#probably should go make links like this for strength/melody

[aritsukemo]

Behind Closed Curtains | Freminét

Freminét x Hydro Archon GN!reader

Warnings: None. Fanfic under the cut.

A/N: Happy New Year's Eve! I got inspired to write this a few weeks ago when I read @freminet-writings's hcs about Freminét dating male Hydro Archon!reader but lost motivation and picked this back up so I apologize if this fic seems kinda all over the place or a little awkward! 😓

Also here's the link to that hc. I really liked it and if you like Freminet, I definitely think you should check out @freminet-writings's blog! She makes some really nice fluffy hcs/drabbles in my opinion! :D

Crystal rain pours from the sky, dripping it's gems upon anything it could touch and drenching it. It's steady flow produces a serene melody, one that never gets old no matter how many times it's replayed.

As nice as this may be to some, the diver wishes it would stop. If the fairytales hold any weight to them it means somewhere out there, amidst this clear, crystal rain, the hydro dragon weeps, most likely submerged in or surrounded by water, alone and upset. It makes him tempted to chant, to plead with the dragon not to cry and to allow the rain to pass. However, deeming his situation, that wouldn't be appropriate..

"Ah! My most devoted follower! Do tell me, what brings you here at such an hour? I know you yearned to feel the greatness and power that my presence exudes, but you do know that even the most divine must rest, yes?"

Piercing mismatched ocean gaze dressed in gaudy, expensive fabrics and topped off with a matching hat, Y/n de Fontaine sits before Freminét. Their aura of godliness surrounding them like a king's cloak along with a crown of intimidation to go with it that makes them untouchable and unapproachable to some people in the water nation.

However, despite their loud words and even louder demeanor, they sit back and wait. Silently and patiently waiting for him to speak his mind about whatever reason he has to visit them so late at night, hoping and praying that it's something small and not some unexpected disaster.

After all, playing this role has posed to be a problem when it comes to comforting others. Having to constantly talk about being above everyone else.. Most people would take your genuine attempts as you pitying them..

"..I'm sorry for bothering you. I know you're probably tired.." He begins, snapping you away from your thoughts immediately, "I just wanted to check on you."

"Hm?"

"I.. I wanted to make sure you were alright," He clarifies. His voice, although a bit shaky, a little louder and more clear to hear than before.

"Lyney mentioned that you seemed upset about something earlier. I was planning on visiting then, but I didn't want him getting suspicious.. Uhm, a- anyways, are you alright? If there's something bothering you, Y/n, you can tell me. I..don't have the strength or power to promise you that I'll do something about whatever upsets you but I can, at the very least, listen to you talk about what's troubling you.."

Now that's not what you were expecting. Or rather, something you didn't want to expect. It was a small, quick slip from character, that's all. Everyone else in the Opera House brushed it off, why couldn't that magician do the same? Now your boyfriend sits here, concerned and asking questions you can't answer truthfully.

"Hehehehe~! Well aren't you the most adorable little devotee! For you to think that something could bother me, the Hydro Archon and ruler of Fontaine, is both cute and foolishly naïve of you!" You boast before another fit of giggles take over, "Worry not, for I am just fine! Nothing in this world could possibly bother me! Not a human nor a god from another nation.. Hah! Not even Celestia!"

"I understand your concern for me. After all, I'm constantly juggling tasks no ordinary human like yourself could ever imagine dealing with. It must be challenging for me, right? Well you're dead wrong! I am the embodiment of the all powerful! Nothing is hard for me! Hahaha~!"

"..Is that really true?" Freminét asks.

"You dare doubt me?" Y/n retorts, crossing their arms and holding them against their chest.

"No," He answers immediately only to pause, eventually following up with a small, "Well, maybe a little.. But if you're really fine, I'll believe you. Have a good night, Y/n."

And with that he gets up, but to his surprise, the archon before him, the same one who just told him that literally nothing in this world could trouble them, seemed rather distressed. Even going as far as to stand up from their comfortable seat to call out to him.

"Wait, where are you going?" You force out quickly. Freminét halts and looks back. A look of genuine confusion etched on his freckled face.

"I'm going back to the House of the Hearth. I had to sneak out in order to avoid anyone catching me.. I should head back before they find out I'm not in bed. I wouldn't want them to get worried and waste their time looking for me.."

"No!" You shriek. Freminét jumps. You notice and quickly clear your throat, "I- I mean, no..~" You drawl, "You can't, I uh.. I haven't.. Our time here isn't up yet! Yeah.. You can't leave because you haven't spent your full time here yet!"

"What do you mean?"

"W- Well you came here to talk to me and might I remind you that I am a god! When you converse with me, it's tradition to stay for at least a full hour before leaving so that I may properly bless you with good faith and fortune and all of that.."

A stretch, but not entirely false. For centuries, religious families from all over the nation have scheduled meetings just to worship you and hear your words of good faith for them and their families, most of which staying for hours on end until they're forced to leave by the Gardes so technically you aren't lying to him. Twisting the truth, maybe. But definitely not lying!

An expression of skepticism crosses the driver's face for a long moment as he mulls over your words in silence. A couple seconds pass, each one making you more and more nervous. After all, there's no official rule or anything that states that he has to stay here so if he really wanted to, he could leave and you'd let him.

Despite what you may say, you can't exactly force him. Anyone else? Sure, you'd have no problem making them do as you please. But Freminét? No, no, no. You see, he's what one would call special. He has leverage over you. Leverage that no one else has. And that leverage is being your beloved partner in secret. If he were to tell or make any indication that he's uncomfortable or upset, you'd do just about anything you could to make him feel better which of course includes letting him leave this Opera House if that's what he'd truly want.

"..Hm, I guess I have no choice but to stay here until time is up.. I've been here for some time so I probably don't have much time left here anyway."

"On the contrary! It's been not but a few minutes since you've sat down so you have a lot more time here than you think." You say.

"But I've been here for almost a half an hour.."

"Archons see time differently than humans, my dear," You explain, "While as time may seem faster to you, it's much different for me. So by my calculations, you still have at least fifty minutes left with me before you can go. Leaving any sooner will count as great disrespect!"

Did that come off too strong? Were you too loud? Ooh.. You hope Freminet didn't feel too pressured by what you said. You just want—no, you need him to stay a little longer. You need to relish in the comfort that his presence brings you just a little longer.

..You want to be selfish just a little longer..please..

Freminet's lips part to speak only to immediately shut. Avoiding eye contact, he walks back over to the couch across from yours and sits down, his eyes remaining glued to the floor. Holding back a sigh, you plop back down on the cushion, staring down at your gloved hands which are clasped together in your lap.

Now you've done it. You should've just stayed quiet and let him leave! Now he's uncomfortable and you two are sitting in this awkward silence that's absolutely killing you!

How can you fix this? Should you resort to flattery? Agh, no. Freminet wouldn't like that. Should you just carry on conversation? What would you talk about.. The sea, maybe?

"Tell me, how has your little companion been faring? I noticed that you didn't bring him with you," You inquire, not ready to look up and see his face just yet and deciding to keep your gaze fixed on your hands.

Freminét looks up, a little surprised. You were interested in Pers? And here he thought you were silently judging him for carrying him around all of the time..

"He's doing fine. I left him back at the House of the Hearth to keep Thelxie company. Although..I was reluctant in doing so.."

"Thelxie? Are you referring to the Water Imp in that children's fairytale? How and why would Pers be keeping him company?"

"It's a little complicated.. I've accepted a commission to make a toy and per my commissioner's request, I've named the toy Thelxie," He explains.

"Hm, I'll admit that you've peaked my interest," You gain the courage to look back up at Freminét. Deciding not to comment on the way he immediately looks away from you upon locking eyes with you, "You've mentioned before that you don't take commissions and prefer to work at your own pace without feeling pressured. What about this commission is so different from the rest? Well, besides the fact that you're basing the toy off a children-eating water imp from a children's tale."

It takes a moment for Freminét to respond and when he finally does, he speaks in a lower tone, "I.. hm.."

"What is it?" You ask, "I know me being interested in things other than an excellent performance is hard to come by and I've been told of the pressure one feels with faced against my expectations, but you should at least try to answer my questions."

"I'm sorry," Freminét mumbles quickly, beginning to fiddle with the skin of his fingers, "But.. For the sake of her privacy, I can't really go into any further detail about this.."

And the silence returns and oh, how you've come to absolutely despise it since your relationship with the diver began. You want to say something. You even fix your lips, waiting for the words to come to you, but they don't. Leaving you looking rather dumbstruck as a result.

What is wrong with you? He's just a person. Someone without any kind of intimidating aura or power to him so why are you hesitating? Since you can't talk about the commission, change the subject. Simple and easy, right?

Don't be so scared. It's just Freminét. Yes, no reason to be nervous. It's just Freminét. It's just Freminét—

"Can you..hold me?" Wait, what are you saying? That wasn't apart of the script! What are you doing? "Please.. It doesn't have to be for too long and you may leave immediately afterwards if you'd like..I just.. I really would like it if..uhm.."

Face warmed, avoiding eye contact, the light sweating.. What? Have you really reduced yourself to some shy background character who's only purpose in the film is to stammer out stupid sentences occasionally? That's no fit for someone who's been acting for as long as you have. You need to fix this. You need to save this performance!

But what do you say? Nothing's coming to mind. All you have to say is a few simple words with your usual confident tone and then divert the conversation to something else until you can recover completely. That's it. That all you have to do so why are freezing up? Don't tell me you suddenly have stage fright or something. That would be unacceptable.

You've been silent for too long. Any longer and you won't be able to salvage this no matter what you say! So, speak. Say something! Anything—!

Cool hands finally snap you from your thoughts. One snakes around your waist and the other rest on the side of your head. You fall to the side and your stiff body collides with smooth clothing before you can react.

"Is this.. Are you..okay with this position?" His voice comes out as a small whisper, just a bit quieter than normal, "My mother.. She could always tell when I was upset. She would hold me just like this and sing in my ears until I felt better.. I- I'm not a good singer like she was, but I can tell you about some of the clockworks I've been working on lately. I'd probably bore you though.."

This definitely wasn't apart of the script. What should you do? Pull away? Chastise him for touching you so freely? You really don't want to do that. His cool embrace, the smell of the ocean on his clothing that for some reason makes you feel the opposite of the uneasy feeling you'd usually get from smelling seawater.. This feels so nice..safe almost.. Can't you just add this in or something? Surely it wouldn't be too out of character for you to indulge in this, right? Right?

At the dejecting sound of your silence, Freminét's already loose grip loosens even more to the point you barely feel his hands on you, "I'm sorry.. I've never done this so I.." He trails off as he watches you pull his arm so that it wraps around you again. The previous statement he was planning to finish having long been forgotten as he seems more focused on you and how embarrassingly warm his face has gotten than whatever he was planning to say.

You arms hesitantly cage his waist, keeping his body flush against you as you begin mumbling something incoherent under your breath. You bury your face—which is beginning to become unbearably warm itself—into his shoulder and with your mouth closer to his ear, he was finally able to hear you..

"Even archons need to be pampered occasionally, divinity or not. You should be honored to share such close proximity with me and bask in the elegance that is me so, uhm..please stay for as long as you're able.."

With a brief wave of confidence that washes over him, Freminét brings his other hand back up to your head, this time slowly running his fingers through your hair, "Oh..alright," He mumbles against your hair after a while.

Another silence comes creeping in yet it no longer carries that thick, unpleasant air of awkwardness with it. Instead, it's light, almost soothing, just like his touch. It was as if the lights behind the closed curtains had dimmed a little and although it didn't stop your performance, it made it a little more bearable.

He makes things just a little more bearable for you, even though he isn't aware of it.

Dividers were made by me, pictures used are from Pinterest, post formatting is inspired by @xxsabitoxx

[phantom-curve]

did I shatter you? pt. 2

part one: you’re not my homeland anymore | part two: when a good man hurts you | part three: there’s an ache in you, put there by the ache in me | part four: my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand | epilogue: what died didn’t stay dead

It was him. There was no denying those overgrown brown locks peeking out from his favorite orange beanie or the ocean within his eyes. His feet skipped a beat at the sound of his name, head raising to stare at her with the pain of a thousand heartaches lurking behind his cloudy gaze. Her chest burned. Both of them in so much pain, so close, and yet still unable to cross the chasm that had opened between them. They stared at each other for a long moment, the snow dampened silence spinning out between them. Luke’s face was pale, his eyes bloodshot from crying or lack of sleep she couldn’t possibly know anymore. He sniffed, raising his arm to wipe at his nose with the back of his overlarge flannel sleeve. So, crying it was. Julie felt like she was staring at a ghost.

“What are you doing here?”

They spoke at the same time, their voices overlapping in a sloppy mess of harmonies they hadn’t practiced in too long. Julie’s heart stuttered at the sound of Luke’s low vibrato. He stared at her as if she was the answer to a prayer he hadn’t known he’d been asking for. Electricity sparked between them, bodies drawing closer together without conscious thought from either one. Julie hadn’t been this close to him for a year. His hair was longer, even more unruly than it had been in the years they’d been together. His face looked tired; brows heavy with the weight of whatever battles he had been fighting alone. Always alone now. Her fingertips itched with the desire to reach up and stroke his cheek. She didn’t have that kind of unspoken permission anymore.

She turned on her heel without a word, soundlessly making her way back to the very same bench she had just vacated. Her steps were sure, no hesitation to wait and see if he would follow. She knew he would. His quiet steps provided the only other noise in the frigid air. They didn’t touch as they each took a seat on the farthest corners of the bench. It was an unspoken agreement to keep that space between them. They needed a buffer zone for this conversation. Julie fidgeted with her necklaces; fingers tucked underneath a chunky knit scarf so they would stay far away from Luke’s body. She watched him tuck his own hands underneath his thighs. At least the feeling was mutual.

Snow accumulated around them in pristine, white piles. Julie watched it gradually stack on her knees, shivered underneath the wetness of slowly melting flakes in her hair. She would be damned if she broke this silence. Luke had come here. He knew how much it had always meant to her and he had come here, on a December day so close to the one she hated most. He could speak first. It only took a few minutes longer for him to break.

“I’ve missed you.”

Three simple little words, yet they cut through her like a finely sharpened blade. She sucked in an icy breath, bracing herself against the burn in her chest.

“You don’t get to say that to me.”

Her words were low, barely an octave above a growl. She stared at him head on, saw him flinch away from the raw emotion in her eyes.

“You chose to leave. You didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say. You left before I could even try to stop you. You don’t get to miss me.”

Her voice had grown stronger with each pointed statement. It was true that Luke had chosen to cut and run instead of stick around and fight for her. But it was also true that she hadn’t chased him down. She had accepted the end of their relationship in silence, too tired at that point to care enough to fight back. She was writing a revisionist history here, and she could tell by the way his eyes blazed that he wasn’t going to let her get away with it. He angled his body towards hers, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets. Probably so he couldn’t get overworked with hand gestures that she would tease him about.

“You didn’t try to stop me. You never tried. Just let Andi reach out with tour negotiations and recording schedules so you could avoid me at all costs while we fell apart! How the hell was I supposed to talk to you without a middleman? You know I hate sending messages through other people.”

“How else was I supposed to talk to you, Luke?” His entire body shivered at the sound of his name leaving her lips. “You barely came home anymore. The only time I really saw you was at the studio and I was tired of trying to communicate with you through song lyrics. Couples should be able to talk to each other!”

“Oh, like you ‘talked’ to Nick?” He scoffed.

“Jesus Christ, not this shit again. Those tabloid photos were taken from the worst possible angle and there was absolutely no kissing involved, but even if there was, what do you care? I kiss Reggie and Alex on the cheek all the time. Why shouldn’t I kiss an old friend like Nick on the cheek? Just because you said not to? When have you ever not done something just because I asked?”

“That’s different! Reggie and Alex respect you, they respect us! Nick was always just waiting in the wings for me to fuck up so he could swoop in.”

Julie let out a humorless chuckle and shot to her feet, unable to keep the frustrated, restless energy out of her legs as she paced back and forth in front of the bench. Luke stayed seated, but his body was vibrating with tension. She could see the strain in his neck as he fought to keep himself in check.

“That’s where you’re wrong. Nick has never done anything but respect us, and he hasn’t been waiting around for anything! You did just fine burning our relationship to the ground on your own. Don’t stand there holding matches and then blame him because he once owned a lighter! Even before we met, Nick was nothing more than a friend. After you...”

She bit her lip to stop the confession. Luke glared and she suddenly couldn’t help herself, the words tumbling out in a desperate whisper.

“After I met you it was over for me. No one else could possibly compare.”

It felt like they were having the exact same fight they had every day leading to their break-up. Luke never confident enough, Julie never willing to shrink herself for the sake of his pride. She had been a fool to think a year apart would change them. It was always like this. All the ways their souls fit so seamlessly, all the ways they connected, were the same things that sabotaged them every time. They would come together in a moment of perfect harmony, and then suddenly the notes and lyrics would sour, and they would be right back at square one.

Luke was constantly fighting to prove himself, pushing harder in the studio, nagging at everyone in the band until every note was perfect. His passion and drive were never-ending. It wasn’t enough for Julie and The Phantoms to be as successful as they were. Nothing could erase the sting of losing Sunset Curve to Bobby right before they were about to make it big. Nothing could erase the way his parents had dismissed his work, refused to help him fight the label Bobby had moved to because they didn’t see a point to it. Julie still remembered how angry Luke had been when she first met him. Ready to fight the entire world and then some.

She had thought working together was softening him, thought that maybe she was healing him. Things had been so good for the first few years after they made it big. Some lightness had returned to him, and the fame they found as a band had given him the exact connection with the world that he had always craved when playing. Julie had thought that would be enough for him. She had thought she would be enough for him. It was far too late when she realized nothing would ever fill that hole in his heart, not even her.

He had kept those wounds hidden, letting them fester and rot until his entire system was corrupted. She couldn’t fight a ghost, and he let the betrayal poison him against her more and more every day. She would never forget the final words he had screamed at her on this exact boardwalk as they fought about why he cared that Bobby was releasing another album. Would never forget the heavy silence that had fallen over the two of them as they landed like a bomb, tearing her apart in an instant. Well maybe if you wrote music worth stealing you would understand! She had felt their connection snap in that moment, had known with every fiber of her being that it was the end then.

She had left New York that same day. Escaped back to LA and their house in the hills to wait for him, but he never returned to her. It had been the last time she saw him until this exact moment. Julie had dropped The Phantoms from her name and pretended it didn’t feel like she had cut off one of her limbs in the process. She nearly sold her soul to the label reworking her contract into that of a solo artist, and the press had a field day with the breakup since no one would talk about it. Reggie and Alex had come by to collect Luke’s things. The three of them still got together every week they were in town at the same time, but it wasn’t the same. The empty fourth chair at their brunch table always felt haunted.

Luke stared up at her from his position on the bench. Her words had drained the fight right out of him. She watched him crumple, felt her own ire dim. He was deviating from the script now. He was supposed to stand up and yell back at her about how she didn’t understand his pain. He wasn’t supposed to look so defeated already.

“You’re right.”

His confession was a raspy whisper, both words pulled from the deepest part of his soul. She came to a stop in front of him, mouth falling open. He lifted his head, their eyes locking. Tears clung to his lashes.

“It was my fault. I ruined it.”

Her heart flared at his words. He had never before admitted that his attitude had helped lead to their downfall. She felt herself drift towards him, drawn in by the genuine anguish she could see etched into every line of his face. He didn’t reach for her, not even when their knees touched. It was all she could do to stop herself from pulling him close.

“You didn’t deserve that. We didn’t deserve that. I let myself get so worked up over beating Bobby at his own game that I didn’t realize I had already won the better prize.”

Julie felt her breath catch in her throat. She was drowning in the unending depths of his ocean eyes, the pain there just as intense and familiar as her own.

“Losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Worse than losing Sunset Curve and my songs. Worse than all the bullshit with my parents. Losing you was like losing myself.”

A muffled sob managed to work its way up and out of her throat. Luke’s hands lifted and clenched before he dropped them back to land on his thighs with a smack that echoed in the frozen air. Still so close and so far away at the exact same time.

“I tried so hard, Luke. Nothing I did was ever enough, and you were so angry all the time.”

Now he did stand, jumping up so fast he nearly knocked her flat on her back. His hands shot out to clasp her forearms. She could feel her skin light on fire under his touch even beneath the layers of winter clothing.

“Not with you, Julie. Never with you.”

She nearly wept to hear him say her name like that again. No frustration or annoyance, just pure affection and adoration. Like her name alone was the highest power he could call to.

“You were the one light in my life. I just didn’t see it until you were gone, and I was alone in the darkness. I’ll never regret anything as much as I regret hurting you.”

Julie let herself fall into him, the soft-spoken words a balm to her ragged soul. His arms raised to tuck her body fully into his, the two of them fitting together like puzzle pieces. It wasn’t everything, wasn’t a full reckoning of their past just yet, but it was a start.

[andraaste]

I am not your enemy - Lance fanfiction part 24

Hello Guardians ! I’ve the honor to announce that chapter 24 of I am not your enemy is online ! The machine is on the way aha, the chapters are linked to my greatest pleasure.

I wish you a good read, and don’t hesitate to give me your feedback ✨

Ps : What are your speculations for the next ? 👀

Chapter 24 : Don’t blame me for hugging you

The smell of blood filled my nostrils, leaving an unpleasant taste of iron in my mouth.

But fatigue won quickly, seizing me more and more, it pushed my eyes to close despite my fears. Stripped of all energy, I wanted to abandon everything, to forget these last nightmarish hours and their physical vestiges that marked my body. Every one of my muscles hurt incredibly as I lay on the hard mattress. However, I had no desire to sit up and leave the protective vice in which I was confused in this misty sleep.

Between the space of our intertwined arms, Lance had fallen asleep in just a few seconds, his fever having visibly drained him of his last strength. This is how I savored the peaceful silence of the room, the calm breathing of the dragon as the only melody.

How long had we been in this bed ?

Making do with my fatigue, I opened my eyelids to shamelessly observe this man who finally abandoned himself without restraint in my arms, the light from the ceiling illuminating us with its harsh brightness. Earlier, Lance had been more...open. And fragile, to me. He had clearly stated that I could hurt him in other ways than physically, and since then I couldn't help wondering what exactly he meant by that and, above all, if that was enough to imply  that his feelings for me had changed.

My pain increased when I observed the many red traces that crisscrossed his face with features always so straight and perfect, lingering for a moment on the white scar that barred his nose. How many would he have now ?

Lazily, my fingers began to caress his rough cheek with a light gesture as I tried in vain to silence my thoughts.

Several questions floated in my mind, grabbing all my attention.

My hand froze between us for a moment before slowly descending. Without thinking, I covered her heart with my warm palm.

Was it beating the same as mine ?

Suddenly, the door leaf behind me swung open, making me jump in surprise. Instinctively, I tore myself from the arms of the young man in order to maintain a certain distance between us, but I knew it was a waste of time because Nevra looked at us with a somewhat intrigued look, probably not expecting to find us like this.

For only reaction, the dragon growled while slapping a hand on his face.

- I'm sorry to wake you up, but I have to talk to Lance immediately now that we've been able to get away from the lands of Genkaku, said the vampire without the slightest ounce of regret in his eyes. I'm waiting for you in the office.

The door closed behind him, leaving us in a strangely heavy silence. The Obsidian leader withdrew his hand while staring blankly at his arm, which a moment earlier had held me tightly pressed against him.

A look of gloom covered his features.

- I hadn't thought about the fact that we might be seen but you quickly got out of my arms, well done.

Guilt overwhelmed me then under his hurt gaze. No...

- It's not...

- Forget it, he cut me off. I'm just tired, it puts me in a bad mood.

His face hardened with pain as he struggled to straighten himself up in bed. I stood up to help him when his big hand stopped me in my tracks.

- I'm better Andraste, don't worry about me.

- You have a lot of fever and your wounds are still open, you should let me help you.

The young man ignored my words.

- I think you'd better go back to your room, the others will probably be embarrassed to find you in the men's dormitory. And... he hesitated for a moment then continued, surprisingly more gently, you better take care of your wounds now. You can ask Koori if you need help.

Then, giving me no opportunity to respond, he slipped out into the hallway without looking back.

Damn it !

I buried my face in my hands, blowing loudly as I passed.

Why did every time our relationship took one step forward, we had to take two steps back ? I was seriously beginning to wonder if we would ever manage to find common ground because, in this close bond, I think we were both far too open-hearted.

Stop hurting us continually.

Pushing the duvet with a big movement, I extricated myself from the rest of our body heat to find the cold parquet floor, letting the anger rise in me.

- Very well Don Juan, you're changing your mood with me again, I said while pulling the duvet again to put it back on the couch correctly. Oh but no worries, I'm not mad. No no no, absolutely not !

I turned around feverishly when I came across Mathieu's uncomfortable gaze, a damp shower towel resting on his shoulder.

- Oh, Mathieu...

The latter planted a hand in his hair, ruffling it in the process.

- I'm glad to see that you're in good shape, Andraste.

That'll teach you to talk to yourself, silly.

- Yes indeed, it could have been worse. I see you're fine too, that's the main thing, I say while aiming at him with one hand. I've to go take a shower, I think I really need it. See you tomorrow Mathieu, rest well.

I closed the bathroom door behind me, keeping my hands on its wooden panel.

Despite his more than unpleasant last words, I couldn't help worrying about Lance's condition. His interview with Nevra was in danger of dragging on when he really needed a rest.

One by one, I painstakingly removed my damaged clothes, all my muscles hurting excruciatingly now that the adrenaline had subsided. Covered in blood, dirt and probably more, I would send them to a corner of the room before turning on the water. The steam soon began to cloud the mirror in front of me.

Arms along the body, I observed myself without real attention when a detail caught my tired gaze. My belly felt a little different. I was a little different. My fingers traveled the area concerned without really being able to put my finger on this strange impression.

Finally, I entered the shower with a weary gesture.  Raising my head, I let the water run down my face, slowly removing the vestiges of this adventure in the snowy lands. I was lifting my wrist to grab some soap when my eyes were drawn to dark marks on my wrist.

Tenjin.

In an instant, I relived those moments spent alongside this despicable man. His huge icy hands, his claws that had pierced my skin many times.

When I brought the soap to me, my hand began to shake unreasonably. I closed my eyes as tears mingled with the water that washed over me, clutching the small object hungrily between my fingers.

- It's over, Andraste. He won't be able to do anything to you anymore... I tried to repeat myself between my trembling teeth, tightening my arms morbidly around my body.

But my tears increased, flowing more and more under the deafening rustle of the jet.

The faces of my teammates appeared to me. I saw them fighting again, defending themselves against these faithless enemies.

All of this took me way too far back seven years.

Was I really made for this world ? On Earth, I had always led a simple, even comfortable life. Some of my ancestors might well have been aengels, but I had never been prepared for it.

And that I didn't feel able to confront it.

Suddenly, I noticed with astonishment that the door slammed behind me. I jerked my head around, fleetingly brushing strands of wet hair against my cheeks.

My eyes widened when I saw Lance standing behind me. Nonchalantly, he took off his shoes and then part of his clothes, showing the already bloodstained bandages that surrounded him.

His gaze never left me as he opened the shower window.

Without giving me time to understand, his hands then surrounded me, pressing my dripping body against his. His face dug into my hair as his fingers dug behind my head.  Stunned, I remained motionless for a long moment while the water soaked the fabrics that still covered him. Lance hugged me tightly, almost desperately. Slowly, I lifted my arms to his shoulders, wrapping him in turn with my still shaking hands.

Putting his lips against my neck, I felt them move in an inaudible complaint.

Was he... crying ?

His broad shoulders rounded under my hands, his palms pressed me even harder.

It was in this cramped shower, with white, sinuous walls, that Lance finally lowered his barriers for me. And it was without a word, not even a sound escaping him, that he allowed me to really discover him for the very first time.

When the jerking of his shoulders calmed down until it finally stopped, I decided to slowly pull away from him. The dragon didn't protest, even when I pulled his face up to mine.

- Forgive me, my angel, he begged me. I know this isn't the first and probably won't be the last time I've done this, but I'm sincerely sorry. Tonight, when I saw you in front of Tenjin... I was mortified at the thought of losing the dearest person to me again. I know I don't have the right, but I don't go a single day without dragging my remorse. Everything I've done haunts me, it constantly eats me up. How can I deserve to breathe again when I could do this to my own brother ? I'm a monster, Andraste. What gives me hope that I can rest in your arms ? Why are you letting me do this ?

In his tirade, his fingernails pressed hard against my flesh.

- Lance, I can't tell you it's not a big deal, I started in an almost impassive voice. Your actions are... terrible. And unfortunately, no one will ever really forget them. But...

Despite myself, my intonation began to vibrate. Talking about all this... it was just impossible.

- But don't blame me for hugging you. Because I'll do it again, again and again, even when you finally realize that you have the right to deserve the love of others. I know that you have always felt alone, and apart, even misunderstood, but I also know that you have never learned to receive. Valkyon... he died knowing full well what was going to happen, because he never lost his faith in you, I added much more difficultly. I'm sure he knew you would one day find your redemption, because despite all these unforgivable acts, you're still the only one who keeps me going. I'm not saying that things are simple, or even that they'll eventually become so...

His eyes locked on mine so intently that I lost myself in them for a moment. Thus, it's with all my will that I managed to finish the sentence which finally freed the air trapped in his rib cage.

- But don't prevent me from always falling a little more in love with you.

In truth,

no matter how hard I looked, I didn't have the faintest idea

when I fell deeply in love with my worst enemy.

(Chapter 25)

[toxicjayhoe]

Maximum Decibels

Shinsou Hitoshi/Reader (Some description of OC)

Alternate Universe - No Quirks (My Hero Academia)

Concerts

Song fic

Explicit Sexual Content

Some Plot ish?

Alcohol

One night stand

Word count : 3000

Songs in this fic : You'll be fine by Palaye Royale I don't feel quite right by Palaye Royale

If he hadn’t been wearing earplugs, he was sure the noise blaring from the low-quality speakers to his right would have blown out his ear drums. Thankfully, Shinso wasn’t an amateur. He lived for his Friday and Saturday nights out.

Music was a big part of his life, just like most people, he assumed. He wasn’t much of the type of person to go out to big venues and rather preferred to go to see and support local bands that played in small, overcrowded bars.

He had never liked crowds, but they seemed easier to manage emotionally in seedy local venues. Physically, not so much.

Another black clothed mosh pitter was dramatically thrown from the pit and headed his way. It was common courtesy to just push them back in.

As with any show, it was impossible to escape the movements of others, shoulders and elbows bumping him as they swayed to the music or a hand on the back as they made their way to the front of the stage, hoping for a better view.

Shinso didn’t care about the view. He just wanted to stand there, lean against the wall behind him, and let the music wash over him, let it drown out all of his worries and anxieties.

The opener for the night said their thanks as they finished the last song of their set. The crowd hollered and screamed their appreciation before the horde scurried off like cockroaches towards either the bar, the bathroom or outside for a smoke.

A sigh left his lips as his shoulders relaxed before stretching his arms over his head, walking over to sit on the edge on the stage as the next band began setting up their gear.

Purple eyes scanned the darkly lit room, pausing on the small groups that remained on the lower floor, analyzing but not judging.

Everyone looked similar. Dark clothes, bright hair. He wasn’t much different. He stared at his old, dirty black boots. His favorite pair. Despite their age, the steel toes were still in perfect shape. He didn’t trust anything more than these boots.

His black jeans were ripped at the knees and, if they hadn’t been tucked into his boots, you could see the tears at the cuffs. His brow furrowed at the thought. He should probably get a new decent pair to replace them. He probably wouldn’t.

There were a few familiar faces, of course. He was here every weekend, and he wasn’t the only one. He didn’t talk to any of them, really. They had a silent understanding, nodding their greetings and nothing more.

Just the way he liked it.

The lights dimmed, announcing the start of the next band. He pushed himself up and walked back over to his wall as everyone started to pour back in.

He closed his eyes, intently listening to the melodies and beats. He wasn’t one to dance, but he lost himself to the music that day, allowing his head to bob to the rhythm.

~~

Fridays were reserved for new bands to make their debut, while Saturdays were a mix of newcomers and the local classics.

He enjoyed getting acquainted with new sounds, but there was just something about recognizing a song with just the first few notes that made life worth living.

Tonight happened to be one of those nights. The bands started earlier and finished later. It was the one night of the week that he would come home exhausted and actually be able to get a full night's worth of sleep.

Saturdays were also the one night he would grab a few drinks of whiskey to accompany the thrum of vibrations coursing through his entire body. The alcohol just seemed to elevate the sensations while also allowing him to relax and enjoy his night more thoroughly.

Earplugs in and glass in hand, he leaned against his usual wall. Everyone was dressed much the same as usual and he was no exception. The only difference? He’d opted on a simple white t-shirt.

He found himself pushing his hair back as he scanned the faces in the crowd, his eyes lidded and his own expression passive. As usual.

A loud laugh caught his attention and his gaze darted to the offender. A flash of red hair, glasses and a crooked grin as the woman continued to laugh at whatever her friends were talking about.

It wasn’t a face he recognized, but it was one that he would remember. He tore his eyes away when he felt the familiar static in the air as the band began their sound check.

~~

The second band had just finished their set and Shinso headed to the bar with the rest of the crowd for another glass of whiskey. He put it on his tab. He’d pay at the end of the night.

He took in his surroundings, much like he always did as he leaned on the bar while he waited for his drink. The place was much busier than usual, which made sense considering the line up. Some of his favorite locals were playing and he felt considerably lucky to experience them all play the same night.

In fact, the last band of the night had become fairly well known over the last few years and they were on tour in their hometown. He smiled at the thought. He remembered their first show.

His cup was placed by his arm and he nodded at the bartender in thanks. People had already begun to pile back in and he quickened his pace to stand in his usual spot.  It was the perfect spot. Close enough to the stage that he wasn’t blinded by the mob jumping and far enough that he wasn’t completely trapped between sweaty bodies.

The familiar buzz of the mics being tested filled the room. Sipping the amber liquid, a small smile painted Shinso’s lips.

He was in for a wild night, he could tell with how rowdy the crowd was, shouting as soon the drummer began beating against the kick drum. Shinso tapped his foot to the rhythm.

As soon as he finished his third whiskey, his eyes caught a flash of yellow in the pit. Shinso dragged his gaze higher, from the hem of the patterned skirt and over a band shirt, red hair bouncing with the force of the woman’s movements.

Shinso stared as she sang with the band, her nose scrunched up and eyes closed, body swaying to the chaotic rhythm. Her every expression was exactly how he felt while listening to music, only he kept it in his heart instead of showing on his sleeve.

The brightness in her eyes when she opened them rivaled that of the sun’s.

He tore his gaze away and pressed his back into the wall.

And if he stole quick glances her way for the remainder of the song, he convinced himself it was just part of his routine; constantly scanning his surroundings. Analyzing and never judging.

~~

Shinso never understood how bars had so few bathrooms. While the line for the boy’s bathroom was nowhere near as long as the girl’s, it still annoyed him.

Honestly, it should be illegal to have people waiting so long for a basic need.

Just as he’d made it to the front of the line, he caught sight of the pretty little redhead exiting the bathroom with her small group of friends. She was covering her mouth in an attempt to stifle her laugh, her arm linked with her multicolor-haired friend in the leather jacket.

He hadn’t noticed it was his turn for the bathroom until the guy behind him cleared his throat.

~~

For some reason, Shinso had drinken far more than what he was used to. He was feeling rather good and very relaxed, a gentle smile plastered on his face, his eyes even more lidded than his norm.

His fingers tapped to the beat against his leg, eyes concentrated on whatever band they were on now. He couldn’t remember. He’d even left the comfort of his wall to get a better look at the stage. He only regretted it a little as more people bumped into him, a few almost knocking him over.

Shinso couldn’t remember the last time he felt this at ease in a crowd. Most likely never, if his memory served him right.

A more rough and up beat song was currently playing and the crowd was going absolutely wild, more and more people joining the center of the floor to jump and dance and push against the pit.

He changed his stance to have a bit more stability. He was glad he did, his arms instinctively reaching out as a small body collided with his, making him stagger.

Gazing down at the person in his arms, his breath caught in his throat as he hauled her up quickly.

She was even prettier up close.

The grin he received in thanks made his heart flutter, her hand squeezing his arm before she darted off into the pit again, disappearing from sight.

Shinso felt his legs moving of their own accord, towards the pit in an attempt to follow her.

~~

I see it in those eyes

His eyes searched frantically in the horde, sweaty bodies pressing into him, moving him into one direction to the next. Shinso felt like he was in the ocean, the waves dragging him back and forth with a strength he couldn’t begin to comprehend.

You're so damn hypnotized

The lights from above the stage danced across them, illuminating the crowd long enough for him to catch a glimpse of red hair.

You wanted to pretend the voice you hear is not in your head

She was facing one of her friends, the tallest one of the three, the two of them grinning as they screamed the lyrics at each other, jumping in time with the crowd.

You wanted to escape, but you're not that innocent

Shinso couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that she seemed to know all the lyrics by heart, knew exactly when the pauses were and when the band would pick it up again.

Just stay for the show, don't turn around

His heart hammered in his chest.

I'm looking for you out there

He was unmoving, barely registering the bodies colliding with his, eyes still trained onto the group of friends as they bobbed their heads to the beat.

I’m looking for truth inside your stare

She had her back turned to him, but her friend with the dark hair did not. Their eyes locked for a moment before she looked away, quickly connecting the dots.

I’m looking for you outside

He could see her moving her lips, no longer singing the song before she motioned towards him. Ginger hair bounced as the redhead snapped her head his way.

'Cause I mean it, no, I mean it, you'll be fine!

The lights passed over the crowd again, allowing them to both see each other clearly. Recognition crossed her features.

I'm looking for you this way

She whispered something to her friends, and they both gave her exasperated looks, hands up in the air in a confused manner. Like they were arguing.

But you don't hear a word I say

Her eyes met his and he didn’t shy away from the intense gaze. It only pulled him forward.

I'm looking for you this time

Shinso saw as the two friends looked at each other, nodding before shoving the redhead towards him. He caught her in his arms again.

'Cause I mean it, yeah, I mean it, you'll be fine!

She was smiling up at him, heat rising on her cheeks at an alarming rate. He could no longer hear the music, just a faint buzz as everything else faded out.

~~

Shinso had grabbed her by the wrist and gently dragged her to his spot at the wall. He could still hear the music but didn’t pay it much mind. He could still feel the vibrations coursing under his skin.

But nothing compared to the way his heart hammered in his chest, his purple eyes peering into hers. They were like sunbursts surrounded by chocolate brown.

His gaze traced down her face, connecting her freckles with his eyes, pausing when he reached an opal adorned nostril piercing, to the matching septum before he reached her cute pink lips.

His tongue darted out, wetting his own lips. Her eyes followed the movement.

Shinso shifted closer, practically towering over her as she watched him through her lashes. He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten so bold. Perhaps it was still the alcohol running through his veins.

Maybe it was whatever connection they seemed to have urging him on.

A new song came on, her eyes lighting up but never leaving his. He watched as she mouthed the words, sending electricity up his spine, heat coiling inside him.

I don't feel quite right

The curl of her lips.

There's something in the air tonight

The suggestion in the way she stared up at him.

Must be the way she's looking at me

Shinso mouthed them along with her.

Is there something wrong

She took a step forward.

Is there something wrong with me

Her hands on the center of his chest, his own arms circling around her waist.

I don't feel quite right

Their lips collided.

~~

Nothing like this had ever happened to Shinso. He never believed he could go through with anything like this.

In fact, the thought had never really crossed his mind.

He fumbled with his keys when they reached his door, the concert completely forgotten.

It was a blur of deep kisses and hands roaming the other’s body with soft but insistent touches.

Pushing her red hair from her shoulder, Shinso dipped his head to her neck, all lips and tongue against salty skin.

Delicate fingers threaded through his hair, gripping tightly when his fingers slipped under her plaid skirt and up the back of her soft thighs, tracing the edges of her panties.

His hands tightened before he heaved her up, her teeth on his bottom lip and she wrapped her legs around his waist.

A soft gasp escaped her when he dropped her onto his bed.

Shinso didn’t move, just stared down at her with lidded eyes. She looked perfect, hair messy, lips swollen, legs spread apart for him like an invitation.

He gladly accepted, crawling between thick thighs, hands on her knees. He spread her wider.

Agile fingers unbuttoned his pants, pushing them lower on his hips before he took over, discarding them somewhere on the floor.

When his cock collided with her heat, they both moaned, hips grinding into each other.

Any doubt he’d had about his current situation flew out the window as he pressed his fingers to her clothed clit.

Her panties were soaked through.

Slowly, he rubbed her little bundle of nerves with two fingers, a third sneaking under the material to feel just how wet she was.

Shinso released a breath he didn’t know he was even holding, hand sliding completely under the fabric and pressing two fingers into her heat.

A different kind of music filled the room. Breathy moans, small whimpers and the wet sound of his fingers inside her. Shinso’s thumb danced rhythmically at her clit, keeping the pressure gentle yet persistent.

His free hand pushed up her shirt roughly just above her bra, exposing her to his hungry eyes.

Cupping one of her breasts firmly, he squeezed into the soft flesh over and over, loving how she filled his large hand perfectly.

Shinso squeezed her nipple through the material of her bra and was very glad he did as her pussy clenched around his fingers still working inside of her, and juices rushed out of her and all over his forearm.

He’d never experienced anything so hot in his life.

When he removed himself from inside her, he chuckled at the desperate whimper she made.

Shinso wasted no time discarding his boxers, pumping himself slowly and groaning as he stared down at her.

He didn’t even bother removing her panties, just pushed them to the side with his cock before sliding in to the hilt.

A new beat could be heard throughout his appartement as he pounded into her rhythmically, her moans urging him on. Deeper, harder, faster before slowing down again, building up the pressure in the pit of his stomach.

His hands gripped her hips as he lost himself in every sensation. The way she tightened around him, the look of her throwing her head back, the glimpse of lust and pleasure in her eyes sent heat from his chest to his dick.

He felt himself twitch inside her.

Shinso could feel she was approaching her crescendo. His hips rolled over and over, pressing onto her clit with every thrust, tempo increasing until her cunt spasmed around his cock, her back arching off the bed.

Shinso fell forward with his hands on either side of her head, eyes locked as he buried himself into her again and again. The look she gave sent Shinso over the edge as he pulled out, spilling himself all over her pretty little skirt.

The image of her would be locked into his core memories for years to come.

He rolled over and laid on his back as they both tried catching their breaths.

The room became quiet as she drifted off. Only then did he allow himself to glance over at her.

Well, I can see the way she sleeps

He was sure he would wake up to her gone.

Tonight, I find a better peace of mind

It didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would.

In her eyes, oh her eyes, oh her eyes, yeah

Shinso stared at her a little longer, a smile plastered on his face.

In her eyes, lord, her eyes, oh her eyes, yeah!

He never learned her name.

Art by me.

I wrote this fic as a birthday gift to myself but I hope you enjoyed!

[dailytomlinson]

A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”

The second takes place a few years later. Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words…” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, what if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?

“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, what if [the next line was] ‘More than a feeling’? Well, that would actually be tight!”

“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live show staple. It’s a mid-tempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock and roll bands of the 21st century.

July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was re-defining the contours of fandom.

It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.

Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of boy band history. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”

In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted only did it once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.

“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatles-esque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, pop-y guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”

“The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” says Carl Falk

To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘N Sync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars.

The Best Face Masks For Running and CyclingHere’s how to stay covered up while on your bike, on a jog, or for your next workout outdoorsAd By Rolling Stone See More

The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”

One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.

“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.

“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”

Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.

“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”

Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.

Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”

Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.

At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”

“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”

At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”

Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.

“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”

Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.

Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack��� and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.

“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”

Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible.

But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.”

“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”

That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”

For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”

“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”

Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.

“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.”

Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.

“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.

“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”

“A lot of the songs were double,” Bunetta says, “like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”

Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.

“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”

He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”

Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.

“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”

A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”

Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.

But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.

“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”

After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”

In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.

“Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing,” Kotecha says

There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”

But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.

“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”

[stylesnews]

A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”

The second takes place a few years later. Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words…” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, what if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?

“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, what if [the next line was] ‘More than a feeling’? Well, that would actually be tight!”

“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live show staple. It’s a mid-tempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock and roll bands of the 21st century.

July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was re-defining the contours of fandom.

It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.

Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of boy band history. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”

In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted only did it once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.

“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatles-esque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, pop-y guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”

“The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” says Carl Falk

To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘N Sync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars.

The Best Face Masks For Running and CyclingHere’s how to stay covered up while on your bike, on a jog, or for your next workout outdoorsAd By Rolling Stone See More

The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”

One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.

“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.

“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”

Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.

“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”

Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.

Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”

Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.

At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”

“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”

At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”

Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.

“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”

Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.

Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack” and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.

“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”

Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible.

But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.”

“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”

That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”

For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”

“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”

Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.

“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.”

Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.

“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.

“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”

“A lot of the songs were double,” Bunetta says, “like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”

Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.

“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”

He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”

Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.

“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”

A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”

Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.

But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.

“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”

After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”

In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.

“Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing,” Kotecha says

There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”

But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.

“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”

[skylarmoon71]

E2 Harrison Wells x Reader- Oneshot (Extra)

"Does it fit?" Harry shakes his head, removing the screw.

"I might have miscalculated the size."

"Wow, you made a mistake. That's impossible."

"Very funny (Y/N)." you just smile, and Harry removes his glasses, heading to get some other screw for the newest of his little gadgets. During the weeks after that little party at Iris's house, you and Harry seem to have gotten closer. Maybe it was the way you could relate. 

You both shared a similar experience. You understood each other. That mutual understanding grew into respect. Now you can't get enough of the grumpy overconfident Harry Wells. Cisco was on a little snack break. You were off your shift, so you thought why not swing by STAR Labs. Now it was just you and Harry, so you settled for helping him with his little experiments.

Taking a seat, you stare at the cup of water on his desk. Harry might be a while, so why not keep yourself entertained. Twiddling your fingers, you watch the water swirl around, rising out of the cup. You make small circles with your index finger, enjoying the patterns it created.

"Having fun." you nearly drop the water, but you catch yourself at the last second, glaring at Harry. 

"I almost caused a short to all these computers." you gesture to the screens right next to you. Harry looks a bit proud that he caught you off guard and you drop the water back into the cup. He takes a seat, but he doesn't return to work, he's looking at you.

"Harry, I hope you're not getting any ideas. I'm not gonna go through some weird experiment." As a scientist you know he can't help but want to test each and every thing. Cisco made you run through so many unnecessary trials when you first discovered your abilities. Some that probably were just for his curiosity.

"I've never had the opportunity to witness you use those abilities up close. We're always facing some kind of danger. "

He's right. When weren't you fighting some crazy meta.

"You can manipulate the water ratio in the body as well." This is the first time he's really taken interest. "Well yeah. Our body's about 60 percent but I guess you already knew that."

"Naturally." you just roll your eyes with a smile.

"Can you show me?" your brows knit.

"Harry, my powers don't work like Barry's. People can get hurt when I.." 

Truth of the matter is you tried to avoid using your powers after you'd almost murdered Calvin's killer. The fear of losing control and offing someone was constantly at the back of your mind.

"I know you." You can see it on his face, he displays nothing but absolute trust. At what point did you become weak to Harry?

"Show me?" He tries again. You don't agree at once, because you're still a little weary. But he trusts you, so what do you really have to fear?

"Okay." you lift your hand, and it's shaking a little. You close your hand to keep it steady. Harry waits patiently for whatever you're about to do. "Can you turn your hand over?" Harry obeys your request, turning his hand over on his lap. Your palm hovers right over it, and he marvels at the fact that his hand lifts on it's own.

He isn't moving a single muscle to assist. Your eyes are intensely concentrated, and he supposes it's the reason he feels nothing but a twitch in his hand. It rises all the way to yours like a puppet on a string, and now your hands are pointed upwards, fingers spread apart. They touch, and Harry's eyes connect with yours. 

"Astonishing." with a shy smile, you take a breath before you stop the action. Harry can no longer feel the pressure aiding him, and he guesses he should move his hand now, but he really doesn't want to.

"I hope it didn't hurt, I was trying my best to deter the pull. With villains I don't have a problem adding force. I'm not really used to applying it under non threatening circumstances."

"I think you've mastered both areas. I didn't feel a thing." you sigh in relief. 

"That's good, I was really worried I'd hurt you."

"Rest assured then, I came out unscathed." He sends you a gentle smile, and it's then you realize your hands are still touching. You're about to pull away, but Harry links your fingers. Those digits slip between yours, causing your heart to stagger.

"H-Harry.."

"It's amazing isn't it, how much you can read from physical contact. How well it conveys what we feel." He places his free hand on the handle of your chair, wheeling you closer. Your breath hitches. Harry really was sneaky. He hasn't released your hand yet, and now your knees brush. You swallow as his eyes seem to penetrate your soul.

He raises his hand, touching your cheek. There's a strong urge to lean into his touch, to fall into this abyss. Harry inches closer, gaze darting between your eyes and your lips. He's just a hairline away. Your eyelids lower and just as you feel the mingling of your breaths, you're smacked back into reality. Pulling back quickly, you scramble to your feet. You're shuffling frantically, eyes beginning to water.

"H-Harry I-I can't I-I need to.." you sob, and Harry rushes to his feet, holding you in his arms. He knows why you're so rattled. Closing your eyes you cry softly. 

"I-I'm so sorry Harry.."

"Shh shh, you have nothing to apologize for. I was acting on my own impulses." It's been years to slowly move on. It's only been a year for you, and you're still finding your way through it all.

"You won't lose me (Y/N)."

He knows, and understands. You're terrified to put yourself out there because you're afraid that if you do, that love will be ripped from you again. Your hold tightens on his body, and he runs his arms over your back, trying to calm you. Rocking side to side, he hums a soft tone, and you can feel the tension leaving your body. Your cries die out slowly, but he doesn't let go. You need this, and so does he. 

He waits until you're ready. When He feels you pulling back slowly, he loosens his hold. "Are you alright?" you nod, and Harry wipes the remnants of tears from your eyes. You appreciate the gesture.

 "I'm sorry I pushed you, I more than anyone should be understanding of your situation. "

"It's okay Harry." You'd never blame him for such a thing, or be angry. For you, there's been a spark for a while now. Between your lectures when he goes at it with Cisco, or just your daily bickers when Harry feels the need to prove his intelligence on a case. "It's not that I'm not attracted to you Harry."

"I would hope not, I'm very attractive." he grins, and you smack his shoulder. "I'm trying to be serious here you jerk." you can't help but laugh, and Harry loves it. He much prefers this sound.

"I get it, you need time to heal. There's no shame in admitting you're still in pain (Y/N). Something like that, love like that, it doesn't vanish overnight.

 "This is one of the reasons that you've fallen for the dark haired scientist. As intolerable as he can be at times, at his core, he's understanding, loyal and caring. "I'll give you space to-'

"No!" He's alarmed at the yell. You step closer, and Harry can't stop his eyes from straying to your lips. Swallowing, he waits for some type of explanation.

"You're right, it has been hard. A part of me will never stop loving Calvin. I know that. But I think I'm..I think I'm starting to move on. I don't want space Harry..not from you.''

"(Y/N), you don't have to-"

"I know." This isn't some obligation you feel you have to fulfill. And earlier, your reaction wasn't a rejection, it was just a call to reality. There's a man standing right in front of you, ready to love you, and it scares you, but it also warms your heart. "We can take it slow (Y/N), there's no rush to feel pressure into it. "

Harry is the cutest. He really doesn't want to jeopardize anything. You're the one who makes the first move this time. Your thumb slides over his lower lip, and you've finally managed to get him to stop rambling. Leaning unto your tiptoes, you kiss him with all you have. 

You need to let him know you appreciate it all. His friendship, care, sarcasm, strength, trust...love. Harry's hands settle on your waist, and he can longer resist. He pulls you impossibly close. 

There are no restrictions, and he uses that to his advantage. Fingers slipping into your hair, he deepens the kiss, relishing in the little moan that slips from you. The melody urges him to provoke some more out. You open yourself to him, no barriers. There's just you and him.

For the first time in a while, you feel light, and it's all thanks to Harry.

[spruceplank]

Here is Home

Impulse isn't anything special. He does his job in simple but effective ways just like the machines he builds. He can't do anything special. He isn't anything special. So he keeps working until he breaks. And when he breaks, it's not a simple fix. When he breaks, he breaks beyond repair.

Warnings for: Temporary character death, starvation, and overworking to death

Fic below read more and ao3 link in the replies! (8955 words)

Tango is like fire. He's warm and bright. Strength visible even when the embers smolder down under the weight of the world. A comfortable warmth and the crackle of burning logs of a fire in the winter. He should burn with every touch he gives but instead there's only warmth seeping through his fingertips like lava flowing down a mountain side at every passing touch.

Zedaph is like the wind. Soft and gentle summer breezes yet also fierce and howling storms. Ever changing and shifting through anything to reach his goals. Pushing anything and anyone forward with ease, his strength unwavering just as his faith. At his softest he eases calmness into weary souls and at his most energetic he's a whirlwind dragging the world with him.

Impulse isn't anything special. He can't provide strength through words alone. He can't do fancy tricks with his creations or build amazing things that make people stare in awe. His machines simply do their job just as he does. Working until soreness is so deep in his bones he would feel off without the constant background aching. He works and works to even measure up to being a fraction of what the others can be. Toiling away at perfect farms with exactly just the right amount of productivity to be simple but still effective. He builds farms as easily as he could build a crafting table at this point. The repetitive labor and click of redstone signals make him feel as if maybe he's doing something good enough to measure up to the others. Maybe this will be enough.

But it's never enough. Not when he looks at the desert he helped Bdubs and Tango to level out for Cub. Where there's now a massive pyramid full of mini games that only seems to grow by the day. Not when he enters the shopping district and sees grass where mycelium used to be. Where there's mini diamonds hanging from the trees and the diamond throne looming over him from town hall. Not when he sees the other's builds, with their massive scale and detailed nature.

He shifts his entire base one block and even though it takes hours and hours of work it feels like nothing compared to what he's seen the others make. He builds more and more farms so he doesn't have to think about that. He only works and works until he runs out of blocks. Then he gathers more resources then he'll ever reasonably need and works until those are gone too.

Tango and Zedaph come over and force him to sleep occasionally but he usually doesn't sleep long to begin with. There's too much work he has to do. Sometimes he doesn't even know what he's working on anymore. What's even the point? But he doesn't stop and think about it. He only works harder. He's nothing special, just like the machines he builds. He does his job in simple but effective ways. He works and works and works some more. His bed remains untouched and his food supply runs dangerously low but he doesn't pay any mind to those. He still has more work he needs to do. He always has work he needs to do.

He isn't anything special. He can't fly as if it's second nature like Grian can. He can't build castles on cliff tops that look as if they're paintings like Bdubs can. He can't tune note blocks so they play songs in a constant flow of melodies like Etho can. He can't craft art from blank sheets like Beef can. He can't make armor stands into scenes of life like Cleo can. He can't spin words and wisdom into poetry like Joe can. He can't wield a sword as easily as breathing like False and Wels can. He can't do anything special. So he keeps working.

He doesn't realize he isn't like his machines until it's too late. His machines aren't alive, they don't need to do anything other than work. He isn't like his machines at all. His machines run and could run forever if he needed them to. He had forgotten he can't do the same. He can break. And when he breaks, it's not a simple fix. When he breaks, he breaks beyond repair.

.

ImpulseSV died of starvation

TangoTek: Impulse buddy? You good?

Renthedog: Did you forget to grab more food when you grabbed more supplies or something dude?

FalseSymmetry: Should someone go check on him?

Iskall85: Probably should, it's not like any of us should starve to death.

StressMonster101: Iskall's right, there's never a shortage of food on this server why would he have died from starvation?

Zedaph: Impulse? You there?

iJevin: Would he have dropped his communicator before respawning?

Cubfan135: He would've respawned with it if that were the case.

Grian: Impulse? Can you tell us you're at least reading these?

GoodtimeswithScar: Who's the closest to his base?

.

Whisper from TangoTek: Imp? Buddy? You okay? You're kind of freakin me out with the silence act.

Whisper from Zedaph: Impy please respond you're worrying me.

.

XisumaVoid: I'll teleport over to him since he seems to not be answering give me a moment.

MumboJumbo: What are the odds he just has his communicator on silent?

Docm77: When you respawn it automatically shuts that off, it can't be on silent.

.

Teleport XisumaVoid to ImpulseSV

Teleport failed

Teleport ImpulseSV to XisumaVoid

Teleport failed

.

XisumaVoid: Whoever is near Impulse's base head there now I can't teleport

iJevin: On my way

Keralis: Shishwammy can't teleport?

XisumaVoid: Something in the code is glitched, but for the life of me I can't see anything wrong with it

iJevin: Uh X I need you here now

.

Teleport XisumaVoid to iJevin

.

TangoTek: X? Is Imp okay?

Zedaph: Jevin? What's going on?

iJevin: He isn't here

Bdouble0: I'm in the shopping district should I go look for him?

iJevin: No, his stuff is here, but he isn't

ZombieCleo: What does that mean?

XisumaVoid: It means he didn't respawn

__

There's nothing. He's aware of nothing and knows of nothing. He merely exists. He thinks he should be somewhere but he doesn't know where. He doesn't have the energy to figure it out. He should just go back to sleep. That's what he'd been doing right? That's what he should do. He should sleep. There isn't anything else he needs to do. He isn't anyone who needs to be anywhere. He can simply sleep.

"What in the… What are you doing here?"

There's a voice. It's familiar but different. Rougher, sadder, more tired than it should be. He thinks he knows the voice. But he doesn't know who. He doesn't have the energy to place the voice to a name. He doesn't even have a name.

"Hey, Hey…… Wake up…… Hey…….. Wake up……"

He can't wake up. There's no need for him to be awake. He doesn't need to wake up. There's no reason for him to keep going. He doesn't serve any purpose. He doesn't do anything necessary. He isn't anyone special.

"Dammit you're really going to make me take you back myself aren't you?"

He doesn't have anywhere he needs to be. He doesn't belong anywhere. He isn't anyone special.

"When X bans me again, I will find a way around it to come make your life miserable."

Someone grabs him. He didn't realize he was simply floating until now. There's something hard yet slightly warm beneath him. Arms under him that hold him up. He feels weightless as he did before. He doesn't have any reason to fight. He simply doesn't care enough to move.

"You're lucky my brother is too much of a derp to realize he needs to ban me again to keep me out of the new world."

Brother? He doesn't know anyone with a brother. Actually he doesn't know anyone at all. He doesn't know anyone or anything. He simply is and that's all there is to know. It's easiest this way. Simple yet effective.

"I don't know what you managed to do that's caused you to wind up like this but if I have to deal with my brother and your friends asking me thirty thousand questions you owe me another one on top of this for bringing you back."

His friends? What is a friend? Does he have those? And bring him back where? He's already where he needs to be. He doesn't need to do anything or be anyone. He is simply here. He can just sleep.

"You really are all perfect for each other huh? Just a bunch of derps. I'm taking your things for the headache dealing with the rest of your derp family is going to give me when I had no part in this."

His family? He didn't have a family. He was alone.

"Forget it, clearly your code is more messed up than even I thought it was finding you in the void."

His code? The void? Nothing made sense. The arms under him gripped him tighter against a hard surface. It should hurt shouldn't it? Yet it was familiar in a comforting way. He could hear a steady beat echoing in his mind. He should go back to sleep. The arms around him tightened but only silence answered him as he finally drifted away.

__

"Exy!" Zedaph calls delighted at the man's sudden appearance. His delight crumbles into fear as he notices the sleeping figure in Ex's arms.

Though he momentarily hesitates, Ex simply forces his nerves away with an eye roll and snaps at the blonde, "How many times have I told you not to call me that?"

"Ex, how, how are you here?" Xisuma stares at his brother in bewildered confusion. He had banned Ex hasn't he? But seeing his brother walk in with the very person he's been unable to find any trace of is a weight off his shoulders he didn't know was settling there.

"You didn't ban me from this world." Ex states as if it was that simple.

Tango ignores X's gaping, Zedaph's silent fear and pushes forward towards Ex. He glances at the still form of his best friend asleep and dead to the world before looking up at Ex. Tango's voice wavers between disbelief and hope as he asks, "How did you find him?"

"You said he wasn't where he should be so I looked in the place where things wind up when they don't know where else to go." Ex explains. He stands awkwardly in the doorway. Not quite moving forward into the room but not running away.

"You can read chat?" Xisuma questions.

"The place where things wind up when they don't know where else to go?" Zedaph asks right after. Both of them turn to look at each other before facing back to Ex with unreadable expressions.

"I can do all the things you can do Xisuma, don't tell me you've forgotten." Ex explains without actually answering. He sighs like it's enough to hide his feelings on the situation when he begrudgingly answers Zedaph, "Yes when things don't know where else to go they all end up in the same place."

"But you haven't done anything -" Xisuma starts but Ex is tired of this already.

"Because I don't want to do anything. I wouldn't even be here if I hadn't found one of your derpy friends lost in the void." Ex pushed back, voice raised over his brother’s. The two stare at each other as if having a silent conversation when Tango speaks up.

"The void? Why was Imp there?" Tango pushes looking between the two brothers.

"It's where things that have nowhere else to go wind up." Ex explains as if the answer is as simple as he puts it.

Zedaph stutters before anxiously speaking, "But he has a place, he has a home here. How did-"

"Ask him not me. I simply found him and brought him back." Ex states calmly over where Zedaph nervously trails off.

"Why though?" Xisuma questions like he's unsure if the person before him is actually Ex.

Ex rolls his eyes but answers his brother all the same, "Because he's just as much of a derp as you are and the void isn't a place for any human."

"But you were in the void." Zedaph counters, voice laced with worry.

"And I'm not human, don't lump me in with the rest of you derps." Ex complains.

Tango looks between the man in the entryway and his friend dead asleep to the world with worry, "Why didn't he respawn? Why won't he wake up?"

"His code's all glitched. Something went wrong somewhere. That or he didn't want to respawn." Ex answers Tango's questions though he faces Xisuma as he speaks.

"Can you fix the code?" Zedaph asks, voice hopeful.

Ex rolls his eyes at the blonde, "Not my job besides I don't have the right things I'd need to do it anyways. That's all on Xisuma."

Xisuma seems to relax for the first time since Ex appeared. He looks between his hermits and his brother who carries the sleeping form of another hermit gently yet protectively and makes his decision, "It would go loads faster if you stayed and helped me Ex."

"Like I said not my job." Ex pushes, eyes wary.

"Please help fix Impulse Exy." Zedaph pleads with hopeful eyes.

"I told you not to call me that!" Ex yells sharply but there's no threat behind his words.

"Just give it a rest Exy, it's not changing." Tango chimes in with a smile.

"You're both insufferable." Ex groans but doesn't move even as the other two surge forward to his side.

"And yet you still hang out with us." Zedaph comments cheerfully as he flutters to Ex's side and looks sadly at his friend who sleeps undisturbed by their conversation.

"Come on you three, let's move over towards the bed to work so we can let Impulse sleep while me and Ex work." Xisuma says, already walking the other way. Despite all of the hesitation before, Ex moves to follow without thinking.

"Wait, why are we coming there?" Tango questions looking between the two brothers confused.

"Because you two are going to tell me when and how you managed to get Ex to be your friend. I certainly don't remember this in the past." Xisuma informs his hermits with gentle warmth in his voice. He crosses the room without hesitation but rather new found confidence with the others not far behind.

"Wait why isn't Exy telling you?" Zedaph argues half heartedly. Fluttering along next to Ex with occasional glances at Impulse.

"He wouldn't tell me even if I threatened him." Xisuma says as if the answer is that simple. He stops on the other side of the bed they crossed the room towards, not paying attention to the others as the approach but rather pulling up screens of code at his fingertips.

With the same care he used carrying the man, Ex bends over to rest Impulse on the bed. At Xisuma's comment, Ex snorts, "What do you know, you can learn."

"Not even back five minutes and I already regret ever missing you." Xisuma fires back. His fingers dancing over holographic screens as numbers and letters blink in and out of sight.

"You missed me?" Ex asks warily, voice betraying him as it wavers. Vulnerable for a moment before it's gone again behind false bravado.

"Come on let's begin." Xisuma states, dodging the question. Fingers flick screens over the bed to his brother without hesitation.

"Just going to ignore the question? Rude, I can't believe I missed you too." Ex retorts, fingers already moving across the screens before he’s even finished talking.

"I didn't think you were capable of such." Xisuma fires back though there’s no heat to his words. There’s screens appearing and reappearing beneath his fingertips as he bickers with his brother. Occasionally he’ll swipe a few over to Ex who merely catches them with practiced ease.

Ex sighs, "You are just as insufferable as they are. Now are we fixing this or not?"

"Careful brother, someone might think you care." Xisuma comments, though his face is hidden by his helmet, it's easy to hear the smile in his voice.

"I hate all of you." Ex grumbles as he works.

"We love you too." Zedaph interjects smiling as he and Tango watch the scene in front of them with awe.

The two continue to work in the silence that comes to rest over the room. To Xisuma’s side another window pops up as Tango pulls out his communicator to update the others.

.

TangoTek: Good news Impulse will hopefully be okay

WelsKnight: Why does it feel like there’s a catch?

TangoTek: Well the bad news is I can’t say for certain yet

FalseSymmetry: But you guys found him?

TangoTek: Yeah he’s here

GoodtimeswithScar: How did you find him?

TangoTek: We didn’t, Ex did

Cubfan135: Ex? He’s here?

Zedaph: Yeah Exy’s here helping Xisuma

Iskall85: Exy? And you lived?

Renthedog: Only you Zedaph, only you

Docm77: X is okay with this?

Grian: Wait who’s Exy?

TangoTek: Exy or Ex is X’s brother

Joehills: Oh its brother now?

Bdouble0: But Impulse will be okay?

Zedaph: Hopefully!

Keralis: :D

Zedaph: :D

.

“If all of your hermits start calling me Exy I’m going to smite you all to the void.” Ex pipes up despite having not looked away from the screens in front of him.

“Your threats would hold a lot more weight if I couldn’t tell you were lying.” Xisuma points out, barely hiding his amusement.

Ex merely sighs deeper before grumbling, “Your ban would’ve been a lot more effective if you had kept me in the void rather than simply keeping me out of that world.”

For once Xisuma actually stops working. His fingers pause mid motion as the screens all slightly lower with his hands and he looks at Ex. He looks at his brother and carefully says, “That was never the reason for banning you and you know it.”

Ex however doesn’t stop working as he talks, “So you knew it was there.”

“Not until it was too late.” Xisuma slowly moves the screens back up and begins to work again. There’s a hesitation in his movements though and many unsaid things hang heavy in the air between the two brothers. Xisuma’s own regrets and sorrows smack dab in the middle as his voice nearly wavers.

“And when it mistook me for you?” Ex questions, still not looking up from where his fingers fly across screens.

Xisuma pauses again. He pauses and looks down at the ground, voice tight with remorse as he says, “I didn’t have any other solution.”

“You are the worst at dealing with your emotions, you know that?” Ex pushes several screens over to Xisuma but he pauses to look at his brother before going back to work for just a moment.

“You’re one to talk.” Xisuma fires back, fingers already zipping across the screens once more.

Ex pauses now. In a true mirror of his brother he looks anywhere but Xisuma before finally facing forward and questioning, “Did it ever-”

“Find? No, no it didn’t thankfully.” Xisuma cuts off with a short nod. Ex’s shoulders sag a little like he’s lost some of the tension he - no doubtly holds on his shoulders just as Xisuma does.

“Well at least that's one less thing to worry about.” Ex admits sounding almost relieved. The two work in silence for another minute or so longer until Ex stops suddenly with a whispered curse under his breath.

Xisuma’s eyes snap up to his brother, “Did you find what’s causing this?”

“Yes and you’re not going to like it.” Ex admits hesitantly, his fingers hovering over screens but not pushing them over.

“Let me see…” Xisuma trails off as he waves the screens over to himself, dismissing the others to the side. He reads whatever is on the screen quickly before sucking in a large breath and stuttering out, “...Oh my goodness me… how did you?”

“You got the same thing before you know.” Ex informs Xisuma like the knowledge they’re sharing is somehow dangerous.

“I did?” Xisuma questions.

Ex sighs, “Ages ago, but yes, you did.”

“But you fixed it, can you do it again?” Xisuma pushes, voice wavering slightly as he nearly pleads out right.

Ex shakes his head, “No I can’t, but you and your little hermits can.”

For the first time in several days, Xisuma breathes a sigh of relief, “Well I certainly don’t know enough about that to lead it well, you’ll just have to stay here and help me.”

Tango groans loudly. Interrupting whatever the two brothers would have continued to dance around with his dramatic gestures and loud accusations, “You two are the worst brothers ever! Can you not just say what you mean to one another and get it over with?! Or do you always have to speak in riddles around each other? Just tell him you want him to stay X!”

Xisuma recoils slightly at Tango’s accusations but attempts to stand his ground, "Tango you-"

Zedaph however is having none of it as well, "Exy would stay if you asked him to stay sincerely Xisuma. I know he missed you as much as you missed him."

They’re all interrupted when Ex barks out a laugh, "Your little hermits will never cease to amaze me with just how nosy they can be 'Suma."

"Well someone has to keep X from getting too lonely! We all know he'd never say anything on his own!" Tango grins widely at the brothers like he’s proud of this knowledge. As if it's something he will personally fix.

"Yeah! Just like you Exy!" Zedaph agrees with his own grin to the two brothers.

Ex glares at the two hermits and deadpan says, I'm going to smite you both."

Tango just laughs at that, "Cool, another threat of smiting for my tally board, now how do we fix Impulse?"

"We wake him up." Xisuma states.

"That's it? We just wake him up?" Zedaph asks in disbelief.

"It's not that simple." Ex pipes up looking pointedly at his brother.

Xisuma merely ignores Ex as he continues speaking to Tango and Zedaph, "He has to feel safe enough to wake up."

"Feel safe enough?" Tango questions slowly, sounding out each word as if they’re a foreign concept to him.

"But he is safe! This is his home!" Zedaph cries looking rapidly between the two brothers.

Ex merely nods down to where Impulse hasn’t moved, "And he has yet to even budge. It's not home enough for him."

"We have to help him feel safe." Xisuma informs his hermits, voice gentle yet unwavering as he says, "That's why I need your help."

Tango and Zedaph share a look before Tango turns back to the brothers with a wide grin, "Well what are we waiting for then? We have work to do, chop chop people!"

__

It's warm. A comfortable warmth like a fire in the dead of winter. There's the sound of half concealed laughter and hushed whispers swaying around him like a gentle breeze. He feels calm. He feels safe. He thinks of resting but something tells him he is needed awake. He's tired in a way he doesn't remember being tired before but if he's needed awake then he guesses he should wake up. How does he do that again?

There's movement at his side. Where is he again? He actually isn't sure this time. He doesn't remember the others insisting on a sleepover. Someone laughs nearby and it takes a moment but he manages to put a name to the laugh, that's Tango who's laughing.

"And he laughed at you? You sold the man some bones, accepted his sad payment of 12 bamboo, and he laughed at you?" Tango's voice is bright. Laughter caught between words as he speaks.

"Yeah he did, even showered himself with diamonds as I left. Mega annoying that hobbit was, glad to see him gone though his replacement isn't much better." Another voice loud and bright with laughter. He knows this voice as well but he can't think of a name for it. He remembers green and a solid presence. But a name escapes him. It bothers him that he can't seem to put a name to the voice.

"I do keep seeing it come up in chat, what even is hermit challenges?" A new voice asks and he knows this one too. Zedaph sits somewhere nearby, conversing with Tango and the other person.

There's a noise of uncertainty, "Your guess is as good as mine. I swear he just makes this stuff up on the spot."

"How does he say it again?" Someone asks but he doesn't hear well enough to know who.

"He-yer-metee-chall-eng-ges" The other person sounds out and he mentally yells at himself for not remembering who's voice that is.

"Hener-matey-chall-geng-ges?" Someone - Zedaph, attempts to a chorus of laughter.

"No, no start low and then go up" Someone encourages cheerfully.

"He-yer-metee chall-eng-ges?" The second attempt seems to work it as the others cheer.

"There you go!" Iskall exclaims loudly, hi-fiving whomever guessed right. Iskall, he knows Iskall, he knows these people. The other hermits. They're all trusted friends. This, wherever this is, as long as he's with the hermits, then that's home. This is his home. He is safe here.

As he blinks his eyes open, he feels like he hasn't seen light for years at the way it burns. Hissing he screws his eyes shut and groans at the sudden amount of pain he finds himself in. There’s the sounds of murmuring and shuffling as a hand comes to rest over his eyes, blocking out any light. A familiar voice not unlike one he remembers hearing before, speaks, “Easy there my friend give yourself some time to adjust.”

The voice is familiar but not quite the same as before; lighter and happier though still tired underneath. It's one of the voices he’d be able to recognize anywhere. His throat is sore but he still needs to be certain so he ignores the scratchy feeling in his throat and how horrible he sounds when he asks, “....X?”

“Yes, you gave us all quite the scare Impulse.” Xisuma informs him.

He can't remember what he did at all, “I… what happened?”

There's more shuffling and he thinks he hears a door but everything is already too loud as it is. He barely even gets his bearings well enough from a sudden spike of dizziness to hear someone say, “Well, we were hoping you could tell us that actually.”

“Zed?” He asks hesitantly. He can't be wrong about that being Zedaph's voice. He wouldn't forget one of his best friend's voices.

There's a relieved exhale before a warm voice speaks up as well, “Yeah and I’m here too buddy.”

“Tango? What’s, where am I?” He pushes verbally for answers as Xisuma still holds his hand over Impulse's eyes, not letting him even try to attempt sitting up.

“We’re at Bdubs’ little village.” Tango tells him. That makes sense, something about the air here felt familiar in a way. But he still has questions.

“Who else is here?” He questions as he tries to push against Xisuma who doesn't even move. He is so disoriented and confused. Why wouldn't anyone tell him more? Why did he have to push for answers? What happened?

“Everyone.” Xisuma tells him. Everyone is here? What happened? What weren't they telling him?

He's near panic when no one says anything else and he has to push for answers again, “Everyone? Why? What happened?”

“You died of starvation and I found you in the void.” A familiar voice states with no tone for doubt about the facts just shared. He stops struggling against Xisuma who holds him down merely by force of presence alone when he processes what he's heard. Actually for a moment, he nearly thinks it's Xisuma speaking but he knows it can't be. Aside from the clear change in tone and attitude, the voice sounds rougher, sadder, more tired than it should be.

“Wait… Exy?” He guesses though it's less of a guess and more of a reassurance he isn't completely delusional. Exy was here? What had happened that got Exy to show up? Wait he died of starvation? Wait Ex found him in the void?

Ex snorts and yep that's clearly Exy who hides his relief with annoyance, “If you wanted to thank me you wouldn’t use that terrible nickname anymore.”

He doesn't know how to process this information. He doesn't even know where to start, “I, how was I in the void?”

“Wait X,” Zedaph cuts in and Impulse can only assume he's the one who makes Xisuma let up. He is unsure what exactly he's slightly afraid of in the fact that X won't remove his hand from over Impulse's eyes but he is glad to be able to actually sit up, even if it's against a wall. Zedaph reaches out and grabs one of Impulse's hands, guiding it up to hold in front of him as something is pushed into his hold. Zedaph doesn't let go with the hand holding the outside of his own but uses his other now free hand to drag Impulse's other hand to help stabilize the glass bottle in his hold. He doesn't know what he's holding but Zedaph chuckles quietly and he feels himself relax a little at the familiarity. Warm hands pull away from his own as Zed speaks with soft reassurance, “Here Impy, drink this and eat something, you’ve been out for quite a while.”

“But-” He starts to argue though he's shot down immediately

“No buts mister!” Zed insists and Impulse knows if he doesn't listen with that tone he's not going to like it later.

Accepting his current fate of sitting in complete darkness and drinking some sort of potion (probably?), he still tries to get any answers he can, “Fine can someone at least tell me what's going on though? Why is everyone here? Why was I in the void?”

"We'll tell you after you drink that and eat something." Zed informs him with that same tone of voice that is very un-Zed like and concerning to hear.

"Can I at least get my sight back?" He tries, but it ends up sounding a lot more uncertain and afraid than he wanted it to.

"Impulse do you trust me?" Xisuma asks and that is unfair.

"Of course I trust you, I trust you with my life!" He insists not at all liking how this is playing out.

"Then trust me when I do this okay?" X continues and he does trust Xisuma with his life, that's not a lie but he can't help wanting to fight a little because there's something big that's happening or happened and no one is telling him anything! He wants to push and push but he loses all will to fight it anymore when he can hear X sigh in that same tired way he does when he thinks no one is around to hear and speaks in a quieter voice that's so unlike Xisuma he doesn't know what to do, "Please."

"Okay." He answers and that's really all he can do. Is answer and go along with it because he's downright terrified now. Did he kill someone? Did he hurt someone? Are they going to kick him out or Hermitcraft?

His mind's racing faster than his heart and he's sure his hands nearly grip the bottle in his hold so tight it'll shatter when there's a deep, aggravated sigh that can only come from Ex. There's a pause before he hears the floorboards creak and feels someone grab his hands and removes the bottle from them. There's a string of mumbled words he can't hear but knows that because it's Exy they're probably curses, when the bottle is shoved against his lips with a command, "Drink."

He really can't do anything but drink what he can now identify as a regen potion. He finally realizes just how awful he feels when it's effects start to kick in. Everything hurts. It hurts worse than any other pain he's known before and all the energy he thought he had falls away like sand beneath his feet by the time the bottles empty and he feels the potion take effect. He slumps backwards against what he previously thought to be the wall but now can tell is Xisuma's armor. His mind is still trying to go 3000 ticks per second but his body can't keep up and any panic he might've had fades into the background.

There's something warm and soft pushed at his hands again with another order he can't really refuse, "Eat."

Slowly he brings what he can tell, from touch and smell alone, is bread up to his face and eats. By the time he's handed several pieces and eaten them he feels exhausted. The hand on his eyes is long gone now, combing cold fingers through his hair instead and it feels nice. His eyes are long closed and would refuse to open even if he tried to do so. He is so tired. Maybe he should just sleep? He feels like he needs to ask the others something but it wouldn't feel so warm and safe if anything urgent was going on. Yeah, a little nap wouldn't hurt would it? He's out cold he even notices.

__

He actually sleeps this time. When he drifts in and out of awareness it's to shushing and soft reassurances he can go back to sleep. Sometimes the hand over his eyes is back and he's given something to drink or eat but for the most part he simply drifts in and out of various stages of awareness to the other hermits telling stories and talking.

"He's decided that instead of it being a proper punishment, it's now a problem I'm going to have to deal with and continues to make a mess in my base to store all these armor stands!" Someone, Cleo, complains with annoyance.

There’s a chuckle, from Cub, who then responds sounding smug, "Sounds like you might end up with a bit of a standoff there."

"I am going to turn your base into an underwater aquarium." Cleo threatens.

__

He fades back out of awareness. He wonders what the rest of the story is. He wonders if the others know he can hear them sometimes. He wonders if the others miss him.

He hears a laugh, that’s Mumbo’s laugh, and then he hears Mumbo ask, "How did you think to add mini mushrooms? What stroke of genius inspired you that much?"

"The mini mushrooms? Oh you mean the end rods and small block combo? They weren't really planned, I just happened to come up with it on the spot. They do look absolutely amazin' though I agree!" Scar says with excitement. He thinks he can hear Jellie purring but he isn’t sure.

“I- What? On the spot! Really?" Mumbo sputters in disbelief, sounding absolutely chuffed to bits as the man liked to say.

__

He wants to wake up. He wants to pay attention to these stories and conversations but even still, he's so tired. He can't even try to fight as sleep pulls him back under into nothingness.

There's a loud and exaggerated voice that only can belong to bdubs as he's telling a story, "So he gives me a bed, you know I love beds, and then later he asks me to sleep and of course I can't say no to that! Who would I even be?!"

"You didn't know about beds blowing up in the Nether?" Doc questions and he doesn't need to see to know Bdubs' annoyed reaction.

"NO! I DIDN'T! Why would it blow up? Of all things! Blow up? WHY!" Bdubs cries angrily only to be shushed by many people.

__

He wants to talk back. Wants to input his own thoughts and laughter into these exchanges. He misses the others. He hopes they miss him too. But, they all sound fine without him there. They all continue life as normal.

"So you like smooth jazz?" Etho asks.

Grian laughs and he can just imagine the look on the prankster's face when he answers, "If you can actually make note blocks sound like jazz music I'll let you put an automatic free glass sample under the entryway to the barge."

Etho chuckles quietly, "Now we're talking."

__

At some point he thinks they all seem to be enjoying themselves. They're all happy talking and chatting. They're all okay without him. He doesn't need to be here.

There's the slamming of a door against the wall that wakes him from his half asleep state with a startle. Loud footsteps echo as someone crosses the floor to yell, "Oh no you don't, not again!"

"Ex wait, he needs rest, don't-" Xisuma starts to interrupt but he misses what X says when Ex cuts over his brother's words.

Ex holds him up by his shirt and snarls, "Impulse if you even fucking dare think of leaving one more time I'm going to make you regret ever winding up like this in the first place!"

"Ex stop!" Xisuma orders but Ex turns his anger around on his brother.

With gritted teeth and a sharp edge, Ex pointedly tells Xisuma, "Stop me and you'll be following not long after him 'Suma. I will not stand here and watch it happen!"

Xisuma sputters, "But I-"

"Do me a favor and don't argue, we both know you'd be lying." Ex retorts.

"I…." X struggles to find the words to say as Ex simply huffs.

"That's what I thought." Ex says before he turns and grabs Impulse up by the shirt again and growls, "Impulse wake the fuck up or I'll flood Decked Out with lava."

"You wouldn't." He gasps, only half aware though his heart is racing.

"You know I would." Ex states as a fact and it's true, Impulse knows Ex would.

He struggles to find an answer as his mind can't seem to calm down from his abrupt awakening, "... Please don't, he's spent so long working on that."

"Always for others but never for yourselves. Why am I surrounded by fools?" Ex complains. He turns away, loosening his grip on Impulse as he yells over his shoulder, "Xisuma go get idiots one and three."

"Idiots one and three?" X questions.

"One, two," Ex says and Impulse can feel the finger Ex jabs at his chest on two before Ex finishes saying, "Three."

Xisuma sighs at Ex's nicknames before telling his brother, "Make sure he doesn't actually get up then."

"No I'll just let him up and about, of course I wouldn't! Now get!" Ex orders.

"Alright alright I'm going, goodness me." Xisuma's voice travels as he walks from the room, the door creaking slightly shut behind him but not closing all the way.

There's silence as Xisuma's light footsteps fade away before Ex turns back to Impulse, "So you figure out what happened to you yet?"

"I? What?" He asks, caught off guard by the question.

Ex helps him sit up right against the wall but doesn't let up the force behind his words, "You heard me."

He doesn't understand the question at all. He still can't see and now there's something noticeable over his eyes yet it feels more secure than a normal blindfold. Nothing about this is making any sense. Ex clears his throat and he rushes to at least answer with something, "No? Did I do something wrong? Why can't I see still?"

"Hardcoded blindfold, couldn't risk you hurting yourself trying to open your eyes." Ex explains quickly, sounding annoyed.

"Is this because I was in the void for a bit somehow?" He asks because he doesn't understand why Ex is so on edge suddenly. He doesn't know why he was dragged awake. He doesn't know what's even going on.

"A bit? You were there a week before I finally managed to find you." Ex informs him and he is immediately even more confused.

"A week? What-" He tries but Ex talks over him.

"Shut up and listen or I'll tell Xisuma I lied to him about what happened and you'll never find out the truth." Ex says on edge, words coming out as a hiss.

He gapes like a fish at where he assumes Ex before he connects enough of the situation to say, "Then start talking."

"It's called I.S. and I voided the original entry I dug up for 'Suma because I know he wouldn't be able to handle it so I lied to him about it. It's a glitch in the code of the world when an update comes through and invalidates part of a person's code, sending them to the void in a false ban." Ex explains so quickly that he fears he almost missed his inside as to what's going on.

"That's the lie?" He prompts, hopeful he didn't just miss his answers.

Ex groans but slows down his explanation to an understandable speed, "Yes, it's not an update glitch. It's an internally inflicted error glitch called Imposter Sequence. A player who meets a specific list of requirements and a certain percentage of difference in behavior is deemed by the internal protection of a whitelisted world as an imposter and banned from the world. Except due to how a whitelist works in the first place, it's a glitch. It's a glitch where someone who expresses extreme self doubt or self hatred who dies by working themselves to death through neglect to themselves winds up being soft banned from the world. You cannot return to the world or go to any other world. You do not respawn and you are not even aware of what's going on. You're lucky your admin happens to be a voidwalker or you would be dead by now."

None of that sounds real. It sounds way too extreme. Part of him admits to it being true but the other half still doesn't believe Ex. Not all the dots match up, "But you're the one who found me."

Ex curses under his breath before continuing his explanation, voice getting louder and louder, "Because my brother is just as much of an idiot as you are and has gotten himself in your exact situation before so I already knew what was going on. Furthermore, if you were in the void just a day longer before I found you, you would not have survived. The entry for Imposter Sequence in the admin code does not account for the admin being a voidwalker. The entry for Imposter Sequence ends by saying the player who is missing and believed to have become or been afflicted with Imposter Sequence is void banned. It's marked as a permadeath. Were you anyone else in the universe but a hermit who has two voidwalkers tied to their world you would be gone. You do not understand how close you were to being gone forever. You would've left everything and everyone behind. For what? For your own stupidity? You would have to be the biggest idiot in the universe to think that you weren't loved here, that you weren't wanted. You have one of the best possible lives and ways of living in this entire universe, do not throw that away as if it were nothing."

They wait in the silence. Only cut through by the sounds of their harsh breathing. His mind is racing and his head is spinning. Ex takes a few shaky breaths as he waits for Impulse to process what was just said. They're not alone anymore though as a sharp inhale echoes in the silence, "Ex…"

"Oh for fucks sake." Ex curses, rushed footsteps echo from across beyond room as Ex commands, "You two pull your heads out of your asses and make him believe, even a little, how wrong he was. I have a derp to find."

Ex leaves to go after Xisuma. Meaning he's now left alone with Tango and Zedaph who, based on X's reaction, have heard the whole explanation of what happened to him. He doesn't even know what to do other than wait for them to start yelling. Instead of yelling though, there's merely footfalls that come closer until they're at the side of the bed. He knows they won't hurt him but he's shaking because he's so afraid of what they'll think of him now. He screws his eyes shut tight and braces for something when there's a quiet whisper, “Imp…”

“You, you…” Zedaph starts to say. And he's so scared of whatever judgement he's about to face that his heart nearly jumps out of his chest when he's tackled backwards as Zed cries, “Absolute idiot! Impulse you big dummy!”

He barely manages to not smack his head unto the wall as Zedaph sobs into his shoulder, shaking like he's just as scared as Impulse is. “Oof, Zed, what-”

A hand on his shoulder makes him pause as Tango asks, “Imp, you don't really think that we don’t want you here do you?”

He feels like he's floating over the void after being blindsided by shulker bullets. He struggles to find the words to say, an explanation for his behavior, some sort of defense for his actions. But even to his own ears it all sounds like lies, “No of course not! We’re the hermits, we’re team zit, I just, I…”

“Tell us Impy, please, we’re a team remember. We face things together.” Zed pleads, his breath hitching as he hugs Impulse harder. He can feel the wet patch Zed’s tears have left on his shoulder and he feels horrible. He feels like the worst person in the universe because he made his friends worry and cry and suffer all for what? For his insecurity? He doesn't, he didn't think he deserved their support and friendship before all this. Now, now he finds it even hard to believe he deserves it.

“I just, I…” He struggles to say it. He can't admit this. Not to them, not to his two best friends. Two thirds of the whole they make, he can't do that to them. A part of his mind tells him that it's too late, that he's already done the damage and he thinks he's crying but he can't tell. He feels Zed hug him harder and Tango’s hand on his shoulder and he can't lie to them. He can't lie to these two. So he tells them the truth, “I just, I just don’t think I’m anything special that's all.”

He hears Zed’s breath hitch and can feel the way Tango seems to recoil as the hand on his shoulder grips tighter. Tango inhales sharply but he can't seem to find the words to say as he hesitates to say, " Impulse, buddy-"

He can't help but blurt out, "It sounds so stupid when I say it out loud but that's…"

That's why he's in this mess. Because he's nothing special. Because he's not like the others. Because he's not good enough. He's not good enough to be here. Not good enough to be a hermit. Not good enough to be their friend. Not good enough to be anything.

"Impulse what does the I in team zit stand for?" Tango asks suddenly.

"Me?" He hesitantly answers. Was it a trick question or something?

"Yeah, team zit can't exist without you. We'd just be ZT and that just sounds lame. You're irreplaceable to us. Not even just us but to hermitcraft as a whole." Tango says and he wants to believe it. He wants to believe it so badly.

"But…" But he doesn't believe it. He can't bring himself to believe it at all. He's not special. He's nothing special. Everyone else is so amazing and he's just, he's just here too.

The room is quiet and he prepares for the inevitable but it doesn't come. Zedaph lets go of him only to shuffle over to his side as Tango sits on the bed too. Both of them trap him in a side hug and he can't do anything but surrender his arms as the other two hug an arm each close to their chests. Both Zedaph and Tango take a hand into their own and hold it tight. He can't help the sharp inhale he takes as he's kept there in the moment by the hands holding his own.

It's Zedaph who starts talking first as he explains what happened after Impulse vanished, "There were set groups to explore different parts of the entire server all week. You died, never responded to chat, X couldn't teleport to you and then said you just hadn't respawned. We searched everywhere we could think of. Bdubs didn't even sleep until the third day when Etho more or less blocked him in and watched him so he couldn't escape. Ren and Grian didn't sleep at all and Xisuma had to teleport them back from tens of thousands of blocks away because they had gone so far X got a warning of how far away they were."

He's barely given time to process Zed’s words as Tango continues where Zedaph left off, "You're the one who's built so many innovations that so many of us use. The villager breeding system most of us use? You built it. The item filters most of us use? You built that? Your base itself is colossal and is full of so many different farms you had Doc and Mumbo looking like kids on Christmas when we all first got together to split into search parties. You can break bedrock without any fancy magic other than redstone and your own two hands. You owned the shop basically every hermit used in season six not to mention the gold farm. There are things you've contributed and things you've done no one else could do or has thought to do."

He feels overwhelmed. There's no way this is the truth but he can't even formulate why these two, his best friends, would ever lie to him as Zed keeps going, "The entire server stopped working for an entire week trying to find you. You vanishing had Xisuma more frazzled than either of us had ever seen and definitely more than the 1.14 update. Joe and Cleo had to knock X unconscious to get him to stop working. Cub and Iskall combed through the code for so long they started to talk in code too. We contacted other worlds and people and no one could find you."

“All of that, for me?” He wonders out loud in disbelief. Because he really can't believe it. Logically he knows they would have done that but emotionally he can't process that they would do that for him. They did that all for him.

Zedaph hums a noise of confirmation and says, “Had Exy not showed up when he did, Cub and Wels were set to go check the season six world so Grian and Doc could use the infinity portal or time machine to figure out what happened to you. No one was going to give up on you. So please don’t give up on yourself.”

He sits there struggling under the weight of their words. Under the actions of the others who had tried just about everything they could to get him back. He thinks he's going to be crushed under the realization of the impact his disappearance had on the others. But two hands squeeze his own in near perfect unison, and he barely manages to remember to breathe once more as all that weight vanishes. His face is wet from the tears he can't really even process as his own as everything comes back to him all at once. He chokes on all the things he wants to say, gasps for air like he's nearly drowned, and sobs out words he can only half understand himself, "I, I'm sorry. I, I didn't real- realize. Every, everyone suff- suffered because, because of me!"

"Oh Imp, buddy," Tango murmurs sadly. His friend inhales shakily before saying, "You don't have anything to apologize for."

"But, but I-" He tries to say but he can't speak through hiccuping breaths of air between his sobs.

"Impy you're not allowed to apologize for any of this. We're friends, we're family, any of us would do it again in a heartbeat no questions asked for you." Zedaph states so soundly he can't even begin to convince himself it's not true.

So he doesn't apologize. He merely sits between his two best friends and sobs his heart out. When he finally manages to stop crying there's a heaviness that comes over him as he thinks about how tired he is now. There's quiet whispers he doesn't have the energy to listen to as he's guided away from the wall to lay back down. He doesn't want to let go this time. Thankfully he doesn't have to as both his hands are squeezed hard and he's surrounded by warmth and the sounds of steady heartbeats. Here, he is safe.

There's a heavy blanket draped over them as hushed voices exchange words once more. Someone runs a hand through his hair and he feels himself relax even further into the bed. Here, he is loved.

In a flash of memories he can see so many scenes just like this one. Of being surrounded by his friends in comfortable quiet. He knows he can sleep safe and sound here. He knows he doesn't have to worry about anything right now. Here, is home.

[notfunnydean]

Pairing: None Warnings: None Word Count: 2.212 Challenge:  @sqz-zine​ Summary: When the end comes, Castiel has an idea how to save them all. It even gives him a new job. One he likes a lot more. Link (if posted on AO3): https://archiveofourown.org/works/29353596

“There is nothing you can do Castiel.”

Chuck’s grin is almost disgusting and while there were quite a few moments where Castiel would’ve loved to punch his father. This one takes the cake. Or… maybe the pie? Dean loves pie more.

“C-Cas.”

Castiel swallows dryly. He doesn’t know what to do and he doesn’t have much time anymore either. He knows Sam and Dean don't have much time anymore.

“So Castiel what is your plan here?” Chuck says and with a small movement of his hand some kind of throne appears out of nothing. Chuck sits down, suddenly a guitar in his hand, and starts to play a melody that Castiel doesn’t know.

“To beat you.” Castiel says and he looks to his left. Sam’s breathing is harsh right now, he’s clearly in a lot of pain. Dean is already unconscious. 

Castiel had always hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but deep inside him he had known it for some years. That doesn’t mean he is ready. He doesn’t want to lose the two best friends he had ever had.

“Doesn’t seem like this is working out for you, huh?” Chuck says and Castiel clenches his fists. He needs a solution. If he could just stop this all together.

No.

Wait.

If he could prevent everything that happened to the Winchesters, to could save them so much tears, blood and pain. 

Castiel looks down, searching for his grace deep in him. He knows he is not at full power but he needs to make this work. His concern about the Winchester Boys always helped him to find his strength. 

“It’s f-fine.” Sam tries to say, but Castiel ignores him. He would save them. He would not only give them a better life, but himself as well.

“Castiel, come on. We both know that you can’t stop this.” Chuck says again, still looking so utterly pleased with himself. Castiel knows that he is right. In the end he is not stronger than his father, as much as he would want to be.

No, maybe Amara could beat him, but not Castiel. But right now this isn’t his plan anyway. He just has to distract him.

“No, I can’t.” Castiel says, down on his knees by now, but he can feel his grace rumbling through his whole body. Almost like tiny thunderbolts. 

The guitar vanishes and Chuck looks honestly surprised. Maybe he hadn’t thought that Castiel would give up so easily. Well, Castiel won’t but he hopes Chuck believes him. 

Sam’s eyes flutter shut as well, but Castiel can still feel both their heartbeats. They are both fine and it would stay that way.

“Glad you -” 

“But I can start it all over again!”

Castiel’s grace literally explodes all around him. He doesn’t have the time to look into Chuck’s stupid face. Instead he presses his right hand on Dean’s shoulder again, where he once marked him before. His left hand finds Sam’s arm.

When the light grows too bright even for him, Castiel closes his eyes.

They’re safe.

*

It’s fall.

It’s still warm outside and Castiel enjoys seeing the leaves falling down from the trees, coloring all the grey streets and front yards. He’s standing at the small window right now and looks outside.

He’s glad that his plan worked out. Dean and Sam are safe and for the first time Castiel feels fully relaxed.

Sure he has a new job, but he really likes this one. Likes all the responsibility that comes with it. This is his new purpose and unlike the last time he had a job in heaven, this one on earth, makes him happy.

“John?”

Even though Castiel is not being the one called, he turns around and smiles even wider when he actually sees the small room, he’s standing in.

The walls are a pale green and there are toys everywhere. Castiel likes how cozy it all looks, but his favorite is probably the mobile above the bigger bed. Sure the angels don’t look like him, but he doesn’t care.

(But what’s with humans and those halos?)

There is even a tiny poster of an Impala on the wall and Castiel knows in the colorful box next to the bed are a lot of tiny cars. Castiel has to say he understands why the boy loves them so much.

“John, we need to go.” Mary says again and it seems like her husband is sitting on the couch downstairs. Castiel wanders down to them, slowly looking at all the lovely pictures on the wall right at the stairs.

“I know, darling. Just waiting for the babysitter.” John calls back and Castiel enters the living room. He’s glad that they can’t see him like this. He doesn’t like lying to either of them and it’s not really lying, but he has a job.

Protect Sam and Dean. What can he say - it’s a full time job.

“Look Sammy like this!” Dean says and he sounds always so excited when he can help his baby brother. Castiel can see them on the carpet, playing with said toy cars. Of course. Dean loves to play with them all day.

Sam can’t really play with him for now, with only five months and a few weeks he’s not good at any games, but he adores his big brother already.

“Did he say when he wanted to come?” Mary asks and she comes into the living room away. She’s beautiful like this, so happy, free of a hunting life. She’s wearing a white summer dress and kisses John’s cheek.

“Should be here any minute.” John promises and he turns off the TV, to get his jacket. Castiel looks back to the kids.

“Oh uh Sammy, that’s not the street.” Dean giggles and he pushes Sam’s car on his own through the finish line. Sam clasps happily at that, not caring that he needs Dean’s help for that.

“I hope you two will be good.” John says, wearing his jacket now and Dean looks up. His bright green eyes wide. 

“Yes daddy.” Dean says smiling brightly and John ruffles his hair. Castiel’s heart beats faster when he sees this loving family like that. No pain, no blood. 

Castiel smiles and then vanishes.

*

The door rings and Dean is the one who runs to the door. He has to stretch to actually open the door, but before he can do so, John catches him easily and opens the door himself. Dean whines loudly.

“You’re late.” John says and opens the door wider, before he puts Dean down again. Dean toddles closer, holding already his arms out for a hug.

“I’m sorry, I was distracted.” Castiel says and he kneels down to get Dean into his arms. Dean cuddles against him, thumb already in his mouth and he still manages to grin at Castiel.

“Cas!”

Castiel gets up again, Dean still in his arms. He knows Dean wouldn’t let go for some time now, but Castiel has to say he enjoys seeing Dean so utterly happy. Castiel is so glad that he can spend more time with them. Happy time.

“Hello Dean.” Castiel mumbles into Dean’s soft hair.

“Ah all good. Mary is even ready this time. So we will probably be back by midnight. I mean you know what to do with them anyway.” John explains and Castiel nods. Mary comes towards him and kisses his cheek.

Castiel remembers a time where she was always so careful around him and didn’t trust him with Sam and Dean. He’s glad she can do that now.

“I wish you a lot of fun.” Castiel says and Mary kisses Dean goodbye. At first it was harder, Dean had often cried when his parents left for a date, but now he just waves at her and focuses on Castiel again.

“Play?”

“Of course, Dean. What do you have in mind?” Castiel asks and he walks towards the living room. Sam is still laying on the carpet but he glucks happily when he sees them.

“Cars! Uhm if it’s okay.” Dean says and Castiel strokes his face. He puts Dean down next to his cars and then sits down himself, after he puts his trenchcoat on the couch.

It’s the only thing he kept from the old time. Otherwise he dresses in soft sweaters and jeans now, so the cuddles with the boys are even softer.

“Of course it is Dean. I know how much you love cars.” Castiel says and he tickles Sam’s stomach, who giggles adorably. They have to eat dinner in a bit and then need to get a bath before it’s bedtime already.

Castiel enjoys bedtime the most.

“Oh did you get a new car?” Castiel asks and Dean smiles shyly up at him, before he holds up his new red car. It looks pretty, but then again Castiel likes most cars.

“But Pala is my favorite.” Dean says and points at the Chevy Impala that is currently in front of Castiel. The angel smiles, because he seems to be the only one who is allowed to play with it.

Dean never allowed him to drive the Impala, but this feels just as good. Dean fully trusts him and Castiel would do anything to deserve that trust.

“Well, she is beautiful.” Castiel says and Dean smiles so happily again. Sam plays with his own toys now (or tries to) and Castiel spends the next half an hour playing little races with Dean. Of course Dean wins each time.

“Cas?” Dean says, rubbing his eyes already and Castiel thinks about skipping bath time, because of that. Dean doesn’t get cranky easily, but sometimes it’s all too much when he’s tired. 

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“I’m hungry.” Dean says sheepishly and Castiel rolls his eyes inwardly, but laughs. Yeah well some things don’t change. 

“Of course, you little monster.” Castiel says and he tickles Dean, before he helps him up to walk to the kitchen. He is glad that monsters are just not a part of Dean's life anymore. 

“You hungry too, Sammy?” Castiel says and picks Sammy up who yawns. Castiel presses a kiss to his cheek, glad it doesn’t feel awkward. Once ago he didn’t even know how to answer a hug.

“Sammy needs his bottle!” Dean says in the kitchen, because he is still very protective of his brother. Castiel is glad some things don’t change. He warms the milk up with his grace and then pulls out a finished meal for Dean.

His Grace is very good for chores.

“Here you go.” Castiel says easily and then sits down next to Dean, Sammy on his lap. He enjoys this too. Dean babbles while eating his food way too fast, but he’s smiling so hard and Castiel answers to each question.

Sammy drinks his bottle without any fuss, but he falls asleep during it. Castiel smiles down at him. So glad he’s allowed to be this lucky.

“Don’t forget your vegetables, Dean.” Castiel says and Dean eats some of his carrots next. He is not overly excited about them, but he always does what he’s told. Castiel strokes over his hair.

“I need them. I wanna be tall like you.” Dean explains and Castiel grins. Well he knows exactly how tall Dean will grow and he grimaces at the thought to look up at Sam again. 

“You will be.” Castiel promises and then pulls out a tiny piece of pie. Dean squeals happily, so Castiel shushes him, because Sammy is stirring a bit. 

“Thank you, Cas. You’re the best.” Dean says so cute and polite, Castiel’s heart just melts. Dean manages to smear the pie over his face and Castiel takes one hand to clean that up with a towel.

“Messy Boy.” Castiel whispers, as fond as ever. 

The next steps are fast. Castiel cleans them both again with his grace, puts Sammy in his Baby bed and then helps Dean brush his teeth and go to pee before bed. Dean is rubbing his eyes again.

So it will be an easy night.

Castiel helps Dean into his bed and softly tucks him in. Dean blinks up at him, that cute smile on his face again.

“Story?”

“Of course.” Castiel says and oh boy, he will be in a lot of trouble as soon as Dean realizes he has Castiel wrapped around his little finger.

Castiel sits down on Dean’s bed, making sure with his grace that Sammy on the other side of the room is fine and then starts to tell his favorite story.

“Once upon a time there were two brothers...” Castiel starts and he knows exactly that Dean easily falls asleep after just a few minutes.

Castiel looks down at Dean, who sleeps peacefully now. His fingers firmly tucked into his mouth. Castiel strokes through his hair.

“Sleep well, Dean. I will watch over you.” Castiel says and the same goes of course for Sam. He smiles, when his eyes shine in a bright blue. His grace bathes the room in a soft light. Almost like a baby light would.

Castiel sits down on the chair in the corner. Keeping his promise to watch over them. Castiel gets his angel blade out and smiles.

Azazel could come. Castiel will be waiting and he will be ready.

[tht-lesbian-fangirl]

Do you ever 100% have those days when you believe supercorp is in fact canon in all the ways compared to the het tropes? But there’s the thorn on your side that’s “waiting” on everybody behind the show to “confirm” what we’ve been saying and preaching for years now? And if it highkey comes down to the show pulling a catradora on us with supercorp I’ll be totally fine with it because I’ll just take that as a big fat “I told you so” to the haters. Analysis GO OFF 😚

Dude, you have no idea how many little break downs I have every once in a while because I just feel so confident that Supercorp will happen! Everything in the Supercorp-specific writing, music, cinematic tropes, actress choices, etc. has shown that Kara and Lena will and should be canon. Look, I’m in graduate school for psychology and I haven’t taken a film class in my life. I’ve never even been a big “shipping” person. But I watched Supergirl live all throughout undergrad, often with my straight friends (who were less into the show) and even they noticed all the things that we "delusional" fans discuss.

Iconic Superhero/Love interest tropes

The Hero having to choose between saving their LI or kids/city/world, but miraculously save both. May I present Exhibit A:

The LI standing between the Hero and their one weakness: literally every time Lena has built anti-kryptonite suits, protected Kara before she knew her identity, and specifically Exhibit B:

Dramatic saves of the LI: I present the longing looks mid-rescue for Exhibit C:

The Hero running flying toward certain death to save their LI: Kara disregards a kryptonite bomb in Exhibit D:

The LI being the last to know the hero's identity, but Hero will still risk their identity to save the LI: Everyone say hello to Exhibit E:

The Hero finding strength from their LI: the CW sure loves using El Mayarah in Supercorp posts! And social media aside, we've seen how confident and strong Lena makes Kara, both in dialogue and visually. (And it's a bonus that Kara makes Lena stronger too!)

Everything with food

Kara literally referred to food as a love language when talking to Nia. Only an episode or so away from bringing Lena food from 3 different countries. And let’s remember how Kara offered to fly to Italy for her first date with James...

Kara also always brought Lena food, even before season 5. That was their Thing.

We also have to talk about the absences of food: Kara dropping potstickers at Pulitzer ceremony when she sees Lena and not accepting Dansen’s invitation to get food after her falling out with Lena.

It was established all the way back in Season 1 (very much so in the fun Flash crossover) that Kara thinks food is more important than everything and will often use it as a coping mechanism when she’s sad (like in Season 2/3 about Mon). Yet, she’s so devastated over Lena that she can’t even eat her favorite foods? Interesting.

Color schemes and certain shots

The red/blue color scheme consistently used with Supercorp, with exception to the purple tones used in Season 5 to represent their conflict.

No other love interest for Kara has consistently used that iconic Super/LL color palet. Not James, Mon, William, or the two episodes with Adam.

I'd like to specifically remind everyone how Kara chose to wear purple with William, against Alex's explicit advice.

There are always lighting choices made with Supercorp shots. No other duo (besides dramatic Danvers sisters shots) seem to have such artistic care.

Do I even need to mention the balcony scenes? Both at the Pulitzer Ceremony and in scenes from multiple seasons where Kara has hovered over Lena's balcony-- most notably in 5x03.

Like seriously, do I need to mention the scene from 5x08 where Kara and Lena are looking longingly at the same picture of the two of them?

Music

If I know anything as a musician, I know scores. And Blake Neely has created certain melodies just for Supercorp saves. There’s the typical “Supergirl hero” melody, but it’s rarely used for scenes with Lena (besides the one instance in 5x07 cliff scene, when Neely combines the Leviathan theme with the Supergirl theme).

If you want to listen to examples: the brief save in 2x15 and the plane save in 3x05. Both melodies are unique, unreleased scores that (to my musical knowledge) have not been repeated with other Kara rescues. 

Also, can we talk about how Supercorp has their own heroic theme, composed specifically for the 100th episode? Played by a live orchestra? For the one AU where Kara and Lena were partners from the start?

Decisions made by Melissa and Katie

We know they've known about Supercorp since at least the end of Season 2. Melissa showed Katie and they've been aware for years.

Yet, they play into the Supercorp dynamic. Longing stares, giggly dialogue, tear filled eyes, etc.

Regarding Melissa specifically: for her directorial debut she made two significant decisions. 1. She chose to have a camera pan over the room during Lex's speech, showing only Lena noticing Kara leaving and upset. 2. She dressed Lena in two comics Lois Lane outfits, one of which in red to parallel Kara's blue.

Melissa also has played Kara's interractions with Lena very similarly to how she played the Kara/James dynamic in Season 1. Something she chose not to do with Mon or William. But let's get into my next point...

Direct parallels with heterosexual superhero couples most on the CW

This includes Westallen, multiple iterations of Clois, Olicity, WonderTrev, Karolsen, PeterMJ, Deckerstar, Brainia, SpiderGwen, Lanolsen...need I go on??

On my blog, I have them tagged as: supercorp and hetero hero parallels

Individual ships are tagged as: [couple]/supercorp (ex. clois/supercorp)

Apologies for just giving links, but damn if I wrote all of the parallels out then it would probably take days and this post would be absurdly long.

And let’s not forget all the parallels Supercorp has with canon w/w

This includes Korrasami, Catradora, Clexa, Dansen, Avalance, Harlivy, Sanvers, etc.

I have these examples tagged similarly to the het examples: supercorp and canon sapphic parallels (same with individual ones)

You’ll notice there are actually more posts and parallels between Supercorp and het couples (the couples that most non-LGBT fans think of as more valid lmao), so take that as you will🙃

Despite the mistreatment of Supercorp fans, and LGBT fans in general, by some actors and crew, and despite the tone deaf plot lines and usage of characters, Supercorp has consistently held up with all of my points stated above. That's why I still have days where I can just feel it in my bones that Supergirl is playing the slow burn game with Supercorp. It clearly won't be as well-done as Catradora, because of how much sh*t they've pulled over the seasons. But just like you, I have days where I get strong feelings that maybe it’s all part of their poorly thought out plan and we’ll get that validation and happiness.

[hlupdate]

A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”

The second takes place a few years later: Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Payne got up to use the bathroom, and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words …” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, “What if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?”

“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio, with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, ‘What if [the next line was] “More than a feeling”? Well, that would actually be tight!’”

“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live-show staple. It’s a midtempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock & roll bands of the 21st century.

July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was redefining the contours of fandom. 

It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.

Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of the history of boy bands. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties, when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”

In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted did it only once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.

“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatlesque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, poppy guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”

To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy-band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘NSync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars. 

The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”

One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.

“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.

“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”

Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.

“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”

Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.

Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”

Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.

At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”

“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”

At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”

Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.

“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”

Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.

Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack” and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.

“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”

Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible. 

But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.” 

“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”

That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”

For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”

“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”

Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.

“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.” 

Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.

“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.

“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”

Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.

“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”

He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”

Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.

“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”

A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”

Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.

But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.

“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”

After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”

In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.

There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”

But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.

“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”

[the-darklings]

Can we have something nice? Maybe something happy please? Something that doesn't make me want to scream due to angst? P̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶H̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶/̶V̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶?̶ Something that has an actual happy ending?

you asked for more elites and here i am!

wc: 2.2k+

.

“I bet twenty you can’t do it.”

“Twenty what? Thousand? Be specific, idiot.”

“Dario, Julian is bullying me!”

A sigh; long and worn, a sound of a man who has had to deal with this for years. “He’s allowed to bully you. You know you have to be specific about bets, Step.”

“V,” Step whines, turning to look at you as you walk behind him. “Julian and Dario are bullying me. Help me, carina.”

“I’m about to bully you with my shoe up your ass, chickenshit,” Hector warns from beside you. In the shadows of the night, his features appear even harsher and he blows out a puff of smoke, glaring. “Stop your yapping.”

Step—in all his unwise, slightly tipsy glory—promptly flips Hector off and the Devil of Camorra growls under his breath, ripping the cigarette from his lips. Those icy eyes appear silver grey in the moonlight and you watch the shadows dance across those wide, sharp features. 

“I’m going to break your goddamn arm,” the man warns and you know it’s not an empty threat. “Try that shit with me one more time, I dare you.”

“V won’t let you hurt me because I’m her favourite,” Step shoots back smugly and sticks his tongue out. “She danced with me all night so, uh, stronzo, maybe next time.”

Dancing all night is a bit of an exaggeration. When the Four—or at the time the three—had invited you out for a night of food and drinks, you had agreed right away. It’s been a few, long months of pulling job after job, mission after mission. Camorra doesn’t rest. There is always some hill to climb or people to kill. You don’t stay at the top by being comfortable with what you have.

Giovanni wields you all like an expert tactician. Aware of every strength and every weakness and delegating appropriately. You are the core that holds his empire together. 

The five of you together have reshaped Camorra into something downright terrifying. 

Looking at you all right now—casual clothes, too wide grins and snarky banter—it would be hard to assume so. 

Except maybe Hector. He makes people uneasy by simply breathing. 

It’s been an amazing night of hearty Italian food and several, eventful bar hops where you danced and laughed and danced some more. Finally relaxed and happy. You’re well known in Rome. Whispers follow you wherever you go, and good service is expected whenever Camorra’s finest and deadliest are present at your establishment. 

Hector joined you late, having just come back from his latest mission. His first solo mission in a while, in fact, but you haven’t asked him for information on it. When it comes to his service to Giovanni, there are no questions to be asked. 

Still it had been surreal seeing him cut through the crowded bar and heading for your booth after almost two weeks of not seeing him. For once, he was not wearing his Camorra suit. Not the burgundy nor his preferred black. 

Just loose, fluffy strands of hair, a white t-shirt and a familiar leather jacket with dark jeans. Effortlessly striking; a dangerous, wild thing claiming every inch of space as his own. More than one head had turned at the sight of him, but as always, Hector didn’t pay them any attention. 

He chooses who he wants, not the other way around. 

The man in question looks like he’s about to reach out and throttle Step till he truly is dead so you take this opportunity to insert yourself between them, walking backwards so you’re facing the Devil. 

“Twenty K was it?” you wonder with a slight quirk of your eyebrows as you link your arms behind you. “You’re all on.”

Silver, devious eyes zero in on you at those words. Warm summer breeze ruffles your clothes, his cigarette smoke hiding his features for a second but his full mouth quirks; a minute, taunting thing. “You sure you can handle that, sweetheart? You don’t take losing so well.”

“Careful, Hector,” Julian remarks knowingly, amused. “This one bites back and delights in laying you on your ass.”

“Yeah,” Dario adds from behind you. “We would hate to see that.”

You bite back a smirk at the way Hector seems to squeeze the cigarette harder between his fingers and bring it to his lips, his eyes narrowing. “Fuck off, Julian,” he shoots back dryly, no heat there, and you watch the way the amber light from his cigarette illuminates his rings. Only four from the eight fit your own— “You’re as bad as the skinny little shit over there. Fine, though. Next one you see. 40k. Let’s see if you have the balls to follow through, compagno.”

Never one to back down. You turn, careful not to let your feet tangle and watch Julian’s lips part. He splutters slightly and Dario chuckles. It’s a deep, rumbling sound that fills the otherwise empty street.

“Walked right into that one, Jules,” Step sniggers with a waggle of his fingers and you can’t help but to silently agree. What good has ever come from provoking Hector of all the people? You should know. “Sì? No? Is it ooooon? Come on, Julie, I’m dying from suspense—”

“Fine!” Julian snaps, irritated, his dark moustache twitching and he rubs his forehead with a huff of air. “Dio aiutami. You’re so annoying.” 

Step beams, bobbing his head and pushes his sunglasses up his nose. You, to this day, have no idea how he manages to see with them on. “It’s part of my charm.”

Hector snorts loudly and your lips curve. In the darkness of the night and in between the melody of bickering filling the air your eyes find his again. 

He throws the bud of his cigarette in the bin as you all walk by and you almost comment how, for once, he’s actually acting like a well adjusted citizen.

“You’re up, Julie,” he drawls suddenly and his eyes linger on you for a beat, a different heat there, before they move over your shoulder. “Better make it count.”

“Wait, what?” 

Hector rolls eyes and points up with his index finger. 

Your head slants and you know that your other three companions are doing the same. 

Above you, on the third floor balcony, stands a lone female figure, smoking in nothing but her lingerie and a loose robe. 

Every bit a self-assured, powerful woman confident in her body, in herself.

Step coughs weakly. Julian is beyond flustered and you don’t need daylight to know that, you can hear the small choked noises he’s making from where you stand. 

Hector, the clever bastard, just looks smug.

His eyebrows cock as he waits expectantly before wandering closer. “Well? Or would you like to give me the cash now, huh?”

A bet to ask out the first person you see.

Julian’s nose twitches and he sighs. “You won, Hector. Happy?”

“What really?” you ask, surprised. “Not even going to try?”

Julian shakes his head, his expression grave, and few loose strands of his dark hair flutter in the breeze. “I’m not stupid. Knowing him, he probably knows the woman and knows that she will yell and throw something at my face if I try. No thanks.”

Hector doesn’t disagree and you blink at him. 

“Hey, assholes,” a voice from above calls in accented English. “You may want to keep it down before someone calls the police on you. It’s 3am.”

Step steps forward, extending his arms as if in a welcome. “Bella signora,” he calls out happily, slipping into a charming Italian drawl. “Would you be so kind as to accompany me for breakfast in exactly two hours and ten minutes?”

Breakfast at sunrise? Oh, Step.

The shadowy shape of the woman peers down at your group and scoffs. “I don’t understand the word you just said,” she retorts, still in English, and you see her throw the cigarette down in your direction. “I’m Swedish. But next time lose the goofy glasses before trying to come onto someone.”

The balcony door slams shut behind her. 

Silence. 

You all burst into laughter simultaneously and even Hector smirks, his amusement apparent. Dario pats Step on the back sympathetically when the younger man’s arms plop to his sides. “Maybe next time, amico, hm?”

“Yeah.”

He’s practically pouting. 

Lowering his head, his tattooed neck disappears from sight and you step closer to him, patting his arm in comfort, too. 

“Next time, S.”

“At least you love me, bella, yes?” Step says with a crooked grin. 

A large, heavy hand lands on top of your head, then, roughly ruffling your hair. “Yeah, she simply adores you, idiot.”

You punch his gut and it’s like hitting a wall. Hard, solid muscle meets your fist, forged by years of relentless training and brutality. 

“She does!”

Dario sighs. 

“Whatever.”

“Hey! Don’t ‘whatever’ me, square face.”

Hector promptly ignores the Camorra Chameleon and turns to you, staring down at you unblinking. “We need to get your ass back home or you will be useless in the ring tomorrow.”

“I could lay you flat on your back without sleep and with my hands tied.”

His eyes spark at the challenge. “That can be arranged, sweetheart,” he warns but you read the double meaning behind his words even if the context might be lost on others. 

Your mocking expression strains and you pull away from his steady grip. “I’m not flinching,” you tell him sweetly. “But you have a point. It’s late.”

You don’t miss the fleeting look Dario shoots you both.

Julian stretches his arms upwards before wrapping his arm around Step’s shoulder, his Camorra rings gleaming in the streetlamp. “Come on, Romeo. Time to go. Boss will have your head if you’re late again. You can crash at mine, it’s closer.”

Step lays his cheek against Julian’s shoulder. “Oh, what would I do without you, JoJo?”

“Perish.”

You laugh. “He’s not wrong.”

Hector’s arm brushes against yours and your head slants in his direction, still grinning, and the man arches his eyebrow. Faint amusement lines his face but he doesn’t comment.  

“Enough you two,” Dario interjects and pats both their shoulders, towering over them. “I’m getting jealous.”

“Oh, Dario,” Step says sweetly, dragging out the man’s name. “You can join us any—”

The Strength of Camorra lives up to his name by effortlessly tugging the other members of the guard with him as he turns to go. 

“See you two in the morning.”

Julian follows Dario willingly as always but Step—in usual Step fashion—makes a fuss the entire way down the street,

You watch them go with a tiny, fond smile twitching your lips. 

Idiot men. 

Your idiot men. Friends. Family. 

You wish Ares and Roberto had been able to come too but Santino had business to deal with in Seoul.

Cassian was busy with Gianna. 

Busy. 

“Coming, blue eyes?” you call out with that faint smile as you turn to go.

You take a step. 

Before he grabs your wrist and drags you to him, his hungry mouth slanting against yours. You let out a small appreciative gasp when he presses you to him, his fingers sinking in your hip, trailing a deliberate path across your waist. His other hand tangles in your hair and your hands wrap around his neck. 

“Fucking finally,” he mutters and kisses you again. Hard. Tobacco and bourbon on his tongue. It’s a demanding and hot kiss that makes your heart stutter and he practically lifts you in his arms. His leather jacket presses into your skin and you moan softly into his domineering kiss, matching every slant and exhale and nibble of his teeth. “Been waiting all fucking night to kiss you.”

He tugs on your hair and presses a series of ravenous, rapid kisses down the length of your neck, his teeth scraping against your pulse. 

“I think Dario knows,” you gasp breathlessly, and suppress a hiss at the way his hand drags over the curved of your ass, squeezing deliberately. “Do you—”

He bites your earlobe, nibbling on it as the heat of his breath tickles your skin. “Dario knows. He’s always known,” Hector grumbles and kisses your jaw before his hand drags up again, slipping under your top and up your naked back. You shiver at the coolness of his rings against your flesh and lean into him further, breathing heavily. “He’s smarter than people give him credit for. Morons.”

“Do you think—”

He bites your neck; playful, deliberate. “Any other men you wanna discuss with me right now, sweetheart?”

Your fingers find the soft strands of his hair, unstyled for once. Your other tangles in the cotton of his t-shirt. “Just your favourite,” you breathe against his mouth and his jaw flutters, his eyes flashing. “You. Looking handsome tonight, asshole.”

His teeth flash. “You’re the one to talk,” he grouses, his eyes narrowing and he grips the skin of your waist—his fingers tracing, claiming—and you lean into his touch. He kisses you again. Bites your lip, tugs on it, and you do the same, and he only grows hungrier for it. “Looking like that, smiling like that. You tested my patience, I’ll admit. The only thing I could think about all night long was you between my legs. How pretty you look when you moan my name.”

“Such a romantic.”

His arms slide down your body and he lifts you in the air easily, your legs wrapping around his waist. Your arms wrap around his broad shoulders and he looks deadly and half-starved in this muted, hazy light. Half-shadow, half-devil he always gets compared to. 

“I’ll show you romance.” 

He carries you in his arms the entire way to your apartment, his lips attached to your neck. 

You barely make it through the door before he tears at your clothes.

You’re late for training the next day. 

[pies-writes-and-more]

aethra

Word Count: 4,368

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Fem!Reader

Warnings: F L U F F :D

A/N: Instalment #4 in @wxstedhexrt​‘s and my Falling collection! Series Masterlist can be found HERE. Please read the poem first as it is the whole centrepiece of the fanfic :) If you need or would like a typed out version of the poem instead of the photo below, here’s the link to it on Destiny’s blog :) Thankfully the parts are getting more and more fluffy :D 

aethra (Latin): brightness, splendor; clear sky

Y/N watched as the sun rays glided into her office space, leaving the kiss of warmth on each surface it touched. In her chilly AC filled office room, Y/N longed for the sunlight and found that her bottom lip pouted out slightly every time a cloud flickered over the golden flashes.

Ping. Another email, as if dragging Y/N back from her never ending daydreams to the boringness of paperwork. She was quickly learning that being an Avengers was not just fast action but also the painfully slow task of doing reports.

I need those mission reviews done for tomorrow afternoon, is that alright? Tony’s brief and unsigned email made Y/N groan slightly. She knew he didn’t really need the reports, he was just trying to make sure she got used to filing paperwork quickly after a job. She sent off a quick response back to him with the completed half of the work attached to the email so he could see that she wasn’t just lazing around, and then opened up the files for the next few.

If this were any other day, Y/N would be drilling through these files quickly, marking them completed and clapping her hands together, ready for more work. But today, Y/N’s brain decided it would be nice to be out in the sun. She craved the feeling of just sitting in the sunlight, maybe a nice breeze to send goosebumps up her skin, the feeling of a nice warm hug from someone special-

The thought made her blush and she knew it was because of who she was imagining being with. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.

The thought of him drew a from her lips so slowly, she had to laugh at herself for being so typical of someone in love. Nat and Wanda and teased her endlessly about this the other day, sighing like she was a character in an old romance novel where a suitor had sent her a letter in which he had proclaimed his entire heart was hers. She couldn’t help how her body reacted when she thought about him, even if she wasn’t all too ready to admit the feelings causing it.

Her eyes drifted back at the first page of her report, thoughts of Bucky fluttering away. In a whole complex full of superheroes, I wonder if I could ever be saved from paperwork, Y/N chuckled to herself, straightening her posture and getting to work. If Tony said this work needed to be done, she really shouldn’t dillydally.

But after one document was completed, Y/N’s mind quickly started drifting again, deciding that she deserved a nice long break for doing so little work. She knew that she should buckle down and focus, force herself to get this done but her eyes just kept going to the blue skies and green trees she had as a window view from her small second floor office. She wondered what the flowers smelled like on this gorgeous spring day. What did it feel like to have that nice breeze flying by? Was it a warm breeze? Was it humid out? Was it the kind of cool breeze you wanted to just stop and close your eyes and appreciate?

A flying object hit her window with a small tap, making her jump with surprise. She waited a moment, eyes scanning the glass, wondering if maybe the wind had carried some debris. But as soon as she accepted this as a reason, two other small stones came and made consecutive taps at her window.

Y/N paused and slowly rolled her desk chair over to the window. She peered down at the ground, smiling to find the man of her daydreams standing there. He gave a shy sort of wave, nodding at her window. She stood up to open it, leaning against the frame so she could see him better. “Trying to break my window there, Sergeant?” She teased.

His laugh was carried up to her with the soft breeze that blew by, as if air nymphs were flying past to say hello with the gift of the most melodious sound she could think of. Bucky had this nervous smile on his face and it was only then she noticed the small basket he had next to him. “I was wondering…” he hesitated and glanced at his things, shifting on his feet. “If you’re not too busy, and if you are, you can say no so don’t worry-” he added quickly.

Y/N wondered if it was the warm glow of the sun or if there really was a pink hue to his cheeks right now. “You seem a little nervous today, Sergeant. Everything alright?” She giggled, leaning her chin into her hands as she watched the pink colour on his cheeks grow.

Bucky’s lips were still spread into a grin as he wrestled with what to say next, “Would you skip the rest of the work day with me? Come enjoy this gorgeous weather?”

Y/N wondered how he could’ve possibly known how eager she was to leave. Here she was, in this super cute spring dress, longing for nothing more than to just relax and bathe in the sun and he was here, offering just that. Y/N nodded eagerly in response to his question but her eyes turned back to the door of her office, which was currently closed.

“If I leave, Tony’ll have my head. I haven’t finished my reports,” she sighed, slumping against the window pane. “Thanks though, maybe some other day?”

Even from up here, Y/N could see the sparkle in Bucky’s eyes fall a bit but he was quick to protest, “Aw come on, doll. I spent all morning getting everything ready, you can’t just sneak off with me just the once? Are you really that busy?”

Y/N was a complete stranger to that flirty smirk on James Barnes’ lips and she couldn’t help but feel her curiosity being sparked. He couldn’t be flirting with her could he? “I thought you said I could say no,” she teased and Bucky huffed playfully in response.

“I did but I meant it as in, you can say no if you don’t want to be with me. This seems like a ‘no, I don’t want to get in trouble with Iron Man’,” Bucky pointed out. “I’ll help you with your reports tomorrow if you like! But it’s far too nice of a day to be spent inside!”

He was right and Y/N knew it. Even just the moments of her hanging out of this window made her want to run out and pretend like she had no responsibilities. The air smelled of freedom, the sun felt like safety and warmth.

“Well then, Sergeant, how do you suggest I get down? If he sees me leaving, he’ll have my head! I can’t just pull the fire alarm and run away,” she laughed, thinking about how confused the Avengers would be to a nonexistent fire.

“Jump,” was all he said with a shrug, not even stopping to think about it. That smirk on his face was turning into an awfully cocky grin and Y/N couldn’t help but feel insanely attracted to it.

She raised an eyebrow at his suggestion, staring at him in disbelief, “You want me to jump out of this window?”

“It’s not that high up! You’re only on the second floor!” Bucky nodded with a laugh. “Come on, don’t tell me you’re scared. You’ve jumped out of the quinjet before miles above the ground.”

“I have a parachute when I do that!” Y/N argued, still staring at him like he had grown 7 heads. “Have you gone mad? I can’t just jump out of here! I don’t have super strength or super healing like you, Barnes, I could break something!”

“Nah, not from that height!” Bucky insisted, but Y/N wasn’t sure if he was lying or not. “Oh come on, doll. I’d catch you - don’t you know that?”

The words that came from his lips paired with that gorgeously confident smile made Y/N’s heart flutter a bit. Tingles spread from her fingertips all the way to her chest, her stomach lurching forward as she thought about hopping out.

“You promise?” She asked unevenly, glancing at the window frame surrounding her. It was definitely a big enough space for her to slide out of and there was a ledge in front of the window that she could situate herself on for a moment before she jumped…

Her cheeks flushed as she realized that she was wearing a dress with no tights or anything to cover up the underwear that would quickly be seen if Bucky was going to be preparing to catch her.

“Don’t you trust me, doll?” Bucky asked with another laugh and Y/N wished her heart would stop swooning. She nodded as she slowly climbed onto the window, her legs hanging out.

“Now, try to keep your eyes away from under my dress, you!” She scolded nervously, staring down at Bucky as he tried to find the best spot to stand.

“You want me to close my eyes?” He joked and she rolled her eyes as he laughed some more. “I promise I’ll do my best to try and not look.”

Y/N nodded and looked back at the office behind her, hoping that she hadn’t caught anyone’s attention. Her heart was pounding into her chest but she couldn’t tell if it was because she was still lightheaded from talking to Bucky or nervous about jumping out of a window. “Alright… here I come!” She screeched as she pushed herself off, wincing a little as the rough texture of the window’s ledge scratched her thigh from behind.

It wasn’t that Y/N thought it was going to be an easy drop but she hadn’t quite expected Bucky to lose his footing and fall back with her in his arms with a loud thump. Bucky’s hard body felt so surprising to her, her mind immediately filling with thoughts of what muscles he was hiding under his clothing. Dust rose from the ground as the two bodies smacked into it and the birds hiding in the tree nearby flew away, probably laughing as they watched the two humans’ bodies slumped against the ground.

Both of them were groaning for a moment, Bucky rubbing his head which had definitely been smacked into the earth. Y/N felt her cheeks burn with a blush, immediately feeling bad as she saw the pain in Bucky’s wincing expression.

“Y’alright there, doll?” Bucky managed out with a chuckle, reaching his hand up to gently brush against her cheek.

Y/N’s cheeks burned hotter, quickly nodding and wriggling off of him, offering her own hand to help him stand up. “Remind me never to jump into your arms again,” she teased, brushing some dirt that had gathered on the edges of her dress.

Bucky rolled his eyes and moved to pickup the items he was bringing along with them, “Hush you, I kept you safe didn’t I? You barely even hit the ground, you just hit me hitting the ground.”

There was an odd sort of silence between them for a moment as Bucky brushed off the dirt on his back. He looked up at her with a sort of sheepish grin, “So. Pink huh?”

Y/N looked at him with confusion until her eyes went wide as Bucky started to laugh once more, “You said you wouldn’t look!” She screeched, slapping his arm. He was trying to stifle his laughter while she smiled even though she felt like ripping his head off.

“I said I’d try! It’s hard to avoid looking when I was trying to make sure I didn’t miss you!” Bucky grinned but held up his hands in defence, “I’m sorry, doll, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

Y/N wished she could stammer out a topic change but the words were drying up her throat and her chest tightened in embarrassment. She quickly nodded towards the items he had brought, “S-So where are we going?”

Bucky smiled and pointed at the car stationed nearby, “It’s a secret. Come on, we gotta hurry before Sam realizes I stole the majority of the food in the fridge.” The two of them giggled their way into the car, the engine roaring into life and kicking dust behind them as they disappeared into the horizon.

Y/N couldn’t help but open the passenger window, leaning her arms against the door so she could feel the warm breeze on her face. Her hair was going to be blown in every direction possible but she couldn’t care less. The air felt so nice on her skin, the sun kissing warmth on each inch of skin it danced on. She was so entranced by the feeling, she wasn’t even sure how long they were driving for.

“What’re we doing out here, Bucks?” Y/N finally asked as the city buildings disappeared and green fields quickly replaced them. Her smile grew as she noted the vibrant colours of wildflowers scattered around them, beaming even more as the car turned into a dirt road and came to a stop.

“I just thought we could have lunch with some peace and quiet, and maybe a bit of a view. Just stay put for a moment okay?” Bucky grinned and waited for Y/N to give him a suspicious but agreeing nod. He hopped out of the car and grabbed the basket from the back seat, rushing off into the fields. Y/N’s eyes watched him until he disappeared into the tall grass. She waited for a moment, starting to feel a little nervous when he didn’t come back immediately. This had to be some sort of a prank right? Bucky wouldn’t really just leave her in a car in the middle of nowhere, right?

The girl was filled with relief when Bucky’s figure came jogging back, a bright smile still on his face. Y/N moved to open the door but Bucky held his hands up to stop her, shaking his head quickly, “My mama raised a gentleman,” he insisted after he opened the door and held a hand out to help her out of the car.

Y/N looked up at those weirdly excited eyes and couldn’t help but laugh. Bucky’s attitude was that of a small kid, pulling their friends to come see the frog they found, or a dog who was eagerly awaiting to play catch at the park. This side of Bucky was rarely ever seen… in fact, Y/N wondered if this was the first time she’d seen it at all. Bucky’s fingers intertwined with hers as he closed the car door and locked the vehicle behind them.

“Come on then. Pretty girl like you in that pretty little dress deserves to have a nice lunch date,” Bucky led her along the grass and Y/N had to wonder if he knew that every word that was leaving his lips was making her cheeks feel hot. She was starting to wonder if he could tell how nervous he made her, how shy and vulnerable she felt around him. Her heart was racing and her temperature was rising and it had absolutely nothing to do with the warm breeze floating around them.

Bucky helped push some of the tall grass away from Y/N’s dress as they wandered around for a few minutes, even though Y/N insisted that grass wasn’t going to hurt the fabric in any way. As he led her, a few large trees finally came into view. Her eyes widened in surprise to find a typical red and white picnic blanket spread out on the flat earth beside one of the largest trees, hiding in the shade that pushed and pulled with the air. On the blanket was an assortment of foods, including a platter of sandwiches, some chicken wings, a large bowl of salad, and containers filled with gorgeous looking pieces of fruit.

“Bucky… what the hell is this?” Y/N gaped as she stared at it, Bucky grinning as the two of them came to a halt in front of the blanket. “Did… Did you plan all of this?”

“Of course,” Bucky’s eyes were already fixated on her when she looked up at him, his blue eyes sparkling in the sunlight.

“You… You did this for me?” Y/N asked again, her chest tightening slightly. Had he somehow taken a peak into her daydreams? Had he heard her talk about how much she loved to just sit in the sunlight or get away from all the noise of the city?

Bucky’s cheeks went rosy as Y/N questioned him, his eyes quickly falling down to the picnic blanket. “Who else would I have done it for?” He asked softly and Y/N’s heart threatened to fall right out of her chest. There was a pause and Y/N wasn’t sure what to say. She could think of a number of girls that would give anything for Bucky Barnes to do this for them but she couldn’t bring herself to mention them. Bucky had done all this for her and right now, she didn’t want to think of any other girl he would’ve done it for.

Bucky cleared his throat quickly and gestured for her to sit down, moving some of the containers around to create some space on the blanket. “I wasn’t sure what kind of food you’d want. I know you really like pho but it was so warm out and I wasn’t sure it would be good by now, and I thought maybe burgers would get cold by the time we got out here and-” Bucky was rambling and Y/N’s lips curled into a smile as she heard it. Bucky Barnes only rambled sometimes. He was such a quiet man nowadays, hearing him ramble was odd. But it only ever happened when he was nervous. How could he possibly be nervous around her, Y/N wondered.

“They look great,” Y/N insisted, interrupting him with a touch to his arm. “Actually, they look amazing. I’m starved!”

Bucky grinned and quickly pushed backed the saran wrap that was protecting the sandwiches, offering her one. “That Parker kid, he told me Delmar’s Deli and Grill has the best sandwiches ever so…” Bucky picked one up for himself before pushing the saran wrap back onto the plate and turning to her.

“So if they’re terrible, we can blame him,” Y/N finished with a giggle. She sat crossed legged in front of Bucky, facing him with a large smile on her face. The two of them sank their teeth into the sandwiches, groaning with delight as the flavours touched their tongues. “Fuck this is amazing,” Y/N whined, barely swallowing the first piece before eagerly taking another. “Sex is good but this sandwich is better,” she decided out loud, making Bucky choke a little on his bite.

“S-Sorry?” Bucky blinked, the two of them sharing an awkward gaze together before bursting into laughter. “What kind- Who says that about a sandwich?”

“I’m sorry, are you not tasting what I’m tasting? It’s incredible!” Y/N insisted, her face going warm with embarrassment and laughter. “Everyone always talks about their last meal on earth, not their last sexual encounter on earth. There’s a reason. Because food is better.”

Bucky thought about it for a moment and then nodded in agreement, “Alright. Fair I guess.” He chuckled to himself and handed her some water to down the bites with. It didn’t take long for Y/N and Bucky to wolf down the majority of the food, Y/N topping off their meal by helping herself to the strawberries that were in a nearby container. Bucky slumped against the tree stump, closing his eyes as he listened to the sounds of the tree swaying to the wind.

“Open,” Y/N whispered and Bucky peek an eye over at her, raising an eyebrow as he felt her touch a strawberry to his lips. “Come on, before I eat all of them,” she pushed with a smile. Bucky rolled his eyes as he playfully glared at her but happily accepted the sweet fruit, going back to closing his eyes.

Y/N watched him for a moment, finding herself unable to tear her eyes away from him. He seemed so much calmer today, so much more relaxed. Over the past few weeks of getting to know him, Bucky Barnes was no longer just the pair of scared eyes that locked onto her while disassociating, he was no longer just the hollowed shape of a man who couldn’t sleep unless it was to the sound of old Scooby Doo cartoons. Bucky Barnes was now a man who held her whole heart in his hands and Y/N wasn’t even sure if he knew that. She stared at him for a while longer before the sounds of birds chirping nearby drew her attention. Her eyes scanned the fields in front of them, sighing contently as she tried to take a photo of the scene to keep forever.

She lifted her phone up, taking a photo of the blue sky, the one or two white cotton candy clouds, the green grass contrasting the red and white picnic blanket. She wanted to keep this memory forever. She smiled proudly as she looked at the multitude of photos she could now keep, resting herself against the tree trunk next to Bucky as she picked out her favourite pictures.

As if coming from the very depths of her memory, a line of poetry flickered into her brain.

There is sweet music here that softer falls …. Y/N blinked as she tried to repeat it over and over again, eyebrows furrowing as she found herself unable to recall the second line.

Phone in hand, Y/N’s fingers tapped along the screen the few words she could remember, searching for this melodic rhythm she had in her head.

“Whatcha doing there, doll?” Bucky asked softly, and his voice became the much sweeter melody in her head. Y/N looked over to find him looking at her quizzically, obviously amused by the little frustration in her expression.

“I’m looking for a poem,” Y/N admitted as she went back to searching, face feeling warm again. Was it embarrassing to be thinking about poetry right now? Was Bucky one of those guys who thought poetry was a waste of time? Stupid fantasies that never any sense?

“Will you read it for me?” Bucky sat up a little straighter, his eyes showing that same little kid excitement that Y/N had seen in him earlier. She smiled at him and nodded quickly, gasping in delight as she found the poems she was looking for.

“There is sweet music here that softer falls-” Y/N began softly.

“Wait!” Bucky yelped, making Y/N jump a little. He shifted over in where he was sitting, lying down so that his head was now in Y/N’s lap, smiling and batting his eyelashes up at her with his oh-so-innocent look. “Alright, now you can start.” He nodded, closing his eyes again and making Y/N laugh.

“God you’re impossible,” Y/N mumbled but bit her lip a little as she let her eyes watch him just for another moment. Her fingers clenched around her phone a little tighter, her other hand soon moving to play with the ends of Bucky’s long smooth locks.

“There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass,”

Y/N paused as a slightly more powerful breeze flew by, imagining herself flying with the air that touched her skin. She shifted her weight into the tree trunk once more, her dress strap falling slightly as the fabric loosened against her skin. Before she could move to pull it up, Bucky’s warm hand did it for her, his eyes only barely open. His fingertips left tingles along her skin as he gently flattened the strap, leaving his touch there just for a moment before pulling away again and closing his eyes once more.

Y/N could still feel the ghost of his fingers, her skin yearning to be touched by him again because he just made her feel so safe, so warm, even though she couldn’t really say she was cold in the first place. Her eyes hastily skimmed her phone again, not wanting him to realize she was fixating on him again.

“Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,”

The words hung in the space between the two bodies as if the air was holding them near. Each syllable that left Y/N’s lips felt soft and soothing and light, like the breeze that was drifting past, but also so grounding and present. As Y/N scrolled through Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Choric Song, her fingers plaited strands of Bucky’s hair into a small braid. She knew he wasn’t sleeping because his eyes kept flickering over to her and Y/N could swear he was watching her, examining her like she had be examining him moments earlier. She tried to keep her gaze away from his, not wanting to prove herself wrong that Bucky was looking at her because if he was in fact looking at her, she didn’t want him to look away.

“Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.”

Soon his eyes were closing slower and staying closed for longer but still Y/N knew he wasn’t sleeping because Bucky always twitched when he was falling asleep. Her fingers twisted and turned against his hair, soon adding soft coloured wildflowers into the braid. She couldn’t help but smile at how soft he looked here, how calm, how completely untortured.

“Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep”

Y/N wondered how time could be so generous in allowing her this time. The poem wasn’t even that long and yet, by the time Y/N got to the end, she felt like a whole eternity had passed them. She wondered if time would always be this kind, if maybe every moment spent alone with Bucky could be like this. Maybe the future could be brighter, softer, and more at peace, just like this.

** ** ** ** ** ** ** **

Another huge thanks to everyone who’s been following along with the series :D Destiny and I really love hearing from you all so please let us know how you like it!

MASTERLIST // Destiny’s Blog! <3

[myjunkisyuzuruhanyu]

[ICE JEWELS VOL. 12 SPECIAL INTERVIEW - YUZURU HANYU

Translation by Juro (juroscorner.blogspot.com)

Please click on the link in the reblog to read the full interview (I put left out parts in brackets [...]) and the Yuzuru related part from Satomi Ito’s interview about her costumes! (Tumblr is acting up with a direct link in the post)

Towards a “me” who surpasses myself

The World Championship (“WC”) was cancelled, drawing the 2019-20 season to a sudden conclusion. This season, he won a title that he hasn't conquered before. The victory at 4 Continents Championship (“4CC”) established Hanyu Yuzuru’s Super Slam as he entered glorious records and memories. His reflection on this season and resolution towards the upcoming season is told as follows. 

On the victory at the 4CC

Do you think of the victory at 4CC as a special memory? -       I really did win that competition, so I was happy. The last titles to obtain would probably be World Champion or Olympic Champion, but in this season, so far I’ve fulfilled tasks like winning competitions (which I haven’t won until then) like Skate Canada. Rather than any competition, this very one (4CC), is where I competed and won a silver medal at 16, but from then on, I couldn’t win it for a while. It’s good that I can finally win it. We heard that after Japan National, there was a period when you couldn’t get back on your feet. How did you spend that period? Was there any specific feeling? Then, how did you recover? Please let us know some details. -       I went through 3 consecutive competitions. (After JN), for I while I thought that Ahh, I’m quite tired out. I’ve been living placing pressure on myself and there was no time to recharge both my physical strength and emotion, so I let myself do whatever I felt like doing. I didn’t really pay attention to anything, so I don’t remember (what I did) clearly…

Just for now, “SEIMEI” and “Ballade no. 1”

[....about change of programs...]

You gave us a brilliant performance of “Ballade no. 1” at 4CC. It’s been previously said that you skated in absolute harmony with the pianist or as if you became the sound of the keyboard. What was your feeling this time? -       This time, it seemed like my body’s movement synchronized with the music playing in my head. Every single sound and melody thoroughly soaked into my body, and I let my body be in charge of the performance. Although I was nervous when doing jumps or difficult parts and there were plenty of matters to focus on, I left more than 80% of myself in the program to the music’s guidance rather than my consciousness. About the FP, what did you have to be cautious about when editing the music, to avoid destroying the world of “SEIMEI” now that the music needs to be 30s shorter? -       I found it compelling not to spoil the flow of the music or the program, so I avoided omitting any iconic part. There were parts where the tempo was quickened in the interest of time. However, even when the tempo was faster, for me, there was a certain meaning in skating [“SEIMEI”], and I had to be careful not to let the unique rhythm of my own fall apart. If the rhythm was changed too much, the true meaning of skating this program would be substantially different. Do you have any intention with SEIMEI’s new layout? To be specific, in the first 1 minute, you include 4 jumps. There was no run-up in between, only a mere turn from 3A to 3F. Please let us know how you came to engendering such a layout, something that can’t be done by anyone but Hanyu Yuzuru. -       Firstly, I wanted to cherish the music cuts which make up the program as much as possible. Then, there was editing to do. I didn’t want to change the flow of the first half, so the solution was to have 3 jumps with [1.1x] bonus in the 2nd half, I must find some way to insert one more jump in the 1st half, and I came up with placing 3F there. It could be either 3Lo or 3F, but I chose 3F since it did not to disrupt the music and rhythm. I showed Shae [my idea] right after she finished shaping the whole program, but she was also pleased by it, so we went with that layout. 

Is there any experience from skating “Otonal” and “Origin” that you can utilize? -       “Otonal” is a piano piece but there’s also an orchestra. With the piano’s sound as the core, I was trying to express the completion of the music, and [skate] while gathering picking up various shades of music. When skating “Ballade no. 1”, because I have [experienced] expressing an orchestra, I’ve come to feel the purity and transparent quality of the piano’s echo, and the expansion of sound even more deeply. I skated “Origin” while channeling the power surging up from deep inside and I always performed it taking my own self as a (candle’s) wick. Throughout the performance, that energy became the nuclear*. In “SEIMEI”, even when receiving those energy and power, it’s important to adjust so everything is kept under control. Rather than letting the overflowing energy run loose, I want to embody floaty, airy image and philosophical insights, even with my feet on the ground.

On this season’s achievements and next season’s goals You adopted the strategy of changing jump layouts according to the competition. You also competed in the GPS, GPF, and JN. What did you achieve? -       I think not getting injured is my biggest achievement.When I forcefully try to push myself from poor to peak condition, my body can’t catch up. I went through a long time with no serenity even in my heart, but this season, I think I was able to adjust well. Would you let us know how your training, for injury prevention and such, is coming along? -       I think I know the where within myself the “line” (limit) at which I should stop pushing ahead is. However, I’m aware that if I can’t overcome that boundary, I can’t improve, so I think cautiously about the days when I can push beyond the limit and days when I shouldn’t.

The WC was cancelled, but how was the result of your training after 4CC, and how that will connect to next season? -       I feel like I was even more attentive to practicing skating basics and jumps. I wouldn’t say everything is completed, but if I train earnestly now, I can detect what goes wrong, and that’s how the result will connect to next season in my opinion. Did the novel coronavirus affect your training and daily life in Canada? Also, what are the precautions you’re practicing? -       I’ve been washing my hands and gaggling my throat. Besides, whenever I come home from practice, I disinfect various things. I think there isn’t much impact on my training. From now on, it’s off-season. Do you have any training you want to do in mind? -       I want to spend time on practicing 4A, for it’s extremely difficult to train for a new jump mid-season. My home rink was already closed, so it’ll be tough from now on (Interviewer: By 3/16, Ontario had been locked down to reduce the spread of coronavirus). However, I can still make use of other methods like on-land training, etc. I think it’s helpful to build a good foundation. Please let us know your vision of next season’s program, image of music and such, to an extent that you find acceptable. -       I want to do new programs. I don’t know for sure how long it would take to incorporate 4A, but that’s also my goal to work hard for next season. I haven’t had any tangible image of the programs or music for now. However, I hope to do something that is meaningful to myself.

We’ll ask you about the 4A. At GPF, you’ve given us a glimpse it for the first time. What do you think about the atmosphere in the arena at that time after you showcased the jump? -       I was nervous, but because I was jumping in front of everybody, I kind of hoped I would succeed. I really enjoy the taste of climbing over the hindering wall.

[...about state of 4A...]

Finally, please let us know your resolutions for next season and send a message to fans. -       I’m really thankful that you keep supporting me to the end in this season as well. I think everyone is all going through a hard time because of the novel coronavirus right now. Please be careful. For me, from now on I will keep on accumulating the training towards next season, including the 4A. 

[...Bonus: Yuzu-related parts in Satomi Ito’s special interview ...] [Juro’s explanation on use of words and message by Juro]

[sea-side-scribbles]

Fanfiction: Sympathy For A Downer

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22737214/chapters/69812202

Chapter 44

Morrie didn't try to steal Norbert's Joy again and endured his high lover in silence. Norbert didn't hold a grudge against him either. Right after the gig, he insisted that Morrie stayed with him for the night. "You can't sleep in your room, you don't have a door!" He claimed that he regarded it as return service for demolishing said door, but it occured to Morrie that Norbert had no idea about what really happened. Still, he stayed with him and enjoyed his lover's efforts to comfort him. Then he told himself that it wasn't that bad after all, since Norbert's affection for him remained unabaited, although more superficial than before. In addition, he was still hopeful to find another solution for his lover's Joy-problem. He thought if Norbert needed a nerver so badly, they could at least get something that wasn't a drug. The next day, he and the band sweeped the town for an alternative. At the pharmacy, Morrie asked for professional advice and was taken aback that the only remedy, the salesman presented him as most tolerable, was Joy, of all things. The responsible pharmacist refused to recommend anything else. When Morrie urged him, he even had the cheek to offer him a probe, because he found him bad-tempered.

Empty handed and indeed moody, Morrie left the shop to try another. But at the end of the day, Joy seemed to be the entire town's only way to handle things. When he met the other band members, he soon found out that they had had the same experiences. "What if we consult a doctor and let him prescribe some real medicine?", Morrie suggested then. "Nick isn't ill", Matt insisted, shaking his head. "He only has the jitters." Morrie understood that it would be an exaggeration to run to the doctor because of stage fright. However, he was frustrated. "So, we give up?" "Well find another way", Chris quickly soothed him.

His hope was soon shattered when some days later he found his lead guitarist high on Joy. Shocked, he grabbed him by the collar and shook him heavily. "What the hell were you thinking?", he scolded. Chris held up his hands in defense. "Calm down, will you? I had a bad day, everyone can have a bad day, not only Nick." "We planned to get rid of that stuff! Do you remember?" Chris gave him a sleek grin. "Wrong, buddy. You planned to get rid of it.  But in the end it's the best medicine we have." "You took that probe they gave you, right? Without hesitation!" Morrie couldn't believe it. Chris shrugged. "Why, it was free. And it's completely harmless, my friend." Morrie, who knew that it was helpless to debate with someone on Joy, let him go.

A few seconds later, he found Matt on Joy. It was obvious, that typical way of strutting with the nose up in the air, that didn't suit him at all. "And I thought you're the reasonable one", he said, highly disappointed. "It's just a test", Matt tried to play it down, but Morrie didn't like the way his pupils were narrowed. "And what to you think of it?", he asked with his voice full of doubts. "I feel fantastic!", his friend exulted with arms wide open. "You should try it, Morrie! Why don't you take your probe?" "I don't have one", Morrie stated. "Oh...ok, I give you one of mine. No problem." After rummaging around in his pockets he offered a yellow pill to Morrie, who was aghast at the fact that he really expected him to take it. For a second he considered it. "Thanks, but I pass." he then said coolly. Matt shrugged. "It's your joice."

When he found Brad he wasn't surprised anymore.  He only said "Not you too." "Don't worry, I don't feel any different", the drummer assured him,  but also, he patted his cheek and wafted away with a spaced out look in his eyes. Norbert didn't seem to notice that he wasn't the only one on Joy anymore. Instead he seemed to wonder why everyone was such a good company all of a sudden and then went on as normal. Morrie in contrast suffered agonies. The next gig they played was the worst he had ever gone through. Not because they failed. It wasn't even a bad performance. But the way everyone had turned into unpredictable freaks stressed him out. He never knew if anyone of them would have a bad trip all of a sudden. And that dampened his own performance, and it made him even more frustrated. In a band, they had to count on each other and Morrie couldn't count on anyone but himself anymore.

When all the fuss was over, Morrie went to bed early again. The others celebrated themselves and he felt very alone. He saw that the others had let him down and left him only two options: play along and take Joy or endure it all in a sober state, what would mean more horrible concerts.

Soon, he didn't even endure his own thoughts anymore and longed for Norbert to knock at his new door. He lived for these moments. Norbert eventually did him the favor. "Hey there, lone wolf", he purred, again giving him the impression that there was a happier world he could enter whenever they were together. "Do you mind some company?" "Not at all. But be careful, I could take you for a lamb", Morrie was persuaded to joke around. He had no idea how much his nonchalant grin seduced Norbert, who walked into his room and made a shocked face. "So, you would eat me?" "Most likely", Morrie whispered and wrapped his arms around his prey. He smelled the faint waft of vanilla when he hugged Norbert from behind and greedily bit his shoulder. Norbert gasped loudly. "In this case...I confess. I'm a lamb." It was nights like these that kept Morrie going.

The Joy-problem was now permanent. After the so-called testing phase the band considered the pills to be harmless, so they abandoned Morrie's plan. They also kept offering this stuff to him, whenever they found him moody. But Morrie intended to never lay a finger on it. And so they went on with their lives. They kept throwing parties, and Morrie could only watch Norbert collect his fans and flirt with them and never looking back at him. At these happenings he just didn't exist for him. Considering everything he knew about Norbert on Joy so far, he wasn't surprised anymore. However, when he found him making love to a fan, he felt like someone pulled the rug from under his feet.

He vented throroughly, to ruin this moment entirely for both of them. He yelled at the two traitors, pulled the girl away from Norbert, scared her so much that she broke out into tears and ran away. Norbert's horrified face was a slight consolation. At least he had wiped that stupid smug grin from his face, that he had to watch all day. When Morrie decided that it was enough, he left the room himself. He noticed that Norbert stumbled after him, playing the puzzled and innocent lover.  Sick of that game, he ignored all of Norbert's cries and continued to walk through the house. The noise allured the fans. It was another moment of consolation for Morrie when they saw their great idol begging and pleading. Morrie didn't listen, all he wanted was to flee from the noise. His ears already rang because of Norbert's cries. When he had reached the studio, the only room that was noise-insulated, he already had his hand on the doorknob when the urge to turn around got the better of him. He just didn't have the heart to leave like that.

When he turned, he saw Norbert who had to support himself against the wall, because he couldn't stand upright by himself. His face was all wet and swollen, his eyes red and his breath carried the smell of alcohol into his direction when he said: "I don't love you any less..." Morrie now wished he had saved himself the sight. Disgusted, he locked himself into the studio, while Norbert was too weak and too slow to stop him. He still had some strength in his lungs to cry, but Morrie only heard a muffled noise. After putting on some earphones, even that was solved. He found a bottle of brandy, that Norbert had probably left there, and although he wasn't a fan of drowning his problems in alcohol, he found that he deserved a drink.

Sitting around like that, with earphones on and a glass in his hand, he thought he looked ridiculous. And it hurt because he had never wanted to look so ridiculous. He had never wanted to be in such a situation. Thinking back, everything had started so beautifully...his relationship that had been gently forced upon him, the band that had asked him to join them...But at the end, nothing had turned out the way he wanted. In a pathetic way, he thought, he faced the ruins of his dreams, and all he could do was hiding and holding onto a glass. Embarassed and helpless, he began to cry.

He spend some time cramping and sobbing into the silence, until he was fed up with listening to his own sobs. Instead he played a tape. A song they were working on. It had a calm, soothing melody. Wrapped up in this, and with a soft sting in his throat from the brandy, he dropped off to sleep.

The next morning, he woke up with a slight headache and an unpleasant taste in his mouth. The earphones had slipped from his head, revealing that there was no sound outside. Morrie was sure that Norbert had already pleased himself with another dose of Joy and was totally clueless about the bygone incident. When they met again, they would simply chat about some trivia and go on with their lives. And Morrie was sure he would play along. He knew nothing else, after all. He needed Norbert. Leaving the studio, he was quite surprised that he found Norbert lying on the floor. He was asleep, looking like he had spend the entire night like this. Because he couldn't just abandon him there, Morrie knelt down and slightly shook him, until he opened his eyes. Then he got up and made his way up the stairs. He didn't have to escort Norbert to his room after all. However, he stopped when he heard Norbert call his name. At first quietly, with a raspy voice, then louder, more desperate. "Please, wait for me!"

Norbert began to run after him, with his hands palpating the wall to support himself. His face was white as chalk. In fact, he looked like he was about to faint. When he reached Morrie he suddenly stopped as if he didn't dare to come any closer. He staggered and sobbed. Morrie, who feared he'd pass out, grabbed him and carefully led him upstairs, where he entered the kitchen and sat him down on a chair. Hoping that his favorite morning drink would bring him back into shape, he busied himself with the coffee machine. Norbert's tears had dried by now. He sobbed and didn't move. When Morrie placed a mug of steaming coffee in front of him, he promptly accepted it, clutching at it as if he'd fall from the chair otherwise. Also Morrie needed the hot drink, so he sat down at the table as well. He watched Norbert out of the corner of his eye, just to make sure he won't secretly faint. This way, they quietly drank their coffee together.

Time passed, and Morrie acknowledged that Norbert wouldn't say a word. He himself had something he wanted to say before Norbert would enter oblivion again. "I'm sick of  this", he said bluntly, no matter if Norbert would listen or not. "All your flings...all that flirting with everyone in sight...I never wanted this." His voice sounded husky and it bothered him. He wanted to sound more collected, more determined. But he had to admit it sounded much better than the faint whine that escaped Norbert's throat. "I...I told you..." The tears came back and he started shivering so much that he had to put down the mug in order to not spill the coffee. What was left of his voice failed again and he sank down, turning back into that picture of misery that Morrie had found on the floor. Morrie inwardly scolded himself for destroying all the progress. He felt no pity though.

"You told me you'd only kiss", he said in a sharp tone. "If anything", he added bitterly. "And still, I'm not surprised." His anger left him already, and he stared sadly into his coffee that had a hard time cheering him up. Norbert sobbed more. "Do you mean you don't want me anymore?", he rasped. Morrie made a face and turned away, alarming Norbert. "Why not? I still love you!", he cried, sounding very desperate. "Yes, me!", Morrie shouted, "And a lot of others too!" Thereafter he heard a thud, that caused him to turn his head. Norbert's chair was empty all of a sudden. In one moment of shock, Morrie thought that Norbert had passed out again. Then something touched his knee.

It was Norbert, who knelt in front of him, hands folded, as theatrical as only he could do it. "Please don't leave me, Morrie! I can't live without you!", he pleaded. Morrie pressed his eyes shut and sighed. "It's true!", Norbert urged him, still shaking and sobbing. "Look, I might be their god, but you are mine! You're my muse, my world, my everything!" Morrie watched him, unable to move or speak. Norbert broke in front of him, frantically begging for an answer. "My heart is yours! If you'd cut it out, you'd find your name engraved on it!" Morrie couldn't bear it any longer and stood up, fleeing the immediate closeness, if only for a few steps. Norbert got up too, and to Morrie's horror he took a knife from the counter. Instead of threatening Morrie, he held it out to him, the blade directed at his own chest.

"Come on, cut it out!", he cried. "Let that go", Morrie demanded, reached out and pulled at the knife. Norbert weeped louder. "Kill me, Morrie! If you leave me, you can just as well kill me!" Finally, Morrie had ripped the knive out of his hands. Bereft of his weapon, he backed away and huddled up again, leaning against the counter. Morrie stared at the knife and his own tense face reflecting in the blade. He believed Norbert. He believed that he, in his eccentric way, loved him.

"Only one thing, Norbert", he said firmly. His lover raised his head. His hopeful gaze was something Morrie wanted to remember forever. "No other men", he decided. "I understand the press is spreading rumors if you shun all the girls, but no one will ever force you to sleep with a man. That would be your choice alone. Do you hear me?" Norbert's face lit up. "Yes, Morrie, I swear...", he began, but Morrie cut him off. "Don't swear, just don't do it." "Okay...", Norbert said quietly and nodded. Morrie sighed heavily. Now he felt he was about to faint himself. "Alright, So you can go back to doing whatever you want to do", he dismissed Norbert with a gesture.

His lover, instead of leaving, made a few steps into his direction. "I want to spend some time with you. Don't you want to see me at all today?" His voice sounded so sad and unsure that it broke Morrie's heart. He'd loved to spend some time alone to think, but then again it was a perfect opportunity to keep Norbert from taking Joy, at least for today. "I need some fresh air", he stated. "Why don't we go out for a walk?" They didn't have this big park built around their residence for nothing after all. It was the only place they could enjoy without someone bothering them. Norbert went along with bright eyes.

[nevergiveupneverrun]

Bodyguard - Chapter Sixty-Four “I remember”

Hello, how are you? Here is chapter Sixty-Four of my Story Bodyguard, yay!! I hope you will like this chapter.

I’m sorry in advance for the mistakes… English isn’t my first language and I do my best. Here is the link to the previous chapter: Click Here.

I hope you will enjoy this chapter :) 💛

       –––––––––––––––––––––––

- I will seat in the room, near the last row. And I will change places regularly to notice any presence or suspicious movements.

- I’m counting on you Nathan because from behind the stage or the back of the stage, I will not be able to watch the room… and I will always keep an eye on Amelia…

- Don’t worry, I will be your eyes and ears to scrutinize the audience. At the slightest bizarre fact, I will tell you.

My attention is detached from Nathan and fixed for a few seconds on the silhouette of a man advancing on the horizon in the corridor of the green room. Nathan and I were posted right outside the door of Amelia’s green room as she was rehearsing her song with Andrew: we agreed that no one outside her close staff or the production team should approach her green room.

I feel a hand on my arm and Nathan’s calm voice rises in a whisper.

- I’m taking care of it… you signal me when you join the stage so that I stand in the room, he specifies with his distinctive and firm tone, as at the time of our missions.

I nod while watching him go to meet the man we had spotted, who is holding a bouquet in his hand. I quickly turn my back to the stage and gently activate the green room door handle.

~~~

I enter it as silently as possible so as not to disturb Amelia and Andrew in their rehearsal.

But no melody or vocalizations to welcome me.

- Will you just give me a nod when you make the first chord? Because the beginning is not obvious…

- Yes, no problem, Andrew replies turning his head in my direction as I close the door behind me. It’s ok otherwise for you?

- Yes, I think we got into the key and the rhythm well.

- Great, I’m going to leave you and already put myself backstage because I have to settle down a little early on the stage.

- Thank you, Andrew, see you later, Amelia concludes with a smile.

The musician gives her a last nod, then walks past me, guitar in hand. He whispers me a quick “I entrust her to you“ which seems to contain a very particular meaning, given the context.

I don’t have time to answer that he’s already left the room, the door creaking shut behind him.

I move forward a little more to approach Amelia.

She observes herself in the mirror and rearranges a few strands of hair on her shoulders.

I discover her for the first time, changed for the evening.

She opted for a dress that reaches her mid-thigh, with pretty graphic patterns. A black belt perfectly emphasizes her waist. But what catches my attention is the back of her dress which largely reveals her skin… and images of the last night awaken for a few seconds. 

We had not approached our few hours “out of time“, following our guideline that when we woke up we would resume our roles as singer and bodyguard… by redrawing the borders that we had mutually decided to temporarily forget. But I could not completely master some subconscious reminders of a night that will forever be etched in my memory and my heart.

- I realize this is the last time I’m going to play with Andrew, she announces with a slightly veiled voice, suddenly pulling me out of my thoughts.

- Did he confirm his decision for you?

- Yes, after the Music Awards, he will make his way… I’m going to find myself a new guitarist quickly… she whispers while staring intently at me through the green room mirror… as if she wanted to communicate a message without expressing it clearly. But one problem at a time, right? She adds with a smile. This reception is already a challenge in itself, I have two Awards to win, she continues with a furtive laugh as an attempt to relax the invisible but very present tension.

Despite the lightness displayed by Amelia, I know this reception is one of all dangers… and I will have to remind the threat that hangs over us.

My right-hand slips into the inside pocket of my jacket: I walk up to the console in front of the mirror to put the object hidden until then.

- I have something for you, I say pushing it slightly towards Amelia.

I catch her surprised gaze to the side when she discovers the box, distinctive of a jewelry box.

She grabs the object with her fingertips and gently opens it, revealing the “butterfly“ necklace hidden inside.

- This is beautiful, she whispers while letting her index finger slide over the pendant.

- It’s a little more than a simple necklace, I started, a little embarrassed at her reaction so moved. You have a small push button right there, I completed by showing her the mechanism hidden within the jewel. Pressing it will send a signal to my pager as well to Nathan’s… we will know that something alerted you or that you feel in danger…

- Equipment worthy of James Bond, but is the butterfly motif a standard for technicians? She asks, clearly finding my gaze.

- The butterfly is my idea, and I specifically asked them to make it happen… I said to myself that it would be appropriate… that you would like it…

A silence of a few seconds settles: Amelia keeps her face down on the jewel without reacting… which makes me tense despite myself.

- These stones are really very beautiful… the illusion is perfect, they almost look like sapphires… and these diamonds, she continues absent, as if talking to herself.

- Well, in fact… they are authentic stones… I replied while scrutinizing her image.

I was strangely embarrassed to reveal that this necklace was a real jewel designed by a goldsmith… to the point that I was not going to tell her the whole story of this necklace. Because I had directly given indications on the form, the choice of colors and stones, involving me much more than necessary.

- Really? She asks watching me, a hint of disbelief in her eyes.

- I wanted it to be a real and beautiful jewel and not a simple gadget… you will still wear it in front of millions of spectators, I wanted to avoid the “plastic necklace“ effect, I said smiling, awkwardly justifying myself. Do you allow?

She nods as I grab the necklace with my fingertips.

She turns her back to me and I put the necklace around her neck. She then grabs her hair to keep it above her head for a few moments: I concentrate on the clasp and attache the jewel without too much difficulty.

- There you go, all set, I say as my gaze wanders along the skin of her exposed back.

She shifts again in front of the mirror, silent for a few moments.

- It is really very beautiful, she says.

My attention is redirected to her reflection: her fingers are resting on the silver butterfly, her gaze fixed on the jewel.

I was divided before her reaction: touched to see that this jewel that I had imagined for her pleases her as much and at the same time, feverish because it is not a jewel-like any other… but a crucial accessory for her safety. And it was especially on this last point that I wanted her to keep in mind…

- Especially, do not hesitate to use it if you perceive anything abnormal… I repeat, taking my eyes off her image.

~~~

Two knocks interrupt us, followed by a creaking of the door.

The silhouette of an assistant director, headset riveted to his head, emerges and his voice rises briefly: “ Live for you in 5 minutes!“.

- Ok, I’m coming, can you give us a little while? Amelia replies.

- Alright, I’m waiting behind the door to lead you to the stage, but just a minute… the assistant says closing the door behind him.

I notice Amelia taking a deep breath and watching her reflection for a few moments.

I step forward to stand next to her, my left hand sliding behind her back.

- Are you ready?

She turns her head towards me and looks me long seconds in the eyes: instead of a nervous and tense face, it is a relaxed and radiant face that she displays.

And I remain fascinated by her strength of character.

She shifts a few steps and grabs my hand which was held behind her back: she squeezes it tight while keeping my gaze.

- With you, by my side, without a doubt… she whispers in a smile.

Her blind and unwavering confidence in me touches and tenses me at the same time… but I send her a weak smile in return without letting my confusion show through.

~~~

We then follow the assistant director who leads us through the maze of the building.

I walk alongside Amelia, my steps synchronized with hers, one hand propped up on her back against her exposed skin.

My heart accelerates imperceptibly and its beats resonate a little more to the rhythm of our steps.

I know these moments are perhaps the last of calm, of closeness to her.

I try to disregard it, but it’s stronger than me… and my fingers come to life against her skin, in a caress I can’t resist.

We thus arrive in less than a minute at the edge of the stage. We see the stage illuminated by the projector as well as Jo, microphone in hand, probably commenting on the performance of an artist.

- He cannot accompany you any further, the assistant director suddenly informs Amelia, pointing to me.

- He’s my bodyguard and I want him to follow me behind the stage, Amelia replies firmly.

- But, this is not the rule…

- If you don’t agree, call your boss, she interrupts him, cutting him off. Otherwise, I guess you have work and other artists, to go and get backstage.

The assistant remains undecided briefly then finally walks away with a sigh.

I stealthily smile at Amelia’s authority and follower her as she takes a few steps forward, standing just at the edge of the stage.

We notice Andrew enter the stage and sit on a stool positioned in the center while equipping himself with his guitar.

Jo’s voice resonates to prepare for the singer’s imminent entry onto the stage, so Amelia suddenly turns to me.

- Don’t be afraid, she whispers.

Her right-hand slides under my suit jacket to quickly touch my holster and my gun, before laying on my heart.

- You are here…me, I am not afraid of anything…

I look into her and let her words resonate with me…but a little voice calls out me: would this be the last time that I contemplate her like this in front of me?

Would this be the last minute of complicity and connection with this woman, who has been the center of my life for so long months?

If he is in the room, prepare to intervene? 

I lose track of the present moment and my body starts to move… to have no regrets… to tase an incomparable sweetness one last time. One last dose before everything stops…

I perceive sounds around me.

A voice.

Footsteps and presences bustling about a few meters away.

But I disregard everything… everything except her.

As bewitched, my face approaches hers. My lips slide tenderly against hers. She welcomes my kiss surprise but brings it to life quickly.

To seal a kiss so sweet, but so intense.

One of those rare moments out of time. Where we are connected to other people… and we only want one thing to last forever.

- Thank you for welcoming the one who is nominated twice this evening… Amelia Shepherd!

Jo’s voice breaks the magic of the moment.

Amelia’s sweetness escapes me.

I open my eyes instantly and contemplate her smile in front of me.

Then she turns quickly to the stage and walks into the light to stand next to Andrew.

~~~

I mobilize my concentration and my senses in a few seconds, moving as much as possible without being visible from the stage. I have a breathtaking view of the entire set and the front rows of the public. But my visibility quickly stops beyond a few rows of the armchair.

- Nathan, are you in position? I ask through the microphone connected to my wrist.

- Yes, I’m ready I’ll let you know if I notice anything suspicious.

- Well received, I answer while directing my gaze on the singer.

The projector lights have been deflected to focus on Amelia and now hide almost the entire room from me… which has the gift of tender me intensely.

The fear of not seeing a threat suddenly rises in me.

- Nathan, the light partially blinds me, keep me informed of everything that happens, I quickly clarified to my accomplice.

Two guitar chords then rise, followed by Amelia’s distinctly melodious voice.

~~~

I remember it well

The first time that I saw 

Your head around the door

Cause mine stopped working

~~~

The words enter my mind, while my eyes remain riveted on the shadows of the technicians in front of me… the silhouettes of the spectators in the front rows…

~~~

I remember it well

There was wet in your hair

I was stood in stare

And time stopped moving

~~~

Amelia’s silhouette captures my attention in my field of vision as she shifts slightly to the side, my eyes subconsciously linger on her for a few seconds: and her gaze is suddenly fixed on mine for the next words.

~~~

I want you here tonight

Want you here 

Cause I can’t believe what I found

Want you here tonight 

Want you here

Cause nothing is taking me down, down, down…

~~~

- Nothing to report, Owen, no movement in the room, Nathan informs me in the headset.

His intervention leads me to break the connection created with Amelia, to focus again on my observation work.

~~~

I remember it well

Taxied out of the storm

To watch you perform 

And my ships were sailing

I remember it well

I was stood in your line

And your mouth, your mouth, your mouth…

~~~

These last words echo in my head and an unexpected tingling awakens on my lips… by the memory of her mouth against me… as my eyes remain fixed on a point in the room, to allow me to discern any new presence…

~~~

I want you here tonight

Want you here

Cause I can’t believe what I found

Want you here tonight 

Want you here

Nothing is taking me down, down, down…

Except you my love, my love, my love…

~~~

A silence of a few seconds settles in during which we just perceive Amelia’s shortness of breath in the microphone… a breath charged with emotion that calls out to me.

And I’m surprised to find her pupils turned distinctly in my direction. Eyes shining and tinged with emotion. I’m afraid that something abnormal has alarmed her but I quickly understand that the emotion I read deep in her eyes is linked to the song she has just performed and not to anything else…

- Amelia Shepherd, ladies, and gentlemen, Jo says with an inappropriate enthusiasm at the moment. Bravo for this superb interpretation.

- Thank you very much, Amelia answers shyly, fixing her attention on Jo and the cameras in front of the two young women.

- If I’m not mistaken, this title is not from you?

- No, indeed I decided to sing a cover tonight… this is a song by Damien Rice, an artist that I really like… a song which is called “I remember“ and which particularly touches me.

A crackle in my ear buzzes before Nathan’s voice rises again.

- Owen, I will wait for Amelia at the exit of the stage to accompany her in her place.

- Ok, well received.

- Thank you for this gift in any case for the reception… Jo continues.

- Precisely, it is a gift that I wanted to offer on a large scale to my fans… if you like it, you will soon be able to download this cover that I will record in the studio… and this will contribute to a nice cause because all the profits from the sale of this song will go to my foundation for children to finance a reception structure project.

- Well, we are impatient, and the message got through, Jo concludes who seems to want to cut Amelia’s intervention short. See you later Amelia.

I scrutinize the singer who politely nods with a smile and goes backstage from the opposite side of the stage.

I wait for feverish seconds, then finally hear the indication that I was waiting.

- Amelia is with me Owen, we go back to her row… nothing abnormal for the moment.

Next step, the rewards, I clarify, observing the stage as Jo seems to have noticed my presence, with a quick smile in my direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if he waited until this moment to act…

~~~

What better timing or dream advertisement?

That to turn a moment of happiness and glory into horror?

          –––––––––––––––––––––––

Thank you for reading. Stay safe and see you on Sunday for a new chapter 💛