#our neighbour’s entire length of fencing just came down

[monstersandmaw]

It’s going really well so far.

Guess who’s got BG3 downloading at long last…

[epizkage]

the first chapter of my good omens fic! its a uni au, the main ship is ineffable bureaucracy but there is also background ineffable husbands, hastur/ligur, and maybe future dagon/michael!  i’ll be uploading this to ao3 tomorrow, as well as uploading a page of sketches for each chapter both on here and on my art insta. thank you for reading, im grateful for any feedback at all!!  tagging as #ineffable neighbours on all platforms!! (here, ao3 and instagram!)

“Crowley, what the fuck?” Bee groaned, incredulous, as Crowley handed them another houseplant through the car window. They were sat in the passenger seat, knees near enough at their chest with how far forward the seat had been pushed, their lap and arms already full of plants which they may as well have been juggling in trying to make room for more. 

“I have to bring all of them, Bee, they’ll be lonely if I don’t.” Crowley answered sincerely, handing them another, which Bee shoved rather frustratedly into one of the cupholders by the gear stick. 

"Oh, don't worry about me-" Bee huffed sarcastically, taking the tray of mini cacti that Crowley handed them and sliding it onto the dashboard. "-I'll just be a fucking shelf, shall I? It's not like I wanted to say goodbye to our mothers or anything."

"Language, Bee!" Came their mum's joking voice, though from where Bee couldn't quite tell, their peripheral vision on both sides blocked by leaves and greenery.  

"Yeah, Bee, language." Crowley mimicked petulantly, having the gall to try and hand them one last plant through the window only to be stopped by a string of very colourful curse words. Bee managed, after a lot of growling and swearing and heightening claustrophobia, to transplant the innumerable pots into the vacant driver's seat, swinging the car door open with enough vigour to nearly hit Crowley as they made their escape.

The tiny battered car was stuffed to the brim, back seats folded down to make room for two lots of possessions, Crowley and Bee's lives packed up into boxes and stacked in the world's most audacious game of Tetris, scraping the roof and blocking the back window entirely; sure to make Crowley's already terrible driving even worse. 

"Arsehole." Bee scowled, stepping back from the car to join their parents on the pavement, all watching and doing nothing to help as Crowley attempted to strap a way-too-big suitcase to the roof.

"Don't call your brother an arsehole, dear." Their mama said jovially, nudging them in the side.

"He is a bit of one, though." Replied their mum - the other one - coming up to their other side. Bee smirked at the two of them, and busied themselves with rolling a cigarette. 

"Oi!" Crowley called, turning to throw them all a faux-offended pout, ignoring the suitcase for just long enough for it to start sliding off the roof. At the sight of him frantically trying to stop it from either hitting the ground or smashing one of the car windows, Bee choked on a laugh and dropped the filter they'd been holding between their lips, figuring it was karma for laughing as Mama rushed to Crowley's aid. 

"You could help, you know, dear sibling." Crowley yelled, way too loud for a quiet, late September morning, as he tightened the straps on the makeshift roof rack. The neighbours, inevitably, would talk amongst themselves - middle class businessmen asking "oh, aren't you glad that those bastard kids are finally going back to uni?" over a neat and orderly breakfast, wives responding "I never did understand them anyway, Karen mentioned Satanic witchcraft, but really I think they're just hippies." Maybe they'd even pop round with fake neighbourly intent, presenting the couple with a rehearsed spiel of "my Sophie left for uni again a few weeks ago, you don't appreciate the alone time until they come back!" and a horrid fake laugh when really all they were trying to do was nosey around and determine whether their neighbours were lesbians or just really good friends.

Really good friends, who shared a surname, raised children together, and held a garden party last year to renew their vows.

Bee ignored him and sparked up their cigarette. Both mothers shared a glance and rolled their eyes, and Crowley rounded the car to lean against it. 

"Is that everything?" 

Bee nodded through an exhale of smoke, and suddenly their parents had zoned in on them, Crowley being dragged into their huddle while Bee was made to extinguish their cigarette.

"Oh, we'll miss you, horrible children." Their mum laughed, pulling both Bee and Crowley into a tight hug and kissing them both, Bee on the crown of their head and Crowley on the cheek, before passing them off for Mama to do the same.

"We'll miss you both too." Crowley replied, his smile showing clearly all of the anxiety he was trying to keep hidden.

"Don't worry, kiddo-" Bee slapped him on the back as they spoke, a rare moment of genuine and open kindness flashing between them and making their mothers smile from ear to ear. "-Everyone's nice, you know that."

It was Crowley’s first year while Bee was going into their second, and Crowley was to move in with Bee and their friends that they’d met last year. Crowley had met them all before, too, even considering them friends of his own after spending a lot of time at Bee’s flat, though nothing could help keep the anxiety at bay. 

Truth be told, the poor kid looked like he might cry, and so with a sigh Bee decided to take control.

“Come on, we gotta go, I’ve got all the keys and I don’t want Hastur or Dagon tearing into me for making them wait.” 

Crowley looked understandably dejected, but nodded nonetheless, and with one last long family hug the two bundled into the car.

Bee got in first, bringing all of the plants back into their lap to make room for Crowley, who soon after slid into the driver’s seat, hands balled into fists on his thighs as he took a deep breath.

“It’ll be okay, kid.” Bee tried to be reassuring despite their voice sounding bored and their face being almost entirely blocked by plants, but Crowley smiled at them anyway.

“I know, it’ll just be weird to be so far away.”

Bee nodded with a hum, both of them waving goodbye to their mothers, before they set off for their new house-

-which was fifteen minutes away, in the city. ~

Crowley and Bee had managed to unpack the car and near enough move everything in before the first of their housemates even showed up, perfectly chaotic and exactly at the wrong time, as Crowley battled to fit the giant suitcase through the front door while Bee laid on the sofa and did nothing to help.

Her arrival was made known by three things: the sound of Britney Spears’ ‘Womanizer’ muffled through car windows and getting ominously closer until coming to a head as she pulled up, a crash as the aforementioned car hit the lamp post outside the house, and then a loud, blunt exclamation of “fuck.”

“Ah, Dagon’s here.” 

She ran out of the car, leaving the engine on, door open and music still blasting, and gave Crowley a hard clap on the shoulder as she pushed past him and threw herself into Bee’s lap, only to be promptly deposited onto the floor.

“Aren’t you guys buzzed?” She grinned, red hair messy and falling into her face, partially covered by a black baseball cap that said “women want me, fish fear me” on the front.

“I was until you got here.” Bee fired back playfully, snatching the hat from Dagon’s head and shoving it on their own. It was way too big and the peak fell down over their eyes every time they moved, and they readjusted the size, quite intent on wearing it for the rest of the night, as they got up to help Dagon unpack her car.

Dagon had brought with her far too much of what she didn’t need and far too little of what she did; half of her car being taken up by a giant fish tank (“I’m going back home tomorrow to get them, I hope they don’t miss me too much.”) while the tiny suitcase on her passenger seat apparently held all of her clothes for the year. The music, still Britney Spears, was only turned off once Dagon had unloaded the car completely (as Bee and Crowley had discovered, she had created a playlist of every single Britney Spears song on Spotify), by which point many of the neighbours had already given them some rather distasteful looks from behind their net curtains. 

With the playlist blaring again, now through a speaker upon Dagon’s insistence, the three of them had split up to investigate the house. The outside was irregular and dirty-white, made complete by a wooden door with chipped black paint and a half shiny, half rusted number six nailed to the wall. The inside was no better, old carpets and ragged papering complimenting holes in the plaster and rusty radiator pipes.

None of them had even bothered to look around the place before signing the contracts - an offer of cheap rent and ‘satisfactory’ facilities more than enough to sway them.

Bee had taken to the garden, itching for nicotine, and they extracted a cigarette from behind their ear, scattering loose tobacco through their mess of black hair and making no effort to even acknowledge it, let alone remove it.

The garden was small, narrow and void of greenery completely, except from a pitiful looking tree that looked more like a long twig that had been plunged into a patch of gravel than anything that had ever been remotely alive. The ground was plain concrete, mossy and damp and unappealing in every sense, resembling an alleyway more so than a garden. Bee thought it crunched nicely beneath their thick-soled boots as they walked, and that was enough for them.

They hopped up onto the shoddy brick wall that ran the length of the garden fence, almost barreling straight into the tree-that-once-was, and once they’d found their footing they paused to light their cigarette. 

Crowley would be sure to try and bring the thing back to life, of that they were certain. 

Eyeing the fence, Bee was sure that it would fall down before the year was up, what with the rot and knot-marks and holes between the panels; and they suppressed a laugh at the death-rattle it gave when they kicked it. They spared a glance over into their neighbour’s garden, and then their nosiness overcame them and they draped their arms over the fence entirely, wrinkling their nose a little at how nice next door seemed in comparison. 

It was a wide, open space and the tiles on the ground looked brand new and almost shone under the early afternoon sun. Bee didn’t feel in the least bit bad about dropping cigarette ash all over them. In the middle was a patch of neat green grass, in the far corner a russet-painted shed, and the entire back fence was painted with a sunset-inspired mural.

Inside the house Bee saw a lone girl, busy packing things away into the wall units in the kitchen. Bee found themselves very intrigued, her deep brown skin flawless and shining with a rich gold highlighter that caught the sun every time she moved, and she wore a loose, ruffled white shirt that flowed with her movements and made her look like an angel. 

For someone so seemingly put-together, she’d sure picked a rough neighbourhood to live in.

Bee stopped staring, then, and as they turned to duck down behind the fence to finish their cigarette they met eyes with Crowley, making his way out of the back door to join them.

“Dagon’s setting up her tank," He waved vaguely behind him as he spoke, up on his tiptoes to peer eagerly over the fence. 

"What's next door like?" 

"Nice." Bee replied genuinely with a nod, waiting for Crowley's hum of approval before continuing. "When's your boy moving in?" 

Crowley choked, and Bee snickered when his face flushed almost as red as his hair.

He had started dating a boy named Aziraphale, though Crowley would only ever call him Ezra, Zira, or Angel, over the summer, having met online and hit it off in a fresher's group chat for their university. 

"Weird name." Bee had commented, and then had immediately taken it back upon remembering that their legal name had very nearly been Beelzebub.

The two had met up a few times, and soon become an official item. Bee could still vividly remember the absolute joy on Crowley's face when he'd found out that, arguably through some sort of divine intervention, Zira would be living just next door when term time started.

Who else he was living with, however, Bee and Crowley hadn't the faintest. All Zira had said was that there were four of them, two second years and two first years, and all of them had met through family friends, university societies and extra curricular youth groups. Nerds.

"Uh, h-he-" Crowley cleared his throat, removing his sunglasses as if it'd help him think better, brown eyes so light they almost shone yellow darting this way and that but never meeting Bee's own. "-He should be here tomorrow, or the day after."

Bee smirked at him, quirking an eyebrow. 

"You'll have to introduce us.”

Crowley very quickly brushed it off with an awkward nod.

“What do you think the rest of ‘em will be like?”

Bee finished their cigarette and stubbed out the end on the wall, little ashy embers flying back at them as they flicked the filter in the general direction of the drain by the back door.

‘Get something to put your dock ends in-’ Bee reminded themselves as they followed Crowley back through to the living room. ‘-Asshole. Think of the planet.’

“Insufferable, probably.” Bee shrugged, leaning back against the sofa and crossing one leg over their knee, their foot beginning to twitch and shake out of habit. They decided not to mention the girl they’d seen in the kitchen, knowing full well that Crowley would mislay the information to Dagon, who in turn would mislay it to Hastur, over-exaggerated and not at all true stories of Bee and the mystery girl somehow being an item forming from nothing more than boredom and a need for drama.

“Yeah, probably.” Crowley’s reply was half-hearted, paying no real attention as he instead stared down at his phone.

“Zira likes them, though, so I’m sure they’re nice enough.”

Bee made no effort to reply, but if they had, it would’ve been cut off. First by a crash, followed immediately by the second customary exclamation of “fuck” of the day. 

It was beginning to feel like home already.

[pllsetskyonice]

so come a little closer

Otabek Altin/Yuri Plisetsky

1,848 words

Yuri only opens his bedroom window to get some fresh air in. He doesn't expect to find out that his hot neighbours are sitting shirtless in the garden next door, and he certainly doesn't expect to get invited over.

AO3 link

Seriously, fuck this weather.

It’s day two of a heatwave that’s come out of nowhere after weeks of nothing but grey skies and rain, temperatures soaring on the thermometer and each day dubbed ‘hottest day of the year so far’ on the weather forecast. Logically, Yuri knows he should be happy that it’s nice and sunny and that he doesn’t have to spend his life dressed in a hoodie with the heating on, but Yuri doesn’t deal particularly well with heat. He never has. He’s better than he used to be, for sure – when he was little he used to get absolutely beside himself when summer came around – but he still reaches for the factor fifty every time the weather forecast predicts temperatures above twenty degrees.

He gets up leisurely, has a shower, gets dressed, changes his bedsheets, opens the blinds. His bedroom is at the back of the house he shares with Mila and Georgi, and his window is practically the length of one entire wall. It’s not a great view, just of the backs of the houses that back onto theirs and the gardens of the houses either side, but the light is always great in his bedroom, so Yuri isn’t complaining.

He doesn’t particularly plan to leave the house today, but supposes he should at least to attempt to get some fresh air, so he opens the window. In doing so, he happens to glance across to the garden next door, and –

Oh.

Sitting on chairs soaking up the sun’s rare appearance, sipping from drinks and listening to music, are a couple of guys. Topless guys. Hot topless guys.

Perhaps this weather isn’t so bad after all.

Yuri’s aware he has neighbours, sure, but he’s barely seen them apart from if they’ve been leaving the house at the same time to go to uni or put the bins out. He’s never met them. And he certainly never knew that they were so attractive.

Hot or not, he probably shouldn’t be staring, so Yuri scoots away from the window and frantically texts Mila.

11:23 WE HAVE HOT NEIGHBOURS

11:23 WHY HAVE WE NEVER MET THEM

11:25 ohhh are you talking about jj and otabek?

11:25 if they’re the ones that live to the right of our house then yes

11:25 yeah that’s them

11:26 BITCH YOU KNOW THEM? WTF WHY HAVEN’T YOU INTRODUCED ME?

11:27 I barely know them, I met them once at a party through a mutual friend

11:27 you should go over!

11:28 absolutely not

11:28 that’s weird

11:29 so you’re just going to sit in your room and stare creepily out your window at them instead?

11:30 I’m not staring thank you very much

11:31 you sure?

11:31 …at the moment

11:32 knew it haha

11:32 seriously though, you should go over, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind

11:33 I’m not convinced

Yuri sighs and puts his phone down, moving back over to the window. They’re still there, and Yuri can hear the music they’re playing faintly through his open window. They’re still there with their dark hair styled with undercuts and their toned muscles and their abs, and – oh shit.

One of the guys is looking back him.

Every fibre of his being wants to run away from the window, leave the house, the city, the country, the world, but something makes him stay put. The guy exchanges a look with the other one and stands up, walking over to the fence that separates their two gardens.

“Hey!” he yells. “You busy?”

“No,” Yuri calls back. “Why?”

“You want to come over?”

Yuri doesn’t even hesitate. “Okay!”

“Great!” the guy yells. “Bring drinks, yeah?”

“Sure!” Yuri gets up and starts shoving things into a bag, namely his phone, the two half full bottles of flavoured vodka he’s got lying around and some lemonade. He quickly slips on some shoes, runs downstairs and out of the door. He walks down the drive and up next door’s, going down the side of the house to the gate that leads to the back garden. The gate is a wrought iron affair, so they see him coming, the guy who yelled at him across the fence wandering over to unlatch it for him.

“Hey,” Yuri says as he walks into their back garden. “Thanks for inviting me over.”

“No worries,” the guy says. “Shouldn’t be sitting inside on a beautiful day like this. I’m JJ, this is Otabek.”

The other guy – Otabek, Yuri mentally corrects – gets up from his chair to greet him. Now that he’s looking at them up close rather than through a decidedly grubby window, Otabek definitely is, at least in Yuri’s opinion, the hotter of the two. “Hey,” Otabek says. “It’s nice to meet you, um…”

“Yuri,” Yuri supplies. “It’s nice to meet you too.”

They look at each other for a few moments, Otabek’s dark eyes seeming like they’re intently searching for something in Yuri’s own. Behind them, JJ clears his throat rather pointedly. “Do I need to leave you two alone?” he asks. Otabek breaks from Yuri’s gaze, going over to sit back down on his chair again.

“No,” Otabek replies. “I think we’re good for now.”

For now. Yuri smirks at that, then remembers that he’s brought drinks over. He takes his bag off his shoulder and pulls out the bottles. “Where do you want…?”

JJ directs him to a cooler sitting in the shade by the back door. He gets Yuri a chair and they all sit down together, discussing what they’re studying, where they’re from, what their housemates are like. Their housemate Leo, Yuri discovers, has gone to the supermarket with his boyfriend Guang Hong to pick up barbecue supplies and more drinks. A few other people are coming over later, apparently, once they’re out of work or uni.

Yuri decides that he should probably put some sunscreen on to save his pale skin from getting burnt, so reaches for his bag and pulls out the bottle. He quickly squirts some out and starts rubbing it into his skin, trying to make sure he isn’t left with any smears of white left on his skin. Once he’s done, he puts the bottle away and sits back in his chair, but not before he notices that Otabek is looking at him a little oddly.

“What?” Yuri asks.

“You missed a bit,” Otabek replies. “Here – let me –” he reaches out and wipes away a smear of sunscreen that Yuri didn’t manage to get rubbed in on his face. “There you go.”

“Thanks,” Yuri mumbles, giving Otabek a shy smile. Otabek gives him a small smile in return and they stay just simply looking at each other for a while and Yuri is convinced that yes, there’s definitely something between them.

There’s the sound of the gate opening and voices coming around the side of the house, making Yuri break away from Otabek’s gaze. Two guys appear, evidently Leo and Guang Hong from the barbecue supplies they’re carrying. They share greetings with everyone and start setting up the barbecue, JJ wandering over to help out.

Otabek gets up and walks over to the table by the back door, where a laptop and a set of speakers are placed. He scrolls through the music library, queuing up a few more songs before taking his phone out of his pocket and throwing it in Yuri’s direction, which Yuri just manages to catch by the tips of his fingers. “Add some songs to the playlist,” he says. “Whatever you like.”

The phone is unlocked, so Yuri immediately starts scrolling through Otabek’s extensive music collection, adding a couple of songs here and there. It’s a vast library, songs and albums from all different genres and artists and time periods, everything from classics like Bohemian Rhapsody to obscure indie bands Yuri’s never heard of before.

“You like your music, then?” Yuri asks as he passes Otabek’s phone back.

“Yeah,” Otabek replies. “It’s what I’m doing my degree in and I DJ in my spare time.”

“You have a club night, that’s hardly just doing it in your spare time,” Leo says with a roll of his eyes. “Bet you’re gonna be famous one day.”

“You have a club night?” Yuri asks. When Otabek uttered the phrase ‘I DJ in my spare time’, Yuri had visions of him playing shitty student house parties pretending like he’s the next Hardwell or something, but no, Otabek is far away from the stereotype of the wannabe student DJ. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, I do,” Otabek says. “Thursdays at GOLDEN. You should come along, I’ll add you to the guestlist.”

At the same time Yuri says, “That’d be nice”, there’s a chorus of indignant shouts from over by the barbecue, all of them sounding rather unimpressed.

“What the fuck, Beka –”

“- number of times we’ve asked to be added to the guestlist –”

“- oh no, it’s fine, we’ll just carry on paying entry like plebs –”

“- just because you want to get in his –”

“Guys!” Otabek shouts. “Calm down, would you? I’ll try and get you added as well.”

JJ, Leo and Guang Hong go back to the barbecue and Yuri turns to Otabek with a suspicious look on his face. “Are you actually going to add them?”

“We’ll see,” Otabek shrugs. “They’re not special like you are.”

Yuri feels himself blush.

He blames it on the sun.

-

Later that evening, when the sun has gone down and all that’s left of the barbecue is a pile of ash, Yuri decides it’s probably time he made a move back to his own house. He starts to collect together his things, leaving behind the now empty bottles of vodka he brought over for them to put in their recycling. JJ has gone over to his girlfriend’s and Leo and Guang Hong are at the other end of the garden lying on a blanket looking at the stars or some other ridiculously sappy shit, so it’s just Otabek Yuri has to say goodbye to.

“You going home?” Otabek asks when he notices Yuri putting his things back into his backpack.

“Yeah,” Yuri replies. “I’ve had a really nice day, though.”

“Me too.” They stand in silence for a moment, neither of them wanting to say goodbye. “Can I get your number?”

Yuri quickly keys his number into Otabek’s phone, ringing himself so he’s got Otabek’s number too. “Guess I’ll see you around, then.” Yuri turns to go, starting to walk towards the gate, when –

“Wait.” Otabek grabs hold of his hand and Yuri turns back to face him. “You can’t go yet.”

Yuri doesn’t even get the chance to ask why because Otabek’s kissing him and this is everything Yuri has wanted all day and more. It’s a perfect first kiss, lasting just the right amount of time, Otabek running his fingers through Yuri’s long hair.

“I’ll text you,” Otabek murmurs when the kiss is over. “See you on Thursday, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Yuri says with a smile. “See you Thursday.”

next chapter >>

[johobi]

When You Least Expect It | 01

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader x Taehyung

Word count: 8.6k

Warnings: lil’ angsty 

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16732419/navigate

A/N: Okay this is my first attempt at a multi-part fic rather than a one-shot, I’ve never written anything this long and I’m so nervous!!! It’s gonna be quite the slow burn, so if you want some quick rump and pump, I’m afraid this one isn’t for you. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy!

Next: 02 | WYLEI Masterlist

You’re in love with your childhood friend, Taehyung. The problem is, you treasure your friendship with him far too much to ever risk losing it. Oh, and he’s quite the Casanova. At your wits’ end with feelings you can no longer hide as diligently as you once did, you ask him to set you up with someone, anyone, in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a heartbreaking conversation.

The day you first saw him would forever be etched into your mind. 

A nondescript, mid-May afternoon; a day heavy with the unmet expectations of those who'd been hopeful for a glimpse of spring sunshine. It had been raining, and you'd been occupying a deck-chair perched on the front doorstep to your house, precariously balanced between the safety of your shelter and the torrential downpour drenching everything outside it. Gameboy Color in hand, you rocked excitedly from side to side in your seat as you anticipated the successful capture of a Ponyta - you'd been after that damn Pokemon for so long. Horses were your thing, see.

And that's when you saw him. In the midst of that pivotal moment. Instead of witnessing the culmination of your capture, your attention had been snatched away by a loud, jubilant screech. Curious, then, because the disconcerting noise had originated from the direction of the house that had stood vacant for several months, your Gameboy fell your chair, forgotten. And your little legs had stretched as far as they could manage in order to glimpse the goings-on in next-door's garden. From your vantage point, you were able to see a sodden mess of dark brown hair bouncing about the perimeter. And, shortly after, the much taller figure of what you presumed to be the child's mother giving chase, exhorting for the boy to halt his troublesome frollicking.

"Taehyung-ah! Get inside, now! I've got enough to do without drying you off being added to the list!" she’d yelled, though the mirth in her voice was unmistakeable.

Ten years old and already rather the bold little thing - still relatively unfiltered - you'd cupped your hands to your mouth and shouted over the pelt of the rain. "Hey, kid! Listen to your mother! You'll catch a cold!"

They'd both paused, then, the boy standing on tip-toes to see over the fence and into your bemused eyes. The mother laughed, picking him up while he was distracted and hoisting him to her chest with some noticeable effort - afterall, this kid was younger than you, but certainly far out of his toddler years. "Why, hello!" she had greeted you warmly, stepping closer to the fence, rain momentarily forgotten. "Are you our new neighbour, young lady? It's nice to meet you. I'm Jihye, and this is my son, Taehyung."

You'd smiled and nodded, your arms linking demurely behind your back despite your brazen outburst. "Nice to meet you, too. I'm ____."

"___! How pretty. Taehyung, how lucky to have such a nice girl living next to us, hmm?" she prompted him when he didn’t say anything. Instead, he planted his thumb firmly into the recesses of his mouth. His large, wet eyes studied you openly, and you remember that it was then that you'd noticed the similarities between him and your favourite neighbourhood labrador. Jihye tapped his wrist, urging him to lower his hand. She tutted in reproach. "Taehyung-ah, how many times? You're too old to be doing that, now. ____ won't want to play with you if she sees you doing that."

"I'll play with you, Taehyung," you'd offered suddenly, and watched his eyes grow impossibly larger. "Do you like Pokemon?"

The brown-haired boy nodded emphatically, his eyes darting to the Gameboy Color lying abandoned in the seat of your deck-chair. You followed his gaze and grinned. "Do you have one? Do you want to trade?"

Again, he nodded. You tilted your head at his peculiar lack of verbal communication. As if sensing your intrigue, Jihye piped up. "I'm afraid he doesn't talk all that much. Not since... um, well," she stumbled over her words, subconsciously rubbing his back in a gesture of comfort. "Since his father passed."

"Oh," you said simply, having been neither an eloquent nor socially savvy ten-year-old. "Don't worry, Taehyung, you don't have to talk. I can do enough of that."

Your words drew a gappy, angular grin from him, and you'd noted the unusual but endearing shape of his mouth, then, and how infectious his happiness was. You reciprocated the expression, and that was all it had taken to cement the foundations of your friendship.

You were looking at it right now, that rectangle of a facial feature that he called a mouth, watching as it spilled forth a flurry of over-excited anecdotes, though you couldn't be sure as to the content of them, stood where you were. Arms crossed, a half-empty bottle of beer - which you didn't even like - nestled in the crook of your elbow, you observed him from the kitchen of his open-plan apartment as your mutual friends surrounded him, hanging onto his every word. You'd had to evacuate the situation when he'd started to regale them with the successes of his latest dating escapade. The fact that they were approaching date number three was big news, apparently, and it had been a wild ride getting there.

Honestly, it wasn't that you weren't interested in Taehyung or Taehyung's happiness, it was just that you sometimes had to put your own happiness first to continue being the supportive friend that he needed. Sometimes you just wanted a breather from the constant descriptions of the gorgeous women, their eagerness to jump into bed with him. Normally you would laugh and nod along, slap him on the shoulder and encourage him, counsel him, cancel on your dates to comfort him when it didn't go right. But today, you couldn't. You just couldn't. You felt too weak, today.

Today, on a nondescript, mid-May afternoon, you loved him more than you could handle.

“All okay, ____?” a quiet voice probed, muffled behind the refrigerator door as its owner rummaged for another drink.

Turning your head to acknowledge the sudden appearance of your friend, you nodded confirmation of your wellbeing even though he was blind to it. “Yeah, I’m good. Is he still going on about Tara?” you grimaced in good humour. Ever the convincing actor, you played the part of long-suffering best friend well. No-one had any inkling that you were in fact the perpetual understudy to his numerous leading ladies, forever rehearsing the lines but never seeing the spotlight. Your absence on the stage, you knew, was entirely your fault. Afterall, how was Taehyung to know if you never told him? He wasn’t some oblivious buffoon of an anime stereotype who missed the blatant advances of a constantly flushed, stuttering love interest. You’d never once made anything equivalent to a move on him. Yep, you hid those feelings well. And you would continue to hide them until you were certain that your lifelong friendship was worth risking for the sake of your own selfish desire to have more of him.

“’Fraid so,” Yoongi chuckled into the refrigerator, aha-ing when he finally found his desired beverage: A cider. Righting himself, he shot you a lop-sided smirk as he strolled to your side, hopping up onto the counter you were leaning against.

For all intents and purposes, it should have been him. Yoongi.

Taehyung’s brother.

You were the same age, had the same interests, compatible personalities and, dare you say it, the potential for some chemistry. And yet, here you were, sulking over your tepid, unappealing beer, swallowing down your feelings for the younger sibling with every bitter swill.

Maybe it would have been different if it had been Yoongi that you had met first that day. Or maybe not. Probably not. Afterall, the bond that you and Taehyung had cultivated wasn’t something that had sprung from a shared interest in Pokemon or any other childhood fad - no, that was just peripheral, some ultimately meaningless activity that brought you together but didn’t keep you there. What did that, was a genuine warmth for and innate understanding of each other that transcended words eventually. Even your parents had noticed how you could go hours without saying a word to each other – instead, some look, gesture or grunt was all the communication required to convey your intentions to each other. Of course, ultimately, Taehyung began to emerge from his shell as he grew older, and with that came his seldom-used words. Soon enough, your short, strange phase of non-verbalisation came to an end, but you continued to retain an intrinsic sense for each other. So, despite your best efforts to conceal the truth, God only knew why the fuck he hadn’t picked up on the fact that you’d been head over heels for him since you were 22. Yes, you were careful with your words, but sometimes doleful, lingering looks or hesitant touches escaped you before your brain had a chance to catch up with your traitorous body. He was intuitive, and he knew you inside out.

Christ, maybe he did know.

The thought made you shudder, and Yoongi wrapped an arm around you, startling you from your thoughts.

“Oh, shit,” you gasped, your beer nearly slipping from your fingers.

Yoongi laughed, rubbing the length of your arm, knocking your shoulders together. “I did call your name twice but you’re in your own world, I see,” his face grew grim. Being personable wasn’t his thing, you see, but he knew to employ it when he deemed it necessary. Apparently, that was now. “Are you sure you’re okay?”  

God, why couldn’t it have been him? He was kind - in his own, peculiar way - and undeniably funny. It didn’t hurt that he was rather handsome, and had a bit of a bite to him, just like you. Your most treasured and long-standing friendship would not be at risk, and nor would your feelings be at the mercy of a serial womanizer.

You let your head loll onto his shoulder and heaved a great sigh, contrary to your words. “Seriously, I’m fine. I’m just tired. Had a lot of overtime, lately.”

“____,” Yoongi tutted. “Please don’t work yourself to death. We’d all miss you and your cakes very much.”

You chuckled at that. “Huh. It’s the cakes really, isn’t it? Not me.”

“Well…” he trailed off, leaving the suggestion hanging in the air.

As you were about to round on him and give him an appropriately seething glare and rebuke, a familiar mop of soft, sun-kissed hair appeared before you, taunting your gaze downwards to those goddamn chocolate eyes you loved and hated so much. “Noona,” the word practically slid from between his lips like syrup, as low and velvety as it was. You felt your heartrate increase suitably in response. “Why are you hiding in the kitchen? We’re missing you over there.”

Because I fucking love you, you absolute--

“Sorry Tae, I had a long day at work and I’m opening tomorrow as well. I might go home, soon.”

The genuine disappointment and concern marring his perfectly proportioned features deflated your heart as quickly as it had swollen. “I get that. Hey,” suddenly he was cupping your jaw, and it was ridiculous how even that simple touch was like sticking your fingers into a live plug socket. “If there’s something other than work getting you down, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

And there he was, rolling a 19 on a perception check. Not quite a 20. Luckily for you, he didn’t appear to possess telepathic abilities. But, were you wearing an I’m desperately lovesick and I hate my life sign on your forehead, or something? The amount of people asking after your wellbeing tonight seemed to suggest so. You needed to retreat and repair your defenses, clearly.

You nodded minutely in the space that he allowed you, his fingers digging into your cheeks so that your lips puckered unflatteringly. “Of course,” you swatted his hand away, pinning him with a piercing stare as he grinned, apparently satisfied with your answer.

“I’ll let you off for now,” his eyes darted to Yoongi and the arm that he still braced you with. “Do you want me to sort this guy out? Is he bothering you, noona?”

“Only his appalling taste in alcohol.”

Yoongi retracted his arm as though stung. “What the fuck is wrong with cider?”

“Oh, nothing. Just that it reminds me of the days we’d buy a cheap 2ltr and share it outside the convenience store when we were but impoverished, thrill-seeking teens. Your taste hasn’t matured much,” you smirked, drawing your own bottle to your lips and taking a sip before remembering what was in it and grimacing.

“Hey, those were good days, why not prolong them? Also, you’re one to talk. That shit you’re drinking—“

“Can the two of you stop insulting the contents of my fridge?” Taehyung cut in, his eyes wide in mock outrage. “And why don’t I recall these inebriated evenings?”

“You were underage, duh. You weren’t invited,” Yoongi grinned gummily.

Taehyung looked smug. “Actually, I was,” he retorted, winking at you. You looked everywhere but at Yoongi. “But I was a good boy.”

The black-haired brother jabbed a finger into your arm to draw your attention. You whipped your head around, eyes wide and shining innocence. “I didn’t know you had encouraged such behaviour, ____. I’m disappointed in you. If I were a better brother and actually gave a shit, I might have even raised an eyebrow at you in admonishment.”

Taehyung folded his arms, narrowing his eyes at Yoongi. “Geez. Thanks, hyung.”

Yoongi shrugged. “I don’t abide by snitches.”

While the two bickered, you glanced down at your phone. 21:36. You heaved a weary sigh, drawing Taehyung’s eyes to you. Before he could open his mouth, you hopped down from the counter, struck once again by how tall he was when your feet were on the floor. “I gotta get going.”

An all-too familiar whine met your ears as you picked up your belongings and made your way to the door. Long fingers encircled your wrist, pulling you back, and you almost gave up then, almost collided willingly with his chest. Oh, to burrow your face into the warm sinew of him and further, further, until you reached his heart and could embed yourself there. Maybe then.

But you didn’t. You stood there, your arm outstretched behind you, but you couldn’t look at him right this moment. Because if he didn’t already know, he would, surely, the instant you turned around. It was harder to hide it when you were overtired, overworked, and more than over this, this fucking suffocating feeling that was slowly consuming you. It hit all the harder when you could forget for a few minutes, like just now, when it was just you, Tae and Yoongi, being friends, acting as friends do, temporarily dispelling the ache in your chest. And when it came back…

“Taehyung-ah,” you chided. “I’ve still got to tidy up and shower, meal prep for the coming week, you know I can’t stay—“

“Noona,” he uttered, and you immediately ceased your bad-tempered tirade. Taking a few moments to steel yourself, you turned to him, exhaling in defeat. Every time he addressed you it was like heeding a siren’s call. Impossible to resist. “I know that. I want a hug, though. You were gonna leave without giving me one!”

Your mind tried to go there, but you shut it down immediately.

Instead, a chuckle reverberated in your throat as you allowed him to draw you close, his arms crushing you to his torso. Hesitantly, you linked yours loosely around his waist, desperate to decrease your proximity to him. This closeness was unbearably dangerous for you. His scent, his all-encompassing heat, devouring you like a furnace, it was almost too much. It was heaven and hell, and he sure as fuck was Lucifer in this analogy, a beautiful, fallen angel tempting you to your doom.

But you pulled back just in time, before you offered up your battered soul for his consideration. “That’s your lot.”

Pointedly ignoring his resultant pout, you waved to Yoongi over Taehyung’s shoulder and yelled your goodbyes to your other friends. Hoseok, one of your long-time school friends and now, to his great amusement, your work boss, hopped up from his seat on the floor and tugged you into another breath-stealing hug, though this was for another reason entirely. “Christ, Hoseok, ease up! Unless you want to cover for me tomorrow when I call in with broken ribs?”

Immediately he released you and held you at arms’ length, patting your shoulders robotically. How the fuck were you going to explain all of the bruising you were almost certainly developing from your friends’ rough handling? Not that you had anyone to explain to. Your romantic life had been rather lacking since you had decided to embark on a monogamous relationship with that ever-eligible bachelor, unrequited love.

Hoseok clicked his fingers in front of your face, and you immediately swiped at his hand, the gesture annoyingly you immensely. “Don’t click your fingers, Hoseok, I’m not a dog.”

“Well, be a good girl and pay attention then, yeah?” he retorted, and you cracked a sardonic smile. “I said, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon. Bring some of those cupcakes with the strawberry icing in with you, please-“

“Oh my God, I knew it, it really is just the cakes, isn’t it?” you snickered at his confused expression. “Nevermind. Yeah, I’ll bring them in. See you tomorrow, okay?”

Hoseok nodded and you shouted your farewells one last time to the occupants of Taehyung’s flat, although Taehyung himself didn’t seem to notice, firmly embroiled in another of his stories as he was, hands waving animatedly before him. You smiled sadly as you closed the door behind you.

The drive home was fraught with repeated, unwanted reminiscence of how you had ended up at this point.

His first day at your shared school as a timid eight year old boy with a regrettable haircut and oversized uniform, had been a memorable one. It had only taken until lunchtime before the whispers of a ‘weird kid’ with a ‘stupid bowl cut’ were making their rounds around the cafeteria, and although you hadn’t even been told that he was starting that week, you immediately knew who they were slandering.

Big.

Mistake.

It took you a while to locate him, as you’d presumed that he would be eating his lunch. Alas, after a walk around the grounds, you eventually found him being cornered by a couple of boys a year lower than you. Although you were smaller than all of them, in elementary school, age equaled authority. And you were in your final year there. 

Oh, and you had a bit of a reputation.

“Hey!” you spat, and the boys span around, alarmed by the sudden intrusion. “Leave him alone, he’s done nothing to you.”

“He’s a weirdo,” one of the boys stated resolutely, as though that were all the explanation required to justify their bullying. “He couldn’t even read the book we’re studying out loud. I think he should be with the special kids.”

You gripped the straps of your bunny backpack tightly, yanking it up higher in annoyance. “Insult my brother again and I’ll start getting nasty.”

The taller of the boys scoffed. “Brother? He’s not your brother, you have different last names.”

Taehyung looked perplexed, still holding out the lunchbox you were certain he was being coerced into handing over before you had arrived. You narrowed your eyes. “Yes, he is. He’s my adopted brother, which means if you hurt him in any way, you’ll have to answer to me.”

You’d think two boys nearly twice the size of you would laugh in the face of such a seemingly unintimidating threat, but these kids knew about you, knew your aptitude for arm-wrestling and kicking the shins of those who dared to flip your skirt.

“Oh, r-right,” the older boy muttered, turning awkwardly back to Taehyung to bow his head in apology. “Sorry. You can keep your lunch.”

When they had scurried away, you hugged the scrawny boy to you and chided him gently. “Taehyung-ah, you need to learn to stick up for yourself. I won’t be here next year to protect you.”

He sniffled and nodded, and you worried for his future at the school. You’d been friends a few years now, and one thing had become clear to you in this time: You were his only friend. Living next door to a compatible companion had either made him complacent, or he genuinely had trouble connecting with people. You suspected it was the latter, but it wasn’t anything Taehyung ever did. Well, it might have been, but you preferred to believe it was the close-mindedness of the ‘normies’ – as you’d jointly coined them – that were unable to appreciate his uniqueness.

Still, from that day onward you escorted him dutifully to and from school, maintaining that you were indeed adopted siblings. The charade was easy to keep up considering Yoongi went to another across town, so there was no-one to undermine your ploy. And, due to that, the kids in his class gradually began to approach him under a pretense other than to heckle him. Awed that he could have such a ‘cool sister’, they initially made his acquaintance to buy into and under this umbrella of protection and infamy he could suddenly provide. Eventually, they began to greet the boy Taehyung in the mornings, and not the novelty. The mornings spent together became lunchtimes, and gradually invitations to birthday parties. Before the year was out, the entire class had become endeared to his charmingly oddball humour and slapstick comedy acts. Taehyung grew, too, and the mouse of a boy you had once known flourished into a confident, fast-talking entertainer that enraptured his audience with ease. He joined the drama club, the dance club, the art club. He was barely ever home after school, but you still had the weekends together. You beamed with pride when you said goodbye for the last time at the school gates with a pat of his head and a promise to see him at home.

“Noona,” he’d pouted, catching your wrist. “Promise you won’t move house?”

You chuckled. “I can’t promise that, Tae, but I promise to always be your friend, whatever happens.”

The boy frowned, finding your reassurance lacking. “But you’ll forget about me if you move away.”

“No, I won’t,” you insisted, clasping his hand between your own. “I would write to you every day. But you have lots of other friends, now, so you shouldn’t worry about being alone anymore.”

“They’re not you, noona. You’re different.”

Your heart swelled then, and it did now, recalling the memory.

“I promise I won’t forget you, Tae. I’ll see you at home, okay?”

He’d nodded as you dropped his hand, waving him off to some extracurricular activity or another.

Thankfully, by the time your little white lie that established his climb to the top of the school had been exposed, Taehyung’s friends had been eating out of the palm of his hand for some time and found the whole farce incredibly amusing, much to your relief. As convincing as the two of you had been, you couldn’t continually explain away Taehyung’s mother as his aunt when she showed up at the school for whatever reason, and if she found out you would both have been in trouble for spinning tales.

You kept your promise, of course. Weekdays were spent largely apart, save for the odd smile and wave when you passed each other on the road to your house, or a quick catch-up in the evening over the garden fence before dinner. The weekends, however, were yours alone, and nobody else was invited. Living on the outskirts of the city afforded the both of you the claim to an expanse of woodland on your back doorstep, and over the years you had both come to know it like the back of your hand. A decrepit birdwatching shelter became your makeshift den, and repeated visits that found you bringing unwanted furniture, toys and blankets transformed it into a cozy safe haven that you would routinely retreat to on your weekend escapades. Even into your teenage years, the two of you still occasionally went there after a stressful or emotional day, finding the gentle nostalgia of the place calming. Of course, those trips were usually made separately by that point. The creep of mold and mildew, the pervasive damp rotting the furnishings served as a harsh reminder of the present; of a friendship neglected.

Yes, despite the long, idyllic summer days of treehouse tomfoolery, pirate duels and games of make-believe, the fairytale friendship didn’t remain such.

There was no real reason, of course. There never is, when these things gradually deteriorate. People become busy, people meet other people, people forget to return calls. It was, perhaps, when you were in your final year of high school and Taehyung was just beginning his stint, that it became clear to you how far you had actually drifted.

By the age of 15, Taehyung had grown into a handsome boy – he had finally started insisting on getting his hair cut by a professional, and the rest of his body had caught up with the gangliness of his limbs. Of course, his social skills had also continued to strengthen since that last day of elementary school, when you left him teary and unsure at the school gates. And yet you were surprised to find him, on his first day, surrounded by a gaggle of students, most of which were female. You stood out of the way, just observing him, and you realised then that you didn’t know what he was like now, in this kind of setting; how easily he handled people. The absolute absence of shyness in the face of so many pretty girls stunned you in particular; Taehyung had never spoken about having a girlfriend, while you had had several boyfriends since the age of 12, as trivial as such connections were at that age.

You only caught glimpses of the friends he had brought home with him in the years that you weren’t at school together, but most of the time he had preferred to spend his evenings at other peoples’ houses, most likely due to the tension between him and his mother. They had developed increasingly clashing personalities and expectations of each other. You’d never pegged Jihye as being a very affectionate mother, and yet, despite that, she had begun to cling to him like a sailor to driftwood. Perhaps his gradual emergence from a childhood chrysalis of self-doubt and agitation had panicked her into realising how alone she really was, how much she had convinced herself that Taehyung would never become brave enough to fly the nest. She’d never clipped his wings, but had never encouraged him to spread them, either. Yoongi had been emotionally inaccessible since the death of their father, and barely said a word to her on the daily. You pitied Jihye. You knew she was not a bad woman, nor even a bad mother; she had been left alone, unexpectedly and prematurely, to raise two sons who tragically saw her as the lesser parent. On top of that, Jihye had to manage her own grief for a husband she had loved dearly. And now the son who’d once chased her apron strings in search of constant comfort was before you, seeking no such reassurance.

As you stood there watching the easy confidence, the steadfast smile, the flirtatious touches, your heart felt both full and empty. You could burst with pride at how far he had come, and yet it was with a melancholy that you had to accept that you were no longer the two inseparable tykes that you had been.

He no longer needed your protection.

He no longer needed you.

So, with a small sigh, you’d plastered on your brightest smile and walked down the corridor past him. And as if he could sense you walking by, he raised his head to look at you. You nodded in acknowledgement, but the small gesture contained so much more. Approval, encouragement, affection and farewell, and he understood it entirely. He nodded in reciprocation, and the girls hanging from his arms snapped their heads to see who had been worthy of his attention.

“Oh my God, Taehyung, you know her?” you heard their voices, shrill in disbelief, filter after you.

“She’s bad news. I heard she once came to school in stilettos and threw them at the teacher when they asked her to take them off.”

“Of course that’s not true,” Taehyung’s unmistakably deep voice – puberty was a hell of a ride for him – cut into their gossiping, but you were too far away to hear the rest of what he had to say.

And, no, you weren’t as bad as that, though the rumours about such mischief had stemmed from somewhere. Smoking, drinking and hanging around with the ‘bad boys’, many of which became eventual flings, yes. Throwing shoes at teachers? No. Minor violence was always affectionate, and merely a roughhousing of the boys during your many underage binge-drinking sessions. The boys primarily being Yoongi and Hoseok, with whom you had become fast friends when you started high school.

Although you’d spent time with Yoongi on occasion at home - usually while waiting for Taehyung for some reason or another - he was almost aggressively antisocial and preferred to work on his music rather than spend time in others’ company. He was very private about it, too. And his room was an absolute bombsite, so steering clear of him wasn’t even a conscious decision.

It had occurred to you several times how peculiar it was that, now you were forced to spend time together regularly at school, you began to hang out more with Taehyung’s brother than the boy himself. And willingly, once you’d pried the reclusive little clam open a bit. 

It turned out that his music was, actually, pretty damn good. You’d ended up begging him incessantly to show you the ins and outs of his production software. He must have admired your persistence - perhaps even been flattered by your constant attention and enthusiasm - because, somehow, you squirmed your way into his limited affections. And he tolerated you for long enough for your friendship to plant roots. 

Other than that, you were both into the same pastimes – drinking, partying, staying out all night – and you bounced cordial insults off of each other beautifully. Taehyung, on the other hand, had become something of a straight-A student, stayed firmly on the straight and narrow, and his group of peers reflected that. 

Sadly, that wasn’t you. 

It could have been, but once you hit your teens it was almost like you suddenly came alive, like you wanted to experience anything and everything, all at once, like the time you had wasn’t enough and every second was wasted when you weren’t wasted. The discovery of alcohol, recreational drugs and, above all, fucking – oh, God, fucking – signaled a gradual spiral into a barely controlled era of hedonism. You kept your grades up – just – and that was enough for your parents. They’d only ever regarded you with mild indifference, so as long as a police car didn’t pull up to the front of their house one night and disturb their very busy, important lives, everything else was in the realms of acceptability.

And, no, you never fucked Yoongi or Hoseok. They’d become your best friends, and even your mess of a life had some boundaries. Some excluding the odd drunken grope and sloppy makeout session, but what else would happen when a group of horny teenagers with alcohol flooding their veins and minds decided to have a full contact wrestling match in the parking lot of a McDonalds at 4am in the rain?

Returning to the present, you snickered to yourself as you recalled the desperate, hormone-fuelled fumbling with Yoongi. Luckily, the two of you were rather laid-back about that kind of thing, and neither of you ever needed to have The Conversation about what happened last night’. You weren’t sure if anything could ever make your friendship awkward. Yoongi approached everything with mirth, for good and for bad.

Twisting the key in the lock, you let yourself into your modest 1-bedroom apartment, your coat and bag already lost to the floor by the front door.

Fuck meal prep, you thought to yourself, yawning. You left a trail of clothes in your wake as you made for the shower and turned it on. And fuck cleaning, I’ll do it all tomorrow.

Your reflection peered back at you in irritation, and you noted, then, the depth of the darkness ringing your eyes. Jesus, I look like shit. No wonder everyone thinks I’ve been given 6 months to live.

Your phone pinged distantly and you groaned, dragging yourself back into the darkness of your living room as you grasped around blindly for your cast-off handbag. Feeling the familiar coolness of the object you sought, you dropped your bag once more and re-entered the bathroom, clicking your phone to life.

A message.

[22:12] Taehyung Night lovely, hope your dreams are sweet~

Your stomach lurched to your windpipe and wrapped right around it. Staring down the woman in the mirror again, you saw there, a stranger. This was not the same person who had been the protagonist of your prior recollections. This woman was weak, pathetic.

“How the fuck did I end up like this?” your voice echoed, unanswered, against the tiles.

But you knew. You knew the exact sequence of events that had led to this point.

You’d been looking forward to going to college. Not for the reason most people intend to go to college for, of course, but nonetheless your excitement was just as valid, in your opinion. Your grades had been less than stellar and so your choice of university was rather limited, but that didn’t discourage you. Afterall, student life was the same on any campus. The local university would do nicely, you thought.

You may as well have thrown a dart, blindfolded, at a list of courses for all the care you had for your chosen major. Still, nursing was a guaranteed job after graduation, and although you perceived yourself to be lacking any of the desired traits for the profession, you still attended that first week of introductory lectures with aplomb.

After that first week, not so much.

Gradually, the bare minimum.

The only real nursing you experienced was of post-party hangovers, and the only drugs you administered were the illegal kind, and only to yourself. Your clinical placement mentors had given up on you ever showing any real interest within a week of your starting there, and by the end of your three month term, couldn’t wait to write you the most damning evaluation possible.

Still, it didn’t bother you. You’d only gone there for one reason, and one reason only – to continue your self-destructive, exhilarating lifestyle.

Although neither Yoongi or Hoseok had decided to go to college, you hadn’t let the fear of the unknown stop you. Granted, you weren’t the best at socialising, but alcohol made everything so much easier, and luckily the girls you roomed with had been of the same mindset. It’d been odd having girlfriends again, as life had always found you surrounded by, and inadvertently hanging out with, guys. Still, it had been refreshing, and something that you'd been sorely lacking without you ever having even realised it. To this day, you kept in contact with a few of them for the occasional shopping trip or catch-up over coffee.

If you made it to more than one or two tutorials a week, that was a rare thing. Almost every night was spent shitfaced and grinding on some frat guy who you ended up bedding within thirty minutes of hitting the dancefloor. Most of them couldn’t believe a girl would give it up so easily, but in your eyes, you weren’t the prey. 

They were. 

You were insatiable.  

Of course, two years of incessant partying began to take its toll on you. You were no longer touching the drugs – you'd kindled some sense, at least – but the alcohol, the empty fucking, it all began to seem repetitive and unfulfilling, and a creeping sense of panic arose within you whenever you had a rare moment alone to think about it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back had been an email informing you that you had failed your second year, and that your only option would be to retake it or dropout altogether. Sat on the doorstep of your family home at some unsociable hour, you bawled into the darkness. Hopelessness, loneliness and overwhelming anxiety engulfed you, your fingernails digging into your upper arms as you cradled yourself, rocking in the absence of a mother’s arms.

That’s when you heard him.

“Noona?”

Your sobs halted immediately, your eyes widening when they finally met the origin of the voice.

Now tall enough to lean easily over the fence, Taehyung’s face, lit majestically by the light of his porch, held an expression of intense concern. “Noona, are you alright? Has something happened?”

You could do nothing but sit there in shock. Though your location would suggest otherwise, Taehyung had been the last person you’d expected to see. You knew his mother was away visiting relatives, and Yoongi had a gig DJ’ing in a nearby town. Taehyung, however, never seemed to visit home anymore, and you hadn’t seen him since the Christmas you’d first left for college. Seeing him now was almost too much for you in your already heightened state, the waves of regret and wasted time battering you as you examined his now mature, adult features. He looked healthy. Happy, before concern had twisted his beautiful features. In fact, he was practically glowing. 

What the fuck must you have looked like?

“Noona?” he urged, agitation entering his tone. He hopped the fence – how were his legs so damn long? – and jogged over, crouching to meet you at eye-level.

Feeling more than a little exposed and disgusted with yourself, you turned away, bringing your knees to your chest. Your streaming eyeliner smeared against your jeans, but he had already seen you at your most horrific, so it mattered little. Your reply was muffled by your thighs. “I-I’m fine, Taehyung. Seriously.”

You heard a snort. “Yeah, it really looks like it.”

Raising your head, nose appealingly snotty and sporting two blackened eyes, you frowned. “Look, I just had a bit of bad news, okay? It’s nothing I can’t handle. I’m just having a moment. You know, like a quarter-life-crisis, or something.”

Taehyung plopped himself onto the step next to you, and despite the fact you hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over a year, he slipped an arm around your shoulders, as familiar as anything. “Tell me what it is.”

“What’s the point?” you spat, suddenly irrationally angry with him. “You can’t do anything, and you’ll just fly back to your perfect life tomorrow without another thought about it.”

“Wow,” he chuckled lightly. “Ouch.”

Immediately, you felt remorseful. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Tae. That was uncalled for. Look, seriously, you shouldn’t talk to me at the moment, or I’ll say things like that. I’ll be fine in a few days.”

Instead of heeding your advice, he squeezed your shoulders, pulling you closer together. You stiffened a little when he rested his head on you, tufts of his feathery hair tickling your neck. “I’ll talk to you whenever I like. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, and I see you’re still overly touchy-feely,” your chest stuttered in a tell-tale laugh that you failed to suppress.

“I know you love it really, I’ve already got you laughing again,” you could hear the smile in his voice. “Now, tell me what’s got you in such a state.”

Sighing in surrender, your knees started bouncing as you considered how much to tell him. “Well… I failed my second year, and I need to decide what the fuck I’m going to do about it.”

Taehyung removed his arm to turn towards you, to better look at your face. He placed a hand on one of your knees to cease your skittish movements. “Noona, I’m sorry. I’m sure that’s devastating for you. But, honestly, and I’m not just saying this to calm you down: This really doesn’t mean anything.”

Meeting his gaze directly, you raised an eyebrow incredulously. “It doesn’t mean anything? Other than the fact that I wasted this past year, you mean.”

“Did you, though?” he pondered. “It was another year of your life. You won’t have the same year again. I’m sure you learnt or experienced new things, and if that’s the case, then it wasn’t a wasted year, was it?”

Your mind flashed briefly with the new experiences you had sought out that year. You wondered what Taehyung would think of you if he could see the sordid imagery replaying behind your eyes. “Tae, I don’t think you really know what I’ve been doing with my time. I certainly haven’t been acing my tests, as you can tell.”

The boy – no, man, now – rolled his eyes heavenward. “I’m not a naïve little child anymore, ____. I’ve heard stories from Yoongi. I know exactly what you’ve been up to.”

“Oh,” you stated simply, feeling your body sag in shame. “What a disappointment I am, huh?”

Fingers were suddenly clamping around your jaw and forcing you to look directly into his face. Taehyung’s brows were knitted in anger. “No, you’re not. Don’t ever say that. I’ve always looked up to you.”

Involuntarily, a snort left you. “Only until you got taller than me, kid.”

“Don’t fuck around, I’m being serious,” he scolded. “You’ve always been a source of strength to me, and I mean that.”

“I guess you didn’t need much strength this past year, then,” you muttered bitterly. “Thanks for keeping in touch, by the way.”

He dropped his hand, but raised his voice. “The same could be said for you, noona! It takes two people to communicate.”

You shook your head, acknowledging the truth of his words. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m directing my frustration at you. I appreciate that you’re trying to help.”

“Let’s play a game,” he announced suddenly, bewildering you.

“What? Now?”

“Yes. Now. To determine what it is you want from life.”

“Is there such a game?” you mused, but you shrugged and turned your body towards him, your knees knocking together.

“Not really, but maybe it’ll reveal something that you hadn’t thought about,” he smiled. “I’ll ask you some quick-fire questions and I want you to say the first thing that comes into your mind. Got it?”

“Oh, this game?” it was your turn to roll your eyes. “Isn’t this the game we used to play where you would try to get me to admit that I wanted to be your girlfriend, just to embarrass me?”

“Well, yeah,” Taehyung’s smile widened into a grin. “But I can also use it as a force for good. Shall we try?”

You sighed, but you were smiling also. “Sure, why not.”

His mouth turned down at the corners, eyes narrowing in acute concentration. “Cats or dogs?”

“Dogs,” you answered instantly, and he nodded in approval.

“Favourite ice cream flavour?”

“Mint chocolate chip.”

“Yoongi or Hoseok?”

“Yoo—Ho—oh, fuck off, Taehyung!”

He cackled like a drunken witch. “Okay, I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. English or maths?”

“English.”

“Art or music?”

“Music.”

“People or animals?”

“Animals.”

Taehyung cocked a brow. “Doyouwanttobeanurs—”

“No.”

Your hands flew to your mouth, agape as it was in shock.

“Ding-ding-ding!” he hollered, looking pleased with himself. “I think we’ve identified the problem successfully.”

“Okay, as dramatic as my reaction was, I honestly didn’t even go to college under the pretense that I was going to become the next Florence Nightingale. I know it’s not me,” you admitted, biting your lip anxiously. The fun of the game had been forgotten, and your future remained hanging precariously in the air.

Taehyung looked genuinely confused. “Why would you study something you’re not even interested in?”

“Uh, hello?” you pointed at yourself with both hands. “Party girl central?”

“Oh, right,” he smiled bashfully, rubbing the back of his head. For a moment, he looked like the adorable kid you used to remember. “Is there nothing you’d actually be interested in studying? I’m guessing this kind of lifestyle is getting old for you, otherwise you’d be snapping up that second chance and going straight back to it.”

He really was a perceptive guy. “I can’t say that you’re wrong, but honestly, I haven’t been interested in anything other than getting pissed and laid for the longest time. I don’t even know a world outside of it, anymore.”

“Maybe not yet,” he started slowly. “But you could do, eventually. I know this will sound scary as fuck, but think about it anyway. Maybe you should take a gap year, ‘find yourself’, all that cliché shit.”

“Ugh,” you grunted, lying back against the cold stone, your eyes taking in the view of the star-dotted canopy above you. “That does sound scary as fuck, but honestly the situation I’m in now is scary, too. And continuing on like I am is scary. Everything is fucking scary. I’m just worried,” you hesitated, then thought better than to continue the sentimental trajectory of your thoughts. Of course, Taehyung wouldn’t let it go.

“Worried about what?” he prompted, lying beside you. He’d always subconsciously mirrored your body language and gestures as children. You found it endearing that he did it now.

“I’m worried,” you started again, and decided to just fuck it, because he had already seen you as a pile of snot and salt water this evening. Might as well get raw. “That I have no meaning in my life. I’ve pushed things away, I’ve neglected things… people. You being one of them, Tae. If I drop out now, I will have absolutely no safety wheels to guide my pathetic life.”

“I’ll be your safety wheels,” he murmured, and you felt the expanse of a large, warm hand surround one of your own. “I promise, from now on, I’ll make an effort. I’ll text you, I’ll call you, I’ll visit you. I’d already been thinking about it recently, because I’ve really missed you, noona.”

Peculiarly, you felt your heart speed up at his words. “I thought about you, too,” you admitted. “I felt sad that we hadn’t connected in a long time.”

“Same. So, we should do something about it.”

A breath you had been unknowingly holding in, whooshed out in relief. “Wow, okay. So, if I do drop out, what then?”

“I’ll help you think about what it is you really want to do,” he squeezed your hand reassuringly. “And in the meantime, why not ask Hoseok for a job at the café? Seeing as he’s running the show. You know he’d have you in a heartbeat.”

You raised your eyebrows in surprise that you hadn’t even considered such a viable option. “That’s really not a bad idea, actually. I could barista it up until I’ve explored what my options are.”

You began to feel a whole lot lighter, then, like an immense weight had been lifted from your drooping shoulders. A spark long extinguished reignited within you, and for the first time since the appeal of one night stands and inebriation began to grow stale, you felt a twinge of excitement. “Oh my God, Tae, I think this could be it.”

“Really?” he propped himself up on an elbow, his eyes shining with happiness. “I was expecting you to immediately reject my ideas, but I’m really glad that you didn’t.”

“No, seriously, I can see a way through this now,” you chirped, beginning to well up with the elation such relief brought. Unable to help yourself, you flung your arms around his neck, dragging him down to you in an appreciative embrace. “Thank you so much, Tae. Fuck knows what I would have done had you not been here.”

Surprised by your vigor, Taehyung’s full weight fell onto you, but you didn’t mind, as delirious with happiness as you were. You felt him chuckle against your chest. “I’m glad I could be of service, noon—ouch, Jesus, you’re strong.”

Giving him one last squeeze for good measure, you released him. Taehyung hovered above you for a moment, his hands either side of your head, and you swear to God that time seemed to slow down. His lips were parted slightly, his breath coming quick from the effort of the hug, and holy hell if an overwhelming urge to kiss them hadn’t hit you like a tonne of bricks, right then. You were blindsided by this desire, a desire that had been strictly reserved for other men up until this moment.

Never him.

Never Taehyung.

And yet his tongue flicked out, then, the gesture playing in slow motion before your eyes, the muscle wetting his generous mouth with a sheen that sent a bolt of longing directly to your nether regions. If you tore your eyes away from such temptation, however, you would be met, instead, by the halo of light surrounding the crown of his head, illuminating and casting shadows over his defined, striking features. His eyes were where your inhibitions went to die, though, because they weren’t the soft chocolate pools of the neighbourhood labrador anymore. You were seeing them anew. They were sharp, narrowed towards you, and enticing in their depth. It felt like gravity was failing, and you were falling into them.

Then, time resumed.

“Noona?” Taehyung blinked. “You okay?”

A mere second had passed, and yet, in that small window you were sure you had reassessed everything about the boy you had once known, and everything about yourself. And then you’d realised.

You were fucked.

Phone in one hand, the other bracing the counter, you stared at the screen that had long since locked. The shower had coated the walls and mirror in condensation, obfuscating all.

It’d been three years since that moment.

Three. Years.

Your desire had gradually morphed into a realisation of love, which evolved again into a painful longing. How long would you have to go on like this before you found repose?

Not much longer.

No.

You were determined.

Swiping your phone awake, you hastily tapped a response to Taehyung.

[22:28] Can you meet me at the café tomorrow, at lunch?

A reply came more swiftly than you had anticipated.

[22:30] Taehyung Sure. Something on your mind?

Your fingers lingered over the letters you wanted to type, the words you wanted to form. Alas, that was your last resort. You had to try this, first.

[22:31] You know I’ve been down lately. I’d like to change that.

[22:32] Taehyung I’ll help in any way that I can, noona. I was just waiting for you to tell me.

Of course you were, you perfect piece of shit, you thought bitterly.

[22:32] You have a lot of guy friends. Set me up with someone?

His next text took a while to come through.

[22:35] Taehyung Noona, are you lonely?

Your heart broke a little seeing your pitiful circumstances put so plainly.

[22:36] Yep. It’s been a while since I dated anyone, and you know a lot of guys that aren’t in our mutual circle.

[22:36] So, can ya help a girl out?

[22:37] Taehyung ‘Course!! Leave it to me, I think I already have the perfect candidate.

[22:38] Awesome. Thanks, Tae. See you tomorrow?

[22:39] Taehyung Yep. Just you wait!!

-

Next: 02 | WYLEI Masterlist

[astrofireworks]

ASTRO WITCH COVEN AU (MJ)

introduction | rocky | eunwoo | moon bin | mj | jinjin

TW: a lot of mentions of blood & also kidnapping

Blood ritualist

Nobody knows for sure what happens in MJ’s ritual room because he’s claimed the top floor of their three-floor coven house

They just know not to go in the room to the right of the stairs if there’s a red ribbon on the door handle until MJ tumbles out of the room, exhausted and usually coated in a light layer of blood 

If you press your ear to the door handle you can hear vague chanting and sometimes a little humming if MJ’s taking a break

One time Sanha tried snooping and sat outside the door watching the crack at the bottom of the door for movement

he heard MJ’s chanting fade into silence and there was a flash of bright light

and then there was a knock on the wall somewhere behind him

oh riP NEVER AGAIN NEVER AGAIN

Sanha doesn’t even dare go up MJ’s stairs now poor baby

Gets results like 777% of the time because he’s really good at what he does, bless his heart

usually comes out of the ritual tired and covered in blood but beaming

cue a dismayed jinjin because he has to do the laundry & even though MJ wears a hooded black ankle-length robe that should technically protect his clothes underneath from stains

MJ manages to stain them anyway

Jinjin has to soak all of his clothes in vinegar every time

Rip Jinjin

But MJ just smiles in his general direction and Jinjin is lost to the world again so never mind

Tends not to talk about his family

Tends not to talk about his life pre-KNK at all actually

What little Astro knows of MJ pre-KNK is what small snippets they’ve gleaned from conversations with KNK or from carefully inferring from things MJ lets slip during small talk

And this much Astro knows:

Whatever came before KNK has made MJ terrified of the dark – he has to have at least a source of light next to him or a human touch grounding him

What Came Before has also made MJ a vegetarian for life

KNK, our token immortal vampires (sparkly or not depending on how much Heejun has had to drink), have been moving around the country with MJ pretending one person or another is his father, uncle, cousin or brother and basically brought our sunshine baby up

Despite being a blood ritualist, MJ never goes near live animals to get blood – he always always always goes to KNK for anything he needs

And more often than not, MJ only accepts requests for rituals that bring small things back to life or rituals that locate someone or something missing

And those rituals exhaust MJ like nothing else can because MJ invests everything he has into getting whatever it is back for his client

Jinjin knows more than the rest, actually

Because the things that hurt MJ before?

If the rest of Astro knew What Came Before, MJ’s sure they’d attempt to form a game plan to go after them

And MJ’s sure they’ll lose

I mean, Astro might be powerful in their own right but they’re firstly newly established and secondly no match for that part of the magical world

And Jinjin, while as full as the rest of Astro (if not more) with the burning desire to punch whatever it was that hurt him before into oblivion, is the only one mature enough to recognise tha

 Also, he’s the only human and the only one incapable of contacting What Came Before

Also he kind of melted MJ over time so really it wasn’t entirely MJ’s fault stupid Jinjin came in with his dumb attractive smile and his stupid handsome face and his cute ass dimples and bright eyes and soft caring hands

And this much Jinjin knows:

MJ was kidnapped at a very young age by another coven, one that practiced sacrificial rituals

He spent a very long month in the basement with about 10 other kids until a rival coven broke into their house and took all the ‘would-be sacrifices’ with them

And all the kids were relieved at first until they realised

They were about to be sold in an auction to other sacrificing covens

And long story very very very very short, MJ was lucky enough to be shuttled back and forth between different buyers for about a year without being ‘used’ before landing into KNK’s lap

Quite literally

One of the cars used by the selling coven crashed into a lamppost on the street a couple of houses down from KNK’s

And upon realising that both the driver and the handler were dead MJ clambered out of the van, bloodied and terrified, right into Youjin’s arms

So KNK cleaned him and the whole accident up and questioned him gently and tried to get him back to his parents but to no avail

And so they raised him

oh my god I never meant to make his backstory like this it just came out

I’m so sorry

But yes brought up by KNK

And so imagine five grown-ass men (with an average height of 185cm, I might add) standing dumbfounded around a kitchen table with a young son with big, watery eyes and a trembling bottom lip  

Because MJ doesn’t want to eat any of his vegetables

Jihun at a loss 

Inseong trying to sing MJ into opening his mouth

I mean, KNK knows that MJ refuses to touch meat of any kind and that he really loves eating rice but they really can’t figure out why MJ refuses to eat his vegetables

It’s because KNK

Really

Cannot

Cook

Ok but to be fair they haven’t really had to cook for the past sixty or so years

And also they eventually figured out that they shouldn’t trust Seungjun with preparing vegetables at all and that the only one in the whole house capable of cooking any sort of green thing without burning it into a crisp is Heejun

Also, Inseong being the closest to MJ and teaching MJ to sing and harmonise and just playing with him and being twin sunshines

Heejun tucking MJ in and strumming lazily on the guitar until MJ drifts off to sleep

Jihun putting a smol MJ on his shoulders and dancing around their newly-installed kitchen while preparing orders for clients

Seungjun being the ultimate softest with MJ, bringing him different charms to play around with

Youjin the only one vaguely serious about giving MJ a proper education and so MJ from a young age learns how to charm clients (beam very brightly at them) and take orders and label deliveries

This makes me so happy adjfhsjkdf but I’m sorry for what’s coming

Had the worst time a couple years later when he found out how KNK was getting their blood and locked himself in his room for about 2 days crying not so much in fear (because really who can be scared of KNK they’re just very tol idiots) than in distress

Inseong sitting outside his room crying and apologising and trying to do everything he could to calm MJ down

In the end it was Jihun who gently talked to MJ through the keyhole about a human family that he was friends with for generations and generations that was looking for an heir and was more than happy to take MJ

And that KNK would get out of his life forever if that was what MJ wanted and if MJ gave the signal KNK would vacate the house for as long as it took for MJ to move out so he wouldn’t have to see them

And another very long story short, MJ decided that he would just stay very far away from KNK’s blood-obtaining means and stay with the hyungs that he loved as family

Because (as MJ came to realise) as vampires there really wasn’t another source to obtain blood from and it ultimately wasn’t really their fault

Loves teasing KNK about their fangs

Once made Heejun cry with relief because he panicked thinking MJ touched his fangs but his fangs weren’t out at the time

Dresses up as a vampire every single Halloween even though he never leaves the house

Knocks on every single member’s door asking for candy though

And he knows they buy candy only for him so he gets them all

Youjin has to make sure he brushes his teeth every time

Youjin: “or you’re going to get fangs and where will we be?”

Seungjun, lazing on the sofa, playing a game on his phone: “you can’t get fangs from eating too much candy”

Youjin: “shUT UP SEUNGJUN I’M TRYING TO TEACH HIM A LESSON HERE”

MJ, a lil shit: “I heard seungjun hyung, I can’t get fangs from eating too much candy!!!”

Youjin: “godDAMMIT SEUNGJUN I’M GOING TO KILL YOU”

Rip Seungjun

MJ, cackling and screeching to a distressed Jihun: “yoUJIN HYUNG SAID A BAD WORD!!!!!”

Eventually starts leaving the house on delivery rounds with Seungjun, but only in the car and in broad daylight

Seungjun complains about having to go out in the sun but Inseong just tells him to shut up, he’s in the car half the time anyway

Seungjun secretly liking having his personal ball of sunshine cuddled up on the car seat next to him and cracking dumb jokes

Sometimes has to stop the car because he’s laughing too hard at MJ’s dad jokes

All their clients cooing over the smiley human teen Seungjun brings around

Eventually one kindly client (affectionally coined the Nam-ster by MJ) offers to teach him some magic

And after a lot of discussion about safety and worried mothering by Youjin and Jihun he’s shuttled to Eric’s house every day for lessons

And so MJ picks up blood magic

And also picks up general human things that KNK has never thought to teach him (like cooking vegetables properly and dealing with other humans and how to pick fresh vegetables at the supermarket)

Anyways back to astro

Came in after everyone else (except Sanha)

Ok so Astro’s house is right next to KNK’s

and one day MJ peeks his head over the fence at their neighbours wondering who the hell moved in next door

and sees Jinjin watering the herb garden patch outside

and :---) well first sight and all that

insists on bringing brownies to their next door neighbours despite Heejun floundering a bit around the oven and burning the brownies slightly

Inseong quietly cheering his baby boy on

His son’s first crush!!!!

Not including that one really handsome client that MJ tripped over his own feet in front of that one time and refused to visit ever again !!!!!!

Bogum’s been stuck wondering what it was he did wrong that the smiley young son never visited again

poor dear

And so KNK clusters around the few windows that overlook the side of the yard that connects with Astro’s and spies on MJ ringing their doorbell

And they all watch as MJ proceeds to charm the pants off of Jinjin

And the rest is history

Inseong crying when MJ moves over even though MJ’s third floor bedroom window directly faces his own and they talk every night before MJ sleeps anyway

What a precious bean can you tell this man is my bias

MJ’s golden triangle (KNK’s coven mark) fading over time after being marked by Astro’s silver curve across his collarbones

Noisy noisy noisy

Oh my god Bin wants to kill him half the time MJ sings all the time and it always wakes Bin up from his post-afternoon-nap nap

If Jinjin wasn’t so attached to MJ and if KNK weren’t so threatening sometimes Bin would have probably charmed MJ’s pants to hang from their ceiling fan or something

I want to say he mothers the rest of Astro because he’s the oldest but really

We all know the truth

Plays very well with Sanha

Could spend all day goading the poor child into doing something stupid

Most of them had to do with bothering Rocky and Bin

Poor Sanha never asked for this

But ok also Sanha really enjoys it so he kind of does

Spends half the time hanging out with Jinjin in the kitchen or in his room

Bet you 10$ anytime you walk in they’re watching anime or cooking

He’s so painfully gone for Jinjin sometimes Eunwoo wants to whack their heads together and tell them to wake up

Sanha could already tell like 2 days after he moved in that something was up between MJ and Jinjin

Eunwoo: desperately crying for his two idiot friends to wake up and get together already

Me: desperately crying bc the colours I’ve matched to Astro in this AU doesn’t match their colours in baby & highly considering editing all the posts so that their colours match

i’m finally getting back to writing out my headcanons instead of keyboard smashing them out to Jiwon bless

[felicezhukov]

:: Dear Nicolas Jaar::

This is another edited entry of a previous post, I wrote it drunkenly, in despair, on Sunday night / Monday morning...

 I haven’t written for a long time, my life has been a series of misadventures, mishaps, missteps and misjudgements. It’s also been an awful lot of fun, now I’m lying in bed taking 2 rest days to recoup, fast and detox and attempt to get back to level ground again. Last night I was laid out on the sofa necking cider and cramming chocolate hob nobs into my mouth whilst Sunny in Philadelphia crackled on the monitor and my ex tapped his feet in his computer chair. It was the final scene in a spiral of consumption and intoxication: on fire with emotion and insatiability, bouncing from place to place in the darkness, with knobbly gnarled knees, a scratched face and a progression of shorts and dresses as the backdrop was engulfed by thick hot sunshine, beating down over this metropolis I call home.

Field Day is this week, you’ll be here soon, they’ve been prepping for over a month, as you enter the mile end part of Victoria Park you are greeted by gates and fences for as far as the eye can see. At first it was just the large cocoon like structure they were erecting by the road, which is where I assume you’ll be playing, but now its expansive, the 3 metre tall green fence encompasses the entire length of park that I walk on my way to work. There’s a large screen at the entrance, at first it confused me on Saturday because it was displaying information about Field Day, advising not to buy tickets from touts and that Saturday was sold out, they must have been testing it.

You must travel from sphere to sphere landing in these shrines to music, where so much love and dedication is put into you being there, these structures that take weeks to erect, which only shelter you for a short time, I hope you appreciate that. There has been so much advertising for Field Day, posters seem to grace every part of London that I travel through, by my studio in Clerkenwell, in Hackney Wick as I walk to work, on the walls of the places in East London I’ve been revelling in. When I walk past the posters specifically of you, I touch your face, not because I’m in love with you Nicolas Jaar, you are now a manifestation of freedom to me.

So then, Tuesday, my open studio’s, all around the studio an energy building from the temporary structures being erected in the adjacent car parks, sheds plonked lovingly in the front and a multimedia installation by shazed dawood, arching against the side of the building. It felt exciting, many of my neighbours in the studio expressed surprise at how there seemed to be an anticipation building, a lot of money had gone into Clerkenwell design week, the audience was tidy, well presented in light flowing fabrics and glossy shimmering eye makeup.

I’d been in the studio solidly for 3 days preparing the installation that is my life, gently folding christmas decorations over heaters and sprinkling flowers under chairs, pegging my clothes up overhead. By the evening it was time to let people inside, there had been promise of a set of art based philanthropists coming to the studio, but it never surfaced and although to me this was a matter of easy come easy go I think to others it might have engendered the evening with disappointment. As I surveyed my studio at 6pm I was satisfied with what lay before me, an odd sort of forest populated by these objects that have travelled with me from place to place for so many years, it was poignant and melancholic, a sight we rarely get to see, our lives in all their finery, as decoration, suddenly making the usefulness of everything you’ve ever possessed somehow obsolete.

People came, many friends I’d contacted last minute walked into my museum, took their shoes off and sat with me on the dirty duvet covers and sofa bed which has never served the purpose it was supposed to have had. What became clear and now is startlingly apparent is that I am selling remnants to friends, no collectors or third parties have expressed any interest in buying anything thus far, it’s people that have touched my life somehow who are walking through my doors, to pick up a little memento of our time together. This is heart warming and has given me a new perspective on how my art travels, what it means and to who. I sold more than I was expecting, particularly to one woman who recently sent me a message that spoke to my soul, about what my art meant to her, about how even after fucking 2 cucumbers you still have to do your washing and tidy up. We haven’t spent a lot of time together but she means alot to me.

And I think that’s a large part of what’s happening here, for the first time in months I have the space to reach out to all the people in my life that mean something to me, invite them to come see what I have accumulated and lived with, to purchase any of it if they desire but mostly to use this piece as a backdrop to re establish relationships.

Outside of this Tuesday was a naughty, silly sort of evening, a collection of me and my neighbours convened and regressed to a childlike state. Stealing a box of prosecco and gulping it down on a bench nearby, laughing and behaving with reckless abandon. I paid for the theft the following day, as karmically no bad deed goes unpunished, at least for me anyway, but I also finally got to know the creatives that reside by me a little better and start to build the foundations for friendships that will blossom as time passes.

I wonder if the bank holiday has been a factor in the ensuing debauchery that’s taken place and the hijinks I’ve been running through. It’s not an alien topic in these letters, I’ve addressed it previously, something about bank holiday weekends just always seems fertile and strange.

On Thursday, I sold a picture of my ex husband to a complete stranger, it was one of those images that's burned into my psyche, I remember the weekend I took it as if it’s just passed. He’s lying on a pulled out sofa bed, the covers still lapping over his legs, with the laptop I’m now typing on, perched on him and an ashtray precariously placed on top of it, in his hand is a cigarette, thick plumes of smoke ebbing out of it are illuminated by the light in the background coming from a partially opened window. His face is one I recognise as I’ve seen it so often, he’s rubbing sleep from his eyes and I just know he’s at that brittle stage where he needs to be left alone or he’ll be rude.

It was at my sister and ehr ex husbands house, we went down to see them and walked about the park, drank lots of lager and wine and sat in their studio apartment talking and jesting till the early hours, then he and I went on to Alton Towers and were both to delicate to enjoy any of the rides. So instead we spent the majority of the time huddled together in the rainy gardens in matching cagoules, we won a cuddly toy each, grey and goo, matching seals and stayed in a lovely b&b in the surrounding area, which is leafy and has a fairytale like quality.

I sold the photo for £3.

Spurred on by the emotional discharge of such a transaction I went to meet a friend and go out to Alibi, a fairly notorious club in Dalston, well known for being a bit of a dive bar and for accommodating the surrounding area’s punters once kick out time has occurred. Without fail Alibi has provided me with some unique and bizarre nights and it didn’t disappoint again, we rolled through a series of interested suitors, talking to a kind man who took the time to read the last entry I wrote you, indulging in whatever was on offer and enjoying the attention we received.

Once outside at the end of the night I found myself in the midst of a group of Frenchmen, who I hadn’t seen in the club, always the driving force for travelling onwards to an after party I encouraged them in their pursuit of the next venue and waved goodbye to my friend who disappeared into the night with the kind man. We ended up in the kitchen of a neat anthropologists house, divided into groups, I sat with a visiting financier and heckled his friends for not speaking to the host, I get bossy when I’m drunk. But they wanted to go to bed so then we ended up in Haggerston Park in crisp morning light, on the cycle tracks which I walk past daily. For a while I just ran around the track but gravity intercepted and I fell a few times, they came over to pick me up and, in a feral state I then veered into the bushes alone, allowing the inner beast to take over and guide me, for some reason this is not the first time this has happened in the same park, after a night at Alibi, I guess these whims are somehow guided and we end up repeating ourselves in the most unusual of ways.

Eventually I launched out of a bush, covered in blood from scratches and scrapes, at a lady who was taking her dog for a morning stroll. She was kind and atypical of the area we were in, having lived out her own odd creative life before becoming more settled, we spent a while together, concern rife in her face rather than horror, and then I charged my phone in a plumbing supplies shop and managed to get in touch with the frenchman I’d been with earlier, who had my bag.

He was an unusual and strangely innocent kind of man, in the throes of finding a house to move to as his 3 year relationship had ended due to his careless lifestyle. In his eyes was a gentle acceptance, a total lack of judgement or ego. We went back to the beautiful top floor flat he was staying in and spent several hours enraptured by each other, slept for a bit and had food in a local pub which was a favourite haunt of mine and my exes before we broke up. He looked at me like he was in love with me and I felt enveloped in this and safe, broken from kissing and behaving like a savage in the park it was healing to have this moment with him. Then he went on to a bar and I met my friends and hung out on her stoop listening to music and laughing for a few hours before getting back to my exes and dragging myself to bed.

I was broken on Saturday.

On Sunday I’d kept seeing some characters that exist on the perimeters of my job, I’d never seen them outside of work before, or inside of work for a while either, so seeing them twice in one day from a distance was unusual and leant an odd tint to the day. I was so broken, my face healing from kissing friction burns, my knees covered in deep scrapes, my eyes puffy and delicate, that I’d never of approached them, so instead just waved and wondered what they were upto. My friend came to visit at the end of the shift, to check out the bar I work in, which is going to be the location of a few arts based nights I want to hold and curate. We decided to go out again, the energy of the weekend still pulsing through us.

More random events and switching of locations ensued, meeting people on the canal, going to a warehouse party for a little while, wandering the streets with a horny mancunian boy and taking him to the boat under the bridge to drink my cider, wading through a downpour, powerful heavy rain which cut through the night and somehow perfectly enshrined the hot beauty of the day.

Then taking a taxi to meet my frenchman in Shoreditch at a house party in an expensive place across the road from the church. This frenchman clearly wandered in circles which were wealthier than mine I thought as we sat at another window looking out over the city whilst he despairingly mapped out the details of his finances, he earned 4x the amount I did a month, and why he had no money. Because he kept spending it on trips, parties and the excesses that go alongside such things. He said he wanted to give up but part of me was saddened by that thought, in all truth if he wants to spend his life from party to party dancing and singing songs I don’t know if I’d consider that a waste, he seemed otherwise content with his choices as far as I could tell. Anyway I got back to my exes around 5am on Monday morning, he shouted at me, I wrote you the original draft of this entry, ate crisps, I’ve eaten a lot of crisps this week, and passed out.

Then I crawled out of bed again, somehow managed to put makeup on and get out of the house and to work, fuelling myself on coca cola and alka seltzer. Last night is another story I won’t write about now.

I’m lying here now, fully accepting of the fact that I won’t be getting dressed or leaving the house, content with this and now I’ve written down the vast portion of what’s happened able to see the patterns and just why this week has not been a write off. I’ve been panicking, worried that I won’t sell all of my things, perhaps also spurred on by the fact that I haven’t produced anything this week, which is rare, essentially unheard of, for me. But being an artist is not just centred in the act of making, I remember watching a talk with your father that illustrated this point.

You have to live, observe, digest and distill what’s going on around you. I guess I’m getting better at these days of reflection but have not had a solid moment of living in quite some time, I’ve met so many people in the last few days, have messages and new contacts etched all over my phone and got to spend time with someone totally out of my normal realm who gave me a kind of unconscious care that healed and centred me, despite it being brief.

I’m happy Nicolas, I hope you are to.