#if they keep that up and actually idk Develop Them i might like it for realsies
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pjsk-hot-takes · 2 days ago
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To add onto Anons before me I’ve noticed that whenever misogyny is brought up in the PJSK fandom the people talking about it always specifically refer to L/N, MMJ and even N25. Which.
Actually I think we should talk about Emu Nene An and Kohane more. They face SO much misogyny. Constantly. And nobody even mentions them in discussions about misogyny BECAUSE of said misogyny. Literally every single time an Emunene or Anhane song comes out people call it bad or say it should’ve gone to someone else. Every time. Without fail. It gets ignored at best outright hated at worst.
Ok so thought experiment time. Name a popular Emunene or Anhane song that’s as beloved or gets as much attention as Aun no Beats and Fixer.
If you couldn’t name one - that isn’t even because they don’t have bangers people just don’t like women unless they’re standing right next to men. Anhane alone has Imperial Girl and Odo and Pheles and Love is War and the Night Sky Patrol of Tomorrow and Butterfly on your Right Shoulder archives and you’re telling me that none of those are “good enough”????? Idk I think that’s just bias. Ruikasa and Akitoya songs have gotten popular with worse. Anhane and Emunene could drop the most jaw dropping gorgeous songs ever and not a single person would care and I firmly believe and will stand by that statement.
This isn’t even getting into how they’re treated in group covers!!!!!! Everybody ignores or hates on them!!!! If people feel like they got even slightly more lines than Ruikasa or Akitoya, even in their *own focus songs* (cough forward cough) they get so upset. And yet when Anhane and Emunene get the EXACT same treatment in Ruikasa or Akitoya songs nobody says a single thing!!!
And that’s not just speculation I KNOW that’s the case I can literally prove it. An has three total solo lines in the entirety of blender. That’s the exact same amount of solo lines as Toya gets in Ready Steady. They pretty much have the exact same amount of duet lines as well. In both songs. But Ready Steady is infamous and hated for it whereas blender nobody has even pointed this out and it’s universally beloved. It’s not even just a “blender is a focus song” thing because this happened with Forward too. It’s just misogyny.
I’ve seen people complain about Daybreak Frontline. Because and I quote “I hate it when the girls get most of the lines”. I can’t even go into any of the Nene or Emu tags without filtering every single Tsukasa and Rui tag first and even then finding any sort of content is almost impossible I think that’s a problem.
People will call Kohane “just a girl” despite the fact that she has a solid character arc and a personality and development. You can think she’s boring or not for you but????????? Don’t call her “just a girl”????? Esp not when she has social difficulties that are intentionally supposed to be relatable to the audience. A lot of people might actually relate to her character and journey even if they don’t necessarily like her. Idk leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
An has it only SLIGHTLY better because there’s a niche little fanbase for her and she’s somewhat popular (in the western fanbase. I think Kohane is more popular in Japan iirc.) but she still gets treated as an accessory to Akito and Toya just like Kohane. Also people keep trying to be weird and frame her as abusive or toxic which. Considering that possibility isn’t like a bad thing but people are just straight up reaching to try to prove stuff that either isn’t implied at any point or is outright refuted in the text just to villainize her??? Which is weird??? Especially because these people will turn around and defend Rui and Akito. Like. What did she ever do to you….. you’re willing to defend Rui who has canonically put people in mortal danger because teehee autism (I am autistic FYI I still think that’s a really stupid thing to use as justification especially if he’s aware it’s dangerous????) but An. Just existing with her fear of abandonment was too much??????
I could go ON and on and on there are so many examples….. help me……… help me anons…..
It’s not even that liking Akito and Toya or Rui and Tsukasa is inherently bad!!!!! But the favoritism as a whole is…….. something. Especially when it turns into hating the fem characters.
Also Mizuki suffers this too with Rui as another anon mentioned and it’s like. Really guys. Like first off it’s not about him it’s about Mizuki and if you’re gonna involve anyone else it should be the Nightcord girlies. Second off It’s a double whammy because people will bring up Rui but make no mention of An despite the fact that An is the one who’s canonically defended Mizuki from transphobes. Like. Why only Rui.
(I tried to word this as neutrally as possible I hope it didn’t come off as too aggressive ausuxuvhxhgxhgshg…. Anyways….. introspection and growth is good and cool actually…. Also I’m using Anhane and Emunene and Akitoya and Ruikasa for ease of use not as like a ship thing just to clarify it’s just tiring typing out each name individually)
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spotaus · 1 month ago
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Late Night quick thing (New Age Sillies)
Bad news: That joke post about including Reset + Orchid is definitely not canon. (I legit got sad thinking about Reset being in a universe where Orchid isn't- because their stories are so so intertwined- but Nightmare 100% would NOT risk the whole twins exploding Error's soul thing.)
Good news: This means I COULD include Kane (Reset's older brother who usually dies in timelines where Reset is born) and use it to develope his character a bit more! Also! Perhaps a Blue × Dream kiddo is finally in the stars for me to design?
#new age au#really enjoying the idea of Reaper + Geno having an heir at some point (and them sending that heir over to Night's kingdom for#exposure to other places as well as to hang with his third cool knight dad who's hard at work 🙏)#Kane has little to no development besides being a perfect angel (foil to Reset's eventual turn to poor choices) so I'd love to do#to him what I do to every oc of mine. (Namely: Throw them into the Kingdom and see what they do.)#oh! and I could see Blue and Dream (beloved boys) listening to the warnings of possible complications if they try to have a lil babybones#and Dream deciding he'd take the risk and carry the growing soul#(<- though tbf this is MANY years into the future and they'd be well established knights of the realm)#i'm not evil so they *would* manage to avoid the twins curse and have a singular beautiful babybones#they'd get raised partially on the move but stay behind with Night and Error if the two had a more dangerous mission#and grow up to be an obnoxiously powerful warrior following after their dads#(but they'd probably be hesitant to follow into the footsteps of being a knight and might go on a quest with friends before choosing a#final path for themselves)#<- Most spoiled rotten kid ever. courtesy of Nightmare and Error and all their extended family <3#oh last note. Ancha has me cracking up w/ ideas for Cross potentially meeting someone and I was beamed w/ an old ship request post I saw and#I think it'd be funny to include Lust in here somehow... (probably call him smth else as a nickname but y'know-)#like. He works in the city around the castle as some sort of... idk tailor? and he's been making things for Nightmare for years without#knowing because Ccino always was discreet about the orders and providing measurements + always tipped well so it was none of his business#but one day it's like. before a big announcement ceremony or smth and Ccino drags Cross in by the scruff because no one can get him to get#clothes that actually fit aside from armor (hc he steals the others clothes a lot and wears 1 shirt until it's threadbare)#so Ccino makes him go to Lust and Lust is able to get him fitted for sone new outfits because. well. Lust doesn't do much but he's very very#handsome and Cross is super easily flustered and shy around new people and he's awkward and aughhh.#and then he thinks about the interaction for the next month before deciding he's going to ask Ccino to go back there again.#and Lust likes dressing Cross up in new outfits (everyone thinks it's great Cross is loosening up and meeting new friends cuz Lust introduce#s him to people in town) and it takes forever for Cross to get over his worries and ask Lust out to a ride on his horse (romantic. of course#) and Lust agrees because he's charmed.#and the best part would be Cross *actually* manages to keep it a secret. like. no one finds out until one morning Killer bursts into Cross'#room to wake him for surprise training and it's Cross. the weird Dog. and- holy shit did Cross have someone over???#Cross pulls the cool ones frfr 🙏#it's just a casual thing between them with little plot relevance or drama I think. just a chill lil relationship 🙏
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deoidesign · 26 days ago
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Can you make a tutorial on how you world build and make ocs? I can't seem to make any people in my brain, but then when I try to come up with environments jobs, beliefs and little details to slowly come up with someone, I think: well I don't really know how people have influenced the world- it's a weird loop
To be honest, I don't think I can! Writing is an extremely personal process. The way I write is directly related to how I process things, what I find important in stories, years of my own analysis of my and other's writing, etc... The way you write will be unique to you, as well. But I can explain how I personally think of it.
The short answer:
Write. Write anything and everything, it's a tool to explore your ideas. Analyze your own writing, and write more. Then, as you discover which ideas you want to develop, write more to explore them more. You won't know what you want otherwise!
The long answer:
I think this kind of loop is common. It's easy to feel like everything needs to be done "at once," because our job as writers is to make elements logically fit with each other for our readers. But as you've discovered, developing multiple elements simultaneously isn't really possible, or at least is extremely difficult.
Personally, when I think of writing, I break it into three major elements; characters, world, and plot. As much as possible every scene explores one or more of these, and as much as possible these three things tie back into what I personally consider most important: theme.
Everything I do is in service of the themes I want to present. Without them my events feel aimless. It can take a while to discover them, but they're the core of my work. You will have to discover what you feel is the core of yours. Analyzing other media helps with this too.
Concepts in your brain exist in a state of infinite potential. But when you start writing you have to start making choices, which removes potential as you move forward... But you have to move forward anyways. If there's ideas you want to explore later, you can always explore them later.
What this ends up meaning, to answer your question, is that I don't think of my characters as "people in my brain" or my worlds as something people have influenced... Not at their core, at least. They are tools that I use to represent specific ideas. Obviously they're also my blorbos, but mostly they're serving a specific narrative purpose.
So above all else... Write. Write, and discover what you're writing about, and then start over and write with that in mind. Keep doing this. But you have to write!
#I wish there were a cleaner answer to this kind of thing#and I also wish that there were a way to answer that didnt feel like 'just do it lol'#but... genuinely you kind of just have to do it!#I find it helps to reframe writing as trying to figure out which ideas I don't like#then if I write anything that feels bad to me#it's not about being a bad writer or anything like that. it's just something I dont want in my story and I delete it.#like if you find yourself naturally coming up with worldbuilding elements. its okay to just start there!#you can start like 'I really want giant mushrooms' and then start thinking about how cool that would be#and like oooh what if there were really cool caves full of mushrooms and all glowy yeaaah#then you start building people from that. colonies of fungal people or something. this is still worldbuilding#then you might think now. whats a plot that could go with this and show off my cool mushrooms.#maybe the mushrooms are all connected and the main one is dying and no one knows why. it's a classic plot.#if you still dont feel like you can find a character in that. keep going! why is it dying? how can it be saved? can it? if not then why?#etc etc etc. when I am writing I actually ltierally write out 101 questions like this as I'm going and then I answer them#and if I cant answer them. then I figure out a different situation that doesnt bring that question up LMFAO#eventually you can decide you want a hero who idfk will replace the big mushroom or something. a sacrifice and immortality simultaneously#then you can be like yeah so my themes are probably about sacrifice. connection to others. love for your community. stuff like that#and then you can go back to your world and say. yeah I think that people should have telepathic communication on some level!#I'm just making all this up right now but I just want to illustrate somehow how this kind of cyclical process can actually be a tool#because it's not about getting it all right at once. its about leaning into the cycle and how it guides you through developing these#anyways idk if this makes any sense. if this doesnt feel like it works for you then it probably literally doesnt#but writing more and analyzing writing more is ALWAYS good#it will never make your writing worse to do those things.#unfortunately (said with all the love in the world) writing is an endless process of learning more about who you are and what you care abou#its wonderful but it's hard and theres no way to skip that process#good luck!#asks#anon#writing stuff#oh also if at any point you go hm. that big thing isnt working for me I think...
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waywardsalt · 3 months ago
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tbh i might go ahead and put dungeons in as a part of the bellum x linebeck fic's plot since like. 1) struggling to actually figure out a main plot and having dungeons as sort of bit points to hit and be little bits of fitting exploration and bonding and 2) i do kinda want to do dungeons. i like thinking of them and again i do think its fitting.
#bellum x linebeck fic#albw fucks thats where i got the idea. i mean dungeons are a general loz thing but albw is rlly good with a bunch of dungeons#the deal now is like. why are they doing dungeons (beyond. linebeck likes treasure and adventure and bellum likes doing stuff with him)#it doesnt really need to be an endgame thing if that makes sense. a mid to late story plot as smth extra for them to do to interact with#the world and ig the issue is that i cant figure out what they'll get out of these dungeons. considering theyre a bit morally fucked. so#i'll have to think on that. will prolly do only a few bc. yknow. or could do some other kinda of like. major points to hit. but tbh dungeon#do fit in since ppl go exploring a lot and ive been playing with the idea of a fantastical system that like. refills dungeons if theyre#influenced by certain magic or w/e. i like the great sea having a lot of magic kinda just. existing around the world unchecked#it def gives a lot of opportunity for worldbuilding and like. things to do and have exist in the great sea setting. anyways#need smth for bellum and linebeck to do other than play a weird dating sim with each other as their endgame picks#honestly the actual plot side of things is the messiest fucking thing abt this and im trying to keep it from getting out of hand#i have the actual romance set up well enough and i really ought to focus on the romance in chapter planning before trying to#string together a main plot between all of it yknow#salty talks#thinking more on it it might not even need to smth where theyre fully successful bc its like. idk. maybe they just want to do some stuff#cuz there is no world threatening thing (thats bellum's role.) so like no sages or pendants but maybe some fucking mcguffin#part of me thinks. oh. triforce! but thats uh. a lot. i might just leave the dungeon stuff as like. bellum wants him to clear them out as#as like possibly places for bellum to hide out in since he's afraid of being threatened and killed. like hes looking a smth like a base#i like that ig. cuz it could end up with them being like. hey i like being around this person that i think i have feelings for#oh. this might be good to use in development of romance too
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semiconducting · 11 months ago
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im trying to convince myself to like mkulia...
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agnimybeloved · 1 month ago
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regarding that last post... not that black butler's canon has to be uplifting or have dadbastian or a happy ending to be "good" (i'm actually partial to tragedies especially the cyclical kind and would love for the series to straight up end with despair and the collection on the contract lol) but i do think that toboso's largely fumbled the found-family/interpersonal,/introspective aspects of her story and sacrificed a lot of narrative and thematic meat there for low-brow and off-putting comedy.... which is really exactly all she does with ciel's trauma as well-- shallowly using it for the purposes of trauma porn and/or comedy/inappropriate fanservice.
ciel only seems to have reasonable responses to his trauma when its aesthetically convenient if that makes sense. i honestly could go as far as to say that she depicts his trauma fetishistically-- every instance i can recall of ciel having an extreme traumatic response (i.e. vomiting, flashbacks, psychosis) is represented with (imo but honestly.... i'd be shocked if this wasn't intentional...) sexual undertones. his episode during the green witch arc doesn't have one of these moments within the episode itself as far as i can recall, but certainly i think the preceding/inciting medical emergency that forces him and sebastian to bathe together contributes to the reoccurring sexualization of "sickness" (physical & psychological).
not to mention ciel's subsequent episode is treated as the dramatic peak of his ptsd and something that he "overcomes" through sheer force of will (and the threats of sebastian... neither of which are a proper/reasonable way to handle such an extreme trauma response) and doesn't really battle going forward in the story. of course a lot of stories take this "one dramatic moment and then its fixed" approach to representing mental illness, and it makes narrative sense for toboso to want to more or less settle that thread to gear up for the important blue cult arc, but i think toboso's handling of mental illness in general goes so far beyond suspension of disbelief and tastelessness that i think she should lowkey be brained for it. the way she intermittently writes ciel's traumatic experiences as something horrifying and wrong and to be given sympathy meanwhile relentlessly putting ciel in inappropriate fanservice situations that diminish the severity of csa & pedophilia as well as disrespect the complexities of trauma and turn them into comedy... mind boggling...
overall though i think that black butler shows a real mastery of narrative arcs while falling short in terms of character arcs. most of the time these arcs are shown in retrospect with the addition of new backstory, but it feels as if the characters in present have barely grown at all... not that every story has to be character driven and a static character type makes sense for someone like sebastian, but for all that ciel is a unique and mature thirteen year old due to the circumstances of his life, he is still a thirteen year old, and one that has experienced a significant trauma quite recently at that. not allowing him coming of age-esque character arcs considering all that sort of breaks the believability of his character imo.
but i think that coattails does a lot in staying loyal to ciel's character and experiences while also respecting his trauma and bringing the depth and flexibility of adolescence to his worldview and actions that toboso unfortunately seems disinterested in. i love that aforementioned chapter of coattails and its sentiments especially with how it reexamines ciel's actions at kelvin's manor and the worldview that lead to burning it down with the children inside... not that it was an out of character decision for ciel in the moment, but i think it established a lot more severe facts about his character and worldview than toboso is willing to address in her writing and therefore feels unresolved. coattails' remedy to that awkwardness by coming full circle is so intriguing and fulfilling in contrast... it shows how adolescence and trauma can work together to so completely convince one of hopelessness and yet how just a bit of hope can change that worldview entirely. literally just the honest love of a random dog and the mundane care of a guardian... there is a cure and it is this..... what da helllll....
#anyway as far as canon goes i genuinely dont care if sebastian never becomes softer or more human or paternal or whatever#i think examining the tiny ways in which he HAS become those things would be very intriguing but#what i do think would make for a way more compelling story was if ciel (and maybe others)#had more dynamic character arcs that contrasted sebastian's uninterest/inability to change#for ciel to slowly develop a worldview and desire for life that began to conflict with his 10 year old one#that so quickly forfeited his soul in a moment of total devastation and loss#or to begin thinking of sebastian as a parental figure no matter how small or unwanted or hated the thoughts#especially with a sebastian that wouldnt reciprocate ciel's regret of the contract or imprinting on him as a paternal figure#like if we're gonna do tragedy lets make it as tragic as possible pleaseeee#in some ways makes me think of spn if that makes sense. ep 1 and the final ep can be watched without missing anything#like if we go from 'ciel wants revenge and is fine having his soul taken' to#'ciel got revenge (however bittersweet it might be idk) and is fine having his soul taken' ending.....#i think that would be sort of boring#i think thats actually what's kind of bothered me about kss in recent years and left me really wanting from the story....#i love love love the narrative arcs and they're my favorite part but as far as the characters i feel like we're almost still at chapter one#why does any of this matter... how has this changed the characters... idk. i feel like we havent gotten much of that#disclaimer i havent read kss in a few years/am not caught up if im forgetting anything but 😭 i feel like i wouldve rememebred...#anyway. another thing i really love about coattails is that its written with sebastians pov and so brilliantly too#the author writes his voice (and everyone) so believably#literally not a single line feels like a throwaway or generalized narrator voice...#i keep thinking about the scene where abberline has his shoes on his head and sebastian thinks its stupid and absurd#and when abberline puts them back on his feet the describing line isnt just#'he put them back on his feet'#but 'he put them back on his feet where they belonged'#and 'where they belonged' is an unnecessary/assumed detail of the action itself but given its written from sebastian's pov#it further emphasizes how stupid and absurd he thinks the whole thing is. 'thats where they belong.... idiot....'#whatever. whateverrrrr.#i love this fic. my fav fic of all time forever i will never find another like it#i just watched the public school arc and was lowkey so disappointed that i had to reread coattails LOL#kss
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chisatowo · 2 years ago
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Just realised a lil evil thing I could do in the unit swap au (remembered that it switched which school Mafuyu goes to)
#rat rambles#sekai posting#unit swap au#makes the two halves of the 15 yr old me projection coin interact (cutely)#maybe idk if Ill actually do it since I feel like it might not work as Id like it to for the mafuyu half of things but Im entertaining the#thought and having fun imagining emo lil amvs in my head abt it#nothing too deep but still makes for a fun thing to think abt#idk we'll see#theres been a lot of stuff thats on the cutting floor or stuck in concept purgatory rn which is unfortunate but I just dont feel confident#enough in my knowledge abt a lot of characters to rly commit to a lot of my ideas for them#I rly need to binge read more sekai stories so I can start digging deeper into some characters I struggle with rn#and by that I mean l/n (shiho specifically) Ive been so scared to develop them more dhdkydkdy#oh also tsukasa Ive been avoiding developing him more so bad#I have a feeling that with those two specifically my concepts for what Im thinking for basic vibes will probably change a lot#and this is important for shiho in particular since they are kind of the glue keeping my unit swap l/n concepts together#so I feel like I should rly just go and bindge read every shiho thing but also I dont wannaaaaaa#not because I dont like shiho but because Ill have to dig up fan translations for everything cause I heard that ensekai did them Dirty#I kind of wanna prioritise vbs also cause theyre the ones Im more actively working on atm#luckily sekai stories arent as hard to bindge as bndori ones cause its not almost 6 Years Old fjkdydkdyjd#also cause they mark their plot important stories but tbh that matters less to me#sometimes its the chill stories that casually drop the most fucked up character lore youve ever seen in ur life dhjdydjdh
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bokutosbiceps · 11 months ago
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don't be afraid to catch feels
eustass kid/monkey d luffy/roronoa zoro/trafalgar d water law/usopp/vinsmoke sanji  x gn!reader | fluff | ~2k words
warnings: some suggestive/18+ themes but nothing explicit
a/n: idk i just really wanted to write so THIS was born !!! how some of the one piece boys realize they have feelings for ya !!  might do this for other fandoms too…actually yeah i will LOL probably if i don’t forget
NOTE: i end them after their confession on PURPOSE so you can choose your own adventure 😆 also there’s more dialogue for luffy’s + usopp’s so they’re a bit longer !!
18+ MDNI | under the cut for length
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eustass kid is angry. he's angry that he developed a crush on you. it's so stupid, he thinks. so outta character.
everyone on the victoria punk knows it, including you. and much to kid’s dismay, so does killer. killer talks to him about it everyday, trying to coax a confession out of him in the most gentle yet firm way he can. he wants his captain to be happy, and he knows that you can make him happy, because you already do without knowing it.
kid is completely docile in your presence, and protective. he’s more quiet, because he wants to hear what you have to say. he’s around more, because he wants to keep an eye on you. and maybe because he likes being in your presence.
kid tells (threatens) the rest of his crew that, even though they’re like brothers to him, they’ll be ripped to shreds if any of them so much as glance at you the wrong way.
luckily for you and unluckily for him, you’d heard his very public threat to the kid pirates, save for you. 
you ask kid what the hell all that was about and he simply shrugs, rolling his eyes and trying but failing to keep his cool. you scoff and chuckle at his indignance. you continue to press him till he finally gets annoyed and locks eyes with you, his pupils dilated and his lips spread out into a crazy grin.
“jus’ claiming what’s mine.”
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monkey d luffy is seeking out the smartest person he knows, and once he sees her, he’s barreling toward her at lightning speed. hands appear, arising from the wood of the sunny’s deck and forming a net right in front of robin, effectively catching luffy and recoiling him flat onto his butt.
“robin! what was that for?” luffy whines, adjusting his straw hat and tilting it back so that he can look at robin.
“i’d prefer to not be crashed into, captain.” robin shuts her book and gives luffy a gentle, almost maternal smile. “now, what has you so excited?”
luffy is thoughtful as he opts to lay back down on the deck, tilting his straw hat over his face to shield his eyes from the sun. he’s not excited, kinda confused, actually. 
he’s good with his feelings, because he knows his feelings. he's familiar with them. but these feelings—the ones he's been feeling for the past couple of weeks or so—are new. he doesn’t know them, but he wants to learn about them. so here he is, ready to learn with the smartest person he knows.
“well…i wouldn’t call it excited, ya know?” luffy stretches his arms overhead before folding them behind his head. robin chuckles quietly, already aware of luffy’s feelings before he'd even realized them himself.
“what would you call it then?” robin asks patiently.
“like…i dunno! it’s different! it’s different with ‘em…” luffy trails off, sinking back into his thoughts.
“different with who?”
“y/n!” luffy chirps, feeling himself smile at the mention of your name. “i’m really happy they’ve joined the crew!”
“happy like…you’re happy that i joined the crew?” 
“nuh uh, like…i always wanna be near ‘em. i like when they laugh, when they’re happy. their smile’s real nice, too.” luffy pauses. “it’s a lot of fun to be alone with ‘em! makes me feel good…”
robin takes her time explaining what these feelings mean, that that bubbly, queasy feeling in his stomach was not, in fact, indigestion. once robin’s words seep into luffy’s thick, rubber skull, he jumps up off the deck and wraps robin in a tight hug, grinning the whole time and whisper yelling i gotta go tell ‘em!
luffy finds you instantly, almost like his body contains a homing device that always leads to you. you notice way too late that you are in the direct path of the tornado that is luffy, and he tackles you, causing you to fall back. luffy is quick to catch you, stretching an arm around your waist and bringing you to his chest, looking at your face with such intensity you can’t keep your face from heating up.
you’re breathless. due to the adrenaline from almost cracking your skull against the wood of the ship, and from the i’ve got feelings for ya! robin says they're love feelings! do you feel the same? that rushed out of luffy’s mouth.
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roronoa zoro is confused. honestly, more confused than he’s ever been in his life. then he’s annoyed. why did he have to develop feelings for a crewmate, let alone you? it would just get in the way of everything. he wants to focus on his dream, on luffy’s dream, and sometimes even on sanji’s dream.
he doesn’t consider himself a particularly selfish person, but he wanted to focus on himself first. 
but then he sees you smile. he hears you laugh. he watches you work and hone your craft, a look of ecstatic determination on your face and the tip of your tongue peeking out between your pursed lips as you focus. suddenly, he realizes it’s really not about him anymore. it’s about you.
he starts to avoid you like the plague—he figures that if he can’t see you, you can’t see him. but he’s oh so wrong. 
when you decide you've had enough of this, you stop zoro, your hand gripping his shoulder and pulling as hard as you can. zoro raises an eyebrow at you and turns around, crossing his arms and waiting for you to explain yourself.
“you’ve been avoiding me.” you state, leaving no room for disagreement or excuses.
“says who?” zoro is very good at playing dumb.
“says me. and luffy.” you huff a bit as you remember your encounter with your captain. how his lips had twisted to the side and how his eyes had shot up to the sky when you’d asked what zoro’s problem was.
“luffy doesn’t know—”
“know why you’ve been avoiding me?” you step closer to zoro, your eyes locked on his and staring into his soul, searching for answers. “i’m sure we’d both love to know.”
zoro scoffs and rolls his eyes, taking a step back from you and turning his face to the sea. the cool ocean breeze feels nice against his burning face. he grimaces as he turns back to you, figuring he might as well get this over with.
“ilikeyou.” zoro mumbles, the words rushing out of his mouth and stopping quickly as they had started.
you shake your head and lean closer to zoro, turning your head to the side so his lips are inches away from your cheek. 
“can you repeat that, please, roronoa?”
“i like you.” zoro says the three, short, quipped words. he’s frowning and his arms are crossed and pulled tightly against his chest, in hopes to dampen the hammering of his heart.
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trafalgar d water law is no stranger to stuffing his feelings deep inside of his chest and leaving them there to rot. so he’s wondering why in the fresh hell these annoying feelings for you keep resurfacing. they crawl up his esophagus and reflux into his mouth, leaving a bitter taste behind and making him scowl every time he feels them. 
and to you, it seems as though every time the two of you lock cross paths, he narrows his eyes at you and stalks away. he rarely talks to you anymore, although the conversations you'd shared before were usually very short, yet somehow still meaningful.
you decide to confront him about it, byway of bepo, who happened to know exactly why law was seemingly scarce around you. 
“c-captain? our captain?” bepo stutters, bringing his paw up to his mouth and feigning surprise. “wow! i have no clue why he’d do something like that!”
you frown at bepo. it’s painfully obvious he knows everything about the answer to your question. “spill it, bepo.”
bepo starts to make gestures with his hands and little struggle noises with his mouth. he has no clue how to get out of this one. so he does, indeed, spill it. 
a few minutes later, after bepo was done with his rambling and law’s confession, you approach law with a smug smile on your face.
it doesn’t take a genius to be able to tell why you’re smirking like that, and law immediately pinches the bridge of his nose and tilts his head down.
“that damn bear…”
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usopp is sweaty. he’s sweaty, he’s wringing his hands, twirling his hair around his fingers, readjusting his goggles on top of his head. he can’t sit still. he’s been thinking about how on earth to deal with his feelings: does he just shove 'em deep down inside or does he shout 'em from the crow’s nest? he hasn’t had romantic feelings for anyone since he left kaya, and he simply cannot deal. 
“usopp…” nami says softly, touching usopp on the shoulder. he jumps, then flinches at his overreaction to his best friend’s simple and gentle gesture. “can you just tell them, please?”
“n-no! why should i?” usopp frowns at nami and furrows his eyebrows, knowing full well that it’d be best for his health and the crew’s sanity to just come out and tell you.
“if you don’t…” nami grins at him, slowly and mischievously, “i’ll tell them myself.”
usopp immediately springs up from his chosen sulking location and mutters an okay, okay! behind him as he leaves nami. he’s back to sweating, wringing his hands, playing with his hair, and fidgeting with his goggles.
you notice usopp looking particularly dreadful and wait for him to get closer to your position on the deck. you reach out and catch his hand, giving it a light tug so that he’s moving closer to you. he seems so deep in thought that he doesn’t even notice.
“usopp?” you tug on his hand twice, trying to get his attention. usopp meets your gaze and stares at you blankly before shaking his head and becoming aware of the situation. he tries to withdraw his hand from your grip but you’re holding on tightly, and he realizes he’s trapped.
“y/n! fancy seeing you here!” usopp laughs loudly, trying to mask the way that he’s absolutely crumbling and melting.
“what’s on your mind, usopp?”
“you.” usopp covers his mouth with his free hand immediately after the words come out of his mouth. what was he thinking, being so forward? he quickly looks away from you, directing his eyes to the clouds above. “i mean, nami was talking about you earlier. that’s why i’m thinking about you. no other reason!”
a small smile spreads across your lips. “oh, yeah. she told me something super interesting about you earlier today…” you say, drawing out the last few syllables and relishing in the way usopp looks at you in utter horror.
“nami told you that i like you?” he breathes.
“no, but you just did.”
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vinsmoke sanji is aware that he actually likes you. that you're not just another pretty face he admires. he’s always known you were gorgeous, the apple of his eye, the object of his affection. you never noticed that it different, though. thinking back on it, you’re glad that you didn’t notice, because you might’ve thought it meant something bad. quite the contrary, in fact.
sanji knows he loves you when he feels calm in your presence. when he’s not acting like a fan boy and when he spends hours talking with you while he cooks or does the dishes or plans the crew's next meal. you’re always around, and yet, he’s never nervous. 
when he really realizes it, though, it’s when he catches a glimpse of nami’s naked silhouette through the crack in the bathroom door and he doesn’t even flinch. not a tingle, not a single palpitation. it’s not you, and his heart knows it, so he’s calm. this is when he knows he has to confess.
“y/n…darling…” sanji says, grasping your hands in his own and looking you in the eyes. “i have to tell you something—something i’ve never told anyone before.”
you look at him, an eyebrow raised in skeptical curiosity. sanji looks worried, and he almost never looks worried. your mind is going a mile a minute, your brain flipping through pages and pages of things he could possibly say to you within the next minute. because of this, you miss the way sanji squeezes your hands, and the way he sucks in a deep breath.
“i’m in love with you.”
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taglist: @usoppsstar (i literally can’t remember anyone else rn lolol, i just knew i wanted to surprise ya coco) | @kingofthe-egirls | @pileofmush | @anemptypuddingcup
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fatesundress · 1 year ago
Text
⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader
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summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.
tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people
note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡
word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)
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You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.
You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.
He evidently does not.
“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.
You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”
“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”
“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”
He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.
It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.
There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.
That decides it. Flotsam still floats.
Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 
…It’s just that he’s insufferable.
The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.
Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 
“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.
You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”
“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”
In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.
I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.
You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.
It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.
Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.
You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.
When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.
You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.
Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 
Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.
You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.
For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 
You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.
It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.
Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.
You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.
Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.
Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.
“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”
“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”
“I wonder why.”
He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.
“What, Tom?”
He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”
You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 
It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.
“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”
“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”
“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”
All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 
Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.
Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 
You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 
For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.
He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)
Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.
You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 
They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.
You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.
“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.
He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”
“Curiosity—”
“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”
He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.
You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.
But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.
“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”
“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”
This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 
“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”
He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 
It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.
The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 
The worst of the world has impeccable timing.
A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.
So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.
And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.
BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES
DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN
All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.
The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.
It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.
In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 
You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.
Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.
But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 
He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.
You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 
You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.
“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.
Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.
He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”
“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”
You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 
“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”
“An altercation.”
“Very good, that is what I said.”
You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 
“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.
You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.
You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 
But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 
She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.
For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.
Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)
Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.
“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.
“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.
“What? Malfoy?”
You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.
But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”
Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —
“A professor?”
“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.
He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.
It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.
He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.
Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.
You consider it a warning.
Tom does not.
“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”
His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.
“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”
“So?”
It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.
“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”
He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.
“Are you stupid, Tom?”
You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.
“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”
Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.
Tom acts stupid.
Dumbledore knows.
It all happens very fast.
You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.
You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.
You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.
“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”
Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”
You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.
“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”
“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”
“I —”
“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”
You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.
“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”
“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”
“So nothing novel then.”
“D’you want me to blast you again?”
His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.
You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”
That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.
“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.
“Tom.”
“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”
“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”
Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”
“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”
And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.
It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.
The day everything changes starts the same as any. 
You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 
Tom has cracked the book.
It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.
“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.
He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.
“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”
“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”
You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”
“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”
“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”
“I have no need.”
You frown. “You… you already know it.”
“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —
“You’re not muggle-born.”
“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”
“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”
“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”
You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.
“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”
He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.
“Are you trying to murder me?”
“I might.”
“You’d be the first suspect.”
“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”
Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.
He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 
It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.
“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.
There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.
“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”
You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”
The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.
“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.
He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 
“Should I?”
And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”
It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.
Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”
The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.
You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.
Summer blisters when it comes.
Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 
And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.
A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.
Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.
But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.
It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?
You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.
“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.
“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”
And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.
He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.
Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.
You always are.
The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 
Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.
He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.
And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.
Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.
You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.
You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.
You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.
Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 
You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.
So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 
It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.
It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.
Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.
The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 
You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.
Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 
But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.
“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.
Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.
“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”
He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.
You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”
“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.
“You’ll get sick.”
His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”
Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.
Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.
When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 
What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.
You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.
Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.
You are regardless. 
It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.
A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.
Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.
It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.
You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.
And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.
“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.
He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”
“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”
“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”
“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”
“Why?” he deadpans.
You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”
“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”
Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.
To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.
“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”
You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.
You are not his keeper. You know that. 
“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.
He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course��� but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.
And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.
What? Sorry. What’s going on?
He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”
You’re almost positive you did not.
Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.
You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.
Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.
Your contentment is remedied quickly.
Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.
You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.
Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.
“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.
You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”
He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.
You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”
“How’s that?”
“No one would be senseless enough to try.”
And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.
One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.
It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.
You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.
It happens again.
Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.
There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.
You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.
This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.
You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.
You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)
He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 
And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.
Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.
And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.
The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.
The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.
That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.
One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.
The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?
You take to the library.
Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.
The third sign is the end. 
You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.
He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 
And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.
So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.
Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.
He’s something else entirely.
What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.
You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.
His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 
You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 
“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.
You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.
“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.
Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”
“I’ve been good at it.”
His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.
His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.
“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.
You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.
You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.
He sees all of you.
Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.
“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.
“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."
He stares at you. There’s nothing there.
“Tell me, Tom.”
Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.
“I cannot.”
Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.
It’s late winter and it’s too cold.
“You killed her,” you say quietly.
“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”
“What are you… so it was an accident?”
“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”
“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.
He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.
“You told me to change things —”
“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”
“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”
“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”
“Do you want me to lie?”
“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”
“Her death is the first step to —”
“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”
“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.
All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.
“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."
You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.
“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."
“...What?"
“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”
You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”
“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.
“How lucky for you.”
“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”
“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”
His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.
“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."
“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”
And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 
You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 
“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 
Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 
Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.
“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 
He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.
After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"
“I thought I would have time.”
“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”
He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”
Fuck him. “Fuck you.”
“Very cogent.”
“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."
He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”
You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.
“You have lost me, Tom."
He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.
You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 
You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 
There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.
You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.
Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.
That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 
You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.
And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.
You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.
It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.
Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.
Be well.
You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —
You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.
Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.
Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.
It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.
You find that to be true.
Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.
Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 
“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.
You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 
Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.
Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.
Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.
Due February.
It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”
Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”
Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.
You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”
Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”
And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.
Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.
You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.
You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.
In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.
Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.
You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.
But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.
You drink, and don’t look away.
By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.
There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.
You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 
An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.
You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 
You’re better than them. You can do it forever.
The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.
The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.
“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.
You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.
You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.
The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.
He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.
You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.
Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)
“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.
You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.
Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”
You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.
“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”
“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”
“I take that back.”
She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”
Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.
You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.
It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.
On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.
There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.
Indifferent it is. 
“Can I help you?”
“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.
You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.
“Am I?”
“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”
“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”
Indifference effaced. You’re angry.
He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”
Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.
It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.
“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”
Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.
He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.
He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”
You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.
“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.
Where is Mari?
“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”
You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?
“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.
You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.
“Well then —” 
Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.
His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.
“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —
“That would be wise.”
He’s still looking at your lips.
No one else is looking at you at all.
It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.
Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.
“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.
“I haven’t protested.”
But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.
“But you will.”
His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”
You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.
The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)
You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”
“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.
“You still lost me.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
He pauses for a moment. “I know.”
You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.
“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”
You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.
He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.
“My door is always open,” he says.
He lets you go.
You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.
Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.
If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.
It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?
You think of him often. You think of his offer.
My door is always open.
Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?
Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.
It’s a tempting door.
The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.
You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.
The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.
Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.
The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 
It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.
But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 
A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.
My door is always open.
Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.
Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.
She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.
When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.
It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.
A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.
“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.
“Renauld?”
He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.
“Well, yeah —”
You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”
“But McCormack sent him.”
“Where is it?”
“I… McCormack said that —”
“Where is it, Flack?”
“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”
That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.
The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.
But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.
“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”
You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”
“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”
You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.
It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.
“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.
Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”
“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”
“Who authorised you?” he hisses.
“I did.”
In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.
But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.
You were completely out of line and utterly right.
It isn’t something people like you are allotted.
Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.
And… he does.
With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.
It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.
There’s really no choice but to promote you.
Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.
By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.
The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.
Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.
After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.
“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”
“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”
Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.
“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.
“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”
“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”
“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.
“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”
“Alves, I’ll have you know —”
You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”
She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”
You roll your eyes, taking a drink.
That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.
But something about it itches.
You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.
You are green, through and through.
Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.
You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.
You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.
And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.
That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 
There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.
“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”
“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”
“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”
You’re incredibly daft about it.
There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 
The itch exacerbates.
You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.
You wake up and he isn’t there.
It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.
The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.
And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.
You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.
You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.
All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.
R.R
It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.
You return to Hogwarts posthaste.
It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.
The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 
You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.
“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.
Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.
“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”
“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”
And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.
Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.
There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.
But you do, because he told you.
You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.
It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 
It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.
You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.
The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 
It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.
You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.
He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.
“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.
“I thought your door was always open.”
You see his posture change from just his silhouette.
“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 
He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.
“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.
You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.
You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.
“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."
“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”
“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."
His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"
“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 
Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.
“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”
“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 
You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"
“Yes."
You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.
“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”
“I earned this,” you hiss.
“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiles. “There you are.”
“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”
The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.
“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”
“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.
You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’d need a Vow for that.”
You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”
“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”
“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”
“A Vow.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Tea, then? Biscuits?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”
“Hm. Terrible shame.”
Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”
He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”
“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”
“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”
Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 
“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 
He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.
“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 
You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”
Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.
“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.
“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”
He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.
He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.
“I should have killed you,” he repeats.
It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.
“Yes,” you agree.
It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.
Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.
There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.
He was your first in everything but this.
You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.
You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.
“How long?” he asks thickly.
You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 
“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."
You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"
You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"
His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 
You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 
“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"
“N-no.”
He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."
Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 
But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 
You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.
He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.
Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.
His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 
You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.
He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.
“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.
You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.
“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”
And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.
You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.
He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.
You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…
A finger presses inside and you moan.
“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.
“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.
He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”
Oh, fuck.
He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”
Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.
You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 
Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.
You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.
He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.
But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.
Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.
“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.
“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.
“Will you give me more?”
Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.
He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.
You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.
He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —
“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.
That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.
You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”
A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?
And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.
Maybe you already do.
Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —
He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.
“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”
You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.
“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”
You whimper.
“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.
If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.
“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”
Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.
“You can — uh — you can — ”
"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”
And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.
You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.
“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.
You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”
You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.
He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 
He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.
You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.
But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.
Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.
“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.
You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.
He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.
You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.
“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.
You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.
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effetsecndaires · 1 year ago
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— 𝐭𝐨𝐤𝐲𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐥𝐥-𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐠. (𝐡𝐜𝐬)
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INCLUDES: kazutora hanemiya, ken ryuguji, manjiro sano, hajime kokonoi, hanma shuji, keisuke baji, izana kurokawa
CONTENT WARNING: some misogyny
NOTE: I made these into headcanons, hope you don't mind 🤍 your gang is called 'jotei rengou' (literal translation: empress union) idk it sounded cool
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— KAZUTORA.
When Kazutora finds out about your gang, he's surprised, to say the least - and not in a good way. To him, women don't belong in the delinquent world and he'll act hostile towards your gang in response, immediately seeing you as an obstacle to overcome, something to get rid of before it can cause too much trouble.
He has some deeply ingrained beliefs about strength and power so he finds it hard to believe that a women-only gang could rival any of the male-dominated gangs of Tokyo anyway.
However, when a fight breaks out between your gangs, Kazutora finds himself intrigued and slightly impressed by your strength. He watches you, analyses your technique, and he eventually recognizes that you are worthy of your title and are obviously not here by mistake.
He ends up developing a strange but genuine sense of respect and admiration for you — though you'll never catch him admitting that out loud.
"So...you're the girl who claims to be leading one of Japan's biggest gangs?" he looks you up and down. "Don't think I'll go easy on you just because you're a woman."
"Ha. I wouldn't expect you to. I've heard a lot about you, Hanemiya. You've got quite the reputation, you know?" you smirked. "But let's see if you can back up that talk with action."
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— DRAKEN.
Draken's calm nature leads him to be open-minded and respectful towards you and your gang — doesn't matter if your first encounter is friendly or a little less amicable. He's surprised to see that a gang like yours exist, that's for sure, but he admires your strength and leadership qualities more than he worries about the 'women only' aspect of it.
He probably wouldn't want to get involved with you, though. He's totally against hitting women no matter what, so, with Mikey's approval, he'll try to find a common ground with you and offer compromises that could benefit both sides in order to avoid confrontation.
He might also harbour a tiny crush on you or one of your gang members.... But that's none of anyone's business.
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— MIKEY.
Mikey takes you and your gang very seriously right from the start, and he quickly learns that: 1) you're not to be messed with, and 2) underestimating and belittling you would be a huge mistake.
However, just like Draken, fighting and hurting women in any way is a no-no. Not because he doesn't think you're capable of fighting back, far from it, but because keeping women safe has always been one of Toman's top priorities. He'll only fight you if he absolutely has to, that means only if your gang is pure evil or an actual threat to Toman.
On the contrary, if your gangs grow closer over the years, he'll gladly accept a friendly fight with you or your girls.
Although he doesn't really show it, Mikey is very admirative of you — a feeling that only intensifies when he finds out that the Jotei Rengou actually shares most of Toman's beliefs and is really similar to it in multiple aspects. He's also surprised by your strength and strategic thinking, which earns his silent admiration.
It kind of makes him want to welcome women into his own gang.
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— KOKONOI.
Koko will treat your gang like any other gang. The fact that you're all women matters very little to him. You know what you got yourself into when you entered the world of street gangs and delinquency, therefore you must know what you're doing and you probably know how to fight back.
Koko immediately sees the power and influence you hold over your gang as you lead and command them, and he soon starts to see you as a valuable ally or potential rival, depending on how your gangs' first interaction unfolds.
He'd be lying if he said he wasn't intrigued by your backstory and your rise to power, because he knows you must've gone through hell and back before people actually started taking you seriously and accepted you as one of Japan's most notorious gangs.
"I don't remember inviting outsiders to my territory."
"I couldn't resist the chance to meet you!You're a hard one to find, you know?" he said, opening his arms and sticking his tongue out. "I've dreamed of this moment, Jotei Rengou."
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— HANMA.
The first time Valhalla and Jotei Rengou come face to face, Hanma laughs. He laughs because it's evident to him that you don't belong at the head of a gang, and he makes sure you know how unserious he thinks your 'pathetic little gang' is.
He tries to provoke you by insulting you and your methods, clearly wanting to test your patience. However, he quickly realizes that you're not easily swayed by his manipulation tactics, having no trouble firing back at him.
Hanma finds you intriguing, and although he won't openly admit it, he's secretly impressed by your ability to stay calm and command respect and loyalty from your gang members — who all look extremely hot and badass, he must admit.
Hanma quickly starts thinking about how he could use your influence and power to his own advantage. He sees you as a potential ally or a stepping stone to achieve his goals.
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— BAJI.
Baji is absolutely thrilled by the idea of facing such powerful women as opponents.
Though he can't do much without Mikey's approval, he sees this encounter as an opportunity for a great adrenaline-pumping battle. A rival gang is a rival gang, your gender doesn't hold him back in the slightest.
He's heard the rumors and whispers about the Jotei Rengou so he knows how serious you are about this — and although he'll approach you with a his usual cocky attitude, the last thing he'll do is underestimate you. The things he knows only fuels his determination further, and he looks forward to testing his skills against such interesting opponents.
"Well, well, well...what do we have here?" Baji smirks. "The Jotei Rengou and their infamous leader in person. Bold move showing up here, ladies."
"Hey, let's cut the small talk and make this interesting, shall we?" you smirk back, getting off your bike. "I'll show you what my gang's made of, and you boys can try to keep up."
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— IZANA.
Izana is intrigued, but he doesn't take your gang seriously. He's heard of you and the damage you've done around Tokyo, but he's convinced that someone else is behind your crimes. He firmly believes that a woman's strength couldn't possibly match up to a man's, let alone his own.
But when you effortlessly take down some of Tenjiku's strongest members, Izana's initial arrogance towards you immediately starts to fade. He finds himself getting more and more frustrated as your fighting style proves to be just as efficient as his own.
Despite being impressed, Izana refuses to let his feelings show. Instead, he starts analyzing your moves, determined to find a weakness to exploit and make you regret ever crossing his path.
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wolverineluvr · 10 months ago
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Yandere Giant Gojo
TW: Yandere, stalking, Gojo is a creep, the reader gets pregnant and has a kid, underwear sniffing, Gojo has breeder balls cus I said so, brief noncon mention, brief mention of jacking off, kidnapping.
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Giant Gojo who saw a cute little human and was immediately drawn to them. How could he not be? You're so adorable and tiny!
Giant Gojo who started to visit you whenever he could, at first you were scared of him, of course you were. He's well, a giant. At least 60+ feet tall.
Giant Gojo who you slowly warmed up to, despite being a giant, he just seemed like a human. He's actually pretty gentle with you too.
Giant Gojo who, whenever you didn't have enough food, would always visit with something you could eat, whether it be a deer, a bear, or just some bread he stole from another human.
Giant Gojo who always stared at you with the most loving and admiring look. He couldn't help it, you're so perfect.
Giant Gojo whose little crush quickly soured into an unhealthy obsession. He can't do anything anymore, all he wants to do is be with you, all he thinks about is you.
Yandere Giant Gojo who starts to watch you sleep through the window in your bedroom, he wishes so badly that he was small so he could be with you, or watch you more stealthily.
Yandere Giant Gojo who finds and forces a mage who gives him pills to be human, and a love potion.
Yandere Giant Gojo who doesn't use the potion on you, believing that you'll fall in love with him on your own.
Yandere Giant Gojo who watches you through your window or under your bed, watching you change regularly and stealing your underwear to sniff and or use to jack off.
Yandere Giant Gojo who soon develops a breeding kink, realizing how much seed he releases when he orgasms. He's sure it'll also help you love him if you realize how easily he can get you to have kids.
Yandere Giant Gojo who surprises you by showing you that he can be human, like you. "We can start planning the wedding now, m'kay?"
Yandere Giant Gojo who is surprised and sad when you say no, and when he finds out that you don't like him romantically.
Yandere Giant Gojo who forces you down as he undresses you, you'll love him after he gives you kids right?
Yandere Giant Gojo who, in the end, takes you back to his massive house.
Yandere Giant Gojo who keeps you locked up, even when you're pregnant. He visits you a lot in the tiny house he made you, when he's not well, a giant.
Yandere Giant Gojo who wasn't really sure what to do when you give birth, and took you back to your village to have the other humans help you, despite his unwavering want to keep you to himself.
Yandere Giant Gojo who, at times, holds his and your child above your head, threatening them so you do, or don't do, something.
Yandere Giant Gojo who decides he's glad he saw you that fateful little day, now you're his little human.
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Notes: might make this a series if ever wanted(js know I'm very slow w that stuff) but idk it was js a lil idea I had :3
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cowgurrrl · 11 months ago
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Something in the Orange
Pairing: Joel Miller x art teacher!reader
Author's note: this might become a mini series idk idk
Summary: A parent-teacher conference leads to trouble [4.0k]
Warnings: no outbreak! au, teacher things, Ellie being a little loner, Joel the Menace making a return, Joel gets both his daughters in this one because it's what he deserves, flirty flirt, i think that's it???
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You feel like you've been running a million miles a minute since you got in this morning. The second you could unlock the door, at least three students spilled into your room and chaotically ran to the kiln to collect their most recent pottery projects. One of them ended up shattering (the exact one you warned Colin about, but he didn't listen), and, as per high school custom, they were all screaming about it. You consoled the students just in time for your principal to walk by and ask about lesson plans which made you scramble through your backpack for your notebook even though you knew damn well there wasn't a single lesson plan in there. "Do you always have those lights on?" Principal Martinez asked, gesturing to the room's fairy lights and orange lamps. Leave it to administration to want to avoid art classrooms so much that they don't even know about the Big Light Philosophy. 
Since then, it's been class after class. You only have one more period before your planning period and then, finally, the end of the day. There are a hundred things to do, but you can't focus on any of them. You got so caught up in managing your classroom and helping students with the hardest parts of their portfolio work that you almost forgot you had a parent meeting scheduled during your planning period. 
Calling in parents for meetings about their children may be your least favorite part of your job. It makes you feel like a bad teacher, and parents usually don't feel great about getting called in on a workday to talk about their kid. Luckily, Ellie's dad, Joel, seemed more than happy to take time to talk about her. You rack your mind for his occupation as you add some detail to a canvas you've been hiding in your office and working on when you can. Was he a blue-collar worker? Or was he another stuck-up Austin transplant parent who's gonna accuse you of lying? He'd make the fifth parent who's made you cry this semester.
A knock on your locked door pulls you from your thoughts, and you quickly put away your painting before answering the door. "I told you she was in here!" One of your students, Dina, announces as she and a posse of three other kids you don't recognize push their way into the room. "Miss, you've gotta take that thing off your door; otherwise, people are gonna think you went home!"
"You mean the sign that says, 'planning period. Do not enter?'" You ask, and she snaps her fingers.
"That's the one." She says as she and her friends start putting their backpacks down at one of your high tables. You sigh and kick the door stopper into the threshold.
"You guys can't stay here. I have a meeting in five minutes."
"With who?"
"None of your business." 
"Miss!" Dina acts wounded, and you cross your arms over your chest, your keys jingling around your neck in the process.
"I am an adult with a college degree and the debt to show for it. You are a teenager with a still-developing brain. You have to listen to me," you say. "Wait, whose class are you supposed to be in right now?"
"Mr. Flynn's."
"Guys!" You groan before walking over to your desk and quickly writing up a hall pass for them. "I know you don't like math-"
"No, we don't like Mr. Flynn." Dina cuts you off.
"Or math!" One of her friends adds, and you shoot them a (loving) disapproving look. 
"Whatever you don't like, you can't keep hiding out here. Mr. Flynn is two seconds away from trying to get me fired for how often I let his kids in here during class, and I actually like this job, so," you rip the hall pass off the pad and hand it to Dina. As they pack their stuff up, a tall, bearded man steps into your classroom and makes eye contact with you. "Out, out, out! I love you. You're gonna change the world one day, but please get out." You blow them kisses as you usher them out of the room. 
"Are you Ellie's art teacher?" He asks, a confused look on his face, and you nod.
"Yes, I am. Sorry about that. They're still figuring out that I have work to get done even when I don't have a class," you explain, a little breathless from running all over the place and getting caught off-guard. You really do try to act a little more professional with parents, but the kids threw you off. The kettle whistling behind your desk doesn't make it any better. "Is there anything I can get you? Coffee? Tea?" You pick up a random mug off your desk but find it full of murky water. "Paint water?"
"Are you allowed to have an electric kettle in here?" He asks, and you laugh nervously as you find a clean mug and your tea box. 
"I won't tell if you won't." You say. He stands there awkwardly as you pour yourself some tea, and you realize you didn't pull a chair up for him. "Um, we can sit..." you glance around your messy classroom until you find a clear table and gesture toward it. "Here." He follows your lead, and you take a deep breath as you sit down.
"You gonna be okay?" He asks, the hint of a smirk on his lips. His curly hair looks golden brown in the low light, and his round eyes have a little knowing twinkle. You take another breath to compose yourself and nod. 
"Yes. Sorry. It's been a long day." 
"Don't worry bout it. I'm sure they run you ragged."
"Is it that obvious?"
"Well, you do have paint in your hair." He says, and panic seizes in your chest. You're never more aware of how crazy your job can be until you meet Real Adults. Even if you can't remember what he does for a living, you still have to admit that you look a little silly next to each other: you, with your paint-stained sunflower dress and markered hands, and him, with his black shirt and jeans. He doesn't have any apparent stains or splatters on his clothes, but he's broad with thick biceps. He must work with his hands or something within that capacity. You clear your throat and try to get back on track with the meeting.
"Uh, so Mr. Miller, the reason I called you here today was to talk to you about Ellie," you start. "First, I just wanna say that she is an amazing student. She always does her work and engages thoughtfully with the material. I really do enjoy having her in class." 
"Well, that's certainly good to hear. She talks a whole lot bout this class and you, so... it's nice to place a face to the name," he says, adjusting his position on the stool. "But I have a feelin' you didn't call me down here just to tell me how great my kid is." 
"She is great. She's extremely talented, smart, and funny, but she spends more time in my classroom during lunch than anything else. I'm worried about her making friends and finding a community here at school. I've tried convincing her to join the art club, but she's hesitant. During class, she just sits with her headphones in and draws. She really doesn't like talking to anybody but me." You wait for blame to be assigned to you or get lectured, but it never comes. He just sighs, and he deflates a little in his chair.
"She's been through a lot this year. Well, her whole life, really, but 'specially recently," he says dejectedly. "What can I do for her?"
"There's an art show this Friday night here at the school. It'll all be student work from across the district. I thought if maybe you or... whatever adults she has at home came with her to this, she might feel more comfortable talking to her peers or even want to submit some of her own stuff."
"We can do that. I'll get off work early and ask her uncle if he wants to come," he's quick with his solution, and you're a little shocked. You rarely get parents, let alone fathers, who act this swiftly when something is going on with their kids. "Is there anythin' else goin' on that I should know bout?" 
"Uh, no. Like I said, she's a great kid. You should be really proud." You say, and the concerned wrinkle between his eyebrows disappears with a proud smile. 
"Thank you," he mumbles, suddenly shy. "And thanks for carin' so much bout her. It's nice to know she's got someone lookin' out for her here." You don't know what to say, so you just nod and stare at him. You know, like an idiot. It takes a chuckle from him to snap you out of your thoughts, and blood rushes to your cheeks.
"Yes, of course. She's a good kid." You say. 
"You said that already." 
"I bet you'd be a little scatterbrained if you were at the mercy of two hundred teenagers all day."
"You're absolutely right. I would be," he says, smirking devastatingly. "Someone ought to get you a coffee or somethin' if you're dealing with all that." 
"People like you should go argue with the school board. I'm sure you'd be popular with all the teachers." 
"That'd be a first. I think I might've been the least favorite parent for all of my girls' teachers." 
"Well, I find that hard to believe." 
"Yeah?" He asks, leaning forward just a little, and you nod, smiling. Your brain struggles to come up with something to say, and you're a little embarrassed at your silence, but luckily, your projector saves the day by buzzing loudly and making the picture on the board cut in and out. You mumble a quick apology before getting up and climbing up on a desk to jiggle a piece back into place. You hear Joel curse behind you, and when you turn to see what the problem is, you see him holding his arms out behind you. "Do you stand on desks often?" 
"Only every day. I haven't fallen yet this year." You laugh at his exasperated expression and turn back to the projector. It's still making a weird noise, so you move it around a little more, moving the desk under your feet, and Joel stabilizes it with a sigh. 
"How long has it been doin' that?" 
"Couple months. I keep putting in maintenance requests, but nobody ever comes to fix it."
"I can fix it for ya," he says simply, and you look down at him. "I've got tools in my truck. It wouldn't take long at all."
"Really?" You ask, and he nods. 
"It'd make me feel better knowin' you're not almost breakin' your neck every day."
"You mean, standing on a decades-old desk to mess with an ancient piece of equipment isn't OSHA compliant?"
"Please," he says, grabbing your ankle when the desk wobbles under you, and you laugh at his worry. "Let me fix it for you before you give me a heart attack." You think about declining and just putting in another work order, but the likelihood that anyone would actually come and fix it is slim to none. Plus, you really shouldn't be climbing on top of desks every day. You pretend to think it over for a few more seconds just to watch the worry play across his features as his grip on your ankle gets tighter.
"Only if you really mean it." 
"I really mean it," he says, offering you his other hand. "Now, would you please get down?"
"Fine." You say and take his hand. You bend to safely get yourself down, but Joel moves his other hand from your ankle to your waist and basically hoists you to the ground. Once your feet touch the floor, he doesn't let you go immediately like he's trying to figure out if you somehow got hurt when he wasn't looking. There's a part of your brain that's aware of how inappropriate this would look to any passersby, but you're also highly aware of how warm his big hand is on your hip. 
"Ya alright?" He asks softly, and you nod, taking a conscious step back from his arms.
"Yes, thank you."
"Good," he says, also taking a step back. "Let me go get my tools, and I'll get that fixed for you." 
"Perfect. I'll be here." You stand there, staring at each other awkwardly, for another moment before he turns on his heels and walks out of the classroom. The second he's out of your line of sight, you bury your head in your hands and start silently freaking out. 
What the fuck are you doing? How did a parent-teacher meeting turn into him hauling you off a desk and offering to fix your projector? Technically, nothing incriminating has happened, and it needs to stay that way. It doesn't matter if you think he's attractive or like how he worries about everything. He's Ellie's dad. Teachers have gotten fired for much less than this, and you're not willing to risk your career because of one guy. 
When he gets back with his toolbox, you're sitting at your desk and sorting through assignments like a reasonable adult. He doesn't say anything as he climbs up on the same desk you were standing on and begins messing with the mechanics of the equipment. You each work in silence for a few minutes before a screw clatters to the ground, and he grumbles something under his breath. "Do you mind..." he starts, pointing toward the lost piece. 
"Not at all." You cover your anxiety with your chipper teacher voice and search for the screw with your phone flashlight. You find it tucked between canvases, carefully pick it up, and walk over to where he's standing, waiting for him to be ready for it.
"It looks like it's just an old piece in here. I'm sure you can order a new one, and I can come back and install it if ya want," he explains, looking down at you. You probably look stupid just standing there with a tiny screw in your hand, but he doesn't laugh. "D'you mind handing me that tool to your right?" He asks, and you blindly reach for the tool you think he's talking about. "Your other right." He corrects, and you flush in embarrassment. 
"Sorry. I never was a very good woodshop student." You say, and he laughs once he has the tool in hand. 
"My girls are the same way. Just askin' ‘em to hold a flashlight while I work on their car is like pullin' teeth," he says fondly. "Speaking of which, is there a reason the lights aren't on in here?"
"The lamp light is less harsh, and it helps students focus. Plus, nobody likes coming into a bright classroom first thing in the morning." You explain, and he hums.
"If I'd had a teacher like you growing up, I would've been at school much more than I was."
"You didn't like school?"
"Hated it," he says, opening his hand for the screw. Once you drop the tiny thing into his large palm, he straightens up, and you can barely hear it going back into its rightful place. "'S a miracle I graduated." 
"That was me in college." 
"Now, I don't believe that for a second." 
"Really?" You laugh, and he nods.
"Someone like you, with your pretty dresses and all that empathy, was meant to be a teacher." 
"I wasn't always like this," you evade the compliment despite the butterflies in your stomach. "Being a teacher was never on my radar until I graduated. A lot of my life was never on my radar until then." He puts the hood of the projector back on and climbs down from the desk until he's standing in front of you again, wiping his hands on a red handkerchief from his toolbox. 
"Well, with the way you carry yourself, I never woulda guessed." He says. He opens his mouth to say something more, but the sharp tone of the bell ringing cuts him off. You jump at the sound and look at the clock as if it were wrong. 
"I'm so sorry. Time must've gotten away from me. Thank you so much again, Mr. Miller, for coming in to talk with me and looking at the projector. I hope to see you and Ellie on Friday." You say quickly as the sound of rowdy kids fills the hallway, and you hold your hand out to him. He takes it and squeezes it firmly.
"You can call me Joel. Mr. Miller makes me feel old." He says, and you smile. He doesn't look old, unlike the other dads you've encountered. Sure, he's got some gray at his temples and in his beard, but it suits him. 
"Joel, it is then." You resolve. His hand lingers in yours for a little too long before finally pulling away. "Well, Joel, unless you want to elbow through teenagers, I'd suggest you hide out here for a few more minutes." He does happily, even helping you carry supplies to your car once the hallways have cleared out enough. He's a proper gentleman, slinging your backpack over his shoulder and opening doors for you. You part only once everything is in your trunk, and he bids you goodnight with a charming smile that fills your thoughts on your drive home.
Ellie surprises you the next day as you're setting up the classroom. Normally, she isn't in until right before the bell rings, so seeing her this early is a little bit of a shock. The ink staining her hands is not. "Hey, dude. What's going on?" You ask. "Did you get breakfast from the cafeteria today? I heard Mrs. Hodges has those French toast sticks that everyone loves. You can probably get two servings if you run." 
"No, I already ate. My dad and uncle had to leave early this morning, so we got breakfast. Speaking of which," she says as she takes off her backpack and pulls a cup of iced coffee out of her water bottle pocket. "This is for you. We didn't know what you liked, so we got a vanilla latte or something." 
"Oh, El! You didn't have to do that. Thank you, honey." You say, and she sets it on your desk for you to enjoy once you don't have paintbrushes in hand. "If this is your way of getting a good grade on your piece, I already told you that you have nothing to worry about."
"It wasn't my idea. It was my dad's." She says nonchalantly before moving to the back of the classroom to get her sketch book. You, however, are confused and secretly pleased that Joel thought of you when he didn't have to. You find a message scribbled on the side when you reach for the cup to take a sip. 
Thanks again. See you Friday. -J
You turn to hide your smile from Ellie, but she's so deep in her work that you doubt she would've noticed anyway. You put some music on, and you and Ellie work silently on your projects until the bell rings and the day starts. 
The rest of the week goes by without a hitch, meaning that nobody accidentally ingested paint, and you only had to have one Come to Jesus talk with your Art 1 class. When Friday night rolls around, you're excited to see all the students work and treat yourself by wearing a new shirt with black scribbles all over it and black dress pants. You figure you should look as art teachery as possible for an art teacher event. 
By the time you get to the school, the hallways are buzzing with students dragging their parents from one piece to another and administrators praising their art programs even though you know not one of them has seen the inside of an art classroom in months. You make small talk with some of your students and their parents before finding a way out of the conversation and letting yourself wander through the makeshift gallery. You love your kids, but you really don't want them breathing down your neck as you look at all the art. You're almost at the end when you hear a familiar voice calling your name, and you turn to find Ellie walking toward you with Joel and, who you assume to be her uncle, next to her. 
"Hey, kid! I'm so happy to see you here!" You say sincerely, and she smiles shyly. You turn to her uncle and hold your hand out to introduce yourself. 
"Tommy. We sure have heard a whole lot bout you at home." He says with a smirk, and you laugh. 
"All good things, I hope."
"Of course. Ellie just bout worships the ground you walk on," he says. "Joel was singin' your praises, too." 
"Alright, I think that's enough. Why don't y'all go walk around, and I'll catch up with ya?" He suggests, and Tommy chuckles. Another teacher calls Ellie's name from down the hallway, and she's quick to drag Tommy off to meet him, leaving you and Joel alone. He's replaced his black shirt with a light blue dress shirt, and it looks like he's recently trimmed his beard. He looks nice.
"Singing praises, huh?" You raise your eyebrows at him, and he smiles sheepishly. "Thank you for the coffee the other morning, by the way. It was a really nice surprise." 
"Figured it was the least I could do to thank you for takin' such good care of my girl." 
"Well, thank you. I owe you." 
"You don't owe me a thing," he says. "Although, Tommy was a little upset that I didn't bill you for lookin' at the projector." 
"Was he?" You ask, and he nods.
"Oh, yeah," he laughs. "Said next time I should, at least, ask you on a date."
"Mr. Miller-"
"I thought you agreed to call me Joel." He raises his eyebrows in a silent challenge, and you shake your head, fighting a smile.
"Joel, while I'm flattered by the offer from someone so handsome-"
"You think I'm handsome?"
"I can't date my students' parents." You say, ignoring his question, but even then, the playful look on his face doesn't fade. "Well, I can leave you to it. I know Ellie will probably want to show you around." 
"Right. Of course," he says. "It's really nice to see you."
"You, too. I'm just glad I didn't have paint in my hair this time."
"I don't know. I thought it was kinda cute." You feel yourself blush at his words, but you have to shut it down before it can become anything more than flattery. You take a deep breath and try not to let that stupid smirk weaken your knees as he watches you.
"Goodnight, Joel."
"Goodnight, ma'am." He says, tipping his head politely before sauntering down the hallway like he owns the place. Trouble, you think to yourself. But you can handle trouble. It's in your job description, for Christ's sake. 
So, you brush off the flirting and try to ignore how his kindness and sweet words made you feel. You absolutely cannot flirt with the parent of one of your students. Dating is completely off the table. You can handle this like an adult. You have to. 
After a cold shower and a leftover dinner, you check your email once more before going to bed that night. Sitting in your inbox with alarming clarity is an email from Ellie with the subject line: Art Club. Her email is somehow just as short as her subject line. 
Simply, "When can I start -E." 
TAGLIST: @abbyhaslongshorts @kiwiharrykiwi @sumsworldz @myloveistoolittle @anavatazes @marantha
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dykesynthezoid · 3 months ago
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I do think we’re getting at least some escalation of devil’s minion in s3 btw. And I don’t think that’s even me being hopeful or optimistic I think it’s literally just logical.
I’ve seen people say oh, but devil’s minion happens in QOTD, and s3 is TVL; and firstly, they’ve definitely made it sound like some elements of queen of the damned are going to be present in s3. Secondly, I suspect season 3 is going to end with the lead up to Lestat’s San Francisco concert. So the whole season will be both Lestat backstory + the set up for the events of QOTD. And devil’s minion happens, guess what, before Lestat’s San Francisco concert. It would almost not make sense to not at least touch on it while the other story beats are culminating up to that moment. Like, Daniel and Armand are already present in the story (where they aren’t in the book in the modern day storyline), why would you not continue their storylines to the next logical step?
Also, I think you have to consider just how many new characters and storylines QOTD introduces and how daunting that can be to absorb if you’re unfamiliar. Waiting to do anything with devil’s minion until season 4 means that’s just one more new storyline to have to inject into a narrative already very crowded with exposition. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that, and I suspect the writers are pretty aware of that.
And frankly like. What other storylines would Daniel and Armand be getting? Like how are either of their stories supposed to move forward without, y’know, each other? Are we supposed to expect all of season 3 just to be one big pause button on both their larger narratives? That seems very silly. Daniel at least has the journey of adjusting to vampirism, but Armand especially is like. His semi-redemption and character evolution comes from devil’s minion. That’s the only real next step for him.
And I mean. Look at Assad and Eric. I don’t think Rolin Jones could convince them to wait a whole other season for something to happen if he tried. I know, I know it’s easy to be like “oh but maybe it’s just actors being silly” but compare how open they’re being about it now and how much more tight lipped they were in between seasons one and two. It’s night and day. It is a very very different vibe. And apparently, Assad has been plenty excited about it this entire time, so he was actually somehow managing to keep his mouth shut before. But now maybe he doesn’t need to, because he knows season 3 will at least offer something in the way of that development.
I think it’s entirely possible we won’t necessarily see the full “culmination” of their relationship until season 4, but I do think season 3 will at least have development and escalating tensions that are undeniable. I think it’ll likely start out slow and ramp up as the season continues. I’m not going to panic if we don’t get much in the first few episodes or if it takes until episode five to see Daniel’s turning. That might be needed, honestly, in terms of giving Lestat his necessary focus. But I think more small pieces will begin to accumulate, will escalate to a place of higher tension by the mid season, and then the finale will include some type of reveal or emotional climax, setting things up going into season 4.
And you know what, it’s worth mentioning: things have happened faster on this show than I expected before! I did not expect Daniel to be turned at the end of season 2. I thought we probably had a whole other season to go before that happened. “Well they were afraid of cancellation” / “well Eric just wanted to be a vampire so badly” and will these things also not apply to season 3/Eric and Assad wanting devil’s minion?? Idk babes. I’m doing the math and it doesn’t seem that crazy to me
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cicerfics · 2 months ago
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Re: the headcanons I shared in this post...
Man. I really do enjoy headcanoning Q as the World's Worst Date.
Like, I adore Q. He's my special baby boy. And I think Bond adores Q, too. I think Bond believes Q is the best date.
But on a date with anyone else, I feel like Q just sucks so bad.
First of all, there's only a 30% chance he'll show up. He may get busy in the labs and forget he had a date. He may have one of his eternal and recurring 'work emergencies' (which he always refuses to explain). One of his cats may develop a slightly upset tummy, and of course Q is not going to keep the date if one of his babies might be ill! Never mind that you booked this restaurant six months in advance or that those theater tickets are nonrefundable and cost you £200 apiece!
But even if he manages to keep the date, I feel like Q is still just The Worst.
He will talk, very passionately and enthusiastically, about some really boring topic his date absolutely does not care about. (Might be something to do with physics. Might be some obscure detail related to 17th century French oil painting. Might be something about cat biology. Who knows! Q has so many interests and opinions, and he would like to share all of them!)
He will 'well, actually...' you. Not with malice! Not to mansplain! Just because he thinks being accurate and factual is extremely important, and of course you want to know if you're mistaken about something...don't you??
He will debate things over the dinnertable. He will provoke a passionate, determined, bare-knuckle academic debate at a candlelight restaurant while a violinist plays in the corner, because that is what's fun for him and he forgets this is not always fun for everyone else.
Q is extremely cute and extremely kindhearted and extremely loyal and really a lovely partner overall! ...But he literally never gets asked on a second date.
Until he meets James H. Bond, who thinks it's very fun and interesting when Q infodumps at him about nanotechnology! He delights in Q arguing with him about increasingly pedantic things, stubbornly refusing to cede any ground whatsoever!
And of course Bond understands about cancelled dates and work emergencies. (He is probably at HQ, too, dealing with the same emergency!). And of course he would not expect Q to keep a date if one of the cats are unwell.
Honestly, I think Bond is very contemptuous of the men who previously dated Q and foolishly declined to ask him on a second date. (You couldn't handle it when Q argued with you for 20 minutes about the aesthetic merits of neoclassical architecture? Skill issue, tbh. Bond is built different. Arguing is such a fun activity! The best part of any date! Needling and pestering and provoking one's partner is the height of enjoyment! Truly, some people have no appreciation for the finer things in life...)
IDK, I just like it when 00Q are meant2be in the most eccentric of ways.
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guardian5tiger3 · 7 months ago
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An honest love reading (general)
Pick a picture -
1 2
3 4
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Group one
A cycle has just been completed in terms of love and romance and either you or someone else did not this to happen. They're almost like, dramatic about that.someone involved , you or someone connected to yourself somehow, is overly focused on love and it stresses them out and it feels extreme though I can't pick up on any situation extreme enough to justify this. Someone could have insomnia and or hair loss you could also possibly see someone's tiredness in their eyes. Someone's money might be affected. I keep picking up on a a group of, as in multiple, people. Either someone here is polyamorous and if that's the case it has something to do with denial about something or the want to be in control of something or someone, or for others there's a group of people you're dealing with and they're "heated " about something . I also heard " eyeing you" who the hell uses phrases like this if you know that's a confirmation for ya. You have a group of people somewhat obsessed they seem like obsessed people in general they may be obsessed with something to do with you or just you, I'm also picking up on one individual who has something to do with you that (is very weird, and the groups I'm picking up on more or less give me weird vibes,) well connected to this person I'm getting something about childhood and I'm seeing candy this is really weird and I just involuntarily made an angry or confused look with my eyebrows you know I pushed them down I don't know why. This person may have known you for a long time or thinks they do or something idk this is super strange g make sure you're not overly trusting of every single person ever in your life you know. Someone also could be trying to take something that isn't theirs. Lock your doors , literally. Wow.sorry y'all . Genuinely. I also am somehow picking up on someone's long straight hair and something about glitter. I also saw a purple dress.
Group Two
You guys are easily manipulated and people who are going to want to manipulate you can notice this probably way more than you can about yourself also someone needs to not bite their fork when they take a bite of food it's bad for your teeth I don't know how or why that would come up for me to say sorry. Somebody needs to literally or metaphorically open a window. Um you're on the path to love and it will happen exactly when it's supposed to how it's supposed to with who it's supposed to and honestly unless you really go out of your way you may not have any romance at all until then even if that isn't what you want like for some reason I guess it depends but either your soul wants people in the meantime or you want someone sooner or what I don't know it just don't work like that though you know. I'm generally getting like if you're the type to hope your person isn't with anyone else before they meet you then this is probably for you also. Or your person is like this and I guess they are somewhat powerful cause therefore that's the way it's gonna be and in the meantime I guess you're gonna have to be solo. Somehow this seems better and more productive for your personal development than learning by Interacting with other people and being with "karmics" and stuff.
Group Three
I'm seeing two energies that are basically, literally, nothing alike. Yet somehow they're paired up. You're with this person right now in the past or future or you wanted or want to be with them lol. Some of you it's your soulmate ,though and that's really special and actually really cool and refreshing. Like 99% of you are supposed to at least at one point be with someone like this to you. Or for like very few of you this is just about your signs like fire and water but I really doubt that's as far as it goes you are probably very different either way. You guys are very deep and cool refreshing people very beautiful , good listeners and balanced. Someone has ADHD or something else so you might doubt the good listener thing I'm getting but I think you pay attention to detail or something like somehow this is still infact accurate and you may be don't see it about yourself . I think you all are very deep mentally and have a deep capacity to hold a lot lot lot of information, knowledge, wisdom, n stuff. A lot of people might be drawn to you or notice you and also possibly a lot of different types of people as something about you a lot of different people can still connect with somehow. Yeah also someone's a hater here though and they might tease you with something somehow so I really hope you stay aware of that possibility, realize this about whoever they are and stand up for yourself basically I feel like you have the potential to retaliate and as long as it is nothing illegal I kind of feel like saying I want you to . ????????? I don't know o feel like it would be really satisfying maybe to your guides or it is when you do, fight back or argue cause you're good at it and it would not be easy to win against you or come up with any comeback especially if you plan something. Wow. Hahaha. I'm leaving it here.
I heard desperado and I know three songs called that well two are just remixes of the og you could look up the og or the Mike bars desperado lol . Or just the word maybe is significant, goes with your picture anyway. I feel like most of you that will hear the song will just like the song lol . I can dig it
Group Four
There was a conditional love given and when this was taken away it had someone really stressed out and hurt. Someone was being a complete dick that was giving love conditionally and then stopped . I feel like the shit they do or say is old as f... Like it's ugly and getting old man anyway. This very well could be past energy like long long ago for some of you. This person might have lied. They might be selfish. They may be downplaying your come up or they will when you do come up. Or some , even saying you don't deserve it but I'm being shown you very clearly do. Like this person only gets dustier through time nobody is ever gonna pick up this old kick knack and undust them theyre old and lame. I'm picking up on like, when people say the type of person that peaked in high school. Yeah so this person has their qualities but eventually everyone's like ok whatever yawn. They're definitely super greedy as I just got a card saying " GREED " lol. In terms of future love y'all will be good I'm picking up generally most of you just need to become more comfortable within yourself first and I'm picking up on like cozy night chilling and watching movies and stuff by yourself or with a pet even a friend but you get me just learning to be content also and have good times like that without the need for someone else romantically. Either way somehow some time after you get into that energy a person will come along softly and surely and it will be really nice and happy . Around that time maybe shortly after you will have something happen positive when it comes to work or their work . I also channeled the movie my big fat Greek wedding as I was channeling this last part haha so I thought I should mention that, I know I'm partially Greek and always loved that movie. Someone might like telling stories ? But yeah in the movie she has a glow up and then she sees this guy she thought was cute again and things just worked out and he asked her out and they fell in love it was just simple smooth and sweet and the timing matched up with what I said may happen for you so that's really cute y'all stay hopeful and focus on relaxation. And for some of you if you know this is true though also studying .
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whendeeplybored · 5 months ago
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We need to talk about this as a community.
I understand being hater. I get it! Like it will always get some people going, it keeps the world balanced but the zk haters are just so terrible at it.
Like what is this here:
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?????????
DID👏🏿 YOU 👏🏿 WATCH 👏🏿 THE 👏🏿 SHOW👏🏿
In what world Zuko and Katara don't have parallels? The parallels are actually so blatantly obvious and numerous a toddler could point them out to you.
I just don't get it. If you wanna criticise zk might as well do it right like just say you don't like enemies to lovers or you don't think they were developed enough or idk some other logical reason.
But every day I wake up and the antis come up with new takes to justify their hatred and bullying that truly makes me wonder...
Did they actually watch the damn show? 🤔
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