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fe-husband-heaven · 4 years ago

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Ahaha...ahahaha...ahaHAHAHA

This has been sitting in my drafts for ages but I finally worked up the energy to actually finish it-

(18+)

Summary: Alfonse does an oopsie😳😳😳

Alfonse shot up with a gasp, panting and disheveled, it took a few seconds before he could take a moment to realize where he was. His head was spinning, and his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. He swallowed thickly, and took a moment to gather his bearings. He rubbed at his temples, willing away the headache he could feel gnawing at his mind. He tried to ignore the way he could feel his lower half pulse with warmth.

But it failed miserably when he realized that his undergarments shouldn't have felt as wet as they did.

He gulped, and with a pit forming in his stomach, he peeled back the covers of his bed. A wet patch he could see soaked into his deep blue garments had a feeling of guilt straining his throat. With a shaking hand, he clasped the hem of his underclothes and pulled it back, whimpering at what he saw.

He was coated in cum, his length was slick with his seed, twitching at the sudden cold air. His cock pressed against his underwear, making a tent of his garments, not yet satiated from having released just once. It almost hurt.

Alfonse felt his eyes sting, and a cold sweat had begun running its way through his body.

He'd dreamed about having sex with his partner, of having his summoner in such a lascivious manner, about violating the bond of friendship they'd formed.

He felt sick.

Now, he was sure it'd be too late. Too late to get rid of those feelings that had formed without his permission, too late to look at his summoner the same way he had when he first met them, and too late to erase the images in those dreams from his mind.

He remembered everything. He'd heard once that you forget what most of your dreams once you're awake...clearly, that piece of information was failing him now.

He could still recall the curve of your back, the way your skin dipped under his fingertips as he held your hips in place, and worst of all, he could remember the loving mewl of his name falling from your lips.

His member twitched again, and another hot wave rippled through his stomach. He buried his face in his hands and sighed in frustration. It burned, he was so hard it was almost painful, the slightest movement only furthered the heat.

Exhausted by the entire situation, Alfonse fell tiredly back on the bed, an arm across his forehead as he thought about what to do. Everytime he closed his eyes in hopes that he could simply will away the problem, it only resulted in conjured up images of you in every position he could think of.

Blood would rush right back down, it was a vicious cycle.

He even considered a cold shower at the baths but if he were to leave his room in this state… it'd be near impossible to hide the bulge in his pants.

With a shaky breath, Alfonse begged the heavens to forgive him for what he was about to do.

Slipping a hand slowly into his undergarments, a hand wrapped tentatively around his length, his breath hitched as the smallest touch on his sensitive length was torturous. His hand gave a hesitant pump of his member, Alfonse gritted his teeth as the feeling made his hips rise from the bed and into his hand, his body desperate to keep the touch going.

He'd hoped to simply finish quickly and then rid himself of every reminder of what transpired but it seemed that no matter what mindless rutting he did against his palm, his body refused to give in to release. Frustration was beginning to grow with each stroke, he had been trying his hardest to keep out of mind his beloved Summoner, in hopes of not tarnishing them further.

But it seemed as though he wouldn't have his way at all tonight, his vision clouded with tears as he let himself slip into the onslaught of images his mind had kept from his dreams. He'd wanted so badly to avoid sullying you further but it was clear the moment he allowed his thoughts to wander over to you, the kind of effect you had on him.

His hips jerked up at the first flash of you having your lips wrapped around his cock, looking up at him with half lidded eyes and flushed skin. From there, the variety of positions that his mind threw before him was almost shocking. From having you bent over the edge of a table in the library as he sunk himself deeper inside you to the obscene imagery of your legs snaked around his waist as he ravished you in the middle of the castle's main hall.

All of it propelled him further through his chase for release, with his eyelids shut tight, the wet slap of his cock being worked up and down desperately by his hand seemed to be a thousand times louder as it rang in his ears.

A strangled cry past his lips forced him to muffle his voice with his free hand as his mind plunged further into the myriad of sin that it had dragged you into. Alfonse cursed himself as he sank into imagining it was your hand that was clenching and rubbing his length, his hips refused to stop lifting off the bed with each pump.

He loved you.

He knew it, he'd known for a long time now, but he had always prayed that those feelings would simply dissipate on their own, through the course of time. He had no such luck, the more time you had spent as his side, the stronger he felt about you. He never meant to see you in such a light but you were so kind and warm to him that any effort to keep you away was near impossible.

Hot tears spilled over the sides of his face as shame and guilt overtook him, you were his precious partner, and yet here he was, wondering if you were perhaps in your own bed mirroring his actions with your legs spread, writhing on your bed, calling his name.

Maybe you returned his affections, wishing for nothing else but for him to burst through your door and fill you to the brim as he murmured his love in between sweet loving kisses. Maybe your body was quaking and jutting in rhythm with your hand as you thought of him making love to you with a heart full of nothing but undying adoration.

His back arched as he felt himself reaching closer and closer to his desired freedom, the hand that had been silencing his moans flitted down to meet his other hand, forming a circle for his member to fuck into. A poor substitute for the heat and wet slickness of your insides that he remembered from his dream.

Your name fell from his lips in between his lewd pants, he was so close, and he could feel it in the tightening feeling along his stomach.

The visage that followed would be what pushed him over the edge.

It was pure and sweet, even if it involved him being buried to the hilt inside you, he'd envisioned you lovingly brushing away stray strands of hair from his face before pressing a kiss to his lips.

'I love you, Alfonse.'

With an arching back, Alfonse was left to cry your name amidst frantic declarations of his own I love you's. His chest was painted with the shame of his lust, love, and guilt, all mixed into one. The ropes of pearly white that spurted from his cock felt like a stain on his skin as he came down from his high.

Alfonse gritted his teeth as his throat constricted painfully, he was awash with contempt for himself, he had cum to the thought of his cherished Summoner, and he had enjoyed every second of it.

He felt dirty.

Hopelessness clutched at him as he whimpered through bleary eyes, his pillow was growing damp with the tears it collected. He was spent emotionally and physically, his hair was plastered to his forehead and the lingering proof of his deed was still splayed across his skin.

He would get no sleep that night. Mortification would be his companion for the remaining hours till morning, along with the question of how he could possibly bring himself to face you tomorrow.

#fire emblem heroes #feh #fe heroes #alfonse #lemon #ahahahaha #its very 💦💦 but also very 😭😭#this is my contribution to the fire emblem fandom

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kyber-kisses · 5 years ago

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As You Wish

Dean Winchester x Reader

Summary: the reader is shocked to discover one of Deans favorite movies ( though he would normally never admit it) is the Princess Bride.

Warnings: this one is so incredibly cheesy that I think it needed to be considered a warning, so here it is.

A/n: I was watching the Princess Bride earlier and this came to mind when I was planning some one shots. Hope you guys like it!

“ Are you kidding me?!” Your voice echoed throughout the entirety of the bunker as you let out a shriek.The sudden burst of noise sending both Sam and Jack sitting upright in their chairs, eyes wide with confusion.

“What was that?” Jack looking to Sam for an answer, who only shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not entirely sure.” He’s eyes moving towards the direction of your voice.

A moment later your figure came stomping up the steps of the library, wide eyed and practically radiating energy. Dean following suit a few moments later, a look of annoyance on his features.

“My whole life has been a lie!” You shouted, throwing your hands up in the air.

“Y/n, would you calm down? It’s not that big of a deal.” Dean sighed, sinking into the vacant chair next to his brother.

Your eyes widened again, as you gaped at him before slamming your hands down on the table, making everyone jump. “Not a big deal?!” You swiveled your head towards Sam and then Jack, only to see the still confused and slightly scared expressions on their faces. “ Can you believe this man?” You breathed, locking eyes with Dean again.

Sam leaned back suddenly, slamming the book in front of him shut. “ OK, can you please fill us in on what the hell is going on?” He questioned, eyes darting back and forth between you and his brother.

Dean opened his mouth to start, but you quickly held up a hand, silencing him. “ I literally just discovered that one of your brothers favorite movies is The Princess Bride! How did I not know that?!” You yelled again, a fire blazing in your eyes.

Sam was taken back, his eyebrows furrowed together but a highly amused smirk on his lips. “ Have you really not noticed how often he quotes that movie?”

Your eyes widened as you looked over at Dean, who gave you a nod and a look that screamed It was pretty obvious sweetheart.

“Of course I noticed! But I just thought that was Dean being Dean. To be fair they were really subtle quotes.” You whined, pulling out a chair next to Jack and defeatedly falling into it. You let your head fall onto the table as your mind still processed the fact that you had known Dean since you were 14, and yet never knew what his favorite movie was. It was a shock to say the least.

“Good job Dean, look you broke her.” Sam's voice scolding his brother. Jacks voice pulled you from your defeated position.

“I’m sorry, but what is The Princess Bride?” You could feel your eyes widening to the size of saucers as you whipped around to look at the nephilim, realization kicking in that Jack had never seen it.

You then glanced over at Dean, who shared the same expression as you.

“What’s the Princess Bride? Well, it’s only one of the greatest movies ever created.” You nodded. “I mean, it’s got bandits, Princesses, massive rodents!” You sighed, shaking your head in disbelief. “And Westley.” At this point you were practically swooning, leaning back in your chair.

You were completely oblivious to the look of surprise on Deans face, which was mixed with what could only be described as Jealousy.

Sam let out an amused chuckle as he looked over at you and then his brother. “ You got a crush on Westley Y/n?” He mused.

You let out a huff before nodding, a light smirk on your face. “ Are you kidding me? Westley was my first love.” You placed a hand on your heart. “He was my dream man.” You sighed, leaning back further into your chair. “ when I was younger I wanted him to ride in on a white horse and whisk me off into the sunset.”

Dean could feel a blush creeping up his cheeks as you talked, which only made him duck his head down, trying to distract himself by picking at the side of the table. He wanted to be your hero. God he wanted to be your hero more than anything, and for some reason he was jealous over a fictional character.

“Dean, are you alright?” Your voice pulling him from his thoughts. He cleared his throat, nodding his head.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Just thinking of going on a beer run.”

“Cool! I’ll go with you! We can go rent the Princess Bride so Jack can watch it. We can make it a movie night!” You exclaimed, popping up out of your chair in excitement.

Dean couldn’t figure out if he was more excited or nervous about going with you. He was never nervous around woman, so why the hell was he acting like this? “ Sounds good to me.”he sighed, pushing himself up.

* * * *

Half an hour later You and Dean found yourselves walking out of the store with way more items than you planned on buying. Just beer and the DVD turned to Just beer, the DVD, two boxes of microwave popcorn, several bags of candy, and an apple pie Dean had promised to split with you.

You juggled the items as Dean fished through his pockets in search of the keys. You watched with a smile as the two of you continued your walk down the street towards where Baby was parked.

“Dean, are you sure you’re okay?”

Dean flipped through his keys, trying to avoid your eyes. “ I’m telling you I’m fine! Why do you keep asking?” You raised an eyebrow as you watched him continue to look for the correct key.

“It’s the square-“ you began.

“It’s the square one I know.” Dean breathed, finally finding it and jamming it into the door, unlocking the car for you.

Dean helped you load the bags into the back seat, every once in awhile letting his eyes wander to your face. God, you were beautiful.

“Okay why do you keep looking at me?” You questioned, not looking up from your task. Shit, you had caught him.change the topic Dean. He quickly panicked.

“I um— So Westley huh?” He teased, or at least attempted to, looking over the roof of the impala at you. You shot him a death glare, walking around the car to stand next to him.

“I never should have told you that.” You shook your head with a laugh before looking up into the jade eyes of the eldest Winchester.

“I thought it was cute.” He teased again, smiling down at you. You squinted, looking deeper into his eyes. There was something off in the tone of his voice. Was he- was he jealous?

“Dean Winchester are you jealous of my childhood crush on Westley?” You mused, tilting your head as you watched a blush creep across his freckled cheeks.

“Wh-what? No!” He huffed. You smirked, taking a step closer.

“Oh my god. You are!” You pokes his chest with a giggle. “ Dean, he’s a fictional character!” You laughed.

“Okay. Okay alright get your laughs in.” He rolled his eyes, grabbing your wrist.

You fell silent for a moment, taking in this side of Dean. You liked blushy Dean. He was even cuter than normal. “ you know how I said earlier that when I was younger I wanted Westley to whisk me off into the sunset on a white horse?”

“Kind of hard to forget sweetheart.” Dean chuckled, staring into your y/e/c eyes.

“Well I didnt realize it until now, but that did happen.” You smiled, watching Deans eyebrows knit together in confusion.

“Are you high?” He questioned, only making you laugh.

“No! It’s just that my Westley didn’t wield a sword and ride a white stallion, instead he was a flannel wearing idiot who drove a black 67’ impala.” You smiled, watching as Dean pieced it together.

“Are you talking about me? Because I kinda need to make sure since apparently we suck at communication skills.” Dean questioned, pointing a finger at his chest.

“Yes I’m talking about you, you big dummy. You're my Westley.” You rolled your eyes.

You stepped forward, Flinging your arms around his broad shoulders, his arms wrapping around your waist to help steady you.

“Oh, my sweet Westley.” You sighed, carding your fingers through the back of his hair as you watched the blush on his face grow to a deeper red. “Kiss me.”

Deans next words made you smirk, as he went to cup your face in his hands. “ As you wish.”

Pulling his head down to your level, you pressed your lips against his, feeling your body melt as his lips molded to your own. It was just like what you had dreamed about as a little girl. Full of passion, full of heat and adoration. Full of love.

Since the invention of the kiss, there have been only five kisses that have been rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.

It was so perfect you didn’t want to pull away, and nor did Dean, but the need for air became too great and the two of you parted.

“We- we should probably head back. We do have a movie to watch.” You breathed, looking into his eyes once more.

“Yeah, probably a good idea.” Dean smiled, squeezing your hand in his. “Let’s go home Princess.”

#supernatural #dean winchester #dean x y/n #dean winchester x reader #dean winchester imagine #supernatural x reader #supernatural imagine

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totallyrhettro · 5 years ago

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Ravenvale, Chapter 12

Word Count: 2172 Rating: This chapter: PG-13; overall story: explicit Warnings: Blood and violence, character death Summary: On their way home from another case, Agent Seaborne and Agent Roach find themselves in the strange, fog-covered town of Ravenvale. Notes: Seaborne and Roach AU where, years after the events seen in the YouTube series, they manage to become FBI agents.

Also available on ao3

First Chapter Previous Chapter

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“Roach!” Seaborne shouted, his voice cracking a bit. He wasn’t normally one to succumb to fear; he wasn’t scared of the dark or of being alone, but this place wasn’t normal. Far from normal, it was impossible. There was no way anyone could transform a working library into a run-down, forsaken dump in just one night. Not without a great deal of help and machinery. The scale of such a project in such little time blew Seaborne’s mind. Then there was the void, the impossible cavern that lay beneath this massive building. Staring in that darkness had been like gazing into a pit of utter nothingness.

No. Seaborne refused to let his logic fail him and clung to it tighter than ever. There was a reasonable explanation for everything, he just hadn’t figured it out yet. There wasn’t an endless void; their light just hadn’t been bright enough to see the edges. Transforming a clean library into an absolute mess overnight wasn’t inconceivable, just very difficult. Everything that seemed out of this world had very down-to-Earth explanations, and that gave Seaborne comfort. Roach hadn’t disappeared into thin air; he had just wandered off… for some reason.

Seaborne folded the picture he'd found and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. Then, with a candle in one hand and a glock in his other, he ventured back into the great hall in search of his misplaced friend. Surely Roach was just around the corner, continuing his eternal search for proof of aliens and waiting for his partner to join him. Slightly comforted, Seaborne fully expected to see Roach immediately, yet the hall, like the records office, was devoid of anyone, Roach or otherwise. The light of his candle didn’t shine nearly as much as he would have liked, showing far less than even half of the long room. Silent as the grave, the library gave no sign of where his partner might be. There was not a whisper, not a footstep, nothing.

“Roach?” he asked into the darkness, much quieter this time as if scared that something other than his friend might be listening. Luckily or not, there was no answer as he crept forward into the room. The candlelight shone a good twenty feet around him before quickly being eaten up by the shadows beyond. Seaborne’s footsteps didn’t echo but felt small and powerless against the silence as he crossed the enormous space, ever watchful for a crack or hole in the wooden floor. Everything looked the same as earlier, as far as he could tell, and moreover he saw no sign that his partner had come through here but he didn’t know where else he could have gone. With most of the shelves knocked over there wasn’t a maze of paths to traverse that would lead to other rooms. It was hard enough just going from the front door to the records office.

“Where did you go?” Seaborne muttered to himself, pausing to peer into the gloom. He couldn’t believe that Roach would have just up and left him all alone in this place, nor could he bring himself to think that someone could have taken him away. He had to be here, somewhere. Hopefully nothing else was lurking in the corners, waiting to jump out and eat him. Normally Seaborne wouldn’t cater to such fears, but right now the fear center of his brain was working overtime to counter his more logical side.

“I swear, if this is a prank...” he grumbled, choosing to become angry rather than let his fear take over. Anger he understood. Anger he could deal with. Being afraid? Afraid was not an option. As he approached the center of the room and the hole he had created and nearly fell to his death through, the floor creaked under his foot and he froze on the spot. Holding his breath he listened for anything that might have heard him, for footsteps approaching or a voice calling out. He let his breath out slowly, inching forward, around the gape in the floor. Another creak but this time he kept going. It was just the wood of an old building, nothing to be worried about.

Something moved in the darkness, just at the corner of his eye and he whipped his head around to see, but there was nothing there. A shadow, a phantom, nothing but his imagination, surely. He continued on, slowly, carefully, giving the chasm a wide berth with his steps. Then, a scraping noise, faint as if from far away, yet it could have been right in his ear. He paused again, looking for the source of the noise but it seemed to come from nowhere and yet somewhere very close by. It got louder; like nails being scraped against wood, it wasn’t constant, Seaborne realized, but punctuated like a slow but steady heartbeat.

Almost as quickly as the sound met his ears, it vanished. Silence once again filled the space and the only sound was Seaborne’s shaky breathing. He suddenly realized that his hands were cold, his shoulders were pulled up tight to shield him from a rapid drop in temperature. He didn’t know what it had gotten so cold in here but now he wished he had a free hand to rub his arms to keep warm. Was that his breath? Was it really that frigid? His teeth started to chatter from the bitter chill. He had to find Roach and get out of here, and soon.

Inching past the hole he thought it couldn't be far now, but just as he started to look around to get his bearings, a new sound met his ears. Was it the wind? He hoped it was. It could have been the wind, though it sounded far more ominous. It sounded like a strained hiss, long and shallow. Seaborne’s heart raced and his breath quickened and even though he begged his feet to continue forward, they wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t move. His entire body tingled with the surge of adrenaline now coursing through his body but he just couldn’t will it to move. Another hiss, this time closer. This time he felt a chilling breeze upon the back of his neck. He turned...

Nothing there. The sight of nothing actually made him feel a million times better. It comforted him that it was only the wind. It hadn’t been a ghost, or some other supernatural being. It was only cold air moving through an old building and making strange noises. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. Nothing unusual or unexplained. Seaborne let out a deep sigh of relief, lowering his arms and chuckling to himself. Just the wind, as he had previously assumed. Everything was going to be fine, that much he now knew. He was anxious for nothing. Taking in a cleansing breath, one that tasted of clean, summer air, he reassured himself one last time before turning back around.

Blazing eyes flashed in front of his face, seven of them, furious and crazed. The creature had the face of a demonic raven, mixed with that of a giant spider; huge mandibles flanked a serrated beak that was open in a deafening screech. Seaborne dropped the candle as he raised his hands to cover his ears from the horrible sound. Beyond the head, a feline body bigger than any lion or tiger Seaborne had ever seen, almost as black as the darkness surrounding it. Each leg ended with a three-clawed talon that looked capable of shredding him to pieces. Behind it, two huge wings that defied physics, being both feathered as a bird yet made of shifting shadow. The entire beast screeched again, rearing back to strike, but this time Seaborne reacted. Raising his gun, he pointed it directly at the beast’s heart and fired, getting off several rounds in just a few seconds.

The bullets seemed to hit their mark, but there was no blood, no wound. As they struck the body of the creature, the whole thing dispersed into shreds of darkness that drifted off into the shadows with one last shriek. Seaborne fired off one last shot just to be sure, but the massive creature was gone, perhaps back to whatever hell it had initially crawled out of. He was still shaking as he stared at the spot the creature was occupied, not sure if he was hallucinating or dreaming. It wasn’t enough to blame a trick of the light anymore. It had been far too real, and far too close for comfort.

“Seaborne!” called a voice. Seaborne looked towards the sound; it was coming from the other side of the room, where the exit from his awful place hopefully still was. He didn’t have his candle anymore; it must have gone out after he dropped it. There was light, however, coming from the source of the voice. It had to be Roach’s lighter.

“I’m here!” Seaborne called back, hope swelling in his chest. Moving faster now, he headed towards the light, hoping to find his dear friend at last and be done with his library for good. Over piles of dusty books and around a bookcase or two finally brought him to that which he sought. It was Roach, lighter in hand, handsome as ever.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he was saying, making a sweeping hand motion to demonstrate ‘all over’. “Where you been, man?” Holstering his gun, Seaborne actually felt a smile cross his face.

“I’ve been looking for you, ya jerk,” he explained. “I turned around and you were gone.” Now, surely, they could leave and continue their investigations elsewhere. Roach just shrugged and smiled.

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” he promised. “I thought I heard something over here, but it turned out to be nothing.” Seaborne could definitely relate.

“I think this place is messing with our heads,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Did you at least find anything that would make this trip worth it?” Before Roach could answer, their conversation was interrupted by a strange, eerie hiss. Dread came over Seaborne’s face but Roach didn’t hear a thing and looked at his friend with confusion. Behind him, out of his line of sight, a dark figure rose up, huge and terrifying. It was the demonic raven, its eyes glowing bright, its maw opening wide, its claws prepared to strike.

“Look out!” Seaborne managed to shout, backing up as he went for his gun. Still confused, Roach turned on the spot, coming face to face to a mass of black feathers. Slowly he looked up into the face of a demon, his own face turning pale as a sheet. “Run!” Seaborne told him, still fumbling for his weapon. He didn’t understand why he hadn’t found it yet. Glancing down, he pulled aside his jacket to see the holster more clearly. It was empty. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he thought, remembering clearly how he had put his gun away just moments ago.

While he looked around on the floor, confident that it had just fallen somewhere, the beast pounced on his best friend. Roach cried out as vicious talons slashed at his midsection, a savage maw snapped at his face. He fought back with every ounce of his strength, but it was no use; the beast was three times his size. It moved in a flurry of feathers and claws, tearing through his clothing and flesh in kind, wings flapping excitedly behind it, a long forked tail swooping back and forth like a cat.

“Seaborne!” Roach managed to scream. Giving up on finding his gun, Seaborne grabbed up a large chunk of wood and wielded it like a thick bat. He tested the heft of his new found armament before turning around and preparing the swing. There was darkness; Roach’s lighter had been extinguished and it took a few seconds for Seaborne’s eyes to adjust. He no longer heard Roach yelling, or the sounds of an attack or scuffle. He crept forward as he became accustomed to the new light level and saw the creature was gone, vanished, having left Seaborne’s his partner and friend lying on the floor. The man wasn’t moving.

“Roach,” Seaborne uttered, softer than he meant to. His voice seemed caught in his own throat. With a shaking hand he picked up the lighter; it took him a few tries for the lighter’s spark to catch fire. The quivering flame illuminated a ghastly scene. Roach’s body was covered in blood and the torn remnants of his suit jacket and shirt. “No…” Tears streamed down Seaborne’s face as he examined closer, inspecting a sight that he could barely stand to look at. Kneeling beside Roach’s twisted and mangled body, he felt for a pulse that he didn’t expect to find. No heartbeat, no sign of life. Though he didn’t want to admit to himself the proof that was there before him, Seaborne had to accept the facts… in mere seconds, before his very eyes, his best friend had been killed.

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Next Chapter More Fics

#rhett #link #rhink #fic #fanfic #fanfiction #ravenvale #blood warning #blood trigger #getting in the halloween mood here #scary #horror #death #reminder of my happy ending guarantee

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adhdusagi · 6 years ago

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Princess Tutu episodes 14-end

I watched the entire second half of the series in one day because I make good life choices

Previously on Princess Tutu Watch:

Okay I can get back to Tokyo Mew Mew now

+++++++++++++++++++

It was a lie, I could NOT

EPISODE, UH, FUCK……… 14! - The Raven

asdklsdhflhdl (google docs stop capitalizing my keysmashes) they’re bringing back “once upon a time there was a man who died”!!!!!! Honestly that might be one of my favorite lines in this whole show

Gotta love the sarcasm in “and they lived happily ever after”

The theme song…… it’s so good

Oh nooooooooooooooo

This scene is literally just the “I’ve got a headache that comes and goes” meme

Fakir you complete dork. You’re all dorks

“Princess Tutu and a crocodile are totally different” you tell ‘im, Mytho

Duck speaks so much more regularly than the other main characters? I mean, there’s Fakir over there like “Shall we go?” and Duck saying things like “I’m gonna be late!” and using “like” and “stuff”... I mean, I know this is the dub, but

Duck why are you using Fakir’s dumb excuses omg

Lilie is just the personification of my negative thoughts

BUT WHAT DID MYTHO TELL FAKIR

Awwwwwwww Duck, no

They’re in a terrifying Raven Dimension with like, ominous music and people wailing in the background and meanwhile Kraehe and the Raven are just having like, a normal conversation

Also, are the white feathers supposed to be like, what’s trapping the Raven there?

Duck please

Wait, Princess Tutu transformed on her own!

Episode 15 - Coppelia

Also, watching Fakir try and fail to stop Mytho from jumping out the window is Pain

Lilie you are a Strange Child

STEALTH DUCK RETURNS!

Oh no?? Fakir doesn’t want to get Mytho in trouble???

alsdfksfh the entire student population is Here For The Drama

Duck don’t yell in the library

Fakir just doesn’t make good decisions

Oooh that doesn’t look good

Sad Kraehe Theme Alert

You “just happened” to do a lot of things, Lilie

Omg Lilie “Want to just happen to go see?”

Rue just shows up to trash talk Fakir for a minute and then leaves

I say as if I’m not in So Much Pain

Yeah! Every single time Princess Tutu transformed in the first season, it was because Drosselmeyer said something, but now she’s transforming on her own!

Oh no Mytho

Also I like how Tutu doesn’t just flat-out say “you don’t actually love him” and instead is just like “how about you try doing things you enjoy with the guy you like instead of giving him Your Actual Heart”

Episode 16 - The Maiden’s Prayer

Wait is Angry Narrator back or did the other narrator just regain the heart shard of Withering Scorn?

Lilie isn’t even interested in the love triangle, she just wants Duck and Pike to fight

Is that Goatette

“So pretty…. What? Oh yeah I meant the flowers of course haha” Duck

Such a serious child

“Love only me, hate everyone else”/“The prince who loves me and me alone”

This child is amazing

It was such a good decision to give Fakir a little sister. A good decision for everyone involved

aslfsdjhklgdlghdjghfdklkdkalh Kraehe told him that Duck would suffer if she knew what was happening with Mytho so Fakir isn’t going to tell herrrrrrrrrr Fakir please don’t internalize that!! You are breaking my heart sir

Oh my god it wasn’t Goatette it was the sloth

*The Can Can plays loudly over a sloth just kinda hangin out*

Episode 17 - Crime and Punishment

This may or may not have been the last episode I watched the first time I watched this show?

“Eyes of truth” huh?

This dumbass child

Femio, from the other side of the school grounds: “DID SOMEBODY SAY ‘PRINCE’????”

What the Fuck are you doing with your hands, kid

Why are you a cow

Honestly as over-the-top as Femio is he is also simultaneously the most realistic middle-schooler in this entire show

Oh my god he’s on probation

I’m sorry I’m just talking about Femio but he’s hilarious

Truly a Grade A Idiot

What is he even doing with his life

I’ve become Lilie

These characters have emotional crises over people saying the stupidest things and tbh I relate to that

Oh dear!

The thing is, Femio would be really annoying in real life, but in a tv show he’s just amusing

Rue’s FACE, she’s so done

I like how Duck can tell which building Rue’s in just by the amount of crows around it

Tbh all the students probably have noticed what’s going on, they just think it’s some kind of weird performance art thing. Wouldn’t be out of character for this school

Fakir and Uzura really are siblings, I love this

The best part about this episode is it’s this completely ridiculous person unintentionally getting in the middle of everybody’s emotional issues

“I feel kinda like something happened, and kinda like it didn’t” Duck you are absolutely correct

And of course the Aquarium is good once again

Episode 18 - The Wandering Knight

Incidentally, how old are these kiddos? We know Mytho is older than Duck, so Fakir and Rue probably are too?? But like, probably only by a year? Who even knows what their actual ages are

I mean, Duck is a duck so

It’s! The trees from the opening!

I don’t know if I’ve asked this before, but why does Fakir have a horse?

Oh my god Lilie

Can everybody STOP picking on Fakir for being afraid to die? He is 14, leave him alone

Ahiru is trying so hard to be helpful, give her a chance Fakir

Once again Rue shows up to get in a burn on Fakir and then leave

I swear every time the Aquarium plays in this show

Oh noooooooo Ruuuuueeeeeeee

Literally Protect All Of These Characters

Save These Children From Their Own Emotional Issues

FAKIR PLEASE

Pride is absolutely the worst feeling Mytho could get back right now?

“There’s something sinister going on that I’m not a part of!” And that really gets to you doesn’t it Dross. I bet it’s really… grinding your gears!!!

(why do I feel so proud of insulting a fictional character)

Episode 19 - A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Wow we really are starting this one off on a sinister note (it’s Drosselmeyer’s revenge on me for that pun)

Of course he can’t tell you, he doesn’t fuckin know what’s going on

Fakir please stop basing your entire identity around being a knight

Oh no, Mytho’s regained the heart shard of Basing Your Entire Identity Around Upholding A Role

I wonder if Hermia being tall is like, a meta Shakespeare joke, cause in the play Helena’s really tall and Hermia’s really short, but in every production I’ve seen it was the other way around

Rue stop projecting your insecurities onto your boyfriend

Ohhhhhhhh dear

Finally someone tells all the crows hanging around to shut up

Oh my god she really is super tall

Or Ahiru’s just super short

I am learning so much about ballet mimes

Cool bird shadows

Whoa, different raven background. And the Raven isn’t speaking with him this time? What does it mean

On no, Tutu

Hahaha oh no

Aaahaha they’re the same

THEY EVEN DO THE SAME ARM-FLAILY THING

Episode 20 - The Forgotten Story

ALRIGHT, TIME FOR THE FAKIR’S SAD BACKSTORY EPISODE

Raetzel: *walks in*

Uzura: And where do you fit in the shipping chart, ma’am

THIS is a High Quality Directatorial Decision

Oh no Duck. oh no she’s so earnest nooooo

It is just Extremely Wrong to see Mytho dancing to something besides Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy

Mr. Cat can hear the word “wedding” from three floors up

Oh my GOD they put broken heart stickers on the window

I mean, I say they but we all know it was Lilie

Again, Duck knows exactly where shit’s going down just because that’s where all the crows are

Oh no!

Everybody needs to stop giving Fakir shit Right Now. Everybody needs to stop thinking it’s a bad thing that Fakir didn’t fucking Die, and that includes Fakir OKAY????

I’ve been thinking… Raven Mytho keeps saying things like “people only want love because they want to be loved” and I wonder… if that was sort of his experience as a prince. Or maybe I’m just getting this mixed up with Utena lol. But it does seem like a genuine issue he has as opposed to just something he says to manipulate people. Hm.

Episode 21 - The Spinners

Every time the narrator says “once upon a time there was a man who died” I Will Flip

Duck tries to lean nonchalantly against a door, it goes about how you’d expect

Duck that’s not how writing works (ughgfjdghskjkgf my pain)

AW NO

Oh no Duck is too relatable

UUAAAAAA TREE GHOST TREE GHOST

“Follow my every order and be prepared to die if you should fail” it’s almost like you WANT me to hate you. FAKIR DOESN’T NEED THIS

See Duck agrees with me

PETITION FOR PEOPLE TO LEAVE FAKIR THE FUCK ALONE THAT MEANS YOU TREE GHOST

Ohshit it’s that old guy from the bookshop???

Uzura is NOT “unrelated”, obviously she is Fakir’s baby sister

“I’m just watching again” oh no Duck

Autor what the Fresh Heck are you doing to Fakir

YOU ARE NOT FINE?????????

Honestly Fakir needs to get in touch with his emotions, not get sleep deprived and hallucinate in a field

This tree is saying things Edel said??? Was Edel made from the wood of this tree?????? Oh my god???????????

Anyway that was Intense

Listen, Raven Mytho has real issues and you can fight me on this

Ah, I see Dross is practicing the time-honored authorial tradition of “If the Story Isn’t Working, Hit It With a Wrench”

Episode 22 - Crown of Stone

But who’s going to protect Fakir huh? Answer me that, Duck

One big-ish happy familyyyyyyyyy

I needed this life advice tbh

Aaaaaah Uzura’s talking to Rue!

“Are you the Rue we’re worried about?” I love how she just included herself in that

Autor, I’m……. not sure you want the tree ghost cult to acknowledge you

Uhm, I’m pretty sure Autor doesn’t fit into the shipping chart and I think Uzura would agree with me

Ah fuck!!! Fakir turn around

Wait it’s an owl on a grandfather clock?? Is that actually a thing? These watchnotes are coming full circle

“I want people to love me, but is it okay to just be loved?” yep, the prince is having issues

Autor, I’m pretty sure Ahiru is figuring all that out right now

And like, the Book Men totally know it too, so

HOLY CRAP THIS SEQUENCE

AND THE MUSIC THE MUSIC IS PERFECT

SKLAFDJKVHFJK;JKLSdf;DSLKJFAKSDAKFJHFKLJJFGKLHGJFHSDLJ

I love this show

EPISODE 23 - Marionette

OH! OH! IT’S THE MUSIC EDEL ALWAYS PLAYED BUT SPED UP! That’s actually kinda creepy!

Anyway now I know why I’m so protective of Fakir, we’re both writers who can’t write anything

Oh noooooooooooo Rue

Oooooooooooh don’t like that

Ruuueeeeeeeeee please don’t stab your boyfriend we’ve been over this

Incidentally, hulu needs to quit it with these bogus commercial placements

Drosselmeyer: How dare you try to resolve your emotional problems!

Dross that’s called character development

Hahahaha joke’s on you Dross!

aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I! LOVE! THEM!

No of course your heart is lovey-dovey Uzura! Your heart is the lovey-dovey-est!!!

Incidentally, Autor is That Guy who says just because you haven’t finished/published anything you’re not a Real Writer. And he is Wrong

Episode 24 - The Prince and the Raven

Okay, just from this title I know I won’t be able to handle this

THIS ISN’T EVEN THE PENULTIMATE EPISODE

YOU ARE HITTING ME WITH ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO DIED RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE I CANNOT BELIEVE

Okay but and then this story explains all of Raven Mytho’s emotional issues as well???

*sigh* Autor……. Fakir literally just told you his motivation is to protect people and you’re still going on about controlling the fates of all mankind… are you sure you’re not Drosselmeyer’s direct descendent?

Rue don’t go into the crow building

Honestly I’m still dying over the fact that you can tell where things are happening purely based on which building all the crows are at today

Tiny Rue is breaking my heart

UUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAA TINY RUE IS DOING BALLET

Omg Rue in the beginner’s class!

Oh noooo Uzura’s saaaaad

I KNOW I’ve heard this songgggggggg

THAT WAS A BIT OF THE FOSSILS FROM CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS???

Okayokayokay so it’s not Carnival of the Animals but DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS it’s another piece by Saint-Saens and DO YOU KNOW what that piece is called????? fuckin Danse Macabre!!!!! I am immediately filled with a sense of foreboding!!!

The music choices in this show are going to destroy me one day

HOLY CRAP????

I can’t believe so goddamn much happened in this episode???

Episode 25 - The Dying Swan

I’m not rrrrrrrrreadyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Not even the narrator’s obvious disappointment in Drosselmeyer can give me solace

Oh my god so is the Drosselmeyer we know just a character in Dead Drosselmeyer’s story?

I think it’s a testament to this story’s power that I’m having so many emotions about it even though I know what’s going to happen? Like, some stories, reading the summary is pretty much the same as hearing the story, but Princess Tutu is not one of those stories

Like I just overcame my social anxiety to ask my roommate to be quieter, that’s how good this story is

Aaaaaagh Rue’s change from saying “you love me” to saying “I love you” my HEART

Oh shoot! Mytho’s angry! I thought one of the gate heart shards might be anger

Oh my god Autor literally no one cares what TEA Drosselmeyer drank look at Fakir he’s so done

Aaaaaaaa ohno

EVISCERATE HIM FAKIR

Holyshitholyshitholyshit

Okay but see the lake is outside the city so Dross just took some random normal duck and plunked her down in his fairytale town and that’s why like, a cat teacher seems weird to her because she’s not from inside the story

OH NO THEY’RE PLAYING THE SWAN BUT THIS TIME IT’S RUE

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr fuck OFFFFFF

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh it’s the sword birds

excUSE you Dross, the knight has NOT “long been useless”

Episode 26 - Finale

I can’t believe after 9 years I’m finally going to finish watching this show

Okay it’s happening

It begins and ends with “once upon a time, there was a man who died”, the absolute most perfect first line in the history of first lines and you can fight me on this

Okay I’m already almost crying just from the theme song, like the Tchaikovsky fits perfectly into it? I’m gonna sing it

I’m just screaming???? They’re all in distress

BUT DUCK IS NOT GOING TO GIVE IN TO DISTRESS

RUE IS THE SWAN

DUCK DECIDES TO WRITE HER OWN STORY AND THE MUSIC FROM THE END OF THE THEME SONG STARTS PLAYING MY HEART

I’M ACTUALLY CRYING

IT’S ALL THE PEOPLE SHE HELPED

THEY ARE PLAYING THE THEME THAT PLAYS WHEN DUCK IS HAPPY

FUCKING -- AND YOU HIT ME WITH ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO DIED NOW

LOOK! LOOK THE SCENERY OUTSIDE THE TOWN FADES IN

I watched it.

#princess tutu watch #i still cannot believe

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shitiger · 6 years ago

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When humans reach maturity, a name appears on their wrist. It is the name of their soulmate, the one person in the entire universe that is perfect for them. Greytrexians are different. For them, life is experienced in shades of grey until they look into their soulmate’s eyes for the first time, and their world suddenly becomes an ocean of color. (John Goodspeed x Jack fic. Jackspeed. Also, Garycato preslash)

Chapter 2: Baby Gary Chapter 3-4: Short moments Chapter 5: Gary meets Avocato :)

Note: In this story, Jack refers to himself as 'Jaxx.' I hope that doesn't confuse anyone. It seemed like the perfect fit for this story.

Until that moment, Jakktrixxriiandraneek had no true knowledge of color. Everything was white or black, or varying shades in-between. His parents always spoke of soulmates as a wondrous thing, and Jaxx had grown up dreaming of the moment when he and his soulmate would gaze into each other’s eyes for the first time, and color would fill the world.

But the years had passed, and life continued to be grey for the Greytrexian. Instead of moping about, Jaxx decided to apply for the Intergalactic Guard. Very few Greytrexians even considered leaving their home planet, but he was determined to see the universe.

This new planet, Earth, was amazing to behold – even in monotone. The air was fresh, the animals were delightfully unique, and the humans were all so tall and extraordinary to look upon. It helped that Jaxx found himself rather taken with the broad-shouldered aliens of his new planet. He wouldn’t mind finding his soulmate among them, even if the thought made him blush.

And then, out of the blue, it happened. Recently promoted to pilot, with honors, Jakktrixxriiandraneek found himself attending the Captains’ Gala. It was the one time each year that all of the captains in the Intergalactic Guard returned to Earth to mix and mingle with their current and future crewmates. Junior trainees were given the night off, but every recently promoted member of the guard was expected to attend. You never knew which captain you would be assigned under, and it was the chance to make a good first impression.

As Jaxx gazed around the room, he caught sight of a small group of senior staff members gathered around a particular human. At first, he seemed the same as all the rest, but the moment their eyes met, everything changed. The world, beginning with the Captain’s dark eyes, blossomed into vibrant colors. It was an awe-inspiring moment that left Jaxx speechless and giddy at the same time.

The man turned away to talk to the woman next to him, but the Greytrexian didn’t care. He’d finally found the other half of his soul — and in a HUMAN, no less. What would his parents think? It was so unusual. The little alien clutched his cheeks, unable to stop the smile brimming across his face.

“Someone is happy,” his friend Trishika said. He turned to see that her skin was no longer a dull shade of metallic grey. Instead, her avian features were in full, colorful display. A lovely blend of colors that Jaxx didn’t have the words for, as of yet.

“You’re beautiful, Trishika,” he whispered, staring at her in amazement.

“Thank you, dear. But I know for a fact that you like guys,” she replied, a smile quirking across her beak.

“No, I mean I can see you — you’re so colorful!” Jaxx nearly squealed.

“You found your soulmate,” she hissed, grabbing him by the arms to pull him close. “Who is it?”

“He’s amazing, but I don’t know what his name is. He definitely noticed me, too. Do you think he knows I’m his soulmate?” Jaxx wondered aloud.

“Humans are a weird species. Once they reach maturity, the name of their soulmate appears on their wrist. We should go see if he has your name,” the Avianrian said, perking up as she began to search the room. “What does he look like?”

“He’s right over there,” Jaxx said, pointing to the man standing between Sergeant Roscoe and a Ventrexian captain.

“The guy with the big shoulders, brown hair, and a very pronounced chin?” his friend asked, her lips curving down into a frown.

“That’s him. Why? What’s wrong?” A feeling of dread was beginning to creep up the Greytrexian’s spine at the look on his friend’s face.

“That is Captain John Goodspeed. Every girl at the academy has heard about him. He’s a very accomplished captain, but he’s also a huge flirt with the ladies. HE’S your soulmate?”

“Yes,” Jaxx found himself whispering, his golden eyes drooping in uncertainty.

“Fate sure knows how to pick them. I’m sorry, Jaxx, but I don’t think Goodspeed is interested in men, at all,” she concluded, wrapping her arm around his shoulders for comfort.

***

True to form, the warm moment came to an end when the very people they were discussing walked up to them.

“There you are, Jack!” Sergeant Roscoe announced, as he and Captain Goodspeed approached them. “John, I want to introduce you to the best pilot in our graduating class. Don’t let his size fool you, he can give anyone a run for their money.”

“Hey, little buddy, I’m John Goodspeed,” Jaxx’s soulmate said, crouching to look him in the eye.

Jaxx was torn between blurting out the truth, and cringing at the way John was behaving. Taller aliens kneeling just to talk to him made him feel like they were seeing a child, rather than an adult, when they looked at him. Warily, he reached out to shake John’s hand. The man’s grip was firm, but on the lighter side. “I’m Jakktrixxriiandraneek, but most people know me as Jack. We… don’t have last names on Greytrexia,” he informed the man.

“That’s alright. And who is this lovely lady?” John let go of his hand, and stood back up, leaving Jaxx feeling like he’d missed the perfect moment. Instead, the Greytrexian watched as his soulmate turned on the charm as he spoke to Trishika. When the sergeant and captain excused themselves, John ever reached out to press a kiss to Trishika’s hand, his dark eyes lingering on her… and never once returning to Jaxx, as they walked away.

“I’m sorry, Jaxx,” the Avianrian concluded, her eyes focused on Jaxx as HE watched John mingle with a new group of graduates.

“He didn’t know who I was. He must not have my name. I didn’t… I didn’t know soulmates came in one-sided pairings,” Jaxx whispered, feeling tears prickling at his eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Jaxx. Do you want to leave?” Trishika asked.

Jaxx took in a breath, and turned to her, pasting a smile on his face. “No. We came here to mingle, and we will. I’ll learn to live with it. For now, I want to experience all these amazing colors.”

***

Jaxx has only wandered off to find a bathroom. Instead, he ended up standing in the doorway of the campus library, watching two humans fornicating against one of the tables. Once he realized what he was witnessing, his face turned a bright pink. “Excuse me,” he squeaked out, ready to shut the door and race out of the room.

The larger, male human turned his head, locking his dark eyes on Jaxx. “You mind, little buddy — we’re a little busy,” John Goodspeed said, his gaze holding no familiarity at all. The Greytrexian shook his head and slammed the door shut in his haste to escape the situation. In less than a minute, he was standing in the men’s room, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

“He’s not my soulmate. How could he be my soulmate? He barely knows I exist. Why would the universe pair me with someone that wouldn’t want me back?” Jaxx choked back a sob, even as he felt the tears streaming down his cheeks. It just wasn’t fair.

***

The next few years passed in a blurr for Jaxx. He’d catch a glimpse of his one-sided soulmate from afar, but the man usually had at least one lady attached to his arm. And they were always different. Trishika was right; he really was a womanizer. The only perk that came with finding his soulmate was the vast array of colors he now had to choose from. The color purple had become his favorite rather quickly.

Jaxx figured that life would continue this way forever. John would always pass him by, barely looking his way, and Jaxx would continue to pretend that he was ignorant of what bound them together. Life should have continued this way… but it never does.

“I remember you. Sorry, little buddy, I’ve forgotten your name,” Captain Goodspeed said, crouching down to extend his hand to his new co-pilot. The Greytrexian shook his hand half-heartedly, but the big human didn’t seem to care.

“You really don’t have to lean down,” Jaxx tried to explain, but John didn’t seem to notice as he stood back up to wave at another crewmate.

“Come on then, I’ll give you a tour, little buddy!”

“Little buddy…” Jaxx muttered distastefully under his breath as he followed his soulmate into the bowels of the ship.

***

Despite the initial awkwardness, Jaxx found himself warming to the human quite quickly. Perhaps it was due to the soulbond, even if it was one-sided, or just John’s vibrant and trustworthy personality, either way, Jaxx enjoyed spending time with him. As long as they weren’t around any females, of course. The moment John was around a woman of any species, he went into full flirt mode.

***

They were in the middle of a multi-level game of cyber chess when Jaxx first caught a glimpse of the mark on John’s wrist. The captain was wearing a blue t-shirt that evening, rather than his uniform.

“Is that a soulmark?” the Greytrexian found himself asking, only to blush when the other man’s eyes focused on him.

“That it is,” John said, turning his wrist over.

Jaxx felt his heart skip a beat, before speeding up rapidly. That was HIS name. In Greytrexian symbols. HIS NAME on his soulmate’s wrist. It WASN’T a one-way bond, after all. A relieved smile began to cross over Jaxx’s face as he focused on the mark.

“I haven’t met her yet,” John suddenly said, tracing the mark fondly. “I’m not even sure what language this is in. When it first appeared, my father searched the Infinity Guard database, but couldn’t find a match. Still, she’s going to be a smokin’ hot alien babe, I just know it.”

A smoking hot alien babe. SHE. Jaxx was not under any illusion when it came to his species. Most humans did not find Greytrexians attractive; at best they were considered CUTE.

Once they were on the subject of soulmates, John wouldn’t stop talking about his search for the mystery woman, which, in a way, made his womanizing rather strategic. How could Jaxx tell him the truth? He’d lose his friend, for sure, if he did. John would be devastated to find out that a stubby little MALE alien was his soulmate.

#finalspace #Final Space #john goodspeed #jack #lord commander #jackspeed #slash #fanfiction #soulmate au

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eudaimonic-writes · 6 years ago

Text

Whisper Your Love - Chapter 2

Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14005500/chapters/32282919

Chapter 1

Masterpost

From the outside it just looks like an overlarge greenhouse but the Butterfly House is one of Derry's best kept hidden gems. Located right at the edge of town, the building is one of the first to have been built in Derry history, originally intended to be the home to a wealthy Lord who planned to live there with his wife and family. Disaster struck before his plans could come to fruition, however, as the wife unfortunately died before the house could be completed and, distraught, the Lord had finished the house, along with the addition of a beautiful butterfly garden in his wife's memory. He never officially moved into the completed house, but legend has it he visited the garden every day until his death many years later, leaving the property to be cared for by his only son.

Now, the Butterfly House is rarely visited outside of the summer months, when tourism is low and the weather is dull, but it is kept alive by the Derry fund, targeted towards keeping the history of Derry alive - even if nobody is there to witness it.

Richie can see why Eddie chose this place. Immediately upon stepping into the humid room, stripping his jacket, he is assaulted by the smell of freshly watered flowers and the sound of water falling in the distance. An emerald blue butterfly swoops overhead, and several brown one's he doesn't know the name of are feeding on the chopped apples on a wooden pedestal half-hidden by a crop of shrubbery. There are elegant, moss covered statues hidden amongst the tall plants, and the gravel crunches underfoot as Richie wanders further down the laid out path.

He can't see Eddie anywhere, but he doesn't dare call out the boy's name, too afraid to disturb the fragile peace of the place. Instead, Richie lets himself drift, listening to the low humming of the heating lamps and gentle pattering of the waterfall, becoming louder as he gets closer to the source. He rounds a bend, finger trailing idly over the words printed on a wooden information plaque, and then he spots him. Eddie is leaning over some shrubbery, placing a few pieces of chopped apple onto a stand like the one Richie had seen when he came in. A small white butterfly lands on his finger just as he's pulling away, and Eddie smiles softly as he raises it into the air, letting the insect flutter from his fingers and onto the pedestal.

It truly is another one of those time-altering moments, and Richie feels all of his senses dull once again as he watches from afar. There's a glass wall behind Eddie, the fading sunlight filtering through and casting a halo-effect around Eddie's hair, and Eddie's cheer uniform is discarded in preference for some light wash skinny blue jeans and a green apron over the pink sweater he had been wearing in the library.

He looks angelic.

Richie must make a noise then, because Eddie's head suddenly whips in his direction, his mouth falling into an 'o' of shock. Richie feels like he's intruding, which is ridiculous because Eddie asked him to come. But for one dreadful moment Richie honestly feels like Eddie might ask him what he's doing there, might ask him to leave, but then he just smiles and turns fully in Richie's direction, placing his hands in the pockets of his apron.

"Richie, you came." He says, the words almost songlike as they fall delicately off his tongue and into the air. The white butterfly takes off suddenly, delicate wings ever so graceful as it flutters over Eddie's head and disappears into the leaves.

"You know my name?" Richie grunts, voice coming out hoarser than he'd intended it to. He coughs, clearing his throat and attempts to hide behind his scrunched fist as Eddie chuckles.

"Of course I know your name, why wouldn't I?" Eddie chimes, slowly moving one foot in front of the other until they're in proper conversational distance of each other.

"Uh." Richie falters. "Because we've never spoken to each other before right now?"

He realises too late that the words come off a little bitter, and he regrets them a moment later when Eddie winces slightly, eyes wide and sad like Eddie wishes the words weren't true. The boy turns away slightly, reaching up one soft looking hand to rub bashfully at the back of his head, almost as soon as his hand touches his hair, Eddie pulls it away, grimacing and wiping it on his apron. "Apple juice." he murmurs, looking down at his apron instead of at Richie. "And, uh, you're right, but that's why I invited you here, I wanted to speak to you."

Richie nods, because he'd figured as much on the walk over there. Agonising over every possibility, until ultimately coming to the conclusion that Eddie probably only wants to thank him for saving his life - he's already resigned himself to the fact that this will be the only conversation the two will ever have and after this Eddie will go on with his perfect life and Richie will continue being the new kid until he graduates. "To thank me?" He asks, because saying the rest is just... desperate and weird. He scuffs the toe of his boot into the gravel absently, pursing his lips as the thought comes to mind. He's desperate, so desperate, for this to not be the only time they ever talk.

"Yes." Eddie agrees, finally looking up at him with an expression so earnest Richie almost has to look away with the intensity of it. "And-"

"And?" Richie repeats, startled. There's an 'and'?!

Eddie smiles. "Yes, and." he emphasises, raising his eyebrows playfully and reprimanding Richie for interrupting. "I was hoping maybe we could be friends... maybe..."

And, honestly? Richie just gapes, he gapes because Eddie - Eddie Kaspbrak, literal angel on earth, walking mother's wet dream, wants to be friends with him. Richie must've drowned in that quarry, probably hit his head on the rock on the way down and sunk because there's no way. Eddie has friends, Eddie has friends who are just like him, and he has a boyfriend who, admittedly, is a bit of an idiot, but a boyfriend nonetheless, who loves him. Why does he want to be friends with Richie? Unless... unless this is some sort of payment - like in the Titanic, except not because they end up together, and if Richie is Jack in that analogy then he dies in the end and he isn't about that life. So more like Clueless? Does Eddie plan to take Richie under his wing under some misguided sense of duty and attempt to straighten him out?! Richie's mind flashes back to the boy he sees Eddie hanging out with the most, the one with the harshly pressed collared shirts and - shudders - chinos. No. Richie can't do that.

But then, would Eddie do that? He doesn't seem like the type to enforce some sort of change on Richie. So maybe it's not like any movie, maybe it's just straight up honest to God gratitude - but that only hurts more. Richie doesn't want Eddie's friendship because he feels like he owes him, that's almost worse than not having Eddie's friendship at all. "You don't have to be friends with me just because I saved your life - I'm a good swimmer, and it's what anyone else would've done, you don't owe me for being a decent human being."

Eddie's eyes widen and his lips press together in a tight thin line, shaking his head all at once. "That's not what- look, I'm thankful but I know I don't owe you, I just, when you pulled me out of the water I felt like you were someone worth knowing, and I want to know you, I want to be your friend... i-if you want that too." It goes quiet for a moment, the only sound the running water up ahead and the steady hum of the overhead lamps. Their eyes don't leave each other's the whole time, Eddie's still impossibly wide and God knows what kind of expression Richie is wearing underneath his gaudy glasses. Then, Eddie shuffles, the sounds of his sneakers disturbing the gravel breaking the silence. "Would you?" he asks, almost a whisper. "Be my friend?"

Richie thinks it over for a moment, deciding that even if Eddie isn't being entirely honest, he has no reason to use Richie - no reason to stand there and beg a second time. So Richie smiles.

And Richie nods.

"This is my favourite place to read." Eddie is saying, one leg tucked up to his chest on the stone bench they're sharing, his other dangling to the side, skimming the gravel. His chin is resting on his knee, his apron discarded on the bench behind him. "When I'm not working - or busy - I'm usually here anyway, I like the quiet."

It had been a few hours, way past the closing time Richie had noticed on the board outside when he came in, but Eddie had assured him that they can stay as long as they like as long as Eddie locks up behind them. They'd migrated to the little tunnel below the synthetic waterfall quite some time ago, and hadn't stopped talking ever since.

With every little thing Richie learns about Eddie, he just finds himself more and more intrigued by the boy. He's obsessed with finding out all of the little details, all of the intricacies that make Eddie Kaspbrak, Eddie, and he'd been delighted when Eddie had returned all of his strange and sometimes intrusive questions - throwing a few of his own in the mix. For the first time in a while, Richie feels like he's having a conversation with someone who genuinely cares about what he's saying - even when he goes on a twenty minute long tirade about the different uses of potatoes, or tells one of his dumb jokes he used to get told off for near constantly. Eddie even laughs.

It's refreshing.

"It's nice," Richie comments, leaning his head against the manufactured stone wall behind them. Opposite from them, built into the wall, is a glass case incubator filled with rows of chrysalises, all of them different shapes, sizes and colours. One of them, a small green one in the top right corner, is beginning to hatch, the little legs of the butterfly just beginning to poke out of a small tear at the bottom. "Calming." He continues, watching the butterfly's head poke out next.

Eddie follows his gaze, regarding the hatchling with a wistful look. "They don't all make it." He says after a short moment of companionable silence. Richie hums, frowning. "The hatchlings." Eddie explains. "Sometimes they get hurt coming out, their wings are broken or deformed, they get stuck and starve... or they just don't come out at all."

Richie looks away from the incubator, watching Eddie instead. "That's sad."

"That's life." Eddie says wryly, returning Richie's gaze.

Richie rolls his eyes, scoffing, "alright Mr. Pessimistic, life isn't all bad - just look at this place!" Richie gestures with his hands, throwing them wide and raising his eyebrows imploringly. Eddie shifts uncomfortably, pursing his lips as he tilts his head back and to the side, eyes lingering somewhere on the ceiling, then he sighs.

"What did you think when you moved here, Richie?" He asks, and his voice has a heaviness to it suddenly, a heaviness that Richie can't decipher.

"Are you kidding? This place is like some kind of fairy-tale village and nuclear town all rolled into some giant ball of pleasantness."

Eddie scoffs, looking uncomfortable. "Derry isn't all sunshine and rainbows, you know? You just haven't been here long enough to know that yet."

For the first time, Richie see's Eddie, not as some otherworldly being, but as a boy. A boy who is looking at him like he wants Richie to understand something, something Richie just can't see. It's true, Richie hasn't been here that long, but from what he's seen, Derry is an enigma. There's a sense of community here that is unrivalled, and Richie likes that. "What do you mean?" He asks.

Eddie sighs again, this time a little agitatedly. "Derry wasn't always like this... a few years back, a boy a few years older than us came out - it was a big thing, you know? Nobody had ever really been gay in Derry before, at least not openly. It had the town up in arms, half of the town wanted to ignore it was even a thing, and the other half wanted to rejoice, and a few people... a few people didn't like it at all. Adrian, that was his name, he found a boyfriend, Don, and then it became a real problem - Don was the preacher's son. Well, those people that didn't like it before, really didn't like it now... they attacked them." Richie feels his breath freeze in his lungs, watching the emotions flit across Eddie's face. "Adrian was killed, Don badly injured." He sniffs a little, and finally looks at Richie. "What you see in Derry, it isn't acceptance, it's ignorance. You think the whole town is fine with Chris and I's relationship? They aren't, they just ignore it, because nobody wants another case like Adrian Mellon. It's the shame of Derry history, the guys who did it got put in Juniper Hill - that's a mental asylum up North - and now nobody ever talks about it anymore."

Richie is silent, can't find the words to say to that. He'd heard of 'an incident' from Bev, but she hadn't gone into any detail and Richie, uncaring, hadn't asked. He realises his mistake now, watching Eddie watching him - distressed. "I had no idea..." Richie whispers, shaking his head, "it's awful."

"It's Derry." Eddie says. "The people here hide their faults under a layer of dust, they ignore anything they don't like because it's easier than admitting that we're just as fucked as the rest of the world."

It's the first time Richie hears Eddie swear.

Riche thinks, later, that Eddie might have been trying to tell him something else when he talked about Adrian Mellon.

But as Richie is wont to do, he doesn't ask.

Because, as loathe as he is to admit it, Richie is a little afraid to shatter any other images he has of Derry. He's already beginning to see the little cracks in the town's exterior, and he fears the day he'll begin to see those cracks in the people too. See the cracks in Eddie.

Eddie is an entirely different person outside of school, hidden away in his little garden, where Richie finds himself most days when 16:00 rolls around, watching Eddie look after the plants and the butterflies, talking about anything and everything that comes to their minds. Eddie seems particularly interested in Richie's life before Derry, so Richie tells him about all of the crazy things he and his group of friends got up to, all of the beach parties and ragers and that time Richie passed out because he wore his leather jacket in 80F weather, and in return Richie learns that Eddie's dad died when he was five, and he's planning on going to Harvard next fall, and he has a 4.0 GPA. Eddie's friends are Stan, Ben and sometimes Mike - though Mike is more Chris' friend because they're on the football team together.

They don't talk much inside of school, and Richie doesn't ask why because he kind of gets it - Eddie is always with Chris, and Richie doesn't want to be around Chris anyway. It doesn't really bother Richie that their friendship seems to be some sort of secret, because even though he barely gets to see Eddie at school, Richie gets to bask in the boy's laughter outside, any time he wants. They go to the butterfly garden, and hang out by the waterfall, or they go to Richie's house and eat his mom's spaghetti - Richie's gives Eddie the nickname 'Eddie Spaghetti' when Richie manages to make him laugh so hard that spaghetti sauce comes out of his nose, which Eddie rolls his eyes at and continuously tells him not to call him that.

Richie knows he likes it though, he can tell by the way Eddie hides a smile behind his sweater paws. Maggie takes an instant liking to Eddie, offering to make him whatever he wants every time he comes over and always smiling at Richie in a way that’s all too knowing.

They're sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, Richie munching on a bowl of lucky charms and his mother meticulously peeling the filament off a tangerine, when she suddenly stops just to stare at him. Richie's movements halt, his spoon halfway to his open mouth, and their eyes meet. Blue on blue. He knows that whatever comes next can't be good, and he's right.

"Richard, I've been thinking." she says, her voice stern. Richie drops his spoon back into his bowl, eyeing her warily.

"Yes, mom?"

"I want you and Eddie to leave the door open when you're studying from now on." Maggie smirks, putting emphasis on the word 'studying'. Richie winces and groans.

"Mom, it's not like that!" He pleads. "Eddie and I are just friends."

Maggie scoffs, beginning to pick apart the individual pieces of her tangerine. Richie's senses get overwhelmed with the scent of citrus. "Please, Richie, I see the way you look at that boy - and I only want you to be sensible!"

Richie groans again, placing his hands flat on the table and bringing his forehead down onto them - hard, twice. "Mom, please, it's too early for the talk. I'm eighteen, shouldn't you have said this a few years ago?!"

Maggie clears her throat. "Yes, well, I was a little bit preoccupied a few years ago." Richie feels guilty all of a sudden, remembering his mother's struggles with alcoholism due, in part, to his shitty dad. He hadn't wanted her to get help, afraid that it would shame their family. The best day of Richie's life was the day his mother told Wentworth Tozier to go fuck himself and threw her wedding ring in his face. She'd been going to AA ever since, and shortly thereafter they'd moved to Derry to start fresh.

Richie smiles at her reassuringly, reaching over to wrap his hand around the one she wasn't using to place a piece of tangerine between her lips. Richie recognises the Tozier trick of deflection for what it is. "I'm proud of you mom." He says, meaning every word.

Maggie smiles softly at him, and then pulls her hand away. "Really, though, when are you going to ask Eddie out? I'd love to have him as a son in law, he's such a sweet boy!"

Richie fake screams, "mom!" as Maggie chuckles, popping another tangerine segment in her mouth, a twinkle in her blue eyes. Richie picks up his nearly empty cereal bowl, dumping what’s left before leaving the dish in the sink for his mom to clean - as punishment. "I'm going now!"

"Ask him out!" She yells after him.

"You should ask him out." Bev says at lunch, slamming her bottle of water down on the table to grab Richie's attention, which, for the sixth time that lunch period and six millionth time that month, had strayed over to Eddie Kaspbrak.

Richie splutters, "Bev!" he yelps, "Jesus, are you and my mother in cahoots or something?"

"Y-your mother knows E-Eddie?" Bill asks, breaking the non-verbal vow of silence Richie is sure the boy probably made at some point. He honestly doesn't know how Bill and Bev got on before he came along to tamper all of Bev's energy. Richie stops a moment to take in Bill's words, and then realises his mistake.

"Uh." Bev's eyes are glinting accusingly, her painted finger pointed straight at him like a bright red and slightly chipped dagger. Spill it says. And with a sigh, Richie does. "Yeah, I guess we're kind of friends..?"

Bev gawks, and Richie thinks Bill's eyebrow might twitch a little, but then he just goes back to sipping at his water bottle casually, the only thing betraying his interest are his eyes, trained on Richie, like a hawk. "You what?!" Bev shrieks, Richie hushes her, glancing around to make sure nobody is staring. "Since when?"

"Since I saved his life at the quarry... we've been talking."

"At y-your house." Bill clarifies. Richie nods. The two redheads stare at him for a moment, and Richie feels a little awkward under their scrutiny, then, "y-you should ask him out."

Bev lets out a little "hah!" at that, and Richie groans. "Not you too, Big Bill! We're just friends - and, besides, Eddie has a boyfriend!"

"So?" Bev scoffs, rolling her eyes. Richie scowls at her, and then at Bill who shrugs noncommittally.

"So," he emphasises, "I can't just ask him out if he's already taken!"

Bev rolls her eyes again, like he's stupid - which, uh? Rude. - and then leans forward. "Sure you can, take a little initiative! Woo the guy! Pull an Avril Lavigne on him and push Chris into a portapotty and declare yourself Eddie's new boyfriend." Richie snorts, as Bev begins humming the tune to Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne, he shoves her shoulder playfully, pursing his lips to try and stave off an amused smile.

"Ha Ha, Beverly, you're hilarious! Now can I go back to pining in silence?" Bev snorts, waving her hand as if to say "go ahead", and Bill is already once again not giving a single shit. Richie turns to continue his longing stare-athon in Eddie's direction, and freezes when he sees Eddie looking back at him. For a moment, he wonders if Eddie could hear their conversation before dismissing the thought entirely because, if he can't hear Eddie's then Eddie certainly can't hear theirs. Then he wonders at how long Eddie could've been looking at him without him noticing, and his heart stutters in his chest, his breaths slowing as a warm feeling fills his tummy.

He hears Beverly whistle lowly across the table, but pays no mind as Eddie smiles shyly at him, before turning away to re-join whatever conversation he was having with Stan. Stan's gaze lingers for a moment on Richie, quizzical, before he too looks away. Richie turns back to Bev, a huge wide-eyed grin plastered all over her smug face. Even Bill looks a little impressed. "You weren't lying." She stage whispers, and Richie feels a little offended.

"Why would I even lie about that?" He asks, indignantly.

Bev shrugs. "I don't know, to seem cool?"

"Nobody even knows we talk except you guys and my mom."

Bev shrugs again, and they fall back into an easy silence, broken only by the occasional crunching of Bill biting into his apple that he'd pulled from seemingly nowhere. Richie thinks he's gotten away scot free, but then Beverly has to open her big mouth again, "I still think you should ask him out." Richie glares at her, and then throws his scrunched up napkin at Bill when the stoic boy agrees with a silent nod.

Richie is walking home when he hears the sound of a pair of feet rushing up the pavement behind him, he turns just in time to see Eddie come to a halt beside him, and grins when Eddie slips his small hand around Richie's wrist, keeping him in place. "Hey." He breathes, breathless from his run.

"Hi." Richie greets, pulling the buds of his headphones out of his ears and pausing his music. "I was just on my way home, you wanna join? Maggie's been asking after you."

Eddie smiles happily. "Tell Maggie I said Hi? But, uh, no, I was wondering actually if you wanted to come to mine for once? My mom's not home 'til late tonight so I thought we could hang out there for a change."

Richie agrees immediately, because he's not too shy to admit he'd been curious to know what Eddie's room looks like. If it'll be as soft and cute as Eddie, or plain, or messy. He can't imagine it'll be messy, nothing about Eddie screams messy, but you never know.

There's something intimate about being invited into someone's bedroom for the first time - even in the most non-sexual setting, where it's just two friends hanging out, one of them with a long-term boyfriend, bordering on childhood sweetheart, and the other with the most hopeless of crushes. It's like being invited to a front row seat to someone's soul; you get to see the essence of them, their most private place. Where they sleep at night and wake up in the mornings, where they dress, where they do their homework and where they cry.

Richie understands this intrinsically when he steps into Eddie's room, he feels like Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon as his eyes take it all in. Ultimately, it's just a room - obviously belonging to a teenaged boy - but also obviously belonging to Eddie. Eddie's house had once been a bungalow, it seems, and Eddie explains that his room was renovated from the attic when he was born. The floor is wooden, sandy in colour, and is goes nicely with the white painted walls. His bedsheets are a pristine white that must be a nightmare to clean, and perfectly made, one fluffy looking pale purple pillow right in the centre. Opposite the bed, is a railing with several coats and jackets hung up in order from heaviest to lightest, and next to that is a door, presumably leading to an ensuite, a small table with a record player perched on it on the other side, a cork board with a calendar and a few pictures above that. Next to the bed, by the bannister, is a wardrobe, the matching dresser at the foot of the bed. On the other side of the room, right as you make it to the top of the stairs, are two large windows, a floor length mirror, and a clean looking desk with drawers.

Eddie sits delicately on the made bed as Richie stands in the centre of the room, taking it all in; from the daisy lights wrapped around the metal bedframe to the scented candles on top of the dresser. The room is clean, ordered, and Richie can see Eddie in it - reading a book in bed or writing at his desk.

"It's very you." He comments, moving closer to the corkboard so he can look at the pictures. There's one of Eddie and Stan, adorably young, and a newer one including Ben. There's a picture of Eddie and Chris, and next to it a picture of all four of them with Mike Hanlon, Eddie in his cheer uniform and lying across their arms, grinning.

"I hope that's a good thing?" Eddie says, and when Richie glances at him, he's biting his lip shyly.

Richie smiles softly, unthinkingly taking the two steps it takes to reach him and pulling his lip out from between his teeth with his thumb. "Always." he murmurs. Eddie doesn't move until Richie moves his thumb away, looking down and trying not to feel guilty. Boyfriend! Childhood sweethearts! Chris! Richie turns away, because he can't take the way Eddie is looking at him - he doesn't know what it means but it feels like something and Richie can't take it if it turns out to be nothing.

"Rich." Eddie whispers, reaching his hand out to hold gently onto Richie's. "Richie, I have a boyfriend."

Richie nods, "I know, I, uh, I should go."

"You don't have to." Eddie says, pleads, and Richie gives in, turning back and sinking down onto the bed when Eddie tugs at his fingers. They're still holding hands, sitting side by side, wrinkling Eddie's pristine sheets. "I... I feel it too, you know?"

"You do?" He asks, hopeful.

Eddie nods, his eyes drooping to stare at Richie's lips. "There's something about you... about this... that I, I just, I can't re-" He cuts himself off, pressing his lips to Richie's with a sigh. Richie gasps, hands coming up to cup Eddie's face as the smaller boy presses into him, leaning into Richie's body. He feels Eddie's hands on his neck, his thumbs rubbing circles into the skin behind his ears and Richie opens his mouth, taking charge of the kiss and pressing his tongue between Eddie's lightly parted lips, pushing them further apart and devouring Eddie's mouth with his own.

His mind is racing, as Eddie climbs over him, knees on either side of Richie's hips as they fall further backwards onto the bed and fall further into their kiss. He feels dizzy, and Eddie must feel it too as he pulls back slightly, breath panting over Richie's face. Richie's opens his eyes, and see's Eddie looking right back at him. Their eyes meet, and then they're kissing again, breathless, reeling.

When Richie wakes up the next morning, he's lying fully clothed on top of Eddie's covers, facing out into the room. He can feel Eddie's weight behind him, dipping the bed slightly, but their only point of contact is the singular finger Eddie is using to draw shapes and patterns between Richie's shoulder blades. Richie sighs contently, shifting further into Eddie's touch. He hears Eddie chuckle breathily, and then a light kiss is pressed to his clothed back. "You should go..." Eddie whispers, "Before my mom comes up here and starts yelling at me to get ready."

Richie laughs out a groan. "You and your crazy mom." They'd talked for a while last night, once they'd finally pulled away from each other. After a minor freak out - Richie's, not Eddie's - and some discussion, they'd agreed to roll with whatever comes, and Richie had spent the night, innocently, after falling asleep to the sound of Eddie telling him a story about his mom from his childhood. Richie rolls over, wrapping Eddie up in his arms and kissing all over his face, Eddie chuckles, weakly attempting to push Richie away. "M'sorry for falling asleep." Richie says, stroking a hand through Eddie's slightly greasy curls.

Eddie's eyes crinkle as he smiles. "S'fine, you looked peaceful."

"Your bed is very comfy." Richie agrees. Eddie snorts.

"Yeah, just don't go telling people that." The smaller boy sits up, and Richie notices he must have changed, sometime while he was sleeping, into a pair of red short shorts and a large soft cotton t-shirt with a hole in the collar. There's a faded logo on the front of the shirt, but Richie doesn't have his glasses on so he can't make it out.

"What?" Richie teases, sitting up too and reaching for the glasses folded neatly on the dresser. "Your boyfriend doesn't think so?" There's a pause, where Richie expects Eddie to laugh or hit him lightly for being crude, but Eddie just freezes in the process of pulling out a clean uniform from his wardrobe, his back to Richie. Richie frowns. "Eds?"

Eddie mumbles something, and then goes back to rummaging through his closet. "What? I don't speak mumble-ese." Richie jokes.

Eddie turns to him then, his cheeks flushed, "I said he wouldn't know." He repeats, voice unsteady.

Richie's brain short circuits, "are you saying you're-"

"A virgin, yes." Eddie says, holding his uniform to his chest like a shield. He bites his lip. Richie stands up from the bed, placing his hands around Eddie's hips and sighing.

"I'm sorry, Eds. I just assumed - you've been with him for so long..." He apologises. "It's okay to be a virgin, you know?"

"I know that!" Eddie snaps, eyes flashing, then he deflates, leaning his head on Richie's shoulder in defeat. "I just - everyone always assumes, and Chris... well let's just say that it's not exactly his fault we haven’t, uh, done it."

Richie doesn't quite know what to say in this situation, he'd assumed so much about Eddie and now? Now he's seeing a whole new side - and that's not to say this changes his opinion of Eddie in any way, just maybe he's realising that if this assumption is wrong, what other assumptions could he be wrong about? "Does he pressure you?" Richie asks, a protective lilt to his voice.

Eddie shakes his head, still buried in the material of Richie's shirt. "Not in a bad way... he asks a lot, but he drops it if I tell him to."

Richie nods. Point to Chris then. "Good."

"I guess..." Then Eddie trails off. Richie pulls away, so he can look Eddie in the eye.

"What?"

"I mean... I guess you're... not?" Eddie asks, unsure. "A virgin, that is. You're not one?"

Richie shakes his head, "I'm not, no."

"Oh."

"Is that bad?"

Eddie's eyes go wide, his head shakes. "No! Of course it's not bad, just, it's nice to know."

Richie grins, and nods his head, pressing a kiss to Eddie's lips - hard, but chaste. "It means nothing." He assures, pressing another long kiss to Eddie's lips when he tilts his head to ask for one. "I promise."

"Mmm, sure, just keep kissing me."

Richie chuckles. "As you wish."

Chapter 3

Masterpost

#wyl #whisper your love #reddie #reddie fic #reddie fanfic #eddie kaspbrak #richie tozier

3 notes · View notes

lyriumlotus · 7 years ago

Text

Solabellan - {So... I’m a dancer}

(AO3)

It had been a few weeks since that day they first spoke to one another, and since that time, they had shared many other days speaking to each-other.

In the beginning, he had tried to politely offer to buy her coffee and breakfast, but she disliked the feeling of owing another, so instead offered that she would instead pay the next.

Sometimes they chatted non stop, other times they worked, or in her case studied, in silence, simply enjoying each others company.

Even when customers started to thin and enough seats were now available again, neither seemed to notice the going ons, around them.

And so, It had become familiar to her.

But one thing had been weighing on her mind in that time, and that was that he still had no idea yet of her current job. She suspected he assumed she was an exchange student or something, but she failed to have the courage to bring it up, since she would have to be truthful.

Would he so freely speak to her still, if he truly knew?

She didnt think it a shameful line of work, but that didnt mean other people didn’t also think so.

Especially someone who carried themselves with an air of pride about them.

He was a mix of expertise himself, partly, Scholar, partly Archaeologist.

Not many people in Thedas studied spirits. So suffice to say, he juggled many fields of work, regarding them.

For there simply wasn’t enough people, in this line of work.

“People spend their everyday lives, unaware of an entire world living amongst their own.

Can you imagine it, spending an entire existence, only knowing half of what beauty the World had to offer it?”

“Some would also take great comfort in their shared ignorance of it too though, I think”

She mused, adding extra sugar to her already sweetened beverage.

“If the wool was suddenly pulled from their eyes, many would be angry..because change is hard, even a slow change, and they prefer to stick to what is familiar.”

“True enough...” He smiled.

“Before, you said Spirits could be of great help to our World.. Could you elaborate? I mean, aren’t they… metaphysical? If they cannot touch, then how can they-”

She motioned him to continue, because she struggled with the rest of how to explain

“Well.. “He began

“Think of it like this…

Imagine you are a physician, and you have a patient, who’s wound is undetectable or worse, misdiagnosed?

From an outside appearance, you may not see anything wrong at all.

However, a spirit, could technically help locate that wound, or could correctly call out that mistreated infection. Mental illnesses are much the same, too.

If you are a Historian, and you believe you have correctly made an assumption based on the credible facts presented to you, A Spirit could help right any inaccurate materials by offering something so simple as a different approach you hadn’t yet considered.

Spirits of sympathy, could help someone grieve after the loss of a loved one.

Spirits of justice, could help law officials make substantially less errors in the field of law. Could prevent less corruption from manifesting in law enforcement branches.

There is just so much possibility we could achieve together.

And-”

His cheeks and the tips of his ears were flushed red again.

“What is it?” She asked.

“N-nothing… I’m afraid I have gone on too long again … But I believe you get the picture”

He remarked, clearing his throat.

“Well, I did ask...” She grinned. “I think it sounds wonderful….” a forlorn sigh following

“Do you, Or should I say ….. have you.. met any Spirits, Solas?”

“Many. There are numerous I consider to be dear friends.

For the most part, I speak more to them, than I do, anyone else..

Well.. with exception to you.” He chuckled.

“How do you… speak to them though? I mean.. Isn’t it difficult when they are incorporeal?” He thought abit on this.

“Some are more powerful than others. Some are more readily easy to find then others.

Occasionally a mage can detect their presence when they are nearby, but you usually need specific tools to strengthen and sharpen the area around you, to better communicate with them.

Others can only be found when you are in a dreamstate and can fully gain control of yourself in your dreams, in order to have some control over yourself there.“ He nodded

Leelas’ eyes widened at this idea “You can gain control of yourself in your own dreams?” “Of course” He acknowledged, matter of factly “Few ever try, and I do not wish to imply that it is easy by any means.

It can take a great deal of practice to do so, and benefits many people for a variety of reasons.”

“I wonder if I could do it then?...” She chuckled “Honestly some dreams I have are just downright bizarre~”

He cocked an amused brow “How so?”

And she shook her head some acting serious “Oh no.. we aren’t going down that road… Too awkward. Nah uh.”

Causing him to laugh in response “I see.” then added” However, I have some wonderful books on the subject of controlling dreams, I will happily find and lend them to you. If you would like?”

She perked up at this, nodding her head eagerly “Yes please!, dunno if they would work or not, but always worth trying at least!”

“Tomorrow then…” Solas promised. “And should you have trouble understanding any of it I can always lend my own personal expertise on the matter.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

It was around midday when Leela found herself standing out the front of Elenas building complex.

The city was overcrowded. Further out where the richer people dwelt, it was better maintained, with proper schooling, markets, hospitals and guard facilities as well as everything else that went with it..

but down here was another story..

Half the time people referred to it as the slums. It wasnt ‘as bad’ as an actual slum. You could trick yourself into thinking the lower city was a nicer place, if you happened to not pay too close attention, or stuck to the places less likely frequented by its homeless people.

Half the reason she liked and frequented the library cafe in the first place, was because it was cosy and clean and encouraged free learning with books that anyone off the street could come in and learn from.

Building complexes like the one she lived in, and the one here that Elena lived in, were jam packed full, with people who weren’t good enough to live in the upper parts.

It wasnt uncommon to find families of 5 or more crammed into the one apartment.

Many people travelled to the Greater Thedas regions to attempt to make good on their educations or degrees so they could be accepted into the higher parts of the City, and be taken from out of here into a life of splendor.

However, it rarely worked out this way, because the requirements needed, were usually far too steep, and like most places. The less a government or council looked after its people, the more likely these ‘lesser offs’ would eventually fall into lives of crime or addiction to simply get by or manage their mental states.

She had dreamed of being a vet all her life just about,

but since travelling here, she no longer dreamt of leaving the lower cities,

because she hated and loathed ‘them’, the people who lived higher up.

Peering down on them with distaste and discontent. Leela had heard them speak many times,

on transistors and image capturing crystal receptors.

They had wealth galore, and splurged on public grandiose displays of abundance whilst bemoaning the laziness and the poorness of the same people who filled and worked in their factories, keeping them running in the first place, for few coin.

As much as the wealthy spat on the lower, it somehow didn’t stop some of them frequenting their districts, in search of light entertainment or worse.

Instead, Leela had come to the decision, that ‘if she could, she would’ make a veterinary ‘here’ in the lower city regions, taking in and caring for the injured or orphaned beasts that wouldn’t survive these parts otherwise.

Elena lived an entire seven blocks up, and Leela passed many sorts on her way up the flights of stairs to get there.

Addicts, bored children playing, Tranquil castaways ( Magic-use was ‘forbidden’ in the lower cities unless you had access to a school and carried license. Penalty was severe. Instant ‘Tranquillity’, no chance of repeat offenders, but also limiting Mage users chances of making good livings for themselves, under the excuse that ‘it helped create less crime’ ).

Lifters trying to sell her stolen goods, or knock offs and the odd person on lute or singing for a couple coin to feed themselves for the night.

She finally reached the door, and knocked heavily.

“Who is it?”

A suspicious female voice called from within

And She responded

“Leela, present and accounted for!”

To hear footsteps wander over, and the sound of clicks and flicks as Elena unlocked and unclasped the locks and chains that barred people entering.

A long face framed with thick black hair and brown eyes peered out at her, then narrowed.

“You… got the goods or what?”

Leela jokingly checked the coast was clear, then slowly slid the packet out of her jacket.

“Cream crisp chocolate biscuits.. just like you ordered Ma’am.”

A wink as she passed them through the door crack, to be checked.

Her friend made a show of checking them over carefully.

“All seems to be in order.. Alright Miss… You can come in...”

She stepped aside for Leela, whom entered quickly so they could lock up again behind them.

Her apartment was more or less one large room.

A bed on the floor, small tub for bathing, a small kitchen stove and a mini fridge.

She kept little else, because break-ins could be common and there would be no point having too much here.

Most of the girls stashed their more valuable shit at the Red Lyrium anyway.

Since that was better fortified due to good protection spells and security measures.

Heck, even when one person had once stolen his way inside, past all of that, only to find himself face to face with Elion anyway, whom quickly disarmed and tied down the hapless burglar, keeping them there until The Boss arrived the next day.

The girls plunked themselves on the mattress, facing one another.

The biscuits, opened and placed in the middle, and a bottle of cheap wine that was hidden under the mattress until Elena pulled it free and popped the cork to take a swig, then passing it to her friend.

Leela liked It here, since Elena always brought herself scented candles and would leave them burning most nights, making the room a sensational mishmash of aroma.

Vanilla, old oaks, lavenders, roses, wild flowers…

Elena had once told her this was how she escaped her every day, by pretending she wasn’t even here, but in some magical forest place far far away instead.

“So~ How are things with you and Marthaniel? Last time I came here, you seemed rather upset?” She asked carefully, popping a biscuit into her mouth.

“Meh… I don’t think we’ll work out really...” Elena sighed. “He’s Law enforcement anyway… They don’t mingle with us people.. Gives em a bad name.”

“They sure don’t mind us when they come to watch us dance though..” Leela huffed.

“Its never good to mingle with them anyway.. but .. You deserve better, Elena.”

Elena bit her lip, a look of uncertainty written across her face, that pained Leela to see,

she lent over to touch her friends beautiful hair and tuck it behind her ears so she could cup her cheek “I’m being serious here.. you ‘do’ deserve better. You know that right???”

“I don’t know...” Elena exhaled “It just feels like all my choices are wrong.. I mean, I keep making the same mistakes? How is that even possible? It -.. it feels like I’m being cosmically challenged, paying my karma or something maybe…”

She took one of the biscuits to nibble on, as her expression looked far away.

“Like.. Maybe in another lifetime I did something realll nasty and now I’m paying my just dues. Otherwise, how else can you explain it?”

“Love is shit.” Leela answered abruptly, causing them both to break into a fit of laughter.

“Okay, seriously though.. “ She continued to Elena ”People can just be shitty… Most often then not people don’t intentionally go out of their way to make others miserable, but they can only think about themselves, what makes ‘them’ happy.. and sometimes… its at the expense of ‘another’ persons happiness. So you see, It’s not about you not being good enough for this douchebag or that asshole.. Its about finding the right one.. And you’ll know when you have, because their happiness will be your happiness and vice-versa.”

Elena smiled, passing the bottle over “You really think its possible?” “I sure do.. You’re still young El.. And lotsa girls and women around the globe go through this everyday, until the day they don’t” She winked.

“Hmm~” Elena smiled. “Thank you, I needed that.” “You needed what??

“Hope.” Elena laughed. “You’re always good at giving that to people.. it just rubs off you, dontcha know? “

Leela looked surprised but smiled quickly after, took a sip and passed it back.

“Anyway… What about you? You never talk about guys. So, What’s the deal with that? You married? Single? Taken? I thought you even had something for Elion once, I mean, you two are always together at work?”

Leela laughed at this and shook her head. “Of course I love Elion.. just… not quite like that...” A nod “….-and, I ‘was’ promised to marriage by someone.. when I was young” A quirked brow from her friend, caused her to add an “-Er” at the end.

“And this guy you are promised to? You are Dalish?, sooooo does that mean you will return to your people one day to wed him?” She asked looking worried

“No.” Leela answered. “I left my people behind. Wanted to find and make something of myself here. And ‘Here’, isnt really what I imagined at all… but.. I don’t regret coming either. Had I stayed, I wouldnt have the same freedom to make my own path”

Elena listened intently as she snacked on more biscuits and wine. “But, was he hot? Or unattractive?” The important questions.

Leela shrugged, took another biscuit for herself “I don’t know honestly… I knew him when he was younger, so to me he just felt like a friend or a slightly older brother.. Couldn’t comprehend having to marry him.”

“Hmmmm” Elena contemplated. “And you don’t have a boyfriend, like.. at all? I mean you’re so pretty … How do you not have guys falling over you????”

She shrugged again “I .. do have a crush on someone.. but it sounds so childish, doesnt it? A woman my age, having a crush on someone?”

“Ohhhhh~” Elena straightened “I don’t think so.. and you’re not ‘that’ old.. Sheesh~ Everyone has crushes! I even have one for the guy who sells me eggs.. “

They laughed

“Tell me more though? Whats he look like? Whats his name and how you know him?”

Elena was bopping up and down on the mattress like a child during the summer festival.

It made her chuckle.

“Alright!” She cleared her throat “So there’s this guy… goes by the name of Solas, and … I had eyes for him the moment I saw him”

She sighed dreamily, crossing her feet infront of her and resting her elbows on her legs to prop her chin in her hands.

“He has these blue eyes.. You’d never believe unless you actually saw ..

They look stormy when hes in a bad mood, like whenever someone calls him up and he has to leave for whatever.. They can also become lighter and vibrant when he smiles and laughs

….and ughhhhhhh, he’s just so gorgeous to look at.. and his voice.. is so smooth and downrigtht lyrical. It should be a crime to sound and look that good!”

Elena giggled in the background, “but.. have you told him you like him? Does he know?”

Leela shook her head “Havent even found the right time to tell him I’m a dance girl yet.. And.. I dunno if I would want to risk losing the chats we have, if I made it awkward like that”

“If he was bothered by something like ‘that’, then trust me girl, he ain’t worth it” Elena remarked.

And she knew the girl was right.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

Sure enough, by next Morning, Solas was awaiting her at their table with a pleasant smile to his face and a few books in his hands. “Miss Leela, I wasn’t sure you would show today”

Leela sat, placing her own textbooks aside and yawned with a hand covering her mouth

“Excuse me.. I may have had a little too much of a late night I’m afraid...”

Spying the books suddenly she asked

“Are those the ones about controlling dreams?”

He nodded, handing them over..

The covers felt old. The top one was wrapped in some kind of green velvet, the word :

‘To walk the Fade’,

titled across it.

When she opened the book up, she could see delicate pages, and she turned a few pages with care.

The writing flowed like lyrics and the illustrations were a plethora of colour.

“How.. old.. is this book exactly?”

He tilted his head thinking “A few centuries. Give or take?”

She gulped, looking up at him

“I-Is it really okay for me to lend these? They look like they belong in a museum...”

“They do.” He chuckled

“Wait, what?” Leela froze

“They are currently on loan to us from the Museum” He commented “The Fade, or dreamstate as we often call it, is where many of pirits choose to remain..

Therefore it covers our field of expertise and hence, the museum had to loan it to us, for research purposes.”

“oh...”

She goes to push it back in his direction , but he declines

“I trust you will take care of it, and return it when you are done… Also the book is quite big.. So please do not feel pressured to read the whole thing...” He replied with a clearing of his throat.

“Even I myself sometimes fell asleep while reading it”

“Good to know” she laughed “I might keep it at my workplace though, under lock and key.. because I wouldnt leave the house with this thing in it unless I get robbed..”

“Oh?” His ears pricked “What kind of work do you do?”

Her heart sank suddenly ans she sat the books gently down on the table. Oh ohhh.. really set herself up for that one.. “Um. Well.. I...Its ...I actually.. err”

She stuttered looking down in embarrassment and trying to come up with a way to phrase it right,

and he was quick to pick up on the general discomfort.

“I apologise. You do not need to tell me if you do not wish, I was only curious.

He finished with another smile.

“Actually I’m a dancer!” She blurted out, much to his surprise.

They stared at each other in silence for a moment, until he laughed and shook his head.

“It is of no surprise”

“What do you mean?” She asked, almost offended.

“I mean judging from the manner in which you carry yourself, of course.. You move with such an ease and fluidity to your step, it is hard not to notice”

“So, you are suggesting I am graceful?” She blushed, foolishly. Willing herself not to take it too strongly to heart.

“No. I am declaring it.” He responded, chin tipped high in that manner he always had about him.

whellllllllllllppppppppp, There went her heart, racing way ahead of her again.

She lifted her cup to her lips to finish her coffee

“Perhaps one day I may come watch you dance?” He asked

And she spat her drink. Fortunately enough for her, it only went back into the cup.

He didn’t seem to notice.

“Really? I.. I mean….”

Holy Makers Balls, He was bold, wasnt he? “Certainly. There are many styles of Dance that are made up of difficult numbers and are remarkably well composed with exceptional flow of movements when done right by a dance company.. “

Wait a minute.. that sounds like Ballet?.

He thought she was talking about a different kind of stage dancing altogether.

She exhaled and struggled to find the words to correct him.

Well, that was a kind of a big fail…. Leela thought to herself.

#solabellan #solas #abelas #lavellan

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asaforestonfire · 7 years ago

Text

Grim

Hey I wrote a weird fic thingy in like, 6 hours and have not edited it at all and prolly won’t cause I’m lazy but hey, here, take it:

In your youth, you would rest on a blanket in the depths of a lab, protected by the watchful eyes of stuff kittens provided to you by the kind hearts who cared about you. White sheens of hard shells crafting soft features of felines with two too many eyes in the dim lights of pulsing green checkerboards that surround your bed. When the glean would fade, the quiet clinking of hard joints against each other cease to fill the room, the calm serenity would be replaced. You would hear them. The voices. The choir of chatterings and soft screeches that would combine into an unnatural melody of promises.

The sentinels lovingly made to guard the young wizard, covered in old sheets and clutching onto her portal to the realm of her friends, shift in the night. Their curious white eyes turn cold when you writhe, small hands plugged over your ears. You want them to fend off the noises, to repel them back, to let you sleep. But they cannot. They sit. They watch. You are young when you learn to ignore them, to simply repel their voices and quiet them to nothing more than a soft buzz. The eyes stare. The figures stay stuck to their seats. The bottles slowly block them out.

Your adolescence goes by in a blur. You are reminded of the moments in your youth, the few words made out among the cacophony of cries bleeding into your sleeping mind, when you first handle the controls below the wide grey screen. Delicate hands travel across the panel in a method that only someone familiar with the technology could perform. The screen lights up, blue light causing your vision to falter for a moment, before fixing itself. An young man sits in a room, red sky behind him as sparks fly off a metal pipe, welding mask over his face and arms exposed. You take brief note of his figure… only to hear the sounds again. They never came up when you were awake and out of bed, you assumed they were resigned to night and when you were teetering on consciousness. It hurts. The voices, they hurt beyond imagine. You can barely hear your thoughts above anything else. You slide down the front of the panel, hands cradling your head and knees moving to protect your face. Without your touch, the screen blinks out, leaving only the pulsing green you are familiar with to fill the darkness.

A month later, you try again. The novels you have written have already stacked tall against the far wall, and your drawings are tiring with nothing new to go on, so you turn to the last source of curiosity. Your hands move in another pattern, different from last time. The target today: a kindly woman sits in a home, leaned over a counter and idly writing in a large book, annotating pages with dense text. For some reason, you are captivated. You lean against the console and watch her for hours, admiring how nice her home looks, the gentle smile on her face, her pretty handwriting… until the screen cuts out when she enters some room you don’t recognize. Frustrated, you try to go back to that setting, to return to what had seemed so simple and pleasant, only to wind up staring at someone with similar features, but in the middle of felling a large beast. You hop back as the screen flares with a gunflash. The man takes a moment, confused, before looking at what you feel like is yourself. You are… unnerved.

Later that night you cannot sleep. No matter how many bottles stack you can never seem to drown them out. They cry out to you, they call you by name, demanding you help them, save them from their agony. They promise you a life free from your residence, to provide you the ability to meet those faces. They reach out and quell the sickening green you are too familiar with, and brush against your face. You feel them around you. You feel… nothing.

The barrel of the blunderbus kicks up into the air and you recoil, complaining that he’s getting to excited and reminding him there’s no reason to fire in the middle of the damn house!!! Sure you did finally manage to mix something that didn’t explode, but all you need is a fucking hug instead of the full 21 gun salute. In seconds you are wrapped in his burly arms, and spun around, getting stupid mustache hair in your mouth. You don’t care though. You’re more than happy to hug him back and giggle as your spun. It’s been years since you saw him on that screen, and now, he’s taken you on as an intern for his business. From the first moment you create a decent adhesive, you start propelling forward in the field of chemistry, advancing rather quickly to the point that you outpace the entirety of the initial team he had assembled. You feel… accomplished. When he pats your head or takes you out for lunch you are entirely focused, kept completely in the moment. You don’t see the void in your dreams.

Normally, normally though, you have taken to manifesting in the empty void, surrounded by nothing and everything at once. There are thousands of eyes peering at you, blinking, unfeeling, curious. But then there is nothing. You are alone. You are crushingly empty. You are nothing.

You have returned to your old home, snow surrounding the brown brick building covering the sprawling complex below. A tinge of pain runs through your body as you step through the light dusting of white, body tensed beyond belief. The silver of your flask touches your lips, a swell of courage courses through your veins, and you suddenly remember everything you had spent so long forgetting. The wrinkles on your face deepen, exasperating by the second as you trail down the winding steps to your childhood home. You need to do this. You need to ignore the unflinching eyes of your former guardians and clean the space. There is work to be done, and you will do whatever you can to ensure it moves along smoothly.

They keep calling to you. Every. Single. Night. They reach out to you and try to wrap their whims onto your soul, always trying to sway you with promises of knowledge and protection, of love and desire, of a spot in their court so long as you accept their gifts. You know, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt, you are not who they want. Yet they call.

Sometimes they strike a nerve, others they manage to catch you in a good mood. But recently, they have talked the only language you listen to. They promise you meaning.

The home has finally become a real home. After your trip to meet the one woman who made you feel calm, you returned home with a new purpose. Her face is too bright for you to look at sometimes, her smile illuminating the dark that had haunted you for so long. She grasps at your fingers and babbles to you as you drive her home. Even without the knowledge you have been provided, you would have known she would do great things, anyone this perfect had to be meant for something greater. In the moments you spend, cradling her close to your breast as you walk the path up to your door, the flask you had carried since you left the labs, falls and rests in a snowbank behind you. She deserves the best, and you will do your damndest to provide it for her.

She’s read her way through half the library at this point. You are amazed at how hungry she can be at such a young age, so concerned about how this works and why that functions like it does. Whenever those bright purple eyes look up at you from your lap, and those cute lips part to ask you why some acids are lethal and others simply erode certain substances, you can feel yourself regain some of that spark you lost. On her third birthday, you present her a sentinel, this one able to bat away the various daytime beasts who end up making your sunshine jump. She cries when you tell her he is hers.

Two years later, he turns up dead on the beach. There are bags under your eyes. The sun is hidden behind dark clouds as you carry the kitten back to the home, a stagger in your step and a few tears staining your cheeks. You wanted to find him a place to rest while the casket can be made, somewhere out of her view, but she noticed. She sits at the counter to do her school work, today scribbling a series of symbols on a piece of black construction paper in red crayon, only to drop it on the floor. She cries. You quake. The darkness slowly creeps into your vision.

Nothing works any more. No matter how much you try and make up for it, how much you beg for them to let you make it better, you can’t. So you drink. Not to keep them quiet, but to forget. To try and find some way out of this shitty fate for her, but no. No every day just makes her more distant and you more tired. She’s stopped going to school, you both knew she never needed it but once you got to drinking often, and she finished elementary, there was no way she could even leave. You’ve trapped her. You know you have, but fuck it! You were doomed from the start and they taunted you with it. They still fucking offer you options, to take their hand and join them but no. No if you are going to be a shit role model may as well make sure it’s not for everything. So you drink, you cry, and you let her hate you. You try to make her not but she always does.

The meteors have started to fall. You watch them on the screen, sitting around your cats and trying to pass the time. It’ll be over soon. She’ll be fine soon. Everything will be okay soon.

They still talk with you. Now you simply talk back. You wander the landscapes they set up with their dreams. Feet traversing the same paths they had arranged you to, you reflect quietly. Their songs are quite peaceful now.

Her land is nice. You missed the feeling of monsters falling to your fist, or the feeling of making the shot that felt absolutely impossible. It reminds you of the smell of mustache wax and burnt gunpowder. You make sure to leave her enough to keep her swimming in resources for as long as she needs. The ruins are calm, the consorts kind, and the lights nice and bright. You take the time to memorize every inch of the surface of this planet, you want to have something new to travel.

He is kind. You never saw him in your viewport, but god you feel like he is everything you could have ever wanted. Tall, kind, able to bake, resourceful… a bit creepy but only in so far as being almost too much of a gentle man, even the pipe smoke somehow makes him appealing. He makes you feel safe. The old man picks you up on his ship, and the meeting is brief. You share a quiet conversation, wine on your breath making his smile waver, the wear on his gun causing your gaze to turn. It is almost over.

You spend the rest of the ride chatting with the partner chosen to guide you into the last moments of your life. He is surprisingly well spoken, passionate about these funny little mundanities, but set against the goofy nature of his interest in pranks. You remember… the woman from the view port. He must be her son. That explains the tranquility. He asks about your interests, you crack a few jokes about the only interest of yours being the interesting field of managing to never see the bottom of your glass. He gives you a slight worried glance, but politely laughs along. Then you say your daughter, and he smiles. That smile rivals hers. It’s a different kind of warmth, more, the kitchen when his wife used to cook, but warm nonetheless. You ask him about his son and the warmth is almost overpowering.

He pours you a drink, you smile. For once, you feel at peace. He holds your hand, pipe by his side, and you hold his, wine in your off hand. And then you feel it. You feel them. They’re back and they’re here and. The darkness comes creeping in above you. No, no no no. You were told this would happen after you were gone. They sing to you in dissonant tones, a thousand different voices screaming at once. You recoil into a small ball, curled up on the ground, hands covering your ears. No. No no no no no no no no no no.

It is dark. You sit back in the void, cradled in the tentacles of Yogthragth, surrounded by the circle. They remind you that they had warned you, and that there is still something left. They offer you a chance to buy some time before the timeline collapses. The light is lost, now all there is left is to return to nothing.

Ink rains from the sky, coating the checkerboard fields enough to render them unrecognizable. Tendrils of thorny black lift your prone form from the ground, setting you on your feet. There is a castle to find, and a grave to lay in.

A sword pierces your gut. A sea of ink flows from your mouth as you hunch over, fist clenched around the mutt’s throat.

Then. It all goes black.

Your vision,

The battlefield,

The planet,

Everything.

As you fade, you think you see them, the sentinels, watching over you with their curious eyes. The darkness overtakes you, and the mutants who had watched idly, take their leave, watching over you again in a different line.

#alcohol /

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drades-lair · 7 years ago

Text

Odd pairing

Author: Drade666

Rating: M

Warnings: Sexual content, nudity

Pairings: Ducifer

Fandom: Supernatural

Woman were the one thing everyone could agree at being Dean’s favorite next to beer that is however it may surprise Sam to find out one day that Dean had also had a few men as well over the years. In the end Dean truly wasn’t picky considering half the towns they pulled up in didn’t have a very large selection to choose from, you want to get your rocks off sometimes you got to just go with what’s available. Anyway as a result Dean has indeed seen his fair share of handsome men but recently one has been catching his attention more than any of them and it was disturbing as crap to him because the man he kept ogling was Lucifer. Now even Dean had to admit that since Lucifer had been freed from the cage to wander the earth he’d been redeeming himself from performing small miracles to helping them on hunts…he changed which definitely didn’t help Dean’s little man crush on him. Certainly Dean never told Lucifer any of this nor even hinted to the fact he found the archangel attractive yet it made it a little awkward sometimes to see him especially if he’d not had any in a while. Either way apparently this crush or whatever you wanted to call it made Dean highly observant towards said archangel seeing as of late he’d notice that Lucifer was shooting off some subtle oddities nothing to indicate he was hurt or in trouble more like…awkward even shy about something. Having not seen Lucifer in a few days the boys were sitting around diligently searching the internet for cases when go figure said archangel shows up in the library with that subtle awkward expression on his features.

“Hey Lucifer, what’s up?” Dean inquired, taking a sip of coffee from his mug

“I…I have a favor to ask,” Lucifer stuttered slightly at the beginning of the sentence which was odd enough let alone the fact he was acting like a teenager about to ask a girl on a date for the first time.

“Shoot,” Sam encouraged, leaning back in his chair to provide Lucifer with his undivided attention

“I was wondering…if I could use your shower.” Lucifer finally asked causing both boys to instantly giggle because well after all they’d not really expected that to be the favor and the fact it was the simplest answer too.

“Of course Lucifer, it’s just down the hall then down the stairs or at least the communal one is…help yourself,” Sam assured the archangel, still unable to help giggling a little.

“Uh…thank you,” Lucifer nodded before heading in the direction of the communal shower downstairs

Sam huffed one last chuckle with Dean before they both went back to their laptops to continue the search for cases. Dean was so busy concentrating on his search that he didn’t realize that about 2 hours had passed since Lucifer had gone to shower yet he’d not shown back up granted it was possible he’d simply angel zapped himself out of the shower once finished but still Dean could have sworn he heard the shower still running. Casually closing the top of his laptop Dean pushed up from the chair he’d been sitting in earning an instant questioning glance from Sam.

“I think the idiot left the water on, I’ll be back,” Dean explained briefly with an irritated expression

Sam gave a smile and a nod of understanding now then went back to his laptop while Dean made his way towards the communal shower. Trotting down the stairs into the large locker room Dean strode over to the large showering area where there was still steam coming out with the rush of water that actually sounded like there was more than one head on. Rolling his eyes Dean turned the corner fully prepared to turn off the shower with the full expectation that he wasn’t going to find anyone in there only to stop short at finding someone in there. As it turned out Lucifer hadn’t left yet after all, he was standing in the steamy room with three shower heads running and for good reason considering that stretched out behind his back were four sets of large feathery wings. Dean actually felt his entire body freeze up as he just stared at those glorious, sun colored wings that radiated with red, yellow and orange like a sunrise unfortunately that wasn’t all Dean took notice of either after all currently standing in front of him was a completely naked archangel. Lucifer had been cleaning one of his wings by hand when he noticed Dean staring from the entrance to the shower area of course instantly he jumped in shocked surprise, tucking his wings close to his body in a defensive manner.

“Dean! What are you doing here?” Lucifer demanded almost sounding angry

“You were taking forever in the shower so I thought you left the water on,” Dean thought on his feet even managing to sound irritated instead of completely turned on.

“You could have knocked,” Lucifer quietly scolded Dean

Lucifer wasn’t making any eye contact with the older Winchester as his wings encircled his body to hide it from Dean. Over Lucifer’s body were multitudes of raised scars from what Dean could see not that he cared after all both him as well as Sam have more scars then either could count but then Dean glanced to the water pooling around Lucifer’s feet realizing there was a bit of red mingling in with the clear water.

“Are you okay?” Dean inquired after realizing it was blood

“I’d be better if you’d leave,” Lucifer quipped

“Is that blood? Are you hurt?” Dean persisted now walking into the shower area not even caring that he was still fully clothed as he pointed at the tiled floor around Lucifer’s feet.

“I’m fine…I just…I need you to leave!” Lucifer barked although it was a rather futile bark

“I can help, where is the wound?” Dean insisted

Lucifer finally gave an irritable sigh as he turned around, adjusting his wings enough so that Dean could see the small of the archangel’s back where a cut was currently open with blood barely oozing from it. Dean gently pressed his fingers just above the cut earning a small twinge from Lucifer’s muscles but the archangel didn’t move away nor cry out in pain, hissed a little when Dean started poking at it a little more but that was about it.

“Angel blade do this?” Dean asked casually

“Yes,” Lucifer simply replied

“Okay, well it’s not too deep so a little cleaning then some patch work once you’re out should do the trick,” Dean offered as his fingers lightly brushed along Lucifer’s pale wet skin

Lucifer turned back around revealing that his cheeks were flushed bright red with his breathing coming in short quick wisps. Dean furrowed his brow in confusion only to realize very quickly that Lucifer was pulling his wings even tighter around his waist area as if trying to make certain Dean didn’t see anything plus he still wasn’t making eye contact.

“Lucifer…are you…turned on?” Dean finally just asked out right

“I…I…no…I mean…I don’t know?” Lucifer suddenly admitted in his fluster

“Wait…what do you mean ‘you don’t know’?” Dean asked

“You can leave now…I’ll be out soon,” Lucifer attempted but Dean wasn’t going anywhere not after hearing that statement.

“Lucifer, do you have a boner?” Dean finally asked bluntly

“A…a what?” Lucifer looked honestly confused by Dean’s question specifically with that word and that damn near made Dean double over in shocked laughter.

“An erection…you know….” Dean managed to clarify despite being on the verge of dying laughing yet this only seemed to deepen the furrow of Lucifer’s brow along with adding that classic angel head tilt to the mix.

Oh this was just too good not to mention it made Lucifer far hotter in Dean’s mind because all though he’d fully admit that he’d fantasized about Lucifer before he never could have dreamed up the idea of Lucifer being a virgin. Dean composed himself enough to gently place his hands on Lucifer’s shoulders causing the archangel to take a couple swift glances at them before finally locking eyes with Dean thus that was it the older Winchester couldn’t resist any longer. Gently Dean pressed Lucifer backwards till his back touched the tiled wall earning yet another confused glance from the archangel that turned to surprise as Dean leaned forwards to just take Lucifer’s lips with his own. Lucifer only resisted for a split second before giving in to the kiss although it proved that this was his first kiss too because Lucifer was awkward, sloppy with the way he tried to figure out how to do it but with Dean leading the way he quickly caught on. Dean slid his hands down Lucifer’s shoulders to his upper arms while Lucifer simply kept his arms plastered to the tile wall on either side of him however the kiss loosened the tight shroud of feathers as his wings casually fell to his sides in a submissive posture. Now Dean could see that Lucifer had indeed been hiding a very prominent boner although he wasn’t fully hard yet he was hard enough that pre-cum had begun to gather at the slit and every time Dean kissed Lucifer his length would twitch in interest. Dean truly couldn’t believe what he was about to do but really too late to turn back now, moving his mouth from Lucifer’s he pecked him on the side of the mouth then dragged his nose feathery light along Lucifer’s cheek till he reached the archangel’s ear.

“Have you ever been touched?” Dean inquired in a deep raspy tone directly in Lucifer’s ear

“Uh…no…” Lucifer breathed out in a shaky tone as his body quivered

“Then let’s change that…shall we?” The last part was a bid for consent after all Dean was many things and if someone wanted it rough or kinky or whatever then by damned he’d give it to them but the one thing he would never do was take advantage of someone who didn’t want it at all.

“W-with you…but you hate me?” Lucifer panted out in a questioning tone

“You did a lot of crappy stuff sure but you’ve mostly made up for it…can’t deny I’m attracted to you so…” Dean trailed off completely taking Lucifer off guard

“You think I’m…attractive?” Lucifer stuttered, searching Dean’s eyes with his own for some sign the Winchester was lying yet he wasn’t.

“Yep…now, you want to do this?” Dean inquired gently

Lucifer averted his gaze momentarily to consider what was being offered then looked back to Dean with a solid head nod of approval. Some virgins could be extremely shy thus saying yes could sometimes be too much but a head nod like that was good enough especially when it was deliberate and clear not hesitant or uncertain. Dean smirked as he pressed himself closer to Lucifer with his clothing now completely soaked he didn’t care one bit, latching his lips to Lucifer’s neck Dean gently kissed all the way down it to the nape where he sucked liberally to form a small hickey. Repositioning his hands on Lucifer’s hips Dean could feel the feathers from his wings brushing lightly against his knuckles like silk against a naked body he felt his jeans get tighter in the crotch area that caused him to suck a little harder on Lucifer’s neck instantly drawing out a heady moan from the archangel. Suddenly Lucifer’s hands were on Dean’s forearms as he let out a quiet ‘Dean…’ in a tone of confused surprise as the sound he’d made appeared to have taken Lucifer off guard despite it being his own voice. Dean responded in turn by pulling Lucifer even closer so the archangel could wrap his arms around Dean’s shoulders with quick panting breaths.

“Sshh…I got you…I’ll make it good…” Dean cooed, shifting his hands around Lucifer’s hips till they could slide down over the archangel’s butt cheeks to begin massaging at the firm flesh.

Lucifer drew his bottom lip up between his teeth as Dean continued to mouth along his neck with his hands groping at his ass in circular motions. Dean could feel Lucifer’s hips beginning to slowly roll forwards obviously he wasn’t doing it on purpose, Dean had experienced this before with virgins as well as experienced people it was just instinct when you crave that friction. Smoothing the flat of his tongue down Lucifer’s shoulder to his collar bone Dean gave a small pat to Lucifer’s right buttock not enough to leave any sort of red mark but enough that it made the slapping sound and allowed the archangel to feel the impact causing him to jump a little with a hitching breath yet he didn’t panic nor pull away so Dean did it again on the other cheek this time earning the same response. Gently Dean took one of Lucifer’s nipples into his mouth, swirling his tongue around the peaked nub while Lucifer moaned out symphonies of Dean’s name as clearly he was a very sensitive virgin. Pulling off of Lucifer’s nipple Dean decided his clothing had become highly uncomfortable from being drenched not to mention from his ever hardening cock thus he pushed back for a moment leaving Lucifer panting, red faced with hooded eyes against the white tile wall with his cock now more than hard between his legs. Quickly Dean managed to remove all his clothing causing Lucifer to rake his eyes along Dean’s naked form before meeting those green orbs once more as Dean moved back against the archangel for another heated kiss. By the way Lucifer squirmed against Dean’s body with needy little moans he could tell the archangel was getting desperate meaning he needed to start getting this thing on the road but against a shower wall wasn’t for amateurs let alone for a virgin who’d never done it before so thinking quickly Dean pulled from the kiss to move Lucifer to the bench that ran down the middle of the shower area for people to sit on while taking their shower and fortunately Dean actually had a locker down here with some lube in it as it was really the only place he could stash it from Sam’s sight. Hurrying to the locker Dean grabbed the lube then returned to the showering area where Lucifer was waiting patiently by the bench.

“Bend over it,” Dean instructed pointing to the bench

Lucifer hesitated for a moment but eventually complied with Dean’s request, getting on his knees then bending over the bench. Dean knelt behind Lucifer, placing a gentle hand on his hip so that Lucifer knew where he was before gently taking the archangel by the hips to scoot him forwards a little while the fallen angel kept looking over his shoulder to watch what Dean was doing. Popping the cap on the lube Dean drizzled a fair amount on the palm of his hand before recapping the bottle to set it down beside him for later use, he slid up closer to Lucifer with his clean hand rubbing reassuring circles on Lucifer’s one cheek before gripping it firmly to spread them so that his lubed hand could slip two fingers between the cheeks over the tight hole there. Lucifer tensed with a small jerk as his fingers white knuckled the edge of the bench.

“Dean? What…what are you…?” Lucifer stammered out almost incapable of forming proper thoughts

“It’s okay…this is going to make it easier…I promised to make it good,” Dean reminded Lucifer as he gently just rimmed Lucifer’s entrance with his lubed fingers making it nice and slippery.

“Okay…” Lucifer breathed out, putting complete trust in Dean as he forced himself to relax a little finally allowing Dean to press his finger in a little bit.

Lucifer moaned but didn’t reacted in pain so Dean pressed in till his finger was up to the knuckle inside him then started to finger fuck Lucifer at a medium pace to get his own natural lubricants flowing. Lucifer wasn’t having any pain reaction at all just moans and groans of ecstasy that encouraged Dean to try a second finger which did slide in easily yet he had to slow his pace because once inside this time Lucifer did respond a little to the stretching so instead Dean took to pressing in with long strokes waiting a few minutes then pulling back out slowly which appeared to do the trick. Once the stretching relented a little Dean started a series of three hard pumps of his fingers then pushing them all the way in where he sat for a few minutes, curling his fingers inside Lucifer to hit all his sensitive walls before pulling out to start pumping again. This actually managed to pull a needy whimper from Lucifer’s chest that made Dean’s own dick spew pre-cum because damn that was the sexiest sound in the world coming from this creature and once Lucifer’s legs began to part on their own Dean added a third finger that slipped in easily with no resistance. With Lucifer moaning like a whore now Dean pulled all three fingers out of him then trailed the slick lube down to his balls, giving them a quick fondle before sliding back up to Lucifer’s ass. Grabbing the bottle of lube now Dean popped it back open to squeeze out another large pool of it in the middle of his palm, recapping the bottle Dean started pumping his own cock with the stuff to make sure he was as slick as possible after all even three of his fingers didn’t really measure up to the girth of his cock so this needed to be as smooth as he could get it for Lucifer’s first time. Kneeling only on one knee which was between Lucifer’s legs while his other leg was crooked up for support Dean spread Lucifer’s cheeks with one hand while using his other one to line up with Lucifer’s now pliant entrance, pressing the head to it till the ring of muscle began to spread resulting in a hiss from Lucifer at the much wider intrusion.

“Breath…just breath out…it’ll get easier I swear,” Dean cooed, rubbing his hands all over Lucifer’s back around to his stomach even up to his chest where Dean tweaked a nipple to help distract from the discomfort as he slowly pressed forwards until the head of his cock pushed inside Lucifer.

The archangel groaned as he panted heavily with all his muscles tensing while his cock dribbled pre-cum between his legs. Dean used breathing techniques he’d learned over the years to control his orgasms he’d gotten so good at it that he could probably sit her for hours before getting too desperate thus it always led to a better experience for his partners which was what Dean wanted. Dean grabbed up the bottle of lube for a third time to dribble a little between Lucifer’s cheeks right over his own cock to renew the slickness, after tossing the bottle back to the ground Dean used his fingers to lightly massage Lucifer’s entrance around his cock to relax them further successfully managing to slide in a little further before feeling Lucifer tense up again forcing him to stop once more.

“D-Dean…it…it’s…painful…” Lucifer stuttered out as his body shook

“I know…it’ll hurt a little at first but slowly it will ease,” Dean assured the archangel who didn’t appear to believe him right now.

Dean continued to massage his hands over Lucifer’s body even into his wings in a calming manner that would ease Lucifer’s tension for a few minutes to allow Dean to slide inside a little more each time. As Dean promised soon the pain began to ease as Lucifer’s hole was stretched to fit the girth of Dean’s cock till finally the elder Winchester was seated fully inside Lucifer’s ass, continuing his breathing technique Dean just sat there with more soothing sounds being whispered against Lucifer’s flesh while he teased his hands around Lucifer hard aching length to help drum up the feeling of ecstasy over the pain. Slowly Dean could feel the archangel’s insides loosen around him till they were willing to accept the intrusion of his cock with in them thus he leaned up to get better leverage and slowly pulled out of Lucifer about halfway before pushing back in just as slowly causing Lucifer to moan but there was no signs of pain now just pleasure as he did it again then again and again till he was pumping in a medium pace. Lucifer was raising his hips further for a better angle now as he craved more to push him over the edge of ecstasy while Dean was also getting close so he gently yet firmly gripped Lucifer by the shoulder to haul the archangel upwards causing him to let out a small yelp of surprise only for a moment though as ecstasy cries over took it when Dean ground his cock deeply into him with the perfect angle to hit that sensitive spot inside Lucifer. Now Lucifer’s insides were tensing again with the warning signs that he was about to cum so Dean reached around to grip Lucifer’s cock by the base, giving it a few tight pumps that matched his thrusts Dean pulled Lucifer over that final edge allowing the archangel to spill his white hot cum over Dean’s hand for the first time ever and his insides clenched in a vice like grip around Dean’s own cock pulling his orgasm out of him as well making him spill inside Lucifer’s ass. Dean eased Lucifer back to the bench while gently stroking Lucifer’s cock to ease him through the aftershocks of his first orgasm, pulling out of Lucifer simultaneously causing the cum he’d just deposited inside the archangel to dribble out. Once they’d both caught their breath Dean helped Lucifer to his feet then over to the shower heads to clean up before drying off, Dean helped Lucifer get dressed even helped him bandage that cut on his back then they headed upstairs where they found Sam asleep at his laptop meaning fortunately Sam hadn’t heard their little moment downstairs. Lucifer left that night but returned a couple days later with another awkward question only this time it was only for Dean’s ears and it wasn’t the only time after the shower incident that Lucifer returned seeking Dean’s attention either.

#Supernatural #SPN #Supernatural fanfictions #SPN fanfictions #Supernatural fanfics #SPN fanfics #Lucifer #Dean #Dean Winchester #Ducifer #smut #Sam #Sam Winchester #humor

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sudos-random-stuff · 6 years ago

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LS - 28

Ch 28 - Screaming into the Unknown

The Ghostwriter walked slowly through the labyrinth of books.

The back of his mind brought fourth a slew of haphazard memories detailing the first few times he had done this. Wandering through the shelving, filled with wonder and awe and terror, instilled with the strange but intricate question: Was this heaven? Or was it merely an oasis that stood drifting through the midst of hell?

But that question had seemed so dull for so many years, now. He’d come to realise it didn’t matter — life went on whether you wanted it to or not, whether you even considered it living or not.

Somehow, this day felt a lot like his first day in the Ghost Zone, in spite of its differences.

… When you got down to it, the ability to twist reality at will wasn’t just uncommon, it was an anomaly.

Over the thirty-three years he had spent in this place, the Ghostwriter had read and read and read, but not once had he ever uncovered even a trace of a human ghost who had wielded a power like his. The only true contender had been the Sorceress, but her power had been described so differently — not so much a reality shift but something more akin to magic. Maybe… maybe that had been the pitfall all these years. Perhaps she truly was the only other who shared his core type, all the while wielding power of such a boggling magnitude.

As he kept walking he realised, with a sickening droop in his stomach, that he was capable of doing anything.

The only other ghosts that truly stood at his level were those that seemed born from concept itself; the few laws of reality that had always eluded his grasp. Time, life, death, and the strange must-be world that laid beyond the bounds of causality — these things were and always would be inaccessible to him. But the ghosts that represented them never seemed human.

Strangely, he felt again as he had the first time he’d walked this path. Stepping quietly into the unknown, struggling to understand the nature of his own being.

And yet, the entire situation was as frightening as it was intoxicating.

It was with the Ghostwriter’s previous change of reality that he suddenly understood the true nature of his own core. He now knew that the limits his keyboard had placed upon him truly were limits of its own — when his power got serious, it didn’t need written words to control it, nor a battery to charge it. While in the act of escaping the Sorceress’s dimension he’d wondered if he might become spent trying to fight her off, but then the simple act of wanting more energy had resulted in its creation from nothing.

He’d watched — no, felt — one of the most serious laws of physics break in front of his very own eyes, and the idea rushed him to the core with an excitement he scarcely wanted to admit.

… How much of that had Jazz heard in his mind, though? It was impossible to tell how much she might know, and this particularly, the way he had felt, was something he was uncomfortable sharing.

Well, it wasn’t like he could stop her from knowing if she did.

Perhaps it was even possible for him to end this little spat with the Sorceress right now, but he shuddered to think what might happen if he misjudged his advantage over her.

Perhaps in the end the real question was this: In a war between the unstoppable force and the immovable object, was it ever actually possible to win?

Jazz’s first real conversation with Mira was an awkward one.

The Script of Sin and Grace sat politely on a side table, exactly where the Ghostwriter had left it. There’d been some quite explicit instructions to not even think about touching it, and as a result, such contemplations had been at least 50 percent on Jazz’s mind at any given time. Her attention was now split between an invisibly inked document of great power and pure misery, and a crumpled, broken ghost that had once had the displeasure of breaking both of Jazz’s arms. He had left them both there alone, disappearing into the depths of his library, apparently seeking out the first swaths of books they’d need to start collectively picking through.

Naturally, she’d felt his hesitation towards leaving the room at all.

Mira was now just starting to get a feel for sitting up on the couch, but she could never quite take her eyes off the human so ill-suited and out-of-place in this environment either. Jazz tried to block the ghost’s thoughts from entering her mind, but even this simple action seemed to be getting ever more difficult as time went on, as her mind hooked more and more automatically into the minds of others. Memories of what she had done to this ghost sliced uncomfortably into her head, and then mixed around with other memories from Mira herself. It was enough to paralyse you.

“I’m so sorry,” Jazz muttered, quickly. “It shouldn’t have come to that, I’m—”

“You’re not worse.”

The rest of Jazz’s sentence fell straight out of her train of thought. “What?”

“Him. He was worse,” said Spectra, and so honestly that it gave Jazz serious pause. “The man who kept me.”

Jazz was pulling herself away from Spectra’s mind by force, now, some primal sense of survival screeching danger from within. “… What are you talking about?” said Jazz, slowly.

Mira’s voice was quiet. “Life.”

A million possibilities ran through Jazz’s head at once, screeching and jeering for equal consideration, each one considerably more horrible than the next. And yet here Mirabella Spectra was, sitting quietly as she stared down at the floorboards beneath her feat.

“… Who was the man who kept you?” Jazz asked, a little more urgently.

Mira didn’t immediately respond, almost as if she was off in some sort of distant dream world. Instead, she started to float away from the couch, and Jazz saw it for real now — this strange, elegant, entrancing way she moved, something Jazz had only seen hazily and infrequently from the inside of the Ghostwriter’s memory. Mira stepped out with grace unlike any other ghost Jazz had ever seen, and like countless individuals before her, she just couldn’t help but stare.

“… Not Ghostwriter, someone else…” Mira muttered, distantly. She was looking around now at all the little suspended dust particles, never having seen anything quite like it before. “Dust, dust everywhere…” she added, apparently in some kind of haze.

A mistake — Jazz had the audacity to stand up. Mira froze midair like a deer in the headlights, still drifting forwards a little even as every one of her muscles locked up tight. Jazz froze too, hands out in front. “Sorry!”

“I thought—” said the ghost, unable to banish a shudder. “—No, sorry, I thought… I don’t know.”

She was only managing whispers at this point, so Jazz took this as a good indication to stay well away from her. And as much as it horrified Jazz to watch the shaken actions of a ghost who had been so terribly taken advantage of, it horrified Jazz much more to cause further harm than she already had. So she did the only thing she could — slowly sit down again, and try to make herself look as though she wasn’t going to be a threat.

Well, not again, anyway.

“… Spec—Mira?” Jazz began, cautiously. “Can I call you that?”

Her gaze drifted down to Jazz as if she was only half seeing her. “Mm,” she said. “… Mira.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

One side of her mouth slid downwards, the other enduring a slight delay before it made a proper frown. “No, I want to… I can move, I want to move around, the other one was always moving for me, and I couldn’t…” Mira hesitated for a second, eyes darting around the room as she twisted midair to see what was behind her. The bottom of that white summer dress followed in a swirl. “I can do everything myself now.”

Jazz watched this spectacle with absolutely no idea what to actually do. She didn’t want to admit it, but a ghost who had suffered in such a way and still actively traumatised was quite a bit out of her depth. Maybe there wasn’t anything she really should do anyway — maybe it was better just to wait.

Mira swung around to face Jazz again, expression knitting together into honest contemplation. “You’re not the same person as the one in that big house, are you?”

… This was going to take some processing. “Um, what do you mean?”

“… Never mind,” said Mira, quietly.

This painful conversation was cut blissfully short by the Ghostwriter’s sudden reappearance in the middle of the room, prompting Jazz to come uncomfortably close to liberating herself from her own skin. Mira on the other hand simply watched amiably, as if she was already so used to herself performing erratic teleportations that it was no longer a surprise when someone did one in front of her.

Perhaps the whole thing was par for the course, at this point.

The Ghostwriter hadn’t only brought himself, either. At least forty books appeared suspended in the air behind him, not floating — instead, they were simply stopped in time, suspended. It gave one a feeling bordering on anxiety, knowing that the moment time caught up with the fact that it was supposed to flow, all of those were going to come crashing down to the floor.

“Sorry for the wait,” he apologised. “I was testing something.”

Jazz almost hadn’t even considered it waiting. In fact, for having picked out and gathered several dozen different titles, the amount of time the man had taken was little short of a miracle. Mira turned her gaze to him levelly almost as if the sight of him relaxed her, but it certainly didn’t take long for her face to screw up in worry.

“But you always said you might not be able to go back.”

He shot Mira a guilty sideways glance. “It was probably going to happen sooner or later, anyway.”

She shook her head. “But in a few hundred years.”

“Well,” he said, but rather than heated he seemed utterly resigned. “What’s a few hundred years in the face of eternity, anyway?” Short. Overwhelmingly short.

“Do you think you can go back?”

The Ghostwriter shrugged, eventually, while trying his damnedest to look away from Mira and over at the bookshelf instead. “Don’t know. I haven’t tried to yet.”

Of course, Jazz had hooked into exactly what was meant by all of this the moment the ghosts had opened their mouths to discuss it. She could feel the discomfort coming from the Ghostwriter in particular in ebbs and waves, and decided steadfastly not to prod thing — his mental state about the entire situation was haphazard at best and it probably wasn’t worth risking the Jenga tower that was his mind.

“… Do you really think you’re stronger than her?” asked Mira, eventually. The Ghostwriter had been halfway through plucking one of the books out of the air behind him but had stopped this action simply to turn and face her properly. “I mean… you can’t just make her disappear, can you?”

“I can’t make any change that would directly result in her death or otherwise any sort of disappearance from causality,” he elaborated, carefully.

“So what can you do?”

“… That would mean you’d have to find some indirect way of getting rid of her,” said Jazz, finally, who was reluctant to use the word kill but who was also painfully aware of what would need to be done. “So wouldn’t that make the first question, how can you destroy a ghost?”

That was when the Ghostwriter shot Jazz a glance that made her insides wobble. Raw green ectoplasmic energy, so concentrated that she could feel it screeching into existence through her heart, quietly surrounded his fingers.

Mira said nothing. In fact, every time Jazz stole a glance at her, she seemed to have moved slightly further backwards.

“Good question,” said the Ghostwriter. “I’m hoping one of these books is going to give us a good idea, or else I’m just going to have to get creative about it and pray it works.”

I wish I didn’t have to kill her… I wish I didn’t have to use my power like this.

Those words entered Jazz’s mind with no permission whatsoever, and yet she was almost certain they weren’t meant to be heard. Confined to her head and yet still the thought seemed to echo around the room, accompanied by an unmistakable chill that settled into the inside of your skull. There was a tired, measured acceptance of the events that may soon come to pass, and it was the first time the Ghostwriter had really slipped his thoughts on the matter. How had he hidden this feeling from her? All this time? … Or maybe it was only just now that the issue had truly come to a head.

In an attempt to escape from what she’d just heard, Jazz ran down another train of thought. “But,” she began, “How can you even hold all of that power, anyway? I can feel it from here.”

The Ghostwriter looked carefully at his dangerously glowing hand, turning it over and stretching his fingers through the ectoplasmic energy that emanated from it. “I can’t. It’s potential.”

“Potential…?”

He frowned, a strange shade falling over his eyes. “The potential to create energy from nothing at all…” he said, quietly. “When I use my power, I don’t… the energy doesn’t need to come from me. I’m just the conduit.”

“I think most ghosts are like batteries,” Mira added, and then she pointed squarely at him. His eyes zeroed in on the tip of her index finger. “But Ghostwriter’s also kind of like a power line.”

Jazz was still staring at his hand. “Doesn’t this violate one of the most basal laws of physics? What happened to matter cannot be created nor destroyed? I know I’m human and I probably just don’t get it, but even in mum and dad’s experiments, we never found any evidence of ectoplasmic energy coming into being without some kind of conversion or source.”

“… Don’t ask me how it works,” the Ghostwriter said, but only after considering his thoughts carefully. “If I want something to happen, it happens. Reality be damned.”

Mira had finally stopped backing away, and now, it seemed, the curious side of her had her haphazardly leaning forward, squinting at him. “You are kind of like a god.”

“I told you not to say that!”

Unfortunately for the Ghostwriter, Jazz had been paying attention over the past week a little too carefully. “If she truly wanted a god, then she can have one,” she repeated. “I dunno, you kind of admitted it there.”

“Please don’t—”

“I mean, how many other ghosts can create energy from nothing?” Jazz continued, much to the Ghostwriter’s dismay. “Probably—”

“The Sorceress can’t.”

Both sets of eyes shot straight to Mira, and she inched backwards in surprise. “Did I… say something?”

A million tiny scraps of knowledge about the Sorceress rushed through the Ghostwriter’s mind, and he barely stopped himself from summoning her right there and then. Books he’d forgotten he’d ever read constructed themselves out of thin air straight on the floor, the change to reality committed before he could even contemplate stopping it. His eyes darted down and then back up as if embarrassed, and he quickly changed the topic before either of his accomplices might have chance to comment.

“It seems like she can bend reality too, we’ve seen that much,” he began. “But that uses an enormous amount of power. If you can’t make at least some of that on demand—”

Mira almost couldn’t get her own words out — Jazz could see it. The ghost had stopped, leaned forward, almost seeming to choke as she forced herself to speak. “It’s from other ghosts, all of it,” she managed. “Y-you know those stories, how she… killed ghosts, forever? I saw her do it, and she — I don’t know, she makes her whole arm disappear, and then… it’s like she reaches right into their chest and tears their core out, crushes it in her fingers! The light from that, it’s so bright, I think the amount of energy she can get from that is unimaginable…”

Unimaginable was right. Trying to visualise the death of a ghost, as described by a variety of books that detailed the Sorcerer’s terrible and terrific service of Pariah Dark, was like trying to visualise the creation of the universe. You could try as you might to wrap your head around the idea, and yet even if you conceptually understood it a solid visual would never quite come to mind. The Ghostwriter suspected heavily it might look, to a bystander, like a contained nuclear explosion, but the writers of that time were a little bit too early to be able to have nuclear weapons in mind as a point of reference.

“But how can she do all of that without an arm?” asked Jazz, breaking him out of his train of thought.

“I don’t know,” said Mira. “It’s like her arm’s still there, underneath. It’s gotta be in the same phase as a ghost core, right?

Jazz’s mind seemed to be ticking over. She fidgeted as she thought. “Does anyone know what a ghost core’s actually made from?”

Silence.

“… But if you break it open, it causes a huge energy release? Ectoplasmic energy?”

“Something from it likely converts into ectoplasmic energy, if the Sorceress is taking it and saving it for later,” the Ghostwriter added. “Cores are out of phase with ghosts. The Sorceress can manipulate them, though, which… hmm, wouldn’t that suggest she can operate through multiple separate planes of existence?”

If Jazz hadn’t already read his mind, then they might indeed have actually been one and the same person, he was sure of it. Because the next words out of her mouth sounded so predictive, so exact to the wording of his own thoughts, that he wasn’t sure how else they could’ve been sourced. “So, she’s getting energy by killing ghosts on a level that’s essentially an inaccessible plane of existence, and she possibly gets access to that by leveraging an ability to bend reality. Or—”

“Or…?” said Mira, who was staring fixedly at Jazz.

This is the part where Jazz’s thoughts diverged. “Or, she doesn’t have a core ability that allows her to bend reality at all. What if her core ability allows her to shift through dimensions and planes of existence instead? What if the things she does look like reality bending, but are actually more like… I dunno, controlling… how… dimensions go together? Maybe? Manipulating how she can move around in those dimensions?”

The Ghostwriter’s first reaction was to reject this entirely. It sounded like something baked up out of a mind that had little context for the situation, and honestly, that’s… pretty much what this was. The problem herein, however, was that he couldn’t find any scrap of knowledge that might discredit her. To make things even fishier, the Sorceress had already shown herself to heavily favour dimensional jumping, and could obviously operate in some kind of strange etheric form to remove and destroy cores in the first place.

… It was an interesting guess. It still wasn’t magic like the stuff the Sorcerer had always been associated with in lore, but perhaps from an outside perspective, any appearance of bent reality might itself look like magic. Any technology sufficiently advanced, as they say.

The uneasier part of this was that it raised some interesting questions about the flow of time, particularly in hypothetical dimensions where things like that might not be so straightforward. It was true he’d frozen time for every conceivable point of causality, but what about the inconceivable? Could the Sorceress know or operate in some way he couldn’t even imagine? Was there a way to circumvent time itself, or would she merely remain trapped in the dimension she was in? The very idea made his non-existent blood run cold in his veins. Maybe he wouldn’t bring that up, for Mira’s sake. Jazz’s face had already turned white, though — when your partner is a telepath, you’ve little choice but for full transparency.

The Ghostwriter made a mental note to himself, and to Jazz, that he would, from this point forward, be keeping a very close eye on things with all the mental capacity he had available to do so.

“… We need to do some proper research before we commit to anything,” he eventually declared, with a quick glance to the books suspended behind him. “We’ve got about fifty different books that might have relevant information — I’m going to drag Randy back here so he can help. Any objections before I do that?” Jazz shook her head. Mira’s face brightened a little, though, apparently looking forward to seeing him. “Okay, good.”

It was a display of enormous self control, in fact, that Randy hadn’t magically appeared here already. The very moment the Ghostwriter had started thinking about wanting — no, needing — his presence, the risk of an accidental summoning shot straight up. In response, the writer was already beginning to compartmentalise his mind into thinking softly and thinking permanently. The last thing he needed was for a wild daydream to leak into reality, to speak nothing of the other horrors that could accidentally be done. Now, though, now it was time to think permanently — the words arranged themselves in his mind and no sooner had he done that did Randy appear, startled, red-eyed, and for some reason clutching a rifle.

Not a normal rifle, of course. Jazz knew what it was in an instant; a prototype long-range projectile rifle that carried miniaturised prods from the Fenton Inhibitor as its bullets. Randy had managed to grip this so hard that he looked as if ready to break it in half, and then started to stare around at the strange state of the time-frozen library.

“I stopped time,” said the Ghostwriter, helpfully.

“… Huh. So that’s why those books are… stuck, rather than just floating.”

“I didn’t get around to putting them down,” he explained. “… By the way, you might want to take a look to your left.”

Randy’s eyes met with those of the reanimated Mira. He almost seemed to forget about the rifle in his hands and indeed dropped it on one side, causing its tip to strike the floor gently. At first Mira didn’t seem all too inclined to emote, but just when Jazz was thinking it a lost cause, she broke out into an awfully tense but relieved grin. “Hey,” she said. “… Look, I can move!”

Randy smiled just a little, but his eyes zipped back to the Ghostwriter. “Exactly how long did you have time frozen for before you zapped me in here?”

“It felt like fifteen or twenty minutes,” Jazz supplied, trying to be helpful.

Randy turned back to Mira. “… About enough time for you to get your wits together, it seems. And I assume John had something to do with restoring your autonomy?”

It seemed like Mira didn’t quite get it. “Uhh, yeah, I think so?”

“I rewrote her back to normal and took her here.”

“Rewrote, or rethought?”

“Rethought.”

There was a slightly awkward pause in which Jazz and the Ghostwriter didn’t quite want to stop Randy from saying something to Mira, but in which Randy also found himself at a loss for words. He held his free hand up, half pointing and half not pointing at the female ghost in the little white dress. “… It’s good to see you as yourself,” he managed, eventually.

Mira didn’t seem to mind. The Ghostwriter cleared his throat.

“Anyway, I’ve got a job for you. There’s about fifty books here that might have information on the Sorceress here and I’m going to need some help picking through all of them.”

Everyone expected Randy to accept immediately, but that was the exact opposite of what actually happened. His brow furrowed as if he thought he was missing some kind of important joke, and then he looked from the books in the air to the books on the floor in quick succession just to check he wasn’t. After that, his free hand found his opposite arm’s elbow, and rubbed it. “… Why?”

The Ghostwriter stared back, expression blank and confused.

“Look, well, it’s not really my place to explain to you how to use your own powers—” Jazz suddenly realised what was happening, and stifled herself from laughter. “—but couldn’t you just change reality to instantly zap all of the knowledge into our heads in about half a second and with zero percent of the legwork?”

It was the loudest silence Jazz had ever known. The Ghostwriter’s face didn’t move. Mira’s grinned.

“Really?” Randy continued. “You have all of causality at your fingertips, the very fabric of space and dimensions, and you somehow managed to forget that the power that allows you to do anything allows you to do anything? My—”

The Ghostwriter interrupted him, far too green-faced for dignity. “I’ve considered your proposal and offer my own esteemed opinion: Shut up.”

Randy paid no mind. “—It’s not that I’m criticising you or anything, but you could really do to be somewhat more creative—”

“Randy, I can and will create the ideal conditions of your second death,” the Ghostwriter shot back, pointed teeth grinding together. “I may have overlooked some slight logistics of this situation.”

I could disappear right now. Scratch that, I should disappear right now. Definitely should’ve thought of that sooner — in fact, why the hell didn’t I? Damnit, Jazz is looking at me. She must have heard everything.

After a brief period of total humiliation, the writer finally cleared his throat and crossed his arms and realised he’d just have to take it all on the chin after all. “Fine, but just you and Jazz, yes? Mira’s been through more than enough and this might be uncomfortable even outside of that.”

“Uncomfortable?” asked Jazz.

“I’m about to inject potentially fifty books worth of random knowledge directly into your mind in an instant of a second. I have no idea of the psychological implications of that.”

“Just mitigate them,” said Randy, helpfully. The Ghostwriter pretended to pay him no attention but wrote the advice down on his mental scratchpad like a hypochondriac at a doctor’s office anyway.

“… Well, are you ready?”

Jazz nodded. Randy decided to take a seat and simply shoot a lingering indifferent look at his brother, but only after carefully putting the Inhibitor Rifle down on the floor. “In your own time, John.”

Honestly, Jazz was surprised at how smoothly it all went. She didn’t even notice anything different — the Ghostwriter had made no move except tightening the cross of his arms. When you got down to it, the information was simply absent one moment and available the next — Jazz had been expecting some kind of mental whiplash even with Randy’s suggestion, but there was no such thing at all. It was a little unbelievable, really, but then when she thought about the Sorceress suddenly she had all of these unexpected ideas about her wild and ruthless history.

“Well, it seems you didn’t kill anyone,” said Randy, after a moment. It was obvious in his eyes that he was sifting through things in his head, too. “Plenty of people died at the hands of that menace, though.”

“What do you know about her now?”

Mira’s innocent eyes were shining up to them, but there was a silent not-exactly-telepathic debate going on between the three who Knew about whether Mira was really in a good position to be finding out now. In the end, however, it was the Ghostwriter who knew her best, and both Jazz and Randy found themselves awaiting his response.

He said nothing.

There was a small technicality about shoving dozens of books worth of research into your brain at once; you might have had the chance to absorb it, but your mind sure hadn’t had the chance to process it. The Ghostwriter had a feeling he could just think himself into improving that processing power millions of times over, but also concluded that doing so would be objectively terrifying — his library’s current state of timelessness would probably suffice for their safety. After all, as long as he kept everything else suspended in time, there wasn’t much possibility of the Sorceress bursting out of nowhere and disintegrating them.

… But the possibility did still exist, and so he remained sitting on the edge of his comfortable armchair, leaning forward and drumming his fingers upon his knee, filled with staticky nervous energy. He didn’t want to answer questions right now, but fate was going to bring them to him anyway.

“What happened to her?”

Jazz. His Jazz. Mira and Randy were gone by request, and so at least in this room they were alone. And yet, with a question like that, the Ghostwriter’s eyes suddenly felt so overwhelmingly heavy.

“Mira?”

“She said a man had kept her,” Jazz elaborated.

He slumped forward a little more, hand catching his chin. “I see.”

“Well?”

The writer was mulling it over in his head, the ultimate question of whether or not it was even a good idea to tell her. It seemed she was trying her best to keep her mind out of his and ask the questions properly, rather than just extracting answers by force — respectful. The thought of telling her rolled from one side of his head to the other as he contemplated the situation, not quite coming to the best of conclusions but to a resting point nonetheless. “It’s not really my place to give detail,” he began, carefully. “But before this life, she was a kidnapping victim, Jasmine.”

She paused, having already figured this out but wanting to approach the subject with respect. “… For a ransom?” she asked, slowly. When that yielded no response, she continued: “… Human trafficking?”

“I believe it went on for a number of years.” His voice was quiet — maybe even a little fearful. In truth the Ghostwriter felt uncomfortable even acknowledging this, knowing how horrible it had been and how hard Mira herself had tried to put it all behind her. “What happened doesn’t bear describing, really.”

“… Did they kill her?”

No. They hadn’t. The Ghostwriter wasn’t sure if that was any better or if it was worse, and so he stared down at the floor trying to find his voice and failed.

“… Maybe she escaped?” Jazz guessed.

“Mm…” said the Ghostwriter, eventually. “… Well, I suppose you could say that, in a way.”

“What do you mean?”

…

“She took her own life, Jasmine.”

Silence. Jazz somehow backed away without moving.

“Don’t you understand?” he asked. “… Someone who can teleport can escape from almost anything.”

They stared at each other, and Jazz finally understood.

“We can’t ever tell her.”

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newssplashy · 6 years ago

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The scent in the workshop where Brian Christopher makes his wooden furniture is at once inviting and entirely unfamiliar.

American oak shavings on the floor of Christopher’s one-man business, Bicyclette, and pastries in the oven across the hall at an artisanal bakery, Machine Shop Boulangerie,

lend a certain aromatic ambience to the fourth floor of a former vocational high school in South Philadelphia known as Bok.

Christopher used to live in Manhattan and work in Hoboken, New Jersey, before migrating to Philadelphia, where he rented an apartment for half the price and watched his business blossom at Bok, a full-square-block complex that bustles with all manner of commercial enterprises, among them letterpressers and photographers, a hatmaker and a boxing school. Prospective tenants from New York are calling about moving into the retrofitted school, according to the leasing manager. And Italian sportswear company Diadora recently signed a contract to relocate its North American headquarters there from midtown Manhattan.

“One thing I like about Philly is it’s a bit slower paced,” Christopher said. “You do feel like you can slow down, and enjoy yourself a bit more.”

This New York-Philadelphia migration, fueled by a quest for cheaper living, has long existed. But this is not just the same story of young artisans priced out of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. There’s another kind of New York transplant spreading out into Philadelphia.

Down the street from Bok, Kin Yeung finished prayers at Zhen Ru Temple and told a parallel story. She lived in New York’s Chinatown in 2003, regularly visiting Philadelphia to attend this Chinese Buddhist temple in two modified row houses. She soon saved enough money from her jobs in restaurants in New York to ditch her East Broadway walk-up to buy a house in Philadelphia. A second home soon followed, and now she’s a landlord of five properties, often renting to New York expats. “The houses in Chinatown are too small and little and old,” Yeung said, describing how eight people live in her old two-bedroom apartment. “New York City right now — they cannot afford the rent. Too expensive. No one can live there.”

And it’s not just the housing. Back in New York, a bag of bok choy cost as much as 89 cents. “And here I get it for 39 cents!” she said. Perhaps the best perk: In the yard of her home in Philadelphia, Yeung has space for a vegetable garden.

Yeung is part of a quiet wave of immigrants who stop for a few months or several years in New York before finding a more manageable city 1 hour, 45 minutes down the New Jersey Turnpike. These foreign-born ex-New Yorkers are enlivening Philadelphia’s businesses, restaurants and neighborhoods with a diversity only now beginning to come into focus.

The number of residents born abroad has increased 69 percent in Philadelphia since 2000, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, and immigrants now amount to nearly one-fifth of the city’s workforce. Many arrived via New York.

Bok is topped by two rooftop bars with dynamite views of the surrounding row house neighborhood, where, in a scene straight out of “Rocky,” vendors at the outdoor Italian Market still burn cardboard in garbage cans for heat in the winter. But scattered throughout that old Italian community are a dozen taquerias and an estimated 20,000 Mexican residents. In much the same way, West African immigrants are now dining at halal restaurants in West Philadelphia, and Russians are buying delicacies at the Brooklyn-based Eastern European supermarket NetCost, in the Bustleton neighborhood.

Northeast Philadelphia — an expansive region with strip malls and lawns that New Yorkers might recognize as a relative of Staten Island — is Pearl Huynh’s territory. A majority of the estimated 2,000 Chinese who are members of a new group she founded, the Northeast Philadelphia Chinese Association, migrated from New York City. Huynh was born in Vietnam to Chinese parents.

She has lived on Long Island, in Flushing, Queens, and in Chinatown, working as a software developer on Wall Street. Laid off in 2010, she moved to Philadelphia to be near family and began a new life owning and renting properties — and working as a volunteer, helping the legions of Chinese new to the city.

“I see many of them moving down from New York, and they’re kind of low-income and have language challenges,” she said. So every morning, Huynh sends messages to her members via WeChat, a Chinese messaging service, with YouTube English language lessons and announcements about neighborhood events and national holidays. She also educates them on the zoning rules regarding private gardens, and translates their mail during drop-in hours at the local library. Huynh said she had helped eight Chinese renters from New York apply for a Philadelphia property-tax exemption that enabled them to be first-time homebuyers. According to Pew, a majority of Philadelphia immigrants are actually homeowners, compared with an average of 37 percent across a selection of other cities.

“It’s like a flow of immigrants come from New York,” Huynh said. “I’m really proud I’m able to help them.”

Sylva Senat, who comes from Haiti by way of Brooklyn, can witness this renaissance from the roof deck at Maison 208, his sleek French-inspired restaurant and lounge. Senat fell for food when he took a culinary class at John Dewey High School in Gravesend that turned into an internship at Sign of the Dove, the former Upper East Side hot spot. He went on to become sous-chef at Jean-Georges at the Trump International Hotel & Tower New York.

But while working as a chef, Senat also spent some time in Philadelphia — his sister and brother lived there. “Philly became kind of like the getaway from New York,” he said. His sister tried to convince him to move. He said she’d tell him, “It’s a lot more affordable, there’s a lot more things to do here, it’s a little more fun, it’s not as crazy as New York.”

Senat tried out at Buddakan, a game-shifting restaurant from the Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr. During his tryout, Senat spent two days in Old City, where restaurants and retail mix on colonial-era cobblestone alleyways. “I just fell in love with it,” Senat said. “It didn’t take much for Stephen Starr to convince me to stay in Philadelphia.”

Senat and his wife got an apartment right there in Old City. “We are definitely New Yorkers at heart; we like the busyness, and we like the bustle,” he said. “Once we got to Philadelphia it was like, ‘OK, not all major cities are as crazy as New York, and they don’t have to be in order to be great.'”

Senat said his friends in New York have inquired about Philadelphia, because they realize it’s just “easier to do things” in a city with about 1 million fewer people than Brooklyn. He relishes walking into a restaurant in the nicest part of town at 11:15 on a Sunday morning and immediately sitting down for brunch without a reservation. “It wasn’t like a big, you know, ‘Let’s plan this for six hours and let’s do it for two hours,’ which I think kind of happens in New York,” he said. “You have to be very specific about what you want to do and where you want to go, or else: ‘OK, now we’re wandering around New York City.'”

Immigrant or hipster, there’s a chief reason for choosing Philadelphia over New York: Cost of living. The American dream feels more attainable in Philadelphia at the moment. Asked about the flight of immigrant New Yorkers who are being priced out of the city, Seth Stein, a spokesman for New York City’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, acknowledged the “challenges of income inequality and the affordability crisis that many New Yorkers face.” But Stein said that New York is still “the ultimate city of immigrants,” with health care and legal services offered to those newcomers.

Reasonable rents aside, Philadelphia is not an immigrant utopia. A ProPublica/Philadelphia Inquirer investigation recently concluded that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office based in Philadelphia is one of the most aggressive in the country, with high numbers of arrests of immigrants without criminal records. Peter Gonzales, who runs the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, a nonprofit that assists new immigrants in Philadelphia, said Mayor Jim Kenney’s pushback against ICE has helped neutralize the deportation threat. Kenney sued Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold federal grants to sanctuary cities. In early June, Philadelphia prevailed, and Kenney did what can only be described as a happy dance on Twitter.

Immigrants are taking note, Gonzales said, getting a message from both their local politicians and their neighbors that they’re welcome regardless of ICE’s actions. “The tension is causing a lot of trauma and distress that people are experiencing, but it’s also bringing people together to fight back,” Gonzales said.

One of the activists fighting back is Prudence Powell. She was an unauthorized 12-year-old when she moved from Jamaica, in the Caribbean, to Jamaica, in Queens. At 17, pregnant with her son, she dropped out of high school. Powell struggled with poverty as she took off-the-books, part-time jobs in New York. At 21, she moved to Philadelphia and found her footing. She became a “Dreamer” through the DACA program for unauthorized young people, earned her GED at Temple University and began volunteering at the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition nonprofit. She now works there full time.

“Being in Philly has really opened up doors, sharing my story has opened up so many doors, DACA has opened up so many doors,” she said. And so has the affordability of life outside of New York. “New York is the first place you go, and then you branch out to Philly or Allentown or York or Baltimore,” Powell said. “New York is always the first stop.”

About 27,000 people move from New York to Philadelphia each year, according to the census, amounting to one of the largest migration flows between metro areas. A separate Baruch College study came up with a smaller overall figure but still concluded that more New Yorkers are moving to Philadelphia than the other way around.

Part of New York’s function, the study said, is to “receive large flows of foreign migrants and to redistribute people across the nation.” Those redistributed to Philadelphia will find a town on a winning streak. The population of the city is growing for the first time in decades, buoyed by both immigrants and millennials in Center City drawn by the luxury of living, working and drinking within the same few blocks. The skyline is rapidly expanding on both sides of the Schuylkill, punctuated by the nearly complete Comcast tower, the tallest building in the city.

The biggest good news for Philadelphians, though, is that the Philadelphia Eagles are finally Super Bowl champions. Public schools closed for the victory parade in February. That’s when Jason Kelce, the team’s center, donned a bedazzled lime green costume lent to him by a Mummers brigade, a Philadelphia-specific kind of performance group made up mostly of blue-collar men. He hollered at the thousands of assembled fans about how a team of underdogs defied expectations by going for it with a trick play on fourth-and-goal and won the championship.

“You know who the biggest underdog is?” he asked. He was speaking just feet from the statue of Rocky Balboa, one of fiction’s great underdogs. This is a town that lost both the capital of the United States and the home of the United Nations to New York, so there’s a bit of a chip on the civic shoulder. “It’s y’all, Philadelphia!” He then led the faithful in a profane chant that ended with, “Philly, no one likes us, we don’t care!”

The thing is, people do like Philadelphia. Immigrants like Philadelphia. New Yorkers, apparently, even like Philadelphia. But Philadelphia nonetheless feels forever slighted by her northern neighbor.

Down the list of transgressions, but not that far down, is the bitter memory of an article that ran 13 years ago in The New York Times Style section claiming Philadelphians occasionally refer to their city as the “sixth borough.” The writer, Jessica Pressler, lived in Philadelphia at the time but, according to the bio on her own website, “was virtually run out of town, and was fortunately granted asylum by New York.” She was excoriated for insinuating that Philadelphia was some appendage of New York.

Looking back on it now, Pressler said the piece “tapped into this resentment” that Philadelphia has toward its “big brother that lives really close and is cooler and gets all the attention.” But that perception may now be outdated, and for one major reason. “New York has gotten in that time so prohibitively more expensive,” she said.

“People don’t see leaving New York as a failure anymore like they used to,” Pressler said. “Now it’s like, ‘That’s a smart thing to do, why would you suffer here?’ You’re going to be able to walk to work and have a grocery store and have a patch of grass — that’s really cool.”

She now lives in Queens but said that two neighbors, both of immigrant backgrounds, recently told her they were moving to Philadelphia. “That sounds like a good idea,” she told them. “That sounds really nice.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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imthescapman-blog · 7 years ago

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Session 1: January 19, 2017

This first meeting was going to be a session 0 type game, where the focus was to create characters, talk about character backgrounds and hooks into the adventure, and discuss the setting. Once character creation was out of the way, we were all itching to play, so we got right into the campaign.

Setting Info

This campaign is going to be the Shackled City Adventure Path converted for play in 5th edition D&D. SCAP was the first adventure path written by Paizo, originally published back in March 2003 in Dungeon magazine, and it’s a lot of fun. Each Chapter features a good mix of roleplay and dungeon exploration. The campaign assumes Greyhawk as a setting, with that pantheon featured in the city of Cauldron, which is the main hub of the campaign. Cauldron is set in the bowl of an extinct volcano. A lot of information on Cauldron is in the hardcover edition that I’m using as my sourcebook for this campaign. A major benefit of running a pre-published adventure with such a firmament of history behind is that there are many community resources available to aid in the campaign. I drew heavily from theRPGenius Adventure Path Repository, which has resources broken down chapter by chapter. (Link). Specifically, I used the following resources:

· The Cauldron Herald – This campaign is centered on the city of Cauldron. A newspaper gives a sense of life to that community and also creates an opportunity for character investment.

· Tax Notices – I include several tax notices in the newspaper as the political situation in Cauldron becomes increasingly tense.

· The Cauldron Campaign Guide – I cleaned this up a bit and shaved off all of the crunchy bits that don’t apply to this edition of the campaign. This was easily the most appreciated document, as it gave the characters background information that they used to build their characters. They came into the campaign familiar with Cauldron and some of its more popular personas.

Characters

Tiny Shalhoub

Tiny is a female human monk, a student of a hermit master who lives in the wild, an old man named Sheeba. Tiny has been haunted by strange dreams her entire life. These dreams tend to focus on themes of imprisonment and symbolism involving a smoking eye.

Discipline is a struggle for Tiny. She fidgets constantly and has a habit of picking things up and toying with them until they break. She is impulsive, and finds an outlet through violence. Despite this chaotic disposition, she has a pure heart and seeks to direct her energy toward positive goals.

Fogo Fumar

Fogo Fumar is a male fire genasi fighter who was adopted from the Lantern Street Orphanage as a baby. He was left in a flaming heap on the orphanage’s doorstep, and word spread quickly about the Orphanage’s new addition. Seymour Xavius Fumar, a scholar and staff member of Bluecrater Academy, was the first to declare his intent to adopt. Unfortunately, Seymour’s motivations were less than altruistic. Fogo was an interesting thing that Seymour wanted to possess, and the scholar had no interest in parenting.

Fogo is loud and boisterous. His favorite topic of conversation is himself and he never passes an opportunity to wax on about his exploits and wild romps. He studied swordplay mainly out of rebellion against his father’s wishes that he become a wizard. Secretly, he finds magic fascinating and useful, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge any common ground with his adoptive caretaker.

Amria

Amria is a mysterious woman, a female half-elf from parts unknown. She is possessed of psychic abilities, able to speak directly to the minds of her companions and able to see without the use of her damaged eyes. Long ago, Amria was lynched by a village mob, which fixed a burning iron mask to her face and tried to burn her at the stake. She managed to escape, but she still bears the scars of that day.

Amria is strong and independent, but slow to trust. She hides her true identity behind the disguise of Madame Zola, a blind card-reader who lives on the streets of Cauldron. She carries a book with her, a tome of dubious origin, though she can’t recall where exactly she obtained it, or why she even keeps it with her.

Ris Thistleleaf

Ris is the youngest gnome of a large family. He grew up in poverty, in a cold family permeated with an unexplained bitterness. The children grew up on fairy tales of Jzadirune, a gnomish enclave dedicated to magical innovation and the creation of arcane implements. Ris encountered Alek Tercival early in life, and developed a relationship with the famous paladin. He eventually joined the Church of St. Cuthbert and trained to be a paladin himself.

Ris is an idealistic gnome. He sees himself as a champion of the downtrodden, a gnome always ready to stand up for those not strong enough to stand up for themselves. He is very much the conscience of the group.

Hugo Vanderboren

Hugo is a rakish human, a son of the most recent additions to the Cauldron region’s nobility, the Vanderborens. The Vanderborens are very easy-going and still humble despite their gain in fortune, but they still find Hugo’s constant indulgences into vice to be unbearable, and they have all but washed their hands of their roguish son. Instead, they focus on investing their energies into their daughter, Selma, and their adopted son, Todd.

A performing wanderer by the name of Ekaym Smallcask took to Hugo during a stay in Cauldron, and he taught Hugo the finer arts of carousing and gambling. Hugo learned the art of story-telling and music from Ekaym as well, but before the two could get very close, Ekaym disappeared, presumably having lost interest in the small city and deciding to wander onward.

Roundtable backgrounds

An idea that I borrowed from Tribality.com is the concept of roundtable backgrounds. This is a method whereby a player talks about their background out loud, then we go around the table and the next player describes their background, but also must include a tie to the previous player’s background or situation in some way.

In this case, Tiny went first, describing her history. Fogo went next, and the players worked together to decide that Fogo knew Tiny from Tiny’s forays into Bluecrater Academy’s library. Old Sheeba, Tiny’s mentor, frequently sent his apprentice to the Academy to acquire new reading material, and she and Fogo became fast friends, since Fogo was often in the library, his services volunteered by his inattentive father. The next character was Amria. The players decided that Amria met Fogo also in the library, as she brought in this strange tome for translation. Fogo was unable to help with the book, but he liked “Madame Zola,” who became a mother figure that was missing from his life. Hugo went next, a frequent traveler of Cauldron’s streets and a participant in the city’s night life, so he was familiar with the charlatan who made her living out of a small stand, offering readings to passersby.

Ris went next. He is another one who frequented the streets of Cauldron, ‘patrolling’ and offering his presence to the city. He met Hugo, who was a presence of a different kind. Hugo was always free with his coin, and Ris, though not materialistic, enjoys a friend who is willing to treat him to the finer things in life. Finally, it went back to Tiny, who offered that Ris lived with Old Sheba for a time during his paladin training, for a deeper understanding of spiritualism and meditation techniques. He and Tiny didn’t get along very well, and she broke something dear to Ris, but he does his best to offer guidance against her chaotic impulses.

Chapter 1: Life’s Bazaar

With characters all made, we began. The adventure began on a breezy autumn night, the players all deciding on various activities that had them out and about tonight. Their peaceful nights were interrupted by a plaintive cry for help coming from a nearby alleyway. Everyone but Amria ran to investigate. Amria, in her guise as Madame Zola, decided that this was something she would do better to avoid, and began packing up her table and cards.

The others investigated the cry and found a man in a purple robe being accosted by a handful of thugs with half their faces painted black and the other half painted white. These were recognizable as members of the Last Laugh, Cauldron’s most notorious thieves’ guild. They saw the man, bloody and bruised, being held up against a wall by one rogue while the other snarled into his face, “Stay away from the Orphanage, you got it?” Then he sank a fist into the man’s gut. Before the party could think to intervene, another thug pointed a meaty finger at them and loudly ordered them to “Piss off!”

Hugo tried to intimidate the criminals, drawing his crossbow and telling them to stand down. Unfortunately, Hugo wasn’t very intimidating, and the criminals ignored him, telling him once again to mind his own business. Hugo’s companions drew their weapons and launched themselves into combat, ready to disarm the situation by force. Even Amria got involved at this point, using her psychic abilities to assail the minds of her opponents. Tiny interposed herself between the attackers and their victim, and was rewarded for her heroism with a long sword rammed into her gut all the way to its hilt. As she was ready to fall, she felt a hand behind her fill her with healing energy. The thugs’ victim was apparently a healer.

After this brief surge of violence, the thugs were soundly defeated. The man in purple identified himself as Ruphus Laro, an acolyte of St. Cuthbert. He was returning to the Church of St. Cuthbert after visiting the Lantern Street Orphanage and was jumped and dragged into the alley by these criminals before the party rescued him. Ruphus did what he could to save the lives of the thieves, noting that they weren’t going to kill him, and so they may deserve to be arrested, but don’t deserve death. Questioning the sole survivor of the assault, the party learned that the rogues were ordered to deliver a beating and a message to the priest, dissuading him from investigating kidnappings at the Lantern Street Orphanage. No more information was forthcoming beyond this, so they released the thieves, the party not wanting to deal with the nebulous legalities of having killed one of the thieves in an alleyway.

Ruphus offered to bring the party to his temple where he was sure they would be rewarded for their assistance. This proved to be true, as the party met with Jenya Urikas, the acting high priestess, who thanked the party with a complimentary healing potion for each of them. She then mentioned again the kidnappings at the orphanage, and asked if the party would be interested in investigating on behalf of the Church of St. Cuthbert. The group agreed readily and began to question Jenya for more information on the kidnappings. The information she offered was as follows:

· Four children were kidnapped from the local orphanage three nights ago. Their names were Deakon, Evelyn, Lucinda, and Terrem. The children are the most recent victims in a series of strange disappearance and robberies.

· The orphanage has two common bedchambers on the second floor - one for girls, the other for boys. Two children were taken from each room. None of the other children and none of the resident staff heard or saw anything.

· The orphanage has barred windows and excellent locks protecting its doors. The children are locked into their rooms at night to prevent any midnight mischief.

· In the wake of the kidnappings, the Church of St. Cuthbert has publicly vowed to locate the missing children and bring the kidnappers to justice.

· Jenya borrowed an item from the church’s vault: the Star of Justice. It has the power to cast divination once per week. Only the church’s high priest is supposed to use it, but in his absence Jenya felt justified.

· Jenya asked the mace “Where are the children who were abducted from the Lantern Street Orphanage?” The response: “The locks are key to finding them. Look beyond the curtain, below the cauldron. Beware the doors with teeth. Descend into the malachite ‘hold where precious life is bought with gold. Half a dwarf binds them, but not for long.”

Chewing on this mysterious clue, the group decided that they should visit the Lantern Street Orphanage immediately, in case the Last Laugh is interested in creating further discord there. Arriving in the middle of the night, the group was greeted by a one-eyed half-orc. Fogo identified himself as a former orphan housed by the facility, and explained the situation. Hugo called the doorman ‘the monster that lives under the bed.’ With a glower, the half-orc growled, “Wait here” and slammed the door in the group’s faces.

After a few tense seconds where the party debated whether or not they should just bust in, the door swung open again, this time opened by an elderly Halfling woman. Fogo introduced himself once again, and the old Halfling seemed delighted. “It’s alright Patch,” she told the half-orc. She then invited the group in and spoke to them frankly, giving them as much information as she can. This information is unfortunately redundant, and a repeat of what the party already knew up that point.

The group discussed possibilities and leads, and they resolved to visit the Bluecrater Academy library to investigate the ‘malachite hold’ in the morning. They also decided that they should perhaps visit the lockmaker, a gnome named Keygan Ghelve, who made the high-quality locks for the orphanage and who also provides locks for most of the city. The party is allowed to sleep in the children’s rooms, not the most accommodating conditions, but all parties felt safer with the heroes present and keeping vigil.

Between sessions, one of the party members is haunted by a surreal nightmare and another recalls an odd memory from his childhood.

#d&d 5e #shackledcity #scap #adventure path #chapter 1

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frecklesandthenerd · 7 years ago

Text

An Overindulgence in Parisian Food and Drink

Story by Nicole

On Thursday we slept in (it’s challenging not to sleep in when the earliest you can end dinner is about 9:30). We had some pizza for brunch and went to Sainte-Chapelle, which came highly recommended by several people. We walked past a ridiculously long line at Notre Dame and straight into Sainte-Chapelle, which was a nice feeling of victory. The cathedral is behind the guarded gates to the courthouse area, which made for an odd mix of suited professionals and confused tourists.

Sainte-Chapelle is just as gorgeous as everyone tells you. It has amazing nearly floor-to-ceiling stained glass panels on three sides, and an incredibly intricate rose window on the fourth. They are just finishing a painstaking stained glass restoration project (doing glass restoration on something so old and well renowned sounds terrifying), and almost everything was back in place.

Sainte-Chapelle (Photo/Jason Rafal) Sainte-Chapelle (Photo/Jason Rafal)

From Sainte-Chapelle we headed to the Panthéon - which we did not go inside of, you may be noticing a trend - and sat on its steps for a while contemplating the day. From there we headed to Shakespeare and Company, one of the oldest English bookstores in Paris. And it is a fantastic bookstore. It’s loosely organized on two floors, and the upstairs experience included a sleeping cat, a man playing the piano, and a donated library and reading room. Definitely worth a stop if you’re in Paris and love books.

Shakespeare and Company (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Another great thing about Paris is the water fountains everywhere. Frequently while wandering the city you’ll see a beautifully carved water fountain, and you can hold your hands or water bottle directly up to the lips of an engraved god to receive your drinking water.

One of the city’s many water fountains (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We then got on the metro and went to Montmartre, where we got off the train partway up the hill and climbed up several flights of stairs on residential streets to reach the Basilica. It was flooded with tourists, as expected, but the view is lovely. It’s fun to people watch and hear all the different languages as well.

Climbing the steps to Montmartre (Photo/Jason Rafal) The view from Montmartre (Photo/Jason Rafal) A view of the Eiffel Tower from Montmartre (Photo/Jason Rafal) The Basilica of the Sacré Cœur (Photo/Jason Rafal) A garden in a ball in the park below Montmartre (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We had our best meal in Paris that night at a little restaurant called L’ange 20. When we first arrived, the waiter told us that we were out of luck without a reservation, but then offered that if we came back in half an hour, he would seat us if one of his 7:30 pairs didn’t show. When we came back, he gave us seats near the bar, where Jason enjoyed his view into the kitchen. The food was French with a creative spin (my entree had guacamole in it, along with angel hair pasta-wrapped shrimp and a delicious spicy sauce), and everything we had was amazing. We would highly recommend it.

On Friday we did a cooking class, which was great. We went to a market, walked to the ruins of a crumbling Roman amphitheater, and then spent several hours preparing a three-course lunch under expert and teasing guidance. We learned useful facts, including how you can dye pears brown to cover any unsightly brown spots by putting a tea bag into the water while they are poaching. We also learned a cheater way to sous vide chicken. At the end, we enjoyed our lunch of cauliflower soup; chicken with mashed potatoes, deglazed vegetables, and red wine sauce; and poached pear with chocolate sauce and homemade ice cream.

Chef Jason (Photo/Nicole Harrison) Our fancy kitchen (Photo/Jason Rafal) Meal in progress (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After our cooking class we went to the Jardin des Plantes, which is Paris’s botanic garden. It’s beautiful and an excellent example of why Paris is so good at parks. I would highly recommend it, and it’s free so you can just stroll in and out on your way somewhere else.

At the Jardin des Plantes (Photo/Jason Rafal) A talented bug (Photo/Jason Rafal) Skeletons of varying sizes in a building at the Jardin des Plantes (Photo/Jason Rafal)

I’m really not quite sure whether to recommend the night cruise to people. I will say that if it’s your dream to get really drunk and enjoy a good view of the Eiffel Tower when it’s lit up at night, the cruise is probably worth it. If those things don’t interest you, you can probably skip it and save the money.

The cruise gave us aperitifs when we got there, and then we had an entire bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine. Because champagne is too sweet for Jason and we didn’t want to waste the alcohol, I ended up drinking an entire bottle of champagne by myself over the course of two hours. We were planning to take the metro back, but when we got off the boat we were drunk enough that it seemed like too big of a risk to attempt to navigate the metro correctly, so we set off walking. I became progressively more drunk as we walked, and because I’m the automatic navigator when around Rafals, this resulted in us walking at least an extra mile trying to get home. We did find some delicious ice cream on the way, though.

Walking to the boat in the rain (Photo/Jason Rafal) The Eiffel Tower all lit up (Photo/Jason Rafal) A lot of drinks (Photo/Jason Rafal) Boat selfie (Photo/Jason Rafal) Nicole getting tipsy on the boat (Photo/Jason Rafal) Wandering home after the boat ride (Photo/Jason Rafal) Amazing midnight ice cream (Photo/Nicole Harrison)

On Saturday, we nursed our hangovers at breakfast (crêpes are delicious) and lunch (Italian food for variety). Then we boarded a bus to see Monet’s garden at Giverny.

If you only have a couple of days in Paris, I wouldn’t use five of those hours to explore Giverny. It’s a lot of travel time. But because it was rainy, we had already been in Paris for a few days, and we were too hungover for museums, it was a good side trip.

Monet’s gardens are really wonderful. There are a variety of colorful flowers scattered everywhere - I was amused to see columbines, colorado's state flower - and there are many trellises that make the garden feel cozy and secluded, even when it's filled with tourists. The water lily pond is also incredibly beautiful, and in a much softer way than the impressive historical monuments in the area. The light rain just made everything even more soft and welcoming.

Monet’s gardens (Photo/Jason Rafal) Monet’s gardens (Photo/Jason Rafal) Monet’s gardens (Photo/Jason Rafal) Monet’s gardens (Photo/Jason Rafal) Soft water (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Monet lived in Giverny with his second wife, and children starting in 1883. It's a lovely house. The kitchen was especially great, with beautiful tiling and copper pots everywhere. There was also a pot filler, which Jason argued was grounds for getting one ourselves.

Monet’s kitchen (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The rain was lightening as we got back, and we enjoyed a last night in Paris.

A man dressed as orange juice for no explicable reason (Photo/Jason Rafal) Outside a typical Paris cafe (Photo/Jason Rafal) Sunset light (Photo/Jason Rafal) Goodbye to Notre Dame (Photo/Jason Rafal)

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intothegrey-blog1 · 8 years ago

Text

Biography

Writer Information Name: Dash Age: 21 Pronouns: he/his/him Timezone: EST Activity Level: 8+

Original Student Character Information First and Last Name: Davian Honey, although exclusively (only) goes by “Grey” Faceclaim: Francisco Lachowski Age: 23 Primary AOS: History of Magic (concentration: general) Secondary AOS: Healing (concentration: emergency) Sexual/Romantic Orientation(s): Pansexual/Panromantic Pet: He has a female Red-Tailed Hawk named Sticks & a male Domesticated Small Bear named Little Bear (which he named after the Muggle TV show, although he’s merely heard the name and is not actually familiar with it). Preferred Gender of Roommate: any / don’t care Classes:

Notes and Memorization

Prehistory

Ancient History

Post-classical History

Modern History

Viking History

The ISWS

Records

Deadly Diseases and Their Cures

Dire Injuries and Their Remedies

Healing Spells

Medicinal and Healing Potions

Clubs:

Outdoor Adventure Club (interested in running)

Muggle Cooking & Baking Club

Athletics:

Quidditch

Desired Position on Team: Starting Keeper or Starting Center Chaser

Appearance Description:

Grey is usually dirty enough to make you sure he’s studying Herbology. He merely has a love for nature and spends a lot of his time outdoors – and when he bathes, he’s in the water for two hours at a time. Because of his various scars (mostly on his back), Grey is never seen without a shirt. He often smells of smoke – burning firewood or leaves – because of his ‘hobby’ of making bonfires nearly every night to ward off darkness. While in class his eyes are often squinted and he needs to sit close to the board – as he needs glasses but has never bothered getting them.

Personality Description:

There’s little that fazes Grey. Easygoing might be an understatement. He’s carefree to the point of having no future plans, aspirations, or even little goals. It’s rare that one would see him doing anything but smiling. Things that might stress one out – tests, homework, interviews, social events – do little to Grey’s emotions… although his grades sometimes suffer as a result. He has difficulty (unknown to him) forming close attachments, but he’ll consider anyone and everyone a ‘friend’. When he does connect deeply with someone, that connection is not easily, if ever, broken. Though he’s never been in a relationship, he is constantly craving affection. At least partially due to his childhood trauma, Grey seeks validation via what he perceives as positive interactions. He is a people-pleaser and succumbs easily to peer pressure – going as far as doing dangerous or illegal things simply so someone would like him. Similarly due to suffered abuse, he becomes extremely tense and nervous in arguments or even when he hears someone yelling. He’ll become visibly anxious and desperately try to negotiate the situation – becoming almost child-like in his fear. Extremely claustrophobic and nyctophobia (both results of being locked in small, dark spaces during childhood) Grey rarely sleeps in his dorm and instead prefers sleeping outside – and always needs a ‘nightlight’. When the History of Magic professor teaches class in the basement, he has a very hard time concentrating. Due to his natural friendliness, boyish charm, and general pleasantness, Grey may come across as confident, but he has low esteem pertaining to his own abilities. He chose History of Magic as his AOS almost entirely because it has little to do with actual magic. If he had to be graded on mixing potions, for example, his nervousness about his abilities would undoubtedly sour his work. Contrary to his self-esteem, however, he’s quite well-rounded in various areas of study – having grown up teaching himself. His secondary AOS is emergency healing simply because he’s one of the few things he sees himself good at – patching himself up as a boy was an every day occurrence.

2+ Positive Traits: friendly, cheerful, affectionate 2+ Negative Traits: careless, unmotivated, pushover, easily frightened, low self-esteem

Biography:

Davian Honey was born to a primary school teacher and a salesman. He was an only child and wholly unplanned. Lori Ellen Honey taught fourth grade and had little personality (although her students thought her quite strict) while John Emery Honey sold cars and was as charismatic as could be. They were perfectly normal to their neighbors, they invited their friends over for dinner, and they brought their extended families together for the holidays. However, as terribly normal as they were, nobody knew they had a son until he was six years old. He’d run out of the house, half-naked and bleeding. Lori Ellen had convinced the neighbors he was not of normal intelligence, and that he had the habit of hurting himself. She painted herself and her husband – two hard-working, middle-class parents – as saints merely for taking care of this abnormal child. In all truthfulness, the only thing abnormal about Davian (aside from his parents) was his ability with magic. His parents were Muggles from Muggle families, and knew nothing of the entire, civil world of wizards and witches. The first instance happened when he was nine: the cellar unlocked and he was free – but only until his mother discovered he’d somehow gotten out and dragged him by the hair back into the small, dark space. They kept him from school his entire childhood – Lori Ellen taught him instead. She gave him a collection of textbooks and had him read them, in preparation for a series of questions that she sometimes made ridiculously hard so punishment could be issued. Scalding baths, whippings, beatings and timeouts in closets and the cellar (sometimes for days) were very common for Davian Honey. He was rescued, if only for eight hours a day, from Lori Ellen’s torture when he was fourteen. The Head Wizard from the closest wizarding school had convinced Davian’s mother to release him into the school’s program for four years of education – these four being the only kind of formal schooling he’d ever gotten. Neither of his parents would believe that Davian was gifted in any fashion – certainly not in magic of all things – but accepted anyway, if only to tell the story at neighborhood barbecues about how their boy had finally been accepted to some ‘special school’; though they didn’t mean special in a way that inspired pride. Most of his memories at the small wizarding school are surreal, as if all merely dreamed. He had no luck making friends, but learned magic for the first time and spent hours in the library, trying to better himself until he was on the same level as his classmates. He would return home every day after school and previous tortures would resume… until Davian got much taller and stronger than his mother, and she would call on John Emery to act as force. His father, having paid no mind to her cruelty for fifteen years, would refuse – having enough misplaced love for his neglected son to not raise a hand to him. And so he graduated, if only barely, and left home the same day. He wandered from town to town, under the name ‘Grey’, cutting himself off from the Muggle world and instead diving into the wizarding one – the only place he’d ever been accepted in any way. A few years of wandering homelessness (where he would do dangerous tricks on sidewalks for petty change, or work for underground potioneers for pennies on the dollar) he turned his sights to Eklands after reading about it in a wizard’s hovering newspaper from afar. He pledged to make up for the years of school he’d missed out on, and this time perhaps walk away with a friend or two.

Desired Connections: None, but very open to accepting some! Sample/Prompts: [choice: going on the four-day journey to the island]

Slender fingers reached to skim the water, but Grey’s arms weren’t long enough. He huffed and slumped against the side of the ship, staring to watch as the water rippled and flowed around the strong wood. He wondered how many trips these ancient trees had seen, and how many people they’d taken across these waters. “Ought to keep from the edge, boy.” Grey raised and turned his head to see a sailor – dirty and damp, with a thick accent – but he didn’t move. “Don’t wanna have to fish you out with the net.” “Has that ever happened before?” he asked, smile bright and amused. “Aye,” he nodded, and continued to stare at Grey menacingly until he backed away from the edge and retreated instead to his cabin. It was tiny and cramped and made his heart race every moment he spent in it. “We’ll stretch our wings soon, Sticksy,” he whispered to his hawk, feeding her a worm through the bars of her cage. She pecked first at his fingers and then finally took it – antsy to be kept locked up, just like he was. He could only stay in the cabin for a few moments longer before he was panting with constriction. Again he left, and again he slumped over the edge of the ship, caring not of that sailor’s annoyed glare. The salty air calmed him until he was breathing normally again. He wouldn’t be able to sleep in that room for three nights. Even that sailor’s net would make a better bed. Eyes flicked to the horizon. We’ll stretch our wings soon, he repeated to himself. In no time at all (or so he hoped) they would be at Eklands. Sticks would be flying high above the college and making meals of mice and squirrels. Grey would be on the ground with air all around him. The thought made him smile.

Anything else:

headcanons: to be posted on the account~

moodboard: x

playlist: spotify

#biography

0 notes

eklands-blog · 8 years ago

Photo

Writer Information Name: Dash Age: 21 Pronouns: he/his/him Timezone: EST Activity Level: 8+

Notes and Memorization

Prehistory

Ancient History

Post-classical History

Modern History

Viking History

The ISWS

Records

Deadly Diseases and Their Cures

Dire Injuries and Their Remedies

Healing Spells

Medicinal and Healing Potions

Clubs:

Outdoor Adventure Club (interested in running)

Muggle Cooking & Baking Club

Athletics:

Quidditch

Desired Position on Team: Starting Keeper or Starting Center Chaser

Appearance Description:

Grey is usually dirty enough to make you sure he’s studying Herbology. He merely has a love for nature and spends a lot of his time outdoors -- and when he bathes, he’s in the water for two hours at a time. Because of his various scars (mostly on his back), Grey is never seen without a shirt. He often smells of smoke -- burning firewood or leaves -- because of his 'hobby’ of making bonfires nearly every night to ward off darkness. While in class his eyes are often squinted and he needs to sit close to the board -- as he needs glasses but has never bothered getting them.

Personality Description:

There’s little that fazes Grey. Easygoing might be an understatement. He’s carefree to the point of having no future plans, aspirations, or even little goals. It’s rare that one would see him doing anything but smiling. Things that might stress one out -- tests, homework, interviews, social events -- do little to Grey’s emotions... although his grades sometimes suffer as a result. He has difficulty (unknown to him) forming close attachments, but he’ll consider anyone and everyone a ‘friend’. When he does connect deeply with someone, that connection is not easily, if ever, broken. Though he’s never been in a relationship, he is constantly craving affection. At least partially due to his childhood trauma, Grey seeks validation via what he perceives as positive interactions. He is a people-pleaser and succumbs easily to peer pressure -- going as far as doing dangerous or illegal things simply so someone would like him. Similarly due to suffered abuse, he becomes extremely tense and nervous in arguments or even when he hears someone yelling. He’ll become visibly anxious and desperately try to negotiate the situation -- becoming almost child-like in his fear. Extremely claustrophobic and nyctophobia (both results of being locked in small, dark spaces during childhood) Grey rarely sleeps in his dorm and instead prefers sleeping outside -- and always needs a ‘nightlight’. When the History of Magic professor teaches class in the basement, he has a very hard time concentrating. Due to his natural friendliness, boyish charm, and general pleasantness, Grey may come across as confident, but he has low esteem pertaining to his own abilities. He chose History of Magic as his AOS almost entirely because it has little to do with actual magic. If he had to be graded on mixing potions, for example, his nervousness about his abilities would undoubtedly sour his work. Contrary to his self-esteem, however, he’s quite well-rounded in various areas of study -- having grown up teaching himself. His secondary AOS is emergency healing simply because he’s one of the few things he sees himself good at -- patching himself up as a boy was an every day occurrence.

2+ Positive Traits: friendly, cheerful, affectionate 2+ Negative Traits: careless, unmotivated, pushover, easily frightened, low self-esteem

Biography:

Davian Honey was born to a primary school teacher and a salesman. He was an only child and wholly unplanned. Lori Ellen Honey taught fourth grade and had little personality (although her students thought her quite strict) while John Emery Honey sold cars and was as charismatic as could be. They were perfectly normal to their neighbors, they invited their friends over for dinner, and they brought their extended families together for the holidays. However, as terribly normal as they were, nobody knew they had a son until he was six years old. He’d run out of the house, half-naked and bleeding. Lori Ellen had convinced the neighbors he was not of normal intelligence, and that he had the habit of hurting himself. She painted herself and her husband -- two hard-working, middle-class parents -- as saints merely for taking care of this abnormal child. In all truthfulness, the only thing abnormal about Davian (aside from his parents) was his ability with magic. His parents were Muggles from Muggle families, and knew nothing of the entire, civil world of wizards and witches. The first instance happened when he was nine: the cellar unlocked and he was free -- but only until his mother discovered he’d somehow gotten out and dragged him by the hair back into the small, dark space. They kept him from school his entire childhood -- Lori Ellen taught him instead. She gave him a collection of textbooks and had him read them, in preparation for a series of questions that she sometimes made ridiculously hard so punishment could be issued. Scalding baths, whippings, beatings and timeouts in closets and the cellar (sometimes for days) were very common for Davian Honey. He was rescued, if only for eight hours a day, from Lori Ellen’s torture when he was fourteen. The Head Wizard from the closest wizarding school had convinced Davian’s mother to release him into the school’s program for four years of education -- these four being the only kind of formal schooling he’d ever gotten. Neither of his parents would believe that Davian was gifted in any fashion -- certainly not in magic of all things -- but accepted anyway, if only to tell the story at neighborhood barbecues about how their boy had finally been accepted to some ‘special school’; though they didn’t mean special in a way that inspired pride. Most of his memories at the small wizarding school are surreal, as if all merely dreamed. He had no luck making friends, but learned magic for the first time and spent hours in the library, trying to better himself until he was on the same level as his classmates. He would return home every day after school and previous tortures would resume... until Davian got much taller and stronger than his mother, and she would call on John Emery to act as force. His father, having paid no mind to her cruelty for fifteen years, would refuse -- having enough misplaced love for his neglected son to not raise a hand to him. And so he graduated, if only barely, and left home the same day. He wandered from town to town, under the name ‘Grey’, cutting himself off from the Muggle world and instead diving into the wizarding one -- the only place he’d ever been accepted in any way. A few years of wandering homelessness (where he would do dangerous tricks on sidewalks for petty change, or work for underground potioneers for pennies on the dollar) he turned his sights to Eklands after reading about it in a wizard’s hovering newspaper from afar. He pledged to make up for the years of school he’d missed out on, and this time perhaps walk away with a friend or two.

Desired Connections: None, but very open to accepting some! Sample/Prompts: [choice: going on the four-day journey to the island]

Slender fingers reached to skim the water, but Grey’s arms weren’t long enough. He huffed and slumped against the side of the ship, staring to watch as the water rippled and flowed around the strong wood. He wondered how many trips these ancient trees had seen, and how many people they’d taken across these waters. “Ought to keep from the edge, boy.” Grey raised and turned his head to see a sailor -- dirty and damp, with a thick accent -- but he didn’t move. “Don’t wanna have to fish you out with the net.” “Has that ever happened before?” he asked, smile bright and amused. “Aye,” he nodded, and continued to stare at Grey menacingly until he backed away from the edge and retreated instead to his cabin. It was tiny and cramped and made his heart race every moment he spent in it. “We’ll stretch our wings soon, Sticksy,” he whispered to his hawk, feeding her a worm through the bars of her cage. She pecked first at his fingers and then finally took it -- antsy to be kept locked up, just like he was. He could only stay in the cabin for a few moments longer before he was panting with constriction. Again he left, and again he slumped over the edge of the ship, caring not of that sailor’s annoyed glare. The salty air calmed him until he was breathing normally again. He wouldn’t be able to sleep in that room for three nights. Even that sailor’s net would make a better bed. Eyes flicked to the horizon. We’ll stretch our wings soon, he repeated to himself. In no time at all (or so he hoped) they would be at Eklands. Sticks would be flying high above the college and making meals of mice and squirrels. Grey would be on the ground with air all around him. The thought made him smile.

Anything else:

headcanons: to be posted on the account~

moodboard: x

playlist: spotify

#accepted #original character #Davian Honey

0 notes