#or hot rich young man looking to expand his family

[jes12321]

Obsessed with the idea of Fushiguro Toji and Gojo Satoru getting into a custody battle for Tsumiki and Megumi aind ending up with the classic MWF with one parent, TRS with the other parent and every other Sunday. Just think it’d be silly.

[chubbyguysfatteningbellies]

Once upon a time in a small town, lived a young man named Danny. At twenty-two, he was an aspiring chef with dreams of opening his own restaurant one day. Danny was passionate about food, experimenting with new recipes in his cozy little apartment. His culinary creations were mouthwatering; from rich, creamy pastas to decadent desserts, he poured his heart and soul into every dish. As a result, he found himself gaining weight, but he hardly noticed at first—he was too busy developing his skills and enjoying his craft.

As the months went by, the comfort of delicious meals began to show on Danny. He embraced the change, cheerfully shopping for new clothes that could accommodate his growing figure. Each shopping trip turned into an adventure, with him playfully trying on outfits that accentuated his burgeoning belly. He sought out clothes in vibrant colors and playful patterns, finding joy in the way they fit over his expanding waistline.

However, a point of no return arrived when he tried on a beloved shirt—one he had worn during his college days. He distinctly remembered how well it had fit back then, but this time, as he reached to button it up, the fabric strained against his rounded belly. A laugh escaped him, a mixture of amusement and disbelief. There he stood, feeling the warmth of his belly pressing against the shirt, desperate to burst free but held captive by the stubborn buttons.

The next day, Danny decided to throw a dinner party for his friends to showcase his culinary skills. He slaved over the stove for hours, whipping up all his favorite recipes—stuffed mushrooms, creamy risotto, and a towering chocolate cake for dessert. As he served his friends, he couldn't help but take enormous helpings for himself, indulging in every bite. The laughter and cheer filled the room, but as the night went on, Danny could feel the once-comfortable shirt tighten uncomfortably around his belly.

After dessert was served, one of his friends, Mark, pointedly looked at Danny’s waistline and simply said, “Man, you’re really living the dream, huh? Looks like you've upgraded to the deluxe package!” Everyone laughed, and Danny couldn’t help but blush. He playfully flexed his belly and declared, “Well, if you can’t enjoy food in life, then what’s the point?”

By the end of the night, Danny’s belly had grown round and firm, the shirt protesting with every move. As his friends began to leave, he watched them with a full heart—and stomach. He relished the way laughter and good food brought everyone together, and he felt proud of his accomplishments as a chef.

In the following weeks, Danny found himself loving the transition. The fabric of his clothes became more accommodating, the soft cotton embracing his form. He learned to navigate this new relationship with his body, gaining a newfound confidence in himself. He even became a local icon among food lovers, known for not just his culinary skills but also his cheerful, unapologetic love for life.

As summer arrived, he decided to host a barbecue in the park. He set up tables overflowing with burgers, hot dogs, and colorful toppings. Friends and family gathered, excited to share a meal together. Danny spent the day grilling, laughing, and, of course, sampling everything he made. When he finally took a breather, he sat back in a sun-drenched spot, laying his hands on his round belly that now stretched his shirt to its limits.

In that moment, he realized something profound: Happiness didn’t come solely from the food he created but from the joy of sharing it with others. With each delicious bite, he embraced who he was—flaws, extra pounds, and all. The world around him was vibrant, and he was part of it, celebrating food, life, and the wonderful journey he was on.

And so, as the sun set, casting a golden glow over the park, Danny leaned back, content in his skin and proud of every inch of his gaining journey—the young man who learned to love himself while savoring every bite.

[mermaidsirennikita]

bridgerton--the good, the bad, the ugly

The short of it: Bridgerton excellently captures the tone of Regency romance novels and offers a lot of escapism and great sex scenes, but could definitely use some serious work in terms of how it depicts race and it should have made some further alterations to the dated and flawed source material.  Definitely loved a lot of it and am hotly anticipating the second season, but I want to see more work done and I HOPE that this encourages the adaptation of better (and less inherently flawed) romance novels.

Now for the longer take.

The Good

Bridgerton depicted sex and romance in a way that is totally different from anything I’ve seen in period dramas, for sure, but possibly different from anything I’ve seen on TV.  The romance of it all was woven into almost every aspect of the show. There is the handsome and seemingly severe but extravagantly wealthy and sexually adept duke sweeping into town.  The (multiple) rakes who just want to have fun while also being hot messes.  The awakening of female sexuality and the copious use of the female gaze.  (Note the pretty modest and minimal focus on female nudity, while we get plenty of lingering shots on Simon.).  People want love!  There is pretty minimal violence and perhaps the most physically violent scene involves Simon beating a man up because HE IMPEACHED DAPHNE’S HONOR~.

The sex scenes themselves focused on Daphne’s pleasure for the most part, and were probably among the best I’ve seen since Outlander in terms of chemistry, in terms of the visuals, in terms of focus on sex as an act of emotional connection and FUN. Yes, there was some Unlikely Vaginal Orgasming, but we also saw Simon tell Daphne about masturbation.  On the wedding night, he was pretty clearly touching her to help her enjoy it.  He ate her out... a good bit.  

And aside from that, we got all of the grand speeches, the stolen glances and touches, an excellent buildup of sexual tension that led to some pretty hilarious moments.  

I also really enjoyed many of the performances on this show.  Rege-Jean and Phoebe had great chemistry and excellent back and forth.  Jonathan was a GREAT Anthony.  I would argue that as lackluster as I found his relationship with Siena (more on that in a minute) it largely existed as a way to set him up for his romance with Kate.  He now has even more of a reason to be down with love, as opposed to solely relying on a kind of flimsy tragic backstory.  Additionally, his overprotectiveness of Daphne added tension to the story and made him a source of comedic relief for me?  I loved it.  Give me disaster Anthony all day; can’t wait until he falls to the enemies to lovers trope just like Simon fell to his FLAW-FREE fake dating plan.

A lot of the changes I found were really good.  Obviously, it was important that the show incorporated greater diversity (though they need way more).  Benedict was INFINITELY more fun and interesting than he was in the novels, and acted as another standout for me.  As much as I hate Portia Featherington, I think that the elevation of her to a proper villainess is probably necessary and Polly Walker excels at those types of roles, though they need to maybe have her be less like, actively racist.  I adored the addition of Queen Charlotte; she was excellent comic relief.  Lady Danbury’s expanded role and relationship to Simon was one of the best moves they made.  It touched my entire soul.

Buuuut....

The Bad

The show needs to work on casting more men that are frankly on Rege-Jean’s level.  It feels a bit awkward to see a guy that is by most people’s standards kind of stunning and then.... Colin looks twelve.  Lord Philip is like... a farm guy.  Get rid of the sideburns, we’re in romance novel territory.

In the same note, the girl who played Siena wasn’t a great actress and wasn’t super stunning, so even though I’m fine with her being a placeholder....  Eh.  Go for better casting.  The woman playing Madame Delacroix would’ve played that role so much better and I really enjoyed her dynamic with Benedict because she was just fun.

Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck they’re going to do to make me want to watch Penelope and Colin fall in love.  Their book was already a bit basic--fun, but far from revolutionary.  I don’t really get why they would receive attention similar to that of Kate and Anthony, basically.  The issue is that Colin, again, looks and sound rather young and twerpy.  It obviously wasn’t great for him to be tricked into raising another man’s child, but.... For fuck’s sake, how much would that have affected his life on a practical level.  He’d never know unless he was told, thanks to the lack of DNA tests.  He was marrying far out of his league in terms of attractiveness.  He’s a rich white guy in England with a supportive family.  

I really disliked the fact that Colin told Marina in his huffy little tantrum that he would have married her anyway--because would you have, buddy?  Really?  The thing is that Marina had no way of knowing that and her entire life (and the reputations of her cousins) was on the line.  She didn’t know if she could trust Colin to keep her secret.  They barely knew each other.  He basically came off as a whiny child and I’m fine with him staying in Greece if that’s the plan.

Penelope was just... psychotic.  And that was really disappointing, because I love Nicola and would love to have loved to see the fat girl get her sexy love story.  But first off, lol, it wouldn’t have been sexy because Colin was miscast.  Second, she basically tried to destroy Marina’s life and that of her sisters?  And herself?  Because Colin?  Because Colin, a guy who hasn’t even shown any amount of attraction to her at this point?  Her tears, her whining, it was all too much.  Penelope was dealing with a crush and Marina was dealing with the real Grown Woman issues of a child out of wedlock and as it turned out a dead lover and they were not on equal footing.

I mean, Penelope could very well make a great villainess at this point, and if done well I’d embrace it.  But I do not know how the fuck they can make me interested in her love story.  And the idea of her basically being launched into villainy because she was this chubby white girl obsessively jealous of a beautiful black woman...... not a great look.

The show definitely needs to explore diversity in terms of sexuality too--I don’t think it’s correct to read Benedict as straight because he still seems to be open to exploring.  Once he has more screentime, I think he could totally end up being bisexual, and it’s possible that the writers were trying to feel the audience out in terms of their receptiveness to taking a straight character who has a big straight love story in the books and making him LGBT+.  Eloise could also easily be a lesbian, and I’d be thrilled to see that happen.  They need to do something to expand the world, and if there are 8 Bridgerton kids, all of them being straight as an arrow seems SO unlikely.

The Ugly

Obviously, the rape scene was bad and should have been written out.  Simon could have gotten caught up in the moment and blown up at Daphne after he accidentally didn’t pull out in time.  Men.... accidentally don’t pull out in time... a lot.  That’s how babies happen.  It would’ve been believable, and due to our sympathies being with Simon largely, I don’t think he would have become irredeemable if he was more at fault than Daphne.  

As it was, I will say that the scene was somewhat better than it played in the books because Simon was conscious and totally sober, and it was a bit?  Confusing?  That he didn’t just roll Daphne over and pull out?  Because she wasn’t really clearly trying as hard as she was in the book to wrap her legs around him and hold him tight.  But it remained a rape scene.  The show also did a better job, I think, of establishing how fucked up it was that Simon took advantage of Daphne’s lack of knowledge.  Whatever he said about thinking she knew what was up--he knew she didn’t even know about masturbation.  He had to know she wouldn’t understand what pulling out meant.  He did very clearly mislead her to think that he was sterile and therefore denied Daphne her ability to give informed consent.  Did that justify what Daphne did?  Nope.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.  But both of them did a fucked up thing and I think that we honestly could’ve stopped at Simon’s misleading.

The issue too is that this leads into a bigger problem the show had.  It wanted to include diversity (yay!) but did not consider the total implications of what was happening (not yay).  Daphne and Simon’s dynamic is inevitably influenced by the fact that she’s a white woman and he’s a black man, regardless of whatever handwaves happened.  This influences the sexual assault and makes it even more messy.

Speaking of mess, I’m not sure what exactly would have fixed the “we don’t want this to be a colorblind casting” issue... but the explanation they came up with wasn’t good.  Never mind that this makes everything SUPER confusing (racism is over like..... maybe 50 years MAX after Queen Charlotte’s marriage if we assume she was a teen when she married and is in her 60s now?) but Lady Danbury’s dialogue explaining this was HORRENDOUS.  “One of them fell in love with one of us”.  The implications are awful.  I don’t know if perhaps setting back the integration of society centuries earlier would have helped?  But this wasn’t it.

Additionally, the writers and casting directors didn’t seem to get that diversity is all well and good, but what about the fact that almost every black character has a light skin tone?  Why are there so few black female characters?  Why is Marina, the most prominent woc on the show, given the “pregnant and desperately trying to trick a man into marrying her until her jealous white cousin fucks her life up and she is humiliated into settling for a loveless match” plot?  I desperately hope we see her next season, falling in love with Sir Phillip or perhaps having experienced a plot twist that gives her someone else...  And she better not die. Eloise can find someone else if Marina really ends up with Sir Philip.

Ultimately, again, I really loved the show.  But it needs to work on some things.  I think that a lot of its issues can be addressed and fixed in a future season, and I HOPE they do that.

[arctimon]

*insert witty title involving Momakase here*

(Warning: This post is long.)

So I never actually shared this theory outside of DeviantArt, and it was also part of a greater post of predictions for the show. But now that I've essentially had a year to sit on it, and can now better illustrate my points, hopefully I can make it clearer. Today, on the "Big Hero 6 Conspiracy Theories" Podcast with Arctimon, we're going to be talking about...Momakase.

“But Jason, you’ve already talked about Momakase and her comparisons with Lady Deathstrike!” You are correct, imaginary person I made up for the purposes of this conversation.  But we’re going to go a little deeper this time.

However, before we get into Momakase, let’s talk about someone else for a hot second.  And that person’s name is Ana Cortés. Now, if you’ve read my stories, that name may seem familiar to you: it’s the alias that Momakase uses when seducing the rich guy at the end of "The Usual Suspects” (Chapter 9 of Continuity II).  But what if I told you that the name isn’t just an alias to her?  What if it’s her real life? But let’s chat about the Prime Marvel Universe Ana Cortés.

The character was only around for four issues back in the 2013 run of X-Men, when the all-female team was being led by Storm.  She made her first appearance in Issue #7, being introduced as the daughter of a recently-deceased Colombian businessman.

Being the head of a billion-dollar company wasn’t enough for young Ana, so she recruited a Yakuza member named Reiko to bring her the consciousness of Lady Deathstrike, who had recently been killed.  That, along with the nanites that she would later be given, gave Deathstrike a new young body, capital to boot, and a quest to make a new Sisterhood to topple the X-Men.

Which ultimately lead to Ana/Yuriko’s new look...

Through the next four issues, Ana would recruit others into her new Sisterhood, such as Amora the Enchantress, Typhoid Mary, Selene, and Madelyne Pryor, with them ultimately achieving their goal: to bring back to life a sentient bacterium named Arkea and declare war on mutants and humans.

As the plan progressed, Ana started getting cold feet, fearing what Arkea wanted to do and hating what she had become.  So, in Issue #11, after pleading with Typhoid Mary to finish her life...

She decides to take her own.

And thus the life of Ana Cortés came to an end.

So what does this have to do with Momakase? Well...everything. Momakase’s history is a mystery (unintentional rhyming).  The only clear thing that we know about her past is her family in an indirect way, courtesy of “Hiro the Villain” and her recruiting him to get her family swords back from Yama:

The katana and the wakizashi seem very important to her, so much so that she would risk breaking into Yama’s penthouse to get it and getting Hiro to come along with ehr.  Unfortunately, this is never expanded upon because this is the last speaking part of Momakase in the show before the series finale in “The Mascot Upshot”.

We know that her father gave them up because they were being threatened by gangsters.  We don’t know how long ago that was, but since Momakase mentions that the swords are “the last connection to her family”, we can deduce that they’re probably not in the picture any more.

(By the way, if anyone can decipher what that emblem is suppose to be, knock yourself out.)

But as we all know, apples don’t fall very far from trees.  And this is where we’re dealing with pure conjecture and guessing on my part.

I’ve written in my stuff about how Momakase started out in villainy at a young age.  Her first attempt at crime ended up with her being caught by Boss Awesome.  And she must have left an impression on him, because remember...he had a file on her in “Food Fight”.  So she must have been active at least a couple of decades ago, because Fred’s dad retired before Fred was born.

But what really led her to go down that path?  Perhaps the mash-up nature of this world could give us some insight. So imagine that your father is a Colombian handyman who had to work extra hard to support your immense family of brothers and sisters after his parents died.  Now imagine that your mother is a Japanese socialite and never had to lift a finger in her entire life.

Now imagine their fates intertwining.

The mother is immediately infatuated.  The father tries to rescue her from her life of artificial captivity.  They run off, elope, and in less than a year, they give birth to a wonderful daughter.

That daughter being you. Your elders, seemingly seen the error of their ways, gift the couple a pair of ceremonial daisho swords that have been in the family forever.  Life goes on. You witness the bullies of the world threaten your family.  You see their most cherished possession being taken away, and then you swear to yourself you won’t end up like that.  So, you get yourself involved in villianry.

And then years later, when it doesn’t seem like you can do anything right...you meet someone.

He’s a police officer, also in the infancy of his occupation.  He visits you in jail, talking on and on about how justice was served...but something else is there in his eyes.  Pity?  Interest?  Sadness?  All of that and more?

Once you get out, you visit him between heists.  He doesn’t know, of course.  You tell him you’ve gone straight.

But the more you stay with him, the more you feel yourself getting closer.

“But it wouldn’t work”, you say.  He’s a man of the law.  You’re a woman of lawlessness.  Both you and he come to the consensus that while things are good between you, it’s best to quit while the both of you are ahead.

Fate, of course, had other plans.

Life rears its beautiful and ugly head.  Your enemies come calling for you.  They want your debt paid.  And they’ll do anything to get it, including taking down your beloved...

And your newborn baby girl.

Of course, we all know who this certain “man of the law” is.

The person who suddenly had to leave San Fransokyo with no reason to the befuddlement of the people closest to him, including Aunt Cass. I mentioned before that it didn’t make sense that his father dying would be the reason why he had to leave San Fransokyo.  It would have to be something that needed to be kept away from public consumption.

Alternatively, what do you think would happen to the most hardnosed, relentless officer in the San Fransokyo force if word got out that he fathered a child with a criminal?

And what do you think would happen to her?

Megan is looking into it with the help of Kate (as of Loose Ends).  We’ve seen Diego and Momakase have this conversation in “Assembly Required”.  Heck, even Hiro seems to think something’s up when he talks to her in “Anti-Hiro”.

She doesn’t have any of her attributes.  She doesn’t have any tremendous thieving skills.  She has never interacted with the Cruzes in the show at all.  It’s the theory that, no matter how you look at it, doesn’t make a lick of sense at all.

And somehow it makes perfect sense to me.

Momakase, the woman whose real name is Anastasia “Ana” Momo Cortés...is Megan’s mom.

And that is a plot thread that I plan on tugging on even into The Future.

What was that about apples and trees?  They never seem to stray too far from each other...

[songtoyou]

Chapter 7: No Such Thing As Good News

Tolerate It

Paring: Modern!Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character

Story Rating: R (No minors should read this fic).

Word Count: 2,373

Warnings: Swearing

Description: Tommy Shelby is the owner and CEO of Shelby Company Limited. Starting out as a Bookmaker, Tommy had big ideas to expand his riches. In the past ten years, the company has grown rapidly to expand its business ventures from bars to producing alcohol, manufacturing motor vehicle parts, and exporting. One of the richest men in Great Britain, Tommy Shelby, has it all. Unfortunately, the death of his wife, Grace, left the multi-millionaire mogul alone and depressed. He needed someone to fulfill his needs and deepest darkest desires.

Chapter Summary: Rose wakes up the morning after the gala and her night with Tommy. She meets Isaiah Jesus, who takes her back home. Tommy wants to know more about Louis. We find out that Alfie continues to be a double-crossing little shit. Our favorite Italian mobster catches wind of Tommy taking away his favorite “toy.”

A/N: This chapter was fun to write and brings a lot of new plot development to the story. 

Italics represent past conversations. 

I do not permit my work to be posted on any other site without my permission.

Tag list: @owenniasstars​ 

The remainder of the night was not a quiet or restful one for Rose. No, Tommy still had needs that he wanted to be met. While the first session was the most intense, the rest after were a tad tamer. Well, as tame as it came when dealing with Tommy Shelby. It was like the man didn’t have the words soft and slow in his vocabulary. Rose noted that when it came to actual sex with Tommy, everything had to be fast and hard. He seemed to take great pleasure in prolonging Rose’s orgasm or retreating just when she was at her peak. It was a long, drawn-out game for Tommy. 

Tommy had Rose on her back, stomach, knees, and on top of him. For a man who was a notorious chain smoker, his stamina was off the charts. He seemed to finally wear himself out by 3 p.m. With Rose on her stomach and head tucked into the pillow, she was quickly falling asleep. She could feel the light caress of Tommy’s hand up-and-down her back. It was as if the gentle act were lulling him to sleep, and soon Rose could hear his soft snores. 

Rose opened her eyes to look at the man sleeping next to her. With the room dark, she could only vaguely make out Tommy’s features. She was able to see a hint of softness to him as he soundly slept. Turning over on her side, Rose pulled up the blankets and fell asleep.

By morning, Rose was awoken by the curtains being drawn back. The blinding sunlight permeated the room. “What the bloody Hell,” Rose groaned and covered her face with the pillow. “It’s too bright.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, miss,” spoke a female voice. “Here, let me close them a little.”

Uncovering her head, Rose looked to see what looked to be a housekeeper in the bedroom. 

“Hi, I’m Rose,” she introduced herself to the older woman who appeared to have a friendly disposition. 

“Hello, I’m Annie. Mr. Shelby’s housekeeper. I apologize for walking in on you. Must have slipped Mr. Shelby’s mind when he left for work this morning.”

“What! He’s gone? What time is it?” Rose asked, looking for a clock.

“It’s ten in the morning, dear. Would you like me to fix you some coffee or tea?” Annie asked sweetly. 

Rose was about to get up but realized she was still naked. She could not believe she overslept or that Tommy left without any sense of ‘goodbye’ or ‘see you later.’

“No, thank you. I…if you don’t mind, need to take a shower. Then I will be on my way.”

Annie nodded her head and left Rose alone in the guest bedroom. With the door shut, Rose tossed the covers off of her and grabbed her to-go bag. She pulled out her toiletries, some underwear, socks, a bra, along with jeans and a t-shirt. She also hauled out her running shoes and tossed them on the floor. 

For a guest bedroom, the bathroom was huge with a standing tub and walk-in shower. If Rose didn’t have somewhere else to be, she would have opted for a bubble bath. Looking at herself in the mirror, Rose traced every bruise, love bite, and red marks that were plastered over her body. 

“He always leaves his mark,” Rose said to herself. She turned on the shower and stepped inside.

The hot water helped ease the soreness Rose was feeling all throughout her body. She lightly washed away any dried fluids that were left on her. Rose more than noticed the soreness between her legs, which would take a while to subside.

When Rose was finished showering, she dried herself and put on her clothes. She did one more look around to make sure she had everything, sent off a quick text to Louis letting him know she was okay and headed downstairs.

Annie warmly greeted her, “I hung up your dress by the door. It is inside the garment cover. I put your shoes in there as well.” 

“Thank you. I appreciate that very much. Uh, when did Mr. Shelby leave this morning?”

“The same time he always does, about six o’clock,” the housekeeper answered. “He told me to let you sleep in, but I was unaware of which room you would be in.”

“Yeah, yeah, look, I have to get going,” said Rose and retrieved the garment bag. She slung her to-go back over her shoulder and walked outside the townhouse.

Before Rose could head down the street towards the Tube, an unknown voice called out to get her attention.

“Ms. Turner,” said the voice.

Rose turned around to see a young black man leaning next to a car. She had seen him around previously outside of her house or place of work. Rose suspected this was one of Tommy’s guys he ordered to look after her. 

“Yes. What do you want?” she asked, not moving.

“Mr. Shelby told me that you would need a ride back home. I’m Isaiah Jesus,” he said, extending his hand out. When he noticed that Rose’s hands were full, he offered to take her garment bag.

“Thank you. I guess you won’t need directions to my house since I have seen you around,” she said, walking to the car. 

Isaiah opened the trunk and put in Rose’s belongings, and ushered to the backseat door, but Rose cut in, saying, “Do you mind if I sit in the front seat?”

“Not a problem, mam,” replied Isaiah with a smile and opened the passenger door for Rose.

The ride back home was quiet except for the sound of music coming from the car stereo. To cut the quietness, Rose decided to speak up. “How long have you worked for Tommy?”

“For a long time,” Isaiah answered.

“How old are you?”

Isaiah laughed, “I’m 21, mam.”

“Okay, you’re sweet, but knock it off with the whole ‘mam’ thing. Call me Rose, okay.”

“As you wish, Rose. My family, well, my father to be exact, has known the Shelby’s a long time. My father’s family immigrated from the Caribbean to England. He met Tommy, Arthur, and John while serving during the War in Afghanistan back in 2006,” Isaiah shared and went on, “It was not the time to be over there, that is for sure. The arrival of the British soldiers in the southern province of Helmand was met with violence from the reviving Taliban. The Afghanis made sure to let our soldiers know that they were not welcomed over there. My dad, his name is Jeremiah, did not come back the same after that, neither did Tommy or his brothers.”

Rose could not believe this young man was telling her all of this, such revealing information. It all started making more sense to her with Tommy’s behavior. He had all of the signs of someone living with post-traumatic stress. And then top it off with his wife, the person he most likely felt comfortable and vulnerable around, diagnosed unexpectedly with cancers, and then dying. No wonder Tommy was the way he was.

“Wait, your dad is Jeremiah Jesus?”

“Yeah,” Isaiah responded, looking over at Rose.

“I have seen him on the news lately. He leads many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations,” noted Rose.

Isaiah beamed with pride, “That would be him. He’s amazing. Definitely the type of voice and leader we need right now.”

“Yeah, my son has become more socially active at school and around our community. It is a good thing. I want him to be aware of his privileges and use them for good causes,” Rose responded fondly. 

When Isaiah pulled into Rose’s neighborhood, he parked the car in front of her house. Both got out of the car, and Isaiah helped retrieve Rose’s belongings from the trunk. 

“Thank you, Isaiah, for driving me home. It was nice not having to take the Tube.”

“No problem, Rose. It is my job, after all. I have to get back to London, but someone will be around to look over your house. Have a nice rest of your day,” said Isaiah and tipped his hat to Rose, and retreated back to the car.

Rose walked up to the front door to unlock it and went inside her home. In the car, Isaiah pulled out his phone to call Tommy. By the second ring, Tommy picked it up. “She home?” he asked.

“Yes, Tommy, she is just walked in her house right now,” replied Isaiah, looking over at the house. 

“Okay, good. Once Darren shows up, you can leave,” Tommy instructed Isaiah.

Hanging up the phone, Tommy pinched the bridge of his nose and took in a deep breath. When he let it out, he sat back down at his desk. Truth be told, Tommy did feel bad leaving Rose to wake up alone that morning. But he had to get to work. He knew she needed the rest from the previous night. Tommy did not know why, but when he was with Rose, he became a different person. It was as if he felt freer. More relaxed. More willing to pursue his darker desires than he ever had before. The way Tommy was with Rose, he was never like that with Lizzie. 

He was not quite sure what made the two women different. Lizzie, he noticed she would never push back, never quite challenge him. With Rose, he could see there was a fire in her. Tommy especially noticed it last night when she turned the tables on him during his line of questioning. For a second, she caught him off guard but managed to recover quickly. Rose was also more open to his sexual fantasies, whereas Lizzie was never that hardcore. Yes, he and Lizzie would experiment with role-playing or bondage, but it was never to the level he had with Rose. 

There was something about Rose that Tommy could not quite put his finger on. While he knew most everything about the woman, he still felt that he didn’t “know her.” That feeling bothered him. He was a man who liked to know everything about everyone and anything. Rose’s son was a factor that he did not know much about. 

According to information Tommy gathered, Louis was sixteen years old and attended public school. His birthday was July 3, 2003. He currently was in his 11th year at school, with next year being he would enter as a lower 6th. While his grades were decent, he was active with after-school sports like football or basketball. All in all, Tommy needed to determine if Rose’s son was a liability. He needed to meet the kid himself to determine if that was a fact.

Once Rose settled down at home, she opened her laptop and looked through her work email. Rose’s boss, Linda, wouldn’t be in the office today. She had to take her husband to a doctor’s appointment. So Rose knew she could get away with not physically being in the office that morning. However, Rose did not foresee herself oversleeping and missing much of the day’s work. She emailed Linda, letting her know that she was not feeling well that morning. Thankfully, Linda believed Rose and told her to rest up. 

What caught Rose off guard was when Linda mentioned how beautiful she looked last night. 

‘What the fuck,’ Rose said to herself, confused. She reached for her phone and saw the mass of text messages from friends and even her mother, Pam. All wrote how gorgeous she looked at the gala and congratulated her on “bagging” Tommy Shelby. The text from her mother stood out amongst the rest. Pam said she wanted to see Rose and Louis and planned to make a London trip sometime soon. Nothing indicating if Rose’s dad, Geoffrey, would join Pam on the trip. While Rose’s relationship with her mother was somewhat cordial, her relationship with her father was practically non-existent. Geoffrey more than let it be known that he wanted nothing to do with his daughter or grandson. It was one of the big reasons why Rose left Blackpool.

Against Rose’s better judgment, she googled Tommy Shelby. Low and behold, there was an array of articles about him with the mystery woman from last night’s gala, with pictures to boot. A part of her knew this would happen but didn’t quite expect this much attention from her friends, boss, or mother. Thankfully, news in England never lasted longer than 24 hours. Soon, a new shiny toy would be dangled in the face of the nation, and Rose would, literally, be yesterday’s news. She only had about a couple more hours to wait until more important and titillating news came along. 

With a slam of his fist to the desk, Luca Changretta was more than upset. He was angry once he caught sight of the pictures. Luca thought Alfie Solomons was lying when he said that Tommy Shelby had taken something from the Italian mobster. The Jewish gangster never quite stated what it was that Tommy had taken.

“Trust me, mate. You will find out soon enough, eh,” Alfie told Luca over the phone a while back. 

“You better not be fucking with me, Solomons. I know you enjoy playing games with Tommy, but I am no fool,” Luca sneered into the phone.

Alfie just laughed, “I’m not fucking with you. No, I wouldn’t do that to ya. I think our boy Tommy needs a reminder of his place, don’t you think. The lad has gotten a bit too big for his britches. Good ol’ Tom thinks he can take anything he wants with no consequences.”

“Again, Solomons, why should I care what Tommy Shelby does?”

“Well, come Thursday morning, be sure to check the London news. Then you will see. Be sure to call me when you do,” Alfie instructed and hung up the phone.

Luca’s first instinct was to brush Alfie off. The man was always playing tricks. However, there was a part of Luca that was intrigued to find out what Alfie was talking about. The pictures of Tommy with Rose infuriated Luca so much that all he saw was red. Blood red. Blood that needed to be spilled. 

[boogiewrites]

Never Break the Chain Pt. 2

Part 2 of 5

Characters: Javier Peña x OFC

Summary:  Javier and Esme's first time seeing each other in almost twenty years. A photograph leads to an obsessive hunt for the woman he thought was dead. They both find they got where they wanted. But is it what they want now?

Warnings/Tags: Tension. Big reunited kiss. 

Click on my icon then go to my Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. (Had to do this since Tumblr killed links, sorry.) Please like, comment and reblog if you enjoyed it! It helps out us writers A LOT!

Time passes, as it always has and always will. It stopped for no man, not even Javier. Seeing his first love fade into nothing had left him a different man. Walls came up, barriers were built that his enemies would even be impressed by. She’d done him a favor, snapping him out of the young man’s dream, but he felt he had nothing left but trying to help once she was gone. So he threw himself into his work.

Sure there were other women. He thought he loved some, but would always leave them. He always hurt them and that wasn’t his intention precisely but they would thank him years later. He was what they would refer to in close company as “a dodged bullet”. He’d been called far worse.

He despised his cliche reactions to his trauma sometimes. Drinking, smoking, being a general pain in the ass, renowned and proud asshole was easier. Burying yourself in prostitutes and let them take away the thoughts for a little while was the easiest. He would fantasize he could help them, even save some of them. He surely wasn’t getting his hero complex stroked when it came to his work. He had a soft spot for women, he had learned the hard way the shit deal they’d landed when they were born. He couldn’t do much...but he could try to help. So he did. Loss after loss he kept trying. This was that bit of good Esme had always believed in. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would have it so he made the best of it while he could.

The night before was nothing knew, an old habit at this point for him. He went out and got a woman, he’d pour every bit of good in him into her, convincing himself he still had it. He’d make them feel good, listen to them, things that were in short supply in their lives from men. He could be that good guy exception, if only for a short while. It felt nice to not be looked at with disgust or fear. The slivers of affection kept him going after dark. He’d leave them breathless, moans turning to laughs as they dressed, joking they might not make him pay. But they always took the money. And he offered it with no judgment, pulling his jeans on and halfway through a highball glass as his lean outstretched arm offer up their compensation for making him feel something good and push out the bad thoughts for a short while. He could be making worse decisions.

He rubs his temple, suppressing a groan as he slid his way into the uncomfortable chair at the beaten-up metal table. The chatter of his coworkers all making their way into the room was grating but nothing he couldn’t ignore. Morning debriefing, something he gave a shit about. Well, work was the one thing he gave a shit about right now, hyper-focused on the clock and trying to drown out the obsession off the clock. It was a dynamic that he was still trying to perfect. He downs the hot black coffee in his hand and nods at the secretary just outside the doorway, “Get me another, sugar. No sugar.” he winks and sends her off. She side-eyed him and went on her way, that was just Pena to her, horny but harmless. He cracks his back, a grunt before landing his elbows on the table to focus, the overblown commander coming in with a handful of photos, spreading them on the table as they talked about what they always did, the cartel.

Pena tries to approach everything individually, but there was only so much range these guys had, and not seeing them all as one giant collection of piss ants with assault rifles was something getting harder and harder to do. So as new and old names were said, he watched the board fill out, the line attaching known connections and new ones. There had been a new wave of intel, something Pena and his partner Murphy were used to being the ones doing, but he wouldn’t complain if someone else finally wanted to sack up and their fucking job like they were supposed to.

“So we have our old friends,” a slap of photos to the board. “Then there’s a new round of boys coming in.” he taps the newest addition to the board. “Seems we’re getting inbred with the other families, the jewel smugglers, the miners...seems we’re trying to venture out and expand our already impressive portfolio.” he snorts.

“They can never just be fucking satisfied with their millions.” someone groans and complains.

“It’s a good chance try to take them down too.” Murphy shrugs.

“Eyes on the prize, kiss ass,” Pena says quietly, accepting his coffee without a second glance. “Do we know these women?” he asks with a nod in the direction.

“Typical.” Murphy rolls his eyes.

“No. Our assumption is prostitutes. Nothing new there.” the commander goes on, but he quickly becomes background noise as Pena stands and moves toward the board. He stood, hips jutted forward, eyes scanning, hand over his mouth in thought. Once he saw the new pictures he hadn’t heard another word the men had said. “PENA!” barked his way grabs his attention as he casually shifts his attention.

“Mmmph. Yeah.” he mutters, eyes moving back to the board.

“I was informing you, you’d be doing street intel on these newcomers.”

“Yeah,” he says disinterested, thumbing his lip before placing his hands on his hips. “Do we have these photos in color?”

The question catches the room off guard. “Why?” he’s met with annoyed opposition.

“This woman…” he taps the photo of a woman with a sly smile on the arm of a very powerful man. Dark waves teased and a heart-shaped face buried in a fur coat collar worth more than he made in a year. He clears his throat. “I’ve seen her before…”

“They’re whores Javi, of course, you have.” Murphy leads the room in a wave of amused hums and chuckles.

“No I’m serious,” he says with no inflection, catching his partner’s attention. “Do we have a location on them if there’s no color?”

“Why’s color important?”

He’s quiet for a moment, jaw tense and eyes blinking, baffled at what he was allowing himself to think. “Her eyes… were green.” MUrphy readjusts himself in his seat, watching Pena’s eyes carefully. He could swear they looked sad.

“What information we’ve got is here.” the commander points at the table with its thick manilla envelopes.

Javier nods with no spoken response, staying in place until the room is empty except for a hesitant Murphy who approaches him. “Who is she?” he asks quietly.

He shakes his head in response. “It can’t be her,” there’s a heavy pause, “But it...fuck it looks like her…” his voice trails off and Murphy is left with more questions.

“Well, are you gonna answer me or just write poetry about her Javi?”

“She’s…” he sighs and sucks his teeth. “She’s supposed to be dead.”

“Did you-?”

“No… no… nothing like that.” his voice still quiet. “I knew her… fuck...over a decade ago now.”

“So we can add hunting ghosts to our agenda now too. Great.” Murphy takes it lightly and presses his lips together. He stares at Javi, his eyes dark and focused. He was left with more questions than answers. His money was still on it being a hooker. It’s not as if Pena had even talked about Esme since the investigation when he was young. His partner may have his back in life or death situations, and they may have been close, but no one knew about her. Pena had hoped to keep it that way. He hoped he was wrong. He hoped it wasn’t her. Because if it was… well he didn’t know what he’d do.

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

Esme didn’t know it but with every minute that passed, she was being proven right about her belief in her first love, that if he knew she was alive, that he would find her.

Esme had ran, a bug out bag down the river and no trace left behind. She made her way south over the years, learning her craft and making friends in the right places. She’d started with rich men, especially rich white men trying to make a living off exploiting her fellow man in Mexico. It had been almost too easy. They thought nothing of her and wore her as if she were a watch; on their arm and shiny and proof of their wealth. She would gain access, gather intel and then sweep in and take the goods and ghost out.

Esme had been legally declared dead and was now living as Estelle. She had so many names over the years but her current incarnation was Estelle. And she was a star. She’d become what she wanted, she was rich and self-reliant. She needed no one and had her fun as she craved it. There were men and women and drugs and jewels and for so long it had been a pleasant hazy dream. But the novelty of it wore off, she grew bored,  a witness to her hypocrisy, growing soft and lazy with her indulgence. When she emerged from her haze and saw the state of the world around her she knew things had changed. Narcos now ruled the world. The government bowed to them, the poor worshipped them. She saw they were the future, the new leaders. And for her, that meant that’s where she had to be.

She found herself once again sharp and full of adrenaline. Her new role took real savvy and cunning. Otherwise, she’d end up dead for real. She cozied up, working for Narcos to steal for them. It wasn’t hard in skill, but it was in the amount of sexist shit she had to deal with. She’d killed men for laying hands on her, and worse. She’d pulled knives and guns and made frown men piss themselves as she threatened them with words they’d never heard women utter up to that point. Most of the leaders would laugh until they cried after the fact, seeing a woman act in such away. She entertained them. They underestimated her, saw her as some novelty pet that fetched things and entertained them. She could handle that. As long as she got paid.

Following the groups, making her way around it made sense she found herself in Columbia. She knew it was dangerous, but she was addicted to it. It filled the void of sex and drugs for her for the most part, although she did partake among her peers from time to time. She thought it made her admirable, independent, and a shining example of what a woman could be if she had the nerve to do it. She was, to a degree, but she was also wrong. She lacked the softness in her life anyone, not just a woman needed. A void where no love or trust or intimacy was in her life she filled with material things and lists of her accomplishments. if she kept busy and looking ahead she wouldn’t be still king enough to face her demons.

Except she was about to come face to face with her biggest one.

—

As was his way, Javier had become a bit obsessed. He had to know if this woman was Esme. He’d been tracking her and was able to have DEA level observation to do it. It was a personal mission he’d been able to spin to look like a cartel one. There was a connection, she was seen with them, but little was known outside of that. After he’d put the word out for the beautiful woman with green eyes it hadn't taken long before someone scorned by her leaked information on her next job. The informant knew what his boss wanted to be stolen and when she’d be there. Normally no agent or cop would care to pay attention to her, or some jewels being stolen,  she was just some woman to them. But serendipitous timing made sure she became THE woman for one of them.

She practically waltzed into the store. She scaled a fence, a wall and came through a window but for her, that was practically begging her to steal from them. The rooms were dark, silent except for the sounds of her feet as she made her way into the back, unseen and unbothered. It wasn’t until she’d stopped to admire her score before snatching it they the clicking of a gun behind her caught her attention.

He’d waited in the shadows, and none too patiently. With the aim set to intimidate, not kill, he Easter no more time. “Who are you?” It came out as an order.

Her head snapped up, back still to the faceless voice she felt was all too familiar. She blinks, the former goal now removed and replaced with a flood of emotion. She remains silent, her turn to be shocked like he was when he saw her face in the photos.

“Turn around.” Another order. The voice was deeper, darker now but still made her feel the same way.

She turns, and painfully slow. She doesn’t meet his intense gaze immediately, reading his body language first and calming her racing mind. There’s no way it was him.

There’s no way it’s her, his mind reassures him. But as soon as her eyes raise to meet his his stomach drops. He was right.

“Javi?” It was almost a whisper, for the first time in she couldn’t remember when she didn’t hide her emotions in her face.

The gun falls first, his sense falling to the wayside as it slipped into its place in the back waist of his jeans. His frame was broader, still lean moves towards her with an earned confidence now. He doesn’t speak, staring at her as if she might not be real. She gives him his time. He’d earned it. “It really is you.” It was his turn to let the veil fall, dark eyes shining in the low, cool light.

She nods. “Javi I can explain.” She begins, prepared to apologize and ask forgiveness before asking him why the hell he was there at all. They were a long way from home.

“You’re alive.” A rather obvious statement that made her smile. It was all he could handle.

“I can explai-“ a quick burst of words before they’re cut off by his mouth landing against hers. She hadn’t expected this. She was prepared for many things last but not this, at least not for him to be kissing her. “Javi my-“ she tries to get out but his hands are already on her cheeks, hot and damp and certain. She lets her concern fade for a moment, it would all be fine. She gives in to it, lets him take the lead, and pull her against him roughly. The anger and hurt coming through in his grip on her back and face as they kissed breathlessly. He stole her focus without trying, there was the signature huff from his nose, the nuzzle into her between separating to catch his breath but he felt different. But so did she.

Where they once held differences in certainty they now held the opposite. He kissed her like he just found out his first love was alive after decades of vices to cover the loss. Because he had. Every woman and experience he’d had between her and now, every skill and thus gained confidence was clear and apparent. This was not a boy handling a girl. He was a man handling his woman.

And there she was, blindsided and touch starved, passion and intimacy starved being devoured by the only man she’d ever truly loved. The only man she’d ever let in and see her for what she was. The only man that knew Esmeralda. It was a raw and painful ache that emanated from her chest as she clutched her hand around his wrist and the other gripped his shirt in her hand. She gave in because she knew it wouldn’t last long, and after it was over she’d miss it.

With eyes squeezed shut, his forehead pressed to hers, his statuesque nose gently rubbing against hers he exhales hot against her face. “Esme…” he pulls back and holds her face, demanding her focus.

“It’s been so very long since someone’s called me that.” she sighs and puts her hands on his forearms.

“Since I called you that?”

She nods and smiles, face pressed into his hand.

“Maybe it’s about time people called you that again.” he pauses and looks her over with a hard brow, he couldn't hide his simmering anger underneath the confusion, relief, and affection. “Where the fuck have you been?” She sighs in response. “Why the hell are you HERE?”

“Same as you. Work.”

“Why are you with those men? Don’t you know who they are? What they do?”

“Why do you ask questions you already know the answer to?”

“Why Esme?” his eyes water and his hands squeeze her face a bit too tightly before a wave of dizziness hit him.

“Same reason now as then,” she whispers, his grip loosening and not hearing her response, she slicks his dark hair back as his eyes start to roll around in their sockets. “You're fine, Javi. Seems you fell for my defense mechanism.” she smiles and he looks at her, starting to slump. “To be fair I didn’t know to expect you. You’ll wake up soon enough. It’s only temporary.” she wipes the culprit of the sudden wave of forced unconsciousness he was going through, her lipstick off his mouth. He was out quickly, and she spent some long moments exploring the now aged face of her once wide-eyed companion. “You are even more handsome than I thought you’d be.” she coos and kisses him after dragging him into a chair and pushing it into a corner so he wouldn’t fall. “It now inevitable we’ll meet again. My old hound dog.” She chuckles, a kiss to take in the scent of his hair before she parted ways. “See you later, mi amor.”

-----------

Peña awoke to a boot knocking against his knee and an odd headache. It was pitch black outside by now, people on the streets outside none the wiser to the life-altering experience he’d just had.

“Are we blacking out in stores now?” Murphy snarks and shakes his head, leaning against a door frame.

“That’s not...I’m not…” Javier shakes his head, rubbing and tapping at the pulse in his skull.

“Then what the hell is it?” He can hear the judgment in his partner's voice.

“If I told you you would think I was crazy.” he groans and sits up with his back straight in the chair, one cocked brow looking over to the man staring him down.

“And I don’t now?”

Peña huffs out a laugh. That was a fair assessment. He’d think the same thing. He looked across the room, the glass case he’d found her standing in front of now empty. “She took the jewels.” he switches the subject, an arm raised lazily and collapsing against his lap after.

“Were they made of cocaine? Why do we give a shit?”

“It’s not the jewels that are important. It’s the woman that did it.”

“A woman? Huh. That’s something you don’t see every day. That is… a little bit crazy I guess.”

“That’s not what’s crazy.”

“Am I gonna have to fuckin’ waterboard you man, just tell me.” he groans.

“That woman I told you about... that stole those... she's been declared legally dead for almost twenty years.” he finally says with a defensive tone and a face that said don’t fucking try me to the man still assessing his sanity with no attempt at hiding his negative prognosis.

“Oh.” Murphy contemplates looking away to the empty case. “That... yeah okay that is crazy.”

@jaegeeeeer​ @likedovesinthewnd​ @inkededucatednnerdy​  @biharryjames @ladamari68​ @past-romantic​ @weliketomoveit

[plumbtales]

Gold Digger or Woman in Love? - The Controversial Life of Dina Goth

From dating scandals to rumors of alien abduction, there’s few sims in Pleasantview as controversial as Dina Goth, formely known as Dina Caliente.

In an exclusive interview for The SimNation Chronicle, the lounge singer opens up her million simoleon mansion to talk about love, family and haters.

Most might know Dina as the widow of the late Michael Bachelor, brother of the infamous Bella Goth.

The fact that Michael Bachelor was a great deal older than his young wife garnered a lot of controversy.

Older men seem to be a constant in Dina’s love life, as her latest husband, inventor & scientist Mortimer Goth, is twice her age.

“Age is just a number,” Dina explains. “Love is love.”

Speaking of love, the nature of Dina’s relationship with Pleasantview’s cassanova Don Lothario is a hot topic.

Lothario’s scandalous affairs have been widely published and gossiped about.

Dina herself is claimed to be one of Lothario’s former lovers. But the young Mrs. Goth is tight-lipped on the topic.

“Don and I are close. But I’m a married woman. The past is in the past.”

The word gold digger is thrown around wherever Dina goes, even before she married into the richest family in Pleasantview.

There’s rumors that goes so far as to accuse Dina of being involved in the mysterious dissapearence of her husband’s ex-wife, Bella Goth. Those rumors have never been confirmed.

Dina herself denies marrying Mortimer for money.

“Sims hear about me and assume I’m some bimbo that married an old rich man to scam him. But that’s not true at all. I married Mortimer because I love him. We have a lot in common. We’ve both lost someone we love in the past so we understand each other’s pain.”

What is the secret to a happy marriage? According to Dina, it’s romance. She preaches the importance of keeping the flame alive.

“My marriage is very passionate. Morty and I make sure to get some time for ourselves and arrange dates as often as we can, even if we don’t leave the house.”

Two seems to be a lucky number for the Goths as the family has been blessed with two sets of twins.

Casper & Vincent came first, shortly followed by their sisters Elizabeth & Isolde.

Mortimer’s oldest children with Bella Goth have both moved out, giving room for the expanding family.

Looking at Dina’s daughter Elizabeth there’s an obvious question that has to be asked.

The SimNation Chronicle: So it’s true that you have alien ancestors?

“Yes, on my father’s side. It’s not something I’ve tried to hide. I’m very proud of my heritage.”

Spirituality plays an important part in Dina’s life. She meditates every night before bed.

“Morty and I recently took a trip to Takemizu Village. It was a very spiritual experience. The zen gardens are beautiful there and and I just felt this sence of peace.”

What does the future have in store for the woman who seems to have it all?

“I love being a singer. I would love to make it big in entertainment. But I’m really focused on my family at the moment. Raising four toddlers is a handful. *laughs*”

As for the gossip surrounding her, Dina takes it all in stride.

“I don’t let rumors bother me. There’s always going to be sims that don’t like me. There’s the saying; haters gonna hate. And It’s true.”

[earnestly-endlessly]

Can i request Cherik fic rec of collage au? Pretty please? Extra cookie points if it’s long fic

Thank you for the request anon! I am so sorry how late this is, but I hope that this list will give you plenty of new fics to read and enjoy!! 

College/University Cherik AU 

** Where they’re both college/university students**

A Road Trip to Pennsylvania – Aainiouu

Summary: For a year Charles has nurtured the biggest and most embarrassing crush known to man towards Erik. They are friends and roommates and when Erik asks Charles to accompany him to home on Thanksgiving of course Charles goes.

Of kittens and teacups and love – Ren

Summary: Modern AU in which Charles and Erik are flatmates. Charles studies psychology and likes tea and chess and keeps bringing home stray kittens, and Erik lets him because he's maybe perhaps a little bit sort of in love with him.

Love Medley – ikeracity

Summary: Charles and Erik have been friends and roommates for two years. They've also, coincidentally, been in love with each other for two years. Neither of them has ever had the courage to admit it to the other, but Erik's new friendship with Magda and an untimely accident forces them to confront their feelings once and for all.

it was a red scarf semester – ikeracity

Summary: When Erik makes a bet that he can get into Charles Xavier's pants before the semester ends, he doesn't expect Charles to resist quite so much. And he doesn't expect Charles to change everything he thought he knew about mutants, friendship, and love.

Can You Feel My Heart – FuryRed

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr hates Charles Xavier.It’s as true as the words written on the wall in the bathroom at the university that Erik attends. Erik sees them one day- accompanied by a crude drawing of Erik and Charles glaring at each other- and recognises the truth of the sentence, and smiles.

He hates Charles. Probably…

Enemies With Benefits – bettysofia

Summary: Casual sex with your sworn enemy gets tricky once feelings get involved.

CMUniverse - Pookaseraph

Summary: A series of fics that star Tony, Charles, and Erik (and probably some others as the idea expands) at Carnegie Mellon University. Some are AU of each other, don't use logic.

Math Reasons - pearl_o, pocky_slash

Summary: "Mom says Erik always knows what he wants, it just sometimes takes him a little while to actually realize it," Ruth said.

Charles fell in love with Erik the first night they met, the first week of freshman year. Two years of friendship, adventures, arguments, hijinks, secrets, and summer visits later, Erik is starting to catch up.

Still Life with Cookies – stlkrchck

Summary: It wasn't fair that he only wanted Erik to draw him when Erik wanted to listen to him talk about how unfair the lack of emphasis that tenure committees placed on teaching ability was and tuck him into the hat and scarf and mittens that he wore even though it wasn’t properly cold yet and kiss his gorgeous, ridiculously red mouth and make out with Charles on the bed that he'd apparently wedged between the window and "pipes of some sort, don't ask me why there are pipes in my room, Erik," in his tiny dorm room.

Or: Charles is a nude model, and Erik is an art student.

The Pretender – Clocks

Summary: Charles is sick of having his best friend Erik drop to one knee and fake-propose to him in restaurants, just to score a free dessert. He doesn’t know which is worse: the complete embarrassment, or the likelihood that Erik doesn’t mean a word of it.

That time the System didn’t work – bluexlily

Summary: "pick each other up from bad dates" au

They had stablished The System a long, long time ago.

Since they became each other’s roommate, actually, and realized that they had more in common than their home state and decided they should be friends.

Whenever he or Charles is on a date, they send a first message after meeting the prospected boyfriend.

Accidentally Welcome to the Rest of Your Lives - Kianspo

Summary: Non-powered college AU. Erik and Charles have nothing in common until they end up having sex at someone's party. They don't have much in common after that, either, but find each other a hard habit to quit.

A Study in Advanced Lecherism - orphan_account

Summary: Charles has this thing he does when he's drunk. He gets completely lecherous. For some reason, that really pisses Erik off. Who knew?

Learning Curve – pocky_slash

Summary: (Non-powered college AU) Erik takes a trip back to campus to visit a despondent Charles and does his best to offer comfort.

Charles Does Not Buy a Shamwow - Madneto

Summary: Charles and Erik are spending the first few days of their university's winter break alone at Erik's mother's house. Then, Erik's mother decides to come home early unannounced... while Erik and Charles are naked on the living room couch.

5 Times Charles Had Nothing to Say and 1 Time He Did – BadLuckBlueEyes

Summary: Charles Xavier usually has a lot to say. But sometimes he doesn't and that's nice too. (Written for the prompt: Erik befriending and falling in love with mute!Charles)

Five Useful Signs When Dating Charles Xavier (a down under remix) – letosatie

Summary: Erik meets a fascinating mute boy and rapidly discovers sign language is useful.

Home Together (The Finding Our Way Remix) – significantowl

Summary: Erik is not the sort of person other students strike up conversations with. His expression, his posture, every part of his manner say: Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to talk to you. But none of that stops the boy ahead of him in line with the collapsible white cane, and nothing can stop Erik from falling for him, like it or not.

The Wall (a.k.a.  Erik Lensherr) – fkbunnyclub

Summary: Charles doesn't really want to have a crush on the cute stoic senior who keeps dropping by the library where he works who also has a pregnant girlfriend. Or so he thinks.

Building a fire – dedkake

Summary: Erik wishes he were in law school instead of med school, because then he would be researching the legal remedies for the doubtless thousands of violations his apartment building's slumlord owner, Sebastian Shaw, has perpetrated on his tenants.

On the bright side, maybe he can finally coax his bizarrely oblivious roommate, Charles into sharing his bed, or curling up together on the couch under many blankets. Purely for surviving the night, of course.

April Showers – ikeracity

Summary: Walking home in the dark in a rainstorm is not Charles' idea of a pleasant night. Of course, the stranger with the umbrella who offers to walk him home makes the experience infinitely more agreeable.

Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei – Darksknight

Summary: “My mother has expressed that if I come dateless, I will be assigned one, to put it lightly. So, you see... well, I have a favor to ask. Erik, darling. Will you be my pretend boyfriend?"

Erik thinks it over for a second. "... No."

Mutant House at Dead Kings College – mabyn

Summary: When it comes to romance, Charles has terrible timing.

Best of Enemies – Black_Betty

Summary: Student and mutant rights activist Erik Lehnsherr is furious when the college newspaper chooses to interview his opponent Charles Xavier instead of him.

He's mad because of the politics of the thing. It nothing to do with how hot Charles looks in the picture accompanying the article.

Seriously.

The Luck You’re Born With – Lynds

Summary: College AU. Erik thinks Charles Xavier is an arrogant, rich brat, whose only redeeming quality is his intellect. Charles never disputes this image. Then through an accident Erik finds out that Charles has been long cut off from his family and is essentially a single parent to a ten-year-old Raven.

Like Roses and Wine – Schwoozie

Summary: Charles is not what you would call a “sports person” - but the promise of free kisses after the game, especially with one Erik Lensherr playing midfield, is a temptation Charles can't resist.

Every Song I Know – Fengirl88

Summary: “Erik,” Janos says wearily, “you had amazing sex with this guy. He obviously really likes you. You have, what, a month, six weeks left? You can spend it moping and hiding and worrying you're going to run into him. Or you can call him, have a good time, and figure out where you go from there.”

Erik groans. It's what he wants to do, so much it scares him.

[or, the one where Erik and Charles meet and fall in love as exchange students, break up, and meet again by chance seven years later]

Argue me tender, argue me true – Wild_Imagination

Summary: “You’re having your bad-boy crisis with seven years of delay, Charles.”

“Why must he spit out those hateful, misanthropic, science-free, separatist ideas of his with a face like that!”

Charles and Erik attend the same college, and they never, ever agree on anything. But that's fine, because Charles can't stand him. No, really.

Simultaneity – TurtleTotem

Summary: Trying to deliver roses to his girlfriend, Erik knocks on the wrong door -- but Charles is so happy to get them, how can Erik possibly tell him the truth? Love, lies and exhaustion follow as Erik tries to keep boyfriend and girlfriend happy and, most importantly, unaware of each other!

**Where one of them is a college/university student**

in the moonlight, on a joy ride – scarlettblush

Summary: Librarian AU. Charles is the young librarian and Erik is the college student who is completely besotted with him.

Mutually Beneficial Transaction – Pookaseraph

Summary: In his sophomore year at Columbia University, Erik, feeling slowly strangled by his mounting college debt, places an add on a sugar daddies website. He doesn't know exactly what to expect from it, but when he's contacted by a man named Charles who seems less creepy than the other people who have responded to his profile, he decides to give it a shot. Charles is nothing like what he expected, and Erik finds himself slowly falling in love with his sugar daddy while trying to find out exactly what caused this amazing guy to buy his emotional and sexual intimacy when he clearly deserves so much more than that.

Authority kink – aesc, Subtilior

Summary: “You’re going to be in your room, on Skype with full video, when I call you tonight, at … nine o’clock sharp, your time.”

Tonight.

Erik, a proud and surly graduate student, keeps his deepest, darkest desires under tight control. Charles, his genetics professor, keeps handcuffs on his copy of the university handbook. You can see where this is going.

An Ideal Grace – afrocurl, nekosmuse

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr is a visiting professor at Columbia University, as well as an acclaimed and award winning poet. Charles Xavier is a lead researcher with the Genetics Department who is well on his way to tenure. But what happens when Charles has to cancel a class because half his students abandon him in favour of a mysterious new English Lit professor? Naturally he ends up sitting in in the class, where Professor Lehnsherr mistakes him for a student. It's really too bad Erik has such a strict policy against dating students. It's also too bad Erik doesn't seem to know how to use Google.

Note: This is not technically a university/college AU, but I’ll let it slide because it’s one of the best cherik fics out there and for the majority of the fic Charles is in Erik’s class (even though, unbeknownst to Erik, he’s a professor as well).

[torncriminals]

“  𝑁𝑂𝑇 𝑌𝑂𝑈𝑅 𝐷𝐴𝑀𝑆𝐸𝐿 𝐼𝑁 𝐷𝐼𝑆𝑇𝑅𝐸𝑆𝑆. ”

Name: Marietta Aria Lombardi Nicknames / Alias:  Mar, Maria. / The Vinewood Damsel Age: Verse dependent. Mid twenties - mid thirties.  DOB: June 5th, 1989 Height: 5′5″  Hair color: Dark brown, looks black sometimes.  Eye color: Baby blue Ethnicity: Italian Spoken languages: English, Italian. Learning several other languages for her jobs.  Occupation: Co-manager of the family restaurant. /  street racer, criminal & driver for contract jobs or heists on the side.  Skills / talents: Mechanic knowledge... she’s been learning how to fix cars since the age of sixteen after she got her first car, pro racer & drifter, knows how to fight and defend herself--- been taking self-defense and martial arts lessons since she was a teenager as well. She can sing and belt high notes. In high school, instead of cheerleading she took up on track and swimming. So yes, she can run fast and swims like a fish. She knows how to use guns as well, thanks to her Uncle and Blue. Parents: Giovanni & Sofia (alive) Siblings:  older brother Lucas (disowned) Other family / allies: Isabella Shepard (best friend since high school), Salvatore (youngest cousin & the baby brother she never had), Vincenzo (Uncle & right-hand man of the Mafia’s Boss), Blue (heist crewmate, bodyguard & close friend). Pets: Pomeranian named after one of her favorite TMNT, Michelangelo aka Mikey. Likes: Wine, fast cars, dogs, money, gambling, traveling, rich / exotic food, pizza, horror movies... even the cheesy ones just because she has a blast making fun of them with Isabella. Dislikes: Assholes, quitters, whiners, cheaters, racists, just shitty / toxic people in general. And shitty fast food like McDonald’s. 

History: She was born in Florence, Italy before her parents decided to move to the United States to expand on their business when she was five years old and her older brother was ten. They moved to Los Santos (or Los Angeles) and Marietta has lived there since then. Despite being a part of a rich family who lived in luxury, Marietta was always an adventurous kid. She liked to explore. She wasn’t your typical Barbie Doll kind of girl, she liked Legos. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and arcade games like Pacman or Tetris. She also liked the Hot Wheels toy cars, which led her to getting into street racing when she became older. Despite seeming like a tomboyish kid with what she liked back then, she still became the girly type. 

She used to be close to her brother when they were kids, but when she became twelve years old... a rivalry began to develop between them and they no longer could get along. They often fought and picked on each other. Lucas and his shady friends were the reason Marietta started to take self-defense and martial arts classes at a such young age. When she became sixteen, her brother came home one night, drunk and high... still enraged by the fact his parents refused to give him his trust fund due to his reckless behavior, he picked on and threatened Marietta since she was the only person there and their parents were out of town. They ended up having a huge fight, and Lucas, in his intoxicated state, attempted to assault her sexually. Luckily, the classes she’d been taking helped her fight him off and she ended up sending him to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder, fractured jaw and ribs. When their parents came back home and found out what happened, they disowned Lucas and kicked him out. He ended up disappearing somewhere up north in Blaine County where he got into the meth business.

After she graduated from high school and while she attended college, she joined her father in co-managing the family restaurant. During that time, on the weekends and sometimes on week days when she wasn’t busy, she would be street racing and has been doing it ever since then. It wasn’t until after she met Blue that she started getting into heists and other robberies. This was after she graduated from college. She became the highly recommended driver / wheelman (or rather wheelwoman) for jobs. Despite having a good life, she still often looks back over her shoulder and watching out for her older brother in case he decided to come back for his revenge.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #27: The Pale Bro

Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.

They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.

Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.

“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”

Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”

“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”

With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.

“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.

“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.

“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” Trevor smirked.

“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for earlier today and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”

“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.

Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”

“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”

“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.

“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. There’s a sofa bed too, in case someone really can’t stand having a roommate. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”

“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”

“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.

“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.

“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”

Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.

***

“I don’t believe this shit.”

They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”

“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”

“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”

“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”

“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.

“Why?”

“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”

Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.

“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.

Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”

In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.

“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”

“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.

“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”

The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.

“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”

“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”

Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.

“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”

Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”

“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.

“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”

“Yeah.”

And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.

***

The Pale Bro stalked through the woods. Now, you’d think that being twelve feet tall and having a foot easily the size of a car tire’s diameter would make it hard to walk through a thickly wooded forest with plenty of underbrush, but the Bro’s long, skinny arms and legs could easily step over bushes and shrubs, and could pivot in directions that didn’t seem to quite exist within three-dimensional space. So he had very little difficulty making his way through the dense forest.

In the beginning, he was tracking the large treads that may or may not have been left by his asshole cousin, but the trail disappeared as it crossed a small creek. In a tone that sounded like the anthropomorphic personification of the trumpets of Jericho, the Pale Bro groaned, recognizing that he’d lost the trail and would have to search for it.

And so he went up the creek, and down the creek, and out from the creek, and up the trees around the creek, looking for any sign of his cousin… until he heard, in the distance, human voices.

Human female voices.

He stumbled through the woods, suddenly much clumsier than he’d been, following the sound of girls, until he half-fell out of the treeline and ended up in a clearing around another cabin, like Evan’s but bigger. The sounds were coming from around the corner of the cabin. The Pale Bro slid forward, long long legs making long long strides through the yard around the cabin, until a hot tub with a wooden deck came into view. The hot tub was on, and populated by five smokin’ hot girls.

There was a fair-skinned blonde girl, in a skimpy blue bikini that showed off all her curves, whose wavy hair floated angel-like around her head, improbably given that she was in a hot tub. There was a short, delicate black girl with hair in very wet braids and a soft, beautiful face, wearing a candy pink bikini. There was an Indian girl with long hair and an athletic build, with a red bindi mark on her forehead and a pale turquoise one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, sitting on the deck and kicking her feet slowly in the water. A red-haired white girl with tan Mediterranean skin, tight curls, and a bright white bikini that stood out against her tan, had turned away from the tub and was looking directly at the Pale Bro, a slight smile on her face. The fifth girl was green and scaly, with webbed hands and golden eyes with nictating membranes; she didn’t have hair, but she had betta-like, beautifully colored fins on her head that looked hair-like.

All of them were absolutely gorgeous.

The blonde girl shrieked and ducked into the tub; the black girl bounced and climbed out of the tub, a big grin on her face. “Hi there, stranger!” she yelled from the rail around the deck. “Why don’t you come over and have a beer with us?”

The Pale Bro admitted in a tone like the creaking of an ancient rusted machine at the base of an abandoned windmill that that sounded awesome.

The green girl rolled her eyes. The Indian girl gave the black girl a questioning look. “Are you sure, Kayla?”

“Come on, Nandi,” the red-haired girl said. “I think he’s cute.”

The blonde girl came back up. “Are you inviting him over?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What if he’s a psycho killer?”

“Oh, right,” the green girl said. “He’s pale and tall and has eyes all over his body so he must be a psycho killer. Racist much?”

“No! He’s just a strange dude, that’s all! You have to watch out for strange dudes!”

The Pale Bro explained in the voice of a broken subwoofer booming at outdoor concert sound levels underwater that he didn’t really want to scare any of the girls and he’d go if they didn’t want him here.

The green girl leaned her elbows on the edge of the hot tub. “Forget Ashlee, she’s just paranoid.”

“You didn’t want him coming over either, Y’lehna,” Nandi said quietly.

“I just knew that if Kayla invited him over, we’re gonna lose Rhiannon for the rest of the night,” Y’lehna muttered.

The red-haired girl, presumably Rhiannon, was smiling broadly at the Pale Bro now. “Hey there,” she said. “We’ve got hard cider and hard lemonade, Bud, Corona and a couple of local microbrews. What’s your pleasure?”

In a voice that was actually surprisingly normal-sounding for once, the Pale Bro said he’d have whatever Rhiannon was having, which turned out to be hard cider.

He clambered up onto the hot tub deck, pulled off his sneakers, and soaked his feet in the hot tub, which barely came up to his knees.

“So what are you doing around here? You don’t live near here, do you?” Kayla asked.

And so the Pale Bro explained that he and his bros had decided to spend their last spring break of college together, in a cabin in the woods, because once graduation came they might never see each other again, and certainly even if they made excuses to get together on occasion, they’d see each other a lot less.

“That’s so sweet!” Kayla said.

“We’re juniors,” Rhiannon said. “Except Ashlee, she’s a sophomore, and Y’lehna’s technically a senior but she’s planning on doing a fifth year. But we decided to hang out here because Ashlee’s parents just put in a hot tub.”

“Hot tub!” Kayla sang out, and slid back into the tub. She was maybe just a little bit drunk.

As it turned out, they all went to the same university, and Y’lehna and the Pale Bro chatted for a bit about sports. “I tried out for the swim team,” Y’lehna said, “but when they found out I had gills, they disqualified me because apparently part of the point of the sport is that you are only allowed to breathe gaseous oxygen?”

The Pale Bro commiserated, as he hadn’t even tried trying out for the basketball team like he had once dreamed of, realizing that they would never allow someone who was taller than the hoop to play.

***

“I don’t know, though,” Ashlee, who had warmed up to the Pale Bro once another hard lemonade was in her hand, said. She was lying in a deck chair rather than in the tub. “Normally I love this place, and the tub’s great, but something just feels really creepy today.”

“You’ve been on edge since we got here,” Nandi – whose full name turned out to be Nandini, but she insisted that the Pale Bro should use her nickname – agreed.

The Pale Bro was thus reminded that his bros were expecting him to track down what might be a killer who may or may not have murdered Joe, the guy who was supposed to bring in the groceries, and also that he was very hungry and the hard cider wasn’t doing him any favors on an empty stomach. He pulled his feet out of the tub and confessed, in a voice like the grinding of the gears of the machinery that runs the universe, that his bros had sent him out to find a monster – he didn’t mention that the monster was probably his cousin – who might have killed someone, and also that dinner was waiting for him back at the cabin.

“Oh, you should bring them over!” Kayla said cheerfully.

“Are they all like you?” Rhiannon asked in a tone that might be considered “sultry” by anyone not as oblivious as the Pale Bro.

The Pale Bro shook his head and admitted that his bros were all much shorter than he was.

Rhiannon put a hand on his arm. “Well, that’s too bad, but I guess one handsome, tall fellow in a group is all I can expect, right?”

The Pale Bro looked at Rhiannon’s hand like it was an inexplicable glob that might be ice cream and possibly should be washed off, but equally possibly should be licked up.

Y’lehna said, “Why don’t you bring them over? They might be cute.”

“Yeah,” Nandi said, “we can’t all fit in the hot tub at once, but didn’t you say you had four friends back at your cabin?”

“That makes five,” Ashlee said, “and there’s five of us!”

“Also,” Nandi said, “we’ve still got, like, five pizzas in the house.”

This made the decision for the Pale Bro. He took the girls up on their offer of a couple of slices of pizza – they were cold, but he didn’t mind – and then headed back to the cabin to let his bros know about the girls’ offer.

***

The Pale Bro knocked on the window of the cabin, which apparently gave everyone inside heart attacks, even though he’d just meant to warn them to open the door for him. “Jesus, Pale,” Evan complained. “There’s a door.”

Within a few minutes – and after dropping his hard cider bottle in the recycling bin, because Evan’s family were big on recycling and the Pale Bro wanted to be polite – he had explained the situation to his bros.

“Let me get this straight,” Evan said. “You didn’t find any sign of Joe, you didn’t find your cousin or any other kind of monster or killer, and you want us to leave and go hiking through the woods to go hang out at a cabin full of strangers?”

When Evan phrased it that way, the Pale Bro admitted that it didn’t sound like a great idea, but on the other hand, there were five incredibly hot girls, plus a hot tub, plus pizza.

“Now let’s talk about this,” Trevor said. “Has anyone considered that if there’s really a psycho killer or a monster loose in the woods, those five girls might be in a lot more danger than we are? Maybe we should go over there to help protect them.”

“Yeah! And we could bring some of our beers, and Evan’s chili and rice—” Harrison suggested.

“Fuck no, I’m not making anybody else have to eat this chili,” Evan said. “It’s shit. It’s just the best I could do with the supplies I’ve got.” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t bring my tunes.”

“We need to be careful about locking everything up,” Steve said. “We really don’t want to come home tomorrow morning and find the psycho killer waiting for us here.”

“Or a gaggle of rabid raccoons,” Evan said. “That’s a thing around here.”

“Did any of you guys bring condoms?” Harrison asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d be seeing any action this weekend, so I didn’t bring any…”

Trevor chuckled. “We haven’t even met these girls, Har. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

“Hey, I like to be prepared.”

“I’ve got a handful in my wallet, but I don’t think I’ve got five of them,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro pointed out with laughter like the rolling of thunder in a distant cavern that probably none of Steve’s condoms would fit him anyhow, so it would be fine.

“You don’t have to eat that chili, man,” Evan said, observing that the Pale Bro had dumped half a rice cooker’s worth of rice onto a plate and then all the rest of the chili that the other bros hadn’t eaten on top of that, and was currently chowing down. “It’s shit. I admit it. And you said you had some pizza.”

The Pale Bro declared that he was too hungry to care what it tasted like, that two slices of pizza weren’t nearly enough, and besides, it tasted fine to him.

So the five bros armed themselves with the sharp knives from Evan’s mom’s kitchen just in case they ran into a psycho killer along the way, locked all the doors and windows to the cabin and the doors to the car, and the Pale Bro carried the beer cooler as he led the way back to the house with the five hot girls.

***

It wasn’t particularly easy for the Pale Bro to retrace his steps through the woods; it’d been just short of sunset when he’d found the girls, and now it was full dark. His myriad eyes could see well in the dark, of course, but his bros couldn’t, so he had to watch out for them, and they were also a lot less flexible, and tall, than he was. Also, he hadn’t been toting a beer cooler the last time he came through here.

It didn’t help that his bros were very jumpy, freaking every time a night bird called or a twig broke loudly. The Pale Bro got it, he did – there might be a psycho killer in the woods, or a monster, or his cousin who was also a monster, and they couldn’t see as well as he could, or defend themselves. But this was just ridiculous. In a voice that was an auditory personification of the concept of dread, he suggested that they stop being such big pussies and concentrate on not tripping before they accidentally stabbed each other trying to brandish knives at random bushes.

“Yo, man, we can’t all be twelve feet tall,” Harrison said, sounding pissed but also still really anxious.

In a voice that was best described by some kind of metaphor implying a deep and scary sound that hopefully hasn’t been used already in this story, the Pale Bro offered to give Harrison a piggyback ride.

Trevor said, “Not in the middle of trees, man, you’d brain him. Walk right into a tree branch and knock him off.”

“Yeah, I gotta turn that down,” Harrison said.

“You smell that?” Steve said. “Smells like someone’s firing up a grill somewhere. I can smell the charcoal.”

“Did the girls have a grill?” Trevor asked.

The Pale Bro admitted that to the best of his knowledge, they did not, but on the other hand they had Hawaiian pizza. This, of course, triggered the old argument, where Steve and Harrison insisted that pineapple did not belong on pizza, and Evan and the Pale Bro insisted that pineapple on pizza was quite valid. The argument continued, with Trevor’s exhortations to show some common sense and save the argument until they were not walking through a dark forest that might contain a psycho killer going unheeded, until Steve accidentally fell in the creek because he couldn’t see it, and in the process lost one of Evan’s mom’s good cooking knives.

However, the Pale Bro mused, this was a potentially good sign because he’d found the girls while walking alongside the creek. So the bros walked alongside the creek, Steve muttering that these girls had better be hot after all this, until they heard the sound of female human voices, exactly like the Pale Bro had had before.

They entered the clearing, observed the very large cabin, Evan making comments like “I bet it’s a bitch to keep clean, ten to one that thing’s not sanitary” because he was jealous that the cabin was bigger than his family’s, and then around the corner to observe the very hot girls, who were all still very hot even though some of them had pizza sauce smeared around their lips.

“Well, hell-o, ladies!” Harrison said, trying to be suave and cool, and failing miserably.

The Pale Bro wondered, in the voice like the echoes of a rockslide in a canyon, if there was any of the pineapple pizza left, because unfortunately he was still hungry. He gestured at his very large body somewhat self-deprecatingly.

“Hi, guys!” Kayla, who was obviously the group’s ambassador to guests, said, with possibly more bubbliness in her voice than was currently in the hot tub. “I’m Kayla, and this is Nandini, and over there in the blue bikini is Ashlee, whose cabin this is – I mean, really it’s her family’s cabin—”

“I get it,” Evan said. “My family’s got a cabin too, that’s where we’ve been hanging. We just got in today. My name’s Evan.”

“Cool!” Kayla said. “That’s Y’lehna in the lawn chair with the wine cooler, and Rhiannon went to the bathroom but I’m sure—”

“I’m back!” Rhiannon announced. Trevor’s eyes widened and then turned heart-shaped. Metaphorically.

“And I’m Trevor. Hello, ladies,” he said, sounding much cooler when he said it than Harrison had.

“I’m Harrison, and this is Steve, and he’s kinda shy!” Harrison punctuated this by shoving his kinda shy friend forward.

“Uh, hi,” Steve said. “I kind of fell in the creek on my way here?”

Kayla’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! Hey, Ashlee, do you mind if I bring him inside and show him the shower?”

“Long as he takes his shoes off,” Ashlee said, coming to the deck railing. Steve saw her angelic hair, beautiful skin, and ample charms shown off by the rather small bikini, and fell in love.

“Oh, definitely. I’ll definitely do that. I – yeah. Thanks a lot for letting me use the shower, I’m all covered in mud. Which you can see. Because you’re standing there, looking at me covered in mud.”

Kayla laughed. “Oh, yeah, let’s get you cleaned up!” She took Steve’s hand with surprising alacrity and lack of reluctance, given that he was covered in mud.

Evan said, “The guy who was supposed to bring over the groceries never showed, and I made some chili and rice out of canned stuff for my friends, but it was kinda shitty. Pale asked if there was any more of the pineapple pizza? I could definitely go for a slice if you’re offering.”

Ashlee lit up. “Oh! Sure! I can take you in to get some pizza!”

Rhiannon had by then walked over to the Pale Bro, and put her hand on his arm again. “You know, I could definitely go for some more pizza myself,” she purred.

Meanwhile, Harrison was trying to chat up Y’lehna, and also strip to his boxers so he could get in the hot tub, without looking like he was doing it in a creepy way. “So, where’re you from?”

“Massachusetts,” Y’lehna said, lying back in the lawn chair and wistfully gazing at Trevor, who had followed Rhiannon, the Pale Bro, and Ashlee in for pizza. “A little town called Innsmouth, on the coast. Little more than half an hour north of Boston.” Y’lehna had legs, but they were covered with scales and her feet were large and webbed.

“Cool. I’m from New Jersey, but, you know, like the south end. Not the part that’s all gritty like Newark and Jersey City.” Harrison slid into the hot tub. “Oh, man, this is nice. You wanna get back in?”

“After I finish my wine cooler, maybe. Ashlee doesn’t like it when we eat or drink in the tub.”

Evan was the first to come back from the pizza hunt, carrying a beer and two slices and had actually had swimming trunks at the cabin – they hadn’t planned on going swimming on this trip, but Evan kept some clothes here all the time, and he’d already changed into them and then put his clothes on over. He stripped to his bathing suit and then went and got into the hot tub near Nandini. “Hey.”

Nandini barely noticed; she was too busy looking at Harrison. Evan had to say it again to get her attention. She turned and looked at him. “Oh, you can’t eat those in the tub. Or drink the beer.”

“What if I sit back from the tub and just soak my feet, until I’m done with the food?”

Nandini shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay, but you’d have to ask Ashlee. Can I ask you something?”

Evan beamed. “Sure! Whatever you want!”

She nodded her head toward Harrison. “Does your friend have a girlfriend?���

Evan’s first reaction was dismay – Nandini seemed to not even notice him as a man, and was just making eyes at Harrison, who was obviously captivated by Y’lehna. Then he narrowed his eyes and decided to make problems on purpose. “Oh, sorry, Harrison is gay.” Actually, Steve was bi and the rest of them were straight – Evan thought, anyway, unsure about the Pale Bro and if he even had a sexuality, but he did seem to like to look at girls.

Nandini sighed. “Aren’t they always.”

Ashlee was the next to come back. She sat next to Evan. “You know, if you want to get into the hot tub and still eat your food, I normally have a rule about that but I could let it go this time. Just as long as you keep the actual food and drink out of the hot tub so it doesn’t make everything gross.” She smiled at Evan.

Evan smiled at her, because it was always good to smile at your host, and it was also always good to smile at a pretty girl, and Ashlee was both. “Thanks,” he said, not planning to take her up on it because what if he dropped the pizza?, and then turned back to Nandini. “What’re you majoring in?”

“Ugh, I hate having to explain it to people,” Nandini said. “It’s… complicated. It’s a discipline that’s part economic theory, part psychology, part sociology and part anthropology. Basically, I’m majoring in the question of why do people do dumb things when they’d be better off doing smart ones, and how that impacts our understanding of economics.”

“That sounds really interesting,” said Evan, who had quit his business major because he was bored out of his mind by economics. “I’m doing Asia studies. Yeah, it’s a cliché.” He’d gone into Asia studies after he quit his business major because it was the only thing he thought his parents would let him get by with if he refused to study business. Some kind of “Mom, Dad, I really want to get in touch with our heritage and understand the culture of my grandparents” bullshit. Also, statistically you were more likely to find a girl who considers Asian guys hot in Asia studies than any other major, he suspected.

“That’s pretty cool!” Ashlee said. “Which part of Asia is your family from? China, Korea…?”

“China, originally,” Evan, whose real name was Haoran, but who’d been going by Evan since second grade, said. His pizza finished, he slid down into the tub and turned back to Nandini.  “So, we came over here to warn you – and maybe help you fight if it comes to it – but we’re worried there might be a killer or something in the woods?”

“Omigod, really?” Ashlee asked, eyes wide with terror.

“Why do you think that?” Nandini asked, seeming completely calm.

“Well, my parents had an employee, Joe, buy food for my cabin. He was supposed to drop it off… but he never showed up, and he never called my parents, and he’s not answering his cell. Meanwhile, we saw this absolutely huge tread in the dirt, and the Pale Bro thinks it might be his cousin.”

“Yeah, he told us all that,” Nandini said. “Except for the part about it maybe being his cousin.”

“So, a monster?” Y’lehna asks. “Because there’s a difference between a psycho killer, who’s human, and a monster, who isn’t. You don’t know what the monster’s capable of, but when you see them, you know they’re a monster.”

“Yeah, but just because they look like a monster doesn’t mean anything about what they’re like!” Harrison said. “The Pale Bro looks like a monster, but he’s a really great guy!”

“I’m guessing his cousin sucks, though,” Y’lehna said.

“Well, we don’t know his cousin,” Harrison said, somewhat diplomatically.

“Do you really think there’s a killer?” Ashlee asked, getting into the hot tub right next to Evan – and inconveniently, between him and Nandini. “But you’ll protect us, right?”

“Uh, some of us can protect ourselves…” Nandini said.

Evan got back out of the tub so he could see Nandini more clearly without Ashlee in the way. “Absolutely. I’m not trying to say that we’re offering our protection because, you know, we’re guys and you’re girls and we think we’re tougher than you. That’s not it at all; I bet most of you could kick my ass.” He did not actually think this; Evan was in pretty good shape, since he was preparing to backpack all over Asia next year if he got the chance, and also, he bicycled a lot. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Nandini was invested in thinking of herself as someone who could protect herself, and who knew? Maybe she was a martial arts master or a crack shot. “But we figure, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, if it is the Pale Bro’s cousin, he can get it to back the hell off.”

“Good point,” Nandini said.

At this point there was a glass-shattering, horrible screech, and then something, some unknown creature moving so fast it was a blur, leapt out of the hot tub and charged directly at Evan, Nandini and Ashlee. All three of them screamed, as it slashed bright pain across Evan’s legs, right above his knees.

And then Ashlee started cracking up, as the horrible assailant stopped at the edge of the deck and began washing itself vigorously. “Phenyl, you dumbass. I know you like to sleep on the tub when we have it covered, but couldn’t you see we have it open and it’s full of water?”

Evan’s heart was still pounding, but now that he could see the creature that had slashed gashes into his thighs, he took deep breaths to calm himself down. “That’s your cat?”

“Yeah, her name is Phenylephrine and she’s a dumbass. She catches rats, though. One time she chased off a raccoon who’d gotten into the trash.” Ashlee attempted to pick her cat up, but the almost-entirely-black-except-for-white-bib cat jumped down off the deck, apparently not sufficiently recovered from her ordeal to tolerate interacting with humans. Evan decided not to ask why the cat was named after a decongestant.

“So what are you majoring in?” Harrison asked Y’lehna, trying to come across as casual. “I’m doing liberal arts, you know? Just a little of everything.”

“Shakespearean literature,” Y’lehna said.

“Oh, wow! You know about the theory that he didn’t write his own plays, right?”

Y’lehna rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. It’s bullshit.”

And as she explained all the reasons why she thought the theory was bullshit, Harrison listened to her raptly with imaginary hearts in his eyes.

***

Steve was deeply grateful to Kayla for taking him in to find Ashlee’s shower. The cabin had wooden floors, thankfully, so the gunk still dripping off his body could be easily cleaned. It made sense – it was a cabin in the woods, after all – but Steve had some vague idea of what rich people houses were like from visiting Evan, and carpet played a big role in his mental image of a rich person abode.

He was less impressed with the towel Kayla found him, after he came out of the shower. It was very… brief. Bigger than a hand towel, but not by much, it covered the territory it was required to cover and not very much else.

“I hate to ask, but does Ashlee have any brothers or other family members who might be around my size? This towel is kinda…”

Kayla laughed. “I think you look cute in it, but yeah, I can see why you’d want something bigger!” She stuck her head in the kitchen, where Ashlee was serving pizza to Evan, Rhiannon, Trevor, and the Pale Bro. “Hey, Ashlee! Does Hunter have any swimming trunks or t-shirts here?”

“You can check. He usually uses the middle bedroom.”

Steve called out, “I can have them cleaned and returned tomorrow, I just… my clothes are all muddy… I don’t want to impose, but this towel’s kind of tiny…”

“No problem, I don’t even care if you keep Hunter’s stuff. It would serve him right for being a douche,” Ashlee said.

Kayla checked, and came back with a NASCAR t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks with grotesquely grinning emojis all over it. “Sorry, I hope it fits! It’s all he had!”

“No problem, NASCAR’s cool,” Steve said. The sum total of his knowledge about NASCAR was that it had something to do with cars, probably, and that guys who drank warm crappy beer and drove pickup trucks liked it, and that was all. But if Ashlee’s family was into it, maybe it was worth checking out.

He and Kayla walked into the kitchen, now that he was vaguely decent. “OMG I am so sorry,” Ashlee said. “That shirt is awful. Is that really the only one Hunter had?”

Steve shrugged, understanding more about Ashlee’s relationship to her brother’s interests. “It’s not like I’m into NASCAR or anything, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

The Pale Bro chose this moment to inform everyone in a voice that echoed like a portent of doom that there was no more beer in Ashlee’s fridge, and this was a problem, because he and his bros had brought beer for 5 people for three days, but now they had ten people, so what if they ran out?

Steve privately thought it was good that the Pale Bro wasn’t majoring in anything that needed math. Ten people would burn through the beer for five people at twice the rate, but twice the rate of three days would be a day and a half, more than enough time to go get more beer, unless the psycho killer or monster slashed their tires or something.

Kayla spoke up. “I’ve got more in the trunk of my car, but I parked kind of crappy.”

“Well, no matter how crappy the parking job was, more beer’s always a good thing,” Trevor said.

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was like the crackling of atoms fusing together in the unfathomable heat of the sun that he’d be happy to go get them out of Kayla’s car.

“Uh… no, I think Steve should do it,” Kayla said. “Because he’s shorter, and it’s a really crappy parking job. Trust me, you will bonk your head on trees about six times just trying to reach my car.”

“Did you park it in the woods?” Trevor asked.

“Um, sorta… I was kinda excited about getting here and waving to my friends and I accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and I ended up in the woods… yeah.” She looked up at Steve forlornly. “I’m such an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Steve said, because it was always a good idea to tell a pretty girl who said she was an idiot that in fact she was not.

In a voice like the echoes of a NASCAR race going on over one’s head because one was in a sewer system under the track, the Pale Bro offered to help Kayla get her car out of the woods, if it was stuck there.

“That’s really sweet of you,” Rhiannon purred. “Probably better to do it in daylight, though. There’s a cliff drop near there, and you don’t want to accidentally slip over the edge.”

“Or worse, drop the car,” Steve said, and laughed. Kayla laughed with him.

The Pale Bro expressed to Kayla that if there was a cliff face near there, then he was very glad that she hadn’t accidentally driven off the edge, because that would have been bad.

“Yeah,” Kayla said, “but it all worked out so no harm done, right? Unless, like, I punctured the gas tank with a tree branch or something. That would definitely be bad.”

Steve, Trevor, Rhiannon and the Pale Bro all agreed that that would definitely be the case.

***

After Steve and Kayla had left to go to Kayla’s car to get more beer, Rhiannon asked the Pale Bro what his major was.

“I’m pre-med,” Trevor inserted, not actually having been asked.

“Mm, nice. I’m trying to become a physicist, myself. What about you?” She repeated the question in the Pale Bro’s direction.

In a voice that was muffled and full of pizza, the Pale Bro conveyed that he hadn’t heard the question, sorry.

“I just wanted to know what your major was,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed that he was majoring in gender studies, having decided that hotel management was not really a good career path for him.

“Oh, really!” Rhiannon brightened. “You don’t see a lot of guys majoring in gender studies! You must be very secure in your masculinity.” She said this as someone who seemed very secure in the Pale Bro’s masculinity, herself, as she pressed against him.

The Pale Bro mumbled in a voice that really didn’t sound all that different from anyone else’s mumbling that he just didn’t like how society treated women, and added that his mother raised him to respect and look up to women. He confided that she had torn apart giant megafauna with her bare claws and fed them to her brood of spawn while insisting on table manners, and that he couldn’t imagine any job more difficult than being the primary caretaker of children. Children, he admitted, scared him.

“Oh, yes, the little rugrats can totally bring the chaos,” Rhiannon laughed.

The Pale Bro clarified that actually chaos was perfectly fine by him and the natural state of all things that the universe must someday return to; it was their high-pitched screechy voices that really bothered him.

“I never knew that,” Trevor said. “Weird, what you learn about people. Rhiannon,which kind of physics are you concentrating on? Like, space, or quantum, or what?”

“Haven’t really narrowed it down like that, it’s going to depend on what grad school accepts me and which programs I can get into,” Rhiannon said. To the Pale Bro she said, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk? It’s really nice out.”

“It is, but there might be some kind of killer or monster in the woods,” Trevor reminded her. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering off by yourself?”

She rolled her eyes and gestured at the Pale Bro. “I’m pretty sure that Pale here would be able to protect me if anything came up,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed in a voice that echoed like the infrasound rumble of the collapse of a concrete building, but an embarrassed and regretful tone, that actually he wanted to wait right here, because he wanted more beer and also his feet hurt.

“Well, why don’t we go back to the hot tub and let you soak your feet for a bit?” Rhiannon asked.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Trevor said. “We’ve got our own beer cooler out there, remember? You brought it over.”

This was true, the Pale Bro admitted, but he couldn’t eat or drink in the hot tub, and he wanted another slice of Hawaiian pizza if there was any.

“Oh, but you’re a big fellow,” Rhiannon said. “You could totally sit back from the hot tub and dangle your feet in it while you’re eating, and you wouldn’t be close enough to the tub to bother Ashlee.”

In that case, the Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like the rumbling of a train full of dead bodies, he was all for the hot tub, because that shit sounded great.

***

The group joined back up around the hot tub, all except for Kayla and Steve, who were still in the woods, ostensibly getting beer out of Kayla’s car. Ashlee had brought out chips and pretzels, which, she said, were not to be eaten within five feet of the hot tub. This meant that the Pale Bro could soak his feet while he snacked, as promised, but no one else could actually eat near the tub.

“Come on, that’s not fair,” Y’lehna, who was considerably more drunk than she had been earlier in the evening and probably really needed to fill her stomach with chips and pretzels, complained. “I’ve been good all night but now I’m starving, and you know my skin needs to be moisturized.”

“I keep offering to let you try some of my Oil of Olay,” Ashlee mumbled.

“If I wanted to cover myself in something oily, I’d use fish oil, it’s traditional around my hometown,” Y’lehna said sharply. “I wanna be in water. Like, H20.” She looked up at Trevor, pleadingly. “Do you think I’m asking too much? I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“I think you should definitely eat something,” Trevor said.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” offered Harrison eagerly.

“But I don’t want to get any food in the hot tub,” Ashlee whined. “It’d be gross, and we’d have to drain it and clean it…”

“Well, I want to be in the water and I want goddamn pretzels, is that too much? Is that really too much?” Y’lehna yelled, making Ashlee quail.

At that point they all heard the sound of clanging and shattering, and Kayla and Steve screaming like they were being murdered.

Ashlee shrieked in terrified response. The Pale Bro, Trevor and Nandini were all off the deck and running toward the sound in a second, followed by Rhiannon, Evan and Harrison. Y’lehna took the opportunity to grab an entire dish of pretzels, drop herself into the tub, and stand at the edge of the tub, facing the concrete around the tub and stuffing her face. “I can be responsible,” she muttered. “I can not get pretzels in the tub. I don’t have to eat underwater. I don’t even want to. Pretzels aren’t like fish. They get soggy.”

No one was there to hear her, though, because they had all gone into the woods.

The Pale Bro had only gotten in a few feet when Steve yelled, “Don’t come any closer, guys!”

“Are you being murdered?” Trevor asked, loudly.

“We will totally fuck them up if someone is trying to kill you!” Harrison said, clenching his fists.

“No, guys, it’s good… it’s all good.”

“It’s not good at all!” Kayla wailed. “I spent so much money on that beer!”

The Pale Bro heard the word ‘beer’ and conveyed that if something was going on with the beer he absolutely needed to know, right now.

“We dropped it!”

“We dropped it off a goddamn cliff,” Steve moaned. “Kayla had this whole big cooler—”

“It was so expensive! So much beer!”

“And we were carrying it together, and then I tripped on a tree root, and slipped, and Kayla tried to grab me… and we dropped the beer.”

“Off the cliff!” Kayla couldn’t have sounded more heartbroken if she were a young lady during the Vietnam War being told that her betrothed, who had been her childhood sweetheart since she was three years old, had had a completely sober four-way with two Vietnamese twins and their pet goat, and then had been killed by the Viet Cong while he was still cavorting with the goat.

In a voice that sounded like the auditory representation of hair raising combined with the scream of nails on a chalkboard, the Pale Bro expressed that he couldn’t believe this and Steve had been such a fuckup.

Steve, actually kind of intimidated, raised his hands. “I know, man, I’m sorry! We didn’t mean to!”

The Pale Bro then lectured the two of them about how if he’d been allowed to help in the first place, he wouldn’t have accidentally dropped the beer off the cliff and right now they would all be knocking back some sweet brews, but instead they insisted they could handle it and now all that beer had been tragically lost, cut down in the prime of its life, its yeasty lifeblood spilling out across the rocks and stones below where none could drink it except maybe some squirrels who would get themselves totally fucked up.

“Come on, man, it’s just beer,” Evan said. “We can get more.”

“Not if there’s a killer out there!” Kayla wailed. “We won’t be able to leave to go get beer until morning! What if the killer slashes our tires?”

The Pale Bro conveyed that if that happened, it was fucking on because no psycho killer, monster, or cousin was going to get between him and more beer.

Trevor, trying to be the voice of reason, said, “Folks, we’ve got a lot of beer in our cooler and we’ve barely touched it. There’s no use crying over spilled… beer.”

“Yes, there is! It’s very cryable!” Kayla declared, starting to cry.

“God, you’re drunk,” Nandini muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hitting any more of the beer anyway.”

“Come on,” Steve said, putting his arm around Kayla. “It’s gonna be all right. Don’t cry. Trevor’s right, we’ve got a lot in our cooler.”

Kayla turned toward him and cried against his chest, as he hugged her with one arm and awkwardly patted her head with the other.

“Wow,” Nandini said. “You’re really into this guy, aren’t you?”

Steve turned red, which they could all see by now because they’d made their way out of the woods and back into the outside lights of the cabin. “Uh, I don’t think so, I’m just trying to comfort her…”

“You’re a white guy touching her hair and she’s putting up with it,” Nandini said. “Kayla’s been known to punch white people who touch her hair.”

“That was that bitch Madison and it was one time!” Kayla cried.

Steve removed his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just…”

“No! I like it when you touch my hair! I don’t like it when bitches like Madison touch my hair after they’ve just said some racist bullshit, but you’re being so sweet! You can officially touch my hair,” Kayla said, and then started sobbing again, hugging Steve tightly.

The Pale Bro audibly sighed, in a voice like a dude who’s just seen one of his best friends score a date with a chick he was really into and he can’t even be mad because it wasn’t like he got anywhere with her himself or even admitted to anyone how cute he thought she was.

***

The group returned to find that Harrison had wandered back to the hot tub as soon as it was clear that no one was being killed except maybe a large number of innocent bottles of beer, and was sitting outside the hot tub but right by Y’lehna, who was in the hot tub eating chips.

Nandini said, severely, “Y’lehna! Ashlee told you not to do that!”

“Ashlee can tell me herself,” Y’lehna said with chips in her mouth.

“I’ve been watching,” Harrison said brightly. “None of the crumbs have fallen in the water! It’s all good!”

Trevor snorted. “Well, of course you think so, Har,” he said. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

Nandini frowned, and then scowled, and glared at Evan. “Wait, you told me he was gay!”

“You said what?” Harrison was shocked.

Evan held up his hands. “Sorry, Har. But…” He looked over at Nandini. “I thought that if I told you that he only likes really unusual girls, you’d feel hurt because it would sound like I was telling you you were basic or something, and that’s totally wrong. You’re gorgeous and you could probably get any guy you wanted, except Harrison, because you don’t have scales or feathers or six eyes or something.”

“Well, you could have said that,” Nandini said.

Kayla said, “I get it. Rhiannon’s like that, too.”

“To be fair,” Harrison said, “I am bi.” This was information Evan had not known. “I just haven’t yet met any weird dudes who aren’t related to Pale here, and it’s just way too weird to date one of your bro’s actual brothers or something.”

“Does anyone know where Ashlee went?” Steve asked.

Everyone looked around. There was no Ashlee.

“Could she be in the bathroom, maybe?” Nandini asked.

“Don’t think so,” Y’lehna said. “She ran off while you guys were running to the woods. I wasn’t gonna get in the hot tub and eat pretzels if she was still here!”

“Uh, yeah,” Rhiannon said. “That’s a little long to be in the bathroom.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was exhaustedly done with this bullshit that he could look for her.

“Nah, man, I’ll do it,” Trevor said. “I know your feet are hurting, and I’m the next biggest guy after you.”

“I could go with you,” Steve said.

Trevor shook his head. “Steve… that is a cute girl who is very, very drunk,” he said, pointing at Kayla. “I don’t know her tolerance, but I’m pretty sure that if she isn’t at puke bucket level now, she will be soon. You need to stay with her and make sure she’s okay.”

“Yeah, good point,” Steve said.

Nandini turned back to Evan as Trevor walked away. “I can’t believe you lied to me, though. I mean, I know Rhiannon. I could have accepted ‘he’s only into weird-looking chicks’—”

“Thanks, Nandi, that’s sweet,” Y’lehna said.

“You know what I mean,” Nandini said, waving her hand dismissively.

“Look, I’m gonna come clean with you,” Evan said. “I really thought you were great. You’re hot, you’re smart – I’m not dumb, but when you talked about your major, I realized you could run rings around me – and you stay calm in a crisis, and I really respect that. But you asked me if Har had a girlfriend, and I just – I’m sorry. It was like you didn’t even notice I’m a dude, and that made me feel bad. So I did something shitty, and I gotta apologize to both you and Harrison.”

“I mean, no problem on my end,” Harrison said. “It’s all good, bro.”

“Damn,” Nandini said, running her hand through her hair. “I didn’t even think about what that sounded like when I asked you. I’m sorry, Evan, what I said to you was a shitty thing too. I mean, I still think what you did was worse because you were lying, but I understand why you did it.”

“Hey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”

“Evan’s right, though,” Harrison said. “I mean, not about me being gay, I like girls just fine, but…” He shrugged. “Girls that look like normal human beings, even beautiful human beings, it just doesn’t click. Y’lehna here’s really different-looking, and that is so hot.” He turned to Y’lehna. “You know you’re super-hot, right?”

“Yes,” Y’lehna said, “but boys like you don’t usually agree. So that’s nice.”

“I guess I can forgive you,” Nandi said to Evan. “But you’d better not lie to me again.”

“I am pretty sure you could kick my ass if I did, so I won’t. I like my ass un-kicked.”

“Your ass is okay,” Nandini said. “I’ve seen better asses, but yours is all right.”

Rhiannon had offered to give the Pale Bro a foot rub, since his feet hurt. A guy as big as he was suffered from foot pain frequently, so he’d agreed, while apologizing in a voice like a church organ in a cave for his toenails. Some might say his toenails were worth apologizing for, as they were about four inches long and razor sharp.

But Rhiannon disagreed. “Your toenails are great. Look how white they are! I never see guys without all kinds of grody fungus turning their toenails yellow. And I bet you’re amazing at climbing trees with them.”

The Pale Bro allowed that this was true, and that climbing in general was one of his talents.

Steve, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly sure what he ought to be doing with Kayla, who was now lying on her back, her head in his lap, rambling about stars and how far away they were. When she’d asked for another beer, he’d gotten her cold water instead and reminded her that water was important to avoid hangovers. She’d finished most of the water – the rest had spilled – and now she seemed to be close to falling asleep in his lap.

“You’re really into stars, huh?” he asked. “You an astronomy major?”

“Oh no!” Kayla laughed. “Math! I’d tell you all about it but I’m waaaaaay too drunk. I just reeeeally like stars!”

“That’s cool,” Steve said. “I’m a comp sci major myself.”

“Are you gonna build an AI that wants to take over the world and enslave humanity?” Kayla asked.

“Hey, I’d be happy if I could build an AI that can identify rocks as not sheep,” Steve laughed.

***

Trevor had very quickly guessed where Ashlee might be.

Ashlee was nervous and reacted badly to things that startled or scared her. Ashlee was also at her own house – well, cabin. So odds were, Ashlee had gone into the cabin to calm down.

The cabin wasn’t very big, and Ashlee wasn’t in any of the rooms in an obvious place. So Trevor started checking the not-obvious places, like a closet in a room that looked girly enough that it might be her room. He knocked on the door.

She shrieked, inside the closet, but he said, “Ashlee, calm down! It’s me, Trevor. Can I check on you to make sure you’re okay?”

“Uh… okay,” she said, and Trevor opened the door. Ashlee was sitting in a lighted closet, on the floor, completely covered to her shoulders with stuffed animals.

“Wow. Are you okay?” He squatted down. Being a big black man, Trevor had learned many strategies for making himself look less threatening. Not towering over somebody was one of them.

“Not… really?” Ashlee said.

“I know you were scared with all that noise. Hell, I was too. But it turned out to be nothing. Steve and Kayla accidentally dropped some beer over the cliff.”

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s just… it’s too much. Too many people.”

“Yeah?” He sat on the floor crisscross applesauce, making himself even lower and more relaxed-looking. “You want us to go?”

“No! I mean, this was supposed to be a weekend with just my friends, and then you guys show up, but you’re nice guys! I like you guys! But it’s just so many people, I started to wig out.” She lifts an arm out of the sea of stuffed animals. “So I do this thing when there’s too many people and I start to freak… I find a tiny place and I fill it with soft things and I lay in them until my tachycardia goes away.”

“Tachycardia?”

“Oh, um, that means fast heart beat. Sorry. I just always call it that because it sounds scarier than fast heartbeat and it really is scarier so I want people to know it’s a problem.”

“I know what it means, I’m a pre-med. I just wondered—”

“Oh wow! I’m in pre-med, too!” Ashlee sat up , some of the stuffed animals falling off her. “I guess we’re not in any classes together because you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore, but did you have Lessing for Organic Chemistry?”

“You’re doing orgo in sophomore year?” Trevor whistled. “That’s fast.”

“Yeah, I, um, my high school had like this program where good students could do science classes at a nearby college, for college credit, in senior year, so I took chemistry then, and bio last year and also the math I needed, so I get to do orgo this year.”

“I hated orgo. It’s just memorize a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and string them together. Couldn’t we find a better way to describe methylethylpropylene than that?”

She laughed. “Is that even a real thing?”

“I don’t know, but it’s pretty ridiculous that I can put together a string of prefixes and make something that sounds like a chemical even if it doesn’t exist.” He shook his head sadly. “And yeah, I had Lessing. She’s tough. She giving your brain a real workout?”

“Yeah. It’s a challenge. Everyone always told me, ‘Ashlee, you can’t just coast along getting straight As without ever studying. Ashlee, when you go to college it’ll be a lot harder. Ashlee, you need to learn how to study or you’ll fail in college.’ Well… I haven’t failed yet, but… it might be close.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I must sound so stuck up with my humblebrag. ‘Oh, it’s so hard to be a gifted student who gets straight As!’ But it really is hard. Because if it was too easy for you in school you don’t learn how to handle it when it gets too hard, and I’m just, like, totally stressed.”

“I feel you. My mom made me study, and I was like, ‘momma, I do not need to read the book and highlight all the important parts and then write them in an outline and then read over the outline! I got it the first time I read the book!’ And that was what she said. ‘You take shortcuts now because everything’s easy, you’ll be in a world of hurt when things get hard.’ And hell, I ended up in a world of hurt in orgo anyway.” They both laughed.

“Anyway, your friends are worried about you and I don’t want people to think we both got bumped off by a psycho killer, so I figure, there’s three options here. I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and I leave you the hell alone; I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and then I come back and we keep talking; or you and I both leave together and we both tell everyone you’re okay, and then we get to eat some chips, if Y’lehna and Harrison didn’t get them all already.”

“She’s in the hot tub eating chips, isn’t she.” It was not a question.

“Yeah, sad but true. At least she’s leaning over the side so the crumbs get on the concrete and they don’t fall in the tub.”

Ashlee sighed. “I guess I better get back out there. But I do still want to talk and stuff. And I wanna check up on Phenylephrine so maybe you can help me find her.”

“Phenylephrine?”

“My cat. The cat before her was Sudafed so when she died and I got a new kitten I named her Phenylephrine.”

“I get the joke there, but why was the first cat named Sudafed?”

“My mom was allergic to cats and she said if we get a cat we might as well name it Sudafed because she’d be taking so much of it, and then we did get a cat, so she did name her Sudafed.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten a cat if she was that allergic?”

“Oh, no, my mom loves cats. She just says wiseass things sometimes. Anyway, Phenyl lives here at the cabin and the cleaning service makes sure she gets fed. They call her the head of Mousekeeping Services.”

Trevor laughed.

***

Outside, it turned out there was no need to turn out a search party for Phenylephrine, as for some entirely inexplicable reason it turned out she liked chips, and also Harrison’s lap, where he was feeding her chips. She didn’t actually eat the chips, she just licked them.

The party was starting to flag just a bit; Evan suggested putting on some music, but the internet wasn’t good enough here for Ashlee’s Spotify playlist and she didn’t have MP3s on a hard drive like Evan did. Evan was regretting not putting a bunch of MP3s on a flash drive and bringing them with him. Nandini had a CD in her car – the girls had all come up here in their own cars, except for Y’lehna who couldn’t drive – but it was hit songs from Bollywood musicals and no one here knew any of them, and she was self-conscious about whether anyone would even like them.

And then, as they discussed what to do about tunes, a shadow fell across them, blocking the moon for a moment.

They all looked up, even the Pale Bro. A shambling monstrosity, 20 feet tall and brick red, with sprouting tentacles where its face should be and eyes on the tentacles, and Edward-Scissorhands-length blades for fingernails, loomed over them.

Several of the group screamed. The Pale Bro got to his feet.

“D̶̫̊̚Ũ̸̟̝͍̘̮͒Ḍ̸͋̽̀E̷̛̝̹̗͈̊͌̍,̷̨̖̲̺̤̝͂̈́̎͘ ̴̛̱͚͗Y̶̧͔͉̙͋͊̊͋͘Ô̸̢̥̙͙U̴͖͍̳̭͗̊̌͘͘͜R̷̫̜̘̀ ̶̼̘̠̾̐̈́̒̚Ṃ̴̡̡̦̮̖̿͗̊͋͝Ȯ̴͛ͅM̴̺̱͕̳̀ ̷̱͔̄̃̎́I̸̙͐̍͑͐S̶͉͉̲͋̊͒̽̄͜ ̵̤̙̬̫̒͋́͛P̷̧̧̧̰͔̦͠Î̴̢̜͒̅͘S̷̛̝̤͂́̍̐S̴̭͉͆̋̿É̴̢̺̲̫̝͋́̋̚̚D̴̥͈̠̋̅̅̀͝͝ ̴̡̡̖̬̓A̵͈͚̣͂̆̔̍̂̕T̷̡͙̠̙̫̎̈̄͝ͅ ̴͔͗̀̋͗̏Y̴̤͇̪͕͇͎͆̌̀̊̈́Ơ̸̡̢̙̭͇͕̒̐̕̕U̸̡̩̠̚.̸̣̖̼̫́͛̄,” the entity boomed.

In a sound like the rushing of lava through underground caverns just before a volcano was about to blow, the Pale Bro demanded to know if the entity had eaten any people lately.

“S̴̙̱͕̀H̴̭͐̈́͠I̷̘̟͉̝͊͐̄̋̀̑Ṱ̷̢̫̮͓̲̐̑͗̈́̀,̵͓̥͖͈̾́̏̇͘ ̵̣̳͍̿Ń̵̟̦̰͖̺͜O̸͉̓̈̊͛̔̕.̷̣̜̗̩̈́ ̸͖̋̓̀̀͝͝Í̶̘̗͓̱̗̬̀̈́'̴̗̯͈͈̥͎̎̇M̷̹̻͉̼͑̎̓̐̏̀ ̴͚̻͚̱̇̿͛̏͒͠O̴̩̪̣̯̤͙̐̐̚̚Ņ̶͇̘̤̗͗͗̑͛̏̇͜ ̸̡͎̔̽͛A̷̢̘̪͎̗͊͐̌͝͠ ̸̤̺͉̫̖̫̀̓̑̕̕D̴̡̜̤̻̉Ĩ̸̡̯͉͔́̓̂͘͝Ę̶̨̫͇̬̳̉̽͑̈̊͐T̸̥̝̹̑̾.̷̢̟̻̭̲̿ ̴̧̣͌̆̃̕ͅÏ̷̟̰̫̰̹̽̐̐F̶͖̂̉̌ ̵͔͚̊̐Y̸͔̆Ö̴̞̦͕̀̒̀͘��Ṳ̶̪̝͙̎̿͘ ̵̥̀̏͗E̵̦̣̲͍͉̥̊V̶̑͒̏ͅȨ̷͚̪̲̎͜ͅR̵͎͖̀̓̈́͑͠ ̷̣̀̀̓͋C̸̲̗͎̞͔̭͌̈́̕͘Ã̶̝͉̮͉͉̓̄͒̈́͜͝M̵̙̮͎̹̌E̷̥̪̎̓͗́͝ ̷͎͓̙̺͔̗͂̑̕H̶̢̍͗́͋͊O̴̗̎̽̆M̴̮̭̮͐̑́̚Ë̶̩̦̹̞́͂̈́̆ ̴̩̻̈́͘Y̴̨͍̣̩͈̎̅͘͘O̵̠͉͒̐̈̕͝U̶̪̝̳̺͑͆̇'̸̖̋D̶̗̉̓̿͐̓ ̸͉̍̀͠K̷̥̞̼̍͛́̇͗͝N̵̡̹̠͚̥̰̋̈́̌̈́͘O̸̻̠͍̲͋̉Ẁ̸̞͎̺̀͆̌̀ ̴̛͔̙͗͗̉͠T̸̨̓̀̎H̶̡̱̘͈̹͐̔͗͂͘A̷̠̠͉͎̫̰̿̄T̴̡̰͍̦͕̉̌,” it said, rolling tentacles clockwise around its face in an approximation of an eye roll.

If that was the case, the Pale Bro shot back, explain why this entity’s footprint was found right outside his bro’s cabin, and a man was missing.

“Į̴̙͈̻̓͗͜ͅ ̷̙̑̔͛͝W̷̺̯̲͗͝Ã̸̹͕̊S̷̹̲͆̏ͅ ̵̝̈́̒͗̓̍L̸͖̺̊͛Ǫ̶̗̥̼͍̥̒̒̌̊O̸͙̊̎̋̏̕Ķ̴͚̫̤̈̔́̅͑͝Į̵͑̍Ṉ̸̨͌͂́Ǵ̵̭̥̹̮̞̏͂ͅ ̷͚͙̹̋F̸̧͕͉͓̊̾͊O̵̲̙͓͛̌̄̏̕̚R̴̬͚̠͉̬̘̽̀̌́͊ ̴͎̀̏̐͋Y̴͈̘̮͌͋̍̃̍̈́Ơ̷̞͉̝͙̻̒U̵̦̭͈̻̪̽͂͗̚,̴̳̐ ̸̢̠̙͕̰̐̅D̸̟̫̋͑̅̈́̄͜͝ͅŰ̵̡̜̤̺̿̍̃̈́M̵̼̜̳̊͊̋̈ͅB̷̧͖̲̮̤̜͋̐͑̔Ȁ̶̼̪̟̼̱̐̔̋̀͘S̷̨̳͂S̶̨̡͈̈́̐͂̿͜͠,” the entity said. “A̷͕̎͆Ṷ̴̢̣͙͐Ņ̷͓͔͕̙̟͛̿́̐͝T̶̠̹̜͇͐̾̊̂̚  ̸͔̐͋̓̓͐͝€̶͉̦̍̊̅₯̷̟̙̗̱̤̈́̋̌͂͌̚ῥ̷̠̩̇ῗ̶̦͎͚̃͊̾ᾗ̴̤̞̰͕͓̈́͜Ỷ̸͔̫͙̦͐ẞ̶̦͕̱́͂͑́͊̈́ ̵͉͍͉̼̐͑̈́͋͝S̷̢͇̽͗͛͊̏E̸͉̲̓̉̎̈N̸̤̾Ț̷̻̍́̍ ̴͓̱͉͍̝̄̐̀͜ M̷̹͖͝E̸̘̖͓̍͋͜ ̶̢̲̘͋ T̴̠̘̲̼̍̈́̄̏̃͝ͅǪ̷̨̡̤͕͎͠ ̴̬͑͊ T̵͚̫̆̏͘E̴͚̗̯̠̊͗͌̕̚ͅL̴̫̺̫̀̄̽̃̕L̶̡͚̫̬̈́͑̇ ̴̲͙̼̖̘̺̈͊̓̂͠ Y̸̰̳̰̑Ơ̵̢̼̯͕̌Ų̶̜̜͚͇̕ͅ ̶̟͎̫͌ Y̴͔̱̼̅̋̄̀͜O̴͕̰̰̎̄U̶͓̜̼̝͑̃͂͘͝ ̸̨͎̀͊Ṅ̵̢͙̙̹̀Ë̸̖E̵̢̪̪͛̒̈D̷͍͖̀̈̏͊͋̚ ̶̦̙̫̺͓̉͂͠T̸̙̮̬͚̚Ó̷̖̘̩̘̝̌̄ ̸͇͍͋͒̃̑Ṽ̸͉̞͔̘̱̃͑̌I̷͙͛͑͝S̸̢̗̬̞͂̽I̵̺̿̾͗̀̓̅T̷̢͈̺̹̀̇͊͐̊̍ͅ,̵̭̔ ̷̹̥̺̟̣͋̄͜Ş̵̺̱̃Ḩ̴̙͙̼͙͉̔̎̍̐́̃I̷͔͚͂̇̑͂͜T̷̲̱͔̬̓͠H̶̝̝͌̏͐Ę̴̨̰̙̤͖̎A̸͔͠ͅḐ̴̻͚͔̯̏́͐͘.̵͚͎̪͖̼̻̇̉.”

The Pale Bro replied, in a voice like the whining of an engine underneath the whapping sound of helicopter rotors, that he was on vacation with his bros and he was not here to visit his mom and she could just deal.

“A̶̱̘̬̪̝̓͌͊͐̚R̸͙͌̉̆̆̇̔ͅE̵̡̱̙̯̮̅͗ ̴͈͒̐Y̶̮̤̽̄O̴̢͓̙̝̮͉̾̆̈́̔̚͝Ų̸͚̗͓̞͎̀͝ ̶̡̬͚̄̆͌͋̉̆F̷̙͊͋U̷̿͊̊̽͌̚ͅC̴͙̦̼͕̈́̊̒K̴̬̘͆̀̑͒̐I̸̅́̈͒̅͠ͅŅ̴̪͍̭͂̈G̴̗̥͎͌̔̽̑̈́ ̸̻̰͆̈̕Ȟ̶̱̜̎̕Ī̴͎̝̖̼̤̱̏̐G̵͚͙̊͆̃̍̅ͅͅḦ̸̡̾̄̕?̵͉̫̠̉̈́̓ ̸̡͕̔͐Y̵̨͒͊̈̕O̴̮͓̼̽̓͝Ú̶̝̺͜ ̴̛̪̚ͅͅC̸̣̆͛̿̓̂Á̸͇͈̦͐͗̇͝N̸̞̭̲̻͖̦̽̈́̈'̶̪̪̐͐̈́T̸͔̘͌̄ ̴̨̪͙̫̩̐́S̶̩̋̃A̷̡̨͙͉͕͑́̔̓̌͜͠Y̸̯̝͕̋͗̄̾ ̵̲̜̥̥͆͊̾̑̊͜͝ͅT̴̟̭̼̲̐̄H̶͚̦̯̱̐̔͝Ą̴̥̤̅̃̄̂̾T̵̞̜̱̍̈́̔̕͜ͅ ̶̤͇͐Ṱ̷̃̾̚Ȏ̷͇͈͓̰͇͓ ̶͓̘̟̉̄̀͌̽ͅẎ̸̢̠̿Ỏ̸̧̢̹̹̀̓U̶̢̬͚̞̘͂́̃̆̽̔Ṛ̵̬̱̯̟̀͐̓̎̃͠ ̵̨̮̏̑̐̐M̷̽͜͝O̴̪̙͙͕̥̕͘M̵̨͉̫̭̩̔͑̈́̈̈͝!” the entity exclaimed.

“This is your cousin, bro?” Evan asked diplomatically.

In a voice like the moaning of the wind through a forest of dead things and disappointments, the Pale Bro admitted that this asshole was indeed his cousin, and was carrying a message from the Bro’s mom that he needed to come visit her, because somehow she’d found out that he was vacationing in the area.

“Well, why don’t you just tell him that you will go to visit your mom, in a few days, right before we head out? It is rude to be right near her house and not go visit her, but on the other hand you’re on vacation to spend time with us, so just do it at the end,” Evan suggested.

The Pale Bro expressed that if he absolutely had to visit his mom, that was probably the best way to handle it, and could his cousin kindly fuck off now.

“Ö̵̡̩͙̠̮͌̓̍K̶͈̬̳̰̺͂̋̂́̕Ạ̸̢̬̪̠̠̽͝Ÿ̴͓̰̰̻͔́̏͒̌͆,̶̮̉͒͒̿̏ ̵̦̺̠͓̩̲̍͆̉B̸͕̽͆Ư̵̟̔̈́̌̏͒Ţ̵̳̞̙̣̪̏̂ ̶͈̲̃͐̈́͋͛Y̴̝͍͌̈̍Ơ̶̙̝̱̘̈́̉́̊͒Ū̷͎̦ ̸͚̓B̷͕̥͊͗̿̒͝Ë̴͕͖̪͇̃́T̶͉̓̾̌̃̀͘T̵̨̟̠̩͚̜͂̎̚̕͝Ḙ̴͈̳̮͗̆͋̐́̈́R̶̡̛̪̮͖͓͙̍̈́͌́ ̸̧̘̻̞̣̈́͆͑̄͜N̷͎̦̬͊͌̆̌̕O̵̧̫̾́̾͜T̵͔̉́ ̸͔̒̀̐͆̌F̵̣͉̖̺̱̚ͅÒ̸̯̜̼̖̋̑͘͜R̶̲̦̱̭̱̙̆̈G̵͓̘̞͎̑̅E̴̲̓̿T̴̝̝̑͌̏̊̄̕ ̴̧̡̮̮͓͓̐͒T̸̡̛̖͈͒̕Ḥ̸̬̭͙̪̲̈́͌̈́̚͠͝Ì̸̡͎̝̎̈́̾͂̕S̷̠̻̣̈́̓͘̚ ̶̧̤̀̈́Ţ̴̧̛̫̫̑͗̓͌̉ͅÏ̵̧̘̰̆ͅM̶̮̤̎̉͜E̶̘̬̟͓̜͔̓̕̕̕,̶̗̈ ̶̖͇̞̀̾͑̓͜͠D̷̡̢̧̹̖͙͛̂̒̏̏I̵̛͍̘̜̲̥̓̏̅͐͂̋͝P̴̧̢̡̱͖̣͔̰̦̊̀Ṡ̸̳̺̓̓̕H̷̰̭̣͂͗Ị̶̢̧̜͇̅̎̓̈̉̂̃̐̕͜͜ͅT̶̰̰̋͐.̵͍̜̠̰͊͝ ̷̝͔̼̞͘ͅI̶̩͍̘͎̺̓'̷͕̟̗̣̳̻̀͂͠L̵̹̣̃͗̇͆L̴̢̛̩̤͖̬̆̚ ̸̲̬̲̈́͛͑̌B̴̘̹́́̈͝E̵͓͐̋͒͐̏̎ ̵͇̹̂͒Ẇ̵̨͎̣̝͔͘ͅA̷̻̗̫̍͑̈́̇̐T̸̥̱̘̲̳̋C̶̪̀H̵̢̏͜Ì̸̡̨͙̜̠̲͘N̸͖̹̦̿͊́͛̈́͝G̵̡̨̘̼̀̑̅̎.̷̍̑̆.” The giant creature lumbered off, back into the woods.

“Your family sounds like mine,” Evan said, commiserating.

“Mine, too,” Nandini said. “If I was within 50 miles of my mom while I was on vacation and I didn’t stop by to see her, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your mom,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro suggested that that was just as well.

***

Kayla was napping on Steve, whose legs were starting to go numb but he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Trevor and Ashlee were talking animatedly about terrible professors and classes that were absolute bullshit but required for the pre-med track. Nandini, having forgiven Evan for lying to her about Harrison, had agreed to go on a date or two with him once they all got back to school, and see where things went. Also, she’d helped him recover his mom’s good knives, which they’d all dropped in the dirt when they got here so the girls wouldn’t be scared of them. Rhiannon continued to hit on the Pale Bro, who either didn’t notice, or was so flustered by a girl paying attention to him that he pretended not to notice. Y’lehna, somewhat overheated by spending too long in the tub and not drinking enough water, had a headache, and Harrison was tending her by getting her glasses of water with ice from Ashlee’s freezer.

Everything was going pretty well, and a lot of fun, except for Steve and his numb legs, when a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a bloody knife came out of the woods.

Everyone except Trevor and the Pale Bro screamed. The Pale Bro growled, less like a dog and more like the sound of the devil’s car engine, down in Hell, when the devil is revving it because he’s just challenged the Archangel Michael to a race in a demonic replica of NASCAR. Trevor took note of where Evan and Nandini had put all of Evan’s mom’s kitchen knives, and yelled, “Can we help you?”, preparing to grab a knife from the pile and go knife-fight the dude, just in case the Pale Bro was too drunk to simply lift the fellow up and toss him off the cliff that had already claimed Kayla’s case of beer.

“I hope so!” the man yelled back. “I’m in the middle of cutting up steaks for the grill, and I realize, I don’t have any potatoes! I was gonna do the potatoes on low and slow so they’d be nice and soft inside, but turns out, all my potatoes rotted and I haven’t got any, and it’d take like forty-five minutes to drive into town. And now it’s too late for baked potatoes, but I haven’t got any kind of starch, so I was wondering if you guys have any French fries?”

Trevor blinked.

“Uh, why are you wearing a ski mask?” Nandini asked.

“Oh, this!” The man pulled off the mask. “Haha, almost forgot I had this on! I’m anemic, so my face gets cold. I wear ski masks around to keep warm, but I forgot how that would look to somebody else. Wow, that was dumb of me.”

The man was a good bit older than any of them, maybe late 20’s or early 30’s. He was a white dude with a tan complexion, like Rhiannon’s, but it was a little grayish and unhealthy looking in the bright lights around the hot tub, which could be due to the anemia. His black hair was wavy and longish, parted on the side and going down to his shoulders, framing his face, and he had a mustache and beard. “My name’s Jason,” he said. “My girlfriend and I just moved back in to the cabin – we live here in the spring and summer months because my girl can’t handle the summer sun, she needs some shade – and I brought the steaks with me to celebrate, but I thought I had potatoes. I forgot, potatoes don’t survive being stored for four months.”

“Whew.” Evan shook his head. “That’s nasty, man. I hope you were able to get the smell out of wherever you were storing them.”

“It might take a few more good scrubs,” Jason acknowledged, grinning. “Hey, do you guys mind if I put the ski mask back on? I know what it looks like, but my face is really cold.”

“Go ahead,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, we don’t mind,” Nandini said. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, it’s not like you’re not a serial killer when the mask is off.”

Jason laughed again. “Well, I can eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, so I guess you could call me a cereal killer.” Many of the college students groaned at the pun.

“You and your girlfriend, do you have kids?” Harrison asked. “Because that was dad-joke worthy.”

“Haha! Nah, no kids yet, dunno if that’s in the cards ever to be frank. Angella’s not much of a kid person.” He pronounced the name On-zhellah rather than An-jellah, like it was French or something.

“I don’t think I have any fries,” Ashlee said. “Or anything, really. When I’m here at the cabin I mostly drive down into town and get takeout. I mean, I’ve got bacon and eggs and bread for toast, and I could make you a PB&J or a lunch meat sandwich, but no real food.”

“That’s better than what I’ve got,” Evan muttered, and then, more loudly, “You got any tomatoes or peppers? I could chop them up and fry you some Spanish rice; I’d just have to go back to my cabin to get rice and spices.”

“Hey, man, that’d be awesome,” Jason said. “Yeah, I’ve got tomatoes and peppers. We’ve got a lot of steak and I don’t think even Angella’s appetite for bloody meat will put a dent in it, so if you guys wanted to come over and get some steak…”

The Pale Bro said in a voice like the moon had crashed but was still orbiting, scraping itself along the Earth’s crust as it went, that steak sounded sweet and he wouldn’t mind having some steak.

“Bro, you are just, like, an eating machine,” Harrison said. “But yeah, wouldn’t mind a steak.”

“I prefer seafood,” Y’lehna said, “but I don’t dislike steak.”

“Guys, Kayla’s asleep and I can’t leave her alone here,” Steve pointed out.

“I’ll stay here with Kayla,” Ashlee suggested. “You can go get steak.”

“I don’t feel great leaving you guys by yourselves, though, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

At this point, Kayla lifted her head and asked blearily, “What’s happening?”, which solved the issue of who would stay with her; when steak was explained to her she cheerfully agreed that steak would be nice, and everyone else agreed that Kayla had had enough to drink that, assuming she didn’t puke it up, putting more food in her stomach might be a good idea.

Trevor and a couple of knives went with Evan back to Evan’s cabin to get the rice; the Pale Bro went with the rest of them to Jason’s cabin, both to make sure nothing happened to any of his friends, and because steak sounded awesome. Since Evan’s family had been coming here for vacations since he was a kid, he knew the area well enough to know how to get to Jason’s house once Jason gave him the address.

***

Jason’s cabin was about the same size as Evan’s, and it did not have a hot tub, but it did have a barbeque grill. Not one of those tiny little portable things that run on charcoal, either. This was a large fancy propane-powered grill of the kind that could practically be used in an industrial kitchen.

“Honey! I brought guests! And they brought beer! And their friend is gonna make us some Spanish rice!” he called.

A woman came out of the cabin, looking so goth she might as well have invented it. She had incredibly pale white skin, without even the undertone of red most healthy human beings have; she wasn’t quite as pale as the Pale Bro, but it was close. Long black hair slunk down her back like she was cosplaying Morticia Adams. She was wearing hip-hugging black jeans and a long-sleeved black blouse, and a chain around her neck with an Egyptian ankh on it, and her lips were blood-red.

Then she opened her mouth, and it became immediately apparent that she had fangs.

“How do you do,” she said in a vaguely quasi-European accent. “I’m called Angella Darque, with a q. And you are?”

The college students introduced themselves, Nandini wearing a very skeptical pair of eyebrows the entire time. After introductions were done, she asked, “Is your last name really Darque?”

Angella looked taken aback. Jason said, “It’s really Duncan, actually, but she’s getting together the legal paperwork to get it changed because she hates her dad. Deadbeat, never paid child support, you know the type.”

“Oh, Jason, I had no idea today was ‘let’s tell total strangers all about my girlfriend’s private history’ day. Is that what we’re celebrating?”

“Sorry.”

“His lips are so loose,” she confessed to the students. “Sometimes I just want to… sew them shut.”

“Isn’t she hilarious?” Jason laughed. “We met at a support group for people with anemia, five years ago, and we’ve been together since.”

“Um,” Ashlee, obviously very nervous, said. “Uh, we brought some beer if you want. And also wine coolers. Would you like a wine cooler?”

“No, I never drink… wine,” Angella said. And then, “Do you have anything like a Jaeger?”

“Evan’s got vodka back at the cabin,” Steve volunteered.

“Does your cell phone work up here? Maybe you could call him,” Jason said. “Or I could, if he’s got a landline.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Angella said. “I have 151 here, and that’s quite fine. Would any of you like some?”

“Yeah, slip it on me!” Kayla cheered, somewhat mangling her idiom.

Nandini and Y’lehna said at the same time, “No.” And then Y’lehna clarified. “I’m a little drunk, but she’s, like, totally plastered. We can’t even let her have a beer at this point. Soda’s cool, though.”

The Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like a million marbles suddenly gaining sentience and stampeding for a cliff to fling themselves over like lemmings, except that lemmings don’t really do that, that he would appreciate a rum and Coke.

Angella went back in the house to make the Pale Bro a rum and Coke with dangerously-high-proof rum. Harrison, Steve, and the girls looked at each other. Finally Rhiannon said, “I thought maybe I saw… your girlfriend has fangs? What’s up with that?”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jason said cheerfully. “Now you guys need to let me know, should I use the rosemary garlic marinade, the pineapple ginger, or the Brazilian steakhouse?”

“Why not mix it up?” Harrison asked. “You got a lot of steak there, you could do ‘em all!”

“I don’t think pineapple ginger would go well with steak,” Ashlee said uncertainly. “Doesn’t that sound like more of a pork thing?”

“Or fish,” Y’lehna said. “Oh, but wait! Nandini, can you even eat pork?”

“I can eat anything,” Nandini said irritably, “but my family’s Hindi, not Muslim. I’m supposed to stay away from beef, not pork. But some traditions I don’t even believe in is not going to stop me from eating a nice steak.”

“I could add pork medallions, if you thought it was a good idea,” Jason said.

“Nah, man, you’ve got a lot of meat here,” Harrison said. “It looks great! Maybe if you had like a swordfish or tuna steak for Y’lehna, but if you don’t, no worries.”

“I got a salmon.”

“Pineapple ginger might go really well with salmon,” Y’lehna suggested.

Meanwhile Angella had brought the Pale Bro his rum and Coke, and they were currently discussing literary trends in fiction aimed at college-educated women.

***

Evan and Trevor returned with rice, spices, dried vegetables, and coincidentally, a can of pineapple chunks. Jason ended up preparing the salmon with the pineapple chunks after defrosting it in his microwave, and Evan made the Spanish rice he’d promised, and no one actually questioned why someone had started grilling steaks at midnight.

The salmon was done first, and Y’lehna and Nandini, who was feeling just a little bit guilty over her earlier decision to eat beef, got most of it. Angella got the first steak that came up, when it was barely warmed, still dripping blood. Then the rest of them, as the rest of the steaks were all done around the same time, along with the rice.

At some point, Evan suggested that everyone return to his cabin, because he had video games and music and nice speakers; Jason and Angella turned the offer down, Angella saying, “The night is young, and has yet to yield all its delights”, which was really corny and pretentious, but given the look she gave Jason when she said it, none of the guys questioned why he was staying at his own cabin tonight instead of going with them. Ashlee also insisted on staying at her own cabin; after a whole night of having ten people at her house, she was kind of burned out on people, and needed to get some sleep. And everyone agreed that Kayla should stay at Ashlee’s cabin; she was still cheerful and fun, but she was still pretty plastered. Because of the potential threat of a killer, Steve volunteered to stay with the girls; he knew Evan’s landline number, so he could call in reinforcements if necessary. Everyone else trooped back along the road, many carrying tinfoil-covered plates of steak and spicy rice, back to Evan’s cabin.

There was blood dripped onto the driveway.

The Pale Bro noticed it before anyone else, with his multiple sensitive eyes. His arm went out to block Evan from going any further, and in a voice like the rumble of an entire river’s worth of water pouring from a broken dam, he warned everyone of the blood and suggested he should go first.

Evan put up his hands. “No problem, man,” he said. “You take point.”

“I’m right behind you,” Trevor, holding one of the knives in front of him, said.

“Okay, I’ll bring up the rear,” Nandini said. “Harrison, Y’Lehna, Rhiannon, Evan, you go between us.”

Harrison looked at Nandini, who was taller than him, and then at the others. Evan was maybe the same height as Nandini, maybe very slightly taller… or very slightly shorter. It was too dark for Harrison to accurately judge.

He, too, put up his hands. “Works for me,” he said.

Evan looked back at Nandini. “I feel like I should be back with you,” he said. “If Pale’s got Trevor as backup…”

The Pale Bro pointed out, in a tone that conveyed deep irritation, that he didn’t need backup because if it was a human killer he’d make short work of them and if it was a monster, only he had a chance, and anyway it was probably not a monster because his cousin had claimed to be on a diet and the only reason they’d thought it was a monster in the first place was his cousin’s footprint. He then walked forward resolutely.

The door to the cabin was hanging open. The Pale Bro ducked his head way down, which he was pretty much used to doing any time he was going through a door, and pushed through, followed by Trevor. They’d left all the lights on, with the shutters closed, so that the light leaking around the edges of the shutters would make someone think they were home, and also because the lights were LED bulbs so seriously, that was probably like only thirty cents worth of electricity wasted. In that light, they saw blood all over the floor.

All of the group looked at each other uneasily. Ever since the Pale Bro had found the girls and the hot tub, no one had really been acting as if there genuinely was a potential killer out there; they’d given lip service to the idea, they’d certainly gotten scared enough every time something bizarre happened – and a lot of bizarre things had happened – but they hadn’t really treated it as a serious risk. Now it seemed possible that someone had been murdered in Evan’s cabin, or had been stabbed somewhere else and staggered into Evan’s cabin, despite the fact that all the locks had been locked.

The Pale Bro went forward into the kitchen, following the blood trail – and stopped in confusion. This caused everyone else to stop short, without being able to see into the kitchen because the Bro was blocking the doorway.

“Come on, bro, what’s going on?” Evan asked.

The Pale Bro slid sideways out of the way in a fashion that didn’t quite look like a real way anything could possibly move, and Evan pushed forward to be right behind Trevor, both of them crammed into the doorway.

A middle-aged white dude wearing a baseball cap advertising Evan’s parents’ company was at the sink, his front covered in blood. He had turned to face all of them, his hands clean but his sleeves completely saturated with something’s death juices.

“Joe?” Evan said disbelievingly.

“Evan!” Joe said. “I’m so sorry about the mess, man, and the hour, I know you’re pissed and I don’t blame you, I’d be pissed too, I know I’m really late—”

“Joe. Why are you covered in blood? What happened?”

“The meat defrosted,” Joe said. “I was driving around this mountain trying to find the cabin for so long, the meat defrosted, and when I pulled it out of my trunk, the bag caught on something and ripped and all the blood from the meat defrosting was all over me. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you—” Evan glanced at a fancy cuckoo clock on the wall that actually ran on batteries, not solely on clockwork. “—getting in at two fucking am when you were supposed to be here before six?”

“I have been driving around this mountain since four in the afternoon,” Joe said. “My GPS stopped working halfway up the mountain, and I swear I tried to follow your mom’s directions, I swear, but I couldn’t find Long Leaf Lane no matter how hard I looked, and I went back down and asked at the gas station but none of them lived on the mountain, so I bought a paper map but it didn’t help at all because Long Leaf Lane wasn’t even on it—”

“It’s a private drive, I don’t even know if they put those on maps,” Evan said.

“Evan, if this is your guy with the food and he’s not dying of stab wounds, I’m going to use your bathroom,” Nandini said. “Where is it?”

“There’s two, one upstairs with a claw-foot tub and one down on this floor, go back out of the kitchen and it’s the door on the east side of the living room,” Evan said.

“Great, using the downstairs one,” Nandini said, and ducked back out of the doorway.

“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked Joe.

“I’ve been driving for ten hours. Last six of which I couldn’t find my way back down the mountain either, and I didn’t have any food and the only water was the ice that used to be in my Sprite that melted—”

“Come on, man,” Evan said, sighing. “Yeah, the GPS situation really sucks around here. I wouldn’t wanna try to find Long Leaf Lane if I hadn’t been coming here every summer for, like, ten years. Let’s get you upstairs and get you cleaned up.” He looked over at Harrison and the Pale Bro. “Guys, you know more or less where the stuff in the kitchen goes, right? Can you put the food away?”

“The ice cream melted,” Joe moaned. “I’m so sorry…”

“No, come on. Let’s get you a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll borrow something of Steve’s while you’re in the shower, he’s about your size.”

“I think I know,” Harrison said. “We put the meat in the freezer?”

Rhiannon and Evan said, “No!” at the same time, and Rhiannon added, “You’ve got to put it in the fridge. You can’t freeze most things twice, they get freezer burned.”

“Huh,” Harrison said, looking over the sheer quantity of meat that Joe had been trying to carry in a paper shopping bag with handles. “I guess we’re gonna go back to Jason and Angella’s at least one night this week, ‘cause this is way more meat than we can eat before it goes bad.”

The Pale Bro, who had just picked up the bag of melted ice cream and slurped the whole thing down like it was a milkshake, said, in the voice of a creature whose mouth was entirely full of melted ice cream, something very much like “Watch me.”

“Lemme go throw this shit out,” Harrison said of the paper shopping bag, whose bottom had almost disintegrated from holding way too much au jus for even a strong, well-made paper shopping bag to handle, and which smelled like a murder had been done, or at least that someone had lost an arm and was bleeding out.

Evan took Joe upstairs to the bathroom to wash himself, broke into Steve’s suitcase and took a random t-shirt and pair of shorts, and advised him that he could stay overnight, sleep on the couch, and have some eggs and bacon in the morning, now that he had brought the eggs and bacon.

And then they all heard Harrison screaming.

Evan got down the stairs approximately as fast as Nandini came racing from the bathroom, but Rhiannon, Y’lehna and the Pale Bro were out the door faster, having been closer.

Harrison was on the ground. The trash can had been dumped over. It was mostly cleaning products used by the team that cleaned the cabin between uses, but there were some banana peels and candy wrappers – and now, a bloody shopping bag – in the pile of trash.

Standing over the pile of trash, looking kind of pissed, was a black bear.

In the voice of a guy who has finally, finally gotten the chance to use his strength and size to protect his friends after like what seemed like twenty-seven false scares tonight, the Pale Bro said something that could possibly be understood to be “Fucking finally,” and charged at the bear.

The bear had a lot of mass, even more than the Pale Bro, who was a very, very skinny dude, but the Pale Bro was around twice as tall as the bear, had much longer claws, and was doing something weird to the space around the bear, making lensing effects that distorted all the angles of the trees and branches behind the trash can. The bear flailed a bit, and then the Pale Bro lifted it and held it straight out from his body, where its much smaller paws couldn’t hope to reach. It snarled and kicked and scratched, but the Pale Bro relentlessly carried it into the woods, where they both disappeared.

“Well.” Evan said. “Who wants to help me clean up this trash?”

“’Want’ is a strong word,” Harrison said, but he helped, and Nandini and Rhiannon pitched in. Y’lehna would have helped, but she had to run back into the cabin to run cold water over her arms and legs.

The Pale Bro returned minutes later, without a scratch on him. “Where’d you put the bear, dude?” Harrison asked.

The Bro conveyed that he could possibly have gone out to the cliff that ran alongside the road – the same cliff that, in a different location, had claimed the life of an entire case of beer – and by the way, did any of them know that bears bounce? Because he hadn’t.

“Dude, you didn’t have to kill it,” Evan complained.

“Yes, he did! It was gonna kill me! I don’t want it coming back for revenge!” Harrison gabbled out.

The Pale Bro declared that he hadn’t killed it. Before anyone could feel either relief or fear over that, he added that his mom lived down that way someplace and she would probably kill it, because eldritch spawn eat a lot and he had a lot of brothers and sisters.

***

And so the first night of their vacation ended, with the Pale Bro staying up all night playing video games with Trevor, who’d returned to the cabin with Steve once they’d both been informed that there was no psycho killer and Joe was actually fine, he’d just gotten really lost. Evan, Harrison and Steve went to bed like normal people, or rather, like normal people who are young men in college, around four am, after walking Rhiannon, Nandini and Y’lehna back to their cabin like gentlemen, because psycho killer or no, the woods were dark and any number of things could happen. In other words, it was a perfectly normal night on vacation, just like any group of friends in college might have.

As for anything that might have happened the next day, or any of the other days of their vacation… that’s a story for another time.

[watusichris]

A Mile or Two in Joe South’s Shoes

My 2016 Joe South career retrospective, restored from Internet Purgatory.

**********

If you know anything about the true breadth of Joe South’s talents, it’s remarkable to consider that if he is known for anything at all today, it’s for just two songs.

For a hot minute in 1969-70, South looked like he was on the way to a major career. “Games People Play,” the tune that introduced him to the public at large, rose to No. 12 on the national singles chart; a radio ubiquity, it captured two Grammy Awards in 1970, as song of the year and best contemporary song. A year after that breakout hit, he rose to the same chart slot with the stomping, soulful “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” a number that would be covered in short order by Elvis Presley.

After those two signature songs, Joe South pretty much disappeared off the American pop landscape. It was an astonishing vanishing act, for, in terms of sheer reach and ability, he came as close to genius as a musician can get. He was one of those cats who could do it all.

He wrote almost all of his own material; before his late-‘60s emergence, he had already made his mark writing for others – most notably fellow Georgian Billy Joe Royal – and one of his songs, “Rose Garden,” became one of the biggest country hits of 1970-71 in Lynn Anderson’s hands.

South had all the chops to put across his material. He was a terrific, expressive baritone vocalist. Perhaps more importantly, he was a dynamite guitar player who had honed his craft as an A-list session man in New York and Nashville. And he knew his way around the studio booth, too. He produced nearly all of his own records, and they were big, opulent sides, dressed with strings, horns, and chorales (in the manner of Chet Atkins’ countrypolitan sessions, Atlantic Records’ castanet-snapping R&B outings, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound). Yet at the core of South’s early records was the gutbucket sound produced by his family band, the Believers.

Though you could broadly categorize South’s music as “pop,” there was nothing weak or watered-down about his stuff. Like any musician who grew up in the South, he was reared on country music, and all his singing and picking reflected those roots. His style also had a strong R&B backbone and backbeat – not surprising, since one of his early hits as a songwriter, “Untie Me,” was for the Atlanta beach music act the Tams. And he could rock hard, and was unafraid to use the studio tools at his disposal for up-to-the-minute effects: Many of South’s most interesting tracks are overtly psychedelic.

Joe South was primed to go places – almost anywhere he wanted to go, really – but a predisposed dislike for the necessities of the music business, the usual rock ‘n’ roll pitfalls of drugs and alcohol, and, most critically, a devastating family tragedy knocked him out of the game when a brilliant career appeared his for the taking.

He was born Joseph Souter in Atlanta in 1940. His family was attuned to music and the arts: His father played guitar and mandolin, and his mother wrote poetry. He began playing guitar at an early age, while his younger brother Tommy took up the drums. Like many Southern households, the Souters tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry on Nashville’s WSM, as well as the popular local DJ Uncle Eb Brown on WGST.

“Brown” was the air name of Bill Lowery, who had been a mover and shaker in Atlanta’s music community since the early ‘50s as a broadcaster, station executive, and music publisher. It’s said that in an attempt to advance his musical aspirations, young Joe Souter boldly went to visit Lowery during his radio shift. No doubt impressed by his spunk, Lowery took the wannabe performer under his wing. One of his first pieces of advice was that Souter should change his name to the regionally reflective Joe South.

Beginning a professional and personal relationship that would survive for nearly five decades, Lowery brought 18-year-old college dropout South on board at his new independent record label, National Recording Corporation. The young picker was at first employed as a member of NRC’s house band, which also included the future recording stars Jerry Reed and Ray Stevens.

South began cutting singles in his own right for NRC, in varying pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and rockabilly settings. His lone chart record for the company came in 1958: “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor,” a sort-of-sequel to two recent novelty smashes, Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor.” Bouncing onto the chart briefly at No. 47, it was the only bright spot during his time on the label, which went bankrupt in 1961.

He continued to work as a performer, cutting singles unprofitably for the indies Fairlane and AllWood and for MGM, the former home of Hank Williams. But he began to hone his chops as a behind-the scenes player with his writing, playing, and production. He made his first mark with “Untie Me,” which became a No. 12 entry on the U.S. R&B charts in 1962.

He made his biggest impact in 1965-67 as writer and producer of Marietta, Georgia-born Billy Joe Royal’s hits on Columbia Records. Their partnership was announced with the propulsive poor-boy-loves-rich-girl saga “Down in the Boondocks,” which climbed to No. 9 in 1965. Royal road-tested such other South compositions as “Leanin’ On You,” “Rose Garden,” “Yo-Yo,” and “Hush.” The latter track reached No. 52 on the Hot 100 in 1967, but became better known in a 1968 cover by British hard rockers Deep Purple.

South also left his imprint via several noteworthy sessions. He played guitar on Simon & Garfunkel’s first bona fide electric sessions, which became the bestselling 1966 folk-rock album Sounds of Silence. He contributed guitar and bass during the Nashville recording dates for Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking two-LP 1966 set Blonde On Blonde. And in 1967, in the company of FAME Studio’s crack Alabama rhythm section, he laid down the signature guitar licks on Aretha Franklin’s hit “Chain of Fools.”

By 1968, Joe South had little left to prove, and Bill Lowery helped midwife a deal for his protégé at Capitol Records, already the home of such progressive pop-country talent as Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry. South was given extraordinary latitude for his first album: He produced the collection, wrote all of the material, and played lead guitar, backed by the Believers, a group that included his brother Tommy on drums and his wife, Barbara, on keyboards.

The resultant LP, Introspect, is an impressive piece of work that didn’t sound quite like anything else on the market. It was a widescreen sound, immense and layered, but at bottom down-home and funky. It drew from several stylistic tributaries. Its lead-off track “All My Hard Times” was an updated rewrite of the old spiritual “All My Trials.” The mocking “Redneck” was a loping countrified lampoon that can be seen as an early anthem of the New South; “These Are Not My People” was an alienated piece of similarly styled, Dylanesque social commentary. The strikingly trippy “Mirror of Your Mind” bore a startling out-of-time passage in its middle, while the equally expansive “Gabriel” was a psychedelic parable cut straight out of the Old Testament.

As great and unique as it was, Introspect was a marketplace failure, and Capitol’s accountants yanked it off the market just as a single drawn from it was beginning to make some noise.

Sporting a unique lead guitar line -- fabricated by South on either, depending on which source you believe, a Coral electric sitar or a Gibson Bell guitar fed through an outboard Echorette echo unit -- and a lyrical hook derived from the title of Eric Berne’s 1964 pop-psychology bestseller, “Games People Play” became a slow-rolling hit. Realizing they may have deleted Introspect prematurely, Capitol decided to capitalize on the song with a hybrid new album.

The Games People Play album – essentially a second debut album for South – resuscitated the title track, “These Are Not My People,” and, in an expanded psyched-up version, the song “Birds of a Feather” (which would appear on three of South’s six Capitol collections). To these were added a couple of new originals (including “Hole in Your Soul,” a frenzied vocal version of the Believers’ two-sided psychedelic instrumental single “Soul Raga”), remakes of several early-‘60s compositions for the Tams and Royal, and a potent rendition of South’s Brill Building-styled 1963 single for MGM, “Concrete Jungle.”

This bizarrely reconfigured opus failed to make any waves, but South gained some name recognition with his “Games People Play” Grammys. Moreover, he made some longer commercial strides with 1969’s Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home? The LP, which ultimately reached No. 60, sported not one but two hit singles: the title cut, a poignant look at the toll wreaked by modern life upon the Southern landscape, and the visceral, gospel-styled “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” It also contained the most hallucinogenic entry in the South catalog: “A Million Miles Away,” a dense instrumental overlaid with a recitation of the album’s personnel and an extract from a telephone call between South and some staffers at the Nixon White House.

These ambitious records might have suggested to some that South’s potential was unlimited. But there was a problem: He didn’t like to tour, and was at heart a studio animal. He also didn’t respond well to the intense pressure of coming up with material that wouldn’t just equal the sales of his chart records, but would better them.

Perhaps in a hope of shaking things up, the 1971 album Joe South was recorded on home turf at Atlanta’s Studio One, where the Atlanta Rhythm Section was the hot session band of the hour. But -- save for “Rose Garden” (included to cash in on Anderson’s enormous hit with the song) and the “Brown Eyed Girl”-like “Birds of a Feather” (it was the third time around for this belated single release) -- the material, a mix of tepid new tunes and recut warhorses, was scarcely South’s best. The disinterest seemed to carry over on the second LP South issued that year, So the Seeds Are Growing; only seven of the album’s 10 tracks were original compositions.

The disenchanted South’s drug use had begun to escalate, and his brother Tommy, who suffered from depression, was also self-medicating. A turning point came on Oct. 11, 1971, when the younger South took his own life.

The immediate result of this tragedy was South’s final Capitol album, A Look Inside, released in 1972. The LP jacket bore a cover photo of South with an open window in his skull, and the most confessional songs on this dark, unsettling record mirror the graphic perfectly. Its first two songs, “Coming Down All Alone” and “Imitation of Living,” are candid and frightening reflections on drug addiction, and they have lost none of their power. But the record’s true killer, which kicks off with a tart quote of the “Game People Play” melody, is the ironically titled “I’m a Star,” possibly the most blunt, world-weary, and self-reflective deflation of the music industry ever released.

It was a record made by an artist at the end of his tether. As South said frankly in the notes to what proved to be his final album, “I flipped out. I just went completely into the ether in the wake of my brother’s death. I just had to get away, so I went out to the islands, caught Polynesian paralysis and just lived in the jungles of Maui for a couple of years.”

He returned, briefly, in 1975, for his lone release for Island Records, Midnight Rainbows. Though it began promisingly with the fittingly introspective original medley of “Midnight Rainbows” and “It Got Away,” the album – again employing members of the Atlanta Rhythm Section – is disappointingly short on new original material; its strongest tracks are wrenching covers of Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” and Johnny Adams’ “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The last track on Midnight Rainbows is an instrumental titled “Cosmos,” and that’s exactly where Joe South headed. He was virtually invisible on the public stage from the release of that last LP until his death on Sept. 5, 2012, in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Before Bill Lowery’s death in 2004, he issued a couple of singles on his old sponsor’s independent labels: “Jack Daniels On the Line” for 1-2-3 Records in 1981, “Royal Blue” for Southern Tracks in 1986.

The last work he released during his lifetime arrived as a bonus track on the Australian label Raven’s 2010 repackaging of So the Seeds Are Growing and A Look Inside. Sung by South in a charred latter-day voice, “Oprah Cried” is an apparently faithful account of his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where his story of life’s hard knocks moves the hostess to tears. “Son, I thought I’d heard it all,” she tells him.

Considered in light of what might have been for Joe South, it’s one of the saddest damn songs ever written.

[elisajdb]

Son Family Week: Goten Day

Dreams and Fantasies @sonfamilyweek

 Day: Goten

 Party

  “Are you sure about this?”

 “It’s the perfect plan and the perfect time to do this.”

 Goten wasn’t completely convinced. “Wouldn’t a party make more sense at your house? It’s huge!”

 “Yeah,” Trunks didn’t deny that. His home would be better, but it wasn’t possible. “But my grandparents, my parents and lots of animals and robots are there. There’s always someone home!” Trunks saw doubt on Goten’s face. He didn’t need his friend to back out of this. Trunks put too much planning in for this to not work.

 “Come on, Goten. It’s the perfect time. Gohan has that conference to go to. This is the first time he’s taking Videl and Pan instead of leaving Pan with your parents. That’s three days. All we need to do is get your parents out of the house for one night.” He pulled out the answer from his pocket and waved it at Goten. “And your parents deserve this. When do they ever go out? Do you really want to keep this from them?”

 Goten looked at the white envelope waving before him. Trunks told him it was a trip to an exclusive island resort. It had nightly parties, fireworks and most importantly, food. Lots and lots of food and it was all free.

 “Mom, gets this stuff all the time. These places always give this to rich or famous people for free.”

 “Why free?” Goten asked. “They can afford it.”

 Trunks shook his head chuckling at Goten’s naivete. He had no clue how the real world worked. “Because if they are seen there or talk about it, it brings more people to the resort. You know how rich and famous obsessed this world is. Mr. Satan can promote a sports drink that’s more junk than healthy but millions would buy because of him.”

 That was true. Even Goten didn’t understand why people still believed Mr. Satan beat Cell.

 “All we have to do is convince your Mom. Your Dad will go along with anything your Mom wants to do.”

 That was true, but it didn’t mean Trunks’ plan will work. “Even so, Mom won’t let me be in the house by myself. She’ll send me to Grandpa for the night.”

 “Don’t worry,” Trunks smirked. He thought of that, too. “Leave that to me.”

 ****

 “Are you looking forward to the conference, Gohan?”

 “It’s no different from the other ones,” Gohan commented as he finished his lunch. He meant to talk to his parents about his trip but couldn’t say no when his mother insist he stay for lunch. “The good thing is Pan gets to come with Videl and me. Videl’s already planning places we can all go when my conferences end for each day.”

 “Well, it’s sad Goku and I won’t watch Pan this time but I’m glad Pan gets to go with you.”

 “Food!” Goten cheered as he and Trunks came downstairs.

 “Do you want to stay for lunch, Trunks?” ChiChi asked the young man.

 “No. I gotta get home. Before I go, I have to give you this.” Trunks handed ChiChi an envelope. “Mom wants you to have this.”

 ChiChi opened the envelope. She read the contents. “Wow!”

 Goku looked up from his food. “What is it?”

 “It’s a free trip to those fancy island resorts Bulma talks about. All you can eat, lots of shopping and games. Oooo,” ChiChi pulled out a card. “According to this, there’s over 100,000 zeni on it. She’s giving me spending money? But we have money now.”

 The money card was something Trunks added. Mr. Satan gave the Son Family enough money to live on. Trunks thought it was extra incentive if he gave them that card. “That’s a gift from the escort. Sometimes they give it to Mom to ensure she comes. She rather spend someone else’s money instead of her own.”

 ChiChi frowned as she read more information. “We can only use this on the 17th and it’s only for two.”

 “It’s for you and Goku,” Trunks explained.

 ChiChi placed the contents back in the envelope and handed it back to Trunks. “We can’t use it.”

 “Why not? My Mom wanted you to have it.”

 “Gohan will be gone for the conference on the 16th-18th. This resort is a one-day pass on the 17th.” ChiChi growled irritated. “Why did Bulma give this to you when it’s going to expire in two days? If we had more time, perhaps we could’ve changed the date.”

 Trunks saw ChiChi reaching for her cell phone. If she calls his Mom, his plan will blow up in his face. “It’s my fault!” Trunks blurted. “Mom gave this to me to give you a month ago but I forgot.” Not true. Trunks has been planning this months and always intercepted mail for his mother looking for free things like this. “Please,” he begged ChiChi. “Don’t tell her. She’ll get mad at me.”

 ChiChi pulled back from her phone. “I won’t but Goku and I can’t use this unless we send Goten to spend the night with Grandpa and he’s getting older. It’ll be more like Goten watching him.”

 “Why can’t I stay home by myself?” asked Goten. “I’m sixteen. I’m old enough to stay home alone for a night.”

 “Goten,” ChiChi said kindly, “you’re sixteen but you’re not ready.”

 “Why not?” Goten’s voice raised at the rejection. “I’m not a baby. I can be home by myself for one night. Gohan did it.”

 “No one’s calling you a baby, Goten and it’s not fair to compare yourself to Gohan. Things were different then. You never had to be by yourself.”

 “I know but I feel like you don’t trust me or you think I’m a baby. You and Dad have this great trip from Bulma and you won’t go because you think you have to take care of me.”

 “Oh, Goten,” ChiChi put a hand on her chest. Was her decision so hurtful to Goten that he thought she didn’t trust him? “It’s not like that all. I never thought to make you think---”

 “I know I never went through all the things Gohan did. Some of the stuff you still won’t tell me about but I can do this,” Goten insisted. “I can stay at home for one day. I can hunt fish. I know how to handle those salesmen calls and not answer the door to anyone.”

 “All right,” ChiChi gave in. Maybe she was being too judgmental. “You’re right. You’re sixteen. You should do this. Your brother was playing superhero at your age. If I let him do that, I should be able to let you stay alone for one day.” ChiChi ruffled Goten’s shaggy hair. “Sometimes I see you as my sweet little baby but you’re growing up into a young man. I have to start letting you go.” ChiChi hugged Goten. “Can you forgive me for wanting to keep you as my baby a little longer?”

 Goten wrapped his arms around ChiChi. Trunks grinned at him. It worked! “Sure, Mom.” Goten assured her but felt a lot of guilt for what he just did.

 ****

 Gohan and his family left for his conference and Goku and ChiChi left for their trip as scheduled. Goten received calls from ChiChi and his Grandpa checking on him but Goten assured them everything was under control.

 For a while, it was. Trunks had everything planned out and brought everything they needed. He brought a capsule jacuzzi, sound systems that will have music blaring for miles, games set up outside and lots of food. Trunks thought twenty of his friends from school will be enough but he shut down Goten’s idea of inviting his friends. Most of Goten’s friends came from Gyumao’s village and their parents knew Goku and ChiChi. It was that issue that prevented Trunks from letting Goten invite them.

 “But they’re my friends,” Goten argued.

 “Yeah, and their parents know yours and your Grandpa. It’s a good chance one will let it slip about the party and your family will find out. No,” Trunks shook his head adamant. “Only my friends can come.”

 “But it’s my house,” Goten argued again. “And I don’t know your friends.”

 “So, this can work, we need to invite people who have no ties to your family,” Trunks explained again. “I’ll introduce you to them. Trust me. They’re cool and the girls I have coming are hot and experience.”

 Some of Trunks’ friends were cool and the girls he brought were beautiful. It was fun being around them that Goten thought Trunks was right about not inviting his friends. He was still having fun but after an hour, things went to great to spiraling out of control. More people showed up. Trunks’ friends invited friends of their own and brought amenities to liven up the party more: alcohol and drugs . What started as a group of twenty expanded to a group of nearly one hundred and they were all partying in or outside Goten’s home.

 “I’m in so much trouble,” Goten murmured. Outside boys and girls were soaking or making out in the  jacuzzi. Naked girls were being chased by half naked boys. There were groups of people drinking excessively. One drunken teen vomited in ChiChi’s garden.

 And this was outside!

 Inside was worse. The house was filled with teens dancing, eating and making out. There were a few broken glasses and dishes. Two end tables were broken because teens danced on it. The coffee table was broken because two muscle bound jocks broke it while celebrating an arm-wrestling victory. Upstairs was off limits but of course being teens, they didn’t listen. They broke through the locked doors for their own entertainment.

 Goten was horrified to see groups of people in his parent’s bedroom have a blow job party. He told these strangers to stay downstairs but instead of listening, they broke in his parents’ bedroom and did things only his parents should do in here. Add on to the trust his mother had in him and knowing he broke and the party not turning out how he wanted, it angered Goten to the point he flared into Super Saiyan as he screamed.

 “GET OUT!!!”

 Goten was angry. He was angry at these people for disrespecting him in his home. He was angry he couldn’t invite his friends and he was angry at his best friend Trunk using him.

 Girls sucking on their boyfriends pulled away stunned and frightened at the golden hair teen screaming. Boys pulled up their pants and girls scrambled to their feet as they rushed out to escape the gold menace.

Somewhere in the sea of people was Trunks. Goten promised to find him and tell his friend the party was over. Shockingly, Goten felt Trunks’ Ki in his bedroom. He pushed open the door and found Trunks kissing a girl besides his bed.

 “Trunks, what are you doing in here?! You have a girl in my room before I got a girl in my room!”

 Trunks broke away from the girl startled. “Goten! What the hell are you doing? Why did you turn into a Super Saiyan?”

 “WHY ARE YOU IN MY ROOM?!”

 “What’s a Super Saiyan?”

 Trunks and Goten looked at the confused pink haired girl that had her tongue down Trunks’ throat moments ago. “Give us a minute.” The girl fixed her clothes, gave Trunks a kiss and flipped off Goten as she brushed past him. “I know it’s wrong to bring her in here but I’m your friend, so I thought it was cool.” Goten’s Ki spiked higher at the explanation. “Goten, could you calm down? I know there’s a lot of people and maybe it’s getting out of hand but we can fix this.”

 The music that blared in and outside of the house since the party started. immediately stopped. It was followed by an angry voice that rocked Goten and Trunks to their core.

 “OUT!! EVERYONE OUT!!! RIGHT NOW!!!”

 “Oh, shit,” Trunks cursed.

 Trunks and Goten could hear the sounds of multiple footsteps leaving his home and the sounds of capsules popping. From his window, Goten and Trunks saw many airships leaving at a frantic pace.

 “GOTEN!!!!”

 “Oh, shit,” Trunks cursed again.

 Goten could feel sick to his stomach at that voice. It was over for him. He will die tonight. Why couldn’t evil Majin Boo come back or some other bad person willing to destroy the planet?

“Don’t make me come up there and get you, Goten!! Get….down…. here… NOW!!!”

 Trunks wiped his forehead. He wasn’t called. He was spared.

 “I know you’re up there, Trunks!! Get down here, too, and don’t you even think of escaping!”

 “Dammit,” Trunks cursed again.

 Goten and Trunks left the room. They slowly walked downstairs ready to die. With the house empty of people, it looked even worse. The sofa had stains of food, alcohol and cigarette marks. Trash littered the floor. There was a stench of smoke and weed in the room. The kitchen was a mess as it was stained with food. In the center stood Gohan, dressed casually, without his glasses, arms crossed and furious!

 Goten witnessed anger from his brother a few times but he had never seen him this angry before. “Big brother, what are you doing here? How did you know?”

 Gohan glared at Trunks. He knew he was the mastermind behind this. “You are definitely Bulma’s kid, Trunks. Your con job on Mom was so bad even Dad noticed.”

 Goku? Trunks couldn’t believe that. “That’s impossible! Your Dad’s—"

 “A lot smarter than you think and he’s known your Mom a lot longer than you. He’s seen this con job before and maybe if Goten didn’t display that temper tantrum he’s old enough to be in the house by himself, Mom would’ve noticed that, too.”

 “If you knew about this, why didn’t you stop us?” Trunks asked. Instead of being scared, he was upset. “Did you set us up?”

 Gohan wanted to laugh. Was Trunks trying to turn this on him? “I understand the need to have parties. I went to a few in college but I didn’t say anything because I thought you two would have it under control. My mistake in trusting you.”

 Goten lowered his head ashamed. He never thought he would lose his brother’s trust.

 Trunks admired Gohan but he didn’t like this scolding from him. “So, what are you gonna do?” he challenged, “Snitch on us?”

 Gohan shook his head. Trunks didn’t behave like the Trunks he knew as a child. It was unfortunate. “I won’t. Mom deserves this break and I won’t have her crush to think she can’t trust her child. We’re gonna fix this.”

 Gohan stepped away from them. He opened a drawer and pulled out ChiChi’s notepad and pen she used when making the grocery list. Goten and Trunks looked curious as Gohan wrote down what was broken in the kitchen. He went to the living room and made list there. Then he traveled to every room in the house writing more things down.

 When he returned, Gohan had a list of two pages. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a capsule. He gave the list to Goten and the capsule to Trunks.

 Trunks read the capsule model number. “This is one of our large airship capsules.”

 “What do you want us to do?” Goten asked as he read the list. He was ready to do anything to earn his brother’s trust again. “You want us to go shopping for all this?  What if they don’t have it?”

 “There’s a storage warehouse in Satan City at 510 Western Ave. It has everything we need. There are duplicates of everything in our house. Every utensil, glass, dinnerplates. Even furniture. It’s all bought and paid for. Don’t worry about the sofa and futons. I broke that in so it doesn’t have a new furniture feel to it. Mom won’t know it’s been replaced. Just get it and get back here as soon as possible.”

 “Hold on.” There’s a story behind this and Trunks wanted to know. “Why do you have duplicates of everything in a warehouse?”

 “Dad still breaks stuff around the house. With all that money Mr. Satan gave us, Dad thought we should get duplicates of everything so Mom would stop getting angry every time he broke something.”

 Goten did remember his Mom being a little frustrated at his Dad for breaking things but that hasn’t happened for….. “You mean this has been---”

 “Going on for years,” Gohan finished. “Yes. You two need to get going. I’m gonna start cleaning up what I can.”

 “Okay but Mom and Dad don’t need a new bed.” Goten pointed to the list. “It’s not broken.”

 “I don’t know all of what went on in Mom and Dad’s room and my nose isn’t as strong as Dad’s but I know something went on in there that shouldn’t have. Dad’s nose will pick it up. You’re getting a new bed and futon.”

 Goten agreed with his brother. He saw what went on and he will take that to his grave. “Dad suspects something but he doesn’t know about the party right, Gohan? You don’t have to tell him.”

 Gohan wished that were true. “I don’t want to but I have to. Mom will want to leave first thing in the morning and I don’t think we’ll be finished covering this mess by then. Dad needs to know so he can stall Mom.”

 Goten accepted that. As long as Mom didn’t know.

 Gohan pointed to the door. “Get going. Mom and Dad will be back tomorrow. We don’t have a lot of time and I have to get back, too. Videl doesn’t know about this.” Gohan squeezed the bridge of his nose as he thought of how to resolve this. “When you two come back, you need to get rid of everything broken and clean this house top to bottom. Make sure the outside is taken care of, too. I’m not needed at tomorrow’s conference but I’ll let Videl think I’m going and come back here and make sure everything is in correct order.”

 “I want to help,” Trunks started, “but I can’t. I have curfew in three hours. I broke it twice and Mom will ground me for the next month if I’m late again.”

 “Then you better get as much done as you can before curfew,” Gohan warned as he approached Trunks. No way will this instigator get out of the mess he help create. “Tomorrow, you’re gonna come back here and help me and Goten clean this mess because if my Mom finds out, after my Mom and your Mom deals with you, you’re gonna have to deal with me. Understand?”

 Trunks swallowed. When Gohan got mad, really mad, he was scary.

 ****

 Goten and Trunks went to the warehouse and brought back everything on Gohan’s list. Trunks went home to meet curfew. This left Goten to spend the rest of the night tossing out the broken furniture and cleaning the house from top to bottom. Trunks returned early the next morning to help. Gohan arrived an hour after Trunks. He inspected in and outside the house for anything Goten (mostly) and Trunks missed in before giving his approval and leaving.  

 Trunks and Goten were in the kitchen eating when Goku and ChiChi teleported two hours later. Both were carrying bags of items from the resort. Goten could see stuffed toys for Pan in one bag. There was another bag filled with clothes and games that looked to be for him.

 “Look at that, ChiChi. The house is in one piece.” Goku squeezed ChiChi lightly. “And you were worried.”

 “I gladly admit to being wrong.” ChiChi looked around her kitchen inspecting everything with a sharp eye. She opened and closed the refrigerator, eyed Goten suspicious before stepping in the living where a lot of damage was done. ChiChi walked around before staring at the sofa, the end tables and coffee table that were replaced. Goten and Trunks exchanged nervous glances. Did they miss a spot? Did ChiChi notice something.

 “Goten!”

 Goten jumped! Did his mother know the furniture were replaced? Gohan inspected everything! He said everything was good.

 ChiChi ran to Goten and threw her arms around him. “Oh, sweetheart. You cleaned the house and shopped for food.”

 Goten laughed nervously. She didn’t notice. He wasn’t going to die today. “I wanted to surprise you. I felt bad about my temper tantrum and---”

 “Ohh!” ChiChi kissed his cheek. “Oh, you’re such a sweet child.”

 “He’s a good kid,” Goku ruffled Goten’s hair. “With a lot of energy. Gohan’s getting so much busier now with his work and family he can’t spar with me as much anymore.” He lightly jabbed Goten’s face. “You’re getting older and slacking off a bit. I think we need to increase our training.” Goku grinned at Goten. “First thing in the morning and after your school lessons are done, we’re gonna train and we’re going to train harder than before.” He jabbed Goten’s face again. “And don’t think I will go easy on you because you’re my son. I know you don’t want that.”

 More training and even harder? They already train four days out of the week. Goten loved it when he was kid but getting older and discovering girls, Goten wasn’t interested in fighting like he used to be. He looked at his mother to bail him out. “Mom?”

 “Oh, I know you can handle it, Goten. You don’t have to ask for my permission. You’ve balanced school and training with your father and you haven’t fallen behind.” ChiChi grabbed a couple bags. “I’m gonna unpack and wrap these gifts for Pan. I can’t wait to show these to her.”

 This left Goku, Goten and Trunks in the room. Trunks looked at father and son. Goten looked frightened at his Dad’s scary smile. He didn’t know what will happen but Trunks knew he should leave. This was Goten’s problem. Not his. “Well, I’m gonna go home. Nice to see you again, Goku.”

 “Bye, Trunks,” Goku kept his eyes on Goten. “Say hey to Vegeta. I haven’t seen him in while but I talked to him this morning. He’s waiting for you.”

 “Shit,” Trunks banged his head against the door. He was a dead man. If Goten’s father was going to increase their training, he could only imagine what his Dad will do to him.

 And then there were two. Goten kept his head bowed. He knew his father wasn’t the yelling type but he felt something was coming.

 “Shall we go?” Goku asked. “Might as well get started.”

 Goten saw his father walking towards the door. Was this it? Was his Dad not going to acknowledge what he did? He knew Mom handles the punishment but this time with Mom not knowing, Goten expected something from his Dad. “Dad, aren’t you mad?”

 “The house is still here and your Mom’s happy. So, no.” He opened the door. “Let’s go.”

 Goten followed his Dad outside. He didn’t understand. The house was a wreck because of his party. He should be punished. “Didn’t Gohan tell you what happened?”

 “He did.”

 And he still wasn’t mad?

 “Listen, Goten. You know I’m not the yelling parent. I trust my kids to do the right thing and when they do wrong, I trust them to fix it. Gohan told me how ashamed you were last night. When he came by this morning, everything was spotless. The house was cleaner than it was when we left.” He put an arm around Goten. “You really felt bad for that party and what happened to the house.”

 “Yeah,” Goten nodded. “I didn’t want to do it but Trunks convinced me and….” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Trunks is my best friend but I shouldn’t listen to him all the time.”

 “That’s true,” Goku agreed. It was something he and ChiChi knew for a while. Goku was glad Goten was starting to see that.

 “I’m really sorry, Dad.” Goten never wanted last night to happen again. “I let you and Mom down.”

 “Nah. You didn’t let us down. You proved to us we did pretty good as parents. You saw you made a mistake and tried to correct it. You didn’t try to get away with it. So, I’m happy.” He winked at Goten. “It’ll be our little secret from Mom.”

 Goten hugged his father. “Thanks, Dad.” His mother’s love and father’s approval meant a lot to Goten. He had that, risked losing it last night and vowed to never let that happen again.  

[somedayonbroadway]

Wow alright I found out how to do the whole ask thing, sorry about that! I was wondering if you could expand on the Outsiders, Tangled, and Aladdin AU? Again, if that’s too much you don’t have to do them all. Love your writing by the way you’re fantastic!

So, the only AU I currently do not have another ask for is Tangled. So...

Tangled AU

Katherine Plumber is a curious young woman. She’s almost eighteen. An adult. And she believes she can take care of herself.

Her father believes otherwise.

Her whole life, her overprotective father has raised her alone in an old cottage, just outside a small kingdom. A kingdom she can hear music from and see just across the river. Every year, exactly on her birthday, there is a trail of floating lights that’s passes just over her.

She wants nothing more than to follow the floating lights back to wherever they’re coming from. But her father refuses, even after she begs him to take her on her eighteenth birthday.

So she lets it go.

Jack Kelly is a wanted thief in five different kingdoms. He’s an escaped convict of three of those five kingdoms and works with many different crews. The most frequent of all would be two brothers. The Delancey brothers.

In an attempt to steal the lost princesses crown, Jack leaves behind his friends in order to get the crown, tricking them into helping him escape before running off and letting them take the fall for him.

But one palace guard is still hot on his trail while he tries to make a run for it. It’s a rookie. Someone who got lucky.

Jack leads the guard down to a part of the forest that hasn’t been explored in decades and tries to lose him, stumbling across an old abandoned cottage himself and sneaking inside, hiding away while the guard gets lost and eventually loses track of him.

Just when Jack believes he can breathe again, he turns around to see what he can find in this old, worn looking cottage, only to find a girl looking back at him, just staring, as if she’d never seen another human being before.

Jack freezes and clutches onto his bag (the one with the crown) and is about to explain before another door opens up and a man is stepping into the room. The girl motions for him to stay hidden and quiet. He does, not having much of a choice.

Eventually, the girl gets rid of her father, Joseph Plumber, by sending him off for her own birthday present. She wants books. Books by a specific author (female author) that it will take her father a couple days to get.

Jack would thank her. And he’d go to leave. But Katherine grabs a knife and block his exit. She’d take his bag from him. Now Jack, being the tough, intimidating guy he is, would be a little impressed. I mean, c’mon... but Katherine would make him leave the house without it and hide it, making him a deal. If he took her to the kingdom to see the floating lights (which Jack describes as “the lantern thing they do for the princess”) he can have his bag back and be on his merry way.

Without much of a choice, Jack agrees. (Katherine is much more serious about things than Rapunzel, if that makes. Jack is a little intimidated).

With that, Katherine steps out of her cottage for the first time and is terrified as she does so, even though Jack is staring at her the whole time. Before she steps out he says something like “what? Ya waitin’ f’r lightin’ ta come down n’ strike me r’ somethin’? Let’s go, Red!”

In which she promptly reminds him that her name is “*Katherine*”. Jack gives her a million little nicknames throughout the story just to avoid calling her by her full name.

As they begin their journey, Jack tells Katherine that he has some business to take care of and asks her if she’d like to stop for a bite to eat while he dealt with it. She agrees and he takes her to small tavern, still outside the kingdom.

She’s kind and nice about the stop, believing they would just be set back a few minutes and be on their way. But the moment they step inside, the noise that had been heard about a half mile away stops in its tracks and everyone is staring at Jack who suddenly looks nervous for the first time since they’d met. Katherine goes to ask him what’s wrong but he shakes his head.

Meanwhile, Joseph is making his trek through the woods and stumbles upon a young palace guard who has gotten himself lost. The young man does not see Joseph and continues on his hunt for the escaped criminal that he lost.

Joseph knows that palace guards typically travel in groups and immediately panics, rushing back to his cottage to find that Katherine is not there. However, he does find a bag with a crown in it. So he takes it with him and sets off to find his daughter.

Back at the tavern, Jack tells Katherine to stay near the door as he walked through the crowd of big, strong boys who were staring at Jack like they hated him. He’d go over and find the boy that seemed to be the leader of the gang and tell him something about almost having it. But Katherine does not know what he’s talking about. Jack tells the leader, “Spot” he calls him, that he’ll have “it” within the next two days.

Spot tells him that that’s not good enough. That Jack owes him now and that he was going to get the money one way or another. Jack tries time argue, but one of the other boys holds up a “wanted” picture. It’s of Jack. And Spot nods to his boys.

They grab Jack, telling him that they’re gonna claim the offer and turn him in. Someone runs out to get the guards while Katherine tries to figure out what’s going on. She grabs a hot pan from the kitchen and threatens Spot with it. He laughs, but asks her why it’s so important that Jack don’t go to jail.

She explains to him the situation and Spot goes a little soft. He tells her that it’s admirable that she got Jack to show her around. That he had a dream of studying music, but his criminal record prevented that. Eventually, she wins the boys over and they tell her they’ll help her too.

That’s about when the boy comes back with the palace guards. Spot hells Jack and Katherine hide immediately, despite Jack’s attempts to run towards the cellar. Spot grabs him by the collar and drags him down behind a counter, revealing a trap door to them. He tells Katherine he’s got her back and he tells Jack something that Kath doesn’t understand. Something like “he’s okay, Jackie... playin’ cards with Hot Shot in the basement... now git!”

Reluctantly, Jack goes, only quietly apologizing to Spot about taking off with his life savings before he leads Katherine down a hidden tunnel.

In the tavern, David Jacobs is determined to prove himself by snuffing out the escaped convict who’d gotten away from him. Spot gives them no useful information whatsoever, but eventually David stumbles upon the trap door and follows Jack down.

The guards that are left, the ones that have the Delancey brothers as their prisoners, turn away for a second only to get overpowered by the two who immediately make a run for the tunnel as well.

Hearing them coming, Jack and Katherine run down the tunnel only to be let out at the end of a dam, hardly holding up. The guards would catch up to them. Jack would steal on of their swords, somehow getting the upper hand as Katherine did as much damage as she could with a frying pan.

Eventually, the fight escalates and the dam begins to break as things hit it. The guards retreat back into the tunnel but Jack and Katherine are forced to run forward where they get stuck in a cave where they believe they’ll probably die, after Jack fights to break through rocks and ends up cutting his hand. Jack admits his real name isn’t Jack Kelly and that he got the name from a story he used to tell his little brother when they were growing up in the orphanage. His real name is Francis Sullivan. A name he truly despises.

Katherine then admits that she has magic powers that can make her hands glow. He thinks she’s crazy. But then she sings her song, realizing she might find a way out, which she does.

Then barely survive the cave through a small river and end up closer to the kingdom where Jack believes he’s dreaming and Katherine is just happy to be alive. Eventually, Katherine heals his hand tells him that she is scared one day someone will come after her for her power and that’s why she’d never been outside before. But Jack promises, without hardly thinking, that he’d protect her. That’s when he tells her about his life. He’s an orphan who has a little brother. He grew up a thief, stealing to provide for the only family he had, eventually stealing from an associate of his to get enough money for his brother to be able to eat. That’s what the crown was for. They’d come back for him and taken his brother, demanding payment in exchange for him.

Shocked at himself, Jack excuses himself to go get some wood for the fire. That’s when her father finds her.

See, Joseph had just come from a neck of the woods where two other escaped convicts had popped up, catching sight of him with a very familiar looking crown. They pull a knife on him and demand it, cursing the name Jack Kelly as they did. And Joseph’s brilliant mind works fast. He offers them a deal. Their help in exchange for the crown and Jack Kelly and something that would make them rich beyond belief. His own stolen daughter.

And now he finds himself here, with a chance to just bring her home. And she refuses. But Joe tries to convince her that Jack couldn’t care less what happened to her as long as he got his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Joe leaves after Katherine takes the crown, telling him she’d give Jack the crown early to prove he’d still help her, after all they’d been through.

When Jack comes back, he’s followed back by a lone guard. Persistent as hell, David Jacobs, who puts a knife to his back tells him he’s under arrest. Jack almost surrenders but turns to fight the other man instead, tackling him to the ground and causing Katherine to have to break up their fight. She tells David that he can chase Jack all he wanted to after Jack took her to see the floating lights because they’d had a deal.

After a lot of arguing and insults, David (now called “Davey” by Jack) finally agrees, on the condition that they let him come along to keep an eye on Jack.

The set off for the kingdom, stopping to rest for a few hours before heading into the kingdom where Jack and Katherine explored a bit, hiding from guards and letting David into their odd sort of friendship. Katherine accidentally starts a dance party in the middle of the street and everyone immediately falls in love with her. She gets Jack to dance with her which is when Jack begins to realize he falling for her and that scares him.

Katherine discovers the story of the lost princess by a few locals, mainly a young boy with a crutch and a bum leg who recognizes Jack as the boy who steals for the kids in The Refuge, an orphanage in the old town. Jack gets embarrassed, but buys the kid a cupcake and send him on his way.

That night, after Jack and David talk for a second to each other, revealing the fact that they both have little brothers and their top priorities are to provide and look out for them, Jack takes Katherine out on the water to watch the lanterns take flight. Katherine takes a chance and returns the crown to him.

Jack turns it down and places the crown on the floor of the small canoe he got. He tells Katherine he hasn’t completed his end of the deal yet and he intended to. To keep her safe. That’s when Katherine tells him she doesn’t wanna go home. That’s when she tells him this is the most alive and free and content she’d ever felt and she would kiss him on impulse and get really nervous about it but he’d kiss her back immediately.

They’d finish watching all of the lanterns fade from view. And Jack would row them back to shore when he’d move to kiss Katherine again, only to catch a glimpse of the Delancey brothers lurking around the bend. He’d immediately get nervous and tell Katherine that there was something he had to do. He’d take the crown, remembering his promise to protect her, and tell her he’d be right back.

Jack tries to offer a truce. He tries to give the Delanceys the crown and go on his way. But they don’t accept. They tell Jack they heard he found something much more valuable. And before Jack can run back to warn Katherine, they knock him out with the back end of a sword. They take him and put it in a boat headed straight towards the castle with the crown and head towards Kath to take her instead of the crown.

Katherine runs but is ultimately “saved” by her father who takes out the Delanceys and tricks Kath into coming home with him.

Davey is waiting on another side of he river when he hears a bit of the commotion and catches sight of a boat headed towards the castle and Katherine going back into the woods with a stranger. After seeing Jack get hauled out of a boat by palace guards and immediately get arrested, David backtracks to the tavern where Jack seemed to have some friends to enlist some help.

Once back at the cottage, Katherine is sad and reserved as her father tries to cheer her up with her favorite desert. It wouldn’t work. And Katherine would come to the realization that she was the lost princess and try to confront her father and insist that she was leaving. But Joseph wouldn’t let her go. And Katherine would ask what her father did with Jack and he’d tell her that Jack was scheduled for a hanging for his crimes.

Jack would wake up to guards pulling him out of a cell. He’d ask where they were taking him and they wouldn’t speak. Jack would understand. He’d almost give up and just let them. But when he saw the Delanceys locked up in another cell, he’d get angry and he’d shove away from the guards and grab at Morris who would immediately get scared. Jack would demand that Morris tell him how they knew about Katherine’s powers and they’d tell him that some old man told them.

And Jack would figure it all out. The guards would grab him again and he’d struggle hard.

He’d beg them to just listen to him, but they wouldn’t. Eventually another guard would come in to take Jack to the noose. And they’d lead him outside only to pause right by the door, removing their helmet. And Jack would cry out in relief and hug the person who was none other than his baby brother, Ty Sullivan, known as Racetrack to most.

Race would hug him back so tight. He’d tell Jack he didn’t have time to explain but he was gonna get him out of there. And Jack would laugh and say he was supposed to be the one doing the protecting. But Race would just tell him to shut up and call for someone. Spot would rush around the corner, dressed as a guard, along with some others from the Tavern. They’d break him out and lead him to David who would get him a horse and tell him to get to Katherine. Jack would be shocked that David was the one who’d planned the rescue, but he’d take off, telling him he’d thank him later.

Once he makes it to he cottage he runs inside, crying out fo Katherine and telling her that she had to come back with him and that there was something she needed to know. That’s when he’d feel a knife pierce through his side.

When he falls he sees Katherine screaming for him, tied down to a chair and gagged. He knows he dying and he can’t move to get to her.

Joe tells them his story. That he was a founder of the kingdom they adored and was never made king. In fact, he was banished from the kingdom entirely after getting too “power hungry” as they called it. He reveals that his name is actually Joseph Pulitzer and that he’d kept himself alive for centuries with the power of a magic flower grown by the sun.

Jack has to watch as Joseph tries to drag her from the cottage, but she gets loose, telling him that if he lets her heal Jack that she’ll just go with him without a fight.

Jack begs her not to. He tells her to run but she won’t. She tries to heal him but he stops her, telling her he can’t let her do it. He’s lived his life. He dies in her arms, his last word being “Katherine” as he says her name for the first time. Joseph still tries to drag Katherine away even though she refuses to let go of Jack. Eventually, she gets so angry and she blasts him with her magic. Unsure of what she’d done, she backs up and watches her father turn to dust before her.

She realizes that she has taken the magic from him, back from all the years she’d given it to him. With a sudden strength she turns back to Jack and heals him, waking him up and rejoicing in the fact that she’s free.

Jack takes her back to the kingdom and tries to leave her at the castle, not wanting to show his face around the guards. But Katherine defends him and meets her parents with him for the first time.

The celebration lasts for an entire week. Jack is reunited with his brother, who Spot has warmed up to, and the orphanage that they grew up in his put in his own care and funded heavily by the king and Queen themselves.

And they all live happily ever after...

Wow. That was a lot. Any questions?

For more AU’s, click here

[mutantsrisingrpg]

Congratulations BECKY! You’ve been accepted as VENUS.

Becky’s back, back again. Becky’s back, tell a friend! Now that I got that out of the way, I can make this a serious acceptance note. I can honestly say there was not a moment while reading this app that I didn’t think your Hana was it. Hana is obsessed with power and the way you hit on that through her bio had me on the edge of my seat. You created this storm of a girl that I want to know more about even if I know the danger associated with her. Both of us are beyond excited to see the “human embodiment of pikachu with anger issues” on the dash!

Welcome to Mutants Rising! Please read the checklist and submit your account within 24 hours.

Out of Character Information:

NAME/ALIAS: Becky

PRONOUNS: she / her

AGE: 24

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY LEVEL: GMT ( but technically GMT +1 currently bc summer! ); online daily, particularly active atm because ya girl is working from home

In Character Information:

DESIRED ROLE: Venus / Hana Mercado

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female; she/her

DETAILS & ANALYSIS:

Even in a city like Miami, Hana is hard to miss in a crowd. Bubblegum bursts, her lazy chew concealing the switchblade sharp smirk that slides across her mouth a little too late for anyone to be able to avoid the trouble that comes from it. She thinks she’s wired up wrong, like a casino gambling machine full of bullets that just keeps dishing out violence while playing its disjointed electric-warped song of congratulations, bright lights flashing wildly.

To your left, a man walking his pet leopard down the sidewalk; to the right, Hana Mercado paralysing a man with the touch of a fingertip for wolf-whistling her. She fits in well here, Florida born and raised, helping the drug lords keep their territories and the mutants keep their identities and everyone and anyone in between keep what’s left of their slowly unravelling sanity. Despite the bustling sea of tourists that ebbs and flows with the good weather, it’s easy to feel lonely. Hana isn’t great when it comes to other people. Pushing them away is a lot less difficult than making them stay.

Everything is loud. Everything is bright. The electricity is near palpable as she splashes through the remnants of a thunderstorm, rainwater spraying over fresh white sneakers. She’s quiet when the sun sets, bleeding red across the sky, the colour of the popsicles she’d eat for dinner as a kid. It’s hard to fear the consequences of her actions when she’s as close to a young god as anyone’s ever going to get. Mutants? Deities? Same difference if you know how to play to the right narrative.

Fuck you has always been easier to spit than a genuinely spoken I love you and that’s the honest-to-fuck truth.

[ + ] driven / brave / resilient / passionate [ - ] arrogant / reckless / unpredictable / childish

BIO:

Money is power. And power is power. And electricity? The sort that decorates the country like a spiderweb, an interwoven network of wires, all humming, all singing to her, the siren’s call of greatness from above ground and beneath it? Power.

Hana is a vicious formation of blood and desire, with the scent of someone burning from the inside inhaled like a nicotine hit. Interrogation comes naturally to her; smiles that should be sweet on a face like hers turn sharp and deadly. She likes to hear them beg. To watch them shake. People spill their secrets to her whether they like it or not.

It’s been that way since she was nineteen years old, static dancing between her fingertips after getting too riled up in an argument with a neighbour’s son over stealing her family’s gas cylinder. An impromptu lightning strike had left the tarmac lining the trailer park sizzling, black and sticky like summertime ( and don’t worry, the Cheeto-dust-decorated-rude-mouthed-slacker-of-a-punk-ass-brat had survived – getting hit by lightning suddenly made him interesting, too, so if anything she’d been doing him a favour ).

A freak accident, they’d called it. Another one of those unexpected Florida storms. But she knew better than that. As had her mom, smoking a fresh pack of Camel Blues from the other side of the door’s insect screen, fresh foils in her hair, acrylic nails the colour of the algae in the neglected community pool down the street. Thinking back, maybe this all stemmed from swallowing too much of that fucking nuclear-waste-looking water when she’d dared to swim there as a kid, hot and sweaty as a storm breaks on the horizon.

But the point – the point is that, to her mom, having the human embodiment of Pikachu as a daughter was as good as winning a jackpot at one of her weekly bingo sessions. She tries to sell it. Power. The ability to pluck electricity from charged particles in the air makes her daughter useful. A living battery. Studies on mutants at University of Miami dish out hefty paychecks after the right terms and conditions have been signed ( note: if you die, that’s on you, don’t try to sue us ). Hana attempts to protest but even she can’t deny that the allure of getting rich sounds like a dream come true.

So she goes to college. Not in the usual sense, sure, but she gets to live on campus ( in a secure underground testing facility beneath the BioMed building ) and hang out with others ( mostly mutants ) her age. And it’s fine for a while until simple fitness tests and blood sampling turn more extreme. Some days are hazy, pumped full of drugs and hooked up to machines that she doesn’t know the name of, let alone the purpose, beeping their own idle hospital-like symphony. Other days are dark and quiet, plunged into sensory deprivation for the sake of whatever it is the boffins in their lab coats are trying to figure out.

She’ll get rich or die trying and, ironically, neither of those things happens.

When the anti-mutant-testing protestors storm the building, they free Hana from both the confinement and the contract. The money she was supposed to get at the end of all this vanishes, along with the pleased looking humans who pat themselves on the back for doing a good deed and disappear to go and celebrate. None of them ask her if this was what she wanted. None of them stop to think that maybe liberation was never an option for her.

Her mom’s gone too. A new trailer stands where Hana’s home once had. The monthly paychecks from the university never reached her bank account, instead wired directly to Mrs Mercado. She laughs until she cries, the air crackling overhead.

After all that, turning to a life of crime is far easier than it has any right to be. Angry and alone, she fucks a guy in a gang in the back of his drop-top and makes herself useful when it comes to getting money out of those who owe it. She runs from the cops. Has a gun pressed to her temple. Watches an illegal weed farm burn at the flick of a lighter. Nothing phases her because she doesn’t let it. Rules stop meaning anything when you realise just what having powers can get you. Making a living from getting spineless people to open up their mouths and offer the gold that is information makes her feel a little less like a failure. Interrogation has a nice ring to it, after all. And once she makes a name for herself, sought after by those who know that secrets are worth a decent stack of bills – well – who is she to turn a job down?

EXPANDED CONNECTIONS:

YVETTE. It’s more than just the sticky sweet sugar of sisterhood. Hana would fight tooth and nail for Yvette should she say the word; would go to war for her if needed. There are very few people in the world that she cares about more than herself, but her partner ( in crime, in the sport of bringing their enemies down, in a vodka-tasting kiss that she’s managed to take a little too far ) holds the throne to Hana’s adoration. If only Yvette would take another step further into chaos and embrace becoming the seductive sort of danger that people run from.

ANDREAS. He knows how to say the right things, she’ll give him that. Hana wants what is hers. And sure, she may not know what that is exactly but the whispers of power he offers are captivating. After so long of operating alone for anyone with enough money to afford her services, the concept of joining strengths is a tricky one to navigate. She keeps him waiting, keeps him on his toes, avoiding a crystal clear answer for the sake of keeping her cards close to her chest. Better to have multiple options on the table than settling for the first one that comes along.

DEREK. Oh, the joy of knowing she’s the shiny new model; a glossy picture-perfect upgrade; a brand new battery to keep Damien and his clowns energised. The temptation of coaxing out Derek’s anger to watch him slip up and fall further from grace is all too great. She’ll press a cherry red lipstick kiss to the dark shades of the sunglasses he will no doubt need down here in paradise. Her future is bright, can he say the same about his own?

DAMIEN ft. JACKSON. He sends his loyal hound. She can only assume that Jackson is missing a collar because he doesn’t like wearing it in public; his Tiffany heart-shaped dog tag would probably get too warm glinting in the Miami sunshine. Hana knows a mob boss pet when she sees one, sniffing her out amongst the cheap cocktails and plastic palms of a Tiki Bar on Ocean Drive. Who’s a good boy? It’s appealing, the carefully constructed dream Damien offers. Almost a little too good to be true given the circumstances. She knows his gang has chased others out, a fine show of strength and organisation, but how long will it last when he doesn’t even know this city?

EXTRA:

Inspo [ x ]   Pinterest board [ x ]

ANYTHING ELSE: ily both

[hazelnmae]

Lies Travel Faster: Chapter Two

Summary: Sophia Murphy’s life seems to be on the upswing when she takes a job with Birmingham’s notorious Shelby Company Ltd. But when she falls for her boss, CEO and ruthless gangster, Tommy Shelby, she finds herself wrapped up in a tangled web of danger and deceit. After all, lies travel faster than the truth.

Tags: Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character; Tommy/Assistant Trope (it’s a hill I’ll die on)

Warnings: angst; smut (in future chapters); violence; language; rape/non-con; death

CHAPTER 2 (read Chapter 1 here)

Each gunshot echoed through the warehouse landing squarely against Alfie’s right temple. He usually let the men on the floor handle the starlings, but their terrible aim was threatening to turn his headache into a full blown migraine if he didn’t step in.

“Oy,” he yelled emerging from his office. “Right, let me at them, then.” He snatched the revolver from the young man closest to him and forced back the hammer, without pulling his eyes away from the man’s frightened expression. Leaning on his cane to steady himself, Alfie took quick aim and hit one of the two birds with his first shot.

“That’s how that’s fucking done, then.” He handed the gun back to his startled employee and motioned for him to continue hunting the remaining bird.

Turning on his heel, he lumbered back toward his office, talking all the while. “What is it they say? If you want something done fuckin’ right, it’s best to do it yourself? That sounds about right, doesn’t it mate? BACK AT IT, THEN,” he called, as he slammed the door behind him.

Ollie awaited him in the office wearing a worried expression and, while this wasn’t a rare occurrence, it did catch Alfie off guard. He wasn’t in the mood for a lecture and felt certain that’s what his friend was about to unleash on him. Alfie felt his heart pulse in his temple and pinched his nose in another attempt to stave off the headache. “What is it then, mate? On with it.”

“A message for you, Alfie,” Ollie answered, holding the telegram card out toward his employer.

Alfie took it absentmindedly as he placed his glasses back on his nose. He stroked his beard and looked it over.

LET US DISCUSS YOUR EXPANDING BUSINESS – L. CHANGRETTA

Alfie’s eyes widened and his fingers moved from his beard to scratch at the patch of irritated skin on his cheek. He’d heard the Italians were in England–no doubt in pursuit of their vendetta toward the Shelby family–but he’d hoped to stay out of the conflict.

“Fucking hell, mate –”

It was all he could get out before the gunshots rang through the warehouse again, startling him this time as he jerked violently in response.

________

Sophie’s first few days on the job were ordinary enough. Polly came around daily to check on her, but Sophie was smart and tough and didn’t need much oversight. She had the diary reorganized by the end of her second day and had corrected all of Arthur’s bad math in the books by the end of her third. Though he’d never admit it, Tommy was quickly impressed by her. She’d turned out to be more than just a pretty face and the war-torn story that captured his attention and prompted him to hire her.

After a couple of weeks, Sophie had fully adjusted and it was as if she’d worked there for years. She even moved her expensive electric percolator to the office so she could have fresh, hot coffee instead of tea.

Tommy’s fascination continued to deepen and he found himself seeking her company, faking the need for someone to take dictation or to help him schedule various meetings.

But as he grew increasingly fond of Sophie he also grew increasingly worried about an attack from the Italians. While Alfie worried over the starlings in his warehouse, Tommy worried over the black hand in his desk. It’d been a month since he received it and he’d yet to tell anyone in the family, except for Polly. No news wasn’t always good news, despite how his aunt tried to convince him otherwise. He feared it only meant Changretta was watching them, mounting an indefensible attack. Polly convinced him to keep the rest of the family in the dark until they had confirmation the Italians were near. Tommy agreed, but only after posting triple the usual number of Peaky and Lee boys to protect his family.

Today, his new assistant provided a nice distraction from the stress troubling his mind.

They worked in tandem, Tommy signing falsified purchase forms while Sophie filed them away. He considered how she hadn’t batted an eye at the ‘less than legal’ side of his business, watching her confirm the signatures on each forged document without a second thought for it’s content. She’d seen the wickedness of war. Was that why she was unaffected by the wickedness of his business?

“Did you always know you’d do this? Build an empire?” Sophie’s question was a welcome interruption to his thoughts .  

Tommy chuckled. “No, I can’t say I did.”

“So what did you want to do with your life?”

He thought that over for a moment. It had been a long time since Tommy considered what he truly wanted. He’d been operating on auto-pilot for so long–making the moves he thought he should for the business, for the family. His family didn’t seem to understand that, but Tommy knew everything he did, he did for them.

“I don’t know. Something with horses,” he finally answered. He put down his pen and took up a cigarette, leaning back in his chair to enjoy it. “Do you ride, Ms. Murphy?”

This drew a small smile from her lips. “I grew up riding. Had a beautiful gray.” She re-shuffled he stack of papers. “Her name was Belle.” She continued to file the signed forms, not turning to address him directly as she talked.

“On the farm?” He asked, taking a long drag from his cigarette.

“Hmmm,” She hummed in reply, placing the next form in its place in the drawer.

He sat in the quiet that followed her response, the paper sliding along the file folders the only sound between them for several minutes.

“I grew up riding, too,” Tommy offered, feeling obliged to share more. “I’ve always been more comfortable around horses than people.”

Sophie had never met anyone who seemed more collected and comfortable around people than Tommy. In the month she’d worked for him, she’d seen him in many tense situations. Unexpected visits from men like Alfie Solomons, closed door meetings with Polly, coppers, politicians, foremen with long lists of demands for their workers, the list went on and on. And in every interaction, Tommy remained calm, stoic even, always completely controlled. He owned the room, regardless of who else was in it.

“You seem plenty comfortable with people to me,” she said. Finally finished with the signed documents, Sophie turned to face him for the first time since their conversation began and leaned against the heavy wooden filing cabinet.

“Do I?” He asked, extinguishing his cigarette and placing his hands on his knees. “Alright, come here,” he said, rising from his desk and stepping around the corner to where she stood.

Sophie did as she was told and closed the distance between them. He took her hand and placed it over his heart, sliding her fingers below his waistcoat so she could feel the warmth of his skin through the thin layers of cotton. The motion pulled her to him even more and it struck Sophie that this was the closest she’d ever stood to Tommy. She could smell his aftershave and could feel his warm breath as it hit the short, loose hairs around her face. She made note of how her eyes fell even with his lips. All this time she thought he was taller, but perhaps it was just his presence that was so commanding.

“Do you feel it?” His deep brummie snapping her back to reality.

She did. His heart. It was racing.

“Why is it beating so fast?” She asked with a furrowed brow.

“It always does when I feel intimidated or threatened,” he responded.

The tobacco on his breath filled her nose and left her head spinning. “But It’s just us here,” She said with a slight shake of her head.

She felt his hummed affirmation more than she heard it. “You must be intimidating,” he said.

She wasn’t entirely sure if he was serious, his expression, as usual, not betraying his thoughts. How on earth could this man, Thomas Shelby, be intimidated by her? He’d seen so much, done so much. How could she intimidate a man who’d killed numerous others, both in France and in Birmingham? How could she intimidate a man with such power?

Sophie found herself suddenly aware of her own heart rate and took a few deep breaths to steady it.

“Alright,” she said. “Now give me your hand.”

Tommy hesitated prompting a quick laugh from Sophie. “Come one now, I’ve humored you. It’s my turn.”

Leaving one hand on Tommy’s chest, she used the other to place his on her own heart. Her soft skin felt rich under his rough fingers, like a luxurious silk, and he fought the urge to let his hand explore further. He hadn’t noticed it before, but she had a pleasing scent. And while Tommy didn’t know enough about flowers to identify it, he knew it was distinctly floral and fresh. He breathed her in deeply.

He’d been with other women since losing Grace, but only out of necessity–either in business or in need of release. What he hadn’t experienced since losing Grace was the desire to learn a woman–to find what pleased her and revisit it again and again. He felt this desire building in him now, as he carefully read all the features of Sophie’s face.

Sophie watched as he ran his tongue along his lips and cleared her throat. “Right,” She said. “Now close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing.”

Tommy did as she instructed and felt her begin to tap her fingers on top of his hand mirroring her own slow, steady heart rate. Before he realized it, his own heartbeat had slowed and fallen into rhythm with Sophie’s.

“See, that’s not so bad,” She whispered with a smirk.

“How the fuck did you do that?” Tommy asked as his eyes sprung open.

Sophie just smiled and Tommy felt a familiar tug in his chest at the sight of it. Without thinking, he slowly moved his hand up her neck to cup her cheek, holding her eyes with his own. “Who are you Ms. Murphy?” he asked quietly.

She looked away from his scrutinizing stare. “Call me Sophie,” she replied.

His hand felt heavy against her face, but as much as she wanted to pull away, she couldn’t. Tommy broke the connection first.

“Gather your things, Sophie. I’ve somewhere to be and I can drop you at your flat on the way,” he said, dropping his hand. And just like that, it was as if the whole interaction had never happened. She just watched as he removed something from his desk, shook into his coat, and headed toward the office door.

He turned and held a hand out toward her, motioning for Sophie to join him.

“And call me Tommy.”

________

Even though the family had owned it for years now (and frequented long before), Tommy had never grown accustomed to the smell of The Garrison Pub. There was a time, when they were all still living in Small Heath, that they were the first to arrive and (Arthur at least) the last to leave. But their lives had changed dramatically over the last several years. Polly was comfortable in her posh neighborhood, Ada was making her way in London, Arthur and John had both moved their families to the countryside, even Tommy himself now lived at Arrow House–their nights at The Garrison seemed few and far between. That was before the arrival of Luca Changretta on Birmingham’s soil. Now, Tommy needed to convince his family to return to the muck and smoke of their roots, at least until he could feel confident they were safe.

As he entered the pub, Tommy took in the crowd. It was busy, which was good for business, but retained the same stale scent of spilled beer and sweat from the men who’d just walked off the line of a full day’s work. He quickly ducked into the snug, avoiding small talk with any of the patrons who may want to challenge, or kiss the ass of, the man who ran their streets.

His family was already waiting for him. Tommy could feel the tension between them as soon as he entered the small room. It had taken a while, but Michael, Polly and John eventually decided to put the incident of their arrests and damn near executions behind them. Michael, perhaps, was the only one who’d actually forgiven Tommy for turning them over, but he was grateful the others had, at least, moved on with business. Arthur was another story, likely being fed a hostile rhetoric from Linda, though Tommy couldn’t blame her. She was far brighter than some members of his family, and perhaps more manipulative too. He’d expect nothing less than her constantly in Arthur’s ear, pressuring him to leave his “corrupt brother and shady business dealings” and head for a new life elsewhere. Ada was hesitant to admit it, but she almost saw the necessity of what he’d done when Tommy turned on his entire family. He believed the ends justified the means and his own belief in that was almost enough to convince her as well.  

He’d never know exactly what they were saying when he entered the snug, but he would have placed a bet it wasn’t in his favor.

“Right then, let’s get on with it,” Arthur said, impatiently.

Tommy remained standing. “A month ago, I received this,” he said, tossing the black hand on the table between them all. “I received it because we killed someone, Vicente Changretta.”

He watched as each member of the family reacted to the card on the table. Each one sharing in the shock and fear that washed through the room. Only Polly remained unfazed.

“And now, I have it on good authority, his son Luca has come to take revenge,” Tommy continued. “Men from New York and Sicily here in Birmingham. These men will not leave our city until our whole family is dead. That’s how it works–an eye for an eye. It’s called vendetta.”

Tommy paused and looked around the room to ensure all eyes were on him before continuing. “This means, that despite the bad blood between us, until this business is settled, we stay together.”

Linda rolled her eyes.

“And we stay here,” Tommy added.

“We can defend our own homes, Tommy,” Arthur said.

But Tommy didn’t acknowledge him. “From Small Heath down the corridor of Stratford Road to Arrow House. We know every face and every man is a soldier in this army.”

“Tom,” John interrupted. “Arthur’s right, we should remain in our own homes. I’m not uprooting my family because some fucking Italians think they can play soldier.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Esme threw at her husband. “They’d likely come for us first, seeing how remote we are.“

“Right. And these men are professionals, they’re good at what they do, so we’re going to need more than we have. I’ve sent a message to Aberama Gold,” Tommy continued.

Johnny, who had remained quiet until now, pushed off the wall and took a step forward. “No,” he said.  “No, Tom. I’ll get you fifty Lee boys. Good men, Tom.”

“I don’t need good men, Johnny. For this, I need bad men.”

“His people are fuckin’ savages. You know?” Johnny continued. “Heathens, Tom. They don’t even let them in the fair, so they come and steal our horses. You know, stealing from their own, Tom.”

“So this the plan, Thomas? This is the plan?” Polly asked. “I supposed there’ll be a bullet with a name on it? Help from a bunch of savages?”

Tommy took a deep breath. Although his aunt knew about the black hand, he hadn’t told her his plans to retaliate.

“We’re going to go on the offensive, Polly,” He added. “I’ve spoken to Moss. He’s putting out word.” Linda scoffed, but Tommy just pressed on. "Eyes and ears so we can find ‘em.” Tommy placed his hands on the table and leaned closer to his family. “Yeah, the truth is, the police are busy with the revolution. Moss says they’re expecting strikes and riots when the weather gets warmer. The Bolsheviks are planning…”

“The Bolsheviks couldn’t plan a fucking picnic,” Ada interrupted, “He’s reading the wrong papers.”

“Ada! Real or not real, the coppers don’t give a fuck about us. All right?” His sister rolled her eyes, but he just continued, standing up straight again and crossing his hands in front of him. “Which means that here today, in this room, we have to agree to end this war between us…” Tommy paused, staring at the back wall across the room.

“So we can move on to a bigger one.”

__________________

Read Chapter 3

[blackleatherjacketz]

My Brother’s Keeper: Chapter 7

Negan x Reader

Summary: Your brother runs away from the Sanctuary and you pay the price. This Chapter: Negan gives you a dress and brings you to The Kingdom to help look for him.

Warnings: Citrus, Nipple Play, Danger, Fear, Negan’s Mouth, Lucille, Wonderment

Featuring: The Kingdom, Richard, Jerry, King Ezekiel and Shiva

Word Count: 2172

Read the rest of the story HERE!

The Kingdom was farther away than you’d expected; the bumpy car ride in Negan’s Charger lulling you to sleep as you rested your head against the sleek leather door. The previous night’s refusal had kept you awake as you did your best to keep your hands to yourself, burying yourself in medical books until the sun finally crept over the horizon. You were exhausted, welcoming this brief moment of rest as you let your eyelids fall to images of trees and abandoned buildings that sped past the car and into your dreams.

“Your brother is gonna lose his SHIT when he sees you in that!” Negan’s voice drew you from slumber, humming a tune as he glanced over at you from the driver’s seat. “I mean, goddamn, I shoulda put you in that thing a long time ago.”

“It’s only temporary, though, right?” You cut him off, pulling the fabric down to your knees.

Negan bit his lip and looked back at the road, sucking in the hot summer air through his teeth as he pondered your question. “Probably,” he smirked, exhaling slowly. “It’s just for show, baby, but if you like it so much I just might let you keep it,” he chuckled, slowing the car down to half speed as he approached a small ghost town.

“I don’t,” you reassured him. “This thing isn’t very functional.”

“Functional?” Negan rose his eyebrows, taking one hand off the wheel before tracing the hem of your collar. “Sure it is.” His fingers sent butterflies into your stomach as they slid underneath the fabric, tickling your skin and rubbing your nipple between his fingertips. “It’s all kinds of functional.” He kept his eyes on the road as he twisted and pulled, sending little bolts of lightning into your chest as your skin played victim to his grasp.

You leaned forward and rubbed your thighs together, providing friction for yourself as you leaned into him. Your heart skipped a beat as he pinched even harder, those bolts of lightning making your moisture more apparent in your short black dress. Maybe he’d put you out of your lustful misery and pull this car over, after all. If only you could just slide your hand over the top of his pants to get him hard...

He laughed and licked his lips, taking his hand out of your dress before slowing the car down to a complete stop. “Nice try baby, but you know the rules.” He winked at you and opened his car door, grasping Lucille by the handle. “We’re going to have a lot of fun with that later, but for now, it’s showtime!”

He walked you up to a group of people who looked like they were ready for the most intense laser tag game of their lives. If you had come across them under any other circumstances you would have greeted them with a smile and a wave, but today you were with Negan. Today you were in a dress. Today you were bait.

“Negan, we weren’t expecting you in person.” A middle-aged man straightened his posture at the sight of him, walking toward you with a machine gun clutched close to his chest. He spoke firmly and without trepidation, keeping his gun pointed at the ground as he got closer. He must be their leader.

“Richie Rich!” Negan bellowed, sauntering toward him. “Don’t get your panties in a twist just yet! Gavin’s still coming for your weekly offering, and I hope for your sake it’s up to par.” He patted the man’s arm. “He’s just a few minutes behind us, but that’s not why I’m here.” He leaned back so far you thought he might fall backward.

“What can we do for you, Negan?” The man’s icy blue irises expanded as he looked at your lover, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints as the grip on his weapon tightened.

“I’m glad you asked, Little Richard!” Negan stood up straight, pulling him in close. “I’m looking for some of my men. Men and women, to be exact, and Good Old Gregory over at Hilltop hasn’t seen them.” He took a breath and pointed at you. “Her brother took himself and two good workers away from the Sanctuary, and you guys are next on my list for where they might be hiding out.” He brought his lips to the man’s ear, his grin barely brushing its cartilage as he smiled into him. “Now, have you or anyone else in this group seen anyone new around these parts?”

Richard turned his head to face him, their lips almost touching. “No, I haven’t.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind escorting me and my little lady friend here through the Kingdom just to make sure, now would you?” He turned and winked at you as he clamped down hard on Richard’s shoulder.

“That’s up to the King.” His voice began to falter, the fear taking over his vocal cords as they vibrated in his throat.

“Well then, take us to the King.” ————————

Richard led you through rows of plentiful gardens, the air fresh with the aroma of lilacs as you passed by leaves of green and juicy fruits. Women and children sat outside freely, learning skills from painting to archery as smiles painted their young and jubilant faces. The Kingdom was made up of bricks and mortar just like the Sanctuary, but something here was drastically different. The air was clearer, the sun shone brighter, the colors more vibrant as you made your way through this Utopian community.

“The king’s not expecting you.” A large Samoan man cautioned, a medieval battle axe in his hands.

“I know, Ben and Jerry, that’s the whole point.” Negan smirked and tilted his head, sizing up the giant man who stood guard to the king’s residence. “It’s kind of a surprise!” He leaned back with his last word, glancing over at you before pointing toward the double doors. “Jerry’s not too bright,” he whispered to you.

“I heard that,” Jerry muttered, turning around and opening the doors. “Come on,” he sighed. Jerry motioned for you to follow him, the metal of his axe reflecting the warm sunlight before disappearing into the cool darkness of what you soon discovered to be a theater.

A rush of cool air hit you, the smell of moth balls and patchouli reaching your nostrils as a few stray hairs fanned away from your forehead. The doors shut loudly behind you, encasing the four of you in the pleasant scent as the very bricks smelled far more pleasant than those of the Sanctuary. Another scent hit you as you stepped down the slanted aisle of the auditorium, bypassing Negan’s cologne that usually took over your senses completely. Was it wet dog, or a barn smell, or….

A thunderous roar echoed against the walls of the theater, answering your unspoken question before you even had time to ask. A tiger. A tiger?! A tiger was in the room! What was a tiger doing in here?!

“Jerry! To what do I owe the pleasure?” A theatrical voice broke your concentration and brought your eyes forward, the bouquet of fragrances taking a backseat to the visual masterpiece in front of you.

Rows and rows of worn-down seats led you to a stage at the opposite end of the room, a medieval backdrop reminding you of your early days in community theater. Judging by the cityscape, it had to have been from an old production of Camelot, complete with a throne and pedestal for it to set on. The man occupying the throne lounged on it nonchalantly, his chestnut skin glowing in the stage light as his dreadlocks cascaded down his shoulders. He smiled unapologetically, his dimples and crow’s feet exuding genuine joy as he looked over at the wild animal at the end of his chain. He was beautiful, in every essence of the word.

“Zeke!” Negan bellowed, his voice drawing a defensive growl from the tiger as it paced in front of its owner.

“Negan of the Sanctuary.” The man’s tone changed from theatrical to worried, his posture straightening in his seat. “I thought we had an agreement inside the Kingdom walls.” He leaned forward and glanced over at you, taking note of the bruises on your neck and wrists as his kind eyes warmed you. Maybe you looked more like your brother than you gave yourself credit for. Maybe Alex was actually here, after all.

“What, you don’t want to bring me home to mom and dad? Let them know you’re in bed with a white guy who takes half your shit?” He paused and looked over at you, grinning wide before looking back up at the King. “I mean, I know we have kind of a... friends with benefits situation going on here, but I’d like to think we’ve always been honest with each other.”

The King sighed, his eyes all but rolling back in his head as Negan continued with his graphic analogy. “We have,” was all he said in return.

“Good, your majesty. See, three of my people ran off in the middle of the night, and Gregory over at Hilltop hasn’t seen hide nor tail of ‘em. Now, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would ya?”

You stepped forward without even realizing it, your feet carrying you toward the man whose next few words held your family’s fate along with them. What he said next would determine if your brother lived or died, if your relationship with Negan continued, and if your father and sister had to keep worrying back at the Sanctuary. Had he seen them? Was he hiding them? Did he know anything about them at all? You squinted to watch his face as he answered the most important question of your life.

“If my scouts found travelers, they would have brought them to me for review.” The King told your leader.

Dammit. You’d hoped Alex wouldn’t be here, but a part of you wanted to see his face again.

“I want to believe that, Zeke, I really do.” Negan stepped closer to the stage, gripping Lucille tightly on his shoulder as the tiger began to square up. “You’ve never lied to me, at least I THINK you haven’t, but if for some reason I think you are, well…” He placed his free hand on a walkie talkie you didn’t even know was there. “All I gotta do is give my men the word and we’ll be all up in your shit like white on rice, ransacking this place until we find them.” He paused and unlatched the device from his belt loop, pressing the button to speak. “Dwighty Boy, you in position?” The static scratched over his last word, disappearing as soon as it had appeared.

“Yeah, boss,” Dwight’s nasally voice came over the radio. “You good?”

Negan’s smile brightened the room like a blinding red light. “I’m good.” He paused. “For now.” He nodded as if his lieutenant could see him, keeping his eyes on the King as he lowered the handheld back onto his hip. “I got my best cook, seamstress and strategist out there just walking around as bait for the dead while we sit here and talk. I know you don’t want to change our relationship status, and that makes two of us, but if I…”

“I wish I could help you, Negan,” the King began.

Without letting him finish, Negan grabbed the handle of Lucille with both hands and smashed it down onto the lacquered wood of the stage. “Then help me!”

The tiger roared so loudly it echoed throughout the theater, putting a pressure on your eardrums you’d never felt before. It was deep and loud, shaking the lights above the King as it jiggled the very screws that held them together.

“Shiva!” The King yelled, standing up and pulling the chain back towards him. “Shiva,” he whispered, walking up to the tiger to pet its head.

“I was nice enough to come in here without the rest of my men to follow YOUR rules, now, I didn’t have to do that. The least you could do is work with me.” Negan followed up, stepping away from the jungle cat.

“Your actions are beyond generous, Negan the Red. Feel free to search the premises if it offers you peace of mind. Take what you need for sustenance, but I must ask you to be discrete.” He glanced over at you again. “We have great doctors if she needs medical attention.”

“She doesn’t need shit.” Negan stepped in front of you, blocking the King’s line of vision. “What she needs is her brother back, and I need my people back at the Sanctuary providing for me. If I’m not back before sunset, my people are gonna get real familiar with your people. Now I know you don’t want that to happen.”

“Of course not.” The King took a breath and pondered his options for a split second. “Richard and Jerry will be happy to show you around.”

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