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bloodybells1 · 4 years ago

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Lucky Dog

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.

—HERMAN MELVILLE

I look into the eyes of an animal.

I am in the habit of doing this with a little Brussels Griffon by the name of Casca, my canine, whose gentle orbs and spunk and flexibility make me forget that he is in fact a dog and not a cross between an Ewok and a Koala.

Not right now, though. These are different eyes, the ones of a Maltese crossed with a West Highland Terrier, peering through a curtain of matted hair draping over his brow, as he lays back on my futon. He has jumped up here as I lay down on it, after having flipped onto his back in a split second, in what seemed to have been a familiar move, so natural and quick. It was a gesture of near total compliance. He was egging me to stroke his belly.

There was something deep about his gaze, somewhat simian in intelligence, communicating a kinship, but difficult to pin down. If this creature hadn’t the capacity to at least conceive of complex, putatively human emotions and other states of mind—like fear, relief, care, or pleasure—lacking only a verbal means to communicate them, then everything that I was seeing in his eyes, the layers of thought and feeling, were just a coincidence of Mother Nature, some thing that animals do which I don’t have access to, but which I insist I do in the form of anthropomorphization.

Yet, that doesn’t seem possible: the facsimile is too close. These have to be the same things, or similar things, that we humans feel, that I am now sensing coming from this upturned canine lying on my lap on the futon.

At this point in the story, the dog’s name is Sammy.

Sheri, the woman who’d found him on the street, had posted on the NextDoor forum hoping that someone might claim him. She’d grabbed him on the corner of Broadway and 177th. The dog was in a panic, chaotically searching for his owner, crossing the street with his leash in tow, and she’d scooped him up and brought him to her nearby apartment. Sheri’s domestic situation precluded a canine presence: she wanted to find the owner of the dog, but more urgently, she needed someone to foster him in the meantime. Otherwise, she’d have to put him in a shelter. My girlfriend Bernie and I had taken pity and responded, offering ourselves as foster parents for the interim. We’d hold him until the owner showed up or until he’d otherwise find a permanent home.

We’d started calling him Buddy, but Sheri had asked he be named something with an “S,” so Bernie suggested “Sammy.”

And Sammy is taking this house by storm.

As it turns out, I’d met Sheri once before, though neither of us know this during our Zoom call. She’s leaning back on the headboard of her bed with the soon-to-be monikered Sammy laying supine, his favorite position, by her side. Bernie’s been texting with Sheri and now she and I are talking to Sheri over Zoom to take a look at Sammy, who is all but glowing through the screen, despite his matted hair which, even on the call, looks as though it's never once been brushed.

I’m having that funny feeling you get when someone seems familiar and you can’t quite place why, until later on in the conversation Sheri tells us her address and a little about her job and I put two and two together and realize she’s the wife of a good friend, a fellow actor and writer named Michael who lives in the neighborhood. I know that Michael’s wife is a make-up artist for various TV shows and—bam—the memory of having briefly met her outside her apartment building once before enters my head.

“Oh my God, this is going to sound creepy but I know who you are, Sheri. I know your husband. I know your son’s name. I’ve actually met your son. Benjamin, right? I’ve been to your house.”

Sheri’s jaw creeps open in amazement over the coincidence and I add with ironic omniscience, “I know everything about your life.”

“Wait . . . what? For real?” Sheri is having a hard time processing all of the information but immediately knows what to do next, which is to walk out of her bedroom and open Michael’s study. My friend’s familiar bookshelves and wall art come into view of the camera.

“Honey, look who I have on Zoom.”

Michael turns around and sees who’s on the other side and yells out my name, happy over the coincidence, as I am as well.

We come right over to pick up Sammy and it’s a nice reunion during a bleak pandemic year when I’ve been seeing very little of people outside of my three-block radius.

It seems that Sammy’s a bit of a good luck charm. He’s bringing people together. Bernie and I are taking him around the neighborhood, to the park just a block above our apartment and everyone is asking who this precious, white-haired creature is.

“We don’t know!” we keep saying. “Our friend found him in the street.”

“Are you going to keep him?”

“We don’t think so.”

“But he’s getting along so well with Casca.”

Indeed he is. He’s friendly. But Sammy’s also timid and nervous. He is after all, a strange dog in a strange land. I can’t imagine what must be going through his head. Who are these strange people? What is this strange neighborhood? Where are my owners?

That’s the thing. The owners.

We’re not so sure whether, in fact, there are any. We hear stories about how animals are often deposited in the city, right on the street, by callous owners with little patience—and little humanity—who then drive off and disappear, leaving the poor animals to be discovered by locals.

Some of Sammy’s details align with those stories. He was discovered not far from the George Washington Bridge, which would lend credence to the account of a disinterested owner from some place in, say, Westchester, who’d decided that Sammy had become a liability they could no longer sustain and who had left him in Washington Heights just before taking the quick way out into New Jersey over the bridge. Sammy’s coat is also completely tangled, with small knots, very much like dreadlocks, peppered throughout, with dirt and lint encrusted within, which suggests a type of neglect that might align with the story of someone who no longer wanted him. He also smells profoundly of urine, though this is likely to have happened from having to spend a night alone, if that is even the case. We just don’t know. Finally, it is abundantly clear that Sammy has not been neutered.

But there’re other details that don’t lend credence to that story. It only takes a couple of hours with him to see that Sammy, who is responsive and trusting and loving, had been cared for deeply by whomever had had him. He was loved. A quick pull on his lower lip reveals pristinely clean teeth, as well. Yes, he’s nervous, and he keeps pulling on his leash like a caught snapper. Every time we walk him he juts around like he’s on a desperate hunt. He has an air of desperation, a vigilance for possibly familiar faces that might pop out any second. But he looks at you with an unmistakable sense of domesticity. And he’s clearly house trained.

Sammy definitely has an owner. Someone who loves him. Of that we are certain.

So then why was he running around on the street? Sheri says that when she grabbed him on the sidewalk he was so scared and confused that he jumped into a car, idling and double-parked, at random, surprising the passengers before being pulled back out by Sheri. It’s obvious that he was in a car just before he was lost. He’s looking at every car, every vehicle that passes by, almost as if to check the make and model, hoping against hope it’s the one that left him in this frightening place.

I think back to a woman I used to care for. I was volunteering for an agency, ComForCare, seeing to social needs for seniors, primarily those living alone. She lived in an elder care facility in the Upper West Side. She wasn’t all that much older, but she had a severe case of schizophrenia, for which she was heavily medicated. She was a lovely lady with a sense of humor and a deep appreciation of art. We used to go to the movies and to the Met. She had difficulty holding conversations for a sustained period and she hoarded. It had been bad enough that her old apartment had needed to be professionally cleaned out. I saw it once and was given a window into what real hoarding looks like: stacks of books up to the ceiling, along with opaque grime on the walls. Still, she was lucid and functional enough to be able to take her car out when she wanted to go for a drive, she could order food and sit through a movie and extemporize about it afterwards and she could use the bus if she needed to commute around the city.

It occurred to me that, had she been moved to, she could have had a dog. She could’ve seen to its needs, fed it, stroked it, watered it, and otherwise cared for it. But the dog would, like Sammy, have borne traces of a style of care that is not regarded as, shall we say, complete.

My theory was that someone with a condition misplaced him. There’re all sorts of humane concerns regarding cleanliness and desexing which take only a couple of Google searches to discover. Therefore, so I reasoned, though Sammy was loved, he nonetheless had been neglected, and only a mental illness may account for the discrepancy. This person likely became disoriented in an unfamiliar neighborhood; perhaps they’d needed to pull over unexpectedly, and hadn’t realized that all of a sudden Sammy wasn’t in the car and drove away. They hadn’t realized it until it was too late, and were now frantically searching around for him, most likely not able to make the right calls to the right places, for “obvious” reasons. The poor owner, I thought, unable to do the right thing. Or maybe they were about to make the call to us. Who really knew? We were just theorizing.

Or maybe I had it all wrong and it was actually much simpler. Maybe the owner just straight up forgot about Sammy.

Sheri’s put up fliers within a two-block radius of where she found Sammy. She’s gone into several vets office’s in the area with news of the found dog. Bernie takes a picture of Sammy on our couch, staring at the camera as though his owner might pop out of the lens. He looks lost, even though he’s been found. He is lost, of course; but we have found him. And we’re seeing to it that he gets to where he belongs. So we follow suit with Sheri’s efforts and post the picture of Sammy with a notice on the largest Facebook group for lost dogs in Manhattan. We also register him with a local shelter which will post his photo and his information on their website. We’re like scientists at the SETI Institute, sending out radio waves into the vast ether, expecting a response from the deep, hoping that if there’s anyone out there searching for us, they will now be able to find us.

We’ve given Sammy a much-needed bath. I didn’t want to just throw him into the bathtub after all that he’s been through, so I waited several smelly hours while he lay next to me before we scrubbed him down. He ran around the apartment like he had a rash, scraping and rubbing his body against any surface he could find, the bottom of the sofa, the rug, the futon, while we chased him around with a towel, trying our best to alleviate that weird feeling dogs get when they’re wet. Casca, ever the Ewok, just sits, enraptured by the sight, like an older brother watching from the sidelines. After Sammy calms down I do my best to brush his hair but the dreadlocks make a proper brushing impossible. Still, he looks much better. In light of everything else it’s pretty inconsequential, but I go ahead and schedule an appointment with Casca’s groomer. I want Sammy to look as spiffy as possible in case the owners don’t show and we need to start finding him a new home.

Bernie takes off from work and brings Sammy to the vet. We need to find out if he has a HomeAgain microchip, that tiny piece of tech injected in between a puppy’s two scapulae, often during the first vet visit, the universally recognized system for canine and feline identification. If he has a microchip, it will lead us to his owner. They could be just a phone call away.

Bernie’s away for hours. Patients are not permitted inside the vet’s office during the pandemic and instead must wait outside while the dog is seen indoors. Vets are overloaded (everyone’s getting a dog for companionship during quarantine). Wait times are much longer than usual. She’s basically gone half the day. I’m sitting in the apartment with Casca, who is oddly quiet. I know him well enough to know the kind of quiet he’s in. It’s the “where’s Sammy” type. I have it too. I’m actually missing Sammy.

But it soon won’t matter that Sammy, indeed, has never been given a microchip.

It’s the day after the vet visit and I’m sitting with Sammy in my study, his head resting on the futon by my side. Bernie comes in with the news: “Sheri says that the owners have contacted her.”

My heart sinks. It’s Day Three of the Sammy Show and I take note of my awful disappointment, how crestfallen I now am, that the possibility he may be out of our lives very soon is here.

“Sheri’s asking them questions, to prove they’re the rightful owners,” Bernie adds.

“Yes,” I respond, in a tone not unlike hasty justice seekers at a trial convinced that the murderer has been found and that the jury must cast its verdict responsibly. “We need to see pictures and they have to confirm the color of his harness and leash.”

I catch myself sounding stern and paternalistic, like an eye witness to the crime defying an alternative account. Who are these people claiming to be his owners? I’m not about to let him go. The killer has been found, I think to myself, Sammy was abandoned and justice demands that he be fostered and adopted. Whoever says otherwise—like the killer claiming innocence—has the burden of proof against them.

Sammy senses something’s afoot. We know this about him already. Earlier in the day Bernie had gone out on an errand and about a minute before she returned, Sammy had “sensed” that she was headed back and sat upright with his ears pricked. One of my favorite thinkers, a spiritualist-scientist by the name of Rupert Sheldrake, ran a study about this phenomenon and published his results in a book called, unironically, Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home. Apparently, it’s a thing, and Sammy, by my estimation, is particularly tuned to this frequency.

He’s whining and agitated all of a sudden, as Bernie and Sheri are on the phone with each other to compare notes on the photos the owners claiming him have sent. He really knows something’s up when we bring his harness into the room to compare it with the photo. He’s hopping off and back on the futon in a restless state that seems to signify his premonition that the family he loves dearly is one step closer to him finally. This is a dog who has not let go of his owners and has stayed vigilant, even as he’s been nothing but a sweetheart during his stay, a stay that is now painfully coming to an end.

The photos lineup perfectly. He looks a little different, but that’s because they were taken when he’d just been groomed. But his harness is identical. There’s no denying it. These are the owners.

Bernie and I look at each other and shake our heads. Like some waking dream, we become aware of a journey, a kind of psychic binge, for which we’d previously had no awareness. Without knowing, we’d consented to fork over our brains and our hearts to go on an emotional rollercoaster, a ride that is now slowing down and edging into the landing bay. It had all been going too fast for us to take real notice of what it was all about. Only in the end do we now see that we’d lost ourselves.

Now that we know that Sammy will be back with a family who loves him, whom he wants to be with more than us, that we are no longer Sammy’s protectors, we let the judgement rip:

“What the hell? How do you lose a dog? I can’t believe this! This is so upsetting. The negligence!”

Things go negative.

It never mattered while he was in our charge. Negative thoughts were like passing clouds. We wanted to keep the skies clear for Sammy. He was our responsibility and we wanted to protect him. He’d already been through enough. So we didn’t care too much for passing judgement. After all, we weren’t even sure who these people were or what were the circumstances. It was all speculation. What mattered was Sammy’s safety.

But the moment has arrived and therefore we feel free to be angry. We want justice for our pains. We want accountability. All of a sudden, we are keenly preoccupied with the wages of the vast emotions we have expended on Sammy.

Then it passes, the initial blast of ire gives way to reason. We come to our senses.

“Of course mistakes happen.”

And who are we to judge?

And so we are left with the brutal phenomenon, unadorned by the needs of the dog, the care which we’d now finally finished giving. He is safe now. We can be free to look after ourselves. The only thing that’s left is grief.

“Tell them to come meet us as soon as possible,” I tell Bernie, meaning that she should tell Sheri, who’s in contact with them. They are desperate to get their dog back. A couple who live in New Jersey. The husband is texting with Sheri, begging to be allowed to pick him up. His family has been broken by the loss and he wants to heal, he says. I can’t deny the obvious show of vulnerability. I want the reunion to happen as soon as possible. But first I need to eat.

The tears flow down my cheeks swiftly. We finish dinner in silence as Sammy watches us patiently from the sofa. I have to look upwards to try to think of other things, to stay the onrush of salty teardrops. We gather our things and put on our coats and I almost lose it and let a couple quakes of my sternum pass through me before pulling myself together.

It’s that old feeling again, like when my old boy Gaius passed two years ago from lymphoma after just having turned thirteen. That sudden loss. That sharp removal. The very quick evacuation of something within, and the consequent hollowness that emerges, as though you were a sack of something meaty and full, a container that held large books or hefty Christmas toys, only for that container to be suddenly relinquished of its contents, contents which evaporate somehow, now nowhere to be found, leaving you with a newfound emptiness.

What is this bond, this decade-and-a-half long relationship that severs with such sudden brutality?

Why do we do it, undertake to care for these creatures? Creatures, by the way, who inevitably will betray us with their short lives, and, furthermore, whom we shall likewise betray by replacing them with descendants after they die, with heirs to their vests and doggy bowls and chew toys and harnesses who are themselves doomed to renew the fifteen year cycle. We can’t refurbish our pets, so we hand them in to God and buy a new one from the breeder or adopt one from the shelter. They last as long as the average car, which we also replace with a shiny, new version. When Gaius passed I lasted only a month without a dog, unlike, say, some of my neighbors who could not live down the memory of their old dog, who could not so readily renew the pact.

Sometimes I see my rush to replace as a sign of disingenuousness, for if the love were as true as I say to myself and the world that it in fact is, how could I replace my dog? Aren’t I lying to myself in thinking that Casca, who came into the house as a two-month-old ball of fur, practically on the heels of Gaius’ deathbed, receives an authentic love? Isn’t love more weighty? doesn’t it come with heavier strings? Are these just playthings that garner my obsession and adoration, but not my true heart? Isn’t this a fantasy? Aren’t they just animals, expendable lifeforms, just pets? When I exchanged those pregnant glances with Sammy on my futon, wasn’t I just staring into the eyes of a mere animal?

There lies an epistemic gulf between Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris. It is a relation bereft of semiotics. They don’t even know what is happening around them. We, as their keepers, hold the light of truth, we grant them access to the benefits of our civilization, the very same benefits that first brought them to us, when scraps thrown from the Paleolithic hearth lured those friendlier wolves, those beasts who’d decided to sever their Darwinian program and break for the humans, who’d opted for the good life outside the law of the jungle and chose to linger with these powerful pack leaders in control of fire and food. They will never know any of this. Unlike our children, whom we may teach our ways, into whose brains we implant the needs of our legacies, whom we teach our languages and whose cooperation we induce, who will be free to continue it or change it or revolutionize it as will be their wish after we pass, our dogs share no such beneficence and will live out their days in the dark, their small brains incapable of absorbing the mandates of our times. Everything they live for dies with them. Nothing gets left behind. No records. No tapes. Nothing they can fashion in their names, no society they can consciously call their own to leave behind.

The fact, then, that, in the midst of this gap, this uncrossable line, something does indeed cross, makes the thing that crosses, that special communication, that comprehension of which Melville spoke, all the more special. Even as there is nothing to say between us but that nonetheless just about everything is said speaks to the power of connection.

Whenever a dog looks into your eyes it is saying this:

I have no need for your ways. They are nothing to me. I do not even know what they are.

And I do not care. I only care about this.

The artist Banksy used to share uplifting memes on his Twitter account. One of them showed a picture of a man and a dog on a hillside overlooking a bay with ships on the horizon and two thought clouds positioned over their heads respectively. The human’s thought cloud was full of worry and preoccupation: will they call back? Have I paid the rent? What should I do after this? The canine’s was simply a facsimile of the very scene before which the two were sitting: a bay with ships on the horizon. The caption read: And we wonder why they are always the happy ones.

With each glance exchanged, a dog returns to sender (without opening) the merciless crux of our hubris and ambition, throughout history, throughout life. The dog says, “No thanks.” It does this by reaching into our souls with the only truly meaningful thing in life: connection. Despite your best efforts, the dog says, I am still connecting with you.

It says nothing suspicious that we replace these creatures after they die, that we invite new babies into the home, even as their predecessors have only recently passed. You still need friends and relatives when someone near and dear has passed. The same goes for animal energy. Another dog is only the continuation of the much larger bond between the species. It is a way to honor the very possibility of the bond in the first place. At least it was for me. I almost felt that Gaius, were it possible for him to express the conditional, would have wanted me to find another dog, to renew the pact between us in the form of another one of his kind.

The grief is worth it, if only to repay the species for what it bestows us, the respite from the constant distraction of civilization, of society, of rules and of niceties. It is worth it for the love they bring, hermetically encased from all that would corrupt it from without, right to our doorstep. It is worth it for the break. For the truth.

We lead Sammy back to Sheri’s apartment. Or rather, he leads us. He’s tugging on the leash. He knows he’s headed home. Sheri’s organized his triumphant return to the family with whom he belongs and with whom he is desperate to be reunited. I am still holding back tears as I try to keep him at bay, as he continues to zig and zag. Casca keeps approaching him, almost as if to ask, Hey man this has been so much fun I hope we can be pen pals. It’s cold and noisy in the streets.

We arrive at Sheri’s and stay in the lobby and the family comes in and Sammy sees them and runs at them at full speed, his tail vibrating like a tuning fork. He jumps up and they catch him. It’s a man and a woman, a couple, and their adolescent child, hanging in the back. The man tries to give us a reward but we refuse. We don’t wish to deny him the opportunity to be grateful, but we also don’t want to take money for what we’ve done. If anything, we should be giving him a reward.

The woman recounts the story of noting the day of his grooming appointment and that he was still missing and she starts crying. Apparently, Sammy has a brother who’s been missing him, though they didn’t bring the canine with them. Bernie hands the gentleman an envelope with all of the info from Sammy’s vet visit: he now has a microchip and some shots. They can sort out what to do next for Sammy. He’s only eighteen months old, the woman says, so it’s not too late to get him neutered. Sheri needs to spend some time emphasizing how jumpy Sammy is and that he requires incredible vigilance. “He’s a flight risk,” she says, making sure they know what she’s trying to say to them, that is, to be more careful.

This prompts the man to recount the story of how he lost Sammy. He dropped off his daughter just down the block and got back into his car. He drove through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania and only then noticed that Sammy was not in the car. Believing that he’d lost him at a rest stop in Lodi, New Jersey, he sent out his notices over there. It only occurred to him several days later that Sammy had jumped out of the car in Manhattan, after which he consulted the Facebook page where we’d posted his photo and was able to finally locate his dog.

He tells this story with a nonchalance I find insufficiently penitent. The anger starts to curdle within. Every time I get in the car with Casca, I think to myself, I am looking at the back seat to see if he is ok, every five minutes, or less. How do you lose a dog and cross two states and only then realize your own dog is no longer in the car? How is that even possible? It escapes me, and because it escapes me it makes me want to scream at the guy, scream at the family. I think about how terrified this dog was and the distinct possibility that he didn’t have to be as lucky as he was, that he could’ve easily been discovered by others not disposed towards canines as much as we all were, and what then? What could have happened to this very lucky dog then? I want to scream all of this in his face.

Sammy jumps up to the adolescent and the kid grabs Sammy in midair and he’s licking his face all over and the kid is very happy to have his dog back. “Can I bring him into the car, mom?” he asks the woman. When she nods he goes through the door and I never see Sammy again.

We finally conclude all the talk and wish the family well and they are off. Sheri, Bernie and I keep talking in her lobby, while Casca sits on his side looking wanly through the doors to the outside. As Sheri departs she says we should all get together for some grub as soon as the vaccine gets distributed and some sense of normality returns. There are so many of these rain checks these days. I can only imagine it’ll be a nationwide feast once the masks are removed and people can feel it’s ok to breathe on each other again.

Bernie and I pick up a Christmas tree on the way back home. Plus a wreath. It’s cold outside and I don’t have cash and I run across the street to the ATM and then it occurs to me just how lucky I have it. I’m buying a tree without thinking about it. Something not everyone can do. I have privileges. Not everyone has the same opportunities. What’s more is not everyone has the same way of ambling about things, the same way of making one’s way. Some people, quite plainly, are just more forgetful. I remember a story someone told me of a friend of there’s who forgot their own kid in a public square and took a bus back home without the child. He noted that he loved his kids very much but that didn’t stop him from having a super lousy memory.

I feel stupid for my initial theory about the owner having a mental illness. I was wrong about that. They were just forgetful.

Obviously there are humane concerns. These dogs need to be cared for. But we have to care for each other too. And, in this case, that means accepting that everybody is struggling and everybody is hurting and everybody is surviving, and therefore compassion is the key.

Homo sapiens is an animal species too. When I look into the eyes of a fellow human, I am also looking into the eyes of an animal, as they are when they look into my eyes. We are animals. We are animals that have to take care of each other, too.

I can be angry that someone was negligent to a poor canine. But I also have to let it go. Who am I to judge?

As I purchase the tree and grab the wreath, something of the Christmas spirits wafts into the scene, and my ire lifts. Bernie, Casca and I are now free to return to our lives with all of the time and space that this pandemic allows for processing momentous events such as these.

How apt, we say to ourselves on the way back, remarking about Sammy’s real name, which we learned when the owners were initially claiming him, that he was called Lucky.

#dogs #dogs of tumblr #lost dog #found dog

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windowinto · 5 years ago

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Social Media

This post is just a thought vomit post: The feeling that I’m feeling is quite strange. As if I cannot show the world the things I genuinely appreciate. Social media terrifies me in every way possible to the point where it is entirely toxic. I constantly live in this panic or fear where everyone is laughing at me or judging me. I feel as if social media is a place where I should be able to express myself in whatever way I want to. Sadly that isn’t the case for me. As much as I would love to show the world or anyone who has an “interest” in following me, whether it’s a mutual “oh I know you ill follow or add you” thing, whatever, the things I love dearly and hold close to my heart. For instance I love Elliott Smith a lot and would love to share my love about him but I feel as if people will make fun of me for enjoying the beauty that is his music and self. I get so terrified or think “what is the point” or “who even cares?”. Social media is so strange and I feel like it has me pinned to the ground sometimes. It is always in the back of my mind. For the last few years I have consistently been on and off social media. I’ll have a stride of confidence and post on social media consistently but it never seems to last before I delete everything, Instagram, twitter, facebook. Ill start with Instagram and why it really scares me. With Instagram, I feel very pressured to upload pictures in a timely fashion. It’s almost a personal blog or a perspective from my eyes to share with the people who decide to follow me. There are people who follow me and will never interact with my posts when I do decide to post something. It makes me wonder what is the point in following me if you don’t like anything that I’m sharing, not in the sense of the actual like, but enjoying what I post? I would rarely post anything on Instagram, I turned my Instagram that is now deleted, into a page for my art. I was scared to share things I have created. Showing people something I like, a window into my brain, for them to judge, even though I have gotten good feedback on my art, at the end of the day I still think its not good. Yet another reason why I am afraid to post on social media. I have little to no ego or confidence in myself. Before my Instagram was my art page, I would sometimes upload selfies only because that is just, what we do nowadays? It felt like I had to fall in line and I felt this pressure to show the world how I was changing as a person. “ooh look at me” but in my head there is nothing to look at. I struggle with body dysmorphia. I look in the mirror every day and see someone completely different. It isn’t just a “I feel ugly today”. It is a brutal battle of one day I feel okay but 30 minutes later my face feels rearranged. I know it’s a very common feeling to never see what others see in yourself, but I look in the mirror a lot and can never figure it out. I’m not sure why, I just try to take time to really understand my face because too often I don’t understand it at all. My face is very A-symmetrical and I feel to be beautiful you must have good face symmetry. My face has twist and turns, which most people might not notice, maybe they do. It is just something I really struggle with. Some days I feel normal, my face looks fine, but some days it feels like someone took a blender to my face. The thing with mirrors and phone cameras you only see the mirrored version of yourself. That is what you are used to. So seeing pictures of me that aren’t mirrored throws my head into a fucking spiral of insecurity. I tend to avoid pictures with people or having people take pictures or videos of me because all I can do is watch the video or stare at the picture for hours wondering what other people are going to think of me and my contorted face and body. I know that no person is perfect and we all have our imperfections, but exposing mine to the world is terrifying. Pictures are different. They give people time to dissect and focus on your imperfections for as long as they want. People terrify me. I’ve been bullied when I was younger and I have been made fun of over the years for looking certain ways, dressing certain ways because I’m not what they want me to be. I just want to be myself without judgement. Being able to be genuine and to not be made fun of for “trying too hard” or “trying” to have a certain look. I always get thrown under certain labels and its so frustrating. “haha you are a sad boy” or stupid remarks as if I’m trying to be anything but myself. I am terrified to be myself because it will never be good enough for anyone. I have been around a lot of toxic friend groups where they even make fun of their best friends. They make evil remarks or judge them for having a stride of confidence or trying new things. I love when people express themselves or try new things instead of staying in the same box that people put them in. It just seems others like to make fun of people for trying something new or pushing the boundaries of what is “them”. Self exploration is a beautiful thing that everyone should focus on every now and then. We should all try to expand on ourselves and strive for the best versions of ourselves. Who likes being the person stuck in a box? Where is the fun in that? That is just a perspective of mine but I always feel forced into this box. Which is a big reason I stay away from posting pictures of myself because if I post a picture of myself I am either “cocky” “too confident” or “trying too hard”. I took a picture of myself. That’s all I did. I had no intentions other than to just show people hey this is what I look like today and for once I don’t feel like my face was hit with a tornado. With Instagram I feel if I don’t post frequently or become inactive then people will start to not care. I’m not sure why I have this feeling of wanting people to care, but that’s how social media feels to me. You follow me for some reason, maybe because you care, who knows. There’s certain people who like to look down on me because I’m constantly changing and they might of liked or are used to a previous version of myself. Some people don’t like change. People also get so wrapped up into other peoples lives which is also another reason why I don’t like social media. Instagram is full of fake pictures and perfect people. Sometimes I feel like I have to be perfect or have a perfect picture for it to be “Instagram worthy”. I don’t understand what is a right and wrong picture to post. Sometimes I want to post everything, sometimes I don’t. Some people get so wrapped up in their “aesthetic” or “online image” and its not them what so ever. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea of me, I would much rather have someone make a judgement of me in person rather than a post on the internet. Intention and tone are hard to grasp on the internet unless you already know that person really well. With twitter, It feels the same as instragram but instead of pictures it’s tweets. I used twitter like a journal of just random things. Random feelings, random thoughts whether they were serious or just goofy. I didn’t try to appeal to anyone, I just kind of posted whatever I wanted. Over the last 4 years of on and off social media usage, there has been a few instances that make me scared of letting people know on the internet what is going on in this complex head of mine. With the first instance, I’ll bring a bit of context. I was about 17 or 18 at the time, my memory with age and time is always so bad so I’m not exactly sure when. I was going through a really rough depressive episode. I stopped hanging out with my friends and isolated, didn’t get out of bed ever, didn’t even play video games. It was really bad. I would also tweet about my feelings, which there is a stigma on posting about being sad on the internet because everyone is sad sometimes or all the time and just wont admit it, but will laugh or judge you for having feelings like a human being. “Wow look at this dude, he is so sad? Go get a therapist sad boy” but are the same people who do the same things they are complaining about. It’s weird how it works. Makes absolutely zero sense to me. People will hide their sadness behind vent accounts but on their “main” act like they aren’t sad. Which there is nothing wrong with that, but don’t judge others for being sad. Maybe they need someone, but you are too afraid to be that someone or “don’t feel like dealing with it”. I finally broke free from the death grip of depression and finally decided to hangout with some friends. It was the current E3 showing off all the new games. We were all having a good time discussing new games and seeing all the new titles. A game came up and I simply said “I heard that game isn’t that good” and a friend of a friend in the room said “of course you think that, you hate everything”. Stunned I replied “how?” and he replied with “you are constantly tweeting about how sad you are and how you hate everything”. Ill admit I had some sad tweets but I never tweeted or talked openly disliking anything. This guy barely knows me at all just so you know. We have mutual friends, have hungout a few times, skateboarded in the same group of friends. Clearly he had bad judgement on me. My eyes scan the room to see all of my “close” friends at the time. They all were just as stunned as me and nobody spoke up. I said proudly, in which this is true “I haven’t tweeted anything sad in months actually, feel free to go look at my tweets” he replied with “well good for you then”. This will stick with me for a really long time and this was maybe 5 years ago or less that this happened, like I said I’m bad with time and memories. I still think about it all the time. Goes to show, be careful what you say, it might stick around in someone’s head for longer than you think. Apparently one of my friends told him afterwards “Dude, he JUST started hanging out with us again and you had to do that”. Although I’m not sure if that is true or not. I would then to go on to delete my twitter and stay off social media for about a year or so because I was so terrified of others having this same outlook on me. Because if someone I barely know can have this judgement of me, then someone else surely can. To this day it still messes with my head and is also a big reason I have been off and on with social media. The next instance is from 2 almost 3 years ago. I was talking to the girl of my dreams, a girl I had a crush on for years. We got along wonderfully, shared the same sense of humor, there was a connection there that I couldn’t explain. But even then I would still struggle with my depression. Even in the happiest of times I still had these dark depressive moments. Which I have to explain that, my mother who had raised me without my dad, had battled cancer for 4 years only for it to take her life in 2012, which turned me into an anxiety riddled depressed kid. I would disappear, walk away, disassociate, have these dips in moods even in public. She didn’t really seem to understand or has never really had to deal with something like this before with someone. I completely understand that I was easily too much for her to handle. It’s really hard to find someone who understands or cares enough to stick around. Unfortunately my depressive episodes lead to the demise of our short “relationship”. We were not dating. We got into an argument and I told her how I was feeling and how she made me feel like she didn’t care. She sent me a long text message about how I’m too sad to deal with and I’m too much to handle. She told me all I do is bring everyone around me down and that I am a sad negative person. I am just summing it up, I don’t want to go into detail. This destroyed me more than any other words have before in my life. We were young and she didn’t understand the power of what she was saying. This threw me into a spiral of a year long depressive episode that I could not control. I didn’t talk to my friends about how I felt or my family because I was afraid to bring them down. I still struggle to this day with opening up about my feelings because of this but I have gotten better about it. But I was scared to just tell people that I was sad. I became so focused on faking this image to not let a single person know how I truly felt. It was hell every day holding in this whirlwind of feelings. I felt like I had to hide all of my feelings and that my feelings weren’t valid. I felt as if I wasn’t allowed to feel sad. I would get so mad if I ever got sad. I would tell myself no. Which it kind of worked, it kind of helped me get better in a sense but I think its important to feel sad now. Its important to process those emotions instead of ignoring them. But this also made me stay off social media for another year or so. But this year of no social media it forced me to learn a lot about myself. I was going into young adulthood and trying to understand the world and figuring myself out. A lot of self-growth was made in this time which I am kind of thankful for. But this was a huge reason why I struggled so hard with social media and how people perceived me. Also another reason why I struggle still because words like those tend to stick with you. Twitter is such a strange platform. I still don’t use it to this day. All because of judgement. Not even about sad tweets this time, just fear of self-expression. Goes hand and hand with the way I feel about Instagram. People thinking you are trying to hard or people just not giving a fuck. Social media is so weird. I feel that I am also missing out on a lot of possible friendships because of not using social media. A friend of mine said “you aren’t putting yourself out there, no one can find you if you are in the shadows” which I feel is very true, for friendships and possible relationships as well. Okay so onto facebook… I grew up in the prime of Facebook. I was there for all the changes and updates and when it first really started to blossom into what it was. This was before twitter was even popular. I grew up with sending everyone friend requests and the bliss of making random internet friends. Not caring about what you post and just having a good time. I think before I stopped using facebook when I was around 15 or 16 and I moved to twitter completely, which felt better for the way I felt, I had around 2,500 friends on facebook. Well that is definitely not the case now. Facebook is a weird strange place filled with old people and family members who haven’t cared about me for 10 years that send me a lovely friend request. I have such bad anxiety about facebook friend requests. It is so incredibly hard to explain. I initially made a facebook for the soul purpose of adding friends on xbox so I could stay in contact with them when we weren’t playing xbox. And then of course I started popping up in peoples suggested friends on facebook. I was friends with maybe 20 or less friends, very close people. Then my friend requests started flowing with people I know who I wasn’t close with. I left some people in what I like to call the friend request purgatory for LITERALLY 3 FUCKING YEARS. I was so scared to accept it and let them into the things I liked and would share on facebook with my close friends. I slipped into a music “scene” and made some friends in this specific scene. There was a guy in a band that actually got signed to a big label who I thought was really cool and funny who I thought hated me, he sent me a friend request and I left him in the purgatory for a whole year before declining the friend request. Just because he lived a whole 3 hours away and was way cooler than ill ever be and I didn’t want him to find me weird or a fucking loser. So I just never accepted it. I am not sure if he ever saw it pending for so long but I did change my profile picture in that time and I am sure he seen that. I feel really bad about it and it makes me cringe with awkwardness. I am not that bad at socializing and id like to think of myself as a funny and nice person. I feel like I am easy to get along with. But now I am no longer apart of that “scene” if you even consider me being “apart” of it. I just went to local shows and really enjoyed the music. That’s is my main problem with facebook. Random people I do and don’t know sending a request “HEY LET ME IN I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND” but… do you actually or do you think we are just mutual and wanting to network. Facebook is a weird place. Especially local selling communities. I live in the Midwest so there are racists and homophobes left and right. In conclusion of this awful mess of a post I just wish I could feel normal. To feel more understood. God forbid I ever tell anyone I feel “misunderstood” without being made fun of or not taken seriously because that’s just what people do now. I understand that the world is full of assholes and judgmental people but, there is also people out there that care and are good people. They are harder to find than the people who suck but they exist. You just have to look a little harder or just be patient. A dear friend of mine told me that I should just be myself and whoever doesn’t like it can just fuck off because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what other people think. But to just appreciate the people who do care. I try to focus on those points and to let myself realize everything will be okay if I just stay genuine and true to myself. People will always have something to say and dislike, all you can do is keep on truckin’ and keep doing what you want. At the end of the day the only thing that matters is your own happiness. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Sometimes you have to just not give a single fuck. Maybe one day I will come back around to social media and finally come to terms with it. Who knows? But for now I am working on it one day at a time and will eventually ease back into it. Still very scared of it all, but progress is progress.

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brightly-painted-canvas · 6 years ago

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(mazlek) - first "I love you"?

Anon, I don’t even know how but this general prompt became something along the lines of those ‘four times + one time’ fic I secretly (or not so secretly?) adore. I also wrote a lot (again). I hope you don’t mind :)WARNING for a bit of angst/hurt-comfort at some point! Be careful!Also posted on AO3

Four times Joe said ‘I love you’ to Rami and one time Rami said it first

The first time happens in 2008, on set of ‘The Pacific’.

Despite being autumn in Australia, the weather is still hot and humid where they are filming, especially since the set is flooded with fake rain water and mud and they are constantly drenched, completely splattered. Assistants and helpers run around with buckets and water pumps with shower heads to spray them every chance they get during breaks between takes and it doesn’t feel nice. In fact it feels miserable and awful.

The only relief the actors get comes in the shape of popsicles, safely stored inside freezers under the production canvas tents.

In a whole week of production, they have already consumed so many of them the assistants had to restock three times and each day they come closer and closer to completely run out of popsicles for all cast and crew.

One fateful day, as Joe gets a break long enough to move away from set and join some of the other cast mates under one of their assigned tents, he realises there are no more icicles left.

As soon as he opens the freezer to find it empty he lifts his head in disbelief and looks around to call someone from the production and ask if maybe there are other popsicles in some other tents.

“Sorry, seems like we run out.” says one girl, looking mortified.

“Here, have mine.” comes a familiar voice from behind him and as Joe turns around, he’s being offered a still packaged popsicle from Rami: “I got given one, but I don’t mind.” explains the other actor, smiling encouragingly.

Joe’s troubled expression immediately morphs into one of pure gratitude as he takes the wrapped popsicle from Rami’s hand and thanks him profusely: “Man, I think I love you!” he adds, making the rest of the cast and crew snicker and smile.

“Joe’s like a dog, promising eternal love to everyone who gives him food.” comments Brendan from his chair and everyone laughs. Joe is not even bothered.

Maybe Rami is a little red on the cheeks, but he’s covered in so much mud and filth that no one notices.

The second time happens some years later in the form of a text.

They hadn’t seen each other in something like a whole year as they are both busy filming and auditioning and preparing role after role, one in LA and the other in New York, but they sometimes exchange texts and there’s the occasional phone call here and there.

It’s been months since the last one though, so when Rami gets a message that only says ‘I love you’ he looks at his phone in confusion, not daring to breathe, not daring to jump to conclusions.

‘Joe?’ he writes back, looking around like he doesn’t recognise his own living room in his and Sami’s flat, like maybe he’s being pranked? Maybe he’s dreaming?

‘Sorry wrong text! But how are you, my dude?’ and Rami can sigh in relief but also he can be a bit disappointed as he types a reply.

Joe is in a chatty mood because he soon texts back: ‘Cool. I miss you. And btw I DO love you! You know that!’ and Rami thinks that Joe’s still Joe.

And at least that managed to make him smile.

The third time Joe is crying hard, sobbing into the crook between Rami’s bicep and forearm while being cradled against the other actor’s chest as he breaks down completely on set, in full costume. Like he would care. (He doesn’t, not right now, not when…)

Rami is holding him close and firmly, warm and reassuring, putting his own sadness and grief aside to be there for him. A solid presence in the form of a hug, skinny but strong arms around his trembling body, whispers of comfort from lips brushing his ear and forehead, against the fake hair of a fluffy wig.

He doesn’t know when he stops, when he sighs out a trembling breath and lifts his head to say: “I’m so sorry.” in the tiniest, most broken voice he’s ever mustered.

Rami is looking into his red wet eyes with a similar desperate look, but with such earnest empathy and affection Joe feels like crying again and again until he’s completely drained.

The other actor just shakes his head and tugs him close again, unable to speak, but knowing that the contact could help.

Knowing firsthand what this kind of grief feels like and what is at least supposed to help.

“I don’t know what to do.” confesses Joe again, closing his eyes and pushing his head against Rami’s chest, expensive Freddie Mercury’s replica of a costume be damned.

“It’s okay.” is Rami’s croaked reply, as he gathers his voice back and sniffs to hide his own tears.

“Thank you…” murmurs Joe and he’s holding Rami close as well now, circling his waist with his arms as they’re messily sprawled on the floor of some backstage room.

Maybe the grip is painful, maybe there’s even someone watching them.

Maybe Joe’s manager is waiting for him to get up and decide what he wants to do: finish shooting? Get changed and head back to his hotel room? Take the first flight back to New York and be with his mom and his brothers?

Have you decided, Joe? What do you want to do? How do you feel?

What will do you, from now on?

Fuck all. Fuck everything.

Maybe he’s saying all of this out loud or maybe this is all in his confused and despairing mind, but he only feels his shattered heart being torn over and over and his breath coming out in irregular, painful puffs of air.

Maybe Rami is trying to talk to him too but he’s mostly just holding him, swaying back and forth slightly, one hand on his back and the other covering his head, shielding him.

“I love you.” he whisper quietly and he doesn’t know if he wants to be heard or not, if it’s the right moment to say it (it’s not), if Rami cares or if he understands what this love means right now.

“I know.” is the even quieter reply and Joe just sighs and lets himself be held as he cries and cries and cries again and curses destiny and distance and illness and missing someone so damn much already.

The fourth time they’re listening to the radio as they drive up and down the hills of LA, already dressed to the nines for this or that ceremony, for this or that award.

Some Billy Joel tune from the 80s fades and suddenly there’s the rhythmic sound of piano keys being pushed and a rolling of drums so familiar they both whoop enthusiastically and start signing as soon as Freddie does: “Ooh, you make me live!”

“This is our song!” exclaims Joe, turning the volume up: “How did they know?”

Rami just smiles and keeps singing and they both are almost screaming as they get to the higher notes of: “Ooh, you make me live now honey!” and as Joe takes a curve a bit too quickly.

They laugh for how the bumps in the roads make singing difficult.

“Oh, you’re the best friend that I ever had.” sings Freddie from the radio: “I’ve been with you such a long time, you’re my sunshine,” and Joe joins in, eyes on the road: “And I want you to know that my feelings are true.”

He turns quickly so he can look into Rami’s eyes as Freddie suggests him to sing: “I really love you.” with a nice relaxed smile that matches the one Rami is sporting.

“Oh, you’re my best friend.” concludes Freddie without them, because Joe can’t take his eyes away from the passenger seat’s occupant and Rami has to snicker and hide a blush and tell him to please watch the road.

The first time it happens Rami has a new shiny gold statuette in his left hand and a glass of champagne in his right hand and he’s surrounded by people cheering for him and congratulating him but he, honestly now, only has eyes for Joe since he came into the post-Oscars party room.

He looks tipsy but most importantly he looks happy. Ecstatic. Stunningly beautiful. And the best thing is that he deserves every second of it. He’s worked hard all his life to get to this and now he has it. Now he’s an Oscar winner.

Joe is looking at him from afar, knowing Rami is searching for him in the crowd but wanting to tease him a bit, to play hide-and-seek like two kids in a sea of people they maybe know only a small percentage of. And so he keeps close to Ben and Gwilym and waits for Rami to hug and shake hands with this actress and that producer as he slowly gets to them.

He even lets his friends and co-actors congratulate him first, hiding a smirk behind his own glass of champagne as he notices the desperate looks Rami is throwing his way now that he know where he is, now that he’s got him pinned and he can’t escape.

He’s the one who has to hug Rami close with his empty hand and they all laugh when Rami clinks Joe’s champagne flute with the statuette instead that with his own half empty glass.Suddenly Rami is whispering in his ear how he’s glad Joe is there with him because he’s a little bit drunk already and he can’t wait to be home and to be taken home by his Joe.

They look into each other’s eyes and suddenly there’s a lump in Joe’s throat and he know what it is but it’s making saying the words so damn difficult all of the sudden.

Rami, who had been able to read him like an open book and communicate with him without needing words for more than 10 years, just nods and duck his head in the sweetest way as he says: “I love you.” first and for the first time.

Joe’s out of breath for a moment and then he’s replying: “I love you too.” like he’s never said something truer and more precious.

“Congratulations.” he adds and Rami is smirking and they’re hugging again, in the middle of the ball room, the other actor’s head on Joe’s shoulder.

#fanfiction #anon ask #anon request #mazlek #rami malek #joe mazzello #prompt fill #first 'i love you'#angst #hurt/comfort

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kittycatred · 28 days ago

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[ ooc blog update ]

i know ive been inactive on this blog for today (or well, technically yesterday) but luckily, there is a very good reason !!!!

i spent a good few hours organizing this blog a bit (& my own main blog), so theres soooome minor changes, moreso for me than you guys, but ill still mention everything :3 (because i spent hours on this i wanna show it off LMAO)

soo if you wanna read my (VERY LONG) rambling and such i go through all the mini blog changes below !! or you can just see yourself either works :3

first thing, pinned post !!!

i learned how to do gradients on text and it was SUCH A PAIN, but so worth it look guys its so pretty now ??

i tried to shorten the pinned post a bit, or atleast leas overwhelming so theres not much red gifs anymore, and instead of 'boundaries / fyi' theres now in & out of character sections !!

everything is about the same as before if you read it, the only changes are:

under in character, ive added some headcanon-y stuff of how i see avm red, clarified shipping stuff id prefer to not have (not cause anyone said anything i just realized i should probably clarify lmao), & ive also added sections of basically how red can sometimes be petty for funsies, and also that if anything said when interacting makes anyone uncomfortable then dont be afraid to reach out ect ect !!

under out of character, clarification on pronouns, kinda ??, i dunno before i just had xe/they i think, name stuff, how im a fictive running this, i moved the no nsfw stuff under here, & how i try to get to everything !!

NOW TAGS >:)

main tags are the usual tags i had aside from me now adding 'drawn posts'

SILLY TAGS look at these guys i organized a good chunk of posts under these, it originally started with me just adding the government assigned cats (which i still need to reblog some more things to put under this from other blogs i forgot oops)

and then the other three i just thought it would be funny since alot of posts fall under those and all

and then askbox pets IVE MADE THAT A TAG CAUSE I GET SO MANY PET PHOTOS IN MY ASKBOX ?? AND I LOVE THEM ?? guys keep doing that i love animals outside of just roleplaying red and theres still some i need to get to answering in my askbox but theyre all adorable oh my gosh !!!!

and ill probably add more of these later as posting and all goes on !!

interaction tags !!! gosh coding the colors was a pain guys i learned how to do this all today but its so worth it though

but here the tags are hyperlinked to show all interactions or mentions of blogs, and their names are hyperlinked to their separate blogs !! so convenient now !!

ALSO i need to catch up on interactions and asks so some blogs are tagged but have no posts i will get to that eventually ive just been doing this all day !!

but wait....theres more than just the pinned posts !!!! (can you tell im writing this at 3am ?)

TAGS !! im finally organizing tags although only i care about that but still

i finally added a separating tag between ooc and in character tags and i also started tagging askbox askers like anon and stuff if you go through you'll see but yay organization !!!

but guys....theres even MORE

okay so im not gonna lie.....i didnt like the stick figure style i was drawing for the asks and stuff ITS COOL DONT GET ME WRONG and other blogs do it WAY BETTER but i didnt like how i was doing it

so guess what ? i humanoid-ized(?) whatever you call it your definitely favorite stickfigure !!!

see all these ??? just a bald stick figure with me overusing the airbrush tool and blur tool wowww ://

now see THIS ??? no longer bald !!! and now EXPRESSIONS and EYEBROWS wow upgrade !! 💥💥💥

(fyi im just jabbing at myself theres nothing wrong with the old way i drew them if anyone else does that just for clarification !!!)

which okay im rambling already so this is fine, but that last image of red angry over the ruben stuff, i dunno how i did that i suck at perspective but i think its actually decent so wahoo !!

anyways i updated all the previous post (ACTUALLY NEVERMIND I MISSED TWO OF THE OLD ONES ill fix that later) with the new drawings but i still kept the old ones !! just under a 'read more' thingy !! and im gonna try to draw out asks more too cause its fun :D if im able to sometimes its just easier to respond with text but theres some i do like to draw out :3

anyways that's all the blog updates on hereee !! :)

i was going to catch up on asks after posting this but it's nearly 4am, and i have a ortho appointment tomarrow in the EARLY morning (i get my braces off guys finally 💥💥💥) but i promise im not ignoring any asks or interactions ect ect !! ill get to them asap !!!

anyways okay thats all !!! i ramble alot (if it wasnt....yknow....kinda obvious here LMAO) so thank youu if anyone read all this !!! im gonna sleep noww but heres a silly colorgang gif for reading through my ramblesss !!!

#[ ooc ]#TLDR: BLOG IS ORGANIZED NOW AND ILL CATCH UP ON ASKS WHEN I CAN !!! 🙏🙏#oh and theres more drawings potentially and updated past post drawings 👍👍#anyways goodnight its almost 4am for me 🫡🫡

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asexualzoro · 6 years ago

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so you want to make a twitter (part 2)

tweeting

i’ve seen a few guides on twitter for new twitter users, which is nice, but something about having the posts being things you had to finds on twitter--a new site for the people who needed those guides--seemed unhelpful to me. so, i figured id make a small series of guides of my own here for anyone considering a move (or just making an account) who dont know how

this is a series of posts, since im going to be sort of detailed, so feel free to use just the pieces you need. ill tag them all “lews twitter tutorials” so you can find them on my blog

this is written under the assumption that youve read part 1 of this mini guide series, and dont know anything about twitter or any other social media site but tumblr

ill put it under a cut to save your space, but here’s the most important feature of twitter: tweeting!

so, tweeting. this is something you obviously have to know how to do. this is how to make a tweet, differences between tumblr and twitter, and how to interact with a tweet

so, making one! when you make a new tweet on mobile, the screen looks like this

(the icons are p much the same whether you use mobile or desktop, so it doesnt matter which i use)

first, the tweet itself! tweets can only be up to 280 characters, and cant be edited once you post them. theres no feature to bold, italicize, underline, or add linked text in twitter, so its not as good as tumblr for stuff like that, unfortunately.

here’s what the icons at the bottom do, from left to right

- pictures! this is sort of straightforward: it lets you add pictures. a tweet can only contain either 4 pictures, 1 gif, or 1 video. you cant have a gif and a picture, or a picture and a video.

a note for artists! twitter is known to compress image quality when images are uploaded, BUT there is a workaround! if you have even one single transparent pixel, your image wont be compressed.

a note for everyone! you can enable image transcription captions in settings (Settings > Accessibility > compose image descriptions). this allows you to type a short image description to any image you post, if you choose to. it’s a feature i recommend you have on and try to use for your followers who might have worse vision!

- gif keyboard! this image is a search for reaction gifs, basically. i almost never use it bc i can usually never find the specific gif im looking for...

- polls! tis is a feature i like about twitter! it allows you to conduct anonymous polls with up to four options. you can set a time limit and leave it up to allow people to respond. settle arguments between you and your friends or get opinions!

you cant post an image and a poll in the same tweet, so if you want opinions on something in an image, just have the poll be a reply to your tweet

- location! you can add your current location to any tweet. ive had this disabled for so long i genuinely dont know like... anything about this.

listen, im trying my best

- the little circle at the bottom which is grey with a dot of blue is the character counter. the circle is grey when empty, and gets bluer as you tweet. it wont count out how many characters you have left until youre within 20 of being full, in which case itll let you know so you dont go over the limit.

- finally, theres the + icon, which is for making threads. it lets you edit multiple tweets at once, connected in a string. threads are helpful for a lot of reasons!

if you have information to share, then put it together in a thread! if one tweet in a thread is retweeted, it’s marked as being part of a thread. this will encourage readers to look at the rest!

if you like to livetweet series, put it in a thread! this allows you to keep all your livetweets in one place, and also allows people following you to mute the thread if they arent interested

- i also know on mobile if you close out with the X, you can save a tweet to drafts to edit and post later. i dont know if you can do this on desktop because i never use desktop, and when i have, i couldnt ever find the drafts thing. i know if you delete the app, all your drafts are deleted, too

WELL, now that youve got the basics on a tweet....

interacting with the tweets of others

okay, heres a bit on what buttons do what, and some Twitter Manners

here’s our sample tweet, posted. this isnt how it appears on the timeline, but how it appears once you click it, so i can show the full range of things you can do with a tweet.

you can see the tweet, who posted it, and the date/time, and other stuff

- profile. top left. if you click the icon/display name/handle of the op, you can go to their profile!

- menu. see the little arrow in the top right corner? thats a menu.

on your own tweet, you can delete the tweet here, pin it to your profile, or mute it. muting a tweet means you no longer get notifications when someone interacts with it

on someone else’s tweet, you can follow or unfollow the op of the tweet, mute the op, block the op, or report the tweet

in the bottom row....

- theres tweet activity. it only shows up on your own tweet, and lets you see how many people have seen your tweet.

- below this would tell you how many likes and retweets your tweet got, but no one liked or retweeted my wonderful tweet for some strange reason, so i cant show you

worth noting, if your account is on private, you wont show up in the notifications of people who arent following you

now for the buttons

- the speech bubble is replies! that lets you repy to the tweet

worth saying, if you reply to a retweet or conversation, its important to be sure to un-@ the people who you arent talking to. when you reply to someone, at the top of the reply it will list everyone youre replying to. click the little names and unclick the check boxes by the names of those not involved, and youre good to go! not doing this is considered rude/annoying

- next, retweeting! retweeting is sort of like reblogging. you retweet another tweet so it shows up on your own account. you can retweet without comment, which brings the tweet as is, or with comment, which allows you to add your own sort of caption. the op of the tweet will nto be notified for any replies, likes, or retweets on a comment retweet

a note! people often do retweets with comments on stuff like news stories to add their own commentary/jokes

another note! DO NOT do this to art by artists, even if youre doing it to be nice! a lot of artists, especially international artists, find this incredibly rude, as it takes away attention and retweets from the art itself. if you want to share art, just retweet. if you want to say something nice, just tell them in replies!

its not uncommon for people to retweet something without comment, then make a tweet of their own to comment on them.these tweets generally start with LRT (last retweet)

- likes are pretty simple. you press the like button and you like the post. one thing thats different from tumblr to twitter, though, is twitter has a feature that shows your likes (and that you liked them) to your followers (if they havent disabled it).

- the share button allows you to share tweets! you can DM them to your friends, bookmark them (this is good for articles and such), or copy the link to share elsewhere.

and... that concludes tweeting!

#twitter #lews twitter tutorials

4 notes · View notes

caradhinaa · 6 years ago

Text

Under The Weather

so this is like,,,,, the first fic i’ve ever written dskhfjksdf. ive been kinda sick the past few days and that naturally inspired me to make my own oc suffer with me. ive been playing around with the idea of starting a writing blog (which would probably just be this blog lmfao) but im still not sure!!! i’ll see how i feel about it!! i just kinda wrote this for fun and thought i might as well post it lmao.

Mornings.

Mornings were the favorite part of Emi’s day; the peaceful, low-key energy, the crisp air, breakfast. Especially now more than ever, since she gets to wake up in a building full of her closest friends. She’s been loving everything about her new life in the dorms.

At least, until right now.

Waking up to the familiar, yet despised sound of her alarm, she could already tell today was gonna suck ass. Her stuffy nose and pounding head could confirm. Emi wasn’t one to get sick very often, but when she does, it sure isn’t a pleasant awakening. She considered going back to sleep, but figuring that someone would eventually come check on her anyway, she ignored her body screaming at her to stay in bed and fought her way up. Guess she didn’t love everything about the new dorms.

Heading to the bathroom and brushing her teeth, she could see that her face had decided to become a few shades paler. She also took note of the lovely bags under her eyes. And couldn’t she at least have brushed her hair? Frankly, she looked like she’d died and came back to life against her will. Well, that wasn’t too far off.

As she dragged her way into the commons area, dreadfully breathing through her mouth, she noticed that it was particularly difficult to walk in a straight line. Maybe no one will notice. She’s a wild card, after all. Maybe they’d just think she stayed up all night studying or something.

...Yeah, sure. She doesn’t even study during the day.

A weak chuckle escaping her mouth, she finally made it down the stairs and into the commons area, being greeted with the usual “good morning”s from her fellow classmates. She tried her best to act as if her head wasn’t about to split open, and headed into the kitchen. She’d begun to take out a box of cereal before she paused and put it back, the unpleasant feeling in her stomach suggesting that she should maybe just grab a glass of water.

“Not eating breakfast...?”

Emi turned her head to the familiar voice. Of course, she’d expected Shouto to show up sooner or later, but did he have to be the first person she talked to? He stood at the other side of the island counter with his usual neutral expression, eyeing the box she’d put away. She should have tested her voice first. Praying that she had a voice at all, she cleared her throat.

“Nah, I’m not real hungry this morning,” she rasped, cringing at the quality of her vocal chords. She grabbed a glass and went over to fill it with water.

Shouto blinked. “I’ve never seen you skip a meal before,” he watched as she missed the water dispenser on the fridge with her glass before immediately trying again. “Are you feeling alright?”

“Aww, are you worried about me? That’s so sweet,” she giggled, sticking her pinky out and taking a sip of the room-temperature water. Forgot the ice.

“You just seem a little off. It seemed like common courtesy to ask,” he explained, making his way around the island to her. “Also, you didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m fine! I’m still just a little groggy is… all…” her voice trailed off as she felt a hand press against her forehead. A moment of awkward silence passed before Shouto narrowed his eyes and spoke again.

“You’re hot.”

“Wow, Todo. A little forward, don’t you think?”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed if you feel sick?” He removed his hand, “You’re gonna make it worse if you push yourself. And you’re probably contagious,” he added, taking a step back.

Emi groaned in response. She guessed that he’d figure it out pretty quick, but she wasn’t expecting him to be such a nag about it. Despite that, she couldn’t find it in herself to be annoyed.

“I guess, but what would I do-- just stay in the dorm all day?” she paused, taking another sip of water, “That sounds so boring…”

Shouto opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the booming voice of their class representative.

“Everybody! It is now 8 O’Clock! I suggest you all get ready for school!”

Emi sighed in relief. “Welp, you heard him! I’m gonna go get dressed and all that.” She put down the water glass and walked past the boy, “See you in class!”

Shouto stood for a moment, watching her quicken her pace up the stairs (rather clumsily, might he add) and turn the corner, out of his sight.

…

The second Emi heard the words “combat training” come out of her teacher’s mouth, she thought back to what Shouto said to her that morning.

And she thought about how much smarter it sounded now.

So, here she was, on the training field with her hero costume, her merciless symptoms, and her crippling regret. The sun was beating down on her already too warm body, and the air making her eyes and nose sting even more. She did this to herself; it was too late to back out now.

Today’s lesson was one-on-one combat. One person carries a fake knife and tries to pin the other one down. Though, in this state, she wishes it were a real one. She closed her eyes and picked a number out of the box that would determine her fortunate partner, who was sure to win the exercise with ease. Opening her eyes, the number 4 was printed on the small sheet of paper.

The unlucky number, of course.

Her eyes scanned around the area for the person with the matching slip. When the second 4 caught her attention, she looked up to see a pair of bi-colored eyes already making their way to her. Oh, can’t she catch a break? This will hardly be a fight, but more like a lesson.

“Hey. Still feeling ‘groggy?’”

“As a matter of fact, I am.” she fanned her face with the 4 in her hand.

Shouto hummed. “Well, I won’t say I told you so,” he held up the fake knife that was passed out, examining it. “I’m sure you’ve already thought it, anyway.”

“Hey, don’t give yourself too much credit,” Emi smirked, “I can still knock that knife out of your hand.”

“I wonder.”

And with that, Shouto raced toward Emi with his hand clenched around the knife. He thrusted it towards her face, but she was quick to pull it to the side. She grabbed his wrist and attempted to loosen his hold on the weapon. Shouto used this opportunity to kick her feet from beneath her and pinned her on her back, knife to her neck.

Emi grinned. “Well? Stab me, coward.”

“It’s a fake knife.”

“You can still try?”

Shouto lifted the knife and rose to his feet. He held out his hand and helped Emi up as well. She giggled, half embarrassed, half amused.

She rolled her head around, stretching her neck. Maybe this was helping, in a weird way. It was at least something to keep her mind off her sick mess of a body. Her head didn’t seem as heavy as before, and it had stopped pounding.

In fact, it seemed to be getting lighter.

“Hey, are you listening?”

Lighter…?

“Koemo--!”

All at once, the ground began to rush closer to her face. Hands moving under her arms caught her before she could hit the dirt, but she couldn’t seem to open her eyes.

Or want to.

…

Emi shifted. She felt soft sheets beneath her, and a pillow under her head. She can’t exactly remember what happened, but she didn’t really want to get up to find out.

At least, until she noticed someone sitting next to the bed.

“Hey. You awake?”

She groaned sleepily in response. She started to slowly sit up in the bed, stretching her sore muscles. She gave a look around the room. The nurse’s room. On her other side, Shouto with a book in his hand. She yawned, wondering how long she’s been-

Shouto.

She blinked twice. “Have...have you been waiting here this whole time…?”

Shouto folded the corner of the page he was reading and closed the book. “Yeah. I didn’t have a sparring partner, after all.”

Emi only stared. He probably had to bring her here, too. She’d feel bad if she didn’t feel disgustingly ill. But even more than that, she felt… happy?

“How do you feel…?”

Happy that someone noticed, even though she was trying to hide it.

“Kinda like ass.”

He huffed, his lips curving up ever so slightly. “Well, can you stand? I’ll take you to the dorms.”

“Oh, you don’t have to escort me,” she smirked, “I know where they are.”

Shouto’s chair squeaked a bit as he got up onto his feet. “Sure, but what will you do if you faint again?”

Emi chuckled. She sat up and turned to the side of the bed. She stretched one more time before getting up.

Shouto opened the door of the clinic. “If I get sick tomorrow, I’m blaming you, you know.”

She hummed as she walked through the door.

“That’s your own fault.”

#kjhdskjfhdkjfh.... idk if this is even good lmao i just had nothing better to do #it was really fun though #writing is real fun #emi koemo #emitodo #mha writing #mha #my writing

11 notes · View notes

comicteaparty · 7 years ago

Text

August 23rd, 2018 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party chat that occurred on August 23rd, 2018, from 5PM - 7PM PDT. The chat focused on Pathways: Chronicles of Tuvana by Elaine Tipping.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

COMIC TEA PARTY START!

Good day everyone~! This week’s Comic Tea Party is now officially beginning~! Today we are discussing Pathways: Chronicles of Tuvana by Elaine Tipping~! (http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/) For those new or in need of a reminder, discussions about the comic are freeform, so please feel free to bring up whatever you wish. However, every 30 minutes I will be dropping in a discussion question for participants to help those who would like a prompt. These questions are totally OPTIONAL to answer! If you miss out on any though, they’ll be pinned for the duration of the chat once they’re posted~! Remember, constructive criticism is allowed, but the primary focus here is to have fun and appreciate the amazing comic~! All that being said, let’s get started and have a great discussion!

QUESTION 1. What is your favorite scene in the comic so far and why?

snuffysam

the most recent couple pages are my favorite

"help me!" hides under cape

Kabocha

Ufufufu. Actually I'm really enjoying the current scene and chapter with Atawn trying to escape. Both he and this guard are in for an adventure... Also, the guard is such a good egg. I hope we find out their name soon.

Respheal

The guard is a good friend

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

yeah i loved the cape thing. mostly cause i appreciate any cape that is big enough to hide a whole person

Respheal

I liked finding the people in the cave because that was the first bit where I was really like "Go on....-scoots forward in seat-"

Kabocha

The stakes are super high, too. Like, I'm already super into the adorable scholar character type, so I want to protect him. I'm a little bit surprised how quickly things escalated. (Well, not really)

YES

I wonder what the deal is

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2595217/pathways-58/ We know they're considered Gods now, but it's like. ........ All right, so....... how doomed is everyone, and how many survivors are there going to be out of the researchers, not counting Atawn

snuffysam

doomed from the gods or doomed from getting their camps burned?

Kabocha

It's DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM Does it really matter? I mean, Zealots are gonna zealot....

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

unless the zealots arent zealoting and just know more and are trying to save everyone from the scourge that is their spooky gods

TriaElf9

Eee I'm glad people like the cape bit, I'm so happy we hit it before this chat happened ^_^

🎵Tenor🎶

IDK if ill be back in time but wanted to say I love the story and art and I have so many speculations. Love its presentation and eager 4 more

Kabocha

@✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨ ...Good point. That would be a twist XD

"OUR GODS ARE AWFUL, WE WANTED THEM TO REMAIN BURIED AND DEAD"

snuffysam

"nobody leaves" sounds like a fun way to save people

as does setting their tents on fire

Respheal

My first impression is that the Akarna aren't awful? I didn't get that sorta vibe from them.....in what little we've seen

But yeah, zealots gonna zealot

Kabocha

What types of gods command you to light things on fire?!

The best ones

.......or the worst ones, if they're living things

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

well tbf they couldve lit the tents on fire while the scholars were inside

legit that is what i expected when atawn turned the corner

to just have on fire ppl everywhere

>_>

Respheal

Hahaha kinda x'D

That woulda been baaaaaaaaaaad

As if the situation isn't bad enough as it is

Kabocha

you mean they're not planning to do that now?

I mean, they realized Atawn escaped, if he gets caught, he's SUPER dead

and so is the guard, I'm sure

Respheal

.....probably

They certainly don't want this info leaving

Kabocha

Yeahhhhhhh

Respheal

Makes me wonder if they have some more "humane" way of not letting the information leave

Since clearly the books aren't leaving this camp

(Mind wiping? I dunno lol)

Kabocha

What is the magic like in this world, I wonder :3

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i think they mentioned they were gonna lock them up

so just eternal prison

forever

Respheal

Kabocha

They're going to get tired of feeding them at some point

TriaElf9

Yeah I will note, that big tent was the main research tent, so essentially they burnt all the information that'd been collected

And yeah, they have indeed started the clock on that, where it leads, we'll have to see ^_-

Kabocha

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

TriaElf9

TELL ME ABOUT IT it's very hard to not just blurt it all out AHHHH

Respheal

x'D

It was smart to tell Atawn to just memorize everything though

Kabocha

I'm not at the point in the comic where I can start spouting conspiracy theories. I MUST KNOW MORE

Respheal

Good bit of foresight there

Kabocha

or am I

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

plot twist: everyone just goes home and lives happily ever after, no deaths. and the bad guys pay for the damages.

TriaElf9

I want to know the theories!!

AHAHAH perfect, it's just festivals and parties until the end

Respheal

All I know is I'm in the "An Akarna person joins the party" party

Kabocha

Ahahahaha

The Guard's actually a spy

Respheal

Wakey, wakey, Akarna person, you've overslept by like a thousand years

Kabocha

He's infiltrated the Mikarna, and is looking to get information out about their gods, and the TRUTH about the Akarna's sudden disappearance

The truth being they have a secret magitek that was sealed away -- because they threatened the world. The other countries engaged in a war with them resulting in a pyrrhic victory... and forcing the Akarna underground for millenia...

.................................And they all had cake

TriaElf9

mmmm cake

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

well at least cake denotes a happy ending O_O

Kabocha

That's the terrible Magitek secret the Akarna had. A killer cake recipe.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

the one cake to rule them all

snuffysam

there's a reason they call it death by chocolate

Kabocha

GASP

TriaElf9

AHAH ^_^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

aside from the guards since were still on favorite scene i want to mention i really enjoyed the festival montage. it was nice seeing all the activities, and i think the fireworks at the end really tied it all together with some beautiful imagery

Kabocha

A shame they're going to soon be embroiled in an international incident

TriaElf9

Aww, yay! ^_^

eheh

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

well we have to have calm before the storm O_O so ill take what calm i can get

Kabocha

I'm sure there'll be plenty of nice, calm moments

TriaElf9

I actually drew all that after having gone through festival season here, as well as a fireworks festival, so I had a lot of places to draw from for inspiration ^_^

Kabocha

enough for us to get attached to all of the adorable characters

Awww

TriaElf9

OH yes, I want to show the world through down-time as well as the AHHH time ^_^ it can't all be AHHHH or we'd get tired

Kabocha

YES

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i also wanna say i really love that one doublepage where you see the crowd and the wall. i really love that huge sense of scale that makes you go "dang those walls are some marvel of architecture."

Kabocha

The color illustrations for pathways are a treat, too

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2534068/chapter-2-the-dig/ Like, even though this is based in what could be a very brown landscape, the reds and greens add such a nice warmth to it, and the cool blues for shading are just pleasant

TriaElf9

Fun fact, that city is actually the smallest of the main cities in Tuvana ^_-

And I'm glad that page came out well, it took foreeeveerrrrrrr

Kabocha

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2622607/chpt-3-attack-on-the-camp/ ...To be honest, it took everything in me not to start throwing fire puns when this page came out

Respheal

Do it

Unleash the puns

Kabocha

It's so serious in context, I can't help but make fire jokes

TriaElf9

I love how it was all "yeah, I'm gonna start this comic, it'll be great! I'll just start with....a massive festival... with thousands of people WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i demand fire puns

Respheal

They are both very nice cover pages

Ha! xD

TriaElf9

omh puns are the best

Kabocha

This cover page is HOT -- have you seen it yet?!

TriaElf9

HEHEH

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

beautiful

serious context is even more reason for puns

gotta defuse that tense situation

TriaElf9

so true

Kabocha

The Mikarna really brought the heat!

My passion for this comic cannot be extinguished!

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

but puns aside i do think the chapter covers are really nice. its some immensely beautiful coloring.

TriaElf9

Ah, Miakarna ^_^

but yes, they did bring the heat eheh

aww, thank you! ^////^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

masterpieces. kabo just gonna have to make a book of puns to story situations

Kabocha

Things are really heating up for the researchers... ....You could say it's... in tents...

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

the holy head guy was like "you need to put the heat on." miakarna set the tents on fire. holy head guy like "I DIDNT MEAN LITERALLY"

Kabocha

PFFFF

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

QUESTION 2. After discovering the supposed Akarna, things go downhill for the scholars at the ruins rather quickly. Do you think that Atawn will manage to escape? If he does, will he actually manage to make it somewhere safe, or will he be pursued and captured eventually anyway? Where will Atawn even go? Why do you think that Miakarna guard is helping Atawn, and will the guard suffer consequences for helping later on? Will Atawn’s records be of use, and if so how? What do you think will happen to the other scholars that Atawn left behind? Lastly, what do you think will be the consequences for the Miakarna regarding their actions? Will they spark a potential war, or will their declaration of the scholars being profane be allowed to stand?

Kabocha

Someone told the Mikarna to light a fire under someone's ass to get all the research disposed of -- they probably weren't meaning literally

TriaElf9

Oh man, all great questions!!!

snuffysam

maybe this whole thing is a misunderstanding. maybe the miakarna are fine with discovering religious secrets, they just don't like holes in the ground.

Kabocha

@snuffysam -- like Trypophobia, just on a large scale?

where there's one hole with people in it, there might be another

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

holes are like graffiti of the earth

cant have hoodlums adding their graffiti

snuffysam

my hope is that atawn and the guard become best buddies and escape to visit taria and friends. and then the gang has a bunch of misadventures in an attempt to quell a brewing holy war.

Kabocha

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2610497/pathways-62/ Well, Rykhana'i will probably not take this well. "Oh, yeah, we uh, lost one of your guys, and burnt all their research. No you can't visit them. NO. THEY'RE TOTALLY FINE"(edited)

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

this is assuming they can get word out. which tbh i do think they can

i think atawn will make it

with the guards help

Kabocha

we can hope

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i believe O_O

although i dont think the guard is going to be safe in the long run

Kabocha

Is the guard already raising death flags for you?

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

yes

ankoart

Atawn's gonna escape, but probably be pursued as he tries to tell others about what he's seen. A man on the run! The guard is gonna join him cause he probably knows shady stuff is afoot and feels guilty just standing by and doing nothing. He seems like the thoughtful type, and he probably became a guard to protect and serve others, not deceive them.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

super death flags

the guard is a profaner O_O

Kabocha

To be honest, I think Atawn's more likely to be injured badly and have to adapt, the guard will be fine long-term.

ankoart

-hugs the guard- don't you touch him

TriaElf9

eats popcorn, grinning

Kabocha

oh no

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

yeah i do get the impression the guard has a kind soul at least and is becoming disillusioned

which good for the guard

Kabocha

I still think the guard's a spy

TriaElf9

WHY CAN'T I DRAW THE COMIC FASTERRRR so many parts to get toooo

Kabocha

AHAHAHAHAHAH

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

someone on the inside should be thinking "maybe its us who are the bad guys"

TriaElf9

"are we the baddies?"

ankoart

Maybe the real baddies are the friends we made along the way

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

LOL the plot twist of the century

Kabocha

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2550453/pathways-43/ I dunno, Guard totally knows who the baddies are. They're very observant

OH NO ANKO

@TriaElf9 -- ....how long until we find out the Guard's name

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

in regards to the other scholars i also see death flags over them. like i think for now theyll be locked up. but then ya know, public executions of the profane and all that to set an example

im gonna burst out laughing if the guard's name is "Guard"

Kabocha

As soon as Atawn finds a place to stop and write a letter, there's going to be a newspaper or something: "SCHOLARS FIRED"

TriaElf9

AHAH

Respheal

> FIRED

Why

Why do you do this

TriaElf9

We'll learn more about the guard soon, I've drawn those pages already, it's just a matter of getting to them in the posting schedule ^_-

extra extra, read all about it! ^_^

Kabocha

@TriaElf9 appreciates my awful, awful jokes

ankoart

It's good to have things to look forward to reading soon!

Respheal

The guard seems smart, so I imagine they'll make it out of this alright I don't foresee them following the narrative much though? But that's just my guess

TriaElf9

I'm trying to build a buffer, so I'm like a bunch of pages ahead, so I keep getting surprised when I check the site and we're not there yet lol

Kabocha

Aaaaaaa I know this feeling. XD But that's okay

So, so far, I can group everyone in this comic into two distinct groups: "Adorable Characters I must protect" and "Flamethrowers"

Respheal

Yes xD

TriaElf9

EHEH

ankoart

I get the feeling they're gonna be joining the narrative to stay~

Kabocha

Actually, you know.... Could we call this event the start of a... flame war?

TriaElf9

I think the other question is, how is this all going to affect Atawn really ^_-

AHAHAHAH

Respheal

istg

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i feel the guard will be around for a while at least. the guard will rise to help again O_O

atawn will be fine. no years of therapy needed or anything

Kabocha

Yep

Respheal

Oh yeah I imagine the guard'll be back at some point if we do part ways with them now

TriaElf9

no survivor's guilt or anything NAH

Kabocha

definitely no therapy necessary never

Respheal

Ahahahaha poor Atawn x'D

Kabocha

Y'all should look at the vote incentive

snuffysam

atawn and the guard get captured. the rest of the comic is taria and gang doing something completely different.

Respheal

Wait

Waaaaaaaaaaaait

the person behind Atawn

TriaElf9

Oh yeah, my full cast art reveals a lot lol

Respheal

I rescind my remarks; Guardfriend joins the gang

Kabocha

GuardFriend is even more adorable without the helmet

TriaElf9

tho it takes the context of connecting faces and people eheheh

excelleennnttt ^_^

Kabocha

+10 want to protect score

Respheal

Also I do really love the umbrella idea with that art. So cute!

ankoart

I wanna know more about the dragons. Everyone deserves dragon cuddles.

Kabocha

YES OH GOODNESS

the dragons are freakin' CUTE

Respheal

Shvir is a good noodle friend

TriaElf9

I also wanted to do a pride yukata picture, but I just didn't have time that month, sadly

Kabocha

How large do the dragons grow?

TriaElf9

a full cast of 8 characters turned out to be murder on the hands lol

they vary in size

they can be tiny to massive

Kabocha

Oooh

ankoart

I need one

Alakotila

Just in time for the cute dragon talk!!

TriaElf9

I haven't much gotten into the dragon stuff yet, but a few people picked up on some of it during the first chapter

eyy, dragon talk! welcome! ^_^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

the dragons were cute but i was curious why all the royalty seemed to have them

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

pant pant pant

Sorry I'm late!

snuffysam

maybe just a popular pet

a popular, expensive pet

Respheal

I suspect there's more to it than that

TriaElf9

more popcorn and grinning

Kabocha

I imagine there's some sort of bonding

ankoart

Yeah they seem like more than just "pets." Companion seems a better word

TriaElf9

Companion is a very good word for it ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Heehee~

So i see you're the creative mind that made this comic, aren't ya Tria?

ankoart

I'd like to know how they find each other, dragons and their people.

TriaElf9

I am indeed ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Heehee, pleased to meet ya~

TriaElf9

and I'm having such a hard time not just like spilling all the beaannnssss

Kabocha

Are you cackling like mad?

ankoart

Oh no, all these beans!

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

maybe its both. maybe the dragons are companions...but also expensive pets O_O

TriaElf9

cackling ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

A 500 dollar pet?

Kabocha

Don't spill the beans, they're needed for setsubun

TriaElf9

very true, gotta keep those oni out

I will drop that size of dragons is actually a plot point, there is a reason to size ^_-(edited)

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

oooh?

Kabocha

Ooooh

Interesting...

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Are you hiding something from us?

Kabocha

............................................................................ HMMMMMMM

Well, yes, that's the point of telling a story :'3

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Ye~

Kabocha

things are hidden from the reader and gradually revealed

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

And I like that there's dragons that are friendly to each other

TriaElf9

it's not a huge thing, really, but there are layers to it ^_^

Respheal

It's definitely just the royal people that have dragon companions, since a merchant recognized them as royalty for having dragon companions

A pact, mayhaps?

ankoart

The bigger the dragon the gayer you become

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Hmm, Ice Candy

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i feel like it must be related to magic somehow. but thats all i got on that one. need to see the dragons more.

Kabocha

It's interesting that royalty is easily able to walk amongst their people. Must be a pretty peaceful country.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

As a food enthusiast I need to know exactly what kind fo treat it is

Is it like water ice but with bigger chunks of ice?

Kabocha

It'd be a shame if the Mikarna did something....

TriaElf9

Oh Ice Candy is similar to shaved Ice ^_^

snuffysam

might just be a funny way to say sno cone

yup got it in one

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Heehee

I was thinking of having a snow cone earlier lol

TriaElf9

they call it kakigori at festivals here

and it's one of my go to favs, so I had to include it of course eheheh

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

You live in Japan?

TriaElf9

I do! ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

That's epic! I always wanted to see what living there was like but I'm too afraid to leave my own home XD It's got everything I could want, but I digress

Kabocha

http://i.imgur.com/sZQnzuA.jpg This, I feel, is an accurate representation of the Mikarna. But, y'know, with fire

Respheal

snrk

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

And I love that the dragons share the treats with their masters~

ankoart

Haha, cat reaction posts are always best

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

So many food vendors too at this fair in the first chapter

Respheal

A cat dragon

snuffysam

i feel like fairs generally have a lot of food vendors?

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Yea

though some just serve lots and lots of fast food

and it's usually the same stuff every time

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

tbf in the comic its the harvest festival

TriaElf9

the dragons are very cat for sure ^_^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

and well

harvest

food is implied in the name O_O

snuffysam

you know what my favorite thing to harvest is?

ice

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

You have a good point there

TriaElf9

It's basically a matsuri

ankoart

lol

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

>harvesting ice

Kabocha

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2521877/pathways-8/ EVERYONE MUST ATTEND AND HAVE FUN

TriaElf9

it's a festival to celebrate a time or a thing, but they also have staple foods at these things

Kabocha

actually, Shvir's expression is just Way too cute there

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

like the aforementioned candy ice?

wondering what flavors they have there too

TriaElf9

various Tuvana fruits flavors probably

also, I am that servant, and Taria is deffo people trying to get me to stop working and GO TO THE DARN MATSURI lol

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i feel like being told its a royal order is a gurantee to not have fun. too much pressure. starts running around forcefully laughing saying, "AM I HAVING FUN NOW!?"

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

In the end it's all about the matsuris

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

QUESTION 3. At the beginning of the comic we are introduced to Taria, Dhiren, and Quinel, royalty far detached from the current situation at the ruins. What do you think their overall roles in the story will be? Will they deal with the situation at the ruins personally, have heavy involvement in the political arena regarding the Miakarna, or will they be involved in some other way? Will Dhiren successfully have his ceremony to celebrate the promise of Cova’t with Jorah, or will the situation with Miakarna throw those plans into disarray? Will Quinel’s role at the House of Healing be significant, and do you consider it foreshadowing of something to come? What about Taria? Will her fighting skills come into play, her apparent charity, or something else?

snuffysam

i think they'll be among the first to find out about the tent-burning

TriaElf9

AHH EVEN MORE GOOD QUESTIONS

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

That's our Rebel!

snuffysam

atawn manages to escape and gets word to them somehow

TriaElf9

Given that Taria and Atawn are from the same country, that's a good bet ^_-(edited)

snuffysam

and honestly quinel being a healer could factor in right then and there

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Maybe~

snuffysam

i doubt he'll escape without a scratch

Kabocha

Taria strikes me as an action princess, so she's going to want to be out there to check on things. I wonder if she knows Atawn though?

Yeah, Quinel's going to be very useful... ............."Yeah, we'll dispatch our best healers to help" ...."Everyone's dead."

TriaElf9

I wonder what the state of necromancy-like magic is in Tuvana? ^_-

Kabocha

.................

OH NO

TriaElf9

This could mean everything OR NOTHING

cackles more

Kabocha

They're going to end up pod people! and then there to wage war against their own peoples!

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

quinel for resident necromancer

Kabocha

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Finally, I binged all the way to the end so far!

Respheal

Just need a lot of diamonds.........#dnd(edited)

TriaElf9

We also have 3 more characters to meet ^_-

Kabocha

I object to this! Atawn strikes me as much more likely to approach Necromancy from a scholarly point of view.

TriaElf9

I can't wait for chapter 4 ahhhhhhhh

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

3 more to meet, you say? :3

TriaElf9

so many diamonds

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

quinel's healing will be useful tho. healers are always useful.

Alakotila

hohohoho

TriaElf9

need that revial spell lol

Alakotila

I guess I can't say anything there

Kabocha

OH DEAR

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Made it for the second hour. ^.^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

hey math~!

Kabocha

ALAKOTILA KNOWS SPOILERS

TriaElf9

woo, welcome! ^_^

OH RIGHT

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

I also like Atawn's water-generating ability

Alakotila

EDITOR IN THE HOUSE

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

also HEY MATH!

TriaElf9

MY EDITOR KNOWS THINGSS

Kabocha

:'3

Respheal

That was handy xD "Oh, no access to water....welp. -generates water-"

Alakotila

that was a whole ton of good questions up there Rebel!

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

speaking of the water-generating ability i was super stoked to see magic used for something practical like that

thank you

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Oh, you're the editor of this here story?

Alakotila

yeah! that was awesome!

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Hmm, so the royalty will probably have to try and calm down the populus when they see all the smoke from the fire.

snuffysam

how far away is the site?

Alakotila

just the copy editor! all fabulousness is created by @TriaElf9 !

Respheal

I imagine the camp is pretty far away

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

There is hydrogen and oxygen in the air, just need the magical bonds.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Sometimes mundane is all you need

And nice X3

Kabocha

If you really want it to explode, just break those bonds

TriaElf9

yes, they check me on my very over use of commas and my rambling ahah

Kabocha

and uh ....add a spark

ahahahah

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

lol

TriaElf9

Yeah the camp is pretty far and surrounded mostly by mountains

we'll see more of the land in the next upcoming bit

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Oh Tria, I have a small idea for the sit if you're the one that made/coded it(edited)

Kabocha

Rumors of the scholars' fate may spread like wildfire once Atawn escapes....

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

so i feel like war is for sure brewing and theyll have to try and stop it. cause at the very least i think this current discovery is gonna make the miakarna invade all the ruins which iirc are spread out on all four lands

TriaElf9

and I'm glad you're liking the magic! I'm really proud of the system and can't wait to share more ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Yea, it's really good magic~!

Kabocha

The Akarna ruled the world with their cake recipes!

Alakotila

CAKE

Kabocha

I mean, they were considered Gods... OF BAKING

TriaElf9

Oh and no, I have loads of help on the site, I'm useless at those things lol

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Lol, alright then

ankoart

Now I wanna make cake

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Cause I thought of suggesting using the arrow keys to navigate through pages

instead of just clicking the page

also

DID SOMEONE SAY CAKE?

TriaElf9

I always want cake, I went out and got cake during last night's typhoon

Kabocha

Ooooh, what kind of cake though

ankoart

-stares at bag full of ingredients to make ace dessert- maybe I'll finally do that this weekend

Respheal

....-wants cake now-

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

I got italian ices during a bad thunderstorm

Alakotila

that's pretty extreme cake getting lol

TriaElf9

I think the arrows do navigate?

snuffysam

this... this is the true power of the Akarna!

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

They take the cake.

TriaElf9

I got strawberry shortcake b/c of course ^_^

Kabocha

I think Justin means using the arrow keys on the keyboard

TriaElf9

ooooh

ankoart

YOU BOUGHT CAKE DURING THE TYPHOON? (Haha I thought about stopping by a conbini actually but I was actually soaked)

Kabocha

That... might be doable...

TriaElf9

I have no idea if SJ has the ability to do that ^_^;;

Respheal

It does, I can link ya

Kabocha

throw it at me

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Back on fave scene, I just wanted to mention I liked the bit near the start where it looked like as the people were meeting back up, so were the dragons. That was just a nice little detail. Hadn't expected different breeds of dragon.

Alakotila

the dragons are wonderful

TriaElf9

oooh I love that bit!

Kabocha

Shvir is like... a noodle cat dragon

TriaElf9

and yes, I wanted to vary dragon types ^_^

Kabocha

also the meeps are great

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

I wonder how many dragon species total exist

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

And in terms of theories, when they first found the door, I wondered if they'd open it and that high priest guy would just be sitting there with a TV. And he'd go, "Well damn, you found my tech man-cave. Now I have to kill you."

Did not expect the frozen gods.

TriaElf9

EHEH

Kabocha

Are they frozen or just... On ice?

TriaElf9

pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Ice see what you did there.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i expected religion breaking secrets but not frozen gods

Kabocha

It looks vaguely computerized. They need an IT person to come in and take a look before the whole system freezes up

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

for a sec I thought they were mummified

ankoart

They're taking a long nap. I relate to them.

TriaElf9

Also, dragon-wise, so far we've met Tova, Shvir and Var ^_^

snuffysam

the secret is that's where candy ice comes from!

the frozen gods!

ankoart

Ice candy, god flavor

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Interesting that the most important God was at the top, as opposed to at the bottom. Is it really safe up there? Is that also where the power is being generated? (And are they "on ice" in a magical way or a tech one?)

snuffysam

"And are they "on ice" in a magical way or a tech one?" is there really a significant difference?

Kabocha

The ice treats are like soylent green

Respheal

por que no los dos?(edited)

Magitek cryostasis

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Well, this is mostly a magical world, but that area was only recently getting magic, hence the desert. Maybe there's an incompaitiblity... or maybe all the magic was being absorbed by the stasis tubes. So could make a difference for plot.

TriaElf9

oh mannnn I'm loving this AND equally tortured that I can't say anything aHAHAH

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Hmmmm

You're onto something Math

TriaElf9

I'll be dropping more in chapter 4, so look forward to that ^_-

snuffysam

yeah i'm just saying that in this world, it seems like magic has a big impact on technology, and vice versa

TriaElf9

I wish there was a plotting emoticon

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Gotcha.

Maybe the dragons are actually mechanical beings.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

yeah i feel like its significant that it looks like theyre being preserved by technology in a world where there isnt a lot of technology around or so it seems

TriaElf9

I will say some of the things people have said today are indeed on the right track

now the question is WHICH of the things muhahahah

Alakotila

hmmm yes

where did the tech come from?

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

I wonder that as well

Respheal

Aliens

Alakotila

ALIENS

Kabocha

They're gods because of the tech!

TriaElf9

that's another emoticon we need

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

"What solved the world crisis?" "Aliens."

Kabocha

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

The shipping of Atawn and that Guard is the right track, yes? Surely someone already proposed that?

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Always blame it on them

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

The Gods are actually aliens. They crash landed here and decided to seal themselves away from the cavemen until there was a decent enough civilization to rule over.

Alakotila

setting ships sailing is fun

snuffysam

actually i don't think anyone mentioned the atawn x guard ship

Kabocha

They gave people enough to get started, then went into stasis until they could take over

snuffysam

even though it's a pretty good one

TriaElf9

I've gotten some comments on the comic about it, but not here yet

Kabocha

"Yeaaaaaaaaaaah, your world isn't comfortable enough... we'll be back when you make it better..."

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

snuffy: Glad I corrected that oversight then.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i feel the atawn x guard ship is just obvious is all. they got all them googly eyes going.

Kabocha

Ahahaha, right?

Alakotila

LOL rebel

Kabocha

but more than anything, I want to protect them both

Alakotila

do they

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Rebel: Maybe the Guard has a nice sister he wants to marry off, who knows.

Alakotila

I gotta look closer for the googly eyes

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"I want a smart guy, but not a guy who's TOO smart. The scholar who dehydrates himself will do nicely."

TriaElf9

AHAHAH

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

no the lol part is to the fact i now cant unpicture them with googly craft eyes glued to their eye lids.

http://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/supplyimages/564756_1000_1_800.jpg

ya know those kind

TriaElf9

dehydration is definitely something to look for in an SO

Alakotila

oh so those kinds

yeah

I can see how that would give the ship away

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

"Stay hydrated!!"

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"You know where there's some moisture? In mah mouth..."

TriaElf9

PFFT

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"I have a spell though." "Oh, well fine."

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

thats gonna be the guard's best selling pick up line book

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

In terms of the fact that there's new characters we haven't met - there's four kingdoms who can lay claim to that one area, right? And we've seen two of them...? Maybe there will be counterpoints to Taria. (Or is Dhiren already one?)

Like, they'll have a Summit.

TriaElf9

Dhiren and Quinel are from another kingdom yeah

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

dhiren and quinel are both from kuvar

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

I really want to see the other kingdoms now that you mention it

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

I am SO bad with names.

TriaElf9

The only one we've yet to see is Durhan

lol me too, and I wrote them ahah

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

this is why notes exist

especially when you got a billion fantasy names

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"There's these four kingdoms, uh... A B C and D."

TriaElf9

I changed the spelling on a few, and I keep getting confused eheh

yuup, I have so many lore notes ehehe

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Do they speak different languages in the different kingdoms, I wonder?

Or is magic the universal langauge?

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

thats a good question

about languages

Kabocha

We can probably safely assume the characters all are fairly well educated

Alakotila

Is there a common tongue?

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

When magic's involved, spelling counts.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Yes

snuffysam

to be fair, we don't know if the guard is well educated

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Who knows what can happen if you mis-pronounce a certain spell

snuffysam

he may have just been hired to stand there

Kabocha

I dunno, I'm still going with spy theory

TriaElf9

there is at least a common tongue, yes

so far we've seen that and magic

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

snuffy: True, but they probably don't want people who are too dense walking over the scholars.

"This is actually a recipe for biscuits, yes."

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

QUESTION 4. The comic quickly makes it apparent that there are many mysteries afoot regarding the past. In regards to the ruins, what do you think the Miakarna are hiding and why? Did they know about the supposed Akarna there? Are they protecting the land simply because they believe it’s holy? Alternatively, is something else going on? What lengths do you think the Miakarna are willing to go to protect the ruins? Atawn also briefly mentions that magic had not returned to the area the ruins are in. What do you think that means for the past and present day of the story’s world? Of a last note, do you believe the people under the ruins are the Akarna, and if so, what are they doing there?

TriaElf9

SO MANY GOOD QUESTIONS

Kabocha

Qualifications for being a Mikarna guard: -The ability to yell "PROFANER" in at least 3 different languages -Looks good in helmets -OK with bringing the heat(edited)

TriaElf9

EHEHEH

snuffysam

the way the miakarna were acting was like there was a specific thing they didn't want the scholars to find. so i think this was that thing.

TriaElf9

and an almost fanatical devotion to the Akarna

snuffysam

like each day they seemed more worried that the archaeologists were going to find something

Kabocha

The Miakarna probably knew, or had an inkling of what they'd find, just not WHERE and when. And they're hoping to harvest that sweet, sweet cake technology

TriaElf9

hey, cool cake in a desert? priceless

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

snuffy: I got the impression that they didn't know what it was they were even protecting though. Like, they didn't want them to find... something... this is probably it, burn it all.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Of course

use fire at first resort

Great idea

TriaElf9

people knowing things and straying from their control is BAD

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Yes(edited)

snuffysam

i'd hate to see what the miakarna will use after fire fails to get atawn

Kabocha

OH GOSH

THE AKARNA KNEW... how to make ice cream cake

like the perfect ice cream cake

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Unless the Miakarna are actually under the mental control of the Akarna. Subconsciously or not.

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

im gonna be honest i think its a mix. like the miakarna were told something vague like "this is the final resting place of the akarna" cause there has to be a reason they already considered the land sacred. so they knew theyd find something they either proved that right or wrong. and then ya know, they found pods.

Kabocha

GO HOME EVERYONE WE'VE SOLVED THE CONSPIRACY

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

BY BURNING IT ALL \o/

Kabocha

.............

darnit

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

the miakarna being under the control of the akarna sounds interesting though

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Rebel: Or maybe they were just told that where the magic was weakest was the final resting place or something. Way vague, which is why they don't want anyone until they figure it out themselves.

Alakotila

it does make sense they'd have been told something vague AT LEAST in order to consider it sacred

I wonder if they expected to find what they did

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Arkarna are all telepaths.

Kabocha

The Akarna were the ones who made the desert

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

swings pendulum "You are getting... creeeepy."

snuffysam

*dessert, kabo

TriaElf9

PFFT

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

as a general semi crack, semi serious theory, i think theres gonna be war as the miakarna block the others from the ruins. but then theyll wake up an akarna. and then the akarna will yawn and wage an even bigger war and everyone will have to come together to scream oh shit oh shit the gods want to murder us.

Respheal

Ahahaha I can get behind this theory x'D

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

never trust the pod ppl

Respheal

The pod gods

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

better, even more specific

Kabocha

An ancient empire awakens, bent on reclaiming the world they once dominated. A small group of people, drawn together by a common cause, are determined to stop them. However, they face more than threats from the outside.... I mean, the synopsis of the comic is this....

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

dont trust pod gods

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Rebel, I can totally see that. Suddenly the Miakarna wave the white flags, "Stop shooting at us, we're under attack from within too."

Respheal

Yuuuuuuuuuuuppppp r.i.p. everyone when the pod gods wake up

TriaElf9

author cackling continuessss

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Unless the Gods decide to use the Miakarna as the instruments to wipe out the other kingdoms.

Kabocha

Does "Mi" have a meaning

because Mi-Akarna

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Mama Mia.

Kabocha

are we following hi-fu-mi here

bc if so, this means they're the third iteration of the Akarna's people... potentially

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

mi actually used to be my because the miakarna are the descendants of their slaves O_O

Kabocha

GASP

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

They're also probably great at dodging magic, if they're spending a lot of time defending a region that doesn't use it.

Kabocha

Bwahahahahahaha

So, basically, we can sum this up as: "They're all doomed"

The Akarna join with their faithful servants,and..............................

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

R.I.P. everyone

Kabocha

TAKE OVER THE WORLD

snuffysam

unless a rag-tag group of friends can stop them!

Respheal

Well if the Miakarna consider the Akarna to be gods, I can't imagine it'll take much to convince them to join in on the conquest

ankoart

Everybody wants to rule the world

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

maybe this will be a technology vs magic war. cause the akarna could be technology wizards instead of regular magic wizards. and the akarna are the reason magic went away.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

oooh

That'd be epic

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Leaves it up to the cat dragons to save the day.

ankoart

Cat dragons save the day! That would be the best

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

The smallest and cutest fighters

Kabocha

The akarna are all sudo rm -rf /

snuffysam

the entire story is just the akarna trying to remember the admin password

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"As soon as we thaw out our army, you'll be in trouble."

(Wasn't there an episode of Star Trek Voyager like that?)

(Dragons Teeth or something.)

snuffysam

use a blow drier to thaw out the army

have to go to the store for extension cords because of the size of the room

it's a whole thing

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Unless blow drier runs on magic. Also, they'll have fabulous hair.

Kabocha

Sam -- you know, they probably just have to boot into single user mode

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"Aim for the heads." "Why aren't they wearing helmets?" "Would you cover up that hair?"

Kabocha

http://pathways.smackjeeves.com/comics/2595215/pathways-56/ "What, you must be mistaken" Clearly they know what's up

Gaslighting before they torch the place

Respheal

I dunno, might be legitimate surprise

TriaElf9

which one which oneeeee ~dances~

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i read it as legit surprise too

Kabocha

....you missed the joke T_T

TriaElf9

OHHHHH YOU

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i saw it O_O i just dont have a witty response to it XD

Kabocha

ahahahaha

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

TriaElf9

sorry I'm getting prepped for critical role lol

Kabocha

It's ok XD

I'm being awful

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Seeing that panel reminds me, did all characters have slightly pointy ears, or no...?

TriaElf9

I HAVE FAILED YOU

it's mixed

Kabocha

IT'S OK, THIS COMIC IS WONDEFUL

TriaElf9

Dhiren and Quinel both have rounded ears

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Gotcha, thanks. I wondered about races at some point there, then forgot.

TriaElf9

so does Vala

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

I guess it's connected to Kingdoms.

TriaElf9

yup, it's just a little detail ^_^

it's actually not a spoiler or anything, it's just a genetic variation in this world

like connected earlobes or detached earlobes

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Nice detail. Actually, really good artwork, given the large setting too.

Kabocha

I'm 100% here for the pointy ears

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

interesting.

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

There's also, like, foreground-background in places.

Kabocha

@TriaElf9 -- now, I have to ask one question before it gets to the end... Is ther ea character we'll get to shout "YOU HAD ONE JOB" at

and will they have a ribbon

TriaElf9

it's more of a "this isn't Earth" tidbits ^_^

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

is there any sort of discrimination caused by the difference in ears or is everyone shrugging about it?

TriaElf9

also I like pointed ears ahaha(edited)

Alakotila

me too

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

The person who made the large cloak, when it fails and Atawn is seen. Had one job.

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Mind of I say one last thing before this chat ends?

TriaElf9

for sure!

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Because this is an incredible read so far with lots of cool (and sometimes cute!) ideas and I love everything about it thus far

TriaElf9

eeee ^////^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Hope it continues on and we experience a lot more about this world you created

(and long live candy ices!)

TriaElf9

I've been working on this comic for a few years now, building the world, I'm so glad people are liking ittt ^_^

oh it'll keep going for sure ^_^

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Glad to hear!

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Is Tuvana the land or the planet?

TriaElf9

and if we hit the next goal on my patreon, it'll reliably update twice a week

ankoart

Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us!

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Sweet!

TriaElf9

instead of my 1-2-1-2 pattern I have now

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

yeah the effort put into the world really shows through. its got a lot of those necessary details that really bring the foreignness to fruition.

TriaElf9

it's both

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Gotcha.

TriaElf9

the world is the land is the planet

TriaElf9

Tuvana is what they call the whole thing, and then there are 4 distinct countries

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Helps the aliens out that way.

TriaElf9

heheheheh

hey it does have a dash of sci fi ^_-

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

That's cool~

TriaElf9

I've only had one panel with it I think, but keep an eye on the sky, there are a few cool things there ^_-

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Yeah, definitely didn't expect the pods... I wonder if they're all actually functioning? Oooh, what if they're all just holograms?

"Thank you for opening my pod, this is a recorded message..."

TriaElf9

EHEHE

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

"...to build the thermonuclear device, insert tab A..."

Respheal

Now I'm going back through, looking at all the sky shots lmao

Divulge your secreeeeets(edited)

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

i feel like some of the pods must of failed maybe. at the very least i can hear them waking up and being like "General Lod is okay but General Joe Bob kicked the bucket I'm afraid."

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Always nice to have reasons to go back. Like, even hair has tufts and strands.

Kabocha

AHAHAHAHAHAHHA

TriaElf9

it'll show up more in coming pages

Kabocha

I can't wait to read more

Superjustingo of ✨Time🕑&Space☄✨

Same here~

TriaElf9

but the night sky has a little fun thing ^_-

MathTans the super Pun 👑Prince👑

Rebel: Hope they took out life insurance.

snuffysam

looking forward to more world building!

Kabocha

I want to see more cuties

TriaElf9

oh there will be more cuties for SURE

also more world building

Kabocha

EVERYONE IS ADORABLE NEED ALL OF THEM ALL THE TIME

TriaElf9

chapter 4 we get some world lore AND some cuties

✨🐱 RebelVampire 🐱✨

COMIC TEA PARTY END!

Unfortunately, the scheduled Comic Tea Party time is now up~! Thank you everyone so much for reading and joining this week’s chat~! We want to give a special thank you to Elaine Tipping, as well, for making Pathways: Chronicles of Tuvana and volunteering it for our reading queue. If you liked the comic, please be sure to support Elaine Tipping’s efforts however you’re able to. All that being said, if you would like to continue discussing this week’s comic, we highly encourage you to do so~!

For next week, Comic Tea Party will focus on The J-Man by Jonny Aleksey. As always, please use the next several days to read as much of the comic as you would like. We hope to see you next Thursday on August 30th from 5PM to 7PM PDT for the chat~! Until then, happy reading~! @The Undefeatable Jonny Aleksey Comic: http://jonnyalekseydrawscomics.com/thelatestpage/

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #comic book club #comic bookclub #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #pathways #pathways chronicles of tuvana #elaine tipping

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boogiewrites · 7 years ago

Text

Before & After - Ch. 4, Pt. 1. The Anniversary.

Title: Before and After - Chapter 4 Pt. 1

Characters: Jim Hopper x Reader

Word Count: 4084

Summary: Dealing with the 1 year anniversary of her almost life-ending accident coming up soon, our character not only has to deal with how this makes her feel, but also how it’s making Jim feel. The anniversary.

Warnings:The first few chapters, not too much. There’s swearing, smoking, drinking, talk about death, mental illness, body image and the complicated feelings that come with living through these things. Further along there is more of the same and then that sweet, sweet smut some of you animals are after.

A/N: It’s the weekend ya’ll, have some more story. I’ll be posting both parts tonight, but since it is almost 8000 words, I wanted to split it up.

This started out as just the urge to write some nice smut for you fine folks. It has grown into an over 20,000 word (so far) exploration. There is lots of fluff and romance, sexual tension, will they/won’t they feelings. There is smut later on, I promise, just stay with me on this. I believe this is called a slow burn.

All other chapters on my Masterlist.

Here are the tagged folks, if you’d like to be added or removed, just leave a reply and I’ll see it! Any positive feedback is also appreciated. :) Thanks!

@whatmakesmebeme-tblr @sleepylunarwolfh @elevenofmages @alahmorah @norcula @undiscl0sed-desir3s @atari-writes @jobean12-blog@miss-harleenquinzel @kiwiphroot @ashphoenix105 @ambeazyyy@riotguuuurl @warriorqueen1991 @misbehaving-f0r-days @divadinag @flamehairedwritings

You decide to wear your hair in big soft waves, your makeup just a bit more than natural. You search for a coat to wear while in your underwear, to keep from messing up your dress. You were feeling surprisingly well. You were slowly pushing that bad mood cloud that always seemed to hover above you away, at least temporarily.

You decide on a basic black leather jacket. It's never let you down. You look at the clock, 4:30, you better get your clothes on now. You're listening to music and watching yourself move in your new dress in your mirror, looking yourself over one last time. Your hair had grown out over the scar on your head and concealed it for the most part; a small stretch of it creeping out of your hairline on the side of your face. You were confident in your body and what it could do again. You had come so far. But your makeup took too long to start crying over your pride. You were glad you got on board with this. You hear the growing rumble of the Blazer in the distance and you feel that anxious wiggling in your gut again. You give yourself a stern look in the mirror, pointing a finger at yourself. "Don't you go feeling nervous. Cut the bullshit, lady, we've got a night to enjoy." You hear him knock on the door as you shut your bedroom door. You walk up to grab your purse off of the kitchen counter and look at Jim over your shoulder as he walks through the door. He keeps his eyes on the keys in his hands while he announces his arrival. "I'm here, sweetheart. You ready to go?" he doesn't look up until he's shut the door behind him. You're already making your way across the floor to him. His eyes wander down your body as you move closer. You take the time to appreciate the effort he's put forth for you this evening. He's wearing a big navy wool coat over a grey shirt, dark pants with nice boots. With his hair combed back and his beard tamed, he looked so handsome. Your eyes meet, you both smile sheepishly at each other for a moment. He takes the time to swallow and wet his lips, giving you an obvious flirty once over, "Well, look at you..." he grins, he reaches up and rubs his chin before holding his hand up to motion you to give him a twirl. You roll your eyes but oblige his request. "You better be glad you're with the Chief of police tonight, looking like that." he pauses, giving you a charming smile. "You look like trouble in that outfit, sweetheart." his tone changing into something less dark and more friendly, he shakes his head. "I mean that as a compliment," he adds, leaning into you just a bit. "The kind of trouble I'd wanna get into." he lets out a small awkward laugh. You smile and swat your hand at him, "Oh, go on..." you laugh and reach out, smoothing the lapels on his jacket as he watches you. "I feel a little bit like trouble tonight." give him a small sly smile, scrunching your nose at him. "You look very handsome in this. " you say, changing the subject. "Thanks," he replies hesitantly. "But I think people are going to wonder why a beautiful woman like you is out with a big monster like me." he smiles down at you. "Oh don't be ridiculous Jim." You playfully smack his chest, "No one's even going to notice you with me around." he lets out a snort of a laugh. "There she is," he says happily, embracing you. "You seem a bit more like your old self tonight." your arms are pinned between you, hands on his chest. You could feel his heartbeat, he smelled so nice. He releases his grip on you. "I feel..." you take a deep breath in, "...good. Better than good." you raise your eyebrows at him. "I can tell, it looks good on you." he smiles at you, "You ready?" he asks, adjusting his coat. "Whenever you are." He turns to the door, switching off the lights. "Do I get to know where we're going?" you follow him to his Blazer. "I'm taking you somewhere nice." he says, opening the car door and holding your hand as you climb in. "It's a little bit of a drive but, should be worth it." He says as he shuts the door for you and you watch him make the walk to the other side of the vehicle, wondering what he's come up with. You'd been driving for over half an hour, and you were not sure where you were at. The road was quiet and the scenery beautiful. You watched all the colors of the sunset on the trees. You still hadn't asked where you were going again, although the anticipation was killing you. The music played softly through the speakers of Jim's blazer. His knuckles were white from the grip he'd been putting on the steering wheel. You weren't sure if you should be nervous too. "There wouldn't happen to be food where we're going is there?" You ask as a hunger pang starts to divert your attention. "Of course there is. What kind of friend would I be if I didn't do something that involved food?" he laughs and keeps his eyes on the road. "You wouldn't be." you laugh. "If you were my friend you'd know better." "Exactly. You're not going to get hungry and cranky tonight. There will be plenty of food, I promise." he continues laughing and reaches over and pats your leg. Usually, only a casual, friendly touch became suddenly much more intimate as he'd forgotten there wasn't fabric covering your legs. He freezes for a few seconds longer than necessary, his fingers having had landed between your thighs. You look over at him, but he refuses to acknowledge the electricity buzzing in the air. You see the lump in his throat bob up and down as his face falls straight. His hands returning to the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road, you didn't say too much the rest of the drive. You finally pull off onto a smaller road and Hopper clears his throat. "We're almost there." You sit up straight and smooth out your dress. "Anything looking familiar yet?" he asks, glancing over at you. You turn your face to the window, shaking your head. "No...should it?" You said, worried you were already messing up the evening. "Maybe." he looks back to the road. The closed in trees on either side of the road start to thin and open to reveal a huge log building. "The Overlook." you read aloud. It seemed to be a hotel with a restaurant and bar. It was a big beautiful wooden monster of a building in the middle of nowhere. It almost felt familiar but then again, your memory wasn't the best. You were sure you'd never been to this hotel before though. "That sounds so familiar." you said under your breath. Jim's eyes watched your face focus. "They finished this place up just a few months ago." he says, rolling up the entrance and pulling up the valet. "This place has Valet? James, you are spoiling this woman tonight." you say both impressed with and picking on him. "Anything for you, babe." he says with a charming glance, as the valet pulls open your doors. You trot in your heels up to the door, waiting as Jim spoke to the valet. You look around, take a deep breath of the air as it was starting to chill. This place was gorgeous. You didn't deserve all this. He saunters up the walkway. He moved smoothly towards you, putting his arm around your shoulders as you walk through the grand entrance of the hotel. You move into the restaurant, it's dark, it's gorgeous and you don't remember the last time you were in a place this nice. He leans into your ear, almost whispering his voice is so low. "Go wait at the bar if you don't mind, I have to check the reservations." he says, placing his hand on the small of your back. You nod and find a nice spot, a friendly bartender appears. "You must be Mrs. Hopper." she says cheerfully, "Would you like a drink?" You are confused, but maybe she just saw the reservation and assumed? "Sure, why not?" you pause to think, "I"m celebrating tonight, have anything to suit that?" "Congrats, and yes! We have a birthday special, would you be interested in that? It doesn't have to be your birthday to order it though." she winks. "Sounds great, thank you." she begins to make the drink. "You mistakenly called me Mrs. Hopper when I came in? May I ask why?" you try to ask casually. "Oh, I'm sorry! I just knew there was a reservation for the whole balcony tonight for Hopper party of two, and I assumed. My apologies." she lowers her head as she keeps making the drink. "Rented out the whole balcony?" you ask, your jaw going a bit slack in surprise. "Yes, it's terribly romantic isn't it?" she says, smiling. She hands you your big, obnoxious, fruity, party drink. She walks to another side of the bar. You sip on the sickeningly sweet drink as you're pondering this newly found information, then Jim slides up next to you. "Come here often, gorgeous?" he asks, grinning and leaning on the bar. You can't help but smile. You turn yourself towards him, flipping your hair over your shoulder. "No. I don't. In fact, another man brought me here tonight." you say flirtatiously. A full laugh comes from him, he runs his hand through his hair. "Well, you don't mind if I steal you from him, do you?" he says, gesturing away from the bar to another large room. "Of course not. You're much more handsome than he is anyway." you say, placing your hand on his chest and lightly dragging it across him as you walk away from him, you hear him laugh again. "Don't go running off so fast, sweetheart." He picks up your drink and follows you. You stop in the threshold of the room. You glance as up as you turn to look back at him. But you see an entire huge wall of glass with a stone balcony on the other side. It looked out over a huge valley of fall colored trees as the sun was just starting to fall between two of the mountains. It was possibly the most picturesque moment you'd ever experienced. You start to slowly walk towards the door to the balcony, you feel Jim behind you. "You remember it now?" he says, as he passes you, holding the door out for you. You walk out to the ledge, a huge drop off into nothing but golden hues, with pinks, purples, and yellows from the setting sun. The Overlook. The building being here made you not recognize the place. You hadn't been here since you were young. But how does he even know about all that? "Jim..." you say softly, reaching backward for him and not taking your eyes off the view. "I remember this." he stands silently, holding your hand, watching you. "How did you know...?" you trail off, awestruck. "A certain Aunt of yours might've told me about you coming here in the summer." he said, looking out. "I can see why you'd like this place so much." Flo. Of course. But, why would she tell him about this place? You're pulled from the thought by a sudden warmth to your right. You look over and see an employee lighting a giant fireplace. You turn and slowly walk towards it and put your arms around yourself, getting lost in the memories that came with thinking about your long summer nights at the overlook. "Your meal is ready Mr. Hopper." a young boy says. You turn and look over at Jim. He holds his arms out over one of the tables. "Ready when you are, sweetheart." his voice was so patient. Tears were trying to form in your eyes because you had so many emotions. You let him scoot in your chair and you sit alone together after you order, you stare, admiring the valley. "You know this is absolutely ridiculous, Jim." you turn your head lazily to make eye contact. You see his face fall and his jaw tighten. "No, I'm not complaining. " You shake your head and give him a warm smile. "At all. This is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. This is just, I say too much but I mean it's just...overwhelming in a good way." you try to convey you aren't in the least bit critiquing his choices. He lets out a heavy breath. "That's a relief." he closes his eyes for a moment to calm back down. He turns to look at the view and you get a good long look at him. For a giant goober, he's pretty handsome. You notice the way the sun hits his eyes, the way the golden hour light softened his hard expression. You feel yourself begin to get a little flustered. Was it hot in here or was it him or...you...or....no you're actually sweating? You're actually hot. You were close enough to the fire and it was giving you enough heat to where you didn't need the coat anymore. Shit. Now he's gonna see you without the jacket on, it had been subconsciously working as a security blanket for you. This was so damn romantic and you're all dolled up and this was starting to feel like a different type of anniversary. You didn't deserve this. "I'm getting hot." you mumble, unzipping your coat. Jim tuts at you and rises to take your coat. You give him a look of "Really?" You stand and turn around to give in. "Such a gentleman." you kid with him as he takes your coat off, hanging it on your chair. Here is the moment you've been pretending to not be anxious about. There's no reason to be anxious, Jim has even seen you naked before. Although that had been in a completely nonsexual situation. Not in a man looking at woman's body who is capable of doing the things that one would think about when looking at a woman that looks like you do right now. He's quiet and his eyes get a little dark, he's looking over your body, seemingly not even caring if you can tell. He sighs and takes his bottom lip into his mouth and he looks up and into your eyes. "You should be glad I'm such a gentleman with you looking like this." You feel the heat in between your legs first, and your face soon follows. He can see you blushing. Way to play it cool. He's never been this aggressive with you when it came to flirting, you were impressed by it honestly. He stood confidently, smirking at you. "Come on, gorgeous." he said softly, motioning to your chair. You hold eye contact with him until you turn to sit back down, wearing an unsure but flirty face. You share stories of the summers spent at the overlook. You drink, you eat, the inside of the restaurant has filled out by the time the moon is in the sky. The fire is warm, your heart and stomach are full. Jim has outdone himself and you realize now you're going to have to pay him back for tonight, you still feel a tad guilty. "How did you pull this off, Jim? The whole balcony is empty but us." you use your hand motioning to the other tables, all empty. A cocky grin appears on his face. "Well, I am the Chief of Police you know." he says playfully shrugging. "The title has its perks on occasion." "Look at you, pulling clout to get 'Lil 'ol me an entire balcony to myself. " You lean forward on the table with your elbows, your chest heaving itself out of your dress just slightly, " Ya didn't have to do all this just to get me alone, Chief." You take a slow sip of your drink. He smiles at you, but this smile brings back that heat to your inner thighs. His eyes are dark, his brow low. His mouth pulled into a sly closed mouth smile. In time to break the tension, the dessert cart rolls around and before you can even think about it, Jim says, "One of everything please, pack it with the stuff to go." he smiles charmingly at the young girl pushing the cart who nods and walks away. Your mouth hangs open. You dart your eyes around in surprise. "What the...Who is this handsome man throwing money and his name around for me? Well, I declare, what have you done with my dusty 'ol curmudgeon, Hop? " you purposely up your southern accent and give him a coy smile, fanning your face with your hand. He laughs, eyes crinkling at the edges. "Not gone anywhere, sweetheart." he tosses his napkin onto the tabletop, crossing the table to pull out your chair. "I told you I wanted to give you a great night." he puts your coat on you. "Well you're doing an unbelievable job." you say encouragingly. He puts his arm around your shoulders and you start out of the restaurant. Jim places the large bags of take out into the back of the Blazer. You drive back in the direction you came. "Can I ask if we're going home now?" you say, taking off your heels. "Of course you can and yes, we're going back to the cabin." "But I'm assuming the night isn't over?" you ask, looking out the window. "Far from it." Neither of you talk much on the way back. You're feeling great, full of food, alcohol, and compliments. You don't feel the need to make small talk. You pull up to the cabin, you put your heels back on. "Mind if I ask why you wore those?" he asks as he holds open your door, offering you his hand to get out. "Flo." you answer quickly, a hint of agitation in your voice. He laughs and nods, understanding. "Don't get me wrong, they look great." he says walking ahead of you. "I agree. They just aren't the most practical things to walk to a cabin in the woods in the dark in." you complain as you slowly cross your front yard. "You said it, not me." he laughed and opened the door before you were up to the stairs and shuts it, standing in front of it, almost as big as the door itself. " I'm gonna go in first and I'll be back in just a minute, okay?" You shrug and nod. More surprises. He slides in the door with the bags of food and you hear his movement through the door. He slides back out a few minutes later. "I want to surprise you so I'm gonna cover your eyes and walk you in." You let out an annoyed groan. "You have to cover my eyes? What am I 8?" you asked with faux exasperation. "Oh come on..." he says pleadingly, walking behind you and putting his hands on your face. You place your hands on his. He directs you, pushing your legs with his to the far side of the cabin. He takes his hands off, onto your shoulders. "Okay, look now." You blink as your eyes adjust to the light. In front of you sits an old piano against one of the walls of the cabin. You drop your hands and look back at Jim. "Jim...you didn't..." "I did." he beams. "You didn't! Jim!" you squeak out in excitement as you reach to smack him. He laughs and watches you gawk at the piano. "I know I didn't have to. But I wanted to." he said, you trace your fingers across the keys. You hadn't played piano since before you had to have the physical therapy on your hand. You just hadn't picked it back up, but you missed it dearly. "I don't remember telling you I missed playing." you sat on the old bench. "You didn't have to." he said, standing over you. "I wanted tonight to be about making you happy." he pauses for a moment." So I thought about the happiest I've ever seen you, and that was at the new year's party 2 years ago, playing that piano and singing. The high school got some money and they got new ones so I got one of the older ones for you." You smiled at the memory of the party. "The old ones sound better anyway." you say dreamily, giving the piano a good look over. You stand and put Jim's face between your hands, he's smiling like a dope, very proud of himself. "Jim. Chief Hopper. Closest confidant, biggest pain in my ass..." you proclaim, speaking loudly to his big face in your hands. You're beaming at him with shock and happiness. "You are amazing and wonderful and I don't know what I did to deserve this but thank you." you declare. "I'm uncomfortable with how happy I am right now." you release his face and see yet another surprise behind him as you lightly smack his cheek to push him to the side and walk past him as he lets out a laugh and follows you around again. "WHAT IN THE BLUE HELL IS THIS?" you shout gesturing with both arms towards the huge projector now occupying a wall in your cabin. "Now, that you don't get to keep." he starts and laughs. "I have some kids in AV club, owe me a favor so I had them hook this up for us." You stand there with your mouth open and don't know what to say to all this. This is a new feeling. You see the spread of food he's put on the counter with alcohol and junk food and you feel a little dizzy. You go over and plop onto the couch, looking at the projection set up, overwhelmed. "I love this, this is perfect, you're so smart." you babble, grabbing his arm as he sits next to you. He might've even blushed at your words. He sits there in silence as you process all this. He hoped he hadn't gone too overboard. "You good?" he asks, pushing your hair back. "Yeah," you nod, a little dazed. "I'm great, don't worry." you look at him, wide-eyed. "Just...this is a lot for a girl to take in, Hop." you give him a kind laugh and look around the room. "I probably shouldn't tell you about the-" he begins as your head whips towards him, your eyes wild. He doesn't even get out his lie before he starts laughing at your expression. "I'm just kidding. I'm glad you're happy." he says softly. "I am." you say, standing up. You hang your coat up and pull on some slippers. You start looking over the deserts from the restaurant, the fire is roaring and Jim starts up the projector, turning the lights out. The fire giving the room a golden hue. You found yourself once again being surprised by how picturesque your evening was. You settled on the couch with Jim, alcohol, and sweets. You both thoroughly enjoy yourself for the evening, doing what you had suggested all along; watch some dumb shit, get drunk, all that good feeling junk.

But now it's gotten late.

#jim hopper #chief hopper #stranger things #stranger things 2 #david harbour #hopper x reader #jim hopper x reader #chief hopper x reader #stranger things fic #fan fic #stranger things fan fic #smut #fluff #reader insert #jim hopper x fluff #chief hopper x fluff #jim hopper x smut #chief hopper x smut

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picturebookmakers · 7 years ago

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Peter Elliott & Kitty Crowther

In this post, Peter and Kitty talk about their collaboration on ‘FARWEST’ – a wildly original picturebook which is based on an old French expression. First published in French by Pastel–l’école des loisirs, there are more foreign editions to come.

Visit Peter Elliott’s website Visit Kitty Crowther’s Instagram page

Peter: Since I was a kid, I’ve been a musician. I write songs. And since childhood, I’ve received a great deal of pleasure from drawing. So I carried on as a musician and became an illustrator, and then later, an author.

I wrote FARWEST as I write lyrics for a song. It always starts with a simple idea. In this case, it was the French expression, ‘qui va à la chasse perd sa place’ (why this expression, I don’t know). The literal English translation is ‘he who goes hunting loses his place’, though I think ‘move your feet, lose your seat’ works better in English.

I simply asked myself what would happen for real if somebody leaves their place and another one takes it...

I thought it would be nice to welcome the guy back anyway, like: “Hey dude, take a seat; you’re welcome!”

Very quickly, I realised this is a perfect way to meet people. And I love to meet people. So... Thinking of all this, I let the rhythm of the words lead the game. I wanted to make the text sound like music.

And finally (the same night) I made sketches for the illustrations. At that moment, I was making the book on my own.

A few days later, I sent ‘Qui va à la chasse’ to Kitty (only the text, not my sketches). I wanted to know her opinion on what I wrote and if she thought it was good enough to present to Odile, our publisher at Pastel.

Kitty and I have known each other for a long time. We were at the same art school, Saint Luc in Brussels, and we’ve shared the same publisher for over twenty years.

Also, I’d seen Kitty dancing back when I was playing live with my band, Busty Duck. This is the reason why I asked her to illustrate the cover of our album ‘Zoomorphic’ in 2009 (our third and final album; the band isn’t together anymore).

I think that Kitty and I have a particular relationship to music. Maybe this is why she felt the rhythm in my text so strongly.

I was really surprised when Kitty asked me if I was okay to let her illustrate the story. I replied: “you’re welcome!” And Kitty decided to do the story with cowboys and to name it FARWEST.

During the making of the book, Kitty and I were with our publisher Odile at Kitty’s house, to see the sketches for FARWEST. It was amazing to discover how my words had been interpreted by Kitty’s brain. How her imagination had devoured the story.

On that day, I met this magnificent red horse and Jonas, a funny dog who is the link between the humans. I also saw this sketchbook page with Jeff, Jim and Koko playing music around a fire:

Odile and Kitty suggested that I compose the music from that picture. Kitty illustrated my words with pictures, and now I could illustrate Kitty’s picture with music. I loved the idea!

A few days later, my father gave me a tenor banjo. That night, I sat on the floor of my workroom, which is also where I record my songs. I lit a candle (my fire), played a few chords and I started to sing. With the lyrics, I wanted to talk about refugees and all the lost people. And to claim that the only possible answer is “welcome.”

vimeo

Today, I just can’t believe how beautiful the book is. And I’m dazzled by the strength and the truth that I feel in Kitty’s pictures – just as I was back at art school, when I first saw her work pinned to the wall of the studio.

FARWEST. I wrote a story. Kitty made a world of it.

Kitty: It’s nice to be back on Picturebook Makers. Thank you for inviting us to talk about this wild, crazy cowboy book. I am super-proud of it.

As Peter mentioned, we have known each other for a long time. We often write to each other. I’ve always loved the way Peter writes his emails and I encouraged him to write novels. So one day, he asked me to read one of his texts and tell him what I thought. I fell for it. I loved the rhythm.

He sent it in March 2015, so thank you for your patience, Peter!

When I read a text, I must be able to see the pictures in my head. It has to take me on a journey; I have to travel. And it has to be very different from what I do with my own books. I love writing; I always feel it’s a different muscle that’s working. And I think that one lifetime won’t be enough to write all the stories that I want to tell. So, I’m not usually keen to illustrate other people’s words, even if they’re nice. With FARWEST, I didn’t say yes to please Peter, but because I believe very strongly in this story. I need a lot of freedom and Peter knows this.

I thought it would be too obvious to have ‘Qui va à la chasse perd sa place’ as the title, and Peter agreed to change it to FARWEST. I’m a big fan of Tarantino, old Westerns, trappers, wildlife, Jack London, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and all the others. And now the Westworld TV series.

In this book, there’s an accumulation of people. And it can be read on different levels (I hope).

You could see it as an immigration story. Or the fear of losing your seat. I remember as a child, it was always hard for me to find my seat. To find my place.

During the recent American election, I felt sick. So much hate. So much lack of wisdom. Hardly any empathy. All my bones were hurting, thinking of my ancestors invading America all those years ago. The descendants of those people. Hunger for gold and land. Escaping misery.

Millions of Native Americans died. Pushed out from their lands. Killed or consumed by illness. They were treated the worst way you could imagine.

I recommend reading the beautiful words of Russell Means, a Native American activist and actor (1939-2012): ‘If You’ve Forgotten the Names of Clouds, You’ve Lost Your Way: An Introduction to American Indian Thought and Philosophy’.

It’s frightening that we hardly take care of nature’s guardian tribe. We just create eager people. More is never enough.

The story of FARWEST starts on the title page. A Native American, drawn in charcoal, sitting on his horse. Beside him is his dog. It’s a black and white page, like this would have happened a long time ago.

(I asked Peter to add a horse and a dog. It amused me so much to see this supposedly loyal dog changing master all the time!)

So, you have to create the link between the title page and the following page. I’ve always been fascinated by the passing of time in books. Page one and page two; what happens in-between?

You have three characters at the start of the story. Two white people and one Native American. It made me smile to draw the Native American with a costume – almost like he would be more educated than the other two. Playing with visual language.

I wanted to draw big landscapes. I think it’s very good for your spirit to see far into the distance. It opens your brain up to possibilities.

I had to choose the person who replaces the little hero of the book when he goes out hunting. It was hard to find this person. An African boy? A Native American boy? A Chinese boy? A girl?

Then I was looking at this incredible animation film from Max Fleischer...

vimeo

I am totally fascinated by how Koko the Clown moves and dances. Such beautiful art!

Anyway, inspired by Koko, this yellow guy showed up.

My Koko has an emoji face, or smiley. People all around the world use them.

With the way he’s dressed, Koko seems to come from the music hall.

Peter insisted on no guns in this book. You think of cowboys and you see guns. But when you see the situation with gun laws in the USA, it’s really frightening. It’s easier to buy a gun than to publish an edgy book for children. Ha! Guns are like drugs/tobacco/alcohol/petrol/human trafficking and all the rest, just to feed the appetite of angry-black-suited greedy men and women (I’m sure these are shortcut thoughts, but hey!).

The next character who arrives is a woman. Rosa Parks.

For the ones who don’t know her, she is a famous African-American civil rights activist. She sat at the front of a bus where African-American people were forbidden to sit at that time. She refused to give up her seat. Very brave her.

With the next ‘names’ that arrived in the story, we tried to find people who work/worked for freedom and humanity.

So there’s Russell Means (read about him earlier in this post).

Then there’s Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (1864–1922; her pen name was Nellie Bly). She was known for her pioneering journalism, including her 1887 exposé on the conditions of asylum patients at Blackwell’s Island in New York, and her report of her 72-day trip around the world.

Patti Smith. Because she is such a beautiful punk.

Martin Luther King. Because he had a dream.

Calamity Jane. The letters to her daughter – even though it was later discovered that they weren’t really written by Calamity Jane – are amazing.

Django from the Tarantino film, based on the legendary African-American Marshall, Bass Reeves.

I love it that the sweet cowboy says: “At the end of the day, I may have lost my seat, but there’s still plenty of space.”

(You might have noticed that all the characters in FARWEST have something in common: their nose! Little round black noses, like Micky Mouse or in Picsou magazine, the Beagle Boys or Felix the Cat. It made me smile to do this.)

Okay, to finish, I'd like to talk a little bit about the animation I made for Peter’s song (see the video earlier in the post).

Peter suggested we use the picture of the gang singing and playing music, and that we could make the fire move...

But I was afraid we would get bored after a while.

I really love animated GIFs – hypnotic ones, like the bison by Eadweard Muybridge.

Muybridge was an English photographer. I recently discovered that he emigrated to the USA in 1850. And in 1868, his large photographs of Yosemite Valley made him world-famous!

But Muybridge is best known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878. A few years before this, a French physiologist and inventor called Étienne-Jules Marey wrote that a galloping horse had all four hooves off the ground for a brief moment, and that the way horses were depicted in some paintings was wrong. I always find it fascinating when art mixes with science and discovery.

Through his pioneering work, Muybridge proved that Marey was right. So thank you to Mr Muybridge (even if it’s said that he killed the lover of his wife and was never punished). And thank you, Monsieur Marey. Because I think that the horse is one of the hardest things to draw, and I always wanted to try to understand it. In fact, horses run on their nails!

With my animation, I wanted to make it as easy as possible to do, and I used the same technique as the wonderful artist, William Kentridge: repeatedly erasing and reworking charcoal drawings.

That’s all folks!

‘Wonderful People’: Lyrics and music by Peter Elliott. Animation by Kitty Crowther and Sam McCullen. Music recorded by Peter Elliott at Constellation 8. Mixed and mastered by Fabrice Lefèvre at Born2Groove studio.

Buy this picturebook

FARWEST

Peter Elliott & Kitty Crowther

Pastel–l’école des loisirs, Belgium, 2018

The weather was beautiful that morning. “I am going hunting,” I announced. As I went out, followed by my dog, Jonas, I greeted Jeff and Jim. It was my very first time hunting and it wasn’t that easy!

Later that day, I returned home, opened the door... and I realised that someone had taken my place!

Jeff said it plainly to me: “Move your feet, lose your seat! There’s no two ways about it!”

#belgium

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taeminuet · 7 years ago

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where there is no Echo

Title: where there is no Echo Fandom: SHINee Pairings: Jongyu Wordcount: 12k Rating: PG-13 Warnings: Illness, homophobia, character death (set before the fic), discussion of suicide (set before the fic) Summary: In which Jongin’s older brother is sick.

This is the first of the WIPs I will be posting over the next little bit. Please pay attention to the warnings.

note: I did my best to get almost everything in this fic to at least stage 2 of my outlining process (though I think one section may be at stage 1). That means there are no gaps in this fic. There are definitely areas where the plot is glossed over, where it’s not formatted into a full fic, but there’s about 10k of full-on fic and a few sections later where I formatted it into a very loose shape of what the future paragraphs would be. I’m sad to think that this will never be a fic, but even the editing of this killed me, and I don’t imagine I could write the whole thing.

That said, I will repeat: please pay attention to the warnings. Thank you all so much for your support and I appreciate all of you. <3

“Look, it's not I'm trying to avoid anything,” Jinki defends himself, shifting the phone he has pinned between his shoulder and his ear. It slides dangerously, threatening to fall, and he hisses a note of panic, throwing his hand up to catch it and stabbing himself in the cheek with his pen. Moaning weakly, he scrubs at the spot, more than a little glad that his roommate isn't there to tease him for this not-so-uncommon show of grace. Unfortunately, on the other end of the line, his cousin is already snickering at him softly.

Jinki sighs. “I want to come home,” he goes on, though how true that is when he's being laughed at is questionable, “but it's just not feasible right now. I have exams to study for, and I barely have enough money to buy food. I just can't afford the week off or the money it would take to get there. I'm sorry, Tae. If it was possible...”

“You know mom would give you money if you asked,” Taemin protests, a pout of his own evident in his voice. Jinki can imagine him without effort, sitting in the center of his bed, his long hair pulled into a high ponytail and his lips curled down at the edges as he sulks into the phone. His cellphone model actually has a speakerphone that works, but he probably hasn't remembered to use it, so he'll be leaning in close to the phone as he whines, “Just come home. You know she'd give you enough to get here. She misses you. We both do.”

Jinki sighs again. He really does miss them both terribly, and it's such a tempting offer, the thought of getting to go home and see him making his resolve waver. But, “I don't need the money though, and I don't want to do that to Auntie. She works hard enough.”

“But hyung,” Taemin whines, “I--”

“No 'buts', Taemin,” Jinki cuts him off. He feels mean, but he also knows that if Taemin keeps talking, he'll give in eventually, and he doesn't want to do that. “It's spring break, not the end of the world.”

There's silence for a long moment, and Jinki wonders if Taemin is giving him the silent treatment -- he honestly wouldn't put it past him. But then the younger takes a deep breath, the sound sending a static buzz across the microphone as if to confirm Jinki's mental image. “It's just really lonely here.”

“Oh, Tae...” Jinki sets his pen down and switches the phone to his other ear, fixing his attention more fully on Taemin. Maybe he can't spare a whole week to visit his cousin, but he can most definitely spare a couple of minutes to talk to him properly. At very least he can do that.

Taemin is his entire world most days, and that's only recently changed. By recently, he means when he moved to college, because up until then, it had only been the two of them.

Living out in the country hadn't been a bad way to grow up, not by a long shot, but it had been a little lonely. Most of the other occupants of their town were older couples, their children moved on into the city with their own jobs, and while of course that had meant that he and Taemin had been adored and doted by older grandmotherly types, it also meant that there just weren't any other children to play with.

It wasn't a good place for kids to grow up, really, but his aunt had tried hard. It had to have been hard to have taken on a child that wasn't her own when she was already struggling with bills and raising her own child. Jinki understood now exactly how much she had done for him, but at the time he had been a confused child, struggling with the loss of his mother and struggling harder to understand exactly why he had been left with a woman who he had only met a few times and a toddler who wasn't old enough to keep him company and cried all the time.

Jinki understood now that it had been the only option, but he had been a lonely child until Taemin was old enough to keep him company.

Once Taemin was older though, grown enough to really spend time with him, they had been inseparable. It had been the two of them against the world; Taemin had looked up to him with some kind of hero worship, and Jinki had adored him. Even when the two of them were old enough to be driven almost an hour the nearest public middle school, exposed to more children around, they hadn't really bothered to befriend the other children.

Or, rather, Taemin had been too busy defending himself from the incessant accusations of him being gay to try and actually make friends with the people sneering at him and whispering behind his back, and Jinki had been furious and unwilling to speak to anyone who would dare make fun of Taemin.

He had tried his best to defend him, of course, but it was hard. Despite Taemin being the one to fit all the ridiculous high school stereotypes -- long hair, delicate features, an interest in dance, and the frame to suit it – Taemin isn't gay. But Jinki is, and Taemin refused to let him risk transferring all the torment to himself. Jinki was the smart one, Taemin had insisted despite Jinki’s protests, the one who had always been going on to bigger and better things.

But now that he has, graduated with honors and moved to the city for university, he's left Taemin alone in a small town and a high school where people tease him, and Jinki feels awful for it. He feels even worse for denying him when all he's asking for is some company. Jinki is five and a half hours away from him studying day and night. If nothing else, Jinki owes Taemin a little while to talk to him.

“Tae, I'm sorry,” Jinki apologizes after a long minute of silence. “I'll be home for the summer. If I can pass all of my exams, I won't have any summer classes, and then I'll be home for months while you're out of class.”

“I have to study during the summer, hyung,” Taemin reminds him, but there's something in his voice that Jinki thinks might be a smile. “And I have dance classes.”

“I'll help you then!” Jinki offers, smiling back. “And I'll come watch you dance. It'll be like old times.”

Taemin laughs into the phone and Jinki exhales a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, leaning back in his chair. More than ever now, he wishes that he was going home to visit Taemin for break, because he's been so stressed out about everything that just taking a moment to speak to his cousin makes him feel more relaxed than he's been in weeks. So much so that when Taemin laughs, “God, I hope not. I've gotten tons better this year,” Jinki giggles so hard that he falls backwards out of his chair.

It's just in time for his roommate to walk in and see him sprawled on the floor, but the guy merely rolls his eyes before going to drop into his bed and grab his laptop. Jinki blushes pink and picks himself up and then the phone in time to hear Taemin ask, “Hyung, are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says, stretching out his leg with a wince. “Just not as graceful as you. I'm glad your dancing is going well!”

Taemin laughs again. “Yeah, well, we got a new student, who's actually really nice. We've been practicing together, so...”

“New student?” Jinki asks with interest, perking up. Taemin groans at his tone of voice, but Jinki's too excited to listen to the clear note of fond protest in Taemin's voice. “Is she cute?”

“He, hyung,” Taemin says with a laugh. “And yeah, I guess so, but you know that's more your scene than mine.”

“That's fair,” Jinki chuckles, “Does he live close?”

“You're not hitting on my dance partner, hyung!” Taemin protests, “He's like five years younger than you!”

“I don't want to hit on your dance partner. I'm pretty sure you'll have him corrupted by the summer anyways. I just meant so that you might have some company.”

It stifles the amusement a little, reminding them both of exactly how this conversation started. Taemin's laughter tapers off into a soft noncommittal sound. “His family lives in an apartment in the city right now. They're trying to find somewhere nice, but they haven't gotten a good place yet.”

“Ah,” Jinki says, smiling sympathetically, “Maybe they'll move in close and you won't be so lonely. It'll be okay, Taeminnie.”

“Don't call me that,” Taemin whines, but he sounds pleased. After a minute, he adds, “I miss you, hyung.”

“I know, Tae,” Jinki sighs, and then catches the glare from his roommate. Right. His roommate can't sleep while there's talking. “I miss you too. And I'll talk to you later, okay?”

“Yes, hyung,” Taemin says, and there's an almost dejected creak from his mattress as he moves around.

Jinki frowns. “I really do.”

“I know. Later, hyung.”

“Later, Tae,” he whispers, but the phone line is already dead. Sighing, he plugs his cellphone in to charge and crawls into his own bed just in time for his roommate to switch out the lights, shift around for a minute, and promptly start snoring softly.

Rolling over, Jinki realizes that he might be just as lonely as Taemin.

Homework swamps him over the next few weeks, and Jinki honestly does spend most of his spring break in the school library. He also spends the weeks after that, and before he knows it, he's answering the phone to his cousin's voice for the first time since they spoke since before spring break, and it's to Taemin's greeting of, “Happy Easter, hyung!”

Jinki blinks at his calendar for a long minute, shocked and appalled. How on earth is it Easter already? The weeks have flown by, and Jinki realizes that in all his preparations for his upcoming finals, he hasn't really had time for anyone else lately. The thought makes his stomach churn uncomfortably. “Happy Easter, Tae. How's it going?”

“Oh, you know,” Taemin replies, and his voice isn't nearly as upset as Jinki would have expected considering that Jinki's practically been MIA for the last for weeks. In fact, he sounds almost giddy when he adds, “Pretty good!”

“Pretty good?” Jinki repeats, dubiously. It's not that he's not happy that Taemin is happy, but it's just strange when it wasn’t that long ago that Taemin was begging him to come home and confessing in that trembling voice how lonely he was. Still, Jinki's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth over this. He grins, knowing Taemin will be able to tell the expression in his words. “Okay, I'll bite. What happened?”

“Free chocolate isn't enough?” Taemin laughs, but he's quick to add, “You remember that friend I met in dance class? He moved in!”

“Moved in?” Jinki asks, bewildered. “Moved in where?”

“The old house a few blocks over. The one that's been for sale forever,” Taemin says, and then giggles. “You know, the one that we used to say was haunted?”

“Taem, tell me you didn't tell your new friend that he lives in a house full of ghosts!” Jinki admonishes, thoroughly ruining it with a laugh of his own.

Taemin snorts into the phone. “Of course not, hyung. What do you take me for? I told him about the brutal murder-suicide in the attic and let him draw him own conclusions.”

“Taemin!” Jinki says, scandalized, and then pauses for a moment before asking, “Does that house even have an attic?”

“I dunno,” Taemin shrugs. “I don't think so, but I mean, Jonginnie's pretty gullible.”

“Jonginnie, huh? You sure you're not interested in him that way?”

“Hyung!” Taemin yells, and it's his turn to sound scandalized.

Jinki laughs until he can't breathe, and Taemin keeps protesting into the phone until it's time to pass it over to his mother. Jinki greets his aunt warmly, and she does the same thing, telling him about her promotion at her work.

“Now that Taeminnie has a friend,” she says honestly, in that furtive voice that means Taemin is nearby and she’s trying not to let him hear, “I'm not so worried about leaving him to take care of himself.”

“You should be. Now he's just corrupting an innocent,” Jinki laughs.

“Well then,” his aunt counters, “you'll just have to come home and stop him.”

Jinki sighs, clearly caught. “Summer vacation starts in a few weeks. I'll be home then.”

“You better,” she threatens, her voice soft. “It's not the same around here without you.”

“Sorry, Auntie,” he apologizes. “I miss you both, and I'll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay, Jinki. We'll see you soon.”

Jinki hangs up, rubbing his eyes slowly. Taemin has a friend now, but that doesn't make Jinki feel any less worn out, any less eager to get back to his family. He buries himself back in his studying, losing himself in flash cards and facts until his roommate wakes him up with a loud clearing of his throat, prompting Jinki to jerk up in alarm from where his head was laid down on his desk. “You need the light?”

“Oh, uh,” Jinki replies, “no. You can turn it--”

It's off before he finishes his sentence, and Jinki has to feel his way to his bed in the dark.

“So, uh,” Jinki says awkwardly, scuffing his foot along the carpet. His bags are in his car, his books have been returned to the school, he has his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, and he's staring across the dorm room at his roommate who is packing up a few more things and not really looking at Jinki. Jinki feels more than a little uncomfortable. “It's been fun.”

“Yeah, sure,” his roommate says, batting his hand in the air. “It's been a real riot, Joonki.”

“It's Jin... you know what, nevermind.” He rolls his shoulders for a second. “I'll see you around.”

He doesn't get a response this time, and he sighs softly, ducking his head as he walks out of the dorm. It's probably the last time he'll see his roommate, considering the size of their campus. Maybe he should feel a little bad, but considering that conversation, he can't say he does. Instead, he scoops his phone out of his pocket and punches in Taemin's number.

It rings a couple of times, and Jinki feels his heart plummet with the thought that Taemin isn't going to answer him. Then the phone clicks and Jinki's assaulted with the sound of music, the bass pounding through the speakers loud enough that he has to pull the phone away from his ear. He's glad he did, because a second later, Taemin is literally screaming into the phone, his voice loud as he hollers, “Hyung? Are you home?!”

Jinki laughs. “Could you even hear me if I was going to say 'yes'?”

He almost doubles over when Taemin's only response is, “What? I can't hear you!”

“Turn down the music, Tae!” Jinki shouts back, earning himself a couple of weird looks from the other students packing up their things to head home for the summer.

“Hold on, hyung,” Taemin says, quieter now, but still too loud, “Jonginnie, turn the music down!”

The music quiets a bit, and Jinki smiles slightly. “You're with Jongin? Are you sure you two are not--”

“Hyung,” Taemin says, and he sounds so honestly mortified that Jinki is actually genuinely taken aback. “I mean,” Taemin adds after a second, “no. You know I'm not--”

“Okay,” Jinki says, holding up his free hand in mock surrender, even if he knows Taemin can't see it. “Okay, I get it. But if I get home and you two are engaged, don't say I didn't tell you so.”

“So you're not home yet?” Taemin asks, and his voice has a little bit of a pout in it.

“No, not yet,” Jinki apologizes, “But I'm on my way. Give me a few hours and I'll be there, okay?”

“Okay,” Taemin chirrups, “I'll see you in a few hours.”

“Alright, Tae,” Jinki says, climbing into his car. “Bye.”

For once, after a conversation with his cousin, he doesn't feel guilty or lonely, and he hums happily under his breath as he tosses his laptop bag and his cellphone into the passenger seat and heads for home. It's a long drive, admittedly, and he remembers about halfway there exactly why he didn't want to do this for spring break, but he has the entire summer now. He'll have some studying to do to keep up with his work, but mostly it'll be free time and getting to spend time with someone who actually remembers his name.

Also, apparently, someone who he's never met before, Jinki realizes as he pulls up outside his house a couple of hours later. The sun is starting to dip toward the horizon, and Jinki has to squint into it as he pulls up the street, so he's not entirely sure whether he's going crazy or not when he sees someone suspiciously similar to his cousin standing right next to Taemin, but when he gets out of the car, he just lifts an eyebrow.

Taemin is beaming, long hair tied up in the loose bun that says he's been dancing, and he bounces up and throws sweaty arms around Jinki's shoulders with a grin. Behind him is what appears to be Taemin if he grew a couple of centimeters, got a tan, and cut his hair short. Jinki blinks, and then remembers to make a face of disgust and shrug Taemin off with a soft, “Ugh, Taemin, that's disgusting. Go take a shower.”

“It's nice to see you too, hyung!” Taemin chirps, clinging on closer with an impish grin. “How was the drive home?”

“Long,” Jinki admits. “What's with the good twin?”

“Wait, why am I the good twin?” The boy speaks up, looking bemused. He tilts his head to one side and stops looking quite as much like Taemin, mostly because he now looks a little like a bewildered puppy.

Jinki smiles at him. “Jongin, I presume? Right, well, you should know Taemin well enough at this point to know that he's certainly not.”

“That's...” Jongin starts and then stops and shrugs, “That's fair.”

Jinki laughs while Taemin pulls away from him to frown at his new friend. “You’re a traitor. You’re a traitor, and I don’t need you now that hyung is home.”

The sentence actually takes Jinki aback, and he blinks rapidly, eyebrows knitting and mouth pursing into a tight line. He isn’t sure whether to tell off Taemin first or apologize to Jongin, and so he stands there for a moment, totally off guard.

Jongin bursts into laughter, the kind that makes his mouth gape open and his upper body bounce with the force of it. Next to him, Taemin beams, covering the expression with his hand like that might help hide the fact that his complaint has now turned to nothing but smiles and happiness. Jinki hasn’t seen his cousin this happy in a very long time, and Jinki reaches out without thinking to squeeze his shoulder, a smile on his lips. He’s glad to be home.

“It’s nice to meet you, Jongin,” he says, voice all honestly. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Nah, I’ve got to get home. I was just walking back with Taemin after practice, and he insisted I wait here until you got here so I could meet you. He's told me a lot about you, hyung.”

Jongin’s smile is sweet, and Jinki nods a little approvingly. Taemin, however, pouts. “Jonginnie, stay. Mom won’t mind, you know. She always says you’re welcome.”

“No, no, it’s alright!” Jongin rubs at the back of his neck a little. “I’ve got to get home. It’s not every night your cousin gets home. This should be a family thing. Besides,” he adds quickly to abate the protest Taemin has just opened his mouth to add, “I’ve got summer school work to catch up on, you know? Moving put me behind, and I don’t want to be a grade behind you just because I’m struggling with some math.”

“Jinki-hyung is great at math! He could help you catch up!” Taemin says, like it’s some kind of bartering system, and Jinki lifts an eyebrow at him for volunteering his services without asking.

Jongin just blinks at him though, suddenly looking a little shy, and asks, “Could you, hyung? I’m just kind of confused by some of it, and I don’t want to repeat a year when I know I could wrap my head around it with a little more practice.”

Jinki caves. Either Taemin has taught Jongin the tricks of the trade for getting Jinki to give in to things or Jongin just naturally has that hopeful puppy look, but either way, it doesn’t bode well for Jinki if Taemin and Jongin ever team up on him.

“Sure, Jongin. It’s not a problem,” he agrees. “Just not tonight? I’m a little tired from the drive.”

“No! No, of course not, hyung!” Jongin says, grinning brightly. “Just whenever you get settled in!”

Jongin and Taemin both look far too excited about this, Taemin’s mouth a proud little smirk like he somehow just brokered the world’s greatest peace treaty instead of some strange tutoring session for his best friend. Jinki fights not to roll his eyes, just grabs the essentials out of his car and tosses them at his cousin’s face. “Help me carry these in?”

To his credit, Jinki only breaks two things while moving back in, and that plate had been on its last legs before he even left, so he can’t really be blamed for that. Also to his credit, in the same amount of time, Taemin loses his cellphone (twice), three different hair ties, and somehow, mysteriously, his left shoe. Jinki figures they all have their vices.

It takes him three or fours days, mostly because he keeps getting derailed by the requests to spend quality time with both Taemin and his aunt, who, while her job takes her away a lot, makes a concerted effort to be home for dinner every night, even if that dinner is take-out. Taemin volunteers to cook, but he’s shot down extremely quickly.

Jongin shows up for at least a couple of hours a day, usually to hang out with Taemin, though sometimes he ends up helping Jinki move things, smiling at him and claiming to “really want to help, hyung!” when prompted. He’s a good kid, Jinki decides, and so, when he’s finally finished unpacking, he figures he owes it to Jongin not to put it off anymore, even if he really doesn’t want to do any more math.

Still, high school math can’t be as bad as college level calculus courses, he figures.

He’s wrong.

It’s not that the numbers are harder – if nothing else, Jinki breezes through the equations once he’s got them figures out. It’s that somehow, somewhere along the line, someone hired a batman super villain to write the word problems that Jongin shows him from his workbook. It takes way longer than it should just to figure out what the questions want him to figure out, and usually there’s at least one completely unnecessary number in there to throw him off, because why just teach math when they can easily throw advanced problem-solving into the mix, just in case the students had strange film noire aspirations to their lives.

Jinki doesn’t say any of this though. No reason to discourage Jongin. Instead, he casually mentions maybe not doing all of this today and coming around to help out a lot more. “Easier to do an hour or two a couple of times a week than try and cram it all into a few days and get frustrated, right?” he offers in his gentlest voice.

The look Taemin gives him from the chair across Jongin's living room tells him he’s fooling no one, but Jongin lights up hopefully. “Would you? God, it’d be great not to have to sit down and do five or six hours of math at a time.”

“Of course. And,” he adds, because Taemin has upgraded from giving him a look to giving him a look, and Jinki wants to discourage that right now, “it might make it a little easier to get through if you’re not getting frustrated after a couple of hours.”

“Yeah,” Jongin admits, looking sheepish again. It’s not an uncommon look for him, Jinki’s learning. “I just can’t sit still for a long time or I get really sleepy, you know? It’s like –“

Jongin stops abruptly, though even if he had gone on, Jinki would have missed it. His head has already snapped around to look up towards the ceiling, the loud thumping noise like something falling making him jump a little. For half a second, Jinki has some weird flashback to him and Taemin joking about this house being haunted, but that’s ridiculous. Besides, Jongin looks more concerned than confused, like he knows very well where the noise is coming from.

“Hyung?” He calls loudly, and there’s a long stretch of silence. Jinki almost jumps when it’s broken by the trill of Jongin’s phone going off. It’s sitting right between them on the table, and Jinki catches a glimpse of the name 'Hyung~ ^^' before Jongin picks it up and swipes the screen, greeting, “Hyung, are you okay?”

Jinki can hear what’s said, but it’s obviously not good because Jongin tenses a little and starts to get up. Across from them, Taemin shakes his head. “Jonginnie’s brother is really sick,” he tells Jinki in a quiet voice. “He doesn’t leave his room a whole lot. It’s why they moved out here – the doctors said the fresh air would be good for him, even if it’s a little further from the hospital. Don’t know if fresh air helps when he doesn’t get outside much, but…”

He shrugs loosely, and Jinki glances at Jongin, but he’s absorbed in the phonecall, saying, “Hyung, if you fell on the way to the bathroom, I can come help… No, I get that, but… Mom’s going to be really upset if you got hurt because…”

It sounds like he’s getting refused at every turn, because he sits back down slowly, protests getting quieter by the minute. Finally he sighs out, “Okay, but if you need me, text me. I’ll be right up.”

He hangs up the phone and sets it down, looking worried. Jinki frowns, empathy stirring up feelings of sadness in his chest. He pats Jongin’s arm quietly, the same as he would for Taemin. “Do you need to go help him?”

“No, he says he’s fine,” Jongin sighs, giving no sign that he’s even remotely upset by Taemin telling Jinki what’s going on. “My mom’s a little overprotective, and he gets upset after a while. Says that he’s sick, but he’s not an invalid. It’s just…”

Jongin shakes his head a little and then shrugs. Taemin reaches out and squeezes his friend’s arm. “It’ll be fine. Do you need to skip dance practice this afternoon to keep an eye out for him?”

“No, my mom will be home,” Jongin says, shaking his head. “We’re good. Can we finish up these two pages maybe?”

It’s an abrupt change of subject, but Jinki’s more than willing to give into it. He probably hadn’t wanted to talk about his mom a lot there at the end either.

“Okay,” he says instead, pointing at a problem, “So they’re looking for which of these could be the total price amount of the coins you have, and you have a ratio of 4:3 with a total of 14 coins…”

Jinki squints at the word problem in exasperation, Jongin looking completely at a loss, and Taemin stands up abruptly, fishing out a handful of coins from his pocket and dumping them out on the table. They’re still laughing and rearranging the money when Jongin’s mother comes home and Jongin and Taemin rush up to Jongin’s room to change into dance clothes.

Jinki smiles after them and introduces himself to the woman as he cleans up Taemin’s money and organizes the workbooks they’d been pouring over. It kind of surprises him when he finds himself being greeted warmly and told to come over any time he’d like, that Taemin is practically a third son at this point and that Jinki is more than welcome any time.

It makes Jinki’s heart swell to hear such good things about Taemin, especially when his cousin rushes back downstairs with Jongin in tow and whines, “Hyung, come on. We’re going to be late!” like that’s Jinki’s fault.

“It was nice to meet you,” Jinki says with another bow as he shoves Taemin’s coins into his pocket to return them when Taemin is once more wearing an outfit with pockets. He gets tugged out of the door before he gets a response, and shakes his head as Taemin and Jongin have a brief scuffle over the passenger seat of Jinki’s car.

Looking back at Jongin’s house, he pauses for a moment at the sight of a short boy in one of the windows, blinking down at them with a look that tugs at Jinki’s heartstrings. He gets distracted when the scuffle ends with Taemin knocking into him, and by the time he looks back, the boy is gone from the window. Jinki stares a moment longer before banishing both of the boys to the back seat under threat of rescinding his offer to drive both of them to dance.

It’s the next Tuesday before Jinki has a real chance to go over and help Jongin again, mostly because Taemin coaxes him into taking him into the city over the weekend. It’s not a big deal, really, but they spend most of the day window shopping, visiting arcades, and getting ice cream. It’s all those things that they both wished they could do all the time when Jinki was still in high school, and getting to do them now is nice.

Nice is also more than a little exhausting though, and they spend Sunday recovering, playing video games in their boxers with the blinds drawn and only stumbling downstairs for dinner when Taemin’s mom gets home.

Monday is another lazy day, though this one is because there’s really nothing much to do; Jongin and his family are in in the city this time. There’s probably no ice cream and window shopping though, because Taemin points out that if they’re in the city then they’re probably at the hospital for Jongin’s brother.

That makes Jinki’s stomach drop hard and fast, but Taemin just shakes his head. “He has checkups, like, all the time. Every couple of weeks or so. They’re pretty much trying to just keep an eye on him.”

“Right,” Jinki says, though it doesn’t help any, and when they walk over to Jongin’s on Tuesday for Jinki to help Jongin with his math, he pauses for an extra moment outside, looking up at the window where he had seen the boy looking out. All the rooms upstairs are dark though, and when Jongin opens the door, he explains why.

“Hyung’s sleeping,” he says, voice hushed. “He’s been kind of worn out lately.”

“Do you want to do this another day?” Jinki asks, because he doesn’t want to disturb the sick boy. “It’s fine if you’d rather wait.”

Jongin shakes his head. “No, honestly, it's fine. We just can’t be super loud or anything.”

They follow Jongin into the living room where he has his math books set out along with some spare papers and a few pencils. He starts to sit down and then seems to think better of it, looking at them both and asking, “Do you want anything to drink?”

“I’ll take a beer,” Taemin says in such a deadpan voice that Jinki glances at him for a moment.

“Okay, so you want a soda,” Jongin says in a voice just as deadpan, and then looks to Jinki. “And for you, hyung?”

“Soda would be great, thanks,” Jinki replies, taking a seat, and opens the math book to begin looking over it and making sure he knows what he’s talking about.

Taemin follows Jongin into the kitchen to get drinks for them, the two of them chatting in hushed, amiable voices that Jinki can’t quite make out. It’s nice background noise, and Jinki hums softly to himself as he listens to their quiet voices from the other room, eyes skimming the words. He hears them come back in the room, jostling each other and still talking away, and he looks up to smile and take the drink from Jongin’s hand only to watch in a kind of helpless horror as Taemin knocks against Jongin a bit too roughly, liquid sloshing from the glass he’s offering and spilling sticky across Jinki’s hand and arm, dripping down onto the table as well.

“Oh my god, hyung, I’m so sorry,” Jongin fumbles out at once, wide-eyed and red-faced, jerking away and ending up spilling more soda across the table. From behind him, Taemin snorts with laughter, and both of them glare at the long-haired boy, Jongin hissing out a, “Shut the hell up, Taemin.”

“Jongin, it’s fine,” Jinki says, trying to be kind, because Jongin looks frankly mortified. “It’ll wash out. Just, where’s your bathroom?”

“Oh, god, uhm, it’s… upstairs and to the left. Or, no, second door on the left. Yeah. First one’s a closet, and… should I, uhm, show you, or…?”

“I’m sure I can find it, Jongin,” Jinki says, trying to be as patient as he can. “You might want to clean this up, though…”

“Right, yes, okay,” Jongin says, and rushes towards the kitchen to, presumably, get something to clean up with.

Taemin watches him go, reaching down and plucking Jongin’s math book away from the mess, and Jinki shakes his head for a second and then heads upstairs, taking them as quietly as he can.

The bathroom is easy to find and loosely decorated, the soap dispenser matching the shower curtain and the towels, though both of those are hanging loosely and unfolded from the rack, making it clear they’ve been used recently. It’s a typical bathroom for a teenage boy, and Jinki finds himself smiling slightly as he turns on the tap and starts scrubbing at his hands and arm, trying to wash the soda out of the sleeve of his shirt.

When he’s gotten it mostly out, to the point where it won’t be troublesome when he goes to wash it, he looks around, fishing for a hand towel of some sort. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something, and when he turns his head, he sees two faces in the mirror, another boy standing behind him in the doorway.

Jinki nearly jumps out of his skin, whirling around with a gasp. “Who…?”

The boy in the doorway blinks at him slowly. “You’re new,” he says, voice soft and light. He has light blond hair and a puppyish face, eyes a little dark like he doesn’t get a whole lot of rest. He’s wearing a thick, soft-looking sweater, fingers curled into it in a clear sign that he’s cold. Jinki can understand that; the air conditioning is running full-blast up here, making the upstairs seem a lot colder than the relatively comfortable downstairs. Still, it seems like a weird thing to be wearing mid-summer, and Jinki hesitates a moment, especially when the boy raises an eyebrow. “You’re… one of, uh, Jongin’s friends, right?”

“Y-yeah,” Jinki says, a little taken aback, and then he remembers the boy he had seen in the window only a few days ago. Jongin’s brother. Jongin had said he was sleeping, but he’d obviously woken up. “I’m Jinki.”

“Jonghyun,” the boy says, sounding almost nervous now. He must not meet very many new people. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jinki answers, smiling politely. “Sorry, you just startled me.”

“Yeah, I, uh… I get that a lot,” Jonghyun says with a shrug. “I didn’t really think you’d notice me, but…”

“Well, you were standing in the doorway. It was a little hard to miss,” Jinki points out, and Jonghyun hums in acknowledgement but doesn’t reply. After a second, Jinki adds, “I’m sorry. Did you need the bathroom?”

“Oh, uh,” Jonghyun says, looking like this has just occurred to him, “yeah. Thanks.”

“No problem,” Jinki says with a smile. “I’ll just get out of your way.”

He twists off the tap and settles for drying his hands on his pants, figuring no one will really care. Then he edges past Jonghyun who’s still standing in the doorway and makes his way back downstairs.

Jongin has the soda cleaned up, but he starts in on apologies the second Jinki’s back in the room, and Jinki has to shake his head a little and wave them off with a, “Jongin, it was an accident. And Taemin’s fault if anything. It’ll come out in the wash. Let’s just work on your math, alright?”

Taemin looks offended, putting his hand to his chest like Jinki has deeply wounded him, and Jongin snickers softly and agrees. Leaning in, Jinki starts in on the math with Jongin, not even thinking to mention that Jonghyun is up and about until a while later when Jongin’s mother gets home and asks Jongin how his brother’s doing. Still, it’s been a while, and Jonghyun’s probably gone back to bed, so Jinki lets it lie.

He and Taemin decline Jongin’s mother’s offer of dinner, saying that they need to get home, and they head out soon after, leaving Jongin with his family. Jinki glances over his shoulder out of habit and sees Jonghyun blinking at him from one of the windows. He waves tentatively, and Jonghyun takes a second and then waves back.

“What are you doing, hyung?” Taemin asks, already headed down the street without him. “Come on! Mom’s home, and she said she’s making something good for dinner tonight.”

“I’m coming,” Jinki replies and strides after his cousin, looking back once more to see Jongyhun staring after him.

It becomes kind of a routine after a couple of weeks. Fridays are dance for the two younger boys, so Jinki helps Jongin with his math then and then takes the both of them to their class in the evenings. Tuesdays are also set aside to help Jongin struggle through the mess of numbers he has to deal with. The rest of the week is kind of a give-or-take thing, and more often than not, the other days of the week find Jongin with Taemin at every possible moment, thus meaning that Jinki sees quite a bit of the boy. Eventually, after a few weeks, Jongin stops being so shy and openly extends the invitation for Jinki to come hang out at his house as well.

Jinki doesn’t mind doing so, though he doesn’t have the same thing for video games that the two younger boys do. Or, rather, he does, but he tends to lounge on the couch and play games on his phone while the two boys argue playfully and shoot each others’ characters in the face, even when they’re on the same team.

Jinki hasn’t seen any more of Jonghyun so far, but Jongin mentioned something about going to the city every Monday now, citing, “Hyung’s been a lot more tired recently. The doctors say the move just took it out of him and it’ll be a while for him to get back on his feet, but… I dunno, they say a lot of things.”

He sounds moderately sad about it, but he’s also kind of accepting, like he’s been dealing with this for a long time. Jinki thinks it’s probably hard for Jongin to deal with, but, of course, it’s probably hard for Jonghyun as well. He’s the one who’s sick after all.

Jinki doesn’t say either one of those things. Instead he gets up quietly while the younger boys argue over who gets to have a certain type of gun and wanders upstairs towards the bathroom.

He hadn’t been meaning to creep on anyone, but when he finds a door open, he can't help but poke his head in. It’s empty, bed neatly made, curtains drawn. It feels a little sterile actually, unlived in, and for some reason it makes Jinki squirm, a chill going down his spine.

Maybe this is a guest room? There are other doors along the hallway, all closed, and those could easily be bedrooms for two boys. Maybe –

“So you’re here a lot now, huh?” A voice interrupts his thoughts.

Jinki jumps about a mile high, heart starting to thunder in his chest. How he had missed Jonghyun sitting in a chair in the corner, he has no idea, but the boy just scared this shit out of him. Jinki presses his palm to his chest, trying to make sure he’s not having a heart attack or something. “S-sorry,” he fumbles out. “I didn’t mean—“

“You’re fine,” Jonghyun says with a shrug, getting up out of the chair soundlessly and moving to lean against the wall nearer Jinki instead. “I’m not mad that you’re in here or anything. The door was open, so…”

“Yeah, I saw that. I just thought… I mean, I thought maybe I’d say hello?” Jinki tries, a little cautiously. “I didn’t know if you were sleeping or what, but…”

Jonghyun looks baffled for a second, blinking a few times. Then he starts laughing for some reason, a kind of weary sound, and shakes his head. “Nah, I don’t sleep much.”

“But I thought…” Jinki starts, and then clams up. He doesn’t want to be rude or anything. After a second he tries, “Should I leave you alone so you can rest?”

“No,” Jonghyun says, a little too fast. “I like the company. I don’t get a whole lot of it.”

“Oh. Does Jongin not…?” Jinki asks, brow furrowing.

“He’s a sweet kid.” Jonghyun shrugs. “He’s just got too much going on to see me much.”

“That’s sad.”

“Not so much as you’d think. I’m kind of used to it. It’s just kind of a part of… all this.” Jonghyun smiles like he’s got a joke that he’s not sharing with Jinki. “I don’t mind so much. It’s nice to talk to someone though.”

“I can come visit more, if you’d like?” Jinki says.

Jonghyun’s eyebrows furrow. “Don’t go out of your way.”

“I’m not!” Jinki promises, smiling as kindly as he can. “Like you said, I’m here a lot now.”

“Then… yeah, that sounds nice. If I’m around,” Jonghyun says, shrugging like it doesn’t matter. There’s something longing in his face though.

“If you’re around,” Jinki agrees. “It’s really nice to—“ Jinki stops abruptly when he hears Taemin’s voice from downstairs, calling out to him. He turns in the doorway, looking down the hall, and then sighs a little. “I should go.”

“Yeah,” Jonghyun agrees from behind him, and Jinki looks back to see him halfway across the room again, settling back into his chair.

Jinki frowns. “I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jonghyun says. “Can you, uh, shut the door behind you?”

“Sure,” Jinki says, stomach twisting a little. That hadn’t been how he wanted that conversation to go.

He shuts the door behind him and goes downstairs to find Taemin lacing up his shoes. “Where’ve you been?” Taemin asks. “It’s time to go home for dinner.”

Jinki thinks about answering, but it feels weird somehow, like he shouldn’t tell Taemin about the loose attempt at friendship he’s carving out with Jongin’s brother. If that can be counted as a friendship.

It doesn’t matter a whole lot. Taemin’s happy to accept Jinki’s shrug and, “Sorry. Lost track of time.”

“Did you find the ghosts in the attic?” Taemin teases, and Jinki laughs as he pulls on his own shoes and they head home for dinner, Taemin chattering excitedly about his and Jongin’s video game.

It becomes a sort of habit for Jinki to try and slip upstairs at some point to see Jonghyun. Not all the time, of course. He still spends quite a bit of time with Jongin and Taemin, sometimes helping Jongin with his math and sometimes just watching the two of them bicker playfully and play video games. But a lot of the times, he manages to find some time to go and visit. He had said he would try, after all, and it’s not like it’s hard to slip away.

Taemin and Jongin are in their own little world, and Jinki finds himself a kind of third wheel more often than not. It’s a little weird, but Jinki doesn’t mind. Taemin’s happy, and it’s nice to see him so open and entirely himself. It’s pretty much all Jinki’s ever wanted for Taemin, and while he originally thought that he might mind the two of them being so wrapped up in their friendship, he’s not.

Part of that is Jonghyun.

He’s not always there. Sometimes Jinki goes up and finds all of the doors shut, and when he knocks softly on the door, he’s always ignored. He figures Jonghyun really is sleeping at those times, and he doesn’t want to disturb him.

Other times he goes up and Jonghyun’s sitting there in his room with the door open, either sitting cross legged on the bed or folded up in the chair. Sometimes he seems to be scribbling things in notebook, but he always hides it away like magic when Jinki comes in. Still, he smiles at Jinki sweetly enough that Jinki has never had room to ask about it, always greeting him with a, “You’re back!”

The first few times he sounded more surprised than pleased, and Jinki had worried that he wasn’t as welcome as Jonghyun had made it seem during their earlier encounters. But Jinki realized quickly that Jonghyun just doesn’t get a lot of socialization. He supposes it’s always either Jongin or Mrs. Kim, and Jonghyun still sometimes expresses how rarely Jongin sees him. Jinki doesn’t have the heart to tell him that that’s probably because of Taemin, but Jonghyun seems to know anyways.

“Your cousin seems nice,” he tells Jinki a couple of weeks into their visits, a wry smile on his lips, and when Jinki’s eyebrows furrow, he continues, “I’ve never really spoken to him. He’s very wrapped up in Jongin, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, they’re pretty close,” Jinki says, shrugging a little. “They spend a lot of time together.”

“I’ve noticed,” Jonghyun says with a snort of amusement. “Jongin’s enamored.”

“What?” Jinki’s eyes widen, flicking downwards like he can see through the floor to the living room if he tries hard enough.

“Jongin’s got a crush. How’d you miss that? He’s always primping before you two come over.”

“But Taemin isn't gay,” Jinki protests, frowning tightly, unhappiness settling into his features. God, if Jongin has a crush on Taemin and it goes badly, Taemin could lose the only friend he has. He doesn’t want to see that happen, not when this is the happiest he’s seen Taemin in a long time.

“Yeah, I know,” Jonghyun says, and something in his voice is chilly enough that it feels like the air in the room literally plummets a few degrees. It pulls Jinki’s eyes back to Jonghyun’s face. The other boy looks pissy, shoulders suddenly set in a way that makes him stop looking as small and soft as he always does. “Your little cousin is as straight as they come. No shame to your family or anything.”

“Woah, what?” Jinki stiffens as well, mentally reeling. Jonghyun sounds so hateful, and it kind of stings to hear that angled at him, but worse is the words he’s using, like he thinks Jinki might genuinely feel that way. “I never said—“

“You didn’t have to. I get it,” Jonghyun says bitterly. He looks away from Jinki towards the window, head turned far enough that Jinki can’t see his expression, and it’s too bright outside for Jinki to be able to get a glimpse of Jonghyun’s reflection in the glass. “It’s written all over your face.”

“Then you’re not very good at reading,” Jinki says, and his voice is tight and controlled. He doesn’t want to yell at Jonghyun, partially because that feels mean, but also because he doesn’t want to get in trouble for being up here and upsetting him. “I don’t give a damn if Taemin is gay or not, and neither does my aunt. But Taemin has always said he’s straight, and that’s for him to figure out, not for anyone else to try and push on him.”

Jonghyun doesn’t look at him for a long time, but when he does, he’s wearing a look that Jinki is more than familiar with. It’s pretty similar to Taemin’s confused face actually, like he’s trying to buffer and process what Jinki just said, and it goes on for just a few seconds too long, making Jinki feel like squirming.

Jinki doesn’t know why, in his urge to break the silence, he admits, “I’m gay.”

“Oh,” Jonghyun says after a second, and then his face contorts into something else entirely, staring at Jinki like he’s never seen him before. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” Jinki says, shaking his head a little. After a moment he pauses and then says in a voice as firm as he can make it, “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No!” Jonghyun blurts out, shaking his head, “No, of course not. I just thought…”

“Yeah, I know. I get that a lot. I’m just not fashionable enough for a gay man,” Jinki jokes in a tone that makes it very clear exactly how much he hates that stereotype.

Jonghyun snorts a little. “I don’t think fashion is much of a deciding factor here. I used to know the most fashionable guy ever, and he was straight as a ruler. And Jongin’s got the fashion sense of a blind frat boy.”

“He’s in high school,” Jinki points out, smiling a little. “He’ll get past it. I hope.”

Jonghyun laughs, and like that it’s a little easier again. They don’t talk about Jinki’s confession, and they don’t really go back to discussing sexualities either. Not that day at least.

Before he leaves though, responding to Jonghyun’s yawn and proclamation of exhaustion, Jinki adds, “Hey, are we, uhm… good?”

It feels like such a lame thing to say, but Jonghyun nods, smiling gently. “Yeah. We’re fine.”

Jinki feels a little warm at the smile he’s apparently earned, and there’s a smile of his own on his face as he closes the door behind him and wanders back down the hallway, humming just loud enough that he misses the shuffling around behind one of the closed doors.

The next week is weird. Jongin and Taemin have a dance competition coming up hard and fast, and while they can’t make it out to the studio as often as they’d like, there’s space enough at their house for Jinki and Taemin to push all of the living room furniture out of the way and make space for Taemin and Jongin to practice. It’s fun to watch them for a while, but after about an hour of watching Taemin and Jongin repeat the same verse over and over with only the tiniest of alterations, Jinki’s getting a pounding headache.

His room’s not enough of an escape, and he can hear the base beat thudding through their walls no matter what he does. It’s driving him clearly mad, enough that when he crosses through the living room to the kitchen to get water and some ibuprofen, Jongin’s mouth pulls. The boy follows him into the kitchen, leaving Taemin for a second, and hesitates in the doorway.

“Uhm, hyung,” he says, looking sheepish (or as sheepish as he can look when he’s red-faced and dripping sweat, tank top soaked through and clinging in a way that is highly unnecessary on a kid his age), “I called my mom, and she says you’re welcome to hang out at our house. I mean, my brother’s there, but he’s still sleeping a lot, so it should be pretty quiet.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t want to bother him,” Jinki says to be polite, though realistically, he’s kind of excited at the prospect. Peace, quiet, and maybe getting to spend time with Jonghyun. It’s not a bad deal.

“Well, I mean, he doesn’t leave his room a lot, so I doubt he’d even know you were there. And if he does, you can just say who you are,” Jongin points out, and Jinki realizes belatedly that Jongin hasn’t noticed him disappearing for hours to hang out with Jonghyun either. He wonders if Jonghyun’s ever even mentioned their friendship. The thought is oddly unsettling.

“That’s…” Jinki starts, and then hears Taemin curse and the track repeat. He flinches openly. “That’s probably a good idea. Thank you, Jongin, and thank your mother for me if I don’t get the chance myself.”

“Yeah, course, hyung!” Jongin says, smiling brilliantly and practically wagging his metaphorical tail as he digs his house key out of the pocket of his sweats and hands it over. He and Jonghyun both look like puppies sometimes, honestly.

“Jonginnie, come on! We’ve got to get through this bullshit transition,” Taemin calls from the other room, and Jongin turns his head in surprise and then smiles at Jinki a little softer before returning to his friend.

“Language,” Jinki teases as he slips back through the room and heads upstairs to go get his laptop, in better spirits now that he has an escape.

“Get out, hyung!” Taemin laughs, and Jinki does so, taking his time on the walk to Jongin’s house. The summer air is sticky, a little stifling, but Jinki doesn’t mind. It only makes the constant iciness of Jongin’s house feel better as it chills the sweat beading on the back of Jinki’s neck, cooling him quickly enough that he shivers a little.

It’s slightly strange being in Jongin’s house when there’s no one home. Well, no one but his brother. But it’s always quiet upstairs, in what feels like Jonghyun’s territory, and now the entire house feels like that. It’s oddly silent without Jongin verbally working his way through math problems or Taemin and Jongin arguing over video games. It’s nice though, and Jinki relishes it for a moment as he goes to get himself a glass of water, comfortable enough here that it doesn’t make him feel awkward.

He gulps it down, sets it in the sink, and takes a moment to look out the kitchen window to the slightly overgrown side yard. It’s strange, how it reminds him a little of the way their yard always looked like when he was younger, after he had moved in with his aunt but before she trusted him to run the mower without running over his own feet. He should probably offer to mow the Kim’s yard one of these days.

He’s still lost in thought when he hears a soft noise from the second floor. It’s quiet enough that he’s fairly sure it’s just the sound of socked feet on the floor above him, but it makes him pause anyways. After a moment, he smiles. He takes the stairs as quietly as possible, just in case, but he’s pretty sure that means Jonghyun is awake, and when he slips into the room at the end of the hall, he’s a little disappointed not to see him.

He frowns for a moment, looking around one more time, just in case, and then turns on his heel to leave, only to nearly jump out of his skin when he sees Jonghyun standing behind him in the hallway, where he certainly hadn’t been a moment before.

“Jesus—“ Jinki breaths, pressing a hand to his racing heart.

Jonghyun smiles. “I’m sorry,” he says, taking a step back to give Jinki some space. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No. God, no, you’re fine,” Jinki laughs, raking his fingers through his hair. “I should have given you some warning. I didn't want to be too loud coming in though, in case you were sleeping.”

“It's alright,” Jonghyun says, smiling. “I'm not sleeping. I wasn't expecting you here is all. I thought it would be-- well, someone else.”

Jinki lifts an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth quirking playfully. “Do you not want me here?”

“I like having you here. It's nice to have someone who actually interacts with me,” Jonghyun says. There's something sad in his face, but he smiles anyways. “I just don't see you much without your cousin in tow. And Jongin, of course.”

“Yeah, they're practicing over at my aunt's place. It's a tiny bit deafening,” Jinki says with a laugh. “They're good, but there's only so many times--”

“Ah,” Jonghyun says, nodding. “It's worse when you can't get away from it. They try not to practice here much, but Jongin plays the same songs over and over and, well...”

Jinki laughs. “He's in high school,” he points out, meaning it as a playful comment on his tastes, but it calls to mind the conversation from the previous week, and that makes him pause.

Jonghyun is obviously thinking the same thing, because he tips his head at Jinki and says, “So, when you said you were gay...”

“I generally meant that I'm attracted to guys,” Jinki says. “The traditional definition.”

Jonghyun laughs weakly. “No,” he says, “I meant... does that work out for you?”

Jinki smiles softly, a little sadly. “It's alright. It doesn't affect too much. I've always been a bit more interested in school and grades than relationships,” he says. He tries not to think too much about how few friends he has at school because of that.

But Jonghyun seems to see right through him. “It's rough, isn't it?” he asks, reaching out for Jinki. He seems to hesitate before touching him, and Jinki realizes abruptly that this is the first time Jonghyun ever has. His fingers are ice-cold and a little clammy, and he pulls them back quickly when Jinki shivers involuntarily. “Sorry.”

“You're fine,” Jinki says. “I know that you're sick. It's okay.”

Jonghyun pauses. “Yeah,” he agrees after a moment. “Sick. Right.”

That seems like a strange response, and Jinki's brow furrows. “Are you--”

Jonghyun only shakes his head. “I should go soon. I'm getting tired.”

“Alright,” Jinki agrees. He's not going to stop him. He needs his rest. “Well, I'll be downstairs if you want to talk.”

Jonghyun nods slowly, moving to one side. Jinki steps out past him into the hallway, letting Jonghyun move past him into the bedroom. After a quiet moment, Jinki moves down the hall towards the stairs.

“Jinki?” Jonghyun says, and Jinki turns towards him in surprise. Jonghyun is standing there, in the doorway, watching him. “I... I'm gay too.”

“Oh,” Jinki says, not sure what else to say. He's not sure if he's surprised or not. “That's--”

“I'm gonna go,” Jonghyun says, before Jinki can get out anything else. He steps back, disappearing out of sight, and the door closes. Jinki stands there for a moment longer before heading downstairs, leaving Jonghyun to his sleep.

-- Jinki and Jonghyun interact a few more times, becoming friends, and Jonghyun starts hanging out for longer and longer amounts of time.

-- Jonghyun admits, one day, to never having kissed a boy. Jinki kisses him --

Jonghyun’s mouth is soft, and his hands shake as he makes a quiet noise of disbelief and wraps his fingers loosely into the front of Jinki’s shirt. It’s not a long kiss, and Jinki pulls away after a moment, swallowing tightly. He hopes that that was okay. He hopes that he didn’t just shatter their friendship, because it startles him to realize that he considers Jonghyun his best friend and to think that he might have ruined that is terrifying.

“Was that…” he starts, slowly, and he can hear the concern in his own voice, wavering and unsure.

Jonghyun makes a tiny, sweet little noise and crumples into him all at once, shoulders heaving. Jinki startles, catching him, and for a moment Jonghyun feels almost insubstantial in his arms, like if Jinki squeezes too tight he’ll just melt away. But then Jonghyun makes another of those noises, a little wetter this time, and Jinki sucks in a breath and tightens his grip because Jonghyun is crying.

“Jonghyun,” Jinki says, a little helpless. He’s always been bad at this sort of thing. “I don’t-- I’m sorry if that wasn’t…”

Jonghyun shakes his head weakly, the action rubbing his face against Jinki’s shirt. “No, no, please don’t-- don’t apologize. I… g-god, I just… I never thought… I’ve never been kissed before, and I d-don’t…”

He’s stuttering, stumbling over his words a little, and Jinki should know better, should think more about it, but he doesn’t. He just unravels his arms so that he can catch Jonghyun’s face instead and pulls him up, kisses him again despite the tears on Jonghyun’s face and the way Jonghyun gasps into his mouth.

Jonghyun’s fingers spasm in his shirt, and then he’s tugging weakly, like he’s trying to pull Jinki closer. When Jinki breaks apart from him, Jonghyun whines, tugging pitifully, but Jinki just grins, leaning their foreheads together and breathing slowly, evenly.

Jonghyun curls into him slowly and clings for a long while, the two of them sitting in peaceful quiet before Jonghyun whispers, “This feels so real.”

Jinki laughs a little, confused by the murmur. “Of course it’s real. Jonghyunnie…”

“I know,” Jonghyun whispers but it sounds almost doubtful, almost near tears again. “I just… I want it to be real, and I know it can’t be. I know it can’t… can’t work out or last…”

Jinki bites back his cringe. He doesn’t like to think too hard about it, about the way Jongin always says ‘my brother is sick’ with the kind of tone where ‘sick’ means ‘dying’. He doesn’t like the think about the way the hope rings hollow in Mrs. Kim’s voice when she mentions going to the city or a new treatment. He doesn’t like to think about it, and now he has to, because Jonghyun is looking at him uncertainly, pulling away, and Jinki feels something ice-cold and desperate.

“Why can’t it?” he says, and then realizes how stupid that was. “I know… I know things aren’t perfect, or… or, I don’t know. I don’t want to mess this up. I like being with you. I like being your friend. And I’d be happy with that, I would. But I also… I like kissing you and holding you and…”

Jonghyun makes a soft, strange laugh, a little tense, a little strained. “I do too,” he says finally, biting his lip. “I want-- I want to be with you. However you-- I just don’t want to break your heart.”

That seems a little much, but at the same time, Jinki has a feeling like it’s too late for that. Romantic or platonic, Jonghyun is so important to him now, and one day he’s going to lose him.

He doesn’t say that though. He just kisses Jonghyun again, hands shaking as he moves to hold Jonghyun’s waist, thin and fragile under his bulky sweater.

“Okay,” Jonghyun says finally, and Jinki doesn’t know what that means, but Jonghyun is swaying a little, tired a little, and they rest there a moment longer before Jonghyun says, “Isn’t it time for you to take Jongin and Taemin to dance?”

“Fuck,” Jinki says, jerking suddenly. He lets go of Jonghyun, fumbling for his phone to check the time and then hisses, “Fuck. Thank you, Jonghyun. I gotta-- we can… later, yeah?”

Jonghyun smiles, hesitant and not entirely a happy expression. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be here.”

“Jong…” Jinki starts and leans in to kiss him again.

Jonghyun stops him, hands bracing on his chest. “You’re going to be late,” he says, and then presses up for a tiny kiss, brief and chaste and something that makes Jinki’s heart swoop anyways. “Go.”

Jinki catches Jonghyun’s hand and squeezes before he goes, patting down his pockets to make sure he has his keys and taking the stairs two at a time.

-- Taemin and Jongin’s team wins their dance competition and are moving on to the next thing, so they start spending more time practicing and Jinki starts basically hiding out at Jongin’s house and just spending a lot more time with Jonghyun. They talk a little more, and Jonghyun never really gives a solid answer on what they are, he just kisses Jinki instead.

-- Jinki hanging out with Jonghyun, and Jonghyun sitting up suddenly and mumbling something about, “I have to go,” and rushing upstairs and Jinki worries about him and tries to follow him up, but Jongin’s mom gets home then and Jinki says hi and they talk for a moment before she starts to go up and Jinki says something about “I don’t know if he’s feeling well. He kind of…” and her face crumples a little and she forces a smile and says she’ll check on him and Jinki nods and kind of reluctantly leaves her to it and goes so it’s not weird.

-- Jongin is gone that weekend cuz his family goes into the city. Jinki and Tae scene where Taemin says something about how hard it is on Jongin and then backtracks and is like ‘I’m not saying Jongin’s got it worse, but… he just… it’s hard for him. His family being like this. I just don’t know what to do for him.’ and Jinki kind of frowns and says, “I doubt it’s easy on any of them, but… all we can do is be there. However we’re needed.” And Tae nods and the conversation kind of falls to other stuff.

-- Jinki and Tae are at Jongin’s house and Jinki’s trying to help Jongin study since Jongin’s been putting it off for dance. Jinki’s aunt calls and tells them that she has to work late and won’t be home until at least 10 or 11, and Jinki is talking to her when Jongin’s mom gets home and Jongin suggests Jinki and Tae stay for dinner. She agrees and Jinki tells his aunt and they make plans and settle in and Jonghyun doesn’t come down for dinner, but another boy -- maybe a year or so older than Taemin -- comes down and grabs some food and goes back upstairs and Jinki assumes maybe it’s someone with Jonghyun and gets jealous, but he doesn’t get a chance until he and Taemin are heading home and then he asks.

“Who was that guy who came down?” he asks, and they’re passing just under a streetlight now, so Jinki gets to watch as Taemin’s face pinches in confusion. Jinki doesn’t know what he said wrong -- it felt like a perfectly legitimate question.

“That’s Jongdae,” he says, and the tone of his voice makes it clear that Jinki should know who that is. After a moment, he says, “You know? Jongdae? Jongin’s brother? Have you not met him yet?”

Jinki is suddenly very aware of his own heartbeat in his ears. Jongdae. Jongin’s brother, Jongdae.

“Then… does he have another--?” But he can’t even finish that question. It’s too ridiculous. How could he have known Jongin for a month and a half and this still be catching him this off guard. Jongin’s older brother. He frowns. “What about Jonghyun?”

“Who?” Taemin asks, and his face is shadowed now. They’ve stopped between streetlights, Jinki frozen on the sidewalk. “Hyung, are you okay?”

Jinki shakes his head.

-- Jinki avoiding the house for a few days until Jongin has to beg him for help with a problem set and Jinki goes over and the entire house feels uncomfortable now, and Jinki asks how ‘Jongin’s brother’ is and Jongin kind of shrugs and mumbles something about “He’s sleeping a lot more recently. The doctors can’t figure it out. He just says he’s tired all the time.”

Jinki goes upstairs when they’re done and runs into Jonghyun and Jonghyun is staring at him and finally says, “I’ve missed you,” and Jinki doesn’t know what to say except, “Who are you?”

And Jonghyun’s face crumples and he gets angry and asks Jinki why it matters, why he has to care when he hasn’t cared this whole time?

And Jinki asks him again because he thought Jonghyun was Jongin’s brother, he thought he knew, and now he doesn’t and he’s scared.

And Jonghyun sighs really loudly and kind of shamefacedly tells his story. He was this kid who used to live in this house a long time ago and he committed suicide b/c he was gay and being bullied, and Jonghyun -- "It's funny how you never realize how much you want to be alive until you aren't anymore."

Jinki finds out that Jonghyun's the one who's been making Jongdae worse and he doesn't mean to, but it takes energy to stick around and Jongdae is the easiest target. And so Jonghyun takes energy from him and just basically leaves Jongdae passed out half the time and Jonghyun's like, "he's dying anyways! What's worse, for me to make it easy on him and give a second chance to someone who wants it, or for him to be in pain every hour of every day?!" and Jinki's literally so aware that Jonghyun can't do this, but at the same time, Jonghyun just wants to be alive, or as alive as he can be.

And Jinki had to choose between his feelings for Jonghyun and the knowledge that Jonghyun can’t do this because he’s hurting people. And Jinki tries to talk to him but Jonghyun starts getting angrier and angrier and lights start flickering, and Jinki stumbles backwards just as something flies across the room and it shatters against the wall and cuts him.

And he looks down and sees the blood on his fingertips and looks back at Jonghyn who’s looking at him in horror and just “I… I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t. Jinki, I promise, I didn’t mean-- I don’t know how I did it. I’ve-- I’ve never…”

Jinki drops his hand and just looks at Jonghyun for a long time. “Why are you here, Jonghyun? Why are you staying here?”

And Jonghyun whispers that he’s scared. And Jinki steps in and hugs him and kisses him really softly, and when he steps away Jonghyun’s just looking at him and his hands are shaking and he repeats, “I’m scared.”

And Jinki whispers that he knows, but that Jonghyun, the Jonghyun he knows wouldn’t want to hurt someone. Wouldn’t want someone to hurt because of him.

And Jonghyun kind of laughs bitterly and says, “How would you know? It’s what I’ve been doing all this time.”

But Jinki just shakes his head and says, “Jonghyun, please.”

When Jonghyun pulls away, he’s looking at Jinki’s injury and his eyes are sad and scared and he takes Jinki’s hand and murmurs, “I’m sorry. I wish… I wish that things had been different. I really wanted to love you.”

Jinki just stares at him, something ragged and tight in his chest. “I do love you, Jonghyun.”

Jonghyun just wells up and presses his face into Jinki’s shoulder, and whispers, “I told you I didn’t want to break your heart.”

But Jinki just shakes his head and closes his eyes, pressing a kiss into Jonghyun’s hair. He stays like that for a long time, and he doesn’t open his eyes until the weight of a body in his arms is gone.

-- Jinki helps Jongin finish his math stuff. He meets Jongdae, who’s feeling a little better now, not as tired all the time. The new treatment is working, they tell them. Jongin and Taemin win their dance competition. They celebrate at Jongin’s house and Jongdae joins them for lunch and talks to Jinki for a bit. He’s a nice kid, and when he gets amused, he smiles like a cat and laughs freely. They could maybe, probably be friends.

Sometimes, at Jongin’s house, Jinki catches sight of something out of the corner of his eyes. Sometimes, at Jongin’s house, he feels a sudden chill of cold air. Sometimes, at Jongin’s house, he finds himself crying for no real reason except the obvious, and he can almost imagine someone holding him.

Sometimes, he’s not sure if Jonghyun is gone or not, but when he can, when he finds himself wondering too hard, sometimes he whispers ‘I love you’ to the maybe-empty house, just in case.

#shinee fic #shinee fanfiction #WIP #unfinished #Jongyu #honestly thank you all #my writing #if anyone know where this title came from please hit me up bc my Fave book

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