#the new owner of the Miss Universe Organization?

[usatricks]

A transgender who had a painful childhood... Who is Anne, the new owner of the Miss Universe Organization?

A transgender who had a painful childhood… Who is Anne, the new owner of the Miss Universe Organization? Mumbai: The finale of the 71st Miss Universe contest is near. In such a situation, the names of all the beauties who participated in this contest are in discussion. Meanwhile, there is another person, whose name is constantly in headlines. This is the name of Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, who…

[randomshyperson]

Five Times You Go Through Wanda Maximoff's Window - [HS Challenge]

Summary: A clumsy spider and a grumpy witch are roommates in Avengers Tower. And it takes you five missed windows to finally get things right. [Prompt]

Warning: None, fluff and funny, spider!reader and emo!wanda, avengers being a family, happy ending | Words: 2.937k

A/N-> This was such a funny one to write because I always wanted to try the Five Times Prompt! I hope you guys liked it.

General Masterlist | Wattpad | AO3 | Holiday Season Masterlist

-&-

The first time you missed a window in Avengers Tower, you still didn't know the place properly. 

You had just come out of a fight and your costume was still smoldering. You stumbled between one window and another and thought you had counted the floors correctly when you balanced yourself inside, and almost fell out again when something pushed you.

Your spidey sense acted immediately, of course. It was a disastrous situation, to be honest. You jumped like a frightened animal away from the magical energy of the witch, the true owner of that room and window, while instinctively hitting her right in the face with your webs.

Wanda yelled angrily, and you, hanging from the wall, only had time to fall straight to the floor before she hit you in the chest this time.

Of course, the confusion attracted the attention of the other Avengers - Vision, and Steve appeared just before Nat, the men confused by the whole thing, but the widow, as soon as she saw the younger witch trying to untangle the webs from her face, burst into laughter.

You were blushing a lot when you went to apologize.

"I'm really sorry Wanda, I thought it was my room."

"It's fine." She retorted between her teeth, and it didn't look like it was fine at all. You rubbed your shoulder, the magical blow left your skin sore and Wanda sighed. "Sorry about the hit. I thought it was an intruder."

Natasha interrupted the whole thing with another chuckle, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes that threatened to return every time she looked at Wanda's grumpy expression over the webs. "You two are clearly an example of attention. You've just earned some extra training."

You and Wanda grumbled in unison. Of course, Natasha was just tormenting you and the training was going to happen anyway, because Wanda escaped as many of them as she could and was already getting sloppy, and you well, in the routine of neighborhood friend and university, it was difficult to attend all the Avenger commitments.

Wanda had no trouble hitting you in training, and you almost thought she was doing it with a certain satisfaction. You couldn't blame her, she would certainly have got away with it if it hadn't been for your disastrous encounter earlier.

You just hoped that future interactions between you would be friendlier from then on.

-&-

The second time you missed a window in the Tower, your intention was not to be late.

This was because Natasha had asked - or politely threatened - you to organize your spider routine, if that was possible, and be present at the introduction of the New Avengers.

Well, that was rather unfair. In addition to your full-time job as a New York superhero, you also had college and your job as a Daily Bugle Photographer, so it should be understandable that delays would occur. But maybe that was your fault, for missing three birthdays in a row, and not even making it to Captain America's shield ceremony last month after Steve retired and assigned the job to Sam Wilson.

In any case, you tried to get to the tower for Kate Bishop's introduction to the team and ended up in the wrong room again. 

Only this time it was worse, as you ended up bumping into the owner of the bedroom who certainly wasn't expecting to see anyone.

Wanda didn't fall to the floor with the impact only because you acted quickly and held her by the waist, turning your bodies so that the entire collision was on your back. Half the items in your backpack made a cracking sound behind you, but you didn't have a chance to check.

You were still grunting in pain when she pushed you away, and the action caused her towel to fall to the floor.

"I-I..."

"Don't look, you pervert!" She demanded infuriatedly, her face as red as yours. You turned away immediately, but the bedroom mirror allowed you to see her bending down to pick up the towel and you thought it best to close your eyes tightly.

"I swear to God I didn't mean to-"

"Zip it." She cut in, holding the towel tight against her body. "Out." She ordered, and you didn't need to be told twice.

You stumbled out with your eyes closed until you found the door, and Wanda had to look away and bite her lip to hide her smile for all the times you hit your head on something before leaving.

You didn't find her again until half an hour later when you had already met Kate Bishop and discovered that she would probably be a friend. She was a very funny girl, and your close age made it easy to get friendly with her. 

She had just commented that it was amazing to have another Avenger going to NYU, and how you could go to classes together and have coffee when Wanda reappeared in the room and dropped something in your lap.

You stared wide-eyed at the red spider's underwear, clutching the item as if you expected it to disappear.

"You forgot it in my room." Said the witch with an indecipherable expression, but with eyes sparkling with mischief. Of course, she left out the part about the item falling out of your backpack during the disastrous encounter earlier, and that was enough for Sam to chuckle knowingly with Clint and Natasha from the kitchen counter when they whistled at the comment.

You turned as red as the colored garment. "I dropped it in her room." You tried to clarify in embarrassment, but Clint added.

"Oh, yes, that happens." He taunted, and you huffed in embarrassment as you got up to find your backpack and remove that outfit from their sight. 

You only missed Wanda's satisfied look when Kate didn't invite you to take her to university again and the subject was forgotten.

-&-

The third time was intentional.

The Avengers were going through a very difficult time since the whole Winter Soldier thing became public, and even with Steve retired, Mr. Stark still wanted closure on the murder of his parents with Mr. Barnes. 

It wasn't your business, but at the same time, it was because the Avengers were one big family and anything that happened to one had an impact on the whole team.

The atmosphere was rather miserable because it seemed that everyone was going through heartbreaking situations at the moment. Natasha and the Red Room, Bucky, Tony and Steve's drama, and Kate with her mother's arrest. Then there was Vision and the Space Stone that had been giving him nightmares, and well, Wanda, who was celebrating her first birthday alone since the death of her twin brother.

So the third time was intentional, because you had cupcakes in your backpack that were a bit of a mess, and you only came in after knocking.

Wanda still had to get used to the image of you hanging at that height.

"Hi." She greeted, not hiding her own discontent about that day. You continued to sit on the edge.

"Hey." You said with a small smile, twirling your bag in front of you. " I won't be bothering you, I just came to bring you something."

She grimaced, biting her lip. She wanted to say that you're rarely a nuisance, but instead, she remained silent.

You take out a closed box from your backpack, a little crumpled, but the contents are safe. There are several colorful, well-filled cupcakes from your favorite place in the center. All with little birthday decorations.

"I didn't know your favorite flavor, so I brought you one of each. If you're allergic to anything, we can throw it away." 

Wanda doesn't take the box held out to her. "Hm, I don't... celebrate today." She says clumsily, looking away. You swallow dry, nodding.

"I didn't think so, but I wanted to... I don't even know what I wanted. I'm sorry, that was stupid of me. I'll take these away and leave you alone."

But Wanda grabbed you before you could leave the room, and instead of pulling away, she hugged you. Quickly, as a thank you, but it warmed your cheeks.

"That was sweet of you, okay? Thank you." She murmured just as embarrassed, busying herself with grabbing the box of cupcakes because she didn't know what to do with her hands.

You smiled. "No problem, Wanda." You say, and before you lose your nerve, you add. "To be honest, the cupcakes are just an excuse. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you that I'm here if you need a friend. I know how hard days like these are, and being alone is sometimes not a choice, it's the only option. I wanted you to know that there are people with whom you can share this pain. Or if you don't want to talk about it, these cupcakes."

The next hug is longer and makes you wish you'd missed the window more often, even if this time it was on purpose. Maybe when all the drama has passed, and Wanda trusts you to become friends, the window will stay open for you.

For now, she lets you stay to watch sitcoms with her and grimaces when you stumble out the window to answer a spider's call. 

It's stupidly dangerous, she texts you that afternoon.

You respond with spider and web emojis.

-&-

The fourth time, you were bleeding.

Almost unconscious, and struggling to crawl through the windows. Fearing that the exhaustion and injuries would be enough for your powers to fail, and inevitably cause you to fall from the tower. 

Perhaps it would have been better to take the front door.

You felt yourself losing consciousness, and your right hand detached from the glass. Before gravity could do its job, a familiar prickling sensation covered your entire body and you were pulled into Wanda Maximoff's room.

"What happened?"

She looked worried, almost desperate to be honest. Your appearance was probably not the best. Well, who could blame you? You've just guaranteed New York's safety for a while longer after one of the most intense fights in months. Why do villains dressed as animals always land such hard punches?

You try to smile at Wanda, to make a "You should have seen the other guy" joke, even though Rhino wasn't badly hurt and the victory was more thanks to your new electric friend and his tricks that knocked the big guy out, than to you. Maybe you're losing your grip.

Wanda didn't laugh, her powers put you against the soft cushions and the next thing that left your mouth was a grunt of pain when she touched your ribs.

"I'm gonna call Bruce-"

"No, I'm fine." You tried to move, but your body hated the idea. So did Wanda, because her magic became harder to ignore. "Please, Wands, I shouldn't be out there."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

And you have to ignore the pain to keep talking and try to look casual about it with a shrug that makes you wince. "I was still recovering from the last fight. I thought I could handle it."

"You're unbelievable." She grumbles, seeming to remember beyond her own busy routine, the image of your bandaged arm after the last villain you encountered. Clearly, it had been against the advice of the rest of the team that you had joined another fight, and obviously, the consequence of your stubbornness was swinging yourself utterly wrecked into her window at dawn. "You need an x-ray."

You groan but are unable to resist her magical efforts that force you to your feet and drag you into Bruce's lab.

The whole thing becomes a blur in your injured head. But you know that you've been given a hard time by at least half the team, until the medication kicks in and you feel better enough to realize that you're already lying on a bed, with Wanda Maximoff beside you.

"Sorry about the scare." You mumble, and you don't need to clarify any further for her to understand exactly what you mean. You know you'll probably have to work harder than that to remove your nearly dead figure from her memory, but that's a start.

Wanda doesn't take her eyes off the book but sighs. "It's okay." 

You know that's not true. So you try to be honest with her.

"Today is one year since Aunt May died." You say quietly, just loud enough for the two of you in the Avengers' infirmary room to hear. Wanda immediately raises uncertain eyes. It's your turn to sigh and look away. "I just... couldn't keep myself from doing anything. When Miles' suit warned me about Rhino, it was the perfect distraction."

Wanda absorbs your words for a few seconds until she puts the book aside. She leaves the armchair and approaches the bed to sit down next to you. 

"Next time, ask me to distract you." She says, one of her hands going up to your face and caressing some of your bandages. "We could watch a movie, or go out to eat. Or even..."

But she doesn't finish, her cheeks suddenly reddening. You give her a lopsided smile. "What?"

"I don't know, anything you want." Says the witch, turning her face away. 

Mentally thanking Bruce for the painkillers that allow you to move, you sit up properly to lean toward her. "All right, I have a suggestion." You whisper, and it's the first kiss between you as you break the distance.

Wanda's lips are soft against yours, shy as she never is. Only with this kind of thing, of course. The goth girl who won't let anyone give her a bad look and has a punk attitude all the time, but can't keep her gaze if you wink at her from across the room. And always blushes when you text her that she looks pretty when she's concentrating on the Avengers meetings.

She's the one who separates, although just as breathlessly, she warns: "I'm still mad at you."

You bite back a smile, absorbing for a second the image of her swollen lips and flushed face. "Well, I suppose I should distract you from your anger then." 

She snorts good-naturedly at the statement, but you kiss her before she can comment. The two of you keep smiling throughout.

-&-

The fifth time, it's a new window.

Well, actually it's a whole new place because Wanda Maximoff has left Avengers Tower and moved to suburban New Jersey. And you were late.

The whole team had already helped with the move and left after an afternoon snack at Wanda's new house. For the first time in a long time, New York had no villain after Spidey, and you were stuck in university bureaucracy.

You apologized dozens of times by text message for not being able to help with the move, and in fact, the whole team laughed at the situation. It was just bad luck that you missed such a fun afternoon.

It was late evening when you arrived on the dark balcony. Through the windows, the lower floor was empty and perhaps you had strange habits because you didn't even consider just ringing the bell. One tug of the webs and you were at the second-floor window, tapping on the glass for Wanda to let you in.

"We have a door, you know." It was the first thing she said. And you smiled, slightly distracted by the figure fresh out of the shower, still with damp hair.

"We?"

She scrunched her nose, her hands working to remove your backpack and jacket. "It's just semantics." She retorts, but you keep smiling. You let the jacket fall into the backpack on the floor before sliding your hands around her waist. 

"Oh, of course. For a second I thought you had found a roommate." 

She rolls her eyes bemusedly. "You know the invitation still stands."

You smile, your anxious fingers drawing patterns across the exposed skin at her waist. "Well, Captain Rogers' influence is making me a bit old-fashioned but before I move I'd like to do a few things first."

"Hm, is that right? Like what?"

Shrugging as if your heart wasn't racing in your chest, you retort. "Like... marrying you, for example."

Wanda hesitates, surprised more than anything. She looks at you as if she's trying to decide if it was a joke, but you don't feel her magic in your mind. 

"Do you really mean that?" She asks almost unsurely, and you sigh before letting go. You duck down to pick up your backpack again and reveal the real reason for the extra half hour of your journey from the university.

A little velvet box hidden in the front pocket. 

"I was saving it for our anniversary, but I don't think there's such a thing as the right moment. Every day I'm ready to marry you, and I don't need a dinner party for that." You declare nervously and swallow dryly when you meet your girlfriend's watery eyes. "B-but I can totally ask you next week-"

She breaks into a tearful laugh, pulling you close again. "Shut up, you fool."  She says practically against your lips before kissing you hard.

It's only later in the evening, after you've laughed and kissed and lost yourselves in hours of pleasure exploring each other's bodies, for the first time holding hands with golden rings on your fingers, that you, still breathless with Wanda almost asleep against your chest, ask:

"That means yes, right?"

She uses magic to throw a pillow in your face.

[bluestar22x]

Boo!

Summary: You buy a mansion on the cheap having no idea it's haunted by the previous owner's friend

Pairing: Dieter Bravo x F!Reader

Rating: 18+ (mature readers only)

Word Count: 5,900(ish)

Warnings: "Enemies" to lovers vibes (they annoy each other at first), recreational drug use mentioned, medical stuff, subtitle mentions of sex/yearning, ghost Dieter follows you around the house but isn't a total creep about it - he's just really bored and invisible, AU?, foul language, fluff

Author’s Note: This was created for Jamie's Halloween Writing Challenge by @mermaidgirl30 - I already had the idea of writing ghost Dieter before this challenge, so I thought it was the perfect time to write it up. The theme I chose is "haunted mansion" for obvious reasons. I was slightly inspired by a movie some may or may not know.

xxx

You had bought the mansion on the cheap - hardly a million dollars despite the huge, modern layout.

Just outside of New Orleans, the mansion was only one of three you owned as an unusually successful author. One of the few that had gotten rich off of making a crime novel series that had later become a successful drama show that was still running after five years - a true feat in modern entertainment.

Your other two mansions were in Los Angeles and Denver, the first being your main home when working and the second being a winter holiday escape, a place where you could go and experience what winter was supposed to be like. You had grown up in Maine, and it hadn't taken you long after moving to Los Angeles to miss the changing of the seasons, even if you didn't quite miss the often dreary weather.

This mansion in Louisiana was supposed to be another escape, one close to a city with rich history and lore. Spooky lore, that was. You were thinking about writing a vampire series - what better place to inspire you than New Orleans?

Though you'd moved there specifically for the stories of monsters in the dark, you avoided the creepy mansions listed on the realtor sites like a plague. Just cause you were interested in writing it, didn't mean you wanted to live a horror-themed novel.

Your mansion was boring compared to the centuries old mansions and plantations nearby and far from any swampland. It was also only ten years old - a baby mansion that had little chance of having been able to attract attention from any supernatural beings.

Not that you really believed in them, but you were the type not to press your luck. Every time you had in the past, you'd paid for it.

However, the universe had to have been against you, as it often was, because after only one week in your new vacation home strange things started happening.

It began with misplaced items, something easy to dismiss when you were still unpacking and organizing the place. You'd set down a mug of coffee on the countertop and find it on the bar later on or, to your dismay, the living room end table without a drink coaster underneath it. You'd throw a fresh shirt on the bed and enter the bathroom to take a shower and find the shirt on the floor when you returned. You'd place the manuscripts on your desk in a neat pile and find them disorganized the next morning. Things like that.

Then after a month more concerning things started happening. You'd lock a door and find it unlocked minutes later. You'd hear heavy footsteps on the second floor when you were in the kitchen or living room downstairs and you knew no one else was in the house. You'd see doors creak open on their own when they hadn't done that before.

Suddenly the cream colored modern mansion felt unsafe despite the high tech alarm system being in full working order and having never gone off.

You took to listening to music almost constantly, attempting to block out the feeling of unease you felt when everything was quiet. What you thought was your irrational side screamed at you to leave, to sell the place and go hang out at your Denver mansion or return to your main home, but your stubborn, so called rational side balked at the idea. You didn't want to admit defeat against a haunting you were pretty sure was all in your head or had explanations that were not of the supernatural kind.

Then one morning, the day before Halloween, you wandered downstairs to find a strange man sitting at your bar, dressed in ripped blue jeans, a dark tan oxford shirt, and a pair of tan slip on sneakers. You also had time to note that he had a graying patchy beard, sunglasses, and a single gold loop earring attached to his left ear before the fear set in and you screamed.

There was a complete stranger in your house! An interloper! Whatever his reason for being in your kitchen was, it had to be no good.

"Holy shit, you're loud!" he snapped, jumping in his seat. "Why are you freaking out so early in the morning?"

He turned to face you and his jaw dropped when he realized you were starring directly at him. "Wait, can you fucking see me?"

"Of course I can fucking see you," you spat. "You're in the middle of my kitchen, seated at my bar. Get the fuck out before I call the police!"

The man rubbed at his temple, his head pounding, which was really unfair, he thought, considering his situation. "Lady, if I could, I would, you are the saddest company I've ever kept, but unfortunately I have no say in the matter. I was here before you and I can't leave. Believe me, I've tried."

"Clearly you haven't tried enough," you hissed, pointing an index finger at the front door. "Try again."

He sighed and rolled his eyes dramatically, though you couldn't see the latter action behind his shades. "Fine, if you insist."

He pushed himself away from the bar, sliding off the stool he'd been seated on, and headed for the door. He opened it and glanced back at you, finding that you'd trailed him with a glass vase in your hand.

At least you were a resourceful recluse.

He braced himself for the sensation of being catapulted back into the mansion and sure enough, as soon as he stepped through the threshold he felt whatever force that was keeping him inside push him back.

He landed on the tile floor several feet away from the door in the mess of his long limbs. "Oof."

"What the fuck?!" He heard you yelp and he groaned.

"Told you."

"What the hell was that?"

He stood up slowly and massaged his lower back. "That was what's keeping me from leaving, sunshine. Now that you've seen why I can't go, I'll let you guess how this situation began."

"A voodoo priest cursed you to eternity in here?" you guessed, purposely trying to come up with what you thought would be a ridiculous answer. You still were trying to recover from what you'd just witnessed. People didn't just get thrown by invisible forces, yet there was no realistic explanation for what you'd just seen.

"I wish," the man huffed. "But it's not a curse. Not as far as I'm aware. Well, maybe. Maybe some god thought it would be funny. But I'm pretty damn sure it wasn't a person who did this. I don't remember much, but the last thing I do remember before this was partying with a friend, breaking my one year drug sobriety with a dose of some pretty fine cocaine, and then waking up splayed out in the middle of the living room - a very empty living room. By the time I worked through my denial over what had happened to me, you had moved in."

"You overdosed?" you questioned, breath catching because that would mean...

"Yeah, that's what I figured," he replied. "I'm not one hundred percent sure about it. Usually I was always careful about that. But it's not like I hadn't overdosed before." He put his hand out - "Long story." - And sighed heavily. "All I know is I'm dead."

You covered your mouth in shock as you pieced it all together. "You are the one that was moving things, making noises. Did you do that on purpose?"

"What? To scare you?" He looked amused. "I wish I was that clever. Maybe I'd have better company by now. But that was just me trying to keep my sanity. You don't know how maddening it is to wander around a boring mansion all day unable to interact with anything, not even a damn spoon. I'm not good with isolation. Glad the practice paid off."

You walked into the living room and collapsed into your leather couch. "This can't be happening."

He took off his sunglasses as he followed you in and you met his dark but surprising soft eyes for a moment. "What's your name, anyways?"

He placed a hand over his chest and acted shocked, a little stung by your lack of familiarity with him. You could tell he was just being dramatic and didn't really care. "You don't know? Hint: I was an actor who was having a great Hollywood comeback when I died."

Your mind was blank. You didn't know a lot of actors by name, or by face for that matter. You didn't watch a lot of TV and movies, your preferred entertainment being reading. Your office walls were covered by filled bookshelves.

You shrugged at him.

"Dieter Bravo," he told you. "My name is Dieter Bravo. Almost everyone I know calls me Dee though."

"Do I know you now?" you inquired.

"Hardly," he snorted. "But I know you enough, unfortunately, no offense."

You rolled your eyes at him, annoyed. "You can't insult me then claim no offense. I'm gonna take offense. Especially since we've never even talked before now."

"Sorry," Dieter apologized half-heartedly. "I've just been going crazy and all you do is sit at your desk writing or read on the couch. And you seem to prefer it that way."

"Introverts do, yes," you said. "But I can be fun when I want to be. I'm going on a tour of the city tomorrow."

You didn't mention that you were going alone. You hadn't made any friends in the city yet. That always took you a while. Something that most actors probably had little trouble doing. People begged for their friendship or more, didn't they?

"Is it one of those ghost tours?" he asked. "Cause that would be ironic."

You held your tongue and kept your comment about him having used the word ironic wrongly to yourself. You were pretty sure that was something someone boring would point out. You weren't sure why you cared about what a dead addicted actor thought about you, but you did for some stupid reason. Probably because his untamed curly hair looked very tuggable and his jeans were tight in all the right places and you hadn't been laid since your last book tour. Handsome guys were your weakness. You weren't usually into jerks or addicts though. Losers, as far as you were concerned.

Instead, you let your mind wander to all those times you'd heard things moving around while you were undressed or in bed. "Please tell me you haven't been stalking me this entire time."

"Stalking is a strong word," he protested. "We're in the same house for hours on end. We have silently interacted, or rather been in the same room. And I might have been watching you, but only when you were dressed, cross my heart."

"That's comforting," you said sarcastically, but you believed him. No one with so much disdain towards your daily activities would have bothered to peep on you, would they? But he could be the type who didn't care if a girl had personality, as long as she had boobs, right?

You decided it was not worth the trouble thinking about. Not when you had no idea how to get him to move on, or at least get him out of your mansion.

"So, what unfinished business is keeping you here?" you inquired. "Last I heard that's the only way either of us is going to get some peace in the forseeable future."

"Ouch. Fair."

"Do you know?"

Dieter shook his head. "What unfinished business don't I have? My latest movie will never finish filming, my girlfriend broke up with me over the damn phone on my way here, I have no idea if Perry overdosed too or if he's still alive, and my family all hate me."

"Surely not," you said. "They just didn't know how to help you with your addictions anymore."

Dieter blinked at you. "I thought you didn't know anything about me?"

"I don't," you replied. "But I've had a couple relatives, not close ones, but still, they got addicted to painkillers and they wouldn't let the family help them, so my family got angry at them and gave up trying. You can't help those who don't want to be saved is how my mother put it."

"What if they wanted to be saved but didn't know how to accept help?"

The vulnerable question, seemingly uncharacteristic, threw you off. You stared at him and Dieter glanced away. "Just asking," he muttered.

"I don't know," you told him honestly. "Same applies. It can't be one sided. They would've had to find a way to accept it. But they didn't. And they've been buried six feet under for five years now."

Dieter nodded.

"I don't think I could help you with your family issues," you continued on. "But I can tell you Perry is alive, if he is the same Perry who owned this place as I assume. He sold me the mansion three months ago, a month before I moved in."

"That's good," he said, scratching at his neck. "I knew from your calendar and your phone that it has been six months since I died, but I didn't know if he was still alive. I can't remember him ever coming back. Maybe he did and I just wasn't...aware at the moment. Time is different now for me. And I think ghosts actually sleep too. Kinda."

"The realtor showed me this place," you told him. "Perry only showed up to finalize the paperwork at her office. Maybe it was too painful for him to come back?"

Dieter pursed his lips. "Maybe."

"Did that help?" you asked hopefully. "See any doors or light to go into?"

He barked out a laugh. "If only! But there's nothing. Guess we're not getting rid of each other that easily." There was a gleam in his eyes that suggested he wasn't as annoyed about it as he was before. It was actually playful.

"Too bad," you stated, smirking.

He chuckled. "At least we can talk now."

"That we can, so long as you promise not to keep watching me like an invisible creep while I sleep," you said.

"I do not."

"I've felt it," you hissed.

"It's hard to look away," he admitted. "You do know you drool, right?"

"Shut up."

x

After your first run in with Dieter you didn't see him for a few days, and you wondered if he'd finally moved on, but of course, no such luck.

You choked on dinner when he popped up next to you at the dining room table on the fourth day.

"Sorry, didn't mean to almost kill you," he said humorously, patting your back.

You felt nothing when he did it. Maybe a cold breeze, but nothing really notable.

"Where've you been?" you inquired once you'd recovered.

"No idea," Dieter answered. "I think showing myself to you all afternoon zapped all my 'spirit' energy. What day is it?"

"November three."

"Damn. Oh well."

"You going to use your newfound 'spirit energy' to find a way to move on?"

He pouted. "Said like I wasn't trying to do that before. And jeez, in a rush, are we?"

You huffed. Like he'd given you a reason not to want it fast. It would be way better for you both once he found peace.

"Aren't you?"

"Of course I am!" he shouted before pointing a finger at you. "But I'm not leaving before I give you this advice: don't wear jeans on the night of your death. You may think they're comfy, but they're not. Not after weeks, months in them. I miss my pajamas. My robe."

He sighed wistfully and you couldn't help but chuckle at him. "Alright, advice taken."

He whirled and phased back into invisibility, leaving you alone until the next morning, when he nearly made you choke on your breakfast.

x

Days turned into weeks like this, with Dieter spending minimal time with you as he made attempts to figure out what he needed to do to be free of the mansion, as he tried to make peace with the things that haunted him in hopes that resolving his unfinished business would open the beyond up to him, but slowly, the more hope he lost, the more time he spent with you.

It started with meals, watching you eat and participating in discourse that became less and less hesitant and hostile over time, turning into shockingly friendly debates and banter.

It turned out Dieter wasn't so bad to be around and he wasn't the loser you'd thought he was, or had been. One search of his wikipedia page and a few youtube videos had settled that for you. He had worked hard to gain his success, spending nearly a decade taking guest star role after guest star role, working in a bar when the roles and his money dried up. And when he did find a major role to catapult his career, he continued to take as many roles as he could.

He was known for partying hard on weekends, but he never showed up for work high.

He enjoyed comfy clothes on his time off, and especially loved wearing his light green robe, sometimes even going to his local coffee shop in it, but he cleaned up well for interviews and other important functions.

Dieter had a good reputation despite his addictions. It seemed like his fellow cast members always had nice things to say about him, even those who worked with him on the disastrous set of Cliff Beasts 6, which was apparently where he'd had his first overdose.

By Thanksgiving you were solid friends, and after you left for the holiday to visit your parents and home in LA, you returned with a souvenir for you both - a fridge magnet with a picture of the city buildings just beyond the Hollywood sign. You'd noticed Dieter seemed homesick and you sometimes felt it too. But you wouldn't leave New Orleans until Dieter figured out how to move on or until you were forced to. The magnet gave you a daily reminder of what it looked like.

As Christmas neared, Dieter began hanging out with you in the living room at night, watching whatever you were watching, which were mostly Christmas movies in December. He did it even when you watched Hallmark, though he'd roll his eyes and make sarcastic comments about the plot throughout those.

"They always fight and break up over an assumption," he rattled on more times than you could count. "Dumb ones at that. His jealous ex flaunts her a ring and says it is from him and the leading lady just bolts without asking him if it's true? And they said I needed therapy."

"You needed therapy."

"Well, not as bad as that bird."

Dieter couldn't leave the house to get you a Christmas gift, and you'd agreed you both would spend Christmas Eve, the night before your parents arrived to celebrate the holiday, just curled up on the couch together as usual, but that hadn't stopped him from giving you something anyway.

He'd thrown a box at you, unwrapped and told you to look inside and you'd found a beautiful charcoal drawing of you writing away at your desk inside. The sight of it made your breath catch.

"You did this yourself?" you questioned, stunned.

"Yeah," he replied. "It took a lot of energy out of me, but I got it done in a few days. I know we said no gifts, but I wanted to give you something anyway. You know, since I can't pay rent."

He'd expected you to laugh at the comment but you were too busy studying the image. He'd gotten every detail, right down to your blemishes. He'd put a lot of care into drawing you. It felt...reverent.

When you tilted your head up to look at him, you did it differently. You saw him in a new light. And though he was in the same jeans and shirt as he always was, you thought he looked particularly handsome in that moment, chocolate eyes hopeful.

"So, do you like it?" he asked nervously.

"I love it," you assured him. "But I...didn't get anything for you."

"It's okay," he said, "Free rent."

"You are the least messy roommate I've ever had," you told him. "But you've got to stop sneaking up on me and making the rooms cold."

"The temperature is out of my hands," Dieter said, shrugging. "Unless you want me to turn up the thermostat. I've mastered turning dials."

You smiled. "I'm good tonight."

x

You should've known better than to get drunk alone on New Year's Eve, but you did.

No, you weren't alone, alone, but you were the only one drinking since Dieter was not physically able to drink. And he should've been the last person you'd hang out with drunk.

Being drunk made you silly, made you excitable, and it also made you bold.

One minute you and Dieter were laughing loudly, and the next you were leaning towards him. "Can I tell you something?"

"Sure. Anything."

You leaned in closer and lowered your voice, "It really sucks you are dead, Dee. It sucks because I really wish we could kiss right now."

Dieter stared at you, dumbfounded, but the shock quickly turned into glee. "We could still, you know."

"You've gotten good at making yourself more solid," you said, "But I can't feel you whenever you touch me, Dee. I don't notice it unless I see you doing it. That's the only way I know. By sight."

"Well, you've never focused on it before, have you?" he inquired. "It always takes me a lot of focus to hold anything, even a pen, for long, but I do."

"It may not seem that way, me being a writer, but I'm terrible at focusing," you admitted.

Dieter brushed your cheek compulsively and you smiled weakly at him.

"Can we try something out?" he asked.

"What'd you have in mind?"

He nodded at the couch. "Turn off the lights and lay down on your back and close your eyes."

You raised your eyebrows questioningly, and he flashed you a reassuring smile. "Trust me."

You did as ordered and Dieter took a moment to take your prone form in, peering through the darkness, and he noticed how your fingers were twitching due to your inability to ever keep perfectly still.

He couldn't believe he was finally going to kiss you. Two months ago he wouldn't have wanted to. He'd had bigger concerns, and you weren't his usual type.

But with time and forced proximity he'd grown to enjoy your company. You were smart, generous, surprisingly witty, and he'd always found you pretty.

He doubted he deserved you, he was certain you were better than him, but you wanted him to kiss you, and lately he'd wanted that too. He couldn't deny you.

He approached the couch and sat down next to you, leaning over you so his face hovered above yours.

"Try to clear your mind."

You nodded and did as told, doing your best to keep all thoughts at bay while your heart thudded in anticipation against your rib cage.

Then you felt his lips on yours. They weren't warm or cold, soft or chapped, and they didn't taste like anything, but you could feel the pressure of them. You could feel when he moved his lips, when he deepened the kiss, when his hand reached out to cradle your face.

You reached up for him automatically, your eyes still shut, and you could feel his strong neck under your hands, could feel the tips of his curls at the base of it.

There was something electric about the moment, and you moaned softly as you let the sensation consume you. The more you got lost in it, the more kissing Dieter felt real.

It was sobering.

You gently pushed him away and opened your eyes to find him gazing back into yours, a confused look on his face. "What's wrong?"

You shook your head as tears flooded your eyes. "I can't, Dee. I can't do this with you. You're dead."

"Pretty sure we just did," he said, wiggling his brows suggestively. "And if we can do that, imagine what else we might be able to do with time."

"I can't," you repeated. "Someday you will move on and I'll be alone again."

"I'll wait to move on only after you die," he declared. "Problem solved."

You shook your head again, harder. "That's unfair for us both and you know it. I don't want to spend my life keeping you a secret, and you don't want to stay cooped up in this house for another four or more decades. You'll go mad."

"Not with you here," he swore, his hand gliding down to squeeze your upper arm.

"I can't take that chance," you said, standing up. "I'm sorry."

You began to walk away, but in the archway to the hall you turned to face him again.

"You should keep looking for your way out," you told him. "Make it your priority again. Cause next week I'm headed back to LA. I've got a book that's going to hit shelves in three weeks and my editor wants to plan some last minute fan meet ups for when it does. I can't stay here while we're doing that."

You tried to avoid looking at Dieter's face but you still got a glimpse of the hurt on it.

He was so upset he didn't say anything to you back, and you told yourself silently that it was easier that way.

You climbed the stairs, quickly curled up in bed under your sheets, and tried to think about anything but him until you fell asleep.

You had no idea that when you woke up in the morning, he'd be gone.

x

Steady beeping was the first thing Dieter registered when he gained consciousness in the hospital, but it was far from the least pleasant thing about the experience. That had gone to the bright lights briefly, then to the uncomfortable feeling of his feeding tube that was pulled through one of his nostrils.

Dieter would never call waking up from his coma fun. It had been confusing and exhausting (he thought that was ironic) and he’d been sore from not moving for a long time, but at least that discomfort felt short compared to what came after.

He'd been in a coma for nearly a year and that had taken a toll on his body, along with the seizure that had caused him to go into it in the first place, a side effect of his long term use of hard drugs.

He had most of his mind right from the start, but his body was weak and had loss some of the connections he'd made as a child to do simple functions like walking and eating with a fork. Frustratingly, he'd had to learn it all back again.

His only solstice was that his parents were there every step of the way. They'd had him transferred to LA after he woke up and had regularly visited him in the hospital and Dieter kinda wished he'd heard them while he was taking his long sleep. What had they said to him?

Probably what they'd been saying since. His parents rarely missed a chance to tell him they loved him, that they regretted letting his addictions come between them.

"It was my fault," he'd told them, but they'd shaken their heads.

"We didn't go about finding you help like we should've. We gave up too fast."

Dieter didn't care about that though. He was just grateful to have them back in his life. To still have a life at all.

He didn't remember the fateful night that had led to his coma, but he was able to video chat with Perry on his laptop and his friend filled in the blanks.

They'd gotten together and Perry had given him all the cocaine he could ask for. They'd gotten comfortable on the couch and rode out their highs talking about the trouble they used to get into in high school. Then he had began seizing sometime after midnight and Perry had dialed 911.

Even with the fill in, Dieter felt he was missing something. Something important. But any time he tried to recall his night with Perry, he got nothing.

He had dreams though, often several times a week, of him patrolling Perry's mansion alone, of an attractive woman chatting away with him at the dining room table, of him kissing her in the shadows of the night, and those felt like the missing pieces, lost memories, but they couldn't be. He couldn't have been a ghost while he was in the coma, he reasoned.

But all the reasoning in the world wouldn't allow him to shake it off. Eventually he caved and asked Perry, who was visiting him after getting out of rehab, to describe the woman who had bought the mansion from him.

When he gave every detail he could think of, Dieter was flabbergasted.

The woman Perry had detailed sounded exactly like the woman in his dreams...

But it couldn't be, could it?

He decided there was only one way to find out.

As soon as he was back to full strength, he'd fly out to New Orleans and knock on your door.

He'd find out once and for all if any of it had been real.

x

He didn't mean to go to New Orleans on Halloween, but that's how it ended up - with him on an early flight to one of the spookiest cities in the world on the arguably spookiest day of the year.

He took a taxi to get to your house and hesitantly made his way to the front door.

How should he go about telling you he had dreams about you? To ask if you knew him when he was in his coma and was a ghost? What if it had really all been in his head?

There were several carved orange pumpkins on the front porch - jack o' lanterns - something he didn't remember you having last year, and they immediately sent him into a spiral of deep uncertainty.

She can't be her, he thought. She didn't decorate for Halloween last year.

It was kind of ridiculous to assume that just because you hadn't had Halloween decorations one year you wouldn't have them the next, but that was how much he was doubting himself.

He took a moment to beat down his nerves on your doorstep, shake it off, then knocked, not knowing if you'd hear it or if you were even on the same side of the house. Not knowing if you were home at all.

You were both shocked when you opened the door and found yourselves staring at each other.

How could it be? You'd assumed Dieter had moved on well over half a year ago, and yet there he was before you, looking very much alive and in a fresh pair of black jeans and an olive green button down shirt that was basically his tan shirt's twin.

"Holy shit, I didn't think you were actually real!" Dieter exclaimed.

"Are you?" you inquired. "Last I knew you were dead. What the fuck?"

He guffawed and you marveled at the way the skin around his eyes crinkled, at how they shined with life. His hair was more gray than you remembered, but it only added to how alive he looked.

"It turns out I wasn't actually dead," he explained. "I was in a coma. I woke up in a hospital bed back in January and found out I'd been unconscious for several months. I didn't overdose, but I'd had seizures from the cocaine I took. I had no idea that could be a side effect. The doctors said it was a miracle I survived, let alone had a full recovery."

You stepped outside with him. "And you've stayed clean?"

He huffed. "Of fuckin' course. I'm not a complete idiot. I'm not going through that shit again. Physical therapy was a bigger pain in my ass than any of the cravings could ever be."

You laughed briefly before your expression turned serious again. "That's good."

"I wanted to see you sooner," he told you, scratching at his cheek over the beard he still had, though it was more neatly trimmed than it had been the last time you'd seen him. "But I wanted to be fully recovered before I flew back out here, and for part of that time I didn't remember being here. Not even the night me and Perry hung out in the living room."

You folded your arms, nodded, and pursed your lips. "So how much do you remember now?"

You tried to keep your expectations low but there was a knife stabbing at your heart when you realized that he might not be able to recall much of you at all. Did he even remember your kiss?

Dieter smiled. "I remember us not getting off on the right foot, and maybe scaring you on purpose a few times."

You gaped at him. "I KNEW it!"

He grinned slyly and continued, "I remember how we used to talk a lot, and how that would drain my energy right out, but I'd always linger a little too long, until I had no choice but to slip into the darkness to rest for a while. I remember loving your sarcastic sense of humor and the way you lose your breath when you laugh too hard. And I...remember that night, when we kissed."

That had been something else. Unexpectedly titillating. It was by far the sharpest memory he had of that time he'd spent between worlds.

"I don't know if you remember it, but I regretted every day since that I said what I said that night," you told him, chewing your lip.

He nodded. "I remember. But you weren't wrong. You deserve to be with someone breathing, and I was really getting sick of being stuck in the house."

You chuckled but the sound was cut short when you felt him palm your cheek.

He was sooo warm. Real.

Your stomach fluttered when your eyes met.

"I thought I'd never get to say goodbye," you whispered. "All I wanted after I woke up to an empty house was to get that chance. But this, this is so much better."

"I missed you," Dieter admitted, drawing closer to you.

You beamed at him and he felt his chest warm.

"I missed you too."

He pulled you into a kiss, far more passionate than the first you'd shared, and you gripped onto his elbows tightly, fiercely clinging to him, almost afraid to let go.

When you eventually did, you smirked at him. "You're a day late for our anniversary, you know."

"First meetings do not count," he claimed.

"Oh yes they do," you countered.

"Well, excuse me for fuckin' forgetting to fly out yesterday. Pretty sure I still have some brain damage."

You huffed playfully. "Excuses."

Dieter shook his head at you fondly and kissed you again.

xxx

Tagged: @harriedandharassed

xxx

Main Masterlist

xxx

[btscontentenjoyer]

BTS Halloween Fic Recs

In honour of spooky season, here are some fanfic recommendations that I think fit the mood or theme of the season! What that means to me really is just some supernatural fics that I've enjoyed a lot. Hope you enjoy some of these fics as well, and if you do, don't forget to let the author know by leaving feedback! Most of these stories contain smut or other mature themes so MINORS DNI!

kim namjoon

hungry (for your love) by @minisugakoobies (two-shot, 4k) slight fluff/slight smut

[namjoon x vampire reader, strangers to lovers]

summary: After a century of slumber, you wake ravenous for your next meal. The first human you stumble across, Namjoon, is a fine choice. You just weren’t expecting him to be so cute.

wish granted by @jjungkookislife (4.6k) smut

[genie namjoon x reader, strangers to lovers]

summary: Finding a genie in a bottle wasn’t what you were expecting the night before Halloween. Being granted three wishes sounded like fun at first, but after wasting one, and stumped on the second, you’re not too sure how your night will pan out. And the genie is of no help… he is insanely attractive though!

kim seokjin

useless magic by @raplinesmoon (2.3k) fantasy/fluff

[baker seokjin x witch reader]

summary: As owner of the hot new bakery in town, you should be more than ashamed to admit that your baking sucks. You know this fact. The only reason why people keep coming back to your bakery is that your desserts are enchanted: chocolate chip cookies that provide warmth and comfort, blueberry muffins that give a burst of energy to start the day, chocolate-covered strawberries spiked with love potions. One day, your fellow rival and bakeshop owner Kim Seokjin stumbles upon you in the midst of casting a spell. And chaos ensues.

in the dead of night by @ot7always (14.5k) smut/fluff

[vampire seokjin x reader, friends to lovers]

summary: You didn’t exactly expect Kim Seokjin to show up at your door at 3 am requesting a bite.

min yoongi

mine by @sailoryooons (14.8k) smut/horror/thriller

[yoongi x succubus reader]

summary: Yoongi lives a quiet life. His days are organized neatly, and every week he can expect the same results. Then he meets you. Hypnotizing. Otherworldly. Strange. And his life never goes back to the way it was before.

the dark by @bratkook (18k) smut

[demon yoongi x reader]

summary: your small town thrives on the occult, luring tourists in with endless themed festivities, but the only place you’re determined to see is the mysterious club that comes to life the week before Halloween. what makes The Dark so exclusive, and what secrets are they hiding behind closed doors?

jung hoseok

not today, satan by @gimmethatagustd (3.7k) humor/a lil bit of smut

[demon hoseok x reader]

summary:  If you had known the demon tasked with reaping your soul would be a total #daddy you would have gone to Hell sooner!

what happened in neverland by @kithtaehyung (4.3k) angst/smut/pwp

[mermaid hoseok x pirate reader, enemies to lovers]

summary: you hate him. he’s your enemy. that’s just how it’s always been. so how the hell did you end up here?

the wood by @sailoryooons (16.7k) psychological thriller/smut

[witch hoseok x reader]

summary:  From the moment you step foot in Kill Devil, you know something about the town is off. Determined to find out exactly how your sister went missing in such a small town, you receive unlikely help from the man staying in the motel room next to yours. But there is so much more than what meets the eye with Hoseok and the citizens of Kill Devil.

park jimin

cloud nine by @suga-kookiemonster (5.4k) smut/horror

summary: “he’s here again” viv whispers. “you know who. the hot guy who’s totally into you.” and he is hot – devastatingly hot enough that you know he can’t actually be into you, because the universe simply doesn’t work that way. that still doesn’t stop your heart from pounding when he smiles at you from across the room. 

nectar by @gimmethatagustd (series, 35k) smut/angst/fluff

[human jimin x vampire reader, roommates to lovers, college au]

summary: Humans have this annoying habit of being drawn to danger, and you’re having a hard time stopping yourself from sinking your teeth into your new roommate. You’re not sure what’s more tantalizing: his impossibly good looks or his seemingly innocent way of flirting with the darkest part of you.

the prince’s cinderella syndrome by @jimilter (39.4k) angst/smut/fluff

[cursed jimin x reader, strangers to lovers]

summary:  He shows up at Halloween, every year, dressed the same, and leaves at midnight like some Cinderella. You would think he was a prankster if his eyes didn’t look like they contained all the sadness in the world. You don’t know him - no one on campus does. You don’t know why he appears only once a year. You don’t know why he never smiles. But you can’t help falling in love with him. Even if he breaks your heart when he abandons you at midnight, again.

lovely demons by @kpopfanfictrash (41.7k) fantasy/angst/smut

[prince of hell jimin x witch reader, enemies to lovers]

summary: As penance for a crime committed long, long ago, the Witch Council banished you to the feared Tholoss forest. Your sentence was one hundred thousand days of solitude – or death, whichever came first. Your only hope of salvation comes from the demon names routinely sent your way; creatures who escape the inner circles of Helland pose a threat to the mortal realms. For each demon you kill, days are removed from your sentence. For years you’ve existed, biding your time, until one morning you receive a name which throws your entire world into chaos: the name of Park Jimin, High Prince of Hell himself.

kim taehyung

moonstruck by @jungkxook (7.4k) smut/fluff

[werewolf taehyung x reader, arranged marriage au]

summary: in hindsight, being friends with a pack of werewolves and, thus, suddenly being thrown into a world of supernatural furries and other inhuman beings isn’t something you would recommend but it was too late to back out now, especially when you consider the fact that apparently you’re now being “hunted” and the only way to save you is to be mated with taehyung. whatever that means.

et sic incipit by @lavienjin (12.5k) smut/pwp

[incubus taehyung x virgin reader]

summary: For Taehyung, born of old and before the dawn of man, tempting mortals is nothing more than a pass-time to quench his boredom. Everything changes when he met you, literally too good to be true, but no human has ever resisted his pull. And he’s sure that you’re no different.

love you for infinity by @gimmethatagustd (24k) smut/angst/fluff

[ghost taehyung x human reader, long-lost lovers, soulmates (kinda)]

summary: Kim Taehyung and his fiancée met their untimely deaths when they were young and heartbroken. When he’s doomed to roam the earth as a ghost with unfinished business, Taehyung is convinced that finding the soul of his true love and righting his wrongs will set him free. However, you have no intention of being haunted by a ghost for the rest of your life.

jeon jungkook

corrupt by @bratkook (5k) smut/pwp

[vampire jungkook x human reader]

summary: You’d be crying out in pain begging me to play my games. I could corrupt you, it would be ugly.

knot today by @kinktae (5.8k) smut/pwp

[alpha jungkook x virgin omega reader, friends to lovers]

summary: When your first heat approaches and you are left desperate and partnerless, who better to turn to than your alpha roommate that you’ve spent the better half of your life hiding your feelings for?

only when you’re lonely by @jjkeverlast (7.5k) humor/smut/angst

[human jungkook x succubus reader, fake dating, college au]

summary: jungkook has never dated anyone, because of you and you're soft touches that bring him to orbit. it's all it's ever been, just sex between you. although, it brings an unexpected turn when jungkook accidentally blurts you out as his girlfriend to his college friends which results in them expecting you to an upcoming party. what jungkook doesn't know is that you're much more than just someone he meets when he's lonely.

wicked by @noteguk (9.1k) smut

[incubus jungkook x inexperienced reader]

summary; in which incubus!jungkook likes to ruin pretty innocent things, and you might just be the perfect target.

darkroom by @yoon-kooks (10.2k) smut/fluff

[vampire jungkook x reader, college au]

summary:  When you somehow end up in an advanced photography class that you definitely shouldn’t be in, you seek the help of shy nerdy boy Jeon Jungkook to preserve your 4.15 GPA. It isn’t until after you stumble upon him in the darkroom that you realize your cute little nerd is actually a super hot vampire with an icy cold stare and beautiful burgundy eyes.

hotter than hell by @chateautae (series, 136k) angst/fluff/smut

[fallen lucifer jungkook x human reader, enemies to lovers, road trip au]

summary: jungkook, lucifer and king of hell, has been cast out of the crimson underworld for a reason he’s unsure of. embarking on his journey for the answer should’ve been easy, if it weren’t for you, the human that nurses his wounded body in her home, and accidentally witnesses the truth of his identity. kickstarting a hellish adventure with the devil himself, you discover lucifer is the most infuriating company ever; and jungkook finds out that maybe his answer to returning home lies within his annoying human confidant.

multiple members

ravished by two by @yoonia (5k) smut

[alpha namjoon x werewolf reader x alpha seokjin, fated mates]

summary: Two dominant Alphas, one defining goal. But how far can you catch up with two prime, tenacious males overcome with desire?

compromise by @here2bbtstrash (10k) crack/smut

[vampire taehyung x human reader x werewolf jungkook, twilight au]

summary: you’re torn between the two loves of your life - but maybe you don’t have to choose.

the (hell) house by @whatifyoulivelikethat (two-shot, 25k+) crack/fluff/smut

[ot7 x fwb reader, all kinds of monster sex lol]

summary: Welcome to the Hell House. Some call it resident evil. Some call it a haunted house. Some call it a waste of space (rude). Enter if you dare – the Doctor will ensure that you never come out the same. What’s that? Why are you going with your seven fuckbuddies? You wouldn’t… fuck in there, right? (Yes, you would.)

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this list! And thank you to these amazing authors for sharing their work with us!! I honestly wanted to read more this month but I ended up not having time and yet I still wanted to put together a little list for the spooky season (thank you to the anon who asked for halloween recs for giving me a little push!) If anyone has more recommendations, I'd love to hear them, so don't be afraid to put them in the comments or send me an ask <3

[echo-goes-mmm]

Silas and Wren 2.0 #5

Masterpost

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Next

Warnings: past dub/noncon

Silas paced in his room. 

As much as he hated solitude, he’d grown accustomed to it. Now that he had company, what was there to say?

He’d gotten what he wanted, but it didn’t help the emptiness inside him.

Typical. 

He stopped, sighing. Maybe… maybe he just needed some time. To get used to another person again; or maybe time for the pain of rejection to leave.

If it ever left.

Silas opened his door, bumping into Wren. 

Wren squeaked at the impact. He stepped back, his honey-brown eyes wild.

“Sorry,” Silas apologized. “I didn’t know you were there.”

Wren's expression shifted in a flash, from fear to a placid smile, but Silas could hear his frantic heartbeat.

“I should have watched where I was going,” he said, polite as always. “I’m sorry, Master.”

Wren was afraid of him.

Of course Wren was afraid of him; how could he expect anything different? He shouldn’t hope for anything good from the universe. Nothing ever panned out right.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Wren’s relief was nearly imperceptible, but it was there.

“What’re you up to?” Silas asked.

Wren tensed again, and Silas could have smacked himself. “I’m only curious,” he added.

“I- I was looking for a duster, Master. To clean with.”

“Oh. Uh, I don’t think I have one. Sorry.”

“It’s alright, Master, I’ll make do,” Wren said with a sunny smile. It didn’t quite meet his eyes.

Silas wondered how many smiles Wren had faked before. He was too good at it.

“You don’t have to clean for me.”

Wren shifted. “I’d be happy to,” he said. “I don’t mind, Master.”

Silas knew a losing battle when he saw one.

“Well, alright. You don’t need to call me ‘master’, though. Just Silas will do.”

“Yes, Master Silas,” replied Wren automatically.

Silas sighed internally, and went downstairs.

So much for bonding. How did people make friends?

Silas scanned the bookshelf, looking for something to read. 

Unfortunately, he had read all of his books many times, and he really didn’t feel like risking the streets for the bookstore. 

The library was outside his pitiful territory, and out of the question.

Silas worried his lip. Maybe he could send Wren to buy a book or two?

He glanced at the clock. Ten pm. The bookstore closed at nine.

It was just as well, really. He couldn’t afford to spend money so frivolously. Sure, the banks were as happy to service vampires as they were humans- money was money after all- but his pockets were not as deep as most of his kin. 

Wren alone was a sizable expense, and he had to buy food for him every week. Not to even mention furnishing the attic room. No new books for a while, then.

Silas grabbed a random title and sat in his armchair. He flipped to the first chapter, skimming the words.

Nothing jumped out at him; the plot couldn’t hold his attention. He had read it too many times.

Silas scrubbed a hand over his face. 

He missed his sired siblings, even though they disliked him. He missed games and chatter and jokes, even if he was mostly left out.

But most of all he missed Felix; the only other person in his nest that didn’t hate him.

If only things had been different.

Silas sighed, and stood to put the book away.

___________________

Wren finished dusting the top of the kitchen shelves. No one had cleaned up there in ages, and no wonder. He had to climb on top of the counter to get to it.

Wren wiped off the counters one more time, and admired his work.

The kitchen was sparkling from top to bottom. He’d even mopped the floor, despite the lack of a proper mop.

Luckily, he’d found some rags in the bathroom closet. It seemed a rather strange place to keep them, but it wasn’t his place to question his Master’s organization system.

Speaking of his Master, Silas hadn’t fed from him yet. Surely he was hungry.

Wren put the stopper in the sink and filled it with hot water. He left the rags to soak, and went looking for his owner.

___________________

Master Silas was in the living room, staring off into space. His hands were folded in front of him, and his legs were stretched out.

Wren hesitated.

“Are you alright, Master?”

Silas turned his head, his gray eyes landing on him. Master looked away after only a moment.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Wren hesitated. “You haven’t had breakfast,” he said.

“I’m not hungry. Just… bored.”

What did he mean? A vampire who wasn’t hungry? Laughable. Incomprehensible. Then again, who was Wren to question him?

Boredom, though, he could fix.

Wren didn’t particularly want to at the moment- he was probably covered in dust- but it was about time he did his duty for Master Silas.

“I could entertain you, Master,” he offered, keeping his voice as pleasant and agreeable as possible.

Silas looked at him again. Wren’s hands twitched at the hem of his shirt, waiting for the order to strip.

It didn’t come.

Silas stood up. He walked to the shelf, and pulled down a box.

Confusion and relief swirled through him. A game. Just a board game.

“Do you know how to play Carcassonne?”

“I can learn, Master.”

Silas set the box on the coffee table, and Wren inched forward. Master began to pull out the pieces, and Wren sat on the rug across from him.

One day, soon, Master Silas would take him to the bedroom and Wren would find out what kind of Master he was. What he liked, and how to really please him.

But for now, Master wanted him to play a game.

Wren tried to pay attention as Master Silas explained the rules, but a thought nagged at him.

Why didn’t Silas want to bed him? 

No one had ever turned him down before. He never really had to offer before, either. It was a given; understood that Wren was always available. No Master needed to be bored when he was around.

It had been three days and Silas showed no sign of interest.

No Master had ever waited so long. Some took him into the bedroom immediately, others waited until evening came. One in particular, the worst of them, had bent him over the nearest piece of furniture as soon as they had walked through the door. 

But three days? Unheard of.

Silas placed the first square, and Wren was struck with a horrifying thought.

Was something wrong with him?

taglist: @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @secretwhumplair @freefallingup13 @mylovelyme @whumpzone

@paintedpigeon1 @haro-whumps @whumpthisway @fanastyfinder @extemporary-whump

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@annablogsposts @tobiaslut @starfields08000 @ghost-whump @bitchaknso

[ausetkmt]

In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

When journalist Dorothy Tucker first learned about the 10 Million Names genealogical project, it helped amplify memories of long car journeys from Chicago to “Down South” in the 1960’s, where her mother’s family owned land.

The Mississippi property purchased by her great-grandfather George Trice in 1881 was special for several reasons. First, nobody’s really sure how a formerly enslaved man was able to purchase 160 acres, but Trice came up with the $800. And every time Tucker and her family drove down to Shannon, Mississippi each summer to visit relatives, it was more than just a vacation.

“I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast at my aunt's house. I'd go a few feet down the road and have lunch at my great-aunt's house. And then I'd play outside at my cousin's house,” says Tucker, an award-winning investigative journalist with CBS2 WBBM-TV in Chicago. “It was that way all day long. Every house was owned by a relative. I thought everybody lived like this. I thought everybody had land and stuff that was theirs.”

Tucker finally got specific details about how and why that land was purchased during the final months of her term as president of the National Association of Black Journalists. In early 2023, NABJ Board Member Paula Madison, a retired NBC Universal executive, informed the group about an offshoot of the Georgetown Memory Project, the initiative that unearthed information about the 1838 sale of enslaved Africans to fund Georgetown University. The 10 Million Names Project was created to recover the names of an estimated 10 million men, women and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500’s and 1865. By engaging with expert genealogists, cultural organizations, and family historians both Black and white, the initiative hopes to provide more African Americans with information that only formally began to be captured for their ancestors in the 1870 United States Census.

Up until that year, enslaved Africans and their descendants were only acknowledged as the property of their owners. If their existence was noted, it was in the form of sales documents or as catalogued property in civil records. Also, the relatives of enslavers often maintain troves of information about those purchased and sold off that would otherwise be completely lost.

(This database is helping to uncover the lost ancestry of enslaved African Americans.)

Much of the work will be dependent on oral histories passed down thru generations of families, and researchers of the 10 Million Names Project also hope that more white families will aid in the search by making familial records, like letters and pages from family bibles, available to them.

Tucker, who ended her term as NABJ president during that organization’s annual conference in August, revealed at the awards banquet in Birmingham, Alabama that she’d been able to learn more about her great grandfather’s real-estate ventures, through a collaboration between NABJ and the New England Historical Genealogical Society’s American Ancestors initiative.

The 10 Million Names Project was formally launched at the convention. Tucker considers it an especially timely parting gift to her journalistic colleagues. As societal divisions along racial lines widen, hate crimes continue, and attempts to ban books and curtail African American studies programs in schools and universities increase, strengthening historical knowledge is urgently important for Black Americans, Tucker says.

“I think that the ability to tell these stories and to know them is so critically important,” she says. “When you know your personal story, then as a journalist, it gives you the perspective to dig deeper when you're doing the next story, whether it’s about the school board or about Ukraine or the next elections. You know, these stories are all tools that are really good for all of us.”

How the initiative evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

“To me, genealogy was sort of like butterfly collecting,” says Richard Cellini, a faculty fellow at Harvard University and founding director of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Remembrance Program. “It’s impressive because of the amount of effort invested into it. But I never quite understood the point.”

Cellini was born in 1963 in Central Pennsylvania to a Penn State University professor and homemaker mother. His Catholic upbringing steered him to Georgetown University and an eventual decade-long law career before pivoting toward the software and technology realm. In 2015, Cellini learned that his alma mater had formed a working group to explore the sale of 272 men, woman, and children in 1838 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. As a white American of European descent, he says he did not live with or know many Black people growing up, going to school or during his legal and technology careers, so the initiative opened a window in his mind.

When Georgetown President John DeGioia invited alumni to weigh in, Cellini wrote an email asking one simple question that had nothing to do with the university. He wanted to know, “What happened to the people?”

Cellini says a senior member of the working group wrote back to say that research had concluded that all of the enslaved men, women, and children had died fairly quickly after arriving in the swamps of Louisiana where they had been transported.

“And I remember just staring at that email, even though I didn't really know much about the history of slavery or African American history, and just thinking that just doesn't make any sense,” Cellini says. Curiosity drove him to form an independent research group, funded initially through his own credit card and then from other Georgetown alumni who eagerly offered financial backing. To date, the Georgetown Memory Project has fully identified 236 of the 272 enslaved people sold by the university's leaders. Of those identified through archival records, the project has verified more than 10,000 of their direct descendants.

“The 1838 slave sale at Georgetown brought home to me, again, they were real people with real families and real names,” Cellini says. “More than 50 percent of them were children. William was the youngest, and he was six months old. And Daniel was the oldest at 80. Len was sickly, and Stephen was lame. I mean, this is all from the original documentation. From that moment on, I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

The gathering of history

The genealogists and historians connected with the project suggest that the richest vein of information may well be in the oral histories they’ve already begun gathering through hundreds of interviews. They contain fascinating stories like the ones that Kendra Field’s grandmother Odevia Brown used to tell about her African American and Native American forebears in Oklahoma. When Field was in high school, she never really liked history classes, but she always loved her grandmother’s stories.

“It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, thanks to a wonderful professor, that my grandmother's stories were history,” Field says.  After the death of her father, Field began to travel back to those historically Black Oklahoma towns to explore her African American and Creek Indian heritage. Now in her career as a historian, author and professor at Tufts University, Field also has taken on the role of chief historian for 10 Million Names.

Technology, including the use of artificial intelligence programs, is allowing project investigators to do quicker, more efficient searches for information. Field says that can happen by identifying the location of plantation ledgers, advertisements, and receipts from auctions. “Particularly, there's been a lot of advancements made in optical character recognition, which allows researchers to identify names and handwritten records,” Field says. 

Prior to this, a researcher had to find the document, transcribe the information, and then pivot to another database to go deeper. But with the development of other genealogical data sets such as Enslaved.org, locating individuals and making connections becomes much easier. “So that means we can move closer to that 10 million much more quickly than we would have been able to even a decade ago,” Field says. Also, the collection at the Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938” has yielded important clues from the estimated 2,300 people interviewed during that project.

(The search for lost slave ships led this diver on an extraordinary journey.)

Though identifying 10 million people who were never meant to be known as human beings may sound like a staggering task, the people behind the initiative believe it’s a totally attainable goal—even amidst all the current cultural and ideological turmoil in American society. That’s because, Cellini says, there are certain inalienable truths in this world.

“John Adams said that facts are stubborn things. You know, our Black brothers and sisters have always known their history and white people have always tried to prevent Black people from learning that history. What's new here is that white people are now trying to prevent other white people from learning this history.”

Cellini believes that Black Americans aren’t the only ones who want or need to know the full story. “It's white people who hunger for knowledge of that history, as well. It’s our duty to engage in determined resistance, to strike repeated blows for the truth. And nothing is more stubborn than facts.”

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

[verdemoun]

Do they get a reminder that their world now still isn’t completely safe and accepting of them? Like, it’s safer and more accepting, but not completely.

me: hey guys i have this super fun idea for a modern au where the gang have memories canon events and slowly become ooc through healing y'all: when do they die. how to they deal with trauma. what was hosea's funeral like. do they get hate crimed

of course they do. modern era is modern era. things have changed. some for the better, some for the absolute worse.

bessie has to give the girls a lecture that the danger that men pose to women has not changed. they shouldn't be walking home alone at night. vaccines might have reduced the number of women killed by disease but just made it more obvious how explicitly men were a risk to women.

the girlies didn't believe it until karen and jenny, having had a great but surprisingly tame night at the bar, noticed a guy walking behind them as they made their way home. the guy proceeded to lurk outside the house despite lenny and sean having both made their presences known. it wasn't until arthur turned up, hunting bow in hand ready, that the guy sprinted off into the dark

kieran actually did have a job for a brief period of time! the stable where bessie took him horseriding informally hired him as a groom, cash in hand for weekends whenever he felt like working, only to change hands and the new owner very aggressively tell him to fuck off because why would they pay a (multiple ableist and homophobic slurs) to do basic chores

not only was kieran distraught to lose his only regular contact with horses, but how upsetting it actual moment was: to be excited for work only to find out about the new management by said new management screaming at him, heckling him with all the same abusive mannerisms of the o'driscolls. it took weeks for him to leave the house afterwards

homophobia is still very much a thing. on one hand the gang are used to 19th century murdered for being queer homophobia, on the other homophobia is fucking loud. it is organized and it is everywhere, especially whenever elections were coming up.

arthur considers himself lucky he just deals with generic homophobia. sure he gets women promising to turn him straight, and he accidentally brutally declares 'ma'am i do in fact like women and men but i'm sure no matter what you were i wouldn't think you were worth pissing on'

the religious rooted homophobia? that hits sean hard. he considers himself catholic, not a very good catholic but a catholic none the less, and when religious groups preach hate and sin it effects him. surely being an outlaw condemned his soul enough. sometimes he needs that extra support from the gang that whatever god there is wouldn't actually hate him for finding happiness with lenny

bill internalizes everything. he comes so far in being comfortable and able to accept himself only to be knocked back by homophobic media and protest and suddenly want to hide again. the tension wrestling with the fact being out and meeting other gay people makes him profoundly happy and then how much he already hates himself only to (re)discover in modern era that people still think he should hate himself for being gay

but absolutely none of them would argue lenny doesn't have it the worst. lenny deals with a) homophobia and racism in his workplace as a university lecturer surrounded by old money conservative white men b) racism within the queer community, forced to swallow that 19th century urge to end an argument with a gun when someone says something that is explicit fetishization that becomes explicit racism when he says no c) being a black man in modern america.

lenny is not shy about the fact he misses the fact in 19th century he could shoot a man that was pissing him off, escape like he did in strawberry, and keep riding until he found somewhere safe. for lenny, modern era doesn't feel safer like it does for the rest of the gang, just a different kind of dangerous.

even after a decade in timewarp, lenny is still shocked by how deep racism runs. one of the worst days of his life, in either era, was a day he had to pick up maeve from school. he was listed as the second emergency contact if sean wasn't available. he was listed as sean's partner. the school knew sean was in a same sex relationship and were supportive. but lenny, a black man, turning up asking to pick up maeve, who was sick, who saw him and called out for him dad, when lenny had all his id on him that matched perfectly with the information that was provided to the school - they still called the cops

and the cops turned up, and maybe it was spectacularly shit cops but they drew their guns on lenny, an unarmed black man, trying to pick up his daughter from school. it was only that karen, who previously thought she wouldn't be able to get there, turned up and said 'that is maeve's father what the fuck are you doing'

maeve didn't understand why she had to change school and threw a mighty tantrum until she was assured abigail jr would be changing school as well after the incident. the next school were almost uncomfortable with how clear sean was in saying my partner is a black man but understood having heard about the incident, and were very supportive

lenny still feels uncomfortable going to school events despite how much he adores seeing maeve at school, participating and trying her best and getting the opportunity to be more than any of them got to be in 19th century. he is both paranoid but knows he is not being paranoid people are watching him out the corner of their eyes just for being a black man

[lboogie1906]

Ariana Miyamoto Born May 12, 1994) became the first Miss Universe Japan of mixed-race descent on March 12, 2015. The beauty queen, the product of a brief marriage between an African American serviceman and a Japanese woman. Her father returned to America and she was raised by her mother’s side of the family in Sasebo, Japan.

She and others of half-Japanese descent are commonly referred to as “hafus.” She endured racism throughout her childhood. Some children refused to touch her, fearing that her Black skin would “rub off” on them.

She moved to Jacksonville, Arkansas to live with her father and learn more about her African American heritage. She was surrounded by people who shared her skin color, but due to her limited English and Japanese mannerisms, she had difficulty adjusting to her new home. She spent two years in Arkansas and started high school there, she returned to Japan and worked as a bartender.

She has a wide variety of interests including volleyball, cooking, and motorcycle riding. She has her motorcycle license and hopes one day to be the owner of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. She is a 5th-degree Japanese calligraphy master.

The tragic loss of her friend spurred her to enter the Miss Universe competition to confront Japanese racial stereotypes.

Her crowning has been controversial. Her reign has been ignored by the Japanese media, She has been criticized by many Japanese individuals and organizations. Online commentators, for example, stated that she is not “Japanese enough,” does not have a “real Japanese face,” and is unfit to represent Japan. She responded to her critics by arguing that her becoming Miss Japan is a specific challenge to that stereotype. She believes that her Miss Universe Japan victory is a sign of racial progress and will help start a much-needed dialogue on what it means to be Japanese.

She competed at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant where she made it to the Top 10. She is married and has two children. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[sunshinedobi]

BBS Fic Master Post

Since I'm trying to slowly leave the sinking ship that is the blue birb site and relocate over here, I figured it's time for me to organize some of my fics!

Where to Find Me

AO3 Twitter

Fics

sleepless in bangkok

She sucks in a sharp breath. Her next words are so soft that he has to strain his ears. "Pat, I don't want you to be lonely." The screen goes to sleep again. Pat doesn't touch his phone. He can barely make out the shape of Paa's face, and he knows she can't see him either. "Silly. Why would I be lonely?" (Or: Pran runs an advice column radio show at his university. Pat nearly dropped out of high school. Somehow, Pat becomes Pran’s #1 insomniac caller. To Pat, Pran is out of his league. He’d rather stay anonymous than face rejection, but un(fortunately) for Pat, Pran has other plans.)

Pat/Pran - 27k+ (7/?, ongoing)

melted

On and on, he counts with this stranger, who holds Pran between two hands with the lightest touch. (Or: In a world where everyone has a quirk, from the mundane to the dangerous, Pran just wants to blend in. One day, his control slips. He doesn't expect anyone to catch him, but Pat would never walk away.)

Pat/Pran - 5k (one-shot)

your gravity, my orbit

Pran and Pat end up attending different universities, but something always brings them back to each other. When they meet again, they get a chance to pretend, to take a break from life as Pat and Pran, childhood rivals. What remains of them might be more than what Pat could’ve ever expected, but he knows this: Pat is not going to let Pran get away a second time.

Pat/Pran - 5.6k (one-shot)

worth the wait

Pat and Pran are childhood friends, roommates, co-owners of a condo, fathers to a Scottish Fold, lifelong rivals, and if they’re feeling particularly sentimental, soulmates. Pat and Pran are not in love. (Or: originally a twitter threadfic – Teenaged Ming makes a decision that saves his friendship with Dissaya and their children from a lifetime of grief. Pat and Pran grow up together, and at 31, remain inseparable and platonic. So platonic, in fact, that when Pat attends a holiday party as Pran’s plus one, he finds out that he’s known at Pran’s workplace as his boyfriend.)

Pat/Pran - 25.5k (9/9, complete)

if you're not the one

How can you miss someone you see every day? (Or: Nanon heads to the beach. He wishes that he knew what was in store for him, for Ohm, and for whatever shaky ground the two stand on now. For better or worse, his wish is heard, and he meets an older Ohm from a not-so-distant future. This Ohm is healthier and happier and everything Nanon could hope for his best friend. But where does Nanon fit in this picture?)

Ohm/Nanon (RPF) - 4.8k (one-shot)

something borrowed & something new

“I bet you wish they sold engagement rings instead of cakes, huh?” Ink teases under her breath. Pran ducks his head to hear her properly. “What do you mean?” Ink subtly inclines her head towards Pat, who is helping another couple at the counter. “Then maybe you’d have an excuse for him to hold your hand. You know, during a ring fitting.” (Or: Pran and Ink attend a wedding expo as fake fiancés to get all the free samples they can get their hands on. The Jindapat siblings run a cake booth at the expo. Pran seriously considers the merits of dumping Ink in front of the entire exhibition hall and eloping with Pat, whose smiles are even sweeter than his cakes.)

Pat/Pran - 4.6k (one-shot)

something blue

Pran brushes away the last few tears on Pat’s cheeks. “Ah, my Pat,” Pran says. “You have such a big heart.” (Or: A “Something Borrowed & Something New” sequel. Not a coda, maybe an interlude. Pat and Pran are in love, through good days and bad days.)

Pat/Pran - 4.1k (one-shot)

the season of you

“I promise. Wait for me. I’ll go slow.” (Or: Pran loses Pat and struggles to cope. After an accident, he develops the ability to see ghosts. He encounters Tess, the ghost of a former schoolmate who has regrets of his own. The two become unlikely friends, and Pran, slowly but surely, learns to live the way Pat would want him to.)

Pat/Pran - 3.7k (1/2, ongoing)

heart in a cage

In another universe, Pran loves Pat. That’s not the universe Pat is stuck with, but that’s ok. She’s getting over it.

Pat/Pran - 35.8k (2/2, complete)

You're My Four-Leaf Clover

Daemon AU. What does it mean, Pran wonders, when a piece of your soul knows something you don’t? 

Pat/Pran - 2.7k (1/3, ongoing)

[npdclaraoswald]

Here's some of my fave Black authored books for Black History Month!

Contemporary

Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett: A girl who recently was forced to switch schools due to serophobic bullying starts spending time with her crush but begins receiving anonymous messages threatening to out her status if she doesn't stop

Generational

Dream Country by Shannon Gibney: traces a family's history, from them as modern day immigrants from Liberia to the US, to their ancestors as American slaves fleeing to Liberia, to the Liberian natives dealing with colonialism

High Fantasy

The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin: we follow three POVs in three time periods of a world where people called orogenes with the magical ability to shape the Earth are discriminated against. A young girl is sent away from her family to an academy to contain them, a young woman is forced to spend time with and have a child with a powerful orogene, and a woman tracking down her husband who killed their son and kidnapped their daughter when he found out the were orogenes

Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender: The only survivor of a slaughtered noble family, the only native noble family on a colonized island, tries to integrate herself with the other nobles and the ruler in the hopes of taking back the island from within the system

Urban Fantasy

The City We Became by NK Jemisin: in a world where cities come alive in human avatars, five people in New York City suddenly become avatars of the five boroughs as the city awakens and faces attack from another world

The Wrath & Athenaeum trilogy by Na'amen Gobert Tilahun a young boy finds out he is descended from gods and is brought into an organization to learn to wield his abilities. Meanwhile, a witch/librarian apprentice in a parallel world is brought into the deadly court intrigue of her rulers. The two of them end up having to work together to fight against a force threatening to destroy both of their worlds

Legendborn by Tracy Deon: after witnessing magic on her college campus, a young girl becomes convinced that magic was involved in her mother's death. In order to investigate, she joins the school's secret society of descendants of King Arthur and his knights

A Song Below Water by Bethany C Morrow: a siren and her best friend, a girl unsure of her ancestry but believes herself to be a mermaid, deal with the political turmoil of discrimination against sirens set against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement, exacerbated when a young, black siren's death falls into the national spotlight

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi: in a utopian world where all problems are supposed to be solved and all monsters gone, a young girl watches a creature emerge from one of her mother's painting, saying that it is there to hunt a monster

Historical Fantasy

Dread Nation and Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland: after zombies rise during the Civil War, Black and Indigenous people are forcibly conscripted to fight them. A young woman trained both to fight and be a lady in waiting for rich white women begins investigating a string of missing people and discovers a conspiracy

The Deep by Rivers Solomon: mermaids descended from pregnant women thrown from slave ships keep their history in one living person. The next one chosen for this task is terrified of the burden of history and flees from the community

Sci-fi

Kindred by Octavia Butler: a woman begins being dragged back in time to every moment one of her ancestor's life is in danger so she can save him. But said ancestor grows up to be a slave owner and she is forced to keep protecting him, or she won't be born

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson: scientists have figured out how to travel to alternate universes, but you can only survive in ones where their version of you is dead, so poor, at risk people, likely to have died are recruited to collect the resources from other worlds. One such young woman, who is confirmed to be dead in nearly 400 worlds begins investigating her newest counterpart's death and discovers a conspiracy

Horror/Thriller

Ring Shout by P Djèlí Clark: A group of monster hunters fight the otherworldly monsters that hide within the KKK

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole: gentrification narratively framed as horror, with a woman's neighbors disappearing overnight and being replaced by threatening people who are robbing the community of its culture and history

Lakewood by Megan Giddings: a young woman accepts an offer to be a subject in medical testing in exchange for enough money to get the family out of her grandmother's medical debt. But the testing requires moving to a remote location and a tight NDA, and as time goes on, more and more questionable things begin to happen

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé: two kids, a popular girl at the top of the school and a scholarship boy who has few friends, become the victims of an anonymous bully spreading their secrets around the school. Realizing they are being targeted as the only two black kids in school, they team up to try to figure out who is behind the anonymous messages

Superhero

Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark by Charlie J Eskew: a satirical novel following a man who gains electric powers and tries to join the legion of superheroes, but faces the racism prevalent in the genre, from media reaction to him to the way the other heroes treat him

Spider-Punk 1-5 by Cody Ziglar: solo comic series following Spider-Punk after the events of Spider-Verse, in which he killed the facistic President Osborn, dealing with the ways the system is still broken and teaming up with Ms Marvel, Captain Anarchy, and Riotheart

Romance

Brown Sisters trilogy by Talia Hibbert: following the love lives of three sisters. Get a Life, Chloe Brown follows Chloe enlisting her hot, bad boy landlord to help her finish her bucket list of things normal and cool people do but she's never done. In Take a Hint, Dani Brown, after a video of Dani's security guard coworker rescuing her from a broken elevator goes viral, he asks her to fake date so they can use the social media hype to promote his charity. In Act Your Age, Eve Brown, Eve, who has never held a job down for more than a year, impulsively takes a job as a cook at a bed and breakfast and slowly starts falling for the owner

Short Story Collection

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

Poetry

Homie by Danez Smith

Nonfiction

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Don't Touch My Hair (American Edition called Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture) by Emma Dabiri

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia by Sabrina Strings

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E Jones Rogers

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A Hotter Planet Takes Another Toll on Human Health

A new hypothesis about heat waves, redlining, and kidney stones.

By Bill McKibben

January 19, 2023

Shortly after the New Year, the Washington Post ran a story with a headline that would have seemed inexplicable, even runic, to most readers just a few years ago: “The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers.” But we’re growing used to the idea that the climate crisis, in Naomi Klein’s phrase, “changes everything,” so why not the internal organs of Nepalis? Remarkable reporting by Gerry Shih tells a series of unbearably poignant tales: young Nepali men, struggling to earn a living in their impoverished homeland, head to the Gulf states to do construction work in the searing heat, some without access to sufficient water, some until they collapse. (Other reporting also shows that some Nepalis who work abroad resort to the black market for a transplant that might keep them—and the families that depend on the money they earn—alive.) The piece ends with a man coming back to the care of his sister, who donates her own kidney to save him. The costs of the medical procedures require that he sell his half-built house, and that he give up his life’s dream, which was to get married.

The Post was right: the world’s future is likely encapsulated in this story. The planet is getting steadily hotter, and large swaths of it are moving past the point at which it’s safe to do heavy outside labor in the middle of the day. A 2022 study estimated that six hundred and seventy-seven billion working hours a year were already being lost because it’s too hot to go outside and build things or farm. The researchers assessed the cost at more than two trillion dollars annually, but, of course, it could also be measured in other units—in vital organs, or dreams.

But it’s not just the future that’s illuminated by such studies; it’s the past as well. Unless you’ve been keeping up with your issues of Current Opinion in Nephrology and Hypertension, you may have missed a recent article titled “Redlining has led to increasing rates of nephrolithiasis in minoritized populations: a hypothesis.” I saw it only because one of the medical experts who wrote it—David Goldfarb, who runs the dialysis unit at New York’s V.A. hospital and teaches at New York University’s School of Medicine—is an old family friend. He forwarded it to me, and it fairly blew my mind.

“Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

For reasons that remain unclear, kidney stones have traditionally been more common among white people, but, in recent years, doctors have noted huge increases among Black Americans and a significant rise in Latino communities. The authors of the new article looked to the past for a possible explanation—particularly to the nineteen-thirties, when a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlay what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to “chronic disinvestment” in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes.

Now the results can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, the authors report, neighborhoods that were graded A in the nineteen-thirties now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer.” Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a thirteen-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town. No one has carefully studied the incidence of kidney stones among these different neighborhoods, but the authors, in their hypothesis, point to research now under way. Similar work on asthma, another heat-related disease, has shown emergency-room visits are 2.4 times higher in redlined tracts.

Indeed, Goldfarb’s son Ben—an environmental journalist who this year will publish a book called “Crossings,” on the environmental impact of roads—writes that the HOLC grading program produced all kinds of deleterious health effects. In Syracuse, Miami, Minneapolis, and other cities, large parts of neighborhoods that the agency had redlined—and whose residents were mostly Black—were bulldozed to make room for interstate highways. He told me, “Minorities today disproportionately live near the urban freeways that displaced them, and suffer as a result. Air pollution causes asthma and cancer; noise pollution increases the risk of heart disease and stroke; and the physical fragmentation wrought by highways shatters local economies. It’s heartbreaking, though hardly surprising, that disastrous policy decisions made decades ago continue to destroy bodies and communities today.”

It’s true that everyone is going to pay some price as the planet cooks. The authors of the nephrology study predict a likely additional cost to the U.S. health-care system of at least a billion dollars a year. But some people are going to be hit much harder than others because of history. Doing justice in the present requires taking that past seriously—understanding how we ended up where we are, and why we must put those with the least first, as we try to address the future. But we’re at a moment in this country when the idea of historical responsibility is increasingly seen not as logical and obvious but as some kind of invidious political correctness.

In April, 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, or the Stop WOKE Act. (In introducing the bill, he had said, “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory,” adding that “we won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”) A preliminary injunction was issued against the act, which includes a dictum against any school teaching that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.” 

But, even if you can silence teachers, legislation can’t muffle the effects of history. On a hot summer’s day in Jacksonville, Florida, where DeSantis was born, the temperature in A neighborhoods is 5.5 degrees below the mean, and it’s 4.4 degrees above the mean in the D-rated communities.

[ekowolf]

Not being able to sleep leaves a lot of time for writing

-Positively Poisoned-

It’s finally Friday.

This day could not come to an end fast enough for Lena.

She slowly rubbed her fingers along her forehead in hopes to relieve some of the tension sitting between her eyebrows with a deep sigh.

On top of the fires she’s put out all week, the board seemed…bored and when they got like this they seemed to find great joy in packing her schedule with meeting after mundane meeting. The subjects so unimportant they could have easily been addressed in an email. But she knew the board was just testing her. Her fortitude. Her grit. They were measuring her worthiness waiting to celebrate her failure. In their eyes her inevitable crumble.

Sad for them that day will never happen.

…but fuck she was tired.

Of course, she would never show them that.

Bumbling interns, overzealous board members and a packed schedule usually didn’t make her blink. She has always lived on little sleep, scotch and stubbornness.

But right now she was also in the middle of a once in a lifetime acquisition that also happened to be a company in Japan, a 14hr time difference that was definitely throwing her body for a loop but after this last paper was signed things would go back to normal.

…or as normal as her life has ever been.

Lena reached forward for her favorite pen, smiling at the subtle family crests of both of her girlfriends etched into its weighty marble cylinder. A gift her blushing girlfriends gave her when she moved into her new office.

With a quick and measured flourish the last paper was signed.

This was such a long time coming.

“We are going to help so many with this…I know it,” Lena thought to herself as she looked at her curly signature.

L-Corp was now the proud owner of the leading most research and technology company in the world with regards to all things cancer.

This amazing company that she had worked with in the past, even helped cultivate its growth in her “off-time” before taking over L-Corp.

It was like coming full circle.

From tinkering in her room, nights seeking refuge from the Luthors in the beakers and pipettes, to her university days that were only a slightly more organized effort in a garage to today—a fully realized cancer research and technology company.

While the scenery has definitely changed over the years her mission hadn’t—find a cure.

A cause she has refocused the majority of her energy into more recently ever now that her family was finally behind bars and no longer a threat to society.

But as joyous as this new adventure was sleep was definitely something she had only gotten a small taste of lately, the evidence showing in the sharp burn behind her eyes and the dull thudding in her head.

She set her pen back in its protective case with a satisfying click and slid it neatly into its place within her top drawer. Ironically next we to a bottle of Ibuprofen she was in desperate need of at the moment.

She swallowed four pills and took a generous gulp of the water that Jess must have placed on her desk…she’s not sure when, another reminder of how tired she was.

“Thank Rao this week is over,” she smiled at how easy she used the Kryptonian deity in her thoughts. While she wasn’t religious she understood the importance the sun-god was to her girlfriends, and they were definitely rubbing off on her…in more ways then one.

“Now I get an entire weekend with them. I just need to get through game night then hopefully some alone time,” Lena leaned back into her plush office chair, closing her eyes for a moment letting images of the people she had missed the most flood her mind.

She could feel Sam’s voice in her ear, her breath hot and tambour low. The one she used only for her and Kara.

Kara’s strong arms wrapped around her waist in a way that made her feel vulnerable and safe all at once.

She would be lying to herself if she wasn’t a little embarrassed that just this quick deviation in thought brought a deep blush to her cheeks.

Two years ago she would have scoffed at the idea of herself being attached to anyone much less two people.

Attachments were frowned upon in the Luthor household. Weakness Lillian called them. The mantra drilled into her psyche from the very first day as a Luther when Lillian ripped her stuffed teddy from her little arms never to be seen again.

But here she was, Luthor blood flowing hotly through her veins, saddened that she had spent only a few fleeting moments with her two Kryptonian girlfriends these past few weeks.

It was difficult not to find humor in imagining Lex and Lillian finding out where she lays her head at night—sometimes on a pillow, others between strong thighs.

Her childhood “family” probably believed they had beaten all these behaviors out of her when she was younger—her attachment, her sexuality, her heart.

Did her past hurt? Yeah.

Is she still working every day to fight against slipping into the darkness of that trauma.

Absolutely.

To be continued

[nancypullen]

Monday, Monday

Oh, I can’t wait for the day when Monday no longer means Mickey dragging down the hallway to sit in front of a screen all day.  He’s good at his job, and most days he actually enjoys it (that might be stretching the truth a bit), but he’s a little over a year from retirement and the grind is getting to him.  I bite my tongue and do not point out that he doesn’t fight traffic, he doesn’t even have to put pants on if he doesn’t feel like it, and his lovely assistant provides a delicious and nutritious lunch every day. He’s got it better than a lot of people, but no one wants to hear that when you’ve worked since your teens and you’re ready to relax and reap the benefits of all that hard work. In other words, Mondays around here are still a bummer.  I try not to be too chipper and I made Monday my bathroom cleaning and laundry day just so I can suffer a little in sympathy.  I probably have a better time cleaning toilets than he does at his desk.  In other news, it was raining Etsy boxes at my house today.

  I’ve used all but about three dollars of my gift certificates and I think I chose wisely.  Garden stuff, hobby stuff, a little jewelry, and this little mouse came all the way from the UK.

Now she’s here to keep my art room tidy.   Anyone recognize her? That’s Hunca Munca from Beatrix Potter’s  A Tale of Two Bad Mice.  She and her husband, Tom Thumb, left their mousehole because the temptation of a dollhouse was just too much.  Once inside the dollhouse they were so disappointed that all of the delicious-looking food was fake that they made quite a mess. SHe felt awful about it and now very early every morning Hunca Munca tidies the dollhouse before anyone wakes.  I’m hoping she’ll do the same around here. If not, at least she makes me smile.

And in the name of tidying up, I’ve been trying to make the most of the pantry space and get it organized.  This was the vision I had...

Yeahhhh, I don’t have that kind of pantry.

I have a long way to go, but I’ve labeled areas so I can start placing similar items in groups and eventually I’ll have lots of pretty baskets ad labeled containers.  But for right now it looks like this.

That’s just one corner. I also have sections for table linens, small appliances, baking stuff, and so on. It’s not pretty yet, but it’s functional.  Even though it’s not pretty, I have to admit that I love opening the doors and seeing Ina Garten smiling at me.

Right now I’m really wishing I’d painted the walls behind those ugly metal shelves.  You know darn well I’d paint them a soft, pale pink and make it all girly. Great, now I’m thinking pink and you know once I get it in my head....Mickey will hate hearing this idea.  I’d also love to replace those wire/metal shelves with some dark stained wood.  Bet he’ll fight me on that.  You all already know I’m going to have a pink pantry with dark shelves, right?   Anywayyyy, big weekend coming up.  The Edgewaters are escaping for a romantic weekend and that means that Little Miss is staying with us.  I’m brainstorming some fun stuff for us to do, but entertainment will not be a problem - my sister is driving over on Saturday morning!  She’s down from Maine for the winter and she wants to pop in and see us.  Actually, she wants to giggle with the grandgirl and I think it will be a hoot to see that her Grancy has a sister.  I’ll tell her we’re like Elsa and Anna except very, very old.  I’m sure the three of us can stir up some fun.

That said, here’s my quandary.  The Miss Universe pageant is Saturday night.  You know how I am about that particular event.  I’ve been doing my research, getting glimpses of national costumes, hoping for a peek at evening gowns.  I’m excited.  So, do I turn it on and let the grandgirl stay up past her bedtime to see princesses from around the world?  If I do that, there will be running commentary.  Also, her parents may not want her watching a pageant. Do I record it and watch it Monday night after we return her to her rightful owners?  I’d have to be very careful not to watch or read any news that might spoil it.  Does this seem frivolous - yes, of course. Would I give up pageants forever for weekends with her? Absolutely. But this is my Super Bowl and I enjoy the heck out of it.  I’m thinking I’ll play it safe and watch it on Monday.   I really don’t need her telling her parents that she stayed up and watched a show where women walked around in swimsuits in exchange for a big diamond crown. Mmmkay, I think I’ll head upstairs and take a bubble bath.  The mister is watching the Georgia-Texas game, apparently this is a big one.  If I go take a bath now I can stay upstairs and turn that tv to murder.  Either that or I can browse pink paint samples for the pantry.  Mickey will probably consider that a crime. Hope you’ve had a pleasant Monday.  If not, then I’m glad it’s over. May the rest of your week be surprisingly fun. Stay safe, stay well. XOXO, Nancy

[madangel19]

Do you have any OCs? Do you have a story for them? : D

I sure do! Thanks for asking about them :3

Imma start with Terra Wilde. I created her for a quick little fic which was based on some scary dream I had about tfp Megatron. I then ended up getting attached to her and ended up writing a fanfic that is over 30 chapters and still going (even though it's on pause lol). She's a hiker who stumbled upon some energon and that led to her falling in love with a certain Decepticon :3 She also had two surviving younger siblings named Bella and Alcina. Here's her story below. Warning tho, it can get violent and a bit spicy

Next OC is Anna Sky, also known as Skyfall. She's an OC in the bayverse. She was just living her life in her little town until the Decepticons come along and destroy everything. She ends up getting taken to Megatron who makes her his pet and she goes on a long journey of trying to survive and eventually escaping the Decepticons. She has a whole fic that is complete and there's a part 2 where I later introduce a lady decepticon named Goldshock. Not much was done for her, but if I remember correctly, she was sent to kidnap the adopted child of Anna Sky, whose name is Valerie. Here's the first story below :3

Time for the SPG OC's!

First up is Jade Walter. She's got two different stories, but the main plot is that she's locked up deep within Walter Manor as a secret adopted human child of The Spine. She's like Rapunzel from Tangled. Never allowed to leave her room due to The Spine's secret plans. In one ending of the story, she is turned into a robot and ends up universe hopping via blue matter portals in order to escape the version of The Spine that kept her locked up.

Here's what she looks like. @pumpkindogart made the art and I will always love how she looks :3

Also, here's her story :D Warning tho, it's dark...

There is also Tabitha and Makenzi/Mak Walter. The fic they come from is a hot crossover mess, but imma talk more about Mak since I like her more. Tabitha is Mak's mother and Mak is a human/xenomorph hybrid and she's an adorable menace in Walter Manor. The more I look back at the fics where they come from, the more I cringe :'D

A newer OC of mine is Miss Malorie. She's the owner of the Midnight Scream Theater in the fic, Scooby Doo and the Mystery Ghoul. She's hosting both the Hex Girls and Ghost and she has her hands hella full with hosting them. She's a tired gal who really doesn't want to deal with some hooligan trying to ruin the big show

I haven't done much with her, but I like her already :3

Here's the story below :D

I also have a new OC in the making who will be in a future Ghost fic. I don't have a name for her, but she already has a tragic backstory. Lost her whole family in a car crash that is near the Satanic church and she is taken in by Papa Emeritus who then raises her after her past memories are taken away and she starts a new life with Ghost

[garenavn]

Donald Trump, former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, secured victory in the U.S. presidential election with 277 electoral votes, marking a significant milestone in his political career. Known not only as a businessman and r eality TV star, Trump emerged as one of the most controversial presidents in American history. With a business backgroun d and direct approach to politics, Trump galvanized a strong base of supporters, especially in key battleground states. According to Fox News, this victory reflects a shift in the sentiment of a large segment of American voters who seek maj or changes in foreign policy, national security, and economic strategy. Trump’s campaign centered on the promise to “Make America Great Again,” a slogan that became the cornerstone of his appeal and a rallying point for supporters. As president, Trump pledged decisive and distinct action to meet the expectations of his supporters, foretelling signifi cant changes across economic, defense, and imm

Donald Trump, former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, secured victory in the U.S. presidential election with 277 electoral votes, marking a significant milestone in his political career. Known not only as a businessman and reality TV star, Trump emerged as one of the most controversial presidents in American history. With a business background and direct approach to politics, Trump…

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