#his dream retirement plan is live in a cottage next to you and hand pick fruits to share with you on the dining table

[mimiriko]

Nanami is suuuch a loyal knight. He absolutely owns it because why should he be ashamed he would bow and worship you till the end of time? Isn’t that what he’s made for? Any other way in life for him would be absurd. He is chained to you and regularly tightens his handcuffs lest you forget he’s there, three steps behind.

[juliandev0rak]

Could I request main 6 when mc crawls onto their lap for a cuddle?

Yes!! I live for this fluff 🥺💖

Asra

he’s sitting on the couch in your apartment when you walk in the door, dripping wet from the sudden rainstorm that had hit just as you left the market 

”You’re back! Did you get caught in the rain again?” He smiles and sets the book he was reading aside

you decide not to answer, a mischievous glint appears in your eyes as you walk over to the couch and plop down onto Asra’s lap

”Ahh, you’re all wet!” he complains as you shake your hair in his general direction, both of you bursting into laughter 

he casts a wordless drying spell on you as his arms snake around your waist, pulling you in for a gentle kiss that seems to dispel the last of the cold you were feeling from the rain

”I missed you.” Asra says, resting his head into the crook of your shoulder

”I just went to the market, silly, you’re the one who goes on trips.” Your voice taking on a slightly scolding tone

”Next time you’re coming with me.” He promises, pressing a kiss to the top of your head

you and Asra spend the rest of the afternoon cuddling on the couch and eating the pumpkin bread you’d stowed safely in your bag, talking about all the places you want to go together 

Julian

it’s late and Julian’s still in his office writing notes in a medical book, he’s so focused that he doesn’t even notice you standing in the doorway

you know if you don’t force him to get some sleep he’ll work all night and show up to the clinic tomorrow morning hyped up on caffeine that can’t hide how tired he really is 

”Julian, it’s late. You need to get some sleep.” You say, stepping fully into the dimly lit room

he’s still so engrossed in his work that he doesn’t hear you so you walk over to him and take a seat in his lap, facing towards him with your arms wrapped around his shoulders

”Oh, uh, hello my dear” His arms reach out to stabilize you, a blush already coloring his face -“Did you um, need something? That is to say- um, that I’m not unhappy to see you here, just surprised..” he babbles, stopping abruptly when you press a kiss to his collarbone 

”It’s past midnight darling, you need to get some rest.” You croon, using your most persuasive tone as your arms tighten around him

”Oh, is it already that late? I’m sorry my love, I lost track of the time.” He pulls you closer in response and you sit there for a few minutes holding each other, one of his hands moves to play with your hair

”Come on, time for bed.” You say after a while, noticing the way his breathing is slowing as he cuddles you

he stands up with a sleepy laugh, arms going to support you as you wrap your legs around him so that he’s carrying you into the bedroom

”I promise I’ll try to sleep if you promise to keep holding me.” He smiles wistfully as he pulls off his boots 

”I wouldn’t dream of letting go.”

Nadia

it’s been a long day of meetings and you can tell Nadia is tired 

for the past hour she’s been listening to Consul Valerius drone on about wine imports and she looks like she has a headache coming on

finally she dismisses him, “That’s quite enough for today, Consul.” and Valerius leaves in a huff, giving you a haughty look as he passes by

the two of you are left alone in the parlor and her eyes close with a wince as the headache comes on, you quickly get up from your seat to sit closer to her

”Nadi,” you say, reaching a hand out to rub her shoulder gently, “Can I help? Do you want me to call for some water?” 

”Consul Valerius always manages to leave me with a headache.” She says disdainfully. “I shall be fine.” 

you’re not so sure, maybe canceling her last meeting of the day would be a good decision, she looks like she needs to rest

before you can open your mouth to suggest it she opens her eyes and regards you with a slight smile “Come here, your presence always makes me feel better.” she pulls you gently into her lap to sit sideways against her

she leans into you and rests her head on your shoulder, you take a deep breath and smell the soothing lavender scent that follows wherever Nadia goes

you reach up to gently rest a hand on her temple, bringing a bit of magic to your hands to try to release the tension she’s feeling

she relaxes further into you, letting out a contented sigh as you begin to ease her headache

you sit cradled in her lap for a while in comfortable silence before she sighs and says “Perhaps we should retire early this afternoon, I think we’re both in need of a nap.” 

Muriel

you’re on your way to Muriel’s hut, soaking in the last bit of sunlight as you walk the now familiar path through the forest 

as you approach the hut you’re nearly knocked over by a grey blur pressing against the back of your legs

”Inanna! Did you come to greet me?” you pat her head and watch as she trots ahead, leading you the last of the way to the hut

Muriel’s waiting for you at the door, holding it open for you with his usual gruff expression

”Muriel, did you send Inanna to get me?” you smile

”I just wanted to make sure you got here safely, I heard you coming.” He says quietly, face spreading into a blush as he refuses to meet your eyes

”That was very sweet of you.” you wrap your arms around him in a hug and feel him stiffen awkwardly for a second before returning the hug, even after the dozens of hugs you must’ve given him by now he still reacts the same way every time

he moves across the room to tend the fire and you follow, taking a seat close to the fire to warm your cold hands after the walk

”Come and sit by me!” you pat the ground next to you as Muriel steps away from the fire

he stares at you for a second and you wonder if he’s planning to stand there for the rest of the night so you pat the spot next to you again, hoping he’ll take the very obvious hint

finally he sits next to you, a lot further away than you had expected and you sigh- time to take matters into your own hands

you scooch over to him and crawl into his lap, watching as his eyes widen in surprise and the blush, which hadn’t really left his face since he’d opened the door for you, deepens 

”I was cold over there by myself.” You smile up at him as his hands move tentatively towards your waist, you snuggle against him and his hands finally reach out to hold you closer

both of you release a breath you’d been holding at the same time and you laugh, his mouth quirking up into the hint of a smile as he holds you 

Portia

you’ve just finished at the shop for the day and are making the trek up to the palace to visit Portia

the trip is long but luckily you know all of the shortcuts and you enter the palace gardens just as the sun is beginning to set

as you walk through the gardens headed to Portia’s cottage you spot a flash of red hair through the trees and find Portia sitting with her back turned to you

she seems to be reading something and doesn’t notice as you round the corner to approach her

”Portia!” You say, launching yourself directly into her lap

her hands reach out around you automatically and she bursts into surprised laughter, “Well hello there!”

”Sorry to interrupt your reading,”  you pick up the book you’d hastily knocked aside and see that it's about garden pest control

”It’s ok! I didn’t want to read that book anyway,” she presses a kiss to the top of your head, “It was boring.”

”And I’m more interesting?” you tease

”Of course you are!” she gushes, “Did you walk all this way to see me?” 

”I missed you.” you say, watching her blush

”I missed you more!” she smiles and you lean in to press kisses across her freckled face

you spend the rest of the sunset cuddling in the garden before it gets too cold and you both decide to move the cuddle session indoors

Lucio

he’s been in a meeting all afternoon and it’s dragging so long that you’re trying to resist the urge to crack the meeting room door open and peak through to see what’s taking so long

finally you hear the door to the room you share with him opening and he walks in, the bored expression on his face turning into a grin at the sight of you

”You’re back!” you say from your spot on the couch where you’ve been trying, and failing, to focus on a new spell you’re learning

”Ugghhh I thought they’d never stop talking.” He complains, pulling off his coat as he shuts the door behind him

he plops down on the couch next to you and presses a kiss to your forehead “You’re a sight for sore eyes.” 

”I’m glad you’re back, I almost went to rescue you.” you joke as his hands reach out to you, pulling you into his lap

”You’d risk a boring meeting to rescue me?” he grins as he nuzzles into your shoulder

”Of course” you relax into him, “I’d follow you anywhere.” 

he presses another kiss to your forehead and you suppress a giggle at the starry-eyed expression on his face, any hint of affection makes him turn to putty in your hands

”Next time I’m bringing you with me, I don’t think I can make it through another meeting about proper aqueduct spacing unless you’re with me” he brings a hand up to hold the side of your face

”I’ll gladly come with you, but I think next time I’ll need my own chair.” you think back to the last meeting you’d attended where Lucio had abruptly pulled you onto his lap in front of all of the new courtiers, it wasn’t that you’d minded- you just didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable by his very brazen public displays of affection

”We’ll see about that.” He says, pulling you into a (mostly) sweet kiss

[sleepytyongie]

the lakehouse (jung jaehyun)

Summary: In which Jaehyun finds peace in a lakehouse.

Word count: 1628

Tags: Fluff, boyfriend!Jaehyun

(Also available on Ao3)

_____

For as long as you could remember, you dreamed of a slow life. A life where there is quiet — a life with very little care of what goes on in the world. Maybe in the countryside, with rolling meadows of lush green, and a sky so blue that you think nighttime might show up a little late. Or maybe at a quaint beachfront, where you could hear the gentle rolling of waves, with tall coconut trees that provided ample shade for a peaceful nap. You wanted a slow life — simple, neither frugal nor excessive. A slow and simple life where there is just enough.

But as cars incessantly honk in city traffic, and the fluorescent white lights slowly blind you in your office cubicle, you’ve realized lately that a slow life isn’t exactly your reality. The first time you realized this, you rested your head in your hands and groaned inwardly when you failed to brush away these distractions. So you relabeled them instead: retirement plans, and you still had a long way to go.

When you’re not dreaming about settling down in a rural countryside town with the love of your life, you daydream of summer. If retirement plans are too far for you to grasp, then dreaming of a summer break will have to do for now, you always thought to yourself. Quiet living just for several weeks of the year — it was the only thing that motivated you through difficult work tasks.

On one particularly terrible Tuesday at work, your phone started to buzz without end. You knew you needed to get this paperwork done as soon as possible, but you decided to take a quick break by answering the phone and stretching. You didn’t bother looking at the caller ID before you picked up, greeting curtly: “Yeah.”

“Baby,” the voice on the other line crooned, and you felt your heart soften hearing it.

“Jaehyunnie,” you replied, and felt yourself smile saying his name.

“Working hard, I assume?”

You laughed, “All for that bread, baby. Are you proud of me?”

“Always, sweetheart.”

You giggle quietly, keeping your voice down to match the office environment.

"So what’s up?”

“You know how you always say that you want to run away from it all, just for a couple weeks?” He asked.

“Yeah?”

“I found this charming little lakehouse, one that Taeil-hyung recommended.”

"I like where this is going," you chimed.

“And I found a way to rearrange my schedule for next month.”

You hummed your approval into the phone, beckoning Jaehyun to continue.

“Could you get two weeks off?”

“You know I can,” you laughed, “Thank you for arranging this, Jae.”

“Anything for you.”

“I love you so much."

“I love you too, babygirl,” he chuckled, “Now get back to work, don’t let your boss catch you wasting your time talking to me.”

Jung Jaehyun was magic, you thought to yourself, your very own magic.

The next month, the both of you packed up your stuff for a quiet two weeks away. Jaehyun drove you two up into the mountains, where a beautiful blue lake sat with its crystalline water sparkling in the sun. On the far end of the lake perched a humble summer cottage of oak that overlooked a lush expanse of grass before the ground dipped into the cool waters. Sunlight illuminated the tops of the slanted roof, with tall trees that shielded the little home with cool shade. You loved it.

“So, do you like it?” Jaehyun asked quietly as you stood in front of the porch, pulling you closer to him and pressing a kiss into your forehead. You could only hear Jaehyun breathing, his steady heartbeat, the sound of the water lapping on the shore, the gentle chirping of bluejays, and the slight wooshing of the breeze. It was quiet, and it was wonderful.

You hummed into the base of his neck: “It’s perfect.”

You lived the slow life you dreamed of having in your two weeks at the cottage. During the day, you spent every moment slowly. On most mornings, you laid down on a blanket on the grass, basking in the warm sunlight. Jaehyun would smile at the sight of you sunbathing, pulling off his shirt, grab a book and his sunglasses, then came down to join you. When the afternoon approached, he pried you off of the blanket to go and cool off in the lake. Jaehyun would joke around in the clear waters until you got too tired of laughing, and you admitted defeat by taking another nap in the blanket.

“You’re not going to be able to sleep tonight if you take another nap this late,” he would often remind you chidingly, “just come back into the water with me.”

“Or, you could just let me nap in peace,” you joked. You did mean it as a joke, but most of the time you actually fell asleep anyway.

On other days, the two of you would climb hand-in-hand up a nearby hill and have a picnic under the shade of a cherry tree. The two of you had made kimbaps the night before to bring to the picnic and filled lemonade into a bottle before leaving for the hill. After you ate, you would spend the afternoon reading together under the tree — or at least, it was you who read as Jaehyun rested his head on your lap while he napped. Then you would come down the hill before the sun got too low in the sky, back into your cottage, his arm slung around your shoulder as you kissed him on the cheek.

Your nightly routine often involved cold cuts, cheese, fruits, and wine. Jaehyun had simple pleasures when it came to quiet dinners, and wine was a very big part of it. Jaehyun had brought along his record player and put on his favorite Chet Baker Sings album to accompany your laughter. When he felt particularly romantic, he would pull you into his arms and sway you slowly to the music. You willed yourself not to melt into his chest, but it was difficult not to when you felt warm and content just being there in his grasp.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on,” you murmured quietly into his ear as you danced.

“And you mine. I don’t know where I would be without you.”

As you kissed, you tasted the sweetness of the wine you had just moments before. There was gentleness there too, like he couldn’t fathom anything like you. You knew before this that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with Jaehyun, and this kiss made sure of it.

Eventually, when both of you got too sleepy, the day’s activities tiring you out, Jaehyun pulled you towards him under the blankets and you slumbered together in peace. But on some nights when it got too hot, both of you would peel off your clothes and try to sleep nude. For the most part, this was a win for you, especially since you could only fall asleep if you were cooler. When it was like this, you tried to keep your distance from Jaehyun’s body because you hated the stickiness of sweat on your skin. It also didn’t help that Jaehyun radiated his body heat, your very own human radiator. This was to your advantage in cold harsh winters, but not during sticky summer nights where you just wanted to doze off quickly. Jaehyun, however, felt that your keeping your distance was the torture of another level — he needed to hold you close as you slept, and you often rejected his touch every time you slept nude.

He reached for you in the middle of the night the first time you rolled away from him. The moonlight streamed in through the window by your shared bed, illuminating his pale face and soft skin. Even half-asleep, Jaehyun looked princely and beautiful, you noted as you watched his face. Jaehyun’s eyes were half-lidded, his large hands searching blindly for your hips to roll you back into his arms.

“Baby,” he mumbled lowly, still half asleep, “where’d you think you’re going?”

“You’re sticky,” you murmured into the crook of his neck before planting soft kisses on his collarbone. You traced your fingers along his bare back, feeling every one of his muscles relax into your touch.

“Go to sleep, Jae,” you whispered, only to garner another mumble in response.

“Not if you’re not in my arms.”

He kissed your temple lazily — a gentle kiss goodnight. Soon, you felt your breath falling into sync with the rise and fall of his chest, and you continued to run your hands lightly along his back.

You gave in to him. Just for tonight, you promised yourself, but you knew that this would repeat every single night after. You couldn’t keep away from Jaehyun even if you tried. Eventually, you’ve come to enjoy the feel of his bare skin while you slept, the stickiness of summer and all. But for the sake of your pride, you smiled to yourself and decided he didn’t need to know.

Your summer came to an end far too soon. You and Jaehyun had to part with the little cottage house that you fell in love with and return to the chaos and responsibilities of everyday life. You didn’t know when you would come back. But if anything, you knew that someday, two weeks at this lakehouse would turn to entire summers, and eventually into the rest of your life. Someday, you’d come back married, and the next time with kids, and the next to retire with Jaehyun holding your hands the entire time. Someday, it would be summer forever.

_____

A/N: I wrote this about a month back when I really needed a break from Uni. All that pent up frustration kinda just manifested into calming myself down by writing my own little bit of paradise. It’s been up on AO3 for a long while, so I think it might be a good time to post it here. Enjoy!

-Matt.

[ddaengyoonmin]

-Prologue-

Pairing: Namjoon x Reader, Jimin x Reader(future), Jungkook x Jin

Genre: Angst, Smut (future)

Warnings: none I can think of (always feel free to let me know if things should be added to the warnings)

The summer of 2015. It’d been four years now, but Jungkook still replayed the events of that summer like it was yesterday.

Until that summer Jungkook’s life had never been touched by the evilness and cruelty of this world. He’d been quite happy his whole life, he still had faith in humanity, and in love. That was all before he dove headfirst into the deadly webs that beautiful people weave.

Now, he had no hope for any of that, his life was full of hate for the human race and their games, only one person was spared of the hatred he held...one person that still made him wish that humans could be a little less cruel, because maybe if they weren’t…

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

In 2015 Jungkook had just graduated from University, not a well known one, but he graduated with honors and a degree in business. He held high hopes for the future and always had dreams of being successful, and settling down with a husband and a family to come home to after a hard days work.

Jungkook had decided to move out from his small town to the big city where his cousin lived, her husband had an internship lined up for him at the company her husband had inherited from his parents.

It wasn’t easy to find a place to live within his budget in this town his cousin lived in. Everyone who lived in her side of town must’ve been billionaires because the rent prices had almost made him faint.

Fortunately, and by some brilliant spark of what Jungkook could only call luck, there was a small cottage available, mixed in between two mansions across the lake from his cousins mansion. The rent was completely reasonable. It was a small house, but Jungkook couldn’t complain, it was his first home.

Everything went smoothly for him getting moved in, it was such a quaint and cozy little cottage buried a bit back into the woods, but he still had a view of the lake, and a tiny porch he could sip his coffee out on in the mornings.

He wondered if he should introduce himself to his neighbors, but decided against it. Their mansions were too intimidating and he wasn’t from any sort of money whatsoever, he didn’t know if they’d judge him, or ask him how he even managed to get into the neighborhood. But, mostly, Jungkook was extremely reserved and shy.

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

The day after moving in Jungkook decided to pay a visit to his cousin’s house, he hadn’t seen her in what felt like years and he wanted to thank her and her husband for getting him the prestigious internship at Kim Financial Corporation. It was a well paying internship that was coveted all across the country by those with Jungkook’s major.

Namjoon had inherited the company from his father only just a couple years ago when his father retired, and that made for a convenient nepotistic stroke of luck for Jungkook. Not that he didn’t plan on earning his place there. Hopefully he could even move up in the company on his own merit.

The taxi dropped Jungkook off after it had stopped at the giant white ornate gates that opened to the long driveway up to the Kim House. Beautiful flowers and the largest most well maintained yard Jungkook had ever seen laid on either side of the road. A tennis court off in the distance to the left, and a giant shimmering pool with a slide and a diving board to the right.

He thanked and tipped the driver, then made his way to the front door. Nervousness flooding over him, as he raised his hand to ring the doorbell.

Almost as if he had a premonition that Jungkook would be there, a second before Jungkook had rung the doorbell, it was swung open and he was greeted with a cheery face.

“Jungkook! Cousin!” Namjoon grinned and pulled Jungkook into a strong hug. “We’d been expecting you to drop by,” Namjoons friendly dimples and charming smile put Jungkook’s nervousness at ease.

“Y-yeah I just arrived last night, I thought I’d come see y/n.” he replied “Oh, and to thank you for the internship of course” he added quickly.

Namjoon led Jungkook down an elegant hall, this mansion looked like it was a hundred years old with all of the intricate decorations, and old paintings on the wall, each one of Namjoon’s ancestors displayed in a painting hanging high on the ceilings. Yet nothing was crumbling, or out of place. It was quite the luxurious home, and Jungkook felt like the cheapest thing in there. He tried his hardest to stand up straight and put on his best manners so as not to be seen as some sort of street rat.

The worries racing through his mind were interrupted by a small squeak of his name.

“Uncle Kookieeeeeeeeeee” A small dark haired little girl ran from out of the room that Namjoon and Jungkook had been approaching.

She reached out her hands, her black curls bouncing up and down as she hopped off the floor the best she could aiming grabby hands at Jungkook.

“Izzy! Wow you’re so big” Jungkook beamed at her and picked her up spinning her around in a circle.

“I am four now” Izzy informed him with a serious but adorable face.

“Whaaat? You’re almost old enough to drive huh?” Jungkook chuckled.

“Daddy already told me he was buying me a car.” She said as Jungkook set her down.

Jungkook wondered if she was being serious, the amount of money that this family had it wouldn’t surprise him if his four year old niece already had 3 cars and 5 horses.

“Izzy don’t bother your uncle darling” A soft and angelic voice rang out from the couch.

There you were, y/n…

You were always the most put together and beautiful girl in the family, and the whole town where you grew up. Men had fallen at your feet your whole life, and Jungkook couldn’t blame them. You had this aura about you, it was irresistible to anyone you’d met, all women were either jealous of you or wanted to be your best friend. It wasn’t a surprise that you married into one of the wealthiest households this side of the country. You stood up and walked over to Jungkook, arms out wide and a glass of white wine clutched in one hand as you throw yourself around Jungkook.

“I’ve missed you cousin dear, you never visited while you were in college” You pouted.

Izzy was tugging on the hem of your white sundress saying “Hey mommy” on a loop.

“Honey.” you snapped “Where's the nanny. Can you please.” You spoke to Namjoon, trying to maintain your sweet voice but it had a hint of annoyance mixed in. To anyone else it might not have been noticeable, but Jungkook knew you well. Namjoon gritted his teeth slightly, “Of course love” and he left the room to fetch someone to collect his daughter. He didn’t return.

A maid rushed in and ushered Izzy away, who complained and whined the whole way out of the room.

You grinned widely and returned to the plush blue couch in the middle of the room. You motioned for Jungkook to come sit on the other couch across from you. That’s when he noticed another man was in the room sitting next to you with a red wine glass in his hand, reading a book.

“Jin dear, this is my cousin I was telling you about” you spoke to the man on the couch. Then you put your hand to your mouth, like you were telling Jungkook a secret, though you spoke in a normal volume. “I figured this summer I set you and Jin up. If you know what I mean” you wiggled your eyebrows up and down and chuckled, relaxing back into the couch and taking a large sip of your wine.

Jin looked up from his book and shot Jungkook a small smirk, “I’ve told her that’s not necessary. I have game and If I like a man, I’m more than capable of getting him without her help.” he looked Jungkook up and down and gave a small approving nod.

“Ah, that's what you say. Why are you single then?” you raised your eyebrows his way and giggled.

“I’m picky.” Jin snapped, but then his face softened as he looked back to Jungkook and bit his lip slightly. “I like pretty men, what can I say” he shrugged.

Jungkook felt himself blushing, and hadn’t quite figured out the right thing to say here.

Luckily Namjoon burst in and announced that lunch was ready.

Jungkook couldn’t remember the last time he ate lunch at an actual dinner table and not just off a plate on his lap in front of the television at his home.

He’d definitely never eaten dinner at a table this elegant. It was a deep brown glossy wood, with at least 30 chairs all around it, which seemed extremely unnecessary considering only three people lived here in this home. Maybe they have fancy dinner parties, Jungkook reasoned.

A giant glass chandelier hung over the table, it’s lights sparkled down and reflected onto the glossy wood like stars.

Jungkook chatted and caught up with Namjoon and you, Jin occasionally chatted as well, asking Jungkook about what he did for a living, and calling him boring when he said he was going to intern at Namjoon’s company.

“Boring? What do you do for a living?” Jungkook wondered what constitutes an exciting career in Jin’s eyes.

“I’m an Actor? You’ve really never seen me before?”

“Jinnie darling is quite the famous actor Jungkook, I thought you watched a lot of movies” you spoke smoothly with a small chuckle as you raised a newly poured glass of wine to your lips. Jungkook noticed your perfectly manicured nails looked like they cost more than Jungkook’s whole rent.

“Ah, No sorry, I mostly watch old television and movies, I really haven’t kept up with anything recent” Jungkook admitted.

Jin tsk’d and shook his head. “Well we’ll have to change that.” his eyes sparkling Jungkook’s way, making Jungkook’s cheeks go hot.

At that moment the sound of a cell phone ringing created a deafening silence in the room.

Namjoon who was at the head of the table, sighed and pulled his phone out of his pocket, checking the number of the caller.

Jungkook noticed an odd emotion flicker in your eyes as you watched Namjoon inspect his phone, and he didn’t miss the way that you instantly lifted your glass of wine to your lips again gulping quickly.

“Sorry to be rude” Namjoon smiled at the group as he stood up from the table and bowed to all of you “It’s work, I’ve got to take this I’ll be right back”

You sighed loudly and finished your glass of wine. You held it up above your head for a moment and set it back down on the table, within seconds one of your servants came over and filled it again.

Jungkook tried to continue the conversation, “Well, I guess we’ll have to have a movie day sometime” he laughed and looked at Jin “I’d love to see some of the things you’ve been in Jin, how about it y/n?”Jungkook turned to you. Your eyes were distracted and locked on the door that Namjoon had gone out of.

“Yeah uh huh, cool” you spoke as if you hadn’t even heard a word Jungkook said as you got up from the table and followed out the door after Namjoon.

“So what genres of films do you do?” Jungkook asked his single table companion left.

“Shhh. Wait listen” Jin put a finger up to hush Jungkook and then pointed it to the door you had left though.

Jungkook’s brow furrowed in confusion and he cocked his head to the side. Listening closely as Jin had said.

Muffled yells sounded out from behind the dining room door. Jungkook couldn’t make out a word of it, but neither of the voices sounded happy.

“What’s…” before Jungkook could finish his sentence Jin was making tsk’ing sounds in the direction of the door.

“He never learns… You think she’d have the manners not to call when she knows y/n is home. It’s like she does this on purpose” he sighed

“Who..?” Jungkook questioned, feeling very confused and out of the loop.

“I thought everyone knew?” Jin shrugged, “Namjoon’s got a lady lover on the side,” he said as if it was nothing.

Jungkook was shocked, Namjoon was having an affair? And you knew? And here you were still having dinner and living like nothing was happening?

Jungkook couldn’t quite understand it, but he wanted to try and not judge, it was your business how you handled it after all.

Namjoon burst back into the room with a wide smile on his face, “Jungkook! I’ve been called into work for a quick second, looks like you get a personal tour of the building from the big boss, lucky you” he boomed pointing a thumb to his chest.

Jungkook choked a bit on the water he was drinking, “U-uh, yeah sounds nice” he stammered. You entered the room now, gracefully and silently, your sundress catching slightly with the breeze flowing in from an open window, looking like an angel as always, a small smile on your relaxed face.

But Jungkook was an observant person, he tended to be a watcher on the wall, he noticed the little things that no one else did. So because of that, he noticed the small crystal tear that was still lingering in the corner of your left eye. It hung like a little secret, the break in the illusion that everything was fine and lovely.

[eyoricka]

dreamy vacation

Summary: This is prompt 4 “When we laugh into the microphone and sing with our sunglasses on, to our favorite song” (Nothings gonna hurt you baby by Cigarettes After Sex) 

Words: 2400

Warnings: none

You finally managed to get vacation for more than a week and at the same time as your boyfriend. You had been dating for years now and that was the first time that it happened. You were so happy that it was hard for you to contain your joy even during inconvenient moment such as professional meetings. Theseus was really better at hiding his excitement but as soon as he got home he would checked at the luggage, read books about what you could do, counted down to you the days before your departure. When the D day came Theseus woke you up with a huge grin like a little kid and you reflected his expression. You insisted to take a breakfast, Theseus argued that it was a loss of time and you shook gently your head in a no, insisting that it was important and you had plenty of time now. Plus your portkey was ready at eleven and not before. He accepted the plate of eggs and hash browns and ate quickly which made you chuckled. After a last check at everything you left your house with a smile plastered on your face. you couldn’t help but walk quickly to the portkey even if your baggage were heavy.

As you arrived at the hotel you admired your surroundings. The sun was warmer than in London however it wasn’t too hot either. A perfect weather for a perfect place for perfect vacations.  You checked the time and decided to grab a lunch. The groom advised you to go to a local restaurant to enjoy a real Casado. You noted the address and tried to not get lost around San Jose. After the delicious meal Theseus asked you what you wanted to visit first and you thought. You were hesitating between the visit of the Mercado Central to taste a real coffee, the Museo nacional de Costa Rica or the national theater to see a play. After some moment of indecision you decided to visit the Mercado Central and go to the museum the following day and watch a play on the evening. Theseus agreed with your plan and the two days in the capital were really interesting and instructive.

After those two days Theseus apparated you both to a small cottage in the village next to the natural park of Manuel Antonio. It was said that it was the smallest but best park to explore the locale fauna. Theseus was really fond of magical creatures however he was still astonished by the diversity of normal animals. And you, since your childhood, loved animals so much, you were a huge fan of Newt’s work and had worked under his supervision when you were younger, that is how you had met Theseus. Since when you arrived you were a bit tired you decided to take a day of at the Playa Espadilla Sur. From where you were laying on the sand you notice the savage path that led to the tropical forest. You had taken a book with you and you were focused on the action when you felt warm hand on you back massaging you. you let out a hum of satisfaction and heard Theseus chuckled. “I bet you forgot to put some sunscreen on” your giggle was the only answer he needed since he continued to massage you. he took your book away and you frowned however it was soon replaced by a smile when he kissed your forehead, your cheeks, your shoulders and finally your lips. As he deepened the kiss you noticed that he had let your book and you discreetly grabbed it with one hand while the other was playing with his curls. You then broke the embrace and managed to find your page. Theseus stared at you with a playful smile “Is a book more interesting than your marvelous boyfriend?” You laughed before replied “I was about to discover if Leon would become the second lover of Emma, that a crucial moment! And by the way I would say that you are marvelous. Average in the best case.” Theseus fake-pouted but he stopped as soon as you brushed some curls away from his forehead, he couldn’t resist when you were doing that.

You woke up really early to avoid the other tourists and truly enjoyed the calm nature in the park. You groaned a bit complaining that it was too much to have to wake at that time during holydays. Theseus told you to say a bit more in bed and he would cook the breakfast. A part of you wanted to stand up and avoid the upcoming catastrophe of Theseus trying to cook something else than pasta and rice. Since the last evening he was determined to master the cooking of grilled plantain bananas and you anticipated the result. However you were too tired to prevent that mess and you let him try the recipe as you fall back to sleep. The second time you woke up an agreeable smell was shrouding the house and you walked to the kitchen to find a plate full of plantain bananas, patacones (fried plantain bananas) and a warm cup of coffee. You looked at him weirdly and he sent you a proud smile saying “you see I know how to cook, stop underestimated me”.  you sat and he pushed the plate before you. you carefully took a bit of the bananas and it actually tasted very good. “did you really cook that alone?” “Duh, who do you think I am?” “The guy who almost put the house on fire while trying to do a sunny side up eggs.” He rolled his eyes but didn’t add a word. As you helped him to clean the kitchen you opened the fridge and found a box full of patacones and grilled bananas with a note in Spanish. It was signed by the chef of the restaurant you went the previous day and explained how to reheat the food. You busted into a roar of laughter when you saw Theseus guilty face as he noticed you read the paper. “Nice try, next time hide the evidence, would be useful to not get caught, didn’t you learn that in your auror training?” he kissed you to shut you up and when he broke the embrace he said “high time to leave to visit the park, get ready!” You quickly did as he asked you and you walked excitedly to the forest. Everything was beautiful, so pure like primal state of the nature, like nothing had changed since the creation of the earth. You were in an awe, you heard Theseus joked “it seems that this place is full of you” as he showed you some sloths. You stuck your tongue out and prepared to reply something but then you noticed some armadillo. You were lost in your contemplation. After a while like that, the auror grabbed your hand and you continued to walk. There were colorful parrots, howler monkeys, iguanas, pelicans… it was like the Garden of Eden. A living dream.

After few reposing days you decided to go to the Turrialba volcano considering that all the locals told you that the view was absolutely magnificent. You spent few hours at the national park next to the volcano. You were wearing warm clothes to prevent you from the coldness at the peak of the volcano. The walk to the peak of it was supposed to last four hours, you had decided to leave at ten am, do a break for a nice pick nick and then walk two hours again to be on the top around two pm. The first two hours went well and the lunch was rather good. You enjoyed the fresh air and walking hands in hands with Theseus, it was a perfect moment. However after the lunch as you were happily walking, you tripped on the floor and let out a scream of pain. Your boyfriend rushed to you and asked you if you were okay. You nodded but winced when you stood up, you realized that you would certainly have a bruise. Theseus didn’t seem to be fully convinced by your words when you said you were okay. As you continued to walk he regularly stopped to check if you were really okay. It was a bit annoying but you found it cute, he really cared about you and that made your heart melted. Ten minutes before arriving to the top you had an idea. You looked at your boyfriend with puppy eyes and asked with a voice you knew he couldn’t resist to “I am a bit tired of walking, can I have a piggy back?” he remained silent pretending that he was thinking but judging the look on his face you were sure that he already had made his decision. He nodded and let you install yourself conformably. He carried you to the top and he giggled a bit when he felt your fingers played with the back of his hair, or the kisses you left on his neck. As you arrived at the top he let you down and you enjoyed the view, it was truly wonderful, you never imagined that a country could have such beautiful landscape, it was so different from England, more preserved, no one touched it for the moment, you wished it would stay like that forever. You couldn’t help but exclaimed “That the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen!!” “oh really I thought that the most beautiful view you’ve ever seen was me leaving the shower with only a towel wrapped around me.” You playfully rolled your eyes at him and punched his arm. He rose an eyebrow at you and a smirk grew on his lips. That was a bad sign and you wondered what he was going to do. He didn’t let you a lot of time to think as he tickled you. you begged him to stop but he acted like he was hearing you. “Please… Theseus, have mercy!” you shrieked between two laughter. “Maybe I will have some but you have to prove me that you deserve my mercy” you refrained a snarky comment and instead went for a “But babe you know I was joking, you are obviously the most beautiful view of this world, nothing can compare your beauty, not even that landscape or the seven wonders.” He eventually stopped and replied “You see when you want, you can say the truth even if you certainly did too much with the seven wonders.” After that you both stayed silent for while just enjoying the moment before finally heading back to your hotel.

You spent the last few days in a cute cottage on the beach of Penca. The sand was white, there were coconut trees, the sea was azure, it was like a painting. There were many people either and you felt a bit like two explorers discovering a retired island. Since there were few surfers and you told how this sport was sexy to your opinion Theseus decided to impress you and took some classes with the surfers already there. it was truly funny to see him trying to keep his balance on the board and miserably failed each time. you had rarely laughed some much during an afternoon. As he realized that he was not impressing you and rather ridiculous he thanked the guys and jogged towards you with an upset face. he didn’t have the habit to fail, he was one of the most brilliant wizard of his generation and he couldn’t admit that a simple board on waves was resisting to him. he grumped and complained all the rest of the evening saying that it was a stupid sport, not interesting…  After a while he stopped his rambling and insisted to go for a swim with you. the water was crystal clear and as you were swimming you could see the sand, your feet… you were lost in your contemplation when you felt a splash of water on your skin. You faced Theseus and he splashed you even more. You replied to his war declaration and splashed him even more. From afar you certainly looked like two children or young people living their teenage dream and honestly that is how you felt. He grabbed you by the waist and threw you in the water. As you were falling in the water you managed to grip him by the arms and he fell too. As you emerged from the water you ran to the beach and he followed you running too. He was faster than you and joined you rapidly. He wrapped his arms around your waist spun your around to hug you.

The rest of your holidays flew away quickly and as you were back in London you cherished those moments of your life. The years went on and your boyfriend became your husband and then the father of your children. You grew old together and never stopped loving each other. You were both with your grandchildren talking about your best memories and naturally you both recounted those vacations and when they asked you your best memory of that day you began to tell the story of how you learn to snorkel and the beautiful water creatures you had swum with. Theseus hesitated a while, he said that he couldn’t only pick one memory but after some insistence he said “ Y/N do you remember our last night in that beach bar when we laugh into the microphone and sing with our sunglasses on, to our favorite song? I am sure that the moment I realized I could never live without you and I needed you forever in my life, that the moment I decided that I had to marry you and never let you go. I think it is one of my favorite moment of my life and I am happy to have live it with you, I am happy that I had a life full of happy moments with you. I loved you, I love you and I will never stop loving you.” “I love you too Theseus”. You kissed him and he kissed you back and you stop giggling when you heard your grandchildren screamed “gross!”

[mirandashadowborn]

(warning- I have another idea. Mind-blowing right? Ok but this one has two things I REALLY want in game (a character development arc involving a bad guy, and a place to live), and maybe some of you do too! Ok listen…)

So you see a yellow quest dot in Firgrove. You take a trailer (cause who really wants to run all that way? Not me!). Mrs. Packard asks that you pick up some eggs from Andy, and you’re like ok whatever as long as you bake me another one of them pancake cakes. Mmmm good. 

Andy is not there, but you find him down by the chicken coop. He’s looking down over the Silverglade Mine, and asks if you know what they’re building, since he sees construction going on. He tells you he’ll deliver the eggs himself, but that you should go investigate and see what they’re doing down there. You head down to the mine and see a familiar sign…

Uh no.. what the hell is this guy doing back?!?!?! (not the actual dialog).

You’re a little concerned about confronting this guy, since he must REALLY hate you by now, so you decide to ask the Firgrove mayor whats up and why are they allowing this?? Mr Franklin is all like “Uh, sorry, anything south of the sandpit is considered Silverglade. That’s out of my jurisdiction!” 

You ride to Silverglade (or take a trailer, whatevs) and the Councilman says “Oh I left Mr Bucket in charge while I took a few days off. Let me look at the paperwork here. Yep, looks legit. He purchased the mine and got all the required documents signed. He owns it and there’s not much we can do about it, except maybe next time I’ll have Mr Bucket wait on me for any property matters”. 

You decide to confront Mr Kembell. 

You ride over to the mine and see him standing there, looking at blueprints, but there isn’t as much construction going on as you thought. You ride up and he sees you and… sighs? 

Kembell pulls out the paperwork and hands it to you, tells you he owns it, fair and square. But.. his dream isn’t turning out the way he thought it would. 

You’re like.. “dream?”

He tells you he got an inheritance but not enough to live on. His parents always pushed him to make money any way he could, and he tried- but found that cutting corners and doing things unscrupulously didn’t work out for him. He realized that he’s taken a lot from the community here and wants to give back. He was hoping to purchase the mine and renovate it. His ‘dream’ had always been to be an interior designer or architect but his parents insisted on something more lucrative. You almost don’t believe him until he sighs deeply and asks if you want to see what he had planned. A cut scene reveals his ideas… 

At the lower part, a stable, since he’s come to understand the bond the people of the island have with their horses. 

a walkway to the apartments. The structure would be divided into spacious lofts, with a bathroom (where we click on to change our hair or makeup, which we will be able to do after this update XD).

The little courtyard would have a cafe and maybe a furniture store, where he can sell his designer furniture (another couple slides, that I did not bother to draw, sorry, but everything is cute and homey - you can buy all the sleek modern stuff in Governers Fall). There would even be a storage space (for additional storage since what the hell would be the point of buying a place to live otherwise?)

He would live at the top, and be security and landlord, and be able to retire from scheming. He apologizes for the way he’s treated you, says he’s been taking anger management classes. And says he really just wanted to give back, only his contractor bailed at the last minute so… it was all for naught u_u

But wait! You know a contractor! You rush over to Jarlaheim to speak with the builder. Does it involve water or heights? No not really! Ok then he’ll be over tomorrow! 

You go back to the site the next day and construction is underway. Kembell thanks you and says he hopes people and their horses are happy here. He admits he’s always been afraid of horses and asks to pet yours. he wonders if anyone will ever lend him a horse since everyone seems to hate him! 

But wait! You know someone with a horse they aren’t using! You ride over to Bjorn and ask to borrow the old horse he gave up on riding. Agnetha asks why and you tell her. She says if they get the exclusive contract to do the landscaping, he can borrow the horse. 

Kembell writes her an offer and she refuses it and they go back and forth (through you cause we know how this quest ends, and no ones gonna make it easy for you lol). They finally settle on a number and you lead this horse whose name I forget over to Kembell. He asks if you would guide him on a trail ride one day, as he just wants to get used to the horse first, you agree. He tells you to come back the next day. 

The next day he tells you he isn’t sure about the cafe idea. He was just going to put one of his old employees in the position of running it, but they’re all so scary. Do you know anyone whose young and hip and maybe wants a better job and might have a future in the food industry? Of course you do! 

(pic from starstablestudies) As you approach, Conny is being yelled at by the older worker. He messed up again. You ask him if he’d like to run a cafe, thereby getting a start in the food business and one step closer to being a sommelier ?(which why didn’t we get the Baroness to hire him?? but oh well). He says he’d love the job! You run back and tell Kembell. He is thrilled, and starts to get working on the designs for the cafe. He tells you he’d love some wrought iron chairs and you say you’ll ask the blacksmith….. 

Only Conrad is all like 

He says he can’t believe you would help that guy after what he tried to do to Moorland. He’s ashamed. Your rep with the druids go down (jk)

A clock appears over Kembells head….. 

You come back the next day with a plan: You’re going on that trail ride. And its gonna be a doozy. 

First you ride over to Firgrove. You bring him to Mr Franklin and have him apologize for whatever he was trying to do at the spies house. Mr Franklin shakes his hand and forgives him. You tell him to take the trailer to silverglade vineyard. 

You ride over to the Baroness, where kembell is apologizing. The Baroness accepts his apology, but only since her grapes have been flourishing now that he’s left. 

At this point, you ride together to Moorland. He makes little comments about how nice it is, and how he sees now that it would’ve been ruined by his other development. You ride down to Mr Moorland, where he apologizes to Thomas and offers him a very nice wooden bench or something, of his own design. Thomas accepts. THEN you ride to Conrad, and they talk it out. Kembell tells him he’s using only recycled material, and the surrounding land won’t be too affected by the construction. He wants to keep that area as close to its natural state as possible. Conrad forgives him and agrees to make chairs and a sign for his cafe. 

Maybe a day after this- after a few finishing touches (Agneta and Bjorn with plants, Conrad with furniture, Conny with a menu) - the homes are open for business! 

I was thinking- if you are lifetime, you can buy a loft. If you aren’t, you can rent (for a reasonable fee). (I honestly feel like it would be SCs taken out early on but then he never really asks you for rent after cause what would you even charge for that per month? If you end your Star Rider, the furniture goes into those little rooms in your stable.) 

This would of course come after you’ve thwarted Kembells last business (The house in Firgrove afaik), and then after that you’d see him in a polo shirt, bermuda shorts and flip flops, drinking a frosty beverage up in his little cottage. You can make this your home stable of course, and after this they would introduce rooms at the other home stables that you can decorate and stuff. Maybe you can have parties here (music and dancing), click on the bed to sleep to skip through on quests you have to wait a day, or just display things. It would all be customize-able - paint, carpet, wallpaper, curtains. There would be more furniture places in towns after this, natch. 

Anyway, that’s my second idea for the day. #starstable I’m here if you want to taco bout them. 

[redsector-a]

Clint hadn’t gotten a good look at Bucky when he’d arrived home from the mission. Hell, he’d barely remembered to take his ears out before he’d collapsed on the bed next to the lump that was his husband, burrowing up next to him and sighing as a cool metal hand stroked his hair briefly before he fell asleep.

Rolling over the following morning netted him a note rather than some good morning kisses and he realized with a start that the sun in the window was higher than expected. He’d slept in. Not too late thankfully, but still. He loved breakfast foods and therefore he hated missing breakfast. And good morning kisses. Usually he could get those whenever he woke, but he needed a Bucky for that and there was no Bucky to be found so he picked the note up and actually focused on it.

There’s a shake in the fridge and some blueberries to snack on. Don’t ruin lunch, I’ve got plans. Meet me at our beach spot at 11:30. - Love, Buck

Love, Buck. Clint smiled widely and enjoyed the way his heart still beat a little faster at the tiny shows of affection Bucky and he shared. He hoped it never got old. It hadn’t so far at least.

Speaking of, the day wasn’t getting any younger and he glanced over at the clock to see it was 10:30. Plenty of time for a shower and snack before heading down the beach. There was another note on the fridge reminding him only to drink the shake and not ruin lunch (I mean it Barton) Clint rolled his eyes but behaved, his stomach growling in protest at only getting the snack as he exited the cottage and made his way down to the beach.  

There was a collection of rocks not far from their home that the two of them considered ‘their spot.’ It was shaded enough to be comfortable even around high noon but still warm enough that they didn’t get cold even in the sometimes timid central California summer.

Clint hadn’t been there too long, leaning against one of the rocks and sunning himself like a cat when he saw a figure in the distance. He wasn’t entirely certain at first it was Bucky, the cream color sweater and light pants weren’t his usual style, but it didn’t take long to confirm that the stride was the same as his husband’s. He’d cut his hair while Clint had been away and that was fine, he looked good no matter the style of his hair - Clint was just used to it being longer, but the outfit…

“You can have me right here, sand and all, I don’t care,” Clint managed, his eyes not straying from taking in the sight of Bucky. And oh God that got him a crooked smile and an eye roll. He loved that reaction. “Jesus, you’re a walking wet dream.” He wasn’t exaggerating - Bucky was always handsome, but this new look…damn.

“Eloquent as always,” Bucky replied with a laugh, ears pinking just a little at the frank admiration in Clint’s voice and gaze.

“You love me for it,” Clint replied softly as Bucky set down the bag he was carrying and pulled out a blanket for them to sit on.

“That I do,” Bucky replied equally soft, and Clint kneeled then clambered onto the blanket, swaying into Bucky’s body and capturing his mouth in a kiss.

He’d missed this while he was away. Missed the solid warmth of Bucky to fall asleep with, missed the quiet of their cottage and the sleepy little town they lived in. But Wanda had been shaken up since Nigeria, and Pietro had been a handful because of her being upset, and Steve and Tony had asked him for help…

“How’re the twins?”

“Better,” Clint replied, fighting against the urge to let his eyes drift shut as Bucky stroked his hands up and down his back. “Mmmm…little lower babe.”

“No sexy times on the beach, Barton.” Bucky replied and a woman laughed as she jogged near them.

“Hey Mrs Kirkland!”

“Hey boys! Good to see you back Clint!”

“Good to be back!” He called out to her retreating form. “Now who is the naughty one?”

“Still you darlin’ they know us too well.”

“Fair point,” Clint replied, letting Bucky guide them both into sitting positions. He turned and pressed his face against Bucky’s chest and neck and inhaled deeply. Yeah. It was good to be home. He allowed his eyes to drift shut this time, relaxing against Bucky as he rummaged through the bag for whatever he’d had planned for lunch. The sound of the ocean creating a lazily comforting backdrop and Clint said a little silent thanks to Tony for the weather proofing he’d added, each generation getting better and better with both that and sound quality, to Clint’s hearing aides. Even the salt spray wouldn’t bother them, though they weren’t close enough right now for that to be a worry.

“Nora says hello,” Bucky said as he opened what sounded like a takeaway container.

“You got my breakfast from Nora’s?” Clint’s eyes snapped open. And sure enough - piled high in the container were eggs and bacon and diced potatoes.  In another container were several pastries, and beside that, a thermos of coffee. His stomach growled it’s approval. “Seriously - right here, take me now.” Bucky’s laugh was a comforting rumble against him - until he leaned in to press a kiss under Clint’s ear.

“I don’t think you want to let that food go cold, darlin’. Besides which, I was planning on a little afternoon delight when we got back to the house.” Another kiss and his voice went a skosh lower. “And if you’re up to it and very good I thought maybe I’d ride you until neither of us can form words as a second round tonight.”

And Jesus fuck - he’d mostly been kidding with the teasing but now heat stirred in Clint’s stomach.

“Th-that sounds like a plan.”

“Good.” Bucky’s voice was full of promise and Clint said a silent thanks to the universe, or any deity that was listening, that he was lucky enough to have married this man. That he’d been lucky enough to have been saved by him, and saved him in return.

They ate in comfortable silence and Clint contemplated the same thing he always did after a mission - retirement. It got harder and harder to leave each time he was called out. He never hated it, he still felt a rush of satisfaction, but it just… He didn’t feel he needed to do it anymore. The drive was gone. Well…needed maybe wasn’t the right term, he wasn’t sure he’d ever needed the work at any point in his life to feel worthy or anything like that, but…maybe in a way he had. Now though, at least for the last few years anyway, he found enough contentment in life just spending time with Bucky. Poking around their house and the village. Going on vacations to new and interesting places.

“I think that was it.” He said after they’d finished the food and had been simply basking in each other’s presence.

“Hmm?” Bucky breathed into his hair.

“I think that was the last one.”

“Yeah?” Bucky sounded casual, careful, like he meant to sound a little distracted.

“Yeah.” Clint sighed, but it was in contentment, not resignation. “Maybe we could get a boat. I’m great with boats - it could be fun.”

“You’re serious,” Bucky said and Clint scooted forwards a little so he could turn and look at him. Bucky raised a hand to caress the side of his face. “You’re really serious this time.”

“I am. If you’ll have me.” It wasn’t like he was gone all that often, but he did spend a decent chunk of time away when it happened and part of him was still concerned that Bucky wanted that time to himself. That he needed Clint to be gone sometimes and wouldn’t want him home 365.

“I meant what I said last year Barton. Til death do us part, always and forever.” Bucky raised Clint’s left hand and pressed a kiss to the palm, just under his matching ring. “And I’d love nothing more than to putter around in a boat with you.”

“Yeah?” Oh there was that little bit of hope that made him sound small. Vulnerable.

“Yeah.” It was only one syllable, but it packed so much emotion.

“Okay - barring the actual end of the world you and me and our beach chairs, maybe some pets-”

“Cats and dogs both.” Bucky said, decisive.

“Okay, definitely some pets.”

“Who’s looking out for them when we get that cabin in the Adirondacks?”

“Gimme a second, I’m envisioning the tasteful scruff you’re going to sport then-” And Clint lasted about three seconds before breaking into laughter as Bucky nuzzled his current scruff against Clint’s neck. The laughter lasted even when he stopped, mostly because Bucky had joined him in his amusement and it took a while for the two of them to calm down.

“I love you,” Clint said eventually, settling back in against Bucky’s chest.

“Love you too,” Bucky replied as they sat back to watch the waves roll in, everything in their little corner of the world just about perfect.

Timestamp about...four years after the end of You rearrange me till I'm sane

[hellostarlight20]

Soldier’s Solstice 5/

One upon a time, the Doctor could talk for England. That time has passed, and now he isn’t much for conversation. He retired to a small cottage on the Welsh coast. He rescued a dog and named her Idris. He had no contact with the rest of his family. His plan was to stay there, with minimal contact with the outside world, and heal. And then the single-person space pod crashed to his beach during his pre-dawn run. So much for his quiet life. Nine/Rose Nine is a human, Rose is an alien Soldiers/warriors Earth-based AU Jack Harkness and Idris Rated T for now but I’m positive that rating will jump. As always, I’m eternally grateful to Mrs. Bertucci for her invaluable services as beta extraordinaire. This entire story is based on a manip by the lovely @rose–nebula.

AO3 and TSP and Tumblr: One Two Three Four

5. Five hours, several aborted conversations about Rose’s home, one quick walk with Idris (alone), and a surprisingly smooth lunch later where Rose asked questions about Wales, Jack finally arrived.

“I do not understand,” Rose was saying as Idris barked wildly at the door.

The Doctor didn’t even bother taming the dog—she was out of control today—and opened the door for Jack who hadn’t even parked the car yet. Idris raced out of the cottage and to Jack’s door, happily leaping up onto it as if she could squeeze through the window.

“Wales is a country but Wales is also a species of mammal who live in your oceans?” Rose tilted her head, and he did his best (which was woefully inadequate) not to stare at her, dressed in his clothing, and still looking as strong and competent as when she wore her armor and swords.

“Wales, W-a-l-e-s, is a country named after an ancient people—” the Doctor shook his head on the entomological history of the word. “Whales, w-h-a-l-e-s, the sea creature, is similar in origin—Celtic vs High Germanic—but they have absolutely nothing in common.”

Idris raced back in, stared at him, then at Rose before racing back to the door. She didn’t run out again, but waited just inside, tail thumbing impatiently.

“I still do not understand,” Rose admitted and moved to keep an eye on the door, a strategic position that wasn’t lost on him. “Why have words that sound so similar but don’t mean anything the same?”

“That’s English for you.” He grinned. At her answering smile, his heart did a funny little flip. Damnit, there was that tongue teasing the side of her mouth again. “Wait until I explain bat and bat. Or their, there, and they’re.”

Her eyes lighted with curious humor and that feeling of wanting to know more about her reared its head once again. Over the last hours, he’d enjoyed their talk, now that the uncomfortable tension disappeared…or, well, lessened.

Princess Rose of Powell, it seemed, was a lot like him—an intellectual warrior. The Doctor didn’t know what to make of that, but he didn’t turn away from it, either. He hadn’t spoken this much in months—years. And he hadn’t enjoyed himself in a conversation for ages before that.

“Well, hello, and who are you, you gorgeous thing?” Jack’s voice echoed down the cottage’s hall and the Doctor faced him as the door closed.

Jack crouched beside Idris and rubbed her head. It was a matter of seconds before his traitorous dog sat, laid down, and rolled over. Jack laughed and rubbed Idris’s belly while the dog’s tail wagged uncontrollably and she made the pleased whines of the utterly content.

“Jack, stop.”

His friend stood, much to Idris’s displeasure, and grinned. “When you said you rescued a dog, I didn’t believe you.”

The Doctor sneered at his friend, who ignored him. Arms wide, Jack hugged him, and the Doctor returned it. He hadn’t realized how long it’d been since he had Human contact until the hug.

“And who is this gorgeous thing,” Jack asked, looking now at Rose.

Rose straightened, though the Doctor didn’t miss the way her cheeks pinked. “Princess Rose of Powell.” She offered a short bow and complicated hand gesture.

Hmph. All he got was to push her capsule along the beach and hide the subsequent tracks. Jack, it seemed, got the formal greeting.

“Powell?” Jack’s eyes slid to his. “Doc?”

“Fell to the beach in her space capsule.” The Doctor sighed and jerked his head in the direction of his spare bedroom. “Torchwood pick anything up?”

Face set, Jack shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of.”

**** Rose laughed at Captain Jack’s story about he and the Doctor’s first meeting. She understood few of the specifics, places, names, occupations, but the captain’s natural storytelling demeanor conveyed more than individual words. As captivating as his story was, she couldn’t help looking to the Doctor.

His silent watchfulness, his broken blue gaze, his barren house all enthralled her. The way he treated Idris, the soft touch of his large hand on her head, showed a softer side of him. Not the strong man who pushed her escape pod or the warrior who interrogate her.

Martha claimed Rose’s destiny lay not on Powell but elsewhere. Rose hadn’t believed her and, despite her exile, always intended to return to her home world and reclaim the throne. Maybe her friend was right.

Jack walked to the bedroom to examine her pod and Rose turned to the Doctor. He watched her, hand on Idris’s head, deceptively casual as he leaned against the wall.

“I betray every instinct I possess,” Rose whispered, rolling up the sleeves of his jumper. The soft material pleasantly scratched her skin. “I knew I needed to trust someone on this new world, but doing so goes against my nature.”

“What did you intend to do here? Accomplish?” The Doctor pushed off the wall and crossed the distance to the table in two long strides. Not that Rose admired his gracefulness. Much.

“I don’t know.” She sighed and stood, restless. “I wanted a new beginning, a place away from the constant battles.”

“You intended to return to Powell.”

Rose nodded. “I owe my people my sword.”

“We owe only what we have promised to give until we have nothing left to give.” The Doctor’s voice remained low, but Rose heard a wealth of meaning—and anguish—in his simple words.

His gaze followed her as she stalked around the room, missing the weight of her swords, the feel of her leg guards, the comfort of her armor. The simple touch of her native clothing meant little compared to the heaviness in her heart.

“I can never return.” Rose stared out a window facing the beach. The quietly lapping water, the expanse of uncluttered sand. “My world once looked like this. I don’t remember it, we’ve been fighting for years before I was born. But the stories tell of a time when the shores of Powell held riches we could only dream of. Fish with names no longer remembered.”

“That’s what you meant when you said you didn’t know what a tide was,” the Doctor said. Rose watched his reflection in the glass and wondered what he saw when he looked at her. “War does that to a people. Doesn’t just destroy them, destroys all they wanted to protect, too.”

“You speak as if you are familiar with war.” Rose didn’t tear her gaze from the beach, the sun shining off the sand, people wandering the shores as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Shaking her head, she turned from the window and the life she couldn’t have.

“Seen enough, me.” The Doctor pushed back from the table and stood, turning for the kitchens. “Too much.”

Rose stepped after him, his shattered words pulling her. She stopped in the doorway and waited while he fiddled with the maker of coffee Rose couldn’t decide if she enjoyed or not.

“I never asked.” She listened for Jack to return, but only heard his muffled conversation. “What’s your name? Or is it just the Doctor?”

The Doctor stopped, shoulders stiff. “Don’t have a name.” He started touching the machine again, clanging louder than she thought necessary. “Not anymore.”

“We all have names.” Rose stood beside him before she realized she moved. “No matter how we wish to change them.”

“Like Princess Rose of Powell?” He looked down at her hand on his arm then met her gaze.

Her jaw clenched. “I never tried to hide who I was.”

“Going to tell me that story?” He leaned a hip against the counter, arms folded over his chest and far more attractive than any man had a right to be.

“I’m sure you figured most of it out.” Rose dropped back a step. “My father is the High Lord Emperor. For generations Powell fought a horrific civil war—that is the word, yes? A war amongst a place’s own peoples?”

He nodded but remained quiet; the tension didn’t lessen but wound around them. Rose didn’t know if it brought them together or held them at a standoff. Either way, it beat through her like a war cry. Rose closed her eyes and fought back memories. But only for a moment. Opening them, she faced the Doctor and told her story.

“Ten cycles ago, our forces captured one of the rebel leaders; Martha and I were sent to interrogate him.”

Rose stalked into the dining area then back to the kitchens. Even now, after all she’d done to end the war, shame burned through her.

“They say there are always three sides to every story—ours, theirs, and the truth.” She snorted and raked her fingers through her long, loose hair. It didn’t sit right, her hair not bound tightly in a braid, but she promised herself a new beginning and this was a small step in that direction.

“The truth,” she whispered, “is often much harder to swallow than many believe.” Rose met his gaze but knew he already understood her next words. “My father began the war on a small kingdom across the seas. They had already pledged loyalty but it wasn’t enough. The world fractured and every able-bodied Powellian took up arms.”

[beckettsthoughts]

A Primrose for Peace

This is a fill for a prompt from my best friend @skyward-sheik! You know I love him most in all the world and in return, he knows me and my favourite things like the back of his own hand. I once said I often write about faeries and I often write about gardening, but I do not often write about both faeries and gardening. He sent me the prompt:

“A devious pixie keeps uprooting your flower beds and you’ve replanted them several times this week; it’s starting wear on your nerves.”

The garden centre was beginning to feel like a second home.

It was a strange feeling, wandering through that great building in the hour before they close. The staff looked half-asleep at their desks, the doldrums of the afternoon having drawn long on their energy. You were clattering a metal cart towards the till, loaded with bright orange marigolds and a plastic tray of pansies. This gardening hobby was becoming a little more expensive than you’d first planned.

As you hauled the crates from the car and across your front garden, you took a moment to send the neighbours’ cottage a bitter glance. Their cat, you’d discovered, was a menace to gardeners everywhere. In the last week alone, the little monster had ruined the new primrose-beds and left your baby tomato plants torn up and scattered across the lawn. Right now there was little more than a patch of soil, edges blurred with the scattering of peat across the lawn. The cat itself was nowhere to be seen, so you dropped the new plants by the doorstep before going inside to find your gardening boots.

At least it’s April, and therefore the evenings were warm and long. The butter-yellow afternoon clouds hung in the sky until almost eight o’clock, and with the radio perched on the windowsill you found that replanting wasn’t such an arduous task. Working methodically around the flowerbeds allowed you to relax in a way that you couldn’t, at work, as the soil and the grass left damp stains on your jeans and dirt lodged itself beneath your nails. It clung to the lines in your palms, making you seem older than you were. The scrape of the trowel was harsh against the quiet jazz on the radio, the space between each song filled by phone-in conversations about people’s plans for the summer. Jean from the south coast wanted to go to France again to see her cousins, Alan and Marie from the north were looking forward to flying down to Italy. You were planning nothing as fancy as that, only visiting your friends over on the mainland. You were looking forward to it nonetheless.

By the time you had finished planting, feeding and watering the new flowerbeds, it was time for the ten o’clock news. The radio was bleating bleak stories at you from the island, politics and royal visits and trees fallen down in the lanes. Roadworks that would obstruct your route to work, the weather for the next week. As the show closed and the music began playing once again, you packed up your tools and traipsed them back to the greenhouse, leaving the empty crates next to the compost heap for collecting. The house greeted you with warmth and pale orange light, and you locked the door behind you on your way in from the garden. The kitchen lamps buzzed faintly as you brought the radio from the window to the breakfast counter and closed the curtains, distant and fuzzy in your tired ears. You were left in an abrupt silence when you turned them off, ready to shut yourself away upstairs for the night. You made sure to remember to lock the front door, too, on your way past. Old cottages in this part of the island may be rumoured to be haunted, but they are the cosiest you’d ever lived in.

The next afternoon, you found yourself back at the tills of the garden centre.

In your rush to leave the house that morning, you’d almost failed to notice the change in your flowerbeds. You’d realised that your glasses lay forgotten on your bedside table and you’d turned back to fetch them, bringing you to face to face with the carnage of your garden. Rather, the lack of carnage that was your garden. It was as if all your work the previous evening had been some kind of hyper-realistic fever dream. You’d snapped your head around in a double-take, and upon closer inspection it became clear that your problem was a little bigger than simply foiling the evil plans of your neighbours’ cat. All of the plants were just as you’d placed them, fresh peat lining the edge where the flowerbeds met the lawn, but each of the stems were cut evenly about an inch above the ground.

So it wasn’t the neighbours’ cat. You felt sort of sorry for glaring at their house so much, all of a sudden. It couldn’t have been the neighbours’ cat at all, no; it was faeries.

In hindsight, this was not altogether unexpected. It was part and parcel of living in such a place. You knew as well as any islander the stories they told about the pouques and the pixies; the tricks they played and favours they granted. Perhaps you had not expected to find one in your front garden, though of course you saw the signs. The realisation laid heavy on your shoulders throughout the day, through paperwork and filing and organising it clung on, until on your way home when you detoured towards the garden centre.

You’d learned in your research that red was supposed to be good at keeping faeries away, and so this time your cart was full of bright scarlet tulips, tiny rose-bushes and vibrant nasturtiums. You’d chosen each flower carefully, scoured every row for a different plant in the hope that at least one of them would be able to deter the little sprite. The bill you paid for them was the highest yet, but you decided it was worthwhile. If it worked, after all, then you wouldn’t be needing to return to the garden centre any time soon.

Again, you spent the evening kneeling in the sodden dirt, planting and watering and feeding and trimming, before you retired to bed for the night.

The next morning was that of a blissful, sunny Saturday. You did not have to go to work, and so you let yourself wake in the lazy hours of lunchtime. The radio was playing classic rock as you grilled bacon for your breakfast and the talk in-between was pleasantly numbing. The one o’clock news began and you decided to rename your breakfast ‘lunch’. It was half-past two when you got yourself organised enough to go into town and browse the shops, and when you opened your front door you were greeted with a pleasant surprise.

Your plan had worked. You had not really been expecting it to work, but as you looked down from the doorstep you could see, clear as anything, that your flowerbeds had remained intact.

The same could not be said for your lawn.

Scores of daisies had been snipped at the stem and subsequently vanished, the clovers that grew in thick patches on the ground had been rooted through and trampled. Even the red campions from the hedge (which, despite their name, are a bright sort of pink) had gone missing. That, you thought, was so shoddy it looked almost like it could have been the cat’s job rather than the faerie’s. The blasted creature was angry at you now, like it was you who had been invading their flowerbed and not the other way around. You pondered mowing your lawn in revenge, for a moment, but you’d learnt it was best not to antagonise powerful nature spirits.

And so, abandoning your plans of window-shopping with a long-suffering sigh, you drove back to the garden centre.

You were not, let it be made clear, going to get rid of the red flowers. No, they were yours and they were to remain nice so that your house remained nice, so that the neighbours wouldn’t laugh at your pitiful attempt to maintain a perfectly quaint country cottage. However, it was possible that a compromise would have to be reached. It may have been difficult to negotiate such a deal with a creature you had never seen, let alone spoken to, but you had to at least make an attempt. This time your cart was full of seeds and tiny plantlings, cuttings from flowers of every colour, ready to be scattered all across your garden.

You hoped it would be understood, with this gesture, that your flowerbeds were not theirs for the taking. If they chose to pick one or two flowers it would be fine, but any more cases of mass floral destruction would be met with a garden full of bright, scarlet reds. The rest of your land, however, was to be a beautiful mix of wildflowers that were free for the taking. They could invite a whole congregation of faeries to live amongst the flowers you would be growing, so long as they left your neat flowerbeds alone.

Your jeans were not only stained but torn, your bones ached from the daily strain of yardwork. Still, for what you hoped would be the last time for the considerable future, you knelt back down in your garden to plant some more flowers.

On Sunday morning there was a single primrose on the doorstep, snipped neatly from the hedgerow. An apology, maybe. A promise. Gently you lifted it, inspected it, thought perhaps you would press it later that evening. Until then, you would carry it tucked in your hair.

[dandelliongirl]

It’s April tomorrow

and spring has sprung!

The season is changing slowly but surely... Too slowly for my current liking though.

Ha - I did manage a March blog post (it’s the 31st today). Overall the entire month of March dragged on for a needlessly long time with nothing too exciting going on so I didn’t particularly feel like blogging. My guy and I have been to two dance rehearsals for my graduation ball in May so far and it has been a lot of fun. I’ve loved being silly and goofing around with him. He did the dances a total of 3 times in high school (his friends’, his own and mine) and mine was only 7-ish years ago so both of us know the steps pretty well from memory. I don’t know if dance rehearsal is as much fun for him as it is for me but I’ve been loving spending time with him. My outfit for the ball is almost finished. My top for the evening needs to be sewn together and the hemline of the skirt cut and finished to be the right length. I just got shoes last week and ordered my graduation ring so everything should be in order.

I did my gig judging the dance competition in February and it was an interesting experience. I liked seeing all the choreographies but the juding process was needlessly complicated with a long form that all of us 3 judges had to fill in for each competing group. In addition we only had from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes between each performance so I felt like I couldn’t really give any actual constructive criticism. Also we had to decide on the winners in less than 10 minutes, which was pretty stressful. In the end we all agreed but it was really difficult and my hand hurt for many days after from writing so much and so fast.

My guy’s friend from Japan visited us for a week at the end of February. The boys spent a lot of time together and I spent time with mum. We went and got facials together, and I celebrated a friend’s birthday making brownies with her. Mum had her second big surgery on the 27th but it went better this time around and dad was on his spring break so he could pick her up and bring her home early.

March was a very busy month at work. The good kind of busy though. The kind that makes me feel important and doesn’t give me time to question being hired to do nothing. We’ve been training faculty coordinators and helping them create timetables for the upcoming academic year. I’ve been in charge of these trainings and I really love it. I love helping people and coming up with solutions to their problems. Whenever the coordinators apologise for the inconvenience of their stupid questions and their constant complaining regarding the new data systems I like to tell them that as long as they have questions and complaints I have a job. Their bitching is paying my mortgage and I know it’s directed at the system not at me, so I really don’t mind. It’s completely understandable and most issues these people have are issues I’ve discovered myself and agree with completely. So all in all I’m really grateful to be in the job I’m in for two more years. I’m still looking forward to summer break though and all the exciting springtime events like Easter break, dance recitals and the big official conferment of degrees. I have felt like everything’s at a standstill so I’m hoping spring will pick up it’s pace.

My friend is currently on her first 3 week trip to Japan. I’m super happy for her but it does make me miss Japan terribly. Last year at this time I was over there enjoying the warmth and the beauty of the cherry blossoms. I’m already planning to go back, hopefully next spring. I’m obsessively updating my friend’s instagram feed to see when she’ll be posting pictures from her trip. I gave her a list (and a reference picture) of some Sanrio products I want her to try and get me from there and I’m really hoping she can find at least some of it.

Ballet is still a struggle. Now that my friend (the one who’s in Japan right now) only goes once a week and I have no other real friends there I have no motivation and literally have to force myself to go. Not that I don’t enjoy ballet itself but it’s frustrating because I feel like we’re not making any progress and we’re stuck repeating the same things over and over. Also we’re still stuck in the stupid regular gym hall with those few crappy portable mirrors and either the wall bars/ladders or portable bars. I want to see what I’m doing, I want friends and I want new challenges. I’m glad we only have two months until summer.

I’ve started working on a bit of a book project. It’s more like a collection of essays regarding various topics that are relevant to me and my life than a book but I’ve wanted to collect my thoughts for a while now and since I’ll be turning 25 in a few weeks I thought it’d be cool to write down a collection of thoughts to celebrate a quarter of a century. I’ve been loving reading and writing now that I don’t have to do it for school/uni. I’ve already planned a somewhat of a structure for it and written down some ideas and topics. Today I’m planning to start with the first essay, which will be about me and who I am as a 25 year old. The project will span my entire 25th year so I’m definitely not trying to finish by my birthday.

My guy has spent this weekend visiting his parents. His dad is working hard on his electoral campaign for the parliament so my guy wanted to go see how it’s going. My guy is going to be working as an election officer on the actual election day.

With my guy being gone I’ve also spent the weekend with my parents. Yesterday we went to the grocery store and visited the cottage for a campfire and roasted sausages. Dad and I went  on a 40-ish minute snowshoe walk and it was a lot of fun. I got to explore parts of the forest I would otherwise never go to because during the summer it’s filled with mosquitoes, snakes and scratchy shrubbery. This was a whole new realm for me and I haven’t been on snowshoes since I was probably like 9 years old or younger. Nature really has a calming effect and I could feel the stress I didn’t even know I was holding onto melt away as I navigated between the branches and fallen trees. My new sleeping cottage is supposed to be finished by Easter and I absolutely can’t wait to get to take in the furniture, start decorating the place and plant flowers. It seems like such a far away future in which it’ll be summer and I’ll be reading books, playing Animal Crossing and taking naps in my new cottage.. It’s been over a year now since the project started and I cannot wait to have it finished...

Dad bought me my 6th Maileg bunny from the flea market this Saturday. His name is Basil and he’s my birthday present. Dad got all 5 of my Mailegs from Sweden whenever he went on his annual fishing trip but it’s been more than ten years since my collection grew. I brought my old clothes that grandmum made my original bunny (the one called Rose whom my little sleeping cottage was named after) and I can’t wait to get them in some fresh outfits.

Today dad and I went for what was probably our last ski trip this season. It was a nice and warm day and we spent almost an hour out on skis but it was really messy from all the pine needles and twigs and the snow was much more like slush with occasional ice fields than snow. In any case I got some fresh air and exercise and that felt nice. I woke up really early today to vacuum the house and put up Easter decorations before going skiing with dad and so today feels really productive. I love weekends like this that feel both relaxing and productive. And I’m proud for getting up early despite daylight savings!

We still have no news on Animal Crossing Switch.. The fandom seems to be holding out hopes for an April direct before Reggie retires as president of Nintendo of America, and because Nintendo doesn’t usually go without a direct before E3, but I’m not holding my breath. The only thing I’m hoping for regarding the new game, is that local multiplayer, visiting dream towns and having at least one person visit you over the internet would be possible without the switch online service bullshit. I’m sure local wireless will be possible. As for the rest I’m not too hopeful.. I’d be fine with having to pay to access 8 people online multiplayer as long as I could keep trading turnips with one person and not pay 40€ a year for it... I also don’t want Animal Crossing to change too drastically. I just want a better New Leaf with more customisation, new items, bigger towns and better villager interactions... I also want to be rewarded for my ACPC grind in some way.. Anyway, in the meantime I’ve been enjoying some Sims 4. For the first time since I was a child I’ve been playing through an actual story. It’s the story of a young adult called Theodore (Theo), who moved away from home to start working as a bartender and gain money to win custody of her teenage sister Journey. She adopted Journey and they lived together in a very crappy starter home for a while, but I just moved them into a two bedroom house in Willow Creek, and renovated Journey’s bedroom into the cute teenager room she deserves. Journey works hard as an A student and a fast food employee. She just got a boyfriend and she’s a hopeless romantic (and loves cats). Theo also got a boyfriend and I think he’s going to be moving in as soon as we get some more money to renovate the house a bit and build Theo a greenhouse. Eventually the girls are also going to adopt a cat for Journey and Theo is going to have a child. I’m thinking I might buy City Living next summer so that Journey and her boyfriend can move out and start their own life in San Myshuno. I’m excited to have a rags-to-riches type story that I’m playing without cheats and with characters I’m invested in. I’ve been so bad at coming up with actual storylines and have stuck with build/buy for years this feels like a whole new game for me.

Wow that was a long bit about Sims there. I’ve been writing for almost an hour now. It’s time to go meal prep and make myself a pasta salad for next week. Then I’ll start my essay collection and then I’ll play some more Sims. My guy isn’t coming back until late this evening so I get some more time off. Happy April! ♥

[therealestatesparkblog]

How Two 30-Something Twins Achieved FIRE in 5 Years on Rental Income

Spoiler alert: Drew and Scott Hoefler still work today. Except now its by choice. Now in their early 30s, the twins live and invest in the Twin Cities, and a decade ago never even considered a career in real estate. After five years of investing in real estate, they successfully reached financial independence. Heres their story, complete with the mistakes they made along the way. House Hunting, House Hacking In 2013, the twins were single 20-somethings working for agricultural giant Land-O-Lakes, looking to buy their first home. They planned to buy a home with a few bedrooms together, move in, and bring on a roommate or two if the house were big enough. Then, over dinner with their parents one night, their mom offered a better idea: Why dont you buy a two-flat? (Thats Midwest for duplex, FYI.) Teenagers may sneer at every idea their parents have, but in your 20s, you start paying attention once more to your parents advice. We quickly realized that we could live in one side, rent out the other side and cover our mortgage we were all-in. The hunt for the perfect duplex was on!

The (First) Duplex After touring some duds, the twins came across a gem in the Arts District in northeast Minneapolis. They described it as an up and coming neighborhood, which was not a euphemismthe neighborhood was gentrifying with a fun and funky craft beer scene. Then came the first stumbling block. At first look, Drew and I had trouble seeing the lower unit because of issues with the renters. We put our offer in based upon seeing the upstairs unit only. You know where this is going. The downstairs unit needed work, which they discovered after putting the duplex under contract. Luckily, the work was cosmetic, nothing structural or mechanical. Upon buying the property, they non-renewed the tenants, made updates such as removing the drop ceiling, and moved in. The purchase price was $208,000. Our financing was an American Dream program that was an owner-occupied conventional loan financed by U.S. Bank. Great program. We rented the upstairs unit out for $1,300 from day one. That proved enough to cover their mortgage payment. A successful house hack. Nowadays, with further gentrification in the neighborhood, they charge $1,700 for that upstairs unit. Related: Are Your Children Stopping You From Achieving Financial Freedom? Rinsing & Repeating the House Hack When you use owner-occupied financing, you have to live in the property for at least one year. So thats exactly what the Hoefler twins did. Seeing how easy it was to house hack and generate rental income, the twins knew they were onto something. They wanted to expand their portfolio. The first thing they did was look for other ways to lower their expenses, so they could put more of their income aside for their next property. If youve ever read a single sentence about FIRE (financial independence, retiring early), you know that the first rule of FIRE is maximizing your savings and investments. (FIRE Challenge: Start by brainstorming ways to live on half your income!) As they neared the end of their first year of house hacking, they set out to find another multifamily to house hack. They successfully rinsed and repeated this process for several years, living in the property for a year then buying a new multifamily and moving in, with owner-occupied financing. Which is a great way to start, but not a viable long-term strategy. First, its slow. It limits you to a maximum of one property per year. Another problem is that at a certain point, conventional lenders stop lending to you. Most conventional lenders allow a maximum of four mortgages on your credit report. Then theres the fact that you have to move every single year. That gets old, even when youre in your 20sespecially when you get married, and your wife isnt keen to live with your twin brother for the rest of your lives. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. It was around this point that Scott married Jennifer, and this whole hopscotch-investing plan started showing its limitations. Transitions Fortunately for the Hoefler twins, Jennifer instantly saw the appeal of the twins vision. She looked into the FIRE and liked what she saw. With her contributing a third income and the rapidly accruing income from their rentals, Team Hoefler set their sights on 20%-down rental property loans. They picked up two single-family rentals. The first was rented for $1,350, which they bought for $107,000a straightforward enough deal. The second was a small one-bedroom home they picked up for $65,000. Initially, we planned to rent it conventionally at around $900, but while we were doing the turnover updates, we listened to a BiggerPockets episode about Airbnb. Halfway through the hour-long episode I decided to make it into an Urban Cottage and make well over $900/month using the vacation rental platform.

Scaling & Strategy Most of the properties we buy need heavy cosmetic work: paint, cabinets, floors, bathrooms, light fixtures, and so on. We do most of the work ourselves. It helps to be handy! The Hoeflers have also tried their hand at full renovations, though those havent always been smooth (more on that shortly). But typically the Hoeflers follow the BRRRR strategy: buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat. They use hard money to finance the acquisition and renovations, then refinance to a 30-year fixed rental property mortgage. Our business model is to find properties that are undervalued from a rental perspective and do heavy cosmetic work to push market value. Or find complete remodels where we can capitalize on the potential ARV (after-repair value). The result? They average around $350-400 monthly net cash flow from each door. Related: Why Financial Freedom Can Be Highly OverratedAnd Not Necessarily Lead to Happiness Missteps Along the Way Our first full remodel was a bust. We had issues with contractors, blew our budget and eventually ended up with an overpriced home that wasnt even completed. We still own the home today, as a rental with minimal cash flow. The good news? Our saving grace is that we went into the project with plenty of backdoor options. The property is in a fantastic neighborhood, which has been seeing solid growth. We knew that the rental market would be strong enough to at least break even. I asked the Hoeflers about what they learned from the experience. The main lesson (among many others) is Do not make decisions based on need. At a certain point we realized we were in over our heads, and we failed to think through our options and the long-term consequences of our decisions. We were making emotional decisions based on our current sense of need. Reaching FIRE & The Ever-After The stability that real estate investing has brought to our lives meant we have been free to change careers, build businesses, travel, and ultimately give back in ways we never thought possible. The twins quit their day jobs, but they found they loved investing in real estate enough to keep going. Today, they sell small multifamily properties to other investors in the Twin Cities, through a company called The Duplex Doctors. Why retire when youre having so much fun making money? Altogether, along with my wife Jenny and my brother Drew, we own eight total properties with 14 doors. We are about to close on another four properties with seven doors. I asked Scott about his final words of advice for anyone looking to reach FIRE through rental properties. Sit down and think through your why for purchasing real estate. Everyone says money at first. But to be truly successful in this industry, you need a deeper reason than just the desire to make money. So? Whats your why, Scott? For me, my time is my most valuable resource. My hope is that real estate will allow me the capacity to give back to this world in ways a standard 9-5 job cant. Its hard to argue with that.

Interested in FIRE from real estate? Whats your why? How are you approaching the journey to FIRE, and what are your questions along the way? Weigh in with a comment! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/fire-in-5-years-on-rental-income

[imspardagus]

The last dream

The road trip with Mark was intended to restore him. But it had another purpose that was personal to me.

 Some 12 years ago, under the heel of what was then the worst bout of depression in over 40 years of the condition, I had walked in the company of a good friend, Graham, from Melrose to Lindisfarne, following what is known as St Cuthbert’s Way. The final stage of the journey had seen us wading barefoot, in horizontal rain that stung the face like a thousand needles, boots dangling around our necks, across the Pilgrims’ Path to the Holy Island.

 The Path crosses a tidal bay. Twice a day, the waters withdraw, leaving a mudflat etched with rivulets and pools. On a good day, they sparkle and delight. On this day, they seemed only to carry a reminder that we were trespassers in the sea’s domain. No matter how often your intellect repeated to you that you had hours to spare before the bed on which you were stumbling, bent into the gale, would be reclaimed and submerged, your instinct was screaming at you that you were somewhere you did not belong.

  We reached the island and sat on a rock looking back and laughed. We laughed uncontrollably, for five minutes. It was the laughter of relief, of the thrill of being spared. And then we walked into town for mugs of tea and lemon drizzle cake that tasted divine.

 I had started the journey a troubled man, unable to tease apart the threads of my misery. Somewhere along the journey, without my conscious intervention, they had started to unravel before my eyes. Now I could see them and they could not hurt me so much. As we walked, I found myself picking up each in turn and examining it with a curious detachment. “Ah, that is all you are! I see.” And with that, depression’s boot heel lifted from my neck and I felt light and began to move more easily through the landscape of my life.

 This is the point where I make my confession. I am an atheist. And yet I know that what I enjoyed on that walk would be regarded by any one of the three billion or so people on this planet who are religious as a spiritual experience. And so do I regard it. As much as I am sure that a Dawkins, a Pinker or an Eagleman could trace every nuance of what I went through back to its chemical and electrical source, yet the outcome of all of those tweaks and sparks is so much more than a set of molecular adjustments (as I am sure Pinker and Eagleman at least would agree). Not to understand that is to confuse the message with the medium. Your mind is a virtual machine created by, and operating within, an organic one. Like our physical selves, it has evolved within our world, responding to stimuli we barely discern, hearing whispers released from a very distant and different past, modifying and re-ordering our perceptions and thoughts, enhancing, or sometimes disrupting, our sense of well-being. That process of subtle engagement with both the world around us and our remote history requires a name and, taking into account its unknowable, ethereal magic, “spirituality” seems as good as any.

 Northumberland seems to be my spiritual home. I cannot imagine why. I am an Essex boy and, despite my mother’s story weaving, so far as I have been able to trace, Essex is where both sides of my family came from. The furthest north my mother’s family made it in 400 years was Sheffield. But after the walk to Holy Island came a walk along Hadrian’s Wall and then another, up the sublime Northumberland Coast from Warkworth to Berwick. Each trip was like a homecoming and the rehabilitation brought a peace of mind that carried me above the dark swamps of my condition for months.

 And so a dream started to form in my head. A dream of retiring from my job, which, though not itself the cause of my depression, yet provided fertile ground in which the seeds of it could take hold and send their blackened and twisted shoots up to pollute my life.

 I dreamed of a cottage close to the coast; close enough that I could open the door and amble unimpeded to the shore. My dog - for yes, at last, I could enjoy the companionship of a dog (a real dog, not one of those pitiable snivelling creatures you had to carry like an animated hand towel) - would race back and forth, up into the dunes then down to the waterline, mapping out an area a thousand times the size of our actual footprint, always returning to me to check in. His energy would supplement and feed mine. His being would lend mine substance and validate my presence in the landscape.

 Then home to the house where, lunch eaten, I would sit, before a real fire in winter, in the garden in summer, and read, read for pleasure. And move quietly towards a gentle death.

 I added to this the aspiration that, each day, on rising, I would sit down at my desk and write. All those stories that had come unbidden into my head and asked for my help in being told: unharnessed now from the shafts of legal certainty which had, for forty years, constrained and stiffened my use of language, I would see whether I could do justice to their petitions.

 It was theatre, a dream bathed in the golden light of wishfulness seen from the auditorium of drudgery. Dutifully, it had all the components I needed to imagine myself at last contented; and all the elements of chilling reality concealed from view behind the painted scenery.

 So I was stung when my son, with whom I shared my dream, took against it.

 What I heard him say was that he wasn’t having his children deprived of the company of their grandparents the way Heather and I had contrived to deprive him and Helen of theirs. (My mother had selfishly died of cancer before Matthew was born. My father had only bothered to survive for four more years. Heather’s parents had been carelessly lost to her by the time she was thirteen.)

 That is what I heard and it filled me with childish resentment. Hadn’t I devoted enough of my life to my children? Wasn’t I entitled to choose how I passed the remainder of my life once they were independent?

 It took some time for me to understand what Matthew had really said and when I did I saw that the gold of my dream was tarnished and peeling, and the solid shapes and landscapes mere trompes l’oeil, the canvas beneath cracked and flat. For, so far from refusing to relinquish his hold on me, my wonderful, rational and sensitive son had seen what I had turned a blind eye to and was trying to save me from it. Matthew knew about my condition and how crippling it could be. And where I had seen quiet and contentment he had seen isolation and the descent into despair. “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” So said Tacitus. Where they have created a wasteland, they call it peace. Not wanting to blow the dream apart before my eyes, he had turned his concern into something he knew I would be obliged to respond to: the call of family. But truth to tell, he was afraid for me.

 And I knew then he was right. The ideal of living alone had been tested thirty years before, when I had bought a basement flat in Pimlico. Almost friendless, I had persuaded myself that that was how I liked it. I was a loner. It took only months (and, it must be said, a few thousand cockroaches) for me to learn that I was wrong. I had no resilience, no inbuilt joie de vivre with which to meet and engage with the possibility of a new life. London should have been my freedom call. But, depressed and anxious, convinced that I was worthless, for three years I cowered behind the front door, hoping it would go away.

 I knew he was right. But as my depression worsened, the call of Northumberland became stronger. I adjusted the dream. Recalling that walk up the coast, I remembered approaching Berwick: the sweep of the Tweed, crossing the ancient bridge into the old town. I remembered how we had fallen into a pub where the beer and the welcome were good. I remembered walking the walls and being entranced by the quality of the architecture, the winding lanes. And the friendliness of the people we met. Maybe, just maybe, if I lived there I could have my countryside and my dog but swap the solitude for the proximity of others. Berwick wasn’t London. It had, I recalled feeling, a human scale and a kindness to it.

  I pictured myself in my study, looking out across the estuary while the next thoughts coalesced in my head. I heard the solid clunk of the front door as I set off with my eager companion for a day’s walk, inland or out along the coast. Or welcoming visitors (who would, of course, stay no longer than the conventions of hospitality dictate). Or making the short journey to those great cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle, as my Twitter friend Mike did, seemingly every day. Culture, so long written out of my life by my growing exhaustion with London, would reawaken my soul and authenticate my pitiable claim to be enlightened.

 But could I afford it? However many times I went over them, the figures seemed not to stack up well. I was well beyond the age at which most of my colleagues had retired but, giving up work, I would lose half my income and I would have to pay off my mortgage and Helen had not completed her education. She would need financial support. My savings were already depleted. I knew my tiny house down here in the South East would command a higher price than properties in rural Northumberland but would that hold true for a town like Berwick?

 And that is why when I sat down to plan our road trip, I made the last stop Berwick. I had to check that my need for hope had not created another soft-focus tableau of utopia.

 We arrived in the darkening afternoon of a bitterly cold January day. But it was as if the doors of heaven had been opened for us. Our room in Castle Vale House looked out on the Tweed and on the majestic sweep of the railway viaduct – a bridge, always a good omen. Our host was welcoming and keen to promote an enjoyable visit. As soon as I could stir Mark I forced him into his overcoat and insisted that we walk into town along the river path.

The time with Mark has been a serendipitous delight but it has also been surreally instructive. I now know how a dog feels when it is out with its master. Mark, for whatever reason, has come to meet the world at a shambling pace. So far from not being hurried, if he senses that those around him want to travel at greater speed he will slow down. If they fail to heed this he will, as like as not, cross the road for, it seems, no better reason than to teach them a lesson when they, looking back, panic that he is not within view. (I am sure by the way that none of this is done maliciously, or even at a conscious level. I don’t believe there is a malicious bone in Mark’s body.) I am not the fastest walker. I thought I was pretty quick until I tried to keep pace with my son. But I found myself constantly walking ten or twenty paces then stopping, walking back, reassuring myself that Master Mark was still on the trail and setting off again. It is a fine way to exercise but it requires more patience than I thought I possessed.

 And so it was that a ten-minute walk took twenty, by which time we were both frozen and Mark’s body language was that of a small child that had been dragged round a gallery of Victorian watercolours for three hours.

 Fortunately, Mike had primed us and we found ourselves outside the Barrels.

Anticipation can be a tricky thing. As we approached the door, I felt the thrill of a moment ago give way to an expectation of that experience most beer drinkers have had when entering a strange local. The perceptible chilling of the air. The sudden drop in conversation, the hard stares. You summon up all the self-confidence you can find, try not to fluff your order before the testing gaze of the barman, and retreat to whatever small space you can find, hoping you haven’t unknowingly taken the seat Old Pete has regarded as his since returning from the Boer War.

 So it came as a shock of pure delight that we were greeted by the four regulars propping up the bar even before we were near it. By the time we had drinks in our hands we were deep in easy conversation with all of them and when we went to leave, three pints later, it was with regret and best wishes on all sides. Berwick seemed happy to have us.

 We walk out in search of a meal. Looking at a self-promoting menu, we are passed by a woman. She takes five steps then turns. “Excuse me,” she says, almost apologetically, “But I really wouldn’t eat there. I mean it all looks nice on the menu. But it’s terribly over-priced and my husband got taken to hospital…” We thank her and I chalk up another tick to the people of Berwick.

 Moving on, Mark is getting resentful again so we drop into another pub, the Brown Bear. We have been told about this place. It is being restored through a kind of crowd-funding trust and, leaving aside the rather awful Jackson Pollock-esque accident over the fireplace it is a rather fine gin palace. But once again, it is how we are greeted that lifts the visit. The girl behind the bar is a delight with a great line in sardonic asides that reminds me at once of Janice Toner from John Byrne’s “Tutti Frutti”, as played by the incomparable Katy Murphy. She tells us about the place and points out the owner. Over by the window is a man in a huge cardigan, talking to two elderly people and a priest. Pretty soon, he joins us, eager to tell us about the project. The priest turns out to be the young curate of the Holy Trinity Church and we learn his life story too over a couple of pints. He is keen to offer us a tour of the church, which is a rare example of English Commonwealth religious building.

By the time we returned to our room, I had enjoyed the conversation of ten people I had never met before. The dream of Berwick was coming to life before me.

 The next day, having walked the walls again and reacquainted myself with the town I went from one estate agent to the next, looking at prices. What I saw seemed unbelievable. It seemed I could exchange my present small house for a six-bedroom, Grade II listed Georgian town house in the centre of Berwick and have enough over to create a fund for my daughter. Too good to be true, surely?

 And as the day wore on, I began to think that perhaps it was. We met Mike and his wife for tea in the splendid Corner House Café and that was a treat. But later, as we continued our tour, I began to see the town more clearly. Everything I had experienced was good and encouraging. But I began to notice the dilapidation that filled the gaps between the old and refined properties. I saw the pinched faces of many of the people. This is, after all, the North-East of England, neglected for decades by Government save to rape it of its industrial bedrock. I felt that the town was on the whole pulling back. I reminded myself that it was the dead of winter and that Berwick has a booming tourist industry. But I had to admit what I was seeing. Berwick is beautiful. Its people, the ones I met, are open and generous. But it is not thriving.

I had to think how much that mattered.

What it seemed to come down to was this. I’m sixty-five now. And I am a physically healthy sixty-five. I am mobile, I am used to fending for myself. And I have in the last few years learned how to meet other people on terms. Better late than never.

 I recall, but not without wincing to this day, my first trip to Amsterdam, back in the Eighties. I went with a colleague, on a course. And while I was in her company I had a great time. Because she was making all the running. We’d dip in and out of bars and cafes, find restaurants, walk the canals and I loved it. But then her partner turned up and, naturally, they wanted time to themselves. For two days of a weekend, I paced the streets alone before returning to my room miserable and defeated. I passed the same bars and cafes but fear kept me out of them: fear of not being welcome, fear of making a fool of myself. I spoke to no-one. Eventually I ventured into a restaurant we had visited and ordered just what I had ordered before with the minimum of interaction. Alone, it tasted dead in my mouth and I left as soon as I could.

 And I remember even then, as it was happening, thinking, “This is Amsterdam, the most open, the most cosmopolitan, city in the world. If you cannot meet these people on terms, the problem is yours.” I was right, but knowing it made no difference.

 This was my life. The barrister’s three-piece suit was my carapace which allowed everyone to assume that my diffidence was born of geeky superiority. But inside it I was a mess, a terrified little boy in a world magnified by his imaginings, his fear of being found out.

 Over time I learned ways to simulate sociability but it was not until my children came along and, still later, when I found acceptance at the Old Cross Tavern, that I learned that I could be myself and not be despised. You cannot fake it with children or drunks (sorry, folks, joke. Honest).

 But Berwick. I’m fit. And I can now make a reasonable fist of being a human in human company. And as my children have grown and moved away, I have become accustomed to being on my own in a way that is much more comfortable than thirty years ago, except when depression has taken hold. And I now have strategies for managing even that.

 So looking at the present, maybe I could make a go of a new life in Berwick. And Edinburgh and Glasgow and Newcastle.

 But what of ten years hence? What if, at seventy-five, I was no longer so strong, no longer so mobile, so independent? Would Berwick’s Elizabethan walls become the perimeter of my prison?

 And all very well selling this pricey hovel and buying somewhere better at half the price in the North East, but what of the return. It’s like the old riddle: what goes up down but won’t go down up. The answer for our time is not an umbrella in a chimney but a man trying to change location. I might assume that the value of my property in Berwick would move with prices in Berwick. But it would take optimism beyond even the capacity of Theresa May when overselling our chances of a successful Brexit to believe that it would even keep pace with those of the commuter belt around London. When I factored in the proposal that I would use the move to Berwick to release capital for my daughter it seemed inescapable that I would never be able to afford to move back.

 So the curtain came down on Dream Number 2 and the darkness of the auditorium closed around me. For a week and more I felt numb. I couldn’t see my way forward and, if I am honest, I didn’t feel the incentive to find it. I wanted to lie down and surrender. I cannot justify that to you. I can only record it.

 This time it was Matthew who lit the tiny candle of hope. He had decided to buy his first flat. It would be a stretch for a while but he thought he could get through the initial period by taking in a lodger. A lodger. It stuck in my brain like a small fish bone between two teeth. I could not at first think why. Then it came to me.

 I had been thinking that I would buy a house that fitted my needs. Three beds at most, so that I could entertain guests. But staring at me through the estate agent’s window had been a substantial house with more than enough space in the centre of town. And I knew, having been shaken by the results of searches, that holiday apartments in Berwick during the summer months commanded a high price. Suppose I were to carve out such an apartment and save whatever income it generated? In ten years’ time I could have recouped all that I had given away.

 And then the next thought, hard on its heels. If I am seventy-five and frail, do I want to saddle myself with ownership of a house, or even a spacious flat?

 The curtain lifted again. An old man seated on a bench in a rose garden musing peacefully on his life before welcoming the kindly figure of Death and taking his hand for the final journey into the dry-ice as the Spot Number 1, infusing the parting with shimmering gold closes to a pinprick.

 Shall I leave it there? The happy ending? No, let’s do this properly. I was talking this through with Matthew at the weekend. He listened and nodded. He opened up the proposal and suggested some options along the same lines (not about meeting Death in the garden. I didn’t include that part of the vision, for some reason). And then he said, quietly, “But this is a few years down the line isn’t it. I mean, you’ve said before. Your sister…”

 Oh, Matthew. You are the best of me. And you have such integrity and such courage. Anyone else would have nodded along but you saw again what I had chosen to close my eyes to. My sister, my older sister, married to a wonderful man but a man who has just turned ninety and, for all that he wishes not to be any trouble to anyone, is a constant source of anxiety. I had explained to Matthew that the reason I kept my car, which last year scraped to a grand total of 1500 road miles, making it the least polluting VW diesel on the road, was that when my sister needed me, I had to be able to be there. Had to. And, ever so gently, Matthew had again brought me back to reality. How could I think of moving away while my brother-in-law was alive?

 And this, I realise, brings me back to the beginning. Not the beginning of this article but to a beginning sixty years ago. I have written elsewhere about the Son of Lassie, the boy who came to believe that it was his purpose to protect his family from harm, even though he had no means at his disposal other than the power of prayer. Now I look at my situation I see that the little boy is still there, still on guard, like a Japanese soldier who never accepted his Emperor’s surrender. My family and my friends can leave me. They have: most of them are gone. But I can’t leave them. Those who are only physically remote from me are still in my thoughts and, though I barely know that I am doing so, all this while, to borrow from the blessed Janis Ian, I’ve been “keeping a light on the stair” just in case they ever need to find their way back home. Those who are gone more permanently have left holes in the fabric of my life on which I still snag my attempts to be happy. As my dreams testify, I still hold myself responsible in some way for failing to protect them.

 But that leaves those who remain and I cannot abandon them even though they may wish for my sake that I would. I have this image in my head, you see. All the people I love are safe, sitting around a table, sharing a meal, sharing conversation, happy. And I am looking down on them through a golden haze, feeling the warmth of their comfort and, without dropping my guard, allowing myself a moment’s satisfaction at a job well enough done. But as I am unable to believe in an afterlife, I suppose that will have to be the last dream.

[therealestatesparkblog]

How Two 30-Something Twins Achieved FIRE in 5 Years on Rental Income

Spoiler alert: Drew and Scott Hoefler still work today. Except now its by choice. Now in their early 30s, the twins live and invest in the Twin Cities, and a decade ago never even considered a career in real estate. After five years of investing in real estate, they successfully reached financial independence. Heres their story, complete with the mistakes they made along the way. House Hunting, House Hacking In 2013, the twins were single 20-somethings working for agricultural giant Land-O-Lakes, looking to buy their first home. They planned to buy a home with a few bedrooms together, move in, and bring on a roommate or two if the house were big enough. Then, over dinner with their parents one night, their mom offered a better idea: Why dont you buy a two-flat? (Thats Midwest for duplex, FYI.) Teenagers may sneer at every idea their parents have, but in your 20s, you start paying attention once more to your parents advice. We quickly realized that we could live in one side, rent out the other side and cover our mortgage we were all-in. The hunt for the perfect duplex was on!

The (First) Duplex After touring some duds, the twins came across a gem in the Arts District in northeast Minneapolis. They described it as an up and coming neighborhood, which was not a euphemismthe neighborhood was gentrifying with a fun and funky craft beer scene. Then came the first stumbling block. At first look, Drew and I had trouble seeing the lower unit because of issues with the renters. We put our offer in based upon seeing the upstairs unit only. You know where this is going. The downstairs unit needed work, which they discovered after putting the duplex under contract. Luckily, the work was cosmetic, nothing structural or mechanical. Upon buying the property, they non-renewed the tenants, made updates such as removing the drop ceiling, and moved in. The purchase price was $208,000. Our financing was an American Dream program that was an owner-occupied conventional loan financed by U.S. Bank. Great program. We rented the upstairs unit out for $1,300 from day one. That proved enough to cover their mortgage payment. A successful house hack. Nowadays, with further gentrification in the neighborhood, they charge $1,700 for that upstairs unit. Related: Are Your Children Stopping You From Achieving Financial Freedom? Rinsing & Repeating the House Hack When you use owner-occupied financing, you have to live in the property for at least one year. So thats exactly what the Hoefler twins did. Seeing how easy it was to house hack and generate rental income, the twins knew they were onto something. They wanted to expand their portfolio. The first thing they did was look for other ways to lower their expenses, so they could put more of their income aside for their next property. If youve ever read a single sentence about FIRE (financial independence, retiring early), you know that the first rule of FIRE is maximizing your savings and investments. (FIRE Challenge: Start by brainstorming ways to live on half your income!) As they neared the end of their first year of house hacking, they set out to find another multifamily to house hack. They successfully rinsed and repeated this process for several years, living in the property for a year then buying a new multifamily and moving in, with owner-occupied financing. Which is a great way to start, but not a viable long-term strategy. First, its slow. It limits you to a maximum of one property per year. Another problem is that at a certain point, conventional lenders stop lending to you. Most conventional lenders allow a maximum of four mortgages on your credit report. Then theres the fact that you have to move every single year. That gets old, even when youre in your 20sespecially when you get married, and your wife isnt keen to live with your twin brother for the rest of your lives. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. It was around this point that Scott married Jennifer, and this whole hopscotch-investing plan started showing its limitations. Transitions Fortunately for the Hoefler twins, Jennifer instantly saw the appeal of the twins vision. She looked into the FIRE and liked what she saw. With her contributing a third income and the rapidly accruing income from their rentals, Team Hoefler set their sights on 20%-down rental property loans. They picked up two single-family rentals. The first was rented for $1,350, which they bought for $107,000a straightforward enough deal. The second was a small one-bedroom home they picked up for $65,000. Initially, we planned to rent it conventionally at around $900, but while we were doing the turnover updates, we listened to a BiggerPockets episode about Airbnb. Halfway through the hour-long episode I decided to make it into an Urban Cottage and make well over $900/month using the vacation rental platform.

Scaling & Strategy Most of the properties we buy need heavy cosmetic work: paint, cabinets, floors, bathrooms, light fixtures, and so on. We do most of the work ourselves. It helps to be handy! The Hoeflers have also tried their hand at full renovations, though those havent always been smooth (more on that shortly). But typically the Hoeflers follow the BRRRR strategy: buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat. They use hard money to finance the acquisition and renovations, then refinance to a 30-year fixed rental property mortgage. Our business model is to find properties that are undervalued from a rental perspective and do heavy cosmetic work to push market value. Or find complete remodels where we can capitalize on the potential ARV (after-repair value). The result? They average around $350-400 monthly net cash flow from each door. Related: Why Financial Freedom Can Be Highly OverratedAnd Not Necessarily Lead to Happiness Missteps Along the Way Our first full remodel was a bust. We had issues with contractors, blew our budget and eventually ended up with an overpriced home that wasnt even completed. We still own the home today, as a rental with minimal cash flow. The good news? Our saving grace is that we went into the project with plenty of backdoor options. The property is in a fantastic neighborhood, which has been seeing solid growth. We knew that the rental market would be strong enough to at least break even. I asked the Hoeflers about what they learned from the experience. The main lesson (among many others) is Do not make decisions based on need. At a certain point we realized we were in over our heads, and we failed to think through our options and the long-term consequences of our decisions. We were making emotional decisions based on our current sense of need. Reaching FIRE & The Ever-After The stability that real estate investing has brought to our lives meant we have been free to change careers, build businesses, travel, and ultimately give back in ways we never thought possible. The twins quit their day jobs, but they found they loved investing in real estate enough to keep going. Today, they sell small multifamily properties to other investors in the Twin Cities, through a company called The Duplex Doctors. Why retire when youre having so much fun making money? Altogether, along with my wife Jenny and my brother Drew, we own eight total properties with 14 doors. We are about to close on another four properties with seven doors. I asked Scott about his final words of advice for anyone looking to reach FIRE through rental properties. Sit down and think through your why for purchasing real estate. Everyone says money at first. But to be truly successful in this industry, you need a deeper reason than just the desire to make money. So? Whats your why, Scott? For me, my time is my most valuable resource. My hope is that real estate will allow me the capacity to give back to this world in ways a standard 9-5 job cant. Its hard to argue with that.

Interested in FIRE from real estate? Whats your why? How are you approaching the journey to FIRE, and what are your questions along the way? Weigh in with a comment! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/fire-in-5-years-on-rental-income