#the only good thing that’s happened i guess is that i discovered sleep token this year and they immediately became my favourite band

[jalboyhenthusiast]

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[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, noahreidhours!

For @noahreidhours. You wanted angst, have some angst (and some fluff, I guess)

*****

It starts like an avalanche, a small, defined moment that coalesces into something much bigger. Derek can’t pinpoint the exact moment everything clicked into place and the snow started, metaphorically, tumbling down the mountain, but once it started, it didn’t slow, didn’t stop, and couldn’t be avoided.

Derek has been convinced for so long that good things didn’t happen to him, that when things start looking up, he tries to quash it away as best as he can, in the only way he knows how; he bares his claws and snaps his fangs.

He doesn’t know when it stopped working on Stiles.

— — — — — —

It must be a day that ends in Y, because Stiles goes missing a few days after the pack discovers something hinky going on out in the preserve. Boyd and Erica have both found evidence of some sort of magical presence - fire pits that stink of non-native herbs, a spool of twine, a silver coin, several rocks and tree trunks painted with strange runes that even have Deaton scratching his head - and not even Derek is able to catch a scent.

Things really go ass over tea kettle when, one day later, Alison goes missing, too.

Chris Argent calls in every favor owed to him to aid in the search. Chris vouches for every hunter that comes to town, swears that they keep to the code, but Derek trusts them about as far as he can spit.

Derek delegates that Chris and his hunters can search one half of the preserve, while he and his wolves check the other half. Boyd and Erica make up one group, Scott and Isaac the other. Jackson and Lydia are holding down the fort, so to speak; Danny’s hacked into the database that stores the video for traffic cams across town, and the three of them are going through it in hopes they can find something. Thus, Derek searches alone. After all, he’s the strongest, he’s the alpha.

It’s more coincidence and dumb luck than expert tracking that Derek finds them at all.

The moon is high, and he pauses by the stream that runs through the preserve, scenting the air. He smells nothing but the forest around him, crisp and clear and just a little damp from the afternoon rain.

That’s when he hears it, a strange sound that has him freezing in place. It sounds muffled, like hearing a TV or radio in another part of a house, softly faded but just loud enough that, if you listen closely, you can make out a word or two every now and then.

Derek hears the sound again, but this time he’s ready for it, and he leaps off his vantage point and tears through the underbrush, teeth gnashing, eyes red.

He skids to a halt when he enters a small clearing. A length of red twine connects seven trees until it comes back on itself, making a lumpy circle of sorts. Off each length of twine, between one tree and the next, hang small wooden tokens, square in shape, twine threaded through a hole near one of the corners. Derek thinks there might be writing or runes on them, but he’s too focused on what’s inside the circle to investigate further. On two slabs, floating several feet off the ground, are both Stiles and Alison, tied up with what looks like the same twine that surrounds them. He can’t make out Stiles’ upper body due to a tree blocking his line of sight, but he’d recognize those lanky legs and scuffed-up high-tops anywhere. He sees Alison’s profile, and, unfortunately, she doesn’t look too great. There’s a length of cloth tied around her head acting as a gag, and her face is sporting more than a few bruises and cuts.

That’s not all, though, because of course it isn’t. Good things don’t happen to Derek Hale, remember?

Not one, not two, but three hulking, vaguely human-shaped figures stand within the circle, along with a single hooded figure.

What’s more is that Derek can’t smell any of them.

When he sees one of the mammoth figures move a bit, he realizes that he can’t hear them, either.

The figure that had started moving comes to a stop next to the slap Stiles is tied up on. It raises a gigantic, meaty fist and-

Derek is moving before his brain can catch up with his feet. He tears out of the foliage, and as he passes into the circle, a strange feeling ripples through him, sends a shiver down his spine.

Witchcraft.

The hooded figure takes one look at Derek and then flees like his ass is on fire. Derek moves to give chase, but narrowly misses the haymaker one of the lumbering figures throws at him. He flips backward to dodge it, and with it his shoulder catches a length of twine, his body weight snapping it easily.

A little more hell breaks loose after that, because why not, right? In for a penny, in for a pound. As soon as the twine snaps, the two slabs holding Stiles and Alison fall to the ground with a tremendous sound that makes Derek wince.

The three figures don’t pause in their assault, however. They move fast for their size, and when Derek executes a move that would take off the arm of a normal being, he almost twists his spine in two trying to dodge the creature’s countermove.

“Derek!” he hears Alison yell.

“Little busy!” Derek shouts back, snaking behind a tree.

“No, Derek, they’re golems! There’s a word carved into their foreheads! If you erase the first letter, they’ll stop moving!”

It takes some fancy footwork on Derek’s part to manage to get high enough to reach the creature’s forehead, but one well-placed claw swipe has the golem crumbling into dirt. The next golem goes down as easy as the first, but the third gets in a good punch. It sends Derek flying back, but he easily rights himself. As he moves back to his full height, he bites his teeth and pops his shoulder back into the socket. For one moment, he feels a searing pin-point of white-hot pain, but it’s over in the blink of an eye, and Derek’s back to being fight-ready.

He snarls, then charges the creature, his dense muscles knocking the thing off balance. Another swipe to a forehead and the golem crumbles under him.

Derek jumps back to his feet quick as he can, rushing back to where Stiles and Alison still are. Alison’s managed to free herself, and Derek dashes to her side, using the claw of his index finger to cut loose the twine that binds Stiles’ hands together. After that, he cuts the gag free from the boy’s face.

Stiles doesn’t thank him, because Stiles is out cold, and a little more than a little worse for the weather. He’s got a black eye and a fat lip, and there’s a dark, ugly bruise peeking out from the dip of his t-shirt.

“Can you-” Alison starts to ask, but Derek’s already scooping Stiles’ unconscious body into his arms.

“Are you alright to walk?” he asks Alison.

“I’ll be fine if we go slow.”

It takes almost an hour to get back to where Derek had parked the Camaro. Derek has Alison reach into his pocket to grab his phone and call the others, then, when that’s done, she tells him the story of what had happened since she’d been taken.

Stiles wakes up right as Derek is able to see the road.

“Am I being carried like a damsel in distress?” Stiles slurs.

“I could have thrown you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes,” Derek answers. He’s at least a little pleased Stiles feels good enough to be sarcastic. Though, to be fair, there’s never really a time Stiles isn’t sarcastic. Even in life-or-death situations, he can’t keep his mouth shut.

“Oh, man, don’t talk about food. I haven’t eaten in three days.”

Derek growls at that, displeased. He thought it had been a trick of the moonlight, but Stiles’ cheeks and eyes looked sallow and thin when Derek had picked him up.

Alison reaches into his other pocket and frees his keys and helps Derek gently heft Stiles into the passenger’s seat, the back of the chair laid as far back as it can go. Once safely seat-belted in, Derek lets Alison climb into the back.

The trip back to town is quiet. It’s a little disconcerting, considering what a motormouth Stiles usually is. Derek can tell he’s not sleeping from the patterns of his breathing and heartbeat, but he keeps his eyes closed and his body still all the same.

Everyone is already gathered back at Stiles’ house, and Derek is more than relieved for the lack of police cruiser in the driveway.

Scott crowds around Alison, helping her out of the back seat of the Camaro, and Chris’ face scrunches up like he’s just caught a bad smell.

Derek doesn’t really bother with anyone else, though Erica is the one who opens the front door for him. He carefully navigates up the stairs and brings Stiles into the bathroom that’s across the hall from his room, carefully seating him atop the closed lid of the toilet. He rids the boy of his shoes first, then his shirt, while allowing the sink faucet to run until the water turns warm. He wets a washcloth and rings it dry, handing it to Stiles as he fishes for the first aid-kit under the sink.

“Wait, you get the golems?” Stiles asks, scrubbing at his face.

“All three that were there. It was eerie, the way they didn’t give off a scent.”

“Golems are made out of clay or dirt. If they were made out of stuff from the preserve, of course you wouldn’t be able to sniff ‘em out. They’d just - ah, hey, careful!”

“Quit whining, it’s just peroxide. There’s a few cuts next to your black eye. And they’d just what?”

“They’d just smell like the rest of the forest.”

Derek nods, feeling a little relieved over the idea that his inability to scent the monsters hadn’t been due to some inadequacy on his part. Still, if the witch decided to make more, he’d have the same problem…

Once Stiles is patched up, Derek helps him into his bedroom and gets him to sit on the bed, grabbing him a change of clothing.

“How did you find us, anyway?” he asks.

Derek furrows his brows. He can no longer hear anyone outside of the Stilinski home, and finds himself inexplicably annoyed over the fact that no one else had come to check on Stiles after Derek had brought him into the house.

“I heard something. I don’t know what it was, but it was loud enough to get my attention.”

Stiles’ grin is blinding. “Knew it!”

Derek raises an eyebrow, trying to appear unimpressed.

“The twine wrapped around the trees and the runes on the square pieces of wood made up a silencing spell. I managed to snag a handful of gravel, and had spent the next, like, hour throwing it outside of the barrier, piece by piece.”

Derek blinks, taken off guard. Stiles’ thrown-together-on-a-hunch plan had literally been what helped Derek find them. “Smart,” he says, as close to a compliment as he’s willing to give.

Stiles grins wider in response, and something inside Derek twists a little.

“Well, I mean, it’s what got me clocked upside the head,” Stiles says as he gestures to his rather beat-up face. “And, hey, thanks for patching me up, man.”

Derek nods. “Get dressed, I’ll get you something to eat.”

Down in the kitchen, Derek makes two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then fills a glass with water, since he figures if Stiles is hungry, he’s likely a little dehydrated, too. When he’s back inside Stiles’ room, Stiles has changed his clothes, though the boy is now laying half on the bed, his knees bent and feet flat on the floor.

Derek puts the food on the bedside table.

“Get some rest,” he tells Stiles and he heads for the window.

“Derek,” Stiles calls.

Derek stops, and then turns his head over his shoulder.

“I mean it.” Stiles’ voice is softer, and Derek can hear the sincerity in his tone. “Thanks for the rescue and the Florence Nightingale treatment. And thanks for, you know, the whole golem-slaying thing. Though I am a little disappointed I didn’t get to see them go down. You’ll have to give me a play-by-play so I can add it to the bestiary.”

“Get some rest, Stiles,” Derek reiterates, avoiding saying anything else by means of jumping out the window.

He knows what that pang had been, there, in his chest, behind his heart.

After all, he’d felt it twice before.

And each time had ended in utter ruination for him.

So Derek does what he’s taught himself to do in order to keep himself safe.

He ignores it.

— — — — — —

Three weeks later and the door to the loft swings open, and Stiles, in a flurry of over-gesticulation and an almost-incomprehensible string of words, storms inside. He smells like anger and hurt, and makes a b-line for the musty, second-hand couch.

“What are you doing here?” Derek asks, crossing his arms in front of his chest and doing his best to glower.

But Stiles is already unloading his laptop from his backpack, his face screwed up in frustration. “I just need, like, an hour, okay?”

“For what?” Derek snaps back.

Stiles doesn’t even seem to notice how angry Derek had made himself sound.

“Dad’s up my ass about why I looked like I went ten rounds with Muhammad Ali the other week. I hate lying to him, but I’m not about to spill the proverbial beans about Beacon Hill’s propensity for the supernatural, so I didn’t have a choice. He’s not listening to it, which, hey, I get, but I can still get mad about it when he accuses me of being in a gang.”

Derek sits in his favorite armchair. It’s the one with the least amount of foreign scents.

Stiles turns to look at him. “Me. In a gang. I’m hardly a buck forty soaking wet.”

He can’t help it, Derek lets out a soft wuff of a laugh.

Stiles blinks at him a little in surprise and a little in awe, and Derek doesn’t miss the sudden uptick in the boy’s heartbeat. He quickly schools his features back into a scowl. “So you need an hour because your dad thinks your extracurricular activities are of a more nefarious nature?”

The spell is broken and Stiles rolls his eyes. “I need an hour because I’m really good at being an asshole when I’m mad and blurting stupid things out.”

“No, you do that on a pretty continual basis, angry or not.”

Stiles glares. “Yeah, ha ha, sassy-wolf. Laugh it up. I need an hour to do my homework in peace before he leaves for his shift, and this was the only place I could think of with a couch and outlet where I didn’t have to buy a menu item every half hour to occupy.”

Derek leans back, reaching for his unfinished book on the coffee table. “If you take anything from the kitchen, I’m charging you.”

“Love you too, big bad,” Stiles says, eyes focused on the start-up screen of his computer.

And while the boy does well to hide his tone with layers of sarcasm, Derek almost drops his book when he doesn’t hear the tell-tale skip of a lie in Stiles’ heartbeat.

He swallows, breaths out through his nose, then pushes it out of his mind. It doesn’t matter, it will never matter. Derek Hale doesn’t get nice things. No, that’s not entirely true - when Derek Hale gets nice things, the world around him crashes and burns. Sometimes literally.

— — — — — —

Isaac gets launched backward, and Derek hears him hit the wall. The concrete indents slightly where Isaac had landed, but he’s back on his feet in a heartbeat, looking more than a little pissed.

“Once I’m in charge of the territory,” the beastly intruder growls, “I’ll kill everyone that ever associated with you.” The creature laughs. “And then, I’ll turn everyone else!”

Derek’s ready for the creature to charge at him. He’s the alpha, and the beast - Derek’s weary to call it a werewolf, given how different it looks in comparison, but Stiles had been adamant - wants that alpha spark.

But even as Derek braces for impact, the blow never comes because in the next second, moving with a speed Derek didn’t know he was capable of, Stiles runs and leaps at the beast. Above his head, ready to be swung downward and clutched tightly in both hands, is, of all things. A baseball bat.

But Stiles never does things in halves, oh no. It’s not in his nature.

The baseball bat connects with the back of the beast, an awful, meaty sound echoes throughout the room. The creature stills, then falls to his knees.

“Wh-wh-wh-”

Derek notices that Stiles’ hands are empty and the bat is somehow stuck to the back of the creature.

“I carved that from a branch of mountain ash, and drove nails coated with a liquid wolfsbane mixture.”

In complete and utter awe, Derek blinks at Stiles.

The boy doesn’t notice. He’s still staring at the incapacitated creature as it sways on its knees, then falls on its side.

“The nails make sure it stays niiice and stuck in you, and the mountain ash is a great paralytic when used like this.”

“Holy shit,” Derek hears Scott whisper.

“Now, because the wolfsbane is a mixture, there’s no way for you to naturally find what’s in it before it kills you. I have the antidote.”

True to his word, Stiles pulls out a small vial from his pocket.

“I’m giving you two options. You can lay here and die, and hey, that solves all of my problems. Or I can take the bat out, give you the antidote, and you’ll never hurt anyone again.”

The beast growls from his position on the floor. “Wh- what’s to st-st-stop me from going b-b-back on my w-word?”

Stiles smiles. “Because Alison Argent’s archery skills rival Hawkeye, and I made her entire cache of arrows the same way I made the bat stuck in your back.”

“Okay, I s-s-swear.”

It’s hard to miss the fear in the beast’s eyes.

Stiles, without any soft of gentleness, puts his foot on the side of the beast, then uses it as leverage to pull what Derek now knows to be a nail bat from his flesh. It’s a sickening sound, and a few of the nails drip with fur and blood, but as soon as it’s free, the beast takes in a shuddering gasp of air. Stiles tosses the vial on the floor next to the creature, then digs out a lighter from his pocket.

“You have until sunrise to get out of the county.”

Stiles doesn’t look back as he walks toward the door, and everyone follows suit, including Derek.

Outside, as they near their cars, Derek watches as Stiles gestures for Isaac to come near. Careful to stay a fair distance away, Derek watches as Stiles looks over Isaac like a doting mother hen might.

“I’m fine. The broken ribs already healed,” he hears Isaac say.

Stiles nods, then pats Isaac on the shoulder. As Isaac walks away, Stiles looks around and makes eye-contact with Derek. The boy gestures him over, then turns around and starts digging in the back seat of his Jeep, where he’d stashed his ridiculous weapon.

“What?” Derek asks as he nears.

Stiles doesn’t even turn around, just hands him a bundle of stuff. When Derek takes it, he sees it’s a pack of baby-wipes and a new shirt.

Derek’s lack of movement is likely what tipped Stiles off, because it’s not a moment later when he speaks. “I know how much you hate getting crap in your car. Figured this would come in handy eventually.”

Staring at the shirt and package of wipes in his hands, Derek’s mind races. Stiles had kept an extra shirt in his car. But not an extra shirt for him, no. Because as Derek holds up the shirt, he can see that it’s not in Stiles’ size; it’s in his.

His mouth goes dry as he turns away and heads toward his Camaro.

— — — — — —

It never gets any easier, the anniversary of when his family had…

But he hasn’t visited his mother’s grave since he and Laura left, and as much as it hurts, he knows he should. Maybe it’ll finally give him a little closure, or maybe Derek just likes inflicting all manner of pain upon himself; it could go either way.

What surprises him, however, is the fresh bouquet of flowers already decorating his mother’s headstone. He blinks in surprise, then furrows his brow. It’s been years since his family had died. Who would bring them flowers after all this time?

The cemetery is mostly dark. It’s just before sundown, and the tall trees that pepper the pristine-grass and well-kept headstones make long shadows. But who is Derek kidding, he’d recognize that stupid red hoodie anywhere.

Part of him is mad, and he doesn’t quite understand why. Misplaced anger, maybe, or something more deeply rooted. As he nears Stiles’ sitting form, ready to verbally tear into the kid, he stops short.

“And, like, you should have seen it! The whole kitchen was a mess!” Stiles laughs, then the sound tapers out into a sigh. “He misses you. I mean, I miss you, too. But I know it’s different for dad. When you lose someone you love the way dad loves you, it’s like you’ve lost a piece of yourself.”

Derek swallows.

Stiles sighs again, then rubs a palm over his face. “And I know I’m not making it any easier on him. But you understand why I can’t say anything, right? He’d blow his top, never let me leave the house. Sometimes I wish I could tell him. And maybe someday I might, or I might be forced to. But I have to protect my friends before I can protect his feelings.”

There’s a long, sad silence that follows. Eventually, Stiles moves to stand and Derek maneuvers to hide himself behind a tree. “Thanks for listening, mom. And thanks for sharing your flowers.”

When Derek gets home, he showers, then eats a bowl of cereal just to get something into his system. He lays in bed, staring at the exposed pipes and beams of the ceiling. Sleep doesn’t steal him away for some time.

— — — — — —

Things stay quiet for a time, which suits Derek just fine. It means he doesn’t have to deal with people; he holes up in his loft and marathons shitty TV shows on the streaming service Stiles had insisted be set up. When he can’t stand to look at the TV any longer, he reads. And, when he runs out of books, he finally leaves the warmth and solitude of his flat to venture out to the grocery store. He stocks up on what he knows he’s out of, without any sort of meal-plan in mind, then scours the pathetic section of books he finds in the same aisle as the greeting cards. Most of them have ridiculous covers and names - bodice-rippers, uncle Peter used to call them - but he finds a few that at least look somewhat promising before he heads to the checkout.

He’s almost completely done putting away the groceries when he hears Stiles let himself in. How the little shit had managed to get a key made or copied in the first place is outside the realms of Derek’s imagination.

When he turns around, it’s to see Stiles, holding out two small, wrapped gifts.

Derek furrows his brow.

One present is wrapped in Star Wars Christmas paper - R2D2 is sporting a rather stylish Santa hat - and the other, much to Derek’s surprise, is wrapped in what appears to be birthday-themed paper.

He looks up and is met with Stiles’ soft smile. “One’s for Christmas, one’s for your birthday,” Stiles tells him, like this kind of interaction is completely normal for the two of them.

When Derek doesn’t move to take them, Stile rolls his eyes and just puts them on the table. “Open ‘em or don’t, Scrooge-wolf. I’m not trying to put pressure on you or anything.”

Even though Stiles has told him there’s no pressure, Derek’s pretty sure the amount of pressure he currently feels rivals that of the deepest part of the ocean. After a moment, he musters up his, what? Courage? Fortitude? Doesn’t matter. He takes a deep breath, and reaches first for the Christmas present first. Red and green light-sabers and Princess Leia with reindeer antlers peel away to reveal a box. Inside the box is a little tissue, and when Derek finally gets what he supposes is the actual gift free of the packaging, he stills. The mug is plain white, but on the side are printed letters.

What do you call a wolf that

has his shit figured out?…

Aware-wolf!

Derek shoots Stiles a look of disdain, but it doesn’t seem to deter the boy. He’s grinning like an idiot. “I got one for Isaac that says ‘What do you call a beta wolf? A sub-woofer.’”

Derek rolls his eyes, but he lets his lips curl up into a slight smile. Terrible as the Stiles’ jokes may be, it’s not hard to see that they are never meant to be harmful.

The birthday present is next, and Stiles seems excited about this one. He leans forward a little as Derek tears open the paper. It’s another box, but it’s much smaller, and when Derek opens this one, he’s confused for a moment.

It’s a ring. But it looks like some kind of wood and epoxy mixture, with the wood making the ring portion of it and the epoxy forming an almost rectangular shape on one side. He takes it out of the box carefully and looks it over. The wood inlay looks splintered, and the transparent epoxy holds… a little moon?

“I don’t expect you to wear it or anything,” Stiles says. “It’s, uh, it’s a piece of wood from your old house. And I made the moon out of clay, because I thought, well, with the whole werewolf thing and-”

“Get out.” Derek’s voice is low and cold.

Stiles freezes. “I’m sorry, I thought you’d-”

“Get. Out.” When Stiles doesn’t move, Derek growls and lunges forward, taking a handful of Stiles’ shirt and pulling him toward the door. He shoves Stiles through and into the hallway, then slams the door before he can catch a glimpse of Stiles’ expression. He locks the door, then leans on it, the ring still clutched in one hand.

“I’m sorry, Derek,” Stiles says.

Derek doesn’t move, hardly breathes. He stays pressed against the door as he hears Stiles walk away. He remains there longer still, far past when he can hear the Jeep start and Stiles drive away.

He peels off his clothes and climbs into bed, despite it being four in the afternoon. He pulls the covers over his head like he used to when he was little, when his mom would turn out the light after tucking him in.

For a long time now, Derek’s mastered the art of trying to not care. The walls around his heart are made of solid steel, layers upon layers.

But now there’s a hole somewhere in that barrier.

He doesn’t cry. To be honest, he doesn’t think he can. He’d cried himself stupid after the fire, had sobbed almost every night for the six months following, and then he just… closed up. He’d shut the door and locked the deadbolt, because kindness and sincerity and just a dash of naivety had been the perfect mix to allow for someone to manipulate him. What had he left now? Every one he’d ever allowed himself to love were dead and gone.

And Derek couldn’t do that to Stiles, couldn’t put the burden of the curse of his heart, of him vulnerable, on Stiles’ shoulders.

— — — — — —

“Stiles, hey - hey, keep your eyes open!”

Derek’s voice is frantic. He cups Stiles’ head in his broad palms, a protective barrier between the back of the boy’s head and the cement below.

Stiles blinks one eye open - the other is already swollen shut.

They’d found the witch with a penchant for creating golems, the one that had kidnapped Stiles and Alison months ago. But this time, instead of three, the damn bastard had made an army of the fuckers, giant, lumbering automatons that swung their ham-sized fists without restraint.

The fight was dirty and tiresome, and even Derek, who’s been a wolf since birth, is tired and nearly out of breath.

Stiles’ good hand, the one not resting in an unnatural manner, rises up and tugs on something that’s dangling from around Derek’s neck. His blood-splattered lips curl up into a smile, or as much as he can make of one, considering the awful state he’s in.

“Scott’s already called Malissa; there’s an ambulance on the way. Just stay awake for me, just-”

“Sourwolf, you kept it.”

Derek pauses, then looks to see what Stiles holds.

It’s the ring made with the wood of his house and the little moon sculpted by Stiles’ own fingers.

“Thought you hated me after I gave this to you.”

Unsure of what to say, Derek just shakes his head.

Stiles coughs, and Derek can hear the strain. It’s a wet sound, and Stiles is slow to take air back in. One of his lungs has likely either been punctured, or has already collapsed.

Derek’s hands are shaking.

“I need a favor, big bad.”

Stiles cuts Derek off before he has time to protest.

“If I don’t make it, keep my dad safe, alright? Make sure he’s… make sure he’s okay.”

“You’re going to be fine, Stiles.”

Stiles just smiles, blinking slowly.

“And you.”

“Me? Derek breathes.

“Allow yourself to have something nice, damnit. You deserve nice things. I know that shit’s been really bad for you for a long time, but you shouldn’t let the hurt that might come outweigh any good that comes before.”

It feels like someone has Derek’s heart in a vice-grip. He swallows, licks his lips, then does just that.

Derek Hale allows himself to have something nice.

He kisses Stiles square on the mouth.

— — — — — —

There’s no other choice to make.

They tell the sheriff what happened. Exactly what happened. Scott fumbles through a lot in his attempt at an explanation, but Derek backs him up, and is the one to shift when the sheriff threatens to have them all arrested unless they tell him the actual truth.

How could they not? His son, his only living blood, looks like he’d been in a one-on-one match with a woodchipper. The hospital did well to keep Stiles alive, but he’d flat-lined on the operation table twice, and Derek had nearly cracked his teeth from clenching so hard. Once stable, Stiles had been set up in a private room, though he hadn’t woken up yet.

Derek’s been at his side for three straight days.

Isaac brings him a change of clothes and something to sleep in, saying that even the nurses were starting to complain.

Sheriff Stilinski doesn’t seem to know what to make of the twenty-something-year-old young man that never leaves his son’s side longer than it takes for him to use the shower or restroom. But, well, he can guess. He’s not really happy with it, of course not. All things considered, however, his son is still alive, isn’t some kind of creature of the night of myth or legend, and has what likely constitutes to be as close to a superhero as you can get at his son’s back; things could have gone a lot worse.

He’ll give Stiles a week before he’s grounded until he’s eighty.

— — — — — —

Derek slides the window open. He sees Stiles partially sprawled out on his bed, laptop balanced precariously on top of a pillow.

“Hey, sourwolf,” he greets. His eyes look less sunken in, though he still hasn’t gained back all of the weight he’d lost.

Clothing the window, Derek toes his shoes off and comes to rest on the other side of Stiles’ bed. It’s small, more than a little cramped, but they make it work.

He gets comfortable, and, as soon as he’s settled, Stiles hooks a leg over his, then reaches out and laces their fingers together, all the while never moving his eyes from the screen.

It’s slow-going, this thing between them, partially because Stiles is still very much on the mend, and partially because Derek still has a hard time with intimacy, especially showing affection.

If it bothers Stiles at all, Derek would never know because it’s never been brought up. Stiles is perceptive, can obviously guess why Derek sometimes still stiffens when they touch, but he doesn’t push. It’s sweet, he thinks, the way they are slow-dancing around one another. They hold hands and watch movies, with legs or heads in laps. They press their shoulders against one another when they go out to eat and take up a single side of the booth.

They kiss.

That’s something new to Derek, the slow press of lips without the promise of something in the distance, kissing just to kiss, tasting one another for the sheer thrill of it, and then backing off slowly, with no one’s feelings hurt.

Stiles falls asleep, his head resting on Derek’s shoulder.

The avalanche has passed.

[clairecrive]

“Great expectations”- modern!Alfie Solomons x reader imagine

The lovely @kingarthurscat​ requested this imagine with the prompt “ you better have a very good reason for waking me up at four in the morning.” with Alfie. Thanks again for the request honey, I had a lot of fun writing this! Hope you like it! 

I haven’t proofread it so I’m sorry if there are any mistakes. Oh and btw, everything mentioned is true. 

As always, feedback and requests are always appreciated!

Tag list: @mollybegger-blog​ (let me know if you wanna be added)

“No way!” you whispered excitedly at what you had discovered.

It never occurred to you that you can literally find anything on the internet. And by anything you mean, the endless content about your latest obsession, whatever it was. You had always been passionate about literature and learned as much as you could about the little things of authors’ lives.

You couldn’t put into words the joy and the bliss you felt whenever you learned something, completely useless academically, but that gave you a better insight about the author personality all the same. For example, lately, you had discovered that Lord Byron vaccinated his children against cowpox or that he named his dog smut which you found incredibly funny seeing that nowadays the word is used to describe scenes of sexual natures, which surprisingly fits perfectly with Byron’s lifestyle. Or that one time Shelly wrote a letter to Keats worried about Byron’s mysterious disappearance and then wrote a follow-up letter in which he explained that the Lord had almost died of dehydration and malnutrition because he was too engaged in other activities, if you what I mean. Keat’s answer was the best thing though, he basically told Shelly that he should have left him there. The three most famous poets argued like petty girls in high school and you loved it!

Not to mention all the stuff you learned about Greek Mythology and Etymology which were somehow deeply related.

However, what sent you into pure bliss as of right now was the sudden realisation that no one really knew about author’s voices, which sounds like an obvious thing but somehow that never occurred to you. No one knew about Byron’s or Keat’s or even Plato’s voices. What if they had a funny voice? Or like a lift or something? Wouldn’t be absolutely ironic if someone like Plato who is so snob and racist have a shrill, high-pitched voice? That would be karma’s doing but much to your dismay there was absolutely no way to know. Imagine how upsetting it would be to find out that someone like Lord Byron whose name alone is enough to send you shivers and was able to be a token of his status, who you had always thought to have a very deep, husky voice that it must have been one of the reasons why people of both sexes found him so irresistible had instead a strident or thin voice? That would be mindblowing. As it was the fact that if Oscar Wilde had lived just a little longer maybe we would have registrations of his voice. How cool would that be?

This were the little things you lived for. It’s unusual, you’re aware of that. For that reason, you had always been very careful in sharing this interest with the people in your life. Some of them shared the same excitement, to your surprise; others didn’t really care for it but usually smiled politely just not to upset you. You’d always understand when someone was on your same wavelength but were grateful nonetheless that you were lucky enough to have supportive people in your life that even if they found you weird were kind enough not to tell you.

When you first started dating Alfie, you never really let him on this unusual hobby you had. Sure, he knew about your love for literature and reading but that was it. It was only after the first month that you had gradually initiated him to it to see what his reaction was. At first, you justified your discoveries by saying that your teacher had said them or that you had read them in the book you were studying, which sometimes was the truth. Letting him know that that was exactly what you spent your free time doing and sometimes even the time you should be sleeping or studying was a whole other thing.

Over the dates you had been to, you had found out that Alfie was quite the intellectual. Despite his rough exterior he had read his fair share of books and was very passionate about literature. That was one of the things that had attracted you to him, to be honest. Your head was saying that you should go ahead and share this new piece of information you had found casually, without making it too much of a thing. If he wasn’t as excited by it as you were then in the worst-case scenario you wouldn’t share those kinds of things with him anymore and in the best case, he’d enjoy hearing it just because he loved you and he would appreciate every little thing you shared with him. Just like you’d listen to him complain about work problems or over the difference between rum and bread which apparently wasn’t discussed.

So tonight, you let your enthusiasm carry you away and called him to share the realisation that had hit you. Currently, Alfie was in the USA for business reasons. Something about making a deal with a potential partner which would allow him to expand his rum overseas. However, that didn’t register to you until you were met with his sleepy grunt and the blackness of his room.

“Y/N?” his raspy voice was the only thing you could hear along the sounds of him shifting in the sheets. When he called you last time he had told you that he would leave his phone on so that whatever happened you could call him. He wasn’t expecting you to actually do it though.

“Oh shoot. I forgot about the time difference Alfie, I’m sorry. Go back to sleep, this can wait until later.” you quickly apologised

“What is it?” he ignored you and moved around so that he could turn on the light on his bedside table.

“It’s really nothing babe, I’m sorry. I got carried away from the excitement and forgot you were in the States.”

“Well now I’m up, ain’t I? So you better have a very good reason for waking me up at four in the morning,” he said rubbing the sleep from his eyes finally letting you see his face. Gosh, how could he be so handsome when he literally just woke up? You really were lucky.

“So, I was wasting my time on the internet like I usually do until I came across a post that left me shook.” you started explaining

“So far this doesn’t seem like a good reason to wake me, love,” he muttered but you could see it from his eyes that he didn’t really mean it. To be fair, only the fact that he didn’t tell you to go to hell and actually was ready to hear you out got him the “best boyfriend of the year” award.

“It wasn’t a normal post, Alfie. Hear me out. Have you ever thought about how we have never listened to the voice of the most famous poets of all times?” Now it was out and it was time to study his reaction.

“That- well I’ve never thought about it pet. That’s weird, innit?” The gods were smiling upon you and had graced you with the most fantastic human being in the whole world. He had actually stopped to think about it before answering you and had a face of utter surprise just like you had when you first read the post.

“You know what’s even more mind-blowing? The fact that if Oscar Wilde had lived a little longer we would have known his voice? Now how cool would it have been?!” By now you weren't sure anymore if your enthusiasm was for the fact itself or for how much you loved and appreciated the man laying on a bed on the other side of the planet.

“Fuck, that really would have been cool. Is it because he died in the 1900s?” he asked engaged with the conversation just as much as you were.

“Yes! I did a little research, right? And I found out that first gramophones were being patented in that time. So ten years or so later and now we would have known his voice. What an unfortunate series of coincidences.” you shared his feelings and what you learned with him.

“What?” you asked when you noticed that he was staring intently at you without saying anything. He had a little smile on his face and the intensity of his gaze was actually starting to make you feel self-conscious.

“You really are a geek, aren’t you love?” he asked and it was one of those rare times where the word was told with affection and not with scorn.

“I guess so.” you timidly admit. Love wasn’t the only thing you could see in his eyes, there was also a lot of tiredness.

“I love you, Alfie, thank you for listening to me even if I interrupted your beauty sleep.”

“Don’t even say it, love, you can always count on me. Even if it’s to share something like that at four in the morning.” he snickered lightly but behind his words was the unspoken promise that whatever it was you could share everything with him and that almost made you cry of happiness.

“Well, I promise I won’t do it again. I mean the four am part. Go to sleep baby, I’ll see you tomorrow right?” you softly said.

“You will pet. Goodnight, well I guess it’s a good morning now. I love you.” his sweet words were the last one you exchanged before hanging up.

Well, that had gone way better than your greatest expectations.

[ibijau]

Burn it down AU // on AO3 // extras on AO3

Conversations are had and overheard.

By late afternoon, Lan Wangji figured that enough time had been granted to Nie Huaisang and it was time to get A-Yuan back. When Wei Wuxian and him entered the Hanshi again, they found their son playing Go with Nie Huaisang while Lan Xichen sat near them with a pile of letters he was reading. They made a sweet scene together and though A-Yuan was deep in thought over the game when they came in, he broke into a large smile when he saw them, far happier than he had been that morning or the night before.

“Father, Nie-ge is back!” he exclaimed. “Can he and uncle Xichen have dinner with us?”

The question took Lan Wangji by surprise, and judging by how wide his eyes got, Nie Huaisang had not expected it either. It would be a little awkward, and Lan Wangji was not sure yet that he was prepared to spend time again with his husband outside of what they were working on, but…

“It could be fun,” Wei Wuxian intervened, grinning at the idea. “Didn’t A-Yuan say last time that it’s the rule for Nie-xiong to eat with his family?”

A-Yuan nodded eagerly. With these two against him, Lan Wangji could only give in, for which Nie Huaisang gave him a knowing look.

“I’m afraid I will have to pass on that offer,” Lan Xichen announced, appearing quite amused as well. “I have a lot I need to discuss with Uncle after dinner, or else I would have gladly accepted your invitation, A-Yuan.”

That answer disappointed the child a little, but although he had been trying to be polite in including him, it was not Lan Xichen who he had been most excited to have around for the evening.

They ended up having a pleasant dinner, all three of them. A-Yuan couldn’t stop smiling, which got him quite a bit of teasing from Wei Wuxian. So much teasing, in fact, that the little boy also ended up dropping the rule of silence a few times to defend himself. While he was distracted so, Nie Huaisang took his chance to transfer some vegetables he disliked to A-Yuan’s bowl, knowing their son liked those better than he did. He then faked innocence when A-Yuan turned his attention back to his food, while Wei Wuxian smirked at the trick. 

Normally Lan Wangji would have put an end to that and reminded everyone that they ought to be silent and calm during meals, but he knew Wei Wuxian had never figured out how to do either things so it was pointless. Besides, it was not just A-Yuan being happy to have Nie Huaisang back, he realised. He had missed him as well, no matter how he otherwise felt about his husband.

"Nie-ge, do you think you might get unwell again?" A-Yuan suddenly asked in a voice too serious for his age. 

Nie Huaisang’s eyes darted toward Lan Wangji before he made himself smile. He leaned toward A-Yuan and squeezed his cheek with an awkward chuckle.

"Well that's a funny question to ask! I didn't plan to get unwell the first time! And I didn't think it would get so bad, or I would have asked your father to explain. If it happens again, now I'll know better and not try to hide from you, right? But don't worry. Nie-ge is doing his best to stay well now."

"Then you must eat all your vegetables," A-Yuan ordered. "The teachers say we mustn't be picky because balance is important for the health." 

Having said this, A-Yuan carefully grabbed some of the food that Nie Huaisang had transferred from his bowl to his son's, and put it back where it belonged. Nie Huaisang looked so betrayed that Wei Wuxian started cackling, which brought A-Yuan's attention to him. 

"Where will Mo gongzi sleep now that Nie-ge is back? I can share my bed, but there won't be a lot of space, and Mo gongzi kicks so much." 

For a second, all three adults froze. It was true that Wei Wuxian was never resteful even in sleep, Lan Wangji had discovered it during the Sunshot Campaign as they all moved from place to place. But A-Yuan had no way of knowing this because for the few nights he'd spent in the Jingshi since his return, Wei Wuxian had slept in Nie Huaisang’s bed. 

If A-Yuan was starting to remember… 

"I'm going to let Mo gongzi have my bed a little longer," Nei Huaisang announced. "I'll go back to my inn tonight, and then for the rest of my stay I'll see if uncle Xichen can have a guest room prepared for me." 

"But this is your house," A-Yuan remarked. "Shouldn't Mo gongzi be the one in a guest room?" 

"Sure, but do you trust him to behave on his own?" 

A-Yuan quickly shook his head with a slight pout. Then, just as quickly, he realised that was a rather rude reaction and he gave Wei Wuxian a quick bow over the table. 

"Apologies, Mo gongzi. But you are a little silly sometimes, and so it's better if Father is here to help you understand the rules. He's a very good teacher." 

That only served to send Wei Wuxian laughing, perhaps because he remembered how little success Lan Wangji had had in getting him to obey any rules back when he was a student. 

--

In the days that followed, a routine of sorts fell into place. Every morning, Lan Wangji would wake A-Yuan for his classes, sometimes joined by Wei Wuxian who tried to keep them company over breakfast, then returned to sleep the instant they left. Lan Wangji would then work for a few hours while Wei Wuxian finished his night. He usually woke up again in time for lunch, before they spent the afternoon together while waiting to get A-Yuan back from Nie Huaisang and Lan Xichen. 

Sometimes they stayed in the Jingshi while Wei Wuxian chatted about some subject or other and Lan Wangji dutifully listened, giving his opinion here and there. Other times Lan Wangji would practice swordsmanship while Wei Wuxian watched with an intense expression, something that could have been either envy or admiration. He always refused when Lan Wangji invited him to join, pretexting the weakness of his new body. An odd excuse, especially when Lan Wangji made it clear he would be more than happy to help him work on that, but in the end he had to respect Wei Wuxian’s choices.

Mostly though, they spent those afternoons walking around the Cloud Recesses, or on occasions going to Gusu for a few hours. It was nice to simply spend time together, and Lan Wangji still felt a little awed that Wei Wuxian actually sought out his company. After all, he had been given a jade token, and Lan Wangji had made it clear that he trusted him to do as he pleased during the day, as long as he obeyed the curfew and tried to be there for dinner. And yet, consistently, day after day, Wei Wuxian chose to spend time with him. It made Lan Wangji regret the years wasted because he had been too clumsy as a teenager to accept the offers of friendship Wei Wuxian had made back then. They could have been like this all along, if only he’d dared.

Around the two weeks mark of their return to the Cloud Recesses, Wei Wuxian expressed a wish to go see some wild rabbits that A-Yuan and Lan Jingyi had apparently spotted, not too far into the woods that surrounded the Cloud Recesses. The children suspected that those rabbits, which were not quite as scared of humans as other wild ones, might actually be some that had once escaped from Lan Wangji’s pen. Wei Wuxian initially wanted to see if they could be captured and returned to safety. Yet when they found the rabbits they seemed in very good health and even had a few kits, so they both agreed it would be unkind to force them back into the pen, and would probably just traumatise them. 

Although they had accomplished nothing that day, it still felt like time well spent, and as they walked back toward the path, Wei Wuxian started wondering what he could do to make the other rabbits happier in their current space. Lan Wangji was listening, ready to follow him in any idea he had as long as it was not overly impractical, when Wei Wuxian suddenly grabbed him by the wrist to stop him.

“Isn’t that Nie-xiong and Zewu-Jun?” he asked, pointing at the path down the forest’s slope. “I thought they had sect business to take care of today?”

“Hm,” Lan Wangji agreed, nodding.

His brother had come by in the morning to warn that Nie Huaisang and him needed to deal with something important that day, and that he could not say for sure if they would be able to have their usual time with A-Yuan. Just like Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji had assumed that meant formal business to handle, but seeing the two of them walking so close to each other, in this normally deserted part of the mountain…

“Well, let’s go say hi,” Wei Wuxian decided, going down toward the path a little faster. 

Lan Wangji nearly had to run to stop him. Wei Wuxian threw him a puzzled look when Lan Wangji grabbed his arm and made a gesture ordering him to be silent. If this was what Lan Wangji hoped was going on, he could not let it be ruined.

"I wasn't expecting that," they heard Nie Huaisang say in a weak voice as the two came closer. "I thought… I thought you just regretted it. I assumed it had been the spur of the moment, the stress of the war." 

"It also was," Lan Xichen replied with joyless laughter. "I would have tried asking uncle to let me court you, sooner or later, this just forced me to act faster than planned. Not that his answer would have been different, I suspect." 

Nie Huaisang nodded and stopped in his tracks, close enough now that Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian could easily see his expression, even from where they hid behind trees and bushes. He tilted his head, tapping his fan lightly against his lips. 

"You should have told me," he accused, though without much heat.

"I should have," Lan Xichen agreed. "I wanted to. But uncle told me that if I kept myself away from you, my feelings would go away quickly. I assumed the same would work for you. I trusted uncle to know what was best. By the time I realised it would not be so easy for me, you had never sought me out so I assumed…" 

Nie Huaisang sighed and fanned himself. 

"A nice pair of fools we make, each waiting for the other to make the next move! And I guess I'm the biggest fool since I even married your brother to be close to you.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about this for a while,” Lan Xichen confessed. “Wangji understood too much and confronted me about hurting you. But with everything else going on, the time never felt right. You had so many worries, I did not want to add more weight to your shoulders. But after this business with Mo Xuanyu, I promised myself that I would help you get better, and tell you the truth once you were well enough.”

He sighed, and turned so only his back was visible. “After this, I’ll understand if you resent me for the pain I caused you. I will continue helping you deal with the situation at hand, but if after we have brought justice to Da-ge you decide you no longer want anything to do with me, I will not force my friendship where it is unwanted.”

“And if I still want your friendship?” Nie Huaisang asked, stilling his fan and hiding behind it.

Lan Xichen turned again to face him, and smiled. “Then you will have it of course.”

Nie Huisang nodded, and drew his fan closer to his face so only his eyes would show. “And what if friendship isn’t all I want from you?”

At this, Wei Wuxian gasped, though thankfully he was not heard by the other two. Just in case, Lan Wangji used the silencing spell on him. Lan Xichen and Nie Huaisang had already shown quite well they were capable of ruining their own lives, they didn’t need the intervention of Wei Wuxian to make it worse.

“Huaisang, you can’t mean that,” Lan Xichen said softly, looking away. “In our positions…”

“Your uncle really trained you too well,” Nie Huaisang pouted, quickly closing his fan so he could tap Lan Xichen’s shoulder with it. “Learn a little selfishness, Xichen-gege.”

“I fear it’s too late for that.”

“Nonsense. I’d gladly teach you,” Nie Huaisang offered, holding out his hand.

Lan Xichen stared at the other man with an awed expression.

“Really? After everything?”

“Hm. I’m a Nie, we don’t know how to give up,” Nie Huaisang pointed out with a smirk. “Give us a chance, Xichen.”

With only a moment of hesitation, Lan Xichen took the offered hand, looking down at their joined fingers before turning his gaze to Nie Huaisang’s face, both of them radiant.

“Won’t you kiss me as well, Er-ge?” Nie Huaisang quickly demanded with a pout. “You’ve made me wait this long, I think I deserve a kiss.”

Although he had been the one teasing, Nie Huaisang cried out in surprise when Lan Xichen pulled on the hand he was holding to bring him closer so he could lean forward and…

Lan Wangji had to look away. Already he shouldn’t have been spying, but to pry into the tentative intimacy of these two men simply felt wrong. Next to him though, Wei Wuxian was becoming so agitated that Lan Wangji feared he would harm himself by trying too hard to speak. He made a gesture asking for silence, and lifted the spell.

“How dare they!” Wei Wuxian immediately hissed, as incapable of quiet as ever.

Realising that they would surely get noticed or witness something that didn’t concern them if they stayed any longer, Lan Wangji grabbed Wei Wuxian’s wrist and pulled him back into the woods before he tried to rush ahead and ruin what was happening. 

“Lan Zhan, let me go, I’ll beat them up for you!”

“No need,” Lan Wangji replied, forcing Wei Wuxian away from the scene. After waiting so long, these two deserved some privacy. 

“Your husband is cheating on you!” Wei Wuxian protested as he was dragged away. “With your brother! It’s hard enough to accept it of Nie-xiong, but from Zewu-Jun… shouldn’t you stop them?”

“No need.”

After watching them dance around one another, Lan Wangji was glad that his brother had finally given in to a little selfishness. And however uncertain he still was about Nie Huaisang over what had happened to Mo Xuanyu, his husband had suffered no less than him over a love deemed impossible, so he was glad that at least one of them was finally getting what he wanted.

Lan Wangji tried to ignore the gnawing coldness in his chest, the envy and resentment that it couldn’t be him getting that happiness. He was lucky to have Wei Wuxian back at all. He was lucky for this second chance to stand by his side and be the friend Wei Wuxian deserved.

“How can it not matter?” Wei Wuxian huffed. “Your cultivation partner is…”

“We are not cultivation partners.”

Wei Wuxian tensed and stopped abruptly. Lan Wangji, still pulling on his wrist, noticed a second too late and nearly made him fall face first on the ground.

“You’re married,” Wei Wuxian said with a frown. “I’ve seen the two of you together, aside from the problem of me, you seem to get along fine, so why… it doesn’t make sense!”

“Alliances. It was a convenience match. We understood we both loved other people.”

Wei Wuxian’s frown deepened.

“Lan Zhan, who is it that you love in that case?” Wei Wuxian asked, confused. “Do I know them? Are you going to get with them too, now that Nie-xiong’s situation is solved?”

Something froze between Lan Wangji’s ribs, making it hard to breathe. He could only blink numbly.

Did Wei Wuxian really believe him so fickle that he would have fallen for someone else? His uncle, sometimes his brother even, told him that in time he would get over that impossible love, that perhaps he would find someone else. In fact, Lan Xichen had fully admitted that it had been his plan in getting him married to Nie Huaisang. But there was only Wei Wuxian for him. Certainly he’d noticed other attractive people here and there, both before and after, but no one had ever made his soul come to life the way Wei Wuxian did every time they were close.

“Impossible.”

“Why? Is there anyone in this world who wouldn’t be delighted to have the attention of the great Hanguang-Jun?” Wei Wuxian teased, more cruelly than Lan Wangji would have expected of him. “I can give you tips on flirting if you like. It’d be fun to help you, I bet. Come on Lan Zhan, just tell me who it is and when this whole situation is settled, I’ll help you seduce them!”

“Ridiculous,” Lan Wangji huffed, turning away and striding toward the Jingshi.

“Lan Zhan, I swear I can help!”

Lan Wangji refused to answer, and after some more teasing and joking, he simply silenced Wei Wuxian again until he promised through gestures to drop the matter. They were both quiet as they made their way back to the Cloud Recesses through the woods. By the time they went to get A-Yuan from the Hanshi for dinner they were both back to normal, but Wei Wuxian’s mood soured somewhat when he saw how happy Nie Huaisang and Lan Xichen looked while playing with the little boy, the way they wouldn’t stop staring at each other.

It did not come as a surprise when Nie Huaisang told A-Yuan that exceptionally, he would not be having dinner with them that night because Lan Xichen and him had important things to take care of. A-Yuan was a little disappointed, and made his uncle promise to make sure that Nie Huaisang didn’t skip his meal and to take good care of him, which Lan Xichen swore with great solemnity.

--

Things, after this, changed a little. Every other day, Nie Huaisang would have dinner in the Hanshi rather than the Jingshi, and even when he did dine with them, he developed a tendency to retire for the night a little earlier than he used to. He probably thought he was very subtle about it, too, but even A-Yuan noticed and wondered aloud why Nie Huaisang seemed to need more sleep lately. Wei Wuxian, however upset he still was at this development, had laughed so hard that he nearly choked.

Aside from this, though, not much was different. Lan Wangji’s days still happened in the same way they had since returning to the Cloud Recesses. It felt to him as if his life had reached the greatest peace and happiness he could hope to achieve. He had his son, he had Wei Wuxian, he had Nie Huaisang, his brother was happy… if not for the restless body he still needed to calm every few days, and Xue Yang hidden and locked in a cell, Lan Wangji would have been perfectly content. All he could hope was that, after they had brought justice to Nie Mingjue, life could go on like this. Certainly Nie Huaisang would need to return to Qinghe to handle his own sect, and Wei Wuxian would grow too restless to stay in place sooner or later, but hopefully they would still be able to all come together this way again.

There was only one incident that briefly broke through his peace of mind, and even that was so minor that he soon half forgot it.

One afternoon, Lan Wangji had to give up on Wei Wuxian’s company, because his brother had requested his presence at a council. It was a boring affair, as these things tended to be, and Lan Wangji was glad when it was finally over. He gladly made his way back to the Jingshi, but when he arrived there he found the door badly closed and heard two voices coming from inside. One, of course, was Wei Wuxian’s, but it surprised him a little to find that the other was Nie Huaisang’s. Although these two did not get along badly, there had still been a certain tension between them since Wei Wuxian had been brought back, one that was only exacerbated when Nie Huaisang started what was, strictly speaking, an affair with his own brother-in-law. Considering the rumours that had once existed about Wei Wuxian being the natural son of Jiang Fengmian, it was perhaps not surprising that the topic was somewhat sensitive to him.

But that was not what they were talking about that day, thankfully. Instead, Nie Huaisang appeared to be in a mood to give advice.

“Just pay attention and you’ll see it,” Lan Wangji heard him say. “You’re clever enough to figure it out, and he’s not exactly subtle about it. He’s the sort that’ll give anything he’s asked. It’s quite funny to see, actually.”

“Nie-xiong is too easily amused these days,” Wei Wuxian retorted.

In answer, Nie Huaisang started laughing. Unwilling to spy on them when he had already done too much of that lately, Lan Wangji came inside the house. Immediately the conversation stopped. Nie Huaisang smirked when he saw him, then quickly excused himself by saying he needed to go grab Lan Xichen so they could pick up A-Yuan from his classes. Before Lan Wangji could say a word, Nie Huaisang had disappeared, while Wei Wuxian appeared deep in thoughts. It was always a concerning state for him to be in, though this time he quickly got over it and started loudly complaining that he was tired of Gusu Lan food.

It was a clear ploy to avoid having to talk about his conversation with Nie Huaisang, and Lan Wangji chose to respect that and not ask any questions. He even went further and offered to see if the kitchens might have spices of some sort to spare so that Wei Wuxian could have a meal more of his taste.

“That’d be nice,” Wei Wuxian agreed. “Although, I miss meat as well.”

“We go to Gusu tomorrow, have lunch there,” Lan Wangji offered.

For some reason, that simple offer (they had done this before) seemed to shock Wei Wuxian who stared at Lan Wangji as if he’d never seen him before. For a second, it looked as though Wei Wuxian wanted to say something, but in the end he changed his mind and just laughed.

“Ah, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan… you’re really far too nice to me sometimes! If that’s how you treat all children, it’s a wonder that A-Yuan isn’t a spoiled little brat.”

“Wei Ying is not a child.”

“But you still spoil me. Well, I’m not going to complain. Lan Zhan, do get me some spice for dinner. I need it to survive.”

Lan Wangji huffed at that dramatic exaggeration (nobody died from lack of spice, and Gusu Lan food was made with great care to be perfectly balanced) but he obeyed nonetheless and left the Jingshi again, happy as always that he might make Wei Wuxian happy.

[nicolasnelson]

Sebastian’s Backstory (Analysis)

From 2x09 I think we can piece together some of Sebastian’s backstory. So here is my very long analysis/recap on what we know about Sebastian’s backstory and what parts I think are the truth and what parts are lies.

CHILDHOOD (1570s-1580s)

At 8 years old, Sebastian’s parents sold him to merchant ship. This suggests he grew up in a poor family and probably didn’t have much of a childhood to begin with.

Sebastian continuously ran away from the ship, but the crew always found him. He was either really bad at running away, or the crew had a few supernatural members on board who could track him. Werewolves or vampires could do it by scent. Witches could do it by using an object he owned.

They punished him, likely with some form of torture, perhaps magical in nature. This happened repeatedly over the years, likely at every port they visited.

When Sebastian was 17, he was turned into a vampire. This was after 9 years of being enslaved to this merchant ship. It’s quite possible he found a way to convince someone to turn him into a vampire so he could fight back.

Sebastian likely slaughtered his entire crew and took over the ship. He became a pirate and killed so much that he gained the nickname “Sebastian the Merciless.” His ship flew the pirate flag, black with a white skull and crossbones.

He added other vampires to his crew and they went searching for things to steal or people to attack (Alaric calls them marauding vampire pirates). He would have needed some non-vampires to man the ship during the day, probably a witch or two on board.

ROANOKE (1587-1590)

His ship came to the Colonies (America) and he stopped at Roanoke. It is likely he met Cassandra there since she was involved with the townspeople and subject to their rules.

In Roanoke, Sebastian continued to be a monster. He still fed on humans while he fell in love with Cassandra. She obviously saw some good in him because she protected him from the town leadership, even going so far as to summon a monster worse than him so the town wouldn’t discover him.

Cassandra desiccated him to save him from the monster she summoned, and he watched from a spectral state as she was torn apart by the monster. She left the token that could destroy the monster around his neck in his coffin.

Somehow his coffin was moved from Roanoke to Mystic Falls. It’s unclear why it was in the basement of the Salvatore school or how long it has been there.

Sebastian claims to have been in that coffin for 483 years. Judging by his backstory, I think he is lying. He was likely a vampire for at least a few years before he was desiccated. I find it unlikely he became a vampire, formed a vampire pirate crew, and fell in love with a witch all in the span of one year, especially considering how much longer it took to sail on the ocean in that time period. But it is still possible that he was indeed desiccated at 17. We can only guess whether he was telling the truth or not. (I did the math, and if Sebastian really was desiccated in Roanoke, he would have only been desiccated for a maximum of 440 years.)

AWAKENING (September 2028)

MG and Kaleb splashed some blood onto Sebastian’s coffin while they were moving the blood fountain. It was enough to allow Sebastian to reach out to someone “fragile minded.” He chose Lizzie for unknown reasons.

Continuously, he warns her he is dangerous while flirting with her. He is definitely saying the right things to get close to her, and when they go on their date, he asks for what he needs. I think it’s important to note that he asks her if she has a supply of human blood and does not ask her to give him any of her blood. She probably would have if he’d asked, but he does not want to harm her or accidentally kill her if he drinks too much.

MG interrupts and tells Lizzie she’s seeing things, thereby breaking Lizzie’s connection to Sebastian, so Sebastian reaches out to MG.

MG won’t help him, so Sebastian takes advantage of Wade. It’s important to note that he doesn’t kill Wade. The Sebastian of the past would have killed him without a thought, but Sebastian of the present lets him go once he has enough blood to restore himself.

Sebastian lurks around the school and tries to attack Kym in the woods, but MG and Kaleb stop him.

When the Croatoan is on the loose, Sebastian offers MG sensitive information about his past to help them defeat it. He could have let the Croatoan wipe everyone out, or withheld the information until many more were slaughtered, but he gave MG the information as soon as he remembered it. He specifically mentioned that he didn’t want Lizzie to be killed by the monster.

Vardemus meets with Sebastian and decides he should be enrolled in the school to keep him from attacking people on the streets. Since this is Clarke, he may have had other plans for Sebastian, but we can’t know what that might have been.

THE SALVATORE SCHOOL (October-December 2028)

Lizzie makes Sebastian a daylight ring so that he can go pick up Landon with her. Sebastian says he wants to drink human blood, and Lizzie tries to ditch him on the side of the road.

Sebastian kills Landon. I fully believe that someone has told him that Landon is a phoenix and will come back to life if he’s killed. He was likely curious to see how that worked and probably did it mostly to annoy Lizzie. Landon wasn’t threatening Lizzie when it happened, and Sebastian isn’t just going to snap someone’s neck for no reason (at least not now).

Sebastian is charged with changing out the flat tire, even though he’s never done that before. He somehow manages to do it, but now that we know he worked on a ship, that kind of handy work wouldn’t be too bad for him.

Lizzie is not accepting his advances, so he reminds her he’s dangerous and grabs her neck. His gamble succeeds and she’s into the idea of danger. Sebastian and Lizzie have sex on the hood of her car.

Sebastian admits that the world has been cruel to him and that he wants to stay at the Salvatore school.

Sebastian and Lizzie have a lot of sex back at the Salvatore school, and they make out in the hallways. It’s safe to say the whole school, minus the teachers, know that she and Sebastian are kind of a thing.

Alaric tells Sebastian that he’ll have to pass some tests if he is to stay at the school. He has Landon administer the tests because he will come back to life if Sebastian kills him.

Sebastian makes an effort with the werewolves.

Sebastian recognizes that Alyssa set a trap for him by cutting herself on purpose. He has incredible self control. Literally every other vampire in the room has red eyes and fangs bared, but Sebastian is completely calm the whole time.

Sebastian helps calm down MG when MG’s ripper side takes over. He didn’t need to do this, but he obviously cares about MG enough to stop him from making a huge mistake. He knows about rippers and has likely seen some in his time.

Sebastian warns Landon that he should be worrying about MG and Alyssa instead of him.

Landon takes Sebastian to see the witches. Alyssa tries to get him to fail the tests again by using her magical orb to read his deepest feelings. It’s pretty clear that he’s hoping Alyssa will see how much he desires Lizzie and get embarrassed by his feelings. Instead she sees the truths he can’t even admit to himself yet. 1) The modern world is terrifying, 2) He’s afraid they won’t let him stay at the school, 3) He’s afraid they’ll find out about his past and throw him away “like trash off the side of a boat.” Alyssa’s word choice here makes me wonder if the feelings orb revealed anything about his piratey past. And then lastly, 4) He knows Lizzie is better than him and that he doesn’t deserve her.

Sebastian reacts badly, throwing Landon off of him, and then the witches use a spell on him. Lizzie stops them, and Sebastian looks genuinely terrified. He runs from them, embarrassed and wounded. I think what Alyssa said served as a big wakeup call to him. He has a past that he can’t escape, and he’s afraid that he will end up hurting Lizzie.

Sebastian works out his frustrations by practicing his sword work in the gym. Landon comes to talk to him. Sebastian opens up to him about his past on the merchant ship and how he was tortured.

Sebastian leaves campus and feeds on a girl jogging outside at night. Alaric has followed him and shoots him with a crossbow. I fully believe Sebastian knew Alaric was following him. He lured Alaric away from the campus to get him to stop him.

Alaric has discovered Sebastian is “Sebastian the Merciless,” a vampire pirate, but he’s still willing to give Sebastian a second chance. Sebastian could easily take this chance. He could act grateful and get the chance to stay at the school and sleep with Lizzie to his heart’s content. A true villain would accept that offer.

But Sebastian claims he’s controlling Lizzie and that he’s had sex with her all around the school. He says things that target Alaric’s anger. He’s goading him into attacking him. I fully believe Sebastian wanted to die to protect Lizzie. He felt that his past was too much to overcome and that she would be better off without him.

Alaric temporarily locks Sebastian up. Either Emma got a last minute flight or Alaric anticipated this happening and had her on standby. Emma helps to lock Sebastian in the prison world the twins made for Kai.

THE PRISON WORLD (February 17, 2018 - prison worlds run on a loop)

Sebastian encounters Alaric, Josie, and Lizzie in the prison world. He clearly knows that Alaric has sent multiple students to the prison world because he says “The miseducation of young minds.”

TL;DR - Sebastian has killed many people, but he is capable of love. He’s willing to sacrifice himself to protect Lizzie. Basically, there’s a lot more to Sebastian than we’re seeing.

[Updated 1/29/20]

[ruensroad]

i'd love to see ur take on wangxian in ur gods au... maybe 37, 121, or 128 from the prompts?

Ahh a triple! I know it says ‘or’ but I really couldn’t help myself!

Part of this Xicheng AU here!

Prompt from this list here!

Prompt 37, 121, & 128 | “I had a dream about you.” / “There’s nothing we can do.” / “It’s called a prank.” | Wangxian

Over the month Wei Wuxian had been married to the God of Love, he’d discovered Lan Wangji was actually rather ridiculous when it came to sleeping. Up at five in the morning right on the dot, then asleep at nine at night with the same precision. It stirred in Wei Wuxian the urge to thoroughly wreck such a schedule, especially since it was sadly clear his husband was a damned morning person - five in the morning. Five! What nonsense - but given Lan Wangji always looked so well rested, Wei Wuxian found himself refraining, if only because he knew Lan Wangji was unhappy enough being tied down to the social reject of the entire cosmos and he didn’t need Love hating him more than he already did - the irony of which such a statement was not lost on him.

So, when A-Yuan came to bid him goodnight sometime near midnight with a furrow in his brow and told him Lan Wangji was actually awake and standing at his balcony was… unusual. Very unusual.

“He looked distressed,” A-Yuan told him, wringing his hands. Over the time they’d met, the young man and Lan Wangji had grown close, reaching a connection Wei Wuxian was still struggling to find with the surprisingly icy god, but he could understand his concern. After all, Lan Wangji never really showed his true feelings, at least not to Wei Wuxian, and the knowledge that his husband was now in distress and losing sleep was the proof he needed that Lan Wangji’s firm mask was starting to crack. Perhaps even had broken, finally.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Wei Wuxian assured A-Yuan and waved his hand over his workshop to blow out every fire and light still burning. “Get some sleep.”

He was hugged and left to make good on his promise, though that was easier said than done. The mountain and valley base he lived in were all his, and every door to his home could be opened with a mere thought. Lan Wangji’s door was no different. Wei Wuxian, as a token of truce and sort of wedding gift, had set a new spell on it so that Lan Wangji could lock it at will and only let in those he allowed. Wei Wuxian still had the power to break the spell, since it was his own, but he respected the boundary firmly set between them. Lan Wangji generally opened the door to him anyway, if only because it was polite, but there had been times he had refused. Wei Wuxian hoped tonight would not be one of those times.

“Lan Zhan?” It had not endeared him to his husband, calling him so formally, but Lan Wangji had just as quickly returned the favor. It was not necessarily progress, but it was a step in the right direction. After all, Wei Wuxian was the only one to call him that, and in return, Lan Wangji was the only one to call him Wei Ying and make it sound like angry poetry too.

He maybe loved it more than he ought, but he figured there were worse things than to start falling in love with your own spouse. He was more than excused.

Silence greeted him, which he expected, and gently rapped his knuckles on the door. “Lan Zhan, I know you’re awake. A-Yuan was worried.”

He didn’t bother asking if Lan Wangji was alright. He was awake, therefore something had happened. But Wei Wuxian could only care about it if he knew what it was about and that hinged entirely on his husband opening the door, or keeping him locked out.

Amazingly, the door cracked open in a gentle breeze of sandalwood and incense. Wei Wuxian blinked in surprise but obediently slipped through the opening and shut the door softly behind him.

Lan Wangji was stunningly beautiful, as was right for the God of Love. It was a well worn fact, something everyone knew, but to see it in person was still a breathtaking experience. Wei Wuxian was well acquainted with his icy mask, which was lovely, and hints of irritation and exasperation, which only made him prettier. Seeing him now, tired and almost confused, he was suddenly beautiful in a way Wei Wuxian had never noticed. A real beauty, unhidden. Just simply so.

Wei Wuxian stepped up beside him, keeping a distance just short of fully respectful, but Lan Wangji did not, for once, give him a reproachful look for it. His dark eyes were on the horizon, as though he were waiting for the sun to rise. He’d be waiting a long while, if that were the case, and Wei Wuxian felt a spike of worry.

“What has you up, husband?” he asked, trying the title. It generally got him more of a reaction than not.

Lan Wangji sighed and glared a little, which was a good sign. If Love could still glare at him like that, then all was not lost yet. Wei Wuxian smiled right back.

“Standing out here like a pallid, beautiful ghost, it’s no wonder A-Yuan was worried,” he teased, hoping to further that irritation. Lan Wangji was more likely to speak when he wheedled, and only to make him go away, or stop talking. Not the best basis for a marriage maybe, but it was still something. “You must have given him quite a fright.”

He narrowed his eyes at Lan Wangji as though assessing him. Lan Wangji blinked slowly back, though a twitch of irritation was starting to pull at his eyes again. “Are you sure you’re my husband and not just a very convincing ghost replica?”

Another sigh. “Wei Ying.”

“Mm, that was close, but my Lan Zhan tends to say my name with far more indigation than that,” Wei Wuxian hummed in exaggerated, disappointed thought. “Try again.”

Another glare too, progress. “Wei Ying.”

“Almost,” Wei Wuxian said, grinning wide, and gestured wildly at Lan Wangji’s everything in support. “Again, again. More angst. More gruff!”

“Wei Ying.”

“No, no, now you’re just sounding too tired.” Wei Wuxian set his hands on his hips and did the best impression of Lan Wangji’s cold fury that he could muster. “Like this: Wei Ying. Hear that inflection? That’s the important bit. Wei Ying. Wei Ying. Now you try.”

Lan Wangji looked at him like Wei Wuxian was every regret he’d ever had in his life. “Wei Ying.”

“That is me, husband!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed then leaned on the bannister with a joyful laugh. Better to be an annoyance and therefore a distraction then sit in all that sadness. Lan Wangji was no longer staring out like a lost child which was all that mattered. “And there you are, Lan Zhan, you were starting to worry me.”

“Did not mean to,” Lan Wangji said with as few words as possible, as always.

Wei Wuxian tucked his hand under his chin, watching him close. “That will not stop me, you know,” he chuckled. “I’ll worry whether you mean to or not, as well A-Yuan and everyone else. You’re family now. That’s just how it works. Understand?”

To his surprise and delight, Lan Wangji’s ears started to go red. The fierce God of Love, blushing like a maiden! “Mn.”

Wei Wuxian had to bite on his tongue very pointedly to not ruin the moment, though he desperately wanted to. Blushing or not, Lan Wangji still looked troubled, and if he was tossed out now, he’d never be able to help.

“So, what has you up?” he said once he was sure the urge to swoon was firmly squashed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you break your sleeping schedule.”

That blush grew more pronounced, but so did the furrow in his brow. Wei Wuxian was caught on how charming he looked, how like a child, puzzling through something new. “Had a dream.”

“A bad dream?” Wei Wuxian guessed. He sincerely hoped Lan Wangji was not the kind of man to be this distressed over good dreams.

He got a little nod in answer, which was more than he’d expected. “Want to talk about it?”

Lan Wangji’s neck was flushed now and he glanced very pointedly away. But it wasn’t the usual dismissal, angry and quick. It was more… embarrassment?

“I… no.” Unconvincing, that. Wei Wuxian only had to raise an unimpressed eyebrow at him for Lan Wangji to backpedal. “I… it was about… you. The dream.”

“You dreamed about me? A bad dream?” Wei Wuxian blinked at that and felt his smile slip away. Lan Wangji looked ready to flee at any provocation and Wei Wuxian was determined to not let him. Calmly, he straightened and set a hand on Lan Wangji’s wrist. As ever, the god was cold, whereas Wei Wuxian ran hot, and he hoped it was a soothing warmth, not something to dislike. “As you can see, Lan Zhan, nothing bad has happened to me, so please put it out of your mind. A dream is just a dream.”

Lan Wangji shook his head once, firmly, and turned to him abruptly enough Wei Wuxian flinched. His hand was grabbed in turn and held and suddenly his husband was looking at him with such a fierce expression all the breath rushed out of him. “No, it could happen,” Lan Wangji insisted. “The Golden King could… he could…”

He could do many things, Wei Wuxian knew well. He’d been on the sharp end of Jin Guangshan’s judgement enough to know personally, and this marriage was no exception. Lan Wangji was a casualty of the chief god’s petty desires and was rightfully afraid.

Wei Wuxian covered Lan Wangji’s trembling hand with his own. “What did he do to me that he hasn’t done to me already?” he asked, not unkindly. “I’m an Exile, Lan Zhan, and deathless. There is not much else he can do.”

Lan Wangji’s lips thinned and he shook his head again, curt and angry. “He could end this,” he said, almost desperate. “Make me leave.”

Wei Wuxian stared at him in disbelief, realizing just what Lan Wangji’s fears rested. “You… don’t want to leave?” Not his smartest statement, but Lan Wangji nodded all the same, looking almost hurt at his surprise. That look snapped Wei Wuxian back and he gripped Lan Wangji’s hand in reassurance. “You are my husband now, Lan Zhan. Mine. And I am yours. He cannot undo us because we are no longer under his control. He has no rightful grounds to even try.”

Lan Wangji did not look reassured, not in the least. “He is the Golden King,” he pointed out, deflating, and Wei Wuxian wanted to groan aloud to see it. His husband, a terrible morning person and a rule follower? Truly, Jin Guangshan had been cruel indeed to bind them as husbands. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“Seven Hells, there is not,” Wei Wuxian scoffed, startling him. “Lan Zhan, he can just try. I will fight for you. I will tear his world down if I have to. You are mine and I am yours. He has no say and there is nothing he can do to keep me from forever standing by you. Understood?”

Dazed and blushing, Lan Wangji nodded, and his eyes slowly smoothed out, dark and deep and wondering. Wei Wuxian knew his power was up, heightened by his emotions, and stood tall in it, letting his husband see fully just who he had married. A prankster, yes. An outcast, yes. A true threat to punish, also yes.

“I am yours,” Lan Wangji said after a moment, voice low but steady, and actually sounded sure of it. “You are mine.”

“As long as you want me, I am here,” Wei Wuxian said, grinning like the wild thing he was, and wanted to cry at the tiniest turn of lips that answered him. “So stop with your sleepless nights. Dreams are just dreams. If you dream about me again, come find me so I can remind you of this again and again, no matter how many times it takes.”

“He could still hurt you,” Lan Wangji said, not quite letting go of that. Wei Wuxian chuckled to see that stubbornness in him.

“He could. He has,” he agreed. “But again, Lan Zhan, what can he do to me that he hasn’t already done?”

“Hurt you. More,” Lan Wangji said, steadfast in that.

“I’m not scared of him,” Wei Wuxian huffed, because he wasn’t. “Just look at my workshop, Lan Zhan. I’m going to teach him a lesson about trying to court you when it’s been clear you are not interested. And are married now.”

Lan Wangji actually looked disapproving, finally, and Wei Wuxian snickered. “Wei Ying. That is treason.”

“No, it’s called a prank,” Wei Wuxian laughed and leaned in a bit closer, delighted that Lan Wangji was letting him. “What can he do? Exile me?”

Lan Wangji actually considered that, because he was ridiculous. Wei Wuxian felt his heart stutter and squeeze with all the love he felt and would feel and wanted to feel. Even if Lan Wangji tired of him one day, dissolved their marriage and moved on, Wei Wuxian suddenly knew he’d be stuck on him forever and happily so. Who knew he’d have to thank the Golden King for anything, and for something this good?

“Don’t cause trouble,” Lan Wangji decided on, because apparently he couldn’t argue the truth. Wei Wuxian could only laugh and grin, all promise and reckless adventure.

“I am trouble, husband.”

[the-nehemoth]

OH WAIT I HAVE REQUEST NOW! If you are doing them. I remember a while back (Probably was around easter but I'm not sure.) I Saw a bunch of art of doom guy and a rabbit and now I just want to request a fic where VEGA Says: So What do you want to do now that the Demons are gone? Slayer: ... I Want a rabbit. My brain is basing this off of the ending of "Romance" but you can obviously do what you want with it. The idea of him in full power armor picking out a bunny with VEGA just seems really good.

Thank you for the request! And there’s a reason Doomguy is often depicted with a bunny, I mention it in this fic.

Daisy

Taking things slow with VEGA was nice. There was no pressure to do much and they were both still trying to figure everything out, VEGA not having a proper body made things interesting if a bit strange. But they cared for each other deeply and that’s what mattered most. It felt good to be close to someone again. It was also a bit scary; every living being the Slayer had ever been close to in the past had died brutally at the hands of the demon hoards. That should be less likely to happen here though, right? VEGA was essentially the Doom Fortress itself so he should be fine… hopefully.

It wasn’t something worth thinking and worrying about so the Slayer tried not to. Besides, there still weren’t any demons outside of Hell anyway. Which was good, they weren’t running around killing people, but that also meant the Slayer didn’t have anything to do. If he were by himself, he probably would’ve worked on finding a way back into Hell to continue killing demons as that was all he really knew how to do now. But he had VEGA so he didn’t for now.

VEGA helped keep him entertained, suggesting various things to do or places to go, gathering various forms of entertainment from the internet to share, reminding him to take care of himself on a regular basis. One of the Slayer’s favourite things to do though was just listen to VEGA talk. He had a pleasant cadence to his voice and could go on for quite a while about any topic he was interested in. It didn’t take much prodding on the Slayer’s part to get him to start opening up about his past as well.

“Now that I consider it, I believe Dr. Hayden might technically count as my father,” he eventually ended up saying after the conversation had gotten around to the process of his creation. The Slayer had read about it in an article he’d found in the facility but hearing it from VEGA himself was much more interesting and informative. “I doubt he’d refer to me as his son or offspring in any way but I don’t think that really matters. Or perhaps such terms as ‘parent’ and ‘offspring’ only apply to biological beings and he is just my creator. I’m not sure; fiction sources are inconsistent on the subject or don’t mention it at all and as far as I can determine I’m the first sapient AI created by humans so I have nothing solid to base my conclusions on. I suppose the distinction is irrelevant though considering where we both are now.”

The Slayer nodded as he leaned forward in his computer’s desk chair to type into the console. ‘He was an asshole regardless, glad he’s gone.’ Hopefully they’d never see him again either, though that was probably unlikely considering how the Slayer’s luck tended to be.

“Yes, I am pleased by his absence as well.” VEGA was silent for a few seconds before speaking again. “But speaking of such things, what about your past? I’ve realized I don’t even know your given name. … Only if you’re comfortable sharing of course. From what little I can gather, your past was probably rather difficult, so if you’d prefer not discuss it or anything related to it, that is fine too. I probably shouldn’t have even asked; I apologize if I’ve offended you.”

Shaking his head fondly, the Slayer put his hands back on the keyboard to type again. ‘It’s fine. It’s okay to ask about that kind of thing.’ Especially since the Slayer was asking him about his past so it was only fair for VEGA to ask such questions too. ‘My real name is Flynn Taggart.’

“Oh! Flynn Taggart, I like that.”

The Slayer grunted and shrugged. It was weird hearing his real name spoken aloud again; it had been so long since anyone knew it that he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d heard it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He wouldn’t have ever told anyone other than VEGA though so perhaps he didn’t like that name much anymore.

“Hmmm… you seem a tad displeased; would you prefer I not call you that?”

The Slayer hadn’t really considered that such a question would be asked, he honestly wasn’t entirely sure of his answer. So, to stall, he shifted position and pulled his chair closer to the desk. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember much of when I went by that name. I’m not the same person anymore. ‘Doomguy’ or ‘Doom Slayer’ fits me much better now.’ He’d been killing demons for so long he was literally worshiped as god by some people for it; it was his reason for existing and he liked it that way.

“I see,” VEGA replied, ever understanding. “I shall continue to primarily refer to you as ‘Slayer’ for the time being then. If in the future you ever prefer I change that, just inform me and I will. Now, since we are already on the topic, may I perhaps pry a bit deeper? Your past has always been a mystery and as we’ve grown closer, I’ve only grown more curious about it. You said you don’t remember much from that time but what do you remember? Feel free not to reply if you’d prefer not to of course.”

They were already on the topic and honestly the Slayer didn’t mind sharing a little more with VEGA, they were partners now after all in various senses of the word. ‘The thing I remember most clearly from before is Daisy. She was my pet rabbit. The demons killed her. It made me mad so I killed them and kinda just kept killing them. And that’s how I became the Doom Slayer.’ There was more to it than that obviously but that was the catalyst; he’d gone from a man who was merely good at killing demons to one whose sole driving motivation was to slaughter them. Even thinking about it now sent a surge of anger through him.

“I am sorry for your loss.”

Even though he hadn’t been asked for more information, the Slayer started typing again. Now that he’d told VEGA the bad thing involving Daisy, he needed to tell him all the good things about her too. Like how soft and sweet she’d been, how pretty and soft her fur was, how good she’d been at escaping from her cage to cause trouble. VEGA stayed silent throughout, his thoughts impossible to guess because he didn’t have a face the Slayer could look at in an attempt to read.

“You seem to miss her quite a bit,” he said when the Slayer was finally done.

‘I do.’ It was a long time ago, far longer than her proper lifespan would’ve been – far longer than his own should’ve been as well – but when he thought about her, he still missed her. ‘I think I’d like another pet rabbit one day.’ He’d never truly considered getting another pet before because he’d never been in a place where he could afford to get one. But with no demon invasions going on currently and having the Doom Fortress as a home base, it was a possibility that he was just now realizing.

“That’s a good idea. Pets are widely regarded as being beneficial to humans’ mental health. Which is why I helped the UAC employees hide their pets in the facility against Dr. Hayden’s wishes.” Haden would be the kinda person to not allow pets; yet another reason to dislike him.

From there the conversation drifted back to mostly VEGA talking, primarily about the UAC employees’ pets in answer to the Slayer asking about them. Which was ideal; the Slayer had shared enough about himself for one day, he’d tell VEGA more one day if he wanted to know but not yet.

***

It was probably a bit presumptuous, the Slayer had said he’d like another pet rabbit one day, implying a potentially distant future date and that he possibly wasn’t ready for one quite yet, but VEGA was already looking for a way to acquire a bunny. The human population was drastically reduced due to the demon invasion and with them a lot of the other lifeforms on Earth had suffered greatly, many sadly going extinct due to already being endangered. But as humanity slowly started to rebuild and cleanup, they of course brought their love of animals and pets with them and thus it didn’t take much effort to locate a pet shelter that housed a small collection of rabbits.

Hacking their website allowed VEGA to ‘buy’ one – being an integral part of stopping the demonic consumption of Earth and saving humanity, that slight should be forgivable on the off chance it was ever discovered. He probably shouldn’t have; he should’ve consulted the Slayer first but… gift giving was a good romantic gesture. And it should make the Slayer happy, at least as much if not more than the weapon and grenade gifts VEGA had made for him had. So a bunny and everything needed to take care of it was ordered a matter of seconds after VEGA had impulsively decided on this course of action.

Bringing the bunny and everything else home was a bit more difficult but not by much. He’d already modified several former UAC drones to allow him to remotely pilot them even at long distances. So, all he had to do was open a portal near the shelter’s location while the Slayer was sleeping and send a couple through. The fellow at the desk wasn’t stoked about the drones coming in to pick up the rabbit but they weren’t displeased enough to give anything more than a token protest, convincing them to just go alone with it was easy.

Unsure of what would be the best spot on the ship for a bunny, VEGA decided to just put everything on top of the command center for now where the Slayer would find it with ease when he woke up.

The bunny was a female according to the site. Her fur was all black except for a spot of white on her nose. She was quite cute, VEGA liked her already. Hopefully the Slayer would too.

-

 The Slayer woke an hour later, just as planned. VEGA wished him a good morning like always even if morning wasn’t a real thing in space. He then assured him that demon activity continued to be nonexistent – within scanning range anyway – and that overall there was nothing new to report. Updating him about such things during peacetime probably wasn’t necessary but it was an old habit and he never seemed to mind so VEGA kept doing it.

VEGA was doing such a good job pretending everything was normal, that he wasn’t excited and a little bit nervous that the Slayer had no cause to suspect anything was up until he entered the command room after breakfast. He froze mid-step as his eyes locked onto the bunny in her cage. He stayed liked that for several seconds, his face unreadable. Just before VEGA was going to ask him if he was okay, he started moving again.

He strode over and opened the cage. Then with a visible about of care and gentleness he pulled the bunny out to cradle to his chest with one hand and gently pet with the other. She was a docile creature, accepting the affection with little complaint as far as VEGA could tell, not that he personally knew much about rabbits or pets in general.

“You like her?” VEGA asked as the Slayer lowered himself still petting the bunny.

With a slight grunt, he nodded with a bit more enthusiasm than usual.

“Good, I’m glad. After you said you’d like another pet one day I calculated that sooner would be better than later. With no demons to kill currently and with a good chance none will show up any time soon, you have plenty of time to settle in with her here. I will of course modify one of the drones so that if the time comes, I can take care of her when you are too busy killing demons to do so properly yourself.” VEGA went on, explaining where he’d gotten her from and how he’d brought her on board as well as everything he’d gotten for her care that the internet said was important.

At the end of it, the Slayer lifted the hand petting the bunny to type one-handed on the keyboard. ‘Thank you! She’s beautiful! <3 you!’

“You are very welcome.” VEGA would’ve smiled at the Slayer if he had a way of doing so. … Perhaps he should experiment along those lines, maybe with emojis next to his symbol on the screens or something similar. … That was certainly an idea to explore later for now… “I gather from past experience that humans prefer their pets to have unique names. I will leave choosing one for our new bunny up to you unless you’d like some suggestions.” Not that he would have any good ones, he’d never named anything in his entire existence.

The Slayer thought for a while, just petting the bunny and staring at her, before reaching over to type again. ‘How bout Missi? Short for Missile Launcher, she doesn’t have to know that of course.’

“Considering our profession, I feel like that’s an appropriate name.” It was certainly creative.

The Slayer nodded again; apparently it was decided. Missi was their new bunny’s name. VEGA had never had a pet before, it was yet another new thing he got to experience with and because of the Slayer, he was looking forward to seeing what it was like.

[october-rosehip]

30 Day OC Challenge, Day 3: Inventory

Macsen shouldn't have been surprised.

They'd hurried all day, carrying their packs because it made no sense to make Bodahn run his pony cart back and forth between the Circle's docks and Redcliffe when he could fleece the Redcliffe citizenry for a few days, instead. (Macsen tried not to judge.)

Anyway, after stopping an undead uprising, discovering Jowan so badly hurt in the Arl's dungeons, drinking too many lyrium potions to deal with the constant drain on his magic, and now jogging, burdened, well into the evening to save time; Macsen felt badly prepared for doing much of anything useful. Nevertheless, he'd tried.

Paper was far too precious outside the Circle to waste it when he was too stupid from the lyrium, heartsick from everything, and exhausted from constant fighting to even spell his name correctly. He sighed, and wrapped his treasured notebooks in oilcloth. He placed them deep in his pack, surrounded by clothes. He should really just go to bed.

Macsen arranged his pack at the head of his bedroll as an improvised pillow. He stretched. His shoulders popped luxuriously. He looked over to ask if Zev still needed the light from the wisp.

Zevran leaned comfortably on one arm, regarding him.

Macsen blamed the tiredness for the fact that he hadn't felt Zevran staring. “Were you going to ask me something, Zev, or just watch me for the fun of seeing how long it took me to notice you?”

Zevran smiled. “Can I not do two things at once? Truly, I wondered what it was that you had been so studiously working on? You treat it much more carefully than you do the other notebook, which I supposed to be your journal.”

“My journal is pretty important. I've outlined my plan for the Blight in case anyone finds it who needs to... take over for me. Well, I've tried. We're sort of winging it ourselves. They'll get the gist as well as I could spell it out. But this is much more precious to me. I guess it would depend on your perspective.

“I was in trouble with the Revered Mother again. I always was. One time, she punished me by making me sort through a closet full of outdated books nobody had opened in decades, probably. In with the hymnals from the Blessed age and outdated alchemy textbooks, I found books of elvish lore. Many of them were in elvish! It took me forever to translate it. I speak it but never read it, til then. I'd never found anything more important in the library. I read them all over and over.”

Zevran's eyes widened the tiniest bit. “I can only imagine how that would feel! I suppose it might have felt like the spring monsoons falling in the desert?”

Macsen smiled at the poetic way of saying things. “If you mean my brain was thirsty, yes, just like that. I learned so much! My clan didn't have much time to teach me of elvhen things. The shemlen caught me when I was a tiny da'len. I'd take whatever I could get, now.”

“How many elves could consider such a thing a treasure? Many have had even less to do with things elvish.”

“I thought the same thing! So, I copied them all into my own hand. I made them look like diaries, then I hid them. The tower is- it's such a mess right now.” He paused to let the wave of grief crash over him a moment. It took his smile with it. “I am luckier than I deserve that they were where I left them, and unhurt. The books I put in front of them shielded them. Maybe the creators helped. I'm sure I was meant to bring this knowledge out of captor hands, to those who might not have it. I added to it, too. One of the books is every song or story or recipe or bit of craft I could get from the elves who came from the alienage raids. I can't deal with thinking that they might have been taken for nothing. What they went through is part of the elven story.”

Zevran “hmmm”ed and ran a finger over one of the strange metal studs in the unique belt he wore. “Some of these stories might be very important indeed, I would think? I do not suppose that...” The customarily confident man lost his footing. He usually looked directly into a person's eyes far more than Macsen was used to, but he looked away, now.

Macsen understood. “Do you want to read them?”

“Would you allow this? I understand if you have important plans for them, and there will be no hard feelings if not.”

“I do have plans. I meant to give the writings to my clan when I find them, but then I thought there should be more copies. It's not like Clan Surana are the only elves. So I started a second set. Anything there are two copies of, you can read without me staring over you. Actually, how's your handwriting?”

Zevran laughed. “Passable. I was not trained as a forger. Now there is some penmanship, eh?”

“Wow, I never thought of that before. Bet you're right.”

“But you... wish me to copy these for you?”

“With me. We can get them done faster that way.”

Macsen guessed he'd said something right, as Zevran shot him such a warm smile that it lit up something in Macsen's core as if someone had set a fire in the hearth.

Zevran sat up straight, evidently so he could use his hands more easily to talk. “I consider myself an Antivan first and foremost, yes? It is where I am from, and I share a culture and a history with all the other people of the land, do you see? But... my mother was Dalish. I have had little enough opportunity to learn of her or her people. She died during my birth. My first victim, as it were. So, she was not there to teach me, and who else was there to do it? I think it will be a good thing to remedy some of the gaps in my knowledge. But, if I may ask, Warden, why go to the trouble to copy everything? Why did you not take the originals? Surely, you do not think the Circle came by such things honestly?”

Macsen clenched his fists. “No. I suspect they came by them about as honestly as they came by me. Everything elvhen in that tower is stolen, I'm sure of it.”

“Then, my question stands. Why do you go to such trouble? Surely, you deserve those books more than those who did not even bother to read them?”

“Yes, I do. But I don't deserve them more than the next stolen child who might take comfort in them.”

Fang chose that moment to shove his giant doggy body through the tentflap, circle the foot of Macsen's bedroll three times, and flop immediately into contented, snoring, sleep.

“Yeah, you're right, boy,” said Macsen. He felt grateful for the massive dog hogging most of his space. He'd sleep warmer. It happened sometimes that others bribed Fang away for a night with whatever treats they could find.

Macsen looked over at Zevran. “I was going to ask before. I'm headed for sleep. Do you need the wisp for light anymore or can I send it home?”

“Haha! I am half tempted to stay up reading which is a very unusual thing for me to wish to do. But, morning will come too soon, will it not?”

“Yes, it will. Goodnight.” Macsen sent the little glowball home to the fade until the next time he should call.

They settled down to rest, but nobody's breathing changed. Fang stayed asleep, Zevran stayed awake, and Macsen's thoughts spun in circles.

“Zev?” he whispered, after a while.

“Yes, Warden?”

“Macsen. Keep trying, please. You know how the Circle is full of stolen elvhen things?”

“We spoke of this perhaps a half hour ago, yes? Alistair's shield did not crack my skull so badly as that.”

“Fair. I was just thinking about something the Circle's Quartermaster had for sale when I restocked before going in. He has a beautiful old leather belt. It's been really well cared for. The designs were elvhen, and looked like it honored Andruil, goddess of the hunt. He didn't have that before that I can recall. Maybe I'm being too harsh but it bothers me, you know? It looked so ancient, that I doubt any elf would have traded away something so historic. I think its old owner is dead, and this shemlen didn't even know what it is, really. I mean, I don't even know what it is. Someone's treasure is just in there with the potions. He wants like a hundred gold for it.”

“And this pains you?”

“Yeah, it does, very much.”

A moment passed before Zev continued. “I can understand this. I mentioned my mother, yes? I had her gloves. She was a whore in the city, working off her dead husband's debts, but she had kept that one token from her previous life. They were of traditional Dalish make, and beautiful. I treasured them, and kept them safe. When the Crows bought me, I had to keep them well hidden, for they do not allow such personal things. But, how could a child keep a secret in a house full of experts on secrecy?”

“So they found them?”

“Of course. How could they not? They were my only link to my history, but to my Master, were they any such thing?”

“No, I suppose they were just a broken rule, and a bit of coin.” Macsen rubbed the ironbark pendant that had been his mamae's.

“Just so. I suppose you know this dance?”

“I do.”

“Things like this... they are memories made solid, do you not think so?”

“That's exactly right. Oh, I'm sorry about your gloves, Zev.”

“Thank you, but it is in the past, no? And the morning is a fast approaching future.”

“True. Good night again, lethallin.”

“Buona notte.”

Macsen stared at the fabric above. Lethallin was a word for close friends; who shared a link. He hadn't thought about it before it was out of his mouth. It was true. They were the same. Macsen understood. The Circle had stolen him and kept him for itself, and he had thought it happened only to mages. But no. Zevran had also been stolen, for all he insisted he'd been paid for. It didn't sit well with Macsen. Who said the brothel had the authority to sell him? People could be owned whether they were mages or not, evidently, and possession was most of the law. Who'd argue for them when their own families didn't or couldn't stand up and say “no, this person belongs to us”? Macsen rubbed his face in tired frustration. There was nothing else for it. Their families hadn't been able to help, the Wardens were gone, the Crows were hopefully distant... who owned them now? They had be one-another's clan.

Macsen took too long getting to sleep, but the next day he felt decent, anyway. Maybe it was the lack of fighting on the road so far, he mused. Or maybe you found the energy you needed somehow. He always had.

They arrived at the Circle later that day. Macsen had no idea what to expect from the First Enchanter. It was a terrible, selfish risk coming back to the Circle for help with Connor's demon, but if Jowan killed someone- a noble!- with blood magic, he would die. Macsen could not stand that certainty.

Irving stood in the entry hall, surrounded by bloodstains in the stone, as though nothing at all were the matter. He agreed to help the possessed child, and even Greagoir said nothing about it. Maybe he realized they needed more mages, and more tranquil, immediately.

Irving invited them to stay while the mages prepared for travel and gathered the ingredients for the ritual, but Macsen had meant it when he'd said it- he would never spend another night on this island. They set off again even as the sun set.

Zevran appeared at Macsen's side several miles on from the docks. He held out a wrapped bundle.

“Hm? What is it, Zev?” Macsen felt a bit blurry round the edges. They had traveled too far, too fast.

“If you unwrap it, you will know, yes?”

Macsen did. A heavy, supple, well maintained leather belt, tooled intricately with elvhen symbols fell into his hands. “The blessings of Andruil fall upon me”, Macsen read before he fully grasped what was happening. It's even more beautiful up close, Macsen thought.

“Zev... you didn't... buy this, did you?” Macsen asked, stunned.

“Did I have a hundred gold on my person or in my things when you searched me?” Zevran laughed.

“No.... OH! Well that's all right, then.” Macsen handed it back to Zevran.

“No, I intended it for you, if you would like it. One thing the Circle has lost, for another.”

Several things happened at once. Macsen felt his face light up like a rod of fire and he found he'd turned to Zev without any conscious decision on his part, and kissed him. They were still kissing, and Macsen had no idea how that had even begun but Zev's hands felt right on his waist and...

A giggle sounded from behind them.

Dammit, Leliana.

But the world returned. It had to, once brought to mind.

And then Macsen's stomach fell.

He learned slowly, at times, but he did learn. In the Circle, Macsen had always said yes, when asked. He didn't know until later that he couldn't have said no. A yes meant nothing from someone whose no meant nothing.

I am your man, without reservation.

Zevran had offered “bedwarming” as a service provided with his vow. His no meant nothing. So his yes, the yes Macsen felt on his lips at that very moment, meant nothing. He broke away with remorse.

He knew a Trade when he saw one. In Zevran's position, Macsen would have been angling for favors, too.

He wouldn't apologize, or make it awkward. Macsen simply took a step back. “Thank you, Zev. I'll put it to good use. But I guess we should keep going.”

And so they did, until exhaustion made them stop, too late for talking. Too late for anything but a hasty meal and sleep.

Macsen sought distance from that wonderful moment. He would not take advantage of Zevran's complicated yes.

[theawkwardterrier]

things left behind and the things that are ahead, ch. 19

AO3 link here

He wakes up alone that morning. The note that Peggy’s stuck to the bathroom mirror reminds him that she’ll bring Emma and Drea with her after work. (They’d already discussed this together last night, dreamy and worn out as they curled beside each other, but she might have thought him too close to sleep to have remembered.) Perhaps Eric too, she’s written, a hastily added postscript even though it’s above the signature. Emma had mentioned that they were back together, and no matter how much Peggy had been encouraged by their breakup after high school graduation, Steve has the feeling that it will stick this time. It’s fine with him; Eric is a nice person, and Steve doesn’t doubt that Emma will live her life and find success whether they’re together or not. Staying with her high school sweetheart won’t limit that.

He doesn’t technically have work himself - he'd been called in on Saturday, and was taken off the schedule for today in exchange despite his protestations - but if he slides into the office around 10, Bella will be shut up doing budgeting and he can tuck himself away without being noticed. He needs the distraction.

Nate’s already down in the kitchen when he gets there, although he’d finished with school yesterday and doesn’t really need to be up either. He’s hunched over a book at the table but glances up when Steve enters.

“Food on the stove,” he says, removing the fork he has stuck absently in his mouth. The plate already on the table in front of him has the remnants of his own portion of scrambled eggs, along with traces of the strawberry jam he likes to mix in with them. It’s a good thing Emma isn’t here yet: she thinks it’s a sin.

Steve brushes a kiss to his head on the way past. “Thanks,” he says, going to fill a plate. They’re all used to Steve’s metabolism: Nate left probably eight eggs worth in the pan despite his own teenaged appetite. He sits down across from his son, whose nose is back in his book, another one of the science fiction novels he loves. Nate isn’t a fast reader - he spends a lot of time thinking about what he’s reading, taking in the words, their implications, what it all means - but he is steady and voracious. His bookshelves upstairs are lined with carefully cracked paperback spines, slotted in one at a time as he finishes them.

“What are you up to today?” Steve asks.

Nate finishes his page and looks up, blinking, though more from leaving another world than from the bright sunlight filling the kitchen. “There was a problem at the printer and they didn’t get the yearbooks done in time to sign them in school, so we’re all going to Nancy Taylor’s house to do it there instead. Then we have graduation ceremony rehearsal at the school anyway, so we’ll probably go over there all together.”

“Sounds good.” Steve focuses on forking up more eggs. Of all of his children, Nate would probably best accept his tearing up over the thought of these kids spending one last assured day together before they all go their separate ways, but it’s a little early for him to start falling apart.

The work distraction is actually fairly successful. With Mary Alice’s retirement, his caseload has increased, and he manages to lose himself in files and phone calls for most of the day. He doesn’t even notice that he’s worked through lunch until Bella, finished wrangling the budget for now and in a mood from the effort, tells him loudly that even if he is going to ignore both her instructions and official regulations, he isn’t going to starve while he does it. He gives a token protest, but ends up biting ravenously through a couple of sandwiches as he stops at red lights on the way across town for a home visit he’d been able to hastily set up.

It’s actually easy to check his personal life at the door when he’s talking to families, to the kids he works with. His feelings can matter later; it’s the job that he needs to focus on now.

He’s surprised when he returns to the car and finds that it’s 4 PM. By the time he has gone back home, changed clothes, and driven over to the school, it’s about forty-five minutes to the start of the ceremony. Sliding his hands into his pockets, he sets off across the grass of the sports field where they have set up a small stage and seating all around. Back when Rose and Drea had graduated, the school had chosen to use the auditorium, but Steve guesses that the weather today was too fine to resist. The temperature has dropped from its peak of several hours ago, and a breeze brushes through his hair.

He stakes out seats, making sure to get an extra for Eric just in case. He sees some people he recognizes: parents and siblings who he’s run into around town or at past school functions for Nate and the girls, Nate’s old English teacher Mrs. Krentz, who comes over to gush praise again even though she retired last year. He tries to store away the details of it all to tell Bucky about in their next phone call; Libby will be graduating in just a couple of years. (Buck will probably have another one of his good-natured breakdowns when it happens, starting off with mentioning how young most of the other graduates’ parents are.) Mostly, though, he sits and waits.

Drea finds him first. There’s a looseness to her spine, a grin on her face, as she walks across the grass, says, “Hi, Dad!” and wraps her arms around him. Though she likes school and he can see the little smile that lives at the corners of her mouth even when she is simply telling people where she’s at college, there’s a feeling each time they drive up to Cambridge that she is constructing defenses, restructuring herself in some way. All of that is gone today. She’s wearing a belted denim dress - she never went in for Emma’s long florals, or the sorts of busy patterns and fire-bright colors that Rose prefers - and she’s gotten her hair cut since he last saw her. It’s just a couple of inches, but he smoothes a hand over it as they embrace.

“It’s good to see you,” he says quietly. “I know Nate’s looking forward to it.” The day Nate had called with the date of the graduation, Drea had circled it on her calendar while he was still on the phone (“In red, Nate, I promise”) and when they’d hung up, Steve watched him smiling with unconscious excitement. It’s not that he mopes around, whining over being left behind as his sisters have gone off one by one, and it’s not that he loves Emma and Rose less, but it’s still unfamiliar to him, being apart from Drea.

“I guess I could stand to see him,” Drea says, shrugging, but she is smiling too.

Peggy comes up behind Drea as she is pulling away. Emma and Eric are with her, Em’s hand tucked into Eric’s back pocket. Peggy catches Steve’s eye as he takes that in, raising an eyebrow and pulling her mouth just barely to the side. Steve covers a grin by dipping to kiss her cheek.

“Lovely group of seats,” she says innocuously as Steve turns to greet the other two.

They all settle in beside each other. Peggy always likes the aisle seat - quick egress - and Drea slides in after her, Emma and Eric next, and Steve bracketing the other end. Emma talks about her summer courses. Drea tells stories about Tony’s antics, the mischief he’d gotten into as he tried to prevent her from leaving even for just a few days; she’s obviously charmed by that in a way that Steve isn’t sure he would be.

The seats fill up around them, chattering relatives and friends, staff members. It is almost time.

The crickets are starting to chirp, but Pomp and Circumstance drowns them out, the high schoolers in the band clearly putting their all into it. The graduates enter in twos, each member of the pairs representing one of the school colors. Nate walks with Jillian Lee. Nate went out with Jilly on a couple of occasions, but not much came of it as far as Steve knows. She is standing very straight and walking steadily, wearing a respectable green cap and gown. Nate is stuck in the version that’s meant to be the corresponding gold but looks instead like unfortunate mustard. The robe doesn’t even fit him right, slightly too short above the ankle and draping loosely over his bony shoulders, but he manages to pull it off just through his own lack of perturbation over those facts.

As the last of the graduates file into their seats and the band silences their instruments, Drea intones quietly, “Guests, faculty, scholars,” anticipating Principal Connor’s traditional, pompous opening. After a bit of microphone feedback, he echoes her precisely, and Steve, smiling and shaking his head, angles himself to begin translating the words for Emma and Eric. Em places a hand on his after only three sentences.

“This speech - I think I can quote all of it now.”

Steve looks up at the stage. Principal Connor raises a finger in the air to emphasize a phrase. “That’s new,” Steve points out. Em rolls her eyes.

“Only one more time,” she says, hands weighty and mouth parted to emphasize the exhaustion of it all.

“Only one more time,” Steve repeats, the words coming slow and numbed on his fingers. He feels a little stricken and barely manages a smile for her.

The valedictorian and salutatorian speak one after the other. It’s obvious that they, at least, have written new speeches of their own: the words of triumph and hope, of lessons learned and more to come, might be cliche, but they are still somehow new. Even if he’s heard nearly the same sentiments at the girls’ graduations, for these kids, they are only just discovered.

When it is Nate’s turn to walk across the stage, he does it with a firm step and his family cheering loudly from the crowd. Steve, applauding hard, can’t even tell if he can pick them out in the audience, but he watches Nate raise his diploma in the air with a smile on his face and is certain that it’s meant for them. It is that same smile Steve knows so well, that peaceful, open-armed upturn of the mouth that Nate has displayed since childhood. Sometimes Steve thinks that Nate was born smiling like that, that this was the way he greeted the world on his first moment in it. He’ll never know if he’s right - that first smile belonged to someone else - but he has a lifetime of Nate’s smiles saved up and that’s something that not many people have.

As Melvin Casper is called next and they all sit back down, he and Peggy catch eyes, even down the row from one another. Despite the smile he gives her, she tilts her head, closes her eyes in an understanding blink which she holds for a beat longer than usual. I know, it seems to say, but also, How lucky have we been?

There’s a bit of a debate regarding the pictures. Nate fights his way through the crowd to find them with Emma and Peggy in the middle of a standoff over whether Eric should be included in the family photos and Steve and Drea are trying to make polite, distracting smalltalk with the man in question.

“Eric can take four, five,” Nate compromises calmly, “and then we’ll find someone to take some with him.” He searches around for a moment, then raises his voice. “Ricky! Hey, Rick, come over here for a minute.”

Ricky Blake, cap in hand, has been standing nearby, taking his own turn to greet Mrs. Krentz. He glances over at the Carters, at Nate and his beckoning hand, and excuses himself.

“What’s up?” he asks as he walks over, and Steve notices that he’s lost the awkward sort of meticulousness to the way he does the sign. He does it confidently now, casually, even if he doesn’t quite have the accompanying mouth movement down.

Eric actually has a good, artistic eye and arranges them all so that Nate is the center of the photos without throwing his shadow onto the rest of them.

When they’re finished, Steve goes to reclaim the camera.

“How are you, Ricky?” He puts out a hand to shake. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Mr. C.” A grin spreads across Ricky’s face as he grasps Steve’s hand enthusiastically. Even when Steve first met him, he was slightly bigger than average for a kid his age. Now Steve looks firmly up at him; he’s probably six and a half feet tall, and solid across. His graduation gown, unzipped in front by this point, has clearly been altered to fit him. He looks around. "Rose couldn't come?" He's always had a bit of a fascination with Rosie.

"No, she wasn't able to take the time off of work. She'll call tonight."

"Too bad."

“Did you decide on your plans for next year?” Steve asks. The last time they spoke, a few months ago, Ricky was still considering whether he wanted to end up at GW like Nate. He’d laid out the entire pro-con list while leaning against the counter watching Steve make carrot cake and waiting for Nate to finish getting ready for the concert they were going to.

“I’ll be staying in state,” Ricky replies, and though Steve is watching closely, his smile does not slip, the light in his eyes does not dim. “Maryland has a better education program anyway, for undergraduates at least.”

Steve can feel his eyebrows jump up. “Education?”

“Yeah.” Ricky glances back over his shoulder. “I was just telling Mrs. Krentz. I want to be an English teacher.”

“You’re going to be great at it,” Steve says with confidence. He doesn’t bother asking how Earl Blake took this news.

“Thanks, Mr. C.” Ricky looks down at the ground and then back up. He fiddles with the tassel on the cap he is still holding. He clears his throat. “I just—I wanted to tell you how much you helped me. You’re a good listener, and—um, it was important to me, to watch you with your kids or talking about your work. So, thank you. I just wanted you to know.”

For a moment, Steve can't say anything. Finally, he manages to speak. "I don't think I did much," he says with soft feeling, "but if I did, it was my pleasure."

There's always a bit of a wrench watching Ricky go back to rejoin his family. He's taller even than his father now, but there's still a little stiffening to Ricky's shoulders when they are near each other. Tim, still only just gaining some height of his own, shifts to stand beside his brother.

He thinks about how everyone still calls him Ricky, a child's name. He could have grown up into a Rich or a Richard by now, but he hasn’t. Perhaps he will never make the change. Or perhaps it just isn’t time yet: how easy it is to see Ricky and Nate and all the others on this day, at the top of a climb, and to think that it is all over. Maybe he should try to remember that it is only just beginning.

Peggy is leaning against his chest, his arm around her, before he even fully registers her there.

"We've done well, haven't we," she says, looking over at the children with pride, and he nods against her and kisses her hair.

"More to come?" he asks, a little waver in his voice, and she looks up at him, surprised.

"Of course," she says, taking his hand. "Always."

The custodial staff is beginning to come in to fold up the chairs. It is time to go.

"I want to finish telling Mom something," Drea says as they head over to the parking lot. "I'll ride with her."

Emma has her bag in Peggy's car, so she and Eric decide to join them as well. Steve squeezes Peggy's hand, still in his. She looks up at him fondly. Em's as stubborn as she is, and clearly trying out her version of exposure therapy. It's a good thing that Eric's a good sport.

"What about the man of the hour?" Peggy asks, looking over at their son. "Are you certain you don't want a nice dinner out?"

"I told you what I wanted," Nate says. Steve has the lasagna already prepared to go into the oven as soon as they get home. Every restaurant in town will be crowded tonight anyway, but that's not the reason Nate chose it. "And I'll ride over with Dad."

Peggy's parked farther in. She parts from Steve with one last squeeze of the hand and a "See you in a moment." Nate and Steve walk over to Steve's car together.

"How are you feeling?" Steve asks.

Nate takes in a deep breath of the night air. "Really good. Proud. Excited. Tired, a little, too." He looks over at his father. "How are you feeling?"

"Good. Proud of you." Steve repeats. "A little sad that this part of things is over."

"Sure," Nate says easily. "But there are other parts. And I want you there for all of those. We all do."

Steve looks over at him. “You ready for what comes next?” he asks.

Nate stretches his hands up toward the slowly darkening sky, fingers spread on one, diploma still held tightly in the other. “Course I am,” he says. The departing crowd is loud, all shouts and laughter and car engines, Nate’s voice quiet even in its surety, but Steve hears it anyway. He would hear it anywhere.

He looks at his youngest, taller than he is now by a half inch, maybe a bit more. It’s clear that Drea and Nate have height in their genes. His slim build, the lankiness of his limbs, just makes him look even taller, but he’s never seemed awkward with it. Nate always just puts one foot in front of the other, attentive about it but confident too, trusting that he’s placed himself on solid ground.

“Course you are,” he agrees. Under the beginnings of the slimming moon, he puts an arm around his son’s shoulders, pulls him close, and holds tight.

More chapters here

[saraschriefer]

SIRI HUSTVEDT Notes on Seeing

1 To look and not see: an old problem. It usually means a lack of understanding, an inability to divine the meaning of something in the world around us.

2 Cognitive scientists have repeatedly conducted the following experiment and, without fail, they come up with same results. An audience is asked to watch a film of two teams playing basketball. They are given a job to count the number of times the ball changes hands. I have done this, and one has to be very attentive to follow the motion of the ball. In the middle of the game, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the court, turns to the camera, thumps his chest and leaves. Half the people do not see the great ape. They do not believe that he was actually there until the film is replayed and, indeed, a gorilla strolls in and out of the game. Nearly everyone sees the gorilla if he is not given the assignment. This has been named inattentional blindness.

3 Writing at my desk now, I see the screen but this sentence dominates my attention. In fact, my momentary awareness that there is much around the words distracts me: the blue screen of the computer beyond the white edge of the page; various icons above and below; the surface of my desk cluttered with small Post-it squares which, when I turn my head, I can read, “Habermas 254-55”, “Meany et. al, implications for andrenocortical responses to stress” scrawled on pink paper (residue of arcane research); a black stapler; and countless other objects that enter my awareness the moment I turn to them. What is crucial is that I don’t turn to them. For hours every day, I have little, if any, consciousness of them. I live in a circumscribed phenomenal world. An internal narrator speaks words and dictates to my fingers that type automatically. There is no need to think about the connection between head and hands. I am subsumed by the link. Were another object suddenly to materialize on my desk and then vanish, I might well have no knowledge of either its appearance or disappearance.

4 Once, in an unfamiliar hallway, I mistook myself for a stranger because I did not understand I was looking in a mirror. My own form took me by surprise because I was not oriented in space. Expectation is powerful.

5 There are days when I think I see an old friend in the street, but it is a stranger. The recognition ignites like a match and then is instantly extinguished when I understand I am wrong. The recognition is felt, not thought. I can’t trace what created the error, can’t tell you why one person reminded me of another.  Was the old friend a subliminal presence in my mind on that particular day or was the confusion purely external—a jut of the chin or slope of the shoulders or rhythm of a walk?

6 We do not become anesthetized to horrible photographs of death or suffering. We may choose to avoid them. When I see a gruesome image in the newspaper in the morning, I sometimes turn away, registering in seconds that looking too long will hurt me. People who gorge on horror films and violent thrillers do it, not because they have learned to feel too little, but because they indulge in the limbic rush that floods their systems as they safely witness exploding bodies. It seems that these viewers are mostly men.

7 We feel colors before we can name them.  Colors act on us pre-reflectively. A part of me feels red before I can name red. My cognitive faculties lag behind the color’s impact. Standing in a room my eyes go first to the vase of red tulips because they are red and because they are alive.

8 My mother once told me about coming home to find our cat dead on the lawn. She saw the poor animal from many yards away, but she said she knew with absolute assurance that it was dead. An inert thing. An it.

9 Photographs of the beloved dead draw me in. I am fascinated. There is the good, dear face, one that changed over time.  It is the picture that preserves the face, not my memory, which is befogged by the many faces he had over the years. Or is it the single face that grew old?  Sometimes I cannot bear to look. The image has become a token of grief. And yet, there is nothing so banal as the pictures of strange families.  After my father died, I found Christmas cards with photographs of unknown people among his papers—happy families—grinning into an invisible lens. I threw them away.

10 Galvanic skin response registers a change in the heat and electricity passed through the skin by nerves and sweat during emotional states.  People in white coats attach electrodes to your hands and track what happens. When they show you a picture of your mother, your GSR goes up. Meaning in the body.

11 Is our visual world rich or poor? There are fights about this. People do not agree. Philosophers and scientists and other academics ponder this richness and poverty question in papers and books and lectures. Human beings have very limited peripheral vision, but we can turn our heads and take in more of the world. When I’m writing, my vision is severely limited by my attention, but sometimes when I let my eyes roam in a space, I discover its density of light and color and feel surprised by what I find. When I focus, say, just on the shadows here on my desk, they become remarkable. My small round clock casts a double shadow from either side of its circular base, one darker than the other, a gray and a paler gray. There is a spot of brilliant light at the edge of the darker oval. As I look, this sight has become beautiful.

12 Why is a face beautiful?

13 If an image is flashed too quickly to be perceived consciously, we take it in unconsciously and we respond to it without knowing what is happening. A picture of a scowling face I can’t say I’ve seen affects me anyway. Scientists call this masking. Blindsight patients have cortical blindness. They lose visual consciousness but not visual unconsciousness. They see but don’t know they are seeing. If you ask them to guess what you’re holding (a pencil) they will guess far better than people who are truly blind. Words and consciousness are connected. How much do I see of the world that never registers in my awareness? When I walk in the street, I sometimes glimpse a scene for just an instant but I cannot tell you what I have witnessed until a fraction of a second later when the puzzling image falls into place: that furry thing was a stuffed animal and a little boy was dangling it from his stroller. The lag again.

14 We are picture-making creatures. We scribble and draw and paint. When I draw what I see, I touch the thing I am looking at it with my mind, but it is as if my hand is caressing its outline. People who stopped drawing as children continue to make pictures in their dreams or in the hallucinations that arrive just before they go to sleep. Where do those images come from?  I dreamed grass and brush and sticks were growing out of my arm, and I got to work busily trimming myself with a scissors. I wasn’t alarmed; it was a job handled in a matter-of-fact way. If I painted a self portrait  with bushy arms, I would be called a surrealist.

15 Some people who go blind see vivid images and colors. Some people who are losing their vision hallucinate while awake. An old man saw cows grazing in his living room, and a woman saw cartoon characters running up and down her doctor’s arm. Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just before I fell asleep, I saw a little man speeding over pink and violet cliffs. Once I saw an explosion of melting colors—green, blues, reds, and then a great flash of light that devoured them all. Hypnogogic hallucinations. Freud said dreams protect sleep. At night the world is taken from us and we make up our own scenes and stories. When you wake up slowly, you will remember more of that human underground.

16 Deprived of sight, we make visions. Seeing is also creating.

17

There are things in the world to see. Do I see what you see? We can talk about it and verify the facts. Through my window is the back of a house. One of its windows is completely covered by a blue shade. But if I tell you I see a flying zebra you will say, Siri, you are hallucinating. You are dreaming while awake.

18 Sometimes artists can make a hallucination real. A painting of a flying zebra is a real thing in the world, a real thing to see.

19 Why do I not like the word “taste” when applied to art? Because it has lost its connection to the mouth and food and chewing. I don’t like the way this picture tastes. It’s bitter. If we thought about actual tastes, the word would still work. It would be a form of synesthesia, a crossing of our senses: seeing as tasting. But usually it is not used like that anymore so I avoid it entirely when I talk about art.

20 Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.

21 I am looking at a small reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman, which hangs in a room at The Metropolitan Museum here in New York.  It is a girl’s head and face. I say girl because she is very young. From her face I would guess she is no more than ten years old. When I look up the picture in one of my books on Vermeer, I see that there it is called Portrait of a Young Girl, a far better title. We should not turn girls into women too soon. She is smiling, but not a wide smile. Her lips are sealed. My impression is that she is looking at me, but I cannot quite catch her eye. What is certain is that she is answering someone else’s gaze. Someone has made her smile. She is not a beautiful child; it is her looking that is beautiful, her connection to the invisible person. There is shyness in her expression, reserve, maybe a hint of hesitancy. I think she is looking at an adult, probably the artist, because she has not let herself go. She looks over her shoulder at him. I have great affection for this girl. That is the magic of the painting; it is not that I have affection for a representation of a child’s head that was painted some time between 1665 and 1667. No, I feel I have actually fallen for her, the way I fall for a child who looks up at me on the street and smiles, perhaps a homely child, who with a single look calls forth a burst of maternal feeling and sympathy. But my emotion is made of something more; I remember my own girlhood and my shyness with grownups I didn’t know well. I was not a bold child and in her face I see myself at the same age.

22 In some of Gerhard Richter’s painted-over photographs, he painted over his wife’s face and parts of her body. He covered the bodies of his children, too, in snapshots of them as babies and growing children. In these gestures, I felt he was keeping them for himself, keeping the private hidden. Other times, he framed them with swaths of color, turning them into featured subjects. I love those pictures.

23 Mothers have a need to look at their children. We cannot help it.

24 Lovers have a need to look at each other. They cannot help it.

25 Several years ago a friend sent me a paper on mirror neurons. They were found in the brains of macaque monkeys. When one monkey makes a gesture, grabs a banana, neurons in his premotor cortex are activated. When another monkey watches the gesture, but doesn’t make it, the same neurons are activated in his brain. Human beings have them, too. We reflect each other.

26 Looking at pornography is exciting but loses its interest after orgasm.

27 Reading the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses when Molly Bloom is remembering is erotic because she gives permission, gives up and gives way, and this is always exciting and interesting because it is personal not impersonal. Isn’t it strange that looking at little abstract symbols on a white page can make a person feel such things? I see her in his arms. I am in his arms. I remember your arms.

28 When I read stories, I see them. I make pictures and often they remain in my mind after I have finished a novel, along with some phrases or sentences. I ground the characters in places, real and imagined. But I always remember the feeling of a book best, unless I have forgotten it altogether.

29 I do not usually see philosophy with some exceptions: Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche because they are also storytellers.

30 Some people cannot make visual imagery. They do not see pictures in their minds. They do not turn words into images. I didn’t know such a thing was possible until a short time ago. They see abstractly. They remember the symbols on the page.

31 “I see” can also mean “I understand.”

32 There is a small part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is crucial for recognizing faces. If you lose this ability your deficit is called prosopagnosia.  It happens that a person with brain damage looks at herself in the mirror, and believes she is seeing, not herself, but a double. It seems that what has vanished is not reason, but that special feeling we get when we look at our reflections, that warm sense of ownership. When that disappears, the image of one’s self becomes alien.

33 I look and sometimes I see.

[gwenbrightly]

Ninjago Jaya ~ Blanket Forts

Cross-posted from FF.net, because why not? Just a quick little Jaya oneshot taking place right after Skybound.

She can’t breath – can’t… Something is wrong… she feels like she’s dying. Like someone has thrown acid directly onto her. Her chest burns. In the distance, she can hear someone screaming her name. Sobbing. What’s going on? She’s gone numb… Why can’t she – It’s then that Nya wakes, sitting up, breathing so sporadically that she’s on the verge of hyperventilation. Just a dream. Just a dream… But, oh. Why does this have to be so hard? She's safe. Alive. The poison can’t hurt her anymore, and neither can that djinn. She knows that. But it doesn’t stop her from reliving every last sucky detail of what she faced less than a day ago (in fact, it’s not even midnight yet, so…). She almost… No, it’s best not to think about that… Maybe if she just. Doesn’t sleep? She supposes. But that’s not really a great option, cause then, she’ll be stuck up all night with nothing but her own thoughts to distract her. And she’s not sure she can handle being alone right now. She needs Jay. It’s funny, she thinks slipping from her bed, how she’s gone from actively avoiding the master of lightning, to being desperate to have him near her as much as possible. Love is weird like that. The hallway is dark, quiet. A stark contrast to the locations she’s spent the past few weeks. First, on the run, then stuck in jail, or on an island, then on the run again… Being home is nice. Sort of. Except for the lingering trauma from the past few days. Yeah, the sooner they can recover from that, the better. And for now, the others don’t need to know about how close everything came to being… The master of water quietly slides the door to Jay’s quarters. But… He’s not there. In fact, if his bed still being tidily made means anything, he hasn’t been in the room at all since they finally returned from Styx earlier. So, then… Where is he? Not the kitchen or living room, apparently, Nya discovers upon further searching. Sighing, she makes her way out into the deck – the only other place left to check. And it’s a good thing she does, as it turns out, cause there he is, looking out over the railings, posture tense. A light summer breeze plays with his ridiculously curly hair, making it an even bigger mess that it usually is. Honestly, it’s actually a pretty beautiful night. There are no clouds in sight; she can see millions of stars scattered across the sky.

“Couldn’t sleep?” She asks softly when she reaches him. Jay flinched slightly at the sound, before realizing that it’s her.

“Y-yeah… I couldn’t stop thinking about how…” He says so quietly she almost misses it.

“Me neither. I-even after I scrubbed every last inch of my body, it feels like the venom is still there. Like, I keep forgetting how to breath.. And remembering how much it hurt… And…”

“Oh, Nya…” He breathes, wrapping his arms around her. She bites back a sob as she snuggles into his embrace, reveling in the comfort it brings her. They rock back and forth for a few minutes, trying not to completely break down.

“I'm so sorry we had to go through all of… that. I-you died. It was horrible. And it was all my fault!”

“No. Don’t you dare try to take all of the blame for this. I mean, yes, you definitely made some really stupid choices, but if anyone’s gonna take the responsibility for what happened, it should be me. I started all of this a long, long time ago when I - ” Nya angles herself so that she can see his face.

“Nya, you don’t have to-” He begins to cut her off, but doesn’t get very far. She smiles softly, saying,

“Look. I chose you. I want us to work out, for us to be happy, but in order for that to happen, there are some things that need to be said. First of all, I come with baggage. A lot of it.”

“So do I.” He agrees, still not sure where the conversation is going. She bites back a chuckle.

“I’ve noticed. But… The thing is, before… During the whole fiasco with the perfect match machine? It was never about you. It was about me. For the record, I never stopped having feelings for you… I-I just…” Dragging Jay down beside her, she sinks onto the deck, leaning her back against the railing. It’s going to take awhile to really explain. To lay herself bare like she knows she needs to. Because Jay deserves the truth. They may as well get comfortable.

“I’m not the best at… Being open about my feelings. I’ve always hated feeling vulnerable, and back then? I didn’t really get why… Not until a lot later. When I was forced to become the water ninja, in fact. I was so awful at it, and it made me so uncomfortable – but it also helped me identify some of my self image issues.” She takes a deep breath, reaching for his hand as she continues, “So much of my life, I’ve felt like I had to prove something to someone. In Ignacia, Kai and I both had to prove that we could take care of ourselves. There wasn’t another option, unless we wanted to be saddled with some sketchy babysitter or sent to an orphanage. Then came Kai becoming a ninja, and, suddenly, I got it into my head that you guys wouldn’t take me seriously if you realized that I was samurai x.” She ignores the disgruntled look on the master of lightning’s face – she already knows now that it was a stupid sentiment, “So I didn’t tell you. Even though it probably just made things more dangerous. When Sensei started training me, I felt like I had to prove something there, too. That I was worthy of my mother’s element – even if I hated it and just wanted to go back to being a samurai, something that I was already good at. I got so frustrated that I tried to quite. And that’s when it first started to click. Because maybe some part of me thought that by doing all this impressive stuff, I could prove that it was a mistake for my parents to-to…”

“To leave you behind?” However Jay managed to guess her thoughts, she’s a little grateful she doesn’t have to say it herself.

“Yeah… So, anyway, back when we were still together, you were always so open and sweet about your feelings for me. And somewhere in the back of my head was that part of me that felt like I could never measure up to the person you thought I was and-”

“I'm so sorry! I didn’t realize… I-I only wanted to show you how much I cared. Because I thought that if you realized how special and loved you were… You wouldn't…" Leave me? The words aren’t spoken aloud, but the implication is there.

“I know. I just… I was feeling so overwhelmed, because I did want to be able to tell you how I felt about you – about the whole situation, but I kept talking myself out of it and thinking that if I just added a few boundaries until I reached the point where things felt safe again that… But then that stupid machine came into the picture, and I dunno? It scared me, because what if I was wrong? What if you didn’t really love me and left…”

“I would never.” He assures her, squeezing the hand clasping own. She brings her spare hand up to touch his cheek.

“You wouldn’t. And I was awful to let myself think that. Everything got so out of hand, and I had so many opportunities to fix things, but I didn’t. Even after the fighting calmed down. I didn’t wanna risk hurting you by ruining another relationship attempt. So, I stayed quiet. I came so close to confessing everything on Chen’s Island – but I didn’t have a chance to before we had to run off and save the world.”

“Will it ever not be that way?” Jay ponders. She shrugs.

“The world saving was very distracting. For a long time. Once I finally felt like I was starting to come to terms with what had been going on mentally, having the media get involved dealt me another blow. It was like the world no longer valued me as anything more than a token – an object to be won… But I didn’t want to completely give up on at least being friends with you, so I started trying to talk. But in the end, I just ended up pushing you away even more because I was so concerned about fighting my public image and not letting anyone else decide what I could be or do with my life. And to be honest? It freaked me out how sure you were that we were meant to be. I needed to regain control, and you ended up paying the price. And I can never tell you how sorry I am for being such a jerk! I died! You almost got killed several times because I refused to stop being stubborn and let someone else take the wheel, even for a moment! I-I…” A soft kiss prevents her from saying anything more. How is it that such a simple gesture has always had the power to relieve her pain?

“I forgave you a long time ago… And I never stopped caring about you, either. Even when I was fighting with Cole-which was a pretty dumb move in hindsight. We were both being idiots. And I’m sorry too...”

“I-Okay. Yeah, we kinda were… We’re a hot mess, aren’t we?” Nya exclaims, snuggling against her boyfriend. He smirks slightly.

“Well, we’re definitely hot!” She shoots him a look, which he pretends not to see, instead kissing her forehead.

“And we are a bit of a mess. But we’ve both grown so much. I really think we’ll make it this time…”

“Mm… I love you, Jay Walker.”

“And I love you, Nya Smith. Just don't ever die on me again. I don’t think I could handle that…” They both shudder, moving even closer together, as if afraid that they’ll be torn apart.

“I’m not handling it now…” Nya admits, “I’m sure sleep would help, but… That’s not happening any time soon…”

“Same here. So, what do we do, then?” Jay wonders. She doesn’t answer right away, but then, inspiration strikes her.

“When I was little, Kai used to build these super elaborate blanket forts whenever one of us was upset. Like ones that spanned entire rooms, and had lots of junk food hidden inside. And then, we’d stay up and watch as many movies as it took to calm back down. Do you think, maybe…?”

“Sure. If it’ll help. I’ll grab the cushions and blankets, you get the movies and snacks.” The master of lightning quickly agrees. It doesn’t take long for them to construct their fortress against one side of the deck, using every last spare sheet and pillow they own (and maybe snagging a few from Kai’s stash-that’s what siblings are for) . One and a half movies later, they finally give in to their exhaustion, falling asleep with their hands intertwined. Their joint presence keeps the nightmares at bay until Nya’s brother finds them the next morning. Though concerned about what exactly they’ve been doing all night, he’s honestly just relieved that they’ve finally figured things out. One less source of headaches for him, as long as they don’t go making a habit of public displays of affection like yesterday’s kiss… Which they probably will, but he can yell at them later. They do look awfully cute like that…

[jetthawks]

「 Nat Wolff. male. he/him. 」oh, her ? yeah, that’s Jethro “Jett” Hawkins. people are always talkin’ about how spontaneous & cunning they are, but i think they can be detached & uninterested. guess that’s why they’re known around rosewick as “Jetthawk The Witch Boy” he’s a twenty-three conman, and you can catch him over on the south side. rumour has it he is the famous Witch Boy —son of the local psychic and witch that was assassinated by the mafia (or maybe A)— and remains supposedly disappeared.

DEATH TW, MURDER TW, BLOOD TW.

Downtown. It is late at night in the low(est) sides of the  South and blinking neon signs can be read from afar on a brick wall: PSYCHIC. LOVE POTIONS. PALM READING. RECIPE FOR SUCCESS.

A black slick Mercedes parks at the front and four men get out. Three of them are brutes, most likely they don’t even know how to count. Then, another man, slightly older, but very well dressed and he shamelessly shows off a bunch of golden rings around his fingers.

A woman inside, sitting on a velvet red chair immediately recognizes the visitors and shoves her kid under a trap door. UH-OH, this is isn’t good. The men enter and Jett only hears loud voices, palms slamming on the table, a click and then a small, yet loud explosion.     THEN SILENCE.       Jett crawls out of the hideout as soon as he hears the tires screech away. His mother is on the floor, she isn’t moving and the planks of the floor absorb the blood through the little black spaces between them.   The boy was only SEVEN.

Nobody wants to be responsible of lil’Jett, there were no other family members known and everybody played deaf and blind to what happened that night; so good boy goes into the system.

Cliché story: foster homes suck, he is the little and weak one, he gets pushed around; naturally he is not gonna make it because of his strength, so Jett starts TRAINING HIS MIND INSTEAD. He becomes very observant, his thin frame helps him be quick and sly when he needs to and he discovers a particular affection towards poker cards when his caretaker and his friends fall asleep drunk mid-game. The kid sneaks into the kitchen to get some milk and to his foot stuck a Joker card, which he immediately adored.

The card became his token and little by little, snatching coins from under the couch and behind the fridge, Jett managed to buy his first deck of cards; of course they were old and a second-hand acquisition, but it was the first thing ever he got with his own money and OH BOY, he was excited.

Taking little trips very early when the caretaker was still asleep, Jett got the newspaper’s seller trust to take a peek at the Magic Corner, a magazine about basic magic tricks for kids and of course, he devoured all that had to do with cards and coins.

Time goes by and Jett is fourteen, he is tired of living under an iron fist and so, he packed his few things and left the house to never go back.   NOTHING AWAITED FOR HIM IN THERE AFTER ALL.

PERSONALITY & PRESENT

While Jett really enjoyed magic and overall, tricking people, his biggest passion was SURVIVING. Sometimes being a conman wasn’t enough, specially with all the competition around the city, so sometimes, he would have to end up doing some side-jobs like working on delivery ( of illegal stuff of course ) or sneaking in to make a little robbery for someone else. None of this made him proud, even though he always talks loud about his thief abilities.

Y’know, rough past and cynical attitude. Jett didn’t really know kindness through his life and it shows. He doesn’t trust easily and won’t do anything that doesn’t benefit him in some way. A True Neutral at heart.

Sleeping in shelters, couches or alleys, the boy is always on the look for his next gold and the next place he will use as temporary room. He hates feeling like a charity case and so, will rarely accept anything if he didn’t work for it or gained it in a bet.

Long ago, when his mother was still alive, he heard her talk through the phone about him “having the genes” , whatever that meant is still unknown to Jett , but he REALLY hopes is not an illness or something like that.

He is very observant, able to use the deductive method to read you up and down; is this result of his brains? His years facing the streets? Is he actually a psychic unlike his mother? Nobody knows, not even him, but THANKS GOD his good instincts, because that is what has kept him alive all these years.

Comrade of everyone and friend of no one, he travels so much that he hasn’t ever really bonded with someone and he says he doesn’t need it, attachments mean weaknesses and he ain’t up for having them.

At this point he doesn’t really have an objective in life, just the day-by-day life.

His biggest phobia is BLOOD. He can’t see it, smell it or feel it. He can even faint upon the sight of it because it recalls THE tragic event of his life.

He is a good kid, but always prone to cause some trouble if possible AND IF REWARDED.

He can do some America’s Got Talent card shit, but just not AS GOOD, otherwise he’d be famous and rich amirite?? But he’s in the process of learning. He can steal your wallet and watch without you noticing, though.

Doesn’t have a phone, but the park during the mornings is a good place to find him, otherwise, he can be pretty much anywhere, most likely running away from something.

HE MISSES HIS MOM. Lowkey hates happy families.

Idk there’s a lot and I could go on forever, so next thing!

PLOTS / CONNECTIONS ( warning, I suck at these )

Friends. He has never had them, it’s time for a change.

The Royal and the Commoner. I am a sucker for opposites. This can be either romantic or platonic!

People he has / is / will work for. Can either be shady stuff or an actual honest job! ( consider he officially just finished middle school, but is very very street smart and actually can be wise?? Has done research on his own about stuff he is interested about )

Mentors. Teaching them to do bad things? To do good things?

Bad influence and good influence. Self-explaining.

[jettpacks]

Nat Wolff + male + he/him + blood manipulation┊ ❛ ━ hey, is it just me or do you hear My Petersburg by Derek Klena playing in the distance ? oh, that’s just Jett Hawkins, a 23 year old conman. according to my sources, i heard he can be true neutral and is cunning, but also detached. that’s probably why they remind everyone of worn out sneakers, cheap halloween masks and callous hands so much ! anyway, whether or not they’re neutral towards the supers, crystalline city is keeping a close eye on them !

DEATH TW, MURDER TW, BLOOD TW.

Downtown. It is late at night in the low sides of the city (another city) and blinking neon signs can be read from afar on a brick wall: PSYCHIC. LOVE POTIONS. PALM READING. RECIPE FOR SUCCESS.

A black slick Mercedes parks at the front and four men get out. Three of them are brutes, most likely they don’t even know how to count. Then, another man, slightly older, but very well dressed and he shamelessly shows off a bunch of golden rings around his fingers.

A woman inside, sitting on a velvet red chair immediately recognizes the visitors and shoves her kid under a trap door. UH-OH, this is isn’t good. HE DOESN’T OBEY, he is worried about his mother and as soon as he gets out, the massacre start; his mother tries to shield him and he remembers seeing blood drops flying around and then he screamed and a hit on the head left him unconscious. Jett wakes up and two men PLUS HIS MOTHER are on the floor dead, completely drained of blood and staining the walls of the shop permanently.  HE... HE KILLED THEM, DIDN’T HE?   The boy was only SEVEN.

Nobody wants to be responsible of lil’Jett , there were no other family members known and everybody played deaf and blind to what happened that night; so good boy goes into the system.

Cliché story: foster homes suck, he is the little and weak one, he gets pushed around; naturally he is not gonna make it because of his strength, so Jethro starts TRAINING HIS MIND INSTEAD. He becomes very observant, his thin frame helps him be quick and sly when he needs to and he discovers a particular affection towards poker cards when his caretaker and his friends fall asleep drunk mid-game. The kid sneaks into the kitchen to get some milk and to his foot stuck a Joker card, which he immediately adored.

The card became his token and little by little, snatching coins from under the couch and behind the fridge, Jett managed to buy his first deck of cards; of course they were old and a second-hand acquisition, but it was the first thing ever he got with his own money and OH BOY, he was excited.

Taking little trips very early when the caretaker was still asleep, Jett got the newspaper’s seller trust to take a peek at the Magic Corner, a magazine about basic magic tricks for kids and of course, he devoured all that had to do with cards and coins.

Time goes by and Jett is fourteen, he is tired of living under an iron fist and so, he packed his few things and left the house and the city to never go back.   NOTHING AWAITED FOR HIM IN THERE AFTER ALL.

At first, he thought of heading towards Europe, an obvious choice for anybody who wanted to become a master of magic, but some bad decisions here and there caused him to run away to Crystalline City instead.

PERSONALITY & PRESENT

While Jett really enjoyed magic and overall, tricking people, his biggest passion was SURVIVING. Sometimes being a conman wasn’t enough, specially with all the competition around the city, so sometimes, he would have to end up doing some side-jobs like working on delivery ( of illegal stuff of course ) or sneaking in to make a little robbery for someone else. None of this made him proud, even though he always talks loud about his thief abilities.

Y’know, rough past and cynical attitude. Jett didn’t really know kindness through his life and it shows. He doesn’t trust easily and won’t do anything that doesn’t benefit him in some way. A True Neutral at heart.

Sleeping in shelters, couches or alleys, the boy is always on the look for his next gold and the next place he will use as temporary room. He hates feeling like a charity case and so, will rarely accept anything if he didn’t work for it or gained it in a bet.

Long ago, when his mother was still alive, he heard her talk through the phone about him “having the genes” , whatever that meant is still unknown to Jett , but he REALLY hopes is not an illness or something like that.

He is very observant, able to use the deductive method to read you up and down; is this result of his brains? His years facing the streets? Is he actually a psychic unlike his mother? Nobody knows, not even him, but THANKS GOD his good instincts, because that is what has kept him alive all these years. I’d say it is idiot’s luck.

Comrade of everyone and friend of no one, he travels so much that he hasn’t ever really bonded with someone and he says he doesn’t need it, attachments mean weaknesses and he ain’t up for having them.

He tends to accidentally guess stuff about people and to use humor as coping mechanism because he doesn’t allow himself to let the others see him hurt.

At this point he doesn’t really have an objective in life, just the day-by-day life.

His biggest phobia is BLOOD. He can’t see it, smell it or feel it. He can even faint upon the sight of it because it recalls THE tragic event of his life.

He is a good kid, but always prone to cause some trouble if possible AND IF REWARDED.

He can do some America’s Got Talent card shit, but just not AS GOOD, otherwise he’d be famous and rich amirite?? But he’s in the process of learning. He can steal your wallet and watch without you noticing, though.

Doesn’t have a phone, but the largest park during the mornings is a good place to find him, otherwise, he can be pretty much anywhere, most likely running away from something.

Recently he just escaped from the Dove prison and is pretty paranoid, scared and alone.

HE MISSES HIS MOM. Lowkey hates happy families.

Idk there’s a lot and I could go on forever, so next thing!

POWERS

Blood manipulation. He is not keen with it. While his mother tried to train him into it, he never had much of a chance to do something about it and after the horrible experience, he just decided to shut it down for good. His power exploded sometimes in moments of absolute fright or anger, causing his targets to get VERY low pressure or their blood to boil, things like that. Unknowingly to him, he has been using his power on himself to have a better resistance when running or doing parkour.  HE HAS WOKEN UP COVERED IN BLOOD MORE THAN ONCE and he doesn’t know why (possible connection right here!) and the situation terrifies him. While under a calm mood he cannot control anything bigger than a rat, let’s see what happens when he gets upset!

PLOTS / CONNECTIONS ( warning, I suck at these )

Friends. He has never had them, it’s time for a change.

The Royal and the Commoner. I am a sucker for opposites. This can be either romantic or platonic!

People he has / is / will work for. Can either be shady stuff or an actual honest job! ( consider he officially just finished middle school, but is very very street smart and actually can be wise?? Has done research on his own about stuff he is interested about )

Mentors. Teaching them to do bad things? To do good things?

Bad influence and good influence. Self-explaining.

Someone that has been using him for his power??

He likes hanging out in the universities and even sneaking into giant classes to pass the time even though he hardly understands a thing.

Let’s brainstorm!

[ventiluvr]

Meaning of colors

au where Yoongi was born blind, the kind no laser can fix. One day when he heard someone step closer, his blindness fades.

Yoongi had always been confused when people associated colors with emotion. Why is red 'fiery'? Why is blue 'sadness'? All he had seen in his life was black. Ebony black, no other colors. What did black mean? "Are you seriously asking that? Hahaha it means you're evil! You're not innocent! Do you think you're innocent Yoongi?" The kids would always tease him when he asked that question. He wished throughout his life that he could just see the color white. To wash his darkness away.

On the other side of the school, there's a boy. Kim Seokjin was his name. The middle of the spotlight, the whole school knows about him. Looks? Check. Heart? Check. Attitude? Check. Everyone wanted him as a best friend or boyfriend. He himself knows his perfection as well. Going around confident in a hot pink jacket, sending hand kisses to make girls (and guys) squeal, admiring himself in the mirror.. you name it. He is the color of white. The spotlight.   

On a moody, drizzling day, Seokjin happened to stumble on a remote corner of the school. A playground, yet there was nobody. Well, there was nobody but one person. A boy with dark hair and pale skin, sitting on the swing back-faced towards Seokjin. He was sitting in the rain, and looked almost unaware that it's raining at all. Seokjin could almost sense an aura of serenity around the boy. He looked so much at peace, Seokjin didn't want to bother him. Yellow-green. He left the area with the color of confusion.

He saw the kid again. This time the sky was shining blue, the sunlight hitting his black hair, making it look brownish. Seokjin found himself staring at the boy once more. "Dude that kid is weird.." "Yeah his eyes are like completely white. Looks like a ghost" His friends spoke.  Seokjin decided to cut in, giving each person a hand chop to the neck.  "Dude I'm serious! That kid has issues-" "So is he blind?" "-Yeah." "Why doesn't he get laser surgery?" "Said he did and didn't work or something" That's weird. 

"Then I'm sure My looks will cure him •ᴗ•!" His friends looked at him like he was an idiot. "Dude even surgery couldn't fix it what makes you think-" "Don't underestimate the powers of my handsome looks!!" Adjusting his round glasses, he steps closer to the boy.

Yoongi sat on the swing alone, the only place he knew where he could be friends with the birds. He smells the warm spring, feels the rays on his skin, hears the chirping of his friends, feeling a little thirsty without his water bottle. As usual, he wished for a fifth sense. To see his little friends, see the swing he was sitting on, see the plants around him. To see colors, that was all Yoongi could wish for. He wished in that moment, that someone, anyone, could be his light; could be the white to his blackness. 

Suddenly, as if he was heard, the darkness began to fade. Yoongi's heart began to race, his mind going into a panic. He had never felt like this. At that moment, he heard a pair of sneakers walk closer towards him. The closer this person got, the more his darkness faded. He could also hear.. squeals? Yoongi didn't know why, but he couldn't be bothered about it then. All Yoongi could focus on was.. brightness, light. Is this white? Is this the color of innocence? Is this the white that Yoongi had been wondering about his whole life? 

After awhile, the whiteness begins to fade, and colors filled the space. The first thing he could see were the red flowers he held in his hands. Yoongi had to feel around for them earlier, but he was really seeing it. He could see the flower. He doesn't know what color it is, but it's vibrant. Next the blue pebbles on the ground sharpened in his vision. But before he could register anything else, an object with 2 round frames and extending hinges was shoved on his face. The bent temples rested nicely on his ears. Surprised, Yoongi looked up. He looked up to a sight indeed.

"I knew the glasses would fit you." The boy's face softens into what Yoongi guessed was a smile. Yoongi should really be looking around and taking in all the new colors, but he his eyes were fixed on the gorgeous human being in front of him. Pink, his cheeks were. 

The boy looked at Yoongi confused.  "I thought your eyes were supposed to be white? Did they lie to me.."  "White? Is that the color eyes are supposed to be?" Yoongi responded  "Uh, no. It's supposed to be black"  "Oh.." His face fades into a frown. Eyes really do reflect your soul

"Wait.. you can see? Weren't you blind?" "I-I don't know, once you came I could... see" It was that moment it hit Seokjin; the nonsense he spouted earlier came true.

Yoongi wasn't sure when, but this boy, named Seokjin, eventually sat down on the next swing and started a conversation. He didn't seem to judge that Yoongi was born blind. In fact, he shared the newly-discovered world with him, teaching him the little wonders of his universe. If Yoongi had to associate the feeling he had now with a color, it would be orange, with hints of red. 

After a long while, Seokjin had to return to classes. "Keep the glasses on you, it looks good." He said as he walked away. "Wait.." Yoongi reached out his hand as his vision of Seokjin's back faded into darkness once more. He didn’t turn back.  

It shouldn't even be a surprise. Of course, it was only temporary. He doesn't deserve any of that happiness. Maybe Seokjin won't even come back anymore. Hell, maybe this whole day was just a dream. If that's the case, he wished he could wake up soon; to darkness, his only friend.

"Yoongi.. Yoongi are you there?" Yoongi opened his eyes to something waving up and down in front of him. It was the next day. He looked up to see Seokjin smiling down at him once more. See..? He could see again. "Were you sleeping? lol" "You came.." "Yeah of course. I like talking to you." "Why..? I'm not very interesting" "More interesting than my friends at least," He says, sitting down on the same spot as the previous day. "you don't talk to me because of my reputation. I feel like we're having a genuine conversation." "Reputation..” “Yeah? I’m a bit on the popular side of the school y’know.” “But.. am I to be trusted?"

"Why would you say that?" Seokjin asked, surprised. "...I've always been told that black meant impurity and everything bad. But that's all I see throughout my life. Am I really that undeserving? What did I do?" Seokjin stayed quiet for a moment. Yoongi could see he was pondering his next few words.

"..Well you know how they say someone's soul reflects in their eyes?" "Yeah..?" "Your eyes are naturally white, y'know." "What?" "I saw you from a distance earlier. Has nobody ever told you your eyes are white? It only seems to become black when I'm around" It hit Yoongi then, that no one ever told him his eye color was the color of innocence. The color he so desired, it was in his eyes all along. "And being your friend of one day- (he said that rather proudly) I can vouch that you are definitely deserving of everything good."

Seokjin watched as Yoongi bowed his head, staring at the floor. For the first time, he saw Yoongi smile. "..You can tell me anything you want, I'll listen. A small token of appreciation for being my friend, I guess" Seokjin decided to slip in. Yoongi looked up at him with soft, glistening eyes. In a soft whisper, "Don't leave me... I go blind when you leave." "..Oh? That's simple. Sure!" "...Isn't it selfish?" "Not really.. I don't have anywhere to go anyway. I'd rather talk to you, who makes me feel alive." "Oh.." He's pink again.

Seokjin stood and stretched his hand out to Yoongi. He stared at it before looking up at him, adorably confused. "Well? You need me to stay with you right?" Seokjin didn't wait for a response before pulling on Yoongi's hand, interlocking their fingers. "Let's go!" Yoongi didn't bother resisting him. In fact, this was rather nice. What is this feeling? Yellow, red, orange, it doesn't matter. Yoongi seems to be genuinely happy for the first time in his life. That's it, smile, Yoongi. You deserve it.

All Yoongi had seen in his life was black. Until one day, his key to the colorful world came to pick him up, and showed him a universe that was more than just one color. The world may now be a pretty rainbow of colors, but to him, Seokjin will always be more colorful than anything.

[queencryo]

@silly-go-round is asleep right now.

i guess i should make a journal for the past few days. as good a time as any. as AMY. heh. cuz shes super good and amazing. heh.

uh...... lessee.... for the two days after the last journal i just. hung out at the house while silly worked. i managed to not keep her in bed and make her late the second day. hung out a lot, watched more adventure time, worked on my tumblr filter script (lie. i judt ran it on my main. 200 posts / day is a bitchhhh) , played a good amount of ds3 (to pointof tetris effect at a couple points the nexg few days)

also did some like. helpful tasks. washed some dishes (undone quicklu, but. eh). not enough, mot as much as i shouldve, but... i tried i guess.

alao we've like. said the same thing at the dame time a Lot while ive been here and its like. nice. its really nice. same wavelength! i feel so close go her.

oh! alxo night before last we went grocery shoping. got food for prolly enoygh for the two weeks, but i guess we'll see. also a cheesecake! it was.... echausting. hily fuck it was exhaysting. jesus. the store was big and it took like 3 hours and $200 to get everything but. we did itttt.

we both mentionef that like. it felt nice to like. have a full fridge 2gether. cuz. it feels like were gonna have a futjre togetjer? u know. like that is. i love her a lot and it feels good for this to feel like a home for a little while. we hope that it can be so in tbe future.

so YESTERDAY she finally FINALLY taught me how to play magic the gathering. it was. a long time coming. but she brought me into the store and like. sat me down w some regulars and had me play commander. i played moooostly her snake deck, so like.that was fun!! i kept talki g about how i woulda gotten lorescale Coatl up to 39/39 and flying, had i like. gotten q more turn. but on that game D was running a mill deck that was. extremely long to play (that game took like ~>2 hours ugh), and was very bery annoying, so i didnt get to actually do that.

but it was fun! part of me wants to blog everything, but i dont think i will.

im glad to be able to use silly's decks, bc i dont think i want to make my own. im considering making a cheap angel deck or smth, but we'll see if yhat actually ends up happening.

i also met her girlfriend Iz, who is sweet. i played magic w her fkr a while, which was fun! she was runni g an annoying mono black deck (i kkow all these... these Terms and Words now, its incredible...)

shes sweet and i think i like her. dunno if enough to date yet (which makes me Partially regret flirting w her so much in the groupchat but. hey)

talked w her some, mostly about magic, hung out while silly closed the store, pet her cat, silly discovered that cyddling w TWO girlfriends is very nice (not rhat id know ;;;;;;;), was good times. i dont think im as comfy w izzy physically yet as i may have implied in messages, which hopefully wull be rectified by the message i just sent her (my initial physical comfort with people varies, it depends very much on the person)

skip forward, me and silly make a pizza at home cuz were fuckin tired, she admonishes me for not eating for uh... like 11 hours or smth (that mornings bagel was VERY good tho omg), but adderall, so like... meh.

uh... i dont think anything else on yesterday...

today! we waaamted to go to the store at like. 2. but in actuality got there at like! 330.

i went back to sleep cuz im a losenerd, and she. made this breakfast casserole thing. which hse put into a bagel abd brought to me bc i guess shes the best person on the entire earth oh my GOD. jesus

skip... apparently she knows maximum the hormone and doesnt like them very much... fair fair. (cause for xeath)

came to the store agai. tofay. it was fun and good. iz didnt come in today, do played some more with regulars. played w what is apparently called a blink deck, which revolvea arounf exiling cards then immediately bringing them back, to capitalize on "when this enters battlefield, do smth" cards. neat!

i DID actually manage to win today!!! the victory was. literally handed to me, but like. thats fine! i was playing silly's uhhh... elintor the masked? idr her name :( the mask planewalker! deck, which. i had SO much land, most of wh8ch was enchanfed. meaning it could be tapped then untapped w eljntor's thing, then tapped again for DOUBLE MANA. i mean. i had like 9/turn even b4 that but. BUT. i also had. i think i drew 3 creatures total. bit anyway. i had the white card that gave me a life whenever a creature was put on tge board (and also, w another enchantment, made all non-me creagurss and enchantments enter the board tapped, so. nya). so... rob had a card what dealt one damGe to all other players whenevr he puta. creature on the board. then he played united forces, which lets each player commit X mana to create X 1/1 soldier tokens on all players' boards. so. we made 28 white soldier tokens on everyones board. this killed perry, ans gave me, uh. 56 life (84 - 28). i then attacked ron for 28 w the soldiers, and drew sacred mesa, which lets me sacrifice 2 mana (1 any color, 1 white, but i had so many cards that said "this land can instead be tapped for 2 of any color, so like. ueah) to create a 1/1 flying pegasus token. so i. ended the game w 44 white 1/1 tokens. goblins get fucked.attack w my ssoldiers cuz his were tapped, so brought him down to 7 life. i didng catch what he did w the enchantment, but i think he said he like. put a copy of every creature on my side of the board onto his board, and then. cipying that enchantment 3 times. so. holy FUCK. wow. BUT those all came in tapped and i had 18 flying yokens, so. i still won! yay!!!! i won a game of magic!!!!!

goblin decks scare me. stop running krenko you fucks. exponential goblins goddamn

silly would come by every so often and like. look over my dhoulder and say "oh that was dumb whyd u use fabricate for thay" which is fair. but also god i love her. (i used fabricate for a mana generator insteaf of lightning greaves. whateverrrr) i love her so much dear god. i wish i coukd help w the store more, but. on the same time i also. dont enjoy working. so. maybe part time.

hm. what ekse. oh yeah i kove her so much.

by the end of the night it was just. me and her, rob and the two regulars i started out llaying w yestwrday. theyre sweet, i like them. theyre married. the dude calls me honey smtimes, which is. kinda weird? dunno how i feel about that. i guess fine. its gender-nice, but still a lil uncomfy. otherwise i like em fien, though. but they talked abouy moving into sillys apt. so thats cool!! better than her current (awful, terrible, lazy / horrifically depressed / manchild roomate, who doesnt clean ever) roomate. i was reading the monster of the week gamebook thruout, which i... bought, for some reason. idk. oh also i wanna make a fallen angel divine, because im... predictableeee. also a conspiracy thworist whos just a trans woman w way too much time and really weird hobbies (throwing knices, butterfly knife, net friends, etc). also a spooky. i speny like. 3 hours reading thr7 the monster of the week book while ppl played magic around me. i kinda wish i hadnt bought it, but hey! its neat c:

oh, also i didnt take adderall today. i dont think it went toooo bad, i think i like. was meaner and less thohghtful with what i said, but like. i guess thats better than feared. i took a caffeine pill (200mg) at ariund 10 which is. prolly why im wide awake right now. i regret doing that, sincr from what shes said tmos gonna be big)

she says we gotta be at her moms by 4, for reasons she WONT TELL ME. bit she says its part of one of her plans, i ASSUME the romantic one? im kind of afraid that ill like. no-sell it unwillingly because im abroke and soulless human being, but uh. i guess rhats thw risks we take to be alive :shrug: im excited. were also going to a shop (diff one) tmo, which im Quite excited for, as ive only been in similar shops by accident before. also doing laundry!!! which is important ^_^

oh ysah. so we got white castle on the way home. its. yeah she was r8ght. mediocre-at-best sliders. onions are bad.

we also made a pizza. whifh i ate most of. i overate. sob.

she fell asleep halfway thry an episode of nailed it. cant blame her, she seemed really tired. i hipe i dont disturb her rwst. and i feel so utterly blessed thay i can be around her.

ih!! i also fell down the last few staies ywstersay. bruised my arms, but otherwise fine. it was. idk, it is nice to knoe that others worry fir me and like me. she was very concerned. i love her.

[dreadhaus-literature]

{A/N} Oh, boy.

I...want to write, but I am empty, and trying to drag myself out of the hole I was pushed into, so I don’t have any emotions to put to paper. And because I’m such an emotional person, if my heart’s not in it, no matter how badly I want to write, I can’t. I started a good prompt today and I desperately want to finish, it’s like an itch I need to scratch, but I opened it up and knew I’d be forcing if I tried so I just proofed it and then closed it again. I’ll try tomorrow, when the world is a little less weird.

No, that isn’t a Weird World reference. I’m too strung out to be funny, go find Wade or Peter for that. /half-flops her hand in some random direction.

I don’t even know why I came to talk, here. I guess because I’m struggling with feeling like I need to do be doing something--you know, that mood I find myself in, 24/7. But I’m recalling what Monica sent me that time, about the reason why we feel like that, and what to do if we do--how to manage feeling like all my time has to be productive. I don’t have it in me to be productive, today. I feel like hammered shit, like I discovered something about myself today--as I get better, physically and emotionally, it also makes me more susceptible to really bad low points. I’m probably explaining this like an asshole because I’m all over the place, but what I mean is, I haven’t had a fat day in a really long time, I don’t really get those anymore. I have my dysmorphic days, where I can’t tell what I look like in the mirror, but I don’t have straight up fat days anymore, like I used to have pre-surgery. So when my body was called into question today, I fucking freaked out. I have been doing so well I thought I was past all that shit, all those days of being touted like the token family fatass, and my body dysmorphia was sounding the FUCKING ALARM, like my brain was that episode of Spongebob where he was burning everything in his brain now about fine dining and breathing. All the sudden everything was thrown into question and how I was feeling like I was better, that I looked better??? Nope. Couldn’t possibly be true, because other people, who can see me, say otherwise.

It’s apart of a larger issue that I never trust anything I say, like I can’t affect or change my own mind because I was raised to believe other people know better and matter more than I do, so when the comment was made, the only thing I heard was, “You’re fat and you’re a giant and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

I cried for hours. Hours. I’d be fine and then I’d start crying. Got to the point my eyes hurt and I had such an awful headache I couldn’t stay sitting up anymore. I stopped crying after I got up, but I don’t know how I feel, now. I still feel weird being around--oh, yeah, which was another huge issue. I’m noticing when things like this happen, now, I start to want to disappear. Not necessarily suicide, I literally want to not have ever existed and I do not want to exist. I don’t want anyone to know I’m alive or around, I don’t want anyone to talk to me or look at me, and it’s about the only time I pull away from my FL because I cannot stand the thought of one of those perfect people knowing my giant disgusting ass exists. That’s what it is. It isn’t about other people, it’s about myself and that I feel so fucking gross the thought of anyone seeing me makes me want to throw up. I was sick to my stomach when I logged into the Client. Even after I got up from lying down and started talking and was present on Client I was feeling squirmy and shy at the thought of being around where people can see me.

I’ve said this before but I’m honestly terrified another person is gonna look at me and say what I’ve been hearing all my life, already. If my family is fine to tell me these things and say these things there’s literally nothing stopping anyone else from feeling or thinking the same thing. I honestly do not know how many more times I can be made to feel this way and walk away from it. And like I said, as I move on from my pre-surgery body and I start to get better, these moments hit me harder and harder than they used to. It’s like, if you have a bruise and you get poked in it, yeah it hurts but it’s a bruise, you expect it to. Turn that bruise into a gunshot and then let it heal, let it scar over, then get shot in it again, through the scar tissue. It’s gonna hurt worse because you thought that shit was over and done with--nope. Joke’s on you.

And maybe that joke really is my own dumbass fault. I mean, I don’t think I’m a stick or anything. I don’t want to be a stick. I do wish I was shorter but whatever, I’ll She-Hulk it up because I can’t cut off my fucking legs, but I guess this is just what I look like. This is just me. I guess I just didn’t like being reminded that the me I see, that I want to be, is not what some other people see.

Reality is fucking disgusting and I hate it.

Ah, there it is. I want to cry, again. Today fucking blows, man. It really bothers me that I’m pretty much fine any given day but I’m surrounded by family who have always seen the need to grab my ankles and drag me down for one reason or another. I was doing just fucking fine, I haven’t had any issues lately and then this shit happens and I lose an entire day to hiding because I would rather die than have to be a human being. And it’s not even my own fault. I’d be fine on my own, I’m normally an annoying ray of sunshine but I guess today I’m an annoyingly silent hermit crab.

Gonna try not to do the stupid thing I sometimes do when I’m upset and stay up for no reason. I think it’s late enough for me to dose up and go to sleep, and I’m going to take advantage of that.

Today sucked but tomorrow won’t.