#ive been watching it since someone wrote about it in this. like. anonymous reading of papers. in class last week

[questionable-doctor]

i'm crazy,,,

[your-phantomfield]

NOEL = VERMILLION

I .. II .. III circa 2198 for @nkn0va

Dating Noel Vermillion...

I.

Noel has been a romantic all of her life- at least, all of it that she can remember.  Her poetry books are filled with references to the butterflies of gentle hand-holding, the warmth of a long walk or a sunset watched together, the feeling of finding a lost part of yourself in way your soulmate says your name.

This sappy, lovestruck side of herself is something she’s a little afraid to show you right away- afraid you’ll laugh at her, afraid it'll gross you out or scare you away.  But it’s so integral to who she is, it will color your relationship from day one.

You’ll catch her looking at you all the time with this expression of absolute awe.  It's one of the rare times she doesn't even look nervous!

Until she realizes you’ve caught her doing it.  Then she absolutely panics, stuttering in her rush to apologize or think of an excuse.

II.

She gets lost in thought, admiring the shape of your hands as you work with something or the melody of your voice and how it's always so comforting to her.

What draws her in most are your eyes. It’s probably one of the most obvious ways you can tell she’s falling for you. Noel struggles with eye contact in general, and early on she does try to avoid your gaze just as much as anyone else- but when you do make eye contact, she’s mesmerized. She can’t look away. Noel is someone who believes you can tell a lot about someone from their eyes, and yours draw her in like nothing else.

Once the two of you are at a comfortable point in your relationship, she tends to hold eye contact with you a lot. She smiles, clearly happy to see you- sometimes giggling a bit- and then eases into this warm, loving expression as she forgets whatever you were talking about and takes a moment to just soak it all in. Her feelings for you. The feelings your presence gives her.

It’s a sanctuary for her. Your name itself is a synonym for peace.

Which is probably a theme of one of the hundreds of poems she’s written about you.

III.

Noel has been writing poetry about you since she first started falling for you.  If you ever found out about the tens of dozens of poems she wrote for you before you even started dating, she’d probably drop dead on the spot.

After you started dating (and after another dozen poems gobbled up her notebook) she bought a special notebook specifically for writing about you and your relationship.  She probably splurged for fancy tinted paper, with a cute pattern and a color that reminds her of you.  It’s carefully organized, neatly decorated with stickers and some small doodles.  It would be a really cute anniversary gift for her to give you one day, but just like before, she’d never have the heart to actually let you see it.

There are a few things she writes that she does share with you, though. On rare, incredibly rare, occasion, like a special birthday or your first anniversary, she may decide to give you a poem.

She pours her heart and soul into draft after draft, looking over each one to make sure it’s absolutely perfect… then collapses into tears at the thought of you actually reading it. Back to the drawing board.

IV.

She just can’t force herself to give you her work, no matter how hard she tries. The compromise she makes with herself is to send it to you anonymously. She doesn’t sign it, but the way it shows up on your door, windowsill, or desk on the day of your anniversary gives you a pretty big hint that it’s from her.

It appears alongside pressed flowers from her hometown, smelling of a perfume you might be able to recognize that she’s worn on a few of your dates when she really wanted to impress you.

Noel of course adamantly denies any involvement. She insists that she’s never ever ever ever seen that handwriting before, and that it couldn’t POSSIBLY be from her because her anniversary gift to you is this wonderful picnic she made for you!  So she’d never send you a letter!  L-l-let alone a l-lo-love p-p- ohhh, just stop asking!  Just drop it!!!  Please!

V.

You’re pretty familiar with her handwriting when you’re dating her. She may be scared to death at the thought of you seeing her poetry, but she writes letters to you often. This is partially brought on by her romantic nature and her love of all things literary.

You could be living in the same apartment together and she’d still leave you a letter every other week, left on your pillow or in your lunch bag or in the pocket of your coat. It’s something she likes to do when you’ve had a bad day or if you won’t be getting home at the same time.

VI.

Her personal preferences aren’t the only reason she ends up writing you so much, though. Chances are the two of you aren’t living together. At this point in her life, her work has to be her number one priority.

She’s a member of the NOL, an elite member of their fighting force no less, and serving directly under the Major Kisaragi. The intensity of her job and the ruthlessness of her superior(s) mean she isn’t exactly swimming in free time. She’s too afraid to even try to ask Jin for days off, positive he would shatter her hopes and somehow find a way to punish you, too, whether or not you’re in the NOL yourself.

If you manage to find yourself serving as a member of the 4th Thaurmaturgist Squadron alongside her, you'll be able to spend more time together. She'd likely end up your commanding officer, considering her rank and her time in the academy at Torifune, but she's a lenient commander in general and there's no way she could be strict with you.

VII.

More likely, though, is that Noel and you will not be serving in the same unit, even if you are a member of the NOL. If you're able to live in the same Hierarchical city, she'll make time for you on all her days off, and maybe you'd have a chance to move in together.

Though her work still drags her away sometimes. This is what leads her to write you so much. She could call you- and she does- but her favorite way to stay in touch with you will always be a heartfelt letter. She tends to get nervous on the phone.

Though somehow that's rarely a problem when talking to you… Actually, she finds herself unable to stop talking when the two of you are on the phone! She'll sit down to call you while she's having dinner and planning to get ready for bed soon, and if you don't keep a careful eye on the clock and stop her, it'll be one in the morning and she'll be falling asleep on call. It's pretty cute, but she really does need to be up in morning, and she has a hard enough time getting out of bed as is!

VIII.

Just how much she has to prioritize her work over you is a huge source of guilt for her. It almost crushes her some days.

Maybe one day, she’ll have the courage to tell you why- about the situation her parents are in, about her adoption, about how important it is that she repay them in this way. They saved her. They loved her when she had nothing. They have to be her top priority right now; which means the NOL has to be her top priority right now. Even over you. It absolutely breaks her heart.

Because of this debt she feels she has to her family, she never intended to live for herself.  Like I said at the start, Noel has always been a romantic, in love with love.  But she never thought she’d find love for herself.  She views herself as plain at best, annoying to many, and unable to offer much, if anything, to anyone.  Yet somehow… you chose her?

She'll never understand why. Every day she's with you, she sees you as more and more incredible. Her low confidence leads her to idolize the people she loves.

She feels she couldn't possibly deserve all the patience you offer her. She's so busy with her job, she can't promise you a future, she can't buy you the kinds of things you deserve, she knows there are prettier and smarter women you could be with.

Yet you stay with her. Through all her failures.

She'll never have the words- and I don't have the words- to express how grateful she is for the way you love her.

[allthefoolishdreams]

HELLOOO hope you're well! 🍓, 🥤, 🌻, 🍄, 🔪 and ❄️ for the emoji truth or dare ask game? (i am getting to yours too! unfortunately i cannot see the second emoji you sent me, but i will answer the rest!) <3

HELLO!! 😊 Im doing okay!! Hope you are as well 🩷(I honestly don't remember what emojis i sent you so dont worry about it, when you post I'll let you know what it was) 💕

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction? 

So I read fanfiction for awhile but I actually started writing fics in high school during my marvel phase and I wrote a lot but only posted some of my fics. Eventually I started venturing into other fandoms that inspired me enough to write and post. Finally ended up witing skz because the brainrot was so strong that i went from reading fics to writing my own for them fairly quickly and yeah here we are!

🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love

honestly i don't really read that much fanfiction (please feel free send me some recs i do want to read more) (i do have like so many open tabs on my phone of fics ive been meaning to read um. dont want to think about how long they've been there.)

but here's two fics i've read very recently and enjoyed:

next level by meloncafe (seunglix. where felix has a massive crush on seungmin and has an anonymous rival in an arcade game that he befriends via text while trying to form a friendship with seungmin, its so fun and cute!!)

(won't you) tell me you miss me by bumblespook (jeongsung, they were roommates but have moved out to live on their own while mutually pining and neither will admit their feelings)

🌻 ⇢ tag someone you appreciate but don't talk to on a regular basis

@isjeonginsoup 💕 hope you don't mind being tagged but yeah we haven't spoken much but i do appreciate you!!

🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings

no comment? i don't know i'm trying really hard and i just can't think of any at the moment (very surprising since i have so many fandoms i think about a lot)

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

I don't remember what the weirdest topic is but I once ended up watching History's Greatest Heists with Pierce Brosman as research for the spidey minlix fic because I wanted to see what kind of stuff people did for heists in real life as opposed to fictional shows. I've also looked into what paintings and valuable artifacts are in NYC museums (@ the fbi i swear I wasn't planning anything I just think its interesting!)

❄️ ⇢ what's your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best?

OH! i actually have a dream plot for descendants, so ive always wanted a leverage au (i dont know if you know the show but its thieves conning the rich for good, think modern robin hood) but core four + ben as the leverage crew. i dont know who would write it best but i would love to read it, or maybe write it idk lol. sea 3 would definitely be a rival heist crew in said au.

[trini-trin-trin]

Sharing this from a FB group that I am in. I was very moved by the article and felt affinity with the experiences shared. A really sweet read.

Here is the article if you don't want to click on the link (I know it is a little long, but well worth your time to read!):

The letter I received ten years ago was unsigned and bore no return address. Clearly its author did not expect, much less want, a reply. A message in a bottle, from no one to no one, that letter still remains the most bizarre form of communication. It asks nothing but to be read, promises nothing but to share a few facts and feelings, and, seeing that it must have been dashed off on a lined yellow sheet that seemed hastily torn out of a pad of paper, the author would not be surprised if, after skimming through it, the recipient decided to crumple and lob it into the closest dust bin.

The letter is one page long. One page is enough. The handwriting is uneven, perhaps because the author had lost the habit of writing in longhand and preferred the keyboard. But his grammar is perfect. The man knew what he was doing. I assume he was writing the note by hand because he didn’t want traces of it on his laptop, or because he knew he was never going to send it as an email and risk a reply. Now that I think of it, he probably didn’t care if it even reached its recipient, a local Bay Area reporter who had mentioned my novel about two young men who fall in love one summer in Italy in the mid-1980s. The reporter eventually forwarded it to me, minus its envelope with the postmark. It took no time to see that all the author of the letter was looking for was a chance to blurt out the words he couldn’t dare breathe elsewhere.

My book had spoken to him. His letter spoke to me.

So here it is: dated April 16, 2008.

I came upon Mr. Aciman’s book while on a business trip back East. Not the type of book I am normally able to read, so I bought a copy for the flight home. I think I’m glad I did.

You see, I was Elio. I was 18 and my Oliver was 22. Though the time and place were different, the feelings were remarkably the same. From believing that you are the only person who has these feelings, to the whole “he loves me – he loves me not” scenario, Mr. Aciman got it right. I was particularly impressed with the attention he gave to the morning after Elio’s and Oliver’s first encounter. The guilt, the loathing, the fear. I felt it too much. I had to put the book down for a while.

But in the end I was able to finish the book before we landed at SFO. Which was good, because I couldn’t take the book home. Unlike Elio it was I who married and had children. My Oliver died from AIDS in 1995. I’m still living a parallel life. My name is not important. His name was Dwight.

Instead, I kept the letter. I kept it for ten years.

What moved me was not just its sobering matter-of-factness or its hint of downplayed sorrow, but the associations it provoked in my mind. It reminded me of those short, clipped messages to loved ones, written by people about to be shipped off to the death camps who knew they’d never be heard from again. There is a chilling immediacy about their hurriedly scribbled notes that say everything there is to say in the fewest possible words — there wasn’t enough time for more, no smarmy pieties, no hand-wringing, no treacly hugs and kisses before the tragic end. It also made me think of the moving phone messages left by those who finally realized they were not going to make it out alive from the Twin Towers and that only their family’s answering machine was going to take their call.

“My name is not important,” he writes, almost as an apology for remaining anonymous; yet the author drops quite a number of hints about himself — hints he likely knows will stir his reader’s wistful curiosity to know what made him write the letter in the first place, what he hoped to accomplish, and if writing did indeed help. The letter itself allows us to see that he travels for business. We also sense that he probably lives in the Bay Area and that he travels not infrequently to the East Coast, since, as he writes, he is “back” in the East. And we know one thing more: that he simply needed to come out and tell someone that a man called Dwight had been his lover when the two were young. The rest is a cloud. We’ll never know more. Writing has served its purpose. We write, it seems, to reach out to others. Whether we know them or not doesn’t matter. We write to put out into the real world something extremely private within us, to make real what often feels unreal and ever so elusive about ourselves. We write to give a shape to what would otherwise remain amorphous. This is as true about authors as about those who want to correspond with them. Over the years, many have written to me either after reading or seeing Call Me by Your Name. Some tried to meet me; others confided things they’d never told anyone; and some even managed to call me at the office and, on speaking about my novel, would eventually apologize before bursting out crying. Some were in jail; some were barely adolescents, others old enough to look back at loves seven decades past; and some were priests locked in silence and secrecy. Many were closeted, others totally out; some were widows who felt a resurgence of hope if only by reading about the loves of two young men called Elio and Oliver in Italy; some were very young girls eager to meet their long-awaited Oliver; and some recalled former gay lovers whom they’d occasionally bump into years later but who’d never acknowledge what they’d once shared and done together when both were schoolmates and neither was married. All were keenly aware of living a parallel life. In that parallel life things are as they perhaps should be. Elio and Oliver still live together. And no one has secrets there.

Unlike Dwight’s lover, everyone who took the time to write to me did not withhold their names, but all had, at one point or another, withheld something very primal. They withheld it from themselves, from a relative, from a friend, a classmate, or colleague, or from a beloved who would never have guessed what troubled longings seethed below their averted gaze whenever they crossed paths.

Some readers wrote to tell me they felt that my novel had changed them, and given them new insights into themselves; some felt it was urging them finally to turn a new leaf in their lives. But some couldn’t go so far and, despite their perfect command of language, confessed lacking the words to explain why they were so moved by my novel or why they felt an unresolved longing for things they’d never considered or desired before. They were experiencing an upwell of emotions and of ungraspable might-have-beens that were asking to be reckoned with because they seemed more real than life itself, a sense of themselves that beckoned from an opposite bank they’d never known was there and whose potential loss now was a source of inconsolable grief. Hence their tears, their regrets, and the overpowering sense of being lost in their own lives.

And yet, they said, theirs were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of recognition, as though the novel itself were a mirror for readers to watch their own emotions laid bare before them. These responses made me aware that Call Me by Your Name does not call attention to anything readers didn’t already know, nor does it bring new truths or revelations; all it does is shed new light on things that were long familiar but that they never took the time to consider. It would be so tempting to say that they are reminded of their forgotten first loves; the truth is that all loves, even those that occur late in life, are first loves. There is always fear, shame, reluctance, and not a tiny dose of spite. Desire is agony.

Everyone who’s read Call Me by Your Name understands not only the struggle both to speak and hold back their truth but also the shame that comes whenever we want something from someone. Desire is always cagey, always secretive — we’ll tell everyone we know about the person we crave to hold naked in our arms, but the very last one to know this will be the person we crave. Same-sex desire is even more guarded and watchful, especially in those who are just discovering their sexuality. Awkwardness and desire are strange bedfellows at a young age, but shame and inexperience are just as paralyzing as fear when we watch them tussling with the urge to be bold. You’re torn between the raw horniness that makes you dream scenes you hope to forget as soon as you’re up and the scenes you pray you’ll dream again and again — if dreams are all you’ll have. Silence and solitude exact a cost that leaves us emotionally wrecked. At some point we need to speak.

So “is it better to speak or die?” asks Elio, the narrator of Call Me by Your Name, quoting words penned by the sixteenth-century Marguerite de Navarre in her collection of tales known as The Heptameron. Marguerite was the sister of King Francis I and the grandmother of Henry IV, himself the grandfather of Louis XIV, hence she was plenty familiar with court intrigue, gossip, and the risks of opening up to someone who may not welcome what’s in our heart and could easily make us pay for it. Not everyone who has written to me has dared to speak their hearts to those they loved. Some have sought silence — slow, lingering droplets of quiet desperation taken every night before bedtime until they realize they’ve been dead and didn’t even know it. Many have written to me with the feeling of having missed their chance when someone tethered his rowboat to their jetty and simply asked them to jump in. “Some sentence or thought on almost every page,” writes a reader, “triggers tears and knots my throat and chest. Tears well up in my eyes on the subway, at my computer at work, walking down the street. Perhaps I am weeping in part because I know that at my age there is virtually no possibility of experiencing anything remotely comparable to what Elio experiences with Oliver.” Someone else writes, “Reading Call Me by Your Name made me feel a love I never had.” A happily married 50-plus colleague took me aside and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this much in love in my whole life.” “I'm 23,” tweeted someone else, “and have never felt such love, until I read Call Me by Your Name. I feel like I lived it.” “Elio and I are essentially the same age,” writes a teenage girl. “I have never really experienced his environment of the Italian summer…My experiences have only taken place halfway between nature and smog, however I have felt the same tension, fear, guilt and overwhelming love that you express perfectly through both Elio and Oliver…Finding myself in Elio was something I never expected and I’m positive that I won’t experience anything quite like it ever again. The first girl I ever loved remains…the only girl I have ever loved and though everything she and I shared…lives now as a secret between two friends.” “I finished reading Call Me by Your Name a couple of days ago,” writes someone else, “and wanted to let you know how much it affected me. It felt like a narration of my thoughts that I had systematically buried long ago.” And finally this from a 72-year-old: “I was fascinated by the idea of parallel lives where would I have been if I had gone with him, where would I be if I traveled alone? Maybe the point is just what do I do with the gift you have given me during the remainder of my life.”

There are at least 500 more such letters and emails.

Some find themselves weeping at the end of the film or the novel, not for what happened long ago or for what did not and might never happen in their own lives but for what has yet to happen, for the terrifying moment when they too will soon have to decide whether to speak or die. This from an 18-year-old: “[Your novel] gives me hope that one day I will meet someone whom I desire so badly that I’ll actually find it in me to make a move, the way Oliver is that someone for Elio. Maybe my Oliver will also turn out to be someone that I realize I love as well as desire.” She was crying for a week, as was this 15-year-old young man: “I stopped reading…because I didn’t want [the book] to end, didn’t want the wounds that you caused me to close, I didn’t want to overcome, for some reason that I have yet to find out. I wanted to stay a wreck, emotionally and mentally fragile….My mother handed me tissues because she had never seen me cry like this. I had finished your book and ‘moved’ is too weak a word to express what your book had done to me. Here a week later and it is literally all I can think about, not my midterms coming up, but…Elio and Oliver and if it is better to speak or die. You answered questions I didn’t even think I had.”

Indeed, the whole novel seems to enable the outing of all manner of feelings, feelings from Elio’s relentless inward journey and obsessive self-examination that readers are invited to identify with. Through Elio’s unfettered introspection they too feel exposed and sliced open like a crustacean without a slough, now forced to look at itself in the mirror. No wonder they are moved. The mask that is torn off their faces is not just the mask that conceals same-sex desires from themselves and from others. Rather, it is the realization, through Elio’s voice, of what they truly feel, who they truly are, what they fear, what bears their signature, and what coy little shenanigans they go through to read others and hope to reach them. Some identified with some effusive sentences in my novel so much that they had them tattooed on their bodies. They even attach photos of these tattoos. People have also tattooed peaches on themselves!

But what moves most people — and this is as true now as it was when the novel first came out — is the father’s speech. Here he not only tells his son to nurse the flame and “don’t snuff it out” after his son’s lover has left Italy, but that he too, the father, envies his son’s relationship with a male lover. This speech tears away the last vestige of a veil between reader and truth and is a moving tribute to the irreducible honesty between father and son.

Most readers have written to me about the scene because the father’s speech rekindles the very difficult moment when they decided to come out to their parents — or, as is often the case with people 60, or 70 or older, it reminds them of the conversation they wished they’d had but never did have with their parents. This is the loss no one forgets and from which no one recovers after seeing Call Me by Your Name. It bears the very essence of that precious and life-defining might-have-been moment that never happened and never will.

Here is the speech:

“Look…[y]ou had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!...

“… {L]et me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”

I received the anonymous letter sometime in early May 2008. At the time, I was staying at my parents’, because my father was suffering from throat and mouth cancer and was already in hospice care. He had refused radiation and chemotherapy, so I knew his days were numbered; though morphine was clouding his mind, he was still lucid enough to bandy a few quips about a host of subjects. He had stopped eating and drinking water because swallowing had become very painful. One afternoon while I was stealing a nap, the phone rang. A reporter I’d met in California had just received a letter, which she wanted to share with me. I told her to read it over the phone. After she’d read it I asked if she felt she could mail it to me. I wanted to show it to my father, I said, and explained he was dying. She felt for me. We talked about my father for a while. I told her I was trying to make it up to him these days, and that he too had been exceptionally easy to be with. How was it growing up with him? she asked. Tense, I replied. Always is, she added. Then the conversation ended, and she promised to mail the letter soon.

After hanging up, I got out of bed and went in to see him. Over the past few days, I had made a point of reading to him, which he liked a great deal, especially now that he was having difficulty focusing. But rather than read to him the memoirs of Chateaubriand, one of his favorite authors, and feeling buoyed by the letter I’d been read on the phone, I asked if he’d like me to read from the French translation of Call Me by Your Name, the galleys of which I had just received from Paris that very morning. Why not, since you wrote it, he said. He was proud of me. So I began to read from the very beginning, and soon enough I knew I was opening up a subject neither he nor I had ever broached before. But I knew he knew what I was reading and why I was reading it to him. This made me happy. Perhaps it made him happy as well. I’ll never know.

That evening, after the rest of us had dinner, he asked if I could continue reading from my novel. I was nervous about arriving at the father’s speech because I didn’t know how he’d react to it, though he was the kind of father who would have given that very same speech himself. But the speech was two hundred pages away still, and that would have taken many, many days. Perhaps I should skip some parts, I thought. But no, I wanted to read him the whole book. My father didn’t last long enough to hear the father’s speech. And when the letter finally arrived from California, he was already gone. His name was Henri, he was 93 years old, and he inspired everything I’ve written.

[alj4890]

Angst Prompt

(Liam x Riley) with the prompt of Riley getting shot in another country while Liam was in Cordonia and it have been ordered by King Bradshaw as requested by Anonymous.

A/N Oof. What a way to knock me off my fluff kick, LOL. This isn't a part of my AU's but let's see what I can do for your prompt, Nonny. This takes place after the Bradshaw/Isabella mess but before Barthlemy's challenge. I guess I will ruin that brief moment of peace, LOL.

@gkittylove99​​​​​​ @krsnlove​​​​​​ @kingliam2019​​​​​​ @texaskitten30​​​​​​ @hopefulmoonobject​​​​​​ @yourmajesty09​​​​​​ @mom2000aggie​​​​​​ @ofpixelsandscribbles​ @twinkleallnight​

Masterlist

News

The Royal Palace, Cordonia...

"Here we go, princess." Liam settled his seven month old in her swing. "How about you help your father with reading through these proposals the Council is considering?"

Eleanor smiled around the teething ring she had put in her mouth.

Liam pressed a quick kiss to her cheek then started the swing.

He settled behind his desk, finally feeling a sense of calmness. With all the ups and downs he had gone through since his brother's abdication, he rested in knowing that he, his family, and country were at last entering into a season of peace.

He intended to keep it that way.

The gurgles and coos from Eleanor drew his attention. She waved the teething ring a few times before putting it back in her mouth.

He chuckled at her antics.

He was enjoying these few days of one-on-one time with his daughter. Riley had been asked to be the guest of honor at Lancelin St Clair's fashion grand opening. The renowned designer had created a place where his creations could be not only sold, but created specifically for the customer.

Lancelin had completely renovated a four-story building in Paris's Faubourg Saint-Honoré district, turning each floor into one with a definite purpose. The first floor was a shop that housed various sizes of his most popular creations. The second floor was part runway/part design on demand for the shopper looking for something completely original. The third floor would debut his new bridal line. And the fourth was set as his personal work area/apartment for when he needed to stay late and work on his designs.

All this was to be shown to the public to set off Paris's fashion week.

Since Riley had walked his runway during Liam and Madeleine's engagement tour, he had invited her to be part of his grand opening. Ana De Luca was traveling with Cordonia's queen to do an exclusive spread of Riley in some of the dresses Lancelin had made specifically with her in mind.

It was just the sort of news the people of Cordonia would enjoy after months of uncertainty.

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

"I really don't want to go without you and Eleanor." Riley told Liam the night before she left.

"I don't want you to either." He held her close. "But I have to meet with the Farmers' Association about the progress of the apple orchards." He pressed a tender kiss to her lips. "I've already had to reschedule twice with them. They need to see I take their concerns seriously."

"I know." She sighed. "And I know that Eleanor would distract everyone from Lancelin's moment." She eased out of his embrace. "This will be the first time I go out without you or any of our friends."

Liam took her hands and tried to ease her worries. "You will do great." He smiled at her. "You charm everyone you meet. I believe I am proof to your effect."

Riley shook her head before kissing him. "If anyone is the charmer, it's you."

He chuckled while tugging her toward their bed. "Do you want me to find someone to go with you? Penelope or Kiara perhaps?"

"No thanks." She snuggled closer to him. "I wish Hana was well enough to go. She was looking forward to it."

Liam gently rubbed her back. "With Maxwell in Hollywood and Drake in Texas, we don't have anyone left."

"I wish Olivia was back." She muttered.

"Amalas needed her expertise." Liam reminded her.

"I know." Riley sighed again. "If I can't have you with me, I do tend to depend on the others to be there. I need to learn how to stand on my own."

"The world will once again be amazed by Cordonia's queen." He kissed the top of her head. "You'll see."

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

Liam glanced at his desk clock. It was nearly time for Ana's live report of Lancelin's grand opening.

His princess had fallen asleep in her swing, drawing another smile from him as he carefully lifted her out. Cuddling her close, he sat down on one of the sofas and turned the television on.

Finding the right channel, he relaxed as the first images appeared.

Cordonia's Queen Riley has been given the honor of walking the red carpet first. Lancelin St Clair awaits, giving her the shears to cut the ceremonial ribbon.

He readjusted Eleanor in his arms as he watched his wife's bright smile flash towards the cheering crowd.

Ana continued to detail what they would soon see when shots rang out.

Liam stood up, causing Eleanor to whimper at being rudely awakened.

Ignoring her fitful cries, he watched as the camera caught his wife and Lancelin falling to the ground.

Then the feed went dead.

"BASTIEN!" Liam shouted over Eleanor's wails.

The head of the King's Guards hurried inside while talking on his phone. Regina rushed in behind him.

"Give me the baby." She insisted, gently taking the fussy little one in her arms. She left the study, allowing Liam to be able to focus on what Bastien was saying.

"And the shooter?" He asked. "I see. Where is her majesty being taken?"

Bastien wrote down the information. "Keep me updated."

Once he ended the call, he faced Liam.

"What happened?" He demanded.

Bastien cleared his throat. "A lone gunman shot both Riley and Mr. St Clair."

"Is she alright? Have the plane prepared. We must get there as quickly as we can!"

"Sir," Bastien hesitated. "I must insist you remain here. The gunman was killed by one of our guards. We don't know if there is another and--"

Liam shoved past him and called the airfield. Declaring it an emergency, he then rushed to tell Regina.

"Liam." She teared up as she took his hand. "Be careful and call as soon as you know more."

"Your majesty, I insist you remain here while I go to Paris." Bastien followed after him. "Once my team has investigated, I can then guarantee your safety--"

"Do you honestly think I give a damn about my safety?!" Liam rounded on him. "My wife was just shot! She is alone in another country and hurt. If you think I will sit here behind these so called protective walls, then you do not know me at all." He went back to his study and quickly packed his briefcase. "Now get me to the airport."

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

Early evening, Paris...

"Her majesty is at one of the private hospitals." Bastien explained as the car continued through the city. "Interpol is working with us to identify the shooter."

Liam stared blindly out the window. "Is my wife conscious?"

"She was." Bastien tried to explain. "She lost some blood from her wound and--"

Their car stopped at the front entrance.

"Liam!" Bastien shouted as the king didn't bother to wait on guards or to check that it was safe.

The young king ran inside, pausing long enough to ask where he should go.

"Je suis le roi de Cordonia. Ma femme a été amenée avec une blessure par balle. Où est-elle? Est-ce qu'elle va bien?" He said quickly.

"Elle se repose dans la chambre 138, Votre Majesté. Dr Miller a dit--" the receptionist blinked when he took off running once more.

Liam slid on the freshly waxed tile floors, barely catching himself as he followed the signs.

A doctor and nurse were just leaving Riley's room when he arrived.

"My wife," Liam gasped, trying to catch his breath. "Is she alright?"

"Oui. She was struck in the shoulder." He paused as both King's Guards and Interpol Agents joined them. "We removed the bullet while she was unconscious."

Liam reached for the door handle as the others began to question the physician.

He paused at seeing his wife laying there, looking so fragile.

One of the first things he had first noticed about her was her inner strength to face any obstacle she encountered. He realized he had taken that he had taken that for granted. The only other time he had seen her like this was when she collapsed during Eleanor's birth.

Liam knew there were only a few things he feared in this world. But those few things centered on something specific: his family.

He could face an entire firing squad and not bat an eye. But let it be Riley or Eleanor that was to be threatened, and he could not take it.

He collapsed in the chair by her bed and pressed a kiss to her fingers. Bowing his head, he waited by her side until she awakened.

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

A few hours later...

Liam stood up when Riley became restless. Soft cries escaped her lips as she slept. He reached for the buzzer.

Explaining that his wife was in pain, he waited for a nurse to come in.

Bastien entered first.

"Have you learned anything about the shooter?" Liam asked in a low voice.

"We have." Bastien stopped the nurse.

He and an Interpol agent patted him down and checked the IV bag of morphine he held.

They stepped back and allowed him to tend to Riley.

Liam watched him replace the bag that had been on a slow drip.

"Can she have more?" He asked as she cried out again.

"Yes sir." He showed Liam the button he could push if she needed more, reassuring him that it wouldn't administer any past the dosage she could have. He increased the flow and left.

Riley's eyes barely opened. "Liam?"

He went back to her bedside. "I'm here, my love."

"My shoulder." She sucked in a painful breath. "What happened?"

"A man was in the crowd." Liam gently explained, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "He shot at you and Lancelin and--"

Her eyes widened. "Lancelin! Liam, he was bleeding so much!"

Bastien cleared his throat as he stepped forward. "He is in intensive care at another hospital, mam."

He pointed at the right side of his chest and mouthed lung to Liam.

Liam frowned some before turning back to Riley.

"Where's Eleanor?" Riley asked, turning her head. "Did you bring her?"

"No. Regina is watching over her at home." Liam eased down on the bed. "Do you need anything? Is there something I can do to make you more comfortable?"

"No." Her eyes filled with tears as she looked up at him. "Liam, if...if I had died...you...my baby..." She began to cry.

Unable to take her in his arms, Liam did his best to comfort her. He wiped her tears while speaking in a calming tone that he wouldn't let anything happen to her. That she was safe. That they would soon be home with Eleanor.

Riley tried to calm down but she shook her head. "We'll never be truly safe, will we?"

Liam paused in his assurances. He felt exhausted from the trials they continued to face. Should he now fear peace, knowing it would end horribly in some new threat?

Running a hand through his hair he spoke of what he did know. "No one is ever truly safe, my love. Even if we were locked away somewhere, accidents can happen. Sickness can strike. Bad things happen just as good ones do."

She sniffed and closed her eyes. "I know you're right," she opened her eyes and met his steady gaze. "I just wish we didn't keep having trouble."

"I do too." He cupped her cheek and softly kissed her. "All I need to know to make it through our trials is that you and Eleanor are taken care of." He struggled with swallowing. "I should have been there today to protect you."

She weakly raised her hand and caressed his cheek. "Then you might have been hurt or..." She couldn't finish that sentence. "I can't lose you, Liam."

He nodded, kissing her again. "I refuse to lose you." His words came out in a harsh whisper. "I will find who did this and will make certain they never do so again."

Riley rubbed her cheek against his hand and closed her eyes.

Liam relaxed once he saw her drift into a peaceful slumber.

"Sir?" Bastien motioned for him to step outside.

"What did you find?" Liam asked.

"The man was a hired gun from America." Bastien began. "But he was born in Auvernal."

Liam's eyes narrowed. "And who hired him?"

"King Bradshaw."

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

Cordonia, a week later...

Riley was rocking back and forth with Eleanor sleeping in the crook of her good arm. She heard voices outside the nursery door. Curious, but unable to hold her daughter properly, she remained where she was.

A few moments later, Liam slipped quietly inside and smiled at her.

"Is she down for the night?"

"She fell asleep long ago, but I wasn’t ready to let her go." Riley let him put Eleanor in her crib. "I missed her so much. I'm so thankful to be home with you both."

"Nowhere near as much as I am." Liam wrapped his arms around her waist.

"I heard voices earlier. Is everything alright?"

He nodded. "Everything is fine."

Riley chewed on her bottom lip. "You never told me what was found about the gunman."

"There wasn't much to discover." He told her.

"Was he just some crazy person or was he hired by someone?" Riley prodded.

Liam let her go and motioned for them to leave the nursery when Eleanor made a disgruntled, sleepy noise.

"I don't want you thinking anymore about this." Liam insisted. "We are taking care of eliminating the threat."

"Eliminating?" Riley's brow furrowed. "But that means he was hired--"

"I want you to rest."

His nearly cold evasiveness alarmed her.

"Liam," she reached for his hand. "Please talk to me. I can handle whatever you have found."

Remembering how upset she was in the hospital, he averted his eyes. "We'll talk about it tomorrow."

Her lips parted to insist. She shut them when he escorted her to their chambers.

"Do you need anything?" He asked after helping her change.

"No." She murmured.

He covered her up and began to leave the room.

"Where are you going?" She sat up in surprise.

"I have somethings that require my attention in the study." He explained. "I'll be back in an hour or so."

She quietly watched him leave, feeling even more uneasy than before.

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

A little after three in the morning...

Riley awoke when she felt the bed dip down.

"Liam?"

"Forgive me, I didn't mean to wake you."

She checked the time. "Are you just now coming to bed?"

"Yes. It took longer than I planned." He stretched out beside her.

"What did?" She demanded, turning a lamp on.

She gasped when she noticed his bruised face and bloody knuckles.

"What happened? How did you--"

"It's nothing." He winced as he tried to get comfortable. "I'll be fine."

"Liam!" She snapped. "Talk to me." Her eyes narrowed. "Now."

"I took care of the one who tried to take you from me." He snapped back.

"So there was someone else involved?"

"Yes. And he will never have a chance to hurt anyone again." Liam declared.

Riley gently touched his face. "Liam, you didn't..."

"I wanted to." He admitted. "I was so close to beating Bradshaw to death." He closed his eyes at that memory. 

It would have been so easy. A few more strikes, a quick twist and the king that had caused Liam’s world to nearly crumble would have had his last breath.

 "I allowed Interpol to take him." He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. "Olivia found all the evidence we needed to make certain the only way he will ever leave prison is to attend his own funeral."

Riley blinked back tears.

She then punched Liam in the arm.

"Riley!" He sat up when he noticed her shaking with rage. "What--"

"How could you?!" She screamed. "How could you risk your life when you already had everything in place to arrest him?!"

"He tried to kill you!" Liam yelled back. "All because we caused him embarrassment." His eyes narrowed. "Did you think I would do nothing to the man who set out to take my wife from me? Take my daughter's mother?!"

"He wasn't worth you taking a chance on him having a weapon or one of his guards kill you! What would Eleanor and I do without you here?" Tears fell, nearly blinding her. "How could you risk our family?"

All of Liam's anger disappeared at hearing that she had his own fear. Gently pulling her close he silently held her as she cried. His own tears mingled with hers as he thought of a life without her.

The sun was beginning to rise as their tears came to an end. They still held to one another, speaking in low tones of their life together. An occasional hitch in one's words caused the other to try and comfort the one temporarily unable to speak.

As light crept through the drapes, the two remained upright, still clinging to the one they loved.

Riley lifted her head off his shoulder. "Eleanor will be awake soon."

"Yes, she will." Liam pressed a kiss to his wife's forehead. "You should rest. I'll take care of her."

"I'll help you." She hugged him close with her good arm. "I don't want to be apart from either of you today."

His arms tightened around her. Unable to say all that filled his heart, he simply nodded while muttering that he didn't either.

She pressed a tender kiss to his lips and smiled. "It's a new day, my love. A new day just for us."

[celebritytgcaptions]

Requests (5/23/2021)

Hi lovelies! I’ve been getting so many requests & I’m working hard to get all of them in the queue. Thanks for sending them my way! I’m writing to let you know that the queue is now full until the end of June. I was able to get every requests from my May 8th post in there except for a few. Requests from May 8th for captions featuring Katy Perry, Jenna Fischer, Marisol Nichols, Addison Rae, Ariana Grande, Erin Kellyman, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Jhene Aiko, & Kirstin Maldonado will be posted in early July.

But there have been an absolute ton of requests since then too, yay! So I’m listing all the requests that I haven’t gotten to below. If you made a request but don’t see it below that might be for a few reasons. 1) I’ve written it already and it will be posted in June. 2) It’s one of the requests I posted on May 8th so I won’t talk about it here. 3) I considered it a demand not a request (for example, I received two that said “Anything with,” that wasn’t really a request just telling me to do it. Sorry if this bothers some of you but it is an issue with me so make sure you word your requests AS requests). Either way, thanks for the love, lovelies! :D

Anonymous said:

Could you do one with either Kelley O’hara or Alex Morgan from the USWNT about a guy soccer player watching the US win the world cup and then want to be them or something like that?

I actually know who both those are (shockingly enough, I don’t really follow sports) so sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Could you do lorengrey captions? She’s so hot

Sorry sweetie, don’t know who that is. :(

Anonymous said:

Hi I just had an idea for a game you could do. It could be where someone has to say as a boy what they’re like physically in stages. So first stage is hair color for example, second stage could be height, third stage could be body type, etc. An example would be if I was a black hair, short height, thick body type, I would match up with someone like Nicki Minaj. Just an idea which you could extend on. Hopefully it makes sense. I appreciate you!

I actually have a game like this mapped out called “Build a Sissy” where you choose age, hair color, and bra size, but it would take a LOT of work to make so I haven’t written it yet. Maybe some day though. :)

Anonymous said:

I would love to see a Tori Kelly caption. Her hair and body are not typical but beautiful for a white girl. I say that last sentence respectfully. I think having a caption with her would be great

Sure thing! Tori Kelly is a cutie. :)

Anonymous said:

Ok I'm not sure if u'll know these 2 cuz even I had to look them up for the names but anne dudek and maitland ward theyre the 2 blonde sisters from white chicks not sure if uve seen it but if u can could u make a caption for them please?

I DO know who they are! I’ve been thinking about doing a White Chicks caps because there’s a lot of cute looks in that movie (especially for Busy Phillips who I just love) so sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Could u do Yvette nicole brown from community? Id like to see some big girl love

Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

I already know that this request is probably gonna be a No but I still have to ask whats the ruling on GCI enhanced celebrities like Taylor swift from Cats?  Or is that too much like "Furry" stuff. Now I'm Feeling this will be a No for multiple reasons

So it is not an issue with CGI “enhanced” celebrities but for Cats it is because I do not have a Furry fetish and I get uncomfortable thinking about writing caps for it. But I write caps with “manips” all the time (photoshopped images of celebs) so I’m not ruling out CGI enhanced celebs all together.

Anonymous said:

Can you do one of Lindsey stirling? And for the story can it be a guy trying to learn Violin but he cant seem to focus he even tried hot female teachers but it didnt work then he gets a male teacher than he starts focusing and wanting to please the teacher he becomes a sissy sorry its a long request

Sounds fun, sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Hi big fan and I think you’ve been doing amazing work. Is there anyway you could do a story about a guy who loses a bet to sorority girl and is forced to get his nails painted and turned into a girl? I love the idea of having a boys nails painted against his will. I’d love one with Selena Gomez but if you think another celeb would be better I leave that cumpletely to you.

Totally! This sounds fun. :D

Anonymous said:

Can you do thelma and Louise?

I’m assuming you mean Geena Davis & Susan Sarandon from Thelma & Louise so yes. Yes I can. :)

Anonymous said:

Can you do a caption from the movie bridesmaids? Like when theyre all trying on dressess or something?

I haven’t seen Bridesmaids (I know I know) but I can try something. :)

Anonymous said:

it would be super cool if you could do some more games! They’re my fav

Glad you like them! As long as I’m not on hiatus, games will be posted every second Saturday. I’ve already got two set for June. :)

Anonymous said:

Hey huge fan of your recent work and super excited about new caps!! Do you think you could do one about a college guy who drops out in pursuit of being a stand up comedian, but the comedy club needs a female comic so they turn him into a girl? I was thinking maybe Nikki Glaser, she so funny and sexy. Thanks can’t wait to see all your new stuff!!

Oooo, Nikki Glaser is great. Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Can you make a caption about a guy who makes fun of curvy and thicc women, where the women get their revenge and turn the guy into Nia Jax?

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Hi Me again on the topic of the assembly line worker caption sequel if you do it i just an idea for the story like before depicting the sissies "first time"  but you can have it be that the coworker doesnt know and is telling everyone about the chick he slept with last night and the sissy is just thinking "if only they knew"idk i thought it was good anyways thank u again

So this message is in reference to a sequel caption that was requested & that I did write and will be posted in June. I’m sharing it here to let the anon know that I wrote the cap BEFORE I got this second request so there will be a followup but the story will be different. I hope that’s ok.

Anonymous said:

Hi idk if u watch wrestling or not I see u have some captions of wwe womens wrestlers but im not sure have far ur knowledge of it is? Could u do a caption of Rhea Ripley if u know her?

I have never seen a single episode of WWE, I do not watch wrestling, and yet somehow every time someone requests a wrestler I know who she is. Don’t ask me how because I do not know. Anyways, yeah I can do a Rhea Ripley one. :)

Anonymous said:

Could you do a caption about a janitor for sissy co. That finds out the strange goings on at work and tries to blow the whistle on the whole operation but is caught and turned into a sissy maid for the sissy co. Corporate office abit specific I know but ive been thinking on that awhile however u do it will be perfect thanks

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Could you do katheryn Hahn from wandavision specifically the 80s look with the Big hair and aerobics outfit

Oooo, sounds nice. I’ll type that up for sure. :)

Anonymous said:

Hi big fan of your caps!! Do you think you could do a cap where a football player wants to go to the NFL but gets hurt, so they turn him into a female commentator, maybe Lauren Rutledge? If you don’t know her, she’s been a college football reporter for awhile and was also a former Miss Florida. Anyways I just think any guy would be lucky to be turned into her and I love your caps keep up the great work!!

Me: *googles Lauren Rutledge to see if it’s who I’m thinking of* How do I know who this is? Anyways, yes I can write this. :)

...for some reason there are no GIFs of her though so I’m just gonna move on.

Anonymous said:

Hi I'm the one that requested the LONG list of celebs I'm still really sorry about that I didnt realize how many it actually was till I looked back so I wanna retract some for your sake tell ya what if you havent done any already just do the ones that are specifically marked (as in the ones detailed by movie or show theyre in) the ones that are just names you can leave out i knoe its still alot but hopefully that takes some weight off of ya sorry again

You don’t have to be sorry! Like I said, in the future I’d ask that folks limit requests to no more than 3 celebs at a time but you didn’t know that. I’d never said that before. I typed up every celebrity and they’re going to be sprinkled in during June. Hope you like them! :)

Anonymous said:

Hello ^^ I love your work. Can u make a caption with the name "jules" and Ariana Grande please? Thank you

Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Hey, not really an ask, but something I needed to share

I'm the one that asked for the Stephanie Beatriz caption from a whole back, and I absolutely loved how it turned out. Each time you roll out a new caption is like a small thrill to me and I read them right as they're released.

Now this wouldn't be an ask if I wasn't asking something, right? Well, next month sees the release of the "In the Heights" movie, and there's an opportunity there to do a series of captions using stephanie Beatriz from that same movie.

In conclusion, I love your captions so much, you're amazing!

Awww, this is such a sweet message. Thank you! And YAAASSSSS! Ever since the first trailer for In the Heights dropped I was like, “I must write a caption with her in this!” So you can imagine how fun it’s been waiting this entire time. *eye twitches*. We’ll have to wait until the movie comes out for me to be sure I can find a good image but this IS a caption I want to write. :)

Anonymous said:

Hi I just recently came across your blog and fell in love with it!! The caption with the football player being turned into Bella Thorne is one of my favorites!! I’d love so much if you could do a sequel or something to that cap it was so amazing and I need to know what else happens to “her”. I’m not sure if this is possible or if you even do sequels but this cap was great and I look forward to all the others!!!

Glad you like it! I’m always looking for sequel captions to write on Throwback Thursday so you’ll get this for sure. :)

Anonymous said:

Hey big fan! Do you think you could do a caption where a short guy gets made fun of by all his girl friends for how short he is? Ariana Grande is fairly short and I think a caption of her (of age of course) would be awesome

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Can you do one with the bella twins as two guys who fought over the same girl then the girl turns them both into look alikes of her but then they start fighting over the same guy

Yep!

Anonymous said:

Do you know suzy berhow? Or angie Griffin? If so would love a caption of either of them please

Sorry sweetie, I don’t know who those are. :(

Anonymous said:

Would appreciate more Sia captions please when u get the chance

I will remember that. :)

Anonymous said:

Can make some Winnie Harlow caption please? I adore her style

Sorry lovely, I don’t know who that is. :(

Anonymous said:

How about instead of removing the captions with Demi in them ,the images of Demi were just replaced with another celeb and if Demi is mentioned by name in the caption then that could be edited  to mention a different celeb. I respect Demi's decision I do but lets not lose some well made captions. Also if you could please make a caption where Amy Adams feminises a fan and raises them as her daughter and Kristen Stewart makes you her submissive wife that would be appreciated. I'm a fan of them.

So about the Demi Lovato captions: I understand your feelings but I’m still going to delete the original captions. Because of how my captions are made I can’t just go back in & swap out an image or edit the text, I have to remake it from the ground up. I am hoping to do that with some (maybe all) of the Demi Lovato captions & re-publish them, but I’m still going to delete the originals.

I can do the Kristen Stewart one for sure and I’ll TRY to do the Amy Adams one I just am not 100% sure I can find a pic for that but we’ll see. :)

Anonymous said:

If it’s possible before your summer hiatus could you do a caption with Amanda Crew (silicon valley, sex drive)?

I will do one with Amanda Crew but I can’t commit to doing it before the hiatus.

About the hiatus: I don’t know when it’s going to be. I want to TRY to make it to at least July 18th because I have a specific game in mind I want to post for 5 years of Celebrity TG Captions games, but after that I have no idea. I’ve been writing caps for a longer stretch of time since normal since I’ve switched to a part-time blog so I might burn out at any second but for right now I’ve still got some juice.

[akvtsuki-ari]

Sweetheart (Ch.1)

Warnings: Mentions of BDSM and bunch of other kinks but nothing sexual in this chapter lol. Sub!Spencer and Femdom!Reader 

Length: 5.3k 

Authors Note: this is hands down the most self-indulgent shit ive ever wrote but do i care? the answer is no dsjk  but this that series i had planned where the reader introduces spencer to proper BDSM and all that. hoping to make this fic kinda informative also lol. also im uploading this fic on ao3 as well. also no tags for this fic bc its really specific and ill probably be writing for it for a while! sorry about that

Plot Summary: Spencer Reid just wanted to be.., well, you know. He doesn’t expect to find much when he signs up for a BDSM dating website but somehow he manages you and he couldn’t be more delighted

Spencer Reid was certainly a lot of things. He was a lover of the arts, someone who had a particular affinity for 15th-century literature, a magician at best, a theater nerd at worst, and a teacher when life called for it. He loves the world even when it's really dark and he loves sleeping in even more. He loves his friends and they love him too - even when they pretend that his random facts annoy them. Spencer Reid was a friend, an FBI agent, a genius with an IQ of 187, and a son to a mother he loves wholly. He was a lot of things and for the most part - he knew a lot about what he really loved to do. He supposed that it's been like that his whole life.

It's not everyday that he discovers something new about himself. About everything else? Always. He loves to learn, but about himself? There's never all that much on the frontier.

It's hard to say, because of that, when Spencer discovered he was a sub. It's difficult to pinpoint a specific time and place, or even how the pieces got put together. He just remembers how it felt when it hit him, like a freight train going 100 miles an hour into a concrete wall. Or a plane crashing onto an island. Or like a fly hitting the glass panes of a delivery truck. He remembers the feeling when he was deftly reminded of this fact. Spencer Reid was a sub - through and through and he wasn't really sure what to make of it.

Surprisingly to most of his direct peers, Spencer wasn't a virgin. He'd had sex with 2 people who he'd been kinda friends with at some point, but it always got a little weird after that. The second time though, the girl ended up choking him a little bit when she got off and Spencer thought he had died. Not in a bad way, more in a "I'm so turned on by this I feel like I've genuinely gone to heaven," sort of way. He didn't think it was possible for a sexual encounter to make him feel like that but it did. It didn't stop after that either, which was the most agitating part. 

Spencer doesn't consider himself a sexual person. Sex is about intimacy and companionship, and hopefully love when he finds that someday. Sex isn't necessarily about pleasure but that wasn't an easy lesson to learn.

Spencer just wanted to understand - so like any great genius he participated in thought experiments. It's normally a female superhero/supervillain that crosses his mind (he has an affinity for Poison Ivy), and he just kinda imagines what it would be like if they did what she did. The choking turned him on, but it wasn't enough. Through that, he figures out that he had more than a choking kink and that he was more than a little interested in a partner having complete access to him. He thought about it for weeks and the getting off was working for him but he couldn't get the fantasy out of his head. He wanted more - he wanted someone to fulfill his wishes.

It was too much for him to ignore. Those months of being able to hold off through masturbating are over and he's just sorta itching. Aching to act on those impulses with another person who can give him what he needs, and he doesn't want it to be transactional. Maybe it's too ideal to want a partner out of such an endeavor but was it so wrong? To want real affection and romance from someone who could also overpower him wasn't a crime and he'd be damned if he pretended to want any less. Spencer was just searching, even if it was rather desperately. 

So, when Spencer finds himself on a BDSM dating site and he feels like his life is in shambles, he can only blame himself. It's not something he'd normally do but he's getting a little more than relentless about it but he also just wants to see what's out there. He's so out of it was it happens, it felt like he was being possessed as he made a fake email and wrote out his account information. Definitely blaming it on possession, he thinks. 

It's too late to go back, as he scrolls through tons of profiles of rather intense looking people. He's not surprised, this is where people go to express themselves. They're entitled to that, it just sucks since he's just not ready for such levels of intensity. He wonders if he's in too deep yet, but he figures he'd hit that mark a long time ago and keeps scrolling through profiles. There wasn't much to go off of, many people not choosing to use photos for the sake of anonymity, which was good for Spencer. He clicks onto his own profile, reading his own bio carefully.

USERNAME: DOC187 

SUB/ SWITCH / DOM 

M / F / O

FETISHES: N/A

BIO: Interest in a dominant female companion. Completely inexperienced.

Spencer feels ridiculous, but he doubts anyone would even message him. He doesn't have much on his profile and he keeps things short for that purpose. He wanted to stay as low to the ground as possible - more curious to explore what was going in the world than to find anything legitimate. He scrolls through hundreds of profiles, mostly of people who were BDSM vets looking for new connections or fun. Some people catch his eye but they don't match his interests so he doesn't bother.

Except, one profile. The bio was beyond interesting to Spencer.

USERNAME: MISS—LILAC

SUB / SWITCH / DOM 

M / F / O 

FETISHES: Sadomasochist, Degradation, Humiliation, Pegging, Overstimulation, Edging, Crossdressing, Exhibitionism, Mutual Masturbation, Dacryphilia, Shibari/Gags/Bondage, Wax Play, Impact Play, Breath Play, General Sensation Play, Discipline, Collaring, Begging. Willing to try most things. 

BIO: Interested in submissive males of any experience level. Helps if you're interesting and like to read and watch indie films. Looking for genuine connection and plenty of good banter. Curly hair is nice too. lol.

Before Spencer can think about it for too long his mouse clicks over that stupid little message button next to your profile. Spencer shakes his head at his own existence as he types you a message. Says you're online right now, but Spencer's sure he won't get a response for a while.

DOC187: Seems I fit who you're interested in. I even have the curly hair.

Spencer chews on his nails anxiously before he sighs at himself. He has no clue what's gotten into him belle before he can think he sees your 3-dotted bubble pop up. He feels his body wracked with nerves.

MISS—LILAC: I'm guessing you like to read and watch indie films too?

Spencer smiles. You seem interesting and the fact that the two of you were just talking normal was making Spencer happy.

DOC187: Indeed. I'm a sucker for 15-century literature and anything in Russian and foreign language. You?

MISS—LILAC: 15th century huh? I'll assume Chaucer. And Russian? You're interesting, doc. I'm more modern and English, hope you're not deterred.

Spencer smiles, surprised that you recognize an author as niche as Chaucer. He shakes his head at your commentary. He almost forgets that both of you are on a BDSM dating site and the irony doesn't escape him.

DOC187: Deterred? Never. I think you're rather interesting too, Miss Lilac.

MISS—LILAC: Ever the gentleman doc. I'm hoping you won't run away if I ask you more personal questions.

Spencer swallows. He types back quickly.

DOC187: What kinds of questions?

MISS—LILAC: If it's okay, you're real name and what you do. My names Y/N, and I'm a florist. I live in DC and I love romance novels.

Spencer smiles. He appreciates you laying down the path for him, knowing the stakes.

DOC187: My names Spencer and I work for the FBI. I also live in DC, and I love magic.

MISS—LILAC: Magic? I'd love for you to show me sometime.

Spencer swallows. Part of him feels like it's a stupid idea to ask you out so early but if you asked, he'd likely say yes. He decides to wait it out.

DOC187: I'd be more than happy to show you.

MISS—LILAC: I suppose you could send me a video but that's not the same as seeing the magic in real life, now is it?

Spencer is smiling like an idiot at this point. He shakes his head a little, jittery.

DOC187: Infinitely better live, I would say.

MISS—LILAC: Seems like I've found an excuse to ask you on a date then. Saturday's work for me but I'm sure it depends on you, FBI man. Before that, I'm gonna drop my number and I'll be expecting your call. (XXX-XXX-XXXX)

Spencer giggles. It's a little out of range for things he's used to doing, giggling aloud for someone else is certainly new. Spencer picks up his phone and dials away, anxious to call you but excited nonetheless. He heard you pick up the phone and his heart catches in his throat.

"Hello?," Your voice is smooth, and a little bit lower than he was expecting. It sounds pretty.

"Hello, Y/N," Spencer says back. He heard you laugh on the other side and can't help the way his heart flutters.

"Lovely to talk to you doc,"

"Still Doc? Not Spencer?" Spencer questions. You smile on the other side of the line.

"Doc seems to fit you. But, for the sake of formality, hello Spencer,"

"I like Doc too, but it feels like I should have a nickname for you as well. Only seems fair," Spencer says laughing quietly.

"If it's your prerogative you can call me Miss Lilac, or just Miss but..." you trail off for a minute. Spencer squints.

"Miss is a title, you know? Doesn't seem fair for you to call me that when I haven't earned it from you yet. I'm sure we'll get there but for now you can just call me Y/N," you say softly. Spencer blushes bright red, his voice betraying him as he speaks.

"O-Oh, well um - where does the name Lilac come from? Normally people go with their names when it comes to stuff like that," Spencer says shyly. He heard you laugh on the other side of the phone and blushes again, grateful you can't see him.

"I love the language of flowers and flowers themselves. It's a way to speak that not many people know - but I like the meaning and look of lilacs. White lilacs represent purity, so that was a bit of irony, but light purple lilacs mean first love," you say carefully.

"First love?," Spencer asks. You bite your lip for a moment.

"I joke that BDSM is my first love since it's such a big part of my life. Not as big as some but not small for certain. It gave me much needed confidence so I joke that it was my first," You say lightly. You hear Spencer giggle on the other side and you smile.

"What about your username? Any significance to DOC187 that I should know of?," you readjust your seat on your couch as you talk. Spencer grows a bit embarrassed.

"I normally introduce myself as Doctor Spencer Reid for work, not a medical doctor but I have three PhD's," Spencer admits. You raise your brows but hear the hesitation in his voice.

"Very, very impressive doc. What about the 187? It could be a plain ol' number but my guess would be otherwise,"

"That's my IQ, actually. I don't think intelligence can be boiled down and quantified like that but I couldn't think of anything else," Spencer explains.

"So you're a certified genius with 3 PhD's? To say I'm impressed is an understatement. Anything else impressive you'd like to tell me before I totally pick your brains," you say a little shocked.

"You wanna pick my brains?," Spencer asks. You wanna laugh at the irony of such a silly question from such an intelligent man but you refrain.

"Who wouldn't?," you say incredulously. Spencer smiles shyly.

"The only other thing is that I can read 20,000 words per minute," Spencer says trying to deflect. Your jaw dropped before but it manages to unhinge a little further.

"There's a lot to get to know about you Doctor Reid,"

"I'm sure it's the same for you," Spencer replies.

"Guess we'll have to find out won't we?," you say smiling.

Damn, Spencer got lucky. Hopefully he'd get to find out soon

_____

"Reid, are you listening?," Derek's voice snaps Spencer out of his entranced state. His smiling expression snaps up to look at Derek who looks a little exasperated.

"Sorry, what was that?," Spencer asks back. Derek puts down the case file they were working on. They had just finished a case and needed to complete some paperwork before submitting it for review and to be used in court. The job was given to him and Morgan and Spencer was evidently distracted.

"Alright, kid - what is up with you? All case you've been checking your phone non-stop and spacing out, all smiles and giggles. C'mon now kid, seriously. You got a little lady at home waiting for you or is there something else I don't know about?," Derek interrogates. Spencer doesn't really know what to make of it, though it's not really in his interest to hide you, it hasn't really come up with anyone on the team yet so it was proving difficult to decide what to do. The smile on his face manages to appear again as he starts to think about you, the tips of his ears red.

"Reid," Morgan says again, with a small look of irritation.

"Her names Y/N," Spencer blurts out faster than he can't think. Derek gives him a huge grin, holding his hand out to dap Spencer up. Spencer just looks at it confused for a second before getting the memo.

"'My man," Derek says chuckling. Before Spencer can continue Prentiss, JJ, and Garcia walk in. Hotch is the only one missing, and Spencer's a little grateful.

"What are we celebrating in here you guys?," Prentiss asks first. Spencer goes to say something to move away from his sudden confession but Derek is quick to cut him off.

"Our boy genius over here got him a little lady," Derek announces. The whole team erupts in questions and Spencer wants to bury himself.

"Congratulations, Spencer!! How long have you two been dating?," Prentiss asks.

"You guys are so dramatic. It's only been two months but no first date because well..." Spencer trails off. JJ just nods her head.

"Duty calls, I'm guessing" JJ finishes. Spencer nods deflated hearing Emily draw a breath between her teeth.

"That's tough, Spence,"

Just as Spencer goes to give a response back he gets a text from you that makes his day a little better. It's a selfie of you at work, a picture your employee must've taken of you in a room full of new flower deliveries. You're giving Spencer a toothy grin as you hold a bunch of gardenias in your hand.

Y/N 🌸: *image attachment* 

Gardenias// You're lovely + Secret Love <33

Spencer cannot control the way his whole face bunches up in a smile, as if there's no one else in the room with him. Everyone just looks at him surprised, Garcia giving him a side-eye.

"How can you guys trust this stranger? We don't even know who she is! I haven't even run any background checks on her," Garcia complains. Prentiss nudges her side.

"I don't know if it matters - look at how hard he's smiling over there," Prentiss says. Garcia reluctantly looks and can't help but sigh.

"Okay well he seems really happy but still! We don't even know her," she pouts.

"I'm sure we'll meet her soon," JJ snickers at Spencer's lovestruck expression. Derek leans over Spencer's shoulder and raises his brows.

"Is that her, kid?," Derek asks. Spencer nods, simply staring at the picture you sent. Derek whistles when he sees you - you're genuinely stunning and he's surprised to say the least.

"Hot mama, pretty boy - how'd you manage that?," Derek asks, dumbfounded. Emily rolls her eyes.

"C'mon Derek, I'm sure - oh wow," Emily leans over Spencer's shoulder to see you and is met with the same reaction. JJ and Garcia are quick to follow thereafter, both looking equally as surprised.

"She's..." JJ trails off. The rest of the team just nods as Spencer grins ear to ear.

Spencer 🐻: Beautiful, as always.

Spencer ignores the rest of the team as they look at each other in disbelief.

Y/N🌸: Me or the flowers, Doc?

Spencer🐻: Both, but mostly you.

"Wow, Spencer you're really -" Prentiss starts

"You're whipped, kid. I mean seriously whipped," Derek finishes, nodding in agreement. JJ can't help but smile, giving Spencer a small pat on the back.

"She seems lovely, Spencer. How'd you two meet?," JJ says. Garcia stands around looking rather suspicious. A blush creeps onto Spencer's neck as he's reminded of how you two met.

"Online," Spencer says shortly. No one decides to question it, and Spencer thanks every god he can think of.

"Have you two FaceTimed yet? How can we know she's not, I don't know - catfishing you? Or scamming you in some other cyber criminal way?," Garcia sounds distressed. Spencer gives a small smile.

"We fall asleep over FaceTime every night," Spencer admits. Penelope's expression falls, and Prentiss gives a smile.

"That is disgustingly cute," JJ says laughing.

"Okay, well - I'm still running a background check on her," Garcia says stubbornly "But, I'm happy for you,"

"Thanks Garcia," Spencer mumbles out as he texts you again.

Y/N🌸: I wanna see you, love

Spencer blushes red as he reads your message. The word love makes his whole face hot.

Spencer🐻: I can't take a selfie for my life

Y/N🌸: You're with your team aren't you? Get them to take a picture of you.

Spencer wants to fold away, not ever really being the picture type, but how could he ever deny you.

Spencer🐻: How could I ever say no to you?

"Hey guys, can one of you take a picture of me for Y/N?" Spencer asks embarrassingly red. The whole team sends him a look of surprise.

"I'll take it Spence, try not to look as uncomfortable as you do right now," JJ says. The whole team refrains from laughing as Spencer gives an awkward smile. He thanks JJ who hands him back his phone before texting you again.

Spencer🐻: *image attachment* You owe me one

Y/N🌸: you're stunning as always. hadn't seen you in so long I almost forgot what you looked like.

Spencer🐻: stunnings an interesting choice of words.

Y/N🌸: I said what I said, doc. 

Spencer can't help but do a little giggle, that causes the whole team to give him a look. Morgan just shakes his head, shrugging. Emily, JJ, and Garcia just look at each other before the room draws into a subtle but comfortable silence as Spencer just smiles, totally unaware of how whipped he happened to look. He didn’t seem to mind either way. 

___

"How was work?," Spencer asks over the phone, kicking his shoes off as he looks into his fridge for something to eat. He hears you sigh on the other side of the line.

"Busy today - wedding season is coming up so tons of calls for centerpiece designs and costs. It's going well though, business couldn't be better," you say, clearly tired yet content. Spencer gives a small smile and feels relieved that things are going okay for you.

"That's really good. I'm glad you're feeling alright," Spencer replies. You ease into the couch as you talk to Spencer, relaxing by the second. 

"What about you, FBI man? You have an okay day?," Your voice is full of a gentle concern that Spencer appreciates.

"Yeah, just paperwork and JJ said that we shouldn't have any upcoming cases this week to be worried about so I have the weekend off," Spencer says without thought.

"Have any special plans for the weekend?," you say cheekily. Spencer, still not having caught on, shakes his head for a second.

"No, why?,"

"Hm... well - would you like to go on a date with me then Doctor Reid?," You ask, giggling. Spencer's eyes widen in realization as he facepalms for a moment.

"Wow, I didn't even think... yes - yes I would love to go on a date with you Y/N," Spencer says laughing at his own misfortune. You shake your head instinctively, but the growing smile and even further growing adoration makes it hard to sit still.

"Hey, Spencer," you say, butterflies filling your stomach.

"Yeah?"

"I really like you,"

____

Saturday comes quicker than Spencer can really understand. You told him not to worry about what the days plans would be but he can't help it. Anxiously awaiting you in front of the cafe that the two of you were supposed to meet at, in a part of town Spencer hasn't really seen before. You said that you'd lead the way and the irony isn't lost on him.

"Spencer?," Your voice is small, as you call out to what you think is Spencer Reid. Of course, you'd seen him before but to see him in person like this was still so unfamiliar. His head shoots up, eyes searching for you. He's delighted to have found you, certainly that was true as he walks towards you. Your arms envelop him in a friendly hug and he can't help but find himself sinking into. You smelled sweet, like fruit and flowers (which makes sense, the more he thinks about it)

"Lovely to finally meet you, Y/N,"

"Same goes for you, doc. Would you like to be informed of our plans for the day, or do you prefer the element of surprise?,"  You ask smiling. Spencer laughs at your question.

"Details would be appreciated, but I get the feeling you're not gonna give me those."

"You're right! It's a trick question, since it's a surprise. But, promise it'll be good,"

"I'll take your word for it then," Spencer says with a small smile. You hold your hand out for Spencer which he accepts, locking his hands with yours. The affection makes him feel full of warmth, as you lead him away for the day you had planned for the both of you.

___

Spencer underestimated how well you knew him. He really, really did. It's hard to explain since Spencers been on a date before but this was so profoundly different. He's a little touched, but beyond that he's just.. surprised? Every date he'd been on before this, he'd have to play the gentleman but it never seemed like the other person was interested in just him. It was always casual small-talk over dinner, or a mid-day coffee date or something else that just felt mundane but this was beyond Spencer's imagination.

The first place you took him was a bookstore - which was in Spencers mind already a winner for best date he'd ever been on. You walked inside with him and told him he had to pick up a book for you and you had to pick up a book for him and to say his heart absolutely fluttered would be an understatement. He picked up up a copy of "The Screwtape Tales," by C.S. Lewis for you, and you gave him a copy of Shel Silverstein's "Where The Sidewalk Ends." For you, you got a glimpse to see what Spencer's sense of humor was and you gave Spencer a piece of your childhood. Both equal but opposite forms of intimacy. The only thing was Spencer had to wait to read his book because it's relatively shorter than yours and he reads 20,000 words per minute.

The next place you took Spencer was an indoor butterfly garden. Does he have to explain why that's a good date? He heard you talk about all the scientific names for the different flowers and why they attract butterflies and he wasn't sure he could crush any harder on you if he tried. A particular moment sticks out to him on which a butterfly landed on your shoulders and just stayed there like it didn't want to leave. Spencer's eyes were fixated on it the whole time - and he had never wanted to be a butterfly in his life before but he figures there's a first time for everything.

The last place, where the both of you were at now was just a small coffee shop, locally owned and supported by the community here. You told Spencer that when you started up your shop, you'd come in here to work on big orders before you'd expanded enough to have employees. Spencer admires your work ethic, much more than he could ever anticipate as he sits down at a small booth, totally covering the both of you as you return to the table with a little plate of banana bread and two iced coffees. Spencer pouts as he looks up at you, watching you flash him a grin.

"I could've helped you carry this over," Spencer complains gently. You roll your eyes.

"Maybe next time doc," you say softly. You hold back your commentary often on the date, and Spencer pretends not to notice for your sake but he'd be lying if he said he didn't wanna know. You always had something sly to say but you'd kept it from him so many times now he figures it's better if he didn't ask.

Spencer looks at you as you push a plate of banana bread towards him. He looks at you with curious eyes before reading your clearly excited face and laughs. He picks up a piece and examines it, before taking a bite. If it tasted as good as it smelled then he would be more than obliged.

The involuntary moan that escapes Spencer's throat makes you choke with laughter. Shit, you weren't kidding when you said this was the best banana bread in the city. Spencer just looks up at you like he's about to cry with joy as you double over in giggles.

"I know," You say softly, taking a bite yourself eyes filling with joy "I ordered some more for us to take home - you're welcome," you say with confidence. Spencer smiles because that is genuinely thoughtful, but it was more endearing to see you pretend it wasn't. He just shakes his head, a blush arising to his face as he looks at you. You're staring at him with intent. He quirks his brow at you in question.

"I had a good time today, Spencer" You say warmly. You only called him Spencer when you were saying something affectionate and a bit serious. He gives you a toothy smile.

"I haven't been on very many dates, but this was easily the best one I'd ever been on," Spencer says honestly. You grin ear to ear, hands carefully holding Spencer across the table, running your thumb over his knuckles for a few seconds. You couldn't say for sure whether it was too soon to ask him to be your boyfriend, but you'd be damned if you said it didn't cross your mind.

Spencer was mind-numbingly unaware of what good boyfriend material he was, but beyond that - what good submissive boyfriend material he was. It was driving you nuts, but you knew this was all new for him and you didn't wanna freak him out. Even when guys say they're interested in being submissive, they're still often times uncomfortable with you being fully dominant. Dominant in public and in bed, if you will. You wanted to pay for dates, and buy him flowers, and make him feel special too - at least on the occasion. That role came naturally to you, that let me make you feel owned type affection that only a dominant person can give. It scared men off - out of relationships, and you totally got why - but you liked Spencer too much as a person to risk iit.

Spencer holds your hands together, gathering your attention. You looked at him spaced out and he gives you a look of concern.

"You okay?," Spencer asks. You nod, chewing your lip in debate of whether or not you should express your concerns. Spencer just tugs on your hand and looks at you intently.

You sigh, looking at Spencer softly.

"I'm okay I just really like you," you say a little exasperated. Spencer laughs but is filled with relief.

"I'm glad to hear that. What else is on your mind?,"

"I really like you - like in an, I want you to officially by my boyfriend way and I hope it's not too soon but I'm just, worried I guess," you say nervously. Spencer can't help the way his heart beats in his chest when he hears you say boyfriend. God did he want to be your boyfriend.

"What're you worried about?,"

"I'm worried about freaking you out. I can be a lot since I'm... you know?," You say nervously. Spencer looks at you  to continue.

"I'm more than just dominant in bed, and for a lot of guys it's not their thing and that's their right but I like you so much. I really don't want that to happen if I ask you out now and you realize that it's not for you," you say in clear upset.

Spencer looks at you in disbelief. You were worried that he was gonna freak out over that? That you were too dominant for him? It feels like such a silly concern but the expression on your face tells him you're speaking from experience.

"I mean, it's all kinda new to me but, well - I do like how you treat me? It's a nice change, I can't imagine myself getting tired of it, or of you. I really like you too," Spencer tried his best to reassure you without totally embarrassing you. You smiles at Spencer but your face is still full of doubt.

"If that ever changes, I'll tell you but I'd really like to call you my girlfriend," Spencer finishes. You can't help the warmth that spreads in your stomach at the offer. You just nod, looking up at him. You stand and walk to Spencer's side of the booth, sliding in next to him, leaning your head into his shoulder for a few while seconds. You sit back up, and Spencer turns to you.

"Hey, doc," you say softly. Spencer hums in acknowledgement.

"Can I kiss you?," you ask softly. Spencer chews his lip and nods, looking down at your lip. You're wearing lipgloss and it makes them look pretty - you are so pretty to Spencer.

Kisses are their own language, Spencer figures. The way someone kisses you can tell you a lot about who they are - so, when you put your hands on the side of Spencer's face, pulling him closer to you with such care and adoration - Spencer can feel what you were referencing earlier. The word Miss rings out in his mind, the way you pay attention to him with your hands. He feels your lips press against his, slowly gliding your fingers in his hair, thumb brushing agains the side of his cheek. Your other hand rested on his inner thigh and he has to think about anything other than that not to get hard. Spencer didn't get how much he'd been thinking about touching you until you'd do with no hesitation and he lets out a small whine. You pull back and Spencer has to catch his breath.

His lashes blink up at you and you're absolutely beaming.

"You're cute baby,"

Baby? Spencer wants to cover his face when you say it. You kiss him again and he can't help but feel flush.

You were Spencer's girlfriend and then some and he couldn't be more happy.

[marvel-lucy]

The Ultimate Weapon, chapter 1

At the request of an anonymous, I’m going to post this fic here, instead of AO3. This was the first fic I ever wrote and some of it makes me cringe so hard, but if I didn’t start, I wouldn’t have ever written all the other things that make me cringe! :D

Something was different. I concentrated on keeping my breathing light and my eyes closed, so it would look as if I was still asleep, but focussed my senses to try and work out what had woken me up. I could see light through my eyelids – unusual as I was usually kept in the dark but I’d been left in bright light as a form of torture often enough that it wasn’t that. I was lying on something softer than I was used to. No hard metal or concrete floor here, and I was covered with… blankets? I was warm, this was definitely not normal, I had been cold for so very long that I’d forgotten the sheer luxury of warmth. I resisted the urge to stretch out and let my muscles relax in the pleasurable warmth, I needed more data.

My skin felt sensitive, I could almost feel each thread on the pillow – wait, a pillow?! – against my cheek, and it struck me that I was…clean. I’d been hosed down with cold water often enough but I had no memory of that happening recently. I moved my arm slightly and realised that my muscles, although sore, were not bearing the usual pains on moving, the usual agonies of torture. Was that what had woken me? For so long – long enough I had no concept of time – I had been tortured, that to not feel pain was terrifying. Then I heard something move, behind me where I lay on my side and my breathing caught. That was what had woken me, I was not alone. I opened my eyes a slit and looked around, I was in a clean, pale room. The light on my eyelids was from a large window in front of me, with pale green curtains softening the light that was shining through. I hadn’t seen daylight for too long to remember, was this some new form of torture? Moving my eyes around as far as I could, I saw carpet, sheets, and what looked like an IV stand near me – then realised that I could feel a needle in my arm. Nothing new there, I had regular doses of serum when I came too close to death, but this didn’t feel like the icy terror of the serum injections. I heard something behind me again, the shushing of fabric as someone crossed their legs perhaps, and I knew I had to act

Faster than a normal human could act, I had rolled out of the bed, grabbing the IV stand and breaking it in half to act as a weapon, pulling the needle out of my arm, and rolling to the corner of the room where I crouched, back against the wall, and faced my companion

Beside the bed, a man was just standing up, startled, from a chair. He had tangled dark hair and glasses, and was holding a book he’d obviously been reading. He looked afraid as he stumbled over his words, flapping his hands in a ‘calm down’ manner

‘I’m Bruce… um, hey, it’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you, let’s keep everything calm… hey, um Jarvis, can you let the team know she’s awake?

He stood there, half in and half out of the chair and watched me. I continued to assess the room. This was new. What was this, suck me in with niceness and gentle treatment so that when they took it away, it would hurt more? They’d have to work harder than that, I was used to that – if I expressed hunger, they took away food; if I expressed thirst, same with water. Without meaning to, I growled in my throat – it had been a long time since I’d spoken, and my throat was often damaged from screaming so I often resorted to animal noises

The man looked afraid again and peered at the door, perhaps hoping to see a horde of Hydra agents come bursting in ready to restrain me. From nowhere, a voice spoke: ‘Captain Rogers and Mr. Stark are on their way Dr Banner. The rest of the team are currently watching surveillance footage in the board room so as not to overwhelm our guest’. Where the hell had that come from? I scanned the room for anything else I could use as a weapon, there wasn’t much in the room but with sheets to tangle someone in, the wooden chair to break apart, a lightbulb to shatter, there was plenty I could use. I started edging forwards, not quite clear yet if I was going for the man or the door, when the door opened and two more men came in

One was short-ish, dark haired and with a goatee. The other was tall, blond and very well-built. Instant assessments of the situation took place ��� take out the two smaller men first, the taller man would be harder to take down, but I had no qualms about my ability. Hydra had yet to find someone I couldn’t best, whether hand-to-hand or mind-to-mind

The darker man spoke. ‘Ah I see our guest is awake, Jarvis how inconsiderate, we didn’t have a fruit basket ready as a welcome gift. See to it for next time?’. This wasn’t how these things usually went. I felt off-kilter. The lack of pain, the sunlight, the comfort, and now… jokes? Hydra weren’t known for being a laugh a minute

‘That’s enough Tony’ said the blond man. He stepped forward to wear I was still half-crouched near the wall, frozen by indecision. This wasn’t like me. I stood up straight, holding the broken IV stand weapon-ready. He stopped walking, just outside my reach, and folded his arms. ‘I’m Captain Rogers. Steve. You’re safe here. We’re with SHIELD. Well, we were, I mean, now we’re not because they’re gone, but... Now we’re independent. The Avengers? We rescued… you’. His voice tailed off as I stared at him blankly. ‘Do you speak English?’ I nodded, once, but didn’t relax. Whatever test this was, I had to keep myself ready.

The smaller man kicked the door closed, making us all start, and walked forward. He threw himself on the bed, arms behind his head and grinned. ‘So this is a good start. You’ve weaponised some medical equipment, Cap’s making no sense, Bruce is terrified that something’s going to trigger the big guy, and quite frankly, I have not had enough coffee for this’. He sat up quickly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.

All of this had taken just moments since I woke up. I felt bleary, as if I’d been drugged, and was starting to wonder if perhaps I was dreaming all this. A comfortable room, pain medication (I assumed that was what had been in the IV). I realised I was wearing a hospital gown, open at the back, but had long since lost all sense of self-consciousness about nudity. My body was a weapon and clothes were often irrelevant – plus Hydra chose when I was and wasn’t allowed them. I was warm, and nobody was hurting me. The first man was hovering near the chair still, looking concerned. Blond was standing and staring at me. Goatee was sitting on the bed and smiling.

I licked my lips, my mouth was dry. My voice, when I spoke, sounded unfamiliar and gravelly. I knew I’d be punished for speaking without permission, but even so, I spoke: ‘what the hell is this?’. Seconds later, adrenaline kicked in and I’d grabbed the man on the bed before anyone could move, and was holding the jagged end of the IV stand to his throat. My reaction had been so quick that it was only as I stood there that I realised that what had made me jump was him… laughing. The laughing had stopped abruptly as I’d grabbed him, and the two other men were now standing, frozen, unsure what to do. Both had jumped up but my reactions were always faster than anyone else’s and so they were still mid-move when they’d stopped.

I spoke again. ‘What the HELL is this?’

----

This is an ancient tag list, I won’t be offended if you ask to be taken off! @melconnor2007​ @avengerscompound @kittyslove​ @badassbaker​ @phoenix21love​ @lbouvet​  @bellenuit45​ @prplprincez​  @gingerrootknits​ @pineapplebooboo​ @feelmyroarrrr​ @avengerofyourheart​ @eyeofdionysus​ @hellomissmabel​ @learisa​  @mitra-k-w​ @imhereforbvcky​ @shaddixlife​ @supernatural-girl97​ @iwillbeinmynest​ @amrita31199 @algud​ @whatsbetterthanfantasy​ @pixierox101​ @edward-lover18 @madcheshire89​ @heartfulloffandoms @chipilerendi​ @kenya-17 @mckorni32843​ @amandarosemire​ @rda89 @nyxveracity @sea040561​ @mrsalh32611​ @ruinerofcheese​ @callmebucky-doll​ @vintagepigeon​ @bubbasmom @sassycanoodler​ @ladylorelitany @natcad​ @thisismysecrethappyplace​ @geeksareunique​ @mywinterwolf​  @moderapoppins​ @rinthehufflepuff @holyfuckloueh​ @onebatch--twobatch​ @jaqui-has-a-conspiracy-theory @patzammit @procrastinatingart1st @princess76179​ @marvelouspottering​  @fangirlanotherjust​   @notyourtypicalrose​ @princess-rene​ @miraclesoflove​ @scarletluvscas @inlovewithjamesbarnes @mizzzpink​ @rand0mfangurlstuff @ occasionalwritingsofmia @tony-stank3​ @creepylittlemarvelgirl @som3thingcr3ative  @miraclesoflove​ @ishouldbewritingx @palaiasaurus64 

[jiyeong]

bmblb flowershop au

been CRAVING this for weeks so i wrote one on twitter and im gonna do a post here too so i don’t lose it in my 43k tweets in case i ever do anything more with it (’: but here’s my bee flowershop au pls enjoy. it’s set in late spring/early summer

yang, age 18 and freshly out of highschool, gets her driver’s license and immediately asks for a motorcycle. taiyang gives her the keys to the family minivan instead and tells her if she wants a deathmobile, she can get a job and buy it herself

she’s walking down the main shopping street looking for job opportunities when she sees a cute girl putting up a “help wanted” sign outside a flowershop. it’s blake. the cute girl is blake.

it’s a delivery job and she applies immediately and gets it mostly because she’s the only one who applied, but ironically also because the minivan is big enough to hold large bouquets, has a 5star safety rating, and also does not go faster than 35mph so its extremely unlikely that she will be in any accidents lol

blake’s family’s shop is very popular, and they do a lot of weddings and big events. it’s an on-call job and she gets called in maybe once or twice a week. it’s always blake calling her in, and they always have a nice chat before she has to go deliver the flowers

she finds out blake is the owner’s only daughter, so she’s probably off limits so like ok. disappointing but whatever it’s easy money and she gets to talk to a hot girl every time she goes to work so this is fine

but then she starts getting some really weird deliveries...

the first one is to a wrestling tournament at some prep school. it’s for a boy (sun wukong, the delivery slip says) who giggles like a little schoolgirl as soon as he sees her coming with the flowers, and before he’ll sign for the delivery, starts talking to her about sports and her workout routines, etc

he’s a nice guy, they talk for a bit, and she asks if he got the flowers because he won and he says no, it’s the nationals and he made third place. the whole time he’s grinning like it’s some kind of inside joke, so that’s what she figures it is.

when she goes back to the flowershop, she tells blake about it, about how weird it was delivering to a wrestling tourney of all things- and she’s laughing too.

yang mentions looking at the delivery slip and that she’s never heard of the flowers before. this gets blake GOING.

she tells her that they’re ranunculus flowers, more commonly known as buttercups in some other flowershops, and that they symbolize attraction, that you find someone charming.

“huh. guess he has some big fan out there,” yang laughs.

“yeah,” blake smiles softly, “guess so.”

the second time it happens, it’s a delivery to some small town fashion magazine publisher. this time, blake mentions the flowers before yang leaves.

it is a mixture of carnations,lilies, and white orchids, and they all symbolize, to some degree, beauty. yang supposes it’s fitting considering she’s going to a fashion magazine, i guess??? this makes blake laugh a bit. yang thinks her laugh is really very cute.

the flowers are for a velvet scarlatina. yang notices her fidgeting as she drops them off in her office. it’s not a nervous fidget, more like she’s excited but is a bit too shy to say and doesn’t know how to express it, maybe?

so yang asks. velvet’s surprised by the question, but she smiles and tells her anyways. she’s just been promoted to lead photographer, she’ll have an entire photo editing department to lead starting tomorrow, and it’s probably the biggest thing that’s ever happened to her. it’s exciting! she’s excited! yang congratulates her, she’s genuinely happy for this girl. she seems like a hard worker.

as yang turns to leave, velvet stops her, holds up a camera slowly, and softly asks if she can take yang’s picture. to test out her new lens, she adds.

it’s a little weird, but okay; artsy people are always weird, yang’s smokin hot on a normal day, AND she’s having an incredible hair day today, if she does say so herself. so she agrees. before she leaves, velvet hands her a small rabbit’s foot, “for good luck.”

this time, yang tells both blake and ruby/weiss about it. blake seems amused, but doesn’t say much, and ruby immediately demands to see the rabbit’s foot charm.

while ruby is occupied by the charm, weiss asks yang how her new job is going. yang gets stuck talking about blake, how cute she is and how smart she is and how nice she is. her smile and her face and her voice.

at this point even ruby’s tuned back in.

so, they do what any good sister/sister’s weirdly obsessive girlfriend would do. they tag along the next time she gets called in to work.

ruby and weiss immediately drift to a section of shop on their own, distracted. ruby’s picking out a bouquet of roses for weiss (ugh, yang thinks) as yang walks to the counter where blake sits. this time the bouquet is simple, made of only one flower: gardenias.

“it symbolizes purity and love,” blake tells her.

“wow i feel like 90% of these flowers symbolize purity and love,” yang jokes. it makes blake chuckle, so very softly, and yang feels like a hammer has dropped in her chest. love. oh no.

“probably accurate. gardenias though, if you were wishing to send someone your undying love anonymously, you would send them gardenias,” blake muses, eyes drifting over to ruby and weiss making a fuss in the corner. “it’s a symbol for a secret love.”

yang’s head is screaming. oh no.

yang ends up leaving (ditching) ruby and weiss there with blake.

the flowers are being sent to the same prep school as the wrestling tournament, but instead of the gym she’s headed for the locker rooms. there’s a sign for a track meet today, and the flowers are for an ilia amitola, some star on the team, yang guesses, as she walks through the school.

ilia is the only one still in there, and yang senses the hostility immediately.

ilia absolutely GRILLS her, there’s no other way to describe it. she asks her question after question about her tastes, her hobbies, her personal life. it’s a little intimidating, and yang is still sort of distracted from her revelation at the flowershop (oh nO) so she answers them all.

ilia’s quiet for a bit at the end before signing the slip and letting yang go.

“don’t fuck it up,” she says as yang’s leaving the room. what the hell???

when she gets home she immediately storms into ruby’s room.

“i think im in love with her,” she’s freaking out. pacing. weiss is in there too, because of course she is, and they’re both just staring at her blankly.

apparently, it was obvious.

“I don’t know why you’re freaking out,” weiss huffs. “when was the last time you dated a girl? like, actually, with feelings??”

“shut UP weiss you’re not invited to this conversation. ruby, sweet ruby, my wonderful adorable baby sister with a strange addiction to model guns and extremely violent shooting games, how the fuck do i get over the cute flower girl that makes me feel like i want to bash my head against the concrete??”

“uhhh well, for one, i think weiss has great ideas so im re-inviting her into the conversation. (”thank you,” weiss huffs, because she was raised to be polite even while offended) and two, just, like, uhhh don’t???”

they convince yang to confess to blake. but yang’s like ok it’s been a while since ive had actual, swear-to-god, feelings, so she wants to do something ROMANTIC. something BIG. something GAY.

yang’s saved up a nice chunk of cash from her job - and okay, who needs a motorcycle when you could get a girlfriend? and like, okay, blake works at the shop, so she’s not quite sure if flowers are an appropriate idea, but she’s literally always reading books on flower meanings and flower dictionaries and looking at natgeo magazines etc so she watches shia lebeouf’s just do it video and why the hell not

but she has to do it right - and she asks the only flower experts she knows other than blake. blake’s parents. she wants to get their okay as well anyways - she’d quit if she had to - so it’s like two birds one stone. but yang’s been charming them since her interview, and they’re almost strangely enthusiastic about helping set up their only daughter.

she gets weiss to place the order, because ruby can’t stop giggling on the phone. it’s a HUGE bouquet - full of every flower that symbolizes love that mr & mrs belladonna recommended her. it’s almost embarrassing listening to weiss list the flowers and knowing that blake is the one receiving the order.

the bouquet is so huge that yang insists that she needs help carrying it. conveniently, ruby and weiss are busy doing something gay, so they aren’t free to help her. blake raises her eyebrow when her parents send her off with yang to help. yang thinks it’s very attractive.

the address is a meadow right on the outskirts of town. lots of rolling hills, lots of swaying trees, the sky is clear and you can already see the moon even though it isn’t nighttime yet. it’s all very scenic, a perfect wedding venue. it’s late afternoon when they leave the shop.

“preparing for a wedding so late in the day is so strange,” blake comments on the way there, playing with the radio stations like she owns the van. it makes yang’s heart clench. can you die early from too much feeling? how awful. “what eccentric people, to be having their ceremony so late at night.”

“aha... y-yeah, eccentric people for sure,” yang sweats.

they park on the hill, and there’s no one there. blake steps out of the van, confused. she’s looking at the sunset and it’s as picture perfect as she thought it would be, but where is everyone?

and when she turns around, yang is holding the very large bouquet perfectly fine on her own. she almost shoves it into blake’s face.

“they’re for you,” yang blurts out immediately. “i’m the eccentric people.”

blake’s all ??? for a second. and then it sinks in and she’s laughing because, “do you know how much these flowers cost? did you literally spend all your money on a bouquet of flowers for me, a florist’s daughter who is literally around flowers all day?”

turns out blake has also been spending her money on bouquets for all of her friends uncharacteristically often, with their consent of course, just to get the cute new delivery girl into the store more so she could see her and maybe have a chat. they’ve been returning the flowers with small favors of their own - non-consensual blake makes sure to point out - namely, yang’s favorite workout spots, some really cute not-at-all-candid pictures of yang, and what basically amounted to, yup u guessed it, an entire autobiography of yang herself. god.

they kiss as the sun’s last rays are fading, laughing, on a hill almost an hour’s drive away in a rusty old minivan, and over a ridiculously unnecessary amount of flowers. it’s pretty fuckin gay.

[alanafsmith]

Some of Trump's top-most advisers have reportedly discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, which lets 14 people remove a sitting president from office

The 25th Amendment formally outlines the transition of power if the president is unable or unfit to serve.

Section IV allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to remove the president from office.

Americans have been particularly interested in the amendment since President Donald Trump took office.

Yet another report indicates that President Donald Trump's top-most advisers have discussed using the Constitution to remove him from office.

In September 2018, an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, claiming there's a "quiet resistance" undermining the president.

The official wrote that "there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment."

Later that month, The New York Times, citing anonymous officials who were briefed on the meetings, reported that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein discussed invoking it in conversations with other Justice Department officials after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director in May 2017.

And on Thursday, CBS revealed that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe told "60 Minutes" that he and other Justice Department officials met to discuss whether they could get a majority of Cabinet members to remove Trump from office after Comey's firing. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018.

Trump himself reportedly didn't know what the 25th Amendment did. When former adviser Steve Bannon told him early in his term that it posed the biggest threat to his presidency, according to Vanity Fair, Trump said, "What's that?"

Read more: A senior member of the Trump administration says they are part of a secret resistance working against the president in the White House

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Congress proposed and the states ratified the 25th Amendment in 1967 to formally outline the transition of power. Before that, the vice president didn't officially have the power to take over.

The amendment states that if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office, the vice president becomes president. If there is a vacancy in the vice presidency for any reason, the president can choose someone to fill it.

And if the president is unable to fulfill his duties — like when President George W. Bush was under general anesthesia for colonoscopies in 2002 and 2007 — he can temporarily transfer his powers to the vice president, and get them back when he's done.

But Section IV is what some liberals have been frantically searching for more information on, because it could be a way to legally remove Trump from office.

A legal loophole to legally remove the president

Under the amendment's fourth stipulation, it would only take 14 people to depose the president — Vice President Mike Pence and 13 of Trump's 24 Cabinet members.

Section IV reads:

"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."

John D. Feerick, former dean of Fordham Law School, is one of the chief architects of the 25th Amendment who shepherded it through Congress in the early 1960s.

He told Business Insider in March 2017 that the senators who signed the provision into law specified that declaring the president unfit must rely on "reliable facts regarding the president's physical or mental faculties," not personal prejudice.

"If you read the debates, it's also clear that policy and political differences are not included, unpopularity is not included, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness, or impeachable conduct — none of that, you'll find in the debates in the congressional record, is intended to be covered by Section IV," Feerick said.

Policy and political differences, unpopularity, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness, or impeachable conduct — none of that is intended to be covered by section IV.

Section IV goes on to say that if two-thirds of both houses of Congress don't vote to uphold the decision and keep the vice president in charge within 21 days, then the powers and duties automatically transfer back to the president. So if the president doesn't want to give up his office, Feerick explained, he doesn't have to if Congress agrees he shouldn't.

Akhil Reed Amar, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale University, said in a podcast for the National Constitution Center on the topic that the president's own running mate is the one who triggers a "palace coup," in order to maintain political stability.

"Here's the key point: The vice president is the pivot in the whole process," Amar said. "Unless the vice president puts himself — maybe one day, herself — forward, no one else can really basically, at least within the 25th Amendment framework, proclaim an unwilling president 'disabled.'"

The idea is that the Cabinet and VP are the president's closest advisers, Feerick said, so they would be the ones with the best sense of his mental faculties. They, and Congress, could also consult doctors to evaluate the president's physical and mental health in order to determine if he or she is fit for the job, though they don't have to.

The 25th Amendment is a separate process from impeachment, which allows Congress to remove a sitting president if a majority of the House of Representatives votes that he has committed treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and a trial in the Senate convicts him.

In either case, legal scholars argue, the goal is to make the process as objective as possible.

"In a time like this of unusual crisis, one had to count on leaders in the executive branch and Congress to really be patriots, not partisans," Joel K. Goldstein, a constitutional expert at St. Louis University, said at a symposium that Fordham Law School hosted in September.

A renewed interest in the 25th Amendment since Trump took office

Americans have been brushing up on their knowledge of the Constitution during Trump's presidency, according to Google Trends data.

The search term "25th Amendment" spiked in popularity after Trump took office, particularly after he signed the controversial travel bans, and after he tweeted an edited video of him body slamming CNN.

The two highest data points for Google searches were after the senior official wrote the anonymous op-ed in The Times, and after former Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee responded to a tweetstorm Trump went on about him in October 2017. "It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center," Corker tweeted. "Someone obviously missed their shift this morning."

Interest was also rejuvenated amid the release of the explosive book, "Fire and Fury" — whose author, Michael Wolff, said the amendment was brought up "all the time" in the White House.

Feerick, who didn't discuss applying Section IV to Trump, said he hopes this renewed interest in the Constitution will encourage Congress to consider filling some of the legal gaps in the amendment that he and other legal scholars have proposed over the years.

For example, the Constitution doesn't outline what happens if the vice president is unable to serve, and he and other experts agree that the order of succession shouldn't include members of Congress as it does today.

"It's important that people be educated about the Constitution. It's our greatest charter of liberty," Feerick said. "I'm really happy that there's greater education going on — I'm obviously not happy about all the division in the country — but I'm happy that at least there's greater education being provided about the amendment."

SEE ALSO: Here are all the top advisers who have been fired or resigned from the Trump administration so far

DON'T MISS: A senior member of the Trump administration says he is part of a secret resistance working against the president in the White House

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is how impeachment works — and what a president would have to do to be impeached

from All About Law https://www.businessinsider.com/25th-amendment-how-can-you-remove-president-from-office-2017-3

[hyungkyun]

okay. okay. first of all, i can't believe you are attacking me like this????? why did u make me see that picture of jh......... with that hair....... and that stupid coat??? denim jacket..... wtf???? but u didn't even stop there. i could've survived that..... u had to put biker jooheon in my head...... what the fuck..... what the fuck. i can't get it out now, thanks a lot, I'm gonna cry myself to sleep tonight. u go die ::::((((( i vow to take revenge [1]

did u see the one i tagged u in this morning :) icb ur bf is so pretty? red lips to match the red beret? wow!! he sure knows what u like :))) cant wait to know ur url so i can actually tag u in stuff and annoy the hell out of u >>:)))

also ????? ur bf saved xmas…..icb he wrote a song for us grinch lonely ppl….thank u mr. lee :-0

Anonymous said:god honestly???? when I saw them live it was incredible??? Like….. i couldn’t believe they were real… they were tHeRE. uhdnjcjdjxjd. they were so nice :(((( it was a great day :( i almost cried tbh….. I’m not even making sense, I’m just rambling like an idiot :/ // “its a cold night and u decided to go to??? the city fair?????? and u buy warm street food bc its?? rly cold” u can’t blame me for this, at this point you’re making urself emo……. I’m not even doing anything….. [2]

FKJFH please i understand the rambling :// i spent this summer watching vids of ppl who went to their concerts and did hi-touch and stuff and i think i cried sfkjsdh i hope to get to see them live someday :( their performances are rly out of this world sigh

and shut h the fukckp ip???? he looked like a bf at a city fair what am i supposed to do…..lie to myself…..maybe i should….itd hurts less………..

Anonymous said:also omgmckcxnx that picture with hyungwon….. thank u god. not to be like this but hyungwon’s forehead is like. there. out there. what a treasure. // you’re so soft for ck’s messy hair, I’d say it’s cute but u attacked me quite viciously earlier so >:( think of ck’s fluffy mushroom hair when he wakes up from ur nap date :( die!!!! —a dying mbb secret santa

hws forehead rly took me by surprise i……..am a fan thank u :0 and his hair looks so good like???? theyre just eating out ck is a mushroom and he??? wow

ICB U SAID THAT DO U REALIZE I WAS IN CLASS WHEN I READ IT WTF SANTA!!!!!!! i kept dissociating for like 7 hours sdkfjhsdkj i h8 u >:(

Anonymous said:jsyk, u might have (forcibly) made me admit I’m jh biased but….. 👀👀 is my other bias rly wonho???? how do u know. i just talked about hw’s beautiful forehead…. we rarely see it…. it really is a blessing :( godbdjsjdjjs I’d never shut up about blond hyungwon ffvdvsssh. or i could talk about kihyun’s grey hair for hours, believe me…. this era he’s been making me want to die… orrrr maybe I’m rly wonho biased :-) his smile makes my entire day tbh… who knows —evil mbb secret santa

this is literally the confirm ure wonho biased tbh :/ but agreed on everything u said…….kihyun tells me to choke every day since dramarama came out ive stopped complaining ://///////

“forcibly” buddy u literally confessed ur love for him i didnt do anything :/

Anonymous said:psssst, ur bf is a nerd :/// mxfansignnotes (.) tumblr (.) com/post/168660027360 —mbb secret santa

:)

u know what id do with my endless energy :) kick his face :) endlessly :)

Anonymous said:d i e twitter (.) com/URIMPACT1996/status/941635423155003392 —u know who it is 🙃

PLEASE STOP do u see…….the mushroom……hes so cute…..so sleepy :( i hope he got to rest :((((((((( do u remember when he went back home and wrote on the fancafe that he ate a lot and then slept like pigs do :( hes a babie :( and same tbh thats why i think we should totally have a nap date? incredible are we meant to be?!

also i h8 u????????? in the first pic his cheeks look so soft i kinda want to cry? and please hes so sleepy im gksddkdkknfkkkngnnnnnnnnnn

Anonymous said:hi, secret santa here. i found out a little while ago about jonghyun’s death and i think maybe my last ask would come off as a little insensitive? i don’t know if you’re a shawol, and even if you aren’t, i think we’re all grieving right now. i know we’re obviously joking when we tell each other to die but i think it is not the right time to say things like that. anyways, you don’t have to post this or anything, i just wanted to apologize somehow :/ i hope you’re okay. take care

of course we’re just joking around but thank you for being so considerate, youre really nice 💗 im not a shawol and i didnt know much about shinee or jonghyun but what happened really saddened me… and knowing that there are so many idols, and so many people in general, going through what he went is incredibly scary to me; just the thought of losing someone so suddenly… i send my love to his family, members and fans, i hope they take care :(

[foursproutwealth-blog]

I've been buying gifts and vacations for women I pay to date for 10 years — here's what everyone gets wrong about 'sugar dating'

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/ive-been-buying-gifts-and-vacations-for-women-i-pay-to-date-for-10-years-heres-what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-sugar-dating/

I've been buying gifts and vacations for women I pay to date for 10 years — here's what everyone gets wrong about 'sugar dating'

In response to a story Business Insider published about “sugar babies,” one reader wrote to us to share his “sugar dating” experience.

He’s been a “sugar daddy” for over 10 years and has been seeing one sugar baby for three years.

He said the women he dates are not prostitutes, but “everyday people” with “jobs and an otherwise regular life.”

  After Business Insider published a story about how some college students are becoming “sugar babies” to help pay for college, we heard from several “sugar daddies” who said there was more to it. One reader wrote to us about his “sugar dating” experience.

This reader works in tech in Silicon Valley, and has an income “well over $250,000″ and a net worth “well over $1.5 million.” He is in his mid-60s.

His account, edited for clarity, is below, and he remains anonymous for privacy purposes.

Outsiders tend to equate being a sugar baby with prostitution, but that’s not how I see it.

To me, sugar dating is more like an arranged temporary marriage where you do your own arranging.

A prostitute not only offers sex acts for money and sees multiple men a day, but that’s how she makes her living. A sugar baby wants an ongoing relationship. She wants a guy who she can get along with. She wants what a girlfriend or wife might get if they found a well-off man. She has a job that mostly pays her bills, but she is looking to improve her lifestyle. And she does not talk about sex for money.

But most of them know if the arrangement is going to continue past the first date they have to make like a girlfriend and become intimate.

I’ve been a sugar daddy for more than a decade

I’ve had an account on SeekingArrangement.com since 2006, but I also tried Sugardaddyforme.com and was on Craigslist Erotic Services for years before that section was closed down.

I have met countless women from these sites. I talk with them and hear their stories. I’ve seen some of the women for years and others were just one time and some in-between.

The picture the advertisements paint of a hot, young college girl meeting a rich guy who pays them to look pretty while eating dinner and traveling places is mostly fake. Women read the stories and try to get that easy gig, but it’s not really there.

The women I meet are everyday people. They have jobs and an otherwise regular life. You’d never know they are a sugar baby. In fact, most women keep the whole thing quiet and, at most, discuss it with one girlfriend who is doing the same thing and maybe taught them the gig.

Most women only last a couple of weeks as a sugar baby, often because they get tired of getting weird propositions from creepy men who don’t actually have the money to help them out. I treat sugar babies like regular people and figure out what they are up for and go with that.

The typical sugar baby has a goal, like saving up for a car, taking a trip, or getting a new apartment. She is likely in-between boyfriends, or just broke up with a boyfriend, or she’s divorced and doesn’t want dating drama. Some of them like that an older guy with money fancies them. Older women who have been married expect things, while sugar babies are grateful to get them.

It’s like having a girlfriend — but I’ll never get married

For three years now, I have been seeing one sugar baby. She’s half my age but our relationship is like boyfriend and girlfriend.

As a sugar daddy, you are in the honeymoon stage most of the time — you get treated well, you get lots of romantic evenings and you are seen as a savior of the women in distress and the facilitator of her better lifestyle.

I have gone on vacations with some women and given some women extra money, but that’s after I get to know them well. I’ve had women ask for money just for dinner, but I don’t go for that. Why would I? I’ve had women ask for money up front or for a large allowance, but no thanks to that either. There are nice girls on sugar baby dating sites who are just looking for some help with their bills, but there are a lot of scammers, too.

Student loans are a problem for many younger sugar babies though, and there’s no doubt many come to the site for cash to make their monthly payment. I’ve met two active college girls over the years, one who went to Berkeley and one who went to UC Davis.

Like all of the sugar babies I’ve interacted with, I gave them a per-visit donation of $200 to $300, plus dinner, gifts, and outings. But I know that very good looking college girls ask for $500 to $600, and some of them get it.

A guy has to be careful of who he is dealing with — many will tell you that they are a college girl when they obviously are not. The first thing I do when contacting someone is get their email and phone number and Google it. They often show up on Facebook, but sometimes on escort sites.

Once I get to know a woman, I might spend $1,000 to $2,000 a month, with dinners, vacations, and shopping on top of that. Some women ask for $5,000 to $10,000 a month, but I’d be surprised if they get that — unless they got lucky and met a millionaire from Manhattan.

My current sugar baby has a good job where she makes about $45,000 a year, but she couldn’t afford an apartment without a roommate. Thanks to me she now lives in a one bedroom condo on her own and is happy. I have also taken her to Europe three times and she was thrilled.

I would never get married given the no-contest divorce laws in California and the courts that favor the woman. I have friends who lost their retirement savings late in life due to a wife who got tired of the marriage and took the house and bank account and then found a boyfriend who did her bidding.

My own brother has had a long divorce and custody battle. In fact, he’s spent much more on divorce lawyers over the years than I have on sugar babies.

I’m having fun and I can still afford to retire.

If you are a sugar daddy or sugar baby and would like to share your story, please email yourmoney@businessinsider.com.

DON’T MISS: Millions of college students are so terrified of loans they’re turning to ‘Sugar Daddies’ for help paying for school

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NOW WATCH: Our genetic makeup makes online dating perfect for men but terrible for women

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I've been buying gifts and vacations for women I pay to date for 10 years — here's what everyone gets wrong about 'sugar dating'

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I've been buying gifts and vacations for women I pay to date for 10 years — here's what everyone gets wrong about 'sugar dating'

In response to a story Business Insider published about “sugar babies,” one reader wrote to us to share his “sugar dating” experience.

He’s been a “sugar daddy” for over 10 years and has been seeing one sugar baby for three years.

He said the women he dates are not prostitutes, but “everyday people” with “jobs and an otherwise regular life.”

  After Business Insider published a story about how some college students are becoming “sugar babies” to help pay for college, we heard from several “sugar daddies” who said there was more to it. One reader wrote to us about his “sugar dating” experience.

This reader works in tech in Silicon Valley, and has an income “well over $250,000″ and a net worth “well over $1.5 million.” He is in his mid-60s.

His account, edited for clarity, is below, and he remains anonymous for privacy purposes.

Outsiders tend to equate being a sugar baby with prostitution, but that’s not how I see it.

To me, sugar dating is more like an arranged temporary marriage where you do your own arranging.

A prostitute not only offers sex acts for money and sees multiple men a day, but that’s how she makes her living. A sugar baby wants an ongoing relationship. She wants a guy who she can get along with. She wants what a girlfriend or wife might get if they found a well-off man. She has a job that mostly pays her bills, but she is looking to improve her lifestyle. And she does not talk about sex for money.

But most of them know if the arrangement is going to continue past the first date they have to make like a girlfriend and become intimate.

I’ve been a sugar daddy for more than a decade

I’ve had an account on SeekingArrangement.com since 2006, but I also tried Sugardaddyforme.com and was on Craigslist Erotic Services for years before that section was closed down.

I have met countless women from these sites. I talk with them and hear their stories. I’ve seen some of the women for years and others were just one time and some in-between.

The picture the advertisements paint of a hot, young college girl meeting a rich guy who pays them to look pretty while eating dinner and traveling places is mostly fake. Women read the stories and try to get that easy gig, but it’s not really there.

The women I meet are everyday people. They have jobs and an otherwise regular life. You’d never know they are a sugar baby. In fact, most women keep the whole thing quiet and, at most, discuss it with one girlfriend who is doing the same thing and maybe taught them the gig.

Most women only last a couple of weeks as a sugar baby, often because they get tired of getting weird propositions from creepy men who don’t actually have the money to help them out. I treat sugar babies like regular people and figure out what they are up for and go with that.

The typical sugar baby has a goal, like saving up for a car, taking a trip, or getting a new apartment. She is likely in-between boyfriends, or just broke up with a boyfriend, or she’s divorced and doesn’t want dating drama. Some of them like that an older guy with money fancies them. Older women who have been married expect things, while sugar babies are grateful to get them.

It’s like having a girlfriend — but I’ll never get married

For three years now, I have been seeing one sugar baby. She’s half my age but our relationship is like boyfriend and girlfriend.

As a sugar daddy, you are in the honeymoon stage most of the time — you get treated well, you get lots of romantic evenings and you are seen as a savior of the women in distress and the facilitator of her better lifestyle.

I have gone on vacations with some women and given some women extra money, but that’s after I get to know them well. I’ve had women ask for money just for dinner, but I don’t go for that. Why would I? I’ve had women ask for money up front or for a large allowance, but no thanks to that either. There are nice girls on sugar baby dating sites who are just looking for some help with their bills, but there are a lot of scammers, too.

Student loans are a problem for many younger sugar babies though, and there’s no doubt many come to the site for cash to make their monthly payment. I’ve met two active college girls over the years, one who went to Berkeley and one who went to UC Davis.

Like all of the sugar babies I’ve interacted with, I gave them a per-visit donation of $200 to $300, plus dinner, gifts, and outings. But I know that very good looking college girls ask for $500 to $600, and some of them get it.

A guy has to be careful of who he is dealing with — many will tell you that they are a college girl when they obviously are not. The first thing I do when contacting someone is get their email and phone number and Google it. They often show up on Facebook, but sometimes on escort sites.

Once I get to know a woman, I might spend $1,000 to $2,000 a month, with dinners, vacations, and shopping on top of that. Some women ask for $5,000 to $10,000 a month, but I’d be surprised if they get that — unless they got lucky and met a millionaire from Manhattan.

My current sugar baby has a good job where she makes about $45,000 a year, but she couldn’t afford an apartment without a roommate. Thanks to me she now lives in a one bedroom condo on her own and is happy. I have also taken her to Europe three times and she was thrilled.

I would never get married given the no-contest divorce laws in California and the courts that favor the woman. I have friends who lost their retirement savings late in life due to a wife who got tired of the marriage and took the house and bank account and then found a boyfriend who did her bidding.

My own brother has had a long divorce and custody battle. In fact, he’s spent much more on divorce lawyers over the years than I have on sugar babies.

I’m having fun and I can still afford to retire.

If you are a sugar daddy or sugar baby and would like to share your story, please email yourmoney@businessinsider.com.

DON’T MISS: Millions of college students are so terrified of loans they’re turning to ‘Sugar Daddies’ for help paying for school

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NOW WATCH: Our genetic makeup makes online dating perfect for men but terrible for women

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Amazing Grace Adkins – my 89 year old learning lab director and the most amazing woman I know

Grace Adkins on episode 191 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Mrs. Grace Adkins is a hero, mentor, and teacher to many. With a 56-year generation-spanning career as an educator, Mrs. Adkins approaches her 90th birthday still teaching, loving kids, and riding over 100 miles on her bike each week. Meet a truly remarkable woman and a personal mentor, Mrs. Grace Adkins.

FlexPath – only at Capella University – lets teachers work at their own pace to earn their MEd in a competency-based learning format. This subscription-based tuition model doesn’t limit the number of courses you can complete during each 12-week period, enrolling in up to two courses at once, for one flat tuition rate. Go to coolcatteacher.com/flexpath to get your free FlexPath guide and see if Capella’s FlexPath option is right for you.

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Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

Amazing Grace Adkins – my 89 year old learning lab director and the most amazing woman I know

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e191 Monday, November 13, 2017

Vicki: This week we’re airing some special episodes of interviews of people that I am particularly thankful for in my life.

Now, Ms. Grace Adkins was my fourth-grade teacher and an inspiration to me. She has been teaching for 56 years. She is our Learning Lab Director here at Westwood Schools. I can tell you, in my life, she’s probably the most amazing person that I know.

She inspires me every day. I want to be like her when I grow up. She is just an incredible person.

So, Ms. Adkins, you’ve taught for 56 years, so you’ve taught for quite some time, and you’re not even slowing down yet. You don’t look like it at all, and you’re getting close to that 90th birthday there.

What keeps you in education?

What keeps you in education?

Grace: There’s always another child to help. And you don’t give up on children.

Vicki: Now you have some amazing kids that people had given up on. Tell us some of the things that your students who struggle with learning differences are now doing.

Grace: Well, I have one that is a vascular surgeon. He wrote everything backwards, had ADHD, and we had an educational prescription that we filled – and his parents filled at home – and he didn’t give up. His family didn’t give up. And WE didn’t give up. And so there he is.

And of course, I have many others, too, that you wonder if they’re going to make it. But you keep on working with them every day. And… they make it. Big time! (laughs)

Vicki: Yeah. I mean, two of my children have learning differences. And you just always helped me coach.

What’s your secret for not giving up?

What’s your secret for not giving up?

Grace: Well, that gives me a reason to get up every morning! I get up at 3:00, ride my exercise bike 10 miles, drive 18 miles to school. So I’m inspired to meet whatever comes each day.

Vicki: So let’s talk about that routine, because actually, you have some family members who have ended up on the radio in Atlanta because nobody can believe your routine. Tell us your routine of what you do in a typical day.

Grace: Well, I just told you part of what I do, but I get up and I ride my bike 10 miles in the morning. And then I have my morning devotional.

I am the guidepost for a book of devotions that Mr. Woodruff funded. I didn’t know he did that until after he was dead.

And then I have another Bible study that I do every morning. And then I write down quotes that I want to go through the day with. You know, we’re never alone. We always have somebody with us. The Lord provides.

Vicki: Now you read more than anybody I know.

Grace: Oh, I read 30 or 40 books a year.

Vicki: When do you read?

Grace: Well, I read some this morning. I’m now reading another book by Pat Williams.

Vicki: Oh, we love Pat Williams! Ms. Adkins and I talk books all the time.

Who is this Mr. Woodruff?

Now, we want the listeners to know about who this amazing Mr. Woodruff is, that Ms. Adkins is talking about. Would you tell us what your husband did, and a little bit about Mr. Woodruff because he’s really instrumental in us even having a Learning Lab here at Westwood.

Grace: Well, my husband and I moved to the plantation when we were 27 years old.

Vicki: And we’re talking about Ichauway Plantation in Baker County.

Grace: Mr. R.W. Woodruff. He was one of the greatest men I ever knew. He wanted to help everybody and make a difference. He started his plantation in 1928. The year we were born, my husband and I. And then my husband was there from age 27 until he died at age 80. He was still a consultant for the plantation.

But Mr. Woodruff, when he bought the plantation, saw someone have what they call a “rigor.” And he asked what was wrong with that man. And they said, “Well, he has malaria.”

Vicki: That went on to become the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Of course, Mr. Woodruff’s claim to fame, I guess, is being the head of Coca-Cola. And I have to say that my husband, Kip, also works at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Center, which is on Ichauway Plantation now. So we do have quite a love of that.

Grace: There’s just no end to what he’s done.

Vicki: Yes. There are many, many books on Mr. Woodruff. I think the thing that’s amazing about Ms. Adkins is that so many of his habits – his habit of reading, his love of people, his desire to make a difference – are all part of who you are, too. You’ve kind of spread that to us, to me.

My favorite book is Mr. Anonymous: Robert W. Woodruff of Coca-Cola

Let’s go back to learning differences. I know some people call them disabilities, but I just feel like everybody learns differently.

Pioneering Work With Learning Disabilities

So you were one of the pioneers in reaching kids with learning disabilities. Tell us what you did.

Grace: Well… the first year I taught was 1946. It was my mission from then on to find out why bright children did not always do well in school. I knew they were bright. From 1946 on, that was my mission to find out.

It took me 30 years, because I was in the Reading Department.

And your answers are not in reading.

I met a neuropsychologist after 30 years. So the way to reach these children is through neurology and psychology applied to education. That’s what we’ve done since 1976.

Vicki: That was Dr. Wagner, right?

Grace: (agrees) And then I met another neuropsychologist. I’d been all over the country to international conferences. This other neuropsychologist that I heard speak in Atlanta in 1981, again in 1983 in Washington D.C., and again in New York in 1986. Then I flew her down here.

Vicki: What was her name?

Grace: Dr. Rosa Hagin. The Center in New York Medical Center was named for her.

I flew her down from New York to Atlanta, and my daughter brought her here to try to help us at Westwood.

Now what I found in 1981 was an evaluation she and Dr. Archie Silver had developed at the Rosa Hagan Center. It was to identify pre-academic skills necessary for academic success.

So from that, I came back. A friend of mine Louise Stevenson. I said, “I found what I’ve been looking for – an evaluation to identify those children that don’t have the necessary skills to be in academics. We started using it, and she said, “Rosa Hagin, a college classmate, and was voted the most likely to succeed.”

Vicki: That’s the Search and Teach Program…

Grace: (agrees)

Vicki: … Which is really the reason that all of our kids are reading… Pretty much most of our kids are reading at the end of K-4.

Grace: I found another evaluation, and I got the school psychologist up on it. She evaluates our 3-year-olds leaving – some of them are 4 by then, leaving that program. And we have an evaluation on them when they leave the 3-year program now.

Vicki: What’s the name of that program?

Grace: Well, it tells whether their social skills and all different types of skills that are necessary for success – whether they are in place or developing.

The Learning Lab Organization

Vicki: People all over the world, I guess, can understand. She always has guests coming in and watching what we’re doing in the Lab. So much of it is one-on-one personal attention, isn’t it, Ms. Adkins?

Grace: (agrees) It is. All of the work is done one-on-one in the Lab.

We have children in the elementary side through fifth grade. If they have a prescription, we bring them in. At first, we do the Search Screening and give them two weeks to get into their routine while we grade summer work. Then we start filling those Search prescriptions and they’re psychological. And that’s one-on-one.

Vicki: Now all these years that I’ve struggled having two of my three kids with learning differences, you’ve always encouraged me. What do you tell the parents who are listening who – they know their child is bright. They look in their eyes. They know they’re bright. But right now, they’re just not performing. What do you say to those parents?

Grace: I tell them, “Don’t give up.” We see possibilities in each child. And we don’t stop until we find out how they learn. We develop a program fitted to them.

Vicki: Yeah. But that can be done anywhere, right? Not everybody can come and be in your Lab. You’ve done – you know, there are some parents who know that their child is bright, and they can’t find anybody to help them.

Grace: Well, I’m having that all the time, from all over southwest Georgia and from the Florida panhandle and Orlando. All around, they’ve brought their children for me to evaluate.

Vicki: But you know, here’s the thing… Doesn’t it make you angry when kids aren’t able to get the help they need?

Grace: Well… I try not to let that happen if I meet them.

I saw a lady in the doctor’s office yesterday, Dr. Goldsmith. And I saw these two little boys smiling, and she was. When I sat down, of course, I spoke with them. They were looking so pleased. She said, “I know you. You taught my little boys. And I couldn’t bring them from Worth County, but I’m homeschooling him, doing what you told me to do.”

And I told the little boy – he’s sixth grade now – and I said, “I taught Dr. Goldsmith in sixth grade.”

Vicki: Ahhhh…

Grace: And that’s who he was seeing. So, the parent is feeling what we had set up.

Vicki: So, Ms. Adkins, have you ever made a mistake? What do you think your biggest mistake is that you might have ever made, somewhere in that teaching career?

Grace: Well… I don’t know. Every problem I saw, I tried to solve. And I didn’t stop until I found a solution. You can’t give up when it’s a child’s life.

Vicki: Yes.

Teaching the Whole Child

Grace: One of my students on the board told me the other day, “I know the ‘artist’ because you taught me in third grade and sixth grade.

Vicki: She always brought artists in and then checked them out from the library, and so we all know our artwork. It’s not just about reading and writing and arithmetic. It’s about living life.

Grace: You teach the whole child.

Vicki: Yes.

So as we finish up, I know that recently you got certified for Growing Leaders, so you’re still educating yourself often.

Organizing Finances

One time you told me something about how you organize your money. I don’t know if you remember the percentages.

Grace: I have a young lady who does houses, and she doesn’t do anybody’s but mine now, but she’s going to do mine. She’s gone into photography and made a lot of money going into photography. So she quit doing houses.

The first time she ??? on Phillip Phillips. She was the photographer. She came to my house on Saturday, and she walked in and said she was going to give her money to give her first 10% to the Lord. She’s going to give all that money.

I said, you’ve got to get on this 70-10-10-10 (plan). You live on the 70%. You put 10% on a passbook savings. You put 10% like if you need a new camera…

She said, “Oh I do need a new camera!”

And the other 10%…

Vicki: It’s your tithe, isn’t it?

Grace: Oh yes. Tithing. It’s 10% to tithe, 10% to passbook savings, 10% to buy new equipment. If you need a lawnmower, buy a lawnmower.

And she said, “Oh I do need…”

Vicki: You invest in yourself, and you invest in the things that you need.

Grace: That’s right.

Vicki: And it just makes so much sense.

So you’re big into motivational books and motivational quotes. You’re kind of one of the first people that really – besides my mom, who got me into reading.

Who are your favorite authors?

Who are your favorite authors?

Grace: Well, Pat Williams… Dr. Henry Cloud…

Vicki: Love Henry Cloud…

Grace: Andy Andrews… and those are, in the last 10-20 years. But I’ve had some over the years, like Norman Vincent Peale.

Vicki: So Ms. Adkins, as we finish up this interview…

You have lived an amazing life. You still live an amazing life. You have more energy than almost anybody I know. You’re riding all these miles on your bike, and what do you think the secret is to living a great life?

What is the secret is to living a great life?

Grace: Well, first, you put the Lord first and do His will.

But then you have to do your part by eating right, exercising… and read. Keep your mind alert.

So I read good books, 30-40 a year, and I share them.

Vicki: So do you think that teaching and working with kids with learning differences for 56 years has been worth it?

Grace: Oh yes. And that’s what keeps me going, is my family and my connections with my children at school and my church.

Vicki: Well, Ms. Adkins is one who is remarkable. I talk all the time about being remarkable.

I hope that you can see that having her in my life, inspiring me to be more remarkable…

I don’t feel like I can even hold a candle to you, Ms. Adkins. You always inspire me.

I remember one time somebody said they went off with you to some professional development. Maybe it’s been 20-30 years ago. They woke up at 5:00 in the morning at you were jumping rope. (laughs)

I think you were in your fifties then. So you were a spring chicken, and you’re jumping rope. And you always exercised. You always worked hard to eat right.

And you are just amazing, and doing so well. And you’re still transforming lives. It’s just who you are.

Grace: Well, I couldn’t take my exercise bike with me, and my trampoline, so I have a mini-trampoline. I would jump rope, jump on the trampoline every morning before I came to school. And ride my bike. But now I can take my rope with me.

Vicki: That’s right. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to meet Ms. Adkins. She’s an amazing woman. I love her very much, and I’m very grateful for her role in my life.

Honestly, I went to her my junior year. I didn’t have the SATs I needed to go to Georgia Tech, which was my dream college. And way back – this was in 1985-86, she actually had computer software to help me improve my SAT score. My score went up about 200 points with a lot of hard work.

I was able to go to Georgia Tech. Now I’m back here. So, you could say that I wouldn’t be anything at all, really, without Ms. Adkins believing in me and helping me and helping every day when I was a child.

Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford kymberlimulford@gmail.com

Bio as submitted

Grace Adkins is the Learning Lab Director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She earned her M.Ed. at Georgia Southwestern State University. She has been working at the school for decades and was Miss Vicki’s 4th-grade teacher. She is an avid reader and shares many of her books with the students at Westwood. She believes every child is a winner and it is her mission to help them become winners.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post Amazing Grace Adkins – my 89 year old learning lab director and the most amazing woman I know appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e191/

[alanafsmith]

Trump's Cabinet reportedly whispered about invoking the 25th Amendment, which lets 14 people remove a sitting president from office

The 25th Amendment formally outlines the transition of power if the president is unable or unfit to serve.

Section IV allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to remove the president from office.

Americans have been particularly interested in the amendment since President Donald Trump took office.

An anonymous senior official in President Donald Trump's administration wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Wednesday, claiming there's a "quiet resistance" undermining the president.

The official wrote that "there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment."

Trump himself reportedly didn't know what the 25th Amendment did. When former adviser Steve Bannon told him it posed the biggest threat to his presidency, according to Vanity Fair, Trump said, "What's that?"

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Congress proposed and the states ratified the 25th Amendment in 1967 to formally outline the transition of power. Before that, the vice president didn't officially have the power to take over.

The amendment states that if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office, the vice president becomes president. If there is a vacancy in the vice presidency for any reason, the president can choose someone to fill it.

And if the president is unable to fulfill his duties — like when President George W. Bush was under general anesthesia for colonoscopies in 2002 and 2007 — he can temporarily transfer his powers to the vice president, and get them back when he's done.

But Section IV is what some liberals have been frantically searching for more information on, because it could be a way to legally remove Trump from office.

A legal loophole

Under the amendment's fourth stipulation, it would only take 14 people to depose the president — Vice President Mike Pence and 13 of Trump's 24 Cabinet members.

Section IV reads:

"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."

John D. Feerick, former dean of Fordham Law School, is one of the chief architects of the 25th Amendment who shepherded it through Congress in the early 1960s.

He told Business Insider in March 2017 that the senators who signed the provision into law specified that declaring the president unfit must rely on "reliable facts regarding the president's physical or mental faculties," not personal prejudice.

"If you read the debates, it's also clear that policy and political differences are not included, unpopularity is not included, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness, or impeachable conduct — none of that, you'll find in the debates in the congressional record, is intended to be covered by Section IV," Feerick said.

Policy and political differences, unpopularity, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness, or impeachable conduct — none of that is intended to be covered by section IV.

Section IV goes on to say that if two-thirds of both houses of Congress don't vote to uphold the decision and keep the vice president in charge within 21 days, then the powers and duties automatically transfer back to the president. So if the president doesn't want to give up his office, Feerick explained, he doesn't have to if Congress agrees he shouldn't.

Akhil Reed Amar, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale University, said in a podcast for the National Constitution Center on the topic that the president's own running mate is the one who triggers a "palace coup," in order to maintain political stability.

"The 25th Amendment doesn't try to specify in great detail what might count as a disability, but does try to in effect identify who and how we go about the process," Amar said. "Here's the key point: The vice president is the pivot in the whole process. Unless the vice president puts himself — maybe one day, herself — forward, no one else can really basically, at least within the 25th Amendment framework, proclaim an unwilling president 'disabled.'"

The idea is that the Cabinet and VP are the president's closest advisers, Feerick said, so they would be the ones with the best sense of his mental faculties. They, and Congress, could also consult doctors to evaluate the president's physical and mental health in order to determine if he or she is fit for the job, though they don't have to.

The 25th Amendment is a separate process from impeachment, which allows Congress to remove a sitting president if a majority of the House of Representatives votes that he has committed treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and a trial in the Senate convicts him.

In either case, legal scholars argue, the goal is to make the process as objective as possible.

"In a time like this of unusual crisis, one had to count on leaders in the executive branch and Congress to really be patriots, not partisans," Joel K. Goldstein, a constitutional expert at St. Louis University, said at a symposium that Fordham Law School hosted in September.

Renewed interest

Americans have been brushing up on their knowledge of the Constitution during Trump's presidency, according to Google Trends data.

The search term "25th Amendment" spiked in popularity after Trump took office, particularly after he signed the controversial travel bans, and after he tweeted an edited video of him body slamming CNN.

Interest was rejuvenated amid the release of the explosive book, "Fire and Fury" — whose author, Michael Wolff, said the amendment was brought up "all the time" in the White House.

Feerick, who didn't discuss applying Section IV to Trump, said he hopes this renewed interest in the Constitution will encourage Congress to consider filling some of the legal gaps in the amendment that he and other legal scholars have proposed over the years.

For example, the Constitution doesn't outline what happens if the vice president is unable to serve, and he and other experts agree that the order of succession shouldn't include members of Congress as it does today.

"It's important that people be educated about the Constitution. It's our greatest charter of liberty," Feerick said. "I'm really happy that there's greater education going on — I'm obviously not happy about all the division in the country — but I'm happy that at least there's greater education being provided about the amendment."

SEE ALSO: Here's who's in Trump's Cabinet

DON'T MISS: A senior member of the Trump administration says he is part of a secret resistance working against the president in the White House

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is how impeachment works — and what a president would have to do to be impeached

from All About Law https://www.businessinsider.com/25th-amendment-how-can-you-remove-president-from-office-2017-3