#is INFINITELY more satisfying than reading about reader being sad :(((

[katasstrophy]

OHMYGOOOODDDDDD YES MAKE HIM SUFFER!!!!

The Devotion of the Girl in the Mirror

Chapter 4 >> Chapter 5 >> Masterlist

✣ Pairing: Rindou x AFAB fem!Reader w/ a chapter cameo of reader/yuzuha

✣ Warning: 18+ explicit content, minors DNI

✣ Series: part of the In the Belly of the Beast fic universe

✣ Chapter CW: bdsm play feat. reader/yuzuha (gasp!), bondage, overstim, vibrators, exhibitionism, group BDSM feat. 2 other subs getting masturbated (one fem!AFAB and one fem!AMAB, idk crowd jeers, a little bit of degradation, bad communication & angst, drinking)

✣ Story CWs: BDSM dob/sub relationship; sex (oral, ptv, pta, etc.); genre typical drug use, alcohol, smoking

✣ Synopsis: A story of two lonely people find love for better or worse. Or, dom!Rindou is sweet on his girl. Or, on paper, you and Rindou have nothing in common. But sometimes chemistry defies logic, and with every conversation, you find yourself more bewitched until all you see, smell, or hear is Rindou.

✣ Word Count: ~8.5k

The black dot may have been nothing but a circle, a representation of the sun or an eye, except it is written, which makes it punctuation. As a symbol of punctuation, it may have been a period at the end of a sentence, except there are three, which makes it part of an ellipsis. As an ellipsis, it may have indicated a trailing off of a thought except it accompanies a blank space on his screen, an auto-generated signal from his phone, which means you are still typing, as you have been for the last five minutes with no message yet in response to his text.

It should not take this long to respond to an invitation to dinner.

With every minute that passes, his ire rises higher.

Rindou strains through another set of lat pulls, refusing to let you and your silent treatment slow him down. Opposite him, Benkei deadlifts a stunning 300 kg. When the bar hits the floor, the clang echoes off the mirror-lined walls.

There is a gym in the basement of his apartment complex, guaranteed to be empty in the early pre-dawn hours, which he prefers for the privacy it offers. Wakasa’s gym is never empty. Fighters practice boxing, MMA, and jujutsu with retired pros morning and night. Most of the customers sport tattoos from one syndicate or another, and Rindou often recognizes the guys on his own payroll by the free weights or sweating in the saunas. Rindou only started returning to Wakasa’s gym for the occasional practice bout or strength training session in the last few months. Wakasa’s been filling his ear with the idea of taking you and his girl on a double date, a vacation to the mountains when your semester wraps, and Rindou has been coming by to talk the details.

A text finally lights up his screen, and Rindou forces himself to ignore it for a solid minute while he finishes his set even as his eyes dart back against his will.

I can’t do dinner. Plans with Naoya. But I could do drinks.

Wakasa lopes forward, hands in his pockets, before Rindou can answer. It’s his turn to leave you with the ellipsis of anxiety and doom. He locks his phone and tosses face-down on a bench.

“Wanted to tell you we got the goods through Nagoya yesterday,” Wakasa says tonelessly. “Ushioda’s really come through. My guy says customs not only didn’t check, they agreed to decrease security personnel during offboarding. Ran is going to be a menace about being the one to make this happen, but he’s worked his magic on this.”

Rindou matches Wakasa’s subdued attitude beat for beat, but in his mind, he runs through a month’s worth of memos and emails to recall if he knew about this plan. “You sent a shipment of girls through the port? That’s fucking brazen.”

“Mochi wanted to test the limits early with something cheap before we put our expensive shit through there,” Wakasa said.

According to Takeomi, Ushioda begged on bended knee for clemency for his son. It was hard to say whether love or shame drove the father, but the outcome was the same. Acme Corp would smuggle Bonten contraband through the Port of Nagoya, so long as they streamlined into their regular shipping schedule to avoid setting off any alarm bells.

This was the second shipment received through the port after moving a little marijuana through a few weeks earlier. Rindou tries to keep his expectations in check as operations continue smoothly, but his hopes rise against his better judgment.

“Mochi says he wants to do a few more runs, but that you should start thinking through where you could source the heroine,” Wakasa relays.

They could source through the triads as the Chinese and Russian gangs already have inroads with the producers, but they would each take their cut and ruin Bonten’s margins. The drug would be new on the market. Rindou doesn’t want to price high outright. Start cheap and once the clientele can’t live without their fix, then drive the prices up. They could run a deficit to start, but that would mean Koko up his ass. Cutting the triads out completely isn’t an option either as they would need to ship out of China, but if they could build their own supplier network, they could negotiate a better rate.

“It’s gonna be too obvious if we have guys coming in and out of Afghanistan all the time. They don’t even run direct flights out of Seoul. We’d get picked instantly. I’m thinking we could get away with sending someone through to Turkey though. With a little palm greasing, they can cross into Iran without getting their passport stamped. The IRGC run the heroine trade through Afghanistan, so we could develop our own connections from there,” Rindou says.

Wakasa nods along at what he already figured. “Who you gonna send?”

“Not me if that’s what you’re thinking. I hate plane rides,” Rindou says.

“Of course, not you. We need you. I was thinking Hanma.”

Rindou groans. “I fucking hate that guy.”

“We all fucking hate that guy. But that’s why he’s good at this shit. He’s done great work in Hong Kong. Send him over there. He knows how to make the coldest man sweat,” Wakasa suggests.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll think about it.”

He finishes another set of lat pulls, while Wakasa and Benkei chat away about the insipid rise of Peloton. Endorphins rush to his brain, and he feels magnanimous enough to finally shoot you a reply.

See you at 5.

If he has anything to say about it, Naoya will be eating dinner alone tonight.

--

Two people could not be dressed more oppositely. Fresh from his post-workout shower, Rindou wears nothing but a pair of sweats. Droplets of water scatter across his bare shoulder blade as his long, wet hair drips freely. Strong chest and arms still pumped from muscle training great you at the door. You, meanwhile, dressed for an Arctic exploration in a floor-length parka, bulging in all the wrong places, a fluffy scarf wound three-times round your neck, and an equally fluffy, fur-lined hood. A mask completes the look, so the only skin he can see is a sliver of your forehead and your narrowed eyes.

“Just looking at you makes me feel cold,” you scowl.

“Just looking at you is making me cold.”

You barge right past him into his apartment. The heater works overtime to keep the entire complex a toasty 23 degrees. Past the entryway, where you slip out of your boots, the dining room table is lined with boxes of Chinese takeout; Unsure what you’d want to eat, Rindou opted to order a smorgasbord of options.

Beneath the unflattering coat, you wear a black dress. The long sleeves and tasteful length contrast a daring vee that dips down to show off the swell of your lovely, little breasts. You’re packaged like a delicious gift for the unwrapping, and Rindou can’t resist planting a soft kiss to the back of your neck as you hang your coat. He expects the battle tonight will be a long and painful one, but still you dressed up for him.

“Good to see it’s you under there. For a second, I thought it might be an assassin,” Rindou jokes.

“Easy for you to laugh all warm in here! It’s freezing outside. They’re calling for snow tonight into tomorrow, which sucks. I can’t miss class at this point in the semester,” you complain.

“Well, I’ve got everything you need to warm up,” Rindou says. He gestures at the table laden with food, and then, more critically, brandishes the bottle of wine bought just for tonight. “And if the weather’s too bad tomorrow, I’m sure they’ll cancel. You can just hang out here all day.”

“My professors are all sadists. I wouldn’t put it past them to host class as they get double-bypass surgery. They’d have the surgeon right there in the lecture hall,” you grumble.

Rindou half listens as you launch into a prolonged rant about your upcoming finals. His attention is understandably split as he searches your lively expressions for the ugly shadow of jealousy. Behind every word, he hunts for double meanings.

The look of pure betrayal on your face when he ran into you yesterday in Chiba will not soon leave his mind. It colored his scenes yesterday with Mayuri, turning him mean and unmerciful as he bound and belted her ass red. She deserved his full attention after putting her trust in him, but Rindou twice almost walked away to call you. Had you answered, he might have berated you for daring to look at him like that, like you’d caught him fucking your mother or murdering the family pet. Like he’d done something unforgivable to you.

Now, as you gripe about exams, every bit the picture of the beleaguered uni student, your words ring false. Like you are filling time and space to put distance between the you of yesterday, so judgey and offended, and the you of today. You tell him how exams are two months out, and like a good student, you are already studying in earnest in the pits of what you dub “flashcard hell” as Kii has taken to posting flashcards over every expanse of wall in her apartment, springing prep questions on unconsenting listeners, and crying periodically about how she should have spent fewer hours sleeping and more time reading the supplementary materials. Rindou hums in sympathy in all the right places, and he almost, almost begins to relax into the conversation. Like an idiot.

“Are you feeling the dumplings or the pork?” Rindou asks, plating up a hearty helping of food for himself.

“Neither. I can’t eat, remember?” you say.

“Oh, come on. Stay the night. It’s too cold to be going out.”

“True, but I promised Naoto. We’re going to this really fancy curry restaurant, and he said he’d pay, so I’m planning to go all out and get dessert,” you say.

Noticing his wine glass is running low, Rindou drains the last dregs and pours himself a healthy portion. This will be easier drunk. He debates pouring you more as well, wondering if a little tipsiness would make you spunkier or mellow the worst of your impulses. Because he senses the fit approaching, the moment you break your pretense that everything is fine and well and force a confrontation.

“You know, I don’t like playing games,” he says.

 “I don’t like playing games either.”

“Then, don’t.”

Rindou says it shortly, definitively. The barest hint of command reinforces his voice, and he watches the way you receive the order, squirming in that delightfully submissive way of yours before you reject your inclination to obedience. You set your jaw.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say.

Rindou sighs. He expected you would be difficult but not passive aggressive. Not like this.

“You have dinner plans with Naoto? Seriously?”

“Yes?”

“Bullshit,” Rindou snaps. “I expected you to be immature about what happened yesterday, but this? You’re better than this. Forget your conveniently timed dinner plans, and let’s act like adults. Then, we can have a nice night.”

“It’s a work event. Naoto was nervous about going alone, so he asked me to come with him. This was planned weeks ago. I just forgot until he reminded me,” you insist, standing up from your chair, like the added height will strengthen your lie.

“Convenient,” Rindou sneers.

In the six months you’ve been together, you have never had a genuine fight or even argument. Seeing your smiling face typically puts Rindou in too good a mood, curbs the worst of his temper, so he is slow to pick fights. You, meanwhile, listen so well, adapting your behavior without him having to utter a word. Bickering typically becomes flirtatious banter in a matter of minutes, the kind that ends with your panties in his pocket.

So, Rindou doesn’t know what to expect from you in a real fight. He half expected you to fold at the slightest correction. You are still young, so he doesn’t write off the possibility of some kind of petty manipulation either, the silent treatment maybe, or more probably breaking into a mess of tears, the kind that bring so many men to a panic; Unfortunately for you, Rindou doesn’t capitulate to a woman’s cries or begging, going cold at any miserable attempt to manipulate his emotions.

Faced with you now, the tendons in your neck pulse as you square of against him without any sign of crumbling. You worry your lower lip between your teeth until it is red and swollen. It is the only sign of anxiety. Otherwise, you stand strong.

“If you feel like I’m somehow attacking you, it must be a guilty conscience. Because I haven’t said or done anything to you.”

“What do I have to feel guilty about?” Rindou demands coldly.

“You’d have to tell me. Because I thought about it all day and night –”

“See, I knew you were wound up about yesterday –”

“I thought about it all day and night,” you raise your voice to drown him out. “And, yes, it was weird to see you with someone else. Yes, it hurt. It was so unexpected. But, if you think I’m trying to punish you over it, you’re out of line because my eyes are wide open. You’re not my boyfriend –”

“No, I’m not. Which is why you shouldn’t –”

“I know, I know. How can I be hurt or angry when you’re not my boyfriend? You didn’t cheat on me or break any promises. I have nothing to be upset about.”

“Right.”

Confused and more than a little wary, Rindou sits back down at the table. He has held conversations like this a few times in his life. Most subs understand the importance of negotiation implicitly and take him for what he is. There have been a handful of in the past, however, usually inexperienced women like you, who struggled to work through the limitations of their relationship with him, crashing futilely against the boundaries of what he offered.

Because he doesn’t do relationships. Blame it on the dangers of his work, the secrecy inherent in the lifestyle, or some intrinsic flaw in his makeup. Regardless, he never plans to tie himself down to one woman. All that road offers is the erosion of his freedom.

“Since you wanted to talk about it so much though, bringing it up and all, I would like to ask about what I should expect,” you continue. “Because I didn’t realize you were seeing other people, and that raises questions. Like, are you practicing safe sex with these women? Have you been getting tested for STDs? Should we be using condoms? And, are you looking for more long-term subs? How would you even fit in another sub? Would we have to see each other less, so you could make time for a new one? What should I expect going forward?”

Each question is too reasonable to deny, so Rindou answers plainly, “You’re the only person I see regularly, so I use condoms with everyone else and get tested on the first of every month. If you want to use condoms together, that is entirely your decision. I’ll accept whatever you decide. I’m not looking to train anyone else right now. If I found someone that suited my tastes, I might consider it though, and yeah, that would mean adjusting my schedule around because I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you would not be open to training together.”

“No!”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Rindou says.

“How many women have you been with since we got together?” you demand.

There is no good answer, and Rindou groans, “Seriously? Don’t start overreacting now.”

“I’m cool! I’m being so cool. Just answer the question,” you smile, but it is a mockery of your normal, gleaming smiles. Teeth clenched tight together, it is more like an animal baring its fangs.

“No! I don’t owe you a fucking itemized list of every woman I’ve fucked. Just like I don’t run around town telling them about you. I haven’t cheated on you. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“I just wanna know how and when you’re finding time to meet other people.”

Rindou rolls his eyes. “Because that’s rational. You don’t actually want to know the answer to that.”

“I just don’t know where you’re possibly finding the time to meet all these women –”

“Again, you’re exaggerating. Not all these women. Some, like Mayuri, I knew before you. Some I meet through work. Straightforward stuff.”

“Mayuri is the woman from yesterday?”

“I think we’re done with this conversation now,” Rindou says tightly.

A shininess blurs the color of your eyes then, and Rindou sighs. He wants to wrap you up in his arms and praise you for being such a strong, beautiful girl because despite all your tough words, this isn’t easy for you. If he could be a better man for you, he would consider it, but there is only so much he can offer, and the burden of accepting that is on you.

“Thank you for being honest with me. I really do need to head out and meet Naoto, but I’ll think about the condom thing,” you murmur.

“Baby, don’t leave like this,” Rindou tries. There is no more fight in your stance and now that the threat of conflict is ended, he finds the energy draining from his whole body.

“I’m fine! We’re fine. Seriously, Rindou. I’m not going to overreact or stamp my foot at you like that might change something. My eyes are wide open like I told you. I understand where you’re coming from completely. We can hang out soon,” you say.

Rindou doesn’t like the idea of you leaving when your foundations are so shaken, wants to stuff you full of gone-cold Chinese food and cuddle on the couch until you fall asleep on his shoulder. Even if neither of you yelled or descended into insults, he feels like he fought a war, and the only way to recover is in your arms.

He follows you to the entryway.

You redon your winter gear in a hurry. The puffy coat is plush and cozy as he pulls you close and kisses you long and slow. You return the kiss with wind-chapped lips not fighting him at all. The heat that always explodes between you blazes, and he cups and caresses you through the barrier of the coat.

He wants you to stay.

You break the kiss after only a minute and smile.

“I’ll call you, ok?”

And then, you are gone.

--

When Rindou sleeps, he dreams of shopping malls built like mazes, window shopping displays of the finest goods, and he understands without knowing that to obtain even one miraculous product from these stores would spell his salvation; But whenever he tries to enter one of the stores, the maze shifts, redirects him until he is walking forwards again, searching. Still searching. During the slippery seconds between sleep and waking, that liminal space where dreams and life converge, he stews in resentment for what he can’t possess. That resentment often follows him into the day, though he tries not to dwell on it. The recurring dream started sometime in his early twenties. He remembers that dream joining him in sleep on at least a monthly basis, but for all he knows, he dreams it every night only to forget with the rising of the sun.

The weeks that follow the lingerie incident remind him of that dream only there is no supernatural force reworking the architecture of time and space to prevent him from entering the store. It feels like he’s piloting a plane headed straight for a cliff. There is still time to push the emergency button and eject to safety if he is only willing to abandon the plane to its solitary, fiery fate. But, he is a pilot, and the plane is all he’s ever known, and the longer he goes without pushing the button, the slighter his chances of escaping unscathed.

Because you are not fine.

The three weeks that follow pass at a crawl. Time reshapes itself into molasses around the giant you-sized absence in his days. It is easy, at first, to deny the obvious as you offer such convincing excuses to blow him off. After all, your friends do often lean on you for emotional support, and finals are drawing close, and your mother does deserve a break. So what if you leave his texts on read for hours at a time?

On the fourth day, he calls you in the free period he knows falls between your Wednesday lectures. When you answer, Rindou mistakes your sing-song hello for the voicemail you have relegated him to recently. You apologize for not having time to talk, squeezing more words into a breath than humanly plausible as you explain your packed study schedule. You promise to see him soon before you hang up.

You sounded fine on the phone. The same voice, light and airy like spring personified, that Rindou knows so well.

But you are not fine.

The ice wall between you thaws a little in the second week when Rindou reminds you that he bought tickets to the Inaba/Salas tour. Again, you surprise him by joining as planned at the stadium. Throughout the concert, you smile and cheer along, and the open delight on your face as you groove to the music invites him to join in the fun. At the end of the night, he drives you home to where you swear your mom is waiting. He kisses you breathless in the front seat of his car. You sigh hot and sticky into his mouth, notched into the crook of his shoulder like you have carved a space for yourself there, and whisper “Sir” with more fervor than a prayer. Everything seems fine.

But you are not fine.

Only a few days later, you agree to a date. The familiarity as he texts you details and soaks up your liberal usage of emojis relaxes him into thinking all is well. He takes you ice skating at Tokyo Midtown Gardens. With your little gloved hand in his, you half carry each other around the rink, equally graceless without the surety of solid ground. Rindou laughs more than he has for two weeks. You both fall again and again, Rindou toppling each time so as to shield your body from the worst of it. As you sprawl on top of him, padded from head to toe in winter wear, you promise to kiss his purple bruises better and call him your hero. Back at his apartment, you do just that, licking and kissing every part of his body, losing track of time. The trains stop running, so you sleep where you belong in the cradle of his arms. He wakes up at 6AM to the sound of you shuffling, halfway out the door citing an early start to the day. You would have left without a goodbye, but at his groggy inquiry, you tell him you are fine.

But you are not fine.

Rindou wants to confront you about the change. He hates playing stupid games more than accusations or tears and would rather have it out at this point. But, whenever you visit, he never broaches the subject. Because you are so singularly you! And fuck it. He misses you. The contrast between seeing you fives time a week and this drought is stark. Now, when you leave, you don’t send him dumb memes or answer his calls to talk about your day. You don’t rush to make plans to see him again either, and Rindou knows he can’t accept your lame excuses anymore. Something is fundamentally broken.

For the first time in maybe ever, Rindou throws himself into his work. The timing is convenient with recent developments, so he offers to take the meetings outside the perimeter of Tokyo when before he might have dragged his feet. He personally briefs Takeomi every day. When Kakucho mentions a security threat in passing, Rindou volunteers to help even though it falls well outside his purview. Anything to keep the body active.

You had come to fill up the hours of his day, to be the dessert he could look forward to after a meal of veggies. Rindou can’t comprehend how he used to fill the interminable hours between six PM and sleep without your assistance.

So, he works, and he tries not to think about anything much at all.

The plane soars onward without any assistance on his part. The details of the exposed cliff face, jagged and unforgiving, grow clearer by the hour. There will be no escape. When he crashes, Rindou knows he is going to explode.

--

Ran once said all of Bonten has PTSD in one form or another. Overexposure to high stress, life-or-death situations puts too much stress on the adrenal system, so now half the executives drop to their stomachs when a car misfires, stand with their backs flat to the nearest wall in every new room, avoid crowds like some people avoid traffic tickets. Rindou considers himself free of this affliction, but on the road, hands flexing on the steering wheel and eyes split between mirrors like a car might strike out into his lane at any moment, he is every bit as activated.

The hour is late, creeping towards midnight when Rindou pulls onto the expressway. There are predictably few passenger cars sharing the road. Semitrucks kick up a mist of rain that obscures his windshield.

To fill the sleepless hours, Rindou is developing all kinds of new habits. Driving, brain preciously blank to all but the threat of traffic, is one of them. So is going to the office. Just today, he went to the Ueno office of all places rather than watch the hours of the day tick by in his apartment. There is no email unanswered, directive unissued, or memo unread to keep his brain occupied. He wishes there was because his apartment holds as little allure now as it did this this morning.

A notification lights up the display. It’s a reminder that the BDSM club in Roppongi – the one where you first met – is open for play tonight. Rindou palms his cock, and it feels like an animal, a dead one, in his pants. Not even a stir. His mood is too black and distracted to responsibly dom anyone, so he dismisses the notification.

Screeching the tires, Rindou almost misses his exit. He brakes hard down the ramp until he shoots out on a quiet street. At the drab buildings, he does a double take, recognizing the north entrance to Nakano Station.

He has driven straight past his real exit and an extra twenty minutes without noticing to arrive in your neighborhood.

Rindou feels drunk despite not taking a sip of alcohol all day. He pulls into a gas station and refills the tank. While it pumps, he pops his contacts out of sore eyes. Everything blurs like a photograph in soft focus. He closes his eyes against a headache and breathes deep for 120 torturous breaths. Back in the car, he unearths his glasses from the glove compartment. They’re the same style, though a stronger prescription, that he wore as a teen. Catching his reflection in the rearview, Rindou sees the boy he once was. Just as lost, letting things happen around him without a thought, only leaping to action when stronger powers (namely Ran) prompted). Someone who watches as life happens.

Nothing is in his control.

The BDSM club is five minutes closer to Nakano than his apartment, a negligible difference, but after the driving mix-up he changes course. Nostalgia takes the wheel to lead to where you first met, where he has not visited since.

The ticket takers at the theater don’t recognize him, hesitating until he points at the tattoo on his throat. He looks unkempt: hair ratty and unbrushed, jacket slung over his shoulder and button-up crumpled at the ends, and his glasses highlight the eyes of a man who has barely slept in days. It is no surprise that subs don’t flock to him when he enters. He doesn’t look like the all-powerful dom tonight. Best he sits back and watches.

Rindou pays for a full bottle of bourbon, served neat and hard on the taste buds. The club is busy as it’s Saturday, and couples and groups clog the four stages. There are no tables left close enough for a view of the action, so Rindou stands in the corner, taking heavy swigs straight from the bottle until his stomach cramps.

There is little variety on stage. Three doms whip, cane, and flog their subs. All older man with younger women. They are impersonal, showing perfunctory delight at the infliction of pain. These are the kinds of scenes that bore him when done without finesse.

On the fourth stage, he recognizes Lady X, a domme he knows from many shared nights spent just like this, bringing women to their knees. Lost in his memories is Lady X’s real name. Yuzu something…Yuzuriha? Yuzuyu? In the clubs, she always goes by her alias or is called simply Lady, but Rindou remembers her vaguely as the sister of the tenth gen leader of the Black Dragons.

Lady is the antithesis of Rindou as a dom.

If Rindou finds control in manipulating a pliant body and acceptance in a sub’s embrace of his touch, whether it offers pain or pleasure, Lady finds release in giving her subs what they want. Where Rindou hoards women’s orgasms like precious jewels, flaunting his ownership of them only to hide them away again, Lady distributes them like cheap birdseed, doling out orgasm after orgasm to her thankful subs. Eventually said thanks turns to pleading, as one orgasm becomes four and the pleasure twists to something monumental. Lady then ups the vibrator or nips the woman’s clit with blunt teeth because, as she told Rindou once over a drink at this very bar, her goal in every scene is to create a world where her subs’ worst problem is the existence of too much pleasure, not its absence, nor its inverse, pain.

Tonight, Lady commands the largest audience of patrons. No surprise there as she strikes quite the picture herself, tall and lovely in a pencil skirt as she brings three subs on stage to piteous tears. Rindou slides closer to her stage for a better look.

Suspended in a harness of ropes, the first sub weeps wretchedly. There is a hitachi wand held to her clit. The setting must be high because the buzz travels from the stage to his ears. The woman cries but does not beg for mercy. There is the sheen of the acolyte behind her eyes, like she might commit unspeakable acts if they only bring her back here to Lady’s ropes and generous toys.

A second sub at her side stands restrained but not suspended. Her arms are tied above her, so that she can do nothing while Lady strokes her cock. Lady’s little hand smears messily over the tip, which is an inflamed red. There is a puddle of cum on the floor from the woman’s past orgasms. Little drips of semen harden on her legs. Every touch must hurt, but Lady keeps playing with the tip, forcing her back to hardness whether she likes it or not.

The third sub is just an ass in the air. A perfect ass at that.

Bent over a wooden block and shackled at the ankle, so that her legs are to the audience, the sub’s pussy is spread wide around a vibrator taped to her clit. Her feet kick ineffectually against her restraints, little trembles jiggling her thighs.

Rindou enjoys watching Lady work, so self-assured, so competent at bringing her subs to the brink and past. His eyes stray again and again to the pretty ass in the air. A stir in his pants makes him question his decision to abstain tonight. It has been over a week of his own hand.

After fifteen minutes of more of the same, Lady releases the first two subs from their ropes and cuffs. They are felled heaps on the stage, panting in puddles of their own slick and cum. Lady rounds to the third sub, leaning toward that hidden face in private conversation. Then she stands, and sighs for the audience’s benefit.

“Here I am being so generous, telling this slut to cum as many times as she wants, and she hasn’t cum once! What to do?”

Lady answers her own question by crouching down in front of the sub’s spread pussy and burying her whole face in it. There is a lull in the music, and Rindou can hear just how lewdly Lady laves that pussy with her tongue. Her fingers stretch the sub’s hole at a brutal pace. The woman keens loudly and kicks her feet again. Everything from her little naked toes to canting hips look beautiful in the throws of overstimulation.

Of course, Rindou knows without knowing. A presentiment colors the scene. He leans forward with interest, compelled toward that wet cunt, not wanting to miss a moment of the action, but his stomach sickens too. He ignores the sensation, blames the bourbon warming its way down his belly.

Lady tuts as the sub continues to hang on the precipice without teetering over.

She turns to the audience and says, “Little slut is having a hard time coming without permission from her old dom. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard? Why don’t you let her know she has permission to cum? Tell her to squirt all over my hand.”

Eager to join in more actively, the crowd of about thirty hoot and holler in encouragement, mixing in obscenities about the sub’s wet cunt and place beneath Lady’s toys. Rindou claps along.

Four fingers slam in and out of that sloppy hole, and the time between shakes and cries from the sub evaporates until she is blubbering at the stimulation. Lady yanks her up by the hair to gift her the added sting at her scalp, and it pushes the sub over the edge.

Correction: it pushes you over the edge.

Because Rindou knows that ass, and he knows those toes, and even at a distance with the lights too bright and a row of people in front of him, he knows that pretty pussy, too. That pretty pussy now clenches around Lady’s fingers in an orgasm far too long and powerful for your overstimulated body.

Rindou watches your face screw up in pain and tears, an expression just as familiar to him. It is an expression that should belong solely to him.

All three subs follow Lady dutifully off stage after your orgasm finally settles. She bundles you all in blankets, heaping compliments and affection down on you as is your due after such a trying scene. Rindou hovers within earshot as Lady pets your head and rubs a tear from your check. Twenty minutes elapse as you come out of subspace, during which time Rindou drains half the bottle of bourbon.

“I look like a racoon. I’m gonna head to the bathroom and fix my makeup,” you laugh, pointing at the streaks of mascara that paint your cheeks.

You replace the blanket with an overcoat to shield your nakedness then weave your way through the crowd. Compliments on your performance rain down from all sides. Rindou shadows your step. Not far from the bathroom, you drop your phone. When you turn to pick it up off the floor, Rindou is there, already scooping it off the ground.

“Rin – Rindou!” you yelp.

“Not trying to scare you,” Rindou says immediately, defensively, and he passes the phone back to you without even scanning the lock screen for a peek at your messages. “Just saw you and wanted to say hey.”

“Well, hey…um…”

“You might wanna fix your makeup. You’ve got…” Rindou gestures at the cakey residue you already know is there, and you curse.

“Yeah, sorry. I need to go to the bathroom and deal with this.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rindou says, opening the door for you.

“Rindou, you can’t come in here with me,” you whisper.

He almost tells you it’s his club and he can do whatever he wants, but Rindou wears his secrecy like a second skin and only smirks at your worries before following you into the women’s bathroom. It is a six-stall affair with a wall mirror above the sinks. He can hear a woman pee behind the door of one stall, but he ignores the stranger’s presence as you ignore his, turning to the mirrors.

“You did good up there. Looked like you had a lot of tension to work out, which isn’t surprising considering all the studying you’ve been doing. Didn’t you have a paper due this week?” Rindou prompts.

You rub dry fingertips against your cheeks. When that doesn’t work, you wad up three paper towels, wet from the sink, and scrub.

“Yeah, I had a paper on Bashō’s references to music and instrumentation in his poems, which was due on Thursday. It could have been a lot worse honestly. I like the subject, and I thought my first draft was good for once. Of course, I had a complete breakdown on Wednesday after dreaming that the paper was really supposed to be about Nishiyama Sōin and that I’d miscited every source in there, but um, I managed to calm myself down.”

“Good. I don’t know why you always have nightmares about your papers. You always get an A.”

“Not always,” you say darkly.

The woman in the occupied stall hurries out, casting a few curious glances Rindou’s way as she washes her hands. She doesn’t dry them, leaving little splatters of water on the counter. Then, they are truly alone.

“Are you planning to stick around now that you finished your scene? Can’t imagine you wanna do another after that? It looked intense.”

“You really watched that?” you ask.

“Most of it,” he confirms. “You did good.”

“Thanks,” you say without looking at him. You dry your hands while staring at your now streak-free reflection in the mirror.

“If you don’t wanna stay, I could take you home. Or, if you’re hungry, I know a 24/7 breakfast place not far from here. You never eat enough after a scene,” Rindou says.

“Um, I’m good…Have you been coming here often?”

“No, it’s my first time in forever. You?” he asks in a tone that just misses casual.

“It’s my second time in the last two weeks. I’m kind of trying out stuff right now,” you say.

“Trying out stuff…” he tests the words.

“Are you okay? You look a little tense.”

Normally, Rindou chooses his words with precision, but he finds himself unable to process his surroundings. He exists somewhere outside his body, outside his brain, outside this room entirely. He peers down on the scene almost like a security camera, removed and distant. No, rather more like footage from a security camera, viewed days after the fact in a little room by someone who neither knows nor understands the context of the scene. Trying to think through the likely consequences of his words or choosing an alternative phrase, he finds his thoughts vaporous and ungraspable. So, he simply speaks.

“I didn’t like it.”

“Like what? Watching me with someone else?” you say quickly.

He grunts because that’s easier than searching for any kind of answer.

“You said we could fuck other people.”

“I know. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rindou agrees. It is the correct and automatic response, but he can’t resist tacking on the truth at the end. “I didn’t like watching.”

“Well, that’s flattering at least,” you mutter.

In a different reality, one where he sent you up there with a pat on the ass, he might have liked watching Lady work your cunt up to a waterfall before returning you to him, still hovering on the precipice, edged and needy. He might have liked teasing you all night with the possibility of an orgasm. But he did not like watching you cum for someone else. Not without his permission. Even with a filmy gauze slowing down his brain from the half bottle of bourbon, he knows that much.

“We’re not okay, are we?” Rindou asks.

“No, Rindou. We are not okay.”

“Well, can we talk about it?”

“I don’t know. Can we talk about it without you making me feel like a complete idiot?” you snap.

A woman pushes open the door to the bathroom, but upon hearing the direction of your conversation, she turns right around, leaving you to a privacy tinged by history. The door creaks back into place with a choked slam.

“Like a…? You’re not an idiot?” Rindou insists.

“I know I’m not an idiot! I have spent the last few weeks going back and forth between feeling so sad and then so goddamn angry with you! Because I know that I could not have been more chill about things if I had a lobotomy to remove my frontal cortex first! I was so cool about everything, so understanding, so kind, and you treated me like, like some fucking bother you had to get out of the way!”

The first feeling to reemerge from the confused pit you dumped him in is embarrassment at himself as he is admittedly slow on the uptake, stuttering out, “Wait…this isn’t about…? This is about our conversation at my apartment?”

“Yes!” you hiss, hands flapping emphatically and voice echoing off the tile. The overcoat swallows you whole, a sea of black fabric trailing the floor, but somehow you stand tall within it. “Yes! I came that night so prepared to listen to your side of things and be reasonable and empathetic and all the rest, and you treated me like I was a hysterical child that you had to manage. Far be it from me to criticize the great Rindou! Not that I even did criticize you before you were jumping down my throat. I am not unreasonable. I am not hysterical. And I am not a child. I did not appreciate being treated like I was.”

Rindou remembers back to the hours before you arrived at his apartment that day. How he’d been so sure you would accuse him of cheating or play mind games to negate your own jealousy. The whole time you were there, he maintained that sureness even when you acted contrary to those expectations.

It, he admits, hadn’t been fair.

Worse, it may have been patronizing.

He groans, not at you but at the memory, and rubs a hand over his face. “Fuck, yeah, yeah, you’re probably right. I see that. I didn’t want you to blow things out of proportion, so I tried to shut you down before you could. But I guess I acted like a prick.”

“A prick might be understating it. I came to you to have a conversation in good faith, and you made me feel so…small. Insignificant. Like, I’m just this easy thing to you. Like you could use and discard me, so I better shut my mouth before you throw me away.”

Rindou opens his mouth to give a rebuttal-like reassurance that you are wrong about your supposed disposability to him, but you plow forward, pointed finger punctuating every word, which is a welcome distraction from the look of raw pain on your face. It is like the sun. Too painful to look at directly.

“I know what that feels like, Rindou, because I’ve been treated that way before. I’m young and people call me sweet, and that means people think I’m stupid or superficial, but I’m not. I’m capable of dealing with the hard things and having the hard conversations, and I do not deserve to be treated like I’m too naïve to know how things work.”

There is a layer of grime on his tongue. He focuses on how foreign it feels in his mouth rather than the thumping organ in his ribcage. The way his heart races and the room feels too small is not dissimilar to the sensations he feels when someone fires a gun, when his life is momentarily suspended. A kind of physical panic that quickly settles into alertness.

He breathes deep, calming. Rindou smells the antibacterial soap and weak air freshener blowing from the vents. The colors of the room appear saturated, more contrast and more details accessible to the eye. Most importantly, he sees you clearly. The veins of your throat strain as if bursting with tension your body can’t contain. There are new smudges at the edges as tiny tears wet your eyeline. There is every emotion in those eyes from disgust to anger to sadness, but most of all, there is a question lingering there as you silently beg him to answer: where can we go from here?

“I have never thought of you as some easy thing. I fucked up. I don’t know what was going on in my head that day, but you’re right. I wasn’t seeing you. I should have shut my fucking mouth and listened. I’m sorry.”

Relief warms your eyes.

“I accept your apology,” you say.

“Really?” Rindou asks. After weeks of brewing resentment and your impassioned speech, he didn’t expect a speedy turnaround no matter how many pretty speeches he made himself.

“Yeah, I don’t like being angry. It takes a lot of energy,” you half laugh.

The abrupt about face from anger to laughter throws into stark relief that the is very drunk and very tired.  Beneath that, Rindou recognizes a more abstract emotion, too: happiness.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner. I didn’t realize what you were upset about,” Rindou says, and then he adds helpfully. “Because I’m stupid. Thanks for forgiving me.”

“Yeah, you are stupid, but I figure you deserve a little grace because this was the first time in six months that you disrespected me. So long as you never treat me that way again. Seriously. My mother taught me to never put up with that from anyone,” you say.

“On my honor,” Rindou vows. “So, can I buy you something to eat now?”

The happiness explodes out like a shaken soda bottle. One second, he’s filled to the brim with it, and the next it’s gone, bubbling to nothing on the tile because you don’t say yes. Instead, you stare grimly at the wall, all traces of reconciliation gone as you clutch the sleeves of your overcoat tight.

He wonders if his apology is not enough, if he might prove his sincerity to you in some other way. If you were Mikey, he would cut off his pinky. He would gladly gift you the ring, index, and middle fingers of his left hand, too, if you demanded them. But fingers out of the question, he has nothing to give you to prove himself, and you don’t say yes.

“Rindou…I do accept your apology for insulting me, but that’s not all…The truth is, I tried to be cool about it, but I’ve had weeks to think, and…I’m not okay with things going back to how they were if you are dating or hell, sleeping with other people. I’m jealous and hurt. And I can’t accept it,” you say.

“It’s normal to be jealous,” Rindou tries, tone bracing and supportive. “I got jealous today, but I worked through it. I’ve been a dom since I was nineteen, and I’ve never been tied down to one person before. It’s not the way I know how to do things. That’s why I didn’t make any promises when we got together. I didn’t cheat on –”

“Please don’t start that again! I know! I know you technically didn’t do anything wrong. And I know that I can’t make you stop seeing other people. It’s your relationship, too, and you can have your boundaries, but…”

“But?”

“But if I can’t ask you to stop seeing other people, then you can’t ask me to keep loving you.”

You clap a hand to your mouth as if shocked by the confession, or like you might herd the words back into your mouth where they will remain unspoken. But it is too late. He can count on one hand the number of times anyone has told him they loved him, and he will not forget this.

“Baby…” Rindou tries to reach for you, but you scramble away, and now tears fall down your cheeks.

“I’m sorry, but that’s the problem, ya know? It hasn’t just been sex or hanging out for me. What we were doing, for me at least, was love, and it hurts too much to love someone who…I tried to take a step back, just have fun with you every once in a while, but there’s no medicine for falling in love, and every time I saw your stupid face, my heart started doing backflips. It doesn’t listen to me when I tell it we shouldn’t love you anymore. And that’s why…”

Your face blurs. It takes Rindou several confused seconds to realize his eyes are wet and blink the moisture away. When you reappear, you have steeled your nerves for the finishing blow.

“That’s why I don’t want to see you anymore. I need space and time to get over you, so um, please just stop calling and texting and all the rest. Just stop.”

Your face blurs again, and this time Rindou knows it’s because his eyes are watering. He blames his stupid glasses. He needs a stronger prescription.

There is no such excuse for your tears that drip past your chin to land on your collar. You wipe fruitlessly at the leakage, too slow to stimmy their fall.

If you say anything after that, Rindou doesn’t hear you over the ringing in his ears. Three women enter the bathroom arm-in-arm and immediately jabber at him about how he isn’t welcome, like three harpies sent to drive him away. Rindou doesn’t fight them as they push him out the door with their words.

Outside in the club, in the dark and music, far from the bright quiet of the bathroom, Rindou feels like he’s stepped onto the surface of Mars. Like he’s planets away from where you are, and he might as well be.

He doesn’t know how to find his way back to you because he stands now amid the wreckage, engine on fire, wings cracked. The plane has finally crashed.

A/N: entering my villain era

"'I was always watching you.' This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell." - Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

[zahri-melitor]

Batmen Eternal:

Oh TYNION. (Posits a future Tim at university with Sebastian Ives and Simon Valentine)

Simon Valentine. SIMON VALENTINE. You magnificent bastard sneaking even more Tim & Kon (and Tim/Kon) in here as best you can while Kon still does not, in fact, exist right now.

I also feel I haven't talked about Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong enough in my reviews of this run, and that's partly because the General is not exactly my favourite character, but it is interesting in how he's been twisted to be a Bat superfan in the most creepy manner, in regards to their quasi-paramilitary traits, which does fit in with Ulysses being Ulysses. Also his obsession with Tim, and his lovely little personal cave there full of idolisation of the exact wrong sort of military dictator generals. Ulysses finally getting his General haircut back (with the stars even growing in between issues, which is the funniest shit ever. Tim hallucinating them, Ulysses deciding he needs them in his program?)

I do like that we finally start to get a bit of Tim and Cass's late preboot dynamic returning between them. It's not 2011 level, but definitely is at least 2005ish in terms of the trust they start displaying in each other.

Steph and Cass finally getting more of their own revelations about preboot timelines is of course satisfying, if a little sad in terms of them both being like "they let me be part of the club??" That bit feels a bit more like Doylist commentary aimed at discussions of who counts as 'family' more than what's actually been portrayed on page through this entire run (which is Cass in particular actually inhabiting a LOT of the same spaces she lived in during the 2000s, including having space at the Manor nobody questioned).

And of course we finally get the OMAC payoff that's been teased all this run, because of the themes of control tied up in it via Brother Eye and its previous incarnations. I am enjoying it, if only in a slightly exasperated way, because what is happening here makes a great deal more sense if you're across what goes on with OMACs around Infinite Crisis, and the statements this is making about what Future Tim has done (that is, leant into Bruce's worst paranoia and picked up one of his old projects and modified it), rather than how I think this reads to newbie readers, which is at best "Tim learnt about protocols from Bruce". Because no! This is ongoing commentary on the "do we trust Bruce with protocols" discussion all the way back to Tower of Babel, at least, and Tim's altering position on them over time and what he will and will not do about this.

I like it! But I like it in context, and I worry it loses a lot of meaning when read by an audience who doesn't see Brother Eye show up and go "oh of fucking course, Bruce". This is supposed to get you mad at BRUCE. Even the reveal that Bruce was of course involved doesn't get across enough "BRUCE PLEASE STOP TRYING TO CONTROL EVERYTHING" (he will not).

(This is also to say this thread continues on and gets picked up in the Failsafe arc, which is "hey look Bruce's paranoia's back again, time for a new variation!")

I like where this finished, in terms of setting up potential future storylines of characters to spin out: Luke back out of costume for a while (typical, he does that frequently); Jean-Paul off to Justice League Odyssey; Kate offscreen for another Religion of Crime storyline/the end of her present Batwoman run; Cass set up to have her background with Babs re-established; Tim and Steph heading off to the starting point of Young Justice 2019; Clayface to ???? with Dr Victoria October (presumably to transition back to villain off panel for next time someone uses him). They're nice clear hooks and I enjoyed that it was done.

Was this a perfect run? No. But in terms of getting the characters assigned to it back on track in terms of characterisation and resupplying them with as much of their preboot characterisation as possible? It was incredibly successful. Definitely the best Bat title of the first 2 years of Rebirth (followed by All Star Batman).

[honeypiehotchner]

That’s When (Hotch x Fem!Reader) -- part three of Bye Bye, Baby

Part three has arrived! Guys, this was so much fun to write and this part made me so weepy. Thank y’all so much for reading <3

Loosely based on “That’s When” by Taylor Swift ft. Keith Urban xx

Summary: Juliet wants to meet Aaron, so you set it up. Things go better than you were expecting.

Warnings: angst, happy ending!

Word count: 3.7k this time EYE

Bye Bye, Baby (part one) || Don’t You (part two) || Hotch Masterlist

You said, “I know,” when I said I need some time, need some space/to think about all of this

You pour the coffee Aaron got you down the drain. You took maybe two sips on your way home.

Juliet is still with Dannie, but she’s on her way now to drop her off. And once Jules is asleep, you’ll be filling Dannie in on everything.

Easier said than done, because Juliet all but refuses to fall asleep.

“Munchkin,” you sigh. “You have school tomorrow.”

“M’not tired.”

You give her a look.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” She asks out of nowhere. “You look sad.”

“I’m okay, baby,” you whisper, even though you nearly start crying. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“French toast for breakfast?”

You chuckle, tapping her nose gently. “French toast. You got it.”

“Love you bunches,” she murmurs, already falling asleep.

You lean over and kiss her forehead. “Love you, munchkin.”

Juliet keeps her eyes closed as you stand and turn off the light, and you don’t doubt that she’s fast asleep by the time you pull her door closed.

Dannie is waiting on the couch, two glasses of wine already poured.

“You know me too well,” you laugh, taking your glass from her. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, it’s your wine,” Dannie grins.

“Right.”

Dannie watches you stare at your wine. Something you never do.

“How’d it go?” She asks. “It looks like it went bad.”

You snort. “Well, it wasn’t great.”

You watched me go/And I knew my words were hard to hear

“Oh boy.” Dannie shifts her body and faces you on the couch, her legs bent underneath her. “Go on.”

“His first question was if she’s his.”

Dannie scrunches her nose in disgust, an expression Jules has picked up from her. “What did you say?”

“That she’s mine, but he is her dad,” you exhale shakily. “I forgot she has his dimples, too.”

Dannie smiles sadly. “Honey…”

“Yeah, it was bad,” you admit. “It was so easy to forget all of that when I was angry and when I was too busy being pregnant,” you joke. “Seeing him just opened that door again.”

You swirl your wine for a second. “He said he wants to meet her. I told him I’d have to ask her first.”

“That’s good,” Dannie nods.

“How do I even bring that up?” You ask, defeated. “And what if she says no?”

“Then she says no,” Dannie shrugs her shoulders. “Then life goes back the way it was.”

You take in a deep breath. “Is it wrong that I kind of want her to say no?”

“I think that’s very motherly of you,” Dannie smiles. “You’ve protected her so well, I hope you know that.”

“I’ve tried.” You take a big sip of wine before your next sentence. “He asked me for a second chance.”

Dannie blinks. “Seriously?”

You nod.

“Did you tell him about the phone calls? He’s ignored you this whole time and now just because he realized he’s a father, he wants a second chance?” Dannie scoffs loudly. “Maybe I want her to say no, too. I hate men.”

You nearly inhale your wine in laughter. “You and me both.”

+++

As it turns out, bringing up Aaron to Juliet is easy. She asks you the next night why you still look sad, and you use it to bring him up.

“I’m not sad, munchkin, I’m just thinking really hard about something.”

Juliet furrows her eyebrows. “What?”

You slide off the couch to sit on the floor next to her where she’s coloring a picture of Elsa. “Remember how I told you that your dad and I don’t talk anymore?”

It was the easiest way to explain Aaron’s absence when Juliet started to ask about it. It was hard to think about because you and Aaron were never married, he didn’t die, and to make matters worse, he had no idea Juliet existed.

She nods, picking up a blue marker. “Yeah, you said adults have to stop talking to each other sometimes.”

“That’s right,” you nod. “Sometimes it’s better for us if we don’t speak. But sometimes, after a while, we can start talking again.”

“Okay.”’

“Well, your dad and I have started talking again,” you pause. “And he said he’d like to meet you. But only if you want to.”

Juliet thinks for a moment, then shrugs, switching to an orange marker. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” You ask, just to be sure. “Where do you want to go?”

“I can pick?”

“Sure can. Wherever you want.”

“Hmm,” she taps her chin for emphasis, and you try hard not to laugh. “What about McDonalds in the park?”

It’s a somewhat tradition of yours to get McDonalds, then go to her favorite park and have a picnic. It’s one of her favorite things to do, so you should’ve known.

“I love that,” you smile. “What about this Saturday?”

“Mhm!” She nods. “Can Dannie come, too?”

“I’ll ask her, but I don’t see why not.”

Juliet is completely satisfied with this answer and goes right back to coloring Elsa.

You chuckle quietly. Kids.

+++

It’s almost noon by the time you get Juliet in the car. And surprisingly, you were the one running behind today. Juliet was ready and sitting on your bed, watching you get dressed before you had even done your hair.

Now, though, you’ve picked up Dannie, and the three of you are headed to McDonalds.

Juliet hasn’t mentioned meeting Aaron once this morning, but she has talked about McDonalds at least four times now.

“How are you holding up?” Dannie asks while Juliet is occupied singing along to ‘Let It Go.’

“Nervous,” you admit quietly. “Thank you for coming.”

“I wouldn’t turn down McDonalds any day,” Dannie scoffs, then turns around to Juliet. “Are you excited?”

Listening to the two of them ramble makes you smile wide, and the drive to the park feels infinitely shorter.

You told Aaron you’d text him when you get there, so he can come over. He said he’d already be there, but for what reason you have no clue.

All you care about is setting out the blanket and getting Juliet to eat her food before she plays with her new Frozen toy.

Truthfully, you’re expecting him to text you and say he called on a case. Not that you blame him because you’ve been there, the BAU is unpredictable like that. But you wouldn’t be surprised.

However, you are surprised when Aaron jogs over.

Yes, jogs.

In shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers, with sweat clinging to his hair, he jogs over. And you lose all semblance of reality. There’s cotton in your mouth. Good fucking god, he looks good.

“When the hell did you start running?” It's the first thing that comes out of your mouth, and it’s complete word vomit.

Juliet gasps dramatically. “Bad word, Mommy.”

Dannie tries and fails to hold in her laugh.

“You’re right,” you chuckle. “Bad word.”

Aaron, with a smile, answers your question. “The BAU is having a triathlon. I’m training for it.”

“When is it?” You ask without entirely meaning to. You hate how easily you fall right back into conversation with him, how easily he makes you dumbfounded just by his looks.

“In a few weeks, so I’ve got some time,” he breathes. “Mind if I sit?”

You shake your head, scooting over. “Here, I got some nuggets.” You ordered enough for the two of you to share, mostly to save money, but now you’re realizing the implications of it.

You don’t have time to think about that, though, because Juliet has been staring at Aaron for a few moments.

“Munchkin?” You ask. Dannie nudges Juliet’s arm.

“Didn’t you hit us in the grocery store?”

Dannie bursts into laughter then, unable to control it this time, and thankfully, Aaron laughs, too.

“I did,” he nods. “I’m really sorry about that.”

“It’s okay, Aaron,” Juliet says, going right back to her nuggets, sandwiching fries in between two pieces of chicken.

His eyebrows raise and he looks at you.

All you can do is shrug. “She forgets nothing.”

From there, lunch is...uneventful.

Juliet is more focused on playing than she is talking to Aaron, but thankfully, she doesn’t seem upset by him being here.

Dannie asks him a couple questions, mostly standard ones. “What’s the BAU like? I bet the hours suck. You’re unit chief, too, right?”

Aaron answers everything politely, and seems mostly at ease.

After a while, you begin to relax, too.

You have no choice, really, when Juliet feels comfortable to ask questions like, “Are you really my dad? Why weren’t you talking to my mommy?”

Aaron handles the questions like a pro. “I am. Your mom and I needed some time to ourselves, so that’s why we weren’t talking.”

“Adults are weird,” she says, but she seems satisfied with his answers and even hands him her Olaf toy. “I’m gonna go swing.”

Aaron chuckles and sets Olaf in the shade of his leg. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t melt.”

Juliet tilts her head. “He’s a toy, he won’t melt.”

This time you’re the one incapable of holding in your laughter.

“Dannie, come on!” Juliet yells out, giggling when Dannie nearly trips over her feet to stand up.

As they run off, you start picking up Juliet’s trash and stuffing it back in the bag.

“Here, I’ll run it over to the trash can.”

You turn your head to Aaron with a smirk. “You’ll run it over there? Promise?”

He gives you a look.

He doesn’t actually take it over to the trash can because he goes completely still, then says, “She has my eyes.”

You take a deep breath. “Yeah. She does. Your dimples, too.”

He smiles. “Thank god she got your nose, though.”

“What?” You whip your head around. “She has your nose.”

“She does not,” he argues. “And as I said, thank god.”

“Oh, shut up, I love your nose.”

His smile is never-ending. “Really?”

You move on from it quickly. “Thanks for meeting us today.”

“Thank you for letting me.”

You nod slowly, deciding to blurt out what’s been eating at you. “You know, if— If you’re doing this just to get a second chance with me, please don’t.”

“I’m not.”

“Because I don’t need that kind of stress, and Juliet doesn’t either—”

I said, “I know,” when you said I did you wrong/made mistakes, and put you through all of this

“Y/N,” Aaron’s hand rests gently on your arm, getting your attention. He lifts it when you stop talking. “I’m not. I’m doing this because I want to be a part of her life, as her dad. I wasn’t there for her, or you, and I’m sorry. I just want to make it right. Let me make it up to you — to her.”

You stare at him closely, watching. “You mean that?”

He nods. “I do. And I’m so sorry my actions in the past made you think differently of me.”

“I just don’t want her to get hurt,” you murmur. “She’s my baby.”

“I know,” Aaron says. “I know.”

+++

Co-parenting with Aaron is surprisingly easy. Or maybe he makes it easy.

Every Saturday, you and Juliet meet him in the park for a picnic lunch after he’s done training for the triathlon. Sometimes you get there early — which happens nearly every week as Juliet becomes more eager to see him — and you get to cheer Aaron on as he finishes his run.

Dannie comes sometimes, but the few times that she hasn’t have been just as pleasant.

Aaron keeps his word. He does this to spend time with Juliet as her dad, and he doesn’t make any advances on you. The two of you don’t even hug at the end of the afternoon, but Juliet has taken to running and jumping in his arms.

She’s growing more and more attached to him every week, and you hate the dread that you feel. So far, you’ve been lucky. Aaron’s cases have been during the week, so he hasn’t missed a single Saturday — yet.

It’s one of the reasons you are grateful for your transfer at the time four years ago. If you had been in as unpredictable of a job as the BAU when you were pregnant, or when Juliet was born, you have no idea how you would’ve done it. Your job now is a perfect 8 to 5, sometimes 6, but that’s only been a handful of times in the past four years.

Juliet is used to you being there every day. And now, she’s getting used to seeing Aaron every week. You’re just bracing yourself for the time when he has a case and won’t be able to make it.

You try not to think that far ahead, but you can’t help yourself. You were once an agent under him. You know just how crazy the BAU can get. You know exactly what to expect when it gets busy.

Which is why you don’t understand the feelings that are growing inside of you.

You told him he wasn’t getting a second chance — at least not right now. Because you don’t have it in you, and you don’t want to do that to Juliet if it doesn’t work out.

But that was before things started working out.

And you said, “When can I come back?”

Before he never missed a single Saturday. Before he insisted on a birthday dinner when he realized her birthday was a few months ago. Before she started running into his arms. Before he started lifting her up and spinning her around, listening to her giggles as she squealed, “Mommy! I’m flying!” Before she fell asleep on the blanket in the park, and he moved over to shield her from the sun, all while still talking to you.

Now, you don’t know what to do. It sounds awful, but you didn’t expect him to prove himself this well.

You’ve always loved him. That is easy enough to recognize and admit. But you never imagined feeling this way again.

“Mommy?” Juliet pushes your bedroom door open a little.

You sit up, patting your bed. “Good morning, munchkin. C’mere.”

She climbs into bed and right to your side, and you spread the blanket over her, letting her snuggle into your side.

After a moment, you think she’s asleep, but then she whispers, “Are you and dad going to stop talking again?”

You freeze. Up until now, Juliet has called him “Aaron.” Obviously, she knows Aaron is her dad, but she’s never called him that.

“Why do you ask that, baby?” You murmur, kissing the top of her head.

“I don’t want you guys to stop talking again. I like hanging out with him.” She buries her head further into your chest. “He makes me laugh.”

Tears fill your eyes. “He makes me laugh, too.”

“I know,” she smiles into your shirt. “He looks at you a lot.”

“What?”

“When you’re not looking,” she whispers, half-asleep again. “He smiles a lot. He has dimples like me.”

“He does,” you smile softly, wiping your tears away.

+++

The day of the triathlon, Juliet is more than eager to get to the park to cheer Aaron on.

You, on the other hand, feel like you could throw up from the thought of it.

Aaron told you the rest of the team will be there, and you’re grateful for the heads up, but you’re also nervous as shit. You haven’t seen them since your send off party. You haven’t texted with Penelope and Derek in...probably two years now.

He said he didn’t tell the team you’re coming because he didn’t want you to feel pressured, but he also warned you that the team has been questioning him nonstop if he’s seeing someone. He said he’s told them that he isn’t, but of course, they think he’s lying.

Dannie comes with to the triathlon, mainly because Juliet asked her to. It’s been a few days since Juliet has seen Dannie because she was out of town for work, but now she’s back, so Juliet wants her around all the time again.

You’re grateful for Dannie’s presence once again to calm your nerves and offer distractions at every second.

Surprisingly, you don’t see the team anywhere when you arrive, so you, Juliet, and Dannie set up your chairs and blanket peacefully. It’s a while before Aaron will be over here for the run, the last part of the triathlon, so Juliet breaks out her coloring book at your and Dannie’s feet.

You and Dannie spend the wait while idly talking, and after about an hour, the first cheers begin echoing out.

Juliet perks up with the noise. “Is that dad?”

Dannie’s eyes snap to yours and she mouths, “Did she?”

You nod, smiling stupidly. It brings you way more joy to hear Juliet freely call Aaron her dad. Way more joy than you thought.

“Maybe,” you stand up and reach for Juliet’s hand. “Let’s go see.”

Juliet grabs your hand and starts tugging you toward the front, and Dannie follows with a laugh, watching you get drug away by a four-year-old.

A few runners are passing by, but none of them are Aaron. Juliet is watching impatiently, and squeals when Dannie lifts her up onto her shoulders.

“Can you see now, munchkin?” You ask, your hand resting gently on her back, even though Dannie is holding onto her ankles.

Juliet nods. “I see him!”

You look down the way, and you see him, too.

Your lips split into a grin almost immediately. His black shorts, black t-shirt, with his number pinned to the front. His hair is slick with sweat, and yet, you still have a burning desire to run your fingers through it.

Aaron moves to the side, running right next to you, giving Juliet a high five on his way by, and you, too, only when his fingers graze yours, he squeezes.

As soon as he crosses the finish line, Juliet is scrambling out of Dannie’s arms, and when she hits the ground, she runs.

You’re running after her, Dannie too, calling her name, because she really shouldn’t run off like that.

But your nerves calm down the second you see Juliet jumping into her dad’s arms.

Slowing to a walk, you shake your head with a smile as Aaron spins her around, squeezing her tightly.

“Hey,” he says when he sees you. “I’m glad you guys could make it.”

“Me too,” you smile. “She wouldn’t let me miss it,” you nod toward Juliet.

“You’re smelly,” Juliet says out of nowhere, pinching her nose.

Dannie laughs loudly at her comment as Aaron sets her down. But despite her comment, she doesn’t move from next to him.

“Is that who I think it is?” Derek Morgan’s voice floats through your ears.

You turn around to face him, putting your hands on your hips. “Depends, who do you think it is?”

Derek grins wide. “Come here, you.”

You hug him tightly, and over his shoulder you see everyone else, all with shocked looks on their faces. JJ, Emily, Penelope, Spencer, and Rossi, too.

After giving out hugs all around, you look back to see Juliet still clinging to Aaron’s leg.

“Who is this?” Morgan asks quietly, kneeling down to Juliet’s level. “Hey there.”

She eyes him skeptically. “Hi.”

“Munchkin, this is Derek. He’s a friend, too.”

Derek waves.

“Do you like Frozen?” Juliet asks.

Derek nods seriously. “I love it.”

“Hmph,” she wraps her arm tighter around Aaron’s leg. The sight makes you want to crumble. She looks up at Aaron, and says, “Dad?” To get his attention.

Everyone stills. Even Derek.

“Yes, honey?” Aaron replies, kneeling down, too.

“Are they your friends, too?”

He nods. “We’re all really good friends.”

She shrugs. “Okay.” She looks around at everyone, and gasps when she sees Penelope. “I like your bracelet!”

Penelope looks down at it with a smile. “You wanna try it on?”

Juliet practically sprints toward Penelope with a dramatic nod.

While the two of them are playing with Pen’s jewelry, everyone else is looking at you and Hotch with blatantly shocked expressions.

“We’ll explain later,” you offer. “But the answer is yes.”

Rossi, bless him, breaks the awkward, silent tension. “Is anyone else starving?”

You laugh some nerves away. “Yeah, I am. We just need to go pack up our stuff.”

“I can help,” Aaron says.

“Okay, yeah,” you nod, glancing over at Juliet, but her, Penelope, JJ, and Emily are now sitting in the grass, talking animatedly about Frozen.

“I’ll stay over here,” Dannie says, nudging your arm.

“Thank you,” you murmur, trying to hide your dumb smile at the thought of being alone with Aaron, even if for only a few seconds.

Regardless, you try to keep your cool when you turn back to him. “We’re just over here.”

“Lead the way,” he gestures ahead.

You ignore all efforts to hide your smile now as you start walking. He falls into step beside you, his sweaty shoulder brushing yours, but you don’t mind.

And against all of your better judgement, you slide your hand into his.

His surprised look is priceless, and you can’t help the snort of laughter that escapes you. “What? Am I not allowed to make the first move?”

You don’t know if the red on his cheeks is from running or blushing. “No, no, you’re allowed.”

“Good,” you murmur, walking a little closer. Your things are far too close for your liking. You want to walk with him like this for longer.

When you stop next to your chairs, you don’t let go of his hand. He doesn’t let go, either.

“Can I ask something?” He says, squeezing your hand.

“Sure.”

He steps closer, his toes nearly touching yours. “If you make the first move, am I allowed to make the second?”

You can’t help the violent swarm of butterflies in your stomach. “I think that’s how that works.” You pause, tilting your head, gesturing to how close your feet are. “Was that your move?”

He shakes his head. “No. This is.”

That’s when, when I saw your face/You let me in, and baby, that’s when

Aaron’s free hand holds your jaw as he kisses you in the same tender, gentle way that he used to, only this one has four years’ worth of apologies in every touch. You let go of his hand to smooth your hands on his chest, his neck, any place you can touch because it’s been too long. Way too long.

That’s when I want you/That’s when I love you/That’s when

[husbandohunter]

Boys over flowers [Genshin Impact/Various x Reader] Part 2

Not everything had to be about fighting. Ahem Childe.

Genre: fluff, angst(?)

Characters: Zhongli, Childe, Albedo, Xiao

{Zhongli}

Out of all the bountiful possessions in the land he carved with his very own hands, the glaze lily had always been his favourite.

This flower was a nostalgia stained with time. As much as he loved them, the love he felt was more of a bittersweet sadness if anything. The loss of a friend, his mentor, someone he cherished so deeply, all of it was held into a single glaze lily.

Once as Morax, now as ordinary Zhongli, in those 6000 years he had seen it all. Even his grief for Guizhong faded into a memory.

Sometimes Zhongli felt like he was reading from a story book. Detatched while staring through an omniscient standpoint. It seems that his infinite years brought both experience and lonliness along the way.

"Zhongli? What are you staring at?"

But not when he was with you.

The glaze lily went on many journeys when he met you

He remembers the first encounter on a sunset night just as the petals  were about to bloom. You were there, crouched down, staring into his golden eyes.

“This is for you! Not many can be fully matured like this so make sure to take good care of it,” You held it out to him and he takes the stem out of your hold.

“A parting gift, I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” Zhongli sees it as a sign of a new contract, “It seems you possess a good eye when you were selecting them.”

He remembers the bouquet you presented during his birthday, the garland you placed on his head when he was reading, the vase by his desk always filled to the brim whenever you’d pay a visit to his parlour.

He remembers how the blue petals scattered across the floor the day you two married, everywhere he went so did this flower. Everytime he saw this flower, he thought of you.

Was it okay to feel like this? No one can ever replace Guizhong, was it okay to love again even when this being was much more perishable than she was? Zhongli was use to the experience of tragedy and loss as it was part of life.

Ah, so this must be what it feels like to live like a mortal.

To cherish every passing moment knowing that it won’t last forever. He will embrace it to the end. 

Old memories that were once dust rose from the soil, now reborn into a new beginning. Your curious gaze leans closer to his profile, sitting side-by-side under the blankets of your shared bed, the corners of his lips lift into a small smile.

“I’m only reminiscing, my dear. You don’t need to worry for me.” He kisses your forehead and tucked you to bed. The candle now blown out as his arms wrapped around your waist while spooning from behind.

Zhongli closed his eyes, knowing if he dreamt of a garden full of glaze lilies, there will be no sadness behind it.

{Childe}

Mother fucker would try to turn this into a sparring session.

This is why you NEVER invite Childe. If the valley were the air nomads, Childe was the fire nation. He’d stomp his muddy shoes in front of you just to get your attention simply because he knows it will piss you off.

An angry s/o means a potential fight. Win win situation.

Thus, no one blamed you for giving him a cold shoulder after that.

“Aha, looks like I went a little too far, didn’t I? Alright alright, I’ll stop trampling on your flowers from now on, you have my word. So talk to me, okay? Please?”

Alas you spare him a glance, “Make that a pinky promise.”

He didn’t know you were so serious about gardening. The Feiyun commerce guild took greate pride in cultivating the finest silk flowers in all of Teyvat and you being from that guild held up that legacy. Even if Childe tries to buy back the ones he stepped on, nothing could match the quality of your work.

Needless to say, your little hobby became a normal thing, Childe was very chaotic in nature so something more calm was nice to mediate that attitude. You taught him how to water plants, place the fertilizer and knowing which ones to pick.

But let’s be real, florist Childe isn’t that far-fetched because he is 10/10 waifu material.

Then Teucer comes in and tags along. He wanted to take some silk flowers back to Tonia until Childe informed him they’ll wilt on their way to Snezhnaya. 

“Aww, that’s too bad,” he would say while pouting, “Then I’ll give them to you big sister (Y/n)!”

“How sweet, you’ll be quite the charmer when you’re all grown up, Teucer. Maybe even better than your big brother.”

“Come on now, babe. You know that’s impossible.”

You twirled the silk flower right under your nose, the playful tone never leaving your voice, “Oh really? You and Teucer both share the same genes so yes, it is a possibility.”

An amusing glint dances in the ocean of his gaze as he gleefully remarks, “Well if you put it that way, I think Teucer would be at a very big disadvantage.”

“What do you-”

Before you could finish, Childe covers Teucer’s eyes and leans over to steal a sinful kiss, sliding his tongue inside. He purposely brushed his lips over yours after parting, completely satisfied by your flustered expression.

I love this bastard

{Xiao}

Hip hip hooray for having both Qiqi and Xiao in your party. Must be fun collecting their ascension materials.

“Adeptus Xiao!”

Your dumbass fell off the high cliff while obtaining the violet grass, Xiao yeets in from nowhere and caught you from death’s clutches.

Shall I mention that this had happened TWICE already?

Xiao carries you to safety and gently settles you down to your feet. He shot you the sharpest and most deadpan look he could muster because actions speak louder that words, he was trying to make a point.

You gave him a weary smile as the violetgrass batch limps in your hands along with the qingxins.

“I can hardly fathom how utterly stupid and moronic you can actually be. What did you think would happen when you tried to pull off that stunt? That you’d suddenly grow wings and be able to fly?”

His harsh words put you back into your place like a scolded child, “I’m sorry...I just wanted to help...”

Mah man does not watch what he says and always end up guilty. Your kicked puppy look is really going to be the death of him. He means well, just harsh when it comes to your well-being.

“Fine, give me those. I’ll take care of it.” He wouldn’t allow you to retort, he just took them from your hands and left without a word.

Let’s just say that Xiao isn’t the best when it comes to handling flowers as he would handle monesters, his touch isn’t the most delicate either and would prefer to get the job done fast. 

Sometimes he’d pull the roots our along with it, dirt and mud dripping from the bottom of the stem. Or the opposite. He pulls too hard and the stem just SNAPS and you’re left with just the blossom. 

“Does it matter? They’re only ingredients as you’ve said.”

That gave you a perfect excuse to teach him the ways of gardening and just be more delicate overall. 

At first he didn’t understand why humans were so meticulous about these things but when he saw a man present a bouquet to his wife, Xiao began to reconsider his methods. He doesn’t undersand mortal traditions as much and sticks to something simple and classy.

Don’t be surprised when you find a bunch on your desk for your birthday <3

{Albedo}

The sheer cold of dragon spine could naturally kill any botanical organisms aside from mints. The only flowers Albedo usually sees are the ones he artificially makes.

But being the genius he was, Albedo knew every variety of flowers to exist in the book. In this case, HE was the expert.

To him, the flower was the symbol of life. Albedo only knew the scientific facts of plant life and their natural functions, you on the otherhand were more familiar with the flower languages in a deeper meaning.

Today was a rare day where Albedo figured he’d step out of that freezing lab and conduct his research somewhere warmer, specifically Windrise where it’s quiet and away from the city.

“Dandelions may not be flowers but thei’re the main specialty of Mondstadt carrying the meaning of ‘freedom’! That’s probably how the Acting Grandmaster got her title.”

“Freedom...” He ponders, “I guess you cold say that.”

Albedo can’t understand why people would choose to associate meaning with plants. Where do their ideas come from? And why? Frankly, he can’t see the point in any of it. 

But at the same time, it made him happy to see you so enthusiastic about his research even if it wasn’t quite near the target. Albedo had always been so engrossed in his work and you’d just silently keep him company of the side, not many times where you both fot to nerd out on the same topic.

Emotions were still a mystery to him. It seems that even upon the most boring subjects, they don’t seem boring anymore when talking to his significant other. Soon enough, Albedo found himself putting his research aside and just listening to you talk. 

“And the Rose expresses romance and love. It’s common for lovers to give it to another during Valentines day.”

He hums cheekily, “Are you telling me that just to hint me to give one to you?”

“W-Well, I didn’t say that.”

He got nothing done. Perhaps his research can wait for another day, right now, he was more curious on what other meanings can a flower hold.

[wordsnstuff]

20 Mistakes To Avoid in Enemies To Lovers

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Weak Conflict

There should always be a strong, compelling source of tension between two people who are considered enemies. Even if their rivalry stems from external sources, such as bad blood between families or competing for a number one spot, there should always be a concrete reason why they hate each other.

Not Explaining Forgiveness

When one of these conflicts subsides, or a tense moment resolves, it should be justified. Tension and emotions shouldn’t disappear because you’re trying to stuff romantic moments in here and there. If one of your characters crosses a line and the other character chooses to forgive them, there needs to be a clear and understandable reason. It doesn’t always have to sit well with the reader. Your character can make a blatantly stupid decision, but it needs to serve the plot. 

No Tension To Be Found

If your characters have to verbally or physically assault each other to demonstrate the tension between them, you’re doing it wrong. If they have to kiss for the reader to see that they like each other, you’re doing it wrong. Tension is in the little things. It’s in the instances that most people would overlook, but your characters zero-in on because the subtext is too thick to gloss over. Tension is the most important plot device in enemies-to-lovers stories, so it requires a lot of time and attention to minute details. 

Conflict Solved Too Easily

If the rivalry between your characters is one misstep after another, with immediate forgiveness following, the tension won’t build correctly. You’re working your way up to a boiling over moment. A moment where everything comes out and then, once resolved, makes way for the romantic feelings to enter. If the conflicts don’t slowly build on each other, that boiling moment will come out of nowhere and be less satisfying to read. Don’t let your characters off that easily. Enemies aren’t constantly letting things slide. 

Characters Changing For One Another

People don’t need to be exactly the same to see attractive qualities in one another. It’s true that relationships shift your perspective and that it occasionally results in outward changes in behavior, but one or both characters shouldn’t mold their personality around their partner. 

Stupid Potion

If one of your characters has to become oblivious or avoid critical thought to maintain a relationship with that character, you haven’t made the two characters compatible enough. This is especially true when one or both of your character’s identity revolves around a higher intelligence. They should have enough in common that there doesn’t have to be a giant shift in one or both personalities to work as a couple. 

The Relationship Brings Them Down

The thing about enemies to lovers stories is that the happy endings are usually an indication of the author’s view of what is and is not forgivable in a potential partner. The acceptance of someone’s past mistakes, current flaws, and future struggles. When a love story ends with a couple that repeatedly lower each other or hurt each other, that sends a bad message, and that is your responsibility to avoid. It doesn’t need a happy ending, but it should never have a destructive one. 

Writing Abuse Instead of Rivalry

There is a big difference between writing two equals who have a rivalry slowly falling in love and putting aside their differences, and writing an abusive, predatory love interest who repeatedly hurts, manipulates, and gaslights the main character. Just because you can imagine the character forgiving them doesn’t mean they’re a good partner. Cheating, physical abuse, isolation, passive aggression, and manipulation are not character flaws. They’re not “mistakes” that the character needs to forgive in order to save their relationship. It’s abuse, and when you write a story between an abuser and a victim that has a happy ending, that has consequences. 

Revealing Feelings In A Cliché Way

This is very subjective, however, there are also a plethora of tropes to choose from and an infinite amount of alterations you can apply to make them your own. The objective, however, is to build up to it in a way that creates a satisfying payoff, and an interesting moment that serves all of the work you’ve done to build to it. There’s nothing worse than reading chapters and chapters of build up, anticipating a big moment where sparks fly, and then having all of that tension result in a sad sputter of mediocrity.

Instant Trust

Trust is difficult to build between two people, especially when they have a complicated past. Trust is earned, no matter who you are or what you’ve been through, it’s always a process. It’s never inherent. When two characters have a history of betrayal or hurt, trust is going to be even harder to develop between them, and that process is an opportunity for more tension, character development, conflict, and eventually a satisfying resolution. Trust development is a major plot device, and I recommend you take advantage of it. It’s also a huge opportunity for building romantic tension amongst the angst of trials and tribulations. 

Why Do They Hate Each Other, Though?

There’s a thin line between love and hate, and that line is infatuation; obsession. So, what put the two of them on the bad side of that line? This reason is the main conflict. The overarching plot begins with the point where that rivalry either begins or is challenged after a long while of stagnation, and it ends with the two characters crossing over that line into love. You need to make that beginning point very clear.

Rivalry Shouldn’t Just Dissolve

There needs to be a transitionary period that is tense and awkward with scattered moments that make the effort worth it to both of them. There should be a “Well, we hated each other last week and then they did some really sweet things and now I’m not so sure. Maybe we’re starting to become friends now? I feel really excited when I see them, so I must not hate them anymore, right?” period. 

Complete Opposites

Yes, opposites can attract. Yes, completely different people can fit together very well and have a happy relationship, but this is a cliché and is, in most cases, poorly thought out with little to no originality. 

Love With No Reason

Just like your characters need a reason to hate each other, they need a reason to love each other. There has to be something that makes them work. Not just a common hobby or characteristic or exterior aspect they share, but something that makes them fit together. If they love each other because... they can, your reader will feel like they’re watching two stupid, lonely people tolerate each other’s flaws in the interest of sex or companionship for 100 pages. 

No Actual Conflict Resolution

Relationships are built through conflict resolution. Communication, empathy, effort, and understanding between two people who work to make each other happy. Hollow forgiveness is not apart of that process, and if that’s all there is, you’re not developing a realistic relationship between compatible people, you’re depicting a toxic relationship that, in the case of these origins, can be abusive. 

Underusing Sexual Tension

Sexual tension is great. It’s easy to develop, it has a satisfying payoff, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space on the pages. It doesn’t have to result in x-rated material, especially if you’re writing for a young adult audience, but it’s simple and effective. 

No Awkward Transition Period

A large chunk of the plot should be awkward and uncomfortable to watch. The transition should be organic and make sense for your characters, but all organic movement contains struggle. Nobody goes from hating each other to loving each other overnight, and relationships are complicated and require hard work. Show this.

Catalogue Characters

There are enough stories out there with cardboard characters and self-insert protagonists, especially in romance. Make your protagonists unique and individual. Make your characters diverse and interesting to read about. Readers should have a bit of wiggle room for imagination, but that doesn’t mean they should be filling in the blanks like your characters are Mad Libs. Don’t close your eyes and point at character archetypes to form your cast. It’s obvious and lazy. 

Stagnant Tone

The tone of these stories often falls flat because in the interest of building tension, writers ignore purposeful tone shifting, scene-to-scene. Change it up, make it potent, and make a lasting impact during important moments. Suspense and anticipation shouldn’t just build during the climax and resolution. 

Bad Pacing

When your readers spend hours reading a story that promises a romantic payoff, they expect to see some of it. I think that a three act structure is really effective with this type of arc, with the first third being devoted to building rival tensions, the middle third being the shift from rivals to friends, and the last third building that romantic tension and ending with a happy resolution. 

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Masterlist | WIP Blog

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[dokifluffs]

Overfeeding and Aftercare | Kenma, Bokuto, Kuroo

Pairings: Kenma X Reader (gender neutral), Bokuto X Reader (gender neutral) ft. Akaashi, Kuroo X Reader (gender neutral)

Genre: Fantasy!! VAMPIRE HAIKYUU. Flufffyy 

Author’s Note: it is about time i dip myself into my favorite genre: fantasy. i hope you all enjoy! Happy reading~~

Warnings: blood, passing out from loss of blood, kuroo’s is a bit spicy 

Overfeeding and Aftercare | Tendo, Himekawa, Miya Twins

Kenma: 

The bitter cold of winter nipped at your cheeks and nose as you walked through the windy day to Kenma’s house, snow crunching beneath your boots with every step, the wind howling in your ear, your eyes squinting at the piercing wind blowing in your direction

No one else even dared to step outside on this day yet here you were

You clenched to the key to his door firmly in your pocket, mentally preparing yourself as you approached it to open it one swift go

Which you did

You groaned into the seemingly empty house as you stomped off the snow on your boots on a towel in the corner behind the door

You peeled off your layers as the heat around the house slowly embraced you. No lights were on but you could see the flickers of flames burning in the fireplace in the living room yet no one was there

Your skin, mostly your hands and cheeks burned as your body temperature rose back up to it’s normal warmth in the cozy home

The house was quiet and still as if it was sleeping, crackle and popping sounds filling the living room

“Kenma?” You leaned on the stairs, calling upwards, your voice echoing into the sudden wide open space of the staircase

“What?” His sudden soft spoken voice made your head whip to the living room, his face illuminated by his switch, eyes glued on the monitor as he played animal crossing

“W…Were you there the entire time?” You asked so confused, you could’ve sworn it was empty yet here he was sat comfortably in a loose t-shirt and sweatpants

“Mm, maybe, I don’t really remember… What are you doing here?” His voice was soft, soothing with the crackles of the fire, the bright flickers illuminating on his facial features. He didn’t even look up from his game as his thumbs never stopped moving

“It’s feeding time, remember?” You made your way around the other couches and sat to the right of Kenma, the cushion soft and plush, you were able to sink right in beside him

You rolled up your sleeve and offered your right wrist in front of his mouth

He paused momentarily from his game, his dainty hand barely even touching yours as he sunk his teeth into your wrist before returning back into his game

In this position, you rest your chin on his shoulder, watching him play, listening to the sounds of his character, who looked exactly like a cat, run around, catching animals and whatnot to distract yourself from the slight suckling sounds from Kenma as he fed

He was never one to feed much with his small appetite, taking the bare minimum of what he needed, eager to return to his game but it was always a big relief seeing when he was actually feeding, taking more than the last

The two of you were wrapped up in the game, watching as his character went from island to island, making deals, purchasing clothes and shops, trapping his villagers

You played animal crossing too, you just weren’t the best nor did you advance your island that much; it was a slow process but you were fine with it but seeing how Kenma played with what seemed like limitless currency and resources, you couldn’t help but wish your island looked as good as his

Coldness began to slowly creep up your body from your legs to your abdomen and your arms

You shivered, suddenly feeling drained and dizzy

It wasn’t until your consciousness was slipping out of your grasp did you realize kenma had been feeding on your non-stop ever since he bit into you, constantly draining you of your blood as he played

Before a word could get passed your lips, your body fell back to the couch with Kenma not even realizing

“Y/N, I made a character look like you…” His words died off when he turned showing off the character he dressed in clothes you typically wore

His eyes flickered bright red for a brief moment feeling guilt wash over him seeing he made you pass out. “This won’t do,” he tucked his switch carefully into his pocket as he scooped you into his arms

As your mind slowly woke, your eyes opened to the warm light of a lamp illuminating behind you, the shirt kenma wore with his body right beside yours

You woke to the sound of his animal crossing as he continued to play

Your body felt as stiff as a statue as you slowly regained strength after your sleep. Half your body was laid over Kenma’s, one of his arms looped around your shoulders so his hands could hold his switch over your heads

“You’re awake,” he glanced down to you when you shifted your legs, your breathing patter different now that you regained consciousness. “Sorry, I overfed,” he apologized as a little “yahoo” came from his character after finding a rare item dug up on the beach

“It’s fine, are you well fed now?” You rubbed your hand over his chest, letting out a deep breath you didn’t realize you were even holding, melting your warm body with his cool one

“Mmhm, thanks to you,” his lips pulled into a subtle smile

“Look, I made you in my game,” he ran his character to a nicely made house that looked like your bedroom, the character looking exactly like you

“Hmm, so cute,” you hummed, nuzzling your face even closer to his comfy body

He turned his body toward you more, readjusting his hold on his switch so you could watch too. This only made you wish you brought your switch too so you could play with him and visit his island

Before he went back to progressing his island, he gave your character in his game flowers

“An apology gift,” the two of you chuckling under his covers in his warmly lit bedroom

“You are forgiven,” you draped your arm around his thin waist, giving him a light squeeze as a hug as you continued to watch him play for the rest of the evening

The bitter winds continues to blow outside, you were grateful you were no where else than right here with Kenma

Bokuto ft. Akaashi: 

You let everything go and relaxed yourself as you slept in your bed, the curtains shutting out any bit of sunlight that could potentially peek in

The weighted blanket on your body made you sleep deeper, keeping you warmer than ever as your mattress cradled you as you visited the dream world

Your bedroom was filled with the sound of your breaths and e fan blowing through the room but with your unconsciousness, you didn’t even realize or feel anyone else in the room

Especially not Bokuto as he silently stepped toward you

He could feel his stomach dropping and grumbling as his ears filled with the booming sounds of your slowed heart beat in his ears, his fangs poking his plush bottom lip

Your shoulder was bare as you slept, a perfect opening for Bokuto to satisfy the never ending hunger he craved for your blood

Your smell alone was able to enhance his senses tenfold, especially when hungry which was nearly always

Being in your bedroom that was filled with everything you, his vision was tunneled as he set his sights on your shoulder

He knelt down as you slept near the edge of your bed

He brought his finger over your arm, warm with life and blood that your beating heart pumped, the thought of your taste making his mouth already water

Unable to resist it any further, he ignored the conscience voice of Akaashi who told him to wait until you called that you were ready to feed them, mainly Bokuto

His teeth sunk into your skin and lips onto your arm as he sucked, his hand gripping your wrist and the other your bed sheets

Your brows furrowed as you slowly woke to the draining feeling and pinching pain in your arm, your vision blurry as you turned your head over to find Bokuto feeding on you

It was like honey on his tongue and lips, his eyes fluttering shut and rolling back, enraptured by your taste

His gluttonous side came out as he fed, your body waking up and jolting in his grasp as he readjusting his bite

“Ow, b-bokuto,” you tried to push him off of you but it was no use; he was infinitely times stronger than you and especially stronger as he drained you with what felt like your life being sucked out of you

None of your protests worked as he was in his own world, not even hearing your voice or your taps to his body

Your vision blurred as his figure doubled, tripled in your eyes, your breath slowing down as darkness that dotted the corner of your vision was now taking over the entirety of your vision

It felt as if there was a weight on your body that paralyzed you

You could feel your heart beating weakly, your face pressed into a different fabric that wasn’t the bedding of your bed

Blinking your eyes, your vision was suddenly met with Bokuto’s glimmering golden eyes with tints of red as his hands held the edge of the couch, his normal perked up, spiky hair drooping down

“Y/N, I’m sorry,” he apologized profusely, an iron muzzle covering his mouth, making him looking like a sad puppy

“It’s okay, you must’ve been hungry, right?” You cupped his face, his skin flawless and cool to the touch, your hold light on his skin as he covered your hand with his

“He was supposed to wait for me, my sincerest apologies, Y/N,” Akaashi spoke up, still pretty annoyed as he sat on the other couch which made sense as to why Bokuto had his muzzle on

Despite being centuries older, Bokuto relied on Akaashi to control his feedings after almost killing you more than he would like to count

His strong grasp cautiously lifted you as you tried to sit up, pulling and holding you close in his embrace, his hand running down your back

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” his eyes glistened with sadness and you knew he meant these words. You were his everything and hunger gets the best of everyone

“It’s okay, just wait til I’m ready next time, okay?”

“Mmhm,” he nodded. “I also bought you some of the candy you like,” he pulled out the little baggy from his pocket at Akaashi’s advice when he first arrived as the younger one treated your bite, cleaning your unconscious person

Bokuto fed you the candies one by one as you remained sitting in his lap, your head resting on his shoulder to regain your strength, a blanket draped over your laps

Glancing up to Bokuto, you could see the dejected look in his eyes

Without a word, you reached your arms around Bokuto’s head, unclasping the leather straps that held the muzzle around his face

“Y/N-“ Akaashi spoke up, sitting up from his seat

“He won’t hurt me,” you reached to the buckle hidden by his hair

“No, he’s right, leave it,” Bokuto took a hold of your hand, bringing them back to your lap

His non-beating heart ached as he remembered the hard pain on the back of his head when Akaashi pulled him off of you like a feral beast, the color drained from your skin, your body cold, nearly matching his own

He could still hear the faint sound of your heart beating as Akaashi pinned him down, how weak and slow it beat in your chest

You shook off his grasp and reached back behind his head, unclasping it and removing it, tossing it to the end of the couch

“You didn’t mean to, don’t feel like you’re some kind of monster when you’re not,” you leaned into Bokuto’s body, doing your best to wrap your arms around his waist, resting your head on his collar

He wrapped his arms around your body and squeezed you but never enough to ever hurt you

“You never have or will be a monster, Ko,” you leaned up pressing a kiss to his neck and cheek repeatedly

“Never,” you mumbled into his ear as he leaned back onto the couch, laying with you on top, never wanting to let you go as he took in your scent but the hunger never came

Not when he got to hold you and have you exist in this lifetime with him after seeing so many come and go

You were the one he never wanted to see go

Kuroo:

You shook off your raincoat and boots as you stepped through the door, closing it behind you, powerful winds outside which made it seem like all the trees were going to fall over

Before you could even speak, Your back was suddenly met with the door you just closed

Kuroo’s lips moved with yours, his head leaned down to taste your tongue with his, one hand propped above his head on the door, the other holding your jaw, tilting your head up

He kept his leg in between yours

“Time for me to eat, kitten,” Kuroo’s eyes glinted a bright red as he pulled out of the kiss, your lips already swollen from his rough force

With his thumb, he turned your head away, pulling down the collar of your shirt a bit more so he could latch his fangs into your skin

The way you tasted made his eyes roll to the back of his head in pleasure, humming as he suckled, not wasting a single bit

You let out high pitched whines at the piercing feeling, your hands gripping onto his wrists, trying to shake him off a bit but he was too strong

You weren’t going anywhere, especially when he had been starving for the past couple weeks. It wasn’t your fault you couldn’t make it last week to your normal feeding day

But Kuroo was desperate. Everything, all his senses and needs and urges were heightened and now you were stuck here

Your blood coating his tastebuds was like liquid gold to him, he wanted to taste everything

He pulled back, seeing the way your blood dripped out, exciting him even more as he pointed his tongue, trailing the blood up until he lapped his teeth marks in your neck

He pulled your shirt more, stretching the collar to reveal your shoulder. He sunk his teeth once again into your body, the hunger he had been feeling for the past weeks slowly disappearing

You whimpered into his hear as he fed, hearing nothing but the way he suckled on your blood

But he couldn’t even hear you- all he could do was taste so he wasn’t aware at all of how excited he was making you feel, subconsciously rubbing his knee in between your legs

With a loud crack of thunder and a beat of your heart in your ears, you could feel the room beginning to spin all around you

As you raised your hand, it seemed to be moving in slow motion

“K-Kuroo…” your voice was unstable, your body growing weaker and weaker with the way he fed, the taste and his hunger mixing to make him lose his sense

“I’m gonna… pass… out,” your voice died out, your body growing limp in his hold without him noticing

He fed on you, naturally holding your body up, not even realizing your current state until he could feel a subtle sticky coldness pressing to his cheek

Pulling away, to his horror, your neck slowly bled out, the collar of your shirt soaking it all up. He was too enraptured with your taste to even notice this as well as your unconscious state

He lifted you off your feet in a swift motion and carried you upstairs immediately

Your head began to squeeze as your mind slowly woke again, your body feeling a strange combination of temperatures- cool in front but warm everywhere else

“Are you awake, baby?” You blinked your vision out of fogginess as his voice echoed a little in the bathroom all around

He held you close, arms looped around your body loosely, your chest to his, head rested on his shoulder, your own legs resting around his sides surprisingly comfortably

It took you a moment to figure out where you were but you felt so drained, you accepted everything

The hot water of the bath felt warm around you, not too hot as you expected with Kuroo’s cold blooded body holding you close

Everything felt so pleasant- the light tapping sounds of the rain bouncing off the skylight in the big bathroom, his touch as he held you close, your bare bodies so exposed to each other and so vulnerable but you never felt safer and more at home than right now with Kuroo

“What happened?” You asked groggily, eyes heavy, drawing lines down his shoulder as he rubbed his hand down your back

“I may have fed from you too much,” he rubbed the back of his neck before returning to your back. “Blood got onto your clothes so after I treated you, I threw them in the hamper but it was also on your body so I figured we could take a bath together.”

Kuroo, being immortal, always felt cold. Specifically, the temperature never really bothered him but feeling how warm your body was against his, he felt like a kitten beneath a heated kotatsu. However, right now, this wasn’t the case; he felt a cold shover run down his spine at the guilt that percolated inside his body

You were mortal, you always felt warm to him but he felt his non-beating heart drop when he felt how cold your body was, limp in his hold

He never wanted to experience that ever again

You didn’t even realize the gauzes he had applied to your neck and shoulder over his bite marks until he mentioned it

“I’m really sorry, Y/N.” He secured his arms tight around your body, squeezing you impossibly closer to his body. “Forgive me?”

“Mmhm,” you hummed as his words went through one ear and slowly out the other. “I’m so tired,” you yawned, melting his body with your hot breath on his neck

“Then let’s get you out and dressed. I’ll bring you to bed, hm?” He moved his head back until it bumped into the wall, his gaze falling upon you with your cheek squished into his shoulder

“Mmhm,” you repeated to which Kuroo just chuckled, standing up as water dripped off your bodies, holding you like you were a koala bear latched onto him

He dried off your body as you struggled to stay awake, dressing you in his closed before he did as he said

He lifted you off your feet and brought you to his bed, staying right by your side until you woke. “I love you,” he kissed your forehead, heart swelling when your hand grasped at his shirt even as you slept

~~~~~ Thanks for reading! Masterlist for more! Please do not repost anywhere else!

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[sobeautifullyobsessed]

A Strange Slice of the Big Apple

a Doctor Strange x Reader fluffy fic by @sobeautifullyobsessed​

...you stood in front of the round window on the fourth floor of the sanctum.  The Window on the World, he had called it, explaining that it enabled him to view more than just the city outside, more than just Earth itself, but countless worlds across countless realities, as one of his most important responsibilities was to monitor for any threats from infinite dimensions, to our quiet little corner of the multiverse.  What a heavy burden that must be, you thought, and one that never ends.  How does he do it, day in and day out; does he ever wish for even a day’s respite?

Stephen looked to you, admitting—as though he’d read your mind, “It is a heavy burden at times, yes—but it’s an incredible privilege, too. You can’t imagine the wonders I have seen, the acts of courage and generosity by beings very different from us, and yet somehow the same.  The sorcerers of Kamar-Taj are not the only ones who defend creation against the darkness.”

He looked a little sad, before he turned back to the Window, and you wondered if standing sentry in this way made for a lonely life—and knew in that moment that if he asked, you’d gladly serve beside him.  Not just to see the marvels of which he spoke, or to simply safeguard life on Earth, but to give companionship to this hero, who was flesh and blood after all, brilliant and funny and surprisingly kind.  Before he might see, you thumbed the tears from the corners of your eyes, smiling brightly enough to keep those thoughts secret.

[full story below the cut]

For the youth of Kamar-Taj, life was never all study and drills, rigorous exercise and strict discipline.  The wisdom of many Masters had long recognized that the young ones needed time away from their studies, time to relax, time to play.  It made them better students in the end, and generally lent a more pleasant atmosphere to the compound—occasionally encouraging even the most single-minded and dedicated of the adults to follow the children’s example.

Adepts, whose natures suited them for such nurturing sort of tasks, were assigned to oversee small groups of these young ones, guiding them quietly and judiciously in their games and leading them on field trips to locales within–and ranging far from–Kathmandu.  On such an occasion, you had the duty of chaperoning a group of young Novices to the New York Sanctum so that they could explore several floors of artifacts housed there—with the promise that good behavior by all would grant them the opportunity to enjoy the Bleecker Street Playground, or perhaps even Washington Square Park, on this fine spring day.

You found yourself as excited as the children were about the outing—but for a far different reason.  Though your path had rarely crossed with that of the renowned Master of the New York Sanctum, his deeds in defense of the Earth had become the stuff of legends among students and masters alike; and the sight of him (on his regular visits to Kamar-Taj) striding through the courtyard of the compound—effortlessly projecting the perfect picture of a man on a vital mission–had reinforced the hero worship which his charisma and accomplishments had kindled in your heart.  

A fruitless, ridiculous crush to be sure, and a distraction which you had vowed not to allow to interfere with your own training in the mystic arts…but for today.  Today was your quiet chance to observe him from a nearer distance, to memorize his little details, and to satisfy your curiosity about the man beneath the hero’s mantle.

Naturally, you had expected to find a fellow Adept awaiting your small party, ready to usher you and the children through a tour of the Sanctum, before allowing leeway enough for all to survey the artifacts and magical relics–the most valuable of which were safely housed in glass cases.  Instead, you exited the portal to come face to face with Stephen Strange himself, clad in his trademark blue vestments, and wearing the Eye of Agamotto.  

Rendered speechless in surprise—and suddenly self-conscious to be so near him, and unprepared at that—you stopped short, gasped, and staring up into his exotic, mesmerizing eyes, mumbled an incoherent hello. Strange raised a brow, looking amused, and the moment seemed to last forever as you studied his breathtaking features.  He’s even more handsome up close, you realized, pondering what the true color of his eyes were; from afar they had always appeared blue or gray depending upon the light, but up close you found a near kaleidoscope in their depths.  Clear crystal blue they were, and yet there were hints of green as well, with flecks of gold; this must be part of his magic, you thought.  In the space of only a few heartbeats more, you read a hard-won wisdom, a sly humor and a quiet compassion that spoke of having borne his own share of pain—all in the depths of his beautiful orbs.  These are eyes some lucky woman could get lost in, you thought dreamily, if only…if only…if only…

Then he was chuckling, pulling you from your musing, and leaving you wondering just how big a fool you’d just made of yourself.  A flush of embarrassment flooded your cheeks, even as a very natural and endearingly crooked grin softened his mouth.  “Welcome to the New York Sanctum,” he laughed, so sincerely friendly that you began to relax a bit.

“Thank you, Doctor Strange,” you managed, hoping your voice didn’t sound as breathless as he made you feel.  The youngsters had crowded around you, hushed despite their eager expectations, surely impressed with the commanding figure of the Master before them.

Smoothly, he turned his attention their way, “Hello, children.  I’m glad you could visit us today—we’ve got some really cool things to show you.  Things that still amaze me at times.”  You noticed that as he spoke, Strange took a moment to make eye contact with each child, before he looked back to you.  The unexpectedly warm appraisal in his gaze held you bound, breathless again as you wondered if he somehow read the secret yearning of your heart.  “So–shall we begin?”  His impish wink convinced you that he knew exactly what you were feeling—and that perhaps it pleased him too.

Your young charges followed him readily, chattering quietly amongst themselves, allowing you to fall to rear of the group.  His manner with them was easy and engaging, and he had them asking questions you wouldn’t have expected of them—and answering his ridiculous puns with giggles that echoed in a way this Sanctum had surely never seen.  Clearly, he enjoyed an audience, and from time to time, you found his eyes on you, checking to see if you were enjoying his show as well.

But you soon realized there was one relic conspicuous by its absence—his very own Cloak of Levitation.  Perhaps he was saving it for last, and would introduce it at the end of the tour with a dramatic flourish.  Or perhaps he was waiting for one of his guests to ask after it.  Well then…that’ll be me, you decided boldly; I’ll just show him I’m much more than a meek junior mage, mooning over the great master.

Gathering your courage, you drew a deep breath, instilling your query with enough sass to impress him with your mettle, “But Master Strange, where is the relic as famous as you?  Where is the Cloak you’ve worn into mystic battles, time and again?“  

He appeared taken aback for a breath or two, squinting those exotic, mesmerizing eyes right at you, with his mouth drawing into a baffled frown as he dramatically patted first his right shoulder, and then his left. The children watched him entranced, a few of them even holding their breath in anticipation of his answer.

“Hmmmm,” he grumbled, playing the scene for all it was worth, “Well, I’ll be damned–Cloak seems to have wandered off!”  He looked to the young ones, shaking his head and t’sking, “Absent without permission.”  He bent closer to the children, “Have any of you spotted it?  I thought for sure that Cloak was looking forward to meeting you all today.”  

Some of the children gaped open-mouthed, while others rushed to suggest just where the famed garment might be.  Strange listened while nodding sagely, giving each little Novice their say. “Those are very good ideas, children,” he told them, then crouched down to their eye level to add conspiratorially, “But I have a hunch that with your help, we can coax Cloak out of wherever it’s hiding.”  He spared you a look, his wide grin and raised brow enough of a hint of what was to come—so you had best just relax and enjoy his little joke. “How about we all shout as loud as we can and see if we can get Cloak to come and join us?”

Needing no further prompting, the youngsters joined in a mixed chorus, calling out to Cloak.  Stephen stood back up, wearing the most shit-eating grin you had ever seen, so that you realized–just before you felt a firm tap on your shoulder–that Cloak hovered right behind you.   The children giggled, some shouting in delight, when they noticed, watching as Cloak draped itself across your shoulders, to gently urge you nearer to the Master of the New York Sanctum–who shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide, silently proclaiming an innocence that was far from convincing—to you, anyway.

Standing right next to him, you found that his eyes were so merry (at your expense, no less) and so completely captivating that you just couldn’t feel the least bit put out as the punch line of his joke.  “Cloak seems to like you, Adept,” he confided, his voice deliciously deep, and low enough for your ears alone to hear, “And Cloak is an excellent judge of character.”  

Emboldened by the compliment in his voice and in his eyes, you let your gaze linger upon the small details of his face—the fine lines beside his eyes, denoting his usual good humor and a tendency to smile; the crinkle at the bridge of his nose, utterly adorable when he’d been playing at being perplexed, though you’d seen it at times so stern and commanding that you had, more than once, secretly wished he’d direct that focus upon you; the fullness of his lips, accentuated by his facial hair, the bottom lip plump enough to make you envious for a taste. Unseemly thoughts, you knew, for an Adept to have about a Master—made more inappropriate in light of the gravitas of Strange’s astounding magical powers, and by the well-known weight of his awesome responsibilities.

Strange seemed to study you as well, and you held your breath, praying that the run of your thoughts was not clear upon your face.  He winked again—and you were sure he at least guessed what you’d been thinking, so that you felt a heated blush rise in your cheeks.  Cloak hugged you a little tighter, bracing your confidence.  “A most excellent judge of character, indeed,” Strange repeated under his breath, before turning his attention back to his younger guests.  

Strange continued to guide them through the Hall of Relics, moving the children along briskly.  You had thought to fall back once again, self-conscious now that that you were certain he was aware of the crush you had been unable to conceal—but Cloak had other ideas.  Each time your gait slowed, it pushed you forward enough to keep pace with the intimidating Master, never allowing you to remain more than two feet away from him. Confounded, you had no choice but to remain in Strange’s orbit, and eventually you relaxed enough to enjoy the tour.

Forty-five minutes later you stood with your charges, in front of the round window on the fourth floor of the sanctum.  The Window on the World, he had called it, explaining that it enabled him to view more than just the city outside, more than just Earth itself, but countless worlds across countless realities, as one of his most important responsibilities was to monitor for any threats from infinite dimensions, to our quiet little corner of the multiverse.  What a heavy burden that must be, you thought, and one that never ends.  How does he do it, day in and day out; does he ever wish for even a day’s respite?

Stephen looked to you, admitting—as though he’d read your mind, “It is a heavy burden at times, yes—but it’s an incredible privilege, too. You can’t imagine the wonders I have seen, the acts of courage and generosity by beings very different from us, and yet somehow the same.  The sorcerers of Kamar-Taj are not the only ones who defend creation against the darkness.”

He looked a little sad, before he turned back to the Window, and you wondered if standing sentry in this way made for a lonely life—and knew in that moment that if he asked, you’d gladly serve beside him.  Not just to see the marvels of which he spoke, or to simply safeguard life on Earth, but to give companionship to this hero, who was flesh and blood after all, brilliant and funny and surprisingly kind.  Before he might see, you thumbed the tears from the corners of your eyes, smiling brightly enough to keep those thoughts secret.

“Now,” he tuned back to the children, telling them magnanimously, “That concludes our tour of the Sanctum—but I doooooooo have one more surprise up my sleeve.”   Strange grinned at the bright little faces giving him their full attention, “Who’s hungry?”

                      _____________________________________

The Sanctum dining room was far smaller than the dining hall of Kamar-Taj, but it easily accommodated the dozen young Novices, the Sanctum Master, and one starry-eyed Adept, enjoying an unexpected treat:  New York style, thin crust pizza.  Some of the children had never had partaken of the Americanized delicacy before, but they didn’t hesitate to dig right in; and he had thoughtfully provided plain cheese pizza, as well as sausage and peppers for the more adventurous among them.  Though he gave them a lesson in exactly how true New Yorkers ate it ( “You have to fold it like this, kids,” he had stressed, “And start from the pointy end,” before taking a healthy bite of his slice) Strange ate little himself–though you could tell he was enjoying every moment of the children’s reactions.   He did, however, take an extra-large portion of ice cream from the make-your-own sundae bar which he had arranged for them in the kitchen.

You had a modest sized sundae yourself, enjoying a treat you’d hadn’t tasted since you began your training at Kamar-Taj.  Cloak had withdrawn from you, to hover just past the industrial size refrigerator, once it was certain that you would partake of the meal. Strange set his empty bowl and spoon in the sink, and came to lean against the counter, right beside you. Your heart began to race to have him so near, and you told yourself don’t stare, don’t stare, even though you yearned to look directly into his beguiling eyes.

“You know,” he told you, “I probably should have held off on the ice cream until after your trip to the park.  They’re um…well, they’re looking pretty sugared up right now.”

You laughed softly, marveling how he spoke to you as an equal, despite his lofty status, and he rewarded you with a sheepish grin.  “I’m sure I can handle it, Doctor Strange. Give them an hour to run around, and play on the swings, and they’ll burn it off.”  

He nodded, as though he was deferring to your wisdom, so that you added, “They’ll be out of steam by the time we get back to Kamar-Taj, and most will probably be conked out in their dormitory before sunset.”

“Still,” he maintained, leaning close enough for you to note the constellation of light freckles that graced the stunning contours of his face (making you wish for the leisure and the familiarity to number each one of them with the gentlest sort of kisses), “I can have one of my staff accompany you to the park—you know, to keep the kids from getting too out of hand.”

You nodded and smiled, quietly disappointed that he couldn’t do that duty himself—but grateful for the offer, “I could probably use a hand with them. Thank you, Sir.”   He nodded back, and then he passed from your side, leaving you to sigh softly, fully heart-struck at his kind nature.

                _________________________________________

Doctor Strange had thoughtfully sent two of his Adepts (one of whom you had trained with in your early days at Kamar-Taj) to help you chaperone the children on their outing to Bleecker Street Park, making your task far easier than expected.  The afternoon passed pleasantly, and though you were fully attentive to your young charges, a small part of your mind—and heart, you realized ruefully—remained back at the Sanctum, imagining what it might be like to watch Stephen Strange move through his day.  Wishing you could watch him at his vital work, in matters both large and small. Longing to not only learn from him, but to somehow serve as a helpmate.  You promised yourself such dreaming would end when you crossed the threshold of 177A Bleecker once again.

Still, you felt rather crestfallen as you prepared to conjure a portal back to the compound, disappointed that the Master of the New York Sanctum was nowhere in sight.  You would have liked to thank him for his hospitality and kindness to the children; you would have loved to stand beside him one last time, to feel his charisma wash over you, to hear that deep, rich, decadent as dark chocolate voice speak your name just once, so you might prize that memory in the days and weeks to come.              

Shepherding the youngsters through the orange-gold portal, where the Master of Novices awaited their return, you couldn’t help but turn back one last time, wistful and wishing for any reason to linger a bit more. Cloak zipped into view, made a beeline your way, and wrapped itself steadfastly around you.  

Strange followed in moments, huffing in irritation, and cursing under his breath as he came up beside you. “I’m sorry,” he growled, hands planted resolutely on his hips, “Cloak has quite a stubborn streak—and apparently thinks it’s rude of me not to see you off…”

You felt Cloak shiver, and loosen the embrace a bit, though it did not release you—apparently waiting for Stephen to continue.

“Alright, I’m getting to it, can you just chill a minute?” he insisted, rolling his eyes.

You swore it felt like Cloak was laughing, and that made you feel like laughing too, the sight of the formidable Master—and object of your quiet, perpetual pining—endearingly out of sorts, as mortal as any ordinary man; warm and funny, and as Cloak drew you closer to him, kissably close.

The man before you, cleared his throat and took a calming breath. “Cloak likes you…a lot, I suppose…and thinks I should invite you back to visit…the Sanctum…”  Cloak aimed a quick jab of its hem at Strange, so that he added, “Us…visit us…another day.”

Secretly thrilled, you wracked your brain for a reply sophisticated and cool enough to impress; what fell from your mouth fell far from your aim. “Uh…um…yes…yes…I…I…I’d like that. A lot…”

“Okay then,” he nodded, watching sheepishly as Cloak disentangled from you, and floated away triumphantly.  “So…any time…if you’re in the mood…you’re welcome here.”  He smiled genuinely, and your heart fluttered softly, as you realized that that smile was actually for you.

How lucky can a girl get, you thought, feeling the warmth of the portal at your back, while you hesitated a moment or two, wondering how bold you dared to be.  Before you could second guess yourself, you stepped in close– enough to feel his breath on your skin and wonder at the incredible depths of his amazing eyes—and laid the softest, sweetest kiss you’d ever bestowed on anyone, upon his cheek. Backing away quickly, you grinned, memorizing his look of surprise mixed with appreciation, “I’d like that, Doctor Strange, I’d like that very much.”

For a moment he looked surprised, and then that crooked smile--which had lodged itself indelibly in your heart--broke upon his face.  The Master of the Mystic Arts chuckled, and raised a brow appraisingly, looking quite pleased with the little token of your regard.   To that, you held your head high, as you turned and entered the portal, delightfully conscious that his eyes lingered upon you as the ring closed--with you already plotting whatever excuse you would need to employ for a return trip back to his Sanctum.

[if you enjoyed this, please stayed tuned--as the sequel will be coming soon!]

tagging: @doctorstrangeaskblog​ @doctor-stephenstrange​ @ravencatart​

[jamesclarke99]

Death: The Only Truth Of Life

What Is The Bhagavad Gita?

The Bhagavad Gita is a compilation of Sanskrit verses and texts. The ancient scripture consisting of 701 shlokas (verses) was written in the year 2 B.C, by Sage Veda Vyasa. Followers of the Hindu religion hold the Bhagavad Gita in very high regard. The verses of Bhagavad Gita are actually the dialogue that took place between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna. Through the medium of this dialogue, Lord Krishna imparted many words of wisdom that were put together to form the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita, as it is commonly known, offers an insight into the world of Yoga, spiritual awareness, reincarnation, and the afterlife to name a few. This sacred book also offers knowledge about the spiritual understanding of life and death.

The Cycle Of Life, Death, And Rebirth As Explained In Bhagavad Gita

The beauty of Bhagavad Gita is that it speaks the language of the reader. The modern-day millennial can relate to it as much as the Yogis living thousands of years ago did. The Bhagavad Gita portrays the concept of life in a slightly different light than what is commonly known. The concept of life, re-birth, and death is explained in a rather unique way in the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that the body and spirit are different. The body is merely a medium through which our spirit acts. Our spirit desires and our body acts; that is how we live our life. The 17th shloka of the 2nd Adhyaya of the Bhagavad Gita explains this concept clearly. The verse as it is in Sanskrit is as follows.

“avinasi tu tad viddhi yena sarvam idam tatam vinasam avyayasyasya na kascit kartum arhati”

Its English translation would be “Know that the one to pervade the entire body cannot be destroyed. It is beyond anybody to destroy the soul as it does not perish.”

As per this verse, the soul or spirit which is intangible is present everywhere in the body. The chapter further lays emphasis on the fact that each body and every soul is individual. The pains and happiness experienced by one body and the soul are the same; and yet they can be experienced by no other body or soul in the same manner. The physical body has a timed existence after which it must merge into its origin i.e. the universe. Death destroys the body but the soul has a timeless existence. For the soul, death is just the beginning of the journey forward, before it merges with another physical body and begins a new life. Lord Krishna told Arjuna that it is the responsibility of every physical body to work towards the advancement of their soul. Detachment of the body from the material wealth and desires in the world is a way for the soul to become spiritually enlightened.

Pancha Koshas

The Pancha Koshas are five coverings or sheaths of the physical body that cover the inner conscious self or the atman. Everything other than the atman, like our physical body or our material possessions, is the anatman. The Pancha Koshas are anatman as well. The Taittiriya Upanishad discusses the concept of Pancha Koshas in depth.

These are the five Koshas that layer the atman.

Annamaya kosha (layer of food)

Pranamaya kosha (layer of vital energy)

Manomaya kosha (layer of mind)

Vijnanamaya kosha (layer of intellect)

Anandamaya kosha (layer of bliss)

The word Anna stands for ‘matter’ or that which is material. Annam means food in the Sanskrit language. Our tangible, externally visible physical body is the Annamaya kosha. It derives its energy from food eaten by the mother during intrauterine life, and food eaten by self after birth. The material body is anatman as it will perish and return to the dust and dirt which made it.

Prana means life. Pranamaya kosha is more subtle than Annamaya kosha, and facilitates human existence. Human life is possible because Prana enters the Annamaya kosha. Pranamaya kosha has an absolute and direct effect over the Annamaya kosha.

Mann is Sanskrit for the mind. Manomaya kosha is even more subtle than Pranamaya kosha. The brain is closely associated with Manomaya kosha. This layer encasing the atman is powerful as it can create emotions and feelings.

Vijnana stands for knowledge. The Vijnanamaya kosha is that part of your mind which allows you to think, rationalize and act in a logical way. It supersedes all the three koshas mentioned earlier.

Anandam is happiness or bliss. Only the intangible, uninfluenced atman can experience pure bliss. Anandamaya kosha is the closest layer to the atman. However, it is still not as free and limitless as the eternal soul.

To appreciate the concept of life, death, and reincarnation, one must acquaint themselves with all the koshas. The koshas teach how the body is different from the mind, and the mind is different from the soul. The atman and anatman are two different forms encased within one another; one is perishable and one immortal. It is the spiritual duty of every human being to work toward the betterment of their soul, and detach themselves from the anatman.

Correlation of Yoga With Life And Death

The Bhagavad Gita describes amply, the benefits of Yoga to develop one’s mental and physical health. However, there is a deep connection of Yoga with the human soul as well. With regular practise of Yoga one detaches himself from the material body and focuses on the elevation of his spiritual self. This is what the Bhagavad Gita says about the contribution of Yoga in the circle of life, death, and rebirth. Lord Krishna advocates that Yoga pushes human beings towards attaining the ultimate goal that should control every enlightened person, which is to become one with the infinite universe. Practising Yoga disciplines the mind and spirit of the practitioner. When the material body dies and the soul is born in a new body, it will carry the disciplines and other qualities imbibed in it in the previous birth due to practicing Yoga. The technique of Yoga involves several poses known as asanas. Each asana helps to build and improve one’s physical health and mental health. However, there are certain yoga poses that focus on enlightening the spiritual being of the person which is the soul. These poses are known as Yoga asana.

What Does The Bhagavad Gita Say About Death And After Life?

Death is the end of the physical body and not of the consciousness and soul residing within the body. And death will come to you one day or the other. The Bhagavad Gita explains how death affects the human body and the soul. The 27th shloka in the 2nd Adhyaya of Bhagavad Gita is as follows.

jātasya hi dhruvo mṛityur dhruvaṁ janma mṛitasya cha tasmād aparihārye ’rthe na tvaṁ śhochitum arhasi

Its literal translation is as follows.

Death is certain to come for the one who has taken birth, and rebirth is mandatory for he who has passed away. Therefore, it is wise not to lament over that which is inevitable.

Death is unknown to us. And those who have experienced it do not return to the material world to speak about it. The fear of the unknown is the greatest fear that mankind can experience. But the one who has read the Gita has nothing to fear, for he knows that death is only a stepping stone for the spiritual progress of the soul. After the material body perishes, the soul will take birth again into the world as a new physical being.

Rising Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

Death is thought to be the end of one’s journey in the world. It is true, but only for the physical body. For the atman it is merely a break before beginning a new journey. The Bhagavad Gita explains the concept of death and reincarnation in a beautiful manner. In the sixth shloka of the eighth adhyaya of the Gita Lord Krishna says:

yaṁ yaṁ vāpi smaran bhāvaṁ tyajatyante kalevaram taṁ tam evaiti kaunteya sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ

It means:

Whatever goes on in the mind at the time of death, O son of Kunti, one retains that same state of mind, and always keeps thinking.

This verse highlights that the soul remains unchanged and untouched by death. It will just pass on from one material body to the other. The shloka also touches on one crucial aspect of life and death. The eternal soul feels and senses everything. The state of mind in which a person dies is the same state in which his/her soul will be reborn. If a person is happy and feels accomplished as they take their last breath, the soul is satisfied and reincarnated as a happy one. He who faces rejection, betrayal or sadness during his final moments will be reborn as a dissatisfied soul.

Through the verse, Lord Krishna asserts the vital role that your ideology and education play in your life. Here, education is not your bachelor’s or master’s degree, but what you have learned in life through your experiences.

Importance Of Continued Learning

Learning is a never-ending process. It begins from infancy and continues till one takes his/her last breath. Lord Krishna explains in the Bhagavad Gita that the atman continues to pass on from one physical body into another without getting affected by a death. The soul also carries its gunas (characteristic qualities) and its attachments in the next life. For instance, if a person is passionate about music, it is his soul and not his body that likes music. The soul may carry forward its affinity towards music when it is reincarnated. Therefore, Lord Krishna urges the readers of Bhagavad Gita to continue learning and advancing in every life. A person’s aim should be to detach from the material body and submit oneself to the universe completely. In every birth, the physical body and mind must strive to elevate the atman to a higher spiritual level.

The Connection Of Ashtanga Yoga With The Cycle Of Life, Death, And Rebirth

Ashtanga Yoga means the eight limbs of Yoga. Maharishi Patanjali elaborates on the topic of Ashtanga Yoga in his writings Yoga Sutras. The practice of Yoga poses as a form of exercise is merely one limb of the Ashtanga Yoga.

The eight limbs of Yoga teach a way of a disciplined life while practising virtuous behavior. Each of these limbs is explained below.

Yama

Each of the yamas indicates the things that a disciplined person abstains from. Violence, lies, stealing, infidelity, and greed are unethical practices one must avoid.

Niyama

Niyama means rules. This limb of Yoga teaches about the virtues one must possess, like purity of mind and body, disciplined behavior, accepting self and others to name a few.

Asana

Asana is a posture that one can attain for a long time while remaining relaxed and keeping a focused and steady mind. The third limb of Ashtanga Yoga is the one that deals with practise of Yoga postures.

Pranayama

Pranayama is the art of controlled breathing. Maharishi Patanjali has described in detail the technique of breathing, regulation of breathing, and ideal postures to practise pranayama in the Yoga Sutras.

Pratyahara

Pratyahara is a combination word that means working on one’s conscious awareness. While going through the path of pratyahara one learns to avoid getting controlled by external influences. This pushes people, a step closer to connecting with their inner self, their soul.

Dharana

Dharana teaches the technique of focusing one’s mind on a singular point while forgetting everything else. This is the basic technique used in Dhyana which is the 7th limb of Yoga.?

Dhyana

Where there is Dhyana, there has to be Dharana. One always leads to the other and one cannot exist without the other. Dhyana means thinking or pondering. It is the technique of meditation that requires tremendous mental focus (Dharana).

Samadhi

Samadhi is a state of total spiritual elevation, where one has successfully learned to merge with their soul and forget the material body. Samadhi allows one to completely absorb themselves with their elevated state of mind.

It is imperative that one understands Ashtanga Yoga because each limb is dependent upon the previous limb. The first to eight limbs of Yoga are in an outer to the inner sequence. The eighth limb that is Samadhi is a state where one is able to detach from one physical self while merging with one soul. This proves yet again that the soul is eternal while the body perishes. Not everyone can attain Samadhi. Great Hindu saints attained a state of Samadhi after many years of meditation and mastering several spiritual techniques.

The soul must undergo several cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation before becoming so refined, as to attain a state of Samadhi. Samadhi is the true state of spiritual elevation where the soul is truly ready to merge into the universe.

The Concept Of Imperishable Soul As Explained In Ashtavakra Gita

Ashtavakra Gita or Ashtavakra Samhita is one of the sacred Hindu scriptures. Sage Ashtavakra compiled this text by writing several Sanskrit verses that teach the basic principles of leading life in a righteous manner. Several verses in the book shed light on the concept of death, reincarnation and how these factors do not affect spiritually elevated souls.

The eighth shloka of the third adhyaya of , Ashtavakra Gita goes like this:

ihaamutra viraktasya nityaanityavivekinah aascharyam mokshakaamasya mokshaad eva vibhishika

This shloka translates as this:

It is a matter of surprise that the one who lacks interest in this or the next material world, who possesses the intelligence to embrace the concept of permanent and temporary, who seeks to be free, is afraid of death.

Through this shloka, sage Ashtavakra addresses the omnipresent fear of death. Death is inevitable and everyone fears it. We may not fear death directly, but most of our fears revolve around facing the unknown mysteries of death. However, the one who possesses higher knowledge is least bothered by the cycle of life and death. The elevated mind knows the difference between the imperishable soul and the temporary physical body. Such a mind seeks to liberate itself from the continuous cycle of life and death to attain complete salvation. One must strive to reach this level, rather than being bothered by worldly worries. Sage Ashtavakra preaches that those who are truly detached do not find themselves tangled in the material world and its matters. This state of complete indifference to the material world is attained when one practices Yoga, meditation, and other spiritual activities.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is an integral part of the Upanishads. Sage Yajnavalkya compiled this Sanskrit language scripture in an era that dates back to 700 B.C. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is like an encyclopedia on the subject of atman. The book also discusses the concept of metaphysics. Metaphysics discusses the relation between the abstract mind and soul with the material body. The first chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad talks about the creation of the universe from nothingness. After creating the universe, lord Prajapati breathed life into it while sacrificing himself. The fourth chapter of Brihadaranyaka correlates the cosmic energy that is the universe, with the concept of soul or atman. Since the universe came from nothing, it is considered to be one with the atman, whose existence cannot be traced back to its origin. Here the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad asserts that the soul is invisible and yet it is present everywhere. The Madhu Khanda literally translating to the ‘honey theory’ is one of the most important sections of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The word honey is used as a metaphor here. Honey making is a laborious process that bees undertake. Honey is compared to the fruit or the result of hard labor. Nectar which is a raw material for making honey is a source of food or many insects. In this way, honey becomes food for other beings. The wandering soul and material body are dependent on the five elements of nature (fire, air, water, earth, and space) and vice versa. One is the honey to the other; meaning that all help one another and get benefits from one another. The atman (soul), everything it depends on and everything dependent on it is, in turn, part of the larger universe which is a cosmic force in itself. The universe is eternal and will never cease to exist. The atman which is a part of the universe is eternal too. It is separate from the physical body, and yet it is merged within a body so well during each cycle of reincarnation.

Katha Upanishad

Katha Upanishad is a dialogue between a young boy Nachiketa and Lord Yamaraj, who is the Hindu God of death. They discussed human nature in general, the concept of atman, and Moksha. Katha Upanishad insists upon the existence of the abstract atman which seeks liberation and knowledge to elevate itself spiritually. The book also expounds on the connection between Yoga and atman. Regular practise of Yoga and meditation helps the material body to connect with the atman and work towards its spiritual progress. The atman is above and beyond the material body, its worldly desires, the five senses, the mind, and the intellect. Superseding the atman is the cosmic energy, the universe which came from nothing. Therefore beyond the universe is nothing. The ultimate goal of every atman is to attain moksha or salvation and blend with this nothingness. Katha Upanishad describes atman as something one can know when one reaches a stage of complete self-realization. The book describes the soul as being composed of internal calmness and spiritual knowledge. Deep introspection, practising meditation, and Yoga are ways to connect with your inner self. The soul or atman is a fragment of the eternal universe. The Atman cannot be created or destroyed. It was, it is, and it will always be.

Other Sanskrit language scriptures that support the concept of atman, reincarnation, and perishable material body are the Ribhu Gita, Ganesh Gita, Vedas, Upanishads, and some of the Mahapuranas.

Ancient Hindu texts lay emphasis on the eternal equality of the soul while stating that the physical body is a perishable entity. The soul will continue to live on in the material world even after the physical body is burnt to ashes. The soul seeks Moksha, which is the highest form of spiritual elevation. Moksha is the state of total liberation which allows a soul to free itself from the shackles of reincarnation. It is a state of surrender that allows the soul to unite with the universe.

[katahnisharma]

the press tour | t.h. [1]

Pairing: Tom Holland x New Actress!Reader

Word Count: 2.2 K

Warnings: none i think?

Summary: You’re a new, inexperienced actress plucked from the obscurity of everyday life to play the lead in the reboot of a famous British Jane Austen novel, and Tom Holland just so happens to be playing your love interest. Of course, love is inevitable. But will it end in love?

A/N: i can guarantee that there will be a rap battle and cute interviews in the future :) also i know you can’t be nominated for an oscar before the movie comes out but bear with me I will explain lol

masterlist || series masterlist | playlist

“Five seconds and you’re on Y/N!”

Your head shot up from scrolling through your text messages. Your ever efficient and sweet personal assistant was standing in front of you, her clipboard and phone at the ready. “Thanks, Bailey. I’m ready to go, just gimme a sec.” She smiled and nodded, watching to see if you needed any help as you smoothed down the pleats on your gorgeous pale blue Emilia Wickstead dress. You felt infinitely powerful in it, which was a good thing because on the inside? You were a nervous wreck. Acting had never been a career you considered after high school. The only times where you had ever acted were in your elementary school plays. Even then, you usually got cast as the side characters, which usually meant the living props like talking tree # 4. Your only main role had been as John Adams’ wife in the fourth grade, and even then you had been given a whopping total of two lines. Then you were told to stand by little Timmy, who was playing John Adams, and “look pretty”. So suffice to say, acting had been a strangely sad experience up until a couple of months ago, when you had somehow landed the role of Emma Woodhouse in the reboot of Jane Austen’s famous novel. You hadn’t even meant to audition, you’d gone alone just to see the process. But after you went inside, you were wrangled by a very enthusiastic man to “read” for the part. And before you could even fathom what had happened, the casting directors voted unanimously. You had to be their Emma Woodhouse. And since then, the past couple months had been a crazy, exciting whirlwind. When everything had fallen into place regarding your new role, they told you that your co-star, your Mr. Knightley, would be the Tom Holland. You even remembered being escorted to the film production office when they told you.

“Excuse me, who now?” You very nearly spit out your coffee, placing it carefully next to you after your hands started to shake from shock. “You mean…Tom Holland from Spider-Man?!” “That’s the one. Great guy, even better actor. I’ve got teen daughters and they pointed me out to him, and I had to admit the kid was good. So we reached out and that was that. He wanted in.” The director shrugged, watching you begin to process that you would have to act alongside one of the most talented actors you’d ever seen on screen. “Oh, is this about the fact that you think you can’t act?” “I know I can’t act. Or at least, not like he can. I’m going to make such a fool of myself, I can feel it. And I’m never wrong about these things.” You were so busy trying to figure out the most effective way to cut and run that you almost didn’t feel the slight tap on your shoulder. “I highly doubt that, for the record. I’m not as good as everyone says, I swear!” You turned around slowly, recognizing the English accent. There was Tom Holland, not more than 10 inches away from you, giving you the widest grin. His eyes searched yours for a sign of friendliness, and he laughed as your eyes widened in response. “Oh my god, hi….. I’m Y/N Y/L/N” You stuttered, shooting up from your chair to extend a hand. “Mr. O’Hanlon didn’t even mention-“ But Mr. O’Hanlon was gone, so now it was just the two of you. You and Tom Holland. “I told him not to, I wanted to come surprise you, I guess? Is that weird? It’s probably weird, I dunno. I just thought it might be better if we met without being awkwardly “sent” to each other.” He took your hand with a smile, shaking it warmly as you felt your cheeks flush. “Oh no, that’s not weird! Actually, that makes a lot of sense. I think this is better.” You smiled back, taking your seat again as Tom pulled another chair from behind to sit next to you. “So, did I hear that you’ve never done this before?” You shifted uncomfortably at his words, tucking a strand of loose hair behind your ear. “Because from what I saw in your audition tape, I never would’ve guessed! Thought you were doing this for a long time or something.” “Oh, no definitely not! Never done this before, unless you count the weird elementary school plays. Wait, you really thought I’d gone to acting school?” Your walls immediately crumble, as your mouth turns into a satisfied grin. Tom starts to let his walls down too. You definitely were not what he had expected.  “Why, does that make you feel validated?” He asked with a shit-eating grin, deciding to try another joke. “Never would have pegged you as someone who needed that.” “Wellllll, that’s where you’d be wrong. I love the praise. I’m a diva that way.” You chuckled, watching him return the action. You liked his laugh, it was husky but still light and happy. He took out his phone, shot off a quick text, and turned back to you immediately. “You know, I think it’s time we had lunch together, yeah?” For a minute, you weren’t sure you had heard him right, but when he kept looking at you for an answer, you realized that he did, in fact, want to have lunch with you of his own volition. You nodded enthusiastically, throwing caution to the wind as you accepted his boldly offered hand. Both of you smiling at each other and talking non-stop, you went out for your first ever lunch together. Since that day, you and Tom had been the co-stars that the world swooned over. The two of you had perfect chemistry in the movie, and fans were, of course, shipping you right and left. When the movie was released to the critics a week ago, you and Tom had been shocked by the magnitude of the reviews. Every single important newspaper and critic had given you glowing remarks. There was even talk of you being nominated for an Oscar. “This is so crazy! This is my first ever movie, and I’m nominated with people like Claire Foy and Emma Stone for a freaking Oscar!” You squealed, hugging a nearby pillow to your chest as Tom and Harrison laughed at your antics from the kitchen. The three of you were hanging out that day in between the pre-release interviews. “I did tell you that you’d be amazing, didn’t I? So where’s my prize for being correct as usual?” Tom brought you a Coke and sat down next to you, grinning as you rolled your eyes. You popped the tab and took a sip, placing it on the coaster Harrison had very carefully placed on the table. “Shut up, I knew I’d be good. I just said that I wouldn’t so you’d validate me, remember?” You burst out laughing as Tom snatched the pillow from you and proceeded to smack you with it. “You’re the worst, Y/N. Stop using my lines on me, get your own!” He teased, finally stopping when he thought you were finally beaten. But just when Tom stopping hitting you with the pillow, you grabbed your own and smacked him so hard he fell on his back. Tom looked up at you and smiled while trying to dodge your blows by holding your wrists in place. “Give it up! You’ve lost!” You pant, now inches away from Tom’s face. You could see his beautiful brown eyes look up at you, and his lips parted to reveal that stupid grin that always made your heart surge. You had basically memorized every bit of his face by now, and you resisted the urge to reach down and touch his features. You had to remind yourself that you were just best friends and co-stars, nothing else. “Darling, I never lose.” The pet name made you blush as Tom grabbed your waist and swung you on your back. “Hey, cut it out! Those pillows are new, idiots!” You and Tom broke away shyly, as Harrison ran into the room and took all the pillows from the couch. “Honestly, were you two raised in a barn?” Harrison gingerly piled all the pillows in one corner and then looked back and noticed how the two of you had suddenly become very quiet around each other. “Did I just interrupt something?” Your eyes widened in alarm, but Tom answered first. “What the hell are you talking about, you div?” You exhaled slightly, feeling relieved that he had come to your rescue, but also a little disappointed by how easily the sentence had rolled off his tongue. Yet another confirmation that the pining was one-sided. “We were just having a pillow fight, but since you’re so testy we promise never to use your precious pillows ever again.” Tom added, with a confidence you only wished you had if you were caught with your foot in your mouth. “My bad then.” Harrison switched on the TV and found an episode of Love Island, and everything appeared to be back to normal. But it wasn’t. You saw Harrison smile slightly from the other side of the room, and you knew he suspected something. You saw in that subtle expression that he wasn’t convinced by your silent denial of his accusation. Fast-forward to the present, and here you were, about to go into your first press tour interview together. Bailey opened the door for you and you walked onto the set stage, seeing Tom there, smirking at you from his seat. “What?” You rolled your eyes, watching his own trail your body’s path to the seat next to him. “Is there something in my hair or...” Tom shook his head, but the faint expression remained on his lips. “No, you just look pretty, that’s all.” You nearly choked on the air, trying so hard to keep it together. Plenty of guys compliment girls all the time, it meant nothing. “You always do, but this looks really good on you.” The wind was basically knocked out of you, and the words you were trying to form were not coming out. “Uh-um, thanks Tom!” Your voice came out at least a decibel higher and you wanted to sink into the floor when he looked at you and smirked. Of course he took some weird pleasure satisfaction in your total awkwardness. He always grinned at you when you did.

“You need to relax, Y/N. It’s going to be okay, love!” You turned your head to look anxiously for the host, who was currently chatting with the cameraman. “Hey, darling, focus on me! That might make you less nervous. You’re not nervous with me.”

You laughed and gave him a shove, which made him pull you in for a quick hug. Honestly, it wasn’t the interview that was making you nervous. It was the prospect of doing it with Tom, who you most certainly had feelings for. You’d tried for weeks to play it off like the feelings weren’t real, lying to yourself over and over again. You never wanted to be the girl who fell so in love with a man they couldn’t have that their hearts broke for years.

On the bright side, you had time to snap out of it when the host of the interview finally came over to introduce herself. She was tall and so sweet, but when she really looked over at you, she nearly fainted.

“Oh my god, you’re actually here! In front of me! Wow, I just…. I’m such an enormous fan. You’re amazing!” She gushed, nervously tucking her hair behind her ear and fiddling with her phone case. You were so taken aback by what she said, but you managed to find your smile.

“Wow, thank you so much! That means so much, you have no idea! I can’t even believe I have fans, honestly.” Tom gently smiled at you both, finding it adorable that you still couldn’t believe how much people adored you. That was just you, he thought. You were always humble, no matter how much attention you got. 

“Ready to roll in ten seconds!” the cameraman called out from behind her. She gave you another quick smile and took her seat in front of you both, her questions at the ready. Tom leaned over and whispered in your ear.

“You excited?” You took a deep breath and shook your head back a little. Tom noticed your actions and resisted the urge to hold your hand, just so he could touch you.

“You know what? I think I am.” You looked at Tom and then the interviewer. 

“Let’s do it!”

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[sageclover61]

Batteries Not Required

AN: I just wanted to write a short story in true second person. No YN, no Y/N, not reader insert. It was supposed to be a short story about a Samuel Winchester with such a screwed up sense of self that it made sense to be in the second person. I’ve been obsessed with the Second Person Voice since before  I read Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney in the 9th grade, which was recommended to me in a failing attempt to satisfy this hunger.

But it’s not a short story. And this six year old narrator is one Sam Winchester with Auditory Processing Disorder. Who John Winchester tries (succeeds?) at sacrificing to one Gabrieloki.

Please enjoy this introduction. Warning, John Winchester isn’t a very nice guy.

________________________________________________________________

Sir sliced your forearm with the silver dagger and you tried not to flinch as your blood ran out onto the ground. The containment circle you were inside was made of animal blood and a powder you were unfamiliar with, and you had no idea how it was holding because the rain had already thinned the circle.

 It was dark and cold and you were soaked through your old tattered clothing. The rain hadn't stopped yet, but you could remember recent days that were long and hot. But the sun always disappears eventually.

 This was for De. That was the only part of Sir's explanation you had understood and it was the only part that mattered. You needed De like a tree needed water. His existence made yours bearable.

 "You have to want this, Sam," Sir had said, slower than he'd ever spoken to you before. "Loki only accepts willing sacrifices." The first sentence had made enough sense, but you did not comprehend the reason behind it.

 "De?" you had asked instead. You didn't need to understand anything, as long as following the instruction meant getting him back.

 "If you don't do this, you will never see your brother again."

 You might have tried your best to follow Sir's instructions anyway, but there was no way you were going to do anything to put De at risk.

 It's one of the few certainties of your life. There were three. De is stability, Sir is not to be trusted, and the burning and acrid scent that often surrounds him means pain and shouting and words you couldn't comprehend.

You don't smell it now, but you knew it was coming. You're kneeling and bleeding on the ground in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night and it's raining. You're not stupid and nothing is capable of surprising you. Whenever this is over, there’s going to be so much pungent scent you won’t be able to smell anything else.

"Find Loki," Sir commanded suddenly. It was the one command you had learned to always hear, and follow, though it always made your head feel further filled with sawdust and so much pain. It was also like filling your head with garage sale artifacts and pieces of things that didn't belong to you.

But you followed the command, closing your eyes and reaching for the figure who Sir believed could return De.

"Gabrieloki," your subconscious whispered. Behind closed eyes you saw a hasty sketch, like from an old book, but it was wrong. A facade of indifference behind a mask of anger behind so much pain it left you gasping for breath.

"Find Loki! You worthless waste of space!" Sir screamed. You felt rather than saw the foot coming over the circle to kick you right in the lower part of your stomach and your forehead slammed into the ground because it hurt too much to stay upright.

"Gabrieloki," you begged, too quietly for Sir to register the sound. You needed De.

There was a flash of light in your peripheral, but you didn't move. Sir's trained you well. Most of the time, it never even occurs to you to flinch.

De would call it self-preservation, but De isn't here. You haven't seen De in a very long time. But you don't want to think about that because it makes you feel sad.

You had felt abandoned then. De had left and you still wondered if you'd ever see him again and at the time you had believed that the very least he could do was take you with him.

But Sir has not let you out of his sight for more than a few minutes at a time and now, finally, you understand. Sir is here, with you and De is gone away from Sir,

And you've never wanted anything else more.

"It has been a very long time since a moron thought sacrificing snake skin to me was a good idea. I thought I was always clear about the necessity of a willing sacrifice."

It wasn't so much the voice of the new arrival that drew your attention back as it was the raindrops splattering on your head.

Sir said something in answer, but you had no idea what. Sometimes you get lost in your head and words have no meaning. Even when you're paying attention, they'll sometimes exist in a state of meaningless flux. Just like you.

"A willing sacrifice must be able to consent to being the sacrifice of their own free will, or else it's not a willing one."

"He is a willing sacrifice! Tell him, Sammy! Your sacrifice for Dean's return to me!"

You looked up at the figure you had brought here. Gabrieloki. His expression was one filled with rage, but you knew it wasn't rage towards you. Another mask. You thought his true mess of feelings might include sadness, but it hurt too much to try to dig deeper.

"De?" You wanted to see De. Nothing else mattered. You could be whatever he wanted you to be if it meant that you could join De away from Sir.

The edges of his anger seemed to fade, but maybe it was because it wasn’t you that he was mad at. But then the anger flared as he directed his gaze towards Sir. “You would exchange one son with another as though they are items to be bartered with?!”

You had to remind yourself that his displeasure wasn’t at you, not like Sir’s when you messed up the salt lines. Or anything else.

“I will do whatever it takes to get back my firstborn! Sammy’s not so unwilling a sacrifice, why won’t you accept it?!” The sound of falling rain and the occasional bird are infinitely more interesting to you than Sir’s current tirade. His loud and angry bustle was normal. Either there would be pain, or there wouldn’t be pain, and it was so commonplace that you were incapable of caring one way or the other any longer. Either was temporary. You would get your De back.

You knew your view of pain wasn’t the healthiest, but it reminded you that you were more alive than the oscillating language you so greatly related to. Did you sometimes wish your pain was greatly lessened? Absolutely. But to feel as though you were only moments from disappearing, not unlike the sounds that vanished in moments, was not any better.

You didn’t like feeling like water in a sieve, as though you had to hold close every fragment of yourself or watch it flow down the drain.

“What makes you think I would be willing to give you another son when you’re willing to so thoughtlessly discard the one you still have? This supposedly ‘consenting sacrifice’ is not walking into this with both eyes open, as I have always demanded.”

You were curious about the Gabrieloki. You had no idea who he was, only that Sir had demanded you summon him, so you did. You did not know what Sir had been asking of you, to be his willing sacrifice.

He was shorter than Sir and the physical differences extended to him looking less harsh. The complexities of his dialogue meant absolutely nothing to you, but that wasn’t relevant. Even with what little comprehension you did have, you were not so stupid as to not understand that they were talking about you.

You could be a good judge of character when you wanted to be and what you wanted was to get closer and understand. You settled yourself to speaking up instead, even though there were times when it was nearly impossible to say anything at all. “De? De afe?”

“Shut up!”

You didn’t look at Sir, but you knew the Mad Voice was directed at you. You knew that the word ‘stop’ was not spoken, but tone can carry intention.

You saw Sir raise a foot in anger, again, and this time you were unable to hold back the flinch. You only wanted pain as a necessary way to stay in reality.

You were already firmly in reality.

But the foot never connected. There was sudden silence and Sir appeared to be frozen in mid air.

The raindrops had stopped falling. They were still in the air, but not in motion.

You felt a tingling at the edge of your senses and your attention returned to Gabrieloki, a name which was decidedly too long. He looked more like an El, anyway.  He wasn’t moving, but his stillness wasn’t as unnatural as Sir’s or that of the water droplets.

You were still kneeling right in front of him, so you settled back on your haunches. The only sound was you and the soft breathing of the one you were considering. You thought about smudging the lines of the containment circle, but you knew that it wasn’t holding him here, that he could leave whenever he wanted to. That he hadn’t left yet, and even the fact that he had shown up at all, meant that he had some reason to not leave yet.

You knew it was because of you. That should have scared you, but you weren’t frightened at all. You were happy.

In a moment of lightning inspiration, you knew what to do.

You pulled De’s stolen and unopened chocolate bar from your back pocket. He’d given it to you “In case of an emergency,” at a time close to the falling apart of everything. You didn’t want to recall the moments leading up to De being gone.

You held it towards El. You still had no idea what a willing sacrifice was, or what it had to do with you. But maybe he’d like a chocolate bar? “De? De afe?” you repeated, waving the candy bar.

El grinned and took the candy bar from you. Then he broke it into equal halves without removing the wrapper. You could tell that it was very melted chocolate bar and hoped that he wouldn’t mind.“Yes, Dean is safe.”

Then nothing mattered. You needed De, but Sir wasn’t safety, so De was better off wherever he was unless you could get to safety too. Then you could have him back.

“You’re a conundrum, aren’t you, Sammy.”

With the rest of the world in silence, it was easier to follow what was spoken. But they were just words. You didn’t have to know what they meant in a sentence to understand that the tone was not one of anger. Almost a chiding friendliness.

You didn’t try to piece enough words together to respond. You expected that he didn’t need a response. You merely watched to see what he would do.

He tossed the second half back at you and delicately removed the wrapper from his half. You stared at your half.

“I know what John wants, and I think I know what your brother wants.”

You unwrapped your half of the chocolate bar because you were sure that it was his intention for you to eat it, even though you didn’t understand why. The chocolate bar was more melted than you’d thought and you managed to get it all over your hands before you had any pieces to put in your mouth.

You tilted your head at the word ‘brother’. You were sure he was talking about De, even if the rest of the sentence was entirely lost.

Did he know where De was? Could he take you to him? Would he be willing to do so, if you were on your best behavior and asked really nicely?

The silence persisted until your train of thought ended and you tilted your head to study the stranger again. What did he want in exchange?

“What do you want, Kiddo?”

[smokeybrand]

Poppycock

Last night, i read a ton of the Crossed comics. I’d been seeing the Horsecock meme for a few years now and finally decided to pull the trigger to see what all the fuss was about. I’m always curious about ho the US does mature content in anything other than cinema because it rarely ever turns out decent. So how does Crossed fair? As something that wears it’s graphic nature on it’s sleeve, is it the unicorn that finally executes mature content, overt sexual situations, and storytelling in a way that is both satisfying and rewarding to the reader? No. No it does not. Crossed sucks. There shouldn’t be fuss because this sh*t is trash. Aside from the fact that the art is ugly as sin, making it incredibly difficult to want to keep reading, the actual narrative content is mediocre at it’s best and a whole ass dumpster fire at it’s worst. This sh*t is peak, teenage, edgelord, nonsense and it’s weird there are so many f*cking issues in the franchise. How is Crossed so successful? F*ck, dude, The Walking Dead does this entire narrative better. It’s like someone read that, removed all of the compelling character work and intricate world building, amped up the gore to cartoonishly ghoulish levels, and sh*t it out into a public too lazy to do the work. The Walking Dead is a story where the violence is a consequence of the plot. Crossed is a narrative that in service to, and almost an afterthought of, the violence. It’s the Michael Bay of this specific genre and i hated every minute i spent reading this trash. Also, and i can’t stress this enough, the art in these books is f*cking ugly. Not disgusting like they want it to be, but fundamentally poorly drawn.

Now, i may be a too hard on this series. May be. I’m not entirely sure but i feel like I'm not. I as raised on Eighties era Japanimation. That’s what we called it back then, not anime. Weebs weren’t a thing a yet, we were Otaku. I had a subscription to Newtype when i was, like twelve, that’s how deep i was into that sh*t. That’s how deep i am still into that sh*t. It’s wild seeing the culture shifts and how everything gets sanitized as appeal broadens but that’s a different essay. My point is i grew up on sh*t like Angel Cop, Dark City, Battle Angel Alita, and Akira. Tits and gore and sex and ultraviolence. It was intricately detailed and never skimped on the grim reality but was drawn with a passionate reverence for the art form. Hell, even films that have cultural significance and are heralded as high art like Grave of the Fireflies, never shied away from the brutality necessary for that narrative. I’ve seen a lot of f*cked up sh*t before my tenth birthday because of my love for the Japanese imports so i might be desensitized to this kind of stuff. That said, i know shock schlock when i see it and Crossed is definitely that. It’s an ugly, bloated, meandering, franchise filled with bad writing, poor art, and uninspired storytelling. We’ve seen this narrative before. Something triggers an apocalypse. Terrible people are terrible. Earnest people are trying to survive in the new status quo of nightmare and brutality. Now and Then, Here and There, did this much better, with less mutilation and more character development. The f*cking Mad Max franchise is built on this sh*t and Fury Road won Oscars for it. You don’t have to be Hemingway but, f*ck, give us something! Crossed doesn’t even present the bare minimum

Nothing is in service to a narrative. It’s all just murderrapezombies just for the shock of murderrapezombies. Holy sh*t, there’s incest in Family Values? That’s horrifying! Yosuga No Sora. They murdered those kids in the first limited? How f*cking bleak! Erased. I’ll admit, there are some interesting choices made in how to tell these pedestrian ass stories, Psychopath really stood out on that front, but the story, itself, is f*cking dumb. The first limited flirted with being pretty good over all but I've seen it done better elsewhere. Blood-C is a great example of that sh*t. Graphic violence, ridiculous gore you can feel, and still a damn decent overarching plot to tie it all together. The violence never overstays it’s welcome. It’s there to accentuate the powerlessness of our principals, never the main f*cking point of the story. I mentioned Alita before but if you want to focus on character, that’s your bet right there. The adventures of Gally are some of the most devastating situations you’ll ever experience. That chick has lived a life. Belladonna of Sadness is a horrible time but a beautiful watch. Want to go wide? An ensemble type narrative? AD Police. F*ck, dude, Devilman exists! Everything just mentioned, came out at least thirty f*cking years ago. Why is Crossed so bad when there is a plethora of material you can read that does this sh*t better? How can you not tell this type of story, when you have literally hundreds of example on how to tell this story properly, both contemporary and historical? And I'm only using Japanese content because that’s what I'm most familiar with. The French can give the Nihon a run for their money with some of the sh*t they’ve dropped over the years. Metal Hurlant, Heavy Metal when it skipped across the pond, is a straight up pioneer in this type of content. That motherf*cker has been publishing since the Seventies. It’s entire thing is mature storytelling and it does it in a way that’s compelling, easy on the eye, and rewarding to experience. Crossed does none of that.

Crossed is just gore porn trash. There’s no substance to be had . None of the characters are actually compelling. All of the violence is gratuitous. It’s never used as a mirror to humanity, just bloody viscera for the sake of it. It does nothing with that naked violence that has merit outside of just being there. Why do the Crossed f*cked each other to death? Is the fact that there are a mother and son character f*cking matter outside of the intrinsic revulsion humans are supposed to feel toward that type of sh*t? Where is the narrative reward for that guy f*cking a moose corpse? I can’t express how try-hard all of this comes across. There’s so much rape and mutilation in this thing, it just becomes normal. All the carnage s just background noise at some point and you’re left with lackluster storytelling for the remainder of the read. Like, there’s a scene where a bunch of these assholes are circle jerking into a bowl of bullets to turn people they shoot. That’s a scene in this comic which had potential. You could have explored how maybe the Crossed are more capable and build them up as a far deadlier threat. Nope. Another shows a bunch of Crossed eating baby corpses in an long abandoned delivery room. Why? What’s the point of this scene? How much harder would it hit if it wasn’t Crossed eating the fetus jerky, but regular people? This is how low some people would stoop just to live another day, even if that day is in a living hell. I read Sweet Tooth a few weeks back and it has a lot in common with Crossed. They can be companion pieces. Sweet Tooth is infinitely better. It does all the things you need to do, in order to tell this type of story. Emotional anchoring, strong motivations, a unrelenting sense of bleak struggle; Sweet Tooth is everything Crossed should have been. Instead, i got horsecock.

[aion-rsa]

Is It Better to Reinvent Fantasy Tropes or Pay Homage to Them?

https://ift.tt/3oItn9x

In August, we brought you the first part of this roundtable conversation between three of speculative fiction’s most exciting up-and-coming authors: Emily Tesh (Silver in the Wood and its sequel Drowned Country), A.K. Larkwood (The Unspoken Name), and Everina Maxwell. In honor of today’s publication of Maxwell’s queer space opera Winter’s Orbit, we’re publishing the second part of their conversation. In it, the writers and IRL friends have a funny and insightful conversation about elves and the value of a homage, the difficulties of writing sequels, and how to name a book.

Q: EVERINA MAXWELL: Fantasy as a genre is constantly reinventing elements it’s had since forever. Both The Unspoken Name and Drowned Country contain elves, for example, or at least something that looks like elves if you squint at them sideways. What inspires you to take a familiar concept and put a new spin on it?

EMILY TESH: Oh thank you, you know I love to talk about elves. For me part of the joy of creating genre fiction is working with the constraints and expectations of that genre, whether you’re running with them or pushing against them–borrowing from what Kass said earlier about reusing characters, it’s helpful to have a paintbox rather than mixing your paint from scratch! I especially love having a starting point for what your readers think is going on; in many ways writing a book is an exercise in mind control–what is your reader imagining right now? What have they guessed? What do they know that the characters don’t? What elements of the story are holding their attention? Sometimes one feels a bit of pressure to subvert, to do an original take that no one has done before. But I don’t think that’s always necessary or even interesting. A boring subversion (you thought… X! But actually… the opposite of that!) can’t carry a story by itself, while the familiar tracks of reader expectation can lead you to interesting places. It’s also the case that having your expectations fulfilled can be a satisfying experience as a reader; personally I love to guess the murderer, to solve the lore mystery, to watch characters who are clearly perfect for each other realise they’re in love. 

Anyway my point is: I find it impossible to talk elves in the fantastic without finding myself in conversation with Tolkien, who just wrote so much elf bullshit. I say this from a place of deep love, as a person who has read all of it multiple times including the obscure stuff that didn’t even make it into the Silmarillion. And while “this isn’t like Tolkien!” is something I’ve heard often as a shorthand for “this fantasy is new and fun and subverts those old familiar tropes you know!,” I knew when I started writing Drowned Country that I wanted to do the opposite of that: I wanted to lean right into Tolkienesque elves–immortals who have outlived their own apocalypse, remnants of a civilization unimaginably older than the human world, and also the cool thing where as they get older and older they start to turn invisible. I think there’s a lot to be said for the homage, the anti-subversion. What is a genre without the echoes and reimaginings, the game of expectations, the mutual understanding between author and reader that what we are reading now is built–for better or worse–on what we’ve read before?

Also elves are cool and great and that’s just facts.

A.K. LARKWOOD: I can’t believe everyone spotted the elves in my book, I thought I hid them so well. Anyway my excuse is because I just think it’s cute to give people pointy ears.

TESH: This is also valid.

Q: TESH: Speaking of sources for fantasy tropes: can someone just like… explain Dungeons and Dragons to me? From a writing perspective, I mean. I know that for some people roleplay can be a hugely productive story-generating engine and I am curious about how that goes because it has never worked for me!

LARKWOOD: D&D as I have played it is good for telling exactly one story, which is “some people who are good at fighting explore a mysterious location.” At its best this is really all you need! God knows I have got multiple huge chunks of book out of this very mechanism! But I don’t think it’s good for generating plot so much as it encourages you to think about character. The role of DM and player are not the same as the roles of author and reader, the axis of authority over what happens to this fictional person is very different, so it gives you a different perspective on… what is it that endears you to a character so much that you get very sad when they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? What makes it fun to spend time in a certain persona, until they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? Why do some character deaths feel important and meaningful and others feel frustrating and pointless, such as, when you are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? (This was in 2014. I will neither forgive nor forget.)

Fun fact: many years ago I DMed a game which featured some of the locations in The Unspoken Name as playable dungeons. In this game my future wife played a professional wrestler named Roxanne, which honestly makes me think the whole book would have been better if she’d been at the wheel throughout.

Q: MAXWELL: Both The Unspoken Name and Silver in the Wood have sequels. How did you find the process of writing the second book? How does your approach to character and plot change when you know the reader has probably already met them?

TESH: It’s both great fun and the absolute worst! Fun because you already have a world to play in and some character dynamics to play with, and you don’t have to do nearly as much work establishing things either for the readers or for yourself. The worst for almost exactly the same reasons. Writing Silver in the Wood took me a long time for how short it is, because I was figuring out the mysteries along with the characters. Drowned Country, conversely, was written fairly quickly, but it was much harder. This despite knowing up front almost everything I needed to know (beach episode, goffic ruins, sad vampire, mysterious young lady, elves!)–having to tell a story within an established character framework threw me, because it limited my options for what those characters would plausibly do and feel. The two-year timeskip that I ended up building into the book is mostly there to give me breathing room and shake up the character dynamics a bit–my original concept for it followed hard on the heels of the first book’s plot, and I wrote about six thousand words of that before realizing it was hurtling towards being a sad story about a couple having a bad breakup, which I didn’t want to write! I think it was Kass who suggested “just set it two years later” and it worked like a charm.

LARKWOOD: I had heard all about The Difficult Second Novel and had blithely been like “but I would simply have no problems with this,” and I was extremely wrong! I wrote The Unspoken Name over several years with infinite latitude to rethink and rewrite, and no expectation that anyone was ever going to read it. “Do the same thing again, but different and better, in approximately a quarter of the time, with more people watching” is always a bit of a daunting prospect. My top tip is: don’t be in your final year of law school, or if you must, try to ensure that a global health crisis doesn’t also happen at the same time. That said, I think it was a productive struggle, and knowing that some people are already invested in the characters does mean you can skip straight to being very nasty to them.

Read more

Books

How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera

By Kayti Burt

Books

Cover Reveal: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

By Kayti Burt

Q: TESH: How do you come up with a good title for a book? (Yes this question is here to torment you.)

MAXWELL: YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THIS AS WELL

LARKWOOD: HA HA HA. The Unspoken Name was my working title! I made a list of about 30 alternative options and thought very hard about it for several weeks and – of course – reverted to the original. (but the title of the sequel I got right away – you win some you lose some)

MAXWELL: You title your first draft five minutes before you post it on the internet, then you discover the title you picked has been used by several other books, then you go through dozens and dozens of titles until words no longer have any meaning, then someone else (hi, Ali!) suggests something thoughtful based on some imagery and you’re like yes! That one! Please never make me title a book again.

TESH: Since I HAVE to answer–I don’t see what the problem is, guys! You just say literally what the book is about: e.g. Silver in the Wood is about a guy named Silver who goes into a wood, and Drowned Country is about some country which is underwater. Simple!

MAXWELL: Petition to retitle both Emily’s books Some Trees And A Sad Man.

TESH: Some Trees And A Sad Man and its sequel Same Trees, Different Sad Man.

LARKWOOD: I can’t believe we’ve solved the title problem for all time! Really looking forward to Ev’s upcoming masterwork, Two Boys In Space (Who Kiss), and mine, Too Many God Damn Things Happen In This Book.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

TESH: I think our publicists will shout at us if we do not end with: that’s Drowned Country by Emily Tesh for gay disaster folklore and gothic seasides, out August 2020; Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell for space princes stuck in an arranged marriage, coming February 2021, and The Unspoken Name + 2021’s upcoming highly mysterious sequel by A.K. Larkwood for haunted snake goddesses and orcs with dating problems. If you have enjoyed our conversation, you may also enjoy our books!

Winter’s Orbit, Drowned Country, and The Unspoken Name are available wherever books are sold. The paperback edition of The Unspoken Name is also now out!

The post Is It Better to Reinvent Fantasy Tropes or Pay Homage to Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3tkYMT2

[an-enigmatic-bliss]

Life was ok, I was not satisfied but it was survivable. I was having all the fun I could have with my amazing friends, but who knew that I was gonna fall, oh boy, did I fall for someone, someone too amazing to be true, too beautiful to be true, someone with the purest heart I have ever talked to. Now don’t get me wrong when I said “I talked to”, it was rather awkward silences with my wingman filling the void, I don’t know but somehow butterflies came alive when I just looked at her. Probably nobody will read this, but it’s just a confession to myself, something to ease the infinite tons of burden that I carry. I m not a regular tumblr user, i started some months ago, just becoz she was on tumblr, and I could not contact her by Instagram. I was a very different guy before. Even I am ashamed of myself. I never believed in love, even though 2 years back I was in a relationship with a very gud girl, but I ruined it. Now I feel sad that I didn’t even try to mend it. But the world became different on August 12th,2018 at exactly 3:37 pm. I just saw a girl passing me, and out of nowhere Ed sheeran started playing “Perfect”. I did found a girl, I discovered an unexplored part of my heart. I wasn’t sure of what I was feeling becoz it was totally new. Flirting with a girl u just find hot is much much different than just talking to a girl u actually care about, which I found out.

But I could never have the courage to go up to her, I started to get depressed due to my fears, just the thought of someone like me, talking to someone like her, was non-existent in my mind.

But my asshole of a bestie, told her about me and she said to bring me over for a chat. I don’t know what someone does, when so many emotions come rushing, I don’t know what I did, didn’t sleep properly for two days, lost appetite, despite having an enormous, sang love songs all day. It was lime I was very angry at my friend, and I had never been so afraid my entire life, but secretly feeling happy, then becoming sad at the thought of her instant rejection, but then feeling angry at myself again, for not being positive.

The fateful day came, I did talk to her, I didn’t stammer, I spoke in English the whole time(she was in London for 6 years), I made her laugh, and her smile is the most beautiful thing, when she smiles, it’s like, she just radiates beauty. I can talk about her for hours, but I don’t intend to. Soooo, she said we could hangout later becoz she had classes to attend, she being a topper. Sadly, that was the only day that I could talk like that with her. I did meet her again and again, with all our friends being there, and I realized that I couldn’t speak up. And also thought that she didn’t spoke first, broke my will and I became more timid the more I met her. I even learnt a few spanish becoz she aced in spanish. I once stood 2 hours with her uttering less than 20 syllables, and even she wasn’t speaking up, so that was day I decided that I have to forget her, becoz my mind knew that she was way out of my league, but my heart tricked me.

“Love is so short but forgetting is so long” is so right. Though I have my proper sleeps at night, but she still has my heart and that’s what makes hope the most terrible thing? I hate hope, it just shows the future I may never have

So concluding this soooo long, soooo monotonous post, I say gud night to myself(as there are high chances nobody will read this) and to a chance reader.

[rpf-bat]

There’s No Way I’m Kissing That Guy

Pairing: Gerard Way x Reader

Genre: Fluff

Summary: Request fic for @sleepersareweaker. “MALE!READER MEETING, LIKE, BASEMENT GEE AT COMIC CON OR SOMETHING AND IMMEDIATELY FALLING IN LOVE BUT HE'S GETTING STRAIGHT VIBES? SO HE JUST NEVER MAKES A MOVE EVEN THOUGH THEY BECOME REALLY GOOD FRIENDS AND THEN GEE MAKES AN AWKWARD HALF-ASSED MOVE.Or gerard does something very explicitly not straight and reader has to rearrange his entire life and like immediately awkwardly asks if gee wants to go for coffee and gee misunderstands so reader has to be like "A DATE" and gees face just lights up.”

Maybe you shouldn’t have cosplayed as Batman, you thought with a hint of self-doubt as you walked around the convention. There were a million dudes dressed as Batman here today, and a lot of them were more skilled at costume making than you.

Besides, you thought bitterly, I don’t even have the body for it. Batman is supposed to be this buff superhero, with six pack abs, who could throw the Joker through a fucking wall. That’s not me! I’m a fucking comic book nerd! The Joker could beat my scrawny ass!

“Maybe I should just go home….” you muttered aloud. You’d already picked up the DC merchandise you’d been hoping to score at the vendor’s booths, and the guests speaking at the panels were kind of B-list this year, anyway. Perhaps it was best to…..

“Can you at least take a picture with me before you leave?” said an unfamiliar voice, interrupting your thoughts. You looked up and saw a black-haired stranger standing before you. He was cosplaying Robin. He was cute.

Whoa, calm down there, buddy, you reminded yourself. He’s probably straight, anyway. That would be your luck.

“You want to take a picture with me?” you asked, surprised. “I’m sure there are better Batmans wandering around, if you want a good picture to post on Facebook, so….”

“No, I like your Batman costume,” the stranger insisted. “I mean, if you’re not comfortable taking pictures with people you don’t know, that’s fine. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No, I’d love to take a picture with you,” you backtracked. “Sorry, my name’s Y/N.”

“I’m Gerard,” the man smiled. Hazel eyes sparkled from beneath his mask.

“Nice to meet you, Gerard,” you smiled.  His attention was making you feel a bit better. “So, what kind of pose would you like to do?”

“Well, I don’t know where my brother wandered off to,” Gerard sighed. “He brought his camera, and he was supposed to help me take pictures with people, but he met some girl in a Wonder Woman costume and I haven’t seen him since. Not that I blame him.”

“Oh. Yeah, uh, gotta love Wonder Woman,” you said awkwardly. If he ‘can’t blame’ his bro for being distracted by a sexy girl, he’s definitely straight, you thought, disappointed.

“Anyway, since I don’t have him to take the photo, just a simple selfie is fine,” Gerard shrugged. “If you don’t mind using your phone, that is.”

“That’s cool with me,” you replied, and opened the camera app on your smartphone.

Gerard stepped closer to you, to make sure he was in the shot. You felt yourself so warm as his shoulder and hip grazed your own.

“Smile, Y/N!” Gerard grinned, and you did, and took the picture.

“There, that’s perfect,” Gerard complimented. “If I give you my number, you’ll text me the picture, right?”

“Yeah,” you nodded. Your stomach flip-flopped at the thought of having this handsome man’s phone number.

Not that anything will come of it, you reminded yourself, frowning.

“So, what’s your favorite Batman storyline?” Gerard asked conversationally.

“Have you read Red Rain?” you wondered.

“You mean, the first part of the Batman & Dracula trilogy?” Gerard recognized.

“Yeah, the one that came out in the early 90’s,” you nodded, happy he recognized it.

“Those comic books were part of the Elseworlds imprint, right?” Gerard recalled.

“Yeah, that’s right,” you grinned, nerding out.

“Dude, I loved that storyline, too,” Gerard grinned back. “I’m a sucker for vampires, and anything horror movie-ish, though.”

“No way!” you said happily. “I love horror movies, too!”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your favorite?” Gerard wondered.

“Oh, gosh, it’s impossible to pick just one,” you confessed.

“Are you staying in this hotel for the whole con?” Gerard asked.

“Yeah,” you replied. “Why?”

“I packed a bunch of horror DVDs with me,” Gerard confessed. “We should totally hang out in my room and watch some of them, if you’re going to be in town all weekend.”

You hadn’t originally planned on sticking around for the whole convention. But now, you thought you just might have to.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Gerard had to leave to go to a signing with Grant Morrison (you would have loved to have gotten his autograph, too, but tickets to that particular event were extra, and you didn’t have the cash), so you went back up to your room to eat some dinner.

A few hours later, your phone buzzed.

Hey, it’s Gerard, the text said, and your heart skipped a beat. Mikey’s sexiling me lol. Can I bring one of my DVDs to your room?

Sure, you replied, happy for the chance to see him again.

Even if he wasn’t interested in you (or guys, in general), it was still nice to be able to make friends with him, right?

I guess I’m satisfied with that, you told yourself.

When he knocked on your door a few minutes later, you noticed that he had changed out of his Robin costume. His face was even more handsome without the mask. Fuck.

He was wearing a pair of black, skinny jeans, and a baggy concert tee. You read the lettering on his shirt: Smashing Pumpkins – The Infinite Sadness Tour.

“Dude, Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness is one of my favorite albums ever,” you gaped fanboyishly.

“Mine, too!” Gerard said, his eyes lighting up with excitement. “Dude, when my brother and I got to see them live, it was fucking amazing.”

“Oh, you saw them in concert? I’m so jealous,” you groaned.

“Smashing Pumpkins, horror, Red Rain……you and I have a lot in common, man,” Gerard noticed.

“Wow, we really do,” you agreed, a bit surprised. You found yourself daydreaming about going to a concert with Gerard, kissing him while Billy Corgan sang ‘Tonight, Tonight’…….

No, you shook your head. Stop. Gerard doesn’t like you that way. I bet he has a girlfriend. Damnit.

“Anyway, what movie do you want to watch?” you asked, changing the subject.

“I brought Nightmare On Elm Street, and Carrie,” Gerard said, holding up the DVDs.

“Ooh, classics,” you smiled, complimenting his taste. “Let’s start with Nightmare. I love Freddy Krueger.”

“Same,” Gerard nodded, and popped the disc into your DVD player before sitting beside you on your bed. You flushed, trying not to think about how close he was.

For a while, you were silent as the film began to play.

“Oh, I forgot Johnny Depp was in this,” you commented when his character came on screen.

“Yeah, he was pretty hot, even back then,” Gerard said casually.

“Wait, what?!” You whipped around to face Gerard, staring at him, shocked. You were rewriting everything you knew about him in your head.

He said a guy is hot, you realized, asking yourself if this had really just happened. That would mean he likes guys. But, earlier he said he was attracted to Wonder Woman, so…..

“Oh…..um, I’m bi,” Gerard confessed, looking embarrassed. “If you have…..a problem with hanging out with a guy who isn’t straight, I can leave……”

“No, no, I’m not straight either!” you admitted. “I’m gay!”

“……Oh,” Gerard said meekly, like he was reevaluating a lot of stuff, suddenly, too.

If Gerard was attracted to men, then maybe you had a chance. You had to say it before you lost your nerve.

“Would you like to go get coffee with me?” you blurted.

“Oh…..uh, yeah, if you want to have something to drink while we watch the movie, I can go with you to buy it,” Gerard said with a confused look.

“No,” you facepalmed, feeling awkward as hell. “I mean…..would you like to go on a date with me sometime, Gerard?”

“…..Oh,” Gerard’s whole expression changed as the penny finally dropped for him. “…..Oh!”

You buried your face in your hands, horrifically embarrassed. What if, even if he did like guys, he didn’t like you? What if you’d completely fucked up a perfectly good new friendship?

“……Yes,” Gerard said softly, gentling removing your hand from your face. “Yes, I’d love to go out with you, Y/N.”

“Really?” you gaped in surprise as Gerard continued to hold your hand.

“Really,” Gerard grinned, and kissed you on your still-surprised mouth.

[deniscollins]

Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain

Do you or your coworkers look at your smartphone more than 52 times a day (which is the national average)? Do you or your co-workers need to unhook your brain from the harmful routines it has adopted around cell phone use? If yes, how can this problem be addressed to improve the relationship they have with their cell phones?

My name is Kevin, and I have a phone problem.

And if you’re anything like me — and the statistics suggest you probably are, at least where smartphones are concerned — you have one, too.

I don’t love referring to what we have as an “addiction.” That seems too sterile and clinical to describe what’s happening to our brains in the smartphone era. Unlike alcohol or opioids, phones aren’t an addictive substance so much as a species-level environmental shock. We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn’t happened yet.

I’ve been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing (group texts, podcasts, YouTube k-holes) weren’t helping. I tried various tricks to curb my usage, like deleting Twitter every weekend, turning my screen grayscale and installing app-blockers. But I always relapsed.

Eventually, in late December, I decided that enough was enough. I called Catherine Price, a science journalist and the author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” a 30-day guide to eliminating bad phone habits. And I begged her for help.

Mercifully, she agreed to be my phone coach for the month of January, and walk me through her plan, step by step. Together, we would build a healthy relationship with my phone, and try to unbreak my brain.

‘A Bit Horrifying’

I confess that entering phone rehab feels clichéd, like getting really into healing crystals or Peloton. Digital wellness is a budding industry these days, with loads of self-help gurus offering miracle cures for screen addiction. Some of those solutions involve new devices — such as the “Light Phone,” a device with an extremely limited feature set that is meant to wean users off time-sucking apps. Others focus on cutting out screens entirely for weeks on end. You can now buy $299 “digital detox” packages at luxury hotels or join the “digital sabbath”movement, whose adherents vow to spend one day a week using no technology at all.

Thankfully, Catherine’s plan is more practical. I’m a tech columnist, and while I don’t begrudge anyone for trying more extreme forms of disconnection, my job prevents me from going cold turkey.

Instead, her program focuses on addressing the root causes of phone addiction, including the emotional triggers that cause you to reach for your phone in the first place. The point isn’t to get you off the internet, or even off social media — you’re still allowed to use Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms on a desktop or laptop, and there’s no hard-and-fast time limit. It’s simply about unhooking your brain from the harmful routines it has adopted around this particular device, and hooking it to better things.

When we started, I sent her my screen time statistics, which showed that I had spent 5 hours and 37 minutes on my phone that day, and picked it up 101 times — roughly twice as many as the average American.

“That is frankly insane and makes me want to die,” I wrote to her.

“I will admit that those numbers are a bit horrifying,” she replied.

Catherine encouraged me to set up mental speed bumps so that I would be forced to think for a second before engaging with my phone. I put a rubber band around the device, for example, and changed my lock screen to one that showed three questions to ask myself every time I unlocked my phone: “What for? Why now? What else?”

For the rest of the week, I became acutely aware of the bizarre phone habits I’d developed. I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted.

Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness. For years, I’ve used my phone every time I’ve had a spare moment in an elevator or a boring meeting. I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate.

If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing. So during my morning walk to the office, I looked up at the buildings around me, spotting architectural details I’d never noticed before. On the subway, I kept my phone in my pocket and people-watched — noticing the nattily dressed man in the yellow hat, the teens eating hot Takis and laughing, the kid with Velcro shoes. When a friend ran late for our lunch, I sat still and stared out the window instead of checking Twitter.

It’s an unnerving sensation, being alone with your thoughts in the year 2019. Catherine had warned me that I might feel existential malaise when I wasn’t distracting myself with my phone. She also said paying more attention to my surroundings would make me realize how many other people used their phones to cope with boredom and anxiety.

“I compare it to seeing a family member naked,” she said. “Once you look around the elevator and see the zombies checking their phones, you can’t unsee it.”

Withdrawal Sets In

Next, I gave my phone the Marie Kondo treatment — looking at all my apps and keeping the ones that sparked joy and contributed to healthy habits and tossing those that didn’t.

For me, that meant deleting Twitter, Facebook and all other social media apps, along with news apps and games. I kept messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal, and non-distracting utilities like cooking and navigation apps. I pruned my home screen to just the essentials: calendar, email and password manager. And I disabled push notifications for everything other than phone calls and messages from a preset list of people that included my editor, my wife and a handful of close friends.

Where you keep your phone is also important. Studies have shownthat people who don’t charge their phones in their bedrooms are significantly happier than those who do. Catherine charges her phone in a closet; for me, she recommended a locking mini-safe. I bought one and started storing my phone inside, which simultaneously reduced my nighttime usage and made me feel like I was guarding the queen’s jewels.

And I pursued activities that could replace my phone habit. On the recommendation of my colleague Farhad Manjoo, I signed up for pottery classes. As it turned out, pottery makes a perfect phone substitute. It’s manually challenging and demands concentration for hours on end. It gets your hands dirty, too, which is a good deterrent to fiddling with expensive electronics.

After a pottery class, I updated my wife on my progress. I told her that while it felt great to disconnect, I still worried that I was missing something important. I liked having a constant stream of news at my fingertips, and I wanted to do more of the things I actually like about social media, like keeping tabs on my friends’ babies and maintaining ambient Kardashian awareness.

“I’m sad that you’re having trouble with this,” she said, “because it’s been great for me.”

She explained that since my phone detox started, I’d been more present and attentive at home. I spent more time listening to her, and less time distractedly nodding and mumbling while checking my inbox or tapping out tweets.

Psychologists have a name for this: “phubbing,” or snubbing a person in favor of your phone. Studies have shown that excessive phubbing decreases relationship satisfaction and contributes to feelings of depression and alienation.

For years, I’ve justified my phubbing by treating it as a professional necessity. Isn’t it my job to know when news happens? Won’t I be neglecting my duties if it takes me an extra hour to learn that Jeff Bezos is getting divorced, or another YouTuber did something racist?

I put this question to Catherine, who reassured me that I wasn’t jeopardizing my career by being slightly later to the news. She reminded me that I’d been happier since I dialed down my screen time, and she gently encouraged me to focus on the other side of the cost-benefit analysis.

“Think of the bigger picture of what you’re getting by not being on Twitter all the time.”

A Thoreau Cleansing

The biggest test came with a “trial separation” — a 48-hour period during which I wasn’t allowed to use my phone or any other digital device. (Catherine’s program calls for a 24-hour separation, but I decided to try a more hard-core version.)

I had dreaded this idea at the outset, but when the weekend actually arrived, I got giddy with excitement. I rented an off-the-grid Airbnb in the Catskills, warned my editor that I’d be offline for the weekend and took off.

A phone-free weekend involved some complications. Without Google Maps, I got lost and had to pull over for directions. Without Yelp, I had trouble finding open restaurants.

But mostly, it was great. For two solid days, I basked in 19th-century leisure, feeling my nerves softening and my attention span stretching back out. I read books. I did the crossword puzzle. I lit a fire and looked at the stars. I felt like Thoreau, if Thoreau periodically wondered what was happening on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story.

I also felt twinges of anger — at myself, for missing out on this feeling of restorative boredom for so many years; at the engineers in Silicon Valley who spend their days profitably exploiting our cognitive weaknesses; at the entire phone-industrial complex that has convinced us that a six-inch glass-and-steel rectangle is the ideal conduit for worldly experiences.

Sadly, there is no way to talk about the benefits of digital disconnection without sounding like a Goop subscriber or a neo-Luddite. Performative wellness is obnoxious, as is reflexive technophobia.

But I cannot stress enough that under the right conditions, spending an entire weekend without a phone in your immediate vicinity is incredible. You have to try it.

Rewired and Renewed

Allow me a bit of bragging: Over the course of 30 days, my average daily phone time, as measured by the iPhone’s built-in screen time tracker, has dwindled from around five hours to just over an hour. I now pick up my phone only about 20 times a day, down from more than 100. I still use my phone for email and texting — and I’m still using my laptop plenty — but I don’t itch for social media, and I often go hours without so much as a peek at any screen.

In one of our conversations, I asked Catherine if she worried that I would relapse. She said it was possible, given the addictive properties of phones and the likelihood that they’ll only keep getting more essential. But she said that as long as I remained aware of my relationship with my phone, and continued to notice when and how I used it, I’d have gotten something valuable.

“Your life is what you pay attention to,” she said. “If you want to spend it on video games or Twitter, that’s your business. But it should be a conscious choice.”

One of the most unexpected benefits of this program is that by getting some emotional distance from my phone, I’ve started to appreciate it again. I keep thinking: Right here, in my pocket, is a device that can summon food, cars and millions of other consumer goods to my door. I can talk with everyone I’ve ever met, create and store a photographic record of my entire life, and tap into the entire corpus of human knowledge with a few swipes.

Steve Jobs wasn’t exaggerating when he described the iPhone as a kind of magical object, and it’s truly wild that in the span of a few years, we’ve managed to turn these amazing talismanic tools into stress-inducing albatrosses. It’s as if scientists had invented a pill that gave us the ability to fly, only to find out that it also gave us dementia.

But there is a way out. I haven’t taken an M.R.I. or undergone a psychiatric evaluation, but I’d bet that something fundamental has shifted inside my brain in the past month. A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world — more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards.

I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too — the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct.

It’s not a full recovery, and I’ll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I’m starting to feel like a human again.

[reviewape-blog]

Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality - Articles - Our Ultimate Reality

https://www.reviewape.com/?p=5406 Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality - Articles - Our Ultimate Reality - Product Name: Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality – Articles – Our Ultimate Reality Click here to get Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality – Articles – Our Ultimate Reality at discounted price while it’s still available… All orders are protected by SSL encryption – the highest industry standard for online security from trusted vendors. Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality – Articles – Our Ultimate Reality is backed with a 60 Day No Questions Asked Money Back Guarantee. If within the first 60 days of receipt you are not satisfied with Wake Up Lean™, you can request a refund by sending an email to the address given inside the product and we will immediately refund your entire purchase price, with no questions asked. Description: The best-selling book Our Ultimate Reality, Life, the Universe and Destiny of Mankind, and 7 years of weekly newsletters has transformed for the better the life of countless people around the world over the last decade. Our Ultimate Reality has become the the de-facto reference for many on all Spiritual, Metaphysical and Life subjects and how to realise a life of peace, harmony, fulfilment, happiness and fulfilment of true potential. A Google search for – Adrian Cooper Our Ultimate Reality – will typically display over 50,000 web pages dedicated to these writings, constantly rising as increasingly more people seek crucial answers on the meaning of life, why we are here, how to live life to the full, what we should be experiencing on Earth and what lays ahead when our time here is over. With the world sinking ever further from Our Divine Source, countless millions of people intuitively feel there is much more to our purpose on Earth than a daily struggle to survive. Our Ultimate Reality, Life, The Universe and Destiny of Mankind reveals our Divine nature and purpose, answering once and for all the true meaning of life and how to enjoy a life of peace, harmony, health, abundance, self realisation and fulfilment, and what to expect when the time comes to move on. Testimonial: “It is rare indeed, when a book of this monumental importance comes along. For contained within its covers, are answers to all manner of questions spiritual seekers will certainly ask along the path. It appears that every possible topic has been covered in this book. Just a few examples include: healing, meditation, dreams, quantum physics, universal laws, descriptions of the non-physical realms and much more. Reading Our Ultimate Reality has left a profoundly deep impression on me, as I have been a seeker for most of my life. The brilliance of this book, is both that the author details all the subjects so clearly, and that these details all ring true for this reader. My advice to anyone interested learning what their ultimate destiny is, and the true nature of this multi-dimensional universe, would be to read this book.”  ~ Nicholas F. Falcone, Public Criminal Defence Attorney (Retired), Petaluma, CA. Click “Read more” to discover how Our Ultimate Reality, acclaimed as a “modern day bible” can transform YOUR life. Our Ultimate Reality has been written in a modern, understandable, non-mystical, non esoteric straightforward way understandable by people of all ages, nationalities and life circumstances, setting out in a concise, logical, easy to follow format, all you need to know in order to understand, pursue and realise your own true life potential and destiny, as humanity transitions from an era founded in darkness and ego, selfishness and taking, to a new era founded in Light and Love, compassion and giving. While this may not seem to be the case with the world in the sad state it is today, as the saying goes, “it is always the darkest before the dawn”. All humanity is entering a new dawn. Every single human being is here to help dispel the darkness and to participate in bringing forth a glorious new era of Light for humanity. Our Ultimate Reality, Life, the Universe and Destiny of Mankind is the companion and de-facto reference on living and the meaning of life for countless people around the world. Click below and read on to learn how this book can help you as well.Here is the complete list of chapters contained within this life-changing book and what you will discover that can transform your life doe the better as it has countless others.  Chapter 1. The Nature of the Universe: In this chapter you will, from the outset, begin to discover the true nature of the infinite Universe in which we live and move and have our Being. This is not related in any way to the so called “big bang theory” of science. Chapter 2. Definition of God: The true definition of God the Universe as opposed to the religious definition of God. Chapter 3. Hinduism: This is the first in a series of chapters that compares, contrasts and analyses the major non-dogmatic belief systems of the world, and how they describe, teach and agree with Universal reality. Chapter 4. Taoism: Another of the great and ancient traditions encompassing great wisdom from which everyone can learn. Chapter 5. Buddhism: Buddhism enjoys a considerable number of followers around the world and not without reason. Discover the how Buddhism approaches the ancient mysteries including the “paths” forming the basis of this ancient culture. Chapter 6. The Wisdom of the West: Aside from the popular, orthodox, dogmatic Western religions, there are also many ancient and great sources of wisdom of the Western hemisphere, that everyone will benefit by understanding understand. Chapter 7. The Principle of Mentalism: This is one of the great Universal Principles that is always present within our lives. Discover how The Principle of Mentalism is responsible for many so called “psychic” and many other “phenomena”. Chapter 8. The Principle of Correspondence: Another important Universal Principle, teaching the truth that there is direct correspondence between all great planes of reality, just as there is in life. Chapter 9. The Principle of Vibration: Discover the important truth about Vibration and its relationship with Energy, together constituting the fabric of the Universe under the influence of Mind. Chapter 10. The Principle of Polarity: Find out how the Polarity Principle manifests in the Universe and in physical life. Chapter 11. The Principle of Rhythm: Discover how Rhythm affects everything in the Universe including you and everyone and everything around you. Understanding this Principle will help you to understand other things influencing your daily life. Chapter 12. The Principle of Cause and Effect: The Principle of Cause and Effect is one of the most important and exalted Universal Principles. Discover why this is so, how it causation affects you, and how to ensure the effects you experience the ones you really want. Chapter 13. The Principle of Gender: Discover how everything in the Universe, not just humans, flora and fauna, has both masculine and feminine aspects. Chapter 14. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes: Discover the meaning and symbolism behind this very important and ancient text found inscribed on a green tablet, symbolically documenting the nature of the Universe and how the Universe itself came into being. Chapter 15. The Kaballah: A philosophy and tradition originating in ancient Judaism and an important Western source of Universal wisdom. Chapter 16. The Wisdom of Quantum Physics: Quantum Physics has emerged over the last century or so as an extremely important source of understanding of the nature of the Universe at a scientific as opposed to mystical level. This really is extremely important knowledge that everyone needs to know, understand and reconcile with the wisdom of the ages. Chapter 17. The Wisdom of the Ages: Discover how, despite the many different religions, traditions and cultures of the world, there is ultimately only one truth of the World and of the ages. Chapter 18. Wisdom from the Inner Spheres: Discover how Astral Projection and Out of Body Experiences are so valuable in discovering our true immortal nature, and of the destination for most people after the change known as “death”. Chapter 19. The Universe of Vibration: Learn more about the Principle of Vibration, which, together with Energy is absolutely fundamental to the entire Universe and everything within the Universe at all levels of life and reality. Chapter 20. The Principle of Cause and Effect: Find out more about the most exalted of the Universal Laws, Causation, and how this knowledge is extremely important to you. Everyone needs to understand how effects arise from corresponding causes. Chapter 21. The Universal Elements: Learn the importance of the Universal Elements of Fire, Air, Water and Earth. These are nothing whatever to do with the familiar Earth substances of the same name, but are characteristics of Energy and building blocks of life. Chapter 22. Vital Energy: The entire Universe in all planes of life is a manifestation of conscious, intelligent, vibrating Energy, known by many names. Discover more about Energy and Its importance to all life, and everything in existence. Chapter 23. Psychic “Phenomena”: In recent years so called “psychic phenomena” have become increasingly more high profile. Discover the reality behind these so called “phenomena”. Chapter 24. Remote Viewing: Remote Viewing has become famous in recent years due largely to its covert use by major governments for collecting information on the actions and secrets of other governments. Find out more about remote viewing and how it works. Chapter 25. Telepathy: Learn about the reality of telepathy, the natural ability of communicating between Minds. Chapter 26. Karma: Find out the truth about karma and how it affects you as well as everyone else. Chapter 27. The True Nature of God: Discover the true and glorious nature of God as opposed to the personified deity called “God” by the various major dogmatic religions of the world. Chapter 28. The Truth about the Change known as “Death?”: This is without doubt one of the most important chapters in the book. Everyone must know the truth about the change known as “death”, and where you will go after “passing on”. Discover also how your thoughts, beliefs and expectations among other important factors will influence your destination, and how they affect loved ones after their passing. Chapter 29. Animals After Passing: Many people and religions of the world believe that humans hold a privileged status during and at the end of “life”. Discover the truth about animals after passing. Chapter 30. Ghosts: Find out the facts about the departed humans often known as “ghosts”, and about the phenomena of “haunting”. Chapter 31. Reincarnation: Discover the important truth about mysteries, understood by very few, of reincarnation. The truth of reincarnation is absolutely vital information that everyone should know and understand. Chapter 32. Suicide: Learn what really happens to those people that feel so compelled to take their own physical life. Chapter 33. The Inner Bodies: Find out about the “invisible inner bodies” that we all have in addition to the familiar physical body, and what they mean to you. Chapter 34. The Astral Body – The Soul: Discover the true nature of the Astral Body, also known as the “Soul”. Chapter 35. The Mental Body – The Immortal Spirit: Learn all about the real “You”, who You really “Are” and the importance of the nature of your Spiritual “body”. Chapter 36. The Higher Self: Find out about the true nature Higher Self and Its importance to you on your path and in life. Chapter 37. The Physical Universe of Matter: The physical Universe of matter in which we are focussed for now is not all it seems. Find out the secret of what the physical Universe really is, especially relative to the Universe of Energy as a whole. Chapter 38. The Planes of The Non-Human Mind: In addition to the levels of consciousness that constitute the levels or planes of the Human mind, there also exists many other levels of consciousness and Energy that includes everything in existence including all animal, vegetable and mineral life. Find out about these great planes of life. Chapter 39. The Planes of The Human Mind: These are the levels of consciousness currently occupied by the various levels of the human Mind in accordance with individual Spiritual evolution. Discover the range of levels of Energy and consciousness currently occupied by humans, where humans are now on the Universal scale of life, and where we are going. Chapter 41. The Outer Astral Planes: Discover the darker characteristics of the lower Astral Planes and what sort of people find themselves there after passing over from the physical world Chapter 42. The Belief System Territories: I cannot stress enough that this is absolutely crucial information for anyone who holds any sort of religious belief. If you are hold any religious beliefs, you must read this and take notice while you still can. Chapter 43. Lower Level Astral Entities: Learn all about the lower level Astral entities, how many of them come into being, and how they can adversely affect people living in the physical world. Chapter 44. The Mid-Astral Planes: Once again this is absolutely crucial information for everyone without exception. This is where most “decent” people will find themselves after the change known as “death”. What you expect and believe about “dyeing” and “death” can make a huge difference to your own experience before, during and after the change known as “death” Chapter 45. The Inner Astral Planes: Often erroneously knows as the “upper Astral Planes”. Discover the realities of these idyllic worlds, sometimes known as the “Summerland”, and the nature of humans who have evolved to these peaceful, harmonious spheres. Chapter 46. Fairytale Beings: Most people have heard of the children’s favourites from their favourite books, the “Fairies”, “mermaids”, “gnomes” and other mystical and charming Beings. Learn all about these Fairy Tale Beings and of their true nature. Chapter 47. The Mental Planes: Also known as the Spiritual planes. Discover the glories, splendours, harmony, peace and tranquility of the inner spheres of life, beyond form, that people transition to after completing their experiences within the Astral realms. Chapter 48. The Celestial and Cosmic Planes: The Celestial and Cosmic planes include the most exalted spheres of life, the highest levels of the Mental planes. Learn about the Spirits who, having transcended the learning experiences and quest for perfection in the Astral and lower Mental Planes, now reside within these glorious spheres of life and reality that await everyone in due course. Chapter 49. Angels: Almost everyone will have heard of “Angels”, often depicted with wings and known by such well known names as Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, Auriel and Metatron. Learn all about these beings and what they really are and what they represent. Chapter 50. The Holy Guardian Angel: Most people have heard of the “Holy Guardian Angel” and perhaps that everyone might actually have one. Discover the true reality of the Holy Guardian Angel, and prepare to be surprised. Chapter 51. Spirit Guides: While we live out our lives on planet Earth it is often said that we have Beings, often known as “guides” watching over us from the inner worlds of the Astral. Discover the real truth about Spirit guides and the services they gladly offer. Chapter 52. Communications With The Inner Spheres: We are never alone. Spirits, high Intelligences of the inner spheres of life and reality are endeavouring to contact us in many different ways. to assist us on our path. Find out all about the methods used to facilitate this. Chapter 53. Psychics: A search on the Internet today will reveal numerous so called “psychic services”, frequently being offered by means of “premium rate” telephone services charging several or sometimes even many dollars per minute. Discover the real truth behind many of these so called “psychic hotlines”. Chapter 54. Psychic Mediums: Find out what “psychic mediums” really are, what they can genuinely offer, whether you should use such a service, and what to watch out for if you decide to do so. Do not seek a psychic medium until you have read this chapter. Chapter 55. Genuine Psychic Services: Find out what to look out for if you do decide to use any sort of “psychic service”. Do not use any “psychic service” without first reading this chapter. Chapter 56. The Ouija Board: Many people innocently believe the Ouija board to be harmless fun. Discover the truth behind the Ouija board. Warning – do not use a Ouija board again until you have read this chapter – even if you dare use one again afterwards. Chapter 57. Trance Mediums: Many mediums place themselves into a state of “trance” before “channeling” information from inner sources. Learn all about trance mediums and their abilities, and the type of communications and information involved. Chapter 58. Materialisation Mediums: Materialisation is a much less common than other forms of mediumship but much more “spectacular” and compelling. Find out about this impressive and important type of Spirit communication. Chapter 59. The Direct Voice: Of all types of mediumship with materialisation, The Direct Voice, together with materialisation to which it is closely related through the medium of Ectoplasm, is one the most compelling and, from the point of view of proof of the continuity of life after the death of the physical body the most valuable. Find out about communications by The Direct Voice in this chapter. Chapter 60. Electronic Voice Phenomena: In recent years considerable progress has been made in the use of electronic instruments to record Spirit voices. This is something that anyone at all can do with the right equipment. Learn all about how EVP works in this chapter. Chapter 61. Instrumental Transcommunication: ITC is a particularly advanced form of EVP whereby instead of using existing electronic devices to record Spirit voices, specially designed equipment is being used to communicate with Spirits. Learn all about these latest developments and how ITC is progressing in this important area of communications with the Astral spheres Chapter 62. Channeling Conclusion: In this chapter we review the entire subject of channeling and what it really means to us today in real and practical terms, particularly in terms of its true value for communicating with Spirits. Chapter 63. Contact With The Inner Spheres: This is the first in a series of chapters discussing this most important subject. The future of Spiritual communication and acquiring valuable information is direct contact with the higher spheres. Discover how and why in this chapter. Chapter 64. Clairvoyance: Clairvoyance quite literally means “clear seeing” and usually refers to viewing the physical Astral Worlds beyond the limitations of space and time. Find out all about clairvoyance and how you can develop the ability of clairvoyance as well. Chapter 65. The Akashic Record: Much as been said about the “Akashic Record” or “Akashic Library” as the “Library” of the Universe where all knowledge from all planes is perpetually stored. Find out more about this great Universal information source and how it can be accessed. Chapter 66. Astral Projection: Astral Projection is by far one of the most important abilities you can learn. Discover the profound benefits of learning Astral projection in this chapter. Chapter 67. Three Astral Projection Methods: Learn the three best methods for Astral Projection so you too can enjoy the considerable benefits of this very valuable ability. Chapter 68. The Out of Body Experience: Together with Astral Projection to which it is related, The Out of Body Experience is also a very valuable ability. Learn all about the characteristics, importance and value of Out of Body Experiences. Chapter 69. Three OBE Methods: Learn the three best methods for achieving Out of Body Experiences. Once learned you will most certainly want to go “out of body” as often as possible. Chapter 70. The Near Death Experience: In addition to the self-induced methods of leaving the body, the Near Death Experience is a very similar experience but happens involuntarily in situations that result in a “temporary physical death”. Discover what the “Near Death Experience” is, and what happens and is experiences in these “near death” situations.  Chapter 71. Progression Through Life: Discover the truth of how and why people generally progress through each physical life and what it actually means in the great scheme of things. This is crucial information for everyone wishing to achieve true progress. Chapter 72. Deep Physical Relaxation: Learn one of the most important and fundamental abilities for a wide range of valuable experiences. Deep physical realxation is one of the prerequisites to many inner abilities. Chapter 73. Concentration: With deep physical relaxation, concentration is another very fundamental ability to learn and practice in order to achieve a wide range of inner and life-changing experiences. Discover the profound benefits of concentration. Chapter 74. The Practice of Concentration: Learn the ability of deep concentration, and start to make real progress in many important aspects of your life and evolution. Chapter 75. Meditation: Meditation is another profoundly valuable, fundamental and life-changing ability. Discover the value and benefits of meditation and what can be achieved during meditation. Chapter 76. The Practice of Meditation: Learn the practice of meditation for yourself and enjoy the considerable benefits that meditation will bring. Chapter 77. Twin-Hearts Meditation: The Twin-Hearts is a special meditation that will bring with it various specific and valuable benefits. Learn all about the Twin-Hearts Meditation and how to practice it. Chapter 78. The Human Paradox: This is an extremely important chapter that everyone should fully understand. Discover the truth of your own reality and “existence” and how to finally free yourself. “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”. Chapter 79. The Eternal Now: Discover the persistent illusion of “time” and the powerful truth of “Now”. Chapter 80. The Law of Attraction: The Law of Attraction is one of the most powerful and important of the Universal Principles. Everyone without exception needs to understand this important Law in order to take real control over your life, abundance, health and happiness. See introductory article on The Secret movie and The Law of Attraction. Chapter 81. The Truth About Money: Most of humanity remains a slave to the concept of “money”. Discover the real truth about money and you will most certainly never look at money in the same way again. Chapter 82. The Power of Positive Thinking: Learn the importance of positive thinking and the positive influence it has over your life. Chapter 83. Affirmations: Many people have already discovered the profound impact that affirmations can have on their experience. Learn and utilise the great power of affirmations in your life. Chapter 84. Powers of The Imagination: Imagination is the major creative force in the Universe. Learn how you can harness your own powers of imagination for a wide range of valuable purposes, and become a conscious co-creator in the Universe Chapter 85. Creative Visualisation: Creative Visualisation is an aspect of the imagination which, once learned, can assist you in attracting anything you wish for need or desire. Discover why this is. Chapter 86. Practice of Creative Visualisation: In this chapter you will learn how to practice creative visualisation in order to attract anything you need, wish for or desire into your life. Chapter 87. Other Senses of The Imagination: In addition to visualisation, learn about the other powers of the imagination that can be used to further enhance the Chapter 88. The Power of Emotions: Discover the importance of emotions in the process of creating your own reality. Chapter 89. Creating Your Own Reality: This is one of the most important chapters for those wishing to change your life for the better. To discover how to change your life for the better, and attract everything you wish for need or desire, you really must read this chapter. Chapter 90. Harmonising Your Desires: This is another very extremely important chapter which teaches another fundamental aspect of attracting your wishes, needs and desires Chapter 91. Let Go and Let God: Learn the importance of “Let Go and Let God” in your ongoing life. Without understanding and practicing this important Principle you cannot enjoy complete success in your Life – or beyond. Chapter 92. The Joy and Power of Giving: Discover the power of giving, not only to help others, but also to attract more into your own life. Chapter 93. The Joy and Power of Healing: Discover the immense healing powers that we all potentially enjoy. Chapter 94. Pranic Healing: Pranic Healing is a form of Energy based healing. Learn more about Pranic Healing. Chapter 95. Reiki Healing: Reiki is probably the best known of Energy healing methods. Find out more about Reiki healing. Chapter 96. Healing Yourself and Others: Discover the joy and benefits of healing yourself and others. Never see a doctor again. Chapter 97. The Principles of Healing: Learn the principles of healing. Chapter 98. The Practice of Healing: In this chapter you will learn how to use Energy to heal yourself and others of any ailment over any distance. This is vital, must know information if you wish to gain total control over every aspect of your healing, health and wellbeing. Chapter 99. Living Your Own Reality: Discover the profound benefits of living your own reality instead of living your own life in accordance with the controlling influence of others! Chapter 100. Our Ultimate Destiny: Find out about our ultimate destiny as Spiritual human beings. This is a chapter that everyone must read. Chapter 101. Know Thyself: Learn the importance of truly knowing who you are and your true spiritual nature Chapter 102. Subjugating the Ego: This is yet another extremely important chapter for your ongoing Spiritual evolution. Discover the great importance of subjugating the demands of the ego. True progress cannot be made without subjugation of the Ego. Chapter 103. Practice of Subjugating the Ego: In this chapter you will learn the vital knowledge required for exactly how to transcend the demands of the Ego. Again, true progress is just not possible without subjugating the Ego, and therefore this chapter is absolutely vital reading for everyone wishing to make true progress and achieve further Spiritual evolution – and that should mean you. Chapter 104. Equilibrium of the Soul: This. together with subjugation of the Ego, is another extremely important aspect of true evolution. In order to progress you need to balance the attributes of your Soul. Discover exactly how in this chapter. Chapter 105. Transmutation of Negative Attributes: Autosuggestion is related to, but not the same as affirmations. Learn how you can use autosuggestion to make positive changes in your life by transmuting negative attributes into their polar opposite positive attributes. Chapter 106. Dreams: Your dreams are potentially an extremely important indicator of your life experiences as well as past, present and future situations. Learn all about the importance of dreams in this chapter. Chapter 107. The Dream Journal: To maximise the benefit of your dreams a dream journal is very important. Discover why this is and how you can start to remember and record your dreams. Chapter 108. The Inner Voice: Another extremely important chapter! Learning how to hear and heed the inner voice is extremely important both in your physical life, and for your onwards and inwards progression. Learn why this is so and what you can do and learn how to hear and interpret the messages of the inner voice to profoundly influence your life for the better. Chapter 109. The Flow of Life: Learn about the perfect flow of life in the Universe, how it affects you and where everything fits into the Divine order of the Universe. Chapter 110. Respect For All Life and Truth of Nutrition: Discover the importance of always having respect for all life and how it relates to the way humans regard food. Your attitude towards life and how you think of and treat other creatures, plants and other forms of life, including in the context of nutrition, will have a profound impact on your own life. This chapter is very important reading Chapter 111. Selfless Unconditional Service: This is one of the most important chapters in the book. You cannot truly progress without learning and applying these important Principles in your life Chapter 112. The Lessons of Life: It would be pointless to simply go through the motions of each lifetime without learning the valuable lessons that you came here to learn in the beginning. Discover the importance of these lessons in your own personal evolution Chapter 113. Pure Unconditional Love: Discover the real truth behind the most powerful force in the Universe, what it really is and what it means to you and your own evolution Chapter 114. The Transition of the Ages: As we rapidly approach this date, originally associated with the “end of the Mayan calendar”, discover the many scenarios associated with 2012, and what they really mean to you, all life, and the planet Earth. It is extremely important to fully understand what the possible effects on all life and Earth Herself as we experience the transition of the ages Chapter 115. Our Ultimate Reality: And finally discover our true purpose, Our Ultimate Reality. The ONLY True Law of Attraction Book You Will Ever Need. Click Here For Full Details Click here to get Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality – Articles – Our Ultimate Reality at discounted price while it’s still available… All orders are protected by SSL encryption – the highest industry standard for online security from trusted vendors. Welcome To Our Ultimate Reality – Articles – Our Ultimate Reality is backed with a 60 Day No Questions Asked Money Back Guarantee. If within the first 60 days of receipt you are not satisfied with Wake Up Lean™, you can request a refund by sending an email to the address given inside the product and we will immediately refund your entire purchase price, with no questions asked. - ReviewApe - https://www.reviewape.com/?p=5406