#if they knew their teacher has spent all weekend obsessing over shows

[cinnarina]

me??? writing fan fiction instead of lesson planning??? never!!!

[five-rivers]

Adoption (part 2)

A gift for @a-flower-lover!  This wound up being more along the lines of vignettes...  Little snapshots into Danny’s life after being adopted by Clockwork.  I hope that’s ok!  (PART 1)

.

Mr. Lancer had met Charles Worth before, albeit briefly. The man had fostered a number of Casper High students and with that responsibility came parent-teacher conferences. He had struck Mr. Lancer as being steady and reliable, if, perhaps, impersonal, despite his predilection for clocks and ominous announcements. A decent foster parent, if not... ideal.

Mr. Worth just didn't seem to connect with his fosters, although he certainly didn't neglect them. Then, too, were the persistent rumors that his home was haunted.

Alright. So, Mr. Lancer didn't think Charles Worth was really a children person. Oh, he was a good person! It took one to do well as a foster parent, but... yeah.

Which was why the scene in front of him surprised him so much. Not the who of it, but the what.

The who was Daniel Fenton and Charles Worth waiting outside the office. The what was smiling and having a conversation. True, Mr. Fenton's smile looked like it was pasted on over several layers of anxiety, but it was genuine.

"Mr. Worth, Mr. Fenton?" he said, tamping down his surprise. "Come on in."

"Hi," said Mr. Fenton, his voice hoarse.

Mr. Worth smiled and nodded, pushing him up with his cane.

But Mr. Fenton must have noticed the curious look Mr. Lancer was giving him. "I knew Cl- Uh. Mr. Worth before this." He winced and smiled widely to cover it up. "So, uh, make up work? Since I missed the past week?"

"Yes, well, circumstances being what they are," aka his parents trying to murder him in public, in broad daylight (and didn't that give Mr. Lancer a chill?), "your teachers have put together a few packets for you to look over this weekend. They should get you more or less up to speed with where your classes are. I'm also willing to stay after school, to help you with anything you've missed in my classes."

.

Jazz knocked on the door of the Worth house. She had been made aware, via various supernatural (she did not particularly appreciate writing suddenly appearing on her fogged-up bathroom mirror) and mundane (Danny did have her phone number) means, that the man known as Charles Worth was actually the ghost known as Clockwork.

How this had occurred was not entirely clear to her. She assumed ghost powers, specifically time travel, were involved somehow.

But, to be honest, that didn't really matter to her. It was secondary, less than.

What was important here was that she hadn't been legally allowed to see her little brother in over a month. To keep her parents from contacting him. To keep her from letting her parents near him. Because they were legally barred from seeing him.

Because they had tried to kill him.

Jazz planned on never seeing her parents again, as soon as she got all of her and Danny's things from their house.

But now that prohibition had been lifted, because Clockwork had forced through what had to be the speediest adoption in the history of adoptions, and Danny was now legally his son. In the eyes of both humans and ghosts. Which was... Well. Danny seemed to be excited about it, anyway. He'd looked up to Clockwork for a while, from what he told Jazz.

Internally, Jazz had more than a bit of trepidation. She didn't know what adoption meant to ghosts, didn't have any context for it. And ghosts, even the good ones, even Danny, tended to be... obsessive. Extreme. She wasn't sure how that would translate when it came to interpersonal relationships.

The door creaked open, ever so slowly, the squeak it made grating on her eardrums. At first, it appeared to have opened on its own, then a hand gripped the edge of the door, and Clockwork, in human guise, leaned out from behind it.

Jazz raised an eyebrow.

Clockwork raised one right back. "This house is haunted, you know," he said.

Okay, never mind. The only thing she had to worry about was the fact that her brother and his mentor both had terrible senses of humor.

"Hi, Jazz!"

Being used to having a half-ghost brother, Jazz only yelped a little bit at his unexpected appearance behind her. Then she sighed and ruffled his hair. He hugged her and then bounced over the lintel into the house.

"Come on! I want to show you my room! It's so cool!" His voice became fainter as he went farther into the house, until his last exclamation was an eerie whisper.

Jazz looked at Clockwork as she stepped inside. "Is he doing that on purpose?"

Clockwork smiled blandly. "I am very fond of the acoustics in this house."

She looked at her surroundings with a skeptical eye. "It seems... dark in here."

"We are ghosts," said Clockwork. "Daniel is very excited to show you his room, by the way."

"He's human, too, don't forget," said Jazz.

"I won't."

.

The house was creepy.

Really creepy.

This was coming from someone who had spent most of her life living under the same roof as two ghost-obsessed mad scientists.

But Danny seemed to enjoy it, and he was the one living here. It wasn't like there was anything wrong with the house. Or anything in the house. It was just... off.

Danny was half-ghost, however, so maybe this was something he needed. Perhaps not all of his peppiness could be attributed to being the heck away from his murderous former parents.

Even so. Jazz had a duty, both as a big sister and an aspiring psychologist.

"I already read it," said Clockwork, setting a cup of tea down in front of her.

"What?"

"The book you were about to give me. I've already read it. And a number of others. I am not the kind of person who goes into things unprepared."

Danny rolled into the kitchen on the ceiling. This was easy to ignore. After her life, an Exorcist reference made by her over-excited younger brother, was, well. Underwhelming.

(Okay, she was a little distracted, but only by his glee.)

"Well," she said. "That's good."

.

"I know this house is out of the way," said Clockwork, craning his neck to look up at his coworker, "but you are rather conspicuous."

"Hm. Am I?" asked Pandora, craning her neck down to look at her comparatively tiny colleague.

"Yes. At that size, humans with average eyesight will be able to see you from town."

Pandora looked out over the trees. "Interesting," she said, mildly. "Do you think the ghost hunters will come?"

"You've spoken to Daniel."

"Yes. He stopped by earlier today, on his way to visit Mattingly. Although, I suppose you knew that already."

"Indeed I did. May I ask, is it your intention to lure the ghost hunters here, fight them, defeat them, and then leave them just close enough to here to constitute a breach of their terms of bail and the restraining order against them?"

"I am not terribly well-versed in human law," said Pandora, "but, why, yes. That is exactly what I'm doing. Best to get it done while Daniel is visiting friends, isn't it?"

"Yes. If you had done this while he was here, I would be significantly more annoyed." Clockwork smiled the sanguine smile of a parental figure who would commit murder if their child was upset.

Pandora returned a matching grin, one that promised retribution against persons who had harmed said child in the past. "Please, Clockwork. You know me better than that. I wouldn't subject him to being in the presence of those fools."

"Good," said Clockwork, eyes glinting.

.

"Hey, Clockwork? Do you know why there were police cars driving down the- Oh. Hello?" He stopped at the sight of an unfamiliar woman sitting at the dinning room table, next to Clockwork. He blinked and tilted his head to the side. "Wait. Pandora?"

"Perceptive," said the superficially human olive-skinned woman. "You seemed so happy when you stopped by, earlier. I thought I would come check in on you."

"You didn't have to," said Danny, beaming.

"Pandora has been trying to convince me to set her up as one of my relatives," said Clockwork, rolling his eyes. "Would you care for a cup of tea, Daniel?"

"Umm," said Danny, dubiously. "I'll try one, I guess. Does that mean you'll be my aunt?"

Pandora smiled. "Why, yes, it does."

Clockwork groaned theatrically.

.

"Ah," said Mr. Lancer, at the next parent-teacher conference. "Are you Mr. Worth's wife?"

"No," said Pandora, grinning. "I'm his sister."

Mr. Lancer looked back and forth between the two very different-looking entities. "I... see."

"We're adopted," said Clockwork.

"Oh! Alright then. Now, about Daniel..."

.

It was a bit strange to see Danny with so much energy, Sam reflected. Strange, but good.

It just went to show how drained he had become over time, how much the constant ghost attacks and worry, all the lies and stress and impossible expectations had worn away at him over time. She hadn't seen her friend this happy since freshman year. If that.

On the other hand...

"Dude," said Tucker. "Your house is spooky. And this is coming from someone who's been inside a literal mad science lab."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Mad science labs are campy, not spooky. Besides, you knew coming in that this house was haunted." He draped himself over the back of the couch, rolling until he was 'sitting' upside-down. "Anyway, what kind of movie do you want to watch? We've got a bunch, because Clockwork apparently collects media from doomed timelines."

"He's got a hobby?" asked Sam.

"Yeah, three," said Danny. "Gardening- you should talk to him about that, by the way, I think he'd like it- baking, and alternate timeline movies. And some books, too, I think. He's got a huge library back in Long Now. I've read like. Two books from it."

Clockwork's voice floated in from the other room. "You've read significantly more than that, Daniel."

"I guess," said Danny, doubtfully. He flopped off the couch, picked himself up, and started prodding at a shelf of movies. "This is from a timeline where the Earth got beaned by a massive asteroid. It's, like, a romcom, but it was made when everyone knew the asteroid was coming. This one is, uh, this is actually a dramatization of real events, apparently, but their timeline split from ours in like the fifties, so the events are pretty wild." He waved the DVD at them. "It's surreal?"

"How'd they die?" asked Tucker.

"Wacky superscience. No, really. Irradiated the entire planet."

"How do you know?" asked Sam.

"Oh, Clockwork puts notes on the boxes. He thinks it's interesting. And there does seem to be some correlation between how cursed the movies are and how bad the timeline was. Which maybe shouldn't surprise me? I mean, if they were bad timelines..." He shrugged. "Oh, this is a CGI Lion King. I can tell you: very cursed. Absolutely soulless. And this is from a timeline where copyright laws weren't changed, so Mickey Mouse and a bunch of other stuff was in the public domain."

"Isn't that a good timeline?" joked Sam.

"You'd think so," agreed Danny. "But apartheid in South Africa apparently never stopped, and they got a nuclear bomb, and, well... World War Three."

"Is that like, a domino effect, or...?"

"I'm not sure... Anyway. Uh. Genre?" He clapped his hands together.

Tucker leaned forward. "I want the wildest version of the Matrix you have."

"Ooh, good choice. There are, like, six with Will Smith. I haven't watched them all yet, but I think the one where they've got another sequel and Zion is also a- Wait, I shouldn't spoil it."

"After that, can you see if there's a non-crappy version of Dracula?" asked Sam.

"Sure. I haven't seen one yet, but I will look."

"I have popcorn," said Clockwork, entering the room, "and various baked goods. No dairy."

"You're the best."

.

Clockwork selected a thick blanket from the chest, then teleported himself to the living room to drape it over the three teenagers passed out on the couch. Overall, he found pretending to be human oddly enjoyable, but it could be trying at times. Tedious. All the finicky little motions humans had to go through to do the simplest of things added up over the day.

So, Clockwork tended to ease off of them when no one was watching. It made life easier.

Heh. Life.

(He would say that Daniel's puns were rubbing off on him, but in truth Clockwork's sense of humor had been like that for, well. Eons.)

He put the kitchen in order with an absent wave of his hand, and double-checked the stove out of habit. It wasn't nearly as good as his actual oven, back in Long Now, but it was serviceable.

One of Daniel's friends mumbled in their sleep, and Clockwork looked in on them. Still peaceful. It was good for Daniel to have them here. Beneficial for both his human and ghost halves.

He hummed to himself and patted Daniel's head as he thought about their plans for the weekend. He had arranged for some truly aggravating evangelical missionaries to darken their doorstep. It would do Daniel good to inspire a touch of terror. In an entirely controlled and risk-free way, of course. No matter how unpleasant the people coming were, Clockwork had no intention of harming them, or suggesting anything of the sort.

But, well. They were ghosts. Being feared was soothing.

(Clockwork knew this wasn't what Jasmine meant when she suggested Clockwork engage in family bonding activities with Daniel. But what she didn't know...)

.

"I think my teeth are getting sharper," said Danny, pulling a face at the mirror. "Is that normal?" The last was shouted, to get Clockwork's attention. Intellectually, Danny knew he didn't need to do that, but a lifetime of habit was hard to shake.

"It is difficult to say what is normal for someone like you, but many ghosts do have fangs," said Clockwork. "Including myself."

"Hm," said Danny. "This isn't, like, a ghost puberty thing, is it? Because I already used up most of my evil puberty jokes."

"Oh, only most?" Clockwork slid behind him and started rubbing the tension out of his shoulders.

Danny shrugged. "Eh, give or take. But, seriously."

"No, it isn't a ghost puberty thing."

"Oh, good. Because dealing with one puberty is more than enough."

Clockwork was silent. Danny looked up and met troubled eyes in the mirror.

"Clockwork?"

"Daniel," started Clockwork, before giving Danny an uneasy smile. "Speaking of puberty..."

Danny blanched. "No."

"What?"

"No. Nope. Not doing the talk today, no sir. I got that at school."

"Daniel, as strange as Casper High may be at times, I highly doubt they taught you anything about immortality."

"What."

.

"It's why ghosts put so much forethought into relationships like this," explained Clockwork, careful not to look directly at Daniel's hiding place. "They might last forever. I certainly hope this one does."

"But I don't want to be a teenager forever!" wailed Danny. He had mastered the art of making his voice sound like it was coming from a completely different direction than it actually was.

Clockwork was older than human civilization and had been worshiped as a god by several civilizations. He did not wince at the heartbreak in his child's voice.

"Your shapeshifting abilities should come in after a few years," said Clockwork. "You'll be able to pass as older."

Daniel answered with a moan.

"I must confess, I'm not sure why you are so upset about this. I can see that you are, but could you explain why for me?"

"I don't knoooooowww..."

.

"I don't want everyone to die and leave me alone," admitted Danny, hunched over a carton of ice cream. "I don't want to see my- my people die." He sniffled.

"We don't have to stay in Amity Park if you don't want to," said Clockwork.

Danny shook his head. "No! That's worse," he said, hating how his voice tilted into a whine. "That's- I can't abandon them! I can't- can't miss their time. I just..." He let out a huff of air. "It's hard."

Clockwork wrapped an arm around Daniel's shoulders. "It may not help much," he said, "but people in Amity Park have a much higher chance of becoming ghosts. It's the ectoplasm in the air."

"Promise?" asked Danny.

"Promise. Although, who, exactly, becomes a ghost is outside of my control. All I can tell you is that the people here have a better chance."

Danny leaned against Clockwork. "Thanks," he mumbled. "Clockwork?"

"Yes?"

"You don't think I'm a freak, do you?"

"Of course not."

.

Mr. Lancer squinted down at Daniel Fenton's latest assignment with a mix of appreciation, disbelief, and shame. This was easily the best work he had ever received from Daniel. In fact, it rivaled papers he had received from Jasmine.

It made him wonder- How long had Daniel been suffering? What had Daniel been suffering? He was no expert when it came to abuse, but all teachers had some training, and he knew that abusers tended to escalate, starting with something relatively innocuous and ending with a travesty. For things to progress to attempted murder... What had it started as? When had it begun?

(Could Mr. Lancer have stopped it?)

(That question would haunt him more than any ghost.)

Well, there was a silver lining to this, Mr. Lancer supposed. He had rarely seen two people who got along as well as Daniel and Charles Worth. It was good, he thought, for the man to have someone in his life on a more permanent basis, rather than the revolving door of temporary foster children.

How rapidly the adoption went through was a little odd, but... Mr. Lancer shrugged. Undoubtedly, Mr. Worth had taken the time over his years as a foster parent to familiarize himself with the system, and with Daniel's former parents unfit to be anywhere near children...

He shrugged again and stamped Daniel's paper with an A+.

[trilliastra]

more adventures of detective wei wuxian and his husband

[you can find the original story here but you don’t have to read it to understand this one :)]

-

Nuying has lists for everything. As a very organized person, she prides herself on her ability to always be on time with her work. She makes lists to go grocery shopping and to go to the mall, she has a list of her favorite books and next to it, a list of books she's still going to read.

There's something about writing down the items of which list that makes her feel organized, not only with her life but with her thoughts as well. She doesn't always write down her lists though, some are just in her mind, stored in archive boxes that she opens whenever she needs.

It's a very systematic thought process, but she quite enjoys living like this.

She doesn't know when she started making lists about people , perhaps it was in she was teenager, but Nuying kept doing it as she grew. There was a list of worst teachers in college, men she'd never marry, ex-fiancés (from best to worst) and ex-friends.

The list of people she hates was created years ago, but when she moved into her new house – to escape from most of the people on that list, mind you – she ended up having to add two more .

Wei Wuxian is not a particularly lousy neighbour and she didn't even know he lived next door for a week, but then he appeared into her life like a freight train, big smile, loud voice and Nuying's first thought was ' annoying' and 'can you stop moving ?''.

She doesn't know what's his job, he leaves early in the morning and comes back late at night and that wouldn't be a problem exactly, if he wouldn't just let so many people come and go freely.

Nuying noticed the woman first, because she was dressed in expensive clothes and when she rang the doorbell, Wei Wuxian pulled her inside the house immediately. They spent the night inside and she left way past midnight – Nuying was watching, of course, worried about her own safety.

The man showed up on the second week, angry looking and yelling for Wei Wuxian to open the door. Nuying was about to call the police when he left, even more angry than when he arrived.

And God, the children, she can't stand them. Most times it's just the one, but every weekend the woman brings in another one and in one occasional Sunday, when Nuying was trying to re-read her fourth favorite book on the porch, a third boy joined them. Wei Wuxian had to chase them down the street as they ran from him, screaming. She kept checking on them through the window, afraid they'd damage her garden.

But the other man, oh , she might hate him even more than she hates Wei Wuxian. He comes to visit every day, leaves way after she's already went to sleep, and he is most impolite. Every time they meet outside, Nuying offers a good morning, watching him curiously, but he never answers, only nods at her – as if that is a way to greet a woman – and enters the house.

She tried, God is a witness of how much she tried to be a good neighbor, but when she invited them for coffee or knocked on the door, cake in hand and proposed they share it inside, the man said they do not drink coffee. Hah , as if a young man like Wei Wuxian would have that much energy in the morning without copious amounts of caffeine.

And it is not like Nuying drinks coffee herself, she was just trying to be polite! They are so uncivilized!

-

That morning started like every other morning. Nuying woke up at seven, made tea and settled by the window to enjoy the morning sun. She doesn't know how much time had passed when she noticed the rude man leaving Wei Wuxian's house, that familiar kid in tow. She frowns worriedly when she notices the boy is crying quietly, as if too afraid to make a noise. He wipes the tears hurriedly when the man turns to him and flinches when the man tries to take his hand.

Nuying stands up, hand over her mouth. Emotional distress, she lists in her mind, afraid of physical punishment? Oh, God, she knew there was something wrong with him!

When the man tries to take the kid in his arms, the boy runs back to the house, crying for his dad. She watches as the rude man sighs and follows the boy, pulling him inside.

Nuying tries to let it go, tells herself it is none of her business, but eventually she decides to listen to her instincts. Wei Wuxian and that – that awful man are trouble, so she takes her phone and calls the police.

-

It doesn't take long for the police car to arrive. Surprisingly, Wei Wuxian is already with them, and Nuying watches as he hurries towards his house. Trying to hide the evidence? She wonders, following the other officers with her eyes.

She wishes she could see what is happening inside, keeps watching through the window, praying that this will be the end – Wei Wuxian cannot keep living here, the other neighbors are already outside, watching curiously. They will not allow him to stay, she is certain of it and feels somehow vindicated.

All those nights, watching, worrying, were worth it. She will finally be able to sleep in peace.

She startles when Wei Wuxian leaves the house angrily and stalks towards her own house, all but punching the door bell. The police officer follows him quietly and it is only because he's there that Nuying allows herself to open the door.

“You–” Wei Wuxian starts, but the officer pulls him back, immediately.

“Madam,” the police officer says, “making false reports are a crime.”

Nuying gasps, confused. “I did not – the child was crying! I don't know what he told you, but – he was crying for his dad and –”

“I am his dad!” Wei Wuxian shouts and Nuying feels her head spin as if she's been punched.

“That is not possible!”

“You stay inside your house, watching us through your window, making up fantasies and you think you know –”

“Detective Wuxian,” the officer warns, “calm down.”

Nuying's mouth opens automatically, shocked, upset, embarrassed.

“Wei Ying,” the other man calls, holding the kid in his arms. The boy's face looks red, eyes glossy as if feverish, and he lets out a pitiful cry for his dad, “A-Yuan wants you.” He does not take his eyes from Nuying, he looks calm, but his cold eyes scream anger and Nuying somehow feels more scared of him than of Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian runs towards them and Nuying watches, dumbfounded, as he hugs them both, pressing a kiss on the boy's temple and then on the other man's cheek.

Oh, oh Gods.

“Lan Wangji,” she hears the officer say, “do you want to press charges?”

Nuying drops a hand over her heart, feels it picking up speed as fear starts to spread through her body. She's never done anything wrong in her life, never broke the law, not even a driving ticket, and now she could be arrested.

“No.” Lan Wangji answers, looking her up and down with some akin to contempt. It makes her blood boil, but she holds back the urge to stalk towards him and slap his face, she doesn't want to make it worse. “But next time.” He doesn't finish his sentence, leaves the warning hanging in the air as he leaves and follows Wei Wuxian inside the house.

-

They've been married for seven years now, Nuying learns from one of the nosy neighbors across the street. They adopted the boy a year after that and Wei Wuxian is a mess, but he is harmless.

Lan Wangji is the one she should be scared of.

"He is obsessed with his husband." Her neighbor whispers carefully as if Lan Wangji would be able to hear her all the way from his house. "In a good way, I mean. He loves him very much."

Nuying doesn't believe in love, but she doesn't say it. Only lets her neighbor ramble on about Wei Wuxian and his husband and their perfectly disgusting life together.

The child recovers soon enough and in the weekend he is back to running outside with his little friends. Wei Wuxian runs after them for some time before he walks back to his – Lan Wangji, and they both watch them from their front door, arms around each other and sharing an occasional kiss.

Nuying watches it all as she searches for a new house far, far away, from them.

[ohholyfanfics]

Daycare 0.3|Tom Holland

Past Parts: One| Two 

Author’s note: I thought it’d be easier to gave y/n an actual name so after much thought I’ve decided that the name Evelyn Rose Smith. 

Tom’s weekend was spent between taken care of Liam and y/n, all while leaving Harrison completely frazzled by his best mates state. He watched as Tom lowly talked on the phone as he held a pen writing no doubt whatever else he needed to get from the store. Harrison wasn’t no fool and knew that Tom had been going out to see someone every couple of hours, it settled into a routine and followed it’s way into Monday and Tuesday as well.

“Leaving again?” he asked as Tom jumped not expecting him to be creeping from the sideline. His cheeks were flushed as he fixed his tie and nodded his head. Harrison looked down at his watching knowing Tom still had another hour and a half before he was due to pick Liam up. “It’s not time to pick little man up yet though..” he breathed testing the waters out.

“I just need to stop where beforehand.”

The blonde raised an eyebrow in question, he thought he knew Tom well enough to know there was something else. Or in this case someone, yet he wasn’t sure how to even approach the topic. The last time just as much mentioned dating, Tom nearly shit himself at the mere thought.

“Oh.”

Harrison watched his friend collect a few things from his office including a paper bag that seemed to have a few grocery items insides. He leaned back in the leather seat as he watched him fix his hair once more in the reflection of the glass windows. There had to be someone and he just hoped it was the same person that he had in mind.

The ride to Evelyn’s, Tom couldn’t help but feel a sheer wave of panic built up within him. He had promised himself that dating wasn’t something he was ready for and yet all he can think about was her. From the moment he woke, to the second he fell asleep. Yet even in his dreams her sweet smile and soft laugh hunted him. There was a longing feeling that loomed around him and he knows she was the only one that could tame it.

He ached to see her smile.

He wanted it directed towards him. For him. Because of him. He wanted to bring her joy; be the source of the way her eyes lit up and those cute dimples he loved so much to appear on her full cheeks. He watched her bring countless amounts of joy and happiness to everyone who knew her. He craved the warmth she’d give him.

He wanted her to show him the beauty she found in everything. Tom found himself craving things he’d never thought of before and the thought petrified him. Since the moment Tom had adopted Liam as his own, it’s always been the two against the world and now having her in his life scared him. It scared him to know that even time he closed his eyes he imagined her there, sharing even the tiniest of milestones Liam hit.

As much as he hated to admit it, he found himself falling and he was falling harder than he had ever expected it.

That afternoon things were slightly awkward between them, she was more put together than the past few days. Her hair wasn’t thrown in a messy state, that he had learned to love, no instead it was pulled back into a neat sleek ponytail. Her sweats had been switched to a pair of leggings but her torso remains covered in a sweater. Her face had color again and her voice was slowly returning to that velvety silk-like song he adored.

“You know you don’t need to keep checking up on me..” She breathed out as she took the last spoon full. As much as she appreciated everything he was doing, he was making it harder on her.

“I know..”

She studied him with a sigh before collecting both of their dishes and walking it towards the sink. Tom Holland was by far the most complex man she had ever met in her twenty-four years of living. She thought she had him figured out, but the man sitting behind her was most definitely not the CEO  she was used too. This was the same man that had walked into Evelyn’s office a little less than two months ago.

“I just-I wanted too Evelyn.” He spoke a few moments later as her cheeks flushed. She was more than grateful to have her back to him. “I don’t look at that phone call as a mistake.” He pointed out as she nodded her head.

Looking back at him she couldn’t stop the swirl of butterflies within her, the same feeling that showed up that very night. Biting onto her lower lip, she allowed herself for the first time to feel everything that she had been locking away. She was falling for this single father, at a rapid speed that had her gasping for air. It was all so sudden it had her begging for some sort of relief.

Much to Evelyn’s joy and disappointment, it was Tom for leave, Liam’s day at the center was coming to a close. Standing by her door, she gave him a soft smile as he nervously stuck his hands in his suit pockets. His heart thumping rapidly as he looked into her olive-green eyes. She couldn’t help but let out a soft chuckle at the situation, it was almost comical as she looked into his soft eyes.

“Um, I’ll see you tomorrow?”

She smiled softly as she leaned forward, his breath cut short as she placed a soft kiss on his cheeks. His eyes fluttered shut as the feeling of her lips lightly brushing against his flushed skin, sent his body into overdrive.

“Bright and early.”

The rest of her day was much uneventful other than the few texts from Tom and a very promising one from Harrison. She couldn’t help the small laugh that escaped her lips as he waltzed into her kitchen. It was clear he had come straight from work, a bottle of her favorite cheap wine and a bag full of take-out. She raised her eyebrow as he pulled a glass filling it straight to the rim.

“Rough day?”

She teased as she reaches inside the cabinet as he took a long sip. It wasn’t long before the pair were both seated at her table surrounded by Chinese take out and a glass of cheap wine. It was silent for a few moments before Harrison spotted the same bag Tom had been holding earlier. He couldn’t help but smirk before taken a good look at his friend.

“Feeling better?”

“So much Haz you wouldn’t believe the shit days I had.”

He smiled softly knowing Evelyn never took being sick well, he also knew she never allowed others to care for her either. Hence his lack of presence lately, but he couldn’t help but wonder made her cave. His thoughts were eating away at him that he didn’t even notice her talking to him.

“Have I lost you Haz?” She hummed softly shaking his shoulder causing him to flush and roll his eyes before giving her a soft smile.

“Sorry just thinking..”

“Penny for your thoughts..”

“Just thinking…”

“Oh no, that’s never good Haz.”

“It’s nothing like that Evy..” He breathed out as he sighed wondering if she would even react to what he had to say. It wasn’t that he was meddling, no he liked to think that he was helping. “I just, I think Tom has so much on his plate lately..” He tested the waters as she raised her eyebrows.

“Oh?”

“I just think he’s been so cooped up with Liam, he hasn’t had much time to himself.” He explained a she smiled softly and placed a hand over his. “I think he just needs to let lose a bit.”

“Have you tried talking to him about it?” She asked as he nodded his head. She tilted her head to the side taken a sip from her drink as she thought back to Tom. He did seem a bit dazed these past few days. “Maybe he just needs a night out.”

“He needs to get laid,” Harrison mumbled with a wicked grin as she chocked on her wine. Her cheeks were flushed as she let out a little awkward chuckle before filling her glass up. “Much like you.”

“I don’t need you insulting my love life mate.”

“Not insulting, I’m pointing out the obvious.” He stated as a wicked thought came to mind. She couldn’t help but sit straighter once she saw a wave of excitement flash across his features.

“Harrison no.”

“You don’t even know what I have in mind babe.”

“I don’t need to know what it is, to know it won’t be pleasant.”

“Just trust me, Evelyn Rose Smith.”

She walked into the center with a skip to her step as she welcomed Sophia who couldn’t help but chuckle. It was clear that she was better than ever as she helped the other teacher’s set everything up, as she rearranged the last few decorations for the spring. Taken a seat at her office, she looked at the pile of new applications knowing she had a few moments before Tom would be showing up.

“Knock knck.”

Looking up her heart swelled as she cheeks flushed at the beautiful flower arrangement that was starring right back at her. The pinks and whites blended so well it had her head spinning slightly as she met his bright brown eyes.  

“Morning darling.” he breathed out with a soft smile as he placed the beautiful vase of flowers on her desk. He couldn’t help but feel a wave of pride wash over him as he took notice of her flushed expression.

“What are these for?”

“They’re a welcome back gift.”

“You didn’t have to Tom.” she smiled softly as she stood infron of him. The vase now in her hold, as she brought them towards her face. Her eyes closed as she took in the sweet smell mixed eith pollen. Biting her lip, she looked at him as a wave of apperication and adortion took over her. 

“Thank you.” 

“Anything for you..” he mumbled as he shifted his weight on his feet, he lookeed at the clock on the wall and chewed on his bottom lip. “Um I should get going.” 

“Um yeah of course..” 

“I’ll see you later?” 

“Um yeah, I’ll be here..” 

Watching him walk away she couldn’t help but let out a soft squeal as she held the vase tighter in her hold. Tom Holland was going to be the absolute death of her. 

Taglist: 

@greenarrowhead​ @xinsonyax​ @rescue3000​ @abschaffer2​ @fav-fan-fic​ @cutiepiemimi13​ @starkerismysexuality​ @jackiehollanderr​ @obsessed-librarian​ @parkeret​ @peterparkersdestiny​ @averyfosterthoughts​ @tomkindholland​ @yourbiggestspiderfan​ @ditzymoon​

[crazylittlethingy]

He loves me (Part 3)

abusive!dabi x reader (eventually x hawks)

a/n: I’m focusing in the reader and hawks’ early friendship in this one, don’t worry, next part I’ll give you some dabi *wink wink*

Part 1 - Part 2

It had been three months since classes started and you forgot why you were so scared of high school. Yeah, UA was tough, with intense physical and intelectual activities, you got home tired most of the time and your already limited time with your parents grew even more limited and you found yourself arguing with them more often, if you are tired enough on that day. You’d usually apologize through movie nights on Sunday. In the beginning no one would say anything, but, as the movie goes on, comments would be made, songs would be sang and laughs would be laughed.

You could also feel yourself becoming stronger. You liked your quirk quite a lot, it would take you and Touya away from trouble when you were little, and, nowadays, it symbolized a ticket to a good hero agency. Before UA, you could only open one portal for about 20 to 30 seconds before feeling a splitting headache that would take you close to passing out. Three months into the course, after training hard in and out of school grounds on weekdays (because even you knew rest is needed to archive a goal), you were able to open one portal for a whole minute or two portals for 30 seconds and you also had a better idea on how to use them on a battleground, teleporting and punching someone, kicking, taking your allies out of the way. But the best thing about training was seeing Keigo in action.

It turns out he wasn’t that bad.

In the time you spent together you came to the conclusion that he’d always seemed to try and give you a reason to smile. It was true that he still was convinced of his “godlike appearance and personality” and knew way too many cheesy pickup lines for his own good, but they were funny and you were getting used to it all, it became a constant form of comfort and calmness in the middle of a growing pile of undone homework and assignments. And, besides, he was genuinely a good friend, listening to complains and to what you were currently obsessing with, showing himself to be an openminded learner, as you discovered when he, willingly, let you make him watch all 8 Harry Potter movies. He was definitely a Gryffindor in your eyes. 

You also learned a lot about him. I mean, nothing related to his personal life apparently, but you knew that he loves fried chicken (even if it sounded a damn lot like cannibalism to you), how he twisted his pen around his fingers when he was concentrated in an assignment, how he’d bite his lip if he had a “brilliant” idea of a place to go or something to do on a Saturday afternoon, how he’d throw his head back and put a hand on his stomach if something was truly funny to him and how he’d roll his shoulders twice and turn his head a little to the left a moment before he took flight.

Oh and how beautiful he looked when he flied.

Keigo seemed fine in any space, a true social butterfly bird, but the only moment he was truly in his element was when he was in the sky. On the ground, he’d be smirking, confident of who he was, but as he cut through the air he didn’t have to worry about who he was or what his obligations were, he’d be free from anything and everything, and that made him smile, which, in turn, would make you smile. What a beautiful friendship am I right?

Thinking about all that made you sigh.

“Good morning, princess~” another day, the same cheesy nickname he gave you. 

You rolled your eyes and buried your face in your arms, letting out a frustrated scream like thing.

“Woah I can’t see you in the weekend this one time and you already missed me this much?” You weren’t looking at him, but you could imagine his infuriating smirk as clear as the day outside the classroom you were siting in… very stifled… because the chair isn’t comfortable… at all.

“Because you are the only source of happiness in my life” how could you not exaggeratedly roll your eyes?

“I know” you still hated that smirk (and how good he looked) for the record.

Another frustrated groan. “My parents spent most of Saturday away because their boss had an emergency or something and, on Sunday, they let all their frustration on me through screaming contest, very pleasing to the neighbors let me tell yah. But I also watched this really good series on Netflix about a girl who just lost her dad and discovers she has a telepathic quirk in a world where no one has quirks”

“It sounds like a really sad reality”

You give a sad laugh and look at the window and what it’s beyond it. “It does.” And for a second there, when he’s quiet for longer than the usual 2 seconds, you turn around to face him and there is something in his eyes you can’t understand, for once you don’t see him smile or smirk.

“Well, worry not, my lady, for I, Takami Keigo, swear on your mother’s cake that I’ll never let you go through anything bad alone” he made this whole really exaggerated curtesy and the smirk was back. How could you not laugh and smile heartedly?

“Thank you so much, kind sire. But where were you this weekend? And why do you swear on my mother’s cake of all things?” You question, still smiling, in your most pompous voice, but you were also worried, Keigo never missed one of your Saturdays, it was the only day your parents allowed you to have friends around or to go around.

Even with his head bowed, you saw how his expression fell a little bit. “I had something to deal with.” He sounded serious, his voice lower than you ever heard. “And your mother’s cake is the best cake ever, so I can’t bear to lose it.” With that wink, his cheerful tone was back.

“Keigo-“ “Okay, everyone, I don’t want to hear anymore giggles, whispers, gossips and jokes whatsoever. Is time for class.” As the teacher entered the classroom, interrupting any and all conversations. Keigo sat down by your side. You spent a few seconds looking at him, as if the answer to his behavior would be found in his blond hair. When he turned and caught your eye, his eyebrows making their way up and down as if he was trying to be suggestive. You gave him the finger and he laughed, you felt your cheeks become warm and you turned to try and pay attention to your first (and very boring) class of the day.

Lunch time is the best and the worst. It was too noisy for your liking on some days, but sometimes you were part of that noise, like today.

“Shut up Keigo” you were laughing so loudly your belly was hurting. “I’m trying to eat!” “When I say funny things you look at me with murder in your eyes, but if I make a shitty pun you almost die of laughing?” He sounded bashful but he was smiling warmly, not that you noticed, as you were too busy trying not to cry out from the momentarily joy the pun brought you.

“Excuse me if I think your normal jokes are the real ‘shitty thing’, I do tend to enjoy puns more, they are witty” You said as you finally caught your breath and dived into the cafeteria food.

“Excuse you, I’m funny” you just rolled your eyes at that, something you do quite a lot, actually.

Things were usually like this, you two would be eating and telling some shitty jokes or puns, complaining about training and assignments and judging your colleagues decisions in life, such as dating the school resident jerk or eating broccoli when pizza sounded like a better option. Everyday, you’d be joined by a girl and a boy from your class. The girl was really outgoing and smart, you two became friends over ‘nerdy things’, as Keigo liked to call your obsession with Supernatural and Doctor Who. The boy, on the other hand, was under Keigo’s wing, he was shy and reserved but also smart (as everyone in the best high school of Japan seemed to be) and he’d often make some comments under his breath when he thought no one was listening. Now those were funny and made you make an effort to pay attention to him at all times so you can get that little glimpse of his true self. 

“You won’t believe what I just heard” Naomi, the girl, came jumping around to the table. You liked to think she saw you as a good and trustworthy friend.

“How is it possible you already have gossips when people are still getting to know each other?” Ren, the boy, questioned quietly. Naomi didn’t seem to pay him attention, but you offered him a smile as if to say you thought the same. He turned almost as red as Keigo’s wings.

Even if you and Naomi were somewhat friends, she and Keigo had a gossip connection, knowing everything about everyone and their parents, so he was always the most excited when Naomi came jumping around the room, you’d take the time to stay in silence or making awkward conversation with Ren. 

“Spill the tea girl” Keigo offered his best American accent, mimicking a slang he read somewhere. You were almost sure he ran a blog in one of those American’s websites to talk about celebrities life’s… or Endeavor, he liked that guy more than you think he should.

“Weeeeelllll do you know who Kanami is?” Naomi’s face made you remember the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t she the girl whose cousin dates the most popular guy in school” Keigo, in turn, made you think of a curious Alice arriving in Wonderland.

“Yep. Apparently she told her cousin Hiro had called the house they live in cancelling their date, which her cousin totally believed, and she, Kanami, went on the date instead saying her cousin was sick! Now, this was two weeks ago and the cousin found out and they were just fighting in the corridor, quirks and all!” Naomi made extravagant gestures while telling the facts.

“What! No way! Are they still there?” Keigo was getting up.

“No, sadly, the principal arrived there as we made our way here” Both teens now looked like a balloon that lost all air.

“It almost seems like you guys are disappointed no one died fighting over a guy” Ren’s observation came as silently as the summer breeze.

“Chicken Little over there eats his fellow chickens as lunch and you think he’d have sympathy for teenage girls fighting over their first ‘love’?” You replied as you cut your meat (or tofu or salad if you are vegetarian/vegan).

When the bell rang once again and you could feel the despair of all the students’ souls, Naomi’s voice came chirping again.

“Why don’t we go out after school today?” 

“Yeah, sure, why not?” 

Smiling like a fool just at the thought of spending the day with your friends, the rest of the day seemed promising.

Keigo’s laugh was probably heard a mile away from where you guys were. Naomi was telling some of her best embarrassing stories as a ‘get to know each other exercise’ because ‘there is still a lot you don’t know about each other’ and it was nice. I mean, you didn’t feel like telling your early teenage embarrassing moments, but the kid ones were ok, seeing your three friends laughing warmly made you feel like you belonged in that second, in that place, with those people. Last time you felt like that was before Touya disappeared.

Yet, here you were, able to be carefree, feeling the wind in your hair, under a cloudless sky, surrounded by people who wouldn’t leave you.

But you felt strange. The tip of your fingers felt a little numb and there was this shiver making its way down your spine. Someone was watching you. That thought made you stop and look around. And there you saw it, Hades’ flames all over again.

There is this thing about knowing someone since you were little: it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it doesn’t matter if the friendship is over, if it was interrupted, there was always this ongoing familiarity in them, no matter how much both of you change.

He was just standing there, looking at you. Blue against (e/c). He was wearing a black windbreaker and black jeans, his hair the color of a corrupted soul, so different from the ruby red (and later snowy white) you were used to. He aged, obviously, his features more mature and you wondered how sharp his jawline would be, but nothing, not even the piercings he wore on his nose and lip, no hair dye, no amount of clothing or scars, nothing would make those flaming blue lights loose their intense gaze and color. (I mean, yeah, contacts would do it but he wasn’t wearing them okay?)

“(Y/n)? Are you alright?” Keigo’s voice startled you, making you look at him and realize he and the others were some feet ahead of you.

“Yeah, no, I’m fine, I just have something to deal with and then I’ll meet you guys at the mall.” You did your best to show your most convincing smile, yet Keigo still looked worried at you. “I really am fine Keigo, for this once I guarantee you don’t have to worry.” You spoke seriously and he seemed to trust you, he gave one look behind you and decided to keep going.

As you got closer to the not so strange stranger, you noticed how a half smile grew at each step you took. When you were close enough to see the daylight reflected in his eyes you spoke in a whisper, like the word alone would be able to make him vanish, like it’d break you all over again.

“Touya?”

“Not anymore, love.”

Part 4

Taglist:

@aly-insanity​

@a-typical-antisocial-fangirl​

@memekingofwwiii​

@axerrri​

@elizabeththe3third​

[plztumb1rhelpmegetoveranxiety]

THE IT TOOK FOREVER, BUT THE PROMISED LONG ASS (vigilante) BAKUSQUAD POST.

This has over 1,000 words and it's basically just me ranting about a new idea I had. Warning: Grammar doesn't exist in my rants.

If you didn't think I was obsessed with vigilantes before... vigilante Bakusquad. They all started in the hero course and it splits off cannon sometime after the sports festival. (Non-cannon additions to their quirks and crappy descriptions of gore ahead. And bumping up the character development speed for the sake of this au + by the time they get to the sports festival they're all almost as close as they are now. + x2 this is just about how they got out of U.A. If I ever write this properly a lot more details will be on other parts mildly mentioned here. + x3 Trans Denki with an LGBTphobic family.)

Bakugou is the first to get expelled less than a week after the festival. Midnight was actually the one to suggest it, after the people saw how Bakugou acted favor for the school went down. Nezu thinking for the sake of his school decided it would be best to expel him, but they would need to come up for a reason to because he was so popular in the media by now.

So shortly after that, instead of going to any of the teachers, Nezu goes live on one of the school's media pages announcing his expulsion due to "behaviours simmilar to the wanted villain Tomura Shigaraki." That same day Bakugou was pulled aside by Aizawa because he was showing signs of being a victim of domestic abuse.

"That old hag hits me and yells and I yell back! That's not abuse, it's always been like that!"

Aizawa eventually gets him to break down and confess everything and he offers to take it up with the police. Bakugou only agrees after Aizawa says he would not mention their conversation to the authorities. He ends up walking Bakugou the exit to talk more about it only to discover Nezu and the press there telling Bakugou never to come back. He's basically run out while Aizawa's trying to stop it only to be held back by Midnight.

---

Aizawa put in his resignation form that night. Effective at the end of the school year.

---

Next to go was Mina, and she knew damn well what was actually going on. See, Mina actually looked up to Midnight and had her as a favorite teacher. Gossip is also both Mina's biggest talent and weakness.

She made a hero gossip blog when she was around 12. Mina wanted a page she could hear all the latest drama on, but with actual sources and a neutral argument. So she made it herself. It's relatively big now and she's made online friends who proof read most of the articles she prepares to post.

With how much Mina looked up to Midnight she wanted to have her double check an article Mina was planning to post about her. She'd printed out a copy to go show her and when she heard Midnight was in the principal's office things went down hill from there.

Sitting outside of Nezu's office door she heard everything. And recorded everything. Her biggest regret is not having been able to tell Bakugou.

After she heard everything she found herself running to the bathroom and throwing up anything in her system. To her misfortune that was also Recovery Girl's break. She was sent home for the rest of the week with how violently she was vomiting.

Needless to say the article was done before dawn the next day and forwarded to all her online friends.

Come Monday and Mina had over 30 printed copies in her backpack. Her post also had tens of thousands of shares. The day was a mess she just barely managed to give Kirishima a copy when there wasn't any pro "heros" around.

Midnight's class was the worst. Mina flinched nearly every time she spoke, worried that she was already found out. Spoiler alert: she was.

When training finally rolled around she was lucky to be grouped with the rest of the squad along with a few others. It revolved around a hostage situation. Three people were supposed to sneak in (Mina, Kirishima, Sero) while the rest (Kaminari, Shoji, Uraraka, and Koda) were supposed to distract the teacher playing as a captor.

Mina had just disintegrated a door when a shout from their captor (Present Mic) had her spinning around to look out a window. Her legs started to move, but her feet didn't and she started to fall. Just as she was falling she saw it was Mic yelling at Midnight. It's all fine, Mina caught herself with her elbow, her hand flashed up into her face, too. Mic was only yelling. She was screaming. Her right eye felt like it was burning up, it hurt. Only her skin had any sort of immunity. By the time Sero was pulling her up with his tape Mina was already passed out.

She didn't even remember the hospital. Her parents pulled her out of school with advice from the school. Her quirk was put on registry as dangerous and unstable.

The doctors couldn't do anything to save her right eye. Her family couldn't afford to keep Mina in school and pay for the medical help on her eye.

---

Within three weeks she ran away from home.

---

In the time it took Mina to run away Kaminari was put on a warning list and the third to be expelled without talking to Aizawa.

It wasn't public like Bakugou's and it wasn't like Mina's because it was multiple incidents. Sneezing in the pool and losing control of his quirk leaving it unusable for days (only m*neta was harmed), accidentally taking power away from parts ofbthe school multiple times, still overusing his quirk almost daily.

When the school decided detention wasn't enough they pulled him aside to tell him the truth. He was told on a Tuesday that he wasn't to return after the weekend.

At this time Kiri, Kami, and Sero had been trying and failing to get in touch with Bakugou and Mina. They had been doing the same thing for Bakugou when Mina was there, too.

Kaminari tried to go to Sero and Kirishima (Kiri had forgotten about the papers Mina gave him) about his expulsion. He was worried what his family would do.

---

Saturday morning the Kaminari household's adults were found unconscious with blunt force wounds. The blood of every family member was found at the scene. The son was missing and assumed kidnapped.

---

Sero was the only one who seemed to leave willingly. After Sero's defeat at the sport's festival that turned to all he was referenced as (outside of other students).

But during an internship the hero he was working under suggested Sero might be better as an underground hero. When Sero said he might consider it, the pro hero suggested a school specifically for future underground heros. It was one they went to briefly before changing and said they would put a good word in for Sero if he ever chose to change.

After the internship he sent an email to the hero asking if he could hold up his promise.

He was transferred shortly to the school, leaving only Kirishima left. As the underground hero school rules no students are even registered on any sourse outside of the school. It was impossible to tell if Sero was still there.

---

Sero also stopped contacting Kirishima shortly after transferring. Over the phone when talking there seemed to be small break between when Kirishima asked a question to when Sero answered it. Sero blamed it on lag. It got worse the closer before Sero cut contact.

---

Kirishima actually first got suspended for disruption (Read: he got suspended for demanding where all his friends were going). He was in his room at his house when he remembered something. He shoved a bunch of random things from his locker into his bag before he left U.A. One of these included the newly remembered papers Mina gave him. He read through all of it.

Kirishima found her listed account and listened to all the audios. That may have only explained Bakugou's disappearance, but to him it explained them all.

Kiri felt so weak for not having saw it all earlier. He sent the account a message explaining that it was Kirishima, and if the mod was Mina they needed to talk.

His message was read within the hour with no reply.

When morning came he was back at school. Breaking his 5 day suspension. He left his hair ungelled to fit in more and left without his moms even noticing.

He did get to Midnight. He also managed to make he activate her quirk to everyone. He did remember waking up in a confined cell. He remembers getting dragged away in handcuffs by the police. He didn't manage to get away from the police.

They never got him to the station, though. Car doors don't last if you're hitting it with an indestructible quirk activated.

Everything's a blur from there.

(This is only part of what I have for this au. Sorry this is such a rant. Tumblr also is being a dick with posting, so sorry. I spent 8-10 hours on this.)

[abundanceofsoph]

SkyFire 1: Chapter 2

The Late Show with David Letterman: August 2013

Word count: 2.1k

SkyFire 1 MASTERLIST

Rori walked onto the set, shaking hands with the crew members before approaching the two seats set up in the middle of the room under the spotlights. David Letterman stepped forward once she reached the seats, offering his hand to her and a warm smile.

“Nervous?” he asked as they both sat down facing each other. Aurora gave a quick nod and a small smile in response, tucking a lose strand of hair behind her ear. “Don’t be,” Letterman added, “we’ll only talk about what you’re comfortable with and if you don’t want to answer any of my questions just say so and we’ll skip to the next one. This isn’t live so we can just take our time.”

Aurora took a shaky breath to calm her nerves, smiling more genuinely in response to his assurances. “Thank you,” she replied. “This is all just really strange to me still. Dad’s made a lot of effort to try to keep me out of the spotlight since people found out who I am last summer.”

“And unfortunately, that’s made people even more curious about you,” the older man said sympathetically. 

“That’s why I knew I had to do an interview,” she explained. “If I keep hiding, then people will just prod and poke until they find out what they want to know. At least this way I can be in control of how the story gets told.”

“A very cleaver way of looking at it,” Letterman replied. “Thank you for asking me to be the one to help you do that.”

“Of course. Dad’s always said you were his favourite interviewer so when I had to decide, you seemed like the best option.”

“That’s very kind of you, and him. Are you ready to start?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Rori replied. There was a brief pause while the crew finished their final checks on the camera’s and other equipment before signalling for Letterman to begin his introduction.

“Here at the Late Show we are no stranger to billionaire Tony Stark, who has appeared on the show countless times in our 20 years on the air. In recent years we have come to know him as Iron Man and last year, in the wake of the tragic Battle of New York, he shocked fans when the tabloids broke the story that he had a 17 year old daughter. Since then the Stark family have remained tight lipped about the mysterious young woman, but tonight I am joined by Miss Aurora Stark in her first public interview. Aurora thank you for joining me this evening.”

“Thank you for having me, David,” Aurora replied.

“Now Aurora,” David continued, “There’s not much we know about you so why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself? How is that the world was unaware of you for 17 years?”

“I grew up in south London and the reason the world didn’t know about me is because for most of my life I’ve been no one,” Rori began, chuckling nervously before continuing. “I lived with my mum until I was 15 and I didn’t know that Tony Stark was my dad and he didn’t know I existed until I was 16 and I moved to New York.”

“I’m guessing the fame and fortune of being a Stark has taken some adjusting too…?”

“More than you can possibly imagine. I grew up really poor, so this is still very overwhelming. My mum was 19 when she fell pregnant with me and her parents kicked her out of home when she told them. She was living in her car and desperately trying to convince anyone to give her a job and she got really lucky that she met the right people when she needed them most.” She paused in her story, but after a quick nod of assurance from Letterman she continued the tale. “She walked into a bar in Wimbledon called the Golden Stag, explained her situation and asked if they had any waitressing or kitchen jobs going and the owners Helen and Greg pretty much adopted her straight away. Within a couple of days, not only did they give her a job, but they converted the office space above the bar into a tiny little one bedroom apartment and let her live there rent free. I honestly don’t know whether we would have survived without them over the years. They became the only family that we had, and I grew up thinking of them as my grandparents.”

“They sound like wonderful people,” Letterman added.

“They’re the best,” Rori grinned, finally shaking off her nerves as she talked about her family. “They were always spoiling me. When I was 6, they brought me my first art set for Christmas and always proudly hung my paintings and sketches in the bar and then when I was 7, I came home from school raving about how I’d got to play on the piano in music class. My music teacher had been talking about how the school would be running a private lesson program and I begged my mum to let me take lessons. I was pretty obnoxious about it now that I look back on it, but of course my mum said we couldn’t afford it and she apologized to me over and over again, but the next day not only had Helen paid for my lessons but one of the regulars at the bar that had heard my pleading brought in an old second hand piano that he said was taking up space in his house. I was allowed to play for an hour every day after school before the crowds started to roll in for happy hour and I could play for as long as I wanted in the mornings on the weekend before the lunch rush.”

“They were the first to encourage your art?”

“Absolutely. Between them and my mum I was always encouraged to explore art. I became obsessed with the piano. By the time I was 11 I’d gotten good enough that I was allowed to play during happy hour and every Sunday the regular patrons would make their song requests and I would spend all week learning them and then play them on Thursday and Friday evenings. It was around then that I started singing and I guess I never really stopped after that.”

“So, it sounds like you had a quite a happy childhood despite not having much to your name,” Letterman said, steering the conversation slowly around to the topic Rori knew she needed to address.

“I did,” she agreed sadly. “My mum was my best friend and she made sure that I always felt loved and safe. Even though we had very little, she taught me that it was so important to be grateful for what we did have and value the people in our lives more than material possessions.”

“Do you feel comfortable talking about what happened to her?” David asked gently. “How is it that you finally met your father and moved here to New York?”

“It was Christmas Eve 2010,” Aurora explained. “Every year we would go get waffles after her shift. It was one of my favourite things, and we’d walk home, full to bursting, looking at all the Christmas lights and singing carols the whole way back to the pub, but that year when we were almost home…” Her voice faded out, her eyes starting to gloss over with tears as her memories pulled her back to that night. “There was a drunk driver,” she continued, before David could ask if she needed a break. “He drove straight through the red light while we were crossing the street. It happened so fast. One minute we were laughing and then the next thing I knew I was flying up over the hood of the car and there was breaking glass and my mother screamed out my name. By the time I woke up in the hospital the next day she was already gone, and Child Protective Services was there.”

“And you were placed into foster care after you left the hospital?” David asked.

“I was,” Rori answered. “Helen and Greg wanted to take me in, but CPS said they couldn’t because a bar was no place for a teenager. We were all so angry over that. I’d spent my entire life living in that bar and now more than ever I needed to stay with the only people I had left but it wasn’t my decision, so I spent the next few months getting bounced from one foster family to the next. Some were good, some… weren’t so good. They did make sure I stayed in the Wimbledon area, so I got to stay at the same school, which I’m grateful for. I’m not sure I would have made it without my friends. My mum and my best friend Ella’s mum had been good friends, so she stepped in a lot and made sure I was doing ok. Depending on which family I was living with I was sometimes allowed to go to the pub after school to see Helen and Greg and play my piano. I know it could have been so much worse if I didn’t have people looking out for me, but it was still such an awful time of my life. I was grieving my mum and trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself now that I was alone. I turned 16 a little over a week after the accident and within about a month of living in foster care, I filed for emancipation and I had planned on moving back into the apartment above the pub, but the judge denied my application given that my father was listed on my birth certificate but had not officially relinquished his parental rights. So, I decided to find him and make him sign the papers so that I could move back home and get just a little part of my life back.”

“You knew then that Tony Stark was your father?”

“I knew that a man named Anthony Stark was my father,” Aurora corrected, “but I never thought that it was that Anthony Stark. My mother had never liked to talk about him so all I had to go on was that she’d been waitressing at a fancy party in the city and that she’d ended up going back to a hotel with one of the guests. Combining that with the name, I started researching. I eliminated those that would have been too young or too old or couldn’t have been in London in 1994 and then I just started emailing them or calling or visiting them. Eventually I started running out of possible Anthony Starks and I thought I  might as well cross the famous one off the list. I emailed his assistant and explained who I was and why I was contacting her. I even attached a copy of the forms for him to relinquish his rights because I didn’t want him to think I was trying to get his money or something. Weeks went by and I never heard anything so I figured I never would and by then it was May and I had exams at school, so I got distracted and I just focused on that. A few weeks into my summer break I got a reply. His assistant, Ms Potts, confirmed that Tony had been in London around that time and had attended multiple parties that could have fit the description and she asked me if I would be willing to take a DNA test to confirm my story.”

“And the test came back confirming you are his daughter,” David concluded after Rori paused in her story.

She nodded in reply, a small smile pulling at the corners of her mouth as she remembered. “He was shocked by the news, as I’m sure anyone would be to learn that they had a 16 year old kid. He got straight on a plane and flew to London to meet me. I think my foster dad nearly had a stroke when he answered the door. We had dinner together and he asked me all about my life and I told him about my mum and living at the pub and the accident. It was awkward at first but within a few hours we’d just hit it off and then when I asked him about signing the forms he refused. He invited me to come live with him in New York instead, at least until I was 18 and then if I didn’t want to stay, he said I could move wherever I wanted. I agreed and we flew out a week later after the courts signed off on it.”

“And this was two years ago?” Letterman questioned.

“Yeah,” Rori confirmed, “in the summer before my Junior year of high school.”

NEXT CHAPTER

OR CONTINUE READING ON AO3

[rainyjellyfishmagazine]

My Mom Died

When i was young, or at least younger than i am now, i used to read stories of people that had lost one or both of their parents, and i always wondered how world was like for them. What do they think when someone mentions something like; "Wow, i spent a fantastic weekend with my parents" or "I went shopping with my mom and look what i got" or "My dad taught me how to drive", or even how they react to relatable memes, when they are not so relatable to them.

Unlike the majority of people who wonder these things, i actually got to experience it. But for me it isn't a story of loosing a best friend, a guardian, a role model, it's about freedom. Free from a dictator, free from the paranoia and the anxiety.

My mom wasn't born an abuser, and she definitely didn't switch into one when she had me. We as a society view abusive and toxic people as if their bad qualities are innate, when oftentimes that's far from the truth. My mom was an amazing woman and i will be the first to admit it. After all, she taught me many things, by being an example of what to avoid becoming, i learned so much. She was independent when she was young, she left her home country to seek higher education in another nation, the USSR. A country of which she didn't know the language, didn't share the same political views and definitely didn't like the weather. But she did it anyway, and when she was done, she searched for a job even further; Finland, Australia, Italy to name a few.

She then decided to get married and have a baby, me. When i was born she fell in love with me. She loved me, she really did. In fact, she loved me too much, that's what made her toxic. She decided to leave her job to raise me, to leave her friends to spend more time with me, she essentially self mutilated her mental sanity because that's what she taught was best for us. But the truth is you cannot be happy talking to small kid all day, every day for years and still be healthy. That was her biggest mistake and My biggest lesson.

I have a lot of memories of her when i was really small; we used to sit together on the couch and watch tv, we would eat chocolate together while doing it, or sometimes ice cream. She taught me how to draw, i distinctly remember us being in the kitchen cooking pasta and her teaching me how to draw hearts with faces, she even got me an easel to paint. We also used to bake cakes together or when i was really young, we used to play with my barbies on the living room floor. These are the happiest memories i have and sadly enough, i think i count them on the fingers of one hand. Even these, that in my heart are filled with nostalgia, the more i delve into them, the more i find issues. She was so indifferent and bored when we played with the barbies, she was annoyed while we were cooking and drawing heart-faced people, she didn't really let me eat much of her ice cream or chocolate because they were hers.

But those were the years that i still loved her. She was my hero, my everything, i loved her so much. And she used it against me, to punish me. She would yell at me for everything and anything, by no means was i a saint but i was a very easy child growing up. Anyway, when i would apparently do something wrong her number one tactic was to insult herself, if for example i hadn't done my homework on time she would go on and on on how she was a terrible mother and she has done an awful job at raising me, that alone would kill me. I was crying and apologizing for making her so sad, i would promise her that i would change to not make her feel that way. One other time we were supposed to go to a festival but i decided to draw with my markers and a got a little color on my hands. When she saw this she was furious that i ruined the day and we didn't go to the festival. For so many years she made me feel that i was causing her so much pain, so much sadness and i would hope to disappear. I have cried my self to sleep countless of nights hoping that i wouldn't bring her so much sadness, that i would disappear and in my place she could have i kid that made her happy...

Silent treatment was usual, she would just ignore me for days, she would withhold love from me, she wouldn't hug me or kiss me or talk to me, she would refuse to wake me up in the morning, or tuck me to sleep or take care of me. She would even lock me outside and not let me in... I was maybe 7 at the time, and i felt abandoned and helpless. And the worst thing of all, i felt guilty for causing her so much distress. I had to walk on eggshells to make her happy, but whatever i tried it wasn't enough, i was never enough. She was a bomb ready to explode.

This wasn't her only tactic though, she threatened me as often as she could, that she would hit me so much i would have bruises everywhere. Because according to her that's the only way i would learn, and that she has tried everything, to explain to me what i had done wrong and apparently this was the only way I would learn. She used to slap me in the face here and there, but nothing major to consider it physical abuse. She would threaten to lock me in the basement, which she often did. She would threaten throw away my toys, that i was very protective of. She would basically threaten to take away everything that i had interest in, it used to be toys, then tv, then my smartphone and wifi... This caused me so much anxiety over the years that when i was in kindergarten, i used to hoard all the dolls.

As the years went by she searched for every little thing that she could punish me for. Our house had rules, one of them was that everything and i mean EVERYTHING had to be in order. To give you a perfect example, she once forbade me to play with my toys and tablet and watch tv for a week because one of my shoes wasn't in a 90 degree angle to the wall and was 80 instead. Another time, i wasn't allowed to watch tv for a week because, i would come from school 10 minutes before her (she was a teacher) and while i was waiting for her i would turn the tv on. Apparently i was obsessed with tv and i needed to be punished for it. My "obsession" also resulted in another punishment i remember. Every night we would watch a series on the tv together and then go to sleep. Many of the episodes were on repeat so i liked to read the episode's description to determine if i should watch it or not. This called for extreme measures and she changed the wifi passwords and didn't give them to me for 1 month. Once when she told me to call her on 6.30 and i called her on 6.37, she came to pick me up from my friends' house and didn't let me go out for 3 weeks. But to conclude, she searched for every little thing to punish me for. She would literally ask me a mind puzzle but if i answered wrong she would take something i loved away. She used to say to my French teacher "I'll catch her, i'll catch her doing something wrong, and then she'll see". She was this desperate to punish me.

When i was a kid i really loved her and hated my self for hurting her, but as i got older i realized that maybe it wasn't my fault. Maybe i wasn't the culprit. Maybe it wasn't me after all. But she would continue to scream and yell, bang the doors and the cupboards in rage and call me and herself names. Maybe i was right, maybe it wasn't my fault that we used to fight, only she would fight as it wasn't my place to "talk back", TWICE a week minimum. Maybe it wasn't my fault that she always spoke of the negatives anyone had, i don't know one person that she hadn't insulted behind their back. I was right, i knew i was right when she complimented me for not fighting for a week or when in a fit if rage she told me that sometimes she wished that she hadn't had me. Her words cut deep into my flesh. One moment it would be "Baby you are so beautiful and so smart i love you so much" and the other it would be "You are so useless and stupid, you will never achieve anything in your life you lazy bitch".

I didn't wanna spend time with her anymore, but she demanded to be loved. She demanded me hug her and kiss her and tell her i loved her, when she would ignore me for days. I felt very conflicted to do it, i hated it but i knew that i would face harder consequences if i didn't do it. There are pictures of us hugging each other and the only thing i was thinking at that time was to touch her as little as possible. I still had to hug her and kiss her even when she said vile things to me. To compensate and to keep at least a strip of my sanity i started thinking vile things too. I couldn't handle it any more, i was loosing hair from my anxiety and i wished she was dead. I used to think it was the only way out, it was either her, or me, and i didn't know which i preferred. I used to say it when i was angry and i would take it back almost as soon as i said it, because i loved her. As the years went by, it would take longer for me to take it back, soon the reason for reconsidering changed. I tried to justify her being alive so that we -and i- would have more money, i tried to to weigh the advantages and disadvantages to show myself that i_need_her and i need to be patient one more day/week/year and i would move out. At my lowest point i stopped being remorseful of wishing for her to die. I welcomed it, i was imagining it constantly, how much better my life would be, how much better everyone's lives would be. But these things happen to other people, not me. Or so i thought.

The day came, she was a teacher at the primary school and she was to accompany the eldest kids close to graduation to the closest middle school, where i was at, for them to gage at the school and talk to the teachers. Everyone in our town with little kids knew her. She passed out in the middle school's playground, i didn't see it but everyone else did. The ambulance came and took her, my dad picked me up and drove me home. I thought they would give her some supplements and send her home. But that of course didn't happen. When they told me it was serious i thought that this is what i had been dreaming, even if she didn't die maybe the shock of what had happened would change my life even for a little time. As the days went by and she wasn't getting any better i was apprehensive, this was really it. I would be free.

They unplugged her in a week, they said it was a brain hemorrhage. Everyone knew of her, but no one knew her true colors. I was the talking subject of the year, only to be pitied.

When something like that happens, its like you want to sit down and think, how it affects you, how life will be, but you can't. Everything is moving, people go on with their lives and time passes so slow and yet so fast. For the first time in my life i felt calm and not on the edge, a weight lifted off of my chest. I wasn't on the edge, i didn't feel paranoid, i felt... relaxed. But no one else did, i was blind to the truth, everyone else seemed to love her and mourn her. I realized it that summer when i went on vacation to my aunt's place. She said that my mom was always so calm and composed and never yelled or caused a scene. I knew a bomb ready to go off when everyone else saw a saint. That week i started having nightmares, nightmares i still have today. The kind that leave you terrified to go back to sleep. I saw that she was alive. Only her thought tormented me. But to everyone else i was a sorry little orphan that lost her mommy. I still haven't really told my dad what she put me through when she was alive. In a way i refuse to let her hurt others like the way she hurt me, especially since she's dead.

I no longer remember her voice. I no longer remember her face, or her hair, her glasses. I have to look the photos to remember. But she taught me the real lessons.

Do not nag for no reason.

Do not try to find the negatives in people.

Do not push the people you love away from you.

Do not take everything as personal offense.

Life is short Do Not Waste It

[it-may-be-dull-but-im-determined]

tagged by @brynnmck​ and @twelvemonkeyswere​, thank you!!

What is the colour of your hairbrush? just plain black

Name a food you never eat: Quite a few because I have weird tastebuds, but mushrooms for the texture, and any kind of peppers basically taste like poison to me, bleugh

Are you typically too warm or too cold? always too cold until it gets humid, and then I basically cease to function

What were you doing 45 minutes ago? Zoom yin yoga :) Although, admittedly I took ten minutes out halfway through because my sister did a video chat so we could see my niece dancing...

What’s your favourite candy bar? I don’t tend to buy candy bars as such any more, but probably Snickers or a Mars Bar? 

Have you ever been to a professional sports game? I’ve spent my entire life avoiding being dragged into any of my dad’s many sports obsessions, so nope. Although I’ve ended up at point to point racing a couple of times, does that count? And then there was a very fun rodeo when we were in Montana.. I mean, define sports?

What was the last thing you said out loud? Probably thank you to my yoga teacher over zoom (it always feels weird doing Ommmms and namaste when you’re in a room by yourself before that, but that’s yoga for ya)

What is your favourite ice cream? Haagen Dazs Pralines & Cream, but it’s never ever on sale so I always end up with their salted caramel instead.  I used to have an obsession with Ben & Jerry’s Totally Nuts but you can never find it anywhere these days...

What was the last thing you had to drink? Coke I think? Or tea? I forget to eat or drink a lot when I’m working from home

Do you like your wallet? I do! My mama bought it for me years ago and it’s got cute different coloured leather linings (except we call it a purse over here lol!)

What was the last thing you ate? Clam chowder soup and crackers I think? I was in a random soup buying phase in Waitrose last week apparently...

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? I haven’t bought any clothes since March, because of the obvious.. I do keep finding bags of clothes I misplaced during the move last year, so honestly I don’t need anything. I just like buying stuff!

What’s the last sporting event you watched? Yesterday I sat through highlights of... four different 2015 F1 races but I kept falling asleep. I definitely saw Austen and Japan and then Sochi because I yelled at @ajoblotofjunk​ about the hats. And about Putin showing up...

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? sweet and salt mixed!

Who is the last person you sent a text message to? an actual text message rather than what’s app... My dad, to tell him someone we knew had died...!

Ever go camping? Ha! So very many times. I HATE IT. I HATE IT SO MUCH. I am the worst camper in the history of the world and I have been forced to camp so many times and it’s always been an unmitigated disaster. The only way we could afford to do our six week road trip across the US in 2010 was to camp for a lot of it, and I basically drove 200 miles a day and didn’t sleep for weeks on end. Rednecks, stray dogs, bear country, hailstorms in Montana (when we ended up stranded in a laundry room for most of the night with more rednecks (they wore tshirts saying they were rednecks, so, whatever - they were very nice and very confused by us), sprinklers, noisy roads, food poisoning, impromptu hippy guitar parties at the next tent over, a weird dude who joined us at our campfire in Klamath and proceeded to tell really tall tales about 9/11 for so long we missed going orca spotting (oh and the fact the Klamath site was washed away by a tsunami in the 50s and I got paranoid about that happening again. Did I mention I was very tired?)

Do you take vitamins? All of them in great quantities... well, a general supplement with mega doses of B complex and iron and starflower oil and D3 (and then I top that up with a D3 mouthspray because it’s more easily absorbed and virtually impossible to overdose on, and I have barely seen the sun for weeks). The gelatin capsule also does wonders for your fingernails...

Do you go to church every Sunday? Nope, which isn’t really unusual for the UK to be fair. Having said that, I live in a town full of churches that’s also named after the 13th century church down the road from me, and has a lot of active church communities. Just not my thing.

Do you have a tan? I am the factor 30 every single day girl, I kinda hate the sun. Having said that, after we did six weeks driving California, NV, Utah, Arizona and NM... I was definitely looking very freckled and slightly less the colour of milk?

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza? Pizza. I need to go buy some pizza shortly (and eat it in the bath, which is my current lockdown friday night routine)

Do you drink your soda through a straw? I probably should do that more because my teeth are falling to bits and my dentist yells at me, but usually only if it’s served in a takeaway cup with a straw

What colour socks do you usually wear? Black as much as possible (although I have bed socks in all kinds of freaky colours)

Do you ever drive above the speed limit? I mean? I don’t drive so much these days, but I am terribly impatient and driving fast is more fun (if you can do it safely). I used to happily hit 100mph on the regular when I had a more powerful car and was commuting back to university twenty years ago. I’m not gonna jinx anything by saying I have always been lucky to drive safely, but I’ve only been stopped once for speeding in two decades, and I got out of that without a ticket (it was 5am on an empty dry road and I asked nicely).

What terrifies you? So very many things, I’d rather not dwell on them? Losing my job (and therefore everything propping up my life) in the current climate. Spiders. Tsunamis. Claustrophia is a BIG thing for me.

Look to your left. What do you see? The abstract painting one of my very talented friends did, and the very pretty pink fake orchid one of my other lovely friends gave me as a housewarming present.

What chore do you hate most? All of them? Washing dishes SO MUCH.

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? Depends on the context? The Aussie guys I work with (who are a nightmare to schedule meetings around because Sydney is So Far Away), whichever former Aussie soap star popped up recently (Jason Donovan is doing a new Cadbury’s advert and it’s super weird), my family in Perth my mum was talking about calling today...

What’s your favourite soda? it’s almost impossible to get decent soda in the UK any more since the sugar tax kicked in, so Cherry Coke, but I have to go to great efforts to hunt it down these days.

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thru?  I’m currently minus a car (but also minus any fast food places being open lol!). Mostly go in...

What’s your favourite number? 42 (and not for Douglas Adams related reasons, weirdly enough)

Who’s the last person you talked to? My sisters and my 18 month old niece, we did a videochat when I was supposed to be in my yoga class!

Favourite cut of beef? Filet, cooked properly (i.e, still mooing)... Having said that, I’ll happily eat steak tartare if it’s on offer

Last song you listened to? I’ve just listened to Portions for Foxes by Rilo Kiley on a loop for twenty minutes (mostly because I was checking my AO3 stats and I have a fic named for one of the lines in that). Also notable for being the first song played in the first ever ep of Gray’s Anatomy... 😂😂

Last book you read? Probably the very battered Tennyson poetry looking sad next to me on the couch

Favourite day of the week? Saturday

Can you say the alphabet backwards? I... probably? why you’d want to, I’m not entirely sure?

How do you like your coffee? I loathe coffee, weird tastebuds lol!!

Favourite pair of shoes? I have a pair of black jeweled embroidered mary janes with heels that I bought for a Christmas party when I was 19, and I still wear them now two decades later. It’s gonna break my heart when they finally die...

Time you normally get up? Ugh. I have not been sleeping well and it’s all over the place. I haven’t been in the office properly for six months now, so 7ish if it’s a good day. I used to set my alarm for 6am when I was commuting, but I also went through a phase of waking up at 5am every morning Just Because. I’ll still probably wake up by 7am if I got to bed at 3am, my body clock is not doing well these days.

Sunrises or sunsets? Sunsets! If I’m looking out at a sunrise, something is seriously wrong lol!!

How many blankets are on your bed? The duvet and... two blankets? And two blankets on the couch downstairs for when I end up sleeping there..!

Describe your kitchen plates. Still the crappy white Ikea plates I bought when I moved out to live on my own three years ago. Two of them are seriously starting to crack and at some point I have to be a goddamn adult and buy a dinner service.

Describe your kitchen at the moment. Stuff EVERYWHERE. Only one of the orchids is living there at the moment so I remember to mist it regularly. But my brain basically has no object permanence, so unless stuff lives on the kitchen counters, I tend to forget it exists (or to eat it)

Do you have a favourite alcoholic drink? Innis & Gunn beer (brewed in whisky barrels) and First Cape Merlot (and god I love dessert wines and PX sherry but they make me so sick)

Do you play cards? Nope, I hate games of all descriptions :)

What colour is your car? Currently non-existent. Need to buy one when this current madness eases up...

Do you know how to change a tire? Nope, honestly, what’s the point when you pay so much for a breakdown service to do it for you.

Your favourite state? Oh god... Oregon? Maine? Bits of California? Vermont? Tennessee? North Carolina? I couldn’t live in the US in a million years but I’ve been there an awful lot.

Favourite job you’ve had? I don’t know that any of my jobs have been a favourite as such - I’ve worked with people I liked and done some interesting stuff. My current job pays enough I can afford rent and has some fantastic health cover (they have to, mostly because the work causes so many nervous breakdowns, idk?)

How did you get your biggest scar? I lost most of the skin on one knee after running for a train and tripping up, and then not getting it cleaned properly and basically I had gravel emerging for months on end.. it was not nice. I’ve got worse and more annoying scars from being bitten but they’re definitely not as big.

Tagging, if you want to do it: @beesreadbooks @djeli-beybi @serhumfreysbrokencollarbone @couragethecowardlygirl @unadulteratedkr @tawktomahawk and anyone else who feels like doing this! :)

[wbtylerbooks]

Children’s Book Author Stories – Darryl Silver – Poppi the Okapi

About the Author:

Darryl Silver is a TV Producer/Writer/ Creator. Darryl is the owner of The Idea Factory (www.tiftv.com), a production company. I also own a Brand of Tequila called Calavera Tequila. www.calaveratequila.com

Creative Process:

I have always been a creative person and have had some great success in the past and still do today.

This is actually my first entrance into writing children's books and it has been an adventure to say the least.

In my early career I was blessed to have great mentors. One in particular told me, "write what you know about better than life itself." What this means is write about what you know and it will come out honest and real. I truly believe this.

When my kids were little I used to take them to the zoo almost every weekend. I did this to give my wife a break as she took care of the kids during the weekdays. It was at this time that I became fascinated by the okapi. I was actually more obsessed with the word and I created a rhyming game that my children and I used to play when we would go there. This game continues even today as they are all grown up. I always knew that this would make a great children's book and one day I just had to get it out of my head and down on paper.  

About two years ago I finally decided to sit down and write it. The writing process took me about three months and I got a great response from friends, family and educators that I had shown the work too. Since I am a TV producer/writer, I am represented by an agent. It was at this time that she submitted the manuscript to several children's book publishers. We instantly got a great response. However, during the phone calls that I had with the publishers I found experience to be creatively stifling.

My book is long. It's 48 pages long, and, when publishers looked at the manuscript their notes were, "the book is too long", "the book needs to be half the length", "there are too many words on the page" and "some of the words are too big". Being someone who is in control of my creative work in my other business I did not respond very well to these notes. The nail in the coffin for me was actually when I asked them what they thought about an illustrator and they informed me that that would not be my choice – publishers would assign an illustrator to the project.

I decided that If was going to write I book I wanted it to be how I wanted it and not someone else's vision. This is not to say I did not listen to others when they gave me notes, this just means that if your creative vision is going to be decimated then what is the point in writing the book.

It was at this time but I decided that I would go at it by myself and that I would self-publish via Kickstarter.

But, first things first. I had to find an illustrator. I met with a bunch of illustrators domestically and I wasn't overwhelmed with any of their art. The one person that I did think was just okay wanted $170 a page. To spend $8,000 on art, for a first time book writer, was too big of a risk for me to take.  I had had great experiences with my other businesses working with fiverr.com and thought that maybe I could find somebody somewhere else in the world who might be more reasonably priced.

I put out an audition and found about a dozen artists and sent them one page of the book and all I asked them to do was illustrate the page with their style of artwork. I was blown away by the level of quality that was sent to me and the person I finally settled upon was a woman named Mary who lived in Pakistan. I can tell you that her art was far more superior than anyone I had seen stateside. It was then that I hired her to do the artwork for the book at a fraction of the price.

The way I approached her was we started with a few pages at a time and then as we went along I would pay her for between 5 to 10 pages at a time to ensure that she would actually finish the project as sometimes people on this platform either don't finish the work or disappear. I made sure that she sent me the masters with each group of pages so that I always had all the work in my possession.

Because of my inexperience I had no idea that it would take another year-and-a-half to finish the art, but in retrospect 48 fully Illustrated pages done in a year-and-a-half isn't too bad. I was very lucky that Mary was so great because as we went along there were a lot of changes to the book not only the illustrations but with the words. It is amazing how you realize what works and what doesn't as the process moves along.  Mary was amazing and even though there was a slight language barrier we got the job done.

Once the book was finished (or what I thought was finished), it was time to print a sample of the book. It was at this time that I realized that the formatting that Mary had done was completely wrong. This was not her fault nor my fault but just both of our lack of experience. It was during this time that I started speaking with printers in China. I used www.Alibaba.com and had conversations with over 20 different book printers. I settled upon a couple different printers who gave me amazing help in understanding how to format a book. They were extremely patient with me and we just kept going back and forth via Alibaba and Skype until the actual formatting was done correctly.

I'm very lucky that I have a great friend of mine and somebody has worked for me for years Andrew who knows how use Adobe in such a professional way that he was able to sit with me and we were able to go frame by frame word by word and make changes to the small artwork and formatting issues until the book was actually properly formatted. This was NOT an easy process.

I believe it's important for independent book writers and publishers to figure out the most financially responsible ways to get the job done. We are taking on all the risk to achieve our goals.

I also think it is super important for the writers to understand the process from beginning to end. Each time you hire someone to figure out something for you is one less thing that you understand in this very complex process.

A great resource that I believe every independent writer should join is https://www.ibpa-online.org/. This organization was a godsend in helping me in getting the project done and done correctly.

There are no shortcuts to learning how all this is done it is HARD work.

During this process I wasn't afraid to ask for help. I asked family. I asked friends. I went online and asked strangers for help. You would be shocked at how many people are willing to share their experience and their skills with you.

I am now at the point that I am launching the book. I chose to do it on Kickstarter because I have a great social media network due to my television background. I am relying on lots of friends and associates to help me drive sales of the book. I spent a lot of time looking at how other people were launching their books on Kickstarter and found the most successful ones. I am trying to emulate what they did. But there is no easy shortcut. I know that going forward this is going to take a lot of work and the only person who can do that work is me since I am the best advocate for my own work.

The first thing I did when the formatting was done was print one book via www.bookbaby.com. The reason I did this was that in theory you think you know how the books going to look when it's printed but only once you get a copy in your hand are you able to truly understand the nature of what you've done. I would say at this point my book is about 90% done and when it goes to the final printing we are going to be making the final changes.

I've actually partnered with a charity https://www.okapiconservation.org/ and I have found that they have been super helpful and promoting my book as well as connecting me with lots of people in the Okapi community.  They have even connected me with our local zoo who are also going to help me promote the book. I even had the opportunity to meet an Okapi and many other animals in a VIP behind the scenes tour. During all these events I filmed myself to use in my social media for the launch of the book. The Okapi zookeeper even gave me a stellar book review. The more people on camera and in print who give your book a great review, the better it will be for your launch.

I have also spent a lot of time on social media pre-promoting my book. When you settle on a title it is imperative that you get all your usernames locked down for your social media. Well before you launch the book you should be promoting the book and creating a social media community that you think would be interested in the book. As of today I have not sold one book and my Instagram is over 700 people.  It is crucial to create a buzz for your book well before you launch your Kickstarter pre-launch and your final launch page.

I've also been using my television contacts and there's an opportunity for my book to be featured on a children’s show this summer.

I always tell my kids if you are going to do something you should do it right.

You only have one shot to launch a book the first time and you should put all your effort energy and resources into launching that book.

I also believe that it's very important to have great focus groups. Within days of getting my first copy printed I met with teachers, friends and children of my friends to read them the book. I've had the great opportunity to read it to several kindergartens to see what reaction they had. It is never too late to figure out what you did wrong so you can change things before the final printing. I will always consider this book a work in progress and anytime I can make it better I will.

I'm cautiously optimistic for the launch of my book but you never know what's going to happen. I could sell 100 books or 100,000 books. You never know until you try.

I believe that it is important to pay it forward so if anyone reading this needs help...

Find me:

Here is the Kickstarter page for my book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darrylsilver/poppi-the-okapi

E-Mail: poppitheokapi@gmail.com Website: www.poppitheokapi.com Instagram: @poppitheokapi Twitter: @poppitheokapi Facebook: www.facebook.com/poppitheokapi

[katebacks]

Love me, Hate me - Min Yoongi (M)

— pairing | Min Yoongi/Reader

— word c | 4,027

— genre | Fuckboy au!, College au! angst , Smut.

— summary |  You hated him, hated how handsome he was, hated how all the girls wanted him, you hated hating him, but you couldn’t contain yourself. At least not anymore. You’ll find out in the worst way, or the best, that Min Yoongi is an addictive drug. ]. 

— warnings/tags |  Adult content, explicit sex, low slang words.

You still lived with your parents, you were still their little girl. After your sister ran away from high school to live with the hippies when you were 10, the rules in your house got pretty tight. You could only go out accompanied by the friends that your parents knew, had to be home before midnight, and couldn’t date before finishing college. You always obeyed your parents, even if you thought that was not necessary, even if you were 23 years old, even if you were an adult, you had never disobeyed an order from them, until a week ago.

You hadn’t planned it, you had no idea how it had happened. In a minute you were drinking with your friends in one pub, and in another you were waking up in a bedroom next to the most coveted Fuckboy at the university. Min Yoongi was the person who most irritated you, no one could irritate you at the level that he could. Looking at him across the hall made your blood boil. In your three years of college, you hated him and despised him every day of your life.

But for some reason, after the night you spent together, something in you has changed, and you were annoyed at the new feeling you were feeling, you were no longer angry at Min Yoongi, you were angry at yourself for having feelings for someone who certainly didn’t feel the same. Your parents were traveling that weekend so they didn’t suspect anything, but what was really difficult was avoiding Yoongi. You studied in the same building, so you always had to leave earlier in the day to avoid bumping into him, or you had to come up with some question to ask the teacher until Yoongi had leave.

Your friends had already told you that he had asked about you, and even if you wanted to talk to him again, to kiss him again, you knew you couldn’t, because of your parents, and for you, you didn’t want to get hurt and you knew he would break your heart, because that's what bad boys do, and Yoongi was the meanest of them.

It was Saturday night, you had decided you wouldn’t leave the house. Your parents had a business dinner to go and they would soon leave, you'd be alone for the rest of the night just watching Netflix and eating junk food.

After they left, you went into the kitchen and opened the pantry, looking for the popcorn, and a few seconds after you closed the pantry, the doorbell rang. You frowned, looking at the clock on the counter. You weren’t expecting anyone and surely no one would show up there that time on a Saturday night. You dropped the packet of popcorn on the counter and walked into the living room, opening the door and widening your eyes at the same moment.

Min Yoongi was standing in front of you.

He was all in black, with his black hair falling over his face. His hands were in the front pockets of his pants and he looked at you with a smug look and a provocative smile on his lips. You almost choked to see him there, you didn’t even know he knew where you lived. And you didn’t know how to feel about his presence there.

Looking at him, flashes of your night with him came in your head, memories that were tormenting you all week. Those black hairs that you pulled, those eyes that looked at you with desire and lust, those lips that kissed your neck and made you crazy when he eat you out, the same mouth that kissed your whole body, whispered dirty things in your ears, things that made you lose control, letting him bosses you. His neck that you left hickeys. The chest you leaned on as you ride him. The arms that hugged you as he was thrusting inside you hard, the hands that gripped your waist, pulled you hair as he hit you from behind, the same hands he used to hold  your throat and dig deep inside you.

All that, that body, Min Yoongi, he was your perdition.

And all through the week, when those memories came to your head, you need to masturbate, relieve yourself, but nothing seemed to satisfy your desire. Your dildo's, your fingers, or porn movies, none of this was enough. Your body wanted Min Yoongi.

You stood for long seconds staring at each other until he let out the air and took a step forward, making you step out of the trance and take a step back, moving away from the door as he came in and closed the door behind him.

“We need to talk.” He said in a hoarse voice, causing the hairs on the back of your neck to bristle. You swallowed and took a deep breath, thinking what to say.

"About what? I don’t think we need to talk about anything." You said, trying to sound as confident as possible, but by the way the corner of his mouth moved, you knew you were not convincing enough.

"Where's your room?" He asked. Shit.

“My parents will be here soon and ...”

"I saw them leaving, (Y/N)." He said interrupting you, walking slowly toward you, not taking his eyes from you, making you hold your breath. When his hand touched your waist and pulled you against him, you yelped in surprise and slammed into his chest. Yoongi took a few steps, pushing you back, pressing you against the wall. You tried to look away from him, knowing that if you looked at his eyes for a long time, you would be hypnotized and loose control, but he grabbed your chin, forcing you to look at him.

Yoongi watched you for a few seconds, his eyes sliding from yours to your lips several times before he placed a peck on it, making the fire inside you spread all over your body. Your cheeks reddened, and you gasped. Yoongi smiled pretentiously.

"Be a good girl and show me your room, huh?" He said and so distanced himself, making your whole body miss his touch. "I promise you that you will be well rewarded, doll."

With no thought or denial, you turned to the ladder and started to climb it. Yoongi was literally the first man you would take into your home and bedroom, you would be so fucked up if your parents came in and found out. But you knew that if Yoongi took the first step, you wouldn’t stop him. You couldn’t because you wanted it too. As you entered your room, you closed the door behind you and watched Yoongi walking toward your bed. Even his walk was perfect, he was literally a magnet for unsuspecting girls, but how did you fall in love with him? The most annoying and crazy guy in college?

You shook your head and pushed your thoughts away, watching him jump on your bed, lying down comfortably, crossing his hands beneath his head and looking at you. He arched one eyebrow, seeing you still standing by the door.

"Feel free, after all, this is your room." He joked. You might even have laughed or smiled, but you were too tense, so you just stood still. He laughed cheekily. “Your choice.”

“What are you doing here?” You asked, too curious to wait for his willingness to say what he wanted to talk to you about.

“I thought you were longing for my company.” He said with a mischievous smile on his lips. “The girls who sleep with me tend to be obsessed with me and miss me a lot.”

You rolled your eyes. Of course he would say that.

"Thank you so much for reminding me that I'm just another girl on your list and sleeping with you was the biggest mistake of my life, ‘sir. my dick is the biggest on campus."

“I don’t think my dick is the biggest on campus, but I know how to use mine very well, and you know it too.” The pretentious smile returned to his lips and in that moment you remembered how much you hated him. He was an asshole.

“How many of your friends have you told about us, Yoongi?”

“I'm not the idiots with whom you usually relate to, (Y/N). I don’t need to go out there telling anyone about my personal life to feel the badass, and you wanna please sit your butt next to me?” He said sitting on the bed and tapping his hand next to him. You rolled your eyes one more time, too tired to argue, disappointed with yourself for having even thought for a minute that with you would be different.

"Yoongi ..." You sighed, folding your arms. "You have to leave before anyone finds out you're here. If my parents find out …"

"C’mon. How old are you, 15?" He frowned. "You're not a teenager, your parents can’t tell you what to do anymore."

“As long as I live under their roof and as long as they pay for my college, yes, they can tell me what to do.” You answered harshly. "And look, honestly, I don’t even know why you came here. It's pretty clear that I'm avoiding you all week and you know it, so why the hell did you show up here at this time with your nose up and your air of superiority? Isn’t there any girl you need to fuck or some party to go to?”

“I was at a party.” He confessed. "But I can’t stop thinking about you." He said getting up and walking to you, but this time without that badboy pose and without the smug smile. Your heart almost jumped out of your chest, because of his words and the innocence you were seeing in his face, something you had never seen before. But you couldn’t get carried away, you knew his fame, knew he was just saying that to get laid with you.

“You couldn’t fuck anyone there, that’s why you came here?” You asked moving away from him, stopping by the bed, as he took a deep breath, turning to you, staring at you as you began to tap your foot restlessly on the floor. “Did you think that telling me sweet words that are obviously lies and looking at me with innocence in the eyes would make me open my legs for you? What happened at Hoseok’s house was a mistake, Yoongi. I’m not like that …”

“And you think I don’t know that?” He asked, his face darkened, with that same look he had minutes before you were naked in one of your best friend's house rooms, walking toward you again. “Why do you think I’m so interested in you? You reject me for years, you detest me, you despise me, and one day you just kiss me, you fuck me and then you reject me again. You used me, and guess what? I liked it. And I want more.” And so he stopped in front of you. His hands gripped your face and you were unable to fight the urge you had to give yourself to him. The touch of his fingers reminded you of how good the feel of his skin against yours is. “And I know you want more too.” He whispered, caressing your lips with his thumb. That was true. You wanted more, you needed more. But you didn’t want to get hurt. You knew this would be just another fuck, you knew nothing would ever change between you.

“I don’t want to get hurt.” You whispered, closing your eyes, squeezing your eyelids, afraid to open them, look into his eyes and get lost in the sea of lust that were those dark eyes. That was when you felt his breath against your face You opened your eyes, seeing him inches from your face, almost making your noses touch. He stared into your eyes, an intense look that made your entire body tremble.

“I would never hurt you."

And so he kissed you. All of your defenses that you had set against him, fell and you drifted by the feel of his mouth against yours. You uncrossed your arms, and wrapped them around Yoongi's neck as he pulled you against him, one hand at the nape of your neck, the other at your waist.

"Please, let me fuck you, I've been thinking about it all week." He whispered between the kiss, lowering his lips to your neck, and biting lightly, making you feel shivers all over your body. Yoongi lowered his hands to your hips, and gave you an impulse, making you entwine your legs around his waist. Your cleavage getting to the height of his face, and he drew his lips from your neck, kissing and biting the valley of your breasts. You grabbed his hair and closed your eyes tightly, resting your chin on the top of his head, letting out weak moans as he dug into your blouse, his lips searching for your nipples. "Thank goodness you're without a bra." He murmured before he began to suck on one of your nipples, making you moan louder.

He walked toward the bed, his face still between your breasts, he tapped the shins on the edge of the bed and fell on top of you. You both laughed as the bed creaked as if you had just broken something. But soon the smiles disappeared and soon you were kissing again.

“God I missed your skin so much” He whispered between your lips, caressing your thighs, gently trailing his fingers close to your crotch, making you fumble for more physical contact. When his fingers touched you over your clothes, you let out a moan and a sigh, which made Yoongi smile. "I think you missed me too." He lowered his kisses down your neck and you took your hands to his hair until his face was between your legs, kissing you over your shorts.

“Please...” You whispered. The boy raised his eyes and so he took his hands to the top of your shorts, pulling it down, throwing it anywhere. He stroked you over your panties before kneeling on the floor and pulling your hips to the edge of the bed, where he placed your legs over his shoulders, pulled your panties aside and began to slowly lick your clit. You moaned with the contact and arched your back, closing your eyes enjoying the wonderful feeling it was to feel Yoongi's tongue caressing the entire length of your pussy.

“You know what excites me the most?” He asked, whispering and stroking it with his thumb. You denied. “Hear your groans. Those soft moans that show you're struggling to hold an orgasm. Those moans you give when I do this.” He said sucking your clit, which made you moan and grab the sheets.

"Yoongi ..." His name slipped between your lips, making the whole body of the boy shiver.

“Oh, my God, (Y/N). How can you be so hot? How can you make me want to fuck you at any time of the day?” He whispered as he gave you kisses and more kisses in your intimacy. You moved in your mouth. You were so excited. He lifted his head and began to stimulate you with his hand. He lay down beside you without stopping the movements with his hand. You looked at his pants and saw his erection. You stroked it over his pants, watching him close his eyes and squeeze his lips. His fingers pressed against you. You then thrust your hand into his underwear and held his cock tight. A few minutes later, you helped him take off his pants and climbed into his lap. He gripped your waist. You helped him fit into your entrance and went down, feeling him fill you up. You moaned as you moved slowly in your lap.

He sighed heavily and his chest trembled as if he was holding himself back to not thrust hard inside your pussy. He then moved his hips toward yours, giving you a strong, deep thrust, making you support both hands on his chest, absorbing the almost orgasm you had. You both took a deep breath. His hands went to your breasts and squeezed them over the bra.

“It's all right?” He whispered and you nodded.

“Yes. Just nearly came with this thrust!” You whispered, laughing. He smiled. He moved with his hips and sank deep into you again making you bite your lips hard to hold a scream.

"God, you are so tight!" He groaned as he gripped your waist and rolled onto the bed, getting over you. He worked his hips in with speed. One of his hands held your thigh that was wrapped around his waist, the other tightening around your breast. You pulled the back of his neck and kissed him deeply to contain moans from both sides. You then heard the doorbell ring and parted the kiss, startled, but Yoongi released your breast and thigh, and caught your chin making you look at him.

"It's okay." He whispered, slowing his movements, but increasing his strength. You nodded and closed your eyes, delighting in the feeling of having him fill you inside, but once again the bell rang and you opened your eyes one more time.

"What if someone has listened to us?" You asked frowning, worried. Yoongi kissed your forehead and stared into your eyes, rolling his hips, hitting your right spots.

"Fuck them, baby. It's just you and me now." He whispered and kissed you again, making you completely forget about anything. “I want you to cum with me, okay baby?” He said slyly, increasing his speed and beginning to take deep thrusts.

"Okay, shit. You know how to make me cum." You laughed. "My God!" You moaned, putting your face on the boy's neck, nibbling it. And again the bell rang, and your name was called, but you were busy taking the pleasure to care.

"Come on, (Y/N)." He whispered in a pleasurable groan. He was getting there, you felt it. You clenched your cunt around his cock, making him squeeze his hand on your thigh. You moved toward him, synchronized with his movements. “Fuck!” He moaned. You bit your lips, unable to hold the loud moan that was coming out of your throat. Yoongi then gave a strong thrust and sank into you, making you cling to him hard and biting his shoulder trying to control the feeling, but it was too strong, your body began to tremble. You tossed your head back and grabbed the sheet, pulling hard. "Do you like this, baby?" He asked hoarsely, rotating his hips.

You stared at him, your eyes burning. His lips parted, his eyebrows drooping, his brow furrowed. The muscles in his arms were rigid, making the veins in his arms rise and stand out. He was a god to you. Like you was to him.

“Fuck me harder, Yoongi.” You said it loudly, making him smile and push harder, making you scream, roll your eyes and throw your head back, screaming with the force of orgasm. Yoongi lay on top of you, thrusting his face into your neck as he fucked you, cumming seconds later. His lips glued to yours and he pulled the blanket over you to stifle the strong, utterly exhausting moans that insisted on leaving your throats.

A few minutes after his breathing normalized, Yoongi asked if he could take a shower with you and you accepted. You thought that during the bath he would want to fuck again, but he was totally a knight, he was affectionate. He helped you clean yourself, he was careful and you liked that part of him. When you returned to the bedroom, you put on your pajamas while he wore his clothes. He was silent, quiet, and that was not typical of him, usually he would have annoying things to talk about and make you angry. But now he looked sad, maybe.

“Are you okay?” You asked and he looked at you. Yoongi blinked a few times, he opened his mouth to speak, but before answering, the doorbell of your house rang again and you rolled your eyes, irritated. You stepped past him and down the stairs to the door. When you opened it, you came face to face with your next-door neighbor. She was the most gossipy woman you'd ever met. “Can I help you with something?”  

"Are you okay? I heard a few screams coming from her house and I was worried.” She said moving her head, looking into your house, as if searching for something. You sighed angrily. You were tired of everyone taking care of your life.

“I'm totally fine. The screams you heard were mine while I was being fucked by a guy who's still up there while I'm here listening to you intrude into my life. So why don’t you do me a fucking favor and get out of my fucking property and go mind your own business?” You asked in an angry voice and then slammed the door shut, leaving the woman in shock at the door of your house. You felt relieved. Maybe Yoongi was a good influence for you after all. You turned to go up the stairs and back to your room, but stopped moving when you saw Yoongi coming down the stairs. He wasn’t happy.

"So ... I'm going."

“Why?” You asked, unable to hide the disappointment in your voice.

"Your parents, they cannot know I was here, or they'll fight with you." You lowered your head, that was true. Yoongi, seeing that you wouldn’t say anything, sighed and walked towards the door, past you, ready to leave. It was when you realized that yes, your parents would fight with you, but you didn’t care. You wanted to stay with him some more.

"Please stay." You asked raising your head and looking at Yoongi who was already holding  the door handle. Yoongi turned his face at once, wide-eyed, not expecting you to say that. He studied your face for a few seconds, searching for some trace of hesitation, but found none.

“What about your parents?”

"Fuck them, baby. It's just you and me now." You repeated his words and he laughed.

He then approached you and pulled you by the waist, giving you a calm kiss.

"Looks like I have a rebellious princess right here… What am I going to do with you?"

"I can think of one or two things." You said giving him a peck. Yoongi smiled and kissed you again. It would be a long night.

“(Y/N), wake up… Oh my god!” You and Yoongi were awakened by your mother's screams. You two jumped on the bed. It was morning, you and he were wrapped in a sheet, both naked, exhausted for having sex until 4 in the morning. Looking at the door, your mother was in shock, no color on her face, static. You had forgotten to lock the bedroom door. Two seconds later your father was standing behind her and asking why she had screamed. When he saw you and Yoongi in bed, he turned red and stormed into the bedroom.

"Who the hell are you? And what are you doing in my daughter's bed? With her and naked?” Your father asked in a menacing voice. You and Yoongi looked at each other. The panic was stamped on your face. Yoongi on the other hand was very calm. He smiled at you, and looked back at your parents.

"Hi, I'm Min Yoongi, your daughter's boyfriend."

all rights reserved © katebacks | 2018 — no reposting and/or modifying of any form on any medium is allowed. no translations allowed.

[slytherinknowitall]

Potion Fumes and Cauldron Leaks

Chapter 12: A Friend For The Lonely Beast At Last

(Click here for chapter 11!)

(Click here to start from the beginning!)

Disclaimer: I don’t own the “Harry Potter” book series. The story of “Harry Potter” is the property of J. K. Rowling, it is not my intellectual property. There is no financial gain made from this nor will any be sought. This is for entertainment purposes only.

The following days went by way too fast, and the weekend was over before Severus knew it.

He had spent the two chilly autumn days locked away in his quarters, not leaving the cold confines of the dungeons even once. While he would normally spend his free days hunting for rare potion ingredients and interesting literature or working on improving his already impeccable brewing technique, he had passed the past 48 hours buried beneath countless pillows and thick blankets in his large four-poster bed. The only contact to the outside world had been provided by the school’s ever-diligent house elves, who had both kept the Potions Master’s rooms clean and delivered warm meals three times a day – not that the man had touched much of the food.

On Monday morning, Severus woke up with a throbbing headache. A quick look at his watch told him that breakfast was probably already in full swing, but he didn’t feel like eating. Most of all, however, he didn’t feel like facing a certain brunette before he absolutely had to. So instead, he got up and moved to the bathroom with sagging shoulders.

As he was standing in the shower a few minutes later, letting the icy cold water pour over his lithe body, he tried hard to ignore the intrusive thoughts that had been plaguing him all throughout the past days. They all had something to do with some newly discovered and rather confusing feelings for a little know-it-all, of course.

While he had dismissed his earlier impure thoughts about Granger as the simple result of prolonged abstinence, these confounding emotions were of a whole new calibre. Physical attraction was one thing; he could deal with that. But fancying one of his own students – let alone maybe falling in love with them – was simply too much. It made him feel almost physically ill.

Severus had never been one to handle his own feelings well, and his relative inexperience when it came to the opposite sex – especially in the romantic sense – only added to his confusion and uncertainty. The only woman he had ever been interested in, the only one he had ever loved, was Lily. And he had always thought that she was the love of his life. Even almost two decades after her violent death, her mental image was still looming over his scarred heart. The redhead had been the one thing that had kept him going throughout the war; she had been the only reason he had tried so desperately to keep that stupid Potter boy alive – and the only reason he had continued to live.

But now, he was slowly but surely starting to question all that. Whatever it was that he was beginning to feel towards Granger was so different and so much more intense than anything he had ever experienced before. Somehow, it even felt more powerful than his love for Lily had ever been to begin with. And over the weekend, the wizard had come to the shocking conclusion that the only reason he had ever been that obsessed with his childhood sweetheart was because she had been one of the few people to ever show a genuine interest in him as a person. Whether Severus liked it or not, he had always been someone who craved the attention and acceptance of others. That had been the main reason he had joined the ranks of the Dark Lord in the first place. Lily had been his friend, she had treated him with respect; and teenage-him had mistaken that for love. Looking back, he realised that it had never been her that he’d been craving; it had been her kindness towards him. The fact that his personal archenemy had also quickly started to show an interest in her had only made Snape more determined to make her his, of course.

His feelings towards Granger were of a different nature. She had never been his friend; in fact, Severus was pretty much sure that she hated him just as much as the rest of the student body – even if she never really showed it. So it wasn’t her continued affection he desired. No, he wanted her. He wanted to run his calloused fingers through her voluminous curls, he wanted to listen to her babble on for hours about some random boring topic, he wanted to hold her and sleep next to her like they had done in his office. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t striving to possess a woman but rather to give himself to her – and it was driving him absolutely insane. Even forgetting the fact that she was his pupil and personal apprentice, those feelings still managed to make him feel vulnerable and weak.

The half-blood sighed before stepping out of the shower and drying himself off with a towel. He took his time with the rest of his morning routine, but it didn’t take long before he found himself in the Potions classroom, surrounded by an annoying, hyperactive flock of second-years. And unfortunately, it seemed to only take a blink of an eye before those young students were then soon replaced by the seventh-years – with Hermione Granger being on time for the first time in weeks.

Severus noticed her presence instantly. She looked the same as always – her brown mane was pulled back into a classic Dutch braid, and her spick and span uniform was topped off with her polished Head Girl badge – yet somehow, the sight of her gave him an armada of butterflies in his stomach. She must have noticed his intense gaze, too; as she gave him a quick but radiant smile before hurrying to her usual seat in the front row. He would have lied if he had said that that small gesture didn’t make his dark heart jump a little.

Staggered by his inner turmoil, the professor frowned as he waited for the class to settle down. As soon as the last chitchat faded away, he briskly made his way towards the front of the classroom. Lightly tapping his wand against the black board, a dozen or so rows of brewing instructions appeared.

“Today –“

He let out a small cough, trying to get rid of that sudden lump in his throat.

“Today, you will be brewing Doxycide. Now, as you all surely are aware, this specific potion has the purpose of temporarily stunning Doxies. These fairy-like creatures are common household pests, so this remedy will likely prove useful to each and every one of you at some point. As anyone with even just a handful of braincells would know, these beasts are –“

The Gryffindor’s eyes were following his every move, and he was uncomfortably aware of that. They seemed to burn through his skin right into his soul.

“Um … bad.”

The little slip-up had an instant impact. There was immediate commotion, with loud chatter practically bouncing between the heads of shocked teenagers, and Severus’ eyes grew big as he unsuccessfully tried to mask his own surprise – never in his entire career as a teacher had he ever tripped over his own tongue like this before!

Not having the slightest clue how to handle this most unprecedented situation, he simply muttered a quick “The required ingredients can be found in the supply cupboard. You may get started.” before disappearing into his office, his long black robes whirling up around him as he did so.

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

Snape waited an extra ten minutes following the chime of the old Clock Tower before finally emerging from his hiding place, making certain to give the students enough time to finish up their potions, clean their workspaces and leave.

As he re-entered the dark teaching lab, he scrunched up his large nose at the foul smell of Doxycide; while he’d become inured to most unpleasant smells over the years, he for some reason still could barely stand the solution’s disgusting stench. Nonetheless, he marched to his desk and was just about to sit down and organise the countless parchment rolls spread across the table when a soft voice suddenly caressed his ears.

“Professor Snape?”

Startled, he spun around. Standing on the doorstep, there was Granger. Her heavy book bag swinging from her delicate shoulders, she was holding another three or four books in her arms. Over the course of the lesson, some of her locks had become undone and were now framing her freckled face nicely.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir! I didn’t mean to take you by surprise!” Biting her bottom lip, she gave him a quick grin.

“Miss Granger, I …” Severus was at a loss for words. Trying hard to ignore his beating heart, he was frantically searching for something, anything to say. Never before had he struggled for words like this in front of a student.

When he didn’t continue, Granger stepped into the room and said, “Oh, well, I apologise for ambushing you like this, but after what happened last Friday, I really feel like we should talk.”

“Fuck!” Severus thought panicked. “Now she will accuse me of being a bloody pervert! What kind of teacher falls asleep hugging a student, anyways?! You really should have known better, Severus! She has probably already reported you to that duffer of a headmaster and demanded to switch apprenticeships! Hell, the whole school likely already knows about that little slumber party, what were you –“

“Thank you.”

Snape was completely taken aback. “Wh-what?”

Her rosy cheeks became even redder. “I would like to thank you, sir. What you did for me was more than kind. The way you defended and comforted me … I cannot express my appreciation enough.” She flashed him another shy smile. “Oh, and also thank you for sending that house elf up to my rooms with my belongings after I ran off. That was very thoughtful of you.”

Severus could only stare at her, his mouth slightly agape. “So … you are not going to switch to another professor?” he asked meekly, the disbelief in his voice clearly audible.

Granger laughed nervously. “No, of course not,” she answered as she fiddled with the cuticle of her right middle finger. Furling her eyebrows, her gaze then wandered to the floor. “If anything, I’m here to apologise for my behaviour over the past couple of weeks. I just … overreacted, I guess.”

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, during which the flustered wizard did not allow himself to breathe. Could it really be that she was grateful for his actions? Perhaps she didn’t dislike him after all? While he would never – could never – permit himself to give into his irrational emotions, Severus let himself believe for just a split second that maybe, just maybe, the two of them could become something like friends instead.

Don’t be stupid! She may not hate you, but she still thinks of you as nothing more than an old, crusty codger.

Or did she? Helplessly overwhelmed by his inner conflict, he simply had to know the witch’s true feelings. Meeting her hazel eyes with his, Severus silently and effortlessly delved into Granger’s smart mind. As soon as he entered, he was amazed – he had never encountered such an extraordinary brain before. He didn’t have time to marvel at it, however, as he was in a hurry to search for any thoughts concerning his person before the Muggle-born would notice his presence inside her head.

Once he found them, however, he was stunned – there was not the least bit of hatred or disgust. Instead, Severus was rushing through a vortex of muddled memories.

First, he found himself in his own classroom more than six years ago, watching a slightly younger version of himself hold his typical introductory speech in front of a bunch of bright-faced 11-year-old Slytherins and Gryffindors. Looking around, he soon spotted a familiar bushy-haired, buck-toothed girl. Concentrating on her, he was able to feel the astonishment and admiration radiating from her.

The next memory seemed to be a couple of years younger, located yet again in the dungeon classroom. He saw himself aiding to a hurt Neville Longbottom lying on the ground after what seemed to have been another botched brewing attempt. Standing amongst the crowd of students gathered around the scene, a fourth-year Hermione Granger was looking at the two of them with both worry and fondness in her eyes. To Severus’ surprise, the latter seemed to be directed at both of them equally. He didn’t have a lot of time to process this, however, as the image promptly vanished before his own eyes.

The last distinct memory was only a few months old, taking place in a little suburban town somewhere in Muggle England. A casually dressed Granger was sitting on a small twin bed situated in what he suspected to be her bedroom. He raised an eyebrow at the various shades of green that the room was arranged in before stepping closer to the young woman. She was presently bend over a piece of parchment paper, and upon closer inspection, he realised that it was a letter from Hogwarts – an application for the apprenticeship programme, to be more exact. He watched as she used a small beige-coloured quill to fill in Professor Severus Snape next to the words Desired Tutor. Looking at her bare, makeup-free face, his breath was taken away when he saw her grin broadly, seemingly filled with excitement. Astonished, Severus slipped back into reality.

“Is everything okay, sir?” Granger asked with obvious concern in her voice, blissfully unaware that her privacy had just been invaded.

Snape gulped. “Yes, Miss Granger. Everything is quite all right.”

And when the girl smiled at him this time, he couldn’t help but smirk back at her. Perhaps they could become friends, after all.

(Click here for chapter 13!)

[hardyorange]

✨Productive morning journal✨

It's been a little while, but I'm ready to get back in the swing of things now that I'm mostly recovered from AWA!

Thanks to daylight savings time ending, this morning I:

✨ got woken up a little early by my roommate's alarm, but then woke up again a bit before 7:00 am, netting me over eight hours of sleep after falling asleep around 11:00 pm last night with the time change giving me that extra bit I needed!

✨ sort of stretched and dozed, so I got out of bed by 7:30 am

✨ I wasn't keeping particularly good track and definitely took longer than usual, so I was dressed and had my breakfast of brown sugar oatmeal with the last two sliced bananas and tea ready by 8:30 am

✨ I didn't want to get sucked into watching yt for too long, so I looked up how to wash my mouse pad and then tried to do a bit of online shopping; I discovered I really hate online shopping! doesn't matter which site, all are equally hard to find what you actually want and feel like endless clicking with none of the fun of actual shopping; I gave up on that (and mostly finished my breakfast) around 9:00 am

✨ I have one assignment due this week, which I started yesterday but didn't start early enough to properly finish, so I opened that up and got to work; it's supposed to be the first 15 minutes of three different assigned lesson topics, so I knew I shouldn't struggle with it; still, I lost focus around 9:30 am and checked social media for a bit

✨ I was back on track around 9:50 am and done by 10:30 am! really, I ought to have been able to do that easily yesterday, but I didn't get moving until too late which, because I didn't have food in my system, through me off entirely

✨ then I got sucked into social media :facepalm: I meant to only text my roommate to let me know when they woke up and read the latest post from the one political blog I follow, but I got side tracked by opening up tumblr to type this, following a mini yt rabbit hole, reading fanfiction, and scrolling fb; I finally got started on writing this at 11:30 am

I spent last weekend at AWA with two of my friends I never get to see and went to an additional concert with one of them Sunday night, so it was a good thing I had worked so far ahead on my school work, because I felt almost useless the whole week!

I delivered my lesson presentation, but our professor almost exclusively gives feedback to the guys in our group because he "has granddaughters" and thus somehow can't get too intense with his critiques of non-dude students??? which, he almost exclusively gives critiques and not compliments so I honestly have no idea how he felt about my presentation, and I made a pretty huge math error in part of it that a classmate had to catch, so I wish he had just said anything about how I did so I could stop obsessing over it; he's a good teacher, but "soft" sexism is still sexism, and I'm not going to get better if he doesn't tell me what I did well or could improve on

the writing team for an academic paper I'm involved with held an emergency meeting Tuesday instead of Thursday because of schedule conflicts, but it meant I could make requested changes ASAP and have the draft ready for submission by Friday when it was due, and then the conference offered a week extension to everyone anyways!

Wednesday was the second test for my hardest class, fortunately moved from Monday because our professor forgot about it; he hadn't handed back the homework relating to the section by the time of the test, so I don't think I did all that great on it

by Thursday I was doing pretty alright, especially since I could nap instead of going to our usual writing team meeting; I actually had a student show up to my online office hours, but he struggled so much with the technology that we hadn't managed to answer a single question by the time he left 45 minutes after he joined; this is particularly concerning because we've been doing classes and office hours online for over a year now, and he's a substitute teacher responsible for working with students himself!

on Friday I actually got up and ate a cooked breakfast before noon (breakfast burger, made breakfast-y by omitting the pickles and adding a fried egg), and then spent that day cleaning up from AWA, which involved laundry and reorganizing the hall closet to fit the cleaning supplies my friend hadn't wanted to keep, and also got the litter boxes cleaned, sink completely empty of dishes, and a few things set aside for donation

Saturday was a bit of a haze, probably because of all my activity the day before, where I didn't get out of bed until noon and spent five hours barely managing to get a third of my homework assignment done before I made dinner (microwave baked potatoes with cheese) and went to bed

✨ it's just after noon now, so I want to finish this by 12:15 pm, then make lunch (fish maybe???) and take the recycling to the center, drop off the donations, and do a bit of grocery shopping with my roommate

[xuseokgyu]

This might be the longest one yet.......... rip. i had some stories to tell.... :((

My job is to mostly to tell people when they make mistakes lmao. i work in document quality control ? for a manufacturing company, mostly check the inspection paperwork and certificates for the medical/surgical devices. and then have to be like this... is not right. fix this. currently have a lot of prototype parts going through which have some added requirements but also they keep changing the prints so then obviously the paperwork then changes and its just been annoying cuz its redo-ing a lot of paperwork.

yeah, that makes sense and that is part of it sometimes... i also think im just not in the mood for certain genres of music at times lol.

lol yeah it was so funny in the beginning she was watching some mv's and kept sending me screenshots of jeonghan with different hair styles with this message "who is this????" and every single time it was still jeonghan. i was just like lmao you should just assume that its jeonghan at this point. her defense was that he looks really different every time he changes his hair. she can recognize him now at least. the only other ones she can recognize currently are s.coups (her current favorite member overall) and vernon (her favorite rapper in their songs - she really like how vernon raps). shes more rap biased lol.

thank you.. you are only a little late lol my bday was the 11th. the last time i played bingo i spent $40 total over two days (80 games @ $0.50/game) and won zero. its a skill... i only got close to bingo (1 space away) like 3 times total. it was really tragic... at one point the lady sitting at the same table as us was just like wow... i haven't seen you even get three in a row since i've been here (which was like an hour).

We went to the same kindergarten, then i moved away and then i moved back in the 8th grade (i also have known the friend that is getting into svt for the same amount of time since she went to that same school, though her family are basically neighbors with my cousins family, and they are really close, so i saw her a lot more overall but wasn't super close to her until more recently actually, when we went to the same wedding (my cousin's) and starting talking again)

also to help this make more sense (as in why would they remember me lol) my graduating class size at that school was only 22 people, and my cousins also went to that same school. my dad went to that school, the english teacher there had taught my dad when he was in high school, its extreme small town vibes. people would literally just recognize what family i came from and just start talking to me. and i'd just be frantically trying to figure out who they were. like oh god oh god am i supposed to know who this is?? have i met this person before???

actually the wackiest thing is one of my friends from when i moved (big school), her grandma, i found out after we moved back to the small town, used to babysit my dad and her grandmas house was literally a mile down the street from us... you could see her grandmas house from our living room windows. i was just like what?? her cousins also then went to the same school as me. and then we fell out of touch but then ended up going to the same college. where she would be like "i saw you on campus today" and i was just like??? i did not see you, where are you? i haven't talked to you in like 3 years wtf?? i'm not in touch with her anymore but my younger sister is currently roommates with her younger sister in college lmao. oh other bizarre thing... one of my classmate's (from the big school) relatives bought the house we sold when i moved in kindergarten, and idk for some reason a few years after we moved we went back to the old house for something idk, and my classmate was visiting her family at my old house at the same time. we saw each other and we just stared at each other like what are you doing here?? we had moved like hour away (highway travel times) lol so it was just so random. (wow i hope these made sense lol)

the heat was worse in the beginning of summer i think... or i've just gotten used to it lol. there was all that smoke though that blew in from canada a bit ago though. but thats almost become a yearly thing now unfortunately. lol your weather sounds like how the weather is here sometimes - i live in minnesota, we are known for our wildly fluctuating weather. extreme highs and lows.

I love piano in music! I had to learn how to play piano as a kid... my grandma taught (most) of the grandchildren. i'm not very good at it tbh i never liked to practice and i havent played in years lol. we also learned how to play the piano/read sheet music when i went to the big school for music class for a year. I feel like if you are able to buy a little cheap or used keyboard it shouldn't be too hard to teach yourself if you wanted to start?? at least simple songs. I guess learning to read music would be the hardest place to start if you've never read sheet music before?? but thats what cheat sheets are for tbh. write the notes in, write them on the keys whatever works. we had a foldable note cheat sheet thing that went behind the keys and said the name of the note and where it was on the staff behind all the keys. when I was learning i'd be like b b b where is the b im looking for... ah here it is *ding* ok and now c ... c . c. ah ha *ding* and then repeat until you can play at a normal speed lol.

oh hands down its Oh My! best summer song lol i love Oh My! .... You Made My Day is also my fav album... what about you?

also what's ur favorite cold drink (#2)? picked this one cuz I have been buying myself bubble tea like once a week almost uhhh all summer lol the tapioca pearls at this place are so much better than other places i've been to and this place has cheese foam that i have also become obsessed with (tho thats very expensive its an extreme treat myself drink add-on lol) the blended mango with cheese foam... so good.... its like $7 though. today i got the normal mango milk tea which i hadn't had in a while cuz i'd been going through the various types of regular? milk tea (made with different types of black tea - i love black tea i have um a lot of tea i think i have like 15 different types rn). Otherwise I almost always have ginger ale in my fridge lol its great for a lot of things and also just to drink. love ginger ale... i just love ginger honestly.....

Is 1am and I should be sleeping but I wanna answer this before reveal day!!!

Best job description 😂😂 I feel like your job is one that can become automatic very easily so I can see how the changes can be annoying

SCoups and Vernon are definitely the ones with more distinctive faces, they were the ones I recognized better first, same for my father... he knows the names of all the members now but he still messes up the three Js hahah Jeonghan Joshua and Jun always take a while for him to recognize, sometimes Wonwoo too, which drives my sister crazy cause two of her three bias are there 😂😂

These small town vibes are so cool! I love that you have this community and managed to form long lasting friendships!! I basically had the same classmates for ten years and as soon as we graduated I lost touch... I made great friends at college tho The pandemic has been hard, we are respecting our health and haven’t seen each other personally since it all started, but I hope once we can meet again everything will go back to how it was between us

I had a situation sort of similar to yours at school too ahha My mom was and had already been a teacher (P.E.) at my school for years so all the staff and a looot of the older students knew who I was, but I had no idea who those people were hahah To this day almost everywhere we go together we will encounter some old student of hers...

Is so cool that your grandma did that! But I can see how it was more a task than something you truly wanted to do so you probably wouldn’t be very excited heheh I was part of a choir growing up and we had sheet music but our teacher never truly showed us how to read it, I know the basics but is literally like a toddler that just learned the alphabet hahah

Oh my! really is THE summer song I completely agree with you there!! I also absolutely loove the mv and whole comeback seemed really cool

Oohh I only had bubble tea once and I want to drink it again!! I only know of one place that sells it here, it is still a pretty new “concept” so there’s not a lot of shops around... And I never had ginger ale! I’m super curious about it cause I’ve heard it being mentioned in, like, tv series, but I don’t drink sodas so I don’t know if I would break my “diet” for a taste heheh My favorite cold drink is lemon iced tea, the ones we have here are really sweet and kinda “sparkling”? (I don’t know how to say it... is almost like a soda but not really 😅) Even during the winter, we drink it during weekends cause is a “special drink” hahahah not a Brazilian thing, just in my house

[aconstantache]

When my son was born, I was sure I wouldn’t push him towards football.

I knew I wouldn’t push him towards anything, but sometimes I thought he might even be better off without all the clutter that football brings. He would be better off without obsessing over the fitness of a full back, better off not discussing Saipan ten years later as if it happened the day before and could still be resolved, and better off not becoming mildly agitated if the league table was out of sync if all the clubs hadn’t all played the same number of games.

Yes, he could be better off without all of that. He would be better off without the aggression and the shouting and the emotional investment and the sense that he had a personal stake in this, which wasn't really a personal stake at all. Why should football make people happy or sad or angry when it has nothing to do with their lives? Why should it matter so much? Imagine the freedom? Imagine what he could do with his weekends?

I didn’t think it mattered to me like it used to do and maybe that was a good thing. It’s not cynicism, I said, but life, an awareness of all the things that matter and all the things that don't. We are standing on the brink of extinction so why would you get worked up if the side you support can’t beat Southampton at home?

And then, earlier in the season, my son stopped playing briefly, went over to the TV and pointed at one player who he said had the same hair as Victor, one of his teachers at his nursery. I told him the player’s name. That’s Mo Salah, I said. He could say Salah so we enjoyed that, but I didn’t think much of it.

This was early in the season and I thought Salah might be another player who does some nice things on the ball but never really delivers, never really gets you a goal. I’d seen this type before, easy come, easy go. It didn't matter. Mo Salah would not be detaining us long. We would not be emotionally investing in Mo Salah.

And then something else happened. My son wanted to play football or, at least, he ran furiously up and down on the spot, kicked the ball and described this as football.  Then he asked if he could be a footballer and, because he could say Salah, he was Salah and I would pass the ball to him and he would kick it under the bed and that would be another goal for Mo Salah. And we’d celebrate. The celebrating, which is when he runs and jumps into my arms, is the best bit.

He would be Liverpool and he’d be Salah. One day, he wanted to be Ireland too so he asked me who he could be and I spent some time thinking about it. And I had to keep thinking for a while.  “Do you want to be Shane Duffy?” I asked. Then I settled on Wes. I'll break the retirement news to him later.

My son was four last month. He hasn’t really made any choices in life, except to declare that the Suchomimus might have been the fiercest of all dinosaurs because it ate fish and meat. He might decide tomorrow he doesn’t want to play football again, or at least not want to kick a football under the bed and decide by some arbitrary measure if it’s a goal or not.

A few months ago, he started to watch football as well, at least for a few seconds, and only when he thought he could see Salah. He’d ask for Firmino too - "Is he Salah’s friend?" - and then he began to expect something. He began to ask to see Salah’s goals and he smiled and said 'Salah' every time Salah scored. And then my wife began to sit down and enjoy the look on her boy’s face every time Salah scored. And, of course, Salah kept scoring.

So our son has come to expect these goals now and we sit with him and watch them. Every time Salah scores, he smiles. And every time he smiles, Salah's goals seems to matter a little more. I don't know why, but I do know that football - all sport - is not just about escape, it is about who you escape with and who you experience joy with. And sometimes you can lose that joy because the people you escaped with aren't around anymore and maybe then it matters less.

So now it seems personal and now we are invested again. When Salah plays, I want to tell my son that he scored. I want to watch football with him in those moments when he's prepared to watch to see if Salah scores, before he decides his time would be better spent impersonating a Mako shark.

And maybe this will be a brief infatuation and he'll never show any interest in football, but for now, there is this extra layer of happiness, this sense that it matters like it mattered when you would catch your joy reflected in the face of your own father when he saw your reaction to a result.

So you come back from Manchester on Wednesday and he asks you where you’ve been and you tell him. And you ask him does he know who scored in the game and he says, with a smile growing on his face, because he's sure he’s got the right answer, “Salah”.

That’s right, you say, Salah scored and this strange feeling, once familiar, washes over you.

And he says, almost bored now, “Salah always scores”.

He does you say, and this feeling that had gone rises in you once more and you know what’s happening. And he smiles again, because he wasn't really bored, and says again, "Salah always scores" and you know this feeling, you know where this is going. You know you have escaped with those who matter most to you.

Mo Salah always scores and just when you thought you were out, they suck you back in.

-  Just when I thought I was out, Mo Salah pulled me back in

[goodnewsjamaica]

Joshua Henry has changed theater (and a few diapers)

New Post has been published on https://goodnewsjamaica.com/world-view/hes-changed-theater-and-a-few-diapers/

Joshua Henry has changed theater (and a few diapers)

Samson Peter Henry, his parents’ first child, made his debut on the cusp of spring, at around 9 o’clock one morning this March. For his mother, Cathryn Henry, a postpartum nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, it was a kind of Have Your Child at Work situation.

For his father, three-time Tony Award-nominated actor Joshua Henry — most recently for his lead performance as Billy Bigelow in Jack O’Brien’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” — Samson’s birth had the advantage of exquisite timing.

“We were in the middle of previews, and like a good boy he came on the day off,” Henry, 33, said over lunch at a diner on the Upper West Side, near his apartment. He’d logged only 3 1/2, maybe four hours of sleep the night before, but he was energetic anyway. When he realized it had been exactly a month since his son was born, he high-fived the reporter across the table.

 It’s a bounteous time for Henry, who is toppling a boundary as the first Black actor to play Billy Bigelow on Broadway. Billy is Henry’s highest-profile stage role so far, while becoming a father is, he said, the biggest moment of his life. What’s strange, and powerfully serendipitous, is how perfectly that intersects with the biggest moment in Billy’s life, when he learns of his impending fatherhood.

“My boy, Bill,” Billy exults, envisioning a son in his famous song “Soliloquy.” When Henry performs that solo now — in what Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review, called “a heaven-rumbling voice” — he summons thoughts of his boy, Samson: his face, his strong little body, even his cry. Like Billy, he is awed and invigorated by what he owes to this tiny person in his life. In both men, actor and character, something has changed.

If, when he was 15, Henry had been given a glimpse of his future — the Broadway debut at 23 in “In the Heights”; his first Tony nomination, at 26, for “The Scottsboro Boys”; a second three years later, for “Violet” — it would have seemed foreign to him. The youngest of three children of Jamaican immigrants, who attended a small Christian school north of Miami where his father taught math, he’d always been musical. But he’d never seen professional theater and had no idea it could be a career.

“I had fully intended to work at an accounting firm like my mom,” he said.

Then came an intervention that Henry credits with everything good that came after. When he was 16, his choir teacher, Birgit Fioravante, urged him to audition for the school production of “The Music Man.” He ended up playing the male lead, Harold Hill.

“Afterward, she took me aside and she was crying,” Henry said. “She was like, ‘You can do this for a living.’ And I was like, ‘Do what?’”

In an interview, Fioravante said that she’d worried about encouraging a student to follow a path where the odds against success are so steep. “I’d never done it before,” she said, “and I haven’t done it since.”

For a year, she gave Henry free private voice lessons at her house. She prepared him for his audition at the University of Miami, where he was admitted into the musical theater program and met his wife, who lived across the hall. More recently, Fioravante helped to train him vocally for “Carousel.”

At college, he knew within a week that theater was something he could do for life. From 11:30 p.m. to 3 a.m., alone in a college studio, he would devote his nights to what he calls “Josh obsession time,” honing his skills.

“I would just be there with the mirrors,” he said, “and I would play cast album after cast album after cast album after cast album. And I would start to learn the directors, the music directors, what musical theater was — how it was constructed, how a show was made. While I was listening to music, I was practicing dance.”

He was also studying the careers of Black musical theater actors like Michael McElroy, Taye Diggs, Norm Lewis and Brian Stokes Mitchell. “I was like, if there’s a template for me out there, I have to know exactly what that is,” he said.

Yet even as he searched for that template, he didn’t want to be limited to roles written for Black men. And while he willed himself to believe that he would perform on Broadway within three years of graduation — a goal he wrote down in a planner he still keeps on his desk — he wasn’t sure that the theater, an overwhelmingly white industry, would welcome him.

But his timing, coinciding with the emergence of Lin-Manuel Miranda, turned out to be impeccable.

In the fall of 2006, Henry drove a Penske truck from Florida to New York and moved into a basement apartment in Washington Heights. Within weeks, he was cast in the original ensemble of Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ breakthrough off-Broadway musical “In the Heights.”

The show was “from a world I was from, from a vocabulary musically that was all about hip-hop, R&B, salsa and reggaeton,” Henry said, recalling the production’s first read-through, when musical director Alex Lacamoire sat at a piano and sang “96,000,” surrounded by a company of Latino and Black actors.

“I was having flashbacks of the nights at 3 in the morning, trying to find myself and my craft and wondering if there was a — not knowing if there was a — hoping,” Henry said, hitting that word hard, “that there was a place for me in this business. I lost it. I was crying so much in that read-through. A lot of us were.”

After he did that show, which transferred to Broadway in early 2008, “couldn’t nobody tell me anything about where I’m supposed to be,” he said.

It means something to him, then, to play a classic role like Billy Bigelow. Billy, though, is a dark-hearted carnival barker who beats his wife. Henry is so gentle-spirited that the director George C. Wolfe, who worked with him on “Shuffle Along,” remarks on the rare sweetness he exudes, while composer Jeanine Tesori, who worked with him on “Violet,” mentions his “radical kindness.” He didn’t have many ways, aside from fatherhood, to connect with Billy.

To Henry, playing this deeply flawed man in a show with a famously glorious score is “an opportunity to leave a bigger mark than just the notes and the scenes” — to expand younger Black actors’ notion of what they can hope to do onstage. He was cautious, though, when producer Scott Rudin floated the idea of the role. In a musical that’s controversial for its seeming indifference to domestic violence, casting a Black actor ran the risk of demonizing Black men.

“My first question to him, when he approached me about it,” Henry said, “was ‘How are you looking at this cast? Are you trying to use the fact that I am an African-American man to tell the story?’ That wasn’t his thought. He was like, ‘I want to get the best people to tell the story.’”

That is largely how his casting has been received, though Hilton Als, the most prominent Black critic in the American theater, found another dimension in it. He argued approvingly in The New Yorker that the production — which has a white Julie Jordan, played by Tony winner Jessie Mueller — offers a rare instance of colorblind casting in which thought has been given to a Black character’s presence in a largely white world.

Aside from his ensemble role in Green Day’s “American Idiot” in 2010, all of Henry’s Broadway roles until “Carousel” were written to be performed by men of color, often in stories about Black culture — most recently “Shuffle Along,” in 2016, about the first Black musical. After that, he spent 15 months playing Aaron Burr in “Hamilton,” in Chicago and then on tour, in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

He was playing Burr last summer when he and his wife found out she was pregnant. Suddenly “Dear Theodosia,” Burr’s tender pledge to his little girl, became a song that Henry was singing to his unborn child. A couple of times — on the lyric “I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll make a million mistakes, I’ll make the world safe and sound for you” — his voice cracked with emotion onstage.

Early in the run of “Carousel,” he’d been singing to his unborn boy, too, tapping into his own anticipation to portray Billy’s in “Soliloquy.” As Samson’s due date approached, Henry’s castmates teased him, saying he’d never be able to sing it the same way again. The first time he had to perform it as a father, the day after the baby’s birth, he didn’t know how he would.

“I’d only gotten like two hours’ sleep,” he said. “You want to let go in the character, you want to let go emotionally, but I was concerned that if I did that, I would feel the actual feelings that I’m feeling in my….”

He broke off, paused a long moment, misted up, exhaled. “Um. And if I felt all those things, I still had to sing the song, this 7 1/2-minute mammoth of a song. There are certain technical things you have to do to just get through it. I don’t even remember that show. I thought I would.”

Mueller does. She gathered with some other actors to watch “Soliloquy” from the wings that night.

“Because it was a moment, you know?” she said. “I was thinking about him a lot, because I knew he has the most on his shoulders in this play. I was so surprised by how calm he seemed.”

O’Brien, their Tony-winning director, remembers, too. The change he saw in Henry’s “Soliloquy” was so profound that it altered the structure of the production. In the first weeks of previews, O’Brien recalled, he had often been moved “but not stunned” by what struck him as a concert-perfect, too-safe performance of the song.

“The weekend that the baby was born, it was like a dam burst inside him,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t say anything about it. He just started to relate, I think, to the depth of his own feelings, and wow. You know, there’s another scene in Act 1 as written, and we decided we were idiots to do it, because he was hitting the high point in the show, and what did you want to see after that? Nothing.”

So in this “Carousel,” that’s when the first-act curtain falls, with the company’s festive departure for the clambake cut from the show.

In Samson’s life, of course, the curtain has only just risen. And his father — brimming with plans as usual, including for a funk and soul album of mostly original songs that he hopes to drop in September — feels the effect this small person is having.

Henry had always been an ace at compartmentalizing, filing away for later anything he didn’t want to think about right then, keeping the personal firmly separate from the professional.

Samson, apparently, doesn’t play by those rules.

“It’s so weird,” Henry said. “He is rounding my edges a little bit. He’s making me see this is all one thing.”

By: Laura Collins-Hughes

Original Article Found Here