#i just feel like it should have the office levels of fame

[thirstyvolleyballhoe]

parks and rec is such a good show and gave us so many great memes and yet it's so underrated in pop culture

[jamiesfootball]

I am only two episodes into Severance but who cares 

Ted Lasso Severance AU ideas in no particular order. Until they are. Special thanks and credit to @altschmerzes for playing pinball with me on this

First of all - all professional athletes have been severed. For their own safety, of course. A lot of entertainers too. It promotes better mental health, not having to deal with the stress of fame. Much easier to focus when you don't have all that pesky outside pressure weighing you down

Enter Ted and Beard, who don’t know that they know each other. Don't know that they've been working alongside each other for years, because while they've coached at the lower levels they've never had a posting that required severance 

Inside Ted and Beard know none of that. To keep things formal, out of respect, they refer to each other as ‘Coach’. It's important to maintain distance in these situations after all

Ted is a good coach. He's engaged, he's encouraging, he's got some funny turns of phrase.  

They may both have a similar accent, but Beard quickly dismisses the idea that their outside counterparts know each other. Beard wouldn't know what to say to him if they did talk.

It's probably a coincidence, but more than likely someone chose Beard to be assistant to Ted so that Ted wouldn't feel as alienated at his new job. Which was smart thinking, because Ted doesn't seem to know a lot about football (Beard doesn't either, but someone seems to have thought ahead there too. Their office is full of books that Beard himself would've picked out if he were trying to learn.)

But when Ted's not coaching, when there's some down time, he becomes... quiet. He watches things. people, from a distance. He gets a glassy, vacant look in his eyes, like he's trying to stare at something that's been ripped from his chest and placed thousands of miles away, and if he can just stare hard enough, it'll come home to him.

One day Beard finds out about Ted's panic attacks. He doesn't mean too, just walks in on one and

"Sorry, Coach," he says quickly before shutting the door, ignoring the way his own chest thrums in sympathy.

It feels like he should be doing something. What? Who the fuck knows. Ted may be congenial on the front, but he seems like a pretty private closed off person so Beard doesn’t want to interfere.

But the panic attacks keep happening.

Something happens to him when Ted hurts like that, though, and he doesn't know why but it aches like a phantom limb. Like someone's sawed him in half (which they did)

Rebecca and Keeley don’t work together but occasionally run into each other. Neither is quite sure they understand what the other does around here, and its against the rules to ask, but Rebecca looks like a goddess and well – look at her. Whatever she does for Richmond, she must be really high up! Very important 

"Think you could try sneaking out a note to your outer self asking her to give me a pay raise?" Keeley smiles cheekily.

"Don't even joke about that," says Rebecca, because it's true. They shouldn't. It's against the rules.

That doesn't stop her lips from curving upwards. From the way she has to make a concentrated effort to pull her smile back, adjust her skirt, and nod at Keeley as if it's just coincidence they passed each other in the hallway. Lot of coincidences, lately. Too many, they might find out too late.

That doesn't stop it from happening.

Sam. Sam is the sunshine at the inside of Nelson Road. Although he has not been there long, it's hard to imagine a better candidate for severance. Endlessly positive. Capable of deftly navigating the rules around interpersonal boundaries in such a way that it still leaves people feeling warm inside. He's a poster boy for the severance movement; one could only imagine the amount of stress and nerves that a young player might typically suffer through were they not severed from the outside world. Instead, since Sam's arrived at Richmond, he's been playing splendidly! So confident and mature. He might be new to the whole inside thing, but look at him - he's a natural! 

Sam tries so hard to stay positive, yet often he finds himself drowning, overwhelmed by a huge wave of sorrow. Something is missing; something huge is missing. 

Sam tugs his own ear and tries to swallow his sobs and wishes desperately he had someone, anyone, to talk to for guidance.

Inside Roy doesn’t believe he has anything waiting for him on the outside. He knows it. He fucking doesn't. 

Roy’s impending retirement? More like Roy’s impending death  

He doesn't know if he's looking forward to it or not. He's been living severed for what's going on about twenty years now. This is his life. And he’s convinced there’s nothing waiting on the other side  

He hates Jamie in part because he's sure the kid's got this fantastic life out there. What the fuck is he even here for?

Doesn't he get that he should be out there living somewhere ?

Here's the thing about inside Jamie.

One day he was at Manchester. Then he blinked, and he was at Richmond  

“What the fuck am I doing here? Did they sell me?”  

“You were loaned.”  

Jamie doesn’t know why it feels so terribly important that he be the one who scores. He doesn't know why he gets so upset and angry and the stupidest, dumbest things set him off. Why he hates Sam for having a good debut season despite being on a shitty team. Why he sometimes feel so scared, his heart thundering in his chest like he's being chased by an invisible monster. And the great thing about severance is he doesn't need to.  

He just needs to show up and kick the ball 

Occasionally he shows up to practice with mysterious injuries. Whenever he does, Inside Jamie receives a card explaining what happened: 

“You received a sprained ankle during training.”

“You reported a hairline fracture along your upper arm from a weight lifting accident.”

“This morning you reported a bump on the head from a kitchen cabinet.”

No matter what excuse the card says, it always has the same cheery note at the bottom: 

Please redeem this note at the cafeteria to enjoy an extra snack from the approved menu list.

God knows what outside Jamie gets up to, but it must be a hell of a life. That or he's a clumsier bastard than inside Jamie. Maybe it's something with the severance, some special skill that inside Jamie has honed that outside Jamie doesn't know about.

Jamie has never redeemed his free coupons. Instead, he keeps all the note cards in his gym bag. It's stupid, and probably against the rules somehow, but he doesn't care. Not like he gets to have anything else to himself here, does he? His kit is the same as everyone else's, so's his shampoo, his deodorant, his shoes. No, the not 

The note cards were generated for inside Jamie, they're the one thing that are uniquely his, and inside Jamie is going to keep them. 

(There’s a lot of them.)

Dani shows up and he just feels….lifeless. Fútbol is life. That's his mantra, or so he's been informed by his previous coaches. But whenever he's on the field he just feels so....lifeless. Disinterested. Not engaged. Ted was hoping for two aces but instead he has no aces 

But then when Jamie is sulking and kicking the ball after practice Dani slunks over like he’s being pulled by an invisible string 

“Are you playing a game?” he asks like he’s not sure. Like he's questioning the meaning of football itself. 

And Jamie, Jamie might feel like he’s choking on air half the time but … it’s football. He’s not all the way gone that he doesn’t know he loves football  

He is still in a bad mood though 

“Yeah, amigo,” he says sarcastically. “I’m playing. Kicked the ball of the post on purpose, didn’t I?” 

“…. I would like to try” 

So they have their little shooting match and Dani blooms into the fucking sun. It’s fun. This is fun 

And then he goes in for the high five and Jamie flinches back like a bomb has gone off, throwing up his fists in front of his face and bracing for the ghost of an impact that doesn't come. He doesn't know how to hide these things. He barely knows when to expect these things. All his trauma is on the surface, and he doesn't even know its there 

Here's the thing about Jamie being at Richmond. 

He stops getting cards. 

The weird, unexplained bruises have a chance to heal. New ones fail to appear. 

They stop. The bruises stop, but he doesn't know why it feels like he’s getting worse. He doesn’t know. He feels off balance... fragile. Things he used to be able to shrug off start sticking to him like tar. He doesn't feel in control of himself. 

He holds onto his stack of cards like a lifeline, like a prized possession. They're the one thing that hasn't changed. He grips onto this shoelaced stack of evidence that he's here, that he exists, and he feels the same feelings he felt back in Manchester – that same tidal wave of emotions that threatens to drown him. Makes him feel like he's bobbing, lost at sea, eyelevel with stinging waves while his feet kick for survival.

Even as it chokes him, it's the only feeling he's ever been sure about. It's the only tether he has to the outside world. To his real life. To himself.

The stack hasn't grown since he arrive at Richmond. He feels like he's losing his sense of identity without them. 

Jamie blinks, and he's back at City.

After Richmond gets relegated, and insistent Ted sends a wary Beard to track down Jamie before the bus leaves, next stop Manchester. 

Jamie, confused, takes the accepted envelope. On the bus, which is part of the inner world in that it holds the team, he carefully unfolds the note inside. Reads it. Spends who knows how long after reading it simply admiring it. The uncomplicated way the paper curves towards gravity. The neat, printed handwriting, just a bit fancier than he expected. The way that even the ink feels fragile compared to the heavy typeset he's used to seeing.

Jamie adds it to his stack of cards, but for some reason the thought of putting Ted's not in with the others makes him feel uncomfortable, so he….moves it. Keeps it separate. Keeps it special, tucked in a separate compartment in his bag.

(That’s not allowed) 

Roy retired. He went through with it. Because the people who loved him on the inside convinced him it would be okay – even though he barely got a chance to say goodbye to most of them. They all knew this day was approaching and fast 

Outside him doesn’t know that 

Outside Roy woke up from knee surgery at a hospital and doesn't know how he got there. Doesn't know he has months of rehab and surgeries and doctors appointments to look forward to

Outside doesn’t remember anyone he played with, and he certainly doesn't expect that any of those players loved him. Certainly doesn’t know that he was beloved by more than just the players. That there’s people like Ted and Keeley who miss him too 

But mostly he tries not to think about that. He has his sister and his niece, who are over the moon at the chance of getting to spend more time with him. Over the fact that he's not doing that to himself anymore.

No way inside Roy mattered to anyone at all. Not as a person. Not the way he does to his family on the outside.

It doesn't matter. He's not going back

Jamie knows Roy’s knee wasn’t his fault. He also knows Roy Kent walked off the pitch. He's pretty sure no one ever saw him again – that's what happens when athletes get career ending injuries, isn't it? 

Or at least inside thinks he knows that until, for reasons he can’t explain that have nothing to do with the fact that he feels like he murdered someone and nothing to do with those damn bruises coming back and the way his hands shake now when he adds a new card to the stack and the way he stares at the other card, the Ted card, sometimes and feels like he wants to cry-

Inside Jamie quits.  

Or that’s not the right word. Sports is entertainment, innit? 

Inside Jamie switches career, trading football Jamie for Lust Conquers All Jamie

(They assure him, don't they, that if he wishes, they can sever that part off too)

Meanwhile Roy, retired and still adjusting to it, continues meeting with the yoga mums. Like most people, they don't really know who he is. Players are just numbers to 99% of the people in their lives – athletes don't wear names on their kits. They get assigned a number when they get severed as part of the push for privacy. Sure, sometimes he gets someone who thinks they recognize him from somewhere, but part of the contract you sign when you get severed is a clause that says you won't speak about your experiences, inferred or not, from being severed. It would violate your contract to violate your own privacy – or the other way around, he can never remember how it's worded. 

Besides, getting recognized is nothing short of a fucking rarity. You'd have to be a fan for a long time and attend lots of matches in person to feel confident enough to identify one of the moving blobs on tv. You'd also have to be a bit of a prick to bring it up to a stranger you'd never met. But mostly you'd have to be either football mad or completely lucky to recognize a footballer when you saw one.

Not like they sell posters.

Recognizing famous people is hard, he reminds himself, as the yoga mums queue up one of their regular programs. Despite his own history with severance, it's a compelling show. Besides, everyone on that show – they basically do what he did, right? Their outside people signed contracts, didn’t they? It’s all fun

Except ever since they started this new season, he's got a sick feeling in his stomach he can’t explain. One of the contestants, a complete twat, a fucking muppet of a person – every time he's on screen, it feels like a predator is clawing inside his chest, trying to break free and drag his weeping entrails into the light. Every smug smile sets his teeth on edge. The prick brags about scoring, and Roy wants to wring his neck with an intensity that startles him so fiercely that he accidentally breaks his wineglass. Rosé spills over his knuckles, pooling over his crisscrossed feet and seeping into his socks as glittery shards twinkle across his lap.

It's all cleaned up in about five minutes, and it still leaves a stain deeper than any his career has left on his life.

He can admit to himself, if not his sister and definitely not his niece, that since he retired, things have been....fine. Not great. A bit awful, maybe.

Okay, so it was all shit.

Long empty nights; endless pain, the kind that grew worse every time he forgot himself and attempted to move the same way he'd done for going on forty years. His sister was worried. His niece he was pretty sure he was starting to scare. There'd been some talk, suggestions that he take up coaching Phoebe's team, but they were gentle laps against the shore of a bigger problem.

He'd even gotten offered a job as a talking head on one of those football programs, the ones that didn't require severance because you were just meant to be commenting about the match like any other normal wanker on the street.

As if.

Compared to the dim half-life of a life Roy finds himself living now, watching Lust Conquers All in hopes that the show's resident prick will say something infuriatingly stupid has quickly become an obsession. it's like breathing fucking air after being chained to the bottom of a sea.

Then, just like that, the price gets kicked off the show in a surprise upset.

It's slightly less rare to recognize TV celebrities out on the street, but you would still be an asshole if you pointed one out.

For the next few days, whenever he's out in London, he finds himself scanning faces in the crowd despite knowing better.

In his distraction, he accidentally bumps into a petite blond woman exiting a coffee shop. He apologizes, has half a second to admire her distracted but genuinely kind smile in return, and then she's gone.

Honestly, what the hell is he even doing with his life?

At Nelson Road, Ted makes one thing clear.

Whatever happens, however much the team is struggling, he's not going to ask Roy, player #6, to come back. They all miss him, but he won't – can't – let himself do that.

He has a whole life out there to live. Ted won't take that away from him. No way what's out there is any worse than what's in here.

Then he gets word about a different individual, and-

Well.

"What the hell are you doing here, eh?"

"Oh, I see. You must be the new coach. The one who's been teaching my son how to play like a total pussy."

"Dad–"

"No, you don't fucking interrupt when the adults are talking, junior. What the fuck would you know, anyways? Christ, I wish I could stick a knife in my brain and erase the last two hours. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't know what a shit player this man has turned you into, son."

"Nah, nah. See, I don't think you will say anything. Because this room is medical, and medical is out of bounds. Medical is all public, and you chippies, you're not allowed to interfere with the public. Go on, lad, tell him. You may not have a single braincell worth rubbing off these days, but I know you know that."

Afterwards, that day in the treatment room is mostly a blur to him. But a few things stick out later, glued stuck behind his eyes like floating afterimages in the dark.

The bench was cold.

The bolt of his shoe smacking against the wall just shy of his ear.

His dad's fingers, tacky with dried beer as he shoved Jamie's head to the side.

And when he looked to the side – the confused man with the mustache standing on the other side of the glass.

The way he didn't hesitate before turning the handle on the door, stepping inside and settling back on his heels with his hands in his pockets. The way he smiled around the room all pleasant-like, like they were all friends.

"Hello, gentleman. Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn't help but notice through the window that this room was starting to look a bit like a tropical storm weighing its chances on whether it might be able to turn into a nasty old cat-5 before it makes landfall. Which seems a bit odd to me, considering that unless I need to get my eyes checked, your team won. That, or your washer machines both lost this morning. One way or the other, my question's all the same:

"Do we have a problem here?"

It was more than enough words for Jamie to place the accent. To take one an one, and turn this man into the damn yankee coach his dad blames for ruining Jamie's career.

Maybe his dad has a point about him being dumber now than he was a year ago, because when Jamie thinks of adding one to anything, his brain tries to tell him that it's not one, it's eleven. It's not one of one, it's one of eleven.

He's so busy reeling with shock at meeting his coach – at meeting anyone from the other side – that he misses most of what his dad says next.

What he doesn't miss, what will be engraved into him long after he leaves Nelson Road, when the bus is quiet and dark and he's left clutching a hastily scrawled note like it's a precious photograph, is the way that his coach — his coach, other Jamie's coach –

The way his coach's smile grows strained under his dad's words, only for him to refocus on Jamie like they were the only two in the room. The way his face softened, and the open apology in his eyes, and the way that Jamie was sure later, dead certain down to his bones, that if he'd just opened his mouth right then and asked, this man would have stayed in the room with him, drawing his father's ire for as long as Jamie needed.

But Jamie didn't have any words; maybe other Jamie had used them all up for the both of them.

The man, his coach, took a deep breath and said:

"It was very nice to meet you, Jamie."

Outside Jamie doesn't have any options. He burned them. Or inside Jamie burned them.

Same difference, when no matter who you ask, you were the one holding the matches.

He arrives and leaves the news station in the blink of an eye. No one is outside waiting for him, because you don't get fans if you're severed.

No one outside anywhere is waiting for him, except his dad.

There's only one person left, and Jamie can't even talk to him without going through his agent. But he can try.

Hope. It's the thing that kills you.

Good thing outside Jamie might as well be dead, as far as anyone's concerned. (Including his agent.)

Inside Jamie gets kicked off of LCA…..and wakes back up at Richmond. And doesn’t know how.  

Oh, he knows why he left City. Vaguely remembers signing up for somewhere warmer than early snow in October. What he doesn't know is how he ended up back here, back at Richmond, with a relegated group of players who look like they want to murder him. Who look at him as if he did murder someone, which in a lot of ways is true.

He doesn't know why he would do this to himself.

But he also feels deep within him a pathetic sense of gratitude, because inside Jamie is selfish, and inside Jamie doesn't want to die.

What inside Jamie can’t possibly know s that when confronted with the possibility of going back to his real life…..his outer self couldn’t take it. He just couldn’t. Being severed has to be better than this. Anything has to be better than this. And he’s right. He doesn’t know it, inside Jamie doesn’t know it, but these are the people who will love him. The people who are going to love him are the ones on the lifeless inside, and fuck they’re the ones who are going to make his life worth it 

Roy didn't think he had anything on the outside, but he did. He thought outside Jamie must have everything, and he had nothing. Wrong on both counts. 

Now Roy, stuck on the outside, has to figure out why he feels like he needs to go home

[tangentsimmer]

Experiencing Burnout

Ari is experiencing fame at a level she has never experienced before, and things are becoming more and more overwhelming. Dinky Beats is pulling Ari in every direction, and pushing her to release more singles or an album before summer, and Ari hasn't had a good night's sleep in a while. Ari's phone hasn't stopped buzzing in what feels like months.

"It's all so much," Ari vented to her mother after a Friday night show at a local lounge. "I feel like I can't keep up. Maybe I'm not cut out for this, mom."

"Everything has always come so easily to you, Ari," Ari's mother, Junie, responded while placing a hand on Ari's shoulder. "This looks impossible now, but I'd bet you anything that you're going to come out of this stronger than before. You always do. And if you fall short, that doesn't mean you've failed or that you're a failure. It's just a life lesson. Oh, honey, you're still so young! Life is going to throw so many obstacles your way, but I promise you I'll always be by your side to help you navigate it."

Ari's mother's words usually provide enough comfort to give Ari peace of mind, but today, Ari felt off. For the third time just this week, Ari has had to either cancel or reschedule plans with her friends because of work, and her label was still not satisfied with the work she puts out. It's never enough--they always need more. The label has sent out a warning earlier this week that they expect at least a single sooner rather than later, or she could be dropped. While Ari is eternally grateful for the opportunities Dinky Beats has given her so far, she was beginning to have second thoughts about signing. Maybe Ari should have remained independent.

"If that's what you want, just know your Dad and I support you no matter what," Junie said, and Ari realized she said her last thought aloud. "To be honest, I always thought you should have remained independent. You've always marched to the beat of your own drum."

"Yeah, but it's so much harder to get noticed if you're not under a label," Ari sighed. Her phone buzzed again and Ari snatched it out of her pocket in a huff to read:

"MANDATORY LABEL MEETING: Uptown, San Myshuno office on 8AM Monday."

Ari's blood drained from her face. Was this it already? Was the record going to drop her? Surely not, "Fun Tonight" is still topping the charts, now up to #17 on "Billboard's Hot 100." She's bringing the label money, what could she possibly have done wrong?

Junie squeezed her daughter's shoulders tightly. "Whatever this is is meant to be, Ari, okay? Here, I'll take a few days from work. Let's go home and pack and go to the city together." Ari looked at the message on her phone again before locking it and stuffing it away in her pocket.

As she and her mother packed the car to head to the city, all Ari could think was her immediate future. She didn't need Dinky Beats...what kind of name is that anyway?

[thegreatimpersonator]

hey Sarah!! first of all i just want to say how glad i am that i follow you, swiftie tumblr can get very echo chamber and you definitely have a way of mixing it up lol.

My feelings on TTPD are... complicated, so it's nixe to have a perspective in my life that's not "oh my god put this in the louvre" or "taylor swift is an evil awful demon lady" because that black & white is very much what i'm stuck with IRL and online.

When it comes to the album itself I personally do like it, and a lot of that has to do with me thinking of it more like folklore/evermore. It's like that fiction writing with the more raw, uncut, messy feelings of something like Speak Now. I don't read these songs as being about her life in her traditional diary kind of way, but i totally get why people do and why that would sour it for them. I am also a fan of the sonic choices but again... i get not being lol.

Where I started having eeeehhhh feelings about TTPD was with the Fortnight video, which you've spoken about. Complicated feelings for me. I like some of the visual choices like the office thing and the outdoors and the black and white but the mental hospital thing just was weird. Especially the ect which at this point you've gone into at length and I agree with you on it being bad. For me it (an asylum) doesn't even really make sense as a visual choice for the song or the album. I love Florence + The Machine, I love Dance Fever and I love How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful and I was excited that TTPD gave me the vibes of Taylor dabbling with that. And then instead she did the hospital thing. Not what I want to be the remembered visual piece of this era but I guess that's what she's going with :/

Which then brings us to the TTPD set on the eras tour which is the most I've been in agreement with you about the ick factor. I give Taylor a lot of grace, and I have over the years. Something about my being a young woman who has made bad choices which can be partially attributed to having grown up in a weird mix of both sheltered and traumatized just makes me feel for her on that level. But the asylum thing on stage is just a bad choice.

waolom is a song i like despite it's use of asylum as a metaphor for fame, not because of it. would've much rather seen that and icdiwabh have circus vibes. we know girlie loves a golden cage. fortnite should just bring that florence welch dancing around in a pretty dress energy that the folklore & evermore sets were giving, full stop. bdilh is a song i like as a kind of different take on love story and i wish she would've rolled with that and given it comedic fantasy vibes. (personally i'd love to see a full commitment to 80's princess bride esque cheesy-ness. i like taylor the most when she just leans into being cringe melodramatically) And frankly? I wish that'd been the whole TTPD set. I don't like the smallest man or so high school as songs, they're the weakest on the who double album for me along with thank you aimee. They don't need to be preformed on that giant ass stage at the expense of some actually solid pieces from other eras.

I really really think that if absolutely nothing else, bare minimum, that bed stage piece & the nurse outfits need to go. Are they going to? probably not. Unfortunately she's 'just like me fr' in having to learn her lessons the hard way, so i'm sure she'll play it up and put it on merch or whatever then look back in a year or more like yikes! Which is disappointing.

I don't know this kinda just turned into ranting because I feel like you're a person who will understand and respect my perspective enough to not belittle me for having complicated, confused feelings. So thanks for that, and even when I don't totally agree with your opinions please know there's one swiftie out there who understands and respects them enough to not pick anon fights over it.

Hope your day goes well and that Taylor has someone actually tell her that this is Not It to her face soon. 💖

aw thank you! yeah i completely get everything you said here. the whole mental hospital, asylum, etc stuff is just.... unnecessary and completely avoidable, there's no ties to it in the album and makes no sense to include it with such heavy-handedness. her continuing the whole circus theme throughout the entire ttpd era on tour would've been a great idea actually and would've really sealed the whole overdramatic, satire thing she's trying to go for (which is another reason the mental health aesthetic isn't working, you cant mix something serious with satire/overdramatic ideas it just wont work). it would've been really interesting to have the entire thing be a cohesive circus theme instead of just one/two songs.

[charliethomascoxuniverse]

Being raised Catholic helped Charlie Cox with his Daredevil role

Charlie Cox feels the pressure of playing a Catholic superhero in a major new Netflix series

By Ed Power  02 APR, 2015  (X)

CHARLIE COX’S tights are in a twist.

“I’m under a bit of pressure,” says the British actor, soon to be seen squeezed into the spandex of Marvel superhero Daredevil.

“If the show fails, it’s my responsibility, to a degree. You just have to keep your fingers crossed. As an actor this is what you want really, isn’t it? You have to focus on the positives."

Cox has consciously avoided Ben Affleck’s notorious 2003 sortie as Daredevil. A blind human rights lawyer by day, lycra-sporting avenger by night, Daredevil is no run-of-the-mill crime fighter and Affleck struggled to get inside the character.

The result was a movie that was laughed out of the box office and which constituted a serious body blow against Affleck’s credibility.

In Cox’s case, the challenge has been made easier somewhat thanks to the reboot’s relative subtlety and sophistication. Indeed, across its first few episodes, Daredevil 2.0 hardly feels like a superhero yarn at all.

The setting is gritty New York and Matt Murdock (Daredevil’s everyday alias) spends almost as much time practising law and struggling with his Catholic faith as kicking bad guys around.

The super-dark sensibility flows from a desire on behalf of Netflix, which has bankrolled the adaptation, to create a comic book show for adults, explains Cox.

“Tonally and thematically, it has a slightly more grown-up audience in mind,” he says.” It is the first Marvel show that has a PG-16 rating. So we are able to include guts and gore, as well as more adult themes. It suits the character. He is geared towards a slightly more adult audience.”

GOING BEYOND BEANO

Growing up, Cox’s comic book experiences were confined to Beano and Dandy. He was aware, vaguely, of Daredevil. 

It was only after signing up for the part, however, that it dawned on him how central a place the character occupies in the Marvel canon.

Was he nervous? Only after people told him that he should be nervous.

“I was in blissful ignorance about the whole thing. Then, I threw myself into the lore. It was a learning curve. I went to ComicCon and talked with fans. And I saw the online reaction as images were released.

“It became increasingly jittery. It’s a big responsibility, portraying this character. I’m cautiously optimistic — I think we are going to satisfying the expectations of Daredevil fans who have maybe not been satisfied in the past.”

This isn’t Cox’s first brush with the A-list. In 2007, he starred alongside Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes in Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust. He recalls feeling awkward under the spotlight, unsure how to handle his sudden prominence.

Second time around, and now a relatively mature 32, he is in a stronger place.

“With Stardust, I was one of the lead parts and I did a major press tour. I remember feeling overwhelmed. Of course, that was quite a few years ago. This time I’m going in from a stronger place, fingers crossed.”

WELL HEELED

Perhaps it’s testament to his relative lack of fame, but Cox is far more down to earth than most actors at his level. We meet in a hotel in central London and he appears genuinely gobsmacked I would fly from Ireland to interview him.

Later, I spy him in the journalists’ holding pen next door, chomping one of the complimentary sandwiches and shooting the breeze with the attendant hacks. It’s as if nobody filled him on the first rule of the entertainment industry press junket: On no account fraternise with the media.

Cox was born in 1982 in London and brought up in the East Sussex countryside. He is supremely well-heeled, his father a prominent publisher (the Cox family tree encompasses two baronets, a colonial governor of New York and the fourth Earl of Findlater).

After private school, he studied acting at the prestigious Old Vic film school in Bristol, from where he was cast, almost immediately, in Stardust. The film was not a big hit and, for the next several years, Cox worked almost exclusively in theatre.

However, he was reintroduced to international audiences by Martin Scorsese, who gave him a part in his HBO prohibition drama Boardwalk Empire (as an IRA gun-runner with a not-terrible Irish accent).

EYES HAVE IT

Going into Daredevil, the actor’s big concern was accurately portraying a blind man. Matt Murdock is sightless, but gifted, with heightened senses, which allow him leap tall building and beat up bad guys with minimal effort.

So determined was Cox to honour the source material, he hired a ‘blind’ consultant.

“I was quiteworried about appearing authentic. I eventually just went back and watched Scent of a Woman.

“Sometimes, it is believable, simply because the audience knows you are blind. You don’t have to make a song and dance about it. The trick is never to look anyone in the eyes when you’re talking to them.”

Realistically portraying a blind man paled compared to the other requirement of the gig: A superhero physique. A slender chap, Cox has had to bulk up and develop pecs in places he never suspected he could have pecs.

“I hadn’t had gym membership before. It was a new world for me. You have to drink endless protein shakes, which has a big effect on your body. You are passing wind non-stop. It’s pretty full on.”

He was better placed when it came to dealing with Murdock’s religious beliefs.

A rare superhero with a strong faith, in Daredevil Murdock spends a lot of time agonizing in church. This was no big deal for Cox.

“I was raised a Catholic. It definitely helped. You grow up steeped in that. If you’re in church, standing in front of the altar, you sort of automatically know how to respond. It all kicks in — you genuflect, you sit in the pew. I didn’t have to pretend any of that. I grew up with it and I found that enormously helpful.”

~*~

[lemonluvgirl]

Hitting The Target (Now with Ch 4)

By SparklingStella & LemonLuvGirl

 I know I said I wasn't going to post much context but I figured I should just post everything I have for this story just in case some people aren't caught up yet.

Summary: “When you shoot, you’ve got to keep both eyes on what you want to hit.” Katniss tells him seriously. “Do you bring this kind of tenacious focus with you to all aspects of your life?” Peeta asks, hoping his wildly mounting attraction for her isn’t as obvious to her as it feels to him. “When the situation calls for it. I’m good at going after what I want. And I find my mark almost every time.” She tells him with such a straight face he would have believed they were still talking about archery if her smoldering grey eyes weren’t glued to his mouth. 

When hot shot college archery rookie Katniss Everdeen makes it to the USA Archery Collegiate National Championships in her first year on the team, the university’s newly appointed college sports reporter Peeta Mellark is sent on assignment to cover her and the archery team’s meteoric rise to fame. What he never intended was to get so invested in the subject of his article, or to get so infatuated with the girl herself. 

~

“Where’s this afternoon’s advance run? And why wasn’t it on my desk 30 minutes ago?” 

A frustrated feminine voice rings out through the university newspaper workroom, and the clicking sound of her power heels marching across the linoleum heralds the end of the afternoon’s peace. 

It’s never a good sign when the editor of the Panem Chronicle steps out of her office to check up on the underlings that scurry around nervously and do her bidding. The woman is intimidating and has a tongue so sharp it’s been known to leave the first-year interns emotionally scarred. 

She might be small, even in her 4-inch stilettos, but she casts a long shadow.  People start fidgeting at their desks and shuffling their papers nervously. One girl actually backs out of the workroom before she can be spotted, when she sees Johanna “The Axe” Mason has left her lair and is on the prowl for unsuspecting victims. 

“Where’s that article on the golf team’s latest tournament?” She questions in a clipped tone that is all business. 

“Fuck me,” I mutter tiredly under my breath while trying to simultaneously shrink down to inconspicuous levels so that Jo Mason, won’t hear or see me. 

But I know that no matter how hard I hunch my shoulders and try to turn invisible, it won’t help me now. She knows I’m here. She knows I’m not done. I feel a sweat break out on the back of my neck as she approaches my workstation. 

Knowing Johanna she’d take my avoidance of this confrontation as an invitation to initiate a few rounds of verbal sparing, not as an expression of utter unenthusiastic dread. She always seems to get a kick out of finding any excuse to go toe-to-toe with one of the only guys in the department who wasn’t terrified of her. It was fun at first, but now it’s getting old. I find myself almost resenting her in recent weeks. She's the reason I’ve got writer's block right now. I’m dreading having to finish this article. It's driving me nuts. 

I hate golf, (I told Johanna this when she gave me the assignment) and I’ve been doing nothing but covering their university’s shitty golf tournaments for the last few weeks. And even though I’ve seen enough mediocre college golf to last till the end of eternity, I can’t for the life of me finish this pathetic golf article that was due half an hour ago. The thing is just a boring, uninteresting, cold fish piece of shit. And I hate myself for writing it. I hate Johanna even more for assigning me this piece. It's like she knows exactly which soul-sucking assignments I desire least and saves them just for me. 

 “Mellark! Are you still stuck on the conclusion? Stop playing with your dick and finish the fucking article already! We’ve got a deadline to meet!” Johanna says when she finally reaches my desk and stands over my shoulder, only to find I’m still stuck in the same spot I was an hour ago. 

“I’m trying Johanna! But this--this story is just--”

“Just what asshole? Too hot for you to handle? It's a damn 600-word news piece, not a 60 minutes interview for god sake!” 

“It's BORING! And there’s no way to make it interesting! I’ve tried! It's just---garbage! Dry, utterly boring, and sleep-inducing garbage!” 

Johnna stands stock still for a minute. I worry I may have gone overboard, for a second. 

Then she starts shaking with silent laughter. 

“Well, yeah duh! I mean it's college golf, not exactly riveting stuff. ” She says in between involuntary shoulder shakes. 

I inhale sharply. 

“So you knew. You knew it was a crap assignment and you made me write it anyway! That’s just great Jo. That’s terrific. Why couldn’t you assign it to Beetee or Wireless or something? They’ve been asking to go out on assignments instead of always getting stuck on research or box design. Didn’t you tell me when I joined the paper that I had the best ‘authentic writing voice’ you’d heard in years? And yet Marvel and Cato get to cover our basketball and football teams every season! What am I doing here JO? How is this a good use of my skills?” I explode in frustration. I’m so tired of getting stuck in this cycle. But I can’t just put up with her shit quietly like the rest of them. If it’s a fight she wants today, then I guess it’s a fight she’ll get. 

Instead of spitting some quickly thought-up insult at me, she surprises me by sighing and shifting to lean against my desk next to me, looking directly at my face instead of over my shoulder. 

“Mellark, you’re talented. That’s exactly why I give you the tough assignments. You can dress up a pile of shit and make it look like a chocolate sundae. But, you’ve only been on the team for a year. You still have to pay your dues, rookie. Look, I’ll make you a deal. Finish this shit show of an article, and make it readable. If you can do that I’ll give you a better assignment this coming week. Not basketball or anything super big, because you know, baby steps, but I promise it will be a step up from the golf crap.” 

“Fine Jo. But I’m holding you to your promise! Maybe I should make you sign a contract so you don't go back on your word,” I say, narrowing my eyes at her. 

“Yeah, yeah, Mellark. No need to break out the ritual sacrifice knife to make me sign my soul away in blood. I'm a woman of my word. I'll deliver on my promise. But, you better wow me with this conclusion, or else it's back to the golf carts, pretentious khakis, and designer sunglasses for you.” She threatens, but there’s a twinkle of respect in her eye that boosts my confidence.  

“It's going to be the best shit sundae you’ve ever had Jo. I promise.” I vow. 

I managed to tweak and finish the article until it was an interesting and engaging college sports piece, and by the time the story had to go to print Joanna was smiling.

“So, I take it that smile means I’m going to get assigned something decent this coming week?” 

“Well, since you pulled it off, I’d say so.” Johanna slams a piece of paper down on my desk. It contains a name, email address, and office phone number.  

Haymitch Abernathy -coachabernathyarchery@PanemUfaculty.edu 555-451-1213

“What’s this?” 

“Contact info for your next assignment. Email this guy and set up a time to go and observe his team at practice. He’s the head coach for the university’s archery team. Word around campus is a new freshman is blowing all the competition out of the water. The team’s got a shot at nationals this year. I want you to do a full piece on her, and the team. You can interview the coach too. The higher-ups want to make this feature article a two-page spread.” 

“Two pages?!” 

“Yep. So don’t say I never did anything for ya Mellark. Oh, and take your camera and get some candid shots. She’s a real hot shot. Hits the target every time. And she looks good doing it, or so they say. That’ll be good for the article too.”  

I laugh, only Johanna would so openly comment on sex appeal as a way to increase our reader base. 

“Ok, Jo. Sure thing. And thank you! You won’t regret it!” 

“Yeah, yeah. Bring me back something spectacular and we’ll see if you deserve to be bumped up permanently to something more substantial after this.” 

I nodded and smiled. I was hopeful, enthusiastic, and most of all intrigued to find out more about this newest assignment and the girl who seemed to be lighting the college archery scene on fire.

(Katniss POV) 

I lifted my bow, breathing in steadily, and lined up the tip of my arrow with the target. Shooting with a recurve barebow required a different technique than the modern sighted bows, with their fancy pins and bubble levels. String walking was my preferred method of aiming, and even without the technical assistance of an adjustable sight component, I was still the best shot on Panem University’s archery team. I brought the string back and adjusted my bare bow tab slightly since this was a 40-yard shot. I took another breath in and as I began exhaling the carbon dioxide from my lungs, I felt my hands still. Then I blew out the silent puff through my parted lips and released. 

The arrow flew fast and true and hit dead center. 

I heard Finnick and Gale and my other teammates whooping in appreciation behind me. I resisted the urge to smirk. Lest our coach, Haymitch, the surly old man who sometimes came to practice just a tad hungover, started giving me shit about being cocky. 

“Girl you are on FIRE! You haven’t missed the mark once today!” Finnick cheered as I tucked my bow underneath my arm and walked back to the cooler filled with ice water where my teammates gathered for breaks in between shots. I grabbed a paper cup and proceeded to pour myself a drink to cool my parched throat before I replied. 

“It's just practice, Finnick. No need to get so excited.” I reminded him and he chuckled. 

“He’s just stoked that now we have enough high-scoring members to register as a team this year for the collegiate 3D nationals,” Gale states proudly as he looks over at me. He had practically begged me to try out for the archery team when I got to Panem U. 

He had promised the team could use someone like me and after a few weeks of his pestering I’d given in, thinking they’d take one look at me and my old hand-me-down bow and cheaply homemade arrows and laugh me off the field. But to my surprise, no one mocked me when I showed up with my old recurve bow, they just gave me quizzical looks. And they didn’t laugh when I sunk arrow after arrow into the bullseyes of the targets. I’d been invited to join the team right afterward. Our coach had even put in a good word for me with his friends at the sporting goods store closest to campus. After saving up for a month, and using some of my financial aid surplus, I’d been able to buy a new recurve bow. It was a beautiful SAS Courage and I’d never owned anything more beautiful or powerful in my life. And my shooting only improved soon after.  

“You mean you didn’t go as a team last year?” I asked Gale and Finnick, as we all drank down gulps of water greedily. We were all a little sweaty since practice had been running longer and longer to prepare for the upcoming competition. Archery was an outdoor sport, which meant a lot of time in the sun. So hydration was important. 

“The university wouldn’t pay the team fee to send everyone, since only Gale and I showed a chance of placing. So it was just me and Finnick and Haymitch, and they put us all in one room. With only two beds. It was cruel and unusual punishment, and I considered contacting the human rights advocates.” Finnick jokes. 

“But now that you’re here Catnip, and kicking ass, they’re going to spring for the team registration this time around. And since you’re a girl, they’ll probably spring for two rooms! And I won’t have to listen to Abernathy’s snoring or twist myself into a pretzel trying to sleep on a tiny hotel couch.” Gale said hopefully. I frowned, wondering how my getting my sleeping accommodations would translate into his not sleeping on the couch. 

“Hey, man you gotta be quick to call dibs next time!” Finnick joked and Gale shot him the middle finger with a scowl. 

“I don’t feel like sharing a hotel room with any of you-” I began but Gale interrupted. 

“Oh, come on Catnip, we can share. It's not like it's anything I haven’t seen before,” Gale says with an unconcerned grin. I tense up immediately and shoot him a warning look. 

Sure, Gale and I had dated in the past. And yes, we’d slept together before, so he’d seen me naked. But we hadn’t been anything more than friends and hunting buddies for a very long time. And one of the conditions of my joining the same archery team with him had been that he wouldn’t make things awkward by bringing up our past dating history. I was naturally a very private person and didn’t want to get around the team that Gale and I used to sleep together. I narrowed my eyes on him. 

His grin quickly fades and is replaced by a repentant expression. 

“Sorry, Katniss. I shouldn’t have said that.” Gale apologizes quietly and after staring at him for a second I nod. Finnick looks between us with a highly amused expression. 

“Don’t worry mighty huntress, I’d be more than happy to spoon with you in your hotel room when we head to the 3D competition,” Finnick says with a suggestive tilting smile and a slightly raised eyebrow. I feel Gale bristle a little beside me. 

I rolled my eyes and prepared to tell Finnick that he’d only be spooning at the 3D competition would be Gale or Haymitch again, when I was interrupted. 

“Odair, keep it in your damn pants. I don’t need you or Hawthorne fucking up this team dynamic with your overzealous libidos and underwhelming dicks.” Haymitch, our grouchy old coach cut into the conversation with his usual crudeness. 

I couldn’t fight a loud snort that escaped, and neither of the guys could hide a flash of embarrassment at the comment aimed at their male egos. 

“Now that we’re going to register as a team this year, does that mean the girls have to bunk together?” Glimmer, the only other female on the team, asked as she eyed Gale appreciatively. 

I wanted to snort again. Glimmer was a terrible shot, even though she’d been on the team a whole year longer than I had. But that probably wouldn’t matter to Gale. She was blond and giggly and slutty. I saw him holding back a smile at her apparent attraction to him and I rolled my eyes. She had no real interest in archery and had probably only joined the team to meet guys. I doubted the university would even pay for her to go. 

Objectively, there were a lot of hot guys on the team. Finnick and Gale probably stood out the most but there was also Thresh Anderson who doubled as a university basketball player as well when he wasn’t going to classes or shooting targets. And Thom wasn’t bad-looking either, just kind of lanky and lean. But I had zero interest in dating any of my teammates. One, because Haymitch was right. Sex and relationships tended to fuck up team dynamics. I mean, look at me and Gale. We’d only dated for two months and it had almost ruined our ability to hunt together. It took almost a year for us to get back to some semblance of normalcy and even then we still had our past to contend with at times. Like just now, when he not so subtly alluded to sharing a room with me. 

“Sorry to break it to you, Glimmer, but we’re not taking the whole team this year. Only the ones who placed in the preliminaries. So that means Hawthorne, Odair, Anderson, and Everdeen here are the ones going. And nobody’s bunking with Sweetheart. University policy. If they pay for the room, it's not going to be co-ed.” Haymitch announces to us all and Glimmer’s face falls. But Thresh and Gale and Finnick quickly start celebrating amongst themselves, with plenty of fist bumps and back pounding. Soon, even the other team members who didn’t qualify began to offer their congratulations. I smiled over at Thresh, who was probably my second favorite team member after Gale, and he flipped me a thumbs up. 

“Alright, alright, before you animals start planning a kegger, I need your attention. Now, since we’ve had such a good year the university newspaper is looking to do a story on us. They’re sending one of their reporters down today to interview the team, and take photos. I need you all on your best behavior. Show ‘em what you got and maybe next year they’ll spring for some new equipment. God knows our targets are practically falling apart!” Haymitch orders with surly annoyance. Everyone begins to disperse and go back to shooting. But I hadn’t failed to notice that throughout his whole speech, his eyes kept darting back to me. 

I crunch my paper cup aggressively and throw it away and turn to face Haymitch. I’m nervous and wary about this turn of events. 

“A reporter?” I ask and Haymitch nods. 

“Yep.” That is all he says. 

I feel my palms grow sweaty. I have never liked being in the spotlight, or the center of attention. And right now I am getting the sinking sensation that this reporter coming to interview us might have something to do with the judges at the last competition calling me the ‘Ken Griffy Jr.’ of archery. 

“Do I have to talk to him?” I ask. 

“No, you have to take him to the prom and divest him of his virginity," Haymitch said with a straight face and my eyes widened before I glared at him. Him and his stupid jokes. 

"Everyone has to talk to him, Sweetheart. He’s interviewing the team. And last time I checked, that includes you.” He says more seriously. 

“Fine.” I bite the word out in annoyance. 

“Oh, and Princess? Might want to towel off some of that sweat. You’re glistening like a pig over a spit, and not in an attractive way.” He comments in a falsely pleasant voice. 

“Alcoholic old son of a bitch.” I mutter as I stomp away. 

“I heard that!” Haymitch calls and I resist the urge to flip him off as I resume my place and knock back an arrow. I imagine that the center of the target is Haymtich’s eye and start shooting at a rapid pace, ignoring everyone else around me and getting lost in the feeling of hitting my mark time and again. 

~

(Peeta POV) 

We arrived at the archery field a little later than I’d planned. I had decided to pick up my friend Annie Cresta last minute to help me take pictures. Annie was a good photographer, having taken pictures for her high school newspaper before she started at Panem U, and a lot of reporters on the paper knew about her talent. Seeing as I needed to interview the whole team and get their pictures too, I figured I could use the extra set of hands and a friendly face. 

“Whoa, I didn’t even know there was anything back here!” Annie exclaimed in surprise. 

“Me neither,” I muttered as we exited my vehicle and started to grab our equipment. 

There in the back lot of one of the university’s unused outbuildings, was Panem U’s archery practice field. It was dotted with rows of targets at various distances. There was a group of people lined up and practicing with bows and arrows dutifully despite the heat. The grass was a little long, and the sun beat down almost mercilessly in the late September afternoon. Hot days like this were rare this late in the season. But this year had been unusually warm, and the extra sun was probably contributing to the grass growth. The field was covered in a blanket of mixed grasses and weeds. 

Their green and yellow tips brushed against us at ankle-high length and outside of the car’s air conditioning the warm air threatened to make anyone who was too used to sitting down in lecture halls and at a desk in the university’s school newsroom break out in an uncomfortable sweat. I sighed. Going on location to interview a subject was just another part of reporting that could either be great or terrible. Today it was just mildly uncomfortable. 

“So, what do you need from me today Peeta?” Annie’s gentle voice asked as I took the camera bag from her and hoisted it over my shoulders. I had offered to get her a gift card to her favorite restaurant as repayment for her helping me out last minute, but I was still a gentleman. I didn’t want her carrying the bags if she didn’t have to. 

“Johanna just said to get some candid shots of the team, especially the new girl. Katniss Everdeen.” I told Annie.

“Katniss? That’s an interesting name. You don’t hear that very often.” She commented. 

“Yeah, I looked it up. It's a type of edible water plant.” I explained and she shot me a contemplative look. 

“Maybe her parents were botanists,” Annie says with a shrug. 

“Or hippies.” I offer with a humorous smile. And Annie chuckles. We’ve been friends since freshman year of college and she’s almost like a sister to me. I find her quiet unassuming demeanor restful, and she says she remains friends with me because I bring her baked goods on her birthday. It's an easy sort of friendship that works for both of us. 

“Alright then, ready when you are, Captain!” Annie announces with a sarcastic little salute. I laugh and wave her on as we walk towards the group of people shooting in the field. 

As we reach their general vicinity, I lay the equipment bag down next to the table with the water cooler and Annie starts to unpack. I scope out the individuals I’ll be interviewing. There’s a middle-aged paunchy-looking man who’s growling out corrections to a cute looking blond in yoga pants and twin ponytails. But by the way, her arrows have all landed outside the blue third ring of the target I’d say she’s not the new wonder girl. My eyes sweep over the group again and I find the rest are male. One extremely large guy, with chocolate brown skin and close-cropped hair, who looks more like he belongs on a football field or a basketball court than an archy field stands with intense focus, eyeing the target but not shooting yet. Two other taller, but less bulky men with dark hair and olive-toned complexions shoot arrows at targets that are marked as 30 paces away. One of them, the more muscular and good-looking of the two, hits almost all his arrows inside the yellow of the target, the bullseye. Next to them is a bronze-haired smiling guy who looks more like he belongs in a catalog than on a forgotten old archery field in the university's back lot.  

“Hello there!” The bronze-haired man calls out as he approaches us. When he gets close enough to make out his features more clearly, I notice his eyes are a startling aquamarine color. 

I feel Annie shift nervously next to me. 

“Hiya! The name’s Finnick Odair, I take it you’re the people from the University newspaper?” Finnick asks as he holds out his hand to Annie with an award-winning smile. She blinks at him blankly for a second before tentatively shaking his hand but doesn’t move to introduce us. That’s Annie for you, shy as they come around new people. That’s another reason our friendship works. I’m better with people in general. 

“Yes, hi. I’m Peeta Mellark, one of the sports writers for the Panem Chronicle. And this here is my photography assistant Annie Cresta.” I say as I thrust out my hand to Finnick in greeting with an easygoing smile. Finnick shook my hand in a  perfunctory way, but the majority of his attention remained on Annie. She squirmed underneath his gaze and I started to get a little concerned. So I take a step closer to Annie, in an effort not to leave my friends defenseless against this guy’s charms. His gaze darts between the two of us in concern. 

“Peeta and Annie, that’s nice. Are you two a team when you’re not interviewing local athletes?” Finnick asks with an interested stare. But he still looks a little nervous looking back and forth between us. 

“What?” Annie asks, perplexed. It's the first word she’s spoken but by the way Finnick is smiling at her with rapt attention you’d think she’d given an eloquent speech. 

I shake my head at Annie’s confusion and bite back a grin. The guy, Finnick, was trying to ask if we were together. He’s interested in her, and they just met. 

“Annie and I are good friends. Have been ever since we met in freshman psyche two years ago. She’s got pretty high standards for the people she dates.” I tell him good-naturedly but also add a serious look at the end to let him know subtly that I’m looking after Annie. He smiles, at us both, a little more relaxed this time, and nods. 

“Well, that’s good to hear. Come on, let me introduce you to the team.” Finnick says with a tilt of his head towards the field. Annie picks up her camera and snaps a shot of him just like that, with his head tilted and his hand beckoning, and the sunlight behind him. He smirks at her, but her face remains expressionless. I grin at Finnick’s confusion and move toward where the rest of his teammates are practicing. 

We quickly got introduced to the team. Turns out there are six members and one coach. Haymitch Abernathy sounds just as grumpy and impolite in person as he did over the phone, but he does seem to try his best to accommodate us. 

“Where’s your last team member?” I ask Coach Abernathy and he scowls.

“Little Miss Sunshine is taking a powder break. She’ll be back soon so you can get your story, kid.” He replies gruffly. 

I nod and Annie and I set about taking pictures and talking to the other teammates. I get to learn their rankings, their scores from the last competition, and who’s been selected to go to an upcoming tournament in Arizona. I get so invested in taking notes for my article that I don’t notice when the number of people on the field increases by one. I didn’t hear or notice her return, even though she takes up a spot very close to where Annie and I are standing as we take shots and interview the 2nd best-ranked archer on the team. His name is Gale Hawthorne and he’s kind of taciturn, but he does look impressive as he pulls his bow back, lets the arrow fly, and hits the target just a half-inch shy of the absolute center. Annie is shooting him from the left, trying to get a profile shot. I turn, trying to see if we could get a better angle. And that’s when I see her. 

She’s smaller than I imagined, maybe 5’3 at the most, petite and slim. But the way she holds herself, with such a straight posture, without being rigid as she draws her bowstring back, makes her seem larger than life. Her ebony dark hair trails over her left shoulder, a couple of flyaway strands dancing in the breeze. Her eyes are almond-shaped and luminous, and I’m startled to see a glint of silver grey where I expected to find chocolate brown. She wears a grey tank top, and shorts, obviously accounting for the heat and hours she had to spend outdoors. But the miles of smooth golden brown skin that’s exposed, from her thin muscular arms to her toned and well-shaped legs are practically mouth-watering. Most of all it's her calm and stoic demeanor that captivates my attention. She’s so focused and determined. I watch as she waits for just a beat, steadying herself, before taking the shot. I don’t have to look at the target to know she hit a bullseye. It's written in the way her eyelids lower for just a second, with a pleasure she tries hard to conceal. 

I suck in a ragged breath. Damn. This girl was more than hot. She was something else altogether, something incredible. 

“Good one.” The guy we had been interviewing, Gale, tells her and she nods at him in acknowledgment. I look back at the two of them and wonder if they are somehow related. They have very similar features, but different last names. Cousins maybe? 

“Hi,” I call over to her and she turns her head to look at me, and I feel the weight of those intense grey eyes land with almost as much force as her arrow did hitting the bullseye. 

“Hello.” She replies curtly. Ok, so maybe they are related. They both seem so reluctant to speak. But I just adjust my smile so it’s a little bigger, a little more friendly, and start over to her side. 

“My name’s Peeta Mellark. And I’m a reporter with the Uni’s Chronicle. You must be Katniss.” 

“Yes. Katniss Everdeen. I’m a first-year student, and I have yet to declare a major. I’ve been hunting since I was 6. I’ve never shot competitively before, and I hope to make the university proud in the next tournament. You can take my picture but don’t get in the way of my shots.” She states dryly and returns her attention to the target. I hear Gale behind me trying and failing to stifle a snicker. 

“Was that your way of trying to shut down the interview?” 

“No. Of course not. Those are all the relevant facts you need to know for the article. I’d rather not waste valuable practice time any more than I already have. We have a tournament coming up and I need to focus.” 

“Your aim seems fine, best I’ve seen today. Are you telling me you couldn’t spare a minute or two to answer some questions?” 

“I already answered everything you need to know. So just take your pictures and get it over with.” 

“You should widen your stance. If you displace your weight a little more, your feet and knees will probably feel better at the end of a long day after standing and shooting for hours.” 

“Excuse me? Are you an archery expert or something?” 

“No.” 

“Well, I’ve been shooting for years. I know how to stand. Forgive me if I don’t take your word as worth anything on the subject.”

“Are you a writer, or a reporting expert?” 

“What?” 

“Do you have any experience with interviewing or writing an article?”

“No.” 

“Ok, well, excuse me, if I don’t accept your bare minimum responses for my article. I know nothing about archery. And you know nothing about my field of expertise. So why don’t we just agree to let each other do what we do best?” 

“Are you also an expert in acting like a dick?” 

I let out a stunned, strangled sound that is followed by Annie’s subsequent gasp. 

Katniss stands, defiant eyes blazing, her bow lowered and one hand on her hip. 

“That was rude.” I point it out to her but she doesn’t even flinch. 

“I don’t win tournaments because I’m sociable. I win them because I focus. And you are taking away my focus. So I’d appreciate it if you would just ask whatever pointless questions you need to so I can move on with my life.” 

“Do you honestly have no respect for someone else’s work? The time and energy put in? Annie and I are here to do a story about you and your team! It's for the university paper, it could mean more exposure for the archery department, maybe even donations! Will you just let me do my job without being such a--” 

“Such as WHAT?” 

I stumbled for a word, mortified that this had escalated into a full-blown argument, with a person I’d just met nonetheless. But she’s impossible, insufferable, no matter how good-looking she may be. 

“An asshat!” I finally exclaimed. And Annie behind me started giggling to my utter humiliation. But Katniss didn’t seem amused. She seemed livid. 

She stalked towards me, like a predator stalking its prey, all lithe-limbed and graceful even in her anger. The look in her eyes was deadly. 

“The only ass I see around here is YOU!” She yelled, shoving a thin delicate finger into the middle of my chest. I freeze, seeing her this close-up. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are flashing, she’s breathing hard and our gazes lock for a long inexplicable moment. And I fight the urge to crush her to my chest and kiss that scowl off her beautiful face. 

I stare down at her, my eyes catching for a moment on the swell of the tops of her breasts visible because of the scoop of her tank top. My chest is heaving as I feel a drop of sweat trail from my temple to my jaw. Her eyes trace the movement reflexively and I see her lips part just a tiny bit, to curse me out some more no doubt. But I stay mutely silent, unable to form a response as I stare at her slightly parted full lips. 

“Everdeen! What the hell did I say? Didn’t I tell you to play nice? God damn it, girl, don’t need you to fuck up the one piece of good publicity our department has gotten in years!” Coach Abernathy’s angry voice rings out somewhere behind me and the spell is broken. 

Katniss takes a step back and looks down, seemingly chastised. And I swallow thickly around the dryness in my mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that Abernathy isn’t the only one who witnessed the argument. The rest of the team was staring at us in obvious dismay. The old archery coach makes his way to my side and sighs tiredly. 

“Look, kid, it's getting late, practice is supposed to be over by now. Maybe the heat’s making everyone touchy. Why don’t you and Red come back tomorrow? Finish the interview then?” Abernathy points his finger in Annie’s direction, his voice inquiring in a tone as close to diplomatic as I think he can get. 

I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand and nod. Maybe he was right. Maybe things will go better tomorrow.

“Yeah, ok. We’ll try again tomorrow. But the university wants to do a 2-page spread. And I can’t do that if the whole team doesn’t cooperate.” I warn him and he nods seriously. 

“Don’t worry kid. Everyone is gonna do their part, I promise.” He says, staring Katniss down. She huffs indignantly and picks up her bow and turns on her heel to walk away. 

“I hope so. Alright Annie, let’s pack up.” I conclude, wanting to get off this field and out of this heat. It's driving me crazy. That must be the explanation for the raw and incomparably powerful sexual attraction I felt for a woman who almost tore my head off. 

Annie nods and we both head back to the water cooler table to pack our equipment away. The rest of the archery team is packing away their bows and arrows already, preparing to leave as well. But when we get back to the car I spare a glance over my shoulder and catch sight of her. The girl with the bow and the dark braid, still sinking arrows into the targets despite being utterly alone on the field. 

I wonder if she’ll be able to work out her frustration before tomorrow’s redo interview. I wonder if I will as well. 

(Katniss POV) 

I empty my entire quiver into the target, once, twice, almost a full third time before I’m hitting bullseyes with my usual accuracy. Today was an incredibly slow start. And I blame the before practice ‘pep talk’, that was more of a guilt trip/gossip session. 

It had been a full day since the blond pretty boy reporter showed up causing a ruckus with his 1000-watt smile and his thickly laid-on charm. But everyone was still completely hung up on the visit. He was a tool. Most likely. Probably. 

 How could he not be with his eager and earnest introduction that lasted all of two seconds before the real him came out when we argued? And instead of being the all-around ‘nice guy’ he pretended to be, he was a condescending know-it with a thing for control when it came to his interviews. 

But that didn’t stop Glimmer from announcing before practice in front of everyone that she’d definitely ‘do’ him if need be to salvage the archery team’s publicity. 

“I appreciate the dedication to the team honey, but let’s not bring out the big guns just yet. I have a feeling Everdeen can still salvage this if she manages to pull that stick she’s got that’s the size of Montana out of her rear end. And just answer some damn questions.” Haymitch lets Glimmer down in a half-satirical, half-appreciative tone. She pouts like a twelve-year-old.

“Whatever, I was just saying. You know, because he's mega-hot.” Glimmer replies with a shrug. I stifle my immediate distaste at the off-hand comment. I mean, I know this is college and hookups are the norm, and of course, Glimmer can do whatever she wants with her body, but wow. The girl works almost at the speed of light, is all I’m saying. 

“If worse comes to worse, I’ll just throw Finnick at him,” Haymitch replies sarcastically. 

Finnick is the first one to laugh at this, while I roll my eyes. Coach Abernathy doesn’t even know the meaning of tact. 

“Oh, I don’t know Coach. He’s good-looking, but the redhead he was with was stunning.” Finnick’s praise of the camera girl surprises me. It's so...G-rated. And so unlike him. Usually, he’s the first to come up with sexual innuendos and double entendres when he meets a pretty girl. But this time he simply called her stunning. How strange. 

“And besides, I think our resident Girl on Fire had a really strong hate-fuck vibe going on with Peeta. And I would never cock-block a dear friend.” Finnick needles me with a laugh and I fight the urge to shoot him in the foot with my bow. After I gasp indignantly, of course. Gale scowls and mutters something angrily under his breath. I just hope no one took Finnick seriously. But several people were looking at me curiously. 

“That’s complete and utter bullshit Finnick! You should probably get your eyes examined. I can’t even stand the guy!” I spit out the words irately. Finnick just grins slyly back at me in response. 

“Whatever, I just call them like I see them. And blondie got you more worked up than any guy I’ve seen you with all year.” Finnick’s sea-green eyes glint playfully at me in the late fall sun and I grit my teeth to keep from chewing him out because something about what he said gave me pause. 

Finnick usually hangs out with Gale a lot, and Gale was pretty much the only other friend I had at this school besides my quiet roommate Madge. So I did spend an inordinate amount of my social time around Finnick, plus archery practice. If only because we had common friends and hobbies. And he may have witnessed me turning down a few guys who asked me out, and some casual flirting with guys who I shared classes with when we all ate together in the student cafeteria. Ok, sure I wasn't usually that welcoming to men’s advances. But to say Peeta had gotten me worked up? As in, a sexual way, was just ludicrous. 

And yeah ok, Peeta was attractive, in that popular boy band, mass appeal, widely marketable way, with blond hair, blue eyes, a dimple when he smiled. It was like a teenybopper’s wet dream. But it sure wasn’t my wet dream. Because he was a nosey pencil-pushing pain in the ass. 

 Even if he was fit and toned. (How that was possible was a mystery to me, the guy worked a desk job for crying out loud). It was obvious in the way his jeans clung to his thick muscular thighs and firm rounded backside that he worked out. In the stifling heat yesterday he had quickly almost sweated through his shit. And not in an unappealing way. More like someone had staged a rugged outdoor photoshoot and specifically planned the way his shirt clung to his muscled torso...molding itself onto his defined abs and stomach...stretched tight across his wide shoulders and chest...

And ok...maybe for a minute while we were yelling at each other I’d considered licking the sweat off the hollow of his collarbone and trailing my tongue down his body so I could feel and taste every delicious dip and groove. But it was only for a moment. And it was only because I hadn’t had sex in...how long had it been again? God, Gale and I had broken up over a year ago. I just hoped my vagina hadn’t acquired cobwebs from lack of regular use by now. I’d just been so busy with a new school, and then the archery team. I was on a scholarship so my grades came first and I studied religiously. I hadn’t had time for dating or sex. But last night for the first time in a long time I had pulled out my vibrator from the bottom of my nightstand and gotten myself off, twice, before bed. Luckily Madge had stayed late with Gale in the library to study for a mutual class they had and I’d had the room to myself. 

But the masturbating hadn’t been specifically because of anyone. And certainly not Peeta. More specifically, it was because I hadn’t gotten laid in forever. This was due to the fact I hadn’t found anyone interesting enough or worth the effort to get to the stage where getting laid was possible. So I just needed to scratch an inch at the end of a long and stressful day. 

And when I pictured big hands gently kneading my breasts and ass cheeks it wasn’t Peeta’s hands I was picturing. A lot of guys had big hands. And when I’d imagined full soft pink lips kissing all over my body trailing up the insides of my thighs and finally stopping between my legs to kiss and suck and nibble at me until I was a quivering frantic sopping mess, it wasn’t Peeta’s infuriating mouth I had pictured. 

They were all abstract images. Random things I found attractive and used at the moment to get me off. 

Except...maybe the second time I had pictured sparking blue eyes full of intense heat staring up at me underneath an adorable mop of ash blond waves right before I exploded in a fit of orgasmic bliss of gargantuan proportions. 

Shit. 

Finnick was right. 

I wanted to hate-fuck the goddamn reporter. 

That was just great freaking news. I could hear the announcement now. 

“This just in! New archery team 3D collegiate national qualifier Katniss Everdeen is too horny to function. She’s lusting after obnoxious blond acquaintances and starting arguments for no reason!”  

It was pathetic. And I needed to do something about it. But what? 

Well...I could handle this revelation in two ways. I could repress my desires, stuff them deep down so they would never see the light of day again. Or….I could do the opposite. I could screw him and get him out of my system. The 3D collegiate archery competition was coming up in two weeks. And I needed to get my head back in the game. Needed to focus. I was kind of a mess in my classes this morning. And my shots had been off since yesterday and I thought it might have been because of Haymitch nagging me to play nice. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I just seriously need to let off some steam. But could I bring myself to hit on the guy who almost drove me nuts within five minutes of meeting him?

I didn’t know if my ego could handle it. I mean he had said some pretty nasty things about me, including calling me an asshat in front of the whole team. Not that asshat was the be-all end of all of the insults. It was a pretty weak comeback. But still, it was the principle of the thing. Could one bed someone as obnoxious as Peeta Mellark and live with the shame afterward? Probably not. At least for me, I didn’t think so. 

Unless he apologized. Maybe. But what were the chances of that? A know-it-all like him admitting he messed up? Yeah, right. I guess repression was the way I was going to have to go. 

And yet when he showed up 15 minutes into practice, wearing an obscenely low-side-cut olive green tank with some grey athletic shorts that hugged his ample backside, every single fantasy I had tried to shove down from last night came surging up. Made all the more intense and worse because even at this distance I could see something I had never expected from the wholesome pretty boy I thought I met yesterday. 

He had tattoos. And not just one douchey-looking tribal band around his bicep that a lot of college guys had that screamed ‘fuckboy’ loudly and obnoxiously. No. Peeta Mellark had a nice collection of several decent-sized motifs all along his upper arms. They had been hidden yesterday by his casual striped button-down with the white undershirt. He has even nicer arms than I originally thought. Thick muscular arms, that catch me off guard by how much I squirm at the sight of them. And to top it off they were accentuated by the impressive collection of ink.

Then he had to go and turn to the side just enough that I caught a glimpse of his exquisitely sculpted obliques, latissimus dorsi, and serratus anterior muscles. Over which was tattooed a block of flowing script that I couldn’t follow because his tank obscured the rest of the view but undoubtedly it had to continue over his ribcage. 

Not fair. It was not fair for him to be this attractive. As if she read my thoughts, Glimmer speaks up right then. 

“Well, dick me dead and bury me pregnant. And here I thought he couldn’t get any yummier.” Glimmer murmured lowly so that only the team could hear. Amused laughter and Gale’s annoyed huff could be heard despite the steady thunk of arrows hitting the targets. The team is used to these kinds of comments from Glimmer. And most find it charming if not predictable. But today I find it annoying as hell. 

“God, Glim, could you get any thirstier?” I muttered in aggravation and she smiled over at me indulgently. 

“If you wouldn’t jump on that deliciousness and ride it six ways to Sunday you’re even more uptight than I thought Katniss.” She hissed and I immediately shut my mouth. There was no point in furthering the conversation. As much as I wanted to argue with Glimmer about how I didn’t want to ascend Peeta's throne, I worried I wouldn’t sound convincing enough. Especially while he looked like hot sex on a stick.

“Hi, there!” He says with a friendly wave aimed at all of us while he sets down the equipment bag he had with him yesterday and begins unzipping it. I don’t even bother attempting to wave back. 

The red-headed girl was with him again. The one Finnick had called stunning. And looking at her today, in her cute cut-off jeans shorts and a breezy peasant top with the camera hanging low beneath her sternum I could see why. She looked younger and freer in her casual clothes, much like Peeta. Her red hair lit up like strands of fire in the (thankfully more muted and less heated than yesterday’s) afternoon light, and her green eyes were spectacular. Like shards of polished jade that stood out even though she stopped by the water cooler table some yards away. 

I turn to see Finnick entranced, eyes following her every move. His mouth even hangs a little open. 

“Close your mouth Finnick, or you’ll wind up swallowing a bug.” I tease him right back for the comment he made earlier about me and Peeta. 

Finnick snaps his mouth shut and blushes. Like actually gets pink-cheeked and bashful looking for a second. I snort through my nose like an uncultured swine and he shoots me the evil eye. 

“Don’t be a dick Katniss.” He hisses at me. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s physically impossible, Fin. But I’ll let you off easy this time if you promise to keep your wildly unfounded theories about who I want to take to bed to yourself.” 

“Deal.” He says quickly. We both nod at each other and I watch in abstract fascination as Peeta lifts a bright blue box out of the equipment bag gently and places it next to the water cooler on the table. It looks oddly like a large cardboard donut box, with a shiny reflective plastic window on top. 

Had he brought some kind of food for everyone? Or maybe for him and his partner while they worked? 

He spoke with Coach Abernathy for a minute. They seemed to be discussing the box, and although Haymitch looked like he grumbled and scowled at the reporter, in the end, he nodded and looked out toward the team members on the field 

“Alright, listen up. Everyone take a 5-minute break and grab some refreshments if you want, courtesy of the University’s journalism representatives. As a gesture of goodwill and cooperation… What’d the hell you call it again boy?” Haymitch breaks off and looks at Peeta for a second, Peeta says something behind his hands I don’t catch, “Respect for the spirit of cooperation. To cut the shit, take a goddamn break and load up on carbs kids.” Haymitch finally just spits the words out impatiently and walks off, grabbing a muffin from the box before he leaves in the direction of his car. Probably to find a half-open bottle of liquor to wash the muffin down with. His liver must be cringing in fear. 

What follows next is a loud and almost desperate migration towards the newly dubbed ‘refreshments’ table, by everyone but me. 

I don’t feel like selling my soul for the price of some mediocre coffee shop baked goods that are probably stale having been left out all day. So, I return my focus to the target and keep shooting. Albeit my shots are slightly off-center, I tell myself that’s just because I’ve got to work harder and focus more. 

It's not until I hear his arrestingly soothing voice from behind me that I snap out of my angry determined reverie. 

“Why didn’t you grab any of the snacks? Got some kind of gluten allergy?” His blue eyes assess me lightly. 

“No,” I say, uncooperatively as he comes to stand a few feet away from me, on my right side. 

“Ok, no allergy. Maybe some weird trendy diet where you have to cut out bread?” Peeta asks. 

I scoff. “No.” In a mildly offended tone. 

“Oh, good, because dieting would be a bad idea for you.” He says, blurts out even, like he wasn’t thinking. And then his face freezes in anxiety. 

I flush in anger. I know I’m not as big-chested as Glimmer, or as round-hipped as a lot of other girls on campus but I wasn’t anorexic or anything. If he was telling me I needed to eat more because I was too skinny then he was an even bigger douche canoe than I originally thought. 

He seems to pick up on the anger in my eyes and backpedals quickly, his hands palm out in surrender. 

“I didn’t mean you don’t need to--wow. And here I thought today would be so much easier with a peace offering and ample time for both of our tempers to cool down.” 

“Well, you’ve managed to kick things off to a great start. So kudos to you.” I snap. He sighs, and runs a hand absentmindedly through his hair, musing up the soft waves. 

“Look, I’m sorry for losing my temper yesterday and cursing at you. I’m also sorry for patronizing you. It was wrong. And I’d like to start on a better foot before we try the interview thing again. But, well, I keep putting said foot in my mouth so…” He trails off in embarrassment. And his pink cheeks look so….humiliated and adorable like a kindergartener getting sent to time out. It's like kryptonite and I feel my indignation slipping. I make a joke instead of starting another argument. 

“Now you barely have one leg to stand on.” I quip without looking at him and pull back my bowstring. 

“Something like that.” He says, and his voice is closer. I fight the urge to look over at him to determine exactly how close. I can feel his eyes on me, but not in a leering or critical way. It was almost like he was studying the mechanics of it, my shooting, anticipating the shot as much as I am making it. It should have felt nerve-wracking. But with my bow in my hands and him having gone peacefully silent, it didn’t feel nerve-wracking at all. I breathe in and out deeply before letting go. 

This time my arrow flies straight into the target, dead center. The corner of my mouth kicks up slightly. 

“Damn, that’s impressive.” He mutters under his breath and I let out a shaky exhale. It was probably the best shot I’d made all day. And I’d done it with him nearly two feet away from my side. Strange. 

“Hopefully impressive enough to place at the 3D competition,” I tell him as I lower my bow and turn towards him fully. He was extremely attractive looking from across the field, but he’s magnificent up close. My eyes run over his sunlit golden waves, strong sturdy shoulders, down his thick and pleasingly decorated arms. Before I have a chance to examine him further he asks me another question. 

“Are you looking forward to going?” He asks and my eyes snap back to his face. I wonder if he caught my casual perusal of his goods. I don’t want to keep talking about myself, but Haymitch did say to play nice. So….

“Sure. I’ve never been to a national archery competition before. Actually, before this year, I hadn't ever competed officially. So, it's kind of exciting making the team and getting to go to nationals right away.” I responded honestly.

Peeta nods at me, his blue eyes clear and bright and behind them, I can see a sharp intelligence that is mentally cataloging every word I divulge. It's like an inner world hidden behind the boyish smile and easy-going mannerisms that are so disarming. 

He’s good at this, I realize. Offhand compliments and getting people to talk about themselves, asking seemingly unimportant questions that lend themselves deeper explanations. Now he’ll probably probe deeper into my background. Find out why I started university so late, and why I’ve never competed before. All the sordid little details of my depressing life. I brace for the inevitable. 

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try some of the pastries I made?” He asks again, catching me off guard. I fumble with my bow a bit. 

“Made?” I say in shock. I wasn’t expecting the question, or to find out he cooked something for the team. He smiles that sweet but just the perfect hint of a shy smile of his and I have to bite my lip to keep from returning it.

“Yeah, um, I grew up in a bakery all my life. I still bake sometimes as a hobby.” Peeta tells me and I blink at him in surprise. I did not expect that. He was catching me all sort of off guard right now. 

“Really?” I ask stupidly, still incredulous. What college guy liked to bake in his spare time? Was he for real? But judging by the look on his open and guileless face I could tell he was being honest. 

“Yeah. I enjoy it. It's a stress reliever, allows me to take my mind off things you know?” He says as he stretches his back lightly and rocks heel to toe. I catch another glimpse of the rib cage tattoo and I feel my curiosity sparking. I wonder if it would be strange to ask him about his tattoos. Probably. I mean I supposedly can’t stand him. 

“Archery is my stress reliever,” I answer him shortly, to distract myself from ogling him. 

“Oh, I can tell. It's like your whole being quiets down when you shoot. Like everything else in the world is just white noise and the only important things are you and whatever you’ve got your eye on.” He says as he looks back at the target and then back at me. His gaze is weighted, but not uncomfortably so. Just heavy with the feeling of an unexpected truth that settles in the air. 

I flush involuntarily at his words. It kind of did feel like that whenever I shot. But how did he know? How could he? We’d met one time, and hadn’t spoken long enough to get much further than introductions before the argument started. Was he simply that observant? 

“It's just something in the way you hold yourself and concentrate.” He tells me, answering the question that must be in my eyes, nonchalantly, as if he’s just described me walking to my car instead of the unexplainable and undefinable feeling that connected me to my beloved sport. 

“You certainly have a way with words,” I tell him dryly. And he chuckles, a deep amused sound that has me trying not to stare at the way his eyes crinkle and his abdomen tightens attractively underneath his thin shirt. 

“I’m even better with baked goods. Come on, accept a carb-laden olive branch from me?”  He asks and there’s a little something in his voice, and his offer that feels slightly like flirting. But that can’t be right. 

“Alright, but only because it's kind of sexist of you to think a woman won’t eat bread because she’s watching her figure. Or has some kind of allergy.” I tell him with a scowl. 

He groans, but it's the exaggerated, joking kind of groan. 

“I’m sorry about that too.” He pleads and beckons me after him with an outstretched hand and curling of his thick strong-looking fingers. I mentally chide myself to stop looking at his fingers. 

“Well, if your pastries are as good as you claim, I might let you interview me without the threat of bodily harm.” I tease and he visibly brightens. 

“Alright, then you have to try the cheese buns. They are the best thing I make and they’re my recipe too.” He suggests as I fall into step behind him. 

“A cheese bun? What’s that?” I ask, intrigued. Anything combining bread and cheese catches my interest. 

“Come on, I’ll show you.” He offers. We make our way to the snack table and I catch sight of Finnick nervously trying to chat up the shy-looking red head. 

“Peeta man, this stuff is amazing!” Finnick calls out enthusiastically when we make our way over. 

“Thanks, man,” Peeta says happily. He practically trots over to the box and starts searching. 

“Shit!” He exclaims in frustration a second later. My head snaps to him, leaving whatever question Gale was asking me unanswered. 

“What? We left stuff for you and Kat,” Finnick says, coming over and looking in the box. And from where I stand I can see there are a couple of muffins and cinnamon rolls but I don’t see anything else. 

“All the cheese buns finished,” Peeta says in an extremely dejected voice. 

“Oh,” I say, surprised to hear the disappointment in my voice.

My teammates look a little sheepish, probably at having eaten the best of the baked goods. But our team is made up of mostly robust young guys, who are always hungry, Peeta’s lucky nothing was even left at all. 

“It's fine,” I tell him and try to brush it off. 

“No, it's not. This was the white flag. The peace offering! I should have set one aside.” Peeta chastises himself and I shake my head. 

“You want something else Katniss? There’s still muffins and they’re hella good.” Thresh offers and I politely decline. I tell them I’m more of a savory than a sweet eater. Peeta looks kind of devastated. I feel bad about it. 

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get started with the interview.” I tell him and he looks over at me, seemingly to gauge my sincerity. 

“Alright, I’ll just owe you one.” He replies. 

I shake my head again.

“No,” I reply and his countenance falls. I feel bad but I don’t want there to be any sort of debt between us. I hate owing people and I hate it when people feel like they owe me too. Then I get an idea. 

“How about this, you ask a question and I ask one back? Would that be fair?” I offer and he looks up at me suddenly. He nods. 

“Yeah, that could work.” He agrees and his perfect pink mouth sketches into a tentative smile. I nod back. 

“Ok, so where do you want to do this?” I ask and when something like interest sparks across his gaze I fight the urge to blush. Parapraxis is bitch sometimes. 

He looks over at Annie and she marches to his side. 

“Can you get some candid shots of the whole team, like wide angle lens with silhouettes and a few close-ups on profiles and faces? But stay in the background this time? I don’t want it to feel posed” He tells her, and the photography jargon is hard to follow. I have no idea what a wide-angle lens is for, but it seems Peeta is not only good with words and pastries, but he also knows quite a bit about photography. Annie murmurs a quiet yes and sets off towards the 20-yard targets where some of the others have already started shooting again. 

But unluckily not everyone has scattered yet. 

“I’m ready for my close up Mr. Reporter,” Glimmer throws out in a flirty voice and even winks at Peeta. 

“Oh, that’s great Glimmer, but I’m gonna try to catch up on Katniss’ interview today since we didn’t get much usable info yesterday.” He tells her gently. I bite my lip and turn away. Of course, the two best-looking blonds would find a way to flirt with each other. She looks especially cute in her yoga tights and crop top. People could say whatever they wanted about her intelligence but Glimmer was still beautiful. 

“You poor thing,” She coos and tries to place a conciliatory pat on Peeta’s shoulder but he turns at the last second and faces her so her hand ends up patting empty air. 

“I love my job. And I’ve learned over the years that usually the more difficult the subject the more amazing the collaboration turns out.” He says firmly. She looks taken aback. 

“Collaboration? I thought you were the reporter. Aren’t I just here to answer your questions?” I ask him in a concerned voice. Momentarily forgetting to reveal too much in the shocked look of disappointment on Glimmer’s face. 

“Nope, in fact, you have the biggest part to play in this article. You’re a newcomer to the sport and the university, you’re talented, and you're unbiased. So you can give an extraordinary window into the dynamics of collegiate archery and life at Panem U. If I let you tell your story correctly, this thing is going to be a smash, for the university and the archery department.” Peeta says confidently and begins to walk back to my spot at the 40-yard targets. I follow him silently. 

I suddenly feel nervous as I take in his words. Is that true? Is that what everyone is expecting of me? I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of pressure. 

When I get back to the targets Peeta seems to sense this, maybe because of the terrified look I’ve probably got written all over my face. 

“Hey, hey, sorry. That must have sounded like I expected you to do all the work in this interview. But really, you won’t. The burden’s on me to ask the right questions. All you have to do is answer honestly. I’ll be doing the majority of the heavy lifting ok?” 

I swallow past the lump in my throat and will myself to calm down. 

“How about this, you take a couple of shots to relieve the stress I unfairly and idiotically put on you, and  then you ask me a question to start.” Peeta offers gently and I find myself nodding. 

“Don’t you need a pen and paper or something to take notes with?” I ask. 

“No, I’ve got a pretty good memory. But if it makes you feel more comfortable I can use an audio recorder so you won’t be misquoted.” He jokes. 

“Um, no, that’s fine. Unless you need it, then go ahead.” I tell him quietly. 

“Alright, well let’s just see how far we get. If I start having trouble remembering I’ll use the recorder. You go ahead and set up your shot. And ask me your first question when you start feeling comfortable.” Peeta tells me. 

So I do. I shoot for a bit and then start by asking him how he got assigned this story. He tells me a little bit about being on the journalism team for the university newspaper and makes me laugh when he talks about how he begged his boss for a more exciting assignment after he got stuck with golf last time. 

“Little did I know I’d be meeting you the next day.” He jokes and I laugh, unable to stop myself. 

“Be careful what you ask for I guess,” I tell him as I sink another arrow into the target.  

“Oh, I’m glad I asked for this assignment. It's probably the most intriguing subject matter I’ve studied all year.” He tells me with a sly smile, looking right at me when he says it. 

My eyes flit back to the target and I pretend to study it for a bit. I still am having a hard time reconciling the fact that he’s flirting with me. But I’m getting that vibe. At least, I think he is. He’s been sweet and disarming and courteous all afternoon. 

That alone is shocking, after the extremely rough start we had. But maybe pretty boy Peeta isn’t so easily deterred by surly dispositions or bad first impressions. He seemed to handle Haymitch pretty well at the start of practice. Even got him to deliver that funny little speech. Maybe he’s good with difficult people. What’s even more startling is that I hope he is. Good with difficult people and also that he is interested. In me. 

Because the longer we talk, the more interested I become. And I want to find out what the heck his tattoo says. I look back at him and find him openly admiring my stance, the way I pull back my bow. I may not have the bust size of some other girls, but I’m pretty fit. I’m particularly proud of my toned arms and legs, not to mention my shoulders which stayed in good shape because of archery. Also, Gale had once told me after we broke up that he missed my ass because no other girl he’s met had one like mine. I’d threatened to break his nose if he ever said that in public but privately I’d been pleased. Maybe Peeta was an admirer of derrieres as well. 

Only one way to find out. 

I shoot my last arrow and it sinks just right of center. But of course, there are so many arrows clustered together in the center there hadn’t been any more room for my last one. I had been aiming for the spot to the right anyway. 

“Let me just go and retrieve my arrows,” I tell Peeta sweetly and he looks a little surprised. 

“Need some help?” Peeta offers immediately. 

“No, you just stay right there,” I told him. You’ll have a better view if you do. I think to myself. He obliged me and just looked on as I walked off. 

I jog over to the target and begin pulling out arrows one by one and placing them back into my quiver. I’m so nervous my palms are sweating. By the last arrow, I don’t even have to pretend to drop it by accident. I feel my heartbeat racing a little. I’ve never been this bold or suggestive with a guy. But if I want to get Peeta out of my system so I can go back to concentrating on my studies and the competition coming up, then I can’t wait for him to make the first move. Peeta seems like the type to want to date and woo a girl. And I’m not interested in a relationship. I need to work out this sexual tension I’ve got with someone who I can see myself getting off quickly with during sex. And Peeta checks a lot of my boxes. All of them if I’m being honest with myself. I turn for a second to see if he’s looking and thankfully he is. He’s staring right at me. 

So, I just go ahead and go for it. 

I bend over to retrieve the fallen arrow, slowly. I’m wearing tiny black athletic shorts that are loose enough at the bottom to not be distracting when I’m standing. But when I bend down, especially at the right angle….

I grab the arrow and stand back up after what I surmise is an appropriate amount of time. I’m still facing away from him. But I know since I didn’t wear any tights underneath my shorts today that I just gave Peeta an eye full of my ass cheeks and he probably knows what color my underwear is now too. (olive green like the tank he’s wearing). 

When I look back at him he looks different. Startled for a second. But when he sees the look on my face it's like something clicks. Gone is the friendly smile. The casual charm that usually emanates from him is nowhere to be found as I slowly walk back, my flushed cheeks betraying me. Instead, there is just this quiet anticipation that rolls off him in waves. 

Good, I think to myself. 

Hopefully, after tonight Peeta Mellark will become a college fling I had once. 

But the way he bites those perfect lips of his and crosses his arms over his chest so that his muscles stand out attractively I think that maybe one might be underestimating him. Because Peeta Mellark looks like he wants to devour me twice over. 

And judging by the slickness of my underwear I think I might want him to do just that. 

(Peeta) 

I’m struck speechless by the tantalizing view of Katniss bent over in those little shorts of hers. I can’t talk, I can’t move. I can barely think. It’s like my operating system has crashed and I need a second to try and reboot it.  

My efforts seem to be failing spectacularly and what’s worse is that I don't seem to mind their apparent failure.

The only thing that does seem to be working properly is my dick. Which is rapidly growing harder in my shorts the longer my eyes linger on the delicious golden fleshy globes of Katniss’ perfectly sculpted ass that are peeking out of her shorts and lacy-edged green underwear. 

The green itself is doing wonders for her complexion, the artist in me notes.

I quickly adjust my hard-on so that my erection is trapped against my stomach and the waistband of my shorts. It’s uncomfortable but it’ll have to do until my cock starts to behave again. I really don’t want to be walking around with a huge tent in front of the entire college archery team. 

I refocus on Katniss again, and I get this sudden urge and mental image of me pulling down her shorts and smacking her ass hard, with an open palm just to watch the perky swells retreat from impact and then bounce back. 

I’d love to see what her bare ass looks like decorated with the outline of my hand on it. 

The thought floats up unbidden from somewhere in the recesses of my mind. 

Whoa, where did that thought come from? 

Great, now I was having spanking fantasies about her. Which was weird because usually, I wouldn’t consider myself a kinky guy. But damn. Katniss just brought out a whole different side of me and I don't know if that discovery is appreciated or not.

 As if it wasn’t bad enough before this. Yesterday I couldn’t get her out of my head and I had jerked off this morning in the shower to the mental image of her flushed face and sweaty cleavage during the argument we had when we met. 

Ok, that’s it. I have to do something about this, or I’ll go insane. I have to try to get this girl to go out with me. At least. 

From the look she threw my way before she bent over I’d say I have a good shot. She checked to make sure I was looking before she pulled her little stunt. 

Suddenly she straightens up and turns back around to face my direction. The look on her face is different. For a moment she seems unsure, but then our gazes lock and even at this distance I can see it in her eyes. 

She wants me. Maybe as bad as I want her if that's even possible. 

Fuck. 

I don’t think I’ve ever been this turned on by a girl I haven’t even seen naked yet. 

But there was just something about Katniss that stirred up my blood. From the lusty yet slightly embarrassed look on her face as she walks back towards me, cheeks flushed and gray eyes flashing in the afternoon light I know that she has no idea. The true extent of the effect she has on me. I don’t even think it's purely physical. 

But I think I’d give my left leg to get to know her better on a purely physical level to start out with. 

 Man, that little show she put on. That was all for my benefit. And the way she’s looking at me right now, as she sexily bites her lip is making it very clear what her intentions are. 

Well, two can play at this game I think as I cross my arms over my chest and return her gaze, spark for spark. 

“We match,” I tell her quietly, tugging on the front of my muscle shirt and letting my eyes drift down to her lower half. Those olive green panties of hers may be covered up right now but I had seen enough to know that my shirt and her underwear were almost the same shade of green. 

She blushed even harder and blinked at me for a second before swallowing thickly and nodding. 

Shooting her a coy smirk, I run one hand through my hair, making sure to flex my arm as I do. I’m gratified to see her molten silver stare flit over my arms and chest before struggling to settle back on my face. 

My smirk deepens. 

“Makes you wonder what other things we might be a match in,” I say smoothly, my eyes trained on her face to gauge her reaction. 

“Possibly.” She replies quietly, her eyes shifting down to my mouth. 

If we were alone I’d probably kiss her right now. But I take a quick look around the field and see that Coach Abernathy has made it back from his liquor break and is watching the two of us intently from some distance away. No doubt waiting to see if Katniss and I blow up at each other a second time. 

The bronze-haired guy named Finnick is following Annie around like a lost puppy, but it seems she’s barely acknowledging his attempts at conversation as she moves around the field taking pictures of the other archers. 

Everyone else seems to be focused on practicing. 

I take a deep breath and look back at Katniss trying to gather my courage. 

“I feel really bad you didn’t get to eat any of the food I baked. I mean, by the time practice ends you must be starving, what with a long day of classes you probably have.” I try to segue into my pitch carefully. 

Katniss is eying me expectantly and it gives me the confidence to continue. 

“Would you wanna grab a bite to eat after this?” I ask, deciding to just go for it. 

She looks down and does that thing where she bites her lip and I stare as she worries a little piece of skin in between her teeth. 

“Maybe you could take me back to your place and whip up some more of those, what did you call then? Cheesy buns?” She proposes in a slightly suggestive manner as she fiddles with the end of her braid. 

I let out the breath I’ve been holding in. It's becoming more and more clear the direction she wants to take this in. 

“Yeah, I think that could be arranged,” I say quietly before reaching out and running one finger down the smooth texture of her plaited dark hair and stopping at the end of her braid before giving it a playful tug. 

“But first we really should finish the interview. My boss chewed me out something terrible when I came back to the office yesterday empty-handed.” I admit with a chuckle and she has the decency to look embarrassed. 

“Sorry if I got you in trouble.” 

“No worries. Johanna can be a bit of a hardass but she’s alright. I just promised her I’d get some really interesting stuff today.” 

“How could you promise that before you even interviewed me? I mean what if I’m totally boring?” 

“Katniss, you may be a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them. That much I’m sure of.” 

She rolls her eyes at me and huffs a little, before taking up her stance again. She pulls out an arrow and notches it on her bow. Then she turns her head slightly to look at me as she raises one eyebrow. 

“Well, start asking your questions already.” She instructs and I grin at her. 

.

.

.

“Tell me about your aiming process. How do you ensure such accuracy everytime you fire?” I ask. 

“When you shoot, you’ve got to keep both eyes on what you want to hit.” Katniss tells me seriously. We’ve been at this for the last 20 minutes. She shoots while I ask her questions. Sometimes she asks me stuff back. Its been working well, and I am pleasantly pleased with the amount of material I’ve collected for the interview so far. 

Even though the words we’ve exchanged have been entirely professional ever since she gave me the green light to continue with the interview, the fire hasn’t left her eyes. Nor my blood. I’m just counting down the minutes until I can end the interview and get her all to myself back at my apartment. 

“Do you bring this kind of tenacious focus with you to all aspects of your life?” I ask as evenly as I can, I find myself almost out of breath as I watch her lean muscular arms go through the motions of pulling an arrow out of her quiver.

 I wanna know what those strong but delicate arms feel like wrapped around me. This leads me to think about her legs wrapped around me too. 

Which leads to….distraction. 

I shake my head and try to refocus, hoping my wildly mounting attraction for her isn’t as obvious to her as it feels to me.

 “When the situation calls for it. I’m good at going after what I want. And I find my mark almost every time.” She tells me with such a straight face I would have believed we were still talking about archery if her smoldering gray eyes weren’t glued to my mouth again.

I lick my lips in a knee-jerk reaction. I see her eyelids lower, fractionally, and she purses her lips just slightly. It's enough to make my heart speed up and my hands clench. 

“So does that mean you feel confident about Panem U’s chances at placing in the upcoming D3 National Archery Competition?” I ask, after clearing my throat and bridging up back on topic. 

At this, she smiles a bit. It's not a conceited or cocky smile. It's enthusiastic and dare I say, hopeful. 

“Yes. We’ve got a great team this year and one of the most knowledgeable coaches in the sport. I think the odds are in our favor this time around.” She says as she looks back over in the direction of her teammates and Haymitch. 

I can see the affection she has for them, even if she doesn’t say it out loud. The more I get to know her the more I realize that her tough exterior is most likely hiding a softer side. 

Which is a side of Katniss Everdeen I’m just dying to get to know. But I know I have to proceed cautiously. She didn’t seem like the kind to open up right away. 

“I think the D13 competition isn’t going to know what hit them this year.” I agree quietly. 

Just like me, when we first met, I add, in my head but don't say it out loud.

[multidimensionalguidance]

Hello everyone, again!

I made this original post back in March in regards to assumptions I had of my solar return chart, and although I did say I was going to check it again on December, I just couldn't wait any longer. The tea during this year has been piping hot, and I'm truly excited to share with all you what the next one will be like.

Taurus ruling my 8th house this year had me spending lavishly in all Venusian matters, and even though I don't regret it, I should have definitely been more mindful. I had zero self restraint when it came to eating out in restaurants often, buying new makeup, new clothes, and about anything that could raise my self esteem. I also did buy a bunch of new crystals, oracle decks, and specially spent a lot of money on all of these things after traveling overseas to visit my family.

Gemini in my 9th house had me communicating a lot about spirituality, personal philosophies, religion, higher studies, and with foreigners. Gemini also rules friends, and I was able to spend a good amount of time with friends overseas which was super fun. Communication was mainly online or through my phone rather than face to face as well. The ruler moving to the 2nd house sticked true because I was able to market (mercury) my spiritual and occult knowledge to gain new sources of income.

In terms of my work, profession, and public image (10th house) I worked from home all year long, so my home was truly my office. Cancer rules psychics and any job where you have a mother-like attitude. I worked as a teacher with children and adults, which all mentioned me being very soft and nurturing. I also did psychic work through divination using tarot and oracle cards. The ruler of this house was in the 5th so again, it confirms how most of work was towards children and creative pursuits, although it was conjunct with Saturn so I had to be very consistent with encouraging positivity. The affliction that was caused on my Moon this year was TOO real, and I really hope to not see this combination again for another solar return.

This year I gained a lot of traction on my social media and networking circle. Leo or Sun in the 11th house always seems to bring a certain level of fame be it from the friends you make (online or offline) and/or from using social media/network circle to display your creativity. The ruler was on my 2nd house and all of my income was from work I was doing online from teaching children and from creative pursuits.

Having Venus in my 12th house during this SR was not such a big deal to me because I have this configuration on my natal chart, but what was quite different was having it in a sign where it debilitates. I usually crave and adore my alone time. It's in the moments of isolation where I connect with my energy the most and enjoy spiritual pursuits the most. During this year I was very hypercritical of my health, daily life, and aesthetics. This wasn't comfortable at all, but I was able to structure these matters and now I'm grateful for feeling more connected with my own personal brand.

I've noticed that a lot of well known influencers tend to have Venus in Virgo, and its precisely because of how they instill their personal style into absolutely everything they do. All the little details of their outfit, their room, the accessories, how their coffee or tea mug looks like, everything you can think of they ensure it fits into their preferred aesthetic. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are the most self confident or best social butterflies, but they will make sure to look in the way they like while having a panic attack. Virgo gifts them the ability to hyperfocus on all these Venusian matters, but again, that doesn't always mean that it brings them inner peace.

Alright y'll, this is the end of my revision of this SR chart for 2024. I truly feel grateful for how pretty much everything I foreshadowed was accurate, and that I've been able to see and experience how everything came together.

If you'd like a reading for your Solar Return chart of any year, feel free to DM me and I'll provide you with essential knowledge to help you be as ready as possible for what's coming ahead. Thanks for the continuous support, I wish love, peace, and abundance to every single one of you <3

SR Chart in-depth Analysis Part 2 🔒

Here’s the continuation and final part of my SR chart analysis and predictions, which has been very fun because its the few moments where I can see myself from a different perspective, and just focus on the information I can decode without any room for judgment.

Taurus 8th house: my sense of security will depend a lot on how much I can rely on indulging in delicacies within my own hidden safe space. Finances are merged or shared within close relationships. Partners resources become my own. Inflexible or hard-headed when it comes to the type of comfort or luxury I expect to enjoy. A big focus in other people’s resources becoming my own somehow. The ruler of this house sits in the 12H, which means that the money I receive or try to keep hidden will be used towards spirituality, foreign settlement, expenditure, bed pleasures, self care, health, work clothes, skincare, and extravagant procedures to enhance my natural beauty, which could be to an almost detrimental or excessive level since Venus is debilitated.

Gemini 9th house: communications in general will be towards philosophy, higher knowledge, luck, feeling blessed, traveling, foreigners, teachers, spiritual guides, etc. It is also likely I will be speaking a foreign language quite often. Lots of short distance traveling to foreigners places. These conversations and type of mindset will influence my finances, bet it due to new perspectives or simply luck allowing me monetize those newly acquired learnings and skills. That would particularly be due to 9H ruler sitting in the 2nd house. I’ve read before that Mercury in the 2nd denotes above average intelligence, so perhaps that will also influence on how I’ll be able to increase my resources.

Cancer 10th house: this year people will perceive me as very nurturing, mother-like, soft, intuitive, and like wife material (particularly bc that asteroid Bried is conj the MC). It is likely that I will be receiving lots of attention because that’s what luminaries do, they put a spotlight, which is career/public image for me. My work environment could be spent in a space that IS or feels like home. There could be discomfort from having matters that are private exposed to the public, so I might have to deal with some of that as well. The ruler of this house sits in the 5H, so I might be doing creative work online, related to children, with romantic partner, in a fun way.

Leo 11th house: my social circle will be full of creatives (artists, leaders, performers, teachers, government workers etc), royal-like people or individuals with a certain amount of influence. My goals, social media image, and gains/income will be focused towards notoriety, fame, child-like joy, romance, appearance, etc. On top of that, the ruler of the house sits in the 2H, so those gains/goals/social media image will also influenced my resources and finances.

Virgo 12th house: with Venus sitting there and it being the debilitation, I’m led to thinking that the possible negative significations of this placement will be experienced in isolation, during my daily night routine or in foreign places. The difficulty with Venus in Virgo is how overly critical and judgy it is towards itself and others. There is a difficulty with fully enjoying the experience of love and beauty because you’re too busy thinking of how things can be better or improved. Now, on the other hand, no one does acts of service and has a deeper awareness of health and beauty than this sign. They give and give happily to those they commit to or love in general. I will probably be enjoying a bit of those sides during this year.

Thank you for reading this far! I’m excited to check this during December and doing a sort of checklist of what I predicted accurately + everything else that will definitely happen without my awareness.

[earaercircular]

Circular thinker Ellen MacArthur: 'Simply consuming less is not a goal'

Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation: our timeline

As a child, she saved her lunch money to buy her first boat. At the age of 28 she became the fastest solo sailor around the world. Today, Ellen MacArthur is one of the most influential voices for a new, greener industry. 'Why would we make packaging that we throw away after one use? As humanity we can do better.'

Ellen MacArthur (47) became world famous overnight in 2005, when she sailed solo around the world in just 71 days, breaking the world record. “I didn't write much in my diaries during that trip,” she says. “But I remember clearly at one point writing down, 'This is all I have.'” If you run out of diesel or food, you can't just stop somewhere in the middle of the ocean and buy extra. With that idea in mind I went back on land. I realized: 'This is not just about sailing, but about our entire economy.' We have the raw materials we dispose of, and we have to do it with those.

That insight would determine her future life. 'I never thought I would stop sailing professionally. But I realised that I could use my fame to do something with it.' That 'something' became the Ellen MacArthur Foundation[1], an influential non-governmental organization (NGO) that wants to get rid of our throw-away economy and, together with companies, scientists and policy makers seeks for a better use of our raw materials.

The determination with which the British dogged herself in this is the same as that which took her to sea at the time. She grew up in rural Derbyshire[2], England. 'We grew our own vegetables. My favourite thing to do was to walk with the dog in the fields, hills and forests. There was no sea to be seen for miles.” But when her aunt Thea took her on a sailboat as a 4-year-old, she was sold. “It was a small boat, but I felt like it could take me anywhere. That was the greatest feeling of freedom I could imagine. All the doors suddenly opened at the same time.”

She saved the money she got for her school lunch to buy her first sailboat. Whenever she could, she  went to sea. When she was told at the age of 17 that she was 'not smart enough' to study as a vet - even though she had prepared for it for three years by working at a local vet on Saturdays - her choice was made. “I would go sailing. I have no idea how I was going to do that, but that was the objective.”

Her foundation has now grown to a team of 200 people and she sits at the table with the CEOs of multinationals such as Gucci, Amazon, Philips and Morgan Stanley and at the highest political levels. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation advises policy, informs the general public through podcasts, and works closely with the various industries. She is working on better battery technology with the chemical company Solvay, the utility company Veolia and the car manufacturer Renault. In the project The Jeans Redesign[3], she is working with more than a hundred brands, spinning mills and producers to find out what sustainable jeans trousers should look like.[4]

“The idea to create that organisation was not there from the beginning,” MacArthur says. “I first thought: 'Maybe I can wake people up by sailing around the world with a large message on my sail.’ But what message should that be? I had to look for that first.”

How do you mean?

Ellen MacArthur

Ellen MacArthur: “I'm a sailor, not an economist. At first I didn't even understand what problem I had to find a solution for. I just felt intuitively that nothing was right.”

“After my trip around the world, I went to the south of the Atlantic Ocean in the winter of 2005 for a documentary about albatrosses. I stayed on an island on which there was a former whaling station. Thousands of people used to work there. An entire city had been built around it, with a church, refectories, dormitories and doctors' offices. Now it is completely deserted. They took 175,000 whales out of the sea, but then they ran out of whales.”

“Are we doing the right thing?” I wondered. “When one resource is used up, do we simply switch to another? How many times can we do that?'

Where did you find the answer?

MacArthur: 'Not by sitting and thinking on my own. I started visiting factories and power plants and talking to economists, environmental experts and CEOs. One day I was sitting with the big boss of Castorama. The French DIY chain was part of the Kingfisher group that had sponsored me for years. It soon became about doing more with less: using fewer raw materials to make products.'

'It struck me that everywhere I went, 'less of everything' was the strategy towards sustainability. Let's just use fewer resources, travel less, buy less. But how can that be an objective? Where does that end? What are we going to use to make cars then? Or is it our intention to sell as few cars as possible? That's not realistic. “Always less” is not a goal. That's the problem with sustainability: we don't know where we want to get. In a meeting it was said: we need sustainable products. But no one could give an answer to what such a sustainable product could look like.'

'Then I saw a drawing in a book. There was a straight line and a circle drawn underneath it. “That's it,” I thought. Since the industrial revolution we have been in a linear logic. We use up raw materials and fossil fuels, waste piles up, we cause pollution and climate change. On the other hand, there is a circular economy. This is how life on Earth has worked for billions of years. There is no waste in a forest, everything regenerates. This is what our economy could also look like.'

'As humanity we are so inventive. Why on earth would we make packaging that we throw away after one use and that we can't use anymore? We can do better, right? From the design stage we should say: 'We are making something that will then be reused. That's just common sense."

To promote that idea of a circular economy, you launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2010. Where did you start?

MacArthur: “     We first identified with the consultant McKinsey what could we possibly gain by a different approach. The numbers were staggering. For the entire European economy, we arrived at an amount of 630 billion dollars if we make better use and reuse of our raw materials. We looked at what could be done differently, for example in vans, washing machines, smartphones or the use of cotton. In 2012 we presented that report at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Naturally, many raised eyebrows. But six months later we did speak in the European Parliament, and we spoke to top industry figures. That has put a lot in motion.”

What exactly can be done differently with washing machines?

MacArthur: 'Today this is the model: the manufacturer buys raw materials, makes a washing machine and sells it. He only starts to make money if he also can sell the next machine. In other words, he benefits from the machine breaking down. What do we see then? A cheaper machine will not last as long. The costs per wash are therefore almost one and a half times higher than with a more expensive appliance.'

'Shouldn't we strive to keep the costs per wash as low as possible for everyone? Perhaps we should evolve towards a model where the manufacturer benefits from the machine lasting as long as possible and being maintained as well as possible? Perhaps the machine remains the property of the manufacturer and he can reuse the materials if the machine breaks down? You simply have to rethink the entire mechanism.”

There must be time and space for that. For an SME that is busy managing everything that comes in its way every day - the pandemic, the energy crisis, geopolitical tensions, inflation - reinventing the entire business model is not an option.

MacArthur: 'When I hear that, I always think of the climate summit in Glasgow two years ago. I sat on a stage with Emmanuel Faber, the former CEO of Danone, and Philipp Hildebrand, the number two of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. An American moderator said: 'I understand the circular thing, but it is about a complex transition that will cost money.' Hildebrand turned to him and said: 'If we do nothing about the climate problem, our prosperity will decline by a quarter. So it's not a matter of what it will cost. Business as usual just doesn't work anymore."

'That's what it's all about for me. If you don't have time to think about it, you will soon cease to exist. Sustainability is not something you put in a separate report. As a farmer, why wouldn't you strive to grow your crops in such a way that the soil becomes richer, not poorer? Why not get to the point where driving a car does not harm the environment? How a company operates should contribute to solving our biggest global problems.'

What role can a circular economy play in our green ambitions?

MacArthur: 'If we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, 55 percent of the effort must come from the energy transition. This is about renewable energy and reducing CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels. But 45 percent will have to come from how we make things different: from food to clothing. This is about our manufacturing industry, but also about our agriculture. That makes it hyper-relevant.'

Do you see yourself as a climate activist?

MacArthur: “No. I just went on a personal journey. Our world population is growing. Our raw materials are finite. That is not sustainable. I want to spread that message. That doesn't make me an activist, I'm a realist.'

How pragmatic are you in this regard? The clothing sector faces enormous challenges. A company like Primark, which is criticised everywhere for the way it does business, is a member of your community. This way it can polish its image very easily.

MacArthur: 'Look, we work in an economic reality. I think there are good arguments for talking to everyone, not just those who are already doing well. We have also done the same with plastic. From conversations with many top people from that industry, it turned out that no one had an overview of the entire chain of plastic packaging. This is not different in the clothing sector. Everyone just produces. But what does that mean on a global scale? It is never about one company alone.'

'We spent a year researching plastic packaging, a business worth hundreds of billions. We presented the results in 2017. The numbers were dramatic. Barely 2 percent of all packaging that came onto the market was recycled into an equivalent material. However, we all feel that we have become very good at recycling.'

'With those results we were able to bring competitors and policy makers to the table. Where should we get? Ultimately, 20 percent of companies signed a commitment in 2019 to set ambitious goals for 2025.'

The ambitious goals to reduce single-use plastic are now proving unattainable. You admitted that too. What is more: in some areas we have even gone backwards.

MacArthur: “Yes. We see that the companies that have endorsed the objectives are doing significantly better than their sector peers in tackling plastic waste. It does make a difference.'

'But to get the entire industry on the right track, an international approach is needed. This is currently being negotiated, and that is necessary. Small flexible plastic packaging is a disaster. The problem is only getting bigger. They are not collected or recycled, especially in emerging countries where there are no collection systems. One company that puts a lot of money and energy into innovation is not going to change that. It is a system error. You have to set that straight.”

Where is that starting point?

MacArthur: 'By realising that everything is connected. When you sail around the world on a boat, you also have to take several systems into account at the same time. You are a system yourself. You have to stay alive. That's easier said than done. You are not hungry, and yet you have to eat. You need to get enough sleep. Then there is the boat, which is also a system in itself. You have sails, electronics. If the batteries are not charged, the autopilot will not work and you will be upside down 20 seconds later. Sometimes I slept next to the wheel. And then there is the third system: the weather. You keep an eye on this via satellite images. You try to predict the wind, because that determines how fast you go.'

'That connection also applies to our economy. It is a large system that embraces the world, but at the same time it concerns each individual. It concerns every sector. That's a difficult balance. On the one hand, you have to zoom deep enough into the practical details of a problem, such as setting up a collection system for a specific plastic. On the other hand, you have to see the big picture.

Can't an agricultural waste stream be converted into a better type of plastic, for example?'

'You cannot solve any problem alone. That requires a different mindset than what we learned at school. We have not learned to think circularly.'

The consumer must also be on board. As long as he buys clothes from Primark and throws them away after wearing them twice, we won't get there.

MacArthur: 'The general public is needed to set the system in motion. People can certainly force companies to change through social media. But that is also not a solution. After my sailing career I changed my life. I started traveling less and I built a house that requires hardly any energy. But to be fair, I also had the means for that. Not everyone can say that. And even if everyone could do it, it wouldn't solve everything, precisely because the entire system needs to change. But it is true that the buy-in from the general public is needed. And it is true that many people are not yet on board today.'

So you hear politicians in Europe say that we should tone down our green ambitions. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scaled back the targets.

MacArthur: 'That brings me back to Glasgow. Business as usual no longer works. We'll have to jump eventually. The question is simply: how long do you cling to your old ideas and when do you dare to jump? There are already opportunities. There are start-ups that focus on reselling or repairing clothing that is now worth billions.'

'What is particularly unfortunate about the political turn is that companies have already invested to achieve those objectives. They bang on the table and say: 'We need policies to be ambitious. There must be a level playing field.' Rightly so. That's the surprising thing about the criticism on Sunak. In the past, companies wanted to leave everything the same, but now they want to move forward more and more.'

You are a realist, you say. Are you also an optimist? Can we move fast enough to make the change in time?

MacArthur: 'I am convinced that it is possible. Whether it can be done quickly enough is another matter. Although we should not underestimate ourselves. During the pandemic, companies have accomplished in four weeks what would otherwise take four years. Covid was terrible, but as humans we have shown what transformation we are capable of.'

'My great-grandfather was a miner. He died when I was eleven, so I remember him well. He was born in 1894, when barely a handful of cars were on the streets. Everyone still moved by horse and carriage. When he was 45, the first computer was built. Twenty years later there was the microchip. When he died, the Internet had just been invented. And now we have artificial intelligence. If we really put our minds to it, things can happen quickly. We just have to determine what we are going for.'

Profile

Ellen MacArthur (47) grew up with two brothers in a small hamlet in England. Her parents were both teachers.

MacArthur became known as a professional sailor. In 2001, as a 24-year-old, she came second in the Vendée Globe, a tough competition in which sailors sail solo non-stop around the world. In 2005 she broke the record: she sailed solo around the world in just 71 days. Her achievements earned her the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), the female equivalent of a knighthood.

In 2010, she launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a foundation that promotes the circular economy to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, waste and pollution. She wrote several books, including the autobiography 'Taking on the World' (2002), 'Race Against Time' (2005) and the second autobiography 'Full Circle' (2010).

She is the founder and CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, an organisation that inspires young people recovering from cancer through sailing.

How a company operates should contribute to solving our biggest global problems.

Source

Stephanie De Smedt: Circulair denker Ellen MacArthur: ‘Gewoon wat minder consumeren is geen doel’, in: De Tijd, 4-11-2023, https://www.tijd.be/dossiers/changemakers/circulair-denker-ellen-macarthur-gewoon-wat-minder-consumeren-is-geen-doel/10503957.html

[1] The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, launched in 2010, works to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. It develops and promote the idea of a circular economy, and work with business, academia, policymakers, and institutions to mobilise systems solutions at scale, globally. https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/

[2] Derbyshire is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south-east, Staffordshire to the south and west, and Cheshire to the west. Derby is the largest settlement, and Matlock is the county town. The county has an area of 2,625 km2 (1,014 sq mi) and a population of 1,053,316.

[3] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/press-release-jeans-redesign-ellen-macarthur-foundation

[4] Read also: https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/724173405892608000/from-10000-litres-of-water-to-zero-the-denim?source=share & https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/687936102220382208/mud-jeans-and-saxion-make-first-circular-jeans?source=share

[shikonstar]

May I interest you in a small Inu-Spiration snippet in these troubling times?

I was partnered with the amazing @mrfeenysmustache of the fantASStic Librarian Inuyasha fame. Will there be more 🐕🍑? You'll have to find out January 1st! @inu-spiration

The first sign of trouble was the look of absolute horror on her face, followed by her hand coming up to clutch at her neck. As he watched, welts began to rise up on her exposed skin, and she dumped her purse on the table to frantically root through the contents. She had managed to gasp that she needed her EpiPen, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't there. Panic filled him as he watched her struggle to breathe; he was halfway across the quad before he even realized he had scooped her up and sprinted in the direction of the nurse’s office.

Luckily, the nurse had pens for just that type of emergency, and it wasn't long before Kagome was breathing normally. Inuyasha had hovered over her until he was sure that she was going to be alright. He had then slipped out to the bathroom.

Where he promptly threw up his lunch.

He had knelt there in the stall with clammy sweat beading his forehead, watching as his hands trembled. Never had he been so shaken; not even the time when he had pulled over to help someone out of an overturned car, only to discover they had lost part of their arm. After that, he thought he could keep a level head through anything.

Apparently, he was fucking wrong because one look at Kagome’s prone form left him like a Victorian noblewoman with the vapors.

Later that night, he was still shaken up, and he had called his parents looking for a little bit of sympathy and reassurance. And to be fair, they had started to give it to him--until they latched onto the fact that he was feeling super protective of her. He didn't think it was possible for silence to be loud, but the handful of moments that he waited for them to speak was deafening.

He probably should have enjoyed that while he had the chance.

His mother had shot rapid-fire questions about Kagome, and he thought for one terrifying minute that he was going to have to go over and physically restrain her from stalking Kagome on social media. His dad’s excited laughter boomed down the line, insisting that he needed to bring Kagome for a weekend visit.

Like hell he was gonna inflict that on her before he had even asked her out.

Now his dad kept sending him texts, asking, ‘Meet?’ And then, after being shot down, would follow up with sad crying dog gifs.

Maybe he could convince Kagome he was an orphan.

[jschllatt]

𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐀 𝐁𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐒 | 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦

Prompt: (Based off of the song I Wanna Be Yours by Arctic Monkeys) Clay’s recent fame leads to a difficult decision to be made. Months later, he’s still regretful. You seem to be fine, so why can’t he move on, too? 

Warnings: Swearing, alcohol consumption, slight angst

Pairing: Dream x GN!Reader

Words: 2.5k

Masterlist

I spent a week on this and idk how I feel about it but I hope you enjoy <3

Clay had been consumed by an overwhelming emptiness, his entire body hollow as the lack of your presence took its toll. 

Two months. Two devastating months had passed since he’d made a grave mistake, and now he was facing the agonous repercussions. He was a mess—anyone could see it. Between his long, disheveled hair, the light scruff that covered his face, and his bloodshot eyes, it was clear that Clay’s mind had been somewhere else. And it had been. Every passing second was a constant reminder of his solitude, causing the emptiness in his heart to evolve into a deep, incessant void, no longer inhabited by the happiness you had ingrained in him just months before. Why? Clay was overcome with a sense of deep regret as a result of your absence, feeling more alone than he ever had before. What could have possibly happened to make him feel this way? To make you leave? The answer was rather simple—he was just too damn busy. 

Clay had dedicated a considerable amount of time to his career, filming or streaming during the little free time he had. As he grew more popular, the time that you had spent in each other’s presence dwindled significantly, each day becoming lonelier than the last. Your interactions with him had shortened drastically—what were once long, lingering kisses placed on your forehead had devolved into chaste pecks, void of any true care or meaning. While you understood entirely that Clay’s career was important, you found yourself slowly losing hope.

You realized it one day as he was filming. 

It was a day no different from the last. Clay was recording a Manhunt video in his office, his voice shrill as he begged his friends for mercy. He was always loud when he filmed, and though you had chastised him for it countless times, he never listened. A loud sigh escaped your lips, going unheard, and you shifted your position on the couch, uncomfortable. Everyday seemed to be the same—each as lonely and frustrating as the last. Clay’s ignorance only fueled your apathy towards your relationship more, and you couldn’t help but find yourself growing hopeless at the thought of Clay being unaware of your unhappiness. Your troubled thoughts continued until a week had passed—a long, grueling week in which you had hopelessly tried to burrow your apathetic thoughts. But you couldn’t. You were giving up. The realization of your unhappiness made a pit grow in your stomach. You knew that you cared about Clay, but you couldn’t keep living the way you were—tired, unacknowledged, pitiful. 

And so, you let him go.

Clay was editing by the time you gathered the courage to face him, your stomach nauseous as you approached his office door. A light knock signaled your presence, and Clay muttered a quiet ‘come in,’ his voice raspy after hours of unuse. Blowing out a breath, you entered the room, your expression sullen upon noticing Clay’s inattentiveness. His eyes were still glued to his monitor, deeply focused on editing rather than your presence. You waited for a few seconds, silently hoping he would pay you any mind, but he didn’t. A wave of disappointment washed over you, though you managed to keep your voice steady as you declared, “We should break up.” Clay tensed in his seat, suddenly fixated on your words rather than the hours worth of footage he was editing. His chair turned with a quiet squeak as he swiveled around to face you. “What?” You sensed the subtle indignation of his tone as he squinted confusedly at your abrupt words. “We should break up.” You were much quieter this time, unable to meet his eyes as your words died silently in the tense air. You wrung your hands together anxiously as you leaned back on your heels, feeling awkward under Clay’s intense gaze. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe you should’ve just stayed quiet and dealt with it. Maybe—

“Okay.” 

Immediately, your eyes flickered up to meet his, filled with a silent desperation as you searched his emerald irises for any indication of his intentions. Nothing. 

“Okay?”

Clay remained silent for a moment, his body stiff as he leaned back in his noisy chair. His expression was inscrutable as he stared at you blankly, trying to find the right words to say as he watched your face remain solemn at his confound brevity. His voice was level as he spoke, “I know I’ve been busy lately. We haven’t spent a lot of time together and that’s my fault. I could sit here and promise to change, but we both know I can’t—not right now.” Though you felt your heart shatter, you knew he was right. His job was too important, too time consuming.

A nod signaled your understanding and you turned to leave, feeling overwhelmingly dejected. 

“Hey.” You turned around to meet Clay’s eyes, noticing the hurt that was settled in them. “I hope you know I care about you.” You fought the urge to cry and shot him a watery smile, struggling to keep your tone unwavering as you agreed, “Me too.”

Two months had passed. 

Clay had been struggling. Everyone knew it—his friends, family, even his fans. It was clear that the once cheerful, happy man had become melancholy, suddenly depressed and unable to hide his unhappiness on camera. There had been numerous speculations of why this was, but only few knew the truth. Sapnap was among one of them and had been staying at Clay’s for the past month, creating content with his best friend while simultaneously making sure he was okay. Though two months had passed, Clay was still a mess. Perhaps it was because it hadn’t hit him that day. He had momentarily convinced himself that his career was more important than you, but deep down he knew that wasn’t true. He wanted so desperately to reach out to you, but assumed you had moved on—another incorrect belief of his. Clay cooped himself up in his home, never leaving unless it was urgent. He had sunken into a deep depression and the only remedy for his pain was you. You. He treated you so poorly. Everyday was a constant reminder of your absence and it was his fault. He could’ve made more time for you, or at least spent the free time he had with you. 

Remorseful thoughts ran through his head everyday, nearly driving himself crazy, and Sapnap knew he needed to get Clay out of the house. 

“There’s a party tonight, I think we should go.” Clay immediately denied the offer with a shake of his head, grumbling to himself. His best friend sighed indignantly, blowing out a breath of frustration before stating, “You don’t have a choice, you need to get out of the house.” Sapnap stood his ground, arms crossed as he stared at Clay sternly. A minute had passed and Clay, aware of his best friend’s stubbornness, gave in begrudgingly, “Fine, but only for an hour.” Sapnap grinned triumphantly, exiting the room with a smirk. He slammed the door behind him, heading back to his room while yelling, “And shave, for fuck sake.” Clay shook his head, cracking a small smile at his friend’s words.

The party was overwhelming to say the least. Bodies swarmed the crowded living room, reeking of alcohol and sweat. Music blared from a speaker, a shrill, nearly deafening melody that was sure to give Clay a headache by the end of the night. The room was buzzing with conversation, every word drowning out in the loud atmosphere. Almost immediately, Clay was passed a beer, and he lifted the bottle to his lips to take a swig. If Sapnap was going to make him stay here, he may as well take some edge off while doing so. A few minutes had passed and he finished the bottle, discarding it in a bin nearby. “I’m gonna go get another drink.” Clay muttered to Sapnap, who was talking loudly to a group of people he’d recognized. His best friend patted his back in response, chuckling as he gave him a playful shove towards the kitchen. Stumbling through the drunken crowd, Clay soon broke free as he neared his destination. He grabbed a beer, opening it skillfully off of the edge of a table, and turned around wordlessly. Taking a big sip, he hoped to free his mind from thoughts of you. Though he wasn’t one to drink, especially when upset, Clay knew that, aside from you, alcohol was the only other solution to temporarily mask his pain. He’d already drank half before he warned himself to slow down, knowing that if he got too drunk, he’d probably do something he regretted. Turning around so he could rejoin Sapnap, Clay nearly dropped his drink on the floor, feeling his heart drop. 

His eyes met yours. And then, he heard the music. 

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathin’ in your dust.

Clay felt his breath hitch in his throat, noticing the surprise in your eyes as you stared at him, astonished. As he stood there, staring at you shamelessly, he regretted it—everything. He regretted how he neglected you, ignored you, prioritized all of the wrong things when the only right thing in his life was right in front of him: you. Memories flashed before his eyes, quick and familiar, yet saddening all the same. The way you smiled at him from across the room when he was filming, the way you held him when he was stressed, the way you spoke to him, softly, while he was streaming to check up on him. Everything.

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

You looked away, suddenly nervous, though the eye contact was all-too-familiar. You felt your heart begin to race as you processed every detail of Clay’s face—from his anxious expression to the dark circles beneath his eyes. He looked like a mess. But so did you. You mirrored most of his tired, dejected qualities because you, too, were hurting. 

If you like your coffee hot

Let me be your coffee pot

Snapping you out of your daze, you felt a tug on your arm. “Hey, you alright?” Your friend asked worriedly. Nodding briskly, you muttered a quiet ‘yeah’ and smiled in a poor attempt to sound convincing. Seconds passed, and you could still feel the intensity of Clay’s burning gaze as your friend tugged you through the crowd, handing you a drink in the process. You dared to look up, instantly locking eyes with Clay, and swallowed thickly. You knew you couldn’t avoid him forever, not when he was looking at you like that—desperate, longing. 

You call the shots, babe

I just wanna be yours

Lifting up the red solo cup to your lips, you downed its contents quickly, eliciting a few laughs and impressed hollers from your friends. You were never the type to drink, but you felt that it was necessary, especially when you knew Clay was still staring at you intently. Downing another shot, you risked glancing up towards Clay, but he was gone. Suddenly anxious as a result of his absence, you surveyed the room. Nothing. “I’m gonna go get a drink.” You said before you could stop yourself, not giving your friends the chance to answer you before you ventured into the kitchen. You tried to dodge the swaying, drunken bodies as you made your way quickly into the room, frowning upon entry. Clay wasn’t there either. You sighed, frustrated, and grabbed a beer, struggling to open it. You nearly laughed at your incompetence, feeling sadly nostalgic despite the humor you found in your struggles—Clay had always opened your beers, then teased you for being incapable. You fought back an onslaught of tears at the memory and sighed deeply, leaning against the table with your head in your hands. 

Secrets I have held in my heart.

“Hey.” Your body jolted at the sound of his voice. Daring to turn around, you felt your chest constrict at the sight of him clutching your now-opened beer, a sad smile plastered on his tired features. 

Are harder to hide than I thought. 

“Hey.” You breathed. Clay passed the beer to your shaking hand, trying to ignore the way his fingers brushed against yours. Chewing on the inside of his cheek nervously as he tried to find the right words to say, Clay admitted, “I’m sorry.” A few quiet moments passed, though they felt like an eternity, and you replied simply,  “Don’t be.” You tried to hide the tremor that shook your arm as you took another swig of your beer, noticing how Clay’s face fell in sudden disappointment. What? Did you say the wrong thing? You didn’t want Clay to feel guilty, to blame himself for your failed relationship though it was mostly his fault. Why? Because you cared about him. You could immediately sense the despair that washed over him. And, though you weren’t sure if it was the alcohol coursing through your veins or the pure adrenaline from the moment, you hugged him. 

Maybe I just wanna be yours

I wanna be yours

I wanna be yours

Clay tensed at your touch, wondering if the beer had gotten to him or if this really was happening. It was. He soon wrapped his arms around your waist, grip purposeful as he tugged you into him. Your head rested against his chest, the steady thumping of his heartbeat in your ear far more of a melodic sound compared to any music you’d ever listened to.

Wanna be yours

Clay swayed the two of you softly, resting his chin atop your head. You clung to him tightly, shutting your eyes as he held you, gentle. “I missed you so much.” You admitted before your mind could even process it. Clay chuckled, lowering his head so his lips were close to your ear, “I missed you more, baby.” You tried to fight the grin that plastered itself on your face as you took in his words, squeezing his torso with such force you were sure he’d explode. Clay went to speak again, caressing your sides so gently you could barely feel it, before being interrupted. 

“Holy shit, there you are, dumbass!” 

Sapnap. 

Clay pulled away from you to glare at his best friend, trying to ignore the shit eating grin on Sapnap’s face as he glanced at you. “My bad, I didn’t mean to interrupt...whatever the hell I just interrupted. I just wanted to make sure you were alright, but you clearly are.” Before either of you could respond, he left, shooting his friend a thumbs up before disappearing into the crowd. You couldn’t help but laugh at the interaction, noticing the slight rosiness Clay’s cheeks had suddenly sported, embarrassed. “Sorry about that, he…” Clay struggled to find the perfect word to describe his best friend, but trailed off. “Yeah.” You agreed, seemingly understanding what he meant despite his silence. Clay laughed, then. The sound was music to your ears, and when his smile faded, the two of you were serious again. Clay’s hand found refuge in yours as he began to speak, his face solemn as he confessed, “I lied. I can change. I will right now if you want me to—I’d do anything for you.” 

Wanna be yours

You smiled lovingly at the man, interlocking the fingers of his hand that wasn’t already occupied in yours, and pulled him closer to you, wanting him near. 

Wanna be yours

“Deal.”

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon�� or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

[alreadyblondenow]

How old is too old?

Jung Jaehyun x reader // SMUT, SMUT, angst, fluff

Themes: OLDER JAEHYUN, YOUNGER READER, please I’m begging you don’t read my works if you’re not comfortable.

Word count: 5k

Summary: Jaehyun was your father’s best friend and life has it’s own twist of reuniting you again. 

Warnings: OLDER JAEHYUN, YOUNGER READER, BOTH LEGAL AGE, sex, sex, sex, over stimulation, choking, slapping, dom Jaehyun, mentions of other idols, pairing of other idols, swearing,  unprotected sex, rough sex, filthy sex, sad ending, Jaehyun is Johnny’s best friend, Johnny is your dad do the math. Mentions of alcohol, mentions of pregnancy, sad ending

A/N: I did this in one sitting. This is only a made up story and theres no way in hell that this is true. If something about the warning doesn’t sit well on you please don’t read. I would like to thank the anon who pointed out the sensitive topic. I already deleted some parts and edited the fic. Again thank you, and I will be better next time. For the first 200+ readers, I’m sorry if the fic was carrying something sensitive and I was clueless about it but after consulting with some of my fellow writers, I think the edited version of this fic is now safer. Thank you! And if the concept is still sensitive you can message me again I’ll be happy to delete it. 

Have you ever seen someone so dreamy and handsome that he sparkles every time he’s around? Or whenever he’s around he just lights up the whole room with his smile. He’s like an angel or a saint that walks among us. Mr. Jaehyun or Mr. Jae, as you call him, is the epitome of that description.

Same birthday, different age. 

Years later

“Good morning princess, happy birthday”

The sun is hitting your eyes and you put an arm on your head, not minding the person kissing your exposed thighs. Yuta has been your fuck buddy ever since the day you’ve been introduced to sex. He was your first at everything, but you two never had the guts to take your relationship to the next level. Nonetheless, you’re both still scared to lose each other.

“See you tonight?” you said weakly, admiring Yuta’s angelic features under the bright natural light that comes in your room perfectly.

“Definitely” he kissed your cheek and flopped on top of your naked body, “Don’t forget to clean up well, I came almost five times inside you last night,” he said before he kisses you one last time and leaves you to enjoy your morning.

On your way to the dining room, every one that crosses your path greets you good morning and happy birthday. You respond with a smile and ‘thank you’ as you continue to walk, everyone seems busy for the dinner party tonight.

On the long table, you found your mother and father having coffee and reading the newspapers. “Morning” you greet the before you sit.

“Happy Valentine's day” Johnny, your father, teases you as he folds the newspaper. You roll your eyes at him at let out a small laugh, “You’ll love my surprise for you tonight” he added, chewing his toast with strawberry jam on it.

“Another car? Oh, wait. Did you bought me a whole Chanel boutique already?” you tease your father, even though he perfectly knew you hate material gifts.

“Oh no. You’ll like this one” he smirks at you and stood up to give you a kiss on the forehead, “happy birthday, I’ll be back before dinner and before the guests arrived. Just have to handle a few things at the office”

“Why do I feel like you’re about to buy me a private plane” you tease him again and left you with your mother to enjoy breakfast together.

Living with fame and money all your life didn’t make you a spoiled daughter, or a big spender like your dad. You’re always about the simple things in life that give you genuine happiness, it’s always the people around you are showering you with expensive gifts that you’re grateful for but to be honest, you don’t need it. Family, career, and love. Those are the most important things in your life. But about love, you’re not sure yet.  

During the family dinner, as usual, the house is packed with family, family friends, and some people at work. Champagnes everywhere, people chatting about business or whatnot, families catching up, and friends reuniting.

“Where is dad?” you asked your mother, Seulgi while you wait for both your father and Yuta to arrive. You’re not blowing your birthday candles without your dad.

As you chat with other people and enjoy your celebration, your ears rang when you heard people exclaiming that Johnny has arrived. You walked to the entrance to greet your father, and to your surprise… Jaehyun is with him. Handsome as ever as if those years of not seeing each other didn’t make him age.

“You remember Jaehyun right?” your father introduced you to Jaehyun like one of his business partners, but Jaehyun is more than that.

“Mr. Jae, you’re back- is he, the gift that you’ve been telling me?” the question was directed to Johnny but your eyes are glued to Jaehyun, shaking his hands still.

“You’ve grown so much!” Jaehyun knew it was wrong to scan your hot body but he couldn’t resist. He’s good at hiding it.

Seeing Jaehyun right before your eyes made you feel things that you are not supposed to be feeling. He’s not your uncle, you don’t share the same blood, he’s just one of your dad’s business partners. The lust that you felt the moment you saw him scan your body felt so wrong but good at the same time. How can Mr. Jae do this to you?

As the night became more and more interesting, you and Jaehyun spent hours and hours talking and catching up. You have completely forgotten about your other guests, you just want to talk to Jaehyun the whole night.

He hasn’t changed a bit, the only thing that changed in his life is his steady career. The business in Connecticut made him filthy rich because he put his whole life on managing it. He apologised for leaving you and not saying goodbye, “to be honest I’m happy I didn’t see you before I leave, I knew you would be sad and I couldn’t bear seeing you like that. How are you?”

“The same sweet girl that you left, Mr. Jae” you just flirted and you hope he will just shrug it off. “Managing my own business now, I could live alone already but I’m too attached with my parents-“

“Hey, princess” Yuta came out of nowhere and interrupt you mid-sentence. He kissed you on the cheek, enough to make Jaehyun think that he’s your boyfriend or someone who has your heart. “Didn’t get to spend some time with you tonight, but it’s fine. I left your present on top of your bed, I hope you like it”

Jaehyun was watching attentively the whole time you and Yuta were talking, and after Yuta left you noticed that Jaehyun was smirking while he drinks his wine. “Now, I’m perfectly convinced that you’ve grown. He’s not your fiancé or anything right?”

“No no.” you shook your head nervously, “Just someone, who can provide my sexual needs” you added confidently letting him know that, yes you’re an adult now.

The catching up with Jaehyun continues, but soon your birthday ends and everyone needed to go home. Jaehyun kissed you on the cheek and told you that he was so happy to be reunited with you again.

“Oh, Mr. Jae” you blurted out before he gets in his car, “Happy birthday”

Jaehyun smiled so sweetly, heart-pounding, ear turning red because he’s so happy that you remember. “Happy birthday to us”

Weeks after your birthday, you decided to live separately with your parents and move out of the mansion. Johnny was sad about it, but he clearly knows sooner or later he needed to let go of you. While you were putting your stuff and organizing some of your things, someone knocked at your door but you’re hands are full you couldn’t open the door for them. “Come in, it’s open. Sorry, my hands are full” You were inside your walk-in closet, putting your shoes inside boxes and you wonder who it might be.

“Thought I should say hi to you. Your father is busy taking important calls” Jaehyun explained. 

For a moment, you and Jaehyun chatted and exchanged questions. He asked you what made you change your mind about living on your own, you asked what's his business with your dad lately. Both gave interesting answers until the room became silent as you go back to packing your stuff.

He watches you put your things on boxes, but your Victoria’s Secret satin sleepwear catches his attention. Those thin shorts that expose your butt cheeks whenever you bend over, thin sleeveless top that he oh so wanted to remove, the way your nipples ghost on your thin satin sexy top makes him want to pinch your nipples until you’re whimpering.

You don’t know what he needs, but you feel his breath on your nape. His presence is not easy to avoid when he’s directly behind you and awfully close. “Mr. Jae, do you need something else?” You clear your throat before reaching something but he stopped you from moving. He turned you around and his hands are quick to hold your ass, squeezing them gently with both hands, your body relaxes against his chest but your heart is pounding.

“Put your leg around my waist” it was a stern tone that made you follow without hesitation. He put you on the nearest wall and pinned you the there, his hands are busy removing your shorts and panties. Once you’re naked waist down, he unbuckles his belt and released his thick, veiny cock. The place was dead silent and you couldn’t talk because you can’t believe what’s happening. He kissed you on the cheek before pushing in halfway.

It hurt. But he didn’t care.

He pulls out again only to push right back in a little harder than before. You closed your eyes because it fucking hurts but it felt so good that you part your lips and rolled your head back.

After a few pleasurable thrusts that stretched your walls good, he stopped. The goal was not to have sex and had an amazing orgasm then and there. Jaehyun was testing the waters if you’re up to doing something stupid with him. His main goal for putting his cock inside you was not to give you an orgasm but to let you know that letting him fuck you someday will fucking feel good.

“If you want this to happen again, go to my place tonight. I’ll text you the address” he went down to get your shorts and panties on the floor and helped you wear it. He buckled his belt in front of you without taking his eyes off of you.

Jaehyun left you in your room with a confused mind. Questions over questions but you do know one thing, he will surely see you in his place tonight. And because of that, you finished putting your stuff and took a long bath on the tub. Making sure that every part of your body smells like lavender.

The thought of Jaehyun being your father’s best friend doesn’t sit well on you but the urge and the want of being fucked by Jaehyun lurks in your mind. What’s so wrong about having sex with Jaehyun anyway? Yes, he’s older but you’re an adult too.

As you drive to Jaehyun’s house for the first time, you try not to think about the people who will get mad if they know about this stupid thing that you’re about to do. Jaehyun’s house location is so far from the city, away from every chaos you could think of. As expected, his house is big and well guarded. But it feels cold and lonely.

“You live alone? Mr. Jae?” you asked when you got out of the car, Jaehyun welcoming you with a hug. He looks comfortable in his house clothes, slippers and all.

“Yes. My helpers come and go every weekend to clean the house. How was the drive?” He put an arm around your waist before he opens the door and enter his house, it was beautiful inside. A Chet Baker song was playing somewhere around the house, and it smells good. “I cooked dinner, I hope you’re starving”

You thought that once you stepped foot in his house, he will bring you straight to his room and have sex with you because it’s always like that with Yuta but you’re wrong. He made you dinner and the set up is kind of romantic. The food that he cooked is delicious it made you feel like you were eating somewhere expensive.

And just after dinner and two bottles of wine ago, you two catch up some more. You caught yourself laughing at his stories, giggling when he flirts with you, smiling whenever he looks at you deeply. Then it hit you, maybe he’s just shy to admit that he likes you and that his true purpose is to date you not just fuck you.

“What I did earlier is rather bold and wrong, I’m-“

“It’s okay, Mr. Jae. I’m here, it happened already” he smiled as you sip on your wine.

“Please, call me Jaehyun” he smiled back to you.

When the two of you grew tired of catching up already, finally he brought you to his room. He left you for a minute to lurk around and all you felt was loneliness. The room felt lonely, his entire house too and you’re not stupid to know why you’re here. It’s clear that Jaehyun is lonely in his life even though he has all the money in the world.

“Where are you?” you feel his lips on your neck. Maybe he noticed that you were spacing out. But again, Jaehyun is close to your body just like earlier and it brought you back to reality. You can feel the warmth of his body that you oh so crave, his soft lips that you want to kiss and taste. He turned your body around to face him and just like that he kissed you softly as if he just read your mind.

“Is it weird?” that an older man is kissing you right now? 

“No. Not at all, do it again?” you confidently requested, and he happily did it again. Arms around Jaehyun’s neck, kissing each other like everything is right, your fingers go through his soft hair. Every moan that comes from your mouth goes straight to his cock making it twitch and want to be inside you.

He sat you down on the edge of his bed and went in between your legs, removing your laced panties slowly. Dress all wrinkled and just above your thighs, straps already fell off your shoulders making you looked ruined already.

“I can’t wait any longer,” he said while removing his pants together with his expensive underwear. What’s about to happen is, Jaehyun will fuck on the edge of his bed. He pushed inside you again for the second time today without foreplay, rolling hips slowly making you see how lustful he is.

He was so concentrated on fucking you, but he leaned down for a kiss and pull away again so he can see his cock go in and out of your pussy. Jaehyun’s deep grunts and moans are like music to your eyes while yours are like an achievement for him. Hearing you moan because of him feeds his pride and he loves it.

“That Nakamoto guy you’ve been having sex with didn’t fucked you enough” he informs you confidently with a sly smirk on his face. You were so sensitive by this time, both legs folded and clipped on the edge of the bed giving Jaehyun more access to your cunt, explore angles as he pleases. You wanted to close your legs so bad, but it feels so damn good you force yourself to keep your legs open for him.

“Spread your folds for me” you followed and you let him flick his thumb up and down your slit while he fucks you still, putting pressure on his finger and putting his whole cock inside you.

“Too much,” you said weakly, out of breath, gasping so hard.

“And that’s what makes it feel good, enjoy it.” by this time you don’t know what made you cum so hard, his sexy voice, his cock inside you, or his fingers. The orgasm Jaehyun gave wasn’t something Yuta can easily deliver and you hate that you’re comparing them with each other. You close your legs and shiver on the mattress, feeling your pussy tingle even tho Jaehyun pulled out already.

“Good?” he leaned down on you again and kissed your lips, your neck, your face while you two crawl up to the bed and lay comfortably with the pillows. The kiss was full of hunger and lust as if he’s not letting you rest even just for a minute after making you cum for the first time. It was so intense that you’re high isn’t going away and you can feel him line his cock again while he distracts you with his hungry kisses.

“Jaehyun, I need to breathe” he chuckles and gave your request. He used the time to remove his shirt and get you naked before positioning himself again in between your legs that you refuse to open, “Baby, don’t make me open those legs for you” it wasn’t a threat, but it made you scared even tho he was kissing your neck the whole time he was talking.

His beautiful body is on top of you as you slowly open your legs again for him, he tickled your sides and it made you giggle. “Y/n, relax why are you so tensed?” Jaehyun’s arms are perfectly wrapped around your body and it’s making you blush and shy because it’s such an intimate position, the kind of sex position married couples use.

“I’m not tensed, it’s just everything feels new and were so close-“

“Get used to it then” he proceeds to kiss your neck and make you calm using his lips, he was still embracing you and you doubt that he’s going to pull away any second. “Ready?” he asked, rolling his hips a little and you nod your head ‘yes’.

There’s that stinging stretch again because of Jaehyun’s cock that makes your mouth open and your eyes closed. Your embrace to Jaehyun tightens while he thrust in and out of you slowly, but not for long. His thrusts became hammering pounds, that your head hit his headboard already but no one cares, it feels good. “Harder Jae, harder” it was a breathy tone that Jaehyun loved.

You can’t believe that those hard and piercing thrusts can make you both cum in no time and as expected, Jaehyun is wild. “Jae” you call out his name but he chose not to listen.

Tears on your eyes started to fall because of the overstimulation but the man above you sill hasn’t stopped, deep inside you don’t want him either. Jaehyun was the kind of man who will not stop even though your cunt is overflowing with his cum, he overstimulated you, he overstimulated himself. And just like that you both cum again, moaning as loud as you can because you perfectly knew no one can hear you.

That night, you’ve been fucked far too many times in ways you’ve never been fucked before. Every round was more intense than the last one, you never felt so thankful to whoever invented birth control pills because you’re damn sure than Jaehyun can get you pregnant.

You don’t know how, but you somehow passed out and you woke up clean and covered with Jaehyun’s thick duvet. He wasn’t beside you, so you forced yourself to go up and wear his black shirt as cover to your naked body and went outside his room. The house was so big that you don’t know where to start finding him, good thing you found him sitting on one of his couches facing the lit pool outside with a glass of wine on his hand. Body still exposed but he’s wearing a clean Calvin Klein boxers briefs now.

“Why are you sitting so far away from me, come sit on my lap” the invitation made you smile and you walked slowly towards him and sat on his lap as requested. “I'm sorry that I had to drag you into this mess. I’m too old to find someone that will love me genuinely, that’s why I find people who can satisfy my sexual needs”

See, you’re right. He’s lonely. And he got the idea of making you a target for his needs because he knew about you and Yuta being fuck buddies during that time on your birthday. “Oh, so that gave you an idea, huh” you smirk, and raked his hair away from his face.

“Yeah. I'm sorry”

“No don’t be. Clearly, I loved everything that happened tonight the moment I stepped right in”

“How about your man friend, Nakamoto. Will he be okay about you fucking other people? Older people?” he took a sip on his wine, leaning comfortably on his expensive couch giving you a perfect view of his hot body.

“You may be old but you fuck like a horny teenager. Yuta doesn’t need to know” the conversation is getting serious.

“Good because, what we have, what happened should stay between us. It will ruin my career, my job, my friendship with Johnny, my relationship with you”

Ouch. That hurt you. “So you’re my second fuck buddy now?” how can you even think that he likes you and that what just happened in his bed was not just because he’s lonely. How can you think that he longs for you, need you? You scoffed and tried to get out of his lap but he’s quick to grab you and put his hands on your thighs.  

“No no, I didn’t mean it that way. We’re together. We’re together as we can be, but we can’t go public until we found a solution. Okay? Don’t frown, please. My heart can’t bear to see you sad or disappointed”

“Okay, I’m sorry I overreacted”

“Let's sleep?” you nod your head with a smile and just like that he left his glass of wine on the table near the couch and carried you back effortlessly in his room. You will never forget this moment that you two slept in one bed. Back against his chest, arms around your waist, the air that comes out from his nose hits your nape perfectly like a reminder that he’s close to you.

Days went on and on like this until it turned into weeks then months. Jaehyun didn’t feel lonely in his house big house anymore, and your life is complete now because you found love. He helped you designed your apartment but you never stayed there because you live in Jaehyun’s now with him.

You and Jaehyun go on to dates like a normal couple but with utmost caution. Spending beautiful nights under the stars, celebrating holidays together, going on vacation. You and Jaehyun plan a lot for the future, and it makes you happy because you have something to look forward to.  

As you live with Jaehyun, you became the woman of the house who managed everything even the expenses. Everything was transparent between you and Jaehyun, ‘what’s mine is yours’ as he described it. It was like a trial to married life with Jaehyun, and you’re loving it so far. A perfect love story and no one is reckless enough so not a single soul suspects your relationship.

“My business partners are giving me a headache” he complains as soon he enters your shared room and kissed you. He smelled like car air freshener and he looked like he had a rough day.

You continue reading your book and reply to some of your clients through email on the side while you wait for Jaehyun to come to bed with you. Focused and unbothered, you didn’t feel him kiss your legs as he crawls on the bed shirtless and only wearing hid pajamas.

“Can we have sex? Make my day better please” he asks so sweetly in between kissing you on your neck, your book is long forgotten.

“Thought you were tired?” you caressed his flawless back, feeling his back muscles on your hand, he only shook his head and kissed you down until you reach the fluffy pillows. Swiftly he unbuttons your sleepwear, revealing your boobs that he soon attacked with kisses and love bites. You managed to get him naked and he managed to remove your thin shorts and underwear.

He checked your slit and you were a little dry, so he went down between your legs and spit on your cunt. Filthy but hot. Whenever you have sex with your boyfriend, his cock still stretches your cunt like he’s getting bigger and bigger each day. You never get used to is. You let out a soft ‘ouch’ and Jaehyun heard it, “Yes that’s right. Hurt for me baby”

“I’m not tight you’re fucking big Jae. You’re not even hard enough and yet-fuck!” he interrupted you with a piercing thrust mid-sentence. “Why do you always do that” you whine, he just smirked and continue fucking you wild.

Whenever Jaehyun is stressed like this the sex is always rough and wild, and you love it. He pulls away from kissing your swollen boobs and put a hand around your neck choking you well. His other hand is intertwined yours so whenever it’s too much you can always tell him to stop. But it was never too much for you. The overstimulation, yes. But his roughness, never. “Harder,” you request in between short breaths.

You smiled at him before you cum, eyes rolling back as usual. He pulls out slapped your cunt while you’re still sensitive and shivering, enjoying the view of his beloved girlfriend whimpering on the bed. “Why is fucking you one time is always not enough. We always have to go for a few more rounds. I’m so in love with you” He grabs both of your hands and put it around his neck, “Keep me close Y/n, I love you” he said before going inside you again to fuck you a little bit softer, gentler, and slower.

Having slow sex with Jaehyun is as good as having rough sex with him. “Does it still hurt? I’m sorry” but he still thrusts and puts his entire cock inside you making a bulge on your stomach.

“Fuck I forgot, pull out when you cum okay? I forgot to take my pill this week. Sorry” it was something that didn’t scare Jaehyun. Having kids with you is something he dreamed of happening and he’s ready for it.

“I want to have kids with you” he sounded serious but you’re not on the right mind right now to tell him your answer. You want it too, but you’re not yet ready. You still have so much to unlock in your life. If he pulls out, that will give you relief. But if he doesn't, well, you can just hope that you won’t get pregnant.

After a few thrust,

He pulled out.

What a relief.

That night, Jaehyun stayed in bed a little late just looking at your beautiful face under the nice moonlight shining through his window. He will ask you to marry him and live a normal life, he will face Johnny and handle the situation in his own hands. He will do everything in his power to give you a happy life without hiding from the people who will judge your relationship.

The next day, you woke him up with loving kisses just how he wants it. Jaehyun lived almost half of his life waking up alone in a cold bed, but now that you’re part of his life, he gets to enjoy waking up from your kisses and waking up with a dimpled smile.

“Good morning, you’re up early,” he said groggily but with a smile.

“See you tonight at the party? I have to leave early and take care of some stuff at the office”

He nods his head and forced himself to sit up and give a kiss. A little longer than you expected, but always sweeter than yesterday’s kiss. “I love you. Find me later okay?” you nod your head ‘yes’ and kissed some more.

The annual business party that your dad threw for his company is a big event for him, nonetheless, it’s not stressful just full of people wearing tuxedos, gentlemen with their wives, your dad’s business partners together with their secretaries.

Wearing a beautiful Valentino dress, you walk to the entrance with Yuta hoping that your boyfriend will not get mad because this was just a last-minute thing. Yuta came out of nowhere before you enter the party, and you didn’t want to shoo him away because it will hurt his feelings. After all, you two had a history.

Seated on the same table, you and Yuta, your father and mother, Jaehyun, and his date Yeri. As part of hiding, you and Jaehyun didn’t talk too much but he did tell you you’re beautiful in front of your father and complimented the necklace that you’re wearing which he gave you. Seeing Yeri near your boyfriend hurt you like you two just broken up. Like you and Yuta, Jaehyun and Yeri had a history because they’re ex-lovers.

“Come dance with me” Yuta being the music lover that he is dragged you into the dance floor and made you dance with him. You feel Jaehyun’s eyes follow you even though you were busy dancing under the upbeat music and having fun with Yuta on the dance floor together with the other guests.

Jaehyun on the other hand invited Johnny to smoke tobacco with him. Men with tobaccos stayed in a room where they can play poker peacefully and talk more about business. This is the perfect time Jaehyun thought. The perfect time to tell Johnny about his relationship with you. Seeing you with Yuta was like the push he has been waiting for and now, he’s going to do it.

“Johnny, I love your daughter” he blurted out, holding his tobacco with his right hand.

Johnny chuckled and shook his head in disbelief, “I know right. Crazy how she was just a little girl, felt like only yesterday. Can’t believe she’s running her own business right now and being successful” he smiled, taking a hit on his tobacco.

“That’s all true, but that’s not what I meant” the atmosphere was quiet even though Jaehyun and Johnny are away from the other men. “Were in love Johnny. We’ve been together for ten beautiful months now”

Johnny was speechless and he wanted to punch Jaehyun on the face right then and there, but this is his party. He can’t cause a scene. Johnny is a powerful man, he can ruin anyone and he’s well aware of that. So instead of causing a scene, he fixed his rings and told Jaehyun that, “You’re a well-established businessman Jaehyun. I think you don’t need me anymore as a partner and… best friend. Stay away from my daughter” he pats Jaehyun on the shoulder and made his way back to the party again to find you.

“Can I dance with my daughter, Yuta?” your father smiled at you and took you dancing. You saw Jaehyun sit beside Yeri, smiling so beautifully and making each other smile. “Oh look at my best friend, I’m happy they got back together” it was a lie that Johnny had to made up to ruin your relationship with Jaehyun and also his way to find out if Jaehyun is telling the truth.

Johnny saw the sadness in your eyes, that’s when he confirmed it. “How about you? Yuta looks like a fine man who’s been around. Give him a shot? After all, The Suh and Nakamoto company looks good merging” it was clear that he was suggesting you to marry Yuta someday because of business and you hate it. But you smile and joked nonetheless.

“Arranging me for marriage dad?”

“Psh. No. I’m just showing you a choice. Yuta is a good person, comes from a good family, and-“

“And I’m not in love with him” your dad knew he had to shut up.

You thought that the party will not stress you out and you will have a great time but the opposite happened. Now, you just hope that Jaehyun will turn everything around remove the stress away. But no. He was silent when you got home and didn’t welcome you with kisses that you oh so crave by this time. You went separately, of course, he was the first one who got home but he’s still wearing the same clothes he wore from the party when you found him in the living room drinking hard liquor.

The dress is beautiful, but you wanted to get out of it because it reminds you what your father just told you about marrying Yuta. Soon, Jaehyun joined you in your shared walk-in closet but he’s still silent.

“You didn’t tell me you were going with Yuta. Baby, I was hurt. I wanted to dance with you so bad but-“

“You should’ve danced with Yeri” you blurted out. “She was beautiful Jae, you just let her sit in the table all night. Did you even offered to take her home?”

“Why would I do that, we're together” he watches you unzip the beautiful dress and expose yourself in front of him with only the lingerie that you’re wearing. “Okay sorry I was overreacting” he leans on the door, shoulders crossed, and his bow tie is already undone. “But I told Johnny about us earlier”

You were speechless and disappointed, you scoffed and you can’t believe he did that. “Well you look disappointed” Jaehyun was hurt, he thought you would be happy that he finally had the guts to man up and tell your father the truth.

“I am! Because you decided all by yourself. You didn’t talk about this with me. No wonder my father was acting weird”

“What, do you want to hide forever Y/n? I’m doing this for us. Don't you want to get married and have kids someday?” by this time both of your tones towards each other were a little higher than usual.

“I know your intentions Jae, but it's not yet the right time. I want to have a family and kids with you but not now. I’m just starting to build my life. Come on Jae, you sound like you’re proposing to me now“ you still sound disappointed.

He thought that getting married will make you happy, but now it’s clear to him that he’s wrong. “Maybe I am”

“Well, then I have to say no for now” that was like a bullet straight to his heart. It was like saying ‘Jaehyun, I can’t marry you because you’re too old. Wait for me to get older, then we’ll talk about marriage’ He ignored what you said.

“Wha did johnny told you?” his eyes were cold, there’s no sign of spark in it.

“He said you were back with, Yeri” you were removing your makeup at the bathroom with only your robe covering your naked body.

“That’s bullshit, my own best friend” Jaehyun sounded irritated you can here drawers closing loudly because clearly, he’s not happy that Johnny bad mouthed him in front of you.

“I know its not true, Jae. He was just saying that because he’s concerned and I don’t know, protecting me?”

“Huh? Protecting you from what Y/n? Were together for almost a year now tell me, am I treating you bad? Can you say that you’re in bad hands?” it was not a question. You knew so you didn’t answer.

This is your first fight with Jaehyun and this is the first night that you shared the bed without facing each other. Tonight he lost his best friend, and he can't afford to lose you too. But he was stern. He still wants to make your relationship public and be engaged soon. He not forcing it but you know he wants it real bad.

If last night you fought for the first time, this morning Jaehyun didn’t feel your kisses woke him up for the first time since you two were together. That simple gesture makes Jaehyun happy first thing in the morning and now that you didn’t do it for the first time, it felt like you’re going to leave him soon.

The same argument went on for days, even you don’t know how to fix this problem but still, life goes on. Jaehyun tried having makeup sex with you but you just let him fuck you and it never fixes things. He was so desperate and he was trying so hard to bring back everything but it was not easy. All he ever wanted was to make you stay in his life. But looks like the relationship is ruined.

Finally, he realized a sad truth. Sooner or later he has to let go of you even though he loves you wholeheartedly. When Jaehyun first mentioned the breakup you were furious and mad, “I’m like this Jaehyun because I don’t know how to fix it but I never wanted to break up! But you! How dare you to even make it an option!” of course you didn’t want to break up with the man you love, being not on the same page for now in the relationship is not enough reason to just throw everything away.

“I can’t give you the life that you want Y/n, we continuously hurt each other every day I can’t hurt you furthermore. We can’t be together anymore” he was so calm and you can’t understand how does he do that.

The perfect love story you thought is now ending with tragedy. How can loving Jaehyun become so wrong? But he was right, sooner or later reality will slap you hard and the truth will not be on your side. Loving Jaehyun was something you will never regret doing, but it was wrong because he was your father’s best friend, you two can’t seem to find your way back to each other now.

As you finally agreed to the breakup, moving out of Jaehyun’s house was a fucking torture. You see to it that you get all your stuff during his working hours so he could enjoy the heartbreak that he singlehandedly decided for the both of you. It was a great relationship that deserved a peaceful breakup.

Jaehyun went home on an empty house and it broke his heart to million pieces. Pictures of you and him scattered around the house and letting go of you is life-changing for him in a bad way. Together with the happy memories that you left in his house is the necklace that he gave and every cute note he gave to you whenever he needed to leave the house before you can even wake up. It’s as if you wanted everything to stay in his house, keep everything hidden like it always has, like you and Jaehyun never happened in the first place.

Jaehyun married Yeri a year after your breakup and the news broke you. Deep inside you were still clinging to the chance of getting back with Jaehyun and turn everything around but you’re wrong. No one knew about your relationship except Johnny. That’s good. You don’t need to explain yourself to people.

As years went by, you decided to build your life with Yuta and love him fiercely without worries, without hiding, you told him about Jaehyun and he didn’t judge you not even a bit. The wedding made the news of two companies merging, and the whole country celebrated.  

Years after your wedding, you were at the record store buying lullabies for babies so you can listen to it and hope that your daughter can hear it. You’re seven months pregnant with Yuta’s baby and you’re excited to be a mother.

“Y/n?” a familiar voice called your name and you’re too scared to turn your back and face him but you don’t have a choice.

And you’re right. You haven’t seen him since the breakup and he was like a ghost to you now. He hasn’t changed a bit. After four years, you’re now in front of Jung Jaehyun with a baby on your belly and a wedding ring on your finger.

[uristarrysky]

Happy Ending Romance (Rant/Review/Theory)

Plot

I am wondering what the “corruption” was that JW revealed that resulted in his exile. My initial thoughts before airing was that the man had his interns writing his work for him & taking the credit. Something along those lines with abuse of power for staff. As the man still holds power in the industry & seemingly is undisturbed power wise as a result of the reveal though still harbors intense resentment towards JW for outing him. But considering how JW is ghost writing for JH, that theory no longer applies - even if there is a more ethical route for these two, I don’t see it JW ghost writing for someone else if that was what led to his exile in the first place. So what kind of Harvey Weinstein bullshit did that guy do for his “corruption” & not get cancelled for it? I will be pissed if they don’t address what the “corruption” was because it feels like such a cop-out story wise to not include the specifics for the impetus of the plot. 

If they try to wrap this up in a tiny little bow with a “happy ending” that JW could publish under TY’s incapable failing company & they lived happily ever after as a couple - I will learn if it is possible to scream & hurl simultaneously. 

Failing Publisher

Oh boy………that startup is worthless. How long ago did they open up that business? JW’s exile & TY’s quitting Literature Square was 3 years ago. When did TY & WJ open up their business? Where did they get the funding for it? How are they surviving with food, rent & other necessities when their business literally makes NOTHING! Did they just open up in the past few months & didn’t prepare enough funds to sustain them for a while as they attempt to actually publish anything? Or has this place been open for 1-2 years & they’ve been so lazy/incompetent to actually sign anyone to publish with? WJ at least seems to be trying while TY just has tunnel vision for JW. 

TY comes across as the type that wants to boast about how they’re a CEO or business owner but has absolutely no business sense & therefore their business is one gust of wind away from falling. He should have stuck with being an editor, he does not have the work ethic, focus, or responsibility required for running a business. He is so wound up thinking about JW that a tornado could come through the office & the man would not even blink!

Ghost Writing

There are a few different scenarios I can think of for this. 

A) JW & JH decided to use JH’s name & body in order to publish JW’s work without destroying another company & actually getting to publish. They share the profits fairly.

B) JH was already an established writer with a following so using his name for ghost writing would ensure that JW’s work got published & gained notoriety. Whether this is intended to be a lifelong deal, until the senior dies (we don’t even know the age of that senior either) or until the books are so wildly popular that revealing the true author would no longer threaten either of their careers because the work is too popular to exile them. With JH’s mention of waiting things out a little longer - it feels like this method of waiting till it’s too popular to fail might have been their plan.

C) JH hit writers block for his own writing career, sees that JW has talent & has him ghost write for him - using him to gain fame & fortune. Perhaps does not share the profits beyond paying for their rent, utility & food costs - essentially making JW a live in slave.

D) JH offered ghost writing under his name to “help” JW get published but was doing this for the sake of his own fame & fortune because he envies JW’s talent. 

Did JW write ALL of JH’s books for the past three years & completely by himself? Did they write them together? Did JH used to get his own work published prior to the exile? Does JH publish some of his own work during this exile? The answers to these questions provide different situations that have varying levels of acceptability. If ALL the books are completely written by JW then naturally he should get a bigger cut of the profits as JH is only a body double & that would explain how JW could feel like he is being used. If they work on them together under JH’s name then that is probably the most ideal option for JH if they go the “too popular to fail” route as then they both could still have a career. If they both wrote their own books under JH’s name then at least JH is also writing for himself & could possibly still have a career if JW left him before the ghost writing secret is revealed. If the ghost writing is unveiled by someone else though then they’re both in the doghouse of the publishing world. JW still being blacklisted & then JH would lose his career as no publisher would ever trust it to be his work thereby assuming it is JW’s - who is in exile. Then they can both be in exile together, though more likely apart as JW would leave now that their arrangement no longer benefits him. He doesn’t seem to love JH at all, maybe he did once but now their relationship is one of convenience & codependency. 

Characters

TY: I can rant about how much this fucker annoys the absolute shit out of me. In my perspective of the series so far & not knowing the “corruption” impetus for the story - TY is the villain. He is a stalker, he has been told to leave things alone over & over by not just JH but also his partner WJ. He literally has done sasaeng behavior but because he’s bubbly - it’s okay? Fuck off with that bullshit. He quit his job because of JW - a man who didn’t even know him. He made his whole life about wanting to publish JW’s work & started a company for that purpose. He refuses to legitimately consider publishing anything that doesn’t involve JW, he HAS to make EVERYTHING about JW. 

If all of JH’s books were completely written by JW then shouldn’t his stalker be able to tell? He is only obsessed with JW & his writing under his name but can’t see that JH’s books are his writing too? People can recognize diction from their friend’s posts online but he can’t recognize JW’s diction in entire full-length books under JH’s name when he has JW’s first book to go by. He probably read that book several times over but never noticed similarities to JH’s work. 

JW: Without knowing the reason for the exile, I feel like we’re missing vital information which could impact our views on his character. Was he really a victim if the person he outed hasn’t been canceled & exiled themselves? Did he just commit slander against them or was there a legitimate case for revealing what he did? 

JH: He seems to genuinely care about protecting JW from further suffering. He saw how much it hurt for JW to be exiled, he saw how his attempt to publish under his own name resulted in the end of their friend’s publishing startup & he wants to avoid that happening again. So when bubbly insanely optimistic stalker comes poking around claiming he can publish JW’s work - JH is understandably guarded & wanting to protect JW. He offers instead to sign with the company & see if they can publish under his name first, as they have never published anything before. If they can’t last long enough to publish with his name then they wouldn’t be able to publish with JW’s. He wants to test them. WJ is all for it & keeps trying to convince TY but TY’s lizard brain only has JW in mind. 

JW & JH

Codependency is a big issue for these two. JW living with JH & using his name to publish his work. JH using JW’s work if the books are not collaborative in nature & he is not writing his own material as well.  The relationship feels one-sided, JH seems to genuinely love or at least care for JW but JW seems to use his “I’m a poor meow meow, don’t you feel bad for me” to guilt trip JH. He feels guilt for sinking his friend’s publishing startup but doesn’t care that he could sink JH’s career if the ghost writing is outed. Caring more for a friend that you haven’t talked to in years, until it was convenient for you, than the boyfriend that has been by your side the whole time - he really isn’t innocent in all this. If you want to claim that JH is manipulative then recognize that JW is too. JH may at least have good intentions whereas JW seems selfish.

JH asks JW if they should break up, asks JW if he is happy. JW says no to breaking up but as soon as he has an offer to stay elsewhere with another man that is interested in him, one that he barely knows - he leaves easily, now that he has someone else to cater to him. 

JW & TY

TY is a stalker & now JW has agreed to live in his apartment. TY claimed he would let JW write in peace & he’d sleep at the office. He does not do this. Instead he creepily watches him with an insane smile on his face. The man has NO RESPECT FOR BOUNDARIES, no respect for the fact that he is actively pursuing JW who is already in a relationship (sure not a healthy one but at least don’t try to actively break them up to have a shot with JW.) No respect for leaving JW the fuck alone to write & not watch him creepily. 

He keeps claiming that he can publish JW’s work under his own name but the man has literally NEVER published ANY author & he confidently claims he can publish an exiled author. The man has rocks banging around in his head, certainly not a brain in there. He can’t afford rent & electricity for his office - he certainly can’t afford to produce thousands of books to sell. The entire process for publishing takes months if not years to accomplish so a company that can’t afford the absolute basics to run (rent & utilities) CANNOT survive to the point of selling books. Writing a book takes time, editing it takes time, picking out the cover art & artist or model takes time. Then you have to produce thousands of copies, advertise it, see which book stores would like to sell it & then finally selling it. This entire process requires several months to over a year. 

The person who is clearly gaslighting JW is in fact TY. His bubbly & obnoxious smile doesn’t excuse the fact that he is a lying asshole. JW is unaware of the fact that TY can’t pay his bills, all he knows is that TY has a publishing startup. 

[1kook]

subdued

— good boy joon on his bday x fem reader

summary; He could so easily take you over in the bedroom, push you down and ram himself inside until you cried. But it’s the other way around, and he likes it that way. tags; birthday boy joon, solo rapper joon, college student reader (unspecified year/age lol), this entire fic is based off THIS joon everyone look and never forget him warnings; kissing, blowjobs, grinding, unprotected, birthday sex, sub!joon word count; 5k

notes; hoooo boy, if you think my other fics were self-indulgent, this one is straight from my 3 am thoughts... anyway. i actually have the same birthday as joon so this fantasy plays off very different in daydream universe no. 794 lol but i understand not everyone is as lucky as us sept 12 babies so i adjusted it 😌

The stoplight down the street from his building takes the longest. He had warned you of its faulty mechanics the very first time you visited. It lingered on red a beat too long, wasted precious seconds you could be spending with him. It’s been the sole challenger to your patience this past year. Every time you wanted to visit him, it was this same stoplight that held you up— made the sugar in his coffee cup settle, the food in its container go cold. It absolutely dampened your mood.

Today, it’s from the back of an Uber that you watch the red glow of the light, gaze fading in and out of focus. It’s raining, the rhythmic pattering of raindrops against the wind shield hypnotizing you. There’s a styrofoam box of takeout beside you falling into the same fate as all its predecessors, tucked inside a plastic bag. It’s his favorite today, the black bean noodles down the street from your university paired with a sickeningly sweet fizzy drink. (There’s a cheap bottle of wine too, but he was never one for getting shitfaced so it had a slim chance of consumption.)

The longer the light stalls, the more nervous you become. One glance at your phone tells you it’s nearing eleven forty-nine, your last message to him just a few minutes before. It was a slew of sad faces as you apologized for the fifth time that night. Another minute ticks by and you’re suddenly hit with the overwhelming fear that you won’t make it on time.

It was Namjoon’s birthday.

At least it would be for the next ten minutes.

You hadn’t seen him all day, your usual Saturday morning brunch postponed by your conflicting schedules. You had a huge group project coming up, and the other students in your group all had lives of their own, jobs, sports, dates, that made their schedules hard to work around. Namjoon, too, was busy gearing up for the release of his mixtape, a collection of songs he had worked hard on for the better half of the year.

He had been planning for this since you first met, around this time the previous year. It was all he ever spoke about these days, which was both endearing and worrisome. Regardless of how you felt about his avid dedication towards his mixtape, you would continue to support him through it all.

You were supposed to drop by after your last class, but one thing led to another and suddenly you were babysitting your neighbor’s kids as she ran off to the hospital. You had felt bad for her, something about a relative in an accident, and had said yes without thinking through what exactly that meant. Two overexcited children and a kitchen lined in cake batter, is what it meant. Your neighbor had returned a little before eleven, and by then you were really cutting it close.

The order you placed had been ready when you got to the little restaurant, and, deciding to forgo bus stop waiting times, the Uber came quickly enough. Because things can never go your way, there was a small accident on one of the major streets that set you back, leading to your driver taking an abrupt detour that you doubt was helpful, and now you were here.

You bite down on your lower lip for probably the umpteenth time, flipping your phone around to check the time. 11:52.

The light changes a second later, your chauffeur for the evening slowly easing his foot off the break and sending the two of you one step closer to your boyfriend. The movement doesn’t ease your nerves in the slightest, foot tapping wildly against the carpeted flooring of the backseat as you think of that creaky elevator. Will it be on your side today? Or will it force you to run four flights of stairs up to his floor?

You won’t know until you get there, absentmindedly tipping the poor soul who bore witness to the rolling waves of tension that had swamped your body tonight. You can only hope it’s an appropriate bill, taking off toward the front doors of his building. The water on the sidewalk splashes beneath your frantic footsteps, tickling your bare ankles. The black boots you wore that day did nothing to save you, a small gust of cold air trying to sweep up beneath the thin material of your dress, luckily to no avail.

The front area is as empty as it usually is, though you doubt the late hour would change that. Knuckle jammed harshly against the flickering elevator button, you wait impatiently for it to descend. His small label takes up the entirety of the fourth floor, studios squeezed beside meeting rooms and offices. It was by no means a monster record label, but it had gained enough fame from the quality soloists it produced over the years; Namjoon was quickly becoming one of those. The carriage is on the fifth floor, right above his, the digital panel beside you says. It passes his floor, passes the fourth, and then… nothing.

You curse every deity in the universe as you watch it freeze on the second floor. You had been so close, you groan, kicking the tip of your shoe against the metal doors. It does nothing to fix the broken elevator, and with one heavy sigh, you turn to the flight of stairs. It was 11:54 now.

The stairway is silent, off-grey concrete walls mocking you as the time continues to tick down. Holding the plastic bag to your chest, you start up the stairs in a hurry. The rustling of the bag grows annoying quickly, your thighs aching half way up. The platforms between floors provide nearly no reprieve before you ascend the next level of stairs, heaving for air as you turn onto the final platform before his floor. Your hair sticks uncomfortably to the back of your neck.

You can’t fling the door open fast enough, heart hammering between your rib cage. The hallway is filled with blissful air conditioning, nothing like the stuffy air of the staircase. You relish in it for a second before taking down the winding halls, torpedoing straight into the room your boyfriend’s in.

“Happy birthday,” you gasp, only hoping you made it in on time. Your sudden appearance has him whirling around in surprise, dark eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets at his surprise intruder. The digital clock above one of his speakers blinks back at you. 11:59.

The surprise wears off soon enough. Namjoon melts back into his puffy chair, easy going smile taking over his features as he regards your ruffled appearance. “Jesus, what’ve you been up to?” he teases playfully, standing up to relieve you of the bag in your hand, still warm against your chest.

He brushes a kiss against your forehead, placing the plastic bag somewhere off behind him before enveloping you in your arms. “Thank you, baby,” he hums, strong arms wrapped around your shoulders. Almost immediately the tension in your body melts away, oozes out of your skin as you bury yourself against his chest. It feels good to be there, the faint cologne from that morning clinging to his white zip-up.

“Sorry I’m so late,” you murmur. Feeling comforted enough, you pull away from your hiding spot against his chest. The arms hanging loosely around your waist don’t let you get too far, low-lidded eyes staring down at you over the straight angle of his nose. “So much happened today— I’m sorry.”

Namjoon waves your apologies off as he guides you towards his computer chair. He plops down first, pulling you over to sit on his thigh. The clock ticks by, and suddenly his birthday is over. The scent of the noodles fills his dark studio, and you become acutely aware of the soft melody drifting from his speakers. Nothing too developed yet, just a simple piano with a bass drum kicking in.

“Another year, another grey hair,” he sighs, leaning back against his seat. You laugh at his dramatics, running a finger through the head full of silver hairs he’s rocking this time around.

“I fail to see the issue,” you muse, shifting about until you can loop your arms around his neck, pulling his face close enough to yours to kiss. He lets you, opening his mouth when your tongue prods against his plush, doll lips. He tastes of that energy drink you know is bad for him, the one that keeps him up way past his nonexistent bedtime. You should scold him for it, but there’s something about the way he molds his mouth against yours that makes it difficult to pull away and do so. You kiss him for a few minutes, lips casually molding against each other.

The enticing scent of the food you brought over has you pulling away with a soft smack of your lips, lazily grinning down at him. “You should eat,” you encourage, attempting to move out of his grip. If anything, the hands on the small of your back stiffen, keeping you comfortably pressed against him.

“Don’t want to,” he whines, half-lidded eyes gazing at you with that tender look. He leans back in, nudges his nose against yours until you’re moving to accommodate him again. His lips catch yours a second time, a soft sigh released on his end. His body feels like a furnace, swaddled up in that nice white tracksuit, some fancy brand he’s an ambassador for. There’s something about him that’s different today, cherry lips catching you in a daze. He seems totally aware of the pull he has over you, moving his mouth against yours like he knows he’s won you over and was now ready to dedicate the rest of the night to you.

You weren’t having any of that, at least not tonight.

Knitting your hands in his hair, you tug. You tug and tug until he’s releasing you with a whine, swollen red lips shiny from your lip gloss. It’s certainly a look on him, and as he pants beneath you, you’re left wondering why he’s chosen to be an elusive rapper when his doll-like face could easily blend into the idol world.

Another mystery you’ll never solve.

“Missed you today,” he admits bashfully, lips pulling into a shy smile he tries to hide from you. You reward his confession with a soft peck against his cheek, hands cupping his soft cheeks between your palms. Despite how easily you’d been forgiven before, there’s a tinge of a whine curling around his next words. “Who blows someone off on their birthday?” he mumbles, eyes fluttering shut.

You chuckle, tracing your thumbs over his skin. They just barely brush against the corners of his mouth, the soft flesh begging to be touched. “Who spends their birthday cooped up in a tiny room?” you reply teasingly, leaning in to kiss the mole beneath his plump lips.

Namjoon inhales softly, head lolling backwards as you kiss down his chin, over his pulse point. “Was inspired,” he weakly defends, the grip around your waist growing tight. “There was a pretty girl in my dreams last night.”

“Oh?” You hum, slithering off his lap. The floor mat he has beneath his rolling chair to protect his hardwood floors is cold. There’s ridges on it that press uncomfortably into your knees. But all that is forgotten when you roll your hands over his shoulders, kiss his neck tenderly, and he groans. “How pretty?”

Your back is straining from being awkwardly stretched over him in a desperate attempt to kiss the entire column of his neck. He doesn’t make it easier, hips wiggling before you as you nip against the side of his neck. “Joon?” you coo, sliding your hands down his chest. The muscles jump beneath his zip-up, one shuddering exhale escaping him.

“R-Real fuckin’ gorgeous,” he mumbles, hands circling your shoulders. He wants to pull you close like he always does, but you can tell he’s equally as conflicted by the need to push you down onto his cock.

The front zip of his sweater gives with one tug, the clicks of the teeth coming apart following your hand down. He’s wearing a plain white shirt underneath, the beginnings of sweat clinging to the flimsy material. You place your hands around his waist, let the fabric catch over your knuckles as you glide them upwards. The sinewy muscle quivers under your touch, Namjoon’s breath catching in your throat.

When you reach his pecs, he barely contains the whimper in his throat, hands releasing you in favor of clutching at the armrest. “Please,” he huffs, the white zip-up halting you from pushing any further. “Off.”

“Of course,” you purr, pushing it over his deltoids. He doesn’t shake the sweater off completely, the sleeves catching over each other in his haste to feel you closer against his body. The t-shirt remains tugged up to his chest, held up by your wandering hands. “Relax for me, okay?” you croon, leaning forward to nip at his lower lip. The plush skin bounces back, redder than ever. He nods shakily, chest rising and falling.

You place a kiss directly on his sternum, his heart fluttering wildly just a few inches away. You feel it beneath your palm, the way it beats wildly out of rhythm for you. The music loops back around, the same melodious tune mixing with his airy sounds. You trail your mouth lower, letting it mold against the faint ridges over his abdomen.

He’s been putting on muscle these last few months. It’s a sight you only get to appreciate in moments like these. Namjoon wasn’t a flashy performer; he was too shy to wear revealing outfits, not that they particularly fit his onstage aesthetic anyway. He liked it simple and dark, wanting his words to capture people more than his looks.

It was a humble approach, really, because you don’t doubt for a second someone with looks of his caliber couldn’t pull fans with that alone. But as you said before, Namjoon didn’t like that sort of thing, and you suppose that’s why he’s declined invitations to join rookie boy groups time and again. He had worked hard to make himself known on his own, frequenting various hip hop scenes until he picked up steam. By the time you’d met him, he had his own contract, with this same company you’re currently in.

Now he was freshly twenty-six, on the cusp of releasing his first full mixtape, completely of his own creativity. His first mini-album had done extraordinarily well, but there had been a lot of outside partners and producers that pushed it along. This mixtape was one hundred percent him, a fact you couldn’t be more proud of.

What better way to treat him than to shower him in attention like this?

You press a soft kiss to his belly button, glancing up just in time to see those plush lips pull into a smile, pearly white teeth appearing in between, eyes fluttered shut. The waistband of his matching bottoms stretches easily enough, giving you a brief view of the dark underwear he’s got underneath. You let it snap back into place, relishing in the tiny gasp he gives. “You’re acting extra sweet for me today, aren’t you?” you smirk, running a palm over the bulge beneath his pants. His knuckles tighten dangerously against his armrests.

“I’m the same,” he chokes out, eyes rolling to the back of his head when you give his outline a teasing squeeze. “Just… lower please.”

His statement is followed with one hand on the back of your head, tentatively urging you closer to his stiff member just an inch. He’s so polite and shy tonight, cheeks tinted a nice rosy color as he looks away from your lewd expression practically salivating over the prize hidden beneath his clothes. His bottoms come down around his thighs, throbbing cock bouncing up to tap his stomach.

“Oooh,” you say appreciatively, taking him in your hand. Namjoon flinches, a groan catching in his throat as you trail your fingers over his cock. They end at the tip, swollen and red; you can’t help yourself as you duck down, kissing the tip softly. Namjoon full on shivers, hips bucking against your touch.

“Please, just... touch,” he begs, wiggling around underneath you.

You nod, pulling away to plant your hands against his hips. “Have to sit still for me, big boy,” you remind him, pushing down until his bottom glues itself firmly to the leather padding of his chair again. He does so with a huff. Clouded eyes meet yours, so beautifully framed by the blood that rushes to his face.

Despite calming him just moments before, the first kiss against his tip makes him squirm and buck like a wild stallion, your name falling from his lips like a mantra. Eventually he calms down, labored breath fanning across his chest as he watches you lower your mouth down around his cock. It twitches in your hand, one perfect pearl of cum oozing from the tip. It’s barely rolled down past his head when you strike, the tip of your tongue scooping it up quickly.

A little on the salty side, but it still makes you shudder. Above you, Namjoon isn't faring that well either. He groans, hands clenched over the armrest as he tries his best to be good for you. “More,” he says hoarsely, silver hair dangling over his eyes. It creates a curtain between you two, his beautiful expression hidden from your view.

You ease his cock down your mouth. It feels just as good as you remembered. Your knees ache from being on the ground, but you wouldn’t trade places with anyone in the world right now. An inaudible moan resonates from above you, his back going stiff the further down you swallow him. You could practically feel yourself drooling, excess saliva making his entrance into your mouth so much easier. You get about two thirds down before it becomes difficult, lips pulled taut around his swollen member. The tip is reaching dangerous territory now, nudging against the soft spot in the back of your throat.

You could gag, but that would only startle him away, make him worry about you. You don’t want that, not when he’s melting into his seat with every inch you swallow. So you push the discomfort away, focus on feeling the entirety of his cock in your mouth.

“Fuck,” he whines, shaking his silvery locks away from his eyes when he leans forward to look at you. You take extra care to bat your lashes up at him; he obviously likes the sight, his lower lip catching between his teeth for the umpteenth time that night.

When you finally surpass that initial discomfort, his cock wonderfully resting in your mouth and throat, everything becomes so much better. The drag against your lips feels almost heavenly, never mind the fact it would certainly leave the skin around there soft and tender tomorrow. It’s something you’re willing to overlook, running the flat length of your tongue against the underside of his cock to distract him.

You make one hand busy, reaching down to cup his balls. The skin is soft, but tight, like it’s taking everything in him not to bust right now. The other situates itself loosely against his hip, thumb drawing slow circles against the skin. He’s grown hotter since you’ve gotten here, like your own personal furnace.

He’s a good boy, through and through.

It had admittedly taken a while to tame his wildness; there had been a time where he would push your head down his cock the second your lips touched his mouth. Now, he fared pretty well against his own carnal instincts, blunt nails digging into the armrests in order to stop himself. Thanks to this, you’re able to pick up a comfortable pace against his cock, bobbing up and down between his thighs.

“M-More,” he pants, muscles trembling from the exertion it takes for him to hold himself back. “Please,” he throws in.

You appease him, letting go of his balls to grip the base of his cock. He hisses at the touch, hips unconsciously jumping. You hold him tight, squeezing his cock between your palm until his thighs are quivering too. The descent down his cock is easier too, no longer trying to swallow him up whole every time.

It only calms him for so long before that same plea is falling from his lips again. This time, you pull off completely, lazily jerking him off as you rest an elbow on his thigh, chin falling into your open palm as you analyze his figure. “Always need more,” you sigh, the slippery sound of your hand mingling with his little moans.

Namjoon’s jaw tightens, head falling forward until his chin touches his chest. “Would like to fuck now,” he seethes, his t-shirt growing damp at the collar from all the sweating he’s been doing.

“Is that so?” You smile. As you say this, you loosen your grip, letting your hand fall away much to his dismay. “Your clothes, Joon,” you explain, using his thighs as leverage to push yourself to your feet again. There’s creases on the skin over your knees, skin and joints tender from the position. That gets pushed to the back burner as you watch Namjoon finally fight his way out of his clothing, hands stuck in the sleeves of his zip-up.

“Off, off,” he huffs, eventually tugging it off all inside out. The shirt is next, neck hole stretched huge as he peels it away from his body.

You muffle a giggle behind your palm, placing a hand on his bare shoulder when he’s done. He’s looking at you with those same, desperate eyes, stealing your heart without even realizing. “Adorable,” you tease only to watch the blood crawl over his ears and down his neck. You throw a leg over him, his thigh pressing against yours. Before you can mount him you’re tugging off the thin jacket you’d worn that day, pawing it off until only the thin barrier of your dress is between the two of you.

With both knees pressed to either side of him, you finally show him what he wants to see. The sundress you’d worn that day makes everything so accessible. The flimsy material stretches over your ass, sits pretty around your waist to reveal your sheer panties. The sight makes Namjoon groan, eyes downcast as he fights to see your pussy. You return his gaze with a hand against his jaw. “Look at me, sweetheart,” you murmur, looping your hands around his head, finding their place on the nape of his neck first. Your fingers instinctively run through his locks, drawing an airy gasp from him.

“Yes,” he breathes, lower lip brushing against yours from such close proximity. You smile down at him, easing your core down on him. His cock pressed against your clothed panties, leaving a wet trail against the exterior side of them.

He fits snugly between your folds, hesitant hands resting at your hips like he wants to grind you down but knows better than to attempt such a bold move. You reward his behavior with a faint kiss against his cheek. “Good boy, Joonie,” you praise, barely containing your own gasp as you wiggle over his cock. “Being so nice for me today,” you sigh, grinding down against him.

Namjoon shivers, cock throbbing against your soiled panties. “Always good for you,” he groans, a trail of sweat running down from his hairline.

Another kiss is pressed against his face, this time against his cheekbone as you begin grinding back and forth. “That’s right,” you confirm, hugging him tight to your chest, until his face is practically buried between your breasts. “Even on your birthday,” you sigh, stretching a hand behind you to tug your panties to the side. The first glide of his cock against your folds has him bucking against you, a choked gasp escaping both your lips.

“I-Yes,” he cries, hands wrapped tight around you.

You bite down a whimper, his length running over every inch of your folds. It makes your toes curl when he stimulates your clit. Your attention had been solely on making him feel good tonight, that the barest amounts of pleasure to your own body was enough to make you shake. “Tell me,” you pant, moving back to grab him by the shoulders as you run against his length. “What you would do if you weren’t my good boy.”

Namjoon cries at your sudden pace, head lolling back as he fights every instinct in his body telling him to just fuck right into your inviting heat. “Can’t,” he sobs, eyes squeezed shut.

“Joon,” you growl, snapping your hips forward roughly. “Tell me.”

He shakes his head with another whimper, thigh muscles jolting beneath you. It makes you shift forward, clit running hard along his cock. “No, you’ll—“ he wheezes, fingers digging deep into your sides now. “You’ll… think I’m bad. Dirty.”

You lean forward, shove your tongue into his mouth with no warning. He moans, letting you push his tongue around until yours is halfway down his throat, licking and slurping every inch of him you can reach. You yank his head back by the hair, catching those watery eyes. “Tell me all your dirty thoughts,” you croon, lips trailing down his jaw. “Tell me them and maybe we’ll make them come true.”

Namjoon moans. “You,” he hesitates. While he does that, you reach down to align his cock with your hole, throbbing to be filled. His tip brushes along the tightened lips surrounding your entrance, reducing him to a stuttering mess. “You tell me I’m dirty,” he cries, “dirty and messy, and-and you make me beg for forgiveness just to cum, s-sometimes you don’t like it and make me d-do it again,” he babbles. “I-if you’re feeling mean y-you just edge me. Until I cry.”

You sink down on his cock, your shared arousal making the glide slippery and so wet. It’s almost too easy how he fits inside of you, your back arching as the head of his cock runs deliciously against your walls. The sensation of your cunt wrapped tightly around his cock has him gasping for air.

“Until you cry?” You repeat through clenched teeth. “Like you are now?”

Namjoon trembles, hips and thighs twitching every few minutes. He nods his head, but he’s become overwhelmed by his thoughts and your touches, so the movement ends up looking more dazed. There’s a couple tears that escaped and painted pretty trails down his cheeks, one catching on the corner of that pout of his. The rest pool in the corner of his eyes, glassy just like his sweat-soaked skin.

“Happy birthday,” you mumble, brushing his hair away from his face to press a kiss against his forehead. Namjoon groans. “Fuck me, baby,” you purr, wrapping your hands around his neck again. “You deserve it.”

Namjoon lets out a loud cry at your permission, hands tightening around your hips. He wastes no time, bucking into you like a wild animal that’s desperate to cum. You don’t blame him; he’d been close to cumming down your throat, and recounting his demeaning fantasies while stuffed deep inside you certainly didn’t help.

You let him jostle you to and fro, dick slipping in and out of your pussy with an unreal amount of force. He was grunting all kinds of sounds against your shoulder, biting down on the skin like it would calm him. It doesn’t, and you already know there will be a big bruise to attend to tomorrow.

With every thrust, the head of his cock rubs against that sensitive spot in your pussy, back arching at the angle he pushes in at. It makes every hair on your body stand, the animalistic sounds he’s releasing reaching deep into your core.

It’s a brief reminder of what this man was truly capable of, buff arms and thick thighs lifting you around like you’re nothing. He could so easily take you over in the bedroom, push you down and ram himself inside until you cried. But it’s the other way around, and he likes it that way.

Well, you liked it that way too, especially if it meant having this big strong man so pliant under your touch.

“Fuck,” you moan, holding the back of his head closer to where he’s seemingly set on bruising your entire shoulder. “Just like that.”

Your walls clench around his length, squeezing him so tight that it becomes difficult for him to move. A wail catches in his throat, his body beginning to burn out from the initial burst of energy he’d received when you gave him the go ahead. “I-I,” he pants, weakly and unevenly bucking into you. You know he’s close from the cute wavering of his speech, his usual eloquent speaking style reduced to a stuttering mess. You take pity on him, gearing your muscles up again to see him to completion.

It doesn’t take long. A few slow rolls of your hips later and he’s spasming beneath you, your name rolling off his tongue in a series of soft whimpers. He continues groaning even afterwards, hands falling limply to his sides as you finish yourself off.

The thing about this big strong body was that it burned out extremely fast, his head rolling back to give you a clear view of his fucked out features. He was tired, absolutely drained from your little moment, and such was exhibited on his lax frame. Your orgasm rolls around right after, stomach clenching. Despite the shock of pleasure that swallows you up, you can’t help the endeared smile that takes over your features at the sight beneath you as you cum.

“So proud of you,” you murmur afterwards, cupping his face in your hands to deliver a brigade of kisses against his skin. He groans in faux annoyance, letting you turn him this way and that as you shower him in affection. “My baby did so well today.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he huffs, though the ghost of a smile tugs at his lips. “What’s there to eat?”

You snort, pushing yourself off of him. You wiggle your panties and dress back into place, tossing him his discarded shirt as you make toward the noodles. They’ve probably gone cold by now, neglected in favor of fucking like two bunnies in heat. Still, you give them a poke. Just as you’d predicted, they’re way too cold to be edible, a fact which greatly saddens Namjoon.

You weren’t having any of that, especially not on his birthday (it was 12:49 now, but technically, it’s still his birthday until he goes to sleep), which is why you make him pack everything up right away. “I’ll heat them up at my place,” you assure him, patting his bum as he whines at the sudden relocation. He’s tugging his zip-up on, the collar tugged all the way up for him to hide the lower half of his face behind.

It doesn’t stop you from pressing a kiss over where you know his mouth is.

“Come on,” you grin, waiting for him to lock up his studio. He falls into step beside you, grudgingly throwing a hand around your shoulders. You beam up at him, leaning onto your toes to kiss his cheek. “I’ll make you cry at my place,” you promise, relishing in the dark flush that floods the apples of his cheeks.

Copyright © July 2020, 1kook on tumblr. absolutely NO reposts allowed.

[sevlgi]

would it be so bad

requested: yes

group: twice

pairing: tzuyu x fem!reader

genre: fluff, angst

contents: hogwarts!au, quidditch player!tzuyu, rivals!au. [23/33]

warnings: none

synopsis: You’ve never exactly been the bright kind, at least not when it comes to love. Would it be so bad to realize your feelings for your partner in crime, though?

a/n: i decided to make the reader’s house ambiguous lol but i hope you enjoy! (also i realize that this isn’t british english, please excuse my idiot american english). i was originally gonna post this tomorrow in time for “cry for me”, but i realized that i should be respectful to jonghyun, and i will not be posting tomorrow ❤

word count: 5.3k

“Tzuyu Chou and Y/N Y/L/N. Why is it that whenever something happens, it is always you two?”

The Slytherin standing beside you in McGonagall’s office stood as impassive as ever, no emotion to be found in her blank expression or her perfect posture. Perhaps that was a thing that Snape taught to his favorite students-- the ability to wipe any guilt or liability off your face in an instant, to stay steadfast in any situation.

Or maybe that was just Tzuyu’s own charm, you noted as you swayed back and forth on the balls of your feet, turning slightly so that you could view her side profile in your peripheral vision. Merlin’s balls, she’s gorgeous, you sighed to yourself, unable to take your eyes off the girl who had been your rival since before birth.

Instantly, you regretted it. “Y/L/N! Have something to say to Ms. Chou?” the professor snapped, the book she threw to the desk making a sharp cracking noise as you faced her again with your fingers knotted behind your back.

“No, ma’am,” you answered, moving your hand to zip your lips shut. Despite McGonagall’s exasperated sigh, a smile quirked at the corner of her lips; she’d always been kinder than she expressed on the outside, and that seemed to be no exception when it came to you.

“You do realize that you can’t get away with decimating the Quidditch pitch, do you?” The witch sat sternly at her desk, a quill scribbling on parchment of its own accord beside her. “It’ll cost thousands of Galleons to repair, and it may not even be possible to do so before the season begins. The two of you collapsed it!”

Tzuyu spoke for the first time since being called into the Headmaster’s office, her eyes still trained on the wall next to McGonagall’s head. “If I may. I believe I did more damage.”

“That is not a thing to be proud of!” Standing, the woman clenched her fists tightly and you smiled at the affect the two of you were able to have on her. No one had seemed to infuriate her quite so much since James Potter; even the Weasley twins were overshadowed as soon as you and Tzuyu sat on the Sorting Hat’s stool. “I realize that you may think you’re carrying on your families’ legacies, or that you’re gaining fame for your antics, but you will not pass your 6th year if you keep this up. I will make sure of it personally.”

“Understood, Headmaster,” you bowed. Your voice was still noticeably singsong-y, and McGonagall bristled at the tone, but she said nothing as Tzuyu followed your lead in dipping her head. “Won’t happen again.”

Had it been any of the other teachers, you were sure that you wouldn’t have been allowed to leave without a year’s detention, but the Headmaster merely pursed her lips and waved her office door open. “Very well. I expect to see you in Transfiguration tomorrow and not caving in the North Tower.”

And as soon as the (not-so) imposing wooden doors slammed shut behind the two of you, Tzuyu raised an eyebrow. “Did you mean it when you said it wouldn’t happen again?”

“Of course not,” you grinned in response, relaxing into a comfortable slouch again. “I just meant we wouldn’t collapse the Quidditch Pitch again. It’s too boring to do the same thing twice.”

She scoffed and followed as you swayed down the hallway, her voice a bit too quiet to echo off the stone walls like yours did. “Of course. And what exactly do you have next, Y/L/N? You won’t be able to one-up my Hogsmeade stunt, I’ll have you know. My parents taught me well.”

“Your parents were nowhere close to mine,” you sniffed, stopping to wave at Fred Weasley’s portrait on the wall. He wasn’t inside, of course, probably off to bother someone, but you liked seeing the heaps of unused pranks piled underneath the frame as offerings. “Which means that you’ll never get on my level either.”

Tzuyu easily caught up to you with her long legs, the slightly-too-short Slytherin robe swishing about her ankles. But no matter how much she annoyed you, the wintery sunlight shined brilliantly on the planes of her face, pooling in the dark color of her eyes. There was that kind of beauty to her that instantly told you she was a Slytherin, a kind of untouchable coldness that didn’t match the warmth hidden inside her heart. “Tell that to the amount of detention I’ve been forced to do,” she protested. “I had hours last week, while you--”

“Never seen a Slytherin so eager to serve detention.” Fred had returned, leaning on an empty portrait’s wall with a familiar smirk on his face. “Y/L/N, Tzuyu. Any mischief to let me in on?”

“McGonagall nabbed us for wrecking the Quidditch Pitch,” Tzuyu rushed to explain before you, a hint of pride sparking in her eyes when she beat you to the punch. “It’s collapsed. And all my doing.”

“Your-” You shoved her, hands colliding with her arm slightly harder than you meant to. But you didn’t bother to apologize, declaring, “I’ll have you know that I did more. I collapsed two of the bleachers, for Merlin’s sake!”

Fred watched the exchange with amusement, egging you on when Tzuyu glared at you. “Go on, pick a fight. You’re right outside old Flitwick’s classroom, though. I’m sure he won’t be too happy for the resident couple of troublemakers to interrupt lecturing first years on Charms.”

“We aren’t a couple,” Tzuyu blurted, stepping back from where she’d been inches away from your throat with her wand. You stared at her in confusion; when had Fred mentioned the two of you to be dating? “Just-- I don’t even like her.”

There was an all-knowing smile on the portrait’s face that you didn’t like, an expression that must’ve been passed on to his nephews as well judging by how often you saw it. “I know. Didn’t even mention that, really.”

“Yeah, Tzuyu, the hell?” When she avoided your gaze, you sighed and grabbed her arm, ignoring how she attempted to pull away at first. “Well, good seeing you, Fred. I’ll let you know how the next attempt goes.”

“Good luck!” he called out as you left. “She’s a stubborn one.”

You stopped at one of the arches leading out to the courtyard, your back to the students idly roaming. Tzuyu still avoided your gaze, crossing her arms and running her thumb over the engravings on her wand. “Hey. What was that about, Chou?”

She hesitated to answer even with her lips parted, and the bell that rang loudly in your ears served as her excuse. “Well, you heard it. Time for potions, don’t want to fail out.”

She walked off, ignoring the group of 4th year boys staring at her with parchment scrolls crumpled in their hands. But your brow was knitted as you stared at her retreating silhouette, and at the way that she walked too fast to notice Dahyun and Chaeyoung raising their hands to wave at her. “Since when have you cared about that?”

Mina and Chaeyoung were disgustingly adorable at the dining table, but you were grateful enough for their company that you didn’t really care. “Maybe we should get Tzuyu’s ears checked,” Mina chuckled as she took a bite of the cake that her girlfriend fed her. “It’s not unlike Fred to say those things, but it is unlike her to take it so seriously.”

“Right? I didn’t think he was insinuating us to be a couple at all,” you frowned, digging into the treacle tart that you’d been picking at for the past hour. To be honest, you weren’t all that hungry, your mind only fixated on your friend/rival. “Do you think something else is going on?”

Chaeyoung shrugged, lips jutting out in a pout as she thought. “If it was anyone else, I’d think she was shaken up from being lectured by McGonagall. But it’s you two, so I doubt it. Double Troublemakers, aren’t you?”

“Double Troublemakers,” you snickered. “Jeongyeon really didn’t know what she was doing, coming up with that name first year.”

Jeongyeon herself, passing by on Nayeon’s arm, shouted out in protest and threw a balled-up handkerchief at your head. “Watch out, Y/N, I’m not scared of you and your pranks.”

“You should be,” you shouted back, incinerating the ball with a simple spell. “Tzuyu’s not going to protect you from me!”

“Hey, hey, speaking of Tzuyu, shouldn’t you be helping her with a potion right now?” Mina mentioned, tapping your arm. “I think you promised to help her at half past seven, and it’s already eight.”

Your eyes widened to the size of a house elf’s, and you scrambled up. “Oh, bloody hell. Thanks for the reminder, she’s going to be pissed.”

Chaeyoung commented offhandedly, “I don’t think she’ll be too pissed off at you.” But you didn’t pay too much mind, rushing out into the icy hallway and leaving your half-finished dessert behind with your friends. You cursed yourself for not bringing your scarf to dinner as you rushed to the Potions wing; for whatever reason, Snape insisted on charming that specific tower to be at the level of the Arctic Ocean. Tzuyu never seemed to mind, but it wasn’t comfortable when you only had your house robes to protect you from the chill.

The door banged into the stone wall unflatteringly, but the Slytherin girl didn’t even bother to look up from her cauldron. “Tzuyu, I’m so sorry--”

“It’s fine, Y/N,” she sighed, flashing you a quick smile as she snapped her book shut. “Just gave me some more time to memorize the potion.”

As you rounded the corner of the huge table, you peered at the array of ingredients laid out. Potions had never been your strong suit-- you’d usually been too busy pranking Jihyo than listening-- and you had no clue what you were supposed to be making whatsoever. “Uh. How am I supposed to help you if I don’t have a recipe?”

Tzuyu raised her eyebrow slightly at you, tying her hair up loosely and motioning for you to do the same as she lit a flame under the cauldron. “Just do what I tell you. It’s not difficult. Besides, I’m going to be working with Dahyun on this, I need to practice how to give directions.”

“Are you jabbing at my Potions skills, Chou?” you rolled your eyes, taking off your cloak. Despite the chill of the potions wing, the other girl had evidently cast a spell that made it boiling hot in the classroom, leaving you in a normal sweater embroidered with the crest of your house.

She didn’t answer, handing you a plant to cut open inside. “By the way. You aren’t wearing any perfume, are you?” Tzuyu asked suddenly, avoiding your gaze as she ground pearl dust even finer in a stone mortar. “It distracts me, don’t look at me like that.”

“You being close enough to smell my perfume is out of the ordinary,” you snorted in response, sprinkling the peppermint into the boiling water. “But no. I’m not wearing any.”

The thing about working with Tzuyu was that everything usually ended up in silence. Not uncomfortable silence, but the kind that made you focus on the way that the candles cast a warm light onto the wooden tables, and the kind that made you notice the smell of the opened potion books. As the girl stirred in more and more ingredients, though, and as colored steam rose from the cauldron, the musty scent of parchment and tinny metal was replaced with--

A clatter sounded as Tzuyu shoved the cauldron over, the potion fizzing when it met the table. You could only stare as your hard work spilled out of the pewter cauldron rolling on the table, but the other girl spoke before you. “O-oh. I’m sorry, I think you should go. I can clean this up myself.”

“I... are you sure? I can help,” you offered, reaching for your robes nonetheless.

“I’m fine. Go.” Her voice was strange, like she wanted to say something to you but was holding it in, but you didn’t comment on it. Despite everything the two of you had been through together, you realized that you didn’t really have a right to ask more out of the girl; you didn’t know her outside of bickering, after all.

When you closed the classroom door softly behind you, though, you realized that you could still smell the potion’s aftermath in a cloud around you. Kerosene, like the kind you used to blow up the stadium a week ago, bitter chocolate, and the faintest hint of the house elves’ kitchen when you snuck in to steal Tzuyu’s favorite bread.

It was the kind of familiar that made you miss it while it was still here, like a ghost that you couldn’t grasp and hold close to your heart in the way that you desperately wished you could. And it made you stare at the closed door of the classroom, listen closer to the sound of Tzuyu mopping up the spilled potion by hand even though she didn’t have to.

It was weird, that’s what it was.

Momo and Nayeon clutched onto each other as you shined the light of your wand into the dark. Tzuyu was just behind you with her own wand held overhead; you were pretty sure that you could see Sana clutching onto the Slytherin’s arm and cowering behind the tallest girl of the group. “Are... are you sure that this is a good idea?” Jihyo asked, her voice uncharacteristically small.

“Ah, come on. It’s one of the Marauders’ abandoned tunnels, who knows what we could find?” you persuaded, turning back to grin at them. When no one reciprocated, you switched to a pout instead. “Rude.”

“We’ll split like this.” Tzuyu waved her wand between the eight remaining girls, parting them like the red sea into two groups. “Nayeon and Momo, you split, you’re too scared to be in one group together. Y/N and I will go together.”

Dahyun wiggled her eyebrows at that. “Ooh. Together, huh? Just the two of you?”

Even in the darkness of the tunnel, you could see Tzuyu’s cheeks flush brightly. She stabbed her wand in front of her in an attempt to shine the light away from her face, muttering out, “Let’s go.”

You waved goodbye at your friends, being tugged forward by the Slytherin girl and nearly tripping over the tree roots winding through the tunnel. “H-hey, why’re you walking so fast? Trying to kill me, Chou?”

“If I killed you, there wouldn’t be any fun in prank wars.” She glanced back at you, eyes straying to the map that you had clutched in your hand. “Where’d you get that, by the way?”

“Fred,” you answered, waving the scroll around. It was stained, of course, with the pumpkin juice that Sana had spilled on you that morning, and with the ink that you had smeared when copying down the Weasley’s overly complicated instructions. “He said that something in here’s going to help us with whatever we plan to do next.”

Tzuyu frowned at you slightly, still pushing aside cobwebs and vines to forge further down the tunnel. “Did you tell him about the rig we’re going to set up for McGonagall?”

You shrugged and peered down at a cockroach skittering over the dirty ground. “Of course not. Fred may be a legend, but legends don’t get treated any differently when it comes to knowledge about Double Trouble’s plans.”

“I hate that name.” Tzuyu stepped through another archway into a tiny cave, a rough stone throne with a button on the armchair the only thing inside. She flicked her eyes over, nodding her head at the chair. “This it?”

You lunged forward, pressing down on the button before you could have any regrets. “Only one way to know.”

And-- nothing happened whatsoever. Your partner in crime stood there with crossed arms, the backs of her calves almost hitting the stone of the throne. “What’s supposed to happ--”

A strong gust of wind, stronger than anything you’d ever felt before, punched all the breath out of you and sent you flying, the force of your body knocking Tzuyu onto the chair. To prevent injury, your hands flew out in front of you and pressed into the crumbly dirt wall on either side of Tzuyu’s head, your knees probably bruising with how hard they hit the stone.

When you opened your eyes, previously squeezed shut, you found yourself sitting on the lap of the Slytherin girl, her hands hovering on either side of your waist and your foreheads almost pressed together. She looked somewhat shocked, eyes wide and her breath shivering on your lips.

Before you could apologize and scramble off, though, you were interrupted by someone coughing at the entrance. “Dahyun’s right, apparently.”

You leaped off of Tzuyu’s lap faster than you could’ve thought possible, heat burning at your ears when you found Jeongyeon and Nayeon smirking at the entrance at the cave. “S-so. Uh. You found anything?” you questioned, attempting not to look directly at either of them.

“Nah,” Jeongyeon answered after a pause, apparently feeling merciful. “I think Fred was messing with you.”

“Damn,” you breathed out, adjusting the collar of your sweater to be perfectly straight. All of a sudden, it was too warm underground, and the heavy robe you wore was pulling you down into the ground. Maybe that last part was wishful thinking. “Let’s go, then. I’ll go get Momo’s group,” you volunteered, brushing past your friends into the tunnels again.

Tzuyu didn’t follow, thankfully, because you didn’t need anything else confusing your senses with the smell of kerosene, chocolate, and sourdough bread wafting past your nose already.

“GO MOMO!”

You cheered louder than anyone else in the bleachers, maybe except for Jihyo, who was practically hanging off the railing as she waved a banner for your Hufflepuff friends.

Chaeyoung laughed, her nose bright red in the winter chill. Sana and Momo waved at you and all her friends as they strolled out with the rest of her team, hands gloved and what seemed to be 3 scarves wrapped around both of their necks. But you were holding in the loudest cheer of all for when the Slytherin team descended to the pitch, and you raised your voice even more when Tzuyu appeared with her broom in her hand.

Unlike Jihyo, she looked nervous, face drawn tight as she stopped with the rest of her team on the grass. She only wore her usual green robes, wisps of caramel brown hair fluttering about her face, but she was more stunning than anyone else in the entirety of Hogwarts. “CHOU TZUYU, YOU KICK THEIR ASSES!”

She looked up in surprise at your shout, a small smile coming onto her face when she spotted you clustered among your friends, all dressed in contrasting house colors but cheering for the same people. You only waved harder when she stared at you, almost hitting Jihyo in the face when you swung both arms in opposite directions.

And when the game started, it was just as chaotic as it ever was to be sitting on the bleachers. Jihyo, who played for Gryffindor, and Chaeyoung for the Ravenclaw team, were thankfully undivided this time, merely screaming their friends’ names instead of houses. Usually, you were next to someone much quieter in their support, a certain Slytherin who was dominating the field instead.

“And Tzuyu scores! Brilliant Chaser, this one, and gorgeous, too, if Y/L/N would just take the hint!” Felix shouted out at the announcer’s podium, his usually growling voice higher pitched to be heard over the crowd’s shouts.

No one seemed to hear him, not even your friends as they thrusted the Slytherin banner up in the air and whooped. You and Tzuyu both stopped in your tracks, staring blankly at the tiny blonde dot that was Lee Felix. For the Chaser, though, it turned out to be much more dangerous, as a Bludger hit by a Hufflepuff Beater slammed into her right below her right arm.

Everything went silent, a dolphin-like tone ringing in your ears as you watched Tzuyu plummet down to the ground. With the way her hair streamed in the wind, you’d think she was floating, but you were cruelly brought back to reality when she hit the ground like a bag of loose bones, a sharp whistle from Madam Hooch making time move normally again.

“Tzuyu,” you gasped, stumbling back into Dahyun, who didn’t complain. “Tz--”

“Three fractured ribs, along with a completely shattered wrist. Can someone tell me what she was looking at?”

Your nails tightened on the skin of your palms as you stared at the wrinkled bedsheet underneath Tzuyu’s good hand, your foot tapping relentlessly against the tile of the hospital wing. Perhaps Jihyo and Mina, talking quietly with Madam Pomfrey, didn’t think you could hear them talk, but every word of theirs echoed unfortunately loudly in the otherwise empty wing. You couldn’t bring yourself to look at Tzuyu, or at the violent purple bruises all along her right side, or at her frail and newly healed wrist cradled to her chest as she slept.

“I’m sorry, Madam Pomfrey. Sana... Sana and I asked Felix to say it as a joke, we didn’t think that Tzuyu would be so surprised,” Jihyo sighed. “And we didn’t think that Steelman would take advantage and hit her so hard.”

Pomfrey was quiet for a second, and the jagged tip of your nails nearly ripped your skin as you waited for one of them to speak. “I see. Well, I do believe you had good intentions, all of you. I will be speaking with Ms. Steelman about her actions, but Quidditch is tough sometimes. Please, refrain from asking Mr. Lee to play such jokes from  now on.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mina joined you first, her hand a comforting weight on your shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself, Y/N.”

“Who said I was blaming myself?” you laughed listlessly, shaking your head. “Who am I kidding? I am blaming myself. Because it’s my fault. It isn’t Felix’s for playing an innocent joke, and it isn’t Jihyo and Sana’s--”

Jihyo shook her head as she knelt near you, her head obstructing the view of Tzuyu’s sleep-peaceful expression. “Y/N, please. You couldn’t have gotten there on time. It’s none of our faults, okay? Besides, we shouldn’t... we shouldn’t have rushed you on this.”

“What?” you blinked up at your friends. “Rushed me?”

They exchanged looks, Mina closing her mouth when the Gryffindor girl shook her head in warning. “I think it’s best for you to find it out on your own time. Because you will,” Jihyo smiled. “I have faith in you, Y/N. Now, don’t stay here too late, Pomfrey will take care of Tzuyu just fine.”

“Seriously,” Mina warned as she retreated, the sympathy in her eyes the last thing that you wanted to see. “Sleep early!”

You raised a hand in farewell, sighing and leaning back in your chair once they were gone. Your friends meant well, of course, and you genuinely didn’t blame anyone for the incident, but you couldn’t help but think about what you could’ve done to save Tzuyu. There must’ve been some spell, some prank mechanism that would’ve done something...

And just like that, hours passed. The sky had begun to turn back to cloudy blue-grey from the black of the night by the time you found your head drooping onto your arms; you had draped one of the blankets that Pomfrey left behind over your own shoulders, your hair loose and splaying out at the foot of the bed when your friend woke up. “Y/N?”

Blinking blearily, you found Tzuyu staring blankly at you. “Why’re you still here? It’s almost dawn.”

There should have only been one answer at the tip of your tongue-- “I was worried” or “I couldn’t leave you alone” or something normal-- but instead, you found answers to questions that you didn’t remember asking just begging to be let out.

Because the potion that you had made all those weeks ago was Amortentia, and it smelled like the kerosene that you used in so many prank wars with Tzuyu, and the bitter chocolate she tried to convince you to like. It smelled like the bread that you stole from the house elves to cheer her up, and it smelled like the vanilla hand lotion that you bought for her on Valentine’s day in 3rd year.

And she asked you whether you were wearing perfume because she wanted to know if Amortentia smelled like you for her, and Tzuyu must’ve knocked the cauldron over because it did. Because--

“You love me.”

You didn’t expect the jolt that shook the entire hospital bed, the Slytherin girl jerking back like you had burned her with your words. “I... what?” Her eyes darted back and forth as she bit down on her lip, almost scrambling back as your eyes began to shine with a revelation that turned your entire world upside down. “Y/N, what’re you talking about?”

Her fists were ice cold in your hands, her expression unrelenting as you attempted to persuade her to admit the truth that should’ve made sense all along. “Your Amortentia smelled like me, didn’t it? Because mine smelled like kerosene, and... and bread, and everything you like. And you reacted so intensely when Fred called us a couple because you like me,” you breathed with the biggest grin of your life on your face. “No, because you love me.”

Tzuyu shook her head and snatched her hands out of your grasp, clutching the bedsheets closer to her chest as if that would protect her from you or something. “You aren’t making sense right now, Y/N. I.. I want you to leave. Before you confuse me further.”

You stared at her for a good twenty seconds, at the girl who was avoiding your eyes like you had told her you’d murdered her mother. “Wh-what?”

“I want you to leave.” The Chaser’s voice sounded steady, but it wasn’t confident in the way that you knew it to be. There was something lying underneath that made her voice that of a stranger to you, and you obeyed it as you stood. 

“Okay.”

Not another word slipped from your lips as you made your way out of the Hospital Wing, standing on the balcony of a silent castle with blankets still wrapped around your shoulders.

That definitely wasn’t how you expected anything to go.

For nearly a week, you spent your free blocks alone, poring mindlessly over all your books by the Great Lake. Nothing you read actually stuck in your mind, though, the words floating before your eyes in hurricanes of black ink. No matter how much Chaeyoung or Momo attempted to convince you, you wouldn’t go back to the hospital wing; instead, you asked Mina for updates, probably the only one of your friends who you knew wouldn’t pressure you to talk to Tzuyu.

Groaning, you collapsed down onto the grass, flicking your quill away from you. It wasn’t fun devising pranks and coming up with plans to rig the Headmaster’s office without her, and there was no real lure in winning when there was no one to win against. Instead of thinking about the water that you wanted to splatter down on McGonagall, you could only think about how to apologize to your friend, how to take back a truth that you weren’t sure you could forget yourself.

But with the way that she responded, could it mean that you were right? Was it possible that Tzuyu really loved you, and you... you really loved her back?

“Y/N?”

Your head jerked to look at the source of your voice, a crack sounding when you turned too fast. “Ow,” you mumbled, raising your hand up to cup the back of your neck. However, you were completely fixated on the slightly paler-looking girl, standing just a few feet away from you. “Uh. Hey?”

“Hey,” she smiled. So she’s not angry. Tzuyu wasn’t wearing her characteristic expensive robes for once, dressed instead in a pretty skirt that was too cold for the lakeside and a black coat slung over her shoulders. “You didn’t come to visit me.”

Shrugging, you reached over and cleared your books away for her to sit. “I figured you wouldn’t want me to.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” she frowned, plopping down beside you and crossing her legs. “You’re my friend.”

“Friend, huh?” You chuckled listlessly, leaning back with your arms supporting you. The surface of the Great Lake rippled softly, and you wondered whether there really was a squid inside that could drag you away from the awkwardness sitting between the two of you. “That’s it?”

Tzuyu laid her hand over yours, her skin cold from the spring weather. She almost looked like she pitied you even though she was the one fresh out of the hospital wing, and you hated that expression on her. “What do you mean? Should there be something else?”

If you were slightly less impulsive, you wouldn’t be scrambling to your feet, crossing you arms to stare in disbelief at the beautiful girl sitting cross-legged mere feet away from the Whomping Willow. “Are you serious? Tzuyu, are you just going to ignore everything we-- everything I said that night?”

She stood as well, her hands still reaching out for yours and her eyebrows furrowed. “Y/N, I wasn’t going to ignore it, I just don’t know how to talk about it. That.”

You scoffed, jerking away from her grasp. Some part of you thanked Merlin that you were alone, because you didn’t know if you wanted your friends witnessing anything that you knew was about to go down. “That. Answer me something, Chou. Would it be so bad to be with me? To admit that... that you love me. And I love you back?”

Tzuyu froze, her hands faltering in midair. “You love me back?”

“Of course I do!” And suddenly, you were rushing forward to meet her again, eyes pleading for her to understand how genuine you were being. “I meant it when I said so, and Amortentia doesn’t lie. Tell me, what did your potion smell like?”

She stammered out, “B- burning books. From the time we set the library on fire, and the stupid perfume you wear. Ink, because you refuse to use the pens that Jeongyeon bought you, and--”

You still paused a second before connecting your lips, giving Tzuyu time to back out, but she might’ve moved even faster than you so that her hands were wrapped around your waist. She tasted like chocolate and bread, too, and you smiled into the kiss when you realized that she probably stole from the kitchen before coming to find you.

The long, winding roots of some tree tripped you over, your back colliding with the grassy ground with a loud thump, but you didn’t care as the Slytherin girl landed right on top of you. “To-- to answer your question. It wouldn’t be bad at all, to be with you,” Tzuyu laughed breathily, her smile so much brighter than you ever remembered it to be. “I love you, Y/N.”

And instead of responding, you pulled her in again, lips moving against hers for maybe a minute before you were surprised by a bug that Tzuyu held up against your face. “Chou Tzuyu, you devil!”

[my-writings-and-musings]

hello! if you are taking requests, can you please do the oxygen loss prompt with megatron and whirl?

I did Whirl in part two, so I have Megatron here with a ridiculously long one and I hope that's okay! I added Thunderclash as well so I can keep my pattern of two because... I like patterns. I might be getting super into this prompt...

Part One: Here!

Part Two: Here!

Part Three: You're Here!

Part Four: Here!

Part Five: Here!

Part Six: Here!

Part Seven: Here!

Part Eight: Here!

Part Nine: Here!

Part Ten: Here!

Part Eleven: Here!

Part Twelve: Here!

Megatron

·You're in the ship's recently finished classroom organizing lesson plans on your own, having been working with Megatron to try and set up more structured class schedules on the growing list of topics he's begun to cover. You're thrilled he's found a kind of calling on the ship, especially one that seems to be allowing bots to see the side of him you know best. He's made it quite clear in his own way that your assistance in this endeavor means the world to him.

·He's on the bridge, scouting out potential locations for refueling on the next leg of the journey with the rest of the commanding officers. For once there's mostly cohesion in their efforts, and his insistence on choosing planets hospitable to humans is met with agreement, if not surprise. They're on schedule to finish early for a quiet afternoon off when everything turns to a level of chaos even the experienced crewmembers have to call extreme. The rumble that shakes the entire ship is one Megatron and experienced space travelers know well; they've been ambushed.

·You're nearly knocked off the desk you're standing on by the unexpected tremors. While you're trying to figure out what could possibly have caused the disturbance, a message is appearing up on the bridge, where alerts of failing systems and corrupted codes almost make it impossible to hear an alien captain decree an intent to storm the ship. Megatron attempts diplomacy before lives are lost, but the enemy makes it clear; this ship and its contents are more valuable than anything they could offer. While the captain notes their species has heard of the famed Lost Light and its crew, their hack of the security systems proved embarrassingly simple, and they look forward to the easy payoff from selling the scraps of the Cybertronians onboard!

·With communications down and systems struggling through an ongoing sabotage, Megatron still prepares to coordinate a defense, but is stopped before he can begin by a final taunt from their enemy. Their hack of the security cameras showed his fondness for his new pet, a homo sapien of all things, and thus his current concern should be for the atmospheric regulation instead of battle plans. But considering how many dead organics he's left in his wake, surely one more shouldn't perturb him too deeply, yes?

·The line goes dead just as the ship's alarm attempts to sound, signaling an impending attack before it too crashes with everything else. His fellow officers are moving to get defenses up however they can, preparing to get the resident tech experts on the job of restoring key systems while trying to plan a counterattack with no way to reach anyone. He's near to frozen as he tries to message you to no avail, the cruel mockery of the enemy cutting deep in ways words rarely do for him, if only because the implication terrifies him like nothing ever has; he's all but helpless to save you.

·Only experience and an undying determination allow him to break through the fog. Without asking for guidance or permission, he states his one intent; to rescue you however he can. If there are any objections, he does not hear them, and soon his pedes are tearing down the hallway to where he last saw you and prays he'll find you; the classroom. Oblivious to his rush, the only thing you're aware of is the fact that something is amiss, but you don't have a clue as to what. Between the tremor, the brief blare of the alarm and your inability to get your communicator running, you only know there's danger inbound.

·Not having much information to work with, you surmise that the classroom is probably not the safest place to hunker down, and recall that the medical and scientific wings aren't far. As the doctors on the ship have added human medicine to their repertoire, and are hardly defenseless, trying to get to them seems your greatest hope for securing yourself. Not wanting to panic, you push your supplies into a somewhat neat pile and climb down the small ladder that's been added to the desk for your sake. Somehow you don't find yourself at the top of your worries at all. Your thoughts center almost entirely on Megatron, who will undoubtedly be forced into whatever conflict might erupt, and even an unexpected staleness in the air around you hardly registers amidst your anxiety.

·Megatron is still too logical of a bot not to stop every crewmember he sees to give them a brief list of orders. He knows that, without a united defense and victory, there won't be any way you can be saved at all. So he takes the hindrance, though bots hardly take long to move when he issues a command. But his growing fear gnaws at him with a simple truth; without communication, he can't even be sure of your location, let alone your condition. Perhaps he's going the wrong way. Perhaps you're already beyond help. Perhaps you've already been discovered by the enemy. All he can do in the face of blinding terror is keep moving, keep coordinating, and keep hoping beyond reason that he'll be fortunate for once.

·You can't remember the classroom ever taking so long to cross, but that's hardly important, especially with your communicator still failing to function. Reaching Megatron would give you incredible comfort right now, if only to hear he's alright, yet that's obviously not going to happen. Honestly, it sounds silly to really think about it, the human worrying for the Cybertronian... But your anxiety isn't comforted merely to remember he's a gigantic combat veteran, not knowing anything about his current status is all it needs to wander to scary places...

·Closing in on your position, the mech in question echoes your worry, but his knowledge of the current danger puts his feelings closer to panic. All he knows is that he's coordinated a not insignificant number of bots for a better defense on his way through the ship. With better resistance on their side, he knows they can win, because they must. The alternative won't come to pass while his spark still flickers within him. That promise comes to an early test when he overhears enemies moving on the path ahead, and he takes the charge without hesitation, his terror converting quite easily to rage for extra assistance.

·By the time you're at the door you know something is wrong with you. Each step comes with a wobble you can't explain, and soon the dizziness you thought was worry has grown to almost debilitating levels. Why is the room spinning? Why does your body feel so heavy? It doesn't worry you as much as it probably should, but you know it needs to be fixed, especially with the ship potentially in jeopardy. Faint activity from the hallway outside spurs you to finally trigger the door to open, which thankfully appears to be one of the few systems still working. Heavy footsteps not too far away register in your ears just as you're forced to lean against a wall for support.

·The aliens that come into view before you quite unexpectedly are large, tough, and well armed. Most races would have found them an insurmountable challenge, and even an experienced Cybertronian combatant couldn't expect an easy victory against a single fighter, leaving you quite hopeless as you stare upwards in confusion. Megatron is not the norm, and his drive to win is fuelled by far more than just survival, so he feels little more than irritation when he finally arrives to the hallway you're pinned within. More than a dozen mark his path to you, their forms clustered around the helpless human in sick curiosity, and as a result they're heedless to his appearance.

·Hulking forms most definitely not of Cybertronian make tower over your body as it struggles to keep upright, the ceiling spinning overhead as you try to connect thoughts and move your legs to flee. A language you don't understand precedes a slow swipe in your direction, one that you stumble away from more than dodge, resulting in you roughly collapsing to the floor. Something like cruel laughter greets your painful tumble. You should be angry, being mocked like a bug skittering from its inevitable squishing, but God you're so exhausted. It's not even in you to be afraid when the barrel of an alien gun is pointed at your head and the scent of ozone fills your nose while the barrel fills with light.

·A second tremor shakes the ship, but this one proves to be far more deadly than the last. Your would be killers are obliterated by a blur of gunmetal gray that pummels them into the floor, and before you can blink the carnage begins and seems to escalate to unimaginable levels of ferocity. Only your familiarity with Megatron allows you to discern him amidst the flurry of quickly diminishing combatants, but he's nothing like the mech you know in this instant, going for sheer brute force over strategy as he tears aliens apart with his bare servos. In the bloody chaos you can't tell if he's taking damage or not despite the sheer numbers he was initially facing.

·The end of it all is somehow more startling than the beggining. In one final attack he ends the last soldier, quieting the cacophony of battle to leave only the steady drip of alien blood down the wall and his own haggard ventilations. There's a dash of bright energon amongst the mess, glowing in rivulets down his side, and somehow that's what gets your cloudy brain moving again. Pushing exhausted legs against the floor, you try to rise as you cry out in concern, reaching for him before you collapse right back against the solid ground.

·Heedless to his own injuries, Megatron is over you in a single instant, no longer blinded by the fury he'd experienced at the sight of you in peril. All he'd known was that your attackers had needed to die, no hesitation, and tearing them apart had come easily from there. Now things are once again far from simple. The blood on his hands doesn't stop him from picking you up as gingerly as he can, though your impossibly tiny body appears more delicate than ever in his massive palms. Though it makes him sick to realize, he does indeed know a struggling organic when he sees one, making the captain's words burn in his audials once more.

·Guilt is forced down to a minimum so he can focus on what matters; you. He needs to get you somewhere safe but with access to oxygen, and the only place that can happen is the medical bay or the laboratory, and he knows both are quite close. He couldn't care less about his own gashed side, so even if the medics and scientists are elsewhere he should likely be able to rig something up before energon loss impacts him. Holding you close, in a way that will permit him to shield you with his body, he starts moving while he speaks to you. It's obvious even to him his words aren't motivating, but at least they seem to get your attention.

·Looking up at him, feeling like you're tiny beyond belief thanks to his incredible size, you wonder how much of this could be real. Megatron had just hurled himself into battle for you, enduring agonizing wounds in the process, and beaten back what should have been impossible odds... If he wasn't so close you could touch him, you'd certainly think he was just a figment of your imagination emerging from the spinning hallways around you. His deep baritone rumbles reassurances to you as your eyes slowly drift shut, your perception fading around the edges until he's all you can see, and you can feel sleep beckoning like never before.

·He truly has seen enough organics dying to recognize that you're fading in his arms, and seeing the connection between such atrocities and you is slowly starting to tear into him with guilt that refuses to be ignored. How many lives just like yours has he snuffed out? How recently was it that he could have ended your life amongst the billions of others, unaware of what a gift you are to the universe? More specifically, because of this, what right does he have to so much as look at you? The thoughts are a dark and unmanageable tangle by the time he arrives at his destination, where an already overwhelmed medical crew is tending to the injured from an apparently victorious battle. He's near to shock when he hands you over to a frantically rushing Ratchet and simply explains you need oxygen, his hand gingerly cupping his injury before he firmly insists on being the last to be repaired. If he's spoken to afterwards, he doesn't remember any of what is said.

·The medical bay is dim when you awaken, and you see that you've been placed in your own private room when you look about, oxygen mask holding secure to your face as you do so. A massive shape against the wall would have startled you if you didn't immediately recognize Megatron. He smiles almost sadly when you awaken, and while you initially attribute his uncharacteristic weariness to the welded injury on his side, he quickly makes it clear that isn't the case. Whispering a simple wish for your recovery, he excuses himself and makes to leave, and you know that something is amiss m

·When you merely call for him to stop, he breaks, confessing that his relief to see you alive is equal only to his certainty that he's not worthy of you and can no longer pretend otherwise. It takes all of your strength to sit up and demand he stay; you refuse to let the bot who just saved you walk out, especially when you've made it abundantly clear his past is something you've accepted, and your firm reminder is cut short only by dizziness forcing you to lay back. The sight stirs him to return to your side, concern in his optics, and you lay a hand on the tip of his digit in a breathless and wordless reminder; he's more than his past to you, and you made that decision knowing the struggles ahead. He smiles as his digit gently strokes your forehead, recalling that he too had made a decision that day; to trust you meant yours.

Thunderclash

·The two of you are in the hangar practicing sparring, which for your benefit mostly consists of him holding up a training dummy against his palm while you whack at it, and as is often the case you've become sidetracked by conversation over actual work. He's laying on his front to keep the two of you closer to eye level, leaning his chin against his spare hand for comfort, talking about all the little things that come to mind as opposed to the grand topics he's used to being asked about. Frankly, this freedom a big part of what he likes about these moments with you. He gets to just be a bot with interests like any other.

·Your casual chat is interrupted by a communication from the command team on the bridge, who summon him for assistance tracing where a series of small anomalies across the ship might be coming from. Systems are glitching in ways that can't be explained, the defensive radar can't seem to decide if there's something in the apparently empty space around them, and in an ironic twist the message goes dead just as communication problems are mentioned. It's quickly apparent something needs to be done.

·Apologizing for having to cut things short, the massive bot offers to give you a ride to the heart of the ship, which he'll have to pass on his way to the bridge. Always eager to spend more time together, you happily oblige, taking the place of the training dummy in his palm as he lifts you to rest beside his spark. While his shoulder is arguably a more dignified location, you take more than a little comfort feeling the hum of his energy at your back, and thus have chosen this as your travel spot. Between his wound and the many setbacks it's taken to get him back in shape, it's just nice to feel his spark going strong.

·Not long after setting off, he gets the sense there's more to these troubles than technical error, and that something less than desirable may be the culprit. It's not something he can explain, but being more attuned to the subtler things in his environment just gives him a feeling. When he voices this to you, along with the thought you should probably be left somewhere safe, you ask what he believes might be coming. Not because you don't believe him, but you know he only drops his smile when he is preparing for something bad, and you haven't seen proof of any concrete threat.

·With almost comedic timing, the ship lurches at that very moment, nearly knocking the big bot off balance. Only his firm but careful hold saves you from a twenty foot fall. The rumble fades off with something like a great dragging sensation through the ship, which you'd compare to a Manhattan sized car grinding to a halt. Now cupping you in both hands, Thunderclash asks earnestly if you're alright, to which you reassuringly reply that a little turbulence isn't enough to do any damage.

·Smiling at the fortitude of your tiny body, he begins walking straight away, shifting to strategy as his red optics narrow in contemplation. He explains that the particular nature of that shake confirmed his suspicions something is planning an attack. Rather, they're initiating an attack. The sensation of a ship being locked to another and anchored is a particular one, and combined with their systems crashing it's obvious an enemy has come prepared to strike for a well planned ambush.

·You see that he's worrying, but you say nothing of it, taking hold of his thumb to communicate support. Being with him in private has made it clear his existence as a perpetual source of strength for others exhausts him, so you've since committed to acting as his well of certainty in difficult times. Not letting your fear bleed in to your words, you instead ask what the two of you should do, confirming your own communicator is uselessly jammed as you do so.

·Moving through the ship at considerable speed with his long legs, he decides that you'll still need to be secured rather quickly, as enemy combatants are probably already storming the ship or preparing to do so. You'd debate him if you weren't well aware of the logic in his plan. No matter what the enemy is, you won't stand much of a chance in a full on brawl, as anything confident enough to attack a Cybertronian starship is likely to have the firepower to back itself up. Still, it's impossible not to be dissapointed by your inability to offer aid, though it's probably for the best as you're rather exhausted from sparring anyway.

·It happens in a blur, but that's partly because of the shocking reaction time of the bot carrying you, something few would expect due to his size. Thunderclash registers the threat as soon as he turns the corner, a feat aided by the very much not Cybertronian appearance of the figures he sees, and then made far easier by the multiple clicks of weapons preparing to fire. Your presence in his hands became his central point of focus in that instant. Turning on the spot, he allowed the first hail of bullets to strike his armored back, keeping you well out of the line of fire before ducking behind an opposite corner for cover. The sting of the gunfire matters little when he sees you safe in his hands, and less when he instructs you to stay low after setting you down and charging in to fight.

·In the heat of it all, you're embarrassed to be caught so frazzled, as this is hardly your first exposure to alien combat. But there's little time to admonish yourself when chaos unfolds just around the corner, and your tiny size permits a small peek... Thunderclash is the gentlest giant in the world to you, but in just a few blinks the hulking aliens are on the losing front, and while his fighting style is far from gratuitous it is effective. You're still trembling from the rush of the initial shock when the last enemy of the group is on the floor, but even with your shaky vision you can see your bot is unharmed. For a moment that little burst of relief supersedes everything else.

·In usual fashion though, he expresses worry for you when he returns to pick you up from where he left you, drawing an affectionate chuckle from you at how impossibly selfless this mech can be. But he doesn't back down from the question like he usually does. His expression of concern intensifies as he starts moving again, and his sharp optics find ample to worry about on your seemingly unharmed body, with particular attention being paid to your face. Those brilliant eyes of yours are well known to him, and so he can tell something is... off in their beautiful depths. Even if his medical studies focus very little on organics, he's able to recognize the signs of a body struggling, and your paleness combined with the way you labor for each breath tells him something is very wrong.

·Now in a race against time, he has no choice but to move, gunning it towards the ship's tech wing where the laboratories and medical bay are located. He doesn't yet know what's wrong with you for certain, but aid will be there if it's anywhere to be found. There's no time to be wasted in securing you somewhere either, he's going to have to face any threats as they come in the moment whilst ensuring your protection in the process. It's a set of circumstances he's encountered before in his long and eventful time as a soldier, but there's an entirely new variable this time around; you. He adores you, like no one he's ever met before, and perhaps it's selfish but the very thought of losing you... he's not sure his spark could take it.

·The soothing tone of his voice and the rhythmic thumping of his footsteps make it surprisingly difficult for you to heed his requests to stay as awake as possible. Even though your breaths are coming in with difficulty, it seems like sleep would be a fantastic idea at the moment, even if only to rest your eyes. His cupped hands just support your body so nicely, and are so warm, and his voice is so delightfully melodic. Why does he seem so intent on keeping you conscious? Why does he look so incredibly upset to see you struggling to keep your eyes open?

·The pathway he chooses is mercifully free of conflict at first, but that matters little due to your rate of deterioration, as you may not make it even at his full speed. Driving isn't an option due to his need to be combat ready, and the lack of options and hope is absolutely tearing him apart. He hasn't had someone like you in his life before, and the desperation in his voice begins to show that, cracking as he loses his steadfast control of his usually impervious wall of confidence. The selfishness of his desire kills him; how dare he put his own feelings on you due to his weakness? Begging you to survive for his sake?

·No amount of haze can prevent you from startling at his pain. There are tears in his optics, though he doesn't even seem to notice them, letting them fall down his face as he pleads. In the warm fog clouding your brain, you feel a surge of worry, and your hand instinctively grabs at his nearest digit to give it a squeeze. Before you can even offer a breathless reasurance, he ceases running and dives from gunfire that seems to erupt from nowhere, laying you in a tiny maintenance crevice before hurling himself at the second delay he knows you don't have time for. The last thing you see before drifting off is the grief in his optics that you wish you'd been able to comfort...

·While his combat skills always make things quick, in this blur of pain and rage he's downright brutal, ending each foe swiftly but with absolute contempt for their existence clear in every torn limb. Hits to his own frame don't register at all. Bullets and blades mean nothing in the face of what he's about to lose, and the vengeance fueling his strength turns foes into scattered body parts more effectively than any grenade ever could. By the end of it all he's likely set a record for the swiftness of his takedown, but it matters as little as his multitude of bleeding wounds. All he can see is your now limp body as he pulls it from the hiding spot, and his vision narrows to only your faintly moving chest and his pedes moving one past the other through the carnage.

·There's a mass of activity in the technology wing, likely due to injuries as well as the many bots ordered to stand guard in the event of battle, but he doesn't hear the reaction his arrival triggers in the slightest. His sharp processor is reduced to one goal, and anything unrelated doesn't exist. At the sight of the crowded medical bay he starts to strategize. Ratchet appears in his vision, first focusing only on his obvious injuries and the alien blood he didn't know was spattered across his frame, before well trained optics catch sight of the tiny human limp in his hands.

·There's a rush of an explanation; they think one of the systems downed was the atmospheric generators, resulting in a loss of the oxygen the ship maintains for your needs. It's all the information Thunderclash needs to act. Brushing off any help for himself and encouraging the more egregiously wounded to be tended first, he requests only to be provided what you need. Busy tending the injured, medics still assist him getting a supply of oxygen going where they can, with Ratchet using his particular knowledge of human anatomy to ensure the ratio is correct for your biology while Thunderclash prepares it all. Dexterous hands set you on a medical slab where an oxygen mask and scanner are used to return your blood oxygen to normal, and just like that, he knows you'll eventually be okay...

·By the time you wake up your tiny frame has been moved to a private room, both to keep you from the chaos of crammed in bots and to give the two of you privacy from adoring admirers. He's beside you, his wounds patched but his frame still dirtied with blood, a sight that shocks you enough to force a gasp into your mask. Perking up the instant he hears you, the hulking mech is as close as the berth allows in a flash. A stream of questions about your wellbeing passes his lips before you can get a word in. Between the dried blood, the patched wounds, and the faint discoloration of his optics that suggests recent weeping... It's hard to know what to ask him, so you vaguely request a rundown of what happened.

·His face falls, and in between recounts of alien attacks and near death experiences there's overwhelming self depreciation. To hear him tell it the entire affair might as well be his fault. You've always known him to be humble, even critical of his actions, but this borders on self destructive. Worse, the crux of his crisis seems to be that he was motivated to save you not just by duty, but by his selfish desire to protect the one he loved so dearly and can't bare to lose. His own desires are inexcusable in these things, as he puts it, and could have hindered him at your expense. Shaky arms rise so that you can grab the nearest part of him, a digit once again, as you encourage him to stop tormenting himself. You owed him your life, several times over just for today alone, and there wasn't a bot in existence less selfish than he. The kindness of his spark was what you'd fallen in love with, and what you still loved now, because he was more than a legend to you. You loved Thunderclash the bot, not the expectation everyone else had built around him, and thus he'd always be enough just by being himself. Finally relaxing after everything, and his spark singing at your ability to become his rock when he needs one, he allows himself to just rest and exist as he is. Laying his helm on the berth beside you, he nuzzles close, allowing himself to feel simple gratitude to have and love you as you do him.