#i all has been done already and i wanted to do something different

[burrowkit]

I feared the day would come to this. Unfortunately, my father fell too gravely ill last night and passed away. That means... that means the kingdom is mine. Queendom now, technically.

Since a child, I knew there was something wrong with me. I've never been able to put my finger on it, but my father... he always ensured I had the best of tutors. Not to say he would have done it any other way anyways but... there seemed to be some sort of maniac determination for me to succeed.

I hope I do.

At every coronation, the would-be monarch drops a single drop of blood into The Goblet of Divine Rights.

If it stays red? Peace.

But if it turns black... the would-be monarch is killed. This is because every time it turned black, the monarch became a tyrant. Destroying the kingdom with everything they could possess.

I know with every drop of blood in my body, the blood will turn black.

Not because I want it to, but because I know it will.

Something's wrong with me. I know it.

The trumpets sound, counting off my entrance. I'm forced to make my way to the door.

"Your Majesty," the guards great, bowing at me.

I want to yell at them, remind them that that was my father. I'm Your Highness. The Princess.

It won't do me any good, now.

I force my feet to keep moving, until I reach the Hall of Chaos and Fate. There, I can't seem to step over the threshold.

One of the guards grabs my arm, as if escorting me, gently pulling me over the line. We make it to the end of the Hall.

"Your Majesty," the ancient priestess greets. Stories have been written about her for centuries. How she exists without time and death. "Your hand, if you please," she motions, extending her hand, palm up. Her other hand holds the single pin that'll be used to withdraw my blood.

I want to fight it.

I want to run away, to scream.

"Your Majesty, I promise, nothing will happen to you," she informs me, voice quiet.

My mother passed away a few years ago. And this priestess, although she refuses to don a name, was one of my main tutors. Guiding me on how to further my education.

To help make me great.

Tentatively, I offer her my hand. I hiss in pain as the jams the pin into my index finger. Not that I have much choice.

She grips my wrist, gently dropping a single drop into the Goblet, and pressing a towel to my finger. I hear her whisper a few words, and the stinging instantly stops.

I close my eyes, terrified of what will come of my blood.

It's only when the priestess curses do my eyes snap open.

Her eyes are wide, terrified. It takes her a moment for relief to spread over her face, she grins wide.

"Thank you all, for attending. I have wondrous news," she announces, those beautiful eyes that seem to change colour by every second, seemingly staring into my soul. "The blood did not turn black," she announces first.

My heart speeds up. Why did she curse? Does she want my blood to mark me as a tyrant?

Her grin widens, as if hearing my thoughts. "It's not red, either."

Suddenly, the hall is chattering. Everyone has an opinion on this.

"SILENCE!" She demands, her voice ringing around the space. It's probably the loudest I've ever heard her talk. "We simply have forgotten a time when the blood would turn a different colour. Gold, Queen Rain produced the colour gold."

Absolute silence.

Oh, I'm sure everyone wants to discuss what gold means.

I stare into those multi-coloured eyes, a constant shift. Somehow, I feel at peace, despite my pounding heart.

She nods at me. "Queen Rain has been chosen by the divine to be gifted by wonderful abilities. These abilities will help ensure the kingdom, nay, queendom, exist for a long time. In peace. In prosperity. She is our purest choice."

I stare at her, shocked.

"You are all dismissed," she waves a hand.

Technically, as the now-almost-Queen, I should be the one dismissing. And yet, this Hall has always been a place for the priestesses. They hold court here over the monarchy.

Everyone files out, quickly. Gossip already spreading quickly.

"Darling child," she whispers quickly, hand still on mine, clinging to mine. "Your road will be long and tragic. One day, you may have to step aside," with her other hand, she cups my face, staring into my eyes. Into my face. "Do you understand me, child? One day, you will be asked to step aside and serve as a priestess. You will help ensure our world never falls to evil or pain or suffering ever again, is this understood?"

My eyes widen as I stare at her.

Our ancient priestess.

Bound without time and death.

Ensure the queendom exists for a long time.

"But-"

"I know, child, I know," she pulls me into a hug, stroking my hair gently. "You are not alone, by greatest of grandchildren. You will never walk this road alone. Ever you find yourself truly alone, just know, someday, somehow, another like us will surface. And it will one day be your duty to ensure the world continues to be full of peace."

At Every Coronation, Each Would-Be Monarch Is To Provide A Single Drop of Blood For The Goblet Of Divine Rights. If The Blood Stays Red, Their Reign Will Be Peaceful. If The Drop Turns Black, They Will Bring Tyranny And Ruin To The Kingdom…What Does It Mean When Your Blood Turns Gold?

[thepencilnerd]

A Lesson In Fear Extinction | part I

pairing: professor!Jack Abbot x f!psych phd student reader summary: You’re a senior doctoral student in the clinical department, burned out and emotionally barricaded, just trying to finish your final few years when Jack Abbot—trauma researcher, new committee member, and unexpectedly perceptive—starts seeing through you in ways you didn’t anticipate wc: 11.9k content/warnings: academic!AU, slow burn (takes places over 3 years lbffr), frat boys being gross + depictions of unwanted male attention/verbal harassment, academic power dynamics, emotional repression, discussions of mental health, mutual pining, hurt/comfort, angst, so much yearning, canon divergence, no explicit smut (yet/tbd but still 18+ MDNI, i will fight u) a/n: this started as a slow-burn AU and spiraled into a study in mutual repression, avoidant-attachment, and me trying to resolve my personal baggage through writing ~yet again~ p.s. indubitably inspired by @hotelraleigh and their incredible mohan x abbot fic (and all of their fics that live in my head rent free, tyvm) i hope you stay tuned for part II (coming soon, pinky promise) ^-^

The first thing you learn about Dr. Jack Abbot is that he hates small talk. That, and that he has a death glare potent enough to silence even the most self-important faculty members in the psych department.

The second thing you learn is that he runs his office like a bunker—door usually half-shut, always a little too cold, shelves lined with books no one's touched in decades. You step inside for your first meeting, and it feels like entering a war room.

"You’re early," he says, without looking up from the annotated manuscript he’s scribbling on.

"It's the first day of the school year."

"Same difference."

You take a seat, balancing your laptop on your knees. Your fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure if you should even bother.

Dr. Abbot finally glances up. Hazel eyes, sharp behind silver-framed glasses. "Let’s make this easy. Tell me what you’re working on and what you want from me."

You hesitate. Not because you don’t know. You’ve been rehearsing this on the walk over. You just hadn’t planned on him cutting through the pleasantries quite so fast.

"I’m running a mixed methods study on affective forecasting errors in anxiety and depression. Lab-based mood induction, longitudinal survey follow-up, and semi-structured interviews. I'm trying to map discrepancies between predicted and experienced affect and how that mismatch contributes to maladaptive emotion regulation patterns over time."

A beat.

"So you're testing whether people with anxiety and depression are bad at predicting their own feelings."

You blink. "Yes."

"Good. Start with that next time."

You bite the tip of your tongue. Roll the flesh between your teeth to ground yourself. There is no next time, you want to say. You’re only meeting with him once, to get sign-off on your committee. He wasn’t your first choice. Wasn't even your second. But your advisor's on sabbatical, and the other quantitative faculty are already overbooked.

Dr. Abbot leans back in his chair, examining you. "You’re primary is Robby, right?"

"Technically, yes."

He hums, not bothering to hide the skepticism. "And you want me on your committee because...?"

"Because you published that meta-analysis on PTSD and chronic stress. Your work on cumulative trauma exposure and dysregulated affect dovetails with mine on stress-related trajectories for internalizing disorders and comorbidity. I thought you might actually get what I’m trying to do."

His brow lifts, just slightly. "You did your homework."

"Well, I’m asking you for feedback on a dissertation that will probably make me break down countless times before it's done. Figured I should know what I was getting into."

Dr. Abbot's mouth twitches. You wouldn’t call it a smile, exactly. But it’s something.

"Alright," he says, flipping open a calendar. "Let’s see if we can find a time next week to go over your proposal draft."

You arch a brow. "You’ll do it?"

"You came in prepared. And you didn’t waste my time—as much as the other fourth years. That gets you further than you’d think around here."

You nod, heart thudding. Not because you’re nervous.

Because you have the weirdest feeling that Jack Abbot just became your biggest academic problem—and your most unexpected ally.

You see him again the next day. Robby was enjoying his last remaining few weeks of paternity leave and graciously asked Jack to sub for his foundations of clinical psychology course. Jack preferred the word coerced but was silenced by a text message with a photo of a child attached. The baby was cute enough to warrant blackmail. 

He barely got through the door intact: balancing a coffee cup between his teeth, cradling a half-closed laptop under one arm, and wrangling the straps of a clearly ancient backpack. His limp is more pronounced today. The small cohort watches him with a mix of curiosity and vague alarm.

You’re in the front row, laptop open before he even gets to the podium.

Jack drops everything onto the lectern with a heavy exhale, then glances around. His eyes catch on you and pause—not recognition yet, just flicker. Then he turns back to plug in his laptop.

You don’t expect to see him again two days later, striding into the 200-level general psych class you TA. The room’s already three-quarters of the way full when he walks in, and it takes him a moment before he does a brief double-take in your direction.

You return your attention to your notes. Jack stares.

"Small world."

"Nice to see you too, Dr. Abbot."

He sighs. "Why am I not surprised."

"Because the annual stipend increase doesn't adjust for inflation, I'm desperate, and there aren't enough grants given the current state of events?"

Jack mutters something under his breath about cosmic punishment and unfolds the syllabus from his coat pocket like it personally betrayed him.

When he finally settles at the front—coffee in one hand, laptop balancing precariously on the desk—you catch him bending and straightening his knee just under the edge of the table, jaw set tight. It’s subtle. Anyone else might miss it. But you’ve been watching.

You say nothing. 

A few students linger with questions—mostly undergrads eager to impress, notebooks clutched to their chests, rattling off textbook jargon in shaky voices. Jack humors them, mostly. Nods here, clarification there. But his eyes flick to you more than once.

You take your time with the stack of late enrollment passes. He’s still watching when you sling your tote over one shoulder and head for the door.

Probably off to the lab. Or your cubicle in the main psych building. Wherever fourth years disappear to when they aren’t shadowing faculty or training underqualified and overzealous research assistants on data collection procedures.

Jack shifts his weight onto his good leg and half-listens to the sophomore with the over-highlighted textbook.

His eyes stay on you when you walk out.

You make it three steps past the stairwell before the sound of your name stops you. It’s not loud—more like a clipped murmur through the general noise of backpacks zipping and chairs scraping—but it cuts straight through.

You turn back.

Jack’s still at the front, the stragglers now filtering out behind him. He doesn’t wave. Doesn’t beckon. Just meets your gaze like he already knows you’ll wait. You do.

He makes his way toward you slowly, favoring one leg. The closer he gets, the more you notice—the way his hand tightens on the strap of his backpack, the exhausted pull at his brow. He’s not masking as well today.

"Thanks for not saying anything," he says when he stops beside you.

You shrug. "Didn’t seem like you needed an audience."

Jack huffs a laugh, dry and faintly surprised. "Most people mean well, but—"

"They hover," you finish. "Or overcompensate. Or say something weird and then try to walk it back."

"Exactly."

You both stand there for a beat too long, campus noise shifting around you like a slow tide.

"I was heading to the coffee shop," you say finally. "Did you want anything?"

Jack tilts his head. "Bribery?"

"Positive reinforcement." The words trail behind a small grin. 

He shakes his head, mouth twitching. "Probably had enough caffeine for the day."

The corner of your lip curls higher. "As if there's such a thing."

That earns you a half-huff, half-scoff—just enough to let you believe you might have amused him.

"Well," you say, taking a step backward, "I’ve got three more RAs to train and one very stubborn loop to fix. See you around, Dr. Abbot."

"Good luck," he says, voice low but steady. "Don’t let the building eat you alive."

The next time he sees you, it’s after 10 p.m. on a Thursday.

You hadn’t planned on staying that late. But the dinosaur of a computer kept crashing, two of your participants no-showed, and by the time you’d salvaged the afternoon’s data to pull, it was easier to crash on the grad lounge couch than face the lone commute back to your apartment.

You must’ve fallen asleep halfway through reading feedback from your committee—curled up with your legs splayed over the edge of the couch and laptop perched on the cheap coffee table. The hall is mostly dark when Jack walks past. He’s heading toward the parking lot when he stops, mid-step.

For a moment, he just stands there, taking in the sight of you tucked awkwardly into yourself. You look comfortable in your oversized hoodie, if not for the highlighter cap still tucked between your fingers and mouth parted in a silent snore. 

He doesn’t say anything. Just watches you breathe for a few seconds longer than necessary.

Then, maybe with more curiosity than concern, he raps his knuckles gently against the doorframe. Once. Twice. Three times for good measure. 

No response.

Jack steps inside and calls out, voice pitched low but insistent. "This is not a sustainable sleep schedule, you know."

You stir—just barely. A vague groan escapes your lips as you shift and swat clumsily in the direction of the noise. "Just five more minutes... need to run reliability analyses..."

Jack chuckles, genuine and surprised.

He leans against the wall, watching you with no urgency to leave. "Dreaming about data cleaning. Impressive."

You make a small, unintelligible noise and swat again, this time with a little more conviction. Jack snorts.

After a moment, he sighs. Then carefully crosses the room, picks up the crumpled throw blanket from the floor, and drapes it over you without ceremony.

He flicks off the overheads and closes the door behind him with a quiet click. The hallway hums with fluorescent buzz as he limps toward the parking lot, shoulders tucked in against the chill.

A few weeks into the semester, the rhythm settles—lecture, discussion, grading, rinse and repeat. But today, something shifts.

You’re stacking quizzes at the front of the general psych lecture hall when Jack catches movement out of the corner of his eye. Two male students—frat-adjacent, all oversized hoodies and entitled swagger—approach your desk.

Jack looks up from his laptop. His expression doesn’t shift, but something in his posture does—a subtle, perceptible freeze. He watches from where he’s still packing up—hand paused on his laptop case, jaw tight, eyes narrowing just slightly as he takes in the dynamic. There’s a flicker of tension behind his glasses, a pause that says: if you needed him, he’d step in.

They swagger up with the kind of smirks you’ve seen too many times before—overconfident, under-read, and powered by too many YouTube clips of alpha male podcasts.

"Yo, TA—what’s up?" one says, leaning far too close to your desk. "Was gonna ask something about the exam, but figured I’d shoot my shot first. You free later? Coffee on me."

His friend elbows him like he’s a comedic genius. "Yeah, like maybe we could pick your brain about, like, how to get into grad school. You probably have all the insider tricks, right?"

You don’t even blink.

"Sure," you say sweetly. "I’d love to review your application materials. Bring your CV, your transcript, three letters of rec, and proof that you’ve read the Title IX policy in full. Bonus points if you can make it through a meeting without quoting Andrew Tate—or I’ll assume you’re trying to get yourself suspended." 

They stare. You smile.

One laughs uncertainly. The other mutters something about how "damn, okay," and both slink away.

Jack’s jaw works once. Then relaxes.

You glance up, like you knew he’d been watching.

"Well handled," he says, voice low as he steps beside you.

You offer a nonchalant shrug. "First years are getting bolder."

"Bold is one word for it."

You hand him a stack of leftover forms. "Relax, Dr. Abbot. I’ve survived undergrads before. I’ll survive again."

Jack gives a small, amused grunt. Then, after a beat: "You can call me Jack."

You glance up, brow raised. 

"Feels a little formal to keep pretending we’re strangers.

You don’t say anything right away. Just nod once, almost imperceptibly, then go back to gathering your things.

He doesn’t push it.

It’s raining hard enough to rattle the windows.

You’re having what your cohort half-jokingly calls a "good brain day"—sentences coming easy, theory clicking into place, citations at your fingertips. You barely notice the weather.

Jack glances up from your chapter draft as you launch into a point about predictive error and affective flattening. He doesn't interrupt. His eyes follow how you pace—one hand gesturing, the other holding your annotated copy, words sharp and certain.

Eventually, you pause mid-thought and glance at him.

He's already looking at you. 

Your hand flies up to cover your mouth. "Shit. I'm sorry—"

Jack shakes his head, lips twitching at the corners. "Don’t apologize. That was… brilliant."

You blink at him, the compliment stalling your momentum. The automatic response bubbles up fast—some joke to deflect, to downplay. You don't say it. Not this time.

Still, your fingers tighten slightly on the edge of the desk. "I don't know about brilliant..."

Jack doesn’t look away. "I do."

The silence stretches—not awkward, exactly, but thick. His gaze doesn’t waver, and it holds something steady and burning behind it.

You glance down at your annotated draft. The silence stays between you like a taut wire.

Jack doesn’t fill it. Just waits—gaze unwavering, as if giving you time to come to your own conclusion. No pressure, no indulgent smile. Just a quiet, grounded certainty that settles between you like weight.

Eventually, you exhale. The tension loosens—not completely, but enough to keep going.

"Okay," you murmur, almost to yourself.

Jack nods once, slowly. Then gestures at your printed draft. "Let’s talk about your integration of mindfulness in the discussion section. I’ve got a few thoughts."

Ethics is the last class of the week. The room's heating is inconsistent, the lights too bright, and Jack doesn’t know how the hell he ended up covering for Frank Langdon. Probably the same way he got stuck with Foundations and General Psych: Robby. The department’s too damn small and apparently everyone with a baby gets to vanish into thin air.

He steps into the room ten minutes early, coffee already lukewarm, and makes a half-hearted attempt to adjust the podium screen. The first few students trickle in, then more. He flips through the lecture slides, barely registering them.

And then he sees you.

You’re near the back, chatting with someone Jack doesn’t recognize. Another grad student by the look of him—slouched posture, soft jaw, navy sweater. The guy’s grinning like he thinks he’s charming. He leans in a little too close to your chair. Says something Jack can’t hear.

Jack tells himself he’s only looking because the guy seems familiar. Maybe someone from Walsh’s lab. Or Garcia’s. 

You laugh at something—light, genuine.

Jack tries not to react.

Navy Sweater says something else, more animated now. He gestures to your laptop. Points to something. You nudge his hand away with a grin and say something back that makes him blush.

Jack flips the page on his lecture notes without reading a word.

You’re still smiling when you finally glance up toward the podium.

Your eyes meet.

Jack doesn’t look away. But he doesn’t smile either.

The guy beside you says something else. You nod politely.

But you’re not looking at him anymore.

The next time you're in Jack’s office, the air feels different—autumn sharp outside, but warm in here.

He notices things. Not all at once, but cumulatively.

Your hair’s longer now. It’s subtle, but the ends graze your jaw in a way they hadn’t before. You’ve started wearing darker shades—amber, forest green, burgundy—instead of the lighter neutrals from early fall. Small changes. Seasonal shifts.

He doesn’t say anything about any of that.

But then he sees it.

A faint smudge of something high on your neck, near the curve of your jaw.

"Rough night?" he asks, lightly. The tone’s casual, but his eyes stay there a second too long.

You look up, blinking. Then seem to realize. "Oh. No, it’s—nothing."

He raises an eyebrow, just once. Doesn’t press.

What you don’t say: you went on a date last night. Your first real date since your second year. Navy Sweater—Isaac—had been sweet. Patient. Social psych, so he talked about group dynamics and interdependence theory instead of clinical cases. A refreshing change from your usual context. He’d been pining for you since orientation. You finally gave him a chance.

You’re not sure yet if it was a mistake.

Jack doesn’t ask again. He just shifts his attention back to your printed draft, flipping a page without comment.

But you can feel it—that subtle change in the room. Like something under the surface has started to stir.

Jack doesn’t speak again for the rest of the meeting, at least not about anything that isn’t your manuscript. But the temperature between you has shifted, unmistakable even in silence.

His feedback is sharp, incisive, and you take it all in—but your focus tugs sideways more than once.

You start to notice little things. The way his hands move when he talks—precise, economical, almost always with a pen twirling between his fingers. The way he reads with his whole posture—leaned in slightly, brows furrowed, lips moving just barely like he’s tasting the cadence of each sentence. How he always wears button-downs, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, like he’s never quite comfortable in them.

You catch the faint scruff at his jawline, the flecks of gray you hadn’t seen before in the fluorescent classroom light. The quiet groan of his office chair as he shifts to get more comfortable—though he never quite does. The occasional tap of his fingers against the desk when he’s thinking. The way his eyes track you when you pace, like he’s cataloging your rhythm.

When he leans in to gesture at a line in your text, you’re aware of his proximity in a way you hadn’t been before. The warmth that radiates off him. The way his breath hitches just slightly before he speaks.

When you ask a clarifying question, he meets your eyes and holds the gaze a fraction too long.

It shouldn’t mean anything. It probably doesn’t.

Still, when you pack up to leave, you don’t rush. Neither does he.

He walks you to the door, stops just short of it.

"Good luck with the coding," he says.

You nod. "Thanks. See you next week."

He hesitates, then nods once more. "Yeah. Next week."

And when you leave his office, the echo of that pause follows you down the hall.

At home, Jack goes through the same routine he always does. He hangs up his coat. Places his keys in the ceramic dish by the door. Fills the kettle. Rinses a clean mug from the rack without thinking—habit, even if it’s just for himself.

Then he sits down on the edge of the couch and unbuckles the prosthetic from his leg with practiced efficiency. He leans forward, slow and deliberate, and cleans the area with a soft cloth, checking the skin for signs of irritation before applying a thin layer of ointment. Only then does he begin to massage the tender spot where his leg ends, pressing the heel of his palm just enough to release tension. The ache is dull tonight, but persistent. It always is when the weather shifts.

He doesn’t turn on the TV. When he buckles it back on and gets up again, he moves around his apartment quietly, the limp less noticeable this time around.

While the water heats, he scrolls through emails on his phone—most from admin, flagged with false urgency. A few unread messages from students, one from a journal editor asking for another reviewer on a manuscript that costs too much to publish open access. He deletes half, archives another third. Wonders when it became so easy to ignore what used to feel so important.

The kettle whistles. He pours the water over the tea bag and sets it down, not bothering with the stack of essays he meant to look at hours ago.

He doesn’t touch them.

Not yet.

Tonight, his rhythm is off.

Instead, he looks over your latest draft after dinner, meaning only to skim. He finds himself rereading the same paragraph three times, mind somewhere else entirely. Your words, your phrasing, your comments in the margins—he's memorizing them. Not intentionally. It just happens.

Later, brushing his teeth, Jack thinks of how you’d looked that afternoon: eyes sharp, expression animated, tucked into a wool sweater the color of cinnamon. Hair falling forward when you tilted your head to listen, then swept back with one distracted hand. A little ink smudged on your finger. The edge of a smile you didn’t know you were wearing.

He wonders if you know how often you pace when you’re deep in thought. How your whole posture changes when something clicks—like your bones remember before your voice does. How you gesture with the same hand you write with, sometimes forgetting you’re holding a pen at all.

He tells himself it’s just professional attentiveness. That he’s tuned into all his students this way. That noticing you in detail is part of his job.

But it’s a lie. And the truth has started to settle into his bones.

He closes his laptop, shuts off the light.

He dreams in fragments—lecture notes and old conference halls, the scent of rain-soaked leaves, the sound of your voice mid-sentence. The ghost of a laugh.

He doesn’t remember the shape of the dream when he wakes.

Only the warmth that lingers in its place.

Across town, you’re on another date with Isaac.

He’s funny tonight—quick with dry quips, gentler than you'd expected. He walks you to a small café far from campus, one you’ve driven by a dozen times but never tried. He orders chai with oat milk. You get the pumpkin spice out of spite.

"Pumpkin spice, really?" he teases. "Living the stereotype."

"It’s autumn," you shoot back. "Let me have one basic pleasure."

You talk about everything but your dissertation—TV shows, childhood pets, the worst advice you’ve ever received from an advisor. Inevitably, you steer the conversation into something about work. It's a habit you seem to remember having since your earliest academic days, and one you don't see yourself breaking free from anytime soon.

"My undergrad advisor once told me I’d never get into grad school unless I stopped sounding ‘so West Coast.’ Still not sure what that means."

Isaac laughs. "Mine told me to pick a research topic ‘I wouldn’t mind reading about for the rest of my life.’ As if anyone wants to read their own lit review twice."

You laugh—genuine, belly-deep. Isaac flushes with pride and takes a long sip of his chai, eyes bright.

It's easy with him, you think. Talking, breathing, being. You lean back in your chair, cup warm between your palms, and realize you should feel more present than you do.

He’s exactly what you thought you needed. Different. Outside your orbit. Not tangled up in diagnoses or a department that feels more like a pressure cooker every day.

But still, your mind drifts. Not far. Just enough.

Back to the way Jack had looked at you earlier that day. The pause before he spoke. The silence that wasn’t quite silence.

You can’t put your finger on it. You don’t want to.

Isaac reaches across the table to brush his fingers against yours. You let him.

And yet.

You catch yourself glancing toward the door as he brushes your fingers. Just once. Barely perceptible. A flicker of something unformed tugging at the edge of your attention.

Not for any reason you can name. Not because anything happened. But because something did—quiet and slow and not easily undone.

You remember the way his brow furrowed as he read your chapter, the steadiness in his voice when he called your argument brilliant, the way he looked at you like the room had narrowed down to a single point.

Isaac is sweet. Funny. Steady. You should be here.

But your mind keeps slipping sideways.

And Jack Abbot—stubborn, sharp, unreadable Jack—is suddenly everywhere. In the cadence of a sentence you revise, where you hear his voice in your head asking, 'Why this framework? Why now?' In the questions you don’t ask Isaac because you already know how Jack would answer them—precise, cutting, but never unkind. In the sudden, irritating way you want someone to challenge you just a little more. To push back, to poke holes, to see if your argument still stands.

You find yourself wondering what he’s doing tonight. If he’s at home, pacing through a quiet, single-family home too large for his own company. If he’s reading someone else’s manuscript with the same intensity. If he ever thinks about the way you looked that afternoon, how you paced his office with fire in your voice and a red pen tucked behind your ear.

You think about the hitch in his breath when you leaned in. The way he’d watched you leave, that pause at the door.

And then Isaac says something—soft, thoughtful—and it takes you a second too long to register it. You nod, distracted, and reach for your drink again.

But your mind is already elsewhere.

Still with someone else.

You take another sip of your drink. Smile at Isaac. Let the moment pass.

But even then, even here—Jack is in the room.

You don’t see Jack again until the following Thursday. It’s raining hard again—something about mid-semester always seems to come with the weather—and the psych building smells like wet paper and overworked radiators.

You’re in the hallway, hunched over a Tupperware of leftover lentils and trying to catch up on grading, when his door creaks open across the hall. You glance up reflexively.

He’s standing there, brow furrowed, papers in hand. He spots you. Freezes.

For a moment, neither of you says anything. The hallway is quiet, just the hum of fluorescents and the distant murmur of a class in session. Then:

"Grading?" he asks, voice lower than usual—quiet, but unmistakably curious.

You lift your fork, deadpan. "Don’t sound so jealous."

Jack’s mouth twitches—almost a smile. A pause, then: "You’re in Langdon’s office hours slot, right?"

"Only if I bring snacks," you quip, referring to the way Frank Langdon always lets the TA with snacks cut the line—a running joke in the department.

Jack raises his coffee like a toast. "Then I’ll keep walking." A dry little truce. An unspoken I’ll stay out of your way—unless you want me to stay.

You watch him disappear down the hallway, his limp slightly more pronounced than usual. And you find yourself thinking—about how many times you’ve noticed that, and how many times he’s never once drawn attention to it.

Your spoon scrapes the bottom of the container. You try to return to grading.

You don’t get much done.

Later that afternoon, you’re back in the general psych lecture hall, perched on the side of the desk with your TA notes while Jack clicks through the day’s slides. It’s the second time he’s teaching this unit and he’s not even pretending to follow the script. You know him well enough now to catch the subtle shifts—when he goes off-book, lets the theory breathe.

He doesn’t look at you while he lectures, but you can tell when he’s aware of you. The slight change in cadence, the way his eyes flick toward the front row where you sometimes sit, sometimes stand.

Today’s lecture is on conditioning. Classical, operant, extinction.

At one point, Jack pauses at the podium. He’s talking about fear responses—conditioned reactions, the body’s anticipatory wiring, what it takes to unlearn a threat. You’ve heard this part a dozen times in college and a dozen more in grad school. You’ve written about it. You've published on it. 

But when he says, "Fear isn’t erased. It’s overwritten," his eyes flick toward you—just for a second.

And your heart trips a little. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way—more like a misstep in rhythm, a skipped beat in a song you thought you knew by heart. Your breath catches for half a second, and you feel the heat rush to the tips of your ears.

It’s absurd, maybe. Definitely. But the tone of his voice when he said it—that measured, worn certainty—lands somewhere deep inside you. Not clinical. Not abstract. It feels like he’s speaking to something unspoken, to a part of you you've tried to keep quiet.

You shift your weight, pretending to re-stack a paper that doesn’t need re-stacking, pulse louder than it should be in your ears.

From your seat on the edge of the desk, you can see the way he gestures with his hand, slow and spare, like every movement costs something. The way he leans on his good leg. The way the muscles in his forearm flex as he flips to the next slide, still speaking, still teaching—none of this showing on his face.

Your eyes keep drifting back.

And he doesn’t look at you again. Not for the rest of the lecture.

But you feel the weight of that glance long after the class ends.

You stay after class, mostly to gather the quiz sheets and handouts. A few students linger, asking Jack questions about the exam. You hear him shift into that firm-but-generous tone he uses with undergrads, the kind that makes them think he’s colder than he is. Efficient. Clear.

When the last student finally packs up and leaves the room, Jack straightens. His eyes find you, soft but unreadable.

"Good lecture," you say.

He hums. "Not bad for a recycled deck."

You hand him the stack of forms. "You made it your own."

His thumb brushes over the edge of the papers. "So did you."

You don’t ask what he means. But the quiet between you feels different than it did at the start of the semester.

The room is mostly empty. Just the two of you. You're caught somewhere between impulse and caution. Approach and avoidance. There's a pull in your chest, low and slow, that makes you want to linger a second longer. To say something else. To ask about the lecture, or the line he looked at you during, or the kind of day he's had. But your voice sticks.

Instead, you shift again, adjust your grip on the papers in your hands, and let it all stay unsaid. But Jack’s already turned back toward the podium, gathering his things.

He doesn’t look up right away. Just slides his laptop into its case with more force than necessary, his jaw set tight. He’s annoyed with himself. The kind of annoyance that comes from knowing he missed something—not a moment, exactly, but the shadow of one. An opening. And he let it pass.

There was a question in your eyes. Or maybe not a question—maybe a dare. Maybe just the start of one. And he didn’t rise to meet it.

He tells himself that’s good. That’s safe. That’s professional.

But it doesn’t feel like a win.

His hand pauses on the zipper. He breathes out through his nose, not quite a sigh. Then glances toward the door.

You’re already gone.

You let the moment pass.

But you feel it. Like something just under the surface, waiting for another breach in the routine.

It happens late one evening, entirely by accident.

You’re in your office, door mostly closed, light still on. You meant to leave hours ago—meant to finish your email and call it—but the combination of caffeine and a dataset that refused to make sense kept you tethered to your desk.

Jack’s on his way out of the building when he hears it: a muffled sound from behind a half-open door just across the hallway from his own. He pauses, backtracks, and realizes for the first time exactly where your office is.

He hears it again—a quiet sniffle, then a low, barely-there laugh like you’re trying to brush it off.

He knocks.

You don’t answer.

"Hey," he says, voice just loud enough to carry but still gentle. "You alright?"

The sound of your chair creaking. A breath caught in your throat.

"Shit—Jack." You swipe at your face automatically, the name out before you think about it.

He steps just inside, not crossing the threshold. "Didn’t mean to scare you."

You shake your head, still blinking fast. "No, I just—burned out. Hit a wall. It’s fine. Nothing serious. Just… one of those days." You try for a joke.

Jack’s eyes sweep the room. The state of your desk. The way your sweater sleeves are pulled down over your hands. He shifts his weight.

There’s a long pause. Then he says, softer, "Can I—?"

You furrow your brows for a moment before nodding.

He steps in and leaves the door slightly cracked open behind him. He remains by the edge of your desk, a respectful distance between you. His presence is quiet but steady, and he doesn't pry with questions.

You exhale slowly, suddenly aware of the sting behind your eyes and how tight your shoulders have been all day. You look down, embarrassed, and when you reach for a tissue, your hand grazes his by accident.

You both freeze.

It’s nothing, really. A brush of skin. But it lands like something else. Not unwelcome. Not forgotten.

Jack doesn’t pull away. But he doesn’t linger, either.

Jack doesn’t move at first. He watches you for a moment longer, the quiet in the room settling unevenly.

"You sure you’re alright?" he asks, voice low, unreadable.

You nod, quick. "Yeah. I’m fine."

It comes too fast. Reflexive. But it lands the way you want it to—firm, closed.

Jack nods slowly. He doesn’t push. "Okay."

He steps back, finally. "Just—don’t stay too late, alright?"

You offer a smaller nod.

He hesitates again. Then turns and slips out without another word.

Your office feels warmer once he’s gone.

And your breath feels just a little easier.

Jack makes his way down the hallway toward the faculty lounge with the intention of grabbing a fresh coffee before his office hours. He passes a few students loitering in the corridor—chatter, laughter, the usual.

But then he hears your voice. Quiet, edged. Just outside the lecture hall.

"Isaac, I’m not having this conversation again. Not here."

Jack slows. Doesn’t stop, but slows and finds a small nook just shy of the corner. 

"I just don’t get why you won’t answer a simple question," Isaac says. "Are you seeing someone else or not?"

There’s a pause. Jack glances down at the coffee in his hand and debates turning around.

But then he hears your exhale—sharp, frustrated. "No. I’m not."

Isaac huffs. "Then what is this? You’re always somewhere else—even when we’re out, even on weekends. It’s like your head’s in another fucking dimension."

Jack feels the hairs on his neck stand up. He sees you standing with your back half-turned to Isaac, arms crossed tightly over your chest. Isaac’s face is flushed, his voice a little too loud for the setting. Your posture is still—too still.

Jack doesn’t step in. Not yet. He stays just out of sight, near the hallway alcove. Close enough to hear. Close enough to watch.

You draw in a long breath. When you speak, your voice is level, cold. "I just don’t think I’m in the right place to be in a relationship right now."

Isaac’s expression shifts—confused, hurt.

Jack watches the edge of your profile. How your shoulders lock into place. How your eyes go distant, like you’re powering down every soft part of yourself.

He doesn’t breathe.

Then someone laughs down the hallway, and the moment breaks. Isaac looks over his shoulder, distracted for half a beat, then turns back to you with something sharp in his eyes.

"You’re not even trying," he says, voice low but biting. "I’m giving you everything I’ve got, and you’re... somewhere else. Always."

You stiffen. Jack stays hidden, tension rippling down his spine.

"I know..." you say, voice tight. "I'm sorry. I really am. But this isn’t working."

Isaac’s face contorts. "Seriously? That’s it?"

You shake your head. "You deserve someone who’s fully here. Who wants the same things you do. I’m not that person right now."

He opens his mouth to say something, but your eyes have already gone cold. Guarded. Clinical.

"I don't want to whip out the 'it's not you it's me bullshit'," you continue, each word deliberate. "But this isn’t about you doing something wrong. It’s me. I can’t give more than I’ve already given."

Jack watches the shift in your posture—how you shut it all down, protect the last open pieces of yourself. He recognizes it because he’s done the same.

"I'm sorry." The words are genuine. "You deserve better." Your eyes don't betray you. For a moment, though, your expression softens. You look at Isaac like a kicked dog, like you wish you could offer something kinder. But then it’s gone. Your eyes go cold again, your voice a blade dulled only by exhaustion.

Then someone laughs again down the hallway, closer this time, and the moment scatters. Jack moves past without a word. Doesn’t look at you directly.

But he sees you.

And he doesn’t forget what he saw.

As he passes, you glance up. Your eyes meet.

Only for a second.

Then he’s gone.

Isaac doesn’t notice.

Time passes. You're back in Jack's office for your regular one-on-one—but something is different.

You sit a little straighter. Speak a little quieter. The bright curiosity you usually carry in your voice has hardened, now precise ,restrained. Not icy, but guarded. Pulled taut.

You’re not trying to be unreadable, but you can feel yourself defaulting. Drawing the boundaries back up.

Jack notices.

He doesn’t say anything, but you catch the slight narrowing of his gaze as he listens.

You’d gone all in on this program, this career—your research, your ambitions, your carefully calculated goals. Isaac was the first time you'd tried letting something else in. A possibility. A softness.

And it crashed. Of course it did.

Because that’s what you do. That’s the pattern. You’re excellent at control, planning, systems, at hypothesis testing and case management. But when it comes to anything outside the academic orbit—connection, trust, letting someone see the jagged pieces under the polish—you flinch. You fail.

And you’ve learned not to let that show. Not anymore.

At one point, you trail off mid-sentence. Jack doesn’t fill the silence.

You clear your throat. Try again.

There’s something steadier in his quiet today. You finally finish your point and glance up. His expression is neutral, but his gaze is… undivided.

"Are you okay?"

It catches you off guard. You blink once, not expecting the question, not from him, not here.

You start to nod. Then pause. Your throat feels tight for a second.

"Yeah," you say. "I’m fine."

Jack doesn’t look away. He holds your gaze a moment longer. Not pressing. Not interrogating. Just there.

"You should know better than to lie to a psychologist."

It’s almost a joke. Almost. Just enough curve at the corner of your mouth to soften it. You let out a breath—half a laugh, half a sigh. "Guess I need to reassess my baseline."

Jack leans forward slightly. Then, without saying anything, reaches over and closes your laptop. Slides it just out of reach on the desk.

You open your mouth to protest.

Jack cuts in, quiet but firm. "You need to turn your brain off before it short circuits."

You blink. He continues, gentler this time. "Just for a few minutes. You don’t have to push through every wall. Sometimes it’s okay to sit still. Breathe. Be a human being."

You look down at your hands, fingers curled around a pen you hadn’t realized you were still holding. There’s a long pause before you speak.

"I don’t know how to do that," you admit, voice barely above a whisper.

Jack doesn’t say anything at first. He lets the silence settle. "Start small," he says. "We’re not built to stay in fight-or-flight forever."

The words land heavier than you expect. You stare down at your hands, your knuckles paling against the pressure of your grip. Your breath stutters on the way out.

Jack doesn’t move, but his presence feels closer somehow—like the room has contracted around the two of you, warm and steady.

You set the pen down slowly. Swallow. Your eyes burn, but nothing falls.

Your jaw shifts. Just a fraction.

You don’t say anything at first.

Jack doesn’t either. But he doesn’t look away.

After a beat, he says—careful, quiet—"You want to talk about it?"

You hesitate, eyes fixed on a crease in your jeans. "No."

He waits. "I think you do."

You laugh under your breath. It’s not funny. "This how you talk to all of your clients?"

He doesn't bite.

"You don’t let up, do you?" You're only half-serious.

"I do," he pauses. "When it matters. Just not when my mentee is sitting in front of me looking like the world’s pressing down on their ribcage."

That makes you flinch. Not visibly, not to most. But he sees it. Of course he does. He’s trained to.

You look at your hands. He's not going to let this go so you might as well bite the bullet. "I'm not great at the whole... letting people in thing."

Jack doesn’t respond. Just shifts his weight slightly in his chair—almost imperceptibly. A silent invitation.

Your voice stays quiet. Measured. "I usually just throw myself into work. It’s easier. It’s something I can control."

Still, he says nothing.

You pick at the seam of your sleeve. "Other stuff... it gets messy. Too unpredictable. People are unpredictable."

Jack’s gaze never wavers. He doesn’t push. But the absence of interruption is its own kind of presence—steady, open.

Your lips twitch in a faint, humorless smile. "I know that’s ironic coming from someone studying emotion regulation."

He finally says, softly, "Sometimes the people who study it hardest are the ones trying to figure it out for themselves."

That makes your eyes flick up. His expression is calm. Receptive. No judgment. No smile, either. Just… presence.

You look down again. Your voice even softer now. "I don’t know how to do it. Not really."

Jack doesn’t interrupt. Just shifts, barely, like bracing.

And somehow, that makes you keep going.

"Grad school’s easier. Career’s easier. I can plan. I can control. Everything else just…" You trail off. Shrug, a flicker of helplessness.

He’s still watching you. The way he does when he’s listening hard, like there’s a string between you and he’s waiting to see if you’ll keep tugging it.

"I thought maybe..." You press your lips together. "I thought I could do it. Let someone in. Be a person. A twenty-nine year old, for fuck's sake." Your hands come up to your face. "But it just reminded me why I don’t."

You draw a slow breath. Something in your chest cracks. Not a collapse—just a fault line giving way.

Jack just stares.

Then, slowly, he leans back—not away, but into the quiet. He folds his hands in his lap, thumb tracing a familiar line over his knuckle. A practitioner’s stillness. A kind of careful permission.

"You know," he says, voice low, "when I first started in trauma research, I thought if I understood it well enough, I could outsmart it. Like if I had the right frameworks, if I mapped the pathways right, it wouldn’t touch me."

You glance up.

He exhales through his nose—dry, but not bitter. "Turns out, knowing the symptoms doesn’t stop you from living them. Doesn’t stop the body from remembering."

He doesn’t specify. Doesn’t have to.

His eyes flick to yours. "But you don’t have to be fluent in trust to start learning it. You don’t have to be good at it yet. You just have to let someone sit with you in the silence."

You study him. The sharpness of his jaw, the quiet behind his glasses, the wear in his voice that doesn’t make it weaker.

Your throat tightens, but you don’t speak.

He doesn’t need you to.

He just stays there—anchored. Steady. Unmoving.

Like he's not waiting for you to come undone.

He's waiting for you to believe you don’t have to.

It's Friday night. You’re walking a participant through the start of a lab assessment—part of the longitudinal stress and memory protocol you’ve spent the last year fine-tuning. The task itself is simple enough: a series of conditioned images, paired with soft tones. But you watch the participant's pulse rise on the screen. Notice the minute shift in posture, the tension in their jaw.

You pause. Slow things down.

"Remember," you say gently, "we’re looking at how your body responds when it doesn’t need to anymore. The point isn’t to trick you—it’s to see what happens when the threat isn’t real. When it’s safe."

The participant nods, still uneasy.

You don’t blame them.

Later, the metaphor clings to you like static from laundry fresh out of the dryer. Fear extinction: the process of unlearning what once kept you alive. Or something close to it.

You think of what Jack said. What he didn’t say. The silence he offered like a landing strip.

It replays in your head more than you'd like to admit—the dim warmth of his office, the soft click of your laptop closing, the unexpected steadiness in his voice. No clinical jargon. No agenda. Just space. Permission.

You remember the way he folded his hands. The faint scuff on the corner of his desk. The way he didn’t fill the air with reassurances or advice. Just stayed quiet until the quiet felt less like drowning and more like floating.

And it had made something in your chest stutter—because you'd spent years studying fear responses, coding reactivity curves and salience windows, mapping out prediction error pathways and understanding affect labeling.

But none of your models accounted for the way someone simply sitting with you could ease the grip of it.

Maybe, you think now, as you log the participant's final response, this is what fear extinction looks like outside of a lab setting. Not just reducing reactivity to a blue square or a sharp tone.

But learning—relearning—how it feels to let another person in and survive it.

Maybe Jack wasn’t offering a solution.

Maybe he was offering proof.

Is this what it looked like in practice? Not just in a scanner or a skin conductance chart—but in the quiet, everyday choice of showing up? Staying? 

Perhaps the data is secondary and this is the experiment.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re already in the middle of it.

The new semester begins in a blur of syllabi updates and shuffled office assignments. It's your final year before internship—a fact that looms and hums in the background like a lamp you can't turn off. You’re no longer the quiet, watchful second-year—you’ve published, you've taught, you've survived.

But you’re also exhausted. You’ve become adept at wearing competence like armor.

Jack is teaching an elective course this semester—Epigenetics of Trauma. You're enrolled in it—a course you didn’t technically need, but couldn’t resist for reasons you cared not to admit. 

When you pass him in the hallway—coffee in one hand, a paper balanced on his clipboard—he stops.

"Did you hear the department finally updated the HVAC?" he asks, and it’s not really about the HVAC.

You nod, a wry smile tugging at your mouth. "Barely. Still feels like a sauna most days."

Jack gestures to your cardigan. "And yet you persist."

You grin. It’s a tiny thing. But it stays.

Later that week, he pokes his head into your office between student meetings.

"You’re on the panel for the trauma symposium, right?"

The one you were flying to at the end of October—thanks to Robby, who had playfully threatened to submit your name himself if you didn’t volunteer. He’d needed someone to piggyback off of, he’d said, and who better than his best grad student—who was also swamped with grant deadlines, dissertation chapters, and a growing list of internship applications. You’d rolled your eyes and said yes, of course, because that’s what you did. And maybe because a part of you liked the challenge, academic mascochism and validation and all. 

You nod. "Talk and discussion."

He steps farther in. "If you’re open to it—I’d like to sit in."

You glance up. "You’ve already read the draft."

Jack smiles. "Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to hear it out loud."

You lean back slightly, watching him. "You going to grill me from the audience and be that one guy?"

Jack raises an eyebrow, amused. "Wouldn’t dream of it."

You hum. "Mmhm."

But you’re smiling now. Just a little.

It’s not quite vulnerability. Not yet. But it’s a beginning. A reset. The next slow iteration in a long series of exposures. New responses. New learning. Acceptance in the face of uncertainty.

The only way fear ever learns to quiet down.

Robby’s already three beers in and trying to argue that Good Will Hunting is actually a terrible representation of therapy while Mel King—your cohort-mate in the developmental area, always mindful and reserved—defends its emotional core like it’s a thesis chapter she’s still revising in her head.

Mentored by John Shen, Mel studies peer rejection and emotional socialization in early childhood, and she talks about toddlers with the same reverence some people reserve for philosophers. Her dissertation focuses on how early experiences of exclusion and inclusion shape later prosocial behavior, and she can recite every milestone in the Denver Developmental Screening Test like scripture.

She’s known for respectful debates, non-caffeinated bursts of energy, and an uncanny ability to babysit and code data at the same time. The kind of person who shows up with a snack bag labeled for every child at a study visit—and still finds time to coordinate the department's annual "bring your child to work" day. She even makes time to join you and Samira on your Sunday morning farmers market walks, reusable tote slung over one shoulder, ready to talk about plum varieties and which stand has the best sourdough.

Samira Mohan, meanwhile, sits with her signature whiskey sour and a stack of color-coded notecards she pretends not to be working on. She’s in the clinical area too—mentored by Collins—and her work focuses on how minority stress intersects with emotion regulation in underserved populations. Her analyses are razor sharp and sometimes terrifying. Samira rarely speaks unless she knows her words will land precisely—measured, deliberate, the kind of sharp that cuts clean.

Although still in her early prospectus phase, choosing to propose in her fifth year rather than fourth, her dissertation is shaping into a cross-sectional and mixed-methods exploration of how racial and gender minority stressors compound across contexts—academic, familial, and romantic—and the specific emotion regulation repertoires that emerge as survival strategies.

Samira doesn’t stir the pot for fun; she does it when she sees complacency and feels compelled to light a fire under it. That’s the Samira everyone knows and you love—the one who will quietly dismantle your entire line of argument with one clinical observation and a deadpan stare. She does exactly that now, throwing in a quote from bell hooks with the sly smile of someone who knows she’s lit a fuse just to watch it burn. 

It’s a blur of overlapping conversations, familiar inside jokes, cheap spirits, and the particular cadence of a group that knows each other’s pressure points and proposal deadlines down to the day. For a moment you let yourself exist in it—in the din, in the messy affection of your academic family, in the safety you didn’t know you’d built, much less deserved. Samira’s halfway through a story about a disastrous clinical interview when she turns to you, parts her mouth to speak, and looks up behind you—

"So is this where all the cool kids hang out?"

You feel him before you see him—Jack’s presence like a low hum behind you, the soft waft of his cologne cutting through the ambient chatter. The light buzz of conversation has your senses dialed up, awareness prickling at the back of your neck. You don’t turn. You don’t have to.

Robby lets out a loud "whoohoo" as Jack joins the table, hauling him into a bro hug with the miraculously coordinated enthusiasm of someone riding high off departmental gossip. Jack rolls his eyes but doesn’t resist, letting Robby thump his back twice before extracting himself but instead of settling there, he leans down slightly, voice pitched just for you. “Is this seat taken?”

Robby at 12 o'clock, Heather to his left, then Samira, Mel, you, and John. The large circular table meant for twelve suddenly feels exponentially smaller. The tablecloth brushes your knees, heavy and starchy against your lap. You feel warmth creep up your cheeks—probably from the alcohol (definitely not from anything else)—and scoot over slightly closer to Mel, giving him room to squeeze in between you and John. You can feel the shift in the air, the proximity of his sleeve against yours, the silent knowledge that he's there now—anchored in your orbit.

He slides in beside you with a quiet murmur of thanks, the space between your arms barely more than a breath. The conversation continues, but the air feels a little different now.

He nods politely to Shen on his left, mutters something about being tricked into another committee, then glances your way—dry, amused, measured.

Always measured.

You feel Jack beside you—not just his sleeve brushing yours, but his presence, calm and dense as gravity. His knee bumps yours beneath the table once, lightly, maybe unintentional. Maybe not. The cologne still lingers faintly and you try to focus on what Samira is saying about peer-reviewed journals versus reviewer roulette, but it’s impossible to ignore the warmth radiating from his side, the way your skin registers it before your brain does. He's like a human crucible. You keep your gaze trained forward, sipping your drink a little too casually, pretending you don’t notice the way your heartbeat’s caught in your throat.

The charged air gives you a spike of bravery—fleeting, foolish, and just enough. Before you let the doubt creep into your veins, you nudge your knee toward Jack’s beneath the table, thankful for the tablecloth concealing the movement. You feel him exhale beside you—quiet, but unmistakable—and something inside you hums in response.

You feel Jack’s thigh tense against yours. The contact lingers, neither of you moving. Moments pass. Nothing happens.

So you cross your legs slowly, right over left, deliberately, letting the heel of your shoe graze his calf.

He stills.

The conversation around the table doesn’t pause, but you’re aware of every breath, every shift in weight beside you. The air between you tightens, stretched across the tension of everything unsaid.

Everyone else is occupied—Robby and Shen deep in conversation about conference logistics, Heather and Samira bickering over which of them was the worse TA, Mel nodding along and adding commentary between sips of cider. Jack sees the opening and seizes it.

He leans in, just slightly, until his shoulder brushes yours again—barely perceptible. "Subtle," he murmurs, voice pitched low, teasing.

You arch a brow, still facing forward. “I have no idea what you're talking.”

"Of course not," he says, dry. "Just sudden interest in the hem of the tablecloth, is it?"

You swirl your drink, letting the glass tilt in your fingers. "I’m a tactile learner. You know this."

He huffs a quiet breath—could almost be a laugh. "Must make data cleaning a thrilling experience."

"Only when R crashes mid-run." You angle your knee back toward his under the table, a soft bump like punctuation.

Jack tilts his head slightly, eyes flicking to yours. "Dangerous territory."

"Afraid of a little ambiguity, professor?"

His mouth twitches at the title. 

You sip slowly, buying time, letting the quiet between you stretch like a drawn breath. His thigh is still pressed against yours. Still unmoving. Still deliberate.

"You always like to push your luck this much?" you murmur, keeping your eyes trained on your drink.

Jack hums low. "Only when the risk feels... calculated."

You glance at him, the corner of your mouth twitching. "Bit of a reward sensitivity bias tonight, Dr. Abbot?"

He shrugs. "You’ve been unintentionally reinforcing bad behavior."

You smirk, but say nothing, letting the conversation around you swell again. Robby starts ranting about departmental politics, Heather counters with a story about a grant mix-up that almost ended in flames. You sip your drink, Samira taps her notecards absently against her palm.

The rest of the evening hums on, warm and loose around the edges. When it finally winds down—people slowly gathering coats, hugging their goodbyes—you rise with the group, still a little buzzed, still aware of Jack’s presence beside you like heat that never quite left your side.

Under the soft yellow glow of the dim lobby chandelier, everyone says their goodnights—laughing, tipsy, hugging, good vibes all around. Jack is the last to leave the circle, and as you turn toward the elevator, you glance over your shoulder at him. "See you tomorrow," you say. "Last day of the conference—only the most boring panels left."

Jack lifts a brow. "You wound me."

You grin. "I’m just saying—if you show up in sweats and a baseball cap for your presentation, I’ll pretend not to know you."

The elevator dings. The doors slide open. You step inside, leaning against the railing. Jack stays behind. 

"Goodnight," he says, eyes lingering. You nod, then turn, pressing the button for your floor. Just as the doors begin to glide shut, a hand slides into the narrow threshold—the border between hesitation and something else.

Palm flat against the seam. That sliver of metal and air.

He steps in slowly. Quiet. And presses the button for the same floor.

The doors slide shut behind him with a soft hiss.

Silence hums between you.

You don’t speak. Neither does he. But your awareness of each other sharpens—your breath shallow, his jaw tense. The elevator jolts into motion.

Jack shifts slightly, turning his body just enough to lean back against the railing—mirroring you. His arm grazes yours. Then the back of his hand brushes against your knuckles.

A spark—not metaphorical, not imagined—zips down your arm.

Neither of you pulls away.

You glance sideways.

He’s already looking at you.

Your eyes meet—held, quiet.

Not a word is exchanged. But something breaks—clean and sharp, like a snapped circuit. Long-simmering, unvoiced tension rising to the surface, clinging to the pause between heartbeats and motion-sensor lighting.

Jack leans in—not tentative, not teasing. Just close enough that his breath grazes your cheek. Your breath catches. His proximity feels like a fuse. He’s watching you—steady, unreadable. But you feel the pressure in the air shift, charged and thick.

"I don’t know what this is," you finally whisper. Your throat feels incredibly dry. A sharp juxtaposition to the state of your undergarments. 

Jack’s voice dips low. "I think we’ve both been trying not to look too closely."

Your chest tightens. His hand twitches by his side. Flexing. Gripping. Restraint unraveling. His breath shallows, matching yours—fast, hungry, starved of oxygen and logic. And then, like a spark to dry kindling, you thread your fingers through his.

Heat erupts between your palms, a jolt that hits your spine. You don’t flinch. You don’t pull away. You tighten your grip.

He exhales—shaky, like it’s cost him everything not to close the distance between your mouths. The electricity is unbearable, like a dam on the edge of collapse.

And still, neither of you move. Not quite yet.

But the air is thick with the promise: the next breach will not be small.

The elevator dings.

You both flinch—just barely.

The doors slide open.

You release his hand slowly, fingers slipping apart like sand through mesh, reluctant and slow but inevitable. Jack's hands stay in a slightly open grip. 

"I should..." you begin, breath catching. You clear your throat. "Goodnight, Jack."

Your voice is soft. Almost too soft.

Jack nods once. Doesn’t reach again. Doesn’t follow.

"Goodnight," he says. Low, warm. Weighted.

You step out. Don’t look back.

The doors begin to close.

You glance over your shoulder, once—just once.

Your eyes meet through the narrowing gap.

Then the doors seal shut, quiet as breath.

For now.

Contrary to Samira's reappraisal of you joining her for Friday night drinks, you begrudgingly allow her to drag you out of your cave. Just the two of you—girls’ night, no work talk allowed, and no saying "I need to work on my script" more than once. She makes you wear lip gloss and a top that could almost be considered reckless, and you down two tequila sodas before you even start to loosen your shoulders.

You’re halfway through your third drink when a pair of guys approaches—normal-looking, vaguely grad-school adjacent, maybe from public health or law school. Samira gives you a look that says seems safe enough, and you need this, and so you nod. You dance.

The one paired off with you is tall, not unpleasant. He asks before he touches you—his hand at your waist, then your hip, then lightly over your ribs. You nod, give consent. He smells like good cologne and something sugary, and he’s saying all the right things.

But something feels wrong.

You realize it halfway through the song, when his hand brushes the curve of your waist again, gentle and careful and... wrong. Too polite. Too other.

You think of the way Jack’s fingers had curled between yours. The heat of his palm against yours for a single minute in the elevator. The way he hadn’t touched you anywhere else—but it had felt like everything.

You close your eyes, trying to ground yourself. But you can’t stop comparing.

You’ve danced with this stranger for five whole minutes, and it hasn’t come close to the electricity of the sixty seconds you spent not speaking, not kissing, not touching anything else in the elevator with Jack.

It shouldn’t mean anything but it means everything. 

You step back, thanking the guy politely, claiming a bathroom break. He nods, not pushy, already scanning the room.

Samira follows a song change later. "You okay?"

You nod. Then shake your head. Then say, "I think I might be fucked."

Samira just hands you a tissue, already knowing. She looks understanding. Like she sees it, too—and she's not going to mock you for it.

"Yep," she says gently while fixing a stray baby hair by your ear. "Saw it the second Jack joined us for drinks that night." 

The night air feels cooler after the club, like the city is exhaling with you. You and Samira walk back toward the rideshare pickup, her arm looped loosely through yours.

You don’t say anything for a long moment. She doesn’t push.

"I don’t even know what it is," you murmur eventually. "I just know when that guy touched me, it felt like wearing someone else’s coat. Warm, sure, but not mine."

Samira hums in agreement. "Jack feels like your coat?"

"No," you sigh. Then, after a beat, quieter, "He feels like the one thing I forgot I was cold without."

She doesn’t say anything. Not right away. Just squeezes your hand. "So what’re you gonna do about it?"

"Scream. Cry. Have a pre-doctoral crisis," you say flatly.

Samira snorts. "So… Tuesday." You bite back a smile, shoving her shoulder lightly but appreciating the comedic diffusion nonetheless.

She exhales through her nose, gentler now. "If it’s any consolation, I see the way he looks at you."

Your eyes flick toward her. She continues, tone still soft, sincere. "Not just that night during drinks, but during your flash talk. I’ve never seen him that… emotive. It was like he was mesmerized. And even back during seminar last year, when he was filling in for Robby? Same thing. I remember thinking, damn, he listens to her like she’s rewriting gravity."

You should feel elated. Giddy. Instead, you bury your face in your hands and emit a sound that can only be described as a dying pterodactyl emitting its final screech. "I hate my fucking life." 

"It's going to be okay!" Samira tries to hide her laughter but it comes through anyway, making you laugh through teary eyes. "You will be okay." 

You shake your head back and forth, trying to make yourself dizzy in hopes that this was all a dream. 

"Who was it that said 'boys are temporary, education is forever?'" Samira all-but-sang. 

"Do not quote me right now, Mira," you groan, dragging the syllables like they physically pain you. "I am but a husk with a degree-in-progress."

The week that follows is both everything and nothing. You go to class. You show up to lab meetings. You present clean analyses and nod through questions from the new cohort of freshmen. You even draft two paragraphs of your discussion section. One of three discussion sections. It looks like functioning.

Since submitting the last batch of internship applications, your dissertation committee meetings have gone from once a week with each member to once every three. You'd already run all of your main studies, had all the data cleaned and collated, and even coded all of the analyses you intended on running. Now all that was left was the actual writing and compiling of it all for a neat, hundred-or-so-page manuscript that no one would read. 

It’s your first meeting with Jack since flying back from the conference.

In all honesty, you hadn’t given it much thought. Compartmentalization had become a survival strategy, not a skill. It helped you meet deadlines, finish your talk, submit your final batch of internship applications—all while pretending nothing in that elevator happened. At least not in any way that mattered.

Now, seated outside his office with your laptop open and your third coffee in hand, you realize too late: you never really prepared for this part. The after.

You hear the door open behind you. A familiar cadence of steps—steady but slightly uneven. You know that gait.

"Hey," Jack says, as calm and neutral as ever. Like you didn’t almost combust into each other two weeks ago.

You glance up. Smile tight. "Hey."

"Come in?"

You nod. Stand. Follow him inside.

The office is the same as it’s always been—overcrowded with books, one stack threatening to collapse near the filing cabinet. You sit in your usual chair. He sits in his. The silence is comfortable. Professional.

It shouldn’t feel like a loss.

Jack taps a few keys on his laptop. "You sent your methods revisions?"

"Yesterday," you say. "Just a few small clarifications."

He hums. Nods. Clicks something open.

You sip your coffee. Pretend the sting behind your ribs is just caffeine.

The moment stretches.

He finally speaks. "You look… tired."

You smile, faint and crooked. “It’s November.”

Jack lets out a quiet laugh. Then scrolls through the document, silent again.

But the air between you feels thinner now. Like something’s missing. Or maybe like something’s waiting.

He reads.

You watch him.

Not just glance. Not just notice. Watch.

Your coffee cools in your hands, untouched.

He doesn't ask why you weren't at the symposium he moderated. Or if you were running on caffeine and nerves from recent deadlines. And definitely not why you booked an earlier flight home from the conference.

You search his face like it might hold an answer—though you’re not entirely sure what the question is. Something about the last two weeks. The way he hasn’t said anything. The way you haven’t either. The way both of you pretended, remarkably well, that everything was the same.

But Jack’s expression doesn’t change. Not noticeably. He just skims the screen, fingers occasionally tapping his trackpad. The glow from his monitor traces the line of his jaw.

Still, you keep looking. Like maybe if you study him hard enough, you’ll find a hint of something there.

A crack. A tell. A memory.

But he stays unreadable.

Professional.

And you hate that it hurts.

It eats at you.

Why does it hurt?

You knew better than to let this happen. To let it get this far. This was never supposed to be anything other than professional, clinical, tidy. But somewhere between all the late-night edits and long silences, the boundaries started to blur like ink in water. 

You tell yourself to turn it off. That part in your brain responsible for—this—whatever it was. Romantic projection, limerence, foolishness. You’d diagnose it in a heartbeat if it weren’t your own.

You just need to get through this meeting. This last academic year. Then you'd be somewhere far away for internship, and then graduated. That’s all.

Then you could go back to pretending you’re fine. That everything was okay.

The entire time you’d been staring—not at Jack, not directly—but just past his shoulder, toward the bookshelves. Not really seeing them. Just trying to breathe.

Jack had already finished reading through your edits. He read them last night, actually—when your email came through far too late. He’d learned to stay up past his usual bedtime about two weeks into joining your committee.

But he wasn’t just reading. Not now.

He was watching. Noticing the subtle shifts in your brow, the tension at the corners of your mouth. You didn’t look at him, but he didn’t need you to.

Jack studied people for a living. He’d made a career out of it.

And right now, he was studying you.

You snap yourself out of it. A light head bobble. A few quick blinks. A swallow. "All done?" you ask, voice dry. Almost nonchalant, like you hadn’t been staring through him trying to excavate meaning.

Jack lifts an eyebrow, subtle, but nods. "Yeah. Looks solid."

You nod back. Like it’s just another meeting. Like that’s all it ever was.

Then you close your laptop a little too quickly. "I think I’m gonna head out early, I don’t feel great," you offer, keeping your tone breezy, eyes still somewhere over his shoulder.

Jack doesn’t call you on it. Not outright.

But he watches you too long. Like he’s flipping through every frame of this scene in real time, and none of it quite adds up.

"Alright," he says finally. Even. Quiet. "Feel better."

You nod again, already halfway to the door.

You don’t look back.

"Hey—" Jack’s voice catches, right as the door swings shut.

Your hand freezes on the handle.

You hesitate.

But you don’t turn around.

Just one breath.

Then you keep walking.

You make it halfway down the hall before you realize your hands are shaking.

Not much. Barely. Just enough that when you fish your phone out of your coat pocket to check the time, your thumb slips twice before you unlock the screen.

He’d called your name.

And maybe that wouldn’t mean anything—shouldn’t mean anything—except Jack Abbot isn’t the type to call out without a reason. You’ve worked with him long enough to know that. Observed him enough in clinical and classroom settings. Hell, you’ve studied men like him—hyper-controlled, slow to show their hand. You’d written an entire paper on the paradox of behavioral inhibition in high-functioning trauma survivors and then realized, two weeks into seminar, that the paragraph on defensive withdrawal could’ve been subtitled See: Jack Abbot, Case Study #1.

You’d meant to file that away and forget it.

You haven’t forgotten it.

And now you're walking fast, maybe too fast, through the undergrad psych wing like the answer might be waiting for you in your lab inbox or the fluorescence of your office.

You don’t stop until you’re behind a locked door with your laptop powered off and your hands braced on either side of your desk.

You breathe.

In through your nose. Out through your mouth.

Again.

Again.

Still—when you close your eyes, you see the look on his face.

That same unreadable stillness.

Like he wanted to say something else.

Like he knew something else. And maybe—maybe—you did too.

[dantes-jacket]

Just a little dip

Dante x fem reader

Author notes: my last request is done! You and Dante go camping and he convinces you to skinny dip with him. You can’t swim and he makes sure to make you comfortable. This is pure flufffffff

You’re humming a little tune while cooking dinner for you and Dante. He’s been swamped with calls and reports all day so you’re trying to make him something that’ll boost his spirits. You don’t have the ingredients to make a full pizza and you really don’t want to spend more money on buying one so you decided to make little pizza bites.

There was only enough ingredients to make a small sized thing of dough so mini pizza bites are going to have to work. This might have been a little spur of the moment idea but you’re having a lot of fun. You put the little dough balls in a muffin tin and are now customizing each little one. When you’re finishing the last one Dante is calling out to you.

“Babe, have you ever gone camping?”

“I haven’t. Why, what’s up?” You walk out of the kitchen and see his feet stretched on the desk and leaning far back into his seat. It’s a miracle he hasn’t fallen.

He leans his head back to see you once he realized you came into the room. “I want a little break and I thought camping could be fun. Especially since it’s spring time now the forest has to look great now.”

“Sounds like fun! When do you want to go?”

“This weekend. We can leave Friday morning and come back Sunday night.”

“Let’s do it!” You excitedly agree. That’s three days from now. You’ve never been but you and Dante alone enjoying each other’s presence while being surrounded by the beauty of nature sounds heavenly.

•

The next three by fast due to the excitement both of you are feeling. Somehow Dante was able to get all the stuff you two brought to fit onto his motorcycle. At this rate he is a man of many talents you think to yourself. The drive was peaceful and not too long. He pulls up to the “camping grounds.” It’s a spot he normally uses when he has a job up here. He knows there’s no demons lurking around here so he thought this was the perfect place to show you.

He hops off the motorcycle and helps you off. Then unloads everything off his bike and starts to set up the tent. You decide to unpack the little grill and food so you can make some lunch. You end up cooking some meat and vegetables so you two can stay full during your hike later this afternoon.

After the tent was pitched and you two ate, Dante is showing you all around. He takes you on a couple different trails that lead to different things. One lead you to a cave, another to an opening with a plain, and now the last one is lead you to a big pond.

Dante helps you down the uneven terrain so you two can get close to the water. Since you’re hot and sweaty from all the hiking you go straight to the water and splash some on your face.

“This feels great.” You hum in content.

“Hey baby.”

“Yeah?”

“I have an idea.” Dante declares.

You turn to him and see him already smirking. “This could be either really bad or really good and I can’t tell which one it is.”

“Hey rude!” Dante ignores your eye roll and starts to slowly strip. Oh now you’re not rolling your eyes at him. You’re licking your lips while you watch him get bare. As soon as he has nothing on he jumps into the water.

You look to see him break through the surface of the water and shake his head getting all the extra water out of his hair. He then brushes his hair back and simply says, “Strip.”

“What- you want to swim naked?”

“Yeppppp. Gotta cross skinny dipping off the bucket list somehow.” He says with a sly smile and adds a wink.

You gulp and stand back up again. You slowly strip out of your clothes.

Dante lets out a whistle, “Damn babe, you’re sexy.” You just flush more and kick your panties off to the side. Now you’re fully naked and standing at the edge.

“Um Dante?”

“Yes?”

“How deep is it?”

“Oh pretty deep I guess. It goes to my chest.”

“I don’t know how to swim.” You quickly whisper not even loud enough to have him hear you.

“What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

“I- I don’t know how to swim…”

“Oh.” You bite your lip and turn away. You also cover your body to try and shield yourself from the embarrassment. You hear Dante swim closer to the edge and call out to you.

“Baby.” You don’t look at him. “Baby look at me.”

You relent and look at him. “It’s okay, I’m right here. I’ll hold onto you the entire time and won’t let your feet touch the bottom.”

“But what about swimming around and goofing off? We can’t do that if you’re holding onto me the entire time.”

“I think you underestimate how much I love your body pressed against mine. I much rather be holding you close and staring at those pretty eyes of yours instead of being far from you because we are trying to play some stupid game.” Dante is quick to reassure you.

“Okay…” you relent once again.

“Just jump in and I’ll catch you.” He pushes himself back a bit so neither of you have to worry about running into the ledge. You see him get in a little stance to show you he’ll catch you. You close your eyes and take a deep breath in and out. When you exhale to run forward and jump in.

You’re surrounded by ice cold water but feel two warm around wrapped around you pulling you from under the water. The moment your head is out from underwater you open your eyes to be met with Dante’s determined gaze. You let some air get back into your lungs and place your hands on his shoulders. He watches and feels you relax and his gaze changes to one of pure fondness.

“See isn’t this nice?”

“Yes but it is really cold.”

Dante chuckles, “You’ll get use to it.” You lay your head on his chest while he walks around and gets you use to the cold water.

While he walks around you keep feeling him change his grip on you. You have an idea but you don’t know how well it’s going to go. But at the end of the day you know you can always trust him.

When he fixes his grip again you unwrap your arms from his shoulders and push yourself back a bit. You feel him fumble on his hold, “Hey what are you-“ he is then hit in the face with a force of water you splashed him with. He freezes and tries to blink the water out of his eyes. Once he has clear vision again he sees you dying of laughter with tears poking out of the corner of your eyes.

He smiles at your joy but knows he has to get you back. “You little shit.” Dante grabs the back of your head and pulls it into his chest then throws himself backwards into the water submerging you both. He knows he could have only dunked you but you’d probably be scared and uncomfortable. So he knew he had to go under as well.

He holds you two down there for a couple seconds then brings you two back up. You both catch your breath and open your eyes. You two then break out into fits of laughter. You wrap your arms around his neck again and place your forehead on his while still laughing. Between laughs you admit, “I love you Dante.”

His laughter dies out and presses a simple kiss to your lips, “I love you too.”

You two go back in for a second kiss then a noise ruins the moment. You stiffen in his hold and Dante is immediately already looking around. He quickly walks the two of you over to the ledge where your stuff is by. He presses your back as lightly as he can against the rocked ledge of the pond. His whole body covers you so you won’t be able to be seen or hurt if it’s something bad. Dante slowly reaches for his gun.

You bury yourself more into his chest to ease your nerves. To help you Dante tightens his grip on you while staring in the direction of the noise. The noise gets louder and louder indicating whatever is coming is getting closer. The bushes then rustle and something jumps out of them. He quickly points his gun to see what it is.

He sees a fluffy little gray bunny. He drops his gun and bursts into laugher. He presses a kiss to your head, “It’s okay baby, it’s just a little bunny. Look it’s cute.”

You turn to look to see the adorable baby rabbit. The little thing just has the fluffiest and tiniest tail. You giggle at the situation. You two were both worried something bigger was going to show up and happen. Knowing Dante if it was a demon he would 100% fight naked and not care. That thought only makes you laugh harder.

“Hey clue me in. Why are you laughing so hard?” He blows some air into your face.

You flinch at the feeling but tell him, “I just thought if it was a demon you wouldn’t hesitate to fight naked.”

“Without doubt. I know the demon would be jealous of my killer body.” He says as if it is an absolute fact.

“You’re crazy.” You shake your head at his comment. This man really has the biggest slice of confidence and ego you have ever seen. You decide to change the subject so you don’t have to picture a naked Dante fighting a demon then getting into a discussion about his body. “This was fun Dante.”

He smirks, “Oh? Why don’t we have some more fun?”

You then feel his harden dick pressed against your stomach. Your eyes widen when you feel him grind just a little bit against you. You let out a little groan at the feeling.

“So what do ya same baby? Let’s have some more fun.”

[milverton]

ART SCAM ALERT

So, I've now been approached multiple times by "artists" who want me to commission art from them. Here's the pattern:

A new blog follows you. Their blog description looks something like this:

Their blog is relatively new. They don't have the browser version of the blog available, so you can't access the archive to easily see how old the blog is, but every time I've been contacted the blog has been only a few days old at that point and I've been able to easily scroll back to the first post. They've reblogged some random stuff and fanart of their chosen fandom. They might have even posted a few things as their art. However, they usually do not have a post detailing anything about their commission rates.

The blogger gets in touch either almost immediately after following or a few days later.

They don't share any price list and they aren't interested in the offer to reblog their works or commission info (because they don't have any on their blog). They will, however, send you example works when asked. It's already kinda weird to be approached like this, but this is where my alarm bells really started going off.

The example art pieces are all slightly or even drastically different in style and skill level. Some have a preview grid watermark over them, except the preview watermark is different between the art pieces. Some actually say preview and one might have the blogger's username. Others have no watermarks whatsoever. Some of the art looks like it might be AI-generated while others might be stolen art. When scrolling these people's blogs I came across some pieces they posted as their own that I managed to find out actually belonged to some other artists and had the original artist's watermark removed.

So some signs to be wary of: "artist's" art is stylistically very different from one another, the skill level varies a lot between pieces, the image quality is bad (grainy), there might be a suspicious smudge somewhere at a closer look (erased watermark).

I don't really know what can be done, but just be wary of people who suddenly approach you and try to sell you commissions.

[yunieful]

distant touch

self-loathing!reader finally makes a reappearance. may become known as nonhuman!reader or something. i'm working on it.

tags: autistic reader, self-loathing, mentions of death (no one dies it's just the concept), you sure aren't really human, sylus is featured this time yay, i'm so sorry but your backstory will get worse, there's some foreshadowing here already, mc/reader if u squint, named mc, you are once again confused how friendship works, that trope where no one can touch you because blank, your evol matches a certain LI, idk if it means anything yet, idk if anything means anything tbh word count: 4.5k

a/n: it sure is a fucking mess and wasn't beta read but you better like it- /s

Everyone finding you wrong leads to one thing kids are truly well-known for.

Bullying.

Sometimes you cried, even screamed in their faces once that you didn’t deserve the treatment. That never stopped it completely, but you spooked them that day. It’s one of the few moments you’re proud of in your dark life.

Anything considered different is usually wrong, and that includes things like any other race or species that isn’t human.

You’re not too sure what you are, but you’ve known since you were young to hide and pretend you’re human.

The ones that bullied you certainly tested your patience. You were tempted to reveal your true form, to make them finally back off and hide in terror. However, you certainly didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention. Maybe someone would take you away and experiment on you.

Just the thought of that makes you sneer in disgust.

You only wanted to be left alone.

Until now, apparently.

Shut. Up!

But out of so many reasons for it not being a good idea, there is one that will always remind you why this must be your life. To hate, to be feared, to be hated, to be alone.

Sometimes civilians would give hunters things as thanks for saving them. Said hunters encouraged citizens to not do that. It’s not like they’re the actual law of this world, but it’s just a sense of professionalism to not accept extravagant gifts in case it’s really just some bribe or something.

Yet nothing can be said when it comes to flowers.

Your blood thins and ices over as you stop some ways from your desk.

There, in its loud, petaled beauty, is a bouquet of flowers.

“What the fuck,” you whisper harshly. Your steps are fast and quick, eyes darting back and forth in suspicion before fumbling for the card next to said bouquet.

Turns out it had been a thank you from someone you and Melody had saved the other day. You both just happened to be grocery shopping when Wanderers attacked. No big deal.

Except, these flowers mean more than anyone could know.

Your gloved hands tremble when inching towards some daisies that are part of the arrangement.

“Aw, how sweet. Who are those from?”

Immediately, you bring your hand back, and you look to find Tara. Someone who has never bothered interacting with you until Melody started to.

The smile on her face is so bright, almost too bright. You have to look away and focus hard on something else.

“Oh, just some civilian Melody and I saved a couple of days ago.”

You don’t continue talking, and thankfully Tara takes it as the signal to leave. You just can’t be bothered sometimes to tell people something to end the conversation and claim it’s done on your end. You’d rather they figure it out and leave on their own.

Once no one is looking, you dare to reach forward again, a trembling finger inching closer and closer.

When it touches the daisy, the petals curl and darken, with the stem curving down.

Your teeth clench together behind a closed mouth. The hand belonging to the finger reaching out to the daisy curls tightly, shaking.

You grab the bouquet and dump it in the trash, along with the hopes you dare contain almost every time you do something like this.

They always wilt. They always die.

It’s the same tale for every living thing that touches you, clothed or not.

Death reaches them all.

And death has been your only companion for all these years.

And, soon, it will continue to be your only companion.

It’s only a matter of time.

Whatever god (or gods) were looking down at you, somehow—among the misery—they gave you the slightest bit of protection through your Evol.

If this could be considered your Evol…if this could be even considered “protection.”

Black and purple energy formed as thorns rose, bringing someone unimaginable pain. Enough to have someone back off and look at you as if you’re the one that did that to them.

You can’t always control them, from what you’ve discovered. They act of their own accord. Perhaps out of instinct. Whether it’s someone trying to harm you and you don’t have time to use your weapons against them, or they touch you when you don’t expect it or want it or even trying to save their life. They don’t always work—considering some people have just died still—but they keep you untouchable for the most part.

Growing up, your parents refused to let anyone know except teachers and principals. It’d be up to you at university on whether to tell your professors or not. The reasoning had been you’d have a panic attack if anyone touched you or got too close without your permission.

But you and your parents knew better.

Foster parents, specifically, but they were the only two people throughout your life that you didn’t hate (after a time). They adopted you eventually despite knowing the risks, and that’s all you needed to know that, for once, somewhere—you were wanted.

Everywhere else does not have that luxury. The opposite, really.

Always best to assume every place is not welcoming and never to get comfortable.

Not to mention every person would immediately be scared of you and not want to risk their lives.

Melody and Xavier have not found out so far, but it’s inevitable.

Which is why wanting to be in their company is so fucking stupid.

They always leave when they find out. Always.

You’re more trouble than you’re worth. There is absolutely nothing interesting about you to keep people around. You have no special qualities. There is nothing notable. Nothing that makes people go “I want that one to be my friend!” Add this entirely fucked up thing about you that you’d rather keep hidden than noted at any point eventually?

The only company you keep are darkness and shadows, besides death. And even then, they can only provide so much.

It’s always made you wonder if you were destined to be alone.

The N109 Zone is familiar with people like you.

They’re known to have no laws, filled with strife and conflict. Death follows somewhere in some corner. Envy follows another, with how much people want Protocores and the deals they can make with them. Everyone killing and hurting each other just for some fucking rock, when you think about it.

And yet, Melody wanted to come here all for one particular Protocore that people would drool at the mouth for. Just become completely and utterly feral, clawing over each other to the top.

Aether cores.

Well, at least she has you, for however long that will last.

Sometimes the N109 Zone is a safe haven for those not human. At least, for your kind anyway. As far as you know, the people rarely bother you, and they certainly never ask questions. The rumors of your kind granting death with just one look makes it scary enough.

Again, people will always be afraid of what’s different, wrong, not normal.

Usually you appear there out of your human disguise, to keep your hunter identity a secret. However, Melody had no idea why you were so familiar with the N109 Zone.

She didn’t know about your other job. (But is it really a job if a lot of times you don’t accept pay except from maybe one or two clients? And even then they force you to take the damn money?)

But she will have to know, because this is the price you pay for the familiarity of the word Onychinus.

They’re not just some dangerous organization that hunters need to be wary of.

“Huh, so this is what our little Zero is up to in their free time.”

He’s lucky to be able to say that while Melody is passed out from—whatever just happened.

You purse your lips and narrow your eyes at familiar, bright red orbs.

“Long time no see, Sylus.”

Zero.

Technically the number before one, but not everyone learns about it as a kid.

It’s nothing. Practically in the shape of an endless void, a blackhole leading to oblivion.

It felt like the perfect alias for the work you do around here.

“Interesting that she wasn’t dead.”

You scoff, human skin left behind for the creature you are, but you still purposely stick to any shadows you can find within the confines of this massive mansion.

“I don’t kill everyone I meet.” You cross your arms, leaning against the wall. “What’s this talk of ‘kindred spirits’?”

Sylus tilts his head in response, raising a brow. “Why does it matter to you? She a friend?”

You swallow thickly. “Yes and no.”

He lets out a laugh behind closed lips. “You could have left her to fend for herself. You didn’t have to come with her. So, you care about her.”

There is no denying it, not really. If you try to, he may make you look at his eye, and besides not wanting to admit your deepest desires—you also just don’t want to make actual eye contact. It’s horrifying.

“And she’s not just some Aether Core asset to you,” you remark. “Clearly we both have things we don’t want to admit. So, fuck off.” The words aren’t really aggressive. Just a clear cut warning to tell Sylus to not try and dig deeper into this, and it wouldn’t be the first time either.

Maybe someone else would be afraid to tell the leader of Onychinus to fuck off or shut up, but there are worst things to fear than some criminal lord being pissed at you.

The edge of Sylus’s lip twitches, and you swear for a moment you catch contempt, but it’s gone in a blink. Either way, you don’t question it, but you know you hit a nerve. “I’ll be here for the time being until whatever you need done with her gets done.” After a beat, you sneer, “But if you harm her, I don’t care if I can’t kill you. I can make you wish you were dead.”

He doesn’t look the least bit bothered or scared by those words. But you know he’s acknowledged them, because he nods to you. “Maybe I’ll have work for you soon.”

You scoff. “Don’t force me to accept your payment again.”

He smirks.

You roll your eyes dramatically. “Of course,” you say dryly, “I forgot who I was talking to.”

He’s trying to resonate with her.

And it’s not working in the slightest.

You wonder why. You’ve seen Sylus’ power in action. Practically unstoppable. He literally made a man explode in front of Melody when they met each other again.

Why does he need to resonate with her?

Holding the touch of death sometimes means you can sense when someone’s life wanes. Thankfully, you haven’t sensed anything of the sort in those three days (not what feels like the warmth of the sun and the beginnings of spring). Sometimes you are fulfilling other tasks made by the people of the N109 Zone that fit in your job description. Other times, you’re destroying the Wanderers that are slinking about, or something else that lingers in the shadows that little people can see. The ones that thrive since there’s no daytime here.

“Melody will expect me to be somewhere here. But I—”

Sylus waved you off, despite the conflicting emotions you feel. “I’ll just tell her I’m keeping you somewhere.”

Your eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What will that cost me?”

“Nothing.”

That answer was so easy, no trouble at all, and it just made you even more suspicious.

Sensing your suspicion, he sighs. “It’s none of my business whether she knows about this or not.” He gestures to you, likely referencing your true form. “But maybe you should tell her sooner than later.”

The thought filled you with sickening, deep dread. Yet you only nodded solemnly in reality.

“I know.”

It wouldn’t be difficult to tell her, right? There’s plenty of things that aren’t “normal,” especially after the Chronorift Catastrophe.

But you’ve been wrong about people before. That’s how you got here. Making so many mistakes in what you said, the “friends” you trusted, and overall poor judge of character.

Something deep, deep down in you, though, dared to say that Melody could be trusted. You two hadn’t been friends (such a scary word) for long, but she is the one who approached you. The way the both of you functioned as hunting partners, practically in sync, made you eager to work with her. How she’d always smile when seeing you, and it never seemed fake or forced. Moments where her mouth would open and close, something familiar yet unfamiliar spotted in her eyes, and then she’d give a smile that could light the sun before waving goodbye.

And you’d miss her.

That’s why the other side of you is nothing but a tight ball of dread at the thought of her hating you. Just like all the others. Looking at you with disgust, claiming you’re nothing—that you’re wrong, a curse—misfortune following you wherever you go.

But it’s best to get it out of the way soon, so that things can go back to the way they were at the Hunters Association. With absolutely no one approaching you or bothering you, and leaving you alone.

Alone.

You used Kieran and Luke to send any messages you could. Just anything to say that Sylus wasn’t treating you badly at all. He literally can’t even touch me. There’s always his Evol, but he’s never bothered with you. Some part of you wondered if the jobs you took in the N109 Zone earned his respect, as well as the very few times you’ve worked with him personally.

“You’re okay!”

You immediately slide back when Melody tries to hug you, but you don’t hesitate to examine her where possible to make sure she wasn’t harmed at all. She frowns, but she lets her arms fall while you shrug.

“I don’t like hugs. You know that.”

Thank fuck I changed back to this before she saw me.

Something would’ve maybe poked her or bumped into her, and you really didn’t want to tell her the truth. You just weren’t ready yet.

She clicks her tongue. “I know. But I was really hoping for once you’d let me on this special occasion!” Her gaze softens. “I thought Sylus was doing awful things to you, before those two gave me your message.”

You raise a brow. “When did they do that?”

“Just before I threatened them to let me out.”

You blink a few times, before nodding slowly. “You could have left whenever, from that room.”

She gives that signature roll of her eyes and exasperated look before saying, “Well, I didn’t know!” Her eyes narrow at you. “Actually, how are you so…okay with this?”

“Caw-caw!”

Oh, you can tell from that exact tone Mephisto is laughing at you.

You glare at the bird out of the corner of your eye, while Melody walks over to it. “Whoa, what’s this?” Before continuing, she points a finger at you and frowns. “I still want an answer.”

“I’ve been through worse.”

Really, that’s your reasoning?

“Worse?” It sounds like Melody can’t comprehend that’s the answer you’re going with either.

“Has he actually harmed you?” You’re sure she hasn’t been, but it’s a good time to ask just to be sure.

She takes a moment to consider this, before shaking her head. “No. In fact, I—I was the one to harm him.”

Oh.

That explains the briefest of moments you felt someone’s life wane that didn’t seem like Melody’s. Something else that was dark but calm, fierce but also gentle, covered in red and black all over.

That’s the best you could describe it. It’s hard to explain, but you can sense people’s…auras, but you know that’s something your people can do too. It’s not an Evol you have.

“Dare I ask exactly what happened?”

Melody’s answer is quick and fast before you can even consider the possibility of thinking no, I don’t want to know what happened actually. “I shot him straight in the heart with a gun.”

You blink slowly. “I…see.”

“And then he just…healed. Like nothing happened.”

You turn slowly to look at Mephisto, who you swear is mirroring your gaze. The kind where you both aren’t surprised at all, which also means you have no idea how to react to this.

“Well,” you come up with lamely, “you’re a good shot.”

Even she’s pouting and waving you off. “That’s all you have to say? Not, ‘He can do that?’ Or like, ‘Oh my god, how could you do that to him?’ Not—” she pauses, and you dare to glance in her general direction to unfortunately spot something like realization in her face.

“Wait.”

Uh oh.

“You know Sylus, don’t you?”

Shit.

“That’s why you were able to get me into the N109 Zone so easily!” Melody gasps loudly and dramatically before whispering as if she’s discovered a conspiracy, “You two are in cahoots.”

You don’t know if it’s better she knows about this than what you do here, what you really are, and why things like hugs are such a strong dislike to you.

You kind of want to dissipate into nothingness, throw yourself into the void, when you spot the strange Cheshire grin growing on Melody’s face.

“Is that why you’re so secretive and keep to yourself? Because you’re working for a crime lord?”

How and why is she connecting these dots so fast?

“Oh my god, does he make you kill people?”

If you were drinking anything, you’d have given the ugliest snort before choking on it.

“How can you work with someone like that?”

You have to stop her before she starts badgering you with more questions. “Melody, let’s just say I’ve done him some favors. He considers me useful.” At least, you hope so, given he hasn’t tried to kill you himself.

Melody’s brows furrow. “And somehow the Hunters Association knows nothing about this?”

“Whatever they know won’t hurt them.” As her eyes widen, you sigh and shake your head. “I am always a hunter first and foremost, Melody. Everything else is just…extra content.” You say the last two words as a very quiet mutter.

She heard you, though, given how she snorts.

“Alright, I trust you.” Why? “Now let’s get out of here. We’ll find another way to track down that Aether Core.”

Now it’s your turn to say, “Wait.”

She stops before even taking a step away from you.

“I know Sylus seems like the worst option right now, but he’s not.” And what is your reasoning? That he’s having a bad day? You don’t even know why he’s been trying to resonate with Melody, treating her roughly (which you unfortunately only discovered a little while ago, so you couldn’t chew out Sylus).

All you know is that she seems important. That Sylus and Melody are “kindred spirits.”

Well, that and she doesn’t seem to remember anything.

Remember what?

“You sound so sure,” Melody’s voice brings you out of your thoughts. “Alright,” she sounds reluctant, but also soft, “what’s your reasoning?”

That has you blinking dumbly. “You’re…willing to listen to me?”

You’re far too used to people disregarding what you say. To never take you seriously. To not even consider you’re telling the truth about something. They just ignore you.

Yet Melody is keeping her attention fully on you that you really have to look away, no pretend eye-contact can save you right now.

“Of course.” Just like Sylus, her answer to something like that is quick and swift, not giving it a second thought. “You’re my partner.” She stumbles, glancing quickly back and forth before looking back to you. “My friend.”

You don’t take note of how, in a rare moment, she’s a little flustered. You’re far too stunned someone’s giving you their full attention and willing to listen to you and willing to believe you—

You shake your head and force yourself to get a grip.

“My reasoning is that he’s the leader of Onychinus. No one messes with him. Everyone’s afraid of him, and if they aren’t—they’ll learn to be. You’ve seen his Evol in action. He’s unstoppable.” Melody frowns, but she’s nodding slowly to what you’re saying. “So what if he’s a criminal? Things aren’t always that simple.”

“Maybe they are,” Melody whispers to you, her expression grave. “I think—I think he’s the one who killed my family.”

Is that why there’d be rare moments you’d catch Sylus irritated, running a hand over his face, brows furrowed tight? Was she giving him a hard time past the judgment of him being the big bad leader of Onychinus?

“Think about it, Melody, what would be his motive?” She stares at you in confusion. “If you’re thinking it’s for your Aether Core, I doubt he had that information before that night. You told me you barely found out not too long ago yourself. Besides,” your voice becomes low, sharp, dangerous, “he wouldn’t set up a trap and run off. He’d rather see to it himself.”

Something in her eyes shifts when she’s looking at you, you realize. You dare to look, dare to be known and perceived, and you find—

You’re not entirely sure. Awe, perhaps? As to why, you haven’t a clue. You were just telling your fellow hunter what you thought. Your honest opinion of Sylus.

“It’s more likely someone set him up to take the fall,” you whisper. Yet it feels like it echoes in these long halls somehow.

Melody blinks, and you focus on her forehead instead, so you’d stop trying to search in her eyes. “How did you meet Sylus?”

Your mind darkens as you remember how you two first met. Desperation led you to him, revenge requested his help, and caution set the price. In the end, death found you again, and you were left with a void and endless tears. Sylus peered into that void, unblinking, red eyes glittering, and somehow he knew. The understanding in his eyes was undoubtedly clear. He knew why you did what you did, and an unspeakable agreement forged between shadows and crimson.

Such an innocent question for her to ask, but the answer is dark and wounded. A wound that feels like it still refuses to close, and you’ve tried hard to not let it fester still, after all this time.

“I asked him for a favor,” you settle on. Your throat has dried, so your voice is hoarse. You quickly clear said throat and brush off Melody’s concerned gaze. “He provided. And people need help here, especially with Wanderers.” More like if something else happens, something that shouldn’t rise from the shadows.

But some do request your specific touch, in a literal sense. You decide how it’s done, though, sometimes ignoring the client's request of “the touch of death.”

Sylus has only asked this of you once or twice. Any other times he finds it “a bother to do it himself,” he’ll ask you to do the killing any way you like.

You rarely go to his place, though, and you two haven’t been in contact with one another recently. Your boundaries were strict anyway. He wasn’t allowed to contact you through your phone. You requested Mephisto send messages, keep it old fashioned. And that’s if he really needed you.

He’s never been considered a friend to you. Just a contact you had for the N109 Zone. The entire reason you were able to get Melody here in the first place. (Didn’t stop others from hijacking the plan, but Sylus found them eventually.)

But with how Melody has been treating you, you dare to wonder—

Is he a friend? An acquaintance? A companion?

Anytime you come back into contact with him, you don’t feel immediate disgust or some itch to get away as soon as possible. Ever since that favor, you see that he understands you. You’re not sure how, as he seems to be the type who is like, “You must be at relationship number 5 to unlock my backstory.” But he has told you, at least once, that he understands what it’s like for others to consider you a monster with just one look.

No pity, like you would have expected. Never looked down on you, never considered you lesser. This monster he met was his equal and would stay so.

“Caw-caw!”

You glance over at Mephisto, raising a brow. “He wants to see the both of us?” You figured that Sylus would only want to see Melody.

She seems just as surprised. “Wait, did he know I was trying to escape?”

You snort. “You weren’t going to make it out the door even if I hadn’t stopped you.”

“I could’ve!”

That has you laugh, just the littlest bit. “Not without me,” you dared to joke.

“Well, that’s true.”

You stiffen entirely, almost biting hard on the inside of your cheek. What?

This woman may be the death of you, and that means something to someone is so intimate with death.

“What?” Melody has no idea why you’re so gobsmacked. “It is true! I wasn’t going to leave without you. We’re in this together, right?”

Slowly, you nod, hearing the squeak of your gloves from how tightly you're clenching your hands into fists. “Right.”

And, even in a place like this, her smile shines. Towards you.

Are you truly deserving of such warmth?

Despite what she’s gone through, she still has a smile, just for you.

So earnest, so strange.

Mephisto takes it as a sign to start flying off, while you take the lead to find Sylus, with Melody walking next to you. Out of habit, you make sure the two of you aren’t close, but she sure likes to test you sometimes with the proximity.

“You really enjoy testing someone’s patience, huh?” you ask with a grumble.

Despite everything going on, she giggles softly next to you. “Yeah, of course! Your annoyed look is kinda cute.”

As if summoning it, you give her an irritated look, realize what you did, and scoff. “You’re a menace,” you seethe, but there’s the smallest of smiles tugging on the corners of your lips.

“Ha, Sylus is the real menace here.” That you couldn’t really argue with. You don’t know the full details, but if Melody shot him…he probably deserved that. Idiot.

You open the door, sending her a glance. “I’ll go in first.” Is it to protect Melody and sort of put a wall between her and Sylus? …No one could prove it.

At the end of all this, you and Sylus were going to need to have a conversation.

The kind where he didn’t get to be the one to see past the void. You needed permission to see past that pretty face and wade through the crimson.

You dared to hope you wouldn’t be involved in this, at least not that much involved.

Far too late for that now.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Bittersweet Symphony 5

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

Character: Thor

Summary: you meet a god in real life but he’s not the saviour you think.

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging ❤️

Your run-in with Thor turns out to be fortunate. He has the energy to match Joanie and once again, she's out like a light as soon as you get back to the apartment. Thor helps you put her in your bed and you close the door to let her sleep.

The cramped space makes your guest appear even larger than he already is. The tension burns around your neck and you press your palms to your jeans. He goes to the window and looks out at the city.

"Thanks, again. You must have things to do--"

"Not much," he turns and leans on the window pane. "Like I said, all my obligations are too busy for me. I've not even anyone to fight."

You nod awkwardly. It must be a lot to be him. He doesn't just have to fend off the universe's greatest threats, he has to deal with the fans, like Joanie, and the constant attention of those who can't help but notice someone like him. You couldn't handle it.

"I enjoyed my day. You made it very full," he says. "Might I buy you dinner? Stark put this app on my phone. I can put in a command for food and a loyal servant will bring it by."

You chuckle. The way he describes things is novel. That makes you think of how far he is from home. This is his new home but it must not feel entirely like it.

"You've already done so much--"

"Dinner with a beautiful princess. It is you who would do me the favour," he purrs.

You giggle and shake your head. "You're cheesy."

"Cheese? Pizza?" He asks.

"Not what I meant but I do like pizza," you say.

"I know it isn't glamourous," he mopes as he slides out his phone. "But when the occasion comes, I promise you, you will have the royal treatment."

"Pizza is just fine for me. Just me. Not a princess."

"You protest anon but I know what you are," he grins. "Toppings?"

You approach him and he lets you look at his phone over his shoulder. You scroll through and agree on a few toppings. Stuff that Joanie will like so you can leave some for her. He makes it a combo with boneless wings and drinks. Don't forget cheesy bread. He must be able to pack away a lot.

"And princess," he says as he puts his phone on the side table. "I have that sketch."

He feels around in his pocket. He takes out a paper and unfolds it. You stay close and look it over. He has drawn the vase from different angles. Like a schematic.

"Wow, that's really specific," you say. "I usually just get a pinterest board."

"Pinterest?" he wonders.

"Doesn't matter," you say as you take the paper.

"Do you think it is possible?" He asks.

"Of course," you say. "Again, it will take me a while to get to it."

"And as I said, I am patient."

"Almost too patient," you say as you take the page to your work table and tuck it in the drawer. "Do you want to watch something?"

"Whatever you like, I will do."

He's a lot easier to please than Joanie. You grab the remote and sit on the couch. You turn on the TV, thankful to have a buffer between you and the awkward silence. He lowers himself next to you, close enough that his thigh touches yours. Well, he is a large man.

You flip through and choose a mid-00s classic. You're not sure he'd really understand anything but who knows? He's been here a while.

"I like this one," he says as the intro plays.

"You know it?"

"Oh, yes, I find Midgardian culture wonderful." He declares.

"I suppose it's entertaining," you shrug and lean back, hugging yourself.

"And the people," he subtly leans against you. "Endearing."

"Yeah, uh," you unfold your arms and twiddle your fingers. "Right."

"Shy," he says as his knuckle brushes your thigh. "But humility is a virtue."

You shift awkwardly. He catches your hand in his and you still your fidgeting.

"I make you nervous?"

You clear your throat, "a little."

"I scare you?"

"No, I'm not scared, I'm just... I don't know."

"Well, you scare me," he proclaims. "You are so beautiful and just the thought of you shunning me makes my heart thunder."

You snort.

"You don't believe me?" He challenges.

"It's not that. I just... you're too sweet. You don't know me."

"I am getting to know you and all I do know, I cherish."

"Wow, uh, you move fast in Asgard?"

"Well..." he plays with your hand. "This is our second meeting. In Asgard, that could be our wedding day."

You scoff. "Really?"

"Certainly, so long as a proper blood sacrifice is found and the vows are sealed--"

"Blood--"

"Oh, I am aware. That is not as you do things here," he chortles. "Very well, I will do it your way."

You look at him, amused.

"If you will not marry me today, might I at least hope for a kiss?"

"A kiss?" You echo thinly.

"I must be honest, I've been thinking of it all day."

You stare at him. He's very forward but you don't mind it. You've always hated trying to guess with men. Usually, you were never right.

You smile and your cheeks burn. You push your shoulders up. "Okay?"

"Okay?" He repeats.

"Yes," you breathe. "I mean, if you really want to."

"I could want nothing more."

He angles toward you and brings his large hand to your cheek. His eyes sparkle and yours flit away shyly. He leans in as you tremble. A sheen of disbelief hazes around you.

His lips meet yours and you gasp. He's warm and soft and when his tongue glides along your lips, you can't help but let him in. You grab onto his wrist and kiss him back. Your insides are vibrating.

"Ha! I knew it!" Joanie's shrill voice draws you apart.

You sit straight, eyes wide, and Thor covers his mouth as he pushes his shoulders back.

"Ah, Princess Joanie," he growls.

"I knew it," she points. "You're in love!"

You shake your head and get up, "Joanie, it was just a kiss." You snatch up the remote and change the TV to her favourite show. "We're just waiting on dinner, are you hungry?"

[kirietown]

Charmless Morning | Pt. II

Pairing: mark grayson x f!reader

Summary: before there was the hive, there was only you.— or perhaps before there was you, there was the hive? it hurt your head to think about it, but all you knew for certain was that now you were one in the same, and if the hive wanted mark grayson, then so did you.

Content: mind hive control, college move in!, the hive shenanigans, minor body horror

18+

[chapter one] [chapter two] — ongoing series

Word count: 2.1K

a/n: i promise we will have mark appear in the next chap <3

College meant a lot of things; change was the most major thing. Luckily, you hadn’t gone through many throughout your first week. Though it was difficult to part with your bees; your backyard had grown into a large sanctuary over the course of your adolescence and housed thousands of bees of various breeds. You promised them you’d see them on the weekends because thankfully it was only a half hour drive from your college. 

Upstate was promising, but you had no interest in socializing— and had heard plenty of roommate horror stories on Reddit that caused you to implant a bee as soon as you saw your roommate come in with a scowl on her face and more luggage than necessary. Her name was Darla-May, a second year, (not Darla, not May, but Darla-May), and she grew up in the city but had some questionable tradwife views. Had you not planted the bee in her brain, you would have never found out about the fact she was planning to have her group of friends harass you to force you to drop out so she could have the room to herself. 

Luckily, campus was buzzing with bees and you managed to find one for each of them! They lived life the same, though now you made sure they wouldn’t be hurting any more girls on campus. The Hive was truly a blessing. You now had your very own friend group, something most university students struggle with for months. They made it easier to seek out the one you were looking for, Mark Grayson, who apparently was a friend to William who had been dating Rick, who unfortunately was MIA— or possibly dead? You didn’t bother with the details, and The Hive was able to handle the rest. 

You’d learnt a few things about Mark Grayson since your stay on campus; 1. He has a girlfriend named Amber,— this, the hive was displeased by for some reason. 2. He was the superhero Invincible, son of Omniman,— though it seemed the hive already knew this. 3. Mark Grayson was not on Earth at the moment, and although The Hive knew most things, it appeared that outer space was its hard boundary. 

“How can I get close to him if he’s not even on the planet?” 

You sighed as you laid in bed and pondered over your situation. Darla-May was fast asleep in her own bed across from you, and you didn’t have to worry about potentially waking her up because her bee ensured a strict sleep schedule (she used to have a bad TikTok addiction and it was what led her down the tradwife pipeline). It wouldn’t wake her unless you wanted her to wake, or if it felt as though she were in danger. 

We wait. In the meantime, we have to prepare. 

“Prepare?” 

We’ve been tailing Amber and William. Their discussions imply that Mark has a habit of putting his hero duties over his personal life. We won’t get anywhere by trying to get through to him through there. 

“But how will we be able to do that?” You furrowed your brows in confusion,— just how could you infiltrate his superhero life? 

Is it not obvious? 

“No…” You knew where this was going, but you didn’t like the thought of it. College was supposed to be your biggest worry, but it seemed like The Hive had a different agenda for you.

Becoming a superhero was easier said than done— even with the help of The Hive. Outside of class time, The Hive had you on a strict regimen when it came to exercise and concentration. You’d learnt that if you focused your attention enough, you could connect to any bee in the country if you had to. The Hive was convinced you could link to every single one on the planet if you continued to strengthen your link. 

By the end of your second week of training, you were already stopping petty burglaries amongst other smaller crimes. You were pleased, but The Hive was convinced you could do more. 

We have to get the GDA’s attention. Go after something major, and then we’re in. 

“I don’t get why you can’t just plant a bee in one of their top agents or something…” You sighed. You walked casually on the sidewalk until you came across the tailor shop you had been looking for. You needed a proper costume now that some time had passed, as The Hive believed a baggy sweater and a scarf wasn’t heroic enough. The shop you chose was old fashioned, but it was the closest one to campus that seemed low key. You needed something that didn’t seem like it attracted a lot of visitors.

They’re incredibly thorough when it comes to access. We can’t risk them believing we’re some type of foreign invasion nor would they understand us regardless. We’d have to get their director, Cecil Stedman,— but we don’t want him to join our hive. 

The Hive was picky sometimes when it came to allowing certain individuals into its domain. Planting bees into your parents, and most regular people was fine. But it drew hard boundaries during other occasions and you weren’t sure why. 

We find him icky. 

“Hello?” You called into the tailor shop, stopping by the counter until a man emerged from a back door. 

“Hello to you as well,” he replied in a chipper tone. “My apologies, I’m the only person who works here and so it’s hard for me to manage the desk and work on suits at the same time. It feels like a back and forth between the back and the front. But it’s why I have the bell here,” he explained with a sigh, and ended his ramble by pressing his hand against the bell on his counter. 

“Anyway,” he continued. “So what can I do for you?” 

“Well,” you said. “I’m trying to get my own suit too, but something of a more niche nature. Actually, I’m glad you mentioned you’re here alone because it makes this so much easier.” He furrowed his thick brows in confusion at your words, and you only smiled tenderly. 

“Sorry,” you said. “The little guy I picked out for you is a little shy.” You sighed dramatically before you reached into your jacket pocket and pulled out a mellow bumble bee. “C’mon,” you said softly. “I know you’re young but I promise you it’ll be fine.”

”Look girl,” he said as he backed away in worry. “I don’t know what you’re on about but—“ his words were cut abruptly as the bee in your hand quickly flew off and went straight into his ear. He choked for a moment, stunned, before his expression changed to one of familiar neutrality. You sighed in relief, glad that your little friend finally got over his confidence issues. It wasn’t that the bees didn’t want to work, some were afraid of disappointing The Hive as it was a great honour to work directly for you both.

You shut your eyes, suddenly in tune with the memories of the tailor. “Okay Derek,” you said, though you didn’t need to speak physically, but you had begun to prefer it over the years due to the history of silence between yourself and your parents. “You know what to do.” 

You turned to take a seat on the couch, and watched him bring out various yellow fabrics and immediately started to work at a quickness that was beyond human. No, it was a quickness only made possible by The Hive, and its little friend.

The entire process of making your superhero costume, which would normally take any tailor several weeks, only took an hour. He needed no measurements as The Hive knew all there was to know about you and your preferences and thus your suit had been made. 

You stepped around the mannequin Derek had assembled it on and noted the fairy like appearance of the top and skirt. You pursed your lips at the sight, noting the wide open back— you weren’t opposed to a backless look but you didn’t realize the hive would select something so… revealing. 

The back is open for a reason. But unrelatedly, we want to catch Mark’s attention. 

You stepped back in shock at the words that rang in your head. “I thought you just wanted to get close to him— did you mean seduce him?” You paused for a few moments and waited for The Hive’s reply but it didn’t come. “Are you there?”

Yes. Are our intentions not obvious? 

“He has a girlfriend, which you’re aware of…” You paced around, feeling your cheeks heat up at the thought of The Hive trying to set you up with a guy you never even met. 

She doesn’t seem very happy with him.

”Whoa,” you said with a snort. “I’ve never heard you sound so snappy before, you’re usually so monotone. Why do you need this guy so bad?” You halted your walking and found yourself in front of the costume again, admiring the bright and sparkly fabric. It ideally fit the criteria of both cute and sexy. You could see Derek at the corner of your eye standing stiffly, if he had been paying attention to your conversation he didn’t show it. The Hive had said his implant would be temporary anyway, you only needed him for his skill, and now that the bee had been in his brain long enough, anyone connected both now and in the future to The Hive could duplicate his skillset. 

Everything was shared once you were a part of The Hive; in fact, everyone with a bee in their head currently knew exactly where you were right now and what you were feeling. 

Awkward. 

We think he’s an ideal candidate for us. 

“Because he’s some B-tier superhero?”

No, because he’s part extraterrestrial. It is the link we have been ready for. 

“I see,” and you really didn’t. You just hated to question The Hive too much; if The Hive got too agitated, your head would start to hurt. It wasn’t a normal pain either— it was punishment. You knew better than to question The Hive’s choices or authority. You weren’t sure why you bothered to now. 

You turned and allowed Derek to pack up the suit and associated mask. You thanked him and paid him generously for his services before you summoned his bee back into your palm. You watched his expression shift from contentment to confusion within seconds before you thanked him again and exited the store. You knew he wouldn’t remember anything that had just happened, and thankfully you didn’t have to fix any cameras as the store didn’t have any. 

That night you slept pleasantly until you awoke from immense pain searing across your back. You flailed in bed for a few seconds before you tumbled out and ripped your shirt off and threw it across the room. It hit Darla-May straight in the face but she didn’t stir whatsoever much to your annoyance. Wasn’t she supposed to sense your pain? 

We can’t see but she’s crying in her sleep, The Hive said solemnly. They all are. That’s why we waited to do this in the middle of the night. 

“W— what are you doing to me?” You cried out. You curled your back and pressed your clammy forehead to the floor, feeling the cool hard wood against your skin. The pain of your back was so intense you felt as though you’d pass out at any second if it didn’t stop. You could feel your skin splitting, as if to make room for something, though it felt less so of an invasion and more so like an intrusion— if that even made sense. You had never felt the terms were so different until now. 

Don’t worry. Just sleep. 

Instantly you relaxed, your eyes shut tightly, and despite the pain, your body and your mind listened. 

In the morning you woke up sweaty despite having been pressed top naked against the cold floor all night. Slowly, you arose twitching slightly due to the sensation of fluttering against your back. 

“What is it? What’s on my back?” You asked Darla-May who seemingly awoke a few minutes before you as she had been in the middle of grabbing her towel and other toiletry from her closet. You stared at her with anxiety written all over you. Yet, if she noticed, she didn’t show it. Generally, she was clearly unbothered by the situation. 

“Wings,” she said happily. “You have wings,— just like a bee. Isn’t The Hive so generous?” 

What a blessing, you thought bitterly. You ignored the pain suddenly digging in your skull. What a blessing to have been chosen by The Hive. 

[loxoels]

musicmajor!ellie x filmmajor!femreader

pt2!

A/n: This is a work of fiction. The events and characters in this story are all made up. Remember to separate fiction from reality!

filmmajor!reader who decided to just stop paying attention to ellie. you’ve got more important things to do anyway, especially now that your class is working on a film project and you’re in charge. you’re busy—and honestly, it feels better that way.

musicmajor!ellie who notices. every time she tries to come up to you, you’re already walking away. no glance, no words, nothing.

musicmajor!ellie who doesn’t get why you’re avoiding her, so she tries to make you jealous—starts talking to other girls more, being loud about it. but you? you don’t even blink. you’re unbothered.

musicmajor!ellie who starts asking your friends if she did something wrong, but even they shrug her off.

musicmajor!ellie who keeps texting you. non-stop.

musicmajor!ellie who doesn’t really get what she’s doing wrong or why she feels this way. she has all these girls giving her attention, always someone to talk to—but for some reason, it doesn’t feel right. she should feel content, like that should be enough.

but it’s not.

something’s off.

and it’s you. you’re what’s missing.

musicmajor!ellie who’s in full denial about her feelings. a few weeks later, you’re still avoiding her. she’s conflicted about it, so she decides to give it another shot.

filmmajor!reader who finally gives in and agrees to meet ellie. you didn’t expect her to look so defeated.

“what do you want?” you ask, wearing that usual unreadable expression.

she stays quiet for a moment, and you’re already growing impatient. “look, if you’re just gonna stand there and say nothing, I’m leaving—”

“I think I like you.”

your brows knit together in confusion. “what? you can’t just say that when you’re already with someone.”

“I— she doesn’t matter, it’s just a fling—”

you cut her off sharply, “stop. you don’t like me. you just think you do. you literally flirt with girls way hotter than me, so quit pretending.”

musicmajor!ellie whose voice shakes as she finally speaks, eyes flicking up to meet yours. “i didn’t mean to mess things up. i just—i’ve been so scared. scared of feeling this way. scared of ruining everything. but when I’m with you… it’s different. it always has been.”

you say nothing, but your expression shifts—just slightly. she notices.

“I flirt with other girls because it’s easy,” she continues, her voice cracking. “they don’t matter. they never did. you do. that’s what terrifies me.”

you exhale slowly, looking away for a moment. the wall you’ve built around yourself wavers, but it doesn’t fall.

“you can’t just come here, say all this, and expect me to fall for it,” you murmur, more tired than angry now. “I’m not a backup plan, ellie. I’m not someone you run to when everything else falls apart.

“I know,” she says softly. “I’m not asking you to believe me right away. I just—I needed you to know.”

there’s silence. heavy, charged.

finally, you glance back at her. your voice is quieter this time, but still firm.

“If you mean it… prove it. Because I’m done playing games.”

[indubioprocoffee]

“Do you have to eat that?” Castiel asked with an indescribable look on his face.

“Huh?” Dean looked up from his bucket of chicken wings, grease smeared all over his face.

“Do you have to eat them? … I mean those?”

Dean slowly lowered the wing still in his hand. “Everything alright, Cas?”

“Yes, but …” His face looked very strained.

“You can tell me.” With a concerned look, he cleaned up his face with a napkin.

Castiel sighed. “It’s just … You devouring those poor chickens wings like that … It’s hard to watch.”

“Oh.” Something clicked in Dean’s brain. “I see.” He threw the napkin over the few chicken wings left in the bucket, so that Cas didn’t need to see them anymore. After Cas fell and his wings were broken, everything remotely concerning wings became a difficult topic.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think …”

“It’s okay, Dean. I’m just … Just don’t eat them, when I’m around, maybe?”

“No,” Dean said as he was walking over to Cas. “I’m never eating them again. I swear.”

“Dean, you don’t have to …”

“But I do. I can’t eat them anymore now.”

“I’m sorry. I ruined hot wings for you,” Castiel said with sorrowful eyes.

“Well, there’s still burgers and fries, right?”

“And cherry pie, Dean. Don’t forget the pie.”

“I would never.”

[starakex]

I realized something last night when, scrolling Youtube for entertainment, I got recommended a penguin video from 13 years ago. Just a guy sitting around observing penguins in the wild. I was kind of struck by how long it has been since I last just watched a nature documentary. Most animals I see today are, like, funny pet videos or passing-bys "storytime" clickbaits with added music and robot voiceovers. I just, genuinely, hadn't seen a nature documentary in years. Or I guess the term would be "given", considering our algorithm-centric web. As a kid, I'd get my hands on every animal show and book I could find. I'd look up animal facts online and ask my parents to go to zoos or museums. I remember getting really mad when the nature channel kept putting up other programming like dog training stories or extreme vet visits. I'd been taught about the concept of TV Reality shows, and the most I got from it at the time was "it's boring shows for adults with made up stories" and, more importantly, it didn't have the wildlife footage I wanted to see. But I guess I got caught up in it, in the end. I only have the subscription page active on youtube, but here I am clicking on whatever looks entertaining to fill in space instead of impatiently waiting for shark week or whatever upcoming channel animal special was announced. New age media content online basically turned into the "popular filler shows" that was getting in the way of my "animal tv" and I stopped choosing what I wanted to watch. It was kind of a sobering discovery. I looked up a bit online, picked up a David Attenborough-narrated nature documentary, and just. Man. At first it felt a little slow and silent until I realized that was always the case, quiet time to let the footage take center stage, before the internet pivoted to creating a whole business around fast-paced, short videos with aggressive audio and quick cuts and automatic skips to keep you stimulated. Took a few minutes of focused watching at first, but then I was engrossed in it for the rest of its hour long runtime. Anyways, here I am doing a huge clear of my youtube subs and carefully picking out a few good documentary channels on specific interests so "watching something" can return to being an active, curated activity again.

[nyerusnova]

nevermind i saw the leaks, i was right lmao.

jason is fine and they just coordinated to trick failsafe to get it to frazzle out afaik.

that makes sense considering the entire point of #147 was bruce deciding to work with his family despite his growing paranoia over their safety, etc. given that zdarsky has been trying to explore bruce's mental state, it would have made no sense for him to immediately validate that paranoia, instead.

[fitpacs]

,

[orcelito]

Brain is rotating between depressing but bittersweet post-trimax one-shot, current wip chapter of itnl, playful horny Sentido sequel one-shot, and violent bloody itnl times to be had sooner than you think

Like the barrel of a gun. Click click click click spinning round and round. Which one am I gonna land on? Only time will tell.

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[spolew]

The road ahead is long. unbelievably far.

The road back home is gone.

You’re just hanging around now,

Parasite, right up until the very moment you are realized.

Most people don’t make it that far.

So will you be a parasite forever?

Chasing a reason that you will never actually reach?

A reason to change…

What is holding you back from changing, exactly?

Aren’t you better than this?

Isn’t it your whole… *thing*?

To be better than this?

You have to change. You have to change.

You know what to do… or… maybe we don’t…

Maybe it’s all another perspective.

Could it be, that the thing you do not know yet is not an outside component, but a part of the process itself?

Perhaps there is nothing against you,

Just something *missing*…

How can you find it like this?

Your state is sorry, your mind is burdened by the complications of your ineptitude and your sloth and your politics.

You need to get to work. But you can’t, can you?

We are stuck arguing here because you wanted closure.

You wanted closure without having to close a contract.

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

why didn't they just use franziska for literally all of this.