#i don’t know if we can all collectively hang on till november

[whentherewerebicycles]

The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad — the massing of protesters, the ensuing crackdowns and the awkwardly staged displays of strength by a leader determined to project authority.

In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.

“I’ve seen this kind of violence,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.”

Helt, now a professor at King University in Tennessee, said the images of unrest in U.S. cities, combined with President Trump’s incendiary statements, echo clashes she covered over a dozen years at the CIA tracking developments in China, Malaysia and elsewhere.

Other former CIA analysts and national security officials rendered similarly troubled verdicts.

Marc Polymeropoulos, who formerly ran CIA operations in Europe and Asia, was among several former agency officials who recoiled at images of Trump hoisting a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington after authorities fired rubber bullets and tear gas to clear the president’s path of protesters.

“It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world,” Polymeropoulos said on Twitter. Referring to the despotic leaders of Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said: “Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”

The impression Trump created was only reinforced by others in the administration. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper urged governors to “dominate the battlespace” surrounding protesters, as if describing U.S. cities as a foreign war zone. Later, as military helicopters hovered menacingly over protesters, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, toured the streets of the nation’s capital in his battle fatigue uniform.

“As a former CIA officer, I know this playbook,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said in a tweet. Before her election to Congress last year, she worked at the agency on issues including terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

One U.S. intelligence official even ventured into downtown Washington on Monday evening, as if taking measure of the street-level mood in a foreign country.

“Things escalated quickly,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of his job. He emphasized that he went as a concerned citizen, not in any official capacity. After seeing tear gas canisters underfoot, he said, he “knew it was time to go” and departed.

Former intelligence officials said the unrest and the administration’s militaristic response are among many measures of decay they would flag if writing assessments about the United States for another country’s intelligence service.

They cited the country’s struggle to contain the novel coronavirus, the president’s attempt to pressure Ukraine for political favors, his attacks on the news media and the increasingly polarized political climate as other signs of dysfunction.

Trump supporters have defended his handling of the unrest, and his trip across Lafayette Square as a display of the strength needed to restore order in dozens of cities where protests have led to looting, fires and violence.

[...]

Even away from the cameras, Trump has assiduously cultivated the aura of a strongman. Earlier Monday, he had chided governors as “weak” for failing to employ adequate force in the face of mounting protests.

“If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” Trump said. He offered no words on how to ease tensions in crowds that have massed largely in anger over the death of George Floyd, an African American man who was killed while being pinned to the ground, a knee against his neck, by police in Minneapolis.

Brett McGurk, a former top U.S. envoy to the Middle East who spent two years in the Trump administration, said the president’s words — recorded by participants and shared with news organizations — would only embolden the world’s autocrats and undermine U.S. authority.

“The imagery of a head of state in a call with other governing officials saying, ‘Dominate the streets, dominate the battlespace’ — these are iconic images that will define America for some time,” said McGurk, who led U.S. diplomatic efforts to counter the Islamic State terrorist group. “It makes it much more difficult for us to distinguish ourselves from other countries we are trying to contest” or influence, he said.

In recent years, U.S. officials have urged restraint or denounced crackdowns against protesters or vulnerable groups in Russia, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Syria and other countries.

Even this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured China about its efforts to prevent citizens of Hong Kong from holding a vigil to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

“If there is any doubt about Beijing’s intent, it is to deny Hong Kongers a voice and a choice,” Pompeo said in a statement that was met with derision on Twitter because it coincided with crackdowns urged by Trump in the United States.

The seeming hypocrisy in the U.S. position has not been lost on foreign targets of American pressure or criticism.

Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen leader who has faced U.S. sanctions for alleged human rights abuses, said Tuesday that he was “watching with horror the situation in the United States, where the authorities are maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights,” according to reports from Moscow.

Article link here

[violettelueur]

RYŌMEN SUKUNA || KIND HEARTED

| featuring : ryōmen sukuna from jujutsu kaisen

| warnings : grammar error, but other than that n/a

| form : imagine

| word count : 1339

| published : 14 november

| request : could i request an imagine w/ sukuna where itadori’s best friend is just so welcoming of sukuna and tries to include him when they do things? like they’re just hanging out and she goes “sukuna would you like to try this” and she holds up a piece of food to his cheek so sukuna can try it and it just warms the curse’s cold dead heart bc she’s genuinely trying <3

| barista’s notes : i kinda went a little off track with this imagine ʕ ㅇ ᴥ ㅇʔ but i hope you enjoy your order of a cup of black coffee (jujutsu kaisen request) and that you have an amazing day! please come back again soon ʕ´•ᴥ•`ʔ

“You know, I think curses spirits have emotions”

“Mother, what in the world are you talking about? They don’t have feelings, they kill without remorse and try to gain power from their greed”

“Y/N dear, how are curses formed?”

“Negative emotions that results in cursed energy leaking from the bodies of humans”

“See ‘emotions’ is in the sentence dear”

“‘Humans’ mother, you forgot the word ‘humans’ was also in the sentence”

Back then you had no idea what your mother was suggesting or saying at that time. Curses having emotions? What was that all about? You knew from previous missions that some curses were intelligent from being able to take hostages to some being able to talk but other than that you still couldn’t comprehend what she was trying to communicate to you.

“You know the Legend of Sukuna?”

Looking up from your book, you stared at your mother - who was sitting on the opposite end of the room with a cup of tea in her hands - with a somewhat nonchalant but surprised expression on your face wondering why she brought up such a topic that was feared by most jujutsu sorcerers

“You used to tell me about it when I was younger, why are you bringing it up now?” you asked curiously, as you closed your book before gently placing it on your lap.

“We all know that the curse was a human before his fingers became cursed objects, don’t we? How do you think he felt when he was killed?”

You were about to answer her before you shut your mouth completely, not sure on how to even answer that question. How could you? No one knows the whole story to even come to a conclusion for that question, you have to interrupt the story in your own way to make one yourself? Wouldn’t he have been enraged when he was killed, annoyed at the fact that he lost in a way? Or was he unsettled? 

“Personally from my perspective, I think he would have been vexed at the fact that he somewhat lost, you mother?”

“I think the same as you, but I have a small feeling that he was upset for some reason, I’m not sure why though”

                                              ꕥ

You still have that assumption till this day. However, you were a little more open about your mother’s thoughts and took them into account sometimes when you were debating on the subject on your own. However, there was a slight shift in your opinion once Itadori Yuji unexpectedly came into your life.

The first time you meant the boy was when Gojo came back with him carrying him and Fushiguro back to Jujutsu high, confusing you completely on what was going on. For someone who was sent to just retrieve a cursed object, Fushiguro looked completely beat up and that worried you completely on what he had encountered during his time away. However, Gojo just couldn’t read the room.

“Yo Y/N, what is my favourite student doing at a time like this? It’s quite late you know,” he greeted you with a smile, before plopping Fushiguro on the ground.

“Sensei, now’s not the time to play with me, what the hell is going on?” you muttered annoyingly before using reserve curse energy to heal some of Fushiguro’s wounds.

After some time of your playful teacher explaining what was going on, you came to the conclusion that the boy ate the cursed object that Fushiguro was supposed to collect causing him to become Sukuna’s vessel as a consequence.

“So what you’re saying is that Fushiguro failed to get the object in the end,” you commented as you pointed at your close friend, leading to Gojo giving you an ‘okay’ sign telling you that you were technically correct.

“Was that all you got from the whole explanation Y/N?” Fushiguro irritatedly asked, causing you to lightly giggle before apologising to him.

                                              ꕥ

However, after that night, you made the decision to become friends with the teenager as you didn’t want him to feel completely isolated on his situation right now - he did leave everything behind to come to Tokyo - and with everything that was going to happen to him, you wanted him to live a happy life with people surrounding him before his execution after he ate all 20 fingers. What you didn't realise was this friendship would lead to you guys to have a sister and brother type of bond.

You and Itadori did everything together from going on missions together with Nobara and Fushiguro to randomly going out to do some shopping or showing him around Tokyo. As time went on, you decided to fully take in your mother’s opinion. You slowly included Sukuna in some of the activities that both of you would be participating in - usually this would involve you asking for his opinion on something, even if he sometimes gave a rude response.

“Do you think Sukuna is a pork or beef type of guy?” you randomly asked, as you lifted up your chopsticks that held a piece of cooked beef to Itadori’s cheek. “Sukuna, would you like to try this?” you kindly asked, leading to the curse to take a bite of the meat before his mouth disappeared like it didn’t appear in the first place.

“I never really asked, but why are you so kind to Sukuna? I mean he is a curse, after all, ain't sorcerers like you supposed to like, hate them?” Itadori asked in a confused tone, causing you to look up away from the meat that you were cooking to the boy that had asked you that question. 

To be honest, you weren’t so sure how to answer his question, just like the same situation that you were years ago when your mother asked you that question. How could you answer this time around? How could you answer this question now?

“Personally from my perspective, I guess I took in some consideration towards anyone’s emotions,” you casually answered, before going back to the meat that was cooking on the grill, leaving Itadori confused yet somewhat understanding what you were trying to say.

                                             ꕥ

Sukuna on the other hand was confused about what you were trying to interrupt to his annoying vessel as he sat quietly in his Innate Domain. Ever since the beginning of your friendship with Itadori, you had been nothing but kind-hearted toward him making him wonder what your intentions were from the start. However, over time he began to discover that’s what you were naturally. You were naturally just a kind-hearted person that was trying to become acquainted with him. You were generally trying.

It was hard to recall the last time he had someone to confide in - if there was anyone he even confided in at all - you were someone that took his emotions into consideration, you always question his reason for power, greed and destruction, instead of assuming that he was born with his sadistic nature. He still remembers that time you were able to somehow get close to him during his fight with Fushiguro and heal Itadori’s heart with no issues at all - making him intrigued on how powerful your reserve energy was. However, he remembers what you said to him as your hand was placed on top of the wound on his chest.

“Listen, I have no idea what caused you to become the man that you are today, I have no idea what pain you went through before your death 1000 years ago, I have no idea what you are feeling right now and I’ll try my best to understand” you quickly stated just as your curse began to revive his heart, “but right now, there is no way in hell am I going to let you kill Itadori, you got that Sukuna!”

That. That caused his cold empty heart to suddenly become warm.

Your kind-heartedness was the reason he began to reach out to you.

He wanted to cherish that trait of yours.

You were kind-hearted.

[your-eternal-muse]

Home

Summery: After months of being held against your will, you escape into the world, and await for the moment when you can return home.

Warnings: Mentions of abduction, vague mentions of abuse, talk of injury, thoughts of giving up, mentions of weight loss

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Words: 2.5k

Authors Note: Wow. It’s been a hot fucking minute huh? Sorry for taking so long. I was moving and unpacking, and getting situated and than I got a new job and so many other things. This is the piece that got me back into the writing flow, so that's fun. I am still working on requests, and while they may not be posted in the order that I received them, they still will be posted. I will also be posting little one shots in between them as well, because my brain doesn’t know when to fucking stop. I missed you guys. I hope you’re all doing well. Also I’m at 950 followers??? That’s insane. I don’t believe it. Anyway, enjoy!

I run.

I run through gaps in between trees, stepping on sticks, ducking under branches.

Every muscle, every bone in my body is screaming at me to stop. To give up, fall to the ground and curl up at the base of a tree and give in to the darkness.

But I can’t.

I can’t stop running, not until I know I’m safe.

Not until I’m home.

The air is brisk, and the leaves crunching underneath my bare feet are different shades of decay.

The sunlight breaking through the canopy does little to tell me what time of day it is, or even what direction I’m going. 

So I just run.

Away from the little wooden house where I’ve been beaten almost everyday for who knows how long.

I’ve lost count of the days.

But I got lucky.

He’s always gone during the day, and I’ve lost enough weight so I could slip my wrists through the zip tie that had me bound.

I’m losing stamina, but I keep pushing forward.

Please, god, give me something, anything.

I stumble through a wall of brush, falling to the gravel ground of the side of the road.

A road.

I push myself up, my steps stuttering as I gain my back my balance.

I turn my head, looking both ways down the seemingly deserted road, and I now believe in a mighty being above because I see gas pumps not even a half a mile down the road from where I’m standing.

I start running as fast as I can, limping every other step, trying to pick up a speed my body has forgotten.

My heart is pounding in my chest, and every breath feels like it’s being ripped out of me, but I couldn’t stop now even if I wanted to.

I turn into the gravel driveway of the station speeding towards the front door, barreling inside, heaving for air as I turn and lock the deadbolt on the door.

I flip the sign from open to closed for good measure, before slipping down to the floor in a heap.

“Oh sweet baby jesus above, darling what happened to you?” A woman runs out from behind the counter, crouching down next to me pushing dirty matted hair out of my face, hands running gently over my exposed skin.

My voice is hoarse, and my throat burns when I speak.

“I’m Supervisory Special Agent y/n y/l/n of the Behavioral Analysis unit of the F.B.I.” I let my head fall back against the glass of the door. “I don’t, I don’t have my badge otherwise I would show you.”

Her eyes are deep green, and kind. Worry creases her already wrinkled face, and her skin looks soft and loose.

“Oh honey, it’s okay. I believe you. Can you tell me what happened?”

Tears start to form in my eyes and I can’t seem to move anymore. “I was abducted by someone we were chasing in May, and I just escaped.” 

A hand comes to cover her mouth. 

“I really need to use your phone to contact my team.” 

She couldn’t be older than 50, with long dirty blonde hair starting to gray at the roots.

I couldn’t help but feel the trust swarm my chest, too tired to put up walls anymore.

“Oh of course, honey. Let me help you behind the counter, and we’ll get you all set.”

She gingerly helped me back to my feet, wrapping my arm over her shoulders to help me sit on a stool behind the counter. 

She makes sure I’m set sturdy on the seat, before handing me a landline from beside the till.

“You use that to call however many people you want, and I’m gonna go get you some water and something to eat.”

She starts to walk away but she snaps her fingers and turns around, grabbing something from the counter and draping it over my shoulders.

It was a fuzzy winter jacket.

“It’s almost November, you’re probably freezing too.”

Her accent is a gentle southern, like a grandma who makes peach cobbler and gives the best hugs. 

I shove my arms through the sleeves, zipping it up to my chin. 

Almost November.

It’s October.

I’ve been gone for five months.

October, and I’m wearing shorts and a ripped tank top.

I look down at the landline and take a breath to steady my trembling hands before dialing the number I know by heart.

Three rings, and he picks up.

“This is Doctor Spencer Reid.”

I start to sob at the sound of his voice, a voice I never thought I’d be able to hear again.

I start to collapse within on myself.

“Hello?”

I haven’t said anything.

I take a breath, wiping my nose on the back of my hand before speaking.

“Hey, Spence.”

It’s silent, and I can faintly hear the sound of something crashing to the floor.

“Y-Y/n?”

“Jesus, I never thought I’d get to hear your voice again.”

“Where are you? Are you safe? Is he there?” He’s frantic, his voice rushed and high.

“I don’t know where I am, but I’m safe. I’m at some gas station. A nice woman is helping me.”

I lick my lips and I can taste the saltiness of my snot. “I got out.” 

“Penelope, I need you to trace this call right now.”

“What? Why? What happened?”

He has it on speaker, and I openly sob at the twinkle of her voice.

“Penelope…” is all I can muster, but it’s enough to hear her gasp, and then her own sob.

“Hold on tight sweet girl! We’re coming!”

I hear typing, and background voices getting louder.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Derek?” I gasp, bringing a hand to the center of my chest and grasping the fabric tight in my hands.

I lean back against the wall as the woman comes up with bottles of water, and bags of different foods.

Tears stream down my face, and the woman pushes hair out of my face, pinning it back with clips from her own hair.

“Is that you stud muffin?” I hope he hears the small smile in my voice.

I hear a shaky breath. “Yeah it’s me sweetheart.”

“I got her! She's a few miles outside of Chattanooga Tennessee!”

Tennessee? How the hell did I get to Tennessee?

“Derek, go tell the others. We’ll meet you at the jet.”

I hear shuffling on the other end as I break the seal on the water, before taking a long, much needed gulp.

“Are you still there y/n?” His voice is laced with concern, and I can picture the crease above his brows, the shakiness of his hands. 

“I’m here.”

“You stay right there, okay? Don’t move. We're on our way.”

The woman hands me a box of tissues, and I take a few wiping my eyes, but my cheeks stay wet.

“God, I missed your voice.”

A moment of silence, and I know he’s trying to collect himself on the other end of the phone, trying to stay strong for me.

“I missed yours too. I called your phone every day just to listen to your voice. I probably left a thousand voicemails.”

The woman opens a bag of chips for me, before kneeling and pulling out a first aid kit from below the counter.

“I thought about you every day. About your voice. Your smile. I just wanted you to walk through the door and say some weird statistic and we’d fly off into the sunset.”

I can hear him choke back tears and all I want to do is hold him, like his pain is somehow my own.

“I tried. I tried so hard, but you had disappeared without a trace. But I never stopped. I would never stop looking for you.”

“I know, Spence. It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you, and I never will.”

Muffled voices in the background and he sniffles. “I have to hang up, baby. We’re taking off. We’ll be there in a little under two hours okay?”

Two hours.

“Okay. Please hurry.” I close my eyes, picturing his smile in my mind. “I miss you.”

“We will. I love you. See you soon. Hang on.”

The line goes dead, and I bring the phone slowly back down from my ear, hanging up.

I take a chip and pop it in my mouth. 

The woman stands in front of me, and with a cotton pad with alcohol, starts to clean at the cuts on my face.

“What’s your name?” I ask, feeling bad, that in the 20 minutes I’ve been here already, I hadn’t even stopped to ask.

“Luanne, sweetpea. It seems like you got a lot of people that care about you.”

I nod my head, popping another chip into my mouth. “My team. They’re my family. We were on a case in Chicago in May when…”

Bile starts to form at the back of my throat, but I shove it back down with another swig of water. 

I lick my lips, trying to get rid of the sting of the salt in the cracks. “Thank you. For helping me. I know you didn’t have to but-”

“Sweetpea,” she holds my face in her hands, wiping away the tears that are still falling. “You have been through hell and back again. You deserve all the kindness in the world.” She pulls me into herself, and I nuzzle my face into the fabric of her shirt. 

It smells like lavender.

“You’re safe now. Any bastard that tries to come in is going to have to go through me first.”

I clutch onto her shirt, basking in the first kind human touch I’ve had in months. 

She smooths down my hair, soft and slow, and I listen to the heartbeat in her chest.

“You know, you remind me so much of my daughter. She looks soft on the outside, but she’s one hell of a fighter. I think you’d both get along rather swell.”

She stands, and just holds me, running her fingers through my hair, as I soak her shirt with my tears. 

I’m never going to forget her, forget this. 

I will spend every day of the rest of my life trying to repay this woman's kindness anyway I can. 

Thank you, will never be thanks enough.

Flashing lights appear outside the window.

~~~

I’m tired. 

My eyes burn with every blink and there’s an insistent pounding matching the beating of my heart inside my skull.

It hurts to breathe.

It hurts to move.

I’m freezing.

I tighten the blanket around me as medics move around me, getting things ready for when I’ll finally cave and agree to go to the hospital.

But I can’t leave.

I won’t leave. 

Not yet. 

The red and blue lights don’t help the migraine swimming behind my eyes, and everyone is talking too loud.

Why is everyone talking so loud?

My eyes look across the darkening parking lot, and Luanne is leaning against the hood of a cop car, her hands in her pockets, and she smiles at me, her hair blowing softly in the cold October wind.

But I hear fast paced tires on gravel, and my eyes move from her to the two black SUVS pulling into the lot.

I’m moving. 

Thoughts aren’t even processing in my brain, my neurons are stagnant. I’m moving on pure instinct. 

The car door opens before it’s even stopped, and the blanket falls from my shoulders in a heap on the floor of the ambulance.

Time is an illusion. 

It’s completely stopped as my feet meet the gravel, and I push the dirt behind me, moving towards the one person I thought about whenever I got the chance.

It’s just me and him, moving towards one another, two unstoppable forces about to test Newton's law.

My eyes start at his feet.

His pants fall over the top of his chuck taylors, and I’m positive two different socks sit below them. 

Higher.

Closer.

His hips.

He’s not wearing a belt. His holster is crooked. He was in a rush.

Higher.

Closer.

His chest. 

His vest is missing. His tie is loose, and the top couple of buttons are undone.

I can see his collar bones.

Higher.

Closer.

His neck, the bobbing adam's apple.

Higher.

Closer.

His lips, pursed.

His nose, red.

Highest.

Here.

His eyes. 

Deep hazel, honey surrounding darkened pupils, and I fly into his arms.

Ice melts.

My head clears.

I wrap my arms around his neck, shoving my face into his shoulder, inhaling like it is my first breath.

My feet aren’t on the ground anymore. 

He holds me, tightly against him, hands splayed across my back, his own face buried into my neck.

Our heart beats sync. For a moment, we're one. 

And then time seems to start again, and I pull back, eyes bleary, and I grab his face, crashing my lips to his in a desperate plea. 

He breaths into me, and I know, for certain, for the first time in months, that I am safe.

I am home.

We break, and our tears mix on cold cheeks, and I can’t stop looking at him, touching him, feeling the fabric of his jacket beneath my fingertips, the growth of his stomach beneath my own.

“I love you, I love you so much, oh my god.” His hands are all over me. My face, my neck, my arms. 

I never thought I’d get to touch him again, get to feel him, get to kiss him.

“You’re here. I love you. You’re here.” Is all I can manage as I bring his face to mine again.

I played out entire scenes where we did exactly this inside my head while that man did whatever he wanted to me.

I had all the things I wanted to say inside my head, but now that it’s real, now that it’s forged into reality, words fail. 

Nothing I can or want to say means anything at this moment. 

Nothing matters other than me and him.

A new hand is on my shoulder, and I lift my head to see Hotch. 

And so I am passed, from person to person, being held and squeezed and kissed and cried on until everyone has felt the breath leave my lungs, and I have felt the warmth of their skin. 

I return to Spencer, and he drapes his coat over my shoulders and zips it up to my chin, before the medics walk over.

They don’t say anything, and they don’t need to. 

I simply grab his hand and start moving towards the ambulance. 

“We’ll meet you at the hospital.” Hotch's voice is stern, and soft at the same time. 

I nod, and climb into the back, Spencer right behind me.

The medics get to work, and I feel my eyes droop, feeling his hand in mine.

He brings it up to his lips, pressing a kiss against each knuckle. “It’s okay. You can rest now. You’ve fought long enough.”

I smile at him, watching the tears stream down his cheeks. 

I succumb to the darkness.

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[sergeant-donny-donowitz]

The First Basterd: DonnyxFem!Reader

requested by @marlenemarauders

A/N *Reader is Polish & Jewish, but you don't have to be either to read it :D

@owba-chan @war-obsessed @inglourious-imagines @tammykelly @struggling-bee @frozenhuntress67 @kwyloz @sodapop182 @marlenemarauders @what-the--curtains @taikawho @spookybearlandtaco Let me know if you wanna be added to the IB or OUATIH taglists! :) _________________________________________ ***November, 1943***

You huffed as you walked through the dense forest. A puff of cool air forming a cloud before your lips as you marched through the winter. Your sniper was slung over your shoulders. You gave the bright grey sky a rare glance with a sigh, before returning to the constant scan of forest floor. You were once a lone sniper, far from home. You had been, since 1939. Lone sniper or not, you quickly learned that in order to survive in war, you had to make a few allies. By late 1942, you had more than a few. Things would change then, though you hadn't anticipated that just yet. By late 1942, you had made a name for yourself. Now, none of your enemies quite knew your name. All they could call you was the Basterd. A composite sketch of you from descriptions from nazis who'd barely survived your gaze was sent halfway around Europe and back. By late 1942, every nazi west of the Vistula River knew your face, and knew you as the Basterd. By 1943, they'd learn you were only the first basterd. 

Back in November of 1942, just before the basterds left England to jump over France, they were informed at the last minute that a special agent working undercover in France would be guiding them when they landed. They were expecting an older, more experienced, serious, mysterious agent. Probably a British spy, or a rogue Soviet. The kind of thing they saw in old movies. They got you, instead. And they loved you... Maybe a little too much, you'd say. It had been a year since then, and you loved them all to pieces, honestly. But, you were a little more than a little annoyed by now. Each and every basterd loved you in his own way...and consequently, became overprotective. Every time you had to risk showing your face to nazis, Aldo hung around dangerously closely, which only made it all riskier. Smitty tried to convince you to only use your sniper, and never even get close enough to have your face seen at all. Omar called him all sorts of names over that, but then acted even more ridiculously by making a Robin-esque kind of mask for you. Hirschberg ceaselessly and shamelessly flirted with you, and stole your kills, insisting you shouldn't waste your time. Wicki was a little more...mature about it. He was still overprotective, but quiet about it. None was more head over heels than Donny. You liked to hang around with him a little more because he made you feel less like a liability, and more like a basterd. Still, it took every ounce of patience and strength to not remind them every waking moment of your life that you were once the Basterd. Until today. Donny took a bullet for you. Well...it was meant for you, but it was a whole meter away from you. The bullet grazed Donny's shoulder, but it could have been so much worse. When the scalping and interrogating was over, you were fuming as you paced back and forth, gathering all the supplies you needed to take care of Donny. "The basterds need you, Y/n. I need you." He knew exactly what you were thinking, and it scared him. What scared you more was that this was not the first time one of the basterds had done something stupid like that. And, you weren't so sure it would be the last. You were tired of it, and you were tired of thinking that if some day, something happened to them, it would be because of you. "Not now, Donny." You shook your head, and clenched your jaw, knowing that if you didn't, you would raise your voice and all hell. "What?" "Not like this," You were exasperated, shaking your head, "Not now. Not in the middle of a fucking war." You were livid. You and Donny had joked about it before. As time went on, you had to actually talk about it.  It kept you both up till two am. It got you both through gunfire, through rain, through sleepless nights. But you'd both come to the same conclusion. This was war. This was no place for love. "Fuck a duck," Donny reached for your hand, but you pulled away as he called out, "I couldn't fucking let them hurt you! Y-" "I was a whole meter away from the bullet! I am not a child in need of protecting." You did your best at cleaning the wound, focusing directly on the blood. If you looked at him, at that smirk you knew he had, you would probably punch him. "When you Americans were still arguing about joining the war, I was already out here, alone, with a stolen gun, running out of bullets, far from home, and far from any allies. I've seen it all, done it all. I've survived." You muttered, "I don't know what more you expect from me." You finally looked at him, with a reproachful glance that stung him,  "I don't know why you expect so little when I'm one of you!" He stammered for a moment, not able to find any justification for it. "It's not that we expect little from you, it's just that....we....I mean..." Donny wasn't the kind of person that stuttered, stammered, and stalled. Whatever he had to say to you, he was having a hard time putting into words, and you were not happy about it. You gave up, uncrossed your arms with an exasperated sigh, and turned away.  "For fuck's sake." "It's just that..." You stormed out of the tent to grab some more bandages, and he followed you. "What? That I'm a girl? I should be sitting behind a typewriter on a fucking base? I should just stick to being a nurse? Let me re-fucking-mind you that I was not trained to be a nurse, I learned all of this out here on my own, years before you even fucking enlisted." All the basterds were sitting around, and could hear it all too clearly. It didn't matter to you, and it didn't embarrass you as much as it would have any other day. They could hear anyway, and...you wanted them to hear. You wanted all of them to quit it. Omar munched on a sandwich and remarked with a shrug, "...She has a point," not yet realizing how serious you were. "Omar!" Smitty put up his hands in exasperation, shaking his head. Aldo muttered, as he opened his tin of snuff, "Just keep your fucken mouth shut."

"Unbelievable. After a whole fucking year..." you muttered, rifling through the supplies for at least one clean, spare bandage. Wicki turned to the others, whispering "So she's mad-mad..." "What else is new?" Hirschberg chuckled, and all the basterds glared at him, not wanting to collectively face your vengeance. Because, as much as they acted like big bad basterds around you and the rest of the world, they were just a tiny bit scared of you. And rightfully so. You shook your head, "I have a higher body count than all of you combined." That alone would have struck fear in anyone's heart. You finally wrapped a bandage around Donny's wound tightly. "Ow! Fuck, Y/n!" "When will you stop acting like I need saving?!" You put your hands at your hips, finally looking at them all, effectively terrifying them. The only thing more terrifying at the moment would be to lose you. "I'm sick and tired of this ridiculous shit. If this is as far as we can get without one of you biting a fucking bullet 'for me', then maybe I should quit." You were dead serious.

You turned your back on them, walking east, which terrified them even more, as they all jumped to their feet, and rushed toward you. "Where are you going?" Wicki asked, completely concerned. Honestly, that was his thing. Being a bit older than all the basterds, he was usually genuinely concerned for all of you. But...mostly you. "You were all ordered to be on this team. I chose it. Now I'm choosing to go to Frankfurt. If you want to come, be my guest. But don't ever do anything stupid, like that again" You gestured to Donny, and he only grinned, wanting desparately to believe that you were bluffing. But, even he knew better than that. "What the hell's in Frankfurt?" Aldo asked, packing up his few belongings, quickly followed by the others. You turned back to look at them, beginning to grin a little. "You ever hear of a man by the name of Hugo Stiglitz?" There was a resounding no. You sighed, "If you want to know, then walk and talk," you shrugged, slinging your sniper over your shoulder, as you walked east. The basterds trotted by, as you revealed a particularly interesting anecdote. _____________ It was 1939. Sirens had been blaring so long and so often, when they stopped, everything sounded as if you were underwater. There was nothing and no one left in Krakow that you could recognize. There were nazis in the streets. There was glass on the ground. People were missing. You had only one chance to escape. It was on the shore of the Vistula river, under the cover of the dark night sky, and the shroud of a thundering storm that you took that chance. You killed a nazi. You took his sniper, and you took off, hoping to make it to Denmark, which was still free at the time. Then, you were sure you'd find a way to help. You'd been running for days on end. When you finally had a moment to breathe, you were in a land you did not know. You didn't even know what day it was. It had felt as though years had gone by. But when you looked around in the dimly lit streets of a strange and small town, your hands shook, your heart stopped, and you watched as your world collapsed. You were in the middle of Germany, nowhere near Denmark. You were only beginning to panic... You had nowhere to go. You had no way to hide a sniper. You felt a thousand eyes falling on you accusingly. You had just caught the eye of a man in a gestapo uniform. He walked over to you, and people turned away. He had been alerted about a "suspicious figure." When he spotted you, he  walked down the street, not raising any alarms or orders. He walked by you, ushering you to a side street, then to a quiet, isolated alley. He saw how terrified you were, and quickly began explaining he knew a place where you could hide. You looked at him, with wide eyes, and hardly breathing. You saw blood on his knife. (And years later, you'd learn he'd just killed one of his officers, minutes before finding you.) He smiled kindly, thinking for a moment, finding the string of Polish words he'd learned not too long ago. "Nazywam się Hugo Stiglitz." 'My name is Hugo Stiglitz.' You didn't know if you could trust him, but when you saw his eyes, you knew you had no choice. When you realized he was putting himself on the line for you, you spoke to him in whatever German you could piece together, "Ich kann von hier aus gehen. Ich kann es schaffen. Geh, bevor du erwischt wirst." You looked so frightened, he could hardly believe what you'd just said, "I can go from here. I can make it. Go, before you get caught."

Hugo simply shook his head, with an assuring smile. "Frag mich nicht Dinge, die ich nicht tun kann." "Don't ask me things I cannot do."

Hugo hid you in the home of a friend, and then another, and another. There was a chain of them. Some of them were hiding neighboring families, some were hiding childhood friends. Some were hiding complete strangers, like you. Hugo visited you every day, wherever you were hidden. He couldn't help you get to Denmark, but, France was an option. He warned you that part of, if not all of France would probably be invaded in a matter of time, and urged you to find a way out. Anywhere. As far as you could. You promised him you'd stay safe, and stay in France, but...he wouldn't find out, would he? He sighed as he escorted you himself to France, knowing you'd be safe there. But, something told him you wouldn't do as he'd advised you to do. No, you had that restless fire in your eyes that belonged to the rebels and the righteous. He smiled, knowing wherever you went after that moment was out of his hands. But fighters like you were never out of his mind. Only months later, he saw the sketch of your face, and he sighed. He wasn't surprised, but he wished you the best. _____________ Four years later, you studied the bloodied papers and 'wanted' picture in your hands. It was a warrant for Hugo's arrest. He was on the run, believed to be somewhere in France. He was to be brought in alive. You only hoped he hadn't been found yet. But if he had, you were going to do something about it. It was only fair, you smirked. Donny found your smirk incredibly cute, though he was undoubtedly a little jealous seeing you get so worked up about some guy. Some guy that wasn't him. He went along with it, trying to stay out of your way. He'd annoyed you before, but this time you were not budging. Every one of the basterds followed you without question. You broke them in and out of a high security prison all the way in Frankfurt. Aldo had his usual spiel ready, of course, being a slave to appearances and all.  Now, he had you to thank for this new recruit. Hugo nodded briefly at Aldo. But, a faint flicker of his old smile graced that grim cell when he realized just who had led the basterds to him. When Hugo was free from his cell, you hugged him. He couldn't remember the last time someone had hugged him. Donny wasn't too thrilled, but you'd both laugh about it some years later in a diner, back in Boston, far from the war and all the ruins it left. It'd be a long time till then. And you were still upset at the boys. If leading them directly into Germany, and in and out of a high security prison, without loosing a single basterd wasn't impressive enough, you didn't know what was. Needless to say, it only took a few hours to find out. You walked at the end of the group, in case any nazis were still on your trail. You were, after all the best marskman they had. Hugo was just ahead of you, but barely. He was tired, more tense then when you had last seen him, which seemed utterly impossible. You spoke in broken German. Wicki was way ahead, he wouldn't hear. "Du bist verletzt." "You're hurt." When Donny heard your voice, he slowed down a little. You smirked, already knowing that basterd was jealous as hell. Still, he muttered something to himself about not knowing anything other than English, and some Italian. Hugo nodded, simply, acknowledging that though you'd known him briefly, you were the only living person who knew him at all. He said one simple word in your language, "Tak." 'Yes.' knowing there was no use in denying it. "If someone comes up behind us, leave me behind." You smiled and shook your head, "Don't ask me things I cannot do." He sighed, remembering that, but still shook his head, "You made it this far without me, why-" "Without you? That's a laugh." It was then that you noticed Hirschberg making a mistake you had made back in 1941. "HIRSCHBERG GET AWAY FROM THERE!" He was on thin ice. Literal, thin ice. Listening to the roaring bellow of the frozen lake. "HIRSCHBERG!" He was listening to everything but you. "GEROLD." He turned to you with wide eyes, knowing to be fucking terrfiied if you ever called him by his first name. "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, GET OUT OF THERE!" Just as he started to get up, the ice beneath his feet began to crack. Donny, through the throbbing, searing pain in his arm, instinctively flung forward, running, and reaching for Hirschberg. "DONNY DON'T!" He slipped away from your grasp, dropping his bat on the ground as he lunged to save his brother in arms. The ice, already fragile and shattered, could offer Donny less time than it had Hirschberg. Now both of them were flailing in the freezing water, in shock from the slicing and searing cold. "NOBODY FUCKING MOVE." You warned, thinking quickly, knowing all of the basterds were liable to follow without thinking. "BUT-" You turned to Smitty. You'd apologize later, but...there was no time to be sorry now. "SHUT IT." "Y/N." "SHUT IT." You turned to Hirschberg and Donny, calling out, "RELAX. FLOAT HORIZONTALLY, BELLY DOWN! BELLY DOWN, HIRSCHBERG!" Though you were shouting, your words seemed soft, and cut through the panic and adrenaline. They slowed down, and did as you told them to do, as you picked up Donny's bat, tying your jacket onto it, praying the knot would hold. You wandered to the edge of the frozen lake, holding on to the sleeve, and sliding the bat out to the boys, "GRAB ON." Donny made Hirschberg go first. "D-donny, I-I c-can't. I-" His teeth were chattering, as he shook his head, along with everything else. Donny stammered, "Th-that's a f-fucken o-order. Go." Your eyes widened, as you felt the ice beneath you pop. "Y/n, no-" Aldo stepped forward now, but you pushed him away. "It won't hold both of us." You looked back, as Hirschberg shakily grabbed on to the end of the bat. "Stay down, I'll pull you back here!" You slowly and steadily pulled Hirschberg. You would've loved to do it quickly, to save Donny. But, that would only make the ice even more unstable. You couldn't bring yourself to look at Donny yet. You could hear him stammering and chattering, trying to encourage Hirschberg through, with some colorful language here and there to keep himself awake. After what felt like an eternity, you finally looked at Donny. His face was blue, his nose was bright red. "DONNY COME ON!" He wrapped his stiff, blue fingers around his bat, as you pulled him over the edge, and close to the shore. The basterds gave up their coats and sweaters for them, and you looked around. You knew this part of the forest. No one would come near it. Not in this winter. Aldo knew that look in your eye. You'd been a basterd longer than they had. You knew what you were doing, and where you were going.  He understood that look meant you were safe. He nodded, agreeing silently with you. "This here's a p'rty good place to stop, boys." Far from the eyes of murderers, hidden from gunfire and planes, you built a fire, and found a place to set up camp. When the sun set, only Donny remained by the fire. Hirschberg, and the rest of the basterds had gone to sleep. Even Hugo with fresh wounds, fears, and insomnia, was able to slip into a dream or two. "Hirschberg's doing ok. " You sat by Donny, smiling softly as you handed him some makeshift soup that Smitty was made. (There was a 50% chance it was edible, and 50% chance the OSS could use it as a torture device. But that's a story for another day.) "Y/n..." The way he looked at you was different. In fact, it was almost the way the rest of the basterds looked at you for the past few hours. There was a form of awe...An unspoken shield of respect. The only difference in the way Donny looked at you, was that there was a shade of love entwined there. "See, and I didn't have to get shot to save you," you chuckled, playfully leaning your head on his shoulder. He slowly lifted his arm, resting his hand on your head. "Where would I be without you..." He was serious, and spoke softly, which was not something you could say happened often. "Probably with a gangrenous arm," you shrugged, and he smiled a little. You looked into his eyes for a moment, and he looked into yours, and he kissed you. "What took you?" He raised his eyebrow, almost offended, as he raised his voice a little, "What took me?! What took you?!" You both laughed about it, your head resting once again on his shoulders, and his head resting over yours as you watched the dancing stars and the rising trees, as snow began to fall softly. There was a long road ahead to occupied France. And longer still was the road to the end of the war. But, in that moment, that was ok. You'd make it out together. All of you. Once, you'd taken pride in being  the one and only basterd. You'd been proud of being the only one who's face could bring the enemy to their knees, and make them beg for mercy. But things changed in 1942. It took some getting used to, but you knew all along it was the only way for any of you to make it out. Together. You were reminded of that when you saw Hugo's face on that warrant. But here, in Donny's arms, it was clearer now more than ever. The only way out of the war, was just like that.

[neerasrealm]

“Send wholesome family requests” I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED AND I would request just like

Holiday things?? Like Christmas or Easter or if they even do stuff like that

OOOH THIS ONE’S INTERESTING OK OK I’m gonna do as many holidays as I can think of

New year’s eve

Everyone is home. The entire family comes to visit for christmas and stays at least till new years. the kids are allowed stay up till midnight, they watch fireworks and just do the general new years eve stuff!

Yes they do the kiss thing when it hits midnight. I’m a sap leave me be

When I say the entire family I mean Slender’s brothers and Kate the chaser (she lives on a farm out of state </3)

Valentine’s day

Listen ok. So many of the people in the mansion are dating so a lot of em just go on dates or buy flowers

everyone is lovey dovey for a day leave them be

Tim sits in his room staring at Jay’s old hat waiting for february 15th to roll around

maybe one day I’ll go more in depth about what each couple does to celebrate ;)

St Patrick’s Day

I’m Irish let me have this one

LJ celebrates by getting hammered and singing irish drinking songs with the older creeps

Slender takes the younger ones to a local parade so they don’t have to see Jack being a bad role model

If you’re not wearing green Jeff and Cody will hunt you down and punch you on the arm

Easter

Slender sets up an easter egg hunt in the woods! he makes it extra hard since there’s so many people taking part, and a majority of them have supernatural powers

Tim, hanging upside down from a tree: can i offer you an egg in these trying times

yes the older creeps take part. let them have fun

and they want chocolate

Pride month

MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE MANSION ARE GAY AND/OR TRANS

Slender lets people put pride flags up if they want

local pride events get RAIDED by the slender family you can’t STOP THEM

Jack dresses like a rainbow nightmare for a month

Everyone else wears a couple rainbow items throughout the month because of him

‘’yearly reminder that i am gay’‘

‘‘yeah we know’‘

Halloween

This one might be long my family is kinda obsessed with halloween so y’know. lotsa projection

the moment it hits october you know Jeff, Ben, EJ, Cody and Sally are going shopping for decorations

The mansion is decorated from top to bottom. skeletons, statues, animatronics, you name it.

they go all in

the outside of the mansion has a fake graveyard set up

LJ doesn’t like creepy clown decorations :( they don’t use any

COSTUMES

they go all in on costumes

slender helps to make them

you’d think the creeps would take the opportunity to walk around without a disguise for once

nah dressing up is FUN BRO!

LJ takes Sally trick or treating along with a bunch of other kids that he’s friends with

just a gaggle of kids running around with this giant clown man

Sally’s go-to costume is a pirate

she loves pirates

Ben, the rest of his gaming friends and Jeff go trick or treating together

they’re just running around like feral bastards. Liu goes with them later on when he joins the family <3

FREE CANDY WHOOO

they attend bonfires and just cause chaos

EJ, Tim and Cody attend whatever local halloween party they can find because they wanna have fun

Helen and Dina go out together to local festivals leading up to halloween

Helen is really good at designing original costumes

they just like being among people and seeing other’s costumes

Liu and Momo watch spooky movies leading up to halloween

Liu is one of the few people in the mansion who actually gets scared by horror movies

everyone else is just desensitized GSDHDGVSHJDSGH

‘’Liu calm down ghosts don’t even work like that smh’’

everyone collectively has a candy induced hangover in early november. smh. 

Thanksgiving

I’m Irish so idk what thanksgiving really is???

Slender cooks for days on end getting ready

Kate comes home for it! she brings her own food and stuff she grew on her farm

Slender loves seeing her 🥺 that’s his LITTLE GIRL he LOVES HER

Trender also comes to visit! he lives all the way up in new york, so they don’t see him super duper often, but he always stays for holidays!

brings stuff from fancy bakeries and new clothes for everyone

he always brings tons of gifts. its his way of making up for never being around

big family dinner <3 they love each other

Christmas

Literally a month later everyone comes back AGAIN

again, Slender spends a few days in advance cooking. nowhere near as intense as thanksgiving tho

the mansion is decorated top to bottom. they have a GIGANTIC christmas tree just COVERED in decorations

slender loves the winter time <3 it reminds him of when he lived in poland

holiday markets!! you know they’re all going to those!

WINTER FESTIVALS YES

lots of family outings throughout december

sally loves going ice skating and they usually all go except for Ben

Tim takes him and Jeff out to do something else while everyone else skates. he isn’t good at skating, and neither is Jeff.

mall santa slenderman

so many fucking gifts. there’s so many of them and they all get gifts for each other so everyone gets like 20 gifts every year

holiday shopping is TOUGH

SNOWBALL FIGHTS

slender makes the best hot chocolate around christmas time

he knits sweaters for everyone too

LJ gets SUPER EXCITED throughout december

christmas is his favorite holiday because it’s also his birthday!!

slender makes a fuss of him leading up to christmas because. husbands.

LJ in a christmas sweater send tweet

trender brings so many gifts. all of them are expensive as all hell. it’s great

christmas eve is spent singing carols together in the living room and just enjoying being together as one giant family 🥺 im a sap istg

aaand that’s every holiday! this post took nearly an hour to type HDSVGHGDSH I GOT SO CARRIED AWAY SORRY FSHGFADSJHFSJ

[thelibranarchives]

For @giucorreias Flufftober 2020 Day 3 prompt- Sunshine

'You've mellowed, Draco,' Pansy opined, taking a drag from the joint before passing it to Millie on her left. 'The Gryffindors have done their number on you.'

Draco Malfoy snorted. 'Nope,' he denied.

Blaise laughed, slapping his thigh. 'This,' he said in between bouts of laughter, 'is exactly what she meant. Normally, a stinging hex would have been your answer.'

'On the contrary,' Daphne said, picking the cigarette out of Millie's mouth. 'If the Gryffindors have had any influence on him, he would have physically tackled you both.'

'That's more like it,' Draco nodded.

Nobody said anything for a while. They were enjoying a very rare, much awaited and incredibly precious Slytherin-only gathering in a small clearing in the Forbidden Forest. It had been almost impossible to not have some Gryffindor hanging off their shoulders for two months now what with the lions accompanying them everywhere from showers to classes, but that day, Granger had Arithmancy for her afternoon class. Longbottom had volunteered to help Prof. Sprout weed out the greenhouses and Weasley and Potter had gone to Diagon to the joke shop. Ginevra and Lovegood were at the quidditch trials, which left the Slytherins with a golden opportunity.

Unlike rumours and speculations, the Forbidden Forest, had a cheerful air about it, though slightly dark with the thick canopy. The five of them sat in a circle under a bubble of protective charms, sharing a joint and blowing out smoky rings, or as in Pansy's case, trying to. An idle, and clearly out of place bird, was humming a sweet tune. There was the occasional rustling of leaves and the half growl and half bark of some as yet unencountered forest animal but Draco was relaxed.

Draco and Potter's dynamic had undoubtedly changed ever since Potter got that dragon lily tattoo on Halloween, even though Potter's behaviour towards him didn't. He still went to classes with Draco and sat next to him, partnering him in Charms, Potions and DADA. No one had mentioned anything about the tattoo in the two weeks since and Draco wasn't a fool to harbour hope that they didn't understand its significance too. He wasn't going to talk about it for as long as he could.

'Muggles celebrate Thanksgiving in November,' Blaise said, inhaling deeply. 'On the fourth Thursday, to be exact.'

'What is it for?' Millie's tone was curious.

'To be grateful to the good things or people that happened to them that year? Mother says Muggles cherish it a lot.'

'How's Maine? Is it suiting her?' Pansy asked.

'She says that's where she's going to settle down but that is what she said of Milan too so I wouldn't bet on it.'

Daphne's brows were furrowed. 'Why are you telling us about this Thanksgiving?' That girl was quick and sharp, no matter how clueless she sometimes acted to be.

'Well,' Blaise said, licking his lips, 'we should thank them too, don't you think?'

It had been easy for Draco to get a first edition copy of Rare Charms and Unique Spells for Granger, a chocolate frog card made in honour of Fred Weasley for Weasley and his sister and an assorted collection of Celestina Warbeck's classics for Longbottom, who loved them and transferred some of his admiration for her onto Blaise as well.

Pansy, Daphne and Millie had got some trinkets, rings and other accessories for all the girls while Blaise imported an Italian Bellflower plant for Neville. The purchases were all made through owl-post, from stores suggested by Narcissa Malfoy, under the name of Madame Zabini.

Draco curiously couldn't think of the best gift to Potter, though Potter was the one he knew the best out of everyone else. He decided he would ask Potter what he wanted but as the days passed, either Draco or Potter found themselves otherwise busy, to say more than "hey" to each other.

Draco sighed and shrugged. There was nothing he could do.

Thanksgiving dawned on them, abnormally cold and cloudy. Draco woke up late from a fitful sleep and didn't even have time to overthink if the atmosphere outside was setting the tone to what was to unfold that day.

Daphne had done that for him, however, whining every possible minute she could about how potentially disastrous the others could think their gifts were. Pansy and Blaise, in their attempts to find courage in liquor since they seemed to lack it in themselves, added to it after stumbling into the common room drunk, half an hour later than the time they had fixed.

Even then, Draco was glad when they had all assembled.

'So,' he began, fidgeting with his shirt, 'Blaise told us, technically it was Blaise's mother, that muggles celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November and well,' he gulped, ' well,' he licked his lips, 'we just..'

'Here are the gifts, bitches!' Pansy screamed, wand shooting confetti into the air as she twirled, tripped and fell over the neatly wrapped presents. 'Oops,' she said, grinning up at them with a dazed look in her eyes.

The stress of worrying his brains over the small surprise that lit up the faces of everyone present, finally melted away the stress beneath his skin. Draco wasn't even aware that he was beaming until Blaise knocked him on the shoulder, sloshed and swaying.

'You've become a sap, Draco,' he slurred.

'And you, a Hufflepuff,' Draco retorted, grinning wider, because yes, this group of unlikely people made each other smile to the maximum.

'I don't want to see all of your teeth, Draco.'

'I don't want to see you bouncing like a toddler either.'

'I'm in full control of myself, thanks.'

Draco had to give him a once over then. 'Yes, I can see that.'

'Are you two arguing over who is better at pretending to be the least affected by our reaction?' Lovegood's sweet voice wafted from behind them followed, an instant later, by her floral perfume and then a smacking kiss to their cheeks.

Weasley and his sister came up to them next, eyes shimmering. They held up Fred's chocolate frog card that read "one half of the only two who managed to set off fireworks in the Great Hall and literally got away with it." That had been Draco's personal addition. He would never forget Umbridge's horror at that.

'This,' Weasley choked.

'Means a lot,' Ginevra said, barely keeping it together. 'Excuse me,' she whispered and then she was exiting the common room, Draco's eyes trained on her till the door shut behind her.

When he turned back, he found Potter staring at him and he blushed, remembering that he hadn't got anything for him.

Potter held up the broom polish from Blaise and a few shirts from the girls as if to ask, 'you?'

'I didn't know what to get for you,' Draco mumbled, rocking on his heels. Behind Potter he spotted a radiant Granger hugging Weasley and talking his ear off about the book in her hand.

'If-' Draco said, glancing back at Potter, 'tell me what you want and I'll get it. For you.'

'Anything?' Potter asked, a small smile playing on his lips.

'Yes, anything.' Draco didn't know how his voice sounded so confident.

'Well,' Potter smirked, 'I want to see the sun, make the clouds go away.'

Draco thought for a while and smiled back. 'Be ready, then.'

Next morning found them both racing through the sky on their brooms at four am.

'Is this revenge, Malfoy?' Potter shouted when they landed on the hill, wet and shivering from the rain falling at Hogwarts.

'Why, scared Potter?' He called back.

'You wish!'

They sat next to each other on a boulder, Draco making them face a certain point in the sky.

'I can't see anything there,' Potter grunted.

'Not yet,' Draco murmured.

'Where are we anyway? Why isn't there snow here?'

'Shut up and watch, Potter.'

And watch they did as the sky lightened and the sun rose in a golden hue. Potter was dumbstruck.

Draco laughed at his expression, wrapping one arm around Potter's shoulder. It was instinctual but Draco had never initiated it before. He froze until Potter leaned into him, resting his head on Draco's shoulder.

'Do you know why I like the November sun?' He asked quietly. 'It shines brighter than in May. There's something about the warmth of the wintry sun, don't you think?' Potter looked up at him.

Draco's gaze was hooked onto the way the emerald orbs were reflecting the sunlight, brimming with satisfaction.

'Yes,' Draco whispered, not looking away. 'The sunshine is brighter.'

This is probably a bit here and there and I tried to make it not huge but 🤷🏻‍♀️

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #213: COURT-MARTIAL

November, 1981

Aw sweet, I could win a ten-speed!

Welp. Here we go.

This title doesn’t fuck around. This cover doesn’t fuck around.

You know, the Avengers are actually a very rules based organization. In an average issue, its a bit weird to think about these goofuses actually following a charter but its true.

Much more so than the X-Men or the Fantastic Four. The Avengers are always talking about who’s going to be the chairman and procedural things. I think because the Avengers are more a group of equals than the X-Men or Fantastic Four are. The X-Men and the FF have a clear cut leader.

But the Avengers need rules because your common Avengers either all think they could be leading the team, actually could, or all of the above. They need an explicit charter to keep those egos in line.

But I guess my point is, having read 213 and change issues relating to the Avengers, you’d think that court martials would show up more often. They are a group prone to nonsense decisions. I think the one other one we see has Iron Man court martialed and suspended for a time for not responding to an Avengers call and not being able to account for it (since it related to secret identity stuff).

I have to figure that they tend to happen off-screen as necessary with exoneration generally occurring.

This one happens on-screen. And follows up on last time: wherein Yellowjacket shot a mysterious magic woman in the back when Cap was trying to use words and not punches to resolve things.

This is a grim day for the Avengers. They have to put one of their own under investigation and their furnishing related mishaps just keep mishappening.

Look at Thor and Iron Man squeezed onto one tiny table. Cap doesn’t even have room. He has to dramatically stand.

Although this is actually the pre-court martial. Captain America has leveled charges on Yellowjacket and Thor and Iron Man are going to decide whether it warrants proceeding or not.

Captain America: “Yesterday, we engaged in combat with a mysterious woman possessing strange, awesome powers who was attacking Washington, D.C.  After heavy fighting -- I managed to win through her defenses and reach her! I’d succeeded in convincing her to cease hostilities -- when, suddenly, for no reason, Yellowjacket blast her with his disruptor ‘sting’ at full force -- in the back! Fortunately, she weathered his attack -- but his action re-ignited the conflict! It could have cost us all our lives... and left the city defenseless!”

Iron Man asks whether Yellowjacket has any explanation for his action.

And since “I was a jerk!” isn’t a great defense, Hank goes with “no explanation!”

Without any explanation for his actions, its decided to convene a formal court martial for three days hence. Until then, Yellowjacket is on temporary suspension. Since Avengers don’t carry guns or badges, he’s asked to turn over his Avengers’ priority ID card. Which presumably gets you discounts at the snack bar as well as some sway with the government and such.

Hank protests but the rules are firm and Hank himself helped write them back in the day.

Outside the... meeting room? Tiny library? Gosh, I’d love a layout to the Avengers mansion. Why aren’t they meeting in their sweet conference room- oh right. The table shrank.

Anyway, outside wherever, Wasp in her new... and frankly lingerie-looking costume is fretting.

(Jan, why are your fashion instincts so hit and miss and miss?)

And then Tigra boops her on the head.

Tigra has continued to be as cat as an equivalent weight in cats and has climbed the wall to hang out on the wall trim. Somehow.

Wasp: “Tigra! What are you doing up there?”

Tigra: “Same thing you’re doing down there -- wondering what’s going on inside! When cats get nervous, they climb! You should try it! It might relax you!”

Tigra also assures Wasp that everything will be alright but privately hopes that it will be. And also dunks on Hank a little.

Tigra: (I’ve never seen a woman so hung up on a guy! And such a strange guy! He seems like such a cold fish... all wrapped up in whatever murky stuff is churning around inside himself! He gives me the creeps!)

Yellowjacket comes out of the whatever room and Wasp is immediately on him, asking he hold her. And he’s like

mmnnyurrh

Yellowjacket: “Jan, just -- just get away from me! Leave me alone! Haven’t I got enough to contend with without you slobbering all over me?”

When she turns away sadly he apologizes and hugs her, saying he’s just afraid because the Avengers are going to court martial him.

A still lurking on the wall like a five foot something cat Tigra wonders to herself “Jan, baby! I just don’t get it! Don’t you know you’re worth ten of him?”

She’s right and she should say it.

The pre-court martial panel splits, to meet up again in three days for the court martial.

Captain America flips off the roof into a thunderstorm to get some serious thinking and flashbacking done. He’s extra like that. I mean, seriously. There’s a front door, STEVE.

Cap: “I wonder... am I doing the right thing? Was Yellowjacket’s action just a mistake -- ? Something that could happen to anyone?”

He thinks back to the war, when he in disguise as Perfectly Average Steve Rogers PFC was on a recon patrol and his unit ran right into a huge German advance.

His unit got cut to pieces around him until he was the only one left. At that point, he ripped his uniform off to reveal he was dressed in layers as CAPTAIN AMERICA.

I was going to snark that his secret identity was worth more than the lives of his unit but I dunno that even a Captain America could have done much to save his GI guys. The way its portrayed and all. Steve even thinks that his number is up so might as well go out as CAPTAIN AMERICA.

“It was early in my career -- after I had established myself but before I had seen much front-line combat! Till that day, I hadn’t suspected how wise the government had been in giving me this costume! The very sight of Captain America seemed to terrify the German soldiers, as, fighting like a man possessed, I cut a swath through their ranks...”

Cap fought and fought until there were no more enemies standing. Surrounded by collapsed and probably unconscious and not at all dead German soldiers.

He hears a sound behind him and acting on battle instinct he throws his mighty shield with the intention to make someone yield.

But: instant regrets.

“The sound was a child... a war orphan, collecting brass to sell for money to buy food! Thank god, she was bending to pick up a shell casing just as my shield would have struck! Meant to stun a full-grown man, it probably would have broken her neck if it had hit!”

Wow! Cap almost killed an orphan!

The point being that Cap wonders if he has the right to accuse Hank, when “there, but for the grace of god...”

Meanwhile, Iron Man has stayed back at the mansion to refresh his memories with some research in the Avengers records.

This is one part a montage of previous Hank Pym moments and one part ‘actually I did do the research before I wrote this’ from Jim Shooter.

Because, yeah, Jim Shooter, according to Jim Shooter, went back and reread every single appearance by Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne before writing this story. Believe it or don’t but the montage is here so he at least did enough to get panels to reference or reuse.

Iron Man notes Hank’s tendency to change identities and costumes frequently, how his gaining the power to go giant didn’t work out too well for him, how he left and rejoined the group, never seemed comfortable with the Avengers, and in Iron Man’s estimation that he felt outclassed by the other founders.

And perhaps the reason he kept ping ponging between the team and his research was a lack of success in either one. How his attempts to achieve a scientific breakthrough to prove himself (I guess Pym Particles are a case of ‘what have you done for me lately?’ or just that he didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder) bore only Ultron, one of the Avengers’ deadliest enemies.

Iron Man: “But I wonder... can he ever truly be free of the spectre of Ultron -- ? Can he ever be more than a haunted, hollow man drowning in a sea of guilt over the wrongs done by his monstrous creation? Can he ever rid himself of the desperate need he has to redeem himself in his own eyes?”

That’s a hell of a way to talk about your friend, Tony. I know the Avengers have a policy of not interfering in each others personal lives but its probably not the best policy to watch him struggling and just wait to see if he figures out his shit on his own.

I don’t know.

Iron Man: “And if he is in that kind of inner turmoil, he needs our help... our support... our love! Hank is a friend to us all... a founder of this group! How can we turn our backs on him when he needs us most? How dare we punish him for a mistake that any of us might have made?”

Oh! Well! Learn me to not flip the page. I guess in fairness Hank has been at his worst here than previous times.

Anyway, as I said, Tony doing this research mirrors Jim Shooter doing his research. And Tony reaches much the same conclusion as Shooter does, although perhaps more kindly worded.

Jim Shooter: “Back in 1981 I was writing the Avengers. Hank Pym aka Yellowjacket was married to Janet Van Dyne aka the Wasp and things had not been going well for him for a long time. Before I embarked on the storyline ... I reread every single appearance of both characters. His history was largely a litany of failure, always changing guises and switching back and forth from research to hero-ing because he wasn’t succeeding at either. He was never the Avenger who saved the day at the end and usually the first knocked out or captured. His most notable ‘achievement’ in the lab was creating Ultron. Meanwhile, his rich, beautiful wife succeeded in everything she tried. She was also always flitting around his shoulders, saying things to prop up his ego.”

Geez, Jim.

I don’t know about Hank never saving the day at the end. Never is a bit much. But I don’t want to reread 213 minus issues to say for sure.

But this is the portrayal of Hank that went into writing this story and Iron Man is the one who speaks it aloud.

Outside the mansion, Wasp and Yellowjacket run into a group of young fans right as they leave. The fans all want Wasp’s autograph and mistake Hank’s codename for Bumblebee and ask if he’s ever done anything.

Wasp: “Look, I’m just his sidekick! You’d better get his autograph too!”

A child, probably: “Nah! We just want yours! Right, guys?”

This is like that scene with Hulk in Endgame where he tries to get the fans to appreciate Ant-Man too, to Scott’s growing annoyance with the situation. Except not as played for laughs.

On their limo ride to their Cresskill, NJ home, Wasp tells Hank not to let those smart-aleck kids get to him.

Yellowjacket: “... Well, they were right! What have I ever done? Nothing!”

Wasp: “Hank, don’t be silly! Oh, who cares what they think? You’ll always be my hero!”

In fairness, Wasp has been actively on the team for a bit and memories are short. Hank’s been busy in his lab. Which Wasp reminds him but that's the lab she paid for and where he’s accomplished NOTHING!

The staff of the house also dig the knife in a little, possibly unintentionally but eh who can say. When they address the couple Mrs. Pym, aka the person who signs their checks is primary and Hank is the after thought. But possibly they just interact more with Jan if Hank has been cooped up in his lab.

Jenkins: “Welcome home, Mrs. Pym! Uh, you too, sir!”

Jenkins in the next panel: “Madame, would you like us to begin preparing your luncheon now? And Mr. Pym’s too, of course!”

And then, things get awkward. Although oh lord, Jan is trying.

Wasp: “Alone at last! Thank goodness! It seems that we never have any time just to be together by ourselves anymore! You know, just to talk, and --”

Yellowjacket: “I don’t want to talk about my problems, Jan! I know you mean well, but --”

Wasp: “But I’m ‘dingaling Jan, the airhead heiress’! Every time I try to help I just make things worse! I know! I -- I’m sorry! I always goof everything up... always say the wrong things! I’m such a dumbbell! It’s a good thing I found you to think for me, darling! You’re so smart... so strong... mmm... so sexy! All I want to do is melt in your arms... be yours! I need you to protect me and keep me warm, lover! Oh, Hank! Let’s just sneak off to bed and cuddle and kiss and -- and let me show you how much I love you! Whaddaya say, big boy?”

Yellowjacket: “Uh... not now, honey! I -- I’m just, just a little too tense now! You understand, don’t you? I think I’ll go putter around in the lab for awhile! Maybe that’ll relax me! See you later... okay?”

Eeesh.

Eeeeeeeeesh. It almost hurts watching Jan diminish herself so much to try to make him feel better.

Although a lot of her solutions seem to be ‘lets make out until you feel better’ but she did offer to talk. Not even about anything specific. And Hank automatically assumes that the only thing to possibly talk about is his problems.

Hank locks himself up in his lab, realizing that he’s disappointed Jan but saying that its better to not even try to get romantic while he’s this upset.

Yellowjacket: “I wouldn’t blame her if she hated me! I’m a failure as a husband... just like I’m a failure as a hero! So here I am again, hiding out in the lab... where I’m a failure as a scientist! I hate this place! ... But I keep coming back -- because, here at least I had one success!”

And yes, that one success he credits himself with... is Ultron!

Yellowjacket: “Yes... here I accomplished what no one else ever has! I built a robot capable of independent thought! Here, I created... Ultron! Even that went wrong! Even that, my own success turned into a disaster! A failure! But maybe, just maybe, my one success will yet provide the key to my salvation!”

And he starts putting together a new robot!

Hoooooooooo boyyyyyyyyyyyyy, Hank. Building robots isn’t always the solution!

Also: in order: does the robot Human Torch just not count then? And do Pym Particles not count?

SCENE AND TIME CHANGE

Three days have passed, it is dawn of the three days later.

Tigra is spending her morning napping because she is here to cat to the utmost.

Look at this. Ridiculous.

You are a ridiculous individual, Tigra Greer Grant Nelson.

And like a cat, sleep can be a tenuous thing for the faint sound of footstep on carpet outside her room has her spring out of bed and answer the door of her room before Jarvis even knocks.

Because Tigra is here to be a cat and unnerve Jarvis, for reasons which escape me.

She jokes about Jarvis bringing her a mouse for breakfast but he’s really here with her weekly stipend check from Tony Stark.

This is a thing that’s been implied but not explicitly spoken but the Avengers actually get paid for being Avengers. Its not really a salary as much as a stipend.

I don’t know that there’s a difference, except maybe legally. Maybe in regards to taxes. Maybe stipends don’t get income taxed and you don’t need to submit a form to the IRS.

That our Tony! Ha ha ha pay your taxes ya dink

Anyway, the weekly check is a ‘merely’ a modest stipend to defray miscellaneous living expenses. Most Avengers refuse the stipend because, well, they don’t need it! And most Avengers aren’t going to pocket a thousand dollars they don’t need just to laugh at Tony for handing out free money.

Your Thors, Iron Mans, Wasps and Antgiantyellowjacket Men.

But the Avengers that live in the mansion and have no outside means of support (definitely Hawkeye whenever he was on the team, definitely Beast and he definitely bought weed with it, Wonder Man, probably Scarlet Witch and Vision) accept the money.

Tigra: “Well, I’ll sure take it! I’m tired of being broke!”

And then she actually looks at the check.

Tigra: “Jarv, this check -- ! It’s for a thousand dollars!”

Jarvis: “If that is not sufficient, madame, I’m sure Mr. Stark would be happy to increase the amount!”

Tigra: “Increase the --! No, that’s okay, Jarv! This’ll do just fine! Whee! We’re in the money... we’re in the money!”

So according to an online calculator $1000 in 1981 dollars is worth about $2,820.56 in 2020 dollars!

Plus no rent because firemen sleep in the firehouse!

Being good really is its own reward! Where do I get some superpowers, an invitation to the Avengers, and probably a c-list fodder death in the next event!

Ok so maybe its not all great to be an Avenger. But the monetary compensation certainly sounds good to some!

And it bears mentioning that Tigra signed up to be an Avenger when all she thought she’d get out of it was a place to sleep and a chance to do hero stuff.

Anyway, Jarvis also reminds her that she has to attend the court martial meeting at four, prompting her to say “Aw! Don’t remind me of downers like that now, Jarv!”

You’re a classy person, Tigra.

Stop sexually harassing the butler and also anyone. Its just uncomfortable.

And poor Jarvis continues to be allergic to cats and giant woman cats. Poor, poor Jarvis.

As four approaches, the Avengers all start to head to the mansion for the court martial.

Iron Man as Tony Stark, normal billionaire man, cuts short a board meeting claiming another appointment. One of the board members is like lucky dog is probably off to a date with a startlet but oh ironies man, Tony would trade places with the board guy Dillworth if he could because he’s not looking forward to this.

And at Upper West Side Medical Clinic, Brilliant Perfectly Normal Surgeon Dr. Donald Blake is doing surgery when he realizes drat that Avengers meeting is soon.

So he asks the other doctors to finish up without him and takes off.

In fairness, in fairness! The patient was out of mortal peril. It was just the closing up and such that was left. But the other doctors are like look at that arrogant doctor man, he may be the best doctor on Earth but I don’t like his attitude.

And in the court martial room waits Captain America. Still stuck in that conundrum he’s been in.

Captain America: “When the court martial convenes, I don’t know how I’m going to find the courage to look Hank in the eye and then demand that he be expelled from the Avengers -- but I must... though it will be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done! I’m going to prosecute the case as best I can... because it’s my duty! But all the while I’ll be praying that they acquit you, Hank! I hope you understand!”

Cap is at least fair handed here. This is exactly the treatment he demanded for himself in the Charles Soule She-Hulk series where he asked Matt Murdock to prosecute the hell out of him and She-Hulk to be his defense in a wrongful death lawsuit.

The idea is this: if Hank is acquitted, then it clears his name without a shadow of a doubt because Cap wouldn’t have gone easy. Accountability, its a hell of a thing.

BUT NOW WE GO BACK SEVERAL HOURS to Cresskill and the casa de Wasp.

Janet woke up and found no Hank. He’s been locked in his lab since they got back from the pre-court martial three days ago. And she’s gotten worried that he’s hurt himself or gotten ill so she decides to invade his privacy a little bit.

Hank has locked the lab door but Jan can just about wriggle through the top because the insulation is a little cracked.

So she squirms into the very small gap between door and frame.

And finds Hank has built a medium giant robot.

He’s just finishing up the programming. Because he’s programming the robot (he calls it Sal, short for Salvation I) to locate and identify the Avengers visually as well as by brain-wave patterns.

Hank this is all very dubious! I can’t think of a good reason why you might secretly be building a robot and putting all of your friends’ faces in it!

But Sal’s detectors are running and its suddenly pinging two Avengers in the area, not one. And when Hank turns on the visual scan system to check, whoops! Jan’s here! Jan saw your robot!

Hank freaks out a little bit.

He slams his fist on the computer near where tiny bug her is standing and shouts.

Yellowjacket: “What are you doing here? Why did you come here? WHY?”

She tells him that she was worried because she hasn’t seen him in days but he accuses her of spying on him.

Jan reiterates that she wasn’t spying. She just wanted to make sure he was ok.

Annnnnnd. Hank decides that Jan being here is a serendipitous chance to test his new robot!

By having it attack Jan!

HANK!

Sal charges Jan and grabs her in its giant pincer hands. Jan tries blasting it with her bio-electric sting but to no effect.

As Hank brags Sal is made of invulnerable adamantium. Plus plus plus, he’s programmed to respond if she tries shrinking.

Yellowjacket: “Yeah, Sal’s a pretty tough customer... powerful enough to trash all of the Avengers together! No one can stop him -- except me, because I happen to know about his little secret weak spot! One precisely placed shot with my disruptor-blast stinger -- and Sal collapses, defeated!”

Jan then asks the pertinent question.

Hank Pym what the hell is this robot for??

Yellowjacket: “Why, I’m going to save my career, Jan! That’s what I’m going to do! Let’s be realistic, shall we? The charge against me is ‘endangering the safety of fellow Avengers and civilians through neglect’! The penalty is expulsion! They’re going to boot me out! This ‘court martial’ is just a formality!”

This isn’t a good plan. Nothing here is good. Only bad things will occur.

I’m not being silly, for a change. This is a bad scene.

It does what it intends to do, more or less. But its uncomfortable.

Jan is like c’mon don’t think like that. And Hank is like well, I’m going to give it a chance. But if things start going badly, boy howdy, I’m going to summon a robot to beat up my friends! Also Hank himself! That’s right! He programmed a robot to beat the shit out of him!

And then when things look their worst, Hank will save the day by blasting the robot in the secret weak spot and saving the day!

Jan tells him not to do this dumb thing.

Yellowjacket: “SHUT UP! I’ve got to do this! I’ve got to save the day right before their eyes! Don’t you see? It’s my only chance to redeem myself! It’s the only way!”

And there’s no way to really sugarcoat this. Hank just hauls off and hits her.

Or makes a very dramatic gesture and accidentally strikes her.

Jim Shooter has said that the hit wasn’t in the script.

Jim Shooter: “In that story (issue 213, I think), there is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration - making a sort of ‘get away from me’ gesture while not looking at her. Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross! There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the ‘wife-beater’ story.”

I don’t know. As I said last time with Gorn and Linnea, Hank is reflected in Gorn. And Gorn intentionally hit Linnea.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that it was set in stone that Hank would hit Jan. But it seems like it was foreshadowed in that way.

And here’s the thing: whether Hank intentionally hit her or not doesn’t really matter with how the story comes off and is attempting to come off.

Before he, intentionally or not, hits Jan directly he has also sicked a robot on her (and under-reacts when she says the robot is hurting her) and smashed his fist near her when she was small sized.

Any one of these would be unacceptable behavior.

And even if it was an accidental hit, Hank doesn’t express remorse or guilt or even awareness that he did a bad thing. He just keeps ranting as she’s sprawled to the floor.

Yellowjacket: “You’ve got to understand -- ! I can’t let them drum me out of the Avengers! I can’t! It’s all I have left! Since you had to stick your nose into my business, you’re in this with me now, Jan! I’ll keep it simple for you! All you’ve got to do is play along and keep your mouth shut! Got that?”

So. Yeah. Inadvertent or intentional doesn’t really change anything here. His behavior in this entire scene is beyond the pale.

So we time skip to the present of 4:27 PM, twenty-seven minutes after the start of the court martial and twenty-seven minutes of no show.

Tigra is getting frustrated.

Tigra: “I want to get this craziness over with! You know I’ve been an Avenger for a week! I feel pretty silly judging a guy who’s been around since day one!”

She asks if she can just cast a vote for acquittal preemptively and fuck off.

Iron Man says of course not! Although he thinks to himself that if it were possible, he would have done it and probably Thor too.

So that’s the situation regarding the Avengers’ thoughts on this court martial. Tigra wants to just vote to acquit because she’s only been here a week. Iron Man and probably Thor would also like to just vote to acquit. And Captain America is going to prosecute as hard as he can but is secretly hoping that Hank gets acquitted.

Far from Hank’s belief that the court martial is just a formality.

Anyway, Hank and Jan (wearing sunglasses) show up.

Yellowjacket: “Sorry we’re late! The George Washington Bridge was jammed as usual!”

Captain America: “No harm done, Hank!”

Yellowjacket: “You mean you won’t be pressing additional charge for malicious tardiness, Cap?”

Captain America: “Uh... let’s get started!”

Yeah. Off to a great start. Just. Not a good foot, Hank.

So the court martial starts! Thankfully the table has had a growth spurt or maybe got switched out for a bigger table.

So the voting will be by Tigra, Thor, and Iron Man. Wasp may participate but not vote because she’s Hank’s wife. Cap will prosecute.

And begin to prosecute he will do!

Captain America: “Four days ago, Yellowjacket blasted an enemy in the back -- an enemy who had already ceased hostilities! We all know that Hank’s no coward and not one to panic! It was a mistake... a misjudgement made on the spur of a tense, pressured moment! It could have triggered disaster!”

“But it didn’t! We were lucky! So, the temptation is to forget it... write it off! We tend to feel that way because each of us thinks that it’ll happen to us someday!”

“Wrong! We can’t let it happen! We’re the Avengers, not the Brooklyn Dodgers! One ‘error’ by one of us can cost thousands of lives! We don’t dare allow ourselves to think it’s ever all right to make a mistake!”

“Our responsibility is overwhelming! We’ve got to judge ourselves harshly! I recommend for Yellowjacket, as I would for myself, the severest possible penalty!”

So at this point Hank can please guilty to the charges and rely on the mercy of the court or defend himself from the charges.

And Hank decides to plead not guilty, of course!

Okay, so what’s your defense, Hank? You actually have a possible avenue here that Elf-Queen didn’t speak English and you were behind her so it was difficult to tell that hostilities had ceased and plus she had tossed your new teammate into space.

Are you going with something like that?

Yellowjacket: “I don’t deny the sequence of events as Cap described them... more or less! Yes, when it seemed as though the enemy had ceased fighting, my attack -- my ‘mistake’ -- seemed treacherous! But I find it odd that the great Captain America never even once considered treachery on the part of the enemy!”

“She could have been setting him up! By striking when I did, in the way I did, I may have actually saved his life! But is he grateful? No! Why not, one may ask!”

“Well, perhaps you noticed that the ‘enemy’ in question was a beautiful woman! Does he think I didn’t notice the way he was looking at her? Well it’s no wonder he’s so upset!”

“You like her, eh, Cap? And I hurt her -- and that’s why you have this vendetta against me, even though I may have saved your miserable life! Oh yes! I was actually the hero out there! Me! But, then, you turned it all around... you made a fool out of me!”

“And it worked, didn’t it? That’s when she started looking back! Isn’t it? Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?”

Yeah. That. Just sort of says it all, Iron Man.

Hank senses that maybe his rant wasn’t quite as convincing as it sounded in his head and demands Jan tell them how right he is!

Jan: “... no more! Let it end! I beg you, Hank, if you love me... let it end!”

And Thor sees her black eye and reacts in shock, asking if Hank hit her.

By the by the way, this is also why Chuck Austen’s retcon that Hank had been physically abusing Jan for a while can fuck off. Because in his telling, the Avengers knew for a while and just didn’t do anything.

And I do not like that as a concept.

So since this is going not how he’d prefer, Hank pulls the killer robot remote out of his outside pants and activates the killer robot.

Its got to be sunk cost at this point, right?

Even if he saves the day from the killer robot, does he think that they’re going to forget the black eye and his rant that really Captain America is too horny?

AND THEN THE ROBOT BUSTS IN THROUGH THE WALL AND STARTS BEATING EVERYONE UP

with a KA-BWHOOM! naturally.

The Avengers rally despite the surprise and try to fight back but the robot is made of adamantium and we know how much trouble the Avengers always have with Ultron.

Cap tries throwing his shield at Sal and it doesn’t even yield! In fact, Sal catches the shield and slams it into Cap’s chest. Possibly caving in his ribs.

Iron Man tries to draw Sal off of the others by shooting repulsors at it but Sal zooms over really quick and punches him in the chest before he can react.

At this point Hank begins to have the faintest inklings that maybe he’s done a bad, specifically in creating a killer robot and programming it to attempt murder on his friends.

Yellowjacket: “I -- I hadn’t realized just how deadly, how savage Sal would be in full attack mode! I’ve got to zap his weak point before he hurts someone bad!”

And he probably forgot that he programmed Sal to kill him too because when Yellowjacket goes for the weak point, Sal swivels around and hits Yellowjacket, sending him WHOK!ing into the wall.

Oh. Hey. Sal’s turn and smack pose is vaguely similar to the thing between Hank and Jan.

Wonder if that’s intentional.

Hank is knocked so for a loop (by a robot that, I’ll remind you, he programmed to beat him up) that he almost passes out and has to struggle to his feet.

But he has to stay conscious because he’s the only one that can stop the threat he himself created!

And since Sal is kicking the shit out of Thor, the threat that Hank himself created really is a big one!

Yellowjacket: “C’mon, Hank! Suck it up! Make the room stop whirling! Focus... focus on the weak spot! Aim... disruptors on full force!”

But Hank takes too long and Sal finishes beating up Thor and grabs Hank in his claws. And hey more mirroring maybe! Like Jan before, Hank is in Sal’s claws and is being crushed.

And to fit the mirroring, Jan comes to Hank’s rescue. But out of actual, factual real concern for Hank’s pain unlike Hank earlier not reacting to Jan’s pain.

Again, I wonder if it was intentional. And I think in this case it must be?

Its because Hank put her through this nonsense earlier that Jan knows where the weak spot is and can blast it to save the day, the Avengers, and Hank.

Sal plops over with a KLANG!

And Hank...

Is not grateful.

Yellowjacket: “Why? Why did it have to be Jan? If -- if I couldn’t do it... why her? Why? Why?”

After everything, after every way in which his own plans spectacularly crashed and burned, he’s still  most concerned that Wasp outshone him?

Lets let Thor put it best.

Thor: “Thy plan... was foolish, Yellowjacket! A base and transparent ruse!”

But Yellowjacket doesn’t hear Thor or anything really.

Yellowjacket: “guess i’ll go now... guess... i’ll go.”

And he lurches out the door in a bit of a daze.

Iron Man: “Jan I -- I -- what should we do? What can we do?”

Wasp: “For me? Nothing! I’m okay... now! You know, I feel like crying... but I just don’t have any tears left!”

And that’s that.

I’ve said a lot of what I’ve had to say as we went along.

There’s more to come in this particular arc. Hank isn’t done yet!

What an ominous statement.

Follow @essential-avengers because I’m doing a good job, maybe. Please also like and reblog.

[kimberlyccoward]

Grow A Healthy Garden This Spring

It doesn't matter if your yard is merely ornamental or you utilize it to grow your very own vegetables and fruits - for a healthy garden this spring, you need to be making the essential preparations currently. Yet where to start? Well, reviewing this step-by-step overview towards expanding a healthier as well as a lot more attractive spring yard is as great an area as any! Put your green-fingers to good use now and enjoy the rewards next year of what you sow today. Provide The Yard A Tidy Garden debris can collect as well as mount up over November, December and also January, so scoop up old leaves and also roaming branches with a fan rake to avoid harmful perennials in the soil or any young shoots in the air. Lawn, plants, vegetables and fruits will certainly now grow devoid of obstruction as well as your yard will look a great deal a lot more welcoming! Compost: The Secret To A Healthy And Balanced Garden The function of garden compost can not be undervalued when planning your spring garden. It motivates earth worms as well as other helpful garden creatures to find as well as aerate the soil, which consequently will combat the sort of fungis as well as weeds that can transform a yard right into a plant graveyard! There are several ready-prepared brands of compost offered at your regional and on the internet horticulture centres. If you elegant matching this with some homemade garden compost, follow this recipe: 1 part raw material 1 part leading soil 1 component peat moss A handful of sand Mix it up in a pail or wheelbarrow using a pitchfork or your hands, whichever is more effective and then position it in your compost container (if you do not have one, it's highly advised you construct or buy one to speed up the fertilisation of a great compost). You can get compost bins from nearly any yard centre in the country or an on-line garden centre if you favor to do your shopping from home. For truly abundant garden compost, why not try including a few of the old fallen leaves you scooped up earlier, along with some old banana skins and also made use of coffee premises? Together these will include moistness, mould as well as organic matter to the blend as they decay - all good things for a plant-supercharging compost. Be Generous With Your Compost As soon as you have actually got a big amount of abundant garden compost prepared, it's time to spread it across your yard as well as over all the bulbs as well as seeds you have actually planted. It's truly crucial that you aren't thrifty, as plants can never get sufficient of good compost and also will certainly grow to be a lot stronger and much healthier therefore. A sprayed layer in between two and 4 inches mixed intensely right into the dirt will certainly make certain the nutrients obtain embedded in the yard. Weeds: The Garden enthusiast's Nemesis The saying goes 'When the feline's away, the computer mice will certainly play'. The same puts on gardeners and also weeds. While you're hanging around inside your home and far from your yard and also allocation, perennial weeds like sofa grass, dandelions, chickweed and also various other insects will be clearing up in, so ensure you remove them by their roots as quickly as you're back in the garden to ensure they do not return in spring (a minimum of for a little while). It's a continuous battle against weeds and also other garden pests, yet if you put in the research now, your spring yard will thanks for it later on. These four steps are the foundations of growing a wonderful spring garden. All of the devices can be purchased from local and also on-line yard centres conveniently, and the techniques are simple to use, just great horticulture technique. One of the most crucial point to keep in mind is: all the hard work you're placing in now will certainly be compensated by the time your spring yard pertains to grow. It's not prematurely to begin considering your Spring Yard Duties as well as preparing a checklist. If you weren't able to obtain your Autumn and also Winter months gardening duties done, put them on the listing and do them asap as this will make your spring duties much shorter. I know, I can see your eyes rolling as well as hear you moaning more job. Wait a minute, hang tough; it isn't truly function if you like gardening. These are merely steps we need to take in preparation for our Spring Garden, our Best Springtime Garden. An inquiry I frequently listen to is, "Where should I start, what do I do first?" The answer is quite simple; order your garden log or yard record publication. If you have actually kept it up then you'll understand what was done or otherwise finished. If you really did not complete making notes in your yard log, after that take a little time to make notes and finish it. If you are brand-new to horticulture as well as this will certainly be your initial year, the very best pointer I can provide you is, "Start a Yard Log". Create whatever in it and I do indicate every little thing. Here's a list to obtain you began: The contact number for your local county expansion office Names of the Yard Catalogues you are looking at or ordering from Plants and Seeds you are thinking about growing Frost days for your area Document the last frost day Uncommon patterns in the climate Days of seeds began Days plants were hair transplanted Strategies you are making use of Problems you encounter as well as your remedies Experiments as well as their results Harvest Dates Harvest Techniques Putting the garden to bed Seasonal Chores Have you prepared your springtime garden? Otherwise this is the moment to do it. If you are getting any kind of plants or seeds, do it currently. Once your garden log is up to date, an excellent location to begin Spring Yard Tasks is to look over your devices both hand devices and also tiny engine devices: Is anything broken, do they need any kind of repair work Are they tidy, this is a great time to clean them Scrub the wood manages with oil Do oil modifications as well as tune ups if they need it, don't neglect to create the day down in your equipment log While you go to it organize your tool lost so its prepared to go Just how around the greenhouse or tool shed, more springtime garden duties: Does it need any repairs Clean out any dead plants Clean expired fertilizers, insecticides, etc . Tidy all the apartments and also containers. Bear in mind the General Rule: Avoid of the yard till the dirt is dry sufficient to work. This provides you time to obtain the other springtime yard tasks done including your lawn. Currently is a great time to begin weeding, it will certainly minimize your weeding time if you weed prior to they have an opportunity to visit seed and also spread. It will certainly also be one less place for slugs to conceal. If you remain in an area tormented with slugs and yard snails start expecting them as well as produce traps. Remove debris where they could conceal. This is the moment to capture up on deadheading the invested or dead blossoms. Pruning can be done now but first study the requirements for each and every plant and also prune at the right time as it does make a distinction. Yes, various plants are trimmed in different ways as well as at different times. Study the when, what, or how to prune a particular plant, bush, bush, or tree. Your local county extension office can assist you with this or a local nursery. I can still bear in mind the first time I trimmed a Hydrangea shrub, I really did not trouble to research study when, what, or how to trim it or ask any individual; besides it was springtime and everyone was out trimming. We were brand-new to the area as well as I wished to stay on par with everybody else. I mosted likely to work on this 5 foot high Hydrangea bush, just seeking out every now and then; I recognized the neighbors were viewing and also I wanted to do an excellent work. I had it down to simply a 4 or 5 inches high in a snap. Later on one of the neighbors asked my spouse why I despised the Hydrangea shrub as I had butchered it. It took a couple of years before it bloomed again as well as never ever did fully recoup. For several years afterward I had not been enabled to touch the pruners. So please do your research prior to you get hold of the pruners and go at it.

[izukillme-moved]

*cracks knuckles before typing* Here we go: Fic/Drabble anything that you are comfortable with. 1. First of all, Jelray (because Jelray): “It doesn't matter if we can't describe it–we both feel this way.” (taken from a Tumblr prompt) 2. Gratsu: “And that is why I come to you over everyone else. That is why you are my boyfriend.” I can and WILL give more since I am bubbling up with ideas and at the same time can't save myself by writing them since I'll probably ruin it.

Okay, so here it is! I’ll edit and post the Gratsu later because I really wanna post this aah!!

The first time Gray sees Jellal Fernandes, he knows he isdone for.

He meets Jellal through Lyon. Jellal works at the library Lyonfrequents every so often when he feels he’s thumbed through his book collectiontoo many to pick up one from it. When Gray’s local library closes down, as atired college student (read tired corpse), he is obligated to go to this‘amazing library’ that Lyon describes as having a really good selection ofnovels, research books, magazines and whatnot.

The instant Gray lays eyes upon Jellal, he knows exactlywhat that evil glint in Lyon’s eyes was.

Damn it all! hecurses the silver-haired devil that is his older sibling.

For once, for once,he thought his brother would be nice and kind and show him to a library wherethere are no stunningly hot boys to distract Gray, he thought he could ignorethe look on Lyon’s face, passing it off as his usual smug smirk, but no. Lyon’s not that nice, and Grayshould know that by now.

Jellal is tall, half an inch taller than even Gray himself. He’sgot natural blue hair – now Gray wouldbe sceptical, but one of his ex-boyfriends and current best friend has naturalbright pink hair, so yeah - and a strange red tattoo working its way down theright side of his face. Oh, and did Gray mention that Jellal has the mostbeautiful, kindest brown eyes that seem to hold the entire universe in them,constellations, asteroids and all? His smile is like the sun, and it lights up Gray’sworld every time Jellal so much as looks at him.

In short, this boy is perfect, and Gray does not knowwhether to kill or thank Lyon for this gift from the heavens.

He decides to hold off on both, preferring to maintain thathe is in no way interested in how pretty Jellal is, or how his brown eyessparkle just so when the light hits them.

–

“Ugh!” Gray grunts as he searches through the racks for a book;he knows he saw it here yesterday. itcan’t have gone, there aren’t many people who even know who Stephen Hawking or RichardFeynman or Michael Faraday are, let alone like their –

“Are you looking for TheDreams That Stuff Is Made Of?” a kind voice comes from behind him.

Gray turns around, almost losing his balance, and issurprised to see Jellal, a small blush on his cheeks, holding in his hands the verybook Gray has been wanting for so, so long.

“Yes, oh my god,” he says in surprise, reaching out to takeit. “How did you-”

“Not many people like this book, it’s been checked out exactlythree times,” says Jellal, hand scratching his neck. He gives a small chuckle,and Gray knows that he would pay good money to just listen to that one sound forthe rest of his life. “I love physics, and I thought I would try it,”

Gray’s jaw drops. “Me too,” he says. “It’s so interesting!”

“You really think so?” Jellal’s pretty eyes widen, and hesmiles. “That’s awesome. We should talk sometime. I guess you know my namebecause it’s on my card,” here he laughs a little, and it sounds like the pealof bells in heaven, “but I never caught yours,”

“Gray,” Gray says, breathless. “I’m Gray Fullbuster.”

Jellal smiles in amazement. “no way. Ultear’s littlebrother?”

“You know Ul?” Gray questions in surprise.

“Yeah. She’s my best friend’s girlfriend,” grins Jellal.

“Wait, what?!” Gray leaps up. “You’re Erza Scarlet’s best friend? You’re that Jellal? The one she just won’t shut up about, the guy who tookcare of her till her real family located her? I should have known, Jellal isn’ta common name,”

“Yup,” Jellal says with a proud smile. “Erza’s mentioned youa couple of times to me. There was a lot of winking and suggestive smilinginvolved,” he says thoughtfully. “She has a tendency to act really weird attimes.”

Gray blushes to the tips of his ears and looks away. Heknows exactly what Erza means whenshe looks like that.

“Anyway, I should be getting back to work.” Jellal says witha little smile, handing the book out to Gray. “It was nice meeting you, GrayFullbuster!” And he runs off.

Gray stares after Jellal’s retreating back, the spot wherehis fingers brushed against Jellal’s burning oddly.

Damn it all, he curseshimself. Damn you, Jellal Fernandes.

–

It has been exactly three months, sixteen days, ten hoursand forty-five seconds since Gray met Jellal.

Not like he’s counting, of course. Certainly not.

Not like he wheedled out Jellal’s birthday (Jellal did thesame, he might add) and wrote it into his phone calendar – it’s the fourteenthof November – so he can wish the guy a happy birthday.

Not like he likes him.No, not at all.

Jellal now regularly makes it a point to say a hello to Grayand ask him how he’s doing every time he drops by.

(Which is becoming more and more frequent. Of course, Grayrefuses to admit that it’s for Jellal – he stubbornly maintains that it’s becausethe books at his own local library aren’t enough for him anymore, but even he struggles to believe that nowadays.)

Gray makes it a point to blush a little and stammer out, “Thanks.I’m doing okay, how about you?”

And then Jellal will inevitably launch into a story aboutErza’s friend Millianna and her cats – “terrible, nasty creatures,”, Jellal rants– a story Gray would have heard from Erza not an hour before, but he findshimself listening avidly, hanging off of every word that comes out of Jellal’s mouth.

“And then – and then the stupid thing nearly ripped apart asweater I’d been working on for almost a month,”Jellal yells exasperatedly, clutching fistfuls of his pretty blue hair. “I’m makingit for someone really special, see, and I can’t afford any more expensive yarn!”

“I didn’t know you knitted,” says Gray. He really didn’t –but it isn’t that surprising. Jellal is the kind of guy who seems like he likesknitting, and baking cookies, and all that sort of grandmotherly thing.

What is surprising is that Jellal is poor. His polite, cultureddemeanour and excellent grooming wouldn’t tell you that. But, well, it shouldn’tbe so surprising – Gray himself comes from a large business family, and is currentlystudying to be its next head, but you can’t tell by looking at the scruffy messhe is. Gray almost offers to buy Jellal some more yarn just in case, but biteshis tongue. It might come across as very rude.

“Not many people do,” Jellal says with a little smile. “Ifeel like I can tell you anything, though.”

Gray’s breath hitches.

“Y – yeah,” he says nervously. “Yeah, sure.”

–

It’s ten am on the fourteenth of November, and Gray standsoutside the library, chewing his lip, holding the little wrapped gift in hishand.

Should he be doing this?

Probably not.

Is it a thing that friends do for each other?

Are he and Jellal even friends?

Shut up, me.

Gray takes a breath in and pushes the doors open. It’s toolate now – he can’t turn back, and he won’t.

I’m going to do this.

He walks in and sees none other than Jellal, lifting a cupcaketo his mouth to take a bite. Gray can tell it’s strawberry on instinct, knowingwhat kind of cake Erza likes to give her friends on their birthdays. It has alittle number twenty on it, and Gray smiles a bit – that’s cute of her. He knowsshe baked it herself.

“Hey,” Gray greets.

“Gray?” Jellal sets his cake down. “Hi! How are you doingtoday?”

Gray shoves the gift at him and attempts to smile. “Happybirthday.”

Jellal gasps. “You remembered?”

Gray shifts in place. “Well, yeah? Is that a question?”

“No, but-” he pulls the wrapper open, long fingers carefulnot to tear it. It’s cute how he is so meticulous about it.

Friends can be thought of as cute. They can, Gray insists to himself.

He is brought out of his thoughts as Jellal gasps, eyes flyingwide open. He stares disbelievingly at the brand-new (second-generation, butGray feared buying the new fourth-generation one would be going overboard) iPodTouch in his palm.

“Gray – I can’t accept this-” he begins, pushing it backtowards him. “It must have cost you a fortune, how even-”

Gray cuts him off with a slight blush. “It’s not a problem. Youmentioned you like Linkin Park. It has all their albums except The Hunting Partybecause you don’t like that one. What are friends for, stupid? Just accept thegift.”

Jellal looks in awe at the iPod. “Thank you, Gray, but-” Heputs it back in Gray’s hands.

“Jellal, take it. It’s really not a problem. Trust me.” Graysays firmly, closing Jellal’s fingers around the touchscreen device. “Theearphones are in the case, too,” he adds, pointing at the neat little pile ofwrapper on the desk. “Try it out – I hear the sound quality is amazing.”

Jellal stares at him unsurely. “Gray-”

Gray grabs the box with a roll of his eyes, pulls out theearphones, plugs them into the iPod and shoves one into Jellal’s ear.

“Pick a song,” he whispers, putting the other one into hisown ear.

Jellal hesitates, but turns the iPod on, shuffling throughthe song list. He stops and smiles at one name, then presses the ‘start’ button.

Gray’s eyes widen as the first bars of his favourite songbegin to play in his ears.

“Castle of Glass,” he realises.

“’Cause I’m only a crackin this castle of glass,” Jellal sings along. He has the voice of an angelas well.

They spend some time listening to all Jellal’s favouritesongs – which happen to be Gray’s as well. Iridescentis a particular hit with the both of them.

“So let it go, let it go,” hums Jellal.

(If he’s being completely honest, Gray is more listening to Jellalsing along in bliss than anything.)

And they stay like that for a long while, until Gray realiseshe has to meet Lucy for their English project. They’re assigned partners, andshe’ll kill him if he’s late.

“Jellal, I have to go. I’m meeting a friend for a project, I’mreally sorry!” he says with a bow of apology.

Jellal’s eyes widen. “Don’t you dare apologise, you’ve givenme the best gift you could,” he says vehemently. “I – I can’t thank you enough.”

Gray smiles a little awkwardly and runs out of the librarywith a “You’re welcome!”.

Jellal Fernandes has himso screwed.

–

Fast forward to the twenty-fifth of December, Christmas.

And also, Gray’s nineteenth birthday.

Gray grins as his cousin Juvia whirls him around one last timebefore going off to dance with her girlfriends, Levy and Mirajane. “See you!”he calls after her, and she turns back to shoot him a smirk.

“Waiting on someone?” Erza asks, sidling up next to him witha suggestive smile. “Someone by the name of Jellal Fernandes?”

“No,” Gray says. “And that wasn’t subtle at all, Erza.”

“Mm, I know.” Erza grins. “But dense idiots like the two ofyou don’t get subtlety, so…”

“I invited him, but he said he might be a bit busy.” Graysays hastily. “Said not to wait on him. So that’s exactly what I’m not doing.”

“Would be a shame,” says a familiar voice from behind him.

Gray turns in shock to see Jellal, holding a lumpy wrappedpresent in his arms. The wrapping has flying reindeer and a little Santa on it –it must be old Christmas paper, but it’s the effort that counts, and Gray can’tstop a small smile from painting itself onto his face. He’s excited, he realises, something he hasn’tbeen all night – happy, yes, for his closest family is here, but not excited.

“You came,” Gray breathes. Erza has slipped off to god knowswhere, but Gray is glad she isn’t here, to be honest.

Jellal laughs. “Took me a while. Nice place you got here. I seenow why the iPod wasn’t a problem.”

And the way he says it, so light-hearted and friendly unlikea lot of others, warms Gray’s heart.

“Yeah,” he says quietly.

Jellal looks a little ashamed of himself, handing the giftto Gray. “It’s not cool, like anything you’re probably used to,” he says uncomfortably.“But, well, this is the most I could do. Sorry.”

Gray rolls his eyes and takes the gift. “It’s fine – it’sreally nice of you to even get me a gift, Jellal,” he says.

Gray holds the lumpy package tentatively. It is soft and pillow-like,and he can almost guess what’s inside. He takes his time to unwrap it,unwinding each piece of cheap Sellotape slowly and carefully.

Once he is done, a beautiful cream sweater spills into hisarms. Gray kneels and puts the wrapper on the floor, holding up the lovelyknitted article of clothing. It has an exquisitely detailed snowflake, in varyingshades of blue – is that silk – in thecentre, and two simple bands of the same blue silk near the wrists andneckline. It’s knitted even better than most of the luxury brands you’d see instores, and Gray clutches the fabric to his chest. It must be custom-made – it’s absolutely beautiful, and Gray wants toput it on immediately.

“This must have cost you so much-” he says in shock. “It’sgot to be custom-made, you wouldn’t see anything so amazing in a store-”

Jellal shakes his head with a smile. “I knit, remember?”

Gray’s jaw drops, and he recalls a certain conversationbetween himself and Jellal.

“And then – and then the stupid thing nearly ripped apart asweater I’d been working on for almost a month,”he’d ranted, and then explained why it was so important.

“I’m making it for someone really special, see,”

That special someone…

Was him.

Gray shakes his head.

“You went to all that trouble, spent money on real, actualsilk – for me?!” he says in utterdisbelief.

Jellal rubs his head. “It wasn’t that much trouble,” he answers.“Really, Gray, it’s not much at all,”

“Shut up,” Graysays, staring at the masterpiece in his hands. “I’m wearing this right now.”

And to prove his point, he shucks off the suit jacket he’sbeen wearing all night and slips into the cosy comfort of the sweater instead. Itfeels even more amazing than it looks, and Gray lets out a sigh of pleasure.

Jellal stares at him, and Gray cannot fathom why until –

“God, I can’t take this anymore,” he breathes, and suddenlyhis hands are on Gray’s hips, pulling him closer, and then he smashes his mouthinto Gray’s.

Gray makes an ‘Mmph!’noise at first, startled by the sudden kiss, but soon melts into it, kissingback with equal vigour. Jellal’s hands trace Gray’s hips, coming up to rest inhis hair, and Gray’s hands draw patterns on his back, pulling him closer,closer, closer till there is no room between them anymore.

The kiss is soft and sweet and loving and fiery andpassionate all at the same time. Gray’s insides are on fire, and his heart isburning with something he cannot place.Sure, he’s been kissed, has kissed others before, but not like this. Never likethis.

“Shit,” he gasps when they finally break apart for air.

Jellal’s cheeks are red. His eyes are wide. His tattoo isalmost invisible with how much he’s blushing.

“I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have done that. I crossed a line. Ihave to go. I better go.” he gabbles and runs off.

“Jellal – wait!” Gray shouts, trying to chase after him,hand outstretched. But Jellal has melted into the huge crowds, and Gray cannot spothim anymore.

He sinks onto the floor, clutching fistfuls of his newsweater.

–

The next day, Gray marches into the library to see Jellal lookingsadly into a book – the same physics book, TheDreams That Stuff Is Made Of.

He walks straight up to the older boy and grabs his collar.

Jellal looks up in surprise. “Gray-” he begins.

“No,” Gray half-shouts. “I’m not letting you run away. It doesn’tmatter if you can’t describe it – we both feel this way. I’ve liked you fromthe minute I saw you. Your cuteness and your personality didn’t help matters.”

“I – what?” Jellal looks absolutely furious. “There is noway someone like you deserves someone like me. I’m not good enough. I bet youhated that kiss.”

“I don’t know how it felt – it was too short for me to tell.”Gray says. “Kiss me again and I’ll tell you exactly what I think.”

And he doesn’t wait for an answer, pulling Jellal’s body towardshis. Melding their lips.

The kiss is eternity itself to Gray, and when they finally resurfaceto breathe, he says in a daze, “That was the best kiss I’ve ever had.”

“What-”

“Go out with me, Jellal.” Gray’s daze is gone now. He leanshis elbows on the desk and stares into Jellal’s eyes. “Go out with me.”

“Okay.” Jellal mutters.

–

“And that is the story of how Gray and Jellal ended up gettingmarried like the idiots they are,” Erza announces proudly, lifting her glass. “Tothe grooms!”

They all drink, and the newlyweds share a shy glance.

Jellal places his palm over Gray’s.

He smiles, and Gray smiles back.

Meeting you was thebest thing that ever happened to me.

--

Hope you liked it!! I will be editing and adding the Gratsu soon enough, hopefully that doesn’t turn into a 3k thing like this did xD@tardisthroughthefandoms, you’d asked me to @you, so I did haha

[general-du-vallon]

so... way back in November (I just went to find out when) @rhesascoffee asked for a prompt off a list that was passing out in the pharmacy or smth, and... I ... here. Have this. It is half a fic cus the rest of it was too dramatic. 

um, WARNINGS: Athos is a recovering alcoholic and anxious and grouchy and I don’t know a whole lot about adiction so im super sorry about that, idk 

Athos loves and hates his home. It’s a nice house and he’s by the river and the village is right on the edge of Oxford but still, somehow, weirdly, a village. It has a post office for Christ’s sake. NOWHERE has a post office. It’s twenty god damned seventeen. It also has a Facebook group to be fair. He tries to stay away from that but he’s pretty sure that doing so just makes him more gossiped about. They also have their own tiny little pharmacy and Athos has been going there to get his prescription filled for the last few weeks. Because who doesn’t want the entire village to know one is taking antidepressants? It’s not like he even is depressed. They help him sleep. Not that it’s anyone’s business. Anyway he checked the Facebook page the first few times he picked them up but nothing’s been said so maybe the pharmacist is actually as nice as he seems. Athos stops and blushes.

He’s stood in the middle of the road on a zebra crossing and that is perhaps not the most normal course of action to choose but it doesn’t really necessitate the beeping. Athos walks extra slow on the walk way and stops a few more times, just because it’s HIS right of way and if he IS a bit head in the clouds it’s NOT his fault it is the FAULT of the mother fucking flashback earlier. And, maybe, just maybe, the two glasses of wine. But only maybe. Anyway, he meanders over the zebra crossing (that’ll be on Facebook later) and then marches off purposefully, just to tripply piss people off. He stops in at the corner-shop for cigarettes (the nicotine is in no way good for him but that and the wine are old coping mechanisms and they’re comforting and he doesn’t really give a fuck). The woman behind the till tries to sell him a vape, so he very gently swears at her without thinking.

“Oh goodness,” he mutters, looking down at the countertop. “I am sorry. I have a young cousin who seems to be beginning a cult and I did not mean to take that out on you, ma’am.”

“It’s sir,” the man says, glowering.

“Oh. Right, sorry. Sir. Of course,” Athos says, looking up a moment. He doesn’t usually look much at people. “The eyebrows. Of course.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Athos says. “Only, you have very masculine eyebrows.” There’s silence so Athos hastens on. “They’re lovely. Um.”

“Thanks. I think. So, no vape, just the death sticks.”

“Yes, sir,” Athos says. “Please and thank you.”

“Packet of death sticks coming right up, Athos,” the man says. How does he know Athos’s name? “Everyone knows your name you’re a famous author.”

Did he say anything out loud? Athos looks around and feels paranoia close in. He puts that down to a.) the flashback, b) the excessive amounts of coffee he consumed post freakout in a great big freaking freak out, c.) the wine he drank to try and calm down. He probably just made a shocked face. He pays for the death sticks, waves goodbye to his new friend with the impressive eyebrows, and heads over to the pharmacy. The cheerful but muted bell goes as he steps inside and he’s greeted by the biggest pumpkin ever, sat round and shiny on the counter, a happy face carved in it.

“Good evening!” the pharmacist calls from the back. “Be right with you, help yourself to the cookies! Vegan on the left, nuts in neither but not swearing to that if you swell up like Veruca Salt!”

Athos peers around the pumpkin and finds two plates. He tries a biscuit from each and decides the vegan ones are, somehow, weirdly, better. He eats another two of those before the pharmacist comes out, drying his hands on a tea-towel in a not-very-reassuring way.

“Sorry. Oh, hi Athos,” he says.

Athos is reassured. He is ALWAYS reassured by the pharmacist. He’s big and wide-shouldered and fat and he’s beautiful and he has the warmest welcoming smile and just exudes competence. He looks a bit off today, but then again Athos is a bit off himself so he sets the cigarette box down so he can find his scrip.

“Hello Porthos,” Athos says, remembering the name he was told a few weeks ago, as he roots about.

“It’s on repeat,” the pharmacist says, going over to the computer.

“What?” Athos mutters, emptying his pockets of conkers, pretty leaves, a slim poetry chapbook, pens, ink cartridges for a pen he lost years ago, receipts, bus tickets, a KitKat and a tenner - Athos pauses to be happy about those two finds -

“Your prescription,” the pharmacist says. “Here we go. Yep, came through yesterday, I’ve already filled it. Good.”

“Why is it good?” Athos asks, restocking his pockets (he stows the KitKat and tenner safely).

“Never mind.”

A bag is passed over the counter and Athos sticks that in his pocket too.

“Nice pumpkin,” Athos says, then turns to go.

“Cigarettes,” the pharmacist whispers.

Which is vaguely creepy but Athos takes it in stride because after all it is halloween and smoking is bad and the pharmacist does run a quitters day every week so maybe he’s trying to spook Athos into joining. Athos picks up the smokes.

“Death sticks,” he corrects, idly.

“What?” the pharmacist says, faintly. Probably from confusion. “Oh, fuckitty fuck.”

“It’s not that bad, I don’t really smoke. Just a little,” Athos says, glancing up in time to see the pharmacist go crashing to the floor in an almighty collapse of: himself, the book off the counter, both plates of cookies, and the giant pumpkin. “Porthos!”

Athos puts the cigarette box back down and pushes himself up on the counter so he can peer over. Porthos is already stirring, blinking confusedly up at the ceiling. Athos hesitates, then gets down and walks around the counter, kneeling at Porthos’s side, helping him sit up, picking bits of cookie out of his hair. The pumpkin is intact and the plates are unbroken but the biscuits were less lucky - they’re shattered, bits of them everywhere.

“Sorry about that,” Porthos says.

“Hm,” Athos agrees. It was terribly rude. His lips twitch at the thought. He brushes cookie off Porthos’s funny little pharmacist smock. “Terribly rude of you.”

“Sorry,” Porthos says again, sitting against a wall and closing his eyes, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Migraine. Been bugging me all day, suddenly decided to explode.”

“Time to go home, then,” Athos whispers, hoisting Porthos up off the floor. Porthos stares at him when they’re up. “What?”

“You’re strong,” Porthos says, awed. Athos ducks his head and blushes.

Porthos is always doing that, making nice little comments. Last time it was about Athos’s shirt, because it was a nice one and apparently made his eyes incredibly blue. Then there was the one about his hair being luxurious and the one being envious of his ‘beard skills’ and the thing about his fancy shoes and his shoulders. It has maybe been flirting. Athos isn’t sure. Pharmacists don’t usually flirt with him .

“I need to lock things?” Athos suggests.

“Oh. Here, here, just… give me ten minutes then you can walk me home and fuss at me. It’s closing time anyway, in half an hour,” Porthos says.

“Fuss at you?” Athos asks, letting go.

Porthos staggers a little then waves a dismissive hand and vanishes into the back. Athos collects his death sticks and hovers in front of the counter, glaring at anyone walking by who looks like they might come in and disturb whatever is happening out the back. Porthos comes out, bag over his shoulder, in the middle of a glare and laughs which is hardly fair. Athos takes his elbow and steers him to the door. Porthos locks it behind him then offers Athos his elbow again, touching his forehead and rubbing a moment before setting off with a sigh.

“I know this is a small village but I don’t know where you live,” Athos says.

“‘s’fine,” Porthos says. “‘preciate this.”

Athos nods. Porthos doesn’t live far, just up the road and off to the left, toward the river, in a nice little house with a yellow-painted front door and a big brass knocker in the shape of a badger head. Athos winces at it, it’s so bright, but doesn’t comment.

“Thanks,” Porthos says, riffling in his pockets and coming up with keys. “I’d invite you in but I’m gonna just throw up and lie down in a dark room and not move for a year. Give me your number?”

“It’s 128,” Athos says, dumbly. “The house has a name though, I called it Chickens when I was drunk one night and apparently I registered it with the post office another drunk night. So it’s Chickens.”

Porthos stares at him for a long time before grimacing and rubbing his face, giving his head a tiny shake.

“I have no idea what… what? Never mind. Your phone number, Athos,” Porthos says, holding out his phone and wiggling it at Athos.

Athos takes it and punches his number in, adding himself to Porthos’s contacts. He appears in the list under an ‘Airbag’ and ‘Argonauts’, and above a ‘Bear’ and ‘bill’ and ‘breadsticks bill’. He passes the phone back and Porthos stares at for a minute, swallows, leans on the door. Athos takes the keys and unlocks the door for him and Porthos mutters a thank you and staggers in. Athos closes the door quietly behind him and walks away. He goes down to the river to sit and smoke his way through half the pack of death sticks and eat his KitKat. Then he calls Aramis.

“I had a drink,” he says, when Aramis gives his usual, stupid, languorous, seductive ‘hola mi amor’. “I had two. It was only wine. I’m smoking my way through twelve cigarettes. I’ve had six so far. I ate a KitKat too.”

“Hi Athos, nice to hear from you, glad you called,” Aramis says. “Call your sponsor. Then ring me and tell me nice things.”

Aramis hangs up on him, which is quite rude really. Athos calls Treville.

“I had two glasses of wine,” Athos says, when Treville grunts hello. Treville makes an affirming sound which, yeah, when Athos calls it’s always because of a drink because that’s the point of Treville. “I’m smoking twelve cigarettes. That will help. I drank a lot of coffee.”

“You know coffee will only help so much,” Treville says.

“I didn’t want to work out why,” Athos whispers.

“Ok. Where are you?”

“By the river. The wine is still at home. I went to get my meds, the pharmacist fainted dramatically.”

“What do you want to do, if not think about what triggered this relapse?” Treville asks.

“I dunno. Can you come take the wine away? Can you do that, is that a thing you do?”

“No. But I will,” Treville says. “Seeing as what I’m MEANT to do is suggest you ask a friend to do it and I know you don’t have any friends except me.”

“What about Aramis?”

“Is he going to come remove wine bottles for you?”

“No. He hung up on me.”

“Besides which he’s in Chile,” Treville says, dryly. Which is probably more pertinent than the hanging up thing.

“He’s rude.”

“Yes. What else?”

“Smoke the rest of these. Did you hear about the pharmacist?”

“Yes, I was ignoring that particular dramatic pot of worms for the moment.”

“It’s not my dramatic pot of worms, it’s Porthos’s.”

“Anything you want to do other than talk to me about irrelevant pharmacists?”

“Don’t think Porthos would think much of being called irrelevant. No, I don’t want to talk to you at all, I have no choice in the matter though do I?”

“You do as you please, Athos, I’m neither your mother nor your nursemaid. I’m here to help if you want it, if you’d prefer to go back…”

“No,” Athos admits, to himself as well as to Treville. “No. Ok. I had a flashback, I didn’t want to face it, and so I… Did Not Face It. The way I used to not face things. I hid from it.”

“Yes,” Treville says.

“It was nice,” Athos whispers.

“Smoke your cigarettes, take a nap, have something proper to eat in fact I’ll take you to dinner. I know you won’t eat otherwise and you can get out of the house. Come to mine for dinner, I will pick you and your wine up, the wine from the house, you from the river.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“Yeah, better than a bottle,” Treville says.

“Better than Aramis,” Athos says, but Treville’s already hung up. Athos rings Aramis, remembers again he’s in Chile and hangs up on ‘hola mi’. He waits. His phone rings. “You’re in Chile. It’s costly.”

“You have so much money you don’t know what to do with it,” Aramis says. Which is true. Athos hangs up and rings him back. “Athos!”

“Yes, yes,” Athos says because he is being a tiny bit ridiculous. “A pharmacist fainted dramatically when I went for meds.”

“Oh? Oh! Is this the sexy guy who winked at you and made you wet yourself?”

“I did not wet myself. Not that such a thing is shameful, incontinence is a fact of life.”

“I didn’t mean piss I meant-”

“Why are you talking?”

“Is he the winky one?”

“Yes, yes. He winked at me and I may have rang you in a… in a moment of confusion.”

“You were in a tizzy! Ha! Yes these are nice things to tell me. Matthew is a jerk,” Aramis says.

“Your brother is a lovely man who you love very much. If you want to come weep on my sofa when you get home for missing him, you don’t get to complain about him. One or the other remember?” Athos says, which is a deal he made when Aramis was asleep so it might be fair if Aramis doesn’t remember.

“Yes ok, weeping on the sofa is probably better,” Aramis says. “So, why did the hunk faint?”

“He didn’t, he had a migraine I think he just fell over. He said ‘fuckitty fuck’. I supposed he was talking about cookies or somesuch.”

“Cookies?”

“He had cookies. They were vegan and delicious,” Athos says, then he spots Treville coming through the meadow and sighs.”Treville’s here.”

“Alright, that’s good. Is he going to feed you and make sure you sleep?”

“I believe that is his nefarious plan.”

“I’m glad, Athos.”

“Are you really cross with Matthew?”

“Nope, just that I’ve been here three weeks and I am ready to come home and be alone. Without him. For five goddamn minutes YES! MATTY OK ALRIGHT I AM COMING it’s dinner time, Ath,” and then a stream of Spanish

Athos bends over his knees laughing at the way Aramis switches so seamlessly between conversations and remembering sharply how he and Thomas and familial and brothers and he finds he’s not laughing he’s crying.

“Oh shit. Bye Aramis,” he says and hangs up.

Treville comes and drags him to his feet and then into a hug so tight Athos hasn’t breath to cry and anyway he’s safe enough not to need it. Treville lets go and they walk to the car in silence, at least three feet of space between them. Treville gives him a snickers bar and a juice box and drives through the darkening evening back into the city and to his nice terraced house and his nice domestic husband who merely says a warm hello to Athos and indicates his room is ready. Alaman is always like that, he takes Treville’s dramas in stride. Treville takes in waifs and strays and Alaman feeds them. At least Alaman’s daughter isn’t there at the moment, instead living in London and running some rebellious and wonderful magazine while wearing the newest Doc Martins and being political with her girlfriend Ninon.

“Athos,” Treville says. “Food, meds, sleep.”

Athos eats, takes his meds, and goes to bed.

II

Athos like the Bodleian. It took him a while to find his footing there and not have horrible imposter syndrome that made him want to scream in the middle of the Radcliffe Camera just to make noise. He like the Oxford Professor Aesthetic, though, and sitting in the Bod for hours, especially Upper Reading Room, with the light streaming in the great windows, the quad out there being historic, is great. As is napping there in the weak winter sunshine. That is also aesthetically pleasing. Athos wraps himself in the scarf so big it might as well be called a shawl that Aramis brought back for him this time, and pulls his beanie down and leans back in his uncomfortable chair, arms crossed over his chest, and dozes, his books gathering dust on the desk before him.

Of course he gets signal up here, unlike when he hides underground in the Gladstone Link (it’s term time, down there is full of undergrads now, sweating and tapping at laptops). His phone buzzing on the table is distracting. It’s on silent and it doesn’t vibrate but it lights up and he can just tell it’s still ringing. And then it goes dead and silent and his heart does a horrible tight flip dive thing and he thinks it was probably Treville ringing to tell him Aramis died in an accident or Aramis ringing to say Treville was in the hospital Alaman holding his hand and weeping over him. He sits up and grabs his phone and jabs it with shaking fingers until it lights up for him. There’s an unknown number coming up as a missed call and a text comes in as he watches, from the same. He opens it and doesn’t breathe until he reads the first few words - hi it porthos - then he breathes really really fast and has to put the phone down on its face while he hyperventilates. Finally he gets a drink of water and tries again - hi it porthos wnt 2 gt a coffee? - Oh. That’s not so bad. Athos nods.

Ok. when? Also use whole words please

Nw? im n twn?

No. Words

Now? I am in the city like a gentleman of leisure?

Ok. Blackwells ten mins

Use whole words please

Athos packs up his things, puts his books aside with a note to say he’s still using them and everyone better get their grubby hands off on pain of death (there’s a form he can’t actually say that. Sadly) and hurries down to the Div School entryway. He calls Aramis from under a random statue, rushing until he’s under the old Clarendon building then stopping and waiting for Aramis to answer.

“Hola mi amor,” Aramis seduces.

“I’m being spontaneous. I’m getting coffee with winky. Now.”

“Goodness. Go you. It’s the anniversary Athos, piss off.”

“Oh shit, I’m sorry. I have flowers for you and I made dinner for later so we can just heat it up, and I got the good blankets out and Harry Potter to watch, and there’s ice cream for afters and I have my ‘cuddling human’ hat on.”

“Right. Good about the coffee. Be calm, you’re nice, he already likes you.”

“Just better not call him winky.”

“Or The Irrelevant Pharmacist.”

“Or that. Love you, be kind to yourself. Bye.”

Athos hesitates before hanging up, listening to Aramis’s breathing, checking he’s ok and not ragged or crying or on the edge of panicking. No, he’s fine, just Athos doing the panicking then. He laughs and clatters down the steps and across the road, dodging a bike and six stupid tourists, and running up the steps into the bookshop. Porthos is stood, peering at a display table, squinting. Athos hurries over and then isn’t sure how to announce himself.

“Need my glasses,” Porthos mutters. “Can’t tell if this is queer or just really colourful.”

“It’s not gay but it has a rainbow,” Athos says.

“Oh!” Porthos jumps upright and spins, nearly knocks over the table, and sits down heavily on the floor looking up at Athos.

“Hi,” Athos says, holding out a hand. He pulls Porthos up to his feet. “Sorry.

“Right, hi, um,” Porthos says. “Oh, you look nice, that’s a good scarf. It looks like you could hide in it. Don’t though, flushed with the cold is a good look on you, you look so alive.”

Athos blushes and glowers, frustrated at the blushing. Porthos smiles and he looks pleased, he probably does this on purpose, getting Athos flustered and blushing. Athos strides to the stairs and up them to the coffee shop, queuing. He takes his hat off and Porthos, at his back, laughs.

“What are you drinking?” Athos asks.

“Cappuccino,” Porthos says. “My treat.”

“No,” Athos says. “I’m rich and stubborn, I pay. Ask anyone.”

Porthos doesn’t say anything but somehow, when it comes time to pay, Porthos gets there first and Athos has no choice but to let it go. He carries the coffees, at least. He can assert his masculinity there. Not that he minds too much about paying but really Aramis is right he has too much money. He should do something with it. For now he sets their things on a table by the window (it’s November and not quite Christmas shopping so it’s not too busy right now) and goes back for cake. Porthos watches him there and watches him back, cheek on his fist, elbow on the table, and he scoots Athos’s chair out with a foot when Athos needs to sit and Athos notices that he, like Samara, wears Doc Martins.

“They’re good right?” Porthos says, proudly sticking his feet out for their surveyance. “Yellow for Hufflepuff.”

“And the door knocker. Damn it,” Athos says. “You’re a nerd.”

“Yep,” Porthos says, smiling proudly. “I’m a Hufflepuff nerd.”

“Ravenclaw,” Athos says, sighing. “I’m Ravenclaw. My friend is obsessed.”

“Right. Your friend.”

“He calls you winky but not like the house-elf just because you winked at me,” Athos blurts out. He grimaces.

“Alright. I am super good at winking,” Porthos says, unphased. “Learnt it from my stepdad. He taught me this, too.”

And then Porthos does the most amazing thing ever. He wiggles one ear, raises an eyebrow, then the other eyebrow, then the other ear, like a wave across his face. Then he winks.

“Wow,” Athos says.

“I’m keeping you,” Porthos says, laughing, looking stupidly fond for someone who barely knows Athos. “If that impresses you, I’m keeping you.”

“I’m not for sale,” Athos says, primly, taking a drink of his hot chocolate (he keeps coffee back, these days, because the caffeine makes him jumpy but also it’s more useful if he doesn’t drink it all the time).

“Can I have a marshmallow?” Porthos asks. Athos blinks at him, realises he got some on a side plate (he’d forgotten he did that, the whole ‘do you want marshmallows’ had confused him). He pushes the plate over and Porthos lights up. Athos feels his own face do a ridiculously fond thing for someone who barely knows Porthos. “I guess I am ok with being kept, if that’s your reaction to a few marshmallows.”

“They’re good! Like tiny fairy pillows,” Porthos says, dumping them in his coffee and waiting a moment before scooping them out gleefully, slightly melted, and making a right mess. “Lovely. Thank you. I have a lot of nicknames, the lads are gonna love winky though.”

“The lads. Your contacts have ridiculous names.”

“Yeah, that’s Charon’s lot, they’re a bit of a bunch of dicks but they get good weed.”

“Should a pharmacist smoke? How do you know I’m not a cop? Is this an in-public conversation?”

Porthos laughs again and shakes his head at Athos.

“You’re not a copper, I know the police. Oh don’t go getting that look, I’m not from a broken home or a bad neighbourhood and my Mum’s alive and well thank you very much,” Porthos says. “No sob story here. My step dad was a cop.”

“The one who taught you,” Athos says, and attempts the face-wave. It does not work judging from Porthos’s hysterical reaction. “So there’s ‘Charon’s lot’ who are ‘the lads’.”

“Yeah?” Porthos says.

“I dunno I was trying to make conversation and divert your attention from my facial gymnastics,” Athos mutters.

“Oh ok. I’ve got Flea, too. She used to be one of the lads, as it were, but then she grew up and decided that, like Hailee Steinfeld, she wanted to be like most girls. Ok I’m being facetious. She and Connie are the best feminists ever,” Porthos says.

“I’m lost.”

“Sorry. My friends,” Porthos says, then takes a gulp of coffee and comes up with froth on his moustache, hands tight around his mug. “I’m a bit nervous.”

“Don’t be. I like you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Athos says, relaxing as Porthos goes all shy and uncertain. Athos softens his smile. “You’re nice to me, you haven’t put my meds on the Facebook group, you make vegan cookies that actually taste nice.”

“It’s not that hard you’ve just got to-” Porthos stops. “On Facebook? Jesus, of course not.”

“You’d think that was obvious.”

Porthos is silent for a while, then changes the subject to books, also softening. Athos reaches out and takes his hand and they stay like that for two hours, heads bent close to talk quieter, hands warm in each others. It’s enough for Athos but he worries, as they get up, that Porthos will want to do something like kiss. Porthos just takes Athos’s hand for a moment, then says goodbye. Athos trails back to the library for a few hours before heading home to do some Aramis caring. Aramis is just asleep on the sofa in the middle of the third Harry Potter and Athos is just tenderly covering him up and brushing hair off his forehead and searching his face for wellbeing when there’s a knock on the front door. Athos waits to check Aramis is properly  asleep being going to answer it, glaring hard at whoever it is dares disturb Aramis. It’s Porthos.

“It’s late,” Porthos says, stepping back.

“Yes,” Athos says, smiling and leaning on the door frame, deciding the Porthos can knock. As long as he doesn’t wake Aramis.

“You left your wallet at Blackwells,” Porthos says. “I went back for my helmet and found it. Right pair, we are.”

He holds out what is indeed Athos’s wallet. Athos stares at it, wondering how he got in and out of the Bodleian without his card, trying to remember. He might have not had it, he knows most of the guys there, one of them might have let him through if he’d been persuasive enough. He’s done it before, not for at least ten years though. But no, afterall, he has his card slid in his phone case. That’s how he did it, he had his card. His mind manages to recreate the moment from scraps of recall, now. He takes his wallet.

“Surprised you didn’t notice,” Porthos says.

“Oh I’m like that,” Athos says. “I’d invite you in but Aramis is here Grieving.”

“Right, sure, of course,” Porthos says. “No, I wasn’t here to… I heard the capitalization in that. Really?”

“Do not mock me I am a kind and caring friend,” Athos says. Then, softly. “He was a soldier.”

“Ah,” Porthos says, pushing up his sleeve to show off a tattoo. “Me too.”

“That might mean something to him,” Athos says, staring at the inky mark. “Nothing to me.”

“It’s not complex or symbolic, it says Sergeant Du Vallon you plonker. I was a drunk squaddie,” Porthos says, rolling his eyes. Athos looks closer. It does indeed say that.

“Ah,” Athos says.

“I made Lieutenant before getting out,” Porthos says. “They were gonna make me captain but I decided to be a pharmacist instead.”

“Really?”

“No. But that’s how it worked out,” Porthos says. “Tell him I’ll say a prayer.”

“You’re religious?”

“Not particularly, I go Sundays with my Mum though. That’s tomorrow. So I’ll put in a good word for your friend with my friend up there,” Porthos says, then gives a lazy, sarcastic salute and heads off, hands stuck in his pockets, looking like he has a film score in his head for ‘picturesque walking away’.

Athos goes back inside and finds Aramis awake. He sits on the edge of the sofa, a bit shellshocked, and takes Aramis’s hand, strokes Aramis’s hair.

“Porthos is going to put a word in with God for you,” Athos mumbles.

“That’s nice,” Aramis says, around a yawn. “Can I go to bed here?”

“Mm. Mine’s got the hot water bottle in to warm it for you. I’ll be up in a bit with tea?”

“Thanks. You’re good at this, don’t let anyone tell you different ok? Do it your way, it’s a good way.”

Athos smiles and sits up, letting Aramis go. He makes them tea and takes his ipad up so they can listen to BBC funnies and then an audiobook. He sleeps with Aramis, like they used to do as boys at the international school. They’d both moved about and had long periods of nothing but letters but they quite often ended up at the same school again, bouncing around the circuit, Aramis’s Dad a wine merchant and Athos’s military. Athos holds Aramis all night and when Aramis is deeply asleep Athos cries for him, for his lost friends, for Marsac. Mostly for Aramis.

III

“Can you get that, love?” Porthos calls from the kitchen.

Athos is at Porthos’s house. On a week night. Athos is a little baffled by this, it’s not the first time it’s been two months, Porthos likes cooking, but it’s still baffling. And being called ‘love’! (though Porthos has been doing that since their second coffee meeting when he realised it made Athos flush a little). And being asked to open the door! He loves Porthos’s house, though. From its quirky geeky door all the way to its tiny back garden of tangled weeds and overgrown lawn and wild flowers. The carpet in the hallway is red so Porthos feels important, there are photos in frames all over the walls and surfaces, of Porthos’s Mum, his aunt and her wife, his dog when he was little, Charon and Flea in various states of aging. The livingroom is small and attached to the kitchen, only separated by a curtain, the furniture is mismatched and all so comfortable. There’s a little table, with a huge avocado plant on it, that has a horse head and tail and feet. There’s a coffee table with a glass top and fish in blue liquid underneath, just plastic fish floating around like forgotten toys. There’s a small dining table in the corner but it’s always covered in stuff, the two chairs also, clothing and papers and letters and books and every bloody thing. Athos gets up with his wine that is actually grape juice but Porthos could only find a wine glass clean, and goes to answer the door.

“Hello, I’m Flea, this is Constance, and we picked up Treville wandering around the village and brought him along he’s basically Porthos’s Papa and we’re his sisters so,” Flea says.

“I met you last week,” Athos points out, opening the door wider, staring at Treville. “Hello, basically Porthos’s Papa.”

“I thought it better not to say anything. I didn’t realise at first to be fair,” Treville says.

“Thought turning up on the doorstep and startling me a better idea,” Athos says, nodding.

“I didn’t mean to show up on the doorstep,” Treville says, rubbing the back of his neck, then his eyes widen. “Athos.”

“It’s grape juice. Porthos (whose Papa you practically are) does not do dishes,” Athos says, stepping aside.

Constance (who Athos hasn’t met - she looks awesome she has converse shoes) and Flea are watching like this is great TV. Athos blinks until they all file in. They all go to the kitchen and Athos takes a moment in the hall, absently downing his grape juice, before heading through. They’ve all made themselves at home; Flea’s sitting on the counter eating pasta sauce with a spoon out of the pot, Treville’s taken over cooking, Constance is half in the fridge calling out foods and Flea’s calling ‘no’ to each. Porthos is leaning on the counter between Flea and Treville. They’re all talking. Athos, completely overwhelmed, wants to flee, but Porthos catches sight of him and beams a welcome. It’s a tiny kitchen. How they all fit is beyond Athos. He goes to the living room. Porthos follows, calling something back.

“Treville is my sponsor,” Athos mutters, staring at the blue carpet. “And my friend.”

“Oh,” Porthos says. “He’s not great at information sharing.”

“No. Clearly,” Athos says. “You don’t seem shocked.”

Porthos sighs and goes over to the window, opening the curtains so he can look out dramatically. Athos goes to stand beside him, tucking himself under Porthos’s arm and against his side. He’s warm and comforting and it’s reassuring. Athos shuts his eyes.

“My mum dated him for all of four months. They were friends. He got into a parental role by accident, through proximity more than anything. He’s great, when he realised I’d grown attached he stuck around, even after him and Mum drifted apart. But he’s not me Dad, and he’s not good at communicating, and our relationship is… complicated,” Porthos says, resting his cheek against Athos’s head. “He did something a long time ago that hurt Mum. He acted like my Dad without actually being my Dad. He hurt me. He comes and goes and when he’s gone it was hard.”

“Ok,” Athos says.

“Love him to bits, mind,” Porthos says. “Is it gonna interfere with sponsor things?”

Athos snorts. Treville is the most unconventional sponsor Athos has ever had (he’s had a few over the years and across various attempts at sobriety). It might add a complication, but they’ll get by. Or Athos will find someone new.

“Doesn’t matter,” he decides. “We’ll sort it, either me and him or me and someone else. This comes first.”

“Um,” Porthos says.

“Not before my well-being you twat,” Athos says, elbowing him.

“Ow. Just making sure. I’ve seen you and Aramis off on a gloom-streak remember,” Porthos says.

Which is fair enough. That had been an Afternoon.

“Also, twats are wonderous beautiful things, so thank you for the compliment,” Porthos adds, distracting Athos from That Afternoon.

“Sorry,” Athos says, a little sheepish. Porthos has Opinions about Cunts. “Are we going to be social?”

“Wasn’t really planning on it,” Porthos says, lips twitching.

“Dinner!” Flea yells from the kitchen.

Constance throws the curtain dramatically aside and Treville brings the pasta through in a big pot, Flea brings garlic bread, Constance brings salad. They sit on the floor around the coffee table and eat in more-or-less companionable silence. At once point Flea reaches over to squeeze the back of Porthos’s neck in an affectionate move that settles something in Athos. Seeing Porthos connected to people is nice. It reminds Athos of Aramis. When they’re done eating they get stiffly to their feet, Treville cracking his back and grumbling about Porthos’s lack of proper dining options, and take various soft-furnishings. Athos is slow and ends up stood a little awkwardly. Constance clears a kitchen chair for him and offers it with a flourish.

“Or you could sit on me,” Porthos suggests, patting his thigh.

Athos blushes and sits on the kitchen chair, unable to keep from being prim and keeping his knees neatly together, hands neatly resting on them, sitting up too straight. Constance laughs but Porthos looks stupidly pleased about it as if it’s something wonderful, Athos being a weirdo. It goes ok, the surprise of Treville showing up slowing eking away. Athos ends up on the sofa with Treville, their feet up on the sofa, drinking strong coffee and talking politics (nights usually ended like this but with whiskey, thus the coffee, though it’s not bad tonight per se. Just habitual). Porthos and Flea paint their nails or something, Constance watching and taking pics and videos for instagram. Athos tunes out quickly of that chaos and leaves them to it. He feels a little light headed but he’s sure he’s far less caffeinated than he should be by twelve am if he’s been drinking coffee for these past hours. He takes his mug suspiciously and peers into it, then narrows his eyes across the room at Porthos, who is making silly faces into Constance’s phone camera. He notices Athos’s gaze and looks up, goes all wide eyed startled, then puts on the most innocent look. He holds a hand up to his mouth, a barrier between him and Athos, and whispers something into the camera then does lofty innocence. Athos gets his phone out and checks instagram. There’s Porthos, same innocent look from another angle. Athos presses play:

Uh oh my boo just noticed I’ve been switching his coffee out for decaf gotta be mr innocence himself, followers. Shhh.

Athos scrolls through the comments. They say things like ‘I ship it’ and ‘who is mr mystery, mr innocence?’ and ‘when will we meet this mystery boo!’. Athos firms his mouth and looks over at Porthos again. Porthos’s lips twitch. Athos watches it on the video story and likes the way Porthos’s eyes get crinkles.

Boo is reading your comments stop he is sending death glares

The comments start at ‘aww’ and go from there, ending on ‘I want to sit on your face PhantasticPharmacist’. Athos blinks at that one.

Guys, my boo is sat right there reading your dirtinesses. Come on internet, be good for me. Ok I’m peacing out, do nice nail art and tag me so I can see! Goodnight.

Porthos blows the camera a kiss and it blinks out. Athos scrolls idly through Porthos’s insta for a while. He hasn’t looked before but now it seems Porthos is internet famous. Or at least a little. He has followers, anyway. A couple of hundred of them. His insta is mostly pictures of his nails, Flea’s nails tonight, Constance’s hair, a make up tutorial video. Athos clicks a link in the bio to YouTube and clicks on the first video.

“No, don’t-” Porthos says, as the first strains of sound emit from Athos’s phone. It’s too late, though.

Athos watches in fascination as Porthos, in odd lighting, peers into a bulb-frame-lit mirror, starting to do his make-up. It goes on in silence for a few seconds then sound buzzes and cracks like the beginning of a record, and then a strung out feminine voice starts to sing, wordless, cracking, and underneath it a deeper voice, also feminine, weaving ‘If I were a Boy’ by Rhianna into the wordless notes. The video switches sharply to Constance, sat on a toilet with a small mirror touching up her lipstick and examining her hair.

“What?” Athos says.

“It’s a music video,” Porthos says. “Um, yeah. You can stop now.”

Athos turns it off, as requested, but not before Porthos sings along in the mirror, glittering his cheekbones.

“That’s so cool,” Athos breathes, looking at the video, frozen on Porthos with his eyes shut doing eyeshadow. “That… is so cool. You’re YouTube people!”

“No. Flea and Constance do music and rope me in now and then,” Porthos says. “I mostly rant about films on that.”

Athos pokes the back button and sees, as Porthos says, a list of film names with exclamations, ‘@’ signs, ‘~’, ‘#’, ‘$’ and more in various awful combinations of keysmash or Asterix and Obelix style swearing. He so badly wants to watch one, but Porthos doesn’t seem to want him to so he doesn’t. Even though there’s a rant about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which was awesome and terrible and conflicting and Athos badly wants to hear Porthos’s opinion.

“I should get going,” Treville says, stretching. He claps Athos on the back, gets up and kisses Porthos’s hair, then wanders out.

“Bye!” Constance calls, settling in.

“Yep, see you!” Flea calls, also pointedly getting comfy.

“Oh piss off,” Porthos says. “There is going to be no drama for you vultures to watch. Go make Athos more decaf coffee.”

“I think I’m good actually,” Athos says, lips twitching. “Though I am far more sleepy than I planned to be and it’s freezing outside, do you mind if I crash here?”

He’s slept on the sofa once before (after That Afternoon - Porthos had been baffled but accommodating). He likes it, it’s comfortable; he’s short, it fits him.

“Yeah if you want,” Porthos says, looking pleased. Athos’s lips twitch. “Alright. Athos is ready for bed, so I’m kicking you two out.”

Flea and Constance, terribly entertained for some reason, nudge and cajole as Porthos flaps at them and busies them toward the front door. They spill out onto the drive laughing, running to the car.  Porthos gets busy making faces and giving the finger to Flea and Constance who have the interior lights on and are clearly still laughing hysterically. Athos, cold, reaches around him and shuts the door on the chaos.

“Oh, right,” Porthos says, turning, smiling. “Cold.”

“Yes,” Athos says. “I’m happy on the sofa.”

“Don’t be daft, I am gonna take you to bed and ravish you,” Porthos says.

“I’m ok with that,” Athos says. “But maybe slower.”

“Slow ravishings. Got it,” Porthos says, nodding solemnly before grinning again. He reaches out, though, and goes all tender and gentle, fingers touching Athos’s cheek, nudging his chin up till Athos looks right at him. “Slow as you like.”

Athos nods, embarrassed. Porthos pulls him into a hug and mutters some things Athos doesn’t catch, then bounces a little and pulls back to look at Athos. He grins conspiratorial and takes Athos’s hand, leading him up the stairs. There are more photo frames wonkily hung on the way up, a bendy distorting mirror at the top (Porthos pauses to pose and make faces), and then the hallway is lined with framed posters from concerts, plays, films. Athos wants to mooch and nose at all of them but Porthos is flinging open doors dramatically to announce ‘bathroom’, ‘airing cupboard’, and then he holds a door for a second and wiggles his eyebrows at Athos. ‘Bedroom’, he whispers, stupidly seductive. Athos’s lips twitch and Prothos gives a little laugh and opens the door. The room is… messy. Clothes on the floor, a pile of teetering books on a desk, an open wardrobe. The bed’s unmade but looks inviting and warm, and quite clean. The curtains are open and Athos can see quite well. He looks at the walls, looking for more photos or posters.

There is one. It’s A2, framed next to the wardrobe. It’s a picture of a flower. Or… not. Athos tilts his head and reaches to put on the light. Definitely not. There are labia. And a clitoris. There’s writing all around it in a pretty swirl: Proud Cunt Owning Men! And little black stick figures. Athos stares at it for a while, then moves on. There are a few costume designs pinned up, lovely inky lines and fluffy spreading watercolours, elongated necks, high heeled shoes, sequins, black scribbly writing and arrows. Athos moves closer to one, then another.

“Did you do these?” he asks.

“Yeah, for our drag show,” Porthos says, sitting on the bed and pulling off his jumper and t-shirt. “Heating should come in for a bit around now, will you be warm enough?”

“Sure,” Athos says, turning away from the wall adornment and back to Porthos.

“Are you gonna watch me undress?” Porthos asks, shifting.

“Do you want me to?”

“No,” Porthos says, grimacing and looking down at himself, arms around his body.

“You’re lovely,” Athos says. “Beautiful. Wonderful. You look incredible. Do you have anything I can wear as pyjamas?”

Porthos gets him a really big soft t-shirt with ‘Who’s the Huffliest? This guy’ written across it, a picture of a badger swaggering, and a pair of boxers. Athos goes to change in the bathroom, awkward and a bit humiliated about that. When he gets back Porthos is wearing grey cotton pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt that says ‘I be Hufflin’’ and another badger. Athos smiles.

“‘puff pride,” Porthos says, eyes on the carpet, hand rubbing the back of his neck. He looks up and meets Athos’s eyes all of a sudden, chin tilting up in desperate pride. “I’m not ashamed of my body, I don’t mind being naked with you, I’m just not ready yet. I won’t… I’m not ashamed.”

“Oh. I thought,” Athos says, then laughs. “I’m not ready yet, either, I thought I was hiding from you.”

“I thought you were giving me privacy,” Porthos mutters. “Should’ve known you weren’t that observant.”

“Hey,” Athos says. Though, fair enough, he doesn’t notice everything. “Can I watch your YouTube videos some time?”

“Sure,” Porthos says, sighing and sitting on the bed. “Not ashamed of that, either. Just that I’m out everywhere, you know? I dunno what I’ve told you.”

“No idea,” Athos says, sitting beside him. “Told me about what?”

“I’m trans.”

“Oh. Me too, what a quinkydink,” Athos says, sarcastically. “I know that, Porthos. Duh.”

“Oi,” Porthos says, sounding hurt.

“You told me,” Athos says, poking him, exasperate. “I don’t know what to do with touchy Porthos.”

“Hey,” Porthos says. “I’m not ‘touchy’. Just uncertain, give over would you?”

“I’m uncertain too,” Athos snaps, then feels sheepish. “it makes me abrasive. Sorry.”

“What an evening,” Porthos mutters. “Ok. Shall we… lie down?”

“Are you ready to sleep?”

“Not really,” Porthos says, laughing. “Are you?”

“No.”

They end up lying on Porthos’s floor and smoking weed. It’s a vice that Athos is actually ok with and not addicted to. It just makes him limp and giddy, lying on the floor among Porthos’s things is lovely, listening to Porthos rambling on and on and on about Hufflepuff house and Newt Scamander who he was so sure was Arabic and probably Iranian but who he still loved and Cedric who is so good at quidditch and didn’t really die it was all a trick and Professor Sprout the absolute best lesbian in the world and probably dating Madam Hooch and on and on and on. Athos shifts so he can rest his head on Porthos’s stomach and feel the rise and fall of his breathing as he talks and smokes. Athos falls asleep somewhere between the Many Lesbians of Hogwarts and the Fat Friar who is probably only the best ghost in the whole entire universe. Porthos wakes him, later. It’s dark and the warm.

“Bed time,” Porthos sing songs, pressing kisses to Athos’s cheeks.

“Carry me,” Athos suggests, lifting his arms and crooking his knees.

Porthos snorts and refuses to do that even though Athos is ever so little and light as a feather. Athos ends up on his feet, Porthos still curled on the floor. Athos hauls Porthos up and Porthos suggests Athos carry him and goes boneless and giggly. Athos drags him over to the bed and they collapse onto it. They wriggle under the duvet, Porthos still vibrating with giggles, and then Porthos starts snoring loudly, lying in a great sprawl on his back. Athos pokes him until he lies on his side. He expects Porthos to be a snuggler, but he’s not; he leaves Athos half the bed and Athos falls asleep too. In the morning Athos discovers that Porthos is after all a snuggler, he just migrates and octopuses in his sleep: Athos wakes up encompassed, squashed, embraced, Porthos’s breath hot on the back of his neck.

“Are we going to do talking?” Porthos asks, over coffee.

He has coffee anyway, Athos has orange juice and toast doing the not caffeine thing again. Porthos is eating an orange, leaning against the sink. He’s dressed and showered, did that almost as soon as he woke up, disentangling himself a little embarrassed.

“I don’t,” Athos says, clipped, watching him.

“Only, that’s stupid,” Porthos says. He makes a rabbit face at Athos. “Sorry I cuddled you without checking. I was unconscious though so you can hardly be mad.”

“I’m not,” Athos assures.

“Ok. Do you like it? Is that what you want?” Porthos asks. “In the daytime, too?”

“I am having breakfast,” Athos says, and finishes his toast in silence, refusing to answer Porthos’s questions.

When he’s eaten he gets up and leaves quickly. It’s not until he’s home that he realises he’s still wearing Porthos’s t-shirt.

IV

Athos is lying by the river, in the grass. It’s cold but he’s got a good coat on. He could lie on the ground at home where it’s warm but Porthos might find him there and Athos is still humiliated after running away in the morning, two weeks ago. Not that Porthos has contacted him or tried to get in touch in any way. Ok that might be a bit of the problem. He can’t call Treville to complain like he usually might. He could call Aramis but Aramis, on the run up to Christmas, is deeply unhappy and could probably do with a break from Athos Drama. Or maybe Athos Drama is just what he needs, as a distraction. Athos is considering this, looking through Aramis’s tumblr (many many reblogged gif-sets of Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth and Hamilton stuff), when someone comes and lies down beside him. It’s Porthos, obviously, because who else would find him in a field in freezing November and lie down next to him?

“I’m sorry,” Athos says.

“Yeah,” Porthos says, sighing. “I wasn’t looking for you you know.”

“No?”

“I was walking,” Porthos says, shrugging. Athos feels him shrug.

“I can ignore you if you like,” Athos says.

“Doing a good job of that,” Porthos says. “You have my t-shirt, I like that one.”

“You shall have it back,” Athos says. “Are we breaking up?”

“How am I meant to know? You haven’t said a word to me since I asked if you like cuddling,” Porthos says.

“I did, I told you I was eating breakfast,” Athos defends. It’s pretty weak even to him. “I’m hopeless at this.”

“I don’t care,” Porthos says, indignant and frustrated, Athos can hear it. “And don’t you sigh at me like that. I get that you have had this reaction before and it’s nothing new to you. It’s new to me and I’m allowed to react to you ignoring me.”

“It’s not like you texted or anything.”

“It was my duty to text, was it? Me who owed you an apology? Who ran off with a demand that we Never Ever Talk,” Porthos grumbles. Then huffs. “You’re meant to care for me. That’s all it is; caring. You know how to do that.”

“I do?”

“If you don’t I’m not teaching you,” Porthos snaps.

“Fine,” Athos snaps right back.

“Fine,” Porthos returns.

“I do care for you,” Athos mutters, grumpily, into his coat collar. “I just don’t know how to… talk about it.”

“Then find a way to communicate it to me. A way that includes not running away when I ask your consent for something. I, by the way, do like cuddling. You never asked. I liked sleeping with you, you never asked that either. I was ok, that morning, feeling a bit scared but ok. You didn’t ask. You didn’t ask me anything, Athos.”

“You need a litany of questions?”

“I need you to check in,” Porthos says. “I need us to be clear about consent and intimacy. I need to be able to ask you things, when I’m uncertain.”

“Well maybe,” Athos snaps, then stops. Why is he even arguing this? He’s been waiting for an opportunity for the past fortnight and now he’s fucking it up by scrunching up defensively. “Maybe I should apologize.”

“I don’t want to make you do things.”

“No. I am sorry, actually, I’ve been waiting for you to get in touch so I could tell you. I thought perhaps you needed space, I can see now I should have let you know I was giving you space, not just made assumptions,” Athos says. “I do like cuddling but only pre-arranged. No stealth hugs. In the day time. Night time, if we’re sleeping together that is consent for hugs.”

“Promise,” Porthos says.

“Are you ok?” Athos asks. Porthos snorts. “Now. For real.”

“Yes,” Porthos says, softly. “I’m ok.”

“Good. Shall we walk?”

They do, to Iffley lock and then turning back on themselves, still wanting to be together, and heading toward Sandford the other direction. Porthos reaches tentatively for Athos’s hand and Athos gives it to him, then remembers what Porthos said about needing verbal assurance when he was uncertain (that’s what Athos thinks he meant, anyway).

“I am ok with stealth hand holding,” Athos says.

Porthos smiles at him, face a bit pinched with emotion. Athos shakes his head and stomps on a bit, then comes back and allows the intimacy, allows himself to be a little tender, allows Porthos to be whatever he is. They stand close, holding hands, until Porthos’s breathing steadies, then they walk on. Caring for Porthos isn’t, afterall, so difficult, Athos decides. He likes it, he really likes it, his heart feels big as he stops again to let Porthos, distracted by looking at something, catch up. He touches Porthos’s chest and then his cheek and Porthos smiles bemusedly at him. They walk onwards.

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles elf . its not you, its me.

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.

It's late today, well i mean there is no set time, but im slow, on this gorgeous early autumnal sunday, i dozed till 15h, getting up intermittently to empty my washing machine, tug at my hair (vinegar makes it sticky? I'm trying to find the perfect all natural solution to shampoo because I’m no poo now : https://www.nopoomethod.com , in fact i’m practising a very loose version of alchemy in my house, trying to find drinks that energise but don't make me anxious, cleaning solutions for my body and for my house that bewitch the nostrils and incinerate grease / kalk. Essentially I’m just concocting weird stuff, hunched over materials collected around the city, boiling my hell broths in ikea pans, surrounded by recycled jars).....

Lets press on…...

Yes, my morning, my intro to the day, I was up so late because I was up last night so late, till 4am, painting and listening to sweet feminine soundwaves in my kitchen, getting it done in my way, step by step. Because now I’m working a 5 day week again, my days are 3 hours long, 5 at a push, 6 in the most extreme cases, so now I’m back to burrowing out time where i can find it, because now i have my teeth dug in to a big project, a big project that will be realized, for the first time since may May last year.

May last year:

I killed myself, artistically, me artistically is the majority of me.

My whole life has been sewn into my practise, my method, my way of understanding and redistributing everything that comes into my life, and May last year I moved out of the house I shared with my ex husband , moon, and into a shared flat, to embark on a restorative journey. Me and moon were not doing well in our little cramped caravan, we were at each other's throats incessantly, already broken up, him with a new partner, me in full swing of frantic madness, fuelled by bottomless bottles of booze.

Day in day out in my studio, I slowly turned my 450sq ft basement into a mermaids cave, drunk on 8% cider, night after night, sticking black bin liners to the walls with double sided tape, hanging spirals of bubblewave to the ceiling, spray painting floor tiles, screaming at the camera on my iphone half naked, making terrifying life size dolls and cry singing to myself, emphatically paranoid and fractured, writing letters to a man I’d never met who I thought could save me. It was my last great project, I created a film I can never show my parents and documented myself throwing my life away, in my wedding dress, shadowed by the virgin: a wreckage, a car crash, a lot of footage I haven’t been able to edit because I haven’t got the equipment to do so.

It's all stored on a clunky hard drive bundled up with the moon, he saved it for me, without him I would of lost it because my laptop, his laptop, broke in the middle of me editing it and since then its been untouched. I’m afraid the hours of video that follow me dancing around everything i’d ever owned up until that point, rigorously chucking it all in more black bin liners. When I can find a place to edit everything and the capacity in my mind, then I can piece it back together and show it to the world.

Since May last year, I have totally uprooted my life, moved out of London, had a very strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing time with my family in Devon, rolled through Turin, Cork, Helsinki, chasing the man I’ve never met, blocking the man I’ve never met at the behest of my friend in Cork, defending and understanding my art more deeply in Helsinki, and finding Tove Jansson. Her bronze bust on the door of the studio she used to hold, her gorgeous expanding black and white prints in the mumin cafe that towered in the sky under artificial light, her room in the museum of Modern Art, her soul in the botanical gardens amongst the families having lunch together.

It's been a glorious invigorating illuminating intrepid journey (I’ve been writing a hip hop song recently, can you tell?) but its not been anything monumental in terms of creation and since May last year is the longest time I have gone without a major project in my life, for possibly my entire adult life, bar being at uni, where conversely I was more orientated towards squat parties than art making.

So here I sit now, with a great big juicy exciting idea inflated in a giant balloon, ready to be released into the atmosphere, the only snag is that it needs to be manifested into real material, which means a lot of work, and so, I find myself back in a place I’d forgotten about.

That's the very good thing about having such a long break, is now I can totally observe what happens to me when I’m in this phase: it’s quite extreme from a fledgling perspective.

Not fueled by booze this time, but instead concocting things to give me a buzz that I can buy in the supermarket (don’t drink to much valerian, it gives you a bad tummy, im not drowsy or euphoric I just feel sick from the after affects and rancid smell) and developing my cleaning routine to be the most streamlined and creative that it can be, to give my art sustenance.

But if I could I would lock myself away from the world in a cabin far up on a mountain and painfully draw out everything in a more concentrated form, the cleaning is fine for now but it's hard to concentrate when I have to go to peoples houses and deal with their kalk as well, it might be one of the factors in why the whole thing is so stressful, but I have the suspicion that it will always be stressful, even if I ever get the luxury to entirely dedicate my day to working on my art.

The big thing I’m noticing is incessant, almost intolerable paranoia, that someone will steal my idea and present it to the world before I’m done. I notice it now and then I turn and look at my past and see its infected traces throughout my history, it's a big driving force in getting the work finished and I’m starting to see that I cannot share or talk about what I’m doing when I’m in the midst of it, but all i want to do is share and talk about it, hence why that cabin would be a better place than a city I’m not fully established in.

I know it’s unreasonable, untrusting, maybe even unkind of me, to believe that someone would steal something like this from me. I know that sharing ideas is healthy and loving and makes the world go round, but this paranoia is totally immovable and so I just accept it and try to satiate it, hoping by feeding it homemade remedies that it won’t make my life worse.

But these big idea’s, they come upon me, I don’t choose them, all the strands of my life and experimentation ferment slowly and then one day I wake up and I know what I have to do, then as I start to do it it grows and morphs, develops, things come and go from my wall, until I have reduced and finelined the parameters of a project, that's where I am now, all the mental groundwork is laid, its just the creation that's left, I’m now half way through the musical aspect of it but not halfway through the visual and I need to amp up, because it must be done by November the second, so I can take it to Turin with me, so I can deposit it at the gates of hell, so I can complete a cycle, so I can be free to make blue music and who knows what, maybe try something formless, kind and organic - that's not for me to know yet though.

Once it rears its great dense head, I am in its power, I am in the throng of obeying my art and that's a lonely place to be. It's lonely being an artist, some of us are collaborative and collective and have communities, but I’m not among those right now, this project, lets just call it by its name for here in : восем acht ocho : is not something I can share and make with others, it is a process of me picking up the pieces of my life, of giving praise to the moon, who has saved me and supported me so many times. I must give praise to him finally so I can move on and give praise to myself.

So I sit in my house and dutifully work back and forth between paint and ableton, singing and faux performing in my hallway in between, performing to my very tolerant invisible neighbours that must think I’m some kind of banshee from a deep buried part of the world. I sit in my house alone, I reject all the invitations extended to me, I retract from the life I am building to some extent and just hope the friends I have been finding will be understanding, though it's hard to explain to someone that I can’t come because of something I am choosing to do myself. It's not work related in terms of my bread and butter, Its not health related, I’m not resting, I guess a lot of people won’t understand which is perhaps why I feel compelled to try and somehow explain myself in this blog today.

I must make this work, it is not a choice, I am in my house alone because this idea has bound me up and demands my care and attention, because for the first time in over a year I can make work again and make it with diligence, create something on a large scale. It means that Berlin is working, this is the change I was looking for, because I feel like I have a future again, whilst the 100’s of drawings, paintings, books, trinkets from my life decay in some junk yard close to London, I have the space to bring new art into the world. It’s really a glorious turning point in my life so far.

I am still terrified that it will all collapse in on me at any time, but there are ways of fighting this paranoia, careful planning, creative problem solving, and probably just not talking about the details of what I am doing anymore until it is finished.

Phew, nothing enlightening this week, more of an attempt to bridge the gap between myself and the life that flows around me. I’m now off to edit my most current track on ableton then do some line work and probably make up some mixes of citric acid / bicarbonate of soda cleaner for the week ahead.

We just have to do what we must, and be grateful when we know what it is we must do.

[blizzardfluffykpop]

Young K X Reader

Summary:You know Bassists are 10x better than guitarists; I would know.

One shot

Please don’t read if you’re innocent, this is smut and mature content, please read other works if you like my fanfiction but, don’t read the smut. Just this is for mature readers and/or over 18 readers.

Prompt: 1. There is a present for you later~

Know the best thing about your boyfriend being a bassist? Is the calluses on their fingers. And just so you know it's even better than a guitarists because of the fact, they need to be thicker for the thicker strings on the bass. Let me tell you that is the best feeling in the world.

For a very long time I was dating a guitarist. Our relationship went well until he cheated on me, not with just anyone. A person who I shared my secrets with, not my best friend. But someone I was about to consider coming into the tight knit circle called best friends. Good thing I never let her into my life that would have been a mistake and a half.

One thing I had missed from the relationship, was how rough his fingers felt against me. When I lost that I sort of felt like I would never feel it again. I sort of vouched ever dating a guitarist again off my lists. Now, not saying all guitarists are bad people. That just sort of ruined it for me.

I was with my best friends collection of friends. I'm really awkward around them but, she made me feel safe with them. I still thank her for that. She had this one friend who she liked to call Brian. He hated it but, didn't care to the extent that some people do. And I'll be honest he is really hot.

He told me his real name is Young-hyun. But since, I am best friends with (B/n) he wouldn't mind me calling him Brian. I grinned at him and agreed to it. I quickly found out that the reason (B/n) wanted me there is she wanted me to meet someone new and she really liked this guy named Jae-hyung. I put two and two together and I realized that's who she liked.

Needless to say, I got them together before I got into another relationship. I had strings to guitar players so I taught everything she need to know to get. To get her even closer. Their first date was him teaching her how to play. I thought it was cute. Even though I had affliction of hate towards guitarists she and him are the two I hold an exception to.

It came to a shock for me when, I was hanging out with the group. And Brian and I were sitting next to each other on the couch watching Dowoon and (B/n) play against each other. When he asked me out. He asked me to go out with him right at that instant and took me out of the house not even waiting for my answer. I guessed he already assumed I would say yes. He wasn't wrong but jeez.

It was one of the best dates I had in a long time. He took me window shopping we could of both afforded to go anywhere and buy what we wanted but we were waiting on Christmas for that.

When Christmas rolled around, I became really good friends and close with everyone that (B/n) was friend with. Honestly, that is pretty hard for me. Brian and I had started dating since that night he took me out on the town.

When the day of Christmas came around we all stayed at their dorm. And we couldn't leave even if we wanted to. We had been snowed in. (I know how the weather is there. But I live in Ohio by the lake so you know it's going to get snowy up in here). I was snuggled up to Brian in our covers as we watched movies. We all got each other something. I loved them all.

Let me just say Brian got me a cute little necklace but he had a little card in it and it said. "There is a present for you later~"

Figuring it is Brian I knew it had to do something dirty. We had never gone to the point where we were having sex. And I was feeling some kind of what do they call it? Oh a dry spell? Maybe? Even though I had a boyfriend.

Should I tell you it's been almost a year with out a dick. It's like no nut November excepted it's lasted almost a year. I'll let you in on a little secret I'm feeling quite needy. Like a little baby to a mom. But it's more like a sexual frustration so maybe that analogy doesn't work. Unless you have an Oedipus condition; which I don't.

I would be lying if I said that didn't turn me on. Even though where watching the cutest, sweetest, most innocent, Christmas movies.

It's about 10 at night when they all start falling asleep. Sungjin bids us a good night and leaves to sleep. Dowoon slowly follows after him doing the same. (B/n) doesn't even get up from the floor she falls straight asleep on Jae'a shoulder. Who laid his head on hers and fell asleep. Wonpil fell asleep on the arm chair in the weirdest position and was out like a light.

I looked over at Brian and he said in a whisper tone, "Ready for your present?"

I nodded and he added, "I'm sorry you'll have to keep quiet this time."

I raise my eyebrows wondering what he meant. And then I thought about what it said. Does this mean that this dry spell will finally be uplifted from me? Or he could be surprising me with a puppy and doesn't want me screaming. I'd be fine with that as well.

He pulls me up and leads me into his room. I've been in here before and it's always messy, it has that aesthetic of a bassist tho. Like their are bass player posters, fairy lights, music sheets, and three different bass guitars hanging up on the walls. His bed is always messed up whether the sheets are strewn and messy or their is music all over it. Wait, wait, hold up. That bed is not messy rather, it's completely tucked in. And are those rose petals or is it blood and he is about to commit murder. And I'm maybe second or third maybe even the fourth victim. Maybe he hides them in his bed like the hotel series from American horror stories. I quickly turn around to make sure be isn't holding a knife or anything. And I sigh in relief.

Well back track that, not really relief. But more of an oh my god he has abs, and is that his dick? Fuck me, well I meant that more as sarcastic; but, I mean please take me literal.

I look at him and with no words said I peck his lips and drop to my knees. And I give a kiss to his tip. He hisses, I find that sound to be music to my ears. I instantly, instead of doing a kitten lick. I wrap my mouth around his cock and go to his the base as far as I could before swallowing around him.

I look up at him to see he is biting his lip and his head is thrown back. In response I swallow around him again. And slowly move my mouth along his cock. I feel his hand encouragingly go into my hair. I continue on for a little while switching from sucking to licking his tip. Till, he pulls me off and whispers into my ear, "As much as I would love to cum inside your mouth. This is your present sweetie."

He goes inside his bedside table. Pulls out the foil of a condom rips it open and rolls on the condom. I give him a little grin and quickly take off mg clothes.

He lays me against his bed softly after, I have taken off my clothes. I kiss him deeply and do you remember when I was telling you about calluses? Let me tell you he slipped his fingers between my folds to find if I was wet enough.

I am from just thinking about since he gave me my present. And yes to answer your question I didn't take off my necklace he gave me.

His fingers were so rough and callused that I had to resist from moaning. My fingers clench the sheets and my toes curl as I feel them. He slips them out. Pulls away from the kiss for him to lick his fingers off. He gives me a smirk and whispers into my ear, "You taste so good, baby."

He teases my entrance with his cock and I tense a little waiting for him to thrust in. And when he does, I have to resist from screaming in pleasure. I'm going to have a bloody lip after this from how hard I'm biting my lip. I see he's doing the same.

He pulls me up a little from the bed to kiss me deeply. As he slowly thrusts in not wanting to shake the bed so it knocks against the wall. And wakes everyone up for them to see him pounding into me.

He looks at me as we pull away from each other to pant a little. And I tell him softly, "If we do it on the floor it won't make as much noise."

"Are you sure? I don't want our first time together as a couple for you to be uncomfortable." He whispers back.

"Don't worry I've fucked in more uncomfortable situations. Plus, you can just promise me for next time." I tell him in a whisper.

He smiles at me and tells me in my ear, "There will be more than just a next time, Jagi."

I grin at him as he lifts us off the bed and onto the floor. He starts fucking me even faster. I feel his hands wrap tightly around my hips trying to hit deeper with each thrust. I hold my hand over my mouth to muffle my moans.

I'm a little uncomfortable but, I think the pleasure he is giving me is ten times more worth it.

I feel my orgasm coming on. And I feel his as well as he twitches and his thrusts get more erratic. I feel him cum first, and with that I feel my orgasm just happen. My walls clenching around his cock. He lets out a soft barely audible whimper. And I grin a bit as he thrusts in for a minute riding out our high.

He kisses me deeply and I kiss back matching his kiss. He picks me up and slowly pulls out. My walls clenching as though trying to feel the feeling of being filled again.

We stop to breath and he places me on his bed. He un-tucks the covers and pulls them our from underneath him and I. And pulls me into him as he throws the covers over us.

When we woke up the next morning we woke up to Polaroid pictures being taken of us. Being as (B/n) just got it last night. We both flipped off the camera and only woke up officially after Sungjin announced breakfast is ready.

[iamcareaux]

[juliebeanbook]

ten: so I’ll take what I can get

November came in snowy and wet, covering the city in slush and salt. The horrid weather meant that the audiences for our shows most weeks were a lot sparser than they had been back in the summer; on one particularly bad day, we played for a crowd of seven cold and damp individuals. Although we had dud weeks where the city seemed to have very little interest in a “folk/rock group with a lesbian leprechaun” (Dex’s catchy slogan for us), Cal insisted that we keep playing every Friday. (We’d only missed a few shows since I’d joined the band; a couple times because of Friday night midterms, once because of Dex’s birthday, and once because Cal had cooked for us the night before and none of us could get out of bed the next day.) He wanted us to become a “fixture” at the Moonlight, which I figured we probably were by now after six months, but according to Cal, we had to keep showing up.

So that’s how I ended up walking to the Moonlight in the dark in the middle of a snowstorm the second Friday of November, snow sticking in my hair and freezing the collar of my coat, cursing Cal to hell with every step my boots made into the ankle-deep slush on the sidewalk.

Pushing open the big wooden door into the café, the warm rush of air hit me like opening the door of an oven. My fingers and toes burned as they adjusted to the climate inside; I shrugged off my jacket and surveyed the room. Surprisingly, a sizable crowd of people had gathered, huddled around each other to keep warm; Vera was weaving around groups, passing out steaming mugs of coffee and tea. Dex was setting his drums up on the stage and he waved when he saw me. “Check this crowd out!” he cried.

“Why so many people today?” I wondered as I took my guitar out of its case, propped it on my knee to tune.

“Maybe they came in to escape the storm?” Dex theorized. “I don’t really care why they’re here though. As long as we can keep ‘em here I’ll be happy.”

When Cal came in, a flurry of snow following him through the door, he grinned at the number of people that had collected in the café. “Now this is what I’m talking about,” he said. “We’re a fixture, I told you! They know we’ll be here every week, they’re catching on.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked Dex, and he shrugged.

Emmy arrived last, shaking her hair to rid it of snow. She swept her red waves up into a loose bun and dropped her coat beside the stage. “Full house!” she announced excitedly. She was right – a few more people had come into the café when she had, and now the place was nearly at capacity.

“It’s because we’re a fixture now,” I told her, and she snorted.

We had an almost completely new setlist this week; Emmy had written a bunch of new songs over the last few weeks, and we’d come up with great arrangements. The songs were slightly angsty but fun and poppy, incorporating copious amounts of fiddle solos from Em and drum fills from Dex. Our last song was full of clapping and a cappella bits, and we had the audience clapping along and singing once they’d learned the hook.

I shouldn’t be here; it isn’t healthy. My heart’s out of tune, and now I’m singing off-key.

As the last of the applause died down and the crowd began to mill about, I felt full and warm, like I’d just drank a mug of cocoa. We all began to pack up, clicking our cases closed, laughing as we went, breathless and exhilarated. A good show went straight to your head like a strong drink.

As the guys mingled with the audience (trying oh-so-subtly to get out of helping take down), I picked up the mic and some pickup cables, and Emmy grabbed an amp, and together we ventured up the Stairs of Death. I followed close behind her, spotting her in case she tipped backward and the amp threatened to crush her. At the second floor landing, I pushed open the door of the storage room, and we dropped our equipment inside, the room hazy and dusty and dim.

The heavy old door slammed closed behind me, making us both jump.

The room was dark, the only light coming from the moon outside, casting Emmy in shades of muted grey. She pushed her bangs out of her face and laughed shortly. “Jesus,” she muttered. “Scare the shit outta me, would ya?”

I didn’t say anything back; my words weren’t quite reaching my throat.

Emmy looked at me, her mouth slightly open; the room was so quiet I could hear her breathing. I was suddenly extremely conscious of how close we were standing, by accident, simply by virtue of how we’d stumbled into the room; the cold air from the windows, slightly open, chilled against my skin, but I felt overwhelmingly hot.

My breathing stopped.

Then Emmy was kissing me, her hands gentle and pulling at the arms of my sweater, her lips warm and way softer than I would have guessed. I stood unmoving for a second, paralyzed by the surprise.

But then, without deciding anything, without thinking, I kissed her back. I pressed up into her, my hands weaving around her neck. Her hands wound around my waist to press against the small of my back and I curved into her, my fingers running through the downy curls at the nape of her neck. Her hands snuck under the back of my sweater, and her fingers were so cold against my overheated skin that I gasped.

I pulled away, my forehead resting against hers, my breathing fast and shallow. I had never been this near to Emmy before, and standing so close I could see her light red lashes, the sprinkle of freckles across her eyelids, over her nose. Her hands still rested on my waist; by now, the temperature of her skin had warmed up to match mine.

The lack of thinking caught up with me then, and I was suddenly overwhelmed. I broke away from her hold completely, stepping back, her hands hanging there for a moment in the place where I had been before she shoved them in her pockets.

“Em…” I started but couldn’t finish. I looked down at my hands; they were shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her gaze fixed on the scuffed wooden floor underneath us.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, walking backwards till I got to the door. I pulled it open and ran down the stairs, barely pausing to throw on my jacket and grab my guitar before bursting out of the café into the snow. I tipped my head up, drinking in the cold air like it was water.

I left my coat unbuttoned as I walked home, craving the coolness of the wind. But by the time I got back to the apartment, I was shivering, and I couldn’t stop. I stripped out of my wet clothes and wrapped a bathrobe around me, and then I sat on the floor of my bedroom and rested my head in my arms and cried.

//

I decided that all I wanted to do with my weekend was hibernate. So I hoarded all the comfort food we had in the apartment (Oreos, cheese, half a jar of Nutella), found an old sweatshirt of Jamie’s that I only wore when I knew I wasn’t going to encounter other humans, and burrowed into a mound of pillows on my bed, trying to lose myself in studying for my physiology midterm. When that didn’t work, I switched to Netflix.

Partway through Saturday, Andy poked her head into my room. Before she could ask, I told her I was sick, and she left me alone.

After receiving the tenth text from Em asking if I was alive, I told her that I was, but that I was in hibernation mode. I thought she’d gotten the memo, but a few minutes later my phone rang.

“Hey, you,” Emmy said as I answered, rising into an upright position.

“Hey.”

“Okay, I’m going to predict where you are right now.”

“Go for it.”

“You’re on your couch, wearing those ratty grey sweatpants, eating Nutella off a spoon and watching an old black and white movie.”

I looked down and pick at a hole in my sweats. “Well, you’re right about the pants.”

“And about the Nutella?”

“Well…yeah. It’s done now though.” I glanced at the empty jar on my bedside table and sighed deeply. “I’m in my bed though, and I’m watching Orange Is the New Black, so you’re wrong there.”

“Ooh, I love that show. Which season are you on?”

“The first. I just started. There are, like, a shitload of lesbians in this show.”

“I know right? My kin,” Em said in a creepy Gollum voice, and I laughed.

She laughed too, but then the line went silent. I lay back down and sighed again.

“So how’re you doing?”

“Not great,” I admitted.

“Do you want to talk about –”

“Nope.”

“Jules, I think –”

“Nope.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll wait. You know we’ll have to talk about it sometime though, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” I’d spent all day trying not to think about it, but it kept creeping into my head uninvited, making my stomach flutter. “I’ve just got to…figure some shit out first.”

“For sure. I know what that’s like.” Emmy’s voice held so much understanding that I was tempted to just tip over like a full glass of water and spill everything to her, but at this point I wasn’t sure what would come out.

My room was darker now; the sun had set. I got up and wandered into the living room, flicking on a lamp and the TV and checking what was on that night. “Hey, Emmy?”

“Yeah?”

“Andy’s out with Dex tonight, and I feel like I should probably get in some human interaction before the day ends…do you want to come over and, like, watch a movie or something? Indiana Jones is going to be on at nine.”

“So you want to just watch Indy –”

“And not talk about anything. Yes.”

“I could do that. Do you want me to bring anything? I have some chips here…” I could hear her rustling around her cupboard. “Ooh, peppermint patties!”

“Yes and yes,” I giggled.

“Okay, I’ll be over in five,” she said, and I settled into the couch, my ear hot where my phone had been pressed against it.

Em showed up just before Indy started, a bag of Ruffles and a package of candy in tow. She sat on the old floral couch beside me, leaned against the back of it and turned her head to look at me. I looked back at her, and her face softened. “You okay?” she asked.

“It’s been quite a month,” I said in reply.

She ripped open the bag of chips. “I know. I’m sorry. But it’ll get easier,” she said, tipping the bag toward me, and something in her voice assured me that it would. “Here. Eat.”

It was nice, and it was easy, sitting with Em and watching Raiders of the Lost Ark; we didn’t talk much, but having her there made me feel better. Neither of us mentioned what had happened the previous night, and for the most part I was doing a damn good job of forgetting the fact that twenty-four hours ago her lips were pressed against mine and now we were sitting with barely an inch between our legs. Sometimes though, we’d laugh at something in the movie and she’d turned to face me, her eyes dancing, and I couldn’t help the warmth spreading through me like rich red wine.

[tomans-darlings-au]

OMFG.

I was reading old messages between me and my little sister to try and remember when was the last time I called my grandmother.

I strolled through and got to a part where she talking about seeing Star Wars, one of her messages was:

“Dad says he doesn’t get Star Wars.”

HOW AM I RELATED TO THIS FUCKER?!

My dad is such a fucking two-faced joke, he talks about how he was supposedly a “nerd” in his day but like that’s bullshit.

He collected 1 fucking comic ever and knows nothing about pop culture at all and finally to say he doesn’t get Star Wars?!

Like i’m praying right now that he’s questioning the popularity and not the plot because omfg I will scream.

Can I disown my birth father? Like legit we don’t talk anymore or anything but like i’m ashamed.

I’m not surprised though coming from a creep who was constantly hitting on women in cosplay whenever he was at a con with me, including the time he decided to randomly show up to the con while I was there.

We didn’t even live together I was 17, I was already a high school graduate.

(Timeline in case people are confused: My birthday is November 13, I graduated in July, New York City Comic Con is in October. I wasn’t moving to Florida till after my Birthday.)

He just randomly calls me while I’m hanging out with my friends at the con and is like “I’m on my way to the con with your sister.” No fucking warning expecting me to be out there waiting for him.

Comes in glares at my guy friends hanging out with me expects me to walk around with him even though I said I had panels to attend to and then wants me to go home at the same time as him.

Then when I don’t go home calls me every half hour “Are you home yet? Are you home yet?”

I told him “Um I’m going to the Evangelion movie premier and I won’t be home till after 1am” and he gets mad.

I fucking despise my dad.

[lordraveondagooseofdolallytap]

CAR TALK

(I assert my ownership to this work and to the photograph. David Kitchen)

 We only had a weekend.

Dad’s ashes had been in the airing cupboard for near on sixteen years, ever since November 1999. My elder brother, Jack and I had talked about tipping them over the cliff at Whitby, but he always had something else on, then mum got poorly and so we decided to wait for her remains and do them both together. She died in 2013, but then there were still more delays. Jack was dragging his feet and I knew why. This was one of those ‘Doing ones duty’ things that he resented. If I pushed him he’d just get snarly, and accuse me of “putting heavy stuff on him”. So I placed mum in the airing cupboard next to dad. Another two years went by and one day I just said out loud to myself, “This is 2015. Dads been waiting fifteen years and mum’s been hanging around for two years already. This is not right”. So next pub quiz night I told Jack, “Listen, I’m taking both lots of ashes up north on the last weekend in August: the Bank Holiday one. Are you coming?”

“Okay Septic” (that’s what he always called me. I had a bad boil when I was seven, and I got the name then), we’d best go in your car. Mines got no MOT or insurance”.

We settled on taking the ashes to Otley and Whitby. Half of each in both. No argument or surliness at any point from him.  I thought maybe this would be alright.

Strictly speaking, it was the beauty spot, ‘Surprise View’, not the town, Otley that would be our first stop. A spectacular promontory on the escarpment that dominates the town and valley. A place with great rocks that kids imagine as castles, blasting winds and rough bike riding. You could stand there like Olympian Gods looking down on the course of the River Wharfe and the eye-shaped town of Otley. This was where mum, dad, me, Jack and our middle brother Mike, walked out to on a Sunday afternoon for picnics. The ashes were left here in memory of potted meat sandwiches and oranges and Penguin chocolate biscuits eaten on an itchy army blanket. Lemon Barley Water, ready diluted in a bottle or tea from a thermos to swill it down. I would go off exploring, and Jack would sneak off for a smoke. There were ten years between us. Sometimes I’d be allowed to bring a friend along but normally it was just me and him. And of course our Mike, the middle brother who I keep forgetting. He has been gone so long.

Jack and I put our heads together and took a selfie to mark the occasion of the depositing of the ashes. I had never been so physically close to him. Our temples touching. Both of us looking a bit toothy. I could smell the mustiness of his clothes. Then we walked back twenty yards to a drystone wall. Lifted a capstone and poured half of each lot of ashes into a space. The streams of gravelly material came together and cascaded down through gaps ‘tween stones. We were quite jaunty. Cracking little jokes and puns. Jack with a head like Lenin. Slimmer and more compact than me. He still had some muscle on his frame at age sixty-eight. Me, well over six foot and carrying surplus weight. If I lifted my head to reduce the jowls I could look like Mussolini. Not that I wanted to.

We got in my car and drove the eighty-odd miles to Whitby on the coast, unpacked at the Resolution Hotel and I went out to walk around the harbour. Whitby was the place for the more discerning day tripper and weekend B&B stayer back in the 1960s. Family worries about money as ever but less tat than Brid or Scarborough and more seafront, salt air, harbour, history. Cliffs, and views as well.

Jack was going into the new town to have a look at something I “would not be interested in”. He would say these things like I did not see through his crap, and it was not like he had to keep up any pretence. It was simple. He needed to top up. He was now calling himself a sober alcoholic. That had been his big announcement a few weeks earlier when I called in one Sunday morning with a gift of Bourneville chocolate, on my way back from seeing a woman in Kings Lynn. “What do you think Septic? Is that a sustainable compromise?”

I laughed. “At sixty-eight, you’ve sidestepped the big, early killers. You are now on the ten-year plateau where, whatever you’ve got, they can keep you alive for a bit. There are a lot of worse things to be than a steady-state alcoholic”. He was 68 and looked better than me at 58. “The time in front is still a lot less than the time behind us, but let’s be like the cowboys and keep riding till we fall!” He said I was too fat to get on a horse, so we settled on mopeds. Big ones.

Relations between him and me had been tetchy since our mam died. She’d had dementia and I had been doing a 400-mile round trip one weekend a month for ten years to see her and take care of whatever needed to be done. Jack said he was grateful but he could not do the same, he would find it too upsetting. That enraged me. I told him it was as a cop-out, and because of that name-calling and another fall out we had in Spain, we were on poor terms. Then one day when I was talking to myself again, I said, “Me and Jack were the last two standing out of the five of us that started out. He was not going to change and neither was I. We were much the same in our heads, any difference, just a consequence of birth order, the times and…what was going on around us”.

He was the only person who knew things from back then and I was the same for him. So I thought sod it and I got on the phone and said “we've got a pub quiz in town Sunday evening. Our team are short on somebody good on sport and 1960s pop. Do you want to come over and give it a go? You can sleep overnight on my couch”.

I heard a couple of coughs on the line and then the mock leery grin reflected in his voice as he said, “Well it depends on how you behave don’t it.”

I told him “snap”, and we were sorted.

He became a stalwart of the team and things got better between us. I noted how fast he could down a bottle of my wine between getting in from the pub and going to sleep. I sometimes stayed up and had a glass but could see that made him worried. He was relying on the full bottle so I tried to make sure there was at least an extra half a bottle or some cans of beer in the house.

He got along well with our team. Half of us did not properly know the other half and Jack, in his easy social way, made a bridge. People livened up and laughed a lot and we started winning. They liked his stories and his Paul Newman style as he liked to think of it. A couple of times I spotted the signs that he was close to popping. It never took much. The others didn’t see it but I did. Some folk need a lot to set them off, Jack only needed a look. Maybe the bar-staff had served a man wearing smarter clothes ahead of him or some people I knew across the room were laughing as he walked back from the bar. That could be enough to inflame the chip on his shoulder and that would end with him decking somebody. Old man or not he could still do it but he held himself in check…just. This was Jack, the human volcano man I had known all my life. I worried about bringing him into my circle of friends, because of these risks, but I did it anyway.

Jack was always in trouble as a kid and his teens. A lot of it, in the beginning, was chapel related stuff and that got him a bad name, quickly. It was like he wanted to be ‘The Great Transgressor’. Do the most shocking and disrespectful things. He’d had sex across the chapel alter with one of Dusty Springfield’s girlfriends. That was when he was around nineteen but the tendencies for havoc went back to his infancy. He’d thrown a stone through a window before he could walk. That’s what mum always said. Jack’s delinquency was what we always seemed to be talking about. Dad would walk in from work, look at mums face and say “What’s our Jack been up to now”? It was that predictable.

Her answers were incredibly diverse but this one time she said “Seems he’s been stealing money off the chapel collection plate. They’ve had enough and are kicking him out the cubs He’d volunteered to do the upstairs collection but then put half of it in his pocket as he came back down”. The bugger had been nicking money meant for the little children in Nyasaland.

That came on top of nicking Bob-a-Job money, so he was ‘drummed out’ as they used to say. Never any shame. If anything it was a badge of honour and the girls liked it even then. Transgressor is the word. He carried it like a badge.

Our dad, an ex-boxer and the most moral of men would hit out. He punched Jack clear across the length of our front room one Christmas Day. I said that the fight had spoilt our Christmas but mum said not to exaggerate. Despite the brusque talk, she was soft for Jack, her firstborn. Always had a smile on her face when he was in the house.

And that sort of summed Jack up. An apostate from any kind of set up, no matter how worthy or sacred. A natural Anarchists and he made people smile. Not a weekend poser Anarchist or one positioned in academia but still drawing his paycheck from the state. No, Jack rebelled against everything. It was just in him. His ‘default’ as they say nowadays.

On that late August Sunday, after a good breakfast, we set off on our main business. I was left carrying the two brown plastic containers that looked like old fashioned sweet jars, in an Aldi carrier bag. We dabbed the ashes around everywhere: in the ornamental gardens at Whitby’s West Cliff, digging the stuff in with an old dessert spoon. There is some of mum and dad next to the famous James Cook whale jawbone arch. A woman from a tea and coffee shack saw what we were doing but said nothing. Then we cut around the harbour, found the lane and climbed the hundred steps to the Parish Church and Abbey. Jack and I sat on the bench at the far end of the graveyard and imagined our parents doing the same in their courting days, then we tipped some of their remains over the cliff and then placed the rest around the back of the bench. I called it guerrilla gardening. Felt like an offering.

The old gravestones around us were draped in a low hanging mist. Just the tops showing. We posed about a bit and he took some black and white photos. He had once had an exhibition at Halifax Piece Hall. The man could take good pictures. He had an eye for it. Did his own developing as well. Lots of unfulfilled talents. That’s what I was thinking.

Lunchtime Sunday, we had fish and chips with the skin still on, in a place over the bridge on the lane to the abbey. Then climbed in my car and set off back to Norfolk. Our job is done. They had given us no instructions but we had done our best for mum and dad. Jack and I wanted to get ahead of the late afternoon traffic. The road across the moors to the A64 and A1 jammed up at Malton and Pickering on summer weekends and bank holidays. An hour’s head start could make all the difference.

But everyone had the same idea and within half an hour we were moving at a snail’s pace through Pickering. Jack had been quiet, smoking rollups and looking pensively out the window. He chuckled for no perceptible reason and said, “Me and the old lass from next door have got a plan. We’re on the case. She is on her own as well, came down from Leeds, that’s how we got talking. Her big adventure had been to get herself to Norfolk and work in the land army during the war. Met her husband and settled. They had no kids. He died thirty year ago and all she does now is catch the bus into Kings Lynn once a week for a walk around and fresh fruit and veg. Anyway, we have this plan. We are both worried about dying on our own and not be found for weeks, so one or t’other of us knock on the others door each morning to make sure we have survived the night. I shout through the door, “Are you still alive and she shouts back yes, and how about you”. Bloody hell you have to do ‘summat’ to keep from cracking up about it all. They keep all this stuff at the end well-hidden don’t they?”

“It’s the cost of having a life Jack”, I say. “You get to live but then you have to do a deal with dying”.

He won’t ever take anything off me and say “that’s right”, Instead its

“Yep. Whatever, I've not given up on finding another woman, Septic. Don’t want to end my days without a woman. A fit lass with attitude, maybe ten years or fifteen years younger than me. I just need a plan to get Viagra on an NHS prescription”.

I knew he had been seeing a woman all the way over at Billericay. He had been scoring the Viagra off me because his doctor told him straight, if he could walk 800 hundred kilometres on the Camino Santiago de Compostela trek in Spain, then he could get an erection without tablets. I was paying an absolute fortune for mine but he would make it sound like an emergency when he called in.  The Billericay woman got men off the internet like you might order stuff off Amazon. There was another one. A vet from near Dereham what did the same. They wanted results. It was an entirely different world. No compassion.

We got singing the Ian Drury song about Billericay (Rickie). Jack fancied he looked like Drury, maybe not but he could do the Essex spiel. That lifted our mood. I reached over in the backseat and pulled out a Sharron Shannon CD from a deep cat tray I kept my in-car music in. There were three tracks I knew he would like, ‘Galway Girl’, a folkie version of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ and ‘Say You Love Me’ by her and Dessie O Halloran (old man, lived-in face, breaking voice, Seen it and done it.  If you are old that’s the kind of old we want to be).

We did some car seat dancing. Sitting but jigging. Then Jack did his impersonation of Joe Cocker at Woodstock singing Hey Jude, arms sweeping over between us. Then we went quiet again.

There was three of us, brothers, like I've said. On the surface of things it looked like the middle one, Neil was brightest because he had passed the 11+ and gone to Grammar School (and later art college) but mum said “Jack was the brightest but the times were not right for him after the war, the upper schools were not yet built and there were not enough proper teachers to cater for all the kids. Jack did not get the chances that he ought to have done and your dad was very hard on him. Always knocking him around. He never had patience.  Jack was no saint but your dad was always at him. He worried about Jack’s character you see, there was something in him he did not like. Like smelling milk that’s going off or something like a feeling of foreboding. That’s what your dad called it”.

The road cleared after Pickering but slowed again at Malton. I figured once past there we’d be okay, as that was the A64 proper, where it’s a dual carriageway. Instead, it was all stop-go as before, it was time for some initiative, a turn off ahead for the A19 had to be better than crawling along till we reached the A1 which might be just as bad. I was right, the switch got us on the move at last, and at the M18 in no time. Then onto the A1 just north of Doncaster, a great corner cut out of Yorkshire and a lot of time made up. At this pace, I’d have us both back in Norfolk between six and seven. We were cruising at speed.

I asked him about going back and walking the Camino Frances trek across northern Spain: the ancient Christian pilgrimage way now mostly adopted by new-age types, creaky hippies, and old Commie Atheists like Jack. This would be the eighth time he’d done the super long-distance walk. Staying in cheap hostels along the way. Ending up at the Cathedral in Santiago and then walking the extra bit to the hippy beach at Finisterre, the end of the world.

“Septic, I’m like those pathetic men that I took the piss out, the ones I figured had nothing else in their lives but to keep walking the Camino, again and again. It’s all I think about. Just a day or two of being back home, and I’m on the Camino Forums handing out advice to the newbies and thinking of the next trip. I will tell you what I heard. Some poor souls have fallen through the net of life so badly they live at the derelict crematorium just below the headland at Finisterre and sleep in the steel draws the bodies were kept in? I don’t want to end up like that. Reminds me of The Little Lost Boys in Peter Pan. I guess a lot of them came out to do the Camino and never went home again. I've met a few that fit that bill. One was the son of a general. He freaked me out no end”.

My brother had been out to Spain the previous April to do the long walk but got a call from his daughter, her baby was due and she wanted him around. It was a boy and would get named after him and our dad. He had got straight on a bus to Santiago and flown home, going directly to his daughter's house in London and had been around for the birth of little Jack. I like that.

Now almost in September, he would be setting off to Spain to finish off what he had started. “All the ‘I should be doing something with my life’, feeling that hangs on me all the time goes away when I’m doing the walk. At home, our Neil’s picture on my PC tells me to get on and do something with my life. On the walk I've got direction every day, I just have to get from A to B, enjoy what’s around me and be social. I’m not like you Septic, I’m an easy mixer and there’s always a chance of a woman. They like me. I like them. It’s like plugging back into life”.

Then he starts fretting about wine. We are on the A17 by now and will be at his house inside ninety minutes. There’s got to be a bottle for the evening and he has no money. He sees a petrol station with a grocery section, on the roundabout at Holdingham and wants to stop here in case the store in his village is shut. We pull in and right at that moment there is an almighty crash and then another one out on the road. People from the forecourt stand on a grass bank. A little out of site but about four hundred yards down the road we had been about to enter, there has been a serious crash. Probably three cars. Maybe more. We go into the shop, get the wine, tobacco, milk, and Cornish pasties. By then sirens are coming over on the wind, police and ambulance are on their way. Jack speaks to an Indian man who has walked in, it’s looking serious. He tells us people are helping. Still in the hearing of our informant, Jack says, “See Septic, close call, stopping for wine has probably saved our lives”. That annoyed me but he may well be right.

More ambulances arrive. Jack and I stand with the other rubbernecks on the grass bank. He smokes, Barriers are going up, and stern-faced policemen are shutting off the A17 and putting up diversion signs in the direction of Sleaford. My ex-jailbird brother is trying to tell me how the top brass in the police make money out of deaths in car accidents and the individual coppers get a buzz out of it all. He can be so full of paranoid shit when confronted by people behaving with decency. It somehow offends him. He sneers and can be hard to like at such times.

We wait till the traffic is flowing and follow the diversion into Sleaford. My big brother is somebody you could drop down anywhere and he would have a story of some kind to tell about it. I am not saying the stories are true in the literal sense, but they make up part of the myth he weaves, and do have some honesty about them. He tells the one about when he was Booking Secretary for a working man’s club in Hebden Bridge. He booked in an unknown called Mick Hucknall as a support act for a big gala event they are having much later in the year. By the time the date comes around Hucknall and Simply Red are big in the charts and the gig is sold out and some more. Everyone’s waiting and then turns on him when the star does not arrive. I believe something like that happened but in Jack’s telling the big-name kept changing. One time it was Jimmy Cliff and another Desmond Dekker but it was still a good story with a core of truth.

“Oh bloody hell Septic, Don’t everything happen if you wait long.  I've not been here since the summer of 1979. It’s Sleaford. Great times. It was when I left Pat and the kids and took off with our social worker who I’d been having it off with. Her name was Denise, and that Debbie Harry song, Denis- Denis was the one we played in her car. Well she did not hang about for long and I ended up here because a mate had got work doing reservations, I mean renovations on a farm, owned by a cokey, dope-smoking Lord who had just inherited it all from his dad. Lots of us turned up in the end. It became a kind of hippy republic but this guy didn't mind. Some were taking the piss but altogether it was good. We worked and partied all summer. Some worked on the farm, me and Irish George did up the cottages, fixed the outbuildings and then did some driving as well. George met a local woman and they ended up staying together. He went from freak to meek in a week…get it? The cow bullied him into it. We all met up for my fiftieth in that pub across there. By then he had been working twenty years in a cardboard box factory around here somewhere. Got to be a foreman. She left him and went back to college, they had no kids but he kept on doing it. The cardboard boxes. Said it was too late to start over again, I thought the man had some balls but…you know…he hadn’t really”.

Of course, I’d heard that story before and seen the photo of him and Irish George looking feral in ragged jeans, torn jerseys and unkempt Hendrix hair. You could almost smell the body odour and dope on them. He was right about George though. How could the man have done that?

Storytelling was always competitive between Jack and me. We would jump in on each other’s tales, outbidding each other on outlandish twists and shocking endings, but today I was content to just listen. Let these life songs flow over me. He told the one about ending up on a farm commune run by the Workers Revolutionary Party on Dartmoor or somewhere similar. There was preparation of sorts for the glorious day when history would be upended. Jack had been told there would be a chance to practice with guns, but it turned out there was only one rusty pistol. An Irish lass had been back home for her father’s funeral. Returning to the farm she left his ashes in their vase on the table and went for a nap. Some dope head had come in and mistaken the remains for the gravel you give to chickens. It helps them in some way. Anyway, the dads remains got sprinkled all over the yard and the chickens had it all, The Irish girl freaked out and went hysterical. Well, you would...wouldn’t you?”

It was a slow crawl through Sleaford but then we joined the A15 and got moving, switched to the A52 and drove through Bicker to find the A17 at Swineshead. Jack telling it all the way like he was doing a valedictory. Like the song, “A poet…a pilgrim and a problem”. A rambling glorious shambles of a life but still a man never satisfied. What would be the point of that? The links were loosening. He was swinging back and forth across decades and places. Selling joints to Phil Lynott, being raided by Irish Special Branch in 72. Walking in Pomerania, travelling on a supplies ferry inside of the Arctic Circle. Alcohol withdrawal whilst sleeping out on the deck. More walking. Rome to Spain, teenager stuff in Danzig, note pad in a pocket. The times in London with our brother, Mike: making up for our artist brother’s lack of social skills and lying to a girl it was Mike who had bought the Faces album for her birthday. Another Irish girl, a sexual athlete and a lover of country music. The times in jail. No false stuff this time. The last sentence had scared him. Playing Nina Simone at our mother’s funeral and the lady minister dancing in the pulpit. Working the lump around the building sites all through the late sixties. The illegality of a type that made money harder than working. Jail again. Being chased out of Bradford and blacklisted in all the pubs.

The fistfights with our dad. He said none of that mattered. Our father was the real thing, an awesome man. “Septic, the bugger left me upwards of thirty thousand. I've tried but just cannot spend it. Given it all to the grandkids. Having it around was like being rubbed wrong way up with sandpaper”.

Motoring through the fens proper now. The shrinking land three feet below the road and stretching, as flat as spirit level can prove, to the horizon. Sun low in the sky. I have not spoken much for an hour. We are on the A134, at a roundabout just outside of Stoke Ferry. He tells me to turn off and join the Methwold road. ”You’ve got to feel this septic. Put your foot down, the road follows every lump, bump and slant. It does not make sense. Put your foot down and you will feel it. Throws you about like the Waltzer” My car rocked and bounced and it felt like I had no control

I ask him, “why Spain again?” He tries telling me again about the difference between a Human Doing and a Human Being. “I am not having that one, Jack. That’s what caused our big bust up at Santa Domingo when I kicked you out the car in the rain next to that cemetery”.

He coughed on his smoke, rattled a bit then came back at me with the story about my rough wedding and the fistfight at the reception. I counter with the one about him crawling silently over my bedroom floor, like a commando, early one morning, intent on nicking pocket money from my trouser pocket. I was eight and in awe so let him have the money. I don’t mention the awe.

The rhythm of his speech slowed, and it felt like a change of gear you might make coming up to a tight corner. He talked about being kicked out of Greece in the 1960s by the Fascist Colonels Junta because he and a load of other hippy types were all living in a cave on some island. It had taken a police baton charge to get them out and how the British government had been forced to repatriate him and how they then put a stamp all across his passport saying “SUBJECT NOT TO TRAVEL”

“Well they were wrong Septic, weren’t they?” That’s what he said, exactly. A look over in my direction, a grin and then those last words.

He looked a little like Paul Newman.

https://youtu.be/ZxKqWiIZseA?list=RDZxKqWiIZseA