#most people have moved to the third installment

[seffien]

if u cheat at splatoon 1 you're like. lowest of the low to me. splatoon is neither that hard nor that serious for you to break the rules

[inbabylontheywept]

Soviet Birds.

The secret facility that I work in has holes in the ceiling. We don't know how to get them fixed.

We tried asking the government to fix it, once. We told them that the holes in the older parts of the facility had gotten large enough to fit birds through, and that birds were getting through, and that, perhaps, a Soviet Spy could fit through as well.

After all, it is well known that Soviet Spies and pigeons are approximately the same diameter.

Our hope was that that this vague and nonsensical threat would put a little fire under Uncle Sam's feet. If the fed couldn't be bothered to give a shit about the giant gaping holes in the roof of our facility, perhaps they could be persuaded to give a shit about... Soviet Spies.

This attempt at manipulation 100% blew up in our faces.

See, the government does not need to be persuaded to give a shit about Soviet Spies. It still wakes up most nights, drenched in cold sweat, terrified and confident that a Soviet Spy is hiding in their nightstand. If it sees a rock on the ground, it flips it over, pistol drawn, ready to shoot the Soviet Spy it fully expects to slither out from underneath. Which is to say: The government is crazy. So when we dropped those two words - inflitration risk - in the repair request, they came in guns-a-blazin'.

Does that mean that they fixed the roof? Of course not. Don't be stupid. No, instead of performing basic maintenance, they installed a state of the art alarm system throughout the facility - lasers, sonar, the works - and told us to always be on the guard. Because of the roof holes.

Then they left.

So now we had an extremely good alarm system... and birds. Which have combined in incredibly obvious and predictable ways to produce an unending fountain of problems.

For Example: About once a month, someone gets called in by the local airforce dispatch because AAAAAAAAAAA a Spy is in the Rad Lab! We're all gonna die! Except every time, it's a bird. And I get why we have to check, but every time, the dispatcher is panicked and the person going out has to be like listen, listen: It's a bird. It's always a bird. It's been a bird every month for the last fifteen years. It will be a bird next month. All this stress? Bad for your heart.

Second Example: Sometimes, birds get in while we're actually working. And when it's in the morning, you know, it's a nuisance, and it stops testing (we are not going to risk irradiating a bird) but it's not an all-hands-on-deck situation because it doesn't take ten hours to get a bird out. But surprisingly often, the bird gets in riiiiight at closing time, and in that situation, everyone goes feral because nobody can leave until the alarm is set, and we cannot set the alarm while the bird is there, because the bird would immediately trigger it and then we'd have to stay another 4 hours to confirm that it was not a Soviet Bird.

So in order to go home, everyone's top priority is Get That Bird. And we have a system for it.

Step 1: The test stands tend to be located in rooms with 30+ foot ceilings. We can't catch birds in places like that - so we have to lure the bird into the relatively low ceilinged (8 feet only) upper offices.

We do this by turning all the lights off in the test rooms, then putting floodlights by the exits. I don't know why this works - some kind of evolutionary brain fragment shared by both Bugs and Birds - but work it does. The birds almost always follow after the lights. From there, it’s just two guys moving the floodlight and a third guy to turn off the lights.

Step 2: Everyone else has been waiting for this step. There is this long stairway up from the basement level into the offices, and in the final stage, the floodlights are brought to the base of the stairwell to bring the bird up. At the top of the steps there will be a group of tennish people, waiting for the signal. The light guys will set up the final transfer, everyone will tense, and then, swish...a bird will flit up the stairs and into the offices.

It's like watching werewolves on a full moon. Before the bird cometh, we are engineers. Nerds. Pale and skinny things, trembling under the fluorescent lights. After the bird, we are beasts. Feral, gnawing things, glowing under the orange sunrise of the 70's halogen floodlights.

And like all beasts, we cannot help but give chase.

Step 3: The were-engineers begin the hunt. The goal at the start is not really to catch the bird - just exhaust it. So the pack simply does not relent. Because the stakes are going home on time, the group is basically given free reign to go anywhere in the building. If someone's door is open, and the bird goes inside, they're going to have to deal with ten sweaty panting maniacs leaping around their office. They don't get to say that they're busy, or remark on how all this movement is a terrible distraction. They are allowed to sit in silence during the chaos, and perhaps thank the war party for chasing the bird while they sat comfortably on their ass. This has been explained several times, and it will continue to be explained until cooperation is achieved.

Anyway.

The chase can go on for quite some time. Sometimes, the bird will get tired and find a crevice to hide in, where it can then be reached through standard cornered-bird catching techniques.

Other times, it will slow down enough that someone can actually yoink it out of the air. But this will go on until someone catches the bird and triggers Step 4.

Step 4: The Finale. This is the get-the-bird-out-of-the-building stage, and it requires someone to adopt a specific role: To Become the Sacrificial Vessel of Bird Removal.

This job is both coveted and feared. It's coveted, because holding a wild bird in one's hands is a precious thing. To feel how small, and fragile, and scared it is, only to free it from the building? That is what it's like to be a benevolent God. But the cost! Oh, the cost. The entire time the Vessel is in motion, the bird will be biting the hell out of their fingers. And I cannot emphasize enough just how painful bird bites are. Their entire face is a set of needle posed pliers, and they know tricks the even the cartels haven't figured out yet. So there's always a little hubbub about who shall be The Vessel while onlookers, stranded outside The Office of Bird Capture, can only look on. Quiet arguments and pleas are heard, little fragments of fear and pride and glory trickling out of room like the silver dust left behind in a bag of well shook quarters. The sound of concensus is silence, and the argument will go on until that's all that's left. And then, from the darkness of the final office, the chosen sacrifice will step forward: Hands gently cupped, tears streaming down their face, fingers trembling from the pain of the ongoing bird chomps.

And this scene is what organizes people. Not leadership, not truly. No one can think and coordinate a crowd while their fingers are being attacked with a combination nutcracker/ear piercer. But the crowd sees the suffering of their annointed, and it is driven to do everything poossible to make the process flow. People instinctively flair out, finding the fastest path outside. Doors are held open. Paths are cleared. Someone, somehow, always knows the way forward and can describe it to the sufferer. Left, left, forward. Corner closet. Yep, there's a hall in there. Forward. Two-hundred more feet man, you're doing great. Just hold it together a little longer. You're killing it.

Then the final door swings open, and the bird flees out into what remains of daylight. And yet, even here, the deed is not yet done. I cannot explain it in words, but the crowd that helped is never content until they can see and speak on the Bird Vessel's wounds. They all have to pull the fingers back and see what was given. Estimate the price: One day to get better - No, three - No, a week! Are you blind? Do you see that blood blister? -Yeah, that's not going away anytime soon - Damn, can you believe how feisty those things are? Like wolves without teeth.

(They cannot help but touch as they go. It has always been this way. Even Thomas was not content until he felt the wounds in Christ's hands.)

Only when the last of the helpers has seen, and commented, and commended, will the engineers scatter. It is their return from the underworld that announces to the sun living surface dwellers that they too can go home. (@somerunner tolja it needed to be a post.)

[gansey-like]

Hey so this is super scary

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.

The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying that the company had strayed too far from its values over the prior decade.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement.

Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.

Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.

Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.

Mr. Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump. He told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.

The change brings an end to a practice the company started eight years ago, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation spread across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.

As a result of enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.

Among the changes, Mr. Zuckerberg said, will be to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He also said that the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas. That would “help remove the concern than biased employees are overly censoring content,” he added.

[wingedcat13]

Tell No Lies

[Part One of the third Synovus installment.]

Living on a tropical island didn’t mean the weather was always sunny.

Your island wasn’t in quite the right spot to really get the worst of the monsoon season - too far on the eastern side of the Pacific - but you did still get plenty of rainstorms. When that happened, your group of minions battened down the hatches, triple checked the generators, and usually played cards or other bored games. Sorry, board games.

Sometimes you played, sometimes you didn’t. You weren’t playing this time, because you were catching up on some reading. Sans costume, slumped sideways in a chair, one hand on the cup of hot chocolate you had requested and immediately forgotten about.

Then your phone had dinged.

That was weird, because during storms you didn’t usually have service - technology hadn’t yet beaten Mother Nature entirely. But there were the underwater cables that had been set up to provide internet access, and emergency calls.

And that was more than enough for an entity like Optix to get through when it wanted to. Even when your phone was set to silent.

With a small sigh, you had set the book aside and reached for the screen. An email from Optix: the subject line, in all caps, “INVITATION.”

Intriguing.

You opened it, scrolling past the gold-adorned letterhead to the digital party invitation. You read it. You deleted it. You reluctantly pulled it from the trash folder to read it again. You forced yourself to read it a third time.

‘Thank you for informing me.’ You replied to Optix, before sliding the phone away. The book came to rest comfortably against your chest, pages down, probably doing all kinds of damage to the spine. You stared up at the ceiling, ignoring the present to alternate between stewing over the possibilities of the future and miring yourself in the past.

Eventually, your field of vision had been interrupted by a slow-moving face, drifting in from your peripheral. One eyebrow raised, only inches from your own face, it continued moving slowly and smoothly past where most people would have reached a limit.

“Dude.” Alexandria said, “You haven’t even blinked in like. Two minutes.”

Your erstwhile ‘apprentice’ was using her abilities to float over you. Wearing her suit, which had been modified recently to include panels of bright color against the near-black gray you’d initially designed, she looked sleek and surreal. And older than seventeen, though maybe you just couldn’t judge ages past ‘young’ anymore.

“Hello, Menace.” You’d greeted her placidly. “How goes the Great Pacific Vandalism Project?”

Alexandria beamed, and floated away an inch or so to a more comfortable speaking range. She’d finally gotten a better handle on equilibrium in flight, so her gestures as she talked no longer caused her to wobble in whatever direction she indicated. “It went great! We finally managed to get that CEO.” Her grin widened, “Right in the middle of a press conference.”

“It was satisfying.” A different voice had agreed, as another costumed figure moved into your general field of view. This one didn’t lean over you, but rather settled into the chair opposite, and helped themself to your hot chocolate. Cold chocolate, by now.

A bit of concentration had changed that, as the thief raised the mug to consider it. Their dark blue form-fitting suit had changed in recent times as well, now featuring more delicate details around the neck and wrists. Not quite scales, not quite flourishes, not quite vines, picked out in a slightly darker shade. The short cape at the hips now had flared ends, rather than a pointed tip. It had an elegance that Menace’s suit lacked.

Or perhaps that was the wearer?

“Naiad.” You’d been certain that your tone hadn’t changed. “Welcome back.”

Minerva had lifted the stolen mug in salute, and allowed you a trace of a smile. Crime agreed with her - even if she only rarely agreed with it. Once the straight-laced, impeccable hero Athena, she was now known much more widely as the Naiad: a bioterrorist with a strong cult following among ecology groups.

Over the past year, she had very publicly and very precisely targeted companies who were responsible for much of the pollution going into the Pacific Ocean. Working alone at first, then allowing Menace to join her, she had made trips to the great garbage patches that floated in the ocean’s wide expanse, and returned their contents very directly to sender.

Cars, homes, persons, factories and distribution centers (while they were closed and no one was present; employees were innocent until proven guilty) were all fair game. The only way to be sure of immunity from the Naiad’s attacks was to publicly document cleanup efforts, make donations to the groups who did the same, and implement vast reductions in pollution.

It was good mother/daughter bonding time for the two of them. You knew your presence would only overshadow their efforts, so you simply offered aid and tips during the planning phases. And there was the standing unspoken fact that you would appear to bail them out, if it ever became necessary. So far, it had not been necessary.

Minerva had even admitted, grudgingly, that this new angle on life was, at times, fun.

And that, really, plus the trace of a smile, is what had given you a terrible idea.

—------------------------------

What was even more terrible was that Minerva had agreed.

She stood now at your shoulder, just a step behind, while your invitation was inspected by a man who had gotten very tense at your approach. His costume was patterned in pale yellows and purples, a strip of rainbow draped over his collarbones. You couldn’t make out much expression behind the mask, but you didn’t really need to when you could hear the material creaking as he prepared to square up.

“I am… confused.” He allowed, considering the printed invitation. “You - do know this is a hero’s wedding, right?”

“I’m aware.” You answer flatly, the helmet giving you a wonderfully crisp punctuation. You’ve made only the slightest concessions to the event’s formality in the form of a nicer, gilt-edged cape with decorative clasps, and white rose corsages at your wrists to indicate your intention of peace. “I don’t begrudge you the confusion, Sun Dog. I will be grudging if you attempt to deny me entry.”

Sun Dog hesitated a moment more. You really didn’t want to hurt the man, no one you knew of did - which was probably why he was the bouncer at this particular event. It was hard to hate the person whose sole job was disaster response and relief.

Just when you were resigning yourself to this going poorly at the gate, Naiad leaned forward over your shoulder. Her costume had been adapted to include a floor-length skirt in a blue ombre, slit to the thigh on the sides and revealing the usual suit’s leggings beneath, and her arms were bare to the shoulder except for jewelry in the places of her normal accents. She’d pinned her hair up with sea-shell and coral pins, with deep purple pearls for earrings. You stopped breathing, attempting to be as still as possible to prevent any of those decorations catching on part of your ensemble.

“Parhelion. We’ll cause no trouble.”

The name clearly meant something to him. Sun Dog’s body language changed, shifting rapidly through a few shades of things you didn’t know him well enough to identify. None of them were hostile, though, so you gave the man his moment to process.

“I… had my suspicions, but…” Sun Dog shook his head, “Sorry. Not the time or the place. Glad you’re alright - Naiad, is it?” At her confirming nod, he continued, “Anyway, the invitation is legitimate, I’m just surprised you actually came. Uh. Guest book is ahead, gift table to the left. Good luck?”

You nodded regally and moved further into the venue, gaudily bedecked in white and taupe and glittering silver and gold. At the guest book, you confined your signature at first to the simple stylized S that was popular among bored schoolchildren. Naiad signed more gracefully, and pressed the pen back into your hand. You contemplated stealing it to make a point, but added the remaining letters to your name in a normal script instead.

Naiad was also the one to place your gift - a small black box with a silver ribbon - among the bright and shiny assortment of well-wishes, though that was more a matter of practicality. If you’d put it there, everyone would’ve assumed it was a bomb.

And the entire time, you were surrounded by people in costume. Some had made little to no alteration to their standard getups. Others had clearly commissioned outfits specifically for this event. Those who were part of the wedding party were all in what felt to you like mockery of their usual garb; the same shapes and silhouettes, but in shades of champagne and adorned with glitter, their masks or helms altered to match each other.

You didn’t stand out as much as you might’ve. There were heroes who dressed in dark colors and full-coverage helmets. It was the cape that really made your silhouette distinctive, which was why you’d shortened it from its usual wide floor-length to a slimmer, knee-length drape. And besides, who would invite Synovus to a wedding? Particularly this wedding?

Abruptly, you wished that changing your outfit hadn’t felt like so much of a concession, a surrender. You wished that you could’ve hemmed and hawed between narrow or wide skirts, short or long sleeves, backless or high necked. Layers of chiffon, of deep blue with tiny flickering gems in blues and greens and purples, a clear blue sash at the waist, or perhaps a shawl around the shoulders -

But that kind of wishful thinking is what got you here in the first place. The moment passes. Your suit is familiar, fitting, and practical. The rosettes at your wrists feel like chains.

You hear the first whispers from one of the bright costumes around you. Is that Synovus?

You turn to Naiad, “We should find our seats.”

—-------------------------------

You were, rather mercifully, seated to the back and one side, in a portion of the room not quite as well lit. The set up was rather traditional, with everyone split down rows, and the aisle in the center. You were on the bride’s side, and couldn’t honestly have said what the name of the groom was.

A few of the heroes had taken to eyeing you. Before they could investigate or act on their suspicions blindly (you knew which one you thought was more likely), the music started.

And the lights went out.

Your hand found Naiad’s in the darkness, and you lifted it to your helmet so she could feel you shake your head. Not me. Your power was quiet, the shadows entirely natural. You remained still, watching the attendees shift and begin to whisper. Most of them must have been warned ahead of time - prudent, considering how many of these people you’d fought. How many of them had you given a fear of the dark?

When a light appeared, it was not natural, nor electric. Nor was it yours. A pale silver glow began at the foot of the aisle, illuminating from beneath one high heel. Then another. On the next step, the first light began to float, turning from a spot on the floor into a small orb of light. Others joined it, like so many small sparkling stars.

In this way the bride, the hero Dazzler, made her way down the aisle.

You had to admit, it was a stunning display. On occasion, one of the lights would twirl around her, granting tantalizing glimpses of her dress and playing off the crystals in her hair. The pale silver glow was soft and alluring, and in the darkness of the room, it made her seem as though she were a deity of creation; the steps she took forming reality in her wake.

At the altar, she paused, to hand off her bouquet. Then she turned to face the crowd, raised her hands, and called all of the globes of light to encircle her and the man in a suit who was presumably her groom. They formed the shape of a heart, then faded as the room’s lights came back on.

Everyone oohed and awed appropriately. Naiad shifted, and you realized you still held her hand. Without conscious thought, your grip had tightened. Abruptly, you let go.

The two of you sat in silence as the ceremony began.

—----------------------------------

Once everyone had moved to the tables, you actually thought you might get through this without being officially recognized by anyone other than Sun Dog. That was both a relief, and mildly insulting.

Naiad had given you questioning glances since you had left the ceremony, but you’d yet to provide an answer. You’d warned her before you arrived that you would speak as little as possible once inside the venue - your voice would certainly give you away. Naiad had said that was the consequence of being a monologuer. You’d protested, vociferously, because it was true.

But as the guests were mingling, the open bar being besieged, the instant your shoulders started to relax, there was a high pitched shriek from somewhere behind you. Not a shriek of terror or anger or surprise. One of joy.

Of course.

The syllables of your name filled the air, broken into three and a half parts. There was a frantic rustle of cloth and the rapid clicking of heels. Then arms wrapped around your middle, and a heavily perfumed, glittery weight slammed into you.

You, very judiciously, did not move.

“I’m so glad you came!” Dazzler gushed, moving around in front of you. She let her arm trail as she did, so that she never lost contact with you. You felt like you were being circled by a shark. Up close, the makeup and glitzy hair-pieces felt like an attack. “You never RSVP'd! I’d almost given up hope!”

You still had not moved, even to turn your head. Dazzler pouted at you, and you tried to ignore that you knew she was just looking at herself in your helmet’s reflection. Around you, half the guests had abandoned their chairs or their place in line at the bar, half-starting, ready to leap into action. Every single pair of eyes in the place was fixed on the two of you.

And you knew that this was exactly why Dazzler had invited you. You’d known when you received the invitation. You knew when you decided to attend. Because this kind of bullshit was exactly why you’d harassed her into moving to a different continent.

“Many felicitations, Diane.” You reply, as though she isn’t doing her damnedest to make a scene. As though she’d cornered you in a hallway, instead of the middle of the banquet hall. “I get invited to so few parties - I can’t imagine why.”

Laughing, Dazzler moves to swat you on the arm, and transitions from that to looping her arm through yours. “Oh, Syn. People just don’t know you, that’s all! Come on, say hello to everyone with me, it’ll-”

You have no intention of being dragged off by Dazzler to become arm candy. But before you can find a way to elegantly maneuver out of the situation, Naiad is stepping between you.

“Perhaps things have changed since my wedding.” Without a filter, Naiad’s voice is not far off from Athena’s. She’s taking a terrible risk to do this, that someone will identify her by her past persona and its questionable end. But Athena never took quite that tone of condescension. “But greeting the guests is typically something one does with their groom.”

“Oh.” Dazzler steps away, a tiny frown creasing her brow. She’s not used to having competition. Not used to being thwarted by anyone who isn’t you. Still, she recovers quickly, laughing again and holding the back of one hand to her forehead. “Of course! With all the preparations and everything, I forgot there’s so many steps! You must remember, right? All the decisions you have to make, and then there’s so many people here -”

Again, Naiad cuts her off, “Then we wouldn’t want to monopolize so much of the bride’s time. Happiness - and many years of it - to you both.”

She raises an arm to your back, and automatically, you reciprocate. It makes you a unified front, automatically reinforcing her words. You know everyone here will remember this. Naiad is now permanently associated with Synovus.

“Be well, Dazzler.” You add, so no one will think this is some kind of catfight you allowed to happen. You’re not sure that thought was coherent, actually, but saying something seemed important at the time.

Together, you and Naiad turn away, moving to your assigned seats in a corner. The rest of the room is silent, except for the music no one thought to pause. Dazzler’s bridesmaids - most of them heroes themselves - swarm her, whispering furiously.

Dazzler raises her voice to be heard by everyone when she responds, “Oh, we used to date.”

———————————

“I dislike that I can’t even call that woman a menace without besmirching my daughter’s name.” Naiad said, some time later.

The two of you had sat in silence while the room slowly restored itself to a cautious order. No one had forgotten you were there, but some seemed to accept that you were here peacefully. Given that you were not going to remove your helmet, and therefore could not actually consume anything, both you and Naiad had eaten before you came. This also spared the nervous waitstaff the task of servicing your - otherwise empty - table.

You let out a long, slow exhale, below what your helmet will verbalize. “Calling her anything will please her, in the end. Any attention is good attention, and if it lets her play the virtuous victim, all the better.”

Naiad glances back at you, gauging something. “She fooled you?”

You wince, attempt to communicate something solely by facial expression, and fail utterly because you’re wearing a helmet. How to describe what you’d seen in Dazzler once?

“I…. Wanted very badly to be someone worth effort. She caught me by surprise. It wasn’t until much later I realized she actually believed….” You break off, grimacing.

Naiad’s head tilts in a way that suggests she’s raising her brows at you. “Believed you loved her?”

“No - no, I knew she thought that. I wasn’t - I was young.”

These had been the days before Rosie, before Doll. Before there had been anyone but you, still running from and hunting any of Sunhallow’s surviving lieutenants. Nineteen and alone and then suddenly there was someone telling you otherwise, someone with a power of light so like and so different from your father’s.

“She felt.” You say finally, “That we were… destined. Her light, to my darkness. That I was… tameable.”

It had taken some years of retrospection to put the pieces together, but you had. Dazzler had wanted a tame villain; proof she was worth loving enough that it erased your identity in the process. Justification for everything she was, because she was the ‘good’ half. The ‘pure’ one.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Naiad mutters. She raises one hand, as though to pinch the bridge of her nose, but settles for bracing against the mask’s thick material.

“That too. But as I said - we were young.” Your voice was dry, and a little bit weary. Dazzler exhausted you, even now.

“Does she-?” Naiad cuts herself off, looking to re-affirm that Dazzler (and her groom) are on the other side of the room. Still, she lowers her voice, “Does she… know, then?”

Your laugh is bitter, but it is a laugh, “No. No, I got away before she learned all my secrets.”

You tap the table, curving your hand to make a small alcove where only you and Naiad can see your palm, and summon a small flicker of light. Then you let your hand fall flat again, extinguishing it.

“I am complete without her, by whatever metric you care to use.”

Naiad nods, accepting that explanation. There had been glasses of water on the table when you arrived, and she’d pulled one closer to claim it. You can tell she’s thinking by the way she traces its rim. You can tell she’s upset in some way by the way the water in the glass rises to follow her movement.

“How’d you explain the tattoo?” She asks mildly.

“She never saw it. I think she believes I have scars I don’t want anyone to see.”

A tattoo was a kind of scar, in a way, so it hadn’t been a lie. And it had fit with the image of you Dazzler so wanted, for you to have been broken and abused. Ashamed.

Naiad narrows her eyes, “If you were lovers, then-“

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, my dear.”

She leans back in her seat, taking the glass with her. She sips at the water and surveys the crowd. You pretend not to be surveying her. Dazzler was not a secret, per se, but the details of how you’d felt about it are not something you’ve ever shared.

You need to stop giving Minerva your secrets. Particularly when she doesn’t realize how many of them she holds.

The music is upbeat and space-filling. Loud enough that conversations are confined to their groups, but not loud enough you have to shout to be heard. You’re pretty sure this song is on one of Menace’s playlists - something by Chappell Roan.

“Synovus, why are we here?” Naiad asks finally. You willingly give up any attempt to identify the song to consider the question.

“Because I’ve never been to a wedding. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I’ve never been a guest at a wedding.”

Naiad’s gaze drifts to the middle distance, and she downs the remaining water like she wishes it was something stronger. You silently slide another glass over towards her - they set the tables for six apiece.

“Whose wedding were you in?” She asks, making conversation.

“Mine. Technically.” It’s a long story.

Minerva - no, Naiad, you need to think of her that way in the field - had been toying with the stem of the second glass. Now she stopped, becoming very still. At first, your attention pivots to your surroundings, searching for the threat.

Then Naiad says, flatly, “Explain.”

“It wasn’t - like this.” You wave a hand. “I - this was after Dazzler. There wasn’t - I’m not still married.”

“Synovus.”

“It lasted a week, as we’d agreed at the start, the identities were fake, and we swore to never speak of it to each other again.”

It had been a last grasp at normalcy. You didn’t have a social security number, you hadn’t had a community in which to undergo rites of passage that weren’t geared towards Sunhallow. You’d never been to a public school or a prom or a fucking football game. But getting Vegas married and having a honeymoon, then immediately divorcing?

Well that you could do.

“Who did you even do this with?” Naiad asks, flabbergasted and possibly appalled.

“Ah.” You wish you could sip water, to buy yourself time. “Tallflawes.”

Naiad’s outraged, “What?” Is drowned out, however, by the sound of shattering glass, as a blurred figure drops through the roof.

———————————

It’s a bad idea to crash a wedding. Lots of people, most of them easily rallied to at least half the attendees’ defense. It’s worse when more than half the guests have superpowers.

The good news was that no one had to worry about the falling glass - there were four or five different barriers flung up immediately.

The bad news was that it was absolute fucking chaos for five minutes. You hope no one attending had epilepsy.

You, of course, had no intention of intervening. This wasn’t your doing, you were going to be blamed for it regardless, so you might as well enjoy the show. But then you’d recognized the invader as Prodigy. And he was alone.

And the only thing he was yelling, over and over, was your name.

So you stood, removing the white rosettes at your wrists as casually as someone adjusting cuff links. You called to the shadows you’d been keeping at bay. You dialed up the volume of your helmet’s speaker.

And as everyone in the room except Naiad - including Prodigy - found themselves wrapped in solid darkness, you bellowed into the room,

“BE SILENT.”

You also had a small loop of shadow kill the music, because you never did a thing by halves.

As the room suddenly quieted, Prodigy came to drift in the middle of the space. The hum of his hoverboard was the loudest thing in the room at the moment. He wasn’t even struggling against your bonds.

And when he neither complained nor cracked a smile, only looking at you with wide wild eyes and tendrils standing on end, you felt your stomach drop. You knew even before he said, “They’re coming, Synovus! My homeworld - they sent a ship!”

——————————————

[I did say this was the one where they went to space. Buckle up, everybody, it’s time to dance!

Which Chappell Roan song is playing? Whichever one you personally believe is funniest and/or most tragic. Tag it!

Links to Ao3.]

[katakaluptastrophy]

Let's be very clear about what the Houses do.

When Gideon fantasises about leaving the Ninth, this is what she imagines:

Not for Gideon a security detail on one of the holding planets, either on a lonely outpost on an empty world or in some foreign city babysitting some Third governor. Gideon wanted a drop ship—first on the ground—a fat shiny medal saying INVASION FORCE ON WHATEVER, securing the initial bloom of thanergy without which the finest necromancer of the Nine Houses could not fight worth a damn. The front line of the Cohort facilitated glory. In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.

A drop ship of infantry. Armed with those infantry standard two-hander swords. Their job is to secure the initial bloom of thanergy. Which sounds like a very antiseptic way of saying that a House invasion starts with a suicide squad of teenagers whose job it is to cause as many casualties as possible, so that the necromancers have something to work with. Teenagers like Gideon, desperate serfs or just wanting to make something of themselves, sold a promise of sex and glory, economic assets of their far-flung Houses until their untimely deaths.

But how useful their deaths, and those they take with them are! To the necromanvers of the Second, who can drain your thalergy as you die screaming. The Third, who can draw energy from the corpses littering the battlefield. The Fourth, who can turn them into bombs...

Until the subdued planet can be flipped, a contract put in place, a profit exacted. That Third governor installed.

Later, John explains to Harrow how planets are flipped:

So back at the start we’d drop in a single Lyctor, unnoticed, to start the thanergy reaction. Not to flip the whole planet, you understand, just to get the juice flowing.” He made a hand gesture for get the juice flowing, which made your head hurt. “Then within an hour or two you could send down a team of adepts and be confident they’d have all the reserves they needed. Nowadays we can’t afford to use Lyctors, so the first strike falls to the men and women of the Cohort, and they do a magnificent job…but the old way was neater, and kinder too, I think.

And in NTN, Aim describes her own harrowing experience as a displaced victim of what happens after that invasion, after the long and exploitative economic contract, and after the planet finally succumbs to its flipping:

The usual. It had been under contract for a long time. I mean, we were the third settlement wave, they built the Crescent in the bones of two other cities, you couldn’t dig up anything without finding remnants of a people we’d never known. The microbial population didn’t show signs of serious decay until the moment before the sea went anaerobic. The things crawling out of there … they seemed to mutate all at once … The Houses pulled support, said they’d prep us for an early move, but they left minimal forces in the barracks. We dug up old caches of materiel and used them. On the mutants from the sea, on the animals as they changed, on one another, on the Houses when they saw what we’d got our hands on and came back to take control. Blood of Eden was there too, you know. And in the end the Houses won and most of us surrendered and we were moved. Two moves later, and I’m here. There’s still a facility on Lemuria, of course. A decade later the Houses made it safe for geopolymer refining. It must be desolate.

And so you get the "lonely outpost on an empty world", the assignment Gideon saw as so unglamorous.

[carriedawatermelon]

Doing some little kinktober ficlets because why not. Please find the first installment of soft Ronance filth, which in this case is not actually that filthy, below.

Prompt: Seven Minutes in Heaven

Someone bumps into Nancy for about the hundredth time, a shoulder jostling her own near the wall of the living room, which Nancy uses to brace herself. At least the girl—Megan, third grade, sixth grade, a few years of ballet and most recently, second period US history—apologizes, genuinely. 

“Sorry, Nancy. Too many people.”

“Too many people,” Nancy agrees and tries for a smile, which maybe works as she gets one in return. 

And there are too many people, and there’s too much noise, and Nancy knows the occasional, protesting throbbing behind her eyes is going to become a full-fledged headache soon, but still, she stays. She stays and makes her way successfully out of the living room and into the kitchen. It’s still too crowded but only with people moving through, grabbing beer and whatever godawful punch is on the counter as they pass into the backyard or the living room or the den, where a whole other mass of bodies has congregated to talk and flirt and try to pretend like this is a normal week-before-graduation party. 

It’s why she’s still here, that last part. Because it’s the week before graduation, and she’d been sitting with Hopper and Steve talking logistics two days ago and realized that the enthusiastically offered invitation from Becky, who like Megan, she’d known for most of her life and also hardly knew at all, would be the last one she ever got. Shit, she’d thought, absently correcting Hopper’s patrol map to accommodate for the newest construction. Shit, this is it. 

She’d had that thought many times over the last few years, in a life-or-death way. It was jarring, to have it in the way she was supposed to, in the way that pretty much every other teenager in Hawkins and if John Hughes was right, everywhere else in America, had it, too. 

“Steve, switch with me for Friday,” she’d said, and he’d done it, and now Nancy is leaning against a kitchen counter, wincing as something lukewarm soaks through the back of her pale yellow button-down and watching as her classmates do exactly what they should be doing the week before summer break. 

She doesn’t feel angry that they’re pretending, the way she had with Steve. Well. She does feel angry. She always feels angry. But for the most part, it’s not with the people around her. For the most part, it’s on their behalf. On Barb’s behalf. On her own, even, when she can let herself. 

They’ve all suffered. They’re the ones who stayed or came back, the crowded party at this point consisting of most of what remains of Hawkins High, grade irrelevant. Nobody is trying to kick anyone out, and nobody’s policing the door. 

As of about two weeks ago, curfew had been lifted. Officially, the army finally managed to secure the area after the earthquake. Unofficially, El had demolished a weakened Vecna, the party offering her backup in the real world and the upside-down and the space in between. The work that’s left is still left, but it’s eliminating stragglers and maintaining vigilance, and El and Will both have a kind of ease and confidence that makes the rest of them feel hopeful, that made Nancy feel like she could switch a patrol shift to Steve to go to a party. 

“Nancy,” someone shouts from the door of the kitchen. Ally, eyes bright with a plastic cup in one hand, shakes her shoulders. “Come play spin the bottle.”

In a small mercy, she’s being dragged toward the den before Nancy is forced to provide an answer, laughing an “Okay, okay, okay!” 

In a bigger mercy, her body is replaced by one that makes Nancy’s shoulders relax, a genuine smile break across her face. 

“I was going to ask if you wanted to sneak out back and smoke, but I’d hate to stop you from a game of spin the bottle with Hawkins High’s most eligible bachelors.”

Robin’s grin is big, her hands shoved into the pockets of her black jeans, an oversized green t-shirt tucked into the front under...Nancy’s favorite jean jacket. 

“Thief!” 

Robin’s grin grows. “Fair’s fair.”

And, well, Nancy can’t exactly argue. Robin’s black jacket is in her possession—currently neatly folded in the passenger seat of Nancy’s car—where it’s been since about two weeks after their first encounter with Vecna and where Nancy intends for it to remain until…until. 

She scowls anyway, pushing back from the counter and making her way to Robin, who stiffens for a second at Nancy’s hug before relaxing into it, wrapping her arms around Nancy’s shoulders and holding her close. The jacket smells like the detergent her mom uses and a little like Nancy’s perfume, but underneath is all Robin, lavender and cloves and the cigarettes her mom smokes. She can smell weed, too, and she pulls back a little to look up at Robin, who’s looking down at her with a faint blush. 

When Robin told her, fingers twisting and face paler than usual on the couch in her basement, that she likes girls, she’d put herself as physically far from Nancy as possible in the shared space. Nancy, heart broken as she listened to halting, stuttering sentences so far from the Robin she had grown used to, had tentatively scooted closer, lifting an arm in offer. Robin had hesitated for a second and then collapsed into her, crying while Nancy reassured her. Now, with Nancy’s constant encouragement, she’s getting better about touch, about initiating it and accepting it.

Of course, it is different now, but that’s Nancy’s fault. That’s because Nancy, as she has let herself admit for the past six or so weeks with increasing acceptance, wants to kiss her. She hasn’t yet and doesn’t now, but she does reach down and lace their fingers, tugging Robin toward the sliding door to the back. 

“There’s a Robin/robber pun here somewhere but I can’t quite get there,” she admits, happy to see that the crowd of their peers thins significantly after the deck.

Robin snorts, follows easily as Nancy begins pulling them past small groups of people and toward the grass. It makes her bristle, still, the relative quiet in the largely dark yard, and Robin squeezes her fingers like she understands, because she does. The house and the summer night give enough light to navigate well enough, and Nancy has her eyes on a set of lawn chairs that seem to have been abandoned by a group now moving back toward the house, but as she moves toward them Robin stops her. 

Her grin is pulled up at the side as she looks from Nancy to a tree with a tire swing and a set of boards nailed to its trunk. Nancy sighs, and Robin moves toward them, grinning, letting go of Nancy’s hand to pull at the steps and look up at the tree house. 

“Robin. No.”

“What?” She says, in a terrible attempt at guilelessness. 

“You know what.”

“I don’t.” She says easily. “I don’t know what.”

She shades her eyes like that’ll help her see in the dark, and Nancy rolls her own, stomach swooping with affection, before reaching into her bag and pulling out a flashlight. 

When it clicks on, Robin looks back at her and bites her lip. “Nancy Wheeler. The Boy Scouts have got nothing on you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nancy says, like she isn’t about to indulge a terrible idea. “Investigation purposes, only, Buckley. We didn’t survive the upside-down so you could break yourself climbing a tree.”

“Totally, totally,” Robin responds, like she doesn’t know Nancy is about to indulge her terrible idea. “I’m just gonna investigate these first few steps and, uh…” When the first two hold, she looks down at Nancy happily and keeps climbing. 

“You have no sense of self-preservation,” she calls after her. “Ms. Delayed Walker.”

When she reaches the platform at the top, she pouts down at Nancy, features a blend of shadows in the strange light. “That’s really rude, Nance. I think you should come apologize.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Nancy says, already on the second plank, flashlight shining up from where she’s tucked it vertically in her purse. It catches Robin’s grin, and Nancy stares, feels like she’s falling with her hands securely gripped on the wood. Robin’s not the only one who’s ridiculous. 

She pulls herself into the plank next to Robin, who wraps an arm around her waist. It’s reflex maybe, because the platform is small, and Nancy sees the flash of panic across her face so she leans into Robin’s body before she can pull away, hand moving to hold Robin’s against her. 

“If we fall out of a tree before graduation, I’m going to be so pissed at you.”

Robin laughs, squeezing her, and then begins scooting back, Nancy releasing her so she can make her way into the little house behind them. For all her talk, she wouldn’t be up here if she didn’t think it were sturdy. The climbing planks are relatively new, wood stained and smoothed against splinters, so she suspected the house would be, too, and she’s pleased to find that she’s right.

It’s big for a tree house, and tall enough that Nancy can almost stand comfortably, bent just a little to explore, fingers on the cross beams below the roof so she doesn’t bump her head. There’s a little table shoved into one corner, a window in each wall where she can see that the little platform they landed on extending around the house like a porch. When she turns around, Robin has made herself comfortable on some cushions against the back wall, a pink floral print that looks like maybe it was stolen from lawn furniture. She has a joint in one hand and pats the seat next to her before reaching into her pocket (Nancy’s pocket) for a lighter. 

There’s a lantern hanging from a hook near her head, two candles inside and Robin lights them as Nancy clicks off the flashlight and settles, close enough that their knees touch. Robin hands her the joint but keeps the lighter, and Nancy bumps her shoulder as she lights it. 

“Such a gentleman,” she says, before inhaling, and Robin rolls her eyes but blushes. 

Nancy doesn’t cough, though it’s still sometimes a close thing, the weed a post-Vecna addition to her life. It helps her relax and it doesn’t make her feel bad the way drinking does and it’s given her some of her favorite nights, sitting around smoking and talking and watching movies with Steve and Robin and Eddie and sometimes Jon or Vickie. 

She passes the joint back, and props herself back against the wall, lets herself look at the girl next to her as they smoke together for a little while, making aimless conversation. There’s something undeniably attractive about watching Robin smoke, the shape of it between her lips and the way they move as she pulls, the smoke that she exhales slowly, eyes exploring the little house. 

Eventually, Nancy asks, “How’re you feeling about next week?”

“Eh,” Robin offers along with another hit, which Nancy takes. “Weird. Fine. Nervous. Excited.” She brings her eyes back to Nancy, who smiles at her. “How ‘bout you?”

“Eh,” she echoes, and Robin pokes her gently. She’s warm, this close to Nancy, and she wants more, scoots closer, takes her hand and twines their fingers. Twirling the thick silver ring around Robin’s index finger, she feels Robin’s breath stutter, her own breath escaping with a happy sigh at their proximity. Robin mutes the joint and sets it against a Coke can. “Fine, I think. I feel good about what’s coming. Good about Chicago.” She squeezes at Robin’s fingers and Robin squeezes back. “Good about Chicago with you. I’m ready, I think. It’s not like…I didn’t exactly love,” she stops playing with the ring for a second and gestures out toward the yard, the house, “all of this. High school. You know.”

“Yeah,” Robin agrees. “Yeah, that’s for sure.”

Nancy presses closer, drops Robin’s hand in favor of wrapping it around her under her (Nancy’s) jacket, bullying her way into her side until Robin wraps an arm around her shoulders, laughing, thumb running a gentle up and down against her arm as they settle. 

“The ending hasn’t been so bad,” Robin says, pauses. 

Nancy can’t help but repeat, stoned and uncertain she’s heard correctly, “The ending hasn’t…” She can’t even finish, her voice cracking on what surely is a joke, and then they’re both cackling, clutching each other. 

“Dingus,” Nancy gasps, mostly in Robin’s lap now, and Robin groans. 

“I am. I’m a total dingus. ‘The ending hasn’t been so bad,’” she repeats, mocking herself, and Nancy tucks her head into her neck, laughing, Robin’s arms tight around her waist. “That’s what I get for trying to be smooth, I guess.” And then she shuts up so fast Nancy hears her jaw click. 

And maybe Nancy should be nervous, but instead all she feels is immensely pleased. “Oh?” She says, voice teasing as she pulls herself away, adjusting until she’s straddling Robin’s thighs. Robin looks terrified and also can’t stop staring at Nancy’s legs where they now bracket her own, eyes flitting between Nancy’s and their laps. Her hands are hovering at her sides, fingers opening and closing around nothing, and Nancy takes pity, full of smug affection as she takes them and puts them on her thighs. 

The noise Robin makes is something between a groan and a whimper, and it makes Nancy more than a little feral. 

“Trying to put the moves on me, Buckley?” She doesn’t try to hide the want in her voice as she lets her own hands settle on Robin’s neck, thumbs tracing the corners of her jaw. 

Robin finally holds her gaze, fingers spreading and squeezing at Nancy’s thighs. Nancy shivers. Robin squeezes harder. 

“Nancy.”

Robin’s lips are warm and waxy, the last of the vanilla chapstick she likes clinging on through their smoking. It’s perfect; she’s perfect, hands climbing to Nancy’s waist, where she holds her steady as she deepens the kiss, the taste of weed and lemonade and Robin filling Nancy up. 

“Nancy,” Robin says when they pull away, voice breathy. “What’s happening right now?”

The affection Nancy feels is almost violent, it’s so overwhelming, and she lets herself kiss Robin again, hard and quick. “Well,” she says. “You attempted one of the worst lines I’ve ever heard.” She keeps her tone teasing, and Robin closes her eyes and groans, head thudding against the wooden wall behind her. 

Nancy tsks, and Robin blinks open her eyes, blush in full force in the candlelight. She’s fucking gorgeous. 

“And it worked,” she says primly, moving a hand to Robin’s sternum, flattening her palm and feeling her breathe before tugging at the lapel of her (Nancy’s) jacket. “Because it appears I like you so much that I’m willing to overlook things like thievery and terrible come ons.” 

“You…you like me so much that…” And then she’s kissing Nancy again, less gently, and Nancy sighs approvingly, sucking at Robin’s bottom lip. Robin’s mouth moves to her neck, her hands shifting to Nancy’s hips to urge her closer, and she goes easily, moving a hand into Robin’s hair and moaning as her tongue and then her teeth find a spot that makes her hips cant.

“Fuck, Rob.” 

She pulls away, gasping, hands flexing on Nancy’s hips. 

“Do you…do you want…” She shakes her head, eyes closing, and Nancy kisses her gently. 

“I want to date you,” she says, watching as Robin’s eyes snap open. “I want to hold your hand while you talk to me about whatever the movie of the day is, and I want to fix your collars and leave lipstick on your cheek when I kiss you goodbye, and I want to ask you to stay over and have you know exactly what I mean.” 

“Yeah?” 

Her voice is small, almost scared, and Nancy channels as much love as she can into her own as she says, brushing a thumb over a beautiful cheekbone, “Yeah. Is that something you could want, too?”

“Yes.” A hand cups Nancy’s jaw. “I want that so much, Nance. I can’t even…I want you so much. I’m…it’s…” She laughs, running a hand through her hair. Nancy misses it. “Sorry, um, sorry. I just, I really can’t believe this is happening. Holy shit.” Her smile is wide, her eyes bright. “Nancy Wheeler wants to date me.”

Nancy laughs, tucks her hair back. She feels the flush in her own face and doesn’t hate it, for once. “Yeah, I really do.”

“You’re beautiful,” Robin says, and bites her lip. “Is that…I think it all the time, you know. Like, all the time. Like, yesterday when you got mad at that guy for turning without his blinker, and you made this face, and your lips did this thing, and all I could think was how gorgeous you were. And then tonight, when I showed up and you were leaning against the counter, and I could tell you were trying to figure out how you were gonna say no to Ally, you know, you have this, like, thinking face, and God, Nancy, all I wanted was to press you back against the counter and…”

She stops, catching herself, but Nancy wants none of that. “And what, Robbie?” She takes Robin’s hand and puts it back on her hip, greedy and pleased as she watches Robin’s eyes grow big, feels her fingers flex. “What did you want to do?”

She moans into the kiss, into the grip of Robin’s hands, letting her hips roll into the body pressed against hers. When her mouth moves to her neck again, kissing and sucking, Nancy throws her head back and holds Robin close. 

Hands move from her hips to the buttons of her shirt, tentative, and this had probably been the conversation Robin wanted to have earlier, about what Nancy wanted.

It takes an incredible amount of willpower but she manages to pull back, panting, tilting Robin’s face to meet hers. Because Nancy will absolutely let Robin fuck her in this treehouse, but Robin’s a virgin, and she deserves better than cramping hands with their clothes still on. Nancy has plans. 

“Come home with me.”

“Okay,” Robin agrees immediately, head bobbing eagerly, and Nancy grins, kissing her gently.

They tidy themselves as best they can, hands untangling as they reach the house again, and the party’s still in full swing, loud and bright and smelling like cheap beer and fruit punch. 

They pass by the group playing spin the bottle on their way out, a series of shouts coalescing into a chant as a couple is sent off to the closet for seven minutes in heaven. 

Robin shakes her head. “Nightmare,” she says under her breath, and Nancy laughs. 

“I don’t know.” She grins at Robin and uses the crowd as an excuse to grab her hand again, keep her close. “I feel like you’d find lots of jackets to steal.”

She doesn’t need to see her to know her eyes are rolling. “I would bet 20 of Steve’s dollars that my jacket will be in the passenger seat of your car when we get there. The hypocrisy is heavy, Nance.” 

“So, what?” She shrugs as they break through the front door, making their way to Nancy’s car up the block. “I like wearing my girlfriend’s jacket.”

It’s quiet, and Nancy’s worried for a second that she’s overstepped, but when she looks, she finds Robin staring at her with heat in her eyes, her jaw set. 

“I bet,” Robin says, looking around and keeping close to Nancy, voice low, “I bet you’d look great in that jacket and nothing else.”

Nancy swallows, stops as they reach the car. “Wanna find out?”

[tonicandjins]

frequent flyers | lee donghyuck

CHARACTERS: haechan | lee donghyuck x fem reader

WORD COUNT: 13k

GENRE: angst, fluff, smut (non-linear) | best friends to strangers

AUTHOR'S NOTE: read with caution. this is written in a non-linear form, so you don't know when it's going to hurt ;) this is a dh x reader version of my markhyuck fic from ao3, but with a different ending

frequent flyers is the third installment from 23 moments with donghyuck

Donghyuck looks beautiful like this: skin glowing under the dainty string lines and lined up lanterns hanging from the high ceilings, lips curled up to genuine smile instead of the usual teasing smirk plastered on his mouth, cheeks tainted in berry red—a single manifestation of the glasses of wine he’s had tonight, eyes round and sincere and everything you’ve ever known.

Zhong Chenle’s mellifluous voice echoes in the banquet, singing to the tune of lover as the newly weds take their first dance (third song in) in the middle of the floor, surrounded by couples and lovers swaying. From your peripheral view, you catch a glimpse of Park Jisung sneaking his phone out and recording the whole thing—after Chenle clearly mentioned no one else aside from the newlyweds’ assigned videographer is allowed to film him.

On other days, you’d love to listen to Chenle’s golden voice, and he knows this because from all the years you’ve known him, you’d supported his career and you’d spend many hours sitting in his studio, listening to him record, or sitting somewhere halfway across the world, watching him write his songs. I can listen to him sing all day, you’d say, but as the night jumps deeper into its darkness, you realize how excruciatingly long his 15-minute medley went by.

You look across the room.

Donghyuck looks enthralling like this: beautiful even after all these years, charming like he’s the day he turned 21, grown, earnest, and at ease. It’s agonizing to look at from where you sit across the room—hands wrapped around her waist, eyes closing as he leans in, drunk, drunk, drunk like the night you’d left him, heart void of you.

You begin to count.

At 27, you’re pretty much done with all kinds of romance the world could offer.

Unlike the person sitting next to you, you prefer to listen to Blushing Youth than watch some high-rated romantic comedy film during your 12-hour flight from Heathrow to Incheon, and while you’ve been moving around for most of your life (having earned your nickname as frequent flyer, credits to Jisung), flying is not one of the things you’re fond of. In fact, it’s not in the long list of strengths you brag about in your LinkedIn bio. You reckon it would truly be embarrassing, to say the least, to ask a stranger to distract you from the sound of the aircraft’s engine running at full power as it takes off from the runway, hence you opt to blast Ahn Jiyoung’s voice right in your eardrums.

It’s odd, people would say, for someone who’s supposedly mastered the art of moving from one country to another to be so terrified of flights, but if people want you to be completely honest, nothing sounds more horrifying than the thought of seeing Lee Donghyuck after years of radio silence.

As pathetic as it sounds, your heart still skips a beat—three, sometimes—at the thought of him.

Donghyuck, who used to be your sun, who had you orbiting around his gravitational pull for years, who used to be so close but not enough to have, who—if you think about it now—might have never been the center of your solar system after all, but maybe just a shooting star passing by.

The plane takes off, roughly and loud like you’d expected, and you catch a glimpse of a scene from Love, Rosie from the person sitting beside you and immediately regret going coach instead of flying business like how you would if your flights last more than ten hours. You hate this film; you hate it because Alex is to Rosie, like how Donghyuck is to you.

Alex and Rosie, like you and Donghyuck, are—were—long-time best friends who used to be inseparable until one day they’re not. Rosie misses her chance. Alex stops yearning, hoping, waiting, and finally decides to get on with his life. It’s a story of a bunch of tangled webs—a messy tumbleweed of missed calls and delayed flights, of long nights and short days, of forgotten promises and faded hope.

The film introduces new people, bids goodbye to old chapters, but in the end it’s Alex and Rosie.

And you wish that’s how your story went. You don’t end up kissing him in your very own hotel with an awe-striking view of the horizon right outside the window.

You bury the thought before you start missing him again. You run out of tracks from Blushing Youth’s discography like how you run dry from thinking about what happens next when your plane lands.

Might as well sleep it off.

A sharp, jabbing pain on your left leg wakes you up from your unscheduled sleep. Hissing, you find Donghyuck sitting on top of your legs.

“I swear to God,” you breathe, kicking your best friend’s weight off your limbs. “I will freaking kill you.”

“Dude, what’s wrong with saying fuck? You’re literally twenty,” Donghyuck replies, moving further so his entire body crushes yours, and you have to pretend that his warmth doesn’t make you feel some type of way, hence you push him as hard as you can until he falls onto the carpeted floor of your room.

He falls with a thump. “Screw you,” he mumbles, mouth forming a pout that you’d gladly smack out of his face—except you’d do it with your very own lips. “It’s almost one in the afternoon. Why are you napping?”

“Good question, Donghyuck,” you start, sitting up and rubbing your eyes while looking for the pair of specs that Donghyuck is already shoving towards your direction; you gladly take it. “Unlike you, I had to work in the café until one in the morning. I hate being rostered in the closing shift, but it pays damn well. Plus, I forgot to do my laundry so I had to throw my clothes in before I slept.

“Overworking again, I see,” he muses, sighing as he scoots to sit cross-legged across you on the bed too tiny for two people.

“The last week of the semester always sucks balls,” you answer, tilting your head in attempts to stretch your stiffened neck and get some kind of relief. “Why are you here anyway? Shouldn’t you be out there doing something stupid with Na Jaemin?”

“There’s a music festival on Friday,” he starts right away. “Jaemin’s wondering if I’d be interested to go, says he could get us some free passes from the guy he’s hooking up with. Apparently, the guy is DJ-ing.”

You blink. “Which one? Lee Jeno? Or Yoon Sanha?” you ask, genuinely curious because Jaemin is Jaemin and he could never be caught exclusively hooking up with one person.

Donghyuck shrugs. “Does it matter? Is it a yes or a no? That’s the question.”

He begins to fiddle with his fingers, playing with the rings on his long, delicate digits, and you recognize it almost instantly. Donghyuck is nervous. You might have an idea why.

“Is this you finally asking me out, Lee Donghyuck?” you half-joke, scratching your head. Donghyuck looks anywhere but your face. A glimpse of his eyes is all you need, because if the eyes are the windows to one’s soul, then Donghyuck’s are wide open, with no curtains and bare from all layers—at least that’s how they are to you. His eyes are wavering, and though he’s mastered the ability to keep his face tough as steel, those orbs could only do so little when it comes to hiding from you.

So, you smile, reaching out and leaning closer, kneeling until you’re face to face with him. “Only kidding, Hyuck,” you say finally, taking it easy because this conversation is not for one who’s hazy from sleep and one who can’t even look at the other in the eyes. “Of course, I’ll come with you. Who else can you bring anyway?”

Donghyuck looks up, rolling his eyes; he’s back. “You’re not really irreplaceable,” he replies smugly. “Don’t think too highly of yourself.”

You poke your tongue out and reach over your night stand to check your phone; at the same time, Donghyuck starts biting his fingernails. You don’t think twice—like blinking, a habit, natural—and reach out to pull his hand away, mumbling about how he should start working on getting rid of this bad habit of his. Donghyuck’s hand is warmer compared to yours, and he lets out a whine, complaining about your freezing hands, but squeezes you hand back anyway.

You are content with this. You hope Donghyuck is, too.

The lingering touches. The stolen kisses. The piercing glances.

While they all seem fleeting and simple, they mean the most to you. You begin to think if Donghyuck feels the same as he pulls you closer until you’re both back lying on his bed, your cheek resting on top of Donghyuck’s warm, cloth-covered chest. You wonder if he means it, when he says you’re not irreplaceable and that maybe you’re a little too comfortable, a little too satisfied with whatever it is that you have.

On a drunken night, Donghyuck may have asked you once. You remember it and think about it so much that sometimes it felt like a dream.

“How long, Y/N,” he had asked, his voice an octave deeper than usual, gaze a shade darker. “How long until you let yourself just lose it? For once, just—just please, let your feelings consume you.”

You didn’t want to—not then, not now—because it’s going to hurt.

It’s going to hurt because it’s Donghyuck.

It’s Donghyuck who feels like home, whose hands are warm enough for your cold ones, your own little sun. Losing him is the extinction of your solar system.

“Y/N,” he had whined when you didn’t reply, shaking you, pleading. “When are you going to want for more? I want you to ask me for more.”

But Donghyuck had passed out before you had the chance to think of an answer—time frame—and you wonder what your answer would have been if Donghyuck stayed awake for a couple more minutes.

“I guess napping at this time of the day doesn’t sound too bad,” Donghyuck murmurs against your hair, kissing it before relaxing. “Set an alarm for me. 3 pm.”

You hope Donghyuck asks you again, not this time, but you hope the question lingers in his mind a little longer.

He falls asleep to the sound of your breathing.

When the person sitting next to you finally wakes up, you could only sigh in relief.

The aircraft has landed a few minutes ago, and your flight seatmate slept so soundly that it took you a couple of minutes to shake her awake.

The 12-hour flight is a pain in the ass, and you wish you mean that figuratively. Waiting was something that you were once good at, and Renjun often told you he wished he had half the patience you had. If you think about it now and reflect whether you’re as patient and as willing to wait as before, you’d changed vastly. Ridiculous, how one could change so much in a lifetime.

Huang Renjun is standing behind a barricade when you finally reach the arrival area after going through immigration. He’s holding a piece of paper that says WELCOME HOME, Y/N! Renjun doesn’t give you the time to cross the boundary because he attacks you in bone-crushing hug the second he’s allowed to. You almost topple over him, your glasses at risk of either falling out of your face and into the cold, hard ground, or being crushed between your nose and Renjun’s shoulder.

Renjun chants your nickname over and over again, swaying both your bodies left and right as though you weighed nothing. “I’m literally about to combust. My chest has been pounding since I arrived here. You have no idea how much I missed you, and you were taking forever to go through immigration.”

“Oh, Huang Renjun,” you sigh, inhaling his scent and returning the hug. “Some things never change. You’re still the sweetest when you miss people. Absence really makes the heart grow fond.”

Renjun pulls away to get a good look on you. “Y/N, you’re all grown up. I can’t believe you resisted not seeing me in person for four years.”

“You’re just as grown up as I am,” you reply. “We Facetime each other every other day. What are you talking about?”

“It’s never the same,” he mumbles and helps you with your luggage despite it only being one small luggage, a small duffel bag, and your small backpack. He starts nagging as soon as he notices how small your baggage is.

“You were away for literally four years and you think packing three old shirts and a pair of jeans will be enough to get you through your entire trip here?” Renjun gasps. “You’re stupid if you think Chenle and Jisung are allowing you to leave after what we’re all here for. They have an entire month planned out the second you agreed to come home.”

“I didn’t bring only three shirts, for your information. And I did bring a few pairs of trousers and a coat, plus my dress for the wedding,” you defend. “And I can’t extend my trip here. I thought we’ve all got that one settled.”

Renjun laughs, as if what you said is some kind of joke, as he leads you towards the exit of the airport. “You know we would 100%, without hesitation, burn your passport if it means we could make you stay longer, don’t you? I hope you don’t underestimate us like that.”

You chuckle at his empty threat, your chest swelling at the thought of your long-time friends being thrilled of your arrival in Seoul. You wonder how much has changed in the last four years, and you reckon nothing much has when it comes to your friends. You’d left when most of you were twenty-three, and the only person you’d ever seen in person since then was Chenle, who at that time, had business in London so he stayed where you lived instead of a luxurious hotel he could afford.

“We’re heading to Chenle’s place,” Renjun announces as soon as you sit comfortably in the passenger seat of his car. “But he’s still in his studio recording something, so he won’t be around until maybe five.”

“Why are we going to Chenle’s place if he’s not there yet?” you ask. “He didn’t tell me he had work.”

“We’ve all worked around our schedules to meet you today,” Renjun explains as he turns the ignition on and starts backing up. “And everyone knows his home’s passcode. Remember back in college when his stupid fancy condo eventually became everyone’s? That’s still how it is now. Only this time, he owns a penthouse in Gangnam’s most expensive building. What a spoiled brat.”

“He earned it,” you comment.

Renjun hums. An old track from the local radio station plays just as the vehicle exits the airport’s parking area. You hadn’t heard this song in years, but your mouth sings the lyrics as though it’s only been yesterday.

Renjun is amused. “Some things never really change.”

Donghyuck suddenly changes his hair color on Sophomore year in college. You, on the other hand, are about to have an aneurysm.

Na Jaemin makes fun of you, laughs as if your reaction is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen his entire life. He deems it as the best day of his life.

“Jaemin, am I a fucking joke to you?” you ask. Jaemin doesn’t even bother to answer. “You think this is funny?”

You almost choke on nothing when Donghyuck decides to walk towards the table you’re sharing with Jaemin inside the university’s very own cafeteria. He’s holding a tray of food for lunch. The man himself has a shy smile on his face, evidently aware of the attention that the people around are giving him because of his newly-dyed pink hair, and you can’t really blame anyone if they stared a little longer.

Because Donghyuck is already beautiful, with his shining eyes and glowing skin and a smile that could make the earth stop orbiting around the sun.

But this Donghyuck, Pink Sun as Jaemin had started calling him, he’s something else. You might pass out if you look at him a little longer.

“I told you pink looks amazing on you!” Jaemin exclaims as soon as Donghyuck is close enough.

Donghyuck instantly blushes, but covers it up with a smug smirk across his mouth.

“Careful,” Donghyuck warns. “I don’t want you getting hurt if I reject you.”

Jaemin gasps, “You would never!”

Donghyuck playfully sticks out his tongue on Jaemin and finally, finally, turns towards you. Your breath is caught in a hitch. Donghyuck tilts his head slightly and you’re about to punch himself in the face. 

“What do you think?” the man asks, smiling cheekily. “Do you think I look better blond or pink-haired?”

You swallow. It takes you great power not to pull Donghyuck and kiss him squarely on the mouth.

Blond Donghyuck was a menace in the society. Pink Sun is giving you a heart attack.

But you’re not about to make things too obvious, so you shrug and mutter a small “either is fine.” Jaemin kicks you under the table. Donghyuck sighs, taking out his phone to open its front camera, probably to check himself out as he brushes his fingertips in his hair. 

“You’re cheap, Y/N,” he says, putting his phone down. “I basically burn my scalp to get this hair color and pull it off better than Lee Taeyong ever will, and all I get from you is, ‘either is fine.’”

Jaemin laughs hysterically, taking his phone out as Donghyuck takes the empty seat beside you—like always, because seats beside you are always reserved for him. Donghyuck carefully places the tray of food he got, immediately, your eyes catch the extra drink he has and your heart somersaults because you know it’s for you.

And this is supposed to be normal. Your friends tell you it’s a routine—every day—and you and him do things for each other like second nature. So, why does it make your heart race like this?

Your phone chimes as Donghyuck starts eating.

“We really need to work on your communication skills,” the text message from Jaemin says.

Your comprehension in Korean went from bad to worse, if it’s even possible.

Renjun is currently roasting you for it, while Jisung and Kim Minjeong are arguing about what to eat. You tell them how small the Asian community in London is as compared to other countries. Jaemin announces that Mark Lee just boarded his flight from Vancouver, too, and you cheer, excited to see him as well after all these years. Yoo Jimin calls out Jisung and Minjeong’s bullshit and says she’d already ordered from the nearest restaurant.

How you all end up in Chenle’s penthouse before the owner himself is aware, you have no idea. All you know is that things have not really changed that much.

You feel a little disoriented, your mind still a little hazy from the 12-hour trip, and you hate that the jetlag is hitting you as early as now. You feel like you could fall asleep anytime soon.

Then you hear familiar voices faintly coming from the door, then the door itself being unlocked. You observe from the digital clock above Chenle’s fancy television that it’s only nearly two in the afternoon, so it’s not Chenle who’s coming in.

Donghyuck appears from the door before you realize it, and he takes your breath away before you could even look him in the eyes.

“Sorry, we’re late,” the dark-haired man says, his voice making you feel suffocated, stepping out of his boots because God forbid anyone who steps inside Zhong Chenle’s penthouse wearing the outdoor shoes.

Lee Jeno enters behind him, his eye smile ready to meet you, while Jaemin says they arrived just in time for lunch. All is a blur and everything sounds like white noise, because Donghyuck looks at you in the eyes with the softest gaze, the smallest smile, and suddenly it doesn’t feel so cold in Seoul.

Jeno walks past him and finds his space beside Jaemin. You hear Renjun and Jisung start arguing about another thing. All while Donghyuck stays still from where he stands, about ten feet away from your space, eyes still on you.

When they’re done dancing, Donghyuck walks with her, holding her hand and keeping her close.

He passes by, doesn’t even take a glance to your direction.

Donghyuck looks at you in amusement.

“It was terrible,” you grunt. “The worst day of my life.”

He giggles and pulls you in his arms, kissing the top of your head while you stand in the middle of the room. You’re still dressed in your warm clothes as you’d just arrived from the airport. You sigh in relief because you’ve been waiting for this all weekend.

“Don’t be too dramatic,” he mumbles. “Your cousin’s going to be ballistic if he learns that you called his wedding the worst day of your life.”

“You should’ve gone there with me,” you muse. “They were introducing me to so many people, and my uncle knows I’m shit at socializing, therefore forcing me to hang out with people I barely know is like stabbing me in the eye and asking me how many fingers you’re holding up.”

Donghyuck chuckles. “What could I have done if I were there?”

You smile, burying your face in his warm chest. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Then why’d you need me there?” Donghyuck asks again. You know he’s teasing you now, poking until he gets the answer he wants to hear. And you’re not about to deny Donghyuck of that. Besides, nothing is more satisfying than knowing you could make Donghyuck feel flustered despite of his strong, wild persona. So, you reach up and kiss him on the chin and hug him closer.

“Because nothing is as bad as it seems when you’re around, my love.”

Donghyuck begins to pull away, making you hold onto him tighter, as if your hands would grow cold without touching him. Donghyuck only laughs, allowing you to hug him longer, and you wonder if you could stretch this night out for as long as he can. 

The moment passes by quickly.

“Donghyuck, will you at least listen to me?”

“I’m done, Y/N.”

Renjun announces he’s done cleaning up.

Jaemin doesn’t waste a single second, getting up from his space on the other couch and announces it’s time they really catch up with everyone. It turns out that Jimin herself just got back from Germany yesterday as well, while Minjeong took a week off from work, and all had waited for you to come home before gathering in Chenle’s place.

“Mark’s a piece of shit, just like you,” Jeno comments when asked why the older didn’t take the earliest flight. Apparently, like yourself, Mark couldn’t get a couple of weeks off from work, hence he’d decided to travel a few days before the wedding, which is essentially why you all had a reason to gather once again after all these years.

“Why are you all harassing me and Mark for not being able to take a longer leave from work?” you whine, throwing a cushion towards where Jeno is seated, right beside Jimin. “It’s not like we can help it!”

Minjeong snorts, “You could’ve said you have COVID or something.”

You snicker. “Only you could think of that, Minjeong-ah.”

Jeno talks about his recent flight to Yonagunijima in Okinawa for a business trip. Renjun tells him he’s never gone that far in Japan, his farthest trip being in Osaka; Jeno says he can take him there anytime he gets some free time from work. Jaemin hypes up Jisung’s newly built dance studio and the contract he’d just signed with the biggest entertainment company in Asia, to which Jisung only downplays and says it’s not that big of deal.

You and Donghyuck stay quiet while everyone else talks over one another. He sits at the other end of the same couch you’re sitting on while Jisung occupies the space between you and him. Renjun probably feels the tension, so he cuts it.

“Donghyuck, what have you been up to?” Renjun asks, reaching over for a piece of chocolate you’d stolen from Chenle’s fridge.

Donghyuck shrugs. “Renjun-ah, don’t act like we don’t see each other every weekend.”

Renjun scoffs. “We’re here to catch up. Do you want me to tell them what you’ve been up to myself?”

Donghyuck throws a cushion and misses. “Nothing’s new about me, guys. Nothing that’s interesting enough.” Then, he leans forward and turns to you. “Maybe Y/N has anything to say. I mean, she’s the one who’s been away the longest.”

It takes you aback, the interaction unexpected, and gets you stuttering. “I’m—There’s really nothing, I mean.”

Donghyuck laughs lightly. “Loosen up. You look like you’d rather be elsewhere but here.”

“It’s not like that,” you defend. “It’s just—jetlag.”

“Of course,” Donghyuck nods. “How long was the flight?”

“Twelve hours,” you answer. Renjun does his best, distracting everyone else with a new conversation so you and Donghyuck, you assume, would feel more comfortable rather than have everyone listen to you talking with the person you used to know the best. Jisung tries to subtly leave, pretending like he needs to go to the restroom, and you know it’s a tactic because you also know Jisung like the back of your hand.

Donghyuck immediately moves closer, taking the space Jisung used to sit on, the distance pulling the air out of your lungs.

“And my flight was delayed for a couple of hours because of a storm,” you continue, clearing your voice. “So, fourteen hours in total, plus one hour from Incheon to Gangnam.”

Donghyuck nods. “Well, you fly frequently.”

You nod back. “Not that frequently anymore. Since the pandemic, I’ve been working from home a lot; there was no need to travel after all. Or move to a different country. It turns out we can do everything virtually.”

Donghyuck chuckles, almost sarcastically. “What a shame that the entire world realized suddenly that everything could work virtually.”

You smile, sadly almost. “Yeah. What a shame.”

“I didn’t get the whole thing,” Jisung sighs. “What a shame. The last parts were the best.”

“You know Chenle’s going to kill you if he finds out you took a video, right?”

Jisung nods proudly. “That was the point.”

“Lia, wait,” Donghyuck’s voice echoes—not loud enough to catch anyone else’s attention, but definitely enough for you. You watch him follow Lia out.

You decide you’ve had enough. The wedding’s done now, anyway. There’s nothing left for you here.

Jisung looks at you. “Y/N.”

“Just need some space, Jisung,” you say. “I’m okay.”

“You’re lying,” You gasp, almost dropping your iPad upon Donghyuck’s revelation. “Holy shit, Donghyuck, that’s huge!”

“Never thought I’d hear that in another context but thanks, my love,” Donghyuck replies, a proud smile etched on his mouth. He reaches over and shows you a piece of paper, the confirmation of his participation in a convention in Shanghai a couple of weeks from now. 

“Wait until Jaemin hears this,” You ramble, already on his phone to text said friend about the good news. “He’s going to throw a party for you.”

“You guys are too proud of me,” Donghyuck whines. “What if I end up being such a flop outside my comfort zone? There are going to be so many amazing artists out there. I heard some vocal majors from Konkuk are attending the conference with me, and I am already terrified of them. I can't imagine myself once I'm surrounded by even more talented and more intimidating singers."

You put down your tablet on your desk, sighing as you step closer towards Donghyuck. You’re in the apartment you share with Jimin, and Donghyuck called in earlier to tell you he’s got some great news. Neither of you really have much time to meet these days, with your internship at Seoul's biggest web developer company and the drastic changes in Donghyuck's schedule, it's a little too difficult to hang out in the safety of your apartment.

Donghyuck is evidently taken aback when you suddenly wrap an arm around his neck, tumbling when you pull him closer and kisses the air out of his lungs. You regret closing your eyes when your lips touch, thinking about the way Donghyuck looks like whenever you kiss him like this. Like Donghyuck's all you’ve ever needed. Like all the years of pining and hurting are expressed in a single kiss. Like it's everything you’ve always wanted and more.  

It's not the first time you kiss—you’ve lost count you made out in the back of Jeno’s car two months ago while all your friends are drunk and out of their minds—but it always feels like it is.

Donghyuck's lips are soft, soft, soft, and you can never get enough of the kissing him. The first, featherlight, a little hesitant touch of your lips would be your second favorite part (the favorite is when Donghyuck's licking your mouth and nibbles on your lower lip), and his hands, his delicate hands would always be in your hair, pulling and pressing and touching.

It's perfect. Donghyuck pulls you down with him on your very own bed, letting you sit on his lap.                   

He's kissing you everywhere, your lips, your cheeks, your nose, your neck, your jaw, but he stops when you begin to unbutton his shirt. You look down on him, confused and eager and dazed, and usually, Donghyuck would give in without a single fight, but this time he stops you. 

"What are we doing, Y/N?" Donghyuck lets out, like he's been holding this breath forever and now he's finally exhaling it.

"We're," you start, confused why he’s asking all of a sudden, but you don’t really have an answer to that. "We're—”

"Messing around. Having fun while we can," Donghyuck finishes, quoting your own words the first time you hooked up. "I know. But that was before, right? What about now? What are we doing now?"

Your hands drop on Donghyuck's side. Donghyuck quickly takes both of them in his, giving you a comforting squeeze, as if he's encouraging you to say something. To be brave. To let go. 

"We can't go on like this if you don't answer me, Y/N," Donghyuck says softly. "I know what I want, and you know that it's you. Just you. From the beginning. As long as I live. And you are making me happy right now. But I need to know if this is what you want, too."

"Love, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't want you," you explain, eyes wavering.

"Y/N, listen to me," Donghyuck urges, letting go of one of your hands to hold your face so you could look into each other's eyes. "Tell me now. Tell me now, honestly, if this is something you would want in the long run."

"Donghyuck," You sigh, like you’re begging for Donghyuck to stop asking. But Donghyuck doesn't let his guard down. He keeps his hands on you, waiting.

You want nobody else but Donghyuck, too. From the beginning. For as long as you live. And Donghyuck is making you happy, and you know well that Donghyuck will make you happy in the long run. The last two months of whatever game you’re playing had been fun. There was no agreement on being exclusive, no rules of some sort, and it all fell into place like you and him are supposed to end up like this. You hadn’t put a label on it, but you and Donghyuck are best friends for many years now. You went through growing pains together, survived each one of the flights you frequently took around the world, went to the same college together, and you don’t really see the point of rushing for a label now.

Because you have other things in mind other than what you feel right now. You have codes to master and board directors to impress. Donghyuck has auditions to pass and flights to catch as well, and now, an opportunity in Shanghai. Not to mention you’re both cramming to have the best credentials to get you the best job after graduation. Now is not really the best time.

So, just like many happenstances in your life, you come up with a stupid, stupid answer.

"I—I don't know, Donghyuck," you say nervously. "I mean, you're clearly making me happy. And I don't plan on seeing anyone else, but I haven't really gotten around to think about it."

Donghyuck takes his touch away all of a sudden. You reach out to hold his hands in place back to your face, but he lets go.

"Think about it?" Donghyuck asks, voice shaking. "What is there to think about? It's a simple question, Y/N. Do you want me for a long time or am I just some good fuck for you?"

"Donghyuck, why are you saying that?" you retort, angry now. "I just said you make me happy. And I'm not playing with you. I just—it's—with all the things going on in my life and yours, a relationship is not something I can maintain right now."

"Maintain?" Donghyuck chuckles, pulling his hands away, gently pushing you off his lap and standing away from your bed to put some space between you and him. "Y/N, we've been best friends since we were in high school. Literally nothing has changed for us except we kiss and fuck now. What is there to think about? I really do not understand."

You sigh. The sound of it makes Donghyuck pull away further until he’s picking up his backpack. 

"Donghyuck, wait," You say, but Donghyuck is already out of his room, barefoot, his shoes in his hands.

Barefoot, his shoes in one hand, two bottles of beer on the other, Donghyuck finds you by the pool outside the wedding reception. He sits beside you and mimics the way you rolled the bottom of your dress up to your thighs so it doesn’t get wet and does the same with his expensive trousers.

“What are you doing out here?” you muse, eyes staring blankly at the way your feet look blurred out underwater. “Shouldn’t you be inside getting drunk and having the time of your life?”

Donghyuck chuckles, his cheeks painted like cherries, mouth glazed like strawberries, and hands you the cold bottle of beer. “I’m already drunk. Do you think I’d have the courage to come find you here if I was sober?”

You nod, taking the bottle from his hand. “Good point. Fun party?”

“Jaemin and Jeno never fail to organize the best party,” he stammers. “They used to invite everyone in their shared apartment to play the American games they learned from Johnny-hyung. I can’t believe they’re married now.”

Jaemin and Jeno, the very reason why all of you gathered after all these years, have always been destined for each other, and you know this because you’d seen them start off as nothing and watched them turn to everything. Their wedding had been the sole reason why you’d returned to Seoul.

“I always knew they’d end up together,” you mutter, drinking from the cold bottle. “I used to manifest it. I said it all the time I saw them together.”

Donghyuck giggles. “You used to believe in the law of attraction so much. You manifested everything that’s happened in your life.”

“I did, didn’t I?” you reply, tasting the bitterness coming from the drink, a reminder why you prefer any other drink aside from beer.

It’s quite for a minute until Donghyuck talks.

“Why didn’t you manifest us?” he says suddenly, words a little grumbled. He’s probably had too much to drink already. You hold onto him naturally as his head starts swaying until his head is leaning against your shoulder, close enough to hear each other breathing. “Y/N, why did you never say we’d end up together like this, too? You were so damn good with this law of attraction bullshit. You could’ve manifested our wedding, too.”

Donghyuck is drunk, and drunk Donghyuck is always vulnerable. His tone of voice is enough for you to decide to cut this trip shorter than it already is. A week, you had promised Jeno and Jaemin, you’d leave two days after the wedding. But at this moment, when you’re frozen in place, Donghyuck’s warmth touching your coldness, you begin to ponder if it had been a good idea to come back in Seoul at all.

You love Jeno and Jaemin and would do anything for them in a heartbeat. Therefore, when the couple announced their engagement two months ago, it had been a quick, solid yes, of course, I’ll be there because you wouldn’t miss their wedding for the world, even if it had been exactly four years and two months since the last time you’d breathed the air of Seoul and that you’d rather die than be in a 12-hour flight, you swore you’d be with your friends during such a huge chapter of their lives.

Your schedules were immediately reconstructed, a ticket to Seoul safely tucked in the files in your desk’s drawer, and all your friends from London were already asking you to bring something back from Seoul when your trip is over. It was all set, with the promise of checking in with your teammates from work during your one-week leave, and it was the easiest itinerary you’d ever made. What you failed to prepare, truly, is yourself.

Somehow, you knew this would happen. You knew coming back would mean seeing Donghyuck. And seeing Donghyuck means opening wounds you’re not certain have healed and resuming conversations you’d never wanted to go back to. And this means, at any given time Donghyuck is within your space, you’d be a goner.

Because four years, it turns out, isn’t enough to get over him.

Quite funny, if you think about it now, how after all these years, you’re still orbiting around him.

You clear your throat, no words coming out, and Donghyuck starts to fall asleep against your shoulder.

Your right shoulder feels sore after falling asleep on your side on Chenle’s couch the morning after Jaemin and Jeno’s bachelor party. It was crazy, to say the least, and you’d decided to drink your guts to in hopes of not remembering anything in the morning. It sucks because you’re stupidly hungover and you remember everything.

The group was divided into two. You, Renjun, Donghyuck, and Minjeong were in charge of Jaemin in the other side of the city, courtesy of Jung Jaehyun for sponsoring and personally planning the grand party for his favorite dongsaeng. Meanwhile, Jisung, Chenle, Mark, and Jimin had planned Jeno’s very own party, along with Lee Taeyong who funded the event.

If you’re being completely honest, you’d think that after college, your friends would lose their sparks in setting up amazing parties, but last night proved you wrong.

The alcohol was disgusting, but you like that it made Renjun do things he wouldn’t do sober. Jaemin refused to get shit-faced drunk because his wedding is in two days, his hangovers usually last an entire day—he doesn’t want to show up at his own wedding looking like a zombie. Minjeong, well, she’s Minjeong, so she was just all over the place, nagging and getting drunk. She’s also a snob who thinks so highly of herself despite being the youngest in the group and liked to look down on her older friends all while attempting to stand upright after downing five shots of tequila.

Donghyuck, however, decided to bring his new girlfriend. Her name is Lia. And the only goal last night was to stay as far away as possible.

You knew that the relationship was new because Jisung filled you in before you had all parted ways for the parties, said that Donghyuck started dating her two months ago right around the time Jaemin and Jeno got engaged, Jimin being their bridge because Lia and Jimin have been friends since last year. Apparently, Lia’s been interested with him for years now; she just never had the chance because like you, Donghyuck also disappeared in and out from Seoul for a couple of years until he’d decided to stay here for good two years ago.

You can’t remember how many shots you had and how many cocktails were handed to you last night, but you wish you had more because it was evidently not enough to erase the scenarios from last night. It wasn’t enough to blur out the memories of Donghyuck holding her, kissing her, dancing with her, and just all out being a lovey-dovey boyfriend.

It’s a relief that you got home safely. There was no designated driver because the plan was to really get drunk, so Jaehyun had one of his employees drive everyone to Chenle’s penthouse because it’s the closest. You hope the others returned to Jeno’s place safely, too.

You stay still from where you’re lying down, eyes up on the ceiling, wondering what time it is. There was no plan for today aside from wedding rehearsal at six in the evening to make sure everything’s all set for tomorrow, so you reckon you have the entire day to get rid of your hangover.

You roll over to your side, facing the television, and the clock tells you it’s eleven in the morning. Renjun is snoring away from the other couch, and you remember letting Minjeong sleep on your bed for the night. You’re staring at Renjun’s sleeping form when someone on the carpeted floor suddenly rolls over, allowing you to see their face.

Donghyuck’s sleeping on the floor beside the couch, body parallel to yours so you can see his peaceful sleeping face, mouth slightly agape. He’s now sleeping on his back, head supported by one of the cushions, body covered with his jacket from last night. You remember parting ways with him with him last night. He’d taken a taxi with Lia back to her place while the rest of you went home in Jaehyun’s SUV. You don’t remember him coming back here.

You stare at him for as long as you can, because in the last three days in Seoul, you’d never really gotten the chance to get a good look on him. You and him don’t follow each other from any social media, so the last four years had truly been radio silence from both sides. Donghyuck, at 27, doesn’t look like he’s aged that much, albeit his round cheeks being gone, replaced by prominent cheekbones. It looks like he never bothered to get rid of the constellations forming on his face and neck, too, because they’re still here, just like many things that haven’t changed. Donghyuck used to love dyeing his hair crazy colors, now his hair is just colored naturally. His lips, wonder if they still taste the same.

“He’s going to melt,” Renjun says suddenly, you plop your head back to the couch, guilty for staring too long. Renjun sits up, stretching and laughing at your misery. “And you’re going to have a heart attack if you keep sneaking glances and getting caught. How many times has Jisung caught you in the last 72 hours?”

“Shut up,” you mumble, getting up and stretching as well. “What do you want to eat for breakfast?”

You carefully get off from the couch, making sure you don’t topple on Donghyuck’s sleeping body, draping the blanket over his body, walking towards Chenle’s fancy kitchen. Renjun helps you, rummaging through the fridge, and comes up with a breakfast menu with whatever you had in the kitchen.

Donghyuck wakes up before you and Renjun could finish cooking everything. He’s quiet when he approaches you in the kitchen, softly asking if you could make coffee for him. You don’t say no, of course.

“This is the most disgusting cup of coffee, I’ve had my entire life,” Donghyuck complains, leaning over the counter where you’re working on the opposite side of. “Stop jeopardizing the café’s reputation. You’re not some scientist so stop mixing concoctions from hell just to brag that you’re a part-time barista and a full-time college student. You make me sick. Literally.”

You ignore all of it, of course, eyebrows furrowed as you take another sip of the quote and quote disgusting coffee, trying to figure out what went wrong this time.

“I think it needs a bit more vanilla,” you think out loud.

“I will not join you in this stupid crusade of making your own “Barista’s Special” recipe,” he continues. “And I will tell your manager you’re wasting coffee!”

“Aha!” you exclaim when you think you got it right. “Maybe I need to level the grounds better and add another pump of vanilla. Let me try that. It should taste better.”

Donghyuck chuckles as you move around and attempt to make another cup. “You’ve been saying it should taste better since last week.”

He keeps complaining, but takes the new cup of coffee as soon as you’re done.

Donghyuck drinks.

You wait.

It still tastes disgusting.

“It’s sweet,” Donghyuck comments when he drinks it. You tilt your head. Renjun is finishing up on the scrambled eggs. You hear Minjeong come out of your room.

“Is that a bad thing?” you ask, hopeful.

Donghyuck shakes his head, chuckling. “Better than the ones you made when we were in university.”

“Hey!” you laugh. “I was awarded employee of the month once!”

“That doesn’t erase the fact that you forced me to drink your disgusting concoctions for three weeks straight,” he states, making you laugh even more. “I guess, all these years you’d learned what you were missing.”

“I’ll miss you,” you mumble against Donghyuck’s chest. “The internship will just be for a few months. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Donghyuck kisses the top of your head. “When you come back,” he mutters. “When you come back, I’ll ask you to be my girlfriend.”

You freeze.

“And you’ll say yes. And we’ll graduate together and make a life for both of us.”

You pull away a little so that you’re looking at him face to face. Donghyuck has tears threatening to fall from his eyes. You wipe it off with the sleeves of his jacket you’re wearing.

“I’ll say yes,” you promise. “And we’ll graduate together and make a life for both of us.”

A woman’s voice announces your flight number once again and says the gates are closing in five minutes. Donghyuck kisses you in the mouth—a promise—and tells you he loves you.

“Oh, Donghyuck,” you say. “I love you, too.”

“Come back home to me, yeah?”

“I will.”

Yours and Donghyuck’s favorite restaurant was located two blocks away from his parents’ home. It closed a few years ago when its owner passed away and his children were too heartbroken to keep the business running. It was a staple from your entire high school life, and if you could say it, it defined your standards when it comes to food.

You’d just gotten a call from home that your childhood pet had to be put down because of old age and many diseases, and you called in sick for work—thank God, Johnny was willing to cover for you otherwise the manager would’ve rejected your request to stay at home for the day—and you’re truly not in the mood for anything at all.

You haven’t been home for quite sometime now, the last time being the holidays and you normally just spend a couple of days before heading back to the campus, so everything really sucks. You didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

Donghyuck hears this from Jimin, of course, because your roommate called him as soon as she heard you crying from your room. He literally carries you out of your room, says grieving is better when there’s food.

As soon as you see the person standing behind the counter, you recognize the place right away. Although located in a different street now, nearby where you are, the place looks exactly the same from when it did years ago.

“Y/N! Donghyuckie!” the lady behind the counter greets.

“Oh my,” you squeal. “Auntie, I didn’t know you’re back in business! How long has it been?”

The new owner, the late owner’s eldest daughter, smiles at you and tells you they re-opened sometime this year. She tells you to find a seat and confirms she knew your order by heart.

Donghyuck sits across you. “You like it?”

“Why did you not take me here sooner?”

He smiles. “Supposedly on your birthday a couple of weeks from now. But with what happened today, I guess this is the best time.”

“You’re the best.”

It’s Jisung and Chenle who find you and Donghyuck by the pool area hours later. Donghyuck had completely fallen asleep on your shoulder. The younger ones help you and practically carry Donghyuck towards the car.

Jaemin and Jeno have left the venue so they could prepare for their flight the next day. You hadn’t paid much attention to the time when Donghyuck drunkenly approached you. Jisung tells you it’s already two in the morning.

Chenle tells you Donghyuck had broken up with Lia—the reason, he’s uncertain—which is why she stormed off from the reception and Donghyuck decided to drink his ass off while you were wandering around the place. You shrug, acknowledging the news like it doesn’t make your heart race, like it doesn’t give you some sort of hope you didn’t know you had stored, and tell them they should take him home.

Jisung says Donghyuck lives on the other side of the city, so it’s best you all head back to Chenle’s.

Jisung and Chenle share the latter’s bed, and you’re not going to let Donghyuck sleep on the couch after he had complained about his back hurting when he’d fallen asleep on the floor the other day, so it’s only right that you let Jisung and Chenle carry him to your bed.

When you wake up on the couch the next day, Donghyuck’s shoes are no longer by the doorsteps.

His footsteps are loud.

“Donghyuck, this isn’t going to work if you don’t fucking give me a chance to explain!” You scream a few feet behind Donghyuck. 

Donghyuck is running away, and you’re beginning to think that convincing him to go to the gym might not have been the greatest decision because Donghyuck is literally sprinting, like he’s being chased by something so terrifying.

You almost stop. Donghyuck, who always called him home, never ran away from you all these years. Not, it looks like he’d rather be anywhere but where you. Nothing feels worse than that. 

You’d just gotten back from your internship in the US, one more term and you’re graduating. The internship was easily the best thing that’s happened to you this year. They were already thinking of offering you a contract as soon as you graduate. They let you go back home, of course, to complete your degree, and said they’d be willing to keep training you in the states and have you relocate to Europe once you graduate because they’ll be expanding their business out there.

It's also the night of Donghyuck's first showcase, the first show he's headlining along with musicians and artists from different universities. You had promised Donghyuck you’d watch and support him, but things doesn't always go on your favor, because as soon as you’d landed, you were needed back to the campus for an interview for the university’s publishing team because they wanted you to talk about your experience alongside the others who went to the states to complete their internship. It was supposed to be an hour session, but you and everyone in the panel liked the questions they were asking, and somehow you felt like this was a sign that the company in the US could lead to better, brighter things for you.

Hence, you were late. Halfway through the show. Donghyuck got mad, but promised he understood. He asked for some space, at least for the rest of the night. But you wanted to apologize properly, to take him out for dinner even if it's already past midnight, and insisted that you should talk about it. Donghyuck refused, you kept insisting, until the former said something about you being a shitty girlfriend.

It’s a shitty excuse, but you were absolutely fucking tired. You’re still jetlagged from the 16-hour difference, and the entire session with your fellow interns took two hours of your day.

What you had left for the day was so little, and you chose to spend it with Donghyuck, but he decided to be an ass about it.

"I never said anything about being your girlfriend," was your dumb reply, which is why you’re now running after him from the building of Chenle’s condominium.

You pull Donghyuck with force as soon as you catch up with him, and you’re faced with your worst fear.

Donghyuck is crying. He’s never cried before, not because of you. A deep painful breath comes out of your mouth, and it hurts when you breathe, like inhaling a cloud of smoke or being hit by a ball in the back. Donghyuck keeps crying, doesn’t even hide it. He sobs and heaves and he doesn’t wipe his tears.

"Donghyuck, can you just—”

“I’m tired,” Donghyuck sobs. “Y/N, I’m so tired. I sound pathetic and I’m not sure if I’m exhausted from the performance or I’m just done with you.”

“I’m sorry,” is all what you could come up with. 

“This,” Donghyuck says, gesturing the small space between you. “I don’t think it’s worth all of the pain I am feeling right now, Y/N. You’re my best friend. I—I, fuck, I used to think that maybe someday this will all be worth it, but I am tired of waiting for that day. I am drained and you have consumed all of me. I waited for you, and I keep waiting until you finally just—let go and decide you want to be with me and stop playing this never-ending game of friends with benefits bullshit we started. I’m done. What else do you want from me?”

“I—I… Donghyuck,” you stutter. I want you to give me a chance. I want you to give me more time to figure some things out myself. I want you to wait a little longer.

"I rejected Ryujin a week before you came home,” Donghyuck confesses. "When you were in the states, and you suddenly changed your mind about being my girlfriend and told me I should go out and date other people and that I shouldn’t hold myself back, I was angry. I didn’t understand why you were pushing me away so much when I’m here!”

You stay still, crying.

“I’m here,” he repeats. “I’m here and I love you, and I’ve never asked anything in return. And you tell me you love me, but you do things that—that hurt me. Every time I think we’re finally going somewhere, you—you push back and I’m just—I’m sick of it. And Jaemin said I should just move on if you can’t make up your mind because I don’t know if you haven’t realized it but Y/N, we’ve been at it for years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Jeno and Jaemin set me up with Ryujin,” he continues. “We went to a couple of dates. And then you called me saying you’re coming back home. So, I broke it off before we even got started. I told her it would be unfair if I kept leading her on when I know that I am still ridiculously in love with you. She said it would be alright and that she's giving me all the time and space I need to think about things."

Donghyuck curses and continues, "But I didn't need time and space, Y/N. Because I already knew that all I've ever wanted was you. I didn't need to think. I only needed you."

You don’t know what to say. You’re still holding him by his arm.

“If you're not going to say anything, let me go,” Donghyuck sternly says. You have a feeling it’s not the grip on his arm that Donghyuck is talking about. “Please.”

The single biggest mistake of your life happened on the third street from Chenle’s place, under the broken streetlight, across the ice cream parlor Donghyuck used to work at when he was seventeen. 

You let him go. Donghyuck stops waiting.

The wait from the audience was long enough.

They say your graduation day is going to be one of the happiest moments in your life. It’s not. Not at all.

Not when you’d gotten your diploma on stage and Donghyuck shows you he doesn’t give a fuck by looking everywhere else. Not when it’s picture taking time with your friends and families and he decides to stand on the other side, far, far away from you. Not when his parents ask him to take a picture with you and he shrugs it off and says he’s hungry and that he’s meeting everyone at the restaurant, leaving with his entire family.

Renjun whispers, “Does he even know you’re leaving first thing in the morning?”

You shrug it off, too. “Looks like he has other things to care about.”

Jaemin sighs. “You’re not serious about this, are you? You and Donghyuck better pull your shit together. Both of you already ruined the moment for everyone.”

Renjun eyes him. “It’s not your fault, Y/N. If Donghyuck doesn’t want to listen, then so be it.”

“It’s not Donghyuck’s fault either,” Jaemin defends. “Because he’s been trying to get answers and you wouldn’t give it to him. So, I don’t think it’s his fault that he’s done.”

“We’re not picking sides here, Jaemin,” Jeno says. “Let’s go.”

Jeno and Jaemin sandwiches you in a tight hug.

The next day after the wedding, in the afternoon, the newlyweds are bound to France for their honeymoon. They’re traveling the continent for two weeks (unfortunately, London excluded from their itinerary), and all of you decided to drop them off as if they’re leaving for years. In your case, this may be the last time you’re seeing them for a long time.

“I love you,” Jaemin says as the two very strong and buff men hug you. “I know things have been tough and coming back here took a lot from you, but thank you for making sure you were present during the wedding.”

“I hope this isn’t the last time in another four years that we’d see you in person,” Jeno adds. “We miss you, you know? Please come visit us when you have time.”

“I love you two so much,” you cry, emotional with the way they’re holding you. “Go have fun.”

They bid their goodbyes to everyone else and enter the airport.

“If I don’t get the same treatment when I leave, I’m ghosting everyone,” Mark announces. Jisung laughs. “What? You all acted like they’re going away for two years. They’re coming back in literally and exactly two weeks!”

“Go be unhappy somewhere, hyung,” Donghyuck teases, making everyone laugh as you all walk back to where their cars are parked.

Chenle needs to go back to work, so did Jimin and Jisung, hence they ride all together. Minjeong’s visiting a friend, so she’s riding with Mark and Renjun because they’re all going to the same side of the city. Which means, Donghyuck is driving you back to Chenle’s place.

“Your flight is tomorrow, too, right?” Mark asks. You hum, nodding. “Come visit me in Vancouver sometime soon, too. Or I’ll fly to London.”

“Wow, you have a lot of money to spend on flying around the world multiple times, huh?” you tease.

“Hey, you’re the frequent flyer here,” he comments. “Wonder how many miles you’ve earned and redeemed from all this flying you’ve done in this lifetime.”

You laugh. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mark.”

Renjun and the others bid you goodbye. You’re not really certain why you and Donghyuck silently agreed to watch your friends leave, you and him standing a foot away from each other as they all drive away. For some reason, it feels like the last time.

The first time it happened, you and Donghyuck decide it’s an accident.

You were drunk, and it had been a while for the two of you considering how busy you both have been because of finals coming up. It was convenient, if you say so yourself, to have your best friend right beside you when you were feeling hot and horny. The morning after was settled with a kiss on your forehead—no apologies as discussed, because neither you nor him regretted it anyway, but there’s a promise that nothing changes.

The second time it happened, you and Donghyuck decide it’s not going to be a one-time thing.

“So, to make it clear,” you huff as you quickly get rid of your pants while Donghyuck pulls his shirt off. “This isn’t a one-time thing.”

“I don’t see an issue if it’s not,” he replies, unbuckling his belt and pulling his pants down, pushing you against the wall and kissing you down your neck. “Besides, we’re best friends.”

You lean your head against the wall, thinking if it’s too late to back out, but Donghyuck’s already has his hands all over you—one on your breast and the other on your waist. It’s not really that bad of an idea. Donghyuck is your best friend, and your friendship has withstood time, distance, growing pains, and mostly everything. And perhaps it’s the way you haven’t stopped thinking about your first time together that’s making you feel so, so vulnerable under his touch, but it’s not like anything’s changed since that night. In fact, if you’re being completely honest, it made you feel like you and Donghyuck know each other better now—in ways that other pairs like you don’t.

Hence, whatever thought you had a minute ago, you throw it down the drain and you let Donghyuck (messily, heartedly giggling) carry you by hoisting you up and wrapping your legs around his waist and bring you back to his unmade bed.

Donghyuck knows how to use his tongue, and you’ve kind of always known because all the girls he’s ever slept with talk about him like he’s a god of tongue or something. Donghyuck licks your lips before diving in, as if he’s giving you a taste of what you’re about to have, and he pushes his tongue in, massaging it with yours, and it almost feels like he’s teaching you how to use the muscle in your mouth. You realize how much he likes kissing, because he kisses more than he touches. He kisses you for what felt like hours, and you’re not about to complain about it.

You let him gently drop you on his bed. His warm palms caressing its way from your waist down to the side of your thighs where he knows you like being touched the most (and you’re not certain whether he’d learned this from stories or from the time you and him had sex); Donghyuck keeps his mouth on you as he rubs circles against your hot skin.

The finger he slips between your underwear and right above your clit sends you shivers down your spine. He allows you to catch your breath for a second, moving his mouth from your lips down to your neck, but doesn’t give you enough time to recover because he rubs your clit oh, so gently.

“We’re best friends,” he repeats, murmuring the words against the skin on your neck. “Nothing changes, except now I know where to touch you.”

He does. He touches you everywhere and slips his middle finger in your hole, sighing against your skin when he feels how wet you’ve gotten simply from kissing.

“You’ve always been such a good girl for me,” he whispers, keeping his finger inside, his palm pressed against your clit. “Such a good girl. Wet and ready for me. You really are my best friend.”

“Donghyuck,” you whine. He starts rubbing from inside, moving a single finger in an upward motion, eliciting a moan from you.

“What?” he asks innocently. “You are. You are my best friend. I don’t think everyone can say they let their best friends fuck them when they’re horny. Which makes me the best best friend, too. Because I fuck the brains out of you when you’re horny. Aren’t we the best team the world has ever seen?”

Donghyuck slips another finger in—easily, because nothing can describe how we you are now. He tongues the skin on your collarbone, licking and tasting and smirking all throughout, then he fingers you properly. At this point, your underwear’s stretched from one thigh to the other.

Donghyuck likes to tease you, and you know this because he massages the inside of your hole in a swift upward motion before pulling his fingers out and slowly filling you again. He does this slowly, then fast, then slowly once again. The explicit sound of your wetness makes him chuckle, leaving your collarbones and using his other hand to pull the left cup of your bra down and goes in. He bites and nips and licks and sucks your breast while he fingers you stupid—legs apart, shamelessly wet and fucking ready for him—and you take everything he gives you.

He doesn’t make you cum though, because Donghyuck is Donghyuck. Nobody is more cunning than him.

But he doesn’t make you wait. As soon as he feels you’re about to cum, he slips his fingers out and rids himself off his own underwear, then slipping the last two pieces barely hanging on your body.

He fucks you dumb. Raw. All his glory and skin. You have no other words aside from that.

He doesn’t wait because there’s truly no need to adjust with how wet and ready you fucking are. He’s big, but Donghyuck knows how to fuck well. He knows how to prevent discomfort and he’s done a very good job at proving that to you.

He fucks you missionary, and usually, this isn’t something you’d opt for. You like being fucked hard with no sense of affection and all that bullshit when you’re stressed and in need of some kind of relief. But with Donghyuck, it’s heavenly despite how sinful his hips snap.

He fucks you. Again and again. He makes you cum twice before he pulls out and spills himself on your stomach.

He kisses you, giggles at the way you’re dumbfounded, cleans you up, and lets you sleep on his bed as though nothing has changed.

Because nothing did. Nothing ever will.

“Funny how things have changed so much in the last four years, huh?” Donghyuck asks, eyes on the road.

Donghyuck’s said he’s driving you home. You haven’t been in Seoul in four years, but the route he’s taking is definitely not the way to Chenle’s.

“We’re taking the long way home,” he interjects when he realizes you’re looking at the GPS on his car’s tablet. “There’s, uh, heavy traffic on the usual way because of some road construction. And you’re going back tomorrow. You haven’t really gone around the city, so I figured it’d be a good time.”

You hum, looking at him with a small smile.

“Sure,” you buy. “It feels like only yesterday you were driving a beat-up Hyundai. Now, you’re all fancy.”

He chuckles, turning as his car speeds through the bridge. “Well, many things have changed since you left.”

Donghyuck looks beautiful like this: Seoul’s horizon running like a movie as he drives, smile soft, eyes bright.

“I’m sorry,” you brave up.

It takes you great courage to say it out loud. As best friends, you and Donghyuck had always said “thank you,” and “I love you” openly, and in countless of occasions, these words have healed scratches made around your friendship. Rarely you and him would ever say you’re sorry. The only time you can remember apologizing to him was the night, a few weeks before graduation when you’d just returned from the States after your internship. That sorry barely made up the wounds you’d caused.

At this age, you understand why saying sorry wasn’t normal for you and Donghyuck. You and him were inseparable. You were soulmates—are if you can bravely say it out loud. Your bond is stronger with him than anyone else, and you’d always believed that nothing could ever come between you and him. Like the decisions you’d made, nothing changed until something did. And when things changed, you and him had no idea what to do. Because as far as you can remember, you and Donghyuck remained constant, like a routine, a bible with a comprehensive and cohesive series of stories that’s never changed. So, when feelings got in between—denial and pining and confusion—neither of you had any idea how to handle it.

Donghyuck was bold and brave. You, on the other hand, had no ounce of courage to give it a try.

He only smiles. “A few years too late, don’t you think?”

You nod. “I know. Do you accept my apology?”

“If you buy me ice cream,” he answers.

“Done,” you say, smiling back at him. “I was scared.”

Donghyuck keeps his eyes on the road. “Of?”

“That I’d come back to Seoul and see you married with kids and all.”

“And what’s so scary about that?”

“Because it would mean I’d thrown away all the chances the universe has given me.”

Donghyuck looks ethereal like this: in a suit, smiling as he watches his bride walk down the aisle.

“Take care, yeah?” Renjun whispers as he hugs you.

Mark’s Dad and Mark himself are waiting for you outside. As most of your friends have gone home to their families after graduation, with the exception of Renjun and Jisung who spared some time today just to see you off, Mark volunteered (his dad) to drop you off the airport.

“I will,” you say, burying your face into his chest. “Any word from Donghyuck?”

Renjun pulls away and looks down. You know the answer.

“It’s okay,” you answer, mostly to yourself. “He’ll call me back soon. I’m sure.”

“I hope so,” Renjun mumbles.

The only call you get before you enter the gates is a drunken one. It’s Donghyuck.

“I hate you,” he grits through the device. “And I never want to see you again.”

“I didn’t want to come back,” you confess. Donghyuck keeps his hands on the steering wheel. “Because you’d said you never wanted to see me again.”

“And I sent you messages you never received,” Donghyuck says. It surprises you. “Because your Korean number was no longer active and you’d blocked me from everything at that time.”

You smile, wondering if you had a little bit more understanding—if you had waited a little before deactivating your old number, if you had given it some time—would you and Donghyuck end up together in the end? If Donghyuck hadn’t been drunk the night you left Seoul—if he’d taken a taxi before you boarded the plane, if he’d just said sorry back—would you and him have gotten into a relationship right away?

Regret, just like grief, makes you feel things like this. They make you wonder what could have happened, if it would’ve given you the same, awful outcome, or if it would take you to the happy ending you keep dreaming about.

“Funny how we had many things we couldn’t say despite us being best friends,” he comments. “And you agree that many things have changed in the last four years, right?”

You hum, looking out your window, watching the horizon blur in motion.

“Donghyuck-ah,” you whisper, eyes still on the moving horizon. “The only thing that hasn’t changed for me.”

“What?” he asks.

“You,” you say. “You’re the only one that hasn’t changed for me. You’re still sharp when you need to be, but gentle where people you love need you to be. You’re still beautiful like the day I had realized I loved you. It wasn’t shocking, though. That day. I wasn’t all too shocked that your newly-dyed pink hair was the eureka moment for me. Because I knew all along. It was more like a flick on the wrist rather than a surprise. Like it’s always been there. The pink hair was just a reminder.”

Donghyuck stays quiet.

“And I say this like I’m hoping I could go back to four years ago and try harder to apologize,” you continue, tears already brimming your eyes. “But I guess we needed this, Donghyuck. We needed to grow—sadly—apart. And I feel like, no, I know that I wouldn’t have gotten to know myself better if we didn’t grow apart.”

“Yeah,” he speaks for what seems like a long time. “We were—you were right all along. We couldn’t just risk it all for a relationship. I had offers left and right even before we’d graduated, and you.”

You look at him. Donghyuck’s eyes are carefully still on the road, but his gaze is soft, eyes shining from the tears welling up.

“You were made to see the world,” he says, and it breaks you like glass. “I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I were the reason why you don’t have the life you have now. Because it wouldn’t have worked. I love you, and I just know that at that time, when we were young and all, I wouldn’t have let you go work abroad. The few months you spent in the state for a mere internship already shook our friendship in ways we didn’t expect. What more if we had been in a relationship?”

“Donghyuck,” you sniffle. “I love you. And it hurt. And I’m sorry it us this long. I’m sorry it took me this long.”

“Stop apologizing. Y/N, I would’ve let you go eventually,” he confesses. “Because I love you so much that I’d be willing to let you go if it meant you could soar.”

The sun sets in the horizon the next time you look out your window.

Donghyuck keeps one hand on the wheel and shows you the other, palm up.

You take it with courage.

And you. You look beautiful like this: dressed in white, smiling as you walk towards your groom. You best friend. Donghyuck.

[bugisastranger]

a/n: prompt once again from @scealaiscoite | i haven't written for steve rogers (or watched any of his movies) since like 2021 so this is all off memory. third installment of my valentine's day series <3

"you're telling me you really have nowhere better to be than here today?"

steve says as the elevator doors open, taking a few steps forward. he turns, about to reach for the button, when he realizes you're going to the same floor.

"you're here, too. i don't wanna hear it."

"yeah, well.. i'm still figuring all this out," steve says, his smirk barely noticeable. he leans against the wall of the elevator, which suddenly feels smaller than you'd remembered.

"is that what you've been doing?" you couldn't remember the last time steve mentioned seeing someone, if he ever had.

"yes."

you hum in response, letting his answer settle into the silence. and then you think... "i could teach you." that's not the right thing to say, is it? "sorry, i meant—i meant that i could be like a consultant. help you out. plenty of girls must be fawning over captain america."

steve scoffs. "that's the problem, though. isn't it? i'm just a guy." the elevator doors open with a ding and he waits for you to exit first. "i appreciate the offer."

he walks down the hallway beside you, and you start to realize this is the most you've ever really talked to steve about himself. "i'm sure someone can look past the red, white, and blue."

"can you?" he counters, holding open the glass door for you. it's a serious question, but he asks it like he already knows the answer—that you can't.

"sure, i can."

steve stops, grabbing your arm lightly to make you look up at him. "okay. what do you see?" you see that his hair is blonder than you remember. you see all the details in his eyes, the different shades of blue.

"i see a guy," you say. he drops his hand from your arm, smiling and looking to the side.

"touché."

you remember what you're here for, to work. but steve seems stuck in this conversation, so you are too. it's not unfamiliar that you're so drawn to him, but there's something more today, like he's magnetic. "what do you see in me?"

there's an almost awkward silence as he looks at you, almost studying your features. it's clear that he's thinking something, that he has a real answer, but he says, "a romance consultant."

"wow. that's all?" you chuckle, leaning against the wall.

"no, i..." he starts. his hands move from his pockets up to his hips, and it seems like he's trying to decide whether or not to continue. then, he catches your eyes, and that seems to make the decision for him. "i see someone too good to be spending valentine's day alone."

"well, you're here. i'm not exactly alone."

"you know that's not what i meant."

"i know. i'm just saying, i don't have to be. alone, i mean."

"i don't have flowers or anything." it almost sounds like an apology, like he should've foreseen this, even if there was no way to.

"that's okay. your company is enough."

"you should be getting flowers." he takes a step closer. "and chocolate." and he takes another step. "and... i don't know, what do people do on valentine's day? go to dinner? get jewelry?"

"they kiss."

"is that what you want?"

you nod, and steve throws caution to the wind. before you can blink, one of his hands is on your waist, the other holding the side of your head. he doesn't give you an opportunity to reconsider, his lips are pressed against yours like he's been waiting a lifetime for this moment. when he pulls away, it feels like you'd been kissing for ages, but then it feels like you'd only been kissing for seconds. his breathing is labored, and you can see red in his cheeks.

"was that your first kiss since 1945?"

"i'm not answering that."

"oh, come on," you pester, bringing your hand up to the side of his face, which seems to do the trick.

"yes."

"really?"

"yes, really."

"it didn't seem like it."

"well, i guess if you put enough heart into something you can fool anyone." his words make your heart practically soar out of your chest. 'if you put enough heart into something'. you wonder if he planned for that to sound the way it did. you could feel his passion in the kiss, but to hear him imply that it actually means something to him is something else entirely.

"although, now that you mention it... maybe i could tell. kiss me again?"

"i will, but that is so corny."

[alexihollis]

The Orphans pt 2

part one

Mercy never wanted to be leader. She never asked to be leader, she never even wanted to be in a gang, but-

Well. Shit happens and all that. But now, here she was, painfully out of her depth as she stared at the hopeful faces of girls who never knew a kind word in their life. Trying to scrape together business and smooth over the relationships Sully tried to set on fire.

Fortunately, most of Sully's attempts were in vain with many of their associates doing a double-take when Mercy explained the situation. One even flat out laughed and said: "I thought you'd been the leader, girlie."

Then seemed to regret that comment when Mercy made it quite clear that they would not be running the same level of business for the pathetic cut Sully accepted. But he seemed to still respect her and happy enough to do said business by the time Mercy left.

Bringing Emily home from the hospital, though? Being able to show her to a room all her own and give her the key to the lock Harley (previously Penelope, now Harley after her motorcycle and damn pleased with her new name) installed on her door? It was the moments like those that made it all worth it.

"This is yours, if you want it," Mercy had said while Emily hobbled around the room they had put together for her. The curtains Stitch sewed for her with all the pink fabric they could scrape together. The rug they found in the attic that was shaggy and soft. All those pictures Emily loved taking tacked carefully to the wall above her bed. When Emily looked at her, confused by her words, Mercy was holding a green vest out to her.

Emily blinked, shocked. "Colors?"

Mercy nodded. "If you-"

Emily moved as fast as one still on crutches could. "Oh, my God. Oh, my God! This is awesome!"

"You don't have to-" And then Mercy found herself tackled by the small teenager, so that said enough.

Her goal for her Orphans was simple, though: survive. Do business, keep the turf, and keep their people, that was it. They did not need to expand, they did not need to mess with other gangs, Mercy wasn't even too keen on recruitment that Harley kept suggesting.

So why the fuck did the Riffs and the Warriors keep patrolling her damn southern border?

The first time Stitch reported on them hanging about, Mercy shrugged it off. The Warriors even crossed that one time, with one of the most infamous enforcers in the city and Cleon's number two, who freaked out more gangs than fucking Masai with the way she looked at you and you just knew she had a thousand different ways to neutralize any threat you posed. It scared the shit out of Mercy bringing her into the dining room, she just prayed none of the Warriors noticed any of the hidden entrances into the backspaces they actually lived in.

It was funny. If Mercy had met Swan in any other situation, maybe it would have been different. She was exactly the kind of woman that Mercy would have-

It didn't matter. It wasn't different.

The second time Stitch and her scouts came back, Mercy got a bit concerned.

Then it was the third. Fourth.

By the fifth time, Mercy was getting annoyed and planted herself at the boundary, smoking in an alleyway and waiting for them to show up.

It was just the one, this time. The number two. Swan. Mercy wasn't dumb enough to believe that, though, knew that the Riffs probably had scouts hidden about, the little ghosts.

Still. It was interesting.

She flicked her cigarette away and stepped out of the alley. "Fancy meeting you here."

Swan didn't say anything, but her eyes flicked down. Then up. Mercy stood her ground, a few feet away, but in front of Swan. Maybe technically not in Orphans territory and maybe Harley did not, in fact, know that she was doing this, but whatever.

"Cyrus finds you interesting," Swan said.

Mercy shifted her weight to her other foot. "Really."

"Yeah," Swan shrugged. Shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket. "Don't have too many women Warlords."

"She's got Cleon," Mercy said. Obviously, fucking obviously Mercy, what the hell was that?

Swan just raised an eyebrow. Then, sighed, "You got a diner or something around here we can chat?"

"Chat about what?" Mercy asked.

"Joining up," came a deep voice from behind Mercy which made her jump and whirl around and- Jesus fucking Christ, okay, there was Masai. Mercy's hand clutched the knife in her pocket, but she knew better than to pull a knife on a Riff.

"Dude," Swan deadpanned, tone ever so slightly disapproving, from behind Mercy as Mercy's heart fought to go back down to a normal rhythm.

"Sorry," Masai actually did look genuinely sorry. Even took a step back from Mercy. Then, looked around, "You really don't have anyone else out here?"

This would be the part where Mercy would lie. Say she did. But...considering no one jumped out to defend her that would either make it look like her crew didn't give a shit about her or were cowards, and she wasn't going to insult them by letting Masai think either.

"...not exactly," Mercy said instead.

She wasn't sure what she expected, but she certainly found herself taken aback when Masai simply nodded. "Bold."

...yeah...okay...

Mercy found herself looking to Swan who just seemed tired of the man. When Swan noticed Mercy looking at her, "Diner?"

"Yeah. A couple." Mercy took a step away from Masai before turning her back and going the way Swan came. "Follow me."

Mel's was good enough. A bit of a dive, but it meant less people and they served pancakes 24/7. Mercy liked pancakes.

She sat on one side of the booth, sitting close to the edge and grabbing one of the menus tucked to the side, ignoring Swan and Masai until they got the hint and sat side-by-side on the other bench. It was amusing, the way they stood there for a minute, neither wanting to sit by the window. Surprisingly, Masai was the one who ended up in that spot, Swan seated directly across from Mercy.

"So," Masai grabbed a menu. "What's good here?"

"Everything." Fuck off.

"Hm." Masai seemed unimpressed, but did not push farther.

Swan said nothing, perusing the menu herself.

Sara came by not long after. She was one of the older waitresses, with her hair white and curly in that way only managed with wash and sets. Her old, faded blue waitressing uniform was always ironed, apron always bleached white, not a stain in sight. Apparently, Sara's roommate, a similarly aged woman named Ethel, was very particular about the laundry, as Sara always laughed. Mercy met Ethel a few times - whenever she got bored, you could find her sitting on a barstool with her glasses that made her eyes look giant, reading a large-print book, while Sara complained about how much coffee Ethel managed to consume in one sitting.

"These friends of yours, sweetheart?" Sara asked.

Sara was not from the city, though she never said more than that, just that she grew up somewhere else. Mercy thought somewhere down south, maybe, but Sara said that it was a lifetime ago and Mercy respected that well enough. After all, Sara never asked Mercy where she was from or asked too much about the colors on her back.

Of course, it would have been beneficial for Sara to not call Mercy 'sweetheart' in front of Swan and Masai, but...no one was perfect.

"Friendly enough," Mercy smiled, moving her coffee cup closer to Sara to pour.

The other two did the same.

"You two ready to place your orders?" Sara asked.

"Toast's fine," Swan muttered. At Sara's raised eyebrow, "Please."

"Butter or jam?" Sara asked.

"...jam?" Swan's voice tilted up a bit, but Sara nodded.

"And you, young man?"

"Bacon egg and cheese, on a bagel, please," Masai even managed a smile. It looked pained.

"Hm." Sara's eyes narrowed slightly.

Then, because it was Sara, when she turned to go, "You've certainly brought worse around, sweetheart."

And off she went.

Maybe not Mel's next time. Not if Mercy wanted to keep any form of street cred.

"So, they know you here?" Swan asked.

"Maybe," Mercy said through only slightly gritted teeth.

"She didn't take your order." And the weirdest thing? Swan smiled when she said it, almost like she found the whole thing amusing or something.

"Anyway!" Mercy clapped her hands, more than ready to move on. "You wanted to talk about something?"

Namely why you keep patrolling my turf when one of you is from Coney Island. Hell, the Riffs don't even butt up that far into the Bronx, for fuck's sake, though the alliance did complicate matters like territory lines.

"We wanted to talk about you joining up," Masai said.

Ah. Right. He did say something about that while scaring the absolute shit out of her.

Mercy pursed her lips. "Hm. Kind of like being an Orphan, actually."

"Not like that," Swan corrected. "Joining up with the alliance."

Huh. Interesting.

"We didn't receive an invite last time," Mercy said.

"You weren't Warlord last time," Swan retorted.

Fair enough. As much as Sully bitched about it, he wouldn't have gone anyway. He didn't have enough to gain from an alliance like that and a lot more to lose. All the weaker gangs did. How long could an alliance like that last before the gang lines within blurred? Before Cyrus started ordering your crew around and suddenly you weren't Warlord anymore?

"We can handle ourselves," Mercy said.

"And you think the Warriors can't?" Swan scoffed.

Mercy narrowed her eyes. "I think that this alliance has gained a strong crew a lot of powerful friends. The Warriors were all alone before this. Cleon and Cochise didn't make it easy on themselves when they split off from the Destroyers."

Neither Masai nor Swan said anything for a moment.

Masai let out a low, long whistle through his teeth, eyebrows raised as he sat back in the booth. "Damn. That's some ancient history there. You're what? Twenty? Twenty-one? No way you were running around back then."

Yeah, Mercy wasn't falling for that. She stayed silent.

"It's a peace treaty," Swan said. "That's all it really is. No one gets a say in how you run your crew. Don't get a say in your business, none of that shit. You aren't looking to expand your turf anyway, you aren't recruiting, you have nothing to lose."

And damn was that tempting.

"What do I have to gain, then?" Mercy shrugged. "I haven't been challenged. No one's stressing my borders except you. Why bother?"

"No one's stressing your borders because Cyrus has made it clear to leave the Orphans alone," Swan said. "You really think no one would try? No one even knows what kind of strength you have. If you don't join up, non-allied crews are gonna start looking at you. You've got more territory than most and good business. You've got a lot you need protected." Swan hesitated for a split-second, side-eyed Masai, and then, "And you don't have the power to keep it protected."

Mercy narrowed her eyes, "Fuck you-"

"You don't have Sully's numbers and you don't have skilled enough fighters, it's not a dig, it's the truth," Swan said.

Mercy clenched her jaw. Looked out the window. Stitch must have sent out an alarm, because Harley stood across the street, watching, with Rocky. The only two in her crew Mercy could even half-way call enforcers and, as much as Mercy cared for them, as much as she knew they would fight for her, for their crew, they were no Swan. No Ajax.

And they had a lot more people at home to protect than the Warriors did.

Fucking Sully, creating this whole damn mess and making her try and clean it up.

"Cyrus wants a conversation," Masai said. "Not a promise to join up, nothing like that, a conversation."

"On your turf," Mercy said, because Cyrus didn't leave Gramercy often.

Masai nodded.

"I get to bring people with me?" Mercy asked.

"Seven has been the standard, including yourself," Masai said. "No guns."

Seven. Hah. Mercy wouldn't even be considering this if she had six other people to bring with her.

"Cleon wouldn't have joined if she thought it would risk her territory or her crew," Swan said. She sounded sincere, too.

This woman. This woman was going to be trouble for Mercy, because Mercy nodded. "When do you want us there?"

----------

All right. Y'all got me. I'm adding to this one.

[lev-1athan]

How to Survive Being Online

There was an article going around a few weeks back that listed dozens of good things that happened in 2024 globally. The site linked to a weekly roundup newsletter called "Fix the News" that I subscribed to, and it's SO wonderful. It's free, but there's also a paid version. It links its sources as well.

As an American who has been spiraling into hopelessness, it puts into perspective that a lot of progress is still happening worldwide and it's helped to shift my perspective from being so Western-centric.

This week's newsletter included this advice from Mike Monteiro (cw for some ableist language; bolding is mine)

"The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them. Protect yourself from their bullshit, of course, but move away from it. Let them have their stage, but refuse to be their audience. This isn’t easy. It’s especially difficult because capitalism is an attention economy. The New York Times and The Washington Post love a narcissistic sociopath because they generate clicks and clicks sell ads. Social media loves a narcissistic sociopath for the same reason, but it’s even worse. On social media, we’re the ones carrying their water. Trump says something that he knows will get him attention (i.e. renaming the Gulf of Mexico) and not only does it fire up hundreds of media outlets, who now divert attention to this idiocy, but it also fires up tons of people like me and you, who end up reposting his garbage. Some of us because we feel like we’re media outlets (we’re not), some of us because we’re freaked out and freaking other people out justifies our own freak-out, and some of us because we were once bitten by a narcissistic sociopath under a full moon and we want to generate some of those sweet sweet likes in our direction. The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience."

A few positives in this week's newsletter: Wage inequality has declined in two-thirds of countries since 2000 A new report from the International Labour Organisation has revealed that, since the early 2000s, global wage inequality has fallen at an average rate ranging from 0.5% to 1.7% annually, with the most significant decreases occurring in LMICs. Global real average wage growth has started to surpass inflation, with projections reaching 2.7% growth for 2024, the highest increase in over 15 years. (source)

The fastest energy transition in history continues Solar and wind are being installed at a rate five times faster than all other new electricity sources—including gas, hydro and nuclear—combined. At these growth rates, energy think tank, Ember estimates that by 2032, solar and wind generation will surpass the combined output of coal and gas. Step by step, the outlook for the world’s energy mix is getting brighter. (source)

Aid begins pouring into Gaza Over 2,400 aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip since the cessation of hostilities was announced on Sunday. The truce requires at least 600 truckloads of aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the initial six-week ceasefire. “This is a moment of tremendous hope — fragile, yet vital,” says Tom Fletcher, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs. (source)

Anyway, I highly recommend taking a look. This has seriously helped my mental health, and I think we could all use a little respite.

[duckprintspress]

A Year with Duck Prints Press: Our 2024 Publications

We’ve had a busy year at Duck Prints Press – we published two anthologies, a novella, a novel, and moved many other projects along. All except our most recent, A Truth Universally Acknowledged, are available from our webstore and from many other retail and library sources. 46 short stories also debuted to our Patreon as new releases exclusively available to our backers, bringing the total number of titles available to our Patrons up to 94 stories. Many of our past titles are now available in print (instead of digital-only), including about half the short stories on our webpage (zines only sold when we vend in person, currently!) and our four novelettes (which can all be purchased online). And we didn’t only create books – our Mythical Creature Pride pins and stickers were a flagship art project for the year, and we’ve released 5 monthly art pieces exclusive to our Patrons. Basically: we’ve had an awesome year, made a ton of amazing stuff, and we’re so so glad that y’all have been along with us for the ride.

-

Aether Beyond the Binary

How would Earth look if the very atoms around us were suffused with magical aether? How would our lives be different if this aether was discovered last year, or last century, or last millennia? How might the people who lived with this magic explore their gender identities? These are the questions we posed to the 17 authors who contributed to Aether Beyond the Binary. Their inventive answers comprise this must-not-miss collection about magical realms, adventures and mysteries, new chances and well-earned endings, and characters as gender-diverse as the worlds they inhabit.

-

Hockey Bois by A. L. Heard

Nick Porter has always loved hockey. Ever since he can remember, it’s been his favorite thing in the world. It’s too bad he never learned to play, he’d tell himself, but it was too late to do it now. Adults don’t just magically learn to skate and join a hockey team. That’d be ridiculous.

Except maybe they do? On a whim, he decides to sign up for an adult  beginner’s class. He learns to skate, joins a team, and meets a really hot teammate… and it’s pretty much a disaster from there on out.

-

Many Hands: An Anthology of Polyamorous Erotica

For those who love their short stories spicy, we’re delighted to bring you Duck Prints Press’s debut explicit anthology Many Hands: An Anthology of Polyamorous Erotica. In this collection of brand-new stories, we celebrate many flavors of polyamory. Orgy? Yes please! Ménage à trois? C’est magnifique! Foursomes and moresomes? Delighted to attend! We asked our contributors to blow our minds with their fun combinations, unusual settings, favorite trope usage, and (of course) super sexy smut—and they didn’t disappoint. From a vampire free-for-all to a heartfelt reunion, from surprise soulmates to enemies-to-lovers, this collection has polyamory in lots of scrumptious varieties that lovers of erotica won’t want to miss!

-

Scrap Metal Angel by Nicola Kapron

Reality, tiny and fragile, is cut off from the sea of chaos and nightmares that surrounds it by seven Gates. One of them is open—and has been since the Stone Age. Through that opening, strange creatures and energies slip through. Some are malevolent. None are harmless. And all of them must be kept a secret.

Every hidden magical world needs a shadowy clean-up crew. Adrian Somer is a Gatekeeper, sworn to protect the cosmic Gates, to defend reality from the unknown entities that exist beyond them, and to help those whose lives are affected by magic.

When a grieving sorceress starts punching holes in reality to try and resurrect her murdered fiancé, Adrian must turn to a ghost from his past in order to save the city, and perhaps the world—even if that means digging up someone he thought was safely buried: the twin brother he killed eight years ago.

-

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” With this third installment in our “Queer Fanworks Inspired By…” anthology series, we set out to explore the truth by which we at Duck Prints Press live: that a classic work without a single canonically queer character must be in want of a very LGBTQIA+ makeover! “A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice,'” with 21 short stories and 20 full-page color artworks, is just that. 38 creators have contributed to this project, drawing inspiration from Pride and Prejudice’s characters and story to create delightful, thoughtful, intriguing, and (of course) very queer fanworks and Pride and Prejudice-inspired original works. For this collection, we encouraged our creators to focus on Sapphic/wlw relationships and/or transgender and genderqueer interpretations for their inspiration, though those are definitely not the only types of queer we’ve fit into this diverse collection.

Happy New Year, everyone! We wish you the best for 2025!

[myers-meadow]

An orange and a knife (Halsin x Tav)

Title: An orange and a knife

Pairing: Halsin x (named) Tav

Summary: You share an orange together. Twice. Or: Your adoration of Halsin grows by the day, but acceptance of those feelings is a whole different beast entirely. One night, they burst to the surface, and you can hide them no longer. Maybe you won't have to.

Warnings: none, all ages; pining, yearning, complicated feelings, happy end. First person pov. An exploration of emotions and how I wouldn't be able to take living close to Halsin as I'd just implode from adoration.

Wordcount: 1459

Please reblog or comment if you enjoyed! Have fun reading! <3 Dividers by@saradika-graphics.

I sank down on the log by the fire, plate and knife in one hand, a big orange in the other. Gale had it left over from somewhere and I gladly took it off his hands. Most of the companions had already retired to their tents, to read, to meditate, to sort out food for the next morning and the journey ahead. Karlach and Halsin were left, wrapped in conversation and I sat my ass down next to Halsin, who immediately scooted over once he spotted me coming. 

"Ay girl, did you borrow that dagger from Astarion?" Karlach joked, pointing to the overly large knife in my hand. They all knew I wasn't a fighter, and I didn't tend to carry weapons, so her guess wasn't a bad one.

"No, actually," I said, going along with the joke. "Wyll lent it to me."

She and Halsin laughed. I laid the plate down on my lap, holding the orange as i sliced off the ends. Halsin leaned back, turning towards me, to allow me to join conversation. Before I came, they'd been discussing Karlach's new ability to touch people, and from the looks of things, they got along swimmingly. My heart swelled at Karlach's joy as Dammon installed the new part earlier that day. Absentmindedly, I cut the orange in thick slices, then cut them in the lenght to eat from the rind.

"You want some?" I held out the plate to them both, leaning against Halsin's arm to reach Karlach, fingers dripping with juice.

"Thanks, soldier!"

Halsin laughed, in that way he sometimes did, somewhat quietly, when he had a joke to himself, or was just too polite to say what was on his mind, but he took a piece anyway. I didn't comment on it, too busy with my first piece, having looked forward to the orange as dessert ever since Gale mentioned the fruit in the morning, hoping no one else got their hands on it before me, fingers sticky, teeth digging in the soft, stringy flesh, sweetness filling my mouth. Moments like these were what kept me sane throughout all this. I realised I was sucking away on my third slice, before coming to my senses and passing the plate along again.

"Have more, please." My cheeks grew hot, hoping I hadn't ruined the romantic tension between them. "Please don't mind me."

Halsin sucked off his fingers and I tried not to look at it for too long, afraid my hunger would show - just as these two were getting along so well. "We were talking about what Karlach wants to do now that she can touch others again."

"And all thanks to you!" she beamed, reaching over for another slice.

"Dammon is a treasure," I said and handed the last piece to Halsin, moving to stand again to clean the plate and knife. "It's getting late, I'll leave you two to it, goodnight, loves! Have fun!"

The next night, Halsin tended to my wounds before I could seek out Shadowheart. Gale was cooking something delicious-smelling back at the heart of camp, and most retreated to do their own thing before dinner. We sat at Halsin's tent at the edge of the light. It was a relief to be back around him, surrounded by his warmth, his smell, the herbs he dries in his tent, the small pots of salves and potions he keeps on hand.

"Let me come with you, tomorrow," he said, voice soft, the healing spell sizzling out, the last of the blue glow fading. "You've been taking hits like you're Karlach, but you're a spellcaster. You should stay back more, like Astarion."

"I try, I just always happen to be-" a gasp left my lips as Halsin rubbed the bruise on my leg with a warm hand, to see if he was done yet, "right there in the middle of it."

He slid my skirt up to see how bad it was, his fingertips leaving goosebumps in their wake, but not from cold. He dipped his fingers in one of his healing salves. "The cultists really don't like you much."

I covered his hand with mine. "I'd be glad to have you by my side tomorrow."

After a particularly rough day of adventuring later that week, my dear companions elected to have me stay at camp. Karlach was overjoyed to join Wyll, Shadowheart and Astarion anyway, so it was a win-win for many. Camp was rather quiet. The hours passed agonisingly slowly, especially as most companions seemed to have their own routines, and no need for company. Sometime before midday I found myself by Halsin's tent. He went out the day before to forage for herbs, and was hanging it all to dry, tying them into bundles with lenghts of string. Movements practiced, it was hypnotising to watch him. Large hands that still had such nimble fingers.

"Did you come here just to stare at me?" His voice startled me. From the way he eyed me, it felt like he was aware of my amorous intentions.

I hummed. "I've never spent the entire day at camp before."

"That doesn't answer my question." His tone was light.

"I'd like to stare, if you'll allow me," I said, eventually. He smiled. His hazel eyes glowed. 

"You're welcome to stay, as long as you have desire for my company."

So I stayed, enjoying the easy conversation, the sun on my face, and fell deeper and deeper in love with him.

No matter how much I tried resisting my feelings, every time I caught a glance of Halsin across camp, a terrible wave of adoration washed over me. The amount of times that Gale got upset when my attention slipped was more than I'd like to admit. With the adoration, came the jealousy. It was foreign to me before, but when Karlach would nestle close to Halsin, the pangs of it were heavy in my stomach.

One night, Halsin sank down next to me, orange and knife in hand, my heart leapt at the sight of him.

"Here, you like oranges, right?"

"You remembered."

"And I remember how terribly awkward you cut it. Here, let me show you an easier way." Halsin angled towards me so much that our knees were touching, and I could see only him, the rest of camp reduced to vague shapes in the dark, the fire behind him illuminating his hair, laying harsh shadows on his face. Beauty. He laughed softly in much the same way as back then, when we shared the orange for the first time. "It'd help if you'd actually pay attention to what I'm doing."

I hummed, but did as he said. Instead of cutting slices, he divided the whole orange into parts, to eat from the rind in a much more effective manner. The knife dripped with juice when he wasn't even halfway done. I ate as he cut, as he didn't bring a plate to put them on. With sweetened lips, I thanked him. "You're right, this makes a lot of sense. Thank you."

He smiled warmly and I almost had to avoid his eyes with the overwhelm of emotion. "Gladly. Frankly, I've never seen anyone cut fruit that clumsily."

I laughed. "Well, I just love to surprise people."

We shared the rest of the orange, in this comfortable bubble of this shared experience. As I was done with my pieces, and Halsin took his last bite before discarding the peel, the juice glistening in the firelight - in an impulse I reached up and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. Immediately, regret drowned out all other thoughts.

"Fuck, Halsin, I'm sorry-"

Seeing my panicked expression, and not caring for how sticky his hands were, he cupped my cheek and kissed me fervently. The sweet citrus mixed with the tobacco he smoked earlier that evening, warm, heady, delicious. Tingles set me alight as though hit by a lightning arrow. In the distance, somewhere, Karlach cheered, and the others didn't remain silent either. It didn't really process - there was only the sensation of his lips against mine, lingering even after he pulled back. Halsin rested his forehead against mine. Somehow my fist was balled into his shirt, and I let go slowly, smoothing out the fabric.

"You've no idea how long I've wanted to do that," he breathed, his voice quiet and heavy with emotion.

"Since the moment-" I swallowed thickly, refusing to look at him still, "we met, amidst the goblin guts."

A laugh rumbled from his chest. He pulled me into him for the best hug of my life and happily I sank into him, heart fluttering lighter than ever before. "Then we have a lot to catch up on."

[bitstitchbitch]

friendly reminder that the time to start thinking about the next election cycle is now. Want a viable third party candidate or a better democratic candidate for president? Find someone with a good platform (or become that person yourself) and start building the coalition now. Upset that your house/senate representative flipped, at either state or federal level? Show up at your political party's next meetings to help build the plan to flip it back in the future. Worried about book bans / helping the homeless / getting trans-friendly and accessible bathrooms installed at your local public school? Those fights are often fought at the local level, so look into city and county elections - these can be the easiest/most effective because you need a smaller vote margin to win and you already know your neighbors. Plus local elected positions are sometimes non-partisan, meaning you don't have to fight the single-party voters.

Obviously elections aren't the end-all-be-all of political action. They are just one tool in the toolbox. You can make as much or more of an impact doing volunteer work, regularly donating, union-forming, etc. etc. But if election work is work you are interested in, it is still important work. We need every tool we have access to to move forward as a society. I think we are all recognizing that the democratic party needs to really rethink it's positions and arguments to appeal to more people and actually benefit society. Whether you think we should reform the democratic party or turn our focus to a different party to achieve those necessary changes, now is the time to start the work. If we wait to the next presidential election year, it will be too late to create meaningful change.

[treethymes]

With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world’s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[realbeeing]

the 3 beasts faced by contemporary humanity, according to Rudolf Steiner

"The human being of today is afraid of the spirit's creativity. Fear sits deep in his soul. And he would like to conjure it away. So he dresses his fear in all kinds of pseudo-logical arguments by which he tries to refute spiritual revelations.

You will hear, my dear friends, from this or that side, arguments against spiritual knowledge. It is sometimes dressed in clever, sometimes in sly, sometimes in foolish logical rules. Never, however, are the logical rules the reason why spiritual knowledge is refuted. Rather it is [the first beast], the spirit of fear, that lives and works deep into humanity's inner life which, when it rises to the head, translates into logical reasons. It is fear!

But it is not sufficient to say: I am not afraid. Everyone can of course say that. We must first comprehend the nature and the seat of this fear. We must tell ourselves that we were born and educated according to the present time, in which the Ahrimanic side has installed spirits of fear, and that we are tainted by these spirits. And conjuring them away doesn't mean that they really go... [it is only] the inner courage of soul which provides the strength and the capacity to follow the path that leads to true, real, light-filled spiritual knowledge.

And the second beast, which creeps into the human soul from the spirit of the times to become an enemy of knowledge, this beast lurks everywhere we go—in most of the literary works of the day, in most of the art galleries, in most sculpture and art in general and music. It wreaks its havoc in the schools and in society. In order to avoid having to confess its fear of the spirit, it resorts to mocking spiritual knowledge.

This mockery is not always openly expressed, because people are not conscious of what is within them. But I would say that only a thin wall, the thickness of a spiderweb, separates what is in people's consciousness and what is in their hearts wanting to mock true spiritual knowledge... Basically everyone today is vaccinated against the spirit's revelations. And the mockery is manifested in the most unusual ways.

The third beast is lazy thinking, the kind of thinking that would make the whole world a movie, because then no one is required to think—everything is reeled out and all one has to do is follow what is reeled out. Even science would like to follow the world's phenomena with passive thinking...Humanity's thinking nowadays can be compared to someone who wants to pick something up from the floor and stands there with his hands in his pockets and thinks he can pick the thing up that way. But he cannot. And existence cannot be comprehended by thinking with its hands in its pockets. We must move our arms and hands if we want to grasp something from the floor. We must activate our thinking if we want to grasp the spirit."

- Rudolf Steiner, from a lecture given February 15, 1924 in Dornach. [edited for brevity; emphasis mine]

[thetypedwriter]

Children of Anguish and Anarchy Book Review

Children of Anguish and Anarchy Book Review by Tomi Adeyemi

This book was so horrible. 

No one is more disappointed than me to say that. 

I’ve gone to two of Tomi Adeyemi’s book signings, including a recent one for Children of Anguish and Anarchy.

Tomi Adeyemi herself is absolutely wonderful. She’s so intelligent, hilarious, addictively charming, and can work a room like no other. The book signing was fantastic. Too bad the book couldn’t hold up to the event itself. 

Children of Anguish and Anarchy follows as the third and last installment of the Legacy of Orisha trilogy, but doesn’t read like that at all.

Other than having the same four main characters of Tzain, Zelie, Amari, and Inan, nothing about the book concludes any issue, plot story, or character development from the previous two novels. 

A completely new villain is introduced, someone we haven't heard about as a reader in the last two books whatsoever, and obliterates any of the conflict and tension that Adeyemi worked so hard to build in her previous stories. 

Gone is the tension and literally hundreds of years of in-fighting between the Maji and the monarchy, gone is the civil war and its repercussions on Orisha, gone is even one of the main characters from the last novel, Roen, who was a significant love interest for Zelie and who has been completely disappeared in this new book all together (like, what???). 

It was incredibly lazy writing to wipe away everything the first two books created in order to “unite” against this new enemy. The sentiment is nice, but it’s not the finale we wanted or needed. 

I desired answers to Amari and Zelie’s broken friendship, closure to the Inan and Roen love triangle, a verdict on how Orisha would rebuild and who would rule. 

We get none of that. 

Instead Zelie and the others spend half their time in the book on a ship with very strong slavery parallels, and the other half in the introduced land of New Gaia.

While I thought the descriptions of New Gaia were beautiful (albeit very similar to Avatar), I was dissatisfied because the whole series at this point has been focused on Orisha and Orisha’s problems, not New Gaia and not the Skulls. 

While the plot was bad and aggrieving, the characters were even worse. 

None of the characters were interesting. They were carbon copies of each other in which all they talked about was avenging their fallen Orishan people, killing the Skulls, and protecting loved ones.

Rinse and repeat. It was boring as hell to delve into four different characters’ minds only to find that they all sounded exactly the same. 

I often had to go back to the start of the chapter to tell whose internal thoughts I was reading because they were so interchangeable and self-righteous and dull.  It is never a good sign when you can’t automatically tell who’s POV you’re reading based on their internal dialogue and tone. 

Lastly, the pacing of the book was atrocious. Everything happened so goddamn fast that I felt like I never had the chance to properly digest or internalize anything.

Oh they’re on a ship? Moving on from that. Zelie got some sort of medallion shoved into her chest?? Moving on. Wait, Maji and Titans and the monarchy are all working together after two full books of them killing each other??? Five pages and it’s done with. 

It was outrageous and insulting. 

The pacing made everything feel shallow, unimportant, and unnecessary. More than most of the plot were action scenes, while difficult to write and interesting in their own right, in this book it was so repetitive that characters killing other characters 90% of the time became egregiously tedious. 

And speaking of the action, I also found it incredibly violent and graphic for a YA book. As someone who is not a fan of gore and blood, this book had so many explicit details for no reason other than being gratuitous.

For example, at one point Zelie shoves a chicken bone through someone’s cheek. I found it repulsive and it was also incessant. 

I know some people can handle brutality, but I can’t, and found it a huge turn off and made me dislike the book so much more, especially as this was a majority of the book to boot. 

Disappointment can’t even contain my full feelings for this story. For such a wonderful trilogy to succumb to such a terrible end is a tragedy. I wish the best for Tomi Adeyemi and success for her future, but I will not read another book by her again. 

Score: 2/10

Recommendation: Read Children of Blood and Bone, a magical story that will inspire and entertain you. Read Children of Virtue and Vengeance if you really need something else, but even this book I wouldn’t recommend picking up.

Do not, I repeat, do not read Children of Anguish and Anarchy. It will leave you feeling dismayed and disheartened beyond redemption.

Bonus: Here's me, my fiance, and Tomi Adeyemi at her book signing!