#nine year old age gaps between siblings are no joke

[latenightsundayblues]

Angel's Delight

Wow, lookadat. Finally managed to slip some subtle brazilian propaganda into my art; the colors we wear during New Years celebrations and what they'll bring for our future matter a lot to us. For example:

White: Peace

Blue: Restfulness

Lilac: Metamorphosis

Black: Discovery of self. Brings misfortune, in the eyes of some.

[mtchstick]

hello all, time to meet my latest nuisance, michelle ‘mitch’ novak, 34, investigative journalist, chaos magnet, megagalactic pain in the ass. full bio + hcs & wanted connections below the cut! 

“ alone in your car, the violence you imagine: it hurts so hard, a memory you can’t forget. wherever you are, why’d you ever concede it? as if, if a god would ever care, and if it did, then nothing unpure is ever complicated, and nothing undone is ever done or said by chance, and nothing unsure has ever resonated — i float through the walls. i float through the walls. ” .  

name : michela michelle maria novak. the last is a taken name: not her birth father’s (pasqualino “lee” ferrante) but the name of the man who married her mother after her divorce with lee. as much of a shithead as he was, sometimes mitch regrets the novak name (only keeps it as a token of her ties with her siblings). her pen name, however, is mitch lennox — a very male, very white name that she believed would help her articles get some credit in the world of journalism (and that helped her distance herself from her red ridge past). age : thirty-four (born october 20th, 1986). pronouns : she/her. gender : cis female. location : red ridge, nv.  occupation : investigative journalist.  sexual orientation : pansexual, demiromantic. religion : agnostic (mostly a non believer, though she tends to find comfort in the thought of a higher power in dire times, and keeps her grandmother’s crucifix in her car). affiliation : none, although she’s never shyed from asking favors to valencia or law enforcement alike (and has often owed favors to both, and more). _________

personality :perhaps in order to understand the full range of mitch’s character one would require a century, perhaps a degree in archaeology. the short version of it is, what you get is mostly an act. not a genuine character, but a persona crafted, layer by layer, for survival, for self-preservation. on the outside, mitch novak is close to a hurricane: can’t be predicted, will show up unannounced, spread havoc all around, disappear again when the sun has set. one might call her volatile, fleeting some, never sticking to a plan but shifting constantly, as if the very essence of staying still was a risk far too big for her to run. it might look like evidence of a poor character, material perhaps — it is instead the proof of her determination, which barely knows any obstacle, surely not one of a human kind. she’s resolute, far too proud of her own beliefs, pushing ever forward with barely any thought over consequences or just the general, common sense awareness of danger. reckless, one might call her, but not for lack of a will to live, rather an attitude she’s developed in being extremely resourceful, constantly finding ways to get out of the corners she’s backed in (so far: there’s no telling how long this will last). this ever changing, constantly moving nature reflects itself in her dynamics with others, too: do not count on her to stick around, whether tied to a familial, friendly or romantical relationship — it is far more likely for mitch to disappear and then return as rapidly as the moon changes. the outer side of her is a shifting tide, never too still, never calm enough for anyone to dive. beyond that layer, however, she is passionate — alive with burning ideals, nursing bravery with seldom any comparison, a protector of those who are defenseless, someone who’s devoted an entire life to the ideal of truth. and yet the choices she’s made, the paths she’s walked in order to get to where her ideals prompted her to be, they have all piled up inside of her: while she’ll appear to have little to no moral compass, little to no care as to the consequences of her own actions, deep within mitch is the harshest of her own critics. she keeps herself busy, constantly moving so that she won’t have to stop and think — reckon with her graveyards of mistakes, deal with her own, deep-seeded self loathing. she’ll much more easily crack a joke instead, defend herself with the use of irony and sarcasm, and at the same time put people to the test, give them the sharpest corners of herself so their allegiance will be proved. but all of this, all her shifting and sharpening nature, it has led to a deep, sometimes unbearable loneliness — it is ever present and still sneaks up on her sometimes, the endless void around her scorched earth, the inability to bridge that gap between her and the rest of the world. perhaps there lies her love for stories: within the distance from her and others, trying to understand them in order to shorten it. but it stays there, separating her from the world, and so self preservation must be the only principle leading her forward. at the end of the day, mitch is as unpredictable as stormy weather: even those who believe they know her, most of the time, only really know the persona she’s allowed them to meet. she can be manipulative, a skilled liar, an unparalleled improviser — perhaps one day she will finally stare in the mirror and ask herself who she really is. positive traits : headstrong, clever, resourceful, brave, protective, witty, open minded, passionate. negative traits : impulsive, proud, self-destructive, fleeting, mutable, unreliable, arrogant, reckless, annoying. ___________

BIOGRAPHY —

trigger warnings : disappearance, death, abuse, child abuse, cults, substance abuse.

red ridge, nv, 1988. pamela rizzo is done with her boyfriend’s antics: never able to hold a job for more than a couple weeks, constantly wasting his pay in booze and boobs and whatever shit he feels like shooting in his own body. her youngest, michela, is two years old; her oldest, tommy, is seven years old: old enough to understand what’s going on. for a while he becomes the man of the house, making sure his little sister is okay when mom comes late from work: for a while, this broken up family makes it work. pamela meets andy novak when mitch is four — four months later they’re married out of a casino’s chapel, and she looks at her kids, bright eyed, and said: see kids? you got a daddy again, now. everything’s gonna change for the better.

red ridge, nv, 1995. everything starts changing for the worse, but none of them can see it yet. there’s two new siblings, jericho and liv, the lovely offspring of the novaks. adjusting to this new family is hard, and mitch sticks around her older brother: he’s good, he’s protective, he watches her back. she picks up from him, her fight and her curiosity and her boyish recklessness — five years apart, yet sometimes they look like twins. she loves her younger siblings, yes, but sometimes she looks at andy’s eyes and remembers this is not my father, and this is not my family, and all i really have is tommy and by tommy i will stand. but over time he gets tired of playing babysitter, one day he simply grabs her and says c’mon mitch, get off my back. don’t you have any friends?

red ridge, nv, 1996. mitch grows restless and reckless, too many hours spent in detention and not enough befriending kids her age. she thinks something’s lacking, a specific code that will allow her to bridge the distance with the other kids: she searches for it in comic books, studying the behavior of characters wondering how a hero is made. she searches for it in other kids, and sometimes she stays out entire afternoons spying on her brother and her friends, wondering what it is that makes people friends, what it is that she’s lacking. that’s when she starts seeing them spending their afternoons in mr. carlow’s house; they say he lets them do some handiwork around the house in exchange for some money, money for tapes, money for gas. tommy comes home full of new stuff every day — one day he brings home a cassette for mitch, jagged little pill. three days later, he goes to carlow’s and never leaves.

red ridge, nv, 1998. thomas j. novak is declared missing on november 1st, 1998. search parties begin, national attention brought to the case. there are errors in the investigation, leads mistakenly pursued. mitch talks to pam, talks to andy, talks to anyone: go to mr. carlow’s, she says, i saw them there. but mr. carlow is an old wealthy man, he’s given more money to the church than the vatican itself: and he was so concerned when they asked him about tommy that he passed out. nobody listens, so tommy isn’t found. they listen to pamela, her face plastered on every news segment, begging for her boy to come home: at night mitch holds her younger siblings close, and fears something will be coming for all of them.

red ridge, nv, 1999. the body of thomas novak, 17 at the time of his disappearance, is found in a ditch three miles out of red ridge, exactly nine months after he was declared missing. the police say he must’ve been trying to leave town when he was robbed, or maybe assaulted, or maybe a coyote got him. nobody seems to have a clear answer, nobody really cares to look for one. pamela finds some comfort in speaking to the nation of her child: every night her face is on tv, until the story of the grieving mother is boring too, and pamela disappears in the background, perhaps like her child did. that’s about the time andy taps into his anger, begins lashing out with his kids, with mitch too. he’s loud, he smells, he comes home and takes it out on the three of them. mitch tries to keep her head up, keep the small ones safe. she keeps yelling, nobody listens. nobody ever fucking listens.

phoenix, az, 2004. she finds another voice. she has parts of tommy that have stayed with her. the curiosity, the bull-headed quest for knowledge. she holds them close to herself, puts them all in the art of the written word, and somehow it gives her a purpose. in her mind remains the need to find an answer, connect the dots around her brother’s disappearance, but they never match to any coherent drawing. still she keeps on, and the moment she becomes a licensed journalist she starts travelling the country chasing stories, chasing mysteries and, above all — chasing answers. 

montréal, canada, 2013. red ridge fades in the background, a dull nightmare unwilling to re-emerge to the surface. she finds new stories instead, she drowns in them. good stories, with martyrs and heroes who die for a  cause (those are the ones she stares at in admiration, wondering if a good spirit is transmittable via osmosis). she finds bad stories, the ways men will make themselves wolves and devour their young (those are the ones she gets deep in, like the bloody entrails of a carcass, turns them inside out until she can make every accurate comparison between them and herself and say it isn’t me, i have nothing to do with people like this). she builds herself a kingdom of sorts, kings and queens and pawns to turn to in her quest for truth. (she asks favors too, sometimes she finds herself under the thumb of criminals and shady characters who can help her quest along, but will ask things of her: her shining moral character begins darkening now, she begins to understand the battle between good and evil must be fought along the line in between). while investigating a dark, morbid story of murder and finance, she meets priscilla — clever, arrogant, bright. selfish enough to drag her out of her own head when mitch lets her investigations swallow her whole. the two get married in a small ceremony with mostly just colleagues from priscilla’s work at the university — for a while mitch toys with the idea of belonging to someone, of a happy life, of a family, of a home.

sam’s cedar, mo, 2017. it lasts exactly four years, though it began rotting right in the honeymoon phase. colliding characters turning to sparks, the fights far outweighing the good they’d found in each other’s company. the crippling blow comes when a story breaks out about an odd, peculiar cult spreading its venomous tendrils around the plains of missouri. an old friend, head of a mainstream newspaper, says it’s just the kind of report she’d be great at. she finds an odd fascination in the idea of entering the cult, seeing evil from the inside: priscilla, of course, thinks it’s foolish, it’s guerrilla journalism, it’s just the pop culture rendition of what a reporter’s work is supposed to look like. her protests echo in the background still, while mitch packs her car and leaves. five days later she is entering the premises of the cult’s church under the alias of rebecca jean wasserman, knowing that this will change things. never once, for her stories, has she gone this deep: there is a fear within her, as she dyes her hair blond and crafts a new identity, that there will not be a way out. 

phoenix, az, 2019. the way out is found by fighting teeth and nails. the way out is found through a dark, morbid journey that spits her out a paler self. her permanence in the cult amounts to eleven months, three weeks, four days: a long time to note down every creepy corner she steps in, every gruesome detail she collects. she sees minds reshaped, she sees crimes committed and barely keeps herself from giving in to the craze like the rest of them. being rebecca wears her out, being rebecca sometimes comes too easy: by the time she’s collected enough material that the point isn’t just an article anymore, but a criminal investigation, she feels herself slipping out of her own mind every night. her reports are so detailed they start a widespread investigation. somehow, she makes it out of the cult into one whole, rotten piece. her reportage gets mitch lennox (the pen name she’d chosen at the beginning, wanting to cut ties to whatever ties michelle novak had been living) two awards, good, it looks, has won over evil. but her mind is frayed, the shadows have come too close sometimes she wonders whether they haven’t gotten in somehow, become a part of her too. at night she lies awake and thinks of tommy: she’s found so many stories, so many villains have been given a name, but her brother’s is still just a ghost story.

red ridge, nv, 2020. sometimes she feels like a pawn on the board of a funny, twisted game. she gets a call one night, about a murder (one in a few) in the town she once badly tried to call a home. by then she’s tired, worn out, overly dependant on liquor and painkillers: but she’s lost herself so tragically she hasn’t thought to look for the pieces of herself back where everything started. she comes back to red ridge on a much too hot day of early may; she wears her identity like a costume, putting on a brave face because red ridge, she knows, has a tendency of swallowing people whole. and she’s been swallowed before, she’s been spat out too. what’s left is a half digested remain of a person. what’s left is someone who’s hungry for truth — and barely has anything to lose anymore. 

_____________________

HCS:

when not undercover for any reason, mitch drives a purplish red ‘83 alfa 6 alfa romeo. not the most inconspicuous car, but a piece of her heart nontheless (stolen from her father as a ‘payback for him being a shithead’, or so she says). she had it slightly altered to fit a music cassette player so she could keep listening to the tapes her best friend sent her.

her biological father, lee, is a rather well known drug dealer in red ridge. he’s also, coincidentally, her main drug dealer.

currently, mitch lives in a motel, refuses to go back to her mother’s house, would rather sleep in her car. 

she absolutely adores spicy food and has been known to have no chill when it comes to deadly spicy peppers, in fact she’s entered at least a couple competitions for pepper tasting and, though never winning, always managed to come up pretty high on the podium.

she’s almost constantly listening to music (mostly blues or grunge), although her heart belongs to alanis morissette, and evidence of that is her vast collection of concert t-shirts and the many cassettes in her car. 

she used to be on the school soccer team but got kicked out after an unfortunate accident with one cheryl d. (the accident being mitch purposefully kicked her in the shins after she called her a psycho bitch).

_____________________

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

below i’ve listed some connections i’d love to get for mitch — if you’re interested in picking any of these up, please don’t be afraid to message me!! 

priscilla — mitch’s ex wife was an academic she met while working on an article in montrèal in 2013. they got married a few months after they began dating each other, but it was short lived. their characters don��t match, they just fought constantly, and eventually mitch left to go undercover in a cult / pursue her career. overall their marriage lasted four years, and it’s safe to say they hate each other now, probably barely tolerate one another at best, and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be together again, but i’d love to explore their colliding, nerve-wrecking dynamic. suggested fcs: ruth negga, lupita nyong'o, leslie ann brandt.

jimmy — her best friend, the one person in red ridge who always knows when she’s coming around again. he used to be one of tommy’s closest friends, which brought him and mitch together once tommy was gone. they dated very briefly, eventually found they worked a lot better as friends. they went to college together for a bit there, he, however, eventually quit college around the time mitch graduated. he owns a record store and is the one who provides her with all the tapes she plays in her car. he’s mitch’s person and the one guy in the world she confides everything to (same goes for him, obviously). they’re kind of in a rough patch right now, considering she never told him about her undercover stint and he ended up not hearing from her for about a year. reconnecting with him is also one of the reasons she decided to come back to red ridge. suggested fcs: joshua jackson, jake johnson, john krasinski.

fwbs — clearly mitch isn’t made for stable relationships but she does have her fair share of one night stands and occasional flings. it would be great if it was something that has happened before, maybe while she was still in college and sometimes came home to red ridge.

fwbs from inside valencia — people she could sleep with that might provide information on valencia’s dealings and just generally be fruitful for her career (of course, they could ask favors of her too; it could be as casual or as tense as we want it to be).

affair (tw: cheating) — i’d love love love for her to have a painful sort of affair with someone who’s already in a relationship with someone. something sad, painful, that they both wish they could do without but can’t. gimme angst.

friends — either childhood friends from before she left red ridge or people she’s just meeting again, she needs someone she can have simple fun with, maybe even someone who can tell her to chill the fuck down sometimes.

enemies — there’s a lot of people who just can’t stand mitch at all, so gimme those. people who find her annoying, people from valencia who find her dangerous, old schoolmates who just never got her thing. give me also people who have stuff they can hold over her head, people who can threaten her and that she generally loathes. 

friends in low places — mitch makes frequent use of recreational drugs and painkillers, plus her job often needs her to find various sorts of illicit goods (be them heavier drugs, weapons, surveillance equipment, etc). she’d need someone who can provide her with these things, maybe even someone she can be friendly with or something.

[heartofgolds]

𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲  𝐜𝐚𝐧  𝐛𝐞  𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝  𝐚𝐬  𝐚𝐧  𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦  𝐨𝐟  𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞  .

specifically  the  remembrance  of  miss  melanie  rivera  .

𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲  𝐤𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧  𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐧  ,  not  the  first  of  her  name  and  certainly  not  the  last  .

her  whole  family  kind  of  falls  into  the  flower  name  theme  .  she  has  three  older  sisters  named  calla  ,  acacia . ,  and  lily  .  then  obviously  rosemary  .  her  middle  name  comes  from  her  maternal  grandmother  .

rosemary  has  a  significant  age  gap  between  her  siblings  .  calla  was  sixteen  when  rosemary  was  born  .  acacia  was  twelve  and  lily  was  nine  .  acacia  and  lily  would  always  play  together  but  calla  was  the  best  big  sister  and  always  played  with  rosemary  .

her  parents  ,  helene  and  adam  (yes  named  after  helen  and  adam  from  trc)  ,  tended  to  focus  their  attention  on  the  middle  girls  .  helene  as  a  solo  unit  gave  a  lot  of  attention  to  rosie  but  adam  was  kind  of  a  deadbeat  dad  even  though  they  sat  at  the  same  dinner  table  every  night  .

it's  not  like  adam  was  a  terrible  dad  though  .  it's  just  that  he  wasn’t  rosemary's  dad  .

and  being  honest  helene  isn't  rosemary's  mother  .  helene  kristen  keegan  only  ever  had  three  daughters  .  but  she  has  one  granddaughter  .

rosemary  was  around  twelve  years  old  when  the  yelling  throughout  her  house  kept  her  up  .  helene  and  adam  argued  all  the  time  (many  times  rosemary  would  wish  her  "parents"  would  just  get  divorced  already)  but  the  fighting  wasn't  just  between  the  two  of  them  that  night  .  calla  was  involved  in  the  argument  too  .  and  there  was  one  thing  she  heard  crystal  clear  that  kept  her  up  all  night  .

the  singular  sentence  haunts  rosemary  to  this  day  .  "i  want  my  daughter  to  know  that  i'm  her  mother  !  i'm  tired  of  being  her  damn  sister  !  that's  my  baby  and  she  deserves  to  know  it  !"  calla's  voice  had  never  been  so  clear  .

the  only  person  rosemary  has  ever  told  about  what  she  learnt  that  was  melanie .  rosemary  hasn't  even  officialy  told  her  family  that  she  knows  .  she'll  occasionally  hint  to  it  at  family  dinners  but  she  doesn't  want  to  be  the  one  to  bring  it  up.  after  all  ,  she  was  eavesdropping  and  should've  been  asleep  .

dance  was  one  of  the  few  things  calla  and  rosemary  were  able  to  share  growing  up  .  so  rosemary  was  a  big  ,  big  ,  big  dancer  all  her  life  .

she  was  clara  in  the  nutcracker  fairly  young  and  not  too  long  after  that  she  decided  she  was  over  recitals  .  she  joined  the  scary  world  of  competitive  dance  and  that  was  her  favorite  thing  for  so  long  .

when  she  was  thirteen  she  competed  in  the  dance  awards'  best  dancer  competition  .  at  that  time  ,  her  life  goal  was  to  win  the  dancer  of  the  year  award  .  it  would  prove  that  all  her  hard  work  was  worth  it  .  and  thankfully  for  everyone  involved  ,  they  announced  rosemary  as  the  teen  dancer  of  the  year  .

melanie would typically vacation with rosemary's family and since the keegan's had to go to orlando for the dance awards  , melanie was there when rosemary won ! that probably made rosemary happier than actually winning . there's a photo of rosemary still in her full costume with melanie hugging her after she came off the stage and rosemary keeps in on her nightstand .

rosemary  retired  from  dance  after  she  won  dancer  of  the  year  .  she  wanted  to  have  a  normal  high  school  life  and  it  was  so  worth  it  to  her  .  plus  she  wanted  other  people  to  have  their  moment  in  the  spotlight  .  rosemary  got  her  dream  ,  it  was  time  for  someone  else  to  get  theirs  too  .

rosemary  is  an  anthropology  major  and  she  knew  going  into  it  that  her  career  options  would  be  limited  to  say  the  least  .  but  she  would  die  to  work  at  a  non  profit  organization  when  she  finishes  school  .  she  thinks  charging  people  for  the  things  they  need  to  survive  is  corrupt.  she  also  hates  amazon  as  a  company  but  she  doesn't  like  the  word  hate  so  she  won't  admit  but  just  know  rosemary  wants  amazon  to  suffer  .

every  year  that  rosemary  dressed  up  for  halloween  ,  she  was  an  angel  without  fail  .  it  kind  of  started  a  joke  that  she  was  an  angel  in  disguise  trying  to  help  the  world  .  obviously  she's  not  but  she  always  took  that  as  a  major  compliment  .

she  is  a  big  coward  .  she  is  scared  of  so  many  things  that  truly  it  would  be  easier  to  make  a  list  of  things  she  isn't  scared  of  .  melanie  has  really  only  amplified  her  fears  .  the  list  used  to  consist  of  clowns  and  spiders  ,  simple  things  like  that  only  .  now  kidnapping  and  death  have  a  place  on  a  her  list  of  never  ending  fears  .

melanie  who  was  the  only  person  that  could  get  rosemary  to  wear  anything  other  than  vanilla  perfume  .  it's  always  been  her  staple  .  she  wears  it  every  day  now  that  melanie  is  gone  .  she  likes  smelling  like  a  bakery  .  it  makes  her  happy  .

rosemary  gets  called  naive  a  lot  .  she  doesn't  think  she's  naive  .  she's  smart  as  all  hell  .  she  just  always  wants  to  believe  in  goodness  .  she  always  argues  that  people  are  inherently  good  .

she  has  the  too  much  gene  .  except  unlike  jenna  marbles  she  knows  when  to  stop  on  a  project  .  she  just  doesn't  know  when  to  stop  giving  people  love  .  people  can  burn  rosemary  repeatedly  and  she  can  rationalize  a  reason  to  still  give  them  love  .  her  kindness  is  truly  her  fatal  flaw  .

the  part  in  story  of  my  life  where  they  say  "  i  spend  her  love  until  she's  broke  inside  "  yeah  that  was  written  about  rosemary  .  she  gives  and  gives  and  never  takes  .

her  most  prized  possession  is  a  locket  that  calla  gave  to  her  .  inside  is  a  picture  of  rosemary  and  melanie  when  they  were  around  fourteen  .  it  was  taken  at  a  sleepover  where  the  whole  night  they  just  spilled  their  souls  to  each  other . it  was  the  night  rosemary  told  melanie  that  calla  was  her  mom  ,  not  helene  .

she  cannot  and  never  will  get  over  anyone  she  breaks  up  .  she's  one  of  those  people  who  says  "  i'll  always  love  you  "  and  genuinely  means  it  .

i  still  need  to  work  on  her  connections  page  but  HERE  it  is  for  the  time  being,  i  think  there's  maybe  three  on  there  right  now  ?  i  genuinely  cannot  remember.

[the-arundel-renegades]

The Underwhelming Finale of The Penderwicks Series

(I just realized that I was supposed to post this before the “Optimistic Look” at the last book, but for some reason I thought I already had. Oops. Here is my original review of the final book from several months ago) :

It is with great regret that I write this. The sinking feeling as I turned the last page of The Penderwicks at Last felt like betrayal enough. How could I feel anything other than bittersweet joy at the finale of one of my all-time favorite series, a series that I, quite literally, grew up with? I was nine years old when I read the first Penderwicks novel, and as the years went by, the anticipation of each subsequent book was almost unbearable -- for my ten-year-old self, my twelve- year-old self, my sixteen-year-old self, and now, my nineteen-year-old self. Except this time, I didn’t put the book on the shelf awash with emotion, eagerly anticipating the time I could read it again (like Jane, I have a self-imposed limit when it comes to re-reading beloved books). This time, I put it on the shelf and immediately read the first four books yet again in an attempt to convince myself that Spring had been the poignant finale. 

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. After all, the title of this blog post went from “disappointing” to “underwhelming” after a second inspection. Perhaps I’m too old to judge the quality of these books anymore -- Jeanne Birdsall, after all, was adamant that the series remain firmly in the middle-grade category. But no. If age had been the determining factor, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Spring as deeply as I had. I was almost sixteen reading a book from the perspective of an eleven-year-old, but Spring managed to become my second favorite volume in the series, only narrowly beat out by Gardam Street. It was simultaneously heavy and hopeful, heart-warming and heart-wrenching. It was, in other words, everything At Last was not. 

Let’s start with plot, or the lack thereof. The Penderwicks has always been a character driven, slice-of-life kind of series, so I was by no means expecting (or desiring) a particularly dramatic conclusion to the series. But every book prior to At Last still adhered to a certain structure -- an overarching, emotionally fraught arc (Mr. Penderwick and Iantha getting married in the second book, Jeffrey finding his father in the third, Batty overhearing Skye in the fourth) within which multiple, smaller escapades and adventures occurred (the Aztec mishap being a fan favorite). At Last was wanting when it came to pacing. The entire book seemed to be building up to the wedding(s), the ostensible purpose of the return to Arundel, only for it to happen almost entirely off-page. And Lydia... 

In theory, I was completely on board with Lydia narrating the fifth book, especially after seeing how well Birdsall handled the time-jump in the fourth. Writing from Lydia’s perspective accomplished both of Birdsall’s goals -- to keep the series grounded in the middle-grade head space while seeing the original four sisters into adulthood. But Lydia. Oh, Lydia. I don’t want to sound cruel, because Lydia truly was an angelic, entertaining narrator. But she wasn’t strong enough to carry the finale. For one, she often struck the reader as younger than her eleven years, as many fans pointed out. Of course, most fans are beyond the target age range for the series, which again, makes much of their (our) criticism biased. But compared to her sisters at the same age, Lydia comes across as somewhat less mature. This could be attributed to birth order, or perhaps her relatively happier childhood. For another, her connection to her older sisters is so tenuous. Lydia’s relationship with Batty was meant to mirror Batty’s relationship with Rosalind, and the latter was already distant in that Rosalind was more of a surrogate mother to Batty than a peer or even older sister. The gap between Lydia and her siblings, the older three especially, is just so big. More of a chasm, really. It meant Lydia was shut out of too many interesting conversations and spent too much time playing with sheep. Which leads me to 

Family. That has always been the driving force and beating heart of the Penderwicks. Birdsall’s ability to capture the dynamics of a large family -- the overlapping conversations, the inside jokes, the shifting alliances -- is what made the Penderwicks so compelling. At Last almost feels like a waste of Birdsall’s writing talent in that most of the family was tangential. 

[aki-chan2014]

The SHSL Survivors’ Society-second generation headcanons

As promised, here it is! Shizuka is included in this list too, but she is of course not my creation. All the other kids mentioned are though, but not all of them have information about them beyond name and date of birth, because there’s a lot of kids here and coming up with that much info is...tricky.

Anyway, enjoy!:

Survivors’

Chieko Akamine and Koutarou Ueda

Shizuka Akamine (surname later changes to Kita), DOB 3rd December 2010. Appears prominently over the course of the story as a six-year-old and has a POV in the final epilogue as a 16-year-old. Shizuka is the first of the second generation, and also has the distinction of being the only one who has a parent who died in the game as well, and because of that tends to feel a greater responsibility for remembering the events that happened and preserving those memories for future generations. She is shy as a small child, but mostly grows out of that over the course of her life-though she remains a quiet sort of person. She is kind, sweet and thoughtful, and adores animals to the point of becoming a vet in her adulthood (as well as helping out at the Towa City Memorial Garden).  She takes to calling her little sister ‘Mushi’ (bug) as an affectionate sort of nickname in the same sort of way Koutarou used to call Chieko ‘Moyashi’, and when she eventually has a child of her own, she names him Koutarou.

Chieko Akamine and Masashi Kita

Haruka Kita, DOB March 13th 2023. Definitely the more extrovert sibling of the two, Haruka is sunny-natured and a little bit of a tomboy, preferring to keep her hair shorter and avoid dresses where possible (much to the despair of her aunt Misa). Though there’s a slightly more parental aspect to their relationship owing to the age gap, Haruka is close to her big sister (even if she gets annoyed at the nickname).  She’s also particularly close to her cousin Hayate (see below) as they’re the same age separated by a few months. She becomes interested in gardening at a young age, and though for her it’s little more than a hobby/pastime, Haruka’s gardening helps Chieko to feel like she’s got that aspect of her life back in some respect and so though she doesn’t directly help out, the mother and daughter bond a lot over gardening.  

Tyson De Guerre and Wakana Abe

Felix Shouta De Guerre, DOB May 26th 2025. As a child, Felix’s speech is delayed and he struggles in school, resulting in him becoming generally unconfident and shy. He looks up to Tyson a lot, and visiting and helping to maintain the Towa City Memorial Garden does boost his confidence, and as an adult he goes to live in Japan, becoming the main gardener/groundskeeper for the garden.

Oliver “Olly” Kanato De Guerre, DOB August 1st 2028. A dreamy, absent-minded sort of person, Olly is always getting into scrapes due to not paying attention to his surroundings or just losing track of time. But he’s so good natured and amiable that it’s really difficult for anyone to ever get angry with him.

Verity “Vivi” Suzune De Guerre, DOB January 14th, 2031. The adored youngest child, Vivi is basically a ray of sunshine in the way her mother was pre-game, though she tends to be more honest with her feelings. She’s pretty proud of her mixed-race ancestry, and always introduces herself by her full name.  Though she is musically and artistically adept, she doesn’t ever pursue either of these things beyond the hobby level.

Akira Kazama

Nanako Kazama (former surname Sawatori), DOB October 31st 2008, fostered January 2020, adopted end of that year. She is streetwise and hot-tempered, and doesn’t trust many people outside of her adoptive family, and the Survivors and their families.  

Yuichi Kazama (former surname Ishi), DOB November 12th 2010, fostered April 2021, adopted March 2022. When he got fostered by Akira he ended up in the same elementary school as Tsubaki Higuchi, and as a result is fairly close friends with both her and Shizuka. He is a bit grouchy and puts on a tough-guy act a lot, but he looks up to Akira in a big way and follows in his footsteps to become a very popular Student Council President in his high school.

Kai Kazama (former surname Takamura), DOB April 5th, 2013, fostered June 2021, adopted same time as Yuichi. A sporty and determined person, Kai eventually becomes a skilled and successful baseball player with a huge fanbase.

  Siblings/Friends etc.

Kazuki Kita (Masashi’s older brother) and Orihime Nanto (Hokuto’s little sister)

(Note: yes, this means that Chieko’s, Masashi’s and Hokuto’s families are all related by marriage)

Daigo Kita, DOB October 9th 2020. Level-headed, sensible and a bit of an old soul, Daigo takes an interest in Café Tanabata from a young age and helps out there a lot even before he decides that he’ll take it over as an adult with the help of his little brother. Given to talking in riddles, especially when he’s annoyed or tired.

Hayate Kita, DOB October 9th 2023. A combination of being impulsive and forever salty about the fact his birthday falls on the same day as his older brother’s, Hayate is more often arguing with Daigo. Luckily, despite this they get on inexplicably well, which is a good thing considering they eventually take over Café Tanabata from their mother and aunt. He’s an extroverted joker type of person.

 Hikari Kita (Masashi’s younger sister)

Kyohei Matsushita, DOB October 12th 2019. Fairly calm, amiable boy who is rather introverted and can end up overwhelmed by his extended family, all of whom he loves dearly. Ends up in the same elementary and middle schools as Athena and Lexie Cain (see below), and the same high school as Lexie, and thus is friends with them.

 Benjamin ‘Ben’ Cain (Erica’s sister)

Athena Cain, DOB October 17th 2017. Cheerful and outgoing like her late aunt, but less intense and generally more thoughtful. Though she takes an interest in mythology due to her name, she isn’t actually all that interested in history (sure, her family’s past interests her, but she hasn’t got the history obsession her late aunt did). She becomes a storywriter and artist instead.

Alexandria ‘Lexie’ Cain, DOB February 21st 2019. A charismatic, attractive girl, Lexie is enigmatic and slightly manipulative but in spite of this (or possibly because of this) she is very popular. She can be a bit prissy sometimes as well, but would put her life on the line for anyone she actually cares about (which is a very few people). She has a crush on Kyohei in high school, but is far too stubborn to admit it because he’s not her usual ‘type’ and she knows too well that he only sees her as a friend.

 Yasu Kazama (Akira’s older sister)

Akiko ‘Kiko’ Shimada, DOB April 25th 2020. The eldest twin by nine minutes, Kiko is academic and driven, but despite this is compelled to become a voice actor like her late aunt. Though never as popular as Hibiki was, she does do quite well for herself, and after a while decides to become a coach for voice-actors.

Akemi ‘Emi’ Shimada, DOB April 25th 2020. Though identical to Kiko, Emi is quieter and struggles academically, and often feels like she is just a pale imitation of her sister and that she doesn’t fit in with her family, despite the fact they do clearly love and value her just as much.  She takes an interest in the Towa City Memorial Garden, and as an adult is one of the people in charge of the funds that help to maintain and organise it, as well as the employment of people who do the actual maintaining and organising.

 Sadao Taneda and Ayame Edano (Noriko’s childhood friend and little sister, respectively)

Airi Taneda, DOB September 30th 2024. Born with albinism, Airi’s birth is what helps her mother and her aunt have a closer relationship, as Ayame often seeks advice from Noriko about how to help her. Unlike Noriko, Airi is never embarrassed by her white hair and indeed likes to learn elaborate hairstyles to show it off, something which eventually leads to her becoming a hairdresser.

Toshio Taneda, DOB June 14th 2026. Quiet, slightly socially awkward, and very intelligent, Toshio basically spends his whole life in education-from being a complete swot in school to pursuing an academic career relating to maths and physics.

Yuuji Taneda, DOB July 7th 2030. Between Airi’s outspokenness and Toshio’s nerdiness, Yuuji finds himself embarrassed by his elder siblings constantly, and tries to distance himself from them in public, but he does love them really, and if anyone else teases them he will be on them like a shot. Indeed, he gets into a lot of fights in school because of defending people from bullies.

 Hitoshi Edano (Noriko’s younger brother)

Isamu Edano, DOB December 9th 2026

Yura Edano, DOB May 24th 2029

 Chikako Ueno (Daisuke’s older sister)

Daisuke ‘Isuke’ Hiraoka (surname later changes to Ikeda with Chikako’s second marriage), DOB February 26th, 2024. Eccentric and slightly flamboyant, this Daisuke actually can play musical instruments, and eventually becomes a professional clarinet player. Isuke is also the classic slightly over-protective brother who scares his siblings’ boyfriends/girlfriends. Also, nobody knows where his nickname came from or why-nobody admits to giving it to him.

Souta Hiraoka (surname later changes to Ikeda with Chikako’s second marriage), DOB August 21st 2026

Rie Ikeda, DOB July 18th 2032

Yumi Ikeda, DOB January 31st 2035

 Shouta Kobayashi (Oshiro’s friend)

Hiroto Kobayashi, DOB May 1st, 2031

 Mio Fujioka (Oshiro’s friend)

Masahiro Fujioka, DOB April 18th, 2032. A devilish, charming prankster, Masahiro is the type of person who just sails through life. He looks for every opportunity to pull off a prank or some sort of joke, and the twin-switch one used to be one of his favourites as a kid-or rather, it was until he decided to pull it on their mother and she freaked out when she realised. Though he’s well aware of the Killing Game and the Despair cult and all that, and that she knew someone who had died there, he’s never probed too deeply into why she had this reaction, as he feels vaguely uncomfortable thinking about all this.

Takeo Fujioka, DOB April 18th, 2032. A little more calm and straight-laced, Takeo is nonetheless a very fun-loving guy who generally enjoys taking part in Masahiro’s pranks, but naturally refuses the twin-switch ones after the reaction their mother had. He takes more of an interest in the past than Masahiro, so he knows more about what lay behind their mother’s reaction, and as it happens, he does pursue becoming a historian as a career because of this.

 Atsushi and Kanade Arata (Kimihiro’s parents)

Hisae Arata, DOB April 6th, 2018. Though very much unexpected and unplanned, she ends up being the thing that puts back together her parents’ marriage, which had been slowly disintegrating under the grief for the older brother she never knew. With a name written with the characters for ‘long time’ and ‘blessing’, her parents have heaped a lot of love on her and are very protective of her, meaning she grows up living a sheltered life. As a result, she is a very sweet, very shy and soft type of person who ends up heavily dependent on others to look after her.

 Tetsuya Yamaguchi (Kimihiro’s friend)

Taro Yamaguchi, DOB February 10th, 2025. He is slightly spoiled because he was the only child his parents were able to have, so sometimes he comes across a little entitled and haughty and coddled. But really, deep down, he’s a good guy, and does well in life. Not stunning or outstanding, but well. He also inherits his father’s whimsical approach to acquiring hobbies, and thus he tends to be interesting company in parties with all sorts of tricks and anecdotes to pull out.

 Ichiro Usami (Shiro’s brother)

Shiro Usami, DOB March 5th, 2022

Akane Usami, DOB April 26th, 2024

Midori Usami, DOB May 30th, 2027

Gin Usami, DOB June 17th 2030

 Yujiko Usami (Shiro’s sister)

Nanae Aikawa, DOB June 18th 2021

Namika Aikawa, DOB September 3rd 2023

Natsumi Aikawa, DOB January 14th 2030

 Zenzo Usami (Shiro’s brother)

Aiki Usami, DOB February 2nd 2023

 Goromi Usami (Shiro’s sister)

Kanon Tajima, DOB August 25th 2025

Kanade Tajima, DOB November 3rd 2030

Hotaru Mori (Hideki’s accquaintance)

Shiki Mori, DOB March 31st 2032. Reclusive as her mother, but probably a bit more practical and assertive, generally speaking.

[misc-oneshots]

It’s a date

Words: 3,156

Remus Lupin x Weasley!Reader

Reader is the second oldest Weasley child, between Bill and Charlie, and takes a break from her usual Auror role to help with security at Hogwarts the year that Sirius Black escapes Azkaban. But with her sister still reeling from being possessed by Tom Riddle the previous year, her adopted brother being targeted by a serial killer and falling for the Werewolf professor, this year is going to be anything but quiet.

Part one Part two Part three

Being back at Hogwarts was like visiting an old friend.

Back when you were a student running around causing trouble with your brothers you never expected that you’d be stood at the top of the Great Hall beside the teacher’s table as an incredibly successful Auror. If only the circumstances were better, it would make your return perfect but alas, you were back at one of your favourite places as a glorified bodyguard. Professor Dumbledore stood at his podium at the front of the school and addressed his students, “Now I know that as you come back to us at Hogwarts that you may have heard distressing things. What you have read is true, Sirius Black has escaped Azkaban prison. However, the Ministry wants to ensure the safety of all of our students so they have indebted to us Dementors to help guard the school. They have also, very kindly, assigned us several very competent, very successful Aurors to ensure your safety.” He moved his arm back to the table at the top of the hall where you sat with two other Aurors who tried their best to look incredibly cool.

Dumbledore continued, “Now, I must stress that the appointment of these Aurors does not mean that any of you are in danger but rather that we want to make certain that all staff and students feel safe and give them opportunity to report anything suspicious. I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce Professor Lupin, our new head of Defence against the Dark Arts. Now please, enjoy your meals.”

As he finished the tables filled with mountains of amazing looking food. The other two Aurors who sat with you on the smaller table at the front chatted amongst themselves and filled their plates up high, it was nice for them having a moment to relax after the weeks of chasing the criminals who escaped from Azkaban.  Still, it bothered you that, as one of the strongest Aurors at the Ministry’s disposal, you’d been taken away from tracking down the criminals and been sent to guard Hogwarts. The Minister may have been putting a brave face on but it was obvious that Dumbledore was expecting something to happen and that the parent’s needed reassurance.

You picked at a few bits from the table and put them on your plate before examining the room. Nothing much had changed since your time there. The house tables sat in the same order and as usual there was a Weasley in residence. Being born between Bill and Charlie meant that you’d grown up incredibly close as the three oldest. Oh, how you used to drive McGonagall insane! Though you doubted that she would have changed anything about you and it reminded you to go and find Peeves the Poltergeist later to remise about your adventures. You were revealing in your memories when Fred caught you eye and waved. At his movement, George, Ginny, Ron and Harry also waved in your direction. Hermione offered you a smile, you didn’t know her well but the boys spoke about her. You gave them as discreet little wave back and they went back to their conversations. You loved your brothers and that included Harry for sure since he’d spent the last two summers living with your family but as the only girls in a house full of boys, you and Ginny were incredibly close despite the age gap. In fact, half of the times that Fred and George had been blamed for blowing things it was actually you and Ginny up to no good. She’d desperately needed you last summer after the incident with Tom Riddle’s diary and you’d spent all summer off work helping her rebuild her control of her own mind and her confidence along with the rest of your family, especially the twins whose jokes at her expense pulled her back to near normality a lot faster. It was only because she seemed so much better that you felt okay to go and chase down the death eaters when Azkaban had been broken into. You often blamed not moving out of the Burrow on not wanting Ginny to kick all the boy’s asses in your absence but really you wanted to help your parents financially since being an Auror was an incredibly well payed job. After Mum and Dad had struggled and scrimped to raise eight children (including yourself), nine if you included Harry, on one underpaid Ministry job you wanted to help them anyway that you could. You paid most of the household bills and lived at home in your quite spacious basement room.

A shadow moved across one of the high windows and your eyes darted to it. A dementor. Ron had caught you in the hallway and told you what had happened on the train and that Professor Lupin had saved them. You made a mental note to check on Harry later and to thank Professor Lupin. You spared him a glance at the teacher’s table where the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher picked at a few bits on his plate and tried to sink back into his chair. You could see the book waiting beside his hand and the encouraging glances that Professor McGonagall sent him, she must has taught him like she had you, she’d always been your favourite Professor. Lupin seemed nice enough, not that the other Aurors would agree, as soon as Dumbledore had told you about Lupin’s werewolf affliction they had made their mind up that they disliked him.

Prejudice assholes.

Like he knew he was being watched, Lupin glanced up at you. His scarred features where tired and you offered him a friendly smile, you didn’t want him to think that you were watching his behaviour just because you were examining the Great Hall. He didn’t return the smile before he glanced back down at his plate. He must have been told that the staff and Aurors were aware of this condition. You focused back on the Gryffindor table were Fred and George were taking it in turns to try and throw carrots into Ron’s open mouth with Harry and Ginny cheering on different twins. You watched them laugh and cheer and hoped beyond hope that your gut instinct about this year was wrong. You swore to yourself you were going to keep them safe from whatever this year would threw at them.

—–

The first full moon of the school year came only days into the first term.

Since you were the Auror in charge of your little gang you took the night shift, you’d kept guard of the Shrieking Shack throughout the night at the request of Dumbledore but you’d not seen Remus Lupin since the first meal of the school year, which was a shame because you wanted to thank him for looking after Harry, Ron and Hermione on the train. You sat to your little Auror table and hid a yawn behind your hand. It was odd eating your dinner before bed when everyone else was eating their breakfast but you didn’t mind running on a mostly different schedule because then no one could accuse you of wasting time with your siblings instead of working. Your Auror teammates chatted idly about their scheduled patrol routes through the castle for the day while you picked at your food.

Before breakfast you’d met them both at Dumbledore’s office and you’d swapped intel for the last few days which basically meant they wanted a report on if Lupin had misbehaved during the full moon.

You were glad that you had nothing to report on that front.

Speaking of the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor, he wasn’t at breakfast and if any of the students noted his absence then you didn’t hear anything. You picked at your dinner for a bit longer before picking up a new plate and piling it with chocolate muffins and picking up two new mugs and filled on with coffee and one with hot chocolate. “Have a good day guys, I’m off to bed. If you need me urgently you can signal my wand.” You said your goodbyes to the two Aurors and on your way out of the Great Hall you nodded a goodbye to your family at the Gryffindor table.

On your way to your assigned bedroom, which were behind the teacher’s rooms, you paused outside Remus’ room and, with both of your hands full, gently tapped the bottom of the door with your foot. As you moved to set down the plate and mugs the door swung creaked open and you could make out a slither of Remus in the doorway. You jumped back to stand up straight, “Sorry Professor Lupin, I didn’t mean to disturb you I just wanted to alert you to the fact that there are hot drinks out here when you’re ready.” You lifted the mugs and plates up in your hands to show them off.

The door creaked open a bit more and Lupin leaned against the doorframe, his eyes dark and hallow. He tried to run his fingers through his hair but the action left it sticking out awkwardly, “Why?” He asked. You glanced down at the mugs, “I didn’t know if you’d prefer coffee or hot chocolate so I thought I’d bring both.” “That’s not what I meant.” His voice dry and tired. “Well, I didn’t want you to miss breakfast.” You shrugged and held out the plate for him to take. Remus took it from you and gave you suspicious look, “Thank you, that’s very nice of you.”

You moved your wand out and bewitched the mugs to float between you both and gave him an easy grin, “Not really. You looked after my brothers so I’ll look after you.” “Your brothers?” Remus asked, his eyes brightening within his dark expression. You nodded, “Ron and Harry and their friend Hermione and all that trouble with the Dementor. I’d hate to think about what could’ve happened if you weren’t there.” You waved away the thought. Remus let go of his suspicion at your words, after all these years worrying about Lily and James’ beautiful little boy it was good to hear a powerful Auror referring to him as family.

“Don’t think about it.” Remus advised you, “Thank you again, er-?” “Y/N Weasley.” You held you hand out and Remus reached from the doorway to shake it. “Pleasure to meet you Y/N.” He gave you a tired smile. “And you Professor. Right, I’m going to bed.” You gave him a small wave before leaving down the hall.

——

The next few weeks you fell into the habit of sleeping for a few hours during the student’s classes before going for breakfast in the Great Hall (Everyone else’s dinner) and then spending time with your siblings or retiring to the library before conducting the night patrol. For most of this week you’d spent your evenings sat across from Lupin at the library, both reading and enjoying the silence of each other’s company. Tonight, was one of those nights. Remus offered you a smile in acknowledgment as he sat across from you and for the first time in a while, he started the conversation. “I brought chocolate and butterbeer.” He smiled and put them down on the small coffee table between you. “Careful don’t let Pince see those!” You grinned, “Once me and Charlie snuck a baby dragon in here and it scorched half of the potions journals. We had to get Peeves to help us escape Pince!” “Well that’s one of the benefits of sitting in the restricted section and Pince doesn’t really come near me…” Remus trailed off when he realised that he’d let his guard down. After a week of spending easy carefree time with someone who already knew his secret it was hard not to let things slip.

You leaned forwards to break apart some chocolate and gave him a wide grin, “So you’re like her kryptonite? Good to know, I’ll have to stick close to you.” He smiled despite his confusion, “Kryptonite?” You waved your hand, “Harry mentioned these muggle things called comic books to my Dad and we had to investigate. They’re like our picture books but the pictures don’t move. They’re so weird but a good way to spend a week in the Summer. It means that you’re her weakness, you make her powerless.”

Lupin shook his head, “Well there’s a first. You should have seen how the librarian before her reacted when we set off fireworks in the restricted section. James set them off and because of his hearing Siri-” Lupin stopped abruptly and took a drink from his butterbeer. You swallowed hard, “Professor –” “Remus, please.” He corrected you. “Remus, I’m sure you know that before I was assigned here I was debriefed on the history of Sirius Black and the threat he possesses.” You told him. Remus said nothing so you continued, “All I’m trying to say is that you can have fond memories and reminisce on the past - regardless of present circumstances.” “There are a few at this school who would disagree with you.” He mumbled and you could see him shrinking back into himself. You snorted, “Well then, they disagree with happiness and enjoying life and they’ll have to answer to me.” Remus seemed unconvinced but still gave you a smile as he settled back into his seat and opened his book. You returned the smile and opened your book to read but found that the words on the page danced outside of your concentration.

Shit.

You had a thing for Remus. You hid your face slightly behind your book at your realisation in case your cheeks had brightened. Yes, he was an incredibly kind, intelligent man who was oddly charismatic and his scars made him even more attractive. Shit, this wasn’t good. You were here for a job.

———

“Is it weird for you now, being up at this time?” Remus asked from beside you as you stood outside in the afternoon sun. “Quiet you.” You grumbled and sipped at the coffee that you’d managed to barter from the kitchens. Remus smirked at your attitude before focusing back on his students, “You’re doing very well Mr Longbottom. Keep at it.”

During a night of patrolling the castle you’d found Fred and George smuggling ingredients for their products from the Forbidden Forest. Unfortunately, Flitch had also caught them so you couldn’t let them off but you did hide their ingredients for them – without the evidence against them the twins could only be given detention. You promised to give them their ingredients back when they’d brought their grades in Potions up. After all that fiasco you’d managed to get an hour or two of sleep before a Hufflepuff student had told McGonagall that the reason that they were late for class was because they had seen Sirius Black.

Even though everyone knew that he was trying to lie his way out of trouble it was still your duty as head of your little Auror brigade to search the grounds before reporting your findings to Professor Dumbledore, McGonagall and Snape. Then, since the whole school was a tatter with rumours, Dumbledore asked you to stay awake and assist Lupin with overseeing his classes outdoor defence class. “Not a morning person Y/N?” He asked and you were damn sure that you could hear him mocking you. “Not a night person, Remus?” You smirked and sipped your drink, you could see him shaking his head in your peripheral vision. “Below the belt.” He mumbled to you but you could hear the amusement in his voice. He continued to guide the students on proper stance and posture for a while before coming to stand back with you. “What’re doing tomorrow?” Lupin asked you. You magicked your empty mug away and cornered the older wizard with a suspicious look, “Well I was planning on sleeping but what do you have on your mind?” He gave a half shrug, “The weather is supposed to be nice and the students have a half day so I have no lessons in the afternoon. I was thinking, picnic?” “I didn’t know you could cook.” You said. He shook his head and scratched one of the scars on his cheek, “I was hoping to convince one of the house elves to take pity on me and help me prepare it. We could read outside for change.” You shrugged, “Sure, why not? It’s a date.” Your face flushed when you realised what you’d said and unfortunately, he caught it.

“Is it?” Lupin asked, he made sure to keep his gaze out on his students rather than look at you. Making sure none of the kids would see you, you nudged his arm with your shoulder, “Shut up old man, you know what I meant.” Your conversation was interrupted when Ron, Harry and Hermione rushed up to both. “Y/N! Is it true?” Ron blurted out as they stopped in front of you. You raised a brow at your brother, “Is it true that you seem to have lost all your manners? Yes, it is true.” “Y/N, Professor Lupin, is it true that Sirius Black was seen today?” Harry asked, his eyes wide with fear. “Harry it’s true that someone claimed to have seen him to get themselves out of trouble.” You told him, “There’s nothing to worry about. Have I ever stirred you guys wrong?” “Well there was the time you let Fred and George convince me that I should stick wizard chess pieces in Percy’s hair.” Ron mumbled. “I was a teenager and Percy had just told Bill and Charlie about me having a date without telling them.” You told him, “This is different, I’m here to make sure that you’re all safe. Do you trust me to do that?” Slowly all three of them nodded in agreement with you. Remus clapped his hands together, “Now that’s settled, why don’t you go and practice your sparring.” He encouraged them with a soft smile to return to the rest of the class.

You watched the class idly for a while until Professor Snape appeared beside you, “Miss Weasley, the headmaster requires more information about the allegations made this morning. If you have time to step away from Professor Lupin’s lesson that is.” His voice was condescending. Remus gave Snape a tight, forced smile, “Of course if you need to go Y/N then do so, I’ll sure that’ll see you tomorrow.” “I’m sure you will Professor.” You gave him a Professional nod in front of Snape but you couldn’t stop your excitement. No matter what either of you had said, it was a date.

This will either be a series or just this one part – let me know if you guys think I should do it as a series :) @serenity-schuyler

[distant-rose-archive-blog]

I love your little pirates family!!! I feel like you skipped over Westley being born could we have a story about how wesley came to be :)

I felt like a shithead for having this sit so long in my askbox, so I decided to work on it while I was having some writer’s block with A Once and Future Thing. Anyway, not so much a Westley being born story so much as how we came to find out he exists and the process of his coming to be. Anyway, this is 5,200 words of Killian and Emma deciding to have another kid - our favorite troublemaking little pirate. I think I’m titling this one ‘Deliberate.’ As always, @welllpthisishappening is a goddess and will inherit the intellectual property of Little Pirates (if fanfiction qualifies as intellectual property that is) when I’m finally murdered by the Trump Administration. 

It had been a strange thing to Emma - the actual decision and act of deliberately trying to get pregnant. She had brought two sons into the world, but neither of them had been planned. Henry had been the result of teenage recklessness and a desperate need to feel connected to Neal while Harrison had been conceived in the aftermath of one of the most emotionally straining moments of her life. Emma didn’t regret giving birth to either of them, but it doesn’t change the fact that they were accidents; happy accidents but accidents nonetheless.

But this child…this one was planned.

When Harrison had been just born, a second child wasn’t even on the radar. It had been a traumatic birth and Emma regretted opting for natural birth over a caesarean; she had torn badly and Harrison had born with a broken collarbone. One baby and a teenager had been enough for the first few months.

Until Henry started asking questions.

“Are you and Hook going to have any more kids?” he asked one day over lunch.

Emma choked on her onion rings and had to thump her own chest to dislodge to clear her wind pipe. She reached for her napkin and wiped away the crumbs and excess saliva from her face, feeling a bit self-conscious.

“What?”

“You guys gonna have more kids?” Henry asked again, patiently.

Feeling uncomfortable, Emma looked down at her plate and tucked her hair behind her ear. No longer hungry, she inched her plate away from her and returned her attention to her son. Henry was leaned back against the vinyl booth and looking at her so intensely that she felt the need to shift in her seat under his gaze.

“What? Worried about having to deal with another screaming baby?” Emma tried to joke.

“More like worried that little Han Solo is gonna be lonely. Being an only child…it can be a little rough sometimes,” Henry replied, taking a bottle of ketchup and squeezing small pool on the edge of his plate. Henry was nearly as meticulous as Killian when it came to his food, making sure his condiments never touched his food without some deliberation.

“He’ll have Neal,” Emma reasoned.

“Neal is his uncle…it’s not the same…sure, they’re going to be roughly in the same age group, but there’s no guarantee that they’re even going to like each other. Look, Mom, I always wanted siblings and now I have one, but it feels weird…I’m just so much older than him and I feel like I’m going to be more of the uncle-figure than a big brother, you know?”

“Having another kid to make sure my other one isn’t lonely doesn’t sound like a good reason to have another kid, Henry…” Emma responded, feeling put on the spot.

“I know, I know,” Henry responded, taking a french fry and dipping it into the ketchup in such a tentative manner so that it didn’t break the perfect circle he created. “Just think about it.”

And she did think about it. It was hard to ignore. Wherever she looked, all she could see was little kids; a brother and a sister holding hands in the park, a young boy trying to help his little brother how to walk and even a little girl trying to share a sandwich with her infant sibling. She would go to the supermarket and all she could see was article headlines on children jumping out at her: “Thinking of Having a Second Child? Seven Reasons for Baby Number Two!”, “Nine Benefits to Siblings” and “The Best Time to Have Baby #2 (or #3!)”

She hated herself a bit for perusing through them while waiting in line to check out. They all said the same damn things; going on about how siblings tend to be less self-centered, better at socializing and problem-solving and had a built-in support system.

She was reading over an article entitled “The Benefits of Having More than One Child” when a high-pitched shriek sounded throughout the whole store. Emma looked up in time to see Aurora’s three-year old son Philip having a complete tantrum while sitting in his mother’s grocery cart. His face was scrunched and mottled red as he wailed and tossed boxes of food out of the cart.

“I WANT LOOPIES! I WANT LOOPIES! I WANT NOW!” he shrieked.

Emma cringed at the volume, suddenly grateful that Harrison was so easy-going. He grumbled a bit when he was hungry, but never he had gone into a full tantrum like that. The cashier, an elderly woman with hair pulled back into a severe bun, made a noise of disapproval.

“Okay, okay, okay!” Aurora responded, looking harassed as she picked up a box of Fruit Loops and placed them in the cart. “See? I got your Loopies? Happy?”

“She’s going to spoil that one,” the cashier commented. “Mark my words, that child is going to be the biggest brat Storybrooke has ever seen. It happens when you have an overindulgent mother and an only child. They grow up thinking the world is about them.”

Emma didn’t comment, just loaded her groceries onto the belt; her head was swimming with thousands of thoughts.

“Though you got a sweet one at home, don’t you?” the cashier asked. “A little boy, right? You usually come in with him. Your husband likes to bring him in too.”

“I have two,” Emma corrected. “I have a sixteen-year-old and a five-month-old baby.”

“That’s quite the age gap,” the woman responded.

Emma merely gave her a tight smile in reply.

It took her a week after the grocery store incident to approach her husband about it. They were laying in bed, both dressed in flannel pajamas to combat the chill of late September and watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” which was playing as a special on ABC. Emma personally thought it was too soon to be playing Halloween movies but Charlie Brown was too classic to pass up. Killian was tucked against her back, thumb rubbing patterns against her hip and more interested in nuzzling her hair than actually watching the cartoon.

“Hey, can we talk?” she asked, turning her head to look at him.

Killian’s entire body seemed to tense at her words.

“Love, almost every time those words are spoken, an unpleasant conversation follows…though you have surprised me a few times. Anyway, what’s on your mind?”

Emma took his hand in hers, running her fingers along the callouses that lined his palm. She played with his fingers for a moment, gathering her bearings. Killian, as per usual, waited for her to speak with unparalleled patience, but there was a noticeable furrow in his brow and a worried look in his eyes.

“Have you thought about having more kids?” she asked quietly.

“You know I have,” he answered in an equally hushed tone. He hesitated for a moment, studying her closely. “Swan, are you?”

“No,” she said firmly. “No. But I’ve just been thinking…Maybe?”

“Maybe,” he repeated. “What do you mean by maybe? You’ve actually been considering it?”

“You sounded surprised,” Emma commented, deflecting for a moment.

“Of course, I’m surprised. You weren’t necessarily happy about Harrison, love. I mean, I know you love him, but he didn’t have the most enthusiastic of beginnings…I just thought…I guess I just accepted that Harrison was going to be our one and only. I mean, aside from Henry.”

“Funny you mention Henry,” Emma replied, leaning back more against him and studying his hand still. “Because he was the one who kept harping on Harrison not being an only child.”

“He’s not an only child,” Killian asserted almost immediately. “He has Henry. He might be older, but they’re still brothers.”

“I know and Henry knows, but there is quite the age gap and Henry is going to be going away soon…They wouldn’t be raised together…I’ve just been thinking maybe a little brother or sister might be good…keep everyone grounded…”

Killian wrapped his blunted arm around Emma’s shoulders, pulling her closer to him, so that he could lean his head on top of hers. He joined her in studying their hands, his own breaking free from her hold so that he could intertwined their fingers.

“This is sounding like more than a maybe, Swan…”

“Well, it’s a hard maybe right now. I can’t be fully on board until I have your thoughts on the matter…”

Killian sighed heavily.

“Swan, I never imagined I would be someone’s father. I always thought Henry would be it and that was enough for me…and then Harrison came along and he was…well, he is perfect. And between you and me, I’ve wanted another since we brought him home, but I always felt the choice should always and firmly be yours…I am content with whatever you’ll give me, love. That’s my decision and that will always be my decision.”

“But you want another baby?” Emma asked, pushing for a definite answer.

“If that’s what you want, Swan.”

“No, Killian, don’t give me that. I want an honest to God answer. Do. You. Want. Another. Baby?”

Killian squeezed her hand hard and she briefly wondered if he was putting all of his strength between it. He brought their combined hands up to his lips and placed a delicate kiss on her knuckles.

“Aye,” he whispered against her skin. “I want another.”

Emma twisted in his arms, pulling her hand away from his so she could place it on his shoulders in order to press him further into the bed. In a movement that felt almost practiced, she slid her leg over his hip and pulled herself up so she could straddle him. Killian’s hand and bare wrist immediately went to her hips. She leaned over him, placing a delicate kiss first on his nose and then on his lips.

“That settles it then,” she murmured, one of her hands reaching up to frame his face. She rolled her hips against his and their faces were so close that she could feel his breath curl against her cheek as he groaned. “Let’s make another baby, babe.”

She scheduled an appointment with her doctor almost the next day to discuss this development. If her GP was surprised with her choice to have another child, she didn’t say anything. She did, however, recommend a variety of pre-natal vitamins and gave her some awkward pointers on things to do in order to bump up the chances of conceiving from diet tips to preferred sex positions for conception.

As if to further her commitment to having another child, she downloaded an app to track her fertility on her way to the pharmacy. Tom Clark gave her an inquisitive look when she bought three different types of prenatal supplements and a new thermometer, but said nothing when Emma met his stare with hard one of her own.

The doctor told her it might take them awhile to conceive again, but Emma was still disappointed when she wasn’t pregnant by December. Very little effort was put into her conceptions of her two boys that it felt reasonable to assume that it would be much easier now that they were actually trying.

If Killian was frustrated by their lack of progress as she was, he didn’t say. However, there was a near palpable desperation in their lovemaking. Sex between them had always been passionate and sometimes a little rough, but Killian’s level of intensity seemed to have amplified over the last of few months. He had always been a talker but since their decision to try for another, he had become less verbose and more…determined; as if he stared hard enough at where they were joined while they fucked, he could actually will conception to happen with his mind.

She didn’t have time to feel disappointed in January and February however. Storybrooke was hit with a series of snowstorms that put both Elsa and the Snow Queen to shame and it took forever to get the power to back on, only to have it knocked out again. Emma and Killian had to huddle poor Harrison between them at night in order to keep him warm. Even Henry had joined in occasionally, the four of them huddled on their king’s sized bed as a blizzard raged outside.

Early March came and with it, a sense of tiredness that seemed to sweep over her. She felt the need to sleep constantly and napped in the most bizarre of places. On top of that there was a sense of dizziness that came when she moved too quickly and a random but intense craving for Indian food and cucumber sandwiches. Emma was almost embarrassed how long it took her to realize the telling symptoms.

The plan was simple. She was going to take the test and if it was positive, she would tell her husband then they would hopefully have a round of celebratory sex before they booked an appointment for confirmation. They would keep it to themselves for more weeks to ensure no issues happened before informing her parents and then letting it be common knowledge. That was the plan and that seemed easy enough.

Except Emma should have known better.

Because plans never go as they’re supposed to.

It was seven in the morning on a Saturday that Emma was caught looking at pregnancy tests in Dark Star Pharmacy by her own mother, who apparently was shopping for children’s Tylenol. Emma’s kid brother had been brought down by a fever recently and Snow had been re-stocking their supply.

“Emma?” The sound of her mother’s voice made her freeze like a deer in headlights.

“Shit.”

Snow’s eyes jump between the Clearblue box in her daughter’s hands and her face, which was turning bright red. A wave of mortification and embarrassment washed over Emma, which made absolutely no sense because she was thirty-five years old, married, had kids already and had actually planned the possible bun in the oven. She just hadn’t told her parents about said planning.

“Emma,” Snow repeated again, this time there was a tone of urgency in her voice.

“Hi Mom,” she replied, attempting to plaster a convincing smile on her face.

“Emma…you are…?” Snow looked around the store for a moment before mouthing the word ‘pregnant.’

“Well, if I knew then I wouldn’t need one of these,” Emma remarked lightly, giving the box a rattle.

As if the situation couldn’t get more awkward, Leroy appeared almost out of nowhere and clapped a hand on Snow’s shoulder.

“Hey sister, if you have a moment, can I talk to you about…” Leroy trailed off when he saw Emma.

Emma closed her eyes and groaned audibly. She smacked her head against the display, causing a number of pregnancy tests to fall onto the floor. This was the exact opposite of what she had planned. When she pulled her head back, both her mother and Leroy were still looking at her, more particularly at the stupid box still in her hand.

“Are you”- “Stop talking,” Emma interrupted Leroy, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Don’t speak. You didn’t see anything. You didn’t hear anything. I will not have my husband find out from you of all people that I’m pregnant,” Emma hissed. “Do you understand me?”

Leroy paled, nodded quickly and turned right around. Emma merely placed her head and her hands, groaning again.

“That is a lost cause, isn’t?” Emma mumbled between her fingers.

“Afraid so,” Snow replied apologetically. “And I thought you didn’t know…”

“I don’t know, but I have a sneaking suspicion. All the regular suspects are rearing their ugly heads, you know?” Emma replied, rubbing at the growing bump on her forehead and wincing.

“And Killian doesn’t know?” Snow asked gently.

“Well, I didn’t mention it to him. I didn’t want to him getting his hopes up,” Emma sighed. “We’ve kinda been trying, actually.”

Snow nodded, looking a bit conflicted.

“I didn’t know you guys were even thinking about another child,” she said after a moment.

“We didn’t tell anyone…it’s not something you really share or something we felt comfortable sharing…We kinda just wanted to keep this to ourselves for a bit…”

Emma honestly didn’t know what else to say. She just shifted awkwardly, wishing the cheap orange carpet would just swallow her up.

“Do you want someone with you when to you take that?” Snow asked, gesturing to the box.

“Ummm…no…thank you, but no,” Emma replied, shaking her head. “I mean, I appreciate it, but I kinda wanted Killian to be the first person to know the news…though I’m pretty sure this cat is out of the bag.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’m sure Leroy knows to be discreet about something like this,” Snow said, placing a comforting hand on her daughter’s arm.

Emma’s eyebrows rose almost comically at her mother’s statement and she fixed her with a look of disbelief.

“Yeah, I want to believe that, but I will when pigs sprout wings and start flying.”

It took only thirty minutes after leaving the pharmacy for people to come up and start offering their congratulations. Emma accepted them with a tight smile, mentally killing Leroy in her head. It wasn’t even official yet and the entire town probably knew. She was trying very hard not to be upset about it.

She stopped by Granny’s to pick up her daily hot chocolate…only to receive herbal tea instead. She didn’t even realize it until she brought the Styrofoam cup to her lips and tasted bitter instead of sweet. She placed down on the counter lot harder than she should have, causing some to splash over the lid.

“Granny, where’s my hot chocolate?” Emma demanded.

The older woman gave her a long look.

“Hot chocolate has caffeine in it,” she said pointedly. “Are you sure you should be drinking that in your condition?”

Emma’s eye twitched. She placed her hands on the counter and leaned forward a bit, staring her down. She was really not in the mood for this nonsense.

“I’m not sure what condition you’re referring to, but it would be much better if you gave me hot chocolate instead of this…nasty leaf juice,” Emma responded in a deadly calm voice.

“So, you don’t have a bun in the oven?” Granny asked, raising an eyebrow.

“What I’m saying is that Leroy’s guts are going to be garters when I find him,” Emma replied with a huff.

As soon as she convinced Granny to hand over her hot chocolate, Emma immediately headed home in hopes of doing some damage control; practically sprinting. She knew it was a long shot, but hopefully she could intercept Killian before he went to the grocery store. The last thing she needed was him finding out from someone else that she could possibly be pregnant. She suddenly wished that she hadn’t walked to the pharmacy; walking home from Granny’s is a thirty walk in comparison while driving only took ten minutes maximum. There was no telling what sort of damage the Storybrooke rumor mill could do in that period time.

However, all of her fear and anxiety was pushed aside when she arrived home and found two of the four most important men in her life playing in the living room. Bob the Builder was playing loudly in the background, but neither Killian nor Harrison were paying attention to it. Killian was holding up Harrison’s prized bear and shaking it gently while Harrison was watching it with rapt attention, cruising towards his father while holding onto the coffee table.

“Trying to get him to walk?” Emma asked, placing the plastic bag down on a nearby table as she regarded them.

“He’s going to do it soon, Swan,” Killian said, holding the teddy bear up higher. “I can feel it in my bones. He took a few little steps yesterday before he toppled over. He’s going to do it.”

“He’s only ten months, Killian,” Emma remarked, smiling nonetheless. “Neal was thirteen months when he starting walking so relax a bit.”

“That is exactly why our little lad is going to finally walk today,” Killian answered. “Gotta stick it to Uncle Neal, right, my boy?”

Harrison responded by putting his entire fist in his mouth and sucking on it.

“If you and Dad make Har and Neal hate each other with this stupid competition stuff, my mother will never forgive you,” Emma remarked.

“It’s all good fun,” Killian responded, giving her a small smirk. “Especially because we’re winning.”

Emma just smiled and shook her head, watching as Harrison inched his way towards his father and his special bear while still holding onto the coffee table for support. As he reached the edge of the table, he took one, two, three steps forward without assistance before toppling over. Harrison blinked in surprise and for a moment, Emma thought he was going to cry, but he only let out a small whimpering noise and held his arms up towards the bear.

Killian sighed and relented, giving the bear to their son. Harrison immediately trapped it in the circle of his arms, wiggled his entire body and made a pleased cooing noise before nibbling on the bear’s ear.

“So close, lad, so close…” Killian mumbled, raking his hand through his hair.

“Is that what you’ve been doing all morning? Walk training?” Emma asked, nodding her head towards Harrison.

“Actually no,” Killian replied, looking up at her. “We got grocery shopping done already, the little lad and me. We got back probably like ten minutes ago, so this is merely the beginning of training, as you say.”

Fuck. Emma’s smile wavered.

“Oh, how was shopping?” she asked, trying to keep nonchalant.

“Odd,” Killian frowned. “Swan, have we done something major recently because random strangers were offering some sort of congratulations. Did Henry get into some prestigious university and the two of you neglected to tell me?”

“No,” Emma sighed, cursing the entire town in her head for not minding their own business. “No, not that. I fucked up.”

Killian’s eyebrows rose at that. He picked up Harrison and shifted him so his head was cradled in Killian’s shoulder, prosthetic hand propping up his bottom. Harrison made a noise of displeasure and squirmed a bit. He didn’t like being held so much now that he was a bit more mobile, he constantly wanted to move.

“Oh? How did you ‘fuck up,’ Swan?” he asked lightly, bouncing their son a bit in his arms.

“I bought something that I should have bought across the town line and besides a few exits down the highway, but I’m a dumb ass and bought it from Dark Star’s and now something that I wanted to be between you and me is now the town’s entire business,” Emma replied, brushing her hair out of her face.

“And what exactly did you buy, Swan?” he asked gently, holding Harrison tightly as he got up and walked towards her.

Emma let out a heavy sigh before grabbing the plastic bag off the table and pulling out the sole item she had bought from the pharmacy. She held the box up and gave a small shake.

Killian’s eyes widened comically and his mouth opened briefly before he snapped it shut. Without saying a word, he turned and placed their son in his bounce chair. Harrison made a disgruntled noise, but his displeasure was quickly forgotten in favor of playing with the various buttons on the chair that lit up and made noises. Both Emma and Killian winced at the amount of noise it was making but it couldn’t be helped.

There was an almost wild look in Killian’s eyes when he returned to her side and he took the box out of her hands with trembling fingers. His eyes kept darting back and forth between the box, her face and her abdomen. He let out an almost disbelieving laugh.

“That was quicker than I expected,” he said breathlessly.

“What are you talking about? It’s been nearly six months since we said we would try,” Emma replied, feeling a bit defensive.

“Aye, it has, but did your practitioner say it might take a year before we might conceive again?” Killian asked.

He placed the box back down on the table and raked his hand through his hair.

“You think it’s too soon,” Emma frowned. A chill went down her spine. This conversation wasn’t going how she had expected it to.

“No, no, I’m just surprised, love,” Killian responded, placing a smoothing hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t even know why we’re getting so worked up about this, it’s not like we know if it’s actually true yet,” Emma mumbled.

“I’m assuming because you bought the test in the first place that your suspicions are rather high, love,” he replied, placing a kiss on her forehead.

He moved his hand from where it was placed on her forearm and slung it around her shoulder, pulling himself closer to her so that they were side-by-side. Emma shifted, leaning against him. Both turned their attention to their ten-month old toddler bouncing around in his toy chair, unaware of the profound discussion his parents were having.

“When do you want to do this?” Emma murmured, gesturing to the box.

“I believe that you’re captaining that particular ship, love,” Killian murmured, placing another kiss on her head.

Emma looked down at the box and bit her lip.

“Might as well as get it over with. The whole town is already buzzing about it,” she sighed.

“Hey…Don’t let that get to you,” Killian replied, squeezing her shoulders. “We can wait until whenever you feel comfortable with it.”

“No, no, no.” Emma shook her head. “Let’s just get this over with.”

She pushed him away briskly, picking the box up again. Her fingers curled so tightly around the box in her hands that the card box crumbled under them. Throwing her shoulders back, Emma began a brisk walk towards the bathroom but before she could get very far, Killian wrapped his hand around her wrist and pulled her back.

“What’s going on, love?” Killian asked, thumb caressing her wrist.

“I just want to pee on the goddamn stick, Killian!” Emma snapped, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice.

“Aye and you can. After we talk. What’s going on? I thought you wanted another child. We have been trying for six months, love and you seemed so eager, and now you don’t seem happy at all. I just want to know what’s going on with you…Are you having second thoughts about the baby?”

“No! I’m not having second thoughts! I want this kid, Killian! I just wanted it to be between you and me! This is supposed be just ours and no one else’s. I just wanted it to be just ours for a while without anyone bugging us and bothering us and nosing around. And now everyone knows and I wasn’t ready for that, Killian. I wasn’t! It’s too early! What if something goes wrong? That would be horrible and everyone would know about it! It’s just too early and anything can happen and this is our personal business and no one else’s. I just feel robbed.”

Killian pulled her close, before releasing her wrist and wrapping his arms around her. His fingers drew mindless patterns into the small of her back. He rested his chin on top on top of her head.

“What happened isn’t ideal…but it’s going to be okay. The news is out sooner than we would like, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Regardless of anyone is saying or thinking, this is ours. This is our family and the only people that matter are in this room, your parents and Henry. No else, just us, love.”

Emma opened her mouth to speak, but Harrison let out a loud squeal. Emma and Killian turned to watch their son bounce around in his chair, waving his little arms in the air. He looked so happy and carefree, completely unaware of the heavy emotions going on around him. They couldn’t help but laugh.

“We should really find out if he’s actually a big brother,” Emma mumbled, burying her head in the crook of Killian’s neck as he continued rub circles into her back.

“But we’re pretty certain, aren’t we Swan?”

“I’m about eighty-five percent positive I am, but we won’t know until I see a doctor but pee sticks are generally pretty accurate,” Emma said with a sigh.

“I’m pretty sure ‘pee stick’ is not the accurate term for it, love,” Killian chuckled.

“Whatever, that’s what they are,” Emma replied, good-naturedly rolling her eyes.

She pulled away from him gently, kissing his cheek.

“Okay, I’m going to do this,” she said, holding up the crumbled box and once more heading towards the bathroom.

Killian followed and he moved to enter the bathroom, Emma stopped him. She gave him an incredulous look.

“What are you doing?” she asked him, raising her eyebrows.

“I thought we were doing the test,” Killian replied.

“Killian, I love you. You’re wonderful. You’re a great husband and you’re the world’s best father, but babe, the world will end before I’m comfortable with having you watch me pee. Boundaries, babe, boundaries,” Emma replied, placing her hands on her hips.

“I’ve seen you give birth, love, during which you defecated yourself. I fail to see the difference between that and this,” Killian replied, raising his own eyebrows.

“The difference is that I was pushing a ten-pound human out of my vagina and I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed,” Emma replied in matter of fact tone. “Go play with our son and I will be done in three minutes, okay?”

Killian put his hands up in surrender.

“As you wish,” he said, backing away.

“Thanks Westley,” she called as she closed the door.

“You’re welcome, Buttercup.” Emma heard his muffled laugh through the door. She let out a chuckle herself, glad she had finally introduced her favorite film to him awhile back.

Three minutes.

All it took was three minutes for Emma Swan to be an emotional mess. She already knew, but she still gasped when she saw the word ‘pregnant’ on the digital monitor. She let out a shaky laugh, running her hands through her hair as she continued to stare it. She was going to have another kid.

Killian tentatively knocked on the door.

“Swan, everything okay in there?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was breathless. She felt a bit like an idiot for being so worked up over something they already certain was true.

Her husband gave her an expectant look when she finally emerged, bouncing Harrison in his arms.

“Well?” he asked.

Emma ignored him for the moment, reaching for their son and taking him into her arms and kissing his forehead.

“Hey baby,” she cooed. “You’re going to be a big brother.”

Killian left out a whooping noise before enveloping the two of them in his arms, sandwiching Harrison between them and placing kisses wherever he could.

“I love you,” he murmured. “All three of you.”

“We love you too.”

[pojkflata]

My emo ass backstory

This was originally the script to a draw my life video, but I realized that it was becoming so ridiculously long that it could only work in text form

Nevertheless, I wanted to get this out of my system. I don’t think I’ve ever truly told anyone about my past in more detail than “I was bullied”, and just getting in depth about it for the first time in my life felt. Good.

CW for bullying, abuse and animal death

I was born in 1998, in a city called Helsingborg in southern Sweden, actually only a few miles away from Denmark by boat. My father worked as a cashier at the time, and my mother was unemployed. She used to breed dogs, but had to give it up when my big brother, Jakob, was born in 1997 in order to be able to raise him, and later me and my siblings. We still had some dogs around though, including one named Bandit who I adored.

During my early years, my family was struggling financially, because the only one out of my parents who had a job (my dad) had a pretty poorly paying one, and not only did my parents have me, my big brother and dogs to care about, I also had a little brother, Filip, and a little sister, Klowbi. We very rarely got things like toys or games, since my parents couldn’t afford them, so Jakob and I early showed interest in the internet as a nice way to spend our free time. The internet was a much more empty place back then, but we still found a lot of fun things to do, moreso than with the few toys we had.

When I was maybe five years old, my parents got more well paid jobs, my mother as a politician and my father in the advertisement industry, and my family’s economical situation became a lot better.

I began 1st grade in 2005, and oh jeez… I was bullied for nine entire years, and most of it stems from the fact that I was an undiagnosed autistic. Worth noting is that I was dfab, and presented as a ”girl” at that time, but it’s not like nobody noticed my symptoms just because of that. A lot of people noticed actually, but my mom did not believe them when people expressed concern.

I changed schools a lot, but I always ended up bullied, and my teachers would never support me, instead saying it was my fault for various reasons. A lot of the bullying was about harrassing me to the point that I would get meltdowns, because my classmates thought that was hilarious. I was a circus animal, in every sense of the word. Other fun stuff that happened to me in school was being asked out as a joke, being assaulted in gym class and being threatened with assault and bloody murder.

One particular story I remember takes place when I was in 7th grade. One of the popular girls asked me if I were a lesbian, and me, not knowing when to keep my mouth shut, said that I was not sure of my sexuality, and that there was a possibility I was not het. It quickly became the hottest meme that ever hit the school, and I was very heavily sexually harrassed over my statement. After four days of no peace, I decided I’ve had enough and attacked the girl. I ended up cracking her phone’s screen, and she promptly threw a fit and started playing the victim. Of course, she played the entire school, teachers included, like a piano, and I was demonized yet again.

At the time, I trusted my mother a lot, so you might wonder how she reacted to the whole thing… not ideally. She completely ignored that I was being subjected to homophobic harrassment, and instead just talked to her friends about how brave I was for being too autistic to know how to avoid giving my abusers ammunition. And yes, she chewed me out for cracking that phone screen. That was when I first realized my mother might not be as fantastic as everyone in my life had told me, and it would only get worse from that point on.

So how did I cope with being so heavily bullied? Not very well, mind you, but I still somehow survived. And I, knowing how pathetic this sounds, owe my life to the internet and my pets. I had a lot of wonderful animal friends. Those I loved the most include a Cocker Spaniel named Tim, a really fat mackerel tabby cat named Pikachu, a white cat with yellow/blue heterochromia named Kitty, and a gray tux cat named Pyret, who is still alive, actually! There was a time where Kitty was my absolute best friend. Kitty was a really antisocial and hissy cat, so it was all the more heartwarming that when no one really cared for me, at least I had a friend in a grouchy hissy cat who hated everyone else but me.

Unfortunately, that meant that Kitty despised other cats too, which became a problem when my family was forced to take in a new kitten back in 2012, the aforementioned Pyret. Kitty attacked Pyret whenever given the chance, and Pyret’s presence put Kitty in such a bad mood that she ended up attacking my at the time 9 year old sister. That was the point where my parents realized that the situation was going out of hand, so we took Kitty to the vet, and she was diagnosed with gastric cancer. The vet speculated that Kitty became unusually aggressive because she couldn’t handle her pain. There was nothing the vets could do, so Kitty had to be put to sleep.

Tim the Cocker Spaniel also suffered a similar fate: I was his very best friend, but one day, he got a disorder that affected the nerves in his eye area. That meant that slowly, his eyesight became much worse, and eventually, he recognized everyone as a threat, and reacted accordingly: aggressively. I was the only one who he could still recognize as a friend. Because of this, as well as the fact that he was clearly suffering, he had to be put to sleep as well.

Both of their deaths caused me great grief, but I’m still glad that I got to know these wonderful pets who helped me during the worst time of my life.

When it comes to coping using the internet, some of my fondest memories come from the website KPWebben, a website for a Swedish magazine directed at kids in the ages 8-15. From 2007 to 2012, the website had a community with a forum. I created a name around myself on said forum. I was spunky, snappy and not afraid to call the BS when I saw it. I was frequently questoning the authority in the moderators at the site, and I loved to make people think and question the reality around them. In many ways, on KPWebben I was allowed to be myself without facing consequences (from peers, mind you: the moderators loathed me). To some extent, I may have taken it too far, because I would often end up doing questionable things and create discourse around myself. I didn’t mind that much, though: I would much rather be known as the really cool and well spoken person that was a little too confident at times than as the human waste of space most people in meatspace saw me as.

This attitude actually gave me a lot of friends, including the person who is now my best friend and favorite person. I may have mellowed down a bit since my KPWebben days, but I still adore her.

Eventually, I graduated 9th grade and began secondary school, and somehow, I was bullied no more. But gradually, another problem surfaced in my life. My mother. Long story short, she was abusive to me. She isolated me from my friends, insulted me, and she expected me to have all the responsibility of an adult but none of the benefits. She was neglectful, as mentioned before, she wouldn’t listen to people who suspected I was autistic, and she never really cared about how I was suffering from being bullied. At times, she would even blame me for being bullied, much like my teachers would do. During this time, I realized that I was non-binary, and I had come out to my family, but my mother aggressively refused (and still refuses) to use my preferred pronouns, saying that ”it’s so hard :(” whenever I corrected her, and would scold me for correcting other people about my pronouns, because apparently me wanting to be referred to using my correct pronouns was embarrassing and annoying.

My mother also showed heavy favoritism towards Jakob and constantly compared me to him. Now, it is true that there’s only a 15 month age gap between him and I, so we are twins in everything but name. But Jakob is not me. Jakob is neurotypical and has not suffered the trauma I have. Jakob is an aspiring musician and while he hasn’t technically made a hit, he is talented and he probably will make it big. Being constantly compared to a person like that really hurts, especially when the people making these comparisions know you can’t become anywhere as good, and that they are just making these comparisions to make you feel bad about yourself.

While the bullying from my classmates was technically worse, what made my relationship with my mother so bad was the sense of betrayal. When I was younger, I thought that my mom was a real life super hero. She worked in politics and all of her motivations stemmed from her wish to make children’s lives better. She had made an extremely good name around herself, and she is a really likable person on the surface. So I didn’t know what I did wrong when she suddenly turned on me and all her talk about wanting to improve children’s lives went out the window. And her good reputation acted as a safety net as well, because no one believed me when I told them about what was going on beneath her facade.

My father was just not there. He was physically there, but he lacked a spine. He constantly enabled my mother’s disgusting actions, and always told me that she cared and that she doesn’t know how to raise me. Because a person with the kind of positive reputation my mother has cannot possibly raise an autistic child, right?

A lot of things happened to me in 2015. I was run over by a bus, for starters. I was on my way home from school, on my bike, when a bus appeared and ran over my left foot. The bus driver was breaking several traffic related laws, but they never faced any consequences despite me pressing the police to do so. The accident led to some minor fractures in the bones in my foot, but I was really lucky in that accident. It could have been so much worse. I’m still here, and able to walk, and that’s nothing short of a miracle.

I was also finally diagnosed with autism later that year, and I was enrolled on a boarding school for autistic people. This was a massive turning point in my life, because it let me move out at the age of 17 and escape the clutches of my mother. It’s far away enough from Helsingborg that my family can’t just visit me randomly, and I have my very own apartment. I still visit my family every other weekend and on breaks and such. I do miss my cat a lot while I’m here, but it’s a small price to pay for the peace and quiet and a place where no one really abuses me anymore.

There are however two downsides to this: I had be held back a year because my autism was making my studies suffer in 10th grade, before I moved to the boarding school, and I effectively won’t graduate until 2019. And Klowbi, my little sister, seems to be affected negatively by this change. We were pretty close to begin with, and me moving so far away when she was only 12 meant that she lost an otherwise ever-present friend. On top of that, she appears to be neurodivergent, but as I’m writing this, she has no access to therapy. And if that wasn’t bad enough, my mother appears to have moved on to abusing Klowbi instead of me. I don’t know too many details, since I don’t spend a lot of time with my family (and my mother seems to act as nice as she can in that slimy abusive way whenever I’m visiting). I try my very best to help my sister, because in my age, I did not have anyone who cared about me or my situation (that wasn’t an animal that couldn’t do a lot to help me), and I don’t want Klowbi to experience what I did.

[onlinegossipnews-blog]

Prince George and Princess Charlotte gave Kate enough time to try for a third

New Post has been published on http://www.onlinegossipnews.com/prince-george-princess-charlotte-gave-kate-enough-time-try-third/

Prince George and Princess Charlotte gave Kate enough time to try for a third

Did Kate Know she was pregnant when she made this joke? Moment Duchess sparked speculation

THIS is the moment Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, sparked intense speculation she was pregnant.

On a royal tour of Poland in July 2017, Kate joked about having a third baby – after being given a present designed for newborns.

She speculated about the prospect of another child when she was offered a cuddly toy designed to soothe tiny babies during an event for start-up tech companies in Warsaw.

Saying thank you for the present, she turned to the Duke, laughing, and said: “We will just have to have more babies.”

It was always thought that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would go on to have three children.

Kate is one of three and had a happy home life with her sister, Pippa Matthews, and brother, James Middleton, and is close to both of her siblings.

By having more than two offspring, William and Kate are following in the footsteps of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who went on to have four children – although there was a gap of 10 years between their second child, Anne, and third, Andrew.

VICTORIA, BC – OCTOBER 01: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte leave from Victoria Harbour to board a sea-plane on the final day of their Royal Tour of Canada on October 1, 2016 in Victoria, Canada. The Royal couple along with their Children Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte are visiting Canada as part of an eight day visit to the country taking in areas such as Bella Bella, Whitehorse and Kelowna (Photo by Andrew Milligan – Pool/Getty Images)

An age gap of less than two years between Prince George and Princess Charlotte gave Kate enough time to try for a third before she reached her late 30s, when women’s fertility starts to decline more rapidly.

But William – who is one of two siblings – may have needed more convincing.

On an overseas tour to Singapore in 2012, when he was asked by a group of teenagers how many children he would like to have, he said he was “thinking about having two”.

The couple talked openly of having a family when they announced their engagement and planned ahead by saving the top of their wedding cake – traditionally served at the christening of a first-born.

VICTORIA, BC – SEPTEMBER 29: (NO UK SALES FOR 28 DAYS) Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge attend a children’s party for Military families during the Royal Tour of Canada on September 29, 2016 in Victoria, Canada. (Photo by Pool/Sam Hussein/WireImage)

It is unlikely they will follow in the footsteps of William’s great-great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, who had nine children. Despite her large brood, domineering Victoria disliked being pregnant and was said to not be at all maternal.

Betting on a third child for William and Kate began to take off in the run-up to Charlotte’s christening when the princess was only nine weeks old.

Original Source: EXPRESS CO UK