#only put no if u genuinely are like this song sucks

[applejongho]

hold on, people DONT like celebrate (the song by ateez)??????

[luvsupa]

I WANT TO HEAR YOU SCREAMMM!

summary: whatever you do, do not fuck mr.ghostface!

tags: ghostface!geto x fem!reader, naoya mention .., set in the 90s and inspired by fear street!!, smut, ōral sex (m and f receiving), knife play, slightly mask kink, humiliation kink, exhibitionism kinda, death, mentions of blood, etc, mdni

w.c: around 3.6k (sorry I got carried away …)

a/n: THANK U GUYS FOR 1.6K WAAAATTTT WE GOIN UPPPPP YEASSS

+ geto in tbis fic looks just like this fanart 🙂‍↕️

kinktober masterlist

you lean against the register, bored out of your mind as you scribble distorted faces on your company’s notepad. working a night shift sucks—especially a closing shift. you huff as the intercom blasts the latest rock song, a weak attempt to liven up the dead atmosphere. lately, the cd shop has been busy with customers buying vinyls, posters, and movies. ugh, it was so annoying having to scan the newest movie, scream. the line was always so long it nearly wrapped around the whole building!

you glance out the glass front doors, scanning the empty, dark streets, genuinely debating whether you should close two hours early since no one is coming. your attention shifts as you hear the bell ring, indicating a customer entering.

ugh.

your smile drops when you see naoya, your annoying coworker who flirts with you in the weirdest ways. he’s always condescending and putting you down until you found out from another coworker that he’s actually attracted to you. he walks toward you, standing in front of the register as if he were a customer. you honestly forgot he was still here after he said he would take a ‘five-minute’ break an hour ago.

“you don’t get paid to draw, now do you?” he says, leaning over to grab the notebook. you let him take it, but he rips the page clean, crumpling it in his fist. gosh, you hated when he acted like the manager. “anyways, I’m clocking out! must suck having to stay for another… two hours!” he laughs, glancing at the clock above. he giggles as he walks behind the counter into the bright red font ‘employees only’ room, leaving you scoffing in annoyance. you waste time fixing the decorations on the register as every minute drags by.

ring!

your heart stops when you hear the company phone ringing. who the hell calls at this hour? you pick up the corded telephone and force yourself into a professional tone.

“thank you for calling cursed tracks, how may I help you?” you say, lazily watching over the store. there’s a long pause, and your brows furrow. is this a prank call?

“hello—”

“what’s your favorite scary movie?”

you burst out laughing, doubling over at the blatant prank call. there’s no way. it’s beyond cringey that you would be a victim of ghostface’s evil scheme. tears roll down your cheeks as you hang up the phone, your laughter still ringing in your ears. but then, you stumble backward, colliding with something solid—no, someone. your laughter halts as you slowly turn your head, gulping hard as your eyes drop in horror. screaming in genuine fear, you see him: ghostface, knife in hand, just like in the movies.

you stumble back into the counter, panic rising as you cry out, cornered in the booth. he drops his hand and bursts into laughter, and your brows furrow in confusion. he lifts his hand to remove the haunting mask, and embarrassment floods over you.

seriously.

“naoya, that wasn’t funny,” you snap, shoving him away as he continues to laugh uncontrollably. “you— you should’ve seen your face! I wish I recorded this— we would’ve been stars!” he wheezes, still amused as you find none of this funny. he continues to mimic your reaction, and you bite your lip to keep from lunging at him.

“stop wearing display costumes, asshole! you’re gonna get us in trouble,” you scold, turning away as he playfully bonks your head with the fake plastic knife. irritation washes over you.

“jeez, naoya— just leave already, you’re ruining my alone time,” you say coldly, clearly annoyed by his antics. you hear his footsteps retreating to the employee room, allowing you to calm down from his stupid joke.

you lean against the counter once again, watching over the store in boredom, your eyes feeling heavy as each minute passes. maybe you should really quit- you’re not getting paid enough for this. you roll your eyes at the ruckus coming from the room behind you—nayoa’s making way too much noise.

bastard, you mentally insult him.

you close your eyes to rest them, feeling exhausted from the long shift when you suddenly sense someone standing behind you. your eyes shoot open, and your heart drops again as you turn around to see nayoa in that damn ghostface costume.

“very fuckin’ funny, naoya,” you scoff, trying to ignore him, but he doesn’t move. he’s breathing heavily under the mask, staying still as if waiting for your reaction. you turn to yell at him, but the words choke in your throat. your eyes drop to the knife he’s gripping in his hand, and it looks too real—dripping with what looks like blood. your breathing quickens as you glance at the fake plastic knife that naoya left on the counter, your eyes twitching in disbelief.

“o-okay, naoya, you’re scaring me.”

“darling, who’s naoya?” the male voice says, distorted through the mask’s speaker. tears rush to your eyes as you see blood seeping from under the employee room door.

you step back, your back hitting the counter, trapping you just like before when nayoa scared you. the male steps closer, tears spilling down your cheeks as fear overwhelms you; you can’t call out for naoya—he’s fucking dead!

without thinking, you attempt to jump over the counter, but before you can touch the ground, you feel yourself being yanked back by strong hands. you squeal at how fast he moves, pinning you against the wall with one hand holding you in place and the other gripping the sharp, bloody knife to your throat. your eyes widen, the blade too close to your artery. if you looked up at the popcorn ceiling. you’d see the end of it—your life flashing before your eyes.

“oh pretty, you were just acting like a big girl,” geto coos, his voice soft yet terrifying. the grip on the knife loosens slightly as he pulls back his head, and your eyes remain shut, fear washing over you.

“y’r sooo fuckin’ nasty, huh,” geto comments, and your brows furrow as you stare at the creepy face behind the mask. he chuckles, and you follow his gaze down—oh fuck. you wish your body wasn’t reacting on its own! you’re grinding your hips against his knee placed between your thighs, your rhythm so subtle you didn’t even realize.

“let’s test how nasty you really get.”

those were the last words that echoed in your head as he had you behind the counter, knees grinding against the freezing floor, your jaw aching from the relentless thrusts. his thick cock slammed into your mouth with brutal force—so deep that you swore you could feel him in your chest, the bulge in your throat visible as he used you mercilessly. both of his hands gripped your head with brutal force, his long fingers tangling in your curly locks as he fucked your face like a filthy fucktoy. his groans, muffled by the infamous ghostface mask, sent shivers down your spine, the hollow black eyes staring soullessly at you as he threw his head back in ecstasy. the obscene sounds of wet gags and sloppy suction filled the store, the mess overwhelming—drool and spit spilled uncontrollably from your mouth, coating his shaft and dripping down your chin, soaking into the front of your work shirt.

your nose repeatedly slammed against his crotch, the rough patch of his pubes tickling against your skin, making you tear up even more. the strain in your jaw was unbearable, his fat cock stretching you wide, each thrust so forceful you thought your jaw might snap. but you kept your grip on his jeans, fingers digging into the fabric as your throat was pounded raw. his heavy black boot was wedged between your legs, you couldn’t stop grinding on him. each roll of your hips against his boot sent delicious friction through your core, and you were drenched, your panties soaked through your pants, sticking to your swollen folds. the slick sounds of your cunt rubbing against his boot mixed with the wet slurps coming from your mouth, each grind making you moan pathetically around his cock.

geto’s head dropped down to watch, eyes behind the hollow mask taking in the sight of you—a filthy, drooling mess on your knees with his cock buried so deep down your throat that a bulge swelled in your neck. drool poured from your lips in thick strings, and your hips moved desperately against his foot, grinding on him like you couldn’t help yourself. but he didn’t let you keep going. his movements stopped abruptly, and with a harsh yank, he pulled your head back off his cock, making you gag and cough, gasping for air. the sound of your desperate choking echoed through the store as strings of spit connected your swollen lips to his twitching tip, your eyes wide with lust and tears. the sight of you, completely ruined in your leggings, face soaked and pussy grinding against his boot, only made him harder, his cock throbbing in front of your face.

“you jus’ can’t help it, can you?” geto growls, his voice thick with cruel amusement as he grinds his boot harder into your cunt, your soaked panties doing nothing to dull the friction. the pressure sends jolts of filthy pleasure up your spine, making you cry out pathetically, your body writhing against him. his grin stretches behind the ghostface mask, those empty black eyes staring down at you, drinking in your desperation.

in a single, brutal motion, he rips you off the ground and slams you onto the counter, CDs clattering to the floor around you. your legs fly up, bent and spread wide, exposing you to him completely. his eyes rake over your body like you’re nothing more than prey. with a harsh tug, he rips your pants off, tossing them carelessly behind him. the moment his gaze lands on the soaked crotch of your panties, your clit twitches in response, your cunt clenching involuntarily, knowing what’s about to come. the fabric is practically see through now, drenched in fear and filthy arousal, and it only makes his smirk widen behind the mask.

your eyes are glossy, chest heaving as your legs stay bent up, thighs trembling with anticipation. you should be terrified, and you are—but the heat pulsing through your core is undeniable. the sight of him towering over you with that eerie mask, black eyes hollow and unfeeling, does something sick to you.

without warning, geto pulls a another knife from behind him, the blade gleaming dangerously in the store light. you gulp hard, a whimper escaping your lips as he waves it inches from your face, the cold steel sending a wave of fear coursing through you, but it only makes your cunt throb harder.

“don’t move,” he whispers darkly, dragging the tip of the knife down your neck, making your skin break out in goosebumps. the blade hovers over your chest, your nipples hardening as he traces your curves. he presses just enough to remind you of its sharpness, enough to let you know he could cut deep at any second. the threat lingers in the air, the thrill of it making your thighs tremble.

he doesn’t hesitate when he reaches your shirt. with a quick flick of his wrist, you hear the rippppp of fabric as the blade slices your work button-up clean open, exposing your bare chest. the sharpness of the knife cutting through the material like paper sends a shiver of fear and arousal down your spine.

“cheap shit,” he sneers, but the way your nipples perk in the cool air has his cock straining even harder. his hand moves lower, the tip of the blade dragging dangerously over your trembling stomach, inching closer and closer to your cunt.

you gasp when he finally reaches your panties, the cold metal resting against the swollen lips of your pussy. “y’know. . .” he trails off, voice thick with lust as he presses the flat of the blade against your clothed clit, the cold, sharp edge making you jerk involuntarily. “never had someone so . . .desperate in their final moments.”

it’s humiliating how your clit twitches at the contact, how your cunt clenches around nothing, soaked and aching for him. he notices, of course, the way your hips twitch toward the blade, and the wetness that’s already beginning to drip down your thighs.

“fuckin’ embarrassing,” he mutters, but his voice is laced with something darker—he’s getting off on this, on how soaked you are for him. the knife slides lower, grazing your inner thigh, just shy of cutting you, the scrape of the blade against your skin sending shivers through your body. you can feel your pulse in your clit, each drag of the cold steel only making you wetter, more desperate.

“this turning you on, baby?” he asks, his voice low and mocking. you can’t even respond, too lost in the filthy heat coursing through you.

with a quick flick of his wrist, the knife slices through your panties, the sharp blade cold against your slick folds. you gasp, your pussy finally exposed, clit twitching as the cool air hits your drenched core. the knife grazes your swollen lips, barely a whisper of pressure, but it’s enough to make you moan, your cunt clenching desperately.

he hums in approval, staring down at your glistening pussy, the wetness dripping from your folds, thighs trembling as you lie there helplessly. geto’s exposed cock twitches painfully at the sight, his eyes narrowing behind the mask as he drinks in how ruined you already are.

“fuckkk,” he mumbles, voice thick with lust. he lets the knife trail up, dragging it over your clit just enough to make you gasp, the cold edge sending waves of agonizing pleasure through you.

you’re fighting the urge to touch yourself, legs trembling with need, but he’s dragging it out, watching you suffer, savoring every filthy, desperate moan that spills from your lips. your cunt clenches again, dripping, aching for more, but all he does is graze the blade over your sensitive skin, keeping you on the edge, waiting for him to finally take what’s his.

without a second thought, geto rips off the ghostface mask, revealing his face in all its sinful glory. his long black hair cascades down his back, a few loose strands framing his face just right, giving him that perfect, messy look. your heart nearly stops at the sight—those silver piercings in his lower lip glint under the lights of the CD store. fuck. your breath catches as you realize just how devastatingly hot he is, a man who could ruin you in every sense of the word.

“f-fuck, mr. ghostface. . .you’re so fucking hot,” you moan, your cunt clenching involuntarily at the sight of him. he smirks, catching your reaction instantly, bringing the blade right back to your dripping cunt, but now it’s different—now you can see every twitch of that gorgeous smirk, every glint in his wicked eyes. nothing is processing in your mind at this point. you’re too far gone, body shaking as he holds all the power over you. he could do anything right now, and you’d let him.

geto leans in, inhaling deeply, letting your scent drive him mad before diving headfirst between your thighs. his lips find your cunt with no warning, devouring you like a fucking beast. his tongue plunges into your soaked hole with reckless abandon, the wet, obscene sounds echoing through the empty store. your back arches violently against the counter, the cold glass windows around the store only barrier between you and the outside world. if anyone walked by and caught sight of this—fuck, you’d be fired in an instant. but the thrill of that thought only makes the heat in your core burn hotter.

your body reacts before your mind can catch up, hands flying to tangle in his thick, soft hair, yanking him closer. he groans deep, the sound vibrating through your clit as you pull his head in tighter. mr. ghostface loves his hair being pulled—check! you think, feeling the way his body reacts to your grip, only making him devour you more ruthlessly.

his nose nudges your clit, adding to the torment as his tongue relentlessly works your insides, the metal ball of his tongue piercing sending shockwaves of pleasure through you. it’s so nasty, so fucking loud as he slurps up your juices, the slick sound echoing around the store. you can’t believe your body is making this much of a mess, slick dripping down your thighs, pooling on the counter beneath you. you’re losing it, completely undone by how he’s devouring you.

geto’s tongue is merciless, and just when you think it can’t get any better, he brings two thick fingers to your entrance, thrusting them in deep. the stretch makes your head spin, his digits spreading you open wide as his tongue continues to work your cunt. he groans low in his throat, the vibrations sending another wave of ecstasy through your core. the sensation of his tongue, his piercing, and his fingers all working together has you seeing stars, your walls clenching around him uncontrollably.

“fuck, look at you,” he growls against your cunt, his voice muffled but still dripping with arrogance as his fingers curl inside you, finding your sweet spot instantly. your eyes roll back, legs shaking uncontrollably as the tension in your belly coils tighter. your grip on his head tightens, forcing him further into you, needing more, more of that perfect, filthy mouth. his lips close around your swollen clit, biting at it just enough to drive you insane, while his fingers pound into you relentlessly.

you catch a glimpse of his face between your thighs, his half-lidded eyes fluttering shut as a moan slips past his pierced lips, his tongue flicking out to lick your slick from the corner of his mouth like he can’t get enough. he’s completely lost in you, ruthlessly making out with your cunt, leaving you trembling and gasping for air. the sight alone nearly pushes you over the edge, your body trembling violently as you feel your orgasm building, heat burning in your stomach, your cunt clenching around his thick fingers.

“listen to how talkative she is,” geto sneers, a wicked smirk stretching across his face. without hesitation, his free hand grabs the store’s telephone, fingers working quickly to connect it to the intercom. before you can process what he’s doing, he presses the microphone right up against your drenched, sloppy cunt.

your eyes go wide in horror as the filthy, wet sloshing of your pussy echoes through the entire store. the slick, obscene sounds of your cunt squelching and dripping around his thick fingers fill the air, amplified by the speakers. every thrust makes it squirt, the embarrassing symphony of your slick coating his fingers making your stomach drop with humiliation. you’re completely exposed, the sound of your body’s desperate reactions bouncing off the store walls, reminding you just how nasty this is.

the wet slaps, the relentless gushing of your cunt, and the squelching noises leave you utterly mortified. It’s so loud, so filthy that if anyone were to walk by, they’d hear everything—and know exactly what a mess you’re making for him. every slick, nasty sound screams your shame, broadcasting to the entire store that you’re getting off to a literal serial killer!

“look at you,” geto chuckles darkly, his voice dripping with arrogance. “so fucking nasty for me. all this for a killer? huh? you like knowing what a filthy slut you are?”

geto throws the telephone, letting it dangle by the cord, before roughly flipping you onto your stomach. your feet barely touch the ground as your chest presses into the counter- bent over, giving you a full view of the empty store. his eyes darken as he takes in your position, biting his lip at the sight of your ass wiggling back, grinding against his hard cock. you can’t help but plead, your voice breathy and desperate.

“please, mr. ghostface, you’ve been sucha tease,” you whine, turning your head to watch him as he toys with his lip piercing, eyes fixed on you like he’s weighing his options. before you can beg again, he makes his choice—sliding his fat, mushroom tip past your dripping entrance. the stretch of his tip slightly burning but- oh it felt so good. your body jerks forward with the slow, agonizing thrust, his thick crownhead teasing innn and outttt of your needy, aching walls. you cry out, wanting—no, needing—more.

desperation overtakes you, and you try to fuck yourself back onto him, but his hand comes down hard, swatting your ass. the sharp sting only makes your pussy clench harder, and you hear him tut in disbelief at how filthy you’ve become for him. “unbelievable how you’re this horny,” he sneers, gripping your hips tighter as if to hold you still.

“if you’re a virgin, just say—ahh,” you taunt- gasping loudly when his fingers wrap around the back of your neck, his grip firm as he pulls you flush against his broad chest. his thick tip remains lodged inside your cunt, teasing you with how little he’s giving, yet how desperately you crave more.

he leans in close, his breath hot on your ear. “i’d love to stay and prove your point,” he purrs, eyes flicking to the front of the store, where the bright blue and red lights of approaching police cars flash in the distance. your mind is too foggy, too consumed with lust to understand what he’s hinting at. “but baby, your little coworker—the one you never bat your pretty lashes at,” he continues, his tone darkening as his grip tightens around your neck, turning your head toward the ‘employee’s only’ door.

that’s when you see it—the large, dark puddle of blood seeping from under the door, your coworker’s lifeless body hidden from view.

“i-i don’t care, i wan’ you,” you plead, tears stinging your eyes as your walls grip his girthy tip, trying to coax more from him. geto chuckles darkly, the sound sending shivers down your spine. he turns your head back toward the front of the store, where the police cars are getting closer. his hand slips away from your neck, leaving you trembling as he cruelly pulls his cock from your addicting cunt, leaving you empty and desperate as he swiftly tucked it back in his pants.

tears spill from your eyes as you feel him slipping away, denying you what you need. “he’s the one that ruined our fun,” geto says, his voice soft but menacing. “and sadly…” his words trail off, and you freeze as you feel the cold tip of a sharp blade pressing against your neck. you gulp hard, heart pounding as the reality of the situation sets in.

“’m really sorry, baby, but i can’t have you snitching to the police, can i?” he whispers, and with a swift motion, the blade slices cleanly across your throat. blood trickles down in a warm line, your breath catching in your chest as your body collapses to the floor. the cold tiles beneath you feel distant as your vision blurs, the last thing you see is geto standing above you, pouting as he watches the life drain from your body.

[ohbabydollie]

MORE MUTUAL BREAKUP 🙏🤲🧎‍♀️

i need a break from trying to write smut 😔

moments of u two!!

a lil comp of silly scenarios, dialogue, etc. i think would apply to reader n schlatt

— — — —

a guy who asked to do a podcast interview with you obviously flirting while schlatt is sitting along side the camera man, sucking his teeth and biting his tongue, staying quiet

you ignore the flirting until you notice schlatt is getting jealous by the second and a few more flirty remarks away from punching the guy

so you do the only thing you can think of

“it’s a little cold in here” you say rubbing your arms

“really? i think it’s kinda hot” the guy says taking off his jacket about to hand it to you before schlatt sprints into action

he takes off his hoodie and hands it to you

“thank you honey” you say grabbing it and receiving a small peck from him and putting it on, completing the rest of your interview with the hoodie on, all warm and cozy in schlatt’s jacket

———

you held a volleyball tournament (very similar to the dodgeball tournament)

everyone showing up in shorts and shirts meanwhile you were in your highschool volleyball uniform, fitting you tighter in some places than it used to

everyone sees the way schlatt’s brows raise when you first arrive

everyone noticed schlatt not taking his eyes off your ass whenever you would bend over, go retrieve the ball, receiving and in general doing anything

during breaks he’ll take you into a corner when he thinks a camera can’t see and kiss you, parting with a smile and slapping your ass as you walk off with a dopey grin

———

“my favorite song right now? it’s probably that song from juno” you say smiling “here is the church and here is the steeple”

“we sure are cute for two ugly people” schlatt chimes in

“i don’t see what any one can see in anyone else but youu” you both sing smiling

“she plays it all the time, it’s so annoying” schlatt teases as you stick your tongue out at him

———

schlatt talks about you when asked or if you’re even referenced

“y/n, she is genuinely the best most incredible person i know, the way you see her on camera is the way she is in person, just that she’s softer and sweeter. I am her biggest fan, genuinely, she’s the most perfect person i know and i love being with her, not even just sex, i like being around her as a person, they make me a better person and it’s like every time i have to leave her, i feel empty. a piece of me is filled when im with her. She could ask me to get back with her in five minutes, tomorrow, fifty years in the future, i wouldn’t care, i’d get back with her in a heartbeat”

———

“my gum is out of flavor” you say looking around for a place to throw it out

“hand me it” schlatt says putting his hand out before you spit out the gum softly onto his palm, schlatt wastes no time putting it in his mouth almost immediately after causing you to look at him with wide eyes

“Schlatt! that’s disgusting”

“eh, i’ve had your tongue in my mouth before” he says blowing a bubble

———

“hello?” you ask putting your phone on speaker for the chat

“hey toots”

“oh hey schlatt”

“so, jambo has been cryin, sittin in the spot he always sat down next to you n he jus’ misses you” schlatt says sadly “i was wonderin’ if you could come over n comfort him since he jus wants his mommy” he asks softly

“yeah, i’ll be over in a few” you say before quickly ending your stream and going over to schlatt’s

“oh my poor baby jambo” you say picking up the mewing cat “you missed your mommy, didn’t you” you ask the cat softly, sitting down next to schlatt and giving jambo small kisses

eventually you fall asleep with jambo in your lap and schlatt carries you both to his bed, laying you down gently and he takes a photo

it’s his background for the next few months

———

“you got any sauce for this?” you ask schlatt as you bite into your fries before he goes into his pantry and fetches a new bottle of your favorite sauce

“schlattie” you chirp “you hate this sauce” you say opening up the bottle

“i know, i just had it left from when you lived with me” he lies

“i took the last bottle with me when i moved out” you say downwards smiling “you bought a new bottle for me”

“whatever” he huffs, knowing that you were right, he hated that stupid sauce but found your reaction to him having it adorable

———

“yeah, i’ve always wanted a surprise birthday party, but i’ve never gotten one” you say softly as schlatt makes note of it

a few months later on your birthday, you realize that very few people have said happy birthday, one of the few being schlatt

it’s a lonely day, you spend some of it alone before you get a text from schlatt at 2 pm

cat babydaddy: get ready, i’m picking you up at 5

you happily get ready, showering, shaving, everything

once he arrived he has a large bouquet of flowers, a teddy bear and a box of chocolate covered strawberries, smiling at you lovingly

“you look great toots” he says handing you your bouquet and bringing your gifts inside, you thank him with a few kisses before he tells you to hurry so you won’t be late for the reservations he made

you giggle the whole way there, holding his hand as the both of you talk before you notice that he’s going past a bunch of restaurants before he makes you put on a eye mask which you do confused

he leads you out of the car and in through some doors, gently he takes the mask off of you to reveal a beautifully decorated venue

your friends and family jumping out to yell happy birthday at you as you feel yourself tearing up, turning to schlatt with tears of joy

“don’t cry, happy birthday toots” he says wrapping an arm around you and planting a kiss on your lips

lmk if u guys want some more, i gotta feed my mutual break up lovers

[instantfoxdonut]

Helluva Boss S1-S2: Octavia Rant

okay, it has CLEARLY come to attention that ever since the episodes Mastermind and Sinsmas came out, MANY people having been hating on Octavia's character with little to no evidence for it.

Allow me to explain

As someone who watches both helluva boss and hazbin hotel, alot of drama has been spreaded around throughout both shows, most recently, with helluva boss's season 2 finale. Alot of people have started to make pointless rants of why octavia being angry and most likely wanting NOTHING to do with her father, Stolas, in the future makes her a terrible daughter and character, and may I remind you, with LITTLE TO NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER.

And now, I shall bring out the evidence of why octavia's feelings towards her father, blitzø, and her mother are justified.

First of all, the first time we actually get to see Octavia is in S1- episode 2: Looloo Land. The episode opens with a flashback to Octavia as a young child having difficulty going to sleep. Due to Stolas hearing Octavia while trying to sleep himself, he goes to her room with his grimoire and sings to her while taking her to watch an entire solar system implode on itself. Then it cuts to Octavia in the present waking up to the sound of Stella, Octavia's mother, screaming at Stolas and throwing objects across the kitchen at him. Now before she woke up, she seemed genuinely content, but once she was brought back to harsh reality, she looks absolutely miserable.

if you can't tell HOW miserable this girl is- then here is a mini compilation of her misery:

In all of these images you can clearly tell, her life SUCKS. Not to mention, the fact that she puts her headphones in to most likely drown out her mom's shouting kind of gives the impression that this has happened before, and she is USED to it- which is not a good thing. Now, I may not be a parent or an expert on taking care of other living beings, but I know enough that if a child is so used to hearing their parents screeching at eachother EVERY MORNING, to the point that they have had to learn to drown it out with other sounds or distractions, then it is CLEARLY A BAD THING. It's normal for parents to argue every once in a while, but this girl has to hear this EVERY MORNING, AND HAS HAD TO FOR GOD KNOWS HOW LONG. And that does not help with that the song she listens to in the beginning of the episode, is "My World Is Burning Down Around Me" by a band called "Fuk u Dad". Do you see where I am going with this? No? It's okay, I'm not done proving my point yet.

Now as for this rant, I have done some delectable research and have found that during the teenage period of life, most teenagers tend to try to find something to relate to. Specifically music, art, books, poetry, writing, ect. They also tend to pick these depending on how they feel about certain subjects, what they have gone through/ what they are going through at the moment, and a way to express themselves, and as a way to vent about their feelings. By the specific song choice, it's not only referring to how her life is LITERALLY FALLING APART AROUND HER, but also how she feels about the whole Stolas and Blitzø situation. She FEELS like her life is burning down around her while it also, non-metaphorically, is. Seems like a pretty fitting music choice for everything she's going through right now, am I right?

Moving on.

Second of all, during the same episode, she was dragged to LooLoo Land by her dad along with, you guessed it, blitz, which she is OBVIOUSLY not happy about. Her day started terrible, and now it's only going to get worse. Also, she has to see her dad FLIRT with the imp that is partaking in ruining her life INFRONT OF HER. And she looks so uncomfortable during the experience to the point that during the LooLoo Land show with the robotic Fizzarolli, she gets up and leaves, and runs off to sit on a ride by herself, and looks like she wants to cry. When Stolas goes after her, she wants him to go away, but still tolerates him. When he asks her what's wrong, she asks him "Are you going to run away with him and leave me behind...? Where i can't find you and I don't know where you are... and leave me alone...?". This moment, you can see how she is so close to crying at this point that her voice is breaking and that she has a teary expression. Then Stolas responds by hugging her and saying "No. No, I would NEVER do that. Ever". And as everyone finds out later, he BREAKS that promise to his daughter. As the series progresses, we also get to see how their father and daughter relationship slowly, but surely, begins to fall apart right before our eyes.

Third of all, in S2, episode-2: Seeing Stars, Octavia, for the first time we have seen, wakes up HAPPY. We then see her go uo to her calendar which shows she has a date circled and written with something along the lines of her going to see Asaphalts Tears with her father. She seems genuinely excited about it. But as she goes out to talk to Stolas about it, we can see a moving van and Stella's stuff being moved out into the van while Stolas is arguing with Stella on the phone. When Octavia tried to talk to him, he pushes her away and tells her that he is busy, not only refusing to listen to his OWN DAUGHTER, but also FORGETTING the OTHER promise he made to her. Now, alot of people may think "Oh, well Stolas is obviously busy and stressed, and it's just some Asaphalts Tears, it's totally okay for him to forget about taking his daughter to see them." No, it's actually NOT OKAY. He clearly promised to her that he would take her to see them, and may I remind you, Asaphalts Tears only show up every 1000 YEARS. That is a LONG TIME before she will get to see them. Not to mention, due to her being 17 at this point in the series, this would be her VERY FIRST TIME SEEING THEM. Due to her reaction, she is clearly upset about him brushing her off and forgetting, to the point she storms back to her room, and tears up and throws away her calendar. Then, she decides to take her father's grimoire and uses it to go see them, which ends up with her in the middle of Los Angeles by herself utterly lost. When Stolas realizes his book is gone and that Octavia is missing, he and Blitz along with the rest of I.M.P., go to look for her. In the process, Blitz gets mistaken for a celebrity and Stolas gets taken with him, leaving Loona to go look for her instead. By the way, the entire time that Blitz and Stolas are stuck on a recording set, Stolas COMPLETELY FORGETS ABOUT HIS OWN DAUGHTER. AGAIN. He then spends that time swooning over Blitz while Loona is busy running herself ragged, looking for HIS DAUGHTER FOR HIM. Once Loona finds Octavia, SHE has to tell her that her father loves her, since he isn't able to do it HIMSELF. Octavia even states, "If he cares so much, then why did you come looking for me instead of him...?" She is SO RIGHT with that line. If Stolas ACTUALLY cares as much as he says he does about his daughter, then why couldn't he be bothered to LOOK AND TALK TO HER HIMSELF? People also seem to like forgetting that as a parent, Stolas should be concerned enough about his daughter to be able to actually talk to her and look for her and not be flirting with Blitz for 5 MINUTES. That is just common sense.

Fourth of all, throughout both Sinsmas and Mastermind, Octavia is starting to suffer more than ever from her father's actions. Jesus, it's like Rose/Pink Diamond with Steven all over again-. In Mastermind, during the trial, we can see that the entire thing is being recorded and broadcasted LIVE. Once Stolas decides to (somewhat) own up to his actions, he places his head on the block, thinking he will be executed. Remember, this is being broadcasted LIVE. Octavia is WATCHING. SHE IS THINKING THAT SHE IS GOING TO WATCH HER FATHER BE KILLED. Alot of people are most likely saying at this point, "Well, Vivziepop wouldn't just kill off Stolas before the show ends." True, but that's not the point. We, as the viewers, DO know that he won't actually be killed. However, Octavia, as a character, DOESN'T know. I also feel like most of people that watch the show don't understand how TRAUMATIZING THIS WOULD BE FOR HER. She thought she was about to watch her father DIE. Even though he didn't actually die, she can still be traumatized by just the thought or even alluding to him being killed. It's already terrifying enough for a child to think about one of their parents dying, let alone WATCHING THEM DIE. ON TELEVISION. That would mess her up terribly. She was so distressed about thinking that her dad was about to die, that she goes to run up to her room. But before she can even leave the room, Stella stands in her way and embraces her. Once this happens, Octavia begins to sob in her arms, while Stella smiles. SMILES. Her daughter is seeking any form of comfort from her, is shaking like a leaf, AND crying, and she SMILES. Everybody already knows, Stella is a terrible person and mother, and is also an abuser and manipulator. To a certain degree, Octavia most likely knows this, but she is also so desperate and in need for comfort right now, that she is willing to hug her anyway.

In Sinsmas, we see that Octavia is still dealing with the aftermath and ending of Mastermind. It's not long until she finds a box of Stolas's pills, and her guitar. She then sings her song, "I Will Be Okay". Some people on tumblr have said that she is actively grieving her father even though he is still alive and her also planning on cutting ties with him. Those ideas make alot of sense and I like and support those ideas. Throughout the song however, we see these silhouette versions of Stolas and Blitz. These are representations of how she seems them. She sees her father leaving her behind for some porno fanfiction written by a virgin, and Blitz as one of the people destroying her life. She clearly hates him, and that is once again, understandable. She may not obviously have the full story due to being stuck with Stella and Andrealphys and hearing their versions of what happened, but she knows enough to the point that she hates Blitz and actively blames him for ruing her life more than it already hazbin. Get it? Hazbin? As in, hazbin hotel? The other show- AHEM- anyways- Her feelings are absolutely understandable and has every reason in the book of feeling the way she does. She already had a shitty life, and then it got shittier. Moving on, when Octavia's phone rings, Stella snatches it away and forbids her from talking to Stolas. Her and Andrealphys then make fun of the idea of him trying to even TALK to his daughter FOR ONCE. When Stolas returns to the castle, demanding to see Octavia, Andrealphys mocks him instead and gets his tail feathers pounded into the ground, which leads to a whole entire fight. At the end of fight when Andrealphys is about to attack Stolas and Blitz, Octavia steps in and deflects back at him and says "Don't. hurt. my. dad.". Once Andrelaphys storms off, Stolas goes to tell how proud of her he is and how he is sorry, and Octavia wants NONE OF IT. She is done with the apologies, the lies, the broken promises, the pain, and with his affair with Blitzø. She lashes out at him with the lines "I DO understand!", "Is that why you had these..!? Because of me..? Am I just some obligation to you...!?", and then "No! You don't love mother and you don't love me, you love him! We were never good enough for you!". Afterwards, she goes back inside, refusing to listen, and even look at him now.

In conclusion, Octavia has every right to be angry and to even go as far to HATE Stolas and Blitz. Before people say "But Stolas was miserable! He didn't mean to hurt Octavia and to make her life worse!". That doesn't matter. Just because he didn't mean to hurt her, doesn't mean it justifies his horrible decision making and him ultimately abandoning her for some utterly unrealistic fantasy. Octavia deserves an apology, a REAL apology and an explanation, not the shitty ones written by people that have never apologized in their lives and don't even know what the word means. As i have said before, her life was already bad enough, and in the process, Stolas made it worse. I am genuinely sick of people babying his character and defending him when his character is an ADULT who MADE the decision to sleep with BLITZØ in the first place. It's his decision, and these are the consequences, and the only way that his character can develop is by facing those consequences and moving past them, which many people seem to have a hard time understanding when writing characters. Not all issues with characters can just be sweeped under the rug, some actually need to be solved. Not to mention, Octavia gets even LESS SCREENTIME THAN MILLIE. And she is one of the main protagonist's daughters. She only has about 17 mintues of screen time in the ENTIRE SERIES, while Milie has over 20. Octavia's character is actively being WASTED and only being used for drama to keep the series going. Don't even get me started on the SHIPPING. There are people actively SHIPPING her with LOONA. If you couldn't tell, Loona is Blitz's adopted DAUGHTER. If Stolas and Blitzø ACTUALLY WORK OUT, that would make Octavia and Loona SISTERS. We also hardly know anything about her character other than her parents taking over the rest of it. Being associated with other characters isn't a personality trait. I also feel like alot of people would also feel angry if one of their parents put them through anything remotely like this. People have been bashing and hating on Octavia's character without justifying it or even explaining why. Everyoje knows that Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel have some of the worst fandoms to be seen with the human eye, which is where all of this hate came from, the FANDOM.

This is just an essay about my opinion on Octavia's character as a whole along with her connections to other characters and her writing. These are my opinions along with some others that I happen to agree with.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk

[stevie-petey]

You quite literally had me listening to break up music, for a break up that didn't happen, over a FICTIONAL CHARACTER. You're truly amazing, I genuinely got so sucked into the story I felt every emotion that you wrote down.

I can only imagine what it'll be like for (y/n) and Jonathan when nacy and Jonathan start dating. Like all of a sudden Jonathan is putting up boundaries and it's just so unusual in their dynamic. I can see it stirring up problems and maybe making (y/n) kinda freeze Jonathan out. Either he'll be too clueless or too into nacy to see that it's happening until it's too late. I don't mean to make it sound like (y/n) is being manipulative, I mean it more like she's trying to give him space because he's got a girlfriend and he can spend all his time with her anymore. Or maybe she'd be the one to distance herself first as her own way of setting a boundary and Jonathan hardly notices.

I've also been curious about (y/n) dating someone before she gets with Steve. Like Dustin tells her to move on, and she listens. She finds a nice guy who she gets along with really well and Steve and Jonathan are just like, " when did this happen? I don't have a good feeling about that guy, nu uh no way." Maybe it was just casual but still just enough for the both of them to be jealous and not even know it. Jonathan getting pissy that (y/n) spends a lot of her time with this guy and she's just like " really?" 😐

1) HONORED i got u to listen to breakup songs due to my fic thats such a high compliment ur so welcome <3

2) u touched on SO MUCH i have plans for !! reader wont necessarily get a bf in between jonathan and steve, but a certain character will be a uniting factor between the boys to protect reader <333 and as for when jonathan and nancy get together, i have a specific plan/dialogue scene between reader n jonathan that will reallly go into the whole boundaries thing. yall will LOVE it !!!

n thank ya for the lovely ask 🫶

[wifiwuxians]

Baby girl of all time ( aq ) . And also maybe xy and jacket of hlm fame but u can separate / choose just 1 from the 3 if u want,

oh shit okay let's Go

First impression: "Oh shit what the hell happened to her. Also WOW WAIT A GIRL"

Impression now: Baby girl who I will protect with my LIFE. I love drawing and writing her and really need to do it more often, I found deep solace in her design since I'd come from Hotline Miami and one of the characters I drew most also has this fringe, so she's very satisfying for me to draw... I just love how she is a complete gremlin with a rude mouth who gets all cute when she's around someone she likes and wants to be in the good graces of... She is my little schemer angel

Favorite moment: This is audio drama only and may be a false memory but she and Xue Yang are doing their bickering and he's like "alright shortie!" and she's like "STINKY!" and it was just very important to me that she said that

Idea for a story: As well as the story I suggested for Song Lan, I'm going to show my ass here and say that I've been playing around with an Arcane AU for a hot minute now LOL I really want her to just go crazy and be powerful, you know? It's not super in line with what I usually do with her or see her but I just... Want to indulge. And what are AUs for if not that. So yeah! Jinx A-Qing, growing up in the underbelly of a toxic city and stealing from the surface with her older brother. It could be so good. Especially with everything else Arcane has going on

Unpopular opinion: I genuinely don't think I have one? I just wish she were in more stuff because like I said before everyone in the arc is of equal importance. Nothing would happen without all four of them

Favorite relationship: It's hers with Xue Yang. I'm sorry. It is. You know it, everyone knows it. Like Xue Yang with Song Lan, it's the what if for me. They're crazy sibling coded whether they like it or not and the way they bounce off each other is delightful for me to write and draw. They're both street rat gremlins and they deserve to mouth off at each other, and I also endlessly long for a world in which they actually have each other's backs. I love them so much it's unreal I can't go into too much detail or I'll start crying

Favorite headcanon: Hmmm that's a really good Q. I kinda just roll with these guys any which way so it's hard to pinpoint, but I guess my favorite thing that I do is give her a green scarf she never takes off in modern AUs because it was a gift from her brother (: But that's... not really a headcanon aksdjfg OH OH! I really like the one that her mother taught her to lie and pretend to be blind before her passing

First impression: "Man this guy fucking sucks he's annoying as shit. When does this part of the story end I literally could not care less"

Impression now: WELP I could spend literal hours talking about all my thoughts and feelings for this little shit but the summarized version for the sake of everyone is He sucks he's annoying as shit and I love him so much. He's super important to me on like a personal level so I am peak annoying about him yaaay

Favorite moment: It's hard to really have a favorite moment for a character who is admittedly rather difficult to follow along, due to the Behaviors, but I like his helicopter blade spin and fun little skipping in CQL, I like his backflips and "I need to get back before it rains" in the donghua (that second one for emotional reasons), I like him staring numbly after receiving candy in the manhua and in the novel I think it's him putting fresh straw in A-Qing's coffin while he waits for his life to magically fix itself

Idea for a story: Since I've covered another few involving him already, I'll share one idea that I would really love to write someday but that I just never get around to... Xue Yang tests the nails on himself to see just how much he can get away with (aka seeing if they can work on the living), effectively giving himself amnesia. He's found by Song Lan, hell-bent on revenge for his temple, but Song Lan cannot kill someone who doesn't remember his crimes. Memory restoring roadtrip ensues. It would be so fun (and also not!) for me to write...

Unpopular opinion: I don't need to write this one out lmao

Favorite relationship: If you've been reading the others I've answered, you'll know it's basically a tie between A-Qing and Song Lan. I just. There's so much that could happen between them. So much good, fun, terrible stuff for me to explore. Song Lan took up most of the space because he's just the favorite guy, really, and he alone makes me feral, but I love the gremlin-off that he has with A-Qing as stated above... And I mean yeah, Xiao Xingchen too, but it doesn't tickle my brain as much as the other two ): maybe because we saw a lot of it already in canon so there's not a lot for me to do there and my brain demands puzzle assembly to the maximum. Honestly, all relationships he has in canon are intriguing and worthy of exploration, but those initial two are my top picks

Favorite headcanon: TRANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First impression: "Is this guy ok" Impression now: This guy is definitely not ok. But that's fine. I'm here for him, I'm here to help him get out of the nationalistic toxic mindset. Take my hand it'll be alright Jacket you need not suffer anymore

Favorite moment: Definitely him rescuing Ms Girl from her abusive situation (which was also a building full of recently deceased people JDHFJHF) and taking her home and making sure she was okay, by a phone in case she wanted to call someone, on the couch so she'd have her own space, all bundled up with a blanket and a bucket nearby...

Idea for a story: I fear most of my HLM juice is depleted after dedicating so much of my life to it, but it might be nice to write something about him and his time in the military with his Special Ops tm. See how he was dealing with all that on a psychological level (hint: not well)

Unpopular opinion: He's only selectively mute, but has a bit of a speech impediment and talks slowly like Wen Ning lJHDJKFJ

Favorite relationship: Aside from him and his girlfriend, which sort of cemented my kind of love for ships in which partners are of similar personalities and full of boundless patience and adoration for each other, it's him and his best friend (so historians say) from his army days, who he still dreams about constantly and who he's shown to care enough about to go on a whole revenge killing spree for. That man saved his life and he was unable to do the same and it clearly kills him inside

Favorite headcanon: The speech impediment thing tbh and the idea that he's actually got these sad, gentle eyes under the scary chicken mask

[thelostgirl21]

I've seen quite a few interpretations of "Extraordinary Things", only to realize that it kinda looks like a literal instruction manual from Jaskier to Radovid on how to effectively woo him!

I mean...

Keep your words on ice

Your gaze lights the fire

Please kindly shut up, because we're stuck in some kind of impossible situation you and I where I know you keep being pressured to lie to me, and that royally sucks (no pun intended)!

Instead of using words, I thus highly suggest you keep looking at me the way you've been doing, because it's working.

They say, "Keep on playing nice"

But I have no desire

Fuck Dijsktra and Philippa, that are trying to make us do their bidding and keep us docile and subservient (i.e. "play nice", "fall in line"...), so they can further their own political agenda! Screw them!

Why waste our words

When lips were made

for extraordinary things

Because I kinda wish we were kissing and using those mouths to bring each other pleasure, instead of being forced to play deceitful games against each other.

It's not a want, it's a need

It is paying no heed

to what others say to sing

I need to genuinely connect with you, and for us to be open and honest with each other. And the only way we'll be able to do that is if we stop listening to them and putting on a performance for them - singing only what they tell us to sing.

The greatest songs are made up

of unspoken words of love

So, perhaps we could listen to our hearts instead? Because although we don't or can't speak it - at least not in the open - I know there's some deep love and affection growing there.

Of them I have had enough

With you, I have enough

With you, I am enough

I am enough

We don't need to play games; not with each other. I've had enough of them. You make me feel like you'd be enough, and like I could be enough, if we could just stop pretending.

Drop the sweet disguise

Your heart's beating too loud

Look, it's painfully obvious that you like me, and that you're much smarter than you pretend to be... So, could you please just drop the "dumb Prince persona" when it's just us?

What I see underneath is far more interesting...

The fairy tales and little lies

can't drown out all the sound

Even with the ambiant noise created by all of your pretenses, and all the little tales you spin to keep your brother / his spymasters pleased, I can still hear the words you won't, or cannot, dare say; and the sound of that warm, loving heart beating underneath.

So take this heart

And break this heart

For extraordinary things

I know loving you will probably hurt me and break my heart - in one way or another - yet I still want you to have it; because of all the extraordinary things I might also gain in return. The heartbreak might be worth it.

It's not a want, it's a need

It is paying no heed

to what others say to sing

Bis

The greatest songs are made up

of unspoken words of love

Bis

Of them I have had enough

With you, I have enough

With you, I am enough

I am, I am enough

Bis

So, by singing the song back to Jaskier, Radovid was basically telling him "I want to be able to love you and be honest with you, too. No more pretense, no more disguises, and no more lies."

Which is probably why his subsequent moment of weakness - with Radovid going to see Ciri behind his back - hurt him so much.

I still think Jaskier's words went too far in the way he said them to Radovid, but I do get the hurt behind them.

I don't think Jaskier can feel safe yearning to be that emotionally unguarded and open with someone that can't take the same risk to fully be honest and vulnerable with him (on things that do concern and involve him, at least).

We all carry some violence in us, and it only makes Jaskier more human and beautiful, in a sense, that he was so harsh...

But rationally, Jaskier can't realistically expect Radovid to learn how to use his newly acquired "fins", and gracefully swim alongside his siren on his very first try to emancipate himself from his usually toxic and very emotionally dry environment.

Unlike Jaskier - that has people that love him and would be willing to risk their lives to keep him safe - Radovid has no one.

Even his brother - though he expressed a passing frustration for the possibility of him being dead in a ditch somewhere - wouldn't have set foot outside the castle to personally search for him.

And the happy reunion lasted but a second before Vizimir spotted his portrait and went "Oh my! Fine work! Don't I look good?"

Like... Kuddos for Vizimir for being willing to recognize his baby brother's unhappiness, basically going "Yeah, you're right, you've been pretty useless here haven't you?", and agreeing to let him go.

But JFC! His brother's relief was so short lived, and his idea of "offering comfort" is basically saying "Oh, don't worry, I'll hurt people in your name once I'm done admiring myself!"

And people are surprised Radovid would be willing to jump in a vast and unfamiliar sea to follow a siren that he all but just met, on the promise of a mere "maybe"...

Regardless, Radovid trusting Jaskier to understand him, and to genuinely care about his plight, takes a lot of courage. He has to believe, and trust, with all his heart, that his siren wouldn't just let him drown out there.

Obviously, it's not Jaskier's fault that Radovid's situation is so awful, and that he's got nowhere else safe to go; nor is it his job to save him, either.

So, I do highly respect, and felt relieved, even, by Jaskier answering Radovid "maybe", immediately followed by "after I find Ciri", when Radovid expressed a wish to show him who he truly is.

He's putting up healthy boundaries, and setting realistic expectations. Jaskier knows how perilous trying to find and protect Ciri is going to be, and how far he's willing to go for those he loves.

By that point, I'm not even sure he's fully expecting to survive it. So, there's no point in him making any promise to Radovid that would only make him get even more heartbroken if he doesn't make it back to him.

That being said, I do believe that Jaskier would have been relieved to have Radovid come find him, and for them to face whatever is going to happen together.

But it has to be Radovid's choice to take those risks. It has to be something that he decides to do because he believes, in his heart, that it truly is what pleases him most.

Jaskier's simply being honest by telling him "I'm going to throw myself into the eye of the hurricane with Geralt to attempt to save Ciri, and I might not make it. If you come with me, you might not survive it, either. I'm not saying I don't want to give us a chance to really get to know each other and be together, but I can't make you - make us - my priority until I know my family is safe. Once we've found Ciri and the storm has calmed down, we'll see. Right now, she's what matters most. So, if you follow me, rescuing her is what we'll be doing, and I can't promise you anything else. I don't know what happens next."

Again, he makes that "maybe" truly worth fighting for, because a partner with a realistic approach to a relationship is extremely reassuring, and someone you can typically really rely on to actually attempt to build something real.

Still, to get back to the song, while I'm not claiming my interpretation of "Extraordinary Things" to be the right one, I can't help but be amused at the thought that it might really have been that straightforward of a song...

Here we are, looking for some deep meaning and symbolism through the lyrics, when Jaskier might really have just been saying:

"Look, I like you, I know you like me, I think we can both agree that Philippa and Dijkstra are complete sociopathic manipulative dicks, and having them set us up to play games against each other truly suck in a way that's far from enjoyable... So, how about we just stopped pretending to be anything we're not, and used our mouths for pleasure rather than lies and deceits?

Y/N?"

And Radovid chose to circle the "Y" by singing the song back, essentially telling him "I want that, too."

Seriously, I thought him having learned the song was a compliment, but that's literally a freaking conversation they are having between them.

Jaskier: Here's how I feel about our situation and how I propose we deal with it.

Radovid: I know, and I feel the same way.

But see, Radovid struggles with his playing, and think it's shit, because it's the first time he can safely be honest with someone.

And he doesn't have Jaskier's level of confidence or experience with being emotionally open and vulnerable with someone that loves him.

So yeah, Jaskier will have to be there to help him work on that, because Radovid has only started to learn playing that song.

They're able to freaking communicate through stares and lyrics. HOW?!?!?!

How do their brains even work?

It's freaking beautiful and I need more of whatever it is they have going on...

This is how they are going to stay under Philippa and Dijkstra's radar, and eventually turn the tables on them; secretly talking strategy right in the open, through song lyrics, without anyone catching onto it!

[taylorgrape]

Mariah's Characters as Taylor Swift Songs.

I am still so sorry. @sweet-sweet-petunia

PETUNIA RHUBARB AS FEARLESS "I'm tryin' so hard not to get caught up now." i have to be so real. this ties into junior's which we will see shortly but. i HAD to pick fearless bc bro!!! all the crimes she's committed with an underage asparagus!! she really do be fearless!! ofc there's also the like very sweet and cute energy of this song which gives larry and petunia vibes. but mostly it's abt committing crimes with an underage asparagus. Other notable lyrics that give me Petunia vibes: "So baby drive slow, 'til we run out of road. "You pull me in and I'm a little more brave." "I'd dance in a storm in my best dress, fearless."

JERRY GOURD AS MIRRORBALL "I can change everything about me to fit in." So while this song is inherently about trying to change everything abt urself for the sake of an audience I think for Jerry it's a little different. he changes not bc he has to but bc he is simply vibing. he can be reflective of the people he's around and while he does want to fit in like we all do, he truly is just trying to be everyone's friend bc he literally has no reason not to be. Other notable lyrics that give me Jerry vibes: "I'll show you every version of yourself tonight." "When no one is around, my dear, you'll find me on my tallest tiptoes." "I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me"

ESTHER AS A PLACE IN THIS WORLD "I'm just a girl, trying to find a place in this world." This was another one that as soon as I knew what this project would be I was like oh this is SO ESTHER. she really is just trying very hard to figure her shit out and live her life and she knows that that's just how life be!! this song also gives me hot normal vibes and that mixed w esther's whole gay thing i'm like yeah this is the song for her Other notable lyrics that give me Esther vibes: "I don't know what I want, so don't ask me, 'cause I'm still trying to figure it out." "I'll be strong, I'll be wrong, oh but life goes on." "And tomorrow's just a mystery, oh yeah, but that's okay."

FRANCOIS BLUEBERRY AS THE LUCKY ONE "And the camera flashes make it look like a dream." a song that is abt the romanticism of hollywood and how it's actually not all that romantic and kind of sucks but ppl would still sell their soul for it. however, francois hasn't reached that second part yet so for me he is the romanticism of this song and show business. he moved far away to live his dream and GOOD FOR HIM. he could never do anything wrong ever. also this is one of my fav songs from one of my fav eras so obviously it had to go to the special little guy. Other notable lyrics that give me Francois vibes: "Another name goes up in lights, like diamonds in the sky." "Now it's big black cars and Riviera views." "It was a few years later, I showed up here." BOB THE TOMATO AS LAVENDER HAZE "I'm damned if I do give a damn what people say." LET'S GIVE IT UP FOR BOBBERRY ARE U KIDDINGGG obviously the song abt the color PURPLE was for them but also!!! so many of these lyrics are so bob coded to me in general?? and then when u add in the megan aspect?? it all came together so beautifully. also this is another one that goes hand in hand with another (bet u can not guess who) but genuinely i am so proud of myself for thinking of this one lmao (also it took everything in me to not make one of the lyrics "the only kind of tomato they see is a one night or a bride lmaaao) Other notable lyrics that give me Bob vibes: "And you don't really read into my melancholia." "I've been under scrutiny , you handle it beautifully, all this shit is new to me." "I just need this love spiral, get it off your chest, get it off my desk."

DAD ASPARAGUS AS CARDIGAN "And when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone's bed, you put me on and said I was your favorite." okay so obviously a decent amount of this is due to the whole mom asparagus trauma. dad has been through a lot and it SHOWS. but also he is SO the type to use romanticized ass lyrics like this to describe his feelings. also idk if dad wears cardigans?? but he seems the type that would so i associated that with him as well. anyways as we know this is perhaps my absolute fav taylor song and so he should be honored to have it. (also notable mention to the fact that i almost added "leaving like a father" as a lyric just bc) Other notable lyrics that give me Dad vibes: "I knew you, your heartbeat on the high line, once in 20 lifetimes." "Chasin' shadows in the grocery line." "And I knew you'd come back to me." ARCHIBALD ASPARAGUS AS MY TEARS RICOCHET "And if I'm dead to you why are you at the wake?" this one makes me feel CRAZY!!! ARE YOU FOR FUCKING REAAAAL archibald's whole thing w his brother and lovey and oh my GOD this song was immediately perfect. obviously i take a lot of influence from the whole lovey thing but truly like... this whole song describes that situation to me and i am frothing at the mouth about it. i wish i could put every single lyric but PLEASE listen to it bc it's perfect!!!! Other notable lyrics that give me Archibald vibes: "And I can go anywhere I want, anywhere I want, just not home." "You had to kill me, but it killed you just the same." "And you're tossing out blame, drunk on this pain, crossing out the good years."

GOSSIP GOURD AS MASTERMIND: "I'm only cryptic and Machiavellian 'cause I care." OBVIOUSLY gossip gourd is a mastermind!! they know so much!!! also disclosure i know who gossip gourd is (figured it out watching vt w mariah irl so u know) but that was part of my reason for picking this song specifically. it fits SO WELL but also to me with or without knowing who it is this song is perfect for gossip gourd imo!! also mariah is an absolute mastermind for picking who she picked lmfao. Other notable lyrics that give me Gossip Gourd vibes: "What if I told you none of it was accidental?" "I laid the groundwork and then just like clockwork, the dominoes cascaded in a line." "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, strategy sets the scene for the tale."

[xstarlightxstarbrightx]

thoughts on how the Liyue Archon quest went [8]

so Lumi and Paimon go to inspect the Sigil stuff, while Kaeya meets up w/ Zhongli and essentially just chats w/ him while they wait for Lumi, right? i feel like Zhongli, at this point, totally sees this as an opportunity to learn more abt them, since Kaeya's a primary source. definitely feels like he'd make a comment about Kaeya's pupil being a unique shape—but i also feel like this would put Kaeya on edge, b/c i feel like Kaeya,,, knows? like he probably knows the Archons destroyed Khaenri'ah, and since Zhongli's very clearly the Geo Archon (and also once a War God), it probably puts him on edge a bit? Very much like 'ur not gonna kill me if u find out i'm Khaenriahn, riiiiight?'

and then when Zhongli notices him dodging the question, he probably just pivots to asking abt traveling w/ Lumine and Paimon b/c he recognizes that yeah, Kaeya probably knows. idk, i think abt this conversation a lot, b/c it's essentially just the unspoken acknowledgement between both of them that Kaeya knows who Zhongli is, and Zhongli knows who Kaeya is. it's just interesting to me.

and then Lumi shows up and they're both kinda relieved b/c MAN was it getting a lil bit awkward haha—and then Zhongli hears abt the Sigils getting reproduced by the Fatui (this is like the ONLY thing i remember from the Sigil bit ngl) so he's like 'mmm be on your guard around them.' i personally think this is when he kinda starts developing a desire to protect these people, which is,,, incredibly precious.

it only gets better when Lumi has to sing to the Glaze Lilies??? b/c listen, guys, LISTEN ok, i feel like Lumi is a decent singer. like she's not Pro(tm) but she's definitely a lil above average yk??? anyway i like to imagine Lumi singing to the Whopperflowers and for like the brief moment of her doing it, both Kaeya and Zhongli are like 'oh,,,,,' b/c who doesn't love a pretty song????

anyway the whopperflowers are assholes and interrupt the very cute moment, and then Ganyu shows up as a one-two whammy :( but it's fine b/c Glaze Lilies and also Zhongli warns Lumi and Kaeya abt the wear and tear of working. i love it a lot b/c Zhongli's whole thing is trying to relax, and it just feels like he already sees these scars growing on these two and he wants them to not earn any more.

unfortunately, upon their return and everything coming to a head, Lumine's like 'well we can't just stand by and do nothing'. i really love how Zhongli warns her to think this through and to be careful. i just think it's so bbgrl of him guys please.

pretty sure that from here, it's just the Golden House fight. that fight actually does leave scars on Lumi's leg and Kaeya's arms (b/c he blocked a nasty sword slash at some point), but generally the fight is over and done w/ pretty quickly (b/c Lumi a tough bbgrl and Kaeya's got her back <3)

They barely have time to like, bandage their wounds before they have to go and help the Qixing, and then they have to deal with THAT WHOLE DEBAUCLE. genuinely, that entire thing was just Lumi being a badass ok. i literally would do anything for her (and so would Kaeya b/c he was also incredibly awe-inspired by how much bad bitch energy she exuded in helping w/ the fight).

and then her being a mediator??? and then her being so wise and smart??? guys please let me gush abt her more i love her so fuckin much GUYSSSSSSS

which is why it sucks that Lumi and Kaeya have to see Signora again after Signora kinda traumatized Lumi a lil bit (yknow, attacking Venti outta the blue, sending Paimon flying away, knocking Lumi out, etc). personally feel like Lumi and Kaeya are a little wounded to see Zhongli just,,, willingly offering his Gnosis up to her??? when he explains it, it kinda makes sense, but also Lumi just,,, very much feels Danger from being around Signora, so she's still tense and wary.

it doesn't help that Zhongli couldn't tell her what the Tsaritsa promised him in return for his Gnosis. b/c that kinda just left a sour taste in Lumi's mouth for a bit.

[florallylly]

so CLEARLY the stobin big brother au brain rot had to come out some time and tbh this is going to be so scatterbrained bear with me

based off of my favorite season ... bb4 with jun song like well yes....like yeah i LOVE this season but also like. i have to think about this because i want to open up the possibility of there being a pre-established stobin relationship.

like OKAY clicking from the first day creating a final 2 alliance immediately ... i see it. initially enemies becoming begrudging allies using a final 2 alliance to keep each other loyal becoming genuine friends who honor that final 2 alliance despite knowing it wouldn't help their game. LIKE.... i am Sick to my Stomach. BUT some type of x-factor WOW.

if they go in as exes, i think i could only see them purposely bamboozling producers into thinking they would never work together when they have a shared google drive of strategies for their game or like fuckin... idk i don't strategize u tell me

OKAY BUT maybe a home town high school reunion type theme, where they make sure to include duos that would have been in the same high school at the same time blah blah. so there are two steves that could possibly have applied for big brother.

one steve was encouraged by His Boys (and carol) to try out bc he's athletic AND good at the social game. king steve is in it to win it, but as time goes on, steve harrington's bleeding heart prevents him from being as ruthless as he planned to be.

stobin seeing each other ep 1 and just the most evil glares toward each other, but actually they're nonverbally setting a meeting to discuss their alliance. they don't know it but it's their strongest, longest lasting alliance and the one they are ultimately the most loyal to. thinking jun and jee picking fights to throw people off their scent.... robin and her you suck/you rule board like. YEAH.

i think that in this scenario, steve is more jee in using his physicality to prove his worth to the team and winning comps. and robin is more jun in that she (unfortunately) is not the most liked in the house bc she has smth of a "floater" strat. WHICH not a coasting strat. a floater strat. okay. she is instigating and she is lying and she is scheming.

however also steve being jun with the kitchen strat like YEAH like yes. using cooking as an excuse to stay in the most central part of the house and eavesdrop like well yes. have a neutral reason to always be present for drama and make people not want to eliminate you bc if they do, they lose ur cooking too.

i think that like robin would win in this season, but only because steve didn't make it to the final 2. both of them knew that steve would have jury. like he just played the social game so well that even people he beat and blindsided wanted him to win. like he proved to be loyal while still pushing his game and he was on good terms with everyone in the house. steve threw the last hoh so he would be eliminated esp since he knew that robin would be the obvious winner against the other contestant

the Second steve would be a post-demogorgon or bullshit kind of checked out steve harrington who doesn't have it in him to fight for his crown. maybe he Did apply before the upside down and unlucky enough to have a life altering experience right before appearing on television. or maybe he was just throwing shit at the wall instead of applying for college thinking whatever. face card never declines.

picturing a taylor hale-esque journey where robin hears that King Steve is joining the house. and she has her preconceived opinions about him and obviously it's beneficial to her game to completely undermine a good social player before he even gets a chance to speak. so she starts turning people in the house against him but not in a paloma way me think. less intense, but still just as detrimental to steve's game.

but steve is able to make a couple solid connections in the house, and despite being put on the block, he's not eliminated. the first month in the house is pretty rocky for steve, and he's put on the block nearly Every Single Week. now he starts giving a jag performance and winning comps left and right like. power of veto every week baby and that's why he will Never Be Eliminated. people are beginning to look at steve differently now

they're like okay he's a bit of a free agent, and obviously a strong player. he could be used as a shield, he could be used as a buffer, keeping him could be beneficial to my game. robin is still iffy about him, but she sees his merit.

just like taylor, steve is one to one in convincing people to support him in his game. he appeals to them so effectively that people who were vehemently against him just boom.... appreciate. like robin is not immune to the harrington charm and she's already the worm in his brain

thinking some Big Drama involving steve though and literally daniel's tirade on taylor (which was SO undeserved and like? insane?) yeah.... and then the turn around and calling out of his previous treatment like. YEAH. that's what i want...

robin taking the longest to come around to steve, but being the most ride or die. they're like jag and matt just. ur my minute man baby.... i know i'd have a better chance against this guy but. we made a final 2 alliance and i'm not going to blindside you.

and steve would win in this case. he's just so strong with the jury and really good with comps like okay... was there a q.... robin argued her social game was more refined (it violated constitutional rights or smth)

but yes yes stobin big brother au... of course after the season they become the platonic soulmates they ARE in every universe. and like. people don't expect them to stay friends for so long after, but at some point like. okay now they're a duo. like that's bert and ernie.... acshually the old man muppets who sit in the nosebleeds and criticize the show loudly (was this only a thing in disneyland idk idk)

[meiozis]

teehee its me

reading this again felt like meeting a dear friend after a while of not being able to catch up <33 but im writing this as im reading so lets gooo

Shakira waits for no one.

SO REAL shes the uniting force

y/n being a horse girl is something that can be so personal…

“Do you think he only listens to classical music? I think a Kim Petras song would kill him instantaneously.”

please 😭😭😭

everything about y/n’s inner monologue is so. like she gets it. also shes mad funny

DEATH BY A THOUSAND PAPERCUTS !! when i first read this line it infiltrated my brain and i have genuinely not been able to stop saying it ever since, like its literally part of my vocabulary now

Joshua seems to take no issue with that, gratefully. He takes a seat on the chaise at the foot of the bed. He’s got a copy of Anna Karenina under his arm, probably to weigh the pros and cons of cheating on you. You don’t blame him—in fact, maybe it would make your doomed marriage exciting enough to be tolerable.

i wish i could add a voice memo of the way i laughed out loud at this

He might be the only person in the world who takes “pea-sized” seriously as a measurement tool.

get his ass

Ten-year-old you would have cried and threatened arson if she knew this is how you would eventually be proposed to, but you have no choice.

and she would be so fucking right to do all that too

If romance wasn’t already dead, then it died here, today, in your prison cell bedroom.

i just feel like y/n gets me and i get her. like you know how sometimes it’s like ‘i would NOT do that’ when you’re reading x reader fics. but this time i feel like im reading my diary from an alternate universe where joshua hong stares at my ass while im putting lipstick on the way the entire family treats her like she’s disposable and just an asset in their life, not their literal child is using my last nerve as a jumping rope but in a way where it makes me wanna read faster and get to the point where she’s finally happy

God really seems to have wasted a perfect face on him.

another line thats entering my vocab after this

He’s just like anyone else, you tell yourself. You’re at the club. They’re playing Everytime We Touch by Cascada.

arguably the most romantic song of all time

i would love to imagine that the skimpy black dress that gets mentioned is just Diana’s revenge dress

"The perfect opportunity to show the world that their hottest bachelorette is a bachelorette no longer. Also, we invited Pitbull.”

STOP i actually screamed vfdkhbgfd

The car ride to the derby feels like your own personal Saw trap, if Jigsaw wore a ridiculous hat and was actually your mother.

i desperately need u to know that im in love w the way ur brain works but also… SCREAAMMM the fact that the derby scene actually made it into the fic!!!! im actually getting a little emotional ngl… also obsessed w the way the whole part is executed, i love watching them bumble through the whole thing in an incredibly endearing way

“Absolutely,” Joshua says, as if there is a gun held to his pretty head. “Among all the garbage and the girl next to me, I suppose nothing else really mattered.”

like come on this is everything to me. when will someone say this about me also Josh rapid firing horse puns is so dear to me

“Well, why can’t you?” you ask. “Minus the Beatles thing. Pick better music.”

the only reason no one likes her (in royal circles duh) is because shes always right

“Don’t give me any ideas,” he replies. Under the bluebird sky of late morning, lips upturned and eyes bright, Joshua may be a sight you could get used to. Someday. “Brought you a coffee. I can’t have you sucking off a bean—the reporters would go crazy.” 

your comedic timing is so impeccable i wish this was a book so i could scribble all over it and slap it on my knees when im laughing at one of ur jokes and im Serious

OKAY hold on i need to go to part 2 asap i’ll see u there :-)

title: royally screwed [m]

pairing: joshua x f!reader

wc: 30.8k in total; part 1: 15.4k, part 2: 15.4k summary: between remembering last night’s party and pleasing your unrelenting family, you think being a princess is hard enough. then you’re thrust into an arranged marriage to royal darling joshua hong—straight-laced, infuriatingly obedient, and everything you’re not. pretending to be the perfect couple? impossible.   notes: romcom + smut (part 2), modern royalty!au in which yn is the princess of cotria/joshua the prince of acros (both fictional), enemies to lovers, arranged marriage, quarterlife crisis/coming of age, very very slow burn. lots of swearing, lots of alcohol, lots of feelings. very special thanks to @meiozis for all their help with worldbuilding and @wuahae for bearing with me through the endless drafts, scene changes, second guessing, horrible word choices, etc. you are the only reason this got done, and i love you to the moon and back <3 [read part 2 here!]

Here, in the dark, there is just you. 

The strobe lights press into your skin with all the brilliance of the sun, there's half a Modelo running down your leg, and you think you kissed the stranger behind you last week, but if you close your eyes, it's just you. No rules, no five second curtseys, no talk about the throne or whoever's ass happens to be keeping it warm at the moment. 

Here, you're nobody, and it's perfect. 

"I'm getting more champagne," Somi says, her voice careening over the music. "You sure Jihoon doesn't want any?" 

You glance back at him. He's flattened up against the back wall, holding your purse, like a raccoon caught going through the trash. This is one of the many trials he's forced to endure for your entertainment, but it's his job–not as your closest friend, but as your legally employed bodyguard. 

"No, he's on duty." 

"Right," she slurs. "Sometimes I forget you're a literal princess." 

If only it were that easy. Five drinks in and you think you can still feel your mother's vice grip on your arm and all the little white crescents of her french manicure. 

You love this song–at least, you think you do. You're too drunk to tell, but it doesn't matter. The dance floor is muggy, sardine-packed with one warm body after another, and it's heaven. The crowd moves, and you move with them. Shakira waits for no one. 

Somi must have secured another bottle of Cristal already. Soonyoung, your other partner-in-crime, hands you a flute and you take it, the glittery foam already bubbling over the lip. 

"Cheers." Out of his too-drunk mouth, it sounds like a new word altogether, but you bring your glass to his anyway. 

Tomorrow, you have a meeting with your parents. This, unlike all of your other involvements, is actually important, they said, and their voices had wound around you like a snare. 

When it gets late, Jihoon will sling your arm over his shoulders and haul you back to the palace, still tipsy and holding your stilettos to your chest like a shield. Tomorrow will come, and it's then when you'll have to try to be good. It's a useless, stupid affair, but you'll go through the motions anyway. 

But tonight, there is you and the music and the wonderful laughter of your friends, and you don't have to be anything at all. 

"Cheers," you tell Soonyoung, and you drink. 

--

There are four large topiaries in the palace garden: all lions. They stand tall in their planters, majestic and hairy with French lavender. Today you notice that the rightmost one's nose has been pruned off by accident, and he stands, snoutless, staring at his green brothers and sisters. 

You know this because this is the view from the study, and it has never changed. There is only one study in the east wing, and it is small and useless and the perfect room for your parents to sit you down and remind you that you do not, in fact, own a single thing about your own life. 

There is nothing new about this ritual. Even as a child, when you were more desperate to please, you could never be the right kind of daughter to your parents or princess to your country. Again and again, you landed yourself here, in trouble once more. 

So you stopped trying–you would find these four walls anyway, no matter what you did. Why not enjoy your Fridays instead?

By now, you’ve memorized the carvings on the armrest of the chair you’re in (a knobby column, then underneath, the whorl of a seashell). There are thirty-four terracotta stones on the way to the fountain, all spaced perfectly apart, sanded down to the millimeter. 

The scene remains unchanged. Your mother now stares down at you over the bridge of her nose, with that tight-lipped frown you've gotten so used to. Your father paces near the window, either wondering why you can't be softer, more pliable, like your older brother Jeonghan, or, alternatively, why one of the lions is missing a nose. Maybe both.

"Enjoy yourself yesterday?" your mother asks. 

"Yes," you reply, out of other answers.

"Wonderful. Then our early morning briefing with PR was good for something. You should be grateful last night's pictures won't make it out of the darkroom." 

Her voice, bitter and incisive, makes the hangover bubble up in your stomach. You and the tabloids weren't exactly on good terms, but it wasn't your fault so many people seemed to care about what you were wearing or who you were out with. 

"What did you want to meet about?" you ask, hoping to change the subject. 

You can't put your finger on it, but there's a cloying, heavy energy hanging on you. You feel as though you're on the precipice of something, although that could just be the consequences of all that Cristal ready to reintroduce themselves to your digestive system. 

Your mother clears her throat. 

"We have arranged for you to marry someone." 

And all at once, it seems as though all the air has been sucked out of the room. There's a sharp pain lodged somewhere between your chest, your stomach, and your unhappy liver. The larks sing emptily in the garden. 

"What?" Your voice sounds like it's unraveling somewhere in your throat. Quickly, frantically, you grasp at the faraway possibility that it can't possibly mean what you think it does. Marry? You can’t even remember the last time you thought of going on a second date with someone. Now you might actually throw up. 

"Prince Joshua, of the Hong family. The crown prince of–" 

"Acros. I know," you interrupt, the words jumping out of you in shock and anger. 

Of course you know who Joshua Hong is–Acros is a tiny, unremarkable country nestled into the border of your much bigger one, and Joshua their crown jewel. If you were the nation's problem, he was their darling. A bland thing to coo at when life got boring, the walking embodiment of a media training session. Smile and nod, smile and nod. He might as well be AI generated.

You wouldn't last a day with him. Not with your impatience, your opinions, or that loud mouth your parents always scold you for. Your mind swims with the mental image of the two of you on a gaudy parade float, doing that stupidly slow wave everyone seemed to insist on.

"Wonderful. So you'll pack a bag? The Hong family will be thrilled to meet you tomorrow," says your father.

"Why?" you ask. Your voice wobbles, treading over that childlike waver you never learned to control. "Is this to punish me?" 

"My dear, your brother will be ascending to the throne soon," your mother answers, looking you dead in the eyes. "It’s his face that needs to be on the front page, not you in another abomination of a swimsuit. The Hongs will keep enough of an eye on you.” 

She's right. She's always been right. Maybe not about the swimsuit, but you haven’t exactly been the PR princess your family needed you to be. If anything, you would think it made Jeonghan look better by comparison, but you know that your parents would prefer you to make appearances in something other than Deuxmoi’s Sunday Spotted. But the royal charade never fit you well either; it clings and sticks and bunches up at the seams like a cheap Halloween costume. 

"The Hongs thought their country would benefit from our money. It was an easy decision, really," your mother finishes, as if that makes you feel any less like a silly, bikini-clad pawn in a game of chess you never asked to play. 

"Does Jeonghan know?" 

"He sees its purpose,” your father says simply, like that was all that mattered. “You will too, in due time.”

He nods solemnly, which is how he closes every conversation–just another turn of the silent knife. As your parents turn to leave, their silken garbs trail behind them like ink in still water. Business as always, especially with you. 

"Your brother will be coming home from his press tour this week," your mother says on her way out. "You mustn't ruin this for him. The car leaves for Acros in the morning." 

There's a mean, barbed feeling in your heart. You don't know whether to scream or to cry, so you do what your mother taught you to do. You sit, stilled by a feeling of hopelessness, and let yourself be emptied. 

--

When you were thirteen, you learned how to ride a horse. 

Not the impractical, side-saddle way drilled into you when you were a little girl, with your skirt billowing over the fender and catching in the stirrups, but how to really ride a horse. 

It was on a night much like tonight–indigo and starless. Your brother had climbed up the marble trellis, his teenage, noodle body a perfect fit for scaling the lattice, and threw a stone at your window, just like you had seen in the movies. Jeonghan was still young, then, rebellious and unchanged by the throne. 

It was him who laced up your riding boots, hoisted you on your first horse, and pressed the reins into your palms. You remember the unforgiving hold of the leather saddle, not yet broken in. You were so sore the next day, you were bed-bound–truly a punishment worse than death, if not for another reminder that everything you do ends up hurting you a little. 

"It's great," Jeonghan had told you, breathless and haloed by the moonlight. "You can just ride. nowhere to go and no one to answer to." 

You had spent the summer this way. Every night, you learned the sound of the forest at twilight, chasing Jeonghan's mud-splattered palomino. In the mornings, breakfast consisted of rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and whispering about whatever misadventure you had found yourselves tangled in the night before. 

That was before he had come of age. Before your father gave him the Throne Talk, and before he was whisked away into endless meetings and etiquette lessons and parliaments. Your inside jokes became foul, overripe in his newly coached mouth. He even learned to play golf, and he hated golf. 

Past August, you don't think you ever got your brother back.

You slide the oaken doors of the stables open, feeling your arms squeeze underneath your riding shirt. Here, it’s always quiet after sundown.

It hasn't changed since the day you first snuck in with Jeonghan. You let the green scent of the hay fill your lungs, the sleep-stir of the horses like music to your ears. Dokyeom has left the tack room open by "accident" once more, likely to avoid catching you picking the lock with a bobby pin like he had a few months ago. 

"Hey, you," you whisper, coming to the stall of your own horse. Astrid, a bay thoroughbred, was Jeonghan's gift to you on your 18th birthday, a wistful reminder of a summer now past its prime. "No surprise here, but I had a really, really bad day." 

Astrid, oblivious, noses at your palm in search of a nonexistent sugar cube. Somehow, this brings the anxious chatter of your mind to a crescendo—would Astrid come with you to Acros? When would that happen? More importantly, when were you moving? You think of a too-warm summer morning, the ridiculous, oversized brim of one of your mother's sunhats, and a moving truck. That, and a country ready to delete you from its ranks. 

It's now, with the bridle in your fists, that you hear the wheedling groan of the stable door as it slides open. Without thinking, you quickly push out the first excuse you have. "I apologize, I was—" 

"It's me." 

Jihoon. 

You would tease him about his fear of ponies—perhaps it's because he is quite literally the same size as them—but you think hearing another person tell you off would officially push you over the edge. You don't want to be dramatic, but you don't even know if Acros even had horses. 

That, and somehow he's both the first and the last person you want to see. The guilt feels a bit heavier when you know his life is about to change too, in no small part due to your own failings.

"Jihoon, I…" you start. There’s an apology that’s been sitting on your tongue, one you haven’t quite learned to spit up yet. You don’t know who it’s for—yourself, or everyone else—but Jihoon interrupts you before you can finish your thought. 

"You forgot your jacket," Jihoon replies. 

For once, you can't read him. You wonder if he's thinking about if he'd get along with the other bodyguards, but, more likely, he's probably pitying you. You're the last person in the world that should be in an arranged marriage, and even someone who kills people for a living could tell. 

"I'll be in the foyer." 

You don't exchange any more words. Jihoon knows that there is nothing he can say that will erase what's about to happen, and like always, he is right.

After you saddle up, Astrid takes you to the forest like usual. Honestly, you've lost count of the times you've come out here to cry, usually about a boy you don’t even like, or, worse, Jeonghan declining your weekly Facetime session again. But now, you think you both know this time is very different. 

"Astrid," you groan. "Joshua looks like a Ken doll from hell. He probably pronounces tomato like tomahto and has a closet dedicated to his tweed collection. I can't marry him." 

Astrid is none the wiser. You wish she was human for a moment so you could show her the crater-sized hole that "prince joshua google images" left in your browser history. 

"Do you think he only listens to classical music? I think a Kim Petras song would kill him instantaneously." 

The mental image of Joshua Hong being struck down by the first ten seconds of Throat Goat makes you laugh, but you still don't feel far away enough from the truth.

You remember your 21st birthday, a balmy spring Friday. Jeonghan had been helping out at the local youth theater, and the opening night of their production was coincidentally the same day. Jeonghan had never been one for theater (last time, he had fallen asleep during Mamma Mia, of all musicals). You knew the press turnout was expected to be huge, but the whole thing felt like one big charade to you. 

So you had planned your big birthday bash—you only get one 21st, after all—that day. The paparazzi fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Unsurprisingly, drunk, hot girls made for a better story than Greek theater. 

You remember the raw, stinging look Jeonghan had in his eyes the next morning. He didn't even have to say anything, but you knew. The memory carves out an abyss in your chest. You knew you should have done better for your brother, but he didn’t even feel like your brother anymore. 

Still, actions have consequences, and this was a hell of a consequence. Even out here, the inconvenient reality of it seems closer than ever. but you're out of time. The night fades fast, especially ones like these. 

So you press your heart to Astrid's mane, the pale moon high over the both of you, and you ride. 

--

Late spring is kind to Acros. 

The tulips push their bright heads out of the dirt, winking and blazing in the daylight, and the green fields stretch so far they look like water. 

You had spent the car ride with your nose pressed to the window, watching all the sun-bleached buildings zip by. You mustn't ruin this for Jeonghan. It spins around in your head like an old pair of shoes in a washing machine. 

Now you stand in the grand foyer, your parents on either side of you. Jihoon hovers behind, holding the overstuffed duffel bag you had rushed to pack this morning. 

A hushed arrival such as this was unbecoming of your family, but it was necessary. your parents had stressed that the arranged part of the deal was not meant to be public knowledge because it was bad for optics. To you, the arrangement was actually the entire deal. That, and you and optics never exactly got along. 

Waiting for Joshua and his parents gives you a moment to observe what could be your new home, although you’re still waiting for the miraculous plot twist that will save you from your fate. 

That being said: you’ve set foot in plenty of nice places, but if HGTV ran segments for castles, this would certainly be the blueprint. It’s smaller than the palace in Cotria, but you like that—it’s cozier, less cold-seeming. 

The filigreed ceilings vault dizzyingly high, and the chandelier above the muraled walls is set afire with the noontime sun. the blushing azaleas cascade from their pots, and they line the hallways with joyous pops of white and pink. breaking the spell is the distant staccato of several sets of footsteps on marble, and you straighten your back, as if by divine command. 

Three figures approach you: Joshua and his parents. Even from a distance, you can see the trained walk of royalty, their shoulders straight enough to hold water. You’ll give credit where credit is due—they look even less thrilled to meet you than you are to meet them.

Unfortunately, up close, Joshua is more handsome than the cameras would betray. He's taller than you had imagined, too. without trying, it looks like he jumped out of a shitty Disney movie, one where the prince says two words and still gets the girl. More than that, you notice how his face is like glass—unwavering, cruelly still. One wrong move, and you'd break him. 

"Your highnesses," you say, lowering your head in a pronounced curtesy. 

Joshua bows in response, like clockwork. He reaches for your hand, then brings it to his lips to kiss the back of it. 

At once, you feel your hackles jump up, even though many a man has done far nastier to you. You can’t tell what pisses you off more: a, the fact that he smells like a hotel lobby, or b, that he managed to get his mouth on you in less than five seconds. 

"I'm elated we have the privilege of welcoming your daughter into our home," Joshua's mother says. Like him, she is staggeringly elegant and even harder to read. "She's beautiful." 

Fortunately, she has picked the one compliment that your parents can agree on without lying through their teeth. You watch them laugh and titter amongst themselves, and it's now that you notice Joshua has been looking at you this whole time.

You think look is too kind of a word, though. It's something colder than that, more clinical, and you really don't like it. Your stylist had spent upwards of two hours today in front of your vanity this morning, mostly in a losing battle with a pair of fake lashes, and you wonder if one of them is crooked. That, or Joshua is similarly wondering just how he will endure a life wedded to you. 

"Joshua, please," his mother chides, and you watch him almost immediately pivot towards her, like he’s on wheels. "Where are your manners? You should show the princess around. Get to know each other a bit before press tomorrow." 

Press. Of course. Your least favorite word. You vaguely remember your parents mentioning it in the car this morning, but it must have gotten lost among all the other terrible things they'd told you. 

Your head starts to hurt. Joshua keeps smiling at you, empty, doll-like.

"Yes, I'd love that," you say, feeling like a deflating balloon. You were hoping his company will be better than watching four grown adults fall all over each other, but you're starting to doubt that. 

Joshua offers you his arm, and you take it anyway. 

"We'll be off then," he chirps before bowing once more. His freakishly shiny shoe nudges yours to remind you to do the same. Begrudgingly, you listen, watching your shellacked, angry expression in the patina of his loafers. 

Not a good start, but what did you expect?

You tamp down your irritation and let him lead you into the Great Hall. It's a shiny, golden tunnel, studded with glossy oil paintings of his parents, his grandparents, then the next set of old people before them. Their eyes stare at you, pools of hazy paint in their moon faces. You briefly imagine your painting up there, with Joshua's hand hovering meekly over your waist, unused to being more than two feet away from a woman his age.

"It's nice to finally meet you," Joshua says. "I think I've only seen you in pictures." 

He's referencing the one of many “encounters” you've had with the paparazzi, a la yesterday night. They take trashy photos, overexposed and grainy from the camera flash, with your ass most likely in the frame. 

You choose to let it slide—you have no choice, really. At least you have an ass. 

"The pleasure is mine," you reply. "I believe you were at the cricket championships a few months ago, right?" 

"Correct. Do you watch? I don't believe I saw you." 

"No, but my brother was there." Your footsteps echo against the marbled walls. "Just trying to think of your last public appearance," you offer unhelpfully, since you and he both know those are few and far between. 

"That's right. He mentioned you were busy," Joshua replies. "Glastonbury was that weekend, was it not?" 

He's right. It was, but you don't like the insinuation he's making. You weren't at Glastonbury anyway—your parents wouldn't let you attend, and Jihoon was unwilling to come up with a cover story for you. Because you would rather watch paint dry than attend another cricket game, you instead spent it with takeout and reruns of Rupaul's Drag Race. 

"Can't recall," you answer. "Doesn't matter. I'm not one for cricket, anyway."

"Didn't know you had a choice."

You watch Joshua halfheartedly gesture to the Great Hall. The seemingly mile-long dinner table is empty now, save for a gratuitously piled fruit bowl. 

Your country frequently hosts guests, but the Hongs are notoriously insular. You imagine the four of you, crammed together at one end of the table, making horrendous small talk every morning over wilted danishes and raspberry preserves. Somehow, your mood worsens even more than you thought possible.

"Can I see the library?" you ask in an attempt to pivot. 

"Of course. Do you enjoy reading?" 

"A normal amount." You pass by another set of windows and take note of the rose garden outside, verdant with the May sunshine. Astrid has a bit of a penchant for eating roses, which would definitely complicate your plan to smuggle her in. No matter—you’ve done worse. "I studied political science at university, so I got a healthy dose of it." 

"Didn't we all?" Joshua chuckles.

He pushes the door open to the library, which is just as lavish as the rest of the palace. You wonder how well-worn it is, how many spines have creases in them, how many dedications were speckled with a funny annotation or two. But judging by first impressions, you wouldn't be surprised if all the books still had their dust jacket on. 

"I mean, I read an insane amount of Dan Brown," you reply. "Not many of us can say we've solved the Davinci code, you know." 

You hoped this would crack a laugh out of him, but his grin is thinner than an eyebrow from the 2000s. Truthfully, you would compare this conversation to a death by a thousand papercuts, but somehow that feels preferable to the guillotine of discussing the terms and conditions of your rapidly impending marriage. You feel as though that would be violating some rule you aren't yet aware of, and you're unwilling to endure the patent leather consequences of another faux pas. 

"I've heard of it," says Joshua after much thought. "My parents were shuttling me between meetings and private lessons, so, unlike some, I was quite busy during university." 

You're not about to explain that you were equally as busy as him. Something tells you that he'd be too prideful to believe you anyway. 

"How difficult. Surely you were able to have some fun," you say, your voice betraying your distaste. "Or were you too good for that?" 

Too far. 

"I did what my position allowed," is Joshua's terse reply, and you know you've crossed a line. Still, it dazes you that the man standing next to you may have never done anything for himself in his life. Even Jeonghan did, before your parents really tightened the reins. 

The air buzzes with a silence sharp enough to make you bleed. You wish literally anyone else was standing next to you, but you realize there are no more horses or emergency cabs or Jihoons to rescue you from this one. 

"How about I take you to our room? I hope you'll find it comfortable." 

You glance to your right to catch a glimpse of Joshua. He smiles, a dutiful press of the lips, and you watch it ripple.

--

"Jihoon, it is so much worse than I thought." 

You sit on the plush carpeting of your bedroom floor, amongst your small disaster of things. Jihoon examines you, one eyebrow raised, as he leans against the bedroom door. 

"He's not around, right?" 

Jihoon shakes his head.

"I don't get it," you sigh. "I go out. I get drunk. I have a little fun on the weekends. I don't see how any of this makes me a bad person." 

"You know how traditional your families are." Jihoon bends down to pick up a hair bow that jumped ship from the vanity. "It's just how it is." 

"He treats me like some high school delinquent. I tried, but he has no sense of humor. No joi de vivre. I think he would actually explode if he knew I went out two days ago." 

"Give it time," Jihoon supplies unhelpfully. "I don't know French, but he can't be that bad. You just met him." 

“Yeah. Usually that’s a good thing. I’ve fucked people i know less about.” 

Jihoon shakes his head and laughs, one of those little cackly ones he reserves for your company. 

"Well, you have been with worse," he tuts. "Definitely worse." 

"Jihoon, be serious. This is the rest of my life we're talking about." 

“I know." He draws his lips into a line, likely searching for the right thing to say. "This sucks. I wouldn't be good at this either." 

"You're talking to me. I don't think there's a single royal thing I can do right."

He's out of words, so he bends down to awkwardly pat you on the head, which, in all your years of knowing him, is the most affection he can muster. This is why you prefer horses to Jihoon for therapy, although you appreciate the effort. 

"I'd stay, but they want me to go to some meeting," he says, jerking his thumb towards the door. "I'll see you tomorrow." 

So he leaves you, desolate and linen-covered. Back to square one. 

The room seems to echo with how empty it feels. The bare walls are painted champagne, a rich, indifferent color. They soar to an arched ceiling lined with baroque crown moulding. There's a large window facing the garden, framed by deep green velvet. Atop the vanity cradled to the wall, the ivy of the wrought mirror curls at the edges, as if escaping. The chandelier hangs low, fat and pear-shaped, and its crystals douse the room in gauzy lamplight.

At least the canopy bed looks comfortable. It's the one thing keeping you from calling this place a veritable jail cell, which still seems like an understatement. For once, you miss your own bedroom. Granted, it didn’t look much different on the surface. but despite all the paneling and the heavy velvet, you still like to think it had some personality. You still keep your pillow pet on your bed (a horse named Robert). The back wall is chipped from a Gossip Girl poster your mom made you take down.  

Before you’re able to get too sentimental, the unwelcome sight of your future husband steals you from your thoughts. 

"Evening," Joshua says, stepping into the room. He's so quiet, it takes you aback. "Still unpacking?" 

"Sorry." You gesture around you. "I underestimated my ability to overpack."

"You should have told the staff," he says, surveying the damage. "Do you need help?" 

"No," you insist. Somehow the prospect of him getting on the ground to sort out all of your things upsets you, even more than him touching all of your unmentionables. "No. Please. Just ignore me."

"Alright." 

Joshua seems to take no issue with that, gratefully. He takes a seat on the chaise at the foot of the bed. He's got a copy of Anna Karenina under his arm, probably to weigh the pros and cons of cheating on you. You don't blame him—in fact, maybe it would make your doomed marriage exciting enough to be tolerable. 

"PR event tomorrow," you start, folding up a nightdress. "Bet you're excited for that." 

“As excited as one can be before announcing their arranged marriage," he replies dryly. "But surely you have enough experience with the press for the both of us." 

So that’s how he wanted to play. Fine. You wouldn’t let him walk all over you a second time. 

"Well, I'd hope all those classes you took would be good for something."

"That's rich, coming from the case study on bad media training." 

"Oh, please," you snap. "At least I know how to have a good time." 

"I was having a great time before I was informed this was happening." 

"Forgive me. I had no idea you were so invested in my personal life." You huff as you heave an oversized armful of clothes to the closet. “Think TMZ has any job openings?” 

"Very funny," he retorts. Joshua holds up a skimpy black dress that's fallen from your pile, one well acquainted with the midnight grease of one too many nightclubs. "You dropped this, by the way. I don't really think the nightlife here will be quite to your taste, though." 

"Oh right, because this is where happiness goes to die, huh?" You snatch it back from him, feeling the knot of anger in your gut flare. 

The room seems to pulse with an uncomfortable silence, red-hot with unsaid words. You recognize the all too familiar way Joshua sets his jaw back, and you're transported all the way to the study in the east wing, snoutless lion, terracotta steps, and all. He’s not any different from anyone else, so you’re not sure why you expected anything else. 

You do the only thing you can do—bite your tongue. 

"Look," you finally say, gathering the wherewithal to call for a truce. "I know that we didn't ask for this." 

Joshua laughs. Actually, it's the first time you've heard it since you've met, and it would be an otherwise tolerable, even nice, sound if it wasn't directed right at you.

"Right, because who doesn't want to have to babysit someone for the rest of their life?" 

You take a hard swallow.  You've both done enough damage for tonight, although you'd love to see his expression when you call him the live-action version of Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Maybe another time. 

Instead you think of Jeonghan, stuck in his meetings and sunk into this new, starched form of himself that you find difficult to recognize. Still, he's your brother, and you'd hate to see him suffer for it. 

"Stop. I'll be good," you say. "I promise. I know there's a lot at stake for the both of us." 

You can hear Joshua's long, drawn exhale. The furrow dug between his brows flattens out, and he seems to be reminded of everything they taught you both in Conflict Resolution 101. 

"I apologize. I got out of line," he says. You watch the cogs turn on that unfortunately pretty face of his. You hope he finally reveals that he has a much better, kinder personality that he was waiting to debut, but he doesn't. Instead he picks up yet another fallen item from your stash and hands it to you (this time, a much more presentable blouse). 

"I know we don't like each other—" You hold up a hand to interrupt him from lying to you. “—but we can do our best for the cameras. Because that matters. Hate me all you want in private." 

"Okay." He gives you a defeated look, which is all you suppose you'll get out of him today. "Deal." 

That night, there are no more backhanded compliments, quips, or mean-spirited attempts at sarcasm. 

You sink into your side of the bed, a damask-woven vat of quicksand, and watch the spears of light dance on the ceiling. If you had known your last outing was the one a few days ago, maybe you would have drank a little more, stayed out later. Maybe you wouldn't have even gone home. 

Joshua has been reading on the other side of the bed, which seems like oceans apart. The metronomic turn of his pages would have put you to sleep if it wasn't for this new fear, a black, trembling one, that's now taken residence in your chest. It feels like you are further from yourself than you've ever been, and you don't know how to get back. 

"Is it too bright for you?" Joshua's voice, now tempered by the stillness of the evening, pulls you out of your thoughts. "I can turn the lamp off." 

"It's ok," you groan. "Can't really sleep. Don't worry about it." 

He doesn't say anything. Instead you hear the oiled pull of the bedside nightstand before he places something on the bed beside you.

It's a book. Specifically, one of those trashy romances that they only sell at the airport because no one would be brave enough to read them anywhere else.

"It's no Dan Brown," he says. "Hopefully still to your liking." 

You sit up against the headboard and flip through the pages. The prince of Acros owning a book with the words "juicy", "mewling", and "best friend's brother" in the first fifty pages are enough to tide you over for the night. Probably the next week, to be honest.

"Yes, indeed, your highness. Of the raunchy summer fling." 

Joshua smiles, and this time, you think it's a real one. 

--

You hate mornings. 

You thought this one would be different, probably due to the fact that you would soon be standing in front of a few too many cameras to announce your tragic fate to the entire world. Unfortunately, it's like all your other mornings—rushed, nauseous, and now with all the added anxiety of a semi-non consensual public appearance. 

"Five minutes!" you holler as best you can, a hair pin wiggling in the corner of your mouth. Rule number one of a hard launch: don't be caught looking complacent. Even if the other half of the launch would rather be with anyone other than you. 

Joshua's in the attached bathroom doing his hair. Like everything else he does, it is painfully calculated. He might be the only person in the world who takes "pea-sized" seriously as a measurement tool. 

But even as he so carefully measures his pomade, pump by pump, you don't miss the way his eyes skim over your figure as you lean over the vanity chair to apply your lipstick. Maybe it's because your ass is practically vacuum sealed into your sundress, or maybe he's just looking for another fight to pick. Either way, there's a small part of you that takes pride in this, even if just a little. 

"Ready?" Joshua asks, switching off the bathroom light. You hate to admit it, but he looks good in a sports jacket. You remind yourself that you had to literally rock-paper-scissors this morning to use the vanity mirror because you fogged the bathroom up after your shower. "It's not a pageant." 

"Shush. You are so rude. Never interrupt a girl when she's getting ready." 

In the mirror, you watch Joshua huff behind you. Then he procures a little black box from his pocket, and a crazy sort of feeling washes over you before you remind yourself to be normal. Ten-year-old you would have cried and threatened arson if she knew this is how you would eventually be proposed to, but you have no choice. 

You're sure Joshua feels the same. He was probably hoping for something classic with all the works, and instead he's got a pissed-off Jihoon and you, internationally renowned harlot. Funny how things turn out.

"Any minute now," bitches Jihoon from the other side of the door. 

You close your compact and turn around to face Joshua, who's still fumbling with the box.

"I'm sure this is not what you anticipated," he says, finally cracking it open. “But—" 

"No speech. Just put it on." You stick your left hand out, still glittery from last week’s manicure. "Not like it means much anyway." 

"Yeah."

And just like that, it is done. You feel the shock of Joshua's huge hands over yours, then the unceremonious bite of the cold band. He doesn't linger. 

You hold your newly engaged hand in front of you. The ring must have looked better in the box—on you, it seems out of place, gaudy, yet another thing you can't quite fit into. It squeezes your finger a bit, but it'll do. 

"Ready?" he asks. 

"Let's get this over with."

If romance wasn’t already dead, then it died here, today, in your prison cell bedroom. 

You have no time to lament this, as Joshua’s already half out the door. Quickly, he seems to shed his foul, argumentative inside personality and slip into a second-skin, one that is more poised, gracious, and luminous.

Today's objective is supposed to be simple: friendly, premarital pictures to accompany a written statement to the public announcing your engagement. No paparazzi, no journalists. Still, you're starting to see why your parents decided it was a good idea to stick you with this guy. 

In the foyer, your families await you. It's as if their gaze can slow time—at least four people approved your outfit, and still, the weight of their eyes on you, ever appraising, is crushing. Immediately, your mother starts rearranging the strands of hair on the top of your head and fiddling with the sleeves of your dress, like you're some sort of doll. 

"Come, come," a member of the PR team urges. "Everything is set up. We'll be quick." 

There's a frenetic, tense energy over the palace. It's clear that this marriage is a gambit no one is happy with, and today would make it very, very real. 

Outside, there is a lone photographer. The sun, morning-ripe, reflects off his camera lens like a third eye. The lawn, freakishly green, sprawls out around you, and the blue spruce frames the scene, perfect by design. 

"I just need you to stand next to each other and smile," he says. "That's all, right?" he directs this towards your PR team, about seven too many for a task like this. One of them whispers something in his ear. Your parents watch from the shaded doorstep like wax figures in a museum. 

You and Joshua stand shoulder to shoulder, yearbook photo style. 

"Bit closer," the photographer calls out, and you smush yourself against his arm, close enough that you can appreciate he's got some muscle on him. "Alright. Hold still." 

Click. You've always hated the flash, but you root yourself obediently to the concrete. Your cheeks hurt from smiling. Click. 

Your mother interrupts her conversation with a staff member—likely haggling over the minutia of the statement—and says, "Look happier," as if you're in some dystopian advertisement for a new car. 

"She's talking to you," Joshua says through the grit of his fake, pink smile. 

"Right, because you're such a peach." 

You just want to go back inside and have breakfast. 

You place a tentative hand on Joshua's bicep and turn to him, beaming like you would at a hot bartender when there are five other people waiting for a drink. 

There's a glimmer of surprise in his expression before he matches you. You can see why people dote on him so much—his cheeks get round, and his eyes magically gain the sparkles that people pay for on Facetune. God really seems to have wasted a perfect face on him. 

"Move your hand up so we can see the ring." You obey, feeling the firm cord of his arm underneath you, and you wonder where the gym is in the palace. Joshua was certainly gatekeeping it from you. "Perfect." 

You stand there, living your America's Next Top Model nightmare, before the photographer hits you with, "A kiss for the camera, yeah?" 

All the blood drains from your face. You think you actually say Huh? aloud. Joshua opts to turn to his parents to intervene, which would be funny in literally any other scenario except this one. 

"You heard him," his father replies. "Act like you're actually engaged." 

Honestly, it was a fair request. No one wanted to take any chances. Plausible rumors of an arranged marriage would backfire spectacularly. Jeonghan wouldn't see the front cover of anything ever again, and the entirety of Acros would wonder just how deep in the shitter they were that Joshua was forced to marry you. 

Your parents were already so far into the conspiracy, you overheard them talking about using unpublished paparazzi pictures and rebranding them as times you snuck off to see your unfortunate lover. Point taken. 

"Okay, okay," you laugh nervously. "Of course." 

You face Joshua, steeling yourself, and lean in. The world seems to fall away, but not how you like—it feels as though you've been sucked out of your own body and dropped into a new one that doesn't know what a kiss is or how to do it. 

He's just like anyone else, you tell yourself. You're at the club. They're playing Everytime We Touch by Cascada. 

Soon all you know is the heat of your cheeks, the shaking flat of your palm over Joshua's shoulder, and the wet pressure of what feels like a pair of lips, soft but also very unwilling. 

Click. Click. Then it's over. Everyone huddles around the camera, like animals to a watering hole. Shame, hot and heavy, seems to drape itself over you. 

"Can we get one more?" the photographer asks.

Fuck. Your stomach drops. You can't even glare at Joshua. 

"Sure thing," Joshua says easily, unaware he was the reason it went so badly in the first place. 

You take a deep breath. You imagine a good Kylie Minogue song and a tall stranger with pecs that could fit into a bra, and your eyes flutter shut. 

You decide to go for it this time. Unfortunately, you and your inept partner are on entirely opposite pages again, and you almost miss each other by a mile. When you do get it right, it's messy, two teenagers fumbling in a closet with the lights off. 

Once everyone sees this massacre, it seems they resign themselves to the same conclusion you had long ago. Someone throws a thumbs up above their head, and everyone clears out so fast, it's like nothing ever happened. 

Soon, it's just you, Joshua, and your mother with a red pen and the manuscript. Your heart is still buzzing in your chest, even though you and Joshua are now standing at a distance that makes you believe in the cheese touch again. 

"Now that wasn’t so bad," she says, before escorting the two of you back inside. Perhaps lying cushions the blow of a bad decision, but you're already in too deep. The script, the cameras, even your mother's glossy words—your life is starting to feel like a permanent movie set, and you don't know how to clock out. 

The first thing you do is take off the ring. It's starting to look more and more like costume jewelry on your untrained, bumbling hand. Even still, you can still feel its ghost on your finger, see the glare of the camera flash in the laser-cut facets. 

Worse, you watch Joshua shrug off his sport jacket, likely wondering how exactly that went so wrong, and you can feel that same sensation, still warm, right over your lips.

--

"Save me, red wine, save me." 

Home, sweet home. You're back in Cotria for the rest of the week. This morning's stint was the only thing you had on the schedule, and you told Joshua you had some business to attend to at home. 

Said business was a Niçoise salad and half a bottle of wine, but no one had to know that part. Your struggle meals were your own business, and you think you will actually disintegrate on the spot if you have to sit through another conversation about World War II with Joshua's dad. The one you had at dinner last night was plenty. 

The restaurant you’re at is a familiar haunt, but not too familiar. The ass-kissers and the groupies have gotten good at keeping their heads on a swivel, and you’re not exactly planning on another encounter with a camera. But here, the crowd is quiet enough, the food good enough, the service fast enough. It’s enough, which you’ve come to prefer. 

That's the other thing about Cotria—there’s an overabundance of everything. Department stores, parlors, dog cafes, polished bars with overpriced cocktails. It’s almost a rarity to find a place like this, quiet enough to actually talk. 

"You must be in the fucking trenches," Somi says, shaking her head. "When's the press release getting published?"

"Next week," you groan. "The good news is that they want us to go to the derby afterward."

"Okay, miss horse girl," Somi says, clinking her wine glass against yours. "You betting this year?" 

"No, I shouldn't." You shovel another forkful of leaves into your mouth. "But I really hope I get to watch it instead of pretending to like a guy the whole time." 

"I didn't see you pretending in uni," Somi says, cocking an eyebrow up at you. "And those guys are ugly. This guy isn't." 

"Okay, wait," you protest. "Ugly cute. Don't get it twisted. And they don't act like sentient wet paint. This guy sucks." 

You're reminded of the moment before you left the palace this morning. Joshua saw that same black dress that he used against you make its way into your bag, and he gave you the dirtiest stink eye you'd ever seen. 

I'm not above tattling. They were the first words he'd said to you after The Incident. 

Good thing you won't have to, you replied. He didn't even see you out because no one was standing around to clap him on the back for being a good fake fiancé. 

"Whatever." Somi picks a tomato off your plate in exchange for some of her fries. "I wouldn't mind it, is what I'm saying." 

"You slept with the bouncer to get into Annabel’s." 

"Fuck off. He was actually really good. Club entry was just a bonus," she laughs. "That reminds me—you're coming to my birthday, right? Or do you have wifely duties now?" 

"Of course I'm coming!" you insist, feeling the word duty hit like an actual bullet to your chest. "I wouldn't miss it for the world." 

"Just making sure! You know I gotta have my people around." 

You had known Somi since you were in diapers. She's the cousin twice removed of a baron, or a count, or maybe even a viscount–you never were good at keeping track of those kinds of things. Even though you had seen her at countless brunches, coronations, and garden parties, you don't think you actually became friends until you ran into her at a college party in Mykonos. She sidled up to you, smelling like strawberries and the bleachy sting of hair dye, and handed you a cucumber margarita. 

The beer here sucks, she had whisper-shouted to you, right over the shell of your ear. Wanna dance? You were inseparable ever since. 

"It's going to be huge. There are, like, 200 people on the guest list right now. Soonyoung rented a villa, There's gonna be a champagne tower, and the music won't suck. Guaranteed." 

"That sounds perfect," you sigh. "Please tell me there's gonna be a pool. I need to show off my new swimsuit." 

"Duh." Somi rolls her eyes, glittery under her extensions. "The perfect opportunity to show the world that their hottest bachelorette is a bachelorette no longer. Also, we invited Pitbull.” 

“Shut the fuck up. Wait, is he actually coming?” 

”Dunno. Wouldn’t be very Mr. Worldwide of him to flake, though.” 

Pitbull or not, you think of the heat of the strobe lights, the electric trill of the too-loud speakers. You're dancing in a dress that looks like a chunk of the moon, with the little neon ties of your bikini top peeking out the sides. There's a peach highball in your hands and no one is telling you what to do, how to do it, or that you're doing it wrong. 

Then you think of Joshua. Maybe he'd loosen up after a few drinks. Maybe he'd dance with you, put those hands to use on your hips and kiss you like he should have earlier today. Maybe he'd even be good at it. The thought makes your cheeks sting.

“Should I invite Joshua?” Somi says, wrinkling her nose at how you immediately grimace. “What if he’s actually a blast?” 

"No! No. Absolutely not." 

“What if he’s—” Then she drops her singsong voice to a whisper. “Hung? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen those pictures of him in the Galapagos.” 

Unfortunately, you have. A lurid, glassy image of your soon-to-be-husband in a sleazy pair of swim trunks comes into vision. You push past the smile, the unfair pecs, and remind yourself of that horrible, self-righteous twist of the lips that he always has. 

Yes, that’s right. That’s the Joshua you know. 

You grab the wine from her and drink it right from the bottle. 

–

Of course it had to be the one time you’re not late to an event that you forget you had swapped everything in all your purses around. You double check your bag—empty. 

You’re already down by half of your worldly possessions (still at home, your real home), and you probably left the other half on Joshua’s bathroom counter. Yesterday, you got derailed mid-task by Joshua lighting the grossest candle ever. You never thought you’d ever fight over candles of all things, but you couldn’t let him walk away from that conversation thinking wet dirt was a normal, socially acceptable, scent for a bedroom. (—It said moss on the label! —So, dirt. —Moss is not dirt. Maybe you need to go back to school.) 

You fling open the bathroom door, still checking the pockets of your handbag, before you collide into a big, sopping wet wall. 

“What the—?” You look up. The wall is not a wall. No, in fact, it is your fiancé, bare fucking naked. 

Your heart jumps up to your throat. It feels like you walked right into a porno, and you can hear Somi’s self-satisfied, witch cackle right in your ear. His dark hair seems to fall into his eyes just right, a nice change from how he normally gels it up, and you watch the beads of water from the shower, torturously glittery, run down his jaw, the hollow of his neck, right onto his chest. 

Men should not be allowed to have bigger boobs than you, at least, not dowdy Joshua Hong, who normally has the sex appeal of an eraser. And God forbid your eyes travel downward and confirm Somi’s sick and twisted hypothesis, past the washboard abs, the v-line, the trail down his— 

“Sorry, did you need something?” You blink again and Joshua suddenly has a towel wrapped around his waist. And he’s eyeing you like you ate a million cloves of garlic and then proceeded to spit on him. “Or are you just going to stand here and ogle me?” 

“I wasn't—no!” You start snatching things off the counter, anything really, and throwing them into your bag. “I just needed to grab stuff for my… my thing. You’re in the way.” 

“Right, because you need four q-tips and my razor to read a children’s book,” Joshua replies, plucking the offending items out of your purse. “It's almost 12:30, by the way.” 

“Shit. Fuck,” you stammer. You can’t glare at him anymore because you know where your eyes will end up and it is not on his face. “Stop distracting me. Whatever.” 

“Have fun,” is the last thing Joshua tells you before you close the bathroom door, that portal to hell, right back up. 

What you can’t do is return the image of what you saw back to where it came from, the wicked, glistening form of Joshua and his B cup tits. He looked so good, it makes you angry. 

Later, on the walk to the library, you reach for your lip gloss. Instead, you pull out q-tip number five and get mad all over again. 

–

The car ride to the derby feels like your own personal Saw trap, if Jigsaw wore a ridiculous hat and was actually your mother. 

Your engagement was announced to the public just a few days ago. It came with no fanfare, no warning. You were sitting on your bed, making your way through the smut Joshua called a novel, when the news app on your phone kindly notified you that you were now a taken woman. 

To some degree, the media uproar fascinated you. The idea that people with actual journalism degrees were writing headcanons about your honeymoon when you hadn’t even seen Joshua since The Bathroom Incident was surely entertaining, to say the least. But, like everything, the unsaid pressure of being a perfect princess, now part of an even more perfect couple, hangs heavy over you. 

You remind yourself this is supposed to be fun. A real couple would be pawing at each other in the backseat, perhaps pregaming with champagne or fan-casting their pick for Spirit the horse. Instead, you’re stuck rehearsing your pitch to the reporters when they inevitably ask you about how the hell this happened. You wish you could tell them you’re not quite sure either. 

Silently, you look at Joshua. Joshua looks out the window. The world rumbles under you. 

[10:15 am, race 1]

The air seizes, swirls with clay-colored dust in the morning sun. The clubhouse is already heady with the low buzz of conversation—you watch the freckled sunhats and oily toupees bob up and down in the swell of the crowd, deep in the morning’s small talk. You wonder how many of them are talking about you, given how recently the news hit. You’re used to people ignoring your media appearances, not celebrating them. 

Someone, tipping their head down to greet you, hands you a program. Joshua elects to tuck his in his back pocket. People don’t come to the derby to watch the races. Instead, it’s an excuse to gossip, day drink, and gamble, which would ordinarily be a good time for you if you weren’t overly invested in the racing circuit. 

All the way from the entrance to your seats, you were met with a tidal wave of camera flashes, all hungry for a glimpse of your first public appearance as a couple. Alongside this, a decidedly worse flurry of congratulations paired with an overly familiar touch to the shoulder or a limp handshake. Joshua is quick to respond with either a smile or some trite platitude. Your least favorite: We couldn’t be happier. Now he’s just lying for sport. 

“We should find the reporters doing interviews,” Joshua says the second his ass touches the chair, unfazed by the onslaught of perhaps a million different people. “The Sun probably wants to talk to us.” 

You’re not listening—you can’t let on that this whole ordeal is mildly terrifying for you. He has enough reasons to dislike you, and stage fright wouldn’t exactly be a good addition to the list. 

The racehorses have lined up at the track, their manes catching the daylight like holy fire. You like the one on the end. He looks like Peanut, Jeonghan’s stubborn palomino. 

Joshua says your name insistently, curdled with the annoyance that you’ve now become acquainted with, and you catch a stray camera flash from the stands. You have an audience, and the audience demands a show, even if they’re second-rate journalists like the scum from The Sun.  

“Darling,” you reply flatly. “Relax. Let's enjoy the races.” 

The horses stretch their long legs, anxious for the thunderclap of the starter’s pistol. Joshua raises a tired eyebrow before the same realization dawns on him. 

“Absolutely.” He clears his throat. “Darling.” 

You wrap a hand around his arm—somehow he makes hand-holding seem like third base—and watch his shoulders sink with a sigh, like you just popped him. 

Likewise, your highness. Likewise. 

A shot crackles through the air, and you’re off to the races. 

[12:43 pm, race 2.]

"I just have to know—how did you guys meet?" 

You know the duchess of Pemarlia to be beautiful and unashamedly nosy, and she has yet to prove you wrong on either account. 

The last time you saw her was on the beach at Lake Como last year, where she spent the entirety of your conversation asking if Jeonghan was single (and peeking into your bag to see what brand of lipstick you were wearing). Like everyone, she always seems to have a look of appraisal on her face. What makes her different is that she never really bothers to hide it; instead, she wears it like an en-vogue accessory. 

She eyes you with an intensity, sizing up your dress, your tawdry sunhat, your ring. You wonder if she’d agree that marriage didn’t look good on you, but any shorter of a dress, your mother would call you a stripper. And God forbid you leave the house hat-less. 

Now she’s no minotaur. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, save for one very small issue: you actually hadn’t planned your answer to this. You had quibbled over it briefly in the car, but you were too focused on your interview pitch to worry about minor gossip. 

"Well," Joshua starts. Through his smile, you can hear the warning edge of his voice. “It was quite ordinary.” 

"Actually," you cut him off. Not only would his version of this story be boring, it would also be horribly out-of-character for you. You did not come this far for your cover to be blown by Joshua’s lack of imagination. "Josh's parents hosted a—" 

"Brunch," Joshua finishes. Whether his teeth are gritted because he's grinning or frustrated is none of your business. “It was Easter brunch, wasn’t it, sweet pea? Four years ago?” 

The pet name makes you want to puke. Now he’s just trying to piss you off, but you know this is his attempt to play along. He's annoying, not dumb. 

"Yes, we sat across from each other.” You playfully dig your elbow into Joshua’s rock-hard side. “He was giving me the eyes the whole time.” 

You watch your hapless victim giggle, her spidery lashes wide with intrigue. Joshua is a little less pleased. 

“If you could call it that,” he replies. “I think you had chocolate on your nose.”

“Which you so kindly wiped off for me, dear.” You try to peek around the flaxen billows of the duchess’s blowout to watch the horses behind her, but to no avail. “After a morning of staring, we had to do an Easter egg hunt, planned by Joshie himself. I had no idea he loved silly little games like that.” 

“It's because people like the princess get so competitive,” Joshua says, with his laser beam grin boring into your eye sockets. “I believe I found you rummaging through the trash for eggs, like some kind of animal.” 

“Oh my goodness,” the duchess laughs. “How...charming.”  

You feel your eyebrow twitch. Only you’re allowed to ruin your own reputation, but you suppose that’s just another thing your horrible fake fiance gets to take from you. 

“Not as embarrassing as seeing Joshua leer at me from behind the corner,” you retort. “He was so enamored that when I invited him to join me, he got right down on his knees to look through the trash together.” 

“Well, did you find anything?” 

“Yes—”

“No—”

“Well—”

Fuck. Luckily, the duchess is either stupid or wildly entertained by the clown show playing out before her. Maybe both. 

“Cute,” she coos. “You must have been too smitten to notice.” 

“Absolutely,” Joshua says, as if there is a gun held to his pretty head. “Among all the garbage and the girl next to me, I suppose nothing else really mattered.” 

“If that isn’t love, what is?” she asks blithely. 

If only she knew. 

[3:45 pm, race 3]

The sun descends on the stadium, swollen and yellow with the afternoon. 

Last year, you and your friends had a betting ring set up during the racing circuit. Obviously, you had won—not too hard when your competition included Soonyoung, who only bet on horses named after food (sadly, it was not Tater Tot’s year). Somi was no better, and your brother thought every horse deserved a participation award.

This time around, things aren’t so simple. But you’d hate to say that you spent a whole day at the track and didn’t bet on a single race. Life could afford you at least one win for today. 

Again, the horses take their positions at the starting line, wound up like a line of rubber bands. The air heaves with bated breath. 

“Joshua,” you say, folding your hands in your lap as you find your target. “I'd like to propose a bet.” 

“You must be a glutton for punishment.” 

You bite back a laugh as you watch your favorite horse, the palomino, ripple in place. Fans would call her a charity case, but you know better. 

“Pick a horse. Mine is number Three, in the blue.” 

“And if mine wins? What’s in it for me?” he asks. Still, he leans forward, corded forearms on his thighs. You watch him squint as he surveys the field with renewed interest. 

“You pick,” you reply. “Choose wisely. I personally cannot wait to call in a favor from you.” 

“The chestnut one. Number Nine.” So he is competitive. “And likewise. Perhaps I'll hold it over your head until the wedding.” 

Before you can reply, you hear the starting pistol rip clean into the air. The racehorses surge forward, as if a silken ribbon through air. 

“Nine makes sense for you,” you say, eyes fixed before you. “He's flashy, the crowd favorite. Spotless pedigree.” 

“I'm picking your punishment already.” 

“I didn't say he would win.” You feel the lilt of your voice rocking upward, the tremulous beat of your heart against your ribs. “You see, Three’s had a rough season. There she is, passing Four right now.” 

“Nine is still first, though.” 

“It’s not about that,” you reply. “She does this, she starts all the way out back and then flies up. No one suspects anything—it’s like she likes proving people wrong. The first couple races of the season, she was just stretching her legs; they were small, small fry. It’s this one that matters.” 

The saddles are just blurs on the track now. To the march of the hoofbeats, Three lunges past Five, Six. The crowd roars. 

“This will be her first win. I'm counting on it. She’s come really close before.” 

Joshua doesn’t reply. Out of the corner of your eye, you see his gaze has shifted. You feel it land somewhere near you, but you’re too engrossed in the race to investigate further. Perhaps he’s admitted defeat preemptively, wisely so. 

“You know your stuff,” he murmurs, the clamor of the audience almost burying him. 

“How can I not?” Three coasts past One and Ten like she’s flying, until it’s just her and unlucky number Nine. “Oh my god. Go, go, go!” 

You and Joshua rise to your feet, as if drawn by a string, now wholly invested in the race. 

“Still beating you, you know.” 

“Not for long! Come on!” 

You watch your darling number Three, against all odds, pull past Joshua’s number Nine, burning a trail past the inevitable finish line. 

From somewhere inside you emerges a joy that you hadn’t felt since this whole ordeal started. You turn to Joshua and clasp his hands between yours, somehow less wooden now, and so, so human. The crowd cheers; they come alive. 

[4:50 pm, races 4 and 5. mainly, the reporter from the sun.] 

The smaller races take place shortly after the headliner, for better or for worse. This forces you to finally face the music—the music being a dull-eyed, greasy journalist ready to sink his teeth into the public’s new favorite topic. 

Joshua is a good sport about it, or at least, he’s good at pretending to be one. 

“It was great,” is his answer to a question you didn’t hear. You’re busy going over the parts of the script that you remember. Your media team spent the better part of the morning repeating it back to you, which was helpful until it wasn’t. You weren’t sure how to tell them you’ve actually never been good at speaking to the press, since you had spent the better half of your life doing the exact opposite. 

“And what did the princess think? It’s not often we catch you for an interview, you know.” 

The eye of the camera seems to pierce through you. You can see your shellacked figure, long and distorted, in the reflection. 

“I—um,” you swallow hard. God. Pull it together. You can already hear the lecture you’re going to get on the way home today. “Yeah, big day today.”

“She’s had to really rein in her excitement, you know,” Joshua adds, chuckling. 

Briefly, you feel his hand brush against yours. Ordinarily, you’d pass it off as a fluke, but you feel the steady, insistent warmth of his palm again, first, to the inside of your wrist, then lower still. Before you’re able to really process what’s happening, he then takes your hand in his all at once, as if to say, I’ve got this. I’ve got you. 

You figure he’s cashing in his favor early–he’d much rather leave you out to dry, let you flounder a bit so you learn to read the PR memorandums the night before. I told you so, he’d say. That’s what everyone else would say, anyway. 

“The races are sure exciting, but I'm sure you’re even more excited about your upcoming wedding.” The reporter grins at you, as if he smells your fear. His hair looks like it’s glued to the top of his shiny head. “If I'm going to be honest, you were one of the last people we’d expect to tie the knot this year. We are all dying to hear more.” 

What? You force yourself to breathe, feel the air fill your lungs, to avoid making an expression you’ll regret. 

“Well, yeah, I'm sure it looks like it all happened quickly,” you answer, feeling your tongue trip over the words. Mostly because it did, in fact, happen quickly, but you can’t let them know that. “But Josh and I feel strongly about, uh, this whole thing, and—”

“Please, don’t spare us the details.” 

Telepathically, Joshua squeezes your hand. This, you understand. He’s telling you to lean on him, and you trust that. 

“Hold your horses,” he cuts in, almost too quickly, which makes the corners of your mouth twitch upward. He was definitely looking for an opening, but you, bizarrely, don’t mind at all. He turns to you and smiles. “What's the fun without a little mystery? It's been a wild ride, but I'm loving every second of it.” 

It’s this one, the lamest and most embarrassing dad joke of them all, that gets you. 

You laugh: a real one, big, loud, and unafraid. It's here, caught in the glare of the camera flash, where you find yourself hoping, even just a little, that this wasn’t just a favor, that this was a sign you could actually survive this arrangement. 

You’re not asking for love—just a little bit of like. and, right now, you think you like Joshua Hong. 

—

In the evening, you find yourself in the oaken parlor nestled away in the back halls of the Acrosian palace. 

There's a piano there, gathering dust. It's a Steinway, spindly and chestnut, almost identical to the one you have at the palace in Cotria. 

You and Jihoon had been unpacking your hodgepodge of things (unsorted, since the act of sorting would have forced you to stomach the fact that you were actually moving), when he had found your old lesson books. 

You should break in that piano, he had said. Either that, or wait for your fiance to find you. He seemed ok at the derby today. 

I guess. 

What Jihoon hadn’t seen was all the photographs you had to take after your interview with The Sun, where Joshua decided to remind you that you were supposed to hate him. By that, you mean that he managed to make every single one unbearable. (A tap of the foot: Stand up straight. A careful brush of the elbow: Let’s link arms. A discerning, tactful glance at your chest: Pull up your dress. That, or he was no better than the average man.) 

You and he hadn’t talked much after that. Hopefully, he’s fled to your cold, dark dungeon of a room to read, so he can finally leave you alone.

“Remember when your parents invited all their friends over and asked you to play?” Jihoon says, perched on the loveseat while he sorts through an old jewelry box. 

“Yeah, and I literally forgot everything?” you laugh. “Freaking Jeonghan had to check on me because I locked myself in my room for 24 hours straight. And then he had the nerve to laugh at me.” 

You thumb through the fattest book of the pile. The binding is soft; the pages now yellow and fuzzed over by time. 

On page 5, Chopin's Waltz in A-flat major. three four time or whatever, you had scrawled in defiant red ink. Page 37, a thick black line through Debussy's name on Arabesque No. 1. This is because you would always laugh at it during lessons, and you wanted to save yourself the trouble. 

“Do you want to keep this?” Jihoon holds up a choker that resembles a jock strap. “When did you even wear this? It looks like a cat toy.” 

You ignore him and start to play. You were never excellent—competent would be a better word. Still, it was enough for you. Soonyoung would ask you to play during drunk karaoke, and you could still keep up with Jeonghan when he played one of his overcomplicated duets. 

Your hands remember the velvet thud of the keys, the glide of the pedal. When you turn the page, there’s a scrawled in BITCH! next to a heavily circled allegro. Piano was one of the only things that your parents forced you to do that you actually liked. The kicker was that it didn’t even do you any good. You weren’t as talented as your parents would like you to be, meaning that, to them, you weren’t talented at all. 

It’s then that your fingers slip, and you miss a chord. In your defense, you have a fresh manicure. Always blame the nails. Your mom hated when you kept them long, even more than your hardass tutor.  

“The prince is helping with the theater production this year, right?” Jihoon holds a single earring up to the light. You think you lost the other one in Ibiza last year. “You gonna help out again?” 

“Maybe.” Another wrong note. You’re losing steam trying to read all the ledger lines and your smeared, illegible writing next to them. “I don't know. He probably won’t even want me to. I'm choosing a different piece, by the way. Bored of this one.” 

The truth about your 21st birthday was that you did actually intend to spend it at the youth theater. It was your idea before it was Jeonghan’s idea, but, at the time, you both still were a package deal.

You were on piano; Jeonghan was on whatever else he pleased. He'd always been indecisive like that. At the bench, you’d hoist the little ones on your knee and regale them with the classical version of the opening song from paw patrol. Jeonghan stole prop masks from the back, mostly to hide behind the curtains and scare people, you included. You’d both stay up late, paint spackled on your palms, trying to Michelangelo a backdrop with the combined artistic talent of a TI-84. 

The production became your thing, just you and him, no cameras, no press releases, no parents. But like everything else, neither you, Jeonghan, nor anyone else was able to keep those inevitable truths apart. The set pieces were repainted in Italy, the finger-painted fields turned luminescent with varnish; the pins and needles in the costumes swapped with mother-of-pearl; and, finally, you, replaced by a classically trained pianist from Juilliard. At least he was hot. 

Everyone knows the rest of the story—the red carpet, the empty seats, and the puffy pink balloons outside the mansion in Saint Tropez. 

“Oh please,” Jihoon wheedles. “You and I both know he wanted you there.” 

“Then maybe he should have fought harder.” You flip to a random page, this one marked up in pink gel pen. You remember it bled through all the pages behind it, making it a pain to read but awfully funny during lessons. “It doesn't matter. There’s probably wedding stuff i gotta deal with.” 

Jihoon lets you play this next piece uninterrupted. It’s not that it’s a sensitive subject for you—there were plenty of other things that filled the wedge between you and your brother—but it certainly didn’t help. 

You let your fingers wander over the stubborn keys. It feels good to play, even if you’re almost unforgivably rusty. You reach for the page, when you hear Jihoon again: “You know, you’re allowed to come in, your highness.” 

Immediately, your hands freeze. Like a scolded child, you become aware of how your fingers teeter over the keys, the stumbling, awkward clacking of your nails, the one or two missed quarter notes from the last measure. 

You turn to face the door, where Joshua stands, leaning against the frame like a sleazy model from an Abercrombie catalog. He probably came from the gym. Seeing him dressed down is still very weird, mostly because you can’t decide if it’s because he looks good or if it’s because it reminds of seeing your teacher at the grocery store. 

“Anyone teach you manners?” you ask, unsure if your hackles should be raised. 

“No, I was raised in a barn, just like those horses you like so much,” he laughs. “I didn’t want to interrupt. You’re not bad, you know.” 

“Thanks.” You eye him skeptically. “Thought you were gonna comment on the nails.” 

“Do you want me to?” 

“Preferably not, but it’s not like you‘d listen to me anyway.” You look for Jihoon’s reaction, but he seems to have conveniently disappeared. “Let’s play a duet. I’m cashing in my favor.” 

“Sure,” Joshua replies. “I'm no good, though. Might be more of a punishment for you.” 

You slide over on the bench, and he sidles up next to you. He smells like Le Labo and sweat, the sting citrusy and bright, close enough to linger. 

“No good?” You pick up another fat book from the stack atop the lid: The Joy of Duets. “Me neither.” 

“You have no idea,” he chuckles. “And trust me, I tried.”  

“I’ll do top?” you announce. 

Joshua snickers, and you kick him under the bench (really, just a tap of your foot). 

You spend the next two minutes tripping over a Schubert piece. Terribly, this is endearing to you. You make somewhat of a couple—you, with your horrible form, and Joshua, now squinting at the key signature like it’ll make it easier to read.

“Buddy,” you exclaim. “Left hand goes here.” Laughing, you reposition his hand mid-chord to an octave below. You feel it tense beneath you before yielding to proper technique. 

“Aw, what?” he whines. “See, I told you I was no good. Give me a second.” 

You watch him puzzle over the next few lines, pretty brow furrowed. You conclude that Pajama Joshua is decidedly better than Prince Joshua. He’s funnier, kinder, warmer. Even his hands feel softer. 

“Also, about earlier today,” you start. The words are starting to dry up on your tongue, but you figure Pajama Joshua is an easier target than usual. “I didn't know they trained you in stand-up comedy.” 

“We laugh in this country too, you know.” When Joshua says this, he grins, bumping into your shoulder like you’d been friends for a long time. For once, it feels easy, natural. 

“Well, thanks anyway.” 

“I couldn't leave my fiancée out to dry.” The word must sound ridiculous even to him, because he laughs just the same as he did when he unloaded his ridiculous puns onto the unassuming world. “No really. We’re in this together, unfortunately. It’s my duty.” 

Duty, both the knife and the wound. You can’t say you’re surprised he’s only nice to you out of obligation. So is everyone else, and you don’t know why you thought it’d be any different, especially coming from him. It’s not like you’re wearing your ring now either; you suppose you’re just as guilty. 

“You cross over here,” you tell him, changing the topic. You slide your hand over his, and it bends to you. “Thumb under. Sorry, I couldn't help but notice.” 

“It's ok,” Joshua replies. “I only learned piano because I had to. When I stopped going to lessons, I forgot everything. Now I feel like I put this piano to shame.” 

“Really? Not to stroke your ego, but you strike me as the type to be good at everything.” 

“No,” he chuckles. “Only when I have to be. I actually wanted to learn how to play guitar.” 

“No way.” 

“Yes way. I wanted to have one of those woven guitar straps, get a little pick collection going, be able to play any song from the Beatles discography. All the cliche stuff.” 

“Well, why can’t you?” you ask. “Minus the Beatles thing. Pick better music.” 

“Back then, it never occurred to me. We all learn piano.” 

“That's silly,” you blurt out. “Who cares?” 

“That's a little rich coming from you.” 

You frown, feeling all the usual unpleasantries bubble up through your skin. 

“That's not really fair.” You absentmindedly play a few keys, all disjointed. “Taking guitar lessons doesn’t make you a problem child.” 

“It's not about that, though,” Joshua says. He's avoiding your eyes. “It's everything, together. I couldn't just pick up a guitar and be someone else.” 

“Someone else? You mean you? The real you?” 

“Yes,” Joshua presses. “That's the point. I can't just do whatever I want. Sometimes the real you is more trouble than it’s worth.” 

“Someone’s dramatic. If you do everything the same, nothing will change. Maybe getting into a little trouble isn’t such a bad thing.” 

“Forgive me,” he says, mid-chuckle. “You wouldn’t call this trouble?” 

He’s got you there. Childishly, all your pride hardens to a lump in your throat, one you’ve never learned to swallow. 

“Your family needed our help too, remember?” 

“Yeah, and you think I don’t think about that every day? How, maybe, if I had done something different, then we wouldn’t be here?” 

You feel stung. You don’t know how to tell him that you’ve been trying to figure out the same thing your whole life. If you were a better daughter, you’d have spared everyone the trouble. Unfortunately, you’d gotten it wrong so many times, you stopped trying.

What's worse is that he doesn’t even sound mad—you watch his fingertips ghost over the keys of a C-scale, rhythmically, methodically. Piano scales, this marriage, everything: just things to do on his never-ending list. 

A hesitant knock at the door interrupts any possibility of you coming up with anywhere close to the right thing to say. 

“Prince Joshua, the king and queen need to speak to you.” It’s an aide, probably sweating bullets deciding when and how they should intrude on this wonderful conversation of yours.

“Right,” says Joshua, and when he gets up from the bench, he doesn’t look back. 

—

“You ready to get stuffed?” 

Good fucking morning to you—Somi’s voice, fluorescent through your phone speakers, seems to be enough of an alarm clock for you. Joshua, in the doorway dual wielding a coffee cup and the morning paper, raises a tired eyebrow.

After the events of last night, you’d wondered if he would somehow disappear at nighttime in an effort to avoid his eventual fate (you). Instead, you found him on his usual side of the bed, drinking his usual mug of chamomile tea, in his usual silence. 

You've heard that couples shouldn’t go to bed angry, but no one said anything about indifferent. Then again, you and Joshua are hardly a couple. 

“Ew,” you laugh. “No. Maybe? Should I be scared?” 

“Absolutely. You’re eating your weight in food today because I need your opinion on catering.” 

Smushing your phone between your cheek and your shoulder, you watch the mirror as your wavering reflection puts on a layer of mascara. 

“For your party?” 

“Yeah, although on second thought, maybe it’s a bad idea to bring the girl who’s gonna puke everything up anyway.” 

“My IBS is none of your business. Besides, the real food critic is Jihoon,” you reply. “Sometimes I feel like that’s the only reason he still works here.” 

“You’re coming in an hour, right?” 

You check the clock. No, you are not. You’re only halfway through a full beat and if you don’t get any caffeine inside you within the hour, you will commit a crime. 

“Nope.” You pop open your compact. “I have to change, and I desperately need to locate a coffee. I will suck a fucking bean off if i need to.” 

“I'm hanging up on you,” Somi whines. “It's too early for you to be gross and late.”  

“As if you weren’t talking about getting stuffed.” 

“Whatever.” Click.

At this point, you feel like Somi’s party is both the proverbial and literal light at the end of the tunnel. No expectations, no rules, and no semi-arguments between you and your doomed fiance. 

Then you notice that Joshua’s disappeared from the room—he probably couldn’t stand listening to your end of the conversation. Briefly, you wonder where he is. Off running an errand for his dear parents, perhaps, or maybe at the gym you still haven’t discovered yet. Even from the hefty distance he keeps you at, you can still appreciate a man who looks like he’s touched a dumbbell. 

It's only when you’re halfway out the door, almost an hour later, juggling your purse and your phone and the distinct absence of a caffeinated beverage, that you find him. 

“Come to ruin my day?” you ask, maybe three-fourths joking. 

“Don’t give me any ideas,” he replies. Under the bluebird sky of late morning, lips upturned and eyes bright, Joshua may be a sight you could get used to. Someday. “Brought you a coffee. I can’t have you sucking off a bean—the reporters would go crazy.” 

Jihoon, hovering by the car, chokes on his water. 

“Oh!” The surprise knocks the sound out of you. “Thank you. Really.” 

“Gladly,” he says, and he sounds like he means it.

He holds all your stuff as you clamber into the car, before handing it back to close the door for you. You’ll admit it’s nice, but as Jihoon starts to drive, you feel a familiar twist in your chest.

“Interesting,” he remarks. “Didn’t know you were on a coffee order basis.” 

“We’re not,” you answer. You pop the lid open. It's a cappuccino, made the classic way, milk foam bubbling out the top. Not your favorite, but it’ll do. 

More than that, it’s an olive branch. Yesterday did get weird, but you’re getting the impression that it’ll always get weird. Undoubtedly, there is someone out there who’ll get Joshua. His schedules, his straight-backed obligation, the polished photo ops and the cappuccinos made to a perfect one to one to one ratio. You know this because this is the world you came from, one that should be home to you. 

Instead, you circle each other in an unsure, clumsy dance. You can’t quite get it right. It's all the same now. The bite of a horse saddle not made for your body, the glow of your heirloom ring, now cheapened by your graceless hand, Joshua’s lonely, reaching palm as he disappears in the rearview mirror. 

—

On your arrival home in the evening, you return with two things: a few extra kilos and an absolutely horrendous copy of the Daily Mail, courtesy of Somi, who saw it at the grocery. 

"Great showing from the couple of the year," you say, shucking your copy at Joshua. "It looks like we're in Shark Tale." 

Even from a distance, the cheap ink-spackled cover shows more than enough. LIP LOCK FLOP!, it reads, although you wouldn’t really call it a lip lock. 

It was at the derby—Quick, they’re looking at us, you had said. Then what you would call a nun’s version of a kiss: you, already halfway out the door, and him, lips hesitant and pursed, as if he was asked to smooch his withering, dusty great-grandmother. 

"I'm not even going to ask what you mean by that," Joshua answers, voice level. "It's not that bad." 

He puts his book down to pick the magazine up, holding it at a distance like the image will jump out of the page and bite him. You see his expression flicker, and that's all you need to confirm your suspicions. 

"Ok, it's a little bad." He places it on the nightstand next to him face-down. "It'll be alright. It's not like the wedding will be called off over one bad picture." 

"You know that's not the issue." You sit on your side of the bed, about a full meter away from him. You kind of want to look again just to see how bad it is, but you're sure it'll be inescapable by the morning. 

"Since when did you care what the press thought of you?" 

"Since it mattered." You stare at your lap, eyes fixed on the too-new, wiggly hem of your pajamas instead of him. You can tell he's still looking at you, though–you think those big, watery eyes have some sort of flashlights in them, and you don't like it. "It seems wrong if our mistakes take up space." 

You hear him make a small noise of agreement. Joshua still won't admit that you're right, but you suppose you like that a little. At least he'll be stubborn about something, even if it's about clearly not liking you. 

"What do you suggest?" he asks, putting his book down. “We didn't choose each other, so I'm not surprised there's no attraction." 

"Ouch." He's right, but you'd rather be the one saying it. "I'm a good kisser. You aren't." 

"I'm just not good at kissing you," he retorts. 

"Evidently." You shimmy towards his side of the bed, where the sheets are cooler under your thighs, the pillows still neatly arranged on the headboard. "What I'm saying is that we should at least try to look more realistic. Like–" 

"Are you saying we should practice?" Joshua looks at you over the frames of his glasses, incredulous. 

"Yeah," you say, now too far in it to back out. "Like exposure therapy. For unwilling couples." 

The room gets quiet, as if it wasn't unbearably so before. You watch Joshua pick up his book again. He puts the bookmark in, two-thirds from the spine of the book so as to not ruin the binding, and places it over the doomed tabloid. 

"Okay." To your surprise, he turns to face you. The lamplight catches the lens of his glasses and makes his eyes look warmer than they truly are. "How should we do this?" 

The way Joshua's gaze settles on you makes you feel like you're being evaluated. An exam in Kissing 101, except the test would rather not have anything to do with you at all. For the first time in your life, you let your eyes wander to his lips, rosy and full, and you feel the pit of anxiety in your belly grow wider. Somehow he's managed to take all the fun out of one of your favorite activities, but you'll be damned if he walks away from this thinking it's you who's the problem. 

"Just...let me lead," you say quietly, now leaning closer to him. You have to ease yourself into it. You let your body respond, feel the skip of your heart, a heady flush wash over your cheeks. He smells like spearmint and clover. 

You've kissed a lot of people. None of this should feel new to you. His eyelashes skim against your cheek, and you can hear the breath he takes, quivering, gentle.

Despite all this, the first kiss is no better than any of the other ones. his lips meet yours, hesitant before they start moving. He's shy, and it would almost endear him to you if he wasn't so annoying. But then the charade is over. His nose clocks yours and it startles you both enough to draw away, ever so slightly. 

"Not my fault," you murmur. You're so close, you can see your reflection in his pupils, glassy and dark. 

"Thought this was practice," responds Joshua, unfazed. 

So you lean in again, giving it another go. Two is better—sweet and succinct. a first date type of kiss. You can taste the berry of your lip balm on him. 

Then again, except this time it's him who goes in, chases your lips. 

The scary thing is that you thought this would be much harder. You had stood in the bathroom, looked yourself in the mirror, and psyched yourself up to do the impossible. 

But the moment you meet him, now so close there's no room to breathe, you feel an impenetrable, unshakable desire crawling up your bones. Your palm finds the flat of his chest. Even under the silk of his ridiculous pajama top, you feel the heat of his skin, the restless quick of his heartbeat, and your stomach flips. 

Four, five. You're losing count. Joshua's hand trails up your arm to cup your cheek, and you'd be lying if you said you didn't feel your breath catch in your chest. 

He's warm, so warm. When your other hand finds the back of his neck, he makes a small sound in his throat and you like it.

It's at this point you realize there is no point in pretending. Maybe you don't want to kiss Joshua at any other moment during any other day, but you do now. You really do. 

When your tongue meets the seam of his lips, it feels all too natural. At first, predictably, he buffers a bit. For a split second, you envision him pulling away and saying you've gotten more than a lifetime's worth of practice in. 

But he doesn't. Instead, an arm winds around your waist and that's all it takes for your body to stop listening to you altogether. Lips still connected, you lift yourself to straddle his lap, right over the folded up covers, and his hands, devastatingly strong, find your hips to keep you rooted there. 

You're starting to think he isn't such a bad kisser after all—maybe he really was holding out on you, but there's something weirdly rewarding about him waiting until he liked you just a little more. Whatever that means. 

You learn that his hair is soft, really soft, at the base of his neck. You learn that he likes when you bite his lips and you learn that his spearmint mouthwash does, in fact, taste as good as it smells. 

You also learn that you, paradoxically, might not know how to love Joshua Hong, but you sure do know how to kiss him. 

--end of part 1--

[part 2 -> ]

[fxirybun]

i swear we never had this much issue honestly 90s was the only last moderately "normal" times bc its just been nuts even from observing kpop and other things from afar

and whats dishartening as well is that the groups u do want to succeed cannot do so bc of knetz not supporting them enough and u know the moment u faves get into dating or whatever that all hell will break loose online again i just cant be fcking with that unhealthy type of attachment / behaviour. then whenever u go to idols personal contrnt on youtube or other platforms like toktoq or tiktok it always seems the comment section eventually winds up being out of hand or immature so it makes it hard to get a genuine compliment or message across to them bc their audiences is largely young folk nowadays even the groups i used to like are still around but the audience is different or more unhinged than it was when i left them lmao. its like i thought fan bases were usually extreme but its ramped up much more in current times

somenoe my age aint going to want to associate with that sort of behaviour same for going to the airport and stalking out their hotels or other private moments seem childish or silly. and the way folk overreact to idols doing things required of them like military service if anything i think its nice for them to get a break from idol activities they buff up a bit too but its smth else that their hard core fans take to heart and make a scene abt anything to do with idols these days. be it their slight weight change or their idfk something activity they did online that sparked chaos blah blah u get the picture lol. i think u can inly really casually enjoy these groups in ur own way than following the rest of their younger fans. plus its actually crazy to me how different it all become yet time aint stopping for nobody. rlly it feels bizzare like anyone got a functioning tardis yet? i also think these unhealthy obsessions ppl have to idols is bc before u could just put the hobbies down and do smth else now its like everyones online all the time everything anyone popular does is also online its kind of a making of their own doing at the same time.

well you got a point 'cause the landscape of fandom in kpop has shifted significantly over the years. the 90s and early 2000s definitely felt like a more balanced time in terms of fan behavior and celebrity culture , both in the west and internationally. though these days the intensity of fan culture has ramped up to a point where some fans seem to feel entitled to every aspect of idols' lives , and how the influence of social media brings more fire to this behavior.

it can be exhausting for fans who simply just want to enjoy their songs and support their fave groups without getting involved in all the chaos and drama that often unfolds online. again , the unhealthy attachments fans form , particularly with younger audiences make it even harder for idols to live normal lives. when issues like dating , military service , or even minor personal changes become seen as massive scandals. the internet allows all users for constant access due to its versatility and how other platforms like tiktok , twitter , and youtube can turn some innocent content into a battleground that is filled with negative comments.

for long-time fans like yourself it can be annoying to watch these behaviors which is making it harder to engage with idols or fandoms in a meaningful way without being dragged into some petty drama.

if you're going to ask me , enjoying kpop or any form of entertainment without getting sucked into the extreme parts of the fandom culture seems like the healthiest route , as everything has become so hyperconnected and fast-paced. with the constant flow of online content and real-time updates , it’s easy to see why fans feel more intense about their idols , but it’s also important to create boundaries.

and yes , things have changed drastically and while it's bizarre to watch it unfold , there's also comfort in enjoying these groups from a distance and focusing on what truly matters: the music and the concept behind those songs , rather than the havoc surrounding it.

[lqfiles]

BRO STFU STFU CAN WE ALL JUST ARREST LQFILES AND HOLD HER HOSTAGE BC WTF YN BEING HURT WASNT MUCH BUT IK THE ANGST IS GONNA HURT SO BAD IF I FELT BAD DURING THAT UPDATE omgggg

also I see that little “2 months” MY MAN HAECHAN IS BEING SO LOYAL WITHOUT REALIZING IT OMG yk he goes crazy with the “i love my gf so back tf up before i personally fight you for disrespecting her” if anyone flirts with him like he would be more offended than mc 😭

“i also got tired of ppl liking me for being haechan instead of really me” goes crazy bc that’s why he loves bothering mc since she gives him back the same energy without trying to suck up to him since she can’t stand him (she’s starting to and i love the progress 🥺)

BUT PUT your hands up PUT EM UP

but awwwww thank you for the update!! you bless us so much ☹️🫶🏼 GIVING YOU A BIG SMOOCH ON THE CHEEK

and for comic con, it was going to be my second timeeee it finished yesterday but the traffic was crazyyyy. it’s like 15-20 minutes away from my house and it was hellll, i didn’t get to go but one of my friends did go and she was dressed up as an anime character i think and another friend saw an actress from marvel (lupita nyong’o) and im so bummeddd i could’ve seen so many actors

ALSO LA IS NOT FAR FROM HERE AND TO BE IN KCON OMGGG I COULDVE SEEN NCT GUYS PLSSSS

hehe bro mark went crazyyy omg but you guys KNOWWWW i just have something for yuta, i go crazy 🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼

“do you hate me?” is the number one question i ask my bf 24/7 😭😭 it gets annoying so i change it up like “would you love me if i was a worm?” or “so you don’t love me? i guess you want me to dieee” or “would you kiss another girl if it meant saving me from dying?” heh thankfully he doesn’t get annoyed 😭🙏🏼

BUT YESS LISTEN TO THOSE SPANISH SONGS AND GIVE ME YOUR REVIEWS AND I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IT MEANS IN DEPTH 🫶🏼 IM HAPPY TO TEACH YOU SPANISH YOU AMAZING HUMAN BEING

- 🫧

(lemme know what you want to learn btw!!)

GIRL DONT ARREST ME… arrest haechan if anything 🤦🏽‍♀️ but yasss if you think these stuff lowk hurt her now just wait till haechan is gonna be conflicted and unintentionally hurt her..

ALSO YES HE’S BASICALLY BEEN SHOWING HIS LOYALTY FR always mentioning how she’s the only girl he likes talking to or still keeps in contact with.. he would DEFINITELY be the type to do that once he gets in a relationship with her like before he liked all the attention but his eyes will be only for her so he wouldn’t even entertain the other girls fr

SHE LIKES HIM FOR WHO HE IS FR like he can be shamelessly annoying because that’s how they started but now he finds it endearing and it’s also the reason he likes talking to her like she really does make him like his true self 🥺

its unfortunate that you didn’t get to go but i’m happy your friends got to go!!!! YOULL HO NEXT TIME and you’re lucky as hell to live near LA, u genuinely was going through it because i wasn’t able to experience fact check 2 baddies and walk live like FUCKKK i should’ve been there

I WANNA KNOW WHAT HE WOULD SAY TO THE KISSING OTHER FIRLS ONE OMGGG we will use that for bonus chapters and haechan will indeed be the one asking that 😄 that’s such a fun relationship tho i hope you two last forever <3

I LOVE TOU AND YASS ILL TELL YOU SOON WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE SONGS you’re amazing and i’m glad you liked the update, and umm please let me know how to say “i’m hungry” 👀👀

[purplesurveys]

1745

What kind of movies are you drawn to?  Dramas and biopics. I used to like romantic comedies but they don't make them like they used to anymore.

What breakfast are you most likely to have?  I just have coffee; I never eat breakfast. On the rare chance that I do, I love going for toasted bread and scrambled eggs.

What career field could you see yourself in?  I would have pursued journalism if I just wasn't so conscious about money...but I like being able to afford the lifestyle I currently get to enjoy so into the corporate world I went. It's harsh to say, but meh it's real life.

What section do you drift toward at bookstores?  Non-fiction, history, autobiographies.

Do you like fried chicken?  This will horrify every Filipino ever but I'm honestly not so much a fried chicken fan :( The meat mostly tastes like nothing. When I get fried chicken I literally just peel off and eat the skin/breading, then offer the rest of the meat to someone who might want it. I also usually go for boneless whenever possible because I'm too impatient to go around all the bones and such.

Do you think your parents are proud of you and what you do with your life?  They say they are, so I guess. The way I've been understanding them as I get older is that as long as their kids look like they have their shit together, they won't meddle; and so far I've never heard a word from them except for that one phase when my mom was trying to convince me to partake in our Sunday mass almsgiving. OMG that was soooooooo annoying now that I remember lmao please don't tell me how to allocate my money.

Does anyone in your family smoke?  Not in my immediate family but I have a couple of uncles who do.

Do you enjoy classic rock?  Not really.

How do you discover new music?  Spotify. I'll give them credit – they're fantastic at curating playlists.

List three things that you love about your favorite season.  I don't have a favorite season because we have only one out of the four seasons that the other countries talk about.

Zombies or unicorns?  Uh unicorns I guess?

What are three of the most disgusting foods, in your opinion?  Beans on toast, sausages, and pickles.

Have you ever had a migraine?  Yes, they are awful and put me in such a miserable mood.

What’s one medication that you take every day?  There isn't any.

Who was your third grade teacher?  Her name was Adette. We were also her last class before she migrated to somewhere in the Middle East. Oman, I think?

What’s the weather like today where you live?  It was miserably humid, which sucked because I was outside for like 5 hours straight for an event and had a few moments where I was genuinely scared I would pass out from the heat. Luckily the event planner I was with offered water bottles, which I gladly took. Then it rained very hard that afternoon so everything made sense LOL but fortunately I was already indoors at a café when it started pouring.

What is one thing you like that a lot of people don’t?  Wrestling. It was cool in the 1990s-2000s then quickly turned cheesy and cringey (apparently), but I never left.

What is one thing that everyone else seems to like that you don’t?  Taylor Swift. I find the songs so whiney, plus I can't relate to most of the lyrics anyway.

When was the last time you went swimming?  December I think, when I was last at the beach.

Do you have other identities/words you relate to/associate with but don't necessarily identify as?  Christian/Catholic. I am in the legal sense, but I ditched religion a very long time ago.

How do you want to be perceived as, aesthetically/socially? (i.e dainty, mature, strong, child-like, ethereal, etc.)  Just 'kind' is enough. 'Professional' is also praise I'd gladly accept.

Does your partner share your orientation? (Do they identify the same as you?)  I don't have a partner.

When was the last time you experienced a pleasant surprise?  I met Trina's replacement yesterday and she was sharing all about her past work experience only for me to learn that she used to handle the slew of WWE Manila shows that took place in the 2000s. We got in a brief back-and-forth about that cos I got curious hehe and apparently her involvement goes way back to the days of Mick Foley. It was so awesome to hear.

When was the last time you were in any amount of pain?  Tuesday was unbearable. My entire body was sore and it was the kind of strain that Katinko couldn't fix. There wasn't any one comfortable position I could've put myself in, and there was no other option but to sleep it off just so I'd stop feeling everything at once.

What’s the longest you’ve ever stayed inside? How about outside?  Inside? Fucking pandemic is knocking at the door haha. What was it...7 months maybe? It was May 2020 when I had to go to the hospital for a UTI; then the next time I got to go out was in December that year when I got invited to visit the office for the first time.

Outside, I think a week. That's how long we spent in Bali.

Who was the last person to hug you? Do you hug this person often?  Celeste. Yeah, relatively often as far as workmates. She's a clingier one, which I don't mind as I find her very sweet.

What was the last show you watched? Have you seen it before, or is it something you’re watching for the first time?  Does Run BTS count? Yes, I rewatch episodes all the time.

Do you enjoy Jim Carrey movies?  Not in particular but I have enjoyed the ones I've seen.

Do you remember what the last kind of gum was that you had?  I never get gum.

Do you enjoy watching shows about survival? Why/why not?  Nah, not my vibe.

Do you have any nicknames for your significant other?  No partner.

Have you ever set up your best friend with someone?  Nope.

What’s the worst car accident you or a friend has ever gotten into?  I can't remember the specifics anymore but one of my cousins got into a really rough accident with a huge truck on Christmas week a few years ago, and the entire back of her car got totaled. She spent a few weeks with some sort of assistance – I just can't remember if it had been a brace, cast, crutches, etc...but it got that bad, in any case.

Has one of your exes ever been the cause of a breakup between you and a boyfriend?  I've never been in that complicated of a situation.

What’s something that has made you realize just how much you care and love someone else?  I accepted them for everything that they were. Their hobbies and interests were pretty unconventional for people our age at the time, so it was always hard for them to even talk about those things out loud, but I always spurred them to share so that I could listen.

They also had their own internal problems, like hating the way they looked and judging their tendencies, but it had always been the easiest thing in the world for me to work around those issues with them. In those days I realized I never would've been as attentive to anyone else regarding these things, so that's when it dawned on me that I'd go ridiculous lengths for this person.

What was the name of the last pet of yours that died?  Kimi.

What’s the longest you’ve gone without talking to someone when you were mad?  14 years and counting.

How long does it take you to normally take a shower?  Anywhere between 9-15 minutes.

Have you ever burned incense before?  No it reminds me of church.

Ever been on a picnic?  Between the possibility of my possessions getting snatched and the horrible weather, you'd never see me wanting to have a picnic in the Philippines.

Do you live with your parents?  Yes.

What do you call them?  Mommy and daddy. Sometimes I'd call him dad. That's a funny thing about Filipino language/culure nuances – mom feels completely western (you'll never! hear anyone using that haha), but dad is largely normal hahha.

Do you know one of your best friend's major secrets?  Sure.

Describe their personality in 3 words:  Angela is thoughtful, creative, and selfless. Andi is intelligent, proactive, and passionate.

Are you weary of displaying signs of affection for your significant other around adults? Why or why not?  I used to be flashy with PDA (nothing gross, but still) but then again I was in college. I imagine it would be drastically different these days.

Have you ever had red velvet cake or carrot cake? Have you ever made either of those?  I LOVE red velvet anything. Yes, I used to make red velvet cupcakes with friends. Carrot cake/cupcakes are just nasty for me.

If you could see any band/musician in concert, dead or alive, who would you see?  BTS.

Are the members of your favorite band still alive?  Yes, all of them are still alive. They've had lineup changes but as far as living, they all are hahaha.

Who is your favorite rapper?  BTS' rap line :)

Favorite country singer/band?  None of them.

Favorite female solo vocalist?  Beyoncé and Adele.

Favorite male solo vocalist?  Hozier, but tbh I haven't listened to anything of his in a while.

Favorite female-headed band?  Paramore.

Favorite male-headed band?  Not sure if there's any.

Who was your favorite musician when you were a kid? Beyoncé.

If you had to get a tattoo based off of a movie, what would you get?  Off the top of my head, probably the Vespa from Roman Holiday.

What book series do you like?  Idk if I've been as hooked to any series as much as I've been with Twilight, lmao.

Name one biography you’ve read?  I want to say BTS, because at the end of the day they didn't write the book they put out. I really thought that was going to be the case haha but I guess that was just me putting sky-high expectations on the boys to be writers.

Do you have any reading disabilities?  Nope.

Who are your favorite artists?  Monet.

What is your favorite period of art?  Impressionist.

Do you prefer classic art or modern art better?  Modern. The more provocative, the more I enjoy.

Do you have any art or prints of famous artworks on your walls?  No.

If you are good, or were good, what kind of things do you/do you think you would paint?  My work would probably be filled with social commentaries. I'd love to piss the government off, especially given our current president.

Do you consider architecture an art?  Yes, in a way. Architecture can be so many things and that's what I love about it.

Are you good at photography?  Nah.

Do you know anyone who has ODed or died while high?  Nope.

Is weed really the gateway drug?  No idea.

Who are your closest friends right now?  Angela, Hans, Andi, Reena, Jo.

Have you ever become legit friends with someone you met at work? Yes, Kata and I have been able to keep in touch.

[domoriu]

hi i’m a new reader here and i love ur fics sm !! ^_^ u can call me 🥐 if it isn’t already taken btw haha :p i’m on riwoo brainrot recently and i love the way u “characterise” bnd if that make sense? basically i love the way u write sm!! u’ve inspired me to write again hehe i was on a huge writer’s block

btw what r ur stances on the riize boycott? although you’ve made it very clear on ur acct but i’ve seen some people wanting to boycott other sm groups as well. to be honest i only like boynextdoor when it comes to boygroups but i will be wholeheartedly boycotting riize and their management in justice for seunghan because he rlly doesn’t deserve this :( the korean entertainment industry is so fucked man. i’m not a big riize fan nor do i stan them but i really want to respect seunghan w the things he’s gone through for absolutely no reason! no fan should be gotham-level violent over ur idol having a gf predebut! sorry i went on a tangent but i wanted to know what ur thoughts are on boycotting the other sm groups as well… i’m an aespa ult and they’re having a comeback soon but the guilt conscience is still there even though i’m boycotting riize… sorry if i sound mean but it’s a genuine question!! 😢 i hope seunghan’s ok and i hope you’re ok as well!

anyways all love, if 🥐 is taken i can be 🧀 cuz i love cheese :pp

hi love !!! thank you !! i also got your other asks so ill put you down as 🧀 anon welcome 😊

for my stance on the boycott besides the very obvious that im partaking in it LOL im boycotting sm all together !! it does really suck bc all my ult groups are under sm unfortunately and i do wanna support aespas cb but i will be streaming off a third party music source !! honestly i feel like for me boycotting isnt that bad because i listen to so much music, and i know i can just listen somewhere where streams aren’t counted. i was talking to my friend about it and how we think that ppl make not listening to a kpop group seem impossible when theres plenty of other music to listen to and if ur not a strict kpop listener then it shouldn’t be that challenging. but to each their own !! i was/am a big orbit and i was very quick to boycott loona… i still stream their songs off musi and thats where i was listening to riize from for the past 10 months (i cant even listen to them anymore without feeling depressed, but i also wasnt a big listener to riize music regardless of the boycott)

only thing im off about is that i planned on buying aespa tickets so im not really sure how tour ticket sales are gonna work if i buy one… since most them are resale they’re technically already bought ?? idk

[obese4haechan]

The After Party.

pairings: fratboy!haechan x shy!reader

genre: smut a bit of fluff <3

warnings: reader smokes weed and drinks alcohol with haechan, protected sex! haechan and the reader are basically both switches.

wc: 2800-2700 ish

note: THE NEW AYO TEASER PHOTOS literally sparked an idea in my brain. FRAT LMFAO. some songs i'd recommend while reading are Her way by PartyNextDoor, Wine Pon You Doja Cat, and Slow Down Bobby V. i hope u enjoy it! 🫶🏽

~

You were so damn sick of studying, college genuinely was not what you were expecting growing up but you learned to adjust to the environment. Constant all nighters, having no money, horrible teachers, and the drug deals around campus. Not to mention the cliques, you thought cliques would be left alone in high school but god it's almost as if it had gotten worse. One of the worst being the frats, you couldn't put into words how much you hated all 9 of those boys. They were just so icky and annoying though you've never gotten to know them, you figured distance was best. Half of the girls around campus had already been knocked up or at least in some sort of relationship with one of them, you'd often hear gossip about the boys in the bathroom from girls who couldn't notice your presence. And of course even your roommate's (which were your best friends) were so damn obsessed with them, "Cmon y/n, you gotta find at least one of em cute?" your best friend Imani groaned. Imani was on the cheer team not necessarily apart of any clique's just very known, so obviously she'd spoken to the boys before. "Shit if she doesn't I do." the other girl laughed, "Well I mean.. HOW I COULD I NOT.. it's just they're so corny.." you stuttered as the girls smirked at you. "What?" you said confused. "You definitely are feeling one of them." Imani snickered, "So who?" You couldn't think of his name off the top of your head, "You know... the one with the moles and babyface." you asked. "OH MY GOD Y/N." Imani snorted, "What?" you yelled smiling. both girls fell over on the loveseat stomachs hurting from laughter, Imani gained her strength and sat up "You like Donghyuck."

Donghyuck. his name was Donghyuck, during class you honestly couldn't get your mind off of him. "I mean i've never heard any girls talking about how good his sex was" you thought to yourself. He really was cute, every time you saw him he was either smiling, cracking jokes, or keeping to himself. "Y/n? answer for number seven?" you had snapped out of your daydream, "W-w Huh?" your professor glared at you, you could've sworn this man hated you or could just tell when you were most vulnerable. You had a high C in his class but he honestly sucked at teaching and you'd never blame yourself over a shitty teacher. "I said could you give me the answer to number seven." you immediately sat up staring at the projector screen "Uhm.." you knitted your eyebrows and squinted your eyes "x/4 sir." you heard a voice behind you speak "Thank you young man looks like y/n's mind is a bit scrambled." your professor joked, you didn't laugh at all in fact it was humiliating.

The bell rung and you nearly sprinted out of class "Hey!" someone screamed, the school was so damn loud you didn't even think about anyone calling for you. There were definitely FAST footsteps behind you so you instinctively turned around and you were met with the Donghyuck that was in your head all period. "How didn't I know he was in my class? I mean there are at least over one hundred students but." you thought, "Oh uhm.. I just wanna say thank you for that back there." He was thanking you? "Why?" you asked. "I mean number seven was the only one I had even tried to do and he's been on my case this entire unit, you saved my ass more than you know to be honest." he smiled keeping the strongest eye contact, you were trying so hard to keep calm, not get flustered, don't smile. "Oh it's okay really thank yo-" a group of eight boys came marching up behind the boy, he turned around was and then back to you "You can call me Hyuck." he smiled. "Haechan's finally getting game it looks like?" one of the tall boys said, "Haechan? who's Haechan?" you asked. "Well Haechan is the one you were just talking to pretty, and i'm Yuta." you flinched at the nickname, "Well yeah that's so awesome i'll get going!" you said ironically, trying to get away any moment you could before Imani caught you talking to the men you despised. "W-wait." Haechan stuttered following you, you turned around "Do you think you could come to our house party tonight?" he asked. You honestly thought about it, drinks, fun music and maybe weed. You honestly needed a distraction and a house party sounded good. "Before you give me an excuse there's no homework until next week even if there is lemme do it for you, cmon love." Haechan stuck his hands into his pockets tilting his head to the side. God he was doing things to you, "Well I guess so i'd have to ask my friend.. if you don't mind her coming." you held eye contact with him as long as you could, "Deal." he smirked, "Don't worry about the address I promise you'll know where it is." Haechan said walking backwards with his hands still in those stupid pockets, he still was just so corny.

"So you're telling me he invited you to a party?" Imani shouted outside of the dorm, "God yes shout a little louder.." you groaned "Sorry... but ARE YOU GOING?" she screamed once inside the dorm. "Yes... I am, I asked if i could bring you as well and he said yeah." you said slipping out of your Ugg boots "Girl we literally have to get ready right now." Imani ran to her side of the room, "Whyyyyy.. I'm so tired." you said as you jumped onto the bed. "Get your tired ass up y/n I literally need to be intoxicated." Imani grabbed something skimpy out of her closet. "So you're gonna go looking like that and all you wanna do is drink or smoke?" you laughed as you got up. Imani always knew how to dress and do her makeup well for the occasion, she was kinda god sent. "I meannnnn that one named Johnny really is cute, i've spoken to him a couple times i'd say we're associates he's a sweetheart." Imani blushed, "Oh please don't break a sweat we have to get dressed." you rolled your eyes. "Y/n bitch DONT."

You and imani had took an Uber to the house it wasn't very packed just yet, a few cars and music already jumping. You two walked inside arm to arm, there they were. All of the boys were on the couch "Imaniii!" Johny yelled at as he got up to hug her. "Associates my ass." you thought, and then you saw him sat on the couch legs spread hand placed on his thigh which was covered by his white jeans he was deep into his phone until more guests came and he looked up to catch you staring at him. "Heyyy!! it's the pretty girl from my chem class, c'mere." Haechan said patting against the spot beside him, you walked over and sat down you were both so close as you sat next to the arm of the couch. "Hi." you spoke a bit quietly intimidated with how close you two were, "You comfortable?" Haechan asked putting his phone down and giving you undivided attention. "Mhm.. my name's Y/n by the way." you smiled to him, "Oh I know." Haechan smirked. "How? I never even told you." you questioned, "I have my ways." he cockily said. "Mhm sure." you laughed, "Do you want something to drink?" Haechan asked as he sat up "Yeah yeah anything with alcohol please." you smiled looking up into his eyes "You're so cute." he said before walking away. You will admit that you had butterflies definitely he looked so damn good nevertheless he smells amazing as well. You looked around for Imani when you saw she was already touching all over Johnny, "Shes about to have sex within the first hour.. shes not even drunk yet." you thought to yourself giggling out loud. Haechan came back with your drinks before he sipped his you asked to take his instead, naturally he didn't hesitate. "Already wanting to drink my things we aren't even together yet." he teased "Yours just looks better." you teased back. Maybe this was flirting I mean anything he did had an effect on you, when he looked deep into your eyes it made you feel so good you wanted to always feel like that.

The alcohol had begun to kick in you asked Haechan if any of the boys had weed and if he smoked, he answered yes to both. Imani had completely disappeared with Johnny you assumed she was probably fucking him by now or took off somewhere, but you knew to text her. After Haechan got some you asked if you two could smoke upstairs away from the noise, he agreed. You both walked into a bedroom as Haechan closed the door behind you two, He began to roll up. "You ready y/n?" he sat beside you taking out a lighter, you nodded your head as Haechan took the first drag. He coughed and cursed after inhaling the drug he was so adorable, he gave you the joint as you began to smoke it as well. "Hm, no coughing you must be a pro?" Haechan teased "No no no.. not at all, just really needed this thank you." you giggled as you hiccuped "You know when you couldn't answer that question in class.. I was so relieved." he said taking a long slow hit. "Hmm why?" you asked in confusion, he scooted so close the both of your legs were touching "I'd been wanting you for the longest time." he calmly said handing you the blunt "What?" you coughed, the first time you coughed ever since you two had been in this room Haechan laughed at that. "What do you mean what? I said what I said." You were so close you could see the pores in his skin, "I- i just wasn't expecting that out of you, you seem like the innocent one out of all your friends.." you teased "Innocent? I haven't even done anything to you yet." he inched a bit closer to you. "Yet, you think im that easy Donghyuck?" you whispered taking another hit, "Easy? no. Attracted to me? yes." he whispered back. Haechan took the blunt out of your hand staring at you, the tension was enough to make you go absolutely insane.

"If you're not so easy let me shotgun you." He said with knitted brows, you honestly started to blush you've never been shotgunned before whenever you smoked it was with your best friends. "Are you too scared?" he asked, "Of course not.." you quickly said. "Alright love." he said as he took a long hit, then flicking the blunt out of his hand he grabbed your face and put his lips onto yours. He was holding his breath for so long he began to moan into your mouth. Smoke going down your throat and out of your nose, Your hands began to travel lower down his body. You didn't even stop kissing him until he pulled his shirt off, his skin was so warm and soft. He moaned and whined into your mouth as you moved against his crotch. "Something told me you'd be a tease." he whined, you put your mouth against his neck kissing and sucking onto the skin the way he jerked up you assumed it was a sensitive spot of his. You sucked on his neck leaving marks as you dry humped his crotch, once you sucked his neck leaving wet spot's you'd blow cold air onto it. "Fuck Y/n.. I really can't take this" Haechan said, "What do you mea-" he cut you off as you were about to tease him more. Haechan took you in his mouth, tongues meeting each other the distinct taste of alcohol and weed made you go ballistic. He made sure to keep your tongue in one spot with his teeth leaving you confused as he began to suck your tongue hard and sloppy, that earned a whimper out of you. Haechan let go of your tongue with a loud pop noise, lifting your skirt as you sat straddling him. "I really want you to sit on my face right now Y/n." he said staring into your eyes, you couldn't hold eye contact when he was speaking like that "O-oh okay.." you stuttered. Face sitting something else you've never done you thought it's pretty self explanatory, "Can I take your panties off?" Haechan asked. "Yes.. of course." you sat on his bare chest as he reassured you about all of your worries. "You ready now, love?" he said rubbing circles into your thighs, "Mhm." you began to pull yourself up to his face. "Baby I said sit on it not sit over it." Haechan said causing you to look down, "I'm sorry!.. but are you sure I won't like suffocate you?" you asked. "Yes! now sit down." he laughed, you sat down like he asked and immediately began to moan.

Haechan was licking over your clit before just sucking it, then dragging his tongue across your cunt. You grabbed his black hair starting to guide yourself, Haechan smirked at this hoping you felt more comfortable. "Mm- god! Donghyuck it feels too good." you weren't getting that much of a response so you began to lift yourself a bit more, until Haechan slammed you back down "So pretty and warm." he moaned muffled against your pussy. The amount things you were feeling at once was pure ecstasy, the butterflies, the alcohol, marijuana and the boy between your legs. You slowly rode his face constantly whining and shaking, strangely still holding eye contact with Haechan. God he was so hard he felt like he would just bust out of his pants any moment, you were getter closer you could feel it so could Haechan. "Come on, baby" he moaned as your pace quickened, "F-fuck donghyuck I'm really close." you whined it felt too good. "Then let go for me pretty." you couldn't hold anything in after that cumming on his face with a slight scream then moving to lay on the side of him, "I love how you sound when you cum." he said rubbing circles into your back. "It's your turn Donghyuck." you said jumping on top of him "Do you have a condom?" you asked him, "In my back pocket yeah." Haechan pulls it out and pulls his pants down. The tip was a quite red and there was precum dripping out of it his dick had somewhat of a curve in it, you had gotten ten times hornier. You grabbed his cock and began to sink on to it making his nails dig into your sides, "Fuck baby, so tight." he whined. Your head was thrown into the crook on his neck, the curve of his cock hit every angle just right. You began to slowly move "Mm.. so full Donghyuck." you said kissing at his neck, you were going at a torturing pace for him. "Babygirl I can't do this slow." Haechan said grabbing your hips as he started to ram into you. "F-..Fuck!" you yelped, completely unable to speak it felt way too good Haechan was so big the stretch was burning. "Oh just take it I know you can take this dick." he moaned shoving a finger into your mouth. You kept clenching, he knew you were close. "Just look at you, fuck." he groaned slapping your ass making you squeal. "Y/n, show me your face." he demanded, "W-Why?" you questioned he was talking to you while he was still fucking into you. "I wanna see that pretty face when you make me cum." That honestly did it, you squeezed so tight around Haechan whimpering his name as he came inside the condom moaning your name. You both sat there panting the silence was comfortable Haechan's heart was beating extremely fast, his little breaths were as cute as ever. "Y'know you're the only one that calls me Donghyuck and it doesn't piss me off." he says looking into your eyes and giving you a gentle kiss, "Are you thirsty? hungry? bathroom? cuddle? or.. we can forget this never happened whatever makes you most comfortable Y/n your benefit matters most to me because we....." you had honesty zoned out, Haechan was adorable. You pulled him in with a kiss "Oh shut up I'd love to keep our relationship going After The Party."