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latenightdecaf · 3 years ago

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Entry 7 - Summer of Vulnerability

part of let the pile of good things grow series - series masterlist

previous entry here

Yoongi x reader

Ft. nonidol!bts (glimpse of ex-boyfriend!namjoon)

Producer!yoongi, roommate!yoongi, soft!yoongi

slow burn romance, friendship, slice of life

series of drabbles/one shots

warnings: alcohol consumption

a/n: okay so here goes y/n remembering his ex!joon also will never get over of in the soop yoongi! can’t wait for the new season. Thank you guys for reading! 🙈

word count: 2,546

Went home from the grocery and some of their wines are on sale so you got carried away and bought 8 bottles and to your surprise, Yoongi’s cooking steak. “oh my God!” You exclaimed as soon as you saw him cooking in the kitchen with paperbag of wines in your arms. Yoongi looked at you with a confused face.

“Did you just read my mind or what??! There’s a sale on the corner deli and…” raising both of your hands as if surrendering, “okay don’t judge me yet but i got a little carried away.”

“A little carried away? You looked like the world’s going to run out of wine tomorrow.”

He smiled on your disclaimer and shaking his head as he paid his attention back to his steak.

“No.” You sighed. “Nothing went my way today, not at all—but i dont want to think about it. I’m psyching myself out of it you see, or better yet i’m drowning myself on these babies.” As you drank your first glass empty. “My eternal companion, the love of my life…”

He turned to your direction, only to see you hugging the bottles of wine that you bought.

“Come on clear the tables, your babies are not going anywhere.” He declared as he puts down 3 steaks and some aglio olio with honestly way too much garlic because it’s Yoongi.

“I didn’t saw you made pasta also. I am so happy now.” You happily exclaimed as you took a bite of your new favorite steak. “But why the 3 steaks? You hungry?”

He sat in front of you, filling your glass with wine and his too.

“You need food before you chug them all up. I’m not gonna clean up your mess. So you better get it together today. I tell you.” He scolded you.

“Sure sure.” As you immediately devour the pasta he made.

One bottle of wine down. He let you listened to a ‘sketch’ he’s been working on lately. Carefully studying your already flushed face for any reaction. He does this sometimes, ask for your opinion even though you have zero idea about music and producing or anything related to that for that matter.

All he considers is whether you winced at the melody of it, or you nod and eventually smile as it goes. But this time you’re just staring blankly in your wine glass, circling it repeatedly as the sketch ended at exactly 2 mins and 19 secs. And when it ended you looked straight at him.

“This looks like it’s almost done right?” You commented. “Yeah.” As he gulps on his wine, emptying another glass.

“And you wrote the lyrics also?” He nodded.

You looked away and sighed. “It’s too beautiful—Sad and in pain, feels tormented also but beautiful.”

He blinked several times at your words. You’ve heard several of his sketches before and you’d just always say, ‘it sounds good, but Yoongi—i have no idea about music. Zero.’ But he’d let you hear it anyway for couple more times and he’d smile at your ignorant reactions.

This time however, doesn’t seem like a laughing matter. Something about your words got his heart beating faster and he has no idea if its just the amount of alcohol he has consumed by now or just you.

You clinked on his empty glass. And asked, “You want more?” He nodded. And you poured him another. “Remember the girl, I introduced to you before?” You stopped and think for a second and it dawned to you. “Hell yeah, I remember.”

“She’s actually my ex-girlfriend.” He declared.

“Well that I did not expected. The ex part. I can tell though she looks really special.”

“Well, we’re together for a while. But now we’re just co-workers for this debut song of a girl I told you about before. That’s why she was here also the last time, we were looking through old sketches that I have after the meeting. We actually finished that quite early. ”

He never really talked that much about himself. He’s good at talking about work, which for you is already more than enough. You know that despite your living situation, he’s not really obligated to get personal if he doesnt want to. And besides, you also don’t want to. Your end of the rope for sure is scared of any form of vulnerability anyway—so you’re not expecting or demanding that from anybody else.

“So you’re just co-workers now?”

“Yeah, I think so. I really don’t know what I feel.”

“Well, relationships are messy my friend.” Raising your glass of wine as if to cheers and chugging it in one go.

Not sure of what to say next but he looks like he’s in mood to talk but the topic looks too sensitive to even crack a joke so you continued drinking despite the eerie atmosphere.

“If you dont mind me asking, what happened?” Yes, despite your immense effort to hold yourself back. Like any other novel you read, you have this eager feeling to know how it ends. Your mind is literally shouting, ‘But I gots to know!!’

And so you asked. Half fearing for your life for being too nosy and half expecting that you might be up for a good story. Elbows resting on the table, with your chin at the palm of your hand looking eager to hear the story.

“We’ve been together for a while”

“Yeah, you said that already.. and that she’s a song writer. I figured.” Unconsciously saying your thoughts out loud.

“You wanna tell the story instead?” He teasingly reacted in a straight face.

“I didn’t mean to say that out loud… I literally said that in my mind and my mouth just burst it open. They both can’t coordinate that well. I’m sorry. You may continue…sir. Please don’t cut my head off.” You love teasing him.

“You’re drunk.” He was pointing out the obvious by that time, after two bottles of wine.

“Yes she’s a songwriter. They said before thay she’s the words to my melody. Well… before.”

Something about those words just made your heart ache. Frowning in his words you continue to listen.

“We’re together for about 2 years? And then on and off after…. She cheated on me, slept with another producer from another company. I really thought that was the end but after that i still accepted her. I don’t know why.”

“Aigoo you dumbass solider of love. And then??” Continuously frowning in frustration led you to keep on drinking.

He has no plans of actually telling this story tonight, it just poured out. You’re just one of those people that actually listens. He has seen you before, how intensely you focus on a movie or in a book that it bothers you for day. You love hearing stories and your willingness felt like a safe space for his unspoken scars.

“She keeps coming back to me and I keep accepting her. That’s it.”

With a confused look on your face, “I don’t get it.”

“Like you said, relationships are messy.” He’s obviously trying to close the topic already but that’s not going to stop you—you never stop midway of the story. This is not how it ends.

“Messy is one thing, toxic is another. And since when are you a coward? You don’t strike me as one. Really.” ‘Yeah i was.’ Yoongi thought in his head. Words are just literally pouring out of your mouth by now, drowning yet another glass. Yoongi opening your forth bottle.

“Boy, I bought the wrong alcohol tonight, tequila would’ve been perfect.” You declared as he pours you a refill. He laughed at this comment, he kept wondering sometimes how easy it is for you to make him laugh.

“No but all kidding aside… Hard question coming in, Min Yoongi. Do you still love her?” Looking right at his eyes and him staring back at you as he answered. “No, we broke up a month before I moved in here.”

‘That’s quite a while, at least 9 or 10 months now…’ you thought to yourself

“Yeah but having been broken up doesn’t mean that love is gone. It’s not a switch you know.”

“I know. And I wish it was, she’s was a big part of my life I’m not denying that and maybe she always will be. But I’ve changed, she has changed—we’re no longer the same people that we were in the same relationship where I keep questioning my self worth. That’s done now, over. Love took a turn, and it doesn’t look the same anymore. We’re just co-workers now that’s all.”

You like the way he said it. Being no longer the same people that they were. You nodded in his statement not sure what to say next and also feeling a little dizzy.

“I gotta pee.” You suddenly declared and stood up, ran in small steps to the bathroom with Yoongi smiling at you and shaking his head.

And when you got back, he got you a warm water on your favorite mug.

Your thoughts are all over the place when you’re drunk, like you said—your mouth just spills it all out.

“You know what, this is all very brave of you. Being friends with your ex, I can’t imagine.”

“Why? Can’t you?” Staring blankly and holding onto your mug, eyes blinking fast in this question.

“I’m not sure. I’ve never really done it before, I’ll let you know if I can.”

You’ve been staring hard on your mug contemplating on his question. He gently touched your hand that’s been holding your mug and said, “Just drink your water.” And pulled it away as soon as you looked like your soul has comeback to earth.

“Can’t I…?” You repeated the question again, and this time out loud.

Hands underneath your chin and resting your elbows on the table. Yoongi is just staring at you, hands in his cheeks—thumb underneath his chin, not even sure if you can even see him. “I hate your question.” You looked at his eyes this time and said that and he just smiled and when he did, you narrowed your eyes. “I hate your smile too.” And this time, he gave you an even bigger one, those gummy smile. And whenever he smiles at you like that you just can’t help but grin in return.

You chugged the water and showed him your empty mug.

He got up and put the rest of the unopened bottle of wine back to the fridge just to prevent you from opening yet another. With his back facing you, arranging the couple of bottles left unto your fridge.

“Yoongi-ah, I know and I love how we respect each other’s privacy and all but just in case things get too heavy. I’m always here, you know. I mean, I’m really glad about today.”

He looked back at you, hands underneath your chin again and eyelids looking all heavy.

“Same goes for you, I’m always here…” And he turned his back again, “fixing you some food and light bulbs.”

And that statement made you smile. “Indeed, my friend. Indeed.”

He went back to the table and grabbed your wine glass and emptying it for you.

“So you wanna talk about how nothing went right today?” You sighed with your eyes closed.

“Maybe next time, my friend.” You stood up from the dinning table, offered to clean the rest of the dishes but Yoongi insisted that he’d do it instead. So you just nodded and slowly creep back into your room.

“Thanks for today, Yoongi.” You thanked him before you go, peeking behind the wall near the counter and he just smiled at you, cleaning gloves on and started washing the dishes.

Minutes later, you shouted from inside of your room.

“Hey i’ll be in the bathroom for a while. Hope you’re already done using it.”

Yoongi didnt answer. He’s already in his room.

You sat in the tub filled with water that is too hot for anyone else but not for you. Head all dizzy and pounding. It’s 2 am and nothing is more comforting than the silence of it all. Alcohol keeps you awake, more than coffee ever does. The dizziness, the feeling that is drilling in your head, makes it hard for you to sleep. Despite the fact that you always drink. You always drink on an empty stomach though, just so you’re sure you would pass out and not have a hard time sleeping.

But tonight you can’t say no—Yoongi made dinner and as much as you hate how you’re having a hard time now you don’t regret it. The question he said, still lingers. And you know your answer to this, you can’t.

Along with the headache, comes the memories you rarely remember—there are just some special days where somehow the guilt and regret still comes to you in waves, together with conversations you long to let go.

“You can’t be serious?” Joon said, voice cracking with hand on his hair in frustration. “But I am.” With a straight face you answered, “I can’t marry you, Joon. I don’t want to have kids and I know how much you want to have children.” Feeling the desperation in his face and actions, he held your hands close and hugged you. “I love you, I want to marry you. We don’t need to have kids immediately, that’s years away. We don’t have to even worry about that now.” It hurts you to seem him this way, yes both of you may be young—maybe you will change your mind but there’s no guarantee to it. You held onto his shoulder to see his face, tears kept rolling down his face and you keep wiping it off one by one. You’ve thought about this even just a year into the relationship, with all the dad jokes and tiny little shoes he kept in his room. He’s going to be a wonderful dad you thought—maybe not just to your kids because you don’t want one.

The most wonderful man in the world just asked you to marry him a few minutes ago, and now he’s crying on your shoulder in defeat. While you can’t even bring yourself to cry, everything about this just made you numb. You just know you’re doing the right thing. Keeping him by your side with a promise of a future you can’t guarantee is not what love is. You loved him—even much so that you could ever admit.

With the knock on the door, you went back to reality.

“Hey you in there?” His voice echoing at 2 in the morning.

“Yeah, I’ll be here still for a while. You need it?”

“No, it’s okay.” He quietly said, as you heard his footsteps getting farther away.

moodboard sr: x

#bts fanfiction #bts fanfic #bts fluff #bts imagine #bts scenarios #bts roommate au #yoongi fics #yoongi fluff #yoongi x reader #yoongi scenarios #yoongi imagine #roommate!yoongi #producer!yoongi #namjoon imagine #namjoon scenarios #exboyfriend!joon

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harvardfineartslib · 3 years ago

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In honor of Universal Letter Writing Week, we’ll post some letters written by Vincent van Gogh. A prolific letter-writer, he wrote more than 2,000 letters in his life, of which 819 survived and are preserved in the collections at Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Below is a translation of letter 421, which Van Gogh wrote to Antoine Philippe Furnée, who was a surveyor due to leave for Batavia on March 14, 1884. The image shown here is a page where van Gogh included his sketches.

My dear friend Furnée,

This morning I received your letter telling me of your rapidly approaching departure for the Indies.

Little had I thought that this would be happening so soon. I sincerely hope that you will be able to feel at home in the Indies. Perhaps you will find this easier now than if you had stayed in Holland for a long time first, and had painted a lot in Holland. Then, once one is wholly and entirely immersed in the grey sadness here, one might perhaps find it difficult to get to grips with the nature of the East Indies.

But in the circumstances, if you now try to get to grips completely with nature over there, I think that you will succeed in doing so. And who knows what curious, picturesque things you will find there.

Many French and other painters profited by going to Algiers or Egypt, and I imagine that the Indies must produce somewhat similar effects.

In the last few years, for instance, several painters went to China and Japan, and I saw very fine things from those countries.

It pleases me so much that you are still keen to paint, and I believe that provided you persevere you can go a very long way.

Especially because you will always have to be outdoors a great deal in your job.

Things are going quite well for me here in Brabant, anyway I find the countryside here very stimulating.

Now, in these last few weeks I have made 4 watercolours of Weavers. And a few others of a timber sale, an interior with a seamstress, and a gardener, all watercolours. Herewith a few scratches of them.

Herewith another order for your father. Be so good as to pick out the watercolour brushes for me, not too thin and not too thick either. The sort one usually uses. Something like this [Van Gogh drew an arrow pointing to the sketch]

Well, my dear friend, I will always think back with great pleasure on many a walk that we took together last summer.

And be assured that I won’t forget you, and that I would be much obliged to hear from you soon, once you’re over there. For my part I will send you some scratches of what I have in hand sometime.

And so now, wishing you a safe journey and success in your undertakings, in particular success with the painting too. With a hearty handshake in thought.

Ever yours,

Vincent

Would you please tell your father that I will be able to send His Hon. money by 20 January for what is still outstanding and for this order.

Translation source: http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let421/letter.html

Image description: Picture containing handwritten text and a couple of sketches

Letter 421 from Vincent van Gogh to Antoine Furnée. Nuenen, between about Sunday 6 and Friday 18 January 1884, with letter sketches: Gardener with wheelbarrow, Interior with a woman sewing, and Weaver Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890, Dutch [artist] Ink on paper 20.9 x 26.6 cm. Dutch 1884, between January 6-18 Repository: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands HOLLIS number: 8001002118

#UniversalLetterWritingWeek #letter #vincentvangogh #vincentvangoghletters #handwrittenletters #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #Fineartslibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary #harvardfineartslibrary #fineartslibrary #harvard #harvard library #harvardfineartslib #harvardlibrary #sketches #vangogh

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unmaskedagain · 5 years ago

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Yeah, I’m done

I got in this prompt in November, if I remember right. I didn’t really look at it because… What the hell is a fall out fic?!!! I thought maybe it meant Lila exposed but I’ve done quite a few of those. However, I don’t really think I ever focused on it too much; usually, I stray to all the wonderful things Marinette does without them. This came from someone anonymous so It's not like I can just ask the sender… SO I decided to wing it.

Marinette could honestly say she had waited a very long time for Lila to be exposed as the liar she was. Over a year in fact. A very long fourteen months.

If Marinette was honest with herself, she would also add that she stopped waiting for any reason other than the fact she hated lies about… seven months, three days, and seven hours ago.

Why did she remember that so well?

That was the moment Marinette stopped trying to save everyone. Don’t get her wrong; she was still Ladybug. Ladybug was still a kickass hero. She did her job better than ever before.

However, Marinette decided to take a step back, breathe, and let the chips fall where they may.

Her fellow students, her once friends, had been trapped in the spider web of Lila’s tales; awestruck and utterly hypnotized into believing everything the Italian girl had to say. Even the ones about a girl most had known their entire lives.

A bully, they called her.

A selfish jerk.

A jealous bitch.

Her! Marinette! The girl who had done so much for them; had gone to bat for them more times than she could count, and obviously more times than they could remember.

Slowly, one by one, her friendship with each and every member of the class withered and died until there was nothing left but ashes.

It was then Marinette realized some things weren’t worth saving.

Marinette had no trouble forgiving them; it was who she was. But she promised herself she wouldn’t forget.

And if they could treat her like this, after everything, that she didn’t want to be friends with them anyway. Not now, not ever.

When Marinette stood up and announced her resignation from being Class President at the end of the prior school year, the entire class cheered. Like they did when Chloe was forced out of office. (…That only broke Marinette’s heart a little.)

The bluenette changed her number the day after school officially let out for summer. It wouldn’t matter, she knew. She doubted they’d even realize. Most hadn’t so much as texted her in months. Unless they needed something; a favor.

But Marinette was done with favors. Done with free commissions that no one ever seemed to realize cost her an arm and a leg; the fabric was expensive, art supplies for banners were expensive, designing was time-consuming. She was done with any free babysitting. She was done to bring in free sweets on big test days or when the class had a hard week prior. Marinette was done fundraising for class trips and events Bustier would exclude her from at the behest of the rest of the class for her “poor attitude” and “negative energy”. She was done with planning birthdays, making special presents, when no one in class even bothered to wish her a happy birthday.

And most of all, Marinette Dupain-Cheng was done fighting for people who didn’t fight for her. She had tried for months and months to get them to listen to her and what did she get in return? Deemed a green-eyed Liar! As far as she was concerned Lila and Chloe could have at it; do whatever they wanted.

She didn’t have a single friend in class.

They weren’t her concern anymore.

…

It took about a month into the new school years for the class to really understand that. Lila had originally voted in as class president, and had feigned a few tears while thanking the class for the honor but had declined due to being too busy. So Alya was voted in next.

Alya handled the first two birthdays, Ivan’s and Alix’s, really well; she decorated their desks, gave them a birthday card. However, the usual tray of baked goods that were usually brought in for every birthday never showed.

When Alya inquired if Bustier had forgotten to order the cupcakes, the teacher had looked confused.

Marinette tried not to smirk as she sat in the back of the class, pretending to look over her sketchbook.

“I’ve never ordered any before,” Bustier said. “Marinette always did. She was class president. It was her job.”

The two looked back at Marinette; expectant looks on their faces.

The Asian girl snorted. It was never the class president’s job. Chloe never did it in all the years she ruled the class with an iron fist. Marinette had done it because she had been their friend. And she didn’t order them. She bought the ingredients and made them herself.

“It’s the job for the new class president,” Marinette corrected and watched Alya’s face fall. Normally, at that point, Alya would try to ask Marinette for a favor; for Marinette to do it instead.

However, the glasses-wearing girl had taken to ignoring her ex-bestie as much as she could.

“Fine!” Alya huffed. “I’ll do it myself.”

The next thing the class realized had changed was when Bustier announced, “Maybe it’s time we start planning for any class field trips?”

Alya had nodded earnestly, and started making outrageous plans for all the trips the class could take; one to Paris Disney world, another to England, New York, L.A, and so many other very costly ideas.

Ideas, when Marinette was Class president, she would’ve quickly shot down as being impractical, expensive, dangerous, impossible, and any whatever other reason she could think of so the class wouldn’t get their hopes up.

Alya did no such thing.

Marinette just shook her head, and let her ex-friend dig her own grave.

The announcement happened in the morning. Alya had stayed behind when the bell rang for lunch to talk to the teacher and had blatantly glared at Marinette as she said so

And Marinette knew exactly what Alya was planning on talking to Bustier about.

Sure enough, at the end of the school day, Bustier had made another announcement; in front of the entire class.

Marinette really hated how unprofessional the teacher was.

Bustier made it clear that, once again, Marinette was excluded from the class trips that year until her behavior changed. This caused half the class, specifically Lila and Alya, to send her smug looks.

Marinette had nodded, “I understand, Miss Bustier. I can’t say it won’t be a relief not to have to help fundraiser.” The smug looks didn’t entirely disappear but a few faces looked confused instead as if they didn’t realize that meant Marinette wouldn’t help. “I always hated all the planning it took,” And doing all the work, she didn’t add. “Fundraiser after fundraiser. Coming up with the budget, making reservations, clearing it with the school board, clearing it with the parents, getting chaperones, actually raising the money.” She gave a fake sad sigh. “Oh well. Hope you guys have a blast though.”

Then it came time to plan for the first fundraiser. A bake sale.

Marinette had nearly fallen out of her chair laughing when Alya brought it up. Because the bluenette had always hated doing bake sales as she was the only one who ever brought in any baked goods. It was like the entire class thought that just because Marinette lived in a bakery it would be easy for her to get all the food needed.

It wasn’t. She made most of it herself and bought the rest with her own money.

“So who’s going to bring what?” Alya asked. She looked straight at Marinette and seemed to wat for the bluenette to speak. Only for Marinette to raise an eyebrow as if daring her to ask. Alya looked surprised for a moment before she seemed to remember that Marinette wasn’t going to help out. “We’ll make a list.”

No one said a word.

Marinette leaned back in her seat, with a smirk on her face. Alya had said they needed to raise at least $2,000 for the bakery. A highly unrealistic goal. Marinette had only ever raised $423 from a bake sale before.

“I can bring in cookies,” Alya offered once the silence and confused looks continued. “Anyone else? Nino?” She asked her boyfriend.

Nino’s eyes went wide, “Uh, I usually just play the music.” Alya glared at him. “But my mom has a killer blondie recipe. I can ask her to make some.”

Alya nodded, “Sweet. Rose?” And then, one by one, Alya called on each member of the class to see what she could force them to bring.

Even though all but one person in the class promised to bring something; it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a very big class. Theirs were the smallest in the entire school which was why new kids always got stuffed with them. In addition, flyers and a banner still needed to be made to promote the fundraiser.

It was clear as she looked at the list that Alya knew they were in trouble. And again, her eyes went to Marinette, a little bit more pleading now. Marinette just shook her head and started sketching a new dress.

She was done with always coming to the rescue.

Marinette didn’t go the bake sale. However, she heard about how much of a disaster it was from Aurore, her new friend from Mendeleiev’s class.

Half the food was burnt and overpriced. The flyers were terrible. And then it rained halfway through.

Suffice to say, the fundraiser was a bust.

And so were the fundraisers that came after it. Never once did the class meet their goals; though admittedly, their goals were never realistic, to begin with.

Marinette knew for certain by December that there was no way the class was taking any of the “oh so amazing trips, and it’s such a pity you can’t go, Marinette” they had planned. Or any good trip for that matter.

It took months for the school board to approve big trips; weeks to approve small ones. Paperwork needed to be filed with detailed plans ready to present. If a big trip got approved, and then for some reason, they couldn’t go and decided to do a smaller trip instead, new Paperwork would need to be filled out. The new trip would need to be approved. It wasn’t like Bustier could take the class somewhere without permission. And if it wasn’t done in time, there would be no trip.

In late October, Marinette posted a flyer on the class board, and around the school, promoting her new website. It got curious glances but only Adrien asked about it.

Adrien, who was neither enemy nor friend, but a neutral party who refused to get involved. His version of the high road, Marinette guessed.

“What’s that?” He asked. “You starting your own business?”

Marinette nodded, “MDC designs. I designed a bunch of clothes over the summer and got a few friends to model them; Aurore, Marc, Luka,” Juleka looked up at the mention of her brother “Kagami, Ondine, Claude Mireille; and a bunch of girls from the fashion club. People can choose the premade designs already promoted on the site and I can send it to them in their size. Or they can contact me for a custom piece; dresses, scarfs, nearly anything really. That’s a lot more expensive, though. Not at much as it would’ve been, say last year, but now that I’ve stopped doing free commissions, I could lower the price.” She said the last sentence louder than polite but she wanted the entire class to hear.

No one in class blinked twice at her statement. However, Marinette knew they would.

Adrien nodded happily, “Cool, that’s kind of what my dad did in the late 90s when he was starting out. Computers were like barely a thing he said.”

Marinette couldn’t picture a time without computers or her smartphone and couldn’t imagine a life without the internet. She shivered at the thought. “Aurore’s become really well known as an Instagram model. I gave her a few outfits in exchange for her promoting my stuff. She even got a few of her model friends to promote my clothes as well. It’s going really well. If the trend continues; I was thinking of doing a live, online, runway show. I’ve already been scouting places.”

That got some envious looks. Whether it was because Marinette was doing so well or because others would be used as her model, she didn’t know. She didn’t care.

Marinette was done caring about every stupid little thing.

The blond just nodded with enthusiasm, “You’re a great designer. I’m sure you’ll be a hit in no time.

“Hopefully, rather than later,” Marinette smiled. “It’ll go even better when Nadja promotes me on her show. I just have to babysit Manon for free for five random days of Nadja’s request that she could request … any time.” It had been a steep price but Marinette had been willing to pay. “She’ll even promote my runway show if I ever have it.”

The first time someone, Mylene, realized just what Marinette had meant when the drama club inquired to her about getting more costumes for the school play and she had no one to turn to. She took one look at commission prices for local tailors for custom pieces and nearly threw up. Marinette’s website, while still expensive, was a much better deal. Still, Mylene couldn’t afford it.

Nino needed a gift for his mom and remembered how much she loved the scarf he got her last year. He thought it was a good idea to get her something similar. But then he remembered Marinette had made the scarf. And Alya would kill him if he bought anything from Marinette’s website. So Nino settled on something small.

When the school dance came, for the first time the majority of the girls in class would have to buy their own dresses. They came from a store, were cheaply made, and were not nearly as amazing as the ones they previously wore.

All in all, it wasn’t the greatest year for Bustier’s class. Midterms had taken a heavy toll. It tense and everyone was clearly frustrated. So were Marinette’s friends from other classes. So during Lunch, Marinette surprised her table with delicious baked goods as a pick me up. The ones she normally would’ve brought just for her class.

Marinette pretended not to notice the hopeful looks on her classmates faces when she walked by with the iconic light blue Dupain-Cheng bakery box. And ignored the crestfallen looks on their faces when she headed them out to just her friends.

In April, it was clear that the trip to New York had fallen through as they didn’t have enough money. Alya had to rush to get something small approved before the end of the year; a trip to the local amusement park. Marinette didn’t laugh when Alya announced it to the class who looked really bummed all their hard work didn’t pay off. She didn’t even blink twice. It had nothing to do with her after all.

In May, the truth finally came out. It happened on a Thursday.

Lila had forgotten her lunch bag at home. Her mother brought it. Lila’s eyes went wide at seeing her mother and she did everything she could to get her out of the class as soon as possible.

Rose asked Mrs. Rossi, “How the meeting in Achu went?”

To which Lila’s mother replied, “A what now? I’ve never been to Achu.”

Marinette had merely leaned back in her seat to watch the fireworks.

And it was beautiful.

It was an even bet as to who had the bigger meltdown.

Mrs. Rossi: when she learned just how much her daughter had been lying; to her, to the school, to her classmates, and basically everyone she met since moving to Paris. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time and it caused a lot of trouble in the past which was why they had to move to France. Mrs. Rossi was quick to refute any rumors about celebrity meetings, traveling around the world, and ever meeting any royalty. And that Lila had no medical issues whatsoever and didn’t participate in any charity organization.

Lila: she had nearly been Akumatized when her mother started to reveal the truth. Luckily, Ladybug had been nearby to catch the little butterfly. (Marinette had just left to the bathroom, not that anyone had really noticed). The hero refuted ever knowing Lila outside of stopping her akuma forms.

And Finally Alya: who had burst into an angry rant and furious tears at being lied to. It was another near akumatization. Alya had to be physically restrained from attacking Lila once the realization hit her about her blog being discredited for lies.

A lot of the class yelled and made accusations but no reaction was nearly as extreme as the other three. Lila had taken advantage of her classmates for almost two years. They carried her books, remade plans so she could be included, took notes for her, threw parties to celebrate her newest accomplishments.

However, Marinette noted, not one of them mention the friendship they had destroyed because of their belief in Lila. She shouldn’t have been surprised.

The bluenette had long since realized she wasn’t ever as important to her ex-friends she once thought.

The entire class was still angry the next day. Lila didn’t show so vented to each other.

Marinette still sat in the back of the class, content to come up with designs to present to a nice lady who wanted a killer dress to wear to her sister’s wedding, and let the class deal with its own drama.

Unfortunately, some people didn’t get a clue.

“Marinette,” Adrien said brightly. Marinette fought not to look up at the sky and ask god why. “What do you think about the Lila situation?”

“I don’t really care,” The bluenette said. “I was done with the whole thing a while ago.”

Suddenly everyone remembered Marinette was there. Marinette who swore Lila was lying for months. Marinette who they had ostracized and exiled. Marinette who they had ignored. Marinette who had once been their friend.

Rose gasped, her hand over mouth, tears welled up in her eyes, “Marinette! I’m so sorry,” She cried.

“I can’t believe we were so mean to you,” Juleka said.

“Dudette, I had no clue what I was thinking,” Nino said.

More apologies came, each one more heartfelt than the last. Alya had been last. She looked like she had been stabbed from the pain her face. Eventually, the glasses-wearing girl cried, “I’m so sorry girl! I’ve been the worst bestie ever. I should’ve believed you over Lie-La.”

Marinette looked at her classmates, shrugged, and said, “Okay.” Then she went back to looking working.

That was it. However, clearly by the silence that came from the class. They had been expected a bigger reaction. Tears of joy and relief. Happiness to have her friends back. Anything but they got nothing.

Alya frowned, “Didn’t you hear us? We’re sorry. We should’ve trusted you, we know that now. We’ll make it up to you, we promise.”

Marinette sighed but shook her head. “No. Thank you. I don’t need you to make it up to me,” She said. “I don’t want you to make it up to me. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

“But, but…” Rose looked around for help. “We’re friends again.”

“Yeah,” Adrien said brightly. “It can go back to the way it was.”

At that, Marinette put down her pencil. She gave the class a hard look. “Let me make this clear because I have no intention of repeating myself: we are not friends. None of you,” She gave pointed looks to her ex-friends, the longest to Adrien and Alya. “Are my friends. You were mean. You called me names. You spread nasty lies about me because Lila told them to you. You excluded me from all class activities; despite the fact that last year I did the majority of the fundraising, the planning, and the work. You hurt me. Things will not go back to the way they were. I don’t trust you. We are not friends. And we will never be friends again. No amount of apologies will change that.”

Alya went to protest, “Girl, we’re-”

Marinette interrupted her, “Just move on. I have.” Then put her headphones in until Bustier managed to get control back over the class. As far as Marinette was concerned there wasn’t anything left they could say.

…

That didn’t stop them from trying.

No one in the class seemed to believe that Marinette, their everyday Ladybug, wouldn’t forgive them. Lila had been withdrawn from school and no one knew what happened to her. And without Lila’s presence, the class was sure Marinette would have no problem moving on from the drama the Italian girl had caused.

They never even considered the fact that Marinette had never been angry at Lila. She hadn’t been happy at her lies. But she had been furious that her friends had fallen for them so easily, particularly the ones about the bluenette.

“Hey,” Alya said brightly stopping in front of Marinette’s desk the following Monday morning. She thought Marinette just needed the weekend to calm down. “All the girls are planning a slumber party at Rose’s on Friday, you in?”

“No,” Marinette said firmly. “I’m busy,” She offered politely.

And she would be “busy” every time they wanted her to do something.

Too busy to go to all the parties she had been previously excluded from. Her ex-friends still hadn’t realized Marinette had never wanted to go after she realized they just weren’t worth it anymore.

Too busy hanging out after school. Or go to Adrien’s photoshoot. (Alya just wouldn’t understand that Marinette was so done with her crush on Adrien.)

Too busy to help with the school play.

Too busy to watch Kitty Section preform.

Too busy to go play video games.

Every day, every moment they could; her ex-friends were trying to pressure her into being their friend again, hanging out with them again, forgiving them. They just wouldn’t take no for answer.

Honestly, Marinette was just done with their antics.

Particularly the incessant need to make sure Marinette was on the “big” class trip; as if they believed if Marinette went it would make up for everything.

Marinette made it clear she really, truly was way too busy to go some random beach trip. She really did have plans and she couldn’t back out of them. They were too important.

But her ex-friends kept bringing it up, with Alya leading the charge, over and over again. They didn’t care what Marinette wanted at all. And once more, Marinette was reminded why she was glad they weren’t her friends anymore.

Eventually, once again, they got the teacher involved. Bustier had so “nicely” announced in front of the class, that Marinette was more than welcome to go on the class trip with them and that they looked forward to coming along.

And as far as Marinette was concerned that was the final straw.

“I’m good,” Marinette said. “Seeing as my behavior hasn’t changed. I think its best I don’t go; right Miss Bustier? That was what you said? And obviously to you thought it was a good reason.” She reminded the teacher. Bustier flushed a pink color at being called out. “It wasn’t like you, an adult woman, caved into peer pressure from your students and a childish need to avoid confrontational situations.”

Silence from the class. No one had expected Marinette to react as she did. In their minds, she was still their “everyday ladybug”; the nicest and sweetest girl in school. The idea made Marinette scoff. Where was that mindset when Lila got ahold of them?

The bluenette glared at the teacher, the woman who should’ve never let the Lila issue get as far as it did; never let Marinette be ostracized and bullied. “I mean, you called me out in front of the entire class to tell me I couldn’t go. Not the first or last time, by the way, you did something so… crass. Not the most sensitive way either.”

“Well, I think-” Bustier had tried to say but was cut off.

Marinette wasn’t going to let her have a word in, “I’m so glad I started to record lesson last year, for you know notes? You know after that expulsion incident? I worried about what I’d miss. It made it so easy for my parents to understand why I was excluded from class events because they could watch it. I mean I have months and months of video evidence they just… loved. They got to see exactly what this class is like on an everyday basis, and exactly how you run it. So did our lawyer, who seemed rather interested in my school. It turns out that physically harming, via tripping or pushing them into walls as you walked by just hard enough for it to hurt. Or destroying private property; like a phone, spilling water on a laptop, or sketchbooks filled with work for commissions. Or verbally bullying someone. Or sending horrible texts daily, all of which I saved and printed out, can be considered harassment. Which is illegal and the perpetrators involved could face criminal charges as well as be sued for the destruction of said property and for emotional ramifications I suffered. But a teacher would never let anything like that happen in front of them so it wouldn’t be on any of the videos I have, right?”

She let the words fill the room. Bustier had paled dramatically and looked ready to faint. The rest of the students who had taken to bullying Marinette instead of ignoring her looked sick. Marinette had no sympathy for any of them. They got themselves into this mess.

Marinette shook her head, “I asked them to chill for now because you’re the teacher. You did what you did for a reason. It’s not like you’d shirk your responsibilities on the class representative. Or force some poor student to be a model example and mediator for all class issues. Or god forbid, cater to the bullies and blame the victim; allow one of your students to be verbally and physically harassed daily. The videos I have surely would never show anything like that; let alone prove it in a court of law… No matter what my lawyer says. But again, you don’t have to tell me why.” Marinette already knew why after all. And she was so done with Bustier. “You had to have had a good reason. Otherwise, I would have to take this to the school board. And a judge in a court of law. And see if you can explain it to them. Maybe I’ll even send them to my mom’s best friend Nadja so she can put them on her show and the world can see too. And we can find out what everyone thinks of you and your teaching methods.”

The threat was clear to all.

Bustier better back off. Or Marinette would make her back off.

The teacher only had to slip once, and she was done for.

“Enjoy the trip,” The bluenette smiled cheerfully, in a way that reminded them eerily how she used to smile at them when Marinette was still their friend; still their “everyday Ladybug”. But instead of bringing warmth as it used to, all they felt was shivers. “It might our last one altogether. After all, who knows where we’ll all be in September. May be separated into different classes. Or different schools. With the way Damocles expels students with no procedure whatsoever, you never know. Or have a new teacher. We can only guess. I think its best if we just… leave things alone. With the way things are, if you push, you might get pushed back… right off a cliff.”

Marinette was done playing games.

When the class left for their “big” trip, Marinette had finally let out a sigh of relief. Next, she was so transferring to Mendeleiev’s class.

She was done with Bustier’s class.

While the students of Bustier’s class were playing at the beach and plotting their next move to get Marinette to forgive them, Marinette was fulfilling one of her biggest dreams.

The bluenette did have for her online runway show. She had spent weeks and weeks promoting it on her website. Aurore, some of the fashion club, and other rising Instagram models walked the runway in Marinette’s new line. Jagged hosted. It hadn’t been Marinette’s idea, but Jagged complained to Penny when Marinette turned him down the first time and Penny talked to Marinette.

Chloe made a deal to her mother to watch the runaway show to review in exchange for Chloe being one of the models. Again, Marinette expressed concerns but couldn’t turn down the chance of Style Queen seeing her clothes.

Marc helped designed the runway; to give it an artistic, futuristic, edgy look. Claude brought in a smoke machine and his laser machine that the used for his short films to make everything really pop.

Clara Nightingale let Marinette use her music as the runway music. The superstar performed a song during the show and promoted it on her social media feed in exchange for a few custom pieces and Marinette getting Ladybug to do some selfies with her. (Tikki had to be bribed with an entire tray of chocolate chip cookies, and to be left alone with the TV in Marinette’s room for the night; something about finally catching up on Game of Thrones.) Marinette was quick to agree. Though Jagged had been in a huff until Marinette agreed to let him close out the show.

The world took notice, albeit mostly because of Jagged and Clara. But Audrey, the Style Queen herself, had raved about how cutting edge it was. She claimed that an underground, exclusive, fashion show was the new big thing in fashion. The clothes were marvelous too. All in all, MDC’s runway was exciting, sophisticated, and fresh, just like her new line.

Not long after Style Queen’s review posted, the orders had come flying in on her website. Everyone who was anyone seemed to NEED to be seen wearing the MDC brand.

Marinette had smiled ear to ear for the rest of the weekend. She looked forward to what the future would bring.

It was a new day.

Which was great because…

Marinette was so done with yesterday.

#ml fic #ml salt fic #ml salt #Marinette deserves better #marinette dupain cheng #class salt #alya salt #A bit of Adrien salt

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codename-adler · 4 years ago

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foxes + onesies (1/9)

based off of that one post i saw and don’t remember, where people once caught Allison wandering around Fox Tower in a giraffe onesie, and i absolutely melted for her. here is the Foxes’ journey to getting a onesie each!

Allison

in the aftermath of the “mob war”, Allison still sees Betsy for counselling, mostly to cope with Seth’s death still, her ED and to process her childhood and teenage trauma

Betsy teaches her a lot about self-care (and not in Allison’s traditionnal definitions of self-care, which are: bottle it up, act out, burn through 500$ in clothes, repeat)

all in all, Allison has a lot to come to terms with by the end of the semester, and Betsy won’t be there as much in the summer, so she leaves her with a little list of self-care tips to look at when Ally feels overwhelmed

- pick a time to make yourself some tea, or try out some new ones and tell me about it next time

- try drawing with those wonderful pencils of yours, but in different art styles (because yes, Allison does have a fashion sketchbook. but silly doodles? abstract drawings? anatomy sketches? she never tried)

- watch movies by yourself, and for yourself, Allison

- since you love shopping and spending so much, find yourself a cozy thing, a soft thing that will only be for yourself, when you need to be reminded to love yourself and be gentle with yourself

those were the suggestions that stuck to Ally the most

so the next time she goes out to the mall with Dan and Renee, she doesn’t expect to find anything like Betsy suggested

she does look for some herbal tea at David’s Tea, and ends up getting some hibiscus + rose water green tea

but then they go to Walmart (she wants to gag)

fucking Walmart

the girls need some pads and tampons, and the gatorades are on sale (because all the Foxes, as a treat for winning the Championship and bc they all want to stay close after the hard year they endured, got to stay on campus for the whole summer (idc if it’s unrealistic, sue me, that’s how i roll))

for once, Allison follows Dan and Renee, without looking at anything, without touching anything (what if she catches it??)

then Renee wants to look for socks

that’s when Ally passes a rack of colorful onesies

one brushes the tip of her elbow, and wow it’s so soft

not at all the quality material she expected

she stops in her tracks, lets the girls go on to the underwear section, and really looks at the pajamas

there are lots of unicorns, and pandas, a few mouses, and two giraffes

bright yellow, light-spotted giraffes, with their little ears and antlers and all

the sewn-on eyes are closed and have cute little lashes details

Allison imagines herself wearing it and feels utterly stupid

but- she keeps running her fingers through the synthetic velvety material, mesmerized by its softness

she thinks back on Betsy’s list

the folks would absolutely loathe it. the high school bitches too. God, even Seth would say it’s fucking stupid. Nobody should ever be seen wearing that…

But I wouldn’t have to worry about my man-shoulders in it… or my stomach… or my thighs… I could even go braless, or wear just that cute little bralette I haven’t got the courage to wear yet… and I think Renee would agree it’s cute…

then she hears Betsy’s soothing voice in her head

But do you like it?

Yes. Yes I do.

and that’s how Allison takes down the onesie, cashes out and waits for the two other girls outside the Walmart entrance, feeling silly, and jitty, yet quite happy with herself

back at Fox Tower, she washes it immediately, only to stuff it back under her bed

it stays there for quite a few weeks, until it’s almost time for school to start again, her last year at PSU

the boys are out at the beach, Andrew and Neil are God-knows-where, Renee is meeting a friend, and Dan is out shopping with her Sisters

Ally is alone, and lonely

she’s craving something, something that feels close to how one of her nanny used to take care of her hair before bedtime, telling her stories of folklore around the world

guessing that nobody will be back before sundown, she reaches underneath her bed and takes out the giraffe onesie

she gets rid of her high-waisted skinny jeans, her silky cropped blouse and her high-heeled sandals in favor of Seth’s old Marvel boxer shorts, her baby blue bralette she still hasn’t worn, and the infamous onesie

and wow, it’s so baggy

as she buttons up the front, it almost feels like being wrapped up in a giant, fluffy pancake

she giggles to herself, like a little girl

until she goes to look at herself in the mirror, where she straight-up bursts out laughing

she feels so, so light

she puts on a pair of Renee’s fuzzy socks with the sticky soles and leaves her bedhair as it is

she spends the rest of the day on the couch, watching Barbie movies from the hidden collection she has in her closet while painting her real nails in rainbow colors

she makes herself a big cup of the tea she bought, and lights an ocean-breeze candle

between Barbie as the Island Princess and Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, she even goes so far as going at the end of the hallway to buy some sugar-free gummy bears from the vending machine, completely forgetting herself…

of course, this is when the boys, including Andrew and Neil, are coming back from their day outdoors

she stops dead in her tracks when she turns around and sees them, a *giraffe* caught in the headlights

the boys only notice her because she stops moving so abruptly

she’s speechless

the boys, not so much

Kevin: *oblivious to the onesie situation* So you’re the one hoarding the healthy gummies. Dude give back some.

Matt: Oh, hi Ally… *raises his pointer finger, opens and closes his mouth in awe, lowers his arm back down* Cute?

Andrew: *his face says he doesn’t give a shit, but he’ll let the image make its way to his heart eventually* *very sneakily snaps an adorable pic for the group chat*

Neil: *whispering to Andrew, genuinely confused* I thought these were for babies? Do we qualify as babies? Why is Ally dressed like a baby, Andrew?

Nicky: BITCHHHHHH I shoulda made a bet on THAT!

Aaron: Well fuck. 60 points to Hufflepuff for cuteness. Ugh. I can’t believe I said “cute”. Jesus, I wanna vomit. Eurk.

Allison slowly makes her way back to her dorm room without a word, her cheeks flushed and her eyes to the ground, clutching her bag of gummies

she hasn’t felt this vulnerable since Seth’s passing

an hour later, she’s still hiding under her blankets as Renee and Dan file in

of course, they saw the photo posted to their group chat, and they heard everything from Matt and Nicky

Renee gets under the covers with Ally, and Dan proceeds to show off the goods she got with a very silly runway walk

they don’t say anything, until Neil sends a new picture on the GC

it’s a printed version of Andrew’s picture, pinned to the locker room wall with all the other photos they’ve accumulated

and everybody in the chat is dying of cuteness overload

Ally’s got that look of a toddler caught red handed, so open and genuine and surprised; her mouth is slighlty opened in an “o” shape; her mismatched fuzzy socks are peeking from underneath the bunched up fabric at her ankles; the hood is pulled up and slouching over her head…

but nobody, nobody, is making fun of her

we’re talking about the Foxes here. they never pull their punches.

so this? unexpected. shocking. astounding.

and right at the bottom of the picture, in shaky black marker: Baby Ally

with a poorly drawn heart next to it

in Neil’s unmistakeable handwriting

she cries

and never again is she ashamed of wandering around in her giraffe onesie

and if from then on, many Foxes gifts are soft things for her, well, that is called character development

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amjustagirl · 4 years ago

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The sky of the sky (of the tree called life)

Pairing: Suga x reader

AO3 Link Here:

Summary: She doesn’t take much notice of him at first, not when he’s one of thirty nine faces that greet her with varying degrees of interest when their teacher introduces her to the class.But then he hits her in the face with his friendship and she starts to get to know him - through the smallest things, in the littlest ways.

Author’s Notes: This is the first fic I wrote and initially posted as a lone (AO3 link (was still getting the hang of Tumblr lol). Lifted the title from ‘I carry your heart’ by E.E. Cummings. Anyways - this is my humble attempt at a fic, my love letter to one Sugawara Koushi.

Ume doesn’t take much notice of him at first, not when he’s one of thirty nine faces that greet her with varying degrees of interest when their teacher introduces her to the class. She doesn’t take much notice of anyone really, not when her mind is consumed with thoughts of college prep and exams and chores, so he remains a stranger, even after weeks of sitting next to him in class.

Still, he greets her every morning with a pleasant ‘Ohayo’, and doesn’t take offense when she merely responds with a small smile. He offers up his notes without comment when she asks to check her English notes against his, and even occasionally slips her a banana from the stash he always seems to be carting around. His grades are decent and his homework is always submitted on time so he’s popular with their teachers, even though he seems to spend most of his break time sketching what looks like volleyball plays or buried in heated discussions with Sawamura.

Overall, he seems like a nice boy - if a little obsessed with volleyball.

She looks at her lunch box in dismay. There should be food in it, rice and tamago and fish that she most definitely packed last night, but her lunch box sits on her desk, clean and empty. She groans, glancing at the clock. Five minutes after the lunch bell. She ponders on whether to wait until dinner or be jostled to death by a thousand teenagers, but then her stomach growls, loud enough for Yuna-san in the front row to turn and stare at her, so she supposes there isn’t much of a choice.

As she approaches the canteen, she can hear the usual bustle and sound of too many students trying to feed themselves in too small a space - but then she hears a shrill shout - ‘cream buns for sale’, and the immediate cacophony of excited shouts that follow makes her think that her chances of getting food in the next half hour plummet to precisely zero.

Her assessment is right, but that doesn’t stop her mouth from dropping in horror as the canteen practically descends into a warzone, her schoolmates collectively losing their minds. The girls’ tennis team looks like they’re leading a charge through the left, but they’re being resisted by the concert band. The volleyball boys’ team seems like they’re causing plenty of chaos down the centre. Sawamura-san, engaged in a vigorous shoving match with the basketball captain, and Azumane-san - the large, quiet boy she shares home economics class with, cowering while trying to swim through the crowd with a feral looking boy perched on his back.

She apologises silently to her stomach and turns to head back to class.

‘Imai-san!’ Sugawara waves at her from the back of the crowd. ‘I’ll help you get some buns! What do you want!’

‘Oh – two buns, any flavour?” she calls back, a little dazed. He answers with a cheerful thumbs up.

She watches bemusedly as he expertly weaves his way through the crowd to Azumane-san, gesturing wildly to the little boy on her back, before combining forces with a bald boy to shove Azumane-san bodily through the crowd to the front of the queue. The boys grab armfuls of buns each, elbowing the displeased soccer team in the face.

Sugawara spins around, and there’s a glint in his eye that she can recognise from far away (courtesy of being an older sister to two troublesome younger brothers), but her legs don’t move despite her mind hollering at her danger, danger, Imai Ume, even as he raises his arm to toss the buns to her.

One bun lands neatly in her hands. The other smacks her right between her eyes.

She yelps, hands clapping over her face, checking to ensure her glasses are still in one piece. A curry bun may be relatively light and fluffy, but it still hurts when used as a flying projectile.

She hears footsteps clatter towards her. ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry - please don’t cry!” Sugawara says, his voice high pitched in worry, hovering next to her awkwardly. “Daichi will never let me get over it if I make a girl cry.’

She snorts despite the sting between her eyes. “It’s fine, Sugawara-san. Thank you for helping get some food’.

‘Are you sure? Maybe we should go to the nurse’s office just in case!’ he fusses, shuffling his weight from one foot to the other nervously, ‘I’m such an idiot, I can’t believe I missed that toss, I should just resign from the volleyball team already - ‘

‘Eh eh eh? Suga - what’s this talk about resigning from volleyball!’ The small, feral boy from earlier leaps onto Sugawara’s back.

‘How can you resign? This is the year we’re making it to Nationals!’ the bald boy rounds up the rear, yelling at Sugawara indignantly.

‘I missed a toss at my classmate, I’m no longer qualified to be a setter.’ Sugawara wails, unfazed by the weight of his two juniors on his back. ‘I should just die now’

‘YOU THINK YOU’RE ASAHI NOW EH, DRAMA QUEEN!’

She takes advantage of their chaos to slip back to class. They don’t get a chance to speak to each other again for the rest of the day, kept busy with classes on calculus and chemistry for the rest of the afternoon. But the next morning he crows a loud ‘Ohayo’ at her, and she smiles at him, wider than she did before.

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

Spring passes into summer surprisingly quickly, and Ume slowly, but surely, gets used to hearing the song of the cicadas in evenings instead of the rumble of cars in the streets, to the uphill bike commute she takes to ferry both herself and Yuji to school and kindergarten respectively.

Becoming accustomed to something doesn’t mean liking it though. She remembers her mother saying that things would be easier when they move to Karasuno from the city. That living with family in a close knit community like Karasuno means more hands on deck to keep their family afloat. For the most part, Ume supposes her mother’s right. Her grandparents are sweet and try their best to help out, if a little too old to chase Yuji around the house or fetch him up and down the mountain to preschool every day. Their neighbours always offer them too much food, and their grandchildren provide Yuji with enough entertainment most evenings for Ume to catch up with schoolwork and revision.

But sometimes, after she’s corralled an unruly Yuji to bed, and shooed a sullen Keiji to sleep, and she herself can’t fall asleep because the cicadas are too damn loud, Ume wonders if her mother uprooted them to Karasuno so she could run away from the fact that she’s stuck raising three children alone, disappearing off on such long business trips that Yuji doesn’t even ask her anymore if their mama’s coming home.

Thankfully, Yuji, with the short memory of a six year old, finds living in the countryside a joy. He joins the neighbour’s children in catching cicadas, and when she tells him that it’s cruel to catch animals for sport – even ones as annoying as cicadas, he laughs and promises that he always lets them go.

Keiji, though, remains quiet and withdrawn, hiding in the bedroom whenever he’s home from school. She tries chatting with him at the dinner table but her efforts are usually met with the surly silence of a thirteen year old. So she doesn’t push him too much, too fast - she already asks too much of him as it is, sharing most of the chores and supervising Yuji so they don’t become a burden to their grandparents.

So it’s a surprise when Keiji asks if they can head to the park for a picnic on a clear summer’s day, but she agrees immediately, swallowing her shock, making sure to pack onigiri and fruit and strapping Yuji to her bike. It’s strange when Keiji drags them all over the park looking for the perfect picnic spot. It’s even stranger when he decides that the playground, full of shrieking children, should be the appropriate spot for a picnic. But there’s a tree for shade and it’s convenient enough for her to watch Yuji while he runs loose in the playground, so she holds her tongue and spreads their picnic mat on the floor.

‘Can I get us some ice cream?’ Keiji asks.

She’s about to tell him to wait til he has proper food in his stomach before moving on to dessert, but catches sight of Keiji staring at the ice cream stand intently, hands in pockets, cheeks flushed pink. She follows his gaze. The ice cream stall looks fairly old, run by an oba-chan and a young girl with short hair and a cheerful smile. Oh.

‘Why don’t you go get an ice cream for yourself? Yuji and I can get some later’, Ume replies, busying herself with the picnic basket to hide her smile.

She settles on the mat, back against the tree, setting her textbook on her lap. The summer air is crisp and cool, and the sunlight shining through the leaves dances on her skin.

‘Hey Imai!’ Suga stops to greet her, hand raised in a friendly wave.

‘Hello!’ she waves back. ‘No volleyball practice today?’

‘No - we have a mandated break on Saturday afternoons’, he walks over to her. ‘Despite what my unruly kouhai think, overtraining causes injuries. Besides, we need time for summer homework’.

She nods, noticing the stack of books under his arm, and before her brain processes her sudden impulse fully, she asks ‘Do you want to join me? We can share the mat’.

He blinks at her, and she cringes internally, expecting him to politely decline. He may chatter at her absentmindedly about his team, and she may share her notes with him when she notices he’s distracted, but it’s not as if they’re friends outside of school. To her surprise though, he agrees easily, kicking off his shoes to join her on the mat. They sit together in silence, absorbed in their respective work. The sun is warm but the breeze is cool and crisp, so it’s comfortable and altogether pleasant.

‘Onee-chan’, Keiji calls, running back over. He raises an eyebrow when he notices Suga and drops into a slight bow before turning to his sister. ‘Can I have my onigiri? I want to pass it to my friend.’

She opens her mouth to nag him to make sure that he has lunch, but promptly shuts it. Instead, she tosses him two onigiris - hers, and his. ‘Make sure you eat, Keiji’, she calls, and he’s off, running with the wind.

‘Hey, Imai, I packed too much food. Share some of it with me?’ Suga offers mildly. She’s about to say no, thank you politely, but her stomach growls - traitor, and he just chuckles at her, snapping his lunchbox open and pressing half his sandwich into her hands. She thanks him, taking a bite and has to stop herself from moaning in delight because it’s full of egg mayo and chicken katsu and it’s so, so good.

‘It’s delicious, right?’ he says, grinning around a mouthful of his half of the sandwich. ‘You can’t study on an empty stomach, that’s against the law’.

She laughs at that and splits her stash of strawberries and watermelon with him.

Later, she shocks herself again when she tells him as he’s about to leave that she’ll probably be at the park again next Saturday - and he’s welcome to join her if he pleases. She wonders if he can see the uncertainty in her eyes, but he shoots her another smile and agrees.

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

She packs two extra onigiris next Saturday, and the Saturday after that. She also starts including peaches from her grandparents’ farm because she learns that he has a weakness for them.

Keiji ignores Suga for the most part, leaving for the ice cream stand as soon as they arrive in the park. Yuji, on the other hand, soon learns he can get Suga to do whatever he wants if he pouts long enough. Suga, for his part, does not help, often buying the little boy far too much mochi and ice cream.

‘Stop it Yuji.’ Ume says wearily. ‘Suga needs to study and you’re distracting him’.

‘But he’s the only one I know who can push me hard enough on the swings’, Yuji whines, scruffing his shoes into the ground.

‘It’s fine, I’ll take it as my break’, Suga says, smiling kindly down at the little boy. ‘Shall we see how high you can fly, Yuji-chan?’

She watches, shaking her head as Yuji cheers, dragging Suga off in the direction of the playground.

‘You seem good with kids’, she remarks when he returns - thankfully after a short while since Yuji, with the typical attention span of a six year old, is quickly distracted by the other kids playing a game of tag.

‘You think so?’ Sugawara responds, turning back to his books. ‘That’s good to know. I’m planning on going to college to train to be a teacher.’

The image of him dressed in a rumpled shirt and tie greeting his class with a cheerful ‘Ohayo’ every morning flashes in her mind. She imagines him smiling wide and indulgent at his student’s pranks, listening patiently to his students’ questions and problems, diligently pouring over his students’ assignments late into the night.

For some reason, her heart clenches. She doesn't know why.

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

‘Tohoku Medical school?’, he asks, eyeing the flyer sticking out of her bag.

‘Mm.’ she mumbles, distracted by the peach juice running down her hands. Then she realises what he’s just said and wrinkles her nose. ‘The entrance exam is hard though. Not a lot of people pass.’

‘Ugh, stop that, your grades are so good- negativity begone!’ He nudges her teasingly with his elbow. She rolls her eyes at him in response.

‘Why, though?’ he asks, before quickly adding. ‘If you don’t mind saying’.

She’s about to rattle off her prepared answer of heeding the noble calling of saving lives and making a difference one person at a time, but for some reason, she doesn’t.

Instead, she jerkily answers - ‘My dad was a doctor’.

She can feel him raise his eyebrows at her use of past tense (and not present tense) and suddenly the peach in her hand doesn’t seem as appetising as it was before.

‘Cancer’, she finds herself saying. ‘Last year’. She looks down at her feet, refusing to see what she expects will be pity in his gaze.

But he doesn’t say anything. He leans his shoulder against hers, and they stay that way for a while.

She doesn’t protest this time when he comes back from the ice cream stall with far too much ice cream, and the tightness in her chest dissipates as she watches him let Yuji flit between his chocolate and vanilla cones like a honeybee, even though she knows she’s going to have a hard time putting the little boy to bed tonight.

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

'I like Suga-san very much.' Yuji declares later as she tucks him into bed.

'So do I', Ume says. So do I’.

The call of the cicadas don’t seem as loud, and she falls asleep easily that night.

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

‘You should be studying’, she reminds him, playfully rapping on his knuckles with her pen.

He scratches the back of his neck sheepishly, looking up from his sketches on volleyball plays. ‘A couple more minutes and I’ll get back to work’.

She shakes her head indulgently at him. ‘You spend far too much time on volleyball as it is’.

‘I suppose I do’, he hums, busy drawing indecipherable pictures in what she’s termed his volleyball notebook.

She’s suddenly reminded of Yamada and Takashi, the two basketball idiots in her class, goading Suga about ‘being a loser for losing his starting position to a first year’. Sawamura usually erupts in anger when he hears them as he’s wont to do whenever he encounters the basketball club, but Suga, for his part, only responds with a serene smile.

‘Is it worth it?’ she asks, before she can stop herself. ‘Sorry’ she says frantically, as her brain catches up with her mouth. ‘That was rude of me’.

He breathes a rueful laugh through his nose. ‘It’s fine, I’m not offended’. But he stops his scribbling, and his mouth slants downward in a way that Ume doesn’t quite like.

‘It’s worth it’, he then says, voice quiet but full of conviction. ‘It’s worth it to play with my team. I want us to keep getting stronger, I want us to keep playing together, and I want us to go to Nationals and win’. He gazes into the distance and smiles, bittersweet. ‘And everything else doesn’t matter’.

It’s her turn to lean into him with her shoulder.

‘I’ll bring Yuji to watch you at the finals’, she says. ‘And we’ll watch you at Nationals on our TV’.

He laughs and she smiles, wide and bold and bright.

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

Sugawara spends their lunch breaks talking about his team’s latest exploits all the time. She laughs when he tells her about the hijinks that the team constantly gets up to, from setting fire to the Vice Principal’s very obvious toupee, to an all out prank war with the basketball team featuring copious amounts of dead fish and paint bombs. She particularly enjoys Suga’s impression of Nishinoya’s ‘rolling thunder’ war cry, and rather suspects the whole team is intent on driving Sawamura into an early grave.

Despite having a tendency to smile indulgently at his team’s penchant for chaos and hellfire, it’s clear that Suga cares deeply for each and every one of his teammates. He broods about Tsukkishima’s lack of ambition and desire to bond with the team, Yamaguichi’s lack of confidence, Kageyama’s and Hinata’s inability to communicate like regular human beings. Even when he jokes about Ennoshita’s latest attempt to evade Sawamura’s talks about ‘passing on the captainship’, she can sense the undercurrent of worry and concern.

Perhaps that’s why she volunteers to give tutoring Tanaka and Nishinoya a go, after he explains that they’ll end up missing the Tokyo Training Camp that Takeda-sensei went through so much trouble to arrange. She also tells herself that the reason she’s doing it is because Second year Math is covered in the university entrance exams - and absolutely not because Suga practically lights up with relief when she waves his thanks away.

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

Tanaka and Nishinoya remind her of Yuji and even Keiji (well, before), rowdy and loud and full of boyish mischief. They fall out of their chairs when they notice Kiyoko-san walk by the classroom deep in conversation with some boy, and she has to rap them on their knuckles with a pen to get them to focus on solving question number two - please and thank you - before they settle back down.

Still, they’re surprisingly attentive and almost respectful even when she’s trying to impress upon them the dryer points of Math, so it’s easy to become fond of them. They get through vectors after she likens the trajectory of vectors to the movement of a volleyball. Statistics were a struggle, but fortunately, volleyball statistics save the day. Calculus seems to be the biggest hurdle, but she’s hopeful they’ll get it, once she finds a way to relate it to volleyball or better yet, convince them that differentiation and integration are very, very manly pursuits.

That said, it doesn’t help that the basketballers in her class seem to have a deep rooted grudge against the volleyball team - though from Suga’s stories, the animosity is probably mutual. Yamada in particular seems to take special pleasure in taunting the two boys.

‘Eh, Baldy! Y’all lose another game yet? I saw you guys crying the other day after school’.

‘They’d probably win more games if chibi-chan here grew a few inches’, Takashi, his fellow basketballer sniggers.

‘Ignore them’, she tells the two growling boys firmly. ‘You don’t need to get kicked out of your team for starting a fight with these guys’.

‘Awww… are you two kouhai hiding behind your female senpai? ’ Yamadai jeers, leering at them. ‘What losers, just like your Suga-senpai. Heard he got turfed out of his starting position by a first year’.

At that, Tanaka and Nishinoya practically levitate out of their seats as one, snarling ‘Huh?!!! You fucking -’

‘Bit rich of you to pick on them, eh Yamada?’ Ume interrupts. ‘I heard Ono-senpai say last week that if you fail your tests one more time, you’re going to get kicked out of the basketball team. Who’s the loser now?’

‘Bitch!’ Yamada growls, hands slapping his desk.

‘Maybe you’d have a better shot at passing your exams if you spent your time studying instead of disturbing others - who unlike you are actually working hard,’ she adds, smiling at him sweetly.

Thankfully, Takashi has some sense of self-preservation and drags Yamada kicking and screaming out of the door. Tanaka and Noya swivel their heads towards her, twin expressions of shock on their faces.

‘Holy shit, that was so manly?!’

‘Imai-senpai, you’re almost as cool as Kiyoko-senpai!’

‘Yeah - almost as good as the time she ignored us when we asked her to marry us.’

‘No - better, but not as good as the time she slapped me’

‘Thank you’, she responds dryly. ‘Can we get back to differentiation, please?

‘Yes, Imai-senpai!’ They snap into a salute.

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

‘I hear from Tanaka and Noya that you’re very manly’. His eyes twinkle at her.

‘Psh’, she says airily. ‘They exaggerate’.

But she laughs when he slips her half his sandwich as thanks.

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

Noya and Tanaka pass their exams (by some miracle, thank god), and they graduate from her tutoring sessions.

She passes her exams too, tops her cohort even.

Her classmates start to take more notice of her, requesting for copies of her notes and tutoring sessions on topics they don’t really grasp. It's not really that much of a problem to just have an extra set of notes for her classmates to copy (she learnt her lesson when Takashi spills juice all over her precious biology notes - an accident, of course), and extra tutoring sessions are a good way for her to revise what she previously learnt - so she doesn’t really mind.

Of course she knows they think they're picking her brains and hard work, but it's not as if she minds. They're reasonably polite when they approach her, and she can pretend she doesn’t hear them gossip about her behind her back (that her parents are rich enough to send her to not one, but two cram schools, that they must know the principal who leaked the exam topics to her somehow).

Still, she can’t help but feel a spike of irritation when Yamada manages to corner her alone in class one day after school.

‘Oi, Ikai. Can you give me a copy of your math notes? I hear they're pretty good.'

She blinks innocently at him. ‘My notes cover whatever sensei taught in class if you were listening’. Which he probably wasn't, considering he seems to spend most of his time tossing spitballs or bouncing a basketball obnoxiously against the wall.

‘Tch.’ He leans towards her. ‘Come on, don’t be a stingy bitch. Just lend them to me for a bit.’

She narrows her eyes at the audacity of this bugger. 'No.' she says simply.

'Eh?' Yamada glares down at her.

'Did a basketball hit you too hard in the head yesterday? I said no.' She turns her back on him, packing her school bag, keeping her sharpest pencil in her hand, just in case.

He takes a step closer towards her, both hands heavy on her desk. 'But you share your notes with everyone else!’

‘Well, yes - but that’s because they're tolerably polite when they ask, and unlike you, they actually get my name right.’

He slaps her table hard with his hands. ‘Stop being a bitch, just give me your notes already'.

She should just give him what he's asking for or placate him with the promise that she'll give him a copy tomorrow - but she suddenly feels so sick and tired of giving more and more of herself - to her mother, her brothers, her classmates, and now this rude asshole - and she's so done, goddamnit.

'No.' She snaps, lifting her chin defiantly at him. 'What are you going to do about it?'

He snarls, grabbing hold of her wrist. 'Stubborn bitch, just give me the notes already!'

'Let go, pig!', she shouts, trying to wrench her wrist away, mind whirring to calculate the force and speed needed to shove her pencil into his face. His grip tightens, and he digs his nails into the thin skin of her wrist.

He smirks down at her. She tries not to flinch.

'Hey, Imai. Got worried about you when you didn’t turn up at the library.' Suga calls out, loud and clear from the door. Ume exhales a breath she didn’t even know she was holding as he walks deliberately towards them.

‘Yamada-san. I always knew you were an asshole, but I didn’t know you stooped so low you’d bully a girl’.

Yamada takes a half step back, but does not release her hand. 'Piss off, Suga. It’s none of your business'.

‘Perhaps’, he responds, humming diffidently. ‘But I thought I should remind you that if you get just one more strike on your disciplinary record, you’re off the basketball team’. His mouth stretches into a semi feral smile. ‘For good.’

Yamada coils back, looking as if he’d like nothing better than to strike Suga in the face, but then, seemingly thinking the better of it, he drops Ume’s wrist and smirks again. ‘We were just having a friendly discussion, eh Imai?’

‘Remind your thick skull to keep it that way.’ Suga says, meeting Yamada’s glare with an even gaze of his own.

Yamada looks away. 'Tch. I can't be bothered with you dumbasses', he sneers, stalking out of the class.

‘Are you ok?’ Suga asks her immediately, glancing at her once over, stopping short when he spots the red welts ringed around her wrist. ‘Did he do that to you?’ he asks, voice dangerous.

‘I’m fine.’ She follows his gaze and yanks her sleeve down, hiding the marks from view. ‘It’s nothing.’

He opens his mouth, about to insist that it is very much not fine, but she cut him off quickly. ‘Really! It’s my fault he got annoyed with me. He wanted a copy of my notes and I was very rude and didn’t want to give them to him,’ she laughs awkwardly. ‘Besides, it’s a good thing you stepped in when you did, or I’d have gotten into more trouble - because I was about to stab him with my pencil’.

Suga’s mouth drops open. ‘With your what?’

She unfurls her palm to show him her pencil, pink and sharp but altogether unconvincing.

He bursts into cackles, wheezing. ‘Maybe Tanaka should’ve taken his time to get me. I would’ve liked to see you try to fight Yamada with that’.

She snorts. ‘I’m just glad Tanaka showed some self-restraint and didn’t jump Yamada himself.’

‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s because Ennoshita was there to stop him.’ Suga says wryly. He drops his gaze back to her wrist. ‘But seriously, if I’d known he hurt you, I’d have jumped him too’.

She looks at him sharply. ‘Suga… If any one of you get suspended, you can’t play in the Inter High Preliminaries.’

‘Not if we don’t get caught for it’. He gives her a zen smile as she splutters in shock. ‘Anyway, don’t you usually leave school to pick Yuji-chan up by now?’

‘Oh no, Yuji’s probably waiting for me!’ She cries out in alarm, dashing across the classroom.

At the doorway, she comes to a pause and turns around. ‘Suga!’

‘Mm?’ He tilts his head at her.

She smiles shyly. ‘Thanks’.

He smiles back.

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

She ends up preparing a copy of her notes for Yamada anyway. He’s stubborn and stupid, and she figures that Suga’s interference, while welcome in the moment, is only likely to spur him on to pester her again. But when she walked into class the next morning, Yamada is nowhere to be found.

‘Did you hear Yamada-kun got caught with the vice principal’s burnt wig in his locker?’ she hears Yuna whisper to Mizuki before the bell rings.

‘Oh no! Is he in a lot of trouble?’ Mizuki gasps.

‘I don’t know, but I heard from Takashi that he’s been suspended from the basketball team indefinitely!’

‘No! Don’t they have a game next week?’

Ume looks over her shoulder at Suga, sitting with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

‘I may have mentioned to Noya what happened with Yamada-san. Tanaka, of course, was very happy to help out’, he says simply when she corners him after school.

Yamada does return to class eventually, but he refuses to even look in her direction for the next month. She figures she’d much rather not press for answers she suspects she wouldn’t like. Instead, she spends the night cutting out twelve crow charms from black felt with the help of a very eager Yuji, hand stitching each member’s number in white thread and leaving them in Suga’s bag for him to find.

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

She sneaks Yuji with her when the school buses students in for Karasuno’s match with Shiratorizawa.

They all watch with tears in their eyes when the final whistle blows and the boys win.

‘Congratulations, Suga’, she tells him the next day and adds. ‘I think Yuji’s found a new way to fly’.

He grins at her, his eyes burning proud and bright.

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

Fall fades into winter. The days start looping, one after another.

Wake up. Get Yuji to kindergarten. School. Homework. Pick Yuji up. Make dinner. Pack leftovers for lunch. Do laundry. Revision. Tuck Yuji into bed. More Revision. Sleep.

Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

She curses when the cock crows every morning, and falls asleep before her head hits the pillow every night, so she wonders how he manages to survive with practices lasting daily into the night. Or maybe he doesn’t, she thinks to herself, watching the shadows beneath his eyes grow, grey and dark.

‘Is it worth it?’ she asks. (Do you ever regret it, she implies.)

‘Yes.’ he says. (At least I hope I don’t, he sighs.)

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

She notices immediately when his seat is empty. Sawamura tells her it’s to be expected, Suga always catches a cold in winter.

‘I don’t mind helping to bring his homework to him’, she volunteers. ‘You’re going to be staying late in school for practice anyway’. She avoids Sawamura’s knowing look as she writes Suga’s address down, his homework tucked safely into her bag.

His mother beams, surprised and delighted when she appears at their door. She’s promptly shooed upstairs, and Yuji is lured into the kitchen with promises of mochi and ice cream. She knocks on the open door. He’s crouched on the bed, watching a replay of Karasuno’s finals match against Shiratorizawa.

‘Hey. I brought your homework.’ She frowns, noting the paleness of his face despite the redness of his cheeks. ‘Shouldn’t you be resting?’

‘I’m watching the match to fall asleep!’ he says defensively.

‘The match is at least two hours long! If you’re well enough to watch the match, you’re well enough to do your homework’.

‘Give me a break’. He groans, sneezing into the crook of his elbow. ‘I’m dying here’.

‘I’m pretty sure you can’t die from a common cold’ she says dryly.

‘Says the one who wants to be a doctor’, he playfully responds.

She rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t argue with me. Get some rest. You don’t have much time before you head off to Tokyo for Nationals, and the Center Shinken* is just after that’.

His smile drops, and he suddenly looks troubled. ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’

(For chasing too many dreams?)

She blinks, confused by his change in mood. She glances at the Miyagi University of Education pamphlet pinned to his wall - only one in three applicants get in. She furrows her brow, thinking about him spending every lunch break, every afternoon and night in their rundown school gym, even as everyone else is spending their days buried in schoolwork and revision.

But then she hears the echo of his words - It’s worth it. I want to play with my team, the cries from the huddle of boys, the memory of him holding a trophy under bright lights and her face softens.

‘Where’s all this self-doubt coming from?’ she says lightly. ‘You already achieved your dream of going to Nationals with your team. Now all you have to do is pass one exam.’

‘As if it’s so easy!’

‘Well, it’d be easier if you rest up so you can get back to work faster!’

‘Ugh, spoilsport’, he pouts at her.

‘Onee-chan’, Yuji pipes up, poking his head into the bedroom. 'Obaa-san said it's time for Suga-san to eat his medicine and take a nap.'

‘Hello, Yuji-chan!’ Suga waves at Yuji, who gives him a gap toothed grin in response.

‘You should tuck him in and tell him a bedtime story’. Yuji tells his sister seriously. She chokes and thinks she should have taken the chance to dump him under a bridge when he was a baby.

Suga laughs so hard he wheezes. 'I won't mind a bedtime story' he chokes out.

Both boys turn to look at her expectantly. 'Fine.' she says, relenting. 'I’ll tell you a bedtime story if you promise you'll try your best to go to sleep'.

They grin and settle down, Yuji on his sister’s lap, Suga laying against his nest of pillows.

She begins telling them a story she’s told Yuji many, many times these past months - about a kind-hearted Prince in a kingdom troubled by a yearly winter plague, who set out to find the cure for this illness, flowers that bloom on the highest of mountains in the deepest, darkest winter days. A Prince who tries to scale the mountain to find the cure, year after year, but is thwarted by blizzards and avalanches and snow monsters.

A small smile grows on his lips as she describes the Prince’s companions - the stalwart captain of his guards, the burly woodcutter with a heart of glass, and he stifles a laugh when she recounts how the Prince manages to trick his frosty hearted little brother to join them along the way. His breath evens out when she reaches the end of her tale, when the Prince and his companions scale the mountain and look down on a field of flowers, green and gold.

'And they lived happily ever after?' Suga murmurs, half asleep.

'And they lived happily ever after' Ume agrees.

She pulls his blanket up under his chin as he slips into sleep, hesitating as warmth furls and unfurls in her chest, before brushing her hand tenderly against his cheek.

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

Third years are released from school for self-study.

She works alone at home. The winter days grow long and dark and hard.

(Her heart clenches. It starts to ache.)

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

They graduate on a spring day, a shower of pink and white petals blessing their way. He catches up to her in the hallway after the graduation ceremony, hand at her sleeve.

‘Congrats on Tohoku’, he tells her, bright eyed. ‘I knew you could do it’.

‘Congrats on MUE’, she responds with a laugh. ‘See - you weren’t crazy after all’.

‘I suppose I’ll be seeing you around Sendai City? Your campus isn’t too far from mine.’

She opens her mouth to tell him not to be silly - Sendai City is nothing like Karasuno town, a million people within its bounds, and the probability of them meeting randomly on the streets is very, very small, but her throat suddenly becomes dry.

‘Suga’ she begins, balling her hands into fists.

‘Mm?’ he beams at her, brighter than the sun, and it’s all she can do to not to look away.

‘Thank you’, she says quietly. ‘For bringing some light into my life’.

‘I should be thanking you’, he replies earnestly. ‘You’ve been a good friend to me this past year. I don’t think I’d have passed my exams without you’.

“No, Suga,’ she says. ‘I mean - I like you’.

‘Oh.’ he breathes. ‘Oh’.

‘I like you’, she repeats, her voice growing stronger. ‘Because you were kind to me when there was no reason to. You bought bread for me, even if you ended up throwing it in my face. You stole and burnt a wig for me, just to put Yamada in his place. You spent your summer days buying Yuji too much ice cream, swinging him so high he thought he could touch the sky.’

‘I like you, Suga,’ she says finally. ‘Not just as a friend - but as a girl likes a boy.’

He stares at her, eyes wide. A few beats of silence pass.

‘I’m sorry’. He grimaces. ‘I don’t know what to say’.

‘It’s fine’, she finds herself saying. ‘It’s ok’.

(Her heart clenches. She wills it not to break.)

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

Ume does not look back. Her bag is packed, and she leaves for Sendai City that week.

Her apartment is small, but she shares it with a few other girls. At night, she re-acquaints herself with the sound of cars rumbling on the street. The song of the cicadas haunts her in her sleep.

(Her heart clenches. She does not break.)

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

Suga prides himself on being relatively observant and good with things like subtlety and tact and feelings - things that volleyball obsessed idiots like Daichi wouldn’t even notice if it hit him in the face.

He observes people and notices things, the way Kiyoko isn’t as indifferent to Tanaka as she seems, the way Yamaguchi’s serve suddenly improves when Yachi shouts ‘Gambatte’, the way Yui’s vocabulary immediately regresses whenever she’s talking to Daichi - though to be fair, he’s certain the only person in their level to not know about Yui’s crush on Daichi himself, so maybe that doesn’t count.

(‘I like you, Suga,’ he hears her say. ‘Not just as a friend - but as a girl likes a boy.’)

But then his brain short circuits and stutters to a stop, and it’s all he can do to watch dumbly as Ume turns on her heel and walks off, head high, back straight, he wonders if he’s not much better than the rest of them after all.

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

‘Imai Ume said she likes me’. He finds himself telling Daichi, as they walk home from school, pork buns in hand, for the very last time.

Daichi grunts something unintelligible through a mouthful of pork bun.

‘Use your words, Daichi’. Suga can’t help but snark. Daichi grumbles and swallows.

‘Yes. I knew that already’. Daichi says simply. He starts on his second pork bun.

‘What?’ Suga retorts. ‘What do you mean you know? How did you know?’

This time, Daichi chews and swallows before he responds. ‘It was obvious to me.’ He turns to look at Suga squarely. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

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

(‘I’m Sugawara Koushi! But everyone just calls me Suga’. // ‘Imai Ume. It’s nice to meet you.’)

To be honest, he didn't think much of her at first when she joined their class. She had a habit of keeping to herself, never lingering in class before or after lessons, eating lunch alone at her desk, nose buried in a book, but he was brought up with good manners - so he kept greeting her every morning until her small nods turn into quiet smiles.

Of course, he just had to embarrass himself by hitting her in the face with a curry bun (Noya and Tanaka will never let him live it down), but in hindsight that probably kickstarted their friendship. And he’s very grateful for it. She's always passing him copies of her notes for lessons he’s missed or summaries of exam topics she thinks might come in useful, all painstakingly handwritten and colour coded - and even gives him the go-ahead to share it with Daichi. She volunteers to tutor Noya and Tanaka, and he’s sure that it’s in no small part due to her effort that they pass and get to attend training camp.

Yet he’s never considered her more than a friend. Right?

Right?

If he analyses the case of how he feels about one Imai Ume carefully, sifting through the puzzle pieces one at a time, he realises that he's not quite right.

There are little things that come to mind. Like his heart skipping a beat when he hears her laugh for the first time. The flush of his cheeks when he finds out she actually brought Yuji to watch their games. The rush of pride and joy when she tells him ‘I think he’s found a new way to fly’.

And maybe there are bigger things. Like the burst of blind panic in his chest when he hears Tanaka shout for him. The burning urge to break Yamada’s jaw and wipe that smirk off his ugly face when he sees red marks marring her skin. The cold satisfaction in his chest when he (and half the volleyball team) strike that bastard exactly where it hurts.

He remembers the sunshine dancing on her skin, the warmth of her shoulder pressed against his. The touch of her hand ghosting against his cheek. The faint memory of a fairytale about a Prince who gave his all and finds everything he set out to seek.

('And they lived happily ever after?' he asks // 'And they lived happily ever after' she agrees.)

The puzzle pieces fit. It finally clicks.

‘Shit,’ he swears, dialing Daichi’s number.

‘It’s midnight’, Daichi mumbles, voice rough with sleep. ‘What could you possibly want from me?’

‘I like Ume’, Suga says - and just saying it feels right. ‘I like her, Daichi’.

He hears an almighty yawn - and then he can almost see Daichi smile.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

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

What is he going to do about it?

Get hold of one Imai Ume and tell her that his mouth moved faster than his brain (and heart), of course.

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

But what can he do about it?

Not very much, as it turns out.

For starters, he realises they’ve never exchanged numbers. He never felt the need to, they were classmates, no, seatmates, so she was always there, like the sun and stars in the sky.

He tries to find where she lives by asking around but soon meets a dead end. Karasuno Town isn’t large by any measure, the main shopping street fanning out into a smattering of small rural neighbourhoods. But he knows for a fact that Ume stays with her maternal grandparents, and she’s never once mentioned their surname, so he’s left with little to go on.

‘At least I know she’s moving to Sendai City’, he mopes to Daichi over a steaming bowl of ramen.

Daichi, probably tired of the number of times he’s heard him repeat this, just slurps his noodles noisily.

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

He and Daichi rent a flat from a little old lady who pats their chests and pinches their cheeks. It’s halfway between their schools, five minutes from the convenience store, and the rent is pretty cheap.

They soon settle into the rhythm of university life. They cycle to school in the mornings for lectures, struggle with tutorials, and fight over chores. Their social life isn’t too shabby either - they both make plenty of friends and even join volleyball teams.

Still, Suga can’t help feeling like something’s missing. ‘Someone, not something, you dolt’, his inner voice tells him, sounding suspiciously like Daichi.

He starts seeing the ghost of her everywhere.

He stares when he sees the slant of her shoulders in his classmate in the front seat. He crashes into Daichi when he thinks he hears the birdsong of her laughter float down the street. He picks up a habit of doing a double take at almost every girl he meets.

‘Stop it’, Daichi tells him crossly. ‘People are going to think you’re some kind of freak or pervert.’

He tries, he really does. But then months pass, and he starts to think that maybe Sendai City, with its million residents and a million more trees, might have hidden her out of his reach.

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

Summer arrives, and he returns home to Karasuno. He and Daichi and Asahi find themselves back in the school gym often, and he finds himself being dragged into practice match after practice match with his unruly kouhai. It’s a good way to spend his holidays, but he can’t help thinking if there isn’t a route he hasn’t explored yet.

‘No, Sugawara-kun, I can’t give you the contact details of our alumni, even if they’re your old classmates’, Takada-sensei says indignantly. ‘And don’t even think about breaking into the staff room at night!’

Eh. At least that was worth a try.

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

Tashiro senpai means well, he really does. But Daichi lets it slip that he’s been moping over some girl (‘For months!’, he roars), so on a Friday night, Suga finds himself thrust head first into a party at Tashiro’s apartment, surrounded by way too many people and not enough food. Daichi’s chatting with Yui (Go, Yui!), and he doesn’t know anyone else, so he doesn’t say no when Tashiro pushes cans of beer and cups of cheap spirits into his hands.

He’s a few months short of being able to legally drink, and it’s the first time he’s drinking outside his family home - but well, what Daichi doesn’t know won’t kill him. Soon though, the living room feels far too warm and the music is far too loud, so he figures he may as well seek fresh air and whatever refuge he can get on the cramped balcony beyond the kitchen.

He leans his forehead against the bannister. Gah. His head hurts. His stomach churns.

A raindrop splatters on to the back of his neck, then another, and soon he can hear the gentle patter of rain against the roof. He rights himself with a groan, and begins to head back inside. As he slides the glass door open, he turns and sees the silhouette of a girl emerge into the balcony, two apartments down, clearing her clothes from the laundry rack.

He stops. He can almost hear Daichi roaring at him at the back of his mind, but Suga can’t help but stare and think ‘there’s something awfully familiar about that girl’, but then - hasn’t he thought that about almost every girl he’s bumped into these past few months?

She takes a step forward and her face is lit by cheap fluorescent lights. He can see her clearly now, recognises the tilt of her chin, the curve of her cheeks and - by god, it’s her. His legs move and he lurches to the edge of the balcony, shouting her name like a loon.

Their eyes meet.

She yelps. And promptly drops her laundry basket, scrambling back inside.

He dashes back into Tashiro’s living room and trips into the corridor, ignoring Daichi’s shouts as he slams his fists into her front door. Her door remains stubbornly closed, and he keeps yelling, keeps beating her door. He can hear Daichi follow him, and he’s certain he’s going to get a bollocking tomorrow morning, but he doesn’t care, he’s finally found her in the midst of a million people and a million more trees and nothing else really matters.

The door swings open, and Imai Ume stands in the doorway looking livid. ‘My roommate is this close to calling the police,’ she hisses.

Daichi yanks him back with his shirt and snaps into a low bow. ‘Sorry for the trouble caused’, he says, and adds - that sly dog, ‘He may have drank a bit too much Umeshu’.

‘For God’s sake, Sawamura’, he faintly hears her squawk. ‘Can’t you take care of him a little better? He looks like absolute shit’.

Suga stares at her glassy-eyed. All he wants to do is to take her hand and tell her all the things he’s dreamt of saying these past few months (starting with I’m sorry I was an idiot- and ending with I missed you) - but his mind is suddenly foggy and his ears are ringing and his stomach keeps bloody churning and he suspects his body might have just given up on him completely.

‘I told you’, he manages to say. ‘I told you we’d see each other again’.

He pukes at her feet and promptly passes out.

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

When he wakes up, the sun is high in the sky, and he knows because he’s pretty sure it’s trying to stab him between the eyes. He flops over to his side.

What happened last night?

He cracks an eye open. He’s pretty sure he isn’t wearing his own pyjamas. The sweatshirt he has on is a touch too snug, the pants a touch too short - so definitely not Daichi’s either. He can’t be in Tashiro-senpai’s room either, because one, he’s pretty certain floral bedsheets aren’t his thing, and two, if he squints, he can see a pile of medical textbooks in the corner that definitely does not belong to him.

He groans, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, groping bleary eyed for his phone.

- You have 7 messages! -

[Daichi, 12.48am]: You are a very lucky man [Daichi, 12.48am]: Imai didn’t call the police on you [Daichi, 12.49am]: I had to clean up your puke [Daichi, 12.49am]: Wanted to lug you home but you’re heavier than you look [Daichi, 12.49am]: So she said to leave you and walk Michimiya home [Daichi, 12.50am]: Figure you’ll thank me anyway [Daichi, 12.51am]: Stay safe. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do

‘You have got to be kidding me’, he moans. Fuck. His head still hurts.

Ume pokes her head into the room. ‘Oh, you’re awake. Feeling better?’

He snaps his head up and immediately regrets it. ‘Ow’, he whines, dropping his head in his hands.

‘I guess not’, she says. ‘Here’, she pokes him in the side. ‘Spare toothbrush. Wash up, and I’ll get breakfast ready so you can eat some meds’. She tugs him to his feet and pushes him into the bathroom.

This isn’t how he imagined meeting Ume again would be like. Getting piss drunk, puking at her door, and passing out in her bed? He’d take getting arrested over this any day, he thinks, moping to himself. Not to mention Daichi's probably going to kill him when he gets back. He shudders, then winces as he splashes cold water into his face.

Ume waves him into the kitchen. ‘Sit’, she says, and so he does. She sets a bowl of rice and fish and miso soup in front of him. ‘Eat’ she says, sliding a bottle of aspirin and a cup of hot tea at him. His stomach still hurts, but he's not about to let her effort go to waste.

‘Ittakimasu’, he says, putting his hands together, inclining his head slightly. Ume nods and sits across him, sipping her tea.

‘Thank you’, he says contritely. 'I'm sorry for the trouble I caused last night'.

‘It’s no problem. I managed to convince my roommates you were just a drunk ex-classmate, not some rapist or serial killer so they let you in', she hums, amused.

He groans. ‘I’m so sorry’.

'It's fine', she says, waving him away. 'I think Sawamura was a lot more mad than my roommates, since he had to clear your mess and then wrangle you into clean clothes’.

‘Well I think Daichi got to walk Michimiya home last night, so I don’t think he’ll be too mad’, he says drolly. She laughs at that, turning to clear the dishes into the sink.

‘Hey, Imai’. He takes a gulp of his tea, his throat suddenly dry.

‘Mm?’

‘'I - I missed you - you know, as a friend', he stammers at his hands. 'And I’d like to see you again. Maybe we could catch up over dinner sometime this weekend?'

She stills for a few seconds. 'I don't think it’d be a good idea to do that', she finally says.

His heart clenches. He wonders if he’s too late - if the distance that Sendai city with its million people and a million more trees has put between them is too great, if she no longer remembers their shared smiles and golden summer days. But then he sees the stack of blankets tucked into the corner of the couch, sees the food she must have woken up early to make, and wonders how his past self could have been so blind.

‘Imai’, he says. She keeps her eyes resolutely on the dish sponge in her hands. He exhales, and tells himself that it’s his turn to be brave. He takes a step towards her.

‘Ume’, he repeats, taking her hands into his. ‘Look at me’.

‘Stop it Suga! My hands are soapy’, she cries.

‘Nevermind that’, he says stubbornly. ‘Listen - I’m an idiot - and a coward. I meant it when I said I missed you, but I didn’t mean it as a friend’.

‘Wha-’, she begins to say but he cuts her off.

‘I like you, Imai Ume’, he breathes, bringing her hands close to his face. ‘I really like you - as a boy likes a girl. I want to keep holding your hands. I want to see you again - see you everyday, if you’ll let me'.

Her eyes widen, then she blinks slowly - once, twice, thrice.

‘Do you mean it?’ she asks, her eyes meeting his, and he’s struck by the thought that the stars in her eyes are so bright they can light up the night sky.

‘Why would I lie?’ he answers. ‘I’ve been looking over my shoulder every day for the past six months, hoping desperately to see you again.’

‘Oh', she breathes. ‘Oh’.

She gives him a look so full of affection and warmth - like sunlight breaking through the rain - that he knows he was right to be brave, knows that the past six months of searching and dreaming and longing hadn’t been a waste.

‘So… I take it you want to see me again?’ he asks cheekily.

‘Maybe’, she says, but her voice is teasing and she leans on to her toes to press her lips gently against his cheek.

‘I - I take that as a yes?’ he stutters and hates himself for flushing a bright pink, but refuses to release her hands.

‘Let me wash my hands first. Then - yes’, and she laughs, wide and bold and bright.

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

Coda

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

He opens the door and smiles at what has become a very familiar sight these past few weeks - Ume fast asleep at the kitchen table next to a half empty pot of tea, head pillowed against her textbooks. Usually, he’d just scoop her up and put her to bed, but they’ve not had much time together this week, what with him running all over the prefecture with his fledgling team for practice matches, and she with work and exams, so he decides to be a little selfish.

‘Ume’, he calls, shaking her shoulder gently. ‘Dearest. Wake Up.’

‘Mmph. Five more minutes. Go away.’ She mumbles, pushing his hand away.

‘Ume. Ummmeee,’ He drags out her name, finding extra syllables where there were previously none until she stirs, grumbling incoherently and he has to stifle a laugh when she swipes her hand across her mouth.

‘Oh! It’s you. Welcome home’, she folds herself upright, rubbing her eyes slowly. ‘Where’s Yuji? How was the match?’

‘Of course it’s me – who else would it be?’ he chuckles. ‘I dropped Yuji off at Kei-kun’s place for a sleepover with the team, they promised not to stay up all night eating junk and watching crappy movies but I don’t believe them. The match was great - we won! Yuji-chan did really well, he earned quite a few points and saved a few balls. You would’ve been proud of him. I know I was.’

‘That’s good, I’m sure he’ll tell me all about it tomorrow when he’s back.’ She nods towards the fridge. ‘I made mapo tofu for dinner – not too spicy though, your stomach will thank me after that long bus ride back.’

He hums a thanks, sliding the plate into the microwave, narrating a play by play of their match today, stopping only when he hears a loud yawn.

‘Go to bed, Ume’, he frowns at the lines of exhaustion on her face. ‘I shouldn’t be keeping you up, you have a morning shift tomorrow.’

‘Mm – I will, later. Was waiting for you. Mm’ not that tired,’ she protests, but then yawns again so widely he’s pretty sure he hears her jaw crack.

‘Bedtime, sleepyhead’, he says teasingly, lifting her into his chest.

It’s a testament to how tired she is when she doesn’t try to swat at him as she usually does, choosing instead to wrap her arms around him, pressing her face into his neck. His breath hitches, and he wants nothing more than to hold her close and hide in bed preferably forever, but reminds himself that they’re adults now (with awful things like jobs and responsibilities and worse, bills to pay), so he settles her onto their bed, tucking the pillow beneath her head, the sheets under her chin.

‘Goodnight, sweetheart. We’ll catch up properly on the weekend’, he whispers, pressing a kiss into her dark hair.

‘Mmph, love you’, she mumbles, half asleep.

‘Love you too’, he shuts the door with a click, a soft smile on his face.

He’s mentioned off-hand to her before that they’re lucky to be this happy.

‘It’s not all luck’, he remembers her replying. ‘Happiness isn’t easy to come by. It’s a choice. It takes effort and hard work to earn that choice, and you need to take the time to build it up, brick by brick, piece by piece.’

He used to wonder what she meant by that - but six years in, and he thinks he finally understands what she means.

She’s meticulous in the way she makes him happy - the way she catalogues his quirks and deals patiently with his follies. How she knows to always leave food in the fridge for him after work so he won’t get cranky. How she tries her best to stay up and listen to him complain about his frustrations with pushy parents or irresponsible kids, how she tries to watch every one of his (and Yuji’s) games should time permit. He can see it even in the way she smiles indulgently when she sends him off with Daichi and Tanaka for izakaya and drinks.

For his part - he wonders if he does enough. He wakes up early most mornings to hitch a ride with her to work so they get a chance to chat about their day. He buys flowers from the florist down the street for her every week, and slips sandwiches and post-it notes in her work bag when he knows she’s had a long shift. He holds her close when she collapses on the couch, boneless and exhausted from a hard day.

He thinks about the life they share - weeknights spent sitting together, him sketching lesson plans and volleyball plays and she reading up for exams and work cases, weekends spent in grocery stores and parks and volleyball games. Six years together - they’re happy, and they show it in the quietest of ways.

They’re driving back to Karasuno this weekend - ostensibly to celebrate Keiji’s birthday and meet a couple of friends. But he’s conspired with Keiji and Yuji so he can sneak her away to the park for a picnic under the tree where they share memories of long, quiet talks and golden summer days. He’s hidden her ring in a picnic box full of homemade onigiri and sandwiches, strawberries and peaches.

He plans to go down on one knee and ask if she’d like to continue working on being happy with him forever.

He hopes she’ll say yes.

(She does.)

#haikyuu #haikyuu fic rec #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu angst #haikyu x reader #sugawara #sugawara fic #sugawara headcanon #sugamama #haikyuu fluff #karasuno #haikyuu fic #sugawara x reader #suga

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ladydarklord · 4 years ago

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The Mighty Boosh on the business of being silly

The Times, November 15 2008

What began as a cult cocktail of daft poems, surreal characters and fantastical storylines has turned into the comedy juggernaut that is the Mighty Boosh. Janice Turner hangs out with creators Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt and the extended Boosh family to discuss the serious business of being silly

In the thin drizzle of a Monday night in Sheffield, a crowd of young women are waiting for the Mighty Boosh or, more precisely, one half of it. Big-boned Yorkshire lasses, jacketless and unshivering despite the autumn nip, they look ready to devour the object of their desire, the fey, androgynous Noel Fielding, if he puts a lamé boot outside the stage door. “Ooh, I do love a man in eyeliner,” sighs Natalie from Rotherham. She’ll be throwing sickies at work to see the Boosh show 13 times on their tour, plus attend the Boosh after-show parties and Boosh book signings. “My life is dead dull without them,” she says.

Nearby, mobiles primed, a pair of sixth-formers trade favourite Boosh lines. “What is your name?” asks Jessica. “I go by many names, sir,” Victoria replies portentously. A prison warden called Davena survives long days with high-security villains intoning, “It’s an outrage!” in the gravelly voice of Boosh character Tony Harrison, a being whose head is a testicle.

Apart from Fielding, what they all love most about the Boosh is that half their mates don’t get it. They see a bloke in a gorilla suit, a shaman called Naboo, silly rhymes about soup, stories involving shipwrecked men seducing coconuts “and they’re like, ‘This is bloody rubbish,’” says Jessica. “So you feel special because you do get it. You’re part of a club.”

Except the Mighty Boosh club is now more like a movement. What began as an Edinburgh fringe show starring Fielding and his partner Julian Barratt and later became an obscure BBC3 series has grown into a box-set flogging, mega-merchandising, 80-date touring Boosh inc. There was a Boosh festival last summer, now talk of a Boosh movie and Boosh in America. An impasse seems to have been reached: either the Boosh will expand globally or, like other mass comedy cults before it – Vic and Bob, Newman and Baddiel – slowly begin to deflate.

But for the moment, the fans still wait in the rain for heroes who’ve already left the building. I find the Boosh gang gathered in their hotel bar, high on post-gig adrenalin. Barratt, blokishly handsome with his ring-master moustache, if a tad paunchy these days, blends in with the crew. But Fielding is never truly “off”. All day he has been channelling A Clockwork Orange in thick black eyeliner (now smudged into panda rings) and a bowler hat, which he wears with polka-dot leggings, gold boots and a long, neon-green fur-collared PVC trenchcoat. He has, as those women outside put it, “something about him”: a carefully-wrought rock-god danger mixed with an amiable sweetness. Sexy yet approachable. Which is why, perched on a barstool, is a great slab of security called Danny.

“He stops people getting in our faces,” says Fielding. “He does massive stars like P. Diddy and Madonna and he says that considering how we’re viewed in the media as a cult phenomenon, we get much more attention in the street than, say, Girls Aloud. Danny says we’re on the same level as Russell Brand, who can’t walk from the door to the car without ten people speaking to him.”

This barometer of fame appears to fascinate and thrill Fielding. Although he complains he can’t eat dinner with his girlfriend (Dee Plume from the band Robots in Disguise) unmolested, he parties hard and publicly with paparazzi-magnets like Courtney Love and Amy Winehouse. He claims he’s tried wearing a baseball cap but fans still recognise him. Hearing this, Julian Barratt smiles wryly: “Noel is never going to dress down.”

It is clear on meeting them that their Boosh characters Vince Noir (Fielding), the narcissistic extrovert, and Howard Moon (Barratt), the serious, socially awkward jazz obsessive, are comic exaggerations of their own personalities. At the afternoon photo shoot, Fielding breaks free of the hair and make-up lady, sprays most of a can of Elnett on to his Bolan feather-cut and teases it to his satisfaction. Very Vince. “It is an art-life crossover,” says Barratt.

At 40, five years older than Fielding, Barratt exhibits the profound weariness of a man trying to balance a five-month national tour with new-fatherhood. After every Saturday night show he returns home to his 18-month-old twins, Arthur and Walter, and his partner Julia Davis (the creator-star of Nighty Night) and today he was up at 5am pushing a pram on Hampstead Heath before taking the train north to rejoin the Boosh. “I go back so the boys remember who I am. But it’s harder to leave them every time,” he says. “It is totally schizophrenic, totally opposite mental states: all this self-obsession and then them.”

About two nights a week on tour, Fielding doesn’t go to bed, parties through the night and performs the next evening having not slept at all. Barratt often retreats to his room to plough through box sets of The Wire. “It’s a bit gritty, but that is in itself an escape, because what we do is so fantastical.”

But mostly it is hard to resist the instant party provided by a large cast, crew and band. Indeed, drinking with them, it appears Fielding and Barratt are but the most famous members of a close collective of artists, musicians and old mates. Fielding’s brother Michael, who previously worked in a bowling alley, plays Naboo the shaman. “He is late every single day,” complains Noel. “He’s mad and useless, but I’m quite protective of him, quite parental.” Michael is always arguing with Bollo the gorilla, aka Fielding’s best mate, Dave Brown, a graphic artist relieved to remove his costume – “It’s so hot in there I fear I may never father children” – to design the Boosh book. One of the lighting crew worked as male nanny to Barratt’s twins and was in Michael’s class at school: “The first time I met you,” he says to Noel, “you gave me a dead arm.” “You were 9,” Fielding replies. “And you were messing with my stuff.”

This gang aren’t hangers-on but the wellspring of the Boosh’s originality and its strange, homespun, degree-show aesthetic: a character called Mr Susan is made out of chamois leathers, the Hitcher has a giant Polo Mint for an eye. When they need a tour poster they ignore the promoter’s suggestions and call in their old mate, Nige.

Fielding and Barratt met ten years ago at a comedy night in a North London pub. The former had just left Croydon Art College, the latter had dropped out of an American Studies degree at Reading to try stand-up, although he was so terrified at his first gig that he ran off stage and had to be dragged back by the compere.

While superficially different, their childhoods have a common theme: both had artistic, bohemian parents who exercised benign neglect. Fielding’s folks were only 17 when he was born: “They were just kids really. Hippies. Though more into Black Sabbath and Led Zep. There were lots of parties and crazy times. They loved dressing up. And there was a big gap between me and my brother – about nine years – so I was an only child for a long time, hanging out with them, lots of weird stuff going on.

“The great thing about my mum and dad is they let me do anything I wanted as a kid as long as I wasn’t misbehaving. I could eat and go to bed when I liked. I used to spend a lot of time drawing and painting and reading. In my own world, I guess.”

Growing up in Mitcham, South London, his father was a postmaster, while his mother now works for the Home Office. Work was merely the means to fund a good time. “When your dad is into David Bowie, how do you rebel against that? You can’t really. They come to all the gigs. They’ve been in America for the past three weeks. I’m ringing my mum really excited because we’re hanging out with Jim Sheridan, who directed In the Name of the Father, and the Edge from U2, and she said, ‘We’re hanging with Jack White,’ whom they met through a friend of mine. Trumped again!”

Barratt’s father was a Leeds art teacher, his mother an artist later turned businesswoman. “Dad was a bit more strict and academic. Mum would let me do anything I wanted, didn’t mind whether I went to school.” Through his father he became obsessed with Monty Python, went to jazz and Spike Milligan gigs, learnt about sex from his dad’s leatherbound volumes of Penthouse.

Barratt joined bands and assumed he would become a musician (he does all the Boosh’s musical arrangements); Fielding hoped to become an artist (he designed the Boosh book cover and throughout our interview sketches obsessively). Instead they threw their talents into comedy. Barratt: “It is a great means of getting your ideas over instantly.” Fielding: “Yes, it is quite punk in that way.”

Their 1998 Edinburgh Fringe show called The Mighty Boosh was named, obscurely, after a friend’s description of Michael Fielding’s huge childhood Afro: “A mighty bush.” While their double-act banter has an old-fashioned dynamic, redolent of Morecambe and Wise, the show threw in weird characters and a fantasy storyline in which they played a pair of zookeepers. They are very serious about their influences. “Magritte, Rousseau...” says Fielding. “I like Rousseau’s made-up worlds: his jungle has all the things you’d want in a jungle, even though he’d never been in one so it was an imaginary place.”

Eclectic, weird and, crucially, unprepared to compromise their aesthetic sensibilities, it was 2004 before, championed by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company, their first series aired on BBC3. Through repeats and DVD sales the second series, in which the pair have left the zoo and are living above Naboo’s shop, found a bigger audience. Last year the first episode of series three had one million viewers. But perhaps the Boosh’s true breakthrough into mainstream came in June when George Bush visited Belfast and a child presented him with a plant labelled “The Mighty Bush”. Assuming it was a tribute to his greatness, the president proudly displayed it for the cameras, while the rest of Britain tittered.

A Boosh audience these days is quite a mix. In Sheffield the front row is rammed with teenage indie girls, heavy on the eyeliner, who fancy Fielding. But there are children, too: my own sons can recite whole “crimps” (the Boosh’s silly, very English version of rap) word for word. And there are older, respectable types who, when I interview them, all apologise for having such boring jobs. They’re accountants, IT workers, human resources officers and civil servants. But probe deeper and you find ten years ago they excelled at art A level or played in a band, and now puzzle how their lives turned out so square. For them, the Boosh embody their former dreams. And their DIY comedy, shambolic air, the slightly crap costumes, the melding of fantasy with the everyday, feels like something they could still knock up at home.

Indeed, many fans come to gigs in costume. At the Mighty Boosh Festival 15,000 people came dressed up to watch bands and absurdity in a Kent field. And in Sheffield I meet a father-and-son combo dressed as Howard Moon and Bob Fossil – general manager of the zoo – plus a gang of thirty-something parents elaborately attired as Crack Fox, Spirit of Jazz, a granny called Nanageddon, and Amy Housemouse. “I love the Boosh because it’s total escapism,” says Laura Hargreaves, an employment manager dressed as an Electro Fairy. “It’s not all perfect and people these days worry too much that things aren’t perfect. It’s just pure fun.”

But how to retain that appealingly amateur art-school quality now that the Boosh is a mega comedy brand? Noel Fielding is adamant that they haven’t grown cynical, that The Mighty Book of Boosh was a long-term project, not a money-spinner chucked out for Christmas: “There is a lot of heart in what we do,” he says. Barratt adds: “It’s been hard this year to do everything we’ve wanted, to a standard we’re proud of... Which is why we’re worn to shreds.”

Comedy is most powerful in intimate spaces, but the Boosh show, with its huge set, requires major venues. “We’ve lost money every day on the tour,” says Fielding. “The crew and the props and what it costs to take them on the road – it’s ridiculous. Small gigs would lose millions of pounds.”

The live show is a kind of Mighty Boosh panto, with old favourites – Bob Fossil, Bollo, Tony Harrison, etc – coming on to cheers of recognition. But it lacks the escapism to the perfectly conceived world of the TV show. They have told the BBC they don’t want a fourth series: they want a movie. They would also, as with Little Britain USA, like a crack at the States, where they run on BBC America. Clearly the Boosh needs to keep evolving or it will die.

Already other artists are telling Fielding and Barratt to make their money now: “They say this is our time, which is quite frightening.” I recall Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, who dominated the Nineties with Big Night Out and Shooting Stars. “Yes, they were massive,” says Fielding. “A number one record...” And now Reeves presents Brainiac. “If you have longer-term goals, it’s not scary,” says Barratt. “To me, I’m heading somewhere else – to direct, make films, write stuff – and at the moment it’s all gone mental. I’m sort of enjoying this as an outsider. It was Noel who had this desire to reach more people.”

Indeed, the old cliché that comedy is the new rock’n’roll is closest to being realised in Noel Fielding. Watching him perform the thrash metal numbers in the Boosh live show, he is half ironic comic performer, half frustrated rock god. His heroes weren’t comics but androgynous musicians: Jagger, Bowie, Syd Barrett. (Although he liked Peter Cook’s style and looks.)

“I like clothes and make-up, I like the transformation,” he says. Does it puzzle him that women find this so sexually attractive? “I was reading a book the other day about the New York Dolls and David Johansen was saying that none of them were gay or even bisexual, and that when they started dressing in stilettos and leather pants, women got it straight away with no explanation. But a lot of men had problems. It’s one of those strange things. A man will go, ‘You f***ing queer.’ And you just think, ‘Well, your girlfriend fancies me.’”

The Boosh stopped signing autographs outside stage doors when it started taking two hours a night. At recent book signings up to 1,500 people have shown up, some sleeping overnight in the queue. And on this tour, the Boosh took control of the after-show parties, once run as money-spinners by the promoters, and now show up in person to do DJ slots. I ask if they like to meet their fans, and they laugh nervously.

Fielding: “We have to be behind a fence.”

Barratt: “They try to rip your clothes off your body.”

Fielding: “The other day my girlfriend gave me this ring. And, doing the rock numbers at the end, I held out my hands and the crowd just ripped it off.”

Barratt: “I see it as a thing which is going to go away. A moment when people are really excited about you. And it can’t last.”

He recalls a man in York grabbing him for a photo, saying, “I’d love to be you, it must be so amazing.” And Barratt says he thought, “Yes, it is. But all the while I was trying to duck into this doorway to avoid the next person.” He’s trying to enjoy the Boosh’s moment, knows it will pass, but all the same?

In the hotel bar, a young woman fan has dodged past Danny and comes brazenly over to Fielding. Head cocked attentively like a glossy bird, he chats, signs various items, submits to photos, speaks to her mate on her phone. The rest of the Boosh crew eye her steelily. They know how it will end. “You have five minutes then you go,” hisses one. “I feel really stupid now,” says the girl. It is hard not to squirm at the awful obeisance of fandom. But still she milks the encounter, demands Fielding come outside to meet her friend. When he demurs she is outraged, and Danny intercedes. Fielding returns to his seat slightly unsettled. “What more does she want?” he mutters, reaching for his wine glass. “A skin sample?”

#I hadn't seen this one before so I thought I'd share #noel will never dress down #ah yes the patient boyfriend Julian Barratt

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vaguely-concerned · 4 years ago

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The Mandalorian Chapter 11; the rewatch edition

I have found a bit more enthusiasm for this one on the rewatch, so here goes!

- din snapping ‘I’m trying my best here!’ in a vaguely annoyed tone as his entire ship is going up in flames around him because he mostly doesn’t get angry as much as sulky... the height of cinema

- I love frog husband’s clothes, because they’re in a very similar style and colour scheme to frog lady’s but also incorporate the knitwear we see on the people of trask, so it both underlines his belonging with her and implies that he’s been on this moon for quite a while, they may have been apart for some time

especially his scarf is a darling detail and there’s a bit of contrast in texture to it next to his wife’s, it’s nice. he’s wearing a similar kind of vest to what we see on the fishermen later, too

- I think my favourite part of this entire episode (well second after din cradling the baby against him after nearly drowning) is just the design and Vibe of the planet and especially this harbour

for one I LOVE that it’s shown that even in the middle of the day it’s dark enough that the electric lights are still on when it’s overcast (it reminds me a bit of norway during the winter, actually, when dawn just never quite breaks and then slinks off in embarrassment before it’s even noon). and there’s also the... sails? nets? hanging around looking almost like flags, which are very Aesthetic but god knows what they’re for. maybe for drying fish on in the summer?

I think the building in the distance behind frog husband’s back here is a lighthouse? or it could be one of those towers for loading you see when they scout out the empire ship too, I suppose!

and one for my strange obsession with Texture on this show: these fabric-covered crates!!! they look exactly as dingy and moldy as you’d expect them to be in this climate, I wonder what they’re for (& I vaguely want to touch them)

- from the sound of it din’s vibroknife is uh ‘on’ when he pokes the squid thing, and he also goes for the tentacle the furthest away from the baby <3

proof the calamari flan have been scratched up a bit during all that time in din’s pockets! (the attention to detail in this show sometimes istg)

- this is 100% me reading too much into things again, call the overthinking police I’ll do my time meekly lol, but the boat looks a little bit like the mudhorn signet from this angle:

again din keeps his hand on or sooo close to his blaster in this entire scene, he knows this is sketch as all hell

a) once again I want to praise the effects team for how GOOD the aliens look in this episode holy shit and b) the hell is this dude wearing on the straps of his overalls tho

- the dude mando (axe woves) uses his little... wrist launcher thing to shoot with to finish two off the fishermen, so my theory that they can be loaded with other things than the whistling birds for slightly less effective use (maybe without the level of honing we’ve seen din’s be able to do?) is looking good!

- din actually has quite good form when diving into the water, I’m guessing he can swim at least tolerably when not in full armour, being stabbed at from all directions, having just had his son eaten by a sea monster and also being trapped in with said sea monster (I’m a strong swimmer and I can tell you that there’s a reason they make you swim with clothes on from time to time to see how hard it is, it sucks. with metal plates strapped all over you as well? yeah good luck) people don’t tend to hit the water that gracefully without some kind of training in my experience lol. might be some of the training with the jet pack has carried over too, considering he throws himself off that cliff in chapter 12 with similar confidence?

it’s interesting that they’re once again showing us a threat where the armour doesn’t help and even hinders him. we’re so used to the ways it can make him near-invincible, but it can also drag him down (literally, in this case. aha ha ha. well if I’m not here for my own entertainment then what am I here for honestly)

- din’s voice sounding like he’s just on the verge of crying as he cradles the baby (and the sound he makes as he realizes the baby’s alive) is my kryptonite, turns out. fucking breaks my heart into tiny pieces every time, I would die for this man and he wouldn’t let me

- in support of din’s paranoia: so far this season we haven’t been able to go five minutes without someone talking about peeling the precious beskar off a mandalorian corpse, I can see why his mind was primed to move in one particular way there

- I think the fabric of din’s cape has been treated with something that makes it waterproof; the water seems to pearl on top of it rather than soak in! can you imagine how heavy it would get if it did absorb water tho christ

(a bit hard to see at this size but that’s what it looked like to me close up anyway! could also be that it’s wool and that’s why it looks that way but I prefer an elaborate sci-fi explanation here, because it doesn’t look particularly weighed down afterwards) might also explain why he doesn’t seem worried about it catching on fire when he uses the jetpack haha, maybe this is something the mandos do with fabric they’re going to use for a long time

I also enjoy part of the gambeson/undersuit thing poking up from under the shoulder pauldron and cape; I think this is about as disheveled as we’ve seen him since immediately post-mudhorn

- the sound mixing in this scene, where din’s breathing is layered a bit over everything else so you almost feel like you’re in the helmet with him listening to what the others are saying........ oh my GOD, it embeds you so deeply in his POV but so subtly

- not to be biased or anything... but din and the armorer’s armour design is so vastly superior to these guys it shouldn’t even be a competition lol

din looks like an honest to god knight in shining armour except also sci-fi western and the armorer looks like a fucking war goddess from a time beyond memory; the clone wars mandos look like high end cosplayers (eh maybe it’s just my dislike for the boobplates that has me so 😒 lol. also a lot of dudes were very shitty about that whole thing and I don’t say anything but the ‘vaguely-concerned will remember this’ telltale message pops up in the corner every time)

moment of saltiness over: I do like the differentiation between their individual character designs

the differences in body type and helmet design is nice! they look like a unified team, but with individuality. I suspect the ladies have those belts and their armour plates on the hips instead of the front of the thighs to emphasize the ‘female’ silhouette, which. okay fine whatever

- bo katan looks very pointedly down at the baby after saying ‘a group of religious zealots who want to return to the ancient ways’ which makes me VERY nervous for reasons I can’t quite articulate

- the mournful guitar version of the mando theme as din watches the sunset...... hmmmmngh (this might be some Symbolism happening to us folks strap in for the identity crisis he still hasn’t processed)

- I Cannot get over din being so unimpressed by and uninterested in bo katan’s ‘retake mandalore’ sales pitch from literally the first moment dfhasdkjfhsad sorry lady kryze this man just does not do main quest shit, he’s all side quests all the time and that’s why I love him

- as someone who after chapter 8 wrote a whole-ass fic that was wholly & exclusively about din telling the baby he’ll always come back for him... some of the shit he’s been saying this season does feel like it’s been written to mercilessly victimize me, personally and specifically

- guessing this structure in the background is the traffic control tower! doesn’t really matter, I just thought it was neat

- this part of the soundtrack is called ‘ship o hoj, mandalorians!’, which I found incredibly charming haha (it’s ‘ship ahoy’ except how you write it in swedish, good one herr göranson)

- bo katan is vague about who exactly the new mand’alor would be if they took back mandalore to begin with, she doesn’t specify she is planning to be the ruler until she’s already got din on the ship and in no position to refuse to help. gotta respect the grift at least lol

I do love her voice, though, it reminds me a bit of jennifer hale as shepard

- “I need to get back to my ship, with the foundling” your honor I uh love him so fucking much

- frog lady stroking the baby’s back a bit as she holds her hand behind him to make sure he doesn’t fall backwards while playing with the tadpole ;___________;

and also frog husband and frog lady reaching out to hold hands and frog smooching as din and yodito leave ;____________________________________________;

- when din says the exasperated “mon calamari. unbelievable” line, the baby makes that little blowing a raspberry sound he does as if to agree ‘uh-huh unbelu -- unbelly -- unbelievable dad smh’ and it is very very adorable

- there’s quite a bit of Stuff in the concept art that didn’t make it in this time around; I wonder if maybe they cut some stuff for pacing or whatever and that’s why this episode is so short? water leaking into the cockpit of the razor crest, something that looked a bit like whaling going on on the docks and more spaceships taking off (maybe there were originally meant to be some smaller ships defending the big empire one?), there’s quite a bit here

#star wars #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #the mandalorian meta

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weeklyfangirl · 5 years ago

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Frat Boy Pt. 21

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 (1), part 7 (2), part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13 , part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19 , part 20

HI LOVIES. Please enjoy a Friday update on the Frat Boy universe. This one is a bit of a breather after the TUMULTUOUS ANGST of the last chappie. Shorter than my usual, but it’s all the chapter needed. Tons more y/n and Harry interaction on the way in the next! Have a safe and happy day loves xx

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Things I want:

Live a life that helps others

Financial freedom

Experience a great love

Visit the the Pincio Gardens in Italy

To have more dreams and fewer nightmares

Doodle more

Acquire a first edition book, either because an old friendly man who owns an antique bookshop decides to give it to me in a bonding moment, or because I have accomplished #2 and I am celebrating being a Boss Bitch

To be happy

Please note: not necessarily in that order

It was taped above my desk, waiting for me to bring it in to the next session. I hesitated to write number 6. It was a dream I hardly entertained after committing my scholarly life to pursue medicine. I used to love to doodle. All the time. Since elementary school. I doodled so much my mom dedicated a wall in the house to my illustrations. She hung a sign above it that affectionately said “Y/N’s Doodles.” Seriously, you couldn’t get me to stop. Even if it was gross sappy sketches of my crush Billy who I would NEVER show on the playground at recess.

My doodling stopped how these things normally do. Because life grew busier than anything else, and the sketchpad and easel my dad had bought for me at a garage sale became ignored, collecting dust in the corner of my room. At some point, it’d become a year since I’d drawn anything, and then it was two, and three, and by this point I’d realized I was the one who’d need to create her own stability in life and medicine was the more logical fit. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the value in drawing anymore, I just had other things take up my time. It became a comfort just knowing I used to draw. Paul had paved his way, and now I was on my way to do the same. At least with medicine, my soul felt fed. It was almost comfort enough.

“oH WE GOT A ROGUE ONE.”

A flying toenail hit my eye.

“WHAT THE-” I flailed my arms, as though there were a thousand more coming. Renny’s mouth opened in shock, her guilty body hunched over her bent leg. Clippers in hand.

“Sorry!!” Renny burst up laughing.

“oH MY GOSH CAN YOU DO THAT OVER A TRASH CAN OR SOMETHING?!”

“IT HAD A MIND OF ITS OWN!!” she screamed back.

I blinked rapidly, my left eye watering up and spilling painless tears. “Well I’m going to have conjunctivitis at the studio later. Or I’ll be stumbling in blind.” I wiped it away.

I heard another clip and she put up her hands with another giggle.

“All done. And you won’t stumble, I’m going to be there.” Renny extended her leg, her perfectly trimmed foot nearly touching the ceiling.

“You’re just going to solicit Zayn to be his next subject.”

“Maybe,” her grin grew devious. “But also because I want to see if he captured the angelic beauty and complex nymph nuances of my best friend.”

I put a hand to my chest, still aching from uncertainty. “Honored.”

“Want to watch another episode until it’s time to go?”

This whole lazy morning had been an OC Housewives bingefest. She’d seen it on my homepage and had a complete spazz, twitching whilst proclaiming but i’ve been trying to get you to watch this show for YEARS!! When she saw the old season I was on, though, she didn’t have to question why her pestering had miraculously worked. She didn’t mention him aloud besides giving me a pointed look. And so, we watched it, even though I wasn’t really in the mood to see anything about Harry right now. It’d hurt more than I thought to walk away from him last night, and to see how sad he looked when I did.

After last night, he hadn’t posted anything to social media. He’d called, twice, but I knew he was drunk, or worse, and I was tired, and whatever he would say he could tell me in the morning. Even though I knew he wouldn’t.

And he didn’t.

And therein lay the problem.

It hurt to see his family on my little box of a computer screen, weird to see his life and get glimpses of his childhood. I felt like a hacker spying on home videos. But then I reminded myself that thousands of people had already done the same. At this point, it was just… morbid curiosity.

“Nah, I don’t know if I can handle any more of that right now. Dr. Rhinecuff is going to yell at me if I don’t return these scanned copies to him by Monday.”

“Ew, he smells like meat.”

“RENNY!!”

“I’m just saying. That one time I went with you it smelled like pastrami in his office. He has a PhD, but isn’t with-it enough to buy air freshener.”

“He likes pastrami sandwiches, let him live.”

She scrolled on her phone, not bothering to respond, and my gaze turned to the window.

“Hey Renny?”

“Hm.”

A bird flew close to the glass, halting just before it hit it, then zooming off in the opposite direction. “What’d you do when your parents were fighting?”

“Ummm…” I knew the question registered in her mind when she stopped scrolling, suddenly concerned. “Are your parents okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, kind of.” I glossed over it, not caring to get into the bitter details. “I was just curious.”

“Uhh..” She plucked at the soft cotton of her cotton candy pajamas that were fraying at the knees. “I lost my virginity to Zach,” she half-laughed.

“Zach? Neighbor boy Zach?”

Renny nodded. She always sounded a little sad when she talked about him. Zach was the hot college boy who shared a backyard fence with Renny, the girl who may or may not have used her kitchen stool to peak over and see him workout on the grass every summer he came home. I’d known they’d slept together. I just didn’t think he was her first.

“I just tried to be out of the house as much as I could,” she said. “Found my true love Mary J.”

“Oh.”

“It was shitty, but I’m glad I got it over with.”

“The divorce or your virginity.”

“Both,” she chortled. “Why what’s up? Are you sad or something? I have a j in my drawer.”

“No, no, I’m fine.” Mostly I was just wondering what it must be like to feel so sexually liberated. In my house sex wasn’t talked about. At all. The inevitable sex scene in every other movie would result in my dad blaring out “WHAT KIND OF MOVIE IS THIS!” in an attempt to make it less awwkard, but having it backfire and only make it horrendously more awkward. I wasn’t saving my virginity for anyone in particular, but after all those romance novels, I wanted it to be… something. I wanted to feel something towards the person where it would justify something I’ve kept to myself for so long. I wanted it to be intense. I wanted it to be like the books. Like a Frank Sinatra song that swept up your heart and transported you back to a time of gentlemen and cigars and women in long evening gowns with fur coats and martinis.

“I wish I could just get it over with,” I confessed. One half of me screamed YOU’RE IN YOUR TWENTIES HAVE ALL THE SEX while the other half said YOU’VE WAITED THIS LONG DAMN IT HOLD OUT A LITTLE LONGER. I didn’t know which part of me was compromising more.

Renny leaned in, quick. “Would you do it with Harry?”

Like the flip of a switch, I remembered the sensuous heat of his body against mine, wrapping me up and pressing me against him where we just fit. And I couldn’t imagine how much better it’d feel to be even more connected to him.

“Maybeeee…?”

But then there was last night.

I cringed. No matter how with me he’d seemed… he couldn’t have been present after mixing whatever the hell he took and a handle of alcohol. Did I really want someone like that? Someone who could only give a shell of themselves?

“No, I wouldn’t. Or- ugh, I don’t know. I don’t know if it could ever mean as much to him.”

Renny nodded. “I mean, don’t let him pressure you, obviously. If he does, I’ll kick his baby maker smack into his prostate. Prostate. See, anatomy. You taught me that.”

“Haha, no, he’s not like that.” My brows stitched. I was confused why he wasn’t more like that, actually. We’d known each other for several months now and he hadn’t even put a finger in me. When I thought about it, it actually frustrated me. Don’t pressure me to do anything, but I wanted to be pushed to do something. I was never the bold one in areas like this.

Not that I should be so willing to do anything with him anymore anyways. Something shifted in me when I’d seen him last night. It wasn’t a shift I could easily describe, but it’d set me a foot apart from my heart. A bit of me was shocked that it had happened so suddenly.

But this shift was new, and my heart still wanted what it wanted. I knew that if I watched any more OC Housewives with Harry’s toddler curls and surfer tan, I’d be sucked right back into speculating about what our future kids could look like. And if I saw him?

You were right, Harry. You are fucked.

I cringed again. That was harsh. That was very very harsh.

I didn’t know if I’d have the courage to apologize. What if my pheromones went berserk and magnetized me to his side??

Renny was right.

I needed therapy.

The clippers were tossed back on my desk.

“Thanks,” she said. “Have you started on your DG Double P yet?”

DG Double P = Renny Speak for DG Pretty Please.

I groaned. “No. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, honestly. I have to-”

“NO!!! Don’t tell me. We’re not supposed to tell each other.” Her hand extended in panic.

“Fine. I can keep a secret.”

I was getting a little too good at that lately.

She moved onto her belly, splaying her arms out in a dramatic fashion, face squished against the comforter. “Isn’t it just killing you inside.” She was dead serious.

“Yeah, more than you know.”

And I was serious, too.

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

I wasn’t expecting people to dress up as much as they did. Donned in my only pair of yoga pants and a chunky white sweater, I walked arm-in-arm with Renny past girls in cocktail dresses and guys in button-downs.

Something that sounded like a baby’s cry filled my ears, but it was gone as soon as we walked through the doors to the on-campus gallery. .

“Woah did you hear that?”

Renny nodded, tossing her head back. “There’s a baby somewhere.”

It reminded me of the bodiless screams in my nightmare. In my chunky sweater, I shivered undetectably.

The on-campus gallery rotated exhibits throughout the year, but this time, student sculptures were on pedestals, nightmarish portraits hung on the walls, and red and orange tapestries swooped down and across the ceiling in a cirque-du-soleil moment as if to secure us beneath fire. Some students had separate booths, but other pieces of work trailed seamlessly into the next.

A tree made from photographs and newspaper took up the center of the space. Zayn had been so adamant about his muse having life, I wondered if that was the focus of this exhibit - to capture natural life. But I suppose all art did.

“It’s the circle of life exhibit,” Renny stated, as if reading my thoughts.

“How’d you know that?”

She held up a pamphlet she must’ve grabbed from the entrance.

I quickly scanned the room, hoping to find Zayn quickly so I could skip out just as quick.

Several of my professors were here, including Dr. Rhinecuff. When he saw me, I raised my hand, but he raised his cup of red wine awkwardly and looked away.

My hand wavered.

Odd.

Zayn was standing by the tree, speaking with an older woman. Her skin was a rich brown, short hair hidden beneath a chic scarf. The man beside her looked around the same age with graying facial hair, a pocket hanky, and beaded bracelets. Art professors.

I caught his gaze, and he gestured me over.

“Y/N, these are my instructors. David and Ebony.”

Their eyes lit up in recognition. “He did you a great justice,” David said, gray moustache twitching with the words.

Ebony beamed. “Oh yes, a piece was already sold. He’s going to be the next big wig before he graduates,” she gushed. “Zayn, I’m sure you’ll be splitting the profits with the heart of the piece.”

She gestured to me and his smile widened, but my stomach sank faster.

“I didn’t know these pieces were going to be sold.”

Ebony sensed my concern. The wine in her glass swirled. “We thought allowing the pieces to be shown and auctioned was a good way to replicate what many of them should be doing once they graduate. The whole department gets involved, and these kids put in a lot of work, and the reputation of starving artists isn’t something we want to buy into here.”

I nodded. “I mean, that’s great. That’s… really amazing.”

Zayn couldn’t meet my eyes. He knew. He could sense my hesitance, too.

“Now he can finally afford a nice dinner to take you out!” David proclaimed.

We were all quiet for a minute. “You know, for a thank you dinner,” David covered up. Zayn’s brows scrunched and he shook his head a bit, not knowing where David’s comment came from.

“Do you do this regularly?” Ebony asked, steering the conversation away from an awkward moment.

My ears pricked up when I realized she was looking at me. “Excuse me?”

“Well I was just thinking…” a light laugh lifted as if her idea would be outrageous. “Would you mind sitting in for one of my classes on Monday? Our model had a sudden death-”

“My God,” David proclaimed.

Ebony waved her hand. “-in his family. I haven’t called to replace him yet.”

It quieted as they looked at me, waiting for a response. “Oh, I don’t… I don’t usually do this. At all. It was a chance thing.”

“Luck be the artist.” David raised his glass.

Ebony followed suit, looking at my empty hand. “You just going to let her stand there without a drink?”

“Yeah, Zayn. What kind of treatment is this?” I teased.

He did a slight bow. “Apologies. We’ll walk to drinks, immediately.” He pulled us away, leading us further into the showroom as his head dipped low to my ear. “Renny just passed us to meet Felix and them. They’re through here.”

We stepped under an archway that led into a darker-lit room, but his hand stopped me beneath the nook. “Did yeh notice anything?”

Yeah. I was noticing how close we were in this archway. He saw my eyes start to squint in thought and he turned me around to face the room we’d just left.

“Look closer.”

My eyes roamed the crowd, trying to find some sort of person, or pattern he could be referring to. With a brief seize of my heart, I expected to see somebody from the gang.

“Look at the artwork, Y/N.” His breath warmed my skin.

The paintings all seemed to be bright, though sticking to red, orange, blacks, and grays. Wait, forget a pallette pattern. The next painting had blue and purple, too. One sculpture looked like a writhing ghost, twisting and reaching for something above. Or maybe it was an unearthed tree root. Despite all the bold colors, there was something off-putting about how bright they all were. It wasn’t a soothing brightness. It was almost violent. The orange and red writhing tapestries warped the ceiling into something hot.

“Is it hell?” I chortled, but quickly quieted. I expected him to take offense, but his hand went lightly around my waist with a small smile.

“Could be. See-” his arm extended out to scan the perimeter “-all this art is supposed to represent death, but challenge the notion of it through color.”

“How so?”

“Yeh know it’s usually your blacks, and your grays, s’depressing shit. But we’re born from death. Before life, there was nothing, but something. It’s bold and necessary and there, and no one really knows whatever comes before. Or after.” He looked at the room, taking a sip of wine. I watched as he swallowed, and I imagined the wine running down. “What is death but an uncertain existence.” He said the thought almost happily, looking at me with a slight smirk. “Could be anythin’.”

He took a deep breath, letting his hand touch the top of the archway. It was then that I noticed it wasn’t just plain drywall. A collage of photographs ran all along the inside.

He wasn’t as tall as Harry, but his hand still reached the top, scuffing across a picture of an African landscape taped over a toddler eating fruity pebbles.

“They’re pictures. Everyone donated one,” he said.

A strand of words were painted over the collage, running from one end of the archway to the other, and I tilted my head back to read it. “Things... that…. make... m..e …...feel alive.”

“Everyone was able to design their space in order to control, to some extent, how their art was perceived. Everyone was a part of the transition space.”

“Very nice,” I noted, slightly put-off. I hadn’t been expecting this art show to be so… professional. “Zayn, this is amazing. Like, really, truly, professional-grade stuff is happening. The presentation, the pieces, everything.”

His smile grew wider, putting cool hands over my eyes. I flinched, but let him.

I felt him come closer.

“Listen now,” he urged.

I listened, but I wasn’t sure for what. There was the familiar busy rumble of people mingling, parents visiting their kids, and professors droning on about the talent of their students. But it was chatter. I couldn’t make out one conversation over another. I shrugged up against his other hand that was atop my shoulder.

“Sometimes you need to change where you’re planted to understand.”

I hoped he could see my cross expression because I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting me right now. It’d been a day. It’d been a night. And I wasn’t in the mood for more philosophical ramblings - especially about death. “I don’t know what you mean,” I sighed.

“Meaning I have to move you closer to the speakers.” He let out a breathy laugh. “Jus’ keep your eyes closed, okay?”

I nodded. His hand moved, tilting my head to its side. Eyes still closed, I became self-conscious imagining people trying to move past me, and here I was, planted, eyes closed in the middle of the archway. My cheeks heated. It was unnerving knowing people could see me when I couldn’t see them. And anyway, I must’ve looked ridiculous.

“What do you hear?” he urged.

“I hear a lot of people talking,” I griped.

But right when I was about to open my eyes-

I heard a familiar chirping through the chatter.

“Birds?” I opened my eyes.

“Observance can be taught, sometimes.” Zayn leant back, looking mighty proud of himself.

“Why are there birds?”

“We’re entering life,” he smiled, backing into the space. I tipped my wine back, several long gulps lightening my step as I followed him. Immediately, I noticed much more natural, earthier tones. For being a room of life, it was surprisingly darker than the prior room.

Renny, Felix, and Andre were huddled in the center where a makeshift wall-on-wheels covered in vines divided the room in half.

My eyes widened, trying to adjust to the dimness. “It’s a lot darker in here.”

“All intentional. They decided to play with light in here. People usually think of life being bright ‘n that, but it’s also when we experience varying degrees of darkness. There’s a balance to things and the trouble is finding it.” Understanding laced his voice as his dark eyes bore into mine, almost completely black. One look from Zayn and I was reminded of all the weight I’d been carrying. I fidgeted, uncomfortable seeing myself in his eyes.

“Y/N, get over here!” Renny called. My shoulders visibly relaxed. My saving grace. “You didn’t tell me you did this,” she said lowly as soon as I got close enough, shocked excitement barely contained. Her giddy smile gave it away though. “Miss sexy secret keeper over here.”

“What do you mean?”

She playfully poked my sides, but Andre and Felix avoided my gaze. Something wasn’t right. And it stirred my stomach, my body already knowing, somehow.

I turned in slow motion, the charcoal drawings in my peripherals stopping me in place. Framed amidst the vines, my face was etched onto paper, scrunching and twisting in various expressions. But my body was attached and twisting, too. And it was bare, bent over, spread out, laying down… My eyes scanned over them a dozen times in a second.

I was naked.

In all of them.

One was titled “21st Century Love.” In this one, I faced the viewer, but looked past them, sorrowful eyes, brows furrowed, breasts I’d never shown on full display. A hickey or two on my neck. A painful sting gripped my chest. I looked sad. I looked so sad.

Tunnel vision, a blurred Renny rushed down to the floor, and a distant part of me registered something wet splatter on my feet.

The wine had dropped.

I’d dropped it.

I was trapped in a shell. My body was numb.

“Babes, you okay?” Renny asked, her voice somewhere far away. Somewhere outside the shell, her voice drowned in the busy rumbling, with the birds, with the watchers. People were watching me now. I was being watched. “Felix, grab some towels!” she barked.

I looked horrified, towards Zayn, but changed my mind just as fast. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t even breathe.

He didn’t know me at all. He could stare at me for a thousand sessions and paint every crevice, sunspot, blemish, and mole and still not see me. How was an artist this blind? How could he not know that this was the last thing I could ever want? How could he picture me so… intimately?

The paintings seemed to swirl into one before bouncing back out into their separate exposees.

Because that’s what it was.

An exposure.

A stranger could pay to have me in their home.

The floor spun, vision spotting.

My lungs tightened, tearing me away from Renny, from Felix, from Andre. From Zayn, the artist who painted a confused girl so unashamed. So honestly. Savagely and Unabashedly.

“I didn’t want this.”

And it was when I was halfway out the door that I realized the voice had come from me, a mantra pushing my shell all the way home.

part 22

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nxrthmizu · 5 years ago

Text

-Lordbug, Robin and Kitty Noir- Chapter Thirteen: In Which The Fun(d) Begins!

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/Part One//Part Twelve/

---

A week after the initial MDC debut was the weeks in which a few things would take place. A few small tests that later contributed to the overall marks of their exams would be given, and there was going to be the school’s first fundraiser of the year.

Each class or club would need to create a booth of some sort, selling whatever they wanted- And the money earned would contribute to whatever sort of trip they could afford from their earnings.

Now, it was a common thing for Marinette to get extra commissions from the other classes during this time. Theatre club needed someone to do costumes, some other classes that were selling goods needed some posters, and the student council would sometimes ask for Marinette to help organise the event due to her great organisation skill. Numerous people needed things from her- And the great thing was, unlike her class, these people understood that her effort couldn’t just be brushed off as a mere ‘favour’.

Due to this, Marinette felt really, really excited for the first fundraiser of that year. She was free! She no longer had to work her ass off for the fundraising of her class- Since they had personally told her so. This was how it went:

“What are we going to do this year?” Rose asked curiously, her eyes beaming with excitement at the thought of the fundraiser- And more importantly, the trip it would later contribute to.

“A bake sale, obviously.” Alya announced as a matter-of-factly. “That’s what we always do for the first fundraiser.” The girl turned to Lila with a bright grin. “You’ll see, Lila, this’ll be very fun! And by the end of the year, we can always go to great places- Last year we went to New York!”

Lila’s eyes glimmered greedily as she listened to Alya’s wild recounts of the places they went before. Then she caught the eye of a particular bluenette who was sitting at the end of the class. Her heart darkened at the thought of the trio going to a trip with them- She wasn’t going to let them off that easily.

“You know, Alya, I’m really excited for the first fundraiser.” Lila begin, pouting. “But I’m afraid the three of them really don’t like me and because of that they might not help during the bake sale, and they might mess everything up!” She whimpered sympathetically. “I really don’t want the whole class to lose their trip just because some people are uncooperative with me.”

The class murmured in agreement, some of the students going to comfort Lila and some other students sending sharp glares at the three at the back of the classroom. Damian and Chloe both shrugged the glares off, being used to being disliked, while Marinette just pursed her lips and continued sketching in her sketchbook. The glares were plain out ignored.

“You don’t have to help out for the fundraisers this year.” Alya spat out acidly. “But you won’t be coming for the yearly trip either.”

Damian shared a look with Chloe as Marinette continued to ignore the class and sketch. “Sure.” He shrugged. “I don’t mind.” He really didn’t- Marinette had informed him that if the class kicked them out of the fundraiser, she had already secured a place for the three of them in the art-drama club alliance. They would be fundraising with another group of their own, and they would go on a separate trip.

“Where should we go this year?” Rose asked dreamily, thinking of the magnificent trips they had in past years.

Alya opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again as she searched for a cool place to go in her mind. “Um...” She fumbled with her words. “What about...” She looked around desperately, looking for any sort of idea.

“You know, that looks like it was inspired by Gotham’s gargoyles.” Damian murmured at the back of the room, pointing at one of the sketches on the page. Marinette giggled.

“That’s right! I based it off some pictures I found on the internet.” She told him, Chloe humming as she peered at the page.

Alya snapped her fingers, grinning triumphantly like it was her own idea. “Let’s go to Gotham this year!”

The class cheered in excitement, and of course Lila didn’t let the opportunity escape.

“That’s great! We could go meet my childhood friend, Damian Wayne!” Lila smiled happily. “He used to like me, you know?”

The class fawned the liar once again as the three at the back sighed and ignored the commotion. “Seriously, do any of them have brains?” Chloe scoffed, narrowing her eyes at the idiots that were their classmates. Damian Wayne was actually in their class- And the blonde had just met Bruce Wayne a week ago.

Damian leaned back into his chair, snorting and feeling glad that he had been kicked out of the class fundraiser. “Obviously not.”

A knock on the door interrupted the fawning session. Annoyance lined Lila’s eyes for whoever disrupted her moment. A brown-haired girl peered in, eyes brightening when she spotted the bluenette at the back. “Sorry, could I see Marinette please?”

The bluenette looked up, smiling at the sight of her fellow student. “Tara!” She skipped down the steps of the classroom, avoiding her classmates gracefully, landing at the front of the door, where Tara was patiently waiting. The brown-haired girl gestured for Marinette to lean closer and whispered something in her ear- Something that made Marinette’s eyes light up. “Damian! Chloe!” She called her friends, her giddiness making fury boil in Lila’s heart. The two friends of the bluenette sighed tiredly at each other before joining their excited sunshine friend at the front of the room, both passing by their classmates with a cool aura.

Tara eyed the two suspiciously. “You sure you trust them, Mari?” She whispered in the bluenette’s ear, making Damian growl defensively.

Marinette nodded surely, grinning at her friends. “Positive.”

And so the four students left the classroom, leaving the classmates in rumbling confusion and Lila in boiling anger.

---

“So, what’s this all about?” Chloe raised an eyebrow, demanding an explanation from the bluenette. Damian hummed, already having guessed that it was about the art-drama club alliance.

“Well, I sort of guessed that Lila would kick us out of the fundraiser, so I talked to the presidents of the art and drama clubs, and we decided to start out own fundraiser!” Marinette grinned. “We’ll get to go on our own trip during summer break, too.”

“And with Mari planning, we’re going to have the best trip ever!” Tara exclaimed, grinning from ear-to-ear. “It’s going to be awesome!”

The bluenette smiled. “Chloe’s a pretty good planner, too! She was class president before I was.”

Tara made a face. “And now that Alya is class president, I hear? Well, I couldn’t care less- But the greatest thing is you finally left that class! Gosh, Mari, they were just taking advantage of you. This year’s trip is going to be so! Awesome!” The brown-haired girl jumped in excitement, pushing the door open to the art room, where a few other students had already gathered. “Alright, guys! I told you all that we’d have some good news to tell today- Marinette’s joining us!” Tara looked at the blonde and the green-eyed boy behind Marinette. “And her friends, too.”

The students in the room cheered and clapped, delighted that the school’s best artist and planner had decided to join their little gang.

“Introduce yourselves.” Marinette told her friends with a grin. “Come on!”

Chloe rolled her eyes. “Chloe Bourgeois.”

Damian sighed exasperatedly. “Damian Wa-Fu.”

Tara furrowed her eyebrows in confusion. “Damian Wafu?”

“Damian Fu.” He cleared his throat, ignoring the sniffled laughs of the two girls behind him.

“RIght...” Tara nodded. “Anyway, I’m Tara, president of the art club, and here we have members of the drama club. Thanks to Marinette, we’ve called an alliance, and we’ll go on a trip together during summer holidays with our shared earnings.”

“I’m Madeline, president of the drama club.” A blonde girl introduced, hopping down from one of the cardboard boxes that were piling at the back of the room. “Alright, since everyone’s here, we’re confirming that no one else will be joining or leaving this group until the fundraiser’s all over.”

Tara nodded, looking at her art club members- The students all nodded and gave thumbs up.

“Okay, so here’s the plan.” Marinette stepped forward, taking a deep breath. “We’re going to run the usual fundraising events- Bake sales, car wash, maybe a fun fair or two, and maybe, just maybe we might have a little fashion show, since your presidents both asked for it.” The bluenette grinned at the drama and art club presidents, both of which smiled sheepishly.

“But while we run the usual funding events, we’ll also be preparing for the grand finale.” Tara paused for dramatic effect before announcing loudly: “A play!”

Madeline nodded. “We’re still getting the script together,” She gestured at the two script writers belonging to the drama club. “And once that’s done, the art club will start putting together sets, backgrounds, costumes, props and all that sort. We’ll also have people from the art club running lighting and backstage stuff while the drama club performs onstage.”

Damian hummed. “Sounds interesting.”

Tara nodded her thanks at his interest, smiling at the fact the cold-looking boy had offered his opinion. “Does everyone understand?”

The art and drama club chorused their ‘yeses’, excitement filling the air with the thought of the play at the end of the year. “That’s great! I’m going to need everyone to come up here and put their phone numbers on this paper, we’re going to create a group chat.” Marinette announced, borrowing a piece of paper and pen from a nearby art student.

The club members swarmed forward, scrambling around to write their names and phone numbers. “Once you’re done, return to your classes. Tomorrow we’ll be meeting here again to discuss the audition dates for the drama club and the roles for the art club.” Madeline yelled over the noise. “Meeting dismissed!”

Chloe crossed her arms angrily at the bluenette. “You planned this, and you didn’t tell me?” The girl basically screeched at her bluenette friend, who held her hands up in surrender sheepishly.

“Sorry.” Marinette apologised. “It was kind of a we-planned-it-last-night thing.”

“Then why does he know?” Chloe pointed an accusing finger at Damian, who shrugged.

“I called her last night.” He said nonchalantly.

---

After Chloe had calmed down, she talked to the script writers of the drama club, requesting for a copy of the script, which they happily gave. She made (surprisingly) little criticism, but she requested for them to make a few changes here and there. Damian hung around near Marinette, who was patiently telling everyone to write their phone numbers and names. When all the art and drama club members had filed out, both Damian and Chloe scribbled their phone numbers of the paper, which was then kept by Marinette.

“Alright!” The bluenette smiled, patting the paper which was in her jeans pocket. “Shall we get back to class?”

---

/Part Fourteen/

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:D I updated! My online classes are killing me, tho. :( Anyway, here’s a chapter! Till next time!

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