#take him hime and secure him

[mistymysticalmoon]

Soft kisses, Safe arms

･ jude bellingham x reader ･

prompt: (fluff/a bit suggestive) after a fun night out with friends, you head home to your boyfriend Jude, whose caring, gentle presence is the perfect contrast to the lively nightclub.

warnings: drinking

wc: 1.5k

a/n: leave me requests!

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

The sounds of the nightclub were all-consuming.

Music, laughter, and singing overwhelmed your senses, and the alcohol coursing through your body was no help. You’d gone out for a night of fun with your girls and it was now almost 2 in the morning. 

A familiar pounding surfaced as you started to feel a headache coming on, but as you glanced over to the dance floor, you saw your friends awake as ever dancing with each other and random men they must have picked up at the bar. 

You giggle, shaking your head at their antics.

As you take another sip of your drink you feel a buzz in your purse. You pull it out and open your messages to see your favorite contact flash on your screen, as he had been periodically checking up on you throughout the night. 

Jude🤍: Hey baby, having fun?

You twirl a strand of your hair giggling like a schoolgirl at such a basic question, the alcohol making you giddier than usual. 

You: Hiiiiii babyy!!!

I misss yoiuuuu

Jude🤍: Missing you too love ❤️

You: I’m comimg hime soon I camt  wait to kiss yiu xx

Jude🤍: I can’t wait either baby, be safe. 

You smile excitedly, hearting the message, and place your phone back in your purse. Jude was never bothersome or controlling when it came to you hanging out with your girls, something you weren’t used to due to some unhealthy relationships of the past. 

He was very secure in himself and your relationship seeing as neither of you had given each other any reason not to trust one another. 

That and the fact that you were both embarrassingly head over heels in love. 

“Oh my goddd he totally wanted to hook up with you” you hear behind you whipping your head to see your girlfriends laughing and stumbling back to the table you had been standing by. 

“Well I hate to burst his bubble but there’s no way in hell” You giggle along not even fully understanding the story but enjoying the moment nonetheless. 

 “I love you guysss” one of your friends exclaims lovingly causing all of you to burst out into laughter but still returning the sentiment. 

“Okay, I’m already feeling the beginning of my hangover. I think I'm calling it a night guys” you express getting a groan from your friends.

“What you reallyy mean is you’re starting to miss your boyfriend and want to fu-” “Oh my god shut up” you cut off laughing awkwardly causing everyone else to join in on the teasing and banter. 

“We're just teasing babes I think we all need to call it a night.” one of your friends assures checking the time to see that it is well past safe hours for a group of girls at night. 

You all decide to get two taxis, splitting up based on where you live, saying your goodbyes, and heading home. The whole ride back to Jude’s apartment your thoughts are consumed by his everything. You imagine his hands on your body, his lips leaving marks on your skin. You feel slightly embarrassed that he can have such an effect on you while not being anywhere in your vicinity. 

You: Hii Judeee Im comibg home niww

You bite your lip thinking about all you want to do to him once you get inside his apartment, clenching your thighs at the mere thought.

A couple of minutes later you feel a buzz in your lap

Jude🤍: Okay baby, I’ll be waiting. xo

You:❤️❤️

As you sent your last message you feel the taxi coming to a stop. You thank the driver and bid your friends goodbye stumbling out of the car and towards the lobby of the apartment. As you push through the revolving doors you look up to see the very face you were just fantasizing about. 

“Judee” you exclaim rushing up and embracing him. “Hii baby” he chuckles pulling you into a tighter embrace. You look up at him lovingly and pull him in for a quick kiss. 

“Come on, let's get you upstairs,” he gently suggests. You quietly nod allowing him to lead you over to the elevator and up to his floor.

The whole way there your hand stays in his , holding your body as close to his as you possible . He hadn't yet caught on to your intentions, attributing your cuddliness to the multiple drinks flowing through your system. 

As you made it through the door he closed it shut behind him letting go of your hand to ensure it was locked properly. As he did, you slipped off your coat tossing it on a chair across the room. 

Once he turned around you stalked up to him, softly pressing your lips against his in a seemingly innocent kiss.

 “Mmm,” he moaned into your mouth, “Missed you baby” His hands found their place on your waist softly caressing your body. 

You kissed him deeper, hoping he would get what you wanted without you having to explicitly ask for it. “Baby” he groaned, slowly pulling away from you.

“Judee” you whined, desperation and need overwhelming you. 

“Baby.. we can’t,” he says resting his forehead against yours. 

“Why not” you pout, looking up at him with a look you know he can't resist. “Fuck, baby you're killing me” he murmurs shaking his head.

“Please, Jude, please I want you,” you whined running your hands along his chest. You reach up and kiss his neck, one of his weaknesses. He groaned at this but restrained himself from giving in. 

“I’m sorry baby, but tomorrow we can do it all. You’re drunk and you need to rest, okay?” he reasons holding your face softly in his calussed palms. You let out a soft groan hanging your head low accepting that your boyfriend was just too caring and loving to take advantage of your drunken state. 

“Okay..” you surrender, feeling a bit embarrassed of how needy you were being. 

Jude lifts your face to look you in the eyes, smiling lovingly at you and leaving a soft kiss on your forehead. “Come on, let's get ready for bed and you can tell me all about tonight.” You nod in acceptance letting him lead you to the bedroom, your hand in his. 

He sits you down at the edge of the bed as he helps you get changed. He starts with your shoes and then moves on to your clothes removing your skirt and softly pulling your shirt over your head leaving you in just your undergarments. 

You felt a shy heat rush to your cheeks, feeling his eyes on your half-naked form, blushing even though he’s seen you in much less. 

He sends you a cheeky grin before walking over to the dresser, pulling out one of his old jerseys that you loved to sleep in whenever you were over his apartment. He carefully pulls it over your head successfully getting you changed. He then leads you to the bathroom to help you brush your teeth and remove your makeup. 

As he props you up on the counter you watch his careful and attentive movements. So sure in himself as he had seen you do this routine hundreds of times. 

“Okay baby, stay still for me” he instructs, wetting a cloth with warm water and makeup remover. 

“Mmm,” you hum in response. 

You close your eyes and he begins to softly drag the warm cloth along your face removing the makeup as best he can, knowing you're too tired to properly wash your face. You open your eyes to see his brows furrowed in concentration, smiling at how attentive and cute he’s being. 

“You're so pretty” you blurt out. He looks at you with a bit of surprise but laughs nonetheless. 

“You’re so pretty, baby” he retorts. “You're prettier” you argue teasingly. 

“You're prettiest” he finishes off with a chaste kiss. You scrunch your nose at his playfulness as you watch him put the cloth in the wash bin and pull your moisturizer from the cabinet. He gently applies it to your face finishing up your skincare. 

Once finished, Jude took you down from the counter and led you back to the bedroom. You get comfortable under the comforter as he turns the lights out joining you once he's finished. 

“C’mere baby” he whispers. You snuggle up closer to him, his natural musk and aftershave invading your senses. You nuzzle your head impossibly close to his chest just wanting to feel his body close.

“Jude..” you whisper gazing up at him “Yes, baby” he replies. “I love you, so much. Thank you for taking care of me” you murmur, feeling a wave of emotions and gratitude for your boyfriend. 

“Aww baby, I love you.” he coos, leaving a lingering kiss you on the forehead. “I'll always take care of my baby, you never have to thank me,” he assures, gently stroking your head.

 You smile up at him seeing the pure love and adoration in his eyes, feeling so grateful that you have such a loving, beautiful, doting boyfriend.

You reach up to leave a kiss goodnight against his soft lips smiling into it. “Goodnight, my love.” he breathes against your lips. “Night, baby” you reply resting your head against his chest, letting your body relax under his caring and protective presence. 

[witchofthesouls]

Okay wait no culture clash: Soundwave and Ratchet both teaching the kids about Cybertonian history and Culture?? Can we PLEASE see some of that??

Ratchet is having back to back fits because nothing is going as planned, and he feels he made a deal with the devil or has been given a monkey's paw because he's getting his wishes in a really twisted way without even knowing there were active conditions.

He returned to Earth to watch on the place that held a special place in Optimus' spark as the rebuilding process is taking a different shape and he's too tired to carry that burden on his own, and found out it there were still Primal Artifacts and other weaponry from the Vaults on the planet.

The once teenage tagalongs are now adults that are continuing Team Prime's directives to collect them. They had sacrificed continuing higher education for the mission, and Ratchet couldn't stand that he already missed a portion of their lives that damn fast and how they're so nonchalant over not improving their own selves. Ratchet then found out that Raf, Jack, and Miko had literally spent lifetimes together as they traveled Elsewhere to secure Cybertronian relics that shaped their planet in some way or form. Not only grew up. They grew old in some of their ventures; delving deep into their Other heritages to ensure they could make it back in the right time.

The kids (because they're all kids to him, even if Raf has a beard) are still limited by an organic lifespan, and humans are shorter compared to other species, so Ratchet clucks over their health, and he counts the days when all he has left are their ghosts and dust. And then a Primal Artifact cyberforms them.

Of course, none of his kids are what the Autobots had thought their frames would be. They're all strange, otherworldly, and dangerous.

Miko is definitely a spitfire. But not a motorcycle or a tank. She's a full-framed War-Forged Seeker femme. She revels in her bloodthirst and dresses well in violence as her plating is a searing and hauntingly bright pink. Her helm has small horns, her mouth spilts wide, and she enjoys showing off rows and rows of serrated teeth with her unsettling optics brimming with tactical programs.

Raf isn't a mech with alt based on lab equipment or even suited towards data. He's something completely else. He's draconian, but not a Predacon, as that root-mode is something familiar to Ratchet. Raf is far more reptilian, even in root-mode. An elongated face with a snout. Teeth hanging over his bottom lip with thick ridges of pointed plates upon his crest to trail up to proper horns, long and notched. His brilliant boy still has the same eyes towards sciences with slitted pupils, and Raf is comfortable navigating around with and without a thick tail and has adapted well to his large hands with thick claws.

Jack seems the most normal. Seems. He could pass off a young mech - handsome with dark and glossy plates and the unique grey-tinged blue optics - but if you stare too long into those optics, strange shapes emerge. Ratchet thought he's some type of jet, but sometimes Ratchet spies wheels along his legs or sees how Jack's silhouette bulks or slims between beats. The hem of his armored coat curls or blends too well with shadows and fog that it's too difficult to tell where Jack is really at.

Soundwave got dragged into this mess via a deal with June Darby, who had traveled into the Shadow Zone because of Ratchet's off-handed commentary that the Decepticon TIC once tied with Megatron in the Pits.

It was the closest thing to help that the trio could receive, especially with their heritages becoming more active in their new bodies.

Miko's sea-yōkai bloodthirst had meld too well with War-Forged programs because they naturally feed into each other. She was starting to frenzy more often. The War-Forged monstrous durability and inability to disable locked mission priorities combined with the Jinja-hime/human hybrid hunting and magical capabilities produced a monstrosity on the field.

It doesn't help that Miko had long incorporated the Apex Armor into her style. Her constant tinkering and experimentation led her from piloting the entire thing to using it as a type of indestructible shield or reinforcement via a controlled surrounding body similar to Susanoo from Naruto.

Ratchet can't keep up. He doesn't have the endurance or the speed to withstand Miko's onslaught.

June could have taken them away, but they already knew how to function as human-based hybrids. The main issue was their new Cybertronian biology.

Ratchet is the most prominent medical expert of baseline Cybertronians, while Soundwave is a well-experienced close combat specialist in brutality and pitted against opponents known for overwhelming strength and voracious mech-hunters.

Ratchet will never admit he's territorial. He won't. He fucking is, though. And it clashes with Soundwave.

Part of it is the medical-programming quirks, but a lot of it is cultural.

Medics function on their own hierarchy, and Ratchet has been the Head for a really long time, serving several Primes, immense hospital networks, and his own clinic. No one had been able to shake him from his position.

He trained in Iacon's universities. Their higher education system fosters a deep sense of competition, alliances, and networks among their students, staff, alumni, and partnerships as the universities function as their own private settlements.

Soundwave, on the other hand, didn't have that kind of opportunity. Instead, his education is eclectic and self-driven since gladiatorial clades would provide martial classes and potential masters as sparkling recruits were a long-term investment, but much had to be clawed for as resources were given to those with the most potential.

Ratchet is used to working with someone who already has all the groundwork and needs experience and refinement into their specialty as well as being the main authority over their journey. While Soundwave is familiar with training groups in various skills levels or backgrounds along with other mentors at the side. An inductee could buy protection services from a mentor, but all are subjected to the management of the clades.

So Ratchet has classical training and education, whereas Soundwave had taken his education through other means.

It doesn't help that there are language differences as well, and Miko is trying to bridge Pit Kaonite and Iaconic together because she's simultaneously learning both. And that Miko with her newfound Cybertronian medical knowledge is becoming a new level of menace.

Since Jasper trio had delved deep into their Other heritage as well. Their respective lineages had followed them through the conversion, and that's a whole other can of fuckery. However, there are cultural misunderstandings as the former humans are okay with stripping down to bare protoform for whatever reasons.

Ratchet, as a medical frame, has been part of the middle-upper castes, so he does carry a lot of those sensibilities. Similar to what Alpha Trion did with a Wastelands mech that would become Orion Pax, Ratchet tried to soothe out those rougher or unpalatable edges but in a more gentle and far less invasive sense, like shifting from talons and claws to blunted edges when not in combat and careful not to show too much fangs when smiling. Contain, contain, contain, is the Iaconic cultural norm.

Soundwave cares little for Iacon's false civility, but the trio does fit some ghost stores and folklore. Jack can be utterly eerie with the way he erases himself and how at ease he is in warped spaces, Miko really gives credence to the tales of Predacon hybrids of the Wilders' traditions, and Raf is something unearthed from Quintessons' fears.

June Darby is something else entirely.

[brbgottagetkfc]

Ohmygod noooooooo I am sobbing now SLUTORUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Pt 3? 🤡🤡🤡

Well serves you right, skinny porcupine, what did you expect? Being yourself by joking you'd marry ur ex??? Yeah we finna talk about THAT!. God this is so good!!!!! Shall there be a reconciliation, the entire group coming together to grovel (Hime, I am looking at you especially hard girl)? God I'm gonna cry now, SATOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I need to see it through, GAH! SEE THE ENDING!!! SHOW HER YOU LOVE HER, SATORU. MAKE HER FEEL SECURE, INSTEAD OF SUCKING UP TO BULLSHIT (I know he didn't cheat, but that utahime thing really messed me up because god I have seen this behaviour and I can't take it, just naur)

I am more invested than bitches in Wall Street. FUCK!

HELPPP NOT THE 🦔🦔

I feel bad for Gojo now, feels like I did him real dirty. (Real Gojo, not Slutoru)

I wasn't really intending to do more with him, but it appears that some of y'all want y/n to say her piece. I'm very confused now should we do a Slutoru only part 3?

[iruinn]

baby, you're the sweetest thing ❀ nanami kento

chapter 5

cw : mild hint of smut, mentions of infidelity

wc : 3017

masterpost

MINORS DNI! TY

You rub your hands together, your breath coming out in visible puffs as you lounge in the garden, waiting for Nanami to join you. He agreed to accompany you to buy you a new dress for the wedding, and you were determined to buy him something to repay him for all this. You just had to figure out what it would be…

You’re broken out of your thoughts by him approaching you. He grabs a hold of your scarf, wrapping it more securely around your neck. “Can’t have you catching a cold.” You shiver at the feeling of his fingers on your neck as he tucks the edge of the scarf in.

Your grandmother stands at the doorway, watching you both with a smile on her face. You turn to her and wave and she calls out to you. “You should visit that old friend’s store of yours for your kimono! Iori, was it?” You throw a thumbs up back in reply. “Was planning to!” Jogging towards the front entrance, you catch up to Nanami, admiring him in his sweater and scarf. You twined your hand through his waiting one, interlocking your fingers. You knew you both weren’t actually dating but you wanted to make today as similar to one as you could.

You both stop in front of the traditional store, and you slip off your shoes. You peek your face around the door, pushing it open. “Iori-san? Utahime?” You call out into the empty store, and you’re greeted by a side door opening, your friend stepping through.

“Hime!” You run up to your friend, her arms coming around yours easily, as you both laugh. “It’s been years, (name).” She exclaims, holding you back at arm’s length, before flicking you on the forehead. Your hands come up to your forehead, covering it in confusion. “I haven’t seen you in months, (name). Not since I last visited you in Tokyo.” Her hands land on her hips. “You’re lucky I happened to be in the shop today since my mother is out. You couldn’t have let me know you were coming?”

“Sorry, Utahime. It’s been hard mustering up the energy to visit.” You snort. “Only took my sister getting married to do it.” She sighs, looking around you. “Are you going to introduce me to him?” You turn behind, having forgotten your company. “Right. This is Nanami. He’s my savior for this wedding.”

“Is it okay that she knows?” He asks, stepping up to stand beside you. “Utahime is one of my best friends. She can be trusted” Her eyes follow you both, clearly extremely curious. “Well, let’s get you fitted for a new kimono. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here, right?” You nod, and she grabs you by your arm. “Right then, let’s get this done. Since you need it immediately, we’ll have to go with a pre-stitched one.” She pulls you closer, before hissing in your ears. “(name), you WILL contact me later and let me know what’s going on.” “Hime! He’s going to hear-“ You both turn towards him, and he’s clearly hiding a smile. You pout. “See?” Nanami raises his hands, placating you. “Don’t mind me. I’m just here to keep you company.” You poke a tongue out at him, turning back to Utahime. She looks like she wants to say something, but stops herself, turning to the heaps of cloth.

A whirlwind of colours and fabric, and an hour later, you finally decide on a suitable one. You swish around in it while Utahime pins it around you for adjustments to make, turning to Nanami questioningly. “What do you think?” He stares at you, blinking slowly. “You look a vision, (name).” You flush, smiling happily as you turn back to your friend. She removes the pins, taking the kimono from you. “I’ll contact you when it’s ready, within the next two days.” She comes up to you, hugging you again. “Hang in there, okay? I know how hard this must be for you.” You nod against her shoulder, and she withdraws, pointing a finger at Nanami. “Take care of her.”

He smiles down at you. “I will.” She makes a phone sign with her hands when his back is turned, the meaning clear. You nod furiously, and you both burst into giggles at the same time. You should really make more of an effort to keep up with the people here.

You’re currently at an restaurant for lunch with Nanami, grumbling. “Ugh, I wish we had more time! I could have taken you around Matsushima Bay…there’s so many pretty places around there…” You pout, your cheek on the table. You had taken him around to the castle ruins, and a popular place for ice tea, and you both decided to stop for lunch before shopping for an evening dress.

Nanami sits down opposite you, his legs knocking into yours. You try to rearrange your legs around his, moving them left and right to find a comfortable spot before he captures your legs in between his, locking them in place. You can feel his muscles strain under his slacks. He pokes at your cheek. “We can always come back some other time. Cheer up, (name).” Some other time? Some other time?? What did he mean by that? Did he forget that this entire relationship was a sham? You look up at him, but he’s distracted by the menu. Did you dare hope that this he shared the same thoughts as you, that this could extend maybe beyond this week? You calmed yourself down, deciding not to call him out on it. You were desperately curious to press the point, but you didn’t want to hear him admit that he was caught up in this pantomime either and that it was a slip of the tongue.

One expensive lunch later, you’re striding down the street,entering the shop you had looked up to (hopefully) purchase a new dress, a frown on your face as Nanami easily keeps up with you. “Are you still mad at me?” You huff at him. “You should have just let me pay the bill! You’re already doing so much for me..it’s the least I could have done! It was mean to hold it over my head when you’re-” You wave your hand up and down at him, struggling to get your words out. “When I’m…?” “So obviously bigger! I never stood a chance..” You stomp your feet. He just seems amused at your temper tantrum.

“I promise you can pay me back some other way. I’m pretty well off, I truly didn’t mind.” The store is near empty this time of the day, the one attendant in there nervously wringing her hands at the two of you arguing. You turn to her apologetically, before explaining to her what you needed. She led you to a shelf with some dresses in your size, you think, and you pull at some of them.

You turn around, holding one to your chest to ask Nanami for his opinion and jump, realising he was looking over your shoulder already. His face is very close to yours, and you feel yourself grow red. He pulls out a couple more for you to try on, and you walk into the changing room with them, feeling his gaze on your back.

“I give up.” You groan, walking back out, another dress discarded. You think you’ve been through atleast 10 by now, you're tired, and your arms hurt from putting them on and pulling them off. “I’m just showing up in an old dress, I don’t care anymore.”

Nanami is sitting, his gaze pitying. “We’ll find something suitable, (name). Maybe somewhere else..” The attendant, who’s been helping you both, walks in with a last dress. “This is one of our newer styles.” Her brow is dotted with sweat, and you straighten at the sight of it. It’s a pretty number in deep blue, long, classy and sleek. You immediately like the look of it, and take it from her, and she leaves you both in the corner of the store alone.

You slip it on in the changing room, realizing the zipper in the back is way too low for you to reach. You groan in annoyance, calling out for the attendant. “Hey, can you come in here for a second and help me out with this?” Your back is turned as you fiddle with the top of the dress. You feel someone enter, and you turn your head, gasping when you realise it’s Nanami and not the attendant. He strides forward, and you turn your head around again quickly, your face beet red.

“May I..?” You nod, shivers running up your back when you feel his fingers running down your bare skin. He grips the zipper, pushing it up slowly, the small room silent and claustrophobic feeling. His hands settle on your waist, large and encompassing, his thumbs stroking. He pushes your hair over to the front of one of your shoulders, leaving the other one bared by the wide collar of the dress.

“If-.” He pauses, before continuing. “If I’ve been reading this wrong. You need to stop me right now, (name).” You feel his warmth as he steps closer to you, your heart beating so fast you’re afraid it’ll explode out of your chest. “I’ll apologize later for not doing this in the right order, but I’m having a hard time holding myself back. So say no right now if you don’t want this.” He bends low, his lips brushing your neck. His breath warms your skin.

“Well?” You bite your lip, whispering. “I want this. Have wanted it for a while-“

You’re cut off when he spins you around, crowding you into the wall. Your hands come up to his sweater, and you grasp the bottom of the fabric. He lets you, a hand coming up and holding your chin in place, his thumb stroking your lip. You see the desire and lust clouding his eyes, probably reflecting yours. He bends down, capturing your lips in his, and you wrap your arms around his neck. You feel his arms come around your waist again, lifting you slightly, encouraging you to jump, and you obey, wrapping your legs around him and letting him support you. He grinds into you as your tongues entangle, swallowing your moans with ease. You bite at his lips and he breaks away from you, his lips landing on your neck as he kisses a line down it, nibbling. You grip at his hair, doing your best to stifle the noises that are trying to escape your mouth.

“Kento, I-“ Your words are interrupted with a moan as he leaves marks down your neck, his hands pushing your dress up. “Hmm?” His voice is even, like you interrupted him while he was reading a book. “What is it, baby?” Ah, you think your brain has melted out of your ears hearing his words. You’re resigned to losing yourself in pleasure, even if this was an almost public place and anyone could walk in. Your dress is now bunched up around your legs, and you can feel his length pressing through his slacks into you, hard and hot.

You feel his hands fiddle with the top of your panties, unsure, like they’re asking for permission, and you’re about to give it enthusiastically when- “Um, hello?” You hear the attendant from outside the door, her voice loud. “Do you need any assistance? You’ve been in there a while, ma’am…” The both of you are broken out of your frenzy, and Nanami breaks away from your neck. Your breaths intermingle, and you call out, your voice shaky. “Just a minute!”

You turn back to Nanami, and he lets you down, pulling down your dress. You run your hands through your hair, turning to the mirror nearby and making sure it covers the marks. “I’ll let you get changed.” His voice is gruff, his expression still a little wild. He leans down suddenly, grabbing your waist. “You should get that dress.” He whispers, before leaving you alone in the changing room.

You hastily change back into your usual clothes, smoothing out the wrinkles from the dress, and checking to see if you look decent. You think you look…passable. Your lips are a bit redder than usual and your hair is ruffled, but your scarf covers up the marks on your neck. You walk out, face red. You notice Nanami near the entrance, his eyes following you. You push your hair behind your ears, before getting your dress ringed up. Your eyes fall on a row of ties near the counter, and you notice one in the same deep blue as your dress. You bite your lips, looking back at Nanami, before grabbing it, adding it in too before he can notice.

You’re both silent on the way home, but right before you walk in, he grabs your arm gently. “After this is over, we should talk.”

Your worry must have shown on your face, because he smiles at you reassuringly. “It’s nothing bad, don’t worry. I had fun today.” He bends down, his lips brushing your cheek, before he strides in. You follow slowly, patting at your cheek. You went into this entire ordeal with dread, but you think you might come out of the other side of it with hopefully more than a fake boyfriend.

Nanami wakes up with a grunt, his eyes roving over the room confused before he remembered where he was. He runs a hand down his eyes, and turns his head, looking at you sleeping peacefully beside him. A smile crosses his face and he grabs a strand of your hair that’s floating in front of your face, tucking it behind your ears gently. Your nose twitches, but you’re still deep in sleep, dead to the world.

He wonders what woke him up, picking up his phone to see the time flashing at him. He rolls his eyes at the message spam from Gojo and Haibara, swiping to get rid of the notifications, before getting out of bed. He might as well go get a drink of water. He pulls the blanket over you more firmly, before walking downstairs silently, noticing the light in the kitchen is turned on already. He pauses near the entrance, straining to hear the furious whispering emanating from the kitchen. Was someone having an argument?

“Do you even want this anymore, Naoya? You’ve been acting weird all week….I’m worried for us.” He realizes it’s your sister, who must be arguing with her fiance..your ex. He shouldn’t be overhearing this, but curiosity overtakes him, and he hovers. “I’m fine, Seiko. You’re the one that’s been on edge all week. Unless you don’t want to marry me anymore now that I’m not the heir? Is that it?” “How could you think that! I’ve always been in love with you, and I don’t care about your status, I never have…I’m afraid, now that (name)’s back…”

Nanami hears him snort, his voice getting closer. “What, afraid I might still be in love with her? That didn’t bother you when you slept with me while I was still with her.”

What? Nanami knew all about the sordid story with your ex. You had told him about how he had broken up with you, and then gotten together with your own sister. But what they were talking about…

He strode in, interrupting them both. He notices your sister close to tears, Zenin’s expression cold. “You cheated on her while you were dating?” “You were eavesdropping?” Naoya strides up to him, but Nanami is firm, his arms crossed. “Answer the question.” “It was two years ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” Your sister’s voice rings out, shaky. “She’s with you, and she’s happy. She doesn’t have to know.” But you weren’t with him. And even if you were over Zenin (God, he hoped…), you still deserved to know. “Tell her.” Naoya scoffs, looking away. “It’s none of your business.” Nanami straightens to his full height. He knows he can cut an intimidating figure when he wants to.

“Tell her, or I will. She deserves to know what you both did to her.”He walks away, to go back to you, leaving them both stunned silent.

Entering your room, he sits down, staring at your face. You looked so peaceful in your sleep. He leans over, cupping your cheek in your hand. You unconsciously rub into it in your sleep, and he smiles, remembering.

When Gojo had asked him for help, he had almost blocked his number, knowing that the man was trying to tie him up in another weird scheme. But when he found out it involved you… He had to say yes. The night at the bar from 4 months ago was still clear in his mind, the few hours he had spent talking and flirting with you. He had been extremely charmed by you, your forward and adorable drunk self occupying his thoughts, even after you threw up. He had wanted to message you the day after, ask you for a date, but Gojo had told him you was extremely embarrassed by everything that had transpired, and he decided to back away.

When Satoru had explained about your situation, he jumped at the opportunity to spend a week with you, helping you through what he figured had to be a pretty torturous experience. He knew it would have been worth sitting through his friend’s gloating, and he was happy about spending so much time with you and getting you to open up more.

But this… His teeth grits. He’s angry on your behalf, angry at the way your mother dismisses you, at the easy betrayal of your sister and your ex-boyfriend. He hoped you’d come out of this whole and happy but even if you didn’t. He ponders, his hand running through your hair. He’d be waiting to pick up the pieces of you.

[moni-logues]

When he asks you to move in together

Pairing: Min Yoongi x reader

Genre: domestic, fluff

Content: reader is drunk af and then hungover; that's really it

Word count: 1.4k

Summary: Miscommunication means you end your night at Yoongi's apartment and he ends his at yours; Yoongi suggests a simple solution.

You scream silently as the electronic lock rings out throughout the apartment; its bleeping penetrating the silence with inappropriate glee. You grimace as you tiptoe in and gently place the door back in its frame. Again, the lock announces itself, bleeping to signify that the door is secure. You grimace and freeze, listening for any sign that someone was disturbed by your entrance. Nothing stirs, so you carefully take off your shoes, place them on the floor and pad, in just your socks, to the bedroom. You make it without crashing into anything, despite your stumbling, and you take a deep breath to try to wake your mind up a little before turning your attention to the second door in your way.

Agonisingly slowly, you grip the handle and turn; every muscle in your body feels tense from trying to be quiet. You find that it has a surprisingly stabilising effect and you are able to stop swaying, even though the apartment continues to tilt and twist around you. You know Yoongi’s expecting you but you still don’t want to disturb him. You know how hard he’s been working recently; it has been difficult to find time to spend together which is precisely why you’re creeping into his apartment after a night out. You might not be able to spend the night together but at least you can wake up with each other in the morning.

As you pop your head around the door, carefully releasing the handle as you do, confusion hits you. There’s no one in bed. In fact, the bed is made; no one has even slept in it.

‘Where the hell is he?’ you think to yourself. There’s no light from under the door and no sound beyond it, but you check the bathroom anyway: empty. No longer concerned with being quiet, you ponder Yoongi’s whereabouts as you traipse around the apartment, checking each room, just in case: all empty.

“Yoongi?” you call into the empty apartment. “Oiii, Yoongi?!”

No one answers. You’re pretty sure he said he would be here. Why would you have gone there if he weren’t going to be? You’ve had too much to drink to be solving puzzles at 3am.

You go back to where you dropped your bag on the floor by your shoes and fumble for your phone. You squint through one eye at your messages; he definitely said to come over to his place. You’re sure... You're pretty sure, but the letters in front of you won’t stop swimming. You tap out a message to him.

‘Whete are yoh????//’

Send.

Of course, he sleeps like a stone, so he probably won’t get it until the morning anyway.

You flop onto the sofa and put your phone on the coffee table. You’ll just rest for a moment while you wait for him to reply. After all, he did say you could come over, so it’s fine for you to be there. It’s certainly not fine for him not to be, though; what is he playing at? It’s so cold outside and you were so looking forward to crawling into bed next to him and passing straight out in a drunken stupor.

Despite the fact that hangovers are entirely self-inflicted, Yoongi has such a warm and gentle soul that he always takes excellent care of you the morning after. His bashful tenderness melts you like ice in a hot drink and you wish he wouldn’t try to hide it away so much. You whine to yourself on the sofa, missing him, contemplating throwing a tantrum. You pick up your phone to message him again.

'come hime pelase!!!!! xXXxXxXXxxXxX'

Lots of kisses, never enough kisses. You throw your phone back on the table and pass out, the waves you feel like you're rolling on rocking you to sleep.

*

You’re brought back to the edges of your consciousness by the same bleeping that you had cursed some hours earlier. It’s not until you hear Yoongi’s voice calling you that you crack open an eye.

“Oi,” he says, standing at the end of the sofa with an iced coffee in hand. “What are you doing here? Why are you sleeping on the sofa?”

You groan and raise your head, looking around. You’ve felt better. You tip yourself into a sitting position and try to rub the sleep from your eyes, forgetting, too late, that you were still wearing your make-up. Black mascara is smudged all over your hands and, you assume, all around your eyes. You squint up at Yoongi in confusion.

“Where were you?” you croak.

“What do you mean where was I? Where were you? You didn’t come home.”

“What do you mean? I’m here! I’m in your home.” You are not sure you have the strength to deal with this right now.

“Exactly. You’re not supposed to be in my home; we agreed to sleep at yours last night.”

This is not how you remembered it. You grab your phone from the coffee table, hoping for vindication. It’s dead. Naturally.

“Look.” Yoongi sighs and sits down next to you on the sofa. He hands you his coffee as he opens his phone to your conversation. You take a sip and realise how thirsty you are. You continue drinking as he shows you your messages from the night before.

‘I will probably be working late again, but I can come over afterwards so we can wake up together?’ Yoongi’s initial message reads.

‘No good,’ your reply. ‘I’m out with friends from work so I’ll probably get in even later than you do.’

‘That’s ok. I can come anyway and just sleep while I wait for you.’

Your drunken messages follow; there were more of them than you remember and you cringe. Oh dear, maybe, maybe you hadn’t quite understood the plan.

“I thought I was supposed to come here,” you tell him, weakly.

“Clearly, but why are you sleeping on the sofa?” Fortunately, he seems to be amused rather than annoyed.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to fall asleep – I was just waiting for you to text back.”

“To text back from my sleep?”

“… Shut up.”

You lean against him, trying to bury yourself in his hoodie, groaning.

“I was worried, you know, when I woke up and you still hadn’t come home. Then I couldn’t get through to your phone. I thought something might have happened to you.” Yoongi speaks softly, without reproach but you feel reproached nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” you reply from underneath his jumper. “I’m just too stupid to date, I understand. You can break up with me; it’s fiiiine.”

You’re joking, of course, being dramatic as you love to be, but the guilt is real. Next time, you think to yourself, you should learn to read. Or learn not to have too much to drin- no, let’s be honest, that won’t happen.

He laughs.

“Obviously, I’m not going to do that. But it has got me thinking. There is a way we could avoid this happening in the future.”

You emerge from Yoongi’s hoodie and face him, pouting pathetically. If this is a riddle, the troll under the bridge is about to have you for dinner. And if this is Yoongi about to suggest that you do something sensible like turn the location on on your phone or take a portable charger around with you, well, you think he should know you and your chaos a little better than that.

“You’re going to have to tell me what that is; I’m clearly not sufficiently capable of thought this morning.”

“We should move in together,” he states simply.

WHAT?

“I’m sorry, what?”

You’re incredulous and you’ve just remembered what a state you look. There’s no way he said that. Yeah, you’re in love and happy together and everything’s going brilliantly, but has he seen your hair this morning? Does he really want to sign up to deal with that every day?

“We should move in together,” he repeats, smiling hopefully.

“No, sorry, one more time.”

He groans and takes you by the shoulders.

“We should move in together!”

You heard him the first time, but you feel like you need it repeating still; you have to be sure that’s really what he's asking. It's overwhelming, frankly. Going to sleep and waking up with Yoongi every single day? Heavenly. Cooking together, eating together, watching TV, watching him paint- oh you have not the fortitude for this kind of happiness right now!

“I just knew you couldn’t get enough of this,” you tell him, gesturing to your whole body.

“You’re right; you’re absolutely irresistible right now, but also, have you thought about having a shower?”

“How very dare you?”

You stand and strike a pose, gesturing broadly to your whole body with a flourish, but you have to admit he has a point. You lean down and give him a parting kiss on the way to the bathroom.

“Have you also thought about brushing your teeth?!” he calls after you.

“Shut up!!!!!”

This was definitely going to be fun.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Who does a (codependent) Camilla Tominey think she is to repeatedly demand that William sacrifice his own family for the (non-heir) traitor brother?

The good news is they actually located the malignancy. This isn't the first time a monarch or senior member of a monarchy has been diagnosed with something life threatening, however they tend to keep it a secret. I think it's a good sign that they've shared details because it suggests the BRF medical team feels confident about the prognosis. If they found a mass, it's possible that the malignant tumor was removed and any adjuvant or holistic treatment is more of a precaution.

I'm so sorry to see the Suck-It duo repeatedly capitalize off of the BRF's suffering:

Sadistic MEgain, licking her chops at the very thought of seeing another Windsor in the ground, while Sparry pays to publish his travel plan with every American celebrity media outlet. What happened to his "security" concerns? It's obvious that Sparry's PR is desperate to bury the African Parks scandal. Will he be forced to rush back to California to rescue the family from the storm?

Sparry is a Crazy Maker and Crazy Makers should not be near cancer patients. If Sparry wants his father to get well, then he should drop all the lawsuits and maintain a quiet, dignified distance.

I have to agree with this comment:

From Technical_Ant_7466 via Reddit

"I am really concerned about Duke of Hazard returning to the UK and visiting Charles. My fear is that Harry will fanagle himself back into the RF, and that he will expect to take on responsibilities or worse that he will but further pressure on the King and Princess Catherine. Just as their vile antics accelerated the death of the late Queen and Prince Philip, I firmly believe that the Harkles have caused a lot of damage, including the health of family members. ***For years I worked in the medical field as a scientist. The research I've read has not proven a definite cause-and-effect relationship between stress and cancer. The connection between emotional (psychological) health and physical health is very complex. Psychological stress can affect your body. Some studies suggest a link between various psychological factors and an increased risk of developing cancer.*** **1.Stress can weaken the immune system. The immune system defends the body against infections and diseases, such as cancer. A weakened immune system plays a role in the development of some types of cancer.** **2. Stress can alter the levels of certain hormones in your body. This may also put you at greater risk of developing cancer.** Stress has a profound impact on how the body’s systems function. Health experts are still sorting out whether stress actually causes cancer. ***There’s little doubt that it promotes the growth and spread of some forms of the disease. Put simply, stress makes your body more hospitable to cancer.*** Long-term/chronic stress is more damaging, and the damages comes from situations that last many weeks/ months/years with no definite end point. ( Ithink we can confidently say that 5+ years of mega mouth and her poodle have been extremely stressful for the RF. This no-end-in-sight stress weakens the immune system, leaving a person prone to diseases, like cancer. It also ups the risk for digestive problems and depression. Chronic stress also can help cancer grow and spread in a number of ways. At this point in time, the last thing the RF needs is Harry in their midst. I can't think of a single advantage their is for him to returning to " his father's side", when he's done nothing but say vile, evil lies about them, divulge members of the RF personal stories and has generally been a human version of POISON. I hope Harry drops in and leaves quickly. THERE'S NO POSITION FOR HIME TO FILL. WILLIAM PROBABLY DOESN'T WANT HIM THERE, AND I APOLOGIZE IF THESE SEEMS CALLOUS, BUT I BELIEVE THE PUBLIC DOESN'T WANT HIM THERE. Harry has proven to be poisinous and toxic. No amount of grovelling will change the perswon he is. His real personality may go into hiding, but make no mistake, he's as eveil as the ILBW. Removing the cause is the clear answer but instead that TREACHEROUS VILLIAN IS BEING ALLOWED BACK, WHICH IS A VERY BAD IDEA. This is a photo op for Harry and a chance to attempt to fleece his father for money/security and whatever else the ILBW has told him to get his grimmy paws on. HARRY CANNOT BE ALLOWED BACK, OR THAT WILL BE END OF THE MONARCHY."

author: Technical_Ant_7466 submitted: 04/02/2024 via r/SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466429/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466429/)

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaintMeghanMarkle/comments/1ajqp3v/the_gruesomes_have_been_stressors_since_before/

Then there's Fergie:

Why would Fergie release her private medical information as the world grappled with the sad news about Charles and Catherine? Fergie was not undergoing adjuvant treatment. There was no risk of anyone spotting her at a daily RTX treatment. I'm certainly thankful she's OK but I wish she would have waited until the working royals were out of the health scare news cycle before shouting "me too."

Fergie is not "battling alongside King Charles" 🤦🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️ Aren't her grandkids just babies---except for a 3 yo?

[11queensupreme11]

Hiii!! Hime and Percy switching universe would be crazy! All I think about is — didn’t Poseidon sent a DOLPHIN to retrieve amphitrite when she ran away?!? Can you imagine if Hime who mysteriously got sent to ROR universe and had to stay w him and has enough of him and his yandereness and decided to run away (swim away) and he knows her hatred for dolphins and he sends an ARMY after her. He knows he just needs one but it’s punishment for her for trying to leave him 😭 and before she tried escaping he would summon sharks for her to play with and he takes that privilege away and has a dolphin as her security guard (more punishment until he thinks she learned her lesson)

NOOOOO NOT THE DOLPHINS ASHEFAHG Poseidon's such an asshole he would totally exploit her hatred of dolphins 😭

[istorkyou]

A Thousand Battles (A Modern!Ivar AU)

A modern!Ivar x F OC (Julietta Lothbrok)

Warnings - NSFW, MINORS DNI. Language. Slight violence.

Synopsis - Julietta wakes up with no memory of her life or her husband, Ivar. Will it ever return? Does she want it to?

Word Count - 4333

This is for @blackseapearl 400 follower trope challenge. I asked for Amnesia :)

Shout Outs - A massive shout out to @blackseapearl and @deans-ch-ch-cherrypie for beta reading, ironing out all the mistakes and the motivation to keep going with it. Special hugs to @blackseapearl for talking through the ending with me and giving me some much needed inspiration and the wonderful moodboard.

This fic kicked (and is still kicking!) my ass, I’ve never had such a hard time with motivation as I have writing this long-ass bitch so I hope you enjoy it :)

It’s also LOOOOOOOONNNGGGGGGGG….. and I’m only the tiniest bit sorry about that!

Tag List - Let me know if you want on or off :)@smears-and-spots @punkrocknpearls​​ @youbloodymadgenius​​ @momowhoo​​ @zuxiezendler​​ @not-another-viking-fanfic-blog​ @ivar-s-my-brat-tamer​ @pieces-by-me​ @heavenly1927​​ @berryonasummerevening @synnersaint​​ @out-of-the-box-and-into-alchemy​ @petite-hime​​ @serasvictoria​​ @mimiiinspace​​ @itsmysticalmystery​​ @lonewolf471​​ @mylifeisactuallyamess​​ @draculasbride-blog​​ @love-all-things-writing​​ @southernbe​​ @redhead7799​​ @kaybee87​​ @ivarlover​​ @ivarhoegh​​ @idgafiamallthefandoms​​ @darkphoenix5037​​ @profoundtyrantharmony​​ @snarling-through-our-smiles​​ @crazyunsexycool​​ @xceafh​​ @bragisrunes​​@noway4u @batmandallyboy​​ @complicatedbutrare @readsalot73​​​​ @meandmycherrytree

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

CHAPTER 9

The rigmarole of getting through the security of the Gala sets Ivar off, especially when Julietta sets off the metal detector arch and is taken aside to be searched.

“No one touches her,” Ivar warns the security guards menacingly as he steps in front of her, pushing her behind him protectively. “Keep your fucking hands off my wife. She has surgical pins in her arms and that is setting them off.

“Sir, we cannot allow entry unless she is properly searched and we are satisfied there are no weapons about her person. Please do not obstruct us.”

“Get a hand held metal detector and wave it over her. The only part of her that will make it beep is her upper right arm which is held together by pins because of a car accident.”

She raises onto her tiptoes and places her lips by his ears and whispers, “Let them do it, I’m not bothered and it’s protocol. I’m no different to anyone else. Okay?” He turns his face towards her, deciding what to do, and when she gives him an encouraging nod he turns back to the security team

“Touch her inappropriately and you die.”

The guard nods tersely and sweeps his hands over her body. He then gets the handheld metal detector and what happens is exactly what Ivar described, beeping over the scar tissue set off by the pins under the skin.

“Ok, ma’am. You may go in. Thank you for your compliance.”

Ivar's arm encircles her waist as he guides her into the great hall, but not before making a note of the guard's name tag

In the banquet hall they find the rest of the family and Ivar hands her a glass of champagne. “To us,” he holds his out and she toasts with him.

“To us.” She takes a sip and looks around the party. There are clear factions, groups clustered together, eyes sweeping the other, surveying the attendees, marking up the enemies in the room.

Ragnar approaches her. “Things will be less tense once the alcohol flows later. I know the atmosphere is crackling right now, Julietta but don’t worry. Is this helping your memory? Do you recognise anyone?”

“Have I been here before? How would I recognise anyone if I haven’t?” she questions and catches the tiniest squint of Ragnar's eyes.

An hour later and Ragnar was right, the atmosphere has changed, still charged but less segregation of the groups, meaning business is being spoken about, deals being made. She is surveying the room when she feels Ivar close behind her, his breath in her hair, his hand grips her waist. “Hello beautiful. Dance?”

“You want to dance here?” she asks with an amused voice.

“I want to dance with you anywhere. Come on, baby.” He grabs her hand and leads her to the dance floor, into the crowd of other couples dancing closely.He pulls her against him, his right to him wrapped around her waist. He sighs happily and she relaxes into him.

“You look so sexy in that dress I can’t wait to get you home later.” He places a small kiss on her exposed shoulder

“Oh yeah? What are you going to do to me later, Ivar?” she asks, letting a hand touch his chest and slowly move it down to stop on his stomach. “Describe it to me.” She enjoys the way his cheeks colour a little. “I know what I want you to do to me.” Her voice is low and sultry.

He moves his face to her ear and whispers, “I am going to make you cum more times than I ever have before. I won’t stop until you can’t take it anymore and you are begging me to stop. How does that sound?” He slides his cheek across hers and kisses her

“That sounds very good,” she replies breathlessly, “let’s go home now!” He throws his head back, laughing at her enthusiasm.

“As soon as we can, love.”

When the song finishes they head back to the family, and soon Ivar is approached by Ubbe, who whispers in his ear. His eyes flit to her and he nods once, taking the few steps that closes the gap between them.

“Baby, I have to go and speak with someone. I’m sorry, I’m needed.” He can see the apprehension in her eyes so he cups her face.

“You said you wouldn’t leave me tonight,” she says petulantly, but she’s covering her feelings of dread at being left alone. She hasn’t seen the stranger from the alley yet but she assumes he is here somewhere and it makes her grip her husband's hand harder.

“I’m sorry, I will be as quick as I can. Stay here with my father, okay? You will be safe with him.”

“Ivar, you said you wouldn’t leave me. You promised.” She repeats.

He kisses her hand. “I won’t be long.” And he leaves. Julietta watches him walk away with a nervous feeling building within her. She’s never been exposed to his business before and strangely, for the first time she’s considering how dangerous it must be for him. Her heartbeat picks up and she wants to run to him to stop him putting himself in harm's way

Her thoughts are interrupted by a quick tap on her shoulder and turns round expecting to see Ragnar's eyes but instead of the crystal blue ones she is looking into the chocolate brown eyes of a man. A tall man with a scar through his right eyebrow and stubble covering his tanned skin.

It’s Lev.

She works her hardest to control her facial expression, her breathing, and fights the urge to run

“Can I help you?” she asks, a tremble in her voice. What is he going to say to her? She glances to the left and sees Ragnar eyeballing the pair of them, clearly gauging her reaction to the stranger.

Lev looks pissed at her, eyebrows drawn together in a deep scowl. “I would like to dance with you.”

She lets out a relieved, high pitched giggle. He doesn’t seem to be there to expose her. She shakes her head and her hand flies to the necklace Ivar gave her earlier.

“I can’t dance with you. I'm a married woman,” she tells him indignantly, looking him up and down.

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Your husband is an insecure man? Doesn’t trust his wife?” His head tips slightly and he smiles menacingly.

His sick little game bursts the calm bubble she is trying to exist in. She looks at him up and down, the man who claims to love her, to know her, but for whom she feels nothing but contempt.

“He’s not insecure at all and he has absolutely no reason to distrust me. It’s inappropriate for me to dance with a stranger,” she snaps at him. Julietta feels hand run up her arm and she closes her eyes, assuming Ivar has returned and for a split second she feels calm again before realising it is Ragnar.

“I do not think my son would mind at all if you had an innocent dance with….”

“Raphael,” Lev replies in a thick Spanish accent.

“With Raphael. Don’t look so worried Julietta, go and have fun.” Ragnar gives her a little nudge towards Lev

“No,” she replies indignantly. “I don’t want to dance, Ragnar. I will not disrespect Ivar and I think you don’t know your son that well if you think he wouldn’t have a problem with this. I will wait here for my husband.”

Ragnar lets out a patronising chuckle and cocks his head to Lev as if apologising for her insolence.

“Nonsense child, off you go. You don’t want to appear rude to a guest of the Gala, do you?” Ragnar flashes his eyes at her. “I must insist.”

Lev doesn’t wait for her answer, he grabs her hand roughly and guides her to the other side of the dance floor, as far away from the Lothbroks as they can get and pulls her to him so her body is flush with his.

“Hello, Etta. I knew you would come tonight. Your curious little mind couldn't stay away, could it?” His eyes are wandering over her face and neck as if he is about to devour her. “My Gods, I want you so badly. I’ve missed your tight little pussy, your dirty little mouth, fuck, I’m getting hard just looking at you.”

She tries to step away from him, repulsed by his words, by the way he is looking at her, at the realisation that he seems to know her so intimately and yet is a total stranger to her. His fingers dig into her waist as she tries to shift away from him

“Where do you think you are going? Did you find the things in your apartment?” he asks in Russian.

“I didn’t look,” she answers stiffly, hoping he doesn’t know her well enough to know she’s lying.

He is staring at her intently. “Always so adept at lying, you know I didn’t have to teach you that? It came naturally to you. You still have no memory?” She shakes her head, turning her head to look at the family but he grabs her jaw and brings her face to his.

She has her hands over his instantly, before she registers it herself and she is digging her nails into a pressure point on his hand which makes his hand drop quickly and he laughs, stretching out his hand.

“I did teach you that though. Don’t look at them. You keep your eyes on me. Do you know how I feel having to watch you dance with that cripple? Watching you let him touch you, kiss you and whisper God knows what into your ear? How dare you do that in front of me, acting as if you actually love him. You have clearly forgotten what I told you about falling in love with him. And stop speaking to me in English. I taught you Russian, you will speak to me in the mother tongue.”

He spins her around on the dance floor and she catches eyes with Ragnar who is watching them closely. She addresses him in English. “I don’t know what you and I were to each other, before my accident, but you need to understand something. Whatever it was is finished, the affair, whatever it was, is done now. I love Ivar, I don’t know who I was before the accident but this me, the one you keep bothering, wants no part of you. Do you understand me?”

He spins her around again so his back is to Ragnar and then his face toughens, turns nasty. “You were mine! Before all this, you were mine. We were in love for years…and I still love you. My Gods, the things we used to do together! You may be married to that cripple but you are mine Etta. My warrior, my fighter, my love. You will remember it’s an assignment and when you do you will run back to me.” He pulls her tight to him again and he moves his head like he is about to kiss her so she shakes his arms off her.

“Assignment? What are you talking about? I don’t believe anything you say,” she hisses in Russian, surprising herself.

“Julietta!” Ivar’s voice shouts behind her far enough away she knows he didn’t hear her speaking Russian. “What is going on here?” He pulls her behind him and faces Lev, who is somehow managing to keep his face neutral despite the hatred she knows he feels towards Ivar

“I wanted to dance with the most beautiful woman in the room, nothing more, nothing less.” Lev has switched back to his fake Spanish accent.

Ivar looks him up and down with disgust. “You make a habit of putting your hands all over married women? You are lucky this evening is a safe haven or I would have put a bullet between your eyes before you even knew I was here. Do you know who I am?”

Lev smirks and replies simply, “yes. You are Ivar Lothbrok.”

“Then you must have a death wish asking my wife to dance with you. We will catch up soon, you and I, in a setting that is much less favourable to you and your disrespect.” Ivar turns to Julietta, sneering and grabbing her hand harshly. He doesn’t say a word, he just walks her briskly back to the family.

“We are leaving,” Ivar announces

Ragnar is still looking at Lev, who, in turn, is watching Ivar and Julietta.

Ivar tries to contain his rage but he doesn’t succeed. He grabs her upper arm and pulls her into him so he can talk quietly to her. “Why the fuck did you dance with him? You’ve humiliated me in front of everyone.”

Before she gets a chance to reply Ragnar interrupts. “Ivar, I gave the okay. That man seems quite besotted with your beautiful wife, didn’t he Julietta? Who is he my dear?” Ragnar questions her with a look of menace and distrust on his face.

Something inside her kicks into gear, she addresses her father in law with an annoyed and covering tone. “Oh you think I know who he is? Very funny Ragnar, I know no one on this fucking Earth apart from your family!” She points her finger at him accusingly. “Don’t put this on me, I told you Ivar wouldn’t like it, didn’t I?” She looks Ragnar up and down in contempt and a rage fills her whole body in a way she’s never felt before.

In her head she watches herself throw her arm around Ragnar's neck and snap it, hear his last breath, see his life force leave. Her conscious mind feels sick at the images playing out.

Ragnar just watches her, as if he can see her thoughts, feel them. A satisfied smile creeps over his face.

Ivar looks between them. “Let’s go. I’m done with this night.” Ivar grips her arm and they leave the Gala, not noticing Lev's gaze following them.

In the car on the way home they are both silent but the tension is so thick it could be cut with a knife. The silence gives her a chance to process what Lev told her. They were in love, before she met Ivar. He referred to Ivar as an ‘assignment’ again

Her ability to speak Russian, an assignment? Surely it can’t mean what she thinks it means… she needs to look at the stuff she found in her apartment. She could be a….

“So. You think it’s appropriate to humiliate me in company? In front of our allies and rivals? To dance with another man?” Ivar’s voice trembles with rage, his knuckles white with the force he is gripping his crutch, but his face is still turned towards the window. “I’m a joke to you?”

“Ivar, please. You know you aren’t a joke, I love you…”

His gaze turns to her. “You fucking love me but you allow another man get close to you?” His eyes travel up and down her with an unmistakable look of disgust.

It flares her anger again. “Your fucking father made me, I said no twice and your father practically pushed me into him! Gods, get a handle on your temper when you are talking to me. I don’t appreciate your tone.”

“I don’t appreciate my wife getting pawed by another man in front of half the city like a common fucking whore.”

Whore.

Whore.

The word bounces around her brain like a ball on a squash court.

Whore. The rage the word ignites in her gut causes her to slap him hard across the face. “Fuck you, Ivar. You are bunch of fucking wolves. All of you! Business was so important that you broke your promise to not leave me alone at the Gala knowing who could have been there! Your father offered me up like a lamb to the slaughter for Gods knows what purpose but I’m fucking sure it was a business one. If you have an issue with me dancing with another man tonight you take it up with your father. He forced me to do it. I told him no but apparently that word isn’t in his vocabulary!” 

Ivar rubs his cheek, clearly in shock at her actions, but she barrels on, undeterred.

“Don’t you ever dare to call me a whore again. You may have a reputation but do not for one second think I’m scared of you or will allow you to speak to me like I’m dirt. Like I’m less of a human than you. Fucking whore??

She stares at him, waiting for his reply but it doesn’t come. He just continues to hold his face and stare at her dumbfounded, so she rips her chin high and spends the rest of the ride home watching the city get smaller, biting back tears she sure as shit will not allow to fall now. In front of him.

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

Ivar doesn’t get out at their house, he doesn’t say a word, she just watches the car drive towards the main house so she assumes he is staying there for the night.

Entering their house and runs to her closet, heart beating so hard from the adrenaline that she thinks it might tear through her skin. Julietta finally takes out the notebook and the phone from the hiding place. Unsurprisingly the phone is dead and she doesn’t want to risk plugging it in to charge out in case Ivar comes back tonight.

She looks first at the notebook she found hidden under her mattress. Pages and pages of nonsense, written not in English or Russian as she expected, but what seems like a code, she only recognised the dates in the corners of the pages, starting from 2012, the year she met Ivar. She scouts every page for the key but doesn’t find one. She throws it down in frustration and picks up the notebook that Lev knew about. Inside it is full of Russian writing, at least she can read that. It’s pages of dates, times, locations, names of people and companies. Each page is dated and they start from before she moved onto the estate, before the accident. She flips through all the pages and around a year in the page dates are getting longer apart, not days now, weeks sometimes months and when they are entries the information on them are less detailed. No more names, fewer locations. After their wedding date there are only two more entries.

She keeps flicking through hoping to find help to decipher the other notebook but nothing.

Her breathing has calmed now, her heartbeat raised but less so. She takes the notebook with the Russian writing and tucks it into her dress, she stashes the other notebook back in its hiding spot along with the phone.

Her feet carry her outside and she turns on the fire pit as her brain tries to offer up any alternative reasonable conclusion than the one she has already come to.

She was leaking information to Lev and whoever the fuck he works for. Who she worked for. Her heart breaks at the realisation: she was selling Ivar and his family out.

Why would she do that? To what end?

She turns the notebook over in her hands and almost throws it into the fire but at the last minute decides against it. If she has to tell Ragnar about herself she will show him what she divulged

She is going to die because of this, the family will kill her. She puts her head in her hands and sobs.

She knows she needs to pull herself together, hide the evidence until she can figure out what she needs to do. How she can handle this new information about herself. She knows she can’t barrel into this, she needs to be smart.

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

Ivar waits in his father's office. Drinking more of the expensive whisky in the crystal decanter than he should, certainly more than he should if he wants to feel half decent in the morning.

He hears Ragnar and Aslaug come home an hour later and he hauls himself to the office door and waits for his father to see him.

“Ah Ivar, I thought you would be here.” He turns to Aslaug. “I will be with you after I have spoken to our son.”

“Ivar, just hear your father out,” Aslaug pleads but Ivar doesn’t reply, he turns back into the office and drops into the chair opposite his father's desk. When Ragnar shuts the door Ivar explodes.

“You made her dance with him! Did you enjoy my humiliation, father? Revel in my shame? In front of the whole fucking city? I fucking hate you!” Ivar continues to scream at his father until his throat grows hoarse whilst Ragnar sits calmly and takes it all. When Ivar screams himself silent Ragnar holds up his hands.

“Son. There was a reason. That man didn’t take his eyes off your wife all night. He barely contained his anger watching you dance with her. I saw the rage in him when you were kissing her, he started to head towards you but he managed to hold himself back. I asked around to find out who he is, no one knew who he worked for but he had a valid ticket. He knows her, Ivar. Or he used to. I needed to see if she knew him.”

“Of course she doesn’t, she doesn’t know anyone here but us and a handful of people from the gym.”

“I couldn’t read her. I couldn’t tell if she was so uncomfortable dancing with him because he was a stranger or because there is a history. He grabbed her jaw, Ivar. He turned her face away from us when they were talking, that’s not an act one stranger does to another.”

“What fucking history? What are you implying?”

“I don’t know but I know the look of jealousy on a man’s face caused by a woman. He watched her for an hour from the corner. I thought at one point he was going to follow you when you went to talk business but I watched him change his mind. He used your absence as an opportunity to get to her. That’s why I allowed it.

Ivar thinks hard for a few seconds. “Was she looking at him?”“She glanced his way but I couldn’t decipher if it was because of the intensity he was watching her or if she recognised him. Talk to her. You know her the best. Ask her if she knows him, Ivar. I’m either wrong or she’s a very talented liar. I hope it’s the former.”

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

When Ivar gets home he hears the television coming from their bedroom. He walks quietly down the hall and into the bedroom, stopping at the door to the walk in closet. When she spots him he sees her take in a massive breath and when she exhales it seems like all the fight, the resentment at his words and actions goes with it. He can see she’s been crying, her eyes are rimmed red and her eyelids are puffy. As her face breaks and more tears flow she holds her hands out to him and he doesn’t wait even a fraction of a second to go to her, pulling her into his arms.

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you by dancing with that man, I didn’t want to, I promise. I’m sorry I slapped you.”

“I’m sorry I called you that name, I won’t ever call you anything like that ever again. I’m sorry I was so mad at you, I was so jealous when I saw him near you. He was looking at you like he was going to kiss you and I just lost it. I’m sorry.”

Julietta reaches behind him and pulls his necklace off the side and shows it to him. “You took it off. You said it was safe at the Gala and you only take this off when it’s dangerous.” He doesn’t reply, just shrugs. “Here, let me put it back on for you.

Her hands snake behind his neck and she looks up into his eyes, which are boring into hers, making her hands wobble as she tries to do up the clasp.

Ivar reaches up as if to stroke her cheek but he actually grabs her face hard and moves close to her, running his nose along hers. “Who is he, Liet?” he says in a sweet voice that doesn’t match his face at all. His face is as dark as the midnight sky.

As her breath catches in her chest things move in slow motion. She feels the necklace slip from her trembling hands, sees the necklace fall from his neck and her eyes follow it as it bounces on the floor.

The familiarity of this situation makes something crack.

Then the floodgates in her brain open.

Memories drowning her, filling her completely, no space left for oxygen even. Snapshot of her life before the accident zooming at her like she is standing in the middle of a motorway, memories hurtling towards her dangerously.

Her parents. Their deaths. Letters. Meeting her real father. Realising what kind of man he is. Meeting Lev. Love with Lev. Training. Her new life. Violence. Meeting Ivar. The circumstances. The wedding. Seeing Lev in secret. Her accident. Seeing who was behind the wheel of the car that hit her.

“Liet! Julietta!” Ivar is shaking her violently, his voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, the blood rushing through her ears is the only thing she can hear properly. Suddenly her vision goes sharp, before the edges get dark, her vision decreasing, slowly being taken over by the blackness until her vision is no more than a pin prick.

Then nothing.

Chapter 10

[ofgravitation-moved]

boku no hero academia verse !!

name: yor briar. age: verse dependent. ( mid to late 20s. ) alias: ibara-hime. / thorn princess.  association: vigilante. / one of the hero commission’s top assassins'.  profession: building secretary for u.a. high. / thorn princess. quirk: inside out - yor can view the emotions of others in ‘ auras ’. they appear to her as colors. red for anger, blue for sadness, green for envy, etc. this helps aid her in reading her targets. & it’s very easy to tell when one of her student’s is lying. 

history: from the time that yor was a young girl, she learned first hand what the trials and tribulations could be of growing up in a hero based society. gangs. mafia. villain's. you name it & it exists. 

at the age of 8, yor lost her parents to a villain attack and became the sole caretaker of her younger brother, yuri. for some time she and her brother were shifted between social workers, homes, the list goes on-- but, there were no relatives available to take them in. yor asked the authorities to let them be on their own, yet-- none, would allow it. 

life-- moving from home to home, if you could even call it that, was no home at all. so, yor did everything she could to keep her younger brother’s spirits high and stayed strong, for him. she talked to her case worker. said she would do anything to get her and her brother out of this situation. the case worker at first encouraged yor to focus on school, & told her that she was too young to work-- but. the next time yor arrived for her check in appointment, there was someone else in the office and they heard her plea. someone, that worked for the pro hero commission. the rest? was easy. 

yor was young, easy to train. if she really was serious about a better life for her brother and wanted to commit to steady work and pay with rigorous training, she could have her own home. paid for in full, for her and her brother: yor didn’t hesitate in saying yes.

yuri went to school and continued on with his studies and his life. meanwhile yor studied in other ways. she trained. learned interrogation tactics with her quirk. learned the ins and outs of her support knives: earrings that she wore every day. when they were taken off and activated, they became piercing sharp blades that she uses to take out her targets with. she herself became a weapon. an assasin, and one of the commission's best. 

as she got older, they only gave her more and more work. but, with larger targets required bigger covers. garden, yor’s own personal codename for the commission and her superior, had secured yor a job at u.a. high where she’s been the building secretary for the last several years. by day, she yells at kids running in the halls, by night? well-- i’m sure you can imagine just what it is the thorn princess does. 

[geekedoutbunny]

so like. this isnt rlly an x reader it just plain crack.

so like. main three (hime, gerard, askin) but theyre a security guard in fnaf 1

Gerard\ Orihime\ Askin imagine - Can You Survive the Night?

Lol a crack story huh? I like this, humor is my language. THANK YOU!! For sending in this funny request, I'll try and give this fic justice, I hope it's to your liking.

MASTER LIST | NSFW CONTENT

Gerard

Being a night guard wasn't on his bucket list, but here he was. He was hunched over in the small chair, his little hat sat upon his head "Security" in bold words labeled on the front of it. His tie looked uncomfortably tight, but he was relaxed. He pressed the small keys on the keyboard, careful not to accidentally press three keys.

The building was silent and dead, the only noise he could hear was the comforting noise of the small fan, he worked in silence for a while, before the phone began ringing, he practically jumped out of his skin from the loud ringing as he grasped his chest and he panted, he stared at it with wide eyes, seeing the light blink. Signaling an incoming voice mail. He relaxed once more, sitting back up in his tiny chair.

He waited patiently for the ringing to stop, and then the sound of the phone picking up and a male's voice came through. "AH, HELLO, HELLO!?" He blinked, listening to the chilling voice message that was left behind, his eyes widen and he began to slightly shake from all of the warnings and promises of enemies and death lurking around. His grip on the small armrest tightened and he damn near snapped the plastic.

Once the phone call was over, he stayed stiff in his chair, his mouth in a tight frown, before he suddenly stood up, a deadly serious look upon his face. "I knew it... this job... is a training program." He said in a serious voice. 'All I have to do is kill them before they can kill me, sounds easy enough.' He thought as he stayed in place. He then placed his thumb and forefinger on his thumb taking a thinking pose.

'Hmm, but how should I go about my plan of action? He said to watch the monitors, but that's too easy, and wouldn't they avoid the cameras? They must've already devised a plan to come and kill me, they're plotting as we speak. I have to be ready, and meet them halfway!!' He thought as he clenched his fist and he gave an excited smile.

'And, I know the best way to meet them too!!' He thought as he took a running pose. "IS TO MEET THEM HEAD ON!!!" He shouted as he took off, the powerful winds from his fast takeoff knocked the desk with everything on it into the wall, destroying it all. "HAHAHAHAHA!! HERE I COME EVIL CYBORGS, FOR I GERARD VALKYRIE, THE STRONGEST WARRIOR AM COMING FOR YOU!!!!"

He shouted as he charged through the building, the sound of furniture, glass, and wood could be heard breaking. "COME OUT AND FACE ME!!! FOR YOUR CHALLENGE IS HERE!!!" His voice could be heard all over the pizzeria.

The animatronics all stood in the security room, the doors all shut tight. Fredy, bonnie, Chika, and Foxy all huddled up in a corner as they stared at the clock.

STATUS: FIRED AND BANDED FROM ALL SECURITY JOBS WITHIN RESTAURANTS!!!

Orihime

Orihime was excited to be a night guard, she was lucky enough to get this job since the last security guard went rampaging through the whole building and destroyed anything that looked like an animatronic. He claimed that they were all plotting against him and that he was going to stop them.

Orihime hummed happily, the newly replaced desk and computer were a nice addition to the old building, and the fan somehow survived but the tap was wrapped around the neck of it, holding it all together. She was happily fixing her tie when the phone began ringing, she jumped out of her seat and hid behind the chair, she peeked from around it, seeing no threat but only the sound of the loud phone.

She sighed in relief and quickly sat back in her chair, she pulled the chair up to the desk, looking down at the phone, the blinking light indicating that it was an incoming message. She waited patiently for the ringing to stop and a man answered. "AH, HELLO, HELLO!!!!" He sounded friendly and Orihime smiled happily. "HELLO!!!" She called back happily.

After the message was over, a grim look was on her face, the warning of dangerous foes advancing upon her while she was to be stuck in the room made her have chills. She quickly sealed all the doors, pressing the little button to close them, she then encased herself into a barrier, curling up on her chair as she watched the clock. It didn't take long for the power to go out.

Her eyes danced around the room, the light from her barrier made it easy to see into the dark, and she was visited by the large purple bunny. She screamed when she saw his shadow, but she slowly relaxed when she saw him curiously tap her barrier. she watched him move about the room, he tilted his head to the side in curiosity and she squealed.

"EEEEE, HE'S LIKE A CUTE LITTLE BUNNY!!!" She shouted in joy, making Bonnie move back from her shock. He was soon joined by Chika and Orihime bounced with joy. "'GASP!!!' AND YOU HAVE A LITTLE CHIKY FRIEND TOO!?" She said in joy as she held her cheeks. Chika and Bonnie looked at one another before they looked back at her. "COME ON, COME ON, COME ON!!!! I HAVE SO MUCH PLANNED FOR US!!!" She said, as she grabbed them by their arms and she dragged them with her.

Foxy and Freddy both stood in the doorway of the dining area. They watched on as both Bonnie and Chika sat at the table with Orihime. they were having a tea party. Orihime had dressed Bonnie up with a necktie and with a top hat while she put Chika in a bonnet with a lovely dress. "Would you like more tea, Mr, BumBum?" She asked Bonnie in a sweet voice, as she held the tea kettle.

Bonnie looked down at the full cup of tea before he looked back up at her and he shook his head. Orihime then turned to Chika. "Would you like some more tea then, Lady Chimi?" She asked Chika in the same sweet voice. Chika looked down at her full cup and looked back up and she shook her head. Orihime then smiled and filled her own cup up instead.

While she did, Both Bonnie and Chika looked over at Freddy and Foxy, their eyes screaming. 'SAVE US!!!' Both Freddy and Foxy looked at one another before they shook their heads. Bonnie and Chika both stared at them with betrayal in their eyes, before they looked over at Orihime, who was happily drinking her second cup of tea. Bonnie reached over and tapped her shoulder, catching her attention.

"Hmm? What is it, Mr. BumBum?" She asked him, and he pointed over at Foxy and Freddy. Their eyes widen, and Orihime cheered. "OH YEAH, MORE GUESTS!!!" She yelled in an excited voice. Both Freddy and Foxy shook their heads in panic before they turned around to run away, but the door was blocked off by a barrier. They observed the barrier for a moment before they slowly turned back towards Orihime.

Her arms were out, almost like she was asking for a hug. "YAY!! COME AND JOIN US, WE'F LOVE YOUR COMPANY.... FOREVER!!" She said, a menacing air behind her. Freddy and Foxy looked at each other in panic and up toward the clock. It was only 1:00am, and they had a long night to go.

STATUS: FIRED BUT WAS HIRED FOR A DAY SHIFT AS A WAITRESS FOR THE CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH!!!

Askin

Askin almost didn't show up for work, he wanted to sleep in and get his beauty rest, like he always did. But he had to get to work at 11 pm and then clock in at 11:30 pm and be in the shitty office at 12 am, he sighed. 'I was really hoping that someone else would get the job and would actually keep the damn thing, instead, they ended up terrifying the damn robots, making them shut themselves down permanently until they left. Something about Tea parties or whatever.'

He thought before he sighed and leaned back into his seat. His arms were behind his head as he closed his eyes. 'No matter, it honestly doesn't matter at this point, it's an easy job anyways, you'd have to be a fool to lose something as simple as this, even a child could do it.' He thought, he then opened his eyes, looking up at the dim lights.

A fly caught his attention, it was flying around the dimly lit bulb and he couldn't help but to stare at it. 'I'm supposed to sit here the whole night... and do what? Watch? but for what? Who'd break into this run-down place? And even if they did they'd probably be doing the manager a favor, because their pizza is god awful.' He thought before he closed his eyes and yawned, a small tear peeking out of his eyes.

The phone suddenly began ringing and he bit his tongue from the shock of it, he sat up and stuck his tongue out as he whined in pain. He then pulled it back in and glared at the phone. 'WHO THE HELL WOULD BE CALLING THIS PLACE AT THIS TIME OF NIGHT ANYWAYS!?' He angrily thought as he looked over at the phone. The light blinked, signally an incoming message and he huffed. 'A message, they better be lucky it is, because if it wasn't then they'd have to hear my mouth, dammit.' He thought before he stared down at the phone.

He tried to wait patiently for the ringing to stop, but he growled in frustration. "PICK UP THE DAMN LINE ALREADY!!!!" He shouted at the phone, causing it to jump up in fear as it answered. "H-HELLO!! HELLO!!" It answered in a happy yet nervous tone. Askin huffed in agitation before he leaned on the back of his hand, he closed one of his eyes as he eyed the phone.

"Hmph, some nerves you have, making an annoyingly loud message at this time of night... and what's worst, is that it isn't even a sexy woman's voice.. how pitifully annoying." He said in a calm voice as he glared down at the phone. "What do you want, spit it out already." He said in an annoyed tone this time.

The phone gave a nervous sweat drop but it answered anyways. Askin kicked back in his seat, his feets propped up on the desk and his arms folded behind his head, his eyes trained on the dim lights again as she listened to the message. Once the message ended, he scoffed. "Hmph, what a load of shit... they should've called an exorcist or some shit for this job." He said aloud as he relaxed in his seat. He stayed in that position for a while, the clock ticked by and he fell asleep.

The animatronics all stayed outside the room, they all watched him through the open doors, too fearful to enter the room. Askin slept peacefully the whole night. So far they liked him the most, all he did was sleep, but they never tried to wake him, in fear of being in the path of his rage.

STATUS: HIRED AND HAS DEVELOPED A STRANGE FRIENDSHIP WITH THE TELEPHONE!!!

MASTER LIST | NSFW CONTENT

[luvs2play]

Hime’s Medieval Adventures- Sabastian’s Memory

Eight years ago, on the day of Richard’s 35th birthday. 

Tucked away one of the studies, Queen Helena had taken her cousin, Lady Nevaeh to warm up by the fire. Neveah’s clothes were much too cold to be wearing today but she wore it anyway in hopes to catch the eye of the King.

Helena: Are you warming now Nevaeh?

Nevaeh: Yes, thank you.... Are you not going to say anything?

Helena: Do you want me to?

Nevaeh: Everyone else has commented on it.

Helena: I’m not everyone else. I’ve never been. We both know that.

Nevaeh: He did not notice me you know. 

Helena: Who?

Nevaeh: Don’t play dumb. Richard, of course. He didn’t look at me once. I believe I’ve lost his favor.

Helena: *unconcerned she drops her gaze* Shame. I wonder then, who has his eyes set on now.

Nevaeh: You.

Helena: What?

Nevaeh: Have you not noticed. Richard has decided he loves you and wishes to make things right with you. He loves you more than me. He has said so, that’s why he’s throwing this grand party tonight.

Helena: *unammused* Hmph

Nevaeh: *angry and on the verge of tears* Are you not happy? You finally win.

Helena: Happy? Happy that my husband has finally chosen me over another woman? My cousin not less. My dearest husband who has sired many children around me has finally chosen me. *Sarcastically* Oh I’m over the moon Neveah.

Nevaeh: This is no laughing matter-

Helena: Oh it is. It’s completely laughable. Now come on, if you’ve warmed up enough, we should return to the party. The nobles will be looking for us.

Helena turns to leave the room but Nevaeh grabs her wrist.

Nevaeh: It is not laughable. I have lost Richard’s favor and therefore Kieran is in jeopardy. There is no telling what will happen to him now.

Helena: *twisting out of her grasp* Do not be silly. Nothing has ever happened to any of the children that Richard has produced. I have never allowed anything but what they are entitled to. They are my step-children after all and most importantly, Sebastian’s siblings. I wouldn’t hurt Kieran.

Nevaeh: You may not but that does not mean the noble or... even Richard would do something. He’s merely your son’s spare after all. Many Kings has killed their own brothers to secure the throne.

Helena: Sebastian would never do that-

Nevaeh: *slyly* How do you know? They say your son is cursed-

Helena: He is not-

Neveah: *frantic* Don’t you find it strange that he does not get sick when the other children do, or the fact that you were only able to finally conceive after that creep old woman that as shunned by the other villagers prayed for you? Are those ungodly eyes not evidence enough for you?!

Helena: *threatening with clinched teeth* Neveah stop it.

Neveah: *manically* That boy is cursed and if you don’t do something about him, he’ll be the death of us.

Helena fully angered by Neveah, catches herself before she can attack her. She takes a breath and grabs Neveah’s arm, twisting it downward, to inflict a small amount of pain. She towers over her and glares at her.

Helena: As a mother, I understand wanting the best for Kieran, but I suggest whatever you might be thinking stays as nothing but a thought. Because if you’re  thinking what I think you’re thinking, the moment you try to lay a finger on Sebastian, will be you last. Do not take my kindness for weakness Neveah.

[evereinefaust]

. . . ⇢ ˗ˏˋ 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐭𝐡 ࿐ྂ

Pairing: Cassata X afab!Reader

Synopsis: After getting soaked in water from Pizza's prank, Cassata helped his master attendant change and provide warmth during the cold season.

Word Count: 1,282

SPLASH!

"Wha⁠!?" [e/c] hues widened as some water dripped down from the person's lashes, slightly blurring their field of view due to the liquid.

A snicker can be heard just near the door the girl was in, along with some terrified stuttering here and there. [Y/n] already identified the annoying snicker as Cassata's since she could practically hear his voice anywhere. As for the stutters, she could wildly guess it as Pizza's. And judging by this frightened tone, it could be said that he's going to expect severe punishment for pulling the prank on her.

"Pi-chan..." a low, dangerous growl escaped from [Y/n]'s lips, her murderous aura spiking from her body.

Pizza squeaked in terror at the tone of his master attendant's voice and immediately left the place running. Cassata sweat-dropped, knowing that he was in this predicament alone and would be facing her wrath soon. A loud sneeze interrupted Cassata's thoughts of escape as he whipped his attention toward the sound. There, by the door, he saw the [h/c]ette profusely rubbing her red nose while trying not to suffer too much from the cold by rubbing her shoulders.

"You cold, [Y/n]-hime?" Cassata casually walked up to her, examining her situation with an amused look on his face.

"Isn't it obvious?" the girl rolled her eyes at him, sending him a heated glare which he just returned with a smug grin. She lightly punched the male on his chest, fuming. "I hate you."

"Aw~ Don't be like that, [Y/n]-hime~ Here, let me help you change your clothes in your room," Cassata tittered while taking his white coat off and carefully placing it on her shivering shoulders before leading her towards her room.

Silence befell the two while they made their way to their destination, no one spoke a word other than the occasional sniffs and sneezes here and there. At last, the duo arrived at the room at the end of the hall. The salmon pink-haired male opened the door for his master to enter. The girl promptly gave him thanks as she entered her room.

The male followed after, closing the door behind him and making sure to lock it after. His golden eye observed the interior of the rather small room. It is only on rare occasions that he was allowed to enter her quarters, and the last he set foot inside was over a few months before. There was her bed on the farthest corner of the room, a mahogany side table just beside it. Her walls were cream-colored with a dark brown tiled floor. There was a balcony on the adjacent wall, and transparent sliding doors securely closed behind the [f/c] curtains. Opposite it was the bathroom.

Cassata trudged over to where the girl's bed was and plopped down on it, setting himself comfortable on the soft mattress. He closed his eye and decided to take a short rest in the meantime. Meanwhile, [Y/n] watched his every action with a roll of her eyes. Nevertheless, she smiled and removed the coat from her body. Putting the garment beside the owner, she then made her way toward her bathroom. She closed the door, locked it, and proceeded to undress while waiting for the tub to fill up.

After a few minutes of waiting, the teen exited the bath with nothing on but a large towel wrapped around her body. Her [h/l], [h/c] locks dripped with water down to her neck, collarbone, and shoulder blades. Cassata glanced up from his seat on the bed and failed to notice the pink on his pale cheeks after seeing his master.

"You do know that it's quite improper to leave the bath just with a towel on, right? Especially when there's a male in the room," he sighed, looking away from her exposed body and trying to cool down the blush.

[Y/n]'s [e/c] hues stared at him for a few moments, no emotion whatsoever on her face before she shrugged her shoulders and strode towards where her closet was. "Meh. It's just you in here, it's not like you're the perverted type of food soul that I know."

The salmon-haired male shook his head disapprovingly, though he remained silent and returned to napping. After getting a sleeveless [f/c] sundress and a pair of underwear, the [h/c]ette returned to the bathroom to dress. In a few minutes, she emerged from the other room with a hairbrush. She plopped on the bed, making the mattress bounce from her weight. Cassata opened his eye, revealing [e/c] hues staring back at him.

"What is it that you want, [Y/n]-hime? Though if it's about my scarf, sorry no one can let you have it," he stated, knowing full well that the girl was obsessed with borrowing his green scarf ever since.

She playfully rolled her eyes as she seated herself properly on the bed, letting him face her back as she held the brush at head level. "Brush my hair for me, please?"

Letting out a sigh, the food soul complied with her request. He propped himself up, grabbed the towel the girl had provided, and dried her tresses with it. After making sure that most of the water was removed, he took the hairbrush and gently combed her hair with it.

[Y/n] fluttered her eyes close as Cassata's gentle hand caressed her [h/c] hair. She loved it whenever her food souls would do simple things like these. Well, in general, the young female just loved spending time with them, no matter what they were doing at that time.

"There, done," the male's voice snapped the girl from her short trance.

"Thanks, Sacchin!" she sent him a warm smile as she stood up.

"No problem, princess," pink hue dusted across his cheeks at her dazzling smile.

Watching her return the items to the bathroom, he then stood up from the bed as well. Returning the coat on his shoulders, his feet sauntered over to the balcony door. Moving the curtains aside, he opened the glass sliding door as the cold, evening breeze immediately welcomed him. Cassata leaned on the railings, observing the multiple lights from the buildings in town.

"Today's such a wonderful evening, huh?" a familiar voice interrupted.

Cassata turned his head towards his sudden companion. [Y/n]'s hair was gently swaying due to the wind, and her [e/c] orbs were focused on the gem-like lights. The moon was illuminating her figure, making her glow a heavenly radiance in the dark.

"Yeah, it is," he replied, a smile on his face as he returned his gaze to the glistering town.

Silence fell upon the two for the time being. It wasn't an awkward silence, rather it was serene. [Y/n] frowned upon experiencing the cold breeze brush past her petite body, making her whole body shiver in response. She had forgotten that she wore a sundress; quite improper in this draft weather. Fortunately for her, her male companion noticed her trembling body.

"You should've worn something warm, [Y/n]-hime. Winter's just around the corner, after all," Cassata removed his green scarf and gently wrapped it around her small frame.

"Thanks, Sacchin..." [Y/n] muttered, a blush erupting in her cheeks at the gestures.

However, it seems that the male wasn't finished yet. Without any warning, the salmon pink-haired male encased the smaller girl in his embrace. This took the girl by surprise, her eyes dilated at the realization. Her blush went into a darker shade of red due to the intimacy, but she didn't do anything to escape from his grasp. In all honesty, she quite loved it.

Gently touching the limbs around her forearms, she lightly stroked his arm. "Thanks, Sacchin."

"You're always welcome, [Y/n]-hime," the male smiled back in response.

[aceteling]

I hate the approach towards cats that's so dismissive about their well-being, I hate the 'cats are fine outside' way of thinking, I hate the 'but it's natural for them to be out and about' approach, I hate it so much

[canmom]

Animation Night 130: Hayao Miyazaki’s Aeroplane Movies

Oh that Hayao Miyazaki! We sure have a slightly complicated relationship to him here on Animation Night!

See for example...

Animation Night 70, where I talk about his early career and years as a Toei union man, up to the founding of Ghibli;

Animation Night 100 where I tell you about one of my favourite ever films Mononoke-Hime;

Animation Night 111 where we look at the fascinating My Neighbour Totoro-Grave of the Fireflies double bill of 1988.

Tonight, we’re going to look at two films, Porco Rosso and the controversial The Wind Rises, which indicate his particular arc through life in, honestly, a rather sad way. Putting them alongside each other to see what we learn...

If there’s one thing old Hayao loves, it is aeroplanes - particularly planes from the early-mid 20th century. No surprise, really: his dad Katsuji Miyazaki ran a company Miyazaki Airplane, which manufactured parts for world war II aeroplanes such as the infamous Zero fighter plane. (Put a pin in that one!) Despite working to arm the Imperial Japanese military, Katsuji was able to get out of actually serving in the war by telling his commanding officer that he didn’t want to fight when he had a wife and kid, which somehow got him discharged with just a lecture.

The young Hayao, born 1941, was therefore surrounded by planes, which were the source of his family’s comfort. He spent his earliest years fleeing from American air raids, suffering from digestive problems, and watching his stern, intellectual mother Yoshiko suffering from spinal tuberculosis (though she ultimately made it to 1983, at age 72). At school in the 50s, he took an interest in manga - which in those days naturally meant Osamu Tezuka; he also went to see drama films with Katsuji such as Meshi (1951).

In ‘58, he saw Toei’s Legend of the White Snake (白蛇伝 Hakujaden), notable as the first colour anime film, sneaking out from studying for his exams. The film had a profound effect on him. In Starting Point, he writes that he fell in love with the film’s heroine Bai-Niang, and yet gradually started to imagine how he might have done the film differently to better show the secondary characters.

Hayao went to university to study political economy with a focus on ‘Japanese Industrial Theory’, and at the same time, started drawing in earnest, cranking out thousands of pages of manga and spending a lot of time sketching and chatting politics with his middle school art teacher. The 60s and 70s were a high point of left-wing activity in Japan, the time of the Japanese New Left and the Anpo protests against the US-Japan security treaty (c.f. Toku Tuesday 33 on Nagisa Ōshima for a truly fascinating filmmaker who rose to prominence at this time!) So Miyazaki fairly naturally became a Marxist, and stayed such as he got his start working in animation, which I’ve covered in other posts.

So at this point perhaps we can see the curious contradiction that sits in so much of Miyazaki’s work: he genuinely loves aeroplanes and other kinds of military hardware on a kind of aesthetic level, and yet this sits pretty curiously against a worldview that went from Marxist to environmentalist and has no love of war or nationalism.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at a few of Miyazaki’s early depictions of planes. First would be his work on episode 21 of Moomin (1969), by TMS entertainment. On this infamous episode, Miyazaki’s senpai Yasuo Otsuka called in his protégé to handle of all things a battle scene with planes and tanks - one which infuriated Tove Jansson, already dissatisfied with the tone of the adaptation, to the point that she pulled the show out of TMS Entertainment and A-Pro’s hands and gave it to Tezuka’s rival studio Mushi Pro instead.

(I can’t find any embeddable version, but I did get my hands on this episode eventually! Lain bless soulseek.)

This did not deter Miyazaki at all. In his work on ‘Green Jacket’ Lupin III Part I, which he co-directed with Takahata and Masaaki Ōsumi as well as animating several scenes, we start to see his love of mechanical detail shine through once more. Miyazaki’s plane obsession would shine through even more strongly with his direction of two episodes of ‘red jacket’ Lupin III Part II (1980), under the pen name “Tsutomu Teruki”, directing animators like the spectacular Kazuhide Tomonaga as @kbnet​ documents here. By that point his style had matured - the character designs and motion feel like something drawn in Ghibli’s early years, and the plane backgrounds are astonishingly dense with detail. The Castle of Cagliostro is by comparison relatively light on aeroplanes, but truly elevates Lupin’s car to a character - not to mention the film’s ridiculously elaborate finale where the characters battle through an enormous system of gears.

In between these two Lupin jackets came Future Boy Conan, where we start to see Miyazaki find more things to say about planes than “damn cool!”; a full of wonderful plane adventures, yet they also represent the sinister forces of industrialism which destroyed the world once and threaten to do it again.

In an essay from 1979 that opens the collection Starting Point, Miyazaki remarks on the qualities needed to animate a plane on Conan, giving a sense of his philosophy around animated machines - and his perfectionism:

Quite a few of toda’s younger animators plunged directly into this line of work because they were fans. But if I were to ask them to draw a picture of what they think a chaika (a flying boat in Future Boy Conan) would look like in flight, they would only be able to imagine what they had previously seen on past TV anime shows. And I wouldn’t be able to use their work as a result.

To draw a chaika flying in a truly original fashion, you would need to have read at least one book on the history of flying, and then be able to use your imagination to augment what you have read.

This is followed by an anecdote about Russian pilot, and builder of the first four-engine biplane, Igor Sikorsky - the man who for Miyazaki “symbolises the way men really fly”.

Miyazaki of 1979 seemed to have a lot on his mind about the relationship of humans to machines. He criticises the mecha shows of the time for a lack of focus on how the character creates and maintains the machine: “the protagonist should struggle to build his own machine, he should fix it when it breaks down, and he should have to operate it himself”. And true to form, when Miyazaki’s films portray machines, there is as much loving depiction of the maintenance as the actual machines in flight.

We’ll fast forward now, since I talked quite a bit about The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky back on AN 70, and Totoro back on AN 111. I haven’t covered Kiki’s Delivery Service yet, although you can trust we will before too long! No, the first film of interest to us tonight is a bit of an oddball in the Ghibli oeuvre; well known to fans of the studio but not quite as much of a household name. That’s Miyazaki’s flying pig movie, Porco Rosso (紅の豚 Kurei no Buta).

^ here’s your obligatory Yoshinori Kanada-animated background animation scene!

Porco Rosso is Miyazaki’s first movie to not just feature planes, but be truly overwhelmingly about planes. Set in a vaguely Mediterranean world, it expresses Miyazaki’s nostalgia for a lost era of flying before he was born, and yet it’s also tinged with the impending horror of the second world war and the recognition that the planes that Miyazaki loves so much are above all weapons.

Unlike many of Miyazaki’s movies, it centres on mostly adult characters and its narrative arc doesn’t really move to any sort of definite resolution; it’s more a portrait of the era, or rather, Miyazaki’s fantastical imagination of the era, in which there can be sky pirate families flying with dozens of children and, of course, a man can get transformed into a pig. The central character of the film, the eponymous Porco Rosso (so called because he’s a pig (porco) that flies a red (rosso) aeroplane), is an outcast due to his pig curse, but also perhaps because he insists on flying for himself rather than for the Italian military, a stance that is already becoming obsolete.

So Porco ends up adopting a young aircraft engineer - a bishōjo character in the spirit of The Castle of Cagliostro - who is eager to see the world. The largest conflict in the film is Porco butting heads with an arrogant American pilot over the affections of Gina, a woman who runs a bar for pilots - yet the two are clearly more similar than different.

By this point Studio Ghibli is well-established, and Miyazaki can take his pick from some of the best animators in the entire industry. So we see not just Yoshinori Kanada, but also sakuga aces Mitsuo Iso(!!!) and Shinya Ohira(!!!), and with Ghibli money they can truly go all-out. All that attention to mechanical detail, the buliding of machines, is there. Events like the testing of an aeroplane engine are accompanied by incredibly complex multi-layered shots that only a drawing demon like Ohira could accomplish. Only someone whose grasp of 3D form is as precise as Mitsuo Iso could animate some of these shots of subtle wobbles in the pre-CGI era. And on top of that, the colour design of Michyo Yasuda is there in all its beauty, Joe Hisaishi truly came into his own with a score as wistful and nostalgic as such a film demands; it’s an incredibly accomplished work of animation. 

But, planes though.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes - one which unites the two films we’re going to see tonight - sees Porco fly up high into the sky to a kind of flying graveyard of aeroplane pilots. It’s here we especially see the ambivalence that obsesses Miyazaki: he finds aeroplanes one of the most beautiful things in the world, idolises their pilots, and yet of course this period of aviation was an incredibly dangerous one, and moreover the aeroplane development was catalysed by war and soon would lead to a level of destruction never seen before in human history with the bombing campaigns of the second world war.

It would be natural to imagine that the workshop where Porco recruits Fio may in some way resemble the workshop run by Miyazaki’s parents - in spirit, as he imagines it, if not in detail. Like Miyazaki Airplane, this workshop in Italy cannot be doing anything but supplying aeroplanes to Mussolini, and indeed we see Porco utter one of the most quoted lines in the film when he tells his old air force buddy “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” even though this leaves him essentially a fugitive, on his own with a plane and a girl (like half his age I guess?).

^ This swarm of tadpole-like children was animated by Masashi Ando.

If you actually read Miyazaki’s comments about his dad, it seems a little different. Far from being lovingly crafted, Miyazaki writes, Katsuji would make defective parts and bribe officials to look the other way. He would go to nightclubs right into his 70s and ask Hayao if he’d started smoking yet.

At the time this film came out, Hayao Miyazaki’s father Katsuji would die only a couple of years later, in 1993. We can find a short piece that Hayao wrote about it in Starting Point (page 208-209, My Old Man’s Back):

...And after the war, he had no sense of guilt about having been involved in the military arms industry or having produced defective parts. In effect, for him war was something that only idiots engaged in. If we were going to war anyway, he was going to make money off of it. He had absolutely no interest in just causes or the fate of the state. For him the only concern was how his family would survive.

(...)

When he died two years ago, those of us who gathered together agreed that he had never once said anything particularly lofty or inspiring. If I have one regret, it is that I never discussed things seriously with my old man. From the time I was young, I always looked at him as a negative example. But it seems, after all, that I am like him. I have inherited my old man’s anarchistic feelings and his lack of concern about embracing contradictions.

So the actual reality of aeroplanes around Miyazaki had little to do with the romantic images we see in his films. But that ‘lack of concern about embracing contradictions’ seems important...

In 2013, 20 years after Katsuji’s death, Miyazaki would direct a new film, The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu, lit. The Wind Has Written) - to date, his last film, although of course like clockwork he’s since come out of retirement to work on another one. Ostensibly, this film is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the inventor of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane so vital to the Imperial Japanese war machine.

However, if you look into the details, you soon realise that the story present in the film - particularly its central element of Jiro love interest and eventual wife Naoko Satomi - is a complete fiction. Jiro Horikoshi did marry and eventually had five children, but there is very little information about them, even in Horikoshi’s own autobiography. An article comparing the film against it remarks...

The Story of the Zero Fighter is 80% plane design ideas, measurements and stories surrounding Jiro’s career. There’s so much focus on the construction of the planes there’s a measly 20% left for autobiographical material.

According to that article, Horikoshi’s autobiography describes his initial thrill at reports of the Zero’s success in the invasion of China, then later, the psychological impact of a bomb striking nearby and his gradual realisation of what a war actually meant. It’s an arc towards increasing horror at the measures the Japanese Empire was taking to win the war with it, particularly the announcement of the Kamikaze suicide-bomber tactic:

Jiro was approached by the press to write a short essay on the Kamikaze, but he declined. He found it too emotionally difficult to think when he looked at photographs of smiling pilots boarding Zero’s, knowing they were doomed to death. Sobbing, the only sentiment that encouraged him to put pen to paper was dedicating his writings to the families who had lost their loved ones in the war. In the haunted depths of his mind he wondered why Japan had not just given up the war, and why they had gone to such measures with the Zero’s.

Very little of this arc makes it into The Wind Rises. Nationalism is glimpsed only at the margins. In one trip to Weimar Germany, Horikoshi witnesses a Jewish man being pursued; later, he meats a privately anti-Nazi German man at the hospital who talks briefly about how foolish nationalism will make a country ‘blow up’, and his final oblique conversation with the dream-ghost of his idol, Italian aircraft engineer Giovanni Cabroni, about what it means to build planes when they will be tragically be destroyed.

Instead, we find Miyazaki draw in a different source for the primary character arc of this movie: a novel by Tatsuo Hori that also has the title 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu. Set in a sanitarium much like the one in which Horikoshi spends the latter half of the film, it tells the story of the relationship between a nameless protagonist and a woman dying of tuberculosis.

It seems an odd connection at a glance: why would you take this seemingly entirely unrelated novel and apply it to an actual historical person? To me, the most plausible answer is that this isn’t really a film about Jiro Horikoshi. Because recall that, of Miyazaki’s parents, his mother also had spinal tuberculosis, and his dad also made planes for the war. Yet, the Horikoshi of this film hardly resembles Katsuji Miyazaki either, who we’ve seen was far from a workaholic like the film’s Jori Horikoshi. Instead, this would better resemble Hayao himself. So instead, it seems to be using this historical setting as a kind of place to explore Miyazaki’s feelings about his parents, his own craft in animation (wedded to the technical industrial world as it is)...

Inevitably that’s a pretty fraught thing to do! More so than any of Miyazaki’s other films, the film sparked a lot of controversy, mostly for how it handles the topic of the war. You could argue that like, OK, do you need a movie to moralistically lecture you on how invading most of Asia was bad? Must it rub our faces in the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy to be a worthwhile movie?

One answer is that with the amount of modern nationalism and historical revisionism out there, it might not go amiss for national hero Hayao Miyazaki to take a stand there! But honestly it’s more that, with such subject matter, seems to go out of its way to avoid showing what the Zero was actually used for. The main tragedy, as far as Horikoshi was concerned, seems to be that so many pilots of this beautiful aeroplane die; that his pursuit of engineering beauty was corrupted by worldly matters like a war.

Which isn’t necessarily a completely inaccurate portrait of the real Jori Horikoshi’s attitude to his creation. The quote that inspired the film was “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” But then this film goes out of its way to emphasise Horikoshi as a caring family man, a wholly sympathetic character, when to much of the world, Jiro Hirokoshi is a symbol of....

That. (And that’s the low estimate. It could easily be four times higher.)

But let’s look at how it relates to old Hayao and the contradictions he talks about living. If not to the same degree as old Isao Takahata, Miyazaki is an infamously exacting and demanding boss, heavily correcting nearly every cut that passes his desk. He’s spent his life working at a frankly kind of insane pace and expects his employees to keep up. Studio Ghibli has at least one dead body on its hands. Yet if you look at his films, they’re all about freedom and romanticism and the importance of enjoying nature. In Totoro, the dad is pulled away from his desk to play outside by his children. Probably not a good idea at Ghibli.

Then there are all the family relationships, all the way from the panda in Panda Kopanda to the mother in Ponyo. But Hayao Miyazaki was a distant father (he writes in Starting Point that his children were basically raised by their mother), and infamously callous to his son Gorō when he attempted to direct a film that Hayao didn’t think he was ready to handle.

Can we analogise animation to an aeroplane? It is beautiful in much the same way as an aeroplane is: elegant shapes, the technical coordination of many disparate parts to achieve an effect that would perhaps otherwise sound far-fetched (a flying machine? a picture that moves?). What’s the cost of animation? Well, thankfully nothing comparable to killing millions of people. But it is not a light undertaking. It is something that does eat lives. Is that a comparison that Miyazaki would have had in mind? I doubt it, honestly, but it’s what occurs to me faced with this film.

Thus I read the film’s Jori Horikoshi is a strange emotional blend of Hayao Miyazaki himself, an idealisation of his father or perhaps the sort of man he wishes his father was, and the real man who invented an effective fighter plane which helped enable his country to pillage most of Asia. And the rest of us? Well, the person working through these contradictions is Hayao Miyazaki, at the head of one of the highest concentrations of skilled animators the world has ever seen, so it’s going to be shared with nearly everyone. Would it probably have made more sense to do this in something like a manga, instead of a high profile movie? ...Well, I think so. But that’s not what happened, so we have this movie.

Inevitably for a late Ghibli movie, this film is crazy good looking. No Yoshinori Kanada anymore since he died in 2009, but Shinya Ohira is still alive, and he is absolutely capable of handling a Kanada-like background animation sequence. One of the most breathtaking sequences is the portrayal of the Great Kantō Earthquake by Atsuko Tanaka and Taichi Furumata, which combines both brilliant multiplane shots and unbelievably complex full background animation scenes of waves rippling through houses and streets. Tanaka also handled these mindblowing shots of cloth flowing in the wind as Naoko paints that form the film’s major recurring image.

The film uses slightly more digital compositing effects than the 90s pre-digital Ghibli films. For the most part the colours are just as lush as those older films, and there’s even very effective use of CG with handpainted textures now and then; Ghibli weathered the transition to digital a lot better than many studios.

And yet, despite all of this, it is a movie that leaves me feeling pretty unsatisfied, like a lot of late Ghibli movies. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he’s attempted to move away from familiar kishōtenketsu structures and try something novel, but when I watch films like Howl’s Moving Castle, I’m left wondering like... what did all of that amount to, in the end? For all its spectacle, what is this film even saying that Porco Rosso didn’t say... honestly, say better?

Maybe I’ll find an answer on a rewatch. It’s... far later than I planned to start, but if you’re willing to join me, please hop into twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll watch Hayao Miyazaki’s two big films about planes! And I’ll show you the Moomin thing too.

[sombreboy]

Biorhythm (13)

⇢𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖙

⇢Explicit (18+) ⇢Pairing: JJK & PJM ⇢Genre: Smut, BL, romance, angst, drama, android AU ⇢Word count: 2.7k ⇢Ch.warnings: Profanity

In this chapter, Jungkook’s private life unfolds just a little bit more, as a new character enters the storyline.

Jungkook waited in the car and leaned against the window to watch Jimin, ensuring he got in safely.

"Goodnight.. Jimin." He murmured out loud to himself as he took in one last last scan of the neighborhood, and the people walking it. Before any of the street workers were able to even think about approaching his car, he drove off to the comfort of his large home. 

Some time later...

Jungkook steps inside—the chime of his security system echoes off the vacant hall walls while he kicks off his shoes, already eager to slip into a warm bath. 

"Master Jeon, welcome home." His personal maid chimes, immediately following him as he strides towards the bedroom. 

The android trails behind and swiftly picks up every piece of dirty clothing as he carelessly discards them to the floor. He doesn't respond to her, but merely allows her to do her job. 

Once fully in the nude, Jungkook glances over his shoulder at the robot and gives a dismissive wave of his hand. "I'm going to take a bath, do not disturb me." 

"Yes, master. A bath has been drawn for you in the main—" 

Jungkook interrupts his maid, reaching out to stroke the artificial skin of her cheek. It's soft, like silk...almost real. But.. after feeling Jimin's natural warmth, he can't ignore the fact that he can sense the difference in the false mechanical heat. 

"You’re dismissed, Hime. Please finish up your tasks and rest. I have a software update waiting for you." 

Hime whirrs—the faint blue line around her irises flash as if she's confirming the new order. She nods and turns on her heel to leave. 

Jungkook sighs and closes the door behind him to rummage in his walk-in closet for new clothes. Finding what he needs, a simple pair of sweats and a t-shirt, he turns around and jumps in place when another of his creations suddenly appears by the exit of his closet. It leans against the frame casually. 

"Shit, you fucking scared me! I told you not to do that anymore."

The android holds a hand to its mouth to cover a small, mischievous smile. "And I'm a very good listener, as you programmed me to be." 

Beautiful, articulated fingers lift to its hairline and comb through the fluffy acrylic hair—a perfect shade of blonde, like the comfort of golden hour on a warm sunny day. The movement is almost undeniably human, how effortless the artificial form holds its casual lean while doing something so unnecessary. For an android, the comfort of where or how hair drapes shouldn't matter in the slightest. Yet, something as simple as brushing hair out of eyes is common amongst humans, and it seems to please the rich man when little nuances are reflected in his latest model. 

"I like the look of shock on a human's face. It's very intriguing to me." Without waiting for acknowledgement from its creator, the android takes a step closer. "Where have you been?"

"I went to the club." Jungkook says without a second thought. He's got no reason to lie, especially not to his android. Even if he did, his creation would easily be able to detect his whereabouts through his phone—mostly done as a safety precaution. 

The rich man slings his clothes over his shoulder, shameless in his nudity as he finds a pair of underwear. "Since when do you care? You always know my location." He chuckles, turning to face his creation. A face he’s grown fond of very quickly. 

It’s a spitting image of Jimin. However, the flawless appearance is noticeable now that the inventor has spent a long time in the real Jimin’s presence, seeing him up close and clear. 

"Did you apply the new software update to the global server in time? The news covered it, so it's important not to deploy even a second too late.." Jungkook huffs, scrunching his nose, "You know how those reviewers are, nitpicking and looking for anything to complain about if their android isn't up to date."

The look-alike quirks his eyebrow. "What do you take me for, an amateur? The update was applied on-time, to the millisecond." 

He has all the confidence of the real Jimin, and it grows every day. Each passing minute with the sex worker has allowed Jungkook the opportunity to pick up little bits of information—now an address, a phone number, and even an original photo of the man. With plenty of time to spare, the android has taken the liberty of pulling that information to better know the object of his creator's desire. In short—the Jimin replica is even more in-tune with Jungkook's muse than he knows. 

This shall please him, the android presumed. Phone numbers lead to social media accounts, and through social media accounts one can easily pull a thrush of characteristics, such as speech patterns and subtle undertones of sass. 

"You know I do not possess the ability to care, but I've noted it's common courtesy to ask questions." The android's eyes gleam as it processes the sight unfolding—incapable of feeling arousal or shock or whatever emotion one could pair with seeing a man in the nude. But he takes in the sight and memorizes it for reference. "It shows interest in the person you're speaking to."

Jungkook hums in approval, internally knowing that there was no chance the deadline would be missed. He glances down at his naked body, then back up at the android, seeing the faint glow of his eyes as they scan him. He smiles, shaking his head as he ensures he's got everything needed before he walks to brush past the robot, lightly nudging him out of his way. 

"If you're not actually interested in something, there's no need to ask,” he mutters into the android's ear, stepping towards the large bathroom connected to his master bedroom. As his maid had told him, a warm bath was already prepared in advance of his arrival. 

"Kami, can you bring my phone? I'm not sure where I left it... Fuck, maybe it's still in the car. Locate it?" Jungkook places his clothes on the counter by the sink and dips his hand into the warm water to confirm it isn't too hot. As always, it’s perfectly warm to his taste, maintained by the heating system of the tub. 

Kami. It's a name he'd chosen for his personal android, the next step in artificial intelligence. He's one of a kind, and has been around the young genius for as long as he can remember. Nobody knows of him, as he is to be perfected. And who else is a better man at trial and error than the mastermind behind a new era of artificial companionships?

For a long time, Kami simply remained a shell of a bot—a program without a face, running through his personal network as an artificial pet to aid him in his work. But he'd also become a companion, somebody he could trust with everything, as he is his most precious accomplishment and most treasured belonging. 

Artificial flesh and a malleable body had been created quickly, detailed and reformed countless times until the CEO was satisfied. Not until just recently, after his first meeting with the sex worker, had he found the perfect muse to replicate. 

Jungkook steps into the tub, slowly sinking in with a longing sigh in contentment. Not until now does he feel the ache of his overworked muscles and marks that linger on his neck.

"This was in your pants pocket." Kami chimes from the bathroom doorway. Jungkook's phone is pinched between his fingers like a fleshy claw machine. "No need to locate, it was here all along." 

He narrows his glowing eyes on his creator as the man adjusts to the heat of the tub, assessing, as if capable of seeing through to the bone. The slight twinge in his expression is quickly registered as pain and discomfort. Such a feeling is not relatable to the android, but he's taught himself what to do if it ever arose. 

"Relax," Kami prompts, bringing the tone of his voice down to a calming hum. With delicate placement, he lays the phone face-down on a small side table, next to his creator. "Lay back." He places a reassuring hand on Jungkook's shoulder and guides him to rest against the tall backing of the tub.

"So..." The mechanical rhythm of deep kneading begins, just as the CEO enjoys. "Suppose I am actually interested. Would it be appropriate for me to ask how you got to be so filthy?"

"Hah.." Jungkook leans back comfortably, relaxing in the warmth of the tub and the precise kneading of Kami's skillful hands, knowing exactly where to apply pressure for relief. "You're sharp, as always." He roams his hands up his torso, wiping off the dried mix of sweet, sour and bitter juices and candy. "I got a bit too excited playing." He licks his chapped lips at the memories resurfacing, a small smile tugging at his lips. 

Jimin... 

He wonders what he's up to, if he got clean and comfy like he said he would. If he thinks about him just as much as he does.. 

"A few drinks and I can't help but get hungry. You know I like sweet things."

"All too well," Kami nods. "This Jimin has a way of making you..." he pauses to register his thoughts. "Carefree." 

The manufactured man remembers a time, not that long ago, when no being could satisfy his creator's sweet tooth, so to speak. No human seemed to peak his interest, or fulfill the many fantasies he'd built up over the years. So he indulged in the fabricated flesh of androids, created to sate his every need to the best of their abilities. 

Kami's abilities grow by the day. He gives an irregular crook of his thumb—a technique he picked up from a YouTube tutorial—to break up a deep knot at the center of Jungkook's trap muscle. 

"Ah, god.." Jungkook groans when the android finds a sensitive spot in his muscle, lip twitching in slight pain. He takes a deep breath when he finds relaxation in his body, definitely thanks to the massage, and the way he manages to rub off the filth from his skin. He waves towards the loofah on the edge, unable to reach it himself from the comfort of leisure. 

Kami continues with concentration. "Will I have the pleasure of meeting him one of these days, or do you plan to keep him all to yourself?"

"We will see, won't we?" Jungkook hums, pondering on the thought. His lips curl into a small, toothy grin, "I definitely plan to keep him to myself. He's so interesting, and unpredictable... and so, so pretty." 

"Very pretty." The android agrees, catching a glimpse of his new visage in the large mirrored wall behind the bathroom sink. 

He leans forward and presses his chest to Jungkook's back, grasping the loofah. Without instruction, he wets it in the warm bath water and lets the fibrous material absorb until it's sopping wet. 

"Just talking about him. It makes your skin pink..." Kami traces the slope of the man's neck with the loofah and circles each new hickey, remembering the placement and color. "No wonder you modeled me after him." 

Circles grow wider and curl around Jungkook's shoulder, gently scrubbing over his sticky chest until the sugar crystals dissolve and fall away. The android is diligent, covering every bit of skin until he's squeaky clean. 

"I've begun to register preferences from my latest patch. One of my favorite parts of this body are the hands." Jimin's small, delicate hands. Kami smooths a bare palm over the expanse of Jungkook's chest, ensuring all the chocolate has gone entirely. "Do they feel just as good?"

Jungkook leans forward a bit, looking down at the delicate hand soothing his chest. If he didn't actually know that this wasn't Jimin, he probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. But although the warmth of water aids in the comforting touch, the rich man is a man of extreme detail, and he can tell it's not the same as a human's touch. 

"Pretty much. The difference is barely noticeable." Jungkook smooths the pads of his fingers over the artificial flesh of Kami's hand. It's the newest fabrication, even more resistant to temperature and injuries of various kinds. Durable, to say the least. 

"Do your sensors work? Do you feel this?" He asks, stroking the skin before pinching it between his fingers. Although pain is not something the android can feel, the sensation of anything touching them is something he's been adamantly working on programming into the system, with many trials and errors. "I need to tweak it further, I think.. You're not reacting."

There's a delayed response, but Kami's hand begins to twitch beneath Jungkook's touch. 

"Wait, I..." His eyebrows knit in confusion at the new sensation, or, sensation at all. For the first time he's able to compute the man's presence on a deeper level than ever before. "I feel you." The blue glowing rim of Kami's irises gleam brighter and zeros in on the point of contact. Now he can tell, just by observing the motion of his creator's hand, how such a simple motion could evoke a response. 

He brings up his hand and returns the light pinch to Jungkook. Takes the delicate skin between the man's thumb and pointer finger and gives it a squeeze, sensing with analytical precision just how hard to press before he too earns a response. 

"Amazing," the android hums and focuses his glowing attention back to Jungkook. "Touch me somewhere else. Make sure it works everywhere."

“Wait, really?!” Jungkook’s eyes widen, spinning around in the tub to face the robot. His face displays excitement and disbelief. 

Has he finally accomplished the ability in his creation to feel physical sensations? 

“What about this?” He asks, reaching out to place his wet, warm hand on Kami’s cheek. He softly strokes his thumb underneath the android's eye, watching the blue light glow as it processes his touch. His hand slowly moves down, to the artificial man’s neck, to the hem of the collar of his shirt. “Or this?” 

Although the Android felt his pinch at a delay, he’s yet to find any reaction to gentle touch. But he’s way too excited, and needs to know. 

“I could reprogram the delay, if that’s all that’s missing. What do you feel? How does it feel?”

“It feels like...erm...” Kami has to process it. Mull it over. Find the words to describe this... “Pressure, I suppose.” He nods to confirm his deduction. “Pressure seems right...” 

His creator’s hands grasp different parts, with the intent of making him feel. It’s a different sensation, not only by the faint pressure of it, but the delivery of touch. Jungkook takes his time and asks Kami, with genuine intrigue, how it affects him. 

“It takes a moment, but I sense you all around me. It feels...good?” He shrugs. “I imagine that’s how ‘good’ feels.” Kami watches on with immense intrigue. This simple act has brought so much excitement to his creator. 

What is it about the sensation of touch that has him in such a state? 

“I’m becoming more like him, aren’t I?” Kami smiles, showcasing his brilliant white teeth. It crinkles his eyes which radiate a striking sky blue. “Jimin.”

Jungkook’s eyes roam every feature of his creations flawless face, so eerily similar to the real man all the way to the small detail of the way his eyes squint into soft crescent moons when he smiles. 

Smiling... 

Kami had learned that the rich man loved a pretty smile—Jimin's smile. Sometimes he wondered whether this smile was a genuine reaction to the situation, or a programmed response. If he'd take a guess, it was probably a mixture of both. 

“Yes. This is... it’s huge, Kami. You... you—“ Jungkook can barely speak, shaking in excitement as he roams his hands down the robot's chest, touching and squeezing everywhere on his torso. “It’s a fucking breakthrough. Albeit a bit glitchy... This is amazing—You’re amazing.” Jungkook praises, his eyes burning with the passion possessing him regarding his work.

One step closer to another era of androids. Androids that could feel sensations. For now, it is just that, a sensation. But Kami described the feeling as good, which is entirely unheard of until now. It makes the inventor wonder, with great curiosity…

Can he possibly feel more than just.. good? 

© ꜱᴏᴍʙʀᴇʙᴏʏ 2021-2022. Do not repost, edit or translate.

[everlastingbutterfly]

Doubt Season 4 (Liar! Dark lies) Epilogue Translation

(Doubt~ Underworld edition~ Do you enjoy dark lies?~ Epilogue)

Words: 1732

Reading time: 6 minutes

❌ do not take translations without credit

★ reblogging okay

If you enjoyed reading, please consider liking and/or reblogging to spread to other fans.

 Half a year has passed since Ichimura-sensei was arrested, and peace has finally returned to the hospital. MC comes to visit a still comatose Hime-chan. MC recalls visiting her family home after Ichimura-sensei’s arrest:

MC’s father: I can’t fully believe everything that happened with Ichimura-sensei but I am really relieved that you are okay MC.

MC explains it was thanks to Okura. He says that Okura had come to visit him just before and had resolutely declared he is going after the Hong Kong mafia. MC is shocked and her father confesses that after the incident before, they had come directly to target him. Okura had insisted on going alone and MC’s father had strongly told him not to but was unable to stop him and he believes Okura won’t be returning to the Ryumon gang.

It’s been half a year since then and she hasn’t heard anything from Okura. She can’t believe he gave up his own life in order to secure safety for the gang. MC takes a breath thinking over all the events of the past year when:

MC can’t believe she is awake and hits the “call nurse” button right away. Sumika and a recently returned Wataya-kun come in, asking Hime-chan if she knows where she is etc.

Hime-chan answers “the hospital?” and slowly starts moving her hand and touches her face. She exclaims how bad her skin is and that she needs to get to work on it lol and everyone laughs, relieved that she seems her usual self.

Everyone comes to visit her, and comments on how long it took for her to wake up and Karen jokes that it was hard work coming to visit her every week. Hime-chan wants to hear how everyone spent the half year while she was asleep. Ami, as usual has been working herself to the ground with her career but doesn’t mind as she enjoys it. BUT she reveals that she properly cleans up after herself after that incident and has quit smoking. Kazemiya-kun is now a project leader and as a result, his hobby time has decreased (you know what that means). Karen also, is very busy with work and the business is doing so well that she is in the midst of preparations for opening a second branch.

Hime-chan also asks after Tokiwa-kun, with Kazemiya-kun replying that he has one more year until he’s released and that he recently sent them a letter. He is still studying to become a doctor and MC truly believes he will become a great doctor, even if the path ahead will be difficult. Hime-chan questions about Eitaro’s happenings, with MC responding that he has been travelling around to apologise to his victims which has resulted in charges being dropped against him (UGH seriously??). He’s been travelling and studying to re-evaluate himself. Hime-chan exclaims how she can’t wait to get back to the share house and resume her life and encourages MC to also look and move forward.

After work, MC is on her balcony staring blankly up at the night sky. She realises no one has asked her about Yuu-kun or Okura, perhaps out of consideration. Suddenly, someone appears from behind her, covering her mouth. 

Yuu-kun: It’s been a while, MC. I won’t do anything, so please don’t call out. Promise? 

MC nods and he lets go. 

Yuu-kun apologises for surprising her and that he’s come to apologise. He conveys that he’s sorry for scaring her that time. MC is wary that this is all an act but expresses that she is happy he is okay. He points out that aspect of her makes her naïve but that’s precisely the part of MC he is drawn in by. He smiles a little sadly at her and pats her on the head. He reveals that she can relax, because the Hong Kong mafia will stop targeting the Ryumon gang because so long as someone like Okura is around, they are unable to take action. Hearing his name, MC questions him on what he knows about Okura but Yuu-kun doesn’t know anything. Yuu-kun remarks he doesn’t have any more time now so he has to go, but that next time instead of as the Hong Kong mafia, he wants to appear before MC as Yuki Kamakura. With that, he leaps lightly over the balcony and disappears into the night. MC thinks to herself that it would be good if they could meet again in future.

Unable to sleep, MC goes to get some water. Drinking it on the sofa, she remembers Yuu-kun’s words and wonders just who Okura is if even Yuu-kun has no idea on his whereabouts. She wonders if she will never see Okura again but no matter how many times she voices that in her heart, Okura won’t reply. As she starts to cry, Karen appears asking what’s wrong. MC reveals she is concerned about Okura and wonders why she only thinks of him.

Karen’s reply is that it’s only natural - after all, Okura is MC’s first love. MC is surprised and Karen is unruffled, knowing that MC hadn’t even realised it. Karen points out that MC’s hard work on practice, exams etc. was really just to gain Okura’s acknowledgement but MC denies it, replying that if anything, it was due to her annoyance at him treating/seeing her as a child. Karen retorts that it means MC wanted him to see her as an adult. It’s as if realisation finally hits her, and she sees that she wanted Okura to view the two of them as true equals. Karen asks MC what she thinks of Okura, and she answers that she loves him… maybe (her exact words haha). MC vows that if she were to meet Okura one more time then she will convey these feelings honestly.

3 months later, Hime-chan is discharged and there is a big celebration on the rooftop. MC’s father had declared that until he sees Okura again, he can’t die and has been earnestly looking for him. Cassie whacks MC on the back, telling her not to look so dark at a celebration but MC complains that she saw through the liars yet her fated person is nowhere. Cassie calls her rude for accusing her fortunetelling of being a failure and that her destined partner truly exists and that he will appear soon.

At that time, Haruichi appears on the rooftop lol but he announces he’s brought the late guest. Behind him stands…

Okura: Long time no see, kid.

Everyone is surprised and expresses their concern while he was away and he apologises. Haruichi whispers into MC’s ear that it was extremely hard and tiresome to find him, and that the repayment will be high. Karen pushes MC towards Okura who remarks that he has something to tell MC, whose reply is “what a coincidence, so do I.” Everyone smiles at the two, as they leave the rooftop.

They arrive at a café, bathed in the afternoon sunset. MC questions why he went alone on such a dangerous mission (of chasing the Hong Kong mafia) without saying anything. MC expresses how deeply concerned she was for him, especially because he disappeared suddenly and made zero contact.

He’s silent and looks away. MC further presses – who exactly is he to be able to take down the Hong Kong mafia singlehanded and also always be saving her? She begs him to answer. Okura doesn’t make a single move to respond and her sadness grows stronger, more so than her anger. She reflects that her outburst makes her seem childlike, and they weren’t the true words she wanted to convey anyway. She sighs – “It doesn’t matter what you are, I love you.”

Okura: Wha-? What did you just…

MC continues on, telling him that no matter what secret he has, if he doesn’t want to share it she won’t push. But, she just begs him to not go anywher-

Okura: Damn it.

Okura pulls her by the arm strongly into a hug.

Okura: You don’t even understand how I feel and you just go and say that… You’ve always been like that. I’ve tried desperately to keep my self-control intact and then you go ahead and break it. You have no idea just how much I…

MC feels his strong arms around her, and the warmth in the places that make contact, and the smell of tabacco… The reason he didn’t tell her about the Hong Kong mafia was because he knew MC would launch herself straight in. She can’t deny it. It makes MC happy that he was looking out for her but however,

MC: I don’t want to just be protected. I want to fight together alongside you Okura.  

Okura: You really are something, aren’t you. You said you didn’t mind what I was. In that case…

Okura: Are you prepared to go to hell with me?

MC recalls he’s said this before, meaning it seems his future is fated to be dark, and it must have something to do with his secret. Many possibilities swirl in her mind but she’s decided.

MC: If it means I can stay by your side, then the destination doesn’t matter. Whether it’s to hell or wherever, take me with you.

Okura: Don’t forget those words just now.

He slowly closes his eyes and leans closer, giving MC a kiss. Normally he’s quite rough but to kiss so gently, MC thinks it’s unfair. When it was dangerous, he was always the fastest to get to MC, and saved her countless times. Although he can be hard to understand, he is a really kind person at heart. Before she realised it, she was drawn in by him. No, it was probably long before that…

MC opens her eyes mid-kiss, and seeing his red tinged face wonders if it’s due to the sunset. MC complains about his rough facial hair and the scent of tabacco.

Okura: Shut up. Be quiet… and open your mouth.

He makes MC face him and gives her a very strong kiss. She wants to support him no matter what and conveys that through the kiss.

“What does happiness mean to you?”

*Spoken from MC’s point of view*

The me from before, wanted to leave the underworld far behind and live a peaceful life. But, I’m different now. I will live like myself, that’s my happiness.

-end-