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emospritelet · 4 years ago

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Homecoming - chapter 26

Last time, they had sex :)

Here's what happened next

[AO3]

The room was warm and dimly-lit, the candles having been snuffed some time ago and the only light coming from the oil lamp and the glowing embers of the dying fire. Ogilvy held Belle close against his chest, her head nestled over his heart and her fingers trailing over his skin. Having her in his arms again was exquisite, and he turned his head, pressing his nose to the top of her head and breathing in the scent of her.

“That was remarkable,” she said quietly, and he smiled, pressing his lips to her hair.

“Yes.”

“Is it always like that?” she asked. “Is it always so wonderful?”

His smile grew.

“I don’t usually cry quite so much,” he said. “But being with you is always special. No matter the circumstances.”

“Well, that’s very encouraging.”

She kissed his chest, nose nuzzling his nipple.

“Everything I’ve read on the subject somehow failed to convey quite how - intimate - it would be,” she added, and his smile grew.

“You’ve read extensively, then?” he asked, and she giggled.

“As much as I can,” she said. “There seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent women finding out about such things. No doubt for our own good, as they see it.”

“Well, given that women are intelligent and rational creatures, I much prefer to let them discover things for themselves,” he said, and she pushed up on one elbow, raising her chin as she met his eyes.

“Most people would consider you rather eccentric, Tristan Ogilvy,” she said.

“Oh, they do,” he remarked. “For which I’m exceedingly thankful.”

She giggled again, nestling against his chest.

“I have to say I agree with you, though,” she said. “I always prefer some knowledge to none at all.”

“You don’t subscribe to the notion that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, then?”

“Only when accompanied by an arrogant refusal to listen to those who know better,” she said lightly. “I don’t think either applies in this instance.”

Ogilvy chuckled.

“In that case, you may find some works in my library to be of interest,” he said.

“Hmm.” Her fingers delicately traced a path over his chest, and she glanced up at him. “I feel that knowledge gained through practical experience may also be very beneficial.”

Her eyes were gleaming, and he laughed, kissing her again.

“I’m happy to encourage your study in this area, in that case.”

Belle bit her lip in amusement, glancing away as she blushed. She felt relaxed and content, a warm and heavy feeling that made it hard to stop smiling. The feeling of bliss at being joined with him was ever-present, and their bodies were sticky with heat, slippery with perspiration where they were pressed together. She was eager to experience more, to experiment with touch and taste and lose herself in sensation, but she had read that men needed to rest after, and she was content to limit her curiosity to the exploration of his body. Her fingers caressed the firm planes of his chest, stroking down over his softer belly, learning the feel of him. She traced the path of the scar on his right side, following the curve upwards, and raised her eyes to his.

“How did you get this?” she asked, and he pulled a face.

“A Rùsgadh demon,” he said. “Long claws and nasty tempers. I got careless.”

Her eyes widened a little, and her hand slipped lower, running over his hip and feeling the knotted scar tissue on his thigh. It felt like a burn, and a serious one.

“And this?”

“A fire demon,” he said. “Hadn’t seen one since the tenth century, in Northumberland. The locals called them Villi-Eldr back then. Very destructive, especially in populated areas, so when Doc foresaw a nest hatching, we knew we had to stop it.”

“This feels like it hurt a lot,” she observed, fingers still caressing him, and he chuckled.

“I threw myself into the river to put out the fire,” he said. “Not sure which was worse, the burn on my leg or the week I spent trying to get the river out of my system.”

“Such an exciting life,” she said, sliding the hand back up to his belly, and he sighed.

“I suppose I’ve seen a lot of the world,” he said. “I’ve seen things that most people think are figments of a fevered mind.”

“It must be interesting,” she said, pushing up a little and folding her arms across his chest. “Dangerous, though, I imagine.”

He smiled at that.

“There have been a few near misses in recent years,” he confessed. “We’re both getting old, and it was always harder to deal with these things with only two. We’ve missed you.”

“Does that mean you’ll be expecting me to assist with your fight against the forces of darkness?” she asked, grinning. “It might be difficult, given that I remember nothing of our past.”

“Give Doc a week and he’ll be planning our next trip,” he said, in a wry tone. “Besides, given your thirst for knowledge, I’m sure it won’t take you long to master the basics. I almost pity whatever we come up against.”

She smiled, leaning in to kiss him with a soft pull of lips before settling back, chin pushed into her folded arms.

“How is it that you can remember, and I can’t?” she asked, and he smiled faintly.

“Part of the magic of our bond,” he said. “Three stones used in the ritual that bound us together in the first place. We use them to wake each other.”

“With magic?”

She was aware that she still sounded a little sceptical, and Ogilvy gave her a small grin that suggested he could hear it in her tone.

“When we get home, I’ll show you a little magic,” he said. “I’ll even teach you some.”

That was an intriguing prospect, but she decided to leave it for the moment.

“Tell me more about the stones,” she said.

“The Seer gave them to each of us in the original ritual,” he said. “We carried them in the early years, hung around our necks in leather bags. Later, when we found someone with the skill to work with metal, we had them set in rings. Ordinarily we’d have all three. Doc and I have ours”—he held up his hand, the moonstone gleaming in its thick gold band—”but we haven’t found yours.”

Belle could feel her brow crease in contemplation as she thought over what he had said.

“How do you manage to find them in each life?” she asked. “I don’t wish to be morbid, but presumably if you die, something happens to your bodies, and to your belongings.”

“Correct.”

“So unless you know where and when you’ll be born again,” she went on. “I imagine you’d have to make some sort of arrangement regarding the rings. A hiding place for them. Somewhere no one else would think to look. Perhaps - oh, I don't know, perhaps a sacred space of some sort.”

He was eyeing her with a look of pride, and it made her want to blush.

“You’re quite right,” he agreed. “Doc always decides on a place to store the rings. As he’s born with his memories, he remembers where we put them, and can go and retrieve them.”

“And is he always right?” she asked. “Does he always remember?”

Ogilvy pulled a face.

“There have been a few occasions where you or I haven’t had time to hide our own rings in the agreed spot before - well, before the end,” he acknowledged. “In those times, he’s had to rely on his Sight to guide him.”

“What if someone else were to find them first?”

“I’ve thought about that myself,” he admitted. “I have to confess that in the past I’ve worried that with the rate of development in this country, the hiding place might be discovered. It would be a poor show if the rings were placed in some museum or other.”

Belle grinned at that, wriggling a little against his side as she got more comfortable.

“He would have to become some sort of professor of antiquities rather than history in general,” she suggested. “Curator of the museum with access to the collection.”

He laughed.

“The alternative would be an audacious burglary, I suppose,” he said, and Belle giggled.

“Do you have any idea where my stone is?” she asked, and he sighed.

“I haven’t seen it since the fourteenth century,” he said simply. “Except in that painting of Elizabeth Willoughby.”

“The necklace,” she whispered. “That was the stone, wasn’t it? Is - is that why Elizabeth remembered? She knew there was something strange about the stone even before she got her memories back, I think.”

“I don’t think it was the stone,” he said. “At least not on its own. We had to use the stones together in the past to wake each other, but the Seer told me that she woke you - woke Elizabeth, I mean. She gave Elizabeth her memories, but I’m not clear on how that was done.”

“No. Nor I.” She thought for a moment. “There was nothing in the journal to explain it.”

"A pity."

There was a moment of silence. His gaze was far away, and she wondered what he was thinking about.

"Would you like to read the journal?" she asked.

Ogilvy seemed to hesitate, lips parted, eyes staring up at the canopy. He turned his head towards her, and that sorrowful look was back in his eyes again, the memory of ancient heartache.

"I'm not sure," he admitted. "Part of me wants to have that connection, to know what you went through without me, and another part of me knows how painful the reading of it will be."

"I think I understand," she said slowly, and his eyes seemed to search her face.

"Would you like me to read it?" he asked gently, and she bit her lip.

"I think so," she said. "But - perhaps when I get my memories back. If I do, I mean."

“Then we must find the way,” he said. “The Seer said she could return your memories to you, as she did before, but that there would be a price.”

“What sort of price?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said gravely. “Nor did she. She told me that waking you in this life would affect us in the next, but as to how...” He lifted a hand to indicate his ignorance.

“That could be any number of things."

“Indeed.”

“And she was unable to even hint at what the price may be?”

“Not at this time,” he said. “She said she would think on it. She will come to us when the time is right. We must hope she has a clearer idea of the price at that time, so that we - so that you - can make an informed decision.”

“And she can return my memories?” asked Belle. “All of them?”

“All of them,” he confirmed. “If you want that, of course.”

Belle was silent for a moment, thinking. Memories of other lives, stretching back thousands of years. How wonderful that must be. And how painful. There must be grief and loss from all those lives. How do they bear it? How will I?

“You don’t have to,” he added. “It’s your choice.”

She pursed her lips.

“But - don’t you want me to remember?” she asked. “Everything, I mean. Everything we did together, the lives we shared...”

Ogilvy smiled faintly. There was an air of sadness about him, a sense of despondency.

“What I want is immaterial,” he said. “There is pain as well as pleasure in the memories. I won’t force them on you. It’s your choice, just as it always has been.”

There was a look in his eyes she couldn’t fully interpret, but she could sense heartbreak and loss, and she wanted to shudder. Whatever he is thinking of, it can’t be pleasant.

“I shall consider it,” she said. “It seems moot at present, given that we don’t know how.”

“True enough,” he agreed. “And there is time for you to think it over. It may be months or even years before the Seer comes to us.”

He nodded, and there was silence for a moment. Belle shifted against his side a little, thinking over what he had told her. One of the candle flames was guttering, sending out pulses of light and making shadows dance and flicker on the walls, and she watched the light shift on his features, his eyes dark pits.

“The Seer,” she said slowly. “Who is she?”

Ogilvy chuckled, running a hand through his hair.

“I wish I knew,” he said dryly. “Back in the days before we were first joined, there were whispers amongst the tribe that she was one of the fair folk. She certainly looks no different today than she did back then, so perhaps she is something other than human. One who walks between the worlds. Perhaps not. Perhaps she’s like us. Returning in every life, the same spirit in the same form, over and over.”

“And she has - magic?”

“Yes,” he said. “She has magic. And the Sight. The ability to see what will be. Just as Doc does. Though perhaps with a somewhat wider and more impersonal perspective.”

“I - I’m not sure I understand.”

“Doc has visions of the future concerning us, those to whom we’re close, and the dark forces we fight,” he explained. “The Seer’s gaze is cast a little wider. Across the earth as a whole. She saw that we would be needed to fight the darkness for the good of all.”

“How did she know it would be us specifically?” she asked.

“She didn’t,” he said simply. “Or at least, if she did, she didn’t let on. The only one she chose was Doc. It was part of the ritual. The rest of the tribe chose me, and I chose you.”

“And what was my choice?” She shifted again, body sliding against his, and he smiled.

“You chose to be bound to me,” he said. “That was part of the ritual too. You had to give yourself to me of your own free will.”

“Well, thank goodness for that, at least,” she remarked.

“Indeed.”

There was silence for a moment. His fingers were gently stroking the curve of her waist. Her mind was reeling, a thousand questions bubbling up from within.

“Why did you choose me?” she asked, and he sighed.

“The Seer of my own tribe told me I had to leave,” he said. “Told me that the future depended on it. She told me I was destined to be one of the three, with the old man and the maiden. I was to look for a girl, and that I would know her when I saw her. And so I wandered, until I found your tribe. Until I saw you.”

“And did you know?” she asked, and he smiled.

“Yes,” he whispered. “The first time I laid eyes on you, I knew. I just had to wait for you to choose me.”

“Did you ever think perhaps I wouldn’t?” she asked. Ogilvy chuckled.

“I think you found me insufferably arrogant at times, so yes, there was always a seed of doubt there,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” she observed, and he sighed.

“I lost a great deal of my sense of worth in the lives without you,” he said. “And some of my rage. I used to snarl and bite at the world when I wasn’t simply cursing the gods for parting us. Mostly I’m just tired now.”

Belle chewed her lip, wanting to kiss some of the self-assurance back into him.

“And - and before that?” she asked. “Back when we first met? Did you really worry that I wouldn’t choose you?”

The smile was back on his face, this time somewhat rueful.

“I wasn’t lying about the arrogance,” he said. “But it was more a question of whether you would choose another before the time came. As the beautiful chief’s daughter you could have had your pick.”

“The chief’s daughter, indeed.” She swatted his chest playfully. “Upstart!”

He burst out laughing.

“Yes, I was certainly that,” he agreed. “But I spent years fretting that perhaps I was wrong, and that at any moment you would choose one of the handsome hunters that were sniffing around your father’s fire. It was a relief when you agreed, and I found that the Seer had spoken truly.”

“Foresight sounds like a dreadful burden,” she observed, and he laughed again.

“Oh, indeed. And it’s far from infallible,” he said. “Having the visions doesn’t always let Doc interpret them properly, for example. Sometimes he just knows what’s coming. Sometimes it’s all interpreting signs and portents and digging through old books to work it out.”

“Sounds equally frustrating and fascinating.”

“I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” she said, pushing up a little. “All these things I thought were myths and children’s tales. Magic and portents and ancient power. So many new things to learn. And here I thought I’d arrived on your doorstep to be a governess!”

He was watching her with a tiny, amused smile and a soft look in his eyes.

“Marry me,” he whispered, and she pursed her lips, trying not to smile.

“Well, I suppose I really ought to,” she observed. “Certainly if we want to do that again. Which I very much do.”

She giggled, and he grinned.

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” she said decidedly. “I shall marry you. Oh, but let’s make it a small wedding. And almost scandalously quick. I rather like sharing a bed with you and I have no desire to wait weeks to do it again.”

He laughed.

“Yes, I’d prefer it if Mrs Wolfe didn’t walk out in protest,” he remarked. “She finds some of the aspects of my lifestyle unsettling enough, I daresay. I think carnal relations whilst unmarried may just tip her over the edge.”

Belle giggled, snuggling against his side.

“Soon, then,” she said. “How soon do you think we could do it?”

“I’d need to make some enquiries, but I believe the shortest time would be seven days.” His fingers were caressing the skin of her waist again, gently stroking. “I think I have to get a licence. Otherwise it’s three weeks.”

“So, at least a week from now.” She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “In that case, we really ought to make the most of tonight, don’t you think?”

He smiled, turning on his side, and his hand gently cupped her cheek as he kissed her. She opened her mouth with a contented noise, her hand sliding around his waist and up his back, her body shifting closer until she was pressed against him. His tongue gently stroked hers and she moaned a little, enjoying the heat of his body, the squash of flesh as they pressed together and his fingers pushing through her hair.

He pulled his mouth from hers, kissing down her neck and sending shivers through her, and she let her head roll back against the pillows, body arching upwards as he moved lower. The feel of his mouth on her nipple made her let out a tiny cry, fingers running up over his shoulders to tangle in his hair. The ends were damp where they had lain against the nape of his neck, his skin hot to the touch, and she closed her eyes, losing herself in the soft pull of his lips.

His hand slid between her legs, gently stroking, and she gasped as he touched sensitive skin, fingers sliding through flesh already slippery with their fluids. One finger gently pushed inside her, and Belle moaned, eyes closed, skin tingling. She could feel the soft, wet sweep of his tongue on her nipple, the scrape of his stubble against her breast, the hard length of the finger inside her and the friction of his hand against the sensitive bud at the top of her cleft. It was making something deep within her belly coil and tighten, her limbs stiffening. He let the nipple slip from his mouth, kissing upwards, nose nuzzling at her neck before his tongue swept up its length to her ear. The sensation made her shiver, and she moaned again, pushing against his hand, eager for the pleasure he could give her.

“Please, my love!” she whispered. “I need you!”

She felt him smile against her neck, and the finger gently slipped out of her, his hand reaching down between them. He shifted, his weight pressing down on her, and she felt the hardness of him push up against her. She licked her lips, her breathing rapid, heart thudding in her chest, and her hands slipped to his shoulders, feeling the firm heat of his skin. He met her eyes, gaze locked onto hers as he slowly sank into her, and Belle let out a tiny cry, lifting her hips to meet him, knees sliding up to let him push deeper. Her hands lifted, stroking over his cheeks and pushing into his hair, soft and damp against her fingers. His hands rose up to cup her cheeks, fingers gently stroking strands of hair back from her face, and he bent to kiss her as he began to move, his lips soft and wet against hers.

Belle closed her eyes, lips parted, listening to her own shallow breathing, in time with his, and the low creak of the bed beneath her. She inhaled the scent of him, a faint hint of the cologne he had been wearing and his own musk, the slightly acrid scent from the fire and the warm wax from the burning candles. She could feel the hard length of him inside her, the low groan that rumbled through him, and the heat and wetness where their bodies joined. Pleasure was rising within her, a wave of pressure that set her tingling, quick and hot, as though sparks were dancing across her skin. She clung to him, gripping his shoulders, her legs wrapping around him as their pace quickened and her body grew taut. A moan started deep within her chest, growing in pitch until she broke with a cry, pushing up against him, feeling him pulse inside her as he let out a low groan of pleasure, his arms sliding around her and hugging her tight.

She clung to him as the wave of bliss washed over her, soaking into her skin and leaving her drained. Falling back against the pillows, she tried to gulp in air, her chest heaving, and he slowed his movements, pushing up on his elbows to gaze down at her with a tiny, wicked little grin.

“Are you well?” he asked, and Belle tried to catch her breath, nodding.

“Oh, we are most certainly getting married!” she gasped, and he burst out laughing, kissing her again as he rolled onto his side and pulled her close.

Ogilvy had always been a light sleeper, when he could sleep at all, and staying in other people’s houses only made his insomnia worse. He had nonetheless managed the best night’s sleep he had had in what felt like years, and he woke reluctantly, dragged from his slumber by a faint clanking. After a moment of confusion he recognised it as the sound of fire irons being carried into the room. There was the sound of a sharp intake of breath, and Ogilvy raised his head, meeting the eyes of a young scullery maid with very curly red hair and rapidly flushing cheeks. She squeaked and promptly turned her back, bending to lay the fire, and he settled back down with a grin. No doubt she had been told to simply ignore anything improper she might see, and to go about her chores unless the guests said otherwise. She was probably new. He suspected Lady Ella’s seasoned servants had seen far worse in their time.

Belle was nestled in his arms, her back to his chest, and the bed was far too warm and comfortable to want to move. He lay dozing as the maid finished the fire, listening to the crackle and snap of the wood kindling. The door closed quietly as she left, and he smiled, leaning in to press his lips to Belle’s shoulder. She inhaled deeply, stretching her legs, and he kissed along her shoulder and up her neck, hearing a low hum of contentment.

“Good morning,” he murmured.

“Good morning to you,” she said sleepily. “What time is it?”

“Early,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might want to go back to your room before the rest of the house wakes up.”

“Mm.” Belle turned onto her back, running her hands over her face. “Good idea. I wouldn’t want the children to wonder where I am.”

She turned to face him, looking beautifully dishevelled, her eyes heavy and her cheeks pink. He leaned in to kiss her, an arm sliding around her waist and pulling her close against him, and she moaned in pleasure, opening her mouth as he pushed her onto her back. The kiss deepened, and he felt himself start to swell once more as his hand cupped her breast. Belle pulled her mouth from his.

“I really should go back to my room,” she said breathlessly. “But if you continue to do that I shall be forced to stay here for the remainder of the morning.”

Ogilvy chuckled, kissing her neck once more before pushing up on his elbows.

“I believe we have a train to catch,” he said. “More’s the pity. I fear we’ll have to be more circumspect at home.”

“A seven day wait once we obtain a marriage licence, you said?” she remarked, pursing her lips. “I must say that Parliament really has no consideration for a woman’s needs.”

“When has it ever?” he quipped.

She made a noise of agreement, kissing him once more before shuffling out from beneath him and throwing back the covers. He rolled onto his back, enjoying the sight of her as she hurried around the room, scooping up her nightdress and shawl and pulling them on.

“The servants came in to light the fire,” she observed. “Well. I suppose we were never going to be able to keep it a secret, were we?”

“You said they’re discreet.”

“Oh, indeed they are,” she said, running fingers through her hair in a futile attempt to tame it. “But that doesn’t mean Lady Ella won’t hear everything from them.”

Ogilvy grunted in amusement. He would have expected no less.

“Let’s try and get back to London before she starts planning the wedding herself,” he remarked, and she giggled, tugging the shawl around her shoulders.

“I should go,” she said, and put her head to the side. “I shall see you at breakfast. I for one have an excellent appetite this morning.”

A blush and a smirk, and she was gone, hurrying out of the door and closing it behind her. Ogilvy lay back against the pillows with a contented sigh, hands behind his head. Life was very nearly perfect.

#fic: homecoming #ogilvelle fic #ogilvelle #rumbelle fic #rumbelle #my fics #rather large estate

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miss-spooky-eyes · 4 years ago

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intersection (a belated OC Kiss Week fic)

Yes, I am extremely late, but in my defense I didn't know OC Kiss Week was happening and it coincided with some insane work.

Author Notes/What to Know:

This is a fic about the (near) kisses of my IA/Cipher Nine, Devinahl, and @sunsetofdoom's Smuggler Teo. I encourage absolutely anybody & everybody to read what she's written about Teo, which you can find the most important & glorious pieces of here, here and here.

'Karia Madeesh' is the alias used by the future Cipher Nine during her adolescence as a schoolgirl spy tasked with befriending the children of important Republic figures. I think that's all you need to know, but Dev's backstory fic Riddle goes into much more detail.

Warnings: Um ... nudity? Mentions of vomiting? Extreme teenage dumbness?

Thank you thank you thank you to Sunset for lending me Teo and letting me get way, way, way too much into my feelings about him, especially his teenage depression. I hope you like it.

Further thank you thank you thank yous to @vespertine-legacy for reading various versions, encouraging me and gently correcting me on minor details like the names of my characters 😘

‘Childhood is long and narrow, like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.’ - Tove Ditlesen

Part One

New Baxeid, 3652 BBY/1 ATC

Teonine Lunulata didn’t often wish he was somewhere else. Didn’t see the point.

If he closed his eyes and opened them to find he was in a completely different place, it wouldn’t change a thing; he’d still be there.

Right now, though, he would like to be anywhere - back in his room with the door closed, preferably, but a classroom, his form tutor’s office, the gym even - other than here.

A fresh wave of shrill laughter crested over the top of the already too-noisy compartment, and Teonine winced as pain stabbed through his temples again. He huddled further back into his corner, one arm wrapped around his stomach to try to keep the length of plastic tubing from slipping out from underneath the baggy sweatshirt his mother would be furious to find out he still owned because it was so old and shapeless. Winding the tubing around his waist beneath the overlarge garment usually worked well enough to conceal it, as long as he kept his distance from people and it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to that; but he hadn’t done that good a job securing it this time, thanks to the shaky hands and the rush he’d been in, and anyone he bumped up against in the crowded carriage was going to notice something. Even if he was surrounded by idiots.

The shuttle bumped and jolted as it jerked on to the next mag-rail, eliciting more shrieks and squeals from the nearby knot of girls as the passengers swayed and clung on to each other to keep their balance. Teonine splayed the fingers of his free hand out on the wall behind him, and wished he was dead. As if the noise and the stabs of pain it elicited from his head weren’t bad enough, the smell of upwards of fifty people crammed into the compartment was rapidly becoming unignorable, even with the scented bands he wore on his tresses to keep his pheromone receptors from becoming overwhelmed. And he wished he hadn’t thought about that, because half the people in here were miners with all the sweat-and-damp-and-body odours that entailed and someone standing near him was wearing far too much perfume and he had puked up way too much way too recently for that cocktail of smells to be filling his nostrils.

Teonine swallowed down hard on a wave of bile; the dumb kids from his school standing near him might be ignoring him now, but if he threw up his guts over their jacketed backs you could bet they’d start paying attention. Don’t puke, don’t puke, he chanted silently in time with the rumbling of the shuttle on the mag-rails, don’t puke don’t puke don’t puke …

The wave of nausea abated and his insides settled down into a muttering sourness. Shivering, miserable, Teonine huddled into his corner and wished again that he was anywhere but here.

Not that it was anyone’s stupid fault but his own that he was here, of course. One day a month, the students were allowed to leave the carefully-curated grounds of the school, get on the mag-shuttle which was the only means of transport between the various different settlement bubbles on the space station, and visit New Baxeid. New Backside, as the students had inevitably christened it (quite the sophisticated wit, whoever had first thought that one up), lived up to its informal moniker; it was just a hub of offices, warehouses and what passed for upscale residences and shops which catered to the bureaucrats and corporate types who ran the mines on this system’s various lifeless planetoids and asteroids. But to the kids who spent the rest of the month inside the ergonomically-designed buildings and wandering the manicured lawns of the Pantomathia Academy (and you could guess what the students in their infinite wit and creativity did with that name), positively the finest school in Republic space for wealthy parents who wanted their kids to be able to do anything except escape, it represented the only opportunity for a monthly crumb of freedom.

Teonine usually didn’t bother going. He’d been at Pantomathia for three years already, had exhausted the possibilities of New Baxeid - at least, the bits that students were allowed to visit - within the first term, and ‘town’ weekends were usually a good opportunity for him to work on his still in relative privacy. But whatever he’d decided it was a good idea to try fermenting this time had done a number on the pipes, which had made an urgent trip into town imperative. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Teonine thought with the clinicalness of the truly hungover, if he hadn’t tried drinking the results last night despite knowing they’d started to dissolve inert plastic.

His stomach lurched at the very thought, and he pulled the cuffs of his sleeves over his balled fists, shivering. At the tender age of fifteen, Teonine had had some truly miserable hangovers, but the way he’d felt when he’d woken up this morning had taken the prize for sheer awfulness with room to spare. Only the knowledge that this was his only chance for a month to get new tubing and prevent an unthinkable future lapse in his supply could have made him crawl out of bed. Even then it hadn’t been until well after what should have been lunchtime.

Don’t think about lunch.

That was how he’d ended up in a situation he normally avoided like Talaxii foot-rot; the last shuttle to leave New Baxeid in time for the school curfew, crammed into a compartment crowded not just with weary workers and miners headed back to their residential blocks, but with the kids who thought that waiting until the very last minute to get back to the academy made them somehow cool. The ones who liked to hang back and stray down the side streets and talk about staying out past sunset, when school rumour had it that illicit and seedy nightspots catering to the transitory miner population sprang to life and stayed open till dawn. As if they’d ever dare try it.

In the frantic jostle to get on board the shuttle, Teonine had ended up getting swept to the back of the carriage with the absolute worst and dumbest kids from his class; Torsin Fralx, blond and beefy, and his cronies Voka Ginn and Fotze the Gran - all boys Teonine’s mother had gently forbade him from having anything to do with (‘If only I could believe your good influence on them would be stronger than their bad influence on you’) - and the Kel’Dor twins, Aun and Zu, whose father served with Teonine’s mother in the Senate (‘What a quaint family, really quite civilised, such a shame the way those boys play would be much too rough for you, Teonine’). They were all being particularly loud and obnoxious today, vying with each other to impress the girls who were standing next to them in a tight little huddle, Tixia and H’Rukn and the new one, pretending to ignore the boys but shrieking with laughter a little more piercingly every time Fralx did something dumb. Knowing Fralx, the girls’ laughter was going to be audible only to certain aquatic species by the time they got back to school.

None of them had acknowledged Teonine, of course, despite the fact that he was standing within a few feet of them; if Senator Lunulata’s descents upon the school (once when Fotze accidentally gave Teonine a nosebleed in gym, and then when Teonine accidentally let slip that Fralx sometimes called him ‘squid-boy’) hadn’t done the trick, the fact that their parents had absolutely warned them not to do anything to upset the offspring of such an influential politician would have. He’d been safely invisible for the best part of his three years at Pantomathia, and that was exactly how he wanted it. He just wished they wouldn’t be so fucking loud, that was all. Some people had hangovers.

‘Give it back, Voka, you kriffing herder!’ Fralx bellowed nearby, and Teonine closed his eyes, trying to pretend he couldn’t hear that voice rattling through his skull. There was the sound of scuffling feet and grunts, and a Rodian yelp before Fralx was yelling again: ‘Got it! Hey, Karia, did you see that? The skrag tried to nick my kriffing holocard! Kriffing skrag!’

Behind closed eyelids, Teonine rolled his itchy eyes in their sore sockets. Pantomathia liked to bill itself as ‘Polishing the Best and the Brightest’; in Fralx’s case, they were definitely buffing a turd.

‘Dastardly,’ said a girl’s voice, dripping with boredom.

‘Hey, hey, Karia, do you know what time it is? Do you remember I said I’d show you our game? Do you remember?’

‘Kriff’s sake, Fralx, she remembers, don’t tell the whole room,’ drawled another girl; the exaggerated Coruscant accent meant H’Rukn, who liked to pretend she didn’t come from Uphrades.

‘Yeah, it’s supposed to be a secret, you skrag.’

‘You’re the skrag, skragface!’ More scuffling feet.

‘Are we going to show her the game, or are you skrags just going to feel each other up the whole ride?’ H’Rukn again. ‘We’re nearly out of the bubble.’

‘Kriff, you’re right.’ That was Fralx. ‘Where’s the datapad? Tixia, do you have it?’

There was a momentary pause, and then Teonine heard the bored girl say again, ‘Ooh, it’s a circle that flashes. I can’t wait to tell all my friends.’

‘The circle’s just for picking the players,’ Tixia was explaining. Teonine peeked from under half-closed eyelids; the Mirialan girl had her datapad out, and was glancing suspiciously all around her in a way that would have betrayed she was up to something she shouldn’t be if anybody had been paying the slightest attention to the students at the back of the carriage. ‘Well, player, really. Then the person who gets picked, picks their player.’

‘Player for what?’ the bored girl - it was the new girl, Karia something - asked, and Tixia and H’Rukn dissolved into giggles.

‘To go in there with,’ Aun, or maybe Zu, buzzed through his antiox mask, and Teonine heard the other one rap on the back wall of the compartment.

‘The airlock?’ the new girl asked, and Tixia and H’Rukn laughed harder than ever.

‘“Take My Breath Away” is a Panty-mouth tradition,’ Fralx announced pompously. (So were bullying, self-harm and eating disorders, Teonine thought.) ‘You draw lots, and whoever loses has to pick someone to go into the airlock with, and we seal you in.’

‘And you can’t get out while the shuttle is between the bubbles,’ Ginn interjected eagerly.

‘She knows how airlocks work, skrag-for-brains,’ Tixia told him.

‘So how long till the next bubble?’

‘Seven minutes. No getting in or out.’ There was another gust of giggling.

‘So it’s an excuse to make out, except you could also both die.’

‘Someone did die once!’ Tixia exclaimed. ‘There was a power failure at the coils and the rail de-polarised and these two girls were in the airlock and the emergency hatch systems failed too -‘ This station really attracted some incompetent engineers, Teonine thought - ‘and when the repair crew came they didn’t know anybody was in there so they blew the back hatch and the girls got vented into space.’

‘Still with their hands down each other’s pants,’ H’Ruk’n added.

‘Sure, whatever.’

Teonine gave in and opened his eyes. Fralx and his minions had their backs to him, facing the girls; through a gap between their shoulders, Teonine could see Tixia, H’Ruk’n and the new girl, confronting the boys like an opposing team. Tixia and H’Ruk’n had their arms round each other’s waists like they always did, but the new girl had her hands on her hips in a way that would have looked cool and provocative on someone with hips, and which, to be fair to her, she was very nearly pulling off with the equipment at her disposal. All the kids who could grow or buy long hair were wearing it the same way that year, in absurdly long, high pigtails that were meant to imitate lekku, but hers was cut short in a profusion of seemingly careless flicks and spikes, and dyed a violent blood orange. She had on a synthleather jacket like the spacers Teonine had sometimes seen in New Baxeid, and tight pants, and she had enough piercings in her nose and elaborate cuffs on her ears to almost camouflage the cybernetic implants that looped her ears and extended delicate silvery arms almost to the corners of her eyes.

Karia Madeesh, that was her name, and she looked just as cocky and pleased with herself now as she had when the form tutor had introduced her to the class with an injunction to make her feel at home and ease the difficult transition between schools while she stood there running her eyes over them all like she was trying to decide who was cool enough to hang out with her.

Usually that sort of thing would get you eaten alive at the Academy. But because everybody had already heard that the new girl had got kicked out of her last school, and who knew how many before that, they were all agog to find out exactly what she’d done; and when she acted like she didn’t even want to know them, that sealed the deal, because these were some of the smartest, best-educated morons in the galaxy.

‘It did happen,’ Fotze was insisting, braying through his nostrils the way he always did when he was blustering. ‘My brood-uncle Gakze was here twenty years ago and he said -’

‘No, yeah, I’m sure you’re right,’ Karia said, examining the orange-painted fingernails of one hand. ‘I’m sure it’s a really dangerous game of … kissing.’

‘Like you wouldn’t be scared to go in there,’ Fralx scoffed, rapping his knuckles on the emergency hatch in the back wall of the carriage.

Karia shrugged. ‘I think I could just about handle it.’

‘So do it, new girl.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t you need your little flashing circle to pick a player?’

‘Usually. But since it’s your first shuttle ride, and since it’s all so tame and juvenile, I think you should go in.’

‘Torsin,’ Voka whined.

‘Shut up.’ Fralx had stepped forward, and Teonine had seen him on the edge of losing his temper enough times to be able to picture the look on his face with perfect clarity. ‘So? Are you going to go in there, or what?’

Karia inspected her fingernails again, flicked some stray lint off her sleeve, tossed her hair out of her eyes and said: ‘Fine, I’ll do it.’ Teonine saw the set of Fralx’s beefy shoulders relax, and was laying his own head back against the wall, losing interest again, when she added: ‘With him.’

Teonine saw every head whip round to follow her pointing finger, and reflexively looked round himself, with the result that his cheek and nose collided with the wall his head was leaning on. There was a hot bloom of pain in his face and a cold lurch of nausea in his stomach and he staggered away from the wall a little, then - idiotically - looked back at the wall again, as if there could somehow be somebody standing behind him.

Fralx’s mouth was open and he was spluttering, apparently lost for words, and a very small, very secret part of Teonine took a mental snapshot of that image. The rest of him was still trying to turn around and look behind him again.

Karia sidestepped Fralx and took two or three steps towards Teonine and the chances that this was some galaxy-sized misunderstanding were further reduced as she looked at him curiously and said, ‘Teonine, right?’

‘Um,’ Teonine said. After a couple of seconds, some neurons kicked into gear in his faltering brain, suggesting that wasn’t enough of an answer, so he added: ‘Er.’

She smiled at him, or at least started to, before she clearly registered the noises he’d made in lieu of words and the smile sort of slid off the side of her mouth. ‘Um … OK?’ She tilted her head to one side, caught somewhere between amusement and confusion. ‘You know about the game, right? So … do you want to?’

Did he want to? Did he want to? Did he want to -? Teonine wasn’t used to being asked what he wanted, except by grown-ups sometimes - visiting professors and more-or-less distant relatives and connections of his mother’s - and that was always ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ and that question was always just a cloak for what they really wanted to know, which was ‘Are you going to fall in line or not?’.

Sometimes he thought about wanting, how it worked, what it must feel like: Like a tug inside, a finger hooking itself inside your waistband, pulling you onwards. Sometimes he thought he could sense wanting by its absence, but that wasn’t better, it just left him feeling like a speeder bike with no ignition key.

He might have felt the tug or not, standing there in front of a cool, pretty girl who’d just asked him in front of everyone to make out with her, but he had no idea how he was supposed to know when his whole body was ringing like a bell with the shock and the heat of being spoken to, looked at, picked.

He didn’t know what he wanted.

He knew he didn't want to say no.

So he said: ‘Yeah. OK.’

She smiled and rolled her eyes at him, but not in a mean way, more like she was inviting him to laugh with her at how stupid everything was, and that made him feel another new thing, like something that had been tightly wound in his chest was unspooling, like he might be turning all sorts of colours on the inside. ‘Well, come on then.’

She reached out and took his hand, just like that, like it was a thing anybody could just do; and led him through the centre of the loose knot of kids, pulling him confidently after her, towards the back right corner of the carriage. Teonine heard a few disbelieving mutters and splutters, but for the most part the kids were silent, silent as Fralx, who seemed to have stiffened into statue-like immobility. Not silent because they were avoiding speaking to him in case they upset Senator Lunulata’s precious boy, but silent like they genuinely didn’t know what to say, like they were truly confounded. And to the complex cocktail of emotions Teonine was conscious of experiencing was added a secret squirm of shameful pleasure at how much he was enjoying that.

Voka Ginn hesitated, looking uncertainly over at Fralx, but Karia raised her eyebrows at him and he knelt down by the emergency hatch, connecting his datapad to the controls and tapping in a few commands (slicing, isolating and slaving controls like these was something even the lowest-achieving pupil at Pantomathia’s computer science classes could do). The hatch cover jolted slightly as it sprang free, and Voka moved quickly to catch it before it could fall on to the floor, although it was hardly likely that anyone in the crowded, noisy compartment would hear it if it did, or bother pushing their way through the tightly-packed passengers to investigate.

Karia raised her eyebrows again, at him this time, and feeling like he was lost in a place he was supposed to recognise, Teonine let go of her hand, knelt down and crawled through the hatch.

He had to release his grasp on the tubing hidden underneath his sweatshirt as he did so, and as he made it through the hatch, it started to slip free, one end of it uncoiling and snaking down towards the floor. Hurriedly he grabbed it and tucked it back into place as he got to his feet, just in time as Karia crawled through after him.

Teonine only had time to register a confused impression of the inside of the airlock - grimy metal, a few nets hanging from nails on the wall as if things had once been stored in here and secured in case of ventilation - when the light shining through the entryway was suddenly extinguished as Voka Ginn replaced the hatch after them.

It was … dark. Teonine probably should have been expecting that - why would there be lights inside an airlock? - but in his agitated state the suddenness of it came as a shock which ratcheted his panic up another notch. In a few moments his eyes would have adjusted, but for now all he could make out was the dim movement that was Karia getting to her feet.

‘Cosy,’ he heard her say with casual sarcasm.

It was small - which, of course it was, why would an emergency airlock on a groundside mag-shuttle be big - but the design rationale didn’t make Teonine feel any better about the size of it. It was the same width as the compartment, of course, but in length it was narrow; Teonine reached out with the hand that wasn’t currently keeping the tubing from falling out of his sweatshirt and felt his palm flatten against the back panel of the shuttle. It was rattling faintly, which was not reassuring; right now, if the maglocks that kept it shut were to fail, they would still be able to breathe the air and feel the warmth of New Baxeid’s atmospheric bubble, but in a few seconds …

As if on cue, there was a faint sucking thunk from both the panel at the back and the direction of the hatch, and a familiar shudder ran through the floor.

‘We’re out of the bubble.’ He had tried to speak quietly, to keep it from being startlingly loud in the quiet, but the words came out in more of a terrified whisper.

‘I guess our seven minutes starts now.’ He saw the fugitive gleam of Karia’s implants as she turned her head from side to side as if trying to survey the space.

His own eyes were rapidly adjusting to the darkness, and he looked around him. What he saw was not particularly encouraging. There were big patches of sealant in several places as if covering up places where the metal seams had begun to part, and, worse, none of them seemed particularly fresh. The control panel in the corner, which would instruct the back panel whether or not to open into the hard vacuum of space, had a distinctly jerry-rigged look; Teonine was almost sure there were a couple of loose wires hanging from it, and the floor and walls in the other corner seemed to be darker than the rest of the airlock, as if blackened by fire. Teonine wondered whether he’d been too quick to dismiss the story of the girls who died in here during a game of ‘Take My Breath Away’ as a school legend.

As if reading his mind, Karia said: ‘Wow. We really might die in here.’

He blinked. ‘Wait - you can see?’

‘A bit.’ He saw her hand come up to point at her implants, and a wave of several different perfumes hit him at once, somehow. ‘Magic eyes. Courtesy of Mom and Dad.’

‘Oh. I guess mine are too. From my parents, I mean.’

She giggled as if his weak joke had been a lot funnier than it was. ‘So how much can you see in this light? How many fingers am I holding up?’

Teonine didn’t need to be able to see in the dark for that. ‘One. The middle one.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She thrust her hand in front of his face, trying to cover his eyes with her spread fingers while she waved the other one. ‘How about now?’

Teonine’s senses were suddenly flooded by conflicting chemical scents; he jerked his head away instinctively, choked on a hasty breath.

‘Hey - you OK?’ She drew back, looking concerned.

‘Yeah,’ Teonine said breathlessly, still trying to force down the choke that pinched at each inhalation. ‘Sorry - the perfume -’

‘Huh? Oh. Yeah, we were testing them out at the store, you know, Largxel’s? I guess we put on kind of a lot.’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘I can’t even smell them any more. Is it awful?’

‘No, it’s just - a lot -’

‘Maybe it’ll help if it’s just one scent. Hang on.’ She pushed up her jacket sleeves and sniffed at her wrists and forearms. Teonine saw dark slashes streaking her skin, and thought for a wild second they were wounds, but then realised they were cosmetics of different shades, sampled on her forearms and the backs of her hands. ‘Here - I think this one’s the nicest. Just try to smell that.’

She lifted her right wrist to his face, so close in front of his nose that it almost grazed her skin; his head swam again.

‘Just breathe,’ she told him, her voice carrying such authority that he automatically did what he was told, concentrating on the strongest scent, the perfume she’d told him was the nicest. He knew he knew the different components of it, the creamy notes on top and the earthy, dried body, but he couldn’t put the right names to them; he just concentrated on breathing them in, focusing on that one scent as, slowly, his overwhelmed senses calmed down.

‘Better?’ she asked him, still holding her wrist up to his face.

‘Mmm-hmmm.’ Teonine wanted to nod, but he knew if he did his nose would touch her skin, so he tried to shrug with his body while keeping his head perfectly still. ‘Yeah. How did you know that would work?’

‘When I got my implants …’ She trailed off, and then gave him a wry smile, finally pulling her wrist away from his face. ‘Let’s just say I get it. Being overwhelmed by something other people are barely aware of.’

‘Oh.’ Teonine had heard the other kids circulating some story about how she got the implants; something about needing them to repair damage sustained in some Imperial bombing, some outpost somewhere where her parents were serving, he hadn’t really been listening. ‘Do they - I mean, did it hurt?’

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘You just have to focus on one thing, and shut out everything else. Everything’s fine when you learn to do that.’ She lifted one hand as if to touch his tresses, but stopped short. ‘Aren’t those band-things supposed to filter out … stuff?’

Teonine fought the urge to flick them back over his shoulders. ‘They block. They don’t filter. But sometimes -’

‘I get it. Making a mental note not to wear seven different perfumes next time I go to make out with a Nautolan.’

Teonine had almost been starting to, if not relax, then unwind slightly, but at the mention of making out his hearts jumped so hard he felt as if he’d been punched in both sides of his chest simultaneously.

‘I haven’t, you know. Made out with a Nautolan before.’ She was definitely standing closer to him than she had been before. ‘Have you? Made out with a human?’

‘Uh -’ Teonine felt like distant areas of his brain were fusing together. ‘I - um -’

‘But you’ve, you know. You’ve done this before.’ Karia laid it out like a statement, but it was unmistakably a question.

The air was definitely getting thinner in here. ‘I don’t -’ He didn’t know how to explain that he avoided the dumb kids that played this game, avoided being on this shuttle, avoided everything. ‘I never got picked before.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t have to go into a dark airlock to kiss someone. You can just, you know, kiss them.’

When she made it sound so simple it was difficult to point out that maybe she could, but he couldn’t. Teonine floundered, trying to figure out what he could say that would convey how hopelessly out of his depth he was without betraying, well, how hopelessly out of his depth he was.

He got as far as ‘Um -’

‘So you’ve never kissed anyone. That’s cute.’ She adjusted her stance, shifting closer into him; he felt her torso brush against the arm he still had wrapped around his front, clutching on to the tubing concealed beneath his shirt. ‘Do you want to?’

There was that question again.

He felt the faintest tug as Karia curled her fingers into the front of his sweatshirt, not pulling, just resting there. Now he couldn’t smell anything but the perfume she’d got him to focus on; it seemed to envelop them both like a cloud, cutting them off from the rest of the galaxy. She was looking up at him, her head tilted back and her expression soft, and she was -

She was really pretty.

The thought took hold of him so suddenly he felt as if the ground had dropped away from beneath his feet; maybe he could do what she obviously expected him to, just bend down and kiss her, just as easily as she had taken his hand before. Maybe he could just lean down and put his lips on hers and let whatever happened, happen. Maybe it really could be that simple …

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, definitely almost about to do it, when she tilted her head to one side, looked up at him through her eyelashes, and said, ‘You know, I bet your mom would hate it if she knew you were in here with me.’

Just like that, whatever Teonine had been tentatively feeling was erased as if it had never been. ‘What?’ he said, too loudly.

‘Isn’t she some big-time senator? I bet she��d hate it if she knew her son was alone in a little dark airlock with me.’ Karia’s hand in his sweatshirt tugged lightly, teasing. ‘Did she warn you to stay away from me?’

In point of fact, Senator Lunulata had called before Karia even arrived at the school to warn Teonine to avoid her (‘She’s the kind of misguided young woman who could seriously impede the pursuit of your goals, sweetheart’). But Teonine didn’t feel the smallest desire to tell Karia that. His hangover had suddenly returned in full force, hammering in his temples and lurching in his stomach and hot little prickles breaking out all over his skin, and all he wanted was to crawl into his bed, or at least out of this airlock.

Karia’s hand released its grip on his sweatshirt; numbly, he could feel it travelling slowly up his chest. ‘Did she tell you I was a bad girl?’

There was a distant lurch of the shuttle on the rails, and Teonine’s stomach heaved in tandem; he squeezed his eyes shut for a brief second and managed not to be sick, but it made him feel like he was falling backwards. He opened his eyes, but the falling continued.

Her hand was sliding around his collar now, towards the back of his neck, and her face seemed closer, somehow. ‘Do you know why they call me a bad girl, little fish?’

He shook his head, unable to open his mouth for fear he’d be sick. The floor of the airlock seemed to be sliding out from under his feet, tipping him backwards, and there was a faint whistling sound like air was escaping somewhere.

Her hand was pushing against the back of his neck, tugging his head downwards, and he felt her breath against his jaw as she whispered: ‘Wouldn’t you like to?’

The shuttle swayed again, and his stomach was yanked out from under him, and Teonine fell.

There was something cold and metal behind his head, and a raised voice. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled automatically.

‘What?’ A girl’s voice. Panicked. ‘What did you say? Are you OK?’

‘Sorry,’ Teonine said again. There was cold metal underneath his legs and butt too, and it seemed to be rumbling and jolting. He put out a hand, and felt more metal, vibrating under his hand with an unmistakable rhythm.

Shuttle. The word set up a train of associations in Teonine’s mind. Shuttle. Airlock. Dark. Cramped. And …

‘Oh fuck.’ He put both hands on his face, and felt how cold and clammy his skin was. ‘Oh fuck.’

‘Dude, you have got to tell me if you’re OK.’

Teonine opened his eyes. He was half-sitting, half-leaning against the bulkhead which had been behind him, his legs sprawled out on the floor in front of him; and kneeling between them, looking scared, was Karia.

‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.

He’d fainted. A girl had tried to kiss him, and he’d fainted.

‘I’m OK. I’m fine.’ He pushed himself backwards, or tried to, but his hands slipped, too damp to get a purchase on the grimy metal floor. ‘Sorry.’

‘You just went down.’ She was pale, and the darkness of the airlock drained the colour from her virulently orange hair. ‘I was just - and then I saw all these colours go off on your, your things -’ She gestured to his shoulder. ‘And then you just went really green and you - you passed out.’

Clearly, his protective colouration had kicked in, a display to warn away predators. Teonine didn’t even have the energy to feel embarrassed about that, even though to another Nautolan it would be the equivalent of pissing his pants. He shifted. No, at least he hadn’t done that. ‘I’m OK.’

‘Are you sure?’ She reached a hand towards his head. ‘You still look pale -’

Teonine flinched away; he thought he might actually die on the spot if she touched him right now. ‘It’s OK, it’s just - I was -’ He sought wildly for an excuse. ‘I’m - I guess I panicked. I’m claustrophobic.’

In the half-light, he thought she gave him a strange look, but what she said was: ‘Oh. Oh shit.’ She scooted backwards towards the other end of the airlock, giving him as much space as she could. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Teonine passed a hand over his clammy forehead; the pain in his temples had subsided to a dull but persistent throbbing. ‘I mean, you didn’t know.’

‘Yeah, but I ask you to come in here, I put you on the spot in front of everybody -’ She waved her hand at the wall adjoining the rest of the compartment.

Teonine wouldn’t have believed his spirits could sink any lower, but at the reminder that the rest of the kids from their class were on the other side of the partition, waiting with bated breath to hear what had happened on this side, they slipped another few notches.

Karia clearly picked up that she wasn’t helping, because she cut herself off in mid-sentence, eyed him warily for a second. ‘Don’t worry. Just breathe, OK?’ She checked her wrist chronometer. ‘We’ll be inside the school’s bubble in a couple of minutes, and then you can get out.’

Get out and begin the rest of his academic career as the freak Nautolan who fainted when a girl tried to kiss him. And to think that this morning he’d genuinely believed his life couldn’t get any worse.

Karia was rooting in her shoulder bag. ‘I really thought I had some water in here. Do you have any? You should have some water.’

‘Huh? No. I don’t have any.’

‘That’s ironic,’ she said nervously. ‘You’re, like, a fish out of water. A fish out of -’ She caught his eye. ‘Never mind.’ She sat back against the wall, hugging her knees, mirroring Teonine’s posture. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? You really don’t look so good.’

‘I’m fine.’ Seeing her sit like that made Teonine suddenly realise he was missing something. He bolted upright, patting down the front of his sweatshirt -

‘Looking for this?’ Karia held up one end of the plastic tubing. It had clearly come loose and slithered out onto the floor.

‘Uh - yeah.’

‘I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it coming out from underneath your sweatshirt. I thought it was, like, your weird Nautolan intestines or something. Or your dick.’

Teonine, caught mid-inhalation, spluttered. His head throbbed again. ‘Thanks.’ He yanked the tubing towards him. ‘It’s - uh - I need it for class - it's a science project -’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Just tell me if you’re building a bomb to blow up the school. I’ll help.’

Teonine smiled weakly. ‘It’s nothing. I - well - I’ll show you sometime.’

‘Sure you will, little fish.’ Karia glanced at her wrist again. ‘We really are nearly out, I promise.’

‘No, it’s OK, I just -’ Teonine broke off, biting his lip.

She looked concerned again. ‘What? What’s up?’

Could you maybe not tell everyone - not tell anyone - about that thing where I fainted on you? He couldn’t even muster up the energy to try to form the words, despite the growing knot in his stomach when he thought about the looks on Fralx and Fotze’s faces. ‘Nothing.’ He leaned his head back against the wall and longed for his bed.

Distantly he heard her say, ‘It’s OK, you know. I’m not going to say anything.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Teonine mumbled.

‘I mean it,’ she insisted. ‘We just won’t say anything about what we did.’

‘Then they’ll assume I freaked out or did something weird,’ Teonine said wearily. ‘It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.’

‘You know what? You’re right. It is fine. Because I’m going to fix it.’ She clapped her hands, startling Teonine out of his daze, and jumped to her feet. ‘Give me a sec.’

Puzzled, he watched as she ran her hands violently through her short blood-orange hair until it lost its carefully-defined flicks and stood out from her head in a fuzzy sort of way. Then she undid the second-to-top button on her shirt. Lastly, she did a weird sort of dance on the spot, jumping up and down vigorously and slapping her cheeks.

‘What are you doing?’ Teonine asked.

‘Trust me.’ She stood stock still for a minute, and Teonine thought she was mouthing something at him, until he realised she was trapping her bottom lip between her teeth and scraping her top teeth over it.

Then she dug in her bag and pulled out a shiny tube of something - lipstick, Teonine realised, as she opened it and scrutinised the colour. She smudged some on her thumb and carefully dabbed her lips with it, then turned to Teonine. ‘Up.’

He pulled his feet in and slid his back up the wall until he was standing; his head swum a little, but he stayed upright. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making you look the right kind of mess.’ She painted more lipstick on her thumb, reached out to touch him and then hesitated. ‘May I?’

Teonine still didn’t know what she was doing, but he nodded anyway.

She reached out and carefully brushed her thumb against the corner of his mouth, then, seemingly as an afterthought, smudged it against the collar of his sweatshirt. She scrutinised him narrowly, then, apparently satisfied, nodded and put the lipstick into her pocket.

‘Now,’ she instructed, ‘when we get out there, just wipe it off with the back of your hand and look embarrassed.’

Teonine touched the corner of his mouth gingerly with his fingertip. ‘That part’s not going to be a problem.’

‘If somebody asks you what we did in here -’

‘They won’t.’

‘- Just don’t say anything and act like you’re too cool to talk about it. I’ll handle the rest. Trust me, I know just what to say.’

Karia looked down at the tubing he was still holding. ‘Should we try and stash this? Or fit it in my bag? No,’ she decided, ‘stick it back up your sweatshirt. If anybody looks, they’ll just think you’re trying to cover up a boner.’

Teonine, trying to wrap the tubing back around his midriff, choked again and dropped one end.

Karia rolled her eyes and stooped to pick it up. ‘Oh, come here.’

‘Thanks,’ Teonine mumbled, head swimming again as she turned him around with a hand on his shoulder, then back to face her again, wrapping the tubing around his abdomen where it could be concealed by his baggy sweatshirt. ‘You don’t have to … Thanks.’

‘One thing about me, little fish? I might get my friends into trouble, but I always get them out of it.’ She tucked the end of the tube underneath the coils. ‘There. That should be OK until you get back to your room. I’d tell you to go straight back there, but you always do.’

Teonine knew she was trying to make him smile. He knew he should want to smile. Instead, he said, too loudly: ‘You don’t have to be nice to me, you know.’

She laughed, picking up her bag and swinging it over her shoulder. ‘Yes, I do,’ she said, briskly. ‘If only because I triggered your … claustrophobia.’

A shudder passed through the floor and walls, and Teonine heard the faint thunk of seals relaxing, pressure equalising, as the shuttle passed through the atmospheric shield and into the school’s bubble.

Karia was already kneeling by the hatch. She turned to look back at him over her shoulder. ‘There’s another reason, of course,’ she said provocatively. ‘For being nice to you.’

Teonine tensed. ‘What?’

‘Well, you owe me one now, little fish.’ She winked at him. ‘Don’t forget, will you? I know I won’t.’

Teonine knew she was teasing, but as he squatted down beside her and waited for Voka Ginn to unseal the hatch, he felt the familiar, leaden weight of obligation settling into his stomach.

Part Two here.

#swtor #swtor fanfiction #swtor fic #oc kiss week #oc: teo lunulata #oc: devinahl #other people's cool ocs #how do you do fellow kids #overuse of the word skrag

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joon-ipersgirl · 4 years ago

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O5 - “airplane pt. 2″

genre: strangers to lovers!au, angst, fluff

pairing: jimin x reader (f)

summary: they say home is where the heart is. you’re convinced yours was taken the day your father died. until you meet jimin.

you believe in love but after watching men cycle through your mother’s arms, rocky relations with ex-boyfriends, and broken friendships, you no longer see it in your future. so much so, you never settle in one place long enough to call it home, choosing a job where you’re always on the go and on your own.

on a chance encounter on a flight from new york city to bali, indonesia, you meet. flustered by jimin’s flirty advances but understanding and good-natured tendencies, you start to fall. what starts off as a work-trip soon blossoms into a budding romance, but will jimin’s secret destroy the relationship before it’s had the chance to truly begin?

word count: 5.4k

warnings: cursing, mentions of anxiety, talks of heartbreak

a/n: i thought i should post this while i had the motivation lol. this has a lot of background for their past relationships with a lil twist so i hope you enjoy it. this is the last part i have completed so updates for this story might be a while but winter break is coming up so i should have more time. i just really want to do the next part justice you know? anywhoo. as always, thank you vi for reading this beforehand and pls leave any comments and thoughts in an ask. i’m curious to the reactions of jimin’s relationship history. enjoy everyone and think you for reading!

full masterlist // series masterlist // previous // next

There were no thoughts of Tiago when you woke up that morning. Your cheek was pressed against Jimin’s back as your arm was draped over his upper body and your leg slung over his lower back. His breathing was deep and even as he slept peacefully beside you. You realized you’d technically only taken a nap as no sunlight peeked under the curtain, only the artificial lights from the street signs gently illuminating the room.

The events of last night came rushing back to you and you pulled away from Jimin, surprised at just how bold you’d become.You’d truly felt comfortable enough to share a deep part of your life story with a man that you’d known for two days. A man that you had a crush on. A man that had almost kissed you in the middle of a dive bar in the middle of Hong Kong. Jimin was encroaching on dangerous territory.

A ping! came through on your phone which you realized was across the room with the rest of your things. You groaned at the thought of having to leave the comfortable confines of the bed. Another loud ping! dragged you from the warmth of the sheets, choosing to crawl over Jimin’s legs instead of his lap, remembering the previous morning’s antics. Checking your phone, you saw three unread messages from Michael.

Michael: Good afternoon Y/N! Have you any word on when you’ll arrive in Bali? [1:09]

Michael: So I haven’t received a call or text from you. I assume everything is fine, or Park Jimin has killed you. I hope it’s the former [4:17]

Michael: So clearly he’s killed you. I’ll be sending his name and social security number off to the authorities [4:19]

You snorted at Michael’s messages as you inched your way back into your spot though Jimin had claimed the majority of your space in his sleep. He didn’t stir as you slipped under the covers, but rested his head against your chest as you laid on your back; you didn’t have the heart to move him as you responded to Michael.

You don’t have his social security number Michael. I’m fine. We just had a long night. And our flight is leaving some time this afternoon. I’ll get the details from Jimin and send them to you

[4:22]

Michael: You don’t know that. And a long night? Y/N, don’t tell me you were in the arms of this man when you’ve only known him for at most 2 days [4:24]

So what if I was? You’ve definitely done worse

[4:25]

Michael: You’re right. But this is one of the areas where I don’t lead by example. Please tell me you used protection at least [4:26]

Gross, Michael. Nothing happened. We just went to the museum (I saw Garland Sans) and then went for dinner and some drinks

[4:27]

Michael: A museum, dinner, AND drinks? In ONE night? Sounds like a date. A classy one at that since you said there was no fucking [4:29]

Michael: AND YOU SAW GARLAND SANS WITHOUT ME?! WITH HIM?! HOW DARE YOU! [4:30]

You’re honestly so crude. There was no fucking. It was just a casual hangout, nothing crazy. Also, I didn’t know his work was going to be there. I don’t think it’ll be the same exhibit in New York so we’re fine

[4:33]

Michael: A casual hangout where you forget to text me back? I beg to differ. Spill [4:34]

You chewed on your lip as you stared at Michael’s message. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to tell him what happened; Michael was more than just a manager, he was also like a best friend. The problem was you didn’t really know how to describe last night. You barely understood what had transpired yourself. Throwing caution to the wind, you laid out all the details of the previous night.

Michael: … [4:53]

Michael: Y/N, this man did NOT wine and dine you and you left him hanging out to dry! Have I taught you nothing? [4:54]

Michael: I just - I cannot believe you got lucky like this. Well, not that kind of lucky. Either way, he didn’t actually kiss you so maybe he deserved that. An art curator at that. And he lives in NYC? You really are living in the moment. I’m so happy to hear after that S.O.B. [4:55]

Michael: Wait, does this mean you’re in bed together now?! [4:55]

It wasn’t that type of night! Like you said, I’ve known him for TWO DAYS. We can’t just have sex. And

I guess so; Tiago hasn’t been on my mind as much lately. Yes, Michael. We’re currently still in bed. Jimin’s sleeping

[4:58]

Michael: It’s the 21st century, Y/N. Live a little. You’re a modern-day woman. It’s been a year and a half love, I would hope he wasn’t. Not when you have a man that sounds like he’s sex on legs wrapped around your finger. [5:01]

Michael: Please send a pic. Thanks! [5:02]

He is not wrapped around my finger! And I’m definitely not just going to send you a picture of him sleeping! That’s weird!

[5:05]

Michael: Booo! This would be for the authorities Y/N. Think about your safety [5:07]

I am. So safe from you and your antics when I’m on the other side of the world. I’m going to shower, I’ll text you later

[5:09]

Michael: Oh you’re a dirty girl! Ask Jimin to join you. Remember to text me the flight details [5:12]

You chuckled at Michael’s attempt to make you uncomfortable. There was no way in hell you would do that. Jimin wasn’t wrong when he said you could barely look at him with clothes on and you blushed as the increasingly inappropriate thoughts tried to break through the barrier of unconsciousness and consciousness. You felt Jimin tug you closer as you tried to slip out of his grip again.

“Where are you going?” he mumbled, still half asleep.

“To go take a shower,” you said while trying to push him off you.

“No,” he whined. “Don’t leave me.” He snuggled closer and you laughed.

“Let go, Jimin. I smell gross; I’m basically leaking alcohol from my pores at this point.”

“I don’t care. You’re warm and I want to sleep more.”

“You can still sleep while I go and shower.” You pinched his side and he jerked away from you. His glare was comical as he struggled to locate you with sleep-heavy eyes. “So you’re ticklish? Good to know.”

“You’re mean,” he pouted as he rolled over onto his stomach after you’d successfully vacated the bed. “And it’s early as fuck. Wake me up when it’s a reasonable hour to be a human being.”

“You don’t even know what time it is,” you mumbled as you closed the door on any reply Jimin could make.

You welcomed the sting of the hot water against your shoulders, soothing the knots in the back of your neck. Letting the water run through your hair, you smoothed it out of your face. Massaging your scalp was therapeutic nowadays, especially since it was so much shorter. You hadn’t grown it out in a year and a half, now enjoying the short dry time and the new woman you were; Tiago would have hated it. You sighed as he resurfaced and you washed him away again with the simple smelling body wash. By the time you were dressed in your last clean emergency clothing, your hair was already drying.

The smell of coffee welcomed you as you sat down to add the final touches to your Saipan video. It wasn’t hard to get lost in editing, your brain working overtime to adjust the exposure of the film, fade out the titles, and sync up the music. You relished the peacefulness of the early morning quiet, your life seeming to return to its normal rhythm even if just for a few moments. Your moleskine journal with edited itinerary notes sat next to the steaming second cup of black coffee just as the breakfast rush started to roll in and along with them an extremely flustered Jimin.

“Y/N!” he crashed into the seat opposite you. “I thought you left!” His backpack sat beside yours on the floor as you stared at him confused.

“Where could I have possibly gone, Jimin?”

“I don’t know. You weren’t there when I woke up and neither was your stuff. I thought I overstepped last night and made you uncomfortable,” he said. Droplets of water fell from his hair and onto his white t-shirt. Your face softened.

“I needed some coffee. And to get some work done. You really thought I would have left you?” you asked curiously.

He shrugged and pushed his hand through his damp hair. “What reason would you have to stay?”

You opened your mouth and closed it. Jimin was right. You didn’t have to stay. It was possible that you could have just gone to the airport, given them your name, and be set - though that would have made for an awkward conversation whenever Jimin arrived as your seats were next to one another. You watched him head over to grab some food, greeting Sonia in passing, as he piled his plate high. He returned shortly after with Sonia and handed you a plate of fruit.

“She says you’ve been down here for hours and haven’t touched a thing; you need to eat. And she wanted to know if you enjoyed yesterday.” Sonia stood at the end of the table expectantly.

“It was really great. The museum was incredible. I really can’t thank you enough. And Jimin was a great tour guide. Did she see the pictures?” Jimin shook his head, his mouth stuffed with food as usual, before he thumbed the polaroids out of his wallet. Sonia cooed and the two of them chatted again, a slight blush overtaking the tips of Jimin’s ears.

“She said you look really beautiful and she’s happy you enjoyed yourself so much.” You thanked her as you chewed on a grape, wondering what else Jimin had left out of his translation. Too much was said for it to be condensed into a two-part sentence.

“What time is our flight leaving, Jimin? Michael wants me to send him the details.”

“So flight leaves at 1:40 pm and we board at 1:10 ish -“

“Holy fuck Jimin!” You slammed your laptop shut. “It’s 12:17! We have to go. Now. Fuck!” You shoved your journal into your backpack, the chair almost tipping back as you shot up from your seat. It took a few seconds for Jimin to realize just how far away from the airport you were before he too was out of his chair and shoving the last piece of pastry into his mouth. Sonia looked alarmed as you tried to return your dirty dishes until Jimin explained and she grabbed the plates out of your hands and yelled for William.

You bounced your leg as you watched William weave through the midday traffic. The leather of the seat bench stuck to the underside of your thighs. Lunch hour traffic in Hong Kong was just as bad as in New York and you willed yourself to remain calm as you cruised down the highway. The wind roared through the open windows and whipped your hair around your face. It was torture leaving the fate of your on-time arrival in the hands of a man you had literally met yesterday in a pickup truck that you were sure was a few years older than you. You envied Jimin’s ability to look peacefully out of the window at the bustling city while the coil of nerves bundled tight in your belly rolling like the waves of the deep sea.

Michael had not texted you back and you worried that somehow your phone service had been cut off again. An irrational thought because it was nearing 1 am in New York, but your brain had seemed to have left rationale back with Sonia. The comfort that your early morning wake up had given you in addition to the previous night’s adventures had been ripped away from you. It was no longer only you and Jimin in the back seat; anxiety had squeezed in beside you. Tears pricked your eyes in frustration as you prayed you wouldn’t have another delay in finally getting to Bali.

“Don’t worry, Shutterfly. We’re going to make it. You’re not missing this flight. I promise,” Jimin said to you as William followed the signs for the departure terminal. You could barely offer him a smile as the looming structure that was Hong Kong International Airport grew closer.

William pulled his truck over to the sidewalk between a Kia and a Buick, the vehicle looking extremely ancient compared to the other two. “Have a safe flight. And Sonia expects to see you both again soon okay?” William declared. Jimin hopped down and turned to help you out of the truck.

“We’ll do our best,” Jimin muttered, glancing at you. “Thank you for everything, William. I’ll let you know when we land.”

“Thank you, William. It really meant a lot, you taking me in and stuff,” you added and he gave your shoulder a squeeze through the open window as Jimin shut the door.

“You two should hurry. Go,” he shooed you towards the terminal doors. Jimin said goodbye once more and then was pulling you through the automatic doors.

The two of you breezed through the other passengers checking their luggage as you used the machine kiosks bypassing any potential cheery airline workers. Jimin trailed behind you as you zipped through the slow-moving passengers, your eyes focused on the glass doors leading towards the security checkpoint.

“Hey! Slow down, Shutterfly. We’re going to make it, even if we have to run,” Jimin said as he picked up his pace to catch up with you. You did not want to have to run. You had never run for a flight in your entire life and you did not want to start now. You bounced from side to side as you moved painstakingly slow towards the immigration officer perched on her high chair. It was already 1 pm, but no one else seemed concerned, probably actually on time for their flight. You rolled your shoulders, trying to loosen the tension nestled between them.

“It’s okay, Y/N. It’s okay.” Jimin slipped his hand under your hair, his thumb rubbing gentle circles between the base of your neck and shoulders. You sighed and removed his hand, turning to face him.

“It’s not okay, Jimin. I don’t even know if they have my bag,” you huffed. You stepped forward to hand your passport and boarding pass to the officer.

“I’m sure they do, darling. As long as you have your -”

“I remember what you said about the tag, Jimin. That doesn’t change the fact that I could land in Bali without my bag. I don’t even have enough time to ask someone about it,” you snapped while placing your camera bags into the grey bins, your shoes following after. Jimin said nothing further as he emptied his own backpack, the book he had been reading more dog-eared than when you first saw it along with a leatherbound book.

Just as you were passing through the body scanner, an announcement blared through the terminal. “This is the last boarding call for passengers Park Jimin and Y/N Y/LN on flight 7860 with services to Bali, Indonesia at Gate C9. Again, would passengers Park Jimin and Y/N Y/L/N please report to Gate C9 for flight 7860 to Bali, Indonesia? Thank you.”

“Shit,” you exclaimed, shoving your hands through your hair as another TSA officer looked over your scan. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

“Alright, you’re good.” You didn’t wait for the last word to spill from his mouth before you were back in front of the conveyor belt waiting for your stuff to pass through its own scanner. Quickly and as carefully as you could, you zipped your cameras back up and tucked them into your backpack. Your hands were shaking.

“Don’t worry, Y/N! I got you!” Jimin called out as he moved around you. He was already packed up and taking off by the time you’d secured your things. You stared in disbelief as you watched him run through the departure terminal, not caring how many people stared at him. It looked like you would be doing the same.

You chased after him, clutching your passport and phone in your hand, chest heaving as you watched Jimin’s head disappear further into the crowd. Fuck, he was fast. You dodged the small children that waddled along with their parents and the elderly couples that squinted up at the screens to find their correct gates. Your legs burned as you pushed through the pain, the hallways of the airport being much longer than you remembered. You couldn’t afford to miss this flight.

Rounding the corner to gate C9, the seats were empty. The rest of the passengers had already boarded the plane. A few of the airline employees milled around getting ready to close the gate. One was arguing with Jimin who refused to walk through the doors so they couldn’t close it.

“Look! There she is. I told you!” Jimin was standing in the doorway leading down the aircraft gangway, blocking the airline employees from closing the door. They looked highly irritated.

“Miss Y/L/N?”

“Yes, that’s me. I’m so sorry!” you apologized while handing over your boarding pass for it to be scanned. Your face felt hot from all the attention but you pushed it down. There was nothing else to worry about.

“Have a safe flight,” the employee mumbled as he handed you back the pass. You smiled, relieved.

Jimin grinned at you as he jogged towards the plane, his hair bouncing with every step. “I told you we wouldn’t miss the flight, Shutterfly.”

Ignoring all the nasty looks you received as you walked down the aisle of the plane, you and Jimin flopped down into your respective seats, tired from your sprint to the gate. The usual airplane routine started up as the plane left the gate and you relaxed in your seat as you watched the tarmac roll by through the window. Running was not your forte and you wondered if you should have considered Michael’s offer to be his plus one at Planet Fitness more seriously. You could feel the sweat bead around your hairline. A shower would be great once you reached your accommodations. You sat up abruptly.

“Fuck,” you whispered, grabbing your phone.

“What’s wrong?” Jimin asked, fastening his seatbelt.

Scrolling through your numerous email notifications, you saw the one you were praying wouldn’t be there. Airbnb reservation canceled in the subject line. Fuck.

“Ma’am, could you please turn off your cell phone or switch it to airplane mode? The plane is getting ready for departure,” a stewardess chided you. You nodded and tucked it back into your pocket, dazed. In 5 hours and 5 minutes, you would be landing in Ngurah Rai International Airport with nowhere to stay for 9 days. Shit.

“You’re chewing your lip again.”

“Huh?” You looked over at Jimin who was still reading The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, his body feigning disinterest but you knew he was paying attention to you.

“You were chewing your lip. It’s your tell-tale sign that something’s wrong,” he replied as he turned the page. You opened your mouth to protest but closed it quickly. He was right.

“How did you know though?” you asked, tucking your hair behind your ear, now extremely conscious that he had been observing you.

“What are you worrying about? Your project? Y/N, it’s going to be amazing. This is what you love doing, right? You can do it,” Jimin encouraged, bookmarking his page and looking at you.

“I don’t know, Jimin. A romantic getaway? That displays passion and love? Those are things I haven’t felt in a very long time,” you noted. The memories of Tiago swirled at the corners of youe mind and you sighed in frustration that you thought about him again.

“Bullshit,” he said. Jimin tucked his book into the seatback pocket in front of him. “Love doesn’t have to only be romantic, Y/N. There are so many incredible forms of love out there. The love people have for their families, for their jobs, for their - I don’t know - neighbors they only see on Sundays because they do laundry at the same time. We love just because. There really doesn’t have to be a reason,” he finished. You stared at him. His brown eyes were bright with passion and his face was set in determination to convince you what he was saying was true. You were amazed at his belief in his own words.

“Do you think you could say that again? On film, though.” He laughed at you as you went to pull out your camera but he stopped you.

“I keep telling you, Y/N. If you want me to be your muse, all you have to do is ask,” he said with a smirk. You rolled your eyes as you rested the camera in your lap. “But if you really do want my help, I’ll be happy to work with you on your project.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded and smiled. “Seriously. This is important to you. I want to help.”

You tried to hide your smile. Though it was something simple, Jimin supporting your craft was something you hadn’t experienced in years. People didn’t believe in the arts as much as they liked to consume it. “Thank you, Jimin. That really means a lot to me.”

“Remember I told you I’d show you what love is? This is a great way to do it.” Jimin grinned as you laughed at him.

“And what do you know about love, Mr. Park?” you asked jokingly. Jimin averted his eyes, his smile less vibrant than before.

“You’d be surprised,” he said with a shrug.

“More lessons from Mr. Park Sr.?” you joked again, poking his shoulder, trying to lighten his sudden change of mood. He chuckled lowly.

“Some. A lot I learned on my own.”

“A lot? What’s your favorite one?” you posed. You were intrigued about a Jimin who had seen these many sides of love. Who was he beforehand? How had he changed? “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

“Yep,” he said, popping the ‘p’. “A few times. I guess you could say the last one was the worst,” he commented.

“Would you like to share?” you asked gently, not wanting to overstep your boundaries.

“I can. Especially if it’ll help you believe in love.” He wiggled his eyebrows and you shoved his shoulder gently. “I assume you’ve also had your heart broken?” You nodded. “Hmm. Well, Shutterfly. Sit back, relax, and let me tell you the story of Alexandria.” Jimin eased his seat back and turned his head to face you, his fingers laced and resting in his lap. He looked as though he was in a therapist’s office to talk about his trauma and the feelings associated with them. Depending on the nature of the story, he might need to go and see one.

“Lexa and I met during my Freshman year of college. She was tall, slim figure, very ‘plain Jane’ except for her copper-colored hair. She was really a brunette, but in certain lighting, it looked red. Then she started toning it - it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I was hanging out with a bunch of friends in the library studying for this major test when she walked by and that was it; I was a goner. We ended up having a class together the following semester where I found out she was a Sophomore -”

“Ooh! An older woman?!” You perked up in your chair at the new detail. “I never would have -”

“Pegged me for the type? We’re back on that, Y/N?” he asked with a wry grin. You blushed at the memory and sank back down.

“Continue,” you whispered sheepishly.

“So she was a Sophomore studying Psychology with a minor in Creative Writing. She was a force to be reckoned with and I thought I had no chance with her until she asked me to hang out. I honestly couldn’t believe she was interested in me. We didn’t start dating until my Junior year of college, both of us traveling abroad the previous year, and we were really happy together.” Jimin smiled fondly as he recalled the memories and your heart fluttered in anticipation of what went wrong. “I proposed at my graduation while she was -”

“Excuse me? What?!” you exclaimed, staring at him in shock. “You proposed?!” He laughed at your reaction.

“Of course. I loved her and it was the right thing for me to do at the time,” he replied. That couldn’t be it.

“You got her pregnant, didn’t you?” He laughed again, this one vibrating through his entire body as he clutched his stomach; he didn’t seem concerned about the noise level.

“No, Y/N. I proposed because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

“Wow,” you breathed, amazed at his level of commitment at such a young age. To know who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with and be ready to take that risk? He had to be crazy. “Wait. How old are you?”

“I’m 26. This happened around 2 and a half years ago, I think. Well, it’s been 2 and a half years since she called off our engagement,” he added matter-of-factly.

“Fuck,” you grimaced. “What happened?”

“She fell out of love. She wasn’t there when I woke up the following morning - we had moved in together while she worked on her thesis and I started grad school. The ring was placed on a neatly written note and all of her things were gone. Said she needed a man that had a little more - she ‘couldn’t put her finger on it’. Less stoic, more spontaneous. Something like that.” Jimin shrugged, the smile no longer reaching his eyes.

“But she knew how you were when you first got together. That’s some bullshit,” you muttered. Anger flared deep in your gut as you thought about this Alexandria stealing away in the middle of the night leaving Jimin alone to deal with the consequences of her actions as the sun rose.

“No need to crucify her, Shutterfly. She made the best choice for her -”

“But she hurt you,” you interrupted, frowning.

“I don’t disagree, but she taught me my favorite lesson: love freely and without expectations. I lost myself trying to prove that I could be this manly man. That I was man enough to deserve a woman as incredible as her. I lost her because of impossible expectations I placed on myself. We were both at fault; she could have said something sooner. I just wrestle with my own transgressions more. At the end of the day, it made me a better man.”

Love freely and without expectations. How could he say that when the woman who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with left him? Alexandria was foolish to leave someone as admirable as Jimin behind. Your heart ached at him waking up and her no longer being there, having to read that she no longer wanted him. You guessed some explanation was better than having the door closed right in your face.

“And you survived all of this?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? Broken hearts aren’t as bad as they seem, Shutterfly.”

“To you, Jimin. Though I don’t know how you got through that,” you said shaking your head in disbelief.

“The same way you got through yours,” he replied seriously. “Tell me about him. Why don’t you believe in love anymore?”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in love anymore. I just don’t expect it to happen to me for a very long time,” you said pushing your hands through your hair. Jimin waited for you to continue expectantly. You sighed and threw your head back against the seat. “Alright, fine. His name was Tiago. I met him when I moved to California with my best friend. He was a TA in one of her classes and she introduced us. He was tall, Hispanic, with the tight ringlet curls. They were sun-bleached because he spent so much time at the beach. He had the most beautiful hazel eyes too,” you added. You don’t think there was a woman alive who could deny how attractive Tiago was.

“He was smart too, attending law school - Gould School of Law at USC to be exact. I was working as a photography assistant in a studio downtown and he seemed interested in my work. We started hanging out and after a few months, we started dating. Things were really good for a while. I thought I had found my home in him, especially after leaving Milo back in New York. I thought he understood what I was going through. He didn’t.” You closed your eyes as you breathed through the memory of the pain.

“After a year of good times, things started to get weird. Some random phone calls he started taking in other rooms, less planned dates, less attention overall. I ignored it, especially after we had a conversation about possibly moving in together. That was a little too far for me so I was thinking of giving him a key to my apartment - I had gotten a promotion at the studio I was working at and could finally afford my own place,” you said with a grin. “I went to his apartment with the key in a little box and when I knocked on the door, a woman answered.”

“Shit,” Jimin whispered. He rested his hand on your knee and you looked at him with a small smile.

“Yeah. She asked who I was - if she could help me, and before I could answer, Tiago appeared looking fresh out the shower and said I wasn’t ‘anyone important. Just a friend of a friend’s who was supposed to take their anniversary portraits’ and closed the -”

“What the fuck, Y/N?! Please don’t tell me that he closed the door in your face.” Jimin’s grip tightened as his jaw clenched. You nodded with another small smile. “That fucking asshole!” he roared. The lady in front of you turned to hush him. He ignored her.

“Mhm, he closed the door in my face. I think I stood there for 2 minutes before I called an Uber and headed home. A few days later, he texted me and told me that we couldn’t be together anymore - like no shit, dumbass. I found out through the grapevine that she had been his girlfriend for 2 and a half years on and off. They were very much on when we were dating. Remember that friend I told you I moved to Cali with? Apparently she knew but didn’t know how to break it to me. I packed up and moved to San Diego which is where I met Michael. He had seen some of my short films from a little exhibit we had on campus and thought he could help me get more work. That was a year and a half ago,” you finished.

“Y/N, I’m so sorry. He was a fucking dickhead to do that to you.” You waved Jimin off.

“Michael says the same thing - actually he calls him a son of a bitch. It’s fine though. But that’s the story. I’m still healing and building up trust with people. So I believe in love, I’ve just had some bad luck with it,” you said with a shrug. “I try not to dwell on it because -”

“It makes you anxious?” Jimin suggested. You gave him a tight lipped smile. His thumb stroked over your knee in soft brushes. “Well, we won’t talk about him then. Fuck him,” he grinned.

“Thanks, Jimin,” I laughed.

“And we’ll get this project done, yeah? Together?”

You looked at Jimin. He was smiling at you, his front tooth a little crooked but gleaming nonetheless. Tiny dimples appeared around the corners of his mouth - something you hadn’t noticed before. The little sun you had been in while in Hong Kong had started to turn his skin a caramel brown and you remembered the smoothness of his skin as you laid in bed. As the corners of his eyes wrinkled with warm affection and you smiled.

“Together.”

full masterlist // series masterlist // previous // next

joon-ipersgirl, 2020

#jimin fanfic #jimin x reader #bts fanfiction #jimin fluff #bts fanfic #fic: bitter and beloved

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worryinglyinnocent · 5 years ago

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Fic: Lost and Found

Summary: After years of searching, Belle finally finds what she’s looking for in the window of Mr Gold’s shop. And perhaps, she finds a friend as well.

Written for the @a-monthly-rumbelling moodboard prompt, available here.

Rated: G

Lost and Found

Belle had always wondered about the phrase ‘it’s always in the last place you look’. Of course it was always in the last place you looked. You didn’t keep looking for something after you’d found it.

She knew that wasn’t the intent of the phrase and she knew that she was being pedantic, but it had always kept her attention and been a source of amusement to her in the back of her mind.

Now she knew exactly what it meant.

A small sob escaped her lips as she pressed her hand up against the pawn shop window, wishing that she could just reach through the glass and grab that which her heart had yearned after for so long. They were so shiny and bright, as perfect and beautiful as the day she had last seen them all those years ago. Just when she had given up hope, just when she had decided that this was the last town that she would visit and that this was the last shop she would try.

Belle would know her mother’s vanity set anywhere, even after ten years without laying eyes on it.

She was vaguely aware of the rain splattering down on her head and plastering her hair down as the umbrella fell from her limp hand and she sank down onto her knees, her tears adding to the puddle of rainwater on the ground around her. She had finally found it.

It was too late to go in and negotiate a price now, as much as she wanted to fling the pawn shop door open and demand the vanity set in the window like someone out of a melodrama. The shop was closed; she had seen the sign on the door. Still, she knew where it was, and she could come back first thing in the morning. Right now, she was so overwhelmingly relieved that everything else paled into insignificance.

“Are you all right?”

The voice sounded slightly alarmed but mostly confused, and Belle was shocked back into cold and rather wet reality.

“Oh. Yes. Erm.”

The man who had spoken was standing at the corner of the building under a large black umbrella, looking wary and suspicious.

“I’m fine.” Belle scrambled up onto her feet again, now very aware that she was soaked to the skin and she must look a complete fright. At least the rain hid the fact that she probably had snot dripping down her face. She had never been able to cry prettily like they did on the TV.

She was also very aware that she probably didn’t look at all fine, and the man with the umbrella wasn’t moving. Belle wasn’t sure if she was expecting him to just tip his proverbial hat to her and go about his evening as if they’d not encountered each other, but it was unnerving to be watched like that. She grabbed her fallen umbrella, perhaps to use as a weapon if nothing else; she couldn’t exactly get much wetter, so it was useless against the rain.

“I’ll, erm, I’ll be off then.”

This statement wasn’t helped by the fact that she had no idea where she was going, but away from this place before she could embarrass herself any further was probably a good idea.

“It’s the vanity set, isn’t it?”

Belle stopped in her tracks in the act of turning away, and she spun slowly back on her heel to face the man again.

“Pardon?” she asked, wishing that she didn’t sound as if she was being strangled.

“The vanity set.” He nodded towards the window that Belle had been pressed against so longingly. “I know the position of every item in that shop window and I know that’s what you’re standing in front of.”

“This is your shop?” Belle’s heart was beating hard in her mouth.

The man nodded and pointed to the sign above the door. “Mr Gold. Pawnbroker and antiquities dealer. I must say, I’ve never had anyone have quite such an emotional reaction to my wares before.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Why don’t you come in out of the rain and tell it to me whilst you dry out a bit?” Mr Gold suggested. “I have tea.”

Belle hesitated. On the one hand, she was a horror movie connoisseur, and she knew that the single young woman on her own in an unfamiliar town taking up a strange man she’d never met before on his offer of tea and warmth was a sure-fire way for her never to be seen again. On the other hand, this was real life and not a horror film. On yet another hand, real life could be even worse than horror films sometimes.

Mr Gold walked past her as she stayed rooted to the spot with indecision, and on seeing the cane and the limp, Belle calculated that she could probably run faster than him if the occasion called for it. He unlocked the door and went inside, turning on the lights and switching the sign to open. Belle watched through the window as he went through the back room, putting the lights on there as well.

That didn’t seem so bad. She decided to take a chance and she pushed the door open, slipping into the veritable Aladdin’s cave of treasures within. It was good to be out of the rain, but now, as she wiped her face, she had the added worry of dripping on the pristine polished floor. From the back room, she could hear the hiss of an electric kettle coming to the boil.

“Earl Grey or Darjeeling?” Mr Gold called.

“Erm, Earl Grey, please.”

Belle rested her umbrella in the doorway and took a couple of steps further into the shop. There was so much stuff in there, but it was all meticulously and delicately curated; she could tell that Mr Gold certainly took good care of his wares. It was amazing that it all managed to fit in the shop.

Presently Mr Gold came out of the back room again, giving her a polite smile as he passed her in the middle of the floor and making no mention of the fact she was standing there staring like a lemon. He went over to the window, hooking his cane over his arm as he unlocked the display cabinet and carefully manoeuvred the faded pink velvet cushion that held the vanity set out of the glass.

“The tea’s ready,” he said as he crossed the floor again, and this time Belle decided it would probably be a good idea to follow him. She passed through the curtain into the back room to find Mr Gold pouring out two cups from the teapot, the vanity set placed neatly on the workbench between the two chairs.

“Please, take a seat.” He indicated the chair nearest to the space heater. “The weather isn’t showing any signs of letting up, but you should be able to warm up a little.”

Belle sat down gratefully and reached out towards the vanity set, her fingers pausing over the handle of the hairbrush.

“It’s all right, you can touch,” Mr Gold said. “Is it yours?”

Belle shook her head, brushing her fingers over the familiar gold handle.

“It was my mother’s.” She couldn’t believe that she was actually here, touching it. She’d been separated from it for so long that it felt surreal. “May I ask how it came to be here?”

“I picked it up at a contents auction,” Mr Gold said. “One of the residents here in town died intestate with no next of kin, so everything was sold. It seemed like a good piece, once I’d polished it up a bit.” He paused. “May I ask how you came to be parted from it? It’s obvious that it means a lot to you.”

Belle sighed. “It’s all I have left of her. Well, all I had. My father pawned it for drinking money years ago; I’ve been trying to track it down ever since. I swear I’ve been into every pawn shop and antiques store in New England looking for it. And now it’s here, in the last place I looked.” She took a sip of the tea; it was perfectly brewed, just the way she liked it.

Mr Gold smiled. “I’m glad that you could be reunited with it.”

They didn’t speak again for a long while. Belle couldn’t stop running her fingers over the pieces, almost as if she was afraid that they would vanish into thin air if she couldn’t touch them all the time to reassure herself that they were really there.

“How much?” she asked eventually. She dreaded to think how much money she’d already blown on this ongoing trip in search of the set, but she couldn’t be put off at this late stage, not when it was quite literally within her grasp. The shop door was still unlocked. If necessary she could just grab the goods and make a run for it, although she didn’t really want to do that to Mr Gold when he had been so kind to her, taking her in and giving her tea and a warm seat.

He shook his head. “It’s yours.”

“Really, Mr Gold, I couldn’t… You bought it legitimately after all…”

“That may be, but it’s still yours. I can see how much it means to you. You shouldn’t have to pay for something so priceless.”

“I…” Belle was lost for words. “Can I at least make it up to you in another way? I’ll buy you dinner; I think I passed a diner on my way here.”

Mr Gold gave a soft chuckle. “All right. Dinner it is. I must warn you against the lasagne, but the hamburgers are good.”

He got up and went over to the precariously stacked shelves at the back of the room, finding a cardboard box and wrapping the set delicately in tissue paper before packing it neatly and wrapping the box in plastic to keep it safe from the rain. “Here you go. May we all be reunited with our loved ones one day.”

There was something slightly haunted in his face as he spoke, and Belle wondered what his own loss was. At least it explained his philanthropy in her situation.

“I think the rain might be easing a little,” he said presently, looking out of the window. A sliver of evening sun could be seen peeping through the storm clouds. “Shall we?”

Belle nodded with a smile, tucking the precious box under her arm. She was incredibly glad to have made the acquaintance of Mr Gold, pawnbroker and antiquities dealer.

#rumbelle fic #A Monthly Rumbelling #rumbelle #Belle French #Mr Gold #first meeting #Fic: Lost and Found

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smuttymess · 4 years ago

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bts astro soulmate reading | for brie

sign: aries sun | taurus moon | cancer rising

lover: Jung Hoseok | soulmate: Kim Seokjin

This reading is for Brie, a Jin bias with Namjoon as a wrecker. I can’t tell you how much Iove a woman that loves our fine ass hyungs. Thanks for waiting, and please enjoy <3

Those born under an Aries Sun and Taurus Moon are a truly powerful force and are considered one of the prized fighters of the zodiac. You are extremely independent and move through the world on your own terms, craving stability - both emotionally and financially - but also artistic and creative expression/freedom, traits which are often at odds with each other. Your Aries Sun is spontaneous, excitable, and determined while your Taurus Moon you patient, grounded, and rooted in reason. While you may have struggled with striking a balance between these two ideals throughout your life, over time it is likely that you've learned to harness your enthusiasm and focus, understanding how to both dream and do in a practical manner. Your watery Cancer rising brings softness and raw emotion to the tangible, grounded nature of your fire and earthy persona. While you are extremely driven towards your goals, Cancer makes you outwardly emotional, expressing your wide range of moods, making you inherently human and more endearing to everyone in your orbit. Highly charming, charismatic, and emotionally intelligent, you are a natural born leader amongst your friends, family and colleagues, likely finding ways to merge your need for artistry and creativity with something that draws a profit. You know how to speak simply about your many entrepreneurial ideas, but with an energy that makes people believe that your words hold authenticity and weight. And as a true caring and sensitive nature of your Cancer rising, that sincerity is your super power.

You, dear Aries, know how to get what you want in life without being overly pushy or manipulative, your passionate yet calm nature typically making people see things your way. This comes in handy in your work life where you lead teams and spearhead projects but also in any social setting. Your demeanor naturally attracts swaths of new fans and admirers in spaces where your communication prowess is able to shine. As a result, you are a bit spoiled - your Taurus moon is quite stubborn and occasionally inflexible when faced with opposing opinions while your Cancer rising makes you particularly sensitive to others viewpoints. While at a dinner party with some coworkers you can't help but feel your blood boiling as you sit across the table from Jung Hoseok, a mutual acquaintance and the life of the party whose sole purpose seems to be to toy with you, playfully pressing your buttons and watching you come undone. He is opinionated, unapologetic, smart, and not hanging off of every word you say - offering up valid retorts to your arguments and having fun doing it. Loving a challenge, you can't can't help but find yourself trying to bring him to see your side of things, resulting in an intellectual sparring match that everyone else can't help but observe. You can't help but be drawn to his striking features as he retorts: the sharpness of his jaw, the darkness of his eyes, his clearly intelligent mind and charisma to match yours. Your Taurus Moon and Cancer rising generally makes you more of a romantic, valuing a long-term relationship over a short term fling with a handsome stranger. But there is something about Hoseok: you don't know much about him, but you definitely want to fuck his brains out sooner rather than later.

Luckily, that is exactly what this Aquarius has in mind as he calls for his car after leaving the second bar where you've ended your night, his hands moving steadily up your back and lets out hisses against your neck. You melt into his grip, your hard Cancer shell crumbling while he whispers into your ear. Show me more of that fire, won't you? And you do, shoving him against the leather interior of his backseat as his fingers move to roll up the partition. In mere seconds you are devouring each other, his mouth moving from your lips to your neck and down to your nipples, licking each one and making you shudder before slipping his fingers beneath the fabric of your skirt and your panties. You can feel his hardness pressed between your legs, and want nothing more than to feel him deeper as his fingers expertly work your clit before finding your center. Eyes locked, you fuck yourself against his fingers while he stares up at you with awe and pure, unadulterated lust. In this moment and the weeks that follow you two are in game of who can drive each other the craziest, your competitive egos more than happy to play. This is the first in a series of wild nights of you getting fucked in various public locations - bars, restaurant bathrooms, dressing rooms - his fingers in your mouth as he stifles your frenzied moans as he makes you cum back to back. Your inhibitions cease to exist when Hoseok is involved, igniting a certain energy in you that has you practically always craving his cock.

For Aquarius Hoseok, sex is a sport, a means of expressing energy and physicality and not necessarily love in the way that you would prefer. His Mars is in Aquarius, making him at times detached and impulsive in relationships. You are impatient, wanting more of a commitment after so much incredible sex and time spent while Hoseok only plays on his terms and no one else's. Ultimately, you can recognize are interested in a more traditional, solidified relationship which the airy, less emotional Aquarius can provide. While your emotional disconnect does not equip you for long-term love, the sex is something that you can't (and don't) give up easily, reuniting with him whenever you see his name pop across your phone. I land tomorrow, can I take you out? You never say no.

One of the main pleasure-seekers of the zodiac, your sign is often seeking out life's finest things from sex and food to travel and new experiences. Your refined taste lends itself to adventures including international jaunts (Aries kryptonite) and of course the most delicious food a city has to offer. It is no surprise when, on a trip of Seoul, that you find yourself booked at the restaurant owned by the infamous Kim Seokjin - its had nothing but rave reviews. Its on this particular night that the owner is making a surprise appearance as a maitre'd, a no-phones policy keeping the vibe intimate but still lively and high-spirited. You are drawn to his effortless Sagittarius confidence, the way that he so easily plays to the guests and the fans that occupy each table as the soju flows and the delicious scenes float around the room. As one of the last tables to dine, an adorably tipsy and flushed Seokjin slides into your booth, asks you how you enjoyed yourself. In the moment it is hard for for you to pretend that you were focusing on anything else that night but the breadth of his shoulders in his button up, the way sweat formed on his brow as he sauntered from table to table, or the generally perfect nature of his face. You are both sugar and spice, singing high praises of the meal and atmosphere while flashing him a fiery stare, suggesting you're interested in more than food. Seokjin bites, equally curious in getting to know what lies beneath that Capricorn exterior. I'm hosting a smaller gathering for my chef to present a new tasting menu - would love to have you.

Your Aries and Jin's Sagittarius Suns have multitudes of acquaintances but only few close friends, and are not ones to commit to anyone or anything too soon emotionally. Yes, you're both big softies beneath a cool exterior but you have been hurt before and therefore have incredibly high standards for the people you involve yourself with romantically. As a result, your dates are proper and curated and of course competitive - think go-carting or mini golf and a four-course dinner, and a chance to get to really know each other beyond the physical even if its just a few dates (you're both impatient). You can hardly wait when you find yourself backed against his front door after you return from that evening's date, a whimper escaping you as he pushes his body firmly against yours as he leans in to trace your lips with his. Stopping just short of a kiss, he smiles at your desperation. I'm going to show you how much I hate losing. You're happy to show him up more often if it means more nights like this: your legs pinned up by your shoulders as Jin thrusts into you softly and deeply until you're cumming mercilessly onto his cock, grabbing onto his thick hair and broad back to stabilize yourself. The hot sex launches you into a relationship that starts off very fun, light-hearted but over time moves into something more serious - something you both likely didn't expect but are happy to fall into.

Jin's Saturn in Aquarius makes him a very diligent, dedicated worker - its one contributor to his major career success - and he likes to enjoy the benefits of his hard work. He very much a provider in the traditional sense, in that he wants to take care of the ones he loves with no questions asked. Jin is happy to provide you with the financial stability you require, as long as it makes you free to pursue more creative, perhaps less lucrative endeavors. For the Sagittarius man in love, you can't put a price tag on joy - the limit does not exist, and this is only aided by his romantic Capricorn Venus which just wants to make you smile by any means necessary. It is not that he is your sugar daddy by any means, he just instinctively wants to anything to make you happy. He enjoys watching your face light up while talking about a new entrepreneurial endeavor and ways to boost your shared wealth, our mind working a mile a minute as you work through your many ideas that he thinks are both crazy and brilliant. You often struggle to recognize your greatness and unlock your potential, something Seokjin's Aries Moon sees and understands on a deep level. His Aries Moon can make him impatient with you and relentless in making you see what he sees.

It's worth mentioning that while Aries holds their own in any relationship, your Taurus Moon is innately turned on by his ability to take care of you financially. He has no issue showering you with affection, gifts, or whatever you need - his Capricorn Venus pairing well with your Cancer rising which is the embodiment of sensitivity, emotion and romance. For you, sex is a way in which you express your love, thinking of ways to satisfy and be satisfied in return. Even when you're the one dressed head to toe in an angelic impossibly gorgeous white lingerie set he bought you when he walks through the door, you hold the reigns. I want to take care of you, baby. Let me do that, please? Your dynamic in bed is naturally one where you are more dominant, with Seokjin happy to lean back against the couch cushions and submit while you lower your lips onto his cock, your tongue swirling around the tip just how he likes it. Nothing is hotter to you than looking up at him, his eyes fixated on your lips as you swallow him - his groans picking up in fervor as you work your way up and down his length. Only you know how to get him this incredibly hard, practically ready to lose it before you climb on top of him sliding the fabric of your stockings to the side so you can take him in. The sex here is sexy but sweet, his lips sucking on your sensitive nipples as his hands gently roam your body to heighten the sensation of your bodies together. I like to think that Jin has a bit of a breeding kink, one that you're happy to indulge, his strong hands frantically gripping your hips and sweet nothings pouring out of his lips as he finishes in you. I love you so much, baby, so fucking much. Jin is insatiable, so there will always be rounds.

Aries and Sagittarius are two of the most passionate signs in the zodiac and you both need someone who endlessly fuels their respective fires. While their interests and careers may take them around the globe and to great heights, you two never stop having fun together. Once these signs go for it, they truly commit to making the best of their partnership, keeping the spark alive by all means necessary: with silly dance parties and hot tub sex in your winter chalet after days of snowboarding in Aspen. You require your finances and relationships, both romantic and familial, to be solid before you can focus on other areas of life, often obsessing over making sure these pieces are in place (looking at you, Taurus moon!) Luckily, Sag Jin is able to take your mind off of the money and onto less serious matters so you can enjoy all of life's little pleasures, of which he knows there are many. With your inner Aries/Taurus worlds battling for stability and adventure, your home needs to reflect each of these proclivities. Luckily, this sense of excitement and responsibility is something that you and Jin share, and you can both take comfort in knowing you could easily spend your Monday night curled up with a favorite movie or jetting off to Jeju Island for a day trip. Together, you cultivate a warm and inviting home that reflects your many travels and adventures, alongside all of the creature comforts you both need (RJ plushes galore). This pairing is one of uniqueness and a learned ability to not care what anyone thinks, allowing you to live peacefully in your own perfectly quirky, fun and beautiful world. Together, the fire of Aries and spontaneous, highly adaptable nature of Sag makes for a strong duo that can achieve great things so long as they have a business manager handling all of their affairs - making sure they don't go too overboard along the way.

#bts #bangtan #bangtan astrology #astrology #astrology readings #horoscope #horoscope reading #aries #aquarius #sagittarius #kim seokjin #jung hoseok #bts smut #smut

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piccolina-mina · 5 years ago

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Something Unexpected

Fandom: Roswell, New Mexico

Teaser: He stepped into her space slowly and deliberate. His voice husky as he tucked strands of her blond hair behind her ear and whispered, “You flirting with me, Evans?”

His lips brushed against the shell of her ear, and Kyle chuckled when her breath caught in her throat.

She wet her lips, and his eyes tracked the motion before meeting hers.

“When I really flirt with you, Kyle,” she breathed, making the hairs of his neck stand on end. “You won’t need to ask.”

A/N: For @craashdowns and @queenrikki because … apparently, this is something I do. Like a freaking squish. Shut up! Anyway, here goes. I only skimmed over it, so excuse any and all errors.

———

She recognized that stride anywhere.

It was all easy confidence and swinging arms, and nothing but swagger. He moved like a panther, slick and quiet down the hallway masterfully shifting his body to accommodate gurneys rushing past and aides pushing wheelchairs.

The coffee cup in her hand burned her palms as she pushed through a break in the hallway and power walked down the hall hoping to catch him before he disappeared.

Fortunately, he stopped at the nurse’s station. He leaned against the counter smiling and signing paperwork.

He must have gotten off of shift. His bag was slung over his shoulder. Scrubs and a lab coat were replaced with fitted jeans and a worn leather jacket draped over a henley.

He smelled divine, as usual. Scent was always a weakness of hers, and Kyle Valenti smelled downright edible.

“I need a favor,” she blurted out without decorum. “No worries, I came bearing gifts.”

She slid the coffee across the counter and flashed a knowing smile. “So, about that favor…”

He released a surprised puff of air, but his eyes crinkled in the corners. His lips curved slightly upward in amusement.

“You need a favor,” he stated rather than asked. “Again.”

It had become a dance of theirs in the months since they spoke at the hospital. Shockingly, they had built up something of a rapport. It was unexpected.

They didn’t exactly run the same circles, but Kyle was kind to her. He was comforting and genuine.

It wasn’t something she forgot. When the latest project or person led her to the hospital halls, something she didn’t want to consider nor name led her to him.

To his credit, he surprised her by never turning her away or appearing the slightest bit put off by her either. It seemed to be just his nature; a Valenti one, she presumed.

“You know, you could always say no,” she teased him. She leaned in and raised a brow mockingly. “You don’t, though.”

He scoffed in surprise or annoyance, she couldn’t figure out which and grabbed the coffee. He studied her quietly while he took a long sip, nodded and headed to the exit knowing she would follow.

Naturally, she did.

“You got my coffee order right,” he observed.

“Maybe I’m psychic,” she deadpanned. “Call it intuition.”

He snorted and shook his head. “How can I be at your service this time?”

“I need the name of the anonymous donor who contributed to the pediatric wing last year.”

He tossed his bag in the backseat and turned to face her, leaning against his car. His jaw was clenched, and she could see faint signs of his exhaustion from coming off of a long shift.

“Funny thing that anonymous part. It means they don’t want their name known,” he crossed his arms and stared at her.

“Is that what that means?” She purred. “I had no idea.”

“Listen, I-”

“Sick kids, Kyle. The committee is putting together a fundraiser, and it would help if someone with deeper pockets could provide some more funding.”

“I understand that, but-”

“Dying children, Kyle. Think about the children!” She blinked unapologetic in her methods of persuasion and inwardly smiled when she saw his resolve falter right before her eyes.

“Fine,” he sighed. He rubbed at the crease in his forehead, and she too wanted very much to smooth it out. “I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything.”

“See? I always get my way somehow,” she joked.

“Yeah, I bet.” He flashed her a small smile that turned into an embarrassed chuckle when his stomach growled.

She smiled fondly at him as he joked about the long shift and poor quality of cafeteria food.

She wouldn’t know; she avoided cafeteria food like the plague. Was she a food snob? Absolutely, and she didn’t bother hiding it.

But there was something about Kyle that made her soften. Maybe she wanted to extend him an ounce of the kindness he extended her.

It seemed natural for him, too. Genuine. He was a good guy – a decent man, and she marveled at how he didn’t need to try, he just was.

It’s a quality she somewhat envied – something she sought out too. It was part of what attracted her to her husband, or at least she thought it was, now? Now she wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

“Are you alright?” He leaned in and studied her face, his warm hand burning her arm, and she almost flushed at the gentle contact.

His eyes darted back and forth, scanning her eyes and face with that concerned frown of his etched on his countenance.

He was tired and hungry, but there he was worried about her.

“How about we grab something to eat?” She stepped back, walked around his car, and unlatched the passenger door.

She met his eyes over the top of the car and watched the perplexed expression disappear as quickly as it came.

“You can pick, but I’ll buy.” She slid into the leather seat and shut the door.

His car smelled like him. By the time she was clicking her seatbelt on, he was sliding into his seat too.

“Um,” his throat worked hard with each swallow, and she could tell she caught him off-guard.

“Don’t make this weird, Kyle.” She cleared her throat, and it was like all of her confidence was stripped away in the confinements of his car.

She clutched her purse, held it on her lap, set it down, then moved it back to her lap again. She wanted to adjust the seat that felt like it was leaned too far back for her taste, but there was no sense in embarrassing herself.

She could sense her rigid posture, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t convince her body to loosen up.

She felt his eyes burning on the side of her face and heard his soft snort as he started up the car. Loud hip-hop blasted through the speakers.

He turned down the volume and turned the dial to change the station.

“You don’t have to change it on my account,” she responded only slightly affronted.“I like Izzo.”

“Lizzo,” he corrected his eyes darting back and forth from the rearview and the road.

“It was a joke,” she supplied.

She couldn’t tell if he believed her, and suddenly she regretted jumping into his car instead of taking her own. It was as though he could read her mind.

“Hey,” he stole a glance her way. His eyes darted back and forth between the road and her face until she looked back at him.

Don’t mind me, it’s not you …“ his voice trailed off for a moment, and his eyes softened.

She couldn’t make sense of his expression, but then he shook his head as if shaking off some deep thoughts and continued.

“It’s not you. I’m just tired, and I didn’t anticipate this or you for that matter.”

She did her best to control her expression. They weren’t close, or even friends and they were so very different.

Maybe she had overstepped some boundary. She didn’t think, she just acted, and if she was being honest with herself, that’s something about him she found alluring.

He was easy to talk to and be around, even briefly. She didn’t think about who she was or wasn’t. She didn’t think about what impression she was giving off or if her carefully curated image was perfectly intact.

He saw through that, and it had been a long time since anyone saw through her perfectly put together exterior.

“I’m sorry, maybe we shouldn’t–”

“Hey,” he grabbed her hand and squeezed it. He cleared his throat and pulled his hand away just as quick.

“That’s not what I meant. Besides,” he flashed a smile as they pulled into a dirt lot in front of a BBQ shack. “ We’re here.”

She raised a perfectly arched brow at what she could only describe as a dump in front of her. Chipped paint and rust-covered the old building.

Half of the lights had blown out in the sign, and all she could make out was a few letters etched on a pink pig.

“Charming.”

“I thought so,” Kyle replied, biting back a smile. “Best BBQ in town.”

“Doubt it’s as good as mine, but whatever you say.” She was not impressed with the outer appearance, but she was still learning the exterior didn’t mean very much anymore.

“You make BBQ?” He was annoyingly shocked by this, and it irked her.

“You don’t have to act so surprised.” She was indignant, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself.

“I figured you went for cucumber crest sandwiches and salads or something,” he admitted only slightly ashamed.

His judgment surprised her and yet didn’t.

“That’s your impression of me, and yet you brought me here,” she gestured at the shack and stifled her disdain.

She was well aware that the worst looking places were usually hidden gems, but she never understood why people couldn’t put in more effort.

Never let anyone see you slip and all of that. It was just sensible.

“I’m hungry. I don’t eat cucumber sandwiches, and you said you were buying, so …” he laughed getting out of the car and startled her by opening the passenger door for her.

“Jackass,” she muttered as she climbed out and adjusted her clothes.

“You wound me,” Kyle grimaced gesturing in an “after you” manner as they walked down the gravel path to the restaurant.

“Not yet, but the night is still young,” she feigned a smile that seemed to amuse him more than anything else.

“And so am I,” he added pulling the door open for her.

“Cute,” she muttered.

“I think so,” he quipped back. His eyes sparkled with humor, and she chuckled.

The shack was bigger than it looked on the outside, and they stopped at the bar to order a drink before settling in at a table.

Kyle flagged down the bartender and gestured at her to order. She leaned against the counter and cringed at how sticky and grimy it was.

Some unfamiliar residue coated her hands, and she recoiled, wiping her hands down her things and trying not to gag.

“Lady?” The bartender was not amused, but Kyle certainly was.

His eyes grew wide as he bit his lip stifling laughter.

“Skinny Cosmo, please,” she demanded, only looking up when she sensed both men were staring at her.

The bartender look scandalized, and Kyle, the bastard, could barely contain himself.

His amusement was irksome, but his eyes were soft and kind, and she exhaled and let herself go.

“Corona with a lime,” she flashed a bright smile that caught both men off guard. “And a tequila shot.”

If she surprised Kyle with her order, she damn near caused him to spontaneously combust when she consumed her shot.

She grabbed his hand without warning, but he didn’t resist when she licked the skin between his thumb and index finger and salted it.

She sucked it lightning quick, downed her shot, and bit into the lime wedge with the barest hint of a frown.

His eyes were dark – pupils were blown as he stood there speechless while she grabbed her beer and sauntered over to a small table on shaky legs.

If he wanted to make her uneasy, even in jest, then she could do the same.

Moments later, he slid across from her with his own bottle in his hand.

He opened his mouth to say something, but an older woman with a weathered face from too much sun came to take their order.

“I’ll have the rib special. Extra sauce, please,” she slid the menu across the table, and both women turned to look at Kyle pointedly.

“Uh, same, please. Thank you.”

She took a long pull of her beer and made eye contact over the bottle. “What?”

She leaned back into the crackly booth and willed herself to relax. The tequila helped.

She hadn’t drunk tequila in some time. She usually opted for whatever specialty drink was served at whatever gathering she was attending or a glass of wine.

“Nothing,” Kyle responded. He studied her intently while he sipped at his drink. “You surprise me.”

“You keep saying that.” She rested her elbow on the table and ran her hand through her hair before resting her head on her palm.

“I’m sorry,–” he started.

“You keep saying that too,” she interrupted. She loved the way she threw him off and made him uncomfortable. It made her feel like the power was back in her hands. These days, all she could remember was being powerless around men.

“People are rarely how they seem. Even then, there’s more to them than what you see. Sometimes …” her voice trailed off as she swallowed back tears she didn’t know she conjured up.

“Sometimes you think you know them, and you find out you don’t know them at all,” her voice cracked, and she attempted a watery smile as she took another gulp of her beer.

“I’m …” Kyle’s voice was as sincere as his eyes, but he shook his head not wanting to extend another apology. “I know. I heard.”

“Small town and all,” she joked weakly.

“And that sucks.” He paused as their food was placed in front of them. “How has that been? Do you–”

“Miss him?” She offered. She tore off a bone from her slab of ribs and dove right in. “Mmmmm.”

Her moans bordered on obscene if Kyle nearly choking was any indication.

“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.” She grew quiet – pensive.

“And everything I thought was true was a lie. That’s what it feels like, like maybe he never loved me at all. Years of being together, and he probably never loved me. But I still miss him and what we had. Like a fucking idiot, I still miss that lie.”

She blinked rapidly, forgetting her surroundings and embarrassed at displaying open vulnerability.

She felt exposed and uncomfortable. He must have noticed because his hand shot out again and grabbed hers.

Even when she tried to pull it away, he wouldn’t let go. He squeezed her hand firmly and with reassurance.

Her eyes followed the gesture and then slowly rose to meet his.

He ducked his head down refusing to break eye contact with her.

“You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to be embarrassed about, and you’re not an idiot for daring to love,” his voice was soothing.

She pulled her hand out of his after one final squeeze and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. She ducked her head down and buried herself into her meal unable to take Kyle’s sympathy.

Somehow it felt infinitely worse than if it was pity.

“So,” she cleaned another bone with a moan. “How’d you find the second-best BBQ place in town?”

“Your moans are confirming it’s the first,” he teased, giving her the change of subject she desperately needed.

“Watch yourself, doc. You still haven’t tried mine,” she tossed another bone on the platter and sucked her fingers. “And I promise it’s the best you’ve ever tasted.”

To her amusement, his face heated up, and he cleared his throat.

“Um, my, uh,” he stuttered. “It used to be my father’s favorite place. We would come at least once every couple of weeks.”

He had a faraway smile as he recalled the fond memories, and seeing him so wistful made her smile too.

“We had some of our best conversations over a meal here,” he laughed softly recalling a memory. “Some over that pool table too,” he nodded at a table in the corner of the room.

It was old but durable and had some good years still left in it.

His eyes were sad for the first time all night, and it pierced her heart.

“You want to go a few rounds?” She canted her head toward the pool table. “Or are you afraid I’m going to kick your ass?”

The last part got him, and he again snorted in surprise.

“You play?”

“I dabble,” she shrugged. She tossed her napkin down and slid out of the booth looking down at him and waiting for him to acquiesce.

“OK,” he climbed out of the booth and stood toe-to-toe with her. “I’ll bite.”

“Promise?” She narrowed her eyes at him, ignoring the double entendre even though a blush crept up his neck around the collar. “I like a challenge.”

“Apparently, so do I,” he huffed. “But first,” he leaned in close to her, their noses inches apart, before he looked down and grabbed her napkin.

He brushed it across her lips and face wiping away smears of BBQ sauce with that confident smirk of his. “You got a little something.”

He took some joy in how mortified she was and left her at the table to gather her thoughts while he grabbed another drink for her and got the pool sticks ready.

She welcomed the new beer and used it to cool herself down.

He called his play as he leaned over the pool table. He had the dexterity of a surgeon, for sure. He had the precision too.

“What happened to ladies first?” She asked as she grabbed the stick.

“Lady?” He scoffed. “I know a hustler when I see one.”

She leaned over the table to line up her shot, the stick gliding smoothly between her manicured fingers. When she glanced up, she caught him eyeing her cleavage. She fought off a smirk of her own.“Who says I can’t be both?”

She took her shot, and even though she was rusty, she couldn’t have executed it better.

“Shit!” Kyle scratched the back of his neck and whistled impressed.

She sidled up to him brushing past, heat and electricity thrumming between them. “I’m really handy with a stick.”

He stepped into her space slowly and deliberate. His voice husky as he tucked strands of her blond hair behind her ear and whispered, “You flirting with me, Evans?”

His lips brushed against the shell of her ear, and Kyle chuckled when her breath caught in her throat.

She wet her lips, and his eyes tracked the motion before meeting hers.

“When I really flirt with you, Kyle,” she breathed, making the hairs of his neck stand on end. “You won’t need to ask.”

He swallowed hard, and she laughed loud and carefree in a way she hadn’t done in a long time.

She knew she flustered him when he missed his shot. He could hardly make eye contact as he took another timid sip of the same warm beer he got when they arrived.

“Not much of a drinker?” She asked as she walked around the table and took another shot with success.

“Not really,” he shrugged. “With my father and all … ” he trailed off.

She nodded in understanding, but the mention of Jim’s addiction must have thrown him off. He scratched the table.

“Dammit,” he swore under his breath. She patted his shoulder.

“You’re not bad, just easily distracted,” her voice took on a playful tone that made his lips turn up slightly. “You need to work on your form,” she gestured at him.

She adjusted his stance, her hands resting firmly on his hips before she even thought about it.

For a split second, she thought of what the other patrons would think. How they would react to her and him and how intimate they looked together?

She wondered what people would say when word spread that she was getting cozy with the sheriff’s son. She thought of the rumors that would spread. The whispers and the judgment.

Then she decided she was too tired to care. She slid her hands down his arms and adjusted his grip on the pool stick until they were holding it just right together.

She was pressed firmly against his back. Her face was nearly touching his.

“Inhale,” she ordered gently pulling their hands back, “and release on the exhale.”

The sounds of balls clinking together and sinking into pockets were those of triumph.

“Good boy,” she whispered in his ear as she smacked his ass.

“OK, now you’re definitely flirting with me, Evans.”

“Maybe,” she laughed, polishing off the rest of his beer.

She lost track of time playing pool, joking, and flirting with Kyle, and it was the lightest she felt in months.

She felt like she was walking on air while strolling down that gravel road with Kyle’s jacket draped over her shoulders and his arm entwined with hers.

Their conversation on the drive back was lighthearted and easy. The awkwardness long abandoned.

She was so wrapped up in their flirty banter that she failed to realize he bypassed the hospital and took her home.

Her buzz gradually wore off at the sight of her dark home, and the loneliness washed over her as if she had been doused with cold water.

“You brought me home,” she sighed pulling his jacket tighter around her as if it served as an embrace.

“I brought you home,” he echoed. “Sheriff’s son, remember?” He cut off the car. “I would rather be safe than sorry.”

“Careful, Valenti. I might think you cared about me.”

“Careful, Evans. I might think you wanted me to.”

Fortunately for her, he jumped out of the car and missed the effect his words had on her. She hoped it had dissipated by the time he opened the passenger door and enveloped her hand in his.

“Walking me to my door, too?” She shouldn’t be surprised his mother raised him right.

“You get the Valenti special,” he teased as they stopped outside of her door. “Thanks for dinner, and … ” he leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “I’ll get that name for you tomorrow.”

“Thank you for …” she laughed to herself as she realized she wanted to thank him for everything.

For being kind to her and being good company. For not judging her. For seeing her in a way she hadn’t felt seen in awhile.

For making her feel comfortable and safe, and for never making her feel self-conscious or different.

“Thank you for everything,” she breathed.

She slipped out of his jacket and handed it to him already missing its warmth and the way his scent clung to it.

Their fingers met with the exchange, and a spark between them nearly caused them to pull away. Except she didn’t want to pull away. No, she wanted to be closer.

She did what she had done all night; she stopped thinking and just felt.

She crashed her lips to his, pulling him closer. She ran her hand through his hair and gripped his shirt with the other kissing him hungrily.

There was still the faint taste of beer on his tongue and the mint he ate after dinner.

She feared he was only indulging her at first, but he kissed her with purpose. His hands slid up to cup her face, and his lips chased after hers between stolen breaths.

She pressed him against the doorframe, her lips sliding across those sharp cheekbones and along his jawline before finding his mouth again.

She slid her leg between his with purpose, and she ran her hand beneath the hem of his shirt dragging her fingertips along his ridiculously hard abs.

His hand enclosed hers, their fingers tangling as he spun her around so she was pressed against the door instead.

He caged her in, pressing their entwined hands above her head as he kissed her slow and sensuous.

She wrapped a leg around him, pulling him forward until they were damn near joined at the hip.

He slowed their kiss down, then ended with a soft peck and ran his nose along her neck.

“We have to,” he was out of breath as he pulled away and rested his forehead against hers. “We have to stop.”

Rejection hung heavy in the air, but she tried to tamp it down.

“I’m sorry.” She kept her voice as neutral as possible considering the circumstances. “It’s weird, right? It’s … with me, it’s weird.”

“What?” His voice rose an octave as he tried to catch his breath. “No! Hell no. It’s decidedly not weird. It’s so far from weird.”

He pecked her lips again in reassurance.

“Uh,” his hips inadvertently jerked forward as he dug into her hips to steady her while extricating himself from her leg lock.

She felt him hard against her and bit her lip trying not to laugh. He stepped back and yanked his jacket off the floor before his eyes met hers.

They were dark and stormy as if a war was brewing behind them. His lips were swollen as he darted his tongue out to wet them or maybe savor the taste of her on them.

“I have an early shift,” he said almost regretfully. “And I don’t make it a habit of spending the evening with women who have been drinking.”

He ducked his head and gave her a shy smile.

“Right,” she said. “No operating heavy machinery.”

“Did you-” he let out a startled laugh that matched the deer in headlights look.

She laughed too, and it released the tension between them. He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Get some rest.“He pressed his lips to her forehead tender and sweet and exhaled. “Goodnight, Ann.”

She smiled. All these months later, and he finally took to using her first name.

He stepped off the porch backward, not taking his eyes off of her until he climbed into his car.

“Goodnight, Kyle,” she whispered while pressing her back to the door and watching him pull off. She sighed contently to herself. “Until we meet again.”

—– Fin —–

#roswell new mexico #roswell new mexico fic #Kyle Valenti #dios mio #sneaks fic in and scurries away #like a little sh*t #byyyee

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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In Snowden’s Memoir, the Disclosures Are Personal

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/books/review-permanent-record-edward-snowden-memoir.html

In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal

By Jennifer Szalai | Published Sept. 13, 2019, 12:01 AM ET | New York Times | Posted September 13, 2019 12:00 PM ET |

Revealing state secrets is hard, but revealing yourself in a memoir might be harder. As Edward Snowden puts it in the preface of “Permanent Record”: “The decision to come forward with evidence of government wrongdoing was easier for me to make than the decision, here, to give an account of my life.”

Snowden, of course, is the former intelligence contractor who, in 2013, leaked documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, dispelling any notions that the National Security Agency and its allies were playing a quaint game of spy vs. spy, limiting their dragnet to specific persons of interest. Technological change and the calamity of 9/11 yielded new tools for mass surveillance and the incentive to use them.

Sweeping up phone records of Americans citizens, eavesdropping on foreign leaders, harvesting data from internet activity: For revealing these secret programs and more, Snowden was deemed a traitor by the Obama administration, which charged him with violating the Espionage Act and revoked his passport, effectively stranding Snowden in Moscow, where he has been living ever since.

“Permanent Record” is a riveting account and a curious artifact. The book is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Snowden, but when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes. For someone who worked in the intelligence community, the very idea of an autobiography feels uncomfortable. “It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification,” he writes, “only to turn around completely and share ‘personal disclosures’ in a book.”

Notice the scare quotes; Snowden is instinctively careful about entering anything about himself into the permanent record of “Permanent Record.” The man who emerges from such “personal disclosures” seems consequently guarded and meticulous — ideal traits for a spy or a whistle-blower.

Born in 1983 in North Carolina, Snowden comes from a family whose service includes the F.B.I. (his grandfather), the Coast Guard (his father), the N.S.A. (his mother) and the Army (himself). He remembers the first thing he ever hacked was bedtime, changing all the clocks in the house so that he could stay up later on his sixth birthday. As a teenager, Snowden learned how to hack school, examining the class syllabus to figure out how he could exploit its weaknesses; the goal was to do the least amount of work without flunking out.

School was at best a distraction, he says, and at worst “an illegitimate system” that “wouldn’t recognize any legitimate dissent.” He preferred to spend time on “something new called the internet,” a “goddamned miracle” that was still distinctly human and profoundly weird, before monetization and surveillance set in. The internet of the 1990s was a liberating space, he says, where adopting and discarding different avatars could open up possibilities for more authentic expression and connection.

“This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides,” he recalls, “or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations.” (In the 2014 book “The Snowden Files,” the British journalist Luke Harding describes online posts made in the early 2000s under the handle TheTrueHOOHA — identified by Harding as Snowden — that extolled “sink-or-swim views on Social Security” and “the joys of gun ownership.”)

Galvanized by 9/11, Snowden eventually turned his technical know-how into a career in intelligence, obtaining a top-secret classification at the age of 22 and bouncing around between different contractors before becoming disillusioned at some point during the Obama presidency. “I fully supported defensive and targeted surveillance,” Snowden writes, but as a young systems administrator he was learning that the government was pursuing “bulk collection” — indiscriminately vacuuming up data from Americans’ internet communications and storing it for possible later use.

Snowden says he was affronted by the rank hypocrisy of it all. Here was President Obama, who had run for office as a critic of the Bush administration’s extraordinary invocations of executive power, not just continuing his predecessor’s surveillance programs but entrenching them. (Obama’s policies have been comprehensively documented by The Times reporter Charlie Savage in “Power Wars,” which dates Obama’s about-face on national security to the failed so-called underwear bombing of 2009.) Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, had “enthusiastically campaigned” for Obama. “Lindsay’s hope in him, as well as my own, would prove more and more misplaced,” Snowden writes.

The second half of “Permanent Record” reads like a literary thriller, as Snowden breaks down how he ended up in a Hong Kong hotel room in the summer of 2013, turning over a trove of classified documents to Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post and the filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Julian Assange wanted Snowden to release the information through WikiLeaks, but the site’s “total transparency,” Snowden says, wouldn’t allow for proper authentication and curation of such incendiary material. Snowden emphasizes that the distinction was important to him — not that the government would see it that way. “Whereas other spies have committed espionage, sedition and treason,” he writes, “ I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism.”

In his acknowledgments, Snowden thanks the novelist Joshua Cohen for “helping to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestoes into a book.” (As the N.S.A. might know, I edited several articles by Cohen in a previous job.) It’s like a recursive loop of life imitating art imitating life; in Cohen’s “Book of Numbers,” published in 2015, a novelist named Joshua Cohen is hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of a mysterious tech billionaire … whose search-engine company happens to be sharing information with government agencies.

“Permanent Record” weaves together personal intel and spycraft info, much of it technologically elaborate yet clearly explained. You’ll also learn that even in our fragmented era, the tools of mass surveillance have revealed one thing that seems to connect almost everyone who’s online: porn. “This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race and age,” Snowden writes, “from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.”

This is funny, but it’s ominous, too. Without belaboring his points, Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already. What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessed — not just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever? Should such sensitive work be outsourced to private contractors? What entails effective “oversight” if the public is kept in the dark? When can concerns about “national security” slip into bids for unchecked power?

Snowden doesn’t reveal too much about his life in exile. He and Lindsay have since married, renting a two-bedroom apartment in Moscow, where he beams out his image through a screen-on-wheels, nicknamed the “Snowbot,” giving talks about privacy to audiences around the world. He says he takes care to avoid being recognized in public — “but nowadays everybody’s too busy staring at their phones to give me a second glance.”

#national security #nationalsecurity #edward snowden #nsa #cyberattack #cybersecurity #u.s. news #u.s. military #pentagon #u. s. military #military #worldpolitics #world news #international news #currently reading

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topweeklyupdate · 6 years ago

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TØP Weekly Update #100: Centenary Celebration (6/21/19)

That’s right, guys, gals, and pals! We’ve made it to the hundredth installment of the TØP Weekly Update! And to honor that, we’re going to kick it back to the ol’ format and do a deep dive into all things Twenty One Pilots from the last seven days. Let’s get it!

This Week’s TØPics:

Spotify Location Sessions

Celebrating the Life of Blake Shelton

Is This Finally It For “Chlorine”’s Chart Time?

Reflections on 100 Updates

My TØP Discovery Story

Major Releases, News, and Announcements:

Sneaking in at the very end of the week, the band dropped a “Location Session” acoustic performance for “Chlorine” last night on all platforms. The latitude/longitude coordinates included in the title translate to the center of Mexico City. This could mean that the song was initially conceived in the city, or it could mean that this was where this version was recorded, perhaps during the private show they delivered a few weeks back. I find the latter more likely, particularly as the recent private show in Brooklyn already leaked some alternate arrangements to a few songs. But who knows? It could be part of a much bigger master plan. We’ll just have to see how the rest of these Sessions roll out- we’ve really been left in the dark on this one.

Interviews, Performances, and Other Shenanigans:

Really, the biggest piece of news from this week is that Josh Dun turned 31. This saw the expected outpouring of love for Debby Ryan and Tyler Joseph’s life partner online from friends, family, and fans. The best celebration for the fans, though, came to us onstage at the show in Birmingham, where Tyler not only agreed to lead everyone in singing “one of the worst songs ever” but offered a video tribute to the most important men born on June 18th- you know, Blake Shelton, Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar (almost) and the first Fast and Furious movie (Tyler thought this joke was so funny he lay down on the stage to laugh it out).

Never one to be left out of the spotlight, Tyler showed us a clearer picture of how Jenna has cleaned up their tour bus space, blew a kiss to a person with a pride flag during “Holding On To You”, and congratulated some fans who got engaged in the pit.

But wait, there’s more! We also got another press conference interview where Tyler talks about how to get inspired and his opinions on The Bachelorette, Josh discusses Jim vomiting up salt water, and they both talk about how they manage all the bags of money sitting around and who they’d want to sit on them if they were chairs (really). Another interview had Tyler speculate on snorting spaghetti, while another press conference saw the boys speculate on when “Trees” might leave the setlist (You hear that? That’s the sound of a million Clikkies crying out in terror at once.)

Chart Performance:

Sadly, the release of the Location Session will probably not be sufficient to save our girl “Chlorine”. After a random uptick in performance last week, “Chlorine” fell back down on Bubbling Under and on most chart metrics. This song’s been taking me on a real roller coaster that I think might finally be over.

Upcoming Shows:

Next week will see the Bandito Tour continue to wind through the United States, with shows in Houston (Toyota Center; 19,000 capacity), San Antonio (AT&T Center; 19,000), Austin (Frank Erwin Center, 17,900), Oklahoma City (Chesapeake Energy Arena, 16,500), and Memphis (FedEx Forum; 19,000). Then the week after that... well, we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

100th Update Retrospective:

It’s truly hard for me to wrap my head around how long I’ve been curating this little blog and all the ways that it has evolved and changed over the last three years. When I started the blog back in August 2016, it was really just a place to sort my thoughts about the band I loved more than any other for much longer than that. The first update still only has a single note, a reblog from my personal account, and I never really expected this blog to receive any more attention than that. The fact that this series persisted even when the Hiatus made it impossible to stick to its titular promise is remarkable, but not nearly as much as the fact that people actually care about what I have to say about these two dummies. I’m so grateful for everyone who has taken the time to read, share, and respond to even one of my ramblings.

To wrap up this update, I thought I’d share my story of how I discovered this band nearly six years ago. If you’re not here to hear some rando ramble about himself, feel free to move right along, but for the Real Ones who have been here for some time, let me catch you up to speed...

It was 2013, the summer after my junior year of high school, and I was absolutely miserable. Now, I tended to be miserable in general back then- I was a teenager struggling with depression, loneliness, and trauma- but I had a special reason to be on this particular week. I had gone to a church camp located on a lake that was nearly a full day’s drive from my house. On the first day of the trip, I slipped while climbing a cliff down by the shore and hit my back on a rock, pretty seriously injuring myself. I stubbornly refused to return home or go to a hospital, so I got bandaged up on site and spent the next three days laying out on the beach alone, watching everyone else have fun while I willed my back to heal.

Since this was a nature retreat, my sole distraction in this time was a 50-song playlist made by one of the church leaders that looped on repeat in the same order for the entire week. With no choice but to actively listen to the lyrics to each of these songs, I grew to really dislike most of them. Yet two of those songs, both sung by a guy with a particularly interesting whine, stood out to me as especially interesting. The singer was talking about stuff I really could relate to, not just in this moment of loneliness but even more in my life back at home. This guy was talking about struggling with your own brain, about trying to find something greater than ourselves to hold on to, about how to turn your hands towards something constructive, about trying to find connection with others through music. Listening through the other 48 songs was worth it to get to those two.

I asked the counselor who wrote “Holding On To You” and “Guns For Hands”. He told me about this new band called Twenty One Pilots. And my life hasn’t been the same since.

Power to the local dreamer.

||-//

#twenty one pilots #tyler joseph #josh dun #trench #bandito tour #chlorine #top weekly update

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frostkingoftheapocalypse · 5 years ago

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kissofmistletoe‌: @kissofmistletoe

Dark eyes watched the procession of his people filter away, hesitate heels moving across the blood-stained floor. Their reservations still lay thick in the air, subtly spoken words to linger in the shadows, and those left unspoken, far heavier in weight, as if to try to seed doubt in the Sooth-Sayer’s mind. They would find the ground harsh for that particular root to spread, however, as eventually the farmers of discord would learn. Ancient beliefs in systems archaic and obsolete had no place in worlds left scarred beyond any previous recognition.

It was thought for another time, another place. This was not a moment to dwell upon future actions, but consider past ones, dealt out by a hand now so known and cherished. The fingers that had once carried a torch into the darkened world had left their prints within the newly crowned’s mind, a thing to be feared, wished, adored, praised. So two had both of them come, time transforming them to this moment, far from where they had first met.

Irony, perhaps, that Baldr sat adorned once more in chains. Nestled within black locks, they snaked between precious jewels, now so willingly worn. Fragile in the softness of metal, as if a toy to give to a spoilt babe, their tenderness was a far cry from the iron that had constricted against a skeletal ankle. Perhaps that strength, shattered in a single blow from a giant, had slowly seeped into the god’s bones. To look upon the golden body now, it was unimaginable the state it had been found in, living despite the universe’s best tries for otherwise.

But had someone told that child, watching a world through a film of tears as the light disappeared for the final time, that he would sit upon a throne as leader for the cosmos that wished his demise, even the Truth-Seer would have not believed.

Silence fell, and was thankfully broken by the one who could seem to easily remove the weight of office, yet perhaps could not yet free himself from the feel of it. Muscles set in rigid formation, as a king would expect from any lord, Loki looked every inch of a subject in perfect respect of his master. A mask they both wore, with practised perfection, even with no on-lookers to see. It perhaps was a situation that demanded such a facade, for a time, as kings discussed matters of history and state.

Baldr listened, with no need to doubt the words spoken. Never had his lover lied to him with outright intent, but to conceal one half when needed. When necessary. It was a mark of deference that the stag had never challenged the decision, even when fury held every inch of his mind in control. He had accepted what was given and pried no further, in knowing the time would come when the light would reveal all. This time.

“It was this much I had gathered as I grew to know more about… everything. About the worlds and their runnings, about our people and about you,” replied the god-king after a moment, voice as equally reserved as his lover’s had been.

Before, when the mere concept of others had been a new found idea, such attitude would have sparked that beast they lay in angry dormant inside. Unable to understand the little-given emotion behind the Jötunns’ words, the unformed mind jumped to extreme conclusions, certain in their deduction that all were arrogantly entertained by a being they thought of as dim. Cats that would watched with smug superiority as their wounded prey desperately attempted to flee.

Between speech, silence was not able to reign. Already had habits of generations settled in, a thoughtless action to occupy the body while the intellect pondered. Another minute grain of stone to be whittled away, a mark left upon the world. The first of many, perhaps.

“I admit, it intrigued me that you did not go down that route.” The softest shrug, setting a gentle orchestra of ornaments to sound. “If you wish to hear rumours, I would advise a few weeks staying in the palace cells, for the guards kill many an hour contemplating the realm’s potential. There were more than a few who wagered my reason for being brought to Jötunheimer was to become some war beast like Mountainbreaker. It became apparent, eventually, that one would not need to teach a warrior how to read or write, if all they intended for that person to do was kill.”

A slip of the mask, humour unable to be disguised in the manner so innate to those cobalt giants. Baldr could no more hide his nature than he could let loose a lie. It was a gift Loki so easily wielded in these private moments, and a demeanour that baffled the newly-formed councils. It passed momentarily, however, the spark of amusement dying down as a question passed into the stag’s mind.

“While, of course, I am still ever in your gratitude for your actions, and ever more so knowing they were done in a kinder intention than previously believed, I am still curious… Asgard was never your enemy, but it was and still is to many on this realm. There is still hatred towards my birth race, albeit far more tempered thanks to your diplomacy on the matter. You mentioned once, in the cells when I believed I had destroyed all chances of being released on your good will, that some had died over the discussion of me on this world. I raise the same question to you again.

Why bring me here in the first place? Later on, perhaps, I could have understand. When I had more understanding and strength, enough to know of the fine line my existence caused to your people, but straightaway? While I know now, should I ever be in the situation you found yourself in, I could not turn my back to one who needed help, as king I do not think I would risk bringing so fragile a person into a world already so fraught.”

The memories of that time seemed more than hazy, edges of images far more than blurred to nigh-on indistinguishable. Those first moments of viewing the world completely, the vastness shown to one who had never known, seemed dulled now, worn down by the expanse of deeds done after, but enough remained. Terror so pure was hard to shake, and awe so great were the few things that lingered on, even now.

“To be subject to so many new things then, any emotion conjured by each revelation was quickly replaced by another, until I was able to know enough to know myself. A baptism of fire, almost, in living. Mayhaps because I was the one to be made to walk through it, but I could not make another follow in those same steps. Did you question how I might react, in those first days of our meeting? Or had your intentions moved to a more political stance?”

It disturbed the elder more than he anticipated to be berated by accusations he had not considered before. For as long as memories were clear and tangible things, he had felt conditioned to pre-brace; to play strategy five steps ahead, ensconced in the shield of detachment and well developed compartmentalisation - and with a rather fair, final deterrent of, do not fuck with mineself, I am your King.

Yet Loki’s heavily scarred bulk was not such a shield on its own. It was Baldr who had the high ground here. His King could not have scraped nails down the chalkboard of his insides better if he had done so on purpose. Loki’s scent smelt rotten to his own awareness, shameful even, the emotions rising from his body, papercuts of salt and iron in his throat.

“You know the answers to those questions.” after a few ripe breaths that scarcely rose his broad chest, reassured somewhat that his bass issued with a level of composure he did not feel ---it was not Jötunar, the language, that had been spoken by him just now, and Loki watched as beloved took attention to his uncertain stare.

The space between them alters at the sound. Like an intimate touch. From the taller’s lips, coming their private lexicon. The pair’s Allspeak had assimilated it in recent years, of shared joy, and curious greed, pouring over battered tomes their own linguistic discovery; curated themselves, collected themselves, sung themselves, and kept alive as a dialect off a realm now lost forever.

It punctuated Loki’s reply now with a wry click, as close to an unhappy tsk as his public behaviour was capable of.

Baldr did not yet understand the ability of prying ears here in the throne room - which was not the As’ fault. It was a gap in his education. To have Loki reliquishing the throne was new to them both, and the nuances that went on across Jotunheimr was a to-do list which was far too long to wait to learn by heart, before crowning the rightful monarch of the Nine. Baldr’s time to be King was now.

Adornments clinked together, painting the air in glass tones as the elder clasped a wrist to hand behind his back. Formality and politeness were quickly transforming what had been vulnerable. At a glance they were alone. But Loki knew a reprimand here was oh so public, and his skin crawled,

“I may give the illusion of grandeur, but I am not complex.” a million tangents of thought aside, the gnarled V of Loki’s brow was automatic, unsettled, “Do not think mineself evasive to these questions, sváss, they are yours to ask, I hear them willingly, gladly. But if ‘tis mine grand game strategy you wish to discuss, we must go elsewhere. Private.”

#kissofmistletoe #v: the Other son of Odin #{wow i wrote this reply LAST YEAR AND FORGOT TO POST WHOOPS}#long reply

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restlessfeathers · 6 years ago

Note

Is Simon Blackquill your favorite character or just your favorite prosecutor?

Honestly, my tastes shift around all the time, and I really don’t have issues with ANY of the main characters what-so-ever…but yes, I do have a weird obsession with Simon Blackquill.