#my birthday is getting closer. glad to be alive

[void-candy]

It's October!!! This is my favorite edit from last month (mostly because of the music 🎶)

[jjunieworld]

epilogue. notes between the fabrics ⸝ ˚⋆

↳ some of the notes you found amongst the hoodies and sweaters that soobin gave you.

[dated ➛ date at the diner]

to my beautiful beautiful y/n,

i love you more than there are stars in the sky. your smile shines brighter than all of them combined. with you, i’ve never felt more alive. i’m just glad that i get to call you mine.

— binnie, your love

p.s. sorry if this is cheesy… i can't wait to let you know how much you mean to me.

[dated ➛ while baking sweets after your birthday disaster]

to my super sweet y/n,

i fucked up really really bad, and i think i might’ve lost you forever. its been keeping me awake at night, fueling my nightmares. i know you need your space, i know you don’t want to see me, but i cant let us end like this. so fucking stupid… now i’m here in the middle of the night baking so i have something to give you tomorrow. you’ll never know how truly sorry i am. i hope you’ll like the sweets.

— soobin, the fucking dumbass

[dated ➛ after the talk in the cornflower field]

to my beating heart, y/n,

i’ll wait however long it takes, even if it’s forever. and in the meantime, i’ll keep your heart safe. i’ll mend the cracks and i’ll soothe it until it learns to trust me again. until it beats for me again. i’ll wait until the end of the world and then after that if it means i’ll get to be with you. even if you don’t believe me, i genuinely do love you more than anything.

— your hopeful beating heart, binnie

[dated ➛ when you put on his hoodie instead]

to my burning flame, y/n,

you’re my light through the dark, my burning flame, you always will be. even if i come too close to your fire and get burnt, i don’t care. i enjoy the warmth. the thought of you leads me out of the tunnel and into the light that is you. that’s all i need, and my body flushes at the fact that it’s all you need too.

— binnie, the wanderer guided by your light

[dated ➛ the afternoon before your do-over first date]

to my breathtaking girlfriend, y/n,

tomorrow is our do-over first date and i just left your dorm. the date is going to be a success, i can feel it, and i hope you do too. soon, we’ll write over all the bad memories with new and happy ones. i’ll make sure that you’re always happy so that you’ll never think about all the bad things that happened to you because of me ever again. i know you said you forgave me and that it’s okay, but i’m really really sorry. i am. to my beautiful beautiful, super sweet, beating heart, burning flame, and breathtaking girlfriend, i love you more than i can ever express. i’ll see you at 6pm tomorrow.

— binnie, your love, the fucking dumbass, your hopeful beating heart, the wanderer guided by your light, and your head-over-heels boyfriend

you never really told soobin about finding his little notes here and there, and he never mentioned accidentally leaving them places. you assumed that it was a way for him to express his feelings in a different type of way that still felt personal and you didn’t want to take that from him. you also didn’t want the notes to stop either.

admittedly, they always brightened your day significantly whenever you found them. even if they weren’t explicitly about you and soobin, they were always addressed to you. rather it would be about his love for you or a hard day he had, you liked that you got to see a glimpse into his head in a different way. it made you feel even more closer to him.

one day, you had went out and had gotten a little fancy box to keep all the notes you’ve found in. you kept the box hidden safely in one of the storing containers under your bed, and you only brought it out to add more notes when you were alone.

it’s not that you didn’t want your friends to know about the notes, it’s that they didn’t need to know about them. they were personal, and just something between you and soobin.

maybe one day in the future you’ll make a subtle hint to soobin about all the notes he addresses to you, but in the meantime, they’ll be kept safe in your pretty little box under your bed. and each time you find one, you’ll give soobin a kiss of gratitude for him letting you inside his heart—your heart.

masterlist.

summary: choi soobin has always been the popular kid surrounded by his popular friends. y/n… not so much. one night, soobin and his friends make bet that soobin can’t get y/n to date him in a month. unfortunately for y/n, they’re a hopeless romantic.

A/N: this is the official end!! *sobs* *cries* *slides down wall and clutches hand to chest* i hope you all had a fun time reading and i hope i didn’t hurt your heart too much with the angst lmaooo 😭 thank you for reading and i hope you enjoyed!! feel free to send asks in about this story at any time! just because the smau has come to an end, doesn’t mean the conversation has to!!! ♡

taglist: @jjunberry @gothgyuu @spooksh0wbabe @beargyuuzz @carengene @binluvsu @seunnimg @vixensss @kittyhyuka @beomsite @hueningm1ckey @n034sy @littlestxli @starsforbeomgyu @soobiary @bunnisoobin @heiiolifeee @cryingforgyu @dani-is-tired @damn-u-min-yoongi @soobieboobiedoobiedaboobie @icouldntcareless22 @sleepdeprivedline @jhuuni @thepoopdokyeomtouched @rikizm @curiousgworge @nakaopolo @mwahvvis @cupidsmoons @soobhns @ryunjin0 @punkhazardlaw @phtogravi @choibeomkai @soobiverse @rapmonie2047 @riaawr (if your name is bold it wouldn’t let me tag you!)

�� kipo <3

[luveline]

kiss over the interweb with sirius! him and reader have been together for awhile maybe since they were like 18/19 and them and being still super in love foreva! cliche couple loveliness

tysm for requesting ♡ fem!reader, 1k

Sirius' hair looks blue-black in the light. His smile shines mega watt gorgeous and his laugh bounces between pint glasses and plates of half eaten dinner. He's at the head of a long, long table, his friends and friend's friends turned out for a celebration of him. You aren't half as loud nor confident, but when he insisted you sit squished beside him, you couldn't say no. 

"Where the hell have you been?" he questions, grabbing your waist as soon as you walk close enough. Any conversation he led swiftly pauses. "This is the worst birthday ever, babe, you keep disappearing." 

Sirius has kept you within arm's reach for the last five years and it doesn't matter, he yanks you into his lap and kisses your cheek, careful not to mess with your makeup. His hand slides down to your hand where he twists your engagement ring around your finger. You're happy to get married but you're not in any big rush. Sirius, on the other hand, is desperate to get you down the aisle. Has been for years. 

"Can't believe you're twenty four," you say, unbothered by the weight of tens of eyes on you as you take his face into your hands. You could draw him from memory. You could do it with your eyes closed. "You're finally growing into your nose." 

Sirius (who, for the record, has an extremely handsome nose), beams at you. "You love this nose." 

"I do." Sorry to his friends, but you share a gross, amazing kiss right then and there. 

"Is that legal?" James asks. 

"No." Remus clinks his drink against James'. "Will you get me another lemonade and blackcurrant, please? My legs hurt." 

Sirius laughs into your mouth as James says, "No they don't. You're just lazy today. I know the difference." 

"Will you get me one anyways? Please, James, I love you." 

"They're almost as in love as we are," Sirius says, encouraging you back gently. "And we're sick." 

You ease off of his lap and back into your seat. You've already sectioned off the lettuce and tomatoes from your salad for his perusal, and laying on a napkin by your plate is the extra fork you asked for and they forgot to give you. "Where'd you get this?" you ask. 

"That's how long you took! Finish your food, doll, before it's stone cold." 

You eat your food but he keeps distracting you. Even when he's talking to people he's squeezing your thigh under the table or bringing the salt shaker closer to you. You shove your plate away when things get too cold to soldier on, dragged into a conversation with Mary sitting to your left and her girlfriend Emmeline. 

Sirius has always had a good bunch of friends. He's never made you feel like an outsider when you're with them, and you think they might actually really like you. You'd hope it, after this long together.

"Sweetness," Sirius says, wrapping his arms over your shoulders heavily, "another drink? And dessert, too, what dessert do you want?" He kisses your cheek between questions, gets distracted, stops asking and just hugs you to his chest for a bit. 

"This is nice, huh?" you ask quietly. 

He squishes you. "I'm gonna go get you another drink and then it'll be perfect." 

You check your watch covertly, and, a master of trickery, turn into his arms to blag a kiss. The funny breathless feeling of his embrace starts to bloom in your chest, alive and well despite the thousands of days spent within it. He's your other half, your found piece, and every minute with him carries a shine that refuses to waver. Things calm down, of course, but you don't doubt for a moment that Sirius is as in sickening love with you as you are with him. The honeymoon phase has lingered like the heat of a long kiss. 

"Happy birthday," you say as you pull away. 

"Thank you. You know, I feel very lucky. I hope you know that." 

You do. And you're glad he wants to tell you but maybe not in front of so many people, which is why the restaurant staff's perfect timing saves the day. Two waitresses carry a white piece of solid plastic and atop it waits your big surprise; a birthday cake with twenty four candles, three tiers of his favorite flavours, coffee, lemon, and plain chocolate fudge. The frosting for each is real buttercream to compliment the sponge, because fondant is for losers and you know what your baby likes. The candles flicker bright as the waitresses begin to sing, and for a solid five seconds, while all his friends join in, celebrating him and him alone, he turns his head to smile at you. 

His smile quickly turns to a glare. But, ever a good sport, Sirius pushes aside your plates for the cake to be bestowed and blows out the candles soundtracked by a raucous wave of cheers. 

"Hip hip!" James shouts. 

You wince at the sheet volume of the answering hurray, but Sirius is laughing, and that's all that matters. 

"First slice for my gorgeous fiancé!" he declares. "I wouldn't be in such good spirits nor state if she weren't with me today. I love you, sweetheart." 

Your cheeks flush with pride. "I love you," you say, receiving his quick kiss eagerly. 

"Don't get spit on the cake, lovebirds! Bagsy the second slice." 

"You can't bagsy the second slice, James, it's his birthday," Mathilde laughs. 

"Look, if he wanted the second slice, he should've said. I gave him loads of time to jump in. What flavours did you get, Y/N? You know what, don't tell me. I trust your judgement." 

[hannibals-favourite-meal]

Take A Fucking Hint

Steve Rogers x plus size reader

Steve is incredibly oblivious to the big hints that his girlfriend drops whenever they kiss and it takes his best friends knocking some sense into him for him to get it.

Warnings: implied smut, fluff, Steve is a naive baby, lots of kissing

WC: 1.5k

Minors DNI

Steve Rogers had his first kiss in 1931. It had been his 13th birthday and for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the girl’s name. But when the fireworks went off, she shyly asked him if he would like a kiss in lieu of a birthday gift. Her lips were chapped and tasted like the cotton candy she had just eaten, it was barely even a peck but Steve thought it was magical.

The next time Steve kissed someone was right above Howard Stark’s lab with an officer who yanked him into a corner, eager to have her way with him. The kiss was tinged with a lust he couldn’t comprehend. He didn’t hate it but he also didn’t like it, it felt wrong to him. A kiss should be an expression of love, he thought, not some desire for someone based only on their body.

Peggy Carter kissed him next. It was in the middle of a battle as they chased down a plane loaded with bombs. It was fuelled with adrenaline and desperation, like they knew they would never see each other again. 

Natasha Romanoff was his next kiss. She teased him relentlessly about it. It was sloppy and unpracticed and very weird considering he thought of the former assassin as a sister. Then, it was Peggy’s great niece Sharon.

But nothing compared to the way you kissed him. You kissed Steve like it was the only thing keeping you alive. You hadn’t been together long, just two months but it was more than enough time for him to fall utterly in love with you. You taught him how to love, how to ask for affection and attention.

But mainly, you taught him how to kiss. Quick pecks when you woke up, both of you still half asleep and with morning breath. Affectionate, have a good day kisses when you left for work. ‘I’m glad you’re alive’ kisses when he returned from missions. And finally, his favourite ones; the ‘I need to feel your body against mine right now’, when your tongues tangled, your breath mingled together as you tried to swallow each other whole, but those always ended as quickly as they started.

You were at the compound with him today, Tony needed your help with engineering a new AI system for the jet. “I don’t know when we’ll finish up tonight so how about you come steal me away for lunch today?” Your hands tugged on the labels of his leather jacket, pulling his body closer to your own. Steve smiled wildly as he looked down at you, so utterly enamoured by your presence.

“Now that is the best idea I’ve heard today.” His hands hovered over your wide hips, not yet touching you. He still struggled with PDA, especially when he was so conflicted as to whether he deserved your touch and wanted to throw you down and have his way with you constantly. Your arms moved up his strong chest to wrap around his neck.

Your eyes were hooded, heavy with desire that sent a shiver through him. “Well then Cap, how about you reward me for having such a good idea.” His lips met your with a practiced ease, a warm feeling filling his gut. Your lips felt like coming home, like a safe place where he could just be. He tilted his head, eager to deepen the kiss.

You moaned into his mouth, your grip on him tightening as the air ignited with a white hot passion. “Hey suckerfish! Break it up! I need my assistant to actually be able to breathe without a geriatric man sucking on her face.” Steve groaned as you pulled away to glare at the billionaire. Tony stood several feet away with his arms crossed over his chest like a disappointed father.

“First off Stark, I am not your assistant. Second, I will kiss my insanely hot boyfriend whenever I want as is my right.” Steve chuckled, pressing one last kiss to your forehead before stepping back and giving you a gentle shove towards the lab doors.

You looked at him clearly offended. “I’ll find you for lunch. Try not to kill Tony.” 

“I’ll kill him if I wanna kill him.” You muttered but walked away anyway, the cutest frown on your face. He chuckled and turned as the doors slid closed behind you, and came face to face with a smug looking Bucky and a disgusted Sam.

“You two are nasty. Why don’t you just fuck at home before work like normal people.” Steve’s face went beat red at Sam’s comment. Bucky guffawed, shoving him with his shoulder.

“Don’t you know they haven’t done the deed yet. Apparently, they’re ‘taking it slow’. Which is just code for Steve has a girlfriend way out of his league and he doesn’t know how to handle it.” 

“Hey!” He objected. “That is our business, not yours. Besides, how do you know we haven’t.” Bucky rolled his eyes at his best friend’s childish retort.

He clapped a hand against Steve’s shoulder. “Oh you poor dumb man, it is incredibly obvious.” Sam joined him on his other side, taking his other shoulder.

“We have so much to teach you.” They guided him away from the lab, intending on educating their lost friend. 

——————

Steve felt like he was in sex ed again, except this was so much worse. They were in one of the many conference rooms on the compound, a white board had been dragged in from a storage room and was now covered in crude drawings that were borderline lewd.

“Now that we have the basics down, you need to understand the nuances of women’s hints.” Sam started but Steve sighed, resting his head in his hands.

“She would have told me if she wanted to have… sex. And she hasn’t so I haven’t gone any further than kissing.” Both men groaned in aggravation. They had been at this for an hour now, trying to get it into Steve’s head that you just wanted to get laid but he wasn’t listening.

“All right, look. What does she do every time you kiss?” The office chair creaked as Steve leaned back in it. His hand scrubbed down his jaw, running over the smooth skin.

“She always pulls me closer to her like she doesn’t want me running away and then puts her arms around my neck.” Bucky nodded thoughtfully, a slightly proud glint in his grey eyes.

“Just as I thought.” Sam muttered, taking a seat right in front of the Captain. “When a woman or whoever does that with the person they are kissing, it’s a signal for the other person to touch them.” Steve’s head tilted questioningly.

“But I do touch her.” 

“Yes but how?” Bucky picked up where Sam left off. “Just her hips?” Steve gave a curt nod. “Ok, next time she kisses you, hold her by the small of her back, or even better, one hand at the base of her neck and the other on her ass. Just trust me.” He patted Steve’s back and walked out of the room like he had just told him the meaning of like.

Sam scoffed but followed him out, yelling down the hall about how much of a drama queen he was being. Bucky retorted but Steve was too lost in his thoughts to consciously hear what they were saying to each other. Maybe he should try it.

——————

As usual with your ‘lunch breaks’ with Steve, he had dragged you into an empty office to make out for a while before you both had to get back to work. And as usual, your arms were around his neck, fingers buried in his short blonde hair as he lightly gripped your hips.

You could live in Steve’s lips. They were always so soft, like he was constantly using chapstick. He tasted like coffee and jam pastries. You let him guide your chin upwards so he could kiss along your soft jaw. But then, he did something new.

His hands moved slowly to the base of your spine, his warm touch making goosebumps erupt all over your body. You moaned quietly into the still air of the office, the sound barely covered by the hum of the air conditioner. 

Apparently the noises you were making gave him an ego boost because suddenly he was holding the back of your neck tightly, keeping your head still as he took what he wanted from you. “Steve!” You gasped and felt him smirk against the skin of your throat. His other hand was placed firmly on your plump ass, something he never dared to try.

Your body thrummed with an arousal you had never felt before. This was an entirely new Steve and you were loving it. “What’s gotten into you, Stevie?” You asked breathlessly. His head lifted from where he had been nibbling on your collarbone, his blue eyes black with desire.

“I learned how to take a hint.” Safe to say that lunch went well into the night.

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[myusuchaa]

Ellis Twilight 2nd Birthday Event Story

The Shape of Happiness - Embraced by the Thorns of a Mad Love: Part 3 this is a fan translation. i do not own anything. Cybird has the right of ownership to all in-game content.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ

Ellis: Hey, Kate... how happy are you right now?

Such were the words that left his smiling face.

Even though I've heard this question asked many times before, right now felt like the first.

Ellis: I'm happy.

Ellis: Being with you, being able to dress you up in things I bought you.

Ellis: To be able to fill you with thoughts of my desires.

I'm sure he may do the same thing to anyone if it made them happy but...this is the first time he's given me so many presents out of his own will.

Kate: I'm very happy. Maybe more than you, I think.

Ellis: Ah, no. Right now, I'm the happiest. Because right now, I'm glad you are alive.

He steps closer, the twilight gleam chasing after his profile.

Ellis: I'll kill to make the happiest moments last forever. That thought will never change.

Ellis: But I am happy whenever I realize that you are alive.

Ellis: I'm sure... it must be because my happiness would not exist* without you.

His hand that caressed my cheek felt gentle and warm, but I also sensed something strange.

Those eyes, which had been sparkling in the twilight earlier, have now turned a dark shade of night.

Ellis: ... I wish we could stay in this moment, a place where no one will find us.

As night approaches, the color of his eyes deepens.

Kate: ... even though you won't see Jude and the other Crown members?

Ellis: Mm, I'd be a bit sad about that, but I think it would be fine as long as you're with me.

Sometimes, I feel anxious for no reason at all.

Ellis: Whenever I see you talking with someone else, I want to tear you away.

Ellis: I only want you to look at me. I don't want you to be made happy by anyone else.

Ellis: To hurt you, and being hurt by you... I only want it to be me.

(The fact that he cares so deeply... something about it makes me uneasy.)

I'm so happy now that I wouldn't want it to suddenly end some day.

Perhaps that thought is what made me so anxious all along.

Ellis: ...Kate?

I smelled the scent of lavender and looked up.

I could see the purple flowers in the flowerbed along the road, their petals swaying in the wind.

Kate: Lavender...

Ellis: Ah, it really is, in a place like this.

The flowers wet with dew reflected the twilight, shining like stars.

A beautiful moment.

Kate: ..As you mentioned, I do think I would be happy going somewhere, just the two of us.

(But...)

I take my eyes off the lavender and turn their gaze to him.

The darkening sky matched the color of his hair, making it look like he was blending into the twilight.

Kate: I like watching you work..

Kate: I enjoy watching all the Crown members talk happily amongst themselves in the lounge.

Kate: Because of that, I can't say I fully like the idea of going somewhere** only with you.

Kate: And I won't be able to see my favorite parts of you.

I took his paper bag in exchange for the one I was holding. As he tilted his head in curiosity, I then told him to open it and look inside.

Ellis: ...Stormglass?

Kate: It rained today, which changed our plans. Although it was fun, I thought it might be better to know what the weather would be like before we go out.

Stormglass, transparent liquid in a bottle, is a tool that can predict the weather based on the formation of crystals inside.

Kate: I thought if you had this, it would be easier to predict the weather.

Delicate white crystals were floating down the liquid like remnant snowflakes, leftover from the rain that just ended.

Kate: I understand you want to make our happiest moment last forever, but I'm looking forward to being with you tomorrow, to being happier with you.

Kate: Even if I get hurt, I don't want things to end without me tasting the happiness that lies ahead.

As his hands wrapped around the Stormglass, he muttered:

Ellis: .....

Ellis: The reason I keep clinging to you so is because I feel like one day you may simply disappear.

Kate: ..?

Ellis: I know I should look forward to tomorrow, but...

Ellis: I'm always worried that by the next time I wake, you'd be gone.

Ellis: That's why I always feel like I need to finish this quickly.

Ellis is truly here with me.

I thought these long vines adorned with thorns*** was only proof of his possessiveness, but-

-it seems all along, I had felt the same about him.

Kate: I've been thinking the same.

I wrapped my trembling hands around his, and the crystals in the bottom swayed softly from the movement.

(I'm sure this anxiety will never go away completely.)

Kate: That's why I want to keep things as they are, to know you're still with me.

Ellis: ..You're something else.

Kate: Oh?

Ellis: You really are. You can easily express the feelings I can't put to words.

It was the first time I saw such a shy smile on his face.

Ellis: I feel like I'm falling in love with you again.

He brought his lips closer to mine.

Kate: Mm...

--

I woke up to the morning sun.

(Ah, we fell asleep without our clothes on last night.)

As I felt embarrassed being vulnerable with him like this..

Kate: Ah..

I was pulled closer until we were skin to skin.

Kate: Ellis?

Ellis: ....

It's rare for him not to wake up even when I call his name.

The early summer breeze flows gently on the sheer curtains.

In the quiet morning, I tighten my embrace on him.

(...It seems like this moment is fleeting after all.)

Listening to his heartbeat, feeling his warmth - it's confirmation that he is still with me.

Kate: I love you, Ellis.

Kate: Stay by my side, always.

Perhaps because I could smile easily after saying that, I relaxed myself and felt sleepy again.

(It's still early... I can go back to sleep.)

When I close my eyes, the Stormglass that fills my vision tells me it will be a sunny day.

I felt the embrace of a pure and warm happiness.

<- Part 2 His POV Epilogue ->

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ

*when Ellis says it must be that his happiness does not exist without her, the literal translation comes from the word 成���立つ, which means to be made up of, consist of, or established by. so on top of kate making him happy, it implies she literally is his happiness, and he wouldn't feel true happiness at all without her.

**by saying "go somewhere", it really means double suicide

***long vines with thorns is used as a replacement for "thorny limbs", meaning his reach for her can be painful, trapping her, and references his curse

a/n: honestly, it's written so well.. the idea of the stormglass, and her ability to talk him through his emotions aaaah

[sl-newsie]

American Woman (Thomas Shelby x American OC) Ch. 43: Familie

https://www.tumblr.com/sl-newsie/739551758747090944/american-woman-thomas-shelby-x-american-oc?source=share

The boat ride home feels like I’m being punished. The further away I sail from England the deeper my heartache grows. When I arrive back in the crowded Brooklyn streets all I can think about is waiting for news about the Shelbys' death sentences. 

“Verena!” Oma gushes and wraps me into a warm hug. “Dear kleinkind, you are home! We- Verena? Why the sad face?”

I offer a small smile and set my trunk down. “Homesickness, oma. And… I’m really going to miss my job.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She hugs me closer. “I’m so sorry. If it's any comfort, we are all glad to have you back. Your vader's been too stubborn to fix that step, and look where it landed him!”

“Verena!” Moeder’s voice shouts from the bedroom. “Run and fetch your vader some morphine!”

“Elowyn, the poor girl just got back!” Oma tries to calm her down.

“She can unpack later. Dochter! Now!”

I steal a quick moment to cry into a pillow before answering. “Yes, moeder.”

So good to be back.

The doctor said vader’s injury will take nearly a year to heal. One whole year. It only takes a month for paranoia to sink in. Every day I wait for Thomas to call. Either with good news of triumph or tragic news of death. It’s not until I’m stuck doing a mountain of laundry when Conor’s wife Delilah calls me over to the phone.

“The name is Shelby. Isn’t that your boss?”

“Yes!” I gasp and wretch the phone from her. “Did they make it in time?”

On the other end Thomas keeps his voice calm. “Just made it. They’re all safe.”

I close my eyes and give a silent prayer of thanks. Dear Christ, they are alive! “They’re going to be angry.”

“I know.” He pauses. “It’s good to hear from you, Verena. I got your letter last week. Please send my best wishes to your father.”

My mouth starts to hurt from how much smiling he’s causing. “I will."

"When will you come back?” He masks his voice to make it unclear if he misses me too.

“I should be back by next December. I’ve been given permission to return to Birmingham once vader’s recovered.” I change to a tone of dry humor. “Thank you, by the way, for sending that persuasive letter.”

“What can I say? It’s not been the same since you left. Charlie keeps asking where you are.”

“Yes, well, when moeder read the letter she was very concerned about why someone like me was being requested by a gang leader.”

I had to swear on my life that there’s nothing scandalous afoot. 

Thomas ignores my implications. “How’s Ada?” 

“According to her calls, our arranged meeting in Boston is still planned. Next Monday we’re meeting with Mr. Anderson.”

“Excellent. Let me know when you’re on your way back.” He waits for a moment, deciding his next words. “It’s- I- Goodbye, Verena.”

I take a deep breath. Typical. “Goodbye, Thomas.”

As I promised, I keep to my word and meet with Ada the following week. She, like Thomas, is surprised with how busy the city is. When I spot her at the Boston docks’ main office Ada greets me with a big hug.

“So good to see you! Did you get the present Tommy sent you?”

“Yes!” 

The silver pendant hangs as a hopeful reminder under my shirt. No cursed jewel. A simple silver pendant with a Celtic cross at the center. Two days after my birthday I received a parcel from Thomas, along with a small note. 

Verena-

You refuse to wear anything of your paygrade so I am gifting you something tied to your devoted faith and heritage. Happy birthday, Verena. Please come back soon.

-Thomas

 I know those words must have been very precisely selected. Whether he does love me or not, the gift always brings joy to my heart.

“And Tommy told you the good news?” Ada asks.

“Yes! They were pardoned!” My smile fades. “Have they yelled at him yet?”

Ada’s face grows grim as well. “Not a word. It’s like no one wants to acknowledge Tommy anymore. Except Michael, that is. He jumped right back in. Finn tries to help when he can. Everyone else walked away.”

I take her hand and give it a squeeze. “Let’s start things off right. Today can bring good fortune to the company, which means good fortune for us.”

We ascend the stairs into the office and find an older man with jet-black hair waiting behind the front desk.

“Hello, Mr. Anderson,” I greet. “I believe you know Christiaan Steenstra?”

He looks me over. “Steenstra, yes. He married that Irish lass from the mob.”

“He is my father. I am his daughter Verena Nora Steenstra.” I gesture to my partner. “May I introduce Ada Shelby. We are here on business for Shelby Company Limited. Thomas Shelby wrote ahead to tell you we were coming.”

The name sparks his memory. “Yes. His instructions were very specific. I have only one question : why do I do business with you? Why doesn’t Shelby come see me himself?”

Ada and I exchange looks. I speak before she can argue with him. “He is a busy man. Saying that, he is a man who is not afraid to let women represent the company. Are we in agreement or would you like some persuasion from the White Hand?”

The name lingers in the air and the blood drains Anderson’s face. “No.”

I smile prosperously. “Then we are decided. Ada, the papers please.”

Once again I owe my leverage to Uncle Colon.

One final week. One week until Christmas, one week until I will be back in Birmingham! Ada’s waiting with the cab outside while I finish packing the last of my clothes. Just then, all five brothers barrel into my bedroom. 

“You’re really doing this, sis?” Eoin asks for the fifth time.

“You’re an American. Not a Brit,” Abel points out.

I clasp the trunk shut. “Must this always end in an argument against the British?”

Liam slaps the side of his head as if I just asked if the sky is blue. “Yes! We beat their tea-drinking asses. Why should you care about some gangster and his shipping company?”

“Need I remind you, Liam, that America’s melting pot is all about international cooperation?”

“America is the best,” Nicolaas mutters.

I face the gang of boys with my hands on my hips. It’s just like lecturing the Shelbys. “Our family comes from other places, too. If Ireland were under attack would you let it burn?”

All five brothers sheepishly look down and shake their heads. “No.”

“Neither would I. That’s why I’m helping.”

“That and you’re sweet on Mr. Shelby,” Liam chuckles under his breath.

I point a warning finger at him. “Shut it. I do not fancy him.”

“Ha!” Conor laughs at my unusual wording. “Verena’s picked up a bit-a-the-’ol English tongue!”

Nicolaas keeps a more mature expression. “Does Uncle Colon know?”

No. I still hesitate to inform my family of exactly who I’m working for. All they know is that I act as a foreign representative for a British trading company. It’s not a lie. If moeder caught on to how dangerous my work can get she would keep me stranded in Brooklyn forever. I can’t tell Uncle Colon how deeply I'm involved with the Peaky Blinders.

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know. The White Hand has spies everywhere.”

Abel catches on to my growing anxiety and leans in to corner me. “There’s something else. What haven’t you told us?”

This is partly why I didn’t want to come back. My brothers’ intentions to protect me involve coaxing out every bit of information about my job. They mean well but I would rather die than expose them to the cruel, brutal world of the Peaky Blinders. How can I convince them not to worry when they keep asking questions?

I bite my lip. “Thomas- My boss… He used to be involved with the Russians.”

Conor’s jaw tightens. “Are you serious?”

“And you’re going along with this?” Nicolaas asks, appalled. “After what they did?”

I keep a look of confidence. “I leave it to Mr. Shelby. My business is anywhere else. He wanted me to chat up Mr. Anderson and now I’m scheduled to head to somewhere in France.”

Liam grunts. “We don’t know a thing ‘bout France.”

“It’s not your concern,” I state firmly. “I can’t do the work of a dozen, but I am able of doing this.”

“You can stand to work for them?” Eoin asks in disbelief.

“Aside from all their sex talk?” Abel’s jaw drops at my laid-back tone. “It’s tolerable. The drinking, smoking, swearing. It’s all old news to me now.”

All five brothers exchange looks. Are they ganging up on me? Do they not think I can handle myself after all these years?

“Verena,” Conor begins. “You’ve changed. Ever since you started working for this guy you’ve been distant. It’s like you don’t want to see us anymore.”

My face falls. Is that how they see me? They know me better than to think I would want to avoid them.

“Broers. I love you all. I love my familie. I will never abandon you. Did I not leave England to aid vader when he was injured?” They all look to the floor again. “And Eoin, I just spent the last three months watching your children. How is that not loyalty?” He doesn’t answer. “But I am loyal to the Shelbys too. I love them all, even with their flaws.”

“You’re so loyal that you’re spending Christmas away from us?” Abel asks softly.

I take a deep breath. “This time of year is supposed to be when people gather and celebrate the spirit of the season. This year has been really hard on the Shelbys and I want to be there to help.”

“You talk as if they’re family oriented like us,” Nicolaas observes. “Yet the rumor is that no one’s getting along.”

A bittersweet smile grows on my face as I lean in to give my broers one last hug. “That’s why I have to go.”

@meadows5

[hmslusitania]

I don’t understand anxiety about getting older.

I know that’s an unpopular thought but the thing is, I spent the years between 13 and 21 basically half dead and with one foot on the wrong side of a certain threshold and this year I turn 30.

When I was 19 the idea of living to turn 30 was… unbelievable. It was simply unrealistic. I was so sick and had been, by that point, so sick for so long that it was just… beyond unlikely to make it to three whole decades.

But now the thing is, I’ve had the surgery I needed to not die, it’s been eight years, I’m stable and as well as one can be whilst missing an internal whatever. And with every year closer to thirty I’ve gotten, it’s become more and more clear that 30 is. Nothing. 30 is SO young.

All of the jokes when I was growing up were about 30 being “over the hill” etc and what was the difference between 30 and dead but like. 30 is young. There’s so much i intend to do and want to do and WILL do and I don’t have crows feet yet and I still get pimples and I’ve also got most of a full grey streak in the front of my hair and everything we say about age makes all of this seem nonsense but I’m so glad to be alive still and I’m looking forward to my 30th birthday and I’m looking so so so forward to finally one of these days getting the books I’ve written published. And I know 19 year old me would be so disappointed in the state of my life right now: single, unpublished, still living in the United States. But I’m not 19 anymore. I made it to the year I’ll be 30. I still want at least some of those things (I want to be published I want people to read my works I want people to enjoy them) but I also… I don’t know. I want the crows feet and I want the white streak at the front of my hair to reach its full potential.

I don’t understand the anxiety about getting older. It just means we survived. So yeah in a few months I’ll be 30. And you know what? Thank god

[beerecordings]

Graceling AU: as Jameson approaches his thirteenth birthday, Anti spirals dangerously.

This turned out long. I would open it in another tab if I were you. Warnings for alcohol use, some gore, and references to depression, suicidal ideation, and past sexual abuse.

Graceling AU is not the most popular AU but it will always have a grip on me!! Let me know if you enjoy.

.

He dreads the fall, welcomes winter.

When the leaves start to turn in that year, he feels a coldness go down the line of him, like something petting its fingers along the inside of his body. Anti pulls his hood lower over his eyes.

Autumn's been difficult for a while. There was what happened with his uncle. There was what happened with the guildsmaster. There was what happened with his white-eyed Monster, so powerful a pain it used to debilitate him throughout most of September. Groaning for the first person who ever loved him in his whole life to come back, just so he could tell him again he was sorry he failed him.

And then, of course, there was Jameson.

He's so glad his little brother came into the world, make no mistake. But every October, something terrible happens: Jameson gets a little closer to being a man.

Anti sucks in a breath of air, growing crisper by the minute, and he steels himself square up against it: says a “fuck you” to his own petty need to keep him small, to contain his favorite human alive into someone who will always love him perfectly (safely). JJ is not his doll anymore and he knows that that truth is important. It was simpler when he was, in a way, before Anti admitted to the both of them that he loved him completely. When he was a puppet for Anti's revenge, he wouldn't have cared so much if JJ was now tall enough to climb onto White Bird without help.

The thought nearly leaves him breathless, which is stupid. So stupid, the way his stomach turns over, like it will erupt its acid all the way up his throat and come up in a mess of bile.

He has to set his own stupid, selfish desire aside, like he always does, and have a calm, happy birthday for the most important person in the world.

Thirteen. Thirteen. Thirteen.

Somehow, he thinks it's going to be a little harder this year.

.

“Can't I have something other than knives for my birthday this year?” the love of his life asks him, tilting his head at him, smiling just enough that it could be a joke.

Anti blinks at him, straightening up to look at him from across their dining table. “What do you mean?”

“Come on. I know you were at the blacksmith's. Are you getting me more weapons?”

The teasing feels strange. Of course he is. Why would he not be?

“JJ, you need to be able to protect yourself.”

The humor falls off his little brother's face and JJ looks away from him. Did he just roll his eyes? Hell, he really is getting to be a teenager.

The thought is even less funny than the teasing.

“You're just little,” Anti says. “You need – ”

“I'm not that little!” JJ's hands clap together with the words. Anti scoffs, stepping back from him, shaking his head. “Anti, look at me.”

“I'm looking! Fuck's sake, what?”

“I'm not little, I'm going to be thirteen! And I know how to protect myself. It's all you've ever taught me. I don't want any more knives or bows or anything. Can't I have some normal presents this year?”

“You're still little,” says Anti, louder than he means to. “You're just small.”

JJ stares at him. The face of the person he loves most in the world is full of a sort of determination Anti's not used to. When did he become so sure that he wanted anything other than what Anti taught him to want?

“I'm just saying,” JJ begins.

“Yeah, Jameson,” Anti snaps. “I see what you're saying. I'm going to my rendezvous. Dinner will be up for you.”

If JJ replies, he makes it a point not to see it. It's not until he's saddling his mare that the conversation hits him in the chest. Anti sucks in a deep breath, covering his face with his hand for a moment, and White Bird pushes her neck against him.

As he rides away, he glances back at his keep, and sees his heart watching him go from the garden, sitting on a bench he used to have to be lifted up to sit on.

.

“Marry me,” Anja says.

Anti weighs her delivery carefully, adjusting his scale on the stone floor of the abandoned house where he meets her once every two months. He doesn't bother to look up at her. “I beg your unbelievable pardon.”

She laughs, throwing back that untamed dark hair. Wild little killer, she always has been. When she sharpened her canines into points, though, he didn't figure she was in the market for a husband.

“Why so shocked? Wouldn't we be a good match? We both have some land, both run a brutal market or two. I spend half the year out of the country, you wouldn't get sick of me.”

“You've never even seen my face,” Anti points out.

“As if I care. You can't be much uglier than me anymore.”

It's interesting to be propositioned by anyone not aware of what he looks like. Anja's seen his eyes and hands, but not too much else. He's masked and hooded now. Then again, maybe the curves of him are enough. There used to be people who could look at him beneath a cloak and still know, somehow. People always find out. Doesn't matter who they are. Eventually, everyone wants him.

There had been another Monster or two, of course, once upon a time. He remembers the feeling of sitting, surrounded by people, and knowing they wouldn't hurt him, or touch him, or gaze at him with that heaviness that suffocated him so many times. Shit, it was like another life. There had even been someone he thought he loved, before that. He would have married Dark, if he let him. Look how that turned out.

“The amount is correct,” Anja tells him.

Anti blinks, realizing he's still staring at his scale.

“Right,” he says, tucking it away. He gives her her payment. “It'll be a no on the marriage.”

“If it's about the kid, I can be sweet to kids,” Anja says. “Look, I brought him a present like I always do when I'm out of the country.”

Anti had informed several of his contacts that he had an heir. In some ways, it was a risk, but JJ would be his successor eventually. They would need to know. Anja was cleverer than most of the men he worked with: she knew the way to his heart was through Jameson. He turns to see her holding out a very fine carved horse, painted with blue reigns and a white saddle. He takes it tenderly. JJ's favorite.

“He'll be a man soon enough, anyway,” Anja adds. “He could handle it if you took a wife.”

As soon as the feeling of warmth came, it's gone completely. Anti's gaze darkens. He hands the horse back. “I won't be bribed into marrying you, Anja.”

“Oh, just take it for the boy, Anti. If you don't want to marry me, I don't care.”

“No. Maybe next time I'll bring it to him. But not the same day you asked me to marry you.”

She shrugs and laughs at nothing, slugging her pack back over her shoulder. “Offer stands, if you ever change your mind. If it's kids you're concerned with, I could give you a couple. Who cares? I like babies. You could do the rest from there. My hair, your eyes. Maybe we'd be a handsome couple after all.”

He rolls his eyes at her and leaves, leaping back onto White Bird, but the idea strikes him in a weird way, twisting uncomfortably in his stomach – but lighting something up, too. JJ was the cutest five-year-old. Anti missed the earliest years with him, and JJ suffered so much in his absence. What a blessing it would have been to have had him from the day he was born, so nothing ever hurt him.

Would things be different? Would Jameson not be acting the way he started acting months ago? Would he understand more or less?

Does he understand at all, now? There had been what happened with the beautiful blue Monster, the one who LOOKED at Anti. Maybe JJ never forgave him for that. Jameson's face after it happened...

Anti closes his eyes. He wishes he could shut out that image. And then everything else, too.

.

It's been bad lately. Hurts to admit. He was doing so good for a while. He was past all that shit. He was working too much to think, and spent the rest of his time with his Jameson. Everything was under control, under his control, the way things need to be. He was... he was safe, felt safe, felt... loved, even, in a way he never has before. He never went to bed without a hug from his little brother, like a hot water bottle pressed against his chest, and when he woke up, they would eat breakfast together, and JJ would lean against his side sometimes, and chew his food loudly to annoy him if they started to argue over anything at all. Anti felt good.

He doesn't know where the pain was able to slip back in, black smoke filling up cavities in his brain and liver. He doesn't know where the old thoughts found the roots to grow back up. Maybe it's his fault. He can't tell anymore.

It's been bad lately, though. Sometimes, when JJ hugs him before bed, Anti wonders if he hates the love of his life. He wonders what it would be like to leave him in this castle forever and never come home.

Thirteen, oh, fuck. Thirteen. He doesn't know why he's throwing up at midnight on a perfectly harmless night, but for the first time since JJ insisted on moving out of his room ten months ago, he's glad his baby brother isn't here to hear him.

It's bad again. Really bad. He doesn't know what to do.

.

The reach the end of September in a slide of heat-shimmering sunsets and hot cider served alongside their dinners. Anti lets Jameson go to the fall festival in the southern village every year, and though he has no energy for it, he knows he can't get out of bringing him. Protesting or complaining will only make JJ look at him in that borderline disgusted way he's been doing lately, like his big brother is such a burden to him. Anti laughs humorlessly, pulling his cloak around him.

“I could go on my own this year,” Jameson points out, stepping in front of him so he can see.

“Yeah, fucking right,” Anti flings back, and JJ all but scowls and ties up his little boots. Anti watches with some satisfaction. No matter what he says, he really is an under-sized kid. Anti swoops down and kisses the side of his head, surprising him.

“Come on, cheer up,” he tells them both, ruffling up JJ's hair. “We'll go get you something sugary and a new knucklebones set.”

He lets JJ run around the festival grounds while he watches from a good spot on the hill with some shade (shadows to hide in) from a groaning oak tree he knows well. He prefers to be set apart from others, for more reasons than one. Would be bad to be recognized as a Monster, of course, but it might be almost as bad to be recognized as an assassin with a business so poisonous he could be arrested for carrying a quarter of his daily merchandise. Luckily, if anyone ever does catch him or become too suspicious, it only takes some gentle Persuasion to disperse their doubts.

Still, when he sees Jameson squaring up with some huge man trying to tell him he's too young to sign up for the archery competition, Anti wishes he could be beside him. He starts laughing hard. They're not far down the hill and he can see the determination on Jameson's face.

The city folk... well, most of them know by now there's a kid with no voice who lives in the strange, private keep near the forest. Even Anti didn't feel it right to keep Jameson away from making friends, so he's let him interact with local children enough that now, it's not so unheard of for a little boy to be unable to speak. He doesn't like it, though. Any extra eyes on JJ are eyes that could identify him too, even if there's only a sliver of a chance.

Or decide that he's a vulnerable young boy. Pretty too. Small and harmless. If someone wanted to harm him, they could just – Anti hisses and strikes himself in the side of the head, trying to cut the thought off before it goes any further. No. He can see him. He knows where he is. And right now, he's sternly insisting, with nothing but gestures, that he plans to shoot in the competition.

They don't end up letting JJ do it – they're shooting bows too big for him anyway – but they do give in and let him take a little hunting bow and show off. A couple boys he hangs out with every now and then watch with disinterest – and then shock – and then delight, whooping and hollering, as Jameson sinks four arrows so close into his target they must chip each other's heads.

“Yeah, thatta boy,” chuckles Anti. “One thing I gave you worth having, I guess.”

He sure hasn't taught Jameson to be a good person. In truth, he has no idea where he got that from. Would it be better, if Jameson had the same sort of ferocity he had as a kid? If he didn't always smile so sweetly at every stranger he passed and swear to Anti that he would keep him safe with his first knife?

No. There's nothing that would ever be worth Jameson being the sort of scared and alone that turned Anti into the person he is.

Someone runs past him, a kid with soft green hair. Anti stares at him as he stumbles and falls to his knees, turning to look back at Anti with huge mismatched eyes, so bright they seem to shine with color. It's not fear there, though. Just the pure, feral need to survive. A cornered animal. Anti does not speak.

Absalom scrambles up and keeps running. He won't get away, though. There wasn't anywhere to go.

Anti realizes he's striking his head again. He clenches his hand into a fist and does it once more, to make the thought stop, to make his skull ring. In the grass below, Jamie is jumping around with his friends and laughing so brightly Anti feels the need to turn away.

Where was he when he was thirteen? No longer running. Staring numbly at the ceiling and waiting to die.

.

He knows that his client told him the target's name. Adam? Aaron? Anthony?

Something. Son of something, did something for work. Doesn't really matter now. They won't identify him by an introduction.

At this point, they might not identify him at all.

Anti cackles and brings his blade down again, letting it find soft liver and a fresh spray of hot sweet blood. He gets so bored, locked away in his tower. The trade keeps him busy most of the time, sure, but busy is different from this, this, this. Not sure how many times he's stabbed him. Something, something, something. He should have counted to thirteen just to make it poetic. A chunk of something wet and slimy flies into his eye and he flicks it out, sitting back for a second.

He finds himself panting, struggling to breathe through the wetness of his mask. He pulls it down his chin, sucking in autumn air and the copper dessert of his kill, hands tight around his knife.

A kid stares at him from his place at the head of the dead man. His knees are tucked under him, a streak of freckles cut across one side of his face, a flash of blood hiding the other side. In the darkness, his green hair looks dark, one strand falling tenderly into his brilliant eyes.

“Go on, then,” Anti pants, letting his knife thud against the earth beside the boy. “Have your turn at him.”

Absalom stares at him, eyes alight with some burden of intent Anti cannot recall without pulling a thousand memories up too, like blood beneath a thorn in his hand.

“The first time you do it, it will be such a relief,” Anti whispers. “The helplessness evaporates like water on the red-hot tool the blacksmith forges. You suck in a breath and your chest is clear. You stab him again.”

Anti pulls out a second blade and buries it in the stomach of the corpse. “And when you do, you feel better. What a shock to the system: the impossible truth that he will never, never touch you again.”

He throws his head back and laughs again, high and wild. Never, never, never again. Absalom doesn't move.

“Go on, then,” says Anti, louder now, howling. “You stupid runt. Have your go at him!”

Absalom's long white fingers touch the unfamiliar handle of the blade.

“For once in your fucking life, just fight!” Anti screams.

He's alone in the darkness. Even the moon has left him without a friend, and the spirit of the man beneath him is long gone from his cooling body.

“Absalom,” Anti hears himself whispering, gripping at his emerald hair. “How could they?”

Blood stains his arms and face.

.

Not doing well. Not doing well.

JJ will be thirteen in a week, and he can't know.

But he does.

He's hovering around his door all the time, bringing books in and asking him to read to him like he used to when Jameson was littler, before he decided he didn't need to lie on his shoulder and put his little arm around his stomach for a few warm moments every night.

Anti stops coming downstairs for dinner and has his food left outside his door so he can eat in his room. Writes his business partners and lackeys and reroutes distribution for a few weeks, pretending he's out at sea. There will be a cut in his profits, but money stopped mattering so long ago anyway. Why did he even bother to become so profitable? For the guildsmaster? He was less than trash to Dark. He's less than trash to everyone old enough to lust after him. Maybe it's just time to accept that he can't make himself worth anything no matter what he tries.

He can't believe he's in this place again, this darkness. It's so much work to get out. He doesn't know if he has the strength. Again and again and again. How many times in his life does he have to do this? What is he even holding on to anymore?

“Anti?”

Jameson's in his doorway again, and Anti looks up from a scab he's been picking at, making his face calm. “Yes.”

Jamie hovers, twisting his shirt in his hands for a moment before he releases and raises them. “Wondered if you wanted to go for a ride?”

Hell, could Jameson have asked him anything that would require more energy? Anti could melt, really, he thinks to himself. Right here in this bed. If he laid down long enough, he might just melt into a slug of a man. He wouldn't sleep, no, but he would lie here as goop for hours on end. Not thinking is such a relief.

“Sure, darling,” he says, trying not to croak. “Be down in a few.”

He puts himself together for him, and it's easier than he expected, in a way, because his body just seems to drag itself through doing what needs to be done. He's coming out of his room, fixing his mask over his mouth, when JJ makes a gesture at him from the hallway.

“Do you really need that?” he asks earnestly. “We'll just go out over the quiet side of the hills. No one will bother us. You can let your hands and face free, right?”

Anti stares at him.

JJ expounds. “I just thought it might be more comfortable for you.”

“It wouldn't be,” Anti tells him shortly. “You've never asked me something like that before.”

JJ twists up his mouth and doesn't press.

He's had the foresight to tack White Horse himself, which Anti appreciates more than he tells him. He didn't know if he had it in him to get through all that. “Okay, where's Bertrand?”

“Can I ride with you on White Bird?”

Another surprise. Jameson loves his own pony, always has. There's no reason for them to ride together. But Anti nods, offering him a hand, and Jameson swings up onto Anti's horse.

That's... close. Which is – it's normal, to be close to his little brother. Why is there an alarm bell trembling in the back of his head, ready to ring?

This is my Jameson, he tells himself coolly, closing his eyes for a second. My brother. There is no one safer in the world.

He'll be thirteen in a week, whispers back another part of him. You had a sister once too. And you remember when she became old enough to forget you were her blood.

Anti clears his throat, touching his heel to White Bird's side. They ride out along the hills, the grass beginning to brown and the trees flourishing with red and orange, and he tries to stay focused, feeling far away from himself. The warmth of JJ in front of him is supposed to be a comfort, and his little brother doesn't make him talk, sitting contentedly against his chest and sometimes patting Bird's neck.

“Let's stop here,” JJ says, pointing to a grove where they used to come have lunch and practice their sign language sometimes, after his voice was taken. Jameson caught onto it so fast, faster than Anti.

They sit beneath a familiar tree and JJ puts his head against his shoulder. Anti touches his head and gazes at him for a second.

Jameson catches him watching and sits up a little, sucking in a deep breath before raising his hands. “Anti?”

“Yeah, kid.” “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Listen,” Jameson picks at his sleeve for a second. “I'm worried about you.”

Anti lets his head thunk back against the tree, biting back a sigh. He really is the shittiest big brother. “You don't have to be, Jameson,” he says tensely. “I'm fine. You're a kid, just worry about kid stuff, okay?”

“Half the time I'm just a kid, and the other half, you need me to be ready for everything,” JJ says. “What I'm saying is, I'm old enough to know you're not yourself.”

“I'm not, am I?” Anti asks, irritable now.

“Anti, are you really going to make me confront you with everything I've noticed?”

“You can spare us both the conversation by stopping it right now.”

Jameson stands and Anti misses his heat. His little brother paces around the grove for a second, and it really does remind him of a little man somehow, with the way he scowls and holds his hands clenched.

“Look, Anti,” Jameson says, turning back to him. “You can't go on like this. And you don't have to!”

Anti groans, rubbing at his face.

“I mean it! You just – you make yourself a prisoner in that keep! You don't speak with anyone but me and the freaks you work with! Of course you're miserable.”

“You say that like I have a choice over this,” Anti snarls. “If you can recall, I'm the freak, Jameson. I'm trying not to get – to get – to get hurt.”

“I know, Anti, but it doesn't have to be like this. What kind of a life is this for you? You need to make – just, even one friend, and I'd be happy!”

Anti laughs with no humor at all. “Right. I can't believe that after all these years, you still don't get it at all. No, you know what, that's not fair of me. You're a kid, you're not supposed to get these things. But you can't tell me what to do about my own deformity, Jameson.”

“People with deformities get to have friends and family, Anti, even if some people will always be cruel. But you don't have to tolerate anyone who's cruel. You have Persuasion, and you're so fierce! You could handle anyone who tried to hurt you, couldn't you? Why do you hide away when you've proven a thousand times you're deadlier than anyone else out there?”

Anti's starting to get this cramp in his stomach that's... not unfamiliar, but old. Been a long time since he had that particular anxiety. He closes his eyes. But no, he swore to JJ he'd never block out his signing just because he could.

“You have to come out with me more, you have to meet some people. You will never talk to me about what makes you so scared – ”

“I'm not fucking scared.”

“But you have to talk to someone.”

“JJ.” Anti clasps his hands together and takes in a deep breath. “Jameson. Look. I get this, okay? You're worried about me. Would it help if I admit that – that I – I have been a little under the weather?”

Jameson scrutinizes him, standing in front of him with his hands at his side.

“But it happens,” Anti continues, more steadily. “I know it's unpleasant. I'm sorry I can't get better right away. But I will. I've been through this before and it always clears up soon enough.”

“Yes, and then it comes back again.”

Anti stops short, staring at him. “What do you mean?”

“You were like this a couple times when I was littler, too,” Jameson plows on. He just says it like he's not ripping Anti's belief in himself apart in front of his eyes. “When I got my growth and you couldn't fix it, you stopped eating the same way I did, I still remember. And you looked so pale all the time, and you would slap your head like you've started doing again. Then when I was eight – ”

“JJ,” Anti croaks.

“No, I promised myself we would talk about this!” JJ insists. “I'm not a little boy anymore, I want to help look after you! When I was eight you were coming home in blood every night and then lying in bed all day, and after Marvin – ”

Anti grits his teeth together. “Don't talk about that.”

“You were leagues away from me even when I touched you,” JJ says, and his big eyes are welling up now. “You're leagues away from me now!”

He feels it. He feels like he's a league above him, watching all this happen. Like someone other than him is finding out that he has failed to hide his hard times from Jameson on repeat, for years. He never wanted Jameson to have to worry about this.

“Anti,” JJ says, and Anti thinks that if he could say it out loud, it might come out as a whimper. “Please, you have to do something different. You can't live like this anymore.”

He comes towards him and tries to get him to reach out and hug him, but Anti finds himself staring right through him, registering his motions belatedly. Even when he does, he can't hug him.

“Anti,” Jameson repeats, and he crouches down to touch his beard with his nails, his other hand cupping Anti's cheek. When did his hands start to grow? He used to put his tiny nails along his cheek and scratch Anti like he was a cat. It was so cute. He was so tiny and so affectionate.

“I love you, I can't watch you keep doing this. My friend Peter, the other boys say his mom got so sad she died from it. I don't want you to die from being sad, Anti. I'm sad too, okay? We spend all day in our keep, and even with the other kids, I know I'm an outcast. We don't have to live like this. Marvin said – ”

But Anti can't bear to hear one more time about the blue Monster and his magical family that loves him despite everything, in his little kingdom where no one hurts him. It's a myth he told Jameson to comfort him, to make him believe that a Monster like them could ever have a happy life. He should never have let Jameson grow close to him. He doesn't understand.

“We do have to live like this,” Anti hears himself say, voice completely flat.

“I can't live like this, Anti,” Jameson signs, and after that, Anti doesn't even remember how they get home, or if he tries anything at all to make Jameson stop crying so hard his shoulders shake.

.

It's the sick part of him, he thinks, that finds it so easy to shut Jameson out completely. His little brother tries to talk to him a couple more times, but Anti can't seem to remember anything he says, not in detail. Just that he's unhappy. That he doesn't want to keep going like this.

He's old enough now. He's realized that Anti can't give him a normal life. Probably not even a happy one. He wants something else, and isn't that his right?

It's the day before Jameson's birthday that Anti finds himself in the empty kitchen, grasping at a bottle of alcohol he knows the cook put there, so long untouched that his fingerprints show in the places where they clear dust. He hasn't had anything but wine since... since when? Sometimes, he would drink with Dark, practically sitting at his feet. And once or twice, Wil brought home strong stuff to drink, and he loved how the twins would get louder and more excited when they drank, but he doesn't think he touched any of it with them.

The burn of the drink is foreign to him. He probably shouldn't have started by throwing back a long swig of it, kneeling by the cupboards while Jameson sits with his tutor two rooms over, but it doesn't matter. Once he starts drinking, he doesn't stop. He goes to his study and paces for hours, half-heartedly pulling out some work, but soon he's too drunk to even pretend he's doing anything other than talking to ghosts.

“Maybe he'd be happy if you were here,” he tells Robbie, slumping to the floor beside a memory of him, consumed with a sudden need to help him brush his hair and get dressed for bed again. “Even when you were unwell, didn't we have each other? Then he wouldn't say I have no friends. We were always friends.”

He would kiss his face if he could, kiss it a thousand times.

“But I'm the one who let them kill you,” he croaks. “Everything's already ruined for me. If he goes too, what will be the point to being alive? If I can't make him happy, why am I doing any of this? Does it even matter if I get what's mine, or if my mother suffers?”

Even as he says it, the weight of his hatred for her rears up and strikes him in the chest, and he groans around it, teeth clenching.

“No wonder JJ doesn't want me. What a complete misery to be around I am.”

He laughs and lets his head fall to the side as it swims. He's drinking again, cold in the place where Robbie should be beside him, when he hears the door swing open.

Somewhere, there's a distant rush of panic - he's not supposed to see this – but it's as numb as most everything else.

"Go back to bed," he manages, trying to stand up, though he can't quite get there. "It's late by now. You're supposed to be sleeping."

JJ just looks at him. What? What's that gaze for? Anti scoffs and sits back down, shaking his head at him.

"You just wanted something else to be annoyed with me about, huh? Go back to bed! How did you even know I was down here?"

"I could feel you from all the way in my room," JJ signs back coolly.

Anti doesn't know what the fuck that means, and he doesn't care.

"Why are you doing this?" Jameson asks. In his sleepshirt, he looks bigger than usual. Anti realizes he hasn't bought him new sleeping clothes in... how long, he wonders? Did he start growing the day he moved out of Anti's room, and now his little brother is just on the other side of the castle, becoming a stranger to him? Anti groans as a wave of something almost physical lances through his chest, gripping at the floor, and JJ flinches too.

"I can't stay a baby forever, Anti," his little brother tells him anyway. Anti cackles, shaking his head, half slumped over himself at the table.

"Why not?" he asks.

Jameson just shakes his head at him, and Anti laughs again. The little light of his life, so disappointed in him.

"You think I'm holding you back from something," he says, rubbing at his forehead. "Like being an adult is some privilege I won't give you. All kids think that way, I suppose. So they tell me. I never wanted to - to be an adult. I wished so badly for one day where anybody in my life would just treat me like a child."

If JJ answers, he can't see; his vision is blurring and doubling over.

"Why wasn't I like other kids?" Anti asks himself, squeezing the lukewarm bottle of his vodka. "What was so wrong with me? I didn't ask to be a freak. But maybe it was my fault. I never fought back, you know? Not until I was old enough to kill. And then I never stopped killing. You think I don't know - you think I don't know what a monster I am?"

He catches a smell of vanilla soap through the sharp empty vodka smell, and he looks up hazily to find Jameson close to him, blinking those big, mismatched eyes. Anti reaches up and holds his cheeks between his hands.

"There you are, darling," he says. "Nobody will ever hurt you. You can just be a kid. You can sleep and no one will come in your room. If they did, you could tell me, and I would make it stop. I would make it stop..."

"Anti." He makes out his name on his brother's hands. "I'm here."

"It's okay, Absalom," he whimpers. "I'll make it stop."

There's a pause from his brother. "How?" he signs finally, and Anti chokes on a sob.

"I don't know," he says. "It never does stop. It never does. I kill it and then it lives again. I can't make it go away. I'm always going to be... broken."

He cups JJ's face again frantically. "But you're not supposed to know that. Don't tell."

JJ nods faintly and reaches up to touch his face in return. Anti flinches back hard, and Jameson stills. It takes a long moment, but his hand returns: he sets his nails tenderly against Anti's chin and scratches at his beard. Anti gazes at him, feeling something wet on his face.

"I'll sleep in your room if you'll come rest," JJ says.

Anti blinks, trying to focus. He's not sure he can get upstairs. But JJ's hand wraps around his own, tugging at him. He staggers up, and when JJ pulls him, he follows.

He has some blurry memory of falling into bed. JJ's gone and he jolts up, head swimming hard as he looks for him. But he's back a moment later, slipping into the room and pressing a cold skin of water into his hands.

"Don't need that."

"Drink some, Anti."

"Sign language is so hard when you're drunk."

"Well, here." He pushes the water into his face and Anti laughs.

"I don't like your laugh like that," he thinks JJ signs, but it's hard to tell. "Scoot over, okay?"

Anti's brow furrows as he feels him coming to sit beside him on the bed. "What? I thought you'd sleep in your little bed."

It's still in the corner. He can't move it out of his room. The headboard is decorated with carved ponies.

"Don't you prefer me here?"

Didn't he used to? Every now and then, when JJ would have nightmares or got sick, he would crawl into Anti's bed and wrap his tiny arms around his neck. After his surgery, Jamie slept in his bed for seven months straight. Anti used to wake up four times a night to make sure he was still breathing. Maybe he did prefer that. That warm little body breathing in the bed beside him. He always knew he was so perfectly safe.

But this isn't a little boy anymore. He feels the tears rise up, and he shakes his head hard, laughing again, lower.

“Go back to your own room,” he says hollowly. “You can't sleep in here with a Monster, and I can't sleep in here with you. Bad boundaries. There you go, I'm healing, aren't I?”

He cackles and hears the noise like a stranger's laugh. Yeah, maybe he gets why JJ doesn't like that.

“If I can't sleep here, I'll sit here,” says Jameson, Anti's eyes flickering over to him. He watches dazedly as JJ pulls over a chair from the table and sits himself down in it firmly. “You might be sick otherwise. You drank too much.”

“No, no. You don't need to know about – about this. Go back to bed.”

“You go to bed. I'm not little. I will watch over you.”

And he remembers, vaguely, the first time his little brother offered to help protect him. He was so little – just five, Anti thinks. When he could still speak. When he opened his mouth and out came love and loyalty.

Anti's head spins hard. He wants to wrap his hand around the throat of his vodka and choke himself with it. He's got a little brother, though. Not little for long. Still little to him.

A soft hand settles on his forehead. He feels a thumb rubbing gently against his cheek before he falls asleep.

.

He understands more than Anti thinks he does.

That's what he tells himself as he watches over his brother that night, wetting a cool cloth to put to his head. It's not really for hangovers so much as for a fever, but that's what Anti always does for him when he's sick, so he does it too.

Yeah, he knows about alcohol. He knows that was the stuff that made his dad so mad, and he knows it makes you sick if you have too much. He knows that Anti hasn't touched it in years because the smell brings back bad memories for both of them. Besides, his brother doesn't like to be out of control. No, Anti likes to have control over... everything.

He feels safer that way.

Jameson pulls the covers closely over Anti, reaching up to scratch his beard.

Yes, he knows about Anti trying to feel safe. He knows about the disguises, the Persuasion, the killing, the blindfolded servants and the triple-locked doors. He knows the way that fear ebbs and flows. He knows that when Anti first gave him a knife at six years old, that was him trying to make JJ feel safe too.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that Jameson needs a change. He'll never be normal, he knows about that. Knows about how, even when he does make friends, they don't make much effort to understand him, and consider it a privilege to let him follow them around and do his best to participate. But it's not just the way he feels cut off from the world, with only Anti and one or two tutors to hear him at all.

It's the killing. It's the misery. It seems to radiate through him. And this – while Anti tries to keep secrets of his own – this is his great secret.

He knows how Anti feels all the time. He can close his eyes and he always knows. Sometimes, he feels it in his chest, like he's the one who's scared or angry or numb to everything around him. Sometimes it wakes him at night. He always knows how Anti feels.

He can't bear to feel his pain anymore.

He can't tell him either, of course. If Anti realized that Jameson's Grace was, of all things, Empathy, how long would it take him to realize that Jameson would never in his life become the killer Anti wanted him to be?

“I can't do this,” he signs to his sleeping brother. “I don't want the life you've laid out for me. I want you to stop killing and selling your sickness. This can't go on.”

He's thirteen now, he realizes, looking out at the moon. That has to be old enough to make things change.

It has to be.

.

“My lord?”

Jameson jerks awake on the side of the bed, nearly falling off it as he rises.

The knock on the door sounds again. “My lord? I'm sorry to disturb you, but the little master isn't in his room, and we have his breakfast ready.”

Anti doesn't shift in his bed, breathing thickly against the pillows. Jameson can't believe he fell asleep so easily. He should have stayed up to make sure Anti didn't throw up and choke.

He lets himself flop out of bed, shivering as his bare feet hit the cold stone of the room they used to share, and pads over to the heavy door. He realizes he forgot to lock it last night. Anti keeps the keys around his throat, and Jameson hadn't thought about it.

Jameson pulls the door open, blinking up at the serving girl, who had jumped back in alarm. No doubt she's only ever spoken with Anti through the door. He can feel her momentary panic, and then the soft wave of her pleasure to see him.

“Oh, hullo there, little master,” she says in relief. “We didn't realize you were up here. We put together your birthday breakfast, darling, and it's getting late.”

Right. It's his birthday. He glances back at Anti, all but passed out on his mattress.

“It's ready whenever you want to come down, dear,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

He nods at her and manages a smile, and she bustles away. Jameson chews at his fingernail for a moment.

Anti's safe up here. And he is terribly hungry... and rather curious about the special breakfast they've made for him. Might be a good chance of sweet buns.

He'll just go check it out real quick.

Jameson puts on socks and traipses down the stairs of their cold tower, back into the less gloomy halls that the servants have decorated just for him. Everything is cleanly swept and there are autumn leaf decorations and carved gourds with leering faces put out for the Samhain celebration. Anti always tells him he was born close to ghosts, and maybe that's why he can always understand things that aren't said out loud.

It's ironic now, when Jameson can feel so much. The servants seem to be in good moods, a warm sensation that seems to curl around his body as he walks into the dining hall, even though there's no one inside. But if he turns his attention back upstairs, he can feel the heavy, heavy pressure of Anti's grief and shame and fear. It's a dark red force that hangs over him and turns Anti into a ghost, so all his loveliness and color turns into something pallid and dragging.

Jameson forces the thought away. He's going to make his brother get better. Why else would he have this power, if not to save his Monster?

His Monster always takes care of him, after all. The dining table is ridiculously full, not just with breakfast, but with sweets to last him all day – all week, really. Candied apples, sugar buns, caramels, fancy lollies shipped in from Corbin. Cider and his favorite cordial. For breakfast, there's a plate crammed with a powdered strawberry sweet bun, thick red strips of bacon, and two white eggs with melted cheese and green onions on top. His mouth waters as he looks over everything. Anti must have asked for all this to be made just for him.

“Jamie?” his brother croaks, and Jameson nearly jumps, turning to see him looking positively harrowed in the entryway of the dining hall.

“Anti.” He runs back to his brother and hugs him around his stomach, feeling Anti set his hand against his head.

“Happy birthday,” Anti says, voice thick, and Jameson wonders if he's still drunk, or just sick from how much he had. “I'm sorry, I meant to take you for a ride at dawn like you like.”

“Do you feel terrible, Anti?”

“Don't worry about me,” Anti rasps. His eyes dart away, and Jameson feels the weight of his guilt come down on his neck like a chain. “I should never have done that, I'm... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have... it's your birthday, you're thirteen.”

“Anti, it's okay. You've not been well. It's not your fault.”

“You're thirteen,” Anti repeats blankly, and Jameson feels his mind drifting darkly. He takes his brother's hands in his own and pulls him towards the table, setting him down in the same place he always sits.

“Don't dwell on it. Have something to eat and you will feel better.”

Anti turns away, nauseated. “No, I think you better have some on your own.”

“Anti.”

Anti can hardly meet his eyes. He's so ashamed Jameson realizes he could ask him for almost anything and get it just now, but he's not sure it would matter come tomorrow.

“Please eat,” he tries.

Anti swallows and pulls a plate towards himself. Jameson sees his hands shaking. “You eat and open some of your presents, then, and I'll try some.”

Jameson glances over at the piles of wrapped gifts on the other side of the table. He pulls a couple towards him as they pick at breakfast together. It's hard to enjoy the taste when Anti's emotions dust everything he eats in ash. Jameson unwraps a present instead.

His hands come up in surprise and satisfaction, and Anti watches him carefully. “That's what you wanted, right?”

It's not knives or a bow or anything made for hurting. It's a pretty set of books bound up in red leather. Storybooks! Jameson pulls open the first one to a picture of a girl and a boy holding hands under a full moon. His fingers run over the words of the pages. “Yes, I love nice storybooks.”

“You're not too old for it?”

“No, I like it. Will you read them to me sometime?”

He sees Anti's eyes flicker nervously down to that boy and girl in love. “Um, sure.”

“You used to tell me stories to put me to sleep.”

“Yes,” says Anti, voice small. “Come on, open another.”

There's a beautiful carved horse inside, painted in fine detail, and Jameson admires the weight of it in his hands. Anti's mouth quirks when he hears him laughing over how much he likes it. Clothes follow, and good boots, a small wall hanging with a rabbit for his room, and a belt with some pouches, because he always likes to gather things like acorns and flowers. It's strange – they're more childish gifts than Anti has ever bought him before, and yet they make him feel more like a man.

“You got me real presents like I wanted,” Jameson says.

Anti's eyes are a little watery. “Don't be a little sap. You asked, so I got it for you. Spoiled brat.”

Jameson smiles at him. Anti looks away, pulling in a shaky breath. Jameson gestures and pulls his attention back.

“Anti?”

“Hm.”

“I want you to tell me what's so scary about being thirteen.”

Anti shakes his head quickly, wiping at his face. “Nothing, James. Not for you. You are as safe as you've ever been.”

Jameson plays with his hands for a moment, sighing. “Then what was so scary for you?”

“I'm not afraid anymore,” Anti says, voice hard. “I handled what hurt me.”

It's so strange to grow up and learn about how the adults around you are lying all the time, without even meaning to. Jameson frowns at him for a long moment. “You must tell me or tell someone. You have to.”

“It's in the past, Jameson.”

“No, it isn't, you still think of it all the time.”

Anti sneers at the wall as if there's an enemy standing there, pulling absent-mindedly at his hair.

“You must tell me or someone. I can't take seeing you like this anymore.”

Anti stares into nothing for a long time. Jameson dares to approach him, his hand reaching tentatively out. He sets it on Anti's arm.

“I can't take this, Anti,” he signs. “I love you so much, I can't see you suffering.”

“Don't know where you got that from,” Anti says, apropos of nothing.

“What? Got what from?”

Anti pulls in a breath and turns to him, a hand against his head, which must be pounding. “You will never need to know what happened to me when I was your age. I am not yours to worry about in that way. You take too much care of me already, and now I've let you down again.”

“You didn't, Anti! I love all my presents and treats. It's a nice birthday. Don't be guilty, please.”

Anti ignores him. “If the choices are telling you or telling someone, then I'll find someone.”

Jameson stares up at him with what Anti calls his puppy eyes. It doesn't feel like a victory, but he'll take it. “Okay.”

Anti leans over, and, in a rare display, kisses him carefully in his hair. Jameson reaches out to hold his wrists as he cups his face. “I'm very sorry I got drunk and ruined this,” he says. “It will not happen again. Ever.”

“But just because you hide it from me,” Jameson signs sadly, pulling his hands back.

“Finish your breakfast. I'll take you riding after I've had some medicine for my head.”

“You can rest, Anti, it's okay.”

“No, no. I'll take you riding. I will.”

“Anti?”

His brother's gotten up to leave. “What?”

Jameson avoids his eye. “You don't have to tell me everything. But I'm old enough now. You must at least tell me what my mother did.”

Anti's gone very still above him, staring through his face.

“You always tell me about what my father's done wrong,” Jameson presses on. “But you don't talk about our mom at all. But you hate her. You have to tell me.”

Anti's still for a long moment. His hands drift over Jameson's storybook. He pulls at the pages and finds one of a child digging in the sand, the ocean lapping near his feet.

“Once upon a time,” Anti says. “There was a little boy who was very sad. And lots of people hurt him lots of times. And his mum and dad were supposed to love him and not let him get hurt. But they didn't.”

Anti turns away from the storybook, looking at nothing. “She told me once that when I was grown, I would understand that things are complicated. She told me I would understand the things she and my father allowed to happen. But the worst part, Jameson, is that here you are, thirteen, and here I am, grown, a monster in every sense of the word: and I still can't even begin to imagine putting you through the things they put me through.”

Jameson stares up at his brother. Anti stares through him.

“The little boy realized he wasn't worth saving,” Anti whispers. “The end.”

Anti tries to walk away from him then, but Jameson won't let him go. He grabs Anti's pants and tugs him back. He wraps his arms very tightly around his brother's waist and he clings to him. It's not a hug: it's not for comfort. He just knows, with something deep in his chest, that he can't let Anti out of his sight in this moment. He's scared of what his brother will do.

“Sorry, Jamie,” he hears Anti croak out, as he begins to come back to himself. “If you knew how sorry I am. I'm so sorry, my heart. I love you. Forgive me.”

.

“What's got you even more mopey than usual?” Anja asks, picking up her pace to come ride beside him, her horse snuffling in White Bird's direction.

Anti doesn't turn to look over at her.

“Seriously, this man I'm taking you to, he's powerful, Anti. You should try to be a salesman for ten minutes. Put on some false cheer and – ”

“Enough,” Anti snarls. He reaches up to touch his head. Three days since he humiliated himself in front of his little brother, and he still has a headache like a hangover.

Worse than the humiliation, of course, is the knowledge that he frightened Jameson, who's always tried too hard to look after him anyways. It rises up in his throat almost like it could make him cry, as if he ever cries. He's been a terrible caregiver to him. Is he even any better than his own parents?

Well, yes, but still. This isn't healthy for a new teenager. Anti is the adult. He has to fix himself. Has to do better. But he's been trying for so many years to do anything he could to make it stop hurting, and it never does. What if he just can't do this? Does he have to send Jamie away? Where? Who could he ever trust with him? There's no one in all the world. His head spins slightly and he clutches White Bird's reigns tightly.

“Anti,” Anja repeats, frowning at him now. “Get it together.”

“It's together,” he spits back, in his gravel voice, devoid of either Persuasion or allure. “I agreed to come meet with him because you guaranteed he would want contracts. I don't care about making a new partner.”

“That's your loss,” Anja tells him. “Kumiho's as much a businessman as he is a killer.”

Anti touches his heels to White Bird's side, and she moves ahead of Anja again as the campsite comes into view. It's easy to find the tent of the master of the place, of course, the biggest one, with animal furs laid out at the entrance and along the floor. Something bitter curls in Anti's gut as he dismounts White Bird and steps onto the furs. Dark used to lay furs out like that too. Jackass.

It's been years and he still remembers what it was like to sit at Dark's feet. He remembers, all the more clearly, the moment Dark saw his face for the first time, and the only life he had ever cared about ended. Dark was everything, and the nothing. Anti remembers crashing into that emptiness with nothing to tether him.

The strange thing is, it's not just his imagination when he hears Dark's voice call out to him in a purr: “It is you. I knew it.”

Anti freezes in the open flap of the tent.

The furs lead to a large wooden chair, one he has sat at the foot of many times. In it, there's a man dressed in white and black, with a drink at one hand and a longsword at the other. He's beautiful. He was always beautiful. Even now, aged into streaks of silver hair and lines around his endlessly brown eyes, he's beautiful.

“Dark,” Anti whispers.

Anja presses into the tent beside him, glancing warily between the two of them as Anti's posture shifts into something dangerous. “Anti, this is Kumiho. He runs an assassin's trade in the west.”

Anti's heart is pulsing like it wants to get out of his chest and start firing arrows. His right hand clutches tightly to one of the knives at his hip.

“He runs as assassin's guild in the west,” Anti corrects her sharply. “They call him Darkness out there. Kumiho?”

Dark's mouth curls. “An old name. You wouldn't have come if you knew it was me.”

“I would have come in the night. You would have woken to my blade in your gut.”

Anja's not oblivious to the hatred in the room. “You bastard,” she hisses. “You set us up.”

Dark raises his hands peacefully. “Of course not. You are in no danger here, and I do have contracts that need fulfilled. Especially after our worthwhile assassin killed one of my men not two weeks past.”

Anti chuckles darkly, something hot pounding through his head. “You were mad about that? As if you have any right to be angry with me.”

“Angry? He deserved to die if he was caught doing what I paid him to do. When the men told me how he was killed, I knew it was you. I had to see you again. I have looked for you for years, my snake.”

Something confused trips through the white hot fury and fear collecting in his chair. Anti stares blankly at Dark, shaking his head.

“Anja,” Dark says, rising to his feet. “Leave us be. You'll have your pay.”

Anja glances at Anti, eyes narrow. In his field of work, that's almost a kindness.

“Go,” he tells her. “Can handle my fucking self.”

As she leaves, the silence enters the tent to replace her. It feels dark to Anti now, as though hours have passed, and evening has come to hang over this tent, heavy on their shoulders. He looks at Dark. Dark straightens, steps forward, looks back.

Anti leaps at him with his knife.

Dark catches him like they're dancing and tears his wrist out of the way of his body. When Anti drops a second blade from the sleeve of his other arm, Dark grabs that too, shoving him bodily into the chair, pinning his arms above his head.

“Bastard!” Anti screams, his foot raising to kick at him. Dark angles him away and holds him. “You're a traitor and a pig! Now you come to haunt me? I'll kill you!”

“If you wanted me dead, all you would have to do was command me off of you,” Dark reminds him, smiling at him with a grin like a jackal. “Right, your grace?”

Anti snaps his teeth at him. Dark was always good at resisting his Persuasion. “Fuck you.”

“In fact, I think that if you wanted me dead, you wouldn't have missed just now with that knife,” Dark continues.

Anti bites at Dark's arms, squirming in his grip. “You threw me out like trash!” he screams. “When you knew I trusted you!”

“Trusted me? Not with the truth of what you were.”

“And you only proved me right not to do so,” Anti shouts. “Do you know – do you have any idea how – how – ”

His voice cracks and he shakes his head furiously, and the humor vanishes from Dark's face. He turns his head at him tenderly. “Tell me.”

“I don't owe you anything!” Anti yells. “Go fuck yourself! I don't owe you the story of the days I spent running! Of how you gave me my first taste of what it might be like to be safe, to have a future, and then you ripped that away from me because you wanted to fuck me! Like everyone wants to! Well, fuck you! Fuck you! I hate you, I'll kill you!”

Dark takes his wrists into one large hand and reaches down with the other to touch his chin. Anti snaps at his hands as he speaks to him. “Anti. Anti.”

“You traitor,” Anti snarls again, his whole face so flushed with heat he feels dizzy. “Perfidy! Perfidy.”

Dark grabs his chin. Anti thinks he could whimper, on the verge of collapsing into that chair. He tried so hard not to think of him for years. He never believed he would see him again. The fact that a man like Dark has even lived this long is a chance thing. “It was perfidy,” Dark whispers to him. “I came to tell you I'm sorry, Anti.”

Anti sucks in a breath and then throws it back out again. “You're full of shit. As if a man like you apologizes. What the hell do you want from me?”

“I have made a trade out of death,” Dark says to him, and he stands over him like a tower. “Proudly. I've killed good people and bad ones. Traded blood for coin. But I have never stooped so low as to find myself on the verge of the kind of depravity I did the day I saw what you were.”

Anti's eyes water now, although he thinks they're more for fury than the need to hear these words for him. Still, Dark presses on.

“Anti,” he says again. “I'm sorry. You were loyal to me, and I had told you many times you were too young for me to touch. I should have controlled myself better.”

“Controlled yourself better?” Anti hisses. “You shouldn't have thrown me out! It would have been better to be with you if you just – if – ”

His words fall off. Dark frowns down at him now, brow heavy.

“Don't give me that look,” Anti snaps. “I been just fucking fine without you, as you can see.”

“Really?”

“Shut your mouth. I'm going to stab you.”

But Dark's releasing his wrists. Slowly, he steps back, straightening his sleeves. “Very well then.”

Anti stares at him for a long moment, reaching half-heartedly for one of the many blades on his person. Dark cocks an eyebrow at him. Anti scowls.

“You always did have a soft spot for me,” Dark says.

Anti steps up and stabs Dark in the arm.

Dark bites down hard on his mouth, and for a second the only sound between them is Anti's breathing, heavy and unsure.

“Thanks for that,” Dark says. “Are we even?”

“Absolutely not,” Anti says back, voice barely there.

Dark reaches up and pulls the knife out of his bicep. Blood pours out over his sleeve. “This is practically a letter opener. You could have done worse.”

His fury gone out of him with the blood, Anti stands numbly in front of him, watching his face. Dark tosses the knife onto a side table and yanks up his sleeve, wetting a cloth and pressing it there before he comes back to Anti, standing in front of him and breathing out.

“Anti. I'm sorry.”

“For kicking me out?”

“I told you to leave to protect you,” Dark says softly. “That was in your best interests. I was weak, and the other men had seen you.”

Anti shakes his head at him blankly. “I'm just to believe that you've changed, now?”

“As soon as the shock of the reveal wore off, I was sorry for the way I scared you,” Dark murmurs. “When I realized you were still alive, and nearby, I came to find you.”

“Well. You found me.” Anti stares through his face, trying to figure out what his body's feeling as he looks at him. “Bye.”

Dark grabs his wrist again, and Anti tenses. “You still kill so exquisitely. You can work for me again.”

“I don't want to work for you.”

“I will make up for what I did in your favorite commodities.”

“I don't want anymore blood or gold,” Anti says.

It's strange to admit it out loud. For years, what else has he pursued? But he knows he tired of the money a long time ago. He kills for nothing and pours coins into feeding troughs and rivers for peasant children to find when he feels like it.

Dark is quiet for a second. “I... can understand that.”

“Can you?” Anti's not sure he cares about the answer.

“Why do you think I left the west, where I was all but a king? I'm tired of the trade, Anti. It's become too easy. Everything has.”

“What do you want instead?”

“I'm sure I have no idea.”

Anti laughs bitterly, turning away from him. He's so tired, suddenly, that he thinks he could cry. He wants another drink. Dark comes to his back and touches his side, just gently. Anti breathes through the panic that this touch would otherwise bring.

Fuck, he loved him so much as a boy. He loved nothing but Dark as a boy. And he remembers the pure joy of being able to fantasize about anyone for the first time in his life. Even to imagine that he and Dark would share years of their life together was life-sustaining. He loved being his apprentice. He loved being his.

“Tell me what you want, then,” Dark says. “I will fetch it for you.”

It's a shaking, garbled mess of feeling and hatred and need that comes out of Anti's mouth. He almost wishes he could take it back as he says it, and yet, there he is, turning around and reaching out to cling to Dark's shirt. To cling to him like he won't let him go again.

“I want to be loved,” he croaks out, gripping tight, tight to the fabric.

“Oh, darling,” says Dark.

“Don't 'oh, darling' me. I'm sick of my own mind being my worst enemy.”

Dark clucks his chin gently, and Anti feels like a teenager again, hungry for his attention, dreaming anxiously about his touch, his hands. “I'm not the one for you, my Monster. You were too young for me all those years ago, and now, I am too old for you.”

“I'll decide for myself if I want you or not.” Anti steps into his space, instantly scared of the closeness of his body heat, but he doesn't pull back. “Listen to me.”

Dark runs his eyes over his face, but his gaze does not fix on his mouth or flicker down to his hips. He doesn't wet his mouth hungrily or reach out to touch Anti's side. Anti tilts his head, watching Dark watch him, and all he does is looking steadily back at him, waiting.

Self-control. Anti's not familiar with seeing it in the face of other adults. But Dark always felt so different to him. Maybe it was the only thing that made him attractive in a way that no one else has been before or sense. Anti breathes out shakily.

“I have the Prince of the Grey Isles,” he says, and Dark, for all his usual calm, is instantly astonished. “He is almost old enough to take his father's throne. I'll kill the King and install my child. Then I'll rule from behind his throne, and he and I will both have what we deserve, at long last.”

“Power?” Dark asks.

“Safety,” Anti says, “which is the same thing.”

Dark regards him carefully. “Why do you tell me this?”

“You're bored,” Anti says, and then he hooks his hand into Dark's shirt and holds him. “And I can't do this alone anymore. Come with me. Love me, care for me. Protect me and the boy. You made me your apprentice all those years ago, but I have grown to your stature. Now make me your right hand. I'll give you a kingdom.”

He pulls back his hood, as he wanted to do in front of Dark more than a decade past, when his love for him was swooning and naive. Now he craves equality beside him, and strong hands to lock his doors, and the thrum of Dark's voice in his ear when he's scared. He reaches out to hold Dark's neck between his hands. “To love me will be no chore,” he says, without the distortion of his false voice, with his face on display in a way no one but Jameson has seen it for years. His eyes are very blue, very green, against long dark lashes. “Will it?”

“You will tire of an old man like me,” Dark says to him, but his hands come forward, squeeze Anti's wrists.

“I will make your body forget that it has aged,” says Anti, and he pushes forward to kiss him.

For a moment, after all this time, Dark's his. His large hands come to his hips as if to push him back, but he doesn't. He kisses him too. His mouth is warm. When Anti breathes, he feels his air move over Dark's lip. He's shivering; Dark holds his body.

“You're scaring yourself,” Dark warns him.

“Shut the fuck up and don't condescend to me,” Anti snarls. He tries to kiss him again, but Dark pulls away. His endless eyes bore into him.

“We will discuss all of this further. I would like to be reacquainted with you and newly acquainted with your plan for regicide. But there isn't time now.”

“What could be more important?”

“Anti, listen to me. This isn't the first I've heard of the missing prince.”

Anti draws back immediately, all softness gone. “What?”

“They know he's in this country. I had no idea he was with you. Someone spotted him at the harbor of Tora, on a ship heading here.”

Anti hears his own breathing picking up like a horse set to the whip. “Jameson.”

“The Queen approached me about a finder's fee. I told her that wasn't the kind of business I run, but the money she offered - ”

Anti's already shoving his way out of the tent, nearly stumbling in his rush to get back to White Bird, who doesn't protest as he hauls himself over her side.

“Anti, be calm,” Dark calls, following him out, and Anti realizes, with a shock, that he's unmasked and unhooded in full view of the rest of his camp. “If they haven't found him now, they won't have found him in the hour you've been gone. I'll come back with you – ”

“Meet me if you want,” Anti breathes. “But I'm not waiting for you to ready a horse.”

“So eager just a moment before,” Dark says. “This princeling must mean – ”

“More to me than even my favorite fantasy of you? Yes.” Anti turns White Bird his way just for a moment. Somewhere in his periphery he's aware of Anja gaping at him. “You betrayed and nearly destroyed me. Protect this child and I will consider forgiving someone completely for the first time in my life.”

He takes off without waiting to see the way it makes Dark smile. The trees rush past as White Bird begins her bursting rhythm of movement, and Anti becomes a part of that rhythm, his body curved to hers. Dark can follow if he wants. Dark can love him or no one can, it doesn't matter. But no one will take Jameson from him.

“Not over my corpse,” he says. “Not for anything.”

He puts his heels to her side, and White Bird flies.

[therantfairysblog]

Dear God, allowed me to share his burden

The first time she saw the scar. It's hurt her. So much that she couldn't stopped her tears.

Kanroji running fast towards the butterfly mansion, she was shocked of the news. 'please don't be too bad, please don't '

'Iguro is fine, he must be' if only she available, she would go to the mission together with him. Iguro was fighting 2 lower moons alone at once! How was he always getting terrible mission like that but not her? Kanroji crashed the mansion and went straight to shinobu.

"shinobu chann!! How's Iguro san??" Kocho who writing some reports in her notebook shocked when Kanroji appeared from nowhere. She's walking towards her and grasping her hand slowly.

"kanroji san, he is stable at this time but he still unconscious. Iguro san got a mild concussion from falling his head first but it's nothing threatening " kanroji falling and sitting abruptly in the floor.

"i was scared..."

......

Kanroji was standing in front of the room, with her, a bouquet of fresh daisy. Her heart was pounding Iike crazy. When she heard about the news that iguro suffered a grave accident while on duty, she was so worry, 'yes of course this job couldn't guarantee you'll be alive the next day, but.... please be safe, Iguro san'

"Kanroji san, don't be too depressed okay, he'll be fine, although he probably need to be hospitalized for a while. He'll be fine" kocho smiled at her, she grasped her hand, give her a little comfort.

"shinobu chan..."

In front of her, Iguro was sleeping comfortably, his head was bandaged, but her face was clean. Kaburamaru aren't there, according to Kocho, the liitle serpent were put separately in another room as medical caution.

No... Kanroji realized, iguro never showing her his mouth. In front of her, a sleeping Iguro with his old scar permanently there, across his face, ripping his mouth. 'iguro san, that must be hurt so much aren't there?' tears flowing down her cheeks. Her heart feel like it was being slice to pieces.

'i think iguro will be glad to have you eating with him all the time'

'himejima san, how..do u know..."

'well, i can sense it, iguro is a sensitive child' both of them caressing a liitle cat they found after their joint mission.

"he has a rough childhood, I'm glad you two are in good terms."

Thinking back then, she's only know a bit of Iguro's past from Himejima. When she try to ask him, Iguro often avoiding it.

Kanroji doesn't want to force him to recall his childhood so the topic was just stay that way, but as they grow closer, she wish that Iguro could be more opened to her.

...

2 days later.

Iguro opened his eyes with the sight of Kanroji falling asleep beside him. His head feel heavy, his whole body feel sore.

"kanroji..." his hand slowly reaching her, gently grasping her hand.

"oh..Iguro san! You awake"

"I'm sorry, how long you have been here...you should take a rest"

"I'm just coming by, don't worry, I'll call shinobu chan. Wait" Iguro didn't let go his grasp. "Please."

She sit back, watching him in that condition break her heart. Iguro often take care of her, unlike her, she feel she didn't help him much. His bare face, amidst the long scar across his face is still beautiful to her. Iguro is such a good looking man.

Iguro, realized his bare face was shown and immediately try to find his bandage.

"I'm sorry, Kanroji, did you see-"

"Iguro san, for today, at least ...let me see you beautiful scar..." Kanroji feel her cheeks reddening. She stuttering.

"...i-, it's disgusting. Please. "

" remember your promise to me the other day? When it's my birthday, you said, you'll give me a pass? To do anything? I want to use it now" kanroji looked at his face carefully, remembering every part of it.

"..."

"it must be hurt didn't it, the old scar"

"I'm fine Kanroji, its the past"

"iguro san, i said i used my pass, and I'm taking it seriously. Please allowed me"

"..."

"Don't push me away. Even for a little bit." She slowly moved her hand towards his face, caressing the scar and then carefully take both of his hand, grasping it, praying. She closed her eyes.

"Kanroji, what are you doing?"

....

"Dear God, allowed me to share, even a tiny bit of his wounds, to me.

Even for a little while, allowed me to shoulder a part of his burden, putting a smile to him.

Allowed me to take a share of his tears, don't put that much burden to him."

Allowed me to give him even a little ray of sunshine in his life. Don't punish him, don't hate him.

Allowed me to eat with him for a longer time. Dear God, give mercy to him"

Kanroji's tears start to fall. Iguro too. He was speechless, nothing could describe his feeling that day. Tears wouldn't stop falling. He never tell her the details of his disgusting past, yet Kanroji understand him like an open book. 'How could i deserve an angel like her in this life?'

"Ara ara, iguro san, you are awake, I'm sorry for being a disturbance, but it look like i need to check him first" Kocho entering his room with a smile. Both looked embarrassed. Kanroji letting go of her grasp. "I'm sorry"

.....

'iguro san, i like you, i like everything about you, iguro san i wish i could know you more '

It was all in her head but nothing was in her speech. Until the end of their time, she was keeping the confession. But she was hoping that, maybe next time-their next life, she'll become much reliable pillar for him and Iguro would never shouldering such a huge burden alone.

[junseotual]

welcome, 2024 !! some messages are longer in the written version below.

as always, i wanted to thank my friends for, well, keeping me alive lol but seriously i say this every single year but you really. made my year. and i'm very grateful for that.

in particular, i'd like to thank my most beloved tuals (twtuals for the most part), thank you for dealing with me on a daily basis, i bet it's not easy !!

// in alphabetical order of the contact names!

[ashie] ; @geumibear

my ribbit !!! we haven’t spoken much this year, but your presence was always, ALWAYS very appreciated!! i’m also very much enjoying the crush saga … in my humble opinion he wants u SO bad ashie. so bad. also, belated congratulations for getting into your chem degree, my whittle alchemist (<- ik that’s not what u are but that’s cute so u hab to accept it sorry) i hope that you always always always remember that i love you very much even when we don’t really talk!! may 2024 bring u crush and uni successes <3 can’t wait to keep up w your adventures this upcoming year as well!!!! lob u

[biebear] ; @marklyluvr

dear bylan p baller! sorry, my BELOVED BIEBEAR <33 we were already pretty good friends (i like to think) but i feel like we’ve gotten much much closer these past few months!! (or is it just me. who knows) . either way i’m really glad for that <3 because idk if u know this (u better. this is a threat.) but i love you a LOT. sorry for making u deal with me recently kjdfksbdk but thank you for hearing me out (and giving me courage also) <3 also thank you for always playing along w me when i say dumb stuff ure so cute i lob u… thank you for always being so nice to me and for being my most beloved villaintual my ohseungtual so important to me what wld i do without u… please be careful on the road!! ure still a whittle biebear so people should let u do whatever u want when ure driving but i have a feeling that they won’t :( i hope that the upcoming year treats you better than this one, i love you!! my cutieful bieloved!! ps. kissie for lillie

[bnuuy / my gabi] ; @yangsminho

my biloved <3 i already said this recently but. i really missed you an awful lot.. an so i’m SO very glad that we’ve been talking a bit more these days <3 u falling for nicho (and subsequently fuma. and) was one of the best things to happen to me this year fr . i kiss u btw . sorry for being so needy and annoying sowwy for targeting u so often when it happens its bc i love u i can’t promise i’ll be less annoying next year hope u understand… also, sure, i only know your internet persona BUT i do love you a whole lot and. this is something i’ve said before but. your internet persona is still a part of You. and i would love you no matter how and where and when i met you, i promise. thank you for being my friend, and i hope we can continue that throughout the upcoming year <3 can’t wait to hunt down nichofuu at the korean clubs w u mwah!!

[founding matthewer / my iri] ; @seokmatthewz

MY IRI WHOM I LOVE my forest witch my cherry fox (og) my shrimptual my elf chef… and most importantly recently my zebitual ofc ofc ofc. founding matthewer. i love you. btw. if u even care. i think this year was a big one for miliri!! got ur twt n subsequently ur discord i feel like i won at life. i guess im also thankful to zebi for existing so i can annoy u more… or i guess ure the one terrorising me most of the time but. as u know. i don’t mind. (also &t i’m so glad u had no other survival show to watch im so glad u decided to subject urself to &audition i love the consequences of that so bad u domt understand) i’m really really glad that we’ve been talking arguably? more this year!! i hope you’re willing to deal with me next year as well!! also excited for the 2024 miliri jesus birthday cafe run, of course!!!!! kdfkjsdnjkd ps. may 2024 bring u all the shrimp of the world. right to ur door. and say miss blue that i love her. and ur honorary catdog also &lt;3

[léksie] ; @possession1981

my léksie whom i love <3 congratulations on your graduation hehe!! things are…….the way they are recently so i feel like we haven’t kept in contact as much as i wish we did this year but i’m glad that you’re still… here, yknow!! i love you very, very, very much and you deserve nothing but all the love in the world!!! 2023 was tough, i know, and i hope that 2024 treats you so so much better… if it doesn’t ill kill the universe actually. i’ll also be crossing my fingers for a potential miléks meetup (<- literally have not discussed this w u seriously but idc i’ll be scheming)(just between lovers marathon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! when!!!!!!!!!!!) thank you for being such an amazing friend and role model, i really, really care about you and love you a lot. 

[loml / my brina] ; @aquablues

MY BRINA LOVE OF MY LIFE MY SUNSHINE MY RAINBOW MY LITTLE TULIP MY BRILOVED MY LITTLE STAR WHO IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME …. MY WORLD …. MY BABRI (baby bri) WHOM I LOVE SOSOOSOSOSOSOSOSOOSOSOSOSOSO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this year was a big one for you and i’m so, so, so, so, so, so proud of you always always always!!! i’m SO glad to see that your college life has been treating you well so far i’m genuinely SO happy that you’re having a good time like u dont get it i’m literally tearing up as im writing this?? anyways thank you so much for keeping me (and the rest of us) updated on your uni adventures i really appreciate it!! and as u know i would have been devastated if u just contact w me like i wld be so sad if u ever do that at least give me like a two weeks notice ok thank u… please remember that i love you i adore you i cherish you my brina!!! so much!! i hope you can continue to enjoy your uni experience in 2024 as well (without the annoying u-know-who this time). ps. i still have a jo to send u someday i just think i prob shldnt send it to ur home address considering ur parents??

[megmeg] ; @lunetual

my megmeg my beloved <33 thank you for helping me this year despite being so busie <3 even if we dont really get to talk i’m really really happy to have you in my life!! and thank you for making efforts to keep in touch despite being so busie i love u… i hope we can continue to be friends in the upcoming year hehe <3 ps. give kissies to apollo from me!!

[mr. meoweks] ; @awek-s

dear mr pawminister sir. i hope you’re doing well in this very busy season,, kjsfnksjdnfkksn hello my meoweks whom i meow (love) so so so meowch!! i thiiiiiink we might have gotten a bit closer this year and i’m very happy about that!! ik this year was definitely not easy for you so i hope that 2024 can be a much better year BUT! congratulations (yet again) on getting into ur phd program im sosoosososososososo proud of you genuinely SO proud!!!! i knew you could do it but STILL!! cant wait to be promoting ur anthology entry in the streets <3 also omgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg……………… meowmeow (aweks millie) meetup i CANT WAIT head in hands im so excited u domt get it meoweks.. also i think its SO cute that u have little bunbuns now wtf tell them that i love them wtf wtf wtf they’re so cute i love them. ps. do tell me if u want me to send u the cappuccino or if u want to wait until u come over!!

[my danderion / my eri] ; @xiaojuun

my beloved eri… what can i say that i havent said yet at the beginning of the month lmao this is the hard part abt u being a december baby it’s like i don’t wanna keep repeating myself but it’s literally only been like 3 weeks. but it’s been. Very busie weeks also. it’s slightly sad to have u so busy (from a selfish standpoint bc … my ewi … i miss my ewi …) but i’m also genuinely very happy for you!! you get to do what you wanted to do where u wanted to!! AND ur not living alone!! u won big time i think!!! im also very very grateful that you’re making efforts to still keep me updated even when you’re so busy, i appreciate it a lot, really :< i love you (you already know this). and. as i said before. i am Very glad to have not a friend Like you, but You As my friend. also i hope u know that i’m taking my wittle pengeri (tuxedo sam) so so many places! in very important 2023 events i am also SO happy (and still so giddy. i am insane. and i love u.) that i got to meet you irl <33 one of my best memories of the year! thank u for being such a cute n nice guide i lob u… i hope 2024 treats you well and that we can !! continue!! to be good friends!! i love you lots <3 i really do. ps. give flo and vika a kithie from me if u can!! and sarabi too, the next time u see her <3 pps. i allowed myself to show my grandma meri christmas pics and she said ure pretty. shes right. btw if u care.

[my ina] ; @flops

MY INA WHOM I LOVE!!! i feel like every year my wishes of getting closer to u get realised !! and u have no idea how happy it makes me!! im also so so happy that u joined us over on twt im so so so glad im so glad u hab no idea im SO happy i can annoy u so much more now thank u so much… (also sorry). thank you for putting up with me and all the annoying things i send u .. its a love language (and for sending me my leo)!! i love you to bits… and yet again, i hope we can get even closer in the upcoming year <3 ps. milina meetup when

[my violet / my vyvy] ; @souladies

MY VYNAIGRETTE!!!!!!!! MY VYONCÉ!!!!!!!!!!! my violet my vyvy my viavy my vyvyney whom i love so so much my little mouse my fluffy cat my beloved fennec fox <3 i feel like we’ve gotten SO insanely closer these past few months?!?! first of all thank you so much for being my beloved dramamate <3 thank you for being okay with me live messaging u my reactions to wifty and piggy king, thank you for agreeing to (re)watch hidden love with me, thank you SO much for experiencing fiys with me, thank you (and paula) so much for welcoming me for that one insane extraordinary you episode, and thank you (and ro!) for watching the killy votey & kidnapping day with me as well!! thank you so much for always making time for me :< i really appreciate it. and more recently, thank you for being my line friend hehe <3 i really love talking to u a LOT !! idk if u can tell . thank you sm for dealing with me skjdnfksdnk i genuinely thought u were going to stop talking to me after that one piggy episode . anyways i hope that 2024 treats you well and that we can continue talking and being friends <3 also i’m very excited for the next vyllie drama, whatever it may be!! ps. tell paquito that i lob him

[pauby] ; @ghiblin

MY PAUBY!!!!!!!!! my capy <3 i lob u so much thank u for always being so cute and so nice to me!!! and thank you for allowing me into the pauney extraordinary you watch that time and for welcoming me so nicely i kithie u … i hope that 2024 treats you vewy nicely (or else!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and that we can continue to be friends <3 ps. tell ur kitty that i said hello pps. pauby to be honest i wld let u :O eat me . honestly

[princess roro] ; @sunghanbin

MY SUNSHINE MY MODEL MY PRINCESS MY BEROVED RORO!!!!!!!!!!! <33 big year for milro i wld say but also i feel like every year is… <3 thank u (and vyvy) for watching killy votey and the kidnapping day with me <3 thank you for being the girl with the prettiest smile ever <3 also just the most beautiful girl ever. i know things have been rough lately and i’m very sorry about that… i hope 2024 can bring you and your family good news! that aside, thank you for being my friend and talking to me and bickering with me and getting me into bonedo and for showing me so much love and for trusting me!! what i’m trying to say is!! i love you!! a lot!! my beroved!! and i hope you are willing to deal with me for another year <3

[puppie !!] ;

MY PUPPIE MY VENVEN MY VEN PARA whom i love. thank you for STILL being friends with me i feel like its been so long…. i don’t really know if you realize this but you’re a extremely important friend to me. genuinely. i think my life would be a lot more miserable without you. thank you for dealing with me despite everything.. amd thamk u for the kitty videos always!! i kissie u <3 i love you <3 i hope that you always remember that and that you Never ever doubt it. may 2024 treat u nicely!!!!!!!!!!! and i hope we can be friends for even longer <3 ps. pls tell my children (phantom max sassa . i feel like im forgetting someone if i am im sorry i am on my knees repenting) that i love them!!

additionally, thank you to my other mutuals that have spent this year with me!! my miha (@jaebeomtual) and lili (@ninqz) who have been so sweet ; my sarah (@wabisaba), my rosie (@kimjiwoong), my beluluved (@fushigojos), my sofsof (@yeofi), luna (@yunwooz), and my dee (@ryudaeng), who have been with me for a While now and stuck with me despite us not interacting much this year ; rachie (@gnanii) and mary (@dongkwan) whose contribution to the eri project i'm very grateful for (and they're amazing just in general as well but) ; as well as vivi (@moonsua) who's a beloved twtual &lt;3

and a special thanks to paquito and lavender ; phantom, sassa and max ; miss blue and iri's woof ; paula's cat ; eri's woofs whose names i forgot i am so sorry... & bestinez and sarabi, bestie j & ellis and florence and vika ; apollo ; lillie ; gabi's many many many animals ; grimm ; sammy and ashy ; brina's friend group. for being around my beloveds and for all the stories (amd cute pictures) involving them !!

as well as jinsung coming back bc this is my post and i can be insane <3 as a treat <3

credits!! [icons] // [ash pfp] // [bie pfp] // [gabi pfp] // [iri pfp] // [aléks pfp] // [brina pfp] // [meg pfp] // [aweks pfp] // [eri pfp] // [ina pfp] // [vy pfp] // [paula pfp] // [ro pfp] // [ven pfp]

[deuvdas]

Wounds of Duty and Hearts of Healing.

(Azad Rathore x OC)

Chapter 2.1

------------

Azad's POV

Dr. Shourya walks behind me to push the wheelchair a little closer to the bars. I felt nervous. I held onto her for balance as she helps me up. I was struggling to stand but.. I tried. She was very careful and gentle. She understands my condition well. Of course, she's the doctor afterall. 

As I looked up.. I realized. Wait.. she's.. taller than me? I look up at her in confusion. She looks at me, oddly with the same expression.

"Azad? Everything alright? What's with the look," She muttered while placing my hands to either side of the bars.

I simply nodded.

"Yes, Im fine. Just.. didn't expect the height difference."

"Height difference?.. Oh! Well, I'm not that tall."

Her laughter and smiles were comforting. It's strange that I'm already warming up to her. I tried showing her a smile too.

"I know.. but still. You're taller," I replied in a low tone.

At first, I tried to take a few steps. I held on tightly, both on the bars and her hand. My head felt light weighted. It felt like there were heavy weights tied to my legs.

"You don't have to force yourself, Azad. We can stop then continue later," I heard her speak as she guided me.

"Im fine, Dr. Shourya."

She seems concerned but gave me a simple nod. After a few more tries, I started to feel tired. It was a difficult task. But, I'm glad I could atleast try.

Dr. Shourya helped me to sit back on the wheelchair. She knelt beside me as she fixed the IV fluid bag and foot rest of the wheelchair.

"Ah.. I forgot to tell you that your father visited the day before you were conscious. He was worried. He did ask me about your progress a lot of times. I'm sure he might visit today," Dr. Shourya told me.

I do miss Baba. It's been a year since I finally found him. I'm happy to finally be close to him again. I hope we will visit me today.

Dr. Shourya brought me back to my room. The halls were emptier than before, outside the huge window was pretty dark as well.

She placed the IV fluid bag to the place it was before. She gently lifted me up, resting my body on the hospital bed.

"Your father told me that he met you last year? How.. is that so?"

Dr. Shourya asked me after letting go.

"Only if you're comfortable enough to tell me, no pressure," She pushes the wheelchair away to the other side of the room.

"It's fine. I'll tell you. But, it's better to take a seat first."

"Long story, eh? Shall I get snacks too?"

Both of us laughed at the light joke. It's almost impossible to stay serious around her. She then took a seat on the edge of my bed. "Whenever you're ready. I'm all ears."

"He said I met him last year because.. I wasn't able to see him before. He was a soldier, but everyone accused him as a traitor. They all assumed he was deceased. My mother was going to be executed but Kaveri Amma found out that she was pregnant with me. The law said the child must turn 5 years old before she can be executed."

I told her. She was listening attentively. Her eyes softened too. I continued my story.

"During my fifth birthday, she was executed. I still remember calling out for her.. and her lifeless body.. being brought on a bed. The jail I now look after.. is the same jail where my mother was in. Kaveri Amma, a warden there, raised me with care. She was a mother figure to me. Still, I thought my father was deceased. I tried clearing his name, I don't want people thinking that he was traitor.. this was all because of Kalee. Now people know Vikram Rathore as a hero.. My Baba is a hero. Someone found out that he was still alive. He lived in a village, where a healer rescued and treated his unconscious body. He lost his memory. When I first met him, all I wanted to do was hug him. I.. never thought I would finally see him standing in front of me. All this time.. I only saw him in pictures.. stories."

"He does not know me then. I still recall how confused he looked when I hugged and kissed him. He did not like that kiss, definitely."

I paused for a moment to lay back a little.

"The day he got his memory back.. he called me his son. Baba finally knew that I'm his son. I've never felt happier.. that moment was everything I could ask for. Of course, we hugged again. This time both of us were in tears. Sometimes we recall and talk about the memories of my mother. We really do miss her.. I just wish she was here with us. And-"

I stopped mid sentence. I looked at her. Her eyes were welled with tears. She was staring off to somewhere else while she was listening.

She notices my stare and immediately wiped her eyes. She chuckled softly.

"Mh? Go on."

I still stared at her. She must be touched by the story. But, she can't hide her tears from me.

Chapter 2.2 is here.

(tags! : @amdone, @my-emo-romance, @pixlerelish, If you want to be tagged in the next, just let me know! :3)

[daintyduck99]

My Jatp Fics: Greatest Hits

It's my birthday! It's also roughly the two and a half year anniversary of me joining this Fandom, which feels like a milestone.

As of now, I've written 75 works for Julie and the Phantoms. 75! That's crazy. Sure, I'd say a lot of my strength lies in exploring small ideas, or in condensing a concept into something short, but... 75!

If you're reading this, I love you! There are so many amazing, talented people in this Fandom and to know you even tangentially is a blessing ❤️ I doubt I would've ever written so much if I wasn't surrounded by so many other passionate creatives.

I do have to give a special shout out to the rest of the Rulie canoe crew. ❤️💜 I love y'all and I'm glad we're friends🥰

In celebration of all of the above, I've compiled a top ten list of all of my fics that I'd most recommend, so if you'd like to show my stories some love (and don't want to wade through all 75), here are the hits:

the sunflower series

Reggie/Julie, QPR Reggie & Luke & Julie, Luke & Flynn

This one is about summer love and how it shines. It's about diving headlong into the surf while your friends cheer you on and holding hands with your ghosts. It follows the echoes of those scorching summer feelings, and the sunflowers that sprout in their wake.

Mutual Pining, Fluff, Slice of Life, 33k, Rated T

what if i fall (but what if you fly)

Julie/Kayla

What if Kayla came to talk to Julie during the dance instead of Nick?

Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence, Julie-centric, 2k, Rated T

one more try (to feel alive)

Reggie/Julie, Julie & Rose

"Get a grip, Reginald. There's no such thing as cute ghost girls."

Fluff and Angst, Role Reversal, Ghost Julie, 1.4k, Rated T

Kept On Climbing 'Til Our Stars Collided

Luke/Bobby, Reggie/Julie, pre-Luke/Bobby/Reggie/Julie

Bobby rubs his eyes.

He must be more screwed up from the dopamine than he thought, because—

There’s an angel in the kitchen.

Fluff and Angst, Pining, Friends with Benefits, Morning After, Jealousy, Awkward Conversations, 2k, Rated M

I'll Be Your Tangerine, You Can Peel Me With Your Teeth

Reggie/Julie

"Don't worry, tesoro. I won't bite. Unless you're into that sort of thing."

He’s pale, far too pale for someone who spends much time at sea, and his blush betrays him.

Pirate AU, Smut, Bonus Romantic Fluff, 4k, Rated E

Our Luxury (A Love Like Stars)

Reggie/Luke/Julie, Luke & Emily, Luke & Ray

“So, I bought a ring,” Luke says, casual in the way that usually Reggie would realize is nowhere near casual and much closer to freaking out, but he’s a little busy choking to death on his lunch.

Fluff and Angst, Established Relationship, Misunderstandings, Proposal, Romantic Gestures, Happy Ending, 13k, Rated T

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Feel Alive

Reggie/Julie, Reggie/Luke/Julie, Julie & Rose, Julie & Ray

Julie has several heart-to-hearts as she tries to figure out how to love a ghost (or two).

Fluff, Queer Themes, Love, Grief, Magic, Series, 7k, Rated T

It Was Only A Pick

Luke/Reggie

God, Reggie thinks as Luke smirks up at him, adorned in the fanning halo of his dark brown hair and the amusement that shines from his eyes, amplified blue from the proximity of the pick, he’s beautiful.

Fluff and Angst, Kissing, Misunderstandings, Music, Confession, Happy Ending, 4k, Rated T

Of Hearts Borrowed And Blue

Reggie/Julie

If anything, Julie’s even more of a grinch here that she would be back home, because she stuffed all of her grief into a battered suitcase, and she can’t just pull it out for every single stranger trying to get her into the Christmas spirit.

Hallmark AU, Fluff and Angst, Strangers to Lovers, 18.3k, Rated E

I Don't Want You Like A Best Friend

QPR Reggie & Julie, Luke/Reggie, Julie/Carrie

Everyone thinks Reggie and Julie are dating. It's a problem, because they're both pining over other people...but they also don't know exactly what they are, or how to reconcile their relationship with the romantic ones they want. They try to help each other, though.

Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, Pining, Jealousy, Queerplatonic Relationship, Friendship (Too Many To Tag), Love, Practice Kissing, Kissing, Friends to Lovers, Sexual Tension, Mild Sexual Content (They Are V Much Horny Teenagers), 13.8k, Rated M

[goth-catte]

Tonight was fun at the Anti-Social Club. I'm glad I get to come hang out with everybody here on Fridays, share a stage with Stella, and bring you guys some goth music for a little while. Mani, the club's photographer, took this amazing shot - thank you so much, I love seeing what you do every week.

•|• Goth Night @ Anti-Social Club •|•

Sisters of Mercy - More Zeromancer - Dr Online (Rico Remix) Powerman 5000 - Black Lipstick Celldweller - Heart On (Aesthetic Perfection Mix) Project Pitchfork - Timekiller VNV Nation - Chrome Apoptygma Berzerk - Until The End of the World (Dark Club Mix) Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams ^^ London After Midnight - Kiss Cryogen Second ft. Sarah Chenoweth - Thirty Eight :Wumpscut: - Wreath of Barbs (Heavy Extended Mix) NIN - Closer Faderhead - Move Harder Night Club - Candy Coated Suicide Emilie Autumn - Dead Is the New Alive (Manipulator Mix) The Last Dance - Once Beautiful Abney Park - The One The Birthday Massacre - Under Your Spell HEALTH & Perturbator - Excess In Strict Confidence - Seven Lives (Club Mix) Starcadian - Interspace ^^ Unity One - Lightseeker ^^ Ayria - Big City Lullaby ( Pax Sono) The Shizit - Just One Fix MDFMK - Rabble Rouser The Mission - Severina Sisters of Mercy - Marian The Chameleons - Don’t Fall Killing Joke - Love Like Blood Front 242 - Headhunter v3 Night Club - Cities in Dust Lacuna Coil - Losing My Religion ^^ Unto Others - Heroin Type O Negative - Love You To Death Faith & The Muse - Running Up That Hill Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again David Bowie - Magic Dance Siouxsie and the Banshees - Peek-A-Boo Q Lazzarus - Goodbye Horses ^^ Ministry - Effigy (I’m Not An) Sisters of Mercy - First And Last and Always

[khasiehondra]

A Shadow of an Eagle Chapter 4: Rumor Mill: Alice

The common room was buzzing that evening to celebrate this month's birthdays. Amit, Sophronia and a few others were the guests of honor in tonight's festivities. While delighted to be there, she was exhausted. The Pensive Guardians had wiped all of her energy for the next month. They were terrifyingly beautiful but she would have been fine if the discussion in the map chamber did not allude to more of them in the future.

“You don’t seem to be having as much fun as the others. Thought you would be excited for your first house party?” Samantha was very sweet to be so concerned for her. 

“I’m alright Samantha, just a little drained. The professors have me doing extra assignments to catch up since I started so much later. 

“Are you too drained to socialize,” She turned Alice a little bit to face someone, “Someone has been trying to talk to you for a while now but I don’t think someone is getting the hint.”

Andrew was very handsome. They had started on rocky footing after the Duncan incident. “Once a coward, always a coward.” He had been so firm in his words, but after their yelling match in the common room one evening it was as if something had changed. He had not only apologized to Duncan but to her as well. “We have sort of a truce going on. I think I could manage some conversation if I really must.” She giggled with Samantha and walked over to Andrew. 

“Is that a Butterbeer or are you also partaking in the stash of fire whiskey that somehow made its way in here?” She had slid up next to him and looked into his brown eyes. 

“Just doing my prefect duties and testing it for the house.” He gave her a sly smile and scooted closer to her, abandoning the conversation he was just in. “Definitely fire whiskey in that lot.” 

“Haven’t had any. At home, father would let me drink wine at dinners, and the muggle doctors claimed it was good for us.” Alice was swirling her cup of butterbeer. “I don’t mind the butterbeer but sometimes it is still weird being out of my routine.”

Instead of words of encouragement, Andrew held out his cup to her. “It burns a little more than wine, but you don’t have to.” 

She grabbed the cup and drank. It warmed her up quickly and she thought her entire body had instantly turned red. “That was,” the aftertaste finally got her, “different.”

“Alice? Are you alright? You drank the rest of the glass.” Andrew was facing her now, hand on her arm just in case. 

“I just feel a little warm. I may step out for a bit.” He was still a prefect, even if he was breaking the rules himself. “I won’t stray far, wouldn’t want to get detention for being out after hours and with my breath covered in firewhiskey.” 

Andrew’s hand slid to her fingertips and the gravitational pull he currently had on her led them from the common room. There were more stairs than she remembered, but Andrew’s guidance brought them to the stairs leading toward the quad. She should have eaten more at dinner because her balance started to falter. Silently, Andrew maneuvered her in front of him and held her steadily with both hands. When they finally made it outside Alice felt alive again. 

“Come on, lets look at the stars!” She pulled Andrew along and plopped him in the grass next to her. “It’s different seeing them like this than through a telescope. That I don’t own yet.”

“No more firewhiskey for you.” He was very close. Their hands were still intertwined and she felt him rub small circles on the back of her hand. “Would you be mad?”

Confusion crossed her face. “To not have to drink fire whiskey again, no I would not. I guess it did make me feel warm. If anything, I’m glad I didn’t drink more than what you had. That could have been dangerous. It’s important to maintain ones wits in all situations.” 

He shook his head, “Not about the fire whiskey, about this.” It didn’t occur to her how little space there was between them. That speed at which that gap closed confirmed that they had been absentmindedly drawing closer to each other the entire time. He took her lips in his, softly and slowly. Her eyes didn’t close but seemed to grow.

Andrew is kissing me! Instead of enjoying the moment, she broke the kiss. “Andrew, if this is because of how much you drank, we must stop.” She was hoping that wasn’t the case.

“Trust me, I would have done this sooner if I had drank more. I've been getting to know you for days and wanted to be by your side." He looked into her wide, crystalline like eyes and closed the gap between them again. This kiss was more confident. It grew and Alice had lost all sense to anything around her. Her first kiss was with someone she had formed an organic connection with, and on top of that he was a gentleman through and through.

It had to be a while before he abruptly whipped his head to the space behind them. 

“Andrew, what is it?” She still had the sleeve of his robe in her hand, the other on his shoulder. 

“I think I heard someone.” Looking back at her, he gently smoothed her hair behind her ear. “Let’s go back to the common room, shall we? People may wonder if we are missing for too long a time.”

In all honesty, it was a wonder she made it to Care of Magical Creatures as early as she did. The only issue it caused was that as the girls swarmed her the minute they reached her. Samantha, Natty, Cressida, and Imelda crowded her table with smiles and big eyes. “Um, good morning. Is this an intervention of some kind?” 

They exchanged looks as if wondering who would fill her in. The silent consensus was that Samantha was her closest friend so she needed to say. “There was word going around after breakfast that someone had seen you and a mystery man snogging after hours on the grounds. Everyone is trying to figure out who it is.”

“I couldn’t believe what I had heard but my curiosity had beaten me,” Natty claimed. “I wanted to confirm as well if you were really seeing someone. Cressida, here, was the one who had informed us when we were leaving the Great Hall this morning.” 

“And Imelda and I both overheard this on the way into the Great Hall.” Imelda nodded at Cressida’s words. 

This was happening fast. The realization that Andrew was correct and they were in fact seen snogging on the grass of the quad. It must have been so dark that he couldn’t be seen, but she also chose not to wear robes concealing her if it was after class hours. 

“It was you! You’re as red as a dirigible plum!” She looked around her and lowered her voice, “Was it Andrew? I saw you two leave together but you never told me what happened.” 

“Andrew Larson?!” The girls all gasped and squealed. Your hands were covering your face and you noticed more of the class arriving. 

“Can we talk about this later. I can assure you, that it was a spur of the moment thing, with whomever it was.” Your cheeks felt as if you had swallowed a barrel of fire whiskey instead of just half a glass. Students began filing into the open hut and you want this conversation to be over. 

“Of course, but I think you’ll need to figure out what you’ll want to tell others when they ask you. I’ve heard others place bets on who the boy is!” Samantha winked and placed herself at the table behind her. “Oh, I heard Sallow was a top pick in the gossip chain. He just had an instance getting caught in the library and Peeves said he was with a girl. Others are deciding to connect the two instances.” 

Oh no. He doesn’t deserve that. At that moment, he walked in and took the table beside her. The little eye contact they had made her realize he didn’t know. No snarky comments, no banter. He would be either living in this moment or denying everything. She smiled and quickly gave her attention to her empty parchment. The hole she felt him burrowing into her head didn’t help. Risking a glance she saw the last two students stroll into the open hut, Poppy Sweeting and Andrew. Thankfully, Poppy made her way to the front as Andrew took the open space next to Arthur. 

Paranoia was killing her inside. She found solace in the distraction and passion that was Poppy with the beasts. Her natural instinct and understanding amazed Alice as she struggled to keep the kneazles from swarming her for food. Before class was over they had taken a quick detour to see Highwing the Hippogriff. When they made it back, Sebastian was waiting with her belongings. 

“Hello Poppy, mind if I steal Shaw from you?” He handed her a fully packed satchel, placing his hands in front of him. 

“She’s all yours Sebastian,” she waved at Alice yelling, “I’ll send you an owl later!”

 “Sebastian, is something the matter?” Please don’t be the rumor, I can’t have this keep happening to him. Especially when he has been so kind to me. “Something troubling you?” 

“Nothing that I can think of, I was thinking it would be beneficial to teach you some spells that the professors do not want to teach at Hogwarts. I believe that it would be better to learn from them if they could save your life one day. Would you meet me near the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom?” 

“Let me guess,” she crossed her arms over her chest, “after hours?” The smirk he gave her was all the answer she needed. “I’ll see you tonight then.” 

He was walking toward Garreth when she turned into the strong chest of Andrew. “Oh my god, I am so sorry.” He didn’t even look phased. 

“It’s my fault, Alice. Not just the lack of making my presence known. I heard about what people are saying. I haven’t made any comments, I didn’t want to say anything without talking to you first. If you want to say it was me, I wouldn’t be mad. It would actually give me a reason to do that again.” Heat slid through her body, her heart was beating like a thousand butterfly wings. “If you don’t know what you want, I’ll wait. I know you’re busy, and I will respect your space.” 

She was going to catch a lacewing fly if she didn’t close her mouth quickly. How could one person be so handsome and gentlemanly? “Andrew, thank you. I am overwhelmed by everything I have going on to think through this. I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything as of now. I would like to see more of you. It should get easier, being in the same house.” 

An impish grin flashed through his eyes. “If it was as easy as you say, that kiss would have happened sooner.” He winked, turned and waved.

Finally being able to collect her bearings, she turned to exit the hut. If he hadn’t been so close she would have thought she imagined it. Sebastian looked as if he was about to set the world on fire. Alice was only able to see a glimpse before he had turned away, but the look of rage on one’s face is unmistakable. 

[carry-on-my-wayward-gays]

Happy birthday Shadow!! Here's your rotten work hurt comfort <3 I'm so thankful to be your friend, and to have gathered the nerves enough to actually talk to you! I adore you <3 /p Enjoy your birthday lunch!!

____________________________

The world was cruel to the canary. All he's meant to do is test. Is warn. Is die. There's nothing he can do about it. He knows that.

The canary knows he isn't meant to leave the coalmine.

Jimmy knows he's not getting out of this alive. He's resigned to it, he thinks, though bitterly, a fact he shares with Tango that night in the ranch.

"I'm.. sorry you got paired with me.." He grumbles miserably, leaning into Tango's arms as he feels him mess with his hair.

"Why?" Tango raised an eyebrow. "I'm not. You're pretty great."

Jimmy laughs, though no ounce of happiness is found within it. "I'm cursed, Tango..."

Tango shakes his head and pulls Jimmy closer. "No you're not.. Just because everyone says-"

"No- you don't understand..." Jimmy sighs and buried his face into his hands. "Have.. have you heard of the canary in the coalmine?"

"I'm... vaguely familiar.."

"The miners used canaries to warn them about dangerous gases... They never make it out alive. They aren't supposed to. They're just meant to die.."

"That sounds awful..." Tango whispered and took Jimmy's hands away from his face. "Someone needs to give that canary a gasmask... Hey- That's it!"

"What's it?" Jimmy blinked in surprise, allowing Tango to hold onto his hands.

"I'll be your oxygen mask! Supporting you and making sure you'd last much longer than anyone ever thought you would! I'll take care of you!" Tango grins, bright and warm like the sun.

Jimmy can't help himself from blushing. He smiles in spite of himself and sighs. "It's rotten work, y'know.. Looking after something that's just meant to die.."

"Not to me it's not.." Tango reassured him, pressing a little kiss to his forehead. "Not if it's you. I promise... we're soulmates, remember? We've got each other's back.."

And for once, Jimmy felt like it. He felt like maybe, just maybe, he wasn't a curse. For once.

ROXIE. ROX N ROLL. BOX OF ROX. IT IS NEARLY 2 AM AND I AM CRYING. I'M SO 🥹🫠😭

Thank you so so much for this! I will treasure it and you forever :) I'm glad you're my friend too. You've become such a big part of my life in such a short time ilysm 💜 /p Thank you so so much for this present, try one of the best ones I'll receive! /g

[mutipede]

Had one of those long crazy-detailed dreams, even though none of the details particularly made sense. First dream I've been able to remember in a while so I'm glad about that even though this particular dream wasn't that great hah. Not quite a nightmare but like it could been.

Some context: my grandpa was in the air force, so one time when I was little, as probably the coolest imaginable birthday present my uncles set up this thing where he got to fly the same kind of plane as he had before at a small airport at this tiny town near where we would go on vacation in the summers. I was around 5 maybe, and I was devastated that I couldn't ride with him. Talking about it afterwards, everyone thought I was crying because I didn't want him to go, but I was like "NO I was crying because I wanted to go WITH!"

So in the dream, my grandpa was alive, and was going to get to do the same thing and fly a plane again. And I was not 5 years old in the dream, I was regular me. My mom and uncle were there, but also some like... random people I didn't recognize but it was like a "these are some sort of distant family" type of thing (even though in reality they were just random people my dreaming brain made up to populate the dream with lol). And my grandpa was at the airport so we were going to meet him there.

First though, one of the random imaginary people was a kid who like... ran into the room as I was getting my phone and some shit together, and started asking me to join some online thing he'd set up about the legend of zelda games. He kept sitting on stuff that I'd set on the couch trying to organize or like disentangle charging cords or shit like that lol, so I told him yeah the N64 Zelda games were some of my favorites I'd check it out if he quit sitting on my STUFF lol, so he did, and then was talking about the Zelda timeline and shit for a little.

And I had a cat, for some reason, that I was holding throughout the entire dream. Around this time, the cat started watching a fly near the ceiling, so I held it up so it could catch it, and the kid was impressed by this cooperative effort.

So then I'd gotten my shit organized and we were going to leave for the airport. My uncle was driving this huge truck, like you could drive over a regular sized car without touching it, it was monster truck TALL for some reason. And we passed through this... like... it was not the actual town, it looked completely different, but I knew that was what it was in that dream logic way. And there were a bunch of weird mobile homes that gradually became packed closer and closer to each other until it was like a maze. You couldn't pass through without going inside at random points, so we had to get out of the TALL truck and walk - there were walls missing (and in one weird instance, a missing wall revealed the backsides of a wall of CRT TVs?) It was really kind of creepy, although in the dream I mostly was just kind of confused and annoyed that it was making it take longer to get to the airport, I wanted to ride in that plane with my grandpa, damn it

So at one of those points where we had to go inside - we'd all sort of gotten separated at this point, so it was me, some lady I didn't recognize, and... I'm not sure but maybe my mom? And I was still holding the cat. And we entered this basement where a weird guy was walking around (the whole mobile home maze had seemed deserted before this) - he was bald, tall and thin, and with sort of weirdly yellowish skin. Like unhealthy / jaundiced looking. And he had this blank smile on his face and was just sort of milling around. And when we took the only other door out of the basement, it led to a fenced yard with no other way out. Dead end.

So we went back into the basement - the lady and (maybe my mom maybe unspecified family member) first, me last. Which allowed me to see the creepy guy start aiming a gun at the random lady. So of course, I materialized a gun and shot him before he could shoot either of them.

Then the dream turned into the police showing up and interrogating me about what happened. I answered all their questions and told them basically everything like I said it here, but the one cop I was talking to kept doing that whole acting dubious, trying to poke holes in what I was saying, because of course he did. Like "You expect us to believe that?" "Uhhh. Yeah? Why wouldn't you?" I knew that all the evidence and the testimony of the people I'd stopped from getting shot was all there, so... I was basically completely calm and mostly just annoyed about getting stuck in a weird mobile home maze and having some random creepy guy attempt to murder us because this was delaying getting to the airport so much and I WANTED to RIDE in that PLANE with my GRANDPA!! >8U

But instead I woke up. >=T