#ideally my housemate could have her own

[homosociallyyours]

. tmi tags .

[sieglinde-freud]

grabs ur hands dm ur reasoning rn *looks at you with my big eyes*

YOU GUYS ARE PEER PRESSURING ME WTF... but ok im just gonna post it here then hi tc thank u for the ask :) going under the read more because my initial ramblings were literally 3k but let me see if i can chop it down. cw: LONG. also pic for reference so we know what im talking about

so the placements all assume the only headcanon thats real going into this is that the morgans are siblings. no canon second parents which means no chrom!inigo or anything like that they all have single moms or whatever idk not important but just clarifying none of that is impacting their placements because i dont want to think about that

black eagle placements were the most fun because the fun thing about that route is that it splits into two more! one thing thats always bothered me is that when that route splits, the only thing that changes is that you either lose edelgard or hubert or you lose flayn. are you really telling me those are the only three students with enough free will to not let byleth pick the rest of their life for them? ferdinand would NOT go to the church i dont care!!! this is something they fixed (kind of) in warriors but in general when picking the black eagles i wanted to keep that in mind too

so kjelle was the first character i looked at and went “i know where you go.” i think she looks at edelgard and goes “you are everything i want to be and more” because what edelgard fights for and how she accomplishes it. kjelle is a very “the strong must protect the weak by any means necessary” which is kind of harsh when its presented to the player in awakening but it is literally edelgard’s whole philosophy. and kjelle is very egotistical (not hate i love her ass so much underrated fav!!) she thinks incredibly highly of herself so for her to bow down to anyone they would have to 1) echo her ideals and 2) be stronger than her. sorry shes never bending the knee to dimitri and claude i dont give a fuck she doesnt like those men. i think she’d understand edelgard’s idea of putting power in human hands and fully commit to the ends justify the means. this isnt really a gameplay rewrite thing im trying to do but if byleth picked the church she would leave. also… please. please please consider edelkjelle… okay guys… for me……..

on the opposite side nah was my second immediate “ohh i know what im doing with you” and its because if byleth picks edelgard, shes out!! granted, i could just put her with lions or deer but how is that fun. its not. nah, being a manakete, would probably be much more understanding of rhea and willing to reach out. being a manakete is probably a pretty isolating experience for her, ylisse or fodlan or otherwise, so i think her finding solace with rhea and flayn and seteth during her time at the academy would allow her to get closer to people more like her, and understand on some level why rhea is the way she is and why governs the way she does. though, still being housemates, she’d befriend edelgard and i think she’d admire edelgard’s conviction and maturity during the academy arc. but when edelgard betrays the church i think she’d take that very hard, and i dont think anything edelgard would say to her would get her to turn on what is basically the family she never got to have (theres also second gen angst potential in here somewhere…)

inigo was interesting to think about and i did almost saddle him in with golden deer but i like the potential of him with edelgard a lot more when i really sat down and thought about it. im pulling more from his characterization as laslow i think but at first i wasn’t really sure if i had a case for him picking between the empire and the church but i decided to go with the empire because i do think in the time he has with edelgard, he’d be a voice of reason for her (to hubert’s dismay). edelgard’s problem is that she has literally no outsider pov and is going based on her own sense of justice that, while its based in good intentions, has a lot of unintended consequences and failure to acknowledge how it impacts everyone else. i think inigo could take a unique role, similar to ferdinand (or lorenz to claude, felix to dimitri) in that he challenges edelgard but on a much more friendlier level. the thing about how that role normally plays out is that its formed on some personal grievance rather than genuine better interest of the people, and i think of all the lords, edelgard needs a friend the most (its why shes so attached to byleth???). and just looking at how hes able to handle xander in fates and how much more introspective he becomes, i think it’d play out similarly here. also i think with the forces of him and dorothea combined they would give ferdinand the worst bisexual panic of his life. ik i mentioned felix/inigo WHICH I STILL LIKE but imagine the layer of angst if they are on opposing sides… ok thanks

was on the fence about gerome until beloved mutual (hi woocy :3) convinced me he would be beagle and im completely down with that. for me, i struck out blue lions immediately. so after that its just a matter of do i think he fits in better with BE or GD and quite honestly. for some reason golden deer gets the rep of being the meme house but aside from lorenz looking a little funny anf claude putting up a facade YOU ALL FELL FOR this straight up is not true. the funny house is black eagles and by GOD it would piss gerome off to be there. i dont think they chose their houses, by the way. i think they got to fodlan and rhea vibe checked all of them immediately so he didnt have a say in this. not only is he stuck with inigo, hes stuck with watching kjelle—the strongest warrior ever probably the only one in the second to match him in terms of raw strength—stumble over herself over their house leader because wwaauuw women pretty LIKE COME ONNNN. though, i do think he’d respect edelgard for her strength, and theres a lot of interesting dynamics for him to explore. dorothea pissing him off, bonding with petra over their enjoyment for wildlife, he would definitely be training partners with caspar, and i think he’d actually be like. really good at talking to bernadetta? maybe seeing her reminds him of how he was when he was younger. maybe he gets her out by introducing her to minerva. much to think about. but in general he would keep mostly to himself with standard gerome “cant get close to people that i cant guarantee will stay with me” fashion i think he probably wouldnt be as close as say someone like inigo or nah would be with the house. so when the time to choose a side comes… i dont think he’d have the relationship with edelgard to pick her. i think he would oppose her ideals, and go with nah, if not flee fodlan entirely because omfg who careeesss…. WHO CAREEESS his ass is in wyvern valley (no i think he’d fight. but he’d def consider dipping)

m!morgan is here because i think it would challenge him. guy who is so cute so earnest so ready to be happy in school learning everything hes ever wanted hoping to come home and make momma proud and oh my god he got put in the most crazy house imaginable. whoever his professor is is probably like wow morgan you have a gift for tactics! why dont you try managing the class for a mission? and being morgan he’d go YES ABSOLUTELY!!! unfortunately this house has hubert. and ferdinand. and bernadetta. and linhardt. and caspar. the thing about robin and the shepherds is that most people immediately respected robin as their tactician and robin was able to connect and befriend most of them fairly easily because they were mostly all sane and normal people. the black eagles are most definitely not and have you guys seen that black eagles seating chart post? well. i just think it’d give morgan a hard time and between him and f!morgan its funnier if its him. also splitting him from the justice cabal for timeskip angst sorry. also i think it’d be cool if he took edelgards side. i dont actually know which way he’d lean thats a tossup like this is a character that i could believe would trust byleth’s judgement and go with them but if its edelgard i think that could set up fun conflict between him and nah. grima vs naga part 2!! though i actually did have him for blue lions first if only because of the three houses the blue lions probably need a tactician type the best but. i like this one better.

so for blue lions i immediately clocked owain like look at this guy. i think owain would see the house of cool knightly chivalrous types fighting for justice and being cool and having swords and i just think he’d be in heaven. i also think, to him, dimitri would be a figure to look up to similar to lucina, but with the difference that they are not family and owain might put him on an even higher pedestal because theres this sense of familiarity he had with lucina thats not really there anymore? kind of similar to ashe and dimitri. and when the timeskip comes, i think he’d be endlessly devoted to dimitri even still, never forgetting who he was before and striving to bring him back, still thinking of this idolized version of him, even if it puts himself at risk. i also think in general, owain would thrive in the blue lions house. felix, ashe, ingrid, dedue, annette— those are all prime support partners for him that have a lot of potential. the blue lion house is very… the way that they are. and something owain shows in fates is that though hes very good at using his theatrics to ease people, whether that be on purpose or otherwise, and by god do the blue lions need it. look at them… jesus.

cynthia is in the blue lion house for similar reasons but i think she has a key difference from owain. while i think owain is the type to go down with the ship, i think cynthia might actually serve as an opposition to dimitri and potentially go against him in a similar fashion to felix and annette in thats hidden in the games files and was never put in the game (WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. dimitri doesnt get enough push back in azure moon!! another post for another time though). in their time at the academy, while owain is fangirling over dimitri, i think cynthia would too at first. but fodlan is very different than ylisse, and in particular faerghus treats its knights and specifically women knights very differently than cynthia wouldve otherwise been treated. i think this would push cynthia into questioning faerghus’s ideals (especially in getting close to ingrid who im sure she’d find friendship in) and eventually dimitri in how he seemingly upholds those ideals. when he goes down a darker path in the timeskip, she’d probably take felix’s more critical approach, and i think she could turn on him. for the empire? probably not. but i dont think she’d be as down as owain or ingrid to keep following him when hes not taking accountability for what hes doing. she might find her way back once hes come back to himself but who really knows. not me (<- girl who is writing all of this)

yarnes a funny pick because lions are supposed to be brave and fearless and hes a Rabbit. but obviously yarne would be very aware of that irony and i think it could serve as a push for him to come into that bravery, and thats something i think the lion house could help him do. i think he’d look to dimitri for solace similar to how he does with lucina, and dimitri would be very happy to provide that for him. when the timeskip comes and dimitri is lost, i think yarne would have to find it in himself to abandon that anxiety for a bit to come help ease dimitri, sort of repaying him for his initial kindness (read: i want eyepatch scary dimitri to find stress relief in petting a big ass bunny). also i dont need yarne to be in the same house as petra and marianne for him to interact with them. dont worry thats a thing. also if youre a real one you recruit marianne to blue lions everytime. no i dont know how they’d handle bringing a taguel to fodlan i dont really care either

for severa i think, even if she would rather not admit it, justice and loyalty are very key parts of her character. its buried underneath her mean girl attitude and like five pounds of trauma but its there. and what are the blue lions if not loyal knights with very LOUD auras of sadness? she would be similar to felix in terms of their views on knighthood, and obviously her whole thing with cordelia would put her at odds with the whole dying for your king/for glory thing faerghus has going on. similar to cynthia she’d be very critical of faerghus and dimitri except she’d be that way to his face. she doesnt have the same personal beef with him the same way felix would, and might be a little more like how i imagined inigo would be to edelgard, criticism with the better interest of the greater good rather than formed of personal beef. in the end though, i think she would stick with dimitri. also i think she’d have insane sexual tension with ingrid like i dont think theyd like eachother but like. my vision… do you see it.

bradys in lions partially due to mutual influence (hi zorua) but also because i ended up liking his potential with the lions as opposed to the deer or eagles. he’d have a very cute friendship with mercedes and annette i think, playing violin for them and having tea party gossip sessions. i think he and dedue could bond over being kinda scary but doing what they can to ease people’s fear of them. since thats an insecurity for both of them that brady purposefully takes steps to get rid of (ex: him hunching over is so that he can be eye level with children and people shorter with them so as not to come off as intimidating or more powerful) i think brady could help with that. though if im being so real i dont think he would like dimitri. i think he would stay and stick around and help dimitri get better. but i dont think he’d approve of his bloodlust and be very open with his issues in regards to how dimitri handles and carries himself. sorry guys im not meaning to have dimitri catch so many strays here 😭 i love the guy i just also like when theres conflict here i promise

laurent is in the golden deer because i think he and claude would be very like minded people in terms of trying to discover the secrets behind fodlan and what that means and how to better navigate fodlan as uncharted territory. theyre both foreigners, as are all of the second gen kids, but thats something claude keeps under wraps that i think laurent would be able to tell very quickly (not that it was hard. claude doesnt hide it well its just that everyone in fodlan is either stupid or all the smart people are kept away from him) that claude is from almyra. i think this knowledge could help him serve as something of a confidant to claude. obviously he wouldnt tell laurent everything but when claudes supposed closest allies are lorenz (guy who hates him and prays for his downfall) and hilda (girl who is racist and from a racist family) its just like. well maybe claude should have another friend who is normal adjacent at least, and laurents not the type to go blabbing anyways. obviously both lorenz and hilda (eh. well.) get better about their mindsets post timeskip but i think in the time of the academy laurent would be a very valuable friend for claude and vice versa. in general laurent would do well anywhere because i think most of his interest would be with the technological and scientific advancements of fodlan which is flexible, but i think, with rhea purposefully halting progress and claude being the main guy who wants truth above all else, this is the best spot for him. could hear an argument for him going to edelgard (potential recruit out of house recruit fs) but i do like him with claude a bit more. gerolau angst also.

lucina is in golden deer because i dont want her in the other two houses but also because i do think, similar to laurent, she’d be very valuable to claude and vice versa. awakening world building is horseshit but from what little we do know there is quite a bit of political discourse that lucina probably knows quite a bit about. even if her timeline was thrown into war when she was young, she probably had some form of royal training and can help claude navigate fodlan a little bit. i also think coming to fodlan would just be a very refreshing experience for lucina as the burden of everything is no longer directly on her shoulders, and i think she’d be looking for a broader perspective on life and finding another purpose for herself now that grima is dealt with. i think claude would be able to help her with that and i think she’d be genuinely interested to learn of his homeland once she figures out where hes from (i do think laurent beats her to the conclusion but not by a lot. remember this is lucina aka marth aka woman her disguised her own royal status and was very successful at it. just saying). also while i did say that golden deer is in fact not the meme house, i think they are more light hearted overall in terms of character (does NOT mean meme house or funny house. look me right in my eyes and say the house WITHOUT hubert and linhardt is the meme house. fucking liar) and i think lucina would love that. i want her to get the chance to be silly and childish for a little bit. characters like raphael and marianne and lysithea might help her heal that inner child that she never really got to let out and i just think the golden deer house would be the best place for her

morgan is here because i didnt want her and marc in the same house thats too easy. but while i think claude is the least in need of a tactician type character, him and morgan would be sooooo funny so cute and i need someone who can keep him on his toes. i think he blurts out a plan and morgan goes “ermmm ackchully” and half of the time her rebuttals are complete nonsense she just wants to argue. i think they both enjoy it. i also think, similar to lucina, a light hearted house would be a little better for her. shes much more prone to mischief than m!morgan is i think and i think the deer would benefit from that if only so she can target lorenz and make me laugh. i also think separating the twins would make for fantastic angst down in the timeskip but for now shes just hanging out having fun being a piece of shit. #girl also i think its funnier if one morgan is absolutely thriving and the other is barely keeping his shit together and by god it is way funnier if its f!morgan getting away with everything

noire is here because. i. could not think of a reason for her to go anywhere else! i thought about putting her in beagles but i dont think making that choice between the church and edelgard would be as interesting for her? and i dont think putting her in lions would do anything for her. i think the best lord and the best house at helping her through her issues and being understanding of her mood changes is probably claude and the deer. i could see hilda and leonie reaching out to her, or ignatz and her getting on pretty well, but im not quite sure on the specifics of that. my least thought out placement but also it doesnt matter because it keeps the placements balanced to put her here. i’ll have to give this one more thought…

anyways if you can believe it this is the cutdown version. i know right. i hope i didnt forget anyone that would be really embarrassing

[b-plot-butch]

Last line challenge

Tagged by @seiya-starsniper thanks hon!! I don’t think I responded last time you tagged me in one of these so…extra long snippet time, I guess? xD

This is from my shortly post-canon fic where Unity and Gault drag Lucienne out of her library for a much needed picnic, feat. juicy backstory between Lucienne and Gault, complex feelings about the idea of family, and the sacred act of bonding while eating a meal.

Morpheus had presented Unity with the same offer he had to Rose Walker: that she could stay in the Dreaming after her death, if she so desired. She accepted. After some experimentation in various sectors of the Dreaming, Unity had eventually settled in Fiddler’s Green. Her innate warmth suited her well to greeting visitors and making them feel at home.

Fiddler’s Green had returned to its full lushness, making it a more than ideal place of residence for her, and Unity enjoyed the company of its embodiment. It charmed Lucienne that Unity always addressed him as Gilbert, and amused her that Unity’s primary association of him—Fiddler’s Green, one of the Major Arcana, known by some as the heart of the Dreaming itself—seemed to be that he was her great-granddaughter’s former housemate. What with his experience with and particular affinity for humans, Lucienne thought he was the one of the best friends Unity could have made in the Dreaming. Lucienne was self-aware enough to know sometimes she herself fell short in that department. She had seldom spent time with humans in their own lands, on their own terms.

Not since she was human herself, that is.

(Look at me actually writing decent-sized paragraphs for once lol)

No pressure tags: @cosmictapestry @bobbole @stellerssong @the-everqueen and anyone else who wants to share what they’re cooking up!

[izzy-b-hands]

I know everyone on here only knew her via my occasional posts about work (back when I worked at the clinic in ND), but I wanted to post a small something about Pam, in honour of her passing today.

Pam had been at the clinic longer than any of us. And she was truly one of those employees that helped keep things running. She knew each doctor (but the MDs in particular, always the pickier and more needy than the ODs) like the back of her hand, in both scheduling requirements and overall likes and hates and needs. At first, she scared the ever-loving fuck out of me. She could be gruff, and occasionally outright mean, though I will always be grateful to her for the kindness she showed me compared to other trainees. Some of that may have come at first because she knew/worked alongside my mum for a few years prior to my being hired, but in time I found out that she simply did like me. Appreciated that I wanted to work hard and be better at everything in my life. Understood that life hadn't necessarily been kind or fair to me or my family and understood that well, because it hadn't been to her either.

Occasionally she'd be gone from work due to her Crohn's, and other chronic issues, and that was only what she'd tell you about. The implication was that, while she overall was quite happy with how things had ended up, there had been a lot of rough shit in between that had toughened Pam up a lot. It made her seem impossible to get to know to some, but I can say it was worth the work. Underneath the shell she'd had to grow to get through, there was a very kind, understanding woman who genuinely wanted the best for those she saw as doing their best in a world that's not easy for anyone to live in, even in the best of times and circumstances.

I admit, we did all encourage less than ideal parts of each other. She smoke too much and drank too much (and during the time in my life when I drank, we overdid it on her favourite long island iced teas more than once during happy hour after work.) But it helped to deal with things as work at the clinic got harder and things changed, unfortunately for the worse both for staff and patients (but I digress on that. The place is still running with Pam and I and many others gone, like any other privately owned rural clinic. When they're one of the few places open for care, they always straggle on no matter what they do to anyone else.) None of the above mentioned changed how fucking hard she worked though, and how she'd put her own job on the line to help out coworkers and patients alike whenever the chance arose.

That said, we helped get each other through the rougher days, and she gave me fantastic life advice in the times in between. Advice that finally helped get me out of ND, in fact, when it became clear that living there was no longer safe. Some of her best bits that I've engraved into my head are: 'there's always another job out there, another place to live, another person to meet that might be a friend to you. Don't let despair override your chance at something better, kinder, or easier. Take the treats that you can in life, whether that's a good drink or a favourite food or outing (she enjoyed the casino herself.) Don't worry too much about overindulging, because the time here is too fucking short anyway for it to matter in the way you think it will. Live your life, and feel it all in full, because it'll go by you faster than you expect.'

So tonight, with Housemate, I'm going to try and take her advice. I'm going to let myself be sad and miss her. I'll let myself be sad that it happened the way it did (barely a few days in hospice, from a cancer that it seems she didn't know about until very near the end. I only hope they had good meds to help her not hurt so much and that they let her have a few drinks and cigarettes if she wanted them.) We'll eat a good dinner, with food and drink that we like, and we'll look to see what we can send for flowers to her funeral (her sisters and nephews, I'm told, are doing their best to set it all up, but aside from that and past coworkers, I don't know if there's much of anyone else left to go to it or send anything. The least I can do to thank her for treating me with kindness and care when others didn't is to send flowers, I think.)

And I'll have a little, non-alcoholic, toast to her life and memory. May her memory be a blessing, and may whatever there is after this life be kind to Pam. She deserves that and more.

[butterflyrocks]

This was published in 2022 in the substack of Jeni Harvey. And it was originally published in 2017. But the message is still very important today, so I encourage all of you to read it and to read more from this amazing woman.

It was sometime in 2006 that I remember sitting on my sofa, watching George Galloway pretend to be a cat. Enthralling and disturbing in equal measure though it was, (poor Rula) it was not what struck me about the man. Lodged in my mind far more firmly are the comments he made regarding fellow housemate and glamour model, Jodie Marsh: that perhaps some might feel it sexist, but he believed deep down she likely longed for nothing more than a quiet life of marriage and motherhood. I remember I gasped in disbelief. Had he really just said that? The man on the left beside me didn’t even flinch.

I wish I could say that were the first time it had dawned on me that some men supposedly on my side were not, but the instances are too many to name. The tale of one visiting man, loaded into a shopping trolley and forcibly wheeled off site by exasperated Greenham women, was a staple of my childhood. Later, as a young activist, I would absorb the subtle messages designed to steer me towards the role of burner of the home fires and entertainer of the troops — a role I didn’t like and had never once asked for. Later still, I would hear in horror of the woman shunned by her supposedly radical community for turning in desperation to the police in the face of domestic violence. For much of my life as a left wing woman, I have been among left wing men. Full of machismo and high ideals, defenders of the poor, the earth, and of human rights and freedoms, some were men I much admired. But running a fine, near invisible thread through it all were the quiet, guiltily told stories of women; stories recognisable from any vantage point. For whether she is of the left, right, or centre, or even if she prefers to spoil her ballot, some women’s stories remain the same.

More recently I have watched, without surprise, men such as Michael Moore, Yanis Varoufakis, and Ken Loach speak up in defence of Julian Assange, who it seems could not possibly be a rapist when there are far more plausible explanations, such as CIA honey traps and lying women, to be had. I have also watched with a strange mix of curiosity, hope, and foreboding as men on the left have developed, out of nowhere, a sudden feminist consciousness. Whereas traditionally men have always been so hostile to the idea of women’s liberation, male feminists are now ten a penny, clustering enthusiastically around an altogether more sexy and palatable third wave, bestowing upon it their generous approval, offering suggestions, and claiming it as their own.

Yet nowhere is the misogyny of the left more apparent than in the current conflict around transgender issues. It is here that men most like to congregate, hiding behind a claim to advocate fairness and equality, aggressively signalling their no cost virtue. Risking nothing in terms of power or rights, they sit easily atop their high horses, shouting down at those of us with everything to lose, insulting us if we do not acquiesce to their view.

As an example, a commissioning editor at The Guardian, Chris Godfrey, recently described as “vile, transphobic trash” a painstakingly researched and frankly heartbreaking article highlighting the ways in which homophobic bullying of young lesbians can set them on a path to becoming trans men. The article had been written by a well respected female journalist and included quotes from both concerned medical professionals (apparently there are many) and a detransitioned woman, who stated explicitly that harassment due to her sexuality had been a huge factor in her seeking to transition. Real women, whose real lives have been turned upside down, summarily dismissed by a man who will never understand what it is to be a female, or lesbian, forced to navigate a hostile world.

On a recent radio show, self described champagne socialist, James O’Brien, recently encouraged listeners to ring in for a discussion on gender identity, claiming to want to understand the concerns some women and parents had about gender neutral spaces. A woman attempting to voice her opinion was interrupted by O’Brien no less than seventeen times as he hectored, mocked, and bullied her, refusing to let her speak. He judged as paranoid her reluctance to share fitting rooms with male bodied people. “Would you feel comfortable getting changed in a room next to me?” he demanded, daring her to say no. “What do you think I’m going to do?” In the current climate of mass disclosure and growing understanding as to the universal nature of women’s experience of sexual abuse and harassment, and given that many men on the left have loudly voiced their shock and condemnation, I find O’Brien’s claim to cluelessness extraordinarily disingenuous. He also appears to lack the self awareness necessary to realise he just scored something of an own goal: his aggressive refusal to accept a woman’s clearly stated boundaries showing a man none of us would want in the next changing cubicle.

It is well documented that the term TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) is inextricably linked with misogynist abuse, death threats, and violence against women, yet many leftist men continue to delight in using it. Former spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn, Matt Zarb-Cousin, complains that socially liberal TERFS are standing in the way of progress. One can only assume his idea of progress is for women no longer to be able to organise politically and exclusively with those of the same sex in order to fight their sex based oppression. He is fond of using the term TERF in place of a woman’s actual name, clearly seeing no need to speak to women like real human beings when there are dehumanising pejoratives to hand. “Jog on terf,” he types with palpable glee, presumably knowing he cannot get away with bitch.

Finally, in a recent tweet, leftist thinker and columnist Owen Jones wrote: “If ‘TERF’ is unacceptable, let’s just use ‘transphobe’ and ‘transphobic’ — problem solved” in an attempt to further cement the idea that any feminist thought critical of gender ideology is to be shut down and denounced, without debate or question. Now that men such as Jones have found a way to deny natal women’s specific rights and experience, and to dismiss, shout, and sneer at us whilst still retaining their veneer of political righteousness, it is hard to miss the relish with which some take up the task.

Fluent in the language of modern feminism, Jones and his ilk claim to be on the side of women. Yet all the empathy and anger they can muster appears reserved only for those self identified women born with the same bodies and biology as themselves. Outraged, they quote (often misleading) statistics on the violence experienced by trans women as though seeing the reality of male violence for the very first time. Perhaps violence against women and girls has always made them this angry, yet it is not an anger familiar to me. After all there has been pandemic, fatal violence committed by men against natal women since records began. We have been raped, burned at the stake, sold into sexual slavery, and are still killed, two of us a week, by men who claim — or once did — to love us. Where was all this righteous rage on our behalf? And if we accept there was none, or at least none equivalent in intensity, then how are we to interpret this sudden, furious epiphany?

Dear men on the left, I’m going to tell you something and you’re not going to like it. When it comes to rank misogyny, you are often no better than men on the right. Your claim to feminism cannot be made reconcilable with your attacks on women with whom you disagree, and neither is your claim to a belief in fairness and equality compatible with ripping up our hard won rights.

You are no better when you tell us we have no right to an opinion on what the word woman means. You are no better when you call us names known to incite threats of rape and violence, because we do not understand gender in the way you would wish us to. And you are no better when you refuse to listen to, empathise with, or try to understand our point of view.

Dear men on the left, have a look around you. You cannot build a better, fairer world on the backs of women. It will only ever take a few of us to get to our feet for it all to come tumbling down

[thedreadvampy]

ON THE PLUS SIDE

no thanks to her

Sam and I DID get a decision in principle today and we ARE looking at flats, and while this is a really shit situation and either way we will have to go through the whole rigmarole of trying to find a housemate on no notice, I'm genuinely really excited about the idea of us actually being in a position to buy a home.

like. both of us have spent most of our 20s in absolute shitholes, freezing cold and full of mould, constantly at risk of not being able to pay rent. we are millennials, after all. I love our flat and we'll never find something this spacious and central but it isn't ours and we can still be booted with a few weeks notice or have the rent shoot up. say, because our fucking housemate leaves with the bare minimum warning.

neither of us have ever lived in a home that we've not had to share with someone else. neither of us have ever had just like 'walk around naked' kind of This Is My Own Home vibes. we've always had to work with a third party present, often someone who we have to walk on eggshells with.

it would be. extremely nice. to own a house just with someone who I know well enough and trust enough to feel like it's my own home. I would really like to be in a position where we know what the monthly cost is, and will be for the foreseeable, and where we can't be suddenly evicted, and aren't answerable to a landlord. where if something breaks we can either focus out how to fix it or pay someone who'll ACTUALLY fix it rather than nail a board over it because that's the cheapest option. I want to put up shelves!!!! I want to paint my wall!!!! I want to make actual long term plans because I know we're going to live here for the foreseeable future! I want to take those conversations when we're hypothesising about what an ideal kitchen or bathroom would look like for us and be able to turn them into actionable long term plans! I want to do what I want in my own home without being accountable to a landlord who doesn't care about me but will take any excuse to take my money! If I spill dye on the floorboards or scuff a wall or dent a door I don't want that to be anyone's business except me and my partner's!

I want that! I want that stability!

And I don't think I 100% realised how much I want that until this shit happened and I had to confront that it's possible. Like we could have that, not in the Nebulous Future but imminently. And I know that a mortgage is still a huge financial commitment and I know you don't own the house the bank owns the house and I know it's still got all this friction and instability but it is such a different situation to renting. It's so much more stable. It's not stable like owning outright is stable but it's something permanent and as I'm coming out of a lifetime of survival-thinking into something resembling a stable and comfortable life I want that so much.

idk I'm really quite emotional about it. like my home growing up was mortgaged (and my parents were comfortably able to keep on top of that), but it was also, cause of The Stuff, largely a really uncomfortable, stressful place where I didn't really want to be. I lived in an empty house with my boyfriend on the weekend for about a year when I was 17-18 and it was awful and tense and unsafe. I lived in a Portakabin for a few months, then last-ditch student housing with strangers, then a student-let house, and then I was homeless for a bit, living out of a suitcase in Sam's flat that wasn't really suitable for two people, let alone three.

and then I lived in my first long term let for 6 years and honestly that in and of itself made such a difference that it was on a rolling contract. even though I was unemployed and desperately struggling and borrowing and begging to make rent every month and my poor housemate and friends had to cover for me for years. even though it was cold and mouldy and damp and there was a hole in the kitchen wall and IV drug users periodically passed out on our doorstep and I didn't know if they were still alive and there was literally not a scrap of sunlight or sky in the whole flat which made me so physically ill I was tired all the time and had constant migraines. but even with that it was the first time in my life I felt like I had an actual home that I could expand into.

and then I moved here during the pandemic and it's big and spacious and sunlit and within days of moving in my migraines and chest pain lifted. and I have plants and I can invite people over and have parties and offer people a bed for the night. but you know. It's still not mine. Because when you're renting there's always a timer on it. and because when you're living with a housemate who you're not in partnership with, there's shit outside your control. as per this.

but like it's hack but I've always been looking for a really reliable home. I remember thinking about it when I was a kid, and I thought and wrote a lot about it particularly when I was staying at Sam's - like a place where you not just feel safe, but you know you can make long term plans. like you can plant a tree now to harvest fruit in a decade. you can put up a shelf now while thinking about how it will suit with the kitchen counter you'll install in a few years. you can know that when you go away it'll be there when you come back. you know? you can have something that you're responsible for that you also have some measure of control over. that gives you back what you put in.

and I didn't really think I was going to have that. and I didn't really think I was going to have relationships that I trusted enough that I could move in with someone and still feel like I had that stability. and I do think that that's more realistic and tangible now than it's ever been before. we are 100% only going to be able to do this with some help, I'm inevitably going to be scrounging a loan of a few grand off my mum for solicitor's fees and moving costs of nothing else, but we can do this. I hope. I think.

and until we went to the mortgage advisor today I don't think it really felt real and I don't think I realised how much of a difference I think it would make. fuck. imagine having a stable home with someone you trust, like, forever. what the fuck.

My housemate is moving out in January

She told us this a week or two ago, when she sat down and, after sitting with us watching TV for over an hour, said "hey so I bought a house and I'm moving out. We agreed on 2 months notice so I won't move until the end of January."

The last time she talked in the immediate terms about buying a house was in 2021, when the sale she was working on fell though and she was unemployed so it was a "when I'm back in a position to look I'll start looking again." Since then I've occasionally asked her how she's doing on the house buying front and she's been like "oh I'm getting there financially" but hasn't mentioned anything concrete.

She didn't tell us she was looking at places. She didn't tell us she had put in an offer. She told us when the offer was finalised. A week AFTER she emailed the letting agent about getting out of her part of the lease. And, it increasingly feels like, only because the letting agent's response was that we had to agree to change the lease.

The letting agent's response (which our housemate obviously didn't copy us into; we had to follow up separately and they copied us into the email chain) also includes that when we change the lease, they're empowered to change the rent, quote, "no cap". Rent was already going up in January - there's no possibility of Sam and I paying her share of the rent.

The really fucking upsetting thing is we're not strangers. This isn't a casual "housemate we found on flatshare" thing. She and Sam have lived together literally their entire adult lives. Me and her have known each other well over a decade. I lived in her and Sam's flat when I was homeless. We were the first people she came out to as trans. We're not super close but I thought we were fucking friends. And she's literally gone out of her way to not talk to us about this for what must have been months while the sale completed - which means she's lied to my face at least once cause I've asked her about her finances in that time (cause she's in a job she hates that she only took to get the house money, so it's like. when we've been commiserating about work stuff I'm often asking 'are you almost free?'). she literally went out of her way to talk to the letting agents before talking to us about putting us in a situation where we could lose our fucking home.

And she keeps. trying. to pretend nothing's happened. Every time I've seen her since then she's not mentioned anything or apologised or anything, she just keeps chatting away and offering hugs and fistbumps like nothing's happened. Like we're still fucking friends.

All it would take for us to still be friends and to be happy for her would have been one fucking sentence in the groupchat like "hey, just put an offer in on a house" or "I'm looking at properties, just so you know, that might happen in the next few months". Like nobody begrudges her for buying a house! It's very cool for her! She's 31 she's worked really hard to get the money I would love to be happy for her! Unfortunately she decided avoiding conflict is more important than giving the people she fucking LIVES WITH (who btw fronted her a month on the rent here while she was unemployed and agreed to take on a larger proportion of the move-in cost back in 2021, if we're still holding ourselves to shit we said 2.5 years ago), so no, you are not entitled to our friendship or to going back to normal.

like if she'd been honest with us it would have been something to process but we'd have had time to figure out our next steps. instead she's left us in a position where we have to find a new roommate before she gives her one month notice, which means finding someone by the end of December, which oh look that's the middle of the fucking Christmas holidays. and she didn't tell us anything until the START of December, or copy us into her conversation with the letting agent, meaning we still don't know what the rent on that space will be so we aren't yet in a position to advertise it. Has she offered to help find a roommate? Has she fuck. Has she offered to help out by moving her move-out date? Nah, she's moving as soon as she gets the keys because, quote, "that means her finances won't have to change". SOUNDS LOVELY. NOT HAVING YOUR FINANCES SUDDENLY CHANGE. I THINK THAT SOUNDS LIKE A REALLY REASONABLE FUCKING GOAL.

Thirteen fucking years she's lived with Sam. Four fucking weeks over Christmas she's left us to figure out a way to not turbofuck our living situation. And she's got the fucking nerve to try and pretend we should be interacting like nothing's changed. Jesus Christ. What a fucking unhinged way to treat...anybody, honestly. never mind the friends-your-entire-adult-life part. literally cannot imagine a scenario in which I would buy a house without telling the people I lived with.

(haha actually this is what my parents divorced over so apparently it's not unusual. although at least my dad had the decency to tell the woman he shared finances with at the point he put in an offer not the point the fucking sale went through.)

Like we'll be fine. It's a huge city centre flat with decent rent and queer housemates, hopefully even when the rent goes up it'll be an easy sell in a city with a huge housing shortage and big queer community. We've got a couple of people interested already, sight unseen - worst case scenario we have to live with someone we don't get on with. And it's given Sam and me a push to look at our own finances and as of today, we've got a mortgage decision in principle and can start looking at flats in the area - mind, we'll be transparent upfront and tell any prospective housemates that yeah, we're looking to buy and move out in the next 6-12 months, and we'll tell them if we put an offer in, because we're decent fucking people who aren't going to spring that on someone out of the blue.

But it's been I think 2 weeks and I'm so fucking angry I could spit. It's such a fucking betrayal. And frankly you know selfishly like. I just had a breakup a couple of months ago, I'm in the middle of moving jobs, both me and Sam have a history of housing instability and this has been the first decent, stable, safe, not-mouldy not-freezing home I think any of us have had, and this is so fucking triggering and upscuttling I could just start biting. like I was talking to my friend about it last week and it's just like. Can I have One Fucking Thing of the three main tentpoles of survival - home, work, relationships - that are fucking stable right now? because shit has been In Flux lately. and at least the work and relationship stuff has changed because of my decisions. going through all that work to make myself short-term unstable to gain long-term stability has been really hard and draining and then just as I was reaching the crisis point with work stuff BOOM, IT'S HOUSING INSTABILITY WITH A STEEL CHAIR. fuck. seriously fuck this and fuck her. we're going to make something good come of it but what a deeply, unbelievably shitty thing to do.

[domaslut]

HOGWARTS MYSTERY ERA.

GWENDOLYN MARY BLACKTHRONE. It’s time to introduce my Mc’s relatives and I would love to start with this angel, probably my favorite member from this problematic family.

• Face claim: Gal Gadot.

• House: Ravenclaw.

• Status: deceased †.

• Date of birth: 14th April 1965.

• Patronus: butterfly.

• Occupation: formerly, student at Hogwarts; after graduation, healer at St. Mungo.

• Affiliation: Order of the Phoenix.

• Sexuality: bisexual.

• Boggart: no one waiting for her at the train station.

• Riddikulus: the toddler version of her sister, Clarice, in a pink attire, eating dozens of chocolate frogs under the Christmas Tree.

• Wand: hornbeam wood with a unicorn hair core, 10 inches long and very flexible.

• Blood: she is a pureblood. Her parents were both Slytherins and they were top Death Eaters. They both survived the first wizarding war and now are helping the Dark Lord to gather followers to raise again.

Gwendolyn Mary Blackthrone, born on 14th April 1965, is Clarice Blackthrone’s older sister. She was the pride and joy of her family, a curious child who spent most of her time practising piano, learning spells and studying Herbology. Although she was ambitious and lived up to her parents expectations, she fell into disgrace as soon as she started attending Hogwarts. The Sorting Hat did not believe she would have fitted into Slytherin and declared she would have been of better use among the wise Ravenclaws. As soon as her parents received the news, they started addressing her as an insult to the family name.

Although she was heartbroken for being rejected by her own flesh and blood, Gwendolyn accepted her fate and did her best to accomplish her duties as a student. She became a prefect and she signed up to the Frog Choir, becoming an inspiring icon for most of the girls of her year.

Her ideals did not quite match the ones of her parents and their relationship grew colder year by year. They did not attend her graduation and she did not come back home after the party. Her decision was detrimental to her career, as her father’s connections at the Ministry forced her to give up on her dream to become an Auror.

Relationship with her sister.

Gwendolyn was a good-hearted person. Five years older than Clarice, she was overprotective of her younger sister, both at home and at Hogwarts. When the news that their parents were Death Eaters spread, the girls were usually mocked and challenged by other students. While Clarice was sorted into Slytherin and did not have to deal with her Housemates, whose parents were mostly Death Eaters too, some Gryffindors picked up on her. Even though the younger Blackthrone could handle them easily, she always got her back and incited her sister to use words instead of drawing wands to deal with bullies.

They loved each other and Clarice was the only one who stayed in touch with her sister, supporting her decisions and helping her to find shelter at St. Mungo as a healer.

Abilities.

Gwendolyn was a brilliant witch and a skilled Legilimens. Some of the male ancestors of the Blackthrone family possessed this ability and there had not been one since ninety years. There is no witch from that lineage known for having been a mind-reader and that makes Gwendolyn the only female exception possessing that ability in her family. Although she was a good duelist, she never matched the skills of her sister and her parents. She refused to use the spells invented by her ancestors and spent most of her life sharpening her knowledge in the use of healing spells, herbs and potions. There was not a subject she was not good at, however, she brewed excellent potions and Herbology was probably the easiest one for her.

Personality.

Gwendolyn was rather open-minded, generous and with a natural predisposition for helping others. She always stood up for herself and her sister, menaging to solve most of the conflicts with long talks and rationality. She was wise and possessed a logical mind, making her always the top of her class. Unfortunately, she had a tendency to blame herself, if things went wrong, and that caused her to become surprisingly quiet and slightly susceptible for days until she figured out a way to forgive herself and, possibly, fix the issue. However, she was usually talkative and adventurous, but that did not stop the Ravenclaw girl from spending hours in the library. She was selfless and she did not mind spending her nights having deep and conforting conversations with her friends. Although being a Ravenclaw and a far way from sharing her parents’ ideals, she inheridated the Blackthrone thirst for power and she cheated, during Quidditch matches, or tournements to help her House win.

What does she dislike.

Gwendolyne loathed family dinners, due to her turbolent relationship with her parents. However, she was forced to attend them until she moved into a small flat in Diagon Alley and started her service at St. Mungo as a healer. She basically hated Death Eaters and her family friends, with the only excpetion of Felix Rosier. She did not fully trust him at first and she feared for her sister’s safety, when they started dating. However, she changed her mind when Felix saved her life during an ambush. In addition, she despised blackstabbers, stubborn and lazy people and, above anything else, feeling useless.

Interests.

Gwendolyne loved playing piano and she kept on doing it even after she parted from her family. Netherless, passion did not flare up in her eyes anymore, if someone asked her to play something, since her parents demanded her to play it in order to entertain their friends during parties. She is a skilled painter, invested into portraits and sketches of strangers she met on her daily strolls. She loves singing too, a passion she developed back at Hogwarts when she signed up to the Frog Choir.

Amorentia.

What does people in love with her smell in the potion? Gwendolyn smells like green tea, the salty tang of the sea, a dusty and forgotten library and the sweetest apple pie.

What does she smells into the potion? She has been in love a few times in her life, both with girls and boys. However, the last time she smelt the fragrance of the potion she had met her first husband, Jackson Ross. The half-blood Hufflepuff, according to her, smelt like cocoa, ink, fresh blankets and sunflowers.

She was forced to marry her second husband after the murder of Jackson. Yet, she never had feelings for him and, when he forced her to smell the potion, she told him she did not smell anything at all but the stink of death in his breath. Totila Samuel Pearson smashed the bottle on her face afterward. Gwendolyn, on that day, swore not to smell a love potion ever again.

The memory to fuel her patronus.

Gwendolyn’s patronus is a butterfly. On her fifth year at Hogwarts she learnt to cast the spell, unleashing it by holding on the happiest memory of her life: her younger sister’s birth. Clarice was everything to her, she was the person she wanted to protect, the one she could not live without and her hope in a miserable life at home with her parents. Despite their unbreakable bond, the memory fueling her patronus switched the moment she fell in love with Jackson Ross. From that day, whenever she casted the spell, she thought about the day they met. The shape did not change, however, the butterfly seemed to have larger wings than before. That did not change when she was widowed.

Friends.

Being beautiful and friendly, Gwendolyn loved making new friends. The closest ones, though, Chester Davies, Felix Rosier, Bill Weasley and, later on, Talbott Winger. Approaching her was not hard, as long as the person valued friendship, loyalty and goodness above anything else. She did not judge kids coming from Lord Voldemort’s followers and, sometimes, helped them to deal with reality.

Romance.

Gwendolyne has fallen in love more than once in her life. Each relationship has brought something special to her, in terms of values or personal growth. She was easy to love, but it was kind of hard getting through her heart and picking her attention. However, a few selected people did. Jackson Ross was what she considered “the epic love of her life”. Gwendolyne was willing to marry him despite his blood status and that cause her parents to pest them, to waylay them, until Jackson died by the hand of Totila Samuel Pearson, the pureblood her family wanted her to marry. Gwendolyne lost her smile that day, along with her child. The relationship with her second husband was based on business, with no benefits or feelings. It soon turned out to be a toxic, abusive bond, until Gwendolyne got to escape. The price she paid was the ‘Blackthrone mark’ craved on her chest, that unleashed an excruciating pain through her body as soon as she was too close to a member of her family.

Cause of death.

Gwendolyne was a member of the Order of the phoenix and she took part to the Battle of Hogwarts. She was actually good at duelling, however, she was not strong enough and, weakened by the mark due to the presence of her family on the battlefield, she realised that the best she could do was trying to protect other people. She saw Jae Kim struggling to keep up with her mother and she did not hesitate to cast a Depulso to push him away and be hit herself by the Unforgivable Curse.

Significant members of the family.

Clarice Charlotte Blackthrone (younger sister).

Tobias Richard Blackthrone † (father);

Gemma Vivienne Blackthrone-Rossellini † (mother);

Gwendolyn Mary Blackthrone † (mc);

Jackson Ross † (Gwendolyn’s first husband);

Totila Samuel Pearson (Gwendolyn’s second husband).

Trivia & Quotes.

Some lines she told people.

• To her sister, Clarice, in the prefect bathroom, when she told Gwendolyne she had feelings for Chester and was scared of it : “There’s no need to be scared. Love makes you feel alive. It’s the best thing that could have ever happened to you. Don’t you think you deserve to smile too? And don’t you dare tell me I sound like a Hufflepuff”.

• To Felix, at Jackson’s birthday party, in her flat: “Who would have thought, a few years ago, that I was going to invite you over for my husband birthday and have a drink with you on my balcony? Geez, shame on me for having being a bitch!”.

• To Jackson, under a pouring rain, searching for shelter: “I love you, Jackson Ross, even if you’re crazy! And I don’t think I will ever be able to stop loving you”.

• To Nymphadora, staying over after Jackson’s funeral: “I have died too that night. He used to call me his ‘little firefly’ and he always told me to never stop shining. Isn’t it ironic, though? Fireflies enlighten fields in the night, but how am I supposed to do it if he was my night and the whole fucking universe too?”.

• To Totila Samuel Pearson, her second husband, after spitting on his face: “May you rot in Hell along with that disgusting gallant I should call ‘father’”.

• To the Ravenclaws, at her graduation party: “Never stop making me proud of you all. Dream, study hard and achieve your goals. There is nothing a Ravenclaw cannot do… Except remembering to drink fresh water, having regular meals and not staying up all night to study!”.

• To herself, in her diary, wiping away some tears with the sleeve of her sweater: “I will not be an Auror. What did I expect? I’ve turned my back on my family and they did not miss their chance to stab me, did they? However, I am a Blackthrone too. I will become a healer and no one can stop me this time. I love helping others, it makes me happy. I am going to cherish every moment I spend mending someone’s wounds… Who is going to mend mine, though?”.

• To Chester, before the Battle of Hogwarts : “If I am not going to make it out alive, tell Clarice that I loved her and that she was the best sister I could have ever had. Tell Felix that I trust him blindly and that I know he will take good care of my little sister. And you, Chester, you have my respect and the gratitude for not having let any of us down”.

Some facts about Gwendolyne.

• Gwendolyne hated being a ‘Legilimens’ for two main reasons. Her father demanded her to use her ability on the people he was torturing and tell him what they were thinking and, secondly, she did not like finding out people’s thoughts on her unwittingly.

• When Totila smashed the Amorentia potion on her face, she got two scars: one on her left cheekbone and one on her eyebrow.

• She loathed swearing, but she occasionally did. The rare occasions usually concerned episodes of people bullying her and her friends, or Death Eaters.

• When she was sixteen, she got a tattoo of a butterfly on her right wrist and had to hide it from her family, whenever she was staying home.

• Gwendolyne was bisexual. The first kiss of her life was from a girl and, although she thought to have a preference in girls and she was actually pretty sure that her life companion was going to be a woman, she was surprised to have fallen madly in love with a man and having made it to the alter with him.

• She was scared of Dragons and Felix once made her ride one for having lost a bet.

• Bad thing or not, she have cheated on Totila more than once in search for confort for Jackson’s death. However, no one could be compared to him.

• Her parents knocked on her door to offer her a chance for redemption, if she agreed to join the death eaters. She refused and, since that day, they countlessly attempted to kill her.

• When she was younger, she was obliged to witness tortures inflicted on muggles. Still, if she was asked to kill the victim, she stormed out of the room and awaited for her punishment locked up in her bedroom.

AUTHOR NOTE.

Hi there! I have finally posted more informations about Clarice’s family and she is my favorite Oc beside my main one! She is looking for friends, love interests, enemies and rivals! Comment or text me, if you are interested :)❤️ let me know what you think about her!

x o x o

[sneverussape]

What kind of person do you think lily was? There's a lot said about her in the series, but i have trouble reconciling pure, shining paragon lily with someone who would marry someone that spent years tormenting her friend, 4 on 1.

ooh boy this will be a LOT. i can't even promise it will be coherent but i'll make an attempt to be. (going under a cut to save us all the grief).

first off, i think it's fair to state that one of the biggest drawbacks of lily's character is how she was written. she is a plot device. she exists to boost other characters’ narratives: she's simultaneously the Rich Boy's trophy wife, the self-sacrificing mother of the Boy Who Lived, the best friend slash lost love of the Fallen Hero, and, at the same time, also no one at all. lily is a character with little to no background and character development that she can barely stand on her own two feet without any of the associated (usually male) characters to prop her up. it absolutely sucks but that's how it is. that's how jk wrote her.

given that and working with the scraps that we do have, my opinion of lily is...complex. i try to give her justice by trying to understand her context, the workings of her mind, and the possible pressures she was subjected to, but it can be challenging especially since lack of canon pushes you into a space where you have to put them in Either/Or situations. my opinion of her has also changed as i got older. when i was younger (i read the books waaaay back, as they were getting released in fact) i only saw her as an extra character (i was most interested in snape, if that's not obvious enough, but neither did i think snape was 'obsessed' with her as a lot of hp fans now think). i saw her and snape as good friends who had had a falling out, and that he'd probably had a crush on her at some point, and it got naturally overtaken by guilt etc when she died. then when i reread some chapters containing her, i was quick to put her in the Bad Friend camp. i don't think that now. i think that she, like snape, was a complex human being who made a lot of questionable decisions but shouldn't be entirely vilified for them.

my main thoughts of her that are kind of built on material from canon as well as what jkr has said herself:

- she was not posh. she grew up in cokeworth, in the same town as severus. i don't think she was middle class as a lot of fics portray her. i think the evanses were slightly better off than the snapes but they were all working-class, and living was a day-to-day struggle. the kids spoke in the local accent, their clothes were all worn and patched over, there were no green spaces or public infrastructure for kids to safely play in, and they were all mostly running wild about the town since all their parents had to work. food was something to be thankful for because there was never enough, and sometimes they had to share with their neighbors. that's the kind of setting i think lily and severus grew up in, although severus suffered abuse on top of it all. it's possible that lily did too because of the setting (post-world war 2, poverty, adults dealing with repressed trauma from the war, etc) and it wouldn't even be that surprising if she had been;

- she and petunia got along fairly well up until the point lily found out she was a witch and, as a result, became friends with severus. it's stated in canon that petunia had also wanted to attend hogwarts with them, going as far as writing to dumbledore to allow her admittance. her jealousy upon his rejection had festered and grown into outright hate that she projected onto harry as an adult, but i don't doubt that she continued to love lily even after her death and despite how she treated harry. i think as kids they had stuck together and were very close, but magic had torn them apart. suddenly lily had a world of her own that petunia wasn't welcome in, and that would have hurt. pottermore stated lily attended vernon and petunia's wedding or engagement party but james made a right mess of it. i think lily TRIED to maintain their relationship but external factors always got in the way. i don't doubt she had also loved her sister very much;

- i don't think she had any other friends. she may have had a lot of acquaintances but i think her only real friend, the one who saw her for who she really was, was severus, and i think, at a certain point in their lives, she saw that as a weakness and resented it;

- i think, from the interactions we saw in canon of lily with other people, that lily had a penchant to please people, especially the ones who ranked higher than her in terms of power dynamics - petunia (who was the older sister), professors (sluggy comes to mind, the head of slytherin with a lot of connections), even the marauders whose actions she defended. it's not necessarily a bad thing, but i've always seen it as her being borderline manipulative. i noted that she wasn't the same with severus (based on their conversations, especially the ones in 5th year, before SWM) because he's lower than her in a lot of aspects, being a slytherin and quite likely of a lower social standing. she could boss him around and tell him to piss off and he probably wouldn't have minded. she actually strikes me as someone who could have been in slytherin; a perfect arrangement, save for the fact that she was a muggleborn. i think lily knew her place and the cards she was dealt with more than anyone, but she was also determined not to stay there;

- this brings me to the point as to why she ever went out with james potter in the first place. i think her friendship breakup with severus was inevitable because they were in the middle of a burgeoning war and both of them were being pulled to opposite and opposing ends. as an added complexity, i think she also wanted to be better than being muggleborn lily evans of cokeworth, best friend of the evil greasy slytherin git, and her way out was to associate with housemates who were in the upper echelons of power. like, we don't even know what her life was like in gryffindor tower. ron was poor, but he was also a pureblood, so that may have saved him from ridicule. but what if you were a poor muggleborn, with a northern accent to boot? in the same way severus trained himself to be more posh, lily could have done the same and could have furiously tried to blend in. maintaining a friendship with severus would have ended in heartbreak as there were too many risks and it likely outweighed the gains. this was the wizarding world too which is much much smaller than the muggle world and relied on connections more than anything. openly siding with the marauders would have saved her skin and secured her a future (which, as we all know, was forfeit anyway but whatever);

- jumping to the jily relationship, i honestly think it was also not one that was meant to last. iirc jkr projected a lot onto lily, so i'm surmising jily reflected a lot of her own failed relationships. i think james and lily had a less-than-ideal relationship, one that involved abuse (verbal, emotional, mental, physical, take your pick, but at least one form of it), and i think she may have been unhappy in the last year of her life, living in hiding with none of her own friends (if they even existed) and seeing no one else but james' pals. her only light in that darkness was likely harry as she couldn't even see her own family. i think, during those times, she thought a lot about the home she left behind and, as a consequence, her lost friendship with severus. she probably missed him, and i'm sure she must have been very lonely.

in sum, i don't think she was the Virgin Mary figure a lot of hp fans paint her to be. imho she had her own questionable but utterly human moments, and i just tried to fill in the blanks as to why she would have acted the way she did. i don't think it was easy to be lily evans at all, and majority of the 21 years of her life was likely a struggle.

[smithy-smith]

I love This Way Up series 2. Did it go the exact way I hoped? No. But I honestly think that I appreciated how much more real and three dimensional the characters all felt as a result of that. Although some aspects of the series felt a touch clunkier than S1, I think a lot of that can be put down to the fact that they had to work under some pretty strict COVID restrictions while filming. I’d be interested to know how Aisling Bea envisioned this series going before it had to be written to work during lockdown and if that meant significant changes to the scripts.

Anyway, more thoughts under the cut…

Shona & Áine : 10/10 sibling dynamic. They love each other so much. Are they verging on co-dependent? Probably a little bit, but it works for them. They would both kill each other and kill for each other at a moment’s notice, and I love that for them. Their interactions feel so real and you can truly get a sense of their deep love and affection for each other. If I tried to list all of my favourite Áine and Shona moments then I’d be here all day, but some highlights are: the whole time that  Áine is ‘helping’ Shona to unpack, the haemorrhoid, and also Áine and Shona lying on the floor together at the end. S1 was so much of Shona being there for Áine (understandably!) that it’s amazing to see that get flipped, and for it to be made explicitly clear that this isn’t just a case of the younger sibling relying totally on the older one. They need each other, and that’s wonderful!

Shona/Charlotte: I feel like we got more confirmation of something I’d sort of suspected- that Charlotte wasn’t Shona’s first foray into sleeping with other women, but that it was probably the first time that feelings got involved. I get the impression that she’s probably had one night stands with women, but relationships with men, and so as soon as Charlotte said that she was falling for her, Shona completely panicked. Charlotte was right to feel hurt and used, and that whole scene where they had it out in the office was so raw and painful. I’m glad they went down that route, and that it is clear that if they do reconcile then they’ll need to do a lot of work to get there. Ideally, I’d love that to be the outcome, but I’m happy to be along for the ride whatever happens at this point!

Shona/Vish: I love Vish, I think he’s sweet, but it still feels like he and Shona are on different pages. Maybe even different books, at least when it comes to their relationship. Him being away for this series really worked, as it allowed Shona to miss him and feel like she wants to connect with him, without the reality of him actually being around. I think it’s clear that she’s burying a lot of her feelings and it’s much easier for her to do that if he isn’t there. I really want see the fallout of that voice note…

Áine/Richard: God love them, but they need to sit down and actually talk. I think they’re super sweet together and that they could be really good for each other, but it’s obvious that Áine is having issues with telling Richard about rehab and her breakdown, and that she’s kind of terrified about what telling him will mean. (I get it. I too get that anxious panicky feeling every time I’m about to talk to other people about my mental health issues. I dread the thought of watching their face change in real time as they realise what a fucked-up mess I actually am…) Richard on the other hand is still dealing with the fact that he became the father of a teenager overnight, and is clearly still struggling to regain a sense of control over his identity as a result. That, combined with his intense level of Repressed British Awkwardness™ is definitely having an impact on how they communicate with each other. Him telling Étienne without talking to Áine first is the peak example of this- that is 100% a conversation they should have had with each other first, even though ultimately it was the right thing to do at this point. Fingers crossed that we’ll get a S3 as I really want to see if that communication issue gets resolved, or if it will be the death of their relationship… They had some really cute moments this series, and some moments with more honest and open communication, so I’m hopeful that they might be able to work things out, it definitely seems like that is an option for them!

Áine/Bradley: I LOVED that we got more Áine and Bradley time this series! Their flatmate dynamic in S1 was great, it very much seemed to sit in the ‘we’re friendly, but we’re not 100% certain that we are friends’ category, and his loud relationship with Emma was clearly a bit of an awkward sticking point, for obvious reasons! But this series they’ve spent more time together on screen and they are clearly solid friends- with potentially something more simmering away… I loved him giving Áine advice on how to be sexy and flirt with Richard when they were having problems, and his obvious acceptance of all her quirks as a housemate. In the fundraiser ep he was not feeling Richard’s vibes, which was understandable given Áine’s obvious insecurity and worries, and let’s be honest, what he’s heard about Richard so far probably hasn’t been the most flattering or reassuring! Áine turning to Bradley when she found out about Tom dying, knowing that he would be there and support her! The fact that he already knows about rehab, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference to how he treats her! Plus, that conversation at the end?? When he was saying ‘wouldn’t it be nice to be with someone you can relax with’?? It definitely seems like he is working through some stuff of his own, and that maybe he is starting to potentially see  Áine as that person… At the moment, it feels like their relationship is teetering on the cusp- if it tips one way he can fit into the protective ‘older brother’ friend mould, looking out for  Áine and supporting her. Or it could tip the other way and they could perhaps be at the beginning of something more romantic…

Étienne: he is so big! I’m hazarding a guess that he wasn’t in this series as much because it’s easier to send him off to France so that they don’t have to worry about exposing the child actor to COVID, but perhaps that was always the plan. His relationship with Richard seems to be improving slightly, but is obviously still a bit difficult for them both to negotiate. Again, fingers crossed for a S3 where he can be more involved, as I really want to see the fallout from Richard telling him about his relationship with Áine, and the change of tutors. God I wish Richard had waited for Áine before he did anything!

I haven’t even touched on the exciting development of Áine and James going into business together, and what that would mean for Áine’s personal growth. (Also her friendship with James! Hooray for Áine having more friends!) But this is already HELLA long so maybe I’ll dig into that another time :) 

Fingers crossed for S3, I think there’s still so much left to explore with these characters, and I hope that we get the chance to see that!

[show-choir-gal]

“Pretty Boy” Oliver Wood Smut

Requested by: savannah117230 on wattpad "Can you do an Oliver Wood smut? They could be best friends since 3rd year but she is a Slytherin so they kept their friendship a secret but in their 5th year their friendship is exposed. You can make up the rest because I'm not that creative lol."

A/N: I really like this idea! I'm going to switch it up a bit but I still really enjoy this! I did a bunch of drinking towards the end of it so if there's anything wrong just lmk lmao.

Warnings: SMUT, cursing, a brief instance of sexual assault, oral (male and female receiving)

Word count: 7,473

Guide: Y/N: Your Name Y/L/N: Your Last Name Y/H/C: Your Hair Colour

*************

I was the presumed heiress of Slytherin, both my parents were very prominent and well known Death Eaters. I was even sometimes called Slytherins "princess" just waiting for another noble Slytherin to come and sweep me off my feet. Marcus Flint, a boy in my year, was convinced he was my "knight in shining armour" and would try to get with me every chance he got. Typically, it always ended with me saying, "I'm sorry but who are you again?" But it never stopped, he was really persistent. It was kind of sad though, but I had to just deal with it. It was a big shock, to my fellow housemates, when I showed up at Quidditch trails. I walked out onto the pitch and just saw all these mouths agape. I looked at every single boy on that pitch with confusion. "We just weren't expecting to see you here Y/N." Our captain, Duncan Pucey said with almost as much as confusion drawn on his face like the rest of the boys standing there. "You boys seem to forget my father was a keeper his entire time here AND played for years on the Falmouth Falcons. Now, can we please stop gawking at me and start trials already?" I retaliated. It was no surprise when I made the team, but it was a surprise when I was placed as a chaser. I for sure thought I would be keeper just like my father. Duncan pulled me aside the last practice before games officially started, "I want you to know that you're brilliant in any position you play, but I need you as a chaser. There's a boy on the Gryffindor team, his name is Oliver...Wood? I think it's Oliver Wood and he knows Quidditch almost as well as you. I need you to keep the chasers on the best path to keeping us winning." He explained as he patted my back and then sent me off to the locker room. And that's exactly what I did. I was keeping the chasers in check, including Duncan. We made plays that no one dared to mess with and were almost impossible to beat. I wasn't entirely like my father, no no. My mother was the brightest witch of her time and it was clear I was following those footsteps as well. Best of both worlds one would assume. I wasn't some Slytherin who only did enough to pass class, I was going above and beyond each time and I quickly made it to top of my class.

The end of our second year wasn't super eventful, until Oliver and I were paired together for what seemed like the millionth time in Charms. Professor Flitwick rarely ever let us choose our own partners which would typically would be fine with me, but I was just continuously paired with Oliver Wood. Once I saw his usual grades, I immediately knew why. He was doing enough to pass, such a shame because he actually was brilliant. Our last class of charms before final exams came and went, but Professor Flitwick surprised me when he called Oliver and I up to his desk after class. "Is there something wrong Professor?" I questioned, shifting my bag behind my shoulders as I pulled my Y/H/C out from behind the bag. "Not per-say Miss Y/L/N. But I am concerned about Mr. Wood. He seems more concerned about Quidditch than his grades." "But I don't need good grades to get recruited for Quidditch." Oliver butt in, to which I rolled my eyes and scoffed. "But you need good grades to graduate Mr.Wood," Professor Flitwick turned to me, "Miss Y/L/N, could you be his study partner?" Professor Flitwick almost pleaded with me, but I didn't have the heart to turn down one of my favourite professors. I let out a long sigh, "I suppose." I replied as I crossed my arms across my chest and moved my weight onto my right leg and hip. Professor Flitwick beamed with delight, "Brilliant! 20 points to Slytherin. Now you two have a good rest of your day." He said as he started to clean up his classroom, Oliver and I made our way out of the classroom and toward the dining hall. Oliver opened his mouth but I responded quicker, "No, you are not getting any Quidditch secrets. Meet me in the library tonight at 7 or I will find you and drag you there myself." "Is that a threat or a promise?" He asked with a smirk. "Wipe that fucking smirk off your face before I decide to hex you instead." The smirk dropped off his face and we entered the dining hall and went our separate ways as I rolled my eyes, eager to let my friends in on the trauma of Oliver Wood I will endure for the foreseeable future.

Our third year came up a lot faster than expected, but I was still excited. I entered Platform 9 3/4 with my parents, and immediately we were met with stares and whispers. We quickly said our goodbyes, but not before my father handed me a broom. As he handed me the broom, he hugged my mother closer and smiles grew on their faces when they saw the excitement in my eyes. "A Transylvanian Barb! They're brand new! But why?" I asked, confused about the gift, but still excited nonetheless. "Our beautiful girl deserves only the best. Keep breaking records out there darling." My mother said before they pulled me in for one last hug and kiss before I boarded the train. I made my way to the back where the Slytherins were, but I couldn't help but notice all the stares and whispers now directed toward me. Directed solely toward me. I just hurried to the Slytherin car and I saw all my teammates waiting for me. We were all so excited for the new year because a new year meant new Quidditch plays. But a new term also meant that soon enough, you were Olivers study partner. It wasn't the ideal situation, but if it meant that the only person close to your skill was still on the pitch, and I was willing to make sure I had a worthy opponent. Soon enough, Oliver was asking for help in all our classes. I didn't mind, I got to keep him accountable, but it took up a lot more of my time. Eventually, it was nearing the time final game of the year. Gryffindor against Slytherin. Both of our teams were practicing as much as we could. I almost had no time to breathe, but this would all be over soon and everything would be a lot better and easier. I found myself in divination class, seated next to Marcus and Terence at our table. We were learning tessomancy, the divination form that requires you to read tea leaves. This class was meant to focus on soulmates and finding their initials in our leaves. Terence was struggling to figure his out, while Marcus just smirked at me. "It's your initial, looks like you really are my soulmate babe." Marcus said with a smirk. I shot him a disgusted look, "Mine is an 'M' BUT before you say anything it's the initial of the persons last name you git." I looked down at my cup and realised my mistake, my cup was upside down. That 'M', is actually a 'W'. I wasn't going to admit this to them though. "Fuck," I sighed, "Must be Malfoy." I played off how I really felt and what everything really meant. There were plenty of people in this school with last names beginning with 'W', but I didn't want to press it to much longer. I ended up helping the rest of the Slytherins and Trewlaney gave me 15 points for Slytherin. I immediately went to my usual spot in the library and just hoped and prayed to Merlin everything would go back to normal. Oliver arrived moments later and took his usual seat. We had two essays to write so we just created small talk every now and again to fill the air. I finished before Oliver, I did some studying before he finished. I proof read his essay, it was actually really good. "Oliver, this is great! I told you that if you a little more effort in you would be great! You might not need me much longer." I said with a playful chuckle. "I would hate to end these study sessions, working with you is actually quite fun and you help me keep on track. Who knew the princess of Slytherin had it all? Looks, smarts, and excellent quidditch skills." Oliver said with a smirk, which made me blush. "Alright pretty boy, I love my ego being stroked, but both of us have practice tonight. Mine is soon, yours is later. I'll see you tomorrow on the pitch Wood. Can't wait to kick your ass." I said as I sent a wink his way and walked away after all my stuff was packed away. I made my way down to the pitch where I got ready and headed over to Duncan to discuss what plays we need to make and so on. By the end of practice, we had a solid plan in place for the game against Gryffindor. We were all radiating positivity with how well practice went for us. We all changed but as soon as we left the locker room, Gryffindor was making their way onto the pitch. Marcus went right up to them and I followed, not wanting anything serious to happen. Marcus was about to say something but I grabbed his arm and pulled him away, "Marcus if you lay even a finger on them before the game tomorrow I will make sure you don't play and you're a sub next year. Step away from them or I will force you to back away." "Awe you're hot when you're angry. How about this, I don't do anything to these pussy's and when we win we celebrate in my dorm and you sleep with me?" Marcus asked in a condescending tone as we walked away. I stopped and immediately started to pretend to gag at the words that just came out of his mouth, "I would much rather sleep with Wood over there ten times over before I even thought about touching you." I practically yelled. All eyes were on us. "What does Wood have that I don't clearly I'm packing a lot more than him." He said as his right hand moved to touch his member through his pants and his left hand trailed around my waist and  squeezed my right butt cheek. That was all I needed to immediately cock my arm back and land a hard punch directly on his nose, which was now just gushing blood down his body. Marcus stumbled back and scrambled to his feet. Terence started to bring him off the pitch. I took my wand out and pointed it at him. I started to make my way towards him when Duncan and a few other of my teammates held me back with all their strength. "I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU FLINT. I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU THE NEXT CHANCE I GET. I SWEAR TO MERLIN. YOU WILL WISH YOU NEVER EXISTED YOU FILTHY PIECE OF SHIT EXCUSE FOR A WIZARD!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, I had tears streaming down my face at this point. Both from the experience and the pain my throat was in. Miles ran to get a professor as Duncan hugged me and apologised to the Gryffindor team. Duncan held onto me as we made our way to meet with Dumbledore, Snape, and McGonagall. I made eye contact with Oliver as I passed by and he looked broken just from witnessing the exchange. Duncan and I met with the Headmaster and our head of house in his office and explained everything that happened. It wasn't a long meeting but it wasn't a short meeting either. Duncan agreed with Snape and Dumbledore that Flint was going to be out for the last game of the year and sub for most of next year. We made our way to dinner and all eyes were on me, but I just ignored it and just put on my RBF and plotted revenge (and how I could possibly tell my parents). It was the day of the biggest game of the year to us. I got to the locker room extra early to clear my mind and go through last minute plays to make sure they were as clean and thought out as possible. Duncan followed not too long after me and I informed him of some errors I found and we worked through them. Once the rest of the team was in the locker room and changed we went over the game plan. After Duncan's speech, we entered the pitch to some cheers but mostly boo's. We were all on the pitch when we got into our positions and went up into the sky. Before we took our actual positions, Oliver sent a wink my way. I just shook my head and shoo'd him away to the posts. The game was going great, we were leading but not by much. We needed that snitch to win. Terence was so close to catching it, Charles wasn't making it too easy though. I paid as little attention as possible toward the seekers fighting for the snitch. Fred and George Weasley were towards the left of me but pretty far behind. I had just caught the quaffle and was heading towards the goals when all of a sudden, I was hit hard in the side and I let go of the quaffle as I flew off my broom from the force of the hit. I hit the corner of the Slytherin stand and just free fell to the ground. I was out cold before I hit the ground. Terence caught the snitch, but people were concerned with my limp body lying on the ground. I woke up later that day in the hospital wing, my team was surrounding me. They told me everything that happened. Fred and George performed a Dopplebeater Defence and the bludger went straight for me. It hit me hard enough to throw me to the corner of the stands like I was a muggle rag doll and I immediately fell hundreds of feet to the ground. I had several broken ribs and many more fractures. But I was more concerned about my broom and if we had won. Duncan chuckled, "We did win, Terence caught the snitch right as you hit the stands. And your broom is fine. I grabbed it before it plummeted to the ground." We were all caught up in conversation when there was a throat clear from behind my team surrounding my bed. "Leave her alone Weasley's, she doesn't need to be hurt anymore." Duncan said, in a voice so firm yet so angry. "We came to apologise." The twins said in unison. I chimed in before Duncan could, "It's fine. You guys can go. I'll be fine." I smiled and hurried them along. "We're so sorry Y/N," Fred started. "We didn't think it would curve and get you." George chimed in. "We promise, once you're better we'll get you all the sweets you want," I cut them off, "Guys it's okay. It's a game of quidditch. I'd be naive if I didn't believe I would never get hurt. I forgave you a long time ago. But I still appreciate the care you two have." I replied with a smile as they handed me a bouquet of wild flowers. They made their way out, I placed the flowers on the bedside table. I looked up and saw Oliver. "How are you feeling?" He asked as he took the seat next to me. "Besides just a blanket of pain, I'm pretty good now that you're here." I said with a smile. There was a thick silence that enveloped both of us, eventually Oliver broke that silence. "Are we friends?" He asked. "What do you mean?" "Like, you've really grown on me in our study sessions and I want to be friends with you but.." "I have an image to uphold Wood. But we can, if that's what you want. Just, we must keep the study sessions professional. Secret friendship, for now," I said, I saw the sorrow in his eyes "It's a secret for now. Until I can figure all this out. I promise Ollie." I said as I stuck out my pinky finger, he chuckled and hooked his pinky finger with mine. Oliver came down every day to help me with homework and our usual study sessions. But once everyone left we just chatted like old pals. It was so much easier once I could actually go back to classes and roaming the castle. Every day meshed together; I went to my classes, bickered back and forth with Oliver, had study sessions, and then snuck away to have alone time with Oliver and acted like normal friends behind closed and hidden doors. I hated it, but being the "heiress of Slytherin" I had an image to uphold. Hopefully our 5th or 6th year I can just be open about this, but right now is not the time. Especially because I don't know what they'd do to Oliver. It was more for his protection, and he figured that out the more we hung out and talked. The deeper our friendship grew, the more we learned about each other... and the more I started to feel something more for him. The end of the year came so fast, yet went by so slow. Saying goodbye to everyone hurt when the one person I didn't want to leave I couldn't even say goodbye to. No matter how bad I felt, Oliver and I still wrote to each other practically every day. Each new letter was a countdown to the first of September, a countdown to seeing my best friend. But with each letter also came stronger and stronger feelings I had never felt before. Was this love? Was this what love felt like? What is this feeling?

The first of September has come yet again, welcoming me to my fourth year at Hogwarts, but this time my family and I were accompanied by the Malfoy's. Mum and dad have always wanted me to marry Draco, keep the pureblood line going. I didn't hate Draco, he was very annoying for an 11 year old, but I didn't hate him. Neither of our families believed in arranged marriages, but they definitely mentioned a married between Draco and I often. Draco was definitely infatuated with me. Trying his best to flirt with me and to keep my attention on him. At the train, I hugged my parents goodbye and hugged Narcissa and shook Lucius' hand. Draco and I boarded the train together, "Now, I sit with all of the older years and first years aren't allowed, but after tonight you can always find me when you need me." I said as I sent Draco a smile. Draco took my hand and kissed it and went on his merry way to find someone to befriend. My eyes drifted from Draco to Oliver, who seemingly was watching the whole time. He shot a smile my way, causing me to blush. I walked passed him to the Slytherin cart and he slipped a piece of parchment into my hand. I kept walking and as I entered I sat in my usual seat, but only Terence and Miles were in their seats. I read the note, "I really missed you, more than ever. Meet me on the pitch at 8?" I let out a smile as I slyly slid the note into my right pocket. We continued our conversations of our summer holidays as more of our peers came through and sat down. I announced that I was the quidditch captain now that Duncan has graduated. We all enjoyed our time together once again, after all, it was just another year and another House Cup we were determined to win. It came to the sorting ceremony and I only was anticipating Draco and his sorting. He was sorted into Slytherin faster than I was, but he was proud and made his way over to me and kissed my cheek before sitting right next to me. My teammates just looked over at me, and then Draco, and looked more confused than when a professor calls on them and they're not paying attention. Draco happily chimed in, "I'm going to marry her. Join the Malfoy and Y/L/N pureblood names and have the greatest bond to ever occur in the wizarding world." He had a smile beaming from ear to ear. They all shifted their gazes onto me, questioning if it was real or in his imagination. "I'll explain later, don't worry guys." I said to calm them down, which it only helped slightly. The upperclassmen made their way to their perspective common rooms. I told my teammates how it wasn't fully a thing, arranged at least. It was encouraged but not forced, and to just let Draco believe whatever he wants to believe. They all finally understood and proceeded to start a whole new conversation. It was almost 8 and I decided to sneak away from my friends and down to the pitch. If someone finds me on my way there then I can just say I need to cleat my mind or something like that. I can always get myself out of trouble. As soon as I walked by the Gryffindor locker room, I heard a faint whisper and made my way to see inside. As soon as I cracked the door, an arm reached out and grabbed my forearm and yanked me inside. I practically fell onto whomever just pulled me in. I looked up and saw Olivers infamous smile and pulled him in for a tight hug. The hug seemed to go on forever, but eventually we let go, but not fully, his arms were still wrapped around my waist and my arms were wrapped around his neck. "Oh how I've missed you." He said with a smirk, but there was definitely something hiding behind it. I was studying his face like it was a written exam. And caught on and he guided me to the benches right behind us. "Obviously I wanted to say hi, but that's not the only thing I wanted to talk to you about," Oliver started as he sat beside me, "I've been having this thought and this feeling for a while now," I was confused, and the furrowed brows and now titled head made him keep going. "I know you like sleeping around and fucking whenever you can... NOT that it's a bad thing because I like that too. But... B-but I want to know what it's like to like, sleep with one person. And I just hope you've been feeling this sexual tension too, Y/N. Would you like, to like, maybe be friends with benefits?" He asked and he started to blush as he looked away. I knew it was too good to be true, he didn't feel the same way I think I feel about him. But if this was the closest to a relationship I could have with him, I was going to seize the moment. "I'm glad you felt the tension too, I was starting to grow exhausted just hiding it," I said as I inched a little closer to him as I unbuttoned the top buttons of my white blouse, "I was getting tired of hopping from dick to dick. Although the variety was nice, getting railed by the same cock over and over sounds so much better to me." I got even closer to him, I moved his hands to my bare thighs and my hands tugged at his shirt. Oliver crashed his lips into mine, the rough intensity of the kiss threw me off guard but I enjoyed every moment of it. I quickly deepened the kiss, feeling myself grow wetter and wetter as Oliver finished unbuttoning my blouse. I unhooked my black bra and he took off his turtleneck and we threw our articles of clothes onto the ground, just letting them land wherever they pleased. I took one look at his body and my mouth dropped. Toned but not overly defined, a perfect middle ground. Oliver took full advantage of the moment and placed his hands roughly on my bare sides, sending sparks throughout my body, and he pulled my into him and crashed his lips onto my bare neck as he sucked and bit every inch of my neck and collarbone. Oliver was still in a sitting position while I was standing over him, one leg on each side of the bench. As Oliver found my sweet spot, he started to pull my skirt down to my knees and I took it off and threw it wherever it decided to land. He started to leave hickies all over my upper body he kissed his way down to my breasts. He took my left breast into his mouth and sucked and kissed every inch of it. His right and trailed from my side down to my warm and wet pussy. He didn't even hesitate to move my panties out of the way and rubbed the folds of my dripping wet pussy. That feeling all on its own made me whimper and melt into him more than I was. His mouth moved to my right breast and give it the same attention my left breast received earlier. His left hand was free and moved to unbutton his pants and pull out his pulsating cock. As soon as I felt his cock touch my thigh, I positioned myself over his member. "I've waited all summer for this." He said right before he took his cock and rubbed the tip up and down my soaking wet folds. He stopped at my entrance but before he could say anything I lowered myself onto him, feeling his cock fill up all the empty space inside of me. No one has ever filled me so perfectly. I crashed my lips onto his as I rode his cock up and down and making sure he understands what he's getting. "If I didn't want this, I wouldn't be this wet for you... pretty boy." As those words left my mouth, Oliver held me close to him, picked me up and laid me down on the bench. He would alternate his thrusts between fast and slow, seemingly trying to pace himself so he can savour this moment. I felt my core start to contract and tighten and my pussy became more and more sensitive. In between my increasingly shallow breaths, I noticed that I was edging closer and closer to my climax. "Ol-Ol-Oliver," My breaths were becoming more and more shallow, "I-I'm g-g-g-getting cl-lose." Oliver was letting out low grunts of pleasure as he gripped my hips tighter than before, but with the words that seemingly dripped out of my mouth, Oliver thrusted harder and faster than he had previously in our little rendezvous. With each new thrust, a new grunt or groan came out of Olivers mouth, I could feel his cock twitch inside me and I knew he was ready to cum. I reluctantly brought my right hand down to my clit and started to stimulate myself while he thrusted into me. I started to feel myself become undone in Olivers grasp, my head was thrown back and my back arched as I let out a final pleasure filled moan. Oliver watched in awe and pleasure as I came undone on his cock. Once my high finished, I pushed Oliver back and got onto my knees in front of him. I took his hard cock into my hand started to pump before I placed my lips onto the tip of his dick. I pumped his shaft as I played with the tip of his cock with my tongue. I felt his cock twitch in my hand one final time before he let his cum release into my mouth. He was a mess of sweat and heavy breathing, I swallowed his seed as he sat on the bench we were just having our most amazing high on. I started to gather my clothes and get dressed, as I was putting my bra on I said, "That was-" I was cut off my Oliver, "Amazing." "That was amazing," He said as he slapped my ass, "I would love to do this again." He pulled me closer as he still hungrily looked me up and down. We both finished getting dressed but then he grabbed my hand and sat me down on the bench again, "We should probably figure out a game plan for this, like rules for us being friends with benefits." I nodded my head in agreement. "Alright, chime in any time you have something to say," I nodded at his statement and he continued, "Consent is the most important thing of all, we are still friends and I trust that both of us will let the other know if sex isn't in the cards for the night. We are friends above all. Secondly, we should probably stop when one of us gets into a relationship. Lastly, no catching feelings." He finished with a chuckle, but my face sort of flushed but I tried to keep my composure. "Couldn't agree more." I said behind a fake smile as I stuck my hand out for him to shake, and he returned the favour. I snuck out of the Gryffindor locker room and went into my own, grabbing my broom and waiting to see Oliver walk up to the castle. I went onto the pitch and just flew around, trying to sort through my own thoughts. I realised it was close to curfew and so I landed, but my broom back in its spot and headed back up to the castle. My team was waiting up for me, scared that something had happened to me but I assured them I was just at the pitch starting to get a game plan going and clearing my mind. As the boys trickled out of the common room, the only ones left were Terence and I but we had sat in silence for some time and I was just staring into the fire. "Is everything okay Y/N?" He asked, which slightly startled me enough to look him in the eyes. "Of course I am T, I just...have a lot on my mind." I said with a bit of a forced smile. He wasn't quite sure if he was buying it but then he said, "Okay, but I care a lot about you and I want you to know you can always talk to me." He placed his hand on my thigh in reassurance, I placed my hand over his and shot him a smile before standing up and heading to our dorm rooms. Maybe Terence could help take my mind off of Oliver only wanting to fuck me. And that's what started to happen. Several times a week, Oliver and I would meet up and either just have a grand ol' time or just to fuck but during the day, I was growing closer and closer to Terence. But Oliver still definitely had my heart, in more ways than one. Nothing I could do would make me feel differently. Oliver and I were both captains, which made fuck sessions and wagers even better than before. Slytherin won the first game of the year, so Oliver had to eat me out, and honestly he might've loved it more than I did. When Gryffindor won their first game, I gave him a blowjob and really whatever he wanted. The Quidditch house cup was quickly approaching and both of us were starting to have stress sex several times a week. He was my release of this stress and I was his. The day before the last game against Slytherin and Gryffindor, Oliver and I had just finished working on our DADA essays and I was cleaning up when Oliver just looked at me and said "Oh, I have a girlfriend now. So, no more funny business." He said with a smirk and a chuckle as he collected his things and went on his way. My heart sank to my feet as tears welled up in my eyes, but I just wiped whatever there was away and I marched my way down to the pitch to try to take my mind off of everything going on around me. I changed into my uniform and sat down thinking and rethinking plays as my leg bobbed up and down with stress. I had notes scribbled everywhere and I was struggling to keep my head on my shoulders. Terence, Miles, and Adrien walked in expecting them to be the first but were shocked to see me but even more shocked to see the chaos surrounding me. Terence asked the other two boys to give them a moment and he sat next to me and rubbed my back, trying to soothe me. "What's going on Y/N?" "A guy I thought really liked me doesn't and he has a girlfriend. We were doing a friends with benefits thing but I hoped it would turn into more." I replied and he pulled me closer. "Well clearly he's an absolute git for leaving you for someone else, even if all you two did was fuck. You deserve so much more than whoever that asshole is." "You're right, I deserve so much better than him. I shouldn't have let it go on this long." "I know this is quick, but we have been hanging out a lot more these past few months and I was wondering if you would be my girlfriend? No pressure, but the hogsmeade dates made me feel a type of way and I hope you feel the same." I smiled and cupped his face in my hands and kissed him, "I would love to. Thank you for showing me I deserve better." We both smiled and the team joined us in the locker room as I reworked plays with my newly cleared mind, well, not fully cleared. Practice went really well and I'm very pleased with what we have prepared for tomorrow. We came down from the sky and Gryffindor was awaiting us in the pitch. "Trying to calculate how much you're going to lose Gryffin-snore?" Adrien shot at them, unprovoked but no care in the world. "Save it for the game boys. See you on the pitch tomorrow, Wood." I said in a dark tone as I shoved passed him as Terrence and I interlocked fingers as we walked into the locker room. It was officially game day and the dining hall was buzzing with wagers and thoughts for the day. Terence and I walked into the dining hall hand in hand and I looked over at Oliver who was staring straight at me. I looked away as we made our way to the table where the rest of our team was sitting. We ate a hearty breakfast and headed to the pitch. Once we were in the locker room and all changed we went over the plays we needed and I finished with a speech, "[...] I know I never say this, so believe me I need you all to listen and take this to heart, play dirty. I will be giving commands but I trust you all know how to play dirty since most of you have been playing that way all year against my wishes... Yes Pucey, I'm talking to you. But you all better hope that if you get a foul on purpose, you better hope Merlin finds you before I even start to hunt you down. Go out and kick some Gryffindor ass." We all exited the room and made our way onto the pitch. Terence and I exchanged a quick peck right in front of Oliver right before we all took position on the pitch. Madam Hooch released the balls and I immediately got the Quaffle and headed toward the goal posts. Angelina and Katie from Gryffindor got on both sides of me but before they could successfully perform a Body Blow on me, I picked up speed and drifted in front of the goals as I threw the Quaffle in and scored. "Forty-three seconds and the first goal goes to Slytherin! The goal was made by Y/N Y/L/N and made a new school record for fast goal made in a match!" Lee Jordan announced. The game went on for ages but I was on fire. I was scoring and checking like no tomorrow, to say I was determined was an understatement. I was fighting for that win, I wanted to see Olivers face lose first hand. And almost as quick as the game started, Terence caught the snitch and Slytherin won! I briefly looked over at Oliver who looked heartbroken, but in more ways than one. I was broken from my chance when Terence came up and pulled me in for a passionate kiss. "And there is it folks, Slytherin's seeker Terence Higgs caught the snitch which landed Slytherin the win of the inter-house Cup! Oh, and by the looks of it he also scored the winning kiss with Slytherin's Captain, Y/N Y/L/N! Y/N won the game with brilliant plays and won Terence's heart!" Lee Jordan said before he said his usual Quidditch game closing announcements. The night was buzzing with drinks and games and cheer in the usually gloomy Slytherin common room. A few weeks passed and Oliver and I were studying for our History of Magic exam when he suddenly stopped and looked at me. "Oliver, are you okay?" He kept staring, I snapped my fingers a few times in front of his face which seemed to take him out of his trance. "Are you serious?" He asked sternly. "About what?" "Dating Terrence." "Well, yeah. That's why we hang out all the time. He treats me like I matter. Anywho, we shouldn't be discussing this because you are also in a relationship. Now keep studying so you don't fail." I left that night feeling uneasy but acted like everything was normal. The end of the year approached fast, but Terrence and I agreed that we just weren't meant for each other romantically and so we broke it off and remained friends. Finals were coming up and so Oliver and I were cramming like we had for countless exams prior. We were in the library very late each night, and this night was no different but something about the atmosphere was very different. "How are you and Terrence?" Oliver asked. "Oh, we broke up a while ago." I replied, keeping my head on my study guide. Olivers head shot up and he looked at me, "What? Why?" "Well," I started as I looked up, "Since you want to be nosy, we just were better off as friends. Simple really, nothing too extreme or anything. How are you and your girl?" "We actually broke up yesterday." "Oh I'm so sorry to hear that. Are you okay?" He pondered that question for a bit, before finally saying something that caught me off guard, "Yeah, but I miss our old nights together." He was waiting for my reaction, hell even I was waiting for my reaction. I missed them too but I didn't want to go through all those feelings all over again. "I miss them too Ollie, but I don't want we used to have. If I'm being honest," I looked around to make sure no one was still in the library, "I caught feelings for you and being friends with benefits hurt me and really messed me up emotionally. I can't put myself through that again." Olivers reaction went from shock, to confusion, to relief. I watched the gears in his mind turn every step of the way for him to process the information I just gave him. "Well that's a relief, I caught feelings for you as well." He said with his signature smirk. My brows furrowed, "Then why did you date another girl?" "To try to get you and your body out of my mind, but the Slytherin heiress has her way with men and I never forgot our endeavors and I just kept missing them. I didn't think you felt the same, so I suppressed my own feelings. I'm sorry, I should've said something sooner." There was an awkward silence between us for a few moments, before Oliver spoke up, "Is that why you destroyed us in the inter-house Cup?" I started to blush and nodded my head yes. His eyes widened and a smile formed on his face, "I hate to admit it but it was bloody brilliant. You're bloody brilliant...on and off the pitch... Can you be my girlfriend?" I blushed and just smiled at him, "Of course. But it's still a secret." The year finished and Oliver and I had successfully kept our relationship under the radar. I hated it but I had a plan, I think.

Fifth year rolled around and started off great. Nothing too exciting happend, except whenever Oliver and I were alone it was more cute and no sex. We mutually agreed to wait. A couple days before the inter-house cup, we snuck into an empty classroom and just talked and chilled together since tomorrow we were both going to be super busy. I was sat atop a desk and Oliver was standing in front of me and holding my hands. Oliver and I leaned in for a kiss when suddenly we heard the door open and a gasp fill the empty room. Both of us spun our head in the direction of the sound, and in the doorway was Lee Jordan. Lee immediately left but that little thing just knocked the wind out of you. "Fuck." I muttered under my breath, "Alright. Hopefully he doesn't go around blabbing about what he saw." "And if he does?" My eyes darted around the room in a moment of pondering, "If he does, then we'll have to make it official in front of everyone." "Is that okay for you?" "We deserve to be open about our relationship. I just need a day or two to get all my ducks in a row. You deserve to be in a public relationship." Oliver smiled at that statement and pulled me into a kiss. We both left the room and headed to our prospective common rooms. The next day started off with an early practice. Lee hadn't spilt the beans about what he saw, yet. I was a bit more nervous than ever before but I still led the team like tomorrow was the last day of their lives. We all left practice happily but I was a bit behind, cleaning the room and pondering my thoughts. I walked into the dining hall for dinner and all eyes were on me and whispers immediately started. I just strutted to my usual seat and just dug in. My teammates opened their mouths and I immediately shot back, "If sone of you says ONE THING I will make sure you don't play tomorrow. I finished eating and went straight to my dorm and fell asleep. I wanted nothing more than for things to be normal again. I woke up bright and early and headed to the pitch. I knew Olivers plays so well, so I was busying myself with coming up with new plays and how to implement them. Eventually the rest of my team joined me and we all got ready. I gave one of the best speeches of my career, but before I could step away from being the centre of attention Marcus asked, "Are you and Woods really dating?" I took a deep breath in, "Yes, yes we are. Now go on the pitch because I never want to hear another word about this. Got it?" We all entered the pitch a few minutes before Gryffindor did, one they came out I immediately looked for Oliver. We made our way over to each other and we looked into each others eyes. "I love you, pretty boy." "I love you too, princess." Oliver threw his broom onto the ground and grabbed my waist and pulled me into a deep and passionate kiss as the crowd roared behind us.

[aprilsrant]

Cariad | Young!Remus Lupin x Slytherin!Fem!Reader.

SUMMARY: (Y/N) absolutely hates when professors make their students work in pairs, but the outcome of this particular project may not be so bad.

WORD COUNT: 2,971, more or less.

REQUEST: can i request another half-blood slytherin reader x remus where she tries to learn welsh for him and i hope you can include smth with the lovespoon! 

This was requested by @cantstopmebitch Thank you so much for requesting something, I hope you enjoy it!

WARNINGS: a kiss? And nothing else I think.

A/N: Please remember English is not my first language, so if there are any mistakes, let me know! In this fic, I’ve used some Welsh words, which I didn’t know a single thing about so I did some research but it may be wrong, so sorry if these are not correct! 

Masterlist.

You can always reblog to help me or request something you’ll like. 

TRANSLATIONS: the title, cariad, means “love, affection, lover, darling”; the phrase fy annwyl un means “my dear one”; and the last one, fy nghariad aur  means “my golden darling”.

Advanced Arithmancy Studies, or simply Arithmancy, was not the most interesting subject Hogwarts offered as an elective course for sixth and seventh years, hence why there weren’t many people taking it, but (Y/N) seemed to be a natural — according to the professor’s opinion — and she loved being good at things without trying too much or else she would lose any interest immediately.  

Sitting down on one of the desks at the back of the classroom, she left her brown leather satchel on the cobblestone floor. (Y/N) watched as the students took their usual seats and started to chat with their partner, but all conversations were shut down by the loud voice of the professor, an old and strict woman who didn’t seem to have control of her voice’s volume as she was always screaming and someone who didn’t have any consideration with those who forgot to do her assignments. 

The minute the woman’s body was an inch inside the classroom, she began to give directions about a project expected for next week and how they would have to work in pairs, (Y/N)’s eyes rolling to the back of her head upon hearing the news. She absolutely detested working with other people for two reasons: the first one being that, if they happen to be from a different House, they would judge her for being a Slytherin; and the second, because she was always the one ending up doing it all on her own, but that was mostly her fault. She wanted to be in control all the time if it was something related to school. 

Once again, (Y/N) was observing how some of her classmates changed desks so they could work with whoever they wanted. No one took the empty seat beside her. She never minded being alone in this class (none of her close friends capable of dealing with the intensity of it or not being too interested in numbers), she was not going to start now. It was better anyways, not having a partner meant less headaches. 

But, apparently, the odds were not in her favor.

A diveleshed looking Remus Lupin crossed the entrance door with his arms full of books, parchments and quills; uniform poorly accommodated and a sad dog look on his eyes, definitely trying to avoid the professor’s rage for being late. His lips curved into a hesitant smile, that to (Y/N)’s opinion came out more as a grimace, and when she thought they all were about to hear a pathetic and improvised excuse from Perfect Remus, the old witch shook her hand into a dismissive gesture and signalised the wooden chair next to the Slytherin girl while she informed him about the task. 

Now that Lupin was beside her, shoulders almost touching, she took a closer look at him. (Y/N) had the impression he was sick because of the dark circles below his dull brown eyes, his skin a lot more paler than usual, and the small noise that left his mouth once he sat down, like his chest hurted. She had also noticed scratches and scars on his neck and cheeks, but kept quiet about them too. It wasn’t her place to ask. 

The first ten minutes passed slowly, neither of them uttering a word, and listening to the expectations the professor had for the project. Well, more like (Y/N) was the one actually listening, because Remus was busy running through his things while leaving them scattered all around their shared desk and muttering curses under his breath. She watched him with a weirded out expression on her face, eyes narrowing and eyebrows furrowing with her mouth pressed on a thin line, while he read the first lines of a parchment and then, obviously not being what he was looking for, leaving it on her side. 

“You forgot the essay, didn’t you?,” she leaned closer to him and whispered in the boy’s ear. He turned around to look at her, but it wasn’t necessary for him to confirm it, (Y/N) already knew she was right. 

Picking her satchel from the floor, she took her own assignment, grabbed one piece of empty parchment and, making sure the professor wasn’t looking in their direction, she muttered a spell under her breath. Instantly, the black paragraphs on her paper copied and travelled to the empty one. With another flick of her wand, some of the words transformed, other changed places and a few of them even disappeared. Grabbing one of Lupin’s parchment that had his calligraphy, and corroborating once more the old witch had her back turned to them, (Y/N) copied his writing style to transfer it to the parchment she had just enchanted. With a proud smile on her face, she handed it to him. 

Lupin’s face was now a little brighter, of course he still had those horrendous bags, but it was an improvement. His eyes wide and shining with interest, his face less tired and his mouth opened in surprise. 

“How did you do that?”

“One of my cousins taught me. Him and his friends had been perfectioning this spell for a long time now,” she mumbled, trying not to catch the other’s attention, while she shrugged her shoulders. 

“That was amazing,” an astonish sound accompanying his words, “thank you, by the way, for helping me.”

“Oh no, I don’t accept thank you’s.” (Y/N) sat straighter on her chair, beaming at him while she crossed one of her legs on top of the other. Before he had the chance to ask what she meant, she spoke again. ”I did you a favor, now you owe me one.”

And after that particular conversation, Remus’s and (Y/N)’s destinies were sealed in an unbreakable and everlasting bond.

That following week was spent in the safety of the Room of Requirement, the place where none of their friends would bother them if they happened to see them together, a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, working together. (Y/N) believed it was stupid at first, not going to the library because someone may or may not catch them in such a forbiden act, but it was all forgotten when the idea that she could become the next target for one of their pranks popped in her head. She had seen what they’ve done to other housemates and she never wanted to be in the receiving end of one. 

The way the Room looked was another major point in why they continued to meet there. (Y/N) had never visited but she had heard about it and how it changed according to your needs. Right now, the chamber resembled a greenhouse, more beautiful than the ones where they had Herbology with Professor Sprout. All kinds of plants covered the walls (not one was the same as the next), coloured carpets underneath old white marble statues and high columns of the same material, reminding her of all the times she’d read a book about Ancient Greece and it’s Gods. In the middle of the Room were two dark red divans, contrasting against the green on the rest of the place, surrounded by piles of books — (Y/N) had the feeling they were all about Arithmancy and Numerology — and, in the centre, a small coffee table made of wood. 

Not even after hours of working in the assignment they were able to finish it in that afternoon. Both of them were perfectionists, ending up in some small arguments about how they should approach certain topics but had also pushed them in coming up with better and more interesting ideas. No one could deny the pair worked marvelously, complementing each other.

To (Y/N)’s astonishment, Remus Lupin didn’t fit the ideal her mind had set a long time ago for Gryffindors. All the ones she’d encountered were boisterous, incredibly annoying, short-tempered and just general prats. The boy with whom she had spent a whole afternoon was utterly the opposite and (Y/N) would’ve discovered that earlier if she’d hadn’t been so prejudiced.  

The day the assignment was due to, arrived quickly than expected and with it came a sudden and small pang of sadness that startled her. 

When she sat down beside Remus, he had made sure of arriving extra early to compensate the professor for the week before, the boy perceived something was off — his superpower according to his three best friends, he was always capable of reading a person perfectly, even if they hadn’t known each other for too long — because of how she was acting, trying too hard to show an unbothered facade but not hard enough for him to not notice.

The truth was (Y/N) didn’t want this class to start since once it was over so would the partnership with Remus. She had enjoyed his calm and warm company, sometimes a little crazy, in the Room Requirement while they worked on the project. And she was one hundred percent sure she would miss the moments when they both agreed on taking a break after many hours of reading and began to talk about nothing and everything, all at once. Was she supposed to forget that he always carried one chocolate inside his bag, and that he’d started to bring one more after their first afternoon studying together? Was (Y/N) expected to ignore the fact Remus wanted to become a professor because he liked the idea of being there for young people in case they needed someone? Was this girl meant to fail to remember about how this boy had asked his mum to teach him Welsh so they, mother and son, could have one more thing in common? 

When the professor dismissed them, not without praising (Y/N)’s and Remus’s essay first, he noticed the girl next to him hadn’t even smiled at the mention of how perfect they’d worked. Now he knew for sure something was wrong with her and Remus Lupin was not the kind of person who saw his friends feeling down and did nothing about it. 

Following her across the corridor, he tried to catch her attention but she was either not listening or down right ignoring him. Finally being able to reach her, Remus grabbed her arm softly and called her name in a whisper. She turned around, head low and eyes fixated on her jet black loafers, not looking at him. 

“Are you alright? Because if something happened, you can talk to me,” Remus asked in a faint voice, almost swallowed by the noise the other students in the hallway were making, moving his hand towards her shoulder and rubbing tenderly the fabric of her grey sweater that covered her skin, “I know we hadn’t been friends for too long, but you can come to me for anything you may need.”

(Y/N) raised her head after hearing the last part.

“We are?” An incredulous look appearing on her face. “We are friends?”

“Of course we are, (Y/N),” Remus announced while letting out a snicker, as if the thought of the two of them not being friends sounded ridiculous in his mind, “I wouldn’t have shared my chocolate with you if we weren’t. And as a half blood… you are one of the few people who actually understands my movie or book references from the muggle world.”

Her mood better now that she knew Remus considered her a friend and for once since she initiated her education at Hogwarts, she was glad the Arithmancy professor had made them work in pairs.

|||

Weeks and months passed by, and with each one of them the friendship between Remus and (Y/N) grew stronger. There were still several things the Gryffindor was not ready to discuss, like him being a werewolf, his other friends becoming animagi to help him during the nights of a full moon; the creation of the Marauder’s Map and how much he wanted to kiss her whenever she began to ramble about a subject she was really passionate about. He kept quiet, and for several months he came up with excuses, not only for the scars and the nights on the Infirmary, but for the random loss of concentration every time she was too closed to him, cracking up a joke or cursing at the professors for thinking they couldn’t have five minutes without being buried in assignments and deadlines. 

His feelings, unknown to him, were not one sided. 

(Y/N) wasn’t one to go for the boys she liked, she was used to just admiring them from afar, never making the effort to start a conversation and she was fine with it. But Remus was a whole other story. She knew him, and his fears, and the books he would read over and over again, and how much of a good friend and amazing person he was. And all of that made it even harder for her to take that quick but impossible last step. Her friends had been trying to make her pursue him since the moment the Firewhisky in her system led her to overshare. They’d said he felt the same and for a moment she believed it, but long nights of overthinking convinced her that Remus was just being kind to her, his specialty.

She tried to push her feelings away, to calm her heart that couldn’t stop jumping whenever she saw him smiling, to control the sweat on her hands every time he whispered something funny in her ear; to put a stop to the flips her stomach suffered the moment he said her name; to even her breathing on the occasions he would utter random Welsh words — one of the reason why she started to learn the language four months after their friendship began —  to see her confused expression. 

One night after a long and stressful day in the midst of their seventh and last year at Hogwarts, while the last quarter moon shined down from above them and illuminated her features, Remus Lupin decided he would honor the reason he was supposed to be in Gryffindor.

Taking a small object from the pocket of his trousers and releasing a shaky breath, he took (Y/N)’s hand to catch her attention. She turned around, looking away momentarily from the moon and the stars, the things she admired the most, grinning softly at him with such alluring eyes.

“I don’t know how to say this and what I’m doing is barely planned, and so many things could wrong but…,” Remus started, taking a large gulp of air before talking again, “I can’t help myself with you sitting there like that.”

She didn’t respond, understanding there was something bugging him and that it was crying out for someone to just let it out.

“I like you and not as a friend, I mean, yes, I do like you as a friend but I also like you as much more than that,” he confessed briskly, shortly after closing his eyes and chewing his bottom lip, “and I did this for you.”

(Y/N) took the tiny object silently, not knowing what to say, and held it up towards the sky so the moon would cast a light upon it. 

The minute she realised what it was, she confirmed that Remus’s feelings were the same as hers. With a large smile on her face, she traced her fingers delicately across the wooden figure. It had an intricate design, with two hearts in the middle and two fine lines lacing with each other, reminding her of a simple braid. On top of the heart, were three threads forming a knot.

“It’s a lovespoon, isn’t it?,” she mumbled just to be sure this was all truly happening. Remus nodded, still not knowing if she liked him too, “It’s gorgeous, Rem.” 

Locking eyes with her, he didn’t need her to say she liked him back because he already knew the answer. (Y/N)’s eyes were brimming with a few tears, holding such intense emotions and staring at him the way his mum did whenever his dad was in front of her. 

“I like you too, fy annwyl un,” she confessed back. A laugh escaped his mouth while he shook his head.

“Since when do you know Welsh, fy nghariad aur?”

“I learned it to impress someone.”

Remus leaned his body closer towards her, putting his hand over her cheek and running his thumb gracefully across it. Both of them shift their weight at the same time to be nearer each other. 

(Y/N)’s heart shaking violently in her chest, anticipating what was going to be her first kiss. 

“Remember that favor you owe me since last year?,” she reminded him. Their warm breaths mixing, lips so close and yet so far away. Remus nodded slightly as his hand descended from her cheek to caress cautiously one of her bottom lip’s corners. His other hand travelled to the back of her head, intertwining slowly with her hair, “well, I’m asking for it now.”

He smiled while their lips brushed against one another. Taking the lead, Remus finally pressed their mouths together. And it was everything and so much more than she had ever imagined. Eyes closed but still capable of seeing a mixture of red bright fireworks and shining stars.

One of her hands, the one clutching the lovespoon tightly, stayed put on his arm, while the other moved towards his neck, not knowing where else to leave it. Instantly, Remus dropped his hand from her cheeks to her waist, pulling her closer and almost sitting her on top of his lap. He moved her head slightly backwards, making (Y/N) to open his lips more and allowing him to explore her mouth with his tongue. 

None of them cared about what the rest of the school would think when they entered the Great Hall, hand in hand, a dark brown lovespoon decorating (Y/N)’s satchel.

Under the moonlight, no one else had felt more alive than them.

[talldarkandroguesome]

26th of Rain’s Hand, Tirdas

While it seems that things have gone less that ideal in Selfora, they have gone far poorer since returning to the Mabrigash. I wonder if I made the correct choice by deciding to go to such drastic lengths to see this through.

I will be honest, I panicked. Once things started to go wrong, I only succeeded in successively making the situation worse. Neither Zethith nor my Prince will be proud of the way I handled that last part of the plan. I can only hope that it will have been worth it.

I arrived to the encampment late. It rained most of my way there and it slowed my progress.

The guards let me through and to the yurt where Sildras was sleeping. I got into bed besides him and let myself try and sleep off my embarrassment.

In the morning, Sildras was a mix of delight at my return and aghast by the signs that I had died. He is too smart for his own good sometimes.

We had to have a talk about it. He was upset at me for not having sent word via Farayn. I had to explain to him that I knew that I would be immediately leaving to return so I simply came to him instead.

It is difficult to tell if he has truly accepted this and forgiven me, or if he is still angry. I must work to do better by him. I need to find a way to balance my responsibilities so that I can provide for him as well as possible.

The Farseer summoned me soon after. She was calm, but her displeasure was immediately evident. I had overstepped by using their encampment as my hold over point. I was made to understand this. To be reminded of how procarious their position was with the Housemer and to consider just how delicate I needed to be.

The Farseer suggested that I do what I like, but requested that I do not make use of their lands or resources or people to succeed in my own plans. Not without her approval. Or at the very least, that of one of the wise women.

I asked for how I could offer penance for my selfish actions and my lack of foresight.

The Farseer had me pray to Azura for wisdom so that I might proceed in a proper way the next time. Then she asked that I go and give offerings to the Ghost Snake and see what he will accept to make amends.

I allowed Sildras to accompany me. I knew how much he wanted to be involved. And he and I need to spend as much time together as we can.

We walked the coiled path and made our prayers and offerings. The Ghost Snake accepted the offerings and I breathed a sigh of relief at that much.

The conclusion was made that I needed to grant the Tribe something equal in value to that which I had taken away. That no hints could be given, I would need to make that decision on my own. And the consequences of the gift were also going to be my responsibility to shoulder.

Returning to the encampment, it was clear that a few of the Velothi are actively upset with me. I will need to make my amends as soon as I can. This is my home away from home and the people of the tribe akin to a secondary family. I care deeply for what they think or say about me. I want to keep it positive. I already have one family that cares little for me. I cannot stand for another to do the same. Not now. Particularly not now.

[angstmonsterwrites]

Back when I was 22, I moved in to a fairly nice townhouse with a group of people I thought were friends.

There were red flags the three years that led up to that point that suggested they might not be the best caliber of people-- enough that one year prior, I was putting some distance between myself and one of them. She confronted me on it, and I lied, telling her that work had simply gotten too rough. I didn't know what else to do, and I was lonely enough to convince myself I could make it work. She and her brother had an unkind father, so I felt for them. Enough that I ignored the ball of dread accumulating in the pit of my stomach.

Before the move, we agreed on obligations for expenses and rent. We were barely in the new place a week before a third roommate I hadn't agreed to was added in the name of helping with expenses.

I still wound up paying for much more than I had agreed to. I was the only one who ever cleaned. The facade of being a welcomed part of the friend group felI completely apart, as I was excluded household outings if I didn't invite myself, which would then always turn awkward. I tried to cling to the idea of self sacrifice as a comforting virtue to survive until the lease was up, but depression began to set in.

When I finally started to complain, their passive-aggressive disrespect turned to outright contempt. They accused me of being self-pitying and dramatic. Selfish. When one of them finally walked in on a suicide attempt, he snapped at me, saying that my "childish temper tantrums" needed to stop, and that no one owed me anything.

It was at that point that it crystallized I had been deliberately and maliciously used and manipulated. It wasn't a matter of misunderstanding or poor communication. A perfect stranger might have reacted more compassionately.

I had to take out a loan to pay off my share of the remaining lease contract because of how cash-strapped I'd become, but I felt I needed out as soon as possible for my safety. 10 months was too much already. And I finally allowed myself to be angry--the kind cold, icy anger that knows it's earned its place.

Unfortunately, that was not the end of the damage. Although it's been 15 years, I only recently made the connection: After that, anytime I've struggled with depression, I become hyper-focused on my social anxiety and feel like I'm still on the receiving end of all that contempt. My mind weaves cruel narratives about how everyone around me secretly believes that my grief and stress are nothing more than self pity and childish fits. And I feel that I must then try to hide it, downplay it to avoid cruel reactions. To some extent, I shut down. Seeking support honestly and directly feels almost taboo for fear it might be perceived and scorned or punished as histrionic attention-seeking.

Growing up, my alcoholic parents instilled in me way too much stranger danger, a strict ideal that embarrassment was to be avoided at any cost, and the belief that if anyone ever hurt me, it would be my own fault for failing to be careful enough. This left me socially awkward, perfectionistic, lacking in confidence, and probably set me up to fail. But not even that measures up to what happened in my early 20's with those now-ex-friends. The occasional bout of depression I already had turned into a trauma trigger, and I am deeply insecure socially, riddled with unearned guilt.

Imagine that you can scarcely ask a housemate for a favor or strike up conversation with friends without feeling like you've broken into their house, cleaned out their refrigerator, pooped on the carpet, and kidnapped their dog--all because you were feeling too down at the time. Imagine living in constant fear that your mental health struggles will be downplayed, your emotions dismissed as insincere or too dramatic. And that's before realizing that having one's entire social life collapse without being at fault strains credibility no matter how true it is, and that many people might just assume you had to have been the asshole in that situation somehow.

Imagine the effort it takes to resist believing that most of the world operates just like those three did. Especially after these past couple of years.

[rreeaahh]

“Then I want to be sick forever” | Pansy Parkinson

pairing: pansy x reader

word count: 2,374 (unedited)

summary: even the prettiest faces have their scars, and sometimes the tears make it worst. but this time, the tears transformed into a kiss.

a/n: pansy deserved better and you can’t change my opinion.

warnings: eating disorder; smoking; swearing

Pansy Parkinson. A name known by the whole Hogwarts, worn by a black haired, quite short and most importantly, pureblood witch. Whether her name was said by a silly boy who couldn’t have her or an angry girl who couldn’t be her, Pansy continued to be the young ladylike girl her mother taught her to be. She would always smile with superiority and talk like she was better than anyone else because, in fact, she really was. She was from a wealthy and respected family, she was friend with a lot of students from families with connections and she had a thing going on with Draco Malfoy – they were the perfect pair for any Slytherin: both of them very beautiful, strong and – again – purebloods.

You, on the other hand, were a simple student – muggleborn, known by your housemates and a few other students you were friends with. The only thing you had in common with Pansy were some classes where you two were forced to stay in the same room. You didn’t really have a problem with Pansy, you just wanted to avoid her so you could also avoid her mean comments or the looks her friends would give you. She didn’t know you – not even your name – but that didn’t make her stop from making fun of you.

You filthy mudblood. Why are you looking like that? Imagining you’re one of us? I guess they don’t have decent clothes in the muggle world.

And the list could go on forever. Sometimes her words were affecting you, especially because of her the jokes about you came to life. Her friends weren’t so harsh – Draco would totally ignore you, being too busy with bullying Harry and his friends, and dear Merlin, Blaise sat besides you in Charms and he didn’t say a word; he even asked nicely for a quill and returned it at the end of the class – but as soon as she made a comment about your presence, they all started. You really wanted to ignore her, but from time to time you would find yourself crying until you would fall asleep because of her words. You did nothing to her.

But one day happened something that shocked you. Pansy arrived earlier than her friends to Potions and she sat at her table, starting to look over her notes.

“Why does she wear so much make-up?”, ask out of the sudden one of your friends, a Gryffindor girl who was just as pure as Pansy – maybe that gave her the nerve to make a comment out loud about the girl who wasn’t very far from you.

It was true that Pansy was wearing make-up everyday – dark lipstick and her eyes always highlighted by some black eyeshadow; but she was beautiful, the colors were just pointing out her features. Her pale skin was perfect and her black hair was always straightened – her whole face seemed to be painted by a skilled artist and you would be a fool to deny it.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever saw her without it, I think it’s a part of her face”, laughed a boy from your table, Gryffindor too.

You thought they wanted to keep the rivality between the houses, but when a Hufflepuff girl joined their little roast you started to have a weird feeling.

“Hey, Parkinson!”, shouted the Hufflepuff, getting her attention. “I think the circus left some weeks ago, they forgot you?”

“Very funny, Puffy”, came her answer quickly, “I think they also left their hippo behind, but maybe you can catch them up if you hurry.”

“Me?”, laughed the Hufflepuff again, “Hunny, you’re the one whose shirt is a little too tight”, and with that comment she made the entire table laugh. You started to feel a little uncomfortable with the hole conversation going on, but you just couldn’t say anything.

Draco Malfoy entered the Potions’ class followed by his friends and sat down besides Pansy, not even looking at her. He was too busy to talk with Theo about Merlin knows what. Blaise tried to start a conversation with the girl, but she was caught in her own thoughts.

“Draco”, you heard her whispering, but your tablemates heard her too.

“Pst, Pansy”, said the Gryffindor girl again, “I think your boyfriend is too busy thinking about some Mudblood Gryffindor to pay attention to you right now”, she laughed and her friends started to do so immediately after.

“Draco”, Pansy said again, this time louder, but she was interrupted by the sound of Snape’s fluttering robes.

“Not now, Pansy”, was the only answer she gained as the boy started to pay attention to Snape’s comments about how the hole class was full with incapable students, with some exceptions.

The class passed by like it usually did. When you got your head out of your notes, the Slytherin table was empty and a feeling of anxiety grew in your stomach, knowing that maybe they were waiting outside of the class to say mean things as you walk by them. But the corridor was empty, and that was the strangest thing ever.

***

Three days later, you were questioning your choices. You made a promise to yourself in your fourth year, but you demonstrated yourself again how useless are those stupid words said only in your head. You swore to never go in the Forbidden Forest with Luna to feed the Thestrals again because everytime you went you were always scared to death or slightly injured and this time wasn’t any different. While Luna was laughing and having a good time, feeding a baby Thestral – you couldn’t say if she was doing so, you saw nothing – you went to have a walk near the place where the blonde girl was. The forest was always a beautiful place, mysterious and dark even in afternoon, and it was calling for you to discover it. But the feeling of fear was calling louder than the forest, your mind playing tricks by making non-existent sounds in your head.

“Luna?”, you called her when you found yourself alone, even if you didn’t go too far from her. You screamed from the bottom of your lungs when you fell into a hollow, all your body hurting from the impact. Maybe you fell three feet or so but the falling felt like an eternity.

“What are you doing there, Y/N?”, asked Luna while looking down to you, from the place you were before falling.

“Just admiring the sky”, you said nonchalantly, “The clouds are beautiful today”, but all you could see were the trees, the tall and leafy trees.

Luna looked up too, smiling a little. “You’re right”, she agreed, “but I’m afraid we need to go back to the castle. Get up.”

You would to that if you could, but your ankle was hurting like hell and it was impossible for you to walk. Luna helped you to move, little by little, and by dinner time you were in the Hospital Wing, Madam Pomfrey looking at your swollen ankle.

“Why did you fell, Y/N?”, asked Luna who was standing at the left of your bed.

“Why did you went to the Forbidden Forest is a better question, Miss Lovegood”, said Madam Pomfrey with a little annoyance in her voice.

Luna shrugged and smiled to you. “These are some questions that will not be answered any time soon. See you tomorrow, Y/N, goodnight Madam Pomfrey”, and she left you alone.

Madam Pomfrey took care of your ankle and suggested to have a little rest in the Hospital Wing for that night, which was a good idea. You were exhausted so a good sleep seemed to be ideal.

But the voices that started to argue after an hour or two woke you up and didn’t let you to go back to sleep.

“I told you I’m fine, it wasn’t necessary to bring me here”, the anger in the girl’s voice was more than obvious.

“You nearly fainted when you got up from the couch, Pansy”, said the one and only Draco Malfoy to his girlfriend. “Blaise told me you didn’t eat in the last three days, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

You tried to see them from your bed, but all you saw was Draco’s back and Pansy’s bare feet.

“Wrong with me?”, she asked laughing. “If Blaise wouldn’t tell you that, you wouldn’t even know that I’m still your girlfriend.”

“Don’t start that bullshit again, Pansy”, warned her the boy and you saw his hand moving. Pansy got up and she was facing the angry platinum-haired boy. “You know that’s not true, do you?” You didn’t hear Pansy’s answer, but soon Draco called her a good girl. “You look sick”, he said before getting on his feet.

“I don’t wear make-up, dumb ass”, laughed slightly the girl. You could see Draco cupping her face with a hand and a smile grew on her pale lips.

“Then get better and put back on that pretty face of yours, ok?”, he asked and pulled away, taking her smile with him. “Night, Pansy”, were the last words he said before leaving her side. He looked at you with a blank face and left the room in silence. You looked back to Pansy and she gave you a dirty look.

“What are you looking at, Mudblood?”

“Nothing”, you simply said, “I just woke up.”

“I didn’t ask you anything, did I?”

And she laid back on her bed, her back facing you. Sighing, you did the same and tried to go back to sleep. But when your sleep was sweeter, the door of the Hospital Wing was slammed closed. Pansy’s bed was empty and by the dark outside of the window the time must have been around midnight. Some time went by and Pansy didn’t came back, so your curiosity made you leave the Hospital Wing as well, walking with a little difficulty because of your ankle. You walked on the empty and dark corridor hoping to don’t see Mrs. Norris or Filch on your way. Hearing sobbings near the Clock Tower, you struggled to go there.

Standind in the front of the big windows, only her cries and the ticking of the clock being heard, Pansy Parkinson was squatted near the wall, a little could of smoke leaving her direction.

“Why aren’t you on bed, Pansy?”, she seemed scared and wanted to hide the cigarette but relaxed a little when she saw you.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I asked first”, you returned the reply to her as you came closer. You sat down next to her and looked outside to the courtyard and then looked at her hand, pale and veiny, holding between her trembling fingers with painted nails the cigarette.

After firing another smoke she held out the cigarette to you and you took it a little confused.

“I didn’t know you smoke”, you told her.

“I didn’t care if you smoke or not but still gave it to you.”

You laughed and inhaled the toxic smoke.

“Yeah, you’re right”, you mumbled and gave it back to her.

You two sat in silence, smoking the cigarette together and after that one Pansy pulled out of her hoodie a packet nearly empty, handing you another one.

“I stole it from my father”, she told you like she could read your mind, knowing that was your next question. “My parents would kill me if they would see my right now.”

“They don’t want you to smoke?”, you asked even if the answer was obvious.

“They don’t want me to talk to Mudbloods”, she said smiling at you, but it wasn’t the mean smile she always gave you. It was a sad one.

“You’re parents are assholes.”

“Yes, they are”, laughed the witch again and suddenly you felt good with her. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all. “The worst part is that they want me to be like them”, she continued while smoking.

“So you don’t want to be such a bitch?”, you laughed but she didn’t find your comment as funny as you did. “Sorry, I…”, you started but she laughed with anger.

“So you think you’re better than me? You’re just as bad as I am, Mudblood.”

You didn’t say anything in return.

“Why didn’t you eat, Pansy?”, you asked without looking at her. A part of you was scared by her possible reaction but a part of you felt bad for her. She was even paler than normally and her body seemed to be weaker, like she couldn’t support her weight.

“I don’t need to eat”, she simply said, “I ate before and it didn’t give me anything nice.”

“You need to eat, Pansy”, you spoke softly, suddenly concerned about her condition.

“No, I need to be pretty”, she said lighting another cigarette. “You heard Draco, I look sick, I need my pretty face back on.”

When you looked at her you saw tears running down on her face again.

“My mother is right, I need to be pretty or I’ll be worthless”, she said looking front.

“Pansy…”

“What happened to your ankle?”, she asked out of the sudden like she really cared, but she wanted to change the subject.

“Pansy, you’re not worthless”, you told her ignoring her question.

“I’m sick”, she said crying even harder. “You don’t know how it feels to be just a pretty face, good only to carry on that stupid line of purity. If I’m not beautiful, I’m sick! If I don’t have my make-up on, I’m sick!”

You cupped her face, wiping her tears away. “You’re beautiful without your make-up on, Pansy”, you whispered, your voice cracking at her pain. “You’re beautiful even if you’re sick.”

“What?”, she asked looking into your eyes. Her full lips were trembling as she wanted to say something.

“You’re beautiful even if you’re sick”, you repeated and then made the craziest shit you did in your entire life: you kissed Pansy Parkinson.

The kiss was soft, innocent and salty from her tears, but when she didn’t answer your actions, you pulled away.

“Then I want to be sick forever”, she told you before cupping your face in her tiny hands and crashing your lips together.

[miamlfy]

Mutual Feelings

A/N: Another Sirius Black X Reader written by yours truly. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one, I wrote it instead of doing school work. I hope it’s good and you guys enjoy it. Who doesn’t like a good old best friends to lovers fics right? 

Pairing: Sirius Black X Fem! Reader

Warnings: None? Fluff

Word Count: 1,633

Enjoy!

(not my gif, credit to whoever made it)

Y/n sighed deeply as she read her notes for Transfigurations over and over again, trying to imprint them into her brain before the upcoming final. She gave up shortly after and laid her head down on the table. There was only a small handful of students in the library, usually Y/n would have stayed in the common room to study but today her housemates decided after dinner it would be great to have very loud conversations with each other. 

“You know, sleeping in the library isn’t ideal especially with an ink pot about to spill all over your neat notes.” She jumped slightly at the voice and cursed as she saw a few droplets of ink fall onto her notes. Composing herself, she looked up to find her best friend and long time crush, Sirius Black staring at her with a sly smile on his lips. 

“I was looking everywhere for you,” he sat down in the chair and faced her, “you weren’t in the common room after dinner or in your dorm. I was worried about you.” His voice turning into a fake sad tone as he said the last words. 

Y/n slightly giggled at him, “It was too bloody loud in the common room and I simply couldn’t focus. Also why didn’t you just use the map?” She turned to fully face him now and leaned back into her chair. 

“The map is only used when it is important and needed.” He too leaned back in his chair and placed his feet on the table. 

“Oh, so I’m not important?” She questioned as she shoved his legs off the table, looking up to meet his eyes that held a slight panic look to them. 

“No! Oh Merlin no, t-that’s not what-“ 

She laughed at his small outburst, “calm down, I’m only joking. I know what you meant.” He gave out a sigh of relief and got up from his chair extending his hand to her. 

“C’mon Y/l/n, it’s late and we both need our beauty sleep before our ever so dreadful exam tomorrow.” She began packing her things into her bag, knowing he was right but feeling slightly disappointed at the thought of sleeping, it would only make the exam come sooner. A light blush made its way up to her cheeks as she interlocked her hands with him, thankful the lights in the library were dimmed. Sirius was also thankful for that as his own cheeks held a light pink color to him. 

Everyone knew the two friends liked each other, Y/n and Sirius were the only ones who were oblivious to their mutual feelings. Y/n could only imagine that Sirius reciprocated those feelings she had for him, and he could only imagine the same. They both been shamelessly flirting with each other since the start of their third year, yet now in their final year at Hogwarts they both thought it was just friendly flirting. 

It was quite annoying for their friends, Sirius would constantly talk about her to the other three marauders. At first they thought it was cute, a simple crush on their friend. Oh but how wrong they were. Within the next four years of school, they would constantly have to hear about how good Y/n smells to how cute she looked while she ate her breakfast and spilled some pumpkin juice on herself. They could only hope that their dear friend grew a pair and asked her out. 

Y/n spoke about Sirius to Lily and Marlene as well, however whenever one of them got annoyed at her for talking about her dear Sirius, she would simply tease Lily about James and tease Marlene about her crush that she had that month. All their friends did at some point come to an agreement that their two friends were very much idiots in love. 

They walked into the common room, a few lingering students sat by the fireplace reading the books that were placed on their laps. Stopping by the stairs, they looked at each other. Y/n’s eyes wondered from his grey eyes to his lips, he was biting them as if to stop his mouth from speaking. “Something on your mind, Black?” His eyes wondered from her lips to her eyes, he shook his head. He placed a kiss on her forehead and said their goodnights to each other. Sighing, they made their way to their respective dorms and laid on their beds. Slightly disappointed nothing more came out of that night with each other. 

The sun shined through the great hall, some students eating their breakfast while talking with their friends and others quizzing each other for any upcoming exams they had. Y/n and the boys, including Lily, were apart of the people quizzing each other. However they kept getting side tracked and constantly going on off topic conversations. 

“Say Lily, maybe we should have a date at Hogsmeade and study each other.” James wiggled his eyebrows and smirked at her, Lily mumbled an ‘absolutely not’ and continued to look at her flashcards. 

James kept his smirk and looked around his group of friends, the smirk only got bigger when he saw Sirius looking at Y/n with love eyes. Y/n and Remus were quizzing each other, both slightly looking like they’re about to break from trying to memorize everything off what they were telling each other. 

“Pads, I guess you’re already on that date with Y/n just without the Hogsmeade part.” James spoke loud enough for Y/n to hear him. Ignoring Sirius glaring at him, he stared at Y/n who was trying to hide her growing blush with her notes. Sirius only grabbed his book and hit James with it. 

As breakfast ended, they all got up and started making their way to the class they were dreading to attend. James walked next to Sirius and whispered into his ear, 

“Sirius, Sirius, Sirius, you better ask her out before we leave for the Easter holidays. There’s a Hufflepuff who’s been eyeing her in our Herbology class and honestly Pad’s, who knows how long she’ll be single for.” With that, he left his friend to think. There was no Hufflepuff guy eyeing her, James only made it up to give Sirius a little ‘push’. 

Sirius couldn’t help but get jealous, he wanted to know who was eyeing her so he could give him a little talk. However he knew he has to make Y/n his girlfriend first and that he would ask her out on a date after class. Giving himself a pep talk before entering the classroom, ‘I can do this’ he thought to himself. 

Class ended and sighs were let out by students exiting the room. Sirius waited for Y/n to finish packing her bag so they could walk out together, HIs heart was beating way too fast and his palms were beginning to get clammy. Wiping his hands on his robes, he made his way to Y/n and proceeded to walk her out of the class. ‘Now or never’ he thought. 

“Are you doing anything this weekend?” His voice trembled slightly from the nerves. 

“Uh nope, why? Are you taking James offer on taking me on a ‘study ourselves date’?” She laughed, secretly hoping it was that. Hopeful that her words were giving him a hint that she wanted to be asked out on a date. 

“Actually, yeah. Listen Y/n, I’ve had the biggest crush on you since third year and my words may or may not ruin what we have now but I must tell you because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it in,” He struggled to look into her eyes, “I am so infatuated by you and everyday I fall more and more in love you with every little thing you do. I love it when you tell Slytherins off for being mean to first and second years, I love it when you are not afraid to voice your opinion, I love how funny, sarcastic, and beautiful you are,” he looked into her eyes, “and I think I want to be with you until we grow old together, as cheesy as it sounds. I love you so much, Y/n Y/l/n and I need to know if you’d like to go on a date with me and possibly become my girlfriend.” He let out a soft sigh, ready to face the ugliness of rejection. 

Y/n took a while processing his words, wondering if she was dreaming. She let out a sigh of relief and wrapped her arms around him, “Of course I feel the same way, Siri. I always had and I was starting to worry you didn’t feel the same. I will gladly go on a date with you. I very much love you as well.” 

“So feelings are mutual?” Sirius was having a little trouble comprehending that her words were also real and not his mind making them up. She simply nodded and gave him a kiss on his soft lips. Sirius, as happy as he’s ever been, began placing sloppy kisses all over Y/n’s face, the corridor they were in filling up with her giggles. 

Later that night, Sirius walked up to his dorm, knowing the boys would be in there. He flopped onto his bed with a giant smile on his face, “Boys, I did it! I finally asked her and she said yes!” 

“Only about time, I’m happy for you.” Remus gave him a pat on his shoulder. 

“See I knew lying about a Hufflepuff being interested in her would work.” James also flopped on his bed, feeling like the perfect matchmaker. 

“Wait, you lied about that?!” 

[positivlyfocused]

It’s Like Being A Jedi In Real Life!

Being Positively Focused is a lot like being a Jedi in real life. I create my ideal versions of other people who then give me what I want when they realize what I want is what they want.

Nutshelling it: When I work through my Broader Perspective, my Inner Being talks to their Inner Being so that what I want occurs to them as what they want too.

A true story showing how this works.

I live in a house I share with three others. When I first moved in, the other three people were quiet and kept to themselves. The landlord showed me my space, “the basement suite” they called it.

Of course, it was perfect. It represented a fulfilled desire coming in perfect timing, as I wanted a new, quiet living space after my ex and I split.

Over several months these original three housemates moved out. Three new people replaced them. People I didn’t enjoy as housemates.

The first was a party boy. He enjoyed drinking, playing loud music and having people over for loud conversations.

The next person was an “adult child”. He had family of origin issues that showed up as screaming at the top of his lungs for no reason, using other people’s property without asking, getting offended at the slightest provocation and not cleaning up after himself. Oh, he also peed in the backyard!

The third person was even worse. He was an Adult Child of Alcoholics, muttered to himself and didn’t respect the landlord’s established norms for living there.

His replacement oddly enough, expected others to clean up behind him. He left things all over the house, let his food get moldy in the fridge, and would leave dishes and utensils on the front porch instead of taking them to the kitchen and washing them.

What’s interesting was each of these people reflected a dimension of my ex. While living with her I developed strong co-creative momentum with her. So strong a momentum, housemates who moved in after I did reflected that momentum. In other words, my Moment of Becoming and momentum brought housemates after me matching experiences I had with my ex.

My ex is from a family of alcoholics. Slight provocations triggered her too. She enjoyed playing her music loud while ignoring other people’s interests. Occasionally she cleaned up behind herself, but often would leave things right where she had them last. I tried a lot of things to change her (not a good idea at all I realize now). All my attempts made things worse.

I’m happier no longer there.

Obviously though my Belief Constellation still included thoughts about her. I know this because each house mate brought experiences and behaviors matching my ex, or rather matching beliefs I still had active about my ex. Were my experiences with my ex less active in my Belief Constellation, different people would show up. These new housemates were not random coincidence.

I know everything in my reality reflects back to me Belief Constellation content. That’s helpful knowing because I can do something with that knowledge. Not knowing what I know, life seems random and separate. It never is though. My thoughts and my reality always match.

So every housemate served me: Each showed me I still had beliefs worth changing. In changing them, I could get a better reality.

Before that though…

At first, I let myself get annoyed about my new housemates’ behaviors. I know emotional reactions are never about what’s happening in my physical reality, they’re always only about my connection with my Inner Being and that is all.

Saying “each new housemate was annoying” or “my new housemates made me annoyed” are complete, inaccurate distortions.

I also know what to do when I feel annoyance. I didn’t do that at first though.

At first I tried coaxing different behaviors out of them. I tried asking the slob to clean up after himself, which, of course, he refused. I asked the ACA dude to stick to the house norms. He told me to fuck off. I asked the party guy to be more quiet. He complained about me to the other housemates, which exacerbated my relationships with them. I asked the backyard pee-er to stop doing a lot of stuff. He got better, but still did things I didn’t like. The other housemates didn’t like it either.

Since direct action didn’t work, and my frustration was getting unbearable, I did the only thing under my control. I changed what I paid attention to, I let go, I surrendered.

It was a radical choice, an interesting sociological experiment. The only recent experience I had creating new people from existing people was with my ex. But that was indeliberate creation. Now, life presented me a huge learning opportunity: Learn to create people you want in life experience deliberately, it said.

So that’s what I did.

Surrender isn’t giving up. It’s realizing where power exists. Real effortless power comes through allowing Universe to bring me what I want instead of trying to make it happen myself.

People always reflect back to me what I believe. I’m creating them for my benefit. I know whatever thoughts I’m thinking that I’m ignoring for some reason will come clear through how people both show up and how they treat me. My expansion never ends, so learning opportunities never end either.

^^Life is best when I follow the inner knowing of my Broader Perspective. When doing that I realize people always reflect back to me my beliefs. (See the full illustrated post here).

So people in my life experience all are helpers, giving me feedback, as does everything else in my physical reality. This feedback tells me “Universe will bring me what I want when I let it.”

I let it through being Positively Focused.

I am feedback for others as well. With many years Positively Focused practice, I feel the pull of other people’s focus. Feeling that pull, sometimes it’s hard maintaining my own focus. I end up being someone less than I want to be. But I know when that happens, I’m matching that other person’s reality, and doing so, give them what they’re wanting to know, even if they don’t know that.

These days it’s easier being authentic, loving me while feeling others’ pulls. My Positively Focused practice has perpetual momentum now. Most of the time these days, I set the tone of an interaction. People shape to my pull instead of me shaping to theirs.

Not so when I was with my ex. Back then, when out in the world, I found it easy staying positive and excited about life. But then I’d come home and almost instantly feel my mood shift when I re-entered the persistent negative atmosphere she and I co-created.

I benefitted a ton from that marriage. She did too. For me, marriage helped me prioritize my Inner Being relationship. As a result, I’m living even more of a Charmed Life than I lived before.

I love how all relationships have that potential: they can amplify one’s focus on the one place unconditional love comes from: the relationship between one’s self and one’s Inner Being.

Things got interesting

So instead of trying to cajole my housemates into compliance, instead of trying to get them to stop doing what I didn’t like. I did what I show my clients: I focused instead on what I wanted. Then I let my Personal Trinity coordinate a new reality. One which included versions of my housemates that matched what I wanted.

What I wanted was a calm, quiet, peaceful place where people subordinated their behavior to the goals of a mutually beneficial, peaceful living space.

I knew, and know even more today, that through my Inner Beingrelationship, I can be, do and have anything I want. I knew I already created probable versions of my housemates, versions matching what I want. I knew my Inner Being held for me a living situation filled with such housemates.

My job: tune myself to that probable reality alive in my Belief Constellation, so it would emerge through my Moment of Becoming in to my physical reality.

Here’s what I did.

First I clarified in my mind what I wanted. I knew it was there in my belief constellation. I just had more momentum behind what I didn’t want (experiences similar to living with my ex) as a result of still thinking about my ex.

I thought thoughts about what it would look like living in my ideal living situation.

I thought about how my ideal housemates moved through the house and…

I thought about and focused on how peaceful, harmonious and quiet it was in my minds-eye version of my living situation.

By envisioning these, I knew I cued up that probable reality matching my ideal, my Charmed Life. But I needed something more. Something critical.

Early in Positively Focused practice, the practitioner strengthens their perceptive skills through feeling emotion. People feel emotions easier than vibration. Emotions let me know what vibration I’m tuned to. Vibration is early-stage manifestation. I needed to tune my vibration via my thoughts to my desired reality.

So while thinking about my ideal living situation, I focused more and more on how that situation felt. Then I amped up those feelings by focusing on them and riffing on emotions in the same vicinity:

It feels nice living in this ideal situation

It feels peaceful living here

It feels like harmony

It feels like peace

It feels satisfying

It feels like home

It feels joyful

It feels right

It feels good…

Next, I completely ignored what my current housemates did. When Slob left his dishes in the living room, or on the porch outside, I ignored it. When Family-of-origin peed in the backyard, or screamed “FUCK!” in the middle of the day, I ignored that too.

Then I took it up a notch. I ignored my housemates. Whenever they were in the common areas – the living room, the kitchen – I stayed in my room. If I was in the kitchen and one came in, I made sure I had my headphones in and listened to a podcast or music.

Then I amped it up further. This is a bit hard to explain. I lived in the house as though my ideal housemates already lived with me. I felt how good that felt. I reveled in their presence. I focused on how great the place would feel with them with me.

^^How I create other people in five easy steps.

Then awesome happened

The fist thing that happened was ACA moved out. Unbeknowst to me, he contacted the landlord saying he needed to move out ASAP. He said his counselor said living alone would be a better living situation for him.

Next, Slob and Family of Origin started getting on each others’ nerves. Family of Origin started enjoying the house being clean and tidy. He also improved around cleaning up after himself.

Problem (for him) was, Slob’s living habits started getting on hisnerves. So Family of Origin pointed out more often things Slob was doing. Exasperated, Slob started looking for someplace else to live. In a month, he was gone!

Perhaps you’ve seen my pictures on my website, so you know I’m brown-skinned. All my housemates up to this point were of the dominant culture. So you can imagine my surprise when my landlord introduced me to ACA’s replacement, another person of color. Let’s call him Andre.

Not surprisingly, Andre told me and the landlord he was looking for a cleaner, quieter and more peaceful living situation, which was NOT where he lived before. He said he liked keeping to himself and was super-respectful. Having toured the house, he already recommended ideas on improving the living situation.

After he moved in, the whole character of the living situation changed. Andre shared a bathroom with Family of Origin and right away Andre put his foot down about how Family of Origin left hair all over the bathroom and hardly cleaned up after himself (I have my own bathroom).

Next the landlord introduced me, Family of Origin and Andre to Slob’s replacement, another person of color and a college student I’ll call Lorenzo. Like Andre, he expressed living in a respectful, quiet place because he’s studying full time from home. Lorenzo and Andre’s energy both transformed the house’s culture. Family of Origin mentioned feeling uncomfortable living with three people of color, this being the first time that ever happened.

Not long after Lorenzo moved in, I heard him and Family of Origin having a slightly tense conversation about race. I went upstairs to see what was up. They were discussing whether a person of color could be racist. It was an interesting conversation I joined with eagerness. It went well, but I could tell Family of Origin was struggling with his “white fragility”.

Within two months, Family of Origin moved out too. His replacement: a kind, peaceful, hard working woman I’ll call Cindy. Cindy and I hit it off right away. Today, we share meals, watch movies together and talk eagerly about our passions. She’s a great fit. So is Lorenzo and Andre too!

Lorenzo and Andre moved out, but two new housemates I’ll call Jeff and Tomiko moved in behind them. They both are wonderful, peaceful, respectful and quiet people. And one of them is transgender which hits close to home.

Epilogue:

What happened here?

Several things unfolded in perfect universal coordination. One, I realized how my current, unwanted reality clarified beliefs in my Belief Constellation I wanted cleaned up.

Next, I surrendered to the unwanted by accepting rather than pushing against those things.

Then I ignored all those things, including the people creating them. Instead of giving what I wanted changed attention, I put attention on future realities containing what I wanted.

Doing all this, I tuned myself so that my now gradually matched my desires. On the way to that, my Inner Being coordinated with Inner Being’s of my old housemates. Through that coordination their Inner Being’s gave them impulses they felt were right for them. They came to their conclusions that served them. Conclusions that served me too.

My Inner Being simultaneously coordinated with people who matched what I wanted, people whose desires matched what I wanted too, and inspired them to me. The result: new people in my living situation matched with my desire and thus, an ideal living space.

Creating people consistent with one’s desires is fairly advanced, but possible for everyone. Cultivating Positively Focused momentum makes available nonphysical connections we share with others. Those connections exist for our use. When Positively Focused, that use ultimately matches me with people consistent with and in agreement with what I want.

It feels like mind control, but it’s not. I feel like a Jedi, but that’s at best, a fable. What’s really happening is I’m drawing to me people wanting what I want, for their own personal reasons that match my own. I call that co-creation between people. It’s so fun!