#out longer than an hour. as it is‚ it's a sharply delivered character study that muses on ideas of class and identity and the nature of

[broiunno]

License to Steal - Act IV

License to Steal

ACT IV

Act I // Act II // Act III // Act IV

---

summary: Min Yoongi is your new protection detail upon your return to your father's side after being sent away during a bloody gang war. Now the dust has settled, you've been called back to your old controlled life, and leaving you an unwilling participant in your family's plans. You don't know what they are but you are no longer willing to be the obedient, protected daughter. You don't really care in the least of it makes Yoongi's new assignment hell on earth- So you'll carve your own life out back home on your own terms.

-rating: 18+

-pairing: min yoongi x reader

-word count: 5.8k

-warnings: swearing, gang activities includes drug mention and eventual drug use, the slowest of burns, organized crime, toxic af family dynamics, BEWARE IN THIS ACT: graphic family abuse (father initiated verbal and physical assault- does not fade to black), violence, blood, graphic descriptions of torture, and graphic sex scenes will be included in this work.

-authors note: @chelsea-chee leading the au as usual. I love her the appreciate her as my love, writer, and my beta. Her works are *chefs kiss* Thank you again beautiful <3 PLEASE NOTE: I AM REALLY NOT EXCITED TO POST THE NEXT FEW ACTS. They deal with heavy subject matter and I don't fade to black at any point so please note my works are for mature audiences, warnings are there for a reason and in bold. You are an adult if you are reading this work (per the warnings) and you are responsible for the content you consume. Thank you. ILY all and I love asks about the characters. And that's all I have to say about that...I'm sorry for the wait. I've had covid. I'm back on a better schedule now.

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

You fumbled with your hair as you tried to rip your fingers through the still damp strands to assemble it back into a semi-presentable pony tail as the door slid open to your father’s office. You really did wish that you had been able to go upstairs and shower. Or at least change your clothes from the workout gear you currently felt sticking to your skin from the cooling sweat. As a breeze drifted from the vent as the air kicked on, you shivered violently, shaking your head and shooting a hateful stare in Yoongi’s direction as you stepped into the office. Appearances were everything in your family. They were the first level of protection to ensure threats stayed at a minimum. A show of strength and cohesiveness discouraged any hair-brained ideas from a weaker or less organized opposition.

Your father raised a dark, thick brow, turning from the man was speaking quietly to, his expression unreadable as you inclined your head slightly in greeting. “You asked to see me?” you said quietly, keeping your eyes downcast. Since Yoongi had mentioned your father was summoning you, you knew it couldn’t be anything positive. This soon after your arrival? Nothing good would come of this. You had just grabbed onto the distraction of Yoongi until you both stood in the office, feeling stripped bare, awaiting whatever admonishment was about to be delivered.

“You couldn’t make it a full forty-eight hours without causing me a migraine,” your father said sharply and you kept your eyes trained on the floor, as you replayed yesterday in your mind.

“Father, I don’t know what you-”

“Y/N, you weren’t even back a day and you spent how much?” he said, aggravation lacing his tone. “I had to call in Kim to look at your accounts immediately. You’re a fucking hassle.�� He huffed and your eyes finally lifted to the stranger that stood next to your father, noting that he stepped away from your father and bowed quickly.

“Nice to meet you, miss. I’m Kim Namjoon. I’ve been handling your accounts and will continue to do so.” You felt your lips part in a soft ‘oh’ as you studied the broad planes of his face, full lips and intense eyes. You felt like he was picking you apart in that moment as you took your time to absorb his ash blond hair in a relaxed, but carefully crafted style. His skin tone was golden; a contrast to Yoongi’s milk-like skin. He glowed, and you couldn’t tell if it from his melanin or the fact that he was radiating intelligence.

“N-Nice to meet you too,” you stammered and managed to close your mouth as he pushed up the rolled sleeves of his white button-down shirt. You swallowed hard and tried to claw through the mental fog that had overcome you. With the teasing from both Jungkook and Yoongi, being presented with another god-like man was the last thing you needed. “I will admit I’m a little confused; my spending was never a problem when I was away? I mean, it’s not like I bought a car.”

Your father barked a laugh and threw up his hands. “You have no grasp on what I do to make this money that you just piss away Y/N! And you COULD have bought a car with the amount you spent yesterday! Like I said: a god damn burden!” he hissed and you flushed slightly, taking a step back unconsciously as you watched his neck flush. Yoongi hadn’t said a word, but you knew you could still sense his dark presence in the corner of the room, not looking at him to notice his eyes narrowed slightly as the scene unfolded.

“Y/N, I’ve had an idea. You’re a daughter. I can’t do much with you. Your brother who I could actually have used is dead. Your mother-” He stopped as he watched your eyes bulge and he shook his head. “I can’t have more children. I’d consider it disrespectful to her memory,” he mused, a hand running along his chin and you couldn’t help the scoff that escaped you, but your jaw snapped shut audibly as your teeth clacked together after the noise passed your lips.

Your father’s eyes flared to life in challenge and he glanced at Namjoon, lip curling. “Did you calculate her estimated cost of living and monthly expenditures? Do you have solid numbers?” he said shortly and Namjoon just nodded, eyes flicking between the family members silently. “And did you adjust for a profit at the margin we discussed?”

“Yes sir,” came the deep steady voice, Namjoon’s eyes traveling your figure, his gaze not heavy with lust or desire, but full of curiosity. “The monthly amount that you should request for that profit is in the proposal if you would like to review it.” He finished and cleared his throat. “I can return if you want me to look over the contract,” he said softly, clearing fishing for a dismissal and your father granted it, offering his hand and you felt your mouth tighten in confusion.

“What contract?”

Namjoon grabbed a briefcase and inclined his head to you stiffly in farewell before his long legs carried him out the doorway. Your father’s gaze didn’t leave your eyes as he spoke. “Yoongi, see him out.” Yoongi nodded and started after the tall man in silence, not sparing you a second glance on his way out.

“I asked you what contract?” you said softly, struggling to keep your voice even as your father stepped closer to you.

“Well, you went out. Spent a lot of money that you’ve done nothing to earn, and caught someone’s eye in the process. Someone worth a lot of money and who would be an asset to have closer to the family at this point in his career.” Your father clasped his hands behind his back as he continued to close the distance between you, each step he made, you felt your heart plummet further.

“Father… what exactly are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything, Y/N. I’m telling you. Someone’s made a bid for your hand, and it’s the only thing you’ll be good for at this point. The shopping sprees, your lifestyle. I can maintain them, but if someone else is willing to do so, and the marriage benefits me in my business, I’d be stupid not to pursue it. Do you think I’m stupid, Y/N?” he said, voice getting dangerously quiet as he reached out to tuck a piece of hair that had escaped the rapidly put-up ponytail behind your ear.

“You can’t sell me off like fucking cattle!-” you said, flinching away from his touch, and his large, calloused hand shot out to grab your chin tightly. He forced your face back towards his as you tried to jerk away, squeezing hard enough to make your eyes begin to water. Your heart thudded out a dangerous irregular rhythm as you breathed hard through your nose.

“I can’t? Y/N, you seem to be under the delusion that you are free from the responsibilities that come with being in this family. I suppose that may be my fault. I was too soft on you, pitied the losses I caused you to have. I always had your brother anyway; there was no harm in indulging you. But now, you’re the only one with my blood in your veins. You’re home to do a service for this family. Everyone else has given their lives in some way. Did you think you were special?” His words were measured and cold as he studied you, grip not loosening on your face. You would be bruised tomorrow as you felt the throb set in from the pressure he was applying.

“You may order me to do it, but I don’t have to go along with this,” you hissed, barely able to open your jaw, but clenching your teeth to get your words out, rage licking up and down your body. He had taken your entire life as a child, as an adolescent. Did he really think giving you a few years of freedom put you back in his debt so far that you owed him the rest of your life?!

No sooner than the words were out of your mouth you heard the sharp crack, and felt yourself stumbling backwards into the wall. You blinked quickly as you registered the pain in your head, immediately starting to pound as the metallic taste of blood filled your mouth. You barely had time to regain a semblance of your bearings before your father was upon you again, face chillingly blank as his ringed fingers gripped the base of your ponytail, ripping your head back at an awkward angle, a scream breaching your bloody lips. The noise was cut short by another blow, snapping your head to the side before he jerked your face back to center.

“Who do you think you are, you little bitch?” he said with a lilt to his tone as you choked out a sob, unable to keep it from escaping your lips. “You really thought you weren’t going to do shit to replace that money you spent?” When he finished speaking he gave your head a violent shake, as if to scramble your thoughts further. It was completely unnecessary, as your head felt as if it was splitting with the pain he had rocked through you with his blows and harsh grip. You felt the start of a purely hysterical giggle break through, spitting out the fresh rush of blood that ran in your mouth due to the cuts in your cheek from your teeth. You noticed a piece of the skin from inside your mouth flapping loosely that made you nauseated if you dwelled on it.

The laugh was probably the worst response you could have had.

You heard a soft hiss, and your father stepped into your space further, hands darting from your head to wrap themselves around your throat and squeezing. As your hands scrambled to scratch at his hand, his arm, his face, anything, you wished you were surprised at this. You wished you were hurt because you were shocked, but you weren’t. There was blood in the water and he was a shark. He built his life this way.

“You don’t have to go along with this…” he said softly, voice void of emotion, “but you also don’t have to keep living here either. How long will you make it without this family? You’d never make it out of the city.” He mused and continued to squeeze, your vision starting to spot as you tried to draw in any bit of air within the hold he had, the choking heaves under the weight of him making the blood that had pooled in your mouth from his blows spill over your chin grotesquely as it began to stream onto his hand. “So will you behave for once in your fucking life?”

You were hyper aware of the tears streaming down your face as you managed the smallest of nods. You supposed he was right; you had never imagined you would be used in the family in any way. Your entire life had been lonely, and even though you hated it, you had resigned yourself to it. His hands unwrapped themselves from your neck, letting you inhale a burning gasp of air as you slid down the wall, and onto the floor. You coughed and rocked forward onto all fours as the shaking of your body didn’t allow for much more than consciousness.

Your father pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the crimson of your blood off his hand before tossing it to you on the floor. You could barely recognize the quick but unhurried footsteps coming back down the hallway to the office before they stopped short.

“Yoongi, take her upstairs.”

==

The flush from hustling back to his boss’s office drained from Yoongi’s face as his eyes widened at your figure hunched forward onto your elbows on the floor. He watched you hack as your body tried to clear your airway. Yoongi stayed silent as he reached down, crouching next to you and attempting to offer you a hand so you could stand on your own, for which you were thankful. You felt the physical pain, but no emotions as your mind sluggishly screamed at you to just accept his hand and stand. You needed to walk out of here on your own. You knew you wouldn’t make it all the way to your room after the assault, but you didn’t need to. Just to the elevator.

You reached out your hand, shaking hard, as you clasped at his large palm and hoisted yourself up, letting him pull lightly as he stood with you, noting that he was still silent. You tried to ignore how your vision swam before you, willing your knees not to buckle. You couldn’t pinpoint if the unsteadiness was from the blows to your face, the lack of oxygen, or the tears that had thankfully stopped streaming down your face but still filled your eyes.

Yoongi seemed to read your mind, shifting his grip from your hand to your upper arm, nestling in your underarm and gently steered you to the door, but let you support most of your weight on the way out. You walked in silence as he didn’t rush you down the hallway, both of your eyes trained on the lift door as he typed in the code. As you waited for the door to open you felt your shaking legs betray you and start to bend. You glanced away from him, the movement of your eyes causing a piercing pain to shoot through your head. “Please,” was all you rasped wetly as you put more weight and started to sink, but the pressure holding you up immediately doubled, Yoongi’s support forcing you upright, even if it made your shoulder raise. It would be almost imperceptible from your father’s office if he was still looking in your direction, but you doubted he would. He had already received your submission; he didn’t need you for anything else.

Yoongi didn’t seem to want to take the chance that he was still watching, stepping into the elevator and continuing to only hold you in one place. His grip was still disguised as if he was walking you out in the same way he may escort an associate who was no longer welcome - in such a manner that would deter any further escalation. No one would be able to tell he was the only thing keeping you upright.

As the door slid shut to the elevator the facade crumbled, you lurching forward and gasping out a sob of pain, tilting your head down to let the blood that had been collecting in your mouth pour out onto the floor. You forgot how much mouth wounds bled. Yoongi was not bothered with the grotesque display as he swiftly adjusted his grip to wrap around your shoulders, his other arm sweeping at your feet as he lifted you with apparent ease. You shut your eyes as the tears began to flow once more, unable to restrain the moans and whimpers of pain that escaped between gasps as you cried. He still hadn’t said a word, even as you turned your face into his suit jacket, inhaling jaggedly as you tried to focus on the scent permeating from him, trying to place it through your snot-filled nose. The only thing you could recognize was the warm, woodsy scent of patchouli as you reached a shaking hand up to hold onto his jacket tightly. You knew he wouldn’t drop you, but it grounded you all the same.

You tried to slow your breathing, but failed as the elevator door opened and Yoongi strode quickly to your bedroom door, bending at the knees and somehow using his crook of his elbow and his body to turn the door knob, the only change in your positioning being that you tilted slightly as he spun it. He kicked the door with his foot gently as he stepped in, by-passing your bed as he carried you into your bathroom, carefully getting on his knees as he lowered you into your large bathtub as he placed you there. You continued to breath quickly, your gasps becoming sharper as your gentle shaking soon became uncontrollable. You released his jacket as he stood and you pulled your knees to your chest, shutting your eyes finally as you heard the tap briefly run before a cool rag brushed your chin, eyes flying open as you flinched away.

“Shh, I need to see your face. I have to get the blood off,” Yoongi whispered, and you finally looked at him, noting his face was still paler than normal. “Princess, I need you to take a slow, deep breath okay? Can you do that? Your lips are turning blue; you’re hyperventilating. You’re safe,” he murmured, brows pinching together in a pained expression you had never seen on his face as you tried to nod, attempting to take a long breath in but ended up gulping in air multiple times on the way, the blurring of your vision worsening as Yoongi grimaced, your breathing speeding up again, your shoulders shrugging with the effort to take in air. The last thing you heard was Yoongi’s tense exclamation of “Shit!” before you blacked out.

==

When you awoke, you were under the covers of your large bed. You sat up quickly before groaning from the ache in your head, then realizing that opening your mouth made you want to scream from pain. Between the squeeze on your jaw and the cuts inside your mouth, it was safe to say you would be saying very little for a while. You glanced towards the window, noting it was inky black outside.

“How long has he hit you?” came a cool voice from beside your bedside and you turned to face the source, seeing a figure standing beside the small table, casting a shadow with the aid of a lamp. Had he even left? Yoongi had shed his stained suit jacket, but still wore the white shirt and same suit pants. You only knew it was the same shirt due to the blood stain from where your mouth must have painted him. Instead of attempting to speak, you shrugged in an attempt to get his gaze off of you. It was piercing and unnerving. You felt as if this was the beginning of an interrogation, and you didn’t fail to notice the color had still not returned to his normally pale face. Now that your mind was a bit clearer you were able to recognize why it registered so deeply with you. He was the embodiment of white with fury. “How. Long?” he said again with such harshness you swallowed hard, ignoring the fire that licked down your throat as you did so.

“That’s a joke right? He’s always been like that. I just normally am better at avoiding it,” you forced out; your words were almost incoherent as you tried to move your jaw as little as possible as you spoke. That was bearable. Good. Not that you had expected it to be, but at least your jaw wasn’t broken; that would have been a pain in the ass. “What time is it?”

“It’s three am,” Yoongi hissed as his eyes glimmered in the near darkness, pushing off the wall and grabbing a glass of water off the table and sweeping a few pills into his hand. “Take these.” You took his offering and a small sip of the water before carefully throwing the pills to the back of your throat and washing them down, sighing softly. “They’re pain pills. They’ll help and you’ll be able to go back to sleep in a bit.”

You didn’t answer but pulled back the cover of your bed and slid out, noting that your bloody shirt had been changed but you still had on your sports bra and leggings. And your ponytail had been taken down, which was probably a good thing since your scalp was still aching from the hold your father had you in.

“Y/N… don’t.” Came Yoongi’s voice, still unemotional but a bit gentler than his earlier tone. You didn’t turn back to him but stopped your path to your vanity, obviously trying to look at your reflection in the mirror to assess the damage.

“Is it that bad?” you grumbled, turning to him and you watched him shrug.

“It’s not good. Don’t worry about it tonight. No bones are broken from what I can tell. I wiped you down the best I could. Just change once I leave and get back into bed.”

You let out a deep breath but finally stepped towards your closet instead to grab an oversized t-shirt. You could work the bra off under it and slip your pants off once you had it on. “Why did you even stay?” you said softly as you set to work, your muscles aching as you attempted to change modestly. You don’t know why it even mattered, but in this moment it did.

“I needed to know if he had done this before. I needed to know if this was the first time. When we were kids, you weren’t around all the time. Sometimes, I’d go months without seeing you. I didn’t know if this was a part of it,” he spat out, visibly tensing as he took a loud steadying breath.

You shrugged as you pulled off your leggings, successful in stripping your bra off under the shirt, and padded back to your bed. “There were a few reasons he kept me separated from everyone. It wasn’t all because he thought I was too precious to see any of this.” You climbed back into bed and tried to settle back into the plushness. Yoongi took a step closer to you, his mouth slightly open as he watched you try to get comfortable, seemingly unable to stop himself.

“Y/N…” he said softly and reached a hand towards you and you stiffened, eyes narrowing, and he took note, dropping his hand slowly.

“Yoongi, I never asked for your fucking pity.”

“I know, and it makes me want to help you even more.”

You blinked and tried to register what he was implying. “Help me?” you repeated, shaking your head as you felt the same hysterical laugh bubble up that had made your assault that much worse in your father’s office. “No one can help me!” You laughed, eyes widening as the smile twisted your features. “This is my life, this is what I was born into. This is what all those shiny things cost, Yoongi! I always knew it but I forgot.” You watched as the pained expression from earlier slid back over his features, and you raised your eyebrows in response. “I appreciate it, but unless you’re willing to put a bullet in my fucking head there’s no saving anything.”

“Who says it has to be your head, Princess?” he said gently and you swear you felt the world stop.

“Don’t say shit like that Min,” you hissed, baring your teeth and shaking your head. “Even if we don’t always get along, I don’t want you dead too.”

“Whatever you say Princess,” he said, a smile tugging at his lips as he cocked his head to the side. “Are you alright to sleep? You don’t feel like you’re going to vomit?” he asked seriously, watching as you shook your head.

“I don’t have a concussion,” you grumbled but as you watched him smirk and go to grab his jacket you felt your heart speed up. “Yoongi- w-wait.” He immediately stopped, as if he was anticipating your words. “Can you stay here the rest of the night? I know he won’t do anything but I-”

“Let me go change my clothes. Is that okay Princess?”

“Yeah… I just don’t want to be-”

“It’s fine Y/N. I’ll be right back.” You stayed sitting up, watching him as he dismissed your attempts at explanations and justification as he walked out.

You sighed, leaning against the leather headboard and let your breathing even out, even as your heart still raced. The pain began to slowly ebb as the medication took effect; what had you even taken? It had to be something strong as a comfortable fog began to cloud your thoughts.

You didn’t know why you felt the need to have him here. Did you even need to explain? He was technically your bodyguard. You had known each other most of your lives. You had just suffered through an assault; staying with you was reasonable. Even if the assailant wasn’t unknown, nor were the motives. At the end of the day, Yoongi’s presence made breathing a bit easier. His presence made you feel safe.

The door opened again and you sucked in a breath as Yoongi re-entered your bedroom, one hand carrying his gun and holster, the other a hanger with a clean pressed suit. “I’ll wake up before you,” was all he said in response to your surprised expression as he studied you. He mistook the shock on your face as being accredited to the suit. He was an idiot if he thought you cared about the fact he would dress here. You were too busy drinking in the sight of his lean figure in low-slung grey sweatpants. You tried to rip your gaze back to his face but you got caught on the black ribbed tank top and the swirling black tattoos covering his shoulder and chest before disappearing under the material.

“I didn’t know you had tattoos,” you choked out, feeling your face flush and mentally slapping yourself. He may look like sex on legs, but you looked like you just had the shit beat out of you. Which to be fair to yourself, you actually just had the shit beat out of you.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, a small smirk tilting his lip up but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. He draped his suit over the chair to your vanity and carried his gun with him towards the plush armchair in the corner of the room.

“The bed is big enough Min. I won’t touch you,” you said breathlessly, trying to force away the blush that was deepening across your face. He seemed to freeze and take a few steadying breaths.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea Princess.” His voice was controlled but quiet.

“Please Yoongi…��� you said just as quietly. “It’s just for tonight. I won’t feel safe if you’re all the way over there.”

It was definitely an over exaggeration. You hadn’t really expected him to even agree to stay in your room with you. The chair was the reasonable option. You knew you were pushing it.

“Princess, I-” He breathed, the airiness of his tone making your belly somersault and it gave you a tiny shiver.

“Yoongi, please. I need you next to me. Just tonight.” You shouldn’t be so worried about getting this man into bed with you, but now that he was here in front of you and it was so close to happening, you felt you might cry if he denied you.

You watched his back muscles rippled as he tensed and tried to relax. He turned wordlessly and walked to the opposite side of the bed, setting his holster down and climbing into the king-sized bed with you. “Go to sleep Princess.”

The drugs had to be prescriptions, not that you really expected a member of an organized crime family to just take a regular aspirin when they were in pain. “Is the oxy working yet? It should start soon if it hasn’t.” You hummed your assent as you squirmed down into the bed and tried to keep the smile from your face as you reached over and turned out the lamp. You took a deep breath and shut your eyes, savoring the heat that quickly built from having two bodies under the covers of your bed, ignoring the slightly annoyed sigh from the other side of the bed.

“Be quiet Min, I’m trying to rest,” you said softly and a soft dry chuckle cut through the silence as you let sleep take you.

==

Yoongi’s POV

Yoongi listened to the soft sounds of your breathing as they lengthened and deepened, the pain pills having done their job perfectly. If only he could have done his job in such a manner. He had been given a job: to keep you safe, and he took it seriously. Even if the one assigning his work was an abusive piece of shit. Yoongi let out a sigh, glancing over at your figure in the dark to make sure his huff hadn’t disturbed your slumber. It didn’t. You were still laying there, eyes closed and unaware, your face turned towards him to afford him a view of what exactly your father had done in his absence.

He felt his teeth grind against each other as even in the dark, he could make out the near black bruises covering your neck in the clear shape of hands, a bloom crossing your smooth cheek as well. Even your chin and jaw were dark from bruising; evidence that your father had held your face to force submission. It had worked. He opened his mouth and stretched his own jaw to try and stop himself from continuing to grind his molars down to nothing in rage. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to forget how you looked and how he felt when he entered the office, watching the blood drip onto the floor. How he wanted nothing more than to simply pull out his gun and lodge a bullet into your father’s knee before proceeding to swing the butt of his gun down onto him until he shattered every bone in the pig’s disgusting face.

Until he begged him to stop. Until he begged his daughter to tell Yoongi to stop.

The daydream made Yoongi smile a full gummy smile and chuckle for the first time today. He would stop when you told him to. If you told him to. Now that he knew your father had put his hands on you before this, he wondered if you would just let him continue until his mania at seeing what had been done to you was sated. He knew it wouldn’t be until he heard your father’s death rattle, knowing it had been at his own hands.

You stirred slightly to readjust in your sleep, drawing his attention back to the present as you moved closer to him in the bed and he sucked in a breath. Even beaten and bruised you affected him. Even carrying you in that elevator down the hall as you clutched onto him. He had been spiraling down into violence but as soon as you grabbed his jacket, he knew you wouldn’t withstand even him raising his voice to anyone without shattering. You were normally so fierce and seeing you broken made him want to tear apart this entire society you both lived in, even if it was all either of you had ever known.

It was then he had decided he would be what you were asking of him with your sobs and how you clutched onto him; he would be as gentle as could be and give you whatever you needed tonight. Tomorrow he would begin the undertaking of dismantling your father piece by fucking piece.

He had watched over you after you passed out; you had woken up briefly for him to get you to take pain medicine once before you actually were able to speak to him. Before you asked him to stay with you. He wanted to pretend it didn’t make his icy heart crack, the way you tried to explain and justify his presence. He would never ask you to in this kind of situation. When Yoongi returned to his room, he attempted to steel himself for a night of sitting in that uncomfortable chair, and a sleepless day tomorrow. He had gone more than twenty-four hours without sleep before.

But when your eyes, even if they had started to become glossy and dilated from the drugs, began to run over him, he had to try and think of every unsexy thing he could fathom. You had just been fucking violated and just with one look he felt the blood travel away from his brain and pool below his waist. Why did he think he would be able to wear sweatpants while staying with you? You destroyed every semblance of self control he had. He still hadn’t forgotten your teasing in the elevator prior to this shit show.

Then your soft drowsy voice had called out to him just as he had regained his mental fortitude and continued to the chair. You would be the fucking death of him and he didn’t think he would really mind. Now, as he laid here in bed with you trying to ignore the fact that you were shifting closer to him in your sleep, seeking his warmth, he closed his eyes. He had anticipated the pure fury of tonight keeping him awake, but instead it was the fact that he could feel your breath on his neck, that if he turned his head back to you he could still make out your absolutely gorgeous feminine form from under the blankets. The dip in your waist and the curve of your hips, sloping into your soft thigh. Yoongi’s eyes shot open as he let out a soft hiss as he felt his member stiffen in his sweats, one large hand reaching down to palm himself, and he willed his hard-on to disappear.

He dropped his eyes again, confident he would get his bulge to go down without waking you, and as he tended to it, a soft small hand reached across his middle, making his forehead furrow. He tried to take a steadying breath, and tried to not imagine that the events of last night weren’t the reason he was in your bed. That you had just invited him to bed because you wanted him there, not for security but because you wanted him as a man to share your bed and body. That he could roll over to face you, slip his own hand up that oversized shirt and rub soft circles into your skin before slipping his hand down in-between your thighs.

Yoongi felt his cock twitch and himself harden further, forcing another deep breath in and out as he circled back to try and think of grotesque things to make his longing subside. You at least had stopped wriggling in the bed in an attempt to get closer; he was thankful for that. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter and tried to calm his heart and regulate his breath to make it possible for him to drift off.

This was going to be a long night.

[creative-type]

Hey @oriigami, I was your Secret Santa for the @opsecretsanta2019. I hope you enjoy your gift, and have a Merry Christmas

Title: Deliverance  Rating: T Characters: Sabo, Koala Summary: It stood to reason that Sabo and Koala would get a cupcake for their first mission. It also stood to reason that nothing would go as planned. 

Or, the story of how Sabo got his first bounty. 

“Promise me you won’t go off script.”

“I told you already, I promise.”

Sabo fought with an ill-fitting workman’s cap, which despite his best efforts to pummel into submission did not want to sit nicely on his head. It was new and stiff, without any of the give his usual tophat had. He heard Koala give a nearly inaudible sigh. Standing on her tiptoes she swiped it out of his hands, giving him just enough time to bend down so she could force it on, pulling the bill so low it nearly covered his eyes.

And his scar.

“When did you get so damn tall?” she groused.

“I’m perfectly average, thank you very much,” Sabo said. “You’re just short.”

Koala punched his arm a little harder than was necessary, but he got her to smile. A real, honest-to-god smile, and not the strained bastardization she resorted to when she was nervous. “Seriously, Koala,” he said. “They gave us a cupcake of a mission.”

“We’re going in alone. There won’t be any backup this time around,” she pointed out.

Sabo scoffed, “Hack will be a snailphone call away, not that we’ll need him just to make a delivery. Seriously, Koala, we’ll be fine.”

“I will be fine,” Koala corrected, jabbing her finger into his chest. “It’s you they don’t trust not to run off towards the nearest explodables.”

“That was one time! How was I supposed to know that ship was transporting gunpowder?”

“I rest my case.”

She took a step back and looked Sabo with a critical eye. He considered making a quip about how cute she looked dressed up like a little peasant girl out running errands, but decided he would rather start his first solo mission without any conspicuous bruising.

It was a simple enough job, all things considered. The Revolution had gotten wind of a few nasty rumors regarding some upstart nobleman on the Isle of Doulos and sent an agent to infiltrate the household, who was now in need of some extra reconnaissance equipment that Koala and Sabo were to smuggle in to the estate.  

“I’m not going to screw this up,” Sabo promised for what felt like the dozenth time. “I don’t plan on having Hack babysit me forever so might as well show them we have what it takes, right?”

“Right.” Koala adjusted his collar before giving her final nod of approval. “Remember, we absolutely cannot blow Bunny Joe’s cover. So no hitting douchebags in the face.”

“I won’t,” Sabo promised for the thirteenth time. He paused. “I mean, unless they really deserve it.”

Sabo set sail to Doulos with a sore arm, but it was worth it to hear her laugh.

Xxx 

There had been some question on how the Revolution would smuggle supplies into the mansion of Lord Chandler, the recently turned nobleman who was promoted from the merchant class after performing some kind of service to the crown. Preliminary scouting missions reported an exceptionally thorough snailphone system that covered every inch of the nobleman’s vast estate. Stealth was technically possible, but it would be difficult to sneak around without arousing suspicion.

Further surveillance uncovered a surprisingly simple solution: Supplies from the nearby port city were often delivered by children the same age as Sabo and Koala. All they had to do was get in, drop off a few snails of their own, and get out again.

It wasn’t exciting, or brimming with danger and glory. The Revolution was still treating Sabo and Koala like children even though they’d been around longer than most of the adults, training and studying for the day they could officially join Dragon’s army.

“This is almost embarrassingly easy,” Sabo complained as he carefully loaded a cart left by other agents in the area. Beside him, Koala was readying the donkey that would lead them to their glorious future.

“Would you rather get a free pass?” Koala asked. “There’s already talk about how you get preferential treatment. Boss doesn’t give out one on one lessons to everybody, you know.”

“Talk? From who?” Sabo asked.

Koala gestured vaguely. “You know, people. Is this really the best time to be talking about this?”

“No. And I don’t want any free passes, either,” Sabo said. He took the reigns from Koala and helped boost her into the cart.

“I know that, the boss knows that. Everyone who matters knows that.” Koala’s expression softened, and she placed a calming hand on his forearm. Sabo forced himself to relax, not wanting her to feel the tension that had him all wound up and irritable.

“Yeah, well I’m going to prove it. Yee-freaking-haw.” And with a gentle snap of the reigns, they were off.  

It was a pleasant trip, the air of the spring island crisp and cool while the sun danced its way through a cloudy sky. Sabo and Koala picked their way through town and out into the countryside where Lord Chandler’s estate was nestled between rolling green hills, away from the polluted pall of the city and the dirty peasants who lived there. It was about an hour of slow, deliberate plodding on a bumpy and unpaved road, but time with Koala always seemed to fly twice as fast. Their most arduous task was trying to lead the stubborn donkey pulling their cart.

“I think he takes after you,” Koala teased.

“I’d like to see you do better.”

And so she did.

Their first roadblock came at the estate itself. Koala knew better than to lead them through the main entrance, following down a well-worn servant’s path farther back. The security guard manning the gate, a burly man who seemed to have more muscles than brains, looked down at his clipboard and frowned.

“I don’t have any deliveries scheduled for today.”

“We were only called for this morning,” Sabo said. “We probably didn’t make it on your list.”

He flashed his most winsome smile while Koala gave a small nod in agreement. The guardsman’s frown deepened, and he squinted harder at his clipboard as if it would spontaneously give him the answer he was looking for.

“Who ordered the delivery?” he asked after a long moment of thought.

Sabo shrugged. “Some guy named Joe, I guess? We were only told to bring the stuff over to the kitchens.”

He climbed to the back of the cart and showed the guard their wares: A dozen bags of flour, sugar, and other staples, plus a few rarer items imported just that day from a faraway island that they could pass off as the reason for the emergency delivery.

“I don’t know...” the guardsman said, stretching out the know so long it almost became two words.

Sabo was not about ready to have his first mission waylaid by some no-name grunt. He took a deep breath, gearing himself to launch into another argument when he was interrupted.

“What seems to be a problem here?”

Sabo turned sharply toward the new voice. All the color left the guard’s face as a newcomer slid out from the shadows of the gate, seeming to glide across the ground as if he were a glob of human-shaped oil instead of a real person. He wore an expression that could technically be described as a smile, provided whoever was doing the describing was blind, standing very far away, and had never known the pleasure of genuine human kindness.

It took a small measure of effort for Sabo not to recoil in disgust as the newcomer observed both Sabo and Koala through heavily lidded eyes. There was something eerie about his expression, magnified by a pair of the palest blue eyes Sabo had ever seen in his life, so clear as to be nearly devoid of color. His gaze flitted from Koala, to Sabo--lingering a moment his scars--before returning to Koala and staying there. His lips stretched to reveal a few more teeth, and it took every scrap of Sabo’s will not to break his promise and punch him in his big, leering face.

Koala, bless her, feigned a look of desperate pleading. “Please, sir, we just want to make our delivery and go home.”

Only Sabo heard the sarcastic edge in her servile tone. The newcomer took another gliding step, the guardsman instinctively shying away as he got too close for comfort. “Ah, yes. The extra supplies for our guests tonight. You’re early.” He made a motion like he were batting away an annoying fly. “Hurry up and let them in. You’re causing a scene.”

“Yes, sir!”

Koala and Sabo exchanged a look of surprise, but they didn’t have any time for anything else as the guardsman snapped at them, “You heard the man, get a move on! You’re causing a scene!”

The newcomer’s eyes never left them as they made their way toward the kitchens. Sabo could feel him boring a hole into his back even as they disappeared out of sight.

Xxx

For as long as Sabo could remember, he had a cat’s instincts for people. He was able to decipher tells with uncanny accuracy, the little pushes and pulls of body language that said more than words ever did. It was something that came to Sabo naturally, but he didn’t think it was Haki. Dragon had taught him some of that, too, and while the ability to Observe had its roots in the same place deep in his subconsciousness they were not the same.

Sabo was one of the only people in the world who could tell when Koala was only pretending to smile. He could read the minute changes in Dragon’s expression to know if he was pleased or upset. He could look at two strangers and dissect the power dynamics between them after only a few minutes of observation, and he didn’t need a Devil Fruit or any supernatural willpower to do it.

It got him into trouble more often than not, his instinctual gut reactions making him act without thinking, but he never regretted plowing ahead when he knew in his heart of hearts he was right. The Revolutionary Army was in the middle of a war; they didn’t have time to wait around for opportunities that would never open up of someone didn’t force the issue.

“Don’t,” Koala hissed under her breath. “I know what you’re thinking. Do not go off-script.”

“Do you see Joe anywhere?” Sabo asked serenely, the picture of perfect innocence. “I don’t want to lay this stuff out where anyone can find it. Someone should go look for him.”

Before Sabo could move, Koala’s hand was around his bicep, her grip tighter than an iron vice. “I swear to whatever god cares to listen, I will murder you in the most painful way I can imagine. For once in your life, listen to me: There’s someone already here investigating. We know there’s some bad juju here and there are measures in place to take care of it.”

“Not fast enough, by the looks of it.”

He felt rather than saw Koala’s reaction, his gaze straight ahead to the men and women scurrying around Lord Chandler’s estate at the same frenzied pace as a colony of ants whose nest had just been overturned. The servants had their heads ducked low, hurrying from one place to another like they were scared to be caught loitering. No one had the time to make small talk with one another. No one seemed to be happy at all.

“Who do you think the guests are for tonight?” Sabo asked, his voice barely carrying the distance between he and Koala. “There wasn’t anything about that in the report.”

“Maybe it was need-to-know, and we didn’t,” Koala said.

“Or maaaybe something’s going on. Joe really should have been here by now,” Sabo said. “If we stick around much longer someone’s going to kick us out.”

He kicked a pebble at his feet for emphasis. It dinged against the side of the great building Lord Chandler used as his kitchens, the heat of a dozen ovens making the air ripple and haze. He hated waiting out in the open like this. It was hard enough trying not to be conspicuous with his face half-fried. They might as well have flashing signs over their heads saying that they didn’t belong.

“Then I’ll go look for him,” Koala said. “You stay here and guard our stuff.”

“But…”

Koala silenced him with a raised finger. “Do you even know the right staff person to ask?” She allowed him a moment to answer, and when he couldn’t said, “Exactly. Of the two of us, I have the most experience with...this kind of thing.”

Her mouth twisted in a way that meant she had unwittingly dredged to the surface the horrors of her childhood. Koala shook herself slightly, like a dog would to dry off, and immediately her more familiar smile was back.

Sabo hated when she looked like that, more than he hated the possibility of flubbing his first mission. “You’re right, you’re right. I’ll be a good boy and stay put.”

Koala’s soft flit of laughter lifted the dour atmosphere of the estate, if only for a moment. “I doubt that.”

She bounded off towards the servant’s entrance, moving with a warrior’s poise and grace. She would have to work on that if they ever went deep undercover; a layman would never notice, but an experienced fighter would and might ask questions they dare not answer.

Sabo was tucking that tidbit in the back of his mind when he saw a blur of color at the edge of his vision. The scarring on his bad eye rendered him nearly blind on that side, and by the time he got turned around the weird man with the blue eyes was nearly at his cart.

“Sorry, sir, we’ll be out of your way as soon as we can,” Sabo chirped in his most simpering tone. “Just trying to find who we’re supposed to drop this off with. It’ll only be a moment more.”

The hairs on the back of Sabo’s neck prickled as he felt the Presence of three others walking up behind him. A quick glance showed that none of them were Bunny Joe, and Sabo didn’t trust the strange man’s smile any more than he had before.

He took a deep breath to calm his racing heart, remembering countless lessons with Hack and Koala and Dragon. He couldn’t lose control. Sabo felt his focus narrow as adrenaline hummed in his veins, sharpening every detail to its finest point.

The strange man stood directly in front of him, while three of the estate’s security detail formed a half-circle at Sabo’s back. Blue Eyes was empty handed, but the rest either held guns or wore them at their hips.

“Does there seem to be a problem, sir?” Sabo asked. Too late he remembered that he was supposed to be a normal city boy making a delivery, and the question came out more impertinent than fearful.

It seemed Koala wasn’t the only one who needed practice.

“Walk with me, boy,” Blue Eyes said. “I think I know where to find your friend.”

Sabo took a sharp breath. He had a split second to make his decision, and a not-so-small part of him wanted to fight. The mission was obviously compromised and Bunny Joe missing, and he’d foolishly allowed himself to be separated from his partner with no easy way to get into contact with her.

A voice that sounded suspiciously like Koala’s told him to wait. There was no turning back once he decided to turn things into a slug fest. There were still too many questions he didn’t have answers to; if there was a chance of salvaging anything out of the mission, then he should take it. For the Revolution’s sake and his own curiosity.

“Um, okay. Sure thing, boss.” Sabo jumped down from the cart, carefully palming the baby snailphone hidden under the bench as he did so. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shuffled forward with his head ducked low and his shoulders rolled in defensively.

The Blue-Eyed man’s eyebrows crept up toward his hairline. “Hands where I can see them. I’ll not have any funny business now.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but have I done something wrong?” Sabo asked. “It’s just...you see, my sister’s the worrying type, and she’s going to wonder where I’ve gone.”

“I assure you, your sister is in the best of hands,” he said, before giggling at his own poor attempt at a joke.  

Blood thundered in Sabo’s ears, and he couldn’t stop a smile of his own, feral and just as unnerving as the one worn by the man who stood before him. Sabo got the satisfaction of seeing something that was very close to fear flash across Blue Eyes’ face, quickly covered by an imperious mask of self-importance.

Sabo was shoved forward while guardsmen came on either side, boxing him in and marching him away from the kitchens, his cart, and Koala. All of a sudden they were alone; the servants had decided it was best to batten down and wait for the storm to pass.

“Who are you?” Sabo asked. “Lord Chandler won’t be happy to see you interfering with his business.”

The man laughed a cruel and terrible laugh, high-pitched and cold like iron scraping against ice. His guardsmen aped him like a trio of trained monkeys, their low guffaws a mocking harmony. Sabo’s stomach sank when he realized his mistake. He should have known an ass of such massive proportions had to be titled.

“The better question is who are you?” Lord Chandler hissed once he regained control of his facilities. He bent close enough to Sabo that their noses were nearly touching and he was seeing double. “Who sent you? Was it El Jefe, or that upstart LeBlanc? I’ll have my answers one way or another; if you’re smart you’ll save me the trouble of beating them out of you.”

“And I told you, sir, I’m just here making a delivery,” Sabo said.

He saw the blow coming in time to turn his head with the hit, but Lord Chandler’s fist still caught enough of his nose to bloody it. Sabo dutifully let his head snap back to sell the hit. He didn’t really know how much to fake it, but erred on the side of caution. The supercilious grin that spread across Lord Chandler’s face as Sabo pretended to writhe in pain told him all he needed to know. The bastard was the kind of man that liked hurting people, and Sabo wasn’t the least bit surprised when he followed it up with a blow to his solar plexus.

This time Sabo didn’t need to fake a wheeze as all the air was forcibly excavated from his lungs.

Lord Chandler rubbed his knuckles. “The first was for your cheek. The second was for making me touch you.” He gestured for his guards. “Come along. I’ve wasted too much time already.”

Sabo drug his feet, making them work for every inch. Somewhere along the way ill-fitting hat fell off of his head and floated gently to the ground, accompanying the trail of blood that would lead Koala to wherever these idiots were taking him.

A curtain of hair fell over Sabo’s eyes and obscured his mad grin. This wasn’t over. Not by a longshot.

Xxx

Sabo had to applaud Lord Chandler’s ingenuity. He kept his prisoners in a slaughterhouse.

He smelled it before he saw it, the metallic stink of warm blood that never went away no matter how often the floors were scrubbed clean. The building itself was unassuming and plain, windowless, made of concrete with a roof of corrugated tin. Sabo was grateful for the island’s mild climate, but once he was forced inside there was no circulation to help keep cool. The air was stale and suffocating, and while the deadly machinery had been removed the long, narrow corridors remained. A true death row.

Sabo could hear other prisoners through the thin walls. He expanded his senses and thought he felt the Presence of fifteen, maybe twenty people in total. Did Lord Chandler have that many enemies, or was he snuffing out competition? His noble title was still sparkling new, after all. Maybe he was afraid of losing it.    

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of business, it’s the importance of taking a hands-on approach,” Lord Chandler said in a conversational tone. He rolled up his sleeves past his elbows with deliberate slowness, savoring each moment. “That’s the problem with nobles these days, they’re afraid to get their hands dirty. But I’ve made an effort not to forget my roots.”

Sabo braced himself, not for any sort of blow, but the pain of the pretentious monologue he was certain was coming his way. He was considering saying something rude in hopes of making Lord Chandler shut up and hit him, but was saved the effort by the unexpected ring of the snailphone.

The snailphone that was currently in his pocket.

The snailphone that Lord Chandler did not know he was carrying.

Blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Search him!”

“Left pocket,” Sabo said with a longsuffering sigh.

One of the thugs growled in a way he probably thought was intimidating and forced one of his meaty paws into Sabo’s pants pocket. He looked at the baby snail as if he’d never seen a phone before in his life, causing Lord Chandler to bark, “Well, answer it, you buffoon!”

The guard did as he was told. He listened to the voice on the other end, thick eyebrows growing closer and closer together, and after a moment said, “Boss, it’s for you.”

Lord Chandler snatched the phone out of his hands and shouted into the receiver, “Who is this?!”

Sabo would have loved to hear what was said on the other end, but after a moment Lord Chandler’s face went ghost-white. He thrust the snail into one of his men’s hands without saying a word and rushed out of the slaughterhouse.

“Uh, boss…?”

“See, that’s the problem with doing everything yourself,” Sabo said. “A leader has to trust their underlings to do their job when they’re not around. Unfortunately, you’re just not up to the task.”

Sabo was moving before they had time to even process what he said. He broke out of their hold effortlessly, not even bothering with covering his fist with haki before ramming it into the nearest face. He had a brief moment of yearning for his metal pipe before thrusting the palm of his hand beneath the jaw of another. The third tripped over his own feet trying to run away, and Sabo decided to help him down, palming the back of his head and smashing his face into the concrete floor.

He took a step back, surveying his handiwork. They were all alive and twitching, so he took advantage of the abattoir aesthetic, wrapping them in the chains hanging from the ceiling. The hooks once used when draining blood of freshly slaughtered animals long-since repurposed with iron shackles.

Iron shackles. The idiot didn’t even invest in proper sea stone cuffs.

“Amateur,” Sabo muttered to himself. He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand and went in search of Bunny Joe.

He found him in the locker, standing over an uneasy group of prisoners. There weren’t enough rooms for individual cells or even chains to bind them all, so they were kept together in one huddled mass.

For a moment Sabo was irritated that Joe hadn’t freed himself of such a pathetic prison. The man himself was talking quietly to a young woman, wide-eyed and trembling like a frightened doe, and Sabo forced his annoyance down. There were some things that were more important.

“Hiya, Joe!” Sabo said cheerfully. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”

Joe whirled around. Confusion flashed across his face, before his eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, hey. You’re the boss’s brat. What are you doing here?”

“Trying to find you,” Sabo said. “What’s going on?  Chandler’s goons jumped me ‘n Koala before we had a chance to explain ourselves.”

Joe muttered a string of expletives and drew a hand over his forehead. “He got me early this morning. Must have seen me snooping someplace I shouldn’t and decided to tag you too. I’m so sorry, kid. I’ll get you out of this mess here in a bit.” A pause. “Wait, you said there was someone else with you? Where are they?”

“With a little bit of luck, out causing chaos and mayhem,” Sabo said.

“That’s no good. I need to get you guys out of here before the auction tonight.”

At the word auction the woman beside him burst into tears. Sabo saw her wobble like jelly, before the strength left her legs entirely and she collapsed into a sobbing mess on the ground. Bunny Joe knelt beside her and started rubbing her back in slow, steady circles.

“I’m going to get you all out of here, I promise. I need you to stay strong for me for just a little bit longer. Okay?”

She nodded, and Joe helped her stand with tears still streaming down her face. Taking her by the elbow, he led her back to the other prisoners. “I need to, uh, confer with my colleague for a moment. We’ll sort things out and get you home.”

“This was my home,” she whispered hoarsely.

Her expression crumpled into a look of wretched misery, and she buried her head in her hands. Joe handed her off to another one of the women, an older, matronly-type, his motions stiff and awkward. He returned to Sabo rubbing the back of his neck, uncomfortable and out of place.

“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t just leave them here.”

“Lord Chandler’s hosting an auction?” Sabo said. It took enormous effort not to start shouting, the spark of his previous indignation ignited into a roaring fire of fury and rage.

“An art auction, yeah. It’s his third in the last two months.”

“I don’t get it.”

Bunny Joe sighed, scratched temple and tried to explain. “Chandler was a smuggler, yeah? And a damn good one at that. He opened up all sorts of illegal trade on this part of the Grand Line under the name Mr. Mooneyes.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Sabo said.

“Yeah, well, the king turned a blind eye so long as he got his piece of the pie. That was how Chandler earned his title, and now that he’s got it he’s decided to expand his business.”

He looked back at the people behind him. “Auctions are the perfect way to get dirty money clean, and art is easy because the value of any given piece is so subjective. You know, the eye of the beholder, that sort of thing. I was digging through old records, and nearly every piece sold was going for about B500,000. I thought that was a little suspicious, so I tried to find out who was buying, but Chandler runs a tight ship. Everything’s anonymous, supposedly to protect the buyer and their new investment.”

“So you tried to find out who the buyers were.”

“And apparently got caught doing it,” Joe said wearily. “Sorry, I didn’t think he’d go as far as gathering up you guys. I’ll make sure you get home safe.”

“I don’t need your protection. What I need to know is what’s your plan to blow this out of the water, and what can I do to help. Lord Chandler isn’t going to stay away for long, and my guess is he’s going to bring backup. We need to be ready when he does.”

Joe peered down at Sabo, as if he were seeing him for the first time. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Deadly.” Sabo said. “And here’s our backup now.”

Sabo felt Koala’s Presence before he saw her dance into the locker. She faltered for the briefest moment at the sight of the room before quickly finding Sabo and Joe. She didn’t appear seriously hurt, but it was impossible for Sabo not to see the blood on her knuckles. He wondered who it belonged to.

“I assume that was your work at the entrance? You were always good at tying people up.” Koala said.

“And I assume you were the one who called me?”

“I was surprised when you didn’t answer, but I think it worked out better this way,” Koala said, a look of pure wickedness on her face. “I wish I could have seen Chandler’s expression when I told him someone had knocked out his surveillance system.”

“And Hack?”

“I convinced him to hold off just a little bit longer. He’s at the harbor now snooping around the ships coming into port. Hopefully he can identify a few of the people on Chandler’s guestlist for tonight.”

She brushed a stray hair out of her face and scanned the room, noting each detail with a methodicalness that Sabo was sometimes jealous of. “But that’s enough about me. What’s all this?”

“A slave market,” Sabo said. “Seems like that’s how Lord Chandler is making money these days, with the approval of the crown.”

Her eyes hardened, the bright blue of her irises frosting over with an icy coldness. Her lips pursed together into a nearly invisible line, every muscle in her small body tensing. It was so rare to see her truly angry Sabo had almost forgotten how scary she could be. Bunny Joe took an involuntary step back as fury radiated off her in waves.

“The auction is this afternoon. I don’t think Chandler can afford to cancel. Not with so many VIPs coming in from all over the Grand Line,” Joe said. “But he’ll be ready. How bad did you mess up his snails?”

“It won’t be back up anytime soon,” Koala said tersely. “And I’ve brought you all a present.”

Without waiting for their response Koala turned sharply on one heel and walked back to the corridor near the entrance. Sitting next to the three guardsmen strung up from the ceiling was a man who’d been stripped down to his skivvies and hogtied, his clothes folded neatly beside him. Sabo almost laughed. “Who is he?”

“A visiting prince from the Moorlands,” Koala said. “I assume he came for the festivities later today.”

At the sight of them, the prince tried to yell into his gag. Sabo knelt down and picked up the man’s waistcoat with his thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as if it were diseased. “Is there a reason you decided to strip him?”

“He looked to be your size. Had this in his pocket.”

Koala handed him a card written on thick stock paper, the words TICKET OF INVITATION written in fancy script. Sabo took it from her skeptically. “His Lordship knows what I look like.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “Everything is done anonymously. They wear masks.”

“It’s in there somewhere, just keep digging,” Koala said.

Sabo found a porcelain carnival mask, white a black domino pattern around the eyes, trimmed in gold. “Oh my god, it’s hideous.” He grinned up at her. “I’ll take it.”

Xxx

The clothes didn’t feel all that different from what he usually wore, albeit in black instead of his usual blue. Koala had even found him a cravat. But Sabo felt stiff, like he was wearing someone else’s skin.

He had to remember to walk like he had a stick up his ass, to look down at everyone else like they were bits of mud to be scrapped off of his polished boots. He stood in the spacious halls of Lord Chandler’s mansion, taking in the marble columns and the shiny crystal chandeliers, the smell of sandalwood in the air.

Even with his invitation he was afraid of someone seeing his disheveled hair, or that a guard would somehow see through the mask to see the imposter that lay beneath. The scars on his face and shoulder itched every time someone so much as glanced at him.

Security had been tripled, both inside and out of the mansion, but was thickest around the ballroom where the auction would take place. After a moment of consideration Sabo bypassed it. He was distinctly aware that they were running out of time, seconds ticking off the clock in the back of his mind. Following the directions left by Bunny Joe, he walked up a winding wrought-iron staircase to the second level of the mansion. A servant gave him a questioning look that Sabo dismissed with an aristocratic flick of the wrist. He ignored the stammared apology, stomach curling with guilt.

He hated acting like this. Hated more how good he was at it.

Sabo’s foul mood had nearly reached a boiling point by the time he reached the upper foyer. Two guards in white masks stood at attention by rich mahogany doors. At the sight of him they shifted their rifles, ready to raise them at a moment’s notice.

“No guests on the second floor,” one barked.

“But I have an invitation,” Sabo protested.

“No guests on the second floor.”

“I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with,” Sabo said softly. Dangerously.

He was moving before they had time to a look of confusion, twisting a hand into a dragon’s claw. Haki coating his hand black, he struck the middle of the rifle. Wood snapped into splinters under his hand, metal warping and bending with the force of the blow. The guardsman was thrown backward, head cracking against the doorpost. Pivoting sharply, Sabo grabbed a fistful of the second guardsman’s uniform. WIth a roar of fury he hurled him into the door with as much force as he could muster.

The door didn’t break, but the guard did. Shaking his head, Sabo stepped over him and jiggled the handle. Locked. Grinning behind his mask Sabo cracked his knuckles, surveying the door while he rolled his shoulders to loosen them.

One hit to break the lock. Another to blow the door off of its hinges. Mr. Mooneyes himself stood at a table at the center of the room in abject shock, the remnants clattering at his feet. His security was a little better, but Sabo hadn’t spent the past two years training with Dragon to be beaten by a handful of scrubs.

The last man fell before Lord Chandler could make his escape. Sabo grabbed him by the back of the waistcoat and whirled him around, pinning him up against the wall. Somewhere in the scrum the mask had fallen off of his face, and Lord Chandler’s eyes widened in recognition.

“Ha...You won’t get away with this,” Lord Chandler said, gasping for air. He looked down at Sabo with those clear, soulless eyes, a terrible grin twisting his face into something that was more monster than man.

“I think I will,” Sabo said.

“Marines are coming,” Lord Chandler said. “They’ll get you and the girl. No one will come to rescue you when you’re locked in Impel Down. I bet they have her already. I hope they make the little bitch suff--achgh!”

Somewhere along the line Sabo’s hand had found his neck and began squeezing. “I think you’ll find that girl doesn’t need rescued. Now tell me, who are your buyers? Who’s letting the slave trade expand this far from Mariejois?!”

“Hypocrite” Lord Chandler sneered. “Hubris like yours stinks of the Revolution. Where do you think Dragon gets his weapons? His supplies? Men like me...like my benefactor...are the grease that turns the wheel of society. My father always said you need a little bit of shit to make the garden grow, so don’t pretend you’re innocent. What sort of monster sends children out to do his dirty work?”

“What sort of monster puts free men and women in chains for profit?” Sabo spat through gritted teeth. “I’m not going to ask again, who’s the one letting you get away with it?!”

Lord Chandler laughed a dry, wheezy laugh. “Someone bigger and scarier than you. I’ll not breathe a word, boy, to you or your Revolution, so you might as well end this charade and kill me now.”

Before Sabo could answer, the snailphone in his pocket started to ring.

At the sound of it, Lord Chandler cackled like a madman.

“You’re too late, little Revolutionary. You should have known better than to challenge me when the World Government is on my side.”

Sabo kept one hand wrapped around Lord Chandler’s neck as he answered the phone. “What is it? I’m a little busy here.”

“We need to get out of here now,” Koala said. “Hack and I have the ship ready and Joe’s just about got the last of the slaves on board, but there’s half a dozen marine ships coming in hard. We’ll hold them off as long as we can, but they outgun us by...a lot.”

“I’ll divert their attention here,” Sabo said.

Hack’s voice cut in past Koala’s protests. “Sabo, you’ve done enough. It’s time to cut our losses and--”

“I’m going to burn it to the ground.”

Sabo hung up the phone. He looked at Lord Chandler like he were a newly discovered insect he was about to pin onto a specimen board. “I’ll admit, you’re clever. Joe said you have a code during your auctions, a whole system for bidding so that an outsider looking in would have no idea what was really going on. What was it, oil paintings if they were women, acrylics for men, that sort of thing? I have to wonder why even bother with all the subterfuge if the World Government is really on your side.”

Lord Chandler opened his mouth to answer, but Sabo stopped him with a little bit of pressure against his windpipe. “I didn’t say you could speak. See, I’d say you were scared of the Revolution, but you didn’t even suspect us to start with. You’ve got enough goons here and the approval of your king, which makes me think it’s not the local competition you’re worried about. You’ve got too many resources for them to ever be a true threat.”

Sabo leaned closer. “The slave market’s pretty much a one man show these days. You were a smuggler once, right? I’m sure you’ve heard who’s in charge.”

A spasm passed over Lord Chandler, all-but-confirming Sabo’s gut instinct.

“I’m going to give you one last shot,” Sabo said. “Either you come with me and tell us everything you know, or I leave you here for Joker to take care of. You have thirty seconds to decide.”

Sabo dropped Lord Chandler with an unceremonious thud. He kept half an eye on him while making a quick sweep of the room, gathering up any sort of documentation that looked to be important and stuffing it down the front of his shirt.

Everything else he gathered into a pile. Sabo found the nearest candle and carefully lowered the wicking flame. The paper caught, curling to black ash and smoke.

He would have to help it along if he wanted to make good on his promise to Koala, but Sabo figured he could make it work. He turned back to where Lord Chandler sat whimpering in a corner.

“Time’s up, your Lordship. What do you decide?”

Xxx

“Wanted for kidnapping, assault, and impersonating a noble.”

Koala slipped Sabo’s newly-minted bounty from between the pages for closer inspection before handing him the rest of the paper. “I thought you would be happy. Why are you not happy?”

“I don’t know,” Sabo admitted. He propped his head on his hand and scanned the news, trying to read between the lines of lies to find the truth that lay underneath. “It was all...vaguely unsatisfying.”

“You burned down a mansion.”

“I burn down things all the time. I wanted something...more. Something meaningful.”

Koala quirked an eyebrow. “Saving eighteen people from slavery isn’t meaningful?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.

Sabo set down the paper and looked at her helplessly. A bandage covered one cheek from an errant bullet, a result of her staving off the marines long enough for everyone to escape.

He felt himself getting angry all over again, but it was an impotent anger. They’d completed their mission, but it wasn’t enough.

It would never be enough.

“Lord Chandler’s one man. One. He’s not even that important in the grand scheme of things. How many others are out there just like him, trying to get their piece of the pie because the Government says it’s okay to sell people like chattel? He’s a symptom, not the disease.”

He tried to go back to his paper, but after a few seconds feeling Koala’s eyes boring into his side gave up and tossed it aside. He leaned his chair back on two legs and groaned. “I want to do more. Go higher. Punch more dochebags in the face.”

“And you will.”

Both Koala and Sabo whirled around where Dragon’s massive body filled the doorway. How he managed to be so sneaky in a base full of Observation Haki users Sabo would never know.

“I’ve gone over Bunny Joe’s report. You commended yourselves well, both of you.”

Koala bowed her head. “Thank you, sir.”

“When’s our next mission?” Sabo asked at the same time.

Dragon’s lips quirked in one of his almost-smiles. “Now. It turns out Mr. Mooneyes made sure to get dirt on each of his clients as a means of protecting himself. With this information, we’ll be able to climb a little bit closer to our goals. Now go pack your bags, you leave tonight with the tide.”

Sabo let out a whoop of joy and jumped to his feet, but before he could make a mad dash to his room Dragon placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Patience. A lion may stalk for hours waiting for the perfect time to strike. Our work will not be in vain. The Celestial Dragons will fall.”

Sabo nodded once, sharply. “And I’ll make sure to be there when it happens.”

[rainofaugustsith]

Taris

Not exactly warm and fluffy but I had a character going through Taris this week, so. Also here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13790595/chapters/42907424 Content warning: allusion to parental death. 

3642 BBY, Taris

Taris has been a nightmare, all the way around. Between the roving rakghouls, the bombed-out buildings and the overwhelming sadness and death pervading the very air, Vette hates leaving the sanctuary of Viri’s ship to go on missions.

All the same, she’s volunteered as Lord Dragoi’s second for every excursion, in lieu of Jaesa. She thinks that Viri needs her, even if she won't admit it. The Sith lord is on edge, and nobody can discern why. It’s not as though she’s being challenged. The missions are child’s play for her at this point; she openly laughs when faced with the Republic’s best generals and their troops before cutting them down.

And yet, the longer they remain on the planet, the angrier Viri becomes. Her words become clipped; her eyes fade from blue to yellow and back. She’s dispensed with her usual jokes and puns. When Darth Baras finally gives them the order to leave, Vette is relieved.

”We’ll be taking off in two hours,” Viri says, striding quickly through her ship. “But Vette, I need you to accompany me on one last errand.”

”Good luck,” Jaesa whispers under her breath, shaking her head. Vette bites back a sigh and rises to follow Lord Dragoi to the shuttle back to the planet’s surface.

”What do we need to do, my lord?” Vette asks politely, as they land in the Empire’s Brell outpost. Viri is, as usual, all business, securing a speeder for them and checking maps on her datapad.

“Take your vaccine,” Viri says, ignoring the question and tossing an injector in Vette’s direction. The entire crew has been scratching their heads about this one, too: Viri’s obsession with the rakghoul vaccine. She’d actually screamed at Jaesa when she’d discovered the apprentice had forgotten it one day.

“Yes, my lord,” Vette says wearily, injecting herself with the vaccine. Truth be told, she understands Viri’s concern about this one. The rakghouls roaming around the planet make her skin crawl, and she has no desire to join them.

“Come on, the speeder’s waiting,” Viri says, shifting impatiently from side to side. Vette shrugs and joins her on the vehicle.

*

The speeder delivers Viri and Vette to a far-flung pocket of the planet; to an outpost that is little more than a single tent with a medical droid.

”My lord, what is this?” Vette asks, her nervousness growing by the minute.

”Nothing bad is going to happen,” Viri says, trying to reassure her. “We just need to swing by the Imperial Science Station here.”

”I didn’t know there were any scientists out here,” Vette says, following Viri.

”There aren’t,” Viri says. “Not anymore. This outpost has not been used in almost ten years.”

”Then why--” Vette begins, but Viri shakes her head and gestures for silence as they enter a vast, obviously abandoned building. Dark splotches of blood dot the walls, and the computers and equipment are covered with thick blankets of dust.

Viri takes two portable torches out of her pack and hands one to Vette. The flames are comforting and warm, but they only illuminate the devastation of the space. There are overturned chairs and shattered test tubes.; long-drained kolto tanks and consoles with smashed monitors.

”I need you to cover me,” Viri says, walking away from Vette. “Stay there.”

Vette watches in disbelief as Viri sinks to her knees in the middle of the room, settles into a meditation stance, and puts her torch on the ground in front of her. She takes a deep breath and begins muttering in Sith, her eyes shut; both hands clutched to her chest.

”My--my lord?”

Viri opens one eye and glares. “I told you to cover me. Not to stare at me.”

”Fine,” Vette snaps, returning to her original position. She can’t help but sneak another look back at Viri, who has resumed her incantation. The Sith words echo in the empty space, even though Viri’s voice is barely a whisper. When the chant stops Viri is silent for long minutes, her head bowed, her shoulders heaving. Finally she extinguishes the flame, stands and turns to Vette.

”We can go now.”

“Yes, my lord,” Vette nods. It’s hard to see clearly by the light of their remaining torch, but Viri’s eyes look red. As though she’s been…

”Have you been crying?” Vette asks. Viri looks at her sharply.

”There’s a decade of dust in here. My eyes are irritated. I’m surprised yours are not.”

”What was that you were saying? Some sort of Dark Side spell?”

“It’s called a Qorit. That’s the Sith word for ‘end.' It’s best we don’t discuss it further here. Later, I’ll explain,” Viri says. Some rakghouls approach, and Viri scowls and draws her lightsaber.

”Understood,” Vette says, brandishing her blasters.

*

Despite her promise of an explanation, Viri says nothing when they’re on the shuttle, nothing when they board the ship, and nothing when they launch into hyperspace toward their next assignment. Her change in mood, however, is apparent to all, including their new crew member, Lt. Pierce.

Vette finally corners her outside the galley. “So are you going to tell me what a Qorit is, or not?”

Viri does not answer, but gestures for Vette to follow her. To her surprise, Viri walks toward her cabin and nods for Vette to come in and close the door.

”Why are we here?”

”Because there’s privacy,” Viri answers. “I don’t want to discuss this in front of the rest of the crew. Can I have your word that this conversation does not leave this room?”

”Of course,” Vette says, confused.

”The Qorit is the Sith prayer for the dead.”

”You were praying for the Republic troops we killed?” Vette says cynically.

”No,” Viri says, pulling a holo-locket out of her belt pouch and activating it. An image of three people flickers into focus. One is obviously Viri as a small child; the other two are tall adults, a woman and a man.

”Who are these people?” Vette asks, studying the images. “That looks like you…are those your parents?”

”Yes.”

“Were they Sith too?”

”No. They were scientists,” Viri says. “You’ll have to believe me when I tell you they worked to help, not hurt. Sometimes they worked in the private sector; at other times they were activated to duty in the Imperial Science Service.”

”Were?”

”Their final posting was on Taris,” Viri says curtly, and deactivates the holo.

A cold chill runs down Vette’s spine as she understands. Viri is silent, her head bowed.

“I’m sorry, Viri,” Vette says, and pats her arm. Viri jumps at the touch.

”I didn’t mean to startle you,” Vette stammers. “I just thought you looked like you needed a hug.”

”Maybe I did,” Viri says, and looks away.

”Would you like a hug? I know it’s not a Sithy thing to do, but…” Vette opens her arms. “Promise I won’t bite you.”

“I haven’t hugged anyone in a long time.”

”Way overdue, then,” Vette says, and hugs her. Viri puts her arms around Vette awkwardly.

”Just relax and let me hug you,” Vette insists. “It’s all right.”

Viri nods, and Vette feels the tension leave her back.

”There. Don’t you feel better?” Vette pats her shoulder again.

”Yes,” Viri says, surprised.

”You always listen to me when I need to talk,” Vette says, finally pulling back from the hug. “I want you to know that I’ll listen, if you need me.”

Viri smiles slightly. “I appreciate that. It’s good to have…a friend.”

”Yeah,” Vette says. “It is.”

[caravanslost]

23 - Strategy

Characters: Damen/Laurent, Nicaise.

Tags: Modern AU; Whistleblower AU; Senator Damianos Akielos, a hot young upstart politician; Laurent deVere, a hot overworked and over-achieving journalist. Written for @capri-month​.

“Which senator?” Laurent asks sharply.

“Akielos. The younger one.”

“And who let him in?” Laurent asks, by which he means: who is going to die today.

A Note: I’ve finally started uploading the fics on AO3, as separate chapters of the same work (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)و

A Note #2: My inbox remains open for prompts. If you feel so inclined, please fire away!

Laurent spends the morning covering the plenary session of the Economic and Social Committee, and heads back to the office at midday. When he arrives, most of the newsroom is out for the lunch hour. He counts five heads amongst the sea of computers.

It’s still enough for him to immediately sense that something unusual is afoot. When he walks into the room, all five heads snap towards him and look back down just as quickly, as though they’ve been caught doing something. All five heads make a terrible performance of pretending to work.

It makes for an unconvincing show. He surveys the room for a moment longer, cool and unflinching, but no one dares look back up at him. No one offers an explanation.

He goes to find Nicaise. Nicaise is alone in the junior copy editors’ office, eating lunch at his desk, halfway through a turkey on rye. The document on his screen is bleeding so heavily with red edits that the original text is almost gone. He feels a momentary pang of pity for whoever authored it.

Before Laurent says a word, and without so much as looking at him, Nicaise asks: “Since when did you fraternize with senators?”

“I don’t fraternize with anyone.” He says. “I hate people. You know that.”

“And believe me, they hate you. But there’s a senator in your office.”

Laurent freezes.

When his thoughts kick back into gear, he takes a step back out into the newsroom to look in the direction of his office. It’s on the other side of the large, open space, and the distance to it is littered with computers and printers and other office sundry.

But Nicaise is right: even from here, Laurent can make out the large silhouette of a man in his office.

He he returns inside, looks back at Nicaise, who still only has eyes for his screen.

“Which senator?” Laurent asks sharply.

“Akielos. The younger one.”

“And who let him in?” Laurent asks, by which he means: who is going to die today.

Nicaise turns slowly away from his computer, and delivers him a withering look.

“Do I look like your secretary?"

“Keep that tone up, and you will be.”

Nicaise puts down his sandwich for the sole purpose of raising two middle fingers in Laurent’s direction. Without so much as blinking, he turns back to his screen, and just in case Laurent doesn’t get the message, he pops in his headphones.

Nicaise is an irrepressible little shit. It’s exactly why they hired him.

But there are more pressing matters at hand.

Laurent begins making his way back to his office. The closer he gets, the more clearly the senator comes into view. He’s deep inside Laurent’s office, standing at the window, admiring the city view from behind my desk, Laurent thinks. The sheer nerve of him.

Laurent is not feeling charitable when he arrives: he has three deadlines to meet by the day’s end. The morning’s plenary session had run overtime by an hour and a half, and he needed every spare moment he could squeeze from the afternoon to write.

He knocks on this own door, and is pleased when the sound shakes the senator out of his reverie. He turns and smiles contritely at Laurent, embarrassed at how easily he’s been startled.

It’s a strangely unfiltered response. Un-senatorial. Especially from a man large enough to cause a solar eclipse.

Senator Akielos walks over to the guest’s side of the desk, and extends his hand to Laurent. Laurent takes it, and watches as his hand disappears in the senator’s warm, gigantic grip.

Laurent says, dryly: “I’ve never been received in my own office before.”

Akielos has enough grace to retain his embarrassed look. It’s still a strange contrast to the sheer power of the rest of him—everything from his height, to the perfect tailoring of his charcoal grey suit, to the obvious muscle that it barely conceals. Laurent imagines that he hulks above most people in most rooms.

“My apologies,” says Akielos, and he sounds he like he means it. “I was led here.”

“So I’ve been told,” says Laurent. “You must tell me the name of the gracious culprit.”

Laurent closes the office door behind him. He takes a quick look out the glass and notes that there are more people in the newsroom. Now there are a dozen heads, and again, they all make a very poor show of pretending not to look.

Laurent winds a hand around the drawstring and curtly shutters the blinds. It’s not much privacy, but it’ll do for now. He waves a hand towards one of the chairs in front of his desk, inviting Senator Akielos to sit, which he does.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Senator?” He asks, taking his own chair.

“Please, call me Damen. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m sure you’re busy.” says Akielos. Damen, Laurent corrects himself. “I’m here because I would like to take you to lunch.”

Whatever Laurent was expecting, it certainly wasn’t that.

“Lunch,” he repeats, neutrally, just to be sure.

“Yes, lunch.” says the Senator. “If you’re free. Which I know you are, because I asked the nice lady at the front desk as soon as I arrived.”

Lauren thinks, two people are going to die today.

He leans back in his chair and studies his unexpected guest. The younger of the Akielos brothers is the more natural politician—far less experienced than Kastor, but much better liked. He smiles easily and speaks simply, and does well enough on the late night talk-show circuit to be familiar. The handsomeness doesn’t hurt, either. Nor the dimple. People use a lot of words to describe his face, like charming, or presidential.

But Laurent is wary of pedestals. Likability is a dangerous platform to cultivate, especially for a politician. It screams to be sullied, and Laurent is wary of ever being tarnished with the same brush.

“We don’t know each other well enough to be lunching, Senator.”

“Perhaps we should. Let me take you out.”

Had Laurent been three or four years younger, and equally less-experienced, he might have mistaken the invitation for personal interest. He might even have been inclined to agree. A handsome face is a handsome face, and it never hurt to build an extra bridge in his line of work.

But he’s shrewder now. He registers the dissonance between the senator’s easy invitation, and the grave expression with which he offers it. There’s something searching in his eyes, and Laurent realizes with a flash that lunch is a subtext for something else, even though he can’t begin to discern what it might be.

“Lunch.” He says deliberately, eyes keen, just to make sure they’re both on the same page.

Damen’s features relax a little, when he sees that Laurent’s understood him. “Yes, exactly.”

So—lunch means a story. Laurent’s pulse begins racing, the way it always does when he finds a new lead.

It races even though he doesn’t know what the scoop might be, or whether it’ll lead anywhere. The thrill of a new tip-off is always sheer and heady. He quietly drums his fingers against the armrests of his chair, and tries to keep the elation off his face.

“Political or personal?” He asks quietly.

“Political.”

“Involving you?”

“Involving Kastor.”

Laurent stills. A less professional man in his place would have emitted a low, long whistle.

Damen looks away from him, to a point beside his head and outside the window. The struggle to rein in whatever he’s feeling is clear. It’s also clear that he doesn’t want to be here, doing this.

The fact that he’s so uncomfortable tells Laurent something promising about the reliability of what’s to come. But they can discuss that later. He steers the conversation down a slightly different avenue.

“Why me?”

Damen looks back to him, the corner of his mouth betraying an ironic quirk. “You didn’t strike me as the self-doubting type.”

“I’m not. I’m only pointing out that if your story’s as big you think it is, you might be expected to take it higher than a mid-level editor.”

“I don’t need someone with profile. I need someone thorough with a low radar, who hasn’t been around long enough to curry loyalties.”

“I’m obviously flattered, but I’d prefer if you told me the whole truth.”

Damen leans back in his chair and fixes Laurent with a pointed look. Now, he’s smiling.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he begins lightly.

It’s hardly a promising start. Laurent says, “I’m not sure there’s going to be a right way to take this.”

Damen opens his mouth as though to speak, but pauses and refrains. He looks at a point above Laurent’s head, visibly struggling with how to phrase what he needs to say. It only serves to pique Laurent’s interest, though he can’t imagine that he’s going to like what he hears

“Put it this way.” Damen says, after a considerable number of moments, biting back the worst of his smile. “No one’s going to ask questions if I start spending time with—well. With someone like you.”

“A journalist?”

“A blonde and attractive one.” He says. “I’m—advised that I have something of a type.”

Laurent feels the colour rising in his cheeks, and he can’t do a damned thing to stop it.

Of course Damen has a type. Of course Laurent knows what it is. He picks up as many gossip rags as the next person. He’s seen the conveyer belt of attractive men and women the Senator keeps on his arm.

But he isn’t sure how he feels, about Damen counting him amongst their ilk.

“Your type is—me.” He says, just to confirm.

“Yes. Which means people won’t ask too many questions if I spend time with you.”

Laurent clicks, and draws the next few lines by himself. “And you’d like to encourage those misunderstandings, to throw them off your scent ... which is why you want to take me to lunch.’

"So you’ll come?”      

Laurent pauses again.

“Yes.” He says. “But senator: we’re going to need to set some ground rules.”

[cartoonmouse]

ANON SAID:  6 for merry and owen maybe?? Totally fine if you don't want to do it, I just think they'd be an interesting pairing

hey anon this is probably not what you were expecting but i have a habit of writing the dumbest plots for these prompts. also according to familyecho, glenmores and whitehills are distantly related, but at this point everyone in the AU is related in some way, so i don’t really give a shit *sunglasses emoji* ALSO i tried to keep owen in character, but i’m unable to do this and he might be OOC so ;-;... 

Here they come.

Merry Whitehill peeked over her laptop screen, eyes narrowing as she spotted the group of rowdy boys entering the coffee shop. They pushed and shoved at each other, trading barbs and insults back and forth. Loud, invasive, cocky boys.

Merry huffed and returned to her work. Graphic design was kicking her ass this semester. The professor graded too hard, found her work twee and therefore mediocre. Her latest assignment was returned with a harsh, red “C”-- the plus only serving to taunt her. Merry had never gotten a C on anything let alone an art assignment. Art was her thing. The one thing she had that set her apart from her other towheaded siblings.

“Rowing team,” Boremund Moss said, looking over his shoulder at the boys. They leaned against the cafe counter, some of the them to flirt with the red-faced barista clumsily taking their orders. “They love to walk around like they own the whole place, don’t they?”

“You sound jealous,” Tabby Lake teased. She was bent over a notebook full of scribbles--poetry, she called it. “Didn’t you try out for the team earlier this year?”

“No,” Mund replied, sharply. “I wouldn’t join up with those idiots if you paid me.”

Merry rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. You’d kill to be one of those dick-swinging jackasses.”

“They throw all the best parties.” Tabby thoughtfully tapped her pen against her lips. “Get all the best girls.”

“Grades are shit,” Merry said. She tilted her head in the direction of one of the taller boys. His hair was a deep russet color, grin bright and troublesome. The sort of grin you stayed far away from if you knew any better. “That one’s in my geology class. Even dumber than the rocks.”

Tabby snorted into her tea. Mund reclined in his chair, hands behind his head, amused.

“Merry, you’re something else.”

“Good to know.”

Her voice dripped with sarcasm--residual annoyance from the C+. She felt it burning a hole in her backpack. Elyse and Karl wouldn’t have gotten a C+, she thought as she ripped up her napkin into jagged strips. Tabby gave her a concerned look which she ignored. Usually being around good friends and good coffee (with doughnuts) would cheer her up. The smell of hot chocolate, cinnamon, and vanilla wafting through the air only stung her nose and gave her a massive headache. Or maybe it was the douche canoes causing a ruckus only a few feet away. This was her space dammit. A pack of wild bros weren’t allowed to invade her space.

“I’m going to kill every last one of them,” she growled. “Put holes in the bottoms of their boats so they all sink to the bottom.”

“They’re not being too bad today.” Sometimes Tabby reminded her of her mother with the sweet, placating tone of her voice, the way she tried in vain to give everyone a fair shot. Merry, meanwhile, carried the Whitehill temper like a curse, and no one was safe.

“I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. For you.”

The words had not left her mouth before the entire rowing team decided to take over the table right behind Merry and her friends. Her shoulders hunched, wincing at the increase in noise levels. The boys yammered and guffawed at each other’s stupid jokes. One directly behind Merry “whispered” to the boy in her geology class, loud enough for the entire cafe to hear him.

“Nice ass on that one, right?” He was talking about the barista, Merry assumed. She gritted her teeth. She recalled nights out with Tabby where men had attempted to grope them and get their numbers afterwards. She would’ve kicked their asses if her friend hadn’t talked her off the ledge.

“Eh,” Dumber Than Rocks said. He took a long sip of his drink. “I’ve seen better.”

“Who?”

“Your sister’s.”

The table erupted as if Dumber Than Rocks had said the funniest thing they’d ever heard. One of them was due to keel over and die from laughter at any moment.

Across from Merry, Mund made a face, but kept doodling in the margins of his psych textbook. Tabby played with the string of her tea bag. She looked nervous. Like she knew…

“Hey--excuse me.” Merry had turned and tapped Dumber Than Rocks on the shoulder. She wore a sweet, artless expression--a look she had perfected over the years thanks to watching Karl and Roslin always get their ways with it. Thanks to Merry’s doe-eyed Bole features this came almost too easily.

Dumber Than Rocks eyed her with interest, his attention fully captured like a fish on a hook. Time to reel his ass in.

“You’re being a bit loud,” Merry said. ‘My friends and I are trying to study.”

“There’s a library on campus,” one of the row bros said, smugly. “You could maybe go there?”

Merry smiled thinly. “Wow… did you come up with that idea all on your own? I didn’t know a guy like you could think.”

The row bros let out a chorus of low oohs and jostled their friend. He soured and went to reply, but Dumber Than Rocks put a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, she’s just playin around,” he said. He directed his smile at her like a floodlight. “Right?”

“I’m actually being really serious.” Merry’s smile didn’t waver. She felt Tabby beside her take a deep breath and hold it. “And if you shits don’t keep your voices down I’m going to use this…” She held up the plastic knife she’d been given with her bagel. “To castrate each and every one of you.”

The row bros blinked, all taken aback by her threat. It was an empty threat, of course--she wouldn’t touch any of them with a ten foot pole--but saying it still felt satisfying. And the looks on their faces… you couldn’t buy that kind of gratification.

The only row bro who didn’t look put off was Dumber Than Rocks. He put a hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh, until he couldn’t hold it back any longer. When he laughed he showed all his teeth. Merry blushed and hated herself for it.

“You look like someone I know,” he said as his friends turned away to talk amongst themselves--quieter this time, Merry noted. “Do I know you?”

“Geology with Professor Skinner,” Merry said. “You sit all the way in the back and come in late every day.”

“So you’ve been paying attention to me.” He seemed pleased by this.

“Only because you’re a disruption.” Merry didn’t like where this conversation was going. She shifted awkwardly in her chair. Confidence only took her so far. She didn’t have Elyse’s breeziness when it came to dealing with others. She could deliver a verbal kick to the groin, but had trouble following it up after her temper had cooled. “Maybe think about coming to lecture on time for once.”

“Maybe we can sit together,” he said, hopefully. He smiled again, making her think of a puppy.

Not a puppy. A wolf.

“Maybe.”

“My name’s Owen.” He held out his hand, and she stared at it. Did he expect her to shake it? What was this? A business meeting?

“Meredyth.” She let most people use her nickname--most friends. Owen wasn’t a friend. He was more of a nuisance and therefore didn’t get the privilege.

Behind her, Mund made a show out of closing his textbook and rustling his papers. Even Tabby fidgeted a bit too noisily with her backpack (why did she need so many keychains anyway?). Merry turned to glance at her friends and they both gestured to the door of the cafe with their eyes, desperate to leave.

“We have an exam next Friday, right?” Owen asked. If he noticed Mund and Tabby getting up to leave then he showed no sign of it. He kept his eyes trained on her, following the movement of her hands as she unzipped her own backpack.

“Thursday,” she replied. “This Thursday. Tomorrow.”

Owen face dropped. “Ah, shit.”

Merry couldn’t help but feel bad for him. A little bad. She’d done her share of forgetting exam dates in the past. Mother would advise her to be kind, to offer sympathy to those who were in need of it. Maybe just this once she could.

“If you need help I have the notes,” Merry said. “You can borrow them, but you have to promise to give them back. Or…”

“Or the castration, yeah.”

Merry flushed and began rifling through her bag for her geology notebook.

“I have a better idea. Why don’t you and I meet up later and you can tutor me?”

“That doesn’t sound like a better idea. That just sounds like you taking advantage of my good will.”

The corners of Owen’s mouth twitched. He found her funny. “Look, you’re probably way smarter at this stuff than I am. I mean, who cares about… rocks?”

“The exam isn’t on rocks,” Merry said. “It’s on minerals.”

“Those are rocks.”

“Rocks are made of minerals.”

Owen waved a hand at her. “See you’re proving my point. I can’t wrap my head around it. I’d be way better off if you taught me.”

“Merry…” Tabby said. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, impatient.

“Wait for me outside. I’ll be right there.”

Tabby sighed and followed Mund out the door. Merry turned to shut off her laptop. Before she could, she heard the sound of a chair scraping against the cafe floor. Owen had positioned his seat next to hers.

“Did you make that?” He was staring at her laptop screen. The Photoshop window with her graphic design homework was still up. Merry quickly went to close the screen, but he shooed her hands out of the way. “It’s cool. The bugs.”

“It’s not done yet,” Merry said, her face beat red. “I don’t even like it. It’s not good.”

“Did you draw them?”

“Yes.”

“They look realistic.”

Merry stewed in her own embarrassment as Owen continued to study her drawings. She’d sketched them a while ago on a family vacation down south. She’d sat for hours in the field around their summer house waiting for dragonflies. They were messy, sketched fast since the dragonflies wouldn’t stick around too long. She had to copy the details out of books.

“You can draw me sometime, if you want.” Owen said. She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“I don’t draw people.”

Merry snapped her laptop closed and started collecting the rest of her things. Owen watched her, grinning to himself.

“So what about the tutoring?” he asked. ‘It’d really suck if I failed.”

Merry considered him a moment. His messy hair, his teeth, the sturdy muscles of his arms. She looked away, hoping he couldn’t see her red face. Just as bad as the barista. Maybe worse.

“If you show up at the library tonight--8 o’clock--I might be there.”

Owen grinned. “It’s a date.”

“Not a date.” Merry picked up her backpack and slung it over one shoulder. “It’s charity.”

And with that she walked out of the cafe, leaving Owen and the row bros behind, wondering what the hell she was getting herself into.

[pardontheglueman]

The Christmas Message

Three sleeps before Christmas, Leigh found herself startled awake in the middle of the night by the utterly impossible sound of falling snow. Leigh knew that this phenomenon couldn’t really be happening, knew that the sensation she felt deep in her bones was inexplicable, that even a million snowflakes, woven into one unfathomably magical snowfall, could never make so much as a single sliver of noise as they settled upon the face of the earth, knew that even the heaviest snowfall is masked by the infinitesimal ticking of the bedroom clock, as it measures out the slow, circuitous, passage of time. Nevertheless, the fact remained: a midnight snowfall had mysteriously disturbed her rest. 

Leigh lay motionless for the longest while. As she listened to the percussive sound of the snow rap against the misted glass of her bedroom window, she sought to persuade herself that the icy drumbeat might be explained away as a simple hail-storm, or by an angular wind rasping against the treetops or, more imaginatively, as the ricochet of white lightening deflected sharply from the rows of smoke-smudged rooftops opposite. Deep down, though, she sensed that there was nothing to disturb the louring night other than the lonesome murmuring of the moonlit snow.  Leigh tried to calm her breathing, to think beyond the strange turbulence outside. Something about the music of the snow thrumming along the power lines had unnerved her. With her eyes squeezed shut, she imagined a plume of incandescent snow spreading beyond her garden, engulfing the whole of the town before disappearing into the darkling night.                                                                                                 

                                Leigh had always loved snow, loved nothing better than to trek playfully across an unblemished landscape first thing of a winter morning. She delighted in leaving her size five footprints on the newly-minted surface while daydreaming of sledding toward the Pole. She liked to see a hard rind of crusted snow packed tight against the windscreens of parked cars, or blown up against the driveways of the expensively furnished houses on Cardiff Road. She liked rolling stupendously large snowballs just for the sake of it, although she sometimes put her hard work to good use by aiming them at unsuspecting snowmen, congratulating herself with an excited whoop each time she dislodged one of the oddly misshapen heads from its roly-poly body. She studied the greened mountains that turned impossibly white between the closing of her eyes last thing at night and their opening again first thing in the morning.  She even ordered the ranks of Christmas cards on the dining room mantelpiece solely with regard to the amount of snow pictured on them, placing those with idyllic, wintry snapshots, even if they were from obscure aunts she had never met, in front of the cartoonish offerings hand-delivered by her best friends. She liked shaking snow-globes furiously until the mini-blizzards she created seemed ready to shatter the glass in her hand..

Leigh believed that snow brought an air of mystery to her drab old town. She believed in the power of snow, like magic, to deceive the eye, to trick the grubby, littered streets of her estate into becoming a vast, white wilderness ripe for exploration and discovery. She loved snow most of all, though, because her father had loved snow. She remembered a night when he propped a kitchen chair against the back door and sat there for hours on end watching the snow falling from a Christmas sky, determined to remain at his sentry post until the flakes dwindled down to nothing or he simply fell asleep, whichever came first. It hadn’t snowed at Christmas for three years, though, and even then it was little more than thin sleet, late on Boxing Day, that had failed to settle. Her mother had let her stay up late that night to see if the snow amounted to anything. They drank milky coffee together and watched in disappointment as the slivers of sleet turned to unwelcome rain.

‘It just doesn’t snow like it used to when I was a girl’, her Mam had observed, looking wonderingly at an old photo of herself perched on her home-made sled with a smile blossoming on her face as big as the Brecon Beacons itself. ‘The most we get these days is a dusting that’s gone before you know it’. ‘Dad always used to say that snow fell like manna from heaven when he was a boy’, Leigh replied, her voice snagging against the still-raw memory of her father’s voice echoing throughout the house.

Sometimes, she asked her mother to tell her about the great snowfall of 1963, when bakers’ vans got stuck in the snow by the dozen and her Grandfather had stupidly got himself lost in a blizzard on his way for a swift pint in Rhydyfelin Non-Pol. Her Grandfather had a soft spot for snow too, especially if it resulted in a whole fleet of 132’s being marooned in the freezing tundra of Maerdy bus station, leaving him unable to get into work for a day or two!                                                                                                                     Leigh, smiling at the memory of those conversations, reached under her pillow and checked her watch, only to find that Old Father Time had somehow nodded off, or that the world had seemingly snowed itself to a standstill. She lay there a while longer, listening to the cold clacking of the snow while summoning up the courage to look outside. When she eventually pulled back the curtain her room was lit suddenly with the luminous glow from an astonishing snowfall that had somehow drifted all the way up to her bedroom window. She looked up at the sky through a tremulous swirl of flakes that ricocheted against each other in the freezing wind and was surprised to see that Eglwysilan Mountain had disappeared altogether behind a fog of snow.

It was then that she looked down into her garden and saw the strangest sight. Her name had been carved deeply into the brittle snow. She blinked in exaggerated fashion a half-dozen times, then let out a thin whistle and a fat giggle, both at exactly the same time; a neat trick that she had only recently perfected, and of which she was still immensely proud! She stared at her name for the longest time, then cŵtched herself into a ball and watched the blizzard blow for another hour, expecting at any moment that her name would vanish forever under the rushing of the snow. Instead, her name became cemented in the blue ice, shining crystal clear in the snow-light. She imagined God, in his heaven, looking down and reading her name out to the angels. She imagined her father doing the same.

For a while, soon after his passing, Leigh had spent her evenings in her father’s old room, leafing through rows and rows of his books in an attempt to rekindle her memories of him. She was disappointed, though, to find no trace of his daft sense of humour sandwiched between the yellowing pages of ‘The Great Gatsby’ or ‘Tess of The D’Ubervilles’. She felt there was nothing in either book that was revelatory, nothing that offered a new clue to his character, nothing at all that would stop her memories of him from evaporating with the passing years.  

When dawn broke she dressed, sprayed on the last drops of her White Musk perfume and went to stand quietly in the centre of the garden. The snow continued to fall heavily about her and it became impossible to see the sky through the kaleidoscope of snowflakes that dappled the air. Because it was Saturday she’d let her mother lie in and, anyway, she didn’t feel like talking to anyone, not to a single person on earth. She was transfixed by the message in the snow. What could it possibly mean?  There was no rational explanation for it. She had understood that much immediately. 

Nobody, not even the class clown Martin Pryce, who had been nursing a crush on her since primary school, would be crawling around her Antarctic garden in the middle of the night trying to sculpt a declaration of undying love into the freezing snow. For a while, she considered the possibility that the word etched into her garden was supposed to be sleigh and that the letter S had been lost in the drifting snow. However, that seemed an even more ridiculous explanation. It was more magical, more mysterious than that, she was sure of it. What else could explain her name still being preserved there, throughout an endless snow-squall?                                                                     

Leigh decided not to tell her Mam about the bizarre message. Instead, she took refuge in her room, making up an excuse that she was having a Christmas Movie day - a triple-decker of It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and Muppet Christmas Carol. She spent the day, though, mostly watching the unrelenting snowfall, her thoughts drifting off into the dreamy whiteness outside her window. Inexplicably, her name did not vanish but remained firmly embedded in the snow. Exhausted by a mixture of worry and excitement, Leigh fell asleep before supper. 

When the sunlight fizzed between the blinds, catching the girl a glancing blow across the temple she stirred and began, at once, to remember the mystery of the snow. She rolled across the bed and raised the blinds. The snow had continued to fall between the constellations the whole night long and now, in the fresh snow, underneath her name, the words ‘BE MERRY’ had been chiselled into the pallid surface. Someone, somewhere, was sending her a message.  She was unsurprised when she began to cry. She felt a surge of loneliness sweep through her body and lodge squarely behind her eyes. She waited a long while for the redness around her eyes to melt and for her headache to simmer down before attempting breakfast. She picked up a handful of mail, blotted with fresh snow, from the rumpled doormat and yawned her way into the kitchen. She made herself a coffee and a boiled egg. She thought hard about telling her Mam about the message in the garden. She pictured an uneasy smile spreading over her Mam’s face mid-explanation. Her Mam had a lopsided sort of smile that occasionally hung about the corners of her mouth a fraction too long as if it didn’t know where to go when the fleeting moment of happiness that had prompted its surprised appearance had passed. She looked at the boiled egg and grinned, the half-hacked shell dangling over the edges of the eggcup reminded her of one of her mum’s sad, unfinished smiles.

She retreated, instead, to her bedroom with the intention of listening to her father’s favourite festive record, ‘Christmas Greetings with Perry Como’, an album that was played faithfully in the run-up to Christmas each year. She didn’t play the record, though, preferring to sit in silence while watching the crumbling snow slip through the cracks of a gloomy sky.  Eventually, she drifted off to sleep in the pale shadow of the snow, as the pleasant voices of carollers exchanging their Merry Christmas’ carried across the town’s snow-cusped streets. When Leigh went downstairs for her tea she found her mother writing Christmas Cards and listening to “Fairy Tale of New York”. Her mother had a tear in her eye, which she quickly blinked away.

‘Can you believe it’s still snowing?’ her Mam asked. ‘What’s the forecast say, Mam?’ ‘It’s a bit strange, love. They say it’s stopped snowing everywhere, but right here. I can’t really account for it!  It’s raining down the road in Nantgarw, and your Nan says it’s been tipping down in Pentre all day too. It seems that good old Ponty is the only place in the whole of Wales that’s set for a white Christmas this year!’   Leigh sat down by her Mam’s side ‘Mam, were you crying because of Dad?’ Leigh asked, quietly. ‘It’s okay, love, it’s just the time of the year. I should be getting used to it by now’. Leigh gave her mum’s hand a squeeze. There is no getting used to it, though, is there, she thought to herself. ‘Do you remember any of Dad’s Christmas stories, Leigh?’ ‘There were so many, Mam - ‘Rudolph’s Ruined Reputation’, where Rudolph, of all reindeer, got himself lost on another foggy Christmas Eve, ‘The Golden Key’, where the key for the toy factory went missing just as it was time to load up Santa’s sleigh, and then there was ‘Heatwave’, where unusually clement weather threatened Christmas!) They both laughed out loud. ‘The course of Christmas never did run smooth, Mam.’ ‘But there was always a happy ending, Leigh’. Santa always got that sleigh off the ground in the end and there were always presents under the tree. Your Dad cherished his childhood Christmases, he wanted you and your sister to feel the same way’. Leigh gave her Mam a long hug, which was her way of trying to fend off the familiar sadness that clouded over her when she talked about her father. ‘You just missed Louise on the phone. She’ll be arriving around six if the trains are on time’. Leigh was only half-listening to the news of her older sister’s Christmas plans. She was still thinking of her father.

   Her Dad had loved everything about Christmas; from opening the first door of his Advent calendar on the 1st of December to singing Auld Lang Syne at the top of his voice at midnight on the 31st and anything remotely Christmassy that went on in between. Each year his ritual would be the same; re-reading A Christmas Carol on his commute to and from work, decorating the tree to the sound of Perry Como’s “Home For The Holidays”, highlighting his favourite festive films in the bumper edition of the Radio Times, taking us to see Father Christmas switch on the Taff Street lights and even to meet him in person, usually in Caerphilly Garden Centre, or, in later years, when the old gent seemed to be going up in the world, in his very own grotto in Ynysanghard Park!  For Leigh, Christmas simply hadn’t been Christmas since her dad’s passing. For sure, she still liked Christmas, but it was just that she couldn’t bring herself to love it anymore.                                                        

To stop herself from thinking, Leigh went out into the street to inspect the snowmen along her road. Some, it had to be said, were pretty poor specimens, but there they all stood; bellies haphazardly bloated by the whisking snow. She couldn’t help but laugh at their inelegance, clad as they were in ill-fitting Santa hats and threadbare scarves. Most had carroty noses that jutted out from king-sized heads and scraggly branches of uneven length for arms. She watched a family; a mother and father, two girls, one around her own age, and a very small boy move their belongings into the house opposite. As the children carried their small cases back and forth up the snow-chalked driveway she waved in their direction. They gladly returned her gesture, the boy wishing her a Merry Christmas at the top of his voice. She felt cheered and, without noticing, began to murmur a song her Dad would sing to her at Christmas when she was very small -

‘Christmas Day is on its way It’s time for Kris Kringle Through the hush of a starry night You can hear his sleigh bells jingle’

She tried to recollect the rest of the song but could only bring to mind the chorus

‘Good old Santa, Good old Santa Claus What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours You’re a good old Santa Claus’.

She stayed in the street for a very long time because she sensed that the crisp evening air was somehow redolent with the fragrance of Christmas. A change in the direction of the wind blew a puff of snow into her eyes, so she huddled back in the doorway, watching a sluggish convoy of snowploughs wind through the neon-lit lanes, until the wintry night began to close in, and she could see her breath unspool in the starlight.

Louise was only 10 minutes late. She came in carrying a suitcase and a bag of presents, singing “Home for the Holidays” so boisterously that she scared the neighbour’s cat off the relative warmth of the windowsill and out onto the cold lawn. You always knew when Louise was home from University, because the quiet house would suddenly be filled, room by room, with the sound of her enthusiastic singing. Leigh gave her sister a cŵtch and helped her stack the presents under the tree before blurting out, ‘Come and see the garden, college girl’ I’ve seen enough snow for one day, Leigh’ ‘There’s something out there I want to show you’ ‘It’s too cold and I’ve just got these boots off’ joked Louise ‘Okay, come to my bedroom, you can see from the window’ They raced each other upstairs and jumped on the bed. Louise pulled up the blind and waited for Louise’s reaction. ‘Uh, okay, you’ve written your name in the snow. It’s mad, Leigh, you must have frozen out there, How many hours did it take you? ‘I didn’t write it’ ‘Mam then, how long was Mam out there’? ‘Mam doesn’t even know it’s there. It just appeared, overnight. It’s snowed solidly for twenty-four hours but it hasn’t swept the name away. If it snowed for twenty-four days and twenty-four nights, it still wouldn’t. It’s magic, Louise, or a miracle, or something. I heard it fall, too, Louise, that first night the snow actually woke me, me of all people! It’s not ordinary snow. It can’t be’.

Louise felt Leigh’s hand tighten in hers, as they continued to watch clusters of snowflakes quake and tremble in the wind. 

                                                                    Louise lay on the bed and Leigh cŵtched up to her until their mum called them for supper. After Louise had told them, at great length, how rehearsals for ‘A Christmas Carol’ were going - she was playing the part of Fred’s wife (again) - she put on her duffle coat and went into the back garden. The skyline and the snowfall were an indistinguishable grey. The words were still engraved on a slab of settled snow, clear and visible until the streetlights dimmed, one by one, and night fell over the white gardens of the Valley.

In the morning, while Leigh slept, Louise went again to look at the message. The snow still fell in abundance. She looked for the longest time and a tear settled in the corner of her eye. When she went inside she woke her sister gently and brought her a breakfast of tea and toast. ‘There are more words. Look and see’.

Leigh peered through the frosted pane and the glimmering snow falling over the garden. The message had been added to again during the night, but now seemed complete. LEIGH BE MERRY CHRISTMAS AND FOREVER XXXX

Leigh said nothing. She sat at the window, brushing her long, brown hair, while staring out at the marbled garden. A cool riff of wind blew a dusting of flakes from the old, ice-capped, willow trees that rimmed the lawn.       Louise said quietly ‘Come downstairs when you’ve finished, I want to show you something’. When Leigh came down she saw her sister sitting at the dining room table surrounded by a stack of Christmas Cards ‘Louise, it’s too late to be sending cards. It’s Christmas Eve, though we can pop one across to the new family opposite. ‘They seem very nice’.  ‘These cards have already been sent, to you, to me, and to Mam, a long time ago. Come and read them’ Leigh picked up a Christmas card that showed a small cottage in the snow, with a Christmas robin in the foreground. She opened up the card. Inside, in her father’s untidy handwriting, was a declaration to her mum To Karen, Be Merry, Christmas and forever Love, Gary XXXX Louise handed her another card that showed a jolly Santa flying his sleigh through the thickening snow at the pole To my Darling daughter Becky - Leigh BE MERRY Christmas and forever xxxxx Dad P.S, only seventeen days to go!!!!

Leigh sorted through the cards, they were all written by her Dad and they were all signed off the exact same way. Tears burnt her eyes as she read and re-read them, trying to picture her father saying the words ‘Don’t you remember, Leigh, Dad always used to say that ‘Be Merry, Christmas and forever’ ‘It can’t be Dad, Louise. You know it can’t ‘. ‘I’m sure it is. Who else would write it? We should show Mam’. ‘No’, shouted Leigh, and ran upstairs crying. For what seemed an age she stared blankly through the window at the message written in the midst of the immeasurable snow.                                                                   Before lunch, Leigh put on her favourite Christmas jumper (Santa shaking hands with a snowman), her matching hat and scarf and went into the garden. The rooftops remained cloaked in snow, and the sky was shrouded in a frail mist. Snow continued to fall about her as she walked toward the message. Leigh reached down to touch the snow, tracing her hand along the powdered groove of the first letter. As she crumbled the stone-cold snow between her fingers she began to tremble and her heart started to jitterbug crazily inside of her. Visions of her past, present and future went bobsleighing before her big brown eyes and she started to swoon. She fell backward, arms outstretched, into the snow and lay there flat on her back. Her mother happened to glance out of the kitchen window, at precisely the time Leigh crash-landed in the snow. Her mum smiled; making a snow angel was such a cool thing to do she thought as she carried a tray of mince pies toward the oven.

As Leigh lay motionless, visions began to swirl about her like cascading snow; she saw herself first as a child, being raised high by her Dad, to deposit a golden star on the top of their Christmas tree; then she saw her teenage self being chased around the garden by her Uncle, who just happened to be carrying an armful of heavy-duty snowballs. Suddenly, she was walking up the aisle to be married, and at Christmas too! One of her bridesmaids was the girl who had just moved in across the street, the other with bobbed rose-gold hair, was her sister. The groom looked handsome and, indeed, somewhat familiar. Leigh couldn’t entirely dismiss the sickening possibility that it was Martin Pryce, her unrequited Romeo from junior school. A hard-edged breeze jostled snow shavings loose from the overhanging branches and the flakes fell like confetti upon the couple as they walked hand in hand toward their wedding car.

Then she could hear the voices of children, echoing across a snow-frosted mountain. Twin girls, who looked the spit of her sister, and an older boy, were sledding down an alabaster slope. The boy turned toward her and shouted ‘are you watching, Mam?’. She looked carefully at the lively boy as he smiled, and there really was no mistaking that smile. She’d seen it time and again in family albums – it was her father’s smile, the one captured in her most treasured photo of her dad pulling a small dinghy through the green shallows of Tenby’s South Beach, a bountiful smile broadening across his face, frozen forever in time. The small boy, battling his way through the bone-sapping snow had the exact same purposeful smile as his late Grandfather.

‘I’m watching, Ga’, you’re super- brave’.  She heard her answer ferried back on the breeze and felt a cheery glow as the boy responded by thrusting his gloved thumbs up into the whitening air. He held the pose long enough for his mother to document his triumph over Mother Nature and then re-launched himself onto his sled and whooshed back down the snow-flossed slope for the hundredth time. Then she was awake, terribly cold and confused by the sight of her mother and her sister bending over her, trying to lift her gently from the clasp of the snow. She remembered nothing of the flurry of visions, but she was aware of an intense feeling of well-being and the pleasant warmth of absolute happiness spreading over her as she looked into the concerned face of her big sister.                                                                                   That night it had stopped snowing, as she somehow knew in her heart that it must. Soon the snow would start to thaw, gradually thinning into clumps of slush to be kicked haphazardly against the kerbsides by bands of small boys making the streets playable for the traditional Boxing Day footie matches that would spring up out of nowhere. Coal-grey rain would soon resume its routine dominance of the valley landscape, washing away the snow for another year. Leigh woke early on Christmas Day to find that the message had disappeared sometime in her sleep, but she was not saddened by the discovery. As dusk fell, she stood in the garden to better hear the Christmas bells ring out and to look up at the night sky and the braille of bluish stars that divined a pathway through the heavens leading, she felt certain now, from one world to the next.

In the turmoil of the last few days, her memories had become unmoored, had drifted dangerously in the cross-currents between the past and the present. She had, though, discovered a precious secret in that journey between the distant poles of life and death. The becalming knowledge that as we seek to make our way in this world memory can grant us safe passage, and provide us with a place of sanctuary in which to rest until the storms of unimaginable loss finally blow themselves out. 

Leigh knew, then, the true meaning of her father’s Christmas message. Knew, deep down in her soul, that the communion between father and daughter would last forever. Knowing that was so, Leigh fell in love with Christmas and with life all over again.

The End

[allyinthekeyofx]

GENESIS Chapter 21 & 22

[colemanspilde]

The Director and The Muse

How An Indie Darling Finally Gave An Oscar Nominee Characters Worth Loving

From Hitchcock and Hedren to Tarantino and Thurman, there has been no shortage of skilled directors collaborating with young ingénues – but in this age when viewers go to the movies not just for escapism but for relatable filmmaking, it can take a special partnership to make a movie that combines those two traits in a way that continues to affect the ticketholder long after the theater lights go up. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig are one such recent auteur/actor pairing. Beginning with their first collaboration in 2010’s “Greenberg,” Baumbach and his muse have managed to churn out three films that not only afford the viewer a great deal of laughs, but a deep sense of empathy.

Since Noah Baumbach appeared on the scene with his first film “Kicking and Screaming,” which depicted a group friends trying to figure out their next steps after graduating college, his work as a director and writer has been a favorite of young arthouse film lovers – those who prefer their coffee black, their cinema French, and their cigarettes lit. Baumbach’s films found a place amongst those who liked to watch studies of irredeemable characters that crashed and burned. Characters like Bernard Berkman in “The Squid and The Whale” and Margot in “Margot at The Wedding” weren’t exactly people to root for – the former a cheating husband with little regard to his family and the latter a young author using her sister’s life experiences for her own writing.

In “Greenberg,” Baumbach’s next major film, Ben Stiller stars as the titular character: a stilted and apathetic middle aged man that moves into his brother’s home after suffering a nervous breakdown – typical Baumbach fare. While not a bad film altogether, “Greenberg” suffers from the lack of likability of it’s title character – a curious notion, as Baumbach’s previous work never felt quite as hard to stomach, even with characters that aren’t emotionally appealing. The difference: Greta Gerwig, a new face in Baumbach’s filmography that proved to be the film’s glowing light, making it difficult for the audience to settle on the gloom of the film’s subject. The first few minutes of the film are spent following Gerwig’s character Florence as she runs errands throughout Los Angeles. In just these short scenes, Gerwig proved herself to be one of the most likable characters in Baumbach’s filmography up to that point. Florence has a wonderful kind of kind glow about her. She waves to a car that lets her into the next lane but moments later tells her boss Phillip Greenberg (Chris Messina) that she doesn’t need her check that day and will gladly take it the next. Her character is eager to please and reluctant to be an inconvenience, leaving most viewers with any sense of decency able to relate to a character that they barely know.

Enter Ben Stiller, the introverted and neurotic Roger Greenberg, whose entire shtick is writing letters to businesses he feels could be doing better while lacking the drive to improve his own life. Roger is by all standards a classic Baumbach antihero. Roger and Florence soon become acquainted when Florence comes to pick up her check the next day, and the two quickly become love interests after that. Through the rest of the film, we’re given very little insight into what drives Roger. His interactions with Florence seem to always end in arguments, a fact that makes very little sense to the audience to due Roger’s paper-thin backstory. The two characters quickly reconcile each time only to end up fighting again, leaving the viewer to become jaded towards the film early on – Roger’s neuroticisms become tiresome before the second act even begins – until Gerwig returns to recapture the viewers attention. The push and pull between the two characters does set up a laugh here an there, but overall Greenberg is ironically swallowed by the same lack of joyousness that it’s title character exhibits. Still, it is Gerwig that holds the film together even when it’s practically begging to fall apart. Towards the end of the film, Florence looks Roger dead in the eye and asks, “Do you think you could love me?” Most audiences will find themselves looking back at Gerwig with a resounding yes.

In Gerwig’s Florence, Baumbach seemed to have found one of his first characters that actually felt lovable, a fact that he clearly took note of when he brought on Gerwig not just as the star of his next film “Frances Ha,” but also as the co-writer. The additional credit for Ms. Gerwig gives the film a sense of levity, which is both a departure for Baumbach as well as a breath of fresh air for his loyal fans and new viewers alike.

As a black and white film that recalls new wave cinema and focuses on a twenty something trying to find herself in modern New York, it would be easy for audiences to refute “Frances Ha” as pretentious independent arthouse fodder – and perhaps under Baumbach alone it may have been – but the addition of Gerwig turns what could easily have been a mundane character study of a black sheep into a deft and relatable comedy with one of the most likable titular characters in recent memory.

During the opening scenes of the film, audiences are introduced to Frances and her best friend/roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner) through a montage of the two gallivanting through New York and bantering in their apartment. At the end of this scene, Sophie protests when Frances tries to leave the bed to go sleep in her own, asking her to stay under the condition that Frances takes her socks off, to which she obliges. From these opening few minutes, it is clear that we are seeing a different side of Baumbach. Not only are we paired with two female leads - something Baumbach had only done once before - but they already seem to be inherently likable, but relatable as well.

In the next scene, Frances asks Sophie to tell her “the story of us,” which affords the viewer a sort of warm insight into the private details of their best friendship as well as a brief perspective on both character’s goals and how those things weave into the girls’ relationship with one another. This is another relatively new approach for Baumbach. Within the first few minutes of the film the audience is given a clear glimpse of who these characters are and what drives them both personally and as friends. Sophie wants to be a publishing mogul while Frances wants to be a world famous modern dancer, with Sophie publishing a coffee table book filled with pictures of Frances. Unlike “Greenberg,” which left people wondering what exactly was the driving force in the main character’s actions, “Frances Ha” lets us know right away exactly who these two women are. This allows the audience to enjoy the film as it unfolds before them instead of overthinking the characters intentions.

When Sophie decides not to renew their lease in favor of moving to her dream neighborhood, a rift begins to form between the two friends that sends Frances on a nomadic journey through the boroughs of New York. In the film’s most exuberant scene, Frances runs, skips, and twirls her way through the streets of Chinatown to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” after finding out that she’ll be moving in with two of her friends. This scene is the clearest testament to Gerwig’s affect on Baumbach’s filmmaking. In any other film of his, a scene even half this jovial would have felt completely out of place, but seeing Gerwig naturalistically gallivanting through New York without a care in the world somehow seems to fit into the narrative perfectly under her skilled performance.

But “Frances Ha” doesn’t always maintain this jubilant nature. As the film continues, we see Sophie and Frances drift further apart. During a visit to Frances’ Chinatown apartment, the two friends have a much more stilted conversational tone than they did when they were regaling the story of their friendship’s potential future. After a few quick jab’s at Frances’ new hipster digs, Frances hits back at Sophie regarding her Wall Street-type boyfriend, calling him “the kind of guy that buys a black leather couch and is like ‘I love it!’” It’s not only Baumbach and Gerwig’s sharply written line that delivers the laughs, but the fact that as it’s spoken, Frances is propping herself up against the wall into an impromptu headstand. Watching this, one can’t help but realize that even under Baumbach’s skilled direction the line would have simply fallen flat without Gerwig’s skilled delivery and characterization. By now it’s clear, these two bring out the best in each other.

In another scene shortly after, Frances is no longer living in Chinatown and everything seems to be up in the air for our protagonist. She’s living with an acquaintance from the dance company she works for, too reluctant to contact Sophie after drunkenly yelling at her to not “treat [her] like a three hour brunch friend,” and now at a dinner party full of people she barely knows. Gerwig is particularly skilled at making awkward small talk seem charming, and Baumbach efficiently conveys this, as he cuts back and forth to different people around the table becoming enamored with Frances, a fact that she doesn’t even seem to notice.

After dinner, while the party is winding down, Frances speaks up and delivers a small, drunken monologue about the feeling of discovering someone’s one true person in this world. Gerwig and Baumbach keep a particularly careful balance in this scene, with only two cutaways to different characters while the camera focuses steadily on Gerwig, who delivers the film’s most poignant moment – one of the best in Baumbach’s entire catalogue.

By the final scene of “Frances Ha,” Sophie and Frances have reconciled and all of the characters that came and went in the brief glimpse of Frances’ life show up to watch an independent dance that Frances organized herself. After the show, while talking to one of the choreographers at her company, Frances turns and catches Sophie’s eye, causing the two best friends to smile, and the viewer instantly recalls Frances’ dinner party monologue, realizing that Sophie has been Frances’ person in this life the entire time. It isn’t romantic, but it is subtly sincere and most importantly, heartwarmingly relatable.

The final moments of the film see Frances getting settled into her new apartment, the first time she has lived alone since we’ve met her. Gerwig’s mannerisms give off the air of a new, more confident Frances. In the second to last shot of the film, Frances writes her name on a slip of paper for her mailbox. She turns around from her desk and looks at her new apartment, and for the first time in the entire film, the shot slowly zooms in on Frances’ face while she smiles and takes in her surroundings. Before this, the film had played out entirely in stationary single or dolly shots, but it is important to note that Baumbach saved the one zoom of the entire film for this scene. The shot makes us feel like we went from watching a stranger’s life unfold from afar to making us feel like Frances is a close friend, possibly even a version of ourselves. Without Gerwig’s performance, this shot would’ve been entirely devoid of any romanticism, but her presence in the film turns what could have been just another Baumbach picture into his magnum opus.

In “Mistress America,” the duo’s third and most recent outing, we are once again treated to a glimpse of the intimate connection between two enigmatic women. Unlike “Frances Ha,” these characters wouldn’t necessarily be labeled as friends so much as a misguided mentor and her would be ward. Gerwig plays Brooke Cardinas, a flighty semi-socialite in New York who does everything and nothing, only finding a temporary purpose when her soon to be stepsister Tracy (Lola Kirk) calls her out of the blue.

Baumbach and Gerwig’s third collaboration is their zaniest yet. While “Greenberg” was a complete dramedy and “Frances Ha” could be called a coming of age story, it’s clear from the moment we first see Gerwig’s Brooke in the middle of Times Square shakily stepping down the stairs with her arms outstretched proclaiming “Welcome to The Great White Way!” – and watching her realize that she said it a few steps too early – that “Mistress America” is about to be an outright screwball comedy. For the next few scenes the audience is swept up in Brooke and Tracy’s burgeoning sisterhood. Gerwig delivers lines at a lightning fast pace with absolutely expert timing. While dancing together, Tracy briefly mentions her mother to which Brooke quicky and coolly interjects, “I watched my mother die…everyone I love dies!” While it would be easy to turn this character into someone with zero depth who says things like this just for laughs, Gerwig plays Brooke as a character whose quirks don’t just come at face value, even if the viewer doesn’t realize it until the latter half of the film.

In a callback to a plot device from Baumbach’s “Margot at The Wedding,” Tracy is using Brooke’s flaky yet entrancing behavior as material for a story she plans on submitting to her school’s literary society. However, Kirk’s character isn’t simply lured in by Brooke’s eventual implosion alone, but by her unabashed confidence as well. While Hurricane Brooke sweeps up everyone in her path, Tracy stays in the eye of the storm, becoming a more assured young woman in her own right thanks to Brooke’s fearlessness. The two stars have palpable chemistry which Baumbach uses to his advantage with whip smart dialogue, cuts, and pacing so fast that it will make your head spin.

Gerwig’s Brooke is a much different character than Florence or Frances, and Baumbach is sure to depict her that way. Brooke’s personality is much more established than the timid Florence and more neurotic than Frances. However, Frances and Brooke do have similarities. During a particular scene in “Frances Ha,” Frances mutters, “I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet.” Brooke’s character, while slightly more grown up, is certainly not a real person yet either, though if she’s embarrassed about it the audience would never know. In fact, her driving force is to become an actual adult. Brooke craves to be free from running between odd jobs as a Soul Cycle instructor and a middle school math tutor, and she sees a restaurant venture as her ticket out, catapulting the film’s narrative into its second half.

It’s here where the screwball really becomes apparent and where Gerwig and Baumbach do their best work in the film. Brooke suddenly whisks us off to Connecticut (with Tracy and two friends in tow) to hit up her ex best friend/current nemesis Mamie-Claire, now married to Brooke’s ex boyfriend, for an investment. Once we arrive, we’re swept into the action as Brooke, Tracy, Mamie-Claire, and the rest of the cast shuffle through the expansive glass house. Each character maneuvers through the scene with careful precision, and Baumbach lets the jokes rip fast, barely giving the viewer a chance to catch their breath before the next one hits. Baumbach isn’t a complete stranger to this type of comedy, but keeping Gerwig at the forefront during this pivotal scene is key to the film’s charm.

Baumbach’s films have often been a study of youth and what to do with it, and as this scene comes to a head, Brooke receives a call from her father notifying her that he’s decided not to go through with the wedding and that she and Tracy will not become sisters after all. When he asks what Brooke will do for Thanksgiving, she laments, “I’ll probably just end up doing something depressing but young.” Suddenly, Brooke fits into Gerwig/Baumbach mold. Florence is afraid of spending her youth making bad decisions with men, Frances can’t figure out what to do with herself or her youth, and Brooke is desperately trying to hang onto hers. In the scene just prior to this, Tracy narrates a part of the story she’s writing about her stepsister, describing Brooke’s youth as something that “had died, and [Brooke] was dragging around the decaying carcass.” The film concludes with one final line from Tracy’s story, describing Brooke as someone that other people are drawn to, calling her a “beacon of hope.”

A beacon of hope seems to be a fitting definition of Greta Gerwig in the Noah Baumbach universe. Prior to Gerwig’s turn as Florence in “Greenberg,” Baumbach was simply a notorious auteur in the new wave of modern arthouse cinema intended for young adults. His characters weren’t incredibly nuanced, didn’t have many motivating factors, and were designed as studies of unsavory personality types. If moviegoers saw themselves in a Baumbach film, it was likely to be in a single action of one of his famously unlikable characters. But with the addition of Greta Gerwig as both star and writing partner, Baumbach allowed his movies to harbor both characters and plots that are fully developed and relatable – giving the audience an incredibly affecting yet satisfying experience; a visionary director with an enigmatic star together to create movie magic.