#the all black fit just rewired my brain

[94erz]

Namjoon for Dazed

[americanwhores]

LIMERENCE !

ft. jimmy x fem!reader

tags. implied/reference rape, failed rape recovery, talk of incest and underage but not in regards to reader, public humiliation, obsession on readers part, sort of stalking, one mention of suicide, slight boot kink, just humiliation tbh..

note. waow.. don’t know what this is.. unedited and kind of sucks.. rbs n feedback always appreciated. ignore any typos!

What do you do when your rapist is the most handsome man you’ve ever had the pleasure of fucking?

He wasn’t ugly or fat and he wasn’t the tallest, but everyone has their shortcomings.

You feel like a total fraud, picking at the lint on your sweater as you listen to a girl bawl her eyes out while recounting the time her father raped her in the back of his pick-up after school.

The woman before her was gang-raped by her delinquent boyfriend’s lackeys, the man to her left is the victim of his middle-school teacher, another lady pushed out two rape babies from her deadbeat husband before she managed to get away from him.

They’re all ghosts; beaten down, so broken, and you are you.

The same as before, if not a little bit better.

In fact, you’ve stopped getting those night terrors where all your teeth fall out.

You got raped and everything just felt right.

Like he knocked something into place, dug so deep into your cunt he rewired your brain.

Your therapist said this would be a chance at community, some place to bring you comfort, like-minded individuals who have gone through all the same things you have. Circle time for victims of brutal, life-ruining—life-changing rape, you should fit right in.

But you have never felt more out of place.

Pick-up girl can’t continue, she’s choking on her words, they come out her throat like the creak in an old floorboard. The box of Kleenex is significantly lighter.

“We can move on,” says a lady with kind eyes, shifting on her chair to face your way.

They all look at you with their haunted, dark eyes, gaping black chasms that lead right to fucking hell. God. You’re going straight to hell.

“Erm..” You squeeze your hands into fists. You unstick your thighs from the plastic chair. You count to ten and try not to think about how nice he looked on top of you.

“It’s okay, honey, take your time.” She places her hand on your knee. You think of him. His hand on your thigh, squeezing your tender flesh until it came right off the bone, the way it inched up your skirt.

You go stiff and she notices, gasping softly like she has done something wrong. And she has. She’s turned you the fuck on, the warmth of her encouragement going straight to your cunt.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think about—“

“No, it’s okay,” you strain to get it out, avoiding her eyes like sympathy is a highly contagious disease of some kind.

They’re all feeling bad for you when you have finally started to feel good about yourself.

Man, you suck.

“He was my boyfriend.” Your voice cracks for dramatic effect, hold the applause. You wish he was your boyfriend. “He did it almost everyday.” You wish he did it everyday. “It would be after I came back from work…” It would be great stress relief after your Friday shift, it’s nearing Christmas and everybody is crushed into the stores like cattle in free stall barns.

You open and close your mouth, unsure of where to go from here, so you stand up and the chair screeches against the ground. “Sorry… I’m so sorry—I need to go.”

You leave and it looks real.

Like you are a real victim with a real story and very real feelings. The type you see on TV, dressed in white, trembling like lambs, abhorred by the notion of anything sexual. Squeaky clean like you should be.

For just a moment you feel normal. Your therapist is not eyeballing you like a mildly fascinating organism in her Petri dish. Your friends don’t give you a funny look when you say you’re fine—great actually. Your mom is not hanging her head in secondhand shame when you refuse to file a police report, disturbed when she unearths your bloodied underwear beside the prayer book you keep tucked beneath your pillow, rosary nowhere to be found.

They mutter quietly amongst themselves.

Poor thing she can’t even speak about it, it must’ve been awful, I can’t even imagine what she went through, so young.

You can’t speak about it, you really can’t, you might start reciting wedding vows if you think about him longer than a second.

Your loneliness is like the crack in a China cup, fine and glossy on the outside but delicate from years stowed away in show cabinets, passed from bidder to bidder. He pressed golden lacquer into the seams of your fracture, put you back together like you were something worth holding, something to be used.

Stored away in your bag, a sacred place your mother has not yet invaded, is his work ID. You say his ordinary name like you’re uttering a prayer, you drag the jagged tip of your nail over his tiny photograph. His hair and beard are longer than you remember, he’s handsome underneath the scruff, a strong nose and a broad chest. The collar of his company-issued jumpsuit is half popped, and he’s scowling at the camera like it’s an inconvenience.

There’s no phone number on it and part of you is glad you won’t have to call into the company, requesting Jimmy like The Pony Express is a sex hotline and he’s their newest, youngest, bustiest doll.

You wait outside the warehouse instead. It’s a big old thing, the last of its kind, muted in colour, blending into the silver skies. You look at the horse who sits on top like a weathervane on a cathedral, oversized features and the stomach of a pudgy toddler.

Every day from two to eight you circle the block a few times, take a window seat in the cafe opposite until the staff begin to stack tables and chairs, sit at the bus stop beside the same lot of people who wonder why you never get on.

The horse watches from above, wide eyes glowing in the dark beside the moon, unsettlingly reverent, sparkling with diamond-sharp logic, like it knows something you do not, a silent witness to your dog-like devotion.

One day, you leave work early and find a truck parked in front of the hulking, metal mass. Two men are unloading it, one is old and the other is blond, but they don’t matter to you. A third steps out of the cab, your breath gets caught in your throat, scared your exhale might blow him away.

You don’t look when you cross the street.

“Excuse me?” You call out, you’re sure he hears you, but he’s choosing to ignore it. “Are you Jimmy?” You ask once you're close enough to go unnoticed.

“Depends,” he says in that voice you have heard so many times in your dreams, rough like the serrated edge of a knife. “Who’s asking?” He hasn’t looked up once, disinterested and completely unaffected while you burn just being near him.

There is a woman near those other two men, leant down amidst some crates, a clipboard pressed to her chest. Her face is white and her nose is long like the snout on a hound dog, her charcoal eyes are sad and droopy.

You wonder if he has touched her like he has touched you. Either she just has one of those faces or she can take your slot at circle time. She would fit right in with the rest of them. Herbivores hiding in long grass.

“I’m asking.” You clear your throat, he looks up at you with his lidded eyes and you don’t look away, openly admiring the colour of them, how they look in the sunlight. There are a million things you want to ask him.

Was it just me? Was I your first and only? Have you been thinking about me? Do you want a summer wedding or a winter one? Vanilla or chocolate cake? We could do floral arrangements in your favourite colour.

He seems to grow slightly antsy when you continue to stare, Adam’s apple bulging out of his throat when he swallows. He looks like he’s started to feel sick, like he’s waiting outside the principal’s office after breaking a window.

It’s different, he’s different in the day. Long gone is his barbed tongue and wolf-like smile. “What do you want?”

You.

Your fingers toy with the rounded edges of his employee card, if you hand it to him now it’ll all be over.

“Listen,” Jimmy starts, lowering his voice, “if it’s something I did, I’m sorry.” Apprehension twists his mouth into a frown, and he doesn’t sound all that sorry. “But you can’t show up—“

“Here.” You fish his ID from your purse, reluctant to hand it over. His fingers don’t brush yours like you hoped and he seems all too eager to get rid of you.

“Thanks, cool,” he says with all the enthusiasm of a funeral celebrant, tucking it into his breast pocket for safekeeping, his disengagement is a knife in your chest. You’re a stain on a shirt he has no intention of cleaning.

“Yeah…” Does he not remember you? Is there nothing about you that is worth remembering? Were you not good? “Cool.” The longer you stand there the more likely it seems he’s going to grab a broom to chase you away. “Well, bye, Jimmy.” You blink at him sadly, expectantly, longingly. This is it.

You walk away and that was it. That was it. You’ll never see him again, you have no reason to be caught lurking outside the warehouse.

You start to think long and hard on your way home about the fuck is wrong with you.

Everyone is shaped by the sum of their exposures. A product of the people you meet, the enemies and friends you make, who you go home to. Every smile, every scowl, every bad habit is the reflection of another. But to be completely fucking honest, you think you’re just like this. The root of the problem is you, it stems from deep inside your very core, a fundamentally fucked up instinct that makes life a fucking inconvenience. It turns everything into a complication and that is why you’re like this.

God, you wonder what it would be like to wake up and think about normal things like normal people who do not have this constant flurry of wrongness whirling around inside of them. You want to go through life like you’re meant to be on earth, not like an alien species that crash-landed here and never managed to get out, unable to acclimatise to the human way, not like you’re a manufacturing defect.

You want to laugh at the right moment, you want to know what everyone else is thinking, you want to be raped so badly. Again and again and again. You can’t be normal if you can’t stop thinking about the most abnormal thing about you, that just defeats the fucking point.

Your friends think it is their fault for bringing you home that night, for letting you go home all on your own, for getting drunk and leaving you sober. They feel responsible for the best night of your life and you hate it. You hate that they don’t get it. You had a good time in your own right, they don’t need to feel guilty—Or maybe you need to start thinking how they do. Like normal people. They’re horrified when they’re supposed to be horrified. Their minds are tailored to the tastes of this world, yours is somewhere else, some rotten, tumultuous, toxic planet.

Therapy is supposed to be helping you learn how to be even slightly human, little by little, step by step. But you can’t take it in small doses, you need all of this wrongness gone at once like a decidual cast. It doesn’t make you lighter, it doesn’t put a pep in your step, it doesn’t do shit.

So you keep going to wait outside the Pony Express warehouse. You camp out in that cafe all day on days off from work. The staff know you by name, six holes punched in your reward card, special access to the staff bathrooms. You’re set for stalker life.

He never comes again, but you do everyday.

The nights are getting darker, stars bleed into the sky as the sun dims, the moon is larger than usual tonight and if you weren’t so taken by the brightness you would be quicker to notice the dark figure in your peripheral.

When you finally do, you think it’s the devil, cloaked in darkness like the devil probably should be. “Oh, it’s you.” You try to hide the smile in your voice as you watch him put a cigarette between his crooked lips.

“Yeah, it’s me.” He’s unbothered in tone, indifferent in manner. It would be flattering that he remembered you if he hadn’t said it like that.

“Do you remember me?”

“Yeah, from last week.” Jimmy’s eyes glow radioactive in the dark like tiger eyes when he lights his cigarette, the flame flickers and casts him uneven light, softening the right side of his face with a golden haze and plunging the left into shifting darkness. “You stalking me?”

“No!” You say all too quickly. “No, no… I study at the cafe opposite you.”

“Okay.” He was joking you think, making fun of you maybe, you wouldn’t be able to tell either way. “Studying the menu or what?”

That was a joke, that has to be a joke. It’s your cue to laugh so you force one out, it crackles unnaturally. “I wish, but I meant before that, do you remember me from before that?”

You look different under the street lamps, they do nothing for your skin, light pools unfavourably in every pore, the jewel-toned dress you picked out today must look washed out.

Jimmy’s lazy eyes rake up your body, and then he shakes his head slowly. “No.” Even to someone like you, it’s clear he has no interest in taking this conversation anywhere.

“It was in November, the beginning, I was on my way home, and it was late...” You should’ve done this at circle time. “You grabbed me and I let you take me, and then after you told me to walk down the block and call a cab, and I did.”

“Hm,” Jimmy shrugs, though you notice his hand trembling as he raises his cigarette to his lip, “nope, don’t remember that.”

Frustrated, you clench your fists, wondering what could jog his memory—Did he do it often? Nab a girl off the street corner so regularly that he didn’t remember a single one, faces all blurring together, the same hole with a different set of tits.

“Remind me again.”

“How?”

“Take off your jacket.” Jimmy’s cigarette gets crushed beneath his boot, he’s looking at you now. Really looking at you, and this is where it all goes pear-shaped. Your whole life is pear-shaped of course, but this is just fucking sad. You beg yourself to think it over, to think of the dozens of security cameras on this street alone. None of it seems too important when he’s here.

And then, you shrug your coat off your shoulders.

“Okay.” You’ve always been obedient because you have no reason to say no, you don’t care if he’s going to mug you, at least he’s talking to you now. At least he is looking at you.

“Think I’m gonna need to see more to know who you are,” he says, detached like there are a million better things he could be doing with his time, but he’s spending it with you. “Take off your dress.”

“What…” You’re shaking slightly in the cold, wind stings your cheeks and the tip of your fingers have started to ache.

“Take off your dress, I might know you.” Fair enough. He’d seen your ass more than your tits and your tits more than your face. It was forced into a flat pillow for three quarters of the night, between his thighs for the last quarter.

You take off your dress, edging it off your ankles. He drapes it over his arm - he’s got enough humanity to not leave your pretty clothes on the pavement.

It’s cold. The type of cold that makes your brain freeze, the type of cold that only Siberian Huskies and yetis enjoy.

And yet here you are in nothing but your cotton panties, t-shirt bra and boutique winter booties looking like the most expensive kerb crawler in all the world.

“Turn around,” Jimmy hums, his hand is cold but not as cold as you, tracing along your spine when you listen like a good girl.

From here, the horse is watching you. Seeing it all, cartoonish eyes forced in your direction. It’s late so the cars that whiz past have no intention of stopping, some houses have their lights on.

Humiliation prickles your skin, it could be the cold, but you don’t think the cold gets inside of you like this. What are you doing? What are you doing? What is mom going to think? What is dad going to do? What are they going to tell your family when you’re sectioned for Christmas?

”That’s good,” his voice comes out in a whisper, “take ‘em off and get on the ground.” Lukewarm hands slide over your hips, checking you over like a piece of meat.

“Okay,” you whisper back to him, and you’ve gone so far there’s nothing to lose, stepping out of your underwear and doing just as he says.

There’s no praise from Jimmy’s end and you don’t expect any. His stern face, his flat tone, it’s all unforgiving like this cold, hard sidewalk is on your hands and knees.

“Jesus, there something wrong with you?” He sounds surprised and you don’t know what you’ve done wrong. (You do know. You do know.) Isn’t this what he wanted? “Sorry,” Jimmy says, not sounding sorry at all, “I shouldn’t say that, you’re not all there.”

Your head isn’t entirely intact, and there is this worm hole that eats away at your insides, but you’re here. You’re here and you’re on the ground, on your knees with your cunt bared to him. Does he not see you?

The horse sees you, perpetually wide-eyed and forever watching.

Something cold, like the nose of a dog, presses against your pussy. It takes you a moment to figure out that it’s the toe of his boot, the leathery texture is wet almost, smooth and still textured, grainy. The cold is making it too hard to focus on the feeling of it nudging your swollen clit. You close your eyes and focus on anything but your hands burning on the ground, how the wind is going straight to your bones.

You’re going to make this worth it. You will. You’ve been wet for months and you won’t let it dry up so quickly, not when the cause of the leak is here to plug it up.

Just as you’re about to push back into him, grind your clit into the leather, show off how much you want him—He kicks you down, your body skids forward, elbows scraping on the cement. It’s painful, but you’re so cold, so shocked, so confused.

Quietly, you hear him under his breath. “What the fuck… Fuckin’ freak.” You don’t know if it’s in awe or disgust. He drops your coat and dress over the flat of your back, you scramble to put them on. “Why did you do that?” Jimmy asks, and he is looking at you like you’re crazy, like he’s disgusted.

You can’t tell if it’s a trick question. “Because you told me to.” It’s a simple answer, the only answer. Your chest heaves, teeth chattering as you stand on aching legs. God. It feels like your bones are fragmenting.

“Are you a dog?”

“No.” You check your pockets to find some loose change is missing.

“Then you didn’t have to do that, it’s not fuckin’ normal.”

Rape is not normal. And neither is asking seemingly nice, well-meaning girls to undress in sub-zero temperatures. But you don’t want to talk back, you don’t like to talk back, you don’t want to scare him off.

“Okay… Then, I’m sorry.”

“What…” His tone lilts in what might be confused laughter, everything you say is a twist or turn in a tangled thread he can’t quite follow. “Don’t say sorry, no, I don’t—I don’t know, just go home.”

“You’re not going to take me?” You gaze at him sadly. Wanting, yearning. “I think I’m going to kill myself tonight,” you proclaim softly, not because you want to make him feel bad, but because you don’t know what to do with yourself and he is distant enough to confide in.

“Alright,” Jimmy shrugs, he lights another cigarette, the smoke billows out of his thin lips, lined with the slightest smile. “Tell me how that goes.” Well, now you feel stupid and wish to take it back. Then, before he goes, he asks a little too casually, “Your dad touched you or something?”

“No…” You answer slowly, wondering if you should’ve said yes, if that was what he wanted to hear, gauging his reaction like you’ll be able to read it at all.

“Right.” He laughs, and his shoulders are still shaking in disbelief as he wanders into the dark like something out of a nightmare.

You look over to the horse, it tells you he’ll be back.

Considering he works there and all you thought the same, so you’ll be back alive and well.

[visenyaism]

Top 5 asoiaf historical characters or top 5 povs to read from ?

my favorite chapter of all time still goes to the tyrion boat school chapter in adwd but in terms of favorite POVs to read?

6. joncon- giving myself a bonus one to talk about how reading his chapters made me feel like i was dissolving like a powerpoint transition. there’s just so much grief and love and bitterness and doom packed into there it is unreal.

5. sam- gender. he is just so special i’ve never read a fantasy protag quite like samwell tarly and his quest to realize his compassion, empathy, and courage are his greatest strengths despite being discouraged by hypermasculine violent feudal society. he is the real protagonist of asoiaf to me.

4. jonsnow- i liked his pov’s in all the books, but ADWD where he is just trying as hard as possible not to be the protagonist after going though like 4 different genres (can u BELIEVE he started off as a boarding school protagonist) even though he literally has super strengthis so beloved to me. His ongoing crisis where he has to realize that despite everything everyone tries to impose on him he has only ever been just himself is so so real (just as real as him being king beyond the wall. btw) though getting immediately killed for it has to be a downer. MY son was turncloak of the month at castle black👍

3. Jaime- he’s funny. he’s cringe. he stares a lot for someone who can’t fight. he’s delusional. he can’t fit a whole knight in his head. he hasn’t emotionally matured past the age of seventeen. everything he says is insane and also heartbreaking. i love jaime POVs so much y’all don’t get it.

2. Cersei- reading cersei i for the first time last year rewired my brain and i was loud about it. Unlike cersei i was not raised by a fascist nightmare but as a nonbinary girltwin i can say that getting raised alongside a direct example of what your life would’ve been like without misogyny can be very hard, especially when you hit puberty and the “your brother is a person and you are the girl one” starts to get even louder. I was fucking alarmed how personally compelling her weird gender thoughts were given EVERYTHING else the Lannister twins have going on that is NOT personally relevant to me. Don’t know how george rr martin old cishet man that he is knew about any of that.

She’s completely delusional, and at times her mental gymnastics are so so fucking funny, but the like roiling layer of unspeakable (literally unspeakable she refuses to speak or acknowledge it) pain and fear underneath is what got me really. Watching her scheme out of arrogance and mortal terror really just to gain respect and bodily autonomy (though in the Tywin way where freedom from abuse and the “right” to abuse others are the same thing) and then just losing everything incredibly fucking hard was really compelling. i hope you win.

1. Melisandre- wait i said another chapter was my favorite of all time in this post? no i didn’t not when melisandre i is in the room. i have talked about this one extensively and probably will do so again. Finding out that r’hllor is literally her enslaved and her entire black and white apocalyptic worldview is her attempt to feel safe within that truth because she is still just a scared little girl at heart who needs what she’s saying to be true because if it’s not none of her suffering was worth it was the revelation of all time. That and the revelation that she actually does have a human attachment to Davos to the point that she’s watching over his son to spare him the grief. We WILL get melisandre ii in this lifetime and it will break my heart all over again because she is going to outlive stannis and have to survive the worldview shattering.

[sleep-deprived-luka]

If all the pjsk characters where animals what do you think they would be

Oh my brain tends to waver in all different directions, so here's current *looks at time* 3-4 am Zondes takes

Ichika: Wolfdog in a way. She gives me abandoned oupy vibes. Maybe Wolf au also played a part

Saki: Golden retriever, I'm taking that from Corv with no semblance of shame. Saki is Dogcoded, her twintails are big floppy ears and you can squish her face

Honami: I can see her as multiple things really. Anything big and gentle, but the first thought is bear (although a small voice in me says bears are loners so that couldn't work so maybe reindeer?)

Shiho: Arctic fox I suppose? There aren't many Shiho animals in my brain, except ig canon bnuy Shiho (very valid) and shoebill Shiho (which I very like) . I'm still more or less indecisive and assign based on vibes, setting and au theme.

Minori: Another dogcoded girl for me, she got that dawg in her. Definitely a mut, idk what mix though. I do sometimes gravitate to otter or hummingbird☝️

Haruka: Easy penguin, but Wolf au rewired my brain to think falcon. Specifically because a fairytale I read for reference had a guy collect multiple unique things to lift a curse or something (3am brain) and the first one was the blue falcon, then the white lightsword, the golden horse and lastly the princess of France (which I jokingly call Minori pfahaha). I gave au Haruka a falcon because of that and heavily associated it with her (also falcon fits her personality imo)

Airi: Once again Wolf au bias, she in my eyes is a lynx. Maybe severe brainrot has influenced me, but lynx fits her well. It's a feline, it's said to be observant and knowledgeable of humanity, but isn't part of it (I connect this with main story Airi and her idolhood + it's also Wolfs themes) fwuffy paws☝️....Yeah I rest that case

Shizuku: Snowy owl. I want to draw wof au Shizuku with snowy owls, gog au Shizuku is a snowy owl, Wolf au...nah there she is connected to hares, so except that, heavily see her as a snowy owl. Additionally, Owls are very pretty and seem intelligent, but are really dense in reality, so that fits. (Although Sega does give us a good Shizuanimal with swans)

Kohane: Call me lazy, but hamster. Things are speaking for snake and I would actually love some snake!kohane in the world (looks at mirror with big beady eyes) still hamster is the kohammy animal. Hamster and/or sheep.... yesh

An: Another Wolfdog in my eyes (points at a-crowcats-nonsense furry!au) I see her having that dog in her. Although she could also be a dolphin of sorts, many thoughts

Akito: Cat. He's very catcoded and lives in a cardboard box (in my heart)

Toya: Moth is the first thought, maybe because I think he's giving... powdery texture and the base moth I think about is a black and white one. He could also be a snow owl, or a hooded crow... gasp *points at goliath beetle that hangs on my wall* and that

Tsukasa: I initially wrote lion, but then I recall Tsukasa in the Wolf au being connected to deer (in Airis Pov) which I stand more besides. Still his hair could be a banger mane for a lion

Emu: Can I say doggirl? Ig I do put all the energetic girls into the oupy category. Emu is actually just an adjective used to describe energetic animals. Emu kinkaju, emu ferret, emu budgie etc. etc. I see a thing with too much energy and go "just like Emu from my gacha game" she's a dog for me but so much more

Nene: My first impression on Nene was "Her hair makes her look like a pathetic dog"... yes this is another dog girl for me. But she can also be Emus anxious cheetah to her overly social dog.

Rui: I could say platypus, but I see Rui more as a bird. Likely an owl of sorts (I am suspecting a gog au bias) Although a manewolf would work aswell

Kanade: *fighting the urge to say dog* snake... or deer. She's giving "animal who has to be put down" but also "emotional support animal that also needs emotional support" I see a dog, but I'm not brave enough to declare the ninth doggirl

Mafuyu: Jellyfish I suppose. I do associate Mafuyu with many things, yet jellyfish is the most concrete. Probably because of her aquarium + the kitchen lamp resembling a jellyfish + wof au. I do think more of her as tangled in one as really one, but the thought... maybe octopus aswell

Ena: Cat or wolf (Wolf au bias for the latter). She is giving more of a cat though so I settle with Ena hissing and batting at people (Mizuki)

Mizuki: Cuckoo, because of Wolf au bias, but cat in my heart. Cuckoo is just because it dabbles in ugly duckling themes, something something your body is betraying you (which only works in a au setting though, since there she's also a changeling which makes the connection clearer) Cat fits better with canon Mizuki, so my final say is cat, or feline of any kind.

[devil-in-hiding]

Talk about brain rewiring, if mine is now just consisting of the plan:

kiss and nuzzle the knee high white ones with fur (been ogling them since I saw your recent pic and now got a better look, I'm gone)

make out with the little skull on the pink one's ankle and try to fit the heel in my mouth (training required). same with whites next to those

get STOMPED by the high black ones with a heart pendant, clean them for hours

get my mouth and tongue all over the chain of the pink with bat hearts ones, those are fucking ADORABLE, I need to hold and cradle your feet in them

the black ones, left top shelf, are just there for me to slobber all over and clean them up, easy

and then the lower shelf is just. so stomping worthy. like the pink ones? if you wanna trample my throat and have fun in them, I'd give up my windpipe to hear you giggle about it-

yeah no brain rewiring for me (no braincells left)

[thedrowsydoormouse]

7

Oh this is going to be hard! I suck at picking favorites! Ok! Here we go! (Side note: I am still working through Big Finish, the EDAs, and yet another Classic Who rewatch (currently on 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry) so this list might get a little weird.)

1. For the First and Second Doctors, because so many episodes are missing, it's hard to pick a favorite but it would feel weird to not pick Unearthly Child for 1. It's where it all began and we wouldn't have any of the past nearly 61 years without it.

2. Again, because even more of 2 is missing it's super hard to pick a favorite. So I'll pick 2! I love Web of Fear because it's our first time meeting the Brigadier and Enemy of the World because of how camp the whole thing is!

3. Me and my mom both love Alpha Centauri so how could I not pick Curse of Peladon! Jo pretending to be a princess is an added bonus!

4. I'm currently on my first rewatch of 4 and I don't really remember very much of this run from my first time through. This may be controversial but 4 is actually my least favorite Doctor and I actually struggle to get through his episodes because Tom Baker's voice makes my skin crawl. For that reason my favorite is Logopolis because it's his regeneration story.

5. This feels like a 1 2 punch of my least favorite Doctors because 5 is just above 4 in my ranking. He reminds me so much of the people I grew up around in a way that puts me on edge and triggers my fight or flight. Out of all of his stories, I think Black Orchid is the best fit for the vibes of 5 which is why it's my favorite.

6. Six is my favorite Doctor and his run is the one I've rewatched more times than any other, including NuWho, and the only Doctor I've listened to more of from Big Finish is 8! It's so hard for me to pick a favorite for him so I'm going to pick 2 TV episodes and 2 Big Finish. For TV I really love Mark of the Rani and The Two Doctors (I'm a simple girl. I see Jamie being sassy and I'm happy). For Big Finish it wouldn't be right if I didn't pick Doctor Who and the Pirates because Six doing a Gilbert and Sullivan ripoff just feels natural. My other favorite is the Maltese Penguin because I LOVE Frobisher and wish we got more of him in Big Finish because I cannot find the comics to save my life (if someone has a link and a way for me to read them on my tablet, my inbox is open add the Jolly Roger is flying high)!

7. I could not decide between Paradise Towers and Happiness Patrol (I frequently get them mixed up in my head) so I'm picking both!

8. Oh, 8! My dear, sweet 8! We will never have enough of you! Obviously I love the TV Movie but that feels like a copout so I'm going to challenge myself! For the books I'm only just getting started but how could I not pick Vampire Science? I'm a vampy goth! It's only natural! Special shout out to The Stranger for being the shittiest smut I have ever read in my life! As for Big Finish, that's a bit harder. I've listened to almost all of 8 so far but I also really do not like Charley for similar reasons to my dislike of 5 which really narrows down my options. I think my favorites are An Earthly Child and Relative Dimensions. It feels nice to see a Doctor who losses so much reconnect with his roots and rediscover some ties he has to the world at large through Susan and finding out about his great grandson, Alex. They also feel particularly special because Paul's son plays his great grandson which adds an extra layer.

9. Now we're getting into the stuff I have actual opinions on! 9 was my first Doctor (technically I saw an episode of 10 first but I don't remember it the same way I remember 9. Eccleston rewired my brain) and I wish we got more of him but I understand why we didn't (justice for Chris). My favorite from day one is the WW2 two-parter the Empty Child and the Doctor Dances. They always stood out to me the most every time I do a rewatch. And just this once, everybody lives, and I'm hooked!

10. When I was younger and a very different person, 10 was my favorite. I used to daydream about running off with this one. I'll pick a favorite with each companion. With Rose, School Reunion. It used to be Girl in the Fireplace but School Reunion has taken on a more personal thing which just nudges it ahead by a hair! With Martha, it's the Dalek two-parter. What can I say? I love New York! With Donna, The Unicorn and the Wasp. I'm a sucker for Agatha Christie!

11. The only correct answer is Vincent and the Doctor. I don't rewatch 11 very much (the vibes are a hit too manic for me) but this is one of the episodes I keep in my back pocket when people want a suggestion for an episode to start with. I deal with a lot of depression and other mental health issues and that ending gets me every single time.

12. I love 12 but I hate Clara so I sadly skip a lot of this run when I do a rewatch. I feel like Heaven Sent is kind of typical to pick as a favorite but it really is one of mine for similar reasons to Vincent and the Doctor. Because of my issues I haven't been able to get out much for the past 5 (almost 6) years and it has started to feel a bit like I'm stuck in a time loop doing the same thing over and over again day after day with the looming specter of my fucked up mental health slowly chasing after me. Sometimes the only thing that keeps me going when shit hits really hard is the memory of 12 punching the diamond wall.

13. I feel like 13 had a similar problem that 6 had where a great actor who was born to play the Doctor was let down by shitty writing and production drama behind the scenes (I am really looking forward to Jodie's Big Finish stuff and I really hope she thrives there the same way Colin has). There is a reason Chris Chibnal was killed in effigy on the show several decades before he became the show-runner (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy during 7's run. Great story but I hate clowns so it's not my favorite)! This is also the first time since starting the show that I have intentionally skipped an episode and plan to never watch it (Arachnids in the UK. I have spider related PTSD & just the trailer for the episode was enough to make me tap out). There are very few episodes I actually did like from this run so I'm just going to list all of them in release order: The Witchfinders, Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, and The Power of the Doctor.

14. This one is tricky because of how short the run was and also because the episode that everyone loved (Wild Blue Yonder) was soured for me because I found out some very depressing personal news the night before and was still in a not so great headspace when I saw the episode. But I did really enjoy the Star Beast and the parts of the Giggle that didn't have NPH in it were very fun (god, he irks me. I can already tell he's going to either go the way of Ryan Seacrest where he overexposes himself by being in too many things until people get sick of him & he's forced to fade into the background or he's going to go the way of Ellen with a massive scandal that's going to crush his career like that wall vaporizing the car on Mythbusters)!

15. And now here we are at the end. It feels strange picking a favorite in the middle of his run because we still have so much more to come and a lot of my favorites from previous Doctors are ones that grew on me over long periods of time where I've been able to sit with the episodes and see which ones I keep going back to and which ones resonated with me and my personal experiences the most or which ones I recommend to other people when they want to start watching. I don't feel like I've had quite enough time just yet to suss out how I feel about individual episodes so I'm not going to pick a favorite! Instead I'll just give my feelings about this past season and the upcoming Christmas special! I feel like this was a good, strong start for Ncuti and I really enjoyed pretty much all of it! While the writing wasn't perfect, the acting and production design more than made up for it (I desperately need to wander through the wardrobe for this show because this season alone is style goals) and 15 is so charming and draws you in so much that he very quickly jumped up my favorites list to sit in a 4-way tie with 6, 9, and 12 at the top! I desperately need more and I wish we could already start getting Big Finish stuff with him because I know 8 episodes a season plus the Christmas Special isn't going to be enough! I am also very looking forward to the upcoming special (my mom has elected to not go to any parties this year because of recent events here in the States and is instead going to be spending the night with me watching the show for the first time ever) because I love Nicola Coughlan and the trailer looks super fun! I might make a pumpkin spice white hot chocolate to sip while watching!

Also, no one asked, but my fan-cast for a future Doctor at some unknown point in the future is Assad Zaman. The universe won't feel right if he never gets to play the Doctor.

[zivazivc]

Pinocchio AU

Okay people want the explanation for this comic so here it goes. It’s long and complicated and MESSED UP because of course it is, this is me. I’m going to write in points because my small tired brain can’t handle good english atm but basically to sum up the Adrien was a sentimonster theory or Pinocchio AU as I like to call it:

Young married Emilie and Gabriel can’t have kids. Gabriel reluctantly accepts this fate and even brings up adoption as a possibility once, but Emilie doesn’t want to hear any of that. She’s a bit of a Marinette in the sense that she pictures this romanticized ideal life for herself and a child—her flesh and blood—HAS to be in it.

They keep trying to get a baby while other young families Emilie knows keep growing. She feels left out and hurt and depressed, then her newlywed twin sister announces she’s expecting a baby too and something within Emilie just unhinges.

She eventually lies to some of her friends, who she was out for coffee with, that she’s pregnant too. She mostly does it just to see their reaction and feel what it would be like but it quickly spirals out of control where she just starts pretending she’s pregnant until you can’t even tell if she believes it herself.

Gabriel is confused at first because he hears the news second hand (a friend/family member congratulating him) so he’s apprehensive when he approaches his wife but she convinces him that they really are getting a baby and Gabriel is ecstatic.

It’s only later at a doctor’s check up that Gabriel learns that she indeed is not pregnant. The doctor even speaks to him alone explaining that his wife is in denial and that he should make sure she goes to see a psychiatrist, something she definitely wouldn’t do alone.

Gabriel is unsuccessful with that because he’s not entirely persistent, doesn’t want to be the guy with the crazy wife having to tell everyone she lied about being pregnant, and hopelessly believes she’ll just get over it eventually.

That is until her “pregnancy is near due”—her sister already had Félix in England a few months ago—and he stumbles on her transformed with her peacock miraculous (they already have both of them) creating a sentimonster newborn.

They have a huge fight about it but because Emilie refuses to destroy it, won’t tell Gabriel where the amok is, and Gabriel can’t just hurt the baby with his hands, Emilie just… wins. Fucked up, yeah?

Now she tried creating kids before this one, using her imagination to try and blend her and Gabriel’s looks but it just wasn’t working. So she decided to copy of photos of baby Félix because he already looked almost like a copy of his mother, and Amélie and Emilie already looked alike so it’s not so weird?—is what her mind was telling her.

She didn’t dare alter his looks but she decided to give the baby Gabriel’s eye color to include the “father” in some way. (Yes in that comic I made I gave Adrien a mix of green and gray but that was mainly to get the point across to the perceptive readers)

Now we got Adrien, a normal baby boy to the whole world except for Gabriel who’s forced into his wife’s fantasy through social expectations.

Why are we only at this point and this post is already so long AAAAAAAA!!!

Adrien physically basically grows in a way where Emilie just keeps changing his appearance to match what Félix looked like a few months prior.

Mentally he’s like a robot just taking in information without really needing to learn it. So Emilie decides when he says his first word, she decides when he learns to walk,… He knows how to walk, he just wasn’t given the command to do so yet.

But even so he does develop a personality over time, just slower, because unlike a normal child who’s always testing his boundaries, how far they’re allowed to go until they’re in real trouble, Adrien just can’t misbehave. At all.

But he does have his favorite foods and favorite toys, and jokes that make him laugh the most. The problem is just that Emilie could just decide that his favorite food is strawberries and he’d just start acting accordingly, rewiring his belief. 

He also isn’t allowed to argue or be mean to others which is why Félix thinks he’s a goody two-shoes weirdo while Chloé the brat adores him.

This behavior isn’t so hard to hide with a toddler who’s fickle but it’s harder and harder as the kid grows. Which is why the family becomes very secluded over time.

Gabriel always keeps distance with his “son”. He’s not Dad, he’s Father, he doesn’t do hugs and cuddles, he doesn’t say I love you. But Adrien knows he loves him because his mom told him so and he loves him back unconditionally because Mom said that’s what families do.

Now even though Gabriel is traumatized by this whole ordeal and knowing Adrien “isn’t real” freaks him out he does soften a bit over time. I’m going to give an awful example but like someone who hates cats softening for a cat that their partner/roommate decided to get/had from before. Continuing with this example: But still becoming appalled when the cat starts acting odd/unusually.

Okay I think you get the gist. Let’s move on…

Emilie loves her son more and more as he grows and his sentimonster behaviours start bothering her more and more too. She hates being reminded that he’s not a real boy by people mentioning he looks young for his age because Emilie forgot to make him grow for a while. She hates when he does everything like he’s told. She hates that he has no real friends because they’re afraid to expose him to the outside too much and without supervision. She hates to think about his future.

Her desire for him to be real keeps growing and is what drives her to search for a solution in the miraculous spellbook.

She cracks the script after years, when Adrien is nearly a teen, and finds a way to transfer the creators soul into a sentimonster.

It’s a long process that takes time and while she falls ill to everyone around her, Adrien becomes more real.

Gabriel starts realizing what’s happening when he notices Adrien hesitate for a second when he’s playing a video game and Gabriel wants him to do something, groan when he gets bothered watching TV, huff, complain, have slightly opposing opinions to his and Emilie’s, when he argues with his mother when she tells him she’s feeling fine; when he notices his son’s eyes are greener. Or is it all in his head?

He confronts his wife too late, when she’s extremely ill already, her normally vibrant eyes dulled match Adrien’s bluish gray, and he pieces together in his head what she’s doing.

Before Gabriel could properly think what to do to stop the love of his life from turning into a lifeless doll, in a fit of panic he tries to take her wedding band (where he knows Adrien’s amok is) to get rid of Adrien instead, but is unsuccessful in getting it off her so he snatches her peacock brooch instead (which she needs to complete the spell obvs) and breaks it. (Heyoo! broken peacock miraculous. things are coming together)

Because the spell was almost complete anyway it’s Emilie who falls unconscious. But she doesn’t disappear because she’s not a real sentimonster, she just becomes dormant like one.

This is the point in the story where Gabriel makes it seem like Emilie ran away or something like that—basically disappear. Now he’s living knowing he has an almost sentimonster wife in the basement, knowing he almost killed his son (or her), and having to care for a son that suddenly became much more alive, questioning, arguing, angry, screaming, not accepting, crying, grieving, staring at him with Emilie’s eyes.

Instead of becoming a real parent, Gabriel shuts him out.

Soon Adrien evolves desires for socializing, company, getting away from the suffocating home which eventually leads to him going to a public school.

He slowly starts to live life freely without the restrictions that were put around his thoughts.

Gabriel has an even stranger relationship with Adrien now because he still loves him in a way but also holds resentment toward him. But mostly he sees him as something valuable.

The show happens here…  And now finally we get to the comic…

Gabriel gets a hold of the ladybug and black cat miraculouses. (There’s no epic fight in his lair as you see there’s no Ladybug in the comic but that’s not really important)

What’s important is that Gabriel had deciphered the miraculous spellbook with the help of Emilie’s notes and had decided to use the unification’s “wish” power to awaken Emilie.

He’s aware he’ll need to sacrifice something for the wish to come true and he’s certain Adrien should be enough because the soul inside him is literally the one thing Emilie is missing.

✨Adrien (poor boy just lost his miraculous) is taken to Gabriel’s lair, where he finds out his father is Hawk Moth, sees his mother, learns he’s a sentimonster, and that he’s going to become a sacrifice ✨

Of course the last part is not what happens. It’s Gabriel who ends up being sacrificed.

I can’t decide if Gabriel ends up sacrificing himself because he changed his mind in the last moment while Adrien was screaming for him to stop, OR  because he didn’t love Adrien enough for him to be considered an equal exchange for his wife… O.O

But anyhow…

Emilie wakes up with Gabriel’s soul within her (hence the bluish gray eyes in the comic).

Adrien is traumatized for life.

This took me hours to write… I knew there was a reason why I didn’t want to do it. I hope I didn’t forget anything and my brain made sense of it all

Well there you have it, peeps. The Pinocchio AU. It’s as messed up as my sleep schedule. Good night. 

[ilikemesometaetaes]

Don’t Hold Your Breath ~ jjk

Chapter Six (M)

•••> Author: @ilikemesometaetaes​

•••> Summary: As the CEO of an international government security company, you have the world at your fingertips. Living life lavishly and extravagantly has become the norm. Behind closed doors, however, you host a past that renders you lonely and, quite frankly, miserable. It’s only a matter of time before your past comes back to bite you right in the ass.

•••> Pairing(s): Jungkook/Reader, Taehyung/Reader (slight)

•••> Inspo: This fic is inspired by the song “SAVAGE ANTHEM” by PARTYNEXTDOOR. Thank you to @dariangarcia​​, @btssmutgalore​, and @junghoseokit​​ for supporting my work. To my mamas, Kaitlin, Adora, Lauren, Lanie, Lu, and Sher.

•••> Word Count: 7.81k

•••> Rating: 18+

•••> Tags: Jungkook x Reader | Tattooed!Jungkook | angst | smut | ceo!au | rockstar!au | CEO!Reader | Rockstar!Jungkook | AU!BTS | Exes to Lovers

•••> Warnings: angst, dirty talk, sexual teasing, heartbreak, cursing, pining, depression, breakup, emotional instability, arguing | Warnings are written specifically to chapter.

Copyright © 2021 ilikemesometaetaes. All Rights Reserved.

Taglist: @dariangarcia​​​ @apurpledheart​​​ @itsgottabeyoo-ngs​​​ @hytibm​​ @namjinsbaby​​ @ggukkieland​​ @fan-ati--c​​

If you’d like to be added to the taglist, say so in a comment to this chapter or the DHYB Main Page, or send me an ask!

NAVIGATION: Chapter Five (M) <- | -> Chapter Seven (M) -> Mini-Masterlist -> Series Masterlist

•••> Official Playlist 

~#~

“I put the dirt into dirtbag. Still got your jacket in my bag.”

THEN.

“Kookie!” You screamed in between breaths, eyes watering at the struggle. “Stop! Please!”

“No way!” His laugh was buried in your hair as he pressed his face against the back of your head. “Apologize!”

“For what?” You wheezed, attempting to get away from the curling fingers that tickled your ribs relentlessly. His long legs were wrapped around your body, restricting your movement and effectively taking away almost any opportunity to escape.

“For calling me a singing demon!” His hands continued their assault, sending you into another laughing fit. You fought helplessly against his tattooed arms.

You wanted to bite back, but the lack of air in your lungs prevented you from doing so. Your heart beat wildly, adrenaline spiking and arms flailing against his grip. Desperation flooding your mind, you wrapped your hand around the one that caged your neck and dug your nails into his flesh in hopes that the pain would get him to weaken his hold.

Jungkook only laughed again and hummed teasingly. “Oh, just like that. Harder, baby.”

Squirming didn’t help much, but when you shifted your hips and felt something poking into your spine, you huffed with defeat on the horizon. His obvious boner signified that he liked your struggle- a clear indicator that there was no way he was letting you go any time soon.

Unless…

With another shift of your hips to grind your ass upwards on him, seating his dick between your clothed ass cheeks, you let the situation take over your body with your brain rewiring into a horny mindset in order to distract him.

“Jungkook,” You whispered through a gasp, hoping the change of pace would throw him off. It was a stunt you always pulled; whether it be during an argument or sex, changing the pace would unfocus your boyfriend’s attention and give you the upper hand.

Sure enough, Jungkook’s embrace around you loosened so that he could give himself more room to slide his manhood against you.

“Oh, baby...” He grunted into your ear with a sliver of surprise tainting his lust.

Slowly, so as to not trigger him, you slid one hand down his stomach and slid two fingers below the waistband of his shorts. With your body on top of him, you couldn’t go further inward, so you settled on harshly scraping your nails across his hip while you dug your other hand harder into his forearm.

“Please.” You said with more air in your lungs. Finally, you could breathe.

“Are you begging for me to fuck you?” His dick twitched against you, desperate to bury itself between your thighs. “Or are you pleading for mercy? Tell me, Y/N,”

Jungkook flipped the two of you over so that your chest pressed into the bed and his entire body pinned you to the mattress with a swift cant of his hips. “Which one is it?”

For a moment, you rolled your eyes and struggled to look at him from your compromised position. It wasn’t until your eyes caught sight of the numbers on the clock sitting on the nightstand that you began struggling with a new burst of concern in your mind.

“Jungkook!” You wheezed. “The time!”

“Answer my question, Y/N. I can stay here all night. The stage can wait.”

“But you’ll be late!” Your voice increased in volume.

“Only if you continue avoiding my question…” Jungkook trailed off for a moment before he leaned down to murmur softly in your ear. “Well, I’ll only be late if you refuse to let go of your pride to ask for mercy and beg for my cock instead. I will rearrange your guts if that is what you’re asking for.”

You huffed in frustration, the desire to fuck your boyfriend dissipating with his words. You knew that Jimin would be through the roof by now, searching high and low for the lead singer of BTS to dress him properly.

“Mercy.” You finally grumbled in defeat, not wanting to delay him any longer.

Almost disappointedly, Jungkook grunted as he removed his weight from on top of you. “Fine.”

“I’ll go turn on the car.” You got up and swiped the keys off of your dresser, thankful that you were still dressed in your internship clothes.

“You go do that.” Jungkook chuckled whilst sliding his shorts off of his body to reveal a very obvious boner tenting his boxers that you pretended to be oblivious of. “You’re a master at turning me on so I trust you with that.”

“Ew.” You grimaced at the poorly-delivered joke. “That was terrible.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was clever.” Jungkook chided.

“Not at all.” You quipped. After you watched him slide a pair of jeans up his muscular legs, you turned to leave. You just needed to make sure he got dressed. “I’ll be in the car.”

~#~

Jimin’s knowledge of art always mystified you. His prowess wasn’t the type of intelligence like knowing how Picasso depicted the loss of innocence in Guernica or how the melting clocks of Dali introduced surrealism to the world of art- no, that was Taehyung’s strong-suit.

Jimin knew how to create his own version of art that left viewers wistful and in absolute awe by making a stage the vessel of his masterpieces.

As you sat on the balcony, overlooking the crowd while they all thrashed and jumped to the beat of Hoseok’s bass drum and the duo of guitars that was Namjoon and Jungkook, you just had to sit back in your chair and stare at the composition that was Jimin’s show.

Flashes of blue and red lights swept across the crowd, printing themselves temporarily into the crowd’s retinas so that when the opposite color came back, a light hue of purple was brought into the experience for a fleeting moment. Short puffs of fire whenever Namjoon strummed a power chord warmed your face, even from the distance in which you sat from the stage, and lasers shot through the crowd every time Yoongi penetrated the sounds of his group with the keys of his keyboard.

Graphics on the jumbotron behind the band, which were also of Jimin’s creation, outlined each member with curls of dark, tentacle-like wisps that matched the purple hue of the crowd with its raven color.

The last song of the setlist, Blue and Grey, was one you were all too familiar with. The lights faded to a soft blue for a moment as Taehyung began the first strong notes with his bass and the crowd in the venue whooped and hollered in excitement- Blue and Grey was BTS’ most popular song. A year and a half into their journey of being a band and they already had a crowd favorite.

As Taehyung continued his bass line with his guitar and tattooed strumming arm put on display by Jimin’s spotlight, Jungkook leaned into the mic and began strumming his own guitar.

“Where is my angel?”

You sighed and leaned forward in your seat, loving the way Jungkook’s voice carried throughout the performance hall.

Taehyung accompanied Jungkook with the intro until Hoseok joined in to transition into the first verse with his high hat and snare drum.

Once the chorus hit, you couldn’t help but stand from your seat as you began to feel the power of BTS’ music rocking the venue.

“I just wanna be happier. To melt the cold me.”

Jungkook’s neck veins bulged from his skin as he belted out the notes, sweat dribbling down his temples from exertion. Even as he huffed for breath in between his lines, the image of him dressed in all black and owning the stage while ripping his fingers through his guitar strings was one you could never get tired of.

The songs were full of angst- the dark, unspoken feelings that not many people talked about- and you loved how you heard them from Jungkook through music. If only he were this honest when it was just the two of you.

“Don’t say it’s okay, ‘cause it’s not okay.” Jungkook closed up his lines with a heartbreaking tone that every fan in the crowd sang along with as Namjoon prepared to sing his part. For a brief moment, your boyfriend met your eyes across the large venue.

“Please don’t leave me alone. It hurts too much.”

~#~

NOW.

You walked into your building, grateful for the warm protection it offered against the freezing winter of New York City.

Noticing the lack of staff around, being that there was only the elevator operator and the receptionist sitting behind the marble counter, you glanced at your watch to check just how long you spent working.

20:17, your watch read. You had been working in front of computer screens and reading contracts for almost 9 hours.

“Greetings, ma’am!” The receptionist stood from his chair. “May I be of any service to you this evening?”

You shook your head to the man and continued on your path to the elevator where the other employee in the lobby waited to take you up. “None needed. I’ll be leaving momentarily.”

“Very well. Please let me know if you need anything.” He sat back down and turned his gaze to the computer in front of him.

The sound of your pumps echoed against the vast but empty room until you stopped in front of the elevator where the woman already had the doors opening in preparation.

“Good evening, ma’am.” She said lowly.

“ ‘Evening.” You responded, stepping inside without another word. The woman kept the conversation at that, which you appreciated, so you smiled at her in gratitude after you placed your key in the penthouse slot. She returned your smile with her own before the doors closed to encase you in silence.

The ride up was quiet, warranting you to pull out your phone so that you could read over your conversation with Taehyung again.

Why am I wearing think socks? I hate thick socks.

Read at 8:01 pm

Trust me. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

Is that so? Why?

Read 8:03 pm

Just wear the damn socks, Y/N.

Are you gonna tell me where we’re going?

Read 8:04 pm

Negative, captain

Tf

Why am I a captain now

Read 8:04 pm

Cuz I said so. Now stop talking or you’ll make me give away my position

Alright.

Read 8:05 pm

I said stop talking

…?

Read 8:05 pm

Fucking hell.

You let a small giggle slip past your lips at how normal the text conversation was. It was as if you never stopped talking to him, slipping into the normalcy of having Taehyung back in your life as quickly as it had been to cut him out of it. You zoned out for a moment in thought.

The strange sensation of friendship didn’t take any getting used to as it settled itself back into your bones and filled your heart with warmth like it never left- like the ice covering the beating organ was only temporary. As you stood alone, staring shallowly at the increasing floor numbers, you smiled in content.

The elevator slowed as the cabin came close to reaching the top floor, bringing you back to your senses. Sliding your phone back into the pocket of your slacks, you looked up once the elevator doors opened, only to drop your briefcase to the floor loudly.

Jungkook sat against the wall beside your door with his knees tucked under his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs. At the sound of your clumsiness clattering on the ground, his gaze snapped to you as he scrambled to stand up.

Anger flooded you immediately. You wanted to backhand him and rip his hair out. You wanted to scream and cry and lose your shit. However much you wanted to hurt him, though, you could not afford catching an assault charge on the man who defaced you once before.

There was a break of silence as you stood staring at him, unsure of how to handle the punch in your mood while the memories were forced to surface in your mind.

“Y/N…” Jungkook trailed, breaking the tangible barrier of tension. He took a step forward whilst obviously hesitating. “I-”

Instead of screaming at him, you went for the more sophisticated and controlled route to keep your lividity at bay whilst stopping his sentence in its tracks.

“How did you get up here?” It was a sensible question to ask. You just wanted to prevent him from deepening the conversation.

“I pulled some strings.” He murmured, looking down almost shyly, before piping up with more confidence. “But listen, I-”

“Save it.” You cut him off again, unable to control your facade much longer. “Get the fuck out of my face.”

His anxious expression turned worried- desperate. You didn’t miss the way his eyes became more expressive than you’ve ever seen them. “Please, Y/N.”

“Please what, Jungkook?”

“Please just give me a moment to speak.”

For a beat, you pondered his request. Taehyung’s words weighed heavily on your mind. We needed to talk.

Fuck talking. You have been done talking for ages.

“Wow.” You scoffed coldly, ice barriers slamming back into place over your heart. Taehyung had been able to melt them away, but Jungkook put them right back with fierce determination to completely ruin you. “You just want to take everything from me, huh?”

“Y/N, what-“ He blinked cluelessly, caught off-guard by your sarcasm.

“I gave you years to speak, Jungkook. I gave you everything.” You stepped forward, the boiling rage overtaking your body, and came to a stop in front of him with the fury of a charging bull. You wanted him to feel small and vulnerable.

“What else could I possibly give you? I have nothing left.” He took everything. The veins in your body were emptied and exhausted of every single ounce of energy to fight for someone.

You were unaware of the way Jungkook’s fists were clenched so tight that his knuckles turned white and his nails dug into his palms.

You failed to notice how much he trembled under your gaze, physically struggling to protect his butterfly from your wrath.

Your vicious swings at the dainty being of hope were nothing compared to what he, himself, had done to it. Jungkook found it ironic that you gave him an aspect that he was just barely strong enough to protect yet took the darker things from inside him and destroyed them as if they were mere placeholders- as if you were his puppeteer.

You were too stressed to realize the toll it took on Jungkook to keep his act together. He needed to keep the door open long enough to be your friend. Anything to prevent losing you. Earlier, his demons swooped in and overtook him, suffocating him to silence once again, but for the first time, they ebbed away at the mere thought of you.

As he walked down the street with his stage persona flowing, the simple thought of your name empowered his butterfly to beat its wings so fiercely that it blew away all of the impending smoke and dark tentacles of smog that threatened to overtake his vision.

Once he thought of you, he thought of everything.

Your anger was justified. He understood that now. Watching you huff breath after breath following your question was somehow relieving- you still cared enough to be pissed off. Jungkook forced himself to look on the bright side of the encounter with you; he made himself see that you were still passionate about the past. You were passionately upset and he couldn’t be happier.

He had seen you with Taehyung. He saw the way you were happy again. Jungkook wanted a part of that because he was too selfish to back off and stay dormant in your life- too determined to make you silence his demons.

Even if it was just as a friend. He could deal with that.

“You’re right.” Jungkook stated.

You paused in your tracks at the concession. Anger no longer blazing- staying right where it was- you quirked an eyebrow at him. Any time the two of you fought, he would never come even close to alluding that you were right.

“You’re right and I’m sorry, Y/N.”

An apology.

Words always seemed minimal to you. Unless to communicate information, you found that words filled with feeling didn’t mean much from someone you didn’t know.

After Jungkook, anyone that told you they loved you was promptly deemed a liar. Kate worked hard to make sure you were aware of the fact that she would actually take a bullet for you because of how much she loved you. She spent moment after moment proving to you that she cared deeply even though she didn’t have to put up with you.

Your parents, despite not talking to you much, expressed their love and gratitude whenever you sent them money. You knew they were hard workers like you and didn’t have time to worry about trivial things like words. Instead of taking the easy way out by simply telling you that they loved you, they showed you.

But Jungkook, who claimed to love you in the way that a lover would- the only person to actually do so- lied.

You could never trust the words in that way again.

Still, you couldn’t help but be taken by surprise.

“I’m right? Really?”

“Y/N, you’ve been right since the beginning. I took and took and just stopped giving back. I understand that you’re angry and I want to fix it so that you don’t hate me anymore. I want to make it right.”

You were silent. You hadn’t expected him to admit his fault so easily. Jungkook changing the pace of your conversation ruined your momentum, sending you stumbling and scrambling for thoughts.

Jungkook sighed for a moment, pressing his lips into a thin line as he let his eyes drop to the floor in your silence. He wasn’t about to lose the opportunity to elaborate further, though.

“Look, I know I fucked up. Bad. I know you can’t possibly forgive me right now, but I want you to know that I’m sorry for the things I’ve done to you.”

Your automatic reaction to being emotionally pushed came back, closing you down and disguising you as a cold woman.

“What the fuck do you know? What the fuck do you know about how badly you fucked up? I don’t need your lame-ass apology, Jungkook. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Stop pretending that you do. Sure, we fucked a little and kissed a few times, but that’s all that it was.” You grit out the last few words, lying through your teeth. “Now please move. You’re blocking the door.”

Shockingly, Jungkook obeyed. He stepped aside and clasped his hands behind his back without another word, allowing you to walk to your door and open it.

Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

No matter how many times you repeated the words in your head, commanding yourself to abide by the mantra as if it were law, the emotions in your head managed to break through and force your head to turn back after stepping through the doorway.

Jungkook stood as still as a statue, staring at you with a blank expression that was almost eerie. You glanced down quickly, unable to maintain the eye contact, and noticed that his knuckles were clenched.

It was almost as if he was a completely different person because of the fact that his appearance was drastically different from that of BTS Jungkook. The man that stood in front of you was no rockstar. He was not an idol nor a role model that millions looked up to.

He was a scared boy. The fear that riddled his eyes was extremely difficult to miss and it made him seem almost small whilst standing in the small junction between the elevator and your penthouse.

You shut the door in his face impulsively, hoping that you wouldn’t have to see him again.

Backing away from the door slightly, you waited until you heard the elevator signal that its doors were closing before going to look through the peephole. You finally released your breath and slumped against the door when you saw that he had left.

Without his presence putting you on edge and keeping you on your toes, you could finally reflect on the conversation that just transpired.

He admitted his wrongdoings and apologized for them. He showed you his belly and became vulnerable. He admitted defeat.

Jungkook wasn’t an apologetic person in the slightest; he wasn’t a forgiving one either. In all the years that you had known him, he was headstrong and stubborn- if you looked past the part where he closed himself off and cheated, of course.

This Jungkook, the one you had just spoken to, was not the one you remember. Maybe you were right. Maybe you didn’t know him anymore.

Your phone vibrating in your pocket distracted you from pondering any further over the epiphany, prompting you to pull it out and fumble with it to get away from the confusing subject. You were thankful for the distraction.

Kim Taehyung (BTS)

I’ll be out front in 15 mins

Cursing internally, you left the idea of Jungkook behind you and rushed to change into clothes better suited for the cold weather.

It was a given that a small smile pulled at the corner of your lips when you slid thick tube socks over your ankles. You hadn’t actually worn tube socks in ages because they didn’t exactly go with your usual professional style of suits and heels.

You zipped your coat up about three-fourths of the way before turning to look at yourself in your mirror with a huff.

Suddenly, you were bombarded with a memory as it flashed before your eyes.

“You know you look good, babe.”

You giggled as Jungkook came up behind you to look at you in the reflection, setting his chin on your shoulder while he used his tongue to toy with the hoop pierced into his lip.

“Thanks, Kook. Just want to look my best is all.” You met his eyes in your bedroom mirror, smiling softly.

“Well, you look beautiful.”

You were left staring at the empty space where his face was, unsure of how to react as you stumbled back from the intrusion. Another meaningless scene came barging into your senses before you could process the first.

“Wow…” You trailed off as you looked at the angry red spot on Jungkook’s chest. A brand new tattoo, the size of your hand, raised out of his skin and shined under the luminescent light of the tattoo parlor. With the tattoo artist cleaning up his station behind the two of you, you were left to admire his beauty in his reflection.

Jungkook stood shirtless in front of the full-length mirror as he smiled brightly at the last tattoo to complete his set. Your eyes drank in the way each exhibit of inked art contrasted with his smooth, caramel expanse of skin while you stood behind him.

The new piece, which was almost large enough to touch the Chinese characters stamped onto the side of his neck and the back of his ear, was a depiction of an angel falling from the heavens. The detail in the blackening feathers attached to the angel’s back was mesmerizing, drawing all of the attention from the rest of the tattoos covering Jungkook’s chest.

“Is there any special meaning behind it?” You asked, knowing that your boyfriend had a few meaningless tattoos that were part of his ‘woke-up-and-it-was-there’ collection.

For a moment, Jungkook stayed silent as he studied the work of art in the mirror. It wasn’t until you called his name again that he answered your question while meeting your gaze in the reflection.

“Nah. It just looked really cool to me.”

You pressed your hand to your forehead and looked away from your mirror, wondering why- now, of all times- you just had to remember those small memories.

You didn’t miss him- you know you didn’t. But something within you twisted at the thought of being with him- the memory of how it felt to be his.

The disconnect between the feelings of your heart and the thoughts of your mind, ever so obvious, shifted. His apology was unexpected, to say the least, but it was also surprisingly heartfelt and pulling on your need to forgive.

Saved by the bell, your landline phone began to ring.

You rushed to the bedside table and grabbed the phone from its dock, pulling it to your ear.

“Ms. Y/L/N? It’s the front desk. Mr. Kim Taehyung is here and waiting for you.”

“Got it. Thank you. I’ll be down in a moment.” You hung up the phone and grabbed your wallet and keys before shuffling over to your desk to grab your briefcase on instinct.

“Wait,” you spoke aloud, laughing at yourself and withdrawing your reach. “I don’t need that.”

As you opened the door to your penthouse, the sound of something lightly hitting your door had you looking down.

A small, navy blue bag, the size of your palm, swung from the doorknob and hit lightly against the wood from the momentum of you opening your door. Confused, you unhooked the loop from the doorknob and looked inside the bag to find a familiar-looking box inside.

Gingerly, you pulled it out and opened it. In the way of the box’s contents was a folded piece of notebook paper with your name scrawled across the top in Jungkook’s messy handwriting.

You held your breath after reading the note and looked down at the small charm.

Since you gave me yours, I’ll give you mine. -jk

In the fabric of the satin display lay the familiar gold chain that Jungkook gifted you those few years ago, but, instead of the small J that you were so familiar with, lay your own initial.

You knew Jungkook’s way with words well enough to know that the small note connected his intentions to the chain. You were instantly pulled back to the night that he gifted the necklace to you in the first place.

“It’s beautiful. Happy one-year, babe.” You whispered onto his lips with a smile.

After you sat back into your seat, Jungkook walked to your side of the table to put the chain around your neck. “I obviously have the describe how much this necklace means so that you never take it off.”

You laughed. “I wouldn’t even dream of taking it off, Kook.”

“I still need to explain. It was like a message from heaven when I saw them in the jewelry store.” He pouted, returning to his seat. “So the idea with these is that we’re wearing parts of each other. You’re wearing the part of me that belongs to you and I’m wearing the part of you that belongs to me.”

Jungkook continued as he raised his glass. “So even though you think this necklace is yours because it’s your letter, it’s actually mine.”

You cocked your head in confusion, struggling to understand the concept. “What are you talking about?”

“It sounded so much better in my head, I swear.”

You understood the idea now.

Push off the emotions. Don’t think about them.

You were hellbent on ignoring the weakness, knowing full well what path you would go down if you let them get to you.

Instead, you made your way down to the lobby with the bag gripped tightly in your mitten-clad hands, heading to the desk with determination furrowing your brow. Even as Taehyung stood from the small sofa in the lobby upon seeing you, you did not spare him a glance.

Forcefully, you thrusted the bag into the receptionists’ face, internally wincing at your rude gesture.

“Please put this in the lost and found. I have no idea where it came from.”

The receptionist did well at hiding his expression, however, you could still see a sense of somber recognition behind his eyes. You decided not to press him seeing as you want to avoid the topic of Jungkook like the plague.

“Understood, ma’am.” He took the bag from your grasp before you had the chance to rethink addressing his slip of emotion, placing it in a drawer by his knee. He looked back up and gestured to Taehyung after locking the drawer. “Mr. Kim is here for you.”

You sighed in a mild sense of accomplishment, forcing yourself to shut out the regret and sadness for giving away a formerly precious memory, before turning to face Taehyung with a small smile to mask your inner turmoil. Your smile faltered when you noticed that Taehyung mirrored the same expression on his face that the receptionist wore.

“What?” You asked, walking to him.

“I just-” He looked down for a moment, scowling, and you noticed he had placed his small barbell back into his eyebrow. “-nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Why won’t you tell me anything?” The two of you had walked to the door, stopping before going out into the cold so that you could finish your conversation.

“Like I said before, it’s not my place to say or judge.”

Taehyung opened the door to an icy gust of wind before you could protest, chilling you into a mind-numbing stupor as you whispered, “Holy fucking shit.”

“Good god, it is freezing.” Taehyung mumbled, linking an arm around your body and ushering you towards his SUV across the sidewalk.

Once sat inside the warmth of the cabin, you shivered in satisfaction at the heat gracing your body.

“Please tell me we’re not going to be outside for whatever we’re doing.” You pleaded to him. The light from the city was filtered by the darkened car windows, however, you could still see Taehyung’s shoulders moving up and down when he chuckled.

“Unfortunately, we are, but fortunately, I brought some heat packs for us.”

You whined in protest, looking up to the GPS screen in front of the driver to see if you could identify where the two of you were going. Without a route plotted, you were left even more curious.

About twenty minutes of small talk and a brief roast session targeting Hoseok later, you sat in front of the ice skating rink at the Rockefeller Center.

“We’re ice skating?” You asked, suddenly in shock. You hadn’t been ice skating since-

No. Stop it. Your mind warred with itself as it suppressed the memory threatening to spill over into your eyes.

“You’re quite the detective.” Taehyung’s sentence was drenched in sarcasm, functioning as the perfect distraction, and prompted you to lightly shove him with a giggle as you exited the vehicle.

“I thought I was a captain.” You pouted against the cold, pulling your hat down on your head even further in hopes of retaining your body heat and warmth from the van.

“You are.” Taehyung laughed again. “Captain Detective.”

You only rolled your eyes at his playfulness before you turned to face the rink from the sidewalk. A person passing behind you and bumping into your back lightly had you cursing New York City’s busy and bustling population.

Seeing all of the people on the rink, you instantly remembered that you did not inform Jay of your whereabouts.

“Do we have security?” Worry riddled your brain as you turned to look at him with your eyes widening in a panic. You became hyperaware of all of the possible outcomes to Taehyung being identified in such a crowded place.

Taehyung sighed as he walked you up to the ticket booth. “We don’t. I just want to have a normal and plain but fun time with my friend- without someone glaring at me like they don’t want to be here while they breathe down my neck.”

Despite understanding his statement, you couldn’t help the automatic stress to being in public without any form of protection.

“Taehyung,” You warned, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Y/N,” He mocked your tone childishly before leveling it to his regular voice. “Relax, weirdo. We’re here to have fun and people are too busy having their own fun to notice us.”

“I doubt that.”

It wasn’t until you got your rental skates tightly secured onto your feet and began walking toward the ice that Taehyung mentioned a vital detail that he definitely should have mentioned prior to arriving at the center.

“You what?” You were baffled to say the least.

“I can’t skate.” He sheepishly brought his hand to the back of his head and adjusted his trapper hat under your scrutiny.

“Then why did we come?” You were almost yelling at that point.

“Because Brian told me that you liked ice skating!” Taehyung gripped at your fingers tightly, anxiety getting the best of him.

Fucking hell, Brian.

“Did he?” Your laugh was almost hysterical because of how wrong he was. You were becoming increasingly hesitant about giving your personal assistant a raise now.

Still, it was worth the effort. Brian was just trying to help the world’s most popular bassist when he came to him in need of information. It was a decent attempt.

“Yeah,” Taehyung huffed. “He did.”

“Well, Tae, I’ll have you know,” You moved towards the ice rink with determination. “I haven’t been ice skating in ages and I hardly like it. Hopefully, I still have muscle memory.”

“Oh god.” Taehyung groaned, tipping his head back as the feeling of imminent and utter chaos ensued. “Fucking hell, Brian.”

As soon as you stepped on the ice, you realized that you were still perfectly coordinated enough to complete the task.

Taehyung, on the other hand, clung to the walls like the world was attempting to swallow him into the ground. Dutifully, you stood next to him with a cautious hand on his back in the case that he went tumbling.

The sight was one to behold.

Kim Taehyung, hard core rockstar- the physical definition of a stereotypical ‘bad boy’- with tattoos littering his skin and a glistening eyebrow piercing that was winking at you from under his gray trapper, stood hunched over and afraid as he moved baby step-by-baby step to proceed further around the rink. You couldn’t help but giggle as the man who possessed the prowess of an elegant panther on stage adopted the likes of a stumbling newborn giraffe within the span of five minutes.

You were still concerned for him despite how funny it was. Tentatively, you reached your hand to grip his shoulder and urged him to look at you.

“Tae, are you okay? We can do something else if you’d like.”

“No, it’s okay.” He wheezed in effort. “I got this.”

Making a show out of how brave he was, Taehyung stood up straight on shaky legs and began progressing forward by attempting to walk on the ice.

“I can show you how t-” Taehyung cut off your offer before you could finish it.

“I’ve been shown countless times how to skate and the best I can do is walk and maybe slide forward a little. I’m a lost cause, Y/N.” Even though he seemed upset, Taehyung couldn’t help but crack a smile at how clumsy he was.

You smiled pitifully at your clumsy friend before you stepped in front of him. “Here, hold onto my shoulders and we’ll slide forward together.”

All Taehyung could do was begrudgingly agree, hating the idea of having to lean on you for support but wanting to remain close to you for the majority of the night. Once he placed his hands tightly on your shoulders, you moved.

At first, you skated slowly so that Taehyung could adjust to the feeling of being pulled forward. Once he got the hang of keeping his legs locked so that you could move around easier, you skated at a normal speed.

After about ten minutes of joking around and catching Taehyung’s slipping form a handful of times, your mind was left free and without defense.

You hadn’t realized how vulnerable you were because of it.

“Y/N, slow down! I can’t go that fast!”

Your breathing came to a halt at the voice that echoed in your ears.

“Here, hold my hand and we’ll skate together.”

Panicking, you rushed your mind to shut it out. No. Stop.

Unknowingly, the chaos in your mind and the desperate need to get away from the memories had you gradually increasing your own speed to subconsciously escape your thoughts.

Taehyung’s nervous laugh and call of your name in warning fell on deaf ears while you furrowed your eyebrows in concentration.

“See? It’s easy. Just step and lean. Step- and lean.” His hand clutched yours as if he was trying to squeeze all of the blood from your fingers but you only squeezed back in reassurance.

“Don’t let me fall, please.”

Taehyung’s skate crashing into the back of yours served as the perfect distraction, yet it only lasted for a split second as the two fo you went tumbling to the ice in a hauntingly familiar manner.

In the process of falling, Taehyung had managed to wrap his arms around your waist and twist his body so that he could take most of the impact from the ice. Landing on top of him with an ‘oof’ reminded you of the last time you went ice skating.

Even with your face mere centimeters from your friend’s, all you saw was him.

Taehyung’s small puffs of air against your lips were an indicator of how close you were to kissing him. Truly, you could kiss him if you wanted to, needing only to relax your neck and let your head fall to close the rest of the minimal gap between you. He looked up at you with wide eyes, holding onto your gaze with an unreadable expression on his face.

All you saw, however, was a small mole dotting the underside of his lips. Fuck, you wanted to kiss Taehyung and rid yourself of the nightmare, but you couldn’t shake the sensation of how wrong it felt to kiss anyone but Jungkook.

“Y/N,” Taehyung called your name cautiously and pulled you from your thoughts. Instantly, your eyes welled with tears at the realization of how fucked you were.

You yanked yourself from him with abandon, needing to get far away from the reminder that you couldn’t move on.

Kim Taehyung was mature. He was kind and respectful- everything you could ask for in a man- yet the thoughts of Jungkook and the good memories you had with him outweighed the bad, preventing you from truly letting go.

Before Taehyung could protest, you stood and left him on the ice, making for a quick exit. You wanted to go back and help him up so that he wasn’t in danger, but you couldn’t bring yourself to look at his face in this setting.

Instead, you skated off the rink and walked to the skate rental area, plopping down on the bench weakly to untie the laces. Once you did so, you set them on the counter and waited for your boots with your eyes on the ground. You didn’t want anyone to see you on the brink of crying.

“Y/N!” Taehyung’s voice was loud and attention-grabbing. You had half the mind to be concerned that he would cause people to notice him, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care as you finally got your boots and rushed to put them on. Taehyung was finally off the ice when you slid the first boot on.

“Y/N,” He called your name again, awkwardly approaching you with the blades still on his feet. “Please, talk to me.”

You could only sniffle in response and continue to put your boots back on, a fresh wave of tears welling in your eyes and threatening to spill onto your cheeks. You’d kept them at bay thus far but Taehyung was making it extremely difficult as his comfort approached you. The welcome yet heartbreaking aura he exhumed paired with your teetering emotional stability wouldn’t fare well in such a public setting.

Without hesitation, you stood and walked away once you were done securing your shoes back on your feet. Again, you felt the urgent need to be alone.

And again, Taehyung was right behind you as he ran without putting his shoes back on.

“Y/N!” He grabbed you as he called your name more sternly, forcing you to face him. Your eyes met his briefly before you looked back down to the pavement and cursed yourself once a tear slipped out. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Because I-” Your breath caught in your throat as it constricted due to the beginning of a sob building in your chest. You cleared your throat and struggled to breathe your way through your response- one you had trouble communicating. “-I just can’t.”

Taehyung grimaced, looking around with concern, before he ushered your body to begin walking away from the busy area.

Once you were a good distance down the street, he grabbed both of your shoulders and forced you to face him once again. Away from the well-lit area of the ice rink, the only light that shone in the middle of the dark night was that of the street lights. With bated breath, you looked up at your friend with your mouth closed tightly so that the sob in your chest wouldn’t come barging past your lips.

The pain was nearly unbearable. It anguished you, knowing that you were stupid enough to think that you could eventually move on from Jungkook. It pained you, being aware of the fact that Taehyung had offered himself to you and you did nothing but continue to look at Jungkook.

But most of all, it hurt that you still wanted Jungkook.

If only you could reach into your chest and tear your heart out so that you couldn’t feel anymore. If only you could shut off your feelings so that it didn’t agonize you like this. If only it were that easy.

Under the light of the street lamps with Taehyung’s look of pity- the one he held as he looked at you across the club on that dreadful night those few years ago- on you, you broke.

As you began sobbing, Taehyung pulled you against his body and backed up into the darkness to give you the privacy to cry without being seen.

The pain stabbed your heart repeatedly; quick blows, shallow at first, became increasingly deep as you drowned in the memories of what once was.

Falling so passionately in love became your biggest regret. For so long, you hated the idea. You hated the fact that you still loved Jungkook notwithstanding the things he had done. You denied the fact until you started seeing the good memories again- until it was an unavoidable and objective truth.

The truth that you still loved him.

As Taehyung held you tightly in his embrace while you held your hands to your face and dug your nails into your skin, you sobbed uncontrollably at how completely and royally fucked you were.

“W-why-” You blubbered into your palms. “-why do I-I still lo-ove him?”

“Because your heart wants what it wants, Y/N. You have no control over that.”

At this point, you had to tell him how you felt- how you truly felt.

“I w-wish that it wa-anted you. I’m so sorry, T-Tae.”

“Hey, now. Don’t say that. It’s a waste of time to wish for things that you have no control over. Don’t waste a wish on something stupid like that.” Taehyung pressed his face to the top of your head, pressing his lips there to leave a small kiss. “Besides, I have someone waiting for me back home so you don’t need to worry anymore.”

Instantly, you looked up at him in shock while still hiccuping. “You do?”

“Of course.” Taehyung laughed warmly, smiling down at you. “I wasn’t gonna be stuck on you forever. One way or another, you move on.”

“It’s been years since I’ve even seen him, Tae. The fact that I still haven’t moved on despite that has to tell you something.”

“Which is why I told you that you still need to talk to him. You can’t move on or do anything about the way you feel unless you communicate it.” He pulled back to bend his body to become eye-level with you so that he could look you in the eyes as he spoke. “There’s things you don’t know.”

For a moment, you weighed his words in your mind. If they’re things that Taehyung can’t tell you because they’re ‘not his place’ to say, then you figure that the matter must be a serious one. Your curiosity was getting the best of you. It wasn’t long before you gave in.

“Yeah…” You trailed off in hesitation, suddenly regretting shutting out Jungkook. “I guess I do need to talk to him.”

“Please just… take your time and be patient with him.” Taehyung winced slightly. “He’s hot-headed but he’s a lot better than he was before. I promise you that.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Taehyung.” You scowled as you backed out of his embrace.

“You know I don’t. I would never suggest that you talk to him if he was the same as he was before.”

A few beats of silence passed before you asked the question that had been nagging at your mind since your revelation of remaining love for the lead singer of BTS.

“Do you think we still have a chance?”

Taehyung answered immediately. “That’s not my place to judge. All I know is that you guys did something sad like being broke up even though you had life.”

“Good god, Tae,” You huffed out a laugh. “Are you quoting Lil Dicky right now?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” Taehyung crossed his arms and let out a small ‘hmph’ as he lightly stomped his foot onto the sidewalk. “And you can’t stop me.”

For a while, Taehyung let you catch your breath and calm down while looking up and down the street. It seemed as if he was planning something.

Before you could process what he was doing, Taehyung took you by your arm, wrapping his arm around your shoulders, and began walking across the street. You looked up in the direction of your path and noticed that you were heading towards the quaint coffee shop that seemed to be the only open place at the current hour.

Your eyes hurt from crying. Your chest ached from sobbing and hiccuping. Your heart and head hurt as they came to blows with each other. You were slowly beginning to freeze as the calming of your emotions slowed your heart and cooled your body. It was so fucking cold.

You could use a coffee right about now.

~#~

Thank you for reading, reader! If you’d like to check out the rest of my work, feel free to visit my Masterlist!

[imtheflash]

Forgotten

It's been a two weeks and Alex still hasn't woken up. She was shot 2 weeks ago and still hasn't woken up. The thought hits you like a train going full speed. It's her birthday today, She wanted to watch the new Game of Thrones promo. No, no it was the new DC movie wasn't it? A horrifying realization dawns on you. Your forgetting her, its only been two weeks and your forgetting her. No you can't forget her. Kara tapping your shoulder to get your attention shakes you out of your thoughts.

"C'mon bubs. We might be able to get to the DEO faster if leave early." It's taken a toll on Kara too. Instead of being in an upbeat mood like she used too she was also rather depressed. It hurt to see your older sisters like this, one on a bed and the other putting an act on for you.

You nod and move gripping onto her shoulders as she takes on the familiar flight to the DEO but not before grabbing a post-it note stack off of the desk.

You start writing into the notes from your spot in a chair next to Winn in the DEO. He glances at you once or twice but eventually gets back to work on researching how to get Alex out of the small coma she was in. Apparently you couldn't help yet because your only 16 but that didn't stop you from hearing conversations and putting in you input where you could. You go back to writing keeping an ear out for any news.

She wanted to watch the new Spiderman when it came out

She always thought that donuts with chocolate sprinkles tasted different than rainbow ones

She almost got a motorcycle with blue decals because It looked more "badass" but ended up getting the black one because the other one was a triumph and she liked Ducati's.

Remember that she liked the alien gun "remakes" better when we worked on them together to rewire them so they'd shoot faster.

Once you and her snuck on to the roof of the DEO to see the clouds because you were bored. You almost got caught when you came down but she managed to get you guys away.

She always fought Kara for potsticker's but didn't really like them anyway

Little things like this kept on getting written down. For days you wrote everything down filling half of the stack of post its and moving them to a notebook small enough to fit in your pocket. Four weeks later Alex woke up and your notebook was forgotten for a few days. But instead of letting it happen you still wrote everything down

Once instead of saying c'mon guys she said c'mon gays and started laughing.

Her favorite song is Highway to hell AC/DC

It kept on going on and on and on. Eventually you stopped, realizing that she isn't going to disappear again. That Lena was good enough to bring her back again and then some. So you let lose a little. But you never let go of the journal. It stays with you in your pocket all the pages worn out and almost filled up with your handwriting. You never let anyone touch it.

But then Winn calls you from your spot in the lab looking at a piece of seaweed through the microscope because you've been in the lab for a couple minutes messing around with Alex, putting random things under a microscope just for the heck of it. The notebook gets knocked out of your pocket and lands on the floor as you race over to Winn with a smile on your face as he gloats about how he finally beat Kara at Pacman.

Alex finds the notebook face open to a random page. She knows that one of you are bound to trip over it if she doesn't pick it up. So she does and is about to place it on the table when she catches glimpse of the words inside. She can't stop reading after she reads the first sentence.

Her favorite movie is Moana but if anyone asks she'll say any horror movie.

Remember when you raced up the stairs to Kara's apartment and you beat her by 2 stairs

She loves to go rock climbing

Once we all rode ATVs and yours fell over and you couldn't stop laughing because you were fine and she was super worried

Once she almost

She hated

Remember when

She tried to

There are tears running freely down her face now as she see's you stumble back in the room tripping over the slight raise on the ground your head still thrown back laughing because of a gloomy looking Kara.

You have your back too her and are still looking through the microscope when she says your name

"Y/N"

You pause turning at her shaky voice and freeze when you see the notebook.

"I-uh" you try to find words, to try and explain how you needed to remember her. That you couldn't bear the possibility of not remembering every single detail about your older sister who was so painfully gone those days but now is here and is in front of you. She rises from her knees and steps closer to you.

Your voice comes out smaller than you'd like it too. "I didn't want to forget you." I couldn't forget you your brain screams as you run your hand through your hair

You elaborate "you were gone for so long it" your voice cracks "It sucked!" You pause chest rising and falling fast to try and phrase the next words, unable to look her in the eyes.

"I started forgetting things. Like your favorite movies or-or your least favorite song. I'm sorry"

Your voice died down to a whisper as you looked at your boots ashamed of yourself.

Two arms wrapped around you as you glance up surprised. Part of you wonders why Alex is hugging you. Why she thinks its forgivable to forget her, any part of her. The other part of you wants to sink into her arms and never ever let go. She seems to make the choice for you burying her head in your neck as you repeatedly murmur "I'm sorry" tears flowing from your eyes as well while you listen to the "its okays" and "its not your fault" falling from her lips"

At some point both of your tears stop and she finally lets out a small chuckle handing you back your notebook.

"My favorite movie isn't Moana by the way. Its Big Hero Six."

@bluberryboy

[wordshakerofgallifrey]

cut scene that didn’t fit anywhere really the way the chapters ended up lying out, but lands somewhere between chapters four and the upcoming six of For Science! (And Love?) and I just didn’t have the heart to delete into the void permanently.

~*~

“Alright, let’s just flip a coin!”

“Is this even an argument? Doesn’t the Gizmoduck helmet only respond to you anyways?” Gandra asks, leaning against the sink.

“Well." Fenton twists the helmet in his hands. "Normally, yes, since the core processor to the suit is, you know, my brain, but I did some tinkering so it can respond to you as a virtual reality helmet, too. Since we only have one right now.”

Her eyebrows jump.  “The suit’s controlled by your brain?”

“Yeah.” He says it like one might say the sky is blue or Scrooge McDuck is very rich. "It used to be in the suit, but it kept overloading, so Huey did some rewiring and now it's controlled by me. Because the brain is the best core processor you have."

Gandra has several questions. "A...twelve-year-old connected your priceless, technologically advanced robot suit to your brain?"

"Yep. Said it got him a Philosophy and a Robotics badge."

"How?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. I sort of blacked out. And there were a bunch of fires Mark Beaks set that I was more worried about at the time. And the aforementioned overloaded core processor that was about to explode. That's how I ended up in a body cast, actually."

None of that answers any of her questions, so she just shakes her head. “Okay, flip the coin, Suit.”

Patting his pockets, Fenton pulls out a quarter, balancing it on his thumb. “Call it.”

Two sets of eyes follow the quarter as it flips in the air. “He—tails. No, heads. Definitely heads.”

He catches it, slapping it on his opposite hand. “Heads. You ready?”

She hops up on the diaper change station, figuring it's better than the toilet. “That’s not going to zap me, is it?” she asks warily.

Scoffing, he gives her a look. “That’s rich coming from the woman who electrocuted me.”

“I didn’t mean to!” she says, kicking at him. Jeez, accidentally electrocute someone one time...

He turns on the monitor, pulling up the program levels. “Okay, does this look right?”

Gandra peers over his shoulder to look. “As right as it can for a first test. Everything's in the green, anyways.”

Fenton hits record on his phone and begins speaking as he sets up the helmet. “First official test of the virtual landscape. We’ll be using the Gizmoduck helmet for the beta test. Gandra Dee will be entering the landscape first—”

“Gandra Dee would like to go on the record and ask why we’re in the men’s room and why it’s so unnervingly clean,” she interrupts, nudging his shoulder with her foot. She hasn't said anything up until now, but she definitely wants to know why, in a whole lab, their project is stuck in the bathroom.

"That is a much longer story that we can either get into now or run the test," he says, swatting at her shoe.

Tilting her head, she considers her options. She definitely needs to know, but... "Yeah, okay, tell me later. Let's do this."

Picking up the helmet, he moves to stand in front of her. “Ready?"

She hesitates a moment, then nods. Fenton won't let anything happen to her.

"Alright, first test is five minutes. Starting in…One, two, three…” The helmet is lowered over her head, obscuring him from her vision.

Gandra opens her eyes and, instead of the purple visor of the Gizmoduck helmet, she’s met with a blank white space that stretches beyond what she can see.

“Whoa…” she whispers, turning in a circle. “Oh, Suit, you’ve gotta see this.”

On the edge of her subconscious, she’s aware of a hand holding hers in reality, and she squeezes it.

“Okay, okay.” She rubs her hands together. Time to test the landscape. “Thought-based manipulation. Something simple…”

Just as the thought forms in her head, a vase of blooming purple irises appears next to her, just like the ones her mom kept around the house. The vase is even the same one she broke when she was sixteen, Mom’s favorite.

She reaches for the vase, expecting her hand to go through it, like a projection. The image glitches and pixilates horribly, but she’s able to pluck a flower out of the vase and hold it in her hand, twisting the stem between her fingers.

“Oh…” she breathes.

Suddenly, the white expanses glitches and the bathroom appears around her again as the helmet is lifted off her head.

Immediately, her eyes are drawn down to her hand, surprised that the flower has disappeared from her grasp. Even though she knew it was pixels, it’d felt so real.

“Sorry." Gandra looks up with a start to see Fenton standing in front of her. Right. Reality. "We said five minutes to make sure it didn’t overwhelm the system.”

“That was five minutes?” she asks, surprised. It barely felt like a full minute to her.

“Yeah," he says, nodding, eyes bright. "The levels still look good, too. Were you able to manipulate anything?”

Gandra nods absently. “Yeah, I just…it was just some flowers. Glitchy, not all there, and apparently took longer than I thought to put it there, but I held one for a little bit, right before you pulled me out.”

His whole face lights up at that. "That's fantastic!" he says, grabbing her biceps. "That’s one step closer, right?” 

His enthusiasm is infectious, as it always is, and she finds herself cracking a smile, shaking off the nearly ten-year-old memory that had rattled her. 

“Yeah,” she agrees, sliding her hands to his shoulders. “Super science for the world?” 

“Super science for the world!”

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 679: Khanate Things Viral + bonus 12″

My first exposure to Khanate was via their Earth cover of “German Dental Work” on the Where Is My Robotic Boot compilation. I remember thinking it was certainly heavy, but that they’d turned the sport of chasing the lowest riffage possible into a zero sum game. The hooks were gone. It was just mud and thud. 

That perspective changed when I heard Things Viral for the first time. I was on tour, driving from DC to Richmond after a show. My shotgun companion had thrown The Stooges’ Funhouse on the van stereo, and that was fine, but after a couple of songs we determined that it somehow wasn’t really fitting to the drive. It was too much of a party. We wanted something loud, but less animated. My companion put on Things Viral instead. 

There we were, barreling down I-95 in the darkness of the post-midnight hours, tunnel visioned in black, the only light being the occasional set of headlamps on the other side of the median. Khanate had doubled down on their zero sum game. This was heaviness stripped of almost anything related to music. The tempos were stretched to such absurdly slow proportions that they were totally arbitrary. Rhythm was only hinted at. Structure was nearly absent. Melody was circumvented. Everything sounded deliberately hostile and anti-musical. In the center of it, some ghoulish voice unleashed torrents of lyrical poison. Where so many metal vocalists serve as little more than a textural component, Khanate vocalist Alan Dubin was almost more like some demonic spoken word artist---crystal clear in his delivery, abstract in his prose, dripping with vitriol. 

I was absolutely floored by the record. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How does someone even write this kind of music? How do you orchestrate such sparse, atonal compositions? Does one guy say “okay, I’m gonna hit this dissonant chord on guitar, you’re gonna count to 20 and then hit the floor tom, then I’m gonna make some feedback for a couple of minutes, then Alan is gonna yell “Red gloooooory” through a delay pedal, then we’ll all hit another note after another count of 20.” There was just enough of a hint of pattern and repetition for their songs to sound deliberate and filled with intention, but it was so deconstructed that it operated strictly on tension and unease. Things Viral is a metal record in texture and instrumentation, but in terms of composition it’s more like horror movie sound design. 

I became obsessed with Things Viral. It altered the way I listened to music---a feat that only a handful of records in my life have accomplished. I listened to it multiple times a day for the remainder of the tour. It got under my skin. It felt like a puzzle---like there was some way of untangling it and finding the logic behind it, but it was so fragmented and broken that my brain couldn’t put it back together. It rewired my creative mind. 

It winds up that Khanate wrote songs much like Miles Davis and Can. They got together in a room, they set up some microphones, they hit record, and they just jammed. And then someone went through the hours and hours of material and cut-and-pasted it into something that sounded like a song. Things Viral is essentially the Bitches Brew or the Tago Mago of abstract drone/doom metal, and in my mind it deserves to be held in the same esteem as those revered classics. 

[multibug]

7. reveal (adrienette/ladynoir)

AO3

Church bells ring through the foyer with an essence of nostalgia from Adrien’s younger days—his mother and him would attend fancy weddings for years and laugh at the expensive, unnecessary items people would scatter around their wedding venues. 

Adrien’s favorite was the golden duck with diamonds encrusted in its eyes that shot water out if its mouth into a fountain. 

Sometimes, he can’t fathom how much time has gone by since he gained his miraculous at thirteen. Six years later, lots of awkward puberty growth spurts and voice changes and here he is, watching two of his best friends get married.

It feels like forever, yet also like no time has gone by. Time is strange and fluctuates weirdly in Adrien’s opinion.

“I can’t believe I’m married,” Nino says from his left, the two of them sneaking through the foyer and out a side door to get a breath of fresh air. “I mean, I can, because I love Alya like no tomorrow, but…” 

“But you never thought you’d get here?” Adrien asks, voice gentle.

Nodding his head, Nino flexes his fingers out and stares down the dark alley. “Yeah, exactly. I know a lot of people think we’re too young—”

“To hell what other people think!”

“I know, I know. I just… I’ve known since we were kids, you know? I know it sounds weird and I know you probably think I’m talking out of my ass.” 

Nudging shoulders with Nino, Adrien stretches his back out and glances at his best friend. “I’ll only think you’re talking out of your ass if you say ‘I know’ one more bloody time.” 

“You spend one year on and off in London for work and you come back talking like you were born and raised there!” 

“I resent that,” Adrien grumbles. 

“I don’t know about that, Adri—”

The metal door creaks open behind them, the chatter and excitement from the reception floating out to wrap them up like a blanket. Marinette, dolled up in her maid-of-honor dress that fit her like a glove, sticks her head out and grins over at them. “Hey boys! Alya was wondering where you’d gone off to.” 

“Does she need me?” Nino goes to run inside, face dropping to a concerned expression before Marinette can edge a word in otherwise. 

Marinette stops him with a gentle hand to her chest, opening the door further and fully coming into view. “Relax, loverboy. Alya just wants to dance with you. No need to panic.” 

“Duty calls.” The moon is the only thing illuminating them as Nino pats Adrien on the chest with a grin, slipping past Marinette to go find Alya inside. The door snicks shut behind him, Marinette glancing at it before over at Adrien. 

“Hey there, stranger.” 

“Hey, Mari!” Quickly, Adrien steps forward to bring the smaller girl into his arms and hug her. He hasn’t seen her in forever, not since graduation at the very least. “Wow, it’s been a bit while, hasn’t it?” 

Laughing slightly, Marinette returns the hug for a split second before they break apart, her hand wrapping around her forearm in an old, nervous tick. She avoids his eyes by smoothing out the skirt of her dress. “Yeah! As much as I’ve loved texting you, I think I prefer seeing your reaction to memes in person.” 

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think anything will beat that time you made a joke in terminale and it made Kim shoot soda out of his nose and hit the girls at the table in front of us.” Adrien’s laughing, back slightly arching forward as he places a hand on his knee to steady himself. “I almost peed my pants.” 

“That wasn’t my intention,” Marinette says, through her own bouts of laughs, her long hair falling over the front of her shoulders. “I tried to apologize to them and you kept pulling me back!” 

His hand rests on her shoulder as he grins, speaking quickly, “Marinette, I couldn’t let you get fed to the pack wolves!” 

Adrien notes her bangs have thinned out since terminale, maturing her face a little. Her dress is a simple bright red strapless, cinching at her waist and flowing outward until it hits her thigh, where a small slit shows off one of her legs. 

The striking realization that she looks so much like Ladybug hits him like a tidal wave. 

Suddenly, the alleyway is too small, claustrophobia settling into his bones. 

“You want to go for a walk? We can make it back before they notice we’re gone,” Adrien suggests, itching to slink out of the narrow space. 

‘Sure,” she says, tucking a piece of her curled hair behind her ear.

Marinette leads them out of the alleyway and around the corner, where La Seine flows in all of its glory. Glittering lights romanticize the strip, only outshone by the tour Eiffel itself. The season is shifting from the last remnants of autumn to winter, the air frigid and cold. Tree leaves a beautiful mixture of orange, red, and brown in its wake, whispering a gentle aura over Paris. 

It’s Adrien’s favorite time of year.

“Do you ever feel like we’re lucky?” Marinette rests a bare elbow onto the stone railing, her body half turned towards him. 

“Lucky?” Adrien asks, frowning when he notices he shiver. It’s small, and she doesn’t say anything, so he shrugs off his jacket and slides it over her shoulders. 

He smiles when he watches her sink into it, and continues, “How so?” 

“So many people never get to experience this,” she says, gesturing to the city around them without knocking his jacket off her shoulders. Her eyebrows raise as she talks, “Yet we do. There are people that have so much less than we do and we worry about the most miniscule inconveniences.” 

Rolling his sleeves up to his elbows, Adrien copies her stance and rests both of his on the railing, chin settling on his palm as he looks at her. “While that’s very much true,” he starts, taking in the slight frown on her face, nudging her ever-so-gently with a wink. “I already know that you help much more than the average person, Mari.”

Her face freezes, grip loosening on the jacket enough to where it almost slips off. “What?” 

“Was that the wrong thing to say?” His voice is gentle as he asks, genuine confusion on his face.

“Adrien,” she says, her words choked. 

Turning fully to her, Adrien blinks at their height difference, even with her in heels. “I’m sorry? You just love to help people—” 

“Don’t,” she whispers, eyes flittering from his face to the river in rapid succession. 

He’s confused, he’s so confused.

“Don’t what? I’m just trying to give you a compliment, Marinette—”

Suddenly, Marinette turns to him, fierce look in her eyes with her hands gripping the lapels of his jacket. “Who told you? Or did you figure it out on your own?” 

“Told me what?” Slightly taken aback, Adrien stands to his full height above her, his arms crossing over his chest. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Mari.” 

Marinette’s gaze is rooting him to the spot with a calculating look, one so familiar that his brain nearly rewires itself. She seems to find what she’s looking for in his eyes and her shoulders droop, her lips curled into a frown. It reminds him eerily of his spotted partner. 

It strikes him how this isn’t the first, but the second time tonight he’s compared Marinette to Ladybug, however unintentional it’s been. He can’t lie and say he’s never thought about it before, though her quick appearance as Multimouse had crossed her off his suspicious list early on.

As he’s staring at her, with all of the worry and disbelief that had been etched into her skin, he wonders if he had crossed her off too soon. 

The girl behind the mask has a special place in his heart, no matter the person—sans Lila. If it’s Marinette who he runs around the city fighting crime with in a skin tight red and black spotted suit, it’ll be an added bonus. 

(Because, all of the crap he spewed in collège and lycée about her being just a friend had always been a lie. 

He hadn’t realized it until it was too late, accepting that he wouldn’t be the one receiving that type of love from her. He’d persuaded himself that her friendship was enough.

And it was. Until now.) 

“You know,” he breaks the silence, shuffling slightly closer to Marinette as if he’s telling her the world’s most important secret. “I was in love with Ladybug for years.”

The shift on her face is priceless, even without the suspicions traveling through his brain. He know it's her, he's sure of it. He just needs some sort of confirmation before he tells her.

Her lips part and her eyes widen, like a deer caught in headlines. “You—You were?” 

Adrien shrugs, idly kicking a rock with one of his boots. He’s glad his jacket doesn’t clash with her dress, as the black suit is simple enough. “Yeah. Kind of hard not to be, you know? She’s so inspiring with the amount of people she helps. I could stare into her eyes and get lost in how blue they are.’ He chuckles, shoving his hands into his pockets and peers up at her stricken expression. “More importantly, she never gives up, even when it’s hard. I love that in people.” 

“You do?” Marinette squeaks out, her brain-to-mouth filter gone. Her cheeks are the rosiest shade of pink, even in the darkness of the night. Her eyes don’t leave his face, as if she’s staring up at him in awe. 

Bingo. If he wasn’t sure before, he’s sure now. That’s his lady, alright. 

He allows the smile threatening to break his cheeks spread over his face, dimples and all. “Yeah. Sadly, she’s her and I’m just, well, me.” 

“Don’t you ever say that about yourself again, do you hear me? You are the nicest boy with the kindest heart I’ve ever met,” Marinette pushes herself into his space, gently jabbing her finger into his chest to make a point. “Anyone would be lucky for you to love them. Especially Ladybug.” 

“Hm. Especially Ladybug?” He’s unable to help the smirk that forms on his face from her embarrassed expression. “You know, I think I would be the lucky one—” 

There’s screams, a crash, and an explosion that interrupts Adrien all at once. The wedding venue is on fire, smoking filling the sky at an alarming rate. People from the reception run around the corner yelling as citizens of Paris begin to stick their heads out their windows to see what’s happening. 

Adrien sighs, holding his hand out to Marinette who all-but shoves his jacket into his hand. He slips it on, hiding his grin as he notices her taking tiny steps back out of the corner of his eye.

Just as she’s about to jet away, Adrien purposely turns fully towards her. “Mari, where are you going?” 

“Oh, I—uh. I’m going to go make sure everyone got out safely, yeah! You should stay here though and worry about the crowd.” She turns around to run off, when Adrien grabs her by the hand and pulls her into his body, ignoring the stares from their lycée friends. “Adrien?!” 

“Stay safe, Marinette,” Adrien whispers, squeezing her once before letting her go, ushering her in the direction of the building. “Go, before I change my mind.” 

And she does, sprinting around the corner faster than he’s ever seen anyone run in heels. That’s his Ladybug. 

“Dude, did you just let her run back into a burning building by herself?!” 

Rolling his eyes, Adrien waves dismissively in their direction, breaking out into a jog. “I’ll be back,” he calls over his shoulder, winking in their direction. 

 “Fuck Hawkmoth. I hate him,” Ladybug—Marinette says to him after she casts her healing spell, a pout on her face. “I was having such a good night and then that bald-headed asshole had to come and ruin it.” 

“I’m sorry?” Adrien chokes out a laugh, the two of them fistbumping with their usual pound it afterwards. “What were you doing?” 

Laughter fills the air as she steps in front of him, jutting the tip of her finger into his chest. “Down, kitty. I was just celebrating a special event with some friends. I was in the middle of a very revealing conversation when it happened.” 

“That sucks,” he supplies with a small shrug of his shoulders, retracting his baton and slipping it back into its rightful place. He takes a seat on the roof, humming quietly. “Come sit with me for a minute?” 

They’d decided to meet back up on the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris once reporters and police showed up as it was the closest to the akuma (and the venue). The historical site had been repaired beautifully since the fire, and Ardien hopes this is as good of a place as any to tell her. 

His feelings for both Ladybug and Marinette had never fully dwinded, and knowing they’re the same person makes him fall all over again. 

“Chat, I don’t really have time. They’ll notice I’m gone and—”

“It’s important, Ladybug.” 

Ladybug’s lips purse together at the usage of her full name and listens to him, dropping in front of him so they’re facing one another whilst sitting criss-cross. “Should I be worried?” 

“You’ll probably be mad at me,” Adrien admits with a shrug of his shoulders, able to fully see her expression with his night vision. 

Worry. Confusion. Slight anger. Though the look that pierces through the most is trust. 

It settles his nerves a bit. 

“Okay, talk quick then, chaton. We don’t have a lot of time,” she tells him with a tap to her blinking earrings. 

Ease her into it, Agreste. You don’t want to scare her away. “I know your identity,” he blurts out, hand slapping over his mouth. 

Uh oh. She’s going to kill him. 

Ladybug’s eyes narrow immediately as her arms cross over her chest. It’s the same, calculating look from earlier and it sends shivers down his spine. Her lips curve into a frown, his hands aching to smooth out the downward pull of her smile with his thumb.

Then, she laughs. So bright and beautiful, so unabashed that it stuns him. “You really had me going there for a minute.” 

“I’m not lying to you,” Adrien says, as truthful as he can, scooting closer to her with a serious expression. “I didn’t mean to find out, honest. But I want you to know that me knowing who you are doesn’t change a single thing for me. It just makes me love and appreciate you even more,” he pauses, gauging her reaction, then adding a beat later, “Marinette.” 

The mirth in her eyes starts to dissipate and she covers her mouth with her hand, unable to form words. He can tell she’s trying to think of a plan, a way to get out of the situation, yet is too stunned to do anything other than stare. 

Slowly, he reaches a hand out to grab her free one as a comforting gesture, thumb rubbing small circles into it. “Hey,” Adrien whispers, smiling encouragingly over at her. “It’s okay, I promise—” 

A blinding, green light fills their visions and once it disappears, Adrien appears in front of Ladybug in his suit. “I thought I had more time,” Adrien whines, face palming with the hand that isn’t holding Ladybug’s. Plagg doesn’t say a word, whizzes into the pocket where Adrien’s hiding his camembert in a tiny container and zooms off. 

“You—I—What?!” Ladybug’s gripping his hand tightly, as though she’s unaware she’s doing it, her eyes wider than he’s ever seen them. “Adrien? There’s no way!” 

“It’s me, Bug,” Adrien rasps out, licking his dry lips and swallowing harshly. “It’s me, Mari.” 

“I’m not going to freak out,” Ladybug tells herself under her breath, gently removing her hand from his and hopping off the ground to pace around the rooftop. “Nope, I’m not going to—”  

Pink lights swirl around her and Adrien stares in awe as Marinette appears in front of him, looking as goddess-like in her red dress as she had prior to transforming. Tikki phases through Marinette’s bag, then comes out with a cookie and follows Plagg. 

“This is crazy,” Marinette squeaks out, hands clenching and unclenching nervously. Her heels clack over the roof as she walks, her cheeks flushing bright enough for Adrien to notice. “I mean, you sat in front of me in school for years! How did we not notice?” 

“At least we know the magic conceals us?” Adrien tries with a wince, standing up and dusting himself off. He chances a step in Marinette’s direction, heart beating faster when she doesn’t back away. “My lady—” 

“Did you mean it?” Her voice croaks as she closes the distance, a determined look on her face. Her hand finds his easily and tangles their matching sweaty fingers together. 

“Mean what?” 

“When you said that it didn’t matter who Ladybug was?” Marinette licks her lips, hope-filled eyes meeting his. 

“Yes,” Adrien rasps out as he nods his head, his forehead falling forward to rest against hers. “Of course, Mari. You’re it for me.” 

“Dieu merci.” 

Adrien isn’t sure who kisses who. He thinks they may have met in the middle, a clash of lips and passion and holy shit I’ve waited six years for this. There’s no sparks, no fireworks that erupt in his stomach, no moment that blinds him. Instead, it feels like a slow burn that warms him from the inside out, lights him aflame and soothes out the aches in his heart. 

It feels like coming home. 

Marinette’s hand that isn’t holding his trails up the side of his arm, to the back of his neck and into his hair, carding through his golden locks. A purr rumbles through his body, and Marinette pulls back with a satisfied smirk. 

“Did you just purr?” 

Leaning in, Adrien presses kisses to her face. “I have—” He kisses her nose. “—no idea—” Her cheek. “—what you’re talking about.” The last kiss lands on her mouth, a short and sweet one, one that she tries to deepen by tugging him back in after he pulls back, but he doesn’t let her. “As much as I’d love to keep kissing you, we do have to go back to the wedding.” 

“I guess,” Marinette grumbles, but he knows she doesn’t mean it. He allows her to fix his hair, relishing in the feel of her hands on him. Her eyes are fond and he knows that what she’s about to say may break him. “I’m glad it’s you.” 

“I’m glad it’s you too, Mari.” 

They’re finally home.

[written-beyond-the-grave]

Da Vinci Code

Word Count: 5,900

Warnings: Mild cursing (btw reader is black b/c SOMEONE had to to do it to em)

I wanna be bold and tag my favorite accounts here so: @writing-prompt-s @madamslayyy @saitamastamaticsoup @canumoveurseatup-no @twilightpocfans @cassandraclare @momolady @imaginepoc @hoe-imaginess

Summer, or as the new generation of civilization deemed it “cuffing season” or “act out season”. Something about warmer weather and not being at an educational facility for eight hours straight for a good three months seemed to always bring out the risque in people. As expected kids and teens would be roaming around the cul-de-sac, some playing basketball in their parent's driveway and others participating in double-dutch competitions on chalk illustrated sidewalks. And as the adolescents played Wallace D. Nolwazi would be miles away from home at the NASA space station in California, soaking up the sun and meticulously building her resume. At least, that what she expected.

The rumbling of the wagon behind her was no match for the choir of raindrops that began to pelt onto the concrete, what had started as a mild drizzle shortly became a full-blown thunderstorm that Wallace’s poncho was no match for.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Correction: A full-blown thunderstorm with a flood watch in effect warning.

Earlier in the year, Wallace had applied to NASA’s Bright Minds of Today™ Summer Camp were ten lucky applicants were flown out to Pasadena, California for a seven-week exclusive boot camp on the inner workings of NASA. Completed with free room and board, transportation, and a weekly allowance. The ad for the summer camp had been almost too good to be true until Wallace decided to call its coordinators. With confirmation that the program was legit, she meticulously began to work on the programs required an essay on what were the benefits and dangers of new technology rising today. She even emailed her teachers and counselor four weeks in advance for recommendations which contrasted from her usual last-minute nature. To say that she was pumped would have been an understatement after she got a call while attempting to rewire an old computer hard drive that she has been accepted into the program after an over the phone interview. 

She was going on a long vacation away from her doting and nosey family, At least, that’s what she hoped until her hope was plucked out her hands like a mean babysitter to a baby’s lollipop. 

A sudden loud crack of thunder startled Wallace enough to have her already misshapen glasses drop to the ground into a rushing stream caused by the lack of grass in the area. Pausing, she fished out the glasses and continued on her way back home. 

Without her knowledge, Wallace’s mother had planned for her aunt Leila to stay over the summer while she attended an important retreat for the medical board at Bayhealth Hospital. To say that Wallace didn’t expect this to happen would be an understatement, her mother or Maureen as she usually addressed her was notorious for pulling last-minute dips on her plans. But this was the one plan in a while that she specifically discussed with her mother beforehand on the prospect of potentially getting admitted to the program. But, her mother brushed it off with little regret saying that there would be a “next time”.

‘Next time’. Heh.

The phrase next time played on in her head as she entered the already opened garage thoroughly soaked from the ongoing storm. The wagon Wallace had been pulling was long forgotten next to a pile of some scrap metal and a blow torch. Making her way from the garage to the basement took less than twenty steps, it took even shorter to get into the shower considering Wallace had begun to undress once she had left the garage. The rain had made her skin crawl and feel as if there were imaginary ants running along her skin. The cold water and rhythmic beating of the showerhead help her predicament. 

Wallace always kept a set of spare clothes in the basement for when she needed them, she seemed to always be in the basement and garage so it was only fitting. Being careful to only drip onto the carpet she took a look into the mirror, honey eyes immediately locked onto her faux locs that were beginning to unravel. To any other person they would have looked freshly done, but Wallace was meticulous over her hair and decided against trying to fix it herself. Knowing well that her hands were a menace to her our hair, vividly remembering the accident of ‘06 at Cardinal Junior High. Her eyes narrowed at the memory as she quickly got dressed in dry clothes and put her hair up. 

Compelled to not waste any more time Wallace stepped to a large steel table and sat on the cool wooden stool pulling forward a dull wooden box. Reaching in she delicately pulled out a worn looking pocket watch that admittedly weighed quite a bit in her hand. Its previously blindly gold exterior was tarnished to gray-blue corrosion that had compromised some the gears inside. Taking a moment to gaze at the antique item, the arms weren’t moving and were stuck at 11:22, putting down the watch Wallace moved the ring light above her into place and turned it on. Without looking up her hand reached across the table to pull a magnifying scope right above the watch.

Opening the watch, she set the magnifying scope to a lens best suited to look at its gears. Some were missing and burned out, pursing her lips in curiosity Wallace stepped off her chair and went digging through her wagon. Only picking objects she deemed acceptable and helping her fix the watch. Wallace deconstructed other clocks and gears from different machines from the junkyard that she raided and shaped them down to size with her father's power saw and other tools in the garage. Stuck in her own little world, she hadn’t noticed the moon made an appearance hours ago.

It was around midnight when Wallace’s mother, Maureen came home. The day at the hospital was a rough one indeed, an abundance of trauma patients came in and out of hospital doors and her brain was just about fried by the end of the day. Pocketing her keys, she opened the front door telephone wire and shut the door behind her while putting her purse down. 

“Wallace,” she called, thinking nothing of her daughter's absence. She walked herself up the stairs to her room, but not before passing Wallace's was she picked open and called her name again, “Wallace!” Letting herself in she looked around meticulously, where was her daughter? She went to the window to see if anyone was outside but her nerves were rest assured when she saw a light coming from the garage out in the back.

“Wallace!”

Without looking up she quipped back, “What.”

“Don’t what me. It’s ‘yes mom’,” Wallace’s mother crossed her arms as her eyes narrowed at her daughter hunched over form in the garage.

“Yes, Maureen.”

Sighing and rolled her eyes, “I’ve been calling you all around the house for-”

Wallace not being one for aimless chatter, “What did you need.” There was a brief silence that seemed to stretch on.

Maureen licked her bottom lip and took a calming breath, “Wallace I am your mother－”

Mentally rolling her eyes at the revelations, she continued tinkering with the watch in her hand.

“－And as your mother I deserve, better yet you owe me your respect－”

Laughable.

“－Secondly, did you eat dinner? The pasta and chicken I left in the fridge for you is still there.”

Wallace’s figure relaxed a bit, “I had dinner at the Hinode’s. Mrs. Hinode said ‘hi’’.”

“You sure,” Maureen walked closer to Wallace and glanced over at the table unsurprised to see she was doing God knows what with that watch, “And why are you still playing around with that old thing? I know it was grandpa Leroy’s, but that thing’s been busted for a while now.” 

Wallace didn’t know why her mother always told her this, like a broken record, every time she came into the garage to find her fixing the old watch. It was a waste of breath in Wallace’s mind since it yielded the same results. She subconsciously clutched the watch tighter in her hand. Grandpa Leroy was her father’s father, he was her father when Maureen’s boyfriend went awol at the altar. Leroy stepped in and helped raise Wallace like his own, he even used to stay with her mother for months at a time. He was the one who got Wallace into technology and fixing things when he first saw her attempting to fix a VCR that had accidentally fallen off a table while playing soccer in the house. It was a good thing that her grandfather used to be an electrician in his working days.

He was the glue that held everything together, up until his untimely death two years ago on a cruise ship sailing around Scandinavia and Europe. The specifics were never explained, but the doctors told her mother that he died of natural causes in his sleep. Since then the usually happily tolerable relationship between Maureen and Wallace had taken a sharp turn. It was beginning to feel like tying a shoe, but instead of looping the strings they were being pulled in opposite directions. Maureen began to shut down by taking more hours at the hospital. Leaving Wallace at home most days for hours on end.

Wallace had a different way of dealing with things than her mother, she became a recluse. Keeping herself in her room or library reading all her grandfather's favorite books. It was Charges: A Retrospect into the Quantum World by M.H. Lyernoff that started her fixation on her grandfather's watch. It was where she found the watch, behind the fake back on one of the shelves in the library behind M.H. Lyernoff’s book. It seemed like any old pocket watch hidden away until Wallace noticed the engraving on the curve of the watch. It was rubbed off but still legible: It’s only as real you make it. Something that grandpa Leroy always used to tell her when she let others make her feel inferior, and the something that got her into the garage some nine months ago into fixing the watch and later restoring it.

She put a comforting hand on Wallace’s shoulder, “It can’t even tell time properly with how it was designed.” 

And Maureen was correct, the clock had hands, however not the standard number system. The clock had roman numerals, but it also had a second system under. It was compass-like with engraved circles and dots, but everything was written in a language that vaguely looked like English. Wallace couldn’t figure out what type of manufacturer would make clocks this confusing, or why her grandfather would ever have it in his possession, all she knew was that the compass contraption was supposed to move most likely in synchronicity with the clock above.

Wallace craned her neck around to meet her mother's eyes, "Is that all?" Quite frankly she was beginning to get a little bit antsy in her mom's close proximity to her. There was always something about being in her presence for a set amount of time that unnerved her.

Another stood there from your seconds contemplating what was wrong with Wallace, she was usually irritable yes. But nothing to level like she is at the moment. Choosing to talk about this another day her mother left the scene to go get ready for bed.

Wallace's figure visibly relaxed as she heard from others retreating but steps. 

‘Finally’, she thought. ‘I can have some peace and quiet to actually work on this thing.’

And that's how the rest of the week went. Wallace would at times take impromptu trip to the junkyard come back home to her garage and work on her grandfather's pocket watch. Then her mom will come looking for her ask her usual suspect questions of whether she ate or not and drank water then would be on her merry way. 

That was until Tuesday evening when a bright pink Chevrolet rolled up in front of the house with bags threatening to fall out the back seats, all driven by a woman with large boho sunglasses and a tightly braided bun. Wallace stared at her from her seat on the couch in the living room with her nearly finished bowl of cereal. Her mother had left three hours before her aunt’s arrival, she knew that she’d be staying for the majority of the summer, but it looked like aunt Leila packed enough for two summers.

When Leila stepped out of her car right into a ray of light Wallace didn’t know what was more blinding: the way her aunt’s skin glowed or the diamond rings that casted a disco reflection. Wallace let Leila in and automatically she shoved her mini handbag into Wallace’s arms.

“Hello, Wally! How’s my favorite niece?” She gave Wallace a toothy grin and walked herself into the kitchen, without waiting for a reply she added, “Be a doll and help get my bags from out the car will you? Thanks.”

Wallace grimaced. Out of all the people, it had to be her. Begrudgingly she went back outside and lugged her aunt’s luggage into the house making sure to drag it someway into the entrance. Wallace entered the kitchen to find her aunt was making herself quite “at home” by treating herself to a slice of cheesecake with a side of strawberry ice cream. 

Mid bite her aunt muffled, “Did yuh geh uem?”

Wallace nodded, “I’ll be in the garage if you need me,” and made a b-line for the garage in back but her aunt was quicker.

“Hold on there, Wally.” 

She paused halfway out the door.

“Where does your mom keep her Rosé?”

“Bottom draw to your left,” and with that she was gone.

For the past week Wallace had been making staggering advancements in getting the old watch to work. Once she troubleshooted some issues with the gears, re-oiled it, and gave it a new shine it was almost working at full capacity. The only problem was getting the button on top the watch to press down to be able to open the glass screen. She had been fussing over it for hours, not wanting to use too much applied force and end up breaking the piece. 

The sun was just beginning to set over the horizon when the watch in question she had been fingering nearly fell, in quick action Wallace caught her grandfather’s watch in an awkward angle where her thumb pushed the button around that elicited a ‘click’. Astoundingly looking at how easy Wallace’s predicament was solved she pressed the top of the watch hoping to open the screen protector. But that never happened, nothing happened for the first few seconds until everything in Wallace’s vicinity began to occur in slow motion. The kid who was going at a moderate speed down the cul-de-sac was now at a turtle's pace.

Wallace’s honey eyes widened. She felt as if her body was vibrating and her brain rattling. Not physically of course, but internally or metaphysically. The world around her began to flow first slowly then all at once, it became a blue of bright colors. Purples, reds, pinks, greens, and yellows swirled around her as if she were in a cocoon of ribbons. She tightly closed her eyes, looking at all of it made her knees buckle and heart race, ‘What the hell?’

At last the spinning sensation stopped and she opened her eyes, however she swiftly closed them again due to the powerful rays of the sun. Raising her hand for some protection against it she took a view of her surroundings.

‘What.. the fuck?’

She was confused, as would be any teenager who was at one second in her garage then in another in a field crowded with tall grass and vibrant flowers. In the distance she heard a clanking noise. Turning around, Wallace noticed a herd of cattle freely grazing and near that was a farm. And a farm always meant people. Giving the field one last tired look Wallace began her trek towards the farm, but not before pulling out her phone to check the date and time. It seemed like it was still Tuesday and about 4:53 in the evening, she unlocked her phone to see if she could get any signal, but the page was taking a while to load.

Looking over at the barn as she got closer Wallace noticed how old school and run down it looked, in a few years it would be down for sure.

“Hello?” Wallace shouted.

“Helloooooo…”

She creaked open the barn door slightly to see nothing but stacks of hay and the putrid scent of manure to greet her nostrils. Scrunching up her nose she let herself in and took a look around. It was out of place for Wallace to see a farm, but no tractor or electric plow of some sort. There wasn’t even a grain silo or a water mill.

‘Maybe I’m in the Amish country… But that wouldn’t explain how I left my garage without physically moving…’

Wallace was halfway through the farm until her ears picked up a shuffling noise, abruptly stopping she turned her head towards the disturbance. 

She cautiously called out again, “Hello? I heard that you know…” She pushed her glasses up her sweaty nose, “Anyone there?”

CLANK. CLANK. SHUFFLE.

Her head turned sharply to the side, there it was again… Looking down she saw a decent sized rock picking it up Wallace aimed it at the large stack of hay near of the walls. The rock went straight through the hay, but out came a small scream and a loud thud. A tall figure emerged from the hay speaking in a rapid language that Wallace was in no way mentally ready to process.

‘What’s the universal sign for stop?’ Wallace shushed the figure, which was male with shoulder length curly hair and broad shoulders. She held out her hands in a ‘no harm’ manner to try and calm whoever it was down.

On the other end of the stick, the man was breathing heavily with a sweat soaked shirt covered in dirt and paint.

“N- non volevo sp- spaventarti. Cosa stai facendo qui, eh?” They boy stuttered out. He was staring at his feet then slowly looked up, and his face went pale. “Chi diavolo sei?” His eyes gauged at her like he had never seen a gir－ no a lady such as the one stand before him. He took in her clothing, she was wearing trousers which was anything unlike her ever saw. And they were tight. They made a splash of color recover onto his cheeks. Her hair was long and curly, but they look like impossibly thick strings of pasta coiling down her face. But her skin, that was the most starting things about her. He had seen paintings of angels rendered with pale as snow skin and golden hair colored hair, but the lady before him pushed that all out of the water. She stool clad in sepia skin that glistened with sweat from the walk she had to take from the field. The boy was at a lost for words, here stood an imitation of an angel that embodied the brown sepia tones of the earth all around her and was a reflection of gold itself while in the light.

Wallace stepped a bit closer, she sported a dirty look on her face. The man in front of her stared as if he had never seen a person with brown skin before. Let it be known though she may have scared him she wouldn’t mind knocking out his teeth with her foot it need be. Setting those thoughts aside she came to a conclusion:

“Hello, can you understand me?” If she heard what she thought she thought was Italian, then it’d solve one mystery. 

“Sì.” Bingo, Italian just as she thought, though it was more… archaic than she remembered.

“Where am I?”

“M-Milan Italia, on the countryside... Who are you lady?”

‘Italy, huh? Not possible’, but she dismissed it nonetheless. “My name is Wallace, Wallace Nohlwazi. And who are you?” ‘At least I know that Italian soap opera shows on Netflix are doing their job.’

The boy let out an anxiously laugh and relaxed a bit, “My name is－” 

He was cut off as a steel rod suddenly propelled out the stack of hay, promptly knocking it down. In the moment you don’t know what moved faster, the stranger that tackled you out the way or the steel rod that embedded itself deeply into the way behind you.

The boy was deceptively heavy on top of you, but didn’t take to notice, “My name is Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci.” Your eyes widened… then you began to laugh leaving a confused yet concerned face on the boy dubbed the Leonardo da Vinci.

“You have to be joking… da Vinci? Pfft.” You continued your laughter, “Is your name really Leonardo da Vinci? The painter?”

Leonardo gave you a careful sideways smile, “... Yes miss…”

The laughing wasn’t completely out of your system until you noticed the hunk of metal that behind the hay, Leonardo noticed your eyes zeroing in on something behind him. Once he noticed what it was he began panicking and speaking in rapid Italian. There were scraps of metal melded into a large watch connected to gold coins and what looked like to be a handmade wire lifted up into the sky, the gadget wouldn’t be as astounding if it weren’t for the fact that it was vibrating creating a noticeable ‘hum’ that was yet present.

“Oh dear, you shouldn't have seen that... did del Verrocchio send you?” The tall man squabbled on.

The ping of your phone alerted you, ignoring the Italian painter going mad, you reached into you back pocket and unlocked the screen. There, in bold lettering stood a wifi connection that should not be possible in the 1400’s.

CONNECT: IϽNIΛ ∀ᗡ

Taking a moment to tune out the yelling da Vinci, you came to the only possible line appropriate for the situation at hand.

“Absolutely not.”

“－he usually sends one of his men to check up on m－”

Wallace refused to believe that she had somehow got transported into the mid-1400s in Italy, and had met the Leonardo DaVinci. The future, or rather past famous artist and inventor. The whole ordeal seem preposterous to Wallace, at least that's what she wanted to believe. It was a single question of how she got there… grandfather Leroy. Wallace quickly dug into her inner jacket pocket and pulled out the pocket watch. She stared at it critically oh, how could this thing send her miles away from her home and hundreds of years before her time on Earth? But most of all how did her grandfather get his hands on this?

“－just so I’ll abandon my ideas… my greatess works－”

Wallace's mind began to buzz with many theories and accusations of how her grandfather got this watch and how it could possibly work. But, for those hypotheticals it would mean a lifetime of advanced mathematics and science, not to mention quantum mechanics. The bending of time calculated with the speed and bending of light and all acting upon the Earth’s laws of physics? It would have taken over a hundred lifetimes to figure that out even with the most brilliant of minds. At least Wallace thought so.

Suppressing her anxiety and fear, Wallace willed her mind to be still and focused. If it was the watch that got hurt here, then maybe it could take her back. With the shaky hand she pressed her thumb down on the button of the watch and waited... and waited some more... and a couple of more seconds until she realized that nothing, absolutely nothing would happen. Had the watch broken again? Internally this was not sitting well with Wallace's gut.

"－and the Church, Christ almighty…"

"Hey… he－HEY!" She tried to get the attention of Leonardo as he was in a moment of an existential crisis. 'Man, does he talk a lot.' She had to find topic that would catch the young inventors attention, that's a pretty neat electrical resonant transformer circuit you've made…" She saw his form stiffen, "Tell me Leonardo, how long did it take you to invent this circuit that produces high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity? The Church must be furious…"

Leonardo turn back to face Wallace, for a second his face was serious and calculating her choosing his next words carefully, "You know of science? So I am understanding that you are not one of del  Verrocchio men, er women." He visibly relaxed at the conclusion, "And yes it is a circuit that produces alternating-current electricity. It took years to make… But what would you know of any of this?"

Leonardo' s question hung in the air and Wallace wasn't sure if he was asking because he was just curious, or if she was just a girl or even possibly both. Wallace Wade the pros and cons of her next actions. She also replayed every time travel movie that she had ever seen: Back to the Future, Hot Tub Time Machine, Men in Black, and Meet the Robinsons. Granted Meet the Robinsons didn't have the main character travels back into the past, but into the future, however, it was still one of Wallace's favorite films next to Mulan in the Disney category. Wallace telling Leonardo small increments of the future well in the past could have a large effect on the future and her would be present. But, if she wanted to get her whole watch situation figured out and fixed and on her way home as soon as possible. She hoped her judgment on his character was good enough.

"Do you have a private place to talk?"

It turns out that the young da Vinci lived and a farmhouse a little ways away from the barn. According to Leonardo he was doing an understudy, or an apprenticeship under Andrea del Verrocchio who was a Florentine painter. The farmhouse on the countryside was a modest size, yet dull and decoration and color. However it was stuck to the brim with finish portraits, sculptures and other types of art. When Leonardo and Wallace arrived at the house, Wallace found it odd that Leonardo's teacher was present. Leonardo explained that Verrocchio would take impromptu trips into the city to talk to our clients and leave him to his own devices, expecting him to paint and do nothing more. Accepting his answer, they both took seats in the living room on some slightly torn cushioned chairs; Wallace began her story. She told him of the watch, it's configurations, her origins etc, but she was careful not to mention how he would soon become famous in the future.

She talked for hours going into detail into each and every action and explanation she could think of how she got here. Wallace hope that she wasn't losing Leonardo, but by the looks of his face he was hanging on to her every word. Leonardo's face looks spaced out the still focused, his body subconsciously lean towards Wallace's over the table as he had his head leading on his hand for support. By the end of the story she was desperately out of breath.

“And that’s how I got here,” she panted and pushed her locs off her face, “Diagnosis?”

He scanned her with his eyes more a moment, “You are not crazy, at least I am fairy sure of it… You mentioned this watch, may I see it?”

She stared him down, if she wanted to get back to her time. She reached into her pocket and pulled it out, Leonardo gently took it from her hands and examined it. Expertly moving his fingers around each curve and edge of the timepiece he pressed the top button of the watch before Wallace could warn him. As before, nothing happened, time didn’t slow down and the physical world didn’t dissipate.

Humming to himself, he pried open the watch to show the compass like map on the second interface of the pocket watch. ‘Latin,’ he thought ot himself thankful he had been forced to learn the language as a child. The more that he stared at the compass the more it began to make sense. He suddenly got up from his chair that startled Wallace.

“Follow me,” he mumbled going through the maze that was called a house. Soon they both stood upon a large door made of oak, pulling out a key from one of his pockets Leonardo unlocked the door, and held it open for Wallace motioning for her to enter.

“Thanks,” Leonardo nodded. Stepping in Wallace marveled at the chaos that was the mystery room. It was filled with misplaced papers written in Italian and some Latin with designs on it, she noticed one in particular as the flying machine. If anything Wallace realized how history down played Leonardo da Vinci, to her his mind seemed like a real time working machine from the future trapped in the body of the past. Wallace gravitated to Leonardo who was standing in from of a large atlas map, she tried to piece together what she saw to no avail.

He concluded, “It’s a constellation map.” And then quickly moved on to another wall full equation scratched out and rewritten in ink, eyes quickly going over every possible formula.

Wallace moved closer to the Italian, “Ok, and what about it?”

“Your Nonno, I mean grandfather had this as a placement for time. The way that you position the circle and ledger help pinpoint where on Earth you want to be and at what time of day,” he patiently explained inhaling her scent of vanilla and fresh cotton, “And the clock is for what year you wish to be sent you whether past or present.”

Wallace was slowly connecting the dots, “So, the reason why it didn’t work when you pressed the button was because it was already set to a time and place I’m at?”

He nodded, “If you know your direct coordinates I can set it back to your home in America.”

Without missing a beat, “39° 57' 9.2988'' N and 75° 9' 54.7992'' W.” It was the IP address ingrained in her memory if she ever needed. Leonardo took the number and manually set the compass into its coordinates and it was done, he handed her back the clock.

“That is all, you are welcome to go back home.”

Wallace idly looked at the watch in her hands, then back at Leonardo. In a flash she was giving him a spine breaking hug as thanks, “I am so happy I got stuck in the mid-1400’s with one of the brightest minds.” Leonardo’s body was stiff upon receiving the hug, but slowly relaxed and gave her an awkward pat on the back.

“No problem Wallace, you were not meant to be here anyway.”

She broke the hug, “I guess you’re right,” there was a ghost smile on her face, “I guess I’ll see you later?” 

He chuckled, he’d be long gone by then but he’s miss his short term acquaintance. 

“I guess you will.”

And with a literal flash she was gone from his eyes. Leonardo sat back in his chair with a huff, he needed a drink. A pretty girl who just materialized out his vision, and an insanely logical story all within one day was too much for his mind. He moved himself upstairs to his dainty room full of paint and a bottle of liquor on his painting table. He sat himself down a and took a swig trying to calm his nerves, if that was a warning from God Himself to stop messing with the universe via his inventions then he was surely listening in. Taking the pencil that was settled atop his desk he began drawing random figures among the page.

The day he had, and the person he met were both highly… remarkable, but worrisome at most. For now he knew that science was by no means a myth, but a working subject matter that could bend the will of time and space. Also meaning that his theories on time travel had to be revamped. Putting the bottle down from his lips he pulled down a design for a similar watch that Wallace had, however it was bigger in stature and made to look like a sundial. There were too many synchronicities to his liking, he glanced down back at his hand.

There stood among the small sketches of ravens, hummingbirds, and trees a mini shoulder length portrait of Wallace. ‘The imitation angel,’ he thought to himself. Leonardo leaned back into his chair and blankly stared up at his cracked ceiling, a plethora of thoughts roamed his mind, but he couldn’t help think about crossing paths with Wallace again. Her knowledge and what she could teach him on his bulky electric conductor, deep down he knew that meeting her wasn’t a coincidence. He didn't believe in coincidences. But also also didn’t believe in seeing her again, his eyes glanced at the canisters of paint that littered his other desk, physically that is.

Wallace’s feet met solid ground, then her knees buckled beneath her. Not willing to take any chances, she dug for her phone to see the times as 7:32 in the evening just about the time she had left. She sighed in contentment, she was finally home, but something deep within her told her it was far from over. Whatever this was.

She stared at the pocket watch in her hand. ‘This thing is dangerous and by no means a toy… I don’t know how grandpa Leroy got his hands on it or why he didn’t break it earlier. It would be best for me to destroy it.’ Wallace weighed her options, the watch could bend time and potentially cause some type of world ending danger. Her thoughts were briefly interrupted by her aunt’s loud talking.

“Girl, she got me up her in the suburbs watching her child… I know, I know she a whole doctor she coulda hired a nanny. Best thing is I get to live lavish for the summer while my man traveli－Sis, I told you he gon visit me whenever his lil’ business trip done with, I’m sure my sister won’t mind the extra body.”

Wallace’s body visually shivered, ‘Leila’ she thought in disgust. She turned to the open garage door and admired the soft wind flowing in and the cotton candy and mango colored skies above her. She wasn’t scheduled for anything big this summer, her plans for NASA were in the trash, quite literally. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breathe, ‘I should really destroy this thing,’ she clenched the watch in her hand, ‘But, then again… it is “act out season” for a reason…’ Opening her eyes she stared down at the watch.

She looked at her horizon one more time and watched as the clouds moved impossible slow out of frame and dissipate into strikingly bold colors that put Wallace mind into a frenzy. And soon enough Wallace disappeared from her place in the garage, going with only one thing in mind.

‘Maybe Leonardo might need a muse.’ 

[thecorteztwins]

Inhuman royal family in the Evo verse

I was hoping someone would ask this one! How to work the Inhumans into Evo is actually something I’ve thought about a lot, because I love the Inhumans and I love Evo, but they SEEM so incompatible, since Evo doesn’t really have any other superhuman species besides mutants, and just plonking some in doesn’t fit the tone of the universe, in my opinion.The EASIEST option is just to make them all mutants, give them some human names (Blackwell Bolton and Maxwell Bolton for the Boltagon brothers, Gordon for Gorgon, etc) and let their Inhuman names just be their codenames. But...I feel like that takes away their Inhuman-ness. That is, I think them being this weird isolated people with their own culture who are wary of outsiders and consider themselves superior to all others is a really important part of who they are, and I’d like to keep that.So my idea is they are mutants, but they’re not just normal “I grew up as a normal human in a normal human family til whoa I got my powers!” mutants. They’re an extended mutant family that has lived in an off-the-grid commune for GENERATIONS. The idea is that their ancestors were mutants whose powers surfaced much earlier in history, like Logan or Magneto, or maybe even before them. Persecuted by humanity, who believed them to be witches (like maybe they came up during Puritan times in America?) they fled and formed their own secret community. They’ve welcomed in new blood here and there over the years, but it’s still very small and tight, implied to be a little inbred. So they’re people who are mutants, who grew up knowing they were mutants even before they got their powers, whose parents and grandparents before them were mutants, whose neighbors are mutants, who have only ever known other mutants. To them, it’s HUMANS who are the weird ones. And since they didn’t have the word “mutant” til very recently in history, they’ve always called themselves “Inhumans”. The “Rite of Terrigenesis” in this version wouldn’t be what gives them their powers, but instead a coming-of-age ritual that they perform after their abilities first surface. They go deep into a mist-filled crystal cave at the center of the commune, and meditate on their new abilities until they come up with their new “Inhuman name” to reflect said abilities. So they’re given human names at birth and then take on names like Triton and Medusa later. Which makes a bit more sense than “yeah the kid we named Triton just happened to turn into a fish guy when he got his powers, what are the odds”.The emergence of mutants en masse amidst the general populace has shaken their sense of identity, as they always considered themselves a unique people, and caused debate among them if they should reach out to these other mutants, attempt to rejoin humanity, if these other mutants count as “Inhumans” too or if you have to be raised in the Inhuman culture to count, should they help the persecuted mutants in the outside world, etc. As for Xavier, he actually learned of the Inhumans long ago via Cerebro, even before he formed the X-Men. He visited them and offered them the chance to send their children to his school, but they declined, wanting nothing to do with the outside world at the time. However, since he had found them, he knew, as they did, that the rest of mankind would sooner or later. So he worked together with them to develop technology that would “block” devices like Cerebro, should anti-mutant forces ever develop them. Thus, the Inhumans stayed hidden successfully---until SOMETHING happens.I don’t have a distinct idea as to what. Off the top of my head...I’m going to say Crystal ran away, wanting to explore the outside world, and she got attacked/captured by a Sentinel. When the X-Men liberate the mutants being kept in the same holding facility as her, they of course get her as well. From her, they learn about the Inhumans, and they want to go meet them. Xavier, however, is like “no, they want to be left alone, I’ll return Crystal privately.” And Crystal is like “but I don’t wanna go home!” but since she’s not being treated badly there, Xavier is like “well you’re going” because he knows the Inhumans, he knows they’ll just come take her back by force. So Xavier takes her there in the Blackbird with some of the older X-Men. But the New Mutants, of course, are all “hey if this teenager says she doesn’t want to go home cuz it’s boring, she shouldn’t have to!” and they stow away, intending to “rescue” her. So after Crystal is handed back to her family, the New Mutants sneak out of the Blackbird and come help her escape AGAIN, but they get caught by her sister (Medusa), cousin (Gorgon), and sister’s boyfriend (Black Bolt). This is how we meet the Inhuman royals, and how they come into conflict with the New Mutants.And somehow or another, by the end of it they’ve decided they want to explore the human world too, and convince the elders/their parents to allow them to be the first explorers into the outside world since the community’s founding, as ambassadors to the “NuHumans” (as they call other mutants) They don’t become permanent members of the school or the New Mutants/X-Men, but they do have a temporary stay at the Xavier’s mansion and attend Bayville High for awhile as “transfer students” from the country of “Attilan” (the name of their commune) Xavier probably helps a lot with convincing the Bayville high officials that “Attilan” is TOTALLY a real country, guys, it’s a tiny city-state in the Himalayas! And the reason they’re white is because it was founded by, um, European missionaries!And now after that VERY LENGTHY SET-UP, here’s the Inhuman royals! As teens! Because that’s the fun of Evo!

Blackwell Bolton aka Black Bolt: As in the comics, he doesn’t speak due to the destructive nature of his vocal powers, which almost destroyed the Attilan commune when he was a child. Because of this, he feels great responsibility for the commune, and protecting it to make up for the damage he did as a baby, even though it wasn’t his fault. His first thought is therefore always looking after his fellow Inhumans, and his reason for coming to the outside world is mostly just to protect the other kids while they explore. His teachers are told that he is deaf-mute but that he has a hearing aid (he wears a fake one) so he can hear them, just not reply. The reason given to his teachers as to why he doesn’t speak sign language is that “oh he does but only Attilan sign language, and there are no interpreters for that in America!”He’s seen as the “strong silent type” by the girls at Bayville High, and it makes them VERY interested in him. The guys claim it just makes him “weird” however, mostly out of jealousy. I imagine there’s a scene where the Bayville guys invite him to play sports or have some other athletic competition, and they expect they’ll humiliate him because there’s no way the weird foreign disabled kid will be able to be good at anything...and he ends up EFFORTLESSLY WHIPPING ASS!He and Medusa might already be dating, I did call him her boyfriend earlier, but I think maybe Romantic Tension might fit Evo better. The show was ALL ABOUT THAT ROMANTIC TENSION. BB/Medusa/Max might be the new Jean/Scott/Rogue?Maxwell Bolton aka Maximus: BB’s younger brother, of course! I’m not sure if I’d make him a villain yet or not? And whether he is or not would influence if he keeps his powers a secret or not. If he’s not going to be a bad guy, then he doesn’t keep them a secret. If he is going to be a bad guy, he keeps it secret so that he can more easily use them without the other Inhumans and X-Men realizing what he’s up to. And if he’s a bad guy....what’s his motive? Do these Inhumans still have royalty? Is BB still in line to be king? Or is it something else? Also, he probably still disdains regular humans (and possibly also “NuHumans”) like in 616, so if he’s got some villainous plan that could give him motive to come along with the others to the human world. But it could also be he just wanted to hang out with Medusa, who of course he has to have an unrequited creepy crush on.Max is obviously a science/engineering whiz, basically the new Forge, and ends up being INCREDIBLY useful on the X-team for this. I think that there should probably be a scene where he and his tech single-handedly trounce the Brotherhood, all with a smirk on his face. So at first they love having him around, but his personality quickly grates on everyone, even MORE than the other Inhumans (who, it turns out, are all kind of snotty besides Crystal)I think I wouldn’t write him as obviously “mad” at the start, just very energetic and enthusiastic about his work, so hyper and weird but nothing to suggest he’s truly unstable. But there increasingly starts to be moments where he just goes “too far” against enemies or even just people who bother him, to the point it starts to be worrisome, with eventually the others having to actually FIGHT him to put a stop to it. I think that, as with the “Royals” series, there would definitely be acknowledgement and exploration with how ableist Attilan society is, that they had no sign language for Black Bolt, no way of recognizing or treating whatever it is Max specifically suffers from, with the explanation being that in this universe, they never moved on with the rest of outside society on these matters, that they still look at these ailments the way their ancestors did long ago. I think there would have to be careful balance to show that he’s not evil BECAUSE of his illness though, more than he actually ends up failing in said evil because said illness trips him up. Something like that. Also the idea wouldn’t be that he was hiding his mental illness, but that it’s developing/getting worse now that he’s hit puberty. And there should be a really emotional scene where it’s been figured out what’s going on and he begs Xavier to fix him and Xavier explains he can’t rewire Max’s brain on that level ;A;Madeleine McQuillan aka Medusa: As mentioned, she’s either Black Bolt’s girlfriend already, or there’s at least Ship Tease between them. She keeps her hair tightly bound so that she can’t subconsciously use it in public. She’s very sensible, responsible, etc., and is basically the “Jean Grey” of the group, except she’s much more no-nonsense, she can be kind of cold and harsh but only when it’s actually called for. She’s basically the serious sister to contrast Crystal’s free spirit, and she takes the leadership role in the group alongside Blackwell, being the one who reprimands the others when they get out of hand or doing something dumb that might get them hurt, reveal their powers to normal humans, etc. But she also defends them against the X-Men when the X-Men try to reprimand them for the same things; she’s very much got a “these are my idiots and only *I* can call them idiots!” attitude, and she cares about them and feels responsible for them, something Blackwell can relate to. I think her arc should be less about romance, and more about her and Crystal’s relationship, their differences and conflicts, and each coming to understand and appreciate why her sister is the way she is. Crystal McQuillan: Might give her an elemental-themed codename if I can think of one! Anyway, she’s the open-minded free spirit of the group, curious about the human world and eager to explore it. She’s very fun-loving and doesn’t hesitate to follow her heart, but the downside means she’s impulsive, childish, and doesn’t think about others before she acts. Due to her enthusiasm for the human world, she’s been consuming human media since childhood (probably something she and Max did together as kids actually), and thus seems the most “normal” to the Bayville kids and X-Men alike, and fits in with them the best out of all her family. The boys especially like her, and I imagine she’s got ship-tease with Sam Guthrie and Duncan Matthews both. I think there might be an episode where she starts getting involved with Duncan and Jean tries to warn her what a jerk Duncan is, but she ignores her and then ends up in some real trouble because of it. There should probably also be some obligatory moment where Pietro winks at her during a battle with the Brotherhood and she calls him cute or something, but nothing beyond that.Gordon Peters aka Gorgon: First thing, someone will ask him why that’s his codename since weren’t the Gorgons what the mythological Medusa was, and he’ll explain that there’s another creature in lore called a Gorgon that is a bull-like creature. Because there is, and his codename baffled me until I found this out.Anyway, Gordon ends up fitting in at the school IMMEDIATELY. He’s a jock, he loves to party, he fits right in with the “popular crowd” even while all the other Inhumans (except Crystal) struggle to various degrees to integrate. Same powers, he wears specialized boots/shoes to disguise his hooves and block the effects of his stomps if need be. I don’t really have any ideas for him besides that he probably gets a human girlfriend or at least is implied to be as popular with the ladies as Blackwell (and unlike Blackwell, he reciprocates the attention!)Carson and Tristan, aka Karnak and Triton: Haven’t picked a surname for them! I also haven’t decided if Karnak’s powers come from training like in the comics, or if they’re actually POWERS like in the ABC series. I’m thinking the latter. Either way, he’s even colder and harsher than Medusa, and way more abrasive about it, so he rubs people the wrong way easily as much as Max does. Thus it annoys the X-team EVEN MORE how useful he is. There’s probably a scene where he goes toe-to-toe with Logan during a fight in training after Logan has wiped the floor with everyone else, but instead of this making Logan or the kids LIKE him, it actually just makes them more irritated with him. The fact he doesn’t care at all makes them like him even less. He’s kind of like Jean in that people resent him for his talents, but unlike Jean this doesn’t cause him any conflict. The only thing that bothers him is when everyone else is BEING AN IDIOT.Triton had to live in the Attilan lake ever since his powers surfaced. He didn’t think he’d be able to go on the trip into the outside world, but once Maximus had access to the level of tech available at Xavier’s, he was able to build him a breathing apparatus. It fits around his neck, and he hides it with scarves and turtleneck sweaters. He uses an image inducer like Kurt, of course.Due to the fact he hasn’t been able to socialize much since he was a kid, a lot of his social skills are very awkward, and he comes off as shy and weird even when he’s TRYING to fit in very hard with the other kids, he’s just so happy to be here but they all think he’s a weirdo. It’s also hard for him to prove his worth in combat to the X-Men since like...he doesn’t really have any powers? He’s just really good at living in an aquatic environment. In the comics he has a lot of training, but in Evo I think he’d lack that, and thus be pretty useless in a fight unless it was underwater. Kurt would see him as a kindred spirit, and go out of his way to be his best buddy, take him to social events, etc.Lockjaw - Of course Lockjaw has to be included! Since there’s no Terrigen Mists though, I think he’d just be a normal dog! Still probably an unusually large bulldog, like the size of a pit bull or Saint Bernard, maybe he’s a mastiff, but he’s not cow/hippo-sized like the comics and show. He also cannot teleport, but maybe he has some kind of teleporting device put on to him by the Attilan parents as an emergency portal back home should the kids ever need it. 

[pinpuku]

pokemon partner/team/region request for @brisenau

original request & description under “keep reading”

zodiac: virgo (aug. 28) mbti: istj

fav colors: red, black, and blue favorite animal(s): sea creatures and dogs

hobbies: video games, reading, listening to music, watching movies aspirations: lmao i can’t even decide what to wear half of the time. i just want to do something that pays well and is enjoyable favorite area type: cities/mountainsides + cool or cloudy weather

good traits: i’m smart and sometimes even funny. i love my friends and show affection by buying them stuff or just goofing off with them. helpful, obedient, hardworking, and patient on good days. laid back most of the time (or at least i try to be)

bad traits: HOO BOY. self-loathing, lazy, selfish, materalistic, easily stressed, snarky, bitter, cold (but secretly emotional), stubborn, awkward, runs away from conflict, dependent on others (as much as i hate it), irritable. i could hate on myself for hours lol

i’m garbage at describing myself, but thank you anyway! 💚💚💚

Let’s meet your new team! 

♡ I think a good partner for you would be Ralts. Ralts is sensitive, shy, empathetic & emotional. It is also very intelligent, especially for being otherwise similar to a quiet human child. Ralts will constantly test you in a positive way without actually trying to. Raising Ralts will require you to learn how to better control & understand your feelings & internal reactions more, as Ralts will feel everything you do to some scale. When you are happy & calm, Ralts will be happy & calm and so on. This might sound like a horrible match for anyone who isn’t particularly emotionally healthy, but it can be a great chance to learn & grow for new trainers. You will benefit from having a partner that can soften & brighten your life. Raising a happy Ralts will have a trainer both consciously & subconsciously rewire their brain to think in better, healthier ways, simply for the sake of Ralts initially. Of course a plain out bad or extremely volatile person are obvious exceptions. Ralts will love affection, goofing off & being as helpful as possible to a trainer they trust & love. Ralts will bring out your best qualities. The bond between a Ralts and a good trainer will grow to be one of the strongest bonds there is. Ralts won’t tolerate you hating on yourself, freely allowing your bad traits to take full reign. However, being emotionally aware & connected to others, Ralts will be understanding & loyal even when you are just not having a great day of course, as everyone has those days including ralts!

♡ Krabby is pretty easy to care for. Just be aware you have to train it to not pinch! Trainers are often charmed by the bubble shows they can create, although not quite as grand & controlled of a scale as the Popplio line. Can grow into surprisingly strong battlers despite their diminutive size. Tentacruel is a pokemon that has a scary image & hunting style, but it is otherwise not particularly difficult to train once tamed. This is especially true if it was captive bred. Just be sure to not grab their tentacles! A dedicated & focused trainer won’t have many issues with Tentacruel. The orbs on their head glow beautifully from time to time, especially when battling. 

♡ Samurott will appreciate a trainer that has a hardworking nature. It is very skilled it battle, and it will intentionally be as proud & intimidating as possible in a fight. Samurott will help a trainer become more sturdy, unshakable & confident. They trust a capable trainer fully & have an honorable attitude in all situations. 

♡ Poochyena & Furfrou are the poke-dogs of the team! Poochyena has a wild streak to their personalities, but they are extremely loyal & obedient to their trainer. Training them to not nip at a young age is key, let them know to reserve that for rough play time & battles only! They are still puppies, and they learn quickly. They work well in teams. Furfrou is regal & serious in comparison. You have to earn their trust fully before you can touch & handle their fur too much. Once trust is earned from patience & hardwork, they are loyal & can be surprisingly fierce in battle or when protecting their loved ones. Don’t underestimate Furfrou just because they look pretty! 

As for region, I feel Sinnoh would be a perfect fit. It is a mountainous, cool region with many interesting cities. It’s rich in mythology & history, and lifestyle tends to be slower paced compared to some other regions. They have advanced technology when it comes to natural energy. 

Hope you like your team! ^~^

[what-even-is-thiss]

I wrote a creative essay about my least favorite aunt. Yeet.

Read it if you’d like. I’m just happy to finally get the damage she caused me mostly dealt with to the point where I feel comfortable writing about it.

Language Barrier

Whenever I speak in German my expressions and hand gestures suddenly become ridiculously animated, like I’m trying to make up for my lack of vocabulary with a sign language that hasn’t been invented yet. One that only I know the meaning of. I flap my hands around like a maniac and point to things I don’t know the words for and make broken sentences that sound like a caveman made them as I misgender inanimate objects left and right.

Das. Das. That. That. This. This.

I can physically feel my brain rewiring itself. I speak like fool. Wrong order spoken are words. Sometimes anxiety make cry me. Social kind.

However, I speak much more German than my uncle’s mother and stepfather speak of English so I’m forced to use what I can and hope they can understand my thick American accent as we stay with them in Southern Germany. Everyone keeps trying to reassure me that my German is very good, but I can’t stop out of order speaking.

Kann ich habe Brot mehr bitte? Can I having bread more please?

I want to crawl into a hole and die.

My grandmother warned me that a person can grow tired of the amount of bread that Germans eat and according to that Bible thing that we both read man cannot live by bread alone. I’m starting to understand both of those things, eating bread and jam for breakfast yet again because I don’t like butter with marmalade and there’s no cheese left.

The weather, unlike my breakfast or Deutsche Grammatik, is perfect. Slightly cold, sunny and overcast at the same time. The neighborhood that my uncle’s parents live in is beautiful, suburban, on the edge of Schwartzwald, known in English as the Black Forest. I can’t remember the name of the town but I do know that we tried to get a brewery tour and my aunt, her twins, and I waited in the van as my uncle talked loudly at somebody in a local dialect until he got out of them that they don’t do tours anymore.

We went to a rope climbing course instead. My uncle, tall and skinny, balding, fit, took the twins, boy and girl, skinny like their dad, not taking after their mother, my mother’s sister, and went rope climbing in Schwartzwald.

I’m stuck talking with my aunt as we stand below the ropes course and I’m tired of speaking in German so we both take time to find comfort in each other’s distinctly Californian manner of speaking.

My aunt is a character. That’s a polite way to describe her if you don’t want to speak ill of someone that’s not in the room. She wears no makeup except for when she’s getting her picture taken or going somewhere important and she always looks stressed and tired with her eyes just a little too wide open. She’s maybe four inches shorter than me but she has the ability to make me feel like I only come up to her waist. In my mind she’s always wearing a knee length beige skirt and a green t-shirt even though she owns other articles of clothing than that, including more than 20 pairs of shoes. Her eyes are wide and her hands move in an animated fashion even when she speaks English. When she speaks German she becomes an exaggerated version of herself, perhaps to make up for her thick American accent and occasionally sketchy grammar. She has lived in Switzerland since the 90s and spoken German since the 80s. I once asked her how to tell what a noun’s grammatical gender is. She told me that she had no idea.

I didn’t know my mother for very long before she died but my grandmother tells me that when my mom was young, to describe her sister, she quoted a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The one about the little girl with the little curl who when she was good she was very good and when she was bad she was horrid.

My aunt’s hair is straight, but other than that the poem describes her very well. Today would be a day she was horrid.

I don’t claim to be a perfect human being. I can be a bitch sometimes just like anybody else. The thing is though, my aunt never let me know when I was doing something bitchy like a normal person would. Instead she let me keep on doing it until she was ready to explode. And then she exploded.

Or, no. Not exactly being bitchy. Just doing something that she didn’t understand or like. She’s a very animated person and her voice goes like

And

Up.

Down.

All the time.

She’s very expressive. I, on the other hand, am not that excitable. I smile, yes, I cry, yes, but I try to be stoic. I like being stoic. It feels natural. I don’t want to express to everyone around me every time I am excited or upset. In my opinion it’s none of their business. I also tend to express gratitude through actions and gift giving rather than hurting my face and voice smiling and screaming all of the time.

I had thought bringing gifts from America, delivering onto my aunt’s family the ever elusive box of grits and Bakersfield candy and trinkets from Disneyland Anaheim would show gratitude. I was under the impression that helping to cook dinner, pack the van, refill the ice trays, take care of the twins, carry the groceries, clean the house, would show how much I loved her. I learned though, in a firestorm under the canopy of dark trees and children riding on zip lines that our love languages didn’t translate properly and she thought that my lack of expressiveness meant that I hated her. She was hysterical about it. I then expressed myself by changing into a lovely shade of red and producing saltwater from my eyes.

Climbing hills is a thing you get used to when you spend time in Central Europe. Walking for three or four kilometers isn’t such a feat in a valley, where the ground is flat and rarely changes, but in hilly terrain you quickly learn just how long that distance is and how much walking can hurt. Locals take no pity on you because they expect that everyone has those muscles built up in their legs when you’ve never had to use your legs like that for long stretches of time before.

Navigating emotion and expectations at home is easy. There is one language being spoken and everyone uses it to tell each other what’s wrong. When staying with my aunt for long periods of time, however, you start to understand emotional exhaustion. Something that would take half a minute to communicate takes up ten minutes of screaming because she expected you to know everything. A flat crowded city turns into a hilly countryside with no help for miles. You quickly learn how to swear in German because she pushes her husband to screaming as well.

Scheiße.

Eventually my uncle finished with the ropes course and pulled me away from her. He gently explained to me in English what we were going to be doing for the next few days. I stopped leaking water from my eyes and tried to remember what had prompted her to start yelling at me but I couldn’t figure it out. Another talent she has. Distracting you from linear events.

While I was in Germany there was a terrorist attack in Münich. Brexit was fresh in everyone’s minds. My first presidential election would be happening in November. I only understood about half of what was said on the news. My little cousins and their dad took turns translating for me. I had the feeling that I still wasn’t getting the whole story.

My aunt and uncle have twins. Test Tube Babies. The girl is the older twin but strangely enough doesn’t hold it over her brother’s head, which would fit perfectly with her personality. The boy takes after his mother in some respects, namely her loud voice.

When we went to Prague we stayed in a campground because that’s a lot cheaper than a hotel and that family affords a second house because they’re stingy. Almost every morning it was a struggle to get the boy out of bed. He and his sister were almost ten and he screamed and refused to move. He cried. He was loud. No amount of discipline worked. His sister stood around quietly going about her business, as did I. We did the same thing when her parents got into screaming matches.

Prague is an old city. A busy city. I loved it, even with all of the pay toilets and Czech bluntness. Even when an angry Czech lady smoking a cigarette yelled at me in broken English for not knowing that I had to pay for the restroom. The old castles and cathedrals and statues and just the right amount of dirtiness in the subway more than made up for it.

My aunt payed for me to go look at a museum that she didn’t want to look at. She told me to take all the time I wanted as the rest of the family waited outside. I didn’t sense any passive aggressiveness that time, so I did. It was a complex that was part of the Prague art museum, a system spread out around the city. The section I walked through by myself was a collection of medieval Roman Catholic art. Stained glass windows, paintings, tapestries. I’m a Lutheran that lives with atheists, so my experience with Catholic art is mostly non existent. Atheists don’t have religious figures to draw and Lutherans are extremely stingy with their images, worried about crossing into the realm of idolatry.

One thing I noticed was that Mary appeared everywhere, even in stories I thought she didn’t belong. In some images she stood equal with Jesus, reminding me of a female God. She seemed mature, different from the outcasted teenage mother I had told children about in Sunday School classes. Different from the refugee that had been painted for me in sermons. I wondered what kind of mother this Mary was. I wondered what her Hebrew sounded like. Or, maybe this Mary spoke Czech and the Mary in Germany spoke German and the Mary in the Vatican spoke Latin and the Mary my Catholic friends at home looked to spoke Spanish. Maybe if I prayed to Mary she would speak English. Maybe she would turn out to speak German and would look down at the frantic dancing of my hands, trying to find meaning in it.

But I don’t pray to Mary, and neither do my aunt or uncle. I report to them what I saw and my observations about Mary. Namely that she seems to be everywhere. My aunt doesn’t quite pick up on the fact that I simply find it interesting and takes it as an invitation to rant about Catholics. I squint at her as we walk back to the subway. I’m trying to figure out if I’d somehow been speaking another language. She certainly seems to be. Maybe it’s a generational gap. Maybe it’s just her, but I try to turn the conversation back to a tone of tolerance rather than complaint. A battle I quickly lose.

Later, in a public park in that busy city, my aunt yelled at me and cried because I had been calling her by her first name rather than Aunt. I nearly start leaking again. I shake. I think she’s speaking English but I don’t understand it. I physically step away from her as she accuses me of not seeing her as family. At the bottom of the hill we’re standing on a dog plays fetch with his owner. Neither of them take notice of the screaming middle aged American woman throwing accusations her deceased sister’s child as her own children zone out and wait for it to be over. No help comes. Nobody translates for me and Google Translate doesn’t have a setting for this.

Twenty minutes later she jokes with me as we find a rare but welcome burrito shop. I buy a mango soda imported from Mexico and it softens my homesickness. We eat on the steps of a light rail station. I laugh. The twins laugh and bounce around, talking to each other in a mixture of English, Swiss-German, and high German. The boy takes a bite out of my burrito and thinks the fact I can eat something that spicy makes me the coolest person in the world. My aunt laughs with me. We make plans for when we go to Southern Germany and visit her husband's parents. That’s where his dentist is. He needs a bit of work done. We’ll have fun, she promises. We had a good time in Prague. I put the bad times in a shoebox for later and then agree with her.

After she yells at me in Schwartzwald for not showing emotion I go quiet. I put more things in the shoebox I’ve made in my mind to deal with later. I learn that all of them have been eavesdropping on the phone calls I’ve been making to my dad and friends back home. My aunt approaches me about how I complained about the yelling. I’m suddenly paranoid and wonder if she read some of the postcards I sent out. I watch my words now and put the ones that might set off her fuse in the box. The little house outside of Zurich has started to feel like home when I return to it and I’m slightly disgusted at that realization. The flowers all make my eyes water and I’m not given nearly enough allergy pills. I still don’t understand what language she’s speaking. Her words are in English or German, as are mine, but we still don’t understand each other.

Currants, especially the red ones, are beautiful fruit. Not easy to find in stores, even in Europe, so you’ve gotta pick them yourself. My aunt and uncle have a small city of currant bushes living in their backyard that hugs the bank of the stream that runs through the neighborhood. They’re beautiful and inviting, asking you to eat them please, but when you do your face scrunches up at the tartness. I never did care for sour tastes, so I found my own way to make the currants sweet by baking them into scones. At first my aunt was sceptical of my scones but after some reassurance from her kids that they didn’t taste like cinnamon she tried them and agreed that I did a good job. They were sweet and went really well with milk or tea. We all enjoyed them very much. Nobody had to translate anything.

Every member of that family gives excellent hugs when you can get them. They share drinks and food with each other, a concept that shocked me at first, but I quickly fell into the rhythm of it with them. They bought me my first beer and took me to Worms, Germany. I loved that place. I got to see one of the first print versions of Luther’s German translation of the bible. I ate pastries and tea with them at an outdoor cafe. It was cold and wet in the middle of the summer and the cobblestones made it even gloomier. The moving feet on the sidewalk seemed to have a language of its own and the new architecture standing by the old had no words to be translated but told a story nonetheless.

My experience in Europe was like Europe itself. Americans expect it to be shiny and beautiful, and it is, but you also have to pay to use the restroom which leads people to piss in the street. You will also find cigarette machines on almost every corner. There is one right outside my aunt and uncle’s second house. The packages of cigarettes have pictures of black lungs and diseased gums on them. The people smoke anyways. Europeans are people. They have drama, they worry about money, they cry, they abuse, they kick, they scream, they love. All the problems you had in America won’t disappear over there, and in fact you might find some new problems you didn’t expect. Like not finding salsa or not knowing how to deal with carnival rides that have no line and are boarded like a much more violent version of musical chairs. And don’t expect to practice your target language there either. The people will hear your accent and excitedly try and use you to practice English. And even if you do speak the language, don’t expect to understand with everyone. Hand gestures can only go so far.

When I got home I left the German language behind me for the most part. I also slowly cut off most contact with my aunt’s family. Six weeks spent putting things in a shoebox and not speaking whatever language my aunt was speaking with English and German words was enough for me. By the time I opened my shoebox a few months later it was rotten, smelly, and leaking. It took over a year to clean it out and it’s still warped and stained, containing whispers of my own desperate language that would never penetrate my aunt’s skull or jump over the barrier we had built together.

My rotten shoebox is revolting to look at, and while I was cleaning it parts of the mess got onto the happy memories but thankfully they’re still there. The cathedrals, the warm hugs, the new foods, and comforting rain are all there. Late nights and early mornings, potato pancakes and beer, museums and trees and the times I could honestly say; Ja, ich bin glücklich. Yes, I am happy. And thankfully that sentence is easy to translate.