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teamddixon · 3 years ago

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A New Normal

Summary: Set in the future of the TWD timeline, this story follows Daryl, Y/N and her brother through their journey in the world of the undead. It wasn’t like Daryl to let people in to his heart easily, but it was Y/N’s smiles that had captured him completely, and before he knew it, there wasn’t a scenario Daryl could think of about his future that didn’t have Y/N in it.

A/N: Hi guys, this is my first time writing a fic of our TWD badass, Daryl Dixon. It’s gonna be a long one, and a work in progress. I write because it makes me happy, and I hope it’ll make you happy too. The intro for this fic would be pretty long, and Daryl wouldn’t appear until slightly later, but I thought it would be important to touch on Y/N and her brother’s background since we already know Daryl’s background pretty well. I’m not a zombie apocalypse expert, and neither dare I call myself a TWD expert (I’m not, please pardon me if I get some facts wrong!), so some parts of the story may not be realistic. It is most certainly strayed from the current universe since this is meant to be set in the projected timeline after the eventual season 11, which of course we don’t know yet how Daryl’s narrative would be changed or if it would at all, (or do we?), so this story may or may not make sense after season 11 ends (maybe think of this as a spin off?). I do hope you like it, and don’t mind the fact that it is set way in the future of the universe. As mentioned, it’s still a work in progress and I don’t know how many parts it’ll be. But writing this is extremely cathartic for me so I’ll continue writing for as long as my brain (and my full time job) allows. Comments and feedback are welcomed and appreciated! Please sit back and enjoy this journey with Daryl. :)

Photo is not mine. All mistakes in this are mine, please pardon them.

There aren’t many moments in Y/N’s life where she’d just sit on a spot, completely and utterly at a loss. The camp where she’d called home for the last month was gone – just like that. Along with it, the people she considered her family. When an unexpected rogue herd of walkers stumbled across the cabin, she was out on a supply run with her older brother, Andrew. By the time they had came back, the cabin was in shambles and the smell of the dead overpowered their senses. Y/N stood rooted to the ground in shock behind the bushes, throwing a look of fear at Andrew. Biting back a scream, knowing it’ll give her position away, Y/N looked around, hoping to see a familiar face. A familiar face that was alive. There was none. It was too late for them to do anything to salvage their family, their home. There were too many walkers to take on and honestly, nothing much left for salvation.

Y/N had no idea how long she was behind the bushes watching the dead feeding on mangled bodies of people she once knew. She knew she had to move, but her feet wouldn’t allow. It was as if they were locked in position, trapped in the nightmare of a scene before her. The only comfort she could gather was seeing quite a number of fallen walkers with slash marks on their heads – meaning they had put up a strong fight against them.

“Come on, we got to go.” Andrew’s voice called out, his hand grabbing hers nudging her to move. There was a catch in his voice, although he tried to hide it. Still in shock and tears, Y/N willed her legs to move. Just one foot in front of another, just one foot in front of another. She had to keep her mind focused on what was in front, and to keep her legs moving forward. Y/N followed him, almost in complete auto-pilot.

Without actually knowing how long or how she even managed to keep in tandem with her brother’s pace with her state of mind, he had led Y/N to a spot in the woods where the two of them finally crashed on the hard grounds. Y/N was shaking violently as she buried her heads between her knees. She had no idea if she was shaking because of the nip in the air, or because of shock. A low growl shook her awake from her reverie. She looked up to see a lone walker approaching from the right. Reaching for her hunting knife from her belt holster with her shaky hands proved to be a tremendous task. Y/N finally managed to unsheathe the knife and plunged it hard into the walker’s temple right before its jaw got onto her. She had no idea she still had that strength somewhere in her.

“Are you okay?” Andrew had walked over to her just in time to plunge his machete into the head of another walker that had approached Y/N from her blind spot. “Thanks. I didn’t see it coming.” Y/N mustered her strength and stood up before kicking the walker in its head with a mixture of anger and disbelief.

“I don’t, I cant –“ Y/N finally allowed herself to sob into Andrew’s shirt. While there were only a few people in the group to begin with, she have had time to know them through this shitstorm and had grown to like them like her own family. They were the people she had been moving with for years. They had lost some people in their journey, but they’d never lost all of them entirely before. To lose them all at once was devasting. But all in all, she was glad her brother was there. Andrew was fiercely protective of her, especially in this new world. She wouldn’t be alive and standing today if not for him. All her survival skills, her knife works, hunting and tracking skills, had all came from him. Y/N was not prepared for this world at all. Without Andrew, she would have become one of the walkers a long time ago. But she was a fast learner, and had more than proven her survival skills. Despite all that, she never lost her sense of hope and cheerfulness, that was until that day.

She was thankful for Andrew for giving her the time to grief while he single-handedly took down more than a dozen walkers while she was still in a daze. She felt horrible, leaving her brother to keep her alive knowing he needed his time to process everything too. Andrew didn’t say anything, he just kept her alive.

Nightfall brings another set of danger – the temperature had dipped drastically. Y/N worked with her brother to build a makeshift shelter with leaves and twigs. Andrew had also got a small fire going to provide a bit of warmth. If the walkers doesn’t get to them, the elements most certainly would. Satisfied with the perimeters, lined with makeshift cans and marbles to alert them when any walkers enter the camp, Andrew gestured for Y/N to sleep while he kept watch.

Y/N tucked herself in next to the small fire and tried to sleep. But of course sleep eluded her. Every time she had her eyes closed, all she could see was the grotesque bodies of her friends back in the cabin. She kept your eyes close despite that, hoping to catch at least a little sleep. Y/N knew she would be in no state to fight for survival without rest. Andrew sat next to the fire and finally allowed himself to process the events of the day. Most of the people in the group had been his friends since he was a child. He had grown up with them, went through triumphs and heartbreaks together. Losing them was painful. Losing them and not being able to do anything for them was painful. He looked at Y/N who had now finally fallen asleep and willed himself to stay strong. He couldn’t – he wouldn’t let the same thing happen to his sister. Y/N was his only family left.

Three hours into Y/N’s fitful sleep, she woke up in a pool of sweat despite the night cold. Before this all happened, Y/N always slept like a log. An earthquake could literally be breaking her room down and she would have no idea. But in this new normal, her body had adjusted itself to wake up within a few hours and it had learned to survive on a couple hours of sleep each night.

She saw Andrew throwing logs into the fire to keep it going. Approaching him silently, she gestured for him to sleep while she took over the watch. Nodding his head, he vacated his space before taking over hers. Y/N was on high alert, determined to keep her brother safe while he catch his much needed rest. Andrew had been there for Y/N all her life. She was only a couple of years younger so they were very close since young. This trip was supposed to be a break from work, but instead, they were thrown with an even bigger shitstorm than they could imagine. Y/N almost laughed when she thought about the irony. She would choose to go back to her office job any day over this. Before long, the cackle of the fire begin to diminish as the day broke. Y/N looked up at the skies, trying hard to fathom how this was the very same sky before the world had turned into hell. The sun still came up in the East and the morning birds still sang, but nothing else about the world right now was the same.

Gathering up all of their belongings, Y/N and Andrew set off for another day. They had to find a more permanent shelter, a sturdier shelter than twigs and leaves at least. Stopping by the creek to gather some water, Y/N took the chance to splash herself with the cold water. As the water hit her face, she perked up. Having not had a shower for days, Y/N’s skin was starting to itch and peel. Her feet was swollen with blisters and her arms were filled with dried scabs from all the cuts she sustained while running away from walkers. Y/N looked at Andrew with a longing in her eyes. She needed that shower. Convinced that the area was free of walkers, Andrew gave in and gave her privacy while Y/N washed yourself. He told her he would try to track something for their food today and set off with his bag, gesturing for Y/N to follow when she was done. A smile almost crept up Y/N’s face as she washed away days of sweat, dirt, and walker blood off her body. She hadn’t dared to take her time though. Once she was done, she quickly put on a fresher set of clothes that she had and set out to look for Andrew.

Feeling more refreshed, Y/N tried to put on a new perspective of how life was going to be moving forward. She was determined to continue living, living for the friends who couldn’t. She was going to continue living for Andrew. She didn’t want all of Andrew’s effort teaching her survival to go to waste. Y/N followed the tracks on the floor, hoping to find Andrew soon. No more than 10 minutes into following the tracks, she heard a slight ruffle of leaves to her left. It was so slight it was almost unnoticeable. It can’t have been a walker – a walker would have made a louder noise than that. It was most certainly a person. She smiled and moved towards the direction where she heard the sound from, anticipating to see Andre.

“Hey, did you managed to –“ Y/N’s whispers faltered into complete silence when a tall, crossbow donning man with striking blue eyes, greeted her. The man had his crossbow trained on Y/N’s head. She stopped in her tracks, knife in hand ready to strike.

“Who are you?” The man demanded. Not only was his crossbow trained on Y/N, his eyes were trained on her too.

“Y/N.” She spoke calmly, hand still steady on the knife. While she knew she’d be dead with his arrow before she could attack him with the knife, she weren’t about to go down without a fight if she had to. Y/N looked at the man, trying to download as much details about him as she could. He wore a long sleeves black shirt with two top buttons missing, a pair of cargo pants that were slightly ripped on some parts and his boots carried the obvious evidence of blood and someone who had been out in the open. Y/N tried not to wince as she stared directly into the man’s eyes. Although his hair covered the side of his face, she could make out his stern expression – an expression of someone who had been surviving on his own. But behind all that, she just had a sense, a strange and unspoken sense that he wasn’t a dangerous man.

“Look, I’m just looking for my brother, all right? I don’t mean to walk into your zone.” Y/N explained. “If you promise not to shoot me, I’ll just turn around and be on my way.”

Adrenaline from meeting a lone stranger in the woods had had blood rushing to her ears, muffling her surrounding sounds. As she prepared to turn and leave, the man spoke again. “Behind ya!” That was when she heard it – the unmistakable sound of a walker behind her. As a reflex, Y/N bent her body forward and side stepped, but in her haste to evade the walker, she had missed her footing. Y/N cursed under her breath but quickly regained her posture. She raised her arm, ready to strike, but before she could, the walker’s dead weight had pushed her, causing her to fall backwards on the hard ground, losing her knife in the process. Y/N quickly worked to fight the walker off but all she heard was the hustling sound of an arrow and the silenced growl from the walker. Feeling the full weight of the walker now, she pushed it off and saw that it had an arrow right smack between it’s eyes. Y/N turned to look at the man as he approached the walker. With one foot on the walker’s head, he pulled out the arrow with one swift motion with his free hand. He then turned sideways to look at Y/N.

“That was really cool.” Y/N couldn’t help but chuckle slightly. Seeing that the man had made no move to point his crossbow at her again, Y/N relaxed. She spotted and dug out her knife that had been partially buried during the fall and tussle with the walker.

“Thanks. I owe you.” Y/N gestured to the walker on the ground as she dusted herself off. “What’s your name?” She smiled.

Daryl was immediately captivated by Y/N’s smile and the sound of her chuckles. Earlier when he had heard someone approaching, he was ready to strike, ready to take them down if he had to. But as he heard Y/N’s voice for the first time, he knew immediately that she was no threat. He hadn’t seen or heard another person’s voice for days. But even if he had, there was something about Y/N’s voice and her smiles that enchanted him. Despite the situation the world was in, Daryl was comforted to see a smile that seemed to make him forget everything else.

“Daryl.”

“I’m sorry again, you know, for walking into you.”

“Sorry for ta’ crossbow on ya head.” Daryl nodded his head slightly at Y/N as apology.

“We’re even then.” Y/N smiled again. It was nice meeting someone else in this crazy world of the dead. Something about Daryl had made her feel a sense of comfort and calm, despite just meeting him a few minutes ago. Daryl looked away, feeling his face flushed from seeing her smiles. There had never been anyone who had that effect on him before. Her smiles were a huge contrast to everything he had come to know in the last ten years. He wanted nothing but to remember them.

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jarofstyles · 4 years ago

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Dirty Business - Latte

A/N: This story. We are really proud of. It’s a spin on business man!harry x spoiled brat y/n. The character development and everything about it just made us so happy and we hope you enjoy :)

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pairing: Harry Styles x Reader

warnings: cheating, a hints of angst

word count: 9.5k

It had been one year since Harry had moved to New York and he still couldn’t get over how dirty it could be. He groaned when he saw it begin to get sunny outside, not because he didn’t want sun— no. Because it would make the humidity terrible. A muggy New York wasn’t enjoyable to many. Though, above it all, he did like it. He had a comfortable apartment with tuning water and head and air conditioning. A cat. A toaster and working appliances. A nice bed and couch, even a tv. He had done well for himself and the pay upgrade at his new level had been immaculate. Hell, he had even gotten a girlfriend! But it just felt a bit... lacking.

He was working hard to get closer and closer to head spots. Harry has been given a pretty good role now, going out to discuss and make deals with potential clients and brands to partner with their locations. He was a people person. His boss, he loved him. He wasn’t sure why, but his work effort and apparently his accent made people here take him more seriously than they had previously. He did well bringing in deals and sweet talking clients to better deals for their end. He saved and made them money. He sighed, resting his hand on his face as he looked over a proposal. Investments were good and always changing, which helped. Just like the city. He needed some sort of excitement. He just didn’t expect to get it so soon. The knock at his door had his sitting up, placing the paper down. His reading glasses were pulled off, making out his boss and seemingly someone behind him.

“Styles! My boy... I want to introduce you to my little girl!”

Y/N had it all growing up. Clothes, makeup, electronics, events, trips, you name it. She did what she wanted when she wanted, always on top of the latest trends. She always had an interest in fashion which her mother was all for seeing as she herself was a designer. Some call her a spoiled brat, and maybe she was, but she was a business woman none the less. She always got what she wanted one way or another, weaseling her way into fashion week when she was 15 to befriend all the designers, so much so that they sent her free things to this day! Now at the ripe age of 22, Y/N had her own boutique showcasing her designs for special order. She did quite well for herself, seeing as she didn’t really need to worry about money. It was all sort of just finding outlets for her creativity so she wouldn’t lose her mind.

Her father of course was disappointed that her mother couldn’t give him a son to take over the business, but pushed Y/N to take over the business once he retired. It really wasn’t happening though. It just wasn’t her thing, dealing with annoying workers who simply wouldn’t listen to her. Sounded like a nightmare, no wonder her dad was so grey. Since she didn’t want to take over the business her father had come up with another plan. Tried pairing her off with his loser interns, or potential replacements in hopes to keep his claws in the company.

She had heard so much about Harry Styles. God, her dad couldn’t be farther up his ass! Apparently he was English and smart, saved them lots of money, he was extremely well mannered. Things her dad said to butter her up usually. Of course, coming in to meet him, she wasn’t expected to see that. Her eyes instantly locked with his, only tearing away so she could scan up and down his body. She wanted him. He was perfect! Every single hair placed on his head, down to his ring clad hands, and to his work shoes. Y/N wasn’t expecting this, but god was she happy to see him.

“Hi Harry, it’s so nice to finally meet you.” She hummed, turning up the charm.

“Hello, it’s nice to meet you as well, Y/N.” Harry stood from his desk and rounded it to be polite, reaching his hand out. His smile was genuine, but his mind was nervous. His boss had often brought up Y/N in passing and said how he wanted her to marry someone from the company so he could know he was a good man, wanted him to meet her so badly, and now was that chance. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive— because fuck, that would be a lie. She was beautiful. Silky hair and glossy lips, chest on display and legs for days. Perfect hips and probably thighs, she was an absolute catch. But she was trouble. He could see it in her eyes and her cat like smile. She wanted something. He could see her mood shift from exasperated with her father for making her come, to interested. Which he wasn’t sure was dangerous or not.

“Your father has told me a lot about you. It’s nice to finally meet you in person.” He murmured, trying to take his hand but failing when her grip tightened for a moment before actually letting go. He felt uneasy. She was looking at him like a cat that looked at a mouse— but he hid it easily.

“All good things I hope.” Y/N cooed, letting a little giggle as their hands separated. “I’ve heard lots about you as well, Daddy says you’re doing wonders for the company.” She smirked, knowing her father wouldn’t be too pleased with her letting Harry in on something but then again, she was playing the game. Y/N wanted Harry to know she had the power to make things happen for him but just as easily take them away. “I’m sure you’re very busy, but you should give me your number and we can do lunch sometime? I’d love to hear all about what your plans for the company are.” Y/N was kissing ass. God, she was practically oozing out desire. She was phrasing things so he couldn’t say no. She wanted to spend more time with him and she would, especially without her father so she could actually pull some moves. Her father had clearly gotten the hint that she liked Harry, smiling to himself.

“Think that’s a wonderful idea sweetheart. It would be good for you, Harry could teach you a lot of things.” He nodded and Y/N’s smirk only deepened, “I’m sure he could...” She hummed, licking over her lips.

Harry could tell she was cornering him. Especially with the look she was giving him. She was quite a smooth talker and he could tell that just by looking at her that he was going to be in trouble. It made him feel a bit panicky inside.

“Um... sure, yeah. I’d be happy to tell you about business.” He said clearly. Y/N looked like she didn’t care though, a laugh coming from her when he handed her his phone. The lock screen was his girlfriend, Caroline. She was a very sweet girl. Truthfully, she was a tiny bit too pushy when it comes to moving along. They’d been together for 6 months and she was trying to get them to move in together but he wasn’t ready yet. She was great but he still felt.. a bit flighty. She wasn’t exactly what he wanted but she was a lovely girl. He did like her quite a bit despite it all.

Y/N has typed in her number and the rest of her information onto his phone and texted herself his contact. She was going to make sure she had everything that she needed. She locked his phone and tapped the screen again seeing the photo of him and some girl. She was pretty, but she was alright.

“Who’s this?” Y/N asked, looking over the photo for a minute before he answered. “Awe, isn’t that sweet.” She replied, her tone fake as all hell. She wanted him. That girl would be gone, she definitely wasn’t the type of girl who was going to give a man like Harry what he needed. Oh no. If he was the one inheriting her father’s company then he surely would be with someone just as driven, attractive, and interesting. Herself, she mostly meant herself and only herself. “I’ll see you soon then?” She raised a brow, already going to check her schedule. “I can do tomorrow at 12:30 if that’s good with you?” Y/N wasn’t asking, she was telling him the plan. “I’ll text you to address.” She smiled before he had the chance to answer. “It was lovely meeting you, Harry.” She smiled, going up to him and kissing his cheek. “Bye.” Y/N giggled and with that she made her way back to her father giving him a kiss on the cheek and a quick ‘bye daddy’ making eye contact with Harry and winking before leaving his office.

Harry knew that women like Y/N wouldn’t let go easily. He knew that. It was just hard when he had the bit of internal want there too. He knew that he was bad for that, yes. He had a girlfriend. But the same way Y/N was drawn to him, he felt it. Which is exactly why he was going to push it all the way down. If it was at a bar and she was someone random? He would try it, but this was his boss's daughter. Every single red flag was there. Everyone. He worked so hard to get to where he was and he knew that this could single handedly destroy everything he worked for. If he was late for a date or got the wrong chocolates she could potentially kiss his career goodbye. He didn’t like this. His stomach hurt with nerves, feeling like he was going to be cornered into a wall and he hated it. He hated feeling nervous and worried because a woman like Y/N didn’t give up. She had the world handed to her and knew how to get what she wanted.

Y/N was excited though, finally one of her father’s prospects were actually promising! She couldn’t believe it, he’d actually chosen well not only for the job at hand but for her as well.

“Daddy, I like him.” Y/N spoke on the phone to her father while she was getting her weekly mani pedi. “I need you to make sure you keep him around, okay? I’ll be in the office more... just— please make it happen?” She pleaded, knowing that as far as her father was in the loop she’d be okay.

Later that day she had texted Harry the address to the restaurant that wasn’t too far from the building he worked at. It would be perfect for when they’d walk because together and Y/N would meet with her father to discuss what she could do for him. She wanted it to be perfect, wanted to get inside that beautiful head of his and hopefully get him to fall in love with her. She knew that she often came off as a crazy psycho bitch, but she could be nice and funny and sweet when she wanted. It just wasn’t something she wanted to do. People go nowhere being nice in her world, she learned that the hard way.

----

There was no way he was going to ignore the brunch. Not after his boss had called him and said to take it easy today and take his time getting back to the office, wishing him well for the brunch. She had her father in the loop. She knew her power. He had put on normal work clothes, sunglasses on his head as he made his way in. Apparently she got a private table which made both fear and excitement rise in his head. He squashed the later down, making his way with square shoulders to her. He could be polite. Tell her business things. But he wasn’t going to develop into personal matters. He had a feeling that’s what she wanted but was hoping she may genuinely just be curious.

“Hello, Y/N. I apologize I’m a minute late, the hostess wasn’t at the front and I couldn’t see you back here.” It was a back patio, beautifully decorated with vines and flowers and had a beautiful brick. It was great. Too bad he felt on edge. She looked gorgeous, but he had the feeling it was hard for her not to.

Y/N smiled when she saw him, admiring his choice of outfit. Did he always look this good? She hoped so. So clean and professional even when not wearing a single item of designer. That’s what Y/N called fashion, being able to pull off a look. They’d look great together. She could already see it all now, just how many events they’d go to. The dream.

“No worries, Harry, I’m glad you could make it.” She cooed, “hope you don’t mind being out here... don’t really like being in there when it’s too crowded.” Y/N explained though it really was an attempt to just get him alone and really get to know him with ease, to not have to talk over anyone in a restaurant or have prying eyes. “Daddy said to put everything on his tab so, feel free to order as you please.” She told him, “he’s really excited to see me get out more, wants me to know more about the business... thinks you’ll be a good influence on me.” Y/N could tell he was nervous though, smirking to herself as she sipped on her mimosa. “Why are you nervous?”

“Hm? Oh, I have a big meeting with a client later.” He did, but he wasn’t nervous. She made him uncomfortable in the oddest way but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “The bigger accounts are a bit harder to navigate but it’ll be alright.” He paused when the waitress came over, seemingly pleased at Harry's presence. He knew he was decent looking. He was just polite, ordering water and a plate of French toast. He wasn’t drinking around her. No fucking way. “So what about the business were you interested in particularly?” He folded his hands in front of him. Was it an excuse to get him to come and see her? Most likely. Y/N was clever and quick and he knew that she thrives off of that and the fact that she thinks she’s going to get him. Her acrylic nails looked sharp.

Y/N smirked, knowing full well he was lying but she was going to let it go for his sake. He of course knew she was aware though, it made her feel a bit more smug. She was completely relaxed, just watching him as he spoke and sat all stiff in the chair. She wanted him to feel comfortable around her, but that would take a while. She needed to break him in.

“You.” She flirted, taking a sip of her drink once again. Y/N wanted to know about the business if it involved him of course. He couldn’t exactly walk out either, her father would be very disappointed. “What? Does that come as a surprise to you?” She asked, genuinely amused. He was a good guy. He wasn’t even trying anything, he was pushing back even! Where on earth did her father find him? “Tell me about how you ended up over here in New York.” She started off small, deciding that she would ask the things she wanted to know that were less personal before she started convincing him about how he should break up with his girlfriend because he could do so much better.

God damn it. He truly was a cornered puppy. He couldn’t very well leave because he wasn’t going to let her father pay the tab. He was a gentleman in all aspects and even if he didn’t want to be here, he would stay and make it clear he couldn’t do anything with her.

“That’s very nice of you.” He cleared his throat. “I can’t say I can get too personal however, I ended up here because I excelled in the London branch. Your father was impressed with my work and made it so I was transferred here.” He explained. “It was a nice change of scenery. New York is something else. Plus, I’d like to continue to grow in the company through the years and I’d have to be at the main branch to do so.” Y/N looked like she was eating every bit of information and that made him second guess what he was saying. Why was she so interested in him out of all people? He had nowhere near the money her father did. Wasn’t a big profile. He was a boring business guy with a fondness for cats, vintage things, and his guitar. Y/N furrowed her brows at his comment about how he couldn’t get too personal.

“Why not? I’m your boss's daughter, not your boss, Harry. There’s nothing wrong with making a friend, hmm?” She decided that that was the best way to get him to agree. Have him understand that though she was interested in him as far more than a friend, she wanted to get to know him. “Do you miss London?” She asked genuinely, “Feel like New York’s so different, doesn’t give you the same level of comfort.” Y/N shrugged, “sometimes wish we just moved over there instead but.. Daddy loves it here.” She sighed before asking her follow up question. “Do you travel a lot?” She wanted to make sure she covered all the bases, wanted to know what he was into and what he did in his free time. Y/N might seem like a bit of a snob but she could appreciate the little things. Maybe it was the perk of being raised by nannies? They gave that touch of humble that her parents never really handed down to her.

“I think you’ll find a lot of success here though. Everyone loves you. Daddy’s always going on about how much you do for the company... don’t think you have much competition if you’re worried about not getting the promotion.” Y/N said honestly, “don’t think he trusts anyone else and to be honest, I wouldn’t either.”

“I do miss London, yes. Especially the food.” He was trying to keep the conversation in neutral territory. This was harder than he had originally thought, but thankfully she was talking about work and that he could talk about. “Thank you, I’m glad you both have confidence in me.” He let himself smile, happy to be in on that. “I want it but I do think I have a ways to go. I want to properly work for my promotions, learn the bases so that when I get there I can be the most knowledgeable.” That wasn’t a secret. Harry absorbed information like a sponge. “I do love working for this company. It’s where I’ve wanted to be for a long time and to see it shaping up is amazing. I wouldn’t risk it for anything.” A little comment he hoped she caught. “It’s nice to be able to get my mum a good Christmas gift too.” He said for a moment, forgetting she couldn’t relate to being broke.

Ah, he was one of those. She should have expected it, but something about him seemed too good to be true. He just kept getting better and better with every moment of speaking to him and she was growing more and more frustrated because well. One, he had a girlfriend who definitely didn’t realize the incredible man she had on her hands and two, that he wasn’t asking her anything about herself. Did he not want to know? Of course he did. Y/N caught his comment but chose to ignore it. She didn’t think of it as a risk, it was more of an investment.

“That’s always a nice feeling.” Y/N smiled at his comment about his mom, thanking the waitress as she brought out some appetizers. “As far as that goes, I don’t really think you have /anything/ to worry about.” She made it sure he too would understand her point. “So New York’s been treating you well then... how long have you and....” She pointed to his phone waiting for him to give her a name. “Caroline— how long have you and Caroline been together?” Y/N wanted to dirt, if he wasn’t going to give it to her himself she’d have to pull it out of him herself.”

He took her words into consideration. The thing was— he didn’t know her. He was going to be as nice as he could be until she started pushing buttons but she had the self destruct right in the palm of her dainty hand. He was worried about that.

“Oh— yes, Caroline.” He smiled. “She’s lovely. Met her through some friends. We’ve been together for about 6 months.” He did like her but there was no passion and excitement behind his words. Fondness, sure. But that was about it. “New York has been treating me well. I like it. I don’t love the smells but, such is life.” He sighed, shrugging his shoulder before taking a bite. “Have you lived here your entire life?” He didn’t know that. He knew that she had a pony that her dad bought her because he had told him the story before, so he wasn’t sure where she lived. Where the damn pony was, but it was a tame question. Safe.

Y/N could tell just from the way he talked about her that she wasn’t what he wanted long term. If he really liked this girl, he’d be on the edge of his seat with fire burning in his eyes as he told her about how amazing she was. Instead he was sitting there, looking at Y/N with pupils dilated.

“So you like her, but she’s not what you really want huh?” She stated simply, chuckling at his stunned expression. “Sorry, am I wrong? Dunno, feel like after six months someone’s a bit more than lovely.” Y/N knew she was pressing a button but she wouldn’t be pushing it if she knew she was wrong. “Or, you’re just being choice with your words... cause it’s me, don’t want me knowing too much. I get it.” She was reading him like a book. “Don’t ever underestimate me, save yourself the effort and the nerves.” And just like that she was already on to answering his question. “In New York? Yes, in the city no. My childhood home is in the Hamptons, but we all moved into the city when I graduated highschool.” Y/N explained, “it’s... nice? I live on my own on the upper east side, run my own boutique and help my parents out where I can. I’ve got lots to do, but yeah... wish I had more fun things to do.”

He didn’t want to be a play toy for an heiress. Yes, maybe she was correct about Caroline but he wasn’t about to dump her because she thinks he should. At least, that’s what her talk sounded like. He hated that she could read him.

“Oh. That sounds nice, having your own boutique. I’m sure there’s plenty of fun things to do if you look hard enough. I’ve been focusing on work lately but I know there’s plenty of things out there if you look elsewhere.” No. He wasn’t giving in to her even though he knew that’s what she wanted. Y/N was going to try and wear him down, but he was hoping he could start early with ignoring the obvious digs. “Is the boutique what you’d like to do? Or do you have other career options you’d want to look at?” He asked, trying to keep his actual curiosities at bay. There were lots he wanted to know but this was one of them. A safe one.

The fact that he even ignored her little dig said enough. The point of that was more for him to know that she could read him and that he shouldn’t try and hide from her because it only made things more obvious. Maybe it was her being hyper aware, having learnt all the tricks people used to get close to her or better yet fuck with her heart.

“I mean it’s amazing, it really is. I love designing and getting actual pieces out for people to wear and buy... try to make sizing as inclusive as I possibly can because I know there is a market for high end plus size clothing.” Y/N explained, “I guess it’s more of myself wanting to branch out. I like doing lots of things, but can’t seem to separate my own work from my parents.” She chuckled, deciding to be a little vulnerable and she wasn’t that girl. “Maybe it’s a bit cheesy, but ultimately what I want is a family.” Y/N knew it might be a bit much but if she wanted him to understand her, if she wanted him to be a friend and not just some guy who works for her dad, she had to show him who she was. Not that she ever hid anything anyway. “Really just want to be a mom and spend all the time in the world I can with them... I have the privilege of not needing to worry about financial stability so.. yeah.”

He was surprised that she was being seemingly vulnerable with him. This... this type of Y/N? He could like. He could be friends with. When it didn’t seem like there was an ulterior motive, he could definitely be more comfortable.

“That isn’t cheesy. It’s something that’s very nice, Y/N. I do want a family one day so I can understand it as well.” He didn’t want her to think wanting to be a mother was bad or cheesy. It was admirable. His mum worked hard and raised both himself and his sister while their father worked an office job. They’d never been rich or even super comfortable, but they’d made ends meet. “I think going in a fashion route is good. Especially expanding in sizes if you see a niche in the market for it.” He praised that decision. He was in an investment firm. “It will be difficult to do that with affluent parents however, your work will surely speak for itself in the fashion industry if you want to continue down that path.” He had faith this woman could get nearly everything she wanted, but he could understand being frustrated by her parents' influence.

“I’m glad you think so.” Y/N smiled, feeling herself get all warm and fuzzy inside because no only was he being extremely sweet and kind, but supportive? He had officially ticked every possible box Y/N had for someone she wanted to date and marry. The poor man didn’t realize that he had just signed himself off to being hers without knowing. She’d stop at nothing for him. “What do you do when you’re not investing then? Hmm?” She asked, taking a bite of her eggs Benedict. Y/N felt like since she was more vulnerable he could be too, maybe he’d show her a side to him she didn’t know about, a side that she could possibly relate to. It was so strange, having a man not giving into her despite her attempts. She’d never had this happen before but it made her want him more. Y/N could only hope that he could see past the exterior of her and realize that she was the perfect candidate. She was exciting, young, had money, offered him job security, and most importantly incredible sex. All with time though, she’d get him to crack.

“I play guitar. I have a kitten, he’s growing up fast. Um... I watch documentaries quite a bit.” He admitted. Harry wishes he didn’t have to be so careful but he could still see too much interest in her eyes and he was nervous about her wanting more than just a simple friendship or work relationship. One slip up with her could cost him his job and life here. He’d have to start from scratch at a new company. It wasn’t what the man wanted at all. “I collect records? So I listen to those. I do a lot of research on my own time. Uh, go to bars with friends though I’m not much of a bar hopper.” This wasn’t anything he didn’t want anyone to know, so why did he feel so odd telling her? He didn’t want to unfairly judge Y/N, because so far she had been nice. Pushy, but nice.

“Really?” Y/N’s eyes had properly lit up and she put her fork and knife down. “Do you have pictures? Can I see him? What’s his name?” Y/N was so excited, it would probably be embarrassing to most but she only ever was this soft with animals and babies. “Oh my goodness!” She cooed at the photo, “I have to meet him!” Again, it wasn’t a question, it was a statement. “My mom never let me have pets growing up because of the furniture and now I travel too much... I would hate to leave a little angel all alone or even have them go elsewhere...” Y/N sighed, picking up her utensils again and felt herself get all giddy inside. Harry really was perfect. “That’s cool! So you’re like a proper vintage guy then?” She raised a brow, already thinking of all the cool things she could get her hands on for him. Even if they weren’t dating Y/N would probably do it anyway just because she was so damn fond of him. He was being so incredibly sweet, on a lunch date with her because he wanted to keep his job. It sort of made her sad, but she’d never admit it to him. Y/N wished he didn’t have a girlfriend and that she met him elsewhere so that there wouldn’t be this massive problem. Wished that it was different so that he’d want her and treat her nice. She was still very determined to get him. She knew she would.

He could see a bit of Y/N he was positive other people didn’t. Or, he thought so. There was a lot of softness in there that she definitely hid. He wondered why but had to remind himself that it wasn’t his problem. It hurt to think like that because Y/N was so sweet right now but he was protecting himself. Being kind was a given but he needed to set boundaries if she tried to push past them. He didn’t miss the fact she said she was definitely going to meet his kitten. When the brunch ended, Harry put his cash on the table.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to be late. I will walk you to your car though?” He wasn’t sure if she had a car or if she walked, whatever it was. He wasn’t sure how to go about this. His head needed a break so he could refocus.

“Oh, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that though, I’m actually meant to be headed back to the office to meet my father anyway. He wants me to help with some things, but thank you for the offer that’s really sweet.” Y/N smiled softly at him, not forgetting to thank him for paying for the meal though he really, really didn’t have to at all. That just made it more of a date. As they walked out Y/N hummed, placing her sunglasses over her eyes as they began walking down the street towards the office. She stayed relatively quiet on their way there, just minding her own business. It wasn’t awkward silence though, perfectly comfortable even up to when they got to her father’s floor. “Thank you so much for coming, I had a really nice time.” Y/N smiled warmly at him, genuinely meaning it this time and he could definitely tell. “We’ll do this again.” She hummed, again kissing his cheek before bidding him a goodbye and heading towards her father's office. Y/N was persistent.

----

He couldn’t get her to back off. Every week, Harry has a new gift from her. A rare record. Gourmet cat treats for Oliver. A vintage Rolling Stones tee shirt. It was driving him crazy. He had told her over and over that it wasn’t appropriate to give him gifts and yet, every week he ended up with her placing one on his desk. Nearly every day though, she would be at the office and would spend an hour lounging in his office. When she would get too flirty Harry would shut it down with a simple reminder that she was being inappropriate. To which she would laugh and roll her eyes.

Today though, he was probably going to lose it. Caroline and him had gotten in a fight the night prior because she was trying to slowly move into his place without him knowing— but he knew. And while she had originally come to apologize, it turned into a whining fest.

“Haz, please? It’s been 6 months. It’s really time to take it to the next level.” He winced at the nickname. God, he hated that shit so much. The cringiest one.

“Caro, love... no. I’m not ready to go further than what we are doing now. Sleepovers are what we’re doing. I can’t rush into such a decision.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“It’s not rushing! I barely get to see you as it is. It’s not fair.” And she had a point. Harry hadn’t been close lately.

“I’m busy, I’m working. I’m sorry.”

Y/N had seen the tall blonde enter the office. She knew that she shouldn’t be nosy, shouldn’t interrupt and it probably took her about 10 times to convince herself that she needed a reason to go over there. So, she waited till her father had a paper or two that needed to be given to Harry and she strutted down with her plan set. She knocked on the door twice as usual and stepped inside with a bright smile on her face.

“Hey! I— oh.” Y/N paused and closed the door behind her. Showtime. “Didn’t realize you had company, my apologies.” Y/N spoke and walked over to hand him the papers, noticing he had been burning the candle she’d gotten him. Oh he made it so fucking easy. “I’m glad you like the candle though, they make one in those sent for the wax burner you have.” Y/N remembered he had mentioned that he couldn’t burn it in the house because Oliver was still quite curious and he was nervous about him knocking something over.

Harry closed his eyes. God damn it. Y/N was a pretty, rich girl. Young. Hot. And Caroline did have a bit of a jealous streak. She wouldn’t at all be okay with thinking Y/N was over at his place. She already was having her insecurities.

“Thank you, Y/N—“

“Wait— how do you know about the wax burner?” Caroline was making his blood pressure rise. God damn it. Why? He was just trying to get work done and two women were going to have a pissing contest over him— one who didn’t even have a right to?

“Girls, that’s not important—“

“Yes it is? Is she why you’ve been busy?”

Y/N was smiling on the inside but part of her wanted to leave and let him explain. Of course, Y/N didn’t want to make it seem like she was doing it on purpose so she got a bit defensive.

“It’s not that hard to find out, I gave him a candle and he told me why he couldn’t burn it in his house.” Y/N spoke calmly, watching the woman narrow her eyes at her. “What, you haven’t heard of being attentive?” Okay, maybe that was a bit much. “All the information is on the papers, H. Don’t have to brief you. See you later.” She said calmly, she knew it would get under the woman’s skin and made her way out of the office and back towards her fathers. Maybe she was evil, but she was a little pot stirrer. She wanted things to bubble over on their own, Y/N just had to be there to catch him.

“Who is she? She seems awfully comfortable with you.” Caroline was getting antsy. She could tell how on edge Harry got when Y/N walked in the room, of course she would assume something was up. Even if she was assuming wrong. The thing was, he couldn’t technically be mad at Y/N because she hadn’t done anything inherently bad. Sure, she mentioned something no one would know unless they were close but it was a simple thing.

“She’s Y/N, the boss's daughter. She’s been very welcoming.” He said simply, taking a swig of his coffee. For fucks sake. He was going to die if these women didn’t give him a break.

“Why is she giving you candles? It’s weird. How much time do you spend with her?” She asked, obviously not happy.

“I don’t know why she gave it to me, to be nice? Love, you’re completely overthinking this. She helps her dad out and runs papers. Sometimes she chats and asks me business questions. Nothing that you’re thinking about is happening.” He promised. It wasn’t. He hadn’t laid a hand on her. Y/N was touchy. Liked to fix his tie or his hair and multiple times he had said to not, it was appropriate. She didn’t seem to care— but he wasn’t going to tell Caroline that.

The girl just nodded, leaving the office. Harry has told her not to come if it wasn’t urgent because he was usually busy. And now she wonders if he was busy with papers or in between the leggy girl’s thighs. Of course it was fate that had her almost crashing into her on the way out. Never in her life had she felt territorial over a man like this but Y/N was an obvious threat.

“What is going on with you and my boyfriend?” She asked seriously.

Y/N was simply going to get her father and herself another coffee when Caroline nearly knocked her off her feet with how fast she was moving. If that wasn’t enough to piss Y/N off, the girl had the nerve to speak to her in a threatening tone in her father’s building? This girl didn’t know what she was doing clearly or how spiteful Y/N could be. She was trying to be nice originally, but she didn’t appreciate her tone or the look she had in her eyes.

“Unfortunately nothing, yet.” Y/N responded in a snarky tone, “but you keep at the jealous girlfriend look, it’ll do you wonders.” She rolled her eyes and blocked her when she tried to storm out. “I better not see you in this building again? Got it?” Y/N raised her brow, “have a nice day.” She smiled at her, pushing past her to walk back towards her father’s office. Oh Y/N was livid. Livid.

“That fucking bitch!” Y/N slammed the door with her foot behind her, moving the coffees on to her father’s desk. “Harry’s girlfriend was here and was chatting to him when I went to drop papers off.. I simply made a comment about the candle I gave Harry and she went off... stopped me in the hallway and questioned me all threateningly, like she had the fucking right.”

“Take what she wants.” Her father said easily. “You’re trying to. She thinks that. Take what she’s been trying to keep. I think you and Harry are a lovely couple. It’s a shame he doesn’t see the vision yet, however he will come around.” He was positive. He wanted the upper hand. Yes, he loved Y/N and wanted her happy, and Harry would promise that but he would ultimately have someone to give the company to, and still be involved. Keep it in his family. It was perfect. “I know my daughter, and I know you’re relentless enough that he should be cracking soon. Go talk to him. Comfort him. If his girlfriend was causing issues, being a source of comfort could help. Make a move.” He suggested. An evil man was always a business one.

So that’s what Y/N did.

She took a second before making her way over to Harry’s office again. This time it wasn’t to give him papers or flirt or anything like that, it was to genuinely check up on him. Y/N knew she had been pretty forward and though he had told her to stop she was still being pretty relentless which, if the tables were turned, would be very problematic. It probably was now too. Y/N knocked twice on the door and stepped inside.

“Harry?” She asked in a soft and gentle tone, one she didn’t use with anyone. She closed the door behind herself and stood there, looking at him. “Are you alright?” She asked softly, “I didn’t mean to cause all that... I��m sorry if I did.” She really didn’t mean to make it that big of a mess. “Know you might not want to talk to me, but... I am here to listen if you need me to.” Y/N offered, hoping that he didn’t take it as some ploy to try and get to him. She really did just want to be there for him. She didn’t want to make it about her, which was rare, even though he could appreciate that.

“Yeah... m’okay, thanks. You didn’t say anything wrong. You just said an innocent comment but, she’s been a bit angry lately with me and thinkin’ I’m avoiding her so it made her upset.” He murmured. She wasn’t trying to get to him. She was genuinely asking and he could tell from the look on her face. It felt really nice, actually. Having someone ask him. He didn’t have his mum or dad or sister here so, seeing someone at least care a bit was nice. “It was... you just said wax melters? Am I crazy?” He rubbed his forehead. “Fuck. There’s nothin’ going on with us and still, she assumes. I’m good, Y/N. Thanks for checking on me.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, expecting her to let herself out.

“She asked me again when she was leaving... what was going on between us, and I told her nothing..” Y/N wanted to be honest with him too, wanted to let him know so he realized the level of jealousy his girlfriend was having. She didn’t want to leave him like this, she could understand the feeling to an extent but she would only leave if he asked her too. Y/N noticed he was too much in his head, clearly struggling to ground himself so she took the initiative. She moved to sit in his lap, her hand gently cupping the side of his neck and rubbing her thumb over the soft skin. She knew nothing technically was going on between them, but was there actually nothing there? Maybe now was the time to ask? “Know I’ve been really forward with you and I apologize if it’s been too much, because if that’s something that’s causing your stress I’ll back off— I will.” Y/N spoke gently, knowing he wouldn’t want her to, but she had to at least offer.

He hated how good her touch felt. How he wanted to melt into it and let her give him attention but every time he thought about giving in, he would remember his job. The years of being a stupid coffee boy. He couldn’t do that again. However right now, he felt vulnerable and upset at Caroline for doing that shit and especially confronting Y/N when realistically she hadn’t said anything wrong.

“You’re not... fuck, Y/N.” He groaned. “I hate that I like when you tease me and touch me. I can’t like it, I can’t like you. It puts me in so much danger.” Plus, he was overcome with thoughts about her in his most intimate moments. The last two times he’s had sex with Caroline, he thought about Y/N instead. Took her from behind and imagined her unstead. It was so wrong. He knew that. “It’s okay. I just... you make it so hard for me.” He knew there she knew that. Especially when he felt her hand gently caress his cheek and her soft little pout. “It’s not fair that you’re everywhere and I can’t stop thinking about it when I get home... fuck. It’s so frustrating and I can’t even hate you for it.” He couldn’t never hate her. “Do you know how crazy it’s making me? When you come in here and make me want to cheat just by batting your lashes at me? It’s so fucked and unfair that all you have to do is giggle and I want to risk my fucking job— fuck.” He hissed. “And I can’t tell if you’re toying with me or like me for real. I can’t tell and It drives me mad.”

Y/N felt her heart swell up at his words. It felt tight in her chest, so many words buzzing through her mind as she tried to figure out what she could say first. God, she just.

“I really like you Harry.” She said simply, forcing him to look in her eyes, her voice soft and quiet. “And I don’t want you to feel like you have to hold back because of who I am— I'd never do that to you, or to anyone for that matter.” She searched his eyes for a moment, feeling out the silence before speaking again. “And I’m not one to go after someone who is spoken for, but it’s you... you just have to be so damn perfect and I can’t help but feel like I can treat you better than she can... especially after what happened today I—”

His silence was killing her. She was so thankful that he liked her, that he felt the same way she did but he didn’t want to risk his job and didn’t want to be a bad guy who cheats. Y/N wished he could understand she wasn’t asking for either of those things necessarily. It wasn’t even that he had doubts that she could treat him better. He quite liked the idea of her. He would need to open his heart to her but that wasn’t an option. Would it ever be? Maybe once he got the promotion but nothing could stop this growth he was wanting. However, she looked so soft. So so sweet and sincere as she told him that she thought he was perfect. Y/N being honest? It was something he liked. When she was like this and it dialed down her brat attitude, that’s what he enjoyed.

He didn’t think before he did it and that was his fault, but he grabbed her face, and kissed her. He wasn’t able to stop himself.

Just as she thought she’d fucked it up, his mouth was on hers. She wasn’t dreaming, this was really happening. She let one of her hands tangle in his hair, wanting to take advantage of what could be the only chance she had at this, a soft pleased moan muffled against his lips. Y/N let him have full control of this kiss, letting him take what he needed from her so that she could prove just how submissive she could be if he only let her be. She wanted him so bad and she felt like she’d finally gotten something from him, even if it was just a little kiss it was already a massive step in the right direction. When he tried to pull back she deepened the kiss, desperate to keep this moment going for as long as possible. She didn’t want it to end, didn’t want him to decide it was a mistake, Y/N just wanted to cherish it and remind herself that a nice man could like her and treat her well.

Harry knew that this kiss was going to place him in a lot of dangerous areas. Y/N would be relentless on getting more— which secretly thrilled and terrified him at the same time. Caroline, She couldn’t ever find out about this. But mostly? Her mouth was perfect. She tasted sweet and had a hint of coffee and some sort of sweet gloss, but he didn’t care. He loved it. He let himself lose, allowing the kiss to deepen. Her tongue running against his and the softest, most cock teasing noises coming from her as she clung to him. Submissive and soft and fuck, perfect. It pained him to pull away, Y/N chasing his mouth and pecking him as he tried to speak. Though, he wasn’t trying to truly stop her yet.

“Baby— no...” He felt her bite on his bottom lip, his heart beating. “Shit— Y/N, we can't.” He finally pulled away, taking in deep breaths. Fuck. He had fucked up. So why didn’t it feel like it?

The pet name rolled so beautifully off of his tongue that her heart fluttered despite the fact that he was telling her to stop kissing him. It hurt her, of course, having to be the better choice but never being the priority. With soft pleading eyes, she sat with a pouty lip while her finger slowly twirled around a curl at the base of his neck.

“Why is it so wrong?” She asked softly, “Yes, you’re with her but... if you want me, you can break things off.” Y/N knew it was easier said than done but she was giving him an option. “And I’m pretty sure my father cares more about you more than me...” She chuckled sadly. She wished she was joking too. Y/N was soft and vulnerable now, having gotten a taste of what she wanted most. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment and be all alone. She wanted warmth, wanted someone to love and someone to love her. “Why is it such a bad thing to want me?”

“That isn’t true. He loves you. I think he finds it easier to talk to me because I’m a male and in business. You’re his daughter.” He tried to soothe. God. He just made shit a million times more difficult. “It's wrong because... what if something happens? What if shit goes wrong and then you get angry or hurt and your father fires me? What if people start shit and think I’m sleeping with you or something to get a promotion?” He said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It just... fuck, this is hard. Maybe later. But for the time being... we can’t do this. I have to figure things out on my own and get it together. Think hard about it because it isn’t just a fling for me. This is my life, my reputation, and my career on the line.” He whispered, standing up. He was gentle when he put her on the ground.

Y/N let out a sigh, did he not realize that she had just as much power as her father? She was just about to make a point but he made it clear that his career was more important than whatever they had. She could understand that, but she didn’t agree. She would have him, especially now that she knew he liked her in the same way.

“What if later is too late? What if I told you being with me can insure you have a job for life? It’s not just a fling for me either. It’s my life too, you know?” Y/N spoke quietly, “wish you’d have a little faith in me.” She said, clearly frustrated with the situation. Y/N decided she’d give him his space, looking at the time and shaking her head. “I better get going.” She spoke after clearing her throat, collecting her things as if nothing had happened and walked towards the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good night, Harry.” Y/N gave him a sweet smile and closed the door behind her on the way out.

Another long and lonely night.

----

Harry wasn’t sure if the kiss was a mistake or not. He wasn’t one to believe in regret, he did something and he had to face the consequences— however this? This was a whole lot. If he had thought Y/N had been much before, it was nothing compared to now. She came in and blatantly flirted with him, leaning over his desk in her sexy as fuck tops or dresses and gave him views he had been thirsting after, knowing he couldn’t. That he needed this job and she was tempting him at every turn. Not only that, but she would bring him coffee every morning and had figured out what scone he liked, coming to sit on his desk and flirting until Harry basically demanded she relax and go help her father.

Why would she stop? She wasn't alone in her want and she knew that now. It was his fault, because he had shown his hand and Y/N knew every small rejection wasn’t genuine. It was to save his job, but internally, he wanted to give in. Still, she would straighten his jacket or come behind him and fix his tie, talking into his ear. Enough to make him distracted half the day. When he was called into the big bosses office, and saw Y/N? He was fucking terrified. However, he was smiling wide and telling Harry to sit— so he did.

“As you know we’re looking to expand our branches across major cities in Europe. I just got off a call with Jean Pierre, he needs me in paris this weekend, but I’ve already booked mandatory meetings with the builders down in Philadelphia.” Her father explained, looking down at his paperwork and then up at Harry. “I need you to go and meet with him and handle business. You’re already briefed on everything you need to know, just need you over there.” He smiled, of course leaving out the most important part. “I’m having Y/N accompany you, seeing as there are a few events you’ll be attending. She’ll show you the ropes, show you around Paris as well, won’t you sweetheart?” Y/N smiled brightly, nodding her head.

“It’ll be amazing, promise I’ll show you a good time.” She cooed, watching his reaction carefully because of course he’d think she planned this.

“All expenses will be covered and you will be paid. This is a huge favor I’m asking of you, I know. Have your suit sizes and passport information sent to me.” Her father requested, knowing that Y/N would want to dress him up for the occasion.

Well fuck.

He was going to be alone with Y/N, in the fucking city of love, and he couldn’t say no. Not that he necessarily wanted to— but it was putting him in such a temptation spot that it made him nervous. The business, he could handle. That wasn’t what made him worried. It was Y/N and her ability to wear him down and be relentless even after he tries to show no reaction whatsoever. She just knew how he was feeling. And she had been sweeter than pie to him, working slowly on bringing him to the spot she wanted. He knew that.

“Oh— of course. How long is this trip for?” He asked curiously, side eyeing Y/N for a moment. He was praying for a short one but by the look on her face, it was definitely a week or more.

“Well, you’d be leaving Friday and arriving Saturday, your first meeting is on Monday and your last event is Friday night so... let’s say a week including travel?” He explained, already booking a hotel for the two of them at Y/N’s favorite place to stay. “Do you need to make any arrangements?” He raised his brow at him.

“He’ll need to make some for Oliver.” Y/N pointed out, her father looked at her with furrowed brows. “He has a kitty, daddy.” Y/N cooed with a smile, “I’m sure his girlfriend can take care of him.” She said with a small smirk, knowing full well the game that she was playing. He had yet to break up with her and she was hoping he’d do it soon so it wasn’t on his cautiousness. Y/N was already packing in her head, knowing exactly what she wanted to bring and needed to bring.

“I’ve forwarded the itinerary to Y/N, she’ll act as your assistant for the weekend, utilize her in any way you will.” Her father explained and Y/N smirked at that. She sure hoped he did.

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

[part 2]

A/N: a bit of a cliffhanger there, but oof.. tell us what you think! - n + d

masterlist

#writing #harry styles #harry styles one shot #harry styles smut #harry writing #jarofstyles #harry styles au #ceo!harry #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fanfiction

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woman-loving · 3 years ago

Text

The “Homosexual Traitor” and US Anti-Gay Purges

Selection from The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.

According to the Russians, Colonel Alfred Redl of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had slightly graying blond hair and a “greasy” outward appearance. He spoke “sugar-sweetly, softly.”

Beginning in 1901, Redl worked as a high official in Austria’s Evidenzbureau, where he single-handedly built its counterespionage program. He had more access to classified information than perhaps anyone else in the empire.

In Vienna, Redl’s homosexuality was an open secret. He often appeared at society events with his longtime “nephew,” and he maintained several other affairs. He had no reason to be fearful of exposure, since even the emperor’s brother enjoyed cross-dressing and the occasional army officer.

Redl closely guarded his work as a double agent, however. During his service in the Evidenzbureau, he offered Austrian war plans to the Italian military attaché in exchange for cash. An Italian intelligence officer later recalled it “required no effort” to recruit him. Redl simply mailed envelopes full of Austrian secrets and received thousands of krone in return.

He then began sending military plans to the Russians, too. Redl became fabulously wealthy, lavishing gifts on his lovers and driving two of the empire’s most expensive automobiles. For years, no one seemed to question how he afforded such extravagances on his government salary.

In May 1913, after Austrian counterintelligence officials intercepted a Russian letter containing six thousand krone, they staked out the Vienna post office to identify its recipient. They were appalled to discover Redl.

The army wanted to keep the matter quiet, since public knowledge of treachery at such a high level would have been a profound humiliation. After following him to his hotel, Redl’s own protégé handed him a pistol. Army officials always maintained that Redl voluntarily took his life.

News of the colonel leaked, fact became intertwined with fiction, and the myth of the homosexual traitor came into being. A Berlin newspaper described Redl’s “homosexual pleasure palace, filled with perversities.” The Austrian Army needed a scapegoat for the 1.3 million casualties in that first year of World War I, so it blamed Redl and the larger, more insidious “homosexual organization” that protected him within the military.

Three years later, when a young Allen Dulles, the future CIA director, arrived in Vienna to work at the U.S. embassy, he found everyone still whispering about the homosexual spy who had lost the First World War for the empire.

By the end of World War II, America had become a more open place for homosexuals, but they also confronted novel threats conjured by a political coalition that exploited the uncertainty of the new world order. In 1945, only months before President Roosevelt died, Republicans and Southern Democrats formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In the 1946 midterm election, after Republicans pledged to “ferret out” threats to the “American way of life,” they won the first congressional majority in sixteen years.

In March 1947, President Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, and the government began investigating its employees to determine their loyalty. Three months later, the Democrat-controlled Senate Committee on Appropriations warned about “the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks.” The committee empowered the secretary of state with “absolute discretion” to purge employees, including homosexuals, who threatened national security.

In September 1949, America learned that the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear weapon. In October, eleven Communist leaders were convicted for advocating a violent revolution in America, and in December, China fell to the Communists.

On January 21, 1950, a jury convicted suspected spy Alger Hiss of perjury.

On February 3, authorities arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage.

And on February 9, Junior Senator Joe McCarthy stood before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and announced, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

Nobody else had seen the list. When reporters caught him at an airport and demanded to see it, he offered to show them—then realized he had left it in his baggage. His number of alleged Communists soon changed from 205 to 57. “Rarely,” The Washington Post declared, “has a man in public life crawled and squirmed so abjectly.”

On the evening of February 20, McCarthy arrived on the Senate floor with an overstuffed briefcase that purportedly contained his list of Communist-linked security risks in the State Department. For six hours, he provided a warped summary of eighty-one cases, relying on unproven allegations from a three-year-old congressional investigation. “In short, the speech was a lie,” concluded historian Robert Griffith.

Two of the cases involved alleged homosexuals, who were “rather easy blackmail victims,” explained McCarthy. It was a shrewd maneuver: what editorial board or politician would dare argue that sexual deviants belonged in the federal government?

McCarthy would later recuse himself from hearings on the issue of homosexuals in the government. At forty-one, the senator was unmarried, and the issue raised questions about his own sexuality.

Other Republicans took the lead. A week after McCarthy’s Senate speech, his colleagues coerced Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy, a security official testifying in defense of his department, into making a startling admission. In only three years, he admitted, ninety-one homosexual employees had resigned upon investigations under Truman’s loyalty program.

And with that, as the New York Post referred to it, the “Panic on the Potomac” began. Conservative newspapers leapt upon the admission. Congress scheduled hearings. Homosexuality, observed a columnist on Meet the Press, became “a new type of political weapon” that could “wreck the Administration.” The chief of the Washington Vice Squad testified there were “3,750 perverts employed by government agencies.” Republican senator Kenneth Wherry alleged the Soviets were using a list of American homosexuals—originally compiled by Hitler—to blackmail federal employees for government secrets. Washington, he said, faced an “emergency condition.”

The Senate committee tasked with solving the homosexual problem, led by Democrat Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, began closed hearings in July. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the director of the government’s new Central Intelligence Agency, testified first. He arrived with a thirty-eight-page statement, and ten of those pages chronicled a “classic” case, one “known all through intelligence circles,” an example that would leave “no doubt as to the fact that perversion presents a very definite security risk.”

Of all the intelligence available to the CIA, its director chose to rest his case against homosexuals on the forty-year-old story of Colonel Redl. In Hillenkoetter’s retelling, Redl had been an “honest” man who found himself in an imperial army with unforgiving policies against homosexuality. The Russians hired a young newsboy, who “became very intimate” with Redl. Next, they broke into the colonel’s room and caught him in an “act of perversion.” After threatening to expose him, the Russians gained copies of the Austrian war plans prior to the outbreak of violence.

And so a single urban legend, the telling of which was almost entirely, verifiably inaccurate (in fact, a 1907 Russian diplomatic cable had falsely labeled Redl “a lover of women”) became the primary piece of evidence that guided federal employment policy toward homosexuals for decades to come.

The CIA director then explained the “general theory as to why we should not employ homosexuals or other moral perverts in positions of trust.” He gave thirteen reasons to the senators.

1. Homosexuals experience emotions “as strong and in fact actually stronger” than heterosexual emotions. 2. Homosexuals are susceptible “to domination by aggressive personalities.” 3. Homosexuals have “psychopathic tendencies which affect the soundness of their judgment, physical cowardice, susceptibility to pressure, and general instability, thus making a pervert vulnerable in many ways.” 4. Homosexuals “invariably express considerable concern” about concealing their condition. 5. Homosexuals are “promiscuous” and often visit “various hangouts of his brethren,” marking “a definite similarity to other illegal groups such as criminals, smugglers, black-marketeers, dope addicts, and so forth.” 6. Homosexuals with “outward characteristics of femininity—or lesbians with male characteristics—are often difficult to employ because of the effect on their co-workers, officials of other agencies, and the public in general.” 7. Homosexuals who think they are discreet are, in reality, “actually quite indiscrete [sic]. They are too stupid to realize it, or else due to inflation of their ego or through not letting themselves realize the truth, they are usually the center of gossip, rumor, derision, and so forth.” 8. Homosexuals who try “to drop the ‘gay’ life and go ‘straight’ … eventually revert to type.” 9. Homosexuals are “extremely vulnerable to seduction by another pervert employed for that purpose by a foreign power.” 10. Homosexuals are “extremely defiant in their attitude toward society,” which could lead to disloyalty. 11. “Homosexuals usually seem to be extremely gullible.” 12. Homosexuals, including “even the most brazen perverts,” are constantly suppressing their instincts, which causes “considerable tension.” 13. Homosexuals employed by the government “lead to the concept of a ‘government within a government.’ That is so noteworthy. One pervert brings other perverts. They belong to the lodge, the fraternity. One pervert brings other perverts into an agency … and advance them usually in the interest of furthering the romance of the moment.”

The testimony of subsequent intelligence officials echoed that of the CIA director, and the Hoey committee’s final report primarily drew from the testimony of its lead witness, sometimes verbatim. As the Hoey report concluded, homosexuals were ipso facto security risks. Colonel Redl remained its only example.

Hillenkoetter’s thirteen principles became official government doctrine. The government incorporated the Hoey report into its security manuals, forwarded it to embassies, and shared it with its foreign allies. “The notion that homosexuals threatened national security,” explains historian David Johnson, “received the imprimatur of the U.S. Congress and became accepted as official fact.” When the federal government needed to justify its homosexual purges, it simply pointed to the Hoey report.

Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 with the help of the slogan “Let’s Clean House” and whispers that his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, had homosexual tendencies. Three months after his inauguration, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which expanded the government’s purging authority—originally given to the State Department—to all federal agencies. Any employee who exhibited “criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” had no place in the federal bureaucracy. With a Republican in the White House, the purges became less of a spectacle and more of a quiet, well-oiled machine. In Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union, he boasted of removing 2,200 security risks in only a year.

McCarthy’s downfall came later that year, but the purges remained alive, as did the rumors that always seemed to saturate America’s capital. After two Republican senators learned that the son of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a Democrat, had been arrested in Lafayette Park, they gave Hunt a choice. He could withdraw from his 1954 reelection campaign or face the publicity of his son’s homosexual arrest. The Senate was virtually tied. If Hunt resigned, he risked shifting power to the Republicans.

On the morning of June 19, 1954, Senator Hunt, a straight victim of antigay political blackmail, entered his Capitol office and shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle.

#alfred redl #austria hungary #mccarthyism #lgbtq history #united states #suicide cw #homophobia #homosexual traitor #the deviant's war

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lassieposting · 4 years ago

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Any alive! Skulduggery hcs that you haven't shared? I live by your version of him tbh

Hi anon! I think I covered skug's backstory up to when he signs up to fight and then skipped ahead to when he meets his wife, so you can have the Early War Years

- so when we left skug, he'd been on the pirate adventure and essentially moved in with ghastly's family at age 16, and that's where he stays for the next three years. Ghastly's father introduces him to taking pride in his appearance, Ghastly introduces him to Hopeless, and Ghastly's mother Saoirse introduces him to three things: motherly love, household chores, and the back of her hand for swearing in the house. He settles into the family, flirts with the prettiest local girls, develops an allergy to manual labour, and starts Experimenting�� with Ghastly, who's absolutely besotted with him.

- at 19, he has his surge, and it's bad. Ghastly has his a few months earlier, and it wasn't pleasant, but Ghastly was always going to be an elemental. He was sick and achy for a few days and howling in pain for just one or two. Skug expects much the same: he hasn't used necromancy in years, and he's had the best elemental tutors his parents could find.

- But he's inherited an insanely strong necromancy gene from his biological father, and an insanely strong elemental gene from his mother, and his surge ultimately comes down to two branches of magic trying to destroy each other to be the last gene standing. His temperature skyrockets as the elemental gene tries to burn the necromancy out of him. What looks like black blood seeps from his eyes and his nose and the corner of his mouth. His veins go black as the shadows retaliate. It goes on for days. Ghastly's mother is beside herself trying to get water into him so he doesn't die of thirst.

- If he hadn't also inherited the extremely rare genetic abnormality responsible for magical ambidexterity, his surge would've killed him. But he did, so it doesn't, and eventually he comes out of it and spends the next six months or so just recovering.

- at this point, the sanctuary is pushing recruitment. Ghastly doesn't look twice at the posters, but skug does. Ghastly's whole world is his family, their farm, and his father's tailoring business. But skug's father is a diplomat, he's got extended family involved in the war, he was supposed to go to a fancy French university that ended up being burned down during an attack by some pro-Mevolent riots, he's had to field questions from smaller siblings about when - and if - their dad would be coming home. He's highly educated, politically savvy, and emotionally involved. He decides he wants to sign up to fight.

- Saoirse does her best to talk him out of it, but skug is skug, and he digs his heels in and insists this is what he wants to do. He's going to join the war effort.

- Ghastly and Hopeless think it over and decide to join up with him. Hopeless, because he's an idealistic young man looking for glory, and Ghastly because someone has to watch skulduggery's back and keep him out of trouble, or he'll get himself shot long before he gets to set foot on a battlefield.

- honestly, ghastly isn't expecting skug to last long in the army. Skug is a pampered spoiled rich brat, and he's about to be surrounded by people who will scream in his face and make him do drills and expect him to obey orders, and he thinks it will take a few weeks tops before skug wants to desert

- that is. Not what happens

- like. none of them like it very much to begin with. hopeless has never had to do this much exercise in his life, and he hates it. ghastly is lonely and homesick and just wants to go back to dublin. and their first CO decides he hates skug on like, their first day of training, because he's a smart-mouthed arrogant asshole who's never had to be afraid of anything but his own father, and he does not react well to being ridiculed during drills. skug's ego takes a good solid battering because the other enlistees don't appreciate being given extra chores as punishment for him mouthing off, ghastly has to crack some skulls to make sure he won't be bullied for his scars, hopeless doesn't quite fit in and gets some nasty ribbing over it

- but also? they've got untapped talent, all three of them. they end up black ops fighters for a reason. hopeless tops the class for intelligence and undercover operations, because he can become anyone. ghastly is strong and level-headed and does well under pressure. and skulduggery is a natural leader, a ruthless tactician, and has a tendency to pull off insane plans that would go horribly for anyone else.

- they survive basic training. they get sent into the field. and ghastly and hopeless find that they're actually pretty good at this. they earn the respect of the rest of their platoon. and skulduggery? he starts to thrive

- this is the era of wealthy aristocrats buying their way into leadership positions they don't have the experience or common sense to do well in. almost none of the lower-class soldiers have any patience for it, but as a fellow aristo Skug has the social standing to call them out on it, so he still has a habit of making enemies of his commanding officers. he resents being handed orders by men who are less than he is, less clever, less observant, less capable. he goes out of his way to prove that his way of doing things is better.

- and? it works for him, sort of. he gets promoted several times - first he's pulled out of the enlisted ranks to be trained up as an officer, then he makes lieutenant, then captain - partly because he's Challenging to deal with and partly because he's becoming incredibly competent. it's fairly common for skug to get a flogging (for disobeying orders) and a promotion (because it worked out well for him) simultaneously. he has quite a few stripes by the time he meets wifey. when he starts being given command of a squad of his own, he takes ghastly with him as his number two, and hopeless comes along for the ride.

- at some point, skug gets palmed off on then-colonel corrival deuce. it's phrased as "oh here i'll give you some of my best men", but corrival is experienced enough to recognise "god please take this one off my hands im begging you" when he sees it, and sure enough, he butts heads with skug almost as soon as they're introduced.

- by this point skulduggery's men have developed a reputation for being a bit wild, and they're very loyal to him, so corrival has his work cut out. but? he's got a bit of a different approach to a lot of his fellow officers, because he came up through the ranks himself. so instead of locking horns with skug and trying to flog him into compliance, he turns skug into his pet project, his protégé. he gives him a loose rein, defends his decisions to the higher-ups, and doesn't interfere too much with how skug runs his team, but he also doesn't tolerate backtalk, bullshit or cheek. he's the stern-but-fair mentor figure - the Captain Holt/Captain Pellew/Lord Wellington to skug's Peralta/Hornblower/Sharpe. and skug's never had a very involved father figure, because ghastly's father is massively introverted and his own was short-tempered and perpetually disappointed in him, so corrival trips his "kids want boundaries" switch and actually wins him over.

- corrival hangs onto him after that. as he gets promoted and moved around, skug goes with him, and by extension so do his team. corrival learns to use the sensible members of the group - ghastly and hopeless, then erskine - to triangulate skug and stop his temper getting the better of him. he's incredibly proud of his chosen men, and all three of them really come into their own under his guidance. skug turns down promotion a couple times because it would mean a change of CO, and he knows there aren't many people he'd take orders from anymore.

- and then skug meets wifey.

- when skug gets married, neither his mother or father attend. they don't approve of wifey or her pitiful dowry. they assume, as does kenspeckle, that he's marrying her to Do The Decent Thing because he's knocked her up, and his father reassures him that he doesn't have to marry the girl, just send her somewhere far away and send her money to support her brat, and this whole sorry indiscretion can be put behind him. skug is. furious. he was smart enough not to take wifey with him to announce the engagement, and he ends up having a screaming match with his father that ends with him a) walking out and b) getting disinherited. he marries her anyway, and despite mr and mrs pleasant senior snubbing the whole event, he's got a full complement of parents there all the same - ghastly's parents turn up, and so does corrival.

- it's a military thing - skug's in his military dress uniform, they cut the cake with his sword - the parade sword, at least, the one he's never actually used, they walk out of the venue through the sword arch and skug's team do the rifle salute. ghastly's mother drags him to one side, pulls him down by the shirtfront to fuss over his hair and try to make it lay flat, licks her thumb and wipes a smudge off his cheek, embarrasses him in front of all his friends. then corrival snags him while they're waiting for the bride, tells him off for not having perfectly shiny buttons, redoes his collar for him, and tells him, "You'll do" like he isn't about to cry a lil. he offers skug some whiskey from his flask "for courage" and without really thinking skug says he doesn't need it because he's never been so sure about anything in his life and corrival is just. he's fine. he's not choked up at all. stand up straight, boy, for god's sake.

- he also makes a speech ghastly still brings up hundreds of years later, because it's the soppiest the old man ever got with any of them. along the lines of "i never had a son, and if i had, i like to think he would've turned out absolutely nothing like you, because you are single-handedly the reason i am going grey several hundred years ahead of schedule. that being said, i couldn't be prouder of the man you've become; you are at least half as stubborn and annoying now as you were when i met you, and i think i can claim at least some of the credit." and then, to wifey, "as to you, my dear, you have freed me, this monster is yours now. to your health, and my heartiest hopes that your future children turn out like you, because one of him is plenty."

- wifey laughs until her sides hurt and she's wheezing. skug pretends he's offended. ghastly wolf-whistles noisily and gets clipped round the ear by his mama. corrival tears up a little in the middle of his speech and clears his throat to hide it. and when it's all over and they're about to leave, wifey thanks him for coming because she knows it meant a lot to skug, and he promises her he'll do his best to bring skug home safe and sound until this damnable war is over.

(he wishes he'd been able to keep that promise until the day he dies)

#Anon #fire message #skulduggery pleasant #sp headcanons #skugwife #skug #corrival deuce #long post

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friendofthecrows · 3 years ago

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Posting a way more in-depth description of my alters than any of you want or need because why not

Keiko: friendliest, nicest, cutest, acts the youngest. Used to front a lot when we were hanging out with friends. Still essentially like the rest of us in that she has the same personality disorders (pointing this out because you wouldn’t guess she has ASPD but we all do. No, none of us are “more of a psychopath” or evil vs good or whatever compared to one another). She just seems more able to feel/express the positive spectrum of emotions, she hasn’t repressed it or detached herself from it as much. She/her pronouns. Aroace. Current fave thing: either MLP or stimboards

Miyuki: calm, collected, responsible, acts like a gatekeeper of the system a lot as in she’s the only one we can actually trust to moderate the rules objectively. Also has pulled people out or put people in control before. Less “control panel” access than say Jokul or I though, but probably only due to lack of practice. THE most sane one (idk how that works either) and the one with the least emotional turmoil. Used to wonder if 1. She was capable of caring about people and 2. If she actually felt any emotions at all. The answer is yes she does, she just Bottles Them Up Completely. We are taking it in faith that she feels stuff because the body cried once while she was in control. Pronouns: she/her. Sexuality: ???? when it comes to romance, but definitely ace. Current fave thing: tea, specifically a nice warming oolong like Da Hong Pao.

Yahto: (me!) people are suggesting ways to describe me and it is mean. For most of my knowledge of my own existence as a separate alter, I’ve kind of assigned myself the role of protector. I was very functional as well! Confident (bordering on insufferably arrogant), and with the level of detachment from my emotions I had at the time as well as my complete lack of fear, perfectly suited to deal with a wide variety of situations. Only if we were okay with other people thinking we’re weird because I used to have a worse filter than I have now. I experienced fear for the first time 3.5 years ago right alongside the strongest emotions I’ve ever felt and my mental health has been spiraling downwards ever since :) Also I am literally the most stubborn person you will ever meet. He/him pronouns. Anything having to do with orientation is a big question mark right now, I just know I’m probably not interested in men. I HAVE dated women but tbh I’m no longer sure if I’m even interested in them. Current fave thing: yahto.exe stopped working 38 hours of being awake ago. Uh,,,,idk sorry How about reading fzanfic to pass the time fnafic fanfic

Jezebeth (Jez): (headspace bestie! Great at writing horror poems!) Does Not Care About People but also surprisingly extremely chill. When she’s enthusiastic about something, she’s REALLY ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT IT but otherwise mostly just stays quiet and has a nice time Observing. People either find her really fun to be around or creepy. No in between. She went through a phase where she thought it was funny to creep people out by saying really messed up things so that probably didn’t help. Actually, DURING said phase, she single-handedly made and maintained the best in-school friendship we ever had for 4 years. Literally none of us talked to her except for Jez. She just had endless “creepy” conversation topics and Robin thought it was *amazing. * She/her pronouns, I have no idea sexuality wise simply because she does not talk about that kind of thing. Current fave thing: inking pens :)

Jokul: (sworn enemy, tried to kill myself once to take him down with us) Perfectly reasonable person realistically. Nothing particularly wrong with him. I just Do Not Like Him. Especially since for as long as I can remember, we’ve made it a game to torment each other. You see, we both hate boredom more than anything else, or at least we did when we were even younger and more naive and we’re not actually malicious, and yet foolishly prided ourselves on not being nice and also our ability to manipulate people. No, little kid me was probably not actually an expert on manipulation, we just thought we were at the time. This all resulted in us taking our boredom, pent up malice, and desire to prove we were better than one another on each other. Such a great idea (sarcastic). We did in fact get better at emotionally wounding people after years of practice, and predictably (if we had any foresight on this matter at all) it backfired! I did in fact turn this skill against the one person I cared about in an effort to push them away during one of my breakdowns and it resulted in 6 suicide attempts, not including my own. Jokul has been trying to manipulate me positively since (both of us have been ordered to be nice to each other by Miyuki because we were causing too many problems) and it has Not Worked. If he was a separate person, I would skin him. The only person I’ve hated so much. We’ve been on relatively good terms lately. Been capable of having casual conversations. Things are okay, I guess. His personality is entirely fake, so I don’t know how to describe it except for how he acts when we’re trying to hurt each other, which might be him dropping his mask or it might be a whole different act just for that. Pronouns: He/him. Sexuality: He can change it at will? I think default is aroace though? Current fave thing: *Jokul imitation* “My purple silk dress I wear when I’m meeting people and am desperate for them to worship my beauty. I look so irresistibly elegant in it, it makes everyone like me automatically.” His actual answer is Death Note (cringe) (I’ve been yelled at for calling Death Note cringe)

Gracelynn: (headspace ex-bestie) Everyone thinks she’s the nicest person ever and super loyal and so on. She is to other people but apparently not to me anymore. Still finds it difficult to empathize with people and care about them, but apparently decided to be nice anyways. Like she doesn’t get the fuss about friends but she’s here for them anyways. Spends as much time daydreaming as possible these days, used to front A TON a few years ago. Extremely shy and full of social anxiety and anxiety in general. Goes nonverbal in a plethora of social situations. Freakishly good memory. Has way less memory gaps than I do and I have no idea why. She/her pronouns, probably aroace Current fave thing: brace yourself for no surprises, a tie between horseback riding and the Chronicles of Amber.

Ryo: (the alter of many names: Ryo, Rachel, Ry, Rei, R) The newest. Noticed a new voice and behavior that did not match any of ours a while after the events of 3.5 years ago. Might be coincidence, might not be, I don’t care. Kind of down to earth and practical and normal compared to the rest of us. Despite him being here for years now I don’t know that much about him partially because I don’t care and haven’t been paying attention, and partially because system communication hasn’t been that great (I’ve also been getting way more memory gaps! Whole days lost! Isn’t that great? (sarcastic)). Pronouns: varies, any are fine. (Despite us, in general, identifying as gender fluid so we don’t have to explain, Ryo is the only ACTUALLY gender fluid alter in our system) Aroace. Current fave thing: He said sleep, he wants us to go to sleep. (refuses to answer the fun question genuinely) Well Ryo, you have just failed my vibe check. Your reward is uh,,,AT LEAST 13 more hours of being awake. Yayyy

(I did colors here but the all green theme will stay in other posts <3 Really if I had to describe our auras it would be different shades of blue anyways.)

#if you actually read all this thank you and why #alters #system #headspace #DID #headmates #dissociative identity disorder #hal rambles #mental illness #long post

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s-horne · 5 years ago

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13. Ambrosia (love returned)

Don’t over-analyse it, don’t over-analyse it, Tony chanted to himself.

He’d kept up the mantra for ages and yet it hadn’t seemed to help. Though he wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been repeating the simple phrase, he’d had to tap the screen of his phone several times when it kept going dark and threatening to clear the message from Tony’s view.

It was sort of ironic, really, that the message telling him to go to sleep had kept him up past even his usual bedtime and would no doubt serve to keep him awake into the small hours of the next week.

Before he really knew what was happening, Tony had managed to make his way up from his workshop until his hand was poised to knock on Steve’s front door. A few minutes of incessant banging later and Steve was suddenly standing there, sleep-rumbled and yawning and looking far too attractive for Tony to deal with.

“Tony?” Steve asked, rubbing at his face and squinting in confusion. His hair was an adorable mess and his shirt was caught up under his armpit and Tony adored him. “What’s happening? Are you okay? Is everyone alright; Tash, Rhodey?”

“What does this mean?” Tony thrust his phone in Steve’s face, totally ignoring the worried words falling from Steve’s lips. When the phone was turned his way, Steve reared back at the bright light and raised a hand to shield his eyes.

“Tony, stop, God.” Steve turned his head sharply and screwed his eyes shut. “What’s wrong? I can’t see that – it’s 2am.”

“What?” Tony twisted his phone around to check the time – and grimaced himself at the brightness of it himself – before he winced a little. “Whoops. That’s my bad, didn’t realise. But,” he barrelled on, spinning the phone back around, “I want to know what this means.”

There was a tense silence as Steve focused his eyes onto what Tony knew was the last text that Steve had sent to Tony a few hours before.

Capsicle [10.54pm]: Get some sleep, Tony. I’ll see you tomorrow xx

“Kisses?” Tony’s voice was far too loud for the late hour, but he figured that his houseguests were more than used to strange noises when living in the Avengers Tower. He had no desire to tone down the pitch of his questioning, even when Steve’s gaze shot back to his instead of staying focused on the blindingly-bright cell screen.

Words poured from Tony’s mouth. He wasn’t thinking too hard about what he was saying, his mind a little frantic at the over-analysis it had been thinking over for hours. “What do kisses mean? Were they an accident, or are they friendly kisses? You’ve never sent me kisses before. Are friendly kisses a thing that we do now?”

Tony and Steve had had a strange friendship over the years. From almost hating each other on sight to fighting a battle together within hours of meeting, they’d literally gone from one extreme to the other.

Over the months that had followed, filled with zero direct communication between them and more thoughts about the other man that Tony would ever freely admit to, Steve had put up the most resistance to moving into Tony’s newly-designed Avengers Tower. The rest of the team had moved in quickly and they’d settled into a surprisingly easy routine. Tony had nearly fallen over in shock when he had entered the communal floor late one night after an inventing binge to see Steve stood there with a duffel over his shoulders, soaked clothes dripping down onto the carpet under his feet, a sheepish smile, and a bag of doughnuts.

From then on, Steve had decided to throw himself wholeheartedly into the Avengers initiative for reasons still undiscovered to Tony. But whatever had caused the change of heart had Tony’s unwavering gratitude. As soon as that commitment had been made, Tony had watched Steve become a new man. Gone was the stick up his ass and even Tony felt himself relaxing into a nicer version of himself with the change in his teammate. Neither of them needed a front around the other after too long and Tony found that he wanted to spend time with the Captain of his team. Willingly. Without being forced into it by Rhodey or Pepper.

It was a new feeling.

Tony wasn’t sure when it had gone from an easy friendship to him being unable to get through the day without talking to Steve, or when Steve had started being the one that Tony sought out after a nightmare, but he couldn’t say he was disappointed with the turn of events.

Steve was a good soul through and through, and Tony loved him.

Unfortunately, that love had never even been hinted at as being reciprocated and Tony had made peace with that depressing thought. Until that evening.

When Steve sent him kisses on the end of his nightly text message and Tony had spiralled. All the King’s men could not have stopped him from reading very deeply into it; apparently wasting over 3 hours analysing every possible meaning and not allowing himself to sleep because he needed to know what it meant.

“They’re just kisses,” Steve said finally, voice low. “I didn’t – I mean… they’re just kisses.”

And no. Tony wasn’t about to let that slide. There was no way that Steve ‘Captain America’ Rogers had suddenly decided to change his texting style for absolutely no reason at all and Tony wasn’t going to just drop it.

“No,” he said forcefully, taking a step forward. He ignored the wild beating of his heart as he decided to be brave and show his feelings for once. “You don’t get to do that. You, Steve Rogers, do not send kisses ever, let alone for no reason to me of all people, so you can’t just brush this off. Not with me. Never with me.”

There was a long pause. Tony’s heart sunk to his toes. He’d thought that he’d read something right for once, when all he had actually done was overthink things to the point of ruining one of his best friendships.

Just as Tony opened his mouth to mumble an apology, – or maybe break down and cry, he hadn’t quite decided – Steve surged forward and caught Tony’s lips in a passionate kiss. His arms wound around Tony’s waist to pull him closer and closer as his tongue swept over Tony’s bottom lip to gain entrance. Tony gave permission willingly, his hand flying up to clutch Steve’s shoulder, eyes fluttering shut in surrender.

“Kisses,” Steve said when they broke apart, voice ragged and chest heaving. “That’s what I meant. That’s what I thought about doing to you when I sent those.”

“Huh.” Tony stepped back and swiped his thumb across his dark cell screen, bringing it back to life and staring down intently. He felt like he’d just run a marathon, as though he’d climbed to the highest mountain, or taken down an entire army single-handedly. He was on the top of the world and his heart was threatening to burst with the love he felt. After a moment, he looked up at Steve and bit his lip, eyes sparkling mischievously. “Only two?”

#i wrote a thing #august in bloom #stony fic #stevetony fic #stony fic rec #steve rogers #tony stark #stony ficlet #stevetony fic rec

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khhunniewriting · 5 years ago

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The Others (11)

[ Mafia/Gang AU ]

Warning: The entire chapter is a flashback to 17 years ago when they first met/dated. There will be some suggestive content.

“Welcome- oh it’s you again Mr. Lee.” You smiled widely at the charismatic man that had earned you a big commission on multiple occasions. He was young, handsome, and rich- a triple threat. On top of it all, he seemed easy to talk to despite the overwhelming gap in status between you two.

“I told you to call me Joonkyung,” he reminded you with a smile of his own. This was his third time at the jewelry store that month. He hardly had time to spare on shopping, more importantly, there was a limit to how much jewelry he could buy but he somehow found the time and space to visit the same shop. It was easy when you were there.

Dok2 had been unable to forget you.

He stayed awake at night thinking about the genuine hardworking young woman that helped him pick out his wife’s anniversary gift.

The shop was relatively lonely with only you and the security guard out on the shop floor while the store’s manager resided in the back office. The counters lined with shining diamonds and sterling silver couldn’t compare to your beauty.

Behind the counter, you subtly slipped back into your heels gaining a couple inches of height. It was tiring standing around most of the day in an empty shop. Jewelry wasn’t a fast-moving item allowing periods of silence at the time.

“What can I help you with today?”

“My wife’s birthday is coming up.”

“And you came to get her another pretty piece,” you sighed. This man never held back for his wife. You figured he was deeply in love with her since he had gotten married at a young age. “She’s so lucky~”

Dok2 chuckled at your exasperated sigh. In previous talks, you declared yourself the most unromantic woman on Earth. “I thought you didn’t believe in marriage.”

“Do you know how many engagement rings get returned? Love is such a foreign concept to me.” You leaned over the counter resting your elbows on the glass and your chin in the palms of your hands. All the while you wondered what twist of fate had to occur for you to experience the devotion of a man who loved you as much as Mr. Lee loved his wife.

It was too late for him to confide in you, to tell you that he too knew nothing about love. On day one you managed to sweep him into conversation. Almost immediately making him out to be something he wasn’t.

He did not know what love was.

Nonetheless, he congratulated himself for playing his role as husband well enough for you to believe he cared about his wife.

Unfortunately, that backfired the day he realized he was more than a little interested in you.

That year, on Valentine’s Day...

Joonkyung popped into the store seeing a vast increase of shoppers. His eyes scanned the vicinity looking for your beautiful smile. It hadn’t been long since his last visit but he missed you. The sound of your voice alone brought a sense of peace he could not find anywhere else.

When he found you there was a couple across from you asking to see nearly every heart-shaped necklace the store carried. They were gushing and cooing at each other as you forced yourself to smile. He knew it was not genuine after receiving his fair share.

“Welcome sir, may I assist you this evening?”

Another female employee of the store that he had never seen before approached him. She was younger, wearing a regular uniform unlike yours. You were now the store’s manager allowing you to wear what you pleased as long as it didn’t hinder the shop’s image.

“I want to see the manager.”

“Oh,” the girl panicked thinking there was some sort of problem. “I’ll get her right away.” She scurried off after politely bowing and asking him to wait, dodging the patrons and calling you aside to let you know of his request.

When you looked out into the store you found Joonkyung staring in your direction. The first meeting of your eyes had the corners of your lips rising into your first smile of the eventful day.

Christmas, New Year’s, and now Valentine’s... this man had class. Mr. Lee had single-handedly caused your promotion. Your sales kept increasing making you stand out to the corporation that owned the store.

You instructed her to take over for you with the couple while you attended to your special customer.

“Joonkyung, I knew you would come in eventually.”

“Hello Y/N,” indeed he had worked hard to get on a first-name basis with you. He never missed an opportunity to call your name.

There was no need for questions on a day like this. You took him directly to the silver jewelry his wife seemed to favor. There were a few new pieces that came just in time for the holiday.

He followed you but he wasn’t paying much attention to what you were saying. His mind wasn’t on the jewelry but on the woman handling it.

“This one has been selling very well-”

“What do you like?” Dok2 thought it was now or never. If he waited any longer he would be unable to hold back. He knew for a fact that you didn’t have a boyfriend but that could change any moment. “What would you expect from your boyfriend?”

You put down the pendant in your hand and instead pulled out a simple thin necklace with an equally delicate and small diamond hanging in the middle.

“That?” Dok2 questioned in disbelief. He was expecting you to pull out some rare expensive items from the back that you only showed him and the other big spenders.

You nodded innocently, “Don’t judge me but I’m not into the flashy pieces like you are. I prefer smaller items that can go unnoticed if one does not look hard enough.”

He agreed, sometimes the best things were those that nearly slipped your fingers.

"Although I wouldn’t expect such a gift on Valentine’s day from a boyfriend.”

“I’ll buy it for you.”

“Wh-what?” You thought you heard wrong at first but when he handed you his card you realized how serious he was being. “You’re serious?”

He nodded, “I’ve been meaning to give you something for a while now.”

You stood up straight your eyes shifting to see if anyone had heard the exchange. Your fingertips turned white as you tightened your hold on his card. Perhaps you were reading too much into it?

“Why would you give me something so expensive- why give me something at all?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

\\\

Looking around your new surroundings made everything seem so unreal. The condo was huge, too big for a single occupant. You walked about noticing every detail of luxury that had gone into it.

“I definitely can’t afford this kind of place.” You returned to his side hoping he would take you to a much more affordable area. This side of the city itself was known for being costly.

“But do you like it?”

“Who wouldn’t.”

“Then it’s yours.” Dok2 held your hand opening it to place a key flat in your palm.

You were stunned, unable to say much but to protest against it. “I can’t accept this.”

He smirked recalling the first time he tried giving you something. That necklace you wore daily, the one he bought for you on Valentine’s day. “That’s what you said about the necklace”

“I also said that we should stop seeing each other.” It hurt to remember that this was an affair now that you were developing stronger feelings towards him. For six months you enjoyed your meetings with Joonkyung but the moral dilemma weighed heavy on you the more you stuck around.

Dok2 wrapped his arms around your waist pulling you in towards him. His lips hovered over yours allowing you to feel the warmth of his breath.

“We both know you don’t mean that.”

He leaned forward meeting your soft lips with his. Dok2 had made up his mind to pursue you. There was something about you that had him laying awake at night. A feeling of regret, as if he had to be with you or he would be losing out on something.

You gasped when his tongue slid across your bottom lip but quickly recovered from it. “Joonkyu-” He wouldn’t allow you to speak or to part ways. He reclaimed your lips, slid his hands lower until one of them pulled your thigh up to his hip.

Once again you gasped, this time he took the chance to slip his tongue past your lips.

His actions had you holding onto him for dear life. You noticed this before but you were always surprised by his aggressive acts of dominance. The more you protested, the harder he tried to coax your honest feelings to come out.

Joonkyung was a confident man. He knew you wanted him as much as he wanted you.

“Be honest,” Joonkyung smirked seeing your flushed and gasping for air. “Do you want me?”

You looked away embarrassed. “What kind of question-”

He latched his lips onto your neck leaving a trail of kisses that elicited your involuntary moaning. He did not appreciate the way you dodged his question with another question.

“Answer me.”

You didn’t know what was wrong with you. The way he demanded things turned you on making it harder for you to deny him.

“You’re married Joonkyung.”

He would be the death of you.

\\\

Dok2 pulled you in closer never taking his hands off of you the entire night. It was a stark contrast to the way he slept with his wife. They shared a bed but he kept to his side while she did the same.

The first night you slept with him it was a night of discovery for Joonkyung. You had clung to him, something he found oddly alluring. It seemed you were only honest in your sleep- seeking him out. Then every morning you awoke pulling away to cover up.

When your eyes fluttered open you looked up to catch a glimpse of his playful smirk. Once again you had given in to this man. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

"You’re really beautiful in the morning.”

You turned your back to him hiding your quickly reddening face.

Dok2 laughed before pulling you back towards him. “You always do that.” He kissed your shoulder trying to dissipate your embarrassment. “There’s no need to hide from me. I like seeing your reactions.”

“Shut up,..” you muttered becoming extremely aware of the fact that you were both still very naked under the thin sheet. “And don’t move.”

He laughed some more.

“Don’t you want to do it once more before I leave?”

“No,” you lied already feeling the heat take over your body. He was the first person to ever make you feel the so-called butterflies in your stomach.

“You’re a horrible liar,” Joonkyung whispered in your ear.

When you looked back Joonkyung took the opportunity to steal a kiss. His lips lightly pressed against yours easing you into a deeper kiss. He just couldn’t get enough. Your lips lured him in weather they were curved up in a smile or pressed tightly in a line of disappointment.

He never knew he could enjoy someone’s company like this.

\\\

“Don’t think about it too much.”

All you could do was think of the consequences your relationship with Joonkyung would have. But, for some reason, it seemed you were the only one who would get hurt.

His wife was pregnant...

Perhaps you had gotten your hopes up. You had thought that because he had you, his relationship with his wife was over. Suddenly your chest felt heavy, empty- void of everything.

Wer you expecting him to leave his wife for you one day?

You were upset.

You were confused.

It wasn’t till this moment you realized what kind of relationship this was. You were a mistress that could be tossed aside. Not once had Joonkyung suggested otherwise.

“Until the baby is born I’ll have to spend more time at home.”

There it was, the first signs of abandonment. You wanted to say something but you had no right. If only he could say something to put your heart at ease.

You loved Joonkyung but-

“I understand,” you did your best to smile.

Joonkyung noticed it was not a genuine smile but said nothing. He went about the condo treating it as his home.

If only he could say he loved you.

If only you could hear him say that word once...

-end-

A/N: I wanted you all to see and know a little bit more about their relationship since I noticed I didn’t say too much about it in the first installment.

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huds-hub · 4 years ago

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THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; MUN & MUSE - MEME

FILL OUT & REPOST ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

Stolen from @mrfunnybone. Since this meme has a bias for canon muses, I’m tagging two of my favorite canon writers that I know didn’t fill this out yet: @soulcoerced and @spearslinger (I wonder if a fellow Undyne RPer has a different take on some of these questions? ^^;;). For everyone else, feel free to steal it and tag me if you do! I’m curious to see how OC muns answer some of these questions...

MY MUSE IS: CANON / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated [[ The adult version of my muse is canon, but her teenage equivalent is not present anywhere in Undertale / Deltarune. So, uh… canon but kind of complicated I guess??? I like describing my muse as canon-wise. My Deltarune fishies are undoubtedly AUs at most, canon-divergent at least. ]]

[[ Mun’s note: I’m going to cheat on this. For the next 8 questions, I’ll answer for both Undyne as my teen muse AND regular adult canon Undertale Undyne. My thoughts on her counts as something, right? My muse is based on canon! ]]

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK [[ Undyne’s character to the rest of the fandom is unpopular (compared to Sans, Chara, Gaster, etc…). It’s a shame, because her dialogue portraits alone would make great meme fodder. HOWEVER, among Undyne fans, I notice there’s an interest in depicting her early years because she’s one of the few cast members who’s had their childhood explicitly mentioned. ]]

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK [[ She’d better not be, because my muse is a C H I L D. As far as I’ve seen, canon adult Undyne is depicted more often as a ‘badass’ than a ‘sexy fish.’ ]]

Is your character considered strong in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK [[ Younger Undyne is definitely interpreted to be a determined, tough kid. Of course it’s the same for adult canon Undyne. It’s basically her most distinct character trait. ]]

Are they underrated? YES / NO / IDK [[ Lordy, Undyne as a whole is entirely underrated by the fandom... ]]

Were they relevant for the main story? YES / NO [[ OMG... you’re gonna get me started. I’m marking ‘no’ on this question because this is supposed to be about my aged-down muse. But Undyne... sweet violent Undyne’s very important to Undertale’s story! *fangirling START* Besides being the mid-point antagonist in the game, Undyne adds a layer of the theme of DETERMINATION to the game and how it can manifest in monsters if their bodies are strong enough to handle it. In an allegorical sense, she represents extremism in reaction to oppression and how that passion can take on the form of extreme love or extreme hatred depending on circumstance. So HELL YEAH she’s important to the main story of the game! AAAHILoveThisFish!! *fangirling END* ]]

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. [[ Same as the previous answer for my teen Undyne: begrudgingly marking this with a ‘no’... It’s a YES for canon Undyne. In all routes, original game’s Undyne is the first character who is purposefully trying to kill the Player. Players can’t get the best ending without helping her hook up with Alphys and not incurring her wrath by killing any monster. In the worst ending, she’s one of the two antagonists that put up enough of a fight to make any player abort the Genocide Route. ]]

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO [[ My muse WANTS to be significant to her world. In the original game, Undyne’s only mentioned by others in Snowdin and Waterfall (not counting Alphys in Hotland). She’s described as a “local hero” by Gerson. I get a sense she’s not exactly famous to the people in the entire Underground compared to, say, Mettaton. ]]

How’s their reputation? GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL [[ Oof. Pretty sure my teen fish annoys the residence of Waterfall for being a loud-mouthed little scamp. The only reason she’s not considered ‘bad’ is because it’s pent-up energy and misguidedness, not flat-out cruelty. In canon, it seems like the people who talk about Undyne do it in either a positive or neutral light. You have Monster Kid, Papyrus, and Onionsan singing her praises. The Royal Guard members respect her. Asgore thought of her well enough to have her lead his military. Uhh, for a neutral instance, I remember an NPC in Snowdin saying she’s “loud, rude, and beats up anybody who gets in her way” (I don’t remember the exact quote). To weigh this more on the side of my muse, I’ll mark this answer as ‘neutral.’ ]]

HOW STRICTLY DO YOU FOLLOW CANON? [[ Since I have an aged-down character, canon is literally my END GOAL! I gave her a “starting point” on her journey to the determined, dedicated, and excitable warrior fish we all know and love from the game. I filled in the gaps from there, using parts of her past mentioned in the game to glue the headcanons together. Deciding what she was like when she was younger – What’s her family background? What aspects about her changed as she matures? What internal and external conflicts would she deal with as a teen? – THAT’S the non-canon part. My Deltarune AUs are… different. Canon is my end goal too, but the timelines are all wonky to fit the needs of wanting to interact with the Fun Gang. LOL ]]

SELL YOUR MUSE! AKA TRY TO LIST EVERYTHING, WHICH MAKES YOUR MUSE INTERESTING IN YOUR OPINION TO MAKE THEM SPICY FOR YOUR MUTUALS. [[ This kid is spunky, loyal, compassionate of the plight of her people, and will see through anything she sets her mind to, despite life’s barriers. She’s got a lot of pent-up energy and is searching for what she can do with it to help her achieve her goal of setting Monsterkind free! ]]

NOW THE OPPOSITE, LIST EVERYTHING WHY YOUR MUSE COULD NOT BE SO INTERESTING (EVEN IF YOU MAY NOT AGREE, WHAT DOES THE FANDOM PERHAPS THINK?). [[ The teen fishy has a streak of selfishness and short-sightedness. Being honest, Undyne would be a racial supremacist if she existed in real life. Big yikes. Also, she’s willingly being trained as a child soldier. Another big yikes right there. ]]

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO RP YOUR MUSE? [[ Ages ago, I RPed the adult version of Undyne, which resulted in a bunch of headcanons for her past. I had no desire to RP any of them after it ended. A year later, I commissioned an artist for a Gerson vs. teen Undyne piece. That single-handedly made me want to get back into RPing again. ]]

WHAT KEEPS YOUR INSPIRATION GOING? [[ My fellow RPers wanting to interact with this silly fishy! When I first started, I expected my interest to peter out over the months. I didn’t expect many RPers wanting to interact with an aged-down character. But here I am, wanting to expand my headcanons further and making AUs so I’m not limited to canon. ^^ It’s all thanks to you guys!! ]]

SOME MORE PERSONAL QUESTIONS FOR THE MUN.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice? YES / NO / I SINCERELY HOPE I DO?

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO / SORT OF? [[ I should do it more often TBH. But I find showing them via story-telling more fulfilling than just explicitly explaining them in posts. Plus, it gives me more leeway if I’m still playing around with an idea. ;) ]]

Do you sometimes write drabbles? YES / NO [[ I’m not counting the three pending drabbles until I finish them. ^^;; ]]

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO [[ She finds a way to bother me! Usually in the form of sudden inspiration for how to respond to RPs. ]]

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO / SORT OF? [[ Sometimes I wonder if I forgot some aspect about Undyne that’s in canon, or unintentionally exaggerating other less-important aspects of her other characteristics… ]]

Are you confident in your writing? YES / NO / SORT OF? [[ Generally, yes. But I do have my days when I suffer from low self-confidence. ]]

Are you a sensitive person? YES / NO. / SORT OF? [[ It depends on what’s meant by that. I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings, so I don’t intend to sound rude OOC, even if I’m expressing something negative about something I think the other did. If this is referring to being sensitive about events in RPs… my sensitivity is equivalent to that of being invested in any work of fiction. I know it’s not reality. I can pull away from the fictional world and it won’t bring down my real life. ]]

DO YOU ACCEPT CRITICISM WELL ABOUT YOUR PORTRAYAL? [[ If it’s given in good faith and is constructive, sure. ]]

DO YOU LIKE QUESTIONS, WHICH HELP YOU EXPLORE YOUR CHARACTER? [[ Hell yeah, give them to me! ]]

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES TO A HEADCANON OF YOURS, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? [[ It depends if they want to tell me. I don’t mind either way. Personally, I like hearing other people’s interpretations! ]]

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES WITH YOUR PORTRAYAL, HOW WOULD YOU TAKE IT? [[ *shrug* It doesn’t matter as long as they don’t harass me. ]]

IF SOMEONE REALLY HATES YOUR CHARACTER, HOW DO YOU TAKE IT? [[ I’d just ignore it. They don’t need to interact or follow me. If my muse really is a bother to them, they can block my account. ]]

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PEOPLE POINTING OUT YOUR GRAMMATICAL ERRORS? [[ I hope my grammar’s good enough, or else my English degree studies went to waste! But yeah, sure. Fun fact: explaining grammar rules so people can avoid major errors in the future is more helpful than nit-picking insignificant errors without explanations. ]]

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE EASY GOING AS A MUN? [[ As long as fellow RPers aren’t being rude OOC, don’t break any serious rules, or do something that I mention are personal triggers to me, I am easy-going! RPing is fun and it should stay that way for everybody involved! ]]

#mun monday #ooc #long post #yikes that took me a week to finish writing #but it was fun #this post was such a pain to format

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ellana-ravenwood · 6 years ago

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Professor Wayne - Bruce Wayne x Reader !TeacherAU Part 1/4

FINISHED SERIES : PART 2, PART 2.5, PART 3, PART 4

Hey guys ! So I never wrote AUs before, because nothing ever really ticked my fancy and I usually like the original worlds too much…But then an idea suddenly popped in my head and refused to leave it, so I just HAD to write it. Here’s said idea. Bruce being a university teacher. So yeah, I kinda adapted Gotham to fit the story and I hope you won’t completely hate it, even hoping you’ll enjoy it :

My masterlist blog : @ella-ravenwood-archives

_________________________________________________

************

Your fists bunch up in the front of his dress shirt as you bring him even closer, his body so perfectly flush against yours now. You’re stuck between him and his desk, and it feels like Heaven.

His tongue delightfully drags across your lower lip and you gladly grant him access to explore your mouth further. The little moan escaping your throat as your tongue dances with his seems to satisfy him to no extend, as his grip tightens around you, his fingers tangling in your hair sweetly but firmly, rearranging your head to change the angle of your passionate kiss.

And oh you dreamt about this moment happening for so long. Ever since you started to take his class in fact. About a year ago.

Your dream since a very long time was to become a profiler for the FBI. So of course you would sign up for (and were miraculously accepted into) what was known to be the best criminology class in the country, taught by none other than the famous Bruce Wayne.

He was famous in town for two reasons.

The first one wasn’t why you wanted so desperately to study in Gotham University, and was kind of depressing…Bruce Wayne, as his name suggested, was the heir of the Wayne family, who used to be the richest in Gotham.

Used to…Ever since his parents’ died, this changed.

Unfortunately, whenever something bad happens, it’s immediately follow by another terrible event. Said event in Bruce Wayne’s case, came from ill intentioned people working for Wayne Inc that stole everything from him.

His parents’ estates, their company, every single things they owned (even souvenirs such as family pictures)…The man who used to be Thomas Wayne’s best friend and business partner found a loophole in his will, and managed to turn things in his favor.

It came from one simple mistake, and it was so stupid. Simple. And something that the Waynes would never have thought about !

First, what kind of best friend would steal everything like that ? Especially from a child who just witnessed his parents’ getting killed in a back alley ? How evil could you be ?

And second, they never paid attention to how the will was actually worded. Which was a fatal mistake.

In case of their death, everything was suppose to go to Bruce, unless he was underaged and then it would go in the care of Wayne inc co-CEO and Thomas’ best friend, Aleister Golden…Only the document never truly stated that he had to keep it for the boy. It was only implied.

And this stupid bureaucratic error is what cost young mister Bruce Wayne everything.In the span of a night, he went from « the boy who had it all » to one who was left with nothing. And how depressing was that, right ?

The silver lining of him being adopted by the man who used to be his butler, a certain Alfred Pennyworth, and not being thrown in an orphanage, didn’t make you any less angry whenever you thought about it. It didn’t even touch you personally, you barely knew the man, he was just your teacher. But still, the injustice of it all made you furious.

You had to admit though, that all this tragic story was also part of why you felt so attracted to him, you had a thing for damaged older men…maybe because you didn’t really have any parents yourself and could relate ? Because you had to work hard to achieve anything ? Your daddy and mommy issues ?

In any case, that first extremely sad reason why Bruce Wayne was famous wasn’t really relevent to your situation. Nope.

The second reason though ? It was everything. It was why you wanted to become a profiler in the first place, and why you worked so hard to be accepted in the prestigious Gotham University.

Every aspiring cops, of any kind, knew about Bruce Wayne.

For a long time he was the most efficient detective that ever worked in the US. You were pretty sure that 50% of the people behind bars in New Jersey, the state he was working in, had been captured by him.

But one day, a few years ago, a bad injury from famed serial killer known as “The Joker” (no one even knew his real name, and it seemed there were no records of his existence...) prompted him to retire.

Fifteen knife wounds to the chest and abdomen can do that to you.

He wasn’t old though. Oh no, he wasn’t even forty yet, you heard. Though he had to be close from that number.

But he started his career very young, earning a promotion of “detective” at barely 20 when he dismantled single handedly Gotham City’s corrupted cops network.

Your hometown was known to be ground to the most corrupted forces in the USA, and that young guy came in and was able to stop it all (or almost all)…you guessed he earned his “youngest detective ever” badge.

According to everyone who ever worked with him, he was a workaholic and dedicated his soul and body to his job. It was obvious, why he became a cop, given his background. The murder of his parents, the way things were taken away from him, having to grow up in a decaying neighborhood (Alfred wasn’t a rich man) etc etc…Of course he’d want to right some wrongs.

You heard he didn’t actually want to stop being a detective, but his boss, Commissioner James Gordon forced him to take time off after his injuries.

He refused to let him back on the job until his stab wounds were completely healed, which you thought was fair and logical…But Bruce Wayne could apparently not rest and he accepted the job Gotham University offered him as head of their criminology department (he did have a few PhD in his name after all).

This was five years ago, and clearly, his wounds were now healed. But it seemed he found a new meaning of life as a teacher, giving all his knowledge to future generation.

In your freshman year, another student asked him why he didn’t return to be a cop, and Mr. Wayne had an answer you could do nothing but admire :

“As a detective, it’s sure that I solved many crimes, saved lives and put scums behind bars..but I found, during my four years of teaching others how to do all that, that giving my knowledge to younger generations, such as yours, was more efficient to cleanse the street of cities like Gotham. Bear with me for a moment, and see it in that way : I was alone, doing all those arrests. Sure my peers worked a lot too, but, and sorry if I sound arrogant, I was the best. Now if I can pass that knowledge and skills of how to be the best to others, so they can in their turn become the best ? Then I’m putting in the streets more amazing officers than just me being out there, does that make sense ? »

It did. At least to you. And sure it sounded a bit pretentious, but it made sense.

Team effort. By him showing all the ropes and subtilities of his work to aspiring police officers and whatnot, he assured a new generation of dedicated fighter just like him.

He wouldn’t be the only one anymore, and many people would take up his legacy. Continue his work on a larger scale.

It made perfect sense.

You totally understood why he never went back on the job afterward, he found a new way of carrying out justice, and he realized it was indeed more efficient to do this. In fact, ever since he became a teacher five years ago, crime in Gotham went down by 23%, and there was no doubt in your mind that this drop correlated with the first wave of his students becoming officers in the GCPD.

There was something about Bruce Wayne, that was inspiring.

All of his students, including you, could only admire the man, and the way he talked about his subject made you want to become the best profiler that ever existed. Made you want to work hard.

He had a talent to “motivate his troops”, and his class was many people’s favorite. He inspired countless of his students and again, there was absolutely no doubt in your mind, or in anyone’s mind for that matter, that those said students were the new police officers in the GCPD. Those who would never be corrupted and that were doing a tremendous work right now.

Yes. Bruce Wayne was a famous and well loved man on your campus.

And a damn attractive one at that…You were pretty sure every girl in your school had a massive crush on him, and many guys did too.

He had handsome physical features like damn was he muscular, and this chiseled face ? You’d gladly get cut on that jawline. And don’t even start on his stunning blue eyes…Oh, and his voice ?! It was all velour and sexiness.

But beyond that, he was also an incredibly charming man, who had a lot of charisma and an aura about him that just attracted people.

You admired the man in more than one way.

And here you were, pinned against his desk, furiously making out with him.

How did that happen ? You were so damn plain and boring compared to some of your classmates !

And yet his eyes fell on you, and no one else.

Somehow he was interested in you, while he could have pretty much anyone he wanted. It was to you, he said to stay after class for whatever reason (you couldn’t even remember it now, as you were slowly unbuttoning his shirt). It was you he started to kiss passionately.

Your hands were now roaming his muscular chest (and wow the man worked out. Like, a lot), and his own warm hands were slowly creeping under your shirt, caressing your skin softly. Oh he was being so gentle…It made your mind melt.

But no matter how tender he was being, there was no mistaking the growing bulge in his pants. He was clearly not having pure thoughts right now, and the way you felt him twitch as you cupped him through his pants drove you crazy.

You were reaching for his zipper now, and he moaned your name desperately…

“(Y/N)…(Y/N)…Miss (Y/L/N) !!”

…

You opened your eyes with a start and jumped a bit in the air.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck fuck FUCK !

There he was, yes, right in front of you.

And sure he was saying your name, but the heat and desperation had left his voice, replaced by impatience. And sure he was standing close to you, but he was still inches away and was looking at you with a mix of annoyance and amusement, not passion and love.

Fuck. Oh fuck.

A wet dream.

You just had a wet dream.

And in class, at that. This was so fucking embarassing.

You readjusted yourself on your chair, quickly wipping off the drool on your chin and sat down straight. You could feel your face growing hot in embarassment, and the snickering of your classmates didn’t help at all.

You couldn’t believe you just fell asleep in your favorite class !! But lately, you just worked so damn much, and your nights were so short…Professor Wayne’s voice brought you back to reality for good.

This definitely wasn’t a dream anymore. And the heat you felt on your cheeks made you want to crawl in a hole and hide there for the rest of the lesson.

“Welcome back on Earth, Miss (Y/L/N). While you were gone to Snoozing Land, we were talking about the social disorganization theory by…Would you happen to know by who ?”

Oh professor Wayne was ruthless.

He taught so many valuable things, and was great at making complicated concept seem simple for everyone. He would go out of his way to make sure every single one of his students understood what he was talking about.

But if one of them was goofing around (or sleeping during class…), he was known to not let it go and test them right after. No pity.

You didn’t even have time to apologize for falling asleep during his lecture, that your brain was trying to remember what this all thing was about again…Your stuttered voice started :

“Um…by…by…by...oh I almost got it...by...AH ! By professors from the Chicago school right ? Henry McKay and…and…and something Shaw ? »

A light sparkled in Professor Wayne’s eyes.

Ah ? But he talked about them while you were sleeping. He saw your head doodling up and down as you were fighting the sleep off unsuccessfully. It started as soon as his lesson began (his voice was just too soothing...), so how did you know that ?

Could it be that you were reading the books he advised all his students to read in advance ? Usually, there were too much work for any of them to do anything in advance like that...Interesting. He continued :

« Clifford R. Shaw. Good. Could you maybe tell us, in your own words, what their theory is ? »

You gulped, focusing hard on your memories. And thanking whatever gods were out there that you read about this theory before. You remembered that you did such a thing because it was something that had to do with Gotham…something that resonated inside you, that you related to…AH ! Eureka !

“It’s a theory that directly links crime rates and the economical situation of a neighborhood ?”

You said, kinda unsure but now it was too late to stop. Under Professor Wayne’s gaze you continued :

“Like for example the youth of a disadvantaged neighborhood that is riddled with poverty and social inequity is more likely to participate in illegal things because…it’s cultural ? Like neighborhood with a high rate of high school drop outs, unemployements, single parents, bad infrastructures etc etc is more likely to have subcultures that are more open to illegal things because there’s nothing else ? It only relates to basic street crimes though, like drug deals or muggings, not every type of crimes and um…yes…Am I completely wrong ?”

You looked at your teacher, worried. You weren’t sure what his facial expression meant right now, but the stress made you talk further :

“You’re making a face as if I’m completely wrong…Maybe I’m mixing up this theory and another one ? I just recall reading about this in a book you suggested to us, and reading it because it kinda concerned Gotham in general, what with all our poor neighborhoods and large social inequities and…I’m going to stop talking now, I feel like I’m just saying nonsense…”

You knew your explanation was wonky and clumsy, but as your brain was still a bit asleep, you just couldn’t explain things better and oh my god why was he looking at you like that ? Were you really completely mixing things up ?!

But Professor Wayne didn’t have a look as if you were wrong, no, you were mistaking. He had a “interesting…” look, the kind that he rarely had when talking to his students.

He had a lot of absolutely brilliant students, but it was rare that he actually had ones that were thinking outside the box.

Like, for example, the fact that you went out of your way to read a book he mentioned because the subject had a direct corellation with Gotham City.

Usually, his students would just do what he told them to, which made them amazing students but not perfect ones. He had enough confidence in his teaching abilities to know he taught those kids things that would turn them into incredible police officers. But he so rarely found that unique one that would go beyond his teaching and do other research on his/her own…

The face he was making wasn’t one of disapproval, but a thoughtful one. One that made him make a mental note in his head about remembering to pay more attention to you from now on.

He already considered you in the top of his class. And he already noticed you had a special way to write essays like none others, implementing your own ideas in things while still basing your reasoning on existing theories.

Yes. He already knew you were above the bunch, but now…He smiled at you and said :

“Well I’m glad to see that sleeping during my lecture doesn’t hinder your knowledge and that you actually know what I’m talking about. Good job. But um, miss (Y/L/N), don’t let it happen again. The sleeping, I mean.”

You nod sheepishly and avoid his (incredible blue) eyes to look down on your table, feeling half-ashamed that you fell asleep and was called out for it, half-proud that you were still able to answer his question.

“Miss (Y/N/L) explained this theory in a good simplistic way, nonetheless let’s focus a bit more on the social…”

The rest of the lesson went by without incident on your part, you paid extra attention to things that came out of Prof’ Wayne’s mouth, to the point that the man found it almost amusing, how you were drinking his every words.

The bell rang, and it was time for lunch. You stayed behind a bit, and went to Mr. Wayne’s desk. He was slowly putting away his things, and you couldn’t help but admire the way he...Ugh. Nope. No no no.

This kind of thoughts is exactly what prompted you to have a damn wet dream DURING class. You had to stop.

Beside, the man was too old for you (but was that really a problem ? Yes no it was, stop it brain !), plus he was your teacher and you were pretty sure there were rules against student/teacher relationship and...What were you even thinking about ?

As if you had even a tiny chance to date a guy like that. You once caught a glimpse of his now ex-girlfriend (according to the rumors), Selina Kyle, and she was clearly an above average woman. In every single way. Beyond this world.

So you ? With your extra pounds and confidence issues and...Ugh. Here we go again with the self-deprecation. Oh well.

You shook your head to drive those bad thoughts away and approached Mr. Wayne’s desk. Shyly, you said :

“Um...Professor ?”

He raises his head and seems surprise to see you for a minute. His lectures were so clear and understandable that he probably wasn’t used to someone staying behind to talk to him...

Oh but if only you knew he was surprised because he was actually thinking about you and what you could become, maybe you wouldn’t be so insecure right now ? Of course, you’d never know that (at least for now).

“Oh, (Y/N). What can I do for you ?”

You chased away sinful thoughts (but you couldn’t really help it, the way his voice rumbled as he said that...why was it so sexy ? Especially those words ? Oh man there was so many things you wish he’d do for you...starting with, actually doing you...UGH ! STOP IT BRAIN !!) and said, avoiding eye contact :

“I’m very sorry about the...-you gestured to nothing in particular- all falling asleep thing.”

He chuckles, and your heart skip a beat. Wow. Chuckle more often please, professor Wayne...Of course, you don’t say that out loud, and instead try to focus on what he says now :

“It’s quite alright. We all have days where we feel a bit low on energy, don’t worry about it. It happened to me a few times in my studying years.”

He smiles at you now, and you can’t help but get hypnotized by it, finally looking at him in the eye. You smile back, of a pure and sweet smile you probably don’t realize is extremely cute and say :

“You ? No way.”

“Oh believe me, way. I wasn’t always the most hard at work in my younger years...Which doesn’t mean you should let it happen again.”

He says, raising an eyebrow at you. You manage not to blush by some fucking miracle, and say :

“I promise it won’t happen again ! Thank you for your understanding.”

You say with another smile that makes you cringe because you’re pretty sure you just look stupid right now. He answers :

“I’ll hold you up to that young lady.”

Young lady ? Oh...Oh what was he doing to your heart...You had to get out of there. Fast. You say :

“Again. Promise. Won’t happen again. Um, well see you tomorrow sir, I have to catch up to my friends for lunch.”

That was a lie.

You didn’t have any friend on campus, they were all from rather wealthy family and you were from the wrong side of Gotham. You just never connected with them.

All your friends were on the poor side of the city, in the streets...What was it again ? The “Social disorganization theory” ? Yes. Exactly.

Right now, you were most likely gonna go study alone while eating a bland sandwich composed of old bread, one little piece of cheese, and ham.

You slowly walk out of the classroom as he bids you farewell too, an awkward smile on your lips.

Your heart races and you can’t help but smile stupidly because damn his understanding means so much to you and...What were you thinking ? If it was any other students, he would have probably said the same thing ! Professor Wayne was known to be quite nice and benevolent to his students.

You shook your head, thinking that you were just another dumb schoolgirl who fell under his spell, and promised yourself you’d stop crushing so hard on him. Of course, you knew you couldn’t fulfill that promise. Bruce Wayne was just...Something else.

On the topic of unfulfilled promises...The one you made to him about not falling asleep again in his class ? Yeah, it wouldn’t last long.

************

Bruce shook his head and slapped himself lightly.

What the hell got into him ? Why did he talk about his “younger years” ? Why did he call her “young lady” ?! He should have scolded her a bit more, like he would have done to any other students !

But he couldn’t help it, her smile was so sweet and she genuinely seemed tired...He just couldn’t bring his authoritative side out with her.

During his years of teaching, it wasn’t the first time one of his student fell asleep in class. He always gave them assignments as punishment for it. But to her ? He just couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing.

Something in his guts told him she had it tougher than any other of his students, and he knew about tough times...Besides, she really had a cute smile.

He slapped himself once more.

What was he thinking about ? She was one of his student ! How disgusting of him to even think that ? Sure she was over twenty one but...Ugh. What the hell was wrong with him ?

That never happened before. He never didn’t punish someone just because he liked their smile. And he certainly never got that friendly with a student. Sure, he was an approachable teacher, but he always stayed professional.

It wasn’t for the lack of flirty girls and boys coming his way. Many tried to seduce him and never succeeded of course. He was their teacher, it would be abusing his power to do anything with them.

It didn’t matter that they were all consenting adults, he made it a rule to never cross that bridge. Besides, none of them ever interested him. It wasn’t that difficult to keep things professional. To gently (or not so gently for the one that insisted too much) reject them.

But with her ? For God’s sake she didn’t even attempt anything ! She just said “sorry” and smiled because he was being nice, like any normal person would do ! And yet...yet she had such a sweet smile. He wanted to see it again...

For the third time, Bruce slapped himself. And promised himself that next time, if there was a next time, he would be colder towards her. Even if it meant being a bit of a dick.

Next time, if there was a next time, he wouldn’t spare her. He would give her a difficult assignment as punishment, and if she came to apologize would ignore her.

Yes. Next time. If there was a next time, he thought, as he dialed “Selina Kyle”’s number. He really needed to think about someone else right now, and his on-off girlfriend was always very good at distracting him. And vice versa.

Besides, really, next time he would be harsh with you.

If there was a next time.

************

The next time came the following week.

You had a lot of exams and studied well into the morning lights, plus you were working at the local cafe who was open until late at night...Needless to say you had barely a time to sleep.

And today, after your final exam of the semester was done and class was continuing “normally”, you kind of just collapsed on your desk. It just so happened to be Professor Wayne’s lesson once more.

One of your classmates, an asshole who thought he was the best damn thing in the world, called William Fryer, pointed it out to Bruce.

For some reason, it annoyed Bruce that someone ratted you out like that.

Sure you were in the wrong for sleeping in his class, but he didn’t like it. He also didn't like William Fryer very much, he always thought he had such a slappable face. With an annoyed “tt” he turned his head to you, stopping in the middle of his lecture.

The truth was, he saw you slowly “melting” down on your seat and falling asleep since a long time, but he didn’t want to call you out in front of everyone again.

Ugh...What was that about swearing to himself he wouldn’t go easy on you anymore ? He sighed, as William said :

“Do you want me to wake her up, professor Wayne ? I can. I bet she went out too late last night, she’s never in her dorm room...”

Bruce didn’t like what Fryer was implying with his words. He also totally ignored the little painful pang in his chest to the thought that you might have someone (or someoneS) in your life, and said :

“No it’s fine. Leave her alone. I am about to talk about very important concepts, if she misses out on it then it’s her loss. Focus again please.”

Fryer nodded and tore his disgusting hungry gaze off of you (why did the way he looked at you make Bruce so angry ?!), and the lesson continued.

************

The bell rang and you jumped in your seat in surprise.

Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Did you fall asleep again ?

A bit lost, still dizzy with sleep, you looked around you as people packed their stuffs and left the room.

Yes. You totally did. Ffff...You bite your lower lip and look down at Professor Wayne’s desk. And there he was and...Did you just dream that or was he staring at you before you looked at him, and did he just turn his head away quickly when your eyes turned to him ?

You slowly put your things away too, and went to his desk as the last few students left the room. He didn’t leave you the time to speak :

“You promised, miss (Y/L/N).”

He said coldly, and you gulped down before trying to say :

“Yes I know but I was in the library all n...”

“No excuses.”

His voice is so damn cold and harsh (though he’s strangely relieved that you spend the night in the library, and not at someone’s place..), and he doesn’t even look at you. It hurts you more than it should. He throws a bunch of papers your way and continues :

“You’ll find an extra assignment in there that you’ll give me back next Friday. For breaking your promise and falling asleep again...”

You take the heavy file in your hand and sigh internally thinking all of it is just the assignment...But you’re not quite right. He hesitates a bit, his voice regaining some warmth unintentionally as he finishes :

“There’s...There’s also today’s lecture. My notes of it. So you can catch up more easily.”

You’re a bit surprise he’s giving you his own notes so you can know what today’s lesson was. You were already ready to chase after your classmates and beg them to give you their notes (those assholes would surely ask something in return). You’re about to thank him but he clasps his bag closed a bit violently and leave the classroom without even saying goodbye.

Damn. You must have really made him angry for falling asleep in his class again...You hope to every gods out there that he’s not going to hold it too much against you, and that he doesn’t think you think his class is boring.

No. It’s really your favorite. But you’ve been so tired lately...

You sigh sadly and leave the room too, walking to your work feeling more defeated and fatigued than ever.

************

Bruce shakes his head for the hundredth time as he walks fast towards his car.

He felt guilty for being so cold and harsh to you, though he shouldn’t. It was normal. He was suppose to be like that, to treat his student a bit tough sometimes when they did something wrong.

But he couldn’t...he couldn’t shake away the sad look on your face, and the bag under your (beautiful) eyes. He didn’t see you smile at all this week...

For the hundredth and one time, he shakes his head.

Damnit. What were you doing to him ? And fuck he should have never gave you his notes for you to catch up ! He told the rest of the students you’d just have to catch up on your own, which is why he didn’t woke you up that time.

It was suppose to be some kind of punishment, and here he was, giving you his own notes AND an extremely easy “punishment assignment” he knew you’d write in a matter of ten minutes.

He wondered if you’d notice that he made it so easy on purpose...He hoped you wouldn’t. It would be dangerous if you ever thought he gave you some kind of special treatment, even if he totally was and that was SO WRONG !

It went completely against his work ethic.

But he just couldn’t help himself...Oh. Oh. Fuck.

Before he knew it, his phone was out and he was calling Selina again.

Feeling guilty as ever as he knew he was calling her only to forget about someone else...about someone else he shouldn’t have this kind of thoughts about.

But he didn’t see this someone else’s smile this week, and he had to think about something else...Besides, Selina used him enough in return too.

This was alright, right ?

************

This really was a shitty day.

First you wake up late. Then you spill coffee all over yourself and don’t have time to change so bam, walking around with coffee stains on your shirt and pants all day...To bump into a football player as you were lost in your study as you walked (you became an expert usually, at avoiding obstacles while reading, but today...today you really were tired) and your computer falls out of your bag and breaks. Of course you can’t afford a new one.

Then you fall asleep in Mr. Wayne’s class, and he gives you an assignment as punishment (though from what you saw of it so far, it seems rather easy). Now he also probably thinks you hate his class or something...

And then you almost get fired of your very necessary job at the local cafe because some asshole decided to “call corporate” on you for forgetting to put sugar with an order...and you can’t afford to lose this job, because if you do, how are you gonna pay for your fucking tuition ?!

What a fucking shitty day.

And you weren’t even half-way through your shift...

You started work right after your last lesson around 7 pm (which was Mr. Wayne’s today) all the way up to 3 am.

8 hours of making coffee and waitressing. It usually was fine, because the people coming to the cafe late at night were mainly students who were as stressed as you because they had to study, and therefor were nice to you.

Of course, there were always exceptions, like that fucking sugar lady.

But overall, it was fine. The manager of the cafe even didn’t mind much you studying discreetly behind the counter, as long as you were ready if a client came in and all.

It was 11 pm now, and you were rearranging the cakes behind the window, making things look nice, when it happened...

The last blow to your shitty day.

The door bell rang, as a new client came in.

You rushed to the cash register to take his or her order and...

Are met with a very surprised Professor Wayne, accompanied by that woman you already saw a few times with him before, Selina Kyle. His supposedly ex-girlfriend (who was clearly not an ex).

What the Hell were they doing here at this hour ?

To be continued...

__________________________________

Ok well...What do you think ? I tried to adapt the Batman’s world to fit this AU, and I hope I didn’t completely fail miserably or just plainly bored you (?). This series will most likely be in about four parts, maybe more maybe less, and um yeah, will be NSFW at some point. Ok. Um...Done. Hope you liked it, as usual, feedbacks are very welcomed.

#Bruce Wayne x reader #Bruce Wayne imagine #Batman x reader #Batman imagine #Batfam #Batfamily #Batmom #Batfam x Reader #Bruce Wayne fanfiction #Bruce Wayne #Batfam imagine #Batmom imagine #Batmom x Batfam #Batmom x Batfamily #Batmom x Bruce Wayne #teacher au #Alternate universe

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heather-in-heels · 6 years ago

Text

getting the hell out of student loan debt

I lost my job at the tail end of 2014. I always remember, in vivid detail, spending the week after New Year’s at the airport waiting for a 7 AM flight. Happy 2015 to me! I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have an income. I was on my way to moving back in with my parents. Days prior, I had sold off most of my possessions and gave away the rest to a local Goodwill. And I was returning home saddled with student loans totaling then at $56k.

It felt like I had single-handedly destroyed my life. In retrospect, I think losing that job was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I was home, sheltered and surrounded by loved ones. I was able to mentally regroup again. In between submitting resumes and job applications, I started writing in the advertising space which later ballooned into a big column. Later that year, I went back to work again full-time.

I had more or less resigned myself in 2015 to the idea that my student loan debt would kind of be there forever. That changed in 2016, once I was working again and back on my feet. I started thinking critically about how I wanted to repay my loans. The minimum monthly payments, stretched across seven loans, totaled $653 a month. It was like a drop of water in a bucket. The account stagnated at $56k and didn’t move.

The only way out of this debt was to work, the hardest in my life, and to sacrifice everything. And I did it, to pay off $56k in under a year in full.

Let me share an important disclaimer now: I’m not rich. I believe money is a fluid object, I’m willing to work hard, and I love a good investment. Education is an example of a great investment. Since I first shared this story, I’ve noticed former colleagues examining my LinkedIn profile like hawks. I know it’s because of the dollar sign attached to an extremely tight timeline. I suppose it’s understandable. When you do a great thing, a successful thing, people want to know how you did it. But most don’t want to put in the work. They want the cheat codes.

The answer I made readily visible on social media the entire time! I was working. I worked nonstop. Working allowed me to create a series of nest eggs for myself. I lined them up in a row, knowing I needed each and every egg to go all in with my loan attack plan. I didn’t have much time, either. In mid-2016, I knew I wanted to stop making minimum payments and start full repayments in 2018.

I had two thoughts going in:

1) I was convinced I could repay everything under the 10-year loan timeframe.

2) I would later set a bet for myself, inspired by a conversation with a late friend in 2018, that I could do this, all of it, in under a year.

So, I had less than two years to prepare. Fun!

Rather than run through the laundry list of all the financial mistakes I made prior to hitting reset on my life (you name it, I did it), I’d like to share the best and worst things that happened to me during my repayment period.

BEST

I received an incredible bonus from my side hustle last year. It was for an event I worked myself brittle to the bone for months on top of my full-time job. I remembered being so nervous, thinking the event would be a bust. We sold out. It was a huge success. The bonus wasn’t something I asked for, just a thank you from my boss. I cried when I got it because it cleared one of my loans in full. It changed my life.

How quickly I shifted gears into thinking, believing, knowing I could do this. Once I got into the head space and knew what I had to do, I was ready to go all in.

The ever-present daily support, encouragement, and love from my friends and family. I don’t know how I would have done it without them. I really don’t. The core family unit was there for the good, bad, and ugly. My Mom encouraging me to pay off the largest loan first and my three brothers telling me not to give up. And the crazy pep talk my Dad gave me in late April that convinced me I could run up to my remaining loans like an unhinged, insane person and blow them up to smithereens.

He called me his champion after I was done. That made my year.

WORST

Deferring and defaulting on my loans when I didn’t have a job. (AKA the “all is lost” moment.)

Repaying the private loan of $26k. It was the biggest loan with the largest interest rate. My Mount Everest. You had to scale it bit by bit. I have likened the memory of it to chipping at a block of ice to create a sculpture. Every month, I threw a few grand at that loan while I tried to take out the little guys around it. It gradually decreased to around $12k and I paid it off in full then. This was not a fast process.

The massive wildfire I lived through during the bulk of repayments. That was like watching the “hold my beer” meme come to life. I joke about it now, but the Woolsey Fire was an absolute catastrophe. I had no way of knowing when I got into the thick of my loan repayments that I would be confronted with a natural disaster that came dangerously close to burning down my home. It was extremely scary to evacuate and watch your world hang in the balance for nearly a week. During the Woolsey Fire, I had no choice but to return to minimum repayments. I needed an emergency fund just in case — and this was the greatest emergency.

Doing it alone. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I always knew I would be alone for this. I didn’t have cosigners. A white knight spouse was not going to save me. I had to do it for “her.” I had to rely on myself for everything, harder than anything I’ve ever done in my life. And even though I went in as prepared as I possibly could have, I did not get out of this without being mentally and physically impacted.

The sheer amount of discipline involved was far too intense. You had to be determined, disciplined, optimistic, and driven at all times. There wasn’t time to rest. I was frantically trying to kill an impossible enemy and keep up the pacing all the time. The physical toll on my health was bad. Very bad. I developed anxiety that impacted my gastrointestinal health and had to take medication to calm my stomach down. I think it will be some time yet before everything gets better internally.

The mental toll was perhaps worse. Everything about my day to day life was a series of dollar signs. I was perpetually at war in my mind where I fantasized about stopping to rest in the snow, but every bit of me screamed “DON’T DO IT GET UP!!!” Because, y’know, when you nap in the snow, you can die there.

I had all of these brain cells telling me to keep pushing ahead coupled with an insane range of emotions running through my head. The stress I was under was crippling. I cried during dinner with a friend last month. Straight up sobbing in public for over 30 minutes, unable to turn it off. It overpowered me.

I was so exhausted, on edge, and full of emotions. I couldn’t do anything about it — like get therapy or sign up for a yoga class — because that costs money. I wasn’t about to incur a credit card balance of any kind in my quest for financial freedom.

So yeah, it was a real mess upstairs. All alone... with my loans.

Would it ever end?

Paying My Loans Alone Might Have Been The Best Thing To Happen To Me

Yeah, you read that right.

I kept reminding myself about the why. Constantly. Asking myself little questions when the going was the roughest.

Why are you doing this? Because I don’t want to celebrate my 32nd birthday with a student loan statement.

Why are you doing this? Because I want my credit score to improve.

Why are you doing this? Because you can’t tell me I made the wrong decision to get an education.

Why are you doing this? Because I am in love with myself and will not let that girl get hurt.

Why are you doing this? Because I am losing my future to debt and I know it.

The more I kept doing this, asking questions and answering them, the more I realized that the answers contained really important granular details.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to grow old with student loans (although let’s be real — I didn’t). I was, and still am, changing on the inside. I knew it. This was an entire chapter of my life that needed to come to a close because keeping it going was preventing every other chapter from beginning. Sitting around with it was, essentially, my long death in the snow. On a less serious note, I’m fond of the pop culture tie-in. Game of Thrones is ending this month... and so did my loan payments.

I’d say it’s bittersweet, but it’s not. I’m not going to miss this part of my life. It’s time for the next chapter to start. If anything, I cannot wait for this part! This chapter will contain more journeys and adventures, unlike any other narrative I had before.

I want to write a book, something non-fiction that has multiple drafts on my desktop and has been a work in progress for years.

i want to get a ton of dental work. Priority number one.

I want to travel. I forgot how much I like to go to places! Italy and Monte Carlo, please. Miami for Ultra 2020. Travel will beget another kind of movement, too.

I plan to aggressively pursue true love to the extent I did with my loan repayments. In terms of personal goals, this one is going to be huge. After 10 years of dating, it’s time to get out of this single person clown car. I’m enlisting the help of my girlfriends, paying for eHarmony, and deleting the free dating apps for the real thing. Calling all soulmates — I’m debt free now and did it all on my own. That’s hot! (Serious inquiries only.)

Paying off my loan allowed me to return to my dreams. Now that I know what I’m capable of, I feel confident I can reach each one. I really do.

Living starts when you get the hell out of student debt. Do whatever it takes now, remember to keep asking yourself about the “why,” and do not give up until you’re running past the finish line.

Be your own champion!

#personal #student loans

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toasttz · 6 years ago

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How to make games: Hero Shooters

So, class, today I posit this little question to you all: Do you want to be the next Blizzard? Fuck no, you don't want to be "Don't you guys have phones?" Blizzard; you wanna be Blizzard from 5-10 years ago when they were at the height of their popularity. But that's not what I'm shooting for here. Do you want a fount of endless revenue? Do you want to do the absolute baseline minimum in terms of engine and game design to actually create a game but aren't creatively and ethically bankrupt enough to make a gacha game? Do you want to build a game whose rules, designs, and themes were just stolen from the effort of others? Do you really like Rule 34? Then it sounds to me like you want to make a Hero Shooter game! Hero shooters are easy to make on account they fundamentally have only three gameplay modes: push a payload, kill the other team, and kill the other team while standing on top of a glowing circular thing. They're also equally easy to design as they require no thematic consistency whatsoever and what little writing you'll be expected to bother with will simply be character bios, which you can keep so vague as to be virtually meaningless. There's never a 'story' in a hero shooter game and what semblance of one does exist is pretense for the non-canon aforementioned three game modes you'll be forced to build around. Best of all, the individual mechanics of each hero are easy to design - just steal them from whatever games came before. Now create about three or four maps with some different sorts of themes, but don't make them in any way mechanically varied - the most complex obstacles on any given map should be walls and maybe elevators that move at a very low speed. We're making a hero shooter, not Mario Party, dammit. If anyone asks why you are essentially just reskinning the same maps you can explain that it's to ensure that the game remains a "test of the players's skills" even though that's a bold-faced lie for the same reasons people who play Super Smash Bros as "tests of skill" are full of shit. Meta-gaming retards make games algebra homework instead of fun, but that's precisely what you'll be banking on in this genre. Once you have that, we need to get into the most important thing about hero shooters: the Heroes. Heroes in these games take one of three major roles: 1) The retard scrub DPS heroes - who will be played by the vast majority of your one-trick glory-chasing mentally-stunted community under the pretenses of being 'the most fun' and will be where the better part of your "cool" themes and motifs will be dedicated toward. These work under the key principle of "Shoot everything until it stops moving" and requires zero brainpower whatsoever. 2) The under-estimated doggedly persistent Tank heroes, played by those with either the willingness to learn something other than "Shoot bad guy with gun" or those who find pressing and holding a single button for the duration of the 10 minute match time to be the highlight of their bleak office-job lives. Though, on the other hand, some of the really cool designs will ultimately end up in this family. 3) The unsung gods among men known as the Support heroes, AKA: the ones no one will actually play. These characters will never be given cool or interesting mechanics or designs, but you'll be at liberty to make as many sexy nurse outfits as you can come up with and no one will be able to tell you otherwise. Like an ungodly amalgamation of tanks and DPS, your gameplay experience will boil down to pointing at your target and holding down the button the entire match - except unlike DPS heroes, you'll be shooting at the blue team and not the red team. Now, some might argue that there are technically other families of heroes, like flankers, zone controllers, pseudo-supports who can debuff enemies, but remember that the key to any good hero shooter is keeping everything rock-stupid. Every hero should have only enough abilities to fill a role for the left and right mouse buttons and the Q and E keys. F or R can be for reloading where applicable, but if you demand anything more of your players, you're going to lose their interest because Hero Shooters are hugboxes for sociopaths who care for nothing more than getting that sweet, sweet 5-second long "Play of the Game" replay at the match's end. This is why the character who invariably rips off Team Fortress 2's Demo Man and can kill people he doesn't have direct line of sight with will always be the most popular, without exception. I mean, sure, you can have 30 or 40 heroes, each with incredibly detailed outfits, backstories, kits, and personalities but everyone will just play the Not-Demo Man so you might as well accept that your userbase is going to be the only thing more toxic than a puffer-fish or a modern-day feminist. But I repeat myself. I don't have the time nor particular inclination to tell you exactly what you need to make but I can give you some character types that are obligatory by law to be in any hero shooter game. This will at least give you a start before you realize that being creative is hard and just steal kits from better games than your own. Call of Duty Man - The main DPS hero and usually the face of your game. Typically a grizzled war veteran man and almost exclusively an American if your game is set in the real world - remember, creativity is hard! He'll have a medium-ranged assault rifle and precisely one movement skill and one healing skill in his kit making him a jack-of-all-trades. Will either be loved or hated by your community with no room for in-betweens. Sexy Healer Lady - The main support hero who is literally just TF2's Medic reskinned and with tits. You really don't need to do anything more with her, as the fanbase will handle the rest. And the less said of that, the better. Big Knightly Dude - The main tank hero who has a big shield that, regardless of origin, will be transparent so Call of Duty Man and Not-Demo Man can fire through it while guarded. Probably wields a melee-ranged weapon even if in a modern warfare setting. By law, they can never be shorter than 6'6" (or 7200 cm. Pretty sure I did my conversion right on that). Flamethrower Guy - Literally just TF2's Pyro. Mechanic - Literally just TF2's Engineer. Sniper - Literally just TF2's Sniper. Probably also a voluptuous woman in a tight suit because creativity is fuckin' hard, man. Not-Demo Man - The cancer in your fanbase you will never nerf. Doesn't matter that he can party-wipe the enemy team single-handedly without being anywhere near them because Hero Shooter maps are literally just a set of narrow corridors so his kit is extremely OP. No, better just nerf Sexy Healer Lady again, since your DPS fanbase is pissing and moaning about her again and, this time, not in the same way a cat in heat does. Next, just make characters around elemental themes. Once you have 30 or so, you can get around to actually doing really mechanically interesting and varied heroes, since there's really only like 10-15 good FPS character ideas to begin with. So don't be surprised if you have some overlap. But by then we should hopefully have completed the next major step after the game is made: alienating your fanbase! This step is easy and requires no particular skill or coordination on your part. First, make some events seasonal, such that you have at least a major event every other month. Any more than that and your fans might actually think you're trying to be anything but another generic Korean eSport event, so be sure to space them out and have at least half of them be terrible. Valentine's Day is a good excuse to dress your female heroes sexily, summer games are a fun and not-at-all tired motif, and of course you need some kind of Christmas event. Just make sure these events only run maybe 2 weeks out of the year, have lots of stuff that you can only get during those times and, as said, that most of them are terrible and not fun at all to play. And don't -EVER- make any of them PvE, as that requires coding AI characters and effort and shit - what do you think think this is? Warframe? No, terrible gimmicky PvP events will be a good start because there is no frustration quite as severe as being told you didn't grind hard enough for: Loot boxes! Shit yeah, your hero shooter's gonna have loot boxes in them! Remember, we want maximum money for minimum effort and there's nothing like a Skinner Box within the hugbox that is the sweet dopamine high of popping a loot box open only to get common drops every time! If MMORPGs have taught us anything it's that Sub-1% drops are TOTALLY good game design and aren't at all unethical and an artificial, cheap tactic to keep people hooked on your game. This is why, in addition to the e-peen bolster that is your arbitrary profile ranking also drip-feeding a loot box upon level up that you have "Weekly Resets" for additional loot boxes. This runs on essentially the same principle as a cell phone games making you wait for additional tries to make it more a habit than a game - but that's okay! You can just rationalize it away as "it was the player's CHOICE to buy 300 loot boxes for the low, low price of 799.99 USD!" and not at all a psychological compunction found in human psychology! You're not an unethical douchebag in the slightest! And speaking of douchebags, it's time for the third and most important step in alienating your fanbase: Balancing the Game! What do I mean by that? You might think it's something like "Oh, this one character has an attack that is way too powerful and so it should be retooled in such a way that it either isn't available as-often, or maybe make its hitbox narrower to make the game more skill-based" but you're dead wrong. That requires actual effort and we all know how we feel about that. So, instead, just start an eSports team. Why? So you can listen only to the DPS players from each team and only implement THOSE changes. That way, only tanks and supports get nerfed into irrelevance and since no one in eSports is ever going to play those roles anyway, who cares? Who needs healers when you respawn to 100% after 7 seconds of dying?! Who cares if the majority of your fans hate these changes and that you end up completely destroying the kits and frameworks of their favorite heroes with needless, superfluous, unwelcomed tweaks? God-damn it, the Not-Demo Man needs to be able to wipe out an enemy team with a 3-second Time to Kill! No questions! I have a very specific vision!! Once your fanbase has been alienated - congrats! You're no longer obliged to release new heroes and levels! The responsibility of server upkeep and releasing new content twice a year are lifted! Now, just reskin the entire game top-down and release a new, better hero shooter founded on the same grounds to re-capture your fleeing audience and fleece them all over again! Now repeat ad infinitum and gain unlimited money. Congrats, you're now another Chinese game manufacturer that shits out products with no care for their fans or reputation but you get to go whaling every single day and fill your bathtub with money. You're ready to work for actual Blizzard now! You're welcome.

#satire #games #video games #hero shooters #comedy

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robininthelabyrinth · 6 years ago

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Fic: Nocturne (21/30) - Ao3 Link

Fandom: Final Fantasy XV Pairings: Mostly Gen

Summary: In which Cor Leonis loses his temper, accidentally acquires a kid, and tries to single-handedly dismantle the Lucian immigration system – and that’s before he and his lawyers find out about this Prophecy business. If the Astrals think Cor’s going to let his kid’s best friend die without a fight, they’ve gotten the wrong cheetah ‘taur.

(a young adult novel set in @kickingshoes’ ‘taur AU)

—————————————————————————————— ——————————————————————————————

Luna is shaking, she’s not going to lie. To think that war – invasion – came so close to Insomnia itself! And at the hands of the Kingsglaive, no less! With daemons, the scourge of Eos, as Niflheim's weapons of choice – she's heard of it before, of course, distantly, but she could barely believe it until she was seeing it - it’s vile, absolutely vile, and it shakes her to her core to know that any ‘taurs, any ‘taurs at all, would choose to use such a weapon.

"Don't be sad, Luna," Prompto says, patting her back comfortingly. "It's over now."

She nods. Over, at least until the trials for the traitorous Kingsglaive, and very likely Drautos' execution.

"Besides, the summoning thing was way cool," Prompto adds, which makes her smile.

"Never lose your sunny way of looking at things, Prompto," she tells him.

He grins at her.

There's a tap on her shoulder – it's Scientia. "I see that you listened to me about not dying," she tells Luna approvingly. "And my little troublemaker came back in one piece this time, too."

"It was one time," Ignis grouses. "And I got pneumonia last time, I didn't break something or anything."

"Lungs are a piece of you," Scientia says firmly.

Luna smiles at her, too.

"Now," Scientia says in her usual brisk manner, "would you like to go home or stay and hear the reports of what happened during the invasion?"

"Stay," Luna and Ignis both chorus.

"We get to?" Ignis adds, looking pleased.

"Well, you're certainly in the thick of it now," Scientia says, looking a touch rueful. "I doubt any of us realized quite how – eventful – these Covenants would be."

They all go to the sitting room, where poor Mr. Amicitia is still being patched up by his wife while Gladio watches worriedly, since Mr. Amicita refused to go to the hospital and take room from someone who probably needed it more, in his words. Luna’s not sure that was a good decision; he looks awful.

At least the King and Queen are all right, and the Kingsglaive they like, too, like the Ulric twins, even if Hemera has a nasty bandage on her arm and Libertus has a broken leg in a cast.

It's been hours and hours since they first arrived back, but this is the first opportunity they've had to all settle down and talk about what happened - everyone's been too busy putting down the last few daemons and restoring order to the city and capturing any remaining Kingsglaive traitors, and that's still ongoing, left in the hands of Cor's trusted Crownsguard lieutenants.

"So, today we went to form a Covenant with Titan," Cor says after a few moments of collectively stunned silence. "What'd we miss?"

That gets a laugh out of the room.

"I think you can gather the general outline of what happened here," King Regis says wryly. "And even I don't know all of the specifics yet. We'll be doing clean-up for days, if not weeks, yet to come"

"There is one thing I'd like to mention to the group up front, though," Mr. Amicitia says, frowning. "I was assigned to lead the division of the Crownsguard meant to arrest the emperor – unsuccessfully, as you can see –"

"How did that happen?" Cor asks, frowning as well. "You're easily a match for any of the MT guards they had, much less any of Niflheim's 'taur officers."

"I am," Mr. Amicitia says. "But not, it seems, for their Chancellor. He went through us like a knife through butter, and barely bothered straightening his posture to do it."

"Is he the Accursed?" Luna asks eagerly. She thinks he is, but it's not like they have any reason to know for sure.

"Still unconfirmed," Mr. Amicitia says, "but let's say – it seems reasonable."

"That would mesh with my observations as well," Queen Aulea says. "In fact, I'm hunting down a lead at the moment – Cyrella, your assistance in the library would be invaluable here –"

"Of course," Cyrella says.

"But that matter can be discussed further later," Queen Aulea continues, much to Luna's disappointment. "I take it from Titan's guest appearance that the Covenant was successful? I would appreciate the details."

The rest of the evening is mostly spent rehashing things and getting damage reports, which isn't quite as interesting as Luna thought it would be. And she's also extremely tired, so she's more relieved than she'll ever admit when Scientia insists that they go home after only a few hours.

Iggy complains, but a yawn breaks through right as he's trying to point out why he can stay, so Scientia doesn't accept his arguments.

When they get home, Luna wants nothing more than her bed, but it was a very exciting day, a very dangerous day. She's sure her mother will want to hear that she's doing fine, so, as much as she prefers to go straight to bed, she sits down at the little long-distance camera-phone set up she has on her desk and calls Tenebrae.

There's no answer.

Frowning, Luna tries again, but still – no luck.

Well, that happens sometimes, when her mother or brother are too busy to take her call. They'll call her back soon enough.

She goes to bed, secure in that knowledge.

That security becomes increasingly frayed when, over the next week, Tenebrae stubbornly refuses to either call her or answer her calls.

"I don't know what to do," Luna stresses to Scientia. "I don't want to bother King Regis with this – he's supervising all the rebuilding and everything –"

"It's important," Scientia tells her. "Not just because you're important, though of course you are, but because your mother is one of our allies. I'll set up a meeting with King Regis this afternoon, and I'll be happy to come with you when you talk to him, if you like."

"Yes please," Luna says, because she might be fourteen and have known King Regis for years now, but he's still scary when he's sitting on his throne.

King Regis listens to her concern and promises to make a few calls of his own, and, if those result in nothing, to send someone undercover to find out what's happened.

And so Luna waits, filling her time with school, and extra fighting lessons, and talking on her camera-phone with Cindy now that the other 'taur has all the pieces she needed to build her own receiver.

A month goes by, and then another, including Prompto's blissfully uneventful (albeit restricted to Insomnia) birthday party.

King Regis tells Luna that they've sent someone to go find out what's going on, and that they have a new receiver with them in case all that's happened is that the old one broke.

That's reassuring, a little, but not as much as she'd like. She wants news. She wants news now!

Sadly, the universe does not align itself with her whims, so she resigns herself to waiting.

Luna's in school when the call finally comes.

"– when I said now, I mean now," she hears Scientia saying from the corridor, sounding irritated, and gathers up her books with an apologetic smile at her classmates, who smile back, and slips out with a nod of approval from her teacher.

"I've gotten all my things," Luna says, seeing an annoyed Scientia with a harried-looking vice-principal. "Shall I be excused for the rest of today?"

"Yes," Scientia says before the vice-principal can respond. "Come along, Luna."

Luna comes along.

"What's going on?" she asks when they're in the car heading back to the Citadel. "Is everyone all right?"

If someone needs her healing – but no, she only does her healing sessions once a week, under Scientia's close observation to ensure that she's not over-extending herself – but maybe one of the children? Noctis?

"Everyone's fine," Scientia says. "Your mother called."

Luna brightens. "That's wonderful news! At last! What was it – did the receiver break?"

"In a sense," Scientia says, and says no more.

Luna rushes into King Regis' secondary office, since he also has a receiver there and her mother would more likely have called him than her given the time of day, not to mention the diplomatic protocol involved.

When she gets there, though, King Regis and Queen Aulea are there, and they look grave, and her mother is on the screen, and her steely mother’s eyes are wet with tears.

Belatedly, Luna begins to worry. "What's wrong?" she asks, looking at the adults. "Mother, what's happened? You got the new receiver working -"

"It's your brother," Queen Aulea says gently. "He's been taken by Niflheim; they broke the receiver to cover their tracks."

Luna staggers back, covering her mouth with her hand.

"It's worse than that," Luna's mother says, covering her eyes with her hands. "Ravus – Luna, Ravus went with them willingly."

"We will have to put our plans for the Inferniad on hold, of course," Regis tells Cor. "Which was likely the purpose of this gambit, assuming the Chancellor is in fact the Accursed."

Cor nods, agreeing. There is simply no way they can afford to split their forces for the Inferniad – every children's story and historical record they can find have all confirmed that Ifrit's fallen body, or his consciousness' consignment to deep storage if you preferred to think of it that way, had been rather notoriously placed within the Rock of Ravatogh, Lucis' most fearsome volcano.

A volcano, unfortunately, positioned very close to the border with Niflheim and Accordo.

Niflheim would need only send its fleet of airships to secure the location, and from reports they've been receiving, they already have.

That leaves only two approaches to get to the volcano: stealth, by some means they have not yet figured out, or a full-frontal attack.

Kidnapping Ravus Nox Fleuret was a very effective way to ensure that the latter option would not be feasible. Niflheim – or rather, its too-intelligent Chancellor – undoubtedly knows that Luna is being fostered in Lucis, and that Sylvia would demand Lucis' help in retrieving her son. Lucis could not afford to refuse, having taken the woman's daughter from her.

And so Cor was assigned to go attempt a resuce, and an elite division of the Crownsguard was to go with him as well; without them, no reasonable attack could be waged.

There was still some time before the Inferniad, but none of them thought the current situation likely to resolve in time.

"I would appreciate you taking some Kingsglaive with you as well," Regis adds. "The morale in that unit has been very low, given the ongoing trials."

Scientia is taking perhaps more glee than she ought to in ensuring that each and every traitorous wretch receives every single possible right they are due under the Lucis Charter, and rubbing it in their faces while she's at it. Her comparison of the laws of Lucis and Niflheim – pointing out that as traitors to the state, they would probably have just been shot on sight or possibly handed over as living specimens for experimentation if they had been prisoners of Niflheim – are growing increasingly less subtle.

Cor is in favor, though Regis worries that she's being cruel. Clarus is firmly on Scientia's side, though: he thinks that her comparisons might even be breaking through the shell of lies they've all told themselves, and possibly offering hope of eventual rehabilitation – though of course they will never be trusted with military service or even unmonitored access to the Citadel again.

The penalty for having been very good liars.

But for all that, it cannot be denied that morale amongst the Kingsglaive is in fact very low. The betrayals gave support to the unfounded accusations of their most bitterly xenophobic critics, who alleged that refugees would never truly become loyal to their new home and would thus turn on it at the first instance. Worse, the remaining Kingsglaive can't even defend themselves - the betrayals did occur, and Drautos/Glauca's particular choice of rhetoric had become public - other than to point out that most of the Kingsglaive did not betray Lucis, and that it was the Kingsglaive that suffered the highest casualties in opposing the traitors.

It wasn't much balm, though, especially during the seemingly endless series of funerals for the Kingsglaive that had been killed by 'taurs they considered to be brothers and sisters, often quite literally by being stabbed in the back.

No, the Kingsglaive needs something to cheer it back up, some heroism they can point to and say: we did that, for you. We are still willing to do what we must for Lucis, for Insomnia, for us all.

"I was already planning on it," Cor tells Regis. "I'm going to split up our attack, creating two teams: a larger armed force consisting of the main Crownsguard force, led by Monica, which will go straight to Tenebrae, focusing on liberating Sylvia's manor and assisting with the search using that as a springing off point, in case they've hidden Ravus near there, and a smaller strike force, let by me, to go straight into Niflheim to try to see if we can find him hidden in Gralea."

"Niflheim's capital," Regis murmurs. “That’ll be dangerous.”

Cor inclines his head slightly. "Agreed. As I said, I will lead the second strike force personally. Additionally, I plan to take some Kingsglaive – they're more accustomed to independent movement than the Crownsguard, since they're not as familiar with regular formation training."

"That makes sense," Regis says. "Not to mention the optics of the Immortal willingly going into battle supported by only Kingsglaive, demonstrating trust in them...yes, very good. You have my blessing – take whomever you like."

"I'll take the Ulric twins," Cor says.

"Oh?" Regis says, his eyebrows arching. "I'd rather thought that you'd want them to stay here - for the new leadership of the Kingsglaive...?"

Cor snorts. Regis would think that – he was never much of a war-leader, but then that's why he has Clarus and Cor.

"They're fantastic soldiers, and excellent leaders in the field," he says gently. "But they'd be awful captains. They're heroes by nature, not soldiers: they want to protect people from bad things, and that includes war. They'd name themselves to head every awful mission, just to spare others from having to do it; they'd refuse to assign the best people to the job for sentimentality's sake; and they'd probably get themselves dramatically killed by sheer over-exhaustion at the first instance."

"Never heard of anyone like that before," Clarus says dryly from where he's curled up on a couch. His injuries are healing well, though he's still bandaged up. "Not once."

"I," Cor says with dignity, "grew out of it. And they might, too, but they're not there yet. Besides, you've seen the quality of their paperwork."

Regis and Clarus wince. In the last few months, they've been jointly acting as the Kingsglaive's direct commander. Cor has taken a particular delight in forcing them to do all the paperwork that comes with the job – more, since they have to review Drautos’ past paperwork as well. At least for that project they have Scientia’s army of lawyers to explain the nuances, but the new documents? It’s all them.

Even for men accustomed to the paperwork of government, the paperwork of the military is an unpleasant beast of burden.

“No, they’re definitely not captain material, at least not yet,” Cor says firmly. “They’re heroes, and Kingsglaive needs heroes right now; I’m going to take them and give them a chance to do what they do best.”

“Any suggestions on who should be the next captain, then?” Clarus asks.

“Libertus.”

“Libertus?”

“Basically all of the Kingsglaive like him, he’s moderately easy-going but doesn’t let people walk all over him, he’s a decent fighter but a better strategist, and he has an entirely instinctual but very good code of ethics,” Cor says with a shrug. “And he somehow gets all of his paperwork done on time, which is frankly a miracle.”

Regis and Clarus look marginally convinced by that last one.

“Take it under advisement,” Cor suggests. “I’ll go pack.”

Packing, however, is complicated by the fact that when he gets home, there’s an overgrown puppy sitting in his pack instead of his clothing.

“Prom,” Cor says.

“I want to come with you,” Prompto says firmly.

“Prompto,” Cor says again.

“It’s Niflheim,” Prompto insists. “I’m a skeleton key, remember?” He waves his barcoded wrist. “I’d be useful.”

“Prompto. No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re nine. I’m not taking a nine-year-old into a battlefield. Not on purpose, anyway!”

“But –”

“No, Prompto.” Cor lifts Prompto out of his bag and puts him down near the door. “This one’s just me.”

“It’s always just you,” Prompto grumbles.

“Yes,” Cor says. “Because I’m an adult.”

“Just like you were when you joined the Crownsguard?” Prompto asks innocently, looking up through his eyelashes.

“Nice try, sneaky,” Cor tells him. “I was older than you are now.”

By at least four years, he tells himself virtuously. Maybe something like three and a half if you want to be bothered by little things like rounding and birth certificates. Damnit, it still counts.

Judging from the look Prompto is giving him, Cor’s not doing a great job keeping an entirely straight face about it.

Also, Gladio, at eleven, is getting dangerously close to thirteen.

He really hopes they finish the whole Prophecy before then, or he'll totally run out of decent arguments.

Somehow divining the direction of Cor's thoughts, Prompto sits back on his hindquarters, crosses his arms, and says, "If Gladio was the one –"

"He isn't," Cor says firmly. "Besides, he'd be staying home anyway to take care of his dad. Remember that?"

Prompto looks a little shamefaced for a moment, remembering Clarus' injuries, but quickly rallies with, "Iggy –"

"Is trying to comfort Luna, given how upset she is over Ravus’ defection. And Noctis is your age, so don't even try."

"Noct can do the summoning thing," Prompto points out. "No one else can. He'd be useful, too."

Cor sighs and settles down on his underbelly to look at Prompto. "Prom, I'm not refusing to take you because you won't be useful. I'm refusing to take you because you could be in danger, and I don't want that to happen."

"Danger's a part of life," Prompto replies. He sounds like he's quoting someone. Probably Cor. "It's how you prepare for it and how you handle it that matters."

Definitely Cor.

Damnit.

"Prom –"

"You said I could get a present or a privilege if I exceeded my shooting targets," Prompto says. "I did. Two days ago. I want to come with you."

"Prom –"

"This is what I want!"

Cor hates saying no to Prompto. But sometimes a 'taur's gotta do what a 'taur's gotta do.

"No, Prompto. You're not coming with me."

"Fine," Prompto explodes, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. "You go by yourself and maybe get hurt like Gladio's dad or – or – or worse, just because you wouldn't take me, and then I'll be sad and it'll be all your fault! So there!"

"Prompto –"

But Prompto is already turning and fleeing to the door. "Guess I'd better say goodbye now," he says, sniffling. "Since you're probably gonna be gone soon. But I'm still mad!"

And then he runs out.

Cor didn't even get his usual pre-mission good-luck hug.

He feels bereft.

"Six, what he'll be like as a teenager," Cor murmurs, scrubbing at his face. "I don't even want to know."

He hopes that his bright, sunny Prompto rethinks his decision not to say goodbye any further, but he doubts it – Prompto's definitely absorbed Cor's stubbornness.

No – best to just accept the way things are. They'll make up when he gets back.

Besides, if the worst should happen, he's written letters for Prompto to open, reassuring him of his love for him, his pride in his development, everything. Cor rewrites those letters twice each year, updating it with new details, new compliments, to make sure they're as good as he can get them.

It won't be enough, he doesn't kid himself about that. But it'll be – something.

Cor turns back to his packing.

A 'taur's gotta do what a 'taur's gotta do...

Nyx is honestly shocked that Cor Leonis has lived as long as he has.

"You – you – the Immortal – head of the Crownsguard – most well-known fighter in Lucis – have been to Niflheim before – how many times?!"

"I've lost count," Cor (the reckless bastard) says with a shrug.

“And after all that, the best you can do is tell us that it’s cold?!”

"Well. It is cold."

"What a characteristically effusive description," Hemera signs, rolling her eyes. "Please, tell us what you really think."

Cor shrugs.

"Remind me about the part where we need all the luggage?" Nyx asks, jerking his head back towards the literal crates of luggage they have on the back of the truck. "Seems unnecessary. I thought you told us to pack light."

"Those crates are necessary."

"But there's nothing in them but clothing!" Nyx protests.

"You looked?"

"Well, at one of them..."

Cor looks long-suffering. "The luggage itself isn't important. Having the luggage is important."

"How?" Hemera asks.

"The reason I've been so successful at smuggling myself into and out of Niflheim is that I do it a different way each time," Cor explains. "This time, since I have you two, we're going to go with the direct approach."

"I feel like there's a hidden jibe in there about Kingsglaive discipline," Nyx says to Hemera, shaking his head mock-mournfully. He can only joke about it because he knows that of all people, Cor wouldn't.

"Crownsguard humor," Hemera agrees. "Sad. Very sad."

"Shut up, both of you," Cor says, sounding amused – which is better than the rather gloomy he's sounded since he left Insomnia. Something to do with his kid; Nyx isn't sure what.

"So what is the plan, and why does it involve luggage with clothing?" Hemera asks.

"You're going as a noble canidaetaur lady, Hemera," Cor says. "From Galahd; you're visiting Niflheim. You know they allow canidaetaurs in pretty liberally, even if they're from Lucis-aligned states."

"That's true," Hemera signs, but she's scowling. "But – a lady? Why?"

"Because then Nyx can go as your bodyguard, and since, as a lady, you'd never stoop to pantomime when someone doesn't understand you because of your deafness, that means I can go as your translator," Cor says. "Your meek, scholarly translator, who you have no choice but to take with you everywhere you go, even if it's technically barred to felidaetaurs."

"That's brilliant," Nyx says after a moment of sheer appreciation. "As a translator, they'd start seeing you less as a person and more as a floating narrative voice."

"Exactly," Cor says.

"Meek?" Hemera signs doubtfully. "You?"

"I'm a decent actor when it calls for it," Cor says dryly. "Also, I have an ugly set of glasses – you'd be amazed how much they help."

Nyx can't wait to see that.

"I see your tail wagging, Ulric First," Cor says warningly.

"Who, me?" Nyx says, deliberately wagging it harder.

"I feel like I should be Ulric First for this trip," Hemera signs. "Given that I'm the noble lady and all. Ugh, does that mean I have to wear jewelry?!"

"Looks like it, selena," Nyx says fondly. "Also, we're getting close to the ferry to Altissia – Cor, should she change?"

"No, no need; changing on board is fine," Cor says. "The ship itself is secure – staffed and filled with people we trust. I want to leave as soon as we get to the port."

"And here I was hoping to experience Galdin Quay for myself," Nyx says, sighing over-dramatically. "The largest population of Galahdians outside of Galahd, you know. They might have real food, not that bland stuff you makes us all live off in Insomnia."

"You'll live," Cor says.

Boarding the ferry is easy enough. Cor produces the snazzy new identity papers they're going to use. Hemera's is ridiculous – Lady Adrasteia delia Ushas, of the Laomedon Estates over on one of the northern isles. It's a real place, with a fairly notorious tendency to change hands between its many distant family members due to a very unfortunate testamentary decision made generations back . Nyx is Erebus Black, a longtime family retainer and her personal bodyguard, and poor Cor is Geryon Praeneste, a translator.

"At least you got the names right," Nyx says cheerfully. "I was worried you used Lucian roots, instead of Galahdian ones."

Cor rolls his eyes. "You done checking us in?" he asks the guy in charge of greeting guests. "Good. Let's be off as soon as possible."

"We delayed departure of an earlier timed vessel for you," the guy says. "So you're the last guests; we can leave at once as soon as your luggage is stowed. Go make yourself comfortable – the journey will be about five hours long from Galdin."

"Five hours?" Nyx asks blankly. He can sail, though as an inlander he doesn't make too much of a habit of it, and he can read a map. "How?"

"There's a cruise element," the guy says with a shrug. "For fancy vessels like this one, we prefer the scenic – and, coincidentally, slightly safer – approach to Altissia. There are more direct routes, but..."

"Not as fancy, not as safe, gotcha."

Hemera pokes Cor, who has his eyes turned back to shore with a very un-Cor-like gloom again. "Let's get something to eat first."

Nyx approves of her plan – and not just because he's always hungry, the way she's always teasing him about. Cor's a leader, first and foremost, and he takes care to ensure that his people are full and energized.

Even if he does pick at the food on his own plate like it's personally offended him.

"You okay?" Nyx asks after a bit.

Cor shrugs. "I have a food thing," he says vaguely. "Hasn't acted up in a while. I'll get down enough to be functional, don't worry."

They spend about an hour at the ship's truly stellar buffet, clowning around a bit in hopes of lifting Cor out of his sulk. They're not entirely successfully, but he does start laughing at the lobster quadrille they put on, complete with Nyx singing the words.

"All right," Cor says after a while. "Go get changed; if there's anything we need to fix, I want to know it now."

Nyx's outfit consists of an overcoat of dark greys and dark purples of the Laomedon estate, very stern but for the somewhat flouncy white shirt underneath – very piratical – which is pretty standard for more monied Galahdians to insist on for their households. He dabs kohl under his eyes, too, which he hasn't had to do for any practical purpose since he left Galahd, and braids the appropriately fierce set of beads into his hair: he's already got good luck ones for fighting, honor and good health in, but he adds loyalty and commitment, plus a whimsical strand signifying smooth sailing – which, in slang, is an indication that he's both single and open to sharing his next heat with the right 'taur if someone's interested.

He's about halfway through touching up his tattoos with a henna overlay that suggests a slightly more conservative heritage when he hears the yelp.

He's out of the door in half a second. "Hemera! What is it?"

Cor's out there too, sword in hand.

"You're going to have to break that habit if you want to come off as meek, you know," Nyx tells him. Now that he's had a second to consider, Hemera's yelp was surprised but didn’t sound like she was either in pain or afraid.

Cor rolls his eyes. He's in a pretty clever variant of understated Lucian servant dress – same colors as Nyx, yet somehow desaturated and even more conservative a cut, more business-suit than soldier. His clothing is a bit too large for him, making him even thinner than he already is and hiding his powerful shoulders. He does, in fact, have a set of spectacles on that somehow manage to complete the effect of a weedy, anxious little man.

It’s – actually really effective. And super weird.

Shit, how many people has Nyx overlooked while on guard duty if Cor the freaking Immortal can do that?

To avoid having to think about that too hard, Nyx knocks on his sister's door. "Selena? You okay?"

She knocks back 'yes, give me a second'.

"One sec," Nyx tells Cor.

"I know what that means, yes," Cor says dryly, putting away his sword.

A few moments later, Hemera opens the door partway. "You will never believe what I found in the luggage next to my dresses," she signs, looking exasperated, and then she opens the door the rest of the way and drags forward –

"Prompto!" Cor exclaims, rushing forward and embracing him.

"Hi, Cor," Prompto replies, smiling broadly and hugging him back.

"What are you doing here?" Cor demands after a few seconds. "I told you that you couldn't come!"

"I'm your skeleton key," Prompto says firmly. "I'm not gonna let you go without me."

"You do know I've been in Niflheim multiple times before, right?"

"Yes, but you've never been to Zegnautus Keep," Prompto replies. "I heard you and Uncle Clarus talking about it."

"Zegnautus Keep?" Nyx echoes, eyebrows arching. "No wonder you needed a noble lady involved, if you wanted to get an invite in there. Isn't that a giant airship that's only sometimes a city?"

"It's the seat of the Emperor when he's at Gralea," Cor says. "If Ravus went willingly, like Sylvia says, and they decided to leave Tenebrae, then that'll be where in Niflheim they take him. His pride won't permit anything less. Prom, I have half a mind to turn this ship around right now and send you back home!"

"Does that mean you have half a mind that you won't?" Prompto says hopefully. "You'd lose a lot of time that way, you know."

Cor sighs. "Prom, we're going undercover –"

"I know!" he interrupts. "I got Noctis to lend me some of his court clothing; I'll fit in with the nobility disguise, no problem!"

"Noctis?" Cor says, sounding alarmed. "Prom, if Noctis is there, I am turning this ship around, time loss or no time loss!"

"No, no," Prompto says quickly, though his tail's started going a million miles an hour at the suggestion in Cor's voice that he might not get left behind. "He had to stay back at home, since he's helping out with the rebuilding effort and doing a lot of public appearances and charity visits and stuff. Iggy's helping him with all of that, plus he's got to take care of Luna, and Gladio has to stay with Noctis 'cause he's his Shield and also 'cause of his dad –"

"Gladio knows he's not officially a Shield until he turns sixteen and gets his tattoo, right?" Cor asks, clearly having given up on turning the ship around, to judge by the way he's absently started grooming Prompto's fur and the way his tail has gone all relaxed and happy.

"He's still a Shield, even if it's unofficial," Prompto says firmly. "And that's everyone accounted for, except for me, and I'm with you."

Cor groans.

"He can be my son," Hemera signs. "I'll be a tragic widowed heiress, taking her only son and heir to visit the land of his father – a dashing Niflheim sailor who visited Galahd only briefly before dying tragically saving lives in a storm –"

"Glacian's jewels, Hemera, where'd you get that from?" Nyx exclaims. "A romance novel?"

"Telenovela, actually," she says, grinning. "They're kind of addictive. I've gotten Libertus into them – you're next."

"Fuck no I'm not next."

Cor has his eyes covered. "This is a terrible idea," he grumbles.

"But you're doing it, right?" Prompto asks eagerly.

Cor taps Prompto's nose with a finger, causing the puppy to giggle and hide his face. "I'm going to need you to be very careful, okay?" he says. "First sign of serious danger, you're going back on the boat."

Prompto's nodding furiously.

"You have a screwed up sense of danger, boss," Nyx can't resist telling Cor, even though it makes Prompto give him a dirty look. "You sure this is a good idea?"

"It's Niflheim," Cor says, like that explains anything. Perhaps figuring out from Nyx's glare that he needs to expand on that, he adds, "Prompto's originally from Niflheim – possibly even from Gralea proper. It's an important part of his heritage, and I don't want to keep him from it."

"An important part of his heritage which we're at war with," Nyx points out. "And currently infiltrating."

Cor makes a face. "In my defense, it isn't actually the stupidest thing I've ever done."

"Knowing you? That's totally not a defense," Hemera signs. "Come on, kiddo," she adds to Prompto, who – thank the Six – is fluent in LSL after all these years. "Let's get you dressed up – luckily your hair is just long enough for some proper braids – oh, and we'll get some henna on you, too –"

Nyx shakes his head in amusement. "We'll keep an eye on him, boss," he tells Cor. "Don't worry. We're really good at playing up the stereotypical Galahd thing when we need to – no one will question our disguises."

"I hope I'm doing the right thing," Cor murmurs, looking at Hemera's now-closed door with no little anxiety. "He's so young..."

Nyx clasps his shoulder. "He's clearly coming along whether you want him to or not," he tells him. "Might as well keep him safe and close to you. Turning around now would nuke the entire mission – the Niffs know our ferry schedules, and they have eyes in Accordo."

"I know," Cor says. "That's the only reason I'm agreeing."

He reaches over and snags a sandwich that Nyx smuggled out of the buffet for later. Taking a nice, big bite, he says, "Say, do you think the buffet's still open? Prom might be hungry."

"I'll check," Nyx offers, hiding his smile. In his opinion, this mission's chances of success just went up considerably: Cor is pretty fearsome as a general rule, but in a good mood and with a kid to protect?

Gralea doesn't stand a chance.

#final fantasy xv #ffxv #lunafreya nox fleuret #cor leonis #prompto argentum #nyx ulric #hemera ulric #regis lucis caelum #clarus amicitia #ignis scientia #apollonia scientia #my fic #nocturne

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princess-in-a-tower · 7 years ago

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The Secret “Betrothal”

In my post Sansa Stark & Arianne Martell: The Hard Road to Marriage, I analyzed the parallels between Sansa and Arianne in regards to their marriage options and the male attention they attract.

Both of them had been quite unfortunate in the department of romance and marriage, yet, out of the both of them, it is quite evident that the one who “drew the shortest straw” is Sansa Stark. Arianne, despite the awful and insulting marriage offers, had a healthy sexual life with numerous lovers. Sansa on the other hand had to suffer much worse things than humiliating marriage proposals. And my question is why?

Why did GRRM have Sansa go through all that?

In AGOT, one may claim that Joffrey, the handsome but sadistic bastard prince, and the Hound, the horribly scarred, crass older man who calls himself a dog and spits on knighthood, are GRRM’s way of deconstructing Sansa’s naïve take on the world.

In ACOK, when Joffrey abuses her publicly in every way possible, one could say it is because GRRM wants Sansa to see exactly how cruel and terrible a beautiful person could be. When the Hound comes to her room intending to rape her after fleeing the Battle of the Blackwater, one might say it was because the plot demanded it. Even when Ser Dontos, a 40 year old drunken disgraced knight starts asking her for kisses as payment for his help, one might say it was to teach Sansa that nothing in this life comes for free.

But then, ASOS comes and the misfortunes of Sansa, when it comes to men, keep on piling up in a way that can be seen as neither realistic nor coincidental. While she’s still in King’s landing, Olenna Tyrell approaches Sansa to propose her a marriage between their houses. Sansa of course thought Lady Olenna meant to marry her to the Knight of Flowers, who was the epitome of everything Sansa ever wanted in a husband, if one disregarded the fact that he was homosexual. The elderly lady had other plans in mind for Sansa though. She meant to help her escape King’s Landing and usher her to Highgarden in order to marry her other grandson, Willas Tyrell, a man more than a decade her senior and a cripple. But Sansa never married to any of the Tyrell men thanks to the machinations of Petyr Baelish.

Somewhere in the beginning of ASOS Petyr Baelish, a man 18 years her senior, offered to marry her himself, but Cercei refused him. The Lannisters then proceeded to marry Sansa to Tyrion Lannister; a malformed dwarf and a man 13 years older than her.

After the Purple Wedding, Sansa fled to the Vale with the help of Petyr Baelish, posing as his natural daughter Alayne. Then, the night of her aunt’s wedding to Baelish, Marillion the singer, who is a serial rapist in the books, tries to force himself on her despite her ardent protests. Sansa’s aunt, Lysa, later promises to wed her to her son, Robert Arryn; a frail and sickly child who happens to also be whiny, skittish and very spoilt. And of course, at the end of this book Petyr Baelish, her uncle by marriage, kisses her against her will.

In AFFC this pattern continues. Despite the fact that Sansa is posing as Littlefinger’s daughter, he keeps on kissing and touching her inappropriately and he even starts grooming her sexually. Robin Arryn, despite his young age, also takes many liberties with her, like slipping into her bed at night, attempting numerous times to suckle at her breasts and also kissing her without consent.

This beautiful picture comes to an end with Harry the Heir in the books. In TWOW Sansa has two interactions with Harry, yet we do not learn much regarding his character, other than the fact that he can be an arrogant prick, so it is possible that he’ll be proven to be a decent fellow in the future. In the show though, the “Vale Plot” was abandoned completely and Sansa travelled to Winterfell to become Ramsay Bolton’s wife. I believe nobody needs the details on this one…

In case you were not counting, between the books and the show we have ten men. Ten men who desired Sansa in a sexual way or who were almost-betrothed/betrothed/married to her. And in case you failed to see the pattern, they were either*:

1. Horribly disfigured

2. Crippled

3. Sick and frail

4. Old

5. Abusive of her (verbally, physically or sexually)

6. Bastards or generally not highborn enough have such relations with a princess**

*Most of the men presented above meet more than one of those criteria. I obviously did not count Ser Loras Tyrell, because he never desired Sansa due to his homosexuality.

**Sansa is still Princess of Winterfell, despite Robb’s demise.

So the question still stands.

Why did Sansa have to go through all that?

We already know GRRM is trying to infuse his story with realistic elements, hence all the suffering our beloved characters have to go though. But, quite frankly, it seems impossible and unrealistic for one girl to have such terrible luck with men. If we were speaking of another author’s work, it could be attributed to coincidence or the need to needlessly torture a character, but that is not GRRM’s style. Every line in those books is written with extreme care and with some hidden, to the reader, intent. Everything that happens in ASOIAF, happens for a reason. Everything is part of a bigger scheme; one only the author knows.

But, GRRM also loves teasing us with foreshadowing of events yet to come. Sometimes it happens through prophecies, other times through symbolic imaging and other times through the recounting of past events, which obviously get repeated, but with some kind of twist in the end.

So, if Sansa’s story has already happened to Arianne in a fashion, could we possibly get an answer to our question from Arianne’s narrative?

Coincidentally, we can, because Arianne Martell asked the same question in one of her chapters from Doran Martell; the man who she believed has single-handedly orchestrated the whole debacle that was her love-life.

Her father's face darkened. "This mistrust does you no honor, Arianne. Quentyn should be the one conspiring against me. I sent him away when he was just a child, too young to understand the needs of Dorne. Anders Yronwood has been more a father to him than I have, yet your brother remains faithful and obedient."

"Why not? You favor him and always have. He looks like you, he thinks like you, and you mean to give him Dorne, don't trouble to deny it. I read your letter." The words still burned as bright as fire in her memory. "'One day you will sit where I sit and rule all Dorne,' you wrote him. Tell me, Father, when did you decide to disinherit me? Was it the day that Quentyn was born, or the day that I was born? What did I ever do to make you hate me so?" To her fury, there were tears in her eyes.

"I never hated you." Prince Doran's voice was parchment-thin, and full of grief. "Arianne, you do not understand."

"Do you deny you wrote those words?"

"No. That was when Quentyn first went to Yronwood. I did intend for him to follow me, yes. I had other plans for you."

"Oh, yes," she said scornfully, "such plans. Gyles Rosby. Blind Ben Beesbury. Greybeard Grandison. They were your plans."

She gave him no chance to reply. "I know it is my duty to provide an heir for Dorne, I have never been forgetful of that. I would have wed, and gladly, but the matches that you brought to me were insults. With every one you spit on me. If you ever felt any love for me at all, why offer me to Walder Frey?"

"Because I knew that you would spurn him. I had to be seen to try to find a consort for you once you'd reached a certain age, else it would have raised suspicions, but I dared not bring you any man you might accept. You were promised, Arianne."

Promised? Arianne stared at him incredulously. "What are you saying? Is this another lie? You never said . . ."

"The pact was sealed in secret. I meant to tell you when you were old enough . . . when you came of age, I thought, but . . ."

"I am three-and-twenty, for seven years a woman grown."

"I know. If I kept you ignorant too long, it was only to protect you. Arianne, your nature . . . to you, a secret was only a choice tale to whisper to Garin and Tyene in your bed of a night. Garin gossips as only the orphans can, and Tyene keeps nothing from Obara and the Lady Nym. And if they knew . . . Obara is too fond of wine, and Nym is too close to the Fowler twins. And who might the Fowler twins confide in? I could not take the risk."

She was lost, confounded. Promised. I was promised. "Who is it? Who have I been betrothed to, all these years?"

"It makes no matter. He is dead."

That left her more baffled than ever. "The old ones are so frail. Was it a broken hip, a chill, the gout?"

"It was a pot of molten gold. We princes make our careful plans and the gods smash them all awry."

A Feast for Crows - The Princess In The Tower

To Arianne’s immense shock, she learns that there was a hidden reason behind her father’s actions and all the suffering they had caused her: She was betrothed to Viserys Targaryen, who everyone believed to be the rightful, but exiled King of the Seven Kingdoms.

So, Doran did not allow Arianne to meet other eligible bachelors close to her age, in fear she would accept a marriage offer from them without his consent. He kept her in Sunspear instead and brought her only the most insulting matches he could think of. Biding his time until Viserys was ready to take back his birthright.

Arianne never knew her father’s intentions and by the time she found out, her betrothed had already died thousands of miles away, when his brother-in-law poured a pot of molten gold over his head.

Quite ironically though, this whole conversation between Arianne and her father Doran could have been a conversation between Sansa and her “father” GRRM as well, would such a thing have been possible.

GRRM, as another Doran, has made a series of even more unsuitable and offensive matches for Sansa. But he did not stop there, as Doran did. The rest of the men GRRM has put her way, who were not “suitors”, but desired Sansa in a sexual way, were even worse than the suitors themselves. And that in my opinion is more than queer, considering Arianne and Daenerys had at least few decent men come their way, all the while living in the same world and time period as Sansa.

In short, Sansa’s arc when it comes to men is completely unrealistic and, seemingly, needlessly terrible. That is why I believe the exposition of Doran’s plan was the author’s way of foreshadowing in a way another “secret betrothal”; one existing in GRRM’s mind only.

Sansa Stark cannot come across a decent, single, man in her storyline, because she is already “promised” to another.

And if Arianne Martell was promised to a Targaryen King, why not Sansa Stark as well, since history is supposed to repeat itself?

The obvious choice would be Aegon Targaryen, Rhaegar’s son, who died and then was “raised from the dead” in a manner of speaking. According to the official story, Aegon’s head was pulverized against a wall during the sack of King’s Landing by the Lannisters. Varys though claimed he swapped Aegon with another baby, taking the heir to the Iron Throne in his custody to raise in secret. And now Aegon has landed on the Stormlands, with the Golden Company at his back, seeking for allies to take back what is his by right.

Is the Iron Throne really his by right though?

Not very likely, if the foreshadowing in the books is anything to go by. There is plenty of meta on the subject of Aegon being a Targaryen pretender, so I will not analyze it any further in this post. Here I will just follow the assumption that he is a fake and not a true Targaryen, due to the ample book evidence and the fact that Varys’ story has more holes than Swiss cheese.

So, could Aegon be Sansa’s intended? That is a loaded question with a complex answer, since there is no other textual evidence to foreshadow such a thing, except maybe from the “Ashford Tourney” theory, which can be found here.

First of all, we know that Aegon and Sansa are not exactly free to make their own decisions. Aegon is Varys’ pawn and ultimate secret weapon and Sansa is Littlefinger’s. I doubt any of those two players would let their protégé anywhere near the influence of the other.

How would Varys and Baelish know though who is behind Sansa and Aegon?

First of all, it is their job to know, but also both Varys and Baelish are intelligent enough to come to that conclusion on their own. When Varys finds out Sansa Stark is alive, won’t he suspect that Baelish was involved in her escape, considering Baelish’s obsession with Catelyn? Similarly, when Baelish finds out Aegon is alive, won’t he immediately pin this down on Varys, who had not only the opportunity, but also the means and the motive to do such a thing?

For Varys and Baelish to take such a huge risk and unite Sansa with Aegon, there has to be tremendous gain in store for each of them individually.

If we examine things from Varys’ perspective, what Aegon needs is legitimacy and an army. In order to gain both, Aegon absolutely needs Daenerys and Dorne on his side.

What will definitely not give Aegon the legitimacy and the army he needs is Sansa Stark. Even if we completely disregard the fact that Sansa is still married to Tyrion (who is in Essos at the moment), a marriage to Sansa would offer Aegon nothing. Sansa is the princess of a Kingdom destroyed by war and taken by enemy forces. She has no army to command, no provisions to offer, no claim to the throne; just a good family name and a pretty face. Literally any other highborn girl in Westeros would be able to offer Aegon more than Sansa at the moment.

We can also examine the possibility that Littlefinger will offer Alayne’s, not Sansa’s hand in marriage to Aegon. From Aegon’s point of view again, this union would be disadvantageous, even if it brought him the Vale army. It would offer him no legitimacy, since Alayne is only the bastard daughter of a minor lordling and it would also prohibit him from finding another, more fitting consort in the future. But, even if that was brushed aside for the sake of the Vale army, I don’t think Varys would let Aegon play into any of Littlefinger’s plans, especially ones including his daughter.

On the other hand, if we see things from Petyr Baelish’s perspective, a marriage between Sansa and Aegon would not further his agenda in the least. I do not presume to know what Littlefinger’s plans are in detail, but there are enough passages in the books hinting at his goals. So, by those hints we know that he hates the feudal system as a whole and that he wishes to make it crash and burn. We know he wants revenge from those in position of power, who had treated him so unfairly for so many years, denying him his dear Cat. And of course we know that he wants more power, more money, and most of all, sweet Sansa all to himself. Littlefinger handing Sansa over to Aegon and Varys, along with the Vale’s allegiance (since Aegon would not take her any other way), would be the equivalent of putting his plans in a pile, drenching them with gasoline and lighting them on fire.

From Sansa’s point of view now, if she were allowed to make her own decisions, a marriage to Aegon would bring her no joy. Sansa wants to go back home; to Winterfell. To rebuild and recreate the happy family she has lost. What she definitely doesn’t want is to go back to King’s Landing as the consort of another boy-king. She’s been there, done that and she does not want a repeat. And maybe Aegon is not as bad as Joffrey, but still, he would never be able to offer her what she wants; a life in Winterfell.

And there might not be much foreshadowing regarding a match between Aegon and Sansa, but in ASOS, there is almost half a chapter’s worth of foreshadowing of Sansa building Winterfell out of snow. Why would GRRM write all those beautiful, nostalgic and loaded with symbolism paragraphs, if he meant for Sansa to stay in the South for the whole span of the books? Wouldn’t it make more sense story-wise, to have her go North instead? To Winterfell?

And even if that is not enough, there is also this:

[…]The realm should be in absolute chaos and disorder when the Others arrive, and the unity of Aegon and Sansa that some fans suppose will happen will make for a worse novel. It just means that Littlefinger just took Sansa to the Vale and almost immediately returns her for nothing to really happen.

Sansa and Aegon will not marry since it would be heavily to the destruction of the story.

Lord_Tyrell: “Why do people think that Sansa will marry Aegon?”

But, even if we completely disregard all the above and just assume Sansa is promised to Aegon anyway, then history would repeat itself without a single plot twist. Sansa, like Arianne would be tied to a fake, exiled King. Aegon, much like Viserys, will fail in his pursue of the Iron Throne, and lose his life over it during the unavoidable war with Daenerys and ultimately, Sansa will end up alone, just like Arianne.

In short, Aegon VI Targaryen is probably not the one.

The less obvious choice is Jon Snow, Rhaegar Targaryen’s second son. Jon Snow’s parentage has been confirmed by the show in the last episode of the 6th season, but many readers had reached the conclusion that R+L=J years before that moment. Despite that, we do not know whether he is Rhaegar’s legitimate son or not.

Again, if the foreshadowing in the books is anything to go by, then Jon Snow is the legitimate son and heir to Rhaegar Targaryen. There are countless metas on this subject as well, so I will not analyze this it any further here.

So could Jon Snow be the Targaryen King Sansa is “promised” to? Most of the things needed in order to answer that question, have been extensively analyzed by @blindestspot in their meta A Time for Wolves - The Case for Jon and Sansa, so I will not attempt to cover them all in mine as well.

What I will examine though is whether Jon Snow could take Viserys’ place in this re-do of history, but this time with a twist.

Viserys, who never was a King, grew up believing he was meant to rule the Seven Kingdoms. Jon, who was the King all along, grew up believing he was a bastard, meant to take no names or titles. Viserys was named his father’s heir after Rhaegar’s death, passing over the -still alive- Aegon. Jon was offered to become his father’s heir after Robb’s demise, yet he refused to take his other trueborn siblings’ birthright.

Viserys borrowed a sword just to appear kingly. Jon was offered a sword for his bravery, yet he thought himself unworthy of it. Viserys refused to adapt with the Dothraki way of life, believing they were savages below his status. Jon embraced the way of life of the Wildlings, coming to respect them despite believing them to be savages all his life. Khal Drogo killed Viserys when he found out he sold his sister to him for a crown. Jon’s brothers killed him when they found out he was going to sacrifice his honor in order to save his “sister” from the husband she was sold to.

Jon and Viserys are mirrors of each other. They are the same person, but reversed. Everything, from their personalities, to their ideas and choices is the complete antithesis of the other. They reach the same crossroads along the way, yet they pick the opposite path from the other every time. In their every step, there is a repeat of history, but with a twist in the end… even in death.

So, if Viserys Targaryen, never got a crown, wouldn’t it be expected that Jon Snow will? And if indeed Sansa’s love-story is a repeat of Arianne’s and Jon’s life-story is a repeat of Viserys’, would it be so shocking if there is a “betrothal” between Jon and Sansa as well, which this time will end with a marriage? A repeat of history, this time with a twist.

And if those are indeed GRRM’s plans, this time around there will be no gods to smash them awry like Doran’s, because the only god existing in ASOIAF is GRRM himself.

#jonsa #sansa stark #jon snow #arianne martell #viserys targaryen #aegon targaryen #asoiaf #part 2 of 2 #jonsa meta #jonsa book meta #sansa/arianne parallels #jon/viserys parallels #princess speaks

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imsarabum · 8 years ago

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{PART 19} I Won’t Stop You // Jeon Jungkook, Vampire!AU

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Vampire!AU, Fantasy, Angst, Smut

Summary; Not knowing whether to stay and fight, or run and protect you; Jungkook gets thrown into a world of fear and panic. Meanwhile, Yoongi and Serrena battle for victory in the silent game of war they play;

“How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.”

I update this series every Tuesday evening, 9pm-10pm (UK Time)

{Part 1} // {Part 18} {Part 19} {Part 20}

You were frozen solid to the chair as you maintained eye-contact with the person whom you knew murdered your parents all those years ago. Your mind raced with the images of the countless drawings your brother had given you; and they matched him almost to perfection. What was more disturbing however, was the fact that he was staring straight back at you – as if you were the only other person in the room. You couldn’t force your gaze away from his intense, dark orbs; and it was almost like he was reaching into your soul with the half-crazed look in his eye.

Jungkook quickly looked back over his shoulder – observing the four figures shifting their weight at the top of the steps; before to his horror, they began slowly descending the staircase, as bold as brass.

“Jungkook” Serrena stood up suddenly – fully aware that your heart was beating way too fast, but not knowing exactly as to why. Every single Vampire in the room could practically taste the fear that resided within you, but you weren’t the only one that was stricken with such terror.

“Jimin – my darling, what’s wrong?!” Taehyung whisper-shouted to Jimin upon seeing him behaving in a much similar fashion to you – his breathing erratic and his eyes full of fright as he clutched on to Taehyung’s grasp.

“It’s him...the one who bit me – I can feel it now, he’s the one” Jimin was barely able to talk as his eyes darted between Taehyung and the same figure that was staring directly at you. Serrena and Jeonju heard his words loud and clear, while Taehyung felt like someone had just single-handedly ripped his guts out with a cold, steel knife. “He...he bit him...and left him for dead? My own brother...” Taehyung could have fallen apart right then and there.

“Jungkook, Taehyung – get them both out of here...right now” Serrena spoke sharply as her eyes took a deathly serious form. “I will keep them here for as long as I can. Go to the Manor and stay there – we will join you as soon as possible” she added, with the rest of Jungkook’s family instantly sitting up in their seats as they all took a defensive stance. The Jeon family knew that they couldn’t just get up and secure Yoongi where he stood; for humans were in their presence as well. Everything had to be done in secret – to avoid any drama or scandal that could be printed about the event.

Without any further need to hesitate, Jungkook’s fight or flight mode kicked in. He knew that he had to protect you at all costs – and as much as he wanted to face the monster that turned your life upside down and shattered your world into a million different pieces, he knew that getting you out of harm’s way and into a safe place was his number one priority.

“(Y/N), we need to go – now” he spoke firmly, grabbing you from underneath your shoulders before almost pulling you like a ragdoll into his chest. Before you even had time to realise what was happening, Jungkook was quickly guiding you in the direction of the fire-escape hallway at the back of the event room – with Taehyung doing the same to Jimin as they both never looked back once.

“Jungkook – I...I can’t breathe I...I –“ you began, but you couldn’t even find the strength to finish as you felt overcome with dizzy-sickness.

“Hold on (Y/N), just hold on to me and I –“ Jungkook cut his own sentence off upon swinging open the heavy fire-escape doors, feeling your heartbeat dangerously pound in behind your rib-cage. After you both managed to step out into the hallway that lead to the back door of the building, he observed huge droplets of sweat on your forehead, running down your face and cascading over your neck. “If she doesn’t calm down, she’s going to have a damn heart-attack”

Jungkook then took it upon himself to sweep you up into his arms in a bridal-style, knowing that your legs wouldn’t be able to carry your weight for much longer. But as he did – he felt you slip from your own consciousness; and you had truly passed out due to so much shock.

“Is she –“

“She’s fine” Jungkook cut a worried Taehyung off. “It’s better this way – her body will relax and we can move quicker” he seethed through his teeth. “What’s wrong with Jimin?” Jungkook asked – all three Vampires now running down the hallway at lightning speed with you passed out and oblivious in Jungkook’s arms, before Taehyung made the doors in front of them burst open with his own telekinetic powers, and all four of you being engulfed by the cool, night air.

“Jungkook...he bit Jimin. He’s the one who turned him” Taehyung muttered almost breathlessly, hardly able to collect his thoughts as he held on to Jimin’s hand even tighter.

“God damn him...fuck!” Jungkook spat angrily into the night, as they made their way to the valet service cubicle to collect their keys.

A few moments later, Jungkook had gently placed you in the passenger’s seat of his car, before securing the seatbelt around you and getting into the driver’s side and locking all the doors.

“Follow me to the Manor – and stay on my tail. Don’t stop for anything...we have to get there as quickly as possible. Mother will hold them for as long as she can, but let’s not take any chances. Do you understand me?” Jungkook ordered his cousin after letting his window down to converse with Taehyung who was currently with Jimin in his black, BMW X5 land-rover series.

“Yes my Prince – we’ll talk again at the Manor” Taehyung replied quickly, before Jungkook nodded at him, both Vampires exchanging unspoken words of confusion and fear to each other with their eyes. Jungkook took one final look at the poor sight you in the seat beside him– listening carefully to your heartbeat and observing your vitals with his Vampiric prowess, which let him know that you were stabilising at long last. And with that, Jungkook sped off in his BMW i8 – the tires screeching on the ground in wake of his haste to get away, as Taehyung proceeded to follow hot on his heels; both Vampires trying to protect the precious cargo that each of their vehicles held - the ones they loved the most.

“I swear I’ll protect you, (Y/N). Until my dying breath, I’ll defend you with my entire existence”

Yoongi, Namjoon, Hoseok and Seokjin observed you, Jungkook, Taehyung and Jimin making a break for the back door – and seconds later, Yoongi felt all of your presences vacate the building.

“...why are they leaving?” Namjoon spoke up as they all reached the bottom of the steps – the chatter in the room becoming livelier again, but every single Vampire had their sights set on them.

“Fucked if I know” Yoongi replied with spite in his voice. “...why did she have that look on her face? She’s never seen me before...does she know who I am?” he battled inside his head.

“If we move quickly, Jin and I can go back out the way we came and cut them off – you and Joon can run after them and –“

“Don’t be so fucking stupid! We...we can’t do that now” Yoongi raised his voice a fraction, glaring at Hoseok with burning eyes. “God damn you, Jungkook” Yoongi cursed his younger cousin for completely ruining his half-assed plan to confront both you and him at the ball – as he knew that now, he had Serrena to deal with. And; as if right on cue, Serrena slinked her body around the table, motioning at Yoongi to come forward to her from across the room.

“Yoongi! My darling – what a surprise it is to see you! And a relief as well! Come, come to aunty Serrena...I’ve been so...worried about you!” her grand voice beckoned him as Yoongi let a scowl unfold on his features. “And bring your little friends over too – it’d be so nice to have a chat with you all! Come...now” her voice took a slight menacing tone as her eyes glistened with a certain wickedness.

“Fuck” Yoongi screamed internally, knowing that he had no other choice but to comply with the wishes of his Queen. It was no secret – even to natum lamia’s, that female Vampires were the stronger and more formidable of their entire species, compared with their male Vampire counterparts. As much as he hated the Jeon’s and as much as he despised the Queen...Yoongi knew that he was essentially sailing up shit-creak without a paddle. For – if Serrena so wished, she could wipe him off the face of the earth without so much as having to lift a finger.

“Are we really going over there, Master?” Namjoon whispered as Yoongi began boldly walking forward – with Seokjin and Hoseok following close behind.

“We don’t have a choice. Keep your mouth shut, all of you. Let me do the taking.” Yoongi growled as they approached the table – an uncomfortable atmosphere settling in the air as the Jeon’s came face to face with the four, rogue Vampires that stood before them.

“Serrena~” Yoongi tilted his head ever-so-slightly – his voice donning a more than sarcastic tone as he let a fake smile plaster its way across his handsome, yet exhausted features. Even though he was practically dying to chase you and Jungkook down, he knew that he had to stay and play along with Serrena’s game; and she was notorious for playing such games extremely well.

“Come my dear, take a seat and have some merlot~ I’m sure your friends are parched as well” Serrena pointed to the four vacant chairs that you had all left behind. Hoseok, Seokjin and Namjoon all looked to Yoongi for direction, before seeing him roll his eyes a little and motion them with his head to take a seat.

“Actually, we’re just after having a bite to eat. We couldn’t possibly eat or drink another morsel” Yoongi grinned wickedly with perverse double meaning as the three other rogues pulled up the empty chairs beside Yoongi – who was now sitting in the chair you had previously sat on. Serrena chuckled impishly as she swapped chairs with her husband – who never took his eyes off all four of them.

Serrena sat down, waving her hand in the air at one of the Vampire bar-tenders who already knew what she wanted with the way she stuck all five of her fingers to the ceiling. “You will sit and enjoy a glass of the finest merlot with me; understood?” her voice dropped ominously, but her face stayed perfectly angelic as the bar tender came over with five glasses of merlot that had all been heavily diluted with the Jeon’s own manufactured blood for all the Vampires there that night to enjoy.

Yoongi knew what she was doing – filling him and his lackeys up so they weren’t bloodthirsty or otherwise; essentially being a thorn in his side by making him overeat more than his fill. Part of the reason that every Vampire in the same room knew of his presence was the smell; the smell of consumed human blood that reeked to the high heavens from all four of them.

“If you insist~” Yoongi purred, taking a sip of the merlot as Namjoon, Seokjin and Hoseok followed his lead.

“I believe your friends haven’t yet introduced themselves to me!” Serrena smiled warmly at them, obviously waiting for them to speak up and address her directly.

“Uh – that’s Hoseok, that one’s –“ Yoongi began mumbling, but was soon cut off quite sharply.

“My dear, are they not capable of speaking themselves? Or do you keep your reigns around their throats so tightly that they have lost the use of their voices?” Serrena’s voice was sickly sweet as she passed a knowing glance to her husband – who then waved his hand in the air before clicking his fingers thrice to attract some unknown attention. Yoongi scoffed, letting an airy chuckle escape him, before raising his eyebrows and looking over to the other three who all sat to his right – letting them know they had his permission to talk while the others at the table sat in silence, almost glaring at all four of them.

“I’m Jin”

“Uh...I’m Hoseok”

“Your highness, it’s both a pleasure and an honour to make your acquaintance. My name is Namjoon” Namjoon’s soft, well spoken voice made Yoongi almost want to regurgitate the entire contents of his stomach, as Namjoon politely inclined his head towards the Queen. To say that Serrena was more than a little taken aback by his respectful behaviour would have been somewhat understated; yet, it made her feel an ounce of sadness for Namjoon in turn.

“Oh my, what a mannerly gentleman you are. The pleasure is all mine” she nodded and smiled back at him. “Such a shame” she added as she took a sip of her wine.

“I’m sorry dear aunt, what’s such a shame?” Yoongi challenged her on her added words – thinking that she would try to make a successful transition at quickly changing the subject.

“I said – ‘such a shame’ my pet. As in, it’s such a shame that a boy made from apparent good stock reports to you. But I guess we can’t help who our friends are sometimes, right Namjoon?” Serrena directly challenged Yoongi back, yet again exceeding his expectations. “You always know how to be such a fucking bitch, Serrena” he continued to stew in his pot.

“So! Tell me Yoongi, what have you been up to as of late? Everyone has been...so worried about you and how you would fare out in the real world. I’m so glad you decided to join us tonight. Why – I haven’t seen you in aeons! How long has it been – ten years? Twelve?” Serrena knew exactly how long he had been locked away for committing unthinkable acts, yet she decided to toy with him further.

“Thirteen, actually” Yoongi smiled at her. To any human on the outside looking in, it would have appeared that Serrena and Yoongi were just two people have a normal, friendly chat with each other – but their chat was far from friendly and normal. Serrena and Yoongi were engaging in a battle of wits; who could get the most eloquent jabs in, who held the best poker-face, and whoever could put the other into checkmate would be the one to be crowned the champion. Serrena knew she had the upper hand playing the role of Queen, for she knew that Yoongi was much like the Knight on a chessboard; cocky and overconfident with his recklessness to go over anyone’s head without a second thought. Yoongi, however, liked to think of himself as a King; which in turn, only added to his self-defeating, inflated ego.

“Actually – I came here in the hopes of being able to have a chat with Jungkook and (Y/N); but it appears they had matters to attend to – along with my brother and his...his plaything” Yoongi so valiantly chuckled; before suddenly realising, he had just given his entire position away at letting your name roll off his tongue and ultimately leaving him wide open for the Queen to close in on him.

“Now...do enlighten me, Yoongi” Serrena licked her lips kittenishly, gazing into Yoongi’s eyes as her face inched forward towards his a fraction. “How is it that, that child’s name came to be in your mouth...hm?” Serrena knew absolutely nothing of Yoongi’s intentions, but she made it seem like she did with the playful tone laced in her tender voice. Essentially; she wished to call his bluff.

Yoongi laughed through his nose as he finished the last of his merlot in one swig. “Oh Serrena – you’re really so out of the loop today, aren’t you? Poor thing~” he uttered most disrespectfully, causing Jeonju to tighten his fists underneath the table as he wanted nothing more than to lay him to rest for good.

Serrena smiled in defeat, tracing the top of her wine glass with her ring finger that produced a gentle humming sound. “Well – no matter, I’m sure you have your ways. Her name is common knowledge now, after all...seeing as she is...promised to my only son~”

Namjoon knew in that moment that Serena had just put Yoongi into the check position from the way his face lost all composure – his eyebrows furiously knitting themselves together as Namjoon donned a blank look on his face. Meanwhile, the other two sat looking around them at the faces of other Vampires glaring at them constantly; leaving an uncomfortable feeling that lingered around them. Yet – at the same time, Namjoon, Seokjin and Hoseok found themselves rather enjoying the comforting, securing sensation that the merlot mixed with manufactured blood brought them.

“Oh – you didn’t know? Jungkook is very much in love with (Y/N)! And it’s more than apparent she harbours those same ardent feelings towards him. Quite a delightful creature she is – she’ll make a fine addition to our long lineage, don’t you agree?”

Yoongi clicked his tongue in pure annoyance. “She’s lying – she has to be...Jungkook wouldn’t fuck a human...would he? Why is Serrena so happy about this?” he scowled to himself, as he wanted to be the one to get to you first; and conquer you for his own gain, completely. Yoongi knew that Jungkook may have possibly been enamoured by your mysterious touch; but he wasn’t counting on him actually developing real feelings for you and mating with you. Yoongi also knew that Jungkook was regium – from Royal blood; and he had been firmly under the impression that the Prince would never even think about a real future with you. With Jungkook being the Prince of the Eternal Kingdom, it was written in Vampiric tradition that he would marry another Royal Vampire to keep the line pure; leaving Yoongi totally and utterly enraged and perplexed at such a notion. “You’ve made my life even harder once again Jungkook, but I can assure you – you haven’t completely fucked my plans up...”

“Congrats to the new couple then” he collected himself, speaking rather obnoxiously as he spread his legs in his seat. “Must be disappointing for you though, my Queen. Your only son wedding and bedding a mere human? I didn’t think you’d agree to such atrocities. Such a shame~” Yoongi could have cackled with glee as he regained the feeling of being one step ahead of Serrena by reusing her previous words she so challenged him with.

Serrena smiled brightly as her two daughters passed uneasy glances between each other – practically able to feel their own mothers rage rise inside of her. “Oh Yoongi, there are a few disappointments in our family...but thankfully – Jungkook is not one of them”

Yoongi felt petty anger spread through him like wildfire, absolutely hating the fact that he wasn’t able to elude Serrena in any way possible. “Oh – that’s right. I suppose my brother and his natum lamia are bigger disappointments. Can you believe it? How dare my own brother bring such filth to your grand ball!”

“Oh my dear – yet another piece of information you’re lacking!” Serrena gave him a believable shocked face – leaving all four rogues completely confused at her words. “Your dear brother’s beloved Jimin is no longer natum lamia~ He’s already a fully fledged Vampire! Isn’t that wonderful?” she paused, watching ten levels of absolute pandemonium habituate Yoongi’s soft, yet cross features, before adding “Well, I suppose – how could you know? Had you not bitten him and left him for dead...had you kept that line of control, like you did with your three friends here; maybe you wouldn’t be the one so – how did you put it? Out of the loop, today?”

“Checkmate” Namjoon almost let an impressed smirk cross his lips.

In that moment, Yoongi wanted nothing more than to stand up, flip the table that all the Jeon’s were sat at and lunge for Serrena. Everything about her made him so enraged – her senses that let her know that he was the one who bit Jimin, her words that dripped with the heaviest form of artificially sweetened sarcasm and the way that no matter how hard he ever tried; Serrena – the Queen of the Eternal Kingdom always had the ability to make him feel like nothing more than a complete, dispensable pawn on a chess board.

“Damn...she’s good” Namjoon thought quietly to himself, watching Yoongi almost come undone from being so filled with spite and vexation.

“It’s not possible! I bit him two weeks ago...he should STILL be natum lamia. How is this happening? Why is this happening? Did Serrena do something? What could she have done?” Yoongi couldn’t form proper words to try and retaliate and refute Serrena’s claims as he continued to become more and more confused by the entire events of the evening.

“Oh my love, it appears you’ve become...rather upset” Serrena clicked her tongue in a patronising manner as she looked down to her dainty platinum wrist watch, observing the time while her husband waved his hand in the air to attract the attention of three, very large male Vampires who stood against the back wall. “No matter” she paused briefly as the three Vampires approached them all, standing behind the four rogues. It was at that moment that Hyeja and Chaewon, along with their husbands, stood up and began walking in the direction that you, Jungkook, Taehyung and Jimin had went before.

“Yoongi, your parents have been going out of their minds – sick with worry for you! So, on that note, I’ll have my security escort you back to your mansion to deliver you all safe and sound to your mother and father. Do make sure to send them my regards! Tell your mother that I’ll be in contact soon~ It was so lovely to talk with you again Yoongi; I dearly missed our little chats” Serrena stood up gracefully, looking down upon Yoongi as he sat staring up at her with the same scornful look he had been wearing for the past twenty minutes of their conversation.

Yoongi stood up – with Namjoon, Hoseok and Seokjin following suit as the three Vampires behind them stood side by side, almost ready to pull them all out by their ears. “I guess we’ll be seeing each other soon then, dear aunt” Yoongi snarled as Serrena held her hand out for Yoongi to perform the traditional Vampiric custom of kissing her royal hand upon departing her presence. He glared at her as if he wished she would burst into a fiery ball of flames, before unwillingly taking her hand in his to lower his head to her knuckles. But before he could get his lips anywhere near her skin, Serrena forcefully pulled him close into her – so close that her own lips were almost right against his ear.

“If you so much as put a toe outside your parent’s mansion again, I will break every single bone in your body and I will smite you where you stand. Do you understand me?” she whispered viciously in his ear – her voice being enough to send a chill through Yoongi’s entire body as he felt himself quiver in response. However – he smirked, pulling himself away from her.

“We’ll see” he cocked his left eyebrow as he hummed his reply in a lowly fashion, before turning around to begin walking towards the main exit. Seokjin and Hoseok immediately shadowed his movements – along with their three escorts; however, Namjoon stayed still, his eyes still transfixed on the Queen as he once again bowed his head respectively.

Serrena flicked her fiery eyes to him, her demeanour becoming slightly soft as she wore a faint smile in the wake of his actions – before extending her regal hand to him. Without a moment of indecision, Namjoon gently took her hand and pressed his plump lips flush with her skin; letting them linger for a moment, before standing back up once again to look her in the eye.

“Namjoon” Serrena spoke, still holding his hand in hers and never taking her gaze off him as the other three began climbing the stairs across the room. “Listen to me when I tell you...whatever he has planned; I can assure you now that, whatever he has promised you? He won’t stay true to it” her voice was low and calm – yet an element of fear resided in it as she genuinely worried for Namjoon’s fate when Yoongi finally achieved whatever he had hoped to accomplish. Serrena knew that Yoongi didn’t have friends. Rather, he had foot-soldiers that were merely just a means to an end.

“...I know” Namjoon barely let out an audible whisper as he cast his eyes to the floor – knowing all too well that he meant absolutely nothing to Yoongi in the grand scheme of things. Namjoon knew, without any shadow of doubt in his intelligent mind that Yoongi would dispose of him the moment he became useless or unwanted; but he also knew that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Since Yoongi was the one who bit him and made him his own...he belonged to him. In short; Namjoon didn’t have a choice.

Serrena let out a regret-filled sigh as she smiled thinly to Namjoon, her eyes which were previously filled with terrifying aggravation; now filled with empathy and sorrow. “If there comes a time your master were to...accidentally loosen the ropes he has you bound to; you are always welcome to run into my embrace. Remember my words well, child” she squeezed his hand with a touch of motherly tenderness that struck even Namjoon’s tormented heart.

Namjoon swallowed hard, feeling like his soul was being pulled apart in two different directions – before inclining his head once more and retrieving his hand from Serrena’s grasp. And with that, he turned around silently – sprinting slightly to catch up with Yoongi and the others before they reached the top of the steps.

Serrena watched Yoongi as he never even glanced back at her – the three security Vampires ushering all four of them outside to escort them back to Yoongi’s parent’s mansion.

“(Y/N) called him ‘Dracula’...” she thought back to your troublesome words when you first laid your eyes on Yoongi that night – throwing her into a deep state of lament as the doors closed behind him.

“My love – I requested for the Hawk to be ready as soon as they all sat down. It’s ready and waiting for take-off. Hyeja and Chaewon are already on the roof with the boys” Jeonju stood up beside his wife, explaining how earlier when he clicked his fingers three times; it was codeword for “Get the Hawk ready.”

Serrena turned to him, producing an exasperated sigh as if to try and let the stress inside her free into the air around them. “Very well darling – we’d better get a move on, then” she smiled at him as he held his arm out for her to latch on to. They walked towards the back doors at what would be considered a leisurely pace as to not attract any unwanted attention from the others in the room – as it would only hinder their need to get back to Jungkook’s Manor.

No sooner had they stepped out into the hallway, Serrena hiked her stunning white dress up to her calves, before both the King and the Queen made a left turn to begin scaling up the building stairwell at an inhuman speed. They could have, of course, taken the elevator up; as the top floor was twenty-three stories high. Alas, being the King and Queen meant that they could make it to the rooftop far quicker than any elevator could ever hope to.

Serrena and Jeonju burst through the rooftop door – being met by the familiar sound of the Jeon’s custom made BlackHawk helicopter; much smaller in comparison to the usual military models, but it still could fly at the same velocity and hold a substantially heavy weight on-board. Serrena had already deducted that by now – given the top speed of Jungkook’s car which was around 155mph, that he would already be home with you, Taehyung and Jimin; all of you safe and sound. It was a calm, windless night – which meant that the BlackHawk could make the 38 mile journey back to the Manor in approximately fifteen minutes.

“Up you go my dear, mind your head” Jeonju placed his hand to the small of his wife’s back as she lifted the bottom of her dress to allow her to climb the small steps up and into the helicopter.

“Mother – he’s gone now, yes?” Hyeja, who was sat beside her husband, shouted over the sound of the whirring blades of the helicopter upon Serrena and Jeonju climbing inside – the crew of assisting Vampires around them making the necessary preparations for take-off.

“Yes! They just left!” Serrena shouted back upon placing the noise cancelling headphones over her ears to communicate through the radio system to her family.

“What was that all about? Why was (Y/N) about to have a bloody heart attack? And Taehyung’s boyfriend too? What’s with (Y/N)’s skin – why did it make me feel so odd? Why was that good for nothing –“ Chaewon began firing question after question to her mother.

“Enough, Chaewon!” Jeonju interrupted her, hardly being able to think straight with all that had happened in one night; knowing that it certainly wasn’t about to be over any time soon.

“Everything will be explained when we get to the Manor. (Y/N) needs to know what she is...she needs to know what we are. And I need to find out how she knows Yoongi and why she was so...terrified of him” Serrena shook her head in frustration as she gazed out the window, looking down at the city lights below the building. Amidst looks of worry, confusion and complete disbelief, Serrena was taken out of her moments trance by the sound of the pilot’s voice through her headphones.

“Jeon Tower, Hawk is ready for take-off – requesting permission” the pilot’s voice paused, waiting for confirmation from the Jeon’s own radio, air and weather tower to begin their flight. “Cleared take-off Helipad 3201, Hawk over and out” his voice vanished as the helicopter doors slid closed – locking in position and securing all Vampire souls on board.

As the helicopter lifted off the helipad and began ascending in the air – all that was going through Serrena’s mind was confusion mixed with turmoil.

“Does Yoongi know what she is? If so – how? Does...does he plan to use her in...in that way?” was all that she could think about, as the helicopter began gliding through the air - making its quick flight to Jungkook’s Manor. Serrena knew you would be completely safe in the Manor for it was physically impossible for Yoongi to step foot behind it’s gates without being permitted to enter. She felt secure in the thought that she knew Jungkook would wait until she arrived to begin explaining everything to you. But ultimately, Serrena knew that you would be ignorantly waiting their arrival; while being completely unaware of the dire evil that was threatening your very existence.

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