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let-it-raines · 5 years ago

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Nonnie, this is quite possibly one of the funniest prompts I’ve ever received. I actually, legitimately laughed out loud when I read it, and I definitely had to find the original post to read it all. Not gonna lie, I’m totally rooting for that poor girl.

I hope you enjoy this version of such a crazy little tale 😘

on ao3 | here | if that’s more your style

-/-

Her back is absolutely killing her. There are bones in positions they are definitely not supposed to be in, and she has to wonder where the hell David and Mary Margaret got their couch. Emma secretly thinks that when she asked them if she could come stay with them for a few weeks – days, weeks, months, who the hell knows at this point – they got rid of their old couch and replaced it with one that they found on the side of the road that’s full of extra springs and the smallest amount of cushion stuffing on the planet.

David and Mary Margaret are too full of kindness to do something like that, but she knows that if her sister – if she had one obviously – called and said she lost her job and her apartment and needed a place to crash for a little while, she would definitely make the stay as uncomfortable as possible.

If the couch crasher isn’t comfortable, it means they won’t stay as long, right?

It’s July, and she’s been on their couch since the end of April. So much for that theory, obviously. But hey, at least she’s not stuck still living with Neal because if she had to sleep in the same apartment as her cheating douchebag of an ex, there is no guarantee that she wouldn’t murder him in his sleep.

Small blessings and all.

Emma raises her arms above her head and interlaces her hands together, stretching her body out and loosening up her limbs, before she moves her legs and starts running. She’s never been much of a runner. She always thought it was some kind of voluntary torture. Back in Boston, she had a kickboxing gym she went to every day, but there’s not one of those in Storybrooke. There’s one gym here, and it’s got out of date equipment that definitely aren’t cleaned every day. There’s no way she’d ever pay for that when she’s already short on cash to begin with.

So running on the beach it is, even if it makes her calves feel like they are legitimately on fire.

There’s no one on the beach this morning. Sometimes tourists will get here early and mark their space with their chairs and their umbrellas, but today, it’s blissfully empty so that she can run up and down the sand without being bothered. Music blares through her headphones, and it propels her forward every time that she wants to quit. She’s never been one to want to stare at the ocean and soak in its beauty. It’s never calmed her, but now, when her days are spent going between having a bad back, serving drinks to people who don’t know how to tip, and wondering if her life is always going to suck this much, she thinks that the ocean isn’t that bad.

It’s calm and beautiful, and right now, it’s as blue as the…what the fuck?

Emma stops jogging, sand kicking up around her, and her breath escapes her as she squints and looks out onto the ocean past the pier.

Is there…is there someone out there?

About forty, fifty feet out in the water, there’s some kind of floating figure. She can’t really tell from here, but it looks like there’s a man floating on his back, his head tilted backward.

Oh shit.

This area has been full of scuba divers this summer, but they’re usually in groups and only go in the afternoon with some kind of instructor. This guy – or girl, she can’t really tell right now because she doesn’t have her contacts in and can’t see that far away – must have been a dumbass and gone on his own.

Her stomach is heavy, like it’s full of wet sand, and when she looks around, she’s reminded that there’s no one around.

Shit, shit, shit.

This isn’t what she’s trained to do. She’s not even technically trained to do anything. She’s only really ever worked in food service besides her boring as hell office job in Boston, and none of that would have ever prepared her for something like this.

“Oh, what the hell?” Emma mumbles to herself as she pulls her tank top off before tugging her leggings down, kicking them off with her socks and shoes. She drops her phone and her headphones into her shoes. She’s in nothing but a sports bra and a pair of underwear that literally has little animated penises on it from Mary Margaret’s bachelorette party, but that doesn’t really matter when this guy (girl) might be dying.

The water is cold when she first dives in, and salt gets up her nose so that her throat is itching, but she manages to swim out to the water as quickly as possible. Now that she’s closer, she can see that it’s definitely a man, and Emma closes her eyes as she closes the final strides and reaches for him.

When she opens them, he is staring directly at her, blue eyes blown wide in what she can only assume is confusion.

So, he’s not dead. That’s good to know.

“Are you okay?” Emma blurts out, salt water still in her mouth that she hacks up.

The guy nods and slowly removes his regulator and his mask. One eyebrow raises before they both furrow together. “Aye.”

Great. He thinks she’s a lunatic. She probably is.

She just tried to save a man from drowning when he wasn’t actually drowning.

This is all Mary Margaret and David’s fault because they own the most uncomfortable couch in existence, and she obviously is suffering from poor decision making because of a lack of sleep.

“I thought you were dead!” Emma explains as she starts treading water and hopes that a shark doesn’t show up any time soon. That would really be the cherry on top of her day. “But you’re obviously not dead.”

“No, love, I don’t think I am.”

“What’s going on here?”

Emma stops treading and dips under the water before she rises back up and sees another guy floating a few feet away. As she looks around more and more keep popping up, all of them deadly silent, and if she had any air in her lungs right now, she would scream.

What the hell has she just walked…swam into?

And then, when she comes to her senses, she realizes that they’re all laughing at her.

The bunch of assholes.

(She probably deserves their laughter, but she won’t admit to that.)

“Alright, alright,” the non-dead guy says, raising his hand in the air, “leave the lady alone. She is a real savior, okay?” He flashes her a pearly white smile and nods back to the shore. “Do you want to go back and get away from these assholes?”

What she’d like to do right now is drown, but there seems to be none of that going around today.

“Yeah, I would. I don’t need you to take me back though.”

“Good because I’m not going to. I’m simply going to happen to be swimming to the shore at the same time that you do.”

Emma nods and then turns around and starts swimming back. He stays at her heels while his friends whistle out words she’s ignoring behind them, and while Emma considers herself to be in good shape, she is not a swimmer. The adrenaline from her run and from her not-so-daring rescue are wearing off, and she can feel her breathing getting heavier and heavier. Is the shore getting further away? That would be impossible.

“You’re so lucky you weren’t actually dying back there because there was no way I was going to be able to drag your sorry ass back to shore.” He chuckles, and she cuts her eyes back at him. “I’m glad you find this funny.”

“I find this hysterical, love. You need a tug to shore?”

She does, but there’s no way in hell that she’s going to accept that.

“Absolutely not.”

Eventually, after what feels like ages, she steps foot on solid, if sandy, ground, and the early morning air nips at her skin as she emerges from the water. She tries to shake it off while walking toward her clothes, but she knows that there’s no way that she could possibly get her leggings back on.

That would be torture of an entirely different kind.

Holy shit. She’s wearing underwear with cartoon dicks on them.

This day could not get any worse.

Except when she turns around, she sees the guy stripping out of his gear, only the wetsuit left on, and this is the first time she gets a really good luck at him. He’s trim, like he spends a heck of a lot more time swimming than she does, and he’s got dark stubble across his jaw that she imagines would feel fantastic brushing against her skin. His eyes also seem to be bluer now, and she definitely didn’t think that was possible.

Okay, so maybe her day could get worse.

Or a little better.

Then she watches his eyes tail down her body, just for a moment, but it’s long enough that she knows that he’s noticed her unfortunate choice in underwear.

“So, do you go about saving people every morning or is this just a one-time thing?”

“Definitely a one-time thing since all of my effort was apparently useless.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. That’s the most entertainment me and the boys have had in weeks. I don’t think we’re going to forget about this for a long time.”

Emma nods and bends down to get her tank top. She pulls it over, and it immediately clings to her skin. So much for getting a little coverage. “You lead that boring of a life then? All diving all the time?”

“Lately, yeah.”

“Is that so?”

He shakes his hair out and runs his fingers through his locks, and she is not distracted by that at all.

(She is definitely not thinking about the fact that she hasn’t had sex in several months.)

(She just embarrassed the hell out of herself in front of him, so that shouldn’t even be a though going through her mind.)

(Even if these were normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be a thought that went through her mind this early in the morning.)

“We’re training for diving school for the Navy,” he explains. “We’ve got a few weeks off that we’re spending up here for the incredible diving spots, but then we’ll be in Florida for four months.”

“Well, I hope you won’t need any saving while you’re there.”

“It won’t be you, so I’m not sure that it’d be quite as enjoyable.” Emma rolls her eyes, and she has to try her hardest not to let herself smile. That was a bad line. She will not smile at it. “Killian Jones, by the way. And you are?”

“Emma Swan.” She reaches out to take his hand to shake, but instead, he pulls it up and brushes his lips across the back of her hand, never breaking eye contact.

“It’s nice to meet you, Swan. You wouldn’t happen to know a good spot around here to get a beer, would you?”

Emma looks down at her feet, kicking them in the sand, before she raises her head and smiles. He’s flirting with her. She just embarrassed the hell out of herself, interrupted a military training exercise, and he’s flirting with her.

What’s wrong with him?

“I actually work at the Crab Shack down by the pier. Don’t let the name fool you. There is only a small possibility that you’ll get crabs if you shack up while there.”

Okay, what is wrong with her?

Killian cocks his head to the side and chuckles as a water droplet falls from his hair and streaks down his face. Why is that so distracting? “I’ll see if the boys and I can stop by tonight. You know, to celebrate the woman who saved me.”

“Alright, alright,” Emma laughs, holding her hands up and bowing her head. “I get it. I’m never going to live this down.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

-/-

David and Mary Margaret are both at work when she gets home, so she thankfully doesn’t have to explain her appearance. Her heart is still racing and her clothes are still soaking wet. Her leggings were pretty much impossible to get on, so she walked through the streets of Storybrooke in nothing but sneakers, a tank top, and dick-covered underwear. She takes a shower and tries to wash away the embarrassment of the morning. She never thought that she was one to embarrass easily, but she guesses that was not some kind of normal situation.

Why is she such an idiot?

Is this just a new low point in her life?

She’s not working until after lunch, and while she would usually take this time to clean up around the loft to show her appreciation for David and Mary Margaret for letting her crash here, she doesn’t do that. Instead, she spends a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide what to wear to work, like she’s not going to wear her regular cut-offs and a tank top. That’s exactly what she puts on, and if she decides to add a lacy bralette, well, that’s just because all of her other bras need to be washed.

Eventually, she heads to work, clocks in, and starts helping to serve the few tables and the people at the bar. It’s pretty slow, though, and when there’s only one guy in a booth in the corner, she tells Ruby about her morning.

Considering Ruby literally starts choking from laughing so much, Emma thinks maybe that wasn’t her best idea.

“You were wearing the underwear from Marg’s bachelorette party?”

“It was clean! I have to do laundry!”

“This is the best thing to ever happen to me,” Ruby laughs, leaning forward and resting her face on the countertop before she pops back up with wide eye and a wolfish smirk. “Wait. Did you say that he’s coming here tonight?”

“Mhm.”

“Is that why you have on mascara?”

“I wear makeup sometimes.”

“Rarely.” Ruby places her hands on her hips, and okay, maybe she definitely shouldn’t have told Ruby. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the Navy guys coming in. “Oh, is he cute? Are you going to sleep with him? Is that what’s up with you looking slightly put together. Emma Swan, have you gone and found yourself a man in the most ridiculous way possible?”

“I am not going to sleep with him.” Ruby raises her brows and then winks, and all Emma can do is shake her head. “He’s in the Navy. He’s about to go to Florida for four months and then who knows where? What would even be the point?”

“That sounds like the perfect excuse to sleep with him. There are no strings attached, and I’m sure he knows that too. I mean, you’ve got to get over that douche eventually. Why not do it with a hot guy who is going to leave, no strings attached?”

She’s only known Ruby from when she’s come to visit David, but they’ve managed to be pretty close friends over the last few months. Ruby is fearless and crass, and there’s never anything holding her back. Emma often wishes she was like that.

The girl is right, unfortunately, not that Emma would admit that to her. She would never shut up about it.

“He’s probably not even going to show, Rubes.”

-/-

He shows.

His entire crew doesn’t. It’s just him and two guys named Robin and Will, and they all settle down at a booth, ordering burgers and drinks and taking the piss out of her every time she brings them something. Will is the main culprit, and she’s pretty sure that he’s the one who scared the shit out of her earlier by silently popping up out of nowhere.

It’s weird seeing them all out of their gear and in their civilian clothes. Killian is in a pair of dark jeans that hug his legs – not that she was staring or anything – and a short-sleeved gray t-shirt. A tattoo peaks out underneath his sleeve, and she’s curious as to what it is.

She’s not going to sleep with him, though. That’s not…that’s not happening.

“So, I have to ask,” Ruby says after Emma’s been chatting with them on and off for an hour, “did you manage to get a good look at the panties this girl had on earlier?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t, love,” Killian tells Ruby before looking at Emma and winking.

Oh, she might be in trouble if he’s going to do things like that..

“Really?” Ruby asks, disappointed.

“I’m afraid that I was too busy being thankful to be saved to pay any attention to what my savior was wearing.”

“I call bullshit on that, but whatever. You really missed out too. They were the greatest pair of panties in existence.”

Little by little, the bar fills up with people, mostly tourists, but a few locals come in. Will and Robin start talking with a few guys they happen to know, but Killian comes to sit at the bar across from her where she learns that he’s originally from California but that his dad was in the military growing up and they moved around a lot. His mom was British, and they spent the majority of his early years in England, which explains the slight accent, and he has an older brother who lives in Denmark with his wife. At twenty-four, he’s only three years older than her, and he says that he got a bit of a late start to being in the Navy, messing around too much and not knowing what the hell it is he wanted to do with his life.

Emma gets that more than he could probably ever know. She’s literally sleeping on her brother’s couch and working in a place called the Crab Shack.

They don’t even sell crab most days.

He gives as good as he gets with being teased, and she finds that he’s always quick to give back an insult or a jab whenever one comes from Ruby or from his friends.

Or from her.

It’s easy talking to him, laughing and sharing a drink and some fries, and as the night goes on, it’s even easier to forget that she hasn’t flirted since Neal and that the man smiling across from her was the witness to one of the most embarrassing moments of her life.

Killian kisses her against the wall in the hallway that leads back to the bathrooms and the storage closets. It’s dark, the music from the bar dimmed, and the only thing she can focus on is the warmth of his mouth and the expert sweep of his tongue as chills scatter across her body before warming her everywhere, from her toes to her cheeks but especially in the pit of her belly. She hasn’t been kissed like that in quite some time, if not ever, and getting lost in it is as easy as anything she’s ever done.

She doesn’t sleep with him, though.

She desperately wants to, aches for it really, but he mutters something about being a gentleman, which she protests against, but he reassures her that he is, indeed, always a gentleman.

Making out with her in the hallway of a bar doesn’t really allow that theory to hold up, but she guesses he’s going to play the gentleman card.

He promises he’ll be back, though, asking her if she’s working tomorrow, and when she says yes, he kisses her again and then walks out the door.

-/-

Killian comes back the next day.

And the next.

And the one after that.

And then he asks if he can see her outside of work, take her on a proper date or something, and the only reason Emma says yes is because she knows this is temporary. He’s going to leave soon, so it’s okay for her to get to know him and laugh with him and make out with him in the backseat of her car until her lips are kiss-swollen and every part of her is flushed.

It’s okay for her to get to know how he likes his burgers and what his favorite drink is and that the tattoo on his arm is in honor of his mom who passed away five years ago. She learns more about his brother and his apparently shitty dad, just as she tells him about David who he apparently had some kind of run-in with on his first night in town, and little by little, she starts to know all of these pieces of this man she never should have met.

If she were a romantic, Emma would say that this is like something out of a movie, a summer romance that passes by in montages full of laughter and good times. She’s not a romantic, though. She knows that this is the real world where things don’t work out like that, but even so, the weeks pass by, and when she goes to bed at night, she finds herself thinking of blue eyes and a kind but mischievous smile.

Oh.

Oh, okay. Maybe she’s gotten herself in too deep of waters without knowing the way out, and this time, there’s not going to be some idiot running along the beach who dives out into the ocean to save her.

Despite her thoughts starting to attack her, her heart aching even when she tells it to stop, she continues to see him whenever she can. And a week before he leaves, they manage to find a time when no one is home but the two of them, and while she doesn’t intend for it go that far, once his lips brush across her neck and liquid heat blazes over her skin, there’s no stopping them as they shed their clothes.

“No dick-covered underwear today, love?” Killian whispers against her bare stomach as he kisses her in such a way that her stomach ripples.

“I’m afraid those have been retired.”

“A pity that.”

They don’t talk much for the next few minutes, not more than curses and instructions and repetitive words of pleasure, and as her heart races while Killian drives her absolutely mad with his movements, it also aches, the ticking time bomb she wants liked suddenly something she’s dreading.

She likes him.

Honestly, truly likes him.

He’s kind and funny and has a mouth on him that matches hers in curses and in banter. He asks her about her day and listens to her when she talks, which Neal nearly never did, and while she finds that what’s between them is physical, there’s something more underneath the surface, so damn close to breaking through.

When he leaves, she doesn’t want to say goodbye. She’s never been particularly good at those, but Killian still comes to the bar, sits with her at the counter likes it’s not his last day, and when he has to go, he takes her hand and pulls her outside, the wind whipping around them and the smell of salt permeating the air.

“There’s not a day will go by I won’t think of you.”

Emma nearly makes some kind of sarcastic quip, but instead she leans up on her toes and slowly glides her lips over his, savoring the softness and undeniable warmth of them one last time.

“Good.”

-/-

Emma wakes to a text the next morning.

KJ: So, I have some time off in January. Do you think I could take you to dinner?

ES: I think that could be arranged. I don’t know if I’ll recognize you all bundled up to live through Maine’s winter weather.

KJ: I’ll bring a red rose, just in case.

Emma rolls over on the couch and buries her smile in her pillow.

ES: I am looking forward to it.

-/-

Emma sees Killian for the first time – FaceTime not included – on January third, four months and a week after they said goodbye. He’s standing outside her apartment – one she shares with Ruby, each of them with their own, actual bedrooms – dressed in his Naval dress uniform with a red rose in his hand.

His hair is shorter, his usual stubble a little bit more trimmed, his skin tanned, and even with his uniform, she can see that his shoulders are broader than they were this summer.

“Hi,” Emma whispers. She thought she was yelling it, but it definitely only came out as a whisper. “You’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow.”

He cocks his head to the side, smile bright, and God, she has missed that smile. “Ah, well, you see, I had an opportunity to see the woman I love one day sooner, and there was no way in hell I was going to pass up that opportunity.”

“The woman you love, huh?”

“Aye.” He steps closer, and it takes everything in Emma not to tackle him to the ground. “She’s this fiery lass who is beyond brilliant and witty. And, I’ll have you know, that she is so brave that she’ll dive into the ocean to save a drowning man. Would you happen to know anyone like that?”

Emma rolls her eyes and closes the distance between them. It was once 1,500 miles (she may have looked it up), but that is no longer. And it feels damn good. “I might have an idea where you can find her.”

“Good,” he says, her own word from so long ago echoing back to her, before pressing his lips to hers in a deep, slow kiss that feels like it never stopped.

She has never been so thankful for David’s shitty couch and how it inadvertently led her to this.

#the one where emma goes underwater #cs prompts #cs fic #cs ff #cs fanfic #captain swan fic #captain swan ff #captain swan fanfic #Captain Swan

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schrijverr · 4 years ago

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Flying Solo

Reggie can dance ballet, he learned from his mother and does it whenever he’s feeling low. The band catches him and it turns into a bonding moment.

On AO3.

Ships: none

Warnings: Reggies home life from before they died is mentioned briefly. Tell me if I missed anything or if you want me to tag something!

~~~~~~~~~~

Alex and Luke had been friends since they were very little and had befriended Bobby in Middle School, only meeting Reggie in High School after he had moved to LA from NYC. He had easily fit in to their little group, but they did not know Reggie as well as each other.

Not that Reggie minded, he was a pretty private person. He didn’t like sharing things about himself and had become a pro in talking without ever saying something.

He did not like talking about his home and his parents, so he avoided those topics and made sure to always have an excuse ready about why they couldn't go to his home and he put on an act (partly) of being a dumbass to discourage deeper conversations.

It had even taken the other three a while before they figured out where he was from, only finding out when he had rolled his eyes at the depiction of the Big Apple in a movie.

Reggie liked his new friends though. They let him stay on their couches when the fighting got bad and never pitied him for the bruises.

They were his family.

However, he did not share everything with them, even after they’d gotten close enough to be brothers. Like the fact that his mother had been a professional ballerina, who was still angry she had to give up her studio for his fathers job, nor the fact that he had spend most of his youth there as well and knew how to dance ballet.

He knew they wouldn't judge him for it or think he was girly or weird, he had seen that with Alex. But still, it was his little thing.

The thing he did when he was down, his small comfort that reminded him of better times when glasses remained whole and his mother still smiled.

Ballet was how he had gotten into music, first learning to play pieces on the piano, later violin, then banjo and guitar, which lead to the true love that was his bass. His mother had always been a music person, his dad too. That used to connect them.

So he kept it to himself, only doing small pirouettes and some stretching in his room or old routines on the beach late at night under the stars to the beat of the fighting floating from the house.

But then they died and nothing was the same anymore. His home was a bike shack, his parents were gone and he was a ghost that could only be seen when they sung with a specific girl. The only good thing was that he would keep his flexibility for all of eternity.

Well, that might be a bit dramatic. Julie was super nice, he still had his friend and their music, and Ray was everything he had ever wanted in a dad, even if the man couldn't see him.

It was just that it hurt sometimes.

It hurt that he would never be able to socialize again, that they never had the breakthrough they had worked so hard for, that their music had been stolen by someone they trusted, that the only good father figure he’d ever known only tolerated him because he was invisible, that his friends were finding other people and he was being left behind.

Life, well, death, just fucking sucked and Reggie hated it. Not always, just some days when the loneliness crept up on him and he had no one to turn to.

So he returned to the thing that had kept him going for most of his life, before he had his band, his new family.

Ballet.

First he went to the beach, like he’d used to, but the bike shack was a bitter reminder of what he had lost and the entire area wasn’t the same anymore. So he returned to the Molina house, which used to be the Willson house.

Ray sometimes listened to classical music while he worked and, since he couldn't see Reggie, it was the perfect time.

He started doing his stretches, before he moved on to the basic positions and some other steps. It was nothing fancy, nothing like he’d used to do, but it was calming. Just flying through the space with his eyes closed while memories played on his eyelids.

His mother beckoning him closer with a smile, the older girls at the studio who had adored him when he was younger, his dad at the piano in the living room, while he either sat next to him or twirled with his mother.

The good times.

Soon it became routine to do old ballet routines in the living room while Ray was working and he was sure none of the others would be home or just whenever there was no one at all.

It was pretty handy that he could phase through objects now and didn’t have to deal with pushing everything to the side, although clothes were still an issue. He had a pair of sweats and a tank-top though, but no shoes, so he had to manage on bare feet.

But it was nice, it was comforting, which meant it had to go to shit at some point.

Today had began not that great. Reggie had been awake, like every night, but this time it hadn’t been nice and quiet, just a reminder that he wasn’t alive anymore. He’d gone on a walk, but all the changes were also a reminder and the day had just been doomed from the start.

First he’d wanted to hang with the guys, but Alex had a date (totally not a date, shut up) with Willie and Luke had heard his parents talking about his cousins and aunt coming, so he was haunting them, leaving Reggie on his own.

He had searched for Ray, but the man was away on a shoot and Reggie was truly on his own in the house. Nothing that bad, he’d thought as he decided to dance for a bit.

Quickly poofing over to the garage, he changed into what he had dubbed his dancing clothes, before poofing back and starting up some Tsjaikovski while he did the warming up. He reasoned that if anyone came home, they’d think Ray had left his music on.

He had started with something easy, but he could do that from muscle memory alone, which wasn’t helping him with getting his mind of things. So the routines had gotten increasingly more difficult throughout the day as he forgot completely about the time.

Because he was so focused on jumping at the right beats and stepping in time with the music, he didn’t notice the door opening and the small gasp Julie let out as she watched him. Nor did he notice Luke and Alex poofing back into the room next to Julie.

They had returned to find an empty garage, so they had assumed Reggie would be hanging with Ray, instead they had found Julie staring at something while standing in the doorway.

With their curiosity piqued they had poofed there and looked to find the usually clumsy bassist flying gracefully through the room.

After a fast set of pirouettes Reggie stopped, the dance was over. He stood still for a few seconds with his eyes closed as he caught his breath only to get snapped out of it by the sound of applause coming from in front of him.

He snapped his eyes open and quickly jumped out of the end position as he squeaked: “How long have you been there?”

“A few minutes.” Julie answered, “But Reggie that was amazing! I didn’t know you could dance like that.”

“Yeah, me neither, that’s sick, dude!” Luke also had processed what he had just seen.

“Why didn’t you ever say?” Alex asked.

“Uh…” Reggie gestured to the air helplessly, before he tried: “Never came up?”

Lukes eyes narrowed as he spotted Reggie lying, which Julie caught onto as she said: “Sorry, was I not supposed to see that?”

Reggie rubbed the back of his head as his cheeks started to flush. He said: “I must have forgotten the time, I’m usually gone before anyone sees. Unless you want to count Ray, but he can’t really see me. It’s my own fault.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Luke pouted, “Don’t you trust us?”

“It’s just something personal. My mother used to have a studio back in New York, we danced together when I was little while my dad played the piano, you know, before they started fighting.” Reggie explained, unable to deny Luke anything when he pouted.

“Oh.” Luke looked sheepish, “Sorry for pushing, but that was insane, bro.”

“Thank you!” Reggie grinned.

“Wait, New York?” Julie asked.

“We met Reggie in High School, he used to live in New York before they had to move for his dads job.” Alex explained.

In the background Luke pulled Reggie into a side hug, as he asked: “How can you be so graceful and trip over your own feet while walking, dude?”

“I do not.” Reggie exclaimed.

“You once tripped over air, Reginald.” Alex told him with an eyebrow raise.

Julie now finally closed the door behind her and excitedly asked: “Don’t care how clumsy he usually is, can you show me how you did that?”

“Did what?”

“The dancing? Please, I’ve always wanted to try, but by the time I had outgrown my ‘I’m-not-like-the-other-girls’ phase I was too old to get good and get lessons.” Julie said, “Can you teach me the basics?”

“I mean I could, but I you have to warm up first and I don’t know how flexible you are.” Reggie replied tentatively. Julie cheered, before she raced up the stairs to get changed into better clothes for this, leaving the three boys behind.

“I’m sorry if I pushed you to share.” Luke said after a few seconds, “I didn’t want to force you to tell us that.”

“It’s alright, man.” Reggie said, “I mostly have good memories connected with dancing, it’s something I do when I feel lonely.”

“Do you- do you feel lonely often?” Luke asked with sad eyes, making Reggie realize what he had just admitted.

Reggie didn’t want to lie to him again or make him feel like a bad friend after all he had done for him, so he just said: “It’s been hard turning into a ghost, you know I love to talk to people.”

That was not completely false, Reggie had always been the social butterfly of Sunset Curve and the life of the party. Usually talking to twenty people at the same time, none he had known three seconds ago and he did miss that it just wasn’t the whole story.

Luke saw through the words and felt guilty about leaving his friend alone when he clearly needed company. Alex seemingly had an answer, though. He carefully asked: “You wouldn't mind me joining either, would you?”

“No, of course not. You need better moves if you’re gonna keep joining Dirty Candy.” Reggie grinned.

At that point Julie came barreling down the stairs, catching the tail end of the conversation. She said: “Luke, you have to join now too. It’ll be band-bonding.”

The other two snorted at the idea of bouncy Luke trying to do strict ballet and Luke paled. It was too late for him, however, Julie was set on it. So a few minutes later they were all wearing dance clothes as they cleared the instruments to make space for Julie in the garage.

They had done jumping jacks to get the blood pumping and had struggled with touching their toes and keeping them pointed when Reggie moved to the splits.

“What the fuck, Reg.” Luke exclaimed, hissing in pain as he failed miserably in doing them himself.

“I’ve been doing this since before I can remember, Luke. Would be a bit strange, if I couldn't do them.” Reggie laughed, it was nice to make some more good memories connected to dancing, now with his new family.

From where she was struggling with the split herself, Julie huffed: “What else have you been hiding from us, Reggie? More surprises in there?”

“I mean, I don’t know if I ever mentioned I also play piano and violin?” Reggie replied.

“WHAT!”

#RR writing #jatp #jatp reggie #jatp julie #julie molina #jatp luke #luke patterson #jatp alex #julie and the phantoms

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aviss · 4 years ago

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a year-in-review meme - for writers!

I thought up this writing meme for fic writers who might have been staring at the artists having their lovely and well-deserved collages of their work through the year - and wanted to join in the fun! also this works as a great reminder for those of you (and me) who’ve been thinking that they haven’t been writing as much as they want to, and allows you to go back to enjoy your old fic ;D

Rules: pick your favourite sentence from a work you posted / wrote during a month of 2020! if you didn’t write anything in any particular month, don’t worry! tell us what you were doing or use it as free space for runner-up sentences. after that, tag 8 people or more to do the meme!

I was tagged by the lovely @ladyxxdaydream so here is mine:

January:

Matchmaker - Kakashi/Iruka - I just love soft, established relationship for these two. Especially when they have a mischievous side.

On the way back to the living room, Kakashi grabbed him by the waist and pulled until Iruka was wedged between his legs and the table. "Are we going to tell him?" he questioned with a mischievous smile. He moved his hands to cup Iruka's ass, food apparently forgotten, and pressed his face against Iruka's stomach.

"Eventually. We can tease him a bit first."

Iruka felt the vibrations of Kakashi's chuckle against his abs, the warmth of his breath and the fingers pressing just barely on the cleft of his ass incredibly arousing. "You're evil," Kakashi said, approving. "I knew there was a reason I loved you."

"I thought it was because of my ass."

February:

Westeros Most Haunted - Jaime/Brienne - What can I say, I love horror stories.

They walked as quick as the darkness permitted, running there was as bad an idea as staying still, and clutched each other's hands. "This is the last time I'm filming without a full crew," she said, and as soon as she spoke there a single note began to play, softly at first but gaining volume the same as the noise had before.

She liked it even less than she had the noise.

Jaime's hand squeezed hers hard enough to hurt but she didn't complain. "Oh fuck," was all he said when a second note and then a third followed, then he was moving faster and pulling Brienne with him. "Run, Brienne, run!"

She did, she knew what song was beginning to play and she knew the doors would close when it did.

They didn't want to be trapped on this side of the door.

March:

Ghost in the Machine - Jaime/Brienne - WestWorld AU, because they made it too easy for me to go there.

"There is a war coming," Maeve said. Jaime wasn't surprised. There was always a war, somehow. That thing in Westworld the man had been talking about, the fear in his voice when he had spoken about it that Jaime had ignored at the time. "And I can't fight it on my own."

"Why me?" There had been so many like him, so many other hosts. Jaime knew about war, but only in his little place, in this little fantasy world someone had written for them.

Maeve could have chosen anyone to fight with her.

"Because you are like me, you fought your programing to get back to her the same way I always tried to get back to my daughter. If they hadn't closed this park, you would have eventually got there on your own, I just got you there faster." She handed him the tablet.

April:

D-Rank mission scrolls - Kakashi/Iruka - Iruka in sexy lady clothing, enough said.

Iruka thought about his options; he could run back home and hide under the bed, pack his belongings and flee the village in the middle of the night. Naruto would miss him but he'd always thought he'd make a pretty good missing-nin, though they'd probably send Kakashi after him and he'd die of embarrassment without even giving him a fight. He could also pretend there was nothing out of the ordinary with his attire, as if academy teachers usually dressed in sexy female clothes, apologize to Kakashi and knock on the next door, hoping this time it was Raidou's house. He could also murder Kotetsu for having such appalling penmanship, and the rest of his friends for not being where they should have been.

May:

In Vino Veritas - Kakashi/Iruka - Another of my favourite tropes, second chances

"I almost proposed, once upon a time." He downed his glass and refilled it, using the last of the second jar and signalling for a third. He was feeling the effects of the drink, his tongue loosening, but he didn't mind. Not if it was with Iruka.

Iruka's eyes sharpened on him. "You did? To whom?" There was something in his voice, curiosity and sadness and maybe some jealousy. It was that what made Kakashi think, fuck it, and throw open the can.

"To you."

Iruka closed his eyes as if in pain and downed his glass, refilling it and downing it again.

"I would have said yes." It was Kakashi's turn to drink to ease the lump in his throat. "Do you remember why we broke up?" he finally asked, as if the sake had given him the courage he needed for the question.

June:

The House on the side of the Road - Kakashi/Iruka - again, horror story. Tooke me over four years to finish, but it was worth it.

It was raining. Again.

It was the thing Kakashi hated the most about autumn. The rain, and the chill that settled in the air and made people's mood turn foul, and the fact that Umino Iruka had disappeared on a day not unlike this one, windy and chilly and rainy.

It had been a year since Iruka had failed to return from his mission, practically vanishing into thin air on the road between Ame and Konoha. That same road Kakashi was travelling through now. Kakashi could still remember everything about the day Iruka had been declared MIA, the search party that had been sent to Ame to look for either him or his body. They had returned empty-handed, shaking their heads and declaring Iruka had just vanished into thin air. Without a body, without proof of any attack on him, Iruka couldn't be declared dead. The conclusion, one that didn't sit well with anyone who had ever known him, was that he had deflected, gone rogue.

July:

This Above All - Jaime/Brienne - Jaime coming out as genderfluid with his own parade

That's not the main thing, though. Seeing it like that, hearing the same things Cersei used to tell him growing up has done for Jaime what years of therapy have not managed. He's spent years and thousands of dragons coming to grips with the fact that he's not a freak for feeling sometimes like a woman and wanting soft things for himself, but he hadn't yet found the resolve to take the last step to be fully himself in public and bring the wrath of Tywin over his head.

Now he's angry enough at the treatment of his nephew to get the heir of the Lannister empire, at least until Tywin sees this, on the front page of all magazines dressed as a woman on the pride parade. He has a plan, he's kind of constructed his career around this moment without acknowledging he was doing it, has put the money his mother let him towards his own architecture studio and other small-time investments. Small-time for a Lannister but enough that he doesn't have to fear being left without resources. And neither does his cousin.

Jaime's also contacted an old friend and knows there is a place in the Martell float for him, ensuring maximum visibility because Jaime can do nothing by halves; if he's going to set his life on fire, he wants a bonfire the Seven can see from the heavens.

August:

Just as Sweet (just as thorny) - Jaime/Brienne - Secret identities, second chances, competency kink. It has all my faves

Jaime shouldn't be doing this.

He's going to be fired or punched, more than likely both. It will be no less than he deserves, he's broken the one rule of his department and he was already on shaky ground with Selmy after the whole Baratheon operation fuckup. If this gets back to him, and he doesn't fool himself that it won't, Jaime's as good as out of a job and not even his family name can save him this time. At the very least he'll be reassigned to the fucking Wall unit, something Selmy has been threatening to do for years when Jaime becomes especially obnoxious.

He looks at Brienne, her blue eyes wide and filling with tears, her entire posture radiating hurt and shock and anger and he couldn't care less. If she forgives him and gives him another chance, Jaime will present his resignation himself.

"Jay?" Brienne asks, her voice lost in the din of the club but he's seen her mouth shape that name enough times he can hear her voice in his head, down to the break at the end.

He leans forward again. "Jaime, my name is Jaime."

That's when she punches him.

September:

Skin Deep - Jaime/Brienne - Brienne owns a strip club asn it’s the most oblivious person on earth.

"She shook my hand," Jaime moans into his drink while Pia and Hilda laugh at him. It's Brienne day off and Jaime is there, sitting in her club surrounded by her employees and friends and missing her. Maybe she's really not interested, though he's seen her looking and there have been times when she was blushing and looking at his mouth, that Jaime was convinced he could just lean forward and kiss her and she'd kiss back, then those moments pass and he's back to wondering if he really is so out of practice flirting that she's not realized yet. If she wasn't interested she would just reject his advances, wouldn't she? "You all suck as wingmen and Brienne is the most oblivious person on earth. What do I have to do, dance naked in front of her so she realizes I want her!"

He groans into his drink when he sees the look Pia and Hilda exchange. "That's an excellent idea, Jaime. Roz! Satin! Come here!"

Jaime looks from one to the other and shakes his head vehemently. "No way. I am not doing that."

Famous last words.

October:

Hollow - Jaime/Brienne - The FMA AU I am not writing (and I keep not writing). This one is not posted because it insists on being a multichapter and I refuseto post it until I have at least another chapter done.

"Another fool," a voice says, low and all encompassing, and Jaime turns in the direction it came from to find nothing but a vague shape of a person, almost like a cutout of lines in the whiteness except for deep red eyes and the biggest ruby ever where its throat should be. "Who are you looking for, fool? Lover or family?"

Jaime narrows his eyes at the speaker. "Neither," he says, because Brienne is almost one of those things, but he's never had the courage to examine which one. "Who are you?"

"It doesn't matter, I've had many names since the beginning of time. I'm the World, and The Flames, and Truth, and Magic and Alchemy. I'm Everything and I am Nothing. " The eyes move past Jaime's shoulder and he turns to look, where there was nothing before now a huge door wreathed in flames stands. "And you, fool, are about to learn all I know."

November:

The Drowned Heart - Jaime/Brienne - an Old Guard AU where I make them suffer a lot.

Brienne pushes herself up on her elbows to see him better. "Will I see you again?" she asks instead of asking him to stay.

"Of course you will, wench, I don't think I can stay away from you forever." He looks at her with some chagrin. "I might kill you again when I do."

"I don't mind," Brienne says, it's the truth. "As long as you kiss me again when I come back."

Jaime closes the distance between them in two quick strides and kneels next to her, hands tangling on her head as he presses their lips together. This kiss is the kind she remembers, the kind they have shared a million times just because they could. It's gentle and sweet, a slow exploration of her mouth, his tongue probing and teasing, and so very arousing. He kisses her, and kisses her until they both run out of breath, and then puts their foreheads together and the look in his eyes is so full of love she wants to cry again.

"I will always kiss you again."

December:

The Prodigal Son - Jaime/Brienne - A view of a good future through the eyes of an outsider.

Spring had finally come to the Westerlands after the longest and harshest winter in memory, something Celys had not been sure they would live to see. The realm had been ravaged by war and cold and famine, too many people had died during that time, and even those living in Lannisport and the small towns surrounding Casterly Rock had felt the bite of hunger, something not even the Lannister gold had been able to keep at bay.

Now the snow had melted and the sun warmed them again, a new crop had been planted and there was a new Targaryen King in King's Landing, one with the blood of the dragons but raised as a northerner, and the Lord of Casterly Rock was his Hand.

And tagging @albatrossisland @ddagent @sdwolfpup @nire-the-mithridatist @scoundrels-in-love @wildlingoftarth @slipsthrufingers @angel-deux-writes and whoever else wants to do it!

#tag games #My writing #Jaime x Brienne #kakashi/iruka

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jadeile-writes · 4 years ago

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Fanfic Progress Update 128

Hi hi hi<3 Stay tuned for a spoilery glimpse into the next chapter of Adventure Gone Mini at the end.

Current WIPs:

Adventure gone Mini

Fandom: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / The Minish Cap

Summary: Sidon is given his very own Sheikah Slate, the first replica Purah has managed to make, and sets out to travel with Link with the intention of registering warp points for convenient travel in the future. However, when a malfunction shrinks them down to the size of bugs, and they meet little people called the Minish, they have to change their plans from “fun adventuring” to “getting out of this mess”. Not that those two have to exclude one another. Link/Sidon.

Progress: Chapter 54 is the current latest chapter and was posted on 21st of July. Chapter 55 is half done, cause I doubled my writing hour this week to catch up on the lost time! : D The scheduled posting date shall be 18th of August.

I post a new chapter every three weeks on Wednesdays, except when I don’t manage to and move it by a week. These updates always include a sneak-peek for the next chapter, slowly getting longer over the three (or four) weeks’ waiting period.

—–

Hah! Our afterlife is the most hilarious bushwa, dearest

Fandom: Hazbin Hotel

Summary: This is not a stand-alone story! This is a oneshot/drabble collection in the universe as “Shit, the Radio Demon is a part of my afterlife”. Read the main story before bothering with this one.

I decided to give my readers a chance to throw Radiohusk prompts at me, and had the Afterlife-verse as an option to set the stories in. Everyone liked that, so this fic is now a thing. Enjoy the extra mischief from these two dorks!

Progress: Chapter 28 is the current latest chapter and was posted on 27th of November. Chapter 29 is technically written, but I’ll need to look it over to see if I want to tweak it before I can call it done. The scheduled posting date is Some Friday, and there will be a sneak-peek on the Previous Thursday. Chapter 30 is half-done as well.

Note to new people who might be looking at this: I’m not taking prompts anymore. These will be the last chapters, and then the fic will be done.

—–

Other WIPs I’m not currently working on but intend to get back to someday:

PoE Drabbles (Pillars of Eternity) (btw, I’ve gotten back to playing the game, so this’ll likely be back on the table soon)

DC Drabbles (Justice League)

Diaphanous Relations (Forgotten Realms, R.A. Salvatore’s books)

Revalink chapter fic (Zelda BotW)

A bunch of Hazbin oneshots and chapter fics, some started, some just on the idea phase. There’s… there’s a lot…

—–

That’s it for the WIPs! Here’s the promised sneak-peek into Adventure gone Mini (Note: the text may end up slightly different in the fic itself due to more editing happening before publishing). Enjoy!

Mini

Link sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the Minish sized shrine. The entrance was a large stone door that could be opened with a Sheikah Slate, and the interierior so far was an expertly carved and elaborately decorated tunnel with Fire Chuchu jelly lanterns on the sides. It was distinctly lacking the mystical floating rock slabs of the regular shrines, which meant the entire dungeon was on ground level, which in turn made sense considering how little space a Minish shrine logically took. His slate had gained a blacked outline of a map upon entering the shrine, so he assumed that his first job would be to find a map-granting altar somewhere nearby. ...Should he be exploring, that is, which he wasn’t going to be able to do on this trip. Damn it.

Slateri had nabbed a Fire Chuchu jelly from one of the lanterns and was boiling a pot of water with some sort of medicine mixed in, planning to fix Link’s coughing with it. If Link got to go through the inevitable tussle with the Vaatians cough-free, he swore he’d be a lot less sour about Slateri’s bossy attitude in return.

—–

That’s it this time. See you next Saturday!

Links:

My AO3 My FFnet My Ko-fi Radiohusk Discord Server

#Fanfic progress update

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remy-arzt · 5 years ago

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TASK iii || A look through the past

For a long as you can remember you’ve had nightmares. Huge waves threaten to drown you and no matter how much you run, you’ll never be able to outrun them. You went to a sleep therapist once. She gave you some pills. They didn’t work. The dreams got more diverse.

Now it’s not just the wave threatening to drown you, you also find yourself floating over an abyss, knowing you will fall eventually. So you decide to try psychoanalysis, the results make sense but say nothing you didn’t already know. The wave represents deep emotion, which you’re terrified of. The abyss is your unconscious and all those unknown parts of you that sometimes you dare take a quick look at but could never face. That doesn’t help you figure out how to stop them, though. Then there’s the other nightmare, the one that is very clear to you.

February 1997 “Wake up! Wake up, boy!” Cold water drips form the tips of your hair, the droplets falling on your skin like small needles of ice. You startle awake. “You’re three minutes late already. Get to work or you get no food.” A quick nod and you get up and shake the dirty water from your hair. The morning passes in a whirl. Your hands hurt. Your back hurts. You can barely open your eyes in the dark, smoke-filled corridors under the factory. But you keep working until lunch time. Porridge, some stale bread and a fried egg. Then back to work, now it’s time to beg. One of your shoes has a hole in it. You’ve gotten used to it, to the cold, murky water seeping through your threadbare sock. Some of coins from a couple who clicks their tongue at you but forgets you five minutes after. A half-full bottle of water from a garbage man whose eyes seem to see right through you. When night hits you count your earnings and sigh. Not enough. Dinner is just a spoonful of peanut butter, you look on with envy at the plates of the kids who managed to raise more.

August 1999 You sit at the police station, your legs swinging back and forth. You wonder if they’ll put you in jail. Probably not. But you wish they would. Free food and a ratty old bed, all to yourself. Sounds like heaven to you. There’s blood in your tongue and the metallic taste of it makes your eyes water. You wonder what will happen if you cry. Will they judge you? Will they slap you, like The Man used to do? Maybe they’ll just ignore it. Maybe you can cry just a little bit.

April 1992 You have some faded, almost gone memories of your biological parents. Immigrants, struggling. They did their best to survive. That’s about it. Somehow, sometime, they got themselves into a mess and The Man pulled them out of it. They owed him. And since they didn’t have money... he took something else from them. You. You never found out if he took you away from them forcefully or if they gave in and let you go willingly. You remember your mother’s last wet kiss against your forehead, as if tears were running down her cheeks. Then training began. You worked in the morning and begged in the afternoon. In exchange you got food, a space on the factory floor and a moth eaten blanket. If you didn’t work you didn’t get any of that, you had to sleep outside. Where anyone could get you, The Man always said. “And then you’d have it much worse than here, boy. That’s for sure.”

March 1999 One night you startle awake, a nightmare too weird to ignore forced you out of sleep. You look around, hoping you didn’t wake anyone else, and your sleepy eyes focus on a pair of moving silhouettes. Maybe if you stay really, really still they won’t see you... but they do. They walk over to you and invite you to go with them. You hesitate, but you’ve never felt like you’re a part of anything before and you’d like to know what it feels like. They’re older, sixteen and seventeen. Looking for real jobs, they say. You’d don’t get what it means. When they ask for your name and you fail to give them one they start calling you “the kid”. It makes sense to you, sometimes they even call you boy too.

October 1997 You found some old books by an alley. The box where they were was musty and wet. The pages were crusty with dust and other mysterious stains. Still, they seemed special to you, you’d never really owned anything before. At night you found a way to convince some of the older guys to teach you how to read. Just twenty minutes before bed, they’d take turns and you’d give them some of your rations in exchange. Sometimes words are more nurturing than food, it seemed fair to you. Until The Man found out. You’d never seen him so angry at you, not even when you were younger and you’d cry on the job. He destroyed the books, you lost the chance to get more than one meal a day for a week. And he gave you a more permanent reminder of what would happen if you tried ”a stupid stunt like that again. Work or die out there, alone. Your choice boy.” You hid what remained of the books and didn’t dare look at them again.

August 1999 When you stated hanging out with them you knew you were probably making a mistake. You barely got by as it was and now you were losing sleep. You got less work done and less food in return. But it was... fun. You were always the lookout. They would steal some liquor or cigarettes and you’d stand outside and scream if you saw anyone coming. Sometimes they even stole some snack for you. But then everything went wrong. They lost control and they hurt someone, and when you saw them running away you tried to go after them. But they were older, taller and faster... and they didn’t wait for you. The police found you a couple of blocks down and the storeowner identified you. Little did you know then that this was actually the best thing that could’ve happened to you.

August 30th, 1999 When they pick you up you hardly believe your eyes. When you see the house on the Hill you’re sure you must be dreaming. This can’t really be your life now, can it? With time you will come to realize living in the Athanas house is not just a blessing, it comes with a curse too. But still, it seems like heaven to you compared to what could’ve been. The man that greets you is tall and imposing. There’s something about him that immediately calls for respect, but it also calls to some deeply buried part of you that yearns to impress him. You need him to think you’re worthy. He welcomes you to his house and then proceeds to tell you his rules. Your chores. What you should do, what you need to learn. You pay a lot of attention to him and nod your head at everything. You’ll do whatever it takes to stay here. Then comes the question you’d feared.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“I... um, my name? Well...”

He says he will call you Remy. And suddenly that’s who you are. That’s who you’ve always been and who you dream to become at the same time. You have a name and it’s more than you could have ever asked for. It’s the best birthday present anyone could have given you.

May 2006 You’re walking through the house, your mind doing it’s usual run over everything that needs to be done and should be happening. You’re humming softly to yourself. A noise brings you out of your mental reverie and you notice Belva running outside. The wind is in her hair and her laughter fills your ears. Florence is watching her too, sitting near her and braiding a flower crown. A soft warmth fills your heart and moves through your whole body. In that moment you feel completely content. The calm smile remains as you walk over to the library, you promised to help Cassia and Horatio with their homework.

December 2001 Your laugh rises over the trees and you feel like it could reach the sky. You turn towards Mom and smile as you finish folding the picnic blanket. Today everyone wanted to have lunch outside and you helped her set up, now you’re picking everything up. She seems distracted, and you know this isn’t unusual for her, but you’re happy she’s still present enough to laugh at your bad jokes. She runs her fingers through your hair as you walk into the house and you lean into the touch, enjoying as much of it as you can. Then you go check on kids, you know you have to look after them. You like to do it.

July 2014 You look at the clock and are surprised to realize you and Pacifico have been talking for hours, way into the night. It’s not the first time it’s happened and you’re happy to know it probably isn’t the last. He’s telling you about fishing, about the calm and patience it requires. About how you need to learn to wait and carefully keep control in the meantime. Maybe someday, when he gets a day off, you can both go. You’ve never seen a body of water big enough to fish in, but in that moment you decide you already love it. You never took that fishing trip...

2019 You’ve been struggling with finding yourself now more than ever. You always did have trouble identifying and adequately classifying your fears and emotions. So you simply tried to counteract them with logic. It usually worked. When it didn’t, you made sure you were alone to let it all out. Now even that certainty has been taken from you. All you used to believe you were, everything you thought you needed to do. The boy you were and the man you’ve become are not enough to make ends meet and you’re wondering what’s missing and how to find it.

And amidst all of this confusion one more thing stands out: all this time you thought you were important to him. You thought you mattered to him, maybe not as much as your work, but... did you ever matter at all? What was real and what wasn’t? What parts of you are truly yours and which are just a cog in the well-oiled machine you willed yourself to become for him? Even as these questions rage through your mind, even as your horror over the murder and everything that’s followed corrodes it, you can’t hate him. You can resent him but you could never hate him. Because Vidal Athanas gave you a purpose, a life. But more than that, he gave you something no one else could. He gave you a name, and with that he gave you an identity. And a life to live with it.

#dhtask #( task 3 )#( hc )#( past )#// well this is long and messy but I liked how it felt with the timeline all mixed up and this was way overdue...

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vintage-vermillion · 5 years ago

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Ghost Writer

I sit down at my desk, which is stationed in front of a broad window. It casts a delicate curtain of sunlight over my journal which still lies flat and open where I abandoned it. I allow my hand to run over it’s pages, and notice dry ink is still caked into the beds of my fingernails from my last entry, reminding me unpleasantly of stale blood. I nervously scrape away at it as I attempt to gather my thoughts. Writing was not a frequent habit of mine until I moved to the lighthouse on the rock. I can say this about it though, it's quite liberating to write here. One can record whatever they wish and never have to worry about a single sole stumbling upon it and fancying themselves a read; being miles away from any neighboring towns or houses. I’m not used to isolation in this severity, as though some divine force found itself inclined to scoop up the whole of humanity and left me to miserably guard it’s remains. Or Maybe it’s as if I died, and now I’m simply a solemn apparition, wandering some ethereal plane, too afraid to brave the mists that curl and gather meters below my window, like an endless sea of gossamer. My only obstacle which prevents ascension. I might enjoy my stay more if it weren’t for the circumstances that put the lighthouse into my care in the first place. But my goal for today is not to dwell on the past, it is only to write. I take up my pen, give it a sip of ink, and begin recounting the events of the previous evenings:

Day 98 - July 28, 1885

I believe my visitor returned last night. I have no sound evidence except for the various thumps and footsteps echoing over the stairwell, as well as a scattered plethora of notes, written in an illegible scrawl and littering the most obscure places, for instance; The other day I found one stuffed unceremoniously into the toe of my slipper, only noticing once the stiff parchment jabbed at my foot, leaving a rather nasty paper cut. Just this morning I discovered another note folded neatly at the bottom of my teacup. I know not of who is leaving these notes, nor their intended message, unless if it was to thoroughly unsettle me, then, rest assured, it is well received.

The night of the storm was when I first met my guest.

It being my first July spent in Newfoundland I was utterly unprepared for the beast of a storm I was to face, and I foolishly had put off some of my work to enjoy the sunnier weather of the day before. My sloth would prove not easily forgiven, as the wind- which was only yet beginning to stir- churned up the waves surrounding me on my stony island, brutishly throwing themselves at my feet, burning my eyes and licking my heels with it’s cold, salty spray. As minutes passed by the storm only grew, sky darkening as the elements warred around my home, inventing for me a hellish vortex of thunder, rain, and wind.

My idle chores now seemed that of Hercules’ twelve labors, the last of which required me to maintain the mercury.

Fresnel lenses, I am told, are a great innovation regarding the intensity and range of light it provides for the beacon. But just as important, is maintaining the specific speed of a twenty second rotation. To do that, one must eliminate friction. This is done by floating the light and lens on a circular track of liquid mercury. My job is to then remove any debris contaminating the mercury by straining it through a fine cloth.

I was nearing the end of completing this task, when I noticed a figure, cut out of the night by the blaze of the beacon. It stood outside the window, and much to my trepidation, appeared to be peering in at me.

I slowly crept forwards, pausing only when the person’s image was lost to 20 seconds of black.

Outside the storm raged on in a broad, vibrating timbre.

Thunder bellowed with such a ferocity that it had nearly knocked me to my knees, but the phantom silhouette remained eerily still.

Finally, I reached the window, and finding myself lost as to what to do, raised my hand to the glass, and knocked.

The light passed, leaving us once again to the mercy of the night.

But not for long.

Suddenly Lightning burst forth from the clouds illuminating a pale face, disfigured and twisted into a permanent mournful plea.

I cried out. For whom I do not know, as I am sure not even the all mighty God in heaven could hear me over that storm.

By the next interval of light I found myself on the floor, short of breath and gasping. With some strain, I managed to ease the palpitations of my heart, and forced my gaze back to the window.

But the phantom had left me, vanished, as though an unfastened scarf stolen by the wind.

I would’ve been glad to have it out of sight, if it weren't for the fact that I now have no idea of its whereabouts, or when it may next return, greeting me with those vacant, inky eyes.

This is my first original post, I’m just practicing writing in a historical setting, as I am still rather new at it.

#short story #writing #lighthouse #ghost story #unreliable narrator #isolation #lonely vibes #creepy #creepy stories #prompts #too long for tumblr #historical writing #old lighthouse #mercury #mad as a lighthouse keeper

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miss-wordful · 5 years ago

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Ghost Writer

Day 98 - July 28, 1885

The night of the storm was when I first met my guest.

My idle chores now seemed that of Hercules’ twelve labors, the last of which required me to maintain the mercury.

I slowly crept forwards, pausing only when the person’s image was lost to 20 seconds of black.

Outside the storm raged on in a broad, vibrating timbre.

Thunder bellowed with such a ferocity that it had nearly knocked me to my knees, but the phantom silhouette remained eerily still.

Finally, I reached the window, and finding myself lost as to what to do, raised my hand to the glass, and knocked.

The light passed, leaving us once again to the mercy of the night.

But not for long.

Suddenly Lightning burst forth from the clouds illuminating a pale face, disfigured and twisted into a permanent mournful plea.

I cried out. For whom I do not know, as I am sure not even the all mighty God in heaven could hear me over that storm.

By the next interval of light I found myself on the floor, short of breath and gasping. With some strain, I managed to ease the palpitations of my heart, and forced my gaze back to the window.

But the phantom had left me, vanished, as though an unfastened scarf stolen by the wind.

I would’ve been glad to have it out of sight, if it weren't for the fact that I now have no idea of its whereabouts, or when it may next return, greeting me with those vacant, inky eyes.

This is my first original post, I’m just practicing writing in a historical setting, as I am still rather new at it.

#short story writing lighthouse ghost story unreliable narrator isolation lonely vibes creepy creepy stories prompts too long for t

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sliceannarbor · 6 years ago

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Jeff Gordinier

Food & Drinks Editor, Esquire Magazine Author/Food Journalist Hudson Valley, New York jeffgordinier.com noma.dk Photo by Andre Baranowski

SPECIAL GUEST SERIES

In this, our 122nd issue of SLICE ANN ARBOR, we are honored to present food journalist and author Jeff Gordinier. Gordinier talks with SLICE about his new book Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World — and life.

Jeff Gordinier is the food & drinks editor at Esquire and a contributor to The New York Times, where he was previously a reporter. In his latest book, Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World, Gordinier chronicles four years spent traveling in Mexico, Australia, and Denmark with René Redzepi, a Danish chef and the creative force behind Noma, often referred to as the best restaurant in the world. Gordinier provided commentary for an episode of Netflix's Chef's Table series featuring Jeong Kwan, a Buddhist nun in South Korea and an avatar of Asian temple cuisine. His work has appeared in Travel + Leisure, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly, Details, Elle, Fortune, Creative Nonfiction, Spin, Poetry Foundation, and anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading. A graduate of Princeton University, Gordinier is also the author of X Saves the World and coeditor of Here She Comes Now. When he’s not working, you can find him taking care of his four children. Gordinier lives north of New York City with his wife, Lauren Fonda; they have a view of the Hudson River from their bedroom.

[Jeff Gordinier will be at the Shinola Hotel in Detroit on Tuesday, July 23, 2019, to celebrate the release of Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World, where he will be in conversation with chef George Azar, owner of Flowers of Vietnam, Detroit. The discussion will be moderated by Devita Davison, executive director of FoodLab Detroit].

FAVORITES

Book: Impossible to say, but for now, Patti Smith's Just Kids, James Schuyler's Selected Poems, Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

Destination: Anywhere I have never been before, so I will say Japan.

Motto: "I promise I will get back to you."

THE QUERY

How [and when] did the concept for Hungry originally take shape?

When I first met chef René Redzepi, in 2014, I was working as a food writer on staff at The New York Times, and it's safe to say I was wary of the fame he had achieved and skeptical about the New Nordic movement that he had instigated. Redzepi and I wound up traveling through Mexico together for a story I wrote for T Magazine, and that led, over time, to more Noma-oriented encounters and experiences. I soon started spending my own money to check out what Noma was doing in Copenhagen and in Australia, et cetera, and eventually I became intrigued enough that I quit my job to join the circus: I left my post at the Times and began tagging along on the trips that make up the bulk of Hungry. (My gig at Esquire gives me a lot of leeway to travel, and the only way to tell this story was to be free to hop on a plane at a moment's notice.)

For decades I've been a fan of the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back, which captured Bob Dylan at a crucial moment in his career, with all of the friction and frustration that that entails. We're lucky that Pennebaker managed to be present to get footage of Dylan, this pioneering cultural figure, when the singer-songwriter was in the midst of so much pressure and transformation. I guess I hoped to do a similar thing, in a book, with Redzepi — I felt as though I had warts-and-all access to this influential person during a genuine inflection point, and I didn't want those observations to go to waste.

What if, I thought, you were riding alongside Dylan from, say, 1965 to 1968 — from the moment he (controversially) went electric all the way through the recording of Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding? That sort of framework seemed available with Redzepi, because he and the Noma crew were preparing to embark on a series of risky, difficult pop-ups (in Japan, Australia, and Mexico) at the same time that the chef was planning to shut down the restaurant that had made him famous and reopen it in a new form on a site that looked like an abandoned nuclear dump. It was a dramatic set-up - and impossible to resist.

What was your overall vision for the book, before you embarked on the journey?

I had embarked on the journey long before I envisioned it as a book. I was just taking these crazy trips. Along the way I got to thinking that I might have material for a book. The structure of the book came together finally, in my mind, when I realized that it was a cult narrative: Hungry is ultimately the story of a lost man (that would be myself) who found clarity and purpose by joining a cult, only in this case the cult happens to be a restaurant called Noma.

How would you describe the evolution of your relationship with René Redzepi, from day one to the end of the travels?

He talked. I listened. At first I was slightly dubious regarding the whole mission of Noma, but eventually I realized that there was no point in trying to say "no" to this chef. It was more fulfilling to say yes.

What was a typical day like as you worked your way across the globe?

A lot of eating, a lot of driving, a lot of talking, a lot of analyzing. By the end of each day I tended to be exhilarated and exhausted. But I should point out that I didn't perpetually travel with Redzepi for years on end. Most of the time I was simply back home with my family, working on articles, et cetera. And Redzipi was back in Denmark with his family and his restaurant team. We would take these trips now and then, usually on a whim, over the course of about four years.

Who did you meet along the way from the culinary world (or from other worlds) that you'll likely never forget, and why?

Reporting the book was like being stuck in a culinary version of The Canterbury Tales, because famous chefs floated in and out of our orbit as we moved along. David Chang, Kylie Kwong, Danny Bowien, Enrique Olvera, Roberto Solís, Rosio Sánchez, to name but a few. What I won't forget is the summer day when René and Nadine Redzepi held a picnic in their backyard at which some of the world's top chefs got together and cooked: Jacques Pépin, José Andrés, Danny Bowien, Kylie Kwong, Jessica Koslow, Gabriela Cámara. Daniel Patterson, Bo Bech, Alex Atala. That was wild.

Is there a moment that stands out as most remarkable during the journey?

Really it was one remarkable moment after another. That's why I kept going back. It felt like an amplified version of life.

How has Redzepi changed the global culinary dialogue about wild and cultivated sourced ingredients?

Answering that would take a couple of days.

Why did Redzepi "have to do this," a question you asked early in your travels, referring to the closing of Noma in 2015 and its reopening/reinvention in 2018?

Most chefs work hard in a ridiculously challenging environment. Many chefs are perfectionists. But Redzepi is unlike anyone I have written about in the sense that he is never satisfied with sitting still. As readers of Hungry will see, he's allergic to coasting. At this point he and the Noma crew could just keep cranking out the most popular dishes. Customers would continue to beg for tables. But Redzepi seems convinced that his creativity would dry up if he let that happen. So he's always conjuring new challenges — exercises in team-building and flavor-searching that would wear most of us out.

How did this experience ultimately create reinvention in your life; how did it change you?

When I first met Redzepi, I was feeling stuck, which is something that happens to a lot of us, of course. Redzepi's philosophy — his whole approach to living — represents the opposite of stuckness. Like so many intensely creative people (from Bowie to Beyoncé), he's adept at escaping stuckness by propelling himself forward. He doesn't like to dwell on the past; he doesn't like to stay put. When he and I met, I was in a period of my life that was pretty much all about dwelling on the past, and that contrast seemed narratively fruitful to me. (The book starts off by quoting the first lines of Dante's Divine Comedy, which is sort of an inside joke, because from one vantage point the Divine Comedy can be read as an extravagant metaphor for Dante's midlife crisis.) I felt like both Redzepi and I were at pivotal moments in our lives. As readers will see, I wound up getting kicked out of my mental rut.

What is the wisdom of tearing it all down and starting over?

I think what drew me to Redzepi, long before I tasted his cooking, was his crazy commitment to making the most out of his life and the opportunities that have come his way. For those of us (and maybe it's all of us) who toy with the notion of reinventing ourselves, well, Redzepi comes across as a kind of mad avatar of renewal. He has reinvented Noma itself over and over, and he has also, in a way, reinvented Copenhagen, almost single-handedly turning it into one of the most compelling culinary cities in the world. It can be seductive and intoxicating to be around people who have that kind of energy.

What do you think the Danish chef might have learned from you along the way?

I am still much better than he is at making tortillas.

#jeff gordinier #andre baranowski #noma #foodlabdetroit #reneredzepi

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jolienjoyswriting · 5 years ago

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Mortem In Contumeliam FFVI, Epilogue

The epilogue (and, final) chapter of "Mortem In Contumeliam Final Fantasy VI," a Final Fantasy VI fan fiction story.

I bet you expecting more of a finale than this, weren't you? Weeell… I could have gone on-and-on, but I figured the story was getting a bit long. Besides, this part of the game goes by in a flash, depending on how you approach it! But, really… I just thought a nice, simple ending was in order, after everything. … if there's interest, though… I might write an extra chapter (or, two) which goes into greater detail on certain events. Hell, who am I kidding? I may just do it, anyway. Just, not right away. … that comment might be invalid by the time this is posted. I wrote all these descriptions on August 1st, ha hah.

Word count: 2,869 – Character count: 16,340 Originally written: July 29th, 2019

Two years after the end of the world…

Final Fantasy VI, Wedge, Biggs, and related characters, scenarios, and properties created by Square Soft, Inc. and © Square Enix Co, Ltd.

[ ← Prev. Chapter | Next Chapter → ]

“I’m an Imperial soldier! Or, at least… I survived being one…”

That was the story a man wearing a facsimile Imperial Army uniform told people passing through the Dragon’s Head Colosseum. Sometimes, he would mention something about the Emperor and “talking to him twice,” while other times, he’d offer friendly hints and suggestions about what to bet… though, that usually ended up with customers losing their items to an opponent they couldn’t win against. Still, it was relatively honest work for modest-but-fair pay, and it kept him off of the streets. But, one day…

“Welcome to the Dragon’s Head Colosseum! I–” “Wedge…? Is that you?” The fake soldier tilted his head as he was interrupted by a blond-haired woman wearing a form-fitting, red dress. “I’m an Imperial soldier!” he told her. “Or at least… I survived being one…” Without warning, she threw her arms around his shoulders, giving him a tight hug. “You were right, Celes!” she called. “It is Wedge!” “No,” said another blond lady wearing a green unitard, white cape, and a blue bandanna. “I said that I think it might be him. I’d never forget that voice, after what I did…” “I’m sure it’s him!” the first woman said, brightly smiling as she held him close. “You’re Wedge, the former Magitek Soldier who tried to help save the world!” “I… I did…?” was the “soldier’s” confused response. “Mm-hmm!” The woman finally stepped back, continuing to smile. “You still have the sword I gave you.” He looked down at the sword on his belt. Unlike the rest of his costume… that was real.

“A… a close friend gave me that…” he told her. “I’m that close friend!” She giggled a little before telling him, “Wedge, I’m Tina!” “Tina…? Y… you’re… Tina…?” “I’m Tina!” she repeated with a bright smile. As she calmed down and brought red-wrapped arms in front, the man took off his helmet and gave her a closer look. Something was familiar about her bouncy, blond hair tied up in a ribbon, and her pinkish-red dress with its and lavender sash and stockings… But, more than that, something about the way she smiled at him reminded him of… better days – days that weren’t just filled with fighting, days where “peace” didn’t seem like such a foreign concept, and days where he had dreams of spending a quiet life running a small shop with a sweet, hope-filled girl and his best friend… who, he suddenly realized, he hadn’t thought about in ages… “B… Biggs…”

As he started to cry, the woman named Tina pulled him inward. She softly shushed him, telling him everything would be alright as she stroked his short, red hair. It was kind of awkward for the other lady to watch… but, kind of heartwarming, too. –––––

“And… that’s what you’ve missed.”

Sometime later, Wedge found himself seated in a small, semi-decorated room. After quitting his job at the coliseum, he’d followed Tina and Celes out and wound up climbing aboard an airship not unlike the one he remembered snapping in half during the end of the world, more-than-a-year prior. The new one, though, was much faster… but, also had a severe lack of rooms, which is why he and Tina ended up talking in what looked to be a closet with a chair and a well-dressed window.

“So, I didn’t dream all that? The world really did end…?” She gave a nod, having finished telling him everything that had happened after the cataclysm, then everything she’d been involved with, since. “Heh.” He rubbed his face. “I… I guess I kind of lost my marble, for a while…” “A lot of us did…” She frowned as she told him, “Celes nearly ended it all when her friend, Doctor Cid, died. Kaien gave up searching for us only to give hope to a sweet woman in Maranda whose husband died. I’m… not entirely sure what happened to Stragos, but we found him at a building, worshiping Kefka as a god! Thank goodness sweet little Lilum was with us, though I wish she hadn’t physically slapped him… She can be so strict with her grandfather!”

“You’re… a mother, now, you said?” “Adoptive mother,” the woman corrected, to his relief. “It… it feels so… so…” He tilted his head. Tina was blushing, all-of-a-sudden… “All my life,” she started over, “I never knew what love was. When I found my way to Mobliz and saw all of those children with their sad faces… something inside just… called to me. Before I knew it, I was taking care of them all. I… I’d finally found the love I was looking for… “When Humbaba stormed the village…” She looked away, pausing. “I was defenseless… There was nothing I could do. I almost gave up… but, Miss Celes and Mister Figaro saved me and the children. I thought I’d failed them and swore to never leave their side… but, it wasn’t until Humbaba returned that I found a new reason to fight with all my power.” She looked up, giving a soft smile. “I’m fighting for the future. For their future.”

“Heh. You’re an amazing lady, Tina…” She smiled a little more, but… “You seem sad…” She’d noticed how quiet he’d gotten, since her story. “It seems like everyone has something to fight for, now more than ever…” “Don’t you?” she quietly asked. “Nope… I don’t have any reason to fight… Nothing we can do will fix this world. But, you guys are hellbent on trying! I just… don’t belong with you guys.” He sighed. “Never have.” “That’s not true,” the girl politely countered. “Yeah?” The former soldier crossed his arms. “Why, exactly, should I stick around?” He gave a blink, then. Tina had leaned down and given him a soft peck on the cheek. As she drew back, brushing her bangs away from her face, she gave a soft smile and whispered… “For me.” –––––

“Oh, gods, what’d they do?! The place is falling apart!!”

The assembled forces of fourteen unique individuals had done the impossible and destroyed not only three warring gods of destruction, but the person who had focused their power and become a god, himself. And, as Kefka Palazzo fell… so did his tower of junk.

Twelve of the New Returners had gone into Kefka’s Tower, leaving the former Imperial soldier named Wedge to keep the airship hovering nearby. He had been freaking out, knowing that Kefka’s “Light of Judgment” could go off at any time, ripping right through the flying vehicle… but, he stayed true to his course. Not just because he was supporting a noble goal… not just because Setzer, the owner of the new airship, threatened to track him down and murder him if he chickened out… but, because he was waiting for someone to come back… and, he wanted to be the first person she saw after climbing up the ship’s hook.

When the tower shuddered, Wedge looked over just in time to see something at the apex explode! He was sure the Falcon – Setzer’s late friend’s airship – would get hit by the blast, but he managed to steer it away from danger… only to pull back as the rocks and metal of the tall structure began to crumble and collapse. Whatever those crazy adventurers had done… it had done a number on the tower! He just hoped… that they’d done the same to its owner.

“Come on… come on…!” He nervously paced back-and-forth. It had been several minutes since the mimic called Gogo and the mostly-friendly cave beast named Umaro climbed down and ran into the tower in an attempt to guide everyone out, and he was getting anxious. “They’ve gotta be okay… They’ve just gotta!”

After a bit more pacing, he finally sat down, pressing his hand to his chest over his tunic. “Gods… This can’t be good for my heart,” he sighed. “It feels like it’s beating like a war drum! Actually, it feels like it’s vibrating… And… tugging at my– waugh!!” Without any warning, something ripped free of his top, knocking his hand out of the way! A second later, he looked up… only to remove his goggles and go wide-eyed. “What are you…?” he squeaked at the creature floating before him. “You don’t recognize me?” it called in a voice that practically pierced into his mind. “Sh-should I…?!” “I spend the better part of two years with you, and you forget I even exist…?” The brown-skinned creature with long, angular horns and purple-blue hair grinned. “I shudder to think of how you’ll treat my daughter, later on in her life!” He narrowed his eyes… “Your daught–” Only to open them right back up. “Son of a submariner… You’re Madin?!” “You’re right,” he said with a warm smile, “and, I need to tell you something…”

Madin had never appeared to him quite so clearly and, in fact, he wasn’t sure that, despite having his very soul next to his heart for over two years, the Eidolon had ever spoken to him, prior. Needless to say, Wedge was all-ears, at that moment.

“Wedge… I’m afraid that this is both the first time, and the last time, that I can appear like this.” he sadly told the man. “The Eidolon’s souls are vanishing from this world.” “What? No! Wait, that’s not fair!” Wedge exclaimed, his eyes going wide, again. “Magic is dying…” he explained, “and, with it, all it has birthed.” Well, that explained why Kefka’s Tower was falling apart, at least. But… “So, this is really it…? I’ll never–” The ex-soldier paused. “Wait, Tina! You– you have to say goodbye to Tina!!” “I wish I could…” He gave a forlorn smile as he said, “You’ll have to do it for me.” The man slowly nodded, feeling himself tear up. “I will, Madin, I will…” “If you get the chance…” “If I…?” He looked up. “What?”

“Tina… my daughter…” the Eidolon quietly murmured. “She is half of what I am.” “Okay… but, what do you mean–” “She may well vanish with the rest of us.” Wedge was immediately sent into a panic. “No– no-no– no-no-no…!” “But…” the magical creature sighed as his form started to fade, “if she has been able to feel something precious, as a human…” “If she’s… wait, what does that–” “Then perhaps… as a… human…” With those last, enigmatic words… Madin ceased to exist.

For several moments, Wedge just held his head, sitting and rocking in-place. He couldn’t believe… refused to believe… that, not a few days after being reunited with the woman he’d grown to love, she was going to… vanish. Just like her father… It was almost too much for him to bear. But, eventually… he pulled himself up, leaped overboard, and started climbing down… “Tiiinaaaaa…!!” “Follow me!” Only to see her whizz by in her Eidolon form.

“Oh.” He blankly stared, hanging onto the airship’s hook for a moment. “W-wait, no– Tina!” “Move it!! We’ve got to get out of here!!” Wedge yelped as Setzer clambered up the chain – and, subsequently, climbed him – before getting onto the deck. A couple more people did the same before he finally got the message and returned to where he was, himself.

Not long after everyone boarded, the airship roared away from the crumbling, exploding tower, led by a pinkish-purple light in the shape of a girl. “Tina…!” Wedge called out. “The last of the Magicite!”

He looked back. A crystal floated away from Edgar’s hand before bursting into dust. “Tina…” the former soldier worriedly whimpered… “Tina! That’s enough!!” Celes cried to her friend from the ship’s head. “Your power…” Wedge had never felt so much sympathy for the former general as he did, then. He, too, could see the half-Eidolon girl starting to falter… and, it was scaring him to a point of silence.

As the tower collapsed and burst into a pile of rocky, molten slag, the Falcon pierced the dark clouds, closely following the half-Eidolon into open airspace. It was strange… but, somehow, the previously-purple sky seemed like it was losing its ominous glow and reverting to a long-forgotten, familiar shade of blue. Tina, on the other hand… “No– no!!” Suddenly, Celes and Edgar ran over to the side of the ship. When Wedge looked that way, he noticed that Tina was slowing and starting to fall. She looked a little pale, too… “She’s losing her power!” the other blond woman shouted. “Setzer!” Edgar called. “After her!” “Leave it to me!” the captain called from the steering wheel. “Hang ooon…!”

Everyone hung on to whatever they could as the airship shot straight down, breaking back through the clouds and chasing the falling woman. “Tina!” Wedge, who was starting to get used to a life of excitement, found himself losing focus… “Tina…” He squinted his eyes, his consciousness starting to slip. And, soon… “Ti… na…” He blacked out.

“Wedge? Wedge…? Are you alright?” The ex-soldier groaned, shaking his head… “Who… where…?” “Relax, Wedge. You’re with friends.” He slowly opened his eyes, having trouble seeing straight. All he could see was blurry shapes and colorful splotches… “Can’t… see…” he huffed. “What… happened?” “What happened?” a smart-sounding voice repeated from nearby. “What happened?! I’ll tell you what happened, Cheese Wedge! Setzer just saved your girlfriend’s butt after she flew us away from Kefka’s Tower – which is just a big pile of trash, now, by the way!” “My… what?” Wedge was… very confused. “Lock…” the voice from before said, sounding shy. “He’s not my boyfriend…” “Not yet!” Lock laughed, “but, I’ve seen the way you two look at each other! Plus, Shadow recently told me a fun little story from the past…” “He– he didn’t!” The female voice sounded nervous. “He sure did!” her companion laughed. “Never would’ve pegged this guy as a romantic…but, two people can learn a lot about each other when stuck on a flyin’ island, huh?” Wedge heard a long, embarrassed groan and felt a weight compress his chest. He tried to get a look at it… only to see what appeared to be someone’s blond-haired head resting on a pair of arms with pinkish-red opera-style gloves. It didn’t take him much thought to realize… “T… Tina!”

The former soldier shot up like a rocket, accidentally throwing his friend’s head off of his body. A second later, he felt incredibly dizzy and slumped back down. “Careful…” he heard Tina say. “What… happened?” he sighed, feeling her stroke his head. “I remember a nosedive…” “That’s ‘cause Setzer put the ship into a nosedive!” Lock explained with another laugh. “Like I said, he saved Tina!” “I told you, didn’t I?” a voice called from somewhere behind. “The world’s fastest ship!” “As far as we can tell… you passed out from the speed,” Tina added after that. “Gotta say, that’s pretty embarrassing!” “Lock! Be nice!” “Hey, just sayin’…” “Anyway…” the kind woman continued, rubbing his cheek with the back of one hand. “You just lay there on the couch until you feel better. We’ll try and be quiet for you.” “Once we’re done partying, anyway! Not every day ya kick four war-gods’ asses!” “You… what…?”

Wedge slowly sat back up, then looked at his companions. Tina was seated on the floor, fondly smiling at him with gentle eyes while Lock stood behind her, his arms crossed and a grin on his face. When he tossed a random thumbs up, Wedge just tilted his head. “Where… is everyone?” he found himself asking, suddenly noticing a lack of people. “They’re celebrating up top!” Lock answered. “You’re welcome to join us when ya feel better! I mean, you just drove the airship while we did all the heavy lifting, buuut…” “Lock!” Tina gave her friend a dirty look as he shrugged and walked away with a smile.

“Anyway, you just rest, and I’ll–” “Tina, there’s something I need to tell you.” She tilted her head. “Can it wait? You still haven’t recovered.” “I…” He hesitated before telling her, “I saw your dad.” “You did?” Somehow… she didn’t seem as surprised as he was expecting. “He said to tell you ‘goodbye…’ He also said you might vanish… b-but, you didn’t!” The man smiled… before looking down at the couch he was seated on. “Tina… I’m so sorry… He was a good dad.” When he looked back up, he saw that Tina was still smiling… but, she also looked sad. “If I hadn’t kept him all to myself for the last two years… If I’d only give him back…!” “It’s okay,” she said, shaking her head with a little sniffle. “You needed him more.” “But–!” She pressed a finger to his lips, her smile brightening a little. “I’m going to Mobliz, soon. I want to check on the children. Come with me?” “Uh…” He blinked… then, he smiled. “It’s a date?” “About time!” she exclaimed. “It’s not nice to keep a girl waiting for two whole years!” He had to blink, again. She’d used a scolding tone… but, she was grinning. And, that was enough to get him smiling, again, which put an even brighter smile back on her face!

“You… are a precious cinnamon bun, Tina…” was all he had to say before finally resting…

#fan fiction #Final Fantasy VI #Mortem In Contumeliam #commercial characters #Magitek Soldier #Wedge #Tina Branford #Terra Branford #Celes Chere #Madin #Maudin #Setzer Gabbiani #Edgar Figaro #Lock Cole #Locke Cole #fantasy #drama

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ms31x129 · 6 years ago

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Little Boy Blue

Summary:

“Son, you look like you’re going through some hard times. And every once in a while you gotta accept a little help.”

XFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXF

It was almost time. He could feel it.

He walks to the end of the room and pulls back the ugly brown drape.

Yes, it would be soon.

He knows it, can almost physically sense it, the same way he can feel the cold that is creeping through the edges of the window pane. Frost clings thick to the glass like tiny snow drifts in the corners. Absently he uses his fingernail to carve a heart into the icy landscape.

He remembers once doing the same thing to the soft skin of her back. She’d giggled as he’d traced ‘I Love You’ with a feather-like touch.

His eyes darken when he remembers finding the trace of red the laser had missed.

And just like that he recalls the city he’s lost the most in. His nails dig in, scratching out the ice-etched heart.

He should have known better than to seek refuge in that wretched city of all places.

He left in May and now in December, when most people are celebrating the holidays with family and friends, he’s just getting through each day.

He’s traveled across the country hundreds of times; usually she was by his side. She wasn’t always happy about it, but she was there.

But he’s tired of moving, of running. Tired of being without contact.

When he left, he’d thought maybe he could teach. Access to whatever false ID and credentials he would need was easily remedied. He’d moved every 3 days from May to July. By then his funds had dwindled and needed to be replenished somehow.

* * * * *

A small town with a community college in Arizona needed a Mythology instructor; Professor Kent Searcher accepted. He gathered the text books he needed, read them cover to cover and had his class syllabus prepared in three days. He found it ironic that he was looking forward to using some of the knowledge he’d worked a lifetime to achieve in this capacity.

Surprisingly, he was content teaching the students–some of them so willing to believe–who didn’t need solid scientific evidence.

The students sensed it the moment their professor’s mood changed, his animated speech breaking off in mid-sentence.

He cleared his throat and bowed his head, asking them to please study quietly until the end of class. He removed his glasses and sat, thumbs digging into the corners of his eyes.

The motion hadn’t been casual enough that they’d missed his reddened eyes and several wayward tears.

He got word the last week in September. They were coming.

He’d left with 8 bags in May. By October, when Mark Hunter took a job coaching High School Basketball, there were only 4. Two of those remained in the trunk of the car.

Six weeks later he accepted a dinner invitation from the 8th grade English teacher. He was lonely and longed for some one on one adult conversation.

She was attractive, though her beauty paled in comparison to the one he still loved. The one he still dreamed about every night he closed his eyes.

He arrived at 7. She smiled and ushered him into the living room. He made himself comfortable on the couch while she excused herself for a moment. He was shocked when she returned and placed a baby into his arms, “Could you hold him while I check the oven?” He nodded dumbly.

How could he forget she’d told him about her 6 month old son?

She returned to find him openly weeping, even as her son slept on, oblivious. He stood, handed her the baby and left.

* * * * *

Finally a bright spot on the horizon. He was needed.

At home. He was going home.

Danger.

A mad dash.

He was chased between boxcars and engines.

A missed chance.

A petite figure stood on the platform, watching the train with him depart.

He ran to his car, eyes burning, tears clouding his vision. He was somewhere in Ohio when exhaustion overcame him and he drove the car into a ditch.

* * * * *

He was found unconscious and taken to the local clinic.

The mechanic who towed the car offered him a job in exchange for the repairs necessary to get his vehicle back on the road. Mr. Guthrie didn’t even mind that he didn’t have any automotive experience short of putting the key in the ignition. He just said, “Son, you look like you’re going through some hard times. And every once in a while you gotta accept a little help.”

He became a wiz at tire rotation, fixing flats and oil changes. He heard the explosion as he was walking to the garage one day. Guthrie’s Repair Shop was a ball of flames; black smoke clouds floated up from the building. He ran back to the bed and breakfast, threw as much as he could into one bag and left town in the truck Mr. Guthrie had loaned him.

He’d abandoned the truck 2 hours later.

He didn’t know if the man who’d taken a complete stranger under his wing was alive or dead as he boarded a bus headed east.

Just one more thing to weigh heavily on his mind.

As the bus ate the highway miles, he fell into a fitful sleep, realizing; each time They found him was sooner than the last.

* * * * *

Donovan Seeker left the grocery store where he worked as a stock boy… man, went to his dingy efficiency apartment and changed into his jogging gear.

Even the snow of mid-December didn’t slow his pace. His normal route took him within 5 blocks of the Liberty Bell, but this night he travelled a new path.

He ran until he spotted the shop. He turned 180 degrees, saw the bar across the street and made his way in.

Dirty, dark and smoky.

A place for adulterers, drug dealers, prostitutes… and whores. Low-life, scum.

The kind of place she shouldn’t have been in… but had.

Anger lashed through him. He turned, slammed the door open.

Run, run, run. Legs pumping. Heart pounding.

What should have been ancient history wasn’t. It just wasn’t.

He made it back to the apartment, unlocked and opened the door with a forceful bang against the wall. He stripped quickly, climbed into the shower.

Hot, hot water. Scrub, scrub. Harder. Faster. He tried to get rid of the images, the anger.

Finally he shut the water off. Dried off, calmer than before. A car door slammed, he made his way to the window.

They were coming.

He grabbed his jacket, his wallet. Reached into the pocket quickly and felt the softness of his one memento. He heard them coming down the hall. Out of time, he opened the window and crawled out onto the fire escape. The old window slammed, catching his jacket sleeve.

They kicked the door in, searched the room. A leather jacket was hanging from the window. They looked down and saw him disappearing around the corner.

They smiled, knowing they would succeed soon.

* * * * *

He’s left his frosty window.

Reclining on the bed he lets his insecurities and anger reign.

Why is he the one running? Why aren’t they together?

Instead he’s the one alone. He’s the one unemployed and surprised at being depressed over getting laid off from a janitor’s job.

At least she still has….

While he has nothing, nothing at all.

Maybe she’s moved on, has another man, another lover. Someone to help raise their son.

Their son. HIS son. A son he should be able to see dressed in a little Santa outfit tonight, Christmas Eve. And then after he’s asleep, the naughty elf could come out and play. He could urge mommy to get naked and on her hands and knees in front of the Christmas tree, while they play 'drive the sleigh’.

Maybe it’s Doggett. He’d sure managed to fill in nicely in the work place. Maybe he’s warming the sheets too.

He knows it isn’t him, and hasn’t been since before William. So few times really; when was William conceived? He hopes it was after they’d shared a beer and movie date together. A happy, comfortable moment in their lives. He hates thinking she was already pregnant and feeding liquor to the tiny person growing inside of her.

He remembers the day he left with such clarity.

* * * * *

William was unusually alert and fussy for a newborn. Could he sense he might never see his father again? Scully started crying and he’d taken the baby into the bedroom, stretching out on the bed with him. Still shirtless after his shower, he held his son against his skin. His large hands held his precious package with tenderness and awe.

He began to sing, softly, his voice full of emotion.

Scully came into the room just in time to hear him choke out, 'he learned to walk while I was away’. She stifled a sob and left them alone.

William quieted, listening intently to his father’s voice singing a heartfelt rendition of 'Cat’s in the Cradle’, he’d finally dropped off to sleep.

After placing William safe and sound in his cradle. Mulder finished dressing and went into the living room. Scully sat on the couch, quiet, subdued. They avoided looking at each other. He picked up his bags and was almost out the door before Scully was in his arms. She wanted to make love, she didn’t care that she’d just given birth. Kissing her lips and brushing her tears away with his thumbs, he gently declined.

Two hours later, on the road to nowhere, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the only thing he had of William’s. He brought it to his nose and inhaled the sweet baby smell, felt the soft yarn tickling his skin. Swearing to himself to never, never lose it.

* * * * *

But he did.

In fucking Philadelphia.

He lost the only physical connection he had to his son. Such an insignificant thing really, just the warming cap he’d worn during his short hospital stay, but it’d meant everything to him to have something that had actually touched his son.

There hadn’t been time for pictures.

He goes to the window again, sees his reflection and the tears streaming down his face. He has nothing to remember his son by, while she has it all.

He wonders how long it takes for love to turn to hate. He wonders how much longer it will be for him….

And if he’ll run the next time They come for him.

The end…

Notes:

I wrote this years ago. Started it just after the S8 premiere and finished it just after Trust No 1 aired. It’s on Gossamer, but I’m going to update it a tad along with my other fic and migrate the updates here. So below you’ll find original notes.

1. I miss the X Files. 2. I miss Mulder’s passion and wonder. 3. This is dedicated to Jemirah, she makes my wild ramblings not so-well-rambling. *g* Thank you.

#msr #msr fanfic #xfiles #xfiles s8 #x files #xfiles fanfic #mulder #scully #xfiles heartbreak #mulder on the run #todayinfic

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gemini-writes-kpop · 6 years ago

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Into the Void, Part 2

Part One here

Contains brief mentions of blood, fluff, supernatural violence and brief mentions of nudity.

3712 words.

Pairing: SanghyukxOC

Part 2 brought to you by the Season’s Greetings Starlight Writing Challenge!

Moodboard made by my talented bby @keepupthegaystuff!

Sanghyuk watched the snowflakes float down and land on her eyelashes as she slept. She didn’t shiver, the wolf that ran through her veins kept her warm. He had only been a werewolf for six months, not long enough for his body to adjust to being a beast to fight away the cold. She told him to imagine the heat his body produced as a wolf as often as possible, the idea being if he thought he was warm, he would be warm. It hadn’t worked yet. He wrapped his arms around himself tighter and tore his eyes away from her peaceful face. He was supposed to be keeping watch. He was glad she finally trusted him enough for this job. He had watched her try to keep up with him, weary from little sleep and even less food. The mountains in the winter did not supply them with bountiful hunts as the forests in the summer did. He was learning to listen for sounds under the snow from rodents and in trees for birds. While listening was easier as a wolf, it drained his energy more to be a beast and they couldn’t afford for both of them to be exhausted all the time. Their compromise was she would hunt and he would watch. There wasn’t much to watch for anymore. They were finally far enough away from the fort where the soldiers didn’t pursue them. He knew the paths to take to avoid towns but it was making their trip longer. Neither of them could risk being seen. The threat of more invaders coming to the quiet Korean shores was still imminent; she would be killed on sight if people knew where she came from. They were teaching each other their languages, slowly but surely. He practiced her name as his eyes scanned the area. “Delilah, Delilah...Lily,” his whispers drifting away with the snow.

---

June. The nights were hot and sticky, but still Sanghyuk shivered. His skin was slick with clammy sweat; he had given up wearing clothes. His insides twisted and turned so much he couldn’t eat. She tried to help him, but she had never turned anyone before. Anything she brought him to eat, he couldn’t keep down. She could tell he was losing weight; his once muscular frame began to look frail, his cheeks were beginning to sink in. She knew he would eat more as a wolf, if he would only let the animal take him over and control his needs. The wolf would do anything to survive. She remembered when she was first turned how often she would transform just to sate her appetite. They had opposite problems: she changed too much, he wouldn’t change at all. She knew if he would just give up that his body would learn to adjust, and he wouldn’t be in so much pain. She tried telling him this, but she still didn’t know enough of his language. When she would change into the tall wolf in front of him, it frightened him. He didn’t seem to know he was the same as her.

---

“Wake up,” Sanghyuk gently tapped Delilah’s shoulder to try to rouse her. He learned the hard way to not wake a sleeping werewolf a few months ago. She had been better to not immediately attack him, the still pink scar on his shoulder filling her with guilt. At least he didn’t poke at her from a distance with a stick anymore. Delilah blinked and stretched. She smiled at him and praised him for how well his English sounded. Sanghyuk grinned. She sniffed the air and asked him he smelled what she did. He tried to pick up whatever scent she had caught, but could only smell her; she smelled like rain and dirt and sweat. He was drawn to it. “No, I...do not…yet,” he managed to say. She stood, using his shoulder as a crutch to keep from falling over. Her legs had fallen asleep. The feeling of her hand on his body made him freeze. He looked away and kept trying to smell as she wiggled her legs, waiting for them to stop tingling. A whiff of meat, rabbit maybe, drifted into his nose. Quickly, he stood, forgetting she was leaning on him. “Sanghyuk!” She exclaimed as she hit the ground again. The words to apologize weren’t coming to him in English; instead they spilled from his mouth in excited Korean. Adrenaline pumped through his veins; the smell invaded his nostrils and begged at him to go find it. She waved him away with a bemused look. It would be good practice for him. Sanghyuk turned and darted away, surprisingly in the right direction. He didn’t need to transform to find the prey today. Delighted with his progress, she began working on a small fire. Now if only she could get him to eat his meat raw as a human, it would be a huge help. It was harder to translate to him that raw meat wouldn’t make him sick now, that the wolf in him allowed him to eat all sorts of things without risk of harm. Until then, however, he still wanted his meat cooked.

---

July. Moving Hyuk away from the fort became easier when he started complying with her. He realized he didn’t have a choice anymore. When he turned into a wolf, his memory was patchy and unreliable. His human brain wanted to block out the monstrosities the wolf committed. He could recall feeling more powerful than he ever had in his life. He remembered the sounds of his teeth ripping into the hide of a deer. He wasn’t hungry anymore, but he was sick with himself. It felt barbaric. It felt wrong. She showed him how to be able to tell that he was about to change. Whenever she transformed, it felt like a pulling in her chest. His started in his stomach. The aches moved to their heads and that’s when it couldn’t be stopped. Hyuk tried once but the splitting headache it left him threatened to crack his head open and kill him. They began trying to exchange words, the growls and howls of the wolf only enabling them to talk for short periods of time. They drew more attention to themselves when the communicated that way, making it more dangerous. As much as he hated it, the dried blood he would find on his body the morning after kept him cool from the summer sun.

---

Sanghyuk dropped the rabbit by Delilah, brushing his hands on his thighs to clear off the blood. She clapped her hands joyfully and began skinning the coney. He squatted next to the fire. The snow began melting from his worn-down shoes, leaving a small puddle at his feet. The color returned to his hands as her deft fingers prepared the meat for him. Delilah glanced up at him and caught him watching her intently. “Do you want to help?” She asked in broken Korean. He beamed at her for trying his language, but still shook his head no. With his cooking skill, he would ruin it. She smiled and kept working. His gaze wandered from her hands to her muscles, to her neck, to her profile. Her lips looked soft despite the cold air. Her green eyes sparkled, a change from the first night he had seen them. He shuddered, memories of her wolf eyes, filled with rage, that had stared into his as her sharp teeth tore into his flesh. He touched the spot on his arm where he swore he could still feel her fangs embedded. Snapping out of it, he noticed a shadow moving just outside the mouth of their small cave, bobbing back and forth. A deep growl emanated from his curled lips. Delilah quickly stood and watched the spot, waiting to catch a glimpse of what Sanghyuk saw.

---

August. The longing Sanghyuk felt to go home was unbearable. The soldiers had stopped searching for him long ago. He wondered if they had sent word back to his family yet that he was dead. He imagined his distraught mother, his disappointed father. He promised he would come home. He was going to make good on that promise. “I want to go home,” Sanghyuk told her, doing his best to make hand gestures symbolizing a house. She understood enough to tell him no. She couldn’t fully explain why this was a bad idea; she only hoped he was level-headed and could figure it out for himself why he couldn’t see them again. He did. It hurt. His heart ached and he couldn’t keep the tears at bay. He stopped eating again, much to her chagrin. She told him he was acting like a child. They fought, often ignoring each other until she found herself lost in the unfamiliar territory and had to go back to him. As upset as he was with her, they needed each other.

---

Sanghyuk could feel the hair standing on the back of his neck as a dokkaebi emerged from behind the trees. How it had stayed hidden behind the tree he did not know. Delilah stepped behind him. He felt her hand grip his arm. If the dokkaebi knew what she was capable of, he would be the one cowering. “What do you want?” Sanghyuk asked the creature. It laughed and sauntered up to them. Delilah could not keep up with the conversation. She wondered if she needed to change, to fight it. Sanghyuk did not seem worried but he was probably used to seeing such strange beings. It stopped a few meters in front of them and sniffed the air. It could tell Delilah was not all human; it just couldn’t identify what it was smelling. Animal, yes. But no animal it had ever smelled before. The dokkaebi pointed at the rabbit Delilah had dropped into the fire. She had been in the process of skewering it when the creature appeared; now it was burned and ruined. “I want that,” it said with a smirk. Sanghyuk shook his head, “You don’t need it. Leave us alone.” It then pointed at Delilah. “Then I want that,” its tone shifted from mischievous to menacing. Sanghyuk held his arm in front of her and tried to puff himself up to match the dokkaebi in size. It laughed again and charged at them. Sanghyuk’s confidence drained. He ducked before realizing it left Delilah open for harm. “Lily!” He shouted, standing again to defend her.

---

September. It was cold in the mornings and sweltering in the afternoons. Delilah was grateful the humidity was lower now that they were in the mountains, but she wished she was back in her warm desert habitat. Her fur was frizzy and wavy here. The only upside was she didn’t shed as much. At least she wasn’t alone; Sanghyuk often looked less frightening with his chestnut fur in messy waves around his muzzle, a comical mustache that hid his teeth. As humans, they tried to keep their hair pulled up to keep it from sticking to their necks. Delilah combed through her hair with her fingers, braiding it and securing it up with her leather wristband. Sanghyuk tried to copy her but he was not skilled enough; his hair tumbled down his back and made him miserable. She cut her band in half and motioned for him to sit in front of her one night. She braided his hair and tied it up for him, brushing the tips of her fingers down the back of his neck. The feeling of her fingers lingered in his hair.

---

A deafening roar filled the cave. Sanghyuk knew that roar too well. Delilah had quickly transformed and was grappling with the dokkaebi. Sanghyuk could tell it was teasing her. Dokkaebi were notoriously strong, and Sanghyuk was worried that Delilah’s inexperience with them would be her downfall. Her wolf form was taller than the dokkaebi but it outweighed her. He scrambled out of the way of the clawed feet as their fight shuffled across the cold stone floor. Delilah huffed and attempted to put her weight into her shoulder to push the dokkaebi into the fire. It slipped under her and rolled away, causing her to keel over into the flames. She howled in pain. “Lily!” Sanghyuk shouted again. He focused all of his energy to transforming. His stomach churned and electricity shot up through his body. He fell to his hands and knees, ignoring the sounds of the fight in front of him. Claws sprung from his hands, his bones cracked, his skin burned. Turning out of the full moon was more painful for him. He screamed, adding to the noise. The scuffle stopped momentarily as both contenders looked over at the now huge wolf that had been in Sanghyuk’s place. The dokkaebi’s eyes widened. “Two of you,” it said in a low voice. “What are you?” Sanghyuk saw his opening to rush at the dokkaebi and pin it to the ground. He couldn’t hold it down for long. It threw him off and sent him flying back into the snow with a loud thud. Delilah took the opportunity to jump at the dokkaebi again, ramming its left side into the wall of the cave. It howled in pain, so she rammed it again, hitting it under the ribs. The flesh there was softer. It howled again and begged her to stop, but only Sanghyuk could understand it. “Again!” He barked out to Delilah. She nodded and hit it one more time. With a screech, it collapsed to the floor and lay still. The adrenaline had left Delilah and she noticed the smell of her fur and skin burning. She whimpered.

---

October. Delilah had never seen such beautiful foliage. The air smelled clean, the breeze was crisp, the sunsets were amazing. She wondered if his home was this wonderful. No wonder he wanted to return. “Sanghyuk,” she asked in her best Korean, “will your family accept you?” Sanghyuk frowned. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he fully accepted himself yet. He was a monster, no matter how much he had it under control. Delilah gently touched his cheek; he didn’t realize he had tears on his face until she brushed them away. “We can go,” she whispered. She hoped traveling with him a bit longer would allow her to train him better. Maybe they could hide what they were. It might work.

---

Sanghyuk held Delilah in his arms and licked at her wound. She was a stronger wolf than he, but the burn had taken the fight out of her. She could only protest with small whimpers. As a human, he would never dare treat her like this. But the wolf knew what it was doing. Once he had the area clean, he laid her with the burn in the snow and curled up next to her. He nuzzled at her neck, licking at the cuts she had acquired during the fight. He heard a small sigh as she settled her body against his. His heart was pounding. They had never been this close. She put her paw on top of his. It was barely past noon but they wouldn’t be traveling today. Besides the fight, having to transform so quickly and without the help of the moon took their energy away. They would be lucky to find food again and replenish their strength by tomorrow afternoon. At least the dokkaebi was no longer a threat. Sanghyuk was surprised they had made it this long without encountering any obstacles. He hoped it didn’t mean their luck had run out; not this close to home.

---

November. Even if Delilah couldn’t fully understand Sanghyuk, she loved hearing him talk about his family. He could talk about them for hours. It helped pass the time as they trekked through the mountain passes. He told her of their winter celebrations and if they were lucky, they would be arriving home just in time for a feast. They had come across a traveling merchant who let them trade Sanghyuk’s dagger for warm cloaks. Sanghyuk kept Delilah covered up in case the merchant was suspicious of her light hair and foreign features. He asked if there was any news about more raids from ships from far away lands. The merchant was unsure; he was coming from the north where everything was still peaceful. Sanghyuk thanked him for the information anyway. Delilah missed her crew. While Sanghyuk was proving to be a faithful companion, she regretted turning him and wished she had made better choices at the fort all those months ago. She thought about their families back home in the American deserts. She hoped they were surviving.

---

Delilah stirred, cozying up to the warm body behind her. She had changed back to a human in her sleep. She winced as she turned to face Sanghyuk. Her side with the burn felt better since he had placed her on the cold snow. She needed clothes again soon, though, or she would freeze. She tucked her small human body close to his large wolf body to steal some of his heat. He felt her moving and pulled her closer to him to keep her still, a soft snore rumbling in his chest. She placed her ear against his body so she could hear his heartbeat. It was slow again; lucky for him she wasn’t listening in on the flutters of an infatuated heart. She laced her fingers through his fur and lightly scratched. His back leg began kicking in rhythm with her scratches. She giggled. He was a giant puppy. Sanghyuk woke up when her scratches stopped, his large brown eyes blinking down at her. “Thank you,” she told him as she buried her face into his furry chest again. Now that he was awake and aware that a naked woman was clinging to him, his heartbeat shot up again. He couldn’t focus on staying a wolf and before he knew it, he was shifting back. Delilah reluctantly let go of the warm fur and waited for his bones to stop cracking before she tried to grab him again. The loss of the fur left them both shivering; but Sanghyuk was too embarrassed to let her cuddle with him again. He scurried to find their cloaks and hand one to her. She tried to sit up and wrap herself in it, but the pain on her side prevented her from moving too much. Guilt flooded him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen her naked before. They often had to leave their clothes behind to transform safely without shredding the thin garments they still had. Once he found scraps of clothes left from his impulsive change, he looked for hers. They were destroyed, nothing to keep her warm left. He knelt and draped the cloak over her, lifting her again once she was bundled.

Despite her protests, Sanghyuk carried Delilah for two days. She could walk, but having her close kept them both warm and they needed that during the cold December days. He assured her they would be home soon. Her wound had begun oozing and they had nothing to fix it with. Delilah told him that meant it was healing. She could see how worried he was when she could only walk on her own a few minutes before needing help. To be honest, she wasn’t sure if she was healing or not. It hurt worse than it did when it happened. It seemed her wolf-fast healing time was slowing down. Poor diet, anxiety, and the excursion were taking a toll on her immune system. Sanghyuk noticed that even with his cloak, her cloak, and his body heat, she shivered. She didn’t have the strength to transform this month. The pain left her screaming all night from her body rejecting the change. He did his best to hide her so he could hunt; her screams drove away any potential prey. He returned in the early morning. She had cried herself into a fitful sleep. He held her and caught a few hours of rest before the urgency of reaching his parent’s home made him press on. Sanghyuk couldn’t show her that he was also growing weary.

Delilah had dozed off between the bouts of pain. Her memories were fading. Sometimes she asked Sanghyuk why the desert had so much snow. When he couldn’t explain that she wasn’t home anymore, she cried. She was confused. She was losing her ability to speak with him. The wolf was fighting to take over and keep her alive but the pain prevented it. It made her mind foggy. Sanghyuk continued to talk to her, to remind her of their journey so far. “Please, I need you, please,” he pleaded with her to stay alive. She didn’t understand him. Sanghyuk stumbled home in what felt like a blizzard. Every step was agony. He hadn’t eaten in days. What he could find to eat was frozen, not much salvageable meat left for both of them. Delilah had not had solid food since the fight. He knew he had to make it home to save her. “Lily, hold on,” he whispered to her every night. They were so close. He recognized the hill that hid the house from the southeast. If he could make it to the top, they would be alright. Sanghyuk’s legs took over when his brain told him it was too hard and to stop. He cradled Delilah’s chilled body close as he reached the top. “We made it,” he could barely get the words out, his throat hoarse from the harsh weather. It was the last thing he remembered before collapsing. Delilah woke from the impact. She was weak, but she needed to see his face; she needed to make sure he was alive. As carefully as she could, she turned him on his side to face her, cupping his face in her cold hands. He was breathing. She sighed in relief. “Thank you,” she choked out the words, pressing a cold kiss to his lips. She hoped his family would find them as she drifted off again, the snowflakes covering their still faces.

To be continued...

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Masterlist

#kpopwonderlandtag #kwritersworldnet #starlight writing challenge #vixx hyuk #prompts:#traveling #supernatural #enemies to lovers

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michiganandback · 7 years ago

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July 30 – July 2 AM

Left camp and drove north by northeast to Lake Circle Drive which is the historic Highway along Lake Huron. The trees are grown up along the highway so there's not much to look at unless you got off the highway. We Googled a point of land off the coast and tried to go there, but GPS took us to a private road with a guard. We turned around and headed north on the scenic route and went past a Historical Museum. We decide to go back because it was free. I like free museums. The curator was very friendly and we had a nice visit. She showed us the bedroom set that President Garfield's stayed in when he visited this area. I was more interested in the mini loom that was next to that display because my mother had had a loom made in the late 1700s that I worked on. We had a good discussion about that and discussed the various levels of looms and about how the loom works. She showed us some other displays which included a grain separator that was hand-cranked to separate the grain for the chaff. She also showed us something which I had never seen before called a cow poke. It's a device you put around the neck of a cow which was probably a Guernsey because they have small necks. I'll try to show a picture in the blog, but the basic principle was that the cow could only take one step or one-and-a-half steps before the stick poked into the ground to stop them. It was used to keep cows from wandering away before they were fences. It was hinged so that the cow could bend down and nibble at the grass and when she stood up to walk forward the stick with jam into the ground to prevent her from walking very fast. This was a nice unexpected encounter and she told us the point we wanted to go to just down the road was a private Resort but Google didn't know that. We ended up in campground near town called Frankenmuth that was modeled after a Bavarian Village. We registered at the Campground and headed straight to the Village because I wanted to see what they thought a Bavarian Village looked like. They did a very good job with half-timbered buildings and German music played around in the stores. We had an ice cream and walked around to see some of the buildings. We stopped by the Bavarian Inn and Restaurant. I was reading the plaque outside when someone asked me to move a little bit. I did and they were speaking another language which I thought was German I asked them where they came from and they said Germany. I asked in German where do you come from in Germany. The lady said you can speak to this man in German. So I did. He would only admit to being from Austria and not Germany, but we had a nice 15-minute conversation while the ladies waiting patiently. He knew I spoke German with three dialects, Swabish, Bayrisch and Frankish. He said Swabish is impossible to learn. We really had a nice visit until the women said we have a reservation in 5 minutes. We went back to the campground and relaxed for the rest of the evening. We always get a campsite near the bathroom and ours was by big tree. I went over and talked to the campground manager who had have been in the Navy and we swapped military stories. He was station somewhere in Georgia when they told him they were transferring him to Key West Florida or Iceland and he picked Iceland because he didn't want to stay in the states. His duty was to get the pilots on and off aircraft carriers safely. Iceland was not the friendliest place for American servicemen even in the sixties. He did get a 14 day pass and flew over to Germany and visited Munich, Berchtesgaden, Garmisch Etc. We're glad we stayed there but after we played golf the next day, we went to another campground nearby. The golf course was beautiful and reasonably priced. However, after not having played for nine-plus months our scores showed that. We really didn't keep score but I did have three pars and a lot of other scores. I think I lost more balls literally on that course than I have a long time. It looked easy, but there are a lot of rough spots running across the fairways and in front of the tee boxes. We still had fun.

We drove through a town called Alabaster and didn't know why it's called Alabaster until we got off the main road and found a plaque. A found Alabaster offshore in 1837 and then eventually found another deposit probably on land. The material from here was used to make the marble like walls for the Chicago exhibition buildings of 1893 and that earned it the nickname of White City. The company was bought by US Gypsum and the quarry near here has helped to make Michigan a leading producer of gypsum for over a century. We believe we saw an offshore operation mining Gibson but we didn't find anyone to ask. We also saw an interesting lighthouse in a state park where we bought our annual non-resident Park permit but they didn't have any Michigan state maps. We have been looking for one for over a week and finally found one at the Lumberman's Monument and Museum. I like having a detailed map of where I'm going.

In the morning, on August 1st we headed more northward toward a National Scenic Highway that was only 20 miles long along the Au Sable River. We stopped at Wally World for provisions and I ended up buying two pairs of cargo pants because the ones I meant to bring are on the bench in front of the bed in Tulsa. I needed some new ones anyway. The road along the Au Sable River was not so interesting, but like Yellowstone you have to take the cutouts to see the interesting things. We went to the Lumberman's Monument and Museum Store. It has some interesting exhibits about the CCC camps and how they actually prepared them for military service after the Depression. I walked down to an exhibit about the cooks and the camp stores that floating down the river behind the lumbermen who floated logs downstream to the sawmills. This area produced millions and millions of board feet of lumber for the growing building industry. That devastated the forest in this area and the CC Camp workers planted millions of trees to replace the forest that had been cut down. There is also a monument to the canoe race that started in 1947. It's a hundred and twenty mile race down the Au Sable River to the town of Oscoda. There are great overlooks if you go off the beaten track. The first one was at the Great Sand Dune that's called the champagne run where they pushed millions of board feet of lumber down into the river to float to the sawmills. We ended up a nice Campground about an hour drive from the Mackinac Bridge which we will drive over on the 2nd of August. Just before dinner, storm clouds rolled in and we have had rain the last 2 hours. It rained all through the night. We will continue to move North by Northwest now on our quest to reach the Isle Royale National Park. We're finally starting to get some good pictures and I have videos that I cannot get Tumblr to accept. I'll keep trying as the Wi-Fi signal get stronger.

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craftycatshrooms · 4 years ago

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Northern Blossom Flower Farm through Storms and Pandemics

Northern Blossom Flower Farm is a tourist attraction in Benguet since 2018. It showcases numerous varieties of flowers imported from Japan. The farm is one of the best sites for Eco-tourism in Benguet. The eco-tour last approximately 2 hours where in the guests tour the 3 hectare farm filled with flowers whilst looking at the beautiful mountains including Mt. Pulag. Most of the flowers are plants that are suited for cold weather and the most popular flower in farm are the cabbage roses. Cabbage roses are unique variety of cabbage that exhibit color when the environment reaches very cold temperatures. Many people come to see these color changing cabbages and on a good day the farm can receive 200 to 300 groups of guests. Northern Blossom flower farm is a breath of fresh air that allowed its guests to escape the hustle and bustle of city life. The gorgeous mountainous views, the beautiful exotic flowers coupled with the crisp cold northern air offers the experience so far removed from the usual Tropical weather, flat lands and white sand beaches. The farm presents an unprecedented experience as no one expects to see imported flowers in this small distant village in a place called Atok. This makes people wonder as to how exactly did this tourist spot came to be.

The tourist spot may have started recently in 2018 but most people do not know that the farm has been around for a very long time. The flower farm first operated solely as a supplier for its flower shop with the same name, Northern Blossom Flower Shop. The shop was founded in 2002 located in Maria Clara Street, Sampaloc, Manila which is very near the infamous hub of flower shops Dangwa. The shop sold wholesale flowers to successful florists like Allen Uy, Hizon, Tecson, Cyrus and events like SM Baguio’s impressive floats during Panagbenga. The flowers from Northern Blossom Flower Farm are seen in the covers of magazines, the hallways of five star hotels and the weddings of famous celebrities. They are also a staple purchase during notable events like Valentines day, Mother’s Day, all Souls and Saint’s Day.

This lucrative business is the brain child of the business owner Mellany C. Ganayan. The farm is managed by the Mrs. Ganayan along with her husband Mr. Leonardo Ganayan. Like all farmers in Benguet, the business started as a vegetable farm. They planted different vegetables like radishes, cabbages, carrots and many more. While the couple worked on the farm, the husband Mr. Leonardo took a second job as a driver. He is tasked to deliver vegetables from Benguet to Manila. As he delivers these vegetables, some relatives asked him to sell their cacti and calla lilies in Dangwa while he stays in Manila. At this point, Mr. Ganayan is juggling the responsibilities of farming, selling cacti and delivering vegetables. One day Mrs. Ganayan asked to come with him to Manila in order to sell some of her cacti collection. Once in Manila, she noticed that there is a profitable market for flowers and cacti plants sold faster than expected. This experience gave her the idea of selling flowers.

(Mrs. Mellany on the right with the white Jacket)

The idea first started small. They started selling local flowers like calla lilies, hydrangeas or million flowers, different varieties of cacti and succulents and siastas. Then they started looking into other varieties of flowers that can grow in the cold weathers of Atok, Benguet. Mrs. Ganayan first inquired in Sunrise, the surplus store for seeds and farm supply. The store had limited varieties to choose from but they were kind enough to give the contact number of a company that sells imported varieties of flowers. Mrs. Ganayan met with the company located in Cubao and was offered a brochure of flowers she has not seen before. The name of the company and their supplier will not be disclosed as per request of the business owners. Mrs. Ganayan bought the seeds and started on the process of cultivating them. What followed was a series of trial and errors. There were series experiments as to how to cultivate and propagate these flowers. As well as investments in buying imported seeds and bulbs that may not return profit or worse they may not grow at all. Greenhouses were built in order to accommodate the growth requirements of different flowers and fifteen years later there now stands eleven greenhouses.

“We had no choice but to become a tourist destination”

Through the years, family, friends and acquaintances have come to visit this quaint farm in Atok but there was one guest that brought impact that changed the course of the business. Enters Ms. Ollen Co. Ms. Ollen Co is a friend of a mutual friend and had been visiting the farm for a while. She has a talent and an interest in photography. She posts her beautiful photographs in Facebook. She featured the farm in numerous occasions, capturing the serene imagery of the farm during sunrise and the milky way at night. A lot of people are in awe of her photographs and are curious as to where these sceneries are. Captions and tags are present with the photos. it came as surprise when people started to inquire about garden tours and accomodations. After a while. people come out of nowhere asking at the doorstep about this flower farm seen in Facebook. Mrs. Ganayan welcomed these surprise visits and allowed allowed the visitors to tour the farm and take pictures for free. The images made their way into Facebook further solidifying the Farm as a go to destination for the perfect Instagram picture. This free publicity gathered the attention of the Department of tourism of Benguet. They asked for a tour which was immediately welcomed. Afterwards, they presented a request to advertise the farm as one of the Eco-tourist spot in the province. Mrs. Ganayan was adamant at first. She was concerned with the requirements in order to qualify as tourist spot like cemented trails, hand rails in the farm, reception area and clean functioning toilets. All of which would cost money in order to construct. In the middle of considering this life changing decision, visitors and tourists would still come and request to see the flowers. Mrs. Ganayan would allow these tourists to enter and often times there are those that walk on flower beds, some who pick and snap flowers and others that leave rubbish all over the place. This is not to say that all of them do it but there is always that one person. With people coming every now and then, Mrs. Ganayan said that “we had no choice but to become a tourist destination.” She does not have the heart to turn these people away and with the expenses and damages incurred from these untimely visits she thought that it would not be a bad idea to at least profit from it. Renovations was in the works and by 2018 Northern Blossom Flower Farm was open for business.

Northern Blossom Flower farm operated as both a supplier and a tourist destination. They have set an appropriate entrance fee of 250 pesos per head with discounts for senior citizens and children. Some complained about the expensive fee for just viewing flowers but as the owner has stated “the fee covers the loses from stopping harvests and allowing the flowers to just bloom in the farm.” Instead of harvesting some of the flowers, they are left in the farm for the tourists to see and the fee covers for the profits lost from not selling them. All was well and good until the unexpected year of 2020.

“The virus has affected the business in more ways than one”

When the virus hit the Philippines, it affected people across the country. A lot of businesses went bankrupt, schools were canceled and a lot of people feared the spreading pandemic. After the long community quarantine, people tried pick up the pieces of what’s left from the wreckage caused by the pandemic and others tried to adapt to this “new normal.” Even with all this problems people still strive to make the best out of the situation, with new business flourishing online, jobs allowing people to work from home and people starting to take part in online classes. According to Mrs. Ganayan “ the virus has affected the business in more ways than one.” The current situation has affected both businesses. Due to the quarantine many flowers and vegetables have not been harvested and most was reduced to waste. All tourist attractions have been closed and the flower shop has also been rendered almost obsolete. The new normal further affects the state of consuming cut flowers. The prohibition of large gatherings like weddings, funerals, birthday parties and other functions have eliminated the need for flower décor and arrangements. With this problem, the owner Mrs. Ganayan sees no other choice than to get with the times. Instead of planting flowers, the farm has reverted back into planting edible produce like vegetables. For the past months from July to September, the farm has been planting cabbages, Chinese cabbages/wombok, carrots, broccoli and green ice lettuce.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CbGN_M6ZX3KUVaX1B5dPxhGp4qcmrm6L/view?usp=sharing

“ It is not the first typhoon to destroy my greenhouses and it won’t be the last. In cases like this we do what we have always done, we replant and rebuild”.

Disaster strikes in one way or another and at times there is just no other way to avoid them especially if the disaster comes in the form of a typhoon by mother nature. With the series of typhoons passing through the Philippines, Mrs. Ganayan has taken an extra precaution of tying the greenhouses down especially with the news of the super typhoon Rolly. What happened next came as a surprise when the most damaged incurred was caused not by Rolly but by the typhoon that preceded it, typhoon Ulyses. Only two out of the previous eleven greenhouses survived the raging strong winds and one of them actually got uprooted and moved. With the decline of the business caused by the pandemic coupled with the damages from a slew of typhoons, one would feel that the situation has proved hopeless. Regardless of the situation, the owners of the Norther Blossom Flower Farm decided to stay positive and to keep on trying. Mrs. Ganayan continues to plant seeds for next year and has decided to plant flowers again in the hopes of producing enough supply for the coming 2021 Valentines Day. In her own words “ It is not the first typhoon to destroy my greenhouses and it won’t be the last. In cases like this we do what we have always done, we replant and rebuild”.

Irsle Fernel Ganayan - CAS 101

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babelrpg-blog · 7 years ago

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below the cut, you will find admin Roman’s sample application for Ted Tonks to give you an idea of what we’re looking for in an app. applications will not be posted in full, when we post acceptances.

OUT OF CHARACTER:

Name: Roman Age: 24 Pronouns: they/them Timezone: EST Activity: pretty high, I’m usually able to do a few replies everyday unless work really kicks my ass, in which case it will be every other day, but I’m always around on mobile for messaging! Triggers: [redacted]

BASICS:

Character name: Edward “Ted” Morgan Tonks Gender and pronouns: genderqueer, they/them Date of birth: July 1, 1955

There are some things that have always remained, and they do truly still believe in the power of looking to the stars for guidance, something that their parents taught them from a young age. Because of this––or because of the stars themselves––Ted embodies all of the traits of a Cancer. They’re emotional and sensitive, and get extremely attached to others. Matters of family are of the utmost importance, and they’re loyal above all to those they care for. At times, they can become selfish and moody, particularly when suffering a perceived lack of understanding from the outside world. Since their time in Azkaban, the negative traits of their sign have been significantly more pronounced than before, the good being pushed to the wayside.

Occupation: the High Justice

Their parents used to joke that they would never be able to settle on a career, that they’d forever be content to float along in life, jumping from one job for another, never staying for too long, always switching from interest to interest. It was like that for a while, anyway. Before the end of the war, they had dozens of odd jobs, everything from potioneer to palm-reader, never for more than a year, and they were happy. But things changed, and once they did, they hadn’t been expecting to ever have another job again, in all honesty, considering they assumed that being sentenced to life in Azkaban meant just that.

But Lily Evans has other plans.

This position was quite literally made for them. They feel certain that if they had refused Lily’s offer years ago, when she came to them in their cell that day, she would have found another muggleborn to fill the position, but with the way things went, with everything they had both been working towards, with the promise she had them make when she managed to have them pardoned, she did this for them. No, that’s not true. She did this for herself. They were just lost and desperate enough to willingly do exactly what she wanted from them. It was all worth it if they would be allowed to raise their child, after all, even if it meant turning into something they wouldn’t have had the capability of becoming before.

And so they took up the gun for her. Using a weapon so supremely muggle, they pass judgement for the Minister. How fitting that they now dispense justice to those who wronged the world, when the reason they became who they are is because of making that same choice ten years ago.

Former Hogwarts house: Hufflepuff Boggart: Dora receiving the Dementor’s Kiss

It changes, but every time it’s changed it’s held one thing in common. Their boggart has always shown someone they love in danger. When they first faced a boggart in school, it was their family; later it was Andromeda, then Andromeda with Alice and Frank. Now the scene they see is of their child suffering the very fate they had come to fear after years among the Dementors. They stay away from boggarts when they can help it.

PERSONALITY

+Tenacious: Since childhood, Ted has been persistent in everything they do, determined and committed. They’ve never been one to hide their opinions or take the easy way out of things, willing to fight for what they believe in, although usually in their own way and not necessarily what others would expect.

+Devoted: They are fiercely loyal to those they care about, devoted to the point of being willing to do nearly anything to keep them safe. This trait led to their downfall, but it’s also kept their family safe from harm since then. They like to think that their dedication to the people they love is what keeps them from becoming a monster, but it’s also caused them to do things they never thought themself capable of.

+/-Emotional: Once, their sensitivity manifested itself in their empathy, in their willingness to be free and open with everything they were feeling, and to help others do the same. Sometimes, that’s still the case, but mostly now, it’s seen in their inability to regulate their emotions at times. They can go from detached and cold, to deeply emotional in the snap of a finger, and often times can’t control themself in those moments, leading to a lot of anger.

+/-Persuasive: They can convince most anyone of anything, really, knowing just how to connect to other people to make them believe they’re truly empathetic and have their best interests in mind. This used to be genuine. Now, it’s more of an act, a way for them to seem more human, more approachable, despite the indifference they feel most of the time.

-Paranoid: Being betrayed by the love of your life changes how you view other people, and ever since Andromeda made the choice to turn them in for their revenge, they’ve been unable to look at most others with anything other than paranoid suspicion. It’s difficult for them to let people in now, unable to give their trust as freely as they did even during the war, because of the constant worry that they’ll be betrayed again.

-Detached: Living surrounded by Dementors for any amount of time changes a person, and living surrounded by them for five years takes away so much that it’s impossible to remain the same as you were before. Before, Ted felt everything deeply and sincerely. They wore their heart on their sleeve, and weren’t afraid to share their feelings no matter what. Andromeda used to joke that they sounded a lot like children’s storybook, with how eternally optimistic they were, how wholesome and full of love. No longer. It’s been so long since they’ve felt much of anything, besides anger. The utter detachment they show in the face of emotion makes them an excellent executioner.

HISTORY

1. It isn’t planned. Anyone with eyes can see that.

They’ve been together since sixth year, but only in secret, hiding their relationship from everyone but their closest, most trusted friends, not even formally living together yet––Ted in Weymouth at their parents’, Andromeda back in London––still planning how best to break the news of their relationship to her family. But that doesn’t mean that both of them aren’t ecstatic when they find out, only a few months after graduating, that they’re going to have a baby. That’s enough for Andromeda to make the choice, and soon enough they’re their own family, married on the beach in Ted’s parents’ backyard two months after Nymphadora is born.

The first few years together out in the open are blissful, so much so that at times they’re almost able to forget the betrayals that Andromeda suffered because of them. She has a new family, after all, one full of love and acceptance and affection, everything that she wasn’t allowed before. And they share that love with their two closet friends, an unconventional relationship to say the least, but one that feels a lot like home to Ted.

2. But war is hard on them. Ted can tell that something’s not quite right with Andromeda, a slow chasm forming between them, but one they can’t seem to do anything about. There are more arguments between them as time goes on, usually about the right course of action, whether it would be safer to run away and live their lives anywhere else, and sometimes Ted wonders if Andromeda regrets her decision. But they always agree that they should stay, even though as the years move forward they suspect it’s not for them, but for her family, for the off chance that they might take back what they did to her, that she might be able to have both lives.

She makes it clear that she doesn’t believe joining in the fighting is worth it. To risk losing them or Dora isn’t worth it, she says, but they suspect it’s something else. Still, they feel the same; they want nothing more than for their family to stay safe, their child to grow up with both parents, in a home as loving as what they’ve managed to give them so far. So they support the Order from afar, and live their lives, watching Dora learn and grow and blossom, all of the best parts of both of them wrapped into a child.

3. There’s this growing unease in their chest, though, as things continue, as they see the pain and suffering of people like them at the hands of people like their wife’s family, and it makes things even more difficult. They want to do something, but they know they can’t, not with Andromeda and Dora to think about. Still, there’s less playfulness between them, more worry shared, more grave looks as the news gets worse and worse, with no sign of a change even as Dora approaches their Hogwarts years.

The attack is the final straw. When they receive the news about Alice and Frank, it feels a lot like something deep within them has broken. And when the healers tell them that Frank will likely never wake from the coma he’s been tortured into, for the first time in their life they truly understand what it means to hate.

Something in the back of their mind tells them that if it had been someone else, they wouldn’t have done what they did. Something tells them that if it hadn’t been her sister, if they hadn’t felt Andromeda slowly slipping away, back toward her family, they would have found a way to move forward. But Bellatrix Lestrange doesn’t let that happen; she taunts them, leads them into taking bait that they should’ve been able to see past. And when they confront her, they do the only thing that felt appropriate. They wrap their hands around her neck and tighten their grip until they see the life leave her eyes.

And then they go to Andromeda and Alice. They look their wife, the love of their life, the mother of their child in the eye, and they tell her that they killed her sister. That they don’t regret it. For a second, they think she might understand. She knows how evil her sister is, everything she’s done; she destroyed Alice’s life. And yet...

It isn’t a surprise when Andromeda makes her choice, when she chooses her family over them, over Dora, over Alice and Frank, though they wish it is. They wish that they don’t expect it, when they see the look in her eyes when they tell her and Alice what they did, they wish that in that moment every single discussion about her family didn’t flash through their mind, the suspicion that, all along, she was just waiting for an excuse to go back to them. But they know as soon as the words leave their mouth that it’s over.

So they leave, take Dora to their parents, drop them off at the little house on the beach they had grown up in, telling their parents that it might be a while before they could speak to them again, but that they want them to keep Dora safe, raise Dora as they had raised them. And then they go back to their flat and wait.

When two aurors they don’t recognize appear at their door, without Andromeda, they feel nothing. When they take them away, no sign of Andromeda in sight, not even offering the courtesy of a real goodbye, a real explanation of what it was that made her choose the family that had abandoned her over the family that had loved her, they feel nothing.

They only start feeling again once they’re sentenced to life in Azkaban.

4. Azkaban changes them at their very core, and it doesn’t take long for it to start happening. No matter how hard they try to resist the feelings, it’s as if they’re watching their happiness slip away moment by moment. The longer they’re in the presence of the Dementors, the fewer happy memories they can recall. They realize it’s happening only a few weeks into their sentence when they wake up and realize they can’t remember clearly what Andromeda’s smile looks like.

After that, memories seem to leave them more quickly.

They’re a goldmine for the Dementors, after all, full of memories of a happy childhood, a beautiful marriage, a life full of love at every turn. So much unadulterated joy, so much for them to feed off of. They can tell that the Dementors like them, from how often they seem to stay by their cell, especially at first. And soon enough they’ve forgotten what it was like to hold Dora for the first time, the feeling they had when they married Dromeda on the beach, the first time Frank had told them he loved them, what Alice’s hair smelled like when they held her close after sex. Every happy memory slipping away.

It doesn’t help that they have a constant reminder of Andromeda in the cell next to them in the form of Sirius Black.

In all honesty, they don’t know how they survive with their sanity for so long. But as time goes on they wonder if maybe it would be better if they lost their mind, too. That way they wouldn’t be able to think about everything else they’ve lost as well. After years, Ted begins to wonder if they’re even capable of love any longer. They wonder if they’d recognize Dora if they saw them, if they’d be able to laugh at their father’s jokes still, if they could smile at Alice. Worse, they realize it doesn’t matter, because they’re alone, and they’re going to be here alone for the rest of their life.

5. That’s not true, though, because five years into their life sentence, Lily Evans appears at their cell door, telling them that she’s found a way to get them out, if they give her something in return.

She wants them to help her fight, help her change things, finally bring justice to all of the others like them, whose lives were destroyed because of Voldemort and his sympathizers, who were hated for their very being. It’s not a hard choice, even though they never were much of a fighter before. Between a lifetime of misery, or fighting for freedom, there’s no question of it.

Five years isn’t a long time, but it feels a lot like a small eternity has passed once they’re on the outside again, a full pardon granted by the Ministry for ridding the world of someone as evil as Bellatrix Lestrange. Everything is different, in the world and their own life. Suddenly, they’re living in a new home without Andromeda, with a thirteen year old child who they barely know, having missed the last five years of their life. It takes some time to relearn how to be a parent, this time on their own, but they think that that’s the one thing that Azkaban didn’t manage to take from them. Everything else is much harder, though, when they feel nothing like themself anymore.

So they focus their energy on helping Lily achieve everything she sees for the future, not for any real passion for the cause at least at first, but more because they have no idea what their life is now otherwise. She sees them as a powerful symbol, a weapon of sorts, and if that gives them something to devote their life to, then they don’t mind being just that.

And it seems to work, on both accounts. They start advocating for Lily’s vision, speaking about their experiences during the war and right after, and things build. It’s a good distraction from the emptiness that they can’t quiet shake from Azkaban, the acute detachment they feel from the rest of the world now. At least they feel like they’re making a difference for Dora’s future.

6. They aren’t happy, but they notice it’s easier to ignore the dark thoughts, somehow, despite the fact that they dispense cruel justice for a living now.

It’s not a surprise when Lily becomes Minister, but for some reason before that moment it hasn’t quite hit them what that will mean for them. In her eyes, their promise hasn’t been kept yet. In her eyes, they have a bigger job to do.

When they’re given their position in the new Minister’s administration, Ted feels strange. Is this what happiness felt like, ten years ago, before it was taken for them? They don’t think so. This is purpose. And this is the opportunity to take the anger they’ve felt in the pit of their stomach since they were released and do something useful with it.

They tell themself that they’re creating a new world, a better world.

They make the decision to erase certain specifics from their parents’ memories, a decision that they’re still not completely comfortable with, but one they know they have to make if they want to allow their parents to have a happy life. They make them believe that they were wrongfully convicted for the murder, that Andromeda didn’t leave by choice, but disappeared, and that their position in the government is on the Wizengamot. Lying to their parents is difficult––as a child, they never hid anything from each other, their parents their closest confidants––but they know it’s for the best. And they’re surprised to find that Dora seems to agree.

That’s when they start to worry, when they start noticing more and more that Dora seems to have somehow inherited all of the worst parts of them, of Andromeda, too, that they’re more genuinely interested in Ted’s position under Minister Evans than they are themself. But it’s difficult to know how to change it, or if it needs changing at all.

This is a brave new world, after all, and they’re well aware that if things went back to how they were, neither of them will survive.

INTERVIEW

How far would you go to protect those you care about?

At least that one is an easy question to answer, because Ted has answered this very question over and over again in their own mind, since before the war. “I would do anything to protect the people I care about. And I have. I’d die if it meant protecting the ones I love,” they nod, as if that’s that. To them, it is.

If you stood in front of the Mirror of Erised right now, what would you see?

They know exactly what they’d see.

They’d see themself with Andromeda, Alice and Frank, with Dora and Neville, a big, strange, happy family. It feels a little like treason, to admit that they’d see Andromeda standing there with them, arm around their waist, head tucked against their shoulder, considering who she went back to. It feels a little like treason to admit that they still have their wedding ring, sitting in a little box they keep right next to their bed, that in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep they put it on again, and try desperately to remember what it felt like to hold her. So they push that thought aside, and lie. It’s almost too easy to lie now.

“I’d see myself and Dora, safe, happy. Maybe off in a little house down in Weymouth on the beach,” they say, and it’s not exactly untrue, considering it’s something they’d very much like to have. Does it sound too much like they’re unhappy, though? They’re worried it does, always paranoid that they’ll make a misstep, end up back where they were. So they go on. “We are safe and happy now, but things are...stressful at times. I wouldn’t mind a bit of peace, if only temporarily. A vacation, of sorts, really.”

Do you believe that anything is predestined?

“For a long time, I thought so. I thought things were written in the stars. Hell, I still do a lot of the time; old habits die hard. But the stars didn’t say anything about it ending up where I am, my tea leaves didn’t tell me, my palms didn’t say any of this. So now I guess I believe that, to an extent, our lives may be outlined by the universe, but our choices can change it in a heartbeat. Take that as you will, I guess,” they finish with a shrug, an uncharacteristic indifference. Or rather, an indifference that wouldn’t have been normal of Ted Tonks talking about anything related to divination ten years before.

Ten years ago, where did you see yourself today? What would you tell your younger self, if you could?

“That’s a cruel question,” they say with a little laugh, an edge of humorlessness to it. They shift in their seat, though, their discomfort with the question clear.

When they were younger, they had never been one to look to the future, more content to live in the moment and enjoy their time in the moment. But Andromeda had changed that. She had made them excited to think about the future, and by the time they had had Dora, there was little more that they did as they were falling asleep each night than think about what their future as a family would be like.

They saw happiness in their future, then.

And now they’re not even certain they’re capable of true happiness any longer.

“I guess I saw myself still with my wife, didn’t I? I definitely didn’t see myself having been to Azkaban because of her,” they say, voice flat, disconnected. “If I could tell my younger self anything, I would tell myself not to get so comfortable. To open your eyes, and see what’s happening in front of you, and do something to change it, even if it meant temporary pain. There were so many warning signs for what was coming. I ignored them all in favor of trying to have a happy life; it was selfish. And it didn’t work. It just made everything more difficult.”

EXTRAS

inspo tag

patronus- Since Azkaban, Ted is no longer capable of producing a corporeal patronus, but it used to be a German Shepard, who looked like their childhood dog, Lancelot

wand- 12″ pear, unicorn hair, very flexible

amortentia- the ocean breeze, fresh blueberry muffins, something flowery that reminds them of nights with Andromeda, Frank and Alice

likes: summer, English beaches, rose tea, Herbology, Sunday roast, weed, psychedelics, Joni Mitchell, classical music, Freddie Mercury, sleeping naked, poetry, tattoos, spending time with family, 80s power ballads, swimming, stargazing, campfires, forehead kisses, cuddling, being outside in the rain, being barefoot, astrology

dislikes: the middle of winter, close-minded people, vodka, straight people, black coffee, aggressiveness, being alone, waking up early, cold showers, the color orange, birds, conformity for the sake of conformity, cauliflower, hypocrites, having to wear suits everyday, deadlines, hats, small spaces

headcanons

Ted is as blind as a bat, and can’t see anything clearly without their glasses. Unfortunately, they also have a tendency to lose their glasses, which results in a lot of clumsiness, a clumsiness that Dora has inherited. Because of this, they’re very good at minor healing charms, especially since they had a tendency to walk around barefoot more often than not when they were younger.

They bisexual as fuck, and also polyamorous. They grew up on the principle of free love, and practiced just that when they were younger, physical intimacy common with their friends and lovers alike. They’re the one that initially suggested the idea of polyamory between them and Andromeda and Frank and Alice.

The dozens of muggle tattoos that cover their arms and chest started when they were a teenager, and they still add to them now. They have tattoos for Dora, for their parents, tattoos for Alice and Frank, a rare ivy that Frank grew winding up their bicep and the flower that sprouted from it only at night blooming on the cap of their shoulder. They still can’t bring themself to cover the very prominent Andromeda constellation on their forearm, the stylized portrait on their chest.

They have a rather large collection of pistols that they use for their job, most of them decorated with intricately beautiful filigree. In all honesty, guns used to terrify them; their parents are hippies at heart, and raised them in a very anti-violence house. But a lot has changed for them since then.

No matter what happens, Ted always makes certain to be home in time to make and have dinner with Dora while she’s home from Hogwarts. Before Azkaban, dinner was a big deal in their family, always a family affair, the three of them, and at times Frank and Alice as well, gathering together to laugh and share their thoughts. That hasn’t changed, even if it’s just the two of them now.

On a similar note, they still do enjoy cooking; it’s one of the few things they can still find some happiness in. Most of their memories of cooking with their family growing up, and then cooking for Andromeda after Hogwarts, meals shared with Frank and Alice, are faded or tainted now, but they’ve made new memories with Dora since then.

They’re also still very genuinely interested in astronomy and divination, never quite able to break the habit of looking to the stars for answers, searching tea leaves for what is to come. They have dozens of decks of tarot cards, and specific cups dedicated to tea leaf reading.

dora

Dora is currently a 17 year old seventh year at Hogwarts, a Hufflepuff just like Ted was, but with a mischievous streak beyond theirs during their childhood.

The summer that they moved back in with Ted after their time in Azkaban, Dora came out to them as nonbinary, and started using they/them pronouns as well. They had already come out to Ted’s parents, as well as Alice.

They love using their abilities as a Metamorphmagus to explore their gender expression, but have pretty much settled on a look, mostly changing their hair instead of their overall appearance nowadays.

They’re very interested in following a similar career path as their father, a strong believer in fighting for justice in any way they can. Part of them is considering becoming a hit-wix, but Alice has been trying to convince them to become an Auror like her.

Despite everything, they look back at their childhood with fond memories, having inherited the optimism that Ted lost. They remember the time they had with their parents together happily, and only wish there had been more of it, but they liked growing up with their grandparents, liked hearing about how similar they were to Ted when they were their age, liked growing up on the beach their father had. And they’re thankful that they have them now, that they only missed a few years, no matter how vital, because they know that things could’ve been much worse.

In Ted and Andromeda’s absence, Alice became something of a mother-figure to Dora, especially once their Hogwarts letter came in the mail, and their muggle grandparents were a bit out of their depth. Even before, they had seen Alice and Frank as a second set of parents, ever present figures in their life as they grew up, and once Ted was in Azkaban, Alice became their greatest connection to the wizarding world. She took them shopping for their books and supplies, she helped them prepare for Hogwarts.

More than anything, they want their father to be happy again, and they do everything they can to try to keep them from falling into the dark thoughts when they’re home.

#ttonks #sample app #sample application

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roadswim-collective · 7 years ago

Text

Three Times He Lied To Me Lie 1.

I was twenty three when I met him. I was back at home, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty three:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

at my tutor's office

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd drink Prosecco in the bath. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too.

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Caerphilly was my favourite. Or I might be at a Roman site like Caerleon. And now and again you might see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions. I'd end the day pretty much as I'd started it, lying in my bed, in my old bedroom, probably watching Gladiator.

I was halfway through a master's in history with archaeology, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree, and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't finish the course, he dropped out. Other than that, though, I was the first to go on to higher education. It was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn.

Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then, middle class people. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the tutors. They were always on the piss too. Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year, though, I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide in the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA.

I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did that day. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to girls. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was, nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in sub-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, and all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke, massively in debt, and I hadn't made any friends. And now I was back at home, with my mother, in my old bedroom, commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I read my Mary Beard books over lunch, and on station platforms in all weathers I listened to podcasts.

My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing trade routes of lost empires, digging through dead cities, reading old epitaphs. I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The only things I watched now were documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

Everyone I'd known, my uni friends, had all sort of evaporated. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive the transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my own company. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a historical site with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it all with small talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? But he wore tight jeans and brown boots and they suited him, oh my god they suited him. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him.

I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my Prosecco bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He made lots of bad jokes about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, and the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist, just as a friendly warning." It turned out later he was joking and he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from all these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing, passionate, hot sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed all the way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't have enough experience to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.

All this drama seemed very distant from my own life. It was like watching I, Claudius, all that passion, the lust and the violence, Brian Blessed. And there was me, alone in my teenage bed at night, my hand wandering down, trying to visualise the exact lift and curvature of beautiful Will's tight bum. I was wondering if it was finally time I invested in a vibrator.

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back to Llanelli or Ammanford or wherever she was from, and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with this, with being out-numbered, but others blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Will was one of those.

He started going out for drinks after work. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. I got caught up in it a bit. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing, so I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on the pent up frustrations of the whole office.

And of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to cold dark Aberdare.

There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We had nothing in common now. All the boys were messing about with the same old things as before, cars and sports and booze, just with jowls now and already balding. Thinking about it, I don't suppose I had much in common with anyone in the first place.

So I started staying the night now and again with my new friend Abby who was doing a PhD and lived in Roath. Not every weekend, just if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I was quite good at drinking, still am, and I'd always be among the last standing. It was me who had to get Abby into a taxi and find her door key and let us in and, more than once, hold her hair back while she was sick. And when it came down to the last handful at the very end, Will was always there too. Will and me, Abby, Hannah, Chris, a few others. There until the bitter end. None of us had anything much to go home to really.

So one Friday night we ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us I think, probably about 1am. Abby and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny glossy circle of table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Abby's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Abby that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is usually just a subset of small talk, really. You're not usually talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy, you're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up and that's the effect most blokes' efforts have on me, their intended target. Not Will. He was good.

Abby was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did, and he said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind." So I raised my eyebrows at him and said Um, okay..? To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test, and I said A test? O-kaaaay... "Don't be worried though", he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value," so I said, Well that's a relief and he chuckled again.

And he was wearing this really nice aftershave and I could see the hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? Those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated it because it was an obvious fix, a swizz, the superpowers thing, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps. Think of the kinds of things being invisible would allow you, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it, Will said. It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms, he said, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv. So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative.

I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"Okay," says Will, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I say. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," says Will. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

Will says, "What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Very funny," I say. "Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh shit. Sorry," he says. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Ah well, life's a shit, your grandmother it is then. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter, " I tell him. "So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will says. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. We were laughing at my laugh. I called it my walrus call, he said it was a great, unashamed, life-affirming laugh, he said it was one of the great laughs. What a bloody charmer, eh? I was seriously starting to wonder if I'd be spending the night at Will's instead of holding Abby's hair as she puked. I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're an archaeology student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two and then continued in the taxi heading for Abby's house. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to sub-Roman Britain to see what it was really like, or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, to when we were still nomads. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out.

So then we talked about that for a while, the far future. It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race and all that.

And then, suddenly it seemed, we were outside Abby's house and she was getting out of the taxi, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight, and falling into her hallway, while I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change, and also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one in Llandaf North.

And then, suddenly it seemed, it was a year a later and we were on holiday in Rome. It was my first ever visit and it was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful, and Will and I were celebrating the anniversary of that night when we got together, and we were walking around having what was basically a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started then, in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath.

It was an odd match really, Will and I. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, both our dads had left home, both of us were under 10 at the time, and neither of us really saw much of our fathers

both went to Welsh school but hadn't really kept up the language since

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was merely a laughable and mundane annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some of differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Star Wars, the first Matrix, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to the scarp of Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, all caused by us. Not just Will and me. Humans. Where we differed was where we looked for possible solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will felt there was no way to fix all the things wrong with the world by going back, it was too late. Humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, international tourism etc – but it was only humans therefore who could fix it all, by being even more clever. He looked to a post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with our incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in creative, peaceful waves, slowly evolving into children of the stars. I exaggerate, but only a bit. And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things a lot in the early days, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. It really seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them.

So we were in a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee, sat right in the bay window, watching the street life. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we might have this coffee then maybe pop back to the hotel room for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I haven't got anything to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, Jeremy Clarkson, fair point," he said. "But, no, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"Do you reckon?"

"I do, yes, I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, right there in the bay window, with everyone going by. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so warm, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Will often said he'd like to write but he never did. And the thing is, he already had a story about that time machine, an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and a funny but very bleak punchline. I couldn't see why he didn't write it up. Can we just skip just for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we're both at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at

glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We're still not quite sure if we're going to do it. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at three in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking. I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. Mostly these were all dystopias. It was satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point. Well, he said, realistically, and whatever I'd prefer, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Realistically speaking, he said. That's funny, I told him, you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today.

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime, any more and you burn out your brain. So she goes first, heads into the past, and comes back a few seconds later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. Then he has a go, into the future, and comes back a few seconds, depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets and enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they were going to live for several more decades so they don't bother and just split up. She later married a quantity surveyor and bought a big house near Chepstow, and he drank himself to death.

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. I kept telling him to write it up but he never did. I couldn't understand because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it.

This morning I looked through my bedroom window and the sky was turning a lighter and lighter blue as the sun came up over the motorway. Everything around was beginning to glow. By the time I got to work the clouds had come, colours went grey, and at lunchtime it started raining. It was pouring down as I drove home at five. I sat in a traffic jam on Cathedral Road, blowing the heaters to clear the windscreen, getting hot and prickly, opening the window and getting splashed, and thinking, well, how quickly it came and went, that early sun, and what a long time ago it seemed now.

There's a Welsh saying, Nid yn y bore mae canmol diwrnod teg. A rough translation would be something like, Morning is not the time to praise a fine day. In other words, it's very unwise to call it a nice day when it's still early and it might well piss down later. I love that. It's one of the cliches about the Welsh, that we're very pessimistic. All down to the rain, or the diet, or being conquered, or the Miners Strike. I can't speak for anyone else though, Welsh or otherwise. You might call it pessimism, fair enough - I just call it realism.

I've just got back from a conference in Rome. The paper I gave looked at some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. It was beautiful, of course, as it always is in the autumn, golden, and glowing. I walked down by the Tiber where all the plane trees had turned orange and were dropping their leaves into the river. Being the maudlin bitch I am, I made a point of walking pretty much the exact route I walked with Will, eleven years ago now, from the Circus to the Colosseum and up to the Capitoline Hill. It was dark by the time I got to the top and my legs were aching. I leaned on a railing, looking down at the spotlit Forum, and I thought about Will, and I thought about my father, who died six months ago next Tuesday, and I felt like crying to be honest. But I didn't, partly because it would have been pathetic and made me feel worse, but mainly because these anti-depressants I'm on seem to dry up my tear ducts. I get the trigger to cry but nothing comes. Probably for the best.

When I get home from these things I'm always exhausted. Even a short trip with no paper to give leaves me completely worn out. I know what it is. It's not the work, that's nothing. It's not even giving the paper, I've long since built my public speaking armour, I can climb into it whenever I need to. No, it's all the other stuff. The chatting and socialising. Relaxing, kicking back. Networking. All that side of it. I'm useless at it. Wears me out. Never been any good at that stuff.

So I tend to get home, lock myself in my house, set the phone to messages, and basically not talk to anyone for, well, for as long as I can get away with. Which is usually about 48 hours, then I go back to work. I always make sure to book time off for exactly this purpose. I call it my decompression period. If I don't get it, if I have to go straight back to work, I go a bit mad. Noticably so. Incredibly irritable, interspersed with moments of mild hysteria. To be fair to my colleagues, they're used to it by now, they've adapted, it's become 'a thing', an amusing thing everyone knows about me, Anna. Academia is a perfect trap for eccentrics. Everyone has their quirks, but actual, diagnosable personality disorders are no more or less common than in any other vocation.

I haven't really changed. Not really.

During decompression I can't even read anything. All my books stay on their shelves. I turn instead to the internet. Last night I watched a whole series of a forgotten ITV sitcom from the 80s called Me and My Girl, starring Richard O'Sullivan as a widower bringing up his now teenage daughter Sam, played by Emma Ridley. Don't ask me why, it's not very good. And this morning I looked up Will's Facebook. Don't ask me why. He's got his profile set to public so I can have a good look at all his family holidays, his wife's birthday, their anniversaries, their kids growing up. Not that I envy her, I can just imagine all the crap she has to put up with. She probably doesn't even know the half of it. She looks more and more hopeless in the pictures, to be quite honest, and a bit thinner every time. This – looking at Will's Facebook – this is no good. I realise that and I hardly ever do it. Why would I, really? I found out all about Will a long time ago, and that's why we're not together now. The main feeling I get when I think of how close I came to ending up with him is relief. I look around my cosy house and I think, wow, close escape. But when I'm in this state, post-conference, I end up doing it, peeking into Will's life, I don't know why.

I wondered if Will ever did rouse himself to write anything. If he ever made something of his time machine thing. By the look of his Facebook, he hadn't, he was still at the humanities library, head of department. When I was full of his family pictures I just sorted of drifted through various Google searches, all pretty desultory. I suppose I was vaguely wondering if anyone else had come up with a similar idea anywhere in the world. Turned out, someone had. My drifting led to a review of a book of short stories, called Minimum City, including one which sounded remarkably similar to Will's time machine story. It was just a synopsis really but it was enough to make me look up the short story collection and its author. It was an American author, a man, quite a big name but I'd never heard of him. Contemporary set fiction still isn't really my thing. From reading the Amazon reviews and all the rest of it, this is what I learned about Minimum City:

It was made up of 28 stories

They were all very short, some only a paragraph long

It was a very slim book, with big type and wide margins

All the stories were set in the modern world

They all tended to have some kind of twist / sting in the tail

The tone was cynical, darkly funny, etc etc

It didn't sound like my kind of thing but I could imagine Will enjoying it, at least Will as he was when I knew him, I can't speak for now obviously. I found the story. It had first been published in an online literature journal before being collected in the Minimum City collection. Its title was The Return Trip. It was very short. A couple come into possession of a time machine. All the rest follows exactly as in the story Will told me on the balcony of his flat in The Crescent at about four in the morning, twelve years ago. Right down to the spambots line.

I'd already checked publication dates. The Return Trip by this American author whose name eludes me now was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before Will told me the story. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins six months before Will told me that story and passed it off as his own, on the balcony of his flat.

And I started laughing and laughing, until I had to put my bowl down in case I got milky cornflakes over my t-shirt.

#The Effluent Lagoon #roadswim collective #three times he lied to me #fairport convention #german minimal techno #richard dawkins #ursula le guin #tolkein #iain m banks #sub-roman britain #the dream of macsen wledig #magnus maximus #st dyfrig #bladerunner #agora #time machine #time travel #minimum city the return trip

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