#something something those relatives further out from the family tree may not deal with the lack of food / poverty as hard as the main

[meatriarch]

i wake up and first thing i think of is: during marias search esp in that first week or two, i wonder how many of the search parties were volunteers considering that civilians can help cover more ground etc rather than the travis or newt sheriffs ( esp since canonically in the remakes, travis countys dept is severely understaffed )

and i wonder, too, just how many of said volunteers were extended sawyers & hewitts ensuring all potential evidence or suspicions that could point to their family ( not just in marias case but all of them in general ) is covered / fucked with / etc.

.

[malevolentbooks]

The View from the Below – The Final Payout

Those of you who have been in the writing business for a while know that it is not always so lucrative of a trade that you can, say, afford to eat.  There are two real solutions to this, become famous and rich, or take on side jobs.  

Before you bring it up, there is a third solution, which is to starve to death.  This will solve the basic problem, and oddly enough actually increases the odds of becoming a famous and rich writer.  Despite that, and for reasons best left to the reader to deduce, it is not the preferred option among the three.

These side jobs are many and varied.  Writing obsequious and largely incorrect family histories for nobles to impress their peers with is a popular one.  Sometimes a good idea for a book will fall into your lap independently and can be turned into a reasonable income.  I’ve been paid to write love poetry for tonguelessyouths to woo a desired paramour.  I’ve been paid to write good and bad reviews for inns, taverns, blacksmiths and tailors.  I’ve been paid to write scathing letters to disfavored relatives to detail the full range of their personal shortcomings.  It should surprise nobody that I was particularly good at the last one.

In this case I was hired to find somebody.  The difficulty being it was not a particular somebody, but an unknown person who matched a few traits.  Just to make it more difficult, it was possible this person didn’t exist.  But, I’ve done worse things for 200 gil a day plus expenses, and I wasn’t exactly busy at the time.

To explain who this person was we have to go back to the Autumn War.  This event was a nasty little war about eighty years ago where Ala Mhigo invaded Gridania, personalities got involved, and the modern world was more or less established.  It was a seminal event (mind out of the gutter, you) in history, but if you’ve not heard of it don’t worry.  It’s one of those things in the past that makes the present too complicated if you think about it too much.

Anyway, the Autumn war led off with the Grianians getting crushed due to the aforementioned personalities getting involved, followed by a period of blind panic on the part of the Seedseers.  Being worried about possible further aggressive expansion by Ala Mhigo if Gridania were to fall, the other three city-states got involved.  Ul’dah followed their usual approach for dealing with problems in that they sent a pile of gold to Gridania that was so big it needed a special ship to transport it.

Even in their blind panic the Seedseers realized that they couldn’t use gold to pay trees to fight for them. Gridania’s own army being recently reduced, they put out a call for mercenaries, pointing to a pile of gold they were sitting on.  Not surprisingly this was very effective, and soon Gridania had addressed their army problem.

Since people have said I have a fantasy-prone personality (which is a nice way of saying I lie a lot), I am the wrong person to learn history from.  As such, I’ll summarize the war: The Ala Mhigans lost, but it was closer than you might think.  All the city-states get along famously now, like a huge family in a small house over the holidays where drinking and expressing grudges are the main entertainment.

Anyway, remember that pile of gold the Gridanians had?  The mercenaries did and they asked for their payment when the war was over.  This being Gridania and not Ul’dah, they actually used it to pay the mercenaries, and everybody went off happy.

For those who are unfamiliar with how mercenaries get paid in wartime, it’s often based off the idea of “shares”, similar to how the pirates…er…merchants in Limsa Lominsa divide up the spoils from those totally abandoned ships they so often and inadvertently find at sea.  Everybody is assigned a certain number of shares as determined by their rank, job, and special awards for something noteworthy they may have done. You total the shares, divide the pay by that amount, and that’s everyone’s payout per share.

If you have the misfortune to die during the event, your share is still paid out, it just goes to the next of kin, assuming those running the mercenary company are that honest.  Mercenary companies may be noted for a failure to pay much attention to rules, but among their own there is a standing rule to not mess with the money.  You are, after all, talking about a group of heavily armed people who fight for a living.  Taking that which they’re fighting for is seldom a good idea.

These payouts to the next of kin are generally referred to as a “Final Payout”, and it’s not unknown for them to get an additional share or two thrown in as compensation for the family.  It’s a small price to put on a person’s life, but mercenaries are a fatalistic lot when it comes to these things.

Somebody from the mercenary group will be selected to be the Final Paymaster and handle these final payouts.  This involves tracking down families and giving them their due.  In most cases these are easy, as a list is kept of these names for just such events.  In the rare case where that person also died, you just keep following family until you find the closest survivor.

Every now and then you wind up with a hard one though.  Wyatt Farr was one of those cases.  

Wyatt didn’t list a next of kin, though some swore he said he had a brother somewhere.  The notes on his enlistment papers said he was nineteen when he signed on, and twenty when he died.  He was apparently reliable, well-liked, and good company.  He showed up with a sword, shield, and a decent suit of mail, though none of these survived his death.  His cause of death was listed as “magic”, with no more details provided.

It wasn’t much to go on.  In fact it was so little to go on that the Final Paymaster was not able to solve it despite many years of trying while also living his life and raising his family.  He passed it on to his son, who took it equally seriously spent his own years trying to find anybody related to Wyatt Farr who had the advantage of simply being alive.  He was equally unsuccessful.

The man who contacted me was the grandson of the original paymaster.  That got my attention, in that one family would pursue a singular duty to the point it became a tradition.  Unfortunately, he was just a young man in his twenties and hadn’t the slightest idea how to do anything that his father and grandfather hadn’t already done.  His father, he said, was not in good health, and there was something about this one errand that ate at him and he wanted to see it completed before he passed.

We spent a few days reviewing the records from prior attempts, and I was impressed at the lengths that the family had gone to trying to locate this one next of kin.  They’d gotten close a few times, only to find a dead end with no surviving heirs, and only hints and rumors of cousins and nieces scattered to other lands.

He also showed me the payout, showing me particularly that the seal had never been broken, even if the original bag was in such bad shape that the coins were kept in another separate bag.  When he showed me the coins inside it got even more interesting.  

When Ul’Dah sent the gold to assist Gridania it was before the standard gil was a coin.  Ul’dah did a special striking of “war coins” for this one event, so they could track where they were spent.  Once the war was over most of these were taken up and reminted into normal gil, and only a very few of them remained.  Beyond their gold content, they were valuable collectables, and the payout bag contained more of them than were otherwise known to be in existence.  It was in short, a fortune within a fortune.

I did realize that one thing nobody had done was walk the farms and talk to the old farm families.  I can understand why, since this is a tedious activity involving an enormous amount of travel and trying to coax information from people who are not terribly trusting of those from cities.

It was here that I had an advantage over the prior investigators though, in that I was raised on a farm and could drop enough names of my own that it didn’t take a lot of effort to get people to open up.  I do a lot of travel anyway, so it became a hobby of mine.  Using the family names he provided I was able to fill in a few others, almost always to dead ends, but sometimes gaining another name.

Which eventually led us to Adora Elwynn, who was a twenty-two year old woman living on a Limsan farm with her husband and toddler.  She was also the great grandniece of Wyatt Farr, a man and a name she’d never heard.

He had asked me to come along to help answer questions about the family line and how we got to her.  He also thought lalafel are inherently disarming due their stature and cheerful reputation.  I did point out that only applied outside of Ul’dah, since in Thanalan the unexpected arrival of a lalafel likely means you’ve just had your house foreclosed on.

She didn’t initially believe our story, but we were able to show the paperwork going back to barely legible scribbles on yellowing paper, and they eventually realized we were not trying to scam them with some convoluted inheritance ploy.  I explained the nature of the coins themselves, as well as their special value, and provided the name of a broker who could sell them on the collectible coins market.  I also gave them his estimate of the total value of the bag, which wound up being a number beyond her conception.  They offered us lunch, and it was very good.

It did sink in that we had given her a life-changing amount of money, courtesy of a man who died before her father was even born, while fighting in a war she’d never even heard of.  To say she was stunned would be to underplay it.

I do not have a good view of people.  I’ve seen normal people turn vicious the moment they miss a meal.  I’ve seen good people make colossal and disastrous mistakes due to inexperience, neglect, or a moment of avarice.  I have learned that when faced with a sudden turn of events, a person’s first reaction is often the best guide for how things will go.

In Adora’s case I knew it would be okay when she set the bag of coins aside and turned to us instead to ask “Wyatt…what can you tell me about him?”

[sam-and-buck]

At Home With Captain America

Fandom: MCU

Pairing: Sam Wilson/Bucky Barnes

Rating: G

Words: 7.7k

Also on AO3

“What can you tell me about how you got to know the Winter Soldier?”

Wilson chuckles. “The first time I met Buck—Sergeant Barnes—he ripped the steering wheel out of the car I was driving on the freeway. He got on the roof, punched through the windshield, pulled the steering wheel off. Just like that.” He mimes with his hands as he describes it.

This doesn’t sound like an auspicious beginning to me, but Wilson is laughing.

At Home with Captain America

By: Adrien Davis

Published: February 2, 2026, 3:35 PM 

To say I’m intimidated by interviewing Captain America in his own home would be an understatement, and I would never have thought to ask if I could do that if he hadn’t personally invited me. Normally, I’d start one of these articles by describing the location, maybe even throw in an anecdote or two about how I got there, but that’s not going to be possible here.

Sam Wilson lives on [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]. It was a windy day.

Here’s what I can tell you: it’s an apartment. A nice one. Two bedroom, two bath.

“Am I allowed to describe the inside of your house?” is one of the first things I say to him, after getting his permission to turn on my recorder.

“Go right ahead,” he laughs, arms crossed over the worn USAF logo on his gray t-shirt. “Just don’t put the street name in there or anything.”

Wilson gives me a moment to poke around. Whoever decorated this place has good taste; it’s no haphazard bachelor pad. There’s an exposed brick wall in the otherwise slate blue living room, several plants (which I assume are fakes—albeit convincing ones—since Wilson is, by his own admission, not home as often as he’d like to be), a sturdy walnut coffee table, and a magnificently squishy-looking red couch.

It’s unmistakably lived in, though. I don’t get the sense that the place has been scrubbed spotless or particularly arranged for my visit. There are two abandoned mugs on coasters sitting on the coffee table, along with several different remote controls, and a stack of half-finished books with dog-eared corners. A pile of mail has been pushed to the side. Next to the door, a wall-mounted coat rack holds several leather jackets in shades of brown and black, and at least as many sweaters, mostly navy blue, charcoal and maroon. The shoe rack underneath houses multiple pairs of black combat boots, worn running shoes, house slippers. And next to that, on the floor, a large, gleaming silver case with red detail that could only contain Wilson’s Falcon wingpack. The legendary shield is propped up against it, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I’m trying to imagine how it would be to leave the house for him. Got my keys, wings, phone, shield, wallet?

There are pictures on the walls and the mantle above the fireplace, under the television. People who I can only assume are Wilson’s relatives by their similarly gap-toothed smiles. Veterans. Wilson in full air force gear next to a blond man I don’t recognize. Then Captain Steve Rogers, in the 1940s with the Howling Commandos, and in the twenty-first century by himself. Wilson with Rogers, and Natasha Romanoff. One conspicuously empty nail where a large frame would clearly fit. 

Scattered among these are several very old, dour black and white photographs of a dark-haired family. The first shows a mother, father and two small children, a boy and girl. The second is the mother and children only, taken some time after, judging by their apparent ages. The third is several years later still; the same children with light eyes and dark hair, but they’re teeangers now, and without parents. They look haunting and out-of-place among the glossy prints of Wilson’s big, happy family in matching 80s colorblocked tracksuits, or Wilson and his sisters in front of a Christmas tree, surrounded by wrapping paper and toys.

There’s also a wood-framed painting that stands out: an idyllic watercolor of a little farmhouse with a green roof and shuttered windows in a field. A small pile of lumber and a white mailbox make up the foreground. The most distinctive feature is the signature at the bottom: S.G.R. I know those initials. 

“Captain Rogers painted this?”

“Uh huh,” Wilson nods fondly, hands now in his pockets. “Man of many talents. Maybe every talent. Having a hard time thinking of anything he wasn’t good at.”

I hear the unstated in that. A tough act to follow.

I think, for purposes of journalistic integrity, I should probably insert my bias before we go any further. We had never met before this interview, but I am and have always been enormously supportive of Captain Wilson and the work he’s done, and have written myriad articles and think pieces about him over the past several years. He’s shown himself time and again to be a man of unshakable integrity and endless emotional intelligence, and frankly, I’m more worried about the poor sucker who’s going to have to follow Wilson. Rogers did a lot of great things, but among the best of them was choosing a successor.

I tell him as much and he smiles, looking down at his shoes.

“Yeah, I know that’s how you feel,” he says. “I requested you for this piece, actually, because of that. People are going to accuse me of wanting a softball interview here, and maybe they’re right. For this one, I think that’s what I need.”

I’m not sure what he means by that, but he continues before I can ask.

“We should probably do this in the kitchen.” Wilson indicates behind us with his thumb, after I’ve stood silently in his living room for probably way too long. “That couch is too comfortable. I end up falling asleep every time I sit on it.”

The kitchen is, perhaps, a little cramped. There’s a large, dark marble-topped kitchen island that just fits in the center of the room with four bar stools tucked under it. The cabinets are tall, with glass doors showcasing a massive collection of healthy, but non-perishable food. The shelf nearest us holds several well-used bags of pantry supplies: chickpea flour, arrowroot starch, raw sugar. There’s a pasta shelf above it, but no Kraft Mac in sight; everything is lentil-based, chickpea-based, black bean-based.

“Have a seat,” Wilson says, inclining his head towards one of the barstools. “Can I get you something to drink?” He opens the refrigerator.

“We have…” he pauses. “Water. Sorry, just got back from Ecuador this morning. Sparkling or still?”

I accept a glass of still water from Captain America. He sits down on the stool next to mine.

His house, or what I’ve seen of it, is homey in a way I can’t imagine any of the late Tony Stark’s buildings ever were, and I mention this.

“I lived at the Avengers Tower briefly,” Wilson tells me. “Tony liked everything streamlined, really modern. Kinda sparse for my taste. I needed some real furniture when I got out of there, you know? Like, things that were made by human beings. Stuff with ‘character,’ that’s what Steve would call it.”

“So you decorated this place?”

“I think it’s about fifty-fifty,” Wilson says, indicated with vague hand motion.

This is my in.

This interview, as you may have read on the cover description, is actually intended to be an exposé about the working partnership between Wilson and Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, but I didn’t want to be the one who brought him up first. 

All I knew going in is that they’re a package deal in the field, a unit. We’ve all seen the footage.

Also, Barnes lives here too, but evidently, he’s not home.

“What can you tell me about how you got to know the Winter Soldier?”

Wilson chuckles. “The first time I met Buck—Sergeant Barnes—he ripped the steering wheel out of the car I was driving on the freeway. He got on the roof, punched through the windshield, pulled the steering wheel off. Just like that.” He mimes with his hands as he describes it.

This doesn’t sound like an auspicious beginning to me, but Wilson is laughing.

“I hope he apologized to you for that,” I tell him, because I’m not exactly sure how else to respond.

“Oh yeah, of course he did, even though he knows I don’t blame him for it. He doesn’t remember it at all,” says Wilson. “There are a lot of gaps, to be honest. Most of it is gaps.”

What Wilson is likely referring to here is the decades-long period in which Barnes was under the complete mental and physical influence of the Nazi splinter group known as HYDRA. If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Sergeant Barnes, I’ll list a couple of great articles for you to read at the end of this one. I assure you, it’s worth your time. 

Wilson has without a doubt been Barnes’s most ardent supporter. He’s spoken out many times about not judging Barnes based on the actions he couldn’t control, and has masterfully refocused the national conversation towards Barnes’s invaluable contributions in World War II and in the recent war to bring half the universe’s population back into existence. Wilson has been quoted as saying, “The least extraordinary thing about Sergeant Barnes is his vibranium arm.”*

But perhaps Wilson’s most effective act towards building public confidence in Barnes was his decision to designate him as an almost exclusive mission partner. Even if the general populace has been reluctant to trust the Winter Soldier, it is abundantly clear that Captain America does, absolutely. Barnes is a constant in the footage of Wilson’s exploits. The moment he touches down on the ground after a successful arrest or negotiation, Barnes is right there. He’s been sighted treating Wilson’s minor injuries, tightening straps on the Falcon wingsuit before Wilson takes flight, and he stands quietly behind Wilson during almost all of his many public appearances.

Despite his ubiquitous presence in Wilson’s company, Barnes has remained elusive for comment. He has no social media, and the only public statement he’s made to date was in November of 2023, in support of Rogers’s decision to pass on the legacy of Captain America. Barnes expressed his categorical agreement that Wilson is “the best and only choice for this job,” describing him as both “worthy of the honor,” and “equipped for the burden.”**

“Is it fair to say that Sergeant Barnes almost comes with the shield?” I ask.

Wilson makes a face.

“No, it isn’t,” he shakes his head. “The shield is an accessory; my partner is not. I really don’t like it when people lump him in with the shield. It sort of minimizes how Bucky and I have made a series of conscious choices to be the way we are now. Especially because he’s experienced being fully stripped of his personal autonomy—as a veteran, I can say I’ve had a taste of that, but nothing like what he’s been through—and I think it cheapens his choice to do what he does if we imply that he, as a person, is a package deal with my title, you know?”

The therapist in Wilson is showing. In addition to his decorated military history and service as Captain America, he has a background in psychology, and a Masters degree in Social Work with a focus on Veterans’ mental health issues. He’s worked extensively with the VA as a leader in group therapy.

“So Sergeant Barnes is by your side day in and day out because he wants to be?”

This, Wilson has another unequivocal answer for. “Yes. He wants to be there, and I want him there. And here at home.”

“Tell me a little more about that,” I say. “After the...steering-wheel-stealing incident. Once he was more or less himself. Did you two hit it off right away?”

Wilson laughs again. “Not at all,” he says. “I think there was this resentment, kind of, in the beginning. Like I’m Steve’s best friend and no, I’m Steve’s best friend. Real elementary school stuff. He really got on my nerves; just everything about him annoyed me, and the feeling was mutual. Looking back…”

And here Wilson pauses for a moment. He chews on his bottom lip, and I notice all at once how nervous his body language has become. His fingers are drumming on the table, the line of his shoulders is taut, his leg is bouncing. He clears his throat though, and seems determined to continue.

“Looking back, I can see where it was coming from. It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but now I get it. There was this one time, it was during the fight over the Accords. We barely knew each other at this point. Buck and I, we’re fighting Spider-Man—who neither of us had ever even heard of before, like, that afternoon—and he pins us to the floor of this hangar with that goo he shoots out of his wrist. Really gross. I manage to get Redwing [Wilson’s drone] to fling Spider-Man out the window. So we’re just laying there, me and Bucky, stuck. And he goes ‘you couldn’t have done that before?’ And I just turn to him, and I’m like, ‘I hate you.’”

At this, Wilson really starts cracking up. He relaxes visibly, just a little.

“Did you mean it?”

“I sure thought I did,” he says, still chuckling. “Like, I wasn’t about to take it back.”

He continues: “Anyway, so after Steve, you know, passed on the shield to me, that’s when things really changed. Actually, back up a second. After the whole Accords incident, we ended up sending Bucky to Wakanda for like… to hear him describe it, it’s like we sent him for a two-year spa retreat. They unscrambled his brain as best they could—and really, I think it’s a good thing they couldn’t do any more because I wouldn’t wish some of his memories on my worst enemy—and he spent like months meditating in a hut and milking goats and going to therapy every day. When I met up with him again, I barely would’ve recognized him.”

“So that’s kind of when you guys reconciled? The arguing stopped?”

“Oh, it never stopped,” Wilson says with a grin. “We still argue all the time, about all kinds of things. Just ask Rhodey [Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, aka War Machine] or Scott [Lang, Ant-Man] or anybody. But the dynamic shifted a little, I think. Bucky’s got… Like I can’t imagine some of the stuff he’s been through, but he’s just kind of learned to roll with it. He is hands down the most resilient person I have ever met. Easily. It was real hard to keep hating him when he was so dead set on getting me to like him, too.”

“Can you walk me through the process by which you two decided to live together?”

“Yeah,” he says, and the nervousness is back. He smooths his hands on his thighs over his jeans. “So, basically, once I got the shield, we’d just barely come back. Like everyone else who got… I—I still don’t know if this is like an okay question to ask people. Do you mind me asking if you were dusted?”

I don’t mind. “Yeah, I was.”

“So you get it,” Wilson says. “Might be the most vulnerable I’d ever felt. I got nothing. Nowhere to go, just the clothes on my back. Then Steve hands me this shield and this enormous legacy—and I look back and there’s Bucky, standing a couple of yards behind me, nodding like, yeah, it should be you. He was the first person who knew, and he’s been right by my side ever since.”

“So you decided to stick together?”

“The original conversation about it was pretty logistical,” Wilson says, rubbing his beard. “There was so much going on, it’s hard to remember exactly what was said, but I think it was along the lines of him offering to fetch the shield for me while I learned how to throw it, and stuff like that. Just easier to do when we’re together 24/7.”

“So rooming together didn’t actually grow out of field partnerships?”

“It was definitely the other way around,” says Wilson. “Basically, I’d get a call from the powers that be that there was something I had to go check out, and it was easier to just walk across the hall than to pick someone else, try to wake them up, and then have to rendez-vous and strategize.”

“I’ll bet,” I say.

Wilson nods. “Easier and faster. Bucky can go from dead asleep to fully geared up in under three minutes. The first few times were like that, with me just knocking on his bedroom door like ‘hey, I need—’ and he comes barreling out covered in knives thirty seconds later like, ‘where are we going?’ We just… clicked. And I’ll be honest; I was really surprised. He’s got my six, I’ve got his, and I never question it. I started asking for him specifically on all my assignments after that, and Fury [Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.] and everyone caught on quick that that’s how it was gonna be. I don’t have to ask anymore.”

“Do you see this continuing long term?” I ask.

Wilson doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely.”

“How would you describe your relationship with Sergeant Barnes now?” I ask. “Clearly you’re partners in the field, and roommates, but…”

Wilson takes a deep breath. His hands are shaking, but he clasps them together in front of him and looks me straight in the eye.

“As of last month,” he says slowly, “Bucky and I are married.”

In the spirit of my interview with Captain America, who stands for honesty and justice and integrity, I think you deserve to know the truth. I want to say that I didn’t drop my recorder, but I did. It clatters to the floor, luckily undamaged.

That startles Wilson into a laugh. For the second it takes me to retrieve my recorder from under my seat, I wonder if he’s kidding.

“Come on,” he says. “Say something. I’m getting nervous.” He’s smiling, but not joking.

“Congratulations,” I blurt out. “I...really?”

“Yeah.” The tension leaves his body in a rush. “We, uh, it’s official.”

I’m struggling for questions at this point. The talking points I was planning on hitting in this interview are all suddenly moot, and I decide to throw out my mental to-do list entirely. I finally settle on, “How long have you two been together?”

“A little over two years,” Wilson answers. “About three months after I took up the shield.”

“How did it happen?”

Wilson grins. “Uh, well. I had sort of been…having feelings about him, you know, for awhile. Actually, it’s more like I had noticed that I was having more-than-friendly feelings in the few weeks leading up to that. I think the main reason we had so much trouble getting along in the beginning is that it took some time to process those feelings as attraction. So in a way, I was interested on some level right from the get go.”

“Even if that person wasn’t...behind the wheel of their own brain, so to speak—” I start, but Wilson interjects.

“I see what you did there.”

“—I think it would take a lot for me to be attracted to someone who had previously tried to kill me.”

“Less than I would’ve expected, that’s for sure,” Wilson says. “But it’s not like I was checking him out while he was busy tearing my wings off my back; I’m talking about once he was mentally present in his body. That was like...two years after the whole steering wheel incident, and I hadn’t seen him at all in the interim. I didn’t even know where he was during that time.”

“So it had at least been awhile since he had tried to kill you?”

“Oh yeah. And plenty of other people tried to kill me in those two years, and they weren’t even sorry about it. You gotta adjust your standards, you know?” he says with a laugh.

“Anyway, if you ask him, he says he’s been all in since the moment he saw me back in Wakanda after his little vacation. Now we’re talking about four years since the steering wheel thing. Me, Steve, Nat and everybody; we landed in Wakanda and Bucky’s there. He and I look at each other over Steve’s shoulder, and like, bam, that was it for him. 

“And then there’s five years where neither of us exist. We get back, we fight the monsters, Steve gives me the shield, and while all this is happening, apparently Bucky has come to the conclusion that he’s in love with me. After that, he was just waiting for me to catch up.”

“And he just knew you’d get there? Did you give him any indication that you were interested, or…?”

“I definitely did, but not intentionally,” says Wilson. “He’s very perceptive—like way more than I was giving him credit for—but I think it’s a combination of that and me not being as subtle as I think I am.

“Because, see there’s this invisible line I’ve drawn here—at least that’s how he was thinking about it—and I keep dancing a little closer to that line every day, the line being the no homo line; the point where you can’t take it back. The flirting, I mean. I, of course, think he has no clue and that I’m being slick about it. Actually, lemme ask—how much detail are you looking for here? Like do you want to know the whole story or just—”

“Lay it on me,” I tell him. “Just however you want to tell it.”

“Alright. Where was I? So I’m just there going back and forth on whether or not it’s a good idea to risk this roommate-partner-buddy thing we’ve got going here by trying to make a move that, frankly, I have no clue if he’s gonna be receptive to. You have to remember we’re talking about a guy from the Great Depression here, like that’s the time period he grew up in. I’m no historian, but I think it’s common knowledge that if you were a man who was attracted to men back then, you mostly kept that to yourself. The chances of him bringing up his sexual orientation unprompted are very low. And like, I’m 90% sure I’ve caught him looking before, but that’s never a guarantee, you know?

“So, instead of sitting down and having a mature conversation about my feelings, I keep doing this thing where, for example, say he’s trying something new with his hair, and I’ll say something nice about it. And then I follow up immediately with, ‘Almost makes up for your ugly mug,’ or whatever, which—I mean, he’s such a good-looking guy, like what ugly mug, obviously I don’t mean that. And he’s not stupid, he knows what he looks like. So he picks up on what I’m doing, doesn’t say anything, and lets this go on for months.

“Eventually, there’s one night… We’re on the couch, watching like, I don’t know, Seinfeld or something. Whatever was on. He’s reading a book on my tablet, looking all relaxed and handsome. I can’t have that, so I start egging him on like I usually do, and I guess I got close enough to the line that he just puts the tablet down, turns to me and says, ‘Sam, you know there’s no line, right?’ 

“And I’m going, okay, what does that mean? Like, is this a conversation I was previously a part of and forgot or...? Where is this ‘line’ thing coming from? And so I ask him—I think I just said, ‘What?’ At that point he looks me right in the eye, and he goes, ‘You can kiss me if you want to.’” So I did, and he was ready for it, like no hesitation. Like I said: waiting for me to catch up.��

This, as you can imagine, is far beyond the level of detail I could have ever imagined I’d get about Captain America’s love life in my wildest dreams. I decide to ask a new question, because I feel like I’d be pushing my luck to delve further when he’s already been so open about this experience. 

“Who proposed and when?” 

“Ooh,” says Wilson, “I guess technically I did, but I’m gonna go on record saying that one was a group effort.”

“Well, now you’re gonna have to explain that,” I tell him. “What’s a ‘group effort’ proposal look like?”

“Hmm. I backed myself into that one, didn’t I?” he says. “First, I want the record to show that before I called you guys to set up this interview, I specifically asked Bucky if there were any us-related topics or whatever that were off-limits to discuss and he said ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Are you sure?’ and he said ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ and I said, “You better be sure, because whatever I say is gonna be public knowledge after that,” and he said “I know, I get it, Jesus.” Then I dropped it because he sounded like he was getting kinda irritated. If he didn’t want me to tell you any of this stuff, that would’ve been the time to speak up, so here we go:

“We were at… Well, I can’t tell you exactly where we were, but let’s just say we were working. There was nobody else in the room, but we were getting ready to go out in the field; seemed like it was gonna be a pretty...intense situation out there. I had my whole suit on, he was calibrating his arm, and the conversation ended up at living wills. As you can imagine, that’s an important thing to have when you’re in this line of work. So he proceeded to tell me that the last time he’d updated his was never and that his next-of-kin was nobody. And I was like, ‘So what, your grenade launchers are all gonna go to the state? I don’t even get the red one?’ and I’m just giving him a hard time, you know, and he’s like, ‘Sam.’ 

“And then, my god, he just goes all the way off about how much he loves me and trusts me and I—we don’t usually go there. I mean, we’d been on the same page for a long time as far as, we’ve established that we’re in love, this relationship is going well, but it’s not something that we’d verbalized in any real depth. That’s just a level of like, exposure, vulnerability, I think, that doesn’t come naturally to most people, myself included. 

“So he just keeps talking—and I think it’s fair to say he’s not a very talkative guy most of the time—and I’m standing there with my jaw on the floor because he is not holding back, and this is all clearly unrehearsed. Like, this is just how he really feels about me, apparently. By the time he’s finished, I’m crying, he’s crying, it’s a mess. And so I open my mouth, and I have no idea what I’m gonna say to all that, but what comes out is, “Will you marry me?” I wasn’t planning on it, but suddenly I just knew. Best decision I ever made.”

“And you’ve made some very important decisions in your life.”

“That’s right. I know which ones I’m leaving out by saying this was the best, and I stand by it.”

At that moment, as if on cue, the lock clicks, and Sergeant Barnes walks through the front door carrying two very full bags of groceries on his vibranium arm. He tosses a set of car keys into a little dish and locks the door behind him.

“Hey, babe,” Wilson calls out, catching his eye.

“You did it?” Barnes asks.

“Yeah.” Wilson tilts his head up.

Barnes rounds the corner, pecks Wilson on the lips with all the comfort and familiarity of a couple who have done it a thousand times. I hear him murmur, “Proud of you,” under his breath.

Barnes sets the groceries on the counter in front of me as Wilson introduces us.

“Call me Bucky,” says Barnes, reaching out with his right hand to shake mine. There’s a silver band on the fourth finger, and when I look back over at Wilson, he’s slipping his wedding ring out of the pocket of his jeans and putting it back on his left hand.

“Wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go through with all this,” he says, gesturing to me and my notepad. “I took the wedding pictures down in the living room too, before you got here.”

“I knew he could do it,” Barnes tells me. His voice is low, soft, and so quiet, a hint of an old Brooklyn accent underlying his words even now, despite everything he’s been through and everywhere he’s been. He shrugs out of his nondescript hoodie and tosses it on one of the unused stools, grabbing a kettle and putting it on the stove.

“Hibiscus or chamomile?” he asks me, pulling two boxes of tea bags from one of the grocery bags and letting me choose before turning to Wilson. “Bad news, hon. They were out of your whole wheat pita.”

“Again?” says Wilson, with feeling. “Really?”

“They only had the gluten free. I guess I could check the other store tonight, but it’s supposed to rain later, and I kinda don’t feel like going out again,” Barnes says, head buried in the cupboard as he stacks cans. “I was thinking maybe I could just try making ‘em. How does that sound? How hard can it be, right?”

“‘How does homemade pita sound,’ he says,” Wilson repeats, jabbing a thumb towards Barnes. “Can you believe this guy?”

“I honestly can’t.” It’s the truth. My brain refuses to reconcile this man with the supposed playboy I read about in my 11th grade history textbook, nor the internationally feared assassin.

“Is that a yes or no on the experimental homemade pita?” Barnes asks Wilson, still deep in the cupboard. “No promises on quality.”

“That’s a yes, Buck,” says Wilson, then he turns to me. “Don’t listen to him; he’s a great cook.”

The Winter Soldier is a great cook, I write in my notes. And then I realize this is my moment to shine.

“I actually know a good recipe for homemade pita,” I tell them. “It’s whole wheat.” That gets Barnes’s attention.

“You do?” he says, pulling out his phone. “Can you send it to—hmm.” He frowns. “Sam, it’s not showing the thing.”

“What thing?” Wilson asks, taking Barnes’s phone from his hand. “Oh, yeah, that’s cause it’s set to Contacts Only, Buck, you have to switch it to Allow Everyone.”

Wilson looks at me, smiling. “Bucky here hates technology—”

“—I don’t hate technology—”

“Oh yes you do, you won’t even let me get you an iPad—”

“Yeah, for what? What do I need it for? I wouldn’t even use—”

“You wouldn’t use one, huh? How about I stop letting you borrow mine for a couple of weeks, then we’ll see how you feel.” Wilson turns to me, passing Barnes’s phone back to him. “He should be showing up on your AirDrop now.”

Sure enough, I’m able to send the recipe link to Bucky’s iPhone. He thanks me and starts scrolling right through it, argument apparently totally forgotten.

As Barnes continues to read, periodically checking on the kettle; Wilson excuses himself to help put away the rest of the groceries, which are mostly produce. 

“I hope you have like, immediate plans for these,” Wilson says, inspecting the avocados as he pulls them out of the paper bag. “They are ripe, man. Tomorrow’s gonna be too late for them.”

“Yeah I do, I was gonna make grilled chicken and avocado sandwiches for dinner,” Barnes replies. “I got tomatoes, swiss cheese—”

“What’s all this about pita then if we’re having sandwiches?” Wilson asks.

“No, the pita is the bread here,” Barnes explains. “You stuff everything in the pocket. I’m gonna have to get started pretty soon; probably gonna double the rising time since it’s cold out.” Wilson hums in apparent approval of this course of action.

I lose Wilson to the refrigerator for several minutes. He stands back up after arranging things in the crisper to his liking.

“Any chance I could get a peek at those wedding pictures?” I ask.

“Oh,” says Wilson. “That okay with you?” He turns to Barnes, who nods, carefully steeping bags of tea in three steaming mugs, and then leads me back to the living room. 

Wilson has stashed two silver-framed pictures in a drawer of the coffee table, apparently in anticipation of my visit, and he pulls them out to show to me. Both are taken in front of a familiar-looking farmhouse, which I struggle with for a moment before placing it as the exact one in Captain Rogers’s watercolor painting that’s hanging to my left. Wilson’s suit in the photo is a matte but brilliant shade of cobalt; Barnes wears black.

One is of just the two of them, arms around one another and foreheads together. It’s almost too intimate to look at; I feel as though I’m intruding on something intensely private, even though Wilson is standing right here offering me a glimpse of it.

He puts that one back up onto the mantle.

The next is them in the center of a large group that consists of some people I recognize and others I don’t. Familiar faces include Dr. Bruce Banner [The Hulk], Clint Barton [Hawkeye], and Maria Hill [Deputy Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.]. Also present: King T’Challa of Wakanda and his sister, Princess Shuri. There’s a young girl in a white dress, carrying a flower basket and missing a front tooth, standing in front of [C.E.O. of Stark Industries] Pepper Potts. Next to them is a teenager with floppy brown hair doing an indescribably awkward double thumbs up.

“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing at him.

Wilson snorts. “Some punk. Family friend.”

That picture gets hung on the empty nail next to Captain Rogers’s painting.

Barnes knocks quietly on the doorway behind us. “Tea’s ready.”

An awkward silence settles in with us once we sit back down in the kitchen, Wilson and Barnes next to one another, and me across from them. I flip through my notes, taking a sip from my mug.. My drink is sweeter than I was expecting, because apparently the Winter Soldier has added agave to the hibiscus tea he made me. It’s delicious.

Barnes eventually breaks. “So whatcha go over so far?”

“How we got together, how we got engaged,” Wilson answers him. “In detail too, so if you don’t want that published, you’re gonna have to grovel at the journalist yourself, because you said—”

“Oh my god,” says Barnes, old-school New York sarcasm dripping from every word. “How dare you tell people about the best thing I ever did, huh? Now they’re gonna think I’m like, a sensitive, good guy, and here I’ve been coasting along on this murder cyborg image. What have you done, you dick?”

Wilson rolls his eyes.

“So...you’re okay with it?” I ask them, absolutely ready to scrub the record if he hesitates.

“You kidding me?” says Barnes. “Every other week comes up some new atrocity I committed against my will in like...the 70s, and you think I’m gonna be upset with people knowing that once in a while I say nice shit to someone I love? Write it. Please. Knock yourself out.”

Okay then. Since Barnes seems willing to talk, I ask them if I can throw them a few questions I have for them as a couple. Barnes looks as though he wasn’t anticipating this.

Wilson turns to him. “You wanna be here for this?”

Barnes nods slowly, hesitantly, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“You’re okay?” Wilson asks. “You decide you’re done at any point and I’ll end it. Or you can go hang out in the other room, your call.”

“I’m good for now,” Barnes decides. “I’ll let you know if that changes.”

“You can ask whatever you want,” Wilson says to me. “I can’t promise we’ll answer everything, but go ahead and shoot.”

“I guess the first question I have is: what’s the hardest thing about navigating your jobs as a couple? What bothers you the most about that?”

Wilson exhales loudly. “I mean, the obvious answer is the danger,” he says. “The nature of what we do is fundamentally unsafe. I think it goes without saying—I’ll still say it—that we’re always aware that one of us might not make it back from a mission, which is...” Wilson trails off for a moment, shaking his head. “You don’t get used to that feeling. The fear.”

“Mm hmm,” Barnes agrees, from behind his mug.

“And,” continues Wilson, “I’m also aware that by doing this interview, I’m putting Bucky in additional danger. I’m not naive enough to think that the people working against us won’t try to use my relationship with him as leverage against me.”

“That makes sense,” I say, because he’s absolutely right, and pretending that public knowledge of his marriage doesn’t put them both in a new kind of danger seems disingenuous. I face Barnes. “Your turn.”

“Racist assholes,” says Barnes immediately.

Wilson smirks and cocks his head in agreement. “Sometimes I think I’ve talked that subject to death, other times it’s like I could never hope to address it enough. Today feels like the first one.”

A diplomatic, but clear answer. Time to move on. 

I’m about to ask the next question when he adds: “Another thing that gets under my skin is how it’s like Bucky’s image in the eyes of the general public is totally dependent on me hyping him up all the time. As far as I’m concerned, he’s proven himself a hundred times over, and yet if I’m not on T.V. reminding people of that every day, it’s suddenly like ‘oh, the Winter Soldier, can we ever really trust him?’ 

“I just… It bothers me. I want us to come to a collective understanding that everything that happened happened to Bucky, not because of him. It kinda circles back into another of the things I’m passionate about, which is mental health care and awareness. I think if we as a society were better about recognizing and addressing mental illness, and particularly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I wouldn’t have to keep having this conversation about my husband.”

Barnes’s face is getting pinker and he says nothing, but he’s smiling a little at Wilson, who puts an arm around his shoulders.

“Anyway, we can move on,” says Wilson, his expression going easy again. “Just had to get that out there one more time.”

“Hopefully this one’s a little more pleasant,” I say. “What inspired you to come forward about your relationship? I know you guys—” I gesture between them, ”—have been together for a couple years, so why now?”

“I want to go on a date in public,” says Bucky. “I haven’t been on a date since the 40s.”

“That’s right,” says Wilson. “We’re doing all this so I can take him Denny’s and hold his hand over a $6.99 Super Slam.”

When I finish laughing, Wilson continues. “Part of it’s because we realized it’s gonna get out there whether we like it or not. You already knew when you got here that we lived together, and that’s because that information got leaked to the public last week, so it was always just a matter of time before people found out anyway. I’d rather have some control over that narrative; better you hear it from me and Bucky, how we want to tell it, than in some tabloid.”

He’s right about that: they would undoubtedly have been outed one way or another. Their status as “roommates” was reported by TMZ a week and a half ago, and there was a Buzzfeed piece only yesterday, rife with gifs, entitled 15 Times Captain America and The Winter Soldier Made Us Wish We Were Their Third Roommate, that ended on the note of how Wilson and Barnes are “absolute BFF GOALS.” Wilson continues:

“But I think the biggest reason is that we decided, together, that we actually think it’s good for people to  know. I’ve seen firsthand the impact that having a Black Captain America has had on the Black community and on the national topic of race, and we think—we hope—that a Captain America who is a member of the LGBT community will have a similar effect. 

“The people who already hate me aren’t going to like me any better or worse for being bisexual, but some bisexual teenager out there is hopefully gonna read this article and feel a little bit better about themselves than they did before. That’s really the impact I want to have here. Got anything to add, Buck?”

“Actually, yeah,” says Barnes, staring at the counter in front of him and fiddling with his wedding ring. “I grew up gay in thirties. The idea of being able to just...tell people, that’s still amazing to me. The fact that I’m sitting here talking about it with a stranger and you’re not screamin’ in my face right now…”

“You do know I’m not straight either, right?” I ask him. I’m not exactly shy about that, it’s the kind of thing most people can tell just by looking at me.

“Even so,” says Barnes, finally looking me in the eye. “You fool around with a fella back in the day—or worse, you make a pass and he turns you down—then he knows about you, and then it’s like, what if he tells someone? Some of the worst shit I ever saw came from people who found out that way. So, other gay guys. Basically you never felt safe.”

“What about Captain Rogers?” I ask. “Did he know?”

“Oh yeah, Steve knew,” says Barnes with a dismissive wave of his hand, like that ought to be obvious. “He wasn’t gonna tell anyone; I got too much dirt on him.“

“Pfft. He’s messing with you,” Wilson interjects, directed at me. “There’s no dirt on Steve anywhere; believe me, I’d know by now if there was.”

“I want you to guess how many times I’ve had to clean up Steve’s puke,” says Barnes in a total deadpan, leaning forward. “Whatever number you think it is, the real answer is higher. 

“This again,” says Wilson. “I keep telling you Buck, Steve throwing up on you at Coney Island isn’t the big scandalous story you seem to want it to be.”

“Sam wasn’t there, he didn’t see it,” Barnes insists. “We were with these girls and they just left us standing there by the Cyclone, covered in hot dog chunks. Actually, that part was kind of a relief ‘cause one of ‘em was definitely jonesing for me to kiss her before that, and I really didn’t want to. 

“But seriously, after everything we went through together, I knew I could trust Steve with anything. And that made me luckier than most—at least I had one person. Lots of guys had no one. 

“Anyway, my reasons for coming out with all this are probably more selfish than Sam’s. You know some of those Nazis—we’re callin’ ‘em something else these days, like ‘alt-right’ or whatever, but I know a Nazi when I see one—they have this crazy idea of what I was like back in the day. They’ve got this fantasy, like a golem of toxic masculinity with my face on it, and I just want to publicly shit on their dreams. Every date I ever went on with a girl was a total sham, and I was scared down to my bones that someone would figure that out. I fight because someone needs to and I’m good at it, but I hate hurting people and I’d much rather be sitting here cuddling on the couch with a man. This man.”

Barnes is grinning big and wide by the time he finishes—a real, genuine smile that brings out the sparkle in his eyes—and suddenly I feel like I’m catching a glimpse of what Wilson must be seeing in him. Wilson himself is laughing.

“I like how you snuck your little buzzword in there, baby,” he says. “Toxic masculinity. That’s one of Bucky’s things he learned about from his Wakandan therapist. 

“Obviously super important,” Wilson adds, lest I think he’s making light of something serious.

“I think it’s great that we’re talking about it so openly now, especially with respect to the military.”

Barnes tilts his head in agreement, checking the time on his phone. We’re probably approaching the point at which he wants to get started on that pita bread, and I’m definitely in his way.

“So what’s next for you guys?” I ask.

“Isn’t that always the question?” Wilson asks, taking Barnes’s right hand in his left and resting them, intertwined, on the countertop. “Sometimes it’s aliens. Sometimes not. Who even knows anymore?”

“Hopefully, a whole lot more of this,” says Barnes, looking down at their hands.

Wilson smiles. “Well, that’s a given. That’s always.”

This is when Barnes gets up to pull a stand mixer out of one of the cupboards, and I read that as my cue to take my leave. I end my recording, Wilson thanks me for stopping by, I promise to give him an advance copy of my writing to make sure he’s comfortable with what I said, and I find myself standing back on the sidewalk of [REDACTED] moments later.

I’m not typically in the habit of including as many details about the dinner plans of my article subjects as I have here—and I’m certainly testing the limits of my editor’s patience with the word count—but in the spirit of Wilson’s wishes for what his coming out story will mean to the people of America, I wanted to emphasize how human his marriage is. 

Barnes and Wilson have extraordinary jobs that they are undoubtedly uniquely suited for and that most of us will never fully understand, but they are also two people who have been through a lot of hardship and found happiness and peace in one another. And that’s something that most of us do understand: love, the human experience that transcends the divisions we give ourselves.

*From a press conference Wilson gave on May 7, 2025.

**From a statement written by Barnes and issued through a S.H.I.E.L.D. representative on November 1, 2023.

For further reading on Barnes, the author recommends: 

1. Greatest Generation X: The Impossible Life of James Buchanan Barnes, by Ariel Guzman, published in 2025.

2. R.Y. Uhlencott’s column “The Wolf of Brooklyn” in the October 2024 issue of Time covers the basic timeline and trajectory of Barnes’s life.

[secret-engima]

hamelin-born

@secret-engima

Oscar likes green. It’s that simple. Yes, he does have a lot of fond memories linked to the color green, and yes, having everything be green means that any magic he choses to use has a good chance of being lost against the background, but - green’s his favorite color. It’s that simple. He’d probably honestly be a little amused at hearing all the frantic speculation about his reasons behind the color scheme.

...the fact that The Emerald City made appearances in the hometowns of what would grow to become Team JNPR is totally a coincidence. Right? Yes. A total coincidence.

*snicker* That is perfectly in character. Mercury probably sarcastically suggested that Oscar’s animated cane-weapon be given the name of ‘Short Term Memory’ or something along those lines. Oscar, true to himself, decided - hey, his cane was a living thing, it should have the chance to chose it’s own name!

That is why the cane proudly bears a name suspiciously similar to ‘Toto’.  

Whitley is cheering on Oscar’s efforts to make miniatured rainbows, and looking up all the information on color spectrum and prisms. He too wants to be able to, one day, see a grumpy person with a personalized raincloud above their head! A raincloud that will break into rainbows when they smile and/or laugh!  And they know just the perfect test subject...

Somewhere, Qrow feels a shiver run down his spine.

Oscar did not set out with the intention of kidnapping Whitley. It just - happened? And ooh, but I love seeing Whitley’s perspectives of his first meeting with Oscar. It’s just - Oscar accidentally come off as mysterious and colorful and almost fae; it’s amazing. And just - I’m suddenly struck by the parallels with another modern fairy tale - namely, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Oscar doesn’t sugarcoat the danger when he offers to take Whitley away; he lays out everything in his offer, and leaves it Whitley’s decision.

And Whitey - comes away.

He never regrets it.

A couple of random thoughts about the Schnee Family Debacle: Actually, Qrow might initially be afraid that the ‘Schnee Bingo’ is indirectly aimed at Ironwood. Because Winter is - relatively close in Ironwood’s confidence, I believe. And the whole ‘dragging the family’s sin’s into the light?’ It is going to impact her, one way or another. And everyone who is aware of ‘Schnee Bingo’ is going to wonder just what they did for the Ringmaster to respond like this - speculation goes anywhere from realistic to highly improbable.

The smart ones, upon uncovering the evidence of what the Schnee family does to their kids, think that that probably has something to do with it.

Me: @hamelin-born 

The reblog chain this is from is getting really long, so I decided to snag this and start a new post with it. XD

Oscar likes green! It means growing things and life! And yes it does hide his magic rather well :3

The fact that Emerald City has been all over the world and stopped in hometowns of SEVERAL main characters is total coincidence yes. :3 Just like how it is TOTAL coincidence that sometimes, a child or two is invited backstage to meet the tiny Ringmaster. >:333

(Pyrrha remembers that circus years later, how she was 14 and just starting to really get famous and realize how much fame sucked, and she didn’t have her parent’s permission to go to the Circus just outside Argus but she did anyway and it was a night she would never forget. A magical, beautiful night, and then the little Ringmaster, a boy younger than her, smiled and sang a song that brought tears to the eyes and somehow- it felt like he was looking right at her.) 

(She remembers being invited backstage by one of the acrobats, a cocky boy her age with silver hair, and at first she thought they were doing it because she was “Pyrrha Nikos” but- they never mentioned it. They never even asked her name. They just led her backstage to the tiny Ringmaster in his top hat and cane and workshop of wonders. He smiled at her and asked her name. She blinked and cautiously asked if he didn’t know it already. The boy twirled his cane and seemed a little too old for his childish appearance as he said “How could I? We’ve never met before. Though,” his smile had gone a little ... something at the edges, sad or wild or maybe even fae like her grandmother’s old stories, “I may have met your shadow along my roads, and for that I suppose I owe you thanks.”)

(“...Thanks? To me?” She asks, and the boy hums as he starts performing magic tricks right there, just for her, reappearing and disappearing of various trinkets and tools. Yes, he tells her, and then he pulls out a beautiful little necklace, a slender gold chain with a glimmering stone in the shape of a juniper tree, he offers it to her, and she wonders if it’s her imagination that the stone tree feels warm and alive on her palm, you don’t remember, he hums gently, but you once told my best friend that you believed in him, and it quite possibly saved his life. He never told me your name, but he told me about the Argus girl with red hair and kind eyes, and I dare say you fit the description to a T.)

(The Ringmaster smiles at her and gestures at the little necklace, “Keep it, as a thank you. May it bring you good fortune and safe passage, no matter where your destiny leads.” Not long after, she was led out by another of the acrobats, and it was only after she’d gotten home and was staring at the ceiling of her bedroom that she realized she was automatically wearing the necklace. And that the stone still felt warm.)

(If anyone bothers to ask Pyrrha Nikos after that if she believed in magic, she will touch the pendant of a tree that she always wears around her neck and say yes. Magic is real. And so are little fairy boys with kind green eyes.)

(Annnnd now I wanna do some drabbles of the main cast meeting the Emerald City circus and having encounters with the mysterious little Ringmaster XD)

Mercury so suggests “short-term memory” but Oscar solemnly says the cane should have a say. It picks the name “Total Remembrance” and Mercury laughs his head off while Neo gleefully calls the cane a sarcastic little twig. They shorten the name to “Toto” for Oscar’s sanity.

Whitley is a glee the day they get the spell to WORK. Now- to find their first test subject. Emerald: I’LL GO LEAD HIM HERE *flies off as a gremlin magpie*

Oscar doesn’t know it, but he comes off as a little bit fae (or a lot fae) to a LOT of people. He can’t help it, with his connection to magic and his future memories and the way he acts and dresses he just- feels like a storybook wizard or fairy boy stepped out of the pages. And gosh, Oscar is totally like Peter Pan in his kidnapping of Whitley. XD Just- he offers adventure and danger and love and FAMILY. Come away with me? whispers his magic and his outstretched hand, and Whitley is far from the only person to have taken it over the years (look at his time-traveling crew), and he never regrets it.

Oh gosh I didn’t think of that. Qrow WOULD possibly think this was a jab at Ironwood, but ... not necessarily because of Winter? Depending on when this happens she might only be newly graduated. No wait the hammer fall happens in canon, so yeah there is the Winter connection, but ALSO, in canon Ironwood is implied to be an old, estranged friend of the family, and further, as a Council member, he and Jaques have to deal with each other on a professional level. Taking down the Schnees could be seen as a personal jab through Winter yes, but also as a threat, that if they can take out the Schnees, who are roughly equal Ironwood’s status and known “friends” (for a loose definition of the word) of the General, then what can they do to Ironwood directly?

The smart criminals look at the confidants of their Ringmaster, who are mostly kids, and a few of them know that the Ringmaster looks like a child himself and they ... well. Put some pieces together.

[xivu-arath]

the taste of salt

for @synnthamonsugar! you requested, among other things, the possibility of savathun and lavinia conversing, and this idea just about consumed me afterwards (and shoutout to nem who managed to mention this exact same idea idly during lorechat and terrify me immensely). I also just associate these two with you at this point, as I think you were the one to point out lavinia had met savathun at the end of her journey to me!!

anyways, I think it’s only been this year that we’ve known each other but I’m very glad that we’ve met!

(AO3)

“My nephew died,” the witch continues, as if talking about the weather. “Just a little while ago.”

“Oh,” Lavinia says, before she can think better of it. “I’m sorry.”

Lavinia is in a cage. She worked that part out very quickly. But it is a cage made like a dream, and it works like a dream, and that makes it difficult to resent. Either the witch is not there, or she is, and might well have always been. Lavinia has tried thinking of her in other terms, even by the few names she can dredge up from pre-Golden Age myths, but they slide off as if oiled. The witch refuses all other titles.

Today – if there are days here, as the only way she can tell time is by the witch’s visits – the tea the witch pours for them both is a dark, smoky blend that she remembers from her time as a student, poring over every new secret and mystery in the archives.

It is also a blend that no longer exists; the plants, the supply chain that brought it to the city, the process and the knowledge behind it all lost, excised by a raid by one species or another. One infinitesimal loss out of trillions. Yet here it is, rewound, warming her hands. The flavour makes her eyes sting, and when she is done blinking the feeling away, the witch is watching her, smiling.

The witch’s eyes are very green, and pin her like knives.

“I really must thank you, Lavinia. You’ve been such a help. But you won’t mind a change in plans, will you?” she says, the question relentlessly rhetorical.

(Lavinia still wonders about Nasya. What things would have been like, if she could have gone with her. Would things have been different, or would she be a pawn in a different set of schemes?)

But at least someone is listening. Someone cares about the truths she has uncovered. Someone who very much does not want to be discovered.

“My nephew died,” the witch continues, as if talking about the weather. “Just a little while ago.”

“Oh,” Lavinia says, before she can think better of it. “I’m sorry.” The mention of family has jarred her out of any sense of caution, even with her thoughts scrambling for how long a while could possibly mean in such a place, what else she might possibly glean from such a short statement. She still has to say something.

“How kind of you.” There is something heavy and ill-fitting about the words as she says them, but the smile remains. “It wasn’t entirely unexpected,” she adds, almost confiding. “He was a clever child, but precocious. He took risks. It made him much like his father, though they would both have hated to hear it. You know how family is.”

Lavinia bites her lip, thinking of her mother, voice shaking through each syllable of her names when they argued. “I am sorry about your nephew, but I don’t see what this has to do with me –”

“We had made a great deal of plans, and it is up to me now to carry them through,” the witch continues, serenely ignoring her input, and her eyes glitter with what has to be laughter. “And it has occurred to me that you’ve been rather neglected here, after everything you’ve brought to my doorstep. You have been wasted for far too long, haven’t you? By your City, of course, and the Reef after that.”

Lavinia swallows, and sets her cup down. The flavour of home has encountered a large lump in her throat, and cannot seem to get past.

“I do,” says the witch, pensive, “hate to see waste.”

“I’ve told you so much,” she says, shying away from her certainty of how terrible a choice – was it a choice, really? – it was to do so. “I’ve told you everything I know. What more could you want with me?”

Maybe it’s still the thought of her mother, and the City, and an entire beautiful, ransacked planet she’ll never see again, that makes Lavinia fling the teacup right at her captor’s face.

The tea spills in a beautiful, gleaming arc. The cup catches on nothing as the air stutters, and she tastes salt and seawater for an instant – and then the world resumes.

They are sitting at the table. The wind howls and makes the branches of the trees outside tap at the windows. The fire crackles. The teacups sit, now empty.

“Feeling better, dear?” the witch asks dryly.

Her shoulders hunch. “No.”

“But you had to try it, anyways, didn’t you? Even though you’ve already learned the rules for this space.” She is still speaking more slowly, thoughtfully, and Lavinia finds she hates it. The conversational pleasantries and veiled condescension are... well, not fine, but they are a game Lavinia has a chance at keeping up with.

This is the witch slowly baring the blade of her intellect, and it is terrible – because of how deliberately she does it, because Lavinia is afraid and yet at the same time, she’s blundering towards trying to understand –

“You too are bound by your nature, after all.” The witch’s eyes are impossibly bright now, almost burning. She is reminded of the auroras over areas blasted by radiation, their very brilliance an implicit warning. “So our cycles continue onward.” She leans forward, and Lavinia scoots back without meaning to.

“If I had left you with the Nine, yours would have ground you to dust by now.”

“And captivity is so much better,” she says, desperately bold. If the witch needs her for something else, she’s scarcely going to get rid of her now.

The witch beams, and Lavinia knows she has somehow set her foot right back into another trap. “In this case, you’ll find it is.

“Tell me, Lavinia. How would you like to go home?”

All her fleeting bravado drains away. “Home? You can’t mean – I’m an exile. The City cast me out. I can’t go back.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind, even if this whole unfortunate journey started to fix that, to prove something so true and important the City would have to allow her to return....

“Oh,” the witch says. “I think your knowledge is exactly what they need right now. Your City will be grateful enough to welcome you back with open arms.”

Questions boil up with more than a tinge of urgency, and Lavinia chokes them down. Either the witch won’t answer them, or she will, and those answers will lead her further astray. She has to stay focused, clear-headed. Never her strong suit when cornered, but she rather thinks all the perilous situations have toughened her nerves just a little since she had crept into the Cryptarch’s vault. Would she have stared down those Guardians, maybe –

(Rambling again, Lavinia. Focus.)

It’s rather like phrasing the right question to get her master’s approval – not a task she was very good at to begin with – but the stakes are so much higher. Her pulse pounds in her ears. “Just sending me back for my own sake would be another waste, wouldn’t it?”

The witch smiles at her like the most terrifying grandmother she’s never had. “It just so happens that I am in need of an envoy to the City, since my last one was so rudely killed –”

“Killed?”

“Do keep up, Lavinia,” she says impatiently, and several pieces fall together in quick succession. Her nephew. Of course. “You’ll have a far more merciful reception than he did. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Lavinia almost wishes she had the simulated tea back just so she could busy herself while thinking very, very fast. Why would an enemy of the City – and she refers to the City and the Reef with such airy distance, like they are such small things – want to speak to it? There’s no question that going to the City on her behalf would be a bad idea. No question that, just as before, she has little choice.

So much for luck.

“And what would I be saying?” Her voice doesn’t quite waver. The witch is offering her what they both want. “As your envoy.”

“All sorts of things. Some of them may even be true.” The witch’s eyes narrow, and Lavinia feels the threat in her drifting attention.

“I’ll do it,” she says quickly, before she can think long enough to regret it. She can hear her master and Rahool and Ikora Rey all despairing of her in the back of her mind. So quick to make choices, so reckless. “Take me back.”

“First,” the witch says. “You must speak my name.”

She reels. “What? But – but you haven’t told me your name. I don’t know it.”

The look she gets is pitiable and mocking, a teacher exasperated by a favourite student. “Surely that shouldn’t be a problem for you. I’ve given you more than enough to find it.”

With growing dread, Lavinia realizes that this is true. How many enemies of humanity have notable relatives? The only ones she can think of are Oryx and his sons, all dead. But Oryx had sisters somewhere out beyond the solar system, circling with their armies and fleets out in deep space....

“Savathûn,” she whispers. “You’re Savathûn.”

“The pact is made,” Savathûn says, and her smile is decidedly sharp-toothed. “Let’s get you to where you belong.”

The warm and pleasant cage of a room shreds itself apart, and Lavinia tastes salt for the last time.

[samwrights]

When The Birds Came

I got Persona 5 Royal as a Christmas gift from my husband and you can bet your ass I fell head-over-heels for Iwai Munehisa and Sakamoto Ryuji. In general, I love loud blonde’s and dads. This is also the first time I haven’t made the reader a smoker (yay, good job Sam) when I very well could have.

Anyway, this is my “yay I’m back from a massive hiatus” piece in which you could tell my main focus was being more descriptive with the NSFW portion as well as continuity. I also am now trying to make lengthy playlists on Spotify to encourage myself and my readers. You can find me on Spotify under the name overxhaul.

Title taken from the song “Prey” by The Neighborhood. 

And yes, I am very aware I love writing ridiculously stupid long oneshots. Sue me.

➳ Pairing: Reader x Iwai Munehisa

➳ Word count: 16,076

➳ Warnings: language, vague child neglect, daddy issues, mommy issues lack of contraceptives, slight breeding kink, slight daddy kink, slight cum play, overstimulatioin, squirting, obviously nsfw

“Come again soon!” You gave a wave to the young man you’d just handed his boba to. Presumably, he was still in middle school, as made noticeable by the school uniform, but he had been coming every day later in the evening before skulking off to the alley around the corner from your little boba shop in Shibuya. Maybe one day you would remember to ask his name, you muse silently. It was even more amusing to note that he always grabbed two drinks when he did come—maybe his sweetheart was too shy to order their own drink, so this little gentleman always handles it for the both of them?

You were merely speculating the minor details of this boy’s life; a telltale sign that you have entirely too much time on your hands. Flicking your wrist upward, you check your watch and assume it’s alright to close up now. It was nearing nine and while Shibuya was relatively peaceful, there has been whispers of shady business deals passing through and you would rather not get caught up in the mess. After packing up all the toppings and washing all the dishes, you locked up your little shop, waving goodbye to nearby vendors as you shut the door.

The tinkling bells over the door drown out as you take a step back, the familiar noise muting as your focus shifts to the abrupt feeling of your back colliding against a squishy but firm wall. Following it was the sound of an abrupt grunt. Immediately, you whip your head around ready to apologize profusely only to be met with a chest. Cautiously, you tilted your head back to look the man in the face—whether merely to apologize or to subconsciously register his face in your memory system in the event he came back to kill you, you weren’t sure—only to be met with steely grey eyes. “S-sorry,” you manage to stutter out, just to receive a bored grunt in reply. His lackluster response prompts you to take a step back away from the man that towered over you, allowing him to move past you with little to no acknowledgement of your remorse.

Silently, the man stuffs his hands into his coat pockets while the crunching of what sounds like glass shatters between his teeth. Unbeknownst to you, you let out an audible gasp—as if trying to remind yourself to breathe—at the noise before you shut your gaping mouth and clench your jaw. The thirty second exchange had left the impression on you that he was dangerous—the hunter versus the hunted. Predator versus prey.

Him versus you.

Had your mind not been too preoccupied with his broad form skulking away from you, you might have noticed the half-drunken plastic cup in his hand with little black boba pearls settled at the bottom. Instead, you had only thought you had felt those vicious eyes boring into the back of your skull as you walked home to your little apartment in the outskirts of town. As if he were standing in every alleyway waiting for the opportunity to pounce—to the point where you were keeping your head down while peeking out the corner of your eyes to see if anyone else was around.

You figured you were being silly and paranoid—even more so when you had entered your apartment and cautiously flicked on the lights before even removing your shoes. You knew you were being paranoid when you ripped back the curtains to your shower as if some serial killer were going to be behind it. And you knew you were going absolutely overboard when you triple checked all the locks on your front door and made sure to close and lock your bedroom door as if that were going to enough to deter a predator.

It was ridiculous to even think you, a mere insignificant fly, was capable of leaving a lasting impression on the man as he did on you. It wasn’t like you were bound to cross paths with him again, you argued with yourself.

He had no reason to notice you—this dread you felt was ridiculously unfounded. But no matter how much you tried to reason with yourself as you laid down for bed that evening, the racing of your heart did little to slow until the man was nothing but a dull hum at the back of your mind.

By the morning, the previous day’s events were nearly forgotten. Perhaps that had something to do with you being late to class this morning and the way you rushed out of your little Shibuya apartment before dashing off to the train station. Not that sprinting would make you not late for class—the train itself only went a certain speed. But the chances of you missing the next soonest train would mean you wouldn’t be that late for class and at least you can still bear witness to part of the lecture—

If only you had made the train.

A defeated sigh leaves your lips; there was no way you’d make it in time. Even attempting to go to your only class now would be a pointless trip to campus. There was still plenty of time until you were supposed to arrive at your boba shop. Seize the day, you figure, as you pay the fee to hop on the train to Inokashira Park. It was a beautiful morning, may as well enjoy the sunshine and attempt to capture the beauty of the landscape through digital painting.

With headphones in, you let the gentle hum of hip hop beats fade into the background while your hand laid out a gestural drawing of the land. A tree here, shoreline there—there was no reason the grumpy man, long forgotten from yesterday, should have been anywhere outside of the depths of your subconscious. But as the saying goes, the more you think of something—or in this case someone—the more likely you’ll notice it more in the world around you. Like how the trees in the distance stood tall as he did and proud of how the natural striations in far off rock formations reminded you of the strange man’s salt and pepper locks peeking from under his hat.

Speak it into existence, or something like that.

Maybe that was the reason the unnamed man was sitting at the park bench directly across from you on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Part of you wanted to get up and leave due to the overwhelming sense of dread that crept up your spine. But, considering he was in the midst of what seemed to be a teeming argument under the guise of a normal day to day conversation, you figured he’d yet to acknowledge your existence. That was what you were hoping for anyway. After having the general layout of your landscape laid out on the drawing application on your tablet, you held up your cellphone to take a reference photo to finish the painting later. Genuinely, you thought nothing of it until you heard a gritty, “hey!” Before your brain could process what was happening, the same man you had bumped into the previous evening was holding your wrist in one hand, the other holding onto your phone. “What do you think you’re doing?” He snarls.

“L-let go of me!” You squeak out, causing his grip to tighten further in reciprocation.

“I’m not gonna ask you again, kid,” sandpaper. His voice reminded you of sandpaper.

“I was just taking a reference photo of my painting so I could work on it at home...” considering there was no canvas or paint, it was no wonder he didn’t believe you. Still, he let go of your wrist but held onto your phone well above your head like a bully holding a child’s toy out of reach. With trembling fingers, you reached into your bag and held open your now unlocked tablet to him, hoping your trepidation didn’t blur the photo. As he studied the drawing, he lowered his hand until it was at his side. Even if it were far from finished, he could see the ripples in the water coming from the love boats on the river and a little family of ducks near the rock formation. He could see the luxurious foliage that seemed to frame him and his not-so-friendly acquaintance.

“Take me out of it,” he grumbles, handing your phone back to you and turning away. If embarrassment was an emotion he was familiar with, then that would have been the best way to describe the awkward feeling bubbling in his chest. Maybe if he had undergone different circumstances, he wouldn’t feel the need to interrogate some poor kid in a park in broad daylight.

There’s no point in regretting the past, he decided this long ago. Nobody can change the actions they had once taken—only live with the consequences of their choices and try to learn to move on.

Iwai Munehisa knew that all too well.

And if you hadn’t yet, you were going to learn real quick.

Your shift at the shop had gone by as usual. The school rush wasn’t particularly bad today despite the sunny weather and cooler temperatures. Yet, without fail, the same mousy boy that had come every day at a quarter to five in his middle school uniform showed up. Before he’s even made it to the counter, you begin prepping everything for his routine beverages: small taro iced milk tea with a little bit of extra boba and a regular sized thai iced coffee with an additional espresso shot poured after the remaining components had been shaken together.

“O-oh,” the boy says, a foreign forlorn look on his face, “I-I’m so sorry. I only needed the taro today—my dad said I needed to stop bringing him all this extra sugar every day,” despite only needing the one, he takes out the usual amount of money that he always does for the two drinks. You purse your lips in a tight line, mentally berating yourself for being so presumptuous.

“It’s on me today, kid,” you push the two cups towards him and hand him the thick plastic straws—a blue one for him and green for the coffee. His eyes always seemed to light up just a bit more when he saw the two colors slide across the counter. “I shouldn’t have assumed, I’m sorry. Tell your dad he can blame me for today’s sugar overdose, okay?” The boy’s face lit up, albeit only for a brief second, before taking the drinks and his hand and thanking you profusely.

The rest of the evening resumed normalcy, crawling along the clock. At one point, you’d sent the rest of your employees home because keeping them at the shop was cruel and unusual punishment.

Even after cleaning all the dirty store equipment and preparing mixes and ingredients for tomorrow, you still had an hour left before you were due to close up shop. The irony of Billie Eilish’s ‘Bored’ playing on the store stereo was not lost you.

As the owner, you decided to remain open for another twenty minutes out of courtesy. But, considering not a soul had come by (you swear you saw a tumbleweed blow across your cafe floor), you had decided to flick the neon light off and lock the door, standing in the doorway and fumbling with the key. At least there was a chance of you getting home and getting to bed early, so as to avoid your train-missing debacle from this morning. Maybe even get a chance to sneak some pampering in with a salt soak in the tub and a face mask or even meal prep a few things so that you wouldn’t have run to Big Bang Burger for the umpteenth time this week because you didn’t have time—

“You again?”

You weren’t even thinking about him, you swear. How the hell did the same grumpy man from the park this morning manifest before you?! “Hehehe,” you chuckle in clear discomfort, “w-we gotta stop meeting like this?”

“Actually, I just came by to say thanks for the drink,” the grey-haired man looks down to the half drunken beverage in his left hand for clarity, “but don’t let Kaoru bring stuff for me anymore.” That answered another question that you’d had for a while—you finally knew the boy’s name. But knowing that this man was his father opened a different can of worms entirely.

“Right, gotta watch your figure?” You joked. The man before you looked entirely unamused, only letting out a simple grunt as a form of acknowledgement of your silly question. “Not that there’s anything wrong with your figure—“

“I run Untouchable,” he interrupts, not caring much for your ramble, “sometimes I have questionable patrons that I don’t need ‘im seeing,” your face drops momentarily as you’re met in a deadlock with the man. Being the daughter of a shop owner at one point led you to empathize with the child. And regardless of his reasoning, that didn’t mean that his son didn’t miss him from time to time. From what you knew about this Kaoru boy, he probably used the boba as an excuse to see his dad, even if just for five minutes.

“You know,” you started off slowly, “Kaoru prolly just misses you. And you not allowing him to even bring you a coffee while you’re working denies him the opportunity of seeing his dad on his own terms.” A scowl replaces his blasé features. Wrong move, [name]. Wrong move.

“And what do you know about parenting, kid?” He spits out.

“My names not ‘kid’, asshole,” you bite back, “and we were all kids once. Some of us just choose to live with consequences of our parents actions a lot longer than others.” With that, you storm away.

Well, you try to.

But the grip this man has on your wrist is dangerous, as if trying to let you know you were meeting the end of your life by his hand. “Be careful who you mouth off to, kid—“

“It’s [surname],” you snip once again as you puff out your chest. It was clear to the both of you that you were not backing down. While this surly man was somewhat taken aback, impressed even, by your tenacity, you had figured there was no point backing down now. Even with your posture standing just a bit taller, the man gripping your wrist held it above his own head, pressing both of your chests together.

“A pleasure to meet you, [surname],” he drawls sarcastically, “I’m Iwai. Now stay out of my fucking business,” letting you go, Iwai grumbles to himself before walking away from you with an audible crunch of the sucker between his teeth. When he was no longer in eyesight and ear shot, you let out an audible gasp to replenish the breath you’d been holding. Maybe he was right—there was no reason for you to meddle or to say the things that you had. But at the same time, you knew those morose looks on Kaoru’s face all too well—being an only child with absent parents is a language that only those who suffer can speak.

So maybe you wouldn’t encourage Kaoru to bring nice treats for Iwai, but you made it your mission to make sure Kaoru didn’t go home every night wishing he could see his dad for more than ten minutes.

One of the downsides to being an owner of a shop, or a good one anyway, was dedicating seven days a week to running your business. Sure, you had a few part timers here and there that could easily handle the shop, but they were students who needed to keep up with their studies and wanted to have social lives. Rather than dealing with the hassle of finding someone reliable enough, you made it a point to shoulder the burden on your own. Being slow enough most nights did allow you to work on your own coursework in between—the perks of being in college merely for the sake of learning rather than emphasizing the importance of securing a degree. It also allowed you to tackle administrative work while engaging with your customers.

Including a young boy who still looked so downtrodden as he ordered his small taro boba tea on ice. “It’s Kaoru, right?” You ask him casually as you hand him his drink. The boy offers you a look of surprise.

“Y-yeah?”

“It’s nice to officially meet you, I’m [surname].” He smiles bashfully to replace his stupefied look. Handing off his tea, you notice the way he lingers, as if contemplating whether or not he wants to stay or flit off elsewhere. “You’re more than welcome to hang around here and do homework or something, Kaoru-kun,” you add, noticing the way his eyes flicker back and forth between the alley where you now know his father is.

“O-Okay,” the boy responds meekly before taking a two-top table by the window. It gave him the best view of said alley, and part of you wonders if he did that intentionally. Deciding to leave it be for now, you occasionally peek out the corners of your eye to see Kaoru flipping through what you assumed to be pages of homework. Every few minutes, he was looking up out the window before mindlessly fingering the pages again.

When your line had died down and all customers had been serviced, you walked out from behind the counter with a towel in hand. Using the guise of sanitizing the tables, you approached the boy, clearing your throat so as to pardon your presence. “Looks like entrance exams, am I right?” Kaoru looks up at you again, boyish eyes gleaming as if he had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar before dinner. “How are your studies going?”

“Uh...not very good,” he admits sheepishly. “Sometimes my dad helps me study, but he hasn’t been home lately before I go to bed.”

Ah.

Why did it feel like you were looking in a mirror every time you talked to this boy?

“Well, I’m sure your dad has his reasons. If you don’t mind, I could always help you study?” Perhaps it was spite that drove your actions. After all, Iwai had told you to stay out of his business, yet here you were, offering to tutor his son just because he refused to be present. Maybe it was remorse because you had meant what you said—Iwai had his reasons. Just like your father did back when you were Kaoru’s age.

That didn’t mean that your father’s absence didn’t hurt you or manifest itself as the young boy sitting at one of your tables.

“R-really?!” The boy’s excited voice pulled you from your inner monologue. You offer a soft smile instead, reaching over to turn his notebook towards you.

Comprehension comes easy enough for you to show him, as well as the various portions of Japanese and English grammar and vocabulary. Math was only slightly more difficult, but not by much considering it was still relatively basic formulas that had just been reworked for the current generation’s curriculum.

Science at this age was something you hadn’t even faced until your second or third year of high school.

“Why the heck,” you emphasize your censorship, despite strongly wishing to drop an f-bomb, “are they teaching you physics in middle school?!”

“They aren’t,” Kaoru all but cries. It’s apparent that this subject has been frustrating him immensely—perhaps that was why he was also desperate for his father’s attention? “I haven’t learned any of this yet, but I really want to make it into this academy but it’s one of the top schools in the prefecture and I’m worried I’m too dumb to get in.” The boy had split every last ounce of anxiety, his words coming a garbled mess as he refused to take a breath as he spoke while teems of hot tears threatened to spill past his eyes.

“Hey, Kaoru-chan?” You say gently as you close his notebook. “You are not dumb,” you murmur firmly while looking him in his wet eyes, “you haven’t learned this stuff yet so of course it’s going to be difficult. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn it.” Kaoru is quiet for a moment, slight sniffles sounding from his face.

“But if we aren’t learning this in school, how am I supposed to learn how to do any of this?” Pausing, you check your watch for the time as you realize how late it must’ve gotten. It was already closing time, and the streets of Shibuya were starting to run thin.

“Tell you what, Kaoru-chan. Give me two days. Two days, I’ll come up with a study guide for you with formulas and units you’ll need to know to learn just basic physics. Does that sound good?” As you shut off the neon ‘Open’ sign, the boy takes this as a signal to begin packing his belongings into his knapsack.

“O-okay,” he hesitates, “but I-I don’t wanna be a bother, [surname]-san. I can always ask my dad, though he’s not much of a help usually,” the last part is mumbled almost unintelligibly.

Almost.

Your chest constricts again because you swear this child, however short of a time you’ve known him, is too much like you to be a mere coincidence. It was more like whatever omniscient being up above sent you this child to help.

“You’re no bother, Kaoru-chan. I’ll see you tomorrow, and I will let you know right away when I have your study guide ready, but you should probably head on home before your dad starts worrying about you.” The boy agrees, the slick appearance of tears dissipating until they were replaced with some semblance of hope. Maybe he could get into the academy—maybe he’s not dumb and his dad doesn’t want to be around him, he thinks.

“Thanks again, [surname]-san!”

“Kaoru, why are you still out right now?” The boy in question whips his head around, meeting the steely grey eyes of his father. “And you, I thought I told you stay out of my business? That includes my son!” Iwai was angry. The lower lid of his left eye shook, and the corners of his mouth trembled as if ready to snarl. He wasn’t just angry.

Iwai Munehisa was livid.

“D-dad, I’m sorry. We lost track of time a-and [surname]-san was helping me—“

“Go home and go to bed, Kaoru. I’ll meet you there shortly.”

“O-okay...” despite not wanting to, Kaoru takes his leave down the streets of Shibuya. Occasionally his gaze would flicker back to the sight of you staring at his father with your arms crossed over his chest and him returning the look with venom.

“What do you want, [surname]? Is it money? Who sent you?” The way your family name leaves his lip is entirely satirical. There’s malice painting his tone, as if trying to submerge his very obvious threatening posture with extra ammunition. “I meant it when I said stay out of my business.”

“I have no problem with that, but your kid might.”

“And what do you know about him? Besides the fact that he keeps bringing you business?” Between the both of you, the volume of your voices is beginning to transcend the quiet streets of Shibuya. And considering the privacy that Iwai clearly strived for, you let out a sigh before turning around to unlock the door to your shop. The disgruntled man raises a brow, teeth clicking against the sucker between his lips as he grunts in confusion. “What, you runnin’ away now, kid?”

“I just don’t think you or your son would appreciate this conversation taking place in such a public space.” You huff with a roll of your eyes before holding the door open for him. Weary, Iwai scuffles in, his clunky boots thumping along the linoleum of your storefront. His caution made you roll your eyes before you locked the door once again behind him. “I offered to tutor Kaoru because he’s having anxiety about his entrance exams.” You bite out. Iwai, now pausing his gawking at your frilly, all white and gold boba shop, snaps his neck towards you. It seems you had his attention now.

“I already told him I would get him a tutor, so leave him alone.”

“Dude,” you huff once again, dropping all formalities along with your patience, “he almost started crying in front of me. He thinks he’s dumb and you’ve apparently put off finding a tutor for long enough that he is freaking out and nearly having public meltdowns.”

For a moment, Iwai is silent. There’s no noise in the shop, save for the incessant clacking of that damned lollipop.

“He’s not dumb,” is all his father grits out, the hardened sugar finally cracking underneath his molars.

“No, he’s not. He actually kept up with my little impromptu lessons. He can pass those exams; he just needs a little help.” With a newfound resolve, Iwai turns around to stand at his full figure, eyes narrowing down towards you.

“Let’s meet somewhere and talk this over. Not tonight obviously, I gotta fix a couple o’ things at home,” he grumbles, much like his son had earlier that evening.

“What, like an interview?” You balk incredulously. What, did he think you were trying to kidnap his kid or something?! Kaoru was nearly your height and you ran a little freakin’ boba shop—what the hell could you possibly do that would be even remotely threatening?!

“Yeah, like an interview. I’ll reach out to ya in a couple days. Later,” with finality, Iwai brushes past your smaller frame, unlocks the door and exits the shop, leaving you to your confused, dumbfounded solitude.

Rest did not find you easy that night.

No matter what tactics you had resorted to in an attempt to find sleep, nothing seemed to work. Guided relaxation and meditation, one of your typical go-to methods, had only left you with even more tense muscles. You tried turning on quiet, gentle music while continuing the digital painting you had started a couple weeks ago. The whole hour you had tried, your eyes had subconsciously flitted back and forth between the area you were painting and the two men conversing on the bench in your reference photo.

Just take me out of it, his voice had gnawed at the back of your mind.

And slowly, the two conversing men had been exchanged with silhouettes of the aforementioned man and a much shorter figure sitting shoulder to shoulder by his side. While it made for decent artwork, the thought of having to paint such a tender moment, as opposed to witnessing it firsthand, had left you full with guilt. The poor boy you were so determined to help—the boy so desperate for his father’s attention. Where was his mother? Couldn’t she help him out?

Then again, it wasn’t like your own mom did much for you either. If anything, she merely stood idly by while your father barked instructions on how to live your life.

Go to college for business.

Earn nothing less than perfection.

Open your own shop.

Be successful.

But also, friendships are unnecessary, and you should sever ties should you make them.

Get a job without help, but also pay for your own transportation said job.

Live independently—do everything on your own so that your success is yours.

These were your guiding principles of life. The only reason you turned out the way you did was out of sheer rebellion, doing everything your parents asked and more in your own way. And when you finally did achieve your rendition of success, you cut all ties with them.

You didn’t want Kaoru to turn into the bitter human you had by following some unwritten code like you had, especially if he didn’t have to.

But thinking of the boy leads you back to his irritated father and the initial reason you couldn’t sleep. The immediate flip in personality of Iwai had left you all sorts of jumbled. At first, he was so adamant and insistent that you stay far away from the Iwai family—to stay out of his business. Was he merely humoring you? Something in those grey eyes told you no. Rather, it told you of a more insidious reason that, even if he wasn’t physically standing before you, made your spine run cold. The type of chill that travelled from the base of your neck down your core.

The more you dwelled on the thought, the more you wondered about how he would get in contact with you. Would he call you? He didn’t have your number, but some inkling in the back of your head told you that wasn’t going to stop him. Would he just come by after work again? Maybe you should make sure your security cameras were working so that he didn’t kill you inside your own shop. The idea didn’t seem farfetched, you attempted to rationalize. Considering the death grip he had on your wrist twice now, he could have easily broken a bone or two. Iwai could easily slam his big hands on your throat and break your hyoid bone, crushing your windpipe. He could bind and gag you—

Okay, [name], time for bed.

Despite all the tossing and turning from the previous night, you had managed to make it to your digital design class early enough to grab a coffee on the way. Lord knows you needed it.

Much like the night before, the hour-long course had dragged on with every second stretching the minutes. Since your mind and presence were practically nonexistent, you had opted to head to a cafe nearby in Kichijoji. It was a short, half-hour walk that seemed to tick by much faster than your morning had. Sitting outside, enjoying a beautifully crafted latte and a light lunch while working on your digital painting had been the reset you’d needed. It seemed to ebb away the sleepless night. Maybe work wouldn’t be so daunting later.

But that feeling of dread is pokes its head once again upon receiving a text message from an unknown number.

Where are you.

Part of you becomes weary of your surroundings, scoping out for any suspicious characters that might be looking your way. Another part of you scoffs at the message—why on earth would you reveal your location to an unknown number? However, ignoring the text as you thought you should, proved to be ineffective as the unfamiliar number flashes again in the form of a call not once, but twice. When you refused to pick up the second time, another message is sent.

What, you scared of a job interview, kid?

Before colorful words can be muttered under your breath, you answer the phone as it rings for a third time. “How the fuck did you get my number?” You bite out between ground teeth. On the other end of the line, Iwai Munehisa lets out a chuckle before merely stating that he has his connections.

“Seriously though, where are you? I got time before the shop opens.” For a moment, you’re quiet, contemplating on whether or not you should tell him. On the plus side, you were in a public space at the moment. He couldn’t kill you behind closed doors like he was so clearly capable of. Though maybe a small part of you wouldn’t mind feeling that delicious grip on your throat, even if for a second—“Earth to [surname],” the voice chimes on the line. Pulling you from your boundless thoughts, you absently spew off your location as if you were talking with an old friend as opposed to the man you’d been continuously butting heads with. “Kichijoji? It’ll take me a few, but I’ll be there within the hour. Later.”

With that, Iwai hangs up, leaving you to your train wreck of thoughts.

Shit.

He was coming to interview you to be a tutor—which, that part was the least of your worries—but you hadn’t prepared a damn thing for Kaoru yet. Considering how yesterday’s events played out, you figured you had a bit more time. Not that you didn’t perform well under pressure, no. It was more of the fact that the Untouchable owner made your skin crawl and your blood boil and triggered your fight-or-flight response with a single look.

Exiting out of the digital painting program, you pull up a blank note page in your tablet before creating a rough draft of Kaoru’s lesson plans. While you were initially just helping him with science, you figured it would be helpful to refine other subjects of the entrance exams just for Kaoru’s peace of mind.

Still awaiting his father, you begin writing out a formula sheet to be used with his study guides for both the math section and the science section. Even only glancing at the boy’s workbook briefly, you had a rough idea of the material content—acceleration due to gravity, formulas for mass, Planck’s constant, conversions between Fahrenheit to Celsius to Kelvin—

“Huh. I didn’t expect you to take this so seriously.” Iwai has a hand on the back of your chair, leaning his weight on the furniture as he looks over what you have written so far. Much of the letters and symbols looked like a whole lot of mumbo jumbo to him—a foreign language that he didn’t expect a girl like you to be so well-versed in.

“Oh!” You squeak out, startled by his sudden presence. “Jesus, give a girl a warning next time, would ya?” Iwai gives a roll of his grey eyes before taking the seat across the table from him. The waitress swings by upon seeing a new guest, grabbing his order for a basic drip coffee with cream and sugar on the side.

“It looks like you know what you’re doing. You just pull these outta your ass?” His roundabout phrasing isn’t as effective as he thinks, you muse. Not that you blame him for his suspicions—you ran a little boba shop that probably didn’t net much profit or had relatively simple supply systems with no need for knowledge of these types of formulas.

“No,” you huff out a small tuft of air in a scoff, “I graduated with a degree in astrophysics.” Iwai quirks a brow, clearly not hiding the confusion at the drastic dichotomy of your current occupation and your area of specialization. Even more than the confusion, he was clearly skeptical of this being true.

“Is that so? Say I believe you,” this man was very good at pushing your buttons, you note, “why waste your degree tutoring my boy?” The question grit against your thin nerves.

“Well, considering I’m running a tea shop instead of finding more habitable planets on the International Space Station right now, I would say that at least tutoring offers me a small, singular use of my degree.” You balk, simultaneously propping your elbow on the table and cradling your head to further emphasize your irritation. Beneath his breath, you swear you hear the man mutter, ‘brat’.

“Fine, next question.” Iwai pauses momentarily, sipping his coffee and setting down the mug a little less than gracefully before slumping back into his chair. His arms and knees are crossed, the telltale signs of one keeping their cards close to their chest. “Who are you?”

Huh?

Iwai repeats his questioning, adding pressure to the first word as if he were indirectly prying for a specific answer.

“Uh, I’m [surname] [name]. I’m 29, Toho graduate in astrophysics, as I mentioned, as well as a double major in business, while currently taking a digital design course for shits and giggles?”

“And?” You narrow your eyes at him, blood constricting and your pupils turning to pinpricks out of sheer annoyance.

“And what?”

“That’s all there is to ya? No tricks, no hidden agendas; It’s that simple?” The question coming from his lips seems to be more to himself rather than directed at you. His body is no longer scrunched—however difficult that may be for someone of his hulking stature—with his legs spread out a bit more comfortably and his arms relaxed in a looser cross. With him stretching out, his feet just barely brush yours, but neither of you make the motion to recede them.

“Simple? You sure know how to make a girl feel special.” Feeling the slightly laxer attitude, you mirror his posture. Despite leaving your hand on the table and cradling your chin, the action is more fueled by intrigue rather than annoyance as it had earlier.

“What can I say? I like ‘em simple. Better than dealing with dramatics and feeling like a babysitter.” You aren’t totally sure if he was aiming for a joke—from the blasé look on his face, you would say no—but you can’t help but laugh. Despite his scary appearance that had rattled every vertebrae in your spine from a single look, Iwai was no better than a grumpy old man yelling at the neighborhood kids for playing too loud in the middle of the day. Or at least, from that tiny interaction he did. The bubble of laughter, however, grates at his nerves. “Alright, last question. You get oddly protective when it comes to my son. Why?”

Protective.

Huh?

Is that how he viewed it? Your initial reaction was to offer a rebuttal—to outright deny his claim. “I-I’m not—“

“[name],” the vowels and consonants strung together like honey straight from the dripper when he spoke your name, rather than the malice that his tone held. “Just spit it out.”

“I’m not protective, I’m preventative.” Well, he did tell you to spit it out. So your words come out unrefined like a rough draft to a thesis while the two of you stare at each other. Grey on [eyecolor]. “My parents used to run a little shop in Sendai—spent all their time there and left me to just do whatever. I always lived by their rule, always tried to be perfect so maybe they would come celebrate my achievements with me.”

But they never did. Student council president? Big whoop.

Valedictorian? You’re only in high school.

Got a perfect in your entrance exams to Toho? So what.

Graduated summa cum laude with a double major? They didn’t even come to your graduation.

“It hurts a kid. A lot. I saw all the same signs in Kaoru, I just don’t want another kid to grow up like me.” For a moment, Iwai is quiet. He’s contemplating his words, careful and cautious of what to say. On the one hand, he understands what you’re saying. Truly, he does. He understands it isn’t fair to his son—it’s not fair to constantly leave him alone and in the dark and all to hide his past. Kaoru never asked for that.

Hell, Kaoru never asked to be born, let alone sold and left on Iwai’s front porch.

At the same time, Iwai Munehisa takes a long look at you. While he acknowledges the tired, nearly empty gaze in your eyes and your gaunt, frail body that clearly lacks some form of nourishment, he also sees the raw intelligence. He sees drive and passion and guts and part of him thinks if his kid turned out half the person you did, maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

However, he also realizes that he’s wrong for thinking that. You are a product of poor upbringing, and you were trying to break the cycle.

“Personally,” the grey-haired man starts off slowly, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. You’re a gutsy woman that’s standing up for what she believes in.” Iwai can tell you’re ready to fire a rebuttal immediately, to which he holds his hand up. “But I get what you’re saying. Kaoru shouldn’t have to take the same journey just to achieve the same results—so you have my permission.”

You close your lips back together as you clench your jaw. This should have felt like a victory for you—you get to help this poor boy feel validated in his efforts. But you know it doesn’t come solely from you, a stranger that just happened to hear his pleas.

“I need more than that, Iwai. You need to start being there for him too, otherwise this is all moot.”

The man in question licks the dry plains of his lips before pursing them together. How was he going to justify leaving the shop? That would mean his part-timer would have to close up shop for him. What if Tsuda or Masa end up at the shop—

It doesn’t matter, Iwai realizes. This is for his son, his literal fucking world. He would be no better than Kaoru’s birth mom if he couldn’t even be there for his boy.

“Okay,” the weapons dealer agrees after a minute, “whatever he needs. But the tutoring sessions happen in my home and nowhere else. Understood?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, you hold your hand out to shake on the deal, not even registering the fact that you were going to be inside the Iwai home or picking up on how adamant he was with this request.

While Iwai Munehisa was a relatively strict man, you were grateful that he showed some flexibility to your own personal schedule. Sure, it was something that any normal, decent human would do, but for some reason you just hadn’t expected that courtesy from him.

Your tutoring sessions started at six in the evening which gave everyone ample time to take care of their own needs. You had time to complete your own coursework and manage your shop, Iwai was able to teach his part-timer how to close up shop for the evening, and Kaoru would be able to take care of assignments due the following day or attend cram school. Each day that you had tutoring sessions, Munehisa would pick you up from your own store, walking with you side by side back to his shared apartment. Some days, he would be silent. Others, he would indulge you with mundane conversations.

“Wait so you’re back in school, just for the hell of it?” The gun shop owner had asked when you presented him with the painting. The one of him and Masa in Inokashira Park, though the latter was no longer in the photo. Instead, the silhouette had been exchanged for a much shorter one, paying homage to Kaoru instead.

“Yeah, I told you that during my interview,” you remind him casually, looking anywhere but his direction as the photo was being zoomed in and out from all sorts of directions under his scrutinizing eye. “I wanted to get better at art, so I took some local classes.”

“Huh,” he hums thoughtfully, handing you back your tablet, “pretty impressive, kid.”

You’ve learned not to take offense to him calling you that. In a sense, he was almost old enough to be your dad (or at least that was what he kept telling you, but you had your doubts)—essentially everyone is a kid in his eyes. If anything, it was more of a term of endearment at this point.

After he opens the doorway to the apartment, you take your shoes off before calling out his son’s name. In the short three weeks that you’ve been at this routine, you’ve found yourself already familiar with the space and easily make yourself at home. Kaoru is in the living room, hunched over a coffee table with his notes scattered everywhere. The boy is muttering formulas to himself as he punches numbers into a calculator, followed by anguished wails before noticing your presence. “[name]-san, help,” he whimpers.

Another normality that’s been created is that Kaoru has dropped the formalities with you per your request. Iwai holds his hands up in defeat, knowing the two of you were going to be busy by the frustrated look on his son’s face. “I’ll get dinner started,” he adds as he saunters off to the kitchen. He knows better than attempt to help in the math or science department—that’s your area of expertise after all.

“Alright kiddo, let’s take a look.” Immediately you get to work, assessing his problem—physics, which had been a real struggle for the boy—step by step while his dad observes from the half-wall in the kitchen. You look entirely at ease, patient and productive as you sit shoulder to shoulder with his son. Iwai can hear your simple explanations for why certain numbers do and don’t work in the formula that the question calls for. “...this is why you gotta make sure that you’re always very specific with your units. It’ll lead to context clues later...” you may be a brat, Munehisa muses, but you were an absolute natural with his boy.

As promised, Munehisa was present for your tutoring sessions and often checked in on Kaoru’s progress. Not just by being there either, but pulling out questions from his study guides, changing the numbers, and having the boy solve them so that he could apply what he learned. On top of that, Munehisa made dinner for the three of you each night as well as prepped his son’s lunches for the next day. It was strangely domestic, but also filled a part of his heart he hadn’t known was missing. “Come eat, you two,” he called out from the kitchen as he finished setting the table. When he hears no response, the grey-haired man pokes his head into the living room to see you and Kaoru engrossed in a very serious conversation fueled by hushed whispers. Focusing his hearing on words rather than the gentle pitter patter of rain hitting the window, he can make out a couple sentences.

“...what if I don’t pass the exams?”

“Hey, you’re gonna do amazing, Kao-chan. You’re already figurin’ out most of these problems on your own, you could get into any school in the prefecture. And we’ve still got a couple months to go, and you’re doing so well, you don’t need to be so hard on yourself.” A small part of Munehisa’s heart aches. Where did he go wrong as a dad for his son to be this hard on himself?

“You’re going to ace it, Kaoru,” he says without thinking, causing the two of you to snap your heads in his direction. Iwai’s expression is soft—a juxtaposition to how it usually is—as he locks eyes with his son. For a moment, the boy looks as if he’s going to cry while having the ability to light up the entire apartment with how bright he’s smiling. Such a soft, tender moment between father and son that you can’t help but think you shouldn’t be here. “Now c’mon, let’s have dinner.” Iwai offers you a hand to pull you off the floor while his son is already setting off to the small dining room at Mach speed. Even after hoisting yourself off the tatami mats, however, Iwai’s hand is still loosely gripping yours. “Thank you. For everything.”

“Uh, y-yeah, no problem!” Your hand retracts from his immediately, as if his skin were made of fire rather than flesh, before you flit off to take the empty seat across from Kaoru to gush over how wonderful your meal looked.

That softness never left Iwai Munehisa’s face, even as he took the seat between you and his son at the little circular table designed for four. The three of you say grace before digging in, with a small reminder to have Kaoru eat his veggies. Since you had started tutoring him over the last couple weeks, the environment in the Iwai household had shifted to something more domesticated—homier—than Munehisa was used to.

And he would be a fucking liar if he said he didn’t like it.

A part of him wonders if this could have been his life from the get-go had Kaoru been born his son; if Kaoru had you as his mom, would this be what life would be like?

Full stop, Munehisa, he grumbles internally.

This was a contract deal. You tutor his son for entrance exams in exchange for meals because he knows for a fact now all you eat is garbage, as well as ensuring that Kaoru is receiving the care that a lonely only child needs. Yet, despite this whole contract set-up, you found yourself seeing the boys even on the days you didn’t have tutoring sessions. There were days when Akira, the part-time employee at Untouchable, would watch the store and both the Iwai men would pay you a visit at the shop, staying until you had finished up your shift for the day. Other times, you and Munehisa would subconsciously meet outside your shopfront and walk together towards his apartment before realizing it was a Sunday or a Thursday—two days you always had off from tutoring.

You were at his apartment almost as much as you were at your own.

Conversation flowed between you and Kaoru so easily, ranging from school to local sports to art. “Oh! I forgot to show you something Kao-chan! Pardon me,” you abruptly stood up, skipping to the living room to grab your tablet from your work bag. Unlocking it and pulling up the painting, you flip the screen over to show Kaoru the completed artwork. For a moment, the boy is marveled as he recognizes his father’s coat and his school uniform on the figures facing the water. The striations in the rock formations, the shadows of the trees—everything is mesmerizing.

“Don’t forget to print a copy for us so we can hang it up,” Iwai reminds you. Though, it’s the first you’re hearing of this. You shoot Iwai a sheepish half-grin before clearing off your plate. Of the three of you, you’re the last one to finish, so Kaoru takes his time clearing the table while Munehisa grabs you a glass of red wine to accompany his own neat whiskey. “I’ll take care of the dishes—“

“Wait, no you cooked. Let me—“ you tried to offer, but the weapon’s dealer just shooed you away with a nonchalant flick of his wrist.

“You kids finish studying before it gets too late, I’ll take care of it.” While Kaoru has already sputtered his gratitude towards his dad and flees back to the living room, you’re still standing in the small kitchen slash dining area, collecting the remaining dishes for Iwai. “What did I just say?” He balks, drying his hands on the towel draped over his shoulder. Before you have a chance to respond, he grabs your wine that’s perched on the counter in one hand, the other gingerly placed on the small of your back as nudges you towards the living room, mumbling something along the lines of, “you never listen, ya brat.” Without another protest, you pluck the glass from his fingers, pretending the heat from his large hand on your back didn’t cause your flesh to erupt into flames.

“Alrighty, where did we leave off, Kao-chan?”

“We were working on phenotypes and genetics.” Easy enough—first year biology, you think to yourself. You go through explaining alleles to Kaoru and dominant and recessive traits with him, and how recessive traits can end up becoming more prominent in offspring.

“So if I was actually my dad’s son, there’s a chance I would have had grey eyes?”

Huh?

“Kao-chan—“

“It’s okay. I’ve always known he wasn’t my real dad.” Oh. Oh. Well that makes this ten thousand times more difficult. From your own experience, it was already hard enough being the only child and never being enough for your biological parents. In theory, they should love you unconditionally—they brought you into this world. However, this circumstance is entirely foreign to you. “My parents died when I was a baby, and he took me in because he was close to them. But sometimes, I wonder if he did that just because he was close to them, ya know? Sometimes I wonder if he even views me as his son.”

Your heart broke—shattered into thousands of tiny little shards that stuck to the muscle fibers in your body. It probably didn’t help at all that Iwai was initially so focused on running his stupid shop to the point where his own son—biological or not—needed to make excuses to see him. But at the same time, Iwai Munehisa was so overly protective of Kaoru that there was no way he didn’t view him as his child.

“Maybe,” you start off slowly, thinking back to the final question of your interview with Munehisa. “His own example of parenting is a little skewed, so he’s trying his best to do the opposite of how he was raised so that he does better with you.”

“Yeah, but you’re much better at it, [name]-san,” you frown slightly at this. In the month or so that you’ve known the Iwai family, you have to commend the fact that Munehisa has been doing much better than when you met him. His guard was still up, of course, but he was home much more with Kaoru and he was absolutely trying. But there are still parts of the boy that are filled with uncertainty and doubt—parts of him that still long for being coddled like a child because he was still one underneath it all. Subconsciously, you wrap an arm around his shoulder, offering him a loose hug that he was free to back out from at any moment.

He didn’t.

“You know what one of the first things I ever said to your dad was?” Kaoru stiffens slightly but doesn’t say anything in response. Instead, he buries himself further into the hug because he can’t remember the last time that he was given a crumb of parental affection. “‘We were all kids at some point. Some of us just choose to live with the consequences of our parents’ actions longer than others’. I told him that because every choice I make is a direct result of how I responded to my upbringing.” And now that you think about it, maybe Iwai Munehisa has seen more than you realize. In fact, you’re almost certain he has by the way he lives and raises his own child.

He was also still living with the consequences of how he was raised.

It seems his son resonates with the sentiment, as Kaoru sniffles while sitting up, but remains quiet while he still leans shoulder to shoulder with you. Despite textbooks and notebooks still being open and scattered across the living room, it was clear that he just needed a moment to be—to exist and sit and stew on his own thoughts. Once again, you reach to wrap an arm around Kaoru’s shoulder while your free hand reaches for the stemless wine glass, both of you watching the drips of the rain creating streaks on the glass of the balcony door.

From the kitchen, Iwai shuts off the water when he’s cleaned off the all the dishes. The only noises that can be heard from the living room is the water hitting glass and the occasional setting down of glass on wood, but there’s no talking. No praise from solved equations and gentle goading to finding the right answer. There’s nothing at all. There’s an intimate stillness that Iwai almost feels guilty for looking in on that creates an ache in his chest.

How the fuck were you so much better at handling his son than him?

Iwai swallows the contents of his glass in one gulp before pouring him another shot of whiskey that he will hopefully sip on as intended.

Looking outside the balcony door himself, Munehisa realizes the rain isn’t going to let up any time soon. Kaoru also likes a nice, hot mug of cocoa on rainy nights like this. While turning to heat milk on the stove, the weapons dealer wracks his brain as to if he even owns an umbrella so that you don’t have to walk home in this storm without one. He should have one, right? There’s no way he’s that shitty of a father that he doesn’t have an umbrella for his kid when it rains.

His extra one is still at Untouchable, where he usually keeps it in the event someone else needs one or if he’s got business to tend to. Upon this realization, Iwai groans before bringing the cocoa to the living room for his son.

“Kaoru, ya got an extra umbrella somewhere?” Munehisa asks gently, ignoring the panic that spreads across both Kaoru’s and your faces while the two of you pry yourselves apart. The boy thanks his dad, shamelessly sipping at the treat before turning to face away from the window.

“Actually I think I left it in my locker at school, sorry dad.”

“S’all right,” he says nonchalantly as you begin helping Kaoru pack up his notes and study guides, “maybe [name]-san can have her husband come bring by an umbrella so she don’t get sick—“ you sputter out a distinguished laugh, grateful you hadn’t been drinking the rest of your wine or you surely would have spit it all over Kaoru.

“Husband? The only thing I’m married to is the idea of getting to work for the International Space Station.” Munehisa doesn’t receive the opportunity to comment on the fact that you’re nearly thirty and not married, thanks to his son who lights up like a start at the mention of the ISS.

“Woah, is that your dream job, [name]-san?! That’s so cool!” Kaoru begins rattling off a few facts he knows about the solar system and a few accomplishments of NASA and where water can be found on Mars. Feeding his enthusiasm, you explain why water can be found on Mars in the first place and how, despite this discovery, we can’t necessarily just up and move to that planet. While the two of you geek out slightly over the stars and planets, Iwai has replenished your now empty glass of Cabernet. “Dad, why doesn’t [name]-san just stay the night until the storm stops?”

“Kaoru, that’s inappropriate.” He would be lying if he said that thought hadn’t crossed his mind. At first, he immediately banished it because he just assumed your spouse would come and get you. Then knowing there was nobody waiting at home, Iwai just didn’t want to admit that he liked the idea of you staying a little more than he should.

“B-but It’s worse to let her go home in this weather cause she’ll get sick and you’ll get sick from walking her home!” Coward, his subconscious screamed. Coward coward coward, you’re a fucking coward Munehisa. His own son has to scold him into what is clearly a smarter choice for everybody’s health merely because he’s too fucking chicken to deal with potential situations that would arise from you staying over for a night. Wait, his mind argues, nothing would even happen because you would have to have some semblance of interest in him for any of those scenarios and there was no way—

“Kao-chan, your father’s right. I couldn’t put you guys out like that. Besides, it’s not that far of a walk, I’ll be alright—“

“What? No, you’re not putting us out,” Iwai combats, feeling the need to squash the idea that your presence is a burden on the family. If anything, your presence was a necessity.

“It’s not that big of a deal—“

“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight; you take my bed.” The grey-haired man is adamant now, while Kaoru is slightly pleased with himself. It’s been a long time since they’ve had company, let alone someone stay at their house. In fact, he doesn’t think anyone has since he’d been adopted. And Kaoru likes having you around, and it’s clear as day to him that his dad doesn’t mind either. So what if his umbrella was in his closet?

After it had been decided that you would crash the Iwai home, Kaoru had finished his cocoa while continuing to ask about other things about space. It was a pleasant surprise, being able to talk about these things with another person who was just as interested. Who knows, maybe one day Kaoru would grow up and want to study galaxies too?

When the boy had said his good nights, Iwai lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. “You’re both a pain in my ass, ya know that?” His arms are draped over the back of the couch, one hand cradling what had to be his fifth glass of straight whiskey. You turn to face him from where you’re still perched on the floor, your back resting along his right leg with your torso still facing the storm.

“Hey, I said I could go home—“

“Yeah, you could. But Kaoru would never let me hear th’ end of it.” The two of you lapse into silence once again, letting both of your minds wander.

“He’s a good kid, ya know,” you start off slowly, “and I know it’s none of my business, but whether he’s biologically your son or not, he’s still your son.” A stifled laugh rolls off of Iwai’s chest in delicate waves before it’s washed down with more whiskey.

“He’s my son, that’s for sure. I just don’t want him to turn into a good-for-nothing scumbag like me,” your eyes peel away from the lightning lighting up the streets of Shibuya, setting your glass down with a scowl crossing your face as you turn to face the weapons dealer. “Maybe he’s lucky that he doesn’t share any of my genetics. Otherwise he would be doomed from the start.”

“Iwai, children are a product of their environment. Look at how much happier he’s been since you started coming around more often. If he hears how lowly you think of yourself, he’ll start to reflect that behavior—“

“What good does it do him to have a thug for a dad?” The grey-haired man snaps, grabbing ahold of your wrist much like he had the very first time you confronted him, though definitely not as tight. His grey eyes are locked with yours once again, hulking body causing yours to pale in comparison.

Prey.

Him versus you.

But this time, you don’t feel fear tingle down your spine. You don’t feel the need to shrink away from him because you know he could hurt you like a predator hunts. Iwai Munehisa wouldn’t do that to you. “That scare you, kid? Knowing sweet little Kao-chan’s dad is a thug? Is former Yakuza? That daddy’s got people coming after him and Kaoru left and right because of shit I did in the past?”

Iwai Munehisa wouldn’t hurt you.

“Sounds like you’re more scared about him knowing that than I am. Why would your past bother me? It’s in the past.” A growl tears at his lips before he throws your wrist towards the couch. It’s not enough force to hurt you in the slightest, just enough to pull you away from him so he can bury his shamed face in his hands with his rocks glass long forgotten on the tatami mats.

“I’m a fucking coward,” he admits, taking a long pause before continuing, “ever since he was a baby and his mother tried to sell him for drug money, I was so hellbent on making sure he never found out the truth about himself or me—that anyone found out the truth about us. Otherwise people would prolly just attach a stigma to his name like they did to me when I was a kid.” Still listening intently, you fix yourself on the couch properly so that you aren’t kneeling on the tatami mats anymore, but rather sitting beside Iwai. He’s not crying, but you can hear the caged and choked breaths trying to escape his lungs. It’s deafening, even with the flooding rain outside, Munehisa drowns out all noise, including the sound of small footsteps approaching.

“Sell me?” Both you and Iwai snap your heads towards the hallway where Kaoru stands in his pajamas, alarm painting the sclerae of his eyes. “W-what are you talking about, dad?” The man in question curses under his breath, once again cradling his face in his hands. This was not how he pictured telling his son the truth—in fact he never even planned on it. He always pictured Kaoru doing something great with his life like finding a cure for cancer and settling down with a nice girl, maybe giving him grandchildren. Everything opposite of Munehisa’s own life.

“Just tell him, Mune,” you whisper, placing a hand on his shoulder. Under the skin you could feel knots that had been long built from years of carrying his burdens. Much to your surprise, he doesn’t shirk off your touch, nor react to the use of his shortened name. In an attempt to calm down, he takes in a deep breath that you can feel inflating his lungs to their full capacity, slowly deflating as he lets it out.

“W-When you were a baby, your mother tried to sell you to me for quick drug money. I told her no, but she just left you on my doorstep. At the time, I was Yakuza, but I took you in and left the life behind,” Iwai’s fingers are laced loosely over each other as he stares at the tatami mats. It feels like his world is collapsing—like you and his son were judging him much like everyone else had when they learned who his mother was. Who knows, maybe Kaoru would rather go stay with you and have you raise him instead. He would probably do better with you anyway—you could actually help him with his education and his livelihood. What good is a dropout-turned-yakuza thug anyway?

“Even if that’s the truth, that doesn’t change the fact that you, Iwai Munehisa, are my dad. And I’m your son.”

Wow. You really felt like you shouldn’t be here at this moment—you’re ruining it. Quietly, you try (and fail miserably) to sneak off to the kitchen to grab more wine because stars above know that you need it. There are hushed words shared between the two of them, low enough that even straining your hearing doesn’t permit you to distinguish anything. Their much-needed talk goes on for quite some time, allowing you to inadvertently snoop through your surroundings. There are a few pictures of him and Kaoru on the fridge from fishing trips and school events, as well as a math exam that has a red one hundred one circled. It’s clear to you that whatever had been weighing down on Munehisa never stopped him from loving his son, just chucked the boy away in a vault to be safe from the dangers of his past.

Voices are still indistinguishable, that is, until you hear Iwai’s voice raising nearly to the volume of the thunder outside. “Don’t make me ground you, kid,” but the threat seems empty to you as Kaoru walks away laughing.

“Goodnight, mom-san!” You spit the Cabernet you were holding in your mouth back into your glass—a gross visual and even grosser to actually do.

“Kaoru!” Munehisa stands up in a half-assed attempt to chase his son. He stops in front of the kitchen, drooping his head before looking at the embarrassment creeping up your neck. “Sorry about that.”

“I-I should go, shouldn’t I?” The weapons dealer just shakes his head.

“I’s fine,” he mumbles, “let me get ya some clothes to sleep in.” Iwai disappears temporarily, leaving you alone in the kitchen with your now nearly empty glass of red wine while he shuffles about in his room. He’s not gone for long, not nearly long enough as you would’ve liked to attempt to compose yourself.

“Thank you,” you mumble quietly as he sets the clothes on the counter.

“I should be thanking you,” Munehisa replies, grey eyes locked on yours. He looks like he wants to say something more, a giveaway from the way he licks his lips. “So it really doesn’t bother you, huh?” Absentmindedly, you pick the clothes off the counter, holding them between your hands while you finger a loose thread on the oversized tee. Anything to avoid the intense gaze in his normally stone-cold eyes.

Lava felt cooler than his gaze.

“Why should it? It’s not who you are anymore, right?” You can’t bring yourself to look at him right now. He’s too intense, too wild and free from the chains of his past. Iwai Munehisa is a loose cannon now, no longer needing to hide any part of himself.

“So then what’s got you so scared you can’t look me in the eye?” When you say nothing in response, he bounds closer to you until he’s towering over you much like he did during your first meeting. Long, surly digits wrap around your chin and jaw until you’re met with his steely eyes. Though, maybe steel isn’t a proper comparison. Steel is typically cold, and his irises are anything but. The man before you had just had a catharsis, like coal had been heated and pressurized and revealing the birth of brand-new diamonds. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not scared,” his voice is husky, thicker than his usually brusque tone.

“I’m not scared,” your words barely pass your lips, but do not waver with trepidation. There was no reason to be scared, not of Munehisa. Scared of the fact that he’s standing so close to you while he cradled your jaw? Absolutely. Frightened slightly by the way his face cautiously edges closer and closer to yours until the overwhelming scent of gun powder and alcohol floods your senses? Check. Terrified of the fact that you are incredibly turned on knowing he could probably snap your neck in a heartbeat?

Hell yes.

“I’m not scared, Mune,” you repeat, reprising the use of his shorter name. It sounds different coming from your mouth, he subconsciously notes. Back in his yakuza days, that name was sinful—a reminder of his reputation. But from your lips, it sounded heavenly.

“I am,” is all he responds with before slotting his lips over yours. Warm and pliable, is the first thought that comes to your mind, much like modeling clay that had been worked between your fingers. Contrary to everything that screams ‘Iwai Munehisa’, his kiss is gentle—experimenting to feel every layer of fragile skin of your lips against his own. Shy, tender, and tentative, Iwai moves his fingers from your chin to wrap an arm around your waist.

Delicate was never a word that you think of to describe Iwai Munehisa. Or maybe delicate wasn't the right word—fragile? It made sense in your train wreck of a mind from the way he sucked in his breath through is nose as your fingers cupped his cheeks. So fragile, as if he were going to break from such a gentle action that he needed to pull away before he crumbled.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Iwai breathes, taking three steps back like you’d suddenly come down with the plague.

“Wha—no it’s—“

“You should get some sleep kid,” before you can say anything else, the weapons dealer has already fled down the hallway and locking the door to the bathroom and leaving you to your own devices. Between pursed lips, you grab the empty glasses that you shared and washed them quickly before grabbing the clothes you carelessly tossed on the floor. From the bathroom, you hear the water running accompanied by wordless grumbles.

Munehisa’s room is exactly how you pictured it. Simple and clean with no superlatives. The bed is made nearly hotel style—like the room hadn’t been lived in for years. Considering the catharsis that he had gone through tonight, part of you wonders just how many of his days he had spent watching every second like it was going to be his last, rather than being in the moment.

Alive and a life are two very different things.

As expected, you drown in the fabric he’s given you—expected from someone twice your height and overall size. They’re comfy, you note, the warmth of the masses combating the springtime storms. Robotically, you check your phone for the time—the clock inching towards midnight to Sunday. From routine alone, you knew that Kaoru didn’t have school tomorrow and you and Munehisa had a later start to your day thanks to your part-timers’ availability.

Before you have the chance to think twice, you’re back on your bare feet, all but stomping towards the living room to where Munehisa lays facing towards the sliding door, staring at the rain. He heard you—he had to have. There’s no way he can’t hear the deafening silence of your own revelation; he has to know. “Go to bed, [name],” he bites with no fire.

“No.”

“Then go home.”

“No.”

Iwai throws the thin blanket he has on himself off as he thrusts his legs off the couch. Every movement is silently violent until he’s hunched over you for the second time tonight. Despite every intention of holding malice in his eyes, he can’t when it comes to you. Not when you’re wearing his clothes and looking up at him with a resolve stronger than his self-loathing. “What do ya want then, [name]?” He asks quietly, echoing the question he had for you three weeks ago.

“Honestly?” You start off, unraveling your arms that were wound around your chest. “I would like for you to let go.”

For a moment, Iwai is taken aback—literally, as signified by the half step he takes towards the couch and away from you. It’s not quite a moment of fear in his eyes; more of an amalgam of questioning and begging—of longing.

The hunter has become the hunted.

“Just let it go, Mune. Your son already forgives you for your past, you need to do the same.” Much to your surprise, a laugh jumbled with a grunt heaves off his chest. The trepidation from earlier is gone, evident by the way his shoulders and chin straighten up from standing erect.

“Let go, huh? You sure you want that?” The double meaning isn’t lost on you, and you’re ready for whatever he throws your way. You’d been ready, you realize, from the moment your fear took a back seat to wanting to aid Kaoru in any way that you could. You’d been ready since the moment you picked up the phone and had him meet you in Kichijouji. Or maybe, you had forgiven him already—not that you necessarily had a place to do so—the moment he had started shifting his focus into being there for his son. It was all you had ever wanted from your family, maybe it wasn’t too late to save other kids from the pain.

Maybe your unresolved daddy issues run much deeper than you thought.

However, Iwai wasn’t much better. He had been so vehemently adamant that if he pretended to be a questioningly upstanding citizen, Kaoru would have a better chance at making it in the world. The grotesque nature of his own upbringing had left him longing for someone—anyone—to unconditionally accept him. No matter how much he told himself the yakuza had welcomed him with open arms, he knows that it was their opportunity to thread his marionette strings. And the society he was surrounded in had blockaded him so long ago, he clutched and grasped at broken straws.

But not you, no. Despite him easily being able to snap your neck and hide your body, you stood toe to toe with him, always ready to fight back without a moment’s hesitation. With you, there was no stigma attached to his name, only knowledge and understanding and an empathy that transcended and smashed through every wall of his.

An unconditional acceptance.

An unconditional love.

Iwai’s mommy issues ran deep, maybe even a little steeper than yours.

“I’m not scared, Mune,” you repeated, pulling him from his reverie that blasted at meters per second. “I have no reason to be.” With large strides, as one would expect of his size, Iwai crosses through the distance he had out between the two of you before grasping at your jaw with finesse and hunger all at once to lock his lips with yours once again. It had been a long time since the weapons dealer had actively sought out the object of his affections; his own desires had taken a back seat for the well-being of his son.

All that was left of him now was depravity and desperation.

Even those two elements to his core were not going to last long. Not with the way you were clutching onto him so tightly with your arms wound around his neck. Despite the flames of hunger constantly being stoked by mere touch, Iwai’s lips are just as gentle and hesitant as they had been before you changed your clothing. It was clear to you that you were going to need to guide the weapons dealer—much as you had been the last month or so. Your tongue cautiously snakes out from your mouth, gingerly running along the seam of his lips to ask for gentle permission.

Things may be moving fast, but you didn’t want to rush this. Not with Munehisa. Not with the man who was so foreign to genuine affection.

Tentatively, Iwai parts his lips ever so slightly, allowing you access to the first layer of him. Candy. He tastes like the cherry sucker he had in his mouth just after dinner to accompany his whiskey. A mixture of smoke and sweetness with a lasting bitterness sounded as if Iwai had decomposed and turned into mere flavor receptors of the tongue. But it’s a taste you find yourself wanting more of as your tongue dances alongside his.

At a snail’s pace, Iwai releases your cheeks and jaw, sliding his palms down the goose bumps on your neck and soft expanse of your arms until they find purchase on your hips. The gesture is cautious, even as he coaxes your body towards him until he falls back onto the couch, bringing you with until you’re left to straddle him.

“Scared, Mune?” You ask in a whisper when you come up for air. Disregarding the need for oxygen, you make it a point to keep your lips ghosting over his, showing the desire to remain connected to him. His eyes are half-open, heavy lids drooping and the crinkles of his crow’s feet are settling in as he attempts to catch his breath—all with the faintest twinge of a grin.

“Should I be?”

“That’s for you to decide.” One of his hands maneuvers its way from your waist, back up to your cheek to cup the skin in full. Perhaps you were more aware from the intimacy of the fact that his hand nearly could hold an entire half of your face or the calcification of hardened skin on his palms, or perhaps your body had slowly come to tune itself to the man beneath you.

“I think I’ve been alone for long enough.” The distance between the both of you closes once again, Iwai’s movements renewed by fire followed by another clash of lightning. His grip on your waist tightens as he sinks you further into him, grinding his pelvis into yours as if granting permission to touch him more. Planting your hands on his chest, you take a moment to graze the backs of your nails gingerly along the openings of his tank top.

You think back to your joke about him watching his figure when you first met him, and silently berate yourself.

Iwai Munehisa didn’t need to watch his figure—he’s a literal statue of Adonis come to life.

Hard muscle twitches under every touch of yours in conjunction with the occasional throaty groan that rumbles along your lips. His tongue is somehow both rushing to explore every nook and cranny and crooked edge of your teeth while simultaneously attempting to commit every inch of your mouth to memory. Despite the loss of his hands on your waist, the sudden cold rush of air swirling around your midriff is a welcome sensation as his calloused digits working their up your body from under the shirt. Your entire body erupts with need—it was no longer a want or a mere whim. You needed this man in every way.

In hopes to urge Iwai further, you break apart momentarily to remove the borrowed clothing from the upper half of your body, leaving you bare chested in front of the weapons dealer. “Fuck,” he mumbles, pupils turning to pinpricks as he drinks in the sight of your slightly erect nipples. Like a man hypnotized, his lips latch on to your left breast, licking and sucking at the flesh as your head tosses back. The motion causes you to grind further into his lap, greeting his clothed erection with a welcome reminder of your presence.

You had never been one for a ton of oral attention, but there was something so damn mesmerizing about Iwai holding a nipple between his teeth while he rolled the nub with his expert tongue. Part of you wonders if it has something to do with the suckers. Another part of you only thinks to let out a sharp hiss of breath as he tends to your right nipple next. “M-Mune,” you whimper, earning another grind of his covered cock against your damp folds, “l-lemme touch you.”

“Hold on a sec, baby, I’m a little busy.”

Your brain goes into overdrive as he frees a hand from holding you up to dipping into the front of your borrowed pajamas bottoms, nails scraping along the waistband of your panties. The thought of Iwai getting closer and closer still coaxed a moan from your lips; or maybe it was the way he goaded your nipple to complete erection. Maybe it was both—maybe it was the way he made it a point to tease by inspecting the wet spot in your panties with two fingers.

“M-Mune, please.”

“All nice an’ wet for me, baby? Lemme just double check.” Even with you still straddling and trying force yourself closer to him, Iwai managed to sneak his fingers past your knickers until he’s met with a sloppy, slick cunt. His half-lidded gaze up at you was laser-focused—as if he couldn’t look anywhere else but your own lust-laden eyes. The pads of his fingers glide along your slit before slightly nudging apart your opening to get a real feel for you. The mere thought of touching you, rubbing your clit until you screamed, cumming and gushing around his fingers—Iwai can’t even remember the last time such thoughts crossed his mind, let alone turned him on so much.

He wants to take his time, he realizes,

Iwai’s touch sends a thousand volts up your spine, causing the tension in your neck to throw your head back as you hissed in pleasure. His middle finger searches every nook and cranny of your nether regions, smearing your excitement all around until no area is left untouched. While he’s preoccupied with exploring you, you reciprocate the treatment with dizzy kisses, unabashedly sliding your tongue against his while your fingers tugged at his tank top. He’s only slightly annoyed that the two of you have to pause so that you can pull the fabric off—a small sacrifice to further progress. The second he’s freed from one of his prisons, his brittle lips latch onto your left collarbone, teeth sinking in to be chased by his tongue while leaving reminders of the moment. At the same time, his ring and middle finger circle your clit in a steady, languid rhythm, coaxing more of your wetness to come forth until you’re absolutely drenched. “O-oh, f-fuck Munehisa!”

Hearing his name made his groin throb beneath you, the pulsing wet, hot warmth tantalizing and torturing you both. Giving your clit one last swirl, his fingers travel further downward, pushing apart your lips until he slowly nestles his middle finger inside your sopping wet hole. His digits are much larger than your own, you noted immediately—his longest finger alone already stretching you more deliciously than your tiny infantile hands. “Ohh, fuck yeah, baby. I’on’t even gotta stretch you out with how fuckn’ wet ya are for me.”

“But I want you to,” Iwai lets out his signature gruff laugh before jamming his finger deep into you with no warning. The lone digit is roaming, exploring your deepest caverns to figure out the fastest way to make you go from zero to hundred. “Mune, it feels so good.” All the praise goes from his ears straight to his dick, the flesh between the two of you now painfully straining against his thin boxers.

After a few twists and turns, Iwai brings his pointer finger to the party, the duo now on the hunt for that squishy tissue to send you over the edge. He refused to fuck you until you came at least once—he couldn’t disappoint you. Not now, not after all the progress you two had overcome together. Crooking both digits, his nails finally find their target, scraping along your g-spot that makes you tremble and your muscles spasm. “You’re mine now, baby girl,” he croons.

You wished he gave you a better warning—a sufficient warning for the relentless attack his fingers had on your g-spot or the way the angle of his wrist was shamelessly scrubbing at your clit. The muscles in your legs can no longer maintain their terse nature, dropping the suspension you had in his lap slightly to give better access to your nether regions. Even still, Iwai couldn’t stop now. “Oh fuck, oh fuck Mune, fuck fuck fuck fuck holy shit I’m gonna—“

“Just let go, baby,” his voice is sardonically sweet despite his damn near malicious actions. A third finger joins the rest of the digits mercilessly pounding away at your insides, stretching you beyond what you were used, while your abused clit cried for him to stop. That cry coming in the form of your walls squeezing around his fingers until a gush of fluid secretes itself onto his palm. Thanks to the breakneck speed of his movements and the sheer force of your orgasm, your release sprays all onto his bare chest and the waistband of his boxers, even parts of his face. “God damn, woman,” he pants out, a new hunger forming in the pit of his belly. Despite you trying to catch your breath, Iwai pulls his fingers from your core and wraps his soaked hand behind your neck and crushes your lips to his.

Tasting yourself on him is a strangely delightful experience. The slight saltiness of your emission mixed with the signature musk of his skin and sweetness from an overdose of suckers has you groaning throatily into the kiss. Shamelessly your pelvis grinds into his, rubbing his proud, protruding covered cock along your tingling slit. His hands move from where they are holding you against your neck and hips, hooking into the waistband of your borrowed bottoms before pulling them off of your lower half. It’s tricky to maneuver with the way he refuses to stop kissing you—he can’t stop, he learns—but he manages to guide the clothing off of you somehow.

The only thing separating the two of you now was thin, soaked boxers and your last chance to walk away from one another.

Not that you would.

Instead, you hook your claws into the elastic of his boxers, suspending yourself above his lap momentarily to slide the fabric past his knees. Your soaked entrance slides along the length of him, greeting him with lubricant. Iwai grits his teeth as you do so, throwing his head back before he pulls your head down to rest your forehead against his sweaty skin. His grey eyes bore straight into yours, electricity sparking between the two of you. “Y-ya sure, [name]?”

Rather than answer, you swivel your hips to slide his cock in before slamming the entirety of his girth inside you in one fell swoop. In hindsight, that was probably a bad idea with the way you can feel the mushroom head of his weeping cock knocking at your cervix or the way the width of his cock stretches you even further than three of his massive fingers. “Jesus fucking Christ!” You howl and sob, head thrown back as you nearly sob from the intrusion. Through heavy pants, Munehisa anchors your hips in place so that you can’t pull away, no matter how torturous for the both of you.

“Just stay still, baby, don’t move.”

“M-Mune, it hurts.”

“Well nobody told ya to shove my whole dick in at once, idiot,” the two of you share a laugh for a moment before he guides you to rest on his chest while your cunt stretched and acclimated to his dick.

“I-I wanted to,” you whimper as he shifts ever so slightly, the curls of his pubis scraping along your thighs.

“Yeah, baby? You wanted to? That why you started hanging around my kid—to try to get daddy’s dick?” His salacious words cause your walls to pulsate around him, squeezing him further in and making him groan at the contraction. “That’s it, isn’t it? Naughty lil girl, you don’t deserve my mercy.” His large hands, wrapping every square centimeter of your hips, began to jostle you in a way to rub your skin together before they start lifting you up in his lap. It’s a reprieve, almost, having his large cock begin to withdraw until his hands force your pelvis back down onto him.

“M-Mune,” you whine, “still hurts.” But the curses and cries do nothing to slow down his rhythm. If anything, Munehisa plants his feet on the tatami mats below him to thrust himself further up into you every time he brought your hips back down. The lightning and thunder painting the sky past the sliding door is merely a full thought, each violent thrust of his cock much more noticeable than nature’s storm.

“Tell me the truth and maybe I’ll go a little easier on you!” He howls, no longer giving a shit if Kaoru heard the lewd slapping of his heavy ballsack against your skin or the breathless cries leaving your lungs. Okay, that was a lie, he did care. But it was more of a subconscious thought buried at the back of his mind that was drowned out by the mere thought of stuffing you full of his cum. The idea alone was enough to drown out the wordless babbles leaving your mouth in accompaniment to the drool dripping from the seam of your lips. “Gonna take my cum like a good girl, baby?”

“Y-yes, please! Please!” You warble, squeezing your walls around his thick cock like a vice. His thrusts are relentless, his hips skyrocketing towards your limp body that can no longer stand his brutality. Iwai’s head is thrown back once again as you collapse forward, your body too numb as your second orgasm begins to wrack through, allowing you to nestle into his bare throat. “‘M so close, Mune.” Your bones are turning to jelly, you notice, as you snake your hands towards your clit for the final push.

Well, attempt to anyway.

Iwai smacks your hand away with blinding speed, thrusts slowing down a fraction as he does so before his hand replaces yours on your nub. “Only I get to make you cum from now on, got it?”

“Then hurry up and fucking do it!” You howl, sinking your teeth into whatever parts of his flesh you can reach. The pads of three of his fingers are relentlessly scrubbing away at your clit, a mixture of both of your slop spraying over the both of you. “Oh god yes, right there! Right there!”

“Fuck!” Iwai sobs as his balls tighten before flooding your pussy with his cum, his thrusts becoming languid as he sees his release all the way through. At the same time, the throbbing of his dick while he cums resonates within your walls, amplifying the rush of him attacking your clit. “Mm, come on, baby, I can feel it. Cum for me, fucking cum for me.” You aren’t sure what exactly does you over—if it’s his gently softening, massive cock still twitching inside you or the way his digits know just how to play with your bundles of nerves or the way he called you “baby”— but your body tenses one last time as the blue hue of lightning fills the living room.

“Munehisa,” your voice comes as a broken trill, though his name is clear as day, as you release one last time, a waterfall running and soaking his fingers. Proud of his work, Iwai slows his pace down until his fingers are moving dully to bring you down from your overstimulation. The both of you are panting and sweating, nearly half-dead from the exhaustion.

“C’mere, baby,” he purrs in your ear after god knows how many minutes passed. You hiss when he carefully removes his flaccid length from within you, globs of cum dripping from your walls. Without thinking, Iwai takes two fingers to catch the loose emission and stuffs it back inside you for good measure. He never asked if you were on any form of contraceptive—part of him almost hopes that you aren’t. “Lemme clean ya up a lil.”

“Mm, can’t move.” Munehisa chuckles, wrapping his large hands around your thighs before hoisting the both of you up. Despite the action being chaste, your whole abused body tingles at the movement. He carries the both of you towards the bathroom, setting you down on the narrow space of the vanity before untangling your koala-like limbs from his body. Without saying anything, he grabs a washcloth, running it under the tap and wipes away the loose cum that’s already starting to dry and crust over.

It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, the way his grey eyes have grown cold, and it seems he’s hyper focused on cleaning your skin as best he can. You elect to ignore the fact that he’s making damn sure not to let any cum that’s sitting in your pussy out. Even after he’s cleaned you and himself off, the two of you are lingering in the bathroom in silence, unsure of who should speak first. It seemed it would have to be you. Again.

Finally finding strength in your gelatinous state, you hop off the vanity, grabbing one of Munehisa’s large hands and lead him back out to his room.

“I should sleep on the couch,” he says quietly, though he makes no motion to get up from where both of your naked bodies are pressed on the tops of the sheets. You only shake your head in reply, holding onto his hand even tighter.

“I don’t care if it was dirty talk or what,” you start, recalling the salacious title Munehisa granted himself, “but I have no ill intention towards Kaoru or you. So as long as you let me keep coming around you both, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” He’s quiet for a moment, eyes darkening at he stares at the floor in contemplation. When he says nothing, you try again. “Will you let me stay, Mune?” The weapons dealer’s head snaps towards you. How the fuck had just his name come to have such a bewitching hold on him? Had it always sounded so pretty? So loved?

It was it just because it was from your lips?

“If I let you stay, I might not let you go.”

“I never said to let me go.”

[shyrose57]

Brothers anon back again. I had a sort of writers block for the last like 2 days which made it really hard to do some questions, but I got em done finally. Sorry about the wait. This one is split between the numbered questions, and next ask is the other questions you asked!

I think I accidentally skipped a question in the last one. I honestly don't completely remember but in case I did skip it by mistake, the groups first travel out of the city's limits and even further beyond in a carriage. When they reach the end of how far the driver is willing to go they then get out and start walking. With Jackie screaming about how their finally going on a adventure. 

1: It thankfully doesn't get to to bad before the others notice. And he immediately told them about Dream, wanting to be very clear with what happened and what they where getting themselves into. But they accepted him anyway and helped him. 

2: Isaac is the leader cause Cletus is too much of a wildcard and too impulsive to lead safely, Charles is too shy to lead, and while Benjamin is perfect for leading he doesnt really like leading and is more of a follower than a leader. But Isaac can joke around and gets along with everyone but also be able to take things seriously and know when something needs to be handled.

5: They do not, they last for a few minutes and unless its a healing or regeneration potion (in which it can take a few days for it to fully go away) they have no long lasting affects. They do know of eachothers past to an extent, they know enough to avoid triggers and enough to know what not to do when around eachother. They know through telling eachother, and they feel awful Grievous and Jackie had to deal with that, but leave it in the past and focus on making their current life better. 

6: Yes and no, while Jackie did mean to throw it at Ran, he ment for it to just hit nearby him, not directly hit him. It was ment to be more of a scare/intimidation tactic than anything else honestly. Grievous's luck is for basically everything, he has won the lottery twice before actually but only those 2 times, he's correctly guessed how many items are in a container more than a few times as well. 

7: I use the height charts and they help mostly for comparison, problem is I have trouble applying it to real world stuff and because of that I still have trouble knowing if something or someone is to tall or short. Jackie can get very mean, like he can make fun of someone who just lost a loved one or experienced a traumatic event at the worst. But he usually doesn't get nearly that mean, most he does normally is making fun of how someone looks or how they do certain things. The others comfort him the best they can when he gets sad, and when he gets mean they either encourage it (Grievous), or discourage it and stop him (Watson. Ran is between either encouraging or discouraging it).

8: He was! He spent most of his life adventuring actually! He misses it somedays now since he lives in Subbin, but he believes giving up his adventuring life for a family and friends who needed him is a more than far trade and would happily pick his family over adventuring again. For around 4 years after Ran left Mizu (including the day he left), Ran traveled everywhere, and learned how to survive himself and taught himself different things, like sewing. Ran has made new socks, fixed clothes, and made blankets for everyone at least once. Watson also designs bows and arrows for show, for top functionality, and for just simple (training) gifts to the others. Ran (and Watson) has visited the nether, though Ran tended to stay in it longer than Watson cause he could withstand the temperatures better. And while digging a new tunnel across the nether he ran into ancient debris, which he then messed with until he figured out to mix it with gold and coat his sword in it. He tried to find more ancient debris but sadly hasn't found any, leaving his sword permanently damaged and at risk of breaking. Jackie isn't good at all at painting, its more of a hobby he's trying out. They try to camp out there at least once a week, where Grievous will sometimes build a pillowfort and either force everyone inside or play a game of capture the fort with them. Sometimes Ran will also read during the pillowfort nights, but not to often. Jackie wants to vist a Snow, Savanna, Jungle,  Tagia, and if possible, a Ice Spike biome. He also wants to vist the nether but he'll have to fight Ran on that. Ran and Jackie's secondary titles are in Javanese!

9: Ran just kinda went "Hey Jackie, stand still for a second." "Ok?" And then he just picked him up and threw up. 

10: When he's first given dinner after already eaten lunch, he just kinda stares at the food. Then asks if they meant to give him food, and when the others say yes, he asks why because he thought people only ate once every few days. His answer shocked the others and they ask him to explain, and he explains futher that he was only allowed to eat and drink once every 3 days. Their horrified by this answer but explain to him how theres 3 meals a day and he can drink whenever, he doesn't believe them at first but eventually accepts it. 

11: When the fishermen first come to Ranbob about their worry, he expresses the same worry as them. But says that it's unlikely Ran will hurt the fishermen specifically, because Rans haunting are already friends with them, and Ran wouldnt risk breaking the friendship unless he deemed it necessary for their safety. 

12: Ranbob is sad that Ran goes to such lengths to avoid him and keep people away from him, but he has resigned himself to it. As he knew that if Ran was alive it was greatly unlikely that he would trust him and knew he would be avoided. Which is actually particularly why he believes Ran will never trust him again and why he views Ran as a kind of lost family member. One he'll never get back no matter what he does.

13: Their first stop is a nearby flower biome, and after that Watson has planned to lead them to a waterfall he found with a shattered Savanna somewhat close to it. They plan to travel for a minimum of 6 months, they can actually travel for as long as they want to, but Prokius made them agree that they must be back before the next General Pit Battles (which happens once every 5 years). 

14: He would 100% run himself into the ground until he's barely alive while searching for them. Benjamin compares Ranbob wanting to go back to Dream, to an abused person wanting to go back to their abusive lover. They believe they've changed and that they truly do love them and want the best for them, but in reality that's not it at all and others have to help them see thats not true and help them save themselves. So it doesn't surprise Benjamin or Isaac that much (it surprises Charles and Cletus though), and after its explained to them, their all more than willing to help Ranbob get over Dream and help him be himself again.

15: Oh definitely. Once they hear the Green-Eyed Enderman is back from hiding they all set out again, and after the group gets attacked and once word spreads that its in a group and there's another enderman with them, they all get targeted. With the Gladiators and Fishermen being targeted as bait or hostages to try to trick the enderman into following a trap. Ran wasnt affected like his brother was. Im talking about trauma and maybe even a bit of PTSD that came from Mizu, caused by Dream. Though both of the brothers have gained different amounts of trauma and PTSD from Dream. I may give the raven to either Watson or Ran, I think its fits both of them really well. I want to have them come across ruins of other Tales but im not sure which ones. Maybe they could find the remains of the Wild West Tale and the Haunted Mansion?

Glad to see you, Brothers Anon, and excited to read!

1: The perfect start to an Adventure. And a funny mental image. Imagining these two groups cramped into carriages is pretty amusing. How ready was everyone to get out by the time they could?

2: The fishermen are really great, and Ranbob is very lucky. I love them.

3: Isaac sounds like he’s a pretty good fit for it then. But nobody’s perfect! What are some flaws of his, leadership-wise?

5: Interesting. What makes Regeneration and Healing last longer? I suppose it’s not relative to the AU, but I am a bit curious. What’s the world’s potions mechanisms, if you don’t mind me asking? And that’s good! They may not know everything, but they know what to avoid, and that’s important. Everyone’s moved forward and are making the best of life, and honestly, that’s pretty cool of them.

6: Welp, Jackie, it seems intimidation tactic failed. However, you have managed to anger Ran, so..there’s that. He won the lottery? Dang. Well, if they ever need money, they can just send him to the nearest casino, I suppose.

7: Aight, so I may have a solution for you there. Whatever height you’re going for, find something in real life that’s just about the same height. Like a tree, or something. Or not, we can always just leave it at short enough to be tossed and tall enough to be the tosser. Jackie sounds like he knows where to hit to make it hurt, honestly. It’s good that they comfort him, though I am curious why they all react as they do to him being mean. Why does Grievous encourage it? And is it more of a depends on the day thing for Ran, or a depends on what was said to Jackie, and what Jackie’s saying thing?

8: Nice! What kind of places did he go? Does he have any particularly interesting knickknacks from that time period? And Ran personally sounds like he knows what he’s doing. Watson’s weapons sound really cool, where did he learn to make them? Is visiting the Nether not a common occurrence these days? Or is it simply that the others never got around to it before? Well, hobbies are always fun to try. Does Jackie keep at it and get better or get bored and try something else? How does Capture the Fort go with these guys, considering they’re gladiators? Why does Jackie want to visit those particular biomes? Is there a reason, or do they just sound cool to him? And why would Ran not want them going to the Nether? Because of the danger?

9: FDXGHJ- He just- tossed him?? No warning?? Oh my gods, I’m dying. How did Jackie react to that? Heck, how did Porkius react to that? I doubt anyone was expecting that display.

10: Oh, no. Now I really want to punch Dream in the face. What the heck, Dream?! He legit asks if they meant to give him food...If one of the fishermen or gladiators doesn’t eventually find a way to punch Dream, I will be forced to travel realities and do it myself. 

11: Kind of sad that Ranbob was equally concerned about it. But hey! He won’t have to be, one day!

12: Poor Ranbob. I hope he’s proven wrong, eventually. Do the fishermen know that he thinks this? If so, how do they feel about it? Or does he kind of just keep those thoughts to himself?

13: Flower biomes are really pretty. What did everyone think about it? Did they bring any flowers with them? So this roadtrip could possibly go on for a few years. Did they leave just after a General Pit Battle, or do they have like, less than five years? Speaking of General, is Jackie still the General in this AU? Does he have extra duties because of it? Or is that not something that happened in this AU?

14: Yikes. Reactions to this? Why does Ranbob believe Dream’s changed, as you put it? Is Dream still able to talk to him, or is it because he just misses being there? So Benjamin and Isaac aren’t all that surprised about it. Do they take the reins in helping out? And how do they all do so? It’s good that they’re helping him though.

15: Well, this sounds like it can’t end well. They try to use the hauntings as bait? Is anyone actually captured? Rescue missions? And alright, that makes a bit more sense. I can see how they’d both be effected differently, and honestly, they’d probably both have very different perspectives of the event, all things considered. Ravens for the win! And it’d be really cool for them to come across the ruins of old Tales buildings. Can you imagine the kind of things they’d find? Diaries, faded photographs, moth-eaten clothes, blood stained floors...Like a walk in the past, but they’ll never know what came to be for the people of that time.

[thestarkerisobvious]

Sixteen - The Masked Librarian

amazing art work by @starker-sorbet​  A snugglefic for @mrstarksbabyy​

Sixteen

1 The Masked Librarian

After his sixteenth birthday, Peter used his birthday money to buy several notebooks and spent the summer filling them up with the facts he had gleaned from Tony, along with the books he had gotten from the libraries.  For fear they would be found, he wrote a lie in bold marker on the covers:  

                                                Novel Ideas:  

                                              Ideas for a Novel

Putting a timeline together with the information he got from Tony was impossible.  Tony was far more concerned with his duties around the farm than who was actually ordering him around.  

Peter’s constant questions finally made it clear – Tony had never been terribly concerned with whom he was serving, as long as he was fed and had a job to do.  Who was the son, nephew or uncle or son-of-the-uncle of whom ultimately did not concern him.  The title of “Master” wasn’t even passed on directly from father to son in every case, although it was, Peter finally ascertained, only given to a male blood relative of the original Post homesteader.  There were other problems, too, with the things Peter was being told.  Tony had no interest in years or wars or anything in American history that Peter could plot along a timeline.  Peter quickly learned there was no point in asking “which war?”  Tony had never understood which wars were which, just that men sometimes left for them.  To Tony, all the wars were “The War.”  To further complicate things, Peter strongly suspected that New York City was referred to as “New Amsterdam” by the Post family long after it was really called something else.

What he could find in the libraries was sparse.  The best he could find was the same stories they had been told when they bought the house: that two Post brothers had come from Germany and married a woman who was related to the royal family in Portugal.  That the boys were always taught German in honor of the patriarchs and the girls Portuguese, for the same reason.  That a Post had been a famous hero in the Civil War until he died by Direct Encounter With A Cannonball.  No other details.

Until the 1920s.  That’s when things got interesting..  The Post Homestead, at one time, had been a type of artist colony, which was to say, the sprawling Post family were famous for inviting artists to live, sometimes for years, as guests in their multi-generation household.    This had started out as a series of artisans hired to tutor the multiple Post daughters.  Over the decades this had become a tiny thriving community.  Mostly painters and sculptors, according to the books, but there were musicians too.  This had caused a conflict between the Post family and the town – for a period of the time the Post Homestead had been bringing in jazz musicians at great expense, much to the delight of the tiny artistic community.  To the town at large, not so much.  (Those of the African American persuasion were welcomed to come and work in Devil’s Hollow, but not “let the sun set” upon them.  The Post Family apparently did not share those same reservations.)

What happened after that was hard to piece together.  Tony wasn’t around to ask, and even if he was, he might not have known the answer.  But the death of Jedediah Post certainly must have been a turning point. 

Or maybe it just seemed that way to Peter because that was the most newsworthy event he could find.  Jedediah Post was a man of considerable wealth, and left a great deal of it to the towns around him, as well as three different museums in New York City.  But none to Devil’s Hollow.  The amount of art the family had amassed was significant, including paintings, sculptures and something called “art deco” which, as far as Peter could tell, involved a lot of very fancy furniture.  The donations were large and it was easy to track down stories about them.  Some of the museums in New York City he had even been to, although he had never seen the art in question (he was more of a Science Exhibit man himself) but some Aunt May had seen. 

The breadth of the donations was breathtaking, but mostly Peter’s research turned up bitterness and resentment.  Jedediah Post had left nothing to the Devil’s Hollow library, nor the museum (there had been one in those days) nor the school.  Apparently After-You-Die Donations had been a local phenomenon in Devil’s Hollow, particularly from the Post family.  That ended, it appeared, with Jedediah. 

Was there a reason?  Did Jed Post attempt to create an artistic community at the Post Homestead, and resent the town’s undue influence on whom he was allowed to invite?  Or did he simply make more friends outside the boundaries of the town than in?  And was that why the sprawling Post family all relocated elsewhere?  Whatever had happened, sometime in between the 1930’s and the 40’s the last Post son was living there completely and utterly by himself. 

Was he hated by the townspeople because he was a hostile misanthrope, or did he become a hostile misanthrope BECAUSE he was hated by the townspeople?   Whatever had happened, the Post estate had gone from a busy, noisy, bustling place to a house with one resident.  

Evan Post.

Evan Post… and Tony.

When Peter wasn’t pouring over his books he was remembering what it was like to be wrapped up in the arms of the thing that lived under the bed.  Which reminded him of his promise to the thing that lived under his bed.  He took long walks daily, getting sunlight and climbing every available surface that looked climbable, doing all those things that he had been promised would make him “healthy.”  Exercise by itself was boring, but the further he could walk the more wildlife he could observe.  The higher he climbed, the same.  Aunt May started to call him “The Spider” as he came home daily reporting all the wildlife he had observed from dizzying heights.  The exercise did him good, it made him hungrier at night and soon he had grown several inches and put on more weight.  He admired himself in the bathroom mirror, he enjoyed standing on the scale.  He was proud of his new body.  

He couldn’t wait to show Tony.

The long walks into the forest and the many hours sitting in trees gave Peter time to think about what life had been like for his friend in the years between Jedediah and Evan Post.  Which led to even weightier thoughts about what life had been like for Tony in the years between life in the monastery and life with the stylite Simeon the Elder.

Primarily, Peter thought about Tony, and what Tony liked to eat.

In the monastery, it appeared Tony and the others (the ones he called “us”) were fed just like guard dogs.  Or more correctly, like hellhounds.  They were fed on cattle and “infernal vapors” and, on rare occasions, people.  All until he was sent to live with Simeon on a pillar where he learned how to feed entirely on feelings.

Peter went over it in his head many times, the things Tony had said about Simeon and his other monk-lover, the one he had left behind without a single thought.  Simeon he had loved, Peter was sure of it.  “I was his beloved,” Tony had said.  (He had also spoken about touching, about pretending to be shy, about needing to be ‘taught.’  Peter tried not to think about that, but he did.  He thought about it a lot.)  

It was true, Tony might have loved Simeon the same way he loved the fields of cattle being raised to feed him, but he loved the man nonetheless.  Spent 12 years with him on a pillar, when he was supposed to be convincing him to return to the monastery.  Protected his ability to ask questions. Took away his hurt and his desire to hurt himself.   Lived on that, and nothing but that, until the day he was forced to kill the man.  That was something he could not control, Peter was certain, any more than he could control being after “sent into the ground.”

The next thing he knew, he was working in the New World.  Was he fed with farm animals, too, working on the farm as he did?  The only thing Peter could think of was the roaring twenties and the artists that lived and created at the Post Homestead.  The layout of the little artist colony was easy to see from his vantage points in the tops of trees or in his hiding place in the empty barn.    Barns, silos, and animal stalls had been razed and almost a dozen cottage-like guest cottages built by Jedediah in his day, only to be raized to their foundations by Evan decades later.  Had Evan despised growing up in that cacophony, unable to find a quiet place to himself, destroying all vestiges of it in his old age?  Or had he treasured that life, growing up in the safety of his title as son of the lord of the manor, removing the artists village when he finally understood he would never see the likes of it again?  Had he hated people as an old man because he had hated people all his life?  Of had he considered the composers, painters and sculptures the ‘normal’ people, and hated the people of Devil’s Holler’ because they were anything but normal?

Even knowing what Evan Post had done, Peter could still sympathies.  He himself had to go to school with boys his age who complained that the “for’ners, n-words and queers” were taking over the country, while he sat in silence and day-dreamed about the day he could go to college in New York City and be surrounded by “for’ners, n-words and queers” again.

Peter tried to picture it, sitting up in a tree and observing the whole of the Post Homestead.  A little village of people, creating, despairing, hoping, disappointing, arguing, loving, scheming, fearing.  And Tony underneath it, grazing on it all.  Tony spoke of feeding from artists after the work was done, or else the work would never get finished.  Did he know it instinctively?  Or did he learn through trial and error?  How much art was never complete because he fed too soon?  It couldn’t have been much, the finished artworks that DID come from the Post Homestead were legion.  Did the artists even know they were feeding Tony their light?  Was it voluntary?  Mandatory?  Tony remembered a grandmother that called him “a musa,” The Muse.  Did they think Tony was the cause of the art that was produced in this place, or did they realize he was simply growing stronger from it?

And where did the money come from?  The Post Homestead was an actual farm, and then one day it wasn’t.  Were the artists all brought here because Jedediah Post was a very rich man, and knew what he wanted to spend his wealth upon art?  Or did Jedediah invest his money into feeding Tony, which in turn made him a very rich man?

And how difficult was it for Tony, feasting on the light of sculptors, painters and controversial Jazz musicians, to learn how to live on nothing but the hate and fear of Evan Post?  What did that turn him into?  Tony readily admitted that he had driven off everyone who had come to live in the Post Homestead before Peter’s family, driving them away because all he wanted to drink was fear.  Couldn’t stop seeking out fear, causing the fear, even when he realized his own greed was driving away his only source of food.

And he had tried to inspire fear in Peter and his little family of three, Peter remembered.  When his quiet family moved into the vast house they decided, that very first night, that there was a good reason why the Post Homestead was considered haunted.  Their quiet country home was anything but quiet. It wasn’t as noisy as their New York City apartment, of course, but still not quiet.  Not only did floors creak and doors slam in empty rooms, but entire wings groaned and floorboards squeaked in the exact rhythm of footsteps.  The wind howled under the porch like an angry monster.  The first night in their new home not a single member of the family slept a wink.

So, naturally, the little family sat at the breakfast table the next and formulated a plan – a research plan.  That very day they set out for the tiny town library, got library cards, and searched out books on architecture.  When the library proved lacking they drove to the next town and did the same.  Soon Peter had a pile of books to read and May and Ben set out to fix up their Still-Quieter-Than-New-York-City farmhouse.  Peter found the books fascinating, had read them to May as she worked in the kitchen or Ben as he worked on the fences, but when those two ran him off he mostly he found himself reading out loud to himself in his room.

And, just like that, the noises quieted down.

The wolves, too, that had howled with alarming frequency when they first arrived (alarming because they had been assured there were no wolves in the woods anymore) dried up the very weekend Peter had come home with an armload of books about canines.  At the time it seemed to Peter that he had superpowers.  Whatever alarming phenomenon their haunted house produced, Peter could make it go away just by researching it.  He joked about it with Aunt May as he read to her about plumbing at the breakfast table (the obvious reason for the growling sounds coming from the basement.)  She called him “The Masked Librarian.” 

Now, he realized, he had been doing something else entirely.  Tony had lived on a diet of fear.  But Peter was only providing Tony with questions, the joy of gaining new information, followed by more information.  The thing Tony called “light.” 

Sometimes Peter wondered if Tony would be happier in a household with more emotional displays – Peter knew that “light” was not simply the positive emotions.  In addition to fear and hate, Tony fed on anger, sorrow and righteous indignation just as well.  But Peter’s little family had certainly put Tony on a strict diet.  May was stubbornly, sometimes grimly, cheerful whereas Uncle Ben raised his voice so very rarely Peter could remember every single instant.  Peter was by far the most emotional of the trio, reading books about pollution that made him cry, about endangered animals and acid rain that made him so angry he felt like punching the walls.  Tony had requested all of those kinds of books, had requested laughter and tears and anger and questions. 

Had requested everything but fear.

He had described Peter as ‘fearless,’ and in many ways that was true.  Maybe Peter had inherited some stubborn, determined optimism from the same ancestor as Aunt May, or maybe he had learned it hanging onto her apron strings.  In any case when he had first discovered that there was a voice talking to him from under his bed, fearlessness and determination had certainly served him well.

But now that the thing that lived under his bed had a name and a backstory, Peter certainly felt some real fears creeping in.

Especially as the season that Tony had told him to wait for came creeping in, a sixteen-year-old Peter was aware of some budding feelings.  His body, he was told, would be changing.  He thought he was prepared for that.  But he was finding, much to his alarm, that his brain was changing too.  Watching the foxes chase rabbits from his perch high in a tree, or watching the owls devour their prey whole from his hiding place in the barn, Peter poked at those fears gingerly, teasing around the edges.

All his life, it seemed, pretending the fear wasn’t real had served him well.   Now he wasn’t so sure.  Normally, when Peter Parker was alarmed by something, he looked it up at the library.  But he wasn’t sure there were any books on this subject.

So he did the only think he could have done, he reviewed it in his brain.  Reviewed everything he knew about Tony.  Everything he knew about the thing that lived under his bed.

As he went over the story in his mind, he found himself with two things that he decided not to label ‘fears’ after all.  He decided it would be more expedient to label them ‘regrets.’

Alright, three.  Maybe four.

[minijenn]

It’s Been Awhile

It’s Been Awhile _______________________________________________________________ (UFF Fic)

Takes place between Unleash the Light & Steven Universe: The Movie _______________________________________________________________ It’s amazing how fast things can progress. It’s only been a little over a year since Era 3 began and Steven had already made big changes to the gem empire. Convincing the Diamonds to liberate their colonies. Allowing gems more freedom. And even constructing a place on Earth where gems can learn to be themselves and how to live freely, Little Homeworld.

Even though Steven is half-diamond, he couldn’t do all of that alone. Luckily, he didn’t have to. He had the help of his family and friends, who have been there for him through thick and thin. Especially that of the Pines twins, Dipper and Mabel. They had gone through almost everything Steven had gone through. From encountering monsters & elite gems to galactic tyrants & dream demons. Although some of those events left a scar or two, their bond with Steven couldn’t be any stronger.

Even though he’s patched things up between him, the crystal gems & the diamonds, he knows that deep down, he can’t forgive the diamonds for everything they put him, his family & friends through, especially after what Yellow did to his best friend Dipper.

Even when he does have those feelings, he always puts others before himself. In his case, all gem kind comes first. Of course, he would feel better if he didn’t come alone. However, all of the gems on Earth were busy constructing Little Homeworld. He would ask Stan and/or Ford Pines, but they were away on an adventure together in the middle of the ocean, on the Stan o’ War II. Connie was busy with studying for school, so Steven didn’t want to bother her either. That left only two options, and he wasn’t sure if they would come along with him, Dipper & Mabel. Surprisingly, they agreed to come along. Even though they too had some bad experience(s) on the gem homeworld, they had free time and wanted to support Steven anyway they could. If that meant keeping him company while he meets up with the diamonds, then so be it.

HOMEWORLD

It may have been a year since they were last on Homeworld, but the twins noticed that the gem planet has been making changes of their own. Not only was the caste system disbanded and all gems were allowed to have relationships with gems of different courts, but homeworld was also planting trees.

Right now, the twins were waiting outside the doors to the throne room as Steven was catching up with the diamonds and discussing how to make Era 3 better. Even though the twins wanted to be by Steven’s side, they figured it was best if they were supporting him from outside of the room, away from the diamonds, especially Yellow. Of all the diamonds, Yellow was the one who the twins disliked the most, especially Dipper, for obvious reasons as he looked at his metallic arm.

“How much longer do you think they’ll be in there?” Mabel asked her smart twin brother.

“I want to say soon, but who knows. Either Steven wants to make sure everything is going smoothly with Era 3 or the diamonds are begging him to move in with him. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made some presentation for him about the pros and cons of living here. Or Blue could just be smothering him against her cheek” Dipper theorized with his sister.

“Think what you may, I actually think it’s kinda cute that Blue does that to him.” Mabel said as she awed at imagining Steven up against his diamond relative’s cheek.

“If she did that to anyone else, she’d probably accidently crush them.” Dipper mentioned, trying to talk Mabel out of it.

“It’d be worth it!” Mabel said positively as the siblings shared a slight giggle. However, their laughter would be put on hold when footsteps were coming their way and a familiar voice was heard.

“Hello Dipper”

The twins halted their laughter as soon as they heard those words. They both recognized who said them. Dipper especially. It was the voice of the person, or gem, that made his first time on homeworld miserable. She tortured him, mentally abused him, and even took part in removing his arm, which is now replaced by a robotic one. The elite era 1 gem that served under yellow diamond’s court.

Hessonite

“It’s been awhile. I see you and your……… sibling decided to accompany Steven to Homeworld as he meets with the diamonds.” Hessonite said. The twins didn’t face her as they instead just decided to ignore her as they directed their eyes towards the ground, hoping that Hessonite would just walk past them.

Although Hessonite was annoyed by their silence, she understood why. After all, she played her part in forever changing their lives. Although Yellow Diamond was the one who came up with the project of making humans into assassins for homeworld, she was put in charge of making sure the project went smoothly. Not just molding Dipper into the ruthless assassin Stonemason, but also using the light prism as a weapon against them.

Of course, Hessonite saw herself as a changed gem and wanted to change the relationship between her and Dipper. Of course, she knew right away it would be easier said than done. Hessonite kept walking past the twins, but stopped in place. She looked towards the end of the hallway, but decided to speak up.

“I see that you both won’t speak to me, let alone look at me, but I assure you that the Hessonite you put up with in the past will never show herself again. It’s thanks to Steven and the light prism, or I guess George, that I have a new perspective on life and am a different gem because of it. I will do everything I can to make sure Era 3 will flourish and-“

“Just Stop” Dipper said, interrupting his former tormentor’s monologue. Hessonite didn’t turn to face him, but was surprised at his bold demand. He decided to raise his head up and face her even though she won’t do the same.

“I’m only going to say this once and you better listen good. First of all, my sister and I are only here for Steven. I didn’t come here to see you. Get this through your head. You may claim to be a changed gem, but I will never see you as one. What you, Yellow and everyone else involved in doing what you did to me and everyone else is unforgivable. If you really want to make amends, then do one thing. Stay the hell away from me, my sister, my family and everyone else I care about! If I ever see you again, or even hear your voice, then I promise you, we will BOTH be sorry. You already left a wound on me. The last thing I need is you causing another one, whether intentional or not.” Dipper lectured to the orange gem his demand before making one last statement.

“If you understand, then keep walking & don’t turn back.” Dipper told her. After a brief silence, Hessonite did just that as she continued walking down the hall. Away from the door to the throne room and from the Pines twins.

Mabel finally looked up when she couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore and turned to face her brother.

“You ok bro-bro?” She asked with concern.

“Yes and no.” He said plainly as he looked at his metal arm. When he did, Mabel grabbed his yellow hand with her own hand and gave him a warm smile, which resulted in him doing the same.

“Yes” He said with a warm smile as they continued to wait for their friend. After a couple more minutes, Steven emerged from the door and turned to see his friends happy that their wait is over.

“How’d it go S-man?” Mabel said with a goofy tone.

“Pretty boring. It started off talking about Era 3, but changed direction with the diamonds asking me to move into the palace.” Steven recapped his meeting.

“Called it.” Dipper said under his breath as Mabel just rolled her eyes.

“I’m sorry I made you guys wait so long” Steven apologized to his friends, not thinking that the meeting would take longer than he thought.

“Don’t worry about it Steven.” Mabel said to her friend with a comforting smile.

“Yeah, we don’t mind.” Dipper added.

“Are you guys sure? I thought I heard another voice earlier. Who was it?” Steven questioned as curiosity got the better of him. The twins looked at each other, wondering what they should say. Should they just avoid the question and tell him it wasn’t anyone important. Or should they tell him the truth? Dipper decided to speak first.

“Let’s just say it’s someone we don’t have the best history with.” Dipper answered. Steven wondered who he meant specifically. There were a number of homeworld gems that gave Steven and his friends a rough time (Aquamarine, Eyeball, Squaridot, etc.). But he could tell that Dipper wouldn’t go into any further detail. Mabel then decided to intervene.

“But now we don’t have to worry about them, because Dipper told her like it is.” Mabel added on as she gave a warm stare at her brother as he made eye contact with her and did the same thing.

Steven didn’t know who they just encountered, but he could tell by the look on their faces that they overcome whatever troubled them. He was happy that they seemed stronger as twins.

“You guys want to head back to Earth?” Steven asked.

“Yeah” The twins responded at the same time. The three friends soon walked the opposite end of the hall to make it to the nearest warp pad that would take them back to Earth.

As she watched the three of them walk away, Hessonite learned something. She knew she wanted to make amends with the twins. But even helping them, Steven and the Crystal Gems deal with Pyrobe & Demantoid, some things are just too difficult to look past. Hessonite accepted that fact and decided to live her life as a new gem, and obliged to Dipper’s demand for her to stay away from him and his loved ones. As she continued to walk out of the palace, she said something to herself that’s meant for the three young friends.

“I wish you all a good future”

[script-a-world]

I really want to create new foods and recipes for one of my worlds, but I have no idea how I would go about doing research for something like that. Do you guys have any resources or advice that might help? To be more specific for this world, most ingredients are incredibly low quality (but they are in abundance) and any imported ingredients are only used for the rich. I was thinking their food would use a lot of seasoning to mask the quality, but I'm not too sure. Thank you!

Feral: We could actually do with a few more specifics to answer this question as fully as you would probably like, but I’ll do the best I can.

First, I’m not sure whether you want to create recipes using real world ingredients that would in fact be cookable to release on your blog as some kind of companion for your audience or you want to conceptualize some recipes to be able to describe taste, texture, etc. If it’s the first option, creating recipes from scratch is pretty difficult. You might want to consider taking some cooking classes to learn techniques, reading cook books for a lesson in combining ingredients, and doing a lot test cooking to nail down the flavor profiles. If you don’t want to go completely chef-y, you could also take recipes and then tweak them by substituting an ingredient or using a slightly different technique (baking instead of broiling, etc). This would also be helpful in the second case. If by "low quality" you mean "low cost," try looking at food preparation that developed in poorer, underprivileged, or minority communities, like American immigrant cuisine and soul food (the original styles, not the bougie, hipster, “elevated” styles).

For example, understanding how immigrant cuisine differs from motherland cuisine can be particularly helpful in determining how your world’s “rich” food can be adapted into “poor” food. In America we often think of corned beef and cabbage as being a traditional Irish food, but in reality, no one in Ireland really eats corned beef and cabbage - it’s a traditional Irish-American food because poor Irish immigrants could not afford the lamb they would have eaten at home (which was more readily available in say rural Ireland than in New York City and therefore at an affordable cost), and they often could not source any bacon or cured pork products because the butchers who would sell to them were often the Jewish immigrant butchers. So, the cheapest cut of cured meat they could get was corned beef and replaced the traditional proteins they would have used at home.

Second, I’m working off the assumption that your world has the same ingredients as we do, but it’s unclear. When you mention creating new foods, that could mean food preparation or it could mean edible plants and animals. If it’s the latter, then the easiest way to do it would be crossing real world things.

So, for example, everyone’s favorite vegetable on your world may be a cross between a cucumber and a lemon (the flesh is cucumber like but grows in segments in a thick skin that wouldn’t be eaten straight but could be zested, and the flavor is like a very watered down citrus). This also gives you the ability to create recipes by using the two ingredients you crossed.

Also, I’m assuming that you’re using actual food rather than powders and extracts (very common in scifi settings where "real" food is incredibly scarce), which I don’t have too many ideas on how to create recipes that way. Firefly has a pretty good method of just obliquely referring to “protein powders in every color” and showing cans of things but only really showing food prepared and being consumed when it is in fact real food provided to the crew as payment.

Finally, seasoning is a good way to hide low quality ingredients, whether it’s a cheap cut of meat or slightly wilted vegetables. Especially sauces. Especially, especially cream sauces (providing that milk of some kind is one of the ingredients generally available). Sauces make spices go further. Also, keep in mind preservation techniques (salting, smoking, drying, pickling); in the real world what has often made something the “cheap” version is that it is preserved and not fresh (with the common exception of salted foods when salt is an expensive import). But those preservation techniques also infuse additional flavors into the food.

And speaking of the real world - have you ever heard that England conquered most of it in search of spices and then decided it wasn’t going to use any of them? Spices were the purview of the very very wealthy for a very long time. The common folk did not have much access to anything they couldn’t grow in their own backyard. So, the working class dishes we commonly associate with England are not particularly spicy. As you’re deciding how the poor disguise the low quality of their food, whether it's less costly trying to appear more costly or slightly less fresh than one would prefer to eat or whatever, keep in mind what they are able to grow in the soil and climate they have (spices are typically tropical while herbs are more often temperate).

A helpful guide in food experimenting:

Cook Smart: How to Maximize Flavor Series

Part 6: Guide to Adding Flavor with Aromatics

Brainstormed: Low quality how? Like, the bakers put sawdust put in bread to save flour low quality? Our teeth are worn down by forty years old because we live in a desert and the sand gets into our food no matter what we do and grinds our molars to nubs? We only get the worst cuts of meat because it’s all we can afford or the best stuff has to be sacrificed or tithed? Salt is expensive because we don’t live near the sea or any salt deposits so trading for it is pricey? There’s been plenty of cheats, circumstances, and shortcuts throughout history that may decrease what we would call the quality of food, and all of those examples really did happen.

Your idea of quality may be a hoity-toity five star restaurant, or an enormous home-cooked fresh meal, or the tastiest dish with all the seasonings on it. Instead of describing the food as low quality, think about what your people would consider high quality. What do they love? What flavors are common, and what’s rarer and therefore richer? How available is plant-based food, meaning are there herbs and fruit trees in everyone’s garden or is agriculture and import the only way of obtaining them? How available is animal-based food, meaning do these people live as herdsfolk and eat a whole sheep every week including the organs or do fishing boats bring in dozens of kinds of seafood or is the entire population practically vegetarian until traders arrive with preserved meats?

Think about where your people are situated geographically to figure out the resources available to them, and their neighboring countries for trade. Also think about how developed your people are. This website is a timeline of food throughout history, and may help you pin down some barebones basics.

Tex: Both Feral and Brainstormed offer excellent advice, and I’ll be reiterating most of that in my own opinion.

Cooking techniques are cumulative skills that reflect a culture’s technological progression. We started with a plain old fire, so cooking food with that meant techniques like spitroasting - with the invention of pottery, we could put things in containers over, on, and even under said fire, which would bring us “new” techniques like broiling, boiling (comestibles in a liquid), roasting, sautéing, searing, and blanching (comestibles scalded in boiling water and then removed into an ice/cold water bath).

These cumulative skills are also exponential, in that most of these adapted techniques can be combined with other skills. Take, for example, a stew. The base ingredients - meats, vegetables, grains - can be cooked with direct heat (e.g. grilling over a fire), then added to a cooking container (e.g. pots of different compositions) with a fat (e.g. oil, butter) to further cook the ingredients until it’s a desired texture (e.g. “spoon tender”).

This would be a “complete” meal by itself, of course - but it’s a cook’s decision to continue on to a stew because… well, because they think it tastes good, and there could be social/cultural reasons to continue expending effort into their food. Adding a liquid - it could be water/milk, but also a composite liquid (more cooking!) such as a broth - and simmering (low indirect heat over an extended period of time) would turn this dish into a stew.

Stews (and soups, the less dense predecessor) are popular in a great deal of cultures for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s relatively easy to make - Medieval European pottage could be tended over a fire throughout the day, portions taken and the dish stretched with minimal fuss. For two, such dishes are filling, with minimal concentration on the type or number of ingredients - the basic recipe is usually water + grain(s) + vegetable(s), and can be dressed up with whatever extra ingredients are on hand. Vegetables are resource-cheap foods, as they can be grown in family/shared gardens, and grains provide the lion’s share of carbohydrates (glucose, necessary for cell function; see: cellular respiration) as well as other things like protein and fats that vegetables are usually unable to provide in significant quantities.

Soup is, in itself, preceded by gruel. Originally, soup was nothing more than something to dip your bread (or other grain-based, dry food) into, and expanded into more than just a glorified sauce. Gruels are liquid + grain, and even simpler than soups or stews. They’re very easy to make, and often invented when a culture experiences their transition to a sedentary society (marked by the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture). Breads of some sort usually accompany this because someone will figure out indirect heating (our first baking!).

Bread-beers (Ancient History), as a side note, frequently accompany breads and gruels in terms of cooking technique epochs. The Ancient Egyptians had one, Eastern Europe another (Kvass). This is a cousin, sort of, to gruels and breads in terms of technique, and utilizes the introduction of fermentation (another skill! Possibly discovered by accident via “oh this spoiled food didn’t kill me, neat”) from ingredients such as yeast. Alcohol that doesn’t start from a solid base such as bread is the refined version of this technique.

So far, everything I’ve mentioned is made from staple foods. It is the application of technique that creates such a wide variety. There is some degree of social hierarchy when it comes to what techniques are picked by a cook, if only because some of the more refined (a term I use as a concentration of technique, not an indication of quality) ones are costly in terms of time and sometimes also available tools (e.g. it’s simpler to make a bread-beer than vodka, especially if you don’t have a distillation set-up).

Seasoning is… a thorny topic. Most ingredients that get called “seasoning” - especially in the modern, North American sense - are just plants used in lower ratios than others in a dish. Take basil, for example. When it’s used in low proportions, it’s a seasoning (e.g. tomato sauce with basil). When used in high proportions, it’s an ingredient (e.g. pesto).

Now, there’s significant overlap in which plants are called “seasonings” and which are called “herbs”. This would be because plants designated as herbs are frequently prized in cookery as adding aromatic or savoury elements to a dish - too much can be overpowering (e.g. rosemary in small amounts can be delicious, but in large amounts can be too bitter to enjoy), so they’re often relegated as a component towards flavour profiles. Their physical quantity available to a culture does not necessarily designate “high” or “low” quality, merely the ratio that is culturally-accepted in recipes. (E.g. Italy uses basil in many dishes, but does that make either the dishes or the basil low quality? No.)

Herbs, as another side note, are frequently also used in medicine - hence herbal medicine. The medicinal plants wiki is less biased than the herbal medicine one, and offers some greater anthropological context.

Quality in terms of food is… usually more the ratio of preferred to not preferred qualities. In meat, this would mean things like fat, tendons, and gristle. Food, or rather ingredient, quality is a benchmark of how much time needs to be invested in preparing a dish. It takes significantly less time to cook bread when the grains are already hulled (and oftentimes polished), than if you had to go out to the field and do it yourself. Higher quality = higher convenience.

(Despite what Apicius might claim, spoiled food is not actually edible, and is different than purposefully fermented or cultured foods.)

Higher-quality ingredients means time saved, and that time could be allocated toward more complex cooking techniques. This isn’t always true in practice, since something like a cut of meat is better for one type of dish as opposed to another for practicality’s sake (i.e. if you’ve trimmed your meat so much it’s cubed, you’re not going to get a steak out of it). There’s some debate as to the idea of ingredient quantity vs technique complexity, where touted “high quality” foods (e.g. Sachertorte) use few ingredients, and “low quality” foods have many ingredients - usually seasonings, to mask the subpar flavour of something like a cut of meat.

Like Feral said, sauces are a great carrier for flavour, as well as helping to stretch the usable lifespan of an ingredient. A cut of meat ordinarily good for a steak that’s close to expiration might not be a good steak, but it could make for a decent stew or sausage, both of which could have sauces added to them to increase the complexity of the flavour profile. The food timeline which Brainstormed mentioned also has a timeline on sauces, which I think might interest you.

You mention “all the imported food is for the rich”, and I’m curious about that. Feral gave the example of the British upper-class restricting usage of some spices to the wealthier - and thus upper - classes of their society; is that what you’re referencing? What spices are you using as a base for your world, can they be domesticated? (For that matter, do greenhouses and the accompanying opportunistic entrepreneurs also exist? Or just a general opportunistic individual.)

The economic context of spices can’t be readily dismissed - there’s a weighing of amount of resources against amount of diplomatic tensions, so even if there’s an abundant amount of a given product, the providing nation could well make a money-based rude gesture in the direction of their client and increase the prices to artificially restrict supply. (Take tea, for example. Many, many economic wars have been fought over that [Abstract].)

The fluctuations of class-availability can include a factor of a nation’s influence on the global stage, and they could demand a good at a lower price and in large enough quantities to satisfy - at least temporarily - multiple social classes. This often comes at the cost of quality (here, in terms of purity of ingredients) - you can see this with tea, black pepper, olive oil, and many other class-oriented comestible goods (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I will stress that quality grades aren’t precisely the same for single-source foods and multi-source foods (e.g. sirloin steak vs curry powder), because a drop in single-source quality is more noticeable than multi-source quality due to fewer things to hide an ingredient’s quality behind.

Foods can still be heavily seasoned on both ends of the class spectrum, but there would be differences in local vs foreign (domesticated vs imported), and whether it’s a specialty dish (e.g. foods made for holidays, see: stollen) because infrequently-made dishes on a cultural basis are more likely to have fewer differences in ingredient quality and technique complexity.

There are also some dishes that have artificial class restrictions, because the upper classes have a habit of refusing to eat dishes from the lower classes as a means of social division. This is especially apparent in something like bread (1, 2), but fluctuations of technique complexity and ingredient quality availability can mean that the classifications of bread types can shift (1).

Further Reading

(PDF) Evolution – Culinary Culture – Cooking Technology by Thomas A. Vilgis

History of Cooking by All That Cooking

Feral (again): Modern History has a four part series on food in Medieval England broken down by social class with commentary on how it compares to food today, which may elucidate some of what we’ve been talking about in regards to the culturally variable meaning of “quality” in food.

[satonthelotuspier]

Like Spring Rain. Like Starlight.

A Beginning - This is Ending No 2

Lan Xichen has chosen to embrace the future, and continue with their plan to bring Nie Mingjue back to consciousness.

Lan Xichen exchanged a glance with Nie Huaisang; as Wen Ning continued, “I would have missed out on so much if Wei-gongzi hadn’t brought me back, Lan-zongzhu. I would have never seen how A-Yuan had grown, I would never have had extra, precious years with jiejie and Wei-gongzi and my relatives at the Burial Mounds, and I’m able to be a part of A-Yuan’s life now. There’s a lot to be thankful for.” The Ghost General had spoken honestly and from his heart, and it touched Lan Xichen, and allowed him to finally, and in good conscience make his decision.

Lan Xichen closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them he saw a new, determined look on Nie Huaisang’s face.

“Let’s go.” He lead the other’s out of the Hanshi and to the hall, where the other Sect Leaders had gathered.

He firstly spoke of their plan, and why they had reasonable expectation of success, and Wen Ning spoke of Fierce Corpses, and how different it was for one to retain their own consciousness; how he still retained his feelings for those he considered his family and friends.

Then the Jiang Sect Leader spoke up, “it’s all very well, Lan-zongzhu, expecting us to agree to you bringing your husband back to consciousness; it would be simply lovely for you, but why should the rest of us agree to this?” there were muttered agreements among the other sect leaders.

It was nothing Lan Xichen hadn’t expected to be questioned on; so he merely smiled at Jiang Wanyin.

“Jiang-zongzhu, a single act may be many things to many people. If I merely expected you to bring my husband back then indeed it would benefit no one else, there are other considerations, however.”

“Please, do enlighten us, Lan-zongzhu.”

“With pleasure, Jiang-zongzhu. Your current seal will last a hundred years. That means in a hundred years Nie Mingjue’s corpse-” he tried not to choke on the word, “-will be your children’s, or your children’s children’s problem. And the seal may be renewed for another hundred years, which moves the problem even further down the family tree. However, we have the Grandmaster of the discipline here and now, and willing to deal with the question of what to do, here and now, saving every clan time, effort and cost in guarding the tomb,” he could sense with the promise of lessened cost and effort he had some of the smaller sects giving his words serious thought. He still had to convince Jiang Wanyin, however.

“What about the Yin Tiger Seal that’s currently buried with Nie Mingjue?” Jiang Wanyin asked.

“Another excellent reason to open the tomb, and let Wei Wuxian destroy the final half once and for all. Or what happens if in another hundred years we have a Jin Guangshan, who covets it’s power, is able to procure it, and have someone rebuild it from the scraps as Xue Yang was able to? It may bring back my husband, Jiang-zongzhu, but it will be forestalling a very dangerous potential future problem to everyone’s benefit.”

There was something like a mocking smile cross Jiang Wanyin’s lips then, and for a moment Lan Xichen felt his heart sink in disappointment.

“You seem to have thought everything through in detail, Lan-zongzhu. It appears it would be to Yunmeng Jiang’s benefit to deal with the situation in the present. I therefore give you my agreement”

Some of the smaller clans expressed theirs immediately.

“Lanling Jin agrees.” Jin Rulan added his agreement to his uncle’s.

“Qinghe Nie agrees.” Nie Huaisang sounded unusually decisive in his support.

Seeing the way the wind was blowing most of the other sects had to follow the consensus.

***

Later, after many of the other sects had taken their leave; the pre-meeting delegation gathered again in the hall; with one other addition in Jiang Wanyin.

“You really had me going, Jiang-xiong,” Nie Huaisang tapped his folded fan against the other man’s shoulder in a recognisably coquettish move.

“Well I had to be the loudest voice in opposition, to take the stilts out from underneath the rest when I finally agreed.” Jiang Wanyin caught the hand holding the fan, “Don’t forget you owe me.”

“Thank you for your agreement, Jiang-zongzhu,” Lan Xichen saluted the other, but Nie Huaisang waved a hand in dismissal.

“Nonsense, er-ge, we came up with the plan to ensure the room went the way we wanted it to. Aren’t I smart? And how could Jiang-xiong not agree when if he hadn’t it would have left him...without.”

“Nie Huaisang!” Jiang Wanyin exclaimed, blushing hotly while Wei Wuxian let out a loud, delighted howl of a laugh.

“Jiang Cheng, you little cat,” he exclaimed, and even Lan Xichen had to hide his smile behind his sleeve.

“You talk like blackmail is the only reason I agreed, you little shit” Jiang Wanyin snapped, “I already told you I thought it was a situation we should deal with sooner rather than later, I don’t only think with...with that.”

“Of course, A-Cheng” there was a tone of indulgence in Nie Huaisang’s voice Lan Xichen had never heard before as he leant in to place a quick, teasing peck against the Jiang Sect Leader’s lips.

“We’ll keep in touch, er-ge, please begin the preparations we discussed,” Nie Huaisang said as he guided Jiang Wanyin out of the hall. They were replaced almost immediately by Lan Qiren and several elders. The former’s face resembled thunder.

Lan Xichen straightened his already rather ramrod-like spine, it was time to face the consequences of his actions; and he intended to follow through on his promise to ensure his brother and brother-in-law didn’t suffer for agreeing to help him.

“Wen Ning, perhaps you should take your leave of A-Yuan” Wei Wuxian suggested, and the other followed his advice and left the hall, as Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian moved to stand next to Lan Xichen.

“Shufu, elders” Lan Xichen acknowledged them, and the three bowed in unison.

“I am tired of making the same speeches to you all over and over, and it travelling in one ear and out of the other. Therefore, as I do not feel like repeating myself, and you are fully aware of the rules you have broken, I will merely assign you each five strokes of the discipline whip. With time to reflect on your immoral, selfish behaviour perhaps you will come to your senses. Though I have my doubts.

“You have both inherited every bad trait of your father, and my years of influence have done nothing to temper them” his uncle couldn’t even look him in the eyes when he pronounced their punishment.

Lan Xichen, as Sect Leader, of course had the authority to veto his Shufu’s orders; however, just as with his brother’s, as much as it had hurt him, he didn’t feel like he could; Lan Qiren had been the Sect Leader in everything but name for many years due to the situation with his father, and Lan Xichen had achieved the rank only by accident of birth on the passing of his father. By all rights it should have been Lan Qiren, who had had to step up to the role again when Lan Xichen had retreated into seclusion after the Guanyin Temple.

There was something he could do this time, however.

“As you wish, Shufu. I accept your punishment, but defer Wei Wuxian’s and Lan Wangji’s punishment onto myself. I am the rule-breaker, and I will bear the consequences as is only fair.”

“Xiongzhang...” Lan Wangji protested.

“Wangji, I promised you I would be the only one to suffer for this. Please continue with the plans as discussed with the other Sects. I will join you as soon as I’m able. You may both go now”

“Xiongzhang,” unusually Wangji didn’t follow Lan Xichen’s first order, “Your body is barely  healed from your time in seclusion...”

“You can’t currently take that many, Xichen-ge,” Wei Wuxian exclaimed, “Please, just reject the punishment.”

“That is enough, both of you. Please leave, you have work to do, mine is done for the present,”

They didn’t argue further. Lan Qiren finally looked at Lan Xichen as they left.

“You are foolish and stubborn, it’s a family failing. Your obsession with this one man brought you nothing but ruin, you can’t even hope for an ending as happy as Wangji’s, as coincidentally as that was achieved.”

“What you refer to as my obsession is love, Shufu, and I would choose ruin a thousand times in a thousand different lives if that’s what his love was to me. I am aware we cannot all be as lucky as Wangji to be given a genuine second chance, however.

“Do as you will, Shufu, I know my own guilt.”

***

Under Lan Wangji’s careful supervision, the plans they had set into place were acted upon, and the sealed sarcophagus was taken to the Burial Mounds under the guard of several different sects. The Burial Mounds had been designated as a safe space away from the general population, and gave Wei Wuxian the quiet and peace he needed to work.

The other sects had set up to guard at the foot of the mountain, to act as a line of defence for anything wishing to either enter or leave over the repaired walls.

The chains the Jins had used to bind fierce corpses had been procured, and Wei Wuxian had prepared many of the talismans he’d used on Wen Ning many years ago.

Lan Xichen arrived just as they prepared to open the sarcophagus and made an admirable show of pretending he wasn’t on the point of physical collapse.

Several other clan leaders were in attendance in order to ensure the Yin Tiger Seal was dealt with in accordance with agreements made.

When the sarcophagus was finally opened it caused a thrill of shock through the crowd.

It was discovered only the calm fierce corpse of Nie Mingjue was interred inside; there was no trace of the Yin Tiger Seal, or Jin Guangyao.

Lan Xichen closed his eyes; he tried to tell himself it was merely that Nie Mingjue had shattered the other to dust in their enforced mutual burial, but in his sinking heart, and because of the Yin Tiger Seal’s absence, he knew it couldn’t be that simple.

Jiang Wanyin stepped forward from where he had been offering silent support to Nie Huaisang; “We know the sarcophagus was under the strict watch of several sects at any given time, from the moment it was moved to the moment it was opened. We need to find out who had access to the tomb before that, who could have spirited the Yin Tiger Seal and that dogs corpse away.” Jiang Wanyin looked at Wei Wuxian, “Continue as we agreed with returning Nie Mingjue, I’ll ask a couple of other sects to volunteer manpower and we’ll start to investigate. We’ll tear the world apart stone by stone to find that seal if we have to”

“You can have Nie Sect disciples, if I have to rip that piece of shit apart with my own hands to ensure he’s dead and stays it this time, I will” Nie Huaisang said with something approaching a snarl in his voice.

“Take Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi, they’re smart and capable boys” Wei Wuxian suggested, and Lan Wangji mn’ed his agreement, “Just ensure you look after them, alright?”

Jiang Wanyin nodded, obviously holding back his natural urge to snark at Wei Wuxian.

Jin Rulan leapt forward at the mention of his friends being involved, “I’ll help too, jiujiu”

***

So the investigation, lead by Jiang Wanyin, began, and as everyone eventually left once the opening of the sarcophagus had been completed it left Wei Wuxian to get on with the very serious work of returning Nie Mingjue to consciousness.

Lan Xichen had prepared himself a cot a little deeper in to the Demon Slaughtering Cave to enable him to begin his own recovery, but he rarely spent much time in it, preferring instead to sit by Nie Mingjue’s side, out of Wei Wuxian’s way, despite Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji’s urgings he was doing himself no good, nor was his constant presence necessary.

Several weeks passed; Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng occasionally visited to check their progress, and to report their own, but nothing much changed on either side of the Burial Mounds wall.

***

It was some time later when Lan Xichen was woken from one of the rare full nights of sleep he took to the sound of a commotion. He leapt up and rushed towards the noise, only pausing long enough to summon Shuoyue with his spiritual energy.

He arrived to find the chains that had held the, until now, calm, fierce corpse of Nie Mingjue down, had snapped in several places and his figure now flailed around the cave. He knocked Wei Wuxian who didn’t dodge fast enough through the air and into the cave wall.

“Nie Mingjue!” At the sound of the voice Nie Mingjue spun, and made his way in the direction it had come from.

“Xiongzhang, move” Lan Wangji called urgently as he helped a slightly dazed Wei Wuxian to his feet.

Collecting himself, Wei Wuxian raised Chenqing to his lips at the same time as the first chords from Wangji’s guqin sounded out inside the cave.

Rather than have Nie Mingjue turn back on them while they worked to try and soothe him, however, Lan Xichen called out again.

“Mingjue-gege.”

Rather than angry now, Nie Mingjue seemed to be questioning, searching, as he continued to step towards Lan Xichen, who held his ground.

Nie Mingjue stopped in front of him, and seemed to examine him briefly, but before Lan Xichen could react he reached up and caught Lan Xichen by the neck.

“Xiongzhang” Lan Wangji called.

He caught hold of the other’s wrists but of course there was nothing he could do to loosen the iron-like grip of the fierce corpse.

He was suddenly slammed against the wall of the cave, and the damage it did to the fresh discipline whip wounds on his back forced tears from his eyes and a mouthful of blood to rise up his throat. It sprayed the front of Nie Mingjue’s robes.

It seemed to make the other pause, and his grip loosened a little.

Nie Mingjue reacted like he’d been burned as the first tears rolled down Lan Xichen’s cheeks and touched his hands, and he let go of Lan Xichen’s throat and raised them to his eyeline, as if to carefully examine the teardrops.

Lan Xichen had collapsed to his knees upon release, vomiting more blood onto the ground.

“Starlight,” the voice was rough, gravelly, pushed through vocal chords that hadn’t made a sound for too many years. “Like starlight.”

Lan Xichen’s fingers flexed against the rock floor of the cave at both the voice and at the specific words used; he reached up to lock one hand in Mingjue’s robes.

He didn’t seem to notice for the moment, “Like spring rain. Like starlight,” Nie Mingjue repeated. A sudden, violent tremor shook his body.

“Where’s my Starlight?” There was an element of panic in his voice.

Lan Xichen used the hand in his robes to tug on them urgently, “I’m here. I’m right here Mingjue-gege.” he tried to climb to his feet but his knees still wobbled and wouldn’t support him.

Strong arms scooped him up instead, and he was held tenderly against Nie Mingjue’s chest.

Lan Xichen looked into Nie Mingjue’s dark eyes, and saw awareness in their depths for the first time in so long that the tears came again.

“It’s really you. You came back to me. I love you, Nie Mingjue.” There would be time later for his apologies and his regrets, but now was the time for happiness and celebration. Lan Xichen reached out to cup that familiar, well-loved face in his hands, then with a wide, happy smile he allowed unconsciousness to finally take him.

***

Lan Wangji moved over to the pair as Nie Mingjue’s throat let out a half-growl of worry and fear, “Mingjue-xiong, Xiongzhang is gravely wounded, he needs rest, but he will be fine.”

Nie Mingjue turned his eyes on Lan Wangji, “Wangji? What happened to Xichen?”

“He was beaten with the discipline whip for his part in returning you to consciousness. He has not been in the best health, and you were quite rough with him. You have a lot to be caught up on, so may I suggest you take Xiongzhang to Qinghe and ensure he takes as much rest as he needs to fully recuperate this time? I know Huaisang-xiong will be eager to see you, and no doubt give you the full account of events.”

Nie Mingjue was fixated on just one part of Lan Wangji’s sentence, “What is it with you stupid Lan men and the discipline whip?”

A small, amused smile pulled at Lan Wangji’s mouth, and he reached out a hand behind him, which Wei Ying took, and allowed Lan Wangji to pull him in to his side, “Mingjue-xiong, the Lans just recognise that some loves are worth the consequences.”

“Wei Wuxian.” Nie Mingjue recognised not the face, but the fact there would be no other man by Lan Wangji’s side, “it seems Huaisang-didi indeed has a lot of story to fill in.”

“Take care of brother for us.”

Nie Mingjue nodded; it didn’t even need to be said that of course he would.

They left for Qinghe soon after.

“Do you think we should have warned him about Huaisang and Jiang Wanyin?” Lan Wangji asked Wei Ying who was still tucked into his side.

“Absolutely not,”  the other wormed out from under his arm and threw his own around Lan Wangji’s neck; he began to rain teasing kisses against his husbands face, “but I can’t wait to hear Huaisang’s account of how Nie Mingjue chased Jiang Cheng around Qinghe when he does find out. Now take your genius husband home, Lan Zhan, it’s been a long, long few months.”

“Mn.” Lan Wangji agreed.

Back to the beginning?

or

Try Ending 1

[nocturne-inuyasha-ff]

Nocturne - Tequila Sunrise

Author's Notes: Sorry, no smut here. We can't have that EVERY chapter. Besides, the lovely dovey isn't as satisfying if there is no tension or story behind it. Please enjoy chapter two of my SessxKag story!

Nocturne - Chapter Two: Tequila Sunrise

Rated - M (for suggestive adult themes, references to some violence, and coarse language)

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.

Kagome dashed through the dense forest aimlessly. She only had a vague idea of where she might be, and she had to hurry. She zigged and zagged around in a generally easterly direction, hoping to come upon a water source.

After nearly a mile of jogging, she finally came upon the river. She sighed with relief. The water ran smoothly here, thank Kami. Further down, the river widened and pushed along with growing force. She pulled the exquisite hankimono loose, still marveling at its exceptional quality. It seemed a shame to leave it here, but she couldn't take it with her either. Just the smell of it would set Inuyasha off into a frenzy unlike any other. And then once he noticed the scent all over her?

She shuddered at the thought and pushed it from her mind. One problem at a time. How could she get back? Perhaps the cold water would shock her system and rejuvenate her ideas.

Determining that the garment could be traced back here by its smell, she left it on and entered the water. The slow current was freezing. It nearly caused her body to go numb, but the numbness only extended as far as her flesh. Guilt and shame racked through her, and the waters were not doing anything to wash that away. She took a deep breath and ducked her head under the water.

Seconds ticked by. Submerging herself was not having the desired effect, but she remained below as long as she could stand. Thoughts raced through her head and memories washed over her in a force mightier than the current downstream.

What had she done? As much as she wanted to be angry with herself, there was also a flood of something else. A gasping breath escaped her when she broke the surface of the water. Submergence was not the answer. So, instead, she deemed it worthy of remaining in the cold water for a few moments more and let the slow waters wash away her sins.

Birds chirped happily in the trees, and she cursed them for their simplicity. They didn't have to worry about jealous hanyos.

Reflecting on her life in the past wasn't as glamorous as she'd hoped. Three years ago she had desired nothing more than to return to the past and spend her life with Inuyasha, the man she had fallen in love with.

After the Shikon no Tama had been wished out of existence, Kagome had been transported back to the present and lived there while finishing school until her wish was finally granted and she was allowed to travel through the well into the past one last time and reunite her with Inuyasha. He'd been there, waiting, when she'd emerged, and she couldn't have been happier.

At first, things had been fantastic; their passion had been as obnoxious to others as it had been intoxicating to them. Their first joining, a first for both of them, had been clumsy, but beautiful. Afterward, they made love incessantly and had been ostracized to the outskirts of the village where others did not have to tolerate the noise. Inuyasha had made a home for them there, and they enjoyed many days exploring one another when they were not busy contributing to the village they called home.

Things were going well but, like many newer couples, sex was one thing, and fighting was another. Sometimes the fights outnumbered the sex, though, the make-up sex had been very stimulating, to say the least. They fought about everything and anything; another reason they had been pushed to the outskirts of the village.

Kagome knew that Inuyasha was stubborn, but she was stubborn as well, and they had a hard time finding neutral ground. Their fights either ended in passionate lovemaking or Inuyasha would sleep it off in a tree.

Kagome blamed herself for many of their fights. Anytime that Inuyasha would cool off away from their home for the night, she would cry herself to sleep. She was angry and embittered and lashing out was the only thing that gave her any solace. Why should she be the only one who felt this way? Despite knowing her own shortcomings, Inuyasha was not guiltless. At times he was too dense to recognize that Kagome was suffering.

As the days passed by, everything around them changed, but Inuyasha stayed the same. People grew older, even Kagome had grown older. She was now twenty-two and knew that she should be settled with a career and a blossoming family; a couple of things that would see her into her sunset years. She was relatively young and shouldn't be thinking about these things yet, but being a miko, she was exposed to the exceedingly low mortality rate of her fellow humans in the Feudal era.

Death was always on the horizon for mortals, no matter their age, and when Kagome looked at Inuyasha, she had difficulty fighting off the growing fear that he would have to watch her grow old and die long before he would even reach his prime.

She'd only had the courage to bring up the topic of her lifespan once, and Inuyasha had tenderly told her that it didn't matter. He would be with her through it all and would likely waste away to nothing after her passing, implying he may take his life once her own had ended. Kagome had felt love swell within her chest when he told her that, but it did little in the following days to diminish her growing doubt. Perhaps if they'd had children, Kagome could settle for the fact that she'd leave something for Inuyasha to remember her by. Except, they had not been successful in that endeavor either.

Kagome had brought with her, from her time, knowledge of medicines in the forms of herbs that would stop her monthly cycle and prevent unwanted pregnancies. She had not used any of those herbal remedies from the moment she'd arrived, though she had shared the concoction with her good friend, Sango, after her fourth child. The woman had a hard delivery, a footling birth, that resulted in Kaede informing her that future pregnancies would not only risk the child's life but her own.

Unlike Sango, who was as fertile as the planting fields, Kagome was not so lucky. Even with all of the lovemaking and nonuse of birth control, Kagome never fell pregnant. She felt that, just maybe, there was something wrong with her. All the fighting and her ever-impending mortality crushed down like a heavy weight, causing her to lash out in pain. Still, Inuyasha was oblivious to it.

Just the night prior, they had fought over something stupid. Inuyasha had brought up something that one of Miroku's brood had done, believing it would lighten the moment, and Kagome snapped at him. Of his two usual reactions, fight or flight, he'd chosen flight that evening, not wanting to deal with her outburst.

It may have also been coupled with the fact that it was his human night, and he did not want to spend his most vulnerable evening in her company while she was feeling somewhat vindictive. He would likely return sometime after midday, giving her and himself time to cool off.

Kagome knew she'd had some time before Inuyasha may return to their home, but hoped that he had not come back early and attempted to look for her. She rose up out of the cold water, now acclimated to the near icy rush and shivered at the cold air as it hit her skin. She'd come to the conclusion that her best bet at getting home without her previous whereabouts being tracked was to follow the river, keeping her bare feet in the shallow banks to mask the scent all the way to the outskirts of the village. She knew that the river paralleled the town, and it was not far from their home, so she began her journey home.

Sesshomaru watched as the woman went under the water. She remained submerged for nearly two minutes, a remarkable feat for a human woman, he supposed. Then again, if she'd been trying to kill herself after last night, he couldn't blame her.

He'd left her shortly after she'd fallen asleep from exhaustion last night. The magic that had coursed through him had finally dissipated, and he'd regained complete control of his faculties. His clothes had been discarded in a pile near to where their bodies had lain entwined, and he quickly fetched them to dress.

The mortal woman still slept soundly upon the ground and Sesshomaru barely afforded a glance to her in a supine position, her breasts rising and falling with each slow breath. He'd reached the edge of the cave and used a hand to part the vines where darkness still lingered outside. She was his brother's problem, not his. He did not have to answer to anyone but himself and sneered at the implication and annoyance at being found in such a compromising situation.

Still, the woman's nakedness weighed upon him slightly and the night was cold. He let the vines fall back into place and turned to the sleeping woman. Her name, he knew, but he was not about to abase himself and acknowledge it. He quickly pulled off his hankimono and knelt to drape it over her. He could afford her nothing more and felt she should be grateful for this kindness when he could just leave her exposed to wander back to her human village and to his brother.

Sesshomaru stood for a moment in the darkness, looking upon her peaceful features. He'd often watched his young human charge slumber and noted upon the similarities. The soft, fragile existence they led that marked their mortality. The young human girl he'd saved and cared for, Rin, now dwelt in the same village as the woman before him. Rin had grown into a lovely young woman and a bright spot within the human community she was now a part of. His visits to her had lessened over time as she found her place among her own kind.

He left the woman there without a second glance. She was no longer of any concern to him. He told himself that again and again, even after the sun rose and he'd found a hidden spot to wait and watch. He convinced himself it was to ensure that he was not implicated in the situation. It had not been his fault; some form of magic had been cast upon either of them, and he made a mental note to find the nuisance and extinguish their life force promptly.

There was the matter of his younger half-brother, Inuyasha. If the runt even suspected that Sesshomaru was involved with his woman, Inuyasha would kill himself in an attempt to avenge his honor, and Sesshomaru believed that killing his flesh and blood, even one tainted with humanity, was beneath him.

Sesshomaru's scent permeated the area around the cave. There was nothing to do for it. After the acts carried out last night, there was a great chance many beasts and yokai alike would be drawn here from curiosity, especially considering that a human still laid within. So, he waited.

Once dawn had breached the horizon, he studied at the cave mouth for movement. It took longer than he would have liked for the mortal to wake. When she finally exited the cave, she looked around wildly and confused before she dashed away. He felt oddly pleased with the woman's ingenuity. He watched her weave through the area to confuse anyone who'd had enhanced senses so that they wouldn't be able to easily follow the trail. It was a laudable effort, but any yokai with half a nose could follow the path.

When she'd stopped at a river, he was doubly impressed. The running water would certainly wash away the scent, and he found himself mildly perturbed by the notion. He quickly chided himself for such ludicrous thoughts. This woman was human and therefore nothing to him. He may have developed compassion, but that had not distinguished his long-held distaste for the dishonor his father had brought upon their lineage by creating a half-breed who could only hold his own in a battle through brute force and lucky swings.

He supposed that coupling with the human was beneath him as well, but he was daiyokai and could do as he pleased with who he wanted. There was no risk in one night, he'd assured himself. The coupling had been a relief in itself, though he'd wished he could have let go of his restraint without the worry of killing her in his intensity. A mere human could never wholly satisfy a yokai, though that certainly did not seem to stop some lesser oni from trying.

The woman left the deeper part of the river and began to trek towards the small village she hailed from. He watched her go, still clothed in the hankimono he had left draped over her. He could catch the scent from where he hid among the trees. It was distinctively hers. His scent had been washed away. He leaned against a tree and closed his eyes, fighting a ridiculous urge to go back and fix that.

Clearing his thoughts, he moved away from the area and began his trek back to his own holdings, intent on finding the caster and ending their miserable existence.

The Onibaba danced around wildly. Her joints did not allow for graceful movements, but the decrepit old woman did not know nor care. What she did care about was playing out before her in her cauldron. Swirling images could be seen if anyone dared to peer in, but no mere mortal nor yokai alike were crazy enough to venture near enough to the crone's dwelling to find out. Her white mane flailed about as she bounced from foot to foot. She hummed a tuneless song and peered back into the bubbling pot. The contents of the pot now resembled a congealed mush that took some effort for the crone to stir.

"Yes!" she said and hopped up on one foot.

The Onibaba was so pleased with herself. It had taken so long for her to complete her spell; centuries now. One necessary component that her spell required had been missing for so long she could not help but cackle with glee anytime she witnessed the results. 

It was her fortune that some peddler had brought her the arm bone from the Inu daiyoukai. She'd only required hair or blood, but the entire unbroken bone from the arm of her hated enemy was more than she could have bargained for. The spell was now promising to be even more potent than planned.

She knew that the Inu daiyoukai felt that humans were an inferior species, undeserving of his time or notice. So far, things were falling into place salaciously. Gazing into the cauldron, she could see beyond the mortal plane. 

Her rheumy eyes glazed over, and she saw what was yet to come. She saw the Inu daiyokai searching her out. Well, let him try. Let him come. The damage had already been done. She only wished to see the events unfold in the following months.

[creativelycryptid]

The Thing in the Woods

There have always been things in the woods. This is a fact of life up here, in the mountains. From the first moment human eyes looked out into the first dark woods, other eyes have looked back. Some eyes were friends, some were food or sought us for food, but others were something else entirely. Things, with a capital T. The woods have gotten smaller, over time. Height wise and width. Things have died off slowly. Not entirely, of course.  Many adapted, became smaller, better at mimicking coyotes or owls or other things considered natural by people, or just better at hiding in general. Still, there are quite a bit fewer nowadays than there used to be. Every culture has or had their own ways of dealing with them or not dealing with them, as the Thing and situation called for. I’ve lived in the Appalachian mountains for most of my years. Not true deep woods, but deep enough to have my fair of stories about Things. Deep enough to learn a few things too, like how even though coyotes live in packs they don’t hunt in them. If you’re in the woods, being chased by something that looks and sounds like coyotes, they may not be coyotes. Climb a tree and say your prayers. There’s a wide variety of Things: Things that have names (Bigfoot, Mothman), Things that used to have names, and Things that have never had names. This story is about one particular Thing named Bibi.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the real estate agent brought me out here the first time, he was highly skeptical. An old woman living alone out in the woods? He was concerned for my health and safety, he said. But I’d lived out here in my younger years, and I remembered how it was. There wasn’t a force on earth short of a heart attack that could’ve kept me from buying this place. A sturdy little house, with a porch just big enough for the table and pair of rockers that sat to one side of the door. I walked through the house with the real estate agent trailing behind me, half-heartedly selling me on the place. I mostly tuned him out. I’d already made up my mind. The only things of interest in all of what he said to me that day were the price (on the high end of affordable), the distance to my nearest neighbor (too far for his comfort but too close for mine), and that it came with the furniture. We went back to his office to get the paperwork in order, and within a few weeks I was settled in. 

My first night was lovely. I had a little upstairs bedroom all set up with quilts and books and a little reading lamp. The mattress was mine, of course, no telling how old the one that came with the house was, or what kinds of people the last tenants had been, but I did use their bed frame. I smiled when I lay down, already running through lists of things to unpack in the morning. An art studio across the hall, dishes for the cupboards, boxes of books and blankets for the living room, and seeds for the garden. It was too early to do much planting yet, but I could plan. Oh Lord could I plan. There would be no guest room, naturally. I slept soundly that night, with the comforting sounds of night birds and wind.

The next afternoon I was taking a break from my unpacking and was enjoying some lunch of sandwiches and hot tea on my porch. The last of winter was thawing out, though I figured we still had one good frost to come. The air was a bit nippy, and I was tightening my shawl around my shoulders when the car pulled into my driveway. It wasn’t the real estate agent’s shiny newish car, and it wasn’t a moving van, so I couldn’t see any reason for this beige Toyota something or other to be here. I was about ready to tell the driver as much, too. 

Before I could finish composing an irate but mostly polite invitation to leave, the driver stepped out and started up the porch. She was a woman of about my age, with a darker complexion and wiry gray hair pulled away from her face. Her eyes had smile lines at the corners, and her expression was friendly but firm. She carried a casserole dish with her, covered over in a layer of tinfoil, and I sighed. There was really no getting out of this. I hauled myself out of the rocker.

“Well hey there! I just wanted to stop by and welcome you to the neighborhood. Lord knows the trees won’t do it.” She motioned towards the surrounding woods with the casserole dish and her face crinkled up into a smile.

“That’s mighty kind of you. Here, I’ll take that and let you get back to your day.” The casserole dish was still warm and her hands were cool where I brushed against them. The tinfoil crinkled up at the edges and the smell of warm peaches drifted out.

“Oh, now, I’m in no rush. I was hoping to sit with you a spell and get to know you. Not many people in the area, so I gotta get my conversations in where I can. I’m Ruth, I live about ten minutes that-a-ways.”

“Name’s Lottie. Lemme get some plates and such for this, we can chat while we eat. G’on, have a seat.” 

To tell the full truth, I had planned to serve up the cobbler, make as little conversation as I could get away with, and then say my goodbyes. Maybe make a few empty promises to stop round her place one of these days and few even emptier invitations for her to come calling again. If I’d had my way, I’d have been a hermit in the old mountain tradition. I suppose, in the long run, it’s a good thing I didn’t get my way.

I stepped back out onto the porch with two plates of peach cobbler and an extra blanket for Ruth. She accepted her plate with a smile, and our fingers brushed again. To her credit, the cobbler tasted amazing, and I told her as much.

“Secret family recipe” she told me, “plus I canned the peaches myself. I think it adds a little something. Where’d you move from? You sound local enough.”

“Most recently just down the hill, in State Road. I grew up further up the mountain, though, and a little to the west. Lived there from the time I was born till I was, oh, about 35. Surface mining got too close for comfort.” Ruth was nodding the whole time I was talking.

“Yeah that sounds about right. ‘Bout the same for me. Moved down the mountain, got hitched, moved back up the mountain. It’s the circle of life or something pretty close to it.”

“Sure seems that way. Never got married, though. Never struck me as something I ought to do. I like the quiet too much to have some man foolin’ around gettin’ in my way. That’s why I came back up here.” 

“Well, there’s plenty of quiet up here, that’s for sure. I’m glad of it myself, but it does get a little lonesome. Ed’s been gone a good - let’s see, what’s it been? - ten years now. He was an alright husband, God rest his soul, but never much of a talker either. The kids have little ‘uns, but they mostly come up in the summer.” Ruth looked off into the trees for a minute, before turning to me. Her face was softer, and her skin didn’t seem as much crinkled as it did folded. Less like paper, more like fabric.

“So I’m glad to have a neighbor now.” She finished, and reached over to pat my hand.

We talked for a while longer, mostly about gardening, before we decided that it was about time to go back to our own businesses. And then, of course, we talked for a little longer, standing next to her car, then through the car window. I waved her off, then went back to unpacking. I tried to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t think about my visitor, but that can only last for so long.

That night, after dinner was eaten and the dishes were cleaned and put away, I settled down on the couch with a glass of whiskey and a crossword puzzle that I just couldn’t focus on. I kept going back and forth in my head about Ruth. It had started off perfectly normal, to be sure. Introducing yourself to your new neighbor with a baked good was the neighborly standard. Hadn’t the conversation gotten a little too familiar too quickly, though? On the other hand, what we’d discussed technically fell into the category of family history, which was well within the range of typical. Although, family history usually ranged to how long your grandparents had lived in the area or which of your relatives had run shine. It wasn’t so much that the visit was strange in general, but it was strange for me. I hadn’t gotten so friendly so quick with someone in decades. And such a long conversation! I hadn’t had a willing conversation longer than 15 minutes in God knows how long. I could’ve gone back and forth for the rest of the night, or at least until I’d finished my whiskey, if I hadn’t had my second, much stranger visitor.

There was a noise in the yard, though I’m hard pressed to say now exactly what it was. A stick snapping or the sound of hurried steps over the gravel in the driveway. I reached for my shotgun and went to take a peek out the front window, running through a list of possible culprits. A bear would be making more noise, it was still too far from spring for a bear to be moving gracefully. It was too big to be an opossum or a racoon. Maybe a deer, maybe a person. I stared out into the darkness.

I couldn’t quite make out where she stood at first, but my eyes adjusted enough to see her, standing towards the middle of my yard. Definitely not a deer, the shadow in my yard moved on two feet, but sort of crouched into herself. It was hard to see her exact shape, but I could tell that she was a little smaller than me, tall and around, even hunched like she was. She looked to be made of shadows, but the parts of her that I figured were her arms and legs stood starkly pale against the night. I tried to angle myself against the window to see her better, and the tip of the shotgun knocked against it, just lightly. I watched her tense, back arching so that now, instead of hunching over, she looked more coiled for a spring. Her head whipped around to face me and we locked eyes.

Good God those eyes. They shone bright in the night, a piercing green that seemed to drill into me. I remember thinking that they were so bright it seemed like they should be casing spotlights in front of her. And that it seemed like she was waiting for something. I held my breath and tried to stay still. I didn’t want to spook her, or incur her wrath. There was no telling, from just this first meeting, what kind of Thing this was in my yard. Some Things are dangerous. I was mostly just hoping she wasn’t one of those. 

I’m not so sure of how long we sat there, but eventually she backed up a pace or two and then darted back into the woods. She moved a little like a human, but mostly like a catamount. Which is to say, she had her back up and her head down and moved quick and graceful, but she stayed on two legs. I stayed where I was, watching the darkness. I didn’t sleep quite as well that night.

But the sun came up, as it is wont to do, and there were things that needed doing. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen Things before, there was even a time in my life where it was downright normal to wake up midway through the night and see flashing eyes in the dark, or hear an almost-human voice calling from the woods. I was a little out of practice, that’s all. And maybe I was a little unsettled that I couldn’t quite tell what she was. I was certain I’d feel better after a little breakfast.

I did not feel better after a little breakfast. In fact, as I unloaded more books into the bookshelf I started to wonder if she would be back. While I was deciding where to hang my few pictures and paintings, I thought anxiously about teeth and claws. By the time I was trying to set up my tv I was remembering how she had moved, with a darting swiftness, and wondering if I could shoot her if I had to, and my hands shook so badly I couldn’t get the cables right. It was time for a break. 

I hesitated in the doorway for a moment before stepping onto the porch. In the end, though, I decided that this was my home and I wasn’t going to be afraid in it. If that were the case, I might as well move out now. Besides, I reasoned, most Things didn’t come out in the daylight, at least not this close to people. As long as I didn’t go for a walk in the woods, I would be fine.

I sat in the rocker for a few minutes, watching the woods. All was calm. Bird song drifted on the wind, and clouds passed by overhead. Feeling emboldened by the quiet, I decided I should look to see if there were any tracks in the yard. The ground was still fairly hard from the cold, and the Thing had moved lightly, so I doubted there would be, but I looked anyway.

I stood in the middle of my yard, bent over the ground and staring holes into the grass, so focused that I didn’t hear the approaching sound of tires crunching gravel until I heard a voice call to me.

“Lottie? Y’alright?” It was Ruth, leaning out her window with a softly furrowed brow and pursed lips. I straightened and felt a flush creep up my neck, knowing how I must look. I hadn’t even put my hair up yet, and thin wispy strands of silver fell all about my face. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m alright. Just saw something out in the yard last night, was checking to see if it left a mark.” The flush crept a little higher as I watched Ruth back her car up a bit and turn into my driveway.

“I’ll help you look. I’m an amateur woodsman of sorts.” She chuckled, climbing out of her car. Despite the chill, my palms were starting to sweat. I wiped them on my jeans and decided it must have been from how I was using them to brace myself as I searched the ground. That was all.

“It’s not a whole lotta use. The ground’s still too hard for any real tracks.” I mumbled, pushing a hand through my hair and wishing she would just leave. 

“Well, no harm in having a look around.” She was still smiling, but her voice was so matter of fact that I gave up and just accepted it. Ruth had wandered over to where I was standing and began inspecting the ground. I stood blushing for another minute before I bent over next to her.

Over the next 15 or so minutes we made our way across the yard, walking slowly and inspecting each step. At one point our shoulders brushed, and when I looked up there she was, so close I could feel her breath on my cheek. My heart beat so fast, I had to move away from her or I feared I would faint.

Eventually, we neared the edge of the woods. I stopped a few feet out and wouldn’t have gone any closer if not for Ruth. She kept going and called out to me that she’d found something just inside the tree line. Hesitant but unwilling to be both a fool and a coward, I followed. She’d found a place where recent snowmelt had turned the dirt into mud, and there were just a few footprints. They weren’t what I’d been expecting, though. I’d thought they’d be closer to cat paws, or taloned like a bird, but they were just human. The first couple were just the balls of her feet, but the other three were full prints of slender feet, undeniably human. Ruth turned to me.

“What exactly kind of Thing did you say you saw?” Ruth asked, and I described what I’d seen the best I could. When I’d finished, she smiled and shook her head just a little. “It’s a little far for them to travel, but I’d wager it was just a kid pulling some kinda prank. Probably won’t be back, either way.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t particularly want to say anything. It seemed to me that Ruth was treating me a bit like a tourist who doesn’t know a racoon from a cat, and I was a bit put off by that. Besides, there was something in Ruth’s expression that I couldn’t quite place. A distance in her eyes and a downward tilt to her eyebrows. It looked almost like concern, but then it was gone, and, as cliche as it sounds, I was left to wonder if it had been there at all.

“Well, I suppose you have things to be getting to. Don’t let me keep you any longer.” I may have been a tad sharper than necessary, but she’d bruised my ego, implying I didn’t know the difference between a teenager in a costume and a genuine Thing. She seemed to realize what I was upset about, though, and hurried to sooth me.

“Oh, dear, no, I didn’t mean that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I just meant, well, the footprints are certainly human, so there’s no cause for concern.” She smiled at me.

“I’d hardly say I’m concerned. I can handle myself just fine.” I said. Oh sure, I’d been worrying all morning about whether or not I could defend myself, but that was hardly the point. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was embarrassed to admit it. Good thing I knew better.

“I’m sure you can. Well, I do need to get going, but I’ll stop by later, if that’s alright with you.” Ruth was still smiling at me, and I couldn’t quite decide if it was genuine or placating. I nodded, and she was on her way. I plodded back inside and finished setting up the tv. It didn’t seem nearly so hard now.

Time crept on, and I found myself eyeing the clock more and more. Ruth hadn’t said when exactly she’d be back, but I had assumed it would be sometime near lunch. So as noon rolled around, I was disappointed to be eating alone. After lunch I found myself restless. I paced, not quickly but aimlessly, looking for things to do. The second I started in on a task, though, I was overwhelmed by the need to do something else and returned to pacing. Finally, there was a knock on the door. I hurried to answer, but stopped a foot short of answering and took a breath, chiding myself silently for acting like an excitable schoolgirl. Then I answered.

It was Ruth, of course. This time I invited her in, and we sat on the faded couch that had come with the house, sipping tea. The tv was on from where I’d been using it for background noise earlier, playing some nature documentary about elephants, but Ruth didn’t seem to mind.

“I wanted to apologize for offending you earlier. It’s a little too soon to be picking fights with my new neighbor.” Ruth smiled while she spoke, a little apologetic, a little hopeful.

“Oh, no, it’s quite alright. I was a bit oversensitive about it, that’s all.” I smiled back, trying to match her levels of apology and hope, though I’ve no doubt mine was a sight more awkward than hers. After a brief pause, Ruth cleared her throat.

“Earlier, I got the idea that you knew what you were talking about, that maybe you had experience with Things. I was just wondering what sorts of Things you’d seen before.” Ruth waited patiently while I thought about the best way to answer. Of course I’d had the usual experiences that anyone has if they stay too deep in the woods for too long, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, I was sure. Really, there was only one story to tell.

“When I was a girl, I would hear something in the woods calling my name. It was almost always at night, and only from the woods. It never crossed into the open space between the woods and my house. My mother told me that that was just something that happened sometimes, and to just ignore it. Well, one day I’m outside, broad daylight, and I hear it. It sounds close too, closer than normal, and I know I shouldn’t but I look over my shoulder towards it. There it is, standing right at the edge of the woods, and it looks almost exactly like me. Except the proportions are just a little off, like someone tried to draw me from memory but hadn’t seen me in a while. Well, I ran back inside, but it didn’t chase me. I never heard it call my name again.” Well, to be truthful I’d heard it call my name twice more after that, but that didn’t make for a terribly good ending. Ruth let that sit for a minute, and we listened to the narrator describe how intelligent elephants are.

“That’s pretty interesting. I’ve heard of people having their names called, but nothing’s ever called mine. I did hear whistling, though. It definitely wasn’t a bird, but it didn’t seem to be from a person, either. I never saw the source, though. It always raised the hairs on the back of my neck.” Ruth stayed until nearly sunset, talking with me about Things, before heading back to her own house. I invited her to stay for dinner, of course, but she declined, saying that she couldn’t drive well at night and needed to leave before it got dark. As we said our goodbyes on the front porch, though, she leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. As much as it embarrasses me to admit it, it made me giddier than I’d been in a long while. 

That night, and every night after for the next week and a half I stayed up late, waiting for any sign that the Thing might have come back. I didn’t mean to, at first. I would go to bed at a reasonable hour and then stare up at the ceiling for hours, thinking about Ruth (how her hair had looked in the sun, how her hand had been cool and burning at the same time when she lay it on my arm) at first, and then slowly spiraling back to the Thing (how she had seemed too big and too small at the same time, how bright her eyes had shone in the dark). I started staying up in the living room later and later each night. Ruth noticed how tired I was when she visited, and I saw more of that concern I’d seen at the end of our monster hunt. Ruth visited often. Not every day, but most days she’d at least stop in for a hello, sometimes staying for lunch, almost always departing with a kiss on the cheek. I waited for Ruth during the day, and, at night, I waited for the Thing. Finally, I got tired of waiting.

One evening, after Ruth had come and gone and I could be reasonably assured I wouldn’t be caught, I started setting out some food in the yard. A little fruit, some carrots, a potato, some scraps of chicken, and a little bit of old biscuit, since there was no way to be sure what she ate. I set it all out on a tarp, the plastic kind that crinkles when it moves, far enough into the middle that anything with regular sized limbs would have to step on the tarp to get at it. Then I went back inside and began waiting for one last time.

I had almost dozed off when I heard the tarp crinkle. I thought that perhaps I’d dreamed it, but after a pause there were a few more crinkles. I shot out of my chair and stumbled to the door, shaking off sleep as I went. I didn’t even pause to consider that there were plenty of other things it could have been. I just threw the door open, light spilling out onto the front yard, and there she was.

Her face was definitely human, the face of a young woman with dark hair and green eyes. Her eyes didn’t look so much brighter than normal now that she was lit up. She was petite, maybe 5’5” at most, and shaped like a track star. From her neck down to her elbows she was dripping in feathers, black as a raven and thickly layered. Antlers grew out of her tangled hair, ridged in a spiral like gazelle horns, but branching like a deer, too. Those were the first things I noticed, as we stood there, staring at each other. Then she shifted backwards and I noticed two more things. Firstly, that she stood on just the balls of her feet and kept her legs at an awkward bend. And secondly that, where her fingers should have been, were long, tapering, black claws, roughly the same size as fingers. She seemed to know where I was looking and curled her finger-claws in as much as she could, though it was clear that they weren’t as flexible as fingers. She shifted another step backwards, and I knew that she was about to high tail it out of there. 

“Wait!” I yelled, and she paused, tipping her head to the right. She looked a little confused, a little startled, but also like she understood, so I kept talking. “It’s for you. The food. You can eat it here or take it with you, but don’t let me run you off. I won’t hurt you. There’s no need for fear.”

I watched as she slowly, ever so slowly, bent down. Her eyes never left mine, half wary and half curious. She picked up a pear in one hand, holding it so delicately that her claws didn’t even graze the peel, and in the other she picked up a piece of chicken and one of the biscuits. She straightened back up mostly and nodded at me just as slowly, before darting off back into the woods. I stood there, watching after her, for God only knows how long. Then the chill brought me back to my senses, and I went back inside.

After that it became something of a nightly routine. After that first night, I opened the door much calmer and greeted her quietly. I took note of what she ate and what she left, figuring out her favorites. I also noticed that she started coming earlier each night, just by a bit. I started waiting on the porch for her, and would chat quietly to her while she ate.  It was almost like feeding a stray cat, if I didn’t think too hard about it. And I didn’t. Think too hard about it, that is, though I probably should have.

Of course, life went on during the day. Ruth would stop by and chat about anything and everything. We talked about her children (two, fraternal twins), and grandkids (three, all from her son), and my past (retired elementary school teacher, no family left to speak of), and everything in between. I was getting quite comfortable with her. I’d almost forgotten how much I didn’t like company.

Then, one afternoon as Ruth and I were sitting on the porch, enjoying the slowly warming weather, a vaguely familiar car pulled up into my driveway, behind Ruth’s Toyota and my beat up old Subaru. Out stepped that real estate agent, young and shiny, and he picked his way over to the porch, where he stopped in front of us and leaned against the railing like he was just visiting some friends. I was glad that there were only two chairs, hopefully he would get tired of standing and leave sooner rather than later. Ruth smiled at him.

“Well hello ladies!  I just wanted to drop by and see how you were settling in. I was concerned, leaving you all the way out here, but I’m so glad to see you’re making friends!” He sounded like he was making a considerable effort to sound local, but I could tell he was about as local as a coconut. On top of that, he was using that gentle voice people use when they think you’re an idiot or senile, and I was neither. He gave us his most winsome smile, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“Well. As you can see, I’m quite alright. So if that’s all, I’d like to get back to my afternoon, and you’re blocking the view.” I scowled just a bit, and the young man flushed slightly. Ruth eyed us both, looking terribly amused. The man recovered with a slight cough and fixed his smile back in place. He tried to hand me his business card, but when I wouldn’t take it he handed it to Ruth instead.

“Okay then. I should be heading back to work, but don’t hesitate to call if you need anything! Y’all take care now!” And with that he walked back to his car and left with barely a backwards glance. I scoffed.

“I oughta put up a no trespassing sign.” As soon as I said this, Ruth stopped holding back her laughter and started cackling up a storm.

“Lord, Lottie, there was no need to maul the poor kid, bless his heart.” She was grinning at me, and I cracked a little smile, too. She’d reached over and put her hand over mine, squeezing a little to let me know she was teasing.

“I just didn’t like his tone. People’ve been talking to me like I don’t have any sense my whole life, and now that I’m old I’m expected to sit back and take it? No sir I think not.” But I was laughing now too, and I let Ruth tease me good naturedly about being too prickly for my own good.

 That night I told my little visitor all about it, and she surprised me by smiling a little at my imitation of the real estate man. I could tell she was warming up to me, and I liked that. By the end of the second week she was arriving just after sundown, and she had started eating while standing flat footed, not poised on the balls of her feet to run. I considered it a major victory. I didn’t think there was much more to it.

Until, one night, she surprised me again. She had finished eating, and I had finished talking, and I had said a soft goodnight, when she paused and lifted her chin. There was a strange tension in her jaw, and I watched her work at it for a moment before she opened her mouth and spoke.

“Th...Hank you. Good ni-ght.” Her voice was rough, almost callused , if a voice can be called such. Her whole body seemed tense, and her eyes locked onto mine, partly showing fear, partly issuing a challenge.

“Good, goodnight. You’re welcome.” I finally managed, and she nodded, running off. I sat there for a long time, before slowly making my way inside and upstairs to bed. My mind was full of nothing but a sort of buzzing static for a good long while. Then, all at once, the thoughts piled in on top of each other. It didn’t seem like feeding a stray cat anymore. If she had language, perhaps her face wasn’t the only part of her that was human. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I decided that the first step would be telling Ruth. She could help me figure out what to do. 

The morning came too soon, a drizzly mess of a day. All day I was listless, and the weather sure didn’t help. It was too wet to be outside, but not wet enough to be relaxing. There was no rain-on-a-tin-roof to soothe me, just an endless drizzle of gray. I paced from room to room, hoping that Ruth would come by, but she never did. The day ran away like the rain down the mountain, and soon I was setting out some food. After a bit of deliberation, I kept the food on the porch, to avoid getting it soggy. I had a feeling that my visitor wouldn’t mind so much, seeing how she lived outside as far as I knew, but no matter how used to the rain you are, dry food is always better than soggy. I set the food away from my chair, though, thinking she might still be a bit skittish.

I almost thought she wouldn’t come. To be fair, it was difficult to tell when the sun was setting, I may have started waiting too soon. But she arrived, and, after the briefest of hesitations, came up on the porch.

“Don’t worry about me, just c’mon and get out of the rain for a bit.” I tried not to stare at her as she ate, but I couldn’t help but look over occasionally, sneaking glances. She sat on the porch, and used her finger claws like sporks, partially skewering, partially scooping. I rocked for a while, staring out into the gloom, gathering my courage. I waited until she had finished her meal before speaking up again.

“Do you have a name?” I tried to keep my rocking steady, but surely she could tell I was nervous. She sat very still. I could see her jaw working.

“Beebeeee” 

“Bibi?”

She nodded and looked up at me. She hadn’t left yet, and I stopped rocking to look at her. She was definitely younger than I’d thought, from this close up. Early 20s, at the latest. She was dirty, too, and heavily freckled so that I could hardly tell what was dirt and what was a sunkiss. Her feathers, which I had took to maybe be a shawl she was wearing but could now see were certainly growing out of her, were stuck together with some sort of oily mud. Her hair was what my mother would’ve called a rats nest, though her antlers seemed well cared for. Her claws, too, were shiny and clean.

“Bibi? I wonder if I might...if you’d like, I could get you clean. Run you up a bath, maybe?” I tried to make my voice gentle as I reached a hand out to her. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I left my hand hanging in the air for a minute and, slowly, Bibi placed her claws gently in my hand. I smiled at her, trying hard not to be unnerved by the texture, which was not unlike a bird’s talon. 

I didn’t quite get her into a bath, but I did manage a brush through her hair. There were a few rough spots, when the brush hit a snag and she hissed in pain I worried that she would bolt. I took to shushing her like you might a horse in a thunderstorm. Just a bit surprising, it seemed to work. She sat at the foot of my rocker, and I told quiet, old stories to her. While I worked on her hair, I gave her a damp washcloth to take to her face. She tried very hard to hold it gently, but by the time I was done with her hair the washcloth was shredded. She looked up at me, panicked.

“It’s alright. I have plenty of washcloths, no need to fuss over one.” I tried not to use that voice the real estate agent had used on me, the one I hated so much. She stared back at me.

“Iiih-ts alriitght” she repeated with some difficulty. She did seem to be getting better at speaking, but I couldn’t help wondering how long she’d gone without talking. I nodded and smiled reassuringly.

“Bibi, would it be alright if Ruth met you, too?” I’d been telling her about Ruth, of course, but if I was going to tell Ruth about Bibi, it was only fair that Bibi have some say in it.

She tipped her head to the side, considering. Finally, she nodded.

“It’s alllriight.” She said, a little clearer this time.

She left after that. I wanted to invite her inside, to stay somewhere warm and dry for the night, but I thought that might be too much too quickly. I was starting to reconsider my policy on guest rooms. As I lay down, I tried not to think about Bibi, in the woods, alone all night in the cold and rain. I certainly didn’t think about what may have led her to be there, and at such a young age, too. Or how long she must have been there, for her voice to be so scratchy from disuse. I fell asleep, not thinking of any of these things.

The next day was cloudy, but dryer. I was almost prepared for Ruth’s visit, when it came. I made sandwiches and tea, and we sat on the porch, having a nice lunch while I tried to bring the words from my throat into my mouth. Finally I was out of time.

“Ruth, do you remember, a few weeks ago, when I told you about what I saw in my yard?” I watched her stiffen just a bit.

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen her, more’n a few times.” Ruth stiffened more, then sighed.

“I thought you might, but I’d hoped you wouldn’t. The last few people who lived here saw her, just once or twice, but it scared them something awful and they left. I didn’t want...well I just enjoy your company so much. I worried you might leave too.” She looked away, a faint flush creeping up her neck and dusting over her cheek bones. I reached out and took her hand in mine, squeezing gently until she looked back at me.

“Come back later this evening, or stay with me here until then. I want to introduce you to her.” Her eyes widened, and I couldn’t help but notice the blush darken on her cheeks as she squeezed my hand back.

“Introduce me to her? What d’you mean? Things can’t talk, Lottie.” 

“This one can. Her name is Bibi, and she’s actually a sweetheart.”

Ruth ended up spending the rest of the day with me as I told her all about Bibi, and what to expect. As evening approached, I could tell Ruth was a bit nervous. Maybe a bit more than a bit. I took both her hands in mine, and they were shaking just a little. I smiled, trying to be reassuring, and then leaned in a kissed her, just gently.

“Don’t worry about a thing. It’s all okay. And if you’re really too nervous, you can always say no. You can stay in here if you’d like, or go home if you’d rather. But it would mean a lot for you to come out with me.”

The introduction could have been smoother, but it could’ve been rougher, too. Bibi had said it was alright for Ruth to come, but I still didn’t know what to expect from her. She didn’t bolt off into the woods, though, and eventually I was able to coax her onto the porch and introduce her properly. Ruth, though she was startled at first, handled it well, and once Bibi got close enough for her to really have a look at, her eyes softened.

“Oh, poor dear.” Ruth said, reaching out a hand to smooth Bibi’s feathers, feeling of the oily mud that I’d yet to get rid of. “We’ll have to do something about that. Some warm vinegar water, maybe. That’ll clear up most things.” Bibi, after sitting a spell, was even able to relax into Ruth’s touch while she ate.

Ruth stayed late into the night, making plans with me about Bibi. The first thing we should do, according to Ruth, was figure out if Bibi had a history as a human, or if she’d always been this way. Tomorrow, we decided, we would drive down into town and take a look at old missing persons reports and newspapers to look for clues. After that it was just a matter of cleaning her up and settling her in to live with me. By that point it was too late for Ruth to be driving home, but I was glad to have her stay the night. 

I hadn’t had company for breakfast in quite a while, but it wasn’t nearly so awkward as I thought it might be. We fit well together. And it certainly made going into town together easier. The police station was not terribly helpful, but the library had plenty of old newspapers. After a good couple hours of clicking through slides and flipping through physical copies, I finally landed on a report that seemed promising. I waved Ruth over and showed her the article.

It was a short piece, just a single column with a small photograph at the bottom. It listed an Abigail Waters, age 5, as missing following what appeared to be a domestic dispute turned tragedy. Though there weren’t many details in the paper and no follow-up article, Ruth and I concluded that after whatever awful thing happened, Bibi had fled into the woods and simply stayed there. The paper was dated to nearly 20 years ago. The picture showed a tiny little thing with long dark hair and unusually bright green eyes. 

“I wonder when she grew her feathers and her antlers and her claws, before or after the tragedy, all at once or piece by piece.” I whispered, half because we were in a library, half because this was just the sort of thing I felt should be whispered about. Ruth looked contemplative. 

“When bad things happen to people,” she began slowly, also whispering, “sometimes they grow claws or fangs or spikes. Usually they’re on the inside, they just happened to be on the outside for Bibi.” Her eyes still scanned the clipping while I thought about that. I guessed that it made sense. Wasn’t my prickliness, as Ruth put it, just claws on the inside? Ruth tapped me on the arm and pointed to a detail I’d overlooked before. There was a smaller picture, off to the side a bit so I’d assumed it went with the article next to it, showing the area Bibi had gone missing in.

“The road isn’t named, but that’s right about where your house sits, Lottie.” I nodded and swallowed hard.

“You said the other people who’d lived in that house saw her, too. How many times did she try to go home?” I looked up at Ruth and found her already looking back at me. We didn’t have to speak to know that from now on, there’d be no more trying. Bibi was coming home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That was some two years ago, now. I sit in my rocker, Ruth sits in hers, and Bibi sits on the steps. Her claws clink against the glass in her hands as she takes a sip of lemonade, feathers shining deep purple in the sunlight. She’s keeping an eye on the older two grandkids as they run around the yard. The youngest one sits by my feet, her knees pulled up to her chest, her dark brown eyes staring up at me.

“Of course, it took your parents more time to adjust. Your mother worried over Bibi’s claws, thought she might hurt one of you. But she never has, even accidentally, and Bibi won her and your father over in the end.” I reach down and pat the little dear on the head.

“That’s my favorite story.” She says, smiling up at me. There’s no trace of tears now, the scrape on her knee that brought her over to my chair in the first place all but forgotten. She hops up and scampers back out into the yard to play with her big brothers, giving Bibi a quick hug as she passes by.

Bibi comes over to take her place by my feet, and I make a mental note to ask her once again later if she’s sure she doesn’t want her own rocking chair. She leans her head against my knee. I can feel her working her jaw slightly, a tic she never quite lost, but her voice isn’t nearly so rusty anymore.

“It’s my favorite story, too. Thanks for bringing me home.”

[jinkkyu]

what’s that comin over the hill is it a monster- no it’s just kiwi who is super thankful for all of you. BUT WHO’S THAT NEXT TO HIM ?  yeah a monster for sure. han jinkyu, heaven-sent face but definitely actually from hell boy but ain’t he so handsome and lovely ? let’s take a look !

◜☾ ─ ◞ AHN HYOSEOP, CISMALE, HE/HIM  — hold on, isn’t that HAN JINKYU walking around uiyeong ? there have been rumors spreading around that they HAVE crossed through the veil. maybe someone will get lucky ! they’ve always been known to be rather PERSPICACIOUS & TENACIOUS, but can also be pretty EGOTISTICAL & CALLOUS. as to be expected from a TWENTY-FIVE year old DARK MANYEO. hopefully the town of uiyeong doesn’t find itself in too much trouble !

you can hmu @  𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕚𝕤 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕪𝕠𝕦 ♡#7529 on discord !

the goblin ( lil long ) !

born as the fourth generation to a full lineage of witches with a family tree mapped out in tapestries & stories. each large room ricochets every sound into the next, most notably filled with countless relatives who occupied the mansion. a past always being remembered by the mouths that passed them on & in the diaries of those who had first told them. there were no secrets kept in his home, no illusions in the fact he was a witch. it was a life most dream of. in spite it all, there is a hollow in his chest he can’t place that only grows. there was a balance to things, he was taught before he could speak or before he even could remember. as he grows, this idea is cemented through constant lessons. nature is kind but unforgiving & he wasn’t to tip the balance. he ultimately doesn’t heed the advice, to the dismay & shame from his own family. ( what gave nature the right to say what he couldn’t do ? what gave anyone ? )  

he is six when he began learning, honing his skills in spells & simple rituals. ‘he’s still too young to understand yet but he will,’ his mother said. balance. how could witches hope to keep the balance when humanity itself was so unfair ? his grandmother sees inklings of it, can see the sparks behind his eyes. she tells his mother she used to have the same thing. tells her that she grew out of it in time, that streak of stubbornness. he doesn’t. he doesn’t grasp it yet but he’s sure that balance doesn’t exist. unabashed even to this day, some things just never fade in time like his family may have hoped. some things only get sharper and more gnarled rather than softened.

age ten and he’s making the kids who say bad words to him trip on their way up the stairs, leaving them with bloody noses and mouthfuls of curses. balance, right ? he thinks his mother would be proud but when he tells her all he hears from her is scolding. ‘what about balance?’ he asks. ‘karma isn’t for you to deliver,’ she reasons. he doesn’t like the idea of balance, not anymore. he’s been burning so long he can no longer feel the heat but everyone sees. everyone sees the blisters crackling over his skin. they’re scared he is heading down a road he won’t return from & they are right. he started learning to hide himself & hide the interests in the dark & untamed spells. they think he got better, that he truly learned the balance but they were wrong. he’s the perfect storm, the most lovely cocktail of kindly smiles & hands behind his back holding what he shouldn’t. a tempest that doesn’t know how to stop & frankly doesn’t believe it ever should.

age sixteen & he had gone beyond what any of his familial bonds could ever hope to stop. his blood sings a song of violence & he has begun stand unflinching in the eye of loss. he’d lost his mother & his newborn sister. he’d lost his best friend & his eyes have seen far more than they should have. ( WHAT OF BALANCE ? WHAT OF EQUALITY ? ) he and his friends find trouble wherever they go. their eyes always go to him first, like they know. his grandfather makes failed attempts to reel him in. him & his dark eyes. him & his lesson in awakening. he comes to adopt emotionally compromised teenagers into his social circle, those with the wicked smiles and eyes that hold the stars. they hold a silent reverence for him & it only feeds him, only scratches the itch he’d had for so long. 

he’s twenty-two when he starts his own coven, full of misfits & outcasts who are more fearful of him than respectful. they have every right to be but their gravest mistake was letting him sense that. what else was he to do but curse them ? turn their food bitter before it reaches their tongue or turn their beds into one of nails. they retreat, he weeds out the weak this way. found other minds like his this way, too. ( the sort to smile kindly while they pull strings behind your back to tie your hands. ) his gravest mistake would be to trust them, even if it was only partly. he’s ambitious, hopes the world for his coven if only to further his own strength. they are a second family, almost. 

twenty-five is when his coven grows tired of him, grows weary of the way he operates. what follows after is what he can only come to recognize as betrayal though what the world may recognize as karma. ( he knew, he knew better. ) a change of power, even the thought has his blood boiling. he puts a curse on the one who suggests it & the rest of his coven retaliates. roots from a nearby pierce his skin, something hot seeping through his abdomen and something black pours from his lips. he’s dead before he can defend himself & he lay dying just as he’d always lived. ALONE & BITTER.

after being dead for nearly half a year.. sloop sloop he’s back !! 

wanted connections !

childhood friends or acquaintances

ex-covenmates, he’s .. gonna be gunning for your muse but hey go for it friends ! some of them were genuinely supportive of him. 

an ex fling, he doesn’t play around with love unless it benefits him somehow.

an ex, i thought you loved me kind of deal you know oops or even someone who still thinks the world of him

young witch he’s mentoring ! 

someone who wanna kill his ass again lbr he deserve it

‘friends’ he really doesn’t have any but he sure can pretend like no one else !

[ficsinhistory]

So, I'm having a lot of free time and hc in the head, so here are some ideas from Hc to Karmi.

It's going to be a long post.

She is an orphan mother, who died when she was four years of a fatal illness. After this happened, her father went a little further; he still loved her, but she could see that he was always trying to distract himself and neglected her because of it.

She has her mother's eyes. If you ask her father, he will say that Karmi has the "sweet but fierce look that will make you feel the luckiest human being in the world or wish to have never been born and beg for mercy. One of the two. There's no middle ground. "You can imagine what made him fall in love with his wife.

Her father has an important position at a scientific research firm in San Fransokyo, taking over after his wife's death as a distraction, leaving him without much time for his daughter, who tries to understand him. Karmi always thinks that's his way of dealing with things. However, he always dines with his daughter, no matter what, he and Karmi have dinner together even if he has to leave later.

She discovered that she was a prodigy on a school trip, at age 5. On an excursion to the Muirahara Forest, the class discovered that Karmi had read all the biology books in the library with no one to see and now knew the names of all the trees in the forest. That was just one of the things she knew, and her father later had to have a talk about where the babies come from because of it.

She grew very lonely. As an only child, her father did not want to marry again, and being a prodigy kept most of the children away, Karmi had few friends and none as the years went by; filling her time by reading in the city library or doing her own research, was when she got into the habit of talking to the virus. In addition to developing her imagination creating history for herself.

She also suffered a lot of bullying. She was called an aberration by more malicious children and rejected by those who did not resort to verbal derision. She was also threatened to do the homework of others. The situation was so severe that everything only stopped when, at age 10. She filled the closet with one of the bullys of poisonous grass, after which, she took a week's suspension, but was left alone.

Because of this, Karmi grew up with suspicion and assumed that everyone had some kind of bad intention until they proved otherwise. That made her skeptical and sarcastic, but somehow she's still optimistic for most things, becoming cold only when it comes to social relationships, putting her heart and soul into everything she does away with.

She suffered a lot of prejudice for being a girl on a scientific branch. She had to prove herself and still put up with sexist and moronic comments that she should do something less dangerous than dealing with deadly viruses and trying more feminine things. She presented a work with the Black Death virus at that time. Her father was very pleased with this result.

She, like Hiro, finished school at age 13. Karmi graduated with merit and her father had a small party to celebrate, it was the first time in years that she had seen him with such a smile.

Karmi's relationship with her father is troubled. She knows he loves her, but the same is a long way away and she spends the day working, which forced her to learn to do most of the things on her own, from tramping the city to cooking and cleaning the house, Karmi knows how to do all. However, the best part of her day is when her beloved parent is going to kiss her good night.

Hiro may have learned to walk through San Fransokyo thanks to bot fight, but Karmi has been alone since she was nine years old, which makes her know all the ways of the city in the palm of her hand. The market, the laundry room, she knows where everything is! She was very good at nurturing the nannies until her father gave up and only gave her a cell phone and red earrings with tracker and beak detector for her, telling her to be careful about "adventures". She never takes them off.

Karmi was never very vain, she always cared more about her intellect than her appearance. Even enjoying a period at the beauty salon depending on the season, she will always choose her lab or a library above anything else. She says she's smart, wants to please her? Praise her brain.

Even loving plants, she chose viruses and bacteria as the study area. After what happened to her mother, she try to find cures and treatments so that no one else has to deal with the pain she had. She still has the picture of her mother by the bed.

Speaking of which, Karmi's mother was also a biologist in botany. She met her husband at a meeting to discuss the fate of Muirahara when some businessmen wanted to overthrow her and her team studied some special native orchids. She was frustrated that she could not find a good argument when the local trainee and her future husband tried to cheer her up and said exactly what she needed. She managed to get on with the job and he got a later meeting at a coffee shop. She also had the habit of taking her daughter to the forest to see these orchids. The prodigy visits the flowers to this day.

Karmi had plenty of free time before going to college, which she did when she was only 15. In that two years, she experimented with various hobbies and acquired various skills. She knows how to draw, play ukulele, sing, write and do athletics, the latter made her very flexible and agile. She also watched and still watch anime and read comics.

On the comics, even though she's not an amateur like Fred, Karmi is still a big fan, with her favorite hero being Captain Fancy. She had spent a whole night reading a saga that left her in tears. The death of a loved character as a protagonist's relative is not easy to deal with!

She always wanted to go to college, but she did not know which one yet. It was at the age of 14 that she paid a visit to SFIT and put it into her head that it was there that she would study there. Later she succeeded.

On the night of the fire, she was present showing a biology job, away from the stage of presentation. All she saw from the microbots was from afar, with a small boy presenting. She was also one of the first to be rescued by firefighters. It was all very confusing that night. Later, she learned of the death of Tadashi and the monument built in honor of him. Orchids are still one of the most beautiful flowers in the memorial.

Karmi and Tadashi knew each other, although they were not friends, they had a good time together. When Baymax was being built, Tadashi asked for her help with some diseases and their treatments. When she went to deliver what he asked for, Tadashi said she remembered his younger brother, although she was taller. He made a recording citing her that day.

One of her motives does not like Hiro is because he, in her view, took the only stable thing she had in life. She does not hate him, but when the emotional, social, family life and everything else is more fickle than the sea and being the youngest student was the only thing she was sure, taking that out was like taking a piece of the fight, history and soul. If she was not successful at it, what else would she have? Karmi tries to avoid this feeling, but is stronger than she.

She admires Liv Amara because she knew her story was very much like hers. A girl alone and rejected I built a successful company. Even though she might wonder what happened to the twin sister who left the project early on. It should not be important ...

Already the admiration with the leader of Big Hero 6 comes for something more deep and personal. She finds it incredible how someone so young has such a noble sense of justice and doing what he does, without fearing to lose his life, always putting others above himself. This encourages her and helps that if she does things on a large scale, she can help others in the same way. Only from a more anonymous and less risky idea ... directly. She thinks that if he has these problems and defends others that way, he can deal with hers.

Karmi's biggest problem, even, is her anxiety. Due to years of bullying and traumatic life abuse, she has developed bouts of strong anxieties that incapacitate her for a reasonable amount of time. They hate their attack episodes as they make them feel vulnerable and useless, and they always happen to her alone, since she spends a lot of time with no one, which only worsened after she almost died on Akuma Island and with the attack on Sycorax. When that happens, she likes to think about her mother.

Like Hiro, she is a complete negation of waltz dancing and dancing in general, however, she is very good at ballet due to five years of schooling that her father has put her in since discovering that she was a genius. However, other types are still a challenge.

Karmi did not have many crushes during her life. Boys have always been a tricky topic, especially when she had her own problems. There were few of whom she liked, most did not even know of her existence, and honestly, she preferred that. Although she wonders what it's like to genuinely like someone that way and someone likes it back.

Speaking of which, she does not really believe Hiro has a crush on her. Since he was one of the first guys who were really kind, she interpreted this as chartering, but after a few days she came to the conclusion that she did not and just said that to annoy him more than anything. For all intents and purposes, however, she had to assume that he was cute.

One secret no one knows is that she likes to camp alone in the woods, climb on top of a tree and watch the stars. The city at night is beautiful, but it does not compare to the night sky of Muirahara, add this to the music box that she puts on and you will have a perfect scenery!

She likes Honey Lemon a lot and admires the blonde's always spontaneous way. Even though she did not much enjoy physical contact, however, she was not going to lie, bio-besties made her day.

She has Grandville as a maternal model and enjoys receiving her directions. Although it was a bit embarrassing when she called her mother once. The woman stayed in the clouds.

One of her favorite times is the Blue Moon festival, an occasion similar to an eclipse event, where the city likes to observe the annual phenomenon that leaves the moon bluish. This phenomenon is observed by the astronomers and Karmi loves the sweets and ornaments of that time. All blue. There is a legend among astronomy students that the light modified by the event makes the brain release more sensitive substances from the body that make you only speak the truth and leaves you unable to fake, and that if a couple stands on the bluish light, it gives to know if they like each other.

By this time she likes to wear only blue outfits throughout the week and see the final event with the apex of the full blue moon in the woods with some other students. This time brings her best memories.

One reminder of that time even was that she was with her father, who had opened a space in the agenda to take the daughter to the festival and then to the great observation. It was a night of laughter and marshmellos covered in chocolates.

Also has one of the most ... unusual souvenirs. She was 10 and away from her father to play around when she met a boy crying, saying that she had lost her aunt and brother. She sat down next to him, offered a sweet spit that was well accepted and they began to talk. She discovered that he liked gummy bears and that his hair was really messy and that in fact he had not been attacked by a squirrel. He discovered that she was able to catalog entire families of plants and that she was very fond of chocolate. They ended up seeing the blue moon together that night. He later found the family and her father. Amazingly, he did not quarrel with her or anything of the sort. He just laughed and said that kid looked like fun.

Currently at the stage and with everything that happened, Karmi has her suspicions of Liv, wanting to admit it or not, she has that inner voice inside her warning. And that usually is right.

She wants to win a biology nobel because someone has to help.

Those were my hc, and maybe I'll write a story about the blue moon festival, but by then ... I hope you enjoyed it, bye!

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 30: Deep and Twisted Roots (Transcript) - 21st March 2016

tw: blood

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

In the early 1990s, two boys were playing on a gravel hill near an old, abandoned mine outside of Griswold, Connecticut. Kids do the oddest things to stave off boredom, so playing on a hill covered in small rocks doesn’t really surprise me, and my guess is they were having a blast – that is, until one of them dislodged two larger rocks. But when the rocks tumbled free and rolled down the hill, both boys noticed something odd about them. They were nearly identical in shape, and that shape was eerily familiar. They headed down the hill one last time to take a closer look, and that’s when they realised what they’d found: skulls. At first, the local police were brought in to investigate the possibility of an unknown serial killer. That many bodies all in one place was never a good sign, but it became obvious very quickly that the real experts they needed were, in fact, archaeologists – and they were right. In the end, 29 graves were discovered in what turned out to be the remnants of a forgotten cemetery. Time and the elements had slowly eroded away the graveyard, and the contents had been swallowed by the gravel. Many skeletons were still in their caskets, though, and it was inside one of them, marked with brass tacks to form the initials of the occupant, that something unusual was discovered. Long ago, it seems, someone had opened this casket shortly after burial and had then made changes to the body. Specifically, they’d removed both femurs, the bones of the thigh, and placed them across the chest. Then, moving some of the ribs and the breast bone out of the way, they placed the skull above them. It was a real-life skull and crossbones, and its presence hinted at something darker. The skeleton, you see, wasn’t just the remains of an ordinary early settler of the area. This man was different, and the people who buried him knew it. According to them, he had been a vampire. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

While it might be a surprise to some people, graves like the one in Griswold are actually quite common. Today, we live in the Bram Stoker era of vampires, so our expectations and imagery are highly influenced by his novel and the world it evokes – Victorian gentlemen in dark cloaks, mysterious castles, sharp fangs protruding over blood red lips. But the white face and red lips started life as nothing more than stage make-up, an artefact from a 1924 theatrical production of the novel called Count Dracula. Another feature we associate with Dracula, his high-collar, also started there. With wires attached to the points of the collar, the actor playing Dracula could turn his back on the audience and drop through a trap door, leaving an empty cape behind to fall on the floor moments later. The true myth of the vampire, though, is far older than Stoker. It’s an ancient tree with deep and twisted roots. As hard as it is for popular culture to fathom, the legend of the vampire and the people who hunt it actually predate Dracula by centuries. Just a little further into the past than Bram Stoker, in the cradle of what would one day become the United States, the people of New England were identifying vampire activity in their own towns and villages and then assembling teams of people to deal with what they perceived as a threat. It turns out that Griswold was one of those communities. According to the archaeologists who studied the 29 graves, a vast majority of them were contemporary to the vampire’s burial, and most of those showed signs of an illness. Tuberculosis is the most likely guess, which goes a long way toward explaining why the people did what they did. The folklore was clear – the first to die from an illness was usually the cause of the outbreak that followed. Patient 0 might be in the grave, sure, but they were still at work, slowly draining the lives of the others.

Because of this belief, bodies all across the north-east were routinely exhumed and destroyed in one way or another. In many ways, it was as if the old superstitions were clawing their way out of the depths of the past to haunt the living. The details of another case from Stafford, Connecticut in the late 1870s illustrate the ritual perfectly. After a family there lost five of their six daughters to illness, the first to have passed away was dug up and examined. This is what was recorded about the event: “Exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs,” they wrote, “still fresh and living, encased in rotten and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered”. This sort of macabre community event happened frequently in places like Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire and even Ontario, Canada, and long-time listeners of Lore will of course remember the subject of the very first episode, and how the family of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island exhumed her body after others died, doing a very similar thing. Mercy Brown wasn’t the first American vampire, though. As far as we can tell, that honour goes to the wife of Isaac Burton of Manchester, Vermont, all the way back in 1793, and for as chilling and dark the exhumation of Mercy Brown might have been, the Burton incident puts that story to shame.

Captain Isaac Burton married Rachel Harris in 1789, but their marriage was brief. Within months of the wedding, Rachel took sick with Tuberculosis, what was then called “consumption” because of the way the disease seemed to waste the person away, as if they were being consumed by something unseen. Rachel soon died, leaving her husband a young widower, but that didn’t last long. Burton married again in April of 1791, this time to a woman named Hulda Powell. But again, within just two years of their marriage, Burton’s bride became ill. Friends and neighbours started to whisper and as people are prone to do, they began to try and draw conclusions. Unanswered questions bother us, so we tend to look for reasons, and the people of Manchester thought they knew why Hulda was sick. Although Isaac’s wife, Rachel, had been dead for nearly three years, the people of Manchester suggested that she was the cause. Clearly, from her new home in the graveyard, she was draining the life from her husband’s new bride. With Burton’s permission, the town prepared to exhume her and end the curse. The town blacksmith brought a portable forge to the gravesite and nearly 1000 people gathered there to watch the grim ceremony unfold. Rachel’s liver, heart and lungs were all removed from her corpse and then reduced to ashes. Sadly, though, Hulda Burton never recovered, and she died a few months later. This ancient ritual, as far as the people of Manchester, Vermont were concerned, had somehow failed them. They did what they had been taught to do, as unpleasant as it must have been, and yet it hadn’t worked – which was odd, because that hadn’t always been the case.

A lot of what we think we know about the roots of the vampire legend is thanks to Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker. Most of us know the basics – Stoker built a mythology around a historical figure from the fifth century named Vlad III. Vlad was from the kingdom of Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania. Vlad had two titles: Vlad Tepes, which meant “The Impaler”, referred to his brutal military tactics in defence of his country; the other, Vlad Dracul, or “The Dragon”, referred to his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a military order founded to protect Christian Europe from the armies of the invading Ottoman Empire. But Bram Stoker never travelled to Romania. The castle that he describes as the home of Dracula, a real-life fortress known as Bran Castle, was just an image he found in a book that he felt captured the mood he was aiming for. Bran Castle, as far as historians can tell, has no connection to Vlad III whatsoever. The notion of a vampire, or at least of an undead creature that feeds on the living, does have roots in the area, though. Stoker was close, but he missed the mark by a little more than 300 miles. The real roots of the legend, according to most historians, can be found in modern-day Serbia. Serbia of today sits at the south-western corner of Romania, just south of Hungary. Between 1718 and 1739, the country passed briefly from the hands of the Ottoman Empire to the control of the Austrians. Because of its place between these two empires, the land was devastated by war and destruction and people were frequently moved around in service to the military, and as is often the case, when people cross borders, so do ideas.

Petar Blagojevich was a Serbian peasant in the village of Kisiljevo in the early 1700s. Not much is known about his life, but we do know that he was married and had at least one son, and in 1725, through causes unknown, Petar died at the age of 62. In most stories, that’s the end, but not here. You probably knew that, though, didn’t you? In the eight days that followed Petar’s death, other people in the village began to pass away. Nine of them, in fact, and all of them made startling claims on their death beds, details that seemed impossible to prove but were somehow the same in each case. Each person was adamant that Petar Blagojevich, their recently deceased neighbour, had come to them in the night and attacked them. Petar’s widow even made the startling claim that her dead husband had actually walked into her home and asked for, of all things, his shoes. She believed so strongly in this visit that she moved to another village to avoid future visits. The rest of the people of Kisiljevo took notice. Something had to be done, and that would begin with digging up Petar’s corpse. Inside the coffin, they found Petar’s body to be remarkably preserved. Some noticed how the man’s nails and hair had grown. Others remarked on the condition of his skin, which was flush and bright, not pale. It wasn’t natural, they said, and something had to be done. They turned to a man named Frombald, a local representative of the Austrian government, and together with the help of a priest he examined the body for himself. In his written report, he confirmed the earlier findings and added his observation that fresh blood could be seen inside Petar’s mouth. Frombald describes how the people of the village were overcome with fear and outrage, and how they proceeded to drive a wooden stake through the corpse’s heart. Then, still afraid of what the creature might be able to do to them in the future, the people burnt the body. Frombald’s report details all of it, but he also makes the disclaimer that he wasn’t responsible for the villager’s actions. He said that it was fear that drove them to it, nothing more. Petar’s story was powerful, and it created a panic that quickly spread throughout the region. It was the first event of its kind in history to be recorded in official government documents, but that report was still missing an official cause. Without it, the stories might have died where they started. But then, just a year later, something happened, and the legend had never been the same.

Arnold Paole was a former soldier, one of the many men transplanted by the Austrian government in an effort to defend and police their newly acquired territory. No one is sure where he was born, but his final years were spent in a Serbian village along the great Morava river, near Paraćin. In his post-war life, Arnold became a farmer, and he frequently told stories from days gone by. In one such story, Arnold claimed that he had been attacked by a vampire years before while living in Kosovo. He survived, but the injury continued to plague him until he finally took action. He said that he cured himself by eating soil from the grave of the suspected vampire, and then, after digging up the vampire’s body, he collected some of its blood and smeared it on himself. And that was it – according to Arnold and the folklore that drove him to it, he was cured. When he died in a farming accident in 1726, though, people began to wonder, because within a month of his death at least four other people in town complained that Arnold had visited them in the night and attacked them. When those people died, the villagers began to whisper in fear. They remembered Arnold’s stories – stories of being attacked by a vampire, of taking on the disease himself, stories of his own attempt to cure himself. But what if it hadn’t worked? Out of suspicion and doubt, they decided to exhume his body and examine it. Here, for what was most likely the first time in recorded history, the story of the vampire was taking on the form of a communicable disease, transmitted from person to person through biting. This might seem obvious to us now, but we’ve all grown up with the legend fully formed. To the people of this small, Serbian village, though, this was something new and horrific. What they found seemed like conclusive evidence, too: fresh skin, new nails, longer hair and beard. Arnold even had blood in his mouth. Putting ourselves in their context, it’s easy to see how they might have been chilled with fear – so they drove a stake through his heart. One witness claimed that, as the stake pierced the corpse’s chest, the body groaned and bled. Unsure of what else to do, they burned the body, and then they did the same to the four who had died after claiming Arnold attacked them. They covered all their bases, so to speak, and then walked away.

Five years later, though, another outbreak spread through the village. We know this because so many people died that the Austrian government sent a team of military physicians from Belgrade to investigate the situation. These men, led by two officials named Glaser and Flückinger, were special, though, because they were trained in communicable diseases, which was a good thing. By January 7th of 1731, just eight weeks after the beginning of the outbreak, 17 people had died. At first, Glaser had looked for signs of a contagious disease, but came up empty-handed. He noted signs of mild malnutrition, but there was nothing deadly that could be found. The clock was ticking, though. The villagers were living in such fear that they had been gathering together into large groups each night, taking turns keeping watch for the creatures they believed were responsible. They even threatened to pack up and move elsewhere. Something needed to be done, and quickly. Thankfully, there were suspects. The first was a young woman named Stana, a recent newcomer to the village who had died during childbirth early on in the outbreak. It seemed to have been a sickness that took her life, but there were other clues. Stana had confessed to smearing vampire blood on herself years before as protection, but that, the villagers claimed, had backfired, and most likely turned her into one instead. The other suspect was an older woman named Milica. She was also from another part of Serbia, and had arrived shortly after Arnold’s death. Like so many others, she had a history. Neighbours claimed that she was a good woman who never did anything intentionally wicked, but she had told them once of how she’d eaten meat from a sheep killed by a vampire, and that seemed like evidence enough to push the investigation to go deeper… literally.

With permission from Belgrade, Glaser and the villagers exhumed all of the recently deceased, opening their coffins for a full examination, and while logic and science should have prevailed in a situation like that, what they found only deepened their belief in the supernatural. Of the 17 bodies, only five appeared normal, in that they had begun to decay in a manner that should be expected. These were reburied and considered safe, but it was the other 12 that alarmed the villagers and the government men alike, because these bodies were still fresh. In the report filed in Belgrade in January of 1732, signed by all five of the government physicians who witnessed the exhumations, these 12 bodies were completely untouched by decay, organs still held fresh blood, their skin was healthy and firm, and new nails and hair had grown since burial. These are all normal occurrences as we understand decomposition today, but three centuries ago it was less about science and more about superstition. This didn’t seem normal to them, and so when the physician wrote their report, they used a term that, until that very moment, had never appeared in any historical account of such a case. They described the bodies as “vampiric”. In the face of unanswered questions, the only conclusion they could commit to was that each of the 12 bodies had been found in a “vampiric” condition. With that, the villagers did what their tradition demanded: they removed the heads from each corpse, gathered all the remains into a pile, and then burned the whole thing. The threat to the village was finally dead and gone, but it was too late. Something new had been born, something more powerful than a monster, something that lives centuries and spreads like fire: a legend.

[21:20]

Many aspects of folklore haven’t faired too well under the critical eye of science. Today, we have a much deeper understanding of how illness and disease really works, and while experts are still careful to explain that every corpse decomposes in a slightly unique way, we have a better grasp of the full picture now than any previous time in history. Answers, when we can find them, come as a relief. It’s safe to say that we don’t have to fear a vampiric infection when the people around us get sick today, but there were still people at the centre of these ancient stories, normal folk like you and me, who simply wanted to do what was right. We might do it differently today, but it’s hard to fault them for trying. Answers don’t kill every myth, though. Vampire stories, like their immortal subjects, have simply refused to die. In fact, they can still be found, if you know where to look for them. In the small, Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus, near the south-western corner that borders Bulgaria and Serbia, authorities were called in to investigate an illegal exhumation, but this wasn’t 1704 or even 1804. This happened just a decade ago. Petre Toma had been the clan leader there in the village, but after a lifetime of illness and hard drinking, his accidental death in the field almost came as a relief to his family and friends. That’s how they put it, at least. So, when he was buried in December of 2003, the community moved on. But individuals from Petre’s family began to get sick. First it was his niece, Mirela Marinescu. She complained that her uncle had attacked her in her dreams. Her husband made the same claim, and both offered their illness as proof. Even their infant child was not well. Thankfully, the elders of the village immediately knew why. In response to her story, six men gathered together one evening in early 2004. They entered the local graveyard close to midnight, and then travelled to the burial site of Petra Toma. Using hammers and chisels, they broke through the stone slab that covered the grave and then moved the pieces aside. They drank as they worked. Can you really blame them? They were opening the grave of a recently deceased member of their community, but I think it was more than that. In their minds, they were putting their lives in danger, because there, inside the grave and just uncovered, lay the stuff of nightmares – a vampire. What these men did next will sound strangely familiar, but to them it was simply the continuation of centuries of tradition. They cut open the body using a knife and a saw, they pried the ribs apart with a pitchfork, and then cut out the heart. According to one of the men who was there, when the heart was removed, they found it full of fresh blood. Proof, to them at least, that Petre had been feeding on the village. When they pulled it free, the witness said that the body audibly sighed, and then went limp. It’s hard to prove something that six incredibly superstitious men – men who had been drinking all night, mind you – claimed they witnessed in a dark cemetery, but to them it was pure, unaltered truth. They then used the pitchfork to carry the heart out of the cemetery and across the road to a field, where they set it on fire. Once it was burnt completely, they collected the ashes and funnelled them into a bottle of water. They offered this tonic to the sick family, who willingly drank it. It was, after all, what they had been taught to do, and amazingly, everyone recovered. No one died of whatever illness they were suffering from, and no one reported visits from Petre Toma after that. In their mind, the nightmare was over. These men had saved their lives. Maybe something evil and contagious has survived for centuries after all, spreading across borders and oceans. It’s certainly left a trail of horrific events in its wake, and its influenced countless tales and superstitions, all of which seem to point to a real-life cause. But far from being unique to Serbia or Romania, this thing is global. And as if that weren’t enough, this horrible, ageless monster is, and always had been, right inside each of us. Like a vampiric curse, we carry it in our blood, but its probably not what you’d expect. It’s fear.

[Closing statements]