#it was like getting ice water dumped on me this morning to see a quote from the intro and Know For Sure

[bisexualgerardway]

the way the bottom of my stomach dropped out when i saw a mutual referencing throam today . epically proportioned jumpscare

[elvish-sky]

The Grumpiness of Uncles Does Not Outweigh the Drunkenness of Nephews {Fíli x Tullaina}

A.N: Ok, so first of all I’m 15 (almost 16 though!) and I have no clue how alcohol or being drunk works. I also don’t know if cold water sobers you up but I decided for the purposes of this fic it didn’t! Also- I had a total blast writing this. Fili and Tullaina are one of my favorite couples, and I loved these prompts because I just got to have so much fun with them! I hope I wrote Tullaina okay, and I really hope you like this!

Requested by @guardianofrivendell for my 1K celebration: 💜 - 1 and 11 from the general prompt list with Fíli (can be x reader or an AU with Tullaina, whatever you prefer!) 1. "I love you.” “Tell me that when you’re sober.” 11. "Did you know that you talk in your sleep?”

Summary: Fili gets rather drunk the night the elven delegation arrives. Shenanigans ensue.

Pairing: Fili x Tullaina, mentioned Thorin x Bilbo

Word Count: 1,318, because @guardianofrivendell picks the best prompts so I can’t resist writing longer stuff!

Warnings: Alcohol, Drunken Behavior

*****

The Grumpiness of Uncles Does Not Outweigh the Drunkenness of Nephews {Fíli x Tullaina}

“Fíli! What in Mahal’s name are you doing?”

Tullaina stood in the doorway of the best pub in Erebor, watching her fiancé- the prince of Erebor and heir to the throne- dance along the tabletops.

The issue wasn’t that he was a bad dancer. It wasn’t even the embarrassment this would cause him in the morning (he knew what would happen when he got drunk! It happened every single time). The issue was that, firstly, Fíli had a big meeting in the morning and would not do well hungover, and secondly, the elves were going to be arriving for said meeting any minute (Thorin had grumbled for hours about how Thranduil had “No respect for sleep,” and that “Some of us can’t stay up all night and then look fresh as daisies in the morning.”)

After the fiasco that had happened the last time the elves visited, which had involved Fíli, Kíli, several jugs of ale, and a game of catch, Thorin was determined to keep everything under control for this visit.

“TULLAINA!” Fíli exclaimed, jumping down from the table and drunkenly making his way over to her.

“I love you,” he said, wrapping his arms around her waist.

Tullaina giggled for a moment, then shook her head and pushed him away. “Tell me that when you’re sober. Now c’mon. The elves should be here any moment.”

“ELVES! Where?” He crouched into a battle-stance and looked around warily.

Tullaina laughed, grabbing his arm and dragging him out the door. She rounded the corner of the pub, entering the alleyway behind it.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes,” said a figure, stepping forward out of the darkness.

“Kíli!!” Fíli greeted his brother with a wave. “Did you know I Love Tulls? I. Love. Tullaina.”

“Oh, wow. He really is drunk,” Kíli said.

Tullaina nodded. “Yup. Now let’s do this so that we can get to the gates and not have Thorin scold us.”

Kíli nodded, reaching down and grabbing a large bucket. Tullaina knew what was in it- ice cold water.

“Ready?”

Tullaina let go of Fíli and backed up. “Ready.”

Kíli hefted the bucket over his head, dumping all the cold water over his brother. Fíli starting shrieking as the cold water rained down over him, jumping and squirming and generally just not looking very pleased as his brother and fiancé both cackled while watching him.

Tullaina waited until Fíli had shaken most of the water off, then approached him. “You at least slightly clear-headed now?”

“Huh? Oh, Tullaina! Kíli, did you know I love Tulls?”

Kíli sighed. “Ok. That didn’t work at all.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” said Tullaina. “We need to figure this out.”

Kíli walked up to his brother, placing a hand on each of Fíli’s shoulders and looking him directly in the eyes.

“Fíli,” he began.

“Yes?”

“Yes, hi. It’s me. We’re about to go see Uncle Thorin and Uncle Bilbo, and we’re going to be greeting the elves. You need to act completely normal. Got it?”

Fíli nodded, suddenly looking very serious. “I’ve got it.”

Tullaina and Kíli let out simultaneous sighs of relief, each grabbing one of Fíli’s arms to frog-march him to the front gates.

As they walked, Fíli asked, “Do you think Thranduil will let me touch his ears?”

“No,” Kíli told him.

“Awwwww,” Fíli pouted. “But they’re so pointy. I want to touch them!!!!!”

The next morning, Tullaina sat on the window seat in her bedroom, watching F​​íli blink his eyes open in the spot he’d collapsed last night- spread eagle on her bed.

“Did you know that you talk in your sleep?” She asked.

“Tulls?” Fíli shot up to a sitting position, blinking his eyes in confusion.

“You collapsed in here last night because you were very drunk,” she told him. “Anyways, did you know talk in your sleep?”

Fíli looked wary. “I did not know that. May I ask what I said?”

Tullaina giggled. “Let’s see, there may have been a fully formed dream-plan to prank Thranduil’s son for revenge-”

“Did you write it down?”

“I- what?” Tullaina was confused by the sudden interruption.

“Tullaina. Focus. Did you write it down?”

She shook her head, and Fíli’s head sank back in disappointment.

“I remember it, though!”

Fíli’s head shot back up. “Great! We’ll discuss it later. What else did I say?”

“There was also a whole lot of grumbling about ‘the grumpiness of uncles,’ and how ‘ever since Uncle Thorin had married Bilbo he’d gotten supremely worse about manners.’”

Fíli groaned. “I hope I didn’t say anything like that in front of my Uncles!”

Tullaina smirked. “Well, you actually did a whole lot worse.”

Fíli shot out of bed. “What?! What did I do?!”

Tullaina sat back against her pillows with the air of someone who was taking entirely too much delight in telling someone else something.

“Well,” she began. “You started off an abysmal night by commenting on the pointiness of the Elven-Kings ears. In front of the whole elven delegation- and like ninety percent of Erebor.”

Fíli flopped back onto the bed in despair. “I really hate to ask, but… did I touch them?”

“Welllllllll, no.”

He sighed in relief.

“However, you did somehow manage to touch Legolas’s ears. And then Legolas caught a whiff of your breath and commented on how drunk you must have been. And then Thorin… well, let’s just say Thorin was not pleased. Especially not when you started yelling at Legolas.”

“What did I yell at Legolas about?” Fíli looked like he wanted to shrivel up and never be seen again.

The smirk on Tullaina’s face was growing. “You said, and I quote, “C’mon, Leggy!! Bros don’t rat out other bros for being drunk at a diplomatic thingy! And you! I thought you were a bro! How could you?”

“So that’s why I wanted revenge in my dream?” Fíli asked.

Tullaina nodded.

“It’s official,” Fíli declared. “I will never leave this room again.”

“I would say that was a good idea,” Tullaina said. “Except for the fact that as of right now, you are officially late to the ‘crisis management (the crisis being your behavior last night) meeting that Thorin scheduled for this morning. The one that all the elves will be attending.”

Fíli shot into the room where Thorin usually held all important meetings, skidding to a halt in shock as he saw the faces of the people inside.

It was everyone. All the elves, Thorin, Bilbo, even little Frodo! And- was that-

“Tullaina?”

Everyone in the room started laughing.

Fíli stood there in complete bewilderment. “What- what is happening?”

Thorin approached him. “Last night, when you were behaving so ridiculously, we figured out that if dwarven-elven relations could withstand that kind of diplomatic fiasco, we could withstand anything.”

Thranduil stepped forward. “Exactly. However, your Uncle still felt you deserved some punishment for last night. So, your all-too-willing fiancée stepped in.”

Tullaina gave Fíli a little wave.

“So- so I’m not in trouble?”

Thorin laughed. “No. We thought that the fact that everyone, until the end of time, will remember you asking to touch an elf’s ears was enough.”

Fíli was blushing like crazy.

“Fine,” he said. “But my retribution for this will be legendary! They shall mark this day as the day when Fíli, Prince of Erebor, came up with his greatest prank ever!” He spread his arms wide to punctuate the declaration.

And then promptly stopped, holding out his hand. “Now, c’mon, Tulls. I’m hungry. Let’s go to the kitchens.”

As the two left the room, Fíli turned around just long enough to yell one more thing.

“There will still be repercussions for this, never fear! There shall be RE-PER-CUSSIONS!”

The large double doors to the conference room slammed shut in their wake, and everyone in the room could hear them walking down the hallway on the other side, Tullaina giggling as she teased Fíli and him good-naturedly replying.

Everything tag: @entishramblings @itgetsatadhazy @boyruins @anjhope1 @kumqu4t @katbby16 @thewhiteladyofrohan @kirstenscaffeinateddisaster @beenovel @shethereadinghobbit @guardianofrivendell @hey-its-nonny

Fíli tag: @laurfilijames @claraofthepen

[tatooedlaura-blog]

Done Pretending

Hi all,

I did a post-Per Manum ... I’ve had the quote ‘you and I are done pretending’ in my head for awhile and finally found a way to use it ... go me!

Anyways, enjoy :)

@today-in-fic

&&&&&&&&&&

He hugged her for what felt like forever, the light fading in the room as he heard her heart break over and over, thudding erratically against his chest, body hitching as a poorly contained sob snuck through her cracking exterior.

She had come so close to kissing him at first, lips stopping at the corner of his mouth, before they traveled over cheek to ear, “I don’t know what to do.”

Whispering back as he tightened his hold on her, “we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

So, there they stood, until finally, Scully moved her head back, sliding it along his shoulder, “how are you doing?”

“Crappy. You?”

Sad chuckle burbled from her chapping lips, “I meant your back. You’ve been hunched over for,” looking at the clock on the VCR, “a good half hour.”

“Back? What’s a back?”

Pulling away, she stayed connected through fisted bunches of his sweater, not willing to give up contact completely but knowing he needed to stand upright or he’d never do it again. He took this correctly as a hint to stop playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame and slowly, he straightened out. His face showed every damn cartilage crack and screaming muscle and Scully couldn’t help but give him a frowning smile in sympathy, “would you go sit down, please?”

Mulder continued his stretch beyond vertical, leaning back as far as he could. twisting side to side, “if you were just, maybe, four, five inches taller or we had a set of steps or something, this would be so much easier.”

“Steps?”

“Yeah,” finally standing, wince clear on his face as his muscles finally began to calm, “I go down two steps, you stay at the top and I can hug you for a half-hour without dying.” Taking her by the hand, “come on. Let’s go find some stairs.”

“Mulder …”

“What? I’m not done with you yet. I need another hour at least.”

She loved him for trying, “how about we just order some pizza and sit down?”

Quickly taking her face in his hands, he kissed her forehead once again before she could swat his hands away, “make sure to order one of those useless veggie-tarian ones for yourself. I won’t say a word.”

Exhausted by her life, she gave him a sigh fitting someone much larger than her 5’ 3” stature, “screw vegetables. Tonight is extra cheese and as much sausage and pepperoni as they can pack on … and three-cheesy bread with at least four of those Ranch cups.”

Amused and terrified at the same time, “salad?”

“If you want me to throw bits of lettuce at you, sure, but otherwise I’m not touching it tonight.”

“You’re scary sometimes. I like it.”

Conversation gave her the distraction she needed to change into pajamas, toss Mulder some of his own from the stash she had managed to accumulate over the years, then listen to him order an obscene amount of greasy food. She made tea, a big kettle of it, knowing Mulder would consume at least half as well as all her ice cubes making it iced. She started a load of laundry and watered her last living plant. She calculated her half of the pizza bill and had a short argument with her partner when he refused to take her money.

Slow night for the pizza industry, their food arrived in under 30 minutes and once they were settled on the couch, steaming plates in hand, “are we taking tomorrow off?”

“Why?”

Mulder gave her a look, “this is food coma territory we are about to venture into. Just saying.”

And suddenly she started crying again, plate shaking in her hand, cheesy avalanche threating her lap. Taking the plate, Mulder set everything down on the coffee table and pulled her close once more, swiftly twisting so he was leaned against the arm of the sofa, Scully snuggled against his chest, sobbing into his t-shirt and kneading cotton between her fingers.

He didn’t know what to say so he cried with her, quiet but steady, until again, Scully was back down to random sniffles, "our pizza’s cold now.”

Mulder kissed the crown of her head, keeping his lips on her as he responded, “thank God you have an oven. Five minutes at 350 and we’ll never know it wasn’t fresh from Senor Jack’s House of Cheese.”

One long sniff later, Scully pushed herself up, using the back of her hand to wipe her nose, then, realizing what she’d done, “that was disgusting. Sorry.”

“Disgusting is what you did to my shirt.”

Glancing down at the large wet spot spread from collar to mid-chest, sternum to shoulder, “sorry.”

Tilting his head to look at her, wanting her to see the remnants of his own crying jag, tear streaks, bloodshot eyes, “don’t apologize. I’m not going to.”

She hadn’t realized he was crying as well and that filled her eyes once again, but blinking rapidly, she didn’t let the tears fall this time, “what was that about 350 degrees?”

He gave her possibly the saddest smile she’d ever seen, “are we going to talk about this at all? I’m not pushing, I swear, I just want to know.” Seeing her muscles tense to stand, he snagged the arm of her t-shirt, “It doesn’t have to be tonight but I’d like to at some point.”

“Can I maybe say tomorrow but reserve the right to change my mind?”

Still holding her in place, “for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Her gaze drifted from enveloping green eyes to full mouth, before struggling north again, watching intently as he studied her, pupils expanding and contracting, trying to figure her out. She gave him a wannabe smile, corner of her mouth turning up a microscopic notch before she managed, “I’m sorry, too.”

&&&&&&&&&&

Pizza re-heated, crust still crispy, cheese melty as ever, they ate while watching Jeopardy, then Wheel of Fortune. At eight, stuffed to the gills and both yawning, Mulder switched off the TV, asking into the darkness, “are we secure enough in our sense of self that we can go to sleep at 8pm and not feel really, really, and I mean, really old?”

“Well, I’m secure enough to know that we’re both going to need a handful of Tums before any kind of sleep can happen.”

“We are fucking old, Scully.” Standing up, “back in a minute.” He was indeed back in a minute, a little less, actually, pillow, comforter, and bottle of Tums in his hands, “catch.”

Snagging the bottle from the air, she chewed three before shaking the same amount out for him, holding them up to his now empty hands, “three for the old man.”

With a grin, glad some semblance of her sense of humor remained, “you should probably just leave the bottle on the table.”

She did, then stood, opting to clean up in the morning. Eyeing the bedding Mulder had dumped on the couch, she hesitated, her thoughts race-stumbling over one another, squishing their way to an undistinguishable mess. Fingered the corner of the deep-blue comforter, she had words fighting on the tip of her tongue, which she inexplicably ignored as she told him a soft ‘good night’ and skirted by him down the hall.

Mulder’s eyes shut, breath in, breath out, his own words fighting for freedom, to be called after her, to be spoken like they should have been hours, years, centuries, before. Instead, he waited, hearing her brush her teeth, wash something, face, hands, he wasn’t sure, then, not hearing the bedroom door shut, he instead heard the creak of her bed.

Finally opening his eyes again, he took in the shadowed living room, dimly lit kitchen, detritus of dinner for two, and turning on his heel, moved to walk down the hall. He made it three steps before he saw her come out of her bedroom door, stopping when she saw him.

He didn’t care anymore, “why do we keep doing this?”

The denial response automatic at this point, “doing what?”

Mulder took the deepest breath he could, holding it for a second before long, drawn-out exhale, “this. All of this. You there, me here, all of it.”

Her clenched fists fought down the denial this time, “it’s how we survive.”

“It’s shitty survival and getting shittier by the minute.” Tilting his head, he let his eyes bore into her, watching the flush on her skin crawl from small spots on her cheeks down her neck, and around past her ears, the hall nightlight providing everything he needed to read her clearly, “I’m done pretending, Scully. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

Her voice nearly failed her, she formed the words, which cracked as they came out, “what are we pretending?”

One pathetic chuckle later, head still shaking, “Pretending I don’t want to sleep next to you instead of on this couch. Pretending you don’t want me to sleep next to you instead of on this couch. Pretending that the only reason I’d like you to stand on some stairs is so I can hug you without dying. Pretending I haven’t wanted to be with you since three minutes after I met you. Pretending that I’m not dying just as much as you are about our child not being inside you right now. Take your damn pick.”

“Mulder …”

About to start bawling all over again, he bit his cheek, realizing his confessions had escaped the confines of his mind, “what?”

“Why are you still standing over there?”

His legs wouldn’t budge, rooting to the spot, needing a question answered before he moved his life forward, “are we done pretending?”

Eyebrows scrunching, lips a tight line of fear, she nodded, “I think we need to be.”

His muscles remember the act of walking and seven strides later, he was in front of her, “you need a place with steps in it.”

“How about we worry about steps later?” Smiling the smile of someone who’d been through the proverbial wringer several times in one day, she reached out, took his hand, “maybe we’ll start with forgetting about you sleeping on the couch.”

Because he was Mulder, he looked over his shoulder to do one last front door lock check before letting her lead him into her bedroom, “you got another non-crusty shirt for me?”

Ticking them off on her fingers, “I’ve got Power Puff girls, Brady Bunch, Tetris, or the one with the Easter Peeps.”

“This feels like a Tetris kinda night.”

“If that’s not a metaphor for our lives, I don’t know what is.”

“They get lined up eventually, Scully. I promise.”

Exhaustion hit her like a freight train and handing him the shirt, “I need some sleep, Mulder. Can we worry about our puzzling lives tomorrow?”

Exchanging one shirt for the other, he headed to the opposite side of the bed, pulling comforter back, “as long as we can order some more pizza while doing it.”

She gave him a curt nod that made him smile, then silence settled while they did, shifting, pulling covers, straightening pillows, giggling once on Scully’s part when Mulder’s cold feet hit hers. Once quiet, comfortable, Scully slowly reached across the expanse between, 14 inches feeling like a mile, stopping when her fingers reached his cheek, “I love that you wanted this child just as much as I did.”

His hand drifted across the same expanse, palm on her cheek, closing the circle between them, “I fell in love with the idea of him the moment you asked me.”

Fingers to his lips and endlessly tracing, “I fell in love with the idea of him three minutes after I met you.”

“I love you.”

Scooting forward, she breathed her ‘I love you’ back, running firmly into his chest, arm up and over his side in a hug.

Tetris, my ass. They’d fit together perfectly from the beginning.

[thepointoftheneedle]

Fall-ing

So, I accidentally wrote a drabble when I wasn't paying attention. I apologise to all you autumn lovers out there, it's not my thing and it's inescapable! Anyway I wrote this at lunchtime to get it out of my system! I thought it might distract from...well...you know.

She was running late for her nine thirty lecture. There wasn’t time to wait in line behind the flurry of girls ordering their pumpkin spice lattes so she’d have to forgo her iced tea today. She scoffed quietly at all those fall aesthetic girls, wearing knitted scarves and gloves even though the weather was still perfectly temperate. Every year they took the first tumbling leaf as their cue to light their cinnamon apple scented candles, pull on chunky knits and start squealing about things being ‘cosy.’ It was decidedly not her vibe.

“Oh screw you,” Betty muttered under her breath as a girl with amber curls escaping her rust coloured beret threw an armful of leaves in the air, staring at them as they fell, with a degree of enchanted wonderment that suggested that gravity was an unfamiliar concept to her. As Betty strode by, the girl yelled, “God, way to ruin the shot. Thanks a lot,” and Betty realised that her boyfriend had been capturing the moment on a phone as she had walked between them. The pink case suggested it was her phone so Betty sang a few bars of “White Woman’s Instagram” and kept right on walking. She heard the girl’s yelp of protest behind her followed by the boyfriend’s rumbling laughter.

She threw herself into a seat at the back of the lecture hall and took out her laptop. The image that appeared when she fired it up was a beach scene, turquoise water, palm trees, in the foreground a fuchsia coloured cocktail with a paper umbrella. She gazed at it and wished she could transport herself through the screen to that eternal summer. She hated the sense of time slipping through her fingers that came every fall, change and decay, wet leaves rotting in stinking piles, rain, every day a little shorter than the one before, every night a little longer, endings and fog and the steamed windows of overheated rooms.

Someone dropped into the seat next to her. She removed her arm from the rest and checked that she wasn’t taking up too much space. Soon there was another laptop next to hers, on the screen she glimpsed a snow scene, pine forests and white capped mountains. She was aware of his leather jacket creaking as he fidgeted, his long legs sticking out into the aisle. She risked a glance at him and blushed when she realised it was the boyfriend. She’d been pretty rude. She steeled herself and made her apology.

“Hey, sorry about before. I think I got out of bed the wrong side. Not a big fan of the season. Could you apologise to your girlfriend for me?” she said, shooting for contrite but not feeling that she quite nailed it.

“Oh, not my girlfriend, just a friend.” He smiled at her and glanced at her screen. “What was it Henry James said? Summer afternoon - the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

“I thought that was cellar door, “ she smiled.

“Hey, if anyone’s going to be quoting Donnie Darko here it ought to be me not you, my sweet summer child,” he laughed. Hot and funny, he was exactly her aesthetic.

“Well I guess you’re happy since winter is clearly coming,” she replied smartly with a wave at his snowy screen, glancing over at him to see if her matching GOT reference had landed. She found herself tumbling into fathomless eyes from which she was powerless to look away, blue green like a summer ocean. The world seemed to retreat as he moved towards her, his eyes flicking down to her lips, but then the lecture hall door slammed and the professor dumped his bag and papers on the front desk with a crash. She dragged her attention to her keyboard even though she could barely process anything that was being said, ignoring the long sigh from the next seat.

The prof was clearly keen to outdo all the pumpkin patch girls. In his russet coloured sweater and his burnt umber corduroy pants he looked like a gingerbread man. “So everyone, welcome to the romantic poets. On this gorgeous late September morning I thought we should begin with Keats, specifically with the Ode to Autumn.”

“Oh for Chrissakes,” she muttered. There was a snort of barely stifled laughter from the next seat.

Somehow she got through the lecture with its oozing cyder presses and rosy hued stubble-plains. Finally at the end of the hour, she prepared herself to leave, with some relief.

“Good note. You don’t want to forget that,” a deep voice murmured beside her and she looked at her screen in confusion.

“Keats, poet, pumpkin spiced bullshit,” was all she had written.

He grinned. “Look I know it’s not really our thing but do you wanna go crunch through some leaves and collect pinecones? See if we’re missing out on anything?”

Somehow, when he put it like that, it actually sounded like a lot of fun. She nodded and found that she had a smile on her face as wide as a jack o’ lantern.

[kpop-cakepops]

So... We Love Each Other? // Vernon Chwe

Friends to Lovers au. 

Genre: Fluff

Word Count: 3,878

Warnings: None.

"The rule to remember is that opposites attract. Every magnet has both a north and a south pole. When you place the north pole of one magnet near the south pole of another magnet, they are attracted to one anothe-"

You switched the television off whatever kid's show had been on. It was an early Friday morning and you had accidentally fallen asleep with the TV on the night before.

The night before.

If only you could you would erase the entire night from your memory and just live your life as if it had never happened. Too bad you didn't have the power to do that, nor did you know anyone that could.

With a distraught sigh, you push yourself from your bed and drag your feet in the direction of your kitchen only to be startled by your best friend and roommate Vernon, who was standing with his back pressed against the counter.

"Holy crap. You scared me!" You exclaimed holding at your chest to alleviate the rapid beating of your heart.

"You're one to talk. Mingyu is now officially terrified of you and wants you to pretend not to know him. He stated, and I quote, 'I've never seen someone get so upset over turtles.' He is also making me pay him back for the date." The younger boy glares at you and chugs down the rest of his chocolate milk. "Care to explain how you managed to ruin a blind date with Mingyu? Kim Mingyu?! The epitome of tolerance and acceptance?!"

You winced at every word he spoke until you finally broke and dropped to the floor. "Animal life preservation" you mumbled. "He brought up my favorite books and then he started talking about animals and I got excited, and may have spoken a little too much about saving the turtles"

"Y/N, I'm running out of friends to set you up with. Seungcheol joined the army as an excuse to not see you, Jeonghan moved to the dormitories on the other side of the campus, Soonyoung said he'll never date again... are you cursed? Should we see a shaman?"

You grunted from your spot on the ground before standing. "Just stop setting me up with people. I don't think I'm cut out for this dating thing... maybe I should join a convent and become a nun?” You asked him as you grabbed a bowl to pour cereal into it. “Maybe it’s a  sign from the heavens, I should learn the ways of God and become the next Mother Teresa."

Vernon’s face softened slightly at the sight of you defeatedly picking at your fingernails but instead rolled his eyes and moved you out of his way when you turned to face him. "Move. You're hopeless and I have class. I swear if I come back to find out you've called the local church I will send Seungcheol all your embarrassing love letters, and before you ask, yes, they are under my custody."

"Excuse me?! Hey come back here! You little- I'm older than you!”

“It’s just a year” he retorted.

"Yeah?! Well, blackmailing is illegal you know!”

He was gone.

Seeing that you had already missed your first class of the day, you decided to take the entire day off as a day to self reflect and find your zen. (You also didn't want to see Kim Mingyu again, so staying home would probably be the best option for you.) Promptly you grabbed your favorite book and flopped onto the only couch in the apartment throwing your legs up against the wall and pretending to read when in reality you were contemplating dropping out of your ethics class to entirely avoid Mingyu... and Jeonghan...

After about 2 hours the front door of your apartment swung open and in walked Vernon’s girlfriend Minji. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw you, her already red face became even redder as she muffled a scream into her hands and stomped in direction of your roommate’s bedroom.

“Uhhhh...” You rolled yourself off the couch and instantly scattered for your phone, dialing Vernon’s number quickly.

“Hello?”

“Hey, um just a real quick question. By any chance did you and Minji fight again?” you asked as you heard things tumbling around inside Vernon’s room.

“Damn it. I told her not to show up at the apartment. I’ll be there in 5 minutes. Please protect my shoe collection with your life, Y/N. It’s all I ask of you.”

The line was cut before you could muster up a response. A loud crash rumbled down the hall and you found yourself sighing. It was time for you to step in as usual, which was probably the thing you most hated to do, especially since your best friend’s girlfriend wasn’t exactly fond of you.

With careful steps, you moved in direction of Vernon’s bedroom and knocked lightly. “Hey, Minji... you in there?” After a few seconds of receiving no response you called out again, “Minji? I’m gonna come in okay?” slowly you opened the door only for your mouth to fall agape.

A crying Minji was sitting on the floor surrounded by Vernon’s clothes, his drawers pulled open and emptied while his closet doors remained open with yet another mess made up of his clothes, some with hangers still in. “Jesus Christ, Minji, what is this mess?! You haven’t even been here 5 minutes!” you exclaimed walking further inside to try and salvage the room.

“What do you care?! These aren’t your things, Vernon isn’t your boyfriend! So what do you care?!” She yelled standing up from her spot on the ground.

“I care because this is my house, and these are Vernon’s things. Being his pissed off girlfriend does not give you the right to just storm in here and start ripping his bedroom apart! We’re hoping to get the deposit for this apartment back when we move out!” you fought back as you picked up your friend’s clothes off the floor and placed them on the bed.

“... stop referring to Vernon as part of your ‘we.’ Do you have any idea how fucking annoying you are? Do you have any idea how much I hate you?!”

You stopped in your tracks and looked over at her in disbelief. “Don’t you think you’re being unfair right now? I’m having as much a rough day as you are and you break into my house to make a ruckus? Do you really think I like you? All you’ve done since you started dating Vernon is push me away from him as his friend, it was like you decided I was the enemy before you even met me. You’ve been nothing but a bitch to me, so do you think I like you?!” You didn’t know where all the resentment was coming from, maybe the words had a cutting edge on them because of the amount of stress you were under what with the failed Mingyu date and your upcoming exams... whatever the reason, you wanted to hurt her feelings.

She looked shocked by your words. Understandably so, you hadn’t ever really talked back to her when she threw a tantrum, usually Vernon would take her away before anything could escalate.

“You must be really happy. Look at you getting brave, you must be really happy to be the reason Vernon won’t marry me. You must be really happy to know he wants to break up with me over you. You’re dead wrong if you think I’m going to allow you both to date peacefully. I’d rather DIE than see you both together, you hear me?! I’ll make both your lives a living hell” Her erratic words felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on you.

"Minji... what do think you’re doing?” Vernon was finally home. You looked over at him to find that his eyes were trained on you as he walked up. “Are you okay?” he asked grabbing you by the shoulders and looking for any signs of a fight.

You nodded your head and pushed the shirt that was in your hand into his chest. “Get her the hell out of this house before I have an aneurism,” you told him quietly before walking out of his room and straight into yours.

With your back pressed to your bedroom door, you heard Minji go into another yelling fit while your best friend calmly tried to deescalate the situation. You rolled your eyes at the sound of him being the nicest while Minji continued to vociferate. It was always like that, you wondered why he always put up with her when she obviously only ever used him as a trophy boyfriend.

You plopped down on your bed putting in your earbuds in an attempt to drown out the outside noise. Only then were you able to process what had just happened. You knew you’d been wrong to vent your frustrations out on Minji who wasn’t really at fault for your failed love life... but it’s not like you were at fault for her failed love life either, right?

“ you must be really happy to know he wants to break up with me over you.”

What had she even meant by that? Was Vernon really thinking about breaking up with her? Even if he were thinking about doing it, how would that be your fault? Everything was starting to become too much for you, the gold medalist of the overthinking Olympics, so you decided to block everything out and do the one thing you were best at: sleep.

---

It had been 2 weeks since your disaster Mingyu date and the epic Minji and Vernon showdown. Minji had not stepped foot in your apartment since and Vernon, who had kept quiet about the entire situation, was rarely home. The number of times you’d seen him in the last 2 weeks were so small that you could probably count them in one hand.

Truth be told, you hadn’t exactly made an effort to talk to him either. You knew if you talked to him you’d ask about Minji and that would lead to a conversation about his fight, which would lead to you asking why Minji blamed you for it. God forbid he say something like ‘I like you’ right? Or were you more worried about him saying he didn’t?

A soft groan left your lips as you allowed your head to drop onto your desk. You were overthinking again. You were almost sure your head was going to burst suddenly.

“Y/N?”

You looked up to find Mingyu standing next to your table with his hands in his pockets. “What’s up?” you asked as you grabbed your bag and shoved your laptop inside.

Mingyu looked at you with raised eyebrows and handed you a shopping bag with what looked like clothes. “These are Vernon’s can you give them to him?” he asked.

You took the bag from him and nodded, “Yeah, I’ll get it to him.” With that, you walked around him and started to leave the lecture hall not really having anything else to say.

“Um... hey, wait.” his hand was around your arm and you looked at him expectantly. He dropped his grip embarrassed before he scratched at the back of his neck. “Aren’t you gonna... ask why I didn’t call you?”

You frowned a little, “Call me? why would you...oh! The date!” you chuckled. Funny how only 2 weeks ago avoiding Mingyu was all you could think about.

The tall boy blinked confused, “Y-you forgot we went on a date?”

“What? no... kind of... but it’s okay! I understand you’re not about that ‘SAVE THE TURTLES’ life”

“Save the turtles?” He questioned.

“Vernon told me what you said, and I’ll be the first to admit that I can get pretty scary when I talk about animal life conservation. You can act like I don’t exist if I make you uncomfortable, I regret my actions, but it’s not that important.”

“it’s not?” he asked.

You hummed in response. “By the way, has Vernon been staying at your place? Truth is he hasn’t been coming home for the past 2 weeks. I heard him and Minji broke up...and I guess I was a little worried”

Mingyu smiled to himself, “Hold on, do you seriously think I didn’t call you because you got excited over saving the turtles?” the tall boy couldn’t help but laugh. “You guys are seriously so stupid.”

“Excuse me?” you queried unsure as to why you were suddenly being called stupid.

He patted your head, “You’re a beautiful and smart girl, Y/N. Getting excited over the turtles was actually kind of hot. Jeonghan thinks so too...”

You couldn’t help but choke out a soft “He does?”

“Of course he does. It’s the Vernon part that pushes a man away.” Mingyu told you. “He was staying at my place after Minji dumped him for not wanting to get more serious about her... but I kicked him out last night. His wallet is in the bag and so are his keys to your place... you should probably go check on him”

You couldn’t help but stare at Mingyu as he left. “It’s the Vernon part that pushes a man away? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” there was a part of you that was offended for your friend. He had been nothing but sweet and caring...

Before he could leave, you ran after Mingyu and cut him off by stomping your foot in front of him. “You... I take back what I said. I don’t regret my actions on that night. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t call me back because I would never date a man that doesn’t like Vernon. Do you have any idea how much he has helped me? He listens to me, he takes care of me when I feel down, he makes me laugh even though he’s possibly the least funny person I have ever met, he left a comfortable dorm life with his best friends so that I could afford living close campus, he pretends to not care that I use his body wash when mine runs out even though I know he hates it, he puts up with my crazy ideas even if they fail... which they do 90% of the time-”

“Only 90%?” asks Mingyu with a raised eyebrow.

“OKAY MAYBE 99%, but that’s not the point! Vernon is the best friend anyone could ask for and if the guy I’m dating doesn’t like him, then I don’t want it. ALSO, YOU’RE A FAKE FRIEND. BAD MOUTHING HIM BEHIND HIS BACK. You ought to be embarrassed!” You could feel your face redden as you ranted away only for Mingyu’s face to light up in a soft smile.

“Do you even hear yourself?” he asked. “It’s not that the men in your life don’t like Vernon... it’s that none of us can compete with him.”

“What?”

“It was pretty intimidating to sit through my first date with you and hear you say all these wonderful things about Vernon... it made me realize you are both idiots that don’t realize what’s right in front of you even if it hits you in the face...” you opened your mouth to speak but were stopped by Mingyu’s large hand pressing over your lips. “...so let me help you out a little. You’re in love with Vernon and that Idiot is very much in love with you too. All you ever talk about is Vernon and all Vernon does is date dumb stuck up girls because apparently, that is easier than telling you how he really feels. So how about you do all of us a favor and go back home and talk your feelings out? You know, like two grown adults.”

Your face went slack unable to say anything back to that. You weren’t sure if you were in agreeance or absolutely baffled by everything Mingyu had just said, but you had the whole walk back home to figure it all judging by the fact that Mingyu had already walked away from you.  

After what seemed like an eternity you decided to take the 15-minute walk home and face your best friend... or crush... or possibly the love of your life, as you had eventually concluded after sitting in your empty lecture hall for 30 minutes. You were ready...

Or so you thought.

The moment the elevator doors slid open to reveal your floor, your eyes landed on Vernon’s slumped form against the door of your apartment dressed in his favorite pink pajama pants. That sight alone was enough for you to freeze in your spot with your finger deeply pressing the ‘door open’ button, but your feet unable to take the ONE step needed to get out of the elevator.

“Y/N?”

There it was, the little push you needed. Vernon was staring at you from his spot on the ground, hair tousled and dark circles framing his pretty eyes.

“Hey” you mustered raising the shopping bag in your hand. “I have your stuff,” you told him as you watched him stand up.

“Cool... why are you standing inside the elevator?” he questioned nodding over at you.

You looked around you realizing then that you had not left the safety of the elevator. With a forced out cough, you stepped out and over to him. “You want to come in?” You asked gesturing to the door of your apartment only to wish you could melt into the ground below you.

“Yeah, I live here” he stated the obvious.

You stopped yourself from saying anything else and simply opened the door for both of you. Vernon, as expected, beelined for his bedroom leaving you behind with his things. Things were very obviously awkward... maybe subconsciously you’d known it’d be like this if you ever faced your feelings for Vernon... but it seemed there was no turning back anymore.

You knocked on Vernon’s bedroom door but were greeted by the sound of the shower running instead. With a small sigh, you walked back to your own room to wait for him to finish up before finally starting the conversation you’d been preparing yourself for since your talk with Mingyu.

After minutes of sitting on your bed feeling antsy and nervous, you decided to go check on Vernon again. With a deep breath, you raised your hand to knock on his bedroom door, but before you could react, his door had swung open and instead of the door, you knocked him on the face. “Oh shit!”

“Dude, what the hell?”

“Vernon, I am so sorry!” you scrambled over to his doubled over form and grabbed at his arms trying to get a better view of his face. “I didn’t mean to hit you!”

“It’s fine, don’t worry, you still can’t pack a punch, I’m fine,” he assured you as he grabbed at your shoulders, a soft smile gracing his lips as he looked into your eyes for the first time since you had left the elevator.

Unknowingly, tears began to fill your eyes. Not only had you missed him for the past two weeks, but now being face to face, looking at him as he smiled at you, made you realize how right Mingyu was.

“Are you crying?” he asked, the smile dropping from his face.

“Vernon...” you looked straight at him as you spoke, you had to get it done now or never. “why did you break up with Minji?”

Almost instantly, Vernon moved his eyes away from yours. “Don’t worry about it. Whatever she said, don’t let it bother you.”

You slowly trailed behind him as he made his way to the kitchen. “So it wasn’t because of me?”

He stopped and turned around, “Because of you? Don’t tell me you’re feeling guilty about my failed love life.” he teased as he ruffled your hair.

You grabbed his hand and shook your head, “I’m not. I’m trying to figure out if I’m in love with my best friend all by myself or if he’s in love with me too.”

Vernon’s mouth opened and closed as he tried to find words to your very sudden confession. “In- in love?”

Oh god... You were starting to hyperventilate. Was Mingyu an idiot? Did Vernon not like you like you liked him?

“Oh my god...” heat was starting to crawl up your neck. “Did I read it all wrong? Oh my god... Oh my god, I’m going to actually kill him. Why did I let him talk me into saying this?”

“I do.”

“What?”

“Love you.” He said. His face was as red as you imagined yours to be. The room became silent suddenly. You had been so adamant on finally confessing your feelings to Vernon that you hadn’t managed to think what would happen after that.

“So... we love each other?” you asked like an idiot still avoiding his eyes.

“I mean, I guess so.” he chuckled nervously, hand rubbing at the back of his neck.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so used to going on blind dates and never getting past the first date that like... what now?” You asked.

Vernon cleared his throat and took a step forward, his hip bumping against yours. “Well, for starters... can I kiss you?”

You squealed. “Why did you ask me, now I’m embarrassed!” you smacked his arm making him laugh.

“Fine, we don’t have to” he shrugged his shoulders and started for the kitchen once again.

Before you could help it your hand grabbed at the end of his t-shirt stopping him, “Wait... I said I’m embarrassed, not that you shouldn’t kiss me.” You mumbled.

“Well shit... now I’m embarrassed” He laughed.

With a surge of bravery, you grabbed his face and pressed your lips against his. You could feel his breath catch in his throat as you did which made you internally panic. Did he not like it? Yet almost as if he’d read your mind he wrapped his arms around your waist almost as if holding you in place, reassuring you that it was fine.

It was more than fine, really. Your heart was racing and tummy fluttering like it’d never done before. You never would have imagined Vernon’s lips were that soft and sweet... or maybe you had, you’d just never admit it to yourself.

Not wanting to, but rather having to, you pulled away from the kiss. “If I’d know you were this good a kisser, I probably would’ve admitted my feelings a long time ago” you joked.

“Is it normal that I’m so happy I could cry?” he asked as he nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck, sending a shiver down your spine.

"I wouldn’t say normal, but judging by the fact that I could also cry, I’d say it’s understandable”

“Does this mean I can start sleeping in the master bedroom with you now?” he asked.

“Wine and dine me first, sweetheart. I’m a woman of dignity.”

“If I wine and dine you tonight, do I get to sleep on your king-sized bed?” he walked you towards the kitchen counter until he had you trapped.

“Maybe... If you agree to be my boyfriend, I would positively consider it.”

[raisedbyfandomwolves]

Hello, I have a fanfic prompt... I think. I was told.on twitter to send it to you this way. Apologies if I've done this all wrong. Shottmacher and Karamel get drunk, go to Vagas and get married. I love your stories! Thank you for all you write.

This is... very long... and I’m sorry it took so long but I hope you like it.

A marching band was having a full dress rehearsal in her skull.

At least, that was the best that Kara's sluggish brain could offer as an explanation for the throbbing pain. Not even the blissful comfort of the very fluffy pillow underneath her head could help with that... or muffle every sound in the world which was really annoyingly loud right now.

Groaning, she forced her eyes to open only to almost immediately squeeze them shut again when blinding light was her reward for her efforts. The stabbing pain made her headache worse and elicited a pitiful whine out of her. Why had she woken up again? And why couldn't she just go back to sleep and escape all this suffering?

She tried, pulling her pillow out from under her head and using it to shut out all the light and sound, but it was no use; both the pounding and racket persisted until she finally gave up and attempted to brave the morning even as she did her best to remember how the hell she had ended up like this. Eve had suggested going to Vegas for the weekend to celebrate Winn's recent promotion and both Mike and Kara had naturally agreed since they wanted to mark the occasion with their close friend.

Unfortunately, everything after they had checked in to their hotel was a blur. There were drinks – which would explain the almost lethal hangover she was having right now – and some gambling... Mike had won a tidy sum in a lucky streak at the roulette table... More drinking... Then nothing.

God, why did she feel like she was forgetting something really important?

Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she raised her left hand to press it to her still throbbing forehead-

-only to get momentarily blinded by an unexpected glint on said hand.

She squinted uncomprehendingly at the glint and blinked a few times in the hope that it would help.

Then she realised what she was looking at with a sense of dawning horror and her hangover magically vanished.

Dread descended upon her as she began noticing other things like how she was naked under the sheets... and, as she turned her head slowly to her side, that there was someone else in bed with her.

Usually, she took every opportunity to ogle her boyfriend's very nice bare chest which sometimes doubled as her pillow... but Kara found herself struggling to do that this one time.

Mostly because her attention was focused on a shiny item on the ring finger of his left hand – a certain item that was identical to the source of the glint on her own left hand.

All of a sudden, Kara had a very strong sinking feeling she knew at least one of the events that had happened during that giant hole in her memory.

“Mike.” She shook him with as much energy as she could muster. “Mike, wake up. WAKE. UP. RIGHT. NOW.”

A pained groan was the first sign of life that he gave, and just as she had several minutes ago, he blearily opened his eyes for a split second only to snap them shut again. “Kara? Oh god, why is it so bright in here?”

There was a small sympathetic part of her that wanted to give him time to get his bearings and all that but it was vetoed by her panic. “Mike, look at your left hand.”

“My left hand?” he echoed confusedly even as he sluggishly lifted said hand to his face. “What about-” He immediately fell silent when he realised what was around his ring finger and with wide eyes slowly turned to face her again.

She wordlessly held up her left hand.

Those blue-grey eyes she loved so much got that little bit bigger.

“Oh,” was all he managed.

“Yeah. 'Oh',” she repeated dryly.

Before their monosyllabic conversation could go any further, they were startled by the sound of a stampede approaching the connecting door linking their hotel room to its neighbour. Kara only had a second to realise what was going to happen and dived back under the sheets with a panicked squeak before there was a telltale beep and the connecting door was thrown wide open.

Standing in the doorway with a thunderous expression was none other than Eve who managed to look threatening even when she was clearly wearing nothing but a sheet. Behind her, a pale-faced Winn was squeaking her name while his hands maintained a desperate grip on the towel haphazardly wrapped around his waist which was similarly quite possibly the only thing he was wearing.

“TELL ME,” she all but roared at Kara and Mike who flinched at the assault on their already suffering eardrums. “TELL ME YOU TWO DIDN'T GET MARRIED WHILE YOU WERE DRUNK LAST NIGHT.”

Rendered mute by fear of their impending deaths, Kara and Mike slowly held up their left hands even as they attempted to disappear into the bed.

Dead silence followed.

Then Eve let out an unholy shriek that caused the other three present to clap their hands over their ears. (In Winn's case, he ended up dropping his towel but luckily no one was looking and he managed to cover himself back up again before anyone noticed.)

“ANNUL THAT.” The way she was pointing at the couple in bed along with her expression brought to mind some mythical god who was about to bring down divine retribution on their puny mortal heads. “GET THAT ANNULLED IMMEDIATELY. I REFUSE TO LET THE TWO OF YOU GET DRUNK-MARRIED IN VEGAS WHERE I MISS THE CHANCE TO BE A PROPER MAID OF HONOUR AND CAN'T RECORD EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THE OCCASION. GET DRESSED.” She whirled around to pin her own boyfriend with her deadly gaze, causing him to let out a terrified squeak and shrink into himself. “WINN. COME WITH ME. WE'RE GOING TO FIND SOMEONE WHO CAN UN-MARRY THEM NOW.”

With that, she slammed the connecting door shut, leaving Kara and Mike blessedly alone once again... technically speaking, at least.

“E-Eve! W-Wait!” Winn's piteous voice could still be heard on the other side. “We got married too! What are we going to do about that?!”

Kara wanted to feel sorry for him, she really did, but her own situation felt dire enough and with the way Eve was behaving about the whole thing, every moment of respite was welcome.

Her thoughts on what she was supposed to do next were interrupted by a wretched groan coming from her side and she turned to find Mike staring at his ring with an utterly miserable look on his face.

“Man,” he muttered dejectedly to himself as if he'd forgotten she was right there, “I can't believe we got married of all things...”

His words were like a bucket of ice cold water that had just gotten dumped right on her head. They'd been dating for over two years already and had even moved in together – mostly in the name of convenience but still – so there had been moments where she had tentatively thought about and even occasionally daydreamed of where she saw their relationship heading.

Apparently he didn't share her sentiments.

Suddenly she wished she was anywhere else and even cursed Eve for having suggested they come to Vegas in the first place.

“Right.” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears and she turned away from him so that he couldn't see that she was on the verge of crying. “Since it's clear you hate this so much, let's just hurry up and get it over with.”

“What? Hey wait.” He sounded confused as his hand – his left hand of all things – wrapped around her arm, stopping her from leaving the bed and gently trying to coax her into looking at him again. “Kara, what's wrong? What did you mean by that?”

Blinking away her tears, she reluctantly turned back towards him and tried to maintain a facade of relative indifference. “You've made it clear you don't want to... to be married to me so it just makes sense to get... It'll probably be easy to undo so we should-”

“Whoa, whoa. Wait. Hold on.” He squeezed his eyes shut and dragged his free hand down his face. “Kara, why are you saying stuff like that? Where are you getting all this?”

His obtuseness made her snap despite her desire to escape her current situation without creating a scene. “You just implied a minute ago that getting married to me was like... like... the worst thing that could have ever happened to you!”

“What? When did I imply that?!”

“It's the way you said, and I quote, 'I can't believe we got married of all things'!”

“That's because I wanted to do it properly, okay?!”

For an indeterminate amount of time, the two of them just stared at each other in complete silence.

“...W-What?” Kara barely managed to get out, unsure she'd heard him correctly, and watched as he pulled his hand back and dropped his head in regret.

Mike said nothing for a long time and she was just about to ask him to clarify himself when he finally spoke again. “I've been trying to find the right moment to propose to you for the past month.”

Her heart did a weird flip-floppy thing. “Y-You have?” she stuttered.

He nodded, the very picture of misery. “But something would come up every single time I'd worked up the courage so I kept thinking that I should just wait for the next moment to come except that would get ruined too somehow and then I started wondering if you'd even say yes-”

“Yes,” she blurted out in a rush.

That stopped his rambling in its tracks, and when he lifted his head to finally meet her gaze his expression was one of confusion. “...What?”

“I would've said yes.” The lead weight in her stomach had turned into a swarm of agitated butterflies by then. “It wouldn't have mattered if you'd asked in a fancy restaurant or our living room; I would've said yes.”

Ever so slowly, the disbelief on his face turned into awed wonder. “You would?”

If she smiled any wider, she was sure she was going to pull a facial muscle she couldn't even pronounce. “Well, I obviously said yes while I was drunk as a skunk last night, didn't I?” she pointed out as she waved her left hand in the air.

The grey in his eyes gave way to blue as he started grinning teasingly at her. “In all fairness, you say a lot of crazy things when you're drunk.”

“Wh- I do not!”

“Oh really? What about that time you started claiming you were secretly an alien with superpowers?”

“T-That's a lie and you don't have any proof to back that up!”

“Sure about that? Because I think Winn recorded it so all we need to do is ask him...”

“Mike!” Blushing with a mixture of embarrassment and put-on anger, she smacked him but to no avail because that just made him laugh out loud. When she stepped up her efforts, he simply grabbed her wrists so that he could pin her to the bed and kiss her until she forgot why she had been mad at him.

She didn't, however, forget their overall situation.

“Let's get this marriage annulled,” she murmured when they had caught their breaths.

His eyes snapped wide open and he pulled away, stunned. “What? But I thought-”

“I meant it,” she insisted, wriggling one hand free of his now loose grip so that she could cup his face. “But I want it all done properly too. I want to actually have and remember every moment of getting married to you instead of it just being the result of some black-out drunk decision-making in Vegas.”

He smiled again, the happiness in his eyes brighter than the sun. “I want that too.”

It had seemed impossible and yet somehow she found herself even happier than she had been less than a minute ago. “Good.” She pulled him in for another kiss before playfully shoving him off. “Now get dressed. The sooner we get this marriage annulled, the sooner we can get married for real.”

(He proposed within the week and the wedding was a beautiful ceremony worth remembering from start to end.)

(Eve was naturally the maid of honour.)

[ellstersmash]

Three: Fifteen

Fandom: Dragon Age

Pairing: Solas x f!Lavellan (Modern!AU)

Rating: overall E for Explicit | this chapter T for Teen

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--

    [  Results were inconclusive. Again. Any last-minute suggestions?  ]

Athi reads the message from Solas, then reads it again. Is ready to send back [???] but her phone buzzes again before she has the chance.

    [  Apologies. That was not intended for you.   ]

She smirks—

no shit

—deletes her question, taps out a response.

    [  :* i miss u too   ]

    [  oop sry. wrong #   ]

    [  Ha Ha.   ]

    [  sry bout ur results :(   ]

    [  Thank you. What are you doing today?  ]

“That Solas?” Sera says, not bothering to look up from her unbroken line of yellow glitter glue. “Tell him to suck it.”

    [  arts n crafts   ]

Athi snaps a quick picture of the mess they’ve made in their living room and sends it to him.

    [  sera says suck it   ]

    [  Of course she does.  ]

“He says hi.”

Sera gags dramatically. “Thought you wanted to help with all this, not flirt with your boyfriend.”

A snotty retort itches behind Athi’s teeth but she stifles it. Rolls her eyes instead and tosses her phone aside, the device bouncing once to rest face-down on the sofa cushion. She picks up a thick black marker with pungent permanent ink, and gets back to work filling in the block letters Sera lined earlier.

Her boyfriend. Gods, but that sounds strange. Childish. Like they go on dates behind the primary school, or pretend not to be having sex in the room down the hall from someone's parents’. And yet she finds herself giddy at the thought. To be fair, it’s all she has for the moment. The thought. He's off on some adventure, and she's stuck here. Again. They'd only had that one perfect day, breakfast and window shopping and holding hands like real life lovers under trees full of dry rainbow leaves fluttering their applause. And then he took a phone call and went home to pack and left first thing in the morning.

She wonders just how often this happens.

How important could it be? Not like a bunch of ancient artifacts are going to up and wander off if he can’t go poke at them right away. A mental note to ask him later, and she moves this poster to the pile of finished ones and exchanges it for another that says “YOUR VILLAGE —> OUR CITY.” Cute, though maybe a smidge too reliant on humans knowing their history.

“Sure you don’t want to come?” Sera asks.

“That’s not—” Athi sighs. “I told you, I have work.”

“Yeah, but isn’t this more important?”

“I don’t know. Do you want rent paid?”

Sera quiets, kicking her legs back and forth as she works. Her glue bottle sputters, spits shimmer all over. A frustrated grunt and she tosses it aside, rolls onto her back.

“I’m just saying you should care is all. ‘S not going to get any better if nobody makes noise, and nobody’s making it for us.”

“Us?" Athi scoffs. "When we met, you said—and I quote—‘So glad you’re not one of those elfy elves.’”

“Yeah, well, therapy’s all right. Besides, it’s not for elves, or not just. It’s for whoever gets stepped on. That means us.”

“I didn’t know you were in therapy.” 

“Maybe I don’t tell you everything," Sera mutters. “Thought of that?”

Athi caps her marker and lays it down. It’s just a feeling, but it's nagging. Persistent. Like and yet unlike the one she still gets when her papae calls her by her full name. Isalathena Sulahnera Lavellan, come here this instant, and it’s heavy on her chest, sitting right on top of her breastbone. Guilty, but she's not.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. Throws it out there before the feeling gets stale and she decides it's something she can live with.

“Nothing.”

“Right, ok, except for it’s not, so come on. Let's get it out and over with.”

Sera sits up, blonde hair sticking out in a couple new directions. “What���s your problem?”

“You! You’ve been acting weird all week, Ser. Haven’t come in for lunch or been home at night, responded to texts—”

“If you think I want to be in the next room while you and—”

“Oh, so you have a problem with Solas? That was one—”

“No!” Sera groans in frustration. “I mean, yeah, he is kind of old, and talks about old stuff a lot, and he’s all”—she straightens her spine into an uncomfortable posture, then slouches again—“but I like him well enough.”

"Then what?"

Sera stares at her hands for a while. Then out the window. Then at the wall. Then back at her hands. Athi’s patience is thin on a good day, and it takes a lot of willpower to keep quiet as Sera opens her mouth and closes it again, false start after false start.

Finally, Sera blurts out: “I want to ask Dagna to move in.”

Athi has no idea what she was expecting, but not that. Searching for some way to relate it to her own behavior, to justify her feeling or shove it aside, she takes so long to form a response that Sera begins to fidget.

“You what?” she asks at last, thoroughly stumped.

“I want to ask Dagna—”

“Yeah, I…” Athi tries to catch up, shuffles through the past month as best as she can in the pause between. “Here?”

Sera squints at her like she's stupid, but that's fair. It was a stupid thing to say. 

“No, my mother's. Yes here!” 

“I’m sorry, I didn't realize you two were dating again. What’s it been, a year since you broke up?” 

“Yeah. You were out at your friend’s place. Better you missed the makeup sex, though, yeah? More room for fun.” 

At first Sera’s cheeky grin has Athi smiling too. It’s a relief to talk about someone else’s shit instead of her own, but then Sera glances toward the couch and—

Oh.

Oh gods, she wouldn’t have . . . would she?

Athi gets up for a glass of water, makes it two at Sera’s request. Sits cross-legged on the coffee table when she comes back. Just to be safe.

“Isn’t it a bit fast?” she asks.

“Maybe. Doesn’t feel fast, though. If you add 'em all up it's been like, a few years or something, so it sort of works out to normal. If you think about it.”

“I guess.”

Sera empties her glass in one go. “Her lease is up next month,” she says.

Athi nods. “Right. So soon, then. Um… and if it doesn’t work out?” She leaves out the again, but it’s implied.

“But that’s why I should do it! See, I keep losing her because I’m not in. She was serious about us, but I kept messing around. Don’t even know why, really.” She looks on the edge of losing her momentum, halfway to introspection, then snaps back into the room. “But therapy! So this time, like Wicked Grace, right? I’m all in and she’ll see I mean it. And then it’ll work out.”

Her logic isn’t quite flawed but it’s far from perfect. Still, friends don't tell friends to be afraid. Especially when those friends have clearly put a lot of thought into their dynamic-altering life-changing decisions. So Athi drops the questions.

“Wow,” she says instead. “I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”

Sera shifts into soft focus and smiles, a faraway look in her eyes. “Me either.”

She seems so certain. Satisfied, and happy. Really, truly happy. And it’s kind of fucking beautiful.

Feeling overcome for no good reason, Athi goes back to her task. Long thick careful black lines, then short ones. She marks a pattern with them to make it less work and more play. Not that anyone will see unless they’re trying. And as she makes the spaces solid, a thought occurs to her.

“So,” she says, bright. Like it’s no big deal. “Do you want me to move out?”

“What? No! Course not. Why would you say that?”

There’s no time to answer. After so much silence, Sera bubbles over with unused conversation. 

“I mean, do you want to move out? You’re not moving in with Solas are you? Gross. Definitely too fast for that one. Bet he wants to get married first, in a chantry and everything. Is he Andrastian, do you know? Where is he, anyway? He travels a lot for work, right? Must be nice. Wonder if his job pays for it. Is he gone now?”

Too many questions, so Athi answers the last one.

“Yeah. Flies in late tonight. He’s picking me up after work.”

Sera snorts. “What, picking you up? So you wouldn’t get up to take him in, huh? Good girl. Stay strong. Trust me, you drive him once and you're in for forever.”

“No, he didn’t even ask. Figured he’d take a cab or something, but I guess he drove himself.”

“And paid for parking? What’s he, loaded?”

Athi grins and crosses her fingers.

“Real nice. I’m serious, Ath, that’s some weird psychopath shit. Nobody drives their own self to the airport. No one who has friends, anyway.”

"I think he's just used to being alone.”

“Way to make it sad.”

"Alone doesn't mean sad."

"It kind of is though. But then, he’s got people, right? Like Varric, and, well... I don’t know. People.”

Athi shrugs. “Habits can be hard to break, especially when you’re not trying.”

“Ooh. Very wise today."

"Shut up."

"I mean it!"

She doesn’t tell Sera about the other things. The books covering all his furniture. The busted bathroom door that he removed rather than replaced. The singular coaster on his side table. The way he forgets to be hospitable, then overcorrects, asks her if she needs anything three times in a row. His house, his life, is not prepared for the presence of others. Not meant to host company or take in strays or accommodate a lover, meant for him and his needs and his convenience and no more.

And she’s honestly not sure if that makes her an exception or an intruder.

--

“Woah.”

The door slams shut behind her. Very nearly catches her in the ass but she happened to freeze just beyond its reach.

The place is gutted. Or maybe it's not? Ceiling and walls are fine and nothing she can place is missing, tables and chairs and bottles of booze all present and accounted for, but it looks fucking empty. And clean, though she can’t tell if that’s real or just the lack of tasteless decor.

“I know, right?” Tali dumps a bucket of ice in the bin with the rest. “It was like this when I showed up today.”

Athi drifts in slow, perturbed by the smell of cleaning solution and the lack of clutter. Hangs her purse on the coat rack just inside the office, her jacket on top of that. Pulls her hair back, ties her apron, washes her hands.

“Were we robbed?” she asks, only half joking.

“Technically, that would be a burglary.”

“Were we burglarized?”

“You know,” Tali says, “If someone broke in just to take those awful knick-knacks and creepy pictures Seggrit had up, I say more power to ‘em. Enjoy your ghosts, thief!"

Athi giggles. “Worst was the cabin.”

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t even look at that family one. The kid’s vacant stare, blessed Andraste, I wanted to flip it around every time I walked in that door. And you know that cat had seen things. I mean, did Seggrit know them? Why were they on our wall?”

"Somebody had to keep an eye on us."

"And make sure we weren't flirting with tall handsome customers in the back alley?" Tali grins, tongue stuck out between her teeth.

"Why? You make that a habit too?"

Tali wrings out and refolds her bar towel. “Ok, sweetie. Keep your secrets. I'll get my details one day."

"Anyway." Athi gestures at the naked walls. "Change!"

"Right. It was Seggie for sure. He was here when I came in. Must have dealt with all that crap this morning, though I couldn't say what he did with all of it. Or why. Oh! And he left that.”

Tali reaches back and raps a knuckle on the fridge where a sheet of paper hangs. Athi slides it out from under the magnet. Scans its contents. Flips it writing-side-out toward Tali.

“The fuck is this?”

“A cleaning list.”

“I can see that. Seggrit made it?”

“Either that or your writer pal is moving in for real.”

“And that’s not strange to you? That he cares?”

Tali shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe he’s decided to rejuvenate this place. You know? Spruce it up, invest a little time, maybe hire some better bartenders.”

“Hey, don't sell yourself short."

"Bold of you to assume I meant myself."

“This is weird, though. Right?" She reads off the paper. "Sweep out back? Deep-clean the office? Dust the brick wall? Tali, most of these have nothing to do with anything. Where are the temp checks? Or the fucking tap lines? Or, you know, any of the shit we should actually be doing?"

“Beats me, babe. I'm just glad he's getting involved. You should’ve seen him whirling around here earlier. Something seems to have lit a fire under his rear-end.”

Another feeling, but she can't place this one. It all fits together somehow, or should. The list and the bare walls and the lack of fire hazards. Chewing on the puzzle, Athi picks a task at random, takes a spray bottle and a coffee filter to the windows. Even free of five years’ grime and in full sun, they don’t illuminate much. But that’s all right. The list says clean, and they are definitely that.

[omishu]

3, 5, 10, 13, 28, 29, 40, 47, 61, 87, 95, 98!

AAH! 🤩 Thank you so much for your inquiries!! 😆 This is my first ever Tumblr ask challenge to receive, so I'm honored 😖 but it's a lot! 😱 I'll try to answer everything thoroughly. 😅 Here it goes! 😁

3. If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

I love the idea of shapeshifting., Not just the kind of transfiguration that Tonks or McGonagall do, but more like adopting the abilities of different animals suited for different scenarios. Like, if I could grow bat wings to fly and then switch to develop lungs like a seal to swim for long periods or the eyes of a tarsier to see in the dark, etc., that'd be dope.

But my superhero alterego actually has the ability to manipulate luck, so she can basically be a blessing or curse to others. It's based on her own storage of luck though. So if she's had a lot of bad luck lately, she can deal it out; alternatively she can give out good luck when she gets lucky. It's kind of a game of balance, but she has meters for both that get distributed and replenished.

5. Tell us some funny drunk story.

I've really only ever been drunk once. It was a time when I was house-sitting for some friends, watching their two dogs while they went on vacation (the usual). I invited a different friend over, my bestie from middle school. Typically, I have a code for myself to not invite guests into clients' homes, and doing so this time set the dominos a-topplin'. We decided to have a Toy Story marathon, like normal grown ups. To make it really adult, we thought we'd make it more interesting by playing drinking games throughout all the movies. There are four movies. Normally, I don't drink much, just a glass of wine or a beer every once in a while, so ... we got big cans of Mike's extra hard lemonade in different fruity flavors (because ... adults watching kids' movies). Anyway, we had our snacks (French macarons and Wegman's pizza, q classic combination, but not really), the dogs had been fed and set up for bed, and we had our jammies on. All was well for the first two movies: we're reliving our childhoods and the early days of cgi animation, laughing and having a grand old time. By the third movie, what's left of the large pizza is cold. So we stumble down two flights of stairs, carrying a mostly empty pizza box, while dogs jumped all over us, trying to get to the oven in the kitchen on the main floor, like this was some kind of epic high fantasy novel quest. I put the pizza on a cookie sheet. The oven's preheated. Pizza goes in. When pizza is all melty again, I grab a potholder, because I'm responsible. BUT it's not covering the end of the metal handle poking out, and I get BURNED, literally, right on the wrist. Which is the hand I usually pose with for selfies. I've had to totally rearrange how I take pictures of myself now because I have an obvious scar there. Anyway, I stick my hand under cold water and get some ice on it right away, so it doesn't actually hurt as much as it probably should have; granted I have a lot of experience with burn damage, so I may be somewhat desensitized to it. Moral of the story, kids, don't heat up food while you're drunk. I don't even remember what happened in the third movie tbh. I passed out after finishing my third large can of alcoholic beverage, and we went to see TS4 at the theater the next morning, hungover like fools.

10. Who was the last person to disappoint you?

The answer is me. I constantly disappoint myself, because I have impossibly high standards. I tend to be very ambitious and driven, so when I don't live up to my own expectations for myself, I'm disappointed. But failure is a chance to learn. Keep moving forward!

13. If the whole world listened to you right now, what would you say?

GOD IS REAL; HIS NAME IS JESUS CHRIST, AND HE LOVES YOU UNCONDITIONALLY MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE.

28. What was your last lie?

"I'll check it out" when someone recommended a phone app to me today. 😬

29. Dumbest lie you ever told?

🤔 I don't really remember most of my lies because they're small, meaningless, and/or usually get cleared up right away. Plus, I don't normally like to lie, so most of them are accidents from misunderstandings or possible future truths or super obvious for joking purposes, like hyperbole or sarcasm.

40. What was the last gift you gave?

When my sister and I rode the bus to NYC from DC to go see Frozen on Broadway together, I gave her a keychain. I got us matching Funko Pop Frozen 2 keychains to commemorate the event. We both Disneybounded as the queens, so we got the characters we matched; she got Anna, and I got Elsa.

47. When was your first kiss?

It depends on what kind of kiss you mean. When I was in 1st grade, I kissed a boy's forehead on a dare. Then in like maybe 3rd grade, I kissed my best friend on her lips out of excitement for something that had happened. But if you mean romantically, I've only ever kissed one person in the lips, and that was my first love. He was my boyfriend in the beginning of high school, back when I still had braces, so it was probably freshman year. He used to come to my house after school some times, and we went for an evening stroll along the golf course one night. He kissed me, and I kissed him again, but then I turned away when he tried to kiss me again. My face was hot and red when we got back, and his mom was waiting to take him home; she knew exactly what had happened because she made a joke about it, and I started getting dizzy from embarrassment. He dumped me a couple years later and then almost a decade later, we started hooking up again, but then he decided he just wanted to be friends, which I couldn't handle, so I cut off ties with him. 🤷‍♀️ His loss

61. Something you find romantic?

There was a time when I liked a guy in my Japanese-American cultural exchange group. The whole club went to an obon matsuri at a Buddhist temple one year with crafts, food, kimono fashion show, taiko, etc. We danced together under the stars with my dress swirling at my feet and thousands of fireflies twinkling out of the ground around us. It was so magical. Then we all went for the best sushi I've ever had and my first beer, which I split with a girl who's now one of my besties. He walked me to my car and made sure I got home safely. Turns out he was 17 years older than me (short and baby faced), twice divorced, and had kids. I was barely 21. Yikes.

87. Meaning behind your blog name?

This is a fun question! I've always loved animation and making my own characters. When I was really little, some time in elementary school, I was super into the show Xiaolin Showdown, which has a character named "Omi". I used that as the basis for the name of my first ever OC and then several other OC's after her haha then in middle school, my best friend had the same first name as me, just spelled differently (yes, the same ms bestie from the drunken shenanigans above. We're getting brunch next weekend too). So we started calling each other by our OC's names, Omi and Lala (Omishu and Laphelliae). We even introduced each other under these identities, so the name stuck. Everyone called me Omi in highschool, and it drove my mom crazy! Even the teachers called me that; Mom absolutely hated it. Now it's my online alias for almost every platform I use. If you ever see a username with Omishu, Omishu Kitsuni, or OmishuK, chances are it's me!

95. Share your favourite quote.

Too many!! Short answer, THE ENTIRE BIBLE. Long answer ... Uh, it depends on the context. The whole series of quotes from the Disney wisdom collection, yesss. A couple on speaking/listening that I appreciate are: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln and "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." Epictetus. I live by Mark 12:28-31, though: "... 'Which commandment is the most important of all?' Jesus answered, 'The most important is, '... you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.'"

98. Have you ever made your mum cry? What happened?

Yes, in college my mentor's husband preached a message about forgiveness. I had to leave in the middle to call my mom. She had verbally abused me and my sisters while I was growing up, which has caused me to develop multiple psychoses in my childhood that I'm still learning to deal with today. My unrealistic expectations are also caused by trying to earn her approval. Anyway, I had to tell her that I don't hold it against her and recognize the stresses of parenting and appreciate how she's tried to do her best for me. We were both crying. She had no idea the affect of her words on me, but our relationship has improved so much since then. We're both careful to speak the truth in love with each other now.

[wonderlustlucas]

dancing through our house - kim yugyeom

⇢ prompt Feet don’t dance like they did with you.—“ghost of you” by 5 seconds of summer ⇢ pairing yugyeom x female reader ⇢ word count 2.5k ⇢ genre some fluff, but mainly heavy angst ⇢ warnings main character death; descriptions of anxiety & depression ⇢ summary In which some things are impossible to forget. ⇢ a/n this be hella sad i think i cried the whole time writing this. listen to the song for optimum sadness. my friend read this earlier and told me to quote what she said sooo: BUT LIKE EVEN THOUGH IT HITS YOU AT THE CORE AND YOUR LIKE WOW THIS IS SO GOOD YOUR ALSO LIKE FUCK THIS AUTHOR CAUSE WOW IM CRYIN

“You’re too pretty for a shitty place like this,” you commented boldly; however, no trace of humor laced your tone and, casual as ever, you took a long gulp from your red plastic cup as Yugyeom leaned against the marble island, speechless because he was the one that spent hours planning for this moment. He was the one that had an insufferable crush on your pretty face from the moment he tumbled headfirst, literally, into your life. Days had rolled into weeks which rolled into months and he simply could never bottle up all his feelings and serve them as they were, “Today’s the day,” he told himself practically every morning, yet as soon as he marched into the lecture hall with the courage of an ex-One Direction fan slash current K-pop fan and found you so, so effortlessly beautiful amongst your circle of friends, his tail shot between his legs and, alas, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the day.”

And so, when Yugyeom’s first ever university end of year party rolled around, BamBam, Jeongguk, and Mingyu thrust an absurd amount of shots down his esophagus and propelled him like a rocket to where you concocted some sort of drink, he was ready this time. He was going to grab the bull—no, not a bull, you’re too pretty to even be labeled as some sort of animal—by the horns and spill out every last ounce of his emotions until his lungs collapsed, whether you remembered him from the first day of freshman orientation nearly six months ago when he oh-so-gracefully smacked your iced coffee right out of your hands or not. He was here now, prepared to do whatever it took to sweep you off your feet, not vice versa.

“You didn’t give me a chance to get to the good part of this conversation,” Yugyeom grumbled, ruffling his hair with his hands, he saw—he saw your eyes follow the motion and his heart absolutely picked up to a detrimental rate. “Wait,” you smiled—or was that a smirk you were hiding?—and added an ungodly amount of rum to your cup, “I think this is where you’re finally going to tell me how you feel and I’d rather embarrass myself drunk than embarrass myself sober because, I’ll have you know, I nearly shit my pants every time I see you.”

Suddenly Yugyeom’s tongue was pulsing like a heart in his very dry mouth and he most definitely misheard you—right? “Is that a good shit, or a bad shit?”

You laughed, a sound so sickly sweet he fleetingly considered smashing his head through the wall until your answer blessed his ears, “Nah, it’s a good shit. I heard you were head over heels for me, or something like that, back in January and I thought you’d come talk to me but—ah, never mind. Needless to say, we were both dumb for not just speaking up.”

“Does this mean if I ask you on a date you won’t reject me?” Yugyeom let out a shaky laugh, mesmerized with the way your skin glowed under the kitchen’s dimmed lights, he fought the urge not to cup your face and instead opted for stepping closer, breathing in your rosy perfume and nearly losing his shit, when you responded with a bashful smile.

“Yeah,” you sighed, much more breathless than you’d like to be, “you don’t have to worry about that anytime soon. Unless, of course, you’re a total dickhead or a terrible kisser,” you snorted, a noise usually found unpleasant but Yugyeom wanted nothing more than to prove to the world no fresh-out-of-the-pussy puppy was cuter than you; however, his prize-winning grin faltered when you went on, “which by the way, I think we should totally test that out. You know, in case you are a terrible kisser and I have time to back out of this dating proposition.”

Yugyeom didn’t need to be asked twice and yanked you forward so quickly you yelped, but, the gentleman he is, steadied you against his chest and dipped down to kiss you without a single drop of hesitation. His lips found yours effortlessly, heart singing with joy when you gasped against his mouth but melted into his arms nevertheless, his tongue ran along the seam of your lips, and he could just barely taste a hint of Doritos cheese as—

The shrieking of his cellphone like an angry rattlesnake renders Yugyeom’s peaceful dreaming of the beginning of his relationship with you nearly 3 years ago cut short-lived, he lets out an aggravated groan, slapping around the mattress aimlessly for the device before pressing down on the off button to shut the annoying blaring off.

Brain still clouded with sleep, Yugyeom flips onto his stomach and sighs blissfully, stretching his arm out to the pillows on the left side in order to determine whether you’ve already left for work or not.

Upon feeling the icy touch of the sheets Yugyeom rolls over to your side, relishing in mornings like these: he’s home, you’ll be home soon, he can spend the rest of the day—the whole day!—with you. Cheek pressed against your pillows, Yugyeom inhales a hefty breath of your scent, filling his lungs and brain with the jasmine and vanilla perfume from your shampoo. He smiles into the coolness of the downy pillow, contemplating whether he wants to send you good morning meme until, like a shit ton of bricks dumped on his head, the weight of the world falling on his shoulders, the realization hits Yugyeom slowly, cruelly.

He realizes, upon impact, that whether he texted your phone or not—you won’t answer. He could text you a million times a minute, call you even, and you wouldn’t answer because you’re not here. Eyelids fluttering open within milliseconds, Yugyeom jerks away from your side of the bed with a choke, clawing the sheets as he flies from the bed, nearly crumbling to the floor but catching a grip against the windowsill. You’re gone.

Breathless and with your smell multiplying like cells in his senses, Yugyeom reaches for the closest thing—one of his pillows hanging lopsided off the mattress—and pelts it to the wall across from where he stands, heaving, watching with disappointment as it thumps against the brick lightly and, consequently, not unleashing any of his pent-up emotions. Your beautiful heart isn’t even beating.

But he knows if you were here, you’d tell him he would be just fine.

The red and black and white grain muddling Yugyeom’s vision begins to clear as he chokes on air, the briny taste of tears enters his mouth when he licks his chapped lips and when did he start crying?

Six feet underground. Like the past thirty-three days, Yugyeom blinks away the rest of his tears and waits until they’re dribbling down his cheeks to wipe them, he lets out a shaky breath and proceeds with his day, plucking up the pillow and setting it back on the bed like you would’ve asked him to.

When he leaves the bedroom and makes way for the kitchen, he winces at the eerie silence of the apartment aside from the incessant percussion of birds singing outside the living room window and occasional creaking of the attendants an apartment above and decides some Chris Brown could do. Swinging open the refrigerator door, Yugyeom sighs at what’s inside—or, better, there lack of—and decides, he really needs to go grocery shopping; a half-empty gallon of milk, three eggs left in the carton, what’s left of the sliced bread, and four bottles of soju that has turned into medicine to cure his headaches and panic attacks rather than a way to enjoy nights like he used to with you.

Despite the persistent growling from his gut, Yugyeom only reaches for the milk, sets it down on the counter and hums—he hums!—something so insignificant but something he hasn’t done since your accident as he reaches for the dishwasher and pulls the door open. His humming stops when he catches sight of your coffee cup inside, mauve lipstick stain faded even more from the day before and he knows if he wants it to stay he has to stop using it every morning, but a part of him cannot help but reach for it because it’s just another part of you.

His stomach churns and keeps churning and suddenly Yugyeom’s head is heavy and saliva is flooding his mouth and he’s burning hotter than the star that keeps our planet alive and he scrambles to the stainless steel and heaves into the sink, expelling everything from his belly, which, ultimately, is nothing. Yugyeom dry-heaves, once, twice, before inhaling a shuddering breath, drool dripping from his lips and down his chin until he hastily wipes it away. With his appetite stolen like a rug whipped away from beneath his feet, Yugyeom slams the dishwasher door closed, the contents angrily rattling inside, and leaves the milk on the counter for he could not give less of a shit.

A cold shower fixes everything, love, you would say, the cold-shower freak yourself, he nods to himself, a cold shower will do, Yugyeom makes way for the bathroom and strips from his clothes that seem to stick to his sweaty body, twists the shower knob just slightly so the stream is at its coldest possible temperature before whipping aside the curtain and stepping inside. Yugyeom shudders at the contact of water against his skin, goosebumps spreading across his body head to toe and he presses himself against the wall, shivers wracking his body, squeezing his eyes tighttighttightuntil it all goes away, until he’s numb, until your standing beside him again.

His body, at some point, numbs to the frigid water and he finally backs away from the wall to stand underneath the shower head, running his hands through his raven hair, rubbing the crust away from his eyes, washing up quickly and using your body cleanser instead of his own. When Yugyeom’s finished, he dries off quickly and wraps the towel low on his hip, but frowns when he enters your bedroom because you’re not there to tell him how hot he is and how lucky you are, in which he would tackle your cute ass and smother your face in kisses, which, eventually, lead to his towel on the floor and your clothes dropped next to it.

A dinging notification from Yugyeom’s phone still buried beneath his pillows snaps him back to reality and he wanders over, scrolling through his notifications from the newest to the oldest.

DabDab🤮– 1:42 PM Hey bud. Hope ur getting there. Call me

Missed Call from DabDab🤮 – 11:23 AM

Missed Call from 🅱️eon 🅱️eongguk – 10:14 AM

Yugyeom sighs—he knows he should be grateful his friends care, but he simply does not care enough for himself to constantly answer their nagging questions. He contemplates ignoring it, he could shove the device back under the pillows and answer it tomorrow like he usually does, but he’s gone three days without talking to one of them and so, guilt makes up his mind and he’s tapping away until BamBam’s voice disturbs the deadened ambiance Yugyeom’s created in your bedroom.

“Hey! You called,” BamBam’s voice fills the hair, Yugyeom can almost see the smile, and falls back onto the mattress.

“I called.”

“I know you don’t want to talk, which I understand. But I want you to do me a favor,” BamBam goes on, Yugyeom pinches the bridge of his nose, biting back a sharp retort, “I want you to use that damn well-spent studio the two of you have in your apartment and freestyle. Just an hour. I know you were coming up for a choreo to something, I don’t know, but go do that.”

Yugyeom pauses, considering the idea, but shuts it down quickly because he does not want to do anything but lie here, “I can’t. Not today.”

“Yugyeom, you’ve said that to everything. I know you’re not doing anything, and I don’t blame you. But if there’s one thing you still have and love, that’s dancing. And I’m not arguing with you over this. Please, just do this. For me.”

Yugyeom hears the crack in his best friend’s voice, he can feel the pain through the phone, another ache to add to his poor heart, “I can’t go in that room without her, Bam.”

“You’ve had dance before you had ___, Yugyeom. You shared dance with her, you grew with her from it. You can do it without her. Do it for her, she’d be proud. Okay?”

Yugyeom swallows the lump in his throat, the tears threatening to spill from his burning eyes and his bottom lip trembles, “Okay.”

“Okay. Don’t say okay again, I’m not Augustus Waters,” BamBam chuckles, sniffling on his line and Yugyeom knows he’s crying too but manages to crack a smile, “okay. Fuck! I said it again. Alright, go dance your heart out for a little and take care of yourself. Also, don’t be a stranger. Please.”

Yugyeom nods, digging his knuckle into his eye to stop the tears, he croaks out, “Okay. Thanks, man. See you.”

He hangs up a moment later to let the tears spill freely.

An hour later, Yugyeom stands in the doorway of his—your—dance room, glaring questioningly at the mirrored walls around him, his pitiful reflection staring back at him. Do it for you, he tells himself, stepping inside and clicking the door shut behind him.

Yugyeom stretches his tense muscles, avoiding looking at himself in the mirror in fear he’ll back out or conjure up a mental image of your bruised and bloodied body in the hospital, he mustn’t think about it or else it’ll only get worse. He scrolls through his downloaded songs, zoned in on something other than you for the first time in weeks, going back and forth between a few options before caving in to another Chris Brown bop he cannot get away from.

Just like before, Yugyeom tells himself after his first slip-up, swinging his leg too far to the side and so he begins again, carrying himself with utmost grace and sharp, fluid movements but he shakes his head a minute and a half in—not good enough. “One, two, three, four,” he whispers to himself, starting from the top for the seventh time, he glides and twists and pulls and—

And he blanks hardly thirty seconds in, pausing, staring into his reflection, shuddering for oxygen, long hair tousled from the quick movements, limbs screaming at the sudden usage, and he can’t wrap his mind around what follows next.

“I can’t do it,” Yugyeom says to no one in particular, balling his fists at his sides before collapsing onto the smooth laminate, he looks to the corner of the room and if he squints hard enough, he can imagine you standing there, telling him he can do it, but his tears blur his vision so he buries his head between his knees, “I can’t do it without you.”

And Yugyeom cries for the thirty-third day, for his feet don’t dance like they used to with you.

[kaaramel]

victorian + cook skin strings

i’m just gonna dump all of it in one go let’s rumble

you can see all the victorian-set items and their descriptions in the curio cabinet screen, so those are legit i’m just compiling them, but the “cook” items don’t seem to be complete/released yet. i’m a filthy dataminer grubbing for secrets. i’ll put victorian first and the cook stuff at the end if, idk, spoilers bother you

highlights:

wx is in a DIVING SUIT. an EXPLICITLY NON-WATERPROOF ONE

WIGFRID the SHAKESPEAREAN ACTRESS looks SO GOOD - is she actually straight up cast as hamlet??? ICONIC I LOVE HER

willow’s makes me SAD let her IN FROM THE COLD

wicker’s item descriptions mention “putting the upper crust in their place” and maxwell’s identify him, unequivocally, as “the upper crust.” TAKE HIM OUT, WB

the two cook quotes for woodie establish he considers lucy his sous chef and he actively uses her to cut things in the kitchen, which is.. dubious

MEEEEAT

character quotes:

wilson: “The root of all malady lies in an imbalance of the humors.” willow: “Fancy a matchstick, sir?” wolfgang: “Sir Wolfgang is strongest boxer!” wendy: “I am in deepest mourning...” wx-78: “PREPARING TO DIVE” wickerbottom: “Manners, my dear.” woodie: “They ain’t beaver pelts, I’ll tell ya that much.” maxwell: “Hmph.” wigfrid: "Wörds, wörds, wörds.” [Hamlet II.ii.183] webber: “Look, we lost a tooth!”  winona: “Honest work makes an honest woman.”

individual item descriptions: 

wilson: Physician's [x]

wilson_victorian = "Wilson is a major advocate of the health benefits of leeches." body_wilson_victorian = "Have you tried amputating what ails you?" hand_wilson_victorian = "Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit!" feet_wilson_victorian = "Shoes that have tread on many a spilled concoction."

willow: Street Peddler’s [x]

willow_victorian = "Willow doesn't just play with matches... she also peddles them." body_willow_victorian = "These rags keep most of the cold out on those bitter nights in the rookeries." hand_willow_victorian = "These matchstick seller gloves do little to keep out the cold." feet_willow_victorian = "The cold of the cobblestones seeps right through them."

wolfgang: Pugilist’s [x]

wolfgang_victorian = "Pugilism is a gentleman's sport." body_wolfgang_victorian = "For when you've a match scheduled naught an hour after high tea." hand_wolfgang_victorian = "Left hook! Right hook! Jab, jab!" feet_wolfgang_victorian = "Just pull them on and jump in the ring!"

wendy: Mourning [x]

wendy_victorian = "Wendy is the queen of strict, socially mandated mourning practices." body_wendy_victorian = "No expense has been spared in these grimly beautiful mourning clothes." hand_wendy_victorian = "Soft gloves to hold your heartbreak." feet_wendy_victorian = "Heavy shoes to tread the path of sorrow."

wx-78: Diving Suit [x]

wx78_victorian = "These are their diving gears." body_wx78_victorian = "It seems this elaborate diving suit was constructed with artistic taste in mind. It has no functional purpose." hand_wx78_victorian = "These diving suit gloves are old and worn. They probably aren't waterproof anymore." legs_wx78_victorian = "The bottom of this diving suit is just for show. It doesn't keep out water anymore."

wickerbottom: Aristocrat’s Haughty [x]

wickerbottom_victorian = "How did Ms. Wickerbottom accrue her fortune? Perhaps you should mind your own business." body_wickerbottom_victorian = "The perfect outfit for lounging in the drawing room, or putting the upper crust in their place." hand_wickerbottom_victorian = "You'll be the envy of all at the luncheon in this refined number." feet_wickerbottom_victorian = "Fashionably heeled shoes for a woman of high society."

woodie: Trader’s [x]

woodie_victorian = "Woodie's wilderness survival comes in handy in the great North." body_woodie_victorian = "A gentleman's overcoat embellished with fine, rare furs." hand_woodie_victorian = "Keep your hands free for tanning pelts!" legs_woodie_victorian = "Comes with shin guards to ward off rabid beavers. (Note: Useless against all other animals)"

maxwell: Aristocrat’s Fine [x]

waxwell_victorian = "Money and affluence have gone straight to this gentleman's head." body_waxwell_victorian = "The extravagant attire of an influential upper cruster." hand_waxwell_victorian = "A pair of white gloves for a high class snob." legs_waxwell_victorian = "Buckle up for a night on the town."

wes: Sooty Sweep’s [x]

wes_victorian = "This sweep's work is quite grueling. He'd prefer not to talk about it." body_wes_victorian = "It's a good bet that the owner of these clothes spent significant time in a chimney." hand_wes_victorian = "These were white gloves when you first started in the sweep business." feet_wes_victorian = "Black shoes don't show the soot."

wigfrid: Tragedienne [x]

wathgrithr_victorian = "It seems Ms. Wigfrid can connect to the poetry of any tragedy." body_wathgrithr_victorian = "This actress fought tooth and nail for this prestigious Shakespearean role." hand_wathgrithr_victorian = "A pair of thin cloth gloves, likely worn by an actress." legs_wathgrithr_victorian = "These pants allow freedom of movement and complete mobility for an incredible performance."

webber: Schoolboy [x]

webber_victorian = "This lively young lad has a most healthy pallor." body_webber_victorian = "Someone's mother dressed them this morning." hand_webber_victorian = "A pair of cuffs to wear when studiously practicing the three Rs." feet_webber_victorian = "Don't forget your slate on the way to the schoolhouse."

winona: Blacksmith’s [x]

winona_victorian = "Winona dreams up all sorts of fantastic mechanical inventions in her private workshop." body_winona_victorian = "Keep oil and automaton grease off your clothing with this fine leather apron." hand_winona_victorian = "Thick gloves for transferring smelted metals." legs_winona_victorian = "If the smithy floor is covered in hay, you never know when you might step on a nail."

item skins:

cane_victorian (Goatshead Cane) = "A cane to accompany you on your afternoon stroll." icebox_victorian = "A sophisticated ice box, for the sophisticated wilderness dweller." firepit_victorian = "The heart of every household." hambat_potroast (Pot Roastbat) = "Delicious, delicious murder." cookpot_tureen = "This crockpot is shaped like an elegant Victorian tureen."

cook skins:

character quotes:

wilson: “Oh yes, I’m cooking something up.” willow: “My food’s always burnt to perfection!” wolfgang: “Wolfgang will cook for you!” wendy:  “Every meal ends in an empty plate.” wx-78: “MEAL SERVER DOWN” wickerbottom: “Just follow the recipe, dear.” woodie: “Lucy is my sous chef.” maxwell: “Everything I make is magnificent.” wigfrid: “MEEEEEAT.” webber: “Let’s get cooking!” winona: “Let ol’Winnie fix ya up somethin’ special.”

item descriptions:

wilson: "Wilson's had a lot of experience cooking with found ingredients." willow: "Chef Willow is a grease fire waiting to happen." wolfgang: "Wolfgang can't relax unless all of his friends are well fed." wendy: "Wendy's not had much kitchen experience, but she's willing to learn." wx-78: "WX must have some utensil addons somewhere around here." wickerbottom: "Wickerbottom has several cookbooks for just such an occasion." woodie: "Woodie's not beyond using an axe in the kitchen." maxwell: "Maxwell is ready to roll up his sleeves and get cooking." wes: "Wes knows a meal is good when the whole table eats in silence." wigfrid: "Wigfrid has many pot roasts in her future." webber: "Webber loves helping out in the kitchen." winona: "Cooking is basically just food assembly, right?"

[nijiimura]

all the botanical asks ;)

damn you.

jasmine; what mythical creature do you wish actually existed?griffins hell yea

lavender; soundcloud or vinyls?soundcloud!!

primrose; what book does everyone right now need to read?annihilation by jeff vandermeer 

lunar mist; do you like wearing other people’s shirts/jackets?depends on if they fit or not but YEA bc it smells like them its nice

bird of paradise; what was the best thing that happened to you this month?tomorrow im gonna see zoe im so fuckin ready

gardenia; what’s a promise you’ve recently made to yourself?that its gonna be ok

lion’s fairytale; would you rather be the sky, the ocean or the forests?the ocean

whirling butterflies; would you kiss the last person you kissed again?the question is who was the last person i kissed 

marmalade skies; do you plan your outfits?dfjdsbnfjsbfhfd NO im a walking disaster

apricot drift; how do you feel right now?bored

everlasting daisy; what’s the last dream you remember having?i dreamed about seeing infinity war the night before i actually saw it and apparently in dream IW they never went to Wakanda and just shot footage just for trailers like they did in rogue one

queen’s cup; what are you craving right now?chocolate...

lavender dream; turn ons/offs?turn on - girls. turn off - men.

water lilly; when was the last time you cried? why?this morning bc my teacher sent me a pissed off email after i told me i was gonna be an hour late bc i missed the bus

lily of the valley; did the one person who hurt you most in your life apologize?no

winterberry; do you bite or lick your ice cream?whoever bites their ice cream are monsters

honey perfume; favorite movie ever?grand budapest hotel!!!!

desert rose; do you like yourself?hmmm next question

snapdragon; have you ever met or seen in person a celebrity?i took a selfie w a WWE commentator years ago 

night owl; how many countries have you visited?2!

heliotrope; have you ever been in a castle?yea it was fucken sweet

creams and sky; what’s the craziest/bravest thing you’ve done?come out??

lantana; what’s on your mind right now?SLEEPOVER W ZOE TOMORROW

pumpkin patch; what’s your zodiac sign?leo... yknow... nya

tulip; name 5 facts about yourself.-i wear socks to bed bc my feet get cold!!-i have a scar on my wrist from a swinging accident w my little brother-i have a spotify playlist thats 122hrs long bc i just dump albums on there-abba is currently my favorite band-bleeding hearts are my favorite flowers bc they remind me of my late great grandma

daphne; do you believe in karma?yes??

queen of the meadow; ever been in love?yes

wisteria; whom do you admire and why?my dad tbh hes one of the hardest workers i know and has such a shitty job and deals w 90% of my family drama but hes always so positive and funny and i love my dad so damn much

angel’s face; what was your favorite bedtime story as a child?good dog carl

remember me; did you make someone laugh today?i fucken hope so

iris; do you believe in ghosts?YEA

lilac; if you could go back in time which time period would you visit?1979 just so i can go to an abba concert

caramel kisses; would you want to live forever? why/why not?hm no lmao

primula; what makes you sad?school. all these rohan ovas davpro keeps releasing

rain lily; was today typical? why/why not?yea i went to class and disappointed my teacher 

queen anne’s lace; who do you trust the most?zoe

lady’s slipper; what did you have for breakfast today?nothing... and i had nothing for lunch either.... all ive had is some lemonade and poptarts i bought like an hour ago

forget me not; do you have any regrets looking back in your life?going to this damn college

lunaria; what’s your favorite fictional universe?ok star wars universe is rad as fuck

violet; favorite tv show?the office and kitchen nightmares HDJIFDNJF

sunflower; share a favorite quote.god idk man

snowdrop; what does your ideal day look like?im home alone and its raining outside and i have the windows open. i dont have any deadlines to meet and i spend the day drawing 

tiger lily; do you have any hobbies?drawing and crying

peony; share a small random book passage that means something to you.BITCH IDK DO U THINK I READ?????

tea rose; what’s something you always wanted to do but were too scared?catch fireflies but i am SO terrified of all bugs its not funny

honeysuckle; do you usually date people your age or older/younger?my fucken age

sweet pea; who means the world to you? why?okuyasu nijimura means the entire world to me, and heres why (pulls out 50 page essay) no but my little brother

love in the mist; best books you’ve ever read?have yall... dabbled in these books called warriors by erin hunter?

foxglove; who is your favorite cartoon character?im not even into su anymore but amethyst always wins

magnolia; coffee or tea?coffee

crown imperial; would you rather be extremely rich or extremely loved?Why Not Both Thot

snowflake; are you a dog or a cat person?WHY NOT BOTH THOT

bell flower; what is your biggest addiction?hey guys im smoking the latest coolest drug called okuyasu nijimura

cosmos; do you ever think about the galaxy?y...yes

moonflower; what’s your favorite color?yellow

freesia; do you have a good relationship with your parents and siblings? why/why not?yea we tight

sundrop; are you a morning or a night person?night

poppy; have you ever dealt with a mental illness?idk if adhd is a mental illness or not so imma say... maybe

clover; how would your friends describe you?

fucken gay

dandelion; do you consider yourself and extrovert or an introvert?depends :/

lilly; what’s something you love watching/reading but you are too embarrassed to admit you do?bitch idk man im an open book i embarrass myself on a daily basis

anemone; describe yourself in 3 words.dumb gay bitch

lotus; best memory as a child?my mom bringing my cat bill home for the first time!!! he was so small.......

angelonia; what is your eye and hair color?brown and brown

dahlia; do you like crystals?yea imma shove my dick in a geode

buttercup; if you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?grievous real so i can fuck him

baby’s breath; what’s your hogwarts house?hufflepuff

calendula; biggest pet peeve?specific but when im literally just sitting in the car and one of my parents goes “looks like SOMEONE has an attitude” like?? i was silently looking out the window

blanker flower; would you rather go to a cocktail party with your best friends or stay home and read a book/watch a movie with your pet?friends bc i love them so much

blazing star; share a secret.I DONT HAVE A FUCKEN SECRET

carnation; would you rather live longer or happier?happier

petunia; who’s story is your biggest inspiration in life? why?bitch im too tired to answer this

bluebell; do you wear glasses?no

nymphea; forest or river?river

orchid; do you like exercise?HFDJKSFNDKJSDFNFK WHO TF DO I LOOK LIKE.

pansy; do you like poetry?FUCK poetry

morning glory; any special talent that you have?i can do a good swedish chef impression

[atc74]

Spread Too Thin

Written for @d-s-winchester​‘s Fall In Love With Fall Challenge. Friends, I had a terrible day and decided to channel it into this. Completely unbeta’d and I hope y’all like it. I choose Jensen and the photo above. And I was inspired by “Crazy Girl” by the Eli Young Band. I had a second inspiration, so you just may get a 2nd fic for this challenge.

Pairing: Jensen x Reader, an AU of sorts (Jensen is not a famous actor but he and Jared are still friends and have gone into business together)

Warnings: Language (like one little swear word), Angst with just a touch of fluff (cause it’s me y’all)

WC: 1700

There were few things you found truly satisfying in this hectic world you lived in. But sitting out on the lake, the leaves changing color with the dropping temperatures and the vapors slowly rising as the crisp autumn air cools faster than the water below it. This was one of them.

You had been sitting out on the dock for what felt like hours after he stormed out of the house after an argument. You had been feeling down for a while, but he was never even home to see it anymore. You felt like a single parent raising your five year old son these days. Between work and school and soccer, you felt stretched way too thin, but he wouldn’t even know. Early in your relationship, you and Jensen made each other a promise to always be honest with one another, so that it what you did, but it didn’t go the way you had hoped.

You walked in the door from work just as Evan was getting off the bus from school. Your timing couldn’t have been better today, after a quick stop at the market to grab the makings to finish up dinner.

“Come on, Ev! We have to get ready for soccer, Buddy!” you shouted as he talked with his friends before slowly making his way up the driveway.

“I’m hungry,” Evan pouted as he dropped his bag inside the front door.

“I am fixing you a snack now. Can you please change into your soccer uniform and get your cleats on? I will help you tie them once you are dressed,” you promised as you prepared a quick snack of apples and cheese, then checked on the roast that had been slow cooking all day.

You could hear him upstairs and prayed he was doing as you asked. He could get ready quickly when you didn’t have anywhere to be, but on the days you were pressed for time is when he became slower than molasses in January. Thankfully, you heard his feet bound down the stairs.

“Is Dad gonna be there?” Evan asked as he sat down with his snack.

“I don’t know, Ev. He has been really busy at the brewery lately. I will call and remind him, okay?” Your heart sunk a little, knowing this would be the third game in a row Jensen missed if he got hung up. Again.

“Hey Babe, I know you have been busting your ass, but I just wanted to remind you that Ev’s got a game tonight at five thirty at Leed’s Park. He is excited and we can’t wait to see you! Love you,” you disconnected after leaving your second voicemail of the day. You stowed your phone in your back pocket with a heavy sigh.

“Okay, Bud, let’s get something on those feet!” You quickly put cleats on your son’s feet and laced them up, ushering him out the door with the last of his snack in a baggie and a bottle of water. You made it to the field with just a few minutes to spare, but didn’t seen Jensen’s vehicle anywhere.

The game was great, considering it was five year olds and Evan scored a goal, so on the way home you stopped for ice cream that he could have for dessert. Once in the house, you got Evan in the shower, set his pajamas and clean underwear out and made your way downstairs to set the table. As you set the last plate out, Jensen walked in the kitchen.

“Smells amazing, Honey. I am starving and exhausted,” Jensen sighed loudly and stabbed his fork into the meat.

“Ev scored a goal and you weren’t there, Jen. Again. He missed you; we missed you,” you sat across from him at the table.

“I know, I am sorry, but the work has to get done. I have to balance the books, pay the contractor. Equipment is arriving by the truckload and I have to be there,” Jensen explained through a mouth full of roast beef. “This is delicious!”

“I’m glad you like it,” you commented, not really caring at the moment, as you prepared your son’s plate, piling it with meat and veggies.

The rest of dinner passed in relative silence, at least from you. Evan was too excited about his goal and told Jensen all about it. Once he was finished, you served up his victory ice cream and he went into the living room to watch his favorite show before bed.

Clearing the table, you felt your frustration with your husband continue to grow, until you slammed the plates into the sink and turned to face him.

“When are you going to put us first, Jen? You spend all your time down there,” you tried to stay calm.

“We both knew I was going to be home a lot less when we decided to open our own place. I thought you were supported me on this!” Jensen was a little less calm than you were.

“I do support you Jensen. You are my husband, my partner, my best friend, but I can’t do all of this on my own. I am working full-time at a job I am not sure I like and raising our son single-handedly, while you are down there, barely making it home for dinner most nights! Soccer, homework and my job and I am barely keeping it together. Evan misses his dad. I miss you. We need you Jen,” you poured your heart out and could feel yourself losing what little control you had left on your emotions. “I cried at my desk today, did you know that?”

“What? So now I am to blame for your shitty job? And single parent, huh? I need some air!” Jensen shouted as he stormed out the door, slamming it behind him. You heard his truck as he gunned it out of the drive.

“Mommy, are you and Daddy fighting?” Evan walked back in the kitchen with his empty bowl, his bottom lip quivering and tears threatening to spill over.

“Sometimes, Mommies and Daddies fight,” you murmured into his hair as you held him in your arms. “It’s going to be okay, Bud. Let’s get you to bed, okay?” you tried to remain strong for him.

You could still see the variegation of leaves against the cloudless sky as it faded from pink and bright orange into navy blue, a few stars started to shine through the inkiness. You remembered nights like this, when you and Jensen would sit, sharing a chair and a blanket as you looked out over the lake, or star gazed on a clear night.

But tonight it was just you and your tea. The tears you had shed dried on your cheeks, as you didn’t care enough to wipe them away; it isn’t like anyone else was there to see them. You took a sip of your now cold tea, a grimace crossed your face and you dumped it over the side of the dock into the water.

“You’re still beautiful, you know that?” a whiskey smooth voice echoed out over the water.

“What?” you gasped, not realizing he was there.

“I said you’re still beautiful, even when you make that face because your tea is cold. How long have you been out here?” Jensen asked as he took a seat next to you.

“Long enough for my tea to go cold and realize I forgot a blanket,” you scoffed.

“I thought so,” Jensen clucked as he placed the blanket in his hands over your lap, because he knows your legs get cold first.

“Thank you, Jen,” you sniffled holding back the tears you felt burning behind your lids. “You can’t just leave like that.”

“You really oughta know that I just have to walk away sometimes. We’re gonna do what lovers do; we’re gonna have a fight or two, but I ain’t ever changin’ my mind,” Jensen whispered into the night as his eyes met yours. “Crazy girl don’t you know that I love you? And I wouldn’t dream of goin’ nowhere. Silly woman, come here, let me hold you. Have I told you lately I love you like crazy girl?”

“Quoting Country songs now are we?” you laughed as you took his hand and allowed him to pull you into his lap.

“I am so sorry. I am sorry that I haven’t been here for you or Ev. I am sorry you are not happy at work. I promise from this moment on, I will let Jared take on more. I have been taking on too much, just because I want it done right, ya know? But my family needs me, and I need them,” Jensen kissed your tears away. “I wouldn’t last a single day; I’d probably just fade away. Without you, I’d lose my mind. Before you ever came along, I was living life all wrong. Smartest thing I ever did was make you all mine,” Jensen sang the rest of the song to you as he rocked you in his arms.

“Just a couple more months. Then the brewery will be open and we will be okay,” you spoke out loud, more to yourself then to your husband.

“Of course we are going to be okay. Y/N, Honey, I am sorry I ran out like that. I went to see Jared and told him I needed him and he agreed. Oh, and he also apologized when Gen started screaming at him. We are going to be more than okay,” Jensen promised.

“Good, because I want to quit my job. I don’t think it makes sense to pay for daycare once we are up and money is coming in,” you blurted out absentmindedly.

“Why are we paying for daycare? Ev is in school full time now and I promise I will be home in the mornings to get him on the bu…” Jensen’s eyes went wide as he took in your smirk.

“We fought and I forgot to tell you; we’re preg…” you were cut off by Jensen capturing your mouth in a kiss and you felt his love for you and knew you were all going to be okay.

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[pinkhourvenus]

thanks to my beloved bby @sofiafabulousphan for tagging me!! im finally doing this after procrastinating HAAHA ILY

Rules: if you do it, tag a few blogs that you adore.

What’s your favoUrite song to sing/hum? UlgO ShIpJi aNhAAAA

What is your favorite flower/tree/plant? 

i’ve nvr paid much attention to plants cause as a kid i was quite good at science except the plants part.But there was one point when i actually searched up different flowers and the meaning of it cause i was interested in making clay necklaces based off the flowers as a gift to my friends lmao. call me mainstream but i think i like roses the best?Like all the different coloured ones symbolises different things and i personally find myself very interesting in a way that if my personality was written as a book it would be those huge ass dictionaries in libraries. I like trees a lot mainly because its really hot in mlysia therefore trees are there to be my shade. also!! trees that bear fruits (mango,rambutan’,papaya) except for durian trees HAHA

Favorite colour?black,light pink and red!

What do you always doodle (if you ever do doodle anything)? 

eyes? i have a lot of artistic friends and they draw really well so they taught me how to draw an eye, i mostly write hangul tho for practice rather than doodle

How do you make your coffee/tea? (if you don’t like those: What is your favorite hot drink?)

i lovEee tea. Iced tea, hot tea,herbal tea, i really love it all :DD but my fav iced tea would be iced peach tea and as for hot tea i’ve been drinking this rose with french vanilla tea (fAnCY HAHA) cause my previous fav which was peppermint and honey finished *cries*. the way i make it is pretty universal, just dump the teabag in the cup then pour hot water over it lmao im lazy. I like coffee like lattes!! ice lattes are nice and i really like instant packet coffee (am i the only one HAHA)

Favorite candle scent? Vanilla tbh ikea used to sell the cookie scented ones which were my fav but they stopped selling it so oh well 

Sunrise or sunset? sunset! im not a morning person lolol

What perfume do you wear (if you do)? 

meagan got for me the same perfume that cheol used apparently and its called peach blossom from w.dressroom!! i really really like it not cause of cheol but the fact that i really love the smell of peaches though i’ve never smelled them before artificial scents are good enough to convince me HAHA 

What’s your go to dance move when you’re alone?

 i usually headbang most of the time HAHA 

 Favorite quote? live in the moment but don’t regret your actions in the future

Favorite self care thing(s) or routine(s)?

mmm i think i take care of myself by cooking whatever i want to eat. im not the type of person who can starve for the whole day unless im sick. i like feeding myself well so i cook a lot of good food for myself but sadly now my kitchen has been undergoing reno for the past month so i havent gotten a chance to cook lately. also by spoiling myself with whatever i would like to buy AHAHA and if i ever feel sad i would tell myself that i can cry about it but only for a short while cause yknow i gotta move on in life. im a pretty optimistic person and try to look on the bright side or try to make it up lmao i cant stand seeing myself being so sad after whatever shits i’ve been through though its nothing serious 

12. Fuzzy socks or house slippers? bare feet HAHA

13. What colour are your eyes? brb gonna check.ok im back. its a realllly dark brown

14. What’s your favorite eye colour on others? whatever colour that suits them i guess. i dont really care lmao

15. Favorite season? Why?in a tropical country like malaysia we only have three seasons, one where its hot af and doesnt rain for like 6 days, two, where it rains every damn day and floods we could be part of the indian ocean, three, where its fucking hot in the morning and rains like no tmrrw in the evening istg if you’re visiting mlysia pls bring an umbrella with you at all times you never know when it’ll rain. i’ve only experienced winter and summer so far but i believe i’ll like spring a lot! its during my birth month and apparently its cold but quite warm as well? also spring clothing is so cute n i wanna try those special spring food!

16. Cheek, neck or nose kisses?

all i guess lmao i love physical affection

17. What does your happy place look like? a room which serves as a kitchen as well as my bedroom

18. Favorite breed of dog? GOLDEN RETRIEVERS,my neighbour has one and shes the sweetest little bub

19. Do you ever want to be married? If so what colours would you pick for your wedding theme?yep i would like to get married~~ ermm probs some warm yet light colours? rose gold would be nice!

20. Silk or lace? im fine with both 

21. Favorite weather? rainy with no thunder and warm cloudy days~

Tagging; im not sure if yall did this yet but oh well @djstarzx @vermemesol @lynnalai yall are all i have ;-; ily

[the-revisionist]

a good fixed star

LTiH, Caroline/Gillian. 

Prompts: “things you said under the stars and in the grass” and “things you said while we were driving.”

Notes: Chapter title quotes are from letters of Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, except for the last chapter, which is from Vita to Virginia. And the longer italicized quotes in text are from Virginia’s letters to Vita. Apologies for any errors of transcription or misattribution; a scholar I am not.

For my dear @farminglesbian, who suggested the prompts.

i. “The whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.” 

Gillian first saw Clash of the Titans with a group of friends at a movie theater in Manchester during the summer of 1981. She was 16 and stoned and—to the delight of her parents—finally growing out the purple streaks in her hair. The previous year—not to the delight of her parents—she’d had an abortion. She was, she thought, done with boys. For a while, anyway. So in spite of the heat she wore a motorcycle leather jacket over her Gang of Four t-shirt and hoped her profuse sweating would repel the idiot sitting next to her, a friend of a friend named Derek who wore a pink Lacoste shirt and whom she barely knew, and who kept trying to convince her to give him a hand job. While she did not appreciate this constant distraction from the smoldering beauty of Harry Hamlin and the troubling voluptuousness of Ursula Andress, eventually she gave in toward the end of the film because he was everyone’s ride home, including hers, and she knew otherwise there was no way she’d get back otherwise. At least he bought her fish and chips afterwards. 

Since then she’s seen this guilty pleasure of a movie so many times that it’s become a family joke; this morning Raff had texted Clash of T on telly 2day but u probs already know. So some 35 years later here she is, watching the same bloody film, ignoring that unsettling summery feeling somewhere between restlessness and lassitude, and thinking that her life is on repeat with only the most pathetic of variations—this time she’s alone, divorced, sprawled on the couch with her head hanging off the cushion so that she’s watching Lawrence Olivier upside down, and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear because it’s hot as hell outside and she hasn’t the faintest intention of really working today. The sheep are fed, watered, and sheltered; that’s all she cares about. A bottle of lager sweats on the table in front of her and creates a puddle that dams against the mobile, which rings at the crucial moment when Olivier famously intones, “Release the kraken.” 

Cursing and flailing, she reaches for the mobile and falls off the couch in the process. Eyes on the kraken, she swipes the damp edge of the phone against her t-shirt and answers with a grunted “Yeah,” assuming it’s Raff and he needs a babysitter because no one else really calls her unless some sort of favor is required. 

This is true even of Caroline, who messages her regularly and usually about Flora or work or some random bad date she’s had—I loathe women a recurring motif as of late and leave it to Caroline to casually drop the word loathe in a text—so Gillian bobbles the mobile when she actually hears Caroline purring, “Make yourself pretty for me.”

She laughs. In addition to the texting they actually see each other more now than in the past couple years and if Gillian actually trusted anyone other than Caroline for confession, she would swear that to her complete and utter consternation, the woman in question actually flirts with her now. She has a hundred reasons why this cannot be true, but two primary counterarguments suffice: (1) it’s delusional wishful thinking on her part and (2) Caroline doesn’t really mean it and is simply practicing flirting techniques on her—and not doing such a grand job if all her dates are shit, apparently. The situation, such as it is, percolates within her, giving rise to a fluttery feeling at best and, with cheap lager in the mix, outright nauseous terror at worst. Men are easy, women are complicated; this is normally her blanket excuse for why she had never seriously attempted a romantic relationship with a woman. In Gillian’s mind there is a Venn diagram comprised of two circles: one labeled flirting and the other women, and the convex sliver where they deliriously conjoin is marked oh fuck and this maddeningly curvy demimonde is where one Caroline McKenzie Hyphen Fucking Dawson currently resides in her jumbled brain.  

Gillian watches the kraken thrash around onscreen while Lawrence Olivier quietly contemplates a professional nadir. “What’re you on about? Don’t you have a thing today? Work conference?”

“Canceled!”  

“Oh. Why?”

“Outbreak of food poisoning!” Caroline says with unabashed glee. 

“Hurrah for salmonella.” 

“Actually it was staphylococcus. Had dinner with them all last night and everyone put mayonnaise on their chips, I noticed, except for me.”

“You’re like the Sherlock Holmes of bacteria.”  

“So I’m a free woman this afternoon. Let’s do something.”

“Do what? Too bloody hot to do anything.” 

“Which means you’re just sitting around in your underwear drinking beer and watching some shit movie.” 

“Do you have a spycam in my house?” Gillian takes a moment to glare suspiciously at her mobile. “Or are we Skyping by accident?”

  “I cannot tell you how impressed I am that you know what Skype is.”

“Twat.”  

“Come on. We’ll go for a drive somewhere. Didn’t you say you wanted to go to that weird bookstore—the one in the old church?” 

“Caz, that’s like on the other side of Leeds. One of those little villages where they’ve probably filmed a hundred episodes of Miss Marple.”

“So? We’ll make a day of it. Put on pants, I’m five minutes away.” She rings off. 

Gillian stares at the phone. Indeed, the kraken has been released. “Oh fuck.”

She runs upstairs. Her jeans are all in various stages of smelly, filthy, and unwearable, so she throws on a dress—subtly flowered and linen, the only dress she owns that has earned some kind of positive response from Caroline. Distinctly she remembers the time she wore it last summer: family dinner al fresco at the farm, Caroline’s smiling appraisal with head tilt and cool murmur of approval—you look nice—and the resultant blush fire blazing across her face. She could not remember the last time anyone made her cheeks burn like that. She pulls on battered Chuck Taylors, looks in the bedroom mirror and sees all these overlapping iterations of identity, an entire life visible in one weary reflection: punk wannabe, mother and grandmother, survivor, slag, widowed farmer, and, currently, middle-aged idiot smitten with her stepsister.  She groans “oh fuck” one more time and goes downstairs, finds a cooler and dumps some ice in it along with the only bottle of white in the fridge, and then strides outside just as the Jeep Cherokee pulls up to the house.  

Caroline rolls down the window. She wears aviator sunglasses that bring Mad Men’s Don Draper to Gillian’s mind and, no surprise, carries them off just as well as he did. While she may not be as successful with women as Don Draper, she is certainly garnering a lot of attention from the scant lesbian population in the area because lately she’s going out on dates with seemingly random and vaguely energetic young females every other week or so. Gillian knows this because she is always the one assisting with the dismal postmortem every time, nodding sympathetically as Caroline ticked off romantic defects:  She thinks “The Archers” are a boy band. She used the wrong fork for the entrée. She asked if I was interested in rock-climbing. She admitted she drinks wine out of cans. She said I reminded her of her aunt. 

To Gillian’s unbridled delight she once again gets the head tilt and the compliment: “You look nice,” Caroline says. She nods at the cooler. “What have we got here?”

“We’re having a fucking picnic,” Gillian says. She puts the cooler in the back seat and climbs into the Jeep.

“Fantastic. What did you pack?”

“Pinot grigio.” 

“And?”

“Ice.”

Caroline puts the Jeep into drive. “Hell of a picnic.” 

Before they even turn around, however, an argument ensues about the air conditioning: Caroline wants it on, Gillian wants it off. 

“What’s the point of having a summer drive if the windows aren’t open, if we aren’t feeling the breeze?” Gillian says. 

  Caroline looks at her uncomprehendingly. “My hair will get messed up.” 

“Oh, the vanity.”

“I’m not vain, I just don’t want to look like an escapee from the mental ward.” 

“No one’s going to see you, just me, and maybe a bunch of nerds at a bookstore. And you always look b-b—um, really good anyway.” Gillian folds her arms and glares straight ahead. “And it’s f-freezing in here,” she adds, even as another blush rampages across her face. “It’s not healthy, we’ll get summer colds and I can’t afford to get a cold because—”

“—you’re a farmer and you can’t afford to take off a single day because you’re hard-working salt-of-the-earth-blah-blah-blah—yes, I know, you’ve run that line on me before and yet here you are, abandoning your precious farm on the hottest day of the year.” 

Gillian pouts. 

“It’s the hottest day of the year,” Caroline repeats in the vain hope that reality will weigh in favor of reason and air conditioning.  

Gillian ratchets up the pout into a sulk. 

Caroline sighs and relents: The air conditioning is turned off, all windows glide down. “Right then. We’ll be smelling sheep shit until we hit the M62.”

ii. “But I do adore you—every part of you from heel to head.” 

Women belong to summer. Or so Caroline thinks. In this season of bounty her heightened senses take note of women to delirious distraction: curling hands and lips, swirling dresses around bare legs, swaying hips, swelling cleavage, all of it—sweat and fading perfume commingle sweet as honeysuckle, throaty laughs, rich, wine-soaked voices. She has always attributed her frustratingly inexplicable attraction to Gillian to this summer madness—especially in that fucking dress, oh God—but the fact remains that she has desired this sullen, stubborn sheep farmer clad in any variation of plaid shirts, torn jeans, grotty jumpers, mechanic overalls, and even Elmer Fudd-esque winter caps, all of which render her desperate self-diagnosis null and void. 

On the motorway they’ve gathered speed, creating a roaring hot-air wind tunnel within the Jeep’s interior. When Caroline looks in the rear-view mirror all she sees is the Medusan rage of her hair and barely restrains herself from melodramatic groaning. 

Gillian leans out the window, almost dangerously so—half-perched off the seat, gripping the doorframe, and screaming woo-hoo into the void of the surprisingly sparse M62 traffic. Even as she takes quiet joy at the sight of Gillian—hair wild, squinting into the sun, wind plastering the summer dress against her strong thighs—this hanging out the window like a demented Labrador makes her nervous and she shouts,  “For Christ’s sake, sit down.”

To her surprise Gillian plops into the seat with uncharacteristic obedience, even putting on the seat belt. She looks at Caroline, hair streaked across her tanned face, laughing, and Caroline thinks I will remember you like this always. 

“Sorry,” Gillian hollers into the din. 

“I just don’t want to scrape you off the road.” 

“It’d put a damper on everything, wouldn’t it?”  Still smiling, Gillian leans back and closes her eyes for a moment while pushing hair out of her face. A tendril remains curled along her cheek and across her lips, a bit of ornamentation run amok outside its prescribed patterns. Caroline notices her stereotypical farmer’s tan—bronzed arms, face, and neck in contrast to bare white legs, upper bicep delineating the pale and the tan courtesy of dozens of t-shirts. The edge of her dress flutters tantalizingly around her thighs and Caroline forces herself to look at the road. Her relationship with Gillian has always possessed an inevitability about it—a fantastic, fatalistic entanglement courtesy of their star-crossed parents—but she has never loved anyone or anything so wildly unpredictable as this woman who now sits next to her in so deceivingly still and innocuous a manner that Caroline’s naturally suspicious mind expects that her next move will be to climb onto the roof of the Jeep and start singing “Sempre libera” from La Traviata in homage to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Except that she knows Gillian loves the movie, but hates opera. Nonetheless Caroline’s feelings remain a source of trouble, so much so that not only has she mindlessly thrown herself into dating and then ridiculously rejecting out of hand any woman who shows the least bit of interest in her, but also that at the present moment she misses the correct turnoff from the M62 and they end up meandering around the outskirts of Leeds in search of the tiny Miss Marple-ish village for a good half hour despite the continual hectoring of both the GPS and Gillian. 

“How could you miss the bloody turnoff?” Gillian grumbles again as they pass a sign that says WARNING: OWL SANCTUARY, LOW-FLYING OWLS for the third time. 

Wisely—just like an owl, yep, that’s me, Caroline thinks, who are you kidding, you pathetic numpty?—Caroline declines the option of admitting the truth, which is that she was so distracted by the continuous sensual writhe of the dress around Gillian’s thighs that she would drive around for hours just to witness the play of shadow, sun, and linen upon her skin and imagine how satisfying it would be to remove that dress and— 

“Maybe we should visit the owl sanctuary,” Caroline manages to suggest after loudly clearing her throat. 

Slouching and petulant, Gillian folds her arms. “If they give me sanctuary from your fucking driving, I’m all for it.”

iii. “I try to invent you for myself”

Finally they discover the bookstore—in its former incarnation known as St. Botolph’s, a modest, squat, moss-covered stone church—in a village with a blink-and-you-miss-it name: Marston Something, Offnor, Colward, Fuckward, who knows. So Gillian takes it upon herself to dub the unknown hamlet Owlshitshire: “Say it fast three times,” she dares Caroline. While Caroline parks across the road from bookstore-church and fusses with her hair, Gillian stares at the building with newfound apprehension. “You think we’ll spontaneously combust, entering a church together? The lesbian and the slapper?” 

Caroline adjusts—but does not remove—her sunglasses. “As if the joint force of our sins will merit our ruin? It’s deconsecrated, isn’t it?” 

“Reckon so. I’m just worried this will end up like The Omen.” 

Caroline sighs. “Everything is a bloody movie with you.” 

“Thought that was one of the things you—liked about me.” “There are,” Caroline replies slowly, “many things I—like about you.” With the Jeep at a sweltering standstill, sweat sprouts upon Gillian’s upper lip and falls in a tingling wave along the edge of her scalp. The white noise of her heart becomes clearer as Caroline leans in toward her—one more hundredth of a millimeter, one more sliver of a hairsbreadth and I swear to Christ or whatever pagan deity hanging about that I will kiss you, sweaty lips and all— Inscrutable as an Italian film star from behind those bloody sunglasses, Caroline grins as she hits the button releasing the seat belt, which slithers off her body in perhaps the dorkiest strip tease known to humankind but that, unsurprisingly, still leaves Gillian breathlessly and idiotically aroused. “Alas, my dear, that is not one of them.” The bookstore is second-hand—damp and disorganized, marinating in the sweet reek of old paper, wood polish, and pastoral, Anglican ideals long past. As she happily waltzes through the chaos, Gillian’s eager fingers tap random piles of books as if she is a pianist lazily running through scales and contemplating a piece for performance. Then her hand hovers above a heart-stopping find: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.  Before picking it up, however, she glances around with a stiff furtiveness that would be screamingly obvious to anyone witnessing her blatant, nervous interest in the love letters between two women. But there is no one in the store except an elderly couple and the proprietor behind the cash register, who is chatting up Caroline. Apparently he has discovered that she is a headteacher and is going on at length about the ruin of the education system thanks to political correctness and multiculturalism. Briefly Gillian considers swooping in for a rescue, but she knows damn well that Caroline can decimate this type of bloviate without working up a sweat; indeed, she leans in and murmurs something to him that shuts him up right quick. So Gillian turns her attention to Virginia and Vita, her thumb ruffling musty tea-colored pages while fearful of the dive into words that she suspects will only grant more clarity and substance to the inchoate feelings within her.   I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about—with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second. It’s like standing in church when the bell tower rings and the vibrato rattles your bones and stiffens your spine with a clarifying chill. And I’m in church right now, Gillian thinks, kind of appropriate, I reckon—then Caroline is beside her, so close that her breast brushes against Gillian’s upper arm. Her pale skin is flush with warmth, her fancy sunglasses glint on her head like a hipster crown and she smells good, like sun and sweat and grass and Gillian doesn’t know how she does that, she hasn’t been anywhere near grass unless she rolled around in a field before showing up at the farm, and Gillian’s senses riot and the beautiful words she just read tumble out of her head, the glue of their cohesion melts away. “What’re you looking at?” Caroline asks casually.    “Oh—um.” She tilts her head to look at the cover and Gillian stares at the shade of her jawline, the golden down along her cheek, and the strong lines of her throat because it seems the safer to look at these things rather than the freckled pointillism on her chest leading one astray into cleavage—though I walk through the valley of cleavage, I shall fear no evil, for the thought of wine in the cooler comforts me—or even the bracing blue of her eyes, those dangerous lodestones that, for some unfathomable reason, have always drawn out the deepest measure of truth from Gillian. 

“Interesting.” Caroline nods at the cover. “Do you like her writing? Woolf, I mean?” “What I’ve read, yeah. I mean, I’ve not read much. Just a couple novels,” Gillian mumbles. “They kind of made me aware—” Now Caroline touches her elbow and she devolves further into a stammering, sweating mess. “—of, um, the interior life? Interior lives? How they could, er, work. How the mind kind of works some-sometimes.” She looks around frantically—why is it so bloody hot in here? “Sound like an idiot.”  

“Not at all. Have to admit I haven’t read much of her writing. You can blame John for that. Every time he wanted to prove he was a feminist he would quote from A Room of One’s Own.”    Gillian laughs, and looks down at her ragged old Chuck Taylors. “That would do it. I—I’m sorry he ruined her for you.” “Should probably give her another go, what do you think?” “Yeah.” Gillian gnaws at her lip. On one hand, she wants to sit around and talk about Virginia Woolf and books and everything under the stars and sun with Caroline but on the other hand, she wants to be alone with the book and let it continue speaking to her like an eloquent oracle sans riddles. The latter might be best because right now words for her are scarcer than crow’s teeth. Usually she can turn on the tap and let language run rampant, not give a toss what she was saying to anyone about anything. More often than not, this got her in a fair amount of trouble; this time, she wants to find the right words that will lead into the right kind of trouble. Caroline’s fingers tap playfully against her forearm and Gillian glances at this invisible tattoo, patiently waiting for some intricate design inked in a riotous rainbow to blossom on her skin. “Tell you what—I’m going to dash out and find us proper sustenance for a picnic.” Gillian busts out a nervous, relieved smile. “You bored already?” “Not in the least.” When Caroline replies to her stroppiness with a certain kind of lovely seriousness it always prompts in her innate, immediate trust. Then, predictably, Caroline goes off and sounds the schoolteacher and mum that she is: “But it’s probably not wise for us to consume nothing but a bottle of cheap white wine on a day like this.” Why not? Gillian wants to say, but no—this is not a time when she wants wine rendering her into sloppy foolishness. “Right.” “Be back before you know it.” As she walks away, Gillian experiences such a ridiculous tightening in her throat, her chest, a physical manifestation of an irrational sense of abandonment—even though she knows Caroline is not some stupid toff boy with a fancy car who would leave her stranded in a big city or even, like here, the middle of nowhere—that she cannot prevent herself from blurting out Caroline’s name, even though she stops herself from bleating pathetically, you’re coming back, right?   Caroline stops and turns around expectantly. The precise spin of her heels, the way she pitches forward as if she’s a dandyesque soldier determined to enter a fray she’s entirely unprepared for—the cumulative effect of her movement assuages Gillian, is more than a guarantee of her return. Relieved, Gillian smiles. “I may be cheap,” she says, “but the wine’s not.” Caroline laughs at the easy joke and Gillian then permits herself the lusty luxury of watching her walk away. Alone, she tucks herself into a dusty corner of the bookstore on a faded burgundy settee with the Virginia and Vita book in her greedy hands; when she looks up again the sun slants suspiciously low through a high stain-glass window and casts jeweled baubles on the wall near an aged reproduction of a George Lambert landscape. The bookstore is empty, silent. Cursing herself for entering some kind of literary fugue state, she drops the book on the settee and commences working her way to the front of the church-store, dipping and swaying around so many claustrophobia-inducing shelves and tables and piles of books with such careful, sweaty precision she feels as if she’s performing an elaborate renaissance court dance. At the front of the store sits the bookstore proprietor in all his balding, cranky glory. He squints at her and ruffles the pages of his newspaper, perhaps hoping its scant breeze will somehow propel her away on a powder-puff of air. She stares at the old, heavy doors barring her way and is strangely bereft.    I suppose it is good for the soul to be hurt and perplexed perpetually. I know at least that I miss you damnably: that is a good fixed star. Amused, the owner watches her frowning at the door and then drawls sarcastically, “Oh, don’t worry, love. I’m sure your wife will come back for you.” Gillian laughs. Of course, Caroline must’ve told this tosser they were married when he was bothering her earlier. After the divorce from Robbie came through earlier this year, she firmly declaimed to no one but herself that she was done with marriage; being Caroline’s imaginary wife for a day is, however, a union more satisfactory than reality has ever granted her. “Yeah. Damn right she will,” she says. “Know why?” He shakes his head. She leans heavily against the cash register. “ ’Cause I’ve got the only keys to the sex dungeon in our flat.”

iv. “It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.”

The rush of sunset brings cooler air through the Jeep, which runs parallel to some tributary of the River Aire. Venus glints in a layer of darkening sky above a thinning band of vermillion while Gillian sits with an open bag of brandy snaps in her lap. She’s already eaten half the bag despite Caroline’s admonishments not to spoil her appetite. The weakening sun jabs through the green interlace of tree branches and in those brief outbursts fills her eyes with light. Somewhere along the river they find the right spot, kick off their shoes, and sit on an old blanket retrieved from the boot of the Jeep. They drink cool wine from a bottle blistered with damp and eat bread, cheese, and berries, and Gillian’s tongue loosens enough so that she talks haltingly about To the Lighthouse and of time passing, then she stops abruptly when the wind flutters the hair along Caroline’s serious brow—she listens so intently, Gillian notices, and it’s unnerving—and Caroline’s eyes resonate as a cynosure in the deep blue evening. In that moment everything stirs wild within her and she cannot keep still because she fears what she’ll say next. Barefoot, she walks through the grass to the river, the alternate swish and crunch of grass wet and stiff underneath her gait give way slowly to soft dirt and pebbles that press into the pads and arches of her feet as if pearls desperate to remain embedded in soft sanctuary. All while Caroline yells at her about the dangers of ticks and other hazards such as snails, broken glass, and used condoms. At the edge, she stops. In darker times now past, she thought of drowning herself. Like Virginia Woolf, except without the eloquent note or a death notice in the papers. She doubted anyone would really miss her. Even Raff. Still, she could not, would not, do that to him. Bad enough the millstone of his father’s death hung around his neck; to have both parents labeled as suicides—regardless of the truth—would be too much to bear. She likes to imagine that if she had drowned herself back then, her body would have found its way to the freedom of a sea—silly, she thinks, but largely due to a proverb that always stuck in her mind: The sea refuses no river. She always liked that one. Many of the proverbs and verses she heard in church as a child seemed focused on judgment, control, condemnation, behaving in a certain way. But in the embrace of the land and the water, well, you belong to it—and not the other way around. Its silence carries no censure. Dusk drizzles over thickening clouds and she tastes the heavy humid air. A smattering of stars now attend Venus. The river has led her to this moment—not to drown, but to declare herself. She turns around and glances quickly at Caroline, who is on the old blanket in an elegant sprawl, legs crossed at the ankles, calm demeanor belied by the continual flexing of her calves. “It’s beautiful here,” she says. “You’re beautiful,” Caroline replies. Uneasy, Gillian laughs. She’s been called a lot of things over the years, but beautiful has never been one of them and she’s old enough now that she mistrusts any easy compliment—even from the likes of the unimpeachably honest, unrelentingly forthright Caroline—and she is not to be won over that easily. Or so she thinks.   “Well now. Your game’s gotten strong—all those girls you’ve gone out with lately, eh?” “I’m not interested in games. Or those girls, really.” Caroline sits, draws up her knees, and adds softly: “You must know that.” “Do I? All I know is, here we are, picnic on the river, you saying nice things—” “How dare you,” Caroline says with mock indignation, “I’ve said only one nice thing to you thus far.” “—a woman could get the wrong idea.” “Or the right one, as the case may be.” Gillian frowns, bites her lip. Even in the face of blatant confirmation, her nerve falters spectacularly. Because nothing and no one has mattered so much to her in such a long time, she cannot remember. “Gillian.” “W-what?” “Tell me all the things you have in your head, that won’t ‘stir by day, only by dark on the river.’” The words ring clear and true. She sees them in her mind once again, feels the soft, foxed page at her fingertips. 

Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads—They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come. Caroline pulls the book out of her purse. Of course, she bought it. When earlier she had triumphantly returned from her shopping excursion to the bookstore, she thrust a bag of brandy snaps at Gillian, ordered her to wait outside by the Jeep, and demanded use of the WC from the bookstore owner, who stammered consent in the face of this wild, dungeon-owning lesbian deviant schoolteacher. And here Gillian thought it had taken her so long inside the store because she was doing number two. The grass murmurs protest under Gillian’s feet and she winces when something sharps bites into the ball of her right foot, so as she stands there in front of Caroline she may be bleeding, her foot may become infected and she’ll get gangrene and end up spending the rest of her days gimping around as Yorkshire’s One and Only Peg-Legged Sheep Farmer, but none of that matters now because she can hardly get past stating the obvious. “You bought the book,” she says to Caroline. “Yep.” “You know that—that quote.” “Yep.” As words continue to fail her in a way they never quite did for Virginia Woolf, she kneels upon the blanket, cradles Caroline’s face in her hands, and lays on the kissing equivalent of a Woolf sentence: long, glitteringly complex, sustained and full and magnificent and, in its aftermath, leaving one breathless and lingering sweetly over every fine detail, every bright facet. Everything rushes by in splendid sensate tandem: the light that fades and glows all the same, the whishing of the river, the wine limning her mouth, the corner of the book digging into her knee, her thumb caressing Caroline’s cheek, the star of Venus blessing the entire enterprise.

“God.” Caroline finally manages speaking. “If I’d known you’re going to kiss me like that over one old book, I would have bought out the entire bloody store.” It is nearly dark, it will rain very soon, and Gillian is quite certain that her bare, dirty foot is bleeding. “Don’t need a book for that. In fact, you should know—I’ll kiss you like that anywhere, any time you want, for as long as you want, every day for the rest of your life.” “Go on then,” Caroline says.

[smoothshift]

My Honda is sick :-( via /r/cars

My Honda is sick :-(

I am gutted.

For those of you in the Northeast currently boarding up your windows and buying out all of the stock of bottled water from the local Costco in preparation of the terrible weather about to trounce across the north east, dumping literal feet of snow all over the salt belt, I have already been negatively effected by it, and it was caused by a little bit of drizzle.

This morning I got a phone call at 4:30, my girlfriend had left about 8 minutes prior to go to work. I hadn't fallen back asleep yet since she is about as graceful as a bull in a China shop. But I knew something had happened, if she forgets something I need to be aware of its usually just a text message, a call means business.

"I hit something," she says.

"what kind of thing?" I slowly mumble out,

"a curb." She exclaims

"Is the steering wheel tiled all funny now?" I reply,

"yes, its driving really funny." she counters.

"come home, don't drive it to work."

She ends up taking the day off, and after almost breaking my pelvis walking from my driveway to my detached garage, I can see why she hit something, the roads were covered in a sheet of ice because of last night's drizzle.

The morning light revealed the carnage. The body of the car looks undamaged, but the wheel was shifted backwards and had the worst curb rash I had ever seen (my poor diamond cut wheels) and had massive positive camber, and was pointing a completely different direction than the passenger side. The lights wheezed into life with a familiar florescent hum in my garage accompanied by the whirring of the electric blower as the gas furnace belched out warm air. I jacked up the drivers side of the car, put my trusty jack stand underneath and zipped off the lug nuts with my Earthquake impact wrench.

The control arm was nearly sheered in half at the rear, the sway bar link was bent, and the strut didn't seem to sit in place correctly any longer. By, what I thought, was some miracle I had every one of these parts sitting in stock in my garage, two brand new Monroe quick struts in box, and a used control arm with usable bushings. Since she needs the car I had no time to order or find replacement parts all around the city, so I tossed in the old control arm, replaced the sway bar link with a brand new MOOG unit from my auto parts store a block down the street, zipped the wheel back on and replaced the passenger strut too since they should be done in pairs.

The wheel still looked... wrong. It was more centered but I still was getting some positive camber, given that the alignment was knocked out of place, I assumed that would get cleared up once the wheels were both pointing the same direction.

Or so I thought.

A quick run up to my local tire shop, I have a year long program with them to get my car aligned for free whenever needed, living in Michigan this is worth every penny. About 30 minutes go by and they tell me the car is 4 degrees out of toe, and no adjustment setting on the steering rack was going to fix that. Their best guess was the knuckle got tweaked too when the car had its... affair... with the curb, as there was no other visible damage like shifted steering racks, bent tie rods, or really any other parts that control the suspension geometry.

Car-part.com to the rescue! The Honda dealer quoted me $500 for a new steering knuckle, eBay wanted $250 for a used one, and I would have to wait a week to get it, and places like AutoZone don't stock them. Car-part.com scoured every near by auto salvage yard, and found a compatible part 8 miles away from my house. A quick phone call and now I have them pulling my replacement used steering knuckle for a total of $45, fingers crossed the wheel bearing isn't shot in it, normally I would just replace it but I am really on a limited time frame. I removed the old knuckle and there doesn't appear to be any visible signs of damage, but 2-4 degrees of toe wouldn't really be visible. At that point though, we would be talking steering rack or subframe replacements (which again, I think would have visible damage). But I am afraid that this poor little Honda may need more than just this knuckle, and I really hope only for the best. More details will emerge later this afternoon after the salvage yard calls me back.

TL;DR - Curb, meet Honda. Honda, meet curb. NOW KISS!

[junker-town]

'The Bachelor' episode 10 recap: Raven ostensibly has an orgasm, Rachel finally goes home, the women tell all

We are one episode away from finding out who Nick’s true love is.

‘Sup, Sports Bachelor Nation. If you’re anything like me, you’re firmly planted on your couch surrounded by pieces of kettle corn that didn’t make it to your mouth as you wait for this endless episode to begin. Not only do we have the rest of the Fantasy Suite dates to make it through tonight, we also have to stay alive for “The Women Tell All,” which is when all the scorned lovers of this season assemble on a stage, laugh at Chris “White Strips” Harrison’s charming jokes, and verbally berate each other and Nick “Handsome Software Salesman” Viall.

So I won’t waste any more of your precious time than I need to. Let’s get down and dirty.

THE REST OF RAVEN’S FANTASY SUITE DATE, ALSO KNOWN AS “THE ONE WHERE WE FIND OUT WHETHER RAVEN FINALLY HAD AN ORGASM OR NOT”

At the end of last episode, Raven dropped a bomb on the American people when she revealed the GOP’s new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Hah, kidding, she just told us she had never had an orgasm. She also told Nick this.

Now, I’m not a man, but I can imagine that if you are a man, and a woman you’re about to have sex with tells you she’s never climaxed before, you might feel, oh, I don’t know, an insane amount of pressure to deliver. Men should, of course, feel that pressure all the time, but The Patriarchy is a hell of a drug, so they often don’t.

I had this theory for a while that Nick was really bad at sex because he kept getting dumped right after he “had intercourse” (to quote Corinne) with women on The Bachelorette. But I may be wrong, because if Raven is telling the truth, she appears to have finally had an orgasm thanks to Nick. At least that’s what I’m guessing the montage of her running through the streets of Inissdlggaardddslgaaaad, Finland, is supposed to represent.

"Nick is really good at what he does, so I'm pretty satisfied today." - Raven#TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/4q0emrB4IB

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) March 7, 2017

I could write a thousand words on this montage alone, because I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest moment in television history: Raven skips in front of a rainbow wall, makes snow angels, high-fives strangers on the street, pats a Finnish dog, and kisses a stuffed reindeer on the nose.

This is also highly relatable content, because every woman I know runs through the streets grinning after she has great sex with a man wearing a very thick turtleneck.

RACHEL’S FANTASY SUITE DATE

Rachel’s date with Nick is honestly pretty boring. There’s some yadda yadda yadda-ing about whether she’s been open enough with Nick. It all feels very forced.

Which leads me to my conspiracy theory: I think Rachel and Nick knew, at this point, that Rachel was going to be the next Bachelorette. They seem very familiar with each other, and like they genuinely care about each other, but they don’t seem ... like they can’t keep their hands off each other. There’s something that feels a little manufactured about their interaction, and I wonder whether they didn’t, like, strike a deal by this point. Or have some brilliant producer strike it for them.

"It is so magical and beautiful out here. It's like being in Narnia!" - Rachel ❄️ #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/9prrw5DXCR

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) March 7, 2017

Nick makes fun of Rachel for “losing her mind” after the volleyball date, and I can’t remember that at all, because this show is a marathon, not a sprint, and the miles have all started to run together. But I don’t *think* Rachel lost her mind, so I’m a little bit peeved at Nick for telling a woman she was being crazy for having emotions.

Rachel then says something like, “You’re refreshing,” or “You’re not like other guys,” and Nick delivers the worst line of the night:

“I might be white, but I’m still a minority.”

Winky face.

Ugh.

SEXY TIME WITH RACHEL

Nick gives Rachel the envelope with the Sexy Time key in it. The Sexy Time key opens the door to the Fantasy Suite, which is just a hotel room filled with candles and roses in which the two parties in question can finally bang. Each Bachelor is allowed to bang the three final contestants.

Now is a good time to tell you that I moved to Brooklyn from Washington D.C. over the weekend (this anecdote doesn’t have to do with Sexy Time, don’t worry). I found this great apartment with these two very nice people who for some reason agreed to let me live with them, despite the bad jokes I tell, and the fact that I eat the cookie dough pieces out of cookie dough ice cream and then put the pint back in the fridge.

I’m telling you this because one of my new roommates has never seen The Bachelor before, but he’s watching it with me after I explained to him that viewing this show is actually my job. When Nick hands Rachel the Sexy Time key, my roommate goes, “Wait, so, does every one get the Fantasy Suite key?”

“Yeah, if Nick decides he wants to give it to them,” I say.

“So he’s literally offering them the key ... which is his penis,” says my roommate.

“Yeah,” I say.

“For the first time I can say I’m not in my head any more. I’m all in my heart. I feel good. I feel confident. I feel loved.” –Rachel http://pic.twitter.com/klJakSP5Ix

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) March 7, 2017

NICK DEFINITELY HAS A NAME FOR HIS PENIS

This is not a segment of the show, it’s just a belief I hold and feel like should be written in bold and all caps.

THE MORNING AFTER WITH RACHEL

Rachel and Nick do the deed, ostensibly, and wake up in the morning, as couples who’ve just had sex are wont to do. Nick makes Rachel breakfast, and she’s wearing a fleece onesie with penguins on it that was definitely chosen so that people would tweet about it. So I tweet about it.

VANESSA AND NICK AND THE ICE BATH OF DEATH

Vanessa’s hometown date was basically a disaster. Her family decided they low-key hate Nick (my words, not theirs, but that was the vibe). For his Sexy Time date with Vanessa, Nick takes her to a Finnish spa where they don matching blue bathing suits and jump in and out of a very cold pool and then go into a very hot steam room.

Listen, as someone who grew up in New England jumping into super cold water in the winter just for the hell of it, I just want to go on record saying that they’re babies for not dunking their heads.

A winter Finland ice bath actually seems like the worst thing. @BachelorABC #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/PhlrFvx7OI

— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 7, 2017

Things then get heavy, which is par for the course for Vanessa and Nick. Vanessa is like, “Hey man, there are some things I’m not willing to compromise on.” And Nick is like, “Like what?” And Vanessa is basically like, “My family.” And Nick tells her that one of his first serious girlfriend’s families was way too involved in their relationship, so he’s spooked by that, and that Vanessa’s family seems too traditional. Which he eventually boils down to his feeling that having to go to lunch at her mom’s house every Sunday would be a real burden.

And I’m like — listen, dude. When I lived near my family, I’d have dinner every Sunday with my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins. We had a blast. If some guy had been like, “It’s too much that you have dinner with your family once a week, I’m out,” I’d have been like, “Yes, you are out, and please never come back, because you’re actually kind of a controlling dick.”

Now, I understand that Vanessa has seemed especially close to her family, and they did kind of hate Nick, and she does seem reluctant to move away from Canada. So the fact that he’s a little concerned about how her attachment would affect them as a couple is somewhat valid. But Nick doesn’t really seem to be considering Vanessa at all here, especially when he says he is a “proud American” and therefore doesn’t want to move to Canada.

This is funny, because I know a lot of Americans right now who would give their left foot for Canadian citizenship. But maybe Nick is just waiting for America to be great again. Maybe he really wants to see how that whole plan pans out.

“This is a pretty awful date,” says my roommate, and I agree.

SEXY TIME WITH VANESSA

The evening date is so dumb, because they’re hanging out in this dope yurt in the Arctic Circle under the northern lights, but all they can do is spew word salad about their feelings at each other. This is what their conversation sounds like:

Vanessa tells Nick she loves him and then they retire to another yurt to bang.

ROSE CEREMONY

I guess we’re just cutting right to the chase, because we’re at the rose ceremony now. The women are wearing stunning dresses and we all know Rachel is going home — even though she is definitely the coolest one in the lineup — because she has to be the next Bachelorette.

Chris Harrison shows up for his requisite 27 seconds of screen time.

“It’s gonna be a difficult day,” he says to Nick.

“Not easy,” says Nick.

“You ready?” Chris Harrison asks.

“Yeah,” Nick says.

I want Chris Harrison’s job.

GETTING RID OF RACHEL

Nick is crying a lot as he gives Rachel the boot.

“I thought we had a really, really good thing,” she says, and while she’s sad, she’s not angry enough to convince me that I’m wrong about there being some sneaky deal to make her the next Bachelorette.

Especially since Nick doesn’t give any good reason for getting rid of her. And, no offense to Raven and Vanessa, I just can’t see a world in which you get rid of Rachel, the smart, funny, kind, gorgeous lawyer, over either of the remaining two women.

She’s crying in the limo, but I’m still skeptical.

THE WOMEN TELL ALL

So somehow we have two hours of the women telling all, and only one hour of the actual show. I’d be super pissed about this had my new roommate not just brought down bowls of ice cream.

My other roommate comes home and watches for a few minutes before wisely going into his room and closing the door.

THIS TOTALLY BLOWS

I’m not going to take you through everything that the women tell because, frankly, it’s the most painful thing I’ve watched since I saw Falcons fans crying after the Super Bowl at NRG Stadium in Houston.

Seriously. It’s just a bunch of women screaming at each other, interspersed with pseudo-inspirational moments when they say shit like, “You are judged by who you are, not by what you do.” I’m like, listen, my friends, if that were true, all the kind-hearted murderers in the world would be free and every cheating spouse would still be happily married.

This segment is somewhat triggering for me, because I went to an all-girls prep school for a few years. I made some of my best friends in the world there, but let me tell you: You don’t know true cruelty until you’ve witnessed females in seventh grade gang up on one another and take certain people’s sides to gain social capital. That’s a lot like what this feels like.

"So, no, I don't apologize... sorry." - Corinne @BachelorABC #TheBachelor #WomenTellAll http://pic.twitter.com/KjqWCuojJK

— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 7, 2017

My IQ is plummeting as I listen to Corinne and Taylor yell at each other about who took more naps. I like Corinne less and less as she talks. She says that she calls Raquel her “nanny” because “cleaning lady” belittles what Raquel actually is to Corinne, which is more of a second mother.

And I’m like ... I’m not sure nanny is actually that much more respectful? I don’t know, I already felt gross about how they made Raquel — who is a real, living, breathing human — into a punchline on this television show, and this just reinforces that feeling.

Liz then says, kind of apropos of nothing, “As women, we should be building each other up, not tearing each other down.” It reminds me of when Taylor Swift told Nicki Minaj that it wasn’t like her to “pit women against each other.” It’s just a bullshit way for one woman to get out of dealing with something real and critical another woman says about her. I’m here for women, I will ride for women, but I’m not going to support a woman I disagree with just because she’s also a woman. That’s not feminism, that’s stupidity.

#TheBachelorette and #TheBachelor! http://pic.twitter.com/hz1DknnrIp

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) March 7, 2017

Then they show a bunch of bloopers, which are better than the actual show and make me wonder why they don't just make the whole show the bloopers. It would be way funnier.

Anyway, see you guys next week for the final episode. I’m really sad, but also really ready for America to get over Nick so we can move on to Rachel.