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all-things-fic · 4 years ago

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Somewhere Only We Know

A/N - Hello, you lovely lot! Hope you are all keeping well in these utterly shit Covid times. Who would’ve thought that we would still be here in December?! Please see my offering for @goldenbluesuit‘s Christmas Fic Challenge. Hope I’ve done a bit of justice with this piece.

I can remember Katie texting me telling me about the challenge, and I’ll admit I was given first dibs and now I’m absolutely shitting myself because I’ve seen all the brillaint entries so far and I’m not sure I really cut the mustard with this piece but I’m proud of myself for being able to put a solid 70% of this together in just one day (that one day being today).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Katie has done a brilliant job and I know how grateful she is towards anyone who has joined the challenge or supported by reading/sharing etc.... I need to stop rambling... Okay, thank you for sticking with me as always and happy reading! .x

***

The last thing you remembered actually reading in the group chat was “make sure you have your wellies”. You were glad that you remembered that part at the very least.

Winds whipped around you as you buried your face further into your cream roll neck cable knit jumper, all but hidden underneath your tobacco borg teddy coat that someone had already likened to Macklemore.

Nothing like being back home with your closest and oldest friends.

Mud squelched under your feet as you walked in line with two of your oldest girl friends, eyes looking over the four males in front of you as they led the way over the grassy hills.

There had been zero planning on what today’s events would bring. It was quite clear that the seven of you just wanted to be reunited with the country air and wind bitten cheeks.

It was nice. How simple it was. On the surface at the very least. That was until you zoned in on the little things.

Like his laugh. The same laugh that always carried somehow and it seemed like the wind was making it that much more prominent than usual today.

There was no denying, he had this glow about him. Even from the back of him. You felt silly for thinking it, but it was true. It was in the way he held himself as he attacked the grassy hills with his feet clad wellies and brown trousers.

Life had changed a lot in over a decade. Christ, had it been that long? You’d all gone from baby teenagers to fully fledged adults. The age range of your friendship differing slightly, the odd person here and there slightly older than a couple of people in the group.

Nonetheless, many of the experiences had been the same. The big job offers, and the even bigger promotions. The heartbreaks, regardless of their prominence or lack of, had been the felt the same. The flirtation between some of you sparked probably a bit more so now with a finesse that didn’t have you rolling your eyes but rather leaning into it.

Four out of seven of you were single. Jack and Jonny were virtually married off, however neither of them were with their partners this year with both deciding to spend Christmas at home and New Years with their significant others. Alice was still loved up and going strong with her fella, as was Grace who you hadn’t heard a peep from as she constantly checked her phone to see when the person she was besotted with finally arrived up North thanks to West Midlands Trains pulling into Crewe.

So that left Will, you and Harry. Harry who had quite publicly made it known that he was single. Well, according to your Mum he had, in several interviews. Including the one that she had described as an ‘incredibly relaxing watch and nice background noise to my Sunday evening brew and ironing session’.

That was a strange one for you, his honesty. In earlier years of friendship, he always seemed quite aloof. Like he was keeping his options open. Guarded in a way that frustrated at least 75% of the friendship group, in the nicest way possible. You knew that was a contradiction but any annoyance came from a good place.

You remembered one night in 2014 when he wouldn’t quite give you a straight answer over tequila shots whether he was shagging someone or not. You also remember the way he’d been pulled away from you tactfully by Alice that night when she sensed how you were about to blow up at his lackadaisical attitude.

The same had been felt in 2016. Not so much in 2018, but you weren’t single then so maybe you just didn’t care.

2019 was significantly different though.

See the thing was, you knew him now. Like, knew knew him.

Some would think it was a lapse of judgment, a reading that you would agree upon given what had happened two days prior if ever prodded about it publicly.

Others would vehemently disagree. Stating how long any sort of energy between the two of you had been bubbling for a number of years.

Looking back you couldn’t even understand why you’d attended his show. You lived in Camden and it made sense, but that’s where the sense stopped. Even the ways he had reached out had been one of the most random messages you’d received from him

There was no context, just a simple ‘I’m playing the Electric Ballroom and there’s tickets waiting for you if you want ‘em.’

And the thing was, you loved that venue. The grungy-ness of it all. The way you had stuck to the floor while trying to dance along to the likes of The Hives and Kings of Leon when seeing them playing there, basking in your sweaty happiness.

But the stickiness of the floor and sweatiness of the room didn’t compare to the stickiness and sweatiness you later found yourself partaking in as Harry took you from behind over the side of his couch.

A shiver rolled through you at the thought, one that you would blame on the December bitter chill because it was a secret. One that neither of you had mentioned since it happened on Thursday night, or to be technically correct the early hours of Friday morning.

He’d been good. Of course he had been.

He had that way about him that night that pulled you under a false sense of endeared security. From his dimpled smile to gleaming eyes. He was happy.

And the way he had shone as he found you on the balcony had warmed you like nothing you had known in the longest time.

It caused you to forget about the worry that had laden you limbs as you turned up at 9.13pm to the wooden doors of the building, wondering how many songs he was in to the set as you convinced yourself he would start at 9.00pm.

As you’d been ushered over to a clear box window and uttered your name to a dorky looking man wearing a tracksuit pull over and watched him handover a white envelope through the circle hatch.

You stood in the dark, next to two much younger girls who enjoyed the way his glances lingered over at their side. Eyes had found Gemma in the opposite corner of the balcony, her dancing and singing with some recognisable faces mainly more so because you had seen them on social media.

You, however, kept yourself to yourself. Until you were anchored in the tightest hug from Gemma that you had ever felt from her and swayed from side to side as she made it known how pleased she was to see you once the concert was over.

That familiarity had been nice. The vibrancy of nostalgia consuming you in your entirety.

Watching him work a room when he finally entered the after party was a sight to behold, in his navy blue pinstripe suit and yellow ‘I’m gonna die lonely’ t-shirt.

He wasn’t. Gonna die lonely, that is.

He glided so smoothly from one person to the next, spilling a drink down himself in the process you’d seen (and later felt when your hand clung to the fabric of his t-shirt as you kissed), making time for everyone in his own unique way.

Big eyes followed you over Gemma’s shoulder when he had finally found himself within your circle and hugged his sister once more that evening. They were hard to read but also openly filled with a glimmer of hope as he dropped his gaze to see what you were wearing.

And when he approached you, he hugged you in a way that managed to pull you into the darkened corner of the dingy space. Spinning your body to keep your face concealed from any prying eyes.

He revealed to you how he didn’t think you were going to turn up, scanning you with his gaze as he spoke. You did the same, a bit taken aback by just how attractive you were finding him. He had always been handsome but the aura he gave off, made your fingers itch to have him closer to you.

Words ran away from you that night as he begged and pleaded with you to tell him what your favourite song had been. Based on first impressions, which the show has been, then Canyon Moon and Watermelon Sugar had smothered you and given you no other option but to pick them.

If he were to ask you now you’d probably say To Be So Lonely, thanks to the drive home being longer than originally thought and said album being your choice of road trip music.

Forget Driving Home For Christmas, nothing slapped more than one of your closest friends admitting to being an arrogant son of a bitch.

After your chat, he mingled some more but Harry was always tactile and that night had been no different. He veered conversations with people you had never seen before to take place by the zone that you all occupied.

He actively kept his back against yours, allowing the faintest of touches and brushing of arms - sometimes hands too if he dropped them down heavily enough with his arms as he spoke - to entice and create a spark.

You were kept late enough to miss the last tube. Battery dangerously low on your phone that you didn’t know if a transaction with Uber would be worth a try.

Jumping into the same car as him had been easy. His soft and tired eyes findings yours in the cab as he leant his head back against the headrest in the back seat and let his lips tip upwards in an expression of tenderness that had you melting in your seat.

“‘S been a while since we’ve both been a bit pissed in the back of a taxi,” he mused, pushing his fallen locks out of his eyes to ensure his view of you wasn’t obscured. “Come an’ cuddle me like you used to do when we went out a’ home and were worse for wear.”

Falling into his side was almost second nature, eyes closing as you let your forehead rest against his jawline and let his worn in cologne fill you senses and scatter your judgment.

You don’t even remember how you ended up kissing that night. A mixture of confessions about missing each other and praise of how good you both were in your own ways. The sound of his whispered, “are you coming home wi’me?” against your lips an offer too good for you to refuse as you sat pressed into his side and half in his lap.

The giggles that night, around dramatic shushes as you tripped and shuffled from the car to his front door were almost haunting in your memory as he tried to chastise you around spluttered laughter about being respectful of his neighbours.

Getting the key in the lock proved unchallenging - one of the better analogies aligned to your memories and latter sexual endeavours - as you slipped into the house. He enjoyed watching the way you walked ahead of him into his home, not realising how much he needed that visual of seeing how well you fit in.

While time seemed to slow in that moment, movements desperately sought the opposite. Hands gripped and clawed like their lives depended upon it.

Looking back now, both he and you wished it hadn’t happened the way it did. Skirt lifted and over the side of his couch. Teeth clashing and hips knocking.

It had been every inch a drunken fumble. A first meeting slightly cheapened but wanted nonetheless. Only made even cheaper by the hush-hush concealing of it ever occurring.

But a secret it was and a secret it would remain.

And oh how you wished you had a pillow you could press you face into right now and scream, this time for an entirely different reason. Unlike that night.

“Not seen a sign of any deer yet, mate,” you heard a voice break you out of your indulgence of recollecting past events. Harry was the worst at wanting to get a reaction.

“Christ, have a bit of patience would yer?”

You smiled at the bickering, just like it always was as the River Dane could be heard in the distance somewhere as you walked. If you listened really close, that is.

Lifting your eyes, your smile lingered as you watched Harry spin his body around and let his hands get lost in the massive pockets of his parka. He walked backwards holding your gaze softly with his eyes twinkling before he gently rolled them at the overreaction and impatience of your friends.

He seemed pleased that you’d enjoyed his teasing as you once again hid you smile into your jumper.

You’d be alright.

***

You heard giggles and screams ahead of you as your friends stumbled in the dark and messed about as you got closer to the viaduct. This place or the people didn’t change, and at times while it filled you with a warm nostalgia, it could be heavily jarring.

A soft and lazy smile pulled at your lips as you felt his heavy forearm lightly tug you closer to him, his lips finding your hair. And then there was Harry.

“Think we should go this way m’self,” Harry mumbled, the nudge of his hips against yours had you stumbling slightly in your heels away from the direction of your friends and somewhere completely different.

“And why’s that?” You turned your face slightly, cheeks warm and flushed thanks to the mixture of alcoholic beverages; eyes glazed as they lifted up to look at him.

“Cause you never would’ve let me when I was sixteen,” he admitted.

“You didn’t ask.”

“‘M askin’ now.”

With slow blinking eyes, you looked at his own unfocused vision. A soft shine to his skin, hair blowing gently against his forehead. The softest of smiles tilted at your lips.

“On yer go,” he nudged you forward, this time more so with his crotch and his hands, which wrapped around your hips to help steer you. Harry was met with only a small amount of resistance from you as you split off from your friends and turned in the different direction.

You bit back your laugh, dropping your head slightly as you felt your heels started to sink into the grass as you walked. Harry was level with you when you sunk down noticing the way you legs slightly gave way, a soft chuckle omitting from his throat as he asked, “You alrigh’?”

“I’m sinking in these bloody things,” you grumbled, pulling your heel from the grass and trying to place the sole of your shoe onto the ground beneath you first.

“So much for no’ being able to take the country out o’ the girl. London’s changed yer, swear it.”

Shaking your head, you cut your eyes to give him a harsh stare for his wind up. His amused expression lit a fire in you like no other. He really wasn’t one to talk though, was he?

“Gi’me your hand ‘ere,” he held his out to you, quickly cupping it when you handed it over and pulled it under his bent elbow. “Remind me again who’s idea this was, eh?”

He didn’t need reminding, he had been one of the keen instigators for the whole jaunt down Twemlow Viaduct. It usually was him, or Jack. The two of them often reminiscing on times they had both raided their parents' alcohol cupboards and managed to sneak out with some dusty bottle that held a liquor that tasted out of date and stale, and if not that then, cheap.

“‘S still fucking freezing down ‘ere, in’it?” He asked, lifting his left hand up to his mouth and blowing against it to try and get some feeling back into his fingers.

“We’re so close to the river, I don’t know why you’d expect anything different?”

“Is this why everyone was always so insistent on necking anything with over 11% alcohol in it when we came down ‘ere as kids?”

“Probably,” you softly laughed.

“‘S a bit different now though innit?”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” you started to correct him, shrugging your hand out from under his elbow and reaching for your bag. Quickly fumbling with the clasp, you lifted up the quilted flap and managed to pull out the stainless steel hip flask.

Harry cackled a harsh laugh, his eyes crinkling as he slowly let his laughter die down and softly let his joy wash over his features. “Impressive. Gone all proper on me.”

“You know I haven’t,” you held his eyes watching as he nervously cupped at the back of his neck for a short while, a gentle bite down of his bottom lip, as you quickly uncapped the item and held it out to him. He looked like he needed the courage. You continued, “We’re just a bit more refined, that and we earn a good living. Some more than others, and by some I mean you.”

He held his hand up towards you with an amused grin at your comment. “You first, ‘s yours after all.”

Lifting the item and knocking back your head, you swallowed the whiskey with a small grimace, before offering it to Harry once more. This time he accepted, his right hand making light work of taking the item from your hands and sipping at the contents.

His face wasn’t as contorted as your’s when he swallowed, a fan of the chosen beverage if needs must. “‘S the proper stuff, tha’ is,” he commented with a quick lick of his lips before continuing, “Come a long way from sneaking the bottles of dusty Blossom Hill from the back of the cupboard.”

“Don’t know about that,” you smiled, taking the item and pushing it back into your bag. “I’d still drink if, if it were on offer.”

“‘M sure Mum’s got a bottle or two going at home?”

“Is that your way of asking me to go home with you?” You paused. “Again.”

Harry remained silent at your words. Both you and he knew it was going to happen. A mixture of sparks and lovelorn, lingering glances was enough to make anyone both want to give up, while also giving a burning confidence usually unknown.

Neither of you expected it would be you who started the conversation, however.

“It is, ‘f it’s gonna work. ‘M not sure I could wait any longer t’be’onest wi’yer.“

Laughing, you reached up to push at his shoulder. He always knew exactly what to say, but no way was he going to make a laughing stock of the whole thing. “Oh, give over,” you spoke, harshly swallowing when he kept your hand against the thick cable knit black jumper he had on. “You’ve made it this far, thus far just fine.”

“‘M not playin’,” he whispered, hand gently curling around your own and lifting it up to press against his face. His cheeks were warm underneath the cooler hands, despite the cold night whipping around you both and your mind quickly wondered if he was just as embarrassed for his lack of acknowledgment as you had been. “Homes nice, you’re nicer.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it,” you let your soft voice get taken by the wind.

“An’ what gave you tha’ impression?”

He did. He gave you that impression. By not mentioning it. By treating you how he always did.

“You.”

“Me?” Harry responded, indignantly, blowing out a sigh that had his cheeks puffing out underneath your hand. “‘M not doing a very good job then am I? I can’t keep m’eyes off o’you. ‘S not my fault you don’t bloody notice ‘em.”

But you had noticed them.

His eyes, gaze following your every move, near enough. Stupid little touches. Glances of approval. Not just now, but from years before.

Treating you how he always did.

Oh, treating you how he always did.

Bringing your eyes back to his figure, you saw the way his gaze darted and nervousness dragged at his features. A frown began to set itself between his eyebrows from worry.

“Changes everything.”

Running his tongue along his teeth, Harry pursed his lips. “Everythin’ has changed, changed a long time ago an’all.”

You dropped your hand down, it now massaging against the back of his neck and shoulder as you felt the tension of his body radiating through his clothes. Under the dim moonlight and the odd spotlight that had been added to the viaduct with each passing year for safety, Harry exhumed everything anyone would want in a boyfriend. He was soft, and so bloody gorgeous. Not just because he was personification of an almost six foot tall string of handsomeness, but his character did the talking for him.

He knocked the door before he walked into a room, for example. Who really did that kind of thing anymore?

But you could also still see the heartbreak that lingered, albeit not as strong as it once was, it was still there. And that was problematic and scary. To be on the receiving end of it. Not that you would hold it against him, because you had been him at one point too. At many points in fact.

When the two of you had shagged, because let’s face it that is exactly what it had been, while a sense of familiarity in the person was prevalent it was definitely overruled by the desire to just hit a euphoric high that if hit right could not be topped.

Familiar overruled in other aspects, and it wasn’t to be brushed away. But was familiarity a mask that would slip sooner rather than later? Was it the start and the end?

The both of you experienced similarities in your life that could not be matched by the friends in your friendship group. London had chewed you up and spat you out, ruthlessly so. While rewarding you with long hours but fat pay cheques, careers that catapulted you to new heights and enabled you to see parts of the world that two country kids (which in one way you were) could never have imagined.

Sure Harry’s had been on a much, much larger scale - you would not ever deny that - but you no longer fit in.

And neither did he.

This was a place that only the two of you knew. A place where you watched those around you fall in love and have the time to do so. A place where your friend's happiness was created a lot easier than it wasn’t and allowed a sense of success to weave its way in, through the most unexpected of happenings.

Not a place where you found happiness in your work because there was less of a space for happiness to blossom elsewhere. Not really. Not like you; both of you.

Understanding was vital.

This had been a place you knew like the back of your hand. A place that had you feeling the earth beneath your feet, fresh air in your lungs and had at times made it so you found yourself sitting by a river and finding yourself feeling complete.

Yet looking over at the almost 26 year old, that just wasn’t the case anymore.

And for once you didn’t feel alone.

The sound of the odd piece of cobbled pavement underneath Harry shoes, buried beneath overgrown grass and plants, broke you from your thoughts, as you watched him kick at the ground and scuff his shoes.

He sighed, head tilted back before he knocked it to the side and caught your eyes. A small scoffed laugh left his lips as he shook his head and dropped his gaze to his feet.

“‘S it fucked?”

You hummed, a small frown lacing your features.

“Fucked it, haven’t I? Fuckin’- idiot-“ he breathed out a noise as he clenched his teeth, one that wasn’t quite a growl but enough to let you know he was agitated. Only strengthened by how tight his jaw became.

Before you could even think, the back of your hand gently brushed against the pulsing hinge of his jaw. Muscles taut as you tried to soothe him in a way that your mind was screaming was far too intimate.

You didn’t want him having any internal battle about right and wrong. Not when you had both taken the same steps to get here.

“Thought it was just meant as a one time thing,” you admitted. “Like you needed it, and I needed it. Was what it needed to be at the time. Bit rough, bit sloppy-“

You cringed are the use of the word. Wanting the ground to swallow you in a weird fashion. You should be able to talk open and honestly with someone who you had known longer than hadn’t.

“Rough?“ Harry swallowed audibly, his face fallen. “That’s not-“

His eyes held an emotion similar to sorrow at the mention of the word. “That’s not the impression I wanted to give you.”

“We were both drunk, it happens.”

“Not with me it doesn’t. Not when it’s me, wanting to be wi’you.”

“I mean I was into it if that helps anything?”

“Were yer?”

You looked at him from the corner of your vision, watching his lips try to fight a smile as you rolled yours into your mouth to not give yourself away. You knew what you were trying to do by speaking those words aloud but you wished you hadn’t. Awkward breathy laughs were shared by the two of you as you held his eyes.

“Was I?”

You hummed in agreement to answer his question, letting your smile dance along your lips now and watching as Harry’s dimples started to show. His expression was youthful, slightly smug.

“Good t’know.”

***

Finishing saying your goodbyes to your friends and ignoring their suggestive expression because ‘Harry was stopping as an extra pair of hands’, you shut the heavy wooden door and reached up to close the deadbolt lock at the top. Shortly after, you let your feet drop as you stopped standing on your tiptoes and pressed your forehead against the door.

The silence of the pub was always a strange one to you. A place that was usually thriving, whether it was just your friends, or your parents friends. When the lights were turned out, it was actually quite a lonely place. Regardless of growing up around this sort of industry your entire life and having parents as publicans nothing was more depressing than an empty bar, lifeless and nothing like it was intended.

A suggested lock-in from Jack, who managed to interrupt both yours and Harry’s conversation earlier had not been a bad shout after all. You knew it meant that you would have to deal with the fallout with it being Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t very often that you found yourself in the setting.

Turning to move from the door, you almost jumped out of your skin when you heard the opening of a familiar Lily Allen song start to play over the speakers.

Harry emerged from the corner of the pub that housed the jukebox, slowly rubbing his hands together before he wordlessly picked up the scattered pint glasses that had remained on one of the tables that had been missed by the staff on the evening shift. His eyes glanced over at you, as you stood with a hand to your chest.

This wicked smile and gleam washed over his face as he paused his movement. “Did I scare yer?”

“Do you not think it’s a bit loud?”

He wrinkled his nose at you, a soft shake of his head no, to answer your question.

“‘S your fave innit?” He asked, head nudging to where the jukebox was now hidden.

With a small smile you nodded, “Prefer the Keane version in all honesty.”

“Don’t have it in the bloody jukebox though, d’yer? Can’t like it that much.”

Your smile deepened at his exclaim and how prominent his accent sounded as he spoke, the small clink of the glasses he was holding only heard if you really zoned in.

“Where d’yer want these?” He asked, holding up the five pint glasses he had collected. “Behind t’bar?”

Humming, you nodded and watched as he weaved his way through the tables to you. You frowned as he got closer, not understanding why he hadn’t bypassed you completely.

Once he was close enough to you, you watched as he reached for what you knew to be your own glass of wine that was almost finished.

“Fancy the rest of this or can it go too?”

Looking at him and down to the glass, you gently wrapped your hand around it and brought the lip to your mouth. You knocked the item back quickly, swallowing the rest of your wine, before handing over the now empty glass back to Harry.

“Good girl,” he joked, light laughter lacing each word. “Sit yourself down.”

Wearing an amused and quizzical expression, you let yourself sink down into the wooden chair. Resting your chin on your hand, you spun slightly in your seat to keep your eyes on Harry as he placed the glasses down and lifted the hatch so he could step behind the bar.

With your free hand, you started to tap the worn beer coaster labelled with the Cheshire Brewhouse logo against the table. Part of you hated how Harry had a knack for anything, including knowing his way around a bar.

He busied himself with collating the glasses once more as you let your eyes take in the surroundings you had known, loved and even grown out of.

Your parent’s pub was cosy and friendly. A truly

classic and quintessential British village pub, featuring open fires, bookcases found in the very far corner or the jukebox in the other, lots of old oak and a really pleasant garden with benches for the summat and heaters for the winter. You know the kind that had its regulars that had kids who had seen each other grow up.

The bar was the centre of the pubs house, with an extensive array of whiskies amongst many other delights. A nice range of local ales and a well-balanced, great quality list of wines on offer designed (which you would be taste testing if the service hadn’t decided to take a break) to complement the food menus designed daily by a team of chefs who all have a passion for great cooking using fresh, seasonal and local ingredients.

It looked as Christmassy as Christmas could get, with a real tree which was locally sourced from one of the many surrounding farms and traditionally decorated with golds and reds. Twinkly lights shone, not only on the trees but as part of the garland that was hung above the bar each year, much to the annoyance of your Dad and the delight of your Mum.

Slowly dragging your eyes back to the bar, you watched Harry as he poured you another glass of white wine and started to recap the bottle. He must’ve felt your eyes on him, his gaze meeting yours almost immediately.

“Service is a bit slow,” you jibed, once you knew he was with you. “Going to ruin the reputation of a fine establishment.”

His chuckle was breathy in response, but warmed you through as he turned his back and pushed his tumbler glass up against the device at the bottom of the Glenfiddich distilled malt whiskey, not once but twice going for a double.

“Helping yourself to the stock now, as well.”

“‘M sure your Dad won’t mind,” he responded, twisting his body back around to reach for your own glass and place it onto a tray that sat along the bar top. “In fact he’d probably make a comment about how it’d put hairs on m’chest.”

You laughed, unrestrained, knowing just how right he had been with that comment.

Over the otherside of the room, Harry smiled and shushed you as he walked closer, easily holding the tray with your drinks upon it. “Being a bit loud,” he taunted as he slid the tray down to the oak table.

“Oh, now you’re concerned about the noise.”

With his hand against the back of the chair which was currently housing your outstretched legs, you felt him start to wobble the seat to give you a warning.

“Hang on,” you said, “Plenty of other chairs.”

“This one’s mine,” he responded.

Wanting to roll your eyes but deciding not to, you let your legs drop down and gave the seat back to Harry. Once he was comfortable and he’d taken your drink off the tray, he gestured with his right hand.

Not entirely focused, he had to do the ‘come hither’ motion a couple of times before you finally cottoned on. He was willing to let you put your legs on his lap instead, while he may have taken the seat it didn’t mean he wanted to take away your comfort.

No sooner had your legs been raised to rest against his tan washed velvet corduroy trousers, was he fiddling with the buckle of your stiletto sandals.

“Got mud everywhere,” you commented, wiggling your toes that were painted a festive red and inspecting the little dots of dirt that were splattered against your skin, as Harry dropped the first shoe to the floor and quickly worked on the second. “Dread to think what they smell like.”

“Smell alrigh’ from ‘ere,” he mused, smirk faint but glaring obvious in his tone of voice as he threw a quick and mischievous glance at you. As you elongated your foot against his thighs, the tips of your toes were just about able to press into his thick jumper to try and jab at him for his comment.

Before you were able to put any sort of force behind your action, Harry’s hand clamped down around the top of your foot causing your eyes to snap up away from his hand and up to his eyes.

There he sat watching you, top two teeth pressed into his bottom lip keep his smile at bay. Releasing his lips slowly, his whispered threat left his throat, “I will tickle.”

You tried to fidget away but to no avail. With a whined laugh, you frowned as Harry goaded you by slowly raising his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me.”

You had tried him.

Truth be told you wanted to again.

If he wanted to.

Reaching for your wine, you took a hefty sip and let the silence swallow you both. Harry, who kept his hand on your foot and his fingers dancing gently against the top, let his head fall back awkwardly against the hardwood. His head dropped to the side taking in his surroundings and their familiarity.

“Do you ever get tired of coming back?”

You hummed, sure you had misheard due to the way the blood was rushing around your ears. He turned to look at you, all double chin and puffy cheeks.

“Of everything being the same, but different?”

His whispers captivated you, hushed confessions not quite meant for anyone else but his own mind yet spilling from him with such an ease that he did nothing to fight them.

“I’ll admit, I come home for other people. Not for me.”

“People?”

“Mum, Dad,” you paused. “You.”

His smile deepened. His chin knocking down to his chest, his eyes looking up at you from underneath his curling hair from being caught in the moist winter evening just hours before.

“You can stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you did three nights ago.”

Harry breathed in deeply, his nostrils flaring and his chest expanding. A lick of his lips, before his mouth dropped to sit slightly agape.

“What if I don’t wan’to? What if I want t’look at yer like this all the time?”

You found yourself unable to respond, nose burying itself into your wine glass as you pressed your lips against the cool outside to try and hide your burning smile.

His lips curled lightly, before he breathed a laugh once and gently shook your foot with his hand. “Eh? Come ‘ere-“

“Harry,” you breathed.

“C’mon, c’mere. ‘S room for more than just your feet.”

If it wasn’t for the creak of your chair as you slowly started to push yourself out of it, you wouldn’t have consciously been aware of how you were making your way to him.

His body relaxed, somehow managing to become closer to horizontal than sitting upright in his seat, as he peered as you walking the short distance over to him.

With his legs widened, he pressed his face into your side now that you were close enough. His nose inhaled the familiar scent of your perfume which was only faint now due to the other senses and scents it had mixed with throughout the evening.

Rolling his face out of your body, he knocked his head back and pressed his chin where his face had been. The face you showed him was worn with worry, an expression he did not want to meet.

“‘S wrong?”

His ask was lazy. Not wanting to dig deep and know. What if he didn’t like what he found?

“We know how this is going to end.”

“Do we?” He prodded. His eyes moved over your features quickly before they partly disappeared to him, thanks to your curtain of hair which slowly fell down.

His hand reached up, desperately brushing it away and cupping at the back of your head as best as he could while he remained seated.

“How’s that? Tell me.”

“Same, but different.”

You knew you shouldn’t use his words, not in a way that could be considered against him, but they - in the most ambiguous of ways - described everything perfectly.

“Not if I have my way.”

His words were almost lost against your stomach as he pressed his face against you once more and wrapped his hands around you; sweaty, nervous palms pressing to the backs of your thighs.

“Same, but better.”

Harry guided you down to his lap, his lips somehow managing to remain pressed into stomach, or your chest, or your clavicle, as your face became level with his.

“Different, but better.”

He kissed against your cheek slowly, nose nudging at your skin as he willed for you to relax against him. “I don’t know how you like it, like this,” he whispered in confession. “Show me?”

A puff of air left your lips as you turned to look at him with hooded eyes. His mouth was closer to yours than you originally thought, corners of lips brushing as you slightly pulled away.

When your lips met, it was in the softest of pecks that trembled under your nerves. Both sets of eyes looking back at each other as you innocently engaged.

If you were to take your eyes away from him in any way, you would notice those fluffy curls of his falling over his forehead and the lightest dusting of red blush making itself known against his cheeks and the tops of his ears.

He felt like a school boy, lost and clumsy. The kid who was once again flicking paper at you in science class just so he could pull a face at you over something your teacher was saying to get you to laugh.

Mouths hovering over each other, your breathing mixed, as Harry nodded to you slightly. You pressed your lips to his once more, feeling the way he gradually opened up to you, warmed and softened underneath the puckering of your mouth against his.

His hands, that slightly trembled, smoothed over your hips trying to pull your body so that it was more so flush against his. You moaned softly, your hands running over his jumper covered shoulders, fingers digging and pulling at the material just below the nape of his neck.

The chair beneath you moved lightly against the floor, not quite a scrape but a dull drag. Neither of you broke the kiss, but his hands against you allowed fingers to dig in to hold you steady to him so if you were to fall from where you were sitting, he still had you.

His lips slowed, moving to press against your cheeks again as he panted and his warmth breath bounced off your skin. “Think I got it,” he heaved.

“Do you?”

Harry hummed his ‘yea’, before pressing his lips so tenderly to your chin and the underside of your jaw. He felt how you swallowed heavily, throat dry from the way your mouth hung open and your neck further exposed itself as you lolled your head back.

You were falling further and further back, finding it hard to stay upright as he devoured you and made you weaker with each pulling kiss. His groans were needy, muffled and making your ache. While yours were silent and making his desperate to pull something from you. To build is confidence in that he was doing something right, you liked it this way too.

Hands fumbled and dragged upwards at your skirt, faintly aware now how it was similar - if not the same one - to the garment you wore to his show.

“Gonna take this off properly,” he mumbled, feeling the way your hips moved slightly from his hands to roll over him.

“You don’t have to-“

“No?”

Your voices were rushed as you spoke to each other, barely audible but loud enough all the same. His head was knocked back slightly as you hovered over him and you found yourself admiring his blissed out face even only in the lead up.

This was a sight that you hadn’t received last time, and if you had your way it was one you were going to greedily enjoy in all its glory.

Like watching the way his eyes closed and he softly grinned, the left side of his teeth started to show as the one side of his face reacted first while your hands blindly moved to lift up his jumper and the white tee he had on underneath, to allow you to find the button of his corduroys.

“What ya doing?”

“Nothing,” you mused.

He pulled a face, the kind that down turned his lips, eyebrows raised and head slightly tilted to the side. The kind that had you smiling.

“Not trying to get m’trousers around m’ankles for a second time within a week then?”

You giggled. “No.”

“Please do.”

A low moan left you as you pressed your forehead to his jaw and dropped your eyes. Your hands slowly started to pull at the brass button and pop it open before seeking out the zip thanks to his desperate plea, encouraging you to continue.

Hands quickly sought out the waistband of the trousers and gently pulled at the item. From the way that you were sat, you knew there was no way you were doing to make them budge.

“Stand up fo’ me,” he mumbled, quickly helping you get off his lap so that he could make light work of his clothing and pull down his trousers and underwear.

His bare bum made easy contact with the cushion leather beneath him, eyes carefully watching you as your hands moved to underneath your skirt.

The fabric of your underwear slipped so easily down your legs, his eyes just about caught the sight of them as they pooled against your ankles and you kicked them away.

Legs pressed together, you slowly untucked the v-necked blouse you had chosen and pulled it over your head. Wearing nothing but a fancy black bra, and a tight little skirt you hastily snatched for your wine and took a hefty gulp.

You could feel his eyes on you, a gruff groan catching in the back of his throat and when you finally turned your eyes from where they had been looking down at your heaving chest and how great this bra made your boobs look, causing him to move his hand down to start playing with himself.

His name left your lips in a breathy gasp, causing you to look up quite surprised at the find of his right hand gently tugging at his hard length.

“Keepin’ me waitin’,” he groaned, his left hand sloppily reached for the back of the collar of his jumper and tee, pulling the item roughly over his head.

“Fuck sake,” he mumbled under his breath, agitated that he was unable to get both items of in one go.

“Smooth.”

Harry stared up at you with a playful squint, before he gently fell back and moved the chair as he did so, the dull scrape heard once more.

And if you didn’t know he was flushed before, when you first kissed, you were definitely aware now. His eyes were blown out and hungry as they devoured you. Hair wildly haphazard before he let go of himself with a soft slap of his skin and harshly pushed his fingers through it.

“‘S it still a couple of quid for a strip of three,” his words brought you back to him. This smugness radiated off of him as he groaned and leaned forward to push his trousers down all of the way. Over his vans and socked feet, before he toed them off as well be harshly pulled at his white sport socks.

You didn’t even need for him to explain what he meant, staying silent as you watched his hands tug at his corduroys from the floor and retrieve his wallet. As his fingers moved around to find a couple of quid, the jangle of the coins was taunting.

One leg crossed over the other, you swayed and found yourself blushing when he looked up at you once he’d managed to find enough money and then some. With his wallet thrown on the table, he stood proudly from the seat and closed the short gap between your both.

Leaning forward he easily took your lips with his own before pulling away. With his face still close to yours he whispered, “Promise not to look at my arse.”

He didn’t hang around long enough for your reply, instead turning away and brazenly giving you all the time you would ever need to admire him, his fantastic bum and his hairy legs before he opted for a jog-walk type of thing, suddenly conscious that he was absolutely walking around naked from the waist down in a pub owned by your parents.

While you waited you took a quick pull from his whiskey, needing the heftier burn for Dutch courage. Nervousness returned when you heard the endings of what you believed to be Harry whistling.

“Machine ate all m’fuckin’ change,” he grumbled, regardless of the twinkle in his eye at the strip of overpriced condoms he had managed to score from the men’s bathroom. “‘S Durex. Business must be booming, your Dad’s definitely gone up in the world.”

“Please don’t talk about my Dad.”

He smiled brightly before he reached for your face with one hand and pulled you towards him mumbling his ‘sorry’s’ against your lips as he gave you several kisses in quick succession.

His other arm loosely wrapped around your back and pulled you with him as he walked backwards and slowly lowered himself back onto his previous seat. The chair creaked as you joined him, slipping into his lap and feeling the way he was smiling now.

Pulling away from your kiss, he quickly tore away one of the condoms allowing the others to fall without much care to the floor. Teeth took a hold of the foil-like packaging and he tore it not so elegantly with his eagerness.

With his cock nestled in the crease of his own thigh now, the heat radiating from it matched your own agonising yearning. Scooting back to give him space, you heard him groan as he gently rolled the condom down onto himself. Eyes looking up just in time to see him knocking his head back and breathing deeply through nose. The foil-like packaging was back in between his teeth once more as his hands were otherwise preoccupied.

Slowly your hand reached up to take it from his mouth, feeling some playful resistance as Harry continued to hold it in his teeth. His eyes were open and boyishly sincere, as you tugged at the item and he finally released it when you lightly laughed.

“Gi’me a kiss.”

Obliging him, you leant forward and slotted your mouths together a lot easier than you had done at the start of the night. A heat built easily between the two of you, as Harry gave you his tongue and you felt the flex of his jaw under your hand as he worked your mouths together.

He was eager, his hands tightening on your waist before he growled when he understood he had to grab handfuls of skirt before he could cup your backside. But when his skin met yours and you ground down onto his lap, the groan that left him was the most animalistic sound imaginable.

The frown your face fell into showed your desire to whimper, as he kept you atop him and marvelled in the way you writhed, both from satisfaction and keenness at the pressure of his cock against you.

“Can I have you again?” He asked, the startings of sweaty hair being pushed off your face. His eyes peered at you, searching for his answer as you seemed to be able to do nothing but pant and look back at him yearningly. “Are you letting me?”

You dragged your fingers down his t-shirt covered torso and lifted it slightly just to see the quiver of his stomach as pulled you onto him once more.

“Like this?” you voiced, meekly.

“‘F this is what you like then, yea’”, he breathed into your mouth, hands shifting your pliant body. “Is this what you want?”

You wordlessly nod, mouth falling open in a breathy gasp when he managed to move you so he sat so enticingly at your entrance. He was teasing both yourself and him, wanting to keep you both on the edge.

Harry blinked a few times as he looked at you, and you revelled in the way he couldn’t seem to concentrate. His hands held your flesh tightly, fingertips dipping into the skin of your bum cheeks as he gently guided you down.

An unattractive and dull, quite strangled noise, left your throat as you let your forehead fall against his temple. Eyes falling down you see the cups of your bra fall slack, you felt his hands softly gliding over your shoulder blades and shoulders.

He rid you of your bra, hands moving to your chest to squeeze your breasts. His jaw fell slack when you found yourself sitting snugly on his lap - on him - settled and already feeling spent.

This was so different compared to the last time; if not overwhelming so because of the way you both appeared to be so present. Each movement of your hips, and the way they rolled and grinded and dragged felt too much. So much so that you had become nothing more than a mess of short, quick breathing and blushing, sweaty cheeks.

Slack-jaw, you were unable to find it in you to return Harry’s kisses, and his joyful, breathy chuckle seemed to lead you to believe he was fine with it. In fact he was happy to keep going as you were.

Your movements were frantic, and despite the build up, not entirely driven by lust either. Harry continued to encourage you to move as you were; slow, grinding motions on his lap that caused the filthiest of groans and dirtiest of laughs from the two of you. Laughter that was only made stronger as the chair that held you both started to creak too.

You couldn’t do much about it though other than to breathe into each other’s mouth, and rock your hips together with more fervour each time.

“Yea’,” he breathed against your lips, left hand at the back of your head holding you to him, while his right rested just above your bum. “‘S better. That’s better.”

It was better. Better than last time. Better than anything before.

And while it hadn’t been frantic before, it was now as your legs that were hanging down either side of the chair started to tremble and your toes started to dig into the worn carpet beneath them. Hips knocking and your clit dragging heavenly against his public bone, you grasped his name as you buried your face into his neck and dug your nails into his nape.

Harry hissed his approval which fell to a groan as your nails pushed up into his hair and lightly pulled as you sought leverage. There were so many things you were learning this time around and his penchant for liking his hair pulled from time to time, was one of those things.

“God, ‘m gonna come soon,” he admitted, gruntly as he forced your hips down as he anchored his legs and widened his seating position. “Are you close?”

“Yeah,” you whined. “Yes. Like this-“

And as you pressed your face to his once more, he was everywhere. Soft but hard, loving but commanding. Smelled like clean washing detergent but of country air. Inviting and alluring, allowing you your lingering kisses between grounding breaths that became staccato in unison with the movement of your hips.

You aren’t ashamed of the whines that escaped your throat as you squeezed down on his cock, praised by indecipherable works that left Harry but were nothing more to you than lips moving against your rough and dry ones. Word that made the burning feeling of your pending orgasm spread through your entire body, warming you and setting you alight.

It was long and deep, with your toes curling into the carpet they were pressed against now. Barely able to catch your breath, sucking in harshly and shaking.

And when you came to, thoroughly exhausted, you noticed that he was waiting for your say so. That he could let go and enjoy the pleasure brought about by your shared labour.

“Coming-“ was all the warning that you got and was enough to encourage you to watch him as he came, his face completely void of anything other than pure pleasure. Wrinkles and frowns fade, his mouth falling open with his pink lips glinting prettily under the dim Christmas lights around you.

His forehead gleamed with sweat as he wrapped his arms around you tightly and his hips bucked up one, two and three times for good measure. “Fuck me,” he heaved gruffly.

You were suddenly desperate to feel his lips on yours despite the way you both continued to fight to get your breath back, but settled for resting them against the skin of his cheek, which was hot to the touch.

When you felt Harry start to go soft, you reluctantly pulled away and let him slip out of you. He wasn’t so keen to let you get too far, holding you just that bit higher than before with his hand cupping gently but firmly at your hip. “Where’d you think you’re going,” he hummed, eyes still closed as he continued to heavily inhale and exhale.

You softly smiled, taking in his soft face and responded by nuzzling close to him again.

Nowhere. Somewhere. Anywhere with him.

A place where only the two of you knew, like the back of your hand. The same way you knew each other. Now and possibly forever.

#gbsxmaschallenge #harry styles #harry styles smut #harry smut #harry styles x reader #harry x reader #harry styles x you #harry x you #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fan fic #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles one shot #harry styles fluff #harry styles christmas #harry christmas

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brookewritesyk · 4 years ago

Text

t w o

───── 𝐉𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 ─────

𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐅𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍. That meant it was time for Charlie-Rose to go back to Goodman's household. Every time Charlie replays the last memory she had with Jonny she felt butterflies at the second hug and the mumbled request of her coming to dinner next Friday.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she exhaled then smiled and thought I really fell hard for him huh. Then her phone ringing snapped her out of her thoughts, she turned around to get her phone on her bed and the caller ID said 'Pissface'. Just who she needed rang by.

Picking up her phone, she answered it and teasingly said: "Hey Pissface."

"Hi Paris," Jonny replied in the same tone.

"What's up?" She asked now sitting on the edge of her bed.

"Nothing I was just was wondering if you were still coming?"

"Yeah, I'm still coming Pissface." She said smiling whilst playfully rolling her eyes and hanging up the call. Then carried on getting ready.

───── 𝐀𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐦𝐚𝐧'𝐬 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 ─────

Charlie-Rose finally got to Martin's and Jackie house and she parked up her Fiat 500 in the drive. Weirdly, she saw Adam and Jonny staring intensely and bewildered at the outside window through the dining room.

"What are you two doing?" Charlie queried with a frown, intrigued and shutting her pastel blue car door and locking it.

"Come here Paris!" Jonny whisper-shouted at her and gesturing to the window.

"What?" Charlie scoffed now getting more perplexed.

"Quickly!" Adam ushered.

Impatiently, Jonny quickly dragged her to the window that caused butterflies to go wild in her stomach again. Now, she was now sneakily looking through the window with them.

"He hasn't got a top?" Charlie guessed "He according to what you've told me and what I saw last week, he never has a top on." Then she noticed that it wasn't the Martin not wearing a t-shirt concerned them, it was that he was looking down his trousers and his boxers. "Oh Shitting Hell!" Charlie exclaimed now increasingly uncomfortable.

"He's been doing that for ages and he just keeps on looking and looking..." Adam told trailing off getting more disgusted as he continued.

"Ok I love Martin but I'm not going to stand here and watch him look at his, you know." Charlie defended shaking her head to get the mental image she had created. "Jonny keys please if you're going to stand here and look at your dad doing that."

Not paying attention Jonny throws her the keys which she luckily catches. Smiling at her mini victory, she opened the door, closed it but leaving the latch on so the boys could come in. "Hi Jackie," Charlie called down the hall, putting her coat on the coat rack.

Then Jackie came in from the kitchen and welcomed "Oh hello Charlie, where are the boys?"

"Oh they'll be in a minute they just forgot something in the car." Charlie lied but she was an actress she knew what she was doing.

"Hello, Bambina!" Marin greeted rather cheerfully pretending for at least half an hour he wasn't looking down his pants.

Then Jonny and Adam walked in as Martin was no longer in the dining room.

"Martin put a bloody shirt on!" Jackie moaned.

"I will in a bleeding minute!" Martin argued walking away.

As Martin left Jackie, the boys and Charlie went into the kitchen.

"So where's Allison?" Jackie asked stirring the soup.

"Oh yeah, where's your girlfriend?" Adam teasingly inquired.

"She couldn't come," Jonny told blankly.

"Because she doesn't exist?" Charlie joked but deep down she didn't know if Allison was actually real but secretly hoped that she wasn't.

"Ohhh Paris you don't know how proud I am of you!" Adam dramatically said and whipping a pretend tear away smiling.

Rolling her eyes, Jackie then looked at Jonny again expecting an explanation as to why Allison couldn't come again.

"She's with a friend," Jonny explained sighing.

"Simion?" Adam asked with a smirk

"Nice soup." Jonny tried to change the subject and looking over the oven to pretend to care.

"Simon?" Jackie responded with a knowing look.

"They're friends," Jonny emphasized.

"Boyfriend." Adam corrected.

Then Martin walked in now surprisingly wearing a shirt and asked Adam for the magnifying glass. Charlie, Jonny and Adam looked at each other nervously shocked.

───── 𝐃𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 ─────

"Does my hair look good?" Jackie randomly asked.

"Yess..." The boys said unenthusiastically whilst carrying on eating.

"She had a flaky scalp," Martin informed not seeing the issue of bringing it up at dinner.

"Uhh, Dad!" Adam groaned.

"It's not in the food is it?" Jonny asked worried, looking down at his plate of food.

"Charming," Jackie muttered.

On the contrary, Charlie complimented truthfully: "Your hair looks lovely Jackie!".

"Thank you, sweetie, why couldn't I have you as my daughter?" Jackie sighed and the boys looked at her offended. "We've run out potatoes I'll just pop to the kitchen." Jackie noticed and rushed to the kitchen.

"So Martin, Jonny told me you hurt your knee, how did you manage that?" Charlie asked acting concerned.

"I banged it." Martin simply said with a slight stutter.

"Oh, really what?" Jonny asker catching onto what Charlie was doing.

"My other knee."

Before they could query him anymore Jackie walked back in the with the potatoes. And Adam said, "Oh mum I have some news, my jingle thing is on tonight."

"Oh, well-done bobble!" Jackie congratulated and kissed Adam on his head and face. "I'm so happy, Martin, Adam's jingle thing is on tonight we mustn't forget to listen."

Martin not surprisingly didn't answer.

"Tell Allison to listen too," Adam added.

"Ok," Jonny replied with a quick smile.

"Although won't she find it difficult with Simion's balls in her ear?" Charlie teased whilst smirking.

Jackie and Adam burst out laughing but Jonny whined with a pout "Hey you're supposed to be on my team."

Then the door went, this time Charlie went to get it and she was greeted with an unfamiliar person.

"Hello, Jack-" Jim started until Charlie cut him off smiling sweetly and said- "I'm not Jackie, I'm Charlie-Rose it's nice to meet you." extending her hand but he just looked a hand whilst flinching away from his dog.

"CHARLIE! Could you ask him to come back later we're eating!" Jackie called.

Shortly after Martin yelled, "Tell him to bloody go away!"

"Martin!" Jackie tutted.

Politely you smiled and went to go close the door until Jim explained: "Jackie said she would sponsor me for cancer."

"Oh," Charlie began to feel guilty and grabbed her purse and took out a thirty-pound note and gave it to him. Smiling sadly said, "here for the sponsor, put it down as Charlie-Rose Evans."

"Oh thank, you thank you!" The strange brunette man with square-framed glasses thanked and went in to kiss her cheek but Charlie quickly dodged them and said laughing "Oh I never caught your name."

"Caught my name?" The man asked confused.

"Umm, I meant what is your name?" Charlie clarified laughing.

"Oh, my name is Jim, Jim Bell." He introduced again flinching away from his dog again.

"Nice to meet Jim I've got go now bye!" Charlie cheerfully said and went back into the dining room.

"He must think I'm such a mean cow." Jackie moaned "He keeps asking me to sponsor him, but I'm always busy."

"Oh don't worry about it, I gave him 30 pounds for the sponsor," Charlie explained sitting down next to Martin again.

"Why would you do that?" Adam asked and Jonny agreed "Yeah!"

"Because unlike you two, she isn't horrible," Jackie answered for her rolling her eyes.

"Adam, your mother tells me that your radio jingle is on tonight," Martin said, extremely formal.

"Rather formal. Uh yes, sir." Adam caught on.

"So who wrote the music?" Martin asked now speaking normally.

"Uhh, I did dad, I wrote the jingle," Adam stated matter-of-factly.

"Brilliant." Jonny and Charlie whispered unintentionally at the same time. They looked at each other surprised with a warm smile.

"Aww, Jonny-boo why won't you go out with Charlie?" Jackie moaned.

Charlie choked on her wine while Jonny looked like a deer in headlights.

"Mum, I have a girlfriend!" Jonny reminded Jackie.

Charlie felt her heart sank again but then realised he never explicitly said he didn't like her like that.

───── 𝐋𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 ─────

"Mum how come you have more pictures of Pissface than me?" Adam asked.

"Your face annoys me," Jackie merely says not looking away from her magazine.

"Right. No really?"

"Really," Jackie said now looking at Adam.

"Apply cold water to the burns." Charlie taunted and Jonny laughed.

Then Martin came in from the kitchen and asked "Adam, could you come with me for a moment."

"What do you want?" But all three of us had an idea of what Martin wanted.

"Oh my God," Charlie whispered looking at Jonny then down.

───── 𝐀 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 ─────

"Females?" Jonny and Charlie said shocked yet relieved.

"Yes, I'm going to go on a dating site for twenty minutes."

"You agreed to that?" Jonny asked puzzled,

"He's paying me twenty pounds." Adam sated simply.

"Fair enough." Charlie-Rose agreed.

───── 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 ─────

"I heard about your parents," Jonny said softly and sincerely whilst Charlie's head was on Jonny's lap and snuggled into him. "I'm so sorry."

Charlie felt tears spring to her eyes. Her parents recently were killed by a robber and the emotions were still fresh. She hide her face into Jonny's lap so he couldn't see her cry.

But Jonny knew better, "Hey, hey Paris look at me." He told Charlie and used his thumb and forefinger to tilt her head up so he can see her face that had tears streaming down her face. "Oh Charlie," He cooed then they stayed like that for a few moments. Suddenly, Jonny kissed Charlie, it was the best kiss either of them had. Then she remembered Allison.

Feeling sick to her stomach, she pulled away and got up then ran to the front door with Jonny following behind her saying "Charlie wait-". Hurriedly, she put her coat on and started to open the door before Martin, Jackie and Adam came down the stairs and noticed she had her coat on.

"What's going on?" Jackie asked confused.

"I'm leaving."

"Why what happened?" Adam asked worriedly seeing the tears on her face.

"I'm sorry." Charlie left, crying silently.

"What did you do?" Jackie asked angrily.

"I kissed her," Jonny murmured realising what he did.

"You what?" Adam asked laughing as he was so shocked.

"I KISSED HER!" Jonny yelled angrily.

"While you were dating another girl?" Jackie clarified giving him a death glare.

"I made Allison up just so you couldn't set me up with anyone," Jonny confessed. "I'm still in love with Charlie."

#jonny goodman #Charlie-Rose #x oc #friday night dinner #adam goodman

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carewyncromwell · 4 years ago

Note

3, 10, 11, and 17 for my faves Carewyn & Bat? ❤️

Who named them? (Mother, father, or someone else?)

Lane named Carewyn, recalling the name from an old family tree tapestry that used to hang in the dining hall at the Cromwell estate and having always thought the name was rather pretty. Oddly enough it was also the middle name of Carewyn's great-grandmother, Charles's mother Isabelle Cromwell, who also had red hair and was sorted into Slytherin. That's where the similarities between the two end, though.

Bat's father, Jonny Harker, named him Robert. Bat's mum Nell had been tempted to name Bat after his father, but Jonny was firm that his son should have his own name, since he himself was the third "Jonathan Harker" in his family. Jonny chose "Robert" because of its association with kings, most notably Robert the Bruce. Before he died, Jonny always imagined that his son would go on to do great things, even though Nell Harker (and ultimately Robert himself, under her influence) was always much more practical and modest when it came to their ambitions.

If they have a partner, what pet names do they use for each other?

Carewyn will sometimes dip into "dear" with Orion, but when she's feeling particularly affectionate, she calls him "Starlight," as a reference to the constellation bearing his name.

As for Bat... *SNORT* "Grim." 🤣 "Grim" is his pet name for his other half Atticus, even when these two are not romantic. Bat calls Atticus almost nothing else. If he ever calls Atticus by his first name, it's either because he's deathly serious or his feelings are so intense in that moment that he feels like his breath's been stolen away.

Do they like their name?

Carewyn likes her name! Though when she was little, she was a little sad whenever anyone misspelled it -- her teachers would sometimes spell it "Carewin" or "Carewinne" by mistake.

Bat likes his name all right -- he just likes his nicknames better, coming out of most people's mouths. When he was a vampire everyone knew as "Bat," though, he actually found he liked it whenever Atticus called him "Robert," however strange it felt at points being reminded of who he used to be, as it kind of made him feel that bit more like his old self than he had in a century. In his second life, he's most often called "Rob," with Atticus exclusively calling him "Bat" -- if anyone calls him Robert, it's generally either his mother or his friends being more serious than normal.

What is their opinion on nicknames?

Carewyn isn't usually the type to give other people nicknames. If someone has a nickname they prefer to be called, she'll call them that...but about the only "nickname" she developed herself, if you can call it that, was the moniker of "Fireballs" for herself and Charlie as a duo. She's fine with people giving her nicknames, though, whether Pip/Pippa (by Jacob), Winnie (by her mum), or Carey (Bill, Charlie, and Tonks).

Bat is ALL about nicknames. He sees shortening someone's name or otherwise nicknaming them as an indicator of closeness, hence why Bartholomew is "Barty," Cecelia is "Ceci," and Atticus is "Grim," among others. Bat even just called his mother "Ma" a lot of the time. When he was a vampire, Bat took to calling people "Mr./Miss [last name]" a lot, dipping into first names only when someone somehow became close to him, but eventually those people at the heart of his inner circle all were called by their nicknames, whether Danny Gibson @catohphm or Adelia and Teddy Selwyn-Ellison and their three kids @thatravenpuffwitch. 💙

Name Ask!

#name ask #carewyn cromwell #bartholomew varney #about carewyn #about bartholomew #atticus grimsley #orion amari #lane cromwell

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noel-byers · 5 years ago

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What monsters do you fight? || chapter O2

Chapter O1 • Chapter O2 • Chapter O3

Words: 1650

N/A: the girl in the gif with Noel is Melissa

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If there was a place where surely a girl was hiding to cry she was definitely under the terraces of the garden, where they usually played rugby matches. In fact, she was under the seat, with her knees on her chest and her shoulders clutching her bent head. I could hear his sobs and his breath trying to stifle his noisy cry. I slowly approached her and seeing that she still hadn't noticed my presence, I coughed putting both hands in my pockets. Melissa looked up and only then could I see her swollen and red eyes. That piece of shit had reduced it to a rag with a few but sharp words. "Cigarette?" I asked, taking the named item out of a pocket of my jeans.

"I...I don't smoke" she said, sniffling. Ah man that sucks the mucus.

"Better this way" I replied with a shrug. "You will ruin only your breath and your lungs. Smoke isn’t cool kid, unless you want to destroy yourself. Which is really cool” I said with a little irony as I tried to light my beloved cigarette.

A few moments passed in silence until Melissa said lightly to me "Did you see it all?"

"Yep" I replied immediately taking out a cloud of smoke from my lips "You don't have to fear anything, you won't lack respect next time" I said capturing the blonde's attention "It's an insult to the male gender to take it out on a woman when it's ten against one” I continued shaking my head.

"But he had all the reasons in the world, in short, look at me...I'm like all the girls...I thought to impress the bad boy of the school and take his best part out of him...but I just deluded myself" the girl explained, sniffing again.

"Listen to me, Melissa, first of all take my flannel shirt and blow that nose...my heart is crying to sacrifice my favorite dress but I don't have handkerchiefs, so blow your nose before I change my mind" I said handing her my shirt, which she immediately grabbed looking at me, puzzled but not refusing my order.

"You're really weird, ehm..." he stopped, looking into my eyes and making me realize that I hadn't introduced myself yet. I put the cigarette between my lips again and brought my hand closer to shake her in education.

"Noel, Noel Byers" she raised an eyebrow.

"Melissa Danielsen, as you will already know. Are you the sister of the missing child?"

"I would prefer you to call him Will, I'm sick of people cataloging him as a poor outcast" he said pulling up a heavy sigh "Going back to us, I know how you feel now, you'll surely be wondering what made you sell your virginity to that asshole of Billy Hargrove, and many other things that surely do not positively depict your person" Melissa nodded silently “Stop being so hard on yourself, you are young and in fact we are both young and in this adolescence we make so many mistakes" my cigarette, making her realize that as far as I was an employee I hated being under a stupid habit.

"The truth is that in the coming days people will stare at you, laugh at you and make you jokes of bad taste, and you don't have time to cry, you have to be strong, you have to growl and let the comments slip away that are not worth it to listen. Probably the same girls that Billy uses as a sex toy will tease you, but you don't listen to them, i mean, you know which pulpit the sermon comes from" I explained, sucking up some tobacco.

"Not forgetting that I will no longer have friends on my side..." Melissa commented disconsolately.

"And who the fuck am I? Santa Claus?" I asked slightly strangely "I almost blew the head of Billy Hargrove for you and probably because I'm a bit feminist. But first of all I did it for you” I concluded with a shrug.

"Thank you..." she replied with a small smile.

"And then, as strange as it may seem, I have a couple of friends too, and they certainly think like me" I continued to cheer her up letting an almost maternal smile show on my mouth "But now you raise your blonde ass, let's go to the bathroom to rinse your face, you blow your nose with real handkerchiefs and I'll walk you home, huh?” I suggested standing up with a jerk and pulling Melissa by the arm in a playful way, urging her to follow me and she choked and consented.

"All right, as long as you wash your mouth a little, hell, you smell obscene tobacco"

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By evening he had fallen on Hawkings and tonight we strangely breathed less heavy air in my house. It was probably because Bob had come to visit us. He and my mother had been dating for a couple of months and...God, I never saw my mother so happy. Seeing her joking, hugging and kissing with one who finally didn't mistreat her made me feel at peace with myself. Slowly my family was re-emerging from that dark and distressing oblivion, I felt that if they were still passing by a couple of months surely my family could have been called as such.

"What are your plans for the evening? Will you watch a movie?" I asked as I made my entrance into the kitchen, tying my hair into something not too high, Bob turned around and his camera automatically picked me up.

"You choose the boys the movie is evening. Do you, ma'am, have an appointment?" The man asked playfully, infecting me with his good humor.

"Tempting, but not. My shift starts at 8:20 pm and if I don't leave the house in ten minutes, I'll pay back my salary” I explained with a shrug “The only plus is the free hot dogs" I admitted attracting my mother's attention.

"Noel don't eat too many, do you remember that on Jonathan's birthday last year you had a colic and -"

"MUM! I don't want you to make a short film about my intestinal problems while Bob is back! "I answered, turning my face flushed as I ran away with my tail between my legs in my room, looking for my shoes.

I went through WIll's room and my attention was caught by his sudden raising of his voice.

"Stop treating me like that! Like I'm about to break. So don't you help me, just make me feel weirder" my exasperated younger brother said, it was obvious he was arguing with Jonathan.

It was difficult to take someone's part in these situations, I knew how Will could feel right now, he was scared and had suffered multiple traumas, including that of an apparent death. On the other hand, I also understood Jonathan, because it was also my own position, like that of anyone who wanted to help Will. To console some or give him moral support was like wandering in a minefield, you never knew if you could touch some sore point.

I remembered when I decided to sleep together with Will the night made me feel better, I knew that I could protect him, but now that he's growing up and kindly asked me to let him sleep alone, I realize how much my "safety" thought travels one way. As far as I could have been next to Will, there was nothing I could do to keep him from thinking about his mind, he was a demon that only Will could have fought.

"You're not weird" Jonathan said

"Yes I am, I am" replied our younger brother dryly. I looked at the figure of Jonathan who was about to give up, but then he came out with a sentence:

"You're right, you're weird" both my younger brother and I raised both eyebrows. "So why should you become normal like the others? Being weird is better, I'm weird. Our sister who has been staring at us for half an hour is weird” he said pointing to me.

"Hey nerd go easy" I said in an ironic tone, approaching Will's bed and occasionally pulled an ear to my big brother in a playful way.

"Is that why you have no friends?" Our little brother asked disconsolately.

"We have friends, and weird friends are the best. You don't need to have a hundred to feel cool, a couple is enough, because you know that you will remain faithful forever. And then we are creative, sensitive and original, in short, the best on the market" I explained to Will to encourage him, infuse he also had it, but it was obvious that in those dark moments the positives were difficult to see them.

"Then why are you always with me?"

"Because you are our best friend!" Jonathan immediately replied "And we prefer to be friends of Zombie Boy than of a trivial nullity. Do you understand me? In short, who would you like to be friends with? About Bowie or Rogers?" At that point Will almost shivered and shook his head with an amused smile.

"What Jonny wants to say is that normal people never do anything important in life, as Kierkegaard says, they are locked in their 4x4 box with a family and a job, thus continuing until the end of their days..."

"Oh my God the nerd has come, Will stuck your ears!" Jonathan said jokingly, pushing Will away, who had begun to show signs of little laughter.

"Come on idiots, it's important! In summary, it is always the people outside the lines who make the revolution and enjoy their lives properly" I explained hiding a laugh and pulling a small snort.

"What about Kenny Rogers?" Will asked ironically.

"Kenny Rogers? Oh I love Kenny Rogers!” Bob said suddenly, coming out of the corridor and suddenly I remembered that I was being late for work.

"Fuck! I love you guys, please, be good" I said, running off down the corridor.

"NOEL YOU ARE LEAVING WITHOUT SHOES" my mother shouted.

"Fuck the shoes!" I yelled back, turning back.

T O B E C O N T I N U E D . . .

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N/A: Hello everyone! This is a passing chapter, but it also seems right to give some space to noel and her character before making her interact with Billy. Thank you all for your support, you make me really happy. If you want to be tagged in the next chapter, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the story, if you like 🌸��

Tag list:

@xxemoluverxx @sledgy14 @ellenna

#stranger things #stranger things imagines #stranger things imagine #stranger things aesthetic #stranger things gif #stranger things headcanon #stranger things preference #billy hargrove #billy hargove x reader #billy hargrove imagine #billy hargrove imagines

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soveryanon · 6 years ago

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Reviewing time for MAG138! /o/

- ………………… It’s Holy Shit Smirke What The Fuck time, and I feel obligated to mention in preamble that: yes, I do get one of the points of his statement – that he lacked… flexibility and that it impacted his understanding of the Fears; that he associated them with a neat categorisation, with places, with stone and concrete and stable, fixed monumentality (“And if, as I came to believe, the Dread Powers were themselves places of a sort, then surely with the right space, the right architecture, they could be contained. Channelled. Harnessed.”) when they’re actually mutable, can express themselves in an infinity of ways, and that Smirke’s ~taxonomy~ was far from perfect, probably too tainted by his preconceptions and associations with tangible places to work for long after a few decades of illusion; that, in the end, Robert Smirke died as an old man unable to admit the flaws in his work (“Would you have me separate The Corruption between insects, dirt and disease? To, to divide the fungal bloom from the maggot? No. No, I… stand by my work.”), ready to blame others than him or his own community for their sufferings (“No; I feel certain they were bought into existence by some ancient civilisation, some… foolish tribe from pre-history.”). Leitner (!) (yes, “!”: Leitner, being right about something, I know. Incredible.) and Gerry had actually warned about describing the Fears with such neat separations:

(MAG080) LEITNER: I told you it was an unhelpful analogy. Let’s try another one. Um… Imagine, you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape and, above you, can see the vast dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?

(MAG111) GERRY: […] And when our fears change, so do these things. But it’s not quick. Gertrude reckons they’ve basically been the same since the Industrial Revolution. She and my mum both liked to follow Smirke’s list of fourteen. ARCHIVIST: [DISBELIEVINGLY] Th– I mean, there are a lot more than fourteen things to be afraid of in the world. Where do you draw the line? GERRY: Hmmm. I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. […] And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour. O–Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like– ARCHIVIST: An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once. GERRY: Now you’re getting it. ARCHIVIST: Like colours, but if colours hated me.

Sounds like the Fears are… part of a whole, and that “infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once” might still be the most Accurate Description for… whatever they are.

But I’m also an utter fool who likes neat categorisations for these concepts so YES, I acknowledge that Jonny is calling us out on trying to put labels on everything that happens in the series and on trying to make occurrences fit into the list we were given in MAG111, but suddenly I can’t read / HOW ABOUT I DO IT ~ANYWAY~. :w

- Obligatory tears because: Tim, disillusioned at the end of season 3, had reached the conclusions about Smirke’s work that Smirke himself half-admitted here (back-and-forth between admitting that he had been wrong and ~standing by his work~):

(MAG117) TIM: […] You know, for the longest time I thought the secret was in balance…! In some… dusty old architect’s work on symmetry. [SCOFF] But he failed, didn’t he? What was he even trying to achieve? He’d lived like anyone else, he… died like anyone else. Whatever he was looking for, in his “Balance and Fear”? I don’t think he found it.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I have been blessed with a long life, something few who crossed paths with the Dread Powers can boast, but now… at the end of it, my true fear is that I have wasted it, chasing an impossible dream. To speak plain, I have begun to lose faith in the possibility of Balance. Of any sort of equilibrium among them.”

And look, yes, I know, I should be terrorised that Smirke’s shiny system wasn’t so great and functioning after all… but I’m mostly SAD, because Tim had spent the last three-to-four years of his life trying to understand Smirke’s work, and had concluded that it wasn’t working. And he was right. (And then he died, too.)

- So we’re getting a new designation for the Fears: the “Dread Powers”, which, yeah, what it says on the tin, neat!

- Smirke’s words and his influence on current characters localised in London puts me to mind again that… how come that some people apparently knew what the rituals would do to our world? How can they know of the result, since no ritual has succeeded so far?

(MAG092) ELIAS: These things that touch us, they… don’t have a form of the sort that could exist in physical reality. So the Stranger wishes to remake that physical reality into something closer to itself. It wants to make this world its own.

(MAG111) ARCHIVIST: No, I don’t have time. Tell me about the rituals. GERRY: Well, they all have one. Most of them, anyway. Takes centuries to build up to a level of power where they can try it, and if they fail, it’s back to square one. ARCHIVIST: Okay, but what do the rituals do? GERRY : They… kind of “shift” the world, just enough for the Power to come through. Merge with reality. Some say, or well, they guess, that it could bring other entities through with them. I mean, I doubt The Buried would be bringing through The Vast, but you know. ARCHIVIST : But what does that actually mean. F–for the world? “Merging with reality”? GERRY: […] right now all the entities have to act like a hunter, they pick off the weak ones around the edges, the ones that wander to close, and the rest of the time they have to just graze on whatever fear we all passively give away. ARCHIVIST : And if one of the rituals succeeds? GERRY : The world becomes a factory farm.

So this might be what Smirke theorised himself, notably on the idea that Powers had allies and opposites:

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “Fourteen Powers, with their opposites and their allies, each with an aim no more no less than manifestation. Apocalypse. Apotheosis. I wonder: did my work bring about these Dreadful things, or… did I simply develop the means by which they can be known…?”

And we saw through The Hunt (or… the essence of the hunt) that its goal is not to manifest, since it revels in the chase and the pursuit – not in getting the prey. Though Smirke might have given inspiration to humans touched by the powers, to organise their activities around circumstantial allies (or allies by nature) and enemies? There might still have been a bit of truth to it, since Gertrude did manage to neutralise The Buried’s ritual with the body of Vast-touched Jan Kilbride… So, to what extent was Smirke, in the end, spot-on, and to what extent did he over-systemise something that was filled with irregularities and particularities?

(- I wonder if the ideas of what the world WOULD look like if one of the rituals succeeded weren’t due to… the Fears-touched dreams? There is definitely something too suspicious about “dreams” overall in this series – I assumed for long that it was a case of “well, of course, if you experience a terrifying thing, your subconscious with get plagued with it and you’ll have nightmares related to this” for a lot of them, independently from Jon’s Archivist-induced dreams. But Smirke revealed that he had initially begun his work influenced by the dreams he had:

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “Did I ever tell you about the dreams? I’m sure I must have. I would dream about them, you see, as a young man, long before I devised my taxonomy. I would find myself in nightmares of strange, far-off places: a field of graves; a grasping tunnel; an abattoir, knee-deep in pigs’ blood. I believed then, as I still believe now, that these places I saw were the Powers themselves, expressed in their truest form, far more entirely than any “secret book” can claim.”

And we’ve had various cases of dreams being more spooky than “regular” ones: Oliver began to see the veins in his dreams (MAG011, MAG121), Robert E. Geiger was only able to hear Stefan Brotchen’s last words in his dreams (MAG099), Annabelle had started to get dreams involving spiders despite being unaware of the nature of the experiments (MAG069), Carter Chilcott had been dreaming of “floating through ancient graveyards or the open, empty sea” while on the Daedalus (MAG057), Joshua Gillespie dreamed of asphyxiating despite the coffin itself not giving him any such experience while he was awake (MAG002)… Is it possible that people are more sensitive to the Fears in their dreams, since dreams are a bit more in the Fears’ territory (Jonny mentioned, iirc, that they behave on “dream-logic”)? Is that how Garland Hillier saw The Extinction coming, too: due to his dreams?)

- Alright: sudden information that Smirke APPARENTLY HELPED THEORISE THE RITUALS??? HOLY MEW????

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “So many have abandoned us, casting about for rituals that I helped design. In my excited discussions with Mr. Rayner, I… perhaps extrapolated too much from his talk of a “Grand Ritual” of darkness. The Dark, I thought, was simply one of the Powers so, it stands to reason that each of them should have its own ritual. Perhaps they already did, even before I put pen to paper. They certainly do now, and I shudder to think how Lukas, Scott and the others may use this conception.”

So, to break this down: it seems like Maxwell Rayner agreed to discuss with Smirke about what he identified as The Dark’s ritual, and Smirke guessed from there that the other Fears that he had isolated probably had (or should have) their own rituals, and worked on theorising them? Basira herself had noticed that Natalie Ennis’s words reported in MAG025’s statement (“She said that they were all going, that 300 years was a long time to wait, but she was lucky to have found it so close to the end.”) matched with two solar eclipses happening in Ny-Ålesund (MAG108: “And when Natalie Ennis talked about it being 300 years ago, well. How much do you know about the relationship between Edmond Halley and John Flamsteed?” “What, Halley like the comet?” “Exactly.”); Basira might have been spot-on on the idea that The Dark is quite… regular and organized around these eclipses? Or at the very least, that The Dark was aware of its opportunities to reshape the world.

And Smirke hypothesises that a few other people might have taken inspiration from it, some of them also part of Jonah Magnus’s own circle (so they were probably all mutual acquaintances, at the very least, as people that Smirke had “brought into [his] confidence”?):

* “Mr. Rayner” (The Dark): unless twist, Maxwell Rayner himself, and Smirke had abundantly talked with him, apparently. No mention on whether Jonah knew him too (except if the Elias-is-Jonah theory turns out to be an actual thing, since Maxwell was revealed to have been a ~friend~ of the Head of the Institute in MAG135), but Dr. Algernon Moss, in a statement given May 14th 1864, had reported on his encounter with Maxwell Rayner who was already well-known at the time (MAG098).

* “Scott” (The Buried): likely referring to George Gilbert Scott (MAG050), who had been under Henry Roberts’s tutelage, who had himself been one of Smirke’s disciples. Sampson Kempthorne, the author of the letter to Jonah, briefly employed Scott in 1834 (historical fact) and noted that he tended to design claustrophobic places. Scott had been said to have “also received certain architectural tutelages from Sir Robert himself”, and during a reception, Smirke had explained to Kempthorne that Scott hadn’t really understood his lessons about “balance” and that Kempthorne had dodged a bullet getting rid of him. Sampson Kempthorne wrote his letter on June 12th 1841, was in good terms with Jonah Magnus but not really an intimate of Smirke himself (he wasn’t into ~the confidence~).

* “Lukas” (The Lonely): we know from Barnabas Bennett’s letter to Jonah Magnus, dated April 9th 1824, that Jonah had warned him to avoid Mordechai Lukas and was himself on “good terms” with him according to Elias (MAG092). Smirke could be referring to Mordechai or another from the family – since, at least, it seems like the ties between the Lukases and the Magnus Institute remained strong over time, with the Lukases being current sugar daddies patrons of the Institute (MAG017, MAG033) and Elias knowing ~Peter~ personally.

So that’s indeed quite a peculiar society of people in the know about the ~Dread Powers~. Given that Maxwell Rayner gave information to Smirke about The Dark’s “Grand Ritual”, and that Mordechai Lukas was already… powerful enough by himself to punish Barnabas in 1824, it doesn’t look like Robert Smirke “converted” all of the people surrounding him, but that he got acquainted with a few people who already had their own knowledge? Not sure about George Gilbert Scott, though – it seems like this one learned Smirke’s principles and ran away with them, serving The Buried.

In the same way, it really feels like Smirke might have exaggerated his role in organising the rituals? The Dark has its own already; we know that the previous attempt to bring The Stranger through took place in the Court Theatre of Buda in October 1787 (statement given by Abraham Janssen in MAG116), when Smirke was… a young kid. There was also some suspicion about the ~Archives~ under Alexandria, which were attacked by what looked like a Dark faction in AD 391, perhaps to stop an attempt by the Beholding (MAG053). According to Peter Lukas, The End and The Web have never been interested in setting up their ritual (MAG134), and Daisy&Jon guessed that The Hunt doesn’t want to reach its culmination (MAG133), even though some Hunters were seeking it. It doesn’t seem like Smirke created the principles that guide rituals, more that he himself didn’t have any information about attempts by other factions than The Dark? But he apparently wrote… guidelines (/wild-mass guessing essays) about others, and feared, towards the end of his life, how they could be misused.

Smirke, why the FUCK did you do that in the first place, OF COURSE IT WOULD GET MISUSED………….. (Though, it’s easy to see how something meant to protect could serve nefarious purpose. Explain in details how fire works, in order to save lives during a housefire, and one pyromaniac could still twist the principles to achieve more damage…)

Smirke specifically said that he “put pen to paper” so, unless it was an exaggeration… there might be a Robert Smirke essay somewhere about his ideas of the Fears’ rituals, whether they’re concrete guidelines or more general principles. The question is: where, and is it actually “worth” something, either to construct the rituals or to stop them? Did Gertrude have access to it? … is it in Elias’s safe? (Or is it… absolutely useless and off-the-mark, and Smirke feared for nothing because he thought his work a bigger deal than it actually was for the Fears themselves?)

- Amongst the list of people into ~Robert Smirke’s confidence~, what about Henry Roberts? He had trained George Gilbert Scott:

(MAG050, Sampson Kempthorne) “Henry [Roberts] was very effusive about the talents and prospects of young Mr Scott and was at great pains to inform me that his young protégé had also received certain architectural tutelages from Sir Robert himself. He said this with the oddest of looks, as though there was some jolly secret between us. I rather just nodded, as if to say I took his meaning, and he left well enough alone. […] At the mention of the name George Gilbert Scott, Sir Robert’s face flushed suddenly, in a manner not entirely unlike that of his protégé. He asked me what my interest was in Mr Scott, and I told him that he had, until recently, been engaged as my assistant. At this, Sir Robert gave a small laugh of satisfaction and told me I did not realise exactly how lucky an escape I may have had. I asked again what his training had entailed, and Sir Robert stared at me for a silent minute, before he finally nodded his head. “Balance,” he told me. “Equilibrium. […]” Without prompting, his tirade continued, and he talked about George, about shortcuts in symmetry and a patron that the young fool did not understand. I could follow very little of it, and it seems to be decidedly removed from anything that I would consider architecture, but whatever it was that Sir Robert had been teaching George, it appeared the lessons had been put to less noble use than he had intended.”

Both George Gilbert Scott and Henry Roberts historically survived Smirke (dying respectively in 1878 and 1876) – but it seemed that at the time, Henry Roberts knew about the true nature of Smirke’s work, and yet didn’t apparently dedicate himself to one power like Scott apparently did with The Buried…? Did it happen later, or did Henry Roberts totally manage to remain neutral…?

(And I’m HOWLING overall that… I hadn’t noticed, back in MAG050, that. Henry Roberts’s behaviour implied that Robert Smirke was indeed sharing what he knew of the Fears with his private club of acquaintances. I thought he was only training people in his “Balance and Fear” and that they independently happened to discover the powers by themselves. But nope, it’s REALLY all because of Robert Smirke; good job, Bob.)

- A curious detail: Robert Smirke’s death as given in MAG138 does not match the official version in our ~world~: the historical figure died on April 18th, 1867 while Martin reported that the letter he wrote to Jonah was dated February 13th, 1867, and that he died of ~apoplexy~ mid-writing it. That’s two months before his historical death!

(MAG138) MARTIN: Statement of Robert Smirke, taken from a letter to Jonah Magnus, dated 13th of February, 1867. […] Uh… [INHALE] The, hum… The letter ends there. Uh… Ap–apparently Robert Smirke was found collapsed in his study that evening, dead of, uh… [FLIPPING PAPER] Apoplexy.

Buuuut that year (1867) curiously has one matching point of data with the statement previously read by Martin, in MAG134 – it’s the same year Garland Hillier disappeared.

(MAG134, Adelard Dekker) “Garland Hillier’s final essay, published in 1867 and simply titled “L’Avenir”, “The Future”, was supposedly a rambling and meandering speculation on the end of the human race, influenced by Darwin’s recent publication of The Origin of the Species and his own shattered faith. He posited a future where, far from any glorious or holy revelation or reckoning, a decadent and corrupt humanity was violently and utterly supplanted, and wiped out by a new category of being. One he referred to as “les Héritiers”. “The Inheritors”. He gave no details on how he believed they might look like, or how they might behave, but his predictions for the final days of humanity were unpleasant, and visceral. […] Anyway, the point is that sometime after that essay was published, Garland Hillier disappeared. Exactly when this happened, no one is really sure, but the last records of his existence can be found near the end of 1867.”

I don’t know if the “change” regarding Robert Smirke’s death is simply a matter of authorial self-protection (Magnus Archives is ~an AU~ of our reality, this Robert Smirke is not the same one as the historical figure) or if it is potentially tied to something more tightly knitted (a shift, a rupture between the Magnusverse and our own world? etc.)

At the very least, I *squint* hard at 1867. Were Jonah’s activities tied (from afar or more closely) to Garland Hillier’s own activities? Did Beholding start feeling threatened by the ~prophecy~ announcing the new emergence?

- You, too, get Marked by Beholding and get A Big Giant Eyeball haunting the sky in your dreams, the got-in-contact-with-Magnus trademark:

(MAG120) ELIAS: The Archivist wanders. He is searching, though, for what he does not know. […] All through it, the shadow is above him; the shape that gazes down upon him, bloodshot and unblinking. […] It opens, and he walks slowly down the steps into the earth; but even as it closes above him, the great shadow still Sees him. There is nowhere in this universe that it would not blot out the sky. […] So he watches her, trying in his single-minded focus to ignore the attention of that impossible thing that covers the sky and fixes its gaze on him with such force it would choke him – were he breathing. […] And at last, the Archivist looks up. [STATIC INTENSIFIES] At last, he looks into The Eye that sees all, and knows all, and clutches at the secret terrors of your heart. The Ceaseless Watcher of all that is, and all that was; the voracious, infinite hunger that tears at his soul, invoking him to discover, to observe, to experience all and everything and forever.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I have been dreaming again, Jonah. The same every night for months, now. I imagine myself a boy again at Aspley. I awake, cold and alone in the dormitory. The sky outside is dark and I see no stars. I light a candle to better see my way, and step down the silent corridor. The masters’ rooms are empty; the fire in the kitchen is dead. Eventually, my steps lead out into the courtyard. It is so quiet that the sound of my feet upon the grass is painful to my ears. I stop, and look up at the sky, that empty black nothing, and I see the edges of the horizon becoming a dull white. I cannot understand what I am looking at. And then the sky… blinks. And I awake.”

(Bob didn’t have it so bad, after all? I mean. At least, his Big Eyeball blinked.)

- Third named mention of “The Watcher’s Crown” in the series! … almost directly answering Jon’s plea to know more about it from last episode:

(MAG111) GERARD: She worked out they’d all be happening quite close together. She’d already been doing it a while, and the Unknowing was the next on her list. That and The Watcher’s Crown. ARCHIVIST: The, the what? GERARD: Uh, the Rite of The Watcher’s Crown. It’s what she called the ritual for the Eye. She didn’t tell me much about that one, just that she knew how to take care of it.

(MAG137) ARCHIVIST: […] What the hell is The Watcher’s Crown? So far the only mention of it I’ve had is from Gerry, and he didn’t seem to know much about what it actually meant. [PAUSE] And he’s gone now. But if it is the grand ritual of Beholding, then I– … I mean… I need to know about it. Right…?

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I am not a fool; I know well enough what this dream is likely to mean, and I warn you again that if you have any remaining ambitions to use our work, to try and wear The Watcher’s Crown, you must abandon them! Not simply for the sake of your own soul, but for that of the world! I have always had the utmost respect for you as a man of dignity, and learning. Do not allow yourself to fall to this madness.”

Interestingly, Smirke presented it like a literal crown that could be worn…? (What is in Elias’s safe.) (Is the crown Fashionable.)

- Take your pick of your Failed-Because-Of-Hubris representative:

(MAG080) LEITNER: And so I branded them with my seal. I told myself that if any should escape such a mark could help me retrieve them. But I think, in my heart, I dreamed of my work becoming known. That “The Library of Jurgen Leitner” would stand as a symbol of courage and protection. Hubris. I suppose it is fitting punishment that my name has become a watchword for evil, spoken by those who only know it as marking the darkest, most terrible of secrets. My name has become a curse.

(MAG111) GERRY: Eventually, I grew old enough and wise enough to see [my mother’s] obsession for what it really was: hubris. She lived her just carefully enough not to be destroyed by things she studied, but that was it. The things out there weren’t like taming fire, they couldn’t be contained or used for light or warmth. The best you could hope for from them, would be that they don’t spot you, and instead my mum chased after them, obsessed with others who had tried to stare at them without being blinded: y’know, Flamsteed, Smirke, Leitner. Idiots who destroyed themselves chasing a secret that wasn’t worth knowing.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “You see, Jonah, I feel the hour of my death approaching and, though you have always been reluctant to pay due heed to my warnings or counsel, I continue to see in you the reflection of my own past hubris. […] So yes. Hubris. Not simply in that, I suppose, but in believing that those I brought into my confidence shared my lofty goals. “

I wonder if we’ll hear about John Flamsteed at some point, since Basira had done a bit of research on him by MAG108, too… (Though he lived waaaay before Smirke and Jonah.)

- I’m still not sold on the Jonah Magnus=Elias theory. On the one hand, there are many things indeed reinforcing that possibility: Smirke thought that Jonah had sunken into Beholding and that he planned to launch the Watcher’s Crown. MAG138 casually revealed that Smirke knew “Rayner” and the way he described him implied that Jonah knew him too (there was nothing in MAG098 to confirm or deny that Jonah knew the guy; the statement was even given to the Institute, not to Jonah himself, and we didn’t know if he was still alive at the time (1864) until MAG138). This is coming shortly after MAG135 which… revealed that Elias PERSONALLY knew Maxwell Rayner and was acquainted (?) with him at some point. Robert Smirke was guessing that Jonah was trying to escape death, and there is obviously the question: and if he had succeeded, who and where would he be? There is even the mention that:

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I am choosing to assume that these manifestations are unintentional, Jonah, and you have not… simply decided to implore a Dark Patron to end the life of an old man.”

… which (except for the fact that Beholding Never Does Shit) obviously puts Elias to mind because uh, who is well-known for murdering old people? Would Robert Smirke have been voiced by someone from Jonny’s family, too?

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, every time Elias opens his mouth, I… can’t “read” him as 220+ years old. He’s too shitty? Too petty? Too… not exactly impulsive, but there is always an undercurrent of impatience in him, I feel? I don’t really know how to explain, but I feel like someone much older than “middle-aged” wouldn’t… revel as he does in petty jabs and punchlines, wouldn’t be so intent on getting the last word and on being Verbally Right at every turn?

(But then, that’s one of the main question in this series: what the HECK is Elias, what is his backstory, what are his goals, what even is his ROLE, and what does he know about the Spiders in his Institute.)

- HOWEVER, nervous laughter re: the fear of dying, because hum. Hum. Who does that remind me of.

(MAG080) ELIAS: Well, he was always going to need to fly the nest at some point. Go out and see the world for himself. LEITNER: He might die. ELIAS: It’s always a danger. Almost always.

(MAG121) OLIVER: The thing is, Jon, right now, you have a choice. You’ve put it off for a long time; but it’s trapping you here. You’re not quite human enough to die, but – still too human to survive. You’re… balanced on an edge, where The End can’t touch you, but you can’t escape Him. I made a choice. We all made choices.

(MAG136) ARCHIVIST: My– [PAUSE] [INHALE] [SIGH] My memories of the coma are not clear. But I know I made a choice; I made a choice to become… something else. Because I was afraid to die.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I beg you, do not pursue this goal; if only a single lesson may be gleaned from my life of long study, and longer hardship, it is that the fear of Death is natural, and to flee from it will only bring greater misery. Repent of your sins, Jonah. Seek forgiveness. I am certain the Dread Powers cannot take a soul that keeps faith in the Resurrection.”

Elias had already installed Jonah Magnus as a Role Model for Jon in MAG092 (“Because he had to know, to watch and see it all. That’s what this place is, John, never forget it. You may believe yourself to have friends, to have confidantes, but in the end, all they are, is something for you to watch, to know, and ultimately to discard. This, at least, Gertrude understood.”) and ;; I. Am. Getting the feeling that Jon might be, totally unknowingly, walking in Jonah’s footsteps a bit…? Except for the part where he’d agree to sacrifice people close to him, because Jon’s conscious decisions have been the absolute opposite so far.

- Something heartbreaking to me: the way… information is not being shared, between Martin and Jon – though Martin is apparently planning to let Jon hear Robert Smirke’s statement eventually. Because MAG138 brings another light on Jonathan Fanshawe’s letter and Jon’s own conclusions about Jonah Magnus:

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: Hm. “Jonah Magnus”. I’ve never really given much thought to him. Not nearly as much as I should have. I suppose I had always hoped there was a chance he was… innocent, in all this. I know, I know! But I had… [EXHALE] I had just… hoped that maybe the founding of the Institute was in earnest. And not simply the foundation stone for all the terrible things that have happened here. … But no. Whatever is happening now… has its origins two hundred years ago. In the work of an evil man.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “It is telling that of those I have brought into my confidence, it is only you and I who have continued this far without falling to one Power or another, despite all my instruction and work. This is, of course, assuming you have not taken the path of The Eye that I know has called you – called us both – for so long, even since before we began our work on Millbank. […] I am choosing to assume that these manifestations are unintentional, Jonah, and you have not… simply decided to implore a Dark Patron to end the life of an old man. I further find myself supposing that they may emanate from your own intrigues and preparations to culminate those plans which we agreed to abandon so many decades ago! […] The Eye has marked me for something, of this I have no doubt. My… humble hope is that it may be a swift death, an accidental effect of your own researches, which I once again implore you to abandon.”

Jonathan Fanshawe sent his letter to Jonah in November 21st, 1831: the fair assumption was that Jonah had probably funded the Institute in 1818 as a temple to Beholding? But it seems like it wasn’t the initial goal of the Institute, since Smirke was under the impression that Jonah hadn’t followed the path of Beholding until rather recently (unless Jonah had managed to deceive him all this time?). It could explain the wording used by Breekon to refer to the Institute:

(MAG128, “Breekon”) “That was the first time we saw what would become this place, The Eye’s Pedestal.”

“what WOULD BECOME this place”: not what it WAS already, even though Breekon is talking about their time serving on the Robert Small, around 1853, years after the foundation of the Institute. (Though the concept of the Institute, of Jonah asking all his acquaintances to send him spooky stories, amassing knowledge, threading his map of relationships around spooky people, of trying to know and learn more about it… indeed sounded extremely Beholding in the first place. But it seems like Beholding taking a hold of the Institute was a consequence, and not the initial goal of it – like the Institute wasn’t initially created to serve it?)

In the same way, I had wondered in MAG127 if Jon mightn’t have been wrong to conclude right away, like Jonathan Fanshawe, that Jonah’s goal had been to get rid of Albrecht without any concern for him – there could have been other reasons to take the actual books away from him, especially since they were the ones affecting Albrecht? But hum, alright: even without being a (conscious?) Beholding agent in the 1810s to 1830s, there are many ways to indeed be an “evil man” – Millbank says hi:

(MAG127, Jonathan Fanshawe) “Jonah; I must first and foremost decline your generous offer of a medical position servicing Millbank Penitentiary. While the terms you’ve laid out are no doubt more than adequate, I have, over these last months, come to the unfortunate conclusion that our intimacy and friendship must cease immediately. I do not know what interest you have in the poor condemned souls within those walls, nor do I care to guess. In the light of what I have so recently witnessed, I can no longer in good conscience associate with any of your endeavours.”

(MAG128, “Breekon”) “Poor wretches who emerged from Millbank, with tales of Australia and its cruelty on their lips, bundled into the cramped and creaking ship that would drag them away from everything they loved – and towards everything they feared.”

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “What we built at Millbank should be left well enough alone, resigned to the nightmares of the reprobates and brigands contained within its walls. […] This is, of course, assuming you have not taken the path of The Eye that I know has called you – called us both – for so long, even since before we began our work on Millbank.”

For Breekon to mention that it was an awful place, it must have been REALLY bad, indeed.

And it saddens me to agree with Martin that he… probably wasn’t the right person to read this statement:

(MAG138) MARTIN: I don’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions Millbank. The old prison, I guess? Tim said the tunnels under the Institute were all that was left of it, but… Jon said he’d checked them pretty thoroughly. [SILENCE] [SIGH] I’m not the one who knows all about this stuff…!

It’s not even just Jon who was specialising in navigating the tunnels – he was finding his way, but Tim was able to use them pretty efficiently too (MAG114, Jon: “I know there are some exits to the tunnels outside the Institute, so I guessed you were using them to get in and out, avoiding any… tape recorders.”). And there is something that Martin didn’t appear to remember about them, but that he had read himself:

(MAG088, Enrique MacMillan) “so here I came. To tell my story, of course, but another thing as well; cold, empty and calling. There’s something here, you see. Something to be dug up, rooted out, buried within. A hollow space that all eyes point towards. And I intend to reach it, if my fingers don’t give out first. I know where to dig.”

[…] MARTIN: Based on a few scattered notes and accounts from some of the older staff, it sounds like Mr. Macmillan got in a bit of a fight, which led to his arrest, and the replacement of quite a bit of the floor in Jon’s office. There are still a couple of boards with marks on them that I’d always hoped weren’t fingernail scratches, but I guess…

(+ Daisy’s mention to Jon in MAG114 that she didn’t like the tunnels because they felt “empty”, and the fact that… the “DIG” leaked into Jon’s dreams for reasons still unknown, despite Martin having been the one to read that statement.)

Is it the same structure as the tunnels under the Reform Club (MAG035) and St Paul’s Church (MAG063), or are they all separate installations? The ones under the Reform Club were long but looked clearly organised and structured; the one under St-Paul’s Church ended with a wall; and the ones under the Institute had been mentioned to be a veritable maze and… cover a very large area:

(MAG080) LEITNER: Over the years I have found that [this unexpurgated copy of Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture] interacts with Smirke’s architecture, and those tunnels specifically, in a more predictable way. By carefully reading specific passages in certain locations I am able to exercise… a degree of control over the substance of the tunnels. […] I’ve been in hiding for over twenty years now, ever since my library was destroyed. Obviously I have not spent all that time below your Institute. The old Millbank prison tunnels stretch out a very long way, and there are other entrances than the one below the Archives.

(Leitner even telling Jon that he had made them simpler for him.)

- YOU KNOW WHAT OTHER LINES SHARE THE SAME ENERGY?!

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. [SHORT SAD CHUCKLE] Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…? … Everything’s changed. … [SIGH] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired.

(MAG138) MARTIN: Tim said the tunnels under the Institute were all that was left of it, but… Jon said he’d checked them pretty thoroughly. [SILENCE] [SIGH] I’m not the one who knows all about this stuff…! I wish– … No. No, it’s fine, I’m… fine, I… [EXHALE] I can do this.

It’s open to interpretation but I’m really hearing Martin’s “I wish–” as a “I wish Tim was still alive and with us” and AOUCH orz

(I’m… still hoping that we’ll get something from Martin about his own mourning of Tim orz Because that one must have been… so harsh… he was so worried about Sasha’s disappearance in the beginning of season 3, his small voice broke my heart in MAG092 when Elias confirmed that she had died a LONG time ago, and the fact that he had been buddy-buddy with her murderer while Elias was doing nothing about it had been one of the points he threw to Elias’s face in MAG118. And Tim was around even longer, and he experienced so many bad things alongside Tim, and even at his worst, Tim was often mellowing down / a bit more protective of Martin than… anyone else, really, be it in Michael’s corridors or when Tim had explained to Martin that he didn’t think that reading the statements were a good thing? And this despite Tim telling Jon in MAG114 that he didn’t know Martin as well as he knew Sasha, hence the fact he was avoiding him like the others – what does it say about Martin’s relationships with other people… ;;)

- But the “Good luck, Jon, I– … [HUFF] Stay safe.” coming after was absolute Gay Energy, and MARTIN!!!

It feels like the episode was the Perfect Recipe for how to get an episode popular/trending/making people scream: it has MARTIN throughout it, and we’re all thirsty to hear from him! It has Martin being snappy and cunning! Martin’s loyalty towards Jon! A Robert Smirke statement! The relationship between Smirke and Jonah Magnus! New questions about Jonah! More lore with Smirke’s taxonomy from the inside! Beholding statement, with eyes horror! A small mention of Tim! Elias! Elias in prison! Elias FINALLY ACKNOWLEDGING PETER’S EXISTENCE! MORE CHAINS RATTLING AT EVERY TURN! Elias calling Martin out for his manipulative tendencies! Martin using the tape recorders instead of being used by them!

I still feel floored.

- Special bonus for another occurrence of Martin’s “Mm-hMM” when people are telling him something he doesn’t want to hear, and I LOVE HIS CASUAL SNAPPINESS IN SEASON 4…

(MAG129) ARCHIVIST: I just… I’m sorry. Basira is off doing… God-knows-what, and I can’t talk to Melanie. MARTIN : Mm-hmm.

(MAG134) PETER: […] And as far as the coffin goes, there’s not much I can do about a bull-headed Archivist who seems hellbent on self-destruction. My powers only extend so far. MARTIN : Mm-hmm.

(MAG138) ELIAS: I am so very pleased to see you. MARTIN: Mm-hmm.

Martin “Mm-hMMm.” Blackwood, ilu.

- The difference between how Elias constantly reminded Jon how he belongs to The Eye, versus Elias’s… apparent uninterest? in Martin’s own alliance to the Lonely is quite… jarring. As for Jon:

(MAG092) ELIAS: [SIGH] What are you? ARCHIVIST: I… The Archivist. ELIAS: Precisely. It is your job to chronicle these things, to experience them, whether first-hand or through the eyes of others. To simply be told, well… ARCHIVIST: It doesn’t please your master? ELIAS: Our master, Jon. […] We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown. If you are to stop them, you need to get better at seeing.

(MAG116) ELIAS: I have been doing my best to prepare you, Jon, to See. You should hopefully have it a bit easier than the others. ARCHIVIST: Another of my… powers? ELIAS: More… an aspect of your becoming. DAISY: You don’t say. ARCHIVIST: Er… right.

(MAG120) ELIAS: [The Eye] stares into him, and it stares out of him, and he is falling into the devouring eternity of its pupil. He wants to cry out in horror, but he cannot. He. is. whole.

(MAG135) ELIAS: Fine. Consider it a test – things are… coming, things that will need Jon to be far stronger and more willing to use his connection to our patron. […] If Gertrude had a plan for this one, I haven’t found it, which is why Jon needs to be closer to The Eye. If anyone can stop what’s happening, he can. See through the darkness, etcetera.

With Jon, it’s always been a casually possessive “us”. While Martin…

(MAG138) MARTIN: I think he wants me to join The Lonely. ELIAS: Then it sounds like you have a decision to make. [SILENCE] MARTIN : … What? [HUFF] That’s it? No, no monologue, no mindgames? You love manipulating people! ELIAS : That makes two of us. MARTIN: [HUFF] ELIAS : But no. This is too important for me to jeopardise with cheap “mindgames”. I simply have to trust that when the time comes, you’ll make the right choice. [SILENCE] MARTIN: Great. Great, great. So, what you’re [NERVOUS LAUGHTER] actually saying is that you’re gonna be… no help whatsoever!

… is clearly not getting that.

It’s terrible yet makes so much sense that of all people, Martin would talk to Elias about Peter’s offer, and implicitly seek out… whatever Elias might have to say about it? Elias had been the one to hire Martin in the Institute:

(MAG056) MARTIN: I don’t have a Master’s in parapsychology, I don’t even have a degree. When I was 17, my mom, she… had… she had some problems, and I ended up dropping out of school, t–trying to support us. I tried everything, but no one was hiring. So I… I just kinda started to lie on my applications, sending them out to just about anywhere. For some reason, my lie about parapsychology got me an interview with Elias and, and then a job here. M–most of my employment details are made up, I’m only 29!

… for reasons still unknown – was Elias actually fooled But Would Never Ever Admit It (as of MAG084, at the very least, he knew about Martin’s fake CV (“I mean, that doesn’t actually, er, make her qualified.” “[POINTEDLY] Formal qualifications aren’t everything, Martin.”) but that was long after MAG056 and he could have eavesdropped on that conversation)? Did Elias hire him because Martin was vulnerable and either prone to become canon-fodder or Beholding food, being Full Of Secrets and fearing that they might get discovered? Was there… something else? And in the same way, we’re not sure how Martin ended up working in the Archives – when Tim, in MAG098, pointed out that Jon had asked him to go with him, Martin was curiously silent as if… he couldn’t really say the same. Why is Martin at the Institute? Doesn’t working there for at least nine years mean anything?

I feel like the episode both began with a question (Martin asking where he should stand between The Lonely and The Eye) and ended up with his implicit answer, maybe… after all guided by Elias, when he made a jab at Martin for being into manipulation games too, and for not sharing his information about The Extinction with Jon:

(MAG138) MARTIN: So… so what? What does it mean? Am I supposed to be reassured that new Entities can be born? That there’s some, some kind of… precedent for The Extinction? … Peter? [SILENCE] Huh. Maybe he has gone to a party. […] I don’t know what Peter’s planning, but my–my guess is that it might involve something below the Institute. Hopefully, by the time you get these tapes, I’ll have something more concrete for you. [PAUSE] Good luck, Jon, I– … [HUFF] Stay safe. [CLICK.]

At the end of the episode, Martin’s answer feels twofold: to manipulate, and to choose “Jon”.

Manipulate, because he checked whether Peter was around before revealing that he wasn’t just using the tape recorders because it’s what the archive team does with the statements (MAG134: “I can’t help but notice you’re recording right now?” “It… was a statement, right, that’s what we do.”), but because he’s planning to send information to Jon, through the tape recorders that have always been associated with him (MAG126: “… It’s because he’s back, isn’t it. [SIGH] He’s back, so now you’re going to be… around, again. Listening in. Mff. You missed him, didn’t you. … Yeah. … [VERY SHARP SQUEAL OF DISTORTION] Yeah, me too.”).

I don’t know if it’s enough to go full Web-aligned, but… it feels like between Eye and Lonely, Martin is actually heading towards a third option? Or maybe a neutral ground, since his loyalty for Jon is bypassing the rest as of now? Elias’s arrest had always been presented as Martin’s plan, it’s logical that Elias would remind Martin of it with such insistence (since he’s still stuck there), but it’s still… stricking:

(MAG113) ARCHIVIST: Martin’s plan is solid. I think. MARTIN: I mean, they might just kill him. MELANIE: Good. ARCHIVIST: I mean, maybe. But… I think they’re still our best chance. Even if we did manage to blindside him, I–I don’t know how long we could… hold him. MARTIN: And, in fairness, he’s happy enough to use the police against us. ARCHIVIST: Quite. And I’d rather not be staring down a kidnapping charge on top of everything–

(MAG114) ARCHIVIST: And Martin… he’s okay with it? DAISY: It was his idea. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. You think it’ll work?

(MAG117) MARTIN: These last couple of years, I’ve always been... running, always hiding, caught in someone else’s trap, but… but now it’s my trap. And, well. I think it will work. I know, I know it’s not exactly intricate, but… it felt good, weaving my own little web. […] I guess I’m just… sick of sitting on my hands, drinking tea and hoping everyone’s okay. This way I finally get to do something. It’s gonna hurt, but… I’m ready.

(MAG120) ELIAS: I must admit I’m impressed, Martin. I knew you were all planning something, of course, but I didn’t believe you specifically would have the… er, capacity for boldness that you displayed. It took me quite by surprise. MARTIN: You didn’t just see it in me? ELIAS: Honestly, I didn’t look. For all my power, I will admit I am not immune to making the occasional lazy assumption. I presumed that I knew you thoroughly, but by the time you demonstrated otherwise… well. There was simply too much to keep watching over. I only have two eyes, after all.

(MAG138) ELIAS: Besides which, don’t forget I am still living At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, due in no small part to your actions. […] MARTIN: … What? [HUFF] That’s it? No, no monologue, no mindgames? You love manipulating people! ELIAS: That makes two of us.

(And once again, it is VERY interesting that Elias likened Martin’s depiction of him to Martin himself on the subject of manipulation. Once again: what do you know about the spiders in the Institute and about Jon’s ties with the Web, Elias…)

- It really feels like Martin was Our Protagonist, during this episode? From Jon barely catching him in MAG124, to Martin’s own work alongside Peter at the end of MAG126, to Martin reading a statement in MAG134 to… Martin being the character we follow in different locations in MAG138, getting his point of view (going to see Elias, reading a statement, doing his own follow-up, revealing a bit more of his own agenda).

;;;; I’m still so “!!!” over Elias and Martin being in the same room. Elias was absolutely shitty with him, but at the same time, there is an undercurrent of… honesty? behind their exchanges? Because Martin knows that Elias knows about his relation to Jon and:

(MAG118) ELIAS: [EXASPERATED BREATHING] … Did Jon put you up to this? MARTIN: You think I’m doing this for him? ELIAS: No. It’s just the sort of half-baked scheme he’d come up with. And I’m well aware that you’ll do just about anything for him– MARTIN: I– ELIAS: –and I don’t need to read your mind for that one. […] MARTIN: Well, I hope you've got something better than that pathetic dig at my feelings for Jon. ELIAS: It’s baffling, really. Such loyalty to someone who really treats you very badly. MARTIN: Oh, is that supposed to be, what, a revelation? ELIAS: [CHUCKLE] You know, I really should have gone for that. Find something that would finally manage to shatter that precious image you have of him.

(MAG138) MARTIN: […] Why am I only hearing about this now, and why doesn’t Jon know?! ELIAS: […] as for our… dear Archivist, I’m afraid I no longer have any real control over what he does or does not know. Unlike yourself! [PAUSE] I notice you haven’t told him either. MARTIN: Yeah. Well. I’m still not sure I really believe it. [EXHALE] A–and, I don’t… I–… I’m, h… ELIAS: Worried he might charge off into another coffin. [SILENCE] … Quite.

… I feel like we always get a glimpse of what Martin isn’t saying, when he speaks to Elias? It’s not the whole picture, it’s not Everything about Martin’s feelings, but there are some bits, some weaknesses that are getting exposed. (And I don’t know if these were Gratuitous Jabs at Martin or if they were meant to get Martin to do exactly the reverse of what Elias was denouncing ;; Because the episode did end with Martin making sure that Jon would know, though indirectly…)

- I’M ABSOLUTELY DDDD: OVER THE FACT THAT

Ahahaha, “This is too important for me to jeopardise with cheap ‘mindgames’” says the guy who sent Basira (and potentially Jon) to focus on The Dark and DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THE EXTINCTION TO THEM, and, in the meantime, discusses The Extinction with Martin when he brought it on the table and DOESN’T MENTION THE DARK’S ACTIVITIES AT ALL WITH HIM. Guess who is back to manipulating through information: THIS GUY. So, there is definitely an agenda behind it; he’s not seriously concerned by The Dark, isn’t he. It’s just a matter of throwing a bone to Basira and making sure that Jon gets to Experience The Dark, isn’t it.

- On the Relationship Between Elias And The Apocalypse:

(MAG080) LEITNER: The Unknowing. ELIAS: [CHUCKLE] Creativity never was their forte. LEITNER: You of all people should want to stop them. ELIAS: And we will. But I don’t think we’ll need your help.

(MAG092) ELIAS: The Unknowing. I need you to stop it. ARCHIVIST: Again with– What is “The Unknowing”? Exactly. ELIAS: A ritual. The Stranger and its kin attempting to gather power enough to bring it closer.

(MAG102) ELIAS: I should have thought preventing the horrific transformation of our world is not solely my concern!

(MAG126) MARTIN: Yeah. You said. … But if things are really so urgent, then why didn’t Elias say anything? PETER: [LAUGH] Because, behind all his bluster, Elias’s just like all the rest. He’s so preoccupied playing the game he doesn’t pay attention to the big picture. He managed to convince himself that he could get his ritual off first, which would have made all of this a… bit moot, but that’s not really an option anymore.

(MAG135) ELIAS: I have been observing a recent increase in people and supplies being moved to the small town of Ny-Ålesund, in Svalbard. An increase which I believe may be linked to a rather desperate attempt, by the People’s Church of the Divine Host, to perform a crude ritual of their own. To bring their… “Mr. Pitch”… into the world. […] You thought the final death of Maxwell Rayner might have sufficiently derailed them? Yes, that was my hope too, but alas it would seem not. […] I rather feel the real shame would be letting the entire world fall into Darkness because of a single person’s wounded pride. Detective. The stakes are far too high for that kind of… indulgence.

(MAG138) MARTIN: So why haven’t you helped him?! ELIAS: My relationship to the apocalypse is more… complicated. MARTIN: [UTTER DISBELIEF] Oh, seriously? ELIAS: Seriously.

TECHNICALLY, we only have Peter’s word that Elias wanted to launch ~his ritual~ because Elias was obviously Very Silent on the issue, but. What is your “relationship to the apocalypse”, Elias – is it just a matter of getting it the way you want it, or not at all…?

(In the way he answered Martin, it sounds almost as if he wouldn’t have been against The Extinction wrecking the world, hence his inaction but? He was probably implying that he had other plans to stop it which involved Beholding’s ritual?)

- Regarding Elias’s agenda:

(MAG122) BASIRA: Elias is locked up. […] A bunch of Section’d officers took him in. He made some sort of deal, I think. But… he’s not getting out anytime soon.

(MAG127) ELIAS: Our… arrangement with the Inspector notwithstanding, I… rather feel that right now all the distrust is very much your own. […] I’ve made it clear my cooperation’s contingent on his not seeing me, and my terms have been accepted thus far.

(MAG138) ELIAS: As for why I’ve done so little about such a looming existential threat… to be blunt, I have been rather busy. MARTIN: [BARELY CONTAINED SNORTING CHORTLE]

Was Elias talking about his activities while still running the Institute, or what he’s currently doing in prison? But oh yes:

(MAG138) MARTIN: Great. Great, great. So, what you’re [NERVOUS LAUGHTER] actually saying is that you’re gonna be… no help whatsoever! ELIAS: … Just like old times~ MARTIN: I don’t know what I expected. [INHALE] Right. Right, we’re done here.

Elias has always been a Very Busy Person.

- … And Peter Has A Very Busy Social Life apparently, too:

(MAG134) PETER: Right! Then, if you’ll excuse me, I have a family thing to get to. […] Okay! Now, I really am running late, so if you don’t mind?

(MAG138) MARTIN: … Peter? [SILENCE] Huh. Maybe he has gone to a party.

Technically, maybe he’s trying to make Martin feel Very Alone by showing off that he has a lot of things to attend, but still. Does anyone even realise he’s there.

- Have I mentioned that ELIAS FINALLY ACKNOWLEDGED PETER’S EXISTENCE? Incredible, I can’t believe, etc.

And he did it in the BEST POSSIBLE WAY:

(MAG138) ELIAS: Come on, Martin. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. Let’s not start with lies. MARTIN: [LOUD SIGH] Fine. ELIAS: I am so very pleased to see you. MARTIN: Mm-hmm. [SILENCE] ELIAS: No time for pleasantries? Very well, then. To business. What can I do for you? Tired of running budgets for Peter? I know I would be.

Absolutely unprompted and to gratuitously complain about Peter – ALSO, L-O-L ELIAS, “let’s not start with lies” but WHO is lying here. We ALL KNOW that you’re dying to do these budgets, that you’re probably doing them in your head a millisecond before Martin by watching him, seething that he’s doing YOUR precious scheduling and budgeting.

And

(MAG138) ELIAS: [INHALE] Everything Peter has told you is true. MARTIN: Oh… ELIAS: For all his… many faults, Peter is legitimately trying to stop the end of the world as we know it.

…………………. Listen. It’s getting harder and harder to keep in minde that they might NOT be marrying/divorcing for the sixth or seventh time. It sounds so much like bitter exes/nagging spouses………………………. And I mean………………… they deserve each other………….?

(Though, if season 4 is any indication: Elias’s true OTP is with hand gestures. He’s getting WORSE and WORSE with the chain rattling sound.)

Title for MAG139 is out and HHHHHHHHHHHHH once again. Immediate thoughts are for AGNES? AGNES? AGNES? PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE? (Reminder that The Desolation still hasn’t gotten a statement in season 4 so far~). Agnes statement from Gertrude’s stash…? (Is there a tape with Agnes’s voice, somewhere?) Or maybe about The Dark’s victims, to keep with the theme; Julia? Julia’s mother?

And second meaning could as well be about Martin, or more likely… Jon, very obviously. I guess ;;

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #the magnus archives #tma spoilers #tma season 4 #mag138 #tma liveblog #long post/

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tmisaccidentreportbook · 2 years ago

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MAG005, Thrown Away

Case #0092302, Keiran Woodward Release date: April 2, 2016 First listen: 14th October I think? Going but the notes. Presumably early on the walk into work.

Ah, the buck toothed step child of a statement that no one could categorise until Jonny set it straight in the Q&As. He admitted that this is a version of The Flesh that still hadn’t been quite realised, but I really liked it. And by really liked, I mean it freaked the bejeezus outta me.

- I have vague memories of listening to thing on the walk into work. Walking in the early morning, y’know, the same sort of time that the refuse collection teams are out…

- I’m not sure if I’m built odd, and I appreciate that refuse collection is hard, sometimes dangerous work, but I think I’d prefer it to office work. I don’t have the constitution for office work, I did admin for a year and it got to the point that every time a phone went I hissed at it. And that role had puppies included.

- ‘A strange side to humanity, but an honesty one at that,’ feels like such a fond line. I love it. And I can appreciate it. I have a somewhat odd inherited habit of skip diving and I’ve found… strange things. Also, I know well the planning needed for the strategic disposal of wine bottles. I don’t drink, but my family has hosted A LOT of shindigs over the years and you learn to chip away at the pile.

- The dolls. Actually, no, the doll heads. An excellent, damn creepy choice Jonny. I didn’t really have a problem with dolls before this podcast, but it’s amazing how many things I’ve come to realise, oop, yup, nope, don’t like that. But I have spent time working at the find arts auctions with my mum on occasion, and I usually on the miscellaneous lots; lots with no real category and were all thrown in together so it was unreasonable to have the person manning it have a deep understanding of everything, so throw the student who knows nothing but is delighted to learn on there. Only, sometimes they had dolls. And they always attracted a strange breed of dealers. Typically little old ladies with slightly unnerving stares.

- I think this episode was a discussion on surplus and waste but there’s something odder still. It’s one thing to have a bag of doll’s heads. It’s another to have a bag of doll’s heads that look purpose bought and then purposely distressed only to be thrown out.

- ‘Waste collecting, second most dangerous profession in England’. OK, checking that out… So a few tabloids are putting it around 12th but they appear to be going off the same data set. uk.indeed.com have it in 2nd after deckhand. Business leader has ‘waste management’ in 5th but I think that’s an entire industry rather than roles. I’m tempted to go with Jonny, Kieran and uk.indeed.com’s assessment because any other publication I’d trust more than The Mirror or The Sun have their articles about the reports behind a sodding paywall…

- Not UK related but I think I read somewhere about the mottos and titles of different city departments in New York. Fire fighters, ‘New York’s Bravest’. Police, ‘New York’s Finest’, ACAB. The Department of Sanitation, are ‘New York’s Strongest’.

- Alan so interested in the bags’ contents. Another one being punished for curiosity. Or rather, the curiosity, almost morbid in this case, made for an easy take.

- The Lord’s Prayer, written over and over again in Latin. Latin = Bad News. We’ve got another one! I’m really interested to hear how Jonny came to this choice. The doll’s heads and the teeth are macabre and could be seen examples of waste and excess and the expandability of people. But I’d love to hear what inspired this line of thought. Was it just something unnerving and almost occult? A prayer passed over a flame? Was it about the organised religion and the history of excess and corruption? Was it about the impacts of prayer over action? The same prayer over and over and over again? Was it just something that was damn creepy? No, I’m not spiralling, Jonny I just want to talk. I’m an atheists, I have no horse in this race, but I have been in a lot of churches and sat through a lot of services, Jonny, what does it mean!?

- The teeth… The mounting dread of the team, apart from Alan. Kieran, the designated pick-uper of the bag. I wonder how many teeth you can fit in a bin bag… Am I gonna risk goggling that?

- All I got was ideally that they need to be disposed of in medical waste and sites selling tiger bags, yellow and black striped bags.

- Dave, vomiting into a drain. Good lad, not compromising the scene or the evidence. Well done.

- Phoned the police. Yeah, there’s no confidentiality clause with the bin teams.

- It’s a little thing, but the officer that knocks on the door is gendered as female. So was one of the officers that attended to Not!Graham and was shown his passport photo. Part of me wondered if perhaps they were either Basira or Daisy or perhaps the same officer. But I’ve looked at the map, and I don’t know how the allocation of police beats works, but Clapham and Walthamstow are clear across the river from one another. And can not see Daisy or Basira laughing with Not!Graham or being rattled by the teeth.

- Poor old couple being the unwitting site of eldritch fly tipping… Ooooh THIS might be why I got so upset someone was leaving bags to go out with my rubbish…

- Yeah, in a job like that, the last thing you want is someone becoming a danger.

- ‘Needed to know’… Ermmm… and coupled with the appearance of the music…

- Fell asleep at the wheel. Jonny makes a point of saying no one was hurt, but there has been a number of terrible and tragic collisions involving bin lorries in recent years in the UK.

- Dark green ribbon. Why dark green? In mockery of the typical council uniform?

- Bronze heart ‘roughly carved’ but the name ‘Alan Parfitt’ engraved with ‘machine like precision’? Like… although whoever it was knew it was to be Alan, but just not what memento was to be left?

- I have often fantasised about disposing of things in our medical waste bins to be incinerated... This is not to be used against me in a court of law, but there’s padlock on that thing and if you put it in a tiger bag… OK, so I will say that during one summer internship, a friend and I effectively wrote a murder mystery between us in an effort to keep ourselves sane and discussed all the ways we could THEORECTICALLY dispose of a body at a falconry breeding centre. We were going to call it ‘Tuppence A Bag’.

- ‘End of statement. So nice to be able to verify this one.’Jonathan, so happy, yes, time stamps, names, addresses, good.

- ‘Got Martin out of the archive for an afternoon, which is always a welcome relief.’ MEAN. SO MEAN. An aside, but I love time travel aus where they go back in time and see just how grumpy and mean past-Jonathan can be. And just how ‘not taking your shit’ future-Martin is. I love starfleetrambo’s stuff.

- Apparently the officers called to 93 Lancaster Road were Officer Suresh and Officer Altman, so defiantly not Basira or Daisy. I can’t remember if it’s mentioned what units the two served with beyond Section 31.

- So you can get 2780 teeth in a bin bag, good to know. The deliberation he takes to say ‘the exact... same... tooth...’ screaming

#MAG005 #the magnus archives #The Flesh

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theothersidepress · 5 years ago

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My Mother’s Grief – A Story of Hope

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This is a difficult, confronting and deeply emotional story about death that must be told. Rest assured it has a comforting ending and I hope it finds its way to anyone who is struggling to come to terms with their grief – particularly mothers of stillborn babies.

Once Upon A Time

Photo Credit: Jonny Lindner

I grew up knowing that that my late mother Maja gave birth to a stillborn baby girl in the early 1960s. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that she spoke at length about her traumatic, at times horrific, ordeal.

Maja emigrated to Australia from the ‘Iron Curtain’ Baltic State of Estonia in the late 1940s. She eventually settled in Adelaide, South Australia where met her Estonian husband Karl. After escaping from the Soviet terror and oppression that befell their homeland, falling in love must have felt like a fairy tale to end all fairy tales.

When they were ready to start a family, my mother miscarried before carrying her first child to full term. She recalled being heavily pregnant and feeling overdue. Doctors at Rose Park Hospital told her otherwise. Her intuition urged her to request that her baby be induced but her plea was ignored.

By the time my mother was what she believed to be at least ten days overdue, she knew that something was terribly wrong and demanded to be induced immediately. This time, the doctors didn’t argue. Tragically, her beautiful baby girl was stillborn.

Dealing With Death Very Badly

After the birth, my mother’s daughter was wrapped in a cloth and whisked away by a nurse. None of the staff knew what to say to her. Nor did her shocked, grieving husband.

She described how a group of doctors milled nervously near her bed, whispering in hushed tones. They all had worried looks on their faces and nobody could look at her, let alone talk to her.

Now deeply traumatized, my mother asked them to bring her baby back but nobody acknowledged her. She needed to hold her child, to say goodbye. Sadly, the hospital staff clearly had no knowledge of how to deal with death in a caring, compassionate manner. Fed up with being ignored and treated like a third-rate immigrant, she yelled at them to bring her baby back.

Thankfully, her baby daughter was returned and she held her close until she was ready to let her go.

Photo: Roman Kraft

A Glimmer of Hope

The final part of this story still haunts me. My father took my mother home from hospital and they never heard a single word about their daughter again. And they were deprived of the opportunity to give their child a funeral. Instead, stillborn babies were secretly buried by hospital authorities and the stillbirth incidents hushed up instead of investigated. As if the babies had never been born.

Just like my late father, I, too, had no words.

Struggling to process this shocking, infuriating story, I sat at my typewriter and thrashed it on my mother’s behalf. Then I called a friend who was a senior newspaper reporter and arranged to meet him.

Unable to speak, I handed him my typewritten pages. He looked over it, looked at me and didn’t utter a word. I left him with it and an article appeared a few days later about an unmarked mass grave in Adelaide’s West Terrace cemetery where stillborn babies had been secretly buried. Parents were given the opportunity to come forward and give their child a respectful farewell with a special memorial.

I showed my mother the story, relieved that she now had the chance to say her final goodbye. Sadly, reliving the grief of losing her baby proved too overwhelming and she shut herself down again. I respected her feelings and left it at that. It felt inappropriate to act on my mother’s behalf and I didn’t dare suggest it.

My Mother and the Shepherd

My mother died suddenly in September 2006. Her health had been failing on all levels and our relationship had become increasingly strained. I saw less and less of her over the years and eventually gave up trying to resolve things. In hindsight, our relationship fractured on the day my father suddenly died in 1980 and we slowly grew apart due to our unresolved grief.

On a happier note, my mother called me the day before she died and sounded unusually chirpy. Little did I know it would be the last words we would speak. Or so I thought.

The Postman Medium

My partner happened to be an evidential mental medium who never charged money for readings because he had a full time job and just wanted to be of service. He considered himself a lifelong apprentice to spirit – a humble ‘postman’ who simply delivered messages – word for word – from loved ones on the other side. His highly attuned gift of mediumship would bring me immense comfort and strength during the immediate aftermath of her death.

On the morning of my mother’s funeral, my partner rose earlier than usual. I hid under the covers, wishing that death and funerals would go away. He returned to the bedroom soon after, sobbing inconsolably. He said my mother was sitting in our lounge-room wearing her wedding dress and reading a passage from Lord Is My Shepherd. He also said she pointed to the verse that says, ‘I have no ills.’ Surprised that she had come to visit us soon after her passing, I felt a loving wave of relief sweep over me.

Interestingly, the stressful days leading up to her funeral, my brother, sister and I met the pastor at our mother’s house and he read Lord is My Shepherd to us. I chose not to mention the earlier incident with my mother to him because most religious teachings tend to discredit or frown upon the reality of mediumship and direct contact with the otherside.

My Mother & The Pastor’s Lap

During the pastor’s introduction at my mother's funeral service, my partner discreetly nudged me and pointed to an empty chair against the wall near the lectern. He whispered that my mother was sitting there listening and seemed quite pleased with the proceedings.

When the pastor sat down, he whispered, “Linda, the pastor just sat on your mum’s lap.” I started to laugh but swiftly composed myself. It was a funeral after all.

The lonely and challenging grieving process that followed the sudden death of my father in 1980 was a far cry from the experience that unfolded with my mother. She ‘moved in’ with us at our seaside home for several weeks after her funeral and many wondrous things occurred during her stay which made my grieving process so much easier.

Proof That My Mother Is ‘Alive And Well’

Three significant moments with my 'dearly departed' mother will stay with me forever. I hope that sharing them will give readers a sense of hope and comfort that I desperately sought, but never found, in the dark weeks and months that followed my father’s death.

The Sunday morning after the funeral, my partner and I sat outside drinking coffee, soaking up the peaceful spring energy. Out of the blue, he said, “Linda, your mum’s here. She needs to talk to you.”

Jolted out of my daydream, I prepared myself for what would become one of the most profoundly memorable experiences of my life.

Connections From The Otherside

For the next two hours, my partner relayed deeply personal, at times confronting questions and emotive anecdotes directly from my mother. I had never shared our old grievances with my partner because they didn’t seem relevant and proceeded to respond to my mother as though she was physically sitting at the table with us.

Immersed in an intense melting pot of truth, misconceptions, anger, honesty and love, my mother and I proceeded to resolve our many earthly differences through my partner’s highly attuned link to her vibration in spirit. We unearthed difficult, painful, at times infuriating issues that had been previously shrouded in toxic silence, creating an ever-widening rift until my mother’s death.

There is no need to share the nature of our grievances here – we all have them. My purpose is to demonstrate why there is no need to live with regret or guilt for the rest of your life when a loved one dies. Issues can be resolved after a loved one’s death with the assistance of an attuned, experienced, evidential medium. But the challenge often lies in finding an authentic medium able to facilitate such a sitting.

The internet will have you believe that everyone is a highly attuned medium which is why discernment is vital when seeking out mediumship services. All the more reason to make our peace with loved ones while they are still with us.

Toward the end of what I can only describe as a crystal clear, three-way-conversation spanning two dimensions and a myriad of emotions, a peaceful calm descended upon us. My mother ended the ‘sitting’ by acknowledging my repeated attempts to pass her an olive branch and heal our differences while she was still alive, conceding that she was too stubborn to meet halfway and accept a truce.

In turn, I apologized for all the upset I caused her over the years and told her that I loved her more than ever. As her energy began to fade, I basked in a soothing energy of love, compassion, joy and gratitude for the profound healing both my mother and I experienced that day.

My partner was as blown away by the marathon sitting as I was and revealed that it was rare to maintain a consistently strong connection to a spirit energy for such a long period of time. My gratitude for his extraordinary gift and vast amount of energy involved in facilitating the vital meeting with my mother, was immeasurable.

Let There Be Light Of A Different Kind

The second significant event occurred when my partner excitedly called out to me from garden shed. When I poked my head inside, I saw him standing underneath a bright fluorescent light with a strange look on his face. When I asked him what was wrong, he pointed to the unplugged light plug swinging from the rafter. We both stood there looking at the light and laughing. I remained brightly lit for quite some time and just as I decided to grab my camera to capture evidence of this freak event, the light flickered out.

I had read that loved ones in spirit can manipulate electricity to gain our attention. Given that my late father was a wildly humorous, electrical engineer in his earthly life, the case of the mysterious, unplugged light made perfect sense.

Mother and Daughter Reunited

The third significant event unfolded early one evening when we were relaxing in the lounge room. My partner looked past me, focused on the nearby patio glass door.

“Linda,” he said. “Your mother is here. She’s holding hands with a beautiful young girl.”

I felt my spirit shift.

“That must be the daughter she lost in the sixties,’ I replied. “My sister.”

He described the little girl as angelic with shoulder length blonde hair and wearing a beautiful white dress. She was seven or eight years old.

“She is very shy,” he continued, “and your mother is gently coaxing her to move toward you. Here she comes now. She is standing in front of you and has just put her hand on your arm. She is saying hello to you.”

I said hello back to my little sister, in awe of the deeply moving moment. We spent some time together in silence and then they left. Knowing that my mother was reunited with the child she lost all those years ago, helped me release the grief that I carried for many years after my mother shared her traumatic story.

“Linda, There Is No Death”

Photo Credit: Valentin Sabau

The healing power of spirit is something that needs to be experienced first hand to truly understand – with or without religious beliefs. I had believed in life after death for a couple of decades thanks to insights from my father who began visiting me in my dreams about nine years after his death.

I clearly recall him appearing in front of me in an ethereal environment and extending his hand. I physically felt his hand when I held it and said, “Dad, you’re not dead, are you?” To which he replied: “Linda, there is no death.”

Which brings me to what prompted me to write this story in the first place.

My day began with a random news report about Australian women giving birth to a stillborn baby every four hours, an abnormal rate that has not declined in two decades. I was immediately reminded of my mother’s experience.

Later that same day, a social media post by evidential medium, spirit interventionist and author Jock Brocas assured grieving parents that their child was ‘alive and well in the spirit world’ and that they will be reunited one day.

I interpreted both messages as signals to write this story about my mother’s loss. Having personally drawn great strength and hope from true stories about overcoming adversity, I hope my story provides some comfort for others who are struggling to come to terms with their grief.

Evidential Mediumship Is Our Greatest Antidote For Grief

In closing, I would like to add that my search for answers began when I was 17, on the day my father suddenly died – the day my impossible grief set in. If it wasn’t for that life-changing event and the tumultuous journey that followed, I wouldn’t be where I am today, or advocating that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel when you know where to look.

Experience has taught me that the secret to healing from grief and embracing life again lies in finding spiritually-minded professional support to help you confront, emerge and heal rather than be hindered by hopelessness or shut down with long-term life-numbing drugs.

An experienced, evidential medium with counseling skills, or a counsellor that collaborates with a trusted medium to help clients navigate through the emotionally tumultuous journey that follows the death of a loved one, is a safe and effective place to start.

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icanttalkimhavingacrisis · 6 months ago

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Introduction Post!!!

hi!! lovely to see you - won't you stay awhile?

the basics:

name: Joy, short for Jonathan

age: 18

pronouns: he/she/they

orientation: omnisexual, polyamory

gender identity: genderfluid and pangender!!

timezone: CET (GMT +1)

my tops:

musicians: Twenty One Pilots, Måneskin, Hozier, George Michael, Wham!, Bastille, P!ATD, Tally Hall, My Chemical Romance, The Oh Hellos, The Amazing Devil, Lemon Demon, Kwiat Jabłoni

songs: Lavish, Bourgeoisieses, This is Love, ANARCONNASSE, Too Sweet, Sunlight, Midwest Indigo, Routines in the Night, l'altra dimensione, tous les memes

fandoms: marauders era, the lunar chronicles, the good place, grishaverse (haven't read king of scars yet tho), the cruel prince, some musicals (mainly Hamilton), DDLC, FNAF (I haven't played the games but I do really like the lore and songs), WTNV, AGGGTM, TØP lore

books: the cruel prince trilogy, red white and royal blue, they both die at the end, aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe, the midnight library, six of crows duology, 1984, animal farm

shows/films: the good place, loki, moon knight, the umbrella academy, heartstopper, hazbin hotel, legally blonde, tick, tick, boom!, hamilton, howl's moving castle

Hobbies: writing, reading, cello, painting, writing my own songs, D&D

miscellaneous:

I'm a band kid, I write songs and plays and stories and books ^^

I finished writing a book recently!! You can read it on AO3 here. Let me know if you want a pdf or epub version, I'd be happy to share!!

hogwarts house: slytherin apparently

grisha order: durast

godly parent: Apollo

divergent faction: amity (born candor)

hunger games district: probably eleven

I'm obsessed with Welcome to Night Vale (mountains are fake y'all, they were made up by the government)(although I haven't listened to a lot of it...)(Still love it tho ^^)

I'm absolutely a yapper, and love meeting new people, so feel absolutely free to dm me if you wanna chat!! <3

please consider using tone tags, I dumb as all heck

I have two younger siblings!! A brother and a sister :>

my people:

@andytheoverthinker - husband, partner, beloved boyfriend <3

@evee-refuses-to-die - squirrel extraordinaire, sweetest lil' insomniac

@lyionly - genuinely the most talented artist I know, best bio partner

@bjcf23 - favourite cousin ever <33

@astroocti - my drummer friend :D

mutuals: @erraticprocrastinator-alt @jess-of-all-trades @finnslay @moonysfavoritetoast @cazzythefrogking @chatter-crow @def-not-kaz-brekker @chaosgremlinlivinginyourwalls @waitingonadeathgodtocallmeback @saivamp @lemon-cosmoscollection @gay-for-zoya @agenaroace-a-fucking-disgrace @finleyforevermore @kaithe-enby404 @currently-becoming-potatoes @catinasink @vintagetee13 @clodoveah @ghost-of-a-poet @viago-vamps @ddlcbrainrot @pan-anarcho @gremleyn @discoveredreality @blue-bell-icecream @xrinnihil @artemisiamezzanotte @drifter-gaming @stqrgirl3 @my-castles-crumbling @winters-rose-daughterofcain @elliots1stshadow @daydream-of-a-wallflower @razz-is-queer @blood-slushy @starcrossedmoony @celestialserenity24 @justafanbutcurious @37x3

WAHHHH I LOVE YOU ALL!!! MANY HUGS AND KISSES FROM MOI <333

final section!! my bullshit:

#jonny writes stuff - my writing

#joy has thoughts - I say stuff

#joy on fandoms - anything fandom related

#joy on volleyball - I rant about volleyball I guess?

#joy has a strange mum - about my mother (sometimes I rant, idk what to tell ya--)

#joy on music - anything music related

#joy has friends - about my irls <3

#joy is gay for andy - about my beloved bf

#joy gets asks - I respond to asks!! May take me a while tho-

#the witchy saga - I post about witchcraft apparently

@joywritesbutitsactuallymystories - sideblog where I repost my writing

@prongsiedadeerest - my James Potter rp sideblog

my poems

my novel

my carrd for further contact info!!:

ok lovelies, that's it!! thank you for being here <3

#intro post #joy has thoughts #jonny writes stuff #joy on fandoms #joy is gay for andy #joy has friends #joy on music #joy on volleyball #joy has a strange mum #joy gets asks #the witchy saga

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laresearchette · 5 years ago

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Friday, June 19, 2020 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES?: DADS (Apple +) SHERMAN’S SHOWCASE: BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPECTACULAR (AMC Canada) 10:00pm

WHAT IS NOT PREMIERING IN CANADA TONIGHT JUNETEENTH: A CELEBRATION OF OVERCOMING (ABC Feed) DINO HUNTERS (TBD - Discovery Canada) DEADLY TRANSACTION (TBD - Lifetime Canada)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME/CRAVE/NETFLIX CANADA/CBC GEM:

AMAZON PRIME 7500 FRANKIE DRAKE (Season 1) LOL: LAST ONE LAUGHING (AU) (Season 1) MURDOCH MYSTERIES (seasons 1-12) MURDOCH MYSTERIES SPECIAL MOVIE 1 MURDOCH MYSTERIES SPECIAL MOVIE 2 MURDOCH MYSTERIES SPECIAL MOVIE 3 PENGUIN

CBC GEM QUEENS (Comedy Series): There’s all kinds of sabotage happening leading up to the “Miss Church Street” pageant as several different Toronto drag queens prepare. However, this year is different as someone has literally stolen the crown from the reigning queen and other performers seem to keep getting interrupted in strange and unfortunate ways while prepping for the pageant.

CRAVE TV 9 TO 5 DOG TALES RESCUE (Season 2) THE FISHER KING GRAND ISLE THE GOOD LIAR HIGHWAY THRU HELL (Season 4-5) I STILL BELIEVE LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE PARENTHOOD TWINS

NETFLIX CANADA BABIES: PART 2 DISCLOSURE FATHER SOLDIER SON FEEL THE BEAT FLOOR IS LAVA (Season 1) GIRLS FROM IPANEMA (Season 2) LOST BULLET ONE-WAY TO TOMORROW THE POLITICIAN (Season 2) RHYME TIME TOWN (Season 1) WASP NETWORK

KOREAN BASEBALL (TSN3) 9:00am: Doosan Bears vs. LG Twins

TIMELESS LOVE (Super Channel Heart & Home) 9:20am: A woman seems to have the perfect life with a wonderful husband and two children. Then she finds herself awakening from a coma and discovers she is not and has never been married.

JUNIOR BAKING SHOW (CBC) 8:00pm: It's Dessert Day and Prue and Liam are looking for the bakers to produce the perfect finale to any meal.

WATTS ON THE GRILL (CTV Life) 8:00pm: Chef/TV personality Spencer Watts demonstrates how to barbeque anything, from steak and chicken, to seafood and breads, like a pro.

MISTER WINNER (BBC Canada) 9:00pm (SERIES PREMIERE): Leslie finds a piano while on a house clearance job with his father-in-law Chris.

GRAND ISLE (Crave) 9:00pm: Walter and his neglected wife lure a young stranger into their Victorian home to escape from a hurricane. When the man is charged with murder by Detective Jones, he must reveal the couple's wicked secrets to save himself.

DEADLY FLIGHT (Super Channel Fuse) 9:00pm: Obsessed with a handsome student, a deranged flight instructor tries to destroy the people in his life and make him fall in love with her.

CARIBBEAN LIFE (HGTV Canada) 9:30pm (SEASON PREMIERE): A busy Wisconsin couple is looking for a change in lifestyle that allows for more quality time together basking in the Caribbean sun.

FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER (BBC Canada) 9:30pm (SEASON PREMIERE): Brothers Adam and Jonny are horrified to find Mum and Dad in a hot tub in the garden, drinking champagne. Neighbour Jim arrives to ask them if they can look after Wilson because his sister, who's terrified of dogs, is coming to visit.

DEAD STILL (City) 10:00pm (SEASON FINALE): A malevolent figure drives Blennerhasset, Nancy and Molloy apart.

DRAG SOS (Out TV) 10:00pm: The Family Gorgeous visits Dudley to help Dominique rediscover her self-confidence by becoming an intergalactic space queen.

HOPE FOR WILDLIFE (Cottage Life) 10:00pm: The Buzzard’s Breakfast

SKINDIGENOUS (CBC) 11:30pm: Nahaan's work draws on the symbology and aesthetics of the Indigenous West Coast.

#cdntv #cancon #canadian tv #canadian tv listings #junior baking show #watts on the grill #mister winner #friday night dinner #dead still #drag sos #hope for wildlife #skindigenous

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aurelliocheek · 5 years ago

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25 years of Frontier Developments

The 25 year tale of Britain’s most ambitious indie.

If there’s one thing that Jonny Watts has learned during more than two decades at Frontier Developments, it’s that the act of making the games is just half of the equation. As chief creative officer and longtime stalwart of one of the UK’s most inventive and ambitious studios, Watts has been at the forefront of many its most famous titles – from classics like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and LostWinds, to its most recent successes: Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. But as he explains, the secret to Frontier’s success as a fully independent, self-publishing development house required the whole team to analyse, study and adapt to the changing industry in order to become the success it is today.

Based in the heart of leafy Cambridge, England, Frontier is one of the most eclectic video game studios in the development business, not just in the UK but the world over. Celebrating its momentous quarter century milestone this year, Frontier‘s games have featured everything from cute interactive animals to scientifically accurate black holes; death-defying theme park rides, to authentic recreations of prehistoric lizards. Now with around 30 fully fledged titles under its age-worn belt, this is a truly veteran studio, but one that exudes a passion and a verve that belies its age.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s an inherent intelligence to Frontier that comes across in its games. There‘s an artful comprehension for how interactive experiences need to make players feel; a mechanical understanding of the detail and depth required to create specific niche interest titles; and an operational rigour that allowed the studio to pinpoint how it wants to communicate with and sell to its players. This last bit, crucially, is what has made Frontier Developments such a shining case study for the many benefits of studio independence.

The rise to indie darling was never an overnight transition; in many ways, it was 25 years in the making.

Elite Dangerous, Frontier’s massively multiplayer space epic let’s players take control of their own starship. They can fight, explore and travel throughout an expansive cutthroat galaxy, consisting of more than 400 billion star systems.

The DNA of a startup For Watts himself, the game development dream begun back in 1987, when he would run home from school, leap up the stairs to his bedroom and get to work coding games on his own personal computer. Naturally, his mum didn’t approve of Watts’ creative flights of fancy, insisting there was no financial future in playing games. At the time, she was largely right, but little did she know that it wasn’t playing games that Watts ever dreamed of turning into a feasible profession – it was making them. “I got just as much enjoyment destructing how games worked, learning how to code, learning how to do art,” he says.

Watts did, despite his initial childhood dreams, follow his mum’s wise advice in the latter half of his education – at least through university, where he studied a zoology degree. He was still creating games while studying, though. It was something he could never escape from, and which sustained his creativity through his university career until he pivoted to study a masters in computer science. Back in those days, this was the main academic currency if you wanted to be a video game developer – there were far fewer routes into the industry then, so Watts capitalised on his opportunities where he could.

As an alumnus, he went almost directly to development, firstly at the fellow Cambridge studio, Sensible Software. “[They] were in the same location as where Frontier was founded,” he says, “they were just north of Cambridge and we were south of Cambridge. It’s a development hub, so we all knew about each other, and I’d known about David [Braben, Frontier’s legendary founder] from when I first got my Spectrum, playing Elite on it. Everyone at our age was influenced by that game but I was actually more influenced by another Braben game called Zarch. It was a polygon game but it had real-time particles, light source shading, real-time generated shadows. It was an absolute technical tour de force, so much so that it influenced me to do my masters in computer science, because I was just so interested in graphical programming.”

Little did Watts know that, only several years after he left university he would begin working with his development hero. He reminisces about the earliest days of the studio‘s history, when the studio was based out of a farm in the Cambridgeshire countryside with just ten staff to its name. “My first memory was going through the door – it was all open plan – and seeing David with a microphone doing chicken sounds for some of the proto sound effects in Dog’s Life,” he says, laughing. Braben’s chicken impression was just for the placeholders, but there’s no doubt it’s uncanny. “You saw a very human side to a very friendly company,” Watts continues. “It was very technologically advanced, but if something needed doing we’d all muck in.”

The expansion from ten staff to now over 400 has taken many years, but the studio still retains the DNA of that startup. Elite, co-developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, along with Zarch and Virus were created before Braben founded Frontier Developments. The studio was born out of a desire to make a wider range of games and to make them faster, rather than spend five or six years in a single development cycle. Establishing Frontier allowed Braben to hire like-minded individuals that brought ideas to the table, in order to create a collaborative space where, as Watts puts it, “the egos are left at the door”.

Fast forward 25 years and Watts is still sat just a short way from Braben’s desk at Frontier’s brand new office premises – a pristine multi-level labyrinth of glass and steel that houses the 400+ strong team, all of which are working on their own individual projects. From the talented group still developing updates and expansions for Elite Dangerous, to the developers that are still adding content and new ideas to Jurassic World Evolution. Frontier continues to update its existing games heavily with new ideas and content, but that’s not to say it isn’t busy at work on future unannounced projects that span far into the future. What‘s perhaps most impressive is that the team has retained the spark and soul that made it such a brilliant upstart back in the early nineties.

The highly acclaimed Planet Coaster gives players limitless freedom to build rides and scenery piece by piece, with advanced management simulation gameplay and a connected global village where everyone can share in the creativity of players around the world.

Fired up by new technologies It must’ve been an alien prospect to think about back in 1994, when Braben and his team were hard at work in their tiny studio on a Cambridgeshire farm. But the technological power of Elite and its resounding popularity paved the way for a studio that relied on powerful, advanced proprietary technology to create some of the most believable worlds in video games. “David is a man who, along with Ian Bell, built an entire galaxy on the comparably unpowered BBC Micro, before creating Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes,” Watts says. “It wasn’t a big gaming machine, at all, but it fascinated him because of how powerful it was and what he could do with it. He did similar with Darxide for the 32x, which wasn‘t really well-supported by third parties but he looked at the technology and thought ‘I bet I can do some really crazy stuff with the technology in here’ Sure enough, it‘s one of the most technically advanced games on 32x.”

You can trace this trend all the way through Frontier’s history – instances where the company just saw an exciting piece of new technology and got fired up about it, using the bleeding edge advancements in hardware to enhance the game experience. And not just doing it for visual‘s sake, but learning how to leverage the machines to make the experience even more visceral, real, believable and authentic. With time the games machines themselves have, of course, become more advanced, with storage space and memory reading capacity increasing to the point where games can render enormous 3D environments, improve graphical fidelity to resolutions like 4K, not to mention feature more voice work, deeper simulations and much more. Features like shadow technology all sound like obvious and even boring, unimpressive staples of modern games nowadays, but the team at Frontier has been one of those driving this technology forward for 25 years, always revolutionising and always innovating.

A galaxy like no other Elite Dangerous is perhaps the purest example of this, taking the core components established with the original Elite and using Frontier’s newly expanded, talented team to build a modern 1:1 recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. It is, at its very core, a natural evolution of the game created in 1984, its enormous scale and detail made technically possible by the many advancements that Frontier has made since then. At the heart of it is a team who bring untold levels of talent to the process.

“The guys who did the stellar forge – the way we calculate the galaxies from real scientific data – one has a PhD in astrophysics, and one did astronomy in university,” Watts says. “There’s maybe five people in the whole country, in the world, who could do that, who have the strange crossover between a degree in astrophysics and a degree in computer programming, an interest in video games, and an interest in Elite. And of course David has his Cambridge science degree. A lot of us have science backgrounds. We’re, at worst, amateur enthusiasts. At best we’re actually pretty clued up people who have an absolute passion for the subjects we work on. We’re still reading, researching, looking at articles, stimulated by it.”

Elite Dangerous is a wonderful melding of passion and intelligence, and one of the the largest video game worlds ever created. It boasts a scale unlike few others, but the magic of Frontier is that there is depth and detail to match the scale. Not only can you gawp at the macro features of the game; faster-than-light travelling across the galaxy, zipping close to distant stars, landing in space stations and rovering around the rugged, rocky surface of exoplanets; you can also invest hundreds if not thousands of hours into role-playing in an interconnected universe that rewards your intelligence. Players can communicate, trade and fight with one another; team up and explore distant star systems; invest and sell trading goods in an ever changing economic world; create clans that fight it out for territorial control of the many segments of this galactic world. There is politics, economics and real struggle in this universe. It’s not just huge – it’s believable. “It feels very real,” Watts says, “and when you’re in it you feel very vulnerable.”

Authenticity and real science The two other of Frontier’s most recent games – Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution – follow similar trends, creating worlds that are believable despite being completely different to galaxy sized space role-playing games. Planet Coaster revels in a beautiful, charming and gentle aesthetic that welcomes you into its colourful simulations and lets you spend dozens of hours creating your dream theme parks. But hidden under the hood are complex codes and authentic simulations all based on the real life flow systems utilised in actual theme parks. Watts himself is an avid theme park enthusiast, regularly visiting parks across the UK and beyond to get his roller coaster thrills with his two daughters, and it’s an intense passion that clearly comes through in the finished games.

“My favourite theme park is – and this is really hard – Disneyland,” Watts says, explaining how the team had the chance to build a 1:1 recreation of the original Disneyland, in Anaheim, which happens to be the only theme park Walt Disney saw before his death. It was re-created for Disneyland Adventures and Frontier captured the sights and sounds of this original landmark down to the most minute of idiosyncrasies. “We were so committed to authenticity. When you feature a Disney princess from the 60s or 70s we had to use, where possible, the original stars. That kind of detail really did transport you into that magical world.”

“Disneyland is a strange place because once you go there, all your troubles just evaporate. I went there with my 18 and 20 year-old daughters and I‘m suddenly a dad again rather than the person giving them a lift back from the pub or something,” he says. “It‘s a wonderful place. And I really like the theming in parks. It transports me to another world. Again, it goes back full circle to another believable world.”

This hidden authenticity enforces the realism and believability of Planet Coaster, despite the otherwise cartoon looks. It’s an approach that allows Frontier’s game to further stand the test of time simply because the foundations themselves are built on real science. It’s not surface entertainment that relies entirely on the graphics or the characters, instead utilising the real world information that’s baked into the very code itself.

In Jurassic World Evolution players take charge of operations on the legendary islands of the Muertes archipelago and bring the wonder, majesty and danger of dinosaurs to life.

Dinosaurs and Kinect experiments As for Jurassic World Evolution, the real life science is less concrete simply because of the 65 million year old nature of the creatures in question, but it’s “unbelievably authentic to the films,” Watts says. “We’re using the original actors, the things that have been derived from the films and the books. There’s actually a bit of zoology in there; the genetics, going back to my zoology degree. We use science and reality and authenticity to make things believable. We have so much accuracy in our games, and everything we do we want to have this grounding. We had a guy called Dr Jack Horner, and he was a consultant paleontologist on the Jurassic films back in the day, actually working with Michael Crichton. We asked him to come over [to talk about the game] and I like to think he didn’t do it just because of the paycheque, but because he saw that we had a passion, and an intelligence, and a dedication to doing these things.”

Frontier doesn’t just limit that adventurous and authentic approach to scientific accuracy to its software. Many of its hardware experiments have similar traits, including the Kinect experiments that it embarked on in the mid noughties with the Xbox 360, when the team was still partnered with publisher Microsoft. What makes this all fundamentally possible is Cobra, the studio’s own game engine, which it has been consistently and steadily updating for many years. Rich Newbold has been the Executive Producer at Frontier for a while now, joining over 10 years ago. “Cobra is constantly evolving and growing,” he says. “It has a dedicated code team working on improving it as well as us generating new technology for each game and merging that into it. On Kinectimals, we developed technology to improve our animation system to allow a more usable way to use state machines and logic on a character. This then got developed more and more with Kinect Disneyland Adventures and again with Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. The constant improvements to the render system for each release feeds back into Cobra and we then use that in the new projects. We‘re always looking to develop and re-use the core technologies across our projects. It’s a huge asset to have such a flexible engine in-house.”

The entire brief for Kinectimals was to create animals that look, sound and feel alive to the players. It was a challenge that Frontier relished as it had the chance to bring its creativity into even more physical environments, connecting cute animals on the screen with players in the real world. It hadn’t really been done before – at least not in such a mainstream way – and Frontier was the mastermind behind the code and tech that would give Kinectimals a real sense of life to the players.

“Even though [the animals] are beautifully cute, the AI behind them is super sophisticated,” Watts says. “There’s something like 500, 600, 700 animations on there, all reacting to make that animal feel alive.” The expertise the team built up animating the animals in A Dog’s Life proved beneficial for the work on Kinectimals. “I remember doing a Dog’s Life lecture at Bournemouth university,” Watts continues. “One of the students came up with a question – he said, ‘are those animals alive?’ A few seconds later I realised it was the first time he’d seen an animal on a computer game screen that was reacting in an organic, non-repetitive way. There’s a lot of attention to detail that stands the test of time.

“The thing I was most proud of was the subtle things that we did; the way you move your head, the way you move your body, the animal would react and position itself to you,” he continues. “If you didn‘t do anything, the animal would try and get your attention. It was always monitoring you. It was always trying to stimulate you to do something and that‘s what I was quite interesting in with Kinect – we can obviously do the clever stuff where you throw a ball [but] it’s what we can do behind the scenes which made those animals come alive. To be honest, it‘s what Kinect did the best; interpret what you could do behind the scenes. We also did something which I thought was really cool in Zoo Tycoon with Kinect. We wanted to do animal enrichment with chimpanzees. And what was really good is that you could move your face and move and blink and the chimpanzee would come up to the screen and mimic you. That‘s what they try doing in real life. What‘s even better is when it didn‘t quite work, you thought – and this is the illusion of game creation – that the chimpanzee was being a bit cheeky even though it might not have recognised it. That was really subtle. It was really interesting to see people properly interact with human natural movement with essentially what is an AI ability.”

With Kinectimals Frontier succeeded in creating virtual animals that felt, sounded and looked alive to players.

Military doctrine and a DIY approach The same too goes for VR, which the studio invested in heavily for Elite Dangerous. Again, earlier work stood the team in good stead – Frontier had already worked in secret on software for Microsoft’s Hololens. The goal was to create one of the most immersive virtual reality experiences available. In many ways it was the perfect fit – a beautiful, expansive world in which you remain stationary as a player, controlling a moving vehicle without having to move your own body. It dodges the usual problems associated with VR – namely, the gimmicky tacked-on movement controls that mean virtual reality shooters or sports games are nigh on impossible to get right. In Elite, you control your spaceship from the cockpit, but are treated to the immense scale and scope of a space game.

“If you launch in a Lakon ship – they‘re with the ones that have a glass bottom – you come out of the station and look down and you almost have a sense of vertigo,” Watts says. “When I‘ve really got the lights turned down, I almost feel like I‘m insignificant in the world and I‘m just trying to make my way. That was really cool.”

“The second thing from a combat point-of-view; in combat you have an amazing competitive advantage. That‘s why all the canopies are glass – because when you are in VR, if a spaceship goes over the top of your craft, you can move your head and look at them. This is military doctrine – in dogfighting, he who sees first wins and really the absolute premise is that we wanted to get dogfighting to be absolutely as visceral as possible and as accurate. What‘s really interesting is in space, if we were really being super accurate, in space you‘d be going so fast that dogfighting wouldn‘t [really work]. All the best space games mess around with speed to make it more akin to World War Two. There was quite a lot of research in combat, which facilitated the use of VR and that‘s why it‘s an amazing experience, because it‘s not just a mechanism to make you feel part of the world, it gives you a competitive advantage in a very large component of the game.”

Kickstarting Frontier’s success Frontier has always had a DIY approach to its development, typically finding and hiring the right people for the job – rollercoaster experts, astrophysicists and more. It’s created a studio that has a wonderful camaraderie that encourages collaboration, and which allows them to go all in on projects. However, it was the transition to being self-published and fully independent that allowed them to take those risks to the next level, making decisions based on what the studio as an entity wanted to embark on, and not being beholden to outside influences. Digital distribution was the catalyst that made all of that possible.

“In the old days, you release your cassette or your 3.5“ disk and never update it,” Watts says. “Maybe, just maybe, you‘d get another disk as a cover disk on a magazine to do a critical flaw but now we‘re distributing digitally and being independent, we can make decisions and keep telling more stories. It‘s fantastic.”

It’s generally regarded that Elite Dangerous was Frontier’s first real self-published game, but in fact it was LostWinds that paved the way for Frontier’s future. “The beautiful thing about Lost Winds is it‘s highly acclaimed, won awards, people really liked it,” Watts says. “It had a beautiful vibe but it was a game that we started and finished without any publisher involved. But publishers can be very helpful. When you make a game, I think there needs to be a little bit of antagonism like in The Beatles, you need someone to critique what you have done to make it better and not settle for second best. We had to fulfill both roles and be our own harshest critics.”

The happiness clearly inspired the team to push further towards full autonomy over their own destiny. Toward the end of 2012, the team unveiled the aforementioned Kickstarter program for Elite Dangerous, which was one of the most successful crowd-funding projects of the time. It propelled Frontier forward and gave them an answer to the question that Braben, Watts and the other senior team members had been asking themselves: is Elite still relevant? Does it still retain the popularity to be a big hit?

Fast-forward five or six years and it’s a model that Frontier adopts for all of its games. “It’s good from a profit point of view, but we also engage directly with players,” says Watts. “We know what they want and it’s an amazing partnership. One of the things that people say that when you self publish it’s so good because you can do what you want and haven’t got this external producer – when we had the Elite Dangerous kickstarter we had 20,000 external producers. They were our conscience. We had exactly the same goals, obviously different ways of getting to those goals, but they really stimulated us to do better. What was really good about it was that it was sort of a validation for our idea. It gave us such confidence to make the game that we all wanted.”

Elite Dangerous is continually evolving, adding new features, narrative and in-game content with each new season.

A clear vision for the future The transition itself was made possible by learning from their excellent working relationship with major publishers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Frontier had always had a fantastic game-making ability from the beginning, but there’s a whole host of other things involved in releasing and selling a video game rather than just producing it on the creative side. Frontier learned a huge amount about maintaining quality, and all the nuances of how publishing works, from working with publishers in the decades prior. “We had such an amazing relationship that [publishers] were very open with us,” Watts says, “and we had insight into the other half of releasing a game. We spent thousands and thousands of hours understanding that and being exposed by these very gracious yet demanding publishers, and that really trained us.”

When the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter was launched, Frontier‘s publishing team was a team of no one. A few years later and that publishing team is over 35 people strong, complete with dedicated product managers, graphics artists, trailer editors, a dedicated community team and its own in-house PR and Marketing teams. The entire company approached publishing very seriously, and dedicated a lot of resources to making the publishing side of the business successful, ramping it up at such an incredible rate. Over the last 25 years the studio has gone from the Cambridgeshire farm, to a single space on the Science Park industrial park, to three individual offices on the Science Park, to its own space on the Science Park. It‘s remarkable.

“We‘re still really friendly with the people that we dealt with,” Watts says. “It‘s quite interesting that when we released Elite Dangerous on Xbox, it was like dealing with old friends again. Microsoft, Sony, whoever we work with knew that we were obviously super professional and hit our deadlines and our budgets, but our quality would always exceed. We exceeded it because we are so passionate about making games. In some way, it was never a development issue transitioning. Yes, we can develop games, but guess what: we can also sell them and we can communicate with our players, we can communicate with the world, we get our story out.”

“The relationships we have across every single component of what it takes to get a game out there has grown magnificently. We‘re a super professional company and I think we managed our transition so well on so many levels. Again, I just think that from where I am sitting, I think it‘s an absolute pleasure to be in the games industry. Between developers and publishers we all know how hard it is to make a game, we know how much passion we put into a game and we‘re all working together. It‘s just a really nice industry.”

As for the future, it looks very bright for Frontier. There’s still the passion and love for video games that existed 25 years ago, only now it’s distilled, straight from the makers themselves without any middle men. What you see is what you get, and it seeps into every aspect of the games – from development to PR and community events. “We still approach games in a very similar way,” Watts says, “and the passion that I put into Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is 100 percent [the same level of] passion I put into Planet Coaster. We‘ve grown so much and over the last few years it‘s just this on-going process. Now we‘re relying on our own IP.”

The team are understandably tight-lipped on what’s next, not ready to reveal whatever creative, ingenious project they’re cooking up behind the scenes. No doubt it’ll be something packed with detail, and rich with a British soul. But Frontier is quick to reassure that there’s still an ongoing commitment to the many games they’ve already got out there in the world – Watts himself is still excited about all of them, and they fit exactly into the creatively unique, technologically challenging framework that they want to achieve at Frontier.

The timeline of Frontier Developments

1994 David Braben had actually been making games since 1983, so he was almost a decade into his development career by the time he founded Frontier Developments. It was a monumental time, with Frontier’s first actual game being the CD32 port of Frontier: Elite II. Braben’s own older games – Zarch and the original Elite (created with Ian Bell) – are considered archival Frontier titles. While they weren’t made under the Frontier name, they influenced the studio’s output and are part of its DNA even today.

2004 It was ten years into Frontier’s life and the team had a huge success with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. It was a much loved theme park simulation game, and one that sold well over 10 million copies worldwide, making it Frontier’s best-selling game to date. Thanks to the studio’s hard work, it was also a technologically bold game with graphical settings that stretched the most powerful graphics cards of the era. That meant that the game itself had a very long shelf life and didn’t begin looking dated until long after release.

2008 LostWinds acted as one of Frontier’s experimental games, letting the team dip its toes into the water and see how self-published games could be made and marketed. Originally released on the Nintendo Wii, the popularity of LostWinds saw it later ported to iOS and later to PC for a wider player base to experience. It isn’t the most well-known of Frontier’s 30 or so games, but it’s arguably one of the most important in its transition to a fully independent studio.

2014 While 2014 marked the official release of Elite Dangerous, the game’s story starts much earlier. In 2012 the studio embarked on a Kickstarter project to fund the game’s development. It was a resounding success, with players desperate to get a new, modern version of the much-loved space franchise. It also marked the real turning point in Frontier’s history, launching the studio onto the stock market and capitalising on the upticking trend of digital distribution to create a fully independent studio. It’s a model that’s made Frontier and several other studios like it a great success.

2018 Jurassic World Evolution saw the many lessons learned with the success of Elite Dangerous applied to a widespread release across multiple platforms. Whereas Elite Dangerous had a staggered launch across PS4, Xbox and PC, Jurassic World Evolution was released on all three at once. While the team worked with Universal on several parts of the project, it was developed and published by Frontier themselves. When it released last year it fast became the team’s best launch of all time, selling one million copies in just five weeks.

Wolfgang Fischer

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tonimarienotbutler-blog · 6 years ago

Text

So lets reel it back a little..

and try to make some sense of the past few weeks by writing about them.

Sam’s been an issue, a major one. Let me start by explaining who Sam is to me.. We met when I had just gone into Year 9 and he was a first year along with my brother Alan. They’d had a scrap and Alan had left him with a big black eye, I noticed it and apologised, asked if he was okay etc and that’s how we got talking. Him and Alan made up and were mates for a while but it was always me he looked for at break times and me he called on the housephones when we got in from school. Some nights we’d stay on the phone from getting in from school to going to bed, we’ve bathed shat and slept all on the phone together. We’re best friends.

His mum has always been a part of my life too, a responsible adult I could look up to. I’ve called her a few times drunk and emotional and she’s talked me down. His sister Jaymee is a bit younger than me with the same passions but far more beautiful. She’s a nice girl with aspirations who’s heading somewhere.

Sam on the other hand.. He is a nightmare.

When he was in either year 8 or 9, they moved house to Billingham and Sam moved schools. He started meeting new people, mainly the wrong kinds of people, and slowly headed on his way on the slow path of self destruction.

We’ve always stayed close though, no matter what we’ll always have that bond, he’s like family to me. Every time I’ve seen him over the years, as few and far between as these visits may be, he just seems to get a little worse. Like the time I hadn’t seen him in a couple years and heard the news he’d been stabbed! I went to see him in the hospital right away, I felt I had to given the life/death situation. It was strange seeing him like that, that was when it first hit me that my little Sammy had gone. Lost to the world of drugs and violence that is Teesside. Sad really. Since then he’s got progressively worse. Every time I see him he has a new scar.

He got in touch a couple weeks ago and asked me to go for a joint at his mates, but when I got there him and his mate came and got into my car as we were going to his other mates. We pulled up to a dingy looking block of flats, and on the way in to the block Sam told me he had recently beat this guy up and threw a kettle over him in his own house. The guy was the shiftiest looking most blatant stereotypical drug addict. He introduced himself, shook my hand, asked me if I wanted a key nicely whilst his eyes burned no thank you into me, then went over to the microwave and started pressing buttons randomly.

It was your typical crack den, a nicer looking crack den, like you could see he’d made an effort to decorate the space with the things he had, but a crack den none the less. So as if my head isn't already farting, in walks a bronzed and muscular alright looking lad wearing nothing but Calvin’s. Like what the heck are you doing in this scenario right now plz? He left and then in storms an angry old lady with a dog, shouting about how she doesn’t care who’s in the flat and what they’ll do, asking him why she bothers helping him and feeding him when he’s just going to let the dickheads back in his flat again.

I empathised with her and told Sam to shut up when he asked her what her problem was. Denise was her name, I think. Not that it’s relevant. Sam’s mate who we had came with, Kecca (but not Kecca Ions) said that his head was bent and he was going to sit in the car, and well he couldn’t sit in the car without me so I went with him. We sat for a few minutes waiting for sam, in surprisingly not awkward silence, both just trying to wrap our heads around who Sam is now and the kinds of people he associates with.

After that I'm surprised I went out the second time, but I guess I had to see him again to get some answers. He messaged me late at night and asked me to go to his friend, Lauren Bellerby’s, this intrigued me cos I’m sure she had something to do with why he got stabbed, and from the look on Ali’s face when I mentioned her name she definitely did.

Anyways the setting wasn’t so bad, really nice house just over the road from where Jonny lives just a few people having drinks and playing Youtube through the television, nothing too crazy. I made a spliff and felt relaxed, the girl and her mate were nice and I’m always comfortable with Sam anyway. Until his friend Baz came. As soon as he came in the door he walked over and put a pill in Sam’s mouth, as if he wasn’t fucked enough already.. After that Sam was a state, kept asking the same questions over and over and could barely talk let alone walk.

He asked me if I'd take him and Baz to get some narcotics, and when I asked sniff? he gave no response. I was already suspicious from the way the pair of goons were acting but Baz dropped him in it by asking for a 20 stone on the phone to the dealer. The dealer who just so happens to be one of the dirtiest families in Stockton, well Teesside, they spread like wildfire. All low life dirty thieving rats, bred by low life dirty thieving rats. They do say behaviour breeds behaviour after all.

Anyways he apologised a thousand times for doing crack in front of me and shouted at his mate for scraping the pipe out to get the most out of their crack when they had company hahaha. That Baz had a beautiful blue English Bulldog so I didn’t care, she kept me distracted. I remember all I kept thinking was that I wanted to either smash the flat up or scream crying, but I didn’t want to show him up in front of his mate, no matter how low this mate may be, I couldn’t do that to him.

It got even worse when someone rang Sam’s phone for crack, as that Baz sells it. They didn’t have any in obviously or we wouldn’t have gone elsewhere to pick it up, but Sam agreed and seemed to be arranging to meet this person? Next thing I know they’re melting and cooling candle wax to pose as crack and selling it to the same ginger drug addict from the flats so they can buy a real ‘stone’. I’ve never been more disgusted, scared, repelled, and distraught in all my life. After witnessing the effects of crack cocaine with my uncle Paul I certainly don’t want to be doing it with my 22 year old best friend. Paul has always been an addict, smack weed whizz pills you name it he’ll take it, but when he got on the crack there was a definite change in him, he lost more weight, had less money, less fucking teeth. It’s just a dirty rotten drug that everyone should avoid.

I didn’t know what to say to him, so I said nothing for about a week. I kept trying to get in touch with Jaymee, tormenting myself over whether to tell her or Alison or not, whether it would actually make any difference. Instead I messaged Sam, and basically told him that I love him and he needs to sort his life out. He messaged me back saying that he knows, he’s going to try living with his mam to sort his life out if she’ll let him, and invites me over for tea with them.

He wouldn’t tell her, I thought thats what the night was about, being honest with himself and his mam about what he’s been up to and starting to move on from it. He said he wouldn’t let me tell her, and began to get a bit threatening with his tone, which is when I told him there’s fuck all he could do about stopping me unless he was going to cut my tongue out, and got up and left.

He messaged me yesterday asking if I was out of my strop yet, I simply said no and reiterated that he needs to be honest with himself, and miraculously he told his mam. He must be ready, he must know himself that he’s fucked his path up and he needs to get back on track. I can’t imagine how she felt, I know it will of broken her heart. She’s a lovely woman its such a shame. I haven’t spoken to Sam since that, only his mother, to tell her that she’s not alone in this and I will be there every step of the way helping him, that I'll never give up on him. I wish I could, truly. I put far too much time and energy into people, especially people who neglect me in my time of need.

I guess it’s just who I am though, I shouldn’t be any less nice of a person just because it seems the rest of the world isn’t.

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a-rush-of-dreams-to-the-head · 8 years ago

Text

It had been months of painful anticipation. As the weeks ticked by one by one, excruciatingly slow for your patience, you had got evermore excited for the concert of a lifetime.

Coldplay.

Getting the tickets hadn't been easy, but you'd been insistent and here you stood. Waiting for the mediocre warm up act to leave so you could experience what you had craved since you first heard the melancholy notes of Chris Martin's voice y years ago.

And finally, without fanfare the moment was here. You pressed further against the crowd, managing to slip to the very front - bar the apathetic looking bouncer holding back the crowd. The band entered the stage and soon you were absorbed in a world you had only dreamed of.

When "Yellow" started to play, you could feel your heart stop dead in your chest, this song had got you on the brink of tears too many a time and to hear it live was a joy - tears certainly streamed down your face. Although you had grabbed a front line position Chris had stayed unusually close to centre stage so far in the show which you thought was curious. However, this also leaves you entirely unprepared when mid-way through the song he strides down the catwalk and stares you dead in the eye, his head tilting slightly as he seemingly sings directly to you.

"for you I’d bleed myself dry"

You felt your legs give way under you and the last thing you remember is the feeling of hitting the ground and a look of alarm in bright blue eyes.

Next thing you know you woke up lying on a strange sofa with a pain in the back of your skull. You delicately try to open your eyes but squint heavily in the brightly lit room. As you make a futile attempt to sit up you hear a nearby rustling sound.

"Oh god, are you feeling OK? that was quite a fall you took there!" A voice questions above you, and you force your eyes open to see a man standing over you.

"Well your eyes are working well enough" he says with a friendly smile.

"I'm" he hesitated " you'd know me as Roadie 42; I do by far best blogs for this band" he chuckles faintly as if at an old joke and the turns his attention back to you.

"Can you get up OK?"

You nod hesitantly and take his outstretched hand to guide yourself back to a vertical position. Fuck, what the hell had happened?

You were about to ask this, but just as your mouth opened to form the words the doors in front of you burst open and in walked the entirety of the band, in full post-concert glory.

If you knew anything in that moment it was that you would have once again tried to fight the floor with your face if not for a very amused looking blue eyed man's hands that firmly held you in place.

"Got you this time" he said with a smile that seemed to make the whole room feel warmer and a wink that set your skin on fire. The first thought that then crossed your mind was that if not for the grip he still had on you, standing would be unlikely- the second was what the hell had happened that had ended with you in the arms of Christopher Anthony Martin with the rest of the band amusedly looking on.

Chapter two - A

"Errrr" is all you can manage to say. Just looking into those eyes is rendering you completely dumb. This looks silly you think to yourself. I've gotta say something. Anything. But words just aren't forming. He's still looking at you. Slightly concerned now. Oh god the fear must be showing in your face. Maybe he thinks you're insane?

Before you can make another futile attempt at replying the back of his hand rests gently on your forehead.

"Are you feeling okay? You're pretty hot. Maybe you should sit back down." You allow yourself to be slowly moved towards an uncomfortable looking sofa. Too busy contemplating that Chris Martin just said you were hot to offer any kind of resistance.

"I'm okay..." You manage to say. Albeit unconvincingly. You daren't look at Chris again. You take a deep breath to try again. But the next thing you know Guy Berryman is handing you a bottle of water and smiling. It looks like he doesn't know whether to be concerned or laugh. Great. You think. Guy Berryman thinks I'm delirious.

You can faintly hear cheers and shouts in the background and start to worry it's in your head. Before you have time to wonder what it is, an angry security guard slams the door open.

"They've been waiting for the encore for 5 minutes!! What're you doing in here??" Chris immediately stands up and you feel cold where he was holding you steady before. You stop yourself from reaching out to him or doing anything embarrassing.

"You can stay here until after the show. We'll come back in about 20 minutes and see how you feel. Okay?" His smile is genuine and warm, and you're feeling better already.

"Sure," you nod enthusiastically (but not too enthusiastically. You're still not feeling great) and then he, and the rest of the band, were running out the door back to the stage.

The door clicks shut and you're left in the quiet of the room. 'Roadie 42' is staring at his phone looking wholly uninterested in anything about what you're doing.

You take the quiet moment to look around. It's a very modern back-stage room, with white material all around and purple mood lamps. What an odd colour you think. Your sofa is white and you're glad your drink is only water so you can’t stain it. There are Union Jack throw cushions, which you think are a nice touch.

You suddenly think about home. You should text your mum and make sure she knows what happened. Maybe she'll send you taxi money so you won't have to get the train. It's gross at night. You can't even see the stars because of the light pollution. It's just dirty clouds and questionable characters.

You go to pull your phone out and stop in your tracks. You forgot that your background was a picture of Chris playing piano. You make a note to change it later. You don't need to look any more like a cringe superfan than you already do.

You hear thunderous applause and Chris shouting "thank you very much Wembley!!" and a couple of minutes later Chris slowly opens the door again and peeks his head in. You're slouching with a cushion in your lap and you make an effort to sit up. But Chris waves you off.

"It's alright. Don't exert yourself," you sit up anyway and move the cushion to the side.

"I'm feeling much better." You say adamantly. And it's true.

Chris gently leans forward and looks into your eyes. Holding your chin between his thumb and forefinger he inches closer. He looks sceptical but his expression softens into a sad smile. "You have lovely eyes..." He muses as if thinking aloud and you don’t even notice the rest of the band enter.

You can feel your heart beating fast in your chest. Oh god what if he can hear it? You internally panic but he seems not to notice and continues to look you over.

"Chris she’s has fainted once already today, stop smouldering and give her some space” you hear Will lament for the wall he was currently leaning on.

He rocks forward to rest his weight on his toes and smiles at you.

"Sorry what's your name? None of these idiots have asked yet" his smile relaxes you and you reply

"Y/N, it's Y/N"

His smile widens and he takes a slight step toward you.

"And what a shame we've missed out on that name so far. I'm Will" he adds

"Percussionist extraordinaire" Chris adds with a smile.

"Um nice to meet you Will, I mean I like knew but um- yeah...” You trail off regretting speaking. However he doesn't seem creeped out, in fact his smile widens more and you wonder if it’s hurting him to maintain.

"You seem better but I don't know if you'll be okay to get home by yourself" Chris speaks up breaking the silence, and in fact the eye contact between you and the muscular drummer, in fact you notice he has shifted to almost block you entirely from the rest of the band.

"Have we even established yet WHY she fainted" a quiet voice piped up

you assumed it was Jonny, but with Chris' broad chest blocking your view of most of the room you could only guess.

Chris tensed slightly. "Yes... Yes you're right Jay" he ruminated. Guess you were right about the owner of the voice. Guy decided to join in, "Guys, she did miss most of the concert."

You look up at Chris and he looks deep in thought for a few seconds. He gestures to the rest of the band and they form a sort of semi huddle on the corner. You look around trying not to seem like you are desperately panicking and see 'Anchorman' look up from his phone. He looks back questioningly for a second, then looks at the huddled boys chuckles and resumes his scrolling. You turn back around and see Chris smiling that heart melting smile again. "On behalf of Coldplay, the best , the sexiest, the most awesome band in the world, I invite you to join us for our post-concert shenanigans to make up for your brief unconscious bout." he recites proudly with a face like a child at Christmas.

Stunned, you watch him to see if it's a joke. His eyes are sincere. You smile shyly and nod slowly a grin spreading across your face. Is this really happening?

Everyone starts to move then and you feel what you assume is Will's hand pressed up against your back guiding you out of the room and down an obviously backstage corridor. You two are soon engaged in conversation about your university course and you could feel yourself relaxing into the light pressure of his arm as you discuss a subject close to your heart. In part, you couldn't believe it. Here you were having a conversation with WILL FUCKING CHAMPION. You try to live in the moment and not let this paralyzing fear stop you. So, deep are you in conversation that you don't notice the odd looks of Chris or, in fact the thoughtful face of Guy Berryman - resident bassist. You do however notice Jonny stealing quick curious glances at you but pass it off as something you don't need to worry yourself about. Soon you are at the door of a shiny black four by four, your current conversation partner opens it for you and you slide in, still not quite believing the situation you have found yourself. However, instead of Will following you in, you suddenly find Chris sitting right next to you -not that you’re complaining despite your pulse being increased tenfold and the fact every bit of your skin in contact with his burns with furious heat. You desperately try not to blush like the giggling school girl you are but by the amused glances from a Mr Berryman seated opposite you, you assume your efforts are fruitless. The band descend into post-concert banter, and for the most part you were relieved to have a moment to drink it all in. You were lost in fascinated appreciation of what was happening to you when the conversation took a turn.

"So Y/N" Jonny asks you curiously from across the car "have you established the cause of your unconsciousness?"

Chapter 4

The rest of the band look over at you as well. You feel the blush creeping back into your face and try to shake it off. You can't exactly say it was shock from when Chris looked at you, can you? That would get you a one way ticket out of this limousine faster than you'd have thought possible. Johnny's head is cocked to the side slightly. He's probably concerned.

"Dehydration!" You blurt. Not wanting the awkward silence you'd created go on any longer. It was getting unbearable. "I-er... Forgot to drink anything today. But I'm much better now. I had some water whilst you were doing the encore." You're impressed by your flawless lie. Delivery could have been better though. You clear your throat as if that will make your voice seem less shaky than it was. You look up to see if it worked. Johnny is nodding slowly and Will is wearing an expression you can't read (which you take to be normal). Guy is looking at Chris quizzically and Chris (who is still quite close) is looking at you with concern on his face. You're worried he's going to grab your chin again when Johnny laughs.

"You sure Chris didn't woo you? It has been known to happen!!" They all laugh and as the banter continues you try not to blush.

Johnny looks over a couple of minutes later and shoots you a knowing smile. You still don't know how to react but before you can pretend everything is normal the limousine stops and the chauffeur opens the door for the boys.

They all file out. Wanting to let loose after the concert. Chris stops before he gets out. "You sure you're okay?"

You don't give your throat time to close. No time to look like an idiot now. "A little partying never hurt anyone," you grin at him and he grins back and extends his hand to you

"M'lady?" His eyes glitter mischievously and you take his hand. Getting out of the car you squint past the unexpected bright flashes of cameras. You instinctively tighten your grip on Chris's hand and are met with an answering squeeze as he pulls you forward towards the rest of the bandmates who are gathered by the entrance to the expensive and fancy looking nightclub.

Chapter 5

You enter the building with the band and fins yourself in a modern looking minimalistic lobby with plain albeit expensive paintings littered across the walls and little exotic flowers in vases that looked to be more than you earn in a year adorning each available surface. You breathe the ruminating scent gently and try not to gag at its intensity. You see Guy visibly choking and hold back a laugh. Tonight seems like it’s going to be the best night of your life; even with the horrific flower smell. There is a man in his mid-thirties who seems to be some sort of receptionist, dressed in a, in your opinion, pretentious looking suit. What kind of nightclubs have receptionists you think, but alas here he was and you don’t know much about top-of-the-range nightclubs so you ignore him. You also spot several beefy looking bouncers guarding the frosted glass entrance to what seemed to be the place you were headed, as well as dotted around the room. You notice none of them have really taken notice of any of the band entering the building, I guess they’re used to it, you think. Chris bends down, fuck he’s so tall, and aligns his mouth with your ear.

“I’ll be right back” he whispers, then let’s go of your now-cold hand and wanders toward the showy looking man and his fancy desk. You are still suffering from the aftershocks of his face being so close and feel greatly relieved that Jonny seems to be facing the other way and can’t see what you assume to be your beet-red face.

You are waiting for a few moments nervously looking around the room before you feel a heavy pressure on your shoulder. Assuming one of the band had snuck up on you, you turn. Instead, you find yourself face-to-face with an angry looking bald bouncer who starts propelling you around the corner you were standing next to towards a door labelled “emergency exit”. He is taller than you but only slightly but you note his physical fitness, excluding this man’s slight beer belly and repulsive eye-bags What is happening? You think, too shocked to do much but be pushed.

“Fucking slutty fan girls” he mutters, “fucking making my job harder every fucking day”.

“How the fuck do you little shits even get in anymore? We vermin proofed the entire bloody building!” He starts to laugh but the pressure on your back gets more violent as you feel his nails dig into you. You suddenly realise what’s happening and begin to struggle but he just pushes you harder, now grabbing both of your arms and yanking them behind you. I guess I do look the part of a crazy-ass fan. You think. Probably because I am one, to be fair.

“wait…no...I’m… I’m with the band” you manage to squeak trying to wrestle your hands free. The bouncer snorts with a cruel chuckle,

“Yeah sure darling, and Chris fucking Martin is your boyfriend,” He’s spun you around to face him now, face so close you can feel his breath. “You desperate whores are all the same. Even that fucking lanky-ass man wouldn’t have you sweetheart hahahah-”

He is interrupted mid laugh by a hand land hard on his shoulder.

“As a matter of fact,” The giant of a man had a stormy look on his face that both scared you and made you want to melt. Chris, save me, your thoughts scream. “Me and my GIRLFRIEND here were just about to have drinks in the VIP lounge this ‘lanky man’ paid an extortionate amount of money for.” Wait, what!? “So, if you be as kind as you take your fucking hands off her immediately, I would be extremely pleased.” A look passes between the two men and the bouncer quickly lets go of you. “Now, apologise to Y/N here, before I have my drummer take you into that ally and teach you how we treat people who talk like that. Believe me, he’ll enjoy it after I repeat what you just said.” Chris states with such an unbelievably harsh tone to his voice that you barely believe its him talking. The bouncer muddily apologises then quickly gets as far away as possible from you both..

Chris has his hands on your shoulder now and is bending down to look into your face.

“Y/N, Y/N look at me, are you ok?” he asks urgently and you realise you’re shaking. You nod the affirmative, being unable to form words again. Am I dreaming, did he call me his girlfriend!? If I’m dead this is my kind of heaven. Your mind is racing.

“You look like you’re going to faint again” Chris mutters, placing both of his cold hands on either side of your face and wiping away the tears that had formed in your eyes with his thumbs.

“Any better?” he breathes soothingly, unbearably close to your face, and you find it hard to parallel this man in front of you with the unusually hostile one you just saw. You consider the likelihood of fainting again but being this close to his eyes you feel entranced and a weird sort of calm descends over you for a moment.

“I’m…I’m fine Chris” you reply finally, “Just a little bit shaken, I guess.” you see the fire almost entirely leave his eyes at your words and a hesitant smile takes its place.

“Oh, I’m sorry about that by the way.” he adds quietly his left hand moving off your face to run his fingers through his golden curls (you try not to stare at them in wonder because you decide you look enough like a creeper already) in a gesture that you’d probably point to nervousness if you didn’t know any better. Cause why the fuck would Chris be nervous, you think. “I mean, for saying you were my girlfriend. I just wanted to wipe that smug bastard’s smile off his face... He shouldn’t dare to touch you again though.”

“Or maybe I’ll just have Will beat him up anyway. Fuck it, I’ll even do it”

He pauses for a moment to look around then turns back to look you in the eyes again, a hint of the steel that just left them returning.

“But next time, if anything like that happens, you shout for me, OK Y/N?” he takes an almost hesitant breath and pauses. “And don’t let people like that put you down.” He adds. Being still unable to speak and just not wanting to ever stop looking into the ocean pools that called themselves his eyes, you hurriedly nod. Jesus bloody Christ I am a weak-ass wreck was the only coherent thought you could muster as Chis links his arm with yours, pulls you tight toward his body and you walk together toward the frosted glass door that you assume the rest of the band had already passed into while you were – ‘otherwise occupied’.

When you walk in you're bowled over by the beautiful interior. You're glad, however, that the nasty flower smell isn't in here. It's fancier than anywhere you've ever been before. The minimalistic style of outside is mirrored with smooth white marble surfaces and delicate black accents. The band are sat around the table, laughing. They have elaborate and fancy drinks in front of them. Except Will who has some sort of beer and looks curiously unreadable, as per usual.

You only realise you're grinning when the guys look up and laugh at you linking arms with Chris.

"You two aren't suspiciously late at all…" Jonny winks at you whilst saying it and you feel a blush begin. He smirks. Wait, he didn't do that on purpose, right?

As you move into a seat between him and Chris you turn your attention to Guy's peachy orange and delicious looking drink. "What's that?" You marvel and you notice that all of their expressions soften. You blush harder at being so uneducated.

"That, my dear, is a sparkling grapefruit champagne cocktail with Lillet rosé and peach." You're too busy trying to contain your blush that you don't notice the look Chris gives him. But Jonny does and quickly tries to resolve any potential tension.

"You want anything, Y/N?" He asks.

"I honestly… have no idea.” They all smile at you and you laugh a little, shrugging your shoulders. “What would you recommend?" You're not expecting the wide grin Jonny gives you. Nor are you expecting what next comes out of his mouth.

"Chris. Do the lady a favour and give her a sex on the beach would ya?" Chris goes wide eyed and splutters

"I-er-um okay?" Before stumbling out his seat before the table could see his red face. You blush furiously as well, remembering the reality of the situation you are in. You ponder what Jonny is doing whilst all three remaining members laugh at you and guy moves into Chris's, now vacant space and you begin to talk.

You'd just made an awful pun about the ‘bae’se, as you called it, being the instrument you’ve always wanted to learn, (causing Will to wince and Jonny to choke on his drink out of laughter) when Chris returned with your drink and a similar one for himself. Still blushing? No. That's your imagination. Why would Chris still be blushing over one stupid joke?

Guy gives him a mischievous grin and they bicker about his seat-stealing whilst Jonny gently taps your elbow and says quietly into your ear "You wanna know a fun fact about Chris?" You nod even though you're confused. "He can't hold his alcohol at all… Watch this." At that point, Jonny stands up and announces "Who's for shots?"

"Me!!!" You're shocked at how enthusiastic everyone is.

"Tequila please!" Guy calls merrily after Jonny and gives you a sly smile. You get the feeling that Chris's alcohol intolerance seis infamous throughout the group. Chris instantly takes Jonny's seat and you start talking animatedly as if you've known him for years.

* *

20 minutes later you're laughing hysterically at a debate between Chris and Will about orange peels.

"You've gotta dig your thumb into it, Will!! How else do you break it??" Chris shouts loudly over the table.

"No!! That mashes up the segment!! You've gotta use your nails!!!" Will retorted inarticulately. Chris is just about to make his counter argument when he gestures grandly with his drink and it splashes onto the Will and the table. But let's face it. Everyone's too far out of it to care.

"Shit, sorry!!" Chris giggles, and he and Will begin to laugh hysterically.

Suddenly, you see Guy get up from where he and Jonny were discussing something away from the table and walk elegantly over to you. "Wanna dance?" He grins. But looks over at the still hysterical Chris before extending his hand to you. You're too out of it to notice this odd gesture and take Guys hand with all too much enthusiasm.

Chapter 7 – L

Guy leads you to the empty dance floor and pulls you unexpectedly close. If you had been sober at that point you don't know how you would have reacted, but with liquid courage in your veins you wrapped your arms around his waist in return earning a chuckle from him. You were about to start drunkenly dancing to the shitty dubstep currently playing when you hear the music change. If you had looked around you would have seen Jonny, having a word with the DJ. But alas your attention was taken up with admiring Guys face and so you barely noticed when a slow acoustic song started to play. Guy's hands slipped onto your hips and he leads you in a slow sway. You giggled, both enjoying the feeling of being so close to such an attractive man and due to the amount of shots currently in your bloodstream.

* *

Guy is out for revenge and has formed a plan. No more will Chris be the one who always get the girls. He’ll feel the pain of rejection and the jealousy of replacement just like he’d made Guy feel. He’d noticed Chris looking at you – but he was resolute. He’d win this time. He’d noticed Jonny trying to fluster the girl and Chris at every opportunity- this could work in my favour, he thought. It was when Jonny suggested shots he fully realised his first chance. It was known among the whole band that Chris was an easy drunk, and an emotional one at that - making this the perfect prospect to get in his first strike against him. He lured Jonny away while the others were hysterically laughing at something or another and dropped some subtle hints about his plan - though pretending it was the sakes of further flustering the girl, Jonny seemed to agree and so the plan was set in motion.

Now Guy finds himself slow dancing with you and enjoying it more than he planned. He pushes away that thought and tries to sneak a glance at Chris. The singer is sat bolt upright in his seat, eyes locked onto the place where his hands and you meet, not a glimpse of a smile in his face. Guy smirks. Perfect. Deciding to take it a step further he leans forward and presses his forehead lightly against yours, humming slightly. You are so out of it at this point you just smile lopsidedly and close your eyes, swaying to the music. What Guy wasn't expecting was to then, very suddenly, find himself face to face with a furious looking Chris, who must have forced his way between the two of you. Oh shit.

* *

To say you weren't enjoying this new-found form of dancing would be to lie. You were definitely enjoying it. Your drunk mind, however felt a small nagging feeling - like someone was watching the back of your head, but you move onto other things when you feel Guy’s forehead rest upon yours. Oh, you think, I like this. You close your eyes and let the music carry you, feeling so far away and so very close at the same time. You are absorbed in this feeling until you feel your skin connection with the bassist be very suddenly removed and stagger backwards. You feel Will steady you, wrapping his arm under yours to try and hold you up.

"Lemmie get you somewhere out of here" he tells you, glancing toward where you were just dancing hurriedly. "This… might get ugly."

Guy blinks twice, rapidly. He hadn't been expecting Chris to react this aggressively. He's vaguely aware that Will is pulling Y/N out of the lounge before she can see anything get ugly..

His attention turns back to Chris and he swallows nervously when he sees the stormy face of the taller man glaring down at him, all too aware of his height disadvantage against him.

"What the fuck was that, Guy?" Guy raises his eyebrows realising that Chris is clearly very drunk and not particularly articulate. He decides to play innocent.

"What was... What, Chris?" He easily conceals his smirk (it was almost too easy to wind Chris up, but he'd had lots of practice) and paints on a visage of confusion.

"Oh you're a piece of--"

"Hey fellas, everything alright here?" Jonny comes in and puts a hand on both their shoulders in an attempt at keeping the peace.

The attempt fails.

Chris shrugs Jonny’s hand off aggressively. Jonny backs off.

"What're you playing at, Guy? Taking advantage like that!" Even in the dark of the room his eyes are on fire. Guy considers giving up the act but his judgement is impaired by alcohol.

"Taking advantage? I don't know what you're..."

"Oh fuck off. She doesn't like you guy!!"

That hit a nerve.

"Oh, because girls always like you and never me? Because you're the singer. Is that it? 'Mr Frontman'??" His voice is raised now. Chris acted like this too much recently and he'd had enough of the cocky bastard. "You know what? You're not the only member of this band, Chris!!"

"It's not my fault you're just the bassist, Guy." His eyes go dark "It's not my fault people just think I'm better than you" his words slurred. Deep down, Guy knows he doesn't mean them, but he's seeing red and there's nothing he can do to stop this train wreck.

"If that's how you feel then why even stay in this fucking band?"

"Guy, calm down. Yeah? We don't have to-" Johnny is cut off by Guy pointing a finger at Chris's chin and hissing.

"Well it doesn't matter. Cause behind all that fake charisma and your massive fucking ego," he takes a deep breath. "You're as miserable and wet as your shitty song lyrics."

Chris feels hurt somewhere deep inside him, too. But before he can catch it, the word

“Cunt" comes spilling out of his mouth in a spit; leaving Guy with a dark and irate look in his eyes. Chris sees the shorter man raise his hand but doesn't think he'll do it. Nonetheless he suddenly feels a stinging sensation in his cheek and is recoiling from the sharp slap. By the time he looks up Guy is gone and Jonny is just standing there watching him. The realisation of what had just occurred dawned upon him and it was an instantly sobering thought.

*Chris POV**

For a while Chris just stood still. Stood and contemplated the contents of his most recent conversation with his bassist. His alcohol muddled brain still tried to defend what Chris himself had said but even in this state he knows he fucked up. A part of him is still furious with Guy, so he does not run to apologise to him and instead stands there and stares at the two spots where Guys feet were last planted and softly rubs the stinging patch on his cheek which has coloured a brilliant burgundy. How the hell is this band going to last? He thinks.

*Jonny POV*

A sharp ringing sound cuts through the air and Jonny sees Chris suddenly snap out of his thoughtful stupor and walk towards the table they were previously sat at. A moment later he sees an unfamiliar phone in Chris's hand and an odd smirk on his face. Must be Y/Ns, he thought but was stumped by the smile of the singer, considering the very recent confrontation with Guy. These sorts of things are happening too often now he thinks sadly. The worst thing is Guy barely ever tells Chris how he feels. He looks over to the singer who is slightly haphazardly making his way towards the emergency exit door Will and Y/N had left from earlier, and he probably won't even remember it. He'll go on thinking Will is the only one with issues with how this band is being run... anything he learns tonight will be wasted when his ego returns tomorrow morning.

*Reader*

You have been sat outside with Will for a while, your head leaning on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around yours. You feel weirdly safe like this, despite being sat on a grimy step outside a nightclub. Your mind briefly wonders to what your roommates will think when you are so late home but the thought makes you feel horribly sad for a reason you can't discern and so you gently open your eyes and try to focus on the street around you to keep your mind from such upsetting thoughts. It's then that you spot a shadowy figure approaching down the dark alley the exit door seemed to open onto.

"Will" you whisper hoarsely and you feel him turn to look at the man. As he passes under the one orange-tinted street light you see his face and instantly recognise it. Instead of forming coherent words you whimper and shift closer to Will, who gently prises you off and stands up to his full height.

"Can I help you?" The situation had obviously sobered the drummer almost entirely and there was no slur in his voice.

"Ahhhhhhh…" the man said slowly "and you'd be the drummer, wouldn't you? Shame, I was looking forward to giving your faggot friend a nice reminder of earlier; but I guess the whore's got another knight-in-fucking-shining-amour at her service." His laughs aggressively and then proY/Nds to spit in your general direction. You stand instantly, fight or flight kicking in, but as you do you see Will take a step closer to the other man.

"I'm going to give you one chance to leave." Will’s voice is calm and almost soft. The bouncer laughes again, almost choking on his own saliva, and counters Wills advance with one of his own.

Seconds later he is nursing a split lip from a punch that lands close to his jawline. He doesn’t fall, or run. However, he does begin to circle Will who begins to move in return. That's when the man makes a lunge for you and manages to hook his arm around your neck, almost cutting off your air.

"Shame the lanky one wasn't here to fight for his bitch" he wheezes and tightens the grip on your windpipe. Your vision begins to fade slightly and you claw desperately at his forearm. The door opens and Chris stumbles out clasping your mobile phone. His befuddled expression soon changes into one of terror.

"Speak of the fucking devil" the bouncer relishes.

You're breathing erratically. Your vision is fading, light pulsating in front of you and black and red spots are blocking you from focusing.

You feel your desperate struggles becoming feebler (though they weren't great to begin with) and your legs giving out from under you, though this time today for a much more unpleasant reason. The man violently tries to drag you towards the centre of the alley and you can only whimper in protest.

"Y/N!!" You hear Chris shout and start running over, but the brutal grip on your neck tightens which brings him to a halt a few metres away.

"Let her go." Will snarls. The man just laughs.

"This bitch, really!? I honestly can't believe you're trying to protect this piece of trash.”

Chris bristles and the man pulled you around to face him.

"I just got fired because of this stuck up slag!!" He spat the last word as if it offended him, "You've ruined my life in the space of a few hours." he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thin, sharp knife and ever so gently rests it on your face, pricking a drop of blood. You gasp in pain.

"Well… now I can ruin yours.” He sizes up your face with his bloodshot green eyes “Such a shame if something were to happen to your pretty face, eh?” He raises the knife – ready,

“You want this slut, Chris Martin?"

Chris POV

He has Y/N. She's stopped struggling. Chris isn't listening to the mad man’s ramble any more. Just standing there, helpless. Trying to think of anything he can do.

He faintly hears the man say, "Come and get her, asshole," when he throws the object in his hands as hard as possible at the man’s face. His aim is a little off thanks to the alcohol, but he manages to catch him and get him down long enough for Will to advance forward and drive an elbow into his temple, though the frenzied assailant has enough time to begin a slash at Y/N. She drops to the ground heavily. Chris rushes to help her and stop the blood now oozing from the now considerable cut on her cheek.

Reader POV

You hit the ground hard and your head is reeling. You take a moment to catch your breath and look up. The security guy has brandished the knife on Will and is wildly slashing at him. Will seems calm and like he knows what he's doing, but you can see an underlying fear in his eyes. Chris is next to you calling your name but you don't know what to focus on.

Hearing Chris’ desperate pleas, Will looks over to you both, but the momentary distraction is enough for the guard to lunge at him with the blade, leaving a long – though shallow - laceration across his arm. His face contorts briefly in pain and seeing the blood flow from the wound you scream in fear.

Horror courses through you and you go limp. Chris moves in front of you to block the fight and pulls your head into his chest. You grasp his shirt in your fingers and cry into him, the horrible scene playing over and over in your head.

He quietly whispers that it'll be okay into your ear until it's all you can focus on and it eventually soothes you until you're a whimpering mess in his arms.

You don't notice that in the background, Will has pinned the guy to the wall and is punching him repeatedly.

You don't hear the crunch of his bones breaking because Chris says anything and everything to keep you from realising the savagery going on behind you both.

Anything to protect you.

By the time Guy and Jonny finally come rushing out of the exit and pull a raging Will off the man, you're exhausted and overwhelmed.

Chris carries you away, and as you drift between reality and your unconscious haze you catch a glimpse of Will’s bloody, mutilated knuckles as sirens sound in the distance; and the blood that coats them isn't all his own.

You fade in and out of consciousness on the journey to the hospital. Chris refuses to let go of you the whole way, simply cradling you in his arms.

Your head just won't stop hurting, and the pounding stinging on your cheek isn't particularly helping. Every time you wince in pain you Chris flinches and the look of guilty fear rises further in his eyes. If you had been closer to wakefulness you would have told him that you were OK, you would have lied and said the pain was fine. But the blow to your head had stopped any attempt you may have made to mask your pain; and now each wince, each moan, each sign of discomfort was like a painful blow to the tall man whose arms you currently reside in.

In the end, you make it to the hospital. The longer you wait the angrier Chris gets and Jonny sees his fists tightening until his knuckles were almost entirely white. You and Will are eventually directed in separate directions and you see the two remaining band members who aren't currently carrying you hesitate which to follow. Jonny looks at Chris, then at Guy and shorty after decides Chris, and the doctors trying to attend to you, need his help now more than Will does. He nods to Guy who decided to keep the drummer company and so the two go their separate ways down the sterile white corridor. A nurse gets you into a bed in a quiet, private room, informing you that a Doctor is on their way

This doesn't settle well with Chris who begins to angrily demand you are given painkillers immediately. Jonny had seen how difficult it was for Chris to let go of you at all and tried to calm to the irrational.

"Chris" he said, softly. "They know what they’re doing" This does seem to calm him slightly and he drops his icy stare from the unshaken nurse.

"Sir" she says briskly, looking briefly at her clipboard "Mr.... um, Martin? Your girlfriend’s going to be fine, and we will make sure she gets her painkillers ok?" He expression softens slightly at Chris's still fearful face. "She’s going to be fine." she says gently and then slips out of the room and down the hallway.

As the doctor comes in and begins to insert the minor stitches on your facial wound he has to leave and Jonny finds him pacing the hall instead. He lifts his head when he sees Jonny and he notices the dilated pupils signalling even this hadn't fully sobered his intoxicated friend.

"It's all my fault Jon" he says urgently yet softly,

"If I had kept a better eye on her in reception.... If I had made sure they took him away as soon as I reported him... If I hadn't been such a jealous twat and tried to put down Guy. Fuck it if I hadn't even turned up to play the show today." he laughs dryly. “She got hurt because of me.”

Jonny looks at him feeling his heart break a little at Chris' cutting words and brings the man in for a tentative hug.

Tonight, Jonny thought has been a bloody long night.

The next day comprised of a plethora of tests and medical exams to ensure you did not in fact have anything more serious than mild concussion. When you had woken that morning you didn’t remember much, so it was to your utter shock to open your eyes to Chris hovering anxiously by your bedside. A slightly less pleasant shock, however, was had when you turned to see your face in the mirror on your bedside table. Your left cheek was now adorned with a crescent shaped laceration; currently being held together by precise black stitches. Suddenly your memory rushed back to you. You and guy, dancing. Will, taking you outside the club to cool off. The man. Grabbing. Choking. Chris. A sharp pain. Then dark. You gasp, the sudden movement pulling at your delicate stitches, and Chris leans closer to you, looking almost as if he is fighting the urge to reach out and touch your face.

Well a small, sad voice whispers in your mind, that's the thing about train wrecks. People just can't look away. You want to hide your face in shame away from the handsome man, end his gawking at the spot soon to be a unfashionable facial scar, wipe out the look of pity and disgust you are convinced you see in his eyes. Instead, frozen in the moment, you duck your eyes downward; partially in sadness and partially to avoid those blue, blue eyes that seem to look deep into your soul. It's then that Chris loses his resolve and reaches out to lift your chin, exactly like the night you met. This time he's not smiling, and a part of you yearns more than anything to see his smile again. You can't help but look him in the eye now, and are surprised by what you see; instead of the teasing of the day you met, or even the disgust you thought you saw seconds ago, his eyes are filled with a mix of guilt and an odd emotion you could only liken to admiration.

"I know I can’t make this up to you." he articulates slowly and softly. "I can leave now... if you want. I just wanted to make sure you woke up OK." he pauses and takes your silence for an answer, slowly releasing your face and beginning to back out of the room. His face looked uncharacteristically unreadable.

"Don’t…you don’t have to go..." you whisper and Chris immediately rotates himself back to face you, a questioning look in his eyes.

"...it wasn't your fault Chris." you continue. You see him begin to open his mouth and so raise a finger to shush him "-lemmie finish... OK." you take a deep yet jittery breath in and try again.

"That maniac was the only person who did anything wrong Chris. There’s… no blame on you. In fact, it's... it's thanks to you that this" you angrily point at you newly acquired facial flaw and Chris winces slightly "isn't fatal or some shit..." Your burst of anger fades as quick as it appeared, and you begin to blush a furious red and find a very interesting point on the floor to stare at. Seconds later, you find yourself enveloped in Chris's arms and the emotions get too much for you, triggering a bout of soft sobbing into his very much already ruffled shirt, much to the amusement of Jonny who has just returned from getting a coffee.

From the rest of the day, Chris doesn't leave your side. You still spot an occasion when he stares you guiltily, but you tried to give him a reprimanding look. This usually does nothing but make the singer (and definitely Jonny if he was around) laugh. That, you thought, was still much better than him wallowing in your sadness on your behalf.

It was getting late now and you were lying in your hospital bed while Chris was catching you up on all the news; albeit by reading you the silliest headlines he could find. Your chest hurt from laughing at Chris's silly voices and your face from smiling but as you glance over at your resident clown for the day you see a weird look in his eyes. Deciding he was probably missing his friends, you tell him he should go and see Will. He hesitates to accept but you cheerfully bid him on and tell him that you'll manage to cope without him for a few minutes. This leaves you unexpectedly alone. Jonny has already gone, as the band had been forced to cancel a show while Will was in hospital, which required heavy amounts of admin work that he needed to deal with. You decide to take this opportunity to nap and so close your eyes and soon drift off into a world of dreams.

You are awoken by soft whispering but don't commit to opening your sleep soaked eyes yet.

"I think she's still asleep Chris." Is that Will you hear? You move slightly and begin to try to force open your eyes.

"Y/N…" you hear a gentle whisper close to your face and at the melody of Chris' voice you manage your task and see two indescribably blue orbs staring back at you.

"Sleeping beauty wakes" Guy says, and you feel a blush rise to your face that makes him chuckle. Chris suddenly withdraws his face and retreats to a standing position. At the sight of the entire band collected by your bedside, Will in his sling and all, you smile nervously.

A moment of strange silence follows and you see Jonny staring at Chris. Chris looks back eventually and Jonny inclines his head slightly toward you.

"Oh… yes!" Chris said hurriedly, then composed himself. "...we have an offer to make you"

Chris POV

I was expecting Y/N to get angry with me. I wasn't expecting the reason. Instead of the fury I'd imagined directed at me for my failure, she was pissed because I blamed myself. Her unexpected show of almost aggression staggered me and as she recovered from her flash of strong-willed, steely-eyed determinism I felt something shift inside my chest. In that moment, I couldn't control myself. With the memory of fire burning in her now downturned eyes and still with the confusion of her avid defence of me I wrapped my arms around her and tried to hug any pain I might have ever caused this girl out of her. She began to sob and I drew her in tighter. I felt a pang of guilt. This wasn't appropriate, I was taking advantage of her emotional drunkardness almost as much as Guy had with her biological intoxication. But I just couldn't let go.

I found out more about her as the day went on. Though we had met only recently, I felt oddly at ease talking to the girl. Once you'd got past the shy, flustered shell she was bright, witty and managed to keep a smile on my face for most of the day. It's when she winced in pain - despite trying her best to hide it - that I felt that guilty feeling rush back, but each time was confronted with her best impression of a frosty glare that made her look more scared than angry and was undeniably funny. Jonny was hanging around a lot, but once he decided that I wasn't at danger of beating up any medical staff he popped off to see Will. Will. I'd unintentionally forgotten about him, so distracted was I with Y/N. I wasn't sure I was ready to see him though. His injury had been as much my fault as Y/Ns had, possible more, and the thought of seeing my band mate hurt because of me, despite our recent disagreements, filled me with dread. There was also the small matter of Guy. I didn't remember much of the middle section of that night, but I did remember an argument and then getting slapped. So, it was with no real hesitation I decided to keep Y/N company instead, which turned out to be a very good decision. Although she still blushed if I looked her too long in the eye or if our fingers brushed together by accident, she was slowly becoming more comfortable. I tried to lure more smiles out of the girl by reading silly headlines using my best impressions, which seemed to work to great effect. I was sat there enjoying the laughter when it hit me. After today she was going to be released from hospital and go home. After today I would have no cause to see her again; a usually minor thought, yet this filled me with negative emotions I couldn't describe. She must have seen my expression and mistook it for an urge to visit my injured band mate as she almost forced me out the room to go see Will. Not that I didn't want to. I just hadn't even thought about it for the last few hours I'd been with her.

When I entered Will’s hospital room the discussion abruptly stopped and I felt as if I'd interrupted something. Nevertheless, I walked over to where Will is sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. Looking at his sling-covered arm, I felt such overwhelming guilt I panicked and brought him in for an unanticipated hug. He grumbled slightly at first and complained I was crushing him, but when I didn't give in he relaxed slightly and told me rather roughly to get over it.

"I'm not dead Chris. And before you profess apology, my tiny cut is not your fault either. Don't know why it's in a sling but" he shrugged and smiled "no permanent damage."

"As for that bouncer-" Jonny began a slight reprimand in his tone,

Will chuckled darkly and I flinched

"You didn't hear that thing speak Jon, he deserved more than what I gave him" Will almost spat the words and the memory of the strong smell of blood and Y/Ns tears filled my mind.

"Just do me a favour and don't talk about that in front of Y/N, OK" I said, rather harsher than I intended. Guy gives me a look and Jonny notices.

"-ah yes" Will asks, "how is she?" I briefly discuss her condition with the boys but feel a nagging feeling still.

"Well…" Will says "what's the plan then?" I look at him quizzically. *Plan?*

Jonny joins in.

"Well she fainted at our concert, then got stabbed when we tried to take her out for drinks. I think she deserves something good to happen."

Guy looked deep in thought, which made me very uncomfortable.

"I...agree" he said slowly after a great deal of consideration.

"Well there's no need to ask Chris his opinion on the matter" Jonny added and him and Will began to chuckle. My face reddened.

"I- uh-... wha-" I stumbled but the two boys raised their eyebrows at me and burst into a fresh set of laughter when I tried to speak further and words wouldn't form. Guy wasn't laughing, but a corner of his mouth was upturned in a smirk.

About half an hour later the guys were deep in discussion. Every time I chimed in I was ignored. This irked me to no end but a slight glare from Will had me retreating. So instead I sat, half listening and abstractly drafting lyrics that began to slip into my head.

When it started we had high hopes

now my backs on the line

my backs on the ropes

when it started we were alright

But night makes a fool of us in daylight

I chuckled at the last line, that for sure was true today

Said we were dying of frustration

Saying " lord lead me not into temptation"

But it's not easy when she turns you on

As soon as I wrote the lyric I felt bad. Who the hell was I writing about? Where had my mind gone. This had to stop. I shut the pad abruptly and tuned back in.

"-be a one time thing. " Will said.

What the hell were they talking about?

You look on in shock at what Chris just said.

"Um... sorry, can you try that again?" You ask slowly

Chris gives you and peculiar look and complies.

"We were wondering if, in return for all the-" he coughs slightly "horrible circumstances' you've endured, that maybe you'd like to come to our next show. In Paris. In two days." You face relaxes slightly as you process what the tall man in front of you just proposed.

"You want me..." you start slowly and see Chris instantly blush which confuses you. Jonny snorts at him but you ignore them both and continue.

"- to go to Paris" you continue swirling the words around in your mouth as you speak. You don't know what to feel.

Chris is still distracted by containing his blush and giving Jonny dirty looks, so Will steps forward to speak. As you see him you are reminded of exactly what the taller man did on your behalf and interrupt him before he opens his mouth.

"Oh god Will...I forgot to thank you." Your voice drips with shame and you almost run forward to embrace the drummer, carefully avoiding his hurt arm. He relaxes into your embrace and you squeeze him tighter, muttering apologies into the shirt your face is currently buried in. Will smells like sandalwood and hospitals, the latter being temporary you assume, and you don't want to let go of him. Eventually you hear a few throats being cleared and pull back suddenly, blushing heavily. Looking up at Will he seems uncharacteristically flustered and you want to sink into the floor a little bit. However, you are still overcome with gratitude and guilt toward the man and so try to stammer out something more substantial.

"I....just wanted... you know-..." you gather your courage and try again, " not to sound melodramatic, but you kinda saved me Will." You glance at his arm and feel unwelcome tears pool in your eyes.

"Oh god.. i-... you-... it's my fault, I'm... I'm so sorry Will" with the final word you feel your lips tremble and feel more and more like running out the door to avoid crying in front of the band. Four sets of eyes are trained on you. Three begin to move forward at the sign of your tears. You end up in Will's arms while Chris and Guy awkwardly step back.

"Don’t be silly." Will exasperates kindly as you sob into his now damp shirt.

"I'll tell you now, I'd do it all over again in a flash Y/N and that's the end of it." He sighs and pulls you slightly away to look into your eyes.

"Now let's talk about the much happier subject, eh?" You nod, shoulders still shaking slightly from the sobs. Will smiles at you, and it takes you aback so much that you can't help but smile back at him. This exchange doesn't seem to relax the tension in the room though. Jonny very suddenly decides that this isn't the best place for discussion and suggests you both check out and meet them at the Costa down the road. You are too busy gathering the little stuff you have to see the exchange of looks between the boys and much too oblivious to know what they meant.

By the time you and Will enter the Costa Guy and Chris are glaring madly at each other, whilst Jonny laughs.

"ROCK PAPER SCISSORS!!!" They both shout at the same time. Guy does rock and Chris does paper, leading him to cheer triumphantly before looking over to see you and Will walking over. He's so busy trying to make room on the sofa for you that he doesn't notice Guy steal the biscuit off his and Jonny's saucers until it's too late.

"Hey! I won!!" Chris whines.

"Gotta keep your eyes on the prize, Martin. You snooze you lose." Guy laughs smugly, stuffing them both into his mouth.

"I'm never offering up my biscuits again..." Jonny mutters and turns to you. "What can I get you Y/N?" He smiles. You've never been a huge coffee person so instead opt for a hot chocolate.

"So, you given our proposal any more thought?" Guy grins. You consider the prospect of going to Paris with these guys and almost feel faint again. Is this real?

"Well-er...." You're trying to control your heartbeat and feel Chris's eyes on you. You turn to look at him. He looks worried. It's then that you realise that you haven't finished your sentence. An awkward laugh escapes you. "Of course!!"

Maybe it's your imagination that Chris breathes a sigh of relief.

"Great!! Are you okay with flying? It won't be a long one." Guy already had his tablet out and is typing a email to his scheduler.

"Well I've never really flown befor--"

"I'll look after you." Chris offers without hesitation, earning a smile from Will and a chuckle from Jonny as he walks over with your hot chocolate.

"Always the knight in shining armour, Chris." He teases and Chris rolls his eyes.

Without thinking, you say "Well I think it's very sweet. Thank you, Chris." Giving him a meaningful, thankful smile. There's an awkward silence for a second whilst you realise what you said and join Chris in blushing furiously before Jonny starts on a story about a sheep or something.

"I don't go near the little fuckers!!" He shouts as the punchline.

But at that point you're too busy watching Chris, who is having a glaring match with Guy again. Before the situation can repeat itself, you take your biscuit, snap it in half, then grin at Guy as you pop half into your mouth and offer half to Chris, who shares your mischievous giggle whilst you both munch on the delicious cinnamon crackers.

After finishing your half of the sought-after coffee biscuit, you feel two chocolate brown eyes trained on you. You instinctively turn to face the bassist they belong to. Instead of speaking a word, he lifts his hand up to your face and, his fingers lightly resting in your chin gently brushes off a lingering crumb from your face,

"I think I got it", he murmurs. You think you can hear angry breathing emanating from your other side and see - as Guy slowly, almost reluctantly, withdraws his hand- his expression turn to a victorious smirk as he looks past you. Looking around yourself, you see Chris returning Guy's smug stare with an expression of barely restrained anger, though you notice his cheeks are still vividly splashed with red. Jonny then immediately bursts into peals of laughter at Chris and Will is staring rather sternly at Guy, disapproval almost flowing off the drummer.

"Gotta keep your eyes on the prize, Martin." Guy reiterates patronisingly, slowly tasting each word as it came, and you can practically feel the tension oozing from Chris as the bassist spoke "You snooze, you lose"

You are entirely confused about how Guy is acting and decide to ask a question about the upcoming trip instead of trying to figure it out.

"Um, so guys..?" All eyes are now on you - even Jonny ceases laughing. Oh great.

"Where shall I meet you for the flight? Like the airport...? Or something? I- I guess you can tell me closer to the time or whatever " Now it's the band's turn to look confused, it takes them a while but Jonny soon understands the area of miscommunication.

"Oh shit, yeah!" He says finally, "The concert is in two days, like Chris said." You nod, still not understanding "But we're flying out today." He turns to his watch briefly "in about 3 hours, I think..." he looks questioningly at you. "You still OK with coming?" You nod immediately but your thoughts are racing even faster than before.

Why are they flying out now? you think, but then reason that if not for this delay they would already have been there and played a show. What the hell am I going to wear for three days?

Chris seems to sense your concern.

"We can drop by your place to pick up some stuff, if that helps" he says nonchalantly. "no biggie." You smile in gratitude at him and earn yourself a heart-melting grin in return.

You pull yourself away from his gaze and turn to Guy.

"Oh- um… how much do I … owe you for the flight by the way?" He raises both eyebrows at you in almost disgust.

"Firstly, we’re not monsters. The flight is on us."

The blush that only just left returns, and you feel like an idiot for your question. Guy's tone then audibly softens "Secondly...well it's a rather 'personal' flight…"

Jonny grins and Chris wraps one arm gently around your shoulders in an effort to relax your body that seemed to be radiating discomfort.

"All will be explained Y/N… all will be explained"

The walk to Costa had been tense, despite Jonny's endless chattering. Guy kept shooting me gleeful glances and I couldn't for the life of me justify how angry I had felt when I saw Y/N hug Will. For a moment, I glanced back at Guy. Thinking back, he had also seemed riled by this, which confused me even further. You know why it is my brain whispered and I tried my best to block it out My mind had been straying far too much and I had not liked the direction that it had tended to go in.. I shook my head slightly as if to shake out every inappropriate thought lodged inside. This thinking was wrong, the girl was 10 years younger than me at least, and I refused to be some sort of dodgy rock-star salivating after a girl I'd only just met. Ah my mind said, so you are salivating after her? That was the last straw and I desperately attempted to engage Jon in conversation to avoid listening to my own thoughts.

"So" he said to me casually, "You think she'll say yes?" She better… The voice in my head reared its head again but I ignored it.

"Hmm- um... it's… anyone's guess." I replied trying to seem uninterested but I knew I wasn't fooling Jon. His smirk as we entered Costa confirmed this.

"Aw Chris, don't be so coy... You haven't exactly been subtle." He taunted me and I flushed a furious shade of red but tried to pass it off as anger as we chose and sat at a table.

But before I could speak Guy spoke up.

"Tired of being lonely, eh Chris?" He taunted a silent challenge and a reminder in his eyes. Feeling the reminder of my slip of words last time still ghosting on my cheek, I tried to ignore his comment.

"I'll have a skinny mocha ta Jon" I said as Jonny began to make moves to get coffee. As soon as he rose Guy pulled out his phone and promptly ignored me. Stuck with nothing to do, I decided to finish the lyrics I had started earlier.

If you only

If you only say yes

Whether you will's anybody's guess

God only, god knows

I'm trying my best

But I'm just so tired of this loneliness

I chuckled slightly at the usefulness of Guys comment in filling in my rhyme.

By the time the drinks returned I had pretty much got a whole song. As soon Jon put them on the table Guys hand swooped in to try and steal my biscuit.

"Hey!" I protested, "You said you didn't want a drink!"

Guy raised his eyebrows.

"I didn't say I didn't want the biscuit" he replied

Jonny didn't even look up.

"One of you can have mine." he muttered, trying to wrestle with the sugar sachet for his tea. I glanced at Guy.

Game on.

You suck in breath as you walk into the vast, bright expanse of Heathrow airport. You don't do much travelling, aside from the odd camping trip so this was a novelty.

You look up at the high, glass roof and get so engrossed you stumble back into Guy. "Watch yourself," he chuckles with a wink and you blush furiously.

You reach a desk with an intricate purple design and a single orchid in a glass vase. It is separated away from the rest of the check in stations and mostly hidden by a delicate screen. Clearly the staff are expecting the band as a sharply dressed man smiles – saying something to Will – and begins to lead you all through a locked door.

Chris comes up beside you. "Sorry you didn't have much time to grab your clothes. Maybe I can buy you something when we get to Paris? For the show?"

"Oh-n-no that's okay. I have some stuff." You didn’t want him to feel as if he had to go out of his way to do anything else for you, also you’re not sure if your heartrate would cope. But the idea is in your head now and you just hope nobody can hear the thrumming of your elevated pulse.

"Ah Y/N you can't say that…" Jonny chimes in. "Chris insists!" He leans close to your ear in a mock whisper "He's actually quite the fashionista. We've had him down as gay for at least 4 years." Chris goes red and elbows Jonny in the chest. You laugh at the banter between them and continue through the corridor.

After going through accelerated customs, you are driven out to the plane. You look up at it in awe but the boys aren’t even slightly phased.

Inside it has beige leather seats and cream walls and you gawk at it all like a tourist.

There's also a woman in flight uniform stood with four champagne glasses by the door. The band all reflexively take them but all eyes fall on you as they realise you are without a glass, naturally causing a furious blush to blossom on your cheeks.

Maybe it's your imagination but you’re sure you see Chris step on Guy's foot as he moves over to you and offers you his own.

"I don't know why I believed Guy was competent enough to let the flight attendants know we had an extra passenger!" He grins, rolling his eyes and calling for another glass.

Guy gives a tight grin to Chris but comes to stand on the other side of you and raises his glass. "To friends, old and new. And to you, Y/N." You don't know when it happened but your hand is in his and he brings it up to kiss your fingers, looking you dead in the eyes. "We are honoured to have made your acquaintance. And I for one, hope our friendship will continue for a very... long time." His eyes are dark as he clinks his glass against yours, Will's and then Jonny's, ignoring the fact that Chris is still without one. You almost inhale your drink in an effort to hide your shell-shocked face.

It's then that the flight attendant arrives with Chris's glass and an apologetic look. Chris strides over to you, gently clinks his full glass against your empty one and smiles before downing it in one. Will starts to ask the flight attendant about the flight plan, it seems to you as if the band are very familiar with the crew of their plane. This reminds you of a question and you direct it toward Chris,

"So, here's the real question Chris..." you begin and he raises his eyebrows curiously. "Do you get to keep the plane after the tour or is it just temporary?" Jonny laughs good-naturedly and you shoot him a bashful smile.

"Hey, it's a valid question!" you protest, giggling.

"Well I'm sure Chrissy-boy wishes he had his very own plane" Jonny says, smirking

"Maybe with a big picture of his face on the side to match his ego." Chris smiles sarcastically at his friend but you can see an embarrassed blush creep into his cheeks.

"But if you’re asking if our dear Chris here will be available to take you flying anytime soon…" It's your turn to blush as your face flash floods with red and Jonny's wry smile extends "I'm sure he'd find a way one way or another if you asked." The guitarist is prevented from teasing you further by a member of the cabin crew announcing it was almost time to take off. Everyone automatically begins to move toward very particular seats and you are left stand awkwardly in the centre of the plane. Great. But, before you had enough time to panic, Chris motions toward an empty seat next to him. There aren’t many seats on this plane, as is the case with private jets, but each of the four loungers in the main compartment positioned like corners of a square having two seatbelts although the guys all seem to take up almost all the room. Nevertheless, you manage to fit comfortably, if not tightly, next to Chris, although find yourself mystified by how the seatbelt works. Chris, seeing your struggle, chuckles then reaches over you to clip your seatbelt together. Your pulse is so elevated you are concerned that your heart won't last much longer and you curse that Jonny is sat opposite you and is giggling at your plight as Chris struggles slightly with the fastener and your face is almost buried into his neck.

"mm... got it!" Chris says victoriously and springs back to a sitting position. The plane starts to move then. You're shaking slightly and Jonny is trying his very hardest not to burst out laughing. Will looks over and noticing your expression, furrows his eyebrows slightly. Chris obviously sees this and also turns to look at you. Misunderstanding your shaking for fear of flight, which to be fair wasn't making it any better, he shifts even closer toward you and slips an arm around your shoulders. You glance questioningly at him in response and his smiles down at you, now pressed closely against his side; your head resting just where his arm joins his body and you feel surrounded by him entirely.

"I said I'd look after you" he says, and as the plane begins to take off he squeezes you closer and you silently thank the lord for having the fear of flying.

You sit on your hotel room bed, reflecting on the last days. Firstly the show in Paris had been forced to be delayed by three days due to a series of serious floods and power shortages to the stadium. Luckily the band had planned a week rest between this Paris show and the next planned set in Germany, so it didn't effect anything much but moving around break dates for the band and a couple of changes to the paperwork. You didn't mind at all, as it had just meant you got to spend more time with them all. Four days in and you were now much more relaxed, although Guy's ceaseless teasing still made you into an awkward, blushing wreck, which Guy and Jonny still found very amusing. You had seen Will giving Guy extremely disproving looks, and the drummer had tried to apologise to you on Guys behalf by letting you attempt to learn to play the drums with him, in the rare moments when he was free. Which had led to not much success and you couldn’t help but admire the patience and good nature of Will.

On the first evening you were sitting in your room and Chris had come in to find you deeply engrossed in a complicated origami swan – having completely lost track of time and your invitation to join them all in the sky bar. You had managed to convince the concierge desk to source you some proper paper earlier that day, before spending the rest sitting in on band rehearsal, and had now amassed a little collection of origami birds from the course of the day. He had laughed as first, when you had accidentally knocked over your handbag while trying to get up to greet him and a dozen or so colourful birds spilled out onto the beige carpet. You blushed and made a stupid joke about being "popular with the birds" which earned you an amused look from the singer in between bouts of laughter. You tried to maintain a serious face and informed him that origami was in fact not a laughable hobby and he raised his eyebrows at you, still standing next to your fallen birds. You plopped yourself back onto the comfy baby green sofa and he soon followed suit and sat gently next to you.

Chris had, in fact, been wondering around the hotel looking for you that evening, but he hadn't quite decided why. He was having a hard time controlling his thoughts toward you, and although his mind had told him to leave the moment it saw your face deep in concentration, with the rays of the sunset reflecting gently across your skin from the room’s floor to ceiling window, his body had protested and now he found himself sat excruciatingly close to you and watching your nimble fingers gracefully transform a price of paper. This time, instead of making another little bird you were working on something else. Chris' attention was distracted then as you bit your lip in concentration and he couldn't draw his eyes away. Just as he was thinking he might have to give up his resolve and close the gap between your faces right then and there, you brandished a paper aeroplane proudly in his face, laughing slightly.

"Um…Jonny said you wanted your very own plane." you explain. "I took the liberty..." Chris looked at you amusedly.

"Does that mean you're the captain?" He asked softly, forgetting his earlier decision to stop getting so close to you and loosely placing his arm on the back edge of the sofa, millimetres from your body.

You try to restrain your blush at his closeness but Chris noticed and enjoyed it more than he should have.

"Haha... you better hope not." you tell him mock seriousness plastered on your face.

"If I'm in charge it won't be plane sailing"

This achieved it's goal of breaking the somewhat intense tension that had managed to build and Chris seems stuck between looking disgusted at the quality of your pun and laughing at the straight face you are struggling to maintain.

After he managed to finish laughing you sat together for a while watching the rain fall onto the window in the moonlight in comfortable silence. Then suddenly Chris piped up.

"I'm sorry about us all being so... busy with boring stuff for the next few days." And he did sound genuinely sorry. "The other fells think I've organised all this practice and media as some sort of plan of keeping you away from them." You snorted slightly in response and looked disbelievingly at him.

"Hmm - yeah, I bet they do." you laughed sarcasm dripping from your words. Oh, you don't know the half of it, Chris thought to himself. "Plus, all the stuff I got to tag along with today was fun." You continued. If Chris was honest with himself, you were a huge distraction in the poorly set up rehearsal room; purely for the reason he felt the need to look at you all the time and your slightest movement, gentlest sigh, derailed his entire train of thought. After rehearsal that particular day he had been confronted by Will, who told him to snap out of whatever had got into him in not so many words. It was then he decided he was getting inappropriately invested in you, a girl 10 years his junior who he'd almost got killed by a knife-wielding maniac, and had told himself to back off. This resolve did not seem to be lasting.

“Teach me” He blurted.

“To make a paper plane?” You reply, cocking an eyebrow.

“To make birds.” He said. Your brow has furrowed slightly but you pulled out two bright sheets of paper and placed one in his hands, trying to ignore it when your fingers brushed together.

“Here, now copy what I do.”

You made the first few folds and watch as he messily copies your delicate work.

“Not…quite right.” You said delicately. “It’s more of a…ah” He’s making it worse. “Here. I’ll show you.” You leant over him and moved the hand that was holding one of the corners of the piece to the right place. You moved your hands around his to help with the next fold but soon Chris got the hang and you let him finish it himself. It wasn’t quite as perfect as the rest of them but Chris didn’t seem to mind and grinned at the yellow bird sitting in his lap. You laughed at the childish joy in his expression and at that moment the door to the room burst open and Guy’s head had stuck in.

“There you are!” He looked annoyed but softened as he turned to you. “We’re all up in the skybar if you still want to come.” He paused, faux-sighed and looked at Chris. “I guess you can come too.”

You snap back to the present day. While reminiscing, you realise you’ve done it again and not wanting to miss your evening source of entertainment you prise yourself off the comfy bed and out of the door, clicking it shut behind you. The corridor is clean and unremarkable. The walls are the colour of faded cotton and meet the swirling expanses of grey marble floor at a rich mahogany skirting. You follow the path you’ve taken these last 4 nights and let your feet carry you automatically toward the end of the corridor and then into the doors of a lift that almost blinds you with its degree of reflectiveness. There’s not a single fingerprint blemishing the polished surfaces, metal or glass. Not a smudge or a speck out of place. This still unsettles you. The sheer perfection of it all. Not just the hotel, but the situation you had found yourself in. You reach out to push one of the silver and pearl buttons, your eyes locating the right number and your fingers reaching it. You activate it and withdraw your hand. As the unwavering light pours down from the ceiling you can see the mark your fingerprint left and you feel as if you are entirely out of place. You have no more time for such anxious ruminations as the lift shoots upward and the doors slide open almost silently as you reach the top floor. You’re out of lift fast, the bright, white light still burnt into your retinas.

The lift opens almost directly into the sky bar. There is a short expanse of corridor in front of you, though it is wide and well connected into the main body, with the right wall consisting entirely of a large, tropical fish tank. A small podium stands at the point where the stretch of corridor and the main room connect and it is flanked, as always, by two intense looking men – complete with indoor shades and black suits. It’s almost comical, but their appearance gives you cause to remember a person you’d rather forget. How his breath felt against your neck. The look in his eyes as he places the blade across your face. Your fingers are absent-mindedly drawn toward the still-healing scar on your face, running over the bump on your skin.

You hear loud, familiar laughter ahead and continue walking. Nobody stops you as you cross the threshold into the bar. They’d seen you with the band and knew better than to ask questions. You are marvelled, yet again, by the view from the slightly outward sloping glass wall. This room is largely glass and split into two levels, though the upper stops just short of the gargantuan window. The whole place is pretty quiet tonight but you know that upstairs it is even quieter. And harder to get into. There is a spiral staircase made of shiny, black metal placed understatedly on the far-right side of the room, not too close to the bar to be a nuisance and not too close to the window to spoil the view. The wall next to it is the colour of a rich, red wine and has the unusual texture of velvet, contrasting with the black granite slabs that make up the floor. Your nerves rise as you realise you’ve never done this bit alone. At this point you’ve always had someone else with you, you’d always run into them on the way or down here in the lower bar. You must be really late today. There’s a man with a leather-bound notepad blocking the entrance to the staircase. His hair is impeccably styled, to the extent it seems plastic, and his charcoal black suit and royal purple tie are not even vaguely out of place. You clench your jaw to maintain your nerve as you approach him. He smiles at you but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“ ’ow may I help you?” Just like his suit, his voice is rich and perfectly inflected. He doesn’t stumble over his words or hesitate before he speaks, it just flows from him; naturally. You envied him that.

“I…I’m meeting my friends.” Could you call them friends? You didn’t know what else to say. ‘I’m meeting my adored musical idols’ wouldn’t have stood a good chance of getting you in.

“Name?” He says in the exact same tone, un-phased.

“Theirs or mine?” You ask and he raises his eyebrows at you – a slip in his perfect mask.

“Yours.”

Oh.

“um...Y/N.” You reply. “Y/N Reid.” A tense moment of silence follows as he flips the pages, his face returned to that expressionless mask.

“I’m going to have to ask which booking you are with, I can’t seem to find you.” He doesn’t even look up from the notebook but you nervously look around, feeling as if everyone sitting on the nearby bar stools is turning to look at you. Of course, they aren’t. They are too busy minding their own business to worry about what you are doing. You make a guess at who’s name it would be under.

“Should be under Champion, Will.” You try to muster authority but your voice doesn’t carry it off. The man is looking again and the inside of your cheek is raw from biting.

“Ah! Found you.” The smile is back and you relax a little bit as he moves aside.

You ascend the stairs. Only two of the secluded booths are in use as far as you could tell but you follow the sounds of Will and Guy’s voice to lead you. It’s darker up here. The ceiling lights are low, and the floor is carpeted rather than cold granite. The lamps set into the backs of the circular, high-backed booths give it a warmer feel and you are not surprised to find that the boys have chosen one of the few that open onto the glass wall and the fascinating view of the city below. As you circle the wall of the booth to get to the front you tune into the conversation.

“But how much? In kilos?” Guy sounds insistent.

“Why do you care so much?” Will’s laughing at him. Guy begins a reply but silences as you slip around the corner and smile at them both. “Y/N!” Will grins at you and scoots around the plush velvet circle so that you have room to sit which you hastily take advantage of. Guy is still staring at Will.

“Come on Will. Why won’t you tell me?” Will looks at you and rolls his eyes.

“Because it doesn’t matter.” He replies, eyes raised to the ceiling then back at you. “Do you want anything Laure-“

“Stop avoiding the question!” The lilt of banter in Guy’s tone isn’t wavering but he’s raised his voice slightly. “I think you won’t tell me because you’re ashamed. Because its barely anything.” You’re confused but the expressions of the pair have melted away your lingering anxiety with laughter. Will looks exasperated and Guy’s eyes are widened in challenge.

“Hmph.” Will replies. “I’d definitely surprise you.” It’s at this moment you hear footsteps approaching and Jonny is pushing Guy along the bench so he can sit down, taking hold of a drink that must be his in one hand.

“What did I miss?” He asks as he sees Guy and Will still engaged in a one-sided stare-off. You smile at him in delighted bewilderment.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

You and Jonny both laugh and look to see that Guy is struggling to keep a straight face. Your attention eventually shifts to the view as you still find it staggering, even after a fair few nights of gawking at it. Will is happy to have a change of subject.

“Enjoying staring at rain and a few flashing lights again?” He says with a wink. A joke comes to mind that you cannot resist.

“Nah, just checking for the police.”

“And …why would you be doing that?” Guy sounds confused but you spot a smirk on Jonny’s face. He can always tell when you’re setting one up.

“I took a shit on the street last time I was in Paris.” Will chokes a little on the drink he was attempting to sip. “The feds are after me…I’m an accused merde horreur.” A moment of silence while everyone is digesting it and you almost regret opening your mouth. Will is the first to laugh followed by Jonny, though their expressions are more of pain than of humour. Guy still looks confused, and this makes Jonny laugh even more. A little while after you all have recovered Chris pops his head up from behind the back of the booth. You wonder how he does it. You know he’s tall but he must be on the very tip of his toes. This thought makes you giggle which you are glad no one seems to notice as Chris makes them all jump by yelling.

“Drink, anyone!?” He looks at you and notices you are without. “tsk, I can’t even trust you to properly look after-” He interrupts himself. “Did you even offer her a drink?” He once again, doesn’t leave room for reply and his head promptly disappears with a faint shout of. “I’ll be right back.” Everyone looks bemused, except Guy who is frowning slightly, as if reminded of something. Chris soon does return and as he approaches you take in his full appearance. He’s wearing a blue jumper with an expanding pattern of white flowers flowing from his left-hand side. His trousers are black and straight-cut but with a certain fitted element that accentuates his body. His hair is slightly ruffled, almost like he just got up from a nap and you must make a conscious effort not to gawk at him like you had done the other mesmerising view. You all move up for him to sit down and he places one drink in front of you and one in front of himself, both flute-like glasses that are almost violently sparkling. He smiles at you.

“Tell me if you like it first.” You take a sip and the delicate, fresh taste takes you by surprise.

A loud “mmm!” escapes your lips without notice and the band laugh, causing you to blush and them to laugh more. Chris has kept his composure.

“That’s a Cuvée R. Lalou 2009 reserve.” He says and Jonny whistles. Chris looks disapprovingly at him. “It’s to make up for your rudeness at letting a lady go without a drink.” A look passes between him and Guy then that you don’t quite catch. You pretend to understand the name of the Champagne so as not to look a fool and nod appreciatively, taking another sip.

“Oh.” Will begins, nursing his drink. “You know we were talking earlier about the stadium?” You’re not sure who his question is aimed at but everyone nods. “Well I think the forecast is good enough that they’re expecting us to be able to play tomorrow.” You sip your champagne. Conflicting emotions arise inside you.

“Well, finally!” Jonny exclaims. Chris is frowning, however.

“Can we not talk work Will, for once.” He says and you see Will’s jaw tighten slightly at the comment, though he raises his hands apologetically.

“So, what do you want to talk about?” He asks. Guy’s eyes glint from across the table.

“Let’s play truth or dare.” His suggestion is met with good-natured groans from the rest of the band as they chimed in.

“Guy we’re not 16”

“I’m not drunk enough for this…”

Will just sighs.

“Fine.” At this, Jonny rolls his eyes and nods.

“I guess if Will is in, I am.” Guy smirks and waves a hand at one of the passing wait-staff.

“One double of fireball whiskey.” He sends them away and turns back. Everyone looks confused but Guy sighs as if it was obvious. “For the forfeit, obviously.” He turns to Will. “Truth, or dare.” Will rolls his eyes again.

“Are we really…? Oh Fine. Truth.” You hear a soft

“Wimp” hidden in a faux cough from Jonny but Will doesn’t respond with anything more than a withering glare. Guys eyes light up.

“How much, in kilos, can you deadlift?” Will looks Guy dead in the eye, reaches his hand forward and downs the whiskey shot without even a flinch. Guy’s jaw clenches and Jonny and Chris laugh while you just smile, confused. Chris leans toward you to explain and you try to keep your mind off the feeling of his breath on your ear.

“Guy’s being going on about this for weeks. Will just won’t tell him, no matter what.” The conversation from earlier presents itself in your head and you join the laughter. Guy looks slightly embarrassed, red tinging his cheeks. He works to rectify this by loudly asking you,

“Y/N, truth or dare?” Oh no. You couldn’t say dare. You didn’t know what in the hell they’d have you do and the thought of it turns your stomach slightly. You guess there’s nothing much you have to hide, so truth couldn’t be that bad. Could it?

“Truth.” You answer and a corner of Guy’s mouth upturns. Oh no.

“Worst date you’ve ever been on.” You laugh sheepishly.

“About three months ago.” You stop but everyone looks expectant. Jonny grins.

“Go on, spill the deets.”

“Well… This guy from my Tuesday class asked me out for dinner. I got excited and dressed up but after an hour of walking, we ended up in subway.” You take a breath. “He hadn’t showered in about a month, insisted on paying but also insisted I had the salad – then ordered a double meat deluxe foot long for himself.” You shudder at the memory. “He kept dripping sauce all over his face and talking with his mouthful about how he was lucky he was a man because he didn’t have to watch his weight.” Everyone is grimacing but you haven’t finished. “Then, I had to lend him money to get the bus home because he’d spent it all on a footlong and he tried to grope me in the bus station.” You let it sink in. “There was no second date.” Guy raises his eyebrows.

“I assume your current boyfriend didn’t woo you with a footlong.” You laugh, half at the joke and half to cover the sadness of your next statement.

“I…um…don’t have one.” You attempt to draw attention away from this. “Who’s turn is it next?” Guy looks as if he’s about to say something else but Chris interrupts before he gets the chance.

“Dare!” Guy’s attention is back at this.

“Flip off the next photographer you see.”

“And get our tour cancelled? Don’t be stupid, Guy.” Guy sighs, irritated.

“Fine, Fine.” He takes a moment to think. “Your Ex, Jenifer.” Chris narrows his eyes. “Text her… text her ‘I love you more than the stars love the sky.’” He smirks at Jonny “Convincingly wet.” Chris purses his lips, but wanting to keep the atmosphere light-hearted, ignored the comment from the bassist and gets out his phone, sending the text.

“Done. Easy.” Next, it’s Jonny. Will scoffs as he asks for a truth. You get in before Guy does.

“Worst part about tour.” It’s not even a hard one for Jonny.

“I can’t have any pets because I’m never home!” He sighs, mournfully. “I’d love to adopt a kitten, but I’m always off gallivanting around so there’d be no one to look after it.” He frowns in consideration. “Though it might scratch my guitars. So maybe it’s for the best.” Chris pipes up.

“I got a text back!” Everyone cranes toward him to see what it is. You see it first and burst out laughing, while Chris blushes.

“What is it?” Jonny asks.

“She… she asked him if he was sending her draft song lyrics by accident again.” You laugh a bit more and Chris feels the need to defend himself.

“Sometimes its quicker than to open notepad, okay!” And when this doesn’t stop everyone smirking at him. “I’ve got big hands, it’s too easy to send a draft text!”

The game continues until quite late and Chris walks you back to your room, telling you he’ll see you tomorrow and smiling warmly before striding to his own room. Head resting on the silken sheet, you have no trouble getting to sleep.

You wake up the next day to a soft knock on your door. Light is streaming through the curtains of your room and the reality of where you are floods back to you in a happy daze.

You hear the knock again. Oh, yeah you think and blearily make your way over to open it, expecting Matt (‘Roadie 42’s’ revealed identity) to be standing there, ready to make a sarcastic remark about your habit of sleeping in and hurry you somewhere – as usual . Instead, on the other side is Chris, fully dressed already (you say already, it's at least 9:30, you can’t expect everyone to be a lazy as you). You suddenly feel self-conscious, having just got out of bed and wearing only pyjamas. You try to hide behind the door without making it too obvious - the blush on your face must be furious because Chris laughs warmly.

"Morning sleepy head." He gives you a heart melting grin. "Wondered if you wanted to do something interesting with the day today? Shopping maybe?" How could you refuse him?

"Sure! I'll be out in a minute?" Chris nods enthusiastically.

"Sure. I'll be...um… Here." He makes a noncommittal gesture to the hallway causing you to you giggle awkwardly.

"Okay." You smile and before the silence and his smile get too much you slam the door, running off to get changed.

You didn't manage to bring much with you in the way of clothes, you had barely anything clean when you had made a quick dash into your flat, so you pull on your nicest t-shirt & a pair of slightly upmarket jeans your mum had got you for your birthday last year. Luckily, they still fit and you smooth your hair slightly in the mirror, looking yourself up and down. Nothing special, but it was amicable enough to you.

Before you open the door you take a deep breath and will yourself to calm down. He’s just a normal guy, you try to tell yourself, desperately praying that you won’t do anything weird.

Half an hour later you're on Champs Élysées avenue. You can't take it all in. Your easy conversation with Chris is no different here and you walk slowly down the street, basking in the sunshine, chatting about all sort of things; from sports to long winded anecdotes. Suddenly, Chris stops outside a department store you recognise as LE66 Paris, you’ve heard of people talking about it before. You look over at Chris, who is staring into the window. Slowly he turns and grins at you,

"Have you got anything to wear tonight?" He asks. You don't want to admit that you are wearing what you were going to wear tonight.

"Erm... Yeah..." The look on Chris's face says you're not fooling him. He looks back to the shop window to a short sleeved, sophisticated black dress. He points at it even though he knows you can see which one he means.

"I think you'd look great in that." Without a second’s hesitation Chris grabs your hand, interlacing your fingers and swiftly leads you inside. You try to contain your blush, thinking you must look like a deer stuck in headlights as a shop assistant saunters over, euro signs in her eyes.

"'Ow can I 'elp you sir? madame?" She smiles sweetly, you can see she's good at what she does. Chris points to the dress in the window,

"Y/N here is very keen to try on that dress." His tone is shifted, its almost as if he’s issuing a command as much as responding to a polite question – but you pay little heed to it with his hand still clasping yours. When the woman sees the dress in question she plasters on the smile ten times thicker.

"Of course, sir. This way, Madame." She gestures to the changing room and you both follow. Once the assistant has retrieved the dress in your size you close the curtain. Taking it in your hands. You are still a bit bewildered that Chris took your hand but you hastily reassure yourself that it meant nothing, if only to calm your pulse than anything else. You hurriedly pull off your clothes, not wanting to keep him waiting. When you're dressed, you glance quickly in the mirror and can’t make up your mind over it. You step outside the dressing room, feeling suddenly horribly self-conscious and staring at the floor. You're met with silence and start to wonder if Chris is even there. You hesitantly look up to see him leaning against the opposite wall. His shocking blue eyes are looking deeply into yours and you blush. You can't read his stoic expression. He doesn't like it.

"I don't think it suits--" before you can finish your sentence he's taken two strides towards you and your face has been taken gently into his hands. You can't see anything but his eyes and you get that sensation of drowning in them all over again.

He closes his eyes and puts his forehead against yours. Breathing slowly and deeply.

"I… think... It does..." He says so quietly you barely hear him. You stand there waiting for him to open his eyes, release you, anything.

"Ahem."

Chris suddenly pulls away and you see the assistant looking disapprovingly at you both. "Iz everything okay?" There's a silence where Chris decides what to do. Slowly, he clears his throat.

"We'll take the dress."

You still haven’t recovered, let alone moved a single muscle. Chris is staring and you can't do anything but stand there for a moment, eyes wide, despite the presence of the disgruntled employee. What the hell just happened?

You quickly change then, any excuse to take a moment away from both of their stares. When you emerge, Chris places his hand on your back to direct you in the path of the woman who is trying, desperately to move you closer toward the one of the checkout stalls. You’re still not entirely sure what’s going on, you think you left some of your cognitive function in that dressing room.

When you arrive, Chris gets out his wallet to pay. You open your mouth to protest but your thoughts are immediately stopped in their tracks as your mind instead notices Chris' mischievous eyes as he turns and winks at you, and you quite suddenly lose the ability to speak. He soon presses a fancy black bag into your hands as he guides you back toward the enterance. You desperately try to say something but all your mind is occupied with Chris, it’s almost insufferable. He looks down at you and you blink fast to try and look less weird.

Realising what he just had done and how much money he had spent, you frown and he notices, mock-offended.

"Not even a thank you?" he’s teasing you and you open and close your mouth like a goldfish, trying and failing to form a good comeback. The memory of his forehead against yours and his slow laboured breathing surfaces in your head and you have an idea. You gently raise yourself onto your tip toes, looking him dead in the eyes, so close that you can hear his breathing again. He looks at you curiously and your mind screams, freaking out, but you've dug this far down, in for a penny in for a pound; so you lean forward and gently place a soft kiss on each of the singer's cheeks.

"I owe you a present now, and I'm calling ice cream" You declare as you fall back down onto the flats of your feet. Chris is smiling as you drag him by the hand out of the shop, shocked at your own confidence.

Soon you find yourself at the front of the queue for a van, and you automatically order your favourite - mint chocolate chip. You glance at Chris and instead of looking at the menu his eyes are transfixed on your face. Seeing you looking back at him his gaze snaps back into an embarrassed smile and he tells the man working in the ice cream van something you don’t understand. You did speak basic French from old holidays and your academic career, but Chris seemed to speak the language effortlessly. The man in the van holds out the two identical cones to you and you take them, giving one immediately to Chris. You get out your purse to pay, not even considering that you didn't have any Euros, but the man shakes his head furiously

" Non Non, Gratuit, pour Chris Martin ou coldplay et sa belle petite amie" he insists smiling at the two of you and waving you away. You don't understand the man but get the general gist. Chris blushes and smiles at him, saying something else that you don't understand which makes the man give you a knowing smile before replying to Chris. Chris then leads you away, colour still on his cheeks. You consider asking him what the man said but decided against it. Instead you ask Chris where you are going.

"You'll see" he says secretively and smiles at you.

A few minutes later you arrive at a small park, nestled in between leafy sidewalks and tall beautiful buildings with an entrance almost covered entirely by the low hanging branches of the willow trees. Your eyes widen as you walk inside to discover a small pond surrounded by freshly cut grass and tall reeds. Chris looks down at you, he’s smiling but he looks hesitant, questioning, and you smile right back at him. Suddenly, you feel something dripping onto your hand and yelp slightly before seeing your ice cream had begun to melt. Chris chuckles at your shock and suggests you find somewhere to sit so you can manage to eat them before the sun gets the better of them. You giggle in agreement, slightly embarrassed over the noise that had managed to escape from your mouth. I'm making a real fool of myself, you think, just after I thought it was going well. You and Chris finally settle in a spot on a raised patch of bank, legs dangling close to the water, and you go to town on your ice cream as soon as you've put the shopping bag safely down. You almost forget the handsome singer sat mere centimetres away as you engross yourself in attempting to control the quickly melting dessert. It's only when you hear a low chuckle that you turn your head and immediately blush a scarlet red as you identify your faux pas. You hate to imagine how it looked, you desperately trying to stop ice cream from dripping onto your hand. Chris has an odd expression on his face and you feel another rush of embarrassment. You desperately try to wipe the ice cream off your face thinking how stupid you must seem, how childish. Unexpectedly, Chris reaches a hand toward your face, he’s moving his head too – almost as if he’s going to kiss you. You’re so taken aback that this action causes you to begin to slip sideways off the bank, having been dangerously close to the edge anyway. Luckily for you however, Chris manages to grab you and hold you up with his surprisingly strong arms. However, in order to rescue you from a damp fate you end up pretty much sat sideways across his lap, his arms still wrapped around your torso.

“I… don’t think a lake dip is a very efficient way to get ice cream off your face” he laughs softly. Then, noticing your wide eyes and red face he gently moves you to be sat next to him – though his arm is resting just behind his back and you are still dizzyingly close.

“You’d be surprised.” You reply, trying to ignore his proximity and the lingering warmth of his arms. “Well, at least I get to finish my ice cream in dry clothes.” He looks at you, seemingly restraining a smile and you look across the lake for a second, the silence hanging heavy. “I dropped my ice-cream in the lake, didn’t I?”

“Yep.”

“You did too, didn’t you?”

“Yep.”

The rest of the morning passes fast, lunch even faster and as hard as you tried to make the day last, you were soon back at the hotel. You definitely feel as if a dynamic has shifted between you two, but its beyond your explanation. Chris leads you into the hotel, your arm in his and as you reach the elevator he turns and cups the left side of you face with one of his hands. You lean into his touch instinctively, despite its unfamiliarity.

"I'm gonna go and catch up with the guys. You should have a nap before the show tonight" when he speaks his voice is soft. You nod compliantly - you are after all, exhausted. "I'll come & get you about an hour before we’re leaving. You can get ready and we can all head down." You just nod again, dumbly.

He presses the button on the elevator for you and it opens. Before he turns away he kisses you on the nose and you don’t have enough brainpower to react as he pushes you toward the lift, but he's not looking at you when the doors close.

Chris POV

Chris can't help himself. As Y/N nods blearily (clearly exhausted) he leans down to kiss her on the nose, she's just too cute not to. He’s surprised at himself but can’t doubt that he’s wanted to do more than that for most of the day. It's then that he hears a soft, yet assertive 'ahem' from behind him.He turns to see Will, leaning on a pillar with his arms folded. His expression is unreadable but his nostrils are flared; Chris knows what that means. He doesn't look around to see the doors close.

Will's glare is obviously disapproving and Chris feels like a school boy caught kissing by the bike sheds by his headmaster. Well. Not too far off an analogy.

"Hey Will." He smiles, hand moving to the back of his neck awkwardly.

"Chris." His expression isn't changing as he acknowledges the greeting. There's an awkward silence where Will keeps looking at Chris. Chris can feel his face heat up. He couldn't really defend himself. "What was that?"

"What was what?" Chris knows playing dumb is not a good idea, but he can't help it.

"Don't play dumb, Chris." Oh shit.

"Erm..."

"Follow me." Will leads him out of the reception area and around the corner into an empty conference room.

"What're you doing?" Chris can't tell how close Will is to snapping and it's scaring the crap out of him.

"Well I... Er..."

"Don’t give me this shit Chris. What is going on?"

Here we go.

Chris instinctively brings his hands up to try and calm the situation but to no real avail. Expressions of anger were exceptionally rare from Will and it leaves him slightly bewildered

"Woah Will, just tell me what's wrong" he says defensively, confused at the intensity of his anger.

"You want a list Chris?" He asks sharply, leaving no gap for Chris to respond. "Fine, I'll give you a list. Just today, you have not turned up for sound check and left us waiting for you for hours, completely ignored all the messages we've been sending you all day-"

Chris makes the mistake of interrupting,

"We? Who's we?" He says, accusations rife in his tone. Wills voice barely changes but his face gives away how far over the line Chris has just stepped.

"Well, I guess you wouldn't know, would you Chris?

Sometimes I think you forget you're in a band with three other people and not just some sort of hot-shot tabloid star free to do whatever he wants." Chris' eyes darken with anger but Will isn't finished yet.

"Oh, but wait that’s not it for today’s list Chris. There's more." Will looks Chris up and down."What do you think you’re doing? I thought you - I thought we - were better than this. All of us." Will gives Chris a moment to speak but Chris just looks angry and confused so the drummer decides to make it crystal clear.

"If you think I'm going to let you toy with that poor girl any longer, you've got another think coming." At this comment, Will sees the emotion in Chris' eyes turn to fury and the singer advances toward him.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about." Will isn't discouraged and doesn't attempt to calm the situation in the slightest.

"I just about put up with Guy because he didn't cross the line enough for me to speak up. But you? I saw the way she looked at you Chris. What's the plan? Eh? Lure her into your bed and then conveniently ship her home when you’re done? It's disgusting. You're being disgusting. I've put up with you treating your own band as disposable people that you can come and go from as you please for this whole tour, but Y/N? There's no way in hell she'd get over you pissing off after you're tired with her." Will glares Chris down. "I can't stop you but I'm not going to just watch this happen. Not to her." He had become very fond of you in the time you had spent together and the thought of Chris taking advantage of your kind yet undeniably naïve personality made his blood boil. Chris, on the other hand, only sees a member of his band, trying to guilt him away from you (which he thought he was doing a good enough job of himself) and by precedent, trying to control him. He doesn't take it well.

"You really have that low expectations of me? After all these years!? You really think that I-.... that Y/N... Nothings fucking happened Will." He takes a deep breath, trying to keep it together, and this moment of silence allows for Will to speak again, puuling a photo from his pocket.

“I got a phone call about an hour ago. You got snapped by some hot-shot Parisian press hack. Nothing too compromising but…" Chris' intake of breath is sharp as he sees the shot of you, sat across his lap with his arms wrapped around you and he curses under his breath.

"Yeah. Problematic." Will continues. He pauses, as if letting it sink in before continuing. "Luckily for you, we had some contacts, turned in some favours and managed to block the story they wanted to run. This time." The sag of relief in Chris' shoulders is visible. "I hope you realise that if a story like that got out, you'd ruin Lauren's life. With the media attention you've been getting recently, she'd most probably be hounded the moment she touched back on English soil. People would assume things, Chris and that could earn her and us, a reputation no one could live down." He sounds calmer now but Chris knows he’s not. “Make sure nothing else happens. Make sure she goes home tomorrow.” With that, he departs, leaving Chris drowning in a sea of conflicting emotions.

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