” and the second is the entirety of English grammar and literature. The key to this is not to complete the task, but instead to basically learn the subject “the normal way” but using the notation as a centrepiece to unify everything you learnt into it, so that you have a way to relate everything to everything else.

Consider how this can be applied to chords and music theory: you learn what notes correspond to which chords and how to write down changes to those chords, and then you can combine the chords together as simple letters on a page to form music. This is an iterative process: you learn what chords go together nicely based on existing theory, mirror it in the notation, and then generalise it in the notation before turning it back into notes and seeing if it appeals. Doing this correctly, you will both increase your understanding of music theory and also have a nice way of generating music.

Another example where the idea of learning by notation has been successfully applied (but not by me) is site-swap notation in juggling, where someone wrote down sequences of digits to describe how balls are thrown in. The inventor eventually discovered a new way of juggling (called “5551” in the notation) just by looking at the notation.

Shortcomings

It is only fair to discuss situations where notation-oriented learning is not the approach to take when learning something.

Sometimes there is no existing notation, whether because the experts have decided that writing bits of ink on a page is not sufficient for the field, or no one has thought of it, or even that all the existing ones have failed to gained currency because it doesn’t perform or there are too many competing ones. In most of these cases you can get around it by attempting to make your own. You can make this work if you know yourself well, and perhaps even present it to the community as as a way to understand the field itself.

Some people don’t take kindly to writing things down, especially in the more artistic field of study where notation might be perceived as constraining to a creative mind, and even knowledge of the existence of some notation is considered harmful because you’re always supposed to learn things “the hard way”, i.e. without any aid whatsoever, much less written ones. Whether one chooses to heed those warnings or proceed anyway is up to individual preference, but in a notation-averse community – for any reason – perhaps it would not be the best idea to show that community your new home-grown notation.

Summary

One of the ways that I have learnt something is to create a notation system for it. This involves figuring out how to write existing facts in that notation, and then how to create new things by altering the notation and seeing what the results in back in the original object that the notation depicts. I found this to be a greatly useful way to understand topics in general and a central point from which to handle unknown fields of knowledge from, while also acknowledging that there are some fields and probably some would-be learners that may not be suited to this way of learning.