#living again and being able to physically. tangibly see your efforts of keeping your little brother alive but you dont remember them.

[ever-after-aaa]

This prompt........ i had some thoughts. One of my favs

Tim Drake and Jason Todd are both halfas. They just don’t know it for a while.

HI BONES I JUST WOKE UP FROM THIS DREAM AND HAD TO SHARE.

There’s something recogonized between them, when Robin meets Red Hood in Titan’s Tower. But it’s a mystery to both of them what - especially Jason. There’s no reason for the new Robin to reek of the Dead - not like him. 

The truth comes out a few years later, in hushed whispers of a desperate Tim Drake - something is happening that reminds him of something terrible: after the first week of truly being in the Robin suit, he has a gap in his memory of weeks. Okay a couple months, accurately.

He’s hidden this well - the gap is after he’d taken a fairly serious injury, something that nevertheless had a relatively low recovery time. So Batman and Nightwing never noticed that it caused him to, technically, die. And like hell Tim would tell them that, especially then.

The thing is that few missing months.

Tim has put together what happened in those months; he’d always kept copious notes for himself. And Bruce and Dick shouldn’t be bothered if he has a bit of amnesia.

After he “died” he was Robin - notes on his computer tell him what he did, notes in the Batcomputer fill him in on the cases. But the notes never refer to himself as Tim. And the tone and methods for what he did - well, they're like Tim’s. Tim can follow all the logic in them. They just seem… off somehow. 

But there’s no memory left to him, between that moment when his heart stopped in the Robin suit to a moment, months later, of waking up in the Medbay after Dick rescued him from the Drake household - targeted by a magic user with questionable morals who claims he was dead and wrong. 

So he was checked out by Constantine or Zatanna or someone and they confirmed that no, that’s not the case and that’s definitely Tim in the body.

Once they get there.

The thing is, the more Tim looked into it, the less he thinks that rogue magician was actually mistaken. He’s a little faster now, a little stronger. Sometimes it’s like he’s invisible, or hanging just a little too long in the air on the grapple - but in the next moment, that’s gone, and he’s just Tim again. Human Tim.

So a couple years later when Jason shows up, and there’s that Recognition - Dead to Dead - that he gets from no one else… the memories start filtering in. Now Tim has the memories of being - well - a ghost, in the Ghost Zone, desperately searching for a way back, a way home, filtering in.

Now for a couple years after that beatdown in Titan’s Tower - a beatdown that should have left him truly dead, or healing for months longer - but his recovery time has always been faster since those missing months, especially in the minutes and hours right after the injuries, where they’re easier to hide a bit. Now there’s a threat to all the ghosts in Gotham, and Jason and Tim wind up in deep.

Hunted by the Guys in White.

And Jason is angry because maybe he’s a weird undead reanimation of a corpse, but Tim sure isn’t and these bastards aren't touching his little brother. And Tim is all like “So there’s this thing that happened.” and he’s (falsely) convinced that if Jason just left him Jason would be okay and the GIW would stop hunting them.

And Jason is gobsmacked - and smacked with memories. Memories he didn’t… really have before, not through the Lazarus haze. Not really. Memories of being Tim.

And then the Dates slot together in his head and oh shit oh shit oh shit.

The day Tim died and something possessed him? Was the day Jason crawled out of his grave and was found, catatonic, on the streets.

And the day Tim regained control of his body.

Was the day Jason was shoved into the Lazarus Pit.

Fuck. He hurt his baby brother more than he ever realized. Fuck.

(They eventually figure out, maybe with a bit of help after they rescue some more experienced ghosts from the assholes in white, that Tim… really would have died fully that day, had Jason’s ghost not possessed his body, bringing it back to life, heart beating and lungs breathing. And he kept it breathing until Tim was called back to it. And the effort Jason put into that - breathing and beating and keeping that living spark alive - was the jump Jason’s own body needed to truly wake up from his grave.)

Yeah so anyway they both say to the GIW: no you don’t not MY fucking BROTHER you don’t. And so do all the other Bats. 

And the GIW is fucked.

[kynaswhereabouts]

Renovations and preservations of ancestral home into a cultural hub (ft. Savage Mind Bookshop and Tugawe Cove Cafe 2.0)

As ancestral homes slowly diminish its traces in the city of Naga along with time’s passing and modernization flourishing, little did we know that one ancestral home located at Peninsula street of Naga City would become a cultural hub that will bring life again to this little old home. 

I have blogged about this house especially the two businesses settling a space here several times, but there are always something new to write about it. I am still amazed with the fact of the efforts made to preserve the house. For one thing, this house has undergone several renovations and this time, a new business opened: Tugawe Cove Cafe. 

TUGAWE COVE CAFE

Tugawe Cove Cafe was once located at the ground floor of Robinsons Place Naga before they moved here in this ancestral home. Before they moved this little space here, this was once the Peninsvla Cafe and Resto which I also blogged sometime in 2019. 

With Tugawe Cove Cafe's collaboration with Savage Minds Book Shop which is situated downstairs, it became more lively now as it also became the place where books published and authored by local writers as well as artworks by local artists can be marketed and promoted as they are displayed on every shelf and corner of the cafe. Anyway, it is nice to see the renovations made and how this house was preserved and became the newest trending hangout in the city of Naga. There is always a space for history, culture, art and literature appreciation here. 

The food is also delicious. With it’s homey and relaxing ambiance, this is also an ideal space to be inspired to work. 

SAVAGE MIND: ARTS, BOOKS, CINEMA

I noticed that a lot of things also changed since I last went here. The set up, the amount of books available, the vintage stuff displayed, then remembering the memories of friends I made here during my previous visits and the lecture series I attended here. Since its opening, Savage Minds kept on upgrading its shop to be more than just as an independent bookstore but as a cultural hub that values creative minds, welcomes intellectual conversations and serves as the home of books published by local and independent authors as well as artworks of local artists. Savage Minds created a mark in the city of Naga by proving and reminding us that we have a place where history, culture, arts, films and literature collide to raise awareness and appreciation. Gesamtkunstwerk. 

Every time I would visit bookstores especially independent ones, I would tell myself, "Sana dumating rin ang araw na makita ko rin dito yung mga isinulat kong nobela."Since college after writing three novels then publishing them online through Wattpad, I have dreamed of getting them all published in print too. It is more satisfying having a physical book and feels more real because it is a tangible proof of hard work as well as ideas weaved to inspire and tell a story. But I just realized now that getting your works published and printed is not as easy as I thought it would be when I was younger. Although, those didn't stop me from being a writer or work for it to have them published on print someday. I know it is hard to tie with publishers too. Self publishing also needs money which I still cannot afford as of the moment. Believe me, if I have sufficient funds, I was able to print something already. I was only able to invest in an editor for the meantime. I did the book cover which still needs to be modified for printing. There are a lot of things to be done and I am not there yet. It is frustrating to have slow progress. This year, I think that the only progress I had was becoming a registered author at NBDB and low key launched my ebooks on Amazon, Kindle Store and Beebly (for 2022). I will start there. Maybe if I can collect enough money, I could have a printed copy being sold here too. Until then, I will try my best to keep the dream alive. I feel pressured to achieve so much at this age as a writer because I can see the younger generation achieving in it too. Perhaps my season hasn't come yet some would say but I will never stop fighting to achieve my dream. Sana sa 2022, published author na tayo. Published author cutie.

Ps. I didn't see Innova, the cat-in-residence. I was hoping I would. Maybe on my next visit?

[vdlest]

Definition of Heaven

Characters:

Husband!Bucky Barnes x Wife!Reader

Summary:

You found out you were pregnant with Bucky's baby when the blip took place. You keep the baby and raised him by yourself. You have always believed that Bucky will come back to you and your son, Gabriel. Five years later, the Avengers won, Bucky came home to you and Gabriel.

Warning:

Fluff

For the past 5 years, it has always been just you, your son, Gabriel, and the rest of the Avengers like Nat and Steve. You found out you were pregnant with Bucky's child when the blip took place, and during that time, Bucky was in Wakanda and that's where he vanished in thin air just like everyone else who got snapped out because of the son of a bitch creature, Thanos.

It was Steve who told you that Bucky vanished as well, so you told him about your situation, about your pregnancy. He and Nat suggested that you stay with them in the compound to make sure your safe pregnancy and to help you as well throughout your journey to motherhood, which you happily agreed on. You stayed with them and they helped you a lot, they made your journey easier, however, the thought of Bucky is still in your mind and your heart. You always miss him, and you told yourself you'll always love him.

After nine months of nurturing and sheltering your baby inside you, you finally gave birth to a handsome healthy baby boy. When you saw your baby's blue eyes, you knew he got it from Bucky. You ended up naming him Gabriel, the name of your late grandfather who raised you after your parents died. Gabriel gave light to your darkness, not just to you but to everyone else like Nat and Steve. You did everything to raise him well, a strong and brave one, who's not afraid to do what is right and good. His first crawl, first step, first walk, first word, you witness them all, and you wished Bucky did too.

Five years later, Steve and Nat had a strong belief that they can actually bring everyone back but it's high-risk. With the help of the remaining avengers, Clint, Thor, Bruce, and the shrinking guy, Scott or he calls himself the Ant-man, they were able to retract all the infinity stones in the past, but like what was mentioned, it's high-risk. Nat risked her life to be able to get the soul stone. Losing her broke your heart, she's like a sister to you. But she's not the only avenger who fell, Tony Stark did too when he snapped his fingers to save everyone.

Despite the pain of losing two important people in your life, Bucky came home to you and your son. When he found out about Gabriel, he instantly kneeled in front of your son as he introduces himself as his father. You could still remember how Gabriel answered him, I know, I always see your picture on mom's locket. Then, your Gabriel opened his arms to give Bucky, his dad, a hug of a lifetime. You can't help but feel emotional while watching them meet each other. Bucky may not be able to see him for the past five years, you know, he would make it up to both of you, especially to Gabriel.

•••

The morning breeze embraces your body as you go out on your room's balcony to have your morning coffee. The two boys are still sleeping in the master's bedroom of the house that you and Bucky bought after the blip. Your view is the sun shining above the small village you are living in, just like how the sun shines on the world again after five years of darkness.

After Tony's funeral, everything happened so fast. You, Bucky, and Gabriel reunite as a family, just like everyone else did with theirs. Bucky did everything to make it up to you and Gabriel, he worked hard and you both finally had the means to move into your dream house and here you are now, living in the life you wanted for so long.

"Perfect view, isn't it?"

You turned around and saw Bucky about to join you on the balcony. He's wearing his white shirt and his favorite pajamas.

"Good morning," you greeted him, "I thought you are still asleep with Gabriel inside, I didn't want to wake you up. You two are like snoring machines," you joked.

He chuckled as he makes his way towards where you are standing.

You and Bucky were able to pick up where you left off everything before the blip. You two became inseparable after the blip, both of you are scared of losing one another again. You haven't talked about getting married yet but you are already happy and contented with the life you have right now, it's like you're living in heaven already beside your two angels.

As he comes closer to you, he grabs your mug and placed it on top of a table, afterwards, he put both of your hands around his neck and his hands are on your waist. You two almost look like dancing.

Being five years away from him was like living in hell, you always miss him and there were nights when you'll just cry yourself to sleep. But when Gabriel came into your life, you knew you had to be strong for both of you. You just silently hope that one day, Bucky will find his way home to you. And he did.

He stared at you, a smile on his face, "Did I ever say thank you to you?" he suddenly asked.

You frowned, "Thank you?" you chuckled, "For what?"

"For being the love of my life, for choosing me, for bringing Gabriel to our lives, for living this life with me," he put strands of hair at the back of your ear as he cups your cheeks, "Thank you for being so brave all these years. Thank you for not giving up on me. Thank you for loving me unconditionally," he said while staring at your eyes wistfully.

There he is again. Being sentimental about the time he lost and the time he could've been with you to support you.

He always feels so sorry for not being there for you when you found out that you're having a baby, for not being there when you're experiencing morning sickness, for not being by your side when you are screaming at the top of your lungs as you push Gabriel out of your womb. You understood his regrets but you have always believed that he may not be physically there, he is there with you, he's inside your heart.

"I could've been there for you when you found out that you're pre--"

You put your finger on top of his lips and shushed him, "Stop it, will you?" You removed your finger on his lips, moving your hands on both of his cheeks, "How many times do I have to tell you that you should stop saying those things? Bucky, we are here and you'll never lose us again. We'll never lose each other again," you vowed. "And you don't have to thank me for those reasons you mentioned because I did those things out of love, out of my love for you," you rested your forehead against his chin, "I did those things because I love you."

"And I love you too," he murmured, feeling his kiss on your forehead, "I love you and Gabriel more than my own life."

Bucky being a father to Gabriel is amazing. You could see his eagerness to make it up to him not just by giving him toys or any tangible things, but by giving him the attention, time, and love your son deserves. There were times you'd see him reading books about fatherhood and how to be a good father. You could really see his great effort to get to know fatherhood even more.

"Dad, Mom?"

You and Bucky slightly pulled away from each other as you both hear Gabriel behind the two of you.

"Hey, munchkin," you detach yourself from Bucky, as both of you make your way towards to doorframe where your son is standing in his pajamas. You and Bucky kneeled in front of your son, "Had a good sleep?" you asked him, fixing his messy brown hair.

"Yes, I had a good dream too!" Gabriel excitedly said, switching his eyes between you and Bucky.

Bucky pulled Gabriel in between the two of you, "Can you tell me and your mom about your dream?" he asked.

Gabriel nodded, still smiling from ear to ear, "I dreamed of seeing mommy in a beautiful white gown, and you're wearing a white suit, daddy," he said while excitement is still in his eyes. "I also saw Uncle Steve, Uncle Clint, Uncle Sam, Aunt Wanda, and the rest of your friends!" he added.

You and Bucky exchanged glances when you both heard what Gabriel's dream is about.

"What else did you see?" Bucky asked while his eyes are still looking at you.

"You and Mommy kissed," Gabriel continued then he sighed, "Then Daddy said he will take care of you forever, he will make you happy every single day."

You and Bucky kept on staring at each other while Gabriel is talking about his dream, that you two are getting married in his dream. The two of you haven't talked about getting married just yet, but Bucky already gave you his word and you have faith in him.

Gabriel went inside again to brush his teeth, leaving you and Bucky on the balcony again.

Bucky stood up and helped you next to stand up as well. He held both of your hands once you are both standing in front of each other.

"Our son's growing nonstop," Bucky reflected.

You nodded, "I know," you playfully pouted your lips, "Our baby is growing too fast."

"So what do you say about giving him a little sister or a little brother?" he teased you, then he planted a kiss on the back of your hand, "Or should we plan our wedding first?"

"Are you really sure this is what you want?" you asked him, your smile slowly fading away.

Bucky's brows furrowed, "What do you mean?" he seems puzzled. "What do you mean if I'm sure if this is what I want?" he added.

You took a deep breath, "Bucky, I just want to be sure you really want this whole thing, me as your wife, us as one family. Not that I don't trust you or I don't want you to, but I just want to make sure that I'm not forcing you to do this," you stuttered.

"Y/n, you're confusing me."

"Okay," you sighed, "Bucky, before the blip, we are together, right? It wasn't really our plan to have a baby, but it happened anyway. Gabriel is the biggest blessing for us, I just don't want you to think that you have an obligation to me, to marry me just because you have a baby with me. I want you to marry me for the right reason, not because I have your child." Your hand moved on top of his, "Bucky, I love you. You know that, right? But I don't want to pressure you into enteri--"

"Look, y/n," he said, stopping you from finishing your sentence, "I know this wasn't our original plan, this wasn't I had in my mind five years ago when I thought of us and our future, but I couldn't think of any best way of having a future with you. Before the blip, I kept on asking myself why I had to go through those pain all those years, and when I met you, I finally understood why. Those pain will bring me to you, my lightbringer. Now, I have more reason to let go of my past, I have you and Gabriel now. I have both of you as my family," he walked closer to you and cupped your face, "And don't think that I am marrying you as an obligation or what because it would be my pleasure and my honor to marry an amazing woman. I will marry you, not because you are the mother of my child but because I want you to be my wife, I want to see you every single time I wake up and before I go to sleep. I want to grow old with you and it may sound cliche as it is, it's true. I want to spend my life with you."

His words made your worries disappeared. His words made you believe that he's the guy who would make all your worries and doubts vanish in thin air.

"So I gonna ask you now," he let of your face and he removed his dog tags around his neck, "Will you marry me?"

It was a spontaneous proposal. He doesn't have a ring with him, but all he could offer and give you are his dog tags. It may not be the usual way of proposing to women, but you couldn't think of any best alternative for that one. Anyway, you like uniqueness.

You smiled at him, "Yes, I will marry you, James Buchanan Barnes."

Bucky pulled you towards him and kissed your forehead, "I love you," he said before kissing your lips next.

After he kissed you, he puts on his dog tags around your neck.

"I knew it will look more good on you," he said, staring at his dog tags on your neck.

You chuckled, "I love you, Bucky."

He pulled you towards him for a hug and you knew at that very moment, you have everything you'll ever gonna need in your life.

Having Bucky and your son, Gabriel by your side forever is your definition of heaven.

-v.dl

[idontblushsrry]

Love Language|| Yona of The Dawn

“I wanna be fluent in your love language. Learning your love language.”

A/N: Almost every man in this show is fine asl I won’t lie to yall. Slight spoilers on Zeno’s part if you’ve only watched the anime.

Warnings: none!

Characters: Yona, Hak, Yoon, Ki-ja, Shin-ah, Jae-ha, Zeno

Word Count: 1425

Plot Synopsis: The 5 love languages; physical affection, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving, and quality time, how the Yona of the Dawn characters love you Ft. gender neutral reader 

Yona

Love Language: quality time and gift giving

So if you and Yona are together before she leaves the castle/ during her time at the castle she showers you in gifts

Like if Yona’s spoiled, imagine how spoiled you’re gonna be

She often has her servants go and give you gifts if she couldn’t directly give it to you

They’re so tired but also happy for her because, how sweet

She’d also blow off her duties as the princess to spend time with you

Sure she gets in trouble, but King Il could never truly punish his daughter, especially not when she’s happier spending time with you

After she escapes the castle however, she can’t really get you gifts or lavish you in the way she used to

As a result she puts in double the work in trying to spend as much time with you as possible

She also learns to sew and weave from Yun to try and give you presents

Sweetheart’s trying her best ok

Yona also appreciates this effort from you

She often times feels like a burden to her friends and she can get insecure and feel like she’s bothering you 

But if you pull her aside to give her something you handmade or bought at the market, suddenly all is right in the world and she’s on cloud nine

Hak

Love Language: acts of service (also teasing but what would you call that?)

So anyways, I said what I said and that’s all I need to say about this issue

Jkjkjk but seriously, Hak is such a devoted person that he’d literally do anything you asked of him

Sure he fronts and will tease you but like “Hak honey... why are you making me a plate? I can make my own?”

“Sit down, I’ll bring it to you.”

He’s literally so sweet, always going above and beyond to not just protect you but to make sure all your needs are seen to

You better reciprocate tho

Like sit him down and remind him to slow down, if you protect him, his heart will melt ever so slightly

Also if you can’t fight, that’s fine! But patch his wounds up after a battle and kiss every cut, bro that’s not Hak, that’s a puddle of love.

Yoon

Love Language: acts of service

Ok so Yun is kind of difficult

He has a hard time communicating his needs to you because 1) he’s inexperienced and 2) he’s not really used to asking and receiving things of people

But the one thing he does know how to do and the way he knows how to love best is through acts of service

The world’s dangerous and he knows that he isn’t entirely built for combat nor has he put forth the effort to be a combatant but he swears to protect you until his dying breath

It’s a pretty steep promise from him but he meets the goal everyday

Aside from that, if you’re ever sick or injured, Yun is immediately all over you checking for any signs of anything that could worsen your condition

After he knows you’re in the clear he’s all mad that you got hurt and worried him

As for him, please help him with keeping the camp functioning

It seems like the bar is low but it takes a lot out of him to run camp especially considering all the tasks he has to see to

Sure the others help but they aren’t always there and they aren’t always able to move much less help with chores

That’s why it means so much for him that you help him

He doesn’t even have to say anything, it’s like you just get it and his heart feels so full

Ki-ja

Love Language: words of affirmation and acts of service

If there’s ever a doubt in your mind that Ki-ja doesn’t love you, it won’t be there for long

Whether yall are together or apart, he likes to remind everyone in the vicinity that he does love you and that to him you are the most beautiful person in the world

He’s a somewhat prideful person as well as being very narrow minded, to him, it’s the most obvious thing in the world that his s/o is the best, should that information not be shared?

He likes to prove that he’s strong or worthy by carrying various things for you

This coupled with he fact that Hak takes every chance to tease him leads to what essentially amounts to competitions in your honor to prove Ki-ja’s worthiness as your boyfriend

Sweetie Hak is literally just messing with you

Anyways, he’s not necessarily insecure, but he’s never been in a relationship so he does like to hear that you also think he’s the best 

Call him pet names or give him a nickname and he’s blushing as he  proudly proclaims to the world his love for you and how “My dear has given me a special name to show their love for me!”

He’s such a sap

All in all, Ki-ja would move mountains to see you smile  

Shin-ah

Love Language: quality time

Shin-ah lived in a cave for most of his life up until this point

While he has gotten better with talking and overall being more open, having friends is a new experience for this man, let alone being in a relationship

So really the only way he knows how to show affection is by spending time with you 

And offering you his meals, like the day you asked him out he pulled a fish from the river and offered it to you

But he just likes being around you, your presence just makes him feel calm and safe 

His ideal date would be you, him, and Ao just chillin makin flower crowns or smthn

Jae-ha

Love Language: physical affection and acts of service

So obviously Jae-ha shows love through physical affection

However, Jae-ha as a person is just someone who generally thinks talk is somewhat cheap without follow through

Sure he says plenty of flirtatious remarks and is generally flirty but he never really follows through with any of his remarks

He’s also just a really loyal person, so to him if you do things that tangibly show your love for him, he’ll be over the moon

Especially at the beginning of your mutual feelings towards each other, what made him truly fall for you was when you took out an archer that was set to kill him

Now that you’re both deep in your relationship, he takes any and every opportunity to just hold you

Whether it be extravagant displays of PDA or just holding you tight in a crowd, Jae-ha is very liberal with his affection and doesn’t mind giving you as much of it as he can

He loves to hold you, but he isn’t clingy with it

Like he’s definitely dramatic but he of all people knows what it’s like to feel chained down  initially was scared to even be with you in the beginning because of that fear but anyways-

So he definitely gives you space if you need it but as soon as you’re ready to come back he’s all like “my lap has been feeling a little empty lately”

You just roll your eyes and move to take your rightful spot in his arms again

Zeno

Love Language: quality time 

Zeno is immortal, whether or not he ends up outliving you or not, the man has seen a lot

So he values every second he gets to spend with you 

He gets very apologetic when he is unable to spend time with you, he feels very guilty because he feels like there isn’t enough time for him to express how much you mean to him

He tends to just make up reasons to spend time with you...they're always obvious, like he isn’t even subtle about it

“Y/N please, allow me to escort you back to camp” 

“I’m fine, it’s right there, I think I’ll be able to handle it.”

“But what if you trip????”

Yeah they’re really flimsy and dumb but if you let him spend time with you he’ll be the happiest man in the world

He’s also really attentive

He’s good at noticing little details about you and remembering them

You mean the world to him so if you reciprocate and notice little things about him or go out of your way to spend time with him, he’s beaming for the rest of the day.

[dustofbrokenheart]

The Lost Boys: Night Ride

Dwayne x Female Reader

Word Count: 2,000

Warning: contains physical intimacy, blood drinking, and mature language.  

Summary: Dwayne and you are enjoying a night ride along the Santa Carla coast when you start to feel a little cheeky. Risqué behavior ensues. 

It was a quiet night at the boardwalk, typical for the time of year when school was back in session and it was off-season for tourists. There was no live music that night, instead a popular Tom Petty tune played over the loudspeakers. Human traffic was a third of what it was during the summer, people mainly flocked to the food and shop stalls in an attempt to keep warm amidst the evening chill.

Most of the time you were fine with making rounds at the boardwalk even when it was dead, but that particular night you felt restless. None of the shops had any new wares to look at and you rode the Giant Dipper coaster four times in a row which quickly took the thrill out.

Sensing your mood, Dwayne herded you to a bench in front of the carousel while the other three boys peeled off to continue following a group that was headed further into the park.

He sat next to you, his heavy, leather clad arm rested along the back of the bench, surrounding you with his presence without actually touching you. The metal seat would’ve likely felt cool to the touch, even through your pants, had you not been a member of the undead.

You instinctively scooted closer to Dwayne seeking affection despite knowing he wasn’t a big believer in PDA. Still, you cuddled into his side knowing that he would never turn you away and his arm came off of the bench to lovingly rub your arm.

The two of you sat silently in each other’s arms, observing people who walked by, the tinkling of the carousel’s jovial organ tune playing continuously in the background.

A few moments passed when you felt Dwayne’s fingers start to play with the hair near your ear. You looked up at him and found his chocolate colored eyes already trained on you. “Wanna go for a ride?”

Subdued only moments ago, you perked up and nodded eagerly. Dwayne got the okay from David that rang in both of your heads courtesy of the coven mind-link and you walked hand-in-hand back to the entrance where the bikes were parked.

Dwayne hopped on first, kicking the motorcycle upright, and you got on second, linking your fingers across his stomach to secure yourself when the bike jolted to life. He didn’t say what route he had planned but when he opted to forego racing along the beach, instead heading out to the road, you knew he was taking the scenic way back to the hotel.

The late night road was mostly vacant making it easy to cruise along the curvy road, the dark, vast ocean on the left-hand side. Dwayne ran the engine at near wide open speed and the wind beat strongly, mixing your hair with his in a whirl of tresses. In spite of riding in seemingly reckless abandon, you knew that he was keeping a close eye on the road; he didn’t want to risk wrecking with you onboard regardless of your immortal status.

Dwayne sighed in contentment up front, the speed was a way for him to have fun that he made sure to take advantage of.

You chose a different way to make some fun for yourself.

The bike was humming along, the engine humming rhythmically between your legs with a blanket of stars shining among the navy sky overhead. Squeezing your chest more fully into his back, your hands started to wander with the goal of giving him something to sigh about.

Your fingernails scratched gently over the solid ridges on his abdomen as they headed further south into dangerous territory. He went still, even by Dwayne standards, and you knew that you had his attention.

He turned his head around just enough for you to see the look in his eyes that said to cut it out. They also betrayed the interest that he tried to hide under his seriousness. You relented momentarily and your hands went returned to a respectable position with your hands linked around his stomach.

He nodded in approval and turned to face the road again. Normally, you took pride in being the mature one in the coven, along with Dwayne, but that ride had you in a playful mood. Game on, you thought to yourself.

The reprieve didn’t last long before your hands started wandering again, going upward to his pectorals that time. One benefit to him wearing an open jacket was that it made his body all the more accessible to you. You kneaded the muscle there to the best of your ability given the angle you had to work with while riding on the bike. His skin didn’t have the same heat that a human did but he still felt warm to your touch.

A low hiss was audible even over the wind when you tweaked his left nipple with a little more force. He let up on the gas a bit, enough for you to feel a lull as it shifted from a racing to a cruising speed. You raked down once more, making sure to fan out to his sides in order to caress his ribs until you reached his hips.

His knuckles tightened on the handlebars when you traced the deep v of his lower abdominals. Y/N… he warned through your link.

With bated breath from both parties, you dipped below the waistline of this worn jeans. The smooth brass button at the top snapped open, adding another splash of heat to the situation. The zipper teeth clicked as you pulled them apart until it went as far as they could go.

His head dropped back for just a second when your hand finally made direct contact with him and you proudly noticed that he was already decently hard. You briefly pulled back to lick a stripe along the length of your palm to make it easier to handle him.

The had was inserted back into his jeans and you drew him out, exposing his cock to the crisp air. The splash of heat from earlier reached a boiling point that was almost tangible. You wrapped your hand around him and gave a few measured pumps, twisting just a little when you got to the top of the shaft.

There was a constant stream of growls and shudders and you felt an incredible sense of power to be able to elicit a reaction like this from him, no matter that you had been intimate hundreds of time prior.

You vaguely registered him pulling a hard left that sent the bike across the oncoming lane and onto the wide, barren plain that lead right to the rickety wood steps outside of the cave entrance.

He let out a particularly drawn out “Shit,” with one of your tugs that had you giggling. You doubled down on your efforts, feeling more emboldened the closer the cliff and the stairs approached.

Dusty dirt and gravel kicked up as Dwayne brought the bike to an abrupt halt, so abrupt that the bike nearly threw the two of you off. A hint of salty ocean spray tickled your nose as his hands gripped your thighs with the intent to move you.

In one last act of playfulness, you brushed his thick hair aside and bit him, fangs piercing brown skin that allowed his blood to trickle into your mouth.

Tease, he moaned while you suckled at his neck.

You released your hold on him with a wet ‘pop’ and Dwayne had you off of the bike and in his arms in the blink of an eye. He fell back onto the hard ground with a loud bang and kept you on top so that you didn’t have to be the one rolling in the dirt.

His lips and tongue attacked yours hungrily, and he was so desperate to have you that he told you in a guttural voice, “Here. Now.”

You weren’t about to refuse him and your mouths met again with vigorous kissing.

He ripped your top apart easily, not in the frame of mind to be gentle with your clothes. He leaned up to capture a nipple and proceeded to nip and suck you, his hand giving attention to your other breast.

Your breathing sped up and you held his head to your chest, warmth leaving your limbs shaky. Lower down, you felt your panties start to dampen, and it was Dwayne’s turn to delve into your pants.

He dragged your pants down and moved the panties to the side so that he could cup you, his fingers teased your entrance while the base of his palm added pressure to the bundle of nerves on top. You whined when one of his fingers suddenly slipped inside you with no resistance. Unable to stop yourself you rocked in an attempt to try and create some much needed friction.

“Shit,” he groaned placing a sloppy kiss on your shoulder. “That slid right in, princess.”

He gave you a moment before adding another and you shut your eyes tight, the sound of his fingers inside of you too much to bear. But then his thumb grazed your clit and they shot open again, your nails digging into his shoulder blades.

Satisfied that you were ready for him, Dwayne tapped your hip with a gentle, “Up,” so that he could fully remove your pants.

You nodded frantically. You would do anything he wanted right then. You would do it happily.

By the time you were bare from the waist down and back on top of him, he had also kicked his pants down. The jacket stayed on, not that you complained—he looked damned good in that jacket.

Even in the midst of lust he had enough restraint to slowly push into you. His cock was wide inside you and it was disorienting as he continued to push inward. The sky spun as your head tipped from delicious pleasure. You moved in tandem from the start, a product of knowing each other bodies as thoroughly as you did.

To the untrained eye he seemed completely in control, his thrusts even and steady the entire coupling. But you recognized the truth. His hands were a vice grip on your hips and his brow protruded the moment his fangs dropped; his eyes were still brown but it wouldn’t take much to get them to turn.

The pace in no way slowed your climb to the precipice and it wasn’t long until your arms no longer had the strength to support you. “Please.”

Dwayne gladly accepted the added weight on his chest and did work for you, the tatters of your ruined top stimulating your nipples from it laid trapped between two bodies. Roughened fingertips rubbed you with precision and his pelvis bucked into you, the excitement building.

The thing that pushed you over the edge was when his tongue ran along the veins in your neck, tracing patterns and sucking at the base of your throat, whispering his love for you. His fangs broke skin and that was it. Euphoria bloomed from your core, spreading to encompass your whole body.

You chanted his name in breathy gasps, your muscles clamping down hard. He quickly followed you into rapture, kissing at your bottom lip while he rode his own wave.

When the fog lifted the two of you were still breathing heavy, every move ten times more sensitive than usual. He made an effort to cup the side of your face. You’re beautiful, princess. Always, he whispered.

Just enough blood rushed to your face to color your blush and you hid in his mused hair. He merely smiled and drew you in for another kiss—a languid one.

His eyes had finally taken on the marbled yellow-red color shared by all vampires and you were certain that your features mirrored his.

Beautiful, you parroted his earlier words, making sure that he heard.  

He may have been a monster, but he was your monster.

_______________

In the year of our lord 2021, I posted nsfw for the very first time 🙈. I’m in no way qualified to write this but was inspired by a confession made on @darling-disastrous​’s blog. Enormous thanks if you stuck with it all the way through! I hope it was alright. 

[apriorisea]

Ok I’m seriously convinced you’re secretly one of the members...(Joonie is that u???) loool but for real, you write their personalities so well. So not a request, but a question?? Their “concepts” aside (like, “golden maknae etc”)... key personality traits & flaws for each of the boys? Like “passionate, sensitive, a perfectionist, or overly self-critical, etc” Which member(s) is hardest to write?Hope this made sense, I’m just super interested in your take on this :)

--First off, you’re so nice!!! Thank you so much:) And also, thank you for this question! I love things like this---even though it’s obviously all just my personal speculation 😅I listed my thoughts down below, but I would love to hear any thoughts (whether in agreement or disagreement!) anyone else might have!  As for which member is hardest to write, for me I typically struggle a little more with Taehyung and Hoseok. For Taehyung, I think it’s probably because our personalities are pretty opposite (again, HUGE grain of salt, since I don’t *actually* know any of them in real life, so I’m just going off the little info we have), so it takes me a little longer to write his stuff. For Hoseok, I think it’s because there is so much more to him than meets the eye and his personality is difficult for me to pin down sometimes. 

Again, thanks so much for your sweet words and thought-provoking requestion (it’s a word now)! I hope you find my take interesting! 💕💜

Seokjin: 

Conscientious - I think Kim Seokjin is very, VERY aware of his role in any given setting. He knows what’s expected of him and how to do it without bending any of his personal boundaries/rules.

Private - I firmly believe that we will never know the true personality of our Mr. Worldwide Handsome. I think he decided early on that to survive in this life, he was going to have to separate his stage persona from his personal life---and he guards this separation fiercely. This is also one of the qualities I admire the most about him: his unwavering commitment to keeping pieces of himself just for him. My personal opinion is that he is the member that gave up the most of a “normal” life and, while he did so knowing the consequences of this choice, he’s found ways to “rebel” and keep his own autonomy (think: responding to fans in a very “blunt” manner [Marry me? No.], cutting/coloring his hair against company wishes, refusing to give-in to fan-service he is uncomfortable with  [thinking specifically of that one time the host tried to get him to kiss Taehyung and he just started yelling over them when they tried to insist], his penchant for avoiding overly ~revealing~ outfits, etc etc).

Professional - I mean, just a continuation of both of the points above. He always knows when the cameras are watching and how he should act accordingly. But---and this is important---I am in NO WAY saying he’s being fake or disingenuous. The Jin we see on stage, in MVs, RunBTS, and even Bon Voyage/In The Soop is the real Jin---it’s just not all of him. He chose the Idol Life as his career, as a profession, so he would never be caught violating the terms that he himself has set to fulfill his responsibilities. What little we know of his family leads me to believe that he was groomed from a young age how to navigate high society and the professional world; now it’s just a slightly different world and society he floats through. 

Responsible - He takes the job of eldest brother very seriously. Though the baby in much of his younger life, as soon as he got 6 little brothers he stepped effortlessly into his new role. Making them food, driving them to school, helping them feel at home in a new place, providing silent but tangible support... My personal favorite is the way he willingly makes a fool of himself to relax the others, to help them calm down during stressful situations and break the ice. 

Good memory - I want to be careful how I explain this, because I don’t want it to come out wrong. I think Kim Seokjin has a very good memory. If you were decent to him and his brothers during the hard times, he’ll remember that going forward. If you were cruel to or dismissive of him as a young exchange student abroad, he’ll never forget. However, I also think he’s cunning enough that you would never be able to tell which category you fall under unless he wants you to know. 

Hard-worker - I mean, just the endless amounts of anecdotes we have about him practicing his vocals and choreography all night long should be enough evidence for this point, but I still sometimes feel like he doesn’t get enough credit. We all know the story of how he got placed in BTS, but I don’t think people appreciate how damn hard he has worked to grow into this life. He was a college student, set on a completely different life with completely different expectations, scooped off the street and told to learn to sing and dance and look. at. him. now. Listen to that vocal range, look at the Black Swan choreography or the way he seamlessly joined the dance break of ON---he has worked HARD and I don’t think we should forget about this. Just because something doesn’t come easy to you, if you’re not naturally gifted, it doesn’t mean you can’t work to achieve it. 

Basically I just love Kim Seokjin with my whole heart.

Yoongi:

Empathetic -  This word is the beginning and end of how I would describe his entire being. I think Min Yoongi is a very empathetic person. He sits back and observes, and he’s aware of everything. You know when you first get into BTS, there’s always the stories of him being the “scariest” member or the “toughest” or the quietest (especially in the earlier days of BTS, because can we just talk about how much happier he has been this last year-year.5?? How much more himself he is at all times? How much more comfortable??? We love to see it.) But I think his quiet watchfulness just gets frequently mistaken for scary or tough. In addition, his empathy allows him to connect with others in a special way, to acknowledge them and build them up (thinking of that one V-Live or whatever where Jungkook says something kind of under his breath---something about a past life?---and Yoongi not only hears him but turns to him and explicitly validates his feelings and thoughts, OR the times when he tells Jimin that he really likes his singing voice).  

Protective - He doesn’t like unkindness in any way, shape, or form. He doesn’t tolerate cruelty or bullying. And let’s not forget: he sees everything. Every slight, every intentional dismissal, every dig or jab, every “diss track” lyrics. Every single injustice. Now, he can stand up for himself (when he deems it appropriate, because I also think he’s pretty good at picking battles), but his true force comes out when those he loves are belittled/threatened/disrespected. He is fiercely protective of those he loves. 

Emotionally Intelligent - Obviously, I think he’s also just intelligent-intelligent, but I want to focus on this aspect for a moment, because I think this is a quality that gets overlooked in people in general. He is aware of the importance of emotions, both his own and other people’s. It’s in the way he recognized that he and Taehyung were polar opposites and made a concentrated effort to understand him better. It’s in the way he unabashedly announces that they hold hands when they’re arguing. It’s in the way that he insists that there is more to life than school, grades, others’ expectations. It’s also in the way he knows exactly how to make the others laugh, the way one of his sharp-witted comments or physical-comedy bits can break a tension or diffuse the moment. It’s all over every single one of his songs. It’s in the way he calmly handles challenges and has a unique relationship with each of his brothers according to their needs. He treats his relationships---with the members, the fans, staff, friends, family, whoever---with care and respect and maturity. 

Compassionate (read also: Cinnamon Roll) - Yoongi understands darkness because he has experienced it himself, and he will do whatever he can to make sure no on else suffers in the same way. He takes care of the people in his life, usually by doing little things or quiet things (think: the reason they call him the “dad” of BTS). He’s not afraid to correct people when they’re wrong, but he always manages to do it kindly. He’s also a complete pushover for the ones he loves: think of how he each member of the maknae line has a different but special relationship with him, think of how Jungkook can basically crawl all over him and hit him and annoy him and bother him and he never bats an eye, think of the way he showed up with chicken because he didn’t want Hoseok to be alone, think of the way he goes fishing with Jin because he knows his big bro loves it so much, think of the way he never ever yells at anyone when he’s angry, think of the way he softens his tone when explaining things. Cinnamon. Roll. 

Straight-forward - He’s blessed with the ability to be blunt but not cruel. I actually personally really hate the word “blunt” because, in my experience, it usually comes into play when someone is explaining that their rude, offensive, and ignorant comment *isn’t* rude, offensive, or ignorant---they’re “just a blunt person.” But I think Yoongi is someone who is actually able to be straight-forward (a much better term than the dreaded b-word) without slipping into carelessness. He says things how they are, but, using his emotional awareness and intelligence, he’s able to say it calmly and kindly. If you’ve messed up, he’s going to tell you you messed up---but he’s also going to help you figure out the next steps and volunteer to walk with you while you take them. He’s going to call out bad behavior---but always remind you that he loves you no matter what. He’s going to critique the song you wrote---but it’s going to be 90% positive comments and 10% suggestions of what could be better/smoother/more understandable. I also feel like he is someone who expects the same in return: he hates liars and has a low tolerance for bullshit. 

Basically I just love Min Yoongi with my whole heart.

Hoseok: 

Duality - Now, I don’t mean duality in the way you can compare his precious ray-of-sunshine moments to the times he absolutely blows everyone away on stage (though this is obviously a thing). I’m referring more to the way he can be both ray of sunshine and serious-business all at the same time. Like Jin, I think Hoseok chose an Idol persona (though I think his decision was prompted more by a desire to be uplifting and cheerful and our hope) and exists comfortably within those parameters. However, unlike Jin, I think Hoseok doesn’t mind if people see the other side sometimes, too. He’s not afraid to set down the bubbly-Hobi persona, even if cameras are rolling. He’s not afraid to be emotional,  whether that’s over-the-top happiness, or genuine overwhelmed tears. He can wear a flower around his face and make cute noises and then the next second he can snap at the maknae to not fool around near a pool so he doesn’t get his clothes all wet. It’s not an act either way, he’s just both. 

Good judgment - Obviously, we know that Jung Hoseok is a hard-worker. We know he’s dedicated his life to his craft, first with dancing and then with rapping. He can be an intimidating dance captain, someone who takes it seriously and pushes everyone to be the very best they can be. His work ethic is insane, and he never accepts less than his best---but, in comparison to others on this list, I think he is able to critique himself fairly and kindly. While he demands perfection, he doesn’t tear himself apart to find it. I think he has the ability to assess something or someone and come away with a fairly unbiased opinion. 

Comfortable - This is hard to describe in just a word, but I think he has a way of making people feel at ease in his presence. Even as one of the biggest superstars on the planet right now, you get the sense that he never wants to make people feel uncomfortable or intimidated or uneasy. Something about his mannerisms, his bright smile, his personableness, make him seem approachable. I think it’s also why Namjoon’s been known to say that BTS couldn’t exist without Hoseok, why Yoongi values his friendship so much, why Jungkook is constantly snuggling him. My personal opinion is that he was instrumental in bridging the gap that sometimes might have occurred between Namjoon and Yoongi in the early days; his comfortable presence eased some of the tension that (I’m guessing) may have naturally arisen between two of the greatest young rappers in the game when they were first working together. Hoseok just wants everyone to feel comfortable and at ease around him.

Kind - I think Jung Hoseok is just a genuinely kind human being. I think he is trusting and loyal, but also just the sort of person who will make it his mission to make you smile on a bad day. Just the fact that he chose to make his stage persona someone who is full of hope and happiness speaks volumes. Knowing his own personal struggles, he extrapolates this knowledge to guess how others could feel, and throws himself into the role of positive, happy, sunshiney, hope. It’s his kindness that motivates this behavior. 

High standards - This goes along with his good judgment, but I think Hoseok expects a certain level of competence from everyone around him, in whatever capacity they’re working. Again, this goes along with his desire to have the entire group work on a bit of choreo until it’s right. I think that, because he pushes himself to be the best and fulfill expectations, he looks for this same dedication in others (what comes to mind is that moment in some interview where Namjoon is struggling a little [cos English is the WORST, ugh] so Hoseok looks over at the interpreter like “what exactly are you doing, do your job, help him translate”). 

Basically I just love Jung Hoseok with my whole heart. 

Namjoon: 

Unbelievably intelligent - I know this one isn’t exactly shocking, but I still feel like it needs to be mentioned first and appreciated more. Namjoon is crazy intelligent, academically speaking. He thrives on the pursuit of knowledge, on contemplating and discussing higher concepts, on learning new things that feed his curiosity and his soul. While I also think this crazy-high intellect can sometimes hinder his ability to connect emotionally with people, it’s also this exact quality that makes him so well suited for the role he has been thrust into---not just in the group, but in the world. 

Nerdy - Bicycling, bonsai trees, reading, tiny creatures, art exhibits. He is unabashedly and desperately passionate about the things he likes. He isn’t afraid to love something just because he loves it. He goes all-in on things that he’s interested in, whether they’re “cool” or not. His curiosity pushes him forward, needling him to learn everything he can about things he’s passionate about. He sinks himself into these hobbies wholly (think: carrying a book or two with him everywhere so he can get some reading in, visiting as many art museums and exhibits as possible on days off, making cutesy noises at stingrays and scooping teeny-tiny crabs out of the sand to tell them how beautiful they are).

Macro-focused - He strikes me very much as the sort of person who loves to talk about concepts and ideas and philosophies in great terms. He loves clever wordplay, he likes to reflect on his place in the universe, he wants to discuss the complexities of life and human nature. His quick-mind devours these topics, and I can imagine he could sit for hours with you debating philosophy and discussing art. On the flip side, though, I think he isn’t so good with minutiae---and by “minutiae” I mean everything from being more aware of his physical surroundings to dealing with personal things. For example, I think he’s brilliant when he discusses happiness and hardship and joy and pain and love and humanity in the songs he writes...... but he’s not exactly the first person you would go to if you were having a tough or emotional personal time. Don’t get me wrong: obviously he cares about the people in his life, he cares about people in general---but sometimes all you need is a hug and pat on the back to encourage you and Namjoon would instead launch into the greater implications and consequences of human nature in an attempt to help you feel better.

Logical - I know this seems like a given, but while I think others on this list are more emotionally-intelligent, I think logic is one of Namjoon’s greatest strengths. For example: if another member is crying or upset, Jimin would notice they’re upset and immediately go and hug them and wipe their tears away; Namjoon would notice they’re upset and immediately look for the source of the problem. Once identified, he’d take the next steps to rectifying the problem, because logic dictates that if the problem gets solved, then the other member would be happier. If there was nothing to rectify, he’d attempt to comfort them with cold, hard facts. (I’m thinking about that time when Jungkook got upset because he felt like he messed up his performances, and Jimin immediately hugs him and comforts him and tells him he was great, while Namjoon assesses the situation and starts talking about how he himself actually, objectively messed up, so there’s no logical reason for Jungkook to be upset right now.) He dreams and enjoys literature and the arts---but when it comes to handling practical, inter-personal issues, he’s much more comfortable with logic. 

Vibes - I really didn’t have a good word to describe this thought of mine, so let me just get right into explaining: I think Namjoon is, generally speaking, one of the smartest people---if not the smartest person---in the room. He’s aware of this fact without being arrogant about it, but it is the truth. Because of this, I think he’s frequently called on to explain things, to expound on them, to teach or interpret or decipher. I think he enjoys this role, because he loves talking about things he’s passionate about (see above: nerdy) but sometimes...sometimes I think he just desperately wants someone he can vibe with. Someone who can match his level intellectually. Someone whom he doesn’t have to teach. I think he is over-the-moon ecstatic when he meets someone he can vibe with in any way---whether that’s intelligence-related or passion/hobby-related. I don’t know, I just sometimes feel like he chooses to spend his personal time with people who can match him in some way, whom he can vibe with.

Basically I just love Kim Namjoon with my whole heart.

Jimin:

Caring - For me, Park Jimin starts and ends with this characteristic. He cares. A lot. About a lot of things. He cares about his brothers, he cares about his family, he cares about his friends, he cares about ARMY, he cares about music, he cares about his dancing, he cares about fashion, he cares about how he’s perceived, he cares about doing his very best, he cares about the future generations, he cares about those who are less fortunate than him, he just cares so much. Along with Yoongi, I think he is incredibly empathetic. How many times do we see him basically sprint across a room or a sandy beach or a campsite or a stage to get to an upset member? He reads people’s emotions and has a natural instinct to take care of them. Like anything, though, I think his biggest strength can also be a great weakness: sometimes he cares too much. How many times has he worked until his body is covered with pain patches, until his feet bled, until he almost passed out? All the weight he lost, because he cared about his appearance? How hard he worked at being “hardcore, manly” Jimin, because that’s what he thought people cared about most? All the times he cried after a tiny mistake, because he cared about being perfect, because he cared about others’ perception of him? Park Jimin cares so/too much and it’s one of the most defining things about his personality. 

Social Intelligence/눈치 - One thing I love the most is how he has such a unique relationship with each one of his brothers. Now, obviously, every single combo in Bangtan is different and unique and special. But I love watching Jimin’s relationships with the others so much, because he’s so aware of what they need. Truthfully, I think Jimin is hyper aware of others in general. If you’re trying to sneaky-cry at a crowded party, Jimin is the type of person who would somehow appear at your side, ready to help you feel better. His empathy and sensitivity allow him to assess what each individual needs the most from him and act accordingly. He knows Taehyung should never be left alone when upset, knows that if Jungkook is actually crying then something is very wrong, knows that Leader RM sometimes needs to just be his one-year-older hyung Namjoon, knows exactly how far he can push Yoongi’s buttons, knows to laugh at Jin’s dad-jokes (especially when they’re for the benefit of the group), and knows that Hoseok needs to be reminded how much cohesiveness he provides the group in general. 

Self-Critical - All right, I feel like this one might be a little controversial, so hear me out. Like I mentioned earlier, he cares a lot, and part of that translates into caring about himself---caring about his achievements, his performance, his appearance. It’s partly the classical dancer in him and partly just his personality. He wants to do and be his best always. But.... I do think that he has learned to be much kinder to himself over the years. Gone are the days of starving himself to get rid of his cheeks, the tearful breakdowns after a single missed step in a performance, the acting outside of his true personality because he thinks that’s what he’s supposed to be. I think we now very much see a Jimin who has come into his own, who has accepted himself for who he is (including his flaws), who has embraced every part of him. This doesn’t mean that I think he never has to fight the nagging voice in his head, or struggle with insecurities, or swallow down the urge to berate himself after a less-than-perfect performance---he still expects the best out of himself, still wants to be the best. I just think he’s found a way to critique himself without absolutely tearing himself apart. 

Cunning - Yet another word that looks and sounds derogatory, but isn’t really in this context. Like a lot of other empathetic, sensitive, socially-intelligent people, knowing exactly what people need and are feeling also allows him to know weaknesses. Weaknesses he would never exploit---unless he wanted to. I actually don’t think we see much of him using others’ weaknesses against them, but in my opinion, this quality is linked to two of his other quirks: 1) his talent and complete lack of guilt for cheating at games and 2) his penchant for pettiness. I don’t really know how to explain my thought-process here---not well, anyway. But I feel like Jimin is so tuned into the important things (so concerned about the important things) that little things, like cheating at a game, don’t matter to him much. And, if he can use his usually sweet and helpful and hard-working, honest self to get away with it, even better. On the flip side, I don’t think he enjoys or endures confrontation as much or as well as, say, Yoongi might---so he expresses himself in a quieter, underhanded way. (The moment that’s coming to mind is that one time they were at an American event and he commented, in Korean, about how unorganized things seem to be.) Jimin is the sweetest, most sensitive, empathetic little cinnamon roll---until it’s time to win a game, or until he’s feeling a little prickly and petty. 

Basically I just love Park Jimin with my whole heart.

Taehyung: 

Individualistic - Kim Taehyung knows who he is. He knows what he likes, what he wants, what he thinks. He is going to wear whatever he wants, paint whatever he wants, say whatever he wants, and do whatever he wants. He’s a person who seems to have figured out a long time ago what makes him happy and how to be his true self around others no matter what---and this something I greatly envy. If he wants to learn the violin, he’s gonna buy a violin and play some scratchy Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a hotel balcony---because that’s what he wants to do. If he wants to write a song, it’s going to be in his style, the way he likes it. If he wants a really cool, avant-garde piece of artsy clothing, he’s going to spray-paint it himself. If he has an opinion on something, it’s highly likely that he’s spent quite a bit of time forming this opinion---but once that’s his opinion, that’s his opinion. That’s what he thinks, there’s no need to listen to others or change. I think this quality, this ability to be himself so  freely and earnestly, is both one of the reasons he’s able to make friends so easily and be beloved so quickly (see: “Bangtan’s True Baby” and “Wooga Squad darling”); and one of the reasons others (including the other members, by their own admission) can’t understand him well at first. I think it has brought many good things to his life, but has also played a significant part in some of the struggles that he has had. He’s precious, but also very easily misunderstood.

Not Very Outward-Sensing - Notice I very purposefully don’t go anywhere near the words “self-absorbed” or “self-centered”---because he’s not. On the contrary, I think Taehyung feels very deeply for the people in his life (see below: Emotional), but his ability to care for them is sometimes inhibited by his lack of outward-sensing. If Jimin is the king of 눈치/social awareness, then Taehyung is the absolute opposite (which is why it is unendingly intriguing to me that two of his closest relationships in BTS---he and Jimin, he and Yoongi---are comprised of one person who lacks this awareness [Tae] and one person who has all the awareness [Jimin, Yoongi]). He would never hurt someone’s feelings on purpose, but quite often he’s just not paying a whole lot of attention to what other people might be feeling or experiencing. He’s not concerned about walking on eggshells, because he feels that as long as his intentions are good, nobody can be too hurt or too uncomfortable with him or his behavior (A great example of this is the infamous Spring Day Dance Debate from “Burn the Stage.” In Taehyung’s mind, he saw something that should be changed and needed to be addressed, so he called it out. It never in a million years would occur to him that the way he phrased it or the way he kept harping on it could be a source of irritation or discomfort to Jin. To him, it was a very black-and-white, clear-cut situation: something was wrong, he had an idea of how it should be fixed, therefore nothing bad could/should come of him speaking his mind in the pursuit of this perfect solution he created). He seems like the sort of person who, after accidentally hurting your feelings, would sympathize with your hurt and want to make it better, but focus more on the fact that he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, so it’s not really his fault. 

Emotional - I think he is very in-touch with his emotions, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. For example, if he’s upset, he wants everyone to know and acknowledge that he’s upset. He doesn’t like feeling ignored or passed over, and where others might let it slide, he’s not afraid to speak up about it (I’m thinking about the time there was a question directed specifically to Yoongi about being from Daegu and Taehyung immediately pointed out that he was also from Daegu, and kind of pouted a little until it was acknowledged). Also, although it’s never been said explicitly, I think he is one of the members who potentially struggles with depression. He can take things very personally and to heart. But this is likely because he has such a big heart. He loves unabashedly and he’s very vocal about who he loves---think of all the times he’s said and posted comments along the lines of “Please love all seven” and “Please love each of us equally.” He also can be very protective (thinking of that one Weverse post where he lowkey chewed somebody out for posting an unflattering photo of one of the others) and blunt when defending those he loves. I mean, he created a whole new word just to express how much he loves ARMY! When he’s sad, he cries. When he’s happy, he giggles. When he’s angry, he expresses it. When he’s disappointed, he doesn’t hide it. To me, he is a near-perfect example of someone who wears their heart on their sleeves. 

Contradictory - One of his most endearing qualities. He is not very outward-focused---but he bought a pair of gloves because he remembered that Jimin offhandedly mentioned that he needed some. He doesn’t read other people easily---but he (so far) is also pretty darn good at completing accurate Vibe-Checks for those who come in contact with BTS. He doesn’t always see as much as the others might---but he also notices certain things they might miss. The beauty of his being is that he can be both things at the same time and not seem out of place.

Basically I just love Kim Taehyung with my whole heart.

Jungkook: 

Confident Yet Perfectionistic - Now listen: when I say confident, I don’t mean that he never struggles with insecurities. I mean confident in the way that his whole life (at least his whole Idol life) he had 6 older brothers who encouraged him to try and do anything he wanted---and then supported him no matter the outcome. Being raised in an environment like that, where you’re encouraged to try things, where you have people who love you constantly praising your efforts and providing a safe space for you to fail, you gain a certain amount of confidence in your abilities, in yourself. I think this is actually a big part of the Golden Maknae moniker: yes, I think he is the type of person to whom things may come quite easily and who is naturally skilled in several areas---but it’s also a little easier to conquer new things when you have years of encouraged-successes under your belt. He has gained a confidence in himself over years of trying and working his tail off and eventually succeeding; he knows he can do anything if he works at it enough because he’s always been able to do everything he works at. Where the perfectionistic aspect kicks in especially is this: there are a lot of people who have a natural affinity for lots of things. There are lots of people who can pick up something new and be decent right away (I honestly think Taehyung is another person like this, someone who can pick new things up pretty easily)---the difference is that Jeon Jungkook is the type of person who takes that natural affinity and runs with it. He’s not satisfied with just being good at something; if it’s something he really wants to do, he throws his whole heart and soul and self into it. In my opinion, this sets him apart from people who could be considered “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” He trusts his process and uses it to be the very best he can be in whatever he does.

Introverted -  Obviously he’s not the only introverted member of Bangtan, but I do think that his specific life experiences require a little more discussion on this topic than the others. By his own admission, his childhood ended really early. He didn’t focus much on school because he was focused on his career; he never got to have the typical high school experiences most of the others had. At an incredibly young age he was thrust into a totally different life that required being in the spotlight---and while this definitely brought unique challenges, he loves his life as a musician and performer. I think out of all BTS, Jungkook especially lives for performing. He lights up on stage and is at his absolute happiest when performing (and performing well). And yet none of this changes the fact that he is absolutely an introvert, someone who needs to recharge with just a little alone time. Alone time. Not easy to achieve when you live in the same tiny dorm with 6 other boys. Not easy to achieve when you are constantly surrounded by brothers, staff, instructors, producers, cameras, and fans.  

Maknae - I can’t explain this well, I know I can’t, but it just is such a huge part of him that I feel like I need to try. In so many ways, Jungkook is a typical baby of the family. It’s evident in the way that he unabashedly idolizes his Rap-Mon-hyung. In the way he constantly cuddles and sniffs and snuggles Hoseok. In the way he’s not afraid to pester Yoongi or tease Seokjin. He also seems like someone who is much more of a fixer than a listener; meaning, if you go to him with a problem, he’s going to be focused on how he can fix the situation, not on just listening and sympathizing/empathizing with you, a trait that I feel comes easily to babies of families (not that *all* youngest children have this, mind you) because they’re typically not the ones confided in, so if something is brought to them they want to help make it right (massive generalization, I know, don’t kill me). As discussed above, he’s also confident in himself because he’s been raised with older siblings who have always told him “yes, you can.” He’s just Baby in all the ways that stick with a person even as they grow older. 

Trusting - Jungkook strikes me as the sort of person who trusts fairly easily---and, more importantly, unshakably. He has no problem admitting to millions of ARMY that he ripped his pants on stage or V-Living while drunk (I don’t care what he says, babyboy was at least a little buzzed) because he trusts us. He could easily follow Namjoon (or any of his brothers) to the ends of the earth. He takes every opportunity to speak earnestly and wholeheartedly about how much he genuinely loves ARMY, because he trusts that that love will be returned. 

Basically I just love Jeon Jungkook with my whole heart. 

[theanxiousstudentblog]

What I've learned from the first year of university: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Three years later than expected, I finished my first year of university. At first, admittedly, it didn't feel like much; I submitted my final assignment, logged off of my student account, and went to watch the new series of The Real Housewives. It wasn't until a few weeks had passed that I was finally hit with how much this milestone meant to me and all the emotions that came with finally getting through the first academic year as a university student. This may not seem like a big achievement to some (I remember how in sixth form we were always made to believe that the first year of university was a piece of cake and way easier than A-levels) but, for me, it has been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. These emotions and thoughts are what have inspired me to write this post, specifically the feeling that university can be very very different from what you expect.

How I got here.

When I was younger, one of my sole dreams was to go to university. This may have seemed odd to some as I suffered from extreme anxiety when I was younger and actually refused to go to school between the ages of 7 and 9. However, it was never the academic side of schooling that worried me but the social side and being away from my family. I loved learning and I knew that I wanted to take my academic career to the highest possible level I could. The idea that I could pick any subject that I was interested in and do a whole course solely centered on teaching me as much as I could absorb was infatuating to me. It was for this reason that I spent so much effort making sure that I achieved good grades, despite my time off. I had my sights set on a prestigious university in London and in 2018 I received an offer to study there. However, instead of feeling excited about my future, I was engulfed with a feeling of dread. Unfortunately, due to events in my private life, my anxiety which had previously been kept under control by CBT and medication began to skyrocket. I would later learn that I developed complex PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) during this time. For the sake of keeping this blog post to a somewhat reasonable length, I will keep this account brief by saying that these difficulties eventually led to me pulling out of the London university and I decided to go to a local uni closer to home after taking a year off for my mental health (for a more detailed account you can look at one of my previous IG posts published 24/05/20).

Expectations vs...

I was excited for what awaited me at my local university; it was close enough to see my family whenever I wanted but still gave me the independence that I felt I needed to grow. Moving day came and went and it seemed to be going pretty smoothly, albeit some hiccups that came with my anxiety. It is important to note that I gave the university's wellbeing service a heads-up about my conditions before moving in so, at first, I felt confident that if I had any issues they would be able to work through them with me. However, over the next couple of weeks, my anxiety grew and grew, finally reaching its peak when my housemate turned around to me and told me that I needed to shut it about my mental health issues and stop hanging out with her. This triggered a major episode in my PTSD and I suddenly felt like I was spiraling out of control. However, despite my attendance beginning to drop and the multiple times I was having to leave lectures early due to panic attacks, I still sustained a level of confidence that my university would be able to give me the reasonable adjustments that the wellbeing team had spoken to me about before starting the term. Sure, they hadn't got back to my emails with any tangible support in weeks, but they couldn't just leave me like this...could they? All throughout my schooling, I was made to believe that educational settings were environments where any appetite to learn was nurtured and fed; education meant an opportunity to achieve anything you worked hard enough for, despite your background, disability, or start in life. Wouldn't universities be the ultimate conceptualization of this meritocracy?

Reality

Unfortunately, this vision would be quickly shattered by the stark reality of my treatment by my head of department and the well-being team. I go into more detail about this treatment in the IG post mentioned previously, but in summary I was given two choices: I get my attendance back to 100% with no support/reasonable adjustments from the university, or I leave/defer until I was "better". There was no comprehension from the uni that this wouldn't have a definable recovery date; I've been dealing with long-term mental illness since I was a child and it is something I've learned to live with alongside the appropriate support. To wait until I was "better" would potentially mean waiting forever. On top of that, I went out of my way to prove to my department that I was keeping up with my work and had achieved top marks on the most recent assignment but little recognition was given to my current grades. From the weeks since I started at university I'd met multiple people who had little passion in their subject or who were just at university because they thought it was what they should do. No hate to these people (I think the pressure young people face to go to university is a whole 'nother issue in itself) but I couldn't help but compare myself to them. The university didn't care that they had a whole student population of disillusioned young people who were indifferent to their academic fields but drew the line at a motivated student who suffered from mental illness. It became clear this wasn't an environment for people like me who were simply viewed as a wrench in the works. In December 2019, I was given no other option but to drop out of my university.

Starting again and the lessons I have learned

What was the worst blow to my mental health? Being kicked out because of my mental health...Having to leave university was a massive blow to my self-esteem and I began to catastrophize what that meant for my future. Luckily I had my family for support and my mum pushed me to look into the Open University, an institution based on distance learning. I enrolled part-time for the start of February (unfortunately I had missed the cohort to start full-time) and decided to focus on my therapy. This actually worked out great for me as in 2020 I was diagnosed with PTSD and started EMDR so being a part-time student gave me enough space to process the emotions that came up in my treatment. The Open University has been so helpful in making sure my needs are met and I have been so grateful to finally find an inclusive learning environment. It is definitely not how I planned to be experiencing university and I still do feel some disappointment in not getting the full "student experience" but it has also taught me some valuable lessons and given me a new insight into how far our education system still needs to go. These are the things I have learned:

Education isn't about degrees or academic prestige. Education is about a person's desire to learn, whether that be through books or the sheer act of being. Everyone requires different conditions to which they need to learn and thrive, and unfortunately, many academic institutions tend to expect us all to be cut from the same cloth. Despite this, no one can take away your passion to learn, and as long as you're living, you are learning.

There can be no equality without equity. The truth is people enter schooling from all different backgrounds and circumstances and it is not enough for institutions to treat everyone the same. In terms of mental health, many people are quick to say they recognise that mental illness can be just as debilitating as physical illness however until they put the actions and policies into place to make environments more tolerant and accessible then their words mean nothing. This means taking the time to talk to individual students about what they require and realise that the most important thing that a university can do is create a place where EVERYONE can learn. Schooling creates the foundations on which the future of our society is built and the fact that inclusion is barely making it on the blueprint is scary to me.

COVID has shown that in this digital age, attendance ISN'T everything. If only I could go back to that final meeting with my head of department and tell him that in a few months time everyone's attendance would be at 0%! Seriously though, this is a wake-up call to how simple accessibility can be if you just invest in a good digital learning platform that allows for people who can't attend in person to still be included.

You can be an academic and still put your mental health first. Despite what my first university led me to believe, my time at the OU has shown me that you do not have to sacrifice one over another. In fact, it has shown me that my mental health recovery and student journey can work hand-in-hand, encouraging each other along.

But most importantly...

It has shown me that despite the pressure to make your university years fit into a nice, neat package of fun, good grades, and self-enlightenment, it most likely won't happen like that. That's okay, let it go and keep moving.

[hellojeffreyjames]

Another mental health awareness month has come to an end. One challenge that a designated period presents, is that it can be hard to navigate for people who struggle to function in a neurotypical culture. It’s hard to parse all the virtue signaling or things folks say just to just participate in the theme of the month. To get ready for all the people to check in once in November, and then abandon them when that dynamic is so stressful they’d rather not have that person check in at all. It can be stressful to interact with people who are well intentioned, but lack an awareness of what being supportive means. It means they may dismiss the idea you have a neurological difference because they view a diagnosis as a defect instead of a part of neurodiversity.

This dullness may not happen, but if that’s the case, it doesn’t have to be forever. It can be a stepping stone towards building cognitive habits and disciplines you need to reduce your dosage. It can be the phase you needed to rewire your neurons. You may be able to build the structures you need to be medication free in a couple years instead of decades.

There are some neurological conditions that make it impossible to do certain things. One can learn the skills to work around that, and make the impossible, possible.  but for many people it’s like trying to learn calculus while bench pressing 200 pounds as someone keeps sticking a needles in your foot and telling you that you have no value and would be better off dead. For me that is not a question of whether or not I could learn calculus like that. It’s whether or it I should.

There are simple things I intend to do every single day and just cannot do them when I’m not on meds. I will beat myself up, tell myself I am a waste of a human life, and a burden to everyone, because I can’t do the even most basic things. I can’t do for those around me what I absolutely believe they deserve from me, and I don’t even have the language to explain why the most simple tasks are next to impossible. How it just looks like me being inconsiderate and selfish. How climbing Mount Everest would genuinely be easier than, say, mailing a letter. 

That’s not an exaggeration. I mean there are chemical differences that make a simple mundane task more difficult than something that includes tangible stress, urgency, extreme physical challenge, and in a distraction free environment. Obviously I’d fail at climbing Mount Everest as an untrained mountain climber, but I would engage with the activity. Taking three coffee cups off the nightstand and putting them in the dishwasher?  Without medication, that might happen if I think about it every day for the next... 2 years. Ok, that one is an exaggeration, but it would be quite a while.

I feel very proud as I watch my friends make life plans and conquer the world, as I formulate my own elaborate 36 step plan to ensure I brush my teeth today. 

If anyone identifies with any of that, to any degree, I just want you to know that you’re not alone. Yes, I also set myself 26 alarms and nine reminders and still did not make it to the post office yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Yes, I also don’t know what to tell my family about why I don’t reciprocate birthday cards. Yes, I also feel like I am doing my best to hide and perform happiness and high function.

Have you gotten so good at it you’re afraid people think the performance is the really of how you are doing, and that mentioning your struggles would be seen as being attention seeking or melodramatic? Hey, me too, and I also feel this paradox:  Wishing somebody knew, yet embarrassed that if anyone really new, they wouldn’t know where to begin to support me and I wouldn’t know what to tell them. Yes, you and I both share that fear, that it will only end with a loss of dignity and to be treated like that unstable neurotic friend that folks keep at arms length and never expect much out of. That you’ll be stuck at the “kids table” of life and never be invited to anything that counts. And “me too” about... a lot of other and darker things we won’t get into right now.

We can spend a lot of energy juggling all of these difficult concepts and throwing the balls up so high in the air we don’t realize The massive amount of energy we are blowing through to just make it through each day. We can’t see them all at one time and realize, no one on the earth should have to do all of that alone. No one on the earth can do all of that alone. You are not a failure to seek help.

You are not a failure to seek help.

You are not a failure to seek help.

You are not a failure to seek help.

You are not a failure to seek help.

To stay afloat we keep juggling but if we stopped we would see it fall to the ground and say, “Holy shit I’ve been trying to manage hundreds of emotional, intellectual, psychological, spiritual, and physical burdens that the people I compare myself to ...simply don’t.”  The reason I feel feel like I am at the razor’s edge of losing everything, is because I am trying to do something nearly impossible, and perhaps absolutely impossible to do on my own.

You are not a failure to seek help. You are not dishonoring your body or your mind to take a medicine. You’re not a failure if you need to talk to a psychiatrist. You are not a failure if you believe you have neglected your whole life, for your entire life.  Because I know how hard it is to just make it through the day and still be alive. I know how hard it is to wake up every morning knowing you’re going to make it through this day, by the skin of your teeth, again.

That’s not your fault. The hundreds of things you have to conquer in your mind to make it through every single day - that’s not your fault and I need you to know that I am so. goddamn. proud of you. I’m proud of you because this fight is absurdly difficult. I hope you can trust me in that because at this point I’m an an expert in this fight.  I’m an expert at putting in every last drop of my effort and willpower, just to tie my shoes, get in the car, and drive to work. This fight is not a fair fight. You’ve been fighting an incredibly unfair fight, if not always by yourself, often by yourself ...and that is why I am so goddamn proud of you. 

I am more proud of you than I am of billionaires. I am more proud of you than those people who get to live laugh love their dream life and get paid to travel the world and sample ice cream for their ice cream travel blog. I’m proud of you because I know what you have to do to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you don’t get to sample the ice cream flavors of Bangladesh for doing so. 

So I want you to know, again: it’s okay to seek help. It can be a difficult road but I recommend professional help. Some wonderful spiritual books and friends can’t often fight that incredibly unfair fight.  You are a specific person and a mental health practitioner will be able to understand your specific needs and make adjustments as needed. 

I can’t promise you that I will give you exactly what you’re needing but I am here if you need to reach out and want to know more about getting help. I can promise, that if your friends fail to support you in the ways that you need, it’s not because they don’t love you, it’s because they are not professional supports. They haven’t trained for this. Seeking professional support is the way that we begin to believe we are not a burden to our friends and family. 

Even when you never were, it’s the same feeling of asking loved ones casually about some car issues for years, tinkering with your engine for years, then hiring a mechanic. There’s no one in your life who will shame you for seeking a mechanic and you might be amazed at how quickly your car begins to drive more smoothy. 

Anyone who talks negatively about medication, therapy, psychiatry, etc. do not have your well-being in mind.  they are sales people for their own ideologies. It’s not about you it’s about how you should take natural medicine or trust Jesus. There are people who would rather you buy some supplements and remain miserable than to see a professional and be shown that professional help does make a real difference.  it’s best to avoid those folks for a little while.

You are not a failure to seek help.

I am more proud of you billionaires and  professional ice cream tasting supermodels. 

You are fighting a battle you do not deserve to fight alone.

You are absolutely positively not alone.

You’re not a failure to seek help.

Things can get better.

Things will get better.

In the darkest places, reasons to try, to go on, to keep living, are often often nonexistent. I don’t want you to have any hope that things will change. I’m asking you to place a tiny sliver of trust in these things I’m saying. The best recent to do something different and to seek help is going to be, for no reason. The voices in your head will try to stop you and you must tell them, “there is no reason I’m doing this. But I am still going to do it.” Hope will betray you. Friends and family are not professional supports and will let you down because they don’t have any training.

I just want you to place that sliver trust in how I know road will get smoother. Things will get easier. Seeking help is not failure. I’m not asking you to hope I know this. I am asking you to trust that I notice. And I’m asking you to please keep on seeking help even though the help feel sometimes. The system may be broken but system can be a crucial part love you reconnecting with yourself and your inner resources so that you can create your own path of healing.

I’m so incredibly proud of you. thank you for reading all of this and if you choose to, thank you for placing that sliver of trust in these things I’m saying. And if you can’t do anything else, keep being around people you feel good around. The people that do you feel excepted and listen to with, and if you don’t have any of those let me know and I’ll make sure you do. 💛🤍🖤💛🤍🖤

[elisaenglish]

How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

John Updike wrote in his memoir, “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” And yet even if we were to somehow make peace with our own mortality, a primal and soul-shattering fear rips through whenever we think about losing those we love most dearly — a fear that metastasises into all-consuming grief when loss does come. In The Long Goodbye (public library), her magnificent memoir of grieving her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection woven of extraordinary emotional intelligence. A poet, essayist, literary critic, and one of the youngest editors the New Yorker has ever had, she tells a story that is deeply personal in its details yet richly resonant in its larger humanity, making tangible the messy and often ineffable complexities that anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows all too intimately, all too anguishingly. What makes her writing — her mind, really — particularly enchanting is that she brings to this paralysingly difficult subject a poet’s emotional precision, an essayist’s intellectual expansiveness, and a voracious reader’s gift for apt, exquisitely placed allusions to such luminaries of language and life as Whitman, Longfellow, Tennyson, Swift, and Dickinson (“the supreme poet of grief”).

O’Rourke writes:

“When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

[…]

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

[…]

When we talk about love, we go back to the start, to pinpoint the moment of free fall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.”

In the days following her mother’s death, as O’Rourke faces the loneliness she anticipated and the sense of being lost that engulfed her unawares, she contemplates the paradoxes of loss: Ours is a culture that treats grief — a process of profound emotional upheaval — with a grotesquely mismatched rational prescription. On the one hand, society seems to operate by a set of unspoken shoulds for how we ought to feel and behave in the face of sorrow; on the other, she observes, “we have so few rituals for observing and externalising loss.” Without a coping strategy, she finds herself shutting down emotionally and going “dead inside” — a feeling psychologists call “numbing out” — and describes the disconnect between her intellectual awareness of sadness and its inaccessible emotional manifestation:

“It was like when you stay in cold water too long. You know something is off but don’t start shivering for ten minutes.”

But at least as harrowing as the aftermath of loss is the anticipatory bereavement in the months and weeks and days leading up to the inevitable — a particularly cruel reality of terminal cancer. O’Rourke writes:

“So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for “procedures.” And waiting, more broadly, for it—for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop.”

The hallmark of this anticipatory loss seems to be a tapestry of inner contradictions. O’Rourke notes with exquisite self-awareness her resentment for the mundanity of it all — there is her mother, sipping soda in front of the TV on one of those final days — coupled with weighty, crushing compassion for the sacred humanity of death:

“Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.”

Then there was the question of the body — the object of so much social and personal anxiety in real life, suddenly stripped of control in the surreal experience of impending death. Reflecting on the initially disorienting experience of helping her mother on and off the toilet and how quickly it became normalised, O’Rourke writes:

“It was what she had done for us, back before we became private and civilised about our bodies. In some ways I liked it. A level of anxiety about the body had been stripped away, and we were left with the simple reality: Here it was.

I heard a lot about the idea of dying “with dignity” while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn’t actually feel it was undignified for my mother’s body to fail — that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn’t want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn’t want to pretend she wasn’t going to die.”

Among the most painful realities of witnessing death — one particularly exasperating for type-A personalities — is how swiftly it severs the direct correlation between effort and outcome around which we build our lives. Though the notion might seem rational on the surface — especially in a culture that fetishises work ethic and “grit” as the key to success — an underbelly of magical thinking lurks beneath, which comes to light as we behold the helplessness and injustice of premature death. Noting that “the mourner’s mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders,” O’Rourke captures this paradox:

“One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss. This sturdy belief system has a sidecar in which superstition rides. Until recently, I half believed that if a certain song came on the radio just as I thought of it, it meant that all would be well. What did I mean? I preferred not to answer that question. To look too closely was to prick the balloon of possibility.”

But our very capacity for the irrational — for the magic of magical thinking — also turns out to be essential for our spiritual survival. Without the capacity to discern from life’s senseless sound a meaningful melody, we would be consumed by the noise. In fact, one of O’Rourke’s most poetic passages recounts her struggle to find a transcendent meaning on an average day, amid the average hospital noises:

“I could hear the coughing man whose family talked about sports and sitcoms every time they visited, sitting politely around his bed as if you couldn’t see the death knobs that were his knees poking through the blanket, but as they left they would hug him and say, We love you, and We’ll be back soon, and in their voices and in mine and in the nurse who was so gentle with my mother, tucking cool white sheets over her with a twist of her wrist, I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn’t walk anymore and a voice in my head said: Do you see this love? And do you still not believe?

I couldn’t deny the voice.

Now I think: That was exhaustion.

But at the time the love, the love, it was like ropes around me, cables that could carry us up into the higher floors away from our predicament and out onto the roof and across the empty spaces above the hospital to the sky where we could gaze down upon all the people driving, eating, having sex, watching TV, angry people, tired people, happy people, all doing, all being—”

In the weeks following her mother’s death, melancholy — “the black sorrow, bilious, angry, a slick in my chest” — comes coupled with another intense emotion, a parallel longing for a different branch of that-which-no-longer-is:

“I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was — as the expression goes — flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things.”

But the embodied presence of the loss is far from trivial. O’Rourke, citing a psychiatrist whose words had stayed with her, captures it with harrowing precision:

���The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

In another breathtaking passage, O’Rourke conveys the largeness of grief as it emanates out of our pores and into the world that surrounds us:

“In February, there was a two-day snowstorm in New York. For hours I lay on my couch, reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside… the sky going gray, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief’s moods: melancholic; estranged from the normal; in touch with the longing that reminds us that we are being-toward-death, as Heidegger puts it. Loss is our atmosphere; we, like the snow, are always falling toward the ground, and most of the time we forget it.”

Because grief seeps into the external world as the inner experience bleeds into the outer, it’s understandable — it’s hopelessly human — that we’d also project the very object of our grief onto the external world. One of the most common experiences, O’Rourke notes, is for the grieving to try to bring back the dead — not literally, but by seeing, seeking, signs of them in the landscape of life, symbolism in the everyday. The mind, after all, is a pattern-recognition machine and when the mind’s eye is as heavily clouded with a particular object as it is when we grieve a loved one, we begin to manufacture patterns. Recounting a day when she found inside a library book handwriting that seemed to be her mother’s, O’Rourke writes:

“The idea that the dead might not be utterly gone has an irresistible magnetism. I’d read something that described what I had been experiencing. Many people go through what psychologists call a period of “animism,” in which you see the dead person in objects and animals around you, and you construct your false reality, the reality where she is just hiding, or absent. This was the mourner’s secret position, it seemed to me: I have to say this person is dead, but I don’t have to believe it.

[…]

Acceptance isn’t necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Instead, researchers now think that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with “integrity” (their word, not mine), while others are primed for “despair.” Most of us, though, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of those in the middle learn to accept their deaths? The answer has real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved.”

O’Rourke considers the psychology and physiology of grief:

“When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity is wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the mental work.

The first systematic survey of grief, I read, was conducted by Erich Lindemann. Having studied 101 people, many of them related to the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, he defined grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tracing the history of studying grief, including Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous and often criticised 1969 “stage theory” outlining a simple sequence of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, O’Rourke notes that most people experience grief not as sequential stages but as ebbing and flowing states that recur at various points throughout the process. She writes:

“Researchers now believe there are two kinds of grief: “normal grief” and “complicated grief” (also called “prolonged grief”). “Normal grief” is a term for what most bereaved people experience. It peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. “Complicated grief” does not, and often requires medication or therapy. But even “normal grief”… is hardly gentle. Its symptoms include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.”

One of the most persistent psychiatric ideas about grief, O’Rourke notes, is the notion that one ought to “let go” in order to “move on” — a proposition plentiful even in the casual advice of her friends in the weeks following her mother’s death. And yet it isn’t necessarily the right coping strategy for everyone, let alone the only one, as our culture seems to suggest. Unwilling to “let go,” O’Rourke finds solace in anthropological alternatives:

“Studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. In China, for instance, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study demonstrated that the bereaved there “recovered more quickly from loss” than bereaved Americans do.

I wasn’t living in China, though, and in those weeks after my mother’s death, I felt that the world expected me to absorb the loss and move forward, like some kind of emotional warrior. One night I heard a character on 24—the president of the United States—announce that grief was a “luxury” she couldn’t “afford right now.” This model represents an old American ethic of muscling through pain by throwing yourself into work; embedded in it is a desire to avoid looking at death. We’ve adopted a sort of “Ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but as my dad had said, the mourner quickly figures out that it shouldn’t always be taken for an actual inquiry… A mourner’s experience of time isn’t like everyone else’s. Grief that lasts longer than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence to those around you. But if you’re in mourning, three months seems like nothing — [according to some] research, three months might well find you approaching the height of sorrow.”

Another Western hegemony in the culture of grief, O’Rourke notes, is its privatisation — the unspoken rule that mourning is something we do in the privacy of our inner lives, alone, away from the public eye. Though for centuries private grief was externalised as public mourning, modernity has left us bereft of rituals to help us deal with our grief:

“The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.

[…]

Such rituals… aren’t just about the individual; they are about the community.”

Craving “a formalisation of grief, one that might externalise it,” O’Rourke plunges into the existing literature:

“The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the author of Death, Grief, and Mourning, argues that, at least in Britain, the First World War played a huge role in changing the way people mourned. Communities were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead that the practice of ritualised mourning for the individual eroded. Other changes were less obvious but no less important. More people, including women, began working outside the home; in the absence of caretakers, death increasingly took place in the quarantining swaddle of the hospital. The rise of psychoanalysis shifted attention from the communal to the individual experience. In 1917, only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” defined it as something essentially private and individual, internalising the work of mourning. Within a few generations, I read, the experience of grief had fundamentally changed. Death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. By the 1960s, Gorer could write that many people believed that “sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as... masturbation.” Today, our only public mourning takes the form of watching the funerals of celebrities and statesmen. It’s common to mock such grief as false or voyeuristic (“crocodile tears,” one commentator called mourners’ distress at Princess Diana’s funeral), and yet it serves an important social function. It’s a more mediated version, Leader suggests, of a practice that goes all the way back to soldiers in The Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus.

I found myself nodding in recognition at Gorer’s conclusions. “If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,” Gorer wrote. “At the moment our society is signally failing to give this support and assistance... The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair and maladaptive behaviour is very high.” Maybe it’s not a coincidence that in Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report more physical ailments in the year following a death.”

Finding solace in Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful meditation on our humanity, O’Rourke returns to her own journey:

“The otherworldliness of loss was so intense that at times I had to believe it was a singular passage, a privilege of some kind, even if all it left me with was a clearer grasp of our human predicament. It was why I kept finding myself drawn to the remote desert: I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life.”

Reflecting on her struggle to accept her mother’s loss — her absence, “an absence that becomes a presence” — O’Rourke writes:

“If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.”

She later adds:

“After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally.”

Among the most chilling effects of grief is how it reorients us toward ourselves as it surfaces our mortality paradox and the dawning awareness of our own impermanence. O’Rourke’s words ring with the profound discomfort of our shared existential bind:

“The dread of death is so primal, it overtakes me on a molecular level. In the lowest moments, it produces nihilism. If I am going to die, why not get it over with? Why live in this agony of anticipation?

[…]

I was unable to push these questions aside: What are we to do with the knowledge that we die? What bargain do you make in your mind so as not to go crazy with fear of the predicament, a predicament none of us knowingly chose to enter? You can believe in God and heaven, if you have the capacity for faith. Or, if you don’t, you can do what a stoic like Seneca did, and push away the awfulness by noting that if death is indeed extinction, it won’t hurt, for we won’t experience it. “It would be dreadful could it remain with you; but of necessity either it does not arrive or else it departs,” he wrote.

If this logic fails to comfort, you can decide, as Plato and Jonathan Swift did, that since death is natural, and the gods must exist, it cannot be a bad thing. As Swift said, “It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.” And Socrates: “I am quite ready to admit… that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good.” But this is poor comfort to those of us who have no gods to turn to. If you love this world, how can you look forward to departing it? Rousseau wrote, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.”

And yet, O’Rourke arrives at the same conclusion that Alan Lightman did in his sublime meditation on our longing for permanence as she writes:

“Without death our lives would lose their shape: “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Or as a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise says, “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need?” It’s not clear that DeLillo means us to agree, but I think I do. I love the world more because it is transient.

[…]

One would think that living so proximately to the provisional would ruin life, and at times it did make it hard. But at other times I experienced the world with less fear and more clarity. It didn’t matter if I was in line for an extra two minutes. I could take in the sensations of colour, sound, life. How strange that we should live on this planet and make cereal boxes, and shopping carts, and gum! That we should renovate stately old banks and replace them with Trader Joe’s! We were ants in a sugar bowl, and one day the bowl would empty.”

This awareness of our transience, our minuteness, and the paradoxical enlargement of our aliveness that it produces seems to be the sole solace from grief’s grip, though we all arrive at it differently. O’Rourke’s father approached it from another angle. Recounting a conversation with him one autumn night — one can’t help but notice the beautiful, if inadvertent, echo of Carl Sagan’s memorable words — O’Rourke writes:

“The Perseid meteor showers are here,” he told me. “And I’ve been eating dinner outside and then lying in the lounge chairs watching the stars like your mother and I used to” — at some point he stopped calling her Mom — “and that helps. It might sound strange, but I was sitting there, looking up at the sky, and I thought, ‘You are but a mote of dust. And your troubles and travails are just a mote of a mote of dust.’ And it helped me. I have allowed myself to think about things I had been scared to think about and feel. And it allowed me to be there — to be present. Whatever my life is, whatever my loss is, it’s small in the face of all that existence… The meteor shower changed something. I was looking the other way through a telescope before: I was just looking at what was not there. Now I look at what is there.”

O’Rourke goes on to reflect on this ground-shifting quality of loss:

“It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”

In one of the most beautiful passages in the book, O’Rourke captures the spiritual sensemaking of death in an anecdote that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s account of a “transcendent experience” and Alan Watt’s consolation in the oneness of the universe. She writes:

“Before we scattered the ashes, I had an eerie experience. I went for a short run. I hate running in the cold, but after so much time indoors in the dead of winter I was filled with exuberance. I ran lightly through the stripped, bare woods, past my favourite house, poised on a high hill, and turned back, flying up the road, turning left. In the last stretch I picked up the pace, the air crisp, and I felt myself float up off the ground. The world became greenish. The brightness of the snow and the trees intensified. I was almost giddy. Behind the bright flat horizon of the treescape, I understood, were worlds beyond our everyday perceptions. My mother was out there, inaccessible to me, but indelible. The blood moved along my veins and the snow and trees shimmered in greenish light. Suffused with joy, I stopped stock-still in the road, feeling like a player in a drama I didn’t understand and didn’t need to. Then I sprinted up the driveway and opened the door and as the heat rushed out the clarity dropped away.

I’d had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. What I knew as “life” was a thin version of something larger, the pages of which had all been written. What I would do, how I would live — it was already known. I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.”

A non-believer who had prayed for the first time in her life when her mother died, O’Rourke quotes Virginia Woolf’s luminous meditation on the spirit and writes:

“This is the closest description I have ever come across to what I feel to be my experience. I suspect a pattern behind the wool, even the wool of grief; the pattern may not lead to heaven or the survival of my consciousness — frankly I don’t think it does — but that it is there somehow in our neurons and synapses is evident to me. We are not transparent to ourselves. Our longings are like thick curtains stirring in the wind. We give them names. What I do not know is this: Does that otherness — that sense of an impossibly real universe larger than our ability to understand it — mean that there is meaning around us?

[…]

I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn’t necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be “remixed” into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.

[…]

I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely, gone.”

The Long Goodbye is a remarkable read in its entirety — the kind that speaks with gentle crispness to the parts of us we protect most fiercely yet long to awaken most desperately. Complement it with Alan Lightman in finding solace in our impermanence and Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (9th June 2014)

[breathe-smiles]

pt iii. points of improvement

i’ve been having some trouble figuring out how exactly to go about this next chapter of growth in my life. i’m attempting to let loose a little more, take things as they come and take them constructively, but easy. there’s definitely advantages in formulaically guiding your growth, knowing specifically what you want and trying to create a way to get it. this is what i’m used to; this is what i know how to do. but somehow, i feel intuitively that i’m currently in for growth that’s spontaneous.

i’m 18 now and it’s 2020. i’m starting my second semester of college. i didn’t expect to be where i am, mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. i love being in control, but i am oddly finding comfort at the moment in letting go of that control and floating. i want to be shown realms i’ve never seen before and meet people i didn’t know could exist. i want to be challenged to think outside of what i know and grow in ways i don’t expect to. it’s really important to me to know what i want. but instead of solidifying my goals and paving my path right in this moment, i want this period to uncover to me what i really want. i don’t have a tangible outline of my future, but i’m excited for the journey of creating one. and i know through it, i’ll learn things i never even thought i needed to know.

everyday, i continue finding my truth. i constantly question the things i think, say, and do, in order to grasp a deeper understanding of why i am the way i am. i have trouble compromising absolute authenticity; i always need to be true to me. sometimes, i have to think twice and revise impulsive comments or thoughts, or make changes to my behavior, because i don’t feel like i’m upholding myself genuinely. it matters a lot to me that i am honest, real, and sincere. those are the things i value the most.

and so, despite being excited to free-spiritedly discover, roam, live, and grow, i have to keep in mind that there are things i have learned and noticed in the past couple of months that do still matter and do hold true to me. living with my head in the clouds, running around my new universe that’s doubled in size, and letting myself go instead of holding on tightly, i realized that i can get caught up in a multitude of convoluted things that don’t necessarily represent me and aren’t necessarily important to me. the theme of my life right now is to be free and feel okay being free, discovering and uncovering things instead of looking for them. but remembering to bring myself back down to earth is the only way not to lose myself in the process, or become somebody i’m not. i have to stay grounded and committed to who i am, because that is so important to me (and because i know i can). i am capable of simply evolving into a more refined version of my core self, even if, at the same time, i flip my world upside down, change how i live and interact with society, and reorient my aspirations and dreams.

that being said, i haven’t been completely myself in the past couple of months. and i didn’t hold myself to my usual standards of being myself because it had been first semester freshman year of college. this was a transition period that i needed to give myself. but needless to say, i could’ve done better. maybe i didn’t do as much mental preparation as i should’ve, because it was a fucking rollercoaster. i fluctuated from having some of my highest highs to lows that i forgot could exist and back. and for the first time in a long while, i didn’t feel in control, like i had no grasp at all on my mental instability. one minute i’d feel on top of the world and the next i’d be falling apart. i was so unsure of what was good for me and what was bad. i just took things as they came and let them hit me like a truck.

my hopes for winter break were to truly process and regain my ability to be in control. my time at home was meant to be therapeutic, to remember who i was before i left and all the things that i ran away from. now that i feel like i’ve done that, it’s clear that lots of things have to change for me to do better. these are parts of me that are points of improvement, crucial pieces that make me up that i’ve let loose these past couple of months. this is me regaining me.

i. self

personality reform is hard. most of the time, you know who you are and you’re sure about it. so, when you try to revert to staying true to you, it feels like mere readjusting. other times, you hope you haven’t already lost bits of yourself in flux.

i’ve been primarily working on my patience and teamwork abilities in the past year, as well as how i deal with setbacks and results that i don’t expect to receive. these things have only gotten better and better, which i am happy about. i’ve been able to continuously push my threshold for tolerance and navigate the dynamics of the different teams i’ve become a part of.

the main thing i’ve noticed first semester is that i’ve lost a little bit of my down to earth-ness - and it’s weird to say that because being down to earth is something i value so much. the person i project to others, especially to people that don’t already know me like the back of their hands, is more intimidating and intense than ever before. maybe this is a product of my found confidence, or maybe a continuation of my ability to have a conversation. i’m no longer shy and that’s apparent now. i stopped being hyper self-conscious and stopped caring so much about what people thought of me. on one hand, i’d categorize that as a strength of mine. on the other, it’s led to more oversharing than i’d like, a lot less consciousness of what i appear to be like.

social media is also once again playing a role in this. being in la has definitely made me more aware of who i am materially (which i’ve come to appreciate as a good thing, even though it’s simply a lifestyle i don’t really understand). aside from trying to create a pretty instagram feed, i’ve also gotten into the habit of oversharing on my finstas. not that i mind keeping those close to me updated. i just find difficulty constructively solving my own problems when i externalize them instead of internalize them - and that’s something i have to keep in mind.

i guess what i’m saying is that i need to relearn how to project the person i want to project. people only need to see so much. and that much for me, is not a lot.

ii. professional life + extracurriculars

academically, i’m impressed by how well i managed to do. i got a 3.9 gpa, which entails straight As and one A-. i didn’t even know you couldn’t get A+s. the point of improvement, however, is that i didn’t throw myself 100% into my work. i wasn’t doing the most i could do. i hadn’t paid attention every time i should’ve. even though it doesn’t seem to matter much grade-report-wise, it matters to me that i wasn’t giving it my all.

the other thing is my health. my physical and mental health are tied, and i seemed to let that slide. fencing practice hurt so badly, but i knew how rewarding it’d be. creating reasons to skip practice made me feel unworthy of taking on the sport in the first place. in addition, i went to the gym maybe once in the very beginning of the semester. my body doesn’t look all that different per se, but it definitely doesn’t feel good perpetuating the inactivity. now that i’m back on my game, i remember just how much a little activity could do to clear my head.

the last thing is that i need to do more things that help me grapple with my future career paths. how do i integrate my interests to ultimately do something that i truly love? i guess i’m still seeking out extracurriculars that help me find this meaning; i guess i’m still learning.

iii. society

i have never felt as introverted as i have in college (and you’d really expect the opposite). what i’ve learned is you really can’t escape people on campus. you’re living with other college students, constantly surrounded by other college students, and inclined to interact with other college students. having complete alone time is almost impossible, unless you make the effort to leave campus.

in all honesty, i quite like the social aspect of college. this environment is an aspect of college i was really looking forward to. but i’ve also had to reevaluate how much time to myself i really need, what i say to invitations to excursions, and if i’m recharged enough to engage in interpersonal interaction. this has been a challenge, and i hope to get better at it this semester. i need to remember it’s a balance between my need for me-time and healthy portions of social interaction.

another part of this is who do i want to surround myself with. my intuition and my ability to read people give me good advantages in filtering the population, but it’s also proven to me that making friends that i really do vibe with is pretty difficult. it’s strange because even though you’re surrounded by people 24/7, finding the ones you’re really in tune with is still incredibly hard. i know it’s a matter of being patient, though. i forget that it took me a few years to meet some of my greatest friends from high school. i suppose it is fate.

@ second sem : hit me w the best u got. i am ready 4 u. 💥

[damn-daemon]

My Unposted Star Wars Story

Okay, @marvelousthronewars, I’m doing the thing. This is actually roughly a chapter and a half from my unposted story, I just really wanted to get to some of Poe’s POV. So this is...just over 7,000 words from it?

LIttle bit of background: this takes place roughly 3 years before the events of The Force Awakens and works its way up to it. It also relies heavily on the events of the book Star Wars: Bloodline, which details the events of how Leia left the Senate, formed the Resistance, and how the galaxy discovered that Vader was her father. Yes, it’s an OC story, namely another Solo kid, because we haven’t had enough of those, have we?

Admittedly, there is a lot of politicking in this. I may have mostly written this story for me haha. Writing politics is my bread and butter, and space politics even more so. This is why I love Game of Thrones so much, and I pretty much brought that love into the Star Wars universe, or attempted to at least. Lots of Star Wars jargon. By all means, ask if you are confused.

Again, this is a story I stopped writing a while ago, but people are curious, and I am curious about the reactions. Also, I came up with this before The Last Jedi, so there’s that tidbit too.

Shattered Balance There were always two, no more, no less. The Dark Side and the Light. Brother and Sister. Ben and Elara.

It all started with a dream, and a man determined to keep it from coming true…

33 ABY The Lower District Republic City Hosnian Prime

The locals called the area Bottom View. Much like its sister-planet, Coruscant, the lower one sank through the levels of Hosnian Prime, the more dangerous and decrepit things became. Bottom View was the last rung before the planet surface, with only an obscure view of the stars if the power grid failed, and if you happened to possess a pair of macrobinoculars, but the inhabitants prided themselves on what height they had achieved in the cityscape.

If the fall can kill you, you’re doing alright.

It was a phrase commonly murmured by the residents, one Prax Edo had heard his entire life. His father had used it as a sort of daily mantra, until he had succumbed to a respiratory disease, one often found in areas that lacked proper air circulation while having an abundance of chemical output. That was essentially anything under the Middle District, which was a good fifty stories over their heads.

Needless to say, the Rodian had become quite the pessimist.

His young life was filled with half-baked, get rich quick schemes, most of which resulted in barely breaking even. The rest left him in debt to people who stopped bothering to climb the ladder and still ended up better off than him. At times, he was almost tempted to follow his brother, who had stowed away on a ship bound for the Outer Rim. Prax had never heard back from him, but whatever happened was bound to be better than his existence in Bottom View. Even the prison on Hosnian Prime was higher up than he was now.

Prax took a swig from his drink. It burned a trail down his throat and tasted something awful, but he needed the liquid courage. He was staring at a plan that could set him up for life, if he played his cards correctly.

The man who sat across from him worked for a politician of some sort, or perhaps just a very rich man. Either way, it was clear neither individual knew anything of slum life. His clothes consisted of what any rich man would assume was the garb of the poor (namely a cheap tunic and the galaxy’s most conspicuous hooded jacket), minus, of course, any holes, mysterious stains, or suspicious smells. And those things were the whole point really. No one trusted a clean man, not this close to the surface, but they also knew better than to not listen to what he offered.

The lowest of the low took on all sorts of jobs to keep their lives afloat, from day to day commissions that brought hard manual labor and little pay to high-risk/high reward missions that would result in either incarceration or death if failed. The latter was the particular idea this rich man was pitching to Prax, or at least he was trying to.

“Speak up, would you?” Prax more or less shouted at the man. “No need to worry about prying ears here.”

They were seated at a corner booth in the local nightclub, aptly named Ataxia, overlooking the throng that crowded the dance floor. The sound was best described as tangible, which was a fancy word that told Prax that if he hadn’t gone deaf yet, he may never lose his hearing. As such, it was the perfect environment for the business’ other purpose.

Encircling the dance floor were multiple tables hidden in dark corners, much like their own, where beings clustered together to talk of trade and contracts, the flow of spice, illegal betting grounds, and other less than savory topics. The Senate had its gathering place, the Underground its own.

“My employer has a competitor who has exceeded her boundaries for far too long,” the man repeated, though he hardly raised his voice any higher. “She needs to be reminded of the working order of things.”

Intimidation. He’d tagged along on a few jobs like that before. The really good ones were meticulous in their efforts. They preferred psychological damage, using techniques that still made Prax squirm. He wasn’t as well practiced in the art of coercion. Clearly his client was of the stingy variety if he was coming to him for this rather than the others. Still, stingy to him was a lot of money to the poor Rodian, whose rent was two months late.

The man, whose features he’d never quite been able to make out under the hood, slid a datapad toward him. Prax noted how he did his best not to make skin contact with any surface in the club. He was half tempted to spit on the clean hand presented with the datapad, but thought better of it. What was the phrase? Don’t spit on the hand that feeds you?

Prax took in the image before him. It was of a woman, young, perhaps pretty by human standards, with dark hair and light eyes. She hardly looked old enough to have made much difference in the universe, much less garner the anger of well-funded individuals. Still, something about her felt familiar, which said something this far down.

“I assume the compensation is to your satisfaction?”

The Rodian read the number just below her face. He suppressed a noise in his throat. “Very.”

Suddenly, the table shook.

Prax looked up from the datapad to see a crossed pair of boots sitting in front of him, attached to a lounging woman who looked oddly like the picture he had just been staring at. His client, he noted, had gone white as a sheet.

“Funny, the people you run into in unexpected places,” the woman said, sinking deep into the cushions of the booth. “It’s Darek, right? Senator Prost’s aide.”

Prax blinked. He looked the woman over again, a picture of calm amid the chaos of Ataxia, with her feet on the table and an arm outstretched to the side, nearly reaching him (unlike Darek who was nervously looking around the room and pulling his hood even tighter). She sported a short, brown jacket, which did nothing to conceal the blaster at her hip. A hand in fingerless gloves rested on it, not taut, but prepared nonetheless.

This was who his client was worried about? She looked better suited to a life in Bottom View than any place a richer person would be found. Was she a jilted lover? Illegitimate daughter? Maybe she had some blackmail on him.

“What brings you so far down, Darek? This place certainly isn’t the kind of nightlife you’re used to.”

“The same could be said about you, Senator,” Darek managed to squeak out. “If word got out, it wouldn’t bode very well for you.”

Wait, did he say senator?

“I wouldn’t know why,” the woman replied, waving down a serving droid. Moments later, three shots of some greenish liquid sat on the table. “I’m just enjoying a drink and a song.”

She took the shot, placing the empty glass upside down. “Aren’t you?”

His client eyed the drink for a half a second before turning his nose up at it. The woman chuckled, taking the glass for herself.

“Maybe your friend will be a little more conversational.” She turned to Prax, though not before eying his own untouched drink. “Elara Organa-Solo, by the way. And you are?”

In over my head.

Now Prax knew where he had seen her face before. Even in the outskirts of society, most people knew the name, and now Darek’s mention of senator made sense. She was a more outspoken politician, who was either loved or hated, never quite tolerated. Her family was chock full of Rebellion heroes, until the tree branch reached her grandfather. His father had spoken of terrifying acts that belonged solely to Darth Vader, things even an army could not accomplish. The fact that this beaming, young woman sitting next to him was related to that monster was downright unnerving.

“No one important,” Prax finally answered, standing. The aide looked pleadingly at him. He wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t been hired for protection, or suicide either.

“Don’t be like that. Stay.” The senator casually waved her hand. “I think you want to tell me why Darek was talking with you.”

Suddenly, all urges to leave stopped, and Prax sat back down as if he had wanted to all along. He wanted to tell her everything. She was a friend, a confidant, and he could not resist her beckoning. “He wanted me to intimidate you. His words implied by physical force.”

Elara raised an eyebrow, turning her gaze to the aide who had somehow remained rooted to the spot, and looked even paler for it. “Definitely not enjoying a drink, then.”

She lifted her boots from the table, leaning forward on both arms to look Darek in the eye. “Is that the kind of game the Senate plays now? Disagree with someone and get beat up for it?”

“Senator Prost doesn’t think you can be reasoned with,” the aide finally said, though it sounded more like a whisper.

The woman scoffed. “That’s a lot come from a man whose first line of defense equates to plugging his ears and chanting about not listening.”

There was a pregnant pause. From Prax’s seat, he could see Elara playing with the blaster, deciding. He wanted to get up again, to run and never come back to this forsaken establishment, maybe just run to the next cruiser destined for anywhere other than the system he was on. But he was frozen to the spot, concerned that any movement on his part might also trigger her.

“Tell me, Darek, do you know why Ataxia is the place to come to for hiring shady characters?”

When the aide shook his head, Elara drew her blaster. She aimed at no one, didn’t even put her finger on the trigger, instead placing it on the table surface, though Prax felt like she had shot him in the chest anyway, the way his heart skipped a beat. And though Ataxia continued to move to the beat of the current dance song, all around eyes were watching.

“Do you see all these tables around us? They aren’t filled with ordinary patrons; they are the scum of the universe, the kind that people like you and Prost shake your heads at, the kind everyone says will amount to nothing more than unintelligent drivel at the wasted bottom of the galaxy.” She waited, letting Darek glance around the space with a keener eye. “You’re in the middle of their territory now. Tell me, does it feel like nothing?”

Prax knew it didn’t to him. Rich men could shake their heads at gangsters all they wanted, but when they were at the wrong end of the blaster, all their status meant nothing.

“Ataxia is what some would call neutral territory. So, not only are all these people criminals, they’re also rivals. Which means, with one wrong move-” She made a trigger pulling motion with a free hand, her wrist slowly arching back from the pretend kick. “-this entire place will light up like New Republic Day on spice, but I’m sure Prost was well aware of that before he sent you down here to do his dirty work.”

Darek gulped. “Yes, I’m…sure he was.”

There was a moment of silence, or whatever qualified as that in Ataxia. No one at the table moved, they all eyed the blaster. Prax wondered how far he could get before the crazy human got them all killed.

Then Elara holstered the weapon, and there was a collective sigh of relief.

“Your view of the galaxy doesn’t work in reality. I suggest you tell your boss to stick to his playing field. He’s not going to beat me in mine.”

As if some invisible string had been cut, the aide immediately fled the area, chased out by rough music and hoarse laughter from the other tables. Prax watched him go, the emptiness of his wallet weighing more than all the coin in the world.

“Sorry for the trouble,” Elara said suddenly, slamming down something on the table while simultaneously downing his drink. “I’m not a fan of it, but some things can’t be helped.”

She left then, disappearing into the crowd as if she had not been there in the first place.

On the table was a small card, which unlocked an account with 10,000 Galactic Credits.

. . .

New Republic Senatorial Complex Republic City Hosnian Prime

The room was a cacophony of languages, binary, and the occasional whoops of a politician whose point had been made. The bowl-shaped assembly, resembling the old senate with its deep build and endless rows of viewing platforms, only aided the chaos presented to the viewer. With that, many delegates found privacy in the din.

But in the midst of the commotion, nestled with the repulsorpods from the Ash Worlds of the Outer Rim, Elara heard it all. She took her time, using the Force to gently probe the conversations surrounding her, no more than a sentence or two at once, enough to gauge the topic of discussion. Most were trivial: family concerns, which systems distilled the best drink, none of the dramatic overtures that the space had grown accustomed to housing, and, more importantly, no mention of the growing threat that lingered in the Unknown Regions.

Pursing her lips, Elara leaned back, allowing the clear conversations to meld into a droning buzz once more.

It was growing worse. The Senate not formally acknowledging the First Order as, at the very least, a subject of interest was one thing, to disregard it completely was another. It was a battle she had been losing from day one, ever since she had taken her mother’s vacated seat four years ago. Many of her fellow politicians still saw her as a young child looking for emotional leverage, while others saw a warmonger hoping for vengeance for a home she had never seen. Of course, what they all saw, to varying extents, was Darth Vader. That was an image she had given up trying to shake. Ever since the provocative reveal in that very room nearly five years prior, it was hard to ignore for anyone. There had been no gentle easing of the truth. The bandage had been yanked off before the galaxy, taking skin and bone with it.

She had been with her father at the time, out on the race circuit, finding herself in a galaxy full of possibility. Han Solo had never been one to look ashamed, even his greatest mistakes he defended proudly, but to see the look on his face when his daughter heard the family’s darkest secret over the holonet, she might have sworn he was a different man.

“Disappointed, are we?”

Remembering her place, Elara’s hazel eyes shot across the pod to where Kaid Dexshi reclined, an annoying grin plastered on his face. The senator from Eredenn Prime (and benefactor of her home system of New Alderaan) was an older gentleman, though no less handsome for it. His graying hair was still cut to Republic Navy standards and his skin tone reflected a lifestyle of a constant outdoorsman rather than the cushy indoor life the average politician led. He was fit (more so than most men half his age) and he was cocky as hell. Most days Elara wasn’t sure if she liked or hated him. Some days she simply wanted to toss him out of the pod.

It was a complicated relationship, to say the least.

“If I say no, would you stop looking so pleased?” Elara sat up, smoothing out the wrinkles that had formed in the light blue fabric of her dress, willing them to turn into leggings if she were to be honest. “Surely you’re not going to tell me we’re all here to witness the failure of another vote regarding the First Order?”

The senator chuckled. “No need to worry, Elara. My entertainment at your expense is borderline cruelty at this point. I’ll not be the senator who violated the Galactic Concordance because of a woman.”

Elara sneered. “Then what horrible thing has you in such a good mood this morning?”

Kaid’s smile only grew as he moved to sit next to her, breath hot on her ear as he whispered. “Just be patient and pay attention. I promise you’ll enjoy it.”

She barely repressed the urge to roll her eyes. Toss him from the pod it was.

After a few minutes passed with scarcely a change in the atmosphere, Elara was beginning to think she’d been had. It was not something she would have put past Kaid, although she had hoped he respected her enough to play such tricks in private.

Then the air shifted. Fear, anticipation, despair. Gasps and angry shouts brought her attention upward, where four Senatorial guards surrounded Senator Prost himself in his repulsorpod. Darek, she noted, was nowhere to be found.

The entire Senate watched as the man was arrested and taken away, before erupting in conversation and arguments. Her pod’s screen lit up as various politicians vied for the first chance to speak.

Elara dared to look at Kaid, whose ego would be unbearable for the next month or so. “What did you do?”

“Senator Prost has a terrible spending habit, and even worse encryption on his accounts. A hint here, a nudge there, and suddenly the Internal Investigation Committee has the answer to all the missing money from public spending accounts.”

“And what, may I ask, inspired you to even look into his spending?” Elara asked, scooting back on her seat so that there was respectable ‘working room’ between them. “Last I checked, you accused Prost of being worth about as much of your time as a five year old on a temper tantrum. You said a man that loud can’t have anything worth looking into.”

Kaid shrugged. “I got a tip. Some underappreciated aide talking about how there were things I’d probably like to look into.”

Elara had to smile at that. Perhaps things the previous night had not as been as bad as she thought.

Her colleague noticed the look on her face. “I had a feeling you might have had something to do with it. I wish you’d stop taking things into your own hands, though. Getting involved in the crime world will eventually do more harm than good.”

She managed to look sheepish. “You heard.”

“Heard?” Kaid practically laughed. “A Centrist damn near cackled after relaying the story to me. You’re on thin ice around here as it is, Elara. You shouldn’t push your luck.”

“So, you’d have me sit back and let these people play their little games with me?” Elara asked, ignoring how loud her voice got. “I wasn’t in Bottom View to cause trouble, but to prevent it. Prost was about to hire goons to attack me, for pity’s sake.”

Kaid put a hand on Elara’s shoulder, leaning closer, urging her to quiet. “You and I both know you have nothing to fear on that front, and I suggest you try harder to keep it between us. The aide was easy to bribe, but once word gets out about your abilities, no amount of money will keep the Senate from forcing you into self-exile like your mother.”

Elara took a deep breath, calming. Few people in her life knew about her Force sensitivity, fewer still her training. It was what managed to keep her afloat in a political environment that wanted nothing more than to be rid of her. She was, technically, an innocent in the disaster that was her family, but not many would be willing to forgive her wielding of the Force, not with Darth Vader’s memory still so firmly intact in their memories.

There had been days when she wondered if she had not been cursed.

“We have to play the long game here,” the senator continued. “It’s the only way to get anything done.”

“We don’t have that kind of time, Kaid,” she murmured. “The Resistance encounters stronger First Order opposition on every mission, and they haven’t even seen the bulk of their forces.”

At that, her friend frowned, looking very much his age at that moment. “You may be right there, Elara. When the aide said there was something I’d like, he wasn’t wrong. Prost’s spending only appears frivolous on the outside. Most of the accounts can’t be traced when you look deeper into them.”

“The Unknown Regions,” Elara added quietly, multiple ideas trying to overtake her train of thought at once.

“Precisely,” Kaid replied with a nod. “And if all this money went to them from one man, how much funding do you think a corrupted Senate could bring the First Order?”

. . .

The last time Leia had visited the complex, she hadn’t been entirely welcome. The Resistance was still in its early stages, back when the First Order was only a dark whisper with no name. She had appeared as nothing more than a traitor, a Separatist, who sought to plunge the galaxy back into civil war. Still, they had grudgingly allowed her to attend the induction ceremony. She was, after all, still royalty, and it was her daughter taking her turn at the political wheel.

There had been a lot of whispers, many shouts, and one man had dared to toss his drink at her, but she had stood tall and proud. Angry opposition was something she was used to.

Or welcomed, as Han put it.

But now the times were different. The dark whispers had a name and while the Senate may have been entirely too slow to act against them, it was obvious that many individuals saw the Resistance in a new light. It was an appreciation of sorts, but for their sacrifice or distraction, she could not say.

Her office had changed, she noted. It had nearly been barren when she occupied it. Her nose was always stuck in datapads so the bare walls never had time to bother her. She’d had a few trinkets, though, pieces of home that had survived, gifts from friends, and a few family possessions, enough to appear that she cared for something other than her politics.

Elara’s decorative take was…well, she wouldn’t say cluttered, but it clearly had her daughter’s touch.

Schematics lined the walls, from ships and podracers to small droids and thermal devices. In the center of the room sat a model of the Millennium Falcon, before Lando ruined it according to both father and daughter. There were also little holos sitting on shelves, which when approached produced images of other famous rebellion fighters, including Wedge Antilles’ T-65B X-Wing and Shuttle Tydirium.

That was the one she found herself staring at when Elara entered, her aide jogging behind her with an armful of datapads.

“This one contains the regulations of the proposed trade routes to the Outer Rim, as part of the New Republic Outreach Program.”

“Let me guess, high tariffs on the participating systems to counter the ‘risk insurance-’” Elara said without looking at the aide (a girl of maybe eighteen with intricately braided blonde hair). She crossed to her desk and picked up something from the floor behind it. An engine component, it looked like. Leia smiled. “-and import taxes that render the products virtually unaffordable in Republic space, because they’re ‘hard to procure.’”

“And that will be going in the ‘nay’ pile.” The aide put down one datapad, shuffling through the others.

Elara tinkered with the part, shifting pieces Leia could hardly see. “Senator Khardeen heads the Outreach Committee, yes?”

Her aide didn’t miss a step, not looking up herself. “I believe last month we agreed he was the committee.”

“Right, right,” her daughter replied, moving to the window, a pensive look on her face.

Leia knew little about Malastare’s new senator, only that he held a grudge against Dugs and was not the kind to play nice, as their conversation suggested.

“The Grand Prix is coming up,” Elara blurted suddenly. “No elected official would dare be caught not attending the podrace. Arrange for passes. I think a private chat with my colleague is needed.”

The aide tapped one of the datapads a few times.

Hearing her daughter play out the game Leia had once been so adept at left a familiar ache in her chest. She truly missed politics, but even when their current crisis ended, Leia knew there would be no going back; she was tainted, and the Senate was tainted for her. There was too much hurt, and far too many things had been broken, but it was good to see someone still upholding some sort of standard, even if she was viewing it from the skewed perspective of a proud mother. Although she had heard Elara was a bit more of a brute than she had ever been. She had Han to thank for that. Chewie, too, no doubt.

“Oh, and you have a visitor,” the aide said, so matter-of-factly, Leia almost missed the underlying joke.

Two sets of eyes turned to her.

“And here I thought Kaid had bought me another joke statue.” Elara smiled. “Hi, mom.”

It was such a simple sentence, but in person and free of the static of intergalactic communication, it was enough to tug at her heart.

Elara looked a lot like her, Leia noted, with her dress in the simple style that had defined Alderaanian humility and her hair wrapped in a braid that hung over her shoulder. It did not need to be pinned; it was nowhere near as long as hers had been or even was now. Her daughter hated excess hair, but she still respected tradition.

Her eyes, though, those were all Han’s, that hazel color that had the strange ability to light up or darken depending on her mood. The former did not happen as much anymore; the latter too much.

“You look busy,” Leia finally said, wondering why ‘hello’ was so hard.

Her smile was rueful. “Says the woman juggling the entire not-so-legal resistance movement.” She turned to the aide. “Go home, Kari. Tell your father happy birthday for me.”

The young woman grinned, bowing her head quickly before exiting the office.

“She knows you well,” Leia observed, watching the doorway.

“I’m pretty sure she is at least two steps ahead of me at all times,” Elara admitted, collapsing in her chair. Gone was the regal politician of New Alderaan, replaced by a twenty-six-year-old Corellian who had better things to do than talk to her mother. “What brings you back to Hosnian Prime?”

“Recruitment, actually. The recent skirmish on the border left quite a few disillusioned pilots. They reached out and we answered.” Leia paused. “Not that I’m telling you any of this.”

Elara put the piece on her desk and shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference. The Senate is no closer to making any legal action on the Resistance than they are to the First Order. Chancellor Villecham’s afraid if the Senate makes a move on me, they’ll have to do the same for the other side, and so on and so forth. I think the term mutually assured destruction comes into play somewhere, so as of right now, it’s a standoff.”

Leia snorted. It was that same inability to make any movement that had contributed to her desire to leave in the first place.

“Although, Kaid did get Senator Prost arrested,” Elara added, “But I doubt even that is enough to cause a ripple. Even among Centrists, he isn’t the most popular."

“Senator Dexshi arranged that?” Leia asked. She never had liked the man much, nor did she appreciate Elara’s informal address of him.

Her daughter had a knowing look.

“Kaid is a frustrating laserbrain, but he is also useful, more so than anyone else. Populists are appeasers now.”

No doubt my fault too, Leia thought.

A silence fell between them. It was a more common occurrence than Leia liked. Things had changed between them, but so much had happened too, things that neither liked to discuss, but Leia knew the rift had started when word that Vader was Elara’s grandfather had reached her ears, and not from her own mother. Han had taken a hit as well, but in the end, it was not his secret to tell, only her own. She could not help but imagine how much easier things might have gone if she had just told her children. Elara might be more willing to open up to the past events, and Ben…

The office doors hissed.

Poe Dameron stepped through the threshold, looking like quite the respectable pilot in his new Resistance uniform, though she could tell he had been tugging at the collar. The boy would never know it, but he had just saved her.

“Pardon the interruption, General. We just got a message from base and I figured you’d want to hear it in person.”

He paused then, catching the eyes of her daughter, who had since stood up. For a moment, everything seemed to stop. They just stared at one another, neither moving nor breathing as far as she could tell.

Then Elara’s face split into a large grin, the likes of which Leia had not seen in an age. “Dameron.”

His smile matched hers. “Solo.”

“Afraid it’s Organa-Solo here,” Elara replied, gesturing to her dress. “Reminding the politicians you’re technically royalty tends to help.”

“And I’m sure you enjoy doing that.”

Leia watched the exchange, a complete outsider. She had no idea they even knew the other existed (particularly on Elara’s part), much less had enough of a relationship to share inside jokes. Back in the early days of the Empire’s collapse, Leia had worked with his mother, and through old war stories, she knew Han had fought alongside his father, but they had not seen either Dameron since then, not after they had moved to Yavin 4. From what she recalled, Poe’s mother had actually passed years ago.

Elara was giving Poe an exasperated look, but her smile had yet to fade. Leia felt her heart sink. In the mere seconds he had been in the office, Poe had elicited more emotion from her daughter than Leia had in years.

“As far as I’m concerned, Poe, you’re still the only person worth bossing around.”

The commander chuckled. “I can accept that.”

Leia finally found her voice. “I guess it’s not too much to assume the two of you know each other.”

She saw reality dawn in her daughter’s eyes, their hues darkening. “Oh, oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to just – Poe spent a season with us…on Dantooine.”

If Poe noticed the change in tone, he did not show it. It was the first time Elara had even mentioned the planet without immediately shrinking.

Leia turned to Poe, her curiosity overtaking the sadness blooming inside. “I didn’t know you were Force Sensitive.”

The pilot shrugged, looking oddly uncomfortable in the spotlight. “Hardly Force Sensitive is more like it. What was it your brother used to say? Enough to notice, but not enough to care?”

Had the room always been so cold?

Elara started to trace images on her desk with her fingertips. Now she looked small again, the young woman who had seen too much. Her hair had been much shorter then and her lightsaber had hung from her hip, a blue blade that matched the open sky. It had been so quiet, and yet hardly peaceful…

“Did I say something wrong?”

Leia jumped. “No, no, Poe, you didn’t. We just haven’t seen Ben in a long time is all.”

Her daughter’s face snapped up so quickly, Leia though she heard her neck crack. She would be answering for that later, hopefully over a long distance comm that gave her the option to walk away from it.

Because that would help repair their relationship.

“Well,” Elara started, interrupting the thick silence that had fallen…again. “If the two of you don’t mind, I will be taking off for the evening. I had a long night, an equally long day, and want nothing more than to be in something with pant legs.”

She picked up a datapad, the ‘nay’ pile one, and headed for the doorway. Leia figured she would run if she could.

“Feel free to use the space as long as you like. It’s not bugged as far as I know.” She paused, hand resting on the control, before turning back. “It was good seeing you again, Poe.”

And then she was gone.

General and Commander stood alone, both staring after her, quiet and lost in thought.

Poe was the one who started. “I’m sorry, General. I shouldn’t have barged in like that. I clearly interrupt-”

Leia held up a hand. “It’s alright, Poe. You made her smile. That’s more than anyone else can do.”

Myself included.

19 ABY Jedi Academy Dantooine

Poe looked around his bare quarters and heaved. He knew that he had agreed to come of his own volition (it was Luke freaking Skywalker after all) but the day was barely over and he was already feeling regret seep into his mind.

Luke was a great hero and an equally great man, but he was a busy one as well, and in the few moments Poe had been able to talk to him, all he mentioned was stuff about the Force. He’d described it as some kind of power. Sounded more like magic to Poe. Flying was a more suitable topic for the 16-year-old. After all, his mom had sworn up and down that Luke had taken the shot that destroyed the first Death Star. And without a guidance system!

Of course, when he even tried to bring it up, Luke had just given him that smile, the kind that adults gave to all kids when they weren’t going to answer their questions. It was usually followed by an ‘another time.’ The Jedi Master was no exception.

Poe huffed, flopping on his cot. It was slightly too small for his still growing frame and sat maybe three inches off the ground. Besides the duffels he had brought and one small chest, the room was basically empty. The walls appeared to be made of solid permacrete and there was one lone window, a horizontal slit he could not see out of without standing on something.

He thought this was some kind of school. Why did it look like a prison?

Time passed, and Poe was half asleep when he got the sudden nagging feeling that someone was watching him.

The room was still empty when he opened his eyes, though much darker. He fumbled through the space for a switch before slapping down on the door panel and coming face to face with-

Well, the air. The subject in question was several inches shorter, and female, and decidedly angry for some reason. She was eying him, hands on her hips, and all business. Like most of the other students, she, too, wore a plain tunic, though she also had a small, brown robe like Luke, and some sort of metallic cylinder attached to her belt.

“Can I help you?” he asked, not entirely sure he wanted the answer.

“Who are you?” she asked, high voice making the seriousness of her question kind of hilarious.

“My name’s Poe. Poe Dameron.”

She waved him off. “No, no, I know that, but who are you?”

He blinked. “…uh…a student?”

A single eyebrow lifted. “Yeah, and my dad’s a rancor.”

As if she owned the place, the girl walked right past Poe into his room. The boy, too stunned by the strangeness of the situation, simply watched as she investigated every corner of the place. As much of an invasion of privacy as it was, she, at least, did not attempt to look in his bags.

“Uncle Luke doesn’t personally escort anyone around here anymore; he doesn’t have the time. And he certainly doesn’t give the biggest room to some new kid.”

He didn’t know what was more surprising, that his room was the largest or that-

“Wait, your uncle is Luke Skywalker?”

She turned to him, face all ridicule. “Duh. Why else would I have full run of the place?”

Poe sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose, his patience ebbing. “I don’t know, because a ten-year-old does what they want?”

Her hands were back on her hips. “I’m twelve, thank you very much.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” he mumbled, unable to help himself.

“I’m short, not deaf!”

“Sometimes you’re both,” a deeper voice called from the doorway. And by deeper, he meant more masculine. The boy’s voice still cracked and sounded more on the childish side.

Poe raised his arms in the air. Now there were two of them!

“Who are you people?!”

The boy didn’t even seem bothered. “Name’s Ben. Short stuff over there is Elara.”

A brother, Poe guessed, seeing as how the newcomer was about as forthcoming with answers as his companion. He had the same dark hair and pale complexion, though his eyes were much darker than the fiery girl digging through his room. His outfit lacked the robe, but he still possessed the cylinder. A weapon, perhaps? He’d hate to think of this Elara girl armed.

“Why are you even in his room?” Ben asked, ignoring the blatantly furious looks Poe was sending him as he entered the room too.

“Looking for answers.” Now Elara was eying his bags. Poe slowly inched toward them. “There has to be some reason why Uncle Luke is so interested in him.”

“Have you tried asking Poe himself?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

The girl huffed, looking up at him. “Do you know why Luke is so interested in you?”

“Um…” Even upon hearing their conversation heading in his direction, he was still caught off guard by the question. To be honest, he hadn’t paid much attention back home either. “Something about the Force…and maybe…a tree?”

She gave her brother a withering look. “That’s why.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “He’ll tell us eventually. You don’t have to be privy to everything Uncle does.”

Now Elara looked offended. “That’s not what this is about and you know it!”

Things looked to be getting heated. He could feel the atmosphere change, something dark and cold lurked. Poe did not like it one bit.

“Uh, guys?” he said, stepping between the bickering siblings, at probably a much bigger risk to his health than he cared to know. “Can I have my room back?”

There was a beat. The anger simmered. Ben nodded and grabbed his sister by the long sleeve of her robe, dragging her to the entrance.

“I’m keeping my eye on you,” Elara managed to say before the doors hissed shut in front of her face. The last image he saw was her glaring eyes.

Why was that so intimidating?

With a sigh, Poe collapsed on his bed again.

It was going to be a long season.

. . .

Present Day

Resistance Base

D’Qar

Beneath the canopy of his T-70 X-Wing, Poe couldn’t help but smile. He had met a lot of interesting characters over the years, many of whom were not the most innocent of individuals, but none ever managed to leave an impression quite as extraordinary as that twelve-year-old girl.

Of course, Elara had eventually been forced to give a proper introduction, at what may have been the closest thing to gunpoint that Luke Skywalker could muster.

BB-8, sitting his astromech slot in the back of the ship, chirped. They were about to land on base.

“That’s okay, buddy, you can bring her in.”

More beeps. He never engaged auto-landing.

“I know. I know. I’m just…distracted.”

And he was. Despite their relatively hostile introduction, the two had become fast friends. After his time on Dantooine had passed, he and Elara had messaged one another sporadically. Happy Birthdays. Congratulations on his graduation from the academy. Simple things. The last time had been…just after Vader.

A lot had clearly changed since then.

Elara Solo had looked tired. Not the logging more hours in the cockpit over the bed kind of tired, more of the weary soldier look, an exhaustion from battle and loss that no amount of sleep can clear from the system. He knew the look well, although it usually belonged to grizzled veterans twice her age.

Now, while Poe thought politics were about as soul-sucking as things could get, it was not the cause of his friend’s distress. Elara would have left a long time ago if that were the case. No, something had happened, something other than Vader, something that cut far deeper and had yet to heal.

As he reached to the chain that had hung around his neck, his mind drifted back to how mother and daughter reacted to his mentioning of Ben.

Had something happened to him?

The General never was one to talk about her family, but thinking back on their conversations, Poe could vividly recall her mentioning something her husband or daughter did, all off-handed things that she was reminded of at the time. She’d say them with a smile, though it was usually a sad one. There was not a single time he could remember her speaking of Ben. Had he not known better, he might have thought Elara was an only child. There were certainly a number of younger Resistance fighters who would have been surprised she was even married.

Ben was not his favorite person from his days on Dantooine, but he had been far from the worst, and thinking back on it, most of his negative feelings had come from that youthful competitiveness that afflicted most boys their age. There was not a single thing one had done that the other had not tried to outdo. It had infuriated Elara to no end, and yet every day she was there on the sidelines, watching the boys beat themselves up again.

They had been quite the trio.

A light rapping on the canopy shook Poe from his thoughts. Lowering his hand, the pilot realized his X-Wing had not only landed, but was also in the middle of cool down procedures. Outside, a brightly smiling Jessika Pava just barely blocked the sunlight.

“Good morning, Commander,” she said, looking very proud of herself. Behind him, BB-8 whistled. “Good morning to you too, Beebee-ate.”

Rolling his eyes, Poe pulled the canopy release, listening to the familiar hiss as it unsealed and lifted. “Can I help you, Blue Three?”

“Oh, it’s nothing really. The team and I were just wondering if you were going to debrief us any time soon or if you just wanted to keep staring wistfully at the horizon.”

Someone snickered below. If he had to guess, it was Karé. The two were tag-teaming menaces.

“I wasn’t staring wistfully,” Poe countered as Jessika lowered herself back down the ladder. “More…contemplative really.”

“Whatever you say, Commander.”

Poe stood up, getting his first chance to stretch his muscles in hours. He loved to fly, and would never want to do anything else for a living, but damn if it didn’t hurt a lot sometimes. Made him feel a lot older than he really was.

Below, a crowd of familiar faces had gathered. Snap, L’ulo, Karé, even Nien Nunb, were all standing at the base of his ship, desperate for orders no doubt. Things had been quiet lately, lots of missions that were scrubbed before the ships even left the flight deck. People were bored. They were also on edge. It was a dangerous combination.

“Shucks, guys, I didn’t realize you all missed me so much,” he spoke, removing his helmet and tossing it into his seat.

“More than our homes, Commander,” Karé joked. There were smiles, laughter, a nice break from his previous thoughts.

He smiled back, sliding down the ladder. “Alright, Black Squadron, how much trouble did you get into while I was gone?”

L’ulo placed a hand on his shoulder. “Not as much as they wanted. The First Order’s still quiet.”

The smiles were replaced with grave faces, looks that told more than words ever could. Pilots hated being grounded, none more so than his squad. These were people who volunteered because they were tired of sitting and waiting, and that was precisely what they had been forced to do.

“Wish I could give you guys better news on that front,” Poe said, placing his hands on his hips. “Republic Command is locked up tight. Whatever they might know, they aren’t telling, not even to the General. And as for the Senate…well, we know how that goes.”

Jessika made a face. “Half the kriffing politicians want the Empire back. We can’t trust them to help us.”

Inwardly, Poe agreed with his fellow pilot’s assessment. How else could he explain the madness of the Senate refusing to see the danger of the First Order? He had seen their Star Destroyers with his own eyes. That kind of firepower wasn’t going to idle in the Unknown Regions forever.

But he was the commander of Black Squadron, and giving in to that kind of talk was not in the best interest of the Resistance.

“If we lose hope in the Senate, we lose hope in the Republic, and the First Order won’t have to attack us then. We’ll have done the work for them,” Poe replied, crossing his arms. “There are plenty of Senators who aren’t about to sit back and let the remnants of the Empire take what we fought so hard for. We just need to give them time.”

Nien Nunb piped up from the back, his rapid Sullustese breaking up the conversation.

Snap nodded, and he wasn’t the only one. “He has a point, Poe. We don’t have much time left.”

Poe thought back to Elara, weary and frustrated in her office, doing what she could with what little the Senate had given her.

“Then we give them as much as we can.”

May the Force be with you, Solo.

[jkjmemory]

I hate this feeling, I hate this night . Yoonkook .

Summary: The nights are Yoongi’s worst enemy; his bad brain is always harder to handle when the world around him is just as dark as his own thoughts.

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook x Min Yoongi Genre: Angst, tiny bits of Fluff Word Count: 3355 Read on: ao3, and if the links on this dumbass site worked properly, i would also link the work but.....@/staff please fix this site please wtf if you wanna know my ao3 to read more of my works, feel free to dm me or send me an ask!! 💓💓 A/N: Another two-day work that was originally Taegi but then turned into Yoonkook somewhere along the way idk? 😅 Can barely even be considered a one-shot tbh, it's more of a character study that's been sitting in my drafts for the longest time and I just wanted to finally get out of the way lol The title is from Key's 'One of those nights' which is such a lovely song 🤕💜 I know next to nothing about Insomnia btw and as always, Jungkook's anxiety is based on my own experience! If there are any major errors please let me know.

Hope you enjoy!! 💘 💘

Jungkook has always liked the city after dark. He likes its lights, the way they remain predictably in exactly the same places in familiar windows and street lamps and skyscrapers every night. He likes the cleanness of the sky when the smog lifts, and he likes how the evening veils the noises the people make. Nights give him a safe feeling, a maybe-people-will-stop-watching-me-now feeling.  Here on the tiny balcony the wind climbing up the walls of the apartment building makes Jungkook’s pajama shirt dance and a shiver crawl up his spine. Yoongi stops trying to light his cigarette for a second and glances at him. Elbows on the railing and head low between his shoulders, his eyes flick up towards Jungkook and he brushes his hair back behind his ear, abashedly, almost. Like he doesn’t really want the younger to see him smoke his way through another sleepless night.

“You should go back,” Yoongi says, and flicks the lighter again, the flame immediately dying in the wind. Yoongi curses under his breath; thin hands come up and cup the end of the cigarette. Jungkook just shrugs and crosses his arms, scratches at the hairs behind his ear.

“I like this better, Hyung,” he says. Yoongi’s eyelid twitches, and with a sigh and a sniffle, he squats down. Jungkook watches as the elder tugs one of the flat cushions they keep out here towards himself, sitting with his feet against the railing and curling his spine. Between his torso and his thighs, Jungkook hears the flick of the lighter.

“Should I get your jacket?” he asks after a while of Yoongi still busying himself with the cigarette; the other lets out a halfhearted snort.

“’m good, thanks.”

Yoongi shifts; the flame of the lighter shines for a second, and then, finally, the tip of the cigarette catches it. Jungkook watches Yoongi take the first inhale, pocket his lighter and lean his head back against the frame of the screen door, closing his tired eyes.

He’s always closing his eyes. Like it hurts to look at things, maybe it does.

Jungkook pads back into the living room, to the couch, where one of the others left their hoodie lying around. He takes it, pulls it over his head, smells sweat and coffee, thinks ‘Namjoon’ and in a second, he’s back at the screen door, sitting down cross-legged next to Yoongi, hands in his lap. And then they’re quiet.  They’re quiet for a long time, unmoving, and Jungkook’s eyelids are growing dangerously heavy when Yoongi finally says something.

„You don’t have to do this every single time, “Yoongi says in a mumble around the second cigarette which he’s been trying to light for the past minute or so. Jungkook glances up, and when Yoongi meets his eye steadily and deliberately, he flinches and looks further up, up, up and away. Eye contact is a dangerous thing.

What Yoongi means is that Jungkook doesn’t have to forgo his sleep to watch Yoongi chain smoke the night hours away. He doesn’t have to stay with Yoongi, Yoongi, who has stopped being able to sleep a couple weeks back. Jungkook doesn’t have to slip out of his bed silently and follow to wherever Yoongi takes them at 2 am, be it the set of swings on the playground two street corners over or the dark, deserted river banks halfway across the city.  It doesn’t matter; where Yoongi goes with his hunched shoulders, cigarette pack, empty hands, Jungkook follows.

He isn’t quite sure why he does it, really. He just doesn’t like the thought of Yoongi out alone in the middle of the night. And Jungkook’s own restlessness keeps him up way past the other members’ bedtime, as well. So, if they’re both not sleeping, anyway, they might as well spend that time together.

Tonight, on the balcony, he followed because he got scared.

When Yoongi got out of bed this time, Jungkook stayed where he was, lay there for a minute, firmly set on not following this time until he heard the screen door open and he remembered that their dorm was on the 11th floor, high, high up, and the railing was easy to climb, and Yoongi was not to be trusted. And he jumped out of bed and followed, after all.

Yoongi is right, he doesn’t have to do this every single time, but he doesn’t mind. He’s alone all night with Yoongi and he doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all.

He shifts a little, tugs at the drawstrings of his hoodie and ties them in an attempt to keep the wind from slipping its fingers into his collar. Yoongi by now has managed to light the cigarette, exhales smoke with a sigh, and Jungkook worries for a second that Namjoon might smell the cold smoke on his hoodie in the morning. He tugs his knees up towards his chest, mirroring Yoongi’s seat and worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

„Does it bother you? When I’m here, does it? “

Yoongi seems to consider this for a long time, and Jungkook feels sick to the stomach, desperately wishes he could see his face because he’s been wondering for so long now, if Yoongi even wants him here like this. But Yoongi has his hair in his face and is turning the cigarette between index finger and thumb contemplatively, then putting it back between his lips. His cheeks hollow slightly around his inhale, and Jungkook wonders just how much weight Yoongi has lost over this, this pain he’s been nursing for reasons unknown.

Yoongi doesn’t sleep, but during the day, he throws himself into practice, into work even more so, even though they just got through a comeback and their schedule is pretty timid for the next month or so. He exhausts himself, perhaps even hoping that if he’s just tired enough at the end of the day, maybe sleep will come to him, but it never does. The toll this cycle has taken on his mind is tangible and the toll it has taken on his body is visible, and Jungkook just wishes there was something he could do to help him. But Yoongi doesn’t want help. Jungkook is pretty sure he is more annoyed than happy to have him around as it is.

His train of thought makes him even more fidgety. He brings his hand up to his mouth, sniffs the cuff of the hoodie, chews on his thumbnail, avoids looking at Yoongi. The night is quiet and so is the other boy and Jungkook hates quiet sometimes, he really fucking does.

“Well, no.”

By the time Yoongi finally replies, Jungkook’s heart is beating a little too fast, lungs pressing into his ribcage on every inhale that he’s trying to keep as deep and calm as possible. Deep down, he hates himself for this, for the fact that every little thing can set him off just like that. A minor inconvenience and Jungkook’s breathing comes heavy, his eyes go wide. It all makes him feel childish and like he’s not in control, but he can’t help it, he likes Yoongi so much. So much. And he’s so worried and his mouth feels dry, stale, Jungkook wills the dizziness away, no, he doesn’t want to do this right now.

Yoongi reaches forward and flicks the ashes of his cigarette over the edge of the balcony. Glowing for another fragment of a second, they blow away, and Jungkook clings onto his elbows, tension in his shoulders that he doesn’t know how to let go. He sniffles, and Yoongi tilts his head, eyes him from beneath hooded lids, takes a drag, and Jungkook holds his heavy gaze for just about a second until he can’t anymore. He looks down, makes himself small, wonders what it would take to stop having a physical form that people could look at. Dangerous, terrifying eye contact, what if they all see, what if they all notice – he’s not even sure what he wants to hide so badly.  His lip is shaking. He feels pathetic, and Yoongi stands and leans over the railing again, away from Jungkook, which doesn’t make it better at all, and Jungkook wipes his eyes quickly with his sleeve.

“Then don’t push me away, Hyung, not me,” he manages, all shaky. Yoongi, again, doesn’t give him much more than a tilt of the head, and Jungkook fucking hates this so much. Why can’t they just have normal conversations, why can’t Yoongi just put in that little effort, why, why, Jungkook knows exactly why and he knows just how toxic his thoughts are, but his mind is running in overdrive all the time and he can’t really help it, no matter how well he means. Logically, he knows Yoongi isn’t doing this to hurt him. He isn’t doing it to hurt anyone, this locking-himself-away thing. He does it because he only has so much energy to spare when he’s fighting a battle against a mind that won’t let him live, won’t let him sleep, even.

But Jungkook can’t take it, he can’t take the uncertainty and he can’t take the isolation. All the other members don’t seem to be having the same problems as him, they know Yoongi just gets like this sometimes, and Jungkook knows this too, and Jimin told him to give Yoongi more time to sort his mind out, but Jungkook has a restless mind of his own. And it overinterprets and it worries, and he just needs to know that Yoongi doesn’t hate him because he can’t tell anymore, he really can’t.

“Don’t push me away, you know what it does to me,” he tries again. Yoongi has finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the railing and is reaching into his pocket for the pack to take out the next one. Jungkook distantly wonders when Yoongi even picked up smoking and how he has never thought about this before, and how Yoongi is hiding his bad habit from the managers. He doesn’t know. It unsettles him, how little he knows about him. He sometimes thinks it’s not his place to worry about Yoongi when really, how close are they? Are they even close? Were they ever close?

“You should go back inside,” Yoongi says. Hands close around the tip of the cigarette, the lighter flicks, Jungkook wants to scream. He shakes his head defiantly.

“I won’t,” he bites. Yoongi turns his head fully now, and Jungkook can feel his eyes on him. He takes a drag, and just looks at Jungkook, looks and looks silently and then crouches down next to him again. Heels to the ground, elbows to his knees, he gets on eye-level with Jungkook and says his name softly, Jungkook-ah, he says, until Jungkook meets his eyes with a small whine. Yoongi’s eyes are still hooded, sleepy, and there’s a softness there that Jungkook wasn’t prepared for. Quickly, quickly he wants to look away but Yoongi touches his shoulder gently, albeit briefly.

“I don’t want you losing sleep over me.” Smoke curls from the cigarette. Jungkook watches it disperse, and then glances back up at the other.

„Let me, though,” he murmurs, and Yoongi groans softly, and drops his seat bones back down on the cushion, stretches his legs out long, socked feet against the rail. Jungkook watches him from the corner of his eye, hands in his lap.

“You’re my favorite thing to lose sleep over, Hyung, “he says, and this sentence is even more quiet, but Yoongi seems to catch it. He stalls his movement, holds his breath and then he crosses his legs, turns towards Jungkook, the cigarette in his hand, and stares at him.

Long looks.

They’re known to get Jungkook all fidgety, scare him, make him want to hide. But sometimes, they make him feel all warm, make his mouth go dry when it’s Yoongi looking at him, black orbs framed by black lashes between black bangs. Fingers fidgeting with the cigarette and clean teeth, whitened for the comeback between chapped, blueish-pink lips.

Yoongi gets so little sleep these days that his circulation is incredibly low, and everything about him has a weirdly translucent quality. He’s always been pale in comparison to Jungkook and the others, but here in the light of the streetlamps and the moon, his skin is made of blueish white and his lips are pale, too, like he’s cold all the time. Which makes sense, since the temperatures have been dropping recently, and Yoongi’s lips are blue, purple, pink, the color of Taehyung’s sweet, sweet strawberry milk cartons. He’s translucent when he puts the cigarette back between his lips, its glow dips him into orange for a second when he inhales. And then, he’s translucent again. Translucent in a way that constantly makes Jungkook either want to whip out his camera or pull him in, warm his cold lips with his own, or tug him inside, where it’s warm and safe.

But Jungkook knows himself, and he knows he wouldn’t be brave enough to do those things. He’s also aware Yoongi would never let him, always has to be the one to take the first step, always needs to stay in control of the situation. So, Jungkook sits and waits and watches Yoongi watching him, and acts like it’s nothing but gladly accepts it with his heart thudding when Yoongi, with a small sigh changes his cigarette hand from the right to the left and reaches his hand out, touching the back of Jungkook’s own with the tips of his fingers.

They both watch very carefully out of the corners of their eyes, shy of any eye contact now, as Yoongi traces his fingertips, just the tips, cool and soft, up the curve of Jungkook’s thumb, and they both hold their breaths when Jungkook turns his hand, palm up, and slowly takes Yoongi’s hand in his own.  Like it’s a secret, he holds it carefully. Cold, smaller than his own, he holds Yoongi’s hand and hangs his head low, wonders what would happen if someone saw them like this.

At first, neither of them moves. They’re both scared to break this fragile thing; all movement needs to be slow and steady. Quiet and slow and steady, like in a morning forest. Jungkook startles a little when Yoongi’s hand stops being limp in his own, when the elder presses his palm a little more firmly against Jungkook’s and then pushes his hand into his sleeve, meeting hot, sensitive skin. Jungkook shivers bodily, all hairs standing on end, and it makes the faintest breathless grin tug at the corner of Yoongi’s mouth.

Yoongi’s index finger and thumb press coldly into Jungkook’s pulse point, and Jungkook moves his hand to accommodate, holds Yoongi’s wrist in his palm. His pulse is slow, worryingly irregular, the pulse of someone with low blood pressure who hasn’t been sleeping or eating enough in late fall.  And Jungkook, always a contrast. He knows he’s all heightened senses, warmth beneath the skin, his pulse must be racing because Yoongi is so close now, leaning into his side. Closer than they’ve ever been, maybe. They both watch their hands in Jungkook’s lap. Jungkook can hear Yoongi’s breath on his ear, and turns his head reflexively, and they look at each other.

Eye contact; a dangerous thing. A beautiful thing.

And then they kiss. Suddenly but consensually gravitate towards each other until their lips meet, their minds in sync.

It’s thoughtful, kind of. Hesitant, deliberate, like the little dance of their hands earlier; it’s more breath than flesh first, both their lips a little dry and Jungkook shy of too much movement, stress still in his jaw and shoulders. But Yoongi’s lips are surprisingly warm contrary to his cold hand on Jungkook’s cheek, the kiss is warm and wonderful and slow as Yoongi twists in his seated position to reach the younger.

His breathing coming deeply through his nose, Jungkook takes his time before he touches Yoongi, right hand tangling clumsily in the elder’s hair, and it’s so soft between his fingers that Jungkook lets out a sigh and buries his hand deeper into it, and Yoongi takes the opportunity to deepen the kiss, licking shamelessly into Jungkook’s mouth. All Jungkook can taste now is the smoke on Yoongi’s tongue and he hates what it means but he also loves it, it tastes like the pink color of strawberry milk. He feels lightheaded, whimpers softly.  Jungkook knows all Yoongi will be able to taste on his tongue is the faint afterglow of toothpaste, but Yoongi doesn’t seem to care, he kisses Jungkook thoroughly, hums low in his throat as he pulls back for a moment to stub the cigarette out for good. Jungkook watches dazedly as Yoongi turns back around and slides a hand up his chest with a shy, wanting glint in his eye and pulls Jungkook back in by his neck.

They’ve never been closer, Jungkook is sure of it. He can’t recall how he ever doubted this.

This right here, it’s not what he imagined kissing Yoongi would feel like, and he has imagined it lots. He was pretty sure that, was it to ever happen, it would be after some award show or party, intoxicated, free of meaning. And this is everything but. Jungkook isn’t drunk, and neither is Yoongi, and they’re both fully aware what they’re doing and of the consequences it could potentially have, and it feels like so much more than it should. Yoongi kisses heavy, and there’s so much urgency and pent-up need in the way his fingers dig into the skin of Jungkook’s neck that Jungkook, on top of feeling hot all over, muffling soft moans into Yoongi’s mouth, isn’t sure for just how long Yoongi has wanted this.

Which only makes it much more confusing when Yoongi’s hands, which have moved to the front of the hoodie, suddenly push him away, and Yoongi pulls back. That’s when Jungkook notices the dampness of his own cheeks, notices the puffiness of Yoongi’s eyes, and thinks oh no.

Yoongi grabs his lighter and cigarettes without a word, jumps up and runs inside.

Jungkook remains seated on the balcony, out of breath, eyes wide, trying to wrap his mind around how quickly Yoongi has changed his mind, how quickly situations can tip over edges without salvation. He can hear Yoongi in the hallway, pulling on his shoes and grabbing his keys, sniffling and opening the door, then throwing it shut.

And Jungkook knows it’s no use, so he doesn’t follow him.  The front door opens eleven floors down and Jungkook watches Yoongi run away into the night, wiping his face with the hem of his t-shirt.

He doesn’t know for how long he stays where he is in the wind on the balcony with a dull ache in his chest, but at some point, he collects the butts of Yoongi’s cigarettes and goes inside, throws them in the trash. He closes the screen door; he peels off Namjoon’s hoodie and places it over the back of the couch, and he goes back to bed.

Jungkook wakes up at the crack of dawn, when Namjoon shouts through the whole apartment which one of them is a smoker and stole his hoodie. He wakes up, and he realizes that curled around his waist is a skinny arm, and someone is breathing softly against his neck, softly and slowly, the breath of someone sleeping deeply.

He knows it’s Yoongi even before he turns onto his side carefully to eye the other.

Parted strawberry-milk lips and purple circles beneath his eyes, skin soft. There’s no tension or awareness there, and he doesn’t look like he’s going to wake up anytime soon. Jungkook figures he must have really needed this night’s rest; he unplugs his phone, mutes it and opens Instagram and lets Yoongi curl back into his side sleepily.  He lets him, because he doesn’t mind. He’s somewhat angry, sure, but he trusts that Yoongi will apologize later, and for now, he’s just glad to be close to him.

Closer than ever, maybe.

Thank you for reading!! Hate on me for mistakes and controversies.

[softboywriting]

Safe and Sound | Part Ten| Werewolf Shawn AU

Summary: You’re a human living within a pack of werewolves. When another supernatural being comes for you, Shawn takes it personally. He will do what ever it takes to keep you safe and sound.

Blog Tag for This Fic

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine

| Masterlist |

Shawn stalks across the kitchen and scoops you up, putting you over his shoulder. He’s careful of the bandages on your back, looping his arm under your butt for support instead of your lower back. You squeal, smacking his back as he walks you up the stairs to his bedroom.

“Put me down! Shawn!” you complain, relentlessly smacking his back. He doesn’t seem to care, only chuckles at your efforts. He sets you down carefully on your butt on the bed. “I can sleep in my own room now,” you huff playfully.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

You cross your arms and stand up, right against his chest. “I’d rather I did. Can’t risk you bumping my back while I sleep.”

The logic of your words makes Shawn’s face fall. He obviously hadn’t thought about that. “Fine...but I’m still not letting you sleep completely alone.”

“Shawn!” you sigh exasperatedly. “I can sleep alone. I’m fine. The wendigo is dead.”

“I just have a feeling it’s not over yet. It just seems like...like it was too easy?” Shawn crosses the room and looks out of his bedroom window to the treeline. “And Matt isn’t back yet. He’s not stupid, he wouldn’t have taken on the wendigo by himself. I swear when Matt left we were still tracking it...when I told him to go back to the house...” Shawn leans against the window sill, face scrunched up in thought. “I told him to go back in case we lost it completely. It couldn’t have attacked him, he ran away from us, not toward the scent.”

You cross the room and lay your hand on Shawn’s arm. “You really think something else is going on? Could there be two wendigos?”

Shawn shakes his head, looking at you softly. “No, they aren’t pack creatures. They’re like betta fish, get them too close together and it’s a fight to the death. I don’t think he was hurt either. We hadn’t gotten that close to the damn thing yet.”

“I wonder if there is something else in the woods,” you mumble, eyes scanning the dark treeline. It wasn’t as if you would see anything, but maybe something would pop out. “Maybe Matt got lost.”

“As unlikely as it seems, I hope so too. Sam will find him. If anyone can it’s her.” Shawn turns, blocking the window and standing in front of you. “Don’t worry about it now. You need sleep. It’s almost 2am.” He puts his hands on your shoulders and turns you around to march you out of his bedroom. “C’mon, to bed with you.”

“Hey!” you giggle as he walks you toward the stairs, stopping just as you reach the first step. “Why’d you stop?”

Shawn’s hand leaves your shoulder to slide across your chest in a one armed hug. He steps close, but not close enough to press his chest into your back. “I don’t want you to sleep downstairs yet. Please... just sleep in my room one more night.”

“Shawn...I don’t want to risk you hitting my back on accident.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor when I come to bed.”

You sigh softly, knowing he wouldn’t give up until you caved and said yes. You were too tired to fight him, besides, you would rather sleep in his big warm bed than your own small one so far away from him. Not that you would tell him that just yet, if it wasn’t already obvious. “Alright, fine. But absolutely no cuddling. You have to keep your word and stay on the floor.”

“Yes ma’am,” he mumbles as he presses a kiss to the back of your head. The gesture makes your heart melt. Knowing he is so gone for you as to listen to you and do what you said. You would make a soft alpha out of him yet.

He walks you back to his room, pausing and grabbing a couple extra blankets from the hall closet for his floor bed. You look around his room for something else to wear as soon as you walk back in. The shirt you had on was kind of too restricting to be comfortable against the gauze on your back. Shawn picks up on what you want and pulls a tee from his dresser. “Here, this should be comfortable,” he says as he hands it to you.

You turn around, facing the bed as you take off your shirt. You toss it aside and stand there, bareback to Shawn and you know he’s staring. You can’t see him, but you know. His gaze is nearly tangible and it makes you flush a little. It takes you just a moment to get his tee facing the right way and able to be pulled over your head. As you do so you can hear Shawn step up behind you and you freeze with the shirt halfway up your arms.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispers, fingertips ghosting over your hips. You swallow the lump in your throat and try not to get too turned on by his simple touch. You pull the shirt up and over your head before you turn and take his hands. He’s smiling, a little satisfied little quirk of his lips. You ignore it, thinking he probably knows he almost turned you on so easily. You squeeze his hands and bring them up to your chest as you stand up on your tiptoes to give him a little kiss.

“Pup, please,” he mumbles, chasing your lips as you pull away.

“I’ll give you another if you tell me why you call me pup,” you grin playfully, hands slipping out of his. “No lying either.”

Shawn runs and hand through his hair, cheeks turning the slightest pink. He obviously wanted the second kiss but he didn’t want to tell you what you wanted to know. Was it really so embarrassing? “Uh, it’s a um, a term of endearment?”

“Well I got that much genius. I want to know what kind, why?”

“I call you pup because,” he closes his eyes, tilting his head back and you take a step back to sit on the edge of the bed and wait for him to explain. “I call you pup because it’s like, you’re like this cute little...” He sighs, borderline growls as he tries to spit out the words. “It’s like...it’s like baby? Y’know how guys call thier girlfriends babe or baby?”

“Mmmhmm,” you hum, looking up at him. “So you’ve been calling me baby this whole time?”

“Yeah,” Shawn mumbles, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “It’s probably weird. I shouldn’t do it huh?”

You shake your head and reach out for him. He steps close and leans down as you cup his face and kiss him lightly. “I don’t mind it. I was just curious.”

The living room door slams closed and you jump, gripping Shawn’s arm instinctively. “Sounds like someone’s here,” you mumble.

Shawn runs his hand through your hair and cups the back of your neck, leaning you forward so he can steal one more kiss. “Get some sleep. I’ll come to bed in a bit,” he murmurs against your forehead as he places a kiss there too.

___________

Shawn comes to bed an hour or so later. You wake up for just a second when his door opens, scraping the floor a bit before he realizes his mistake. He really need to fix that thing. He leans over the bed and kisses your head before laying on the pile of blankets on the floor.

It’s sometime later that you wake up, the early morning sun is just barely illuminating the bedroom. You’re on your stomach, arm hanging off the bed. His fingers are curled around two of yours and he’s snoring softly, more of a purr than a proper snore. You just lay there, cheek squished against the pillow as you stare at the big alpha laying on the floor beside you.

“Mmm, stop,” Shawn mumbles as you pull your fingers away from his grasp. “Come back,” he says, reaching up aimlessly as if to grab your hand again. He wakes himself up as his arm flops down onto his chest. Suddenly he’s sitting up, staring at you snuggled into his pillow, wide awake.

“You okay there?” you giggle sleepily and he just runs a hand through his hair. His cheeks turn a little pink and you giggle more. The amount of blushing you caused him was astounding. You had never seen him this soft since you met him.

Shawn gets up, stands beside the bed and shoo’s you with his hands. You take the cue and scoot over, your back to the wall. “Fuck the floor,” he grumbles as he lays on his side of the bed and looks at you.

“Such a potty mouth,” you say jokingly and he rolls his eyes with a growl. “Not sure I wanna kiss a potty mouth.”

Shawn immediately stops growling and puts his arm over his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay I was only teasing you.” You reach out and run your hand over his chest, slow strokes up and down from his navel to his collarbones. He remains quiet, mouth opening as he lets out a little huff. He does it again and you watch him curiously. You keep your hand going, up and down and up and down. The huffs turn into little rumbles, soft little purrs as he clenches his jaw and his body betrays him. He was obviously fighting it.

“Stop,” he says weakly, but makes no move to physically stop you.

“You’re purring,” you giggle, speeding up your rubbing. Suddenly Shawn’s hand covers yours over his upper chest and he turns his head to look at you. “I didn’t know wolves purred.”

“We do. Just...not often.”

“Are you embarrassed? It’s okay I won’t tell anyone.”

Shawn rolls onto his side to face you and reaches up, running his finger from your forehead down the bridge of your nose. He strokes your nose this way as he says, “I’m not embarrassed. I’m jealous because I can’t make you purr.”

“I’m sure you could if you tried.”

Shawn smirks and slides his hand into your hair as he massages his fingers through it gently. “I know I could. Wanna see if I can?”

His words make you flush but this was no time. Your back was aching and you’re sure you need new dressings, not to mention a shower. “Not now. I need to get up and change my bandages,” you say with a little smile.

Shawn groans and lets his hand fall to the bed as he rolls onto his back. “Alright. Come on then. To the bathroom we go.”

[joeybelle]

Starlight - Chapter 23

Relationship: Cassian Andor / Original Female Character

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Strong language, Background character death, Blood, Violence

Tags: Pre-Rogue One, Romance, Feels, Hurt-Comfort, Canon-compliant Violence, Blood, Background character death

The blaster pistol hung heavily on her belt. The whirring sound of the ship’s engine as it exited hyperspace was almost deafening, but Cora was thankful for it somewhat muffled the ringing in her ears. Her hand clutched the support railing at the back of the ship, trying to keep her balance.

She had forgotten how incredibly confining transport ships could be, with more people crammed inside than it would be comfortable. Some silent, some nervously chatting, they were all waiting for the incoming battle. She never thought that she’d be sent into action so soon after the assessment, but this is what she’d signed up for and this wasn't the time to get cold feet. Not when people were dying.

The orders came as she was changing some bandages in the med bay. They told her one of their outposts had been attacked by imperial forces and were currently under siege, so they called for backup. Some of them were gravely wounded, and that’s where she came in. She dropped everything, changed into her combat uniform and joined the others in the crowded transport ship. She was the only medic.

She knew that by the time they reached the planet’s atmosphere she was already deathly pale, but fortunately her hands weren’t shaking and she didn’t feel like she was going to faint anytime soon. Which was great, because she didn’t really want to embarrass herself in front of all of those soldiers. She really wished it was just her and Cassian, like on the other missions she had been part of, so she didn’t have to fear being an embarrassment. She’d even take K2’s snarky comments any day.

Her comm buzzed and she heard Cassian’s voice, breaking her train of thought. “Are you alright?” he asked, sounding weary.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice cracking a little. “Yes, I’m ok.” She repeated, this time making an effort to control her voice and sound up to the task at hand.

“Don’t worry too much. I’ve just landed and with the other two incoming ships we have enough troops to win this quick and clean.”

She sighed, relieved. He was going to be there after all. It was a small relief, but comforting nonetheless. “Did you manage to contact the ones inside?” she asked, not wanting to waste too much time with her own feelings. She had a job to do after all.

“Yeah, they’ve got a few wounded. Their medic’s down. Come find me once you land and I’ll put you in direct contact with them.”

“Understood.”

“Good luck, Doctor.”

“Good luck to you too, Captain.”

The connection ended with a faint buzz. She looked at the soldiers around her. They were readying their weapons, tension almost tangible in the air. She held tight onto the railing and closed her eyes once the ship entered the dense atmosphere, wishing she were still at home, changing bandages and not this close to a battlefield.

The sudden rush of air that hit her in the face once the main hatch was opened felt wet and warm, making it hard to breathe. It reminded her of the first time the landed on Yavin 4, and how hard she adjusted to it. This time it felt worse, so Cora gritted her teeth and got off the ship.

She found Cassian near the command post. How they managed to install one so quickly, along with a portable med bay, Cora didn’t know, but she was impressed. With their huge, well equipped battleships, the Empire usually didn’t bother.

“What’s the plan, Captain?” she asked, joining Cassian in one of the tents. He looked just as tired as he sounded, and Cora made an effort to stop herself from hugging him in front of everyone.

“Doctor.” He greeted her with a curt nod, but then turned around to another captain that Cora only vaguely recognized. “They have maybe three stormtrooper units and a heavy weapons squad,” he started explaining, and although Cora wasn't sure if this was addressed to her too, she stuck around listening. “Their air support has already been neutralized by our X-wings, but that still leaves a lot of troops between us and the outpost. We have Garris pushing on the right side, but I want you,” he said, gesturing towards the captain, “to take your team and try to blow up the laser cannon on the left. The shield is weakened, but still holding and we can’t do anything with it shooting at the troops.” The captain nodded and hurriedly left the tent.

“What do I do?” Cora asked, once they were alone again. She could hear the noise coming from the battlefield, but since the tent was a little bit sheltered, she couldn't see it. She tried very hard not to imagine what horrors were happening just a few meters ahead.

“You stay back for now,” he said, fiddling with a comm unit. “You’ll have to wait here until we manage to secure the area and get the injured out.”

“Is there no way to get me inside before that?”

He looked up at her and frowned. “They’re surrounded. Unless you know of a way to teleport you inside, there’s nothing I can do.” The tone he used was really derisive and Cora scoffed. She realized that her questions may have sounded stupid, and he was definitely tired and stressed, but there was no need to treat her with contempt. “And even then, I still wouldn’t let you go in as long as they’re still shooting at the base.”

“So they’re still shooting at the people trapped inside?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think we could get to them in time?”

“We’ll do our best.”

It didn’t sound very convincing, but she knew Cassian was doing everything he could to get them out safely. She just hated that she had to wait around doing nothing while people could be dying. She really wished she could do more. Even joining the soldiers on the battlefield sounded better than just doing nothing. Unfortunately, she knew that would only get her injured before she could actually be of any use.

She sighed. “Is there a way for me to contact them, at least?” If she couldn’t physically be there, at least she wanted to be kept in the loop. Maybe she could somewhat remotely manage the situation.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m working on,” he said, and continued working on the comm.

It didn’t take long for him to make the connection and put Cora in contact with the men on the other side of the war zone. Unfortunately, the kid that picked up didn’t seem to understand much of what she was telling him and in his nervousness wasn’t being very helpful.

“So the man shot in the leg,” she started asking for for the third time, before he interrupted her once again.

“He’s bleeding a lot,” he almost cried in the comm, and although her heart was breaking for him, she really needed to know if his femoral artery had been severed. By the way he described everyone, the man with the wounded leg was the one that required immediate medical attention.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard she tried explaining to him how to tell arterial blood apart from venous one, he was way too agitated to follow her directions. She covered her eyes with her hand and almost wailed in despair. The feeling of powerlessness was overwhelming. She needed to do something.

“Is there no one else around you that can talk to me?” she eventually said, seeing that the kid was losing all remaining composure, and she didn’t have time for that.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, after a few precious moments of silence. “Captain Harper here. How can I help you Doc?”

“The man shot in the leg, is he still alive? Is he still conscious?”

“Yes,” she replied, her voice calm and collected. “He’s still conscious, but not looking too good, He’s losing a lot of blood.”

“Do you know how to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Already on it.”

Cora breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe they would survive until they were rescued, but who knew when that would happen. Cassian had left immediately after handing her the comm, and now he was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t need him to babysit her, but she would have liked to be kept in the loop. Like this, just waiting for things to happen while people bled to death, she was useless.

“What’s the situation in there?” Cora asked the captain, hoping she would get a glimpse of what was happening behind the outpost’s walls.

“Umm… Pretty bad, I’d say. But we can see you guys advancing. I hope you can get here in time,” she said with a sigh, and Cora felt her heart sink.

“We’ll make sure to be there in time,” Cora said, full of determination, hoping the woman couldn’t tell that she was faking it. “Do you know the place well, Captain?”

“No, not really, I’ve only been stationed here a couple of weeks.”

“Is there anyone there that knows the outpost better?”

“Yes, and I might be able to put you though,” she said, and Cora thanked her.

“Lieutenant Berav speaking. Ma’am, how can I help you?” a man’s voice replied after more moments of silence.

“Is there any way for me to get inside the outpost, before our troops arrive there?” She didn’t want to waste any more time, knowing that any wasted second might cost some of the injured their lives. “A different entrance, maybe?” she asked, feeling like it was a stupid question the moment the words left her mouth.

“There may be,” he replied to Cora’s surprise. “There’s a hidden trench on the left side of the battlefield. The entrance is right next to that tall, red boulder. It could offer you enough shelter to get to the gates, but you have to be fast. Plus, you’ll be fully exposed before entering it, and upon exit, so I don’t think it’s a viable option unless you can somehow distract them.”

Cora walked around the tent, closing in to the area where she could hear blasters shooting. A single look at the battlefield made her skin crawl and she had to force herself to keep looking, so she could identify the area described to her.

“The one close to the cannon?” she asked, scanning the area.

“Yeah, that one,” the man said, and for a brief moment his voice was covered by the sound of an explosion. Cora almost ran back to the safety of the tents. “The entrance is right next it, you’ll be able to jump into it quickly. But it won’t give you cover for long.”

Cora sighed. “I’ll see what I can do. Please keep everyone alive until I get there.”

“Please tell them to hurry. I don’t know how much longer we can hold the lines.” His words felt like a dagger stabbing though her heart. He sounded exhausted and almost hopeless when he broke the connection, and Cora felt like it was imperative to try and do something.

She had to find Cassian. He’d know what to do. He wouldn’t abandon his comrades, surrounded by enemies, wounded and exhausted. If he knew about the trench maybe he’d send her and a small team to take care of the soldiers trapped inside, until the rest of the troops could defeat the Imperial forces. But the problem was, where to find him? The clock was ticking.

Asking around the makeshift base, she eventually found him near the front-line, talking on the comm.

“What are you doing here?” he hissed, when he saw her approaching. “I told you to wait right where I left you.”

“I talked to the people inside,” she said, ignoring his harsh tone. She expected him to be annoyed, after all her was under a lot of pressure. “They have at least five wounded, one of which is bleeding profusely. I’m not sure we’ll make it in time for me to be able to save their lives.”

“We’re doing whatever we can,” he said, looking at the battlefield, suddenly looking a lot older than he was. Cora felt really sorry for him. He was carrying the weight of the battle on his shoulders and she was certain he would blame himself for every death. In that moment she really wished she could be more useful to him, carry a bit of this weight herself, but she was just a doctor so the only thing she could do was to try and save lives.

“There’s a hidden trench that crosses the battlefield,” she said, swallowing the lump in her throat as his head snapped back to look at her. “It could give us enough cover to get to them before the fight is over. I could get to them in time,” she said, making an effort to keep her voice steady, not betraying how scared she actually was.

“That’s out of the question.”

“Cassian, just listen.”

“No,” he cut her off, without making any effort to listen to her idea. “I know what you are talking about, and there’s no way of getting there in one piece.”

“But if we created a diversion…”

“Cora, it goes straight through the middle of the battlefield, you’d be killed in minutes. I’m not risking your life by letting you join the fight.”

Any other day she would have agreed with him. After all, she knew she wasn’t ready to fight, and she’d either die or get someone else killed, but today it was a different story. She had left the Empire because she couldn’t stand to watch people die while she did nothing about it. She couldn’t do it now either, even if it meant risking her own life to save others. In the time spent with the Rebellion she had gotten really attached to the fighters, and even though she didn’t personally know the men inside, she felt responsible for them.

“But people are dying, Cassian,” she pleaded with him, hoping that he would soften up, but his reply was even harsher than before.

“This is a war, Doctor,” he said, and she could feel his severe tone cutting like a knife. “People are dying every day. You’ve got to get used to it. Now go back to the tent, and wait there until someone comes for you. It’s an order,” he said, looking her in the eye, his dark, piercing gaze making her soul hurt. “Understood?”

“Yes, Captain,” she replied, her voice cracking a little. “I’ll wait in the back until everyone is too dead for me to make any difference.”

Cora turned around and walked away, not waiting for any other reply from Cassian. She was angry and hurt. She didn’t really understand how he could be so passive in a situation like this. He never struck her as the type of person who would wait and not try every solution possible, no matter how risky, even if that meant putting himself in danger. He was a man of action, she was sure of that. Waiting was killing him, just as much as it was killing her, but she was certain he was trying to shelter her. He didn’t trust her to do it. To be honest, she didn’t really trust herself either, but right now wasn’t the time for doubts. It was time for action.

But he had given her an order, and there was nothing she could do besides going back to the tent and waiting for the battle to end. Disheartened, she sat on a chair and grabbed the comm.

After a few moments of fiddling she was able to access the outposts frequency once again. This time, Captain Harper picked up.

“How are the injured soldiers?” Cora asked, feeling like she was going to get a headache soon.

“Still injured,” the woman replied, a little snappy, before she realized what she had said and softened her tone. “I am sorry, Doctor,” she apologized. “It’s been a long day. They’re not doing good. None of us is. Two more people have been shot. I don’t think we can hold the line much longer.”

“We are doing everything we can to get to you,” Cora assured her, although she wasn’t convinced they were doing enough—that she was doing enough. “We’ll get to you soon.”

“I hope so,” the captain said, but Cora felt there was no more hope in her voice.

A loud explosion broke the connection and made Cora jump to her feet and run to the edge of the safe zone. The cannon that the rebel army still hadn't been able to neutralize, had pierced the wall surrounding the outpost, sheltering them from direct fire. Right now, the Imperial troops could just pour through the opening and kill everyone inside. She had to do something. But before she had time to move away, another explosion shook the ground. Once the smoke and dust cleared a little she saw that the imperial blaster cannon had been taken out. By the X-wings or by the ground troops, she didn’t know, but it seemed to be a little too late for the people inside, since most of their defenses were already down. However, this could provide enough of a distraction for her to reach the injured.

Cora took the comm and accessed their frequency one last time. “Are you guys alright?” she asked a pretty shaken Captain Harper.

“We’ve had better days…” she replied, sounding incredibly tired. “We’ve lost some more men. A couple more are incapacitated, but we’re standing our ground.”

“Can you offer me some cover? I’m coming though the trench,” Cora said, without even thinking about the dangers, or that she was in fact breaking a direct order, or that Cassian would be pissed even if it wasn’t one.

“We’ll try. Good luck, Doctor.” No, she wasn’t thinking about any of those things when she fastened the medipack on her back, pulled out her blaster, and readied a flash grenade.

She took a pair of macrobinoculars off the table and scanned the area. She could see the exact place where she had to enter the trench and the general direction she should be headed to. She could see the Imperials retreating, now that their cannon was no longer functional. Now was her chance, she thought, as she placed the binoculars back on the table and started hurrying towards the battlefield.

Once she reached the edge of the field, she started running, before she had the time to think it through and change her mind. She ran between soldiers, she ran between blaster shots and flames. She wasn’t sure how she’d managed to reach the trench, but she did, in one piece. She only allowed herself a moment to just stop and breathe, because every second she was wasting could mean that someone’s chances to survive dwindled. She crouched, trying to stay as hidden as possible, and hurried through the trench. It felt like it was never ending. She could hear fighting above her head, the strident sound of the blaster shots sending cold shivers down her spine. Every explosion shook her to the core, making her fear that it would be the last thing she’d hear. She was frightened, but she kept going.

Eventually, the trench opened, leaving her exposed once again. She could see some stormtroopers blocking her way to the outpost. The fastest way to get inside, she figured, would be through the hole blasted in the wall by the canon, but even so she would have to get past the troopers first. She squeezed the grenade in her hand. If only she could throw it hard enough to reach them, it would provide enough of a distraction for them to not notice her running around them, she hoped.

But before she had time to panic, someone started shooting at them. She didn’t know if it was coming from inside the outpost—the soldiers trapped in there offering the much needed cover—or someone from behind her that just wanted to take them down, but she didn’t wait to find out. She started running again, heading for the opening in the wall. She ran so close to the troopers, they they could kick her in the face if they noticed her. She took out the pin and dropped the flash grenade at their feet, stopping them from shooting her in the back as she ran past them.

The sound of the grenade detonation was lost in the cacophony of noises on the battlefield. The only thought present in Cora’s head was to get to safety, everything else was a blur. She kept running until she reached the hole in the wall. Strong arms helped her climb though and suddenly she was out of the line of fire.

“It’s good to see you in one piece, Doctor. It was quite a crazy move you pulled out there,” said a woman, that by her voice and accent Cora identified her as Captain Harper.

“I’m glad to be here,” she replied, deciding that it wasn’t quite the time to think about the crazy thing she had done.

However, Cassian coming through the same hole she did, looking angry and disheveled, looking her straight in the eye made the blood freeze in her veins. She knew she’d fucked up, so she looked away, deciding that she’d do her job first, and face the consequences later. “Where are the injured?” she asked Captain Harper.

She was guided through a poorly lit corridor to a large room. Laying around or slumped against the wall there were nine people, with varying degrees of injuries, moaning and breathing heavily. The air felt heavy with the smell of blood and death.

Cora pulled on a pair of sterile gloves and went to work. A couple were unconscious so she hurried to look at them first. One was already dead. The medic, she found out from the insignia on her uniform. She had a pretty ugly wound on her neck, which meant she’d bled out quickly. She had been dead a while, maybe before they’d even landed. There was nothing Cora could do for her, besides covering her with a sheet.

She moved on. The other unconscious man was the one with the injured leg. The wound was ugly, to say the least. There wasn’t much Cora could do about it but to try and find the nicked vein and stop the bleeding. The tourniquet was still in place, and that was the only thing keeping him alive, but by the paleness and coldness of his skin, he’d lost a lot of blood. He also had a wounded shoulder, but that seemed to be less severe. Cora took off her medipack and started working.

“It’s good to see you, Doc,” the man seated next to her said, looking at her with kind eyes. He didn’t look very good. He didn’t look good at all. When she first checked on the injured he vehemently shooed her away, assuring her his wounds were only superficial, but now that she looked at him again she started to doubt that. “Were you able to cross through the trench? I can still hear them fighting outside.”

“Lieutenant Berav?” He nodded weakly and Cora’s looked him over. He was dirty, dust staining his skin and pieces of rock stuck in his beard. His left hand was tucked into his jacket and there was red staining his lips. His breathing was laboured. He didn’t look fine at all. “Would you please remove your jacket for me, Lieutenant?” Cora asked, keeping her voice as steady as possible, while she fixed an IV sleeve on the unconscious man.

“I’m fine, Doctor, don’t you worry about me,” the older man said with a smile.

“You don’t look fine at all,” she said, working as fast as she could on the other man’s leg. Time was ticking and she knew she couldn’t take care of all of them. She had only two hands and it wasn’t enough. “Could you please remove your jacket?”

The man laughed, which then turned into a coughing fit. Cora looked at him with the corner of her eye. There was more blood foaming in the corner of his mouth. He must have had blood in his lungs. She took a break from what she was doing and grabbed the lieutenant’s jacket, pulling it aside to reveal what he was hiding. The sight made her lose all the remaining colour in her face: his whole torso was full of shrapnel.

“The cannon took out the blaster turret I was using. It could have been worse,” he said and smiled, but Cora was sure it couldn’t have been worse. There was no way she could safely take out the shrapnel from the man’s chest in a poorly lit, stone room in the middle of nowhere. She could only hope that it didn’t hit any major artery and he would survive until he could be transported back to base. But even then, she still couldn’t say for sure if he’d survive.

“I’ll put you on an IV right away,” she said, still trying to stabilize the unconscious man. He had lost quite a lot of blood and she wasn’t sure, even with a tourniquet in place, that she could save his life. His leg, almost certainly not. “I have some plasma on hand…”

“Don’t bother, Doctor, I’m already a goner,” he said, with a resigned smile on his face. “Save the meds for someone who has more chances than me. And take care of the kid. Maybe he’ll survive.”

“You’ll both survive,” Cora said, but she could sense the lie in her words, as she hurriedly forced an IV sleeve over his forearm and a thermal blanket around him despite his protests.

She wasn’t sure if any of them would survive. She could still hear the fight going on outside and there was no indication that it would be over anytime soon. From time to time she could hear voices coming from the hallway, or the door, but she didn’t have the time to lift her head up and look. The Imperial troops could be pouring in any second, shooting them all dead. At least that would be quick.

“I’ll make sure you’ll all survive,” she said to herself, trying to mend the nicked vein in the younger man’s leg, his blood slowly seeping into the fabric of her tunic, staining the sleeves above her gloves.

“It’s alright, Doc, you don’t have to save everyone,” Lieutenant Berav muttered, closing his eyes. “The world is already getting colder. And darker,” he said, between shallow breaths. Cora spared only one second to look at him. His looked clammy and his lips had taken a bluish tint. Maybe if she had a little more time… But she knew she didn’t. Even with the plasma pumping into his veins she knew that for him, she had arrived too late.

“Hang in there, Lieutenant,” she said, blinking rapidly to keep the tears at bay.

“You know, I have a boy about his age,” he said, moving his bloody hand a little to point at the unconscious man. “He was a little kid when his mom and I broke up. She took him with her. Last time I’ve heard about them they were living in a small village near Arden. She had two more daughters. Twins.”

“You could visit them when all this is over,” Cora said without lifting her eyes. She had no idea where that place was, but there was no reason she couldn’t try and give him a little hope.

“I will visit them soon.” His voice was becoming weak and raspy, and Cora tried to hurry patching the man’s leg to try and help him too. Although she knew she couldn’t do much, she still hoped she could miraculously keep him alive until they arrived back at base. Unfortunately, there were others needing medical attention too, and she knew she would have to prioritize. “They’re waiting for me on the other side,” he whispered, and she felt her heart break.

Cora didn’t stop—couldn’t stop—working, but she could feel the familiar pang in the back of her throat, when tears were threatening to fall. She tried focusing on what she was doing, because any little mistake could cost someone’s life.

“There was a stream in front of our house,” he spoke after a short pause, his words already slurring. He kept his eyes closed and Cora forced herself to not look at him too long, for she could already feel the tears running down her face. “There was… a beautiful stream…”

He was silent after that. Cora didn’t know exactly when he passed away, nor did she want to. When she had finally managed to stop the hemorrhage in the other soldier’s leg, and stabilize him enough so that she was sure he would survive being transported back to base and then looked at Lieutenant Berav, he was already dead. She pulled up the blanket to cover his face and moved on to the next patient.

The smell of blood and disinfectant was rapidly filling the room. It had stained her sleeves and tunic, seeping slowly though the fabric until it reached her skin. She could feel cold sweat forming on her forehead, and her palms were clammy under the gloves, but she couldn’t stop. She was running on adrenaline only, her world having narrowed to the task ahead of her. She kept stitching and patching and balancing fluids, completely oblivious to what was happening around her.

At some point someone she didn’t recognize told her they were starting to take the injured to the ships and that she was needed outside, where more wounded soldiers awaited her. She did her job, even when her hands started to hurt and her knees bruised from kneeling on the gravel. She could still hear it in her head, the man’s last whisper. ‘There was a stream in front of our house.’ She wondered what she’d be thinking of before she died. Would life flash before her eyes or would she be stuck in a memory from her childhood? Was her mother waiting for her on the other side?

She wiped her still tear stained face with her sleeve, before realizing the only thing she had done was to smear it with blood. She wanted to rip off her uniform and throw it away, to shower until she could get the smell of blood out of her nostrils. To try and wash away the guilt with a bottle of something strong and mind-numbing.

She looked around for Cassian, but he was nowhere to be seen. She felt a pang in her heart at the thought that he could have died in the fire, but she made an effort to push it away. No, he wouldn’t die that easily, he couldn’t die that easily. He’d always survive, and come to her to fix his wounds every time. She pulled off her blood stained gloves and looked at her hands. There was blood on them too, stuck in the creases made by her skin and under her nails. She pulled on a new pair and moved on.

She spent the whole journey back to base with her eyes glued to a monitor, hoping that the soldiers would survive long enough to get home. She felt powerless, watching the beeps and the numbers. She had no idea how many had died, she’d stopped counting, deciding to focus on those who had survived instead, but she couldn't push away the thought that maybe if she had gotten to them faster, and she’d somehow worked harder and if she’d been better, more would have survived. Maybe she could have stabilized the lieutenant enough to get him back to base. The logical part of her brain knew there was no way she could have done that, that she had to choose which one to save, and the younger soldier with the leg hemorrhage was the logical choice, since he had more chances to live.

But she still felt responsible for every death on that battlefield. She still blamed herself for not being able to save everyone, even if that meant somehow cloning herself. The blood was drying on her uniform, making it hard and scratchy. She couldn’t wait to rip it off and take a shower, hoping to get rid of the smell. The everpresent smell of blood.

Back at the base, she followed the gurneys back to the building, but was almost instantly relieved of her duties. She insisted that she would help in the med bay, but Doctor Crane didn’t even want to hear it. She was tired and her hands hurt, but she was still running on adrenaline so she was sure she wouldn’t be able to relax anytime soon, so why not try and be useful, but the doctor dismissed her anyway.

Lost in the sea of people, she felt completely out of place. She felt so drained of energy, like her soul had been sucked out of her body. The only thing she wanted to do was to crawl into a ball and cry herself to sleep. She turned around to head to her room when she saw Cassian striding her way his face contorted into a mask of anger. It had been a very long time since she’d seen him this angry, so she knew she fucked up.

“What have you done?” he barked at her, but Cora could tell he was making an effort to stay composed. He was furious. “I specifically told you to stay behind.”

“My job,” she snapped. “It entails saving lives, not waiting around,” she mumbled and kept walking, with Cassian on her heel. She didn’t have the strength to deal with him yet so she tried getting away.

“You disobeyed a direct order.”

“It was a stupid ass order,” she raised her voice, turning around to look him in the eye. “Every second I spent waiting around lowered their chances of survival and you know it! I had to do something.”

“We were already doing something,” he almost yelled at her, but then lowered his voice, taking a step closer to her. “We were doing something. We were doing our job, and yours was to listen to my order and wait until we cleared the area.”

“My job is to save lives,” she spat in his face. “Every life lost on that battlefield is on me! You purposefully ignored a way of getting inside. Two people died because I didn’t get there in time.”

“Everyone on that battlefield is my responsibility!” he whisper-shouted. “Including you, and including the people that could have died while you pulled a stupid move like that.” Cora’s jaw dropped. “Oh, you didn’t think about that, did you?” His voice had turned threatening as he took a step closer. “You didn’t think about the people that could have died trying to protect you. No? Did you know that the only reason you made it there in one piece is because I followed you and shot everyone that had their weapons pointed at you? Did you even notice how close you were to dying? Did you?”

She hadn’t so she kept her mouth shot and swallowed the lump in her throat. She felt tears starting to form once again.

“Of course you didn’t. You were too busy playing hero.”

“I wasn’t trying to play hero,” she yelled back suddenly finding her voice, but also feeling the first tear sliding down her cheek. “I just… I just wanted to save everyone. You don’t understand…”

“I don’t understand? How do you think I would have felt if I had watched you die today!” he yelled and his voice faltered for a second. “How many people would you have saved if you were killed?” Cora didn’t reply, as tears were already streaming down her face. “You’re a doctor. Your life is more important to the Rebellion than ten soldiers—than a hundred soldiers! Because you can potentially save hundreds. But you can’t save anyone if you’re dead.”

“I know,” she yelled back and wiped the tears away, only to notice the blood on her hands once again. She straightened her back and curled her hands into fists, swallowing a sob. “I just can’t stand around and wait, biting my nails while people die just because you and the Rebellion are afraid to lose me!”

“Well, you’re going to have to,” he said, taking a few steps back. “Actually no, you won’t. No one’s going to let you go back on a battlefield after disobeying a direct order. You’d be too much of a liability,” he said, and the calm, yet biting tone of his voice hurt. “Consider yourself grounded.”

“Fuck it, I don’t care,” she spat back, but she cared. It hurt to the bone, and although she knew she had fucked up, she still thought Cassian was wrong.

“Go back to your quarters and stay there until I try and sort this mess,” he said, turning around and leaving her there.

Cora leaned on the wall and took a few deep breaths trying to stop the tears, but it was in vain. She trudged back to her quarters and collapsed into a chair, sobbing into her hands. When she managed to stop crying long enough to rip off her uniform and go into the bathroom, she looked in the mirror and noticed the smeared blood on her face. There were dried droplets on her face and hair and more blood smeared by her hands and tears. She felt like vomiting, but made an effort to get into the shower.

She cried in the shower too, vigorously scrubbing away all the blood. She could still feel it on her hands, wet and warm, seeping into her skin no matter how long she scrubbed. Once she was tired, she got out of the shower, got dressed and wrapped herself into a blanket and cried some more.

The anger slowly died down and so did the adrenaline. Now that she was thinking a little more clearly, she realized what a stupid thing she had done. She had disobeyed a direct order, which she knew would instantly kick her out of the military—in her case, send her back to the cell—but more than that she hadn’t thought about how Cassian would feel seeing her run like an idiot right across the middle of the battlefield. She hadn't thought about him at all. Of course he was responsible for everyone and of course he would try to find the best solution. He cared about everyone just as much as she did, maybe more, but he was a lot more level headed than she was. And she just put his life in danger by not thinking of any of that.

She wrapped herself tighter in the sheets, shivering as if she was cold. She wished she could fall asleep to forget about the horrible day she had just lived, but whenever she closed her eyes she could either see the dying man, bleeding and talking about his stream, or Cassian’s angry face, yelling at her in the hallways.

By the time she heard a knock on the door, she was sobbing once again. She got up and wiped away her tears, wishing she’d just misheard, and everyone would just leave her the fuck alone for the day. She hoped that they’d at least let her sleep in her own bed tonight before sending her to prison. Another part of her really wished she could see Cassian, to find a little comfort in his presence, but after the argument in the hallway she was afraid of what he’d say to her. When the second knock came she had to make an effort to go to the door instead of wrapping herself in blankets and pretending she wasn’t there.

Luckily it was just Cassian, no guards in sight. He didn’t seem to be angry anymore. At least not the searing hot anger she’d witnessed a few hours back, but Cora was still a little wary. She took a few steps back to let him in, and he did, letting the door close behind him. He stood awkwardly by the door, like he didn’t know if he was welcome anymore and even though he wasn’t saying anything, the apologetic look on his face was enough.

Cora made the first move, tentatively hugging him, and when he returned the hug she let out a sigh of relief and rested her head on his shoulder. They stood like that for a while, in complete silence, and Cora was finally able to calm down a bit and stop being on the brink of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally breaking the silence between them. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he whispered, nuzzling into her hair.

“You were right to,” Cora mumbled, pressing her nose in his shirt. He smelled like standard issue soap. “I did some dumb shit today.”

“Yeah you did. But I still should have kept calm.” He took a deep breath. “Promise me you won’t do it again.”

Cora broke the embrace and climbed back into bed, wrapping herself in the covers and leaning on the wall. “I don’t think I’ll have the chance to do it again, since I’ll be grounded for the rest of my days.” Or jailed, one more fun than the other.

Cassian followed her and took a seat at the edge of her bed, keeping her back to her. She could see his profile illuminated by the tank on the desk, and he was silent for a few moments, seeming lost in thought. “They didn’t drop you from the program yet. You’re still an emergency field doctor.”

“How?” she asked, knowing full well there was no chance they’d let her do anything after pulling a move like that.

“I didn’t tell them you disregarded a direct order.”

“You lied for me?” she said, scooting closer to him.

Frowning, he looked at her over his shoulder like he was outraged by her supposition. “Of course not,” he denied. “I just left out a few details.”

“I think that would technically still be lying,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder, enjoying the familiar feeling of his beard on her skin.

“Don’t make me regret it,” he said, and Cora could tell that despite the apparent calm on his face he was still rather hurt and angry. She couldn’t blame him, she would be angry too. “Don’t ever run off like that without telling me, because I won’t always be able to protect you.” It sounded half resentful, half like a plea, and Cora felt really guilty for making him feel like that, but she knew it would be really hard to just be patient and wait. “Promise me,” he said, looking at her over his shoulder.

Cora breathed deeply. He was asking a lot. If it was anyone else asking this of her she would just smile and say yes, but she knew he would never take an empty promise. And neither would she want to give him one.

“Can you promise me that you’ll never knowingly put your life in danger while on a mission?” she asked instead.

“Cora…” He looked at her with a really sad expression on her face and Cora already knew what he would say. “You know I can’t promise something like that.”

“Then I can’t promise something like that either,” she said, scooting back to her place, leaning on the wall, the blanket on her shoulders.

“This is my job, Cora…”

“Then quit.”

“What?” He looked at her with such a shocked expression on his face that Cora had to stifle a laugh.

“Quit and let’s run away. We can go someplace where no one knows who we are and live as farmers for the rest of our days. I can tell you that I’m completely useless, and a terrible roommate, but you’ll laugh your ass off watching me stumble and fall face first into bantha shit.” She was only half joking. Actually she wasn’t joking at all, but she already knew what his answer would be. If he said yes, though, she would pack her bags and leave without a second thought. “You could teach me how to cook.”

Cassian laughed and it seemed that the whole tension between them vanished into thin air. “You really know how to make it seem enticing,” he said, taking off his shoes and crawling into bed with her. Cora lifted her blanket to let him in besides her. Cassian put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer, softly kissing her temple. “At least promise me that you’ll listen to me on the next mission. I can’t take care of everyone if no one listens to me.”

Only now did Cora realize just how much responsibility was hanging on his shoulders and how much it affected him. If she felt guilty because she didn’t get so save someone, she didn’t even want to think how Cassian was feeling after losing so many people on that battlefield. Cora realized how selfish she had been, only thinking about her own feelings. She nodded and settled into his embrace.

“Did you know him?” she asked, after a few moments of silence. She could still smell blood whenever she breathed in. “Lieutenant Berav, did you know him?”

“Yeah,” Cassian answered, pulling her a little closer.

“He died,” she said, although she was certain he already knew that. “He was talking about his family before he passed.” There it was, the feeling that she was going to start crying once again, but she made an effort to swallow the tears. She knew she had cried more than enough, but for some reason she was really shaken by his death. Maybe he had been the catalyst for every emotion she had bottled over the past year to just start pouring out.

“I know,” Cassian whispered in her ear and kissed her temple once again. “I know.”

They didn’t speak much after that, settling into a comforting silence. Cora’s mind was still very loud, but slowly, the shouts became whispers and she was starting to doze off in Cassian’s warm embrace.

She had no idea when she fell asleep for good, or how they moved around so they’d sleep in a normal position. But what surprised her the most when she woke up in the morning, was Cassian’s sleeping figure still next to her in bed. She shifted a little and looked at the clock. It was close to her usual waking hour on a workday. Cassian would normally be long gone by this hour, so it was surprising to still see him sleeping. Well at least now she was convinced he did sleep, she thought shuffling back under the covers, nuzzling into his chest.

“Morning,” she said, once Cassian opened his eyes and looked at her with an unfocused gaze.

“Morning,” he mumbled, stretching. He glanced at the clock then settled back into bed and closed his eyes.

“Do you have work today?” Cora asked, praying for him to say no so they could both go back to sleep and spend a lazy day together, although she didn’t have much hope.

“Mhm,” he mumbled, and Cora pouted. “We have a mission debriefing after breakfast, but there’s no need to hurry just yet.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling her stomach sink. She had forgotten that she had to actually be debriefed on yesterday’s mission which meant talking directly to Draven and she knew how that would go, even without her fuck up. She was starting to feel sick already.

“Draven won’t be there,” Cassian said, knowing perfectly well what she was thinking. “He left last night. You should just stand your ground and you’ll be fine. I’ll be there to back you up.”

Cora felt really bad that he had to back her up when they both knew she was in the wrong, but she was incredibly thankful for his willingness to help her out.

“Thank you,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “And I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.”

“Yesterday, or in general?” Cora smacked him over the head and he laughed.

“It’s pretty early, should we go back to sleep?”

“What are the alternatives?”

“Well…” she said, climbing on top of him. “I might have a few ideas.”

Masterlist

[tonystarktogo]

A Lesson In (Fading) Dreams

For those of you who remember the Dragon!AU I talked about many, many months ago, here a little something (that I don’t think I’ve posted yet, though correct me if I’m wrong). You can also read it on AO3.

Summary: "Tony is five years old, when he learns that dreams don’t last. He is five years old, when he learns that monsters do." 

Howard Stark doesn't want a son. Can't afford to have a son. Yet, when the time comes, he finds himself unable to give up on a dream he had long since discarded. The question that remains unanswered is who will pray the higher price for his choice in the end: his son or the world that won't succeed in breaking him if Howard has anything to say about it. 

“Once there was a dragon, who guarded what was most precious to him, with a love so deep, a fire so strong, even the Fates themselves would not dare to incur their wrath,“ Maria reads, an unusually soft smile on her lips. It gives new life to her features that are too often banned into stillness by social protocol and the ever looming knowledge of what would happen, should either of them ever lose control of their emotions.

Howard stills, leans his shoulder against the door frame, waiting. His wife doesn’t acknowledge his presence, still focused on the tale she is reading, as engaged as the young child curled into her side.

“And so the Fates granted them the gift of an outer shell not unlike their treasure’s, so they would live together for as long as time allowed.”

As beautiful as Maria is when wrapped in the finest silk and most expensive jewellery, a gentle smile on her lips that Howard knows to be more destructive than any weapon his capable hands have managed to build, he prefers to see her like this. Dressed in a silk robe three sizes too big—stolen from his closet, no doubt—her hair held together in a lose bun, naked feet tugged under their son’s bright red—a royal colour, she had insisted—blanket, one hand holding a book, the other carding through the boy’s unruly hair, she looks settled and content in a way Howard rarely gets to appreciate anymore.

It soothes the permanent rumblings of discontent in his chest to see her, them, like this. Happy and safe. The sight is too rare, too precious, to let it go to waste.

It is only when the boy has long fallen asleep, when Maria carefully disentangles herself from the too clever hands, slides off the bed and places the book on the bedside table with a care she only ever bestows on a treasure she truly values, that Howard can bring himself to disrupt the serene mood.

“How long-“ he quietens at the glare his sharp voice earns in response, reflexively searches out the child buried under a ridiculous amount of blankets, still deeply asleep.

Far too used to loud voices perhaps, Howard contemplates, the thought accompanied by a dark tingle suspiciously reminiscent of guilt. He pushes it aside, though he indulges Maria all the same. Waits for his wife to quietly close the door. Even walks a couple of steps down the hallway before he repeats his question, uninterrupted this time.

“How long are you going to indulge this silliness?”

Maria sighs, pulls the gown tighter around her deceptively slender body. “For as long as he asks me too.” The reply is drenched in an stale annoyance, the kind born out of an argument that has been rehashed too many times, has lost all its potency and none of its importance.

“What good will it do him?” Howard growls all the same, unable to let the topic be. It is not in his nature to give in, nor in Maria’s to indulge him, and he doesn’t know whether to be grateful or exhausted by the steel lurking under his wife’s charming smile. “To fill his head with fantasies and fairy tales?”

“Antonio is but a child, Howard.” Maria shakes her head. “The world will do its very best to break him into a man as it is, the last thing he needs is for his father to do it first.”

“Soon he won’t have a choice.” The words ring cold and unforgiving in the abandoned floor, and Howard hates having to say them out loud, but he can keep them quiet even less. No problem has ever gone away by being ignored and he prides himself on providing solutions. Sometimes though, there are no good solutions, only working ones.

“It’s been three years.” Maria turns her head slightly towards him, a stubborn crease forming between her carefully plugged eyebrows. “You promised me five. Five years before he has to grow up. That is all I have asked for. You gave your word, Howard. Let him dream for now.” Her voice is soft, but there is fierce desperation in her usually cool eyes, and by the Fates, he loves this woman.

“He’s intelligent,” Howard states, instead of the ‘I know, I’m sorry’ that is lingering on the tip of his tongue. “The maids are starting to notice. We won’t be able to keep him out of the spotlight for much longer, dear. The time for dreams has passed.”

The crease between Maria’s brows deepens further, displeasure now plainly there for all to see. “It shouldn’t be this way,” she eventually answers, an echo of a rage older than time itself clinging to the words.

“He is—“ Howard breaks off, not daring to finish the sentence, not even in the relative safety of his own home. There are words better left unspoken, secrets best left undiscovered in the Stark mansion, and their heritage is undoubtedly one of them.

Maria rests a hand on his arm, squeezes gently. But her expression remains stony. “Five years,” she repeats, and Howard knows — has always known — that there is no arguing with his wife when it comes to their son.

“Five years,” he agrees, and hopes the time will never come.

*—*—*—*—*

Little is known about the origin of the race of dragons.

Some legends speak of a coupling between a demon of the lowest of hell’s dimensions and a shallow, vapid woman, and about the child born out of their unholy union, cursed with the worst traits humanity has to offer and the undying fire of the damned burning in its veins.

Others theorise that dragons, not unlike other malevolent spirits, were first born out of pure energy built on nothing but fury, an anger so potent, it eventually granted them the power to take on a physical form so similar to their preferred prey, they have become virtually indistinguishable from true humans.

There are other tales of course, some less well-known than others, like the stories told in small, isolated villages deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Tales of terrifying creatures not unlike huge snakes with grotesque wings and a tongue made out of fire, who have been cursed by a mystical power, for example. But beyond a couple of frightening Halloween masks and specialised college courses, they haven’t gained a lot of attention.

And though what is known of dragons is built on fiction more than fact, what remains true through every tale ever told, is the tangible fear of the unfeasible power they possess.

Thus perhaps the only truth respected researchers and religious fanatics, Americans and Russians, children and adults alike can agree upon, is the fundamental, undeniable fact that dragons are predators, and humanity is their designed prey.

*—*—*—*—*

Howard meets Maria by accident as much as on purpose. It is a coincidence that the two of them are attending a public lecture on species bias and its impact on a neutral outlook on the dragon species. It is no coincidence that they find each other during the following mingling, Howard sipping on a glass of wine, Maria with an untouched flute of champagne in her hand.

“Howard Stark,” he introduces himself with a charming bow, allows the warm, tingling sensation of one mind welcoming another to envelop him for a moment.

“A pleasure to meet you,” the radiant woman responds delicately, lets him take her hand and kiss its back, a brief touch of tongue any curious observer would have missed. “My name is Maria Carbonell.”

There is a faint accent in her words, and soon they are talking about Europe, Maria’s love for her country easily soothing some of Howards’ most painful memories, filled with blood and tragedy.

Neither of them mentions it that night, but when Maria breathes a soft kiss on Howard’s cheek in goodbye, her tongue flicking for the fraction of a second, he knows he will meet her again.

The tabloids have a field day of course. Notorious playboy Howard Stark, suddenly showing interest in a single woman for a prolonged amount of time? It seems improbable, impossible even, and gossip rags as well as galas are filled with whispers and rumours about the unexpected pair.

Not that Howard lets that stop him from going after what he wants. Or Maria for that matter.

Because the truth is, they both have waited a long time, have endured a world that doesn’t realise how much it should fear them with stoic tolerance. Now that they have found each other through luck and coincidence, Howard refuses to let the opportunity slip away.

He’s spent the last thirty years of his life pretending it doesn’t bother him, the lack of a true treasure. Has tried again and again to fill the burning need with one thing or another, has created and built, dated and slept with countless women, even tried his hand at relationships a couple of times. His efforts were futile though, doomed from the start, because Howard has always known that none of these women would ever earn his trust.

There was too much at stake, should his secret be revealed, too much damage that his heritage could cause, should the information reach the wrong ears. It is true, times for dragons have changed. In large parts because of the accomplishments and sacrifices of Steve Rogers, the first human to be successfully turned into a dragon.

With this new turn, the mythical species has become more tangible and reachable, not to forget that people are always easier swayed by a hero they admire. But for all the praise sung in Captain America’s memory, Howard knows better than to believe his kind has truly earned an equal standing in human society. For most people, Steve will always remain more human than dragon. Never mind that decades of hatred and mistrust can not be overcome by a single man, no matter how determined and idealistic.

No. His nature has always been a hazard, a secret by necessity, to hide away to the best of his abilities. Howard has heard too many stories, witnessed too many stories of the ends humanity has in store for his kind.

During his darkest nights he can’t help but wonder if Steve ever learned how many dragons had to die for the serum to be perfected, die needlessly and painfully at that. If he ever cared to learn.

In the end, Howard supposes it doesn’t matter. The thought is as bitter as it is placating, but he washes the taste away with alcohol just as easily.

The point is, there is a very fine line between the people who have experimented on dragons, driven by their curiosity about a species they fear and envy, and the people who have welcomed them, seen them as a resource to be used and exploited. Neither is a treatment Howard would ever accept or endure, and as he doesn’t wish for his death any time soon, hiding his true nature is the best option.

Living in shadows and pretence doesn’t require as much effort as is often assumed. If anything, dragons are meant to appear human. An objective they achieve remarkably well. As a scientist, though his interest in biology is admittedly limited, Howard can confirm that there are no physiological characteristics that distinguish a dragon from a fully grown man. For all intents and purposes they are the same—until you stab both of them in the stomach and only one of them immediately gets up and rips off your head.

So Howard has done what his father has taught him to. Has avoided deep emotional attachments and late night confessions of things best left undisturbed. Has created and amazed and played the crowds, drawn as much attention on his inventions as possible. Because never are people blinder than when they believe they see you clearly.

None of those lessons have prepared him for Maria.

Maria who had already known his deepest, darkest secret before their introduction had been finished. Who had shared it with him. Who had taken him by surprise and slipped right through the cracks and around his walls, easily evading every defence mechanism he’s spent years building up. Howard still hasn’t decided whether he is bothered or impressed by that.

He supposes, like so many other things, it doesn’t truly matter.

*—*—*—*—*

Despite the many characteristics that make a dragon dangerous, especially when put against an average human, there is only one they are really known for. One thing they are feared for.

Their rage.

Just like their strength, endurance and durability, a dragon’s emotions are amplified. They are stronger, clearer and more overwhelming than those of a human. And for no emotion does this rule apply as much as for rage. It overwhelms their senses, dominates their entire mindset. Turns a dragon into the single-minded centre of death and destruction.

Once a rage has been triggered, a dragon is known to attack anything within its reach, be it friend or foe, human or animal. They can not be calmed, nor reasoned with. The only known cases in which a rage has been ended successfully is by their death—or the death of everyone and everything around them.

It is perhaps for this reason that for every culture that believes dragons to be a manifestation of fury, there are three others, who see them as the harbingers of death.

*—*—*—*—*

Howard has never wanted an heir.

Holding the tiny bundle with wrinkled, pink skin and a fluff of dark hair in his arms for the first time is a jarring experience. Seeing Maria’s tired smile that holds too much understanding to be considered happy doesn’t help. Neither of them had expected this, had even thought about it. It hadn’t occurred to him that a child was even a possibility, so used had he become to the conviction that his line would die with him.

It was what Howard had wanted. What he had sworn to himself, back when he had first realised the curse their blood brought.

Howard has always known the pain of being what he is. Has always known that his life is filled with lies, omissions and deceit. That he is hunted, even if the rest of the world hasn’t realised they are looking for him yet. That one day he might slip. That one day his own mind, his very nature may betray him, and there won’t be anything he will be able to do about it.

But it was one after he had met Steve Rogers that Howard realised what it truly means to be a dragon. Only after he had watched humanity be destroyed, Steve Rogers be destroyed, and something else be rebuilt from the remains. Something stronger, Erskine had called it enthusiastically, blinded by idealism and the necessities of war.

The truth was that Steve had lost something during the change. Something Howard hadn’t even realised he himself too was missing until then. They all do.

And when Steve had died in the war, deep down, under the grief and the desolation, Howard had been relieved. Relieved that the world would never have to realise what Captain America had become. That Steve would be spared the knowledge of the extend of his change.

It had been an eye-opening experience. One that had caused Howard to give up on his dream of a family, however distant and unlikely it might have been at the time. He didn’t want an heir then. Didn’t want to pass on the curse in his very blood. He still doesn’t.

Yet, here he is now. In a private hospital room, his exhausted wife watching him from behind half-lidden eyes, holding the child he doesn’t want, can’t have. A mockery of a dream Howard has given up on all those years ago.

A son.

They name him Anthony Edward Stark.

“He is perfect,” Maria whispers lovingly.

But he isn’t. Howard knows he isn’t. Knows he should have gotten rid of the child before it ever had the chance to be born, should never have conceived it in the first place. But for all his determination and principles, when the time had come, when Maria had confessed to what had happened — he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. He hadn’t been able to deny himself this. No matter that their world isn't one he wants to bring his heir into.

No matter the price the world might pay one day for his choice.

Because the truth is, Howard has never cared all that much about the fate of the world. The truth is, the Starks have always been monsters in one way or another.

*—*—*—*—*

Whilst it is difficult for a known dragon to make an honest living, it is not entirely impossible. For all the social shunning and prejudice they face, there are certain sectors known to unofficially seek dragons out and hire them for the kind of work humans won’t or simply can’t do with the same efficiency.

The military in general, and special ops in particular, are known for their high employment rate of dragons. They survive fights that humans simply can’t, pull off nigh impossible stunts and shrug off traumatic experiences that would have brought a human to their knees. In short, they are the perfect weapons, so long as they are aimed at an enemy. And with a country’s security and power at stake, governments and the public are known to look the other way, as long as the results are satisfactory.

Occasionally an unplanned rage will go through the press and cause a nation-wide scandal. The discussion about the risks of employing dragons will flare up again, and some higher up will publicly lose his job. The dragons will remain where they were before, occasionally shuffled around and allocated into a different or renamed unit, until their existence is once again forgotten by the majority of the populace.

It remains an open, if unacknowledged secret that none of these dragons leave their service alive.

*—*—*—*—*

In another world, Howard thinks with renewed bitterness, he could have raised a son.

In this one, which only four months ago declared it illegal — if only punishable by a laughable fine — to purposefully trigger a dragons’ rage, he can’t afford to. He can’t afford to have anything but an heir, and watching the way the boy smiles at his wife as soon as she enters the room, knowing that this child is too soft for the war that will be its life, seems like more of a curse than his nature has ever been.

The child is already proving itself to be a prodigy, baffling its tutors and astonishing their staff. Howard hasn’t made his mind up yet, whether he is glad for the boy’s brilliance or not. He is too young, but already his light shines so bright, and soon the rest of the world will begin to notice. It was always going to, of course. There was always going to be a spotlight shining on the Stark heir, and with the boy’s fifth birthday fast approaching, the time is coming to prepare him for the double-edged sword that is the attention and adoration of the general public.

Howard pours himself another, generous glass. The alcohol isn’t enough to make him forget about the could have’s and would have’s of a future he has already given up on, but it numbs the pain to a level of displeased indifference.

These days, that’s the closest to happiness he gets.

*—*—*—*—*

Tony is five years old when he learns that dreams don’t last. He is five years old when he learns that monsters do.

Soooo... What do you think of this Howard? And of the dragons as they’re portrayed in this ‘verse?

[friedesgreatscythe]

So I don't know if you've talked about this before but do you have any thoughts on what the hell happened during Faith's boss fight? Like I love my beautiful pixie lady but that boss fight made no sense to me in terms of how people were hurting each other.

I’m probably in the minority here, but I think Far Cry 5 has elements of the eldritch/supernatural in it, and that the Bliss’ effects, if not its entire existence and power, is an indication of this. So too with Jacob’s conditioning and what it does to the Deputy, where it takes them, why it’s able to get into their head so quickly (this is also why you can hear Only You playing softly in the battle music of the Henbane region). This is also why I believe that Joseph hears a Voice. If you’re at all familiar with Bloodborne, it’s like the inhuman voices of the Great Ones that are transcribed and etched into runes. It’s also like how patients in the Research Hall can “see” the hunter’s voice whenever they speak to a patient.

So, those were a lot of references lol Lemme try to get back on track with FC5. Faith’s boss fight takes place in the Bliss like all of your encounters with Faith, and is also a dreamy mirror/exaggeration of reality–the angel’s trumpets, the gates you walk through (that are similar to the gates of Faith’s bunker), the statue of the Father. Not to keep mentioning other outside sources here, but if you’re familiar with Silent Hill, it’s probably like the layered realities in that game. There’s the real Silent Hill (which we never see in game but know it exists because you find notes, articles, and other references about the town); there’s the foggy Silent Hill, which we always visit in game; there’s the dark/nightmare Silent Hill, and then there’s Nowhere, a nightmarish amalgamation of the foggy/nightmare worlds that are crumbling rapidly.

The Bliss is like the foggy Silent Hill: a mirror of what’s real, but with things that aren’t seen in reality. But what you do there still effects reality because they’re connected and if something in the reflection changes, then so does what it’s reflecting. If that makes sense?

Faith being able to teleport, duplicate herself, hurl Bliss at you, and summon Angels is all stuff that no drug hallucination could do. I don’t care how bad the Deputy was tripping lol, that’s the sorta shit that’s positively occult. I think this is also why Faith can pop up in little bursts all over the place around the Henbane: she’s always got one foot in the Bliss, so to speak. She can move in and out at whim, and the more the Deputy travels into the Bliss, the more they’re effected by it and can see things from it (how animals will pop up out of nowhere, how seemingly harmless NPCs can transform into Angels that will attack on sight). Once the Bliss is in your head, it stays there, and you stay in it. It’s also like STEM in The Evil Within, in that way–once you’re pulled into it the first time, you always have one part of your consciousness stuck there. You can’t fully escape it.

I find it very interesting and horrifying that Faith’s is the only Herald body you can’t find after you kill her. Jacob and John are dead with physical, tangible proof of it. But Faith dissolves, vanishes, disappears. How is that possible? How is it physically and rationally possible? Handwaving it as “oh the Deputy was high” never really satisfied me, so this is why I think it’s plausible that something supernatural is going on there, that Faith’s discovery of the Bliss and its effect on living things could even have been seen (by Joseph) as a sign that God favored him and his efforts (it’s a powerful drug, if nothing else), and constant exposure to it probably strengthened Joseph’s visions, or at least the clarity of them.

I also find it interesting that the Seed siblings seem immune to any withdrawal effects of the drug. Bliss isn’t even a normal drug; Tweak’s notes seem to indicate that you can’t detox from it. Once it’s in you, it’s in you, and if you get in too deep then there’s no going back–much like how, in Bloodborne, once your eyes are open to the eldritch truth, they can never be closed again. You can’t unsee what has been seen–or, to quote Ophelia (who is most definitely Faith-y–or maybe it’s the other way around?) “Oh, woe is me,T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”

Faith even seems to have some sort of visions herself, considering her dying words that you’ll be the deciding factor in the end, not Joseph; that you will be the one whose word and decisions matter. She’s seen it–she knows it. And she was right.

So. That’s what I think. The Bliss is in another plane of reality and Faith can move in and out of it at whim.