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thatisnicemahogany · 4 years ago

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Spine Breaker: Ch. 5

Summary: Life in the mafia isn’t just about killing and maintaining order, but also maintaining their lives as 7 individuals becoming family.

Genre: Mafia!AU with fluff and mild angst

Pairing: None? Platonic OT7?

Chapter TW & CW: Violence, language, familial issues

Series masterlist

CHAPTER FIVE: “Hoseok’s Backstory: Holding the Devil’s Hand”

Hoseok dropped the empty bag onto the couch, preparing to pack it for his fight later that evening. He’d done this countless times before, but for some reason his nerves were a little on edge for tonight’s fight. Tonight he was fighting Park Jisung, someone he knew would be a tough opponent. If the bets were any indication, the odds were apparently in Jisung’s favor, so the chances were that if he didn’t lose entirely, Hoseok’s ass would at least get knocked around a fair bit.

Typically, he liked to watch matches so he could learn the fighting style of potential opponents, but he hadn’t watched many of Jisung’s fights. Jisung fought really dirty and did some serious damage to his opponents, which had made them hard to watch. On top of that, he was a grade-A asshole - constantly running his mouth the whole time and walking around big-dicking it like he was the hottest shit in town. Most of his opponents left with broken bones or through automatic losses by knockout, and every bit of each win went straight to Jisung’s head. It didn’t matter if he cheated or played dirty to win, either - most people with an ounce of decency would feel at least a glimmer of guilt for winning by such poor standards, but not Jisung. No, Jisung seemed to pride himself in winning this way, as though it proved he had ambition by being willing to do whatever it took to win.

That’s not ambition. That’s obsession and greed, fusing together into a disgusting monster that rears its head in the worst possible way. And fighting works wonderfully as a vessel to feed this monster, allowing Jisung to fatten it up with cheap fighting tactics.

Letting out a breath, Hoseok rolled his shoulders before stuffing his first aid gear and hand wraps into his bag. The wraps were necessary during a fight to keep his fingers and wrists from getting damaged, and the first aid kit hopefully wouldn’t be necessary. However, in the case that Hoseok gets a gnarly gash somewhere crucial, it’d be completely essential to his continuation in the fight. Following those were three water bottles, since there was no guarantee there’d be access to drinking water anywhere nearby. Lastly, he prepared a change of clothes in case the fight lasted too long. Generally, he’d be able to get back to wherever he was staying, but sometimes the fight would last way longer than he anticipated, and it was good to get changed before heading back. Especially when he crashed with Hyoseob, who had a tendency to have people over late - and Hoseok hated trying to wind down from his fight with people around. On those nights, he found a nearby convenience store where he could clean up in their bathroom, buying a pack of gum to convince the worker to let him stick around. Then he’d either wait for Hyoseob’s group to finish up or find somewhere else to crash for the night.

Look, it’s the best he can do right now, alright?

Sighing, he yanked the zippers of his bag shut, looping the strap up onto his shoulder. He silently slipped out the door, making his way through the hall and down the stairs until he emerged out into the night. As he shut the door behind him, he pulled his phone out of his pocket: 9:00. Perfect. He began his walk down the street, hands shoved back into his pockets. He didn’t shy away from the eyes of those he passed if he managed to meet them - rather, he met them with a kind smile. Or at least, he hoped they would receive it as such. Hoseok often tried to face others with a pleasant demeanor to mask the inner anxiety surrounding upcoming fights. There had been times where he kept his head down, avoiding everyone’s gaze in an attempt to remain focused. Those were the fights he lost; he got too inside his own head, forced himself into a funk he couldn’t bring himself out of, then promptly got his ass kicked for doing so.

Turning a corner, he approached a familiar convenience store he used to visit when he still lived with his family. They wouldn’t visit together by any means - it had been a long time since they did anything together as a unit - but he would often stop by alone to pick up something on the way home from school, or go there to get out of the house whenever things were just a little too stressful. Over time, it became a sort of safe haven and he’d gotten quite close with the workers and owner.

Of course, he hadn’t returned since his family kicked him out. It’d been weeks since he last visited, but there never was a reason to come all this way. There were closer convenience stores to Hyoseob’s place, and he even still worked at the one two doors down from their building. If he needed to go to one, he’d go there - one of his coworkers would give him discounts, or even free food. Who’d turn that down?

Besides, he was never in this neighborhood unless he was heading to a fight. The fights changed locations most of the time, just to keep the cops from knowing where they’d be. Only a few had been this way, but Hoseok never stopped in the old store. Part of him didn’t know what to say at this point, especially since they’d probably ask where he’d been. Sure, if he’d been gone for only a few days or a week or whatever, he could probably play it off. But it’s been, what, 3 weeks? 4 weeks? There’s no easy explanation for that, and the truth is too hard to talk about.

Passing by the store was the one time he planned to keep his head down, out of fear that if he looked in the window someone may recognize him and start asking questions. The chimes of the bells on the door caught his attention, though, mainly out of worry about running directly into whoever was exiting the store.

He definitely didn’t expect to see his father and sister walking out of the shop, both looking over at him and meeting his eyes. He knew he probably looked like a deer in the headlights, shock written stark across his face. For some reason, he expected them to acknowledge him somehow - even negatively.

But no, nothing. A clear indication of recognition hit both of their faces, but neither stopped. They pressed right past him, treating him no different than any other stranger on the street. Hoseok absolutely expected this from his father; it was his parents who kicked him out, after all. But Heeyoung? They weren’t exactly close, especially after he’d left, but to act like she didn’t know him at all?

Well, she had always been their father’s favorite - the man never even tried to hide that from anyone. For all Hoseok knew, she was reveling in basically being an only child now. For all he knew, they didn’t miss him at all - and it sure seemed that way with what had just happened.

Then again, they could be worried sick about him. His father could be the only one still harboring strong feelings; his sister could just be mimicking this to stay on his good side; their mother could be being eaten alive by the guilt of abandoning one of her children.

No, that’s not very likely. If that was the case, why force him out in the first place?

Hoseok continued on to the formerly abandoned warehouse, trying his best to stay out of his own head. It was ten times harder now, after running into his family. How was he supposed to not focus on that betrayal, that hurt? Hyoseob always told him to let it go, and he tried, he really did, but it’s difficult. It feels impossible when it’s staring you in the face, when it smiles at you as it twists the knife in your back just a little deeper. How the hell is he supposed to be chill or relaxed or whatever at a time like this?

Huffing, Hoseok kicked a rock that was laying on the sidewalk, watching as it skipped down and dropped into the street. All he wanted to do in that moment was fight to get this anger and hurt out, but the fight didn’t start for another half hour. Besides, he tried to not use his emotions to fuel his fighting - that was dangerous fire to play with, and there was a thin line between using it to your advantage to win and pushing too far and hurting yourself.

Hoseok turned a final corner onto the side street where the warehouse resided. It had worn away over the time it sat empty, the exposed brick crumbling in spots and each gust of wind causing the wooden beams to threateningly creak. The previous owner left very little behind, and with all of the remaining clutter pushed back against the walls, the center of the spacious room was left bare and available for a hardy match. Between its unassuming nature and being tucked away from the main street, it was the perfect location for fights.

Luckily, as he entered the building, he noticed it seemed that he was the first one to arrive, which is precisely what he preferred. He went over to a mountain of pallets, cartons, and boxes, inspecting a few of the boxes on the ground. One in particular looked less gross than the rest, so he dropped his bag off his shoulder and into it. Although there were people who attended the fights that he could likely trust to watch his stuff, he never risked it - he couldn’t afford to lose his wallet right now. Before closing the box, he dug into his bag for his handwraps and water bottles, pulling them out and setting them on top once he finished closing it so he knew which one was “his” later.

He began to warm up, jumping in place and bouncing from foot to foot. His mind kept settling onto the hurt and betrayal from before, no matter how hard he tried to focus on other things. It didn’t help that what he was here for - street fighting - was the major drive behind the final falling out with his family. It was always something eating at him from the back of his mind, but now that he had another confrontation with it head-on, it was screaming at the forefront.

Things would’ve just been easier if he’d done what his parents had wanted. They pushed him towards legal fighting - Taekwondo in particular - when they found that that’s where his passion lied. They swore up and down they’d support him, so long as he worked at it and put his all into it. His father had been a touch wary at first, worried about his son getting involved in such a field, but warmed up eventually. Hoseok had been so ecstatic when they started supporting him; nothing could match the elation he felt when they offered to help pay for a trainer. He felt like he was on top of the world, like no one could knock him down. His dream of becoming a professional Taekwondo fighter was coming true - he found a trainer through the gym he went to, and worked his ass off with training every single day. He was on cloud nine, his family was supportive and happy, everything was outstanding.

But that all changed a couple weeks later, when he showed up to the gym and his trainer wasn’t there. He tried again the next day, and the day after that, and each time the trainer failed to show. He even tried calling and texting him, and the asshole still didn’t respond. When he asked around at the gym, the general consensus was that Hoseok had been scammed and the “trainer” went MIA once he got his money.

Of course, Hoseok completely lost his mind over this. If his parents found out, they’d surely get much stricter with the fighting - or bring an end to it altogether. His journey to professional fighting couldn’t stop after it had barely even started. Hoseok had been able to taste what the success would feel like, even without having fought in any real fights yet, and he didn’t want to lose it already. He begged and pleaded with everyone he could at the gym to help him figure out something so his family didn’t kill him. Eventually, he got a job at the convenience store, just to try and make some money to help pay his parents back. It helped, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

When his parents did find out, they were furious, berating him up and down for trusting someone who’d do this, livid he hadn’t caught any red flags or warning signs that the “trainer” should’ve been trusted. They forbade him from fighting any longer until he paid them back, and at his core, he truly understood and felt that was fitting. He knew he’d fucked up, he knew he should’ve been more careful, and the last thing he wanted to do was make them suffer for his own faults. With the truth out in the open, he picked up more and more shifts at the convenience store, trying his best to save up enough to just pay them back. He even obeyed their wishes; he stopped training at the gym, just sticking to running or lifting weights. For a while, it filled the void - he missed fighting, but keeping active made him feel like he hadn’t given it up yet.

It didn’t last very long. Soon, he began itching to fight again. Catching glimpses of other people training just like he had at the gym made his heart ache. The temptation grew and he gradually watched the other fighters more and more, yearning to be in their place. Then one day, someone took notice of him watching, offering to let him spar with them. How was he supposed to say no? He craved it like an addict in withdrawals, and his willpower to obey his parents’ orders had been so weakened by this point that he couldn’t help but cave in. He tried to justify it in his head - there wasn’t anything wrong with just one little spar session, and it wasn’t like he was training for a career again.

The one spar session turned into two, then three. It began luring him back to the sparring area during his daily gym trips, seeking out those sessions with anyone who was there. It still felt harmless to him, though; it was just for fun, just to keep his energy and skill up while he worked on paying his parents back.

About a week into returning to fighting, he was sparring with another regular fighter, Yongsun. They’d sparred a couple of times but generally didn’t talk much, simply going their separate ways once they were finished. However, this time, Yongsun called him over before Hoseok had a chance to leave.

“You know, you’re pretty good at this. You could make a lot of money fighting.”

A short glimpse of hope had fluttered up in Hoseok’s chest, only to be choked down with disappointment and guilt when his parents’ words flashed back through his head. “I can’t, I’m sorry. Thank you though.”

“Why not?” Yongsun pried, confused by Hoseok’s rejection.

“I just can’t.”

Yongsun snorted, patting Hoseok on the back. “Alright, fine. But just think about it.”

From that point forward, Hoseok began sparring with Yongsun regularly, and the pair grew closer, chatting more after their sparring sessions. Hoseok opened up about being scammed - it was shocking that Yongsun didn’t know, considering most of the gym was aware and semi-sympathetic at this point. Yongsun often proposed for Hoseok to fight in some way, and Hoseok always turned him down, wary of being scammed again and not wanting to get involved with another trainer. Although he looked at Yongsun like a sort of mentor at this point, he stayed guarded, his parents’ disappointment in him looming over him any time he even considered taking him up on his offer.

“Why don’t you ever take me up on fighting for money?” Yongsun asked him after one session, the pair heaving their breaths from exertion, working on packing up.

Hoseok shrugged, fixated on unwinding the wrap from his left hand. “I don’t want to go against my parents, I guess. I’ve already disappointed them enough.” Hoseok glanced up at the older fighter, who was watching him with a curious expression. “Don’t get me wrong though, I really appreciate you offering to train me. I want to take you up on it one day, if I can.”

Yongsun broke out in an animated laugh, rocking back and forth as his body was wracked with it. Hoseok blinked blankly at him, thoroughly confused at the reaction.

“I don’t want to train you, kid. I want you to fight with me.”

Hoseok paused, knitting his eyebrows in even more confusion. “Oh. I mean, I still can’t...my parents would know if I was fighting in the league here.”

Having calmed down a little, Yongsun still wore an amused grin, shaking his head at Hoseok. “Not in the league.” He scooted closer to Hoseok, looking around as he did. He lowered his voice to little above a mutter, forcing Hoseok to lean in to hear properly. “There’s sort of an...underground league, if you will. But it pays even better than the legal shit.”

Hoseok drew back, surprised at this revelation. “Wait, really? That’s what you fight in?” Yongsun nodded, taking a swig of his water. “So, what, do you guys fight here in the gym on your own time?”

“No, we fight in a bunch of places around the city. Usually abandoned buildings.” Yongsun pushed off the ground, holding a hand out to Hoseok to help him up. “Look, come with me to the next fight and just watch. You can decide if you want to join from there.”

From that first fight, Hoseok was hooked. There was a rush that came with fighting in general, but illegal street fighting? That was on another level. He’d be lying if he said that the money didn’t matter, as well. Sure, it was against his parents’ wishes, but the convenience store just wasn’t making a dent in his debt fast enough. Just three wins would give him enough to pay them back, and then they’d hopefully be more lenient on him fighting. That’s all he had to do - just keep at it until then, and then he’d be okay to stop and move onto the legal Taekwondo league.

He only got more drawn in as he kept winning. Those three wins came and passed; he paid his family back, and just as he suspected, they gave him the greenlight to return to fighting. He should’ve just stopped at that point, he should’ve quit street fighting and sought out a real trainer to get him into the legal league. But he couldn’t. He loved it too much - enjoyed the thrill too much, revelled in the success too much. He enjoyed the leniency that came with street fighting, how the rules were much more relaxed than in legal fighting. It added an extra challenge to matches, though. There were some who leaned into the fact that a lot of dirty tactics were ignored by moderators. Although he didn’t resort to dirty tactics himself, fighting against them added to the rush, made the whole experience a thousand times better than it had been when he was originally training for the legal league.

Hoseok groaned as he punched the air, still bouncing on his toes. Why didn’t he just quit when he could have? If he’d just stuck to the plan, just quit once he was back in his parents’ good graces, he wouldn’t be like this right now. He wouldn’t be starving because he couldn’t afford to eat another meal today. He wouldn’t be stiff before his fight from sleeping on a lumpy couch. He wouldn’t feel so fucking lonely and disappointed in himself.

Shaking his arms out, he paced in a circle, loosening up his legs. A few people were beginning to gather, keeping to themselves and chatting in hushed tones. Hoseok rolled his neck, feeling it crack two - no, three times. God, he really needed to sleep on something better soon. He wouldn’t be able to keep winning if he kept waking up like he was half frozen from cryosleep.

“Hey buddy!” Yongsun greeted, slapping Hoseok on the arm as he approached. He dropped his own bag next to Hoseok’s box before straightening up and crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “How’re you feeling? Ready to fight?”

Hoseok merely shrugged before stretching his arms out.

“Where’s your energy? C’mon man!” Yongsun teased, reaching out to jokingly swat at Hoseok. Typically, Hoseok was quick enough to bat him away, but with being in this headspace, he didn’t even react. Yongsun immediately frowned, stepping closer to the younger fighter. “What’s wrong?”

Hoseok sighed, looking over his shoulder as more people gathered in the warehouse. “I ran into my family on the way here.”

Shock washed over Yongsun's features as the realization dawned on him. “Shit. How’d that go?”

Hoseok stayed expressionless, attempting to mask any hint of the voices going crazy inside of him. “Fine, I guess. They didn’t acknowledge me.”

Yongsun hesitated in an attempt to tread lightly around the sensitive topic. “Maybe they just didn’t realize it was you?”

“They knew. I could tell.”

A few beats passed, Hoseok loosely still stretching out as Yongsun shifted his weight from foot to foot. Hoseok didn’t blame him for not saying much - what was there to say? “Well, look, don’t let it get to you, man. Take your anger out on Jisung.”

As if on cue, Jisung and a crowd of people with him noisily made their way into the warehouse. Hoseok watched on as he continued to stretch, somewhat taken aback by the number of people following Jisung. The fights always had their fair share of spectators, but the sheer number of people arriving with Jisung and crowding around him in particular was astonishing. “They can’t all be here with him, can they?” Hoseok asked Yongsun quietly, chewing on his lip due to nerves.

“He’s popular. They’re all probably his fans,” Yongsun explained, voice flat with irritation.

Hoseok cocked an eyebrow, looking over at Yongsun. “He has that many?” Hoseok couldn’t hide the slight intonation of awe in his voice, clearly intrigued by the idea of having dedicated fans.

Yongsun nodded, expression still apathetic. “I don’t envy him. Things get dicey when you get more fans like that.” Noticing Hoseok’s confusion, Yongsun explained further. “It’s not...unheard of...for some fighters to get...let’s go with ‘overzealous’ fans.”

Hoseok tilted his head as he stretched his arms out behind his back and brought them up over his head. “What, like crazies?” Although he found the concept amusing, the humor was lost as he saw that Yongsun didn’t share it.

“Some of them can go stalker-level. They follow you around fight to fight, next thing you know they’re popping up at stores and by your home. And what are you supposed to do, tell the police? ‘Officer, this person is stalking me because they’re a fan of me - oh, did I mention I do illegal street fighting?’”

Hoseok grimaced as he began to understand just how bad a situation like that could be. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

Before either of them could say much more, the moderator for the fight started gathering everyone together and preparing for the fight to start. Hoseok shrugged off his jacket, handing it over to Yongsun as he rolled his neck from side to side a few more times. He steadied himself with a few breaths as Yongsun placed his hands on Hoseok’s shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes. “You’ve got this, man. Don’t get too into your own head, just let that shit feed your fighting.” Hoseok nodded as Yongsun turned him around, clapping his hands down on his shoulders a couple times before digging his thumbs in to massage the muscles. He leaned in, mumbling quietly to be sure that only Hoseok could hear. “Kick his fucking ass.”

The crowd gathered around in a loose circle, with Jisung straight across from Hoseok. Jisung looked ready to kill him, eyes fierce as his jaw visibly clenched. He smirked as he met Hoseok’s eyes, both stepping towards each other. Hoseok refused to falter under his gaze, matching his intense glare with one of his own. The moderator between them cleared his throat before speaking loud and clearly.

“This is a no-holds-barred match up between Park Jisung,” the moderator gestured over to Jisung, the crowd cheering noisily for him, “and Jung Hoseok!” As the moderator gestured towards Hoseok, he noted the dampening in the cheering from the crowd. It was unsurprising, as he was a lesser-known fighter. He didn’t allow this difference in support to hold any weight; rather, he used it as fuel. Hoseok thrived in being the unassumed underdog. It just meant he had to prove himself, that he had a reason to win.

“This fight will go for three rounds, or until loss by knockout! Are both fighters ready?” The moderator looked between Hoseok and Jisung, both nodding and taking ready stances, their eyes never leaving one another. “And...fight!”

The moderator quickly stepped back away from the pair, watching intently from the sidelines as the two fighters approached each other. As Jisung approached, Hoseok noticed the other man likely took a more active offense approach with his fighting from the way he aggressively stepped forward. Hoseok was light on his toes, dodging as Jisung took a couple quick swings at him. He nimbly dodged a right hook from Jisung, ducking under it while using his right leg to swing out in a turning kick. His shin made contact with the side of Jisung’s thigh, causing the opposing fighter to stumble backwards in a failed attempt to dodge the kick.

Jisung’s eyebrows visibly furrowed in agitation, annoyed that Hoseok made first contact for the fight. It was Hoseok’s turn to smirk at him, slightly proud of himself. Jisung charged again, backing Hoseok towards the crowd behind him. This was one of the added challenges of street fighting: no ring. The fighters had to be mindful of their positions, otherwise they could easily collide with crowd members. There were no rules against crowd members getting involved in a fight, other than the understanding that the action happens between the two designated fighters. It was sort of an “unspoken rule” about the fights, something that bled over from the legal sport. However, in instances where the crowd strongly favored one fighter over the other, it was more likely to take place - even just through the crowd pushing one fighter towards the other. A seemingly small shove like that could throw Hoseok off balance, leaving him vulnerable and giving Jisung an opening. And with Jisung being so comfortable with fighting dirty, Hoseok didn’t want to think of how dangerous that opportunity could be.

Luckily, Hoseok had managed to learn a few tricks in the time he’d been street fighting, one of which being avoiding hitting the crowd. Managing to be mindful of his placement while fighting used to be quite difficult for Hoseok, and he actually ran into crowd members a couple of times early on. Thankfully, those matches weren’t too bad, and they didn’t involve themselves too much - but he highly doubted this crowd would do the same.

As he moved backwards, Hoseok veered left, trying to avoid backing into the crowd. Jisung continuously threw jabs and hooks towards him, but Hoseok continued to dodge them all, much to Jisung’s dismay. He was sure his ability to manipulate his opponent’s position in the pseudo-ring would come in handy if he ever fought legally as well, if that ever even happened. Though at this point, there wasn’t much reason to go fight legally.

Would his family take him back if he did?

Dammit, he was doing such a good job of not thinking of them, too. The pain from running into them at the shop came to the forefront of his mind, dividing his attention long enough to make him drag his feet a little too much. Jisung must’ve seen his slip in concentration, or maybe he’d just gotten lucky and landed one of the fifteen swings he just threw, and it felt like Hoseok just watched as Jisung’s right fist zeroed in on his jaw. The impact of his hit only managed to throw Hoseok off more, and suddenly Jisung’s left fist sunk into his stomach in a powerful uppercut.

With the wind knocked out of him, Hoseok hunched over, trying to retreat from Jisung. He knew the guy was strong, but he wasn’t expecting that. He managed to get just out of Jisung’s reach, righting himself and resetting his stance. The pair danced like this for a while, with Jisung pursuing Hoseok punch after punch while Hoseok fiercely swerved around each one. Hoseok was determined to not let Jisung make contact again, especially not by losing his focus thinking about - never mind that. Hoseok shook his head to regain his focus and zero in on the man in front of him.

At one point, Hoseok noticed as Jisung lunged just a bit too close to him, his feet too far apart to continue maintaining solid balance. Seizing this opportunity, Hoseok kicked out with his left leg, his foot making direct contact with Jisung’s waist. The impact knocked Jisung off his balance, causing him to stumble sideways with Hoseok closely following. Taking advantage of his opponent’s vulnerability, Hoseok threw a right hook followed by a left, connecting with Jisung’s side and then up to his chest. The opposing fighter blindly jabbed at Hoseok, managing to hit his chest and prompting Hoseok to back off again.

Once again, the fighters danced around each other, Jisung more conservative with his punches now that he realized they weren’t working. Jisung also appeared to be slowing in stamina, wearing himself out by his energetic fighting style. Hoseok maintained his own reserved style, saving his energy and plotting to outlast Jisung. At the very least, Hoseok could wait him out, let him wear himself down until he was too weak to properly fight against Hoseok’s onslaught. If he could just do that, he could secure a victory.

Jisung lunged in once more, again unaware of his disadvantaged stance. Although he was quite mindful of his placement regarding the crowd, it appeared that Jisung often was less self-aware of his body itself. He consistently broke his stance, and Hoseok wasn’t too sure if he simply was excellent at dodging Jisung’s attacks, or if Jisung wasn’t completely aware of where he was placing his hits. Hoseok had evaded the punches by side stepping to the right, putting Jisung slightly behind him and leaving him open to Hoseok. Hoseok quickly jabbed with the back of his elbow, striking the side of Jisung’s face before twisting and landing a hard punch on Jisung’s torso with his right fist. He bounced back before Jisung’s right hook could hit him, ready to dodge another.

However, before Jisung could follow through, the moderator interjected with a stern “time!” Jisung and Hoseok stepped away from each other, retreating to their opposite sides of the circle. Yongsun was waiting with a water bottle at the ready for Hoseok, holding it out for him. Hoseok took it and began drinking greedily from it.

“You absolutely crushed that first round!” Yongsun exclaimed, still using relatively hushed tones. “That one definitely goes to you. Just keep that same energy this round.” Hoseok nodded, panting as he tried to catch his breath. “He seems to lead with a lot-”

“-of punches, yeah. He leaves himself vulnerable,” Hoseok finished Yongsun’s assessment, handing the water bottle back to him.

“Exactly. Keep exploiting that.” Yongsun set the water bottle down on the ground before raising back up to look over Hoseok. “Need anything?”

Hoseok merely shook his head, working on regulating his breathing. He’d managed to catch it again, but now he worked on evening it out even more to relax some of the adrenaline pumping through his veins. The last thing he needed was to get too worked up and lose the lead he had.

“Fighters!” The moderator called, signifying the end of the rest break. Hoseok turned to face Jisung again, Yongsun patting him on the back before Hoseok stepped towards the center again. If Jisung had looked intimidating before, he looked monstrous this time around. He seemed to have come to terms with the fact that Hoseok had won the first round, and now he just looked pissed and out for blood. “On your ready…” The moderator trailed off, Hoseok cracking his neck as he readied his stance. “Fight!”

Unlike the first round, Jisung didn’t immediately launch into a pursuit of Hoseok this time; rather, the two fighters moved slowly, constantly facing each other as they moved in a circle. It appeared that Jisung was determined to fight more reservedly this round, possibly due to the realization of being unable to keep up the aggressive fighting style he had initially begun with.

The two stayed locked in a stand-off, and it appeared that Jisung was waiting for Hoseok to make the first move. Although he usually waited for his opponents to instigate things, Hoseok was riding on the high of having won the first round. He wanted to maintain that momentum, and he was worried that if he waited too long for the next round to really start, he’d lose it. Hoseok advanced on Jisung, not yet throwing any swings, only initiating movement. Jisung took the bait, throwing a hook that Hoseok smoothly evaded. However, Hoseok hadn’t expected to lean directly into a kick that hit him square on the calf.

Admittedly, Hoseok shouldn’t have been so careless as to not pay attention to the possibility of kicks coming his way, but to be fair, Jisung had really only thrown punches up to this point. Hoseok had assumed he just preferred to fight using his upper body and that he wasn’t comfortable using his legs. And where did that assumption get him? Knocked off balance while Jisung took advantage of his vulnerability, landing two consecutive punches.

Hoseok managed to break away, back up a few steps to give himself time to re-center himself. Jisung, however, didn’t give Hoseok a break, pursuing him and unrelenting in his assault. Hoseok kept backing up, trying his best to avoid each incoming punch and kick. Occasionally, Jisung would let up just a tad, but that was likely more to give himself a break instead of allowing one for Hoseok.

The crowd didn’t seem too pleased with the lack of action, murmurs of anger beginning to turn into yells. Typically, the crowds stayed relatively quiet - as quiet as a crowd of people could be, that is. It was another “unspoken rule” about the fights: avoid unnecessary noise to keep from drawing attention. Occasionally things could get a little rowdy, but most regulars would help calm things back down. This time, though, the crowd began to spew criticism towards the fighters, mainly directed at Hoseok.

“Quit running away!”

“Fight like a man!”

“Pussy!”

“Fucking coward!”

Although he tried his best to keep the comments from getting to him, he couldn’t help the irritation rising within him. He was already the underdog, but now he had to prove them wrong on this as well? Huffing, Hoseok pushed towards Jisung, aiming for a high kick. Jisung evaded, backing away from Hoseok once again. It felt as though the crowd’s critiques got louder, mocking him for missing. He had to land something, otherwise they’d just keep getting worse.

He lunged forward again, this time aiming a hook at Jisung and preparing to follow up with a jab. But Jisung blocked the incoming hook with his forearm, quickly reaching out and grabbing Hoseok’s shirt with his other hand. The arm that blocked Hoseok twisted, his hand latching onto Hoseok’s wrist. Now that Jisung had him in close quarters, he kneed Hoseok, hitting his upper thigh instead of his groin, as Hoseok assumed he’d meant. The blow pushed Hoseok back on uneven footing, but Jisung’s grip didn’t give. Hoseok threw as powerful of a jab as he could with his free arm, hitting Jisung in the ribs before Jisung kneed him again. This time, Hoseok was prepared and he twisted his hips away, ensuring that Jisung’s knee hit him on the hip instead of near his groin. He wrenched his right wrist, forcing Jisung to let go, and backed up as fast as he could to get him to let go of his shirt. However, Jisung’s grip still wouldn’t give, and both were thrown off balance by the movement.

The moderator intervened, pushing the two apart. “Reset.” Jisung let go of Hoseok’s shirt, turning to walk back a few paces. Hoseok watched as Jisung took a moment to fix his hand wrap before assuming a stance similar to Hoseok’s. The moderator swung his hand as a signal that they could return to the fight, and the pair resumed their slow moving stand-off. For a few pregnant moments, no movement was made from either party, both waiting to see what the other did. Sure enough, as it continued on, the crowd began to get antsy again.

“Come on!”

“Do something!”

“Kick his ass!”

“Get him, Jisung!”

That voice stood out above the others, sending an icy chill down Hoseok’s spine. It was familiar, too familiar, and he naturally scanned the crowd to find the voice’s owner. That sounded like his father - but there was no way he was here, right? He deliberately forbade Hoseok from street fighting, so there’s no way he would be here to watch a match for himself. Then again, his father was a strong believer in tough lessons. What if he was here to prove his point to Hoseok? What if he came to say “I told you so” and let him come back home?

For the short moment he looked, no face matched the one he was looking for. Suddenly, a sharp pain split across the back of his skull as Jisung punched him in the back of the head. Hoseok’s vision went fuzzy and blacked out momentarily. He was vaguely aware of Jisung grabbing his shirt again as another assault of punches was thrown at him over and over, though Hoseok was too disoriented to do much to counter it.

Again, the moderator intervened pushing Jisung off of Hoseok. “You pull anymore shady shit and you forfeit, Park.” The moderator kept them apart as both reset once more, Hoseok taking a moment to shake his head to clear his vision. He could vaguely see Jisung fixing his hand wrap again, but thought nothing of it as the two faced off once more.

This time, Jisung returned to his tactic from the first round, beginning his pursuit immediately. Hoseok shuffled away from him, feet dragging some from residual disorientation. He attempted to throw a kick and punch here and there, but nothing was landing. Luckily, nothing Jisung was throwing was landing either; each fighter was just barely out of reach of the other.

Occasionally, Hoseok blinked his eyes hard to try and keep his vision clear, finding it difficult to track Jisung’s quick movement. He knew he was using timid tactics at this point, but if he attempted anything more aggressive, he didn’t have the confidence he could land it properly without getting his ass handed to him double in the process. The punch that had connected with the back of Hoseok’s head was still disorienting, handicapping his abilities. He had to figure out some way to make it through to the break, some way to take back the lead that he was sure he’d lost at this point.

Jisung made a swift advancement on him, throwing a jab that caught him square in the jaw, which didn’t help with Hoseok’s vision problem. A hook followed, landing dangerously close to Hoseok’s eye and setting off a hot, stabbing pain across his eyebrow. A few gasps were audible from the crowd, and Hoseok was almost certain that something had been broken. Shortly after, an odd cooling sensation hit the same spot, confusing Hoseok but not stopping him from attempting to hit Jisung back. One punch had managed to connect with Jisung’s cheek, but as it did, something dripped from Hoseok’s eyebrow. Stepping backwards to evade anything from Jisung, Hoseok wiped at his brow with his forearm, not too shocked to see blood smeared across his skin when he lowered his arm.

Hoseok hoped there wasn’t much time left in the round, otherwise the cut could really mess with his fighting for the rest of it. He brought his gaze back up to meet Jisung’s, lunging at him to land another kick on his thigh. The pair exchanged blow after blow, things having heated up from the stalemate earlier in the round. Jisung had managed to land two punches directly on his jaw following Hoseok grazing Jisung’s ear with a poorly-timed jab. Hoseok continued having to blink hard, his vision still a little fuzzy from the blow to his head, as well as the mixture of blood and sweat from his exertion getting in his eyes. He aimed another jab at Jisung’s head, this time glancing off his cheek as Jisung evaded before landing his own jab on Hoseok’s clavicle.

Again, Hoseok blinked to clear the fluids getting in his eyes, but rather than it clearing away, the vision in his left eye became more blurred. He blinked again and again to try and clear it, but it just kept getting worse. To temporarily fix things, he tried to keep that eye closed, but this began to mess with his depth perception. He was essentially blind in that eye, and he was sure that Jisung noticed and was going to take advantage of it.

Sure enough, Jisung landed a couple rapid punches on Hoseok’s left side, connecting with his cheekbone and his clavicle again. Hoseok threw his own hook at Jisung, but he side-stepped to avoid it. Hoseok followed him with his “good” eye, turning his face to try and maximize the space that eye could see. He managed to block a few of Jisung’s hits, but he was throwing attacks at him too fast to catch them all. Another punch caught him where he assumed he’d been cut, and another hit him at the top of his sternum, scarily close to his throat. Hoseok tried to start taking up a solely defensive tactic, blocking everything he could, and it felt as though Jisung’s assault kept coming.

After who knows how long, the moderator called out “time!” Hoseok heard him clearly, and he was certain that Jisung did as well, but the assault didn’t end. The moderator called out again before getting fed up with Jisung not listening, physically pulling him off of Hoseok. Hoseok slowly made his way to his side of the circle, anchoring his left hand against his injured eye as he staggered up to Yongsun. Immediately, Yongsun grabbed at his hand and pulled it away from his face, inspecting the injury.

“Fuck, that looks deep.” Yongsun guided Hoseok to sit on a stack of wooden pallets, crouching down and digging through his bag to find some supplies to fix up Hoseok with. He pulled out a towel, wetting it with his water bottle before dabbing at the wound to clean up the blood. Hoseok winced, the area still sensitive, but didn’t dare pull away as he knew Yongsun was just trying to help. “I’ve got bandages, but I don’t know how much they’re going to help. This is bad enough you’ll probably need stitches.”

“May I?” A voice asked. The two looked up at a young man standing next to them, looking inconspicuous with his hood pulled up and hands shoved into the front pocket of the hoodie. He smiled warmly in response to the skeptical look that both Hoseok and Yongsun were giving him. “I’m a medical student, I can help.”

Yongsun glanced at Hoseok, who nodded in approval and slight desperation as he grimaced in pain. “Anything that’ll make sure I can keep fighting.”

Yongsun got up, moving out of the stranger’s way and handing him the towel. “Go for it. But if you fuck him up, I’ll kill you.”

“That’s fair,” the stranger chuckled, assuming Yongsun’s previous spot in front of Hoseok. Immediately, he pressed the towel up against the cut before talking to Hoseok. “I need you to keep this here for me.” As Hoseok followed his directions, the stranger turned his attention to Yongsun. “Can I see what supplies you have?” He asked, and Yongsun instantly dug his kit out of his bag and handed it to the stranger. The stranger peeked through it for a moment, assessing what tools he had at his disposal.

Humming in thought, he turned his attention back to the towel, lifting it away from the cut to take a better look at it. With his other hand, the stranger dug his phone out of his pocket, navigating it to turn on the flashlight. Careful not to shine it in Hoseok’s eyes, he shone it on the cut, gently using his free hand to palpate the skin around it. Hoseok stayed as still as he could manage, watching the man inspect his eyebrow.

“Well, it’s bad, but not horrible. It doesn’t seem like anything is broken.” Hoseok let out a breath in tandem with Yongsun, who watched on worriedly. “But your friend is right, bandages probably wouldn’t work well. They’d probably fall off thirty seconds into the next round, and then you’re back to square one.”

The medical student continued digging through the first aid kit, humming in approval as he seemed to find something. “This’ll work, though!” He held up a small container of superglue, smiling reassuringly at Hoseok.

“I totally forgot that I had that in there. I was ready to give him stitches on the spot.” Yongsun joked, causing both Hoseok and the stranger to chuckle.

“You could do that, but it’d probably hurt like hell,” the stranger mused, pulling out an antiseptic wipe and tearing it open. “Then again, this won’t be the most pleasant either, especially since there’s hair here. But I won’t be repeatedly piercing your skin without any painkillers this way.”

Hoseok’s eyebrows shot up, albeit painfully. “No thank you, let’s go with the glue please.”

The stranger chuckled again, using the partially bloodied towel to wipe at Hoseok’s skin in an attempt to clean off some more of the sweat and blood. “Sorry if this hurts,” he muttered as he followed up with the wipe, sterilizing the area and causing Hoseok to wince in pain. “Tilt your head back, please.”

Hoseok followed his polite orders, the stranger preparing to apply the glue. “This is also probably going to hurt, sorry,” he apologized again before squeezing some of the glue out along the cut. Hoseok hissed at the stinging, although it was duller compared to the throbbing he’d felt as he’d been cut during the fight. He stared at the ceiling high above him, barely lit by the light from the few scattered lanterns brought by attendees. Although it was pitch black now, too dark and far away to make out any details, he was sure it was dingy and unkept. This building, like most that the fights were held in, had likely been abandoned for years at that point. It was left unloved, meant to rot and crumble away until the city tore it down to make space for something new. Hoseok pondered on the irony of its husk secretly being used for these fights, already being utilized for new, lively gatherings such as these. If it wasn’t empty and abandoned, they wouldn’t have been able to use it for this, to be able to fill it with some form of life again, and for that Hoseok was grateful. Not all that was abandoned had to be left as such.

“How’s your vision?” The stranger asked, interrupting Hoseok’s thoughts. His hand was warm as it held the cut closed to give the superglue time to set, his touch gentle, yet firm.

Hoseok looked up at him, his face blurry and distorted due to Hoseok’s left eye. “My right eye’s clear, but my left one is a little blurry.”

The stranger’s brows knitted together, leaning in to take a closer look. “Hmm, did some of the blood get in it?”

“I think so.”

Still holding Hoseok’s eyebrow together, the stranger leaned away out of Hoseok’s vision. When he reappeared, he was holding up the water bottle that had been set aside. “We should flush it out.”

Hoseok swallowed thickly, attempting to nod under the stranger’s hand. He wasn’t the biggest fan of having anything near his eyes, but he knew it’d probably help him. The stranger popped the top of the water bottle, looking down at Hoseok. “Try to keep your eye open, okay? I don’t have enough hands to do it for you.”

Widening his eyes as much as he could to try and be helpful, Hoseok averted his gaze to the side, not wanting to watch the water be poured onto his eye. Out of his periphery, he could make out the hazy shape of the bottle lingering above his eye, light glinting off the water as the stranger carefully poured it. The sensation of it was cooling yet bothersome, and Hoseok involuntarily blinked rapidly, his head trying to jerk away from the stream but stopped by the stranger’s hand keeping it mostly in place. Hoseok rolled his eyes around for a moment as he continued blinking, actively trying to get the water everywhere so this cursed process didn’t have to be repeated. The stranger tilted the bottle up to stop the stream, waiting for a moment before asking, “How’s your vision now? Did it help?”

Once Hoseok was able to slow down his blinks, he tried to focus on the stranger, glad to see that his face was no longer distorted. “Much better, thank you.” He smiled gratefully up at the stranger, who returned it for a moment before disappearing from his vision again to most likely set the bottle back down.

“That motherfucker,” Yongsun growled, suddenly pissed for seemingly no reason.

Hoseok tried to look at him, but the stranger’s hand carefully held his head in place.“What? What’s wrong?”

Yongsun abruptly appeared in Hoseok’s vision, on the opposite side of him as expected. He kept glancing away towards Jisung’s side of the circle. “I think he has something in his wraps,” he muttered, irritation written all over his face.

“What?” Hoseok and the stranger echoed in unison.

“There’s something catching the light in his wraps and he keeps moving it around.”

The stranger peered across the circle, still holding Hoseok's eyebrow together. Hoseok could only manage to watch as his eyes narrowed scrutinizingly at Hoseok’s opponent. “You’re right. Maybe that’s what cut Hoseok?”

Yongsun’s eyes flared with fury as the dots were connected. “You’re probably right!” Looking down at Hoseok, Yongsun grimaced as he scanned over the cut again. “If that’s the case, we’re lucky he didn’t catch you a couple of centimeters lower.”

Hoseok’s stomach flipped nauseatingly at the mental image of what could’ve been. The mixture of disgust and horror must’ve been clear, as Yongsun muttered a quiet “sorry, buddy” remorsefully. Finally, the stranger let go of Hoseok’s eyebrow, apparently satisfied with how the glue set. “There we go, you’re all good now. But I’d avoid getting hit there again or expressing too hard; you don’t want to rip it back open.” Again, Hoseok winced at the mental image as he reached up to touch at the wound lightly with his fingertips.

“Thank you, I really appreciate your help.”

The stranger smiled warmly at Hoseok once again, something that should’ve been comforting, but had an underlying feeling of discomfort. He didn’t even know this man’s name. Why was he being so kind and helping him? “It’s no problem. Good luck!”

With a wink, the man stepped back as Hoseok sat up, nodding and holding a thumbs up to the moderator when he sent a look questioning if Hoseok was good. As the moderator settled everyone down, Hoseok pushed up to his feet, sighing as he began regulating his breathing again. He glanced over his shoulder at the man and Yongsun, who both smiled at him, before turning back to Jisung and approaching the middle once more. “Ready?” The moderator asked, paying more attention to Hoseok’s response than Jisung’s. After both affirmed that they were ready, the moderator swung his hand a final time. “Fight!”

The pair fell back into circling each other, their steely focus not leaving one another. Jisung struck first this time, approaching swiftly and attempting to land a jab on Hoseok’s left eye, clearly hoping that Hoseok’s vision was still messed up. To Jisung’s disappointment, Hoseok dodged, completely evading the hit. After a pause, Jisung tried again, this time with a right hook. Again, Hoseok swerved out of the way, this time sneaking in a jab of his own that caught Jisung on the ribs.

Hoseok heard as Jisung grunted in frustration, bouncing on the balls of his feet as Jisung recentered himself and attempted to reassess his opponent on the fly. In the meantime, Hoseok swiped his leg, kicking Jisung square on the side of his calf just below his knee. Hoseok allowed his momentum to carry him forward in an uppercut that got Jisung on his stomach before darting back out of Jisung’s reach. Jisung tried to hit Hoseok with a kick to the ribs, but Hoseok blocked him before landing his own kick on the same part of Jisung’s calf. Jisung’s knee slightly gave way under the attack, but he quickly corrected it as Hoseok backed out of reach again.

Satisfied with what he’d accomplished so far and in no hurry to get into another skirmish, Hoseok went on the defensive. Jisung was clearly growing more frustrated, likely feeling something similar to what Hoseok had felt at the start of the second round. Perfect, thought Hoseok, ready to watch his opponent give in to heated emotions that would result in his own downfall. He observed as Jisung lunged yet again, eager to land something, but only managing to glance his fist off Hoseok’s shoulder. Hoseok went for the same calf again, hitting hard and successfully making Jisung’s knee buckle. As soon as he had his foot planted again, Hoseok threw a jab at Jisung’s cheek, which was met by a weak block. This allowed Hoseok’s frame to restabilize, giving him a chance to build back up the power he fed into his next right hook.

Although he expected this, too, to be met with the block, he’d managed to aim where Jisung’s arms were not and hit him square on the temple. Instantaneously, Jisung crumpled and collapsed on the ground, all energy that had been keeping him alert and fighting endlessly entirely gone. Hoseok reflexively jumped back, expecting for Jisung to take him down with him, but instead was met with Jisung out cold on the ground.

“Winner! Jung Hoseok!”

An eerie silence fell over the crowd as the moderator announced Hoseok the winner, the crowd stunned at the turn of events. Slowly, they began to pull out of the daze and a mixture of claps and cheers filled the warehouse. A few of Jisung’s fans came to gather around the knocked out fighter, helping him sit up as he regained consciousness, unaware he’d been knocked out and had lost.

Panting, Hoseok rolled his shoulders back to release some tension. He muttered his thanks to those congratulating him as he passed them, making his way past the small crowd to his side of the fight circle. Yongsun excitedly cheered him on as he approached.

“Hell yes, man, I knew you could do it!” Hoseok muttered his thanks, smiling at his mentor. Yongsun started talking a hundred kilometers a minute, too fast for Hoseok’s tired brain to keep up with. The adrenaline of the fight was beginning to wear away and the exhaustion was seeping in; aches were radiating from every part of his body. A hot shower and a solid 18-hour nap was everything he wanted in that moment.

Yongsun seemed to have gotten the hint that Hoseok couldn’t handle much more tonight, so he patted him on the shoulder gently. Hoseok tuned back into what Yongsun was saying to the best of his abilities. “...I’ll see you at the gym, alright?”

“Sure thing man, thanks again,” Hoseok bid farewell to Yongsun, watching as he walked out of the building. He proceeded to dig his bag out of the box, unwrapping his hands slowly to take pity on his sore muscles. Stashing them away, he pulled his jacket on, fumbling with the zipper in the dim lighting. Hoseok dug his final water bottle out of his bag and took a few greedy gulps, not realizing just how thirsty he was and nearly emptying the whole thing in one go.

“Hi again.”

Sputtering a little in surprise, Hoseok twisted around to face the voice. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand as he coughed forcibly. “Oh, it’s you again. Hi. Thanks again for earlier - if it wasn’t for your help, I probably would’ve lost.”

“It was nothing. I’m happy to help.” The stranger from before smiled warmly at him, holding out a towel. “Congratulations on winning.”

Hoseok warily eyed the towel, cautious of it and the man holding it. Granted, the other man had helped him during the break in the fight and did a damned good job at patching up the slice on his eyebrow. Hoseok took the towel and brought it up to his forehead to wipe at his sweat, movements cautious and calculated. “Thank you.” After a beat of silence, Hoseok’s eyes met the stranger’s, and he swallowed uncomfortably. The man was still smiling as though he appeared to be giving Hoseok an assessment. Finally he spoke, “I’m sorry, but...who are you?”

The stranger chuckled, seemingly unphased by Hoseok’s question or apparent unease. “Oh, just a fan. I’ve been to a few of your fights. You’re quite impressive.”

Immediately, Hoseok’s eyes widened. He had a fan? He didn’t know he’d had one already. He really must’ve improved a lot to have gained a fan, especially one who had seen multiple of his fights. A sense of pride washed over Hoseok at this revelation, finally feeling like his work had paid off.

“It’s not...unheard of...for some fighters to get...let’s go with ‘overzealous’ fans.”

The sense of pride morphed itself hideously into a sense of dread, slowly being choked down until it dissipated. Unintentionally, Hoseok shifted his weight back and began to lean just barely away from the other man. Out of the corner of his eye, movement caught his attention, and he watched as the last few stragglers from the fight began to leave, meaning he was stuck here alone with this “fan.”

“Some of them can go stalker-level.”

Red flags and sirens began to go off in his head, every possible bad scenario running through his mind at once. He couldn’t possibly fight now, after such an intense match. Perhaps he could use his bag as a weapon? Maybe the towel, or his water bottle? The man in front of him didn’t look like much of a fighter, but looks can surely be deceiving - hell, that was something he relied on with his own fighting when it came to opponents who were unaware of who he was. For all he knew, this man was some top-level trained fighter or some shit.

While Hoseok was generally quite good at masking his emotions, he was entirely unaware of just how perceptive the stranger was. The stranger caught every small signal of alarm the other man gave off - the wide eyes shifting from surprise to horror, glancing around to assess the encounter in its entirety as Hoseok moved just a hair away from him. The stranger internally reevaluated what he’d said, trying to understand what could set off such alarms in Hoseok. Following Hoseok’s gaze, the stranger looked around and noticed they were the last ones in the building. Oh, he thought, he must think I’m crazy or something.

Realizing the misinterpretation of his words, the stranger chuckled again, thoroughly amused. He reached his hand out to shake Hoseok’s. “I apologize, that must’ve come off wrong. My name is Kim Seokjin, you can call me Jin. I’d like to buy you dinner. Think of it as a celebration, plus you look hungry.”

Confused, Hoseok took Jin’s hand, the pair shaking them and bowing simultaneously. Although he still wasn’t entirely sure of the other man, he did seem to have no blatantly malicious intentions. Hoseok’s stomach also happened to growl right on cue - and food did sound pretty good. It’d probably be the best meal he’d had since leaving home. “Yeah, okay, I guess that sounds alright.”

“Here you go!” Jin exclaimed, setting a steaming container of ramen in front of Hoseok. He noticed that Hoseok’s brows furrowed as he looked down at the disposable container, his metal chair shifting on its uneven legs as he leaned in towards the warmth. “By the way, sorry it’s just convenience store ramen. We’re a little tight on money right now.”

Hoseok waved his hands in front of himself, slightly flustered at the idea of Jin thinking he was anything less than grateful for this meal. “No, this is great! Thank you!” Reaching for his chopsticks, he scooted closer to the table, ready to dig into his ramen. “So...‘we’?”

Jin’s wide eyes met Hoseok’s, a large mouthful of noodles half hanging out of his mouth. Hoseok snorted as Jin, clearly very hungry, hurriedly stuffed them into his mouth and chewed. “My brother. We live together in a condo nearby.” Hoseok quirked his eyebrows in interest, prodding at his noodles to gather them for easier picking up, as Jin took a sip of his beer. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Hoseok asked, chewing on a healthy bite of noodles.

“Do you and your family live around here?” Jin noted the slight frown Hoseok gave at the word family, twirling his ramen with his chopsticks.

“Uh, no. My family doesn’t live in this area.”

Jin’s head tilted, intrigued, leaning back in his chair to stretch out some. “So you travel to the fights? That’s a long way to walk.”

Hoseok kept his head down, staring deeply into the swirling broth of his noodles. “I’m staying with a friend nearby for the time being.”

Given the frown from the mention of his family, Jin could feel that it was a sensitive subject and decided there was no need to keep prying at it. He took another swig of his beer, setting it on the metal table gently to avoid causing it to lurch in a random direction. Sadly, this outdoor furniture seemed to be relatively neglected - perhaps one of the other available tables were more stable? “So, how long have you been fighting?”

Hoseok visibly perked up with the topic change, some of the tension in him seeming to melt away. “Almost a year!”

“Really? You fight like you’ve been doing it for far longer.”

“Well, I did start training before that. I think last May? It was a little bit after I graduated.”

Jin nodded, avidly listening as he made his way through his noodles. “So, why street fighting? Why not go the legal route?”

Hoseok drank the broth, wiping a drop off his lip with the back of his hand. “It’s a lot of money, which I don’t have.” Setting down his container, he shrugged, looking over at the street as a car passed by. “Plus, there are all these rules and regulations with it. Don’t get me wrong, some make sense - I mean, that’s why our fights still follow them. But there are a lot of unnecessary ones that just get in the way.”

Jin’s grin from earlier returned, as though something had just clicked for him. Taking in the empty ramen containers and mostly-empty beers, Jin cleared his throat before shifting so he was sitting more forward, closer to Hoseok. “Look...we’re almost done here, so I have something to ask of you.”

A pink flush spread over Hoseok’s cheeks, settling on the tips of his ears. He fiddled with the beer in his hands, toying with the tab in particular. “I have a feeling I know what this is about.”

Jin sat up, eyebrows raised in genuine surprise. What?

Hoseok continued, flustered to the point of accidentally breaking the tab off the can of beer. “I’m sorry, but I won’t sleep with you.”

Jin’s eyebrows furrowed, his mouth dropping open in protest.

“Really, thank you for the dinner. It’s just...I’m not...It’s not that there’s anything wrong with you, I promise, I’m just...not-”

“I’m sorry, what? You think I bought you dinner to sleep with you?”

Hoseok flushed even deeper, avoiding Jin’s eyes. “I mean, that’s...kind of...what it seemed like?”

“That’s not what I’m doing!”

“Oh thank fucking god,” Hoseok muttered, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He dropped the tab inside the can and set it on the table, slumping in his chair.

“I- what’s that supposed to mean?!” It was Jin’s turn to flush, visibly ruffled by the idea of someone being relieved at not having to sleep with him. “You know what? Never mind. We’re revisiting that later.” He punctuated his claims by pointing at Hoseok, who seemed a tad amused by Jin’s agitation. “I actually do have a question for you, which isn’t that.”

Hoseok stifled a laugh, biting the inside of his lip. “Okay, what is it then?”

“My brother and I- we run a...sort of...business? And you seem like you’d be a great addition to it.”

Hoseok raised his eyebrows in surprise - a job offer wasn’t exactly what he was expecting to be at the end of this conversation. “Why? You barely know me.”

Jin sighed, running his hand back through his hair. “You seem like you can more than handle yourself. It’s not really the most conventional type of job, but it does have benefits. It’d be a little safer than street fighting, but there still won’t be any rules.” Jin furrowed his brow as he reassessed what he’d just said in his head. “Well, there are rules - but they’re our rules. But it definitely has far less rules than normal jobs.”

Hoseok narrowed his eyes skeptically. “I mean, it does sound pretty good, but it also sounds kind of sketchy. What line of work is it?”

Jin’s eyes danced over the air above Hoseok’s head noncommittally as he clearly calculated his phrasing before saying anything. “Nontraditional.” Jin snorted at the irony - although he and Namjoon aimed to run their sector in a far less harsher way than other leaders had, there was still a sense of tradition that came with the job, especially given how Namjoon had inherited it. It was nontraditional, but with some of the most traditional of origins. “Look, it’s not something I should really be explaining here. Can we talk somewhere more private?” Realization flashed in his eyes as he sat up rather excitedly. “I know! Come with me to the condo - my brother can help me explain it to you.”

Hoseok sighed, looking down the road again in the vague direction of his friend’s apartment. “Yeah, sure, why not?”

“Yah! Namjoon, we have a guest!” Jin yelled as he and Hoseok walked through the door. Hoseok looked around, slightly amazed at the quality of the condo. It wasn’t flashy or overly-nice; rather, it just felt so homey. There were bookshelves practically overflowing with books, and he spied a comfortable-looking couch that had a plethora of blankets and pillows around it. An abandoned laptop and some textbooks laid open amongst the blankets and pillows, clearly belonging to someone who had just been studying. College student? Hoseok wondered, taking in more and more of the cozy atmosphere. There’s no way a college student - or two - could afford somewhere this nice.

“Oh! Hello!” A deep voice disrupted Hoseok’s pondering, drawing his attention to a young man peeking his head out from behind one wall. He can’t be much older than me, Hoseok guessed as the man - or teenager - hurried out to greet Hoseok in the same respectful and pleasant manner that Jin had earlier. “I’m Namjoon.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Please take a seat. Sorry about the mess,” Namjoon mumbled as he fumbled to gather various textbooks and his laptop to make room for Hoseok. Jin had disappeared out of the room somewhere but reappeared moments later towing along a rolling desk chair. Quite awkwardly, Hoseok made his way to the couch, sitting rather gingerly on one side of it. “Would you like anything? I’m making tea right now, you’re welcome to have some,” Namjoon explained, tucking the books and laptop into a bookbag.

“Oh, sure. Thank you.” Hoseok continued to look around and take in the environment of the room as Jin plopped himself into the desk chair, accidentally making it roll back a little too far. In the background, Hoseok could hear Namjoon gathering dishes out of a cabinet, presumably for the tea. As Jin scooted up to correct the chair’s placement, Namjoon returned carrying a platter with a teapot, mugs, and what seemed to be sugar on the side. He set it down gently onto the coffee table before sitting on the opposite end of the couch. Hoseok watched as Namjoon poured the tea rather meticulously, handing out each mug as it was finished.

“So, who are you?” Namjoon asked Hoseok, settling back once everyone had been served.

“My name’s Hoseok,” Hoseok introduced himself, giving a timid yet bright smile to the other two men.

“He’s the fighter I told you about.” Jin remarked to Namjoon.

As Namjoon hummed and nodded in understanding, Hoseok sputtered. “You- You talked about me?”

Jin and Namjoon laughed in tandem. “Of course! I told you, you’re impressive.”

“I hear you’re quite the fighter. Jin-hyung wouldn’t shut up about you after the first time he saw you fight, he kept going on and on about how light on your feet you were and how it looked like you were dancing-”

“Namjoon. Shut up.”

Hoseok laughed, both amused by the pair’s antics and flattered at the description of his fighting. “I’m not that good yet. I’ve still got a lot of improvement to make.”

“Well, you don’t necessarily have to improve on your street fighting.” Jin mused, giving Hoseok a pointed look before turning to Namjoon to explain. “I offered for him to work with us.”

Hoseok turned to watch Namjoon’s reaction, who was nodding yet visibly setting his jaw and taking on a more steely look. “Did you tell him what we do?”

Jin shook his head. “No, I figured that’s something to discuss in private, which is why I brought him here.”

Namjoon sighed, relieved. “Oh thank god, I thought we were going to have an issue.” He turned to face Hoseok. “So, what’d he tell you about it so far?”

Hoseok glanced between the two unsuredly, taking a sip of his tea. “Well, he mentioned that it’s nontraditional and not the most conventional, but that it has its own benefits. He also mentioned that there aren’t really rules with it, but you have to follow your rules, so that was confusing.”

Namjoon looked at Jin completely deadpan. “That’s how you described it?”

Jin, affronted, scoffed at Namjoon. “How the hell else am I supposed to describe it without outright saying what it is?!”

Namjoon sighed and shook his head, turning back to Hoseok. “So, we work in my family’s business. Jin-hyung’s family started working with mine before we were born.”

“Wait,” Hosoek interjected, looking over at Jin. “You guys aren’t actually brothers?”

Namjoon sighed, shaking his head. “No.”

“We might as well be!” Jin protested, prompting a pointed look from Namjoon.

“Anyway, we have our hands in different businesses around the city and take care of the problems that come about,” Namjoon explained, pacing his words somewhat slowly to give Hoseok a chance to digest them. “Basically, we work for the mafia. Well, we are the mafia.”

Hoseok briefly froze before a loud cackle escaped him, a sound that racked through his whole body and seemed to echo through the otherwise quiet apartment. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” His laughter died down as he saw how neither Jin nor Namjoon were taking part in his amusement, waiting a few beats for one to reveal the surprise. “You’re...not joking?” The pair shook their heads earnestly at him. “But, how? You’re both like, my age!”

“Well, he is,” Jin pointed out while nodding his head in Namjoon’s direction. “I’m older than both of you.”

Shooting Jin a glare, Namjoon faced Hoseok again. “My parents were the ones who ran it in this area for a while. They left to go help start a new branch in America, and they passed it down to me.”

Hoseok gaped at Namjoon for a moment, trying to process this information. “So...you run it...and you’re like...19? They trust you that much?”

Nodding, Namjoon poured himself more tea. “It should’ve gone to my older brother, but he didn’t want to be involved.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to be involved?” Hoseok questioned Jin, brows knitted in confusion.

Jin choked on his tea when he realized Hoseok was addressing him with that question, coughing forcefully. “Not me! I’m still involved, clearly.”

“No, my older biological brother,” Namjoon clarified, chuckling to himself. “But my parents left us here to run things, and we need to build our group up more. It’d help a lot to have a good fighter join us.”

Hoseok bounced his knee, chewing on his lip from nerves. “And what if I say no?”

Namjoon quirked a single eyebrow at him, still wearing a serious expression. “Then we’d have to kill you.”

At first, Hoseok thought the threat was entirely real. Namjoon was selling it to be - he looked deadly serious, shockingly mature for his age. However, seconds later, Jin began giggling, which broke Namjoon’s facade and made him break into laughter as well. Hoseok simply blinked in shock, bouncing his gaze between the two.

“I’m mostly joking about that. But we would have to take some pretty serious measures.” Namjoon explained, crossing one knee over the other.

Hoseok resumed chewing at his lip, grasping the mug of tea between both hands now as he felt his grip weaken due to the clammy sweat gathering on his palms. Although these two seemed trustworthy, he couldn’t help but be nervous over the information he’d learned. They seemed like people he’d be great friends with, yet they joked so casually about serious matters and, more worrisome, they wanted him involved in those serious matters. “I...what would I be doing? If I join?”

Namjoon brightened at the question, apparently consoled by the genuine interest that Hoseok appeared to have in the work. “Well, we can see what you’re most drawn to. It’d be good to have a specialty, so we can try a few different things to see what you like. It would be nice to have someone handle the more hands-on, violent jobs this early on, but I wouldn’t want to force you into one of those positions.”

“Right now, Namjoon and I basically do everything ourselves. You’d be trained to do a variety of things, but one particular specialty is always good.” Jin explained, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

The way the two bounced this proposal off of each other was a touch unsettling to Hoseok - it both gave him the impression that they’d done this before, but also that they were very much in sync with each other. That added another layer of anxiety to Hoseok’s nerves. How was he, an outsider, supposed to join this pair, who clearly were linked on another level? How was he supposed to be able to contribute to that in a way that was anywhere near as fruitful as what they could already do? “Do I have to decide now?”

A chorus of some variants of “no!” came from both Namjoon and Jin, as well as some encouraging words that Hoseok couldn’t quite make out over the thoughts rushing in his mind. All of this information was just too much at once, and he couldn’t quiet the thoughts down long enough to be able to focus on what either of the other two men were saying. “I...think I’m interested? I’m not entirely sure, honestly. This is a lot of information to take in, and I don’t know if I’m thinking clearly enough to make this decision. It’s...it’s just a lot.”

Namjoon and Jin both appeared to understand at the same time that Hoseok was feeling a little overwhelmed, and they both toned down their enthusiasm, nodding rather solemnly. “Would you like to stay here tonight while you think it over?” Jin asked, eyes trained on the potential new recruit.

Hoseok looked into his tea, the mug now lukewarm in his hands. “Would that be alright?”

“Of course!” Namjoon affirmed, smiling warmly at Hoseok. “You can stay here for tonight, and we can talk in the morning if you feel up to it.”

Hoseok returned the smile, his screaming thoughts slightly quieting down. “Thank you, I would greatly appreciate that.”

“Speaking of bed,” Jin yawned, stretching in his chair. “I think it’s time for it. It’s nearly 2 AM.”

Between the fight and the mafia stuff, the excitement had kept Hoseok pretty wide awake. Once Jin mentioned the time, however, Hoseok felt the exhaustion start to wash over him and his yawn followed Jin’s.

Namjoon chuckled as he watched the other two express their tiredness, pushing up from the couch. “Not for me, I have studying to do, but you two should definitely get some sleep. Hoseok, if you want, I can show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

Hoseok nodded, following suit in getting up from the couch and bidding goodnight to Jin, who appeared to already be slinking off to his room to sleep. Going up the stairs, Hoseok followed Namjoon rather silently down a hall to a room on the right.

“Here you go.” Namjoon stepped aside to allow Hoseok to step into the room and look around. “The bathroom is right next door. Please feel free to take a shower, if you’d like - I’m sure it’d feel nice, if you fight as hard as Jin-hyung says you do.”

Hoseok grinned gratefully up at Namjoon, setting his bag down next to the bed. “Thank you so much, for everything.”

Namjoon returned the grin, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It’s really no problem. If you need anything, I’m at the other end of the hall. I’ll be up studying, so you’re welcome to come get me.”

Hoseok nodded, looking out the window at the empty street below before turning back to Namjoon. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you again. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight Hoseok.”

After a long hot shower, Hoseok climbed into bed, his exhaustion having grown even more. He felt like he could melt into the bed, engulfed by the assortment of pillows and blankets, and the mattress itself - was that memory foam? Rather than melting into a fatigue-induced coma, Hoseok laid awake, staring at the shadows that danced along the ceiling from the lights on the street outside. His body craved sleep, but his mind was wide awake, back to racing with endless thoughts of his impending decision.

If someone was to approach him 8 hours ago and tell him that he would be offered a position in the mafia tonight, he would have laughed in their face. He didn’t even know there was a mafia in this area. And now, not only is there one, but they want him to join. How the fuck was he supposed to do that? What would people think about that?

Well, who was there to “think” about that? His family didn’t care anymore. For all they knew, he was dead on the streets. He wasn’t particularly close with anyone else. Sure, Hyoseob let him crash at his place, but they had entirely separate lives outside of that. And he had grown close to Yongsun, but mostly when it came to fighting - they never really hung out, and they definitely weren’t close enough to have Hoseok be staying with him. It wasn’t like he could tell anyone, anyways - he probably would be sworn to secrecy, forced to keep that part of his life entirely private.

But then again. Who was there to keep things private from?

It wasn’t the worst proposal that could’ve come his way. Hours ago, he wasn’t sure if there’d be hot water for his shower tonight. He had a place to sleep, yes, but it was a lumpy couch. And now, he’d had the most beautiful and serene hot shower and he was practically given this wondrous, stupefying, nothing less than a nest of soft bed, and comforting pillows and blankets that felt like he was being hugged by a cloud. In a matter of hours, the mafia had done nothing but give him a better life - even momentarily - and there was no doubt in his mind that the benefits would only continue. He’d have a stable source of these basic necessities, he’d likely be more than financially stable - it’d be thousands of times better than what he could manage on his own.

At the price of what? Killing people? Torturing them? Forcing people to pay debts that they owed? Living constantly in fear of being found out, considering probably 99% of the things they’d do would be illegal?

Could he do that? Could he handle that?

In theory, some parts didn’t sound too different from fighting. Hoseok loved fighting, he really did. He loved the rush behind all of it, the adrenaline that it brought. He loved calculating the other fighter’s every move, and doing everything he could to not only avoid getting hit, but to win. A sense of satisfaction came from winning, for sure, but a lot of his satisfaction in fighting had to do with how well he could do. How much he could avoid getting hit. How hard he could train and push his body to its limit.

How much he could push other fighters’ bodies to their limits.

How much damage he could do to them in the process of winning.

Blinking, Hoseok shook his head, trying to push out that thought. He didn’t really get some sort of enjoyment out of hurting them, did he?

On some level, yes. It usually happened more when the other fighters were complete dicks and needed to get the shit beat out of them. When they were assholes - when they said shit that shouldn’t be said, were cocky to the point of overrunning those around them due to their self-importance - they deserved to be hurt. And man, it felt great to be the one doing it. It tasted like justice.

Hoseok trained his eyes on one particular shadow, focusing on it so intently that it began to swirl and morph into different shapes and movements. This whole internal conversation felt so cliche - angel on one shoulder, devil on the other, the whole nine yards. The angel was going on and on about how the mafia can’t possibly be good, how they’re always shown to be doing horrible things in television and movies and clearly that’s a reflection of real life. It’d be more honorable to just make it on his own, even if he suffers along the way and it takes a while.

The devil, on the other hand, was tempting him with ramen, tea, hot showers, and this damn bed. The devil was telling him that mafia work would be like fighting as a job. He could live so much more comfortably, he could taste that justice constantly. After all, wouldn’t they be hurting people who did bad things? They’re the ones who deal with the mafia in the first place - and there’s got to be a reason they’re being targeted by them. They probably fucked them over, or didn’t stick to a deadline. They’d need to be taught a lesson, just like the assholes he fights.

And what about Jin and Namjoon? Sure, those material items the devil was tempting him with were from them - but those are also things they gave him from what seemed to be a genuine place. They really seemed like good guys, like guys he’d want to be friends with regardless of the circumstances. They’d shown him so much hospitality, even before they offered him a place in their world. They’d made him laugh, showed him more genuine care than anyone had bothered to in a long time. He felt more like family after only being here with them for a couple of hours than he’d ever felt with anyone else; even his real family didn’t match up. He had never felt truly cared for in his family, not in the way parents are supposed to protect their child. How did these men make up for that and more with some super glue, ramen, and a cup of tea? As much as it felt like the devil was what was tempting him to join them, the angel seemed to be giving in as well, drawn to their kindness and hospitality.

Joining the mafia didn’t have to be a bad thing. Of course, he’d know more after their talk in the morning, but he was almost certain it didn’t have to be a bad thing. If this night was any sort of an indicator, it wouldn’t be.

It’d be the best thing he’d done in a long time.

#bts #bts fanfic #bts fanfiction #mafia au #bts mafia au #bts platonic #hoseok fanfic #hobi fanfic #hoseok fanfiction #jhope fanfic #jhope fanfiction #hobi fanfiction

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ainereads · 4 years ago

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Disneymovieathon TBR

This month I am participating in The Disneymovieathon. I’m really excited about this one because High School Musical is one of my favourite Disney originals! I’m on the science kids team. All book descriptions are from Goodreads.

Read a book that is pink or glittery

I’ve picked The Babysitter’s Coven by Kate Williams. The entire cover isn’t pink but there’s a lot of it throughout.

Seventeen-year-old Esme Pearl has a babysitters club. She knows it's kinda lame, but what else is she supposed to do? Get a job? Gross. Besides, Esme likes babysitting, and she's good at it. And lately Esme needs all the cash she can get, because it seems like destruction follows her wherever she goes. Let's just say she owes some people a new tree. Enter Cassandra Heaven. She's Instagram-model hot, dresses like she found her clothes in a dumpster, and has a rebellious streak as gnarly as the cafeteria food. So why is Cassandra willing to do anything, even take on a potty-training two-year-old, to join Esme's babysitters club? The answer lies in a mysterious note Cassandra's mother left her: "Find the babysitters. Love, Mom." Turns out, Esme and Cassandra have more in common than they think, and they're about to discover what being a babysitter really means: a heroic lineage of superpowers, magic rituals, and saving the innocent from seriously terrifying evil. And all before the parents get home.

Read a book set in space

I picked Gemina by Jay Kristoff & Amie Kauffman for this prompt. I really enjoyed Illuminae by them.

Hanna is the station captain’s pampered daughter; Nik the reluctant member of a notorious crime family. But while the pair are struggling with the realities of life aboard the galaxy’s most boring space station, little do they know that Kady Grant and the Hypatia are headed right toward Heimdall, carrying news of the Kerenza invasion. When an elite BeiTech strike team invades the station, Hanna and Nik are thrown together to defend their home. But alien predators are picking off the station residents one by one, and a malfunction in the station’s wormhole means the space-time continuum might be ripped in two before dinner. Soon Hanna and Nik aren’t just fighting for their own survival; the fate of everyone on the Hypatia—and possibly the known universe—is in their hands. But relax. They’ve totally got this. They hope.

Read a romantic book

I picked Frankly in Love by Davd Yoon. I’ve had this on my TBR for a while and really want to get to it.

Frank Li is a high school senior living in Southern California. Frank's parents emigrated from Korea, and have pretty much one big rule for Frank - he must only date Korean girls. But he's got strong feelings for a girl in his class, Brit - and she's not Korean. His friend Joy Song is in the same boat and knows her parents will never accept her Chinese American boyfriend, so they make a pact: they'll pretend to date each other in order to gain their freedom. Frank thinks fake-dating is the perfect plan, but it leaves him wondering if he ever really understood love - or himself - at all.

Use a random number generator

I got Date Me, Bryson Keller by Kevin van Whye when I used the number generator. This is a new book on my TBR.

Everyone knows about the dare: Each week, Bryson Keller must date someone new--the first person to ask him out on Monday morning. Few think Bryson can do it. He may be the king of Fairvale Academy, but he's never really dated before. Until a boy asks him out, and everything changes. Kai Sheridan didn't expect Bryson to say yes. So when Bryson agrees to secretly go out with him, Kai is thrown for a loop. But as the days go by, he discovers there's more to Bryson beneath the surface, and dating him begins to feel less like an act and more like the real thing. Kai knows how the story of a gay boy liking someone straight ends. With his heart on the line, he's awkwardly trying to navigate senior year at school, at home, and in the closet, all while grappling with the fact that this "relationship" will last only five days. After all, Bryson Keller is popular, good-looking, and straight . . . right? Kevin van Whye delivers an uplifting and poignant coming-out love story that will have readers rooting for these two teens to share their hearts with the world--and with each other.

Read a book you changed your mind about

I picked Normal People by Sally Rooney for this prompt. When I read it the first time, it took me a while to realise I was actually enjoying it because I found it strange to be honest. Now, it’s one of my favourites of the year.

Read a book in a day

For this prompt, I’ve decided to listen to Quidditch Through the Ages on audiobook because it’s so short.

Read a polarising book

After googling what this meant, I’ve gone with Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney. Most people say you like one or the other, so I’m interested to see which I prefer.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

And that’s my entire TBR for this readathon. I’m so excited to complete it!

#tbr #reading #reader #readers #book #books #disneymovieathon #book blog #book blogger #readathon #fantasy #ya #middle grade #bookworm #bookworms

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rorykillmore · 5 years ago

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and this one is for @mikexxwheeler who asked for something with mike and villanelle, who were a BLAST to go back and write for since it’s been a while since we rped them together

merry christmas jace!!! consistently our friendship is one of the things that brightens up my life the most, and i wanted to tell you how much i appreciate you just... reaching out to me and maintaining that even during the times when we’re not actively writing together or anything. even if it’s just one of our silly memes or a joke about whatever crazy thing a politician did recently (or linking the star wars holiday special in its entirety, which of course we then proceed to drop everything and watch.) it always just. instantly lifts my mood to get a message from you, and being friends with you is one of the things i’ve treasured most over the years. as carrie fisher would say... [weird emotional musical number set to the tune of the star wars theme]

She’s not the kind of person who drops ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ into her internal monologue without actually preparing for the worst that could happen. She isn’t stupid.

“Are you sure you do not want to be seeing Star Wars, or something boys your age should like?” Villanelle asks conversationally as she and Mike wait in the concessions line outside the movie theater. “Apparently there’s a new one out.”

“Yeah, but I heard it sucks,” Mike tells her with thinly veiled disdain. “They made the main character, like, the granddaughter of Palpatine, or something.”

“Which one is Palpatine?” asks Villanelle, who hasn’t seen a Star Wars movie since she was about twelve. “Wait -- is he -- ?”

Mike nods grimly, and Villanelle throws back her head and cackles in abject disgust.

“It’s not funny. It’s gross.”

“It is really gross. I’m laughing as a coping mechanism.” Shaking off any unwanted thoughts of crusty old men fucking, Villanelle squints down at the ticket she’s holding. “So what is this movie we’re seeing? ‘Demons’?”

“Yeah, it’s a re-release of an old one. A horror movie, I think. It actually came out in like, 1985, I think, so I just missed it.”

Villanelle cocks her head thoughtfully to one side. “The horror movies that came out in the 80′s were the best. They were so campy and stupid.”

Mike laughs. “Yeah, I figured it’d be fun.” And then his smirk turns into a more genuine smile. “Thanks for coming with me.”

Villanelle shrugs and takes a sip of her soda. “This is what friends do, right?”

It isn’t as rhetorical a question as it sounds, but Villanelle is pretty sure of the answer, at least. Movie nights are nice, normal things that people do. Even she isn’t compelled to mess this up too badly in the course of only a couple of hours. So her aside, what could possibly go wrong?

They enter the theater together, snacks and drinks in hand, and Villanelle barely pays attention to the woman in the shiny silver mask who hisses “Ow!” as she accidentally cuts the side of her face.

---

Really, it’s no wonder that Mike barely had to bribe her to tag along. Villanelle likes movies. She’s always liked movies. And this one is the perfect combination of campy and gory, so she is comfortably enjoying herself right up until the scene where one of their characters cuts their face on a weird looking demon mask -- and proceeds to begin to turn into a demon themselves.

“You know, this is basically just a zombie movie,” Villanelle leans over to murmur to Mike. “They probably just called it ‘Demons’ because Italians are so Catholic.”

But Mike is busy frowning at the screen, surprisingly unimpressed by the gnarly display of body horror taking place in front of him. “Wasn’t there a lady out in the lobby who cut her face on a mask like that?”

“Was there?” Villanelle raises her eyebrows in surprise. She does vaguely remember it now that Mike has brought it up, but she shrugs. “Probably just part of the immersive experience.”

Teenagers. So easily spooked by movies like these.

“Hey. What the hell happened to Rosemary?” A guy in the row in front of them growls, stoking the fires of Mike’s unease.

“I’m pretty sure that was where she was sitting, too. She’s missing!”

It is a slightly... strange coincidence, but Villanelle only twists around in her seat briefly to make sure they’re not attracting any attention. “She probably just went to the bathroom. Relax.”

“Go check.”

“What?”

“Villanelle, if we’re about to get stuck in the middle of a demonic apocalypse, we’d better get a jump on it.”

Villanelle grimaces in irritation, but reminds herself that Mike has survived the odd supernatural possibly-apocalyptic scenario on occasion before. She needs a refill, anyway. “Fine. But you are coming with me.”

“I can’t go into the girls’ restroom,” Mike protests.

“You can wait outside. Just in case I get turned into a demon, and it’s up to you to warn the rest of the world.” Villanelle gets up and starts inching her way out of the aisle without waiting for an answer. It isn’t long before she hears Mike shuffling behind her, following as she knew he would, ever incapable of resisting a taste of adventure even if it is under completely ridiculous circumstances.

Villanelle never would have imagined she’d have anything in common with Mike Wheeler, of all people. But sometimes she thinks he’s been through so much that at the end of the day - even if he hasn’t yet admitted it to himself - he wouldn’t ever be able to settle for a normal life again either. So in that way, they are the same.

“Arm yourself,” Villanelle tells him as they reach the lobby, only half-joking. She gets a flat look in return, but then Mike does pick up a broom a janitor left propped up against the side of the wall, raising his eyebrows at her as if to say ‘happy?’

Villanelle gives him a cheeky little thumbs up before she steps into the women’s restroom. There is no need for her to arm herself, because - as always - she has come prepared, a knife strapped to her ankle, a tiny hand-sized pistol tucked into her jacket lining.

(She’s not the kind of person who drops ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ into her internal monologue without actually preparing for the worst that could happen. She isn’t stupid.)

But when she steps into restroom, everything seems calm, almost to her vague disappointment. What has she become, if she is very nearly craving the unlikely possibility of demonic mass hysteria? She misses the good old, simple days. When she was content to get her adrenaline rush by slashing a few throats, and never stretched her imagination unreasonable lengths beyond that.

There is a woman standing in front of one of the sink mirrors. Villanelle assumes she must be Rosemary, if the way she is dabbing at her face is any indication. The cut on the side of her cheek looks normal, and Villanelle decides she’ll just get a quick closer look before delivering the all-clear to Mike.

“Do you need a band-aid for that?” Villanelle asks, sidling up and quickly slipping into Girl Talk Mode. “I think I have one in my purse...”

“That’d be great,” Rosemary says with a relieved smile, and now that Villanelle is closer she notices... there’s an unusual amount of blood dripping down her jaw, for a wound that seems comparatively shallow. “It’s weird, I just can’t get it to stop bleeding.”

Fortunately, Villanelle hadn’t been bluffing, and really does have a bandage in her purse. She fishes it out and offers it to the other woman, watching closely as Rosemary uses it to cover the wound and...

...Within seconds, it bleeds right through.

Okay. That is definitely not normal.

“Mike?” Villanelle calls back out into the lobby. “I thiiink we have a problem.”

“What’s happening?” Mike calls back to her, but Villanelle doesn’t answer him right away. She’s too busy watching in growing, morbid fascination and disgust as the wound starts to pulse and throb, like there is something under Rosemary’s skin burrowing its way to the surface to get out.

“Mike,” she calls more insistently.

“What! I can’t come in there!”

“Oh my god, it’s not like there is a force field, or something --” But Villanelle’s retort breaks off into a horrified shriek as the wound on the side of Rosemary’s face explodes.

“Villanelle!”

This time, throwing all caution to the winds and evidently deciding that his dignity is not as important as Villanelle’s life, Mike comes rushing into the restroom just as Villanelle is flattening herself against the wall to avoid the worst of the oozing... pus... no, she does not want to even describe it internally.

“What’s happening to her?! Is she --”

Rosemary’s screams turn feral, and Villanelle has to interrupt Mike’s question to pull him out of the way as she slashes at him with... are those claws?

“It’s the movie! I fucking told you it was just like the movie!” Mike shouts. Rosemary rounds on them again with wild, animalistic yellow eyes, and Mike... promptly smacks her right in the face with the broom handle. Her neck snaps back at an unnatural angle.

“Ha!” Villanelle laughs, recovering in the midst of all this chaos. “Nice hit.”

“Thanks. Wait, I mean -- what do we do?!”

“Run?” Villanelle guesses, unsure if there is any way to actually kill this thing. Rosemary’s seems to be snapping her neck back to its normal position, and neither of them stayed in the theater long enough to know if the demons had any significant weaknesses.

Mike spares a moment to shoot her a frantic look. “But she’ll get out and spread the virus to other people!”

That sounds like their problem, Villanelle wants to say, although she supposes she can easily enough see how a supernatural pandemic might eventually become her problem as well.

Rosemary lets out an unearthly snarl and lunges forward again. It is not so much the threat of being scratched and turned, or at least dismembered, that makes Villanelle react (although that alone is obviously enough) -- as does the sight of her wide, gaping jaws. And all that slimy pus stuff she’s drooling everywhere.

“That is fucking disgusting,” Villanelle tells her, before pulling out her pistol and firing three close range shots into the woman’s head.

It... works. Effectively. As one might expect.

Rosemary stumbles back and falls into a pool of her own blood, twitching unpleasantly in what seems to be a round of dying spasms. Villanelle fires one more head shot, just to make sure.

“O-okay. I think you got her.” Mike sounds slightly shaken, and it’s only then that she remembers that she just brutally shot a person right in front of him. Then again, she is not really sure Rosemary counted as a ‘person’ at time time. Never the less, Villanelle lowers her gun and turns so that she’s at least half-obscuring Mike’s view of the body.

“That was kind of easy.” She scrunches her nose up a bit.

Mike takes another steadying breath, but he’s doing a better job of composing himself than she might have expected. “...Yeah. Uh. I think we maybe just... prevented an apocalypse?”

Villanelle considers that for a couple of seconds. It almost feels kind of anticlimactic. “Huh,” she finally says with a shrug. “Guess I will add it to my resume. Stop it at patient zero, that’s what I always say.” Or what she would always say, if she’d ever been involved in any humanity-threatening spread of disease before now.

“Is now a good time to say ‘I told you so?’” Mike quips in return, and Villanelle gives him a passive-aggressive (but also sort of playful) shoulder check as she passes on her way to the restroom’s exit.

“I guess we call the police. And they can call in Hazmat people to clean up the body, or something.” Already, she’s kind of wondering how exactly they’re going to explain the weird, meta experience of watching a movie and then having that movie repeat itself in real life. Then again, it’s probably par for the course for the cops around here, by now.

“Wait,” Mike says suddenly. “What about the mask?”

Ah. He’s right, she realizes, following his gaze over to the lobby display where the mask still sits. The apparent source of the virus, if the movie lore holds up.

“Well, we have gotten this far by being genre savvy, so I don’t think we should have it over to the police,” she muses.

“Yeah, no way. One of them’ll cut themselves while they’re joking around, or something, and infect the whole police station. Always happens.”

“So... we keep it?” Villanelle tries to run through some other, smarter possibilities in her head. “Burn it? Bury it? Throw it into a volcano? We could do that. There’s one out in the Prehistoric Wilds.”

Mike starts to grin, and Villanelle squints at him suspiciously. “What is so funny?”

“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head. “Just... the volcano thing. It’s just like in Lord of the Rings.”

Villanelle pulls up short as their very first conversation comes ebbing back to her. Unexpectedly, what accompanies it is a trace of amused warmth. And she grins back at him briefly. “Guess we’ve come full circle.”

“We really have.”

Villanelle makes a note to get out of there before he remembers to make a communism joke.

#im not going to spoil what the concept of this fic actually is but when you read it #ask yourself: how could i not?#fic #christmas gifts #OH ALSO I ALMOST FORGOT #body horror cw #?????

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yourimaginarycupcake · 7 years ago

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Shantytown.

I tried my hands at writing! (I actually do write.. Once in a while, but rarely in english.. Let me know about spelling errors or such! :D )

It’s based on my AU that you can read about here :)

He peeked over his shoulder again. He couldn't see her anywhere. And he knew by now where to look for her. He checked the roofs of the buildings, and he checked the sky. He elbowed his way further through the crowd, and made himself smaller. Which probably wasn't necessary, his size considered. Quite possibly the only perk his early death had given him. It was easy for him to disappear - to sneak away. He felt bad about it - of course he did. But he had to. Just once in a while. He turned when he reached a dark alley, and once again checked to see if he could see her. Making sure to stay hidden in the dark of the alley. Because if he could see her, then she definitely could see him. It wasn't the best angle, but he still checked the rooftops and the paths - that he could see - that lead to the plaza. The crowd didn't help, but he was certain that she still wasn't there. That she wasn't watching him from somehere. He let out a relieved sigh, and slipped off the hood that previously had covered his face. He ran a hand through his hair, and leaned against the wall behind him. It wasn't because he didn't love his family. He did. But the music ban was just too much for him. And it wasn't even a new thing. It had been there for centuries! He was supposed to follow the rules. He was supposed to adjust. To bend or something. He knew that. But he couldn't. He simply couldn't. And he really did love this family - but the music ban drove him crazy. He wasn't even allowed to hum! It was his afterlife, and he still wasn't allowed to hum. He removed his apron - the same his family wore with pride - with a huff. He threw it over his shoulder, and pushed himself away from the wall. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and began walking. Away from the crowded plaza - and even further away from the family business. He didn't need to increase his pace - seeing how his family most likely wouldn't follow him, or even know he left in the first place - but he did anyway. For two reasons; he wanted to reach his destination. It was like an itch that wouldn't go away. And second; Pepita. He wasn't always on the best of terms with her. It wouldn't take her long to track him down and ruin his fun. The bewinged jaguar was fine. Most of the time they did get along. But his first years in his afterlife he and mamá Imelda would have heated arguments - they still had them sometimes. And it made his and Pepita's relationship a little tense. Especially because it became her job, to track him down when he first started to run off. And that bothered both of them - since it happend a lot the first years. It did strain his and mamá Imelda's relationship too. The rest of the family followed her rules - but he was against them. And he wasn't afraid to speak up either - it was his afterlife too. Not just hers.

He was pulled out of his thoughts, when the old stones under his shoes started to crumble and he lost his footing. He shrieked and just barely managed to grab the apron in the air, before he slipped down the remaining stairs. It was his own fault for not paying attention, but he still glared at the old staircase as he got up from the ground. He dusted himself off with a short sigh - at least that meant that he was almost at his destination. Much against his will he tied the apron behind his neck again. That way he wouldn't end up losing it, if he lost his footing again. He really didn't feel like explaining to his family why he needed a new one. Not that he would need to - it would probably be written all over his face. Or.. Clothes. Or whatever. Or maybe mamá Imelda would see it with her own two eyes, on Pepita's wide back up in the sky. The thought of that made him jump the last bit until he could see his destination. Shantytown! Finally. He knew the place sent shivers down the spines of others. It even did so for him when he first arrived there. The place was a bit of a dump - or so people said - but he actually liked being there. Maybe not for the view. But for the people. They all acted like they were one big family, and he liked that about them. Most of them were happy and friendly, and the ones who weren't mainly kept by themselves. He never could bring himself to call them anything related to family though. He already had a family, and it felt wrong to call these people his primos or tiás or anything like that. But they still felt like a second familia in some way. They didn't make rules and they did listen to him. They let him talk about his dream, and about music. They listened when he talked about senõr de la Cruz. Stuff he couldn't do with his own family. Not truly at least. Sometimes he and mamá Coco would talk about music, but it was always when nobody else was around. And it was never enough for him. Their little talks would always get cut short by other family members showing up. As if they knew what was going on. Plus she was back with her husband now, and they tried to catch up on lost time. He shuddered slightly at how lovey-dovey mamá Coco and papá Julio always was. He was happy for them, but did they have to be so.. Gross? They would always smile a little sadly, and say something about him being too young to understand, when they saw him making faces.

A gnarly hand on his shoulder brought him back to reality. He blinked and looked up from the wooden platforms. ''Running off a little early today, eh Miguel?'' He couldn't help but give the elder skeleton a sheepish smile. She wasn't much taller than himself, but her braided hair was mostly grey with only a little black in it. He scanned her face - her markings that looked so much like flowers, but so faded he could barely tell the colors apart anymore. ''Hola Areli!'' He cheerfully greeted her and she smiled back at him. Areli was always one of the first to greet him when he showed up. She had also been the first one, to actually talk to him when he first showed up in Shantytown. Her bones looked a lot more loose now, and his smile faded a little at that. He followed her with the eyes as she began to walk away. ''Feel like playing for us today ninõ?'' He smiled at her question and followed her. ''Sí! I'm so glad you're asking. It's exactly what I need.'' She turned her head to look at him, and instead of saying anything she just winked at him. It wouldn't surprise him if she already knew that. People knew him here. They knew how much he loved music. He calmly greeted people when they passed them, and followed Areli inside the shack she called her hown. He smiled at the many flowerpots - most of them broken in one way or another - filled with dirt and haywires twisted as flowers with colorful lightbulbs hanging on them. Of course they didn't give any lights - but they were pretty nonetheless. ''I still got green thumbs.'' She laughed and poked him lighty with the guitar in her hand. ''Here ninõ. Now let's gather a crowd, eh?''

He was trying to tune the guitar, while skeletons slowly gathered around him and Areli. They settled in a circle of old chairs and as soon as the guitar was tuned, he focused on them with a smile. ''Any requests?'' He asked. He tried to ignore how yellow their bones were, and how loose they were. How faded their markings were. If any of them would be gone the next time he came around. How they had ended up in Shantytown in the first place. Maybe he should visit them more? His smile faded as he briefly thought of his own family. His living family. Would they forget him too? Would he end up as his great great grandfather? The one that shouldn't be mentioned? Would they ever put up his own photo on their ofrenda? Would they ever worry he was dead or think that he simply just ran off? Or would he simply be dead to them by now? Forgotten? He was nudged in the side, and he turned to Areli. She looked worried, but she was still smiling. ''The world es mi familia. That's what Raul requested.'' She said. He pushed through the fog in his head and gave a little nod as he strummed the first note of the song. Areli was singing along next to him, and he forgot all his worries. All the tension he had built up simply just disappeared. He stayed there for two more songs. But it was starting to get darker and he had to go, before his family sent Pepita out to find him. He handed Areli the guitar back, and stood up. It was met with a few sighs. ''What a lovely audience! But I gotta go now.'' He felt much lighter and ready to go home to his actual familia. ''Mucha gracias for letting me borrow your guitar Areli.'' He added with a smile to the elder skeleton. ''No problem ninõ.'' She laughed and waved lightly as he started to back away. He looked at them one last time over the shoulder, before he started running.

#Coco #Coco AU #No Dante AU #Coco writings #Writings #Miguel Rivera #I might do more c': It was fun!#My writings #yourimaginarycupcake

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the-voice-of-hell · 3 years ago

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Rent is Theft, part 18

Read from the beginning here, read the previous chapter here. Note: My MC is a Filipina trans woman and I am not. If you have notes on that or anything else, hit me up.

***

I heard the soft sound of another glass door opening behind me. The tall doors were of frosted glass indistinguishable from the walls but for etched stainless steel handles and hinges. Perhaps they were held shut with magnets because there was no noise from a latch opening, just a hollow pop and slight vibration of air as the door swung. I only heard it because I wasn’t walking at the moment, and I turned to see it.

A lady with a corporate version of rockabilly style flashed whitened teeth at me, her face framed in big phony burgundy hair, and waved me in. “Ms. Marquez,” she said, “I should have had the door open for you when you walked by, I’m silly. Easy to forget what this must look like for visitors.” She flapped a hand at the sterile hall, then turned it into another beckoning gesture.

Time for me to mirror her pleasant falsity with a smile of my own. Her teeth were ringed with candy apple red lipstick, mine with an eccentric but unobtrusive matte rose. We shook hands and went into her office. There was mustard yellow plaster on the wall up to about six feet, above which the exposed brick resumed. Her framed diploma from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago hung there between meaningless matted black and white photos of parts of classic cars. A curvy wheel hub, a tail fin.

I sat on a low stool that felt like a sawed-off version of something from Johnny Rockets. I sat my purse on the floor, folded my hands on a knee, and tried to engage her face. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“Ah, sorry. No name on the door because we just moved in. I’m Diana Whitford, human resources coordinator. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise. Does the Selman Design Group have a lot of human resources?”

“You got me. Small building gave it away? I’m the whole department. Also assistant CFO.”

“Nice.” I gestured at her fancy little office. “It looks nice.”

“It is! Not so much for decor, right? Just a lil’ fishbowl under the bricks where we work, but it helps keep us focused. The meeting rooms are much nicer, and there are so many amazing restaurants around here for lunches. And the art museum... It’s a good neighborhood to work in.”

“I know. I’d love the job. What can I say to make you love me for it?”

“Haha, can’t give it away so easy, can I?”

“Shoot. Thought I had you on the ropes. So,” I nodded coquettishly, “I’m ready.”

She leaned back and cocked her head, considered me. I didn’t love it. She asked, “Alright. Tell me about yourself. What makes Courtney Marquez who she is? I bet that’s interesting.”

“Mm, I don’t like to settle for ordinary. I’ve been working in tech for a long time now, and felt it’s time for a change of scenery.” Sound rich, baby. “The boys are so drab and provincial. A graphic design firm, now that’s interesting.”

“And what interests you about Selman Design Group?”

“The code we worked on was for purely functional purposes - moving cloud data around, secure networks, server switching in massive arrays. Here you are dealing with all kinds of businesses, right? And at a level where the clients are going to be interesting people, cosmopolitan. I feel it would just make for a nicer atmosphere.”

“I can hardly imagine. I’ve had some friends marry tech guys but they are in a whole other world.”

“It’s not really that interesting. The other world. Smells like energy drinks and sweat.” Play to stereotypes, Courtney.

“Hohoho,” she said, “But we sweat too sometimes. How do you handle a challenging day?”

“When I read this job posting, I imagined it would be coding UI, animation, things to assist with graphic design. Those were the prerequisite skills listed, right? But here I am with the human resources assistant CFO and I can tell this is a company where you have to wear a lot of hats. That’s the kind of challenging day I’m confident I can handle - a little tech support here, a project pushing deadline there.”

“You don’t have any weaknesses, as a worker?”

I hate these things a lot. “None, hahaha. Of course, I’ve just come from the world of maladjusted boy genius types. Getting used to a different workplace vibe, it might not be a perfectly smooth transition. But I promise not to crush cans on my head and play noisy videogames on break.”

“OK. But what’s a challenging situation you’ve had in the past, and how did you handle it?”

I cleaned my ass and walked through the door to have this horrible dance while a dozen people are depending on me to keep our asses off the streets. “There was a new handshake system we’d been developing functions for, a few months at least, when hackers discovered an exploit in it, rendering the whole system a massive liability overnight. The biggest stress was for the sysadmins at companies using it, but there was talk around the office our company might have to declare bankruptcy, dump us all to cover debt from damage control. It had us working under a lot of uncertainty, right when housing prices were shooting up all around the city.”

“Like, two years ago?”

“Another time they were going up, about seven years before that? So it’s work quick and come up with genius solutions while you could end up homeless at a moment’s notice. We really used all of our team skills on that one. And that was me. The genius stuff was for enfants terribles and people like me would try to make their solutions workable in practical space, documenting the code, translating it for other people in the pipeline. I probably cried in the bathroom at least once? But we got through it.” Pathos, girl. But not too much.

“Wow. That sounds like a hard time.”

“Hard times come and go. That one is gone. But lessons learned?”

“I can’t imagine. Well, just one more thing. What kind of compensation would you be expecting here?”

“Better than a grad but worse than I was making, I’m sure. I understand I’m starting over, but I am bringing a competency of experience you won’t see in a new kid. I could go as low as forty-five, if it’s strictly necessary.”

The fake rockabilly’s eyebrows moved. What did it mean? Don’t let them know you care.

“Thank you, Courtney. Now do you have anything you’d like to know from me?”

“Do you have anybody here doing tech support at all, or would that become part of the job description?”

“You got me. We did not include IT in the listing, but you know we’ll be asking for it.”

“I’m OK with that, Diana.”

***

I got out as fast as I could without making it too obvious. I did not like how that went. Usually I’ve done better. Maybe the head wrap was making me lightheaded. I found a metal pole to lean on, tried to slow my breathing.

It didn’t help that this was not far from Walter’s stomping grounds, but I had to make myself stop worrying about that. The late morning sun was bright white, the shadows electric blue. Every scrap of garbage, eggshell, feathers, plastic, paper was clearly visible in the cement, joining its constituent stones like the skin of an endless lizard. People walked around me.

I finally shook it off, put on my sunglasses, and strolled. Knobby had eluded me long enough. The full moon was going to happen that night. If he and Olivia were out walking the streets every day, when did he have time to be taking shits in front of old ladies? I was going to catch his ass. If I could cure his werewolfism, maybe anything was possible. Cures for twisty hair and headmouth, why not?

I switched from pumps to sneakers and walked back to the Myrmidon Apartments with purpose. I was getting used to walking, even with the uphill-downhill of it, and if one picked the right streets, this route was mostly downhill. I was on the block, eyes open for the off chance of seeing those kids on the street, and peered into the window of the Subway behind the building. I didn’t see the kids, but I did see a lone sub-muncher in the uniform of the pest control company that was investigating the bed bug situation.

I stepped in. The people at the counter really didn’t care about short stay loiterers - lots of things to do in keeping an urban fast food joint from exploding. I went confidently to his table and looked down with arms folded over my chest.

“Hey, young fella. Don’t worry, I’m not a cougar or a hooker. Just a resident of the Myrmidon.”

“I really shouldn’t talk to residents, ma’am.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m cool. It’s not my apartment that’s getting sussed out, and not my problem. I’m just curious about how this works, in case it becomes a problem for me. Down the road.”

“Hmm.”

We had a moment, me smiling, trying to convey a sense of fun-loving criminality, speak to the young man inside the professional. He pondered it for a moment, then assented. “OK.”

I sat down across the table from him. “Alright. So this is the new reality, they’re saying. All the DDT that squished those bald eagle eggs wore off, bed bugs are moving back into the cities. What all have you heard about that?”

“Not a lot, honestly. There’s the experts and then there’s guys like me who just move shit around, work the tools. What was that about eagles?”

“I don’t know much either, but somebody told me there’s this pesticide we used to spray on crops, but also indoors. It made eagle eggshells thin so that when momma tried to incubate them, squish. Bald eagles became an endangered species and the stuff was banned. According to the guy I talked to...”

“That’s why nobody had bed bugs until last year. What a trip.”

“Well what do you know about them? Has to be something.”

“Heh. Now this is hella gross. I heard the females don’t have a... well, they don’t have a vag. So to get inseminated, basically, the males got a gnarly spike for a dick, and just stab ’em with it. Is that too much?”

“Hahaha, no, that is horrible. Thanks!”

“A way to keep ’em out of your bed is to keep your bedding from reaching the floor and put the feet of your bed inside, like, a ring of laundry detergent.”

“Nice, nice. So what’s in store for my unfortunate upstair biddies?”

“Our company is high end, so... uh...”

“Promise, I’m cool. You can tell me anything.”

“Basically, everybody we deal with is insured out the ass, so we come up with services just to charge more money. It isn’t a total scam, right? The services do something. But is every last one of ’em necessary?”

“So you’re gonna milk this thing? Hell, everything in this town is so fucking expensive, that doesn’t bother me at all. Do it to it. But that isn’t the reason you told me, is it?”

“OK, we basically already know there are bed bugs. Boss man stabbed her bed with a bowie knife and found black dots - like digested blood.”

“Euggh.”

“I know. But we’ll be like, this is suggestive but it isn’t a clincher, and run another test.”

“A more expensive one.”

“You got it. And man, it is the real trip. We bring in a trained animal to sniff ’em out.”

“Is it an expensive dog breed?”

He was smirking and enjoying this too much. “Not a dog.”

“Aardvark?” I remembered what Grime had told me about the animal, but didn't want to ruin the boy's fun.

“A pig.” His expression dimmed a bit. “But now that you say that, I wish it was an aardvark. That sounds fun.”

“No, no, that’s pretty fucking funny. You’re literally gonna get these apartments to pay them to have a potbelly piggy running through the halls.”

“Oh it ain’t no potbelly, ma’am. It’s one of the big boys.”

“What do they call that, a boar?”

“Yup. A male pig, big as fuck. Maybe you’ll get to see it. It’s like three feet at the top and I swear at least five hundred pounds.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Well, here’s hopin’ those sons of bitches stay upstairs.”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.”

He must have known that wasn’t likely to happen. Shit. “So the boar confirms what you already know. Then what?”

“That’s our part. We help the lady treat and isolate everything in her apartment. Anything that can’t take the heat is moved out. The sprinkler heads are packed in coolant, and then we heat the place to a hundred twenty-five degrees for three hours.”

“Holy shit. Big space heaters?”

“Custom, industrial motherfuckers. It’s pretty cool stuff. No poison involved.”

“Except the laundry detergent.”

“The laundry detergent? Oh yeah, the laundry detergent. We don’t tell most of our customers about that one.”

“Because they’ll be more likely to get reinfested. Sharp.”

“You never know when they’ll bring that pesticide back and put us out of a job, right?”

“Well thanks, man. That was a real thrill ride.” I shot him a finger gun and stood up.

“Hey, ah... You don’t have to go so fast..?”

“Heh. Charmed, but I do have to get going. Enjoy your sandwich, son.”

“Yes ma’am.”

***

I made a mental note to line the baseboards with borax at the earliest opportunity. I was getting a mental picture of the shit. They boil the granny floor and fleeing bed bugs come down through the walls, end up on our floor.

I decided to take the stairs up, and at each floor get out and walk the hall. If Knobby was doing his doggy deeds, I’d catch him. I tried to listen for sounds in the stairwell, in the halls, but the exertion made my pulse pound in my ears. Not terribly, but enough to mute the quiet noises of the world.

The first ten floors had a different layout from ours - a little bit larger, with more variable apartment sizes. The smallest ones were even smaller than ours, judging by the distance between doors, and the largest might have been larger. On the tenth floor, another variation - a gym I had never used.

I used my prox key and got in. A redundant nuisance - anybody on this floor had already badged in downstairs, or been badged in by somebody else. Did they want to keep visitors out of the precious fitness center?

The outer walls were surely floor-to-ceiling glass, like on ours, but they were masked completely by drawn vertical blinds. Interior lights were weak in competition with the daylight that gave the blinds an unappealing amber glow, the room washing out to a dim grey-green.

Still easy enough to see by, and I found myself looking at myself. One of the inner walls was pure mirror. Watch your beach bod take shape while you ride the stationary bikes. Or stand alone and watch yourself fade in real time. All the dolling up I did for the interview was coming apart, and the shadows added ten years to my face.

Even with the wrap clamped down on my head, I had forgotten it was visible. It changed me, made my reflection alien. And remembering this, I remembered Reverse Courtney was waiting under that grip for any chance to rat us out. I touched the back of my head and felt her shift underneath the cloth.

Get out. No way Knobby was in there anyway. As I stepped away, I noticed the floor beneath my feet was raised and discolored. No allergy medicine here. Get out.

The eleventh floor was, to my knowledge, one of several completely unoccupied ones. On seeing no Knobby, it occurred to me that if the monster in him had the same motivation as Reverse Courtney, he would only visit floors with people on them.

Our floor. The ritual wasn’t really complete yet. I had prepared my potions and talismans and such, but I still needed to set up the magic circle. It was far from midnight, so time remained, but who knew how long it would take to catch the boy?

I realized we needed to talk to everyone at once. Patrick and Graeme would be at work, probably, and Deandre and the kids probably out and about. Still, better to get as many people as possible on the same page as early as possible. I started knocking on doors.

Patrick was indeed at work, and I decided to leave Perry alone. With that and less anybody out on the town, I was only able to convene Mike, Momi, and Marcie, in her apartment. Mike looked lively, but greener than ever.

The three sat on the couch and I sat across from it.

“What’s this about, Courtney?” Mike was the only one with no prior knowledge, that I knew of.

“Marcie and Leimomi already know some of this, but not all of it. Like the allergy situation, it’s important for all of us to know. Mike, have you noticed that you’re not looking... well?”

“The green? Yeah, and I’ve seen that Knobby kid hunchbacked, and his girl’s neck go weird.”

“So you have an idea what this is about. I think the building is trying to make us lose control of ourselves, make us get ourselves caught. I have a mouth on the back of my head that has basically said as much to me.”

“Does Leimomi have a head mouth too?”

“No,” she said.

“Let me get to the point. The neighbors talked about seeing a dog, or a dog-like man, in the halls on their floors - causing trouble. It has to be one of us. We know what our problems are, and Knobby is already hunched over, so safe bet it’s him. And I have a plan.”

Mike smiled, green hands on his knees. “Great! And here I was worried. You’re so good, Courtney.”

Marcie said, “What are you going to do, Courtney?”

“Ehh, I don’t...” Maybe they’d feel better if I didn’t express my doubts. “Sorry. Remember how wearing the allergy pill necklace was helpful? It’s kinda like that. I’m setting up a thing... OK, a magic spell. In my room. We get Knobby inside the magic circle and do an exorcism.”

“The power of Christ compels you! Haha,” Mike said, “I can do that.”

Marcie nodded in admiration. Momi knew what I was thinking, gave me a sensitive smile.

“Yeah, so here’s the deal. We all do our best to find that kid, get him and everybody else in my apartment by midnight. I’ll write up everybody’s instructions for the spell. You’ll have to read some words, do some things.”

“Any of that cool shit from Exorcist in there?,” Mike asked.

“No but there may be some room for improv. Just make sure you do the spell right first.

And in the meantime...”

“We’ll try to find Knobby.”

“Richie’s been trying,” Marcie said.

“Unless he has a hot lead, call him home,” I said. “It’s a full moon, and if I’m right - that the werewolf is trying to get us in trouble here - he’ll be in the building somewhere.”

Momi said, “Oh good, I didn’t wanna run around town anyways. Should we start looking now?”

“Eat lunch first, get plenty of water. For my part, I’m gonna turn my apartment into a magic circle.”

***

In my initial pass at the exorcism material in Werwolves, I didn’t notice the shin-kicking ritual involved some worse tortures besides. We weren’t going to whip him until he was drenched in blood. I did my best to come up with ways to symbolically accomplish anything I was unable or unwilling to do in the prescribed method. For example, where it called for whipping the “werwolf” I thought we could just give him a few whacks and then cover him in some kind of blood. Unsanitary, but not torture. I’d paid for blood from a butcher, because there’s no good way to shoplift it, and sanitized it by boiling. That made a blood pudding which I intended to reliquefy when we got closer to midnight. Grody.

Another thing I couldn’t do was follow hyper-specific astrological instructions. OK, I might be able to sync the ritual to a night of the full moon, but learning enough about astronomy or astrology to even know when Mercury was seventeen degrees on the cusp of the Seventh House? Not happening. The text said Mercury was the “most bitter opponent of evil spirits,” so I thought, hang some liquid mercury from the ceiling above our boy. I poured my mercury into an emptied bottle of some micro-brew with a white stag on it, to honor St. Hubert.

***

Read next chapter here.

#Rent is Theft #part 18 #nanowrimo july 2021

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lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks · 8 years ago

Note

Writting Prompt: Danny cries in his sleep, sometimes really loud. And screams. Once he even transform while sleeping. The problem is, he start to doing it when he fall asleep in class. Hope it's good enough to write

angst oh god what is with this phandom and angst okay here’s ur angst with a heavy dose of weird millennial humour because this bitch can’t angst without a metric fuck of comedy sprinkled all over the place

also I’m sick and wrote half of this in the middle of the night while feverish so like, I did my best

–

“OKAY THIS IS FINE.” Danny said aloud to the floor. He didn’t really intend the floor to be the recipient of his ire but it was where his face was currently planted so it would just have to ding darn diddly deal with it.

Danny had experienced his fair share of being stuck in awkward positions but this one had rivalled many of his top ten, and he hadn’t even been thrown across a room by a ghost to achieve it! Nope, he just fell out of bed.

One arm was flung out before him, the other awkwardly pulled behind his back, still twisted up in his bedsheets, along with his leg. Just the one leg, the other was hanging - in quite a remarkable display of inhuman dexterity - over his shoulder.

All it took was some gut wrenching, heart stopping, bile inducing nightmares. Nothing fancy really, just the visceral image of everyone he loved and cared about DYING from TOO MUCH FIRE right in front of his eyes as he watched helplessly. Yep.

“THIS IS FINE.” Danny said again, a little louder this time. The carpet smelled like feet, Danny decided maybe he should take his eating hole off the gross floor before he caught a foot fungus on his lip. He knew it was possible, it happened to Ricky Marsh once at camp.

Yeah Danny should REEEAAAALLY get his face off that carpet. Right now, yep. He was gonna get up at this very mome-

Jazz heard a loud snore come from Danny’s bedroom. He was supposed to be up half an hour ago, school started in ten minutes. But she knew he had a plate piled high with superhero shenanigans that kept him up at obnoxiously late hours nine nights out of ten. The bags under his eyes could hold all the homework he never got done, with extra space for his unfinished chores.

Jazz was fully prepared to sneak in and firmly tuck him into bed with ghost proof sheets, a lie, an excuse and at least three compromises balanced on her tongue ready to jump at any parent and/or teacher that wanted her brother out of the warm sanctuary of bed today. Then she heard his gentle snores twist into a devastatingly soul crushing little whimper.

Oh boy, that wasn’t good.

Jazz opened her brother’s bedroom door and quietly peered inside to find… no one. He wasn’t there. Typical ghost bullshi-

Jazz had almost closed the door when she heard it again, that tiny little whimper. Was he invisible? She thought to herself, barely acknowledging how fucking weird her life had gotten that that question came so naturally to her.

Jazz padded into the room and found that Danny had, somehow, managed to fall asleep on the floor beside his bed. One leg still hanging in the air via blanket sling, it was almost funny, until he screamed that is.

Jazz nearly jumped out of her spotty blue socks when a noise ripped out of her sleeping brother’s throat, a noise that honestly could have come from the cutting room floor of a horror flick that was deemed too terrifyingly violent to be shown on screens literally anywhere. His back was arched, his mouth wide, hands curled in on themselves, he almost looked as though he were convulsing.

It stopped suddenly, with a gasp and a jolt Danny woke. He didn’t shoot up or flail about, he just laid down on the floor, eyes blearily noticing that there was another person in the room. Jazz sat down by his side as he wiped his face, staring at the tears on his hands.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Danny glared at her.

“Sorry, standard question.” Jazz mumbled as she unhooked his foot from the clinging bedsheets. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Danny, still laying on the floor, swung his right arm around, it had gone numb and tingly, the kind of numb and tingly that really hecking hurt when he started moving it again, yeesh.

“I had this really gnarly dream,” he started as he massaged his arm, Jazz listened intently. “I ordered a sandwich without mayo but when I bit into it there was mayo like, EVERYWHERE and-”

Jazz dropped a pillow on his face.

“That was rude.” Danny’s muffled voice grumbled.

“If you don’t want to talk about it you can just say so instead of being an asshole.” Jazz huffed as she found a pair of jeans and a shirt that were Clean Enough and threw them at the pillow. “You were crying and screaming, I was WORRIED.”

Danny pulled the pillow and clothes away and looked at his sister, actually looked her in the face. Her eyebrows were pulled tight and she was gnawing on her bottom lip, she really did look worried. Danny sat up and fished a somewhat pungent binder from under his bed, Pariah’s Oath he really needed to do his laundry.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” he stared down at his hands, face suspiciously neutral.

“Okay.” Jazz’s voice was gentle, she wasn’t going to push it, she’d learned a long time ago that it always just made things worse. “That’s okay, just know you can always talk to me, alright?”

Danny stood up and stretched, joints cracking and popping in a way that made Jazz want to barf. He could feel his arm again, thank the Ancients.

“You say that now, but every time a new rocket model comes out-”

“Bye Danny.” Jazz fucked off faster than Johnny’s shadow at dawn, absolutely Not wanting to stick around for another geeky space rant. Danny’s shit eating grin followed her out the door until it clicked shut, suddenly dropping back into the deadass tired face of a student who was entirely convinced that consistent sleep schedules were a myth.

He was not okay, ooooh he was so not okay.

Falling asleep again had been a mistake, a GRAVE mista- no okay, no, that pun was just inappropriate. He’d just had not one, but TWO disgustingly detailed nightmares about Literally Everyone dying, death puns were OFF the table right now.

Regular puns were still on the cards though, he thought to himself as he plopped his Little Pocket Book of Puns on top of a deck of cards sitting on his desk. He was proud of that one, in fact he snapchatted it, his smug face squeezed into the corner of the shot by the words ‘passng chem is off the cards bt my puns arnt’. It was easy to fool people with photos, he only had to pull off one good smile and people thought he was fine.

The flood of horrified snapchats he received in return made him giddy. Everything from a two minute video of Valerie trying not to hurl to a picture of Dash’s middle finger. Danny grinned, his grin looked genuine, it was not.

“This is fine.” he lied.

*RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING*

Danny barely made it through the door before the bell went off, he celebrated his victory with a very brief and offensively outdated dance move before Tucker threw a pen at his head and the teacher told him to sit down before he hurt himself.

Danny’s goofy grin remained plastered onto his face as he sat next to Tucker, who was giving him the kind of look that was usually reserved for the weird surrealist internet videos Nathan always tagged him in on Facebook.

“You are like…” Tucker started, fiddling with the broken nib of his stylus. “Super hyper today what the fu-”

��Language, Foley.” the homeroom teacher deadpanned from behind his book.

“Sorry sir! But seriously what the fuck dude.” Tucker continued at a still very perceptible volume. The teacher sighed heavily.

“It’s cool I’m fine I just got like two hours of sleep and drank five coffees in ten minutes I think I can hear colours.” Danny’s eye twitched.

Tucker didn’t laugh, Danny was trying to be funny but it was like, twelve year old funny. He sighed and lowered his voice.

“You’re having nightmares again aren’t you.” Tucker stared through Danny’s plastic grin with serious eyes. “We talked about this Danny, I told you to STOP faking this shit with me. You know what happens when you don’t get enough sleep, you get really fucking weird.”

“Did you get my snapchat this morning?” Danny asked as though he hadn’t heard a single word his best friend had just said.

“Yes, it was awful and I hate you.” The jab had no bite, Tucker couldn’t stand seeing Danny like this, it was like some awful parody of his friend amped up to eleven. He didn’t bother trying to talk sense into him, sense was gone, sense was out the window, sense was on the next plane to god damn Timbuktu.

Danny’s giddiness didn’t let up a single inch throughout their first couple of morning classes. He had stupid jokes and shitty puns hidden up every sleeve in the building, and the tiniest little thing would set him off giggling. Star smacked a fly with a ruler, Danny literally fell off his chair laughing.

Mr Lancer gave Tucker permission to drag Danny out into the hallway to calm down. Tucker grimaced in apology as he dragged along a snorting Danny by the sleeve, the rest of the class having a good laugh of their own.

“Do you think he’s like, actually on drugs or something?” Tucker heard Paulina whisper not even remotely quietly as they left the room.

The moment the classroom door had closed, Tucker slammed Danny against the wall.

“DUDE! GET. A. GRIP.” Tucker was not even in the general vicinity of fucking around right now. Danny needed to chill his tits before he got into serious trouble, the last thing he needed was a detention lumped on top of the pile of reasons Danny’s life was a train wreck.

Danny clenched his teeth, his eyes were wide, too wide. Then his mouth curled up and a laugh squeezed its way through taught lips. Oh no, not again. Not on Tucker’s watch. Before the next giggle fit could get into full swing Tucker had pulled out his drink bottle, uncapped it, and dumped the entirety of its contents on Danny’s stupid guffawing head.

A cough and a splutter later and Danny was sitting on the floor, the stupid grin officially washed from his face.

“Can we talk like actual human beings now?” Tucker asked, the plastic water bottle thudding emptily on the ground.

“I’m not an 'actual human being’. So no. I can’t.” Danny’s voice was short and clipped, his expression stony.

Tucker slumped to the floor next to his best friend, ignoring the puddle he was half sitting in. They sat in silence for a bit, listening to Mr Lancer’s muffled voice droning on about adverbs or something. A squeak from someone’s shoe echoed down the empty hall. A fluorescent light flickered. Danny winced.

“You wanna borrow my earphones? I’ve got some chill tunes if you need to like, shut everything out for a bit.” Tucker held the tangled cords out to Danny who promptly stuck them in his ears and buried his face in his arms. It was all just, just too much right now.

He threw his hands over his ears when the bell rang, Tucker put a gentle arm around his shoulder.

“C'mon, it’s about to get really loud out here.” he said quietly, taking Danny by the arm and leading him to their next class. It was history, they were watching a movie. Perfect. Tucker rolled up his jacket and put it on the desk in front of Danny.

“Try and sleep a bit, if you can. You can copy my notes later.”

Tucker was a good friend.

Danny put his head down, Tucker’s chill playlist still thrumming softly in his ears. He didn’t want to sleep, he didn’t want to see everyone die again, but his eyes could barely stay open. He read somewhere online that just laying down and resting was still good for you, even if he didn’t sleep he could still get some energy back at least, maybe.

He was out like a light the moment his head hit Tucker’s jacket.

The dream was never the same. Every time it started as just a regular weird ass dream, he was at the Nasty Burger, but he was sitting at his kitchen table. His friends were there, so was some guy he’d never met, they were talking about monster trucks or… something. The guy he didn’t know was showing him a song he wrote, it was gentle and calm, Danny liked it.

That was when the Guys in White showed up. They’d been there before, but not every time. Danny remembered the last dream he had, vaguely, he didn’t know he was dreaming now, but he knew what was going to happen next.

“RUN!” he tried to scream, but his voice came out strangled and quiet. Sam and Tucker kept chatting, they couldn’t see the danger, the strange guy started playing a different song, he had an acoustic guitar now and was on a stage that wasn’t there before.

The Guys in White aimed their ectoguns, knocking off shots around the entire Nasty Burger, Valerie collapsed behind the counter, had she always been there? Jazz was next, she was reading a book on the lounge that had definitely been there the whole time. Danny kept trying to scream, but his throat just couldn’t make anything more than a strangled rasping noise.

Sam and Tucker collapsed before him, the music changed again, the guy on the stage had a smoking hole in his chest, he was playing a cello now. The music was calm, soft and gentle, it hadn’t stopped during the shooting. The GIW agent at the head of the group turned to Danny, face splitting into an evil grin, flaming hair licking at his temples, it wasn’t a GIW agent any more. It had never been a GIW agent.

Danny tried to transform, he needed to save them, they were dead but he NEEDED to save them, if he could go ghost, if he could change he could fix this. His core felt so far away, the cold chill within him just JUST out of his grasp. Why couldn’t he change? WHY COULDN’T HE CHANGE?

Tucker sat at his desk in the dark classroom, taking halfassed notes about… something something president Washington. Hadn’t they already covered this? A flash at the edge of his vision pulled his tired gaze over to the sleeping mess beside him. Danny made a noise, a whimper? It sounded like he was trying to say something.

“Ru… ru-” Danny muttered, voice broken and, oh god he sounded so terrified.

Tucker’s heart splintered into tiny little pieces, and those tiny pieces shattered until his heart was basically just a pile of powder, really sad and devastated powder. Concentrated melancholy, in powder form. He nudged Danny.

“Danny, Danny wake up. Dude you’re talking in your sleep, WAKE UP.” Tucker was super worried, like beyond overprotective mother worried, if Danny said something incriminating in his sleep, if he said something about PHANTOM-

“Gotta… go-” a strand of silver began to creep through Danny’s dark hair.

Oh fuck.

Tucker shook Danny as violently as he subtly could, he needed to wake up. He needed to wake the fuck up right the fuck right NOW. FUCK. It was panic time, shit was getting dangerously identity revealing up in here and Tucker had to do something about it.

More silver was weaving through Danny’s hair, flickers of a dark, skin tight costume appearing for only the briefest of anxiety inducing moments. They were sitting in the back corner of the room, no one had noticed that anything was wrong yet, but someone would. Someone would notice SOON if Tucker couldn’t get Danny to wAKE THE HECKING FUCK HELL UP.

“Danny I swear to god if you don’t wake up I’m going to kill the rest of you. WAKE. UP.” How was Tucker supposed to wake him up without drawing attention to- oh good lordy fucK HIS HAIR.

Tucker pulled Danny’s hood over his head as quickly as he could nearly half a second after a flash of white overtook his entire scalp. Had anyone noticed?? Tucker glanced around the room, nobody was looking, thank christ Wes wasn’t in this class.

Tucker tucked the white strands into the hood as best he could manage before texting Sam as fast as his fingers would allow.

Sam was in the middle of copying some crap about photosynthesis that she already knew when she felt her phone buzz. It was from Tucker, and if his spelling was anything to go by, he was in trouble.

'DIASTRACTION NOWm’

Sam got the gist.

Pretending she was about to vomit everywhere was an easy way out of the classroom, and from there it was just a quick run to the fire alarm. It wasn’t the first time Sam had pulled off a fake emergency, she smashed the glass and hit the button with no hesitation, fuck the consequences. From there she just had to figure out where Danny and Tucker were, they all had copies of each other’s classes in case of just such emergencies.

History, they had history. She knew which room that was.

Sam took off running, boots thundering through the crowds of students filtering out of their classrooms. Sam could barely hear the alarm over the sound of her heart beat thudding in her ears, she didn’t have time to panic and worry, something was wrong and the most important thing right now was finding out what it was and if her friends were okay.

Someone noticed her through the crowd though. As she smashed through a group of kids coming out of a maths class, one guy caught her gaze, one guy decided to follow. Jesus shit she did NOT have the time for this.

Sam detoured down a seperate hallway, the tall redhead on her tail easily keeping pace, why couldn’t he just mind his own god damn business for once and, you know what? Sam thought, FUCK IT.

Another detour into an empty classroom and she had him. Bursting through the door after her, Wes looked around fervently, expecting to find Danny in some kind of juicy compromising situation. What he got was a surprise boot to the gut and he hit the deck like a sack of bricks.

Sam didn’t waste a second before bolting from the room, Wes had already taken up enough of her precious time.

Wes coughed and wheezed and tried to drag a breath into his aching abdomen, she’d clocked him a damn heavy blow and his body was not cooperating until it had a good few moments to recover from Whatever The Fuck Just Happened.

Damn it he was so close!

“Alright everyone, out onto the parking lot, like we do literally every other week.” The history teacher droned, his voice dry. He didn’t even bother making sure everyone left the room before walking out himself, it was probably a ghost attack anyway. These things lost their sense of urgency after the last fifty billion times, the only reason he didn’t make everyone get back into their seats was for legal reasons and honestly, he could really use the smoke break.

Tucker made a show of getting up to leave, but once he and Danny were the only two left he immediately dropped his shit and whammo’d his fists down on Danny’s desk.

“WAKE UP!” He yelled as Sam slid haphazardly into the room, clocking her hip on the teacher’s desk as she failed to reign in her momentum. She struggled with her footing for a moment before catching herself and racing up to the back of the class.

“Is he okay? What’s happening??” she asked, breathlessly.

Tucker lifted the hood from Danny’s bright-ass silvery hair.

“He’s transforming in his sleep and I can’t get him to wake up.” Tucker rushed out in one breath before grabbing Danny by the shoulders. “WAKE. UP. WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!!!!” Tucker screamed while shaking him with about as much tenderness as an irate Skulker on illegal performance enhancing ghost drugs. Finally, it was enough.

Danny jolted roughly, spasmed almost, and opened his fluorescent green eyes. Sam and Tucker took a quick step back in case he lashed out, but he didn’t. Danny’s hands gripped at the table hard enough to leave gouges in the sharpie-graffiti stained surface as his breath came out laboured and rasping. Tears smeared across his cheeks and dripped from his nose and chin.

He blinked, hard, before finally raising his head from the desk, looking remarkably disoriented. He was still flickering in and out of ghost form, disappearing from view entirely a few times as well, but it was slowing down as he took a few deep, shuddering breaths. Soon enough he was calm enough to stick to one form, human fortunately.

Sam breathed out a sigh and sat heavily on the nearest chair. He was okay and god she needed to sit down and catch the breath she’d left behind in science class.

Tucker sat beside Danny - who was now vigorously rubbing at his face - and took back his earphones, Sam could hear something that sounded like a cello playing through the small speakers

Tucker got through maybe the first two syllables of the standard 'are you okay?’ when he was abruptly cut off by a mildly lisping giggle.

Wes stood half through the doorway, phone out and trained on Danny’s previously unstable form. He looked a little pale and seemed to be having trouble breathing but that didn’t stop a wide shit eating grin from stretching across his freckled cheeks.

“Gotcha.” he sneered before turning on his heel and fleeing in unbridled glee.

Sam had recovered quickly from her previous run, she was on him like the Box Ghost on a roll of bubble wrap. Tucker heard the pounding of two sets of feet followed by a loud THUD, a squeal, and then what sounded suspiciously like a phone being heavily stomped on by a very firmly placed boot. The groaning came after that, punctuated with some extremely foul language that may have been spluttered through a bleeding nose and/or lip.

Sam came back into the room with a crushed phone in one hand and bloody knuckles on the other. She wasn’t dicking around, not today.

“You okay Danny?” she asked, getting only a tired glare in response. “Sorry, standard question.”

Sam picked up Danny’s backpack and put her hand out for him to take, he grasped it gratefully and she pulled him up from his chair as Tucker wound an arm around his waist. With the support of the two actual greatest people in the whole damn world, Danny walked out of the school and into the parking lot where an exasperated principal Ishiyama was counting heads and calling names.

“Equal Rites! What were you three still doing inside? Get into your- Mr Fenton are you alright?” Mr Lancer’s angry stride softened into a quick jog, concern weaving it’s way through his face at the sight of Danny’s red eyes and wet cheeks.

“He uh, had a head on collision with Wes on our way out.” said Sam, like a liar. “Took a corner too fast and copped a hit to the nose so his eyes got all teary, but he’s okay.”

“Wes might need a little help though.” Tucker added on. “We offered but he’s pretty much convinced we just rammed him on purpose and he threatened to tell everyone we beat him up sooo we kinda just left him on the floor.”

Lancer rubbed at his brow, exasperated. He did NOT have the time for Wes shenanigans. He took a quick look at Danny’s face, checking for any bleeding, satisfied when he could find none he sent the three on their way to get their names marked off before he headed back to the school building to find Wes.

“Thanks.” Danny squeezed Sam and Tucker tenderly, never wanting to let them go. He was so glad they were here, he was so glad they were alive.

“Sleepover at my place tonight.” Tucker declared. “No exceptions, there’s gonna be cuddle piles and maybe a pillow fort, but definitely lots of these.” he gave Danny a big ol’ smooch on the forehead and pulled him in for a tight hug. “You’re gonna be fine man, you’ll be okay.”

Sam jumped on and threw her arms around both her boys, pressing her lips against Danny’s cheek.

“We’re not going anywhere, okay? We’re gonna sleep right beside you and tell those fucking nightmares to fuck right off, just like last time.” Sam gave him a hearty thump on the back that might have knocked over a regular human, but Danny barely shifted.

What in Ring and Crown’s name did he ever do to deserve these two.

That night after a coma inducing amount of junk food and soft drink Danny passed out smushed between Sam and Tuck in what was pretty much the most affectionate and down right adorable Danny Sandwich either of them had ever made.

He dreamed of the three of them beating the shit out of Dan with Fenton Anti-Creep Sticks. He hadn’t slept so well in years.

#lucifer is a bag of asks #danny phantom #lucifer is a bag of fanfiction

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zimboxl · 8 years ago

Text

The Tearful Run Home

Highlands Junior School taught children between the ages of five and thirteen, grades one through seven. It became a government-run institution some time in the late 90s or early 2000s. “It used to be so good,” is the refrain often muttered by nostalgic alumni of all races, although some of the older Rhodies do seem to take a special pleasure in seeing their world views affirmed. “Ay, it was good man!”

Kudzai attended the school in the mid-nineties, his parents lived nearby, and its standards plus the convenience made it an obvious choice. All the students wore anonymizing grey uniforms with red trimming, knee high socks with shorts and short sleeved shirts for the boys; and knee-length dresses and socks for the girls. All topped off with a fashion crime of a floppy hat that was essential for children frolicking for hours daily in Zimbabwe's sun. Perhaps if more of our melanin-deficient comrades heeded the verbal warnings of earnest teachers about sun damage, more of them would have avoided morphing into red-browed reptiles in their mid-to-late thirties.

The Highlands School grounds seemed intentionally designed to instill nostalgia years later. The property was large for a school catering to a few, if not just a couple of, hundred students. There were open sports fields, tennis courts, and a consistent style to all the architecture with regularly retouched paint to match the students' uniforms. On any given day the air would be alive with the smell of freshly mowed grass and children playing outside during class hours. There was a tiny peep hole between the girls' and boys' change rooms by the swimming pool. An open secret that enabled an improv game of voyeur and exhibitionist between the naughtier kids at an age when nobody cared to ask what comes next. The 'Upside Down Tree' was a convoluted dwarf tree which that was simultaneously grotesquely malformed, and cutely endearing. This tree is well engrained in the mythology of the place, taking on Tolkienesque proportions if you bring it up in conversation, just don't sully the memory by actually going to see it again. It still stands there, decades later, looking dejectedly over a set of unkempt tennis courts and the large grassy playground-cum-cricket pitch.

As is the norm, the students were split into streams. The dumdums and later bloomers were abandoned to the lower streams to contemplate their inadequacies, while the more cognitively gifted were placed in the upper streams to cultivate arrogance and a sense of entitlement. This was largely done fairly via standardized tests, but politics did play its part. Especially as one particular teacher, Mrs. Stenben, had two children, one year apart, enrolled in the school. A viral rumor once spread among the students that this she had conspired with her athletically challenged, overweight, and lazy older son to help him cheat during the compulsory cross-country run. She did this in typically crude Zimbabwean fashion by picking him up in the parking lot and dropping him off further down the course.

Break time, at about 10am, was a highlight of each day. Most children would split off into their groups and sit in circles, chatting hot air. They'd bring out their pack lunches, share jokes, mockery, play games. The livelier ones would run around playing more active games while dodging the seated groups. The main playground was vast, comprised of two adjacent cricket fields bissected by a straight walkway between the main classroom block and the boarding house. The flatness made it possible to see and hear hundreds of kids all at once. The sounds blurred into a cacophony of chatter, laughter, and the occasional scream.

The Gang was a group of five generally unremarkable black boys who Kudzai often hung out with during break time. Farai, the ring-leader, was arguably the least intelligent. He had a somewhat misshapen, but functional, head and a jarring laugh that demanded a victim. At break time The Gang (TG) would slither about the large playground looking for naive cheerfulness to sully with their rebellious anti-social experiments. In hindsight, this was just a gentle introduction. The full extent of the casual cruelty of children would be revealed later in high school, long after The Gang had disbanded.

When kicking a tennis ball back and forth became boring, the Gang sometimes looked for someone to laugh at mercilessly until they cried. They almost always succeeded, in large part due to Farai's maniacal cackle and talent for accusatory pointing. They would just walk up and start laughing. No verbalized reason was needed, the mere sight and sound of the laughter was enough to prompt tears from the more sensitive children.

Once, again for no reason, Farai turned his talents against his fellow gang member Kudzai. Kudzai was caught off guard and felt a horrible nauseating churn in his belly, but he managed to avoid the final humiliation of tears. For revenge he later hid a soft-core porn magazine (tits only) in Farai's desk, which an appalled teacher later found. Farai was punished and Kudzai never confessed his role in the debacle. It was easy for all to accept that Farai had naughty magazines, just as it was easy for Farai to accept that one of his many victims over the years had finally struck back.

The Gang was over after the boys passed their Grade 7 examinations and returned to the bottom of the social cesspool as Form 1 students at their respective high schools. Years later Tapiwa, one of the quieter Gang members, would win an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League University in the US, rumored to have been Harvard. A scholarship which he never used because he tragically got a girl pregnant a few months before he was due to depart to what would probably have been a better life. The rest blurred into obscurity over the years, either leaving Zimbabwe quietly or settling into well-adjusted, socially acceptable Zimbo routines.

Classes ended at 1pm and the students either went home, ate lunch, or starved before afternoon sports. Since his family lived closeby, Kudzai usually walked home to for lunch, even if he had to come back for sports. He alternated routes between Kew Drive and Dromore Road. Both were about the same distance, conventionally pretty streets with a variety of flowering trees and domestic workers passing time and braiding hair outside their gates. Kew Drive had more traffic, while Dromore Road was a quieter and shadier street. Most of the children who took that route walked alone as opposed to the groups on Kew Drive.

On his walks home down Dromore Road Kudzai had observed a mysterious man in a Mazda 323 who regularly came and parked there for about half an hour before leaving. He always parked in the same tree shaded spot furthest from any house gates and the Seventh Day Adventist church towards the other end of the street. The man clearly had a littering problem and was creating a growing mess of discarded fast food packaging and other plastic garbage in his go-to spot. Usually the man wasn't alone, but his companions seemed to have a dark talent for evading Kudzai's curious side eye as he ambled by, slowing down just enough to not make it too obvious that he was watching them. One day the mystery died and it became obvious what was going on. The Mazda 323 wasn't there, but it was clear that amongst the dirt-stained and broken Chicken Inn packs were a lot of used condoms. One of which was still glistening and relatively fresh. Suddenly Kudzai got an idea.

He ran loosely and seemingly tirelessly down Dromore Road. Like most eleven year old boys who ran a lot. Beth, wrong place wrong time, ran breathlessly like a novice, reaping the rewards of having managed to dodge most physical training and compulsory cross country runs with her various parents' and doctor's notes. Kudzai had used a stick to pick up the gnarly condom. He ran with it on front of him, a little to the side just in case it fell off so he wouldn't run into it. He cried ecstatically from laughter as he chased after Beth, leaving a misty trail of tears in the wake of her annoyed screams. This was just the sort of asinine prank that perfectly tickled his adolescent sense of humor. He could laugh so much at times he had to force himself to stop before his jaw cramped or he tweaked an intercostal muscle in his rib cage.

Beth was horrified, and she was tiring. Kudzai, thinking devilishly on the fly, consciously slowed to just the right speed to sustainably keep her running, backpack and all, for the road's roughly three hundred meter length. His intention was not to catch her, only to make her run all the way to the intersection at which point they could turn their separate ways towards their respective homes. Catching her prematurely would only ruin his fun. And if he actually touched her (or god forbid, himself) with the gooey contents of the used condom that would be too gross and probably lead to peeved parents getting involved. Kudzai didn't fully understand the mysterious goo or condom at that point in his life, but he knew it wasn't something he could put on someone forcibly without getting into real trouble.

As they reached the intersection Bertha turned right and looked over her shoulder to see if Kudzai was going to follow her. He did not. He waved goodbye to his classmate grinning, his growing appetite for mischief satiated for one more day.

#non-fiction #true #story #struestory #zimbabwe #harare #highschool #chase #sgort

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petriichvrs · 4 years ago

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𝒘𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒍𝒆𝒚, 𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐘.

❝ you know PEACE like someone who has survived a long war. take it one day at a time, because everything has the scent of another possible war ; you know how easily one can start, one moment QUIET, the next, blood. war colors your voice, warms it, even. 𝐍𝐎 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐊𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐄𝐑. no one asks. perhaps you were both. you haven’t kissed anyone for a while, now. to you, EVERYTHING tastes like 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅. ❞

hey, isn’t that GINEVRA MOLLY WEASLEY? i read a daily prophet article on them, once ; the twenty two year old pureblood WITCH is a gryffindor alumnus who has gone on to be a professional chaser for the holyhead harpies. i’ve heard they can be quite RESILIENT & INTUITIVE, but i don’t know... they came off very HEADSTRONG & WAGGISH in that interview. it really is hard to know what to believe these days though, isn’t it? click 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 for statistics, 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 for ginny’s entire history and 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 for her pinterest.

𝐅𝐔𝐋𝐋 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘.

click this link !

𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘.

seventh child and only daughter of arthur and molly. first girl born into the weasley fam for GENERATIONS, so that makes her special. had too many brothers. biggest grievance was they never let her play quidditch with them, so she broke into their shed and taught herself. cried every single time they went to hogwarts without her.

eventually got there herself. her first year notoriously SUCKED.

if ‘sucked’ is a good enough word to describe being possessed by tom riddle and opening the chamber of secrets, which ultimately led to a lot of people almost dying, including herself.

this, understandably, royally fucked ginny’s shit up. easily seen by her extra special hysterical reaction to the dementors. didn’t do much in her second yr other than be upset by them on the train and be hermione granger 2.0 ( overachiever extraordinaire ).

fully supported harry potter during his fourth year, when he became the unwitting fourth champion. would have gone to the yule ball with him if she hadn’t pledged herself toneville longbottom, who goes on to become one of her best friends.

got all up in order business in her fourth year, against her parents wishes. you can take the girl from the rebellion but you can’t take the rebellion from the girl. joined dumbledore’s army. also named it. became a royal pain in umbridge’s ass. was super talented at spells ( she’s special ) that they were being taught. had a rough christmas cos her dad almost got killed by voldemort’s ugly snake. hexed draco malfoy and still giggles about it to this day. fought off death eaters in the department of mysteries and was witness to sirius black’s death.

everyone rly wanted a piece of ginny in her fifth year ( understandable ). she got invited to slug club. was also made chaser of the gryffindor quidditch team ( after playing seeker the previous year when harry was banned ). she dated harry for a hot minute after she finally got rid of dean thomas ( srry dean ), but… after dumbledore died and death eaters attacked the school he broke up with her to ‘protect her’ which… sucked.

honestly. summer in general sucked. her bro got attacked by a werewolf. her boyfriend dumped her for her own good. there was a wedding, for some reason.

sixth year also sucked. the da was reformed ( by ginny & her friends ) but could only do so much in the face of the gross misuse of power by grown ass adults. ginny did all that she could even when they were actively torturing them all, but was made go into hiding at easter.

followed her fam to hogwarts for the battle. almost had to sit the whole thing out, but ran off after she was forced to leave the room of requirement.

let’s recap the battle real quick : her brother? died. her friends? died. the love of her life? never even said goodbye and died. ginny? almost died! she did not have a good time. 0/10 stars on yelp, in fact. but they prevailed! they made harry proud! love when you succeed and get ptsd for your troubles.

ginny helped rebuild hogwarts over the summer, and went back in september to finish her seventh year, but… it wasn’t really home anymore. a war will do that. loss will do that. she was trying very hard to be okay - and in a lot of ways, trying a little too hard to be who she had ALWAYS been. she probably could have done with being told that no one expected her to be unchanged, but… everyone was going through their own stuff.

she tried to honor the one’s that they lost by living, but… that was easier on paper. ginny didn’t seem to make it all the way through the five stages of grief. she was angry, and she was sad, but she couldn’t deny it and she couldn’t change it - and acceptance was impossible. her grief turned into a persistent feeling of emptiness, and that took a toll on her, as a person.

a lot that made her happy once didn’t, anymore. she was scouted by the holyhead harpies fresh out of hogwarts, but when they asked her to sign, she didn’t immediately take them up on the offer. quidditch was about the only thing she had left at that point that brought her some measure of joy, and it felt…surreal, to be considering taking such a small pleasure and turning it into her life work. it felt not right, for some reason. doing something so ‘normal’ felt insulting, almost, to all the people who wouldn’t do anything normal again - but she couldn’t do nothing forever, and eventually, she was convinced.

she took the offer. she never looked back. things haven’t really gotten better in all the time since then, but at least they can’t get any worse.

𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐒. triggers for talk of death, scars and trauma.

ginny’s scars tell more stories about her life at hogwarts than she has ever uttered. from her first year, she has marks that she can’t name the cause of. scarring along her thighs and upon her fingertips that were obtained in some of her black outs, that her parents BEGGED madam pomfrey to remove, but who she quietly told to not bother. there’s a small dent on her forehead that she sustained when she collapsed in the chamber of secrets, and you wouldn’t see it, if you weren’t looking. she doesn’t point it out.

of course, she sustained some in her fourth year. she fell over during a dumbledore’s army session and she scraped up the palm of her hand, something that they all laughedabout, back then. she broke her ankle badly enough that it continues to click, even now, but luckily was never a hassle in her chosen career. maybe she’d have been even worse of, if bellatrix had tortured her like planned. ginny counts her blessings.

but it’s her sixth year that ruined her. that instilled within her a LOVE of long sweaters and a fear of being seen entirely naked. ‘blood traitor’ is carved into her right arm from lines she was FORCED to write with her own blood, over and over, after being caught putting graffiti on the side of green house number five. she didn’t cry, to them. she didn’t shed a tear. along her back there are criss cross scars from the CRACK of a whip, so many of them that ginny still closes her eyes when she’s getting into the bathtub, so she doesn’t catch a glimpse in the mirror. she’s been suspended by her ankles, by her wrists, and she has the taut skin there to show for it, and under one instance of the cruciatus curse, she FELL and sustained two wounds most commonly paired together in her thoughts - a scar along her left cheekbone, and a gnarly one upon her knee.

the war scarred her too. scarred her deeper. scarred her truer. she has more now than she can possibly remember that serve as a reminder to the war that they fought, together - and she tries to be proud of them. she really does. but even she finds it difficult.

ginny still keeps a bag packed and ready to go at the drop of a hat under her bed, just in case she has to run. it’s a habit instilled in her by her parents from when they went into hiding, and it’s one that she’s finding almost impossible to break. she still sleeps with her wand underneath her pillow every night, fingers curled around the wood - terrified, always, to be caught without it.

her nightmares vary, but they’re there. sometimes she wakes in a cold sweat, blinking away the MEMORY of green light that came all too close to finishing her off. sometimes, all she can see is the rotting body of her older brother and his open, vacant eyes. sometimes it’s harry, and he’s all alone, and she’s screaming at him - just screaming and crying and begging him to turn around and stop and come back, but he never does. sometimes she’s back in the dungeons of hogwarts, hanging by her ankles, and when she’s shakily sipping coffee in the morning, she can still hear the carrow twins laughter in her ears, clear as day.

she’s suffered from sleep paralysis, too, though this predates the war and began in the weeks after the chamber of secrets. her limbs too heavy to move, the demon that stands over her is tom riddle - her longest and most withstanding nightmare. she’s ashamed of the fact that though she fears she’s forgotten the exact sound of fred’s laugh or the feel of harry’s hand in hers, she’ll never be able to forget the features of sixteen year old voldemort.

ginny can throw off the cruciatus curse, now, and perhaps can even resist imperio. she’s never wanted to TRY, but after the many times it was used upon them in her sixth year.. she believes it possible.

she trained to be an animagus, more out of… boredom, than anything else. she’sregistered as an orange tabby cat, and it’s not uncommon for her to run off in this form in the direction of the lake, where she can sit for hours.

ginny is bloody awful at all of the things her mother tried to teach her. knitting, cooking,general housework. she would sit for HOURS with molly in the lead up to christmas, a pair of knitting needles held awkwardly in both hands, fingers incapable of making the loops and stitches that molly is so skilled at doing, until SHE had all the christmas jumpers done… and ginny only had a rather pathetic excuse of a scarf. similarly, she tried many a time to lend a hand in the kitchen, or memorize the recipe and replicate her mothers famous homemade fudge - almost always creating some sort of inedible goop at the end of it all. she tries, god bless her, but she just doesn’t seem to have the knackthat came so EASILY to molly, and years ago after a particularly disastrous attempt at knitting the weasley family matching jumpers that ended with tears all around, ginny gave up that particular hobby.

she can garden, though. BOY can she garden. neville taught her how to take care of plants she thought were beautiful, and when she moved into her little bedsit, ginny pulled up the entire garden in her allotment - redoing it in her image. she spends hours out there, knee deep in mud, hands covered, and she comes in, sunburnt, smiling, blazing and beautiful. it’s such a simple joy to her, but it is one, nonetheless.

she always had an interest in muggles. ginny idolized her father ( and still, perhaps, does ), and some of her earliest memories were of clambering onto piles of scrap in the burrows yard, just to peek through the little dusty window on arthur’s shed and watch as he tinkered with some new muggle artifact. she was the one who told fred and george about the car, you know - though she never thought even for a MOMENT that they would end up driving it.

she learned the concept of ‘stick and poke’ tattoos from a worn out fiction book she borrowed from hermione, and learned how to replicate them with a good quill, some magical ink and a couple good spells. she gave herself her own one, in fact - the little snitch inside of the crook of her left arm, that isn’t a perfect circle, but still manages to glow BRIGHT when the conditions are perfect for quidditch. she got pretty good at them, too, giving many of her classmates their own magical tattoos as the years went by - though, like many things that brought her joy, she stopped doing them after the battle of hogwarts.

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒.

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their FATHER / ARTHUR WEASLEY who resembles ANDREW LINCOLN, EWAN MCGREGOR, MADS MIKKELSON, DANIEL CRAIG / ANY FC and should be OLD. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( father of the weasley kids ! muggle loving king ! arthur doesn’t get ENOUGH recognition for being one of the good ones, but he can have it here !)

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their MOTHER / MOLLY WEASLEY who resembles NICOLE KIDMAN, SUSANNA THOMPSON, CHRISTINA HENDRICKS, LENA HEADEY, GILLIAN ANDERSON / ANY FC and should be OLD. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( kickass mother ! the earliest love of my young life ! the strongest woman alive for dealing with her merry band of misfits day in and day out ! pls bring momther.)

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their NEIGHBOURS / ANY AMT who resemble MENA MASSOUD, ALEX FITZALAN, ZIYI ZHANG, JESSICA ALBA / ANY FC and should be ANY AGE. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( they can be any age ! they can be a canon, if you’d like, or someone entirely original ! ginny lives in a bedsit in london - i imagine somewhere in greenwich and i’m leaning towards charlton - which she purchased outright two years ago, sort of… seeking out her own space, in a sense. she rented an allotment just around the corner where she could grow her own vegetables and flowers and things, and she finds… a great deal of peace simply existing, there. tending to her garden. sipping tea in her bedroom/sitting room/kitchen combo. reading on the roof, probably. i'd actually love if the bedsit was a part of a small little wizarding community in london - so a lot of members of the magical world all living closely together - and i’d love even more if she had a bunch of neighbours, all of whom she could have some varied dynamics with. there could be the one who she always goes to when she needs a sugar topup ! the one who trampled on her tomatoes once in the allotment, and they’re now in all out war ! the one who comes over sometimes and simply sits quietly with ginny, for a while, both of them enjoying each others company so simply ! lots of options. gimme all.)

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their PET SITTER who resemble ANY FC and should be 20+. applicants do have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( i’d put this as sort of adjacent to the above, but it doesn’t have to be ! they COULD be a fellow neighbour, but they might just be someone ginny as come to know well and trusts to take care of her pygmy puff and owl when she’s away. that’s… a huge position of trust in ginny’s life, because she loves arnold and archimedes more than she loves HERSELF, so ; they’d probably have quite a good dynamic ! )

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their FLINGS who resemble BEN HARDY, AVAN JOGIA, HUNTER SCHAFER, ASHLEY MOORE / ANY FC ! IDC and should be 21+. applicants do have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( i don’t know whether ‘romantic connections’ is the right place for this , but… o well ! i have the flip side connect down below for characters who ginny has been involved with in the past, but i thought one for present time would be fun ! i like flings, as a concept. i like them for ginny especially, because i think she has a very modern view on them, and doesn’t really… go in to any one night stand or three date relationship or brief fling with… an expectation, or the NEED for it to go beyond what it is for them both at the time. ginny’s quite happy to exist as a single being for the rest of her life. she’s not seeking a long term relationship, nor am i in the mindset right now that she ever will - but she hasn’t become an old maid just because she’s grieving someone she loved, and no one expects it of her. i love the idea of just… characters having casual dates ! characters hooking up for fun, no strings attached ! please let me explore it. )

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their PERSONAL TRAINER / TRAINING PAL who resemble ANY FC and should be 20+. applicants do have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( this can be one or the other, i don’t really mind ! and it could be quidditch based or gym based - also, don’t mind ! i think ginny tries to continue finding quidditch fun, even though it’s also her job now, so she probably does a lot of training on her own just as a way to… fly, on her own, outside of a harpies training session. it’d be nice if she had someone to do that with, or finds someone with who she can ! flip side ; now she lives in muggle london, i think she’s started to really get into muggle gyms, so that’s an option too. a good connect to pair that take with would be the one for her neighbours, cause they could walk there and back with one another ! )

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their QUIDDITCH TEAMMATES / HOLYHEAD HARPIES who resembles PRISCILLA QUINTANA, FLORENCE PUGH, HUNTER SCHAFER, ANTONIA THOMAS / ANY FC and should be 20+. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( the holyhead harpies is an all female quidditch team that plays in the britain + ireland league, and ginny has been one of their chasers for almost five years now ! there isn’t much given to them, outside of that and some controversies surrounding their captain - gwenog jones, a past member of the slug club - but i can’t see it any other way than as a team of talented players who have formed a tight knit bond. i’d love to explore the different dynamics they all could have, and the only way to do that is by having ‘em here !)

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their EX / MICHAEL CORNER who resembles SANTIAGO SEGURA, DAVID CASTENEDA, AVAN JOGIA, ALBERTO ROSENDE / ANY FOC and should be 23/24. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( the first boy ginny dated at hogwarts ; the one she dumped because he was being a sore loser about gryffindor beating ravenclaw. honestly ? hilarious. i don’t think that there was love between them at all, and i’d love to see them have become quite good friends, since - give me two people who were figuring out relationships and what that meant when they were together, who fell apart and then came back together when they realized they could be good friends ! that’s a story i’m interested in hearing. )

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their EX / DEAN THOMAS who resembles LUCIEN LAVISCOUNT, KEITH POWERS, REECE KING, JOHN BOYEGA/ ANY BLACK FC and should be 23/24. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( the one who got away ! sort of. you know. i think dean got it rough, to b honest with you. he came along at a point in ginny’s life when she had just started to feel she was breaking away from her brothers, a bit, and becoming a bit more miss independent - and she was also absolutely not oblivious to the fact that harry seemed a lot more interested in her than usual. things with dean and ginny went well for a while, but they weren’t what each other needed at the point of their lives that they were at, and that led to arguments between the two of them - a lot. eventually they broke up, and for a long while, couldn’t even be in the same room as one another. it was definitely the awk breakup that made everyone else feel awk, but i’d hope that after the war and in these past six years, they might’ve reached a point of being able to get along ! )

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their EXES / ???who resemble ABSOLUTELY ANY FC and should be 22 - 24. applicants do have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( you know what ? try and convince me that there weren’t more teenage flings. of course there were ; because ginny was encouraged to find things out for herself, and was NOT raised to be find casual dating shameful in any sense of the words. ginny worked out that she was bi in school, and i actually like to imagine that it was through short lived flings with fellow students who were doing exactly what she was - figuring themselves out. they would have been pretty young and it was all mostly innocent, but i’m interested in the thought !)

GINNY WEASLEY ( jessica barden ) is looking for their SUPPORT GROUP PALS who resemble ABSOLUTELY ANY FC and should be ANY AGE. applicants do not have to contact RACHEL to talk over the details before applying. ( look me in the eye and tell me there aren’t a whole bunch of support groups running to this day, dedicated to the witches and wizards and wixs who fought in either of the major wizarding wars. ginny probably attends one that’s london based, and was probably heavily encouraged to go. she’s not against therapy or even ‘support’, but… she is the sort of person who finds it a nice thing to think about, but not something that feels as if it’s doing her much good. she holds on to a lot, and that makes it difficult for her to really take from the group what she should be, but she’s still going ! she might hate some of the people at it. she might grab coffee with someone after, every time, religiously. maybe she just always saves your character a seat or vice versa. we can discuss ! ) [ heather pettigrew + more ]

#nox.intro #( 𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐘 𝐖𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐋𝐄𝐘 ) ━━━ * biography !#just reposting bc i changed my intro format and i like things to b matchy matchy #but i added her wanted connects ! fun !

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