#the way it was horribly cloudy all morning

[jarkonian]

Traveled to Dallas to see the total eclipse and my GOD it was *fantastic*

[florencemtrash]

The Shadowsinger & The Inkbird: Chapter Ten

Azriel x Day Court Librarian Reader

Summary: Y/n's clairvoyance is a gift from the Mother, but it feels more like a curse. With the power to gain knowledge through touch alone, Y/n holes herself up in The Alcove and hopes her powers and parentage will remain a secret. But things will change after the Summer Solstice ball and a chance encounter with a certain Shadowsinger.

Warnings: Mentions of cannon-typical violence. Azriel and Y/n have a late night conversation. Fluff and other stuff.

The Shadowsinger & The Inkbird: Masterlist

Masterlist of Masterlists

“Gwyn says hi by the way.” 

Azriel choked on his coffee, bitter flavor rising in his throat. Nesta sauntered into the kitchen, cool eyes glaring at the back of his head. Your familiar silhouette was nowhere to be found. 

Not here. His shadows whispered. With Rhys.

“Calm down you idiot.” Nesta’s voice dripped with unrestrained contempt as she poured herself a cup and sat. His tan skin glistened with sweat after his morning training session, inky tattoos splashing across his bare chest and trailing over his shoulders, down his back, and up to his neck. In the cloudy afternoon light it was difficult to tell where his shadows ended and where his tattoos began. 

“Y/n’s not here. You’ll have to walk around half-naked some other time.” 

Azriel winced. “That isn’t what—”

Nesta brushed him off with a wave of her hand, eyes narrowing over her mug. Azriel felt like a bug pinned down under a microscope. A crushed butterfly about to hang.

“How is Gwyn doing?” he asked gingerly, casually. 

“She’s fine. Believe it or not, the world did not end when you broke up with her.”

Again he flinched. “I’m sorry, Nes,” he whispered rather pathetically. 

“I’m not the one you need to apologize to. But you already know that.” 

There seemed to be no shortage of people he needed to apologize to: Elain, Mor, Emerie, Gwyn, even Lucien — especially Lucien. His cheeks burned to think of the absolute mess of things he’d made. Feyre had been the quickest to forgive him for the debacle with Elain and Gwyn. But as Cassian had mentioned at dinner, there was a reason everyone was staying away from the River House, and the reason was him. 

Two years ago he’d challenged Lucien Vanserra to a blood duel for Elain’s hand. It had felt so right at the time, so obvious: three sisters for three brothers. But it was only when their deaths had loomed over her head with shocking reality that Elain realized what a horrible mistake she’d made. The mistake they’d made together. 

“Call it off,” she’d commanded him, blocking Lucien’s bloody, heaving body. The son of Autumn’s sword had been kicked away, scraping across the rock with an eerie scream and disappearing over the cliff edge. But Elain had stayed, soft brown eyes begging, “Do this and I will never forgive you. What we did… it wasn’t right. It was a mistake.”

A mistake, she’d called it. Years of silent longing and bare bone brushes of their hands in dark hallways. All a mistake. Those words had haunted him. They’d chased him into Gwyn’s kind arms where he once again mistook the friendship he felt towards her as love and broke her heart in the process. Add that to his lackluster response to Mor’s coming out and… well he had a lot of work ahead of him. 

He hoped he would be forgiven in time, but that didn’t mean he’d twiddle his thumbs until that day came. He scoured Prythian’s publishers for new releases of adventure, mystery, and romance books — the raunchier the better — and they showed up every month at Cagniv Library like clockwork. The priestesses still thought it was part of a trade bargain with the Day Court. He’d sent Elain and Lucien plenty of letters and gifts, but either they weren’t being opened or they weren’t bothering to respond. He wouldn’t blame them either way. As for Mor and Emerie, they were gone with the wind, too busy infiltrating lands and enjoying an extended honeymoon on the continent to bother with him. 

That cold stillness in Nesta’s eyes transformed into pity. It was hard not to be reminded of her own failures when she looked at him. Seeing him angry. Watching him crawl into the darkest corners of himself and burn every bridge he crossed had been a shock to Nesta’s system. A plunge into freezing waters that brought pain and clarity. 

She sighed, rubbing her temples. “Just give them time, Az. They’ll come around. If they did it for me, they’ll do it for you.” “I think our situations are rather different.” 

“I don’t.” 

“You didn’t try to kill anyone.”

She grimaced. “I came close.”  

He stayed silent for a long while. He washed his cup. He dried it. He put it in the cupboard. 

“Can you—can you please not tell Y/n?” he begged. His voice was small and quiet. He’d been a fool in the past and made terrible decisions in the name of love. Mor, Elain, and Gwyn. They’d all lived more in his mind than in his heart — people he could never fully grasp, and therefore never lose. They’d been safe. Easy. 

It didn’t feel that way with you. You felt solid and warm, even if he’d only touched you once. You felt more real to him than anyone else. You felt like someone he could actually have. Which meant he could lose you before you’d even become his to lose. 

“You can’t keep her in the dark forever. Not about your history, not about the bond. If you’re going to learn anything from your brothers, learn that.”  

“I know,” he whispered. “I just want to get it right this time.” He had to get it right this time. “I want her to fall in love with me because she wants me, not out of some sense of obligation. I want…” I want to be worthy of her.  

Nesta shook her head, a laugh escaping despite her best attempts to stifle it. Azriel looked at her like she’d gone mad.

She giggled again. “It’s funny. For a male as handsome and desirable as you, you have the worst fucking luck with women. The Mother must have a twisted sense of humor.” 

Maybe she did. But Azriel was still enough of a romantic to hope that he had learned from his mistakes, and that his bad luck would end with you. 

You shoved the notebook off Rhysand’s desk, loose papers flying out like uncoordinated doves. 

“I told you notetaking was a futile effort.” The High Lord didn’t even look at you, too busy searching for invisible dirt beneath his manicured fingernails.

You groaned and dropped your head against the book he’d handed you two hours before. 

Rhysand had to smile at your frustration. It was a wholly different experience teaching you magic compared to teaching Feyre. With Feyre, her greatest barrier had been her lack of knowledge (and her hatred of him at the time). She’d been thrust into the world of fae without preparation, but it had left her malleable and adaptable. It was like teaching a newborn how to walk — a mind that could absorb more because it knew so little.

But you knew too much. You could spout off magical theory at the drop of a hat. You were a pedagogical master with a thousand mnemonics to your name. You were the first to wake in all of Velaris, making your way to the Library before bodies could fill the streets, and you only returned when the crowds had either turned in for the night or gone out to drink until daybreak. You swallowed every history book on the Night Court, Clairvoyants, daemati, and death gods until you felt untethered from the earth — until your mind began to float outside your body, buzzing with thoughts that never went away. 

But none of that mattered. Your power was an immovable object that couldn’t be controlled by logic or studying. 

You shoved against that power now.

“Good,” Rhysand nodded, leaning against the window, “You’re getting better at it.” 

He lingered in your mind, hovering over the depths of your emotions and memories like a bird ready to break water. It had taken some time before you felt comfortable with the intrusion. Your first lesson together, Rhysand’s presence in your mind had made it impossible to focus. Panic had seized your mind and your body until you could do nothing more than brace your hands and feet against the chair’s leather upholstery. You could have sworn you saw a head of silver hair to your left. The gentle pitter patter of rain had sounded like dripping blood. 

It wasn’t like that anymore. Henna had left you with a useful skill — you could wind your consciousness around Rhysand and keep him there, suspended in that indescribable space where your thoughts lay so he could do no more damage than you permitted him. 

Through your mind he felt the narrowing of your power. You imagined it like a blanket wrapped around your body, suffocating but familiar. It was this power that laced your skin and made contact with others so hard. You imagined the fabric shortening, creeping up your arms and legs, curling around your torso and squeezing like a snake. Inch by inch you tightened it around you, burying it within your chest instead of carrying it openly like a wound. 

You held a music book between your hands — Nyx’s to be exact. The little Lordling showcased a certain aptitude for the piano his father could only dream of, and being as young and protected as he was, the worst kind of emotion imbued within its pages was agitation. You could hear one of the ballads written within it as clearly as if Nyx was sitting beside you plucking out the melody. 

Tighter. Tighter. Tighter. You swallowed your power. Pulled what was outside inwards. Slowly but surely the music faded away until the book was as all books should be — silent. 

Sweat beaded your brow. This was the most difficult part — not tuning out the music, but keeping the volume at zero. 

Rhysand checked his watch. Waited. Checked it again. 

You lasted thirty minutes before your power burst out along your skin once more like a thousand prickling needles. You shuddered, half-disappointed, half-grateful that you could hear the melody again.

Rhysand clapped his hands, slow and proud. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room was dangerously close to five bells. Rhysand nodded. 

“Perfect timing. We’re done for today.” 

“I can go for longer,” you pleaded. 

“I know you can.” Rhysand pushed off the wall, polished leather boots gleaming. He was wearing his Illyrian leathers this time, the scent of wind still clinging to his skin after a visit to the northern war camps.

Old Illyria lasted thousands of years. The clans used to flow up and down the Steppes, following the tundrabeast that lay claim to those mountainous regions and were said to speak for their god Ramiel — Starbreaker, Night Herder — after whom the mountain is named. They don’t move with the cold winds anymore, even if they’ve kept their names: Ironcrest, Bloodborn, Windhaven, Seawhip, Hawkseed, Timberbane, and a dozen others. And they don’t make sacrifices, although the Blood Rite might be a close—

Rhysand rapped his knuckles on the desk to grab your attention and splayed his fingers wide. “I also know that the moment I dismiss you, you’ll scamper off to the Library to work until you can’t see straight.” 

You shifted in your seat. “I like it there.”

“That’s besides the point. If you keep going at this pace you’ll burn out. Then you won’t be able to help anyone. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” 

Your eyes widened ever so slightly. You hadn’t thought he’d noticed. “I know what it feels like to burn out and it’s not going to happen anytime soon. I promise.” 

Rhysand suppressed the urgent need to roll his eyes as you gathered your things and walked out the door. “And here I thought I worked too much,” he muttered beneath his breath. 

You carried Henna’s journal tucked within your new Librarian robes — black with ivory detailing and wide sleeves that narrowed at the wrists. You kept a hand on it during late nights at the Library. You ate with it propped open, black splotches swimming across the page like worms. You slept with it beneath your pillow. 

But alas, it would seem the book was going to make you work to wring meaning out of every odd symbol.

You were muttering to yourself as you walked back and forth in front of the fireplace. You’d effectively commandeered one of the reading rooms on the seventh floor, leaving the library only when required for Rhysand’s lessons. Helion’s most recent letter lay open on the table with Cherp’s resting just beneath it. A map hung crooked on the wall, four athenaeums circled in bleeding red ink alongside a list of books that had gone missing — the ones that people knew about at least. 

The Alcove, Ares House, Folkmen’s Bard, and most recently, Argot’s.

 Three Librarians dead. Their throats slit. Blood dribbling down their burgundy robes as they’d sat hunched over their desks. The week before it had been two from Ares House caught swaying from the third floor balcony. 

No one has any idea how it happened. The wards were never set off. Nothing in the Library was disrupted. I tell you this only because you deserve to know what’s happened to your people. Continue your training. Continue your research. Do whatever you need to do. But leave the court business to me, dear. I’ll write to you again when I can.

~ Helion 

“It doesn’t make sense,” you mumbled, drumming your fingers against your hip where the book remained silent. “None of this makes sense.” 

You’d used every ounce of Rhysand’s training on the book. You’d imagined your power sliding over it like water, fire, needles shooting through cowhide, a hammerstrike, every metaphor imaginable. You’d glared at it with an intensity that would have disintegrated a lesser object. 

When that failed, you had moved onto solving the murders and thefts at your father’s court. You couldn’t content yourself with sitting in one of the cushy, high-backed chairs in Rhysand’s office sipping imported tea in porcelain cups while athenaeums were on lockdown. 

The pattern was shockingly simple — Koschei was going after books that could be traced back to him. Books that might give his enemies the upper hand: folktales alluding to him and his siblings, translated texts from old Bauldish that might have proved useful in deciphering Henna’s book, secondary accounts of the age before High Lords ruled. 

If you were Koschei you’d go after Godswoods next — the collection of athenaeums dedicated to religion. Then on to The Gallows — the athenaeum on death and dying. The two were intricately tied to one another, but people tended to write books on dying before coming up with explanations for what comes after. You’d spent a great deal of time there following your mother’s death, and you could picture it now — solemn black bookshelves looping around a circular room that tapered up into a point like a blade pointed to the sky. 

You finished writing your letter to Helion, along with the list of books you wanted pulled from the archives. Cagniv Library may have been a glowing beacon in the Night Court, and a place of sanctuary for the priestesses, but it was nothing like you were used to.

You held the paper out in front of you, Helion’s glimmering pen tucked behind your sharp ears, and blew. The black letters lifted off the page and faded away like a breath in cold air. The message was already writing itself back into existence in Helion’s office.

“It doesn’t make sense.” 

You scribbled out another note, this one for yourself with another pen. You ripped it to pieces and fed it to the fire. 

What was Koschei looking for now? Was he still looking for the book that now rested against your hip, or had he turned to some other prize? And why kill the Librarians and set all of Day Court on high alert? 

Henna had been careful. She’d stayed hidden until she was forced to tear down the Alcove to get the book. Whoever was causing the killings now was either a showman or a fool. They left bodies hanging from rafters. They carved smiles into throats. They let the Librarians know what they were stealing whether they meant to or not. They left patterns scattered among wreckage for someone like you to figure out. 

It all felt… juvenile for lack of a better word. Someone young. Someone who wanted to prove themselves in a loud way. Someone whose ego hadn’t been tested yet and wasn’t listening to Koschei’s commands in their entirety. 

Azriel. 

You couldn’t help but think of him. 

Azriel was nothing like that. 

He wasn’t loud. He didn’t vy for attention. He didn’t seek the light in a room. His confidence was quiet and true. His kindness took the shape of the shadows that lingered by your ankles. It took the shape of the robes you wore now. He was the only one who’d seen them at The Alcove. He was the only one who could have requested the court seamstress to make a copy and leave it hanging in your closet.

No. Azriel was nothing like that.

Azriel’s eyes lit up like embers when you slid through the front door, weary but bright-eyed and cradling your journals against your chest. The shadows he’d left behind with you slithered across the floor like mist. 

She’s been in the Library all day. Working. The shadows whispered in his ear. She thought about you. 

Azriel smiled. He’d thought about you as well. “I was wondering where you’d gone.” 

You gasped, closing the door louder than you intended. You’d developed a talent for sneaking in and out of the River House unnoticed to the point where Cassian considered hiding bells in your pockets. Nyx had tried to do it as a joke, but you’d caught him giggling too loudly in your bedroom. 

You brightened immediately, a broad smile appearing on your face. Azriel felt his heart leap, then quiet as he caught the scent of parchment paper. 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow?” You whispered, tip-toeing through the dimly lit hallway to where Azriel was in the sitting room. You sank into the couch with a groan. The hardwood desks at the Library had not been kind to you. 

He shrugged and brushed back his wind-thickened hair, shifting to face you better. A crumb-coated plate lay on the table and he still wore his leathers. He must have just arrived home. 

“I flew as quick as I could. I wanted to be home.” With you. 

He’d gotten so used to the feeling of you sleeping across the hallway that he’d flown the last three days without sleep. It was worth it to see you again. From the looks of it, you’d not fared well in his absence either. Your eyes had that glassy, half-there sheen: a perfect mixture of exhaustion and mind-crackling clarity. 

“And how were the Mortal Lands?” You tucked your knees beneath you and leaned against your hand, fighting the sleep that seemed to grapple for you now that Azriel was home. His wings were spread wide and you resisted the urge to close the last few inches between you and the talon that glimmered in the faelight like obsidian glass.

You’d never been that far south. You’d never had reason to. But Azriel flew far and wide. The Continent was now Mor’s domain, but the secret goings of Prythian and the Mortal Lands belonged to him and him alone. The Spymaster of the Night Court. The Shadowsinger.

Azriel shook his head. “Quiet. Koschei hasn’t touched them yet as far as I can tell, and the Mortal Queens don’t care. They seem to think that they can handle Koschei because he’s agreed to bargains with them in the past.” 

You made a noise of disapproval. “Like they handled Hybern? The only reason they’re still standing is because fae fought their war.” 

The scattering of human armies that had arrived on that battlefield had belonged to no crown. They’d either fought for the bloodlust or the money. You could respect them for that. 

Azriel tipped his head to the side, following the curling of his shadows around his shoulders. “But they are still standing. They don’t know what we sacrificed to keep them safe. That’s the problem with humans. They forget too quickly and get complacent” 

“It would seem we have the opposite problem. We can’t help but remember everything,” you said, with no small amount of bitterness. 

He wanted to keep you talking. He wanted your thoughts. Wanted to fall asleep to the sound of your voice after three weeks of silence. You weren’t aware of it, but the bond had felt thin the further he’d traveled away from you. Like a tightrope stretched to its snapping point. Now that he was back, and you were here, his heart didn’t feel like such a strenuous burden.

He smiled. “I think that’s just you. I know plenty of fae who are forgetful and empty-minded.” He leaned back, stretching his wings out to the side, and winced. They were whipped raw and tender from the flight. 

Without thinking you got up and moved to the fireplace, feeding wood to the flames until it crackled happily. There was a reason Cassian and Azriel loved to bath their wings in sunlight every chance they got. The heat helped the soreness and eased the wind’s rough edge. 

It also drove color into your cheeks and set your hair alight in a soft golden haze. You were a marvel. An angel with a halo to match and Azriel drank in the sight. 

“Like who?”

“Cassian.” 

You smirked and chucked the last of the wood into the flame’s gaping mouth. 

Cass was far from empty-minded, but after decades of being feared as the Lord of Bloodshed he was grateful that people loved him enough to be just a little mean. He gave and received friendly blows like kisses on the cheek and smiled all the wider for it. To threaten his life was the same as saying I love you. It must be why the Mother had made Nesta his mate. She said I love you to him all hours of the day. 

Azriel asked you what you were thinking, and when you told him he felt some of that pain slide off his shoulders like rain. He threw his head back and laughed until his chest started to hurt again and you thought about how rare that sound must be, and how much you loved it. 

“How are the others? Rhysand told me Feyre’s sister is down there along with your friends.” 

Azriel sobered up quickly and cleared his throat. “Yes. Elain, Lucien, Jurian, and Vassa.”

His voice caught on two names: Elain and Lucien, and it didn't escape your notice. He sounded... nervous.

“And? Are they alright?”

He rolled his shoulders and looked out the window to the inky black sky. Vassa would be sleeping now in her human form, and if she was lucky, she’d wake up in the morning still within the manor’s grey stone walls. Safe. Home. 

He shook his head gravely. “They’re nothing short of terrified. Koschei has Vassa under a spell that would normally keep her tied to his lake. He let her go during the war against Hybern and he’s been allowing her to stay, but… everyone’s just holding their breath and trying to prepare for the day he’ll take her back.”

You shivered and wrapped one of the spare blankets around your shoulders. You couldn’t imagine a life where every waking moment held the risk of being torn away from everything you held dear. The anticipation would have broken you more than the act itself. 

“I’ve heard of her. The firebird.” You murmured softly. You imagined a creature with glowing eyes, blue-red feathers streaking behind like ribbons set on fire. Azriel narrowed his eyes in confusion, and you explained, “Ares House records all wartime information. I read the reports. We’re very thorough.”

Azriel smiled. “I would expect nothing less.”

Silence passed in comfort, and you couldn’t stop thinking about Vassa.

“Do you think they’d be able to stop it if Koschei did make her go back?” 

“I don’t know, Y/n.” And it was driving him mad to have Koschei hanging around like a forgotten word at the end of his tongue.

“I hate this,” you spat out, “The not knowing. I hate it.” 

Azriel stared at you, hazel eyes silently begging you to continue. Shadows curled around your body, gently tugging you closer to him until your knees were a whisper away from touching. 

You both sighed softly into the quiet air. Even the River House seemed to be at rest for the night. The usual background hum of cooking and cleaning were absent. It was just you and the Shadowsinger. 

“How are things going? With the book?” 

You slipped your hand through the slit in your robes and pulled it out. The gold chain rustled, glowing faintly from your touch. 

“It’s going.” You shoved the book back out of sight. You couldn’t even stand to look at it after the hours you’d spent agonizing over its pages. “Rhysand’s been teaching me to contain my power better. I can actually touch some things now.” 

But not him. Still not him. And it was killing you. 

Azriel gave another one of his small smiles. The ones that never failed to make the world a smaller, more manageable place. “That’s good.”

“I just… this may sound silly but, I’m not used to things being this hard. With my powers a lot of things just sort of came naturally for me. But now people are dying and I’m just sitting here on this very expensive couch and I can’t do the thing I was brought here to do and I… I don’t like feeling this useless.” 

“Hey, hey, hey,” Azriel murmured. He closed the space between you even more, shadows hovering over your face in silent permission. When you didn’t pull away they brushed back the strands of hair that had fallen over your face with a cool, silky touch. 

Azriel was all calm darkness and you imagined that if you reached out to touch his chest your hand might just slip through him like he wasn’t there at all. He seemed too good to be real. 

But he was real, and he was sitting close enough that you could feel the warmth of his breath fan your cheeks. 

“You’re not useless. Never believe that. Not even for a second. And even if you were useless, it wouldn’t matter. You’re worth more than the things you can do, remember?”

“I remember.” Your voice was quiet and thick. 

You rested your cheek in the crook of your arm as you gazed at him wearily. 

Azriel kept his hands out in the open, one hand reaching across the couch cushions before stopping mere inches away from yours. His shadows closed the remaining distance, slipping in between your fingers to mimic Azriel’s touch. 

“Did you uncover any more secrets of mine while I was gone?” Azriel asked as your eyelids began to droop. 

“I confess I forgot to look. But maybe now that you’re here, I’ll start again,” you mumbled into the encroaching dark.

“I look forward to it,” were the last words that filtered through your ears before you fell asleep to the untranslatable whispers of shadows. 

Nyx bounded down the stairs, leaping the last six steps before landing soundlessly on the floor with a soft bend of his knees — just like Azriel had taught him. Feyre gave a proud nod before ruffling his ebony hair and Rhysand beamed. 

Let me. Feyre adjusted the wrappings around Rhys’s chest that kept Velaria’s plump body swaddled and comfortable. Her pink lips opened in a yawn that had both mates sighing. 

“Uncle Az!” Nyx raced forward towards the sitting room and then froze, mouth opened in a surprised oh.

Azriel slept like the dead on the floor, chest rising and falling with the beat of his gentle breath. You lay stretched out on the couch, one arm propped beneath your head and the other dangling over your waist and off the cushions. Your fingers swayed an inch above Azriel’s chest, shadows swimming over his torso and creeping up your arms so that even in sleep you were connected to one another. 

Feyre gasped softly at the picture. The sunlight blanketing the both of you in peach fuzz. The faint uptick of Azriel’s lips and the smoothness of his brow. The way you looked like you were bleeding into him. The black of his shadows and your robes. 

Rhysand rubbed Nyx’s shoulder and kissed Feyre’s cheek.

Let them sleep, Nyx. We’ll get breakfast at Huth’s today.

Nyx let his parents lead him towards the door without protest. He’d never seen Uncle Az sleep so soundly in his life. 

<- Previous Chapter Next Chapter ->

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Author's Note:

Yeah... this slow burn is burning... but I just love it so much and I love writing all the sweet little moments they have and their conversations with one another and I hope you're enjoying it as well.

[000-pawz]

mission p.s.h is a-go! (p.sh) ˚ · .

park sungho x fem!reader (she/her), college au, art major! reader, art major!sungho, reader is so lovesick, sungho is a nervous wreck, ft. lovingly-bothersome sidekick jaehyun + mom friend roommate yujin, shy extrovert sungho, not so shy extrovert reader <3, mutual pining, puppy love, first kisses, jaehyun has a lot of piercings because why not, the world is your wingman, a story about friendship and first loves!!!!, romantic comedy

warnings: suggestive scene (mdni pleek), some sex jokes, cursing, drinking

wc: 11.3k+

playlist ⋆｡˚ "a girl like me" by flowerovlove, "wishlist" by txt, "stylish" by loona, "blooming in the morning" by spool, "serenade" by boynextdoor

a/n: i have been working on this for.... forever..... >3< but it's finally here!!! <3 happy bonedo first anniversary to all who celebrate! also tysm for 100+ followers!!! ^___^ ur support means everything to me. i had so much fun writing this and i hope you guys have even more fun reading!!!

DEAR DIARY

11:44 a.m | weather: partly cloudy

dear diary,

so today has already gone to absolute shit!!!! i missed my morning lecture because i forgot to put my phone on the charger so it fucking died in the middle of the night and then i realized that my period started 4 days early and i ran out of pain killers and i didn’t have any time to stop by the health center and get some but even if i’m physically dying and rotting away, i HAVE to get my usual chai tea with three pumps vanilla and 1 pump brown sugar but THEN i dropped my chai tea with three pumps vanilla and 1 pump brown sugar in the middle of the courtyard and i was already late to my next class so i didn’t have time to go back and get another one and then i finally make it to fucking studio arts and my usual spot is taken by some sleeping rando who ISN’T EVEN IN THIS CLASS. WHAT ARE THEY DOING HERE??? so then i was forced to sit in the back of class and use that stupid squeaky easel that literally wobbles when you BREATHE on it and all of this happened BEFORE 12 O’CLOCK!!!! now i’m—

“watcha writing?” an all too playful voice sounds right behind you, way too close for comfort and you don’t even bother to look up—you already know who it is by the irritating jingle of his dangly jewelry and the snicker that bubbles out of his throat at your annoyed expression.

“fuck off, jaehyun,” you mumble as you continue to recount your horrible day while you wait for the first layer of paint on your easel to dry, the obnoxiously hot pink pen in your hand scribbling ferociously against the white page of your diary. you hear another irksome laugh leave his body before the chair beside you squeaks as someone pulls it out.

“shh, don’t disturb her. she’s poetically releasing her emotions...” out the corner of your eye, you see yujin glance down at your page before slightly wincing, setting her watercolors down on the table slowly. “or something…”

jaehyun takes a seat at the table in front of you, sitting backward in his chair to take a closer look at what you’re writing—any semblance of privacy was long dismissed once you became friends with the two at the beginning of the school year. freshman move-in day had been possibly one of the worst experiences of your life, all thanks to the maltipoo puppy jaehyun tried to sneak into the residence hall and yujin’s immense fear of dogs. you guys have been inseparable since. 

trauma bonding, you think.

jaehyun flicks some of his brown hair out of his vision as his face contorts into something sour. “woah, when did the grinch take over your body?”

yujin scoots away and jaehyun raises his hands in surrender as you suddenly slam your diary shut, mentally rolling your eyes at their antics. 

“woah, when will you learn to stay out of my business?” you shoot towards jaehyun with the straightest face ever, his lips frowning as you slide your diary off of the table and into your bag. 

“hey, don’t take your anger out on me, grumpy pants.” 

and that just so happens to be your final straw—like those mundane moments where you’re having the worst day known to man and then all of a sudden your key doesn’t want to fit in the keyhole and now you want to rip your door off of the hinges—and jaehyun is now that door. you lunge at the pierced man, going straight for his jugular, but yujin is quick to wrap her arms around your waist, pulling you back down into your seat as she shushes you. 

“breathe, y/n, breathe,” yujin speaks in her exaggerated yoga instructor voice, the deep one that makes her sound like she’s high on shrooms. you close your eyes, forcing yourself to think of kittens and rainbows as your shoulders slowly untense. “there we go. smell the tulips and blow out the candles. that’s right. smell the tulips and blow out the—”

“why can’t they be roses?”

your eyes immediately snap open like a vampire at the smell of blood, meeting jaehyun’s highly entertained and highly aggravating expression.

“jaehyun, we talked about this. tulips smell better than ro—”

yujin’s voice is drowned out in your ears once a tall, raven-haired figure strolls into the studio. everything in the background fades to a blur as he makes his way to his usual sketching table, just a few seats away from where you reside. from here, you have a perfect view of his side profile, the sunlight streaming through the open windows lighting up his face heavenly. 

any anger in your body dissipates on the spot.

he’s wearing a baby blue knit sweater—the same sweater he wore on tuesday last week (...not that you remember or anything!)—with baggy light-washed jeans that adorn a little eevee pokemon charm hanging from his front belt loop. the black converse on his feet match yours and you try not to squeal at the slight prospect of a couple's outfit. slung over his body is the green satchel that he seems to take everywhere with him, filled to the brim with notebooks and art supplies. 

his black hair is messy and a little longer than the last time you have seen him. it curls over his eyebrows and down his neck, some tucked behind his naturally flushed ears. his eyelashes are so full, and even though his eyes are slightly obscured by the thin, circular glasses that sit on his nose, you can still make out the delicate shadow they cast onto his doughy cheeks. you wonder if he has a skincare routine from how smooth his skin looks, almost picture-esque as the sunrays illuminate a halo above his head. you swear a chorus of angels begin to sing in your ears.

he’s taking out his sketchpad now, and you watch the way he adjusts his glasses ever so slightly before lining up his charcoal pencils in order of point size next to his page. you’ve never gotten to see his art up close, but you’ve picked up on the fact his medium has always been a pencil of some sort—let it be graphite, pigmented colors, carbon—and you crave to see what his nimble fingers can create. his lips are pressed into a thin line as he completely submerges himself into that little bubble you notice he goes into when he starts to draw. 

you think he looks the most handsome when he’s immersed like this.

you don’t realize you’re staring until you blink and register that park sungho, aka the man of your dreams, aka the most gorgeous person to ever walk these streets, aka an angel from above, is staring directly at you. with this new angle, you can fully see his pouted heart-shaped lips and slightly puffy face—he must’ve just woken up. he’s so perfect, in every way possible. your heart nearly crawls up your throat as he sends a tiny smile your way, his eyes bunching up cutely at the corners. you almost raise your hand to wave back before a voice cuts through your dazed state.

“hey, sungho!” jaehyun calls, waving his hand frantically, the many bracelets on his wrists jingling with the movement; and said sungho waves in response, contained and shy, before turning his attention back to his sketchpad. while you’re slightly disappointed that sungho hadn’t been looking at you, you mentally thank jaehyun for saving you from could’ve-been detrimental embarrassment. 

you slightly deflate, slumping back down into your chair with a tiny huff—and jaehyun watches you from beginning to end, a knowing look in his eyes. 

“look, y/n’s upset her little boobie bear didn’t—”

this time, you grab your barbie-esque pen and chuck it squarely at jaehyun’s nose, the plastic clinking against his nose ring. you hear yujin giggling from beside you, jaehyun shooting her a hopeless look of betrayal.

“you set yourself up for that one, myung,” she speaks before she gets up to fill her paint cup with water. jaehyun rolls his eyes with a scoff, quickly turning his attention back to you—much to your dismay.

“you should try to talk to him. he’s really nice, trust me,” jaehyun suggests with a little wiggle of his eyebrows, not-so-subtly nodding his head in sungho’s direction. your eyes can’t help but trail back over to the tall man’s frame, nearly swooning at the way he pushes his glasses up his nose with his pinky finger, squinting his eyes slightly despite the lenses as his pencil glides across the paper like a ballerina. 

fuck, he’s so cute. you want to die.

“i don’t even think he knows my name,” you sigh, almost dreamily as you spectate from afar. the way he readjusts his grip on the pencil every few seconds, and the way his knee bounces unrhythmically under the table, his pokemon charm shaking with the movement. his bottom lip is caught in between his teeth now and you’re sure you might pass out as he reaches up to run his fingers through his hair, the fluffy locks falling back into place slowly as they nearly defy gravity. 

oh, park sungho. you don’t know how perfect you are.

“girl, you look like a stalker,” yujin appears beside you once again, multiple watercolor brushes knocking against each other as they swim in her now water-filled cup. it’s your turn to glare this time, crossing your arms over your chest as you manage to slump even further in your seat—you aren’t sure how you haven’t fallen to the floor yet.

“i can’t help it! just… look at him,” you whine pitifully, trying to keep your voice down as you glance at him one last time. yup, still gorgeous.

jaehyun groans loudly from his spot, his bracelets clanking as he grips his hair with both hands.

“i am going to bash my head into this table if you don’t speak to him. i don’t know how much more sungho mushy-gushy talk i can take,” he complains, his eyes wide and faux-crazed as he lightly tugs his hair. he looks stupid as hell—you’ve always thought jaehyun resembles the annoying orange.

“that’s if sungho doesn’t decide to run away before she can even open her mouth.”

and there it goes. the real reason why you’ve never gotten the chance to speak to your puppy-love crush. 

it’s a strange phenomenon actually, the way park sungho seems to avoid you like the plague. at first, you thought he was just incredibly shy. maybe he had chronic social anxiety, in which, you wouldn’t blame him at all—you were the exact same way before you got to college, so it would make perfect sense. he’s just a shy, shy guy who doesn’t intend on making small talk; and that would’ve been just fine with you.

but then you saw him interact with like… everyone else in the entire world, and decided to rule out that option because—what? he shows up to every single birthday party he’s invited to, says hi to all of his friends as he passes them on campus, and he even complimented your brooding english professor’s tie once! so there’s no way park sungho doesn’t know how to interact with other humans.

it’s just you. he doesn’t want to interact with you.

not to be selfish and arrogant or anything, but it’s truly a huge blow to your pride. you’ve always considered yourself to be a pretty likable person—maybe a little off-kilter, but not to the point where it literally makes people pack up their things and leave as soon as you enter the room. and yes, sungho has done that before. 

so now you’re stuck in this predicament where you can’t go one night without falling asleep to the idea of holding park sungho’s lovely hand and kissing his squishy cheek and touching his luscious hair, when—in truth, horrible, horrible truth—this exact park sungho doesn’t even want to see your face.

once snapped back into reality, the realization rebirths all of your anger—at the world, at yourself, at sungho “loml” park. yujin mumbles out a little half-assed apology that you completely dismiss and jaehyun snickers as he rises to a stand, throwing something over his shoulder about how he all of a sudden has a sculpture he needs to get started on before he disappears from your sight.

he doesn’t even know how to sculpt.

when you look up, you see jaehyun giving sungho a little goodbye pat on the back, in which sungho returns with a little “see you later” and a smile that bunches his cheeks up like bread rolls. damn you park sungho and your adorable, adorable cheeks.

this is definitely going in your diary tonight.

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

or at least you thought it would be going in your diary tonight.

because currently, as of 7:28 pm local time, you can’t seem to find that sparkly pink journal anywhere. 

you checked your tote bag, yujin’s bag, jaehyun’s giant pockets, under your seat in the art studio, the cafeteria, and even asked around hoping someone’s heard of it through word-of-mouth—and yet, nothing. no sign of your journal at all.

if you were thinking rationally, you would have maybe thought to check your dorm room. you did end up having lunch in there with the blinds closed after your shitty day and the overwhelming need to disappear from society. or, you might have left it in your french language class because you had pulled it out mid lecture to complain about your horrible view from the very back row. it might have even fell out on your bus ride to the small dimsum restaurant located on the outskirts of your campus. 

but you have been on the edge of snapping since the very moment you woke up this morning, and if you thought jaehyun’s little quips earlier brought you to your limit, then losing your diary now broke the meter.

you glumly take a seat on an unoccupied bench outside of the arts building, trying your best to hold in your tears at the absolute wreck this day has become. no chai tea, early period, squeaky easel, park sungho not even knowing your name—

“um, y/n?”

as soon as the first tear rolls down your cheek, your hear that all too familiar voice in your ears, a tall shadow blocking the slight rays of the moon in the distance. everything feels unreal, almost hallucinatory as your lift your head to see the man of all your dreams standing right in front of you with a shy smile on his perfect, perfect face.

as soon as he locks eyes with you though, his smile falters, his lips turning down into one of the softest frowns you’ve ever seen grace such an angelic face. snapping yourself out of your mini daze, you reach up with the sleeve of your jacket to quickly wipe your eyes. 

not now tear ducts! the love of your life is in your vicinity! and he knows your name!

“hey, sungho! hi,” you rush out in one breath, hoping your voice isn’t too shaky. 

“are you…” sungho’s question starts off as a small mumble, but he quickly cuts himself off with a tiny shake of his head.  “n-nevermind. i just wanted to give this to you.”

you watch him as he digs around in his green satchel for a second before pulling out something bright pink, the street lights reflecting off of the sparkles. you feel your heart leap in your chest at the sight, jumping up from your seat.

“my journal! oh my god, thank you! where did you find it?” you quickly speak as sungho passes you your journal.

“it was in the art studio. i promise i didn’t read any of it so… yea.” 

his fingers lightly brush yours for a split second and the end of his sentence falters a bit. you try not to read into it, but this moment is definitely, for sure going in your journal tonight. your first ever, longer-than-30-seconds encounter with the love of your life. totally disregarding the fact that he saw you crying… 

you clutch the notebook to your chest as you give him a bright beam, trying to keep all of the squealing and fawning locked away in your mind. sungho looks incredibly gorgeous in the low ray of evening lights, strands of his shiny hair tucked behind his ear and falling over his forehead. as the wind blows, you’re able to get a whiff of the sweet cologne he always wears, vanilla and another hidden tone that mixes perfectly.

“thank you, sungho. really, thank you.” your voice is soft as you meet his sparkling eyes; they’re deep and mesmerizing, glittering with stardust as he mirrors your smile. he nods ever so slightly before gripping his satchel strap with both of his hands.

“um, yea. it’s no problem,” he speaks through a small puff of nervous laughter. you’re surprised you haven't melted to the ground in a puddle of love-ridden goo yet. “have a good night.” 

“you too!” you say a little too enthusiastically. sungho simply nods again before he turns on his heel to leave towards the direction he came in. suddenly, he stops, turning back around to face you.

“i… my dorm is that way,” he rushes out before speedwalking past you without giving you a second glance. you hold back a giggle at his cute slip up, covering your mouth with your hand.  

he. is. so. cute. you want to scream the words to the sky. as soon as sungho disappears around the corner, you wip out your phone, your heart pounding in your chest.

to: dumb and dumber

guys. you’ll never fucking guess what just happened.

MISSION P.S.H

6:15 a.m | weather: clear skies

dear diary,

i dreamt of him. again. please kill me already.

“...and then i was like what? because that was the same guy i hooked up with last week!” yujin spills as she dramatically reenacts her encounter at some party she went to last night. you’re having lunch with your friends in the courtyard, the chatter of students, bikes, and overhead planes mixing with the warm breeze.

“i told you he was a fuckboy. and then you called me an annoying virgin,” jaehyun deadpans as he takes a bite out of his sandwich, shrugging his shoulders. you laugh at their bickering from the other side of the table, looking back down at your journal where you are currently doodling the scene in front of you, but with yujin and jaehyun as cats.

yujin rolls her eyes, opening her mouth to rebuttal, but she stops herself as her eyes catch onto something over your shoulder. you watch as her eyes widen toward you, immediately catching onto what that stare means.

‘park sungho incoming. act normal!’

you sit up straighter, trying to act nonchalant as sungho strolls up to your table. as naturally as possible, you lift your gaze toward him, your breath catching in your throat as soon as your eyes lock onto his figure.

today, he’s in a simple white t-shirt, zip-up, and jeans with his classic green satchel, but to you, he looks other-worldly. the sun shines brightly above his head, casting a spotlight onto him as if he were standing solo on a stage. you envision red rose petals falling around him in slow motion as he blinks, his long eyelashes tickling his cheeks with the movement. his skin is slightly flushed from the humid air, his lips full and plush as a smile stretches across his perfect face. 

he’s going to be the death of me, you think, holding back a dreamy sigh.

“i brought those references you asked for,” sungho directs towards jaehyun with his silky smooth voice, reaching into his satchel to pull out a blue folder of papers. you get deja vu, recalling the way his fingers brushed yours last night (and yes, you recapped the moment to yujin and jaehyun at least three times since then.)

“oh, thanks bro! i totally forgot about these,” jaehyun speaks, grabbing the folder from sungho’s perfect hands. “hey, are you still going to riwoo’s party on saturday?”

“yeah, i’ll be there. see you then?” 

“yup! i’m dragging these two along with me.” sungho nods with a small smile before his eyes catch onto yujin.

“your shirt is dope, yujin. i love that band,” sungho compliments and yujin quickly jumps into a recap of how she went to their concert last week. sungho says something about him also being there with a friend and all of it goes through one ear and out of the other. “anyways, i’ll see you guys around.”

sungho gives your table one last smile, his eyes catching onto yours for a split second before he merges off into the crowd of students. the table is silent for a few beats and both of your friends turn their eyes to you, just waiting for you to say something. you sigh as you stare off into the direction sungho disappeared in, resting your cheek in your palm.

“is he avoiding me? he has to be avoiding me… like he talks to you guys but pretends like i’m not even there!” you speak through a dejected pout. yujin eyes you with something akin to pity, completely contrasting jaehyun whose face is decorated with an annoying smile. 

“it’s ‘cause he’s afraid that if he looks you in the eyes, you might eat his soul.”

you completely disregard jaehyun’s comment, running through all of the possible explanations for his behavior in your mind. does he have a secret partner? or maybe he doesn’t like the smell of your perfume? what if he thinks you are butt-fuck ugly and a pain to look at? no… it’s definitely not that. you remind yourself to give your reflection an apology when you get back to your dorm. 

your eyes slowly increase in size as you sit up, a eureka moment taking over your train of thought. the gasp that leaves your lips is a little too loud for a public, communal space, but it doesn’t even register in your brain. 

you’ve got it all figured out.

“guys…” you start ominously, smiling widely at your friends as you brace your hands on the table. “i think he’s playing hard to get.”

jaehyun and yujin stare at you half-incredulously and half-amused, a puff of laughter even passing through jaehyun’s lips while yujin has to turn away to muffle her giggles.

“yu, i think she’s finally lost it.”

you shake your head quickly. “no, no, guys, it all makes sense. i caught him staring at me in class once—”

“anyone would stare if they saw a free-roaming demon in a college art course.”

“jaehyun, i will literally cut your tongue off.”

jaehyun pouts his snakebite-accented lips, turning to yujin with pleading eyes as he gestures towards you on the other side of the table. “did you hear her? that’s actually a threat this time. a real threat.”

yujin sighs, half-heartedly patting jaehyun’s shoulder twice to console him before giving her full attention to you. 

“y/n… i think it’s time to have ‘the talk’.”

you blink blankly at yujin before glancing over at jaehyun who is nodding along to said woman’s words, a playfully solemn look on his face.

“what ‘talk’?... look, if this is about sex, i already know how babies are made so…”

“no, no, not that talk. the park sungho talk,” yujin explains, reaching across the table to place her hand on top of yours. this feels like some weird group therapy session, and to be honest, your best friends are really starting to creep you out in the way that they seem to communicate silently through their eyes.

what the fuck is going on?

“let me explain it to you in simple terms,” jaehyun sits up straight before dramatically clearing his throat. “park sungho plus girlfriend equals no-no. nada. never happened. park sungho plus crush equals ‘AHHHHHHHHH! THE WORLD IS ENDING!’. park sungho see you. park sungho ‘AHHHHHHH!!!!’”

jaehyun shouts in a high-pitched girly voice before doing a little running away motion, covering his eyes as he pretends to tremble before going back to normal.

now it’s time for both you and yujin to stare blankly at jaehyun—the latter looks incredibly proud of himself nonetheless, his chest puffed out confidently after his little performance. you slowly turn your gaze to yujin’s figure, motioning towards jaehyun next to her.

“can i get a translation or something…?”

yujin sighs before flicking jaehyun’s nose ring, resulting in a drowned out complaint about the both of you “teaming up on him” or whatever. you both don’t pay him any mind though—you have bigger things to worry about, such as—

“basically, what he’s trying to say is that sungho has a crush on you, but he’s scared because he’s never had a girlfriend before and he freaks out around you. so he… flees like a little baby rabbit when you’re near him,” yujin concludes with a bright smile, clasping her hands together.

okay.

okay.

this is not what you were expecting to hear during your wednesday afternoon lunch break. everything you’ve ever known, everything you’ve forced yourself to believe comes crumbling down all at once. 

park sungho has a crush on you.

park sungho has a crush on you.

wait.

“and no one has thought to tell me this until now?” you breathe out, your eyes as wide as saucers. jaehyun shrugs, picking up his sandwich to take a bite.

“well, it’s kind of something we found out like today,” jaehyun speaks through a mouthful of lettuce and bacon, yujin nodding along next to him. 

“you know han taesan from our literature class?” yujin asks, leaning towards you as she lowers her voice. you search your fried brain for any familiarity, humming in thought for a second before it clicks.

“the one who dresses like a wannabe kurt cobain?”

“yes, him. so basically, sungho confessed to him about his crush on you. and jaehyun and i, who were magically sitting behind mr. han, just so happened to accidentally see their text messages. so. yeah,” yujin explains.

the silence is loud.

“so what i’m hearing is you guys violated someone’s privacy and now you’re telling me their classified business?” you speak, blinking blankly between then.

“...yes?” jaehyun replies slowly with a guilty smile. you look at them for a few seconds before reaching your hands out for highfives. 

“i knew i could trust you guys,” you affirm as you double highfive them both, jaehyun letting out a little woop woop. “so, what do i do now? i obviously can’t just walk right up to him and ask him out. i’m gonna need a plan if i’m ever going to get him to willingly talk to me.”

“oh, i’m already ten steps ahead of you, babygirl. mission p.s.h is a-go,” jaehyun declares, pulling out his phone. you tilt your head in pure confusion and you’re sure the crinkle between your brows is apparent. 

“mission p—what?”

jaehyun sighs with exasperation—as if you were the cause of all of his troubles in the world—before placing his phone on the table. “mission park sungho. come on, let’s use our head, idiot.”

“i will smash your head into—”

“you will do none of those things,” yujin interrupts with a stern motherly glare before turning to jaehyun. “now can you explain this mission park sungho thing because…?”

jaehyun rolls his eyes before leaning back in his seat with a sly smile on his lips.

“i began working on it last night and i was going to show you guys when i finished, but we’re in a dire, dire situation.” jaehyun sends you dramatically sympathetic eyes and you stick your tongue out at him in return. “it’s simple, really. we just set the bait, and like the little baby rabbit he is, he’ll bite the carrot. then, once our handy work is done, y/n and sungho will live happily ever after in their fairy princess castle. it’s foolproof.”

jaehyun concludes with a triumphant smile before he slowly slides his phone over towards you like a suspicious dealer. you raise a brow at him, but take the phone anyways.

“phase one, get his attention. so just like… get him jealous?” you ask, cocking your head. jaehyun nods quickly in response, his hair bouncing like an overly excited puppy.

“mhm, yup! i know a guy who’s perfect for this.”

“that sounds… sketchy… but a good idea nonetheless.” you squint your eyes a bit as you continue reading the almost illegible notes app ramble. “and then phase two…”

“get him alone. he’s going to be at riwoo’s party, right? right?” you and yujin nod in response. “so we find a way to get him and y/n alone so they can… you know…” jaehyun does some weird, obscure motion with his fingers and yujin gently places her hand on top of his to stop it immediately.

“this is literally phase two, myungjae. slow down,” yujin chastises before turning to you. “what do you think, y/n?”

“we may need to tweak phase two a bit, but this looks… surprisingly safe…” you mutter as you read through the plan once again. “why is phase three just a bunch of question marks and thinking emojis…?”

“i didn’t get to finish it. i had more important things to tend to last night,” jaehyun smiles menacingly. yujin gags and you groan, rolling your eyes.

“i don’t even wanna know,” you say, trying to clear your mind of whatever the hell he meant by that. 

“i guess we’ll just figure something out when we get there?” yujin suggests, looking between you two for approval. you nod in agreement because, well, you’re running out of options here. sungho is one of the world’s most desirable bachelors! you can’t just wait around for another girl to come by and woo him. you need to get to work asap.

“don’t worry. i’ll come up with something. they don’t call me myungstein for nothing,” jaehyun runs his fingers through his hair cockily, trying to subtly flex his nonexistent muscles.

“literally no one… no one calls you that…” you trail off but keep the rest of your words to yourself. you owe it to him for making up this plan in the first place.

at this point, you’re going to run out of pages in your journal before the year ends.

PHASE ONE: GET HIS ATTENTION (easy enough, right?)

11:37 a.m | weather: sunny with a nice breeze

dear diary,

i’ve decided to listen to myung jaehyun for once. i apologize in advance to my future self. i’m desperate okay?!?!?!

“remember what we practiced?” jaehyun whispers to you as you stand outside of the campus cafe where sungho works. yujin is already stationed inside of the cafe to make sure everything goes well. through the big glass window, you see her sitting in the corner with a comically large newspaper and sunglasses sitting low on her nose. not suspicious at all.

“yes. flirt with that guy with the luscious hair and make sure sungho hears,” you recite the exact words jaehyun had told you on your walk here. jaehyun gives you an affirmative hum, dropping his hand onto your shoulder.

“okay, let’s practice right now. pretend i’m luscious hair guy,” you open your mouth to argue, but jaehyun is already getting into character, dramatically running his fingers through his hair, slipping a cartoonish shmoulder on his face. “hey, pretty lady.”

“jaehyun, that’s gross. no.”

“who’s jaehyun? is he your boyfriend? of course a beauty like you would already be taken,” he speaks in a low voice before biting his lip in the least seductive way possible.

you try not to gag at his words, shrugging his hand off of your shoulder. “i’m going in now. bye.” 

drowning out jaehyun’s objections, you open the door of the cafe, the little bells above the door jingling with the movement. your eyes scan the cafe for a second before they land on a familiar figure making small talk with some guy as he serves him coffee. he looks so handsome in his work uniform, a white button-up and brown slacks with a matching brown apron. his hair is a little curlier than usual and he has on his glasses again today. 

you definitely wouldn’t mind seeing this every day. maybe you should come to this cafe more often.

you try to calm the frantic beating of your heart as you give yujin a curt nod. she gives you one back before ducking behind the newspaper again. it’s go time.

it doesn’t take you long to spot “luscious hair guy”, seeing as he’s currently working the front register. he’s tall and attractive, the perfect bait. honestly, you have no idea what jaehyun bribed him with to get him to go with your plan, and honestly, you don’t really want to know. 

you quickly adjust your clothes as you walk up to the counter. luscious hair guy’s eyes lock onto yours and you offer him an affable smile.

“hi!” you greet brightly before leaning in to quickly whisper the code word “p.s.h”. luscious hair guy nods quickly in recognition before the both of you get into character.

“hello! what can i get for you today?” he asks with a glimmering smile, leaning forward in interest. you pretend to think, tapping your lips as you glance up at the menu.

“hm… i’ve never been here before… what do you recommend?” you ask with a (hopefully) flirtatious smile. just then, you notice sungho slip behind the counter to put some dishes away, his eyes widening once he sees your face. it takes less than two seconds for him to duck his head away, turning his back to you as he frantically begins organizing some mugs. 

“the vanilla caramel latte is really good,” leehan suggests, shooting you an award winning smile. someone get this guy a oscar!

“then i’ll get that,” you dramatically glance down at his name tag. “thanks, leehan.”

over the tall man’s shoulder, you notice sungho inconspicuously walk over to the front counter, his eyes flickering over to the both of you for a split second. he busies himself by adjusting the pastry display, but you can see him definitely listening in on your conversation.

“i’m sorry if this sounds odd, but you have a really beautiful smile,” leehan compliments shyly, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. you gasp before letting out a small giggle.

“wow, thank you!” you breathe out, blinking up at leehan coyly. “you’re pretty cute yourself.”

“that means a lot coming from a pretty girl like you.” in your peripheral, you see sungho slightly tense up, his entire body stilling for a moment. “i’ll get that right out for you.”

at those words words, sungho abruptly stands up, nearly slamming the display shut before going to wipe down tables. leehan smiles at you once sungho’s back is turned to the both of you, trying to hold in his laughter.

“he’s upset,” leehan mouths, nodding his head towards sungho who is currently aggressively scrubbing an already stainless table. perfect.

you head over to a vacant table, a few away from yujin, but still close enough to whisper “i think it’s working”. yujin lowers her sunglasses with a manicured nail, glancing over at sungho who is aggressively scrubbing another table; his lips are pouted and his eyebrows are slightly furrowed. she turns back to you with a knowing look, nodding her head.

you scroll on your phone for a bit, making sure to update jaehyun who had a presentation this afternoon. you’re sure that if he were free, he’d be in a wig and spectacles, adorned in a trench coat and briefcase right there with yujin. maybe his absence is for the better.

a few minutes later, you hear that all too familiar, lovely voice flow through the quiet buzz of the cafe. you look up from your phone to see leehan moving to plate your order with sungho hot on his heels.

“leehan, i can take that order for you,” sungho speaks, his gentle voice a little sharper around the edges. you see leehan brush him off with a warm smile, adjusting the mug on the tray.

“oh, it’s okay, i’ve got it,” he says, but sungho quickly cuts him off.

“no, no, i insist. really.” sungho gives leehan a tight-lipped smile before shooing him off to take another order. your eyes widen, quickly turning toward yujin who’s wiggling her eyebrows at you over the newspaper.

“it worked!” she mouths. you hide your smile behind your hand as you nod quickly before looking down at your phone to text jaehyun.

to: dumber

the fish has landed in the hole. or however that goes

when you finally look back up, sungho is making his way over to you, his bottom lip cutely caught between his teeth.

“oh, hi sungho!” you greet when he stops at your table, awkwardly holding the tray in front of his chest. 

“hi, y/n. uh, here you go.” sungho gives you a shaky smile and you resist the urge to coo. he’s so cute, in the way his hands shake slightly as he lowers the mug and a slice of strawberry cake onto the table.

“oh, i didn’t order the cake!” you say, meeting his eyes. sungho nervously laughs as he tucks the now empty tray under his arm.

“it’s… um, it’s on the house,” he messily motions towards your table before gluing his arms back to his sides. “everything is.”

“really? you’re so sweet, sungho. thank you.” you think you are going to float out of your seat. he quickly looks away from your gaze after your compliment, redirecting his eyes to his shoes. his ears are slightly blushed on the tips, his circular glasses slipping down his nose slightly.

“don’t mention it,” he mumbles, his cheeks dusted an apple red that match his ears.  “also, your um… your outfit is really nice.”

yup. you’re definitely floating.

“thank you so much! you look nice, too. i mean, you look nice in everything,” you giggle, watching the way sungho’s wide eyes shoot up to yours. he looks like a surprised kitten with the way his black curls fall into his face at the sudden movement. you get the sudden urge to gently brush them away, but you remind yourself of proper etiquette and keep your hands to yourself.

“that’s… that’s not true, but thank you,” he speaks quietly. you open your mouth to rebuttal, but sungho simply gives you a quick nod and scurries off back to the counter. you can’t even be disappointed this time—that little interaction was enough to feed your delusions for the next month and a half.

as soon as sungho makes it back behind the counter, you see him drop his head into his hands in embarrassment, shaking his head. leehan comes up behind him to give him a pat on the back, trying to hold in his laughter. the luscious haired guy gives you a thumbs up over sungho’s shoulder and you shoot him one back with a wide smile. mission accomplished, you guess as you take a bite of the fluffy cake. 

so sweet.

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

5:14 p.m | weather: ANGELS SINGING FROM ABOVE

dear diary,

park sungho wrote his number on the napkin. i have park sungho's number. he gave me his number. we're sooooo back.

PHASE TWO: GET HIM ALONE (and not in the creepy way!!!)

if there was one thing about your best friends, it would be how hard they party. it’s not like you were a prude or anything—definitely not that—but these two took parties to a different level. you aren’t sure how long you’ve been dancing in between jaehyun and yujin, squeezed between other sweaty bodies as the music thrums through your veins. jaehyun’s hands are on your hips and yujin’s arms are wrapped around your shoulders as you laugh with your head thrown back, letting loose. there is no room to be shy when it comes to partying with them.

your friend riwoo went all out for this end of the semester party, it seems. he rented out a beach house that sits right along the shore and you’re pretty sure he invited more than half of your entire university. you already greeted the host with hugs and small talk before you went straight for the drinks. as the song playing through the speakers comes to an end, the dj announces that fireworks are going off at the beach at 2 a.m, so people start stumbling and filing out of the house to see the pretty lights and colors.

“you wanna get another drink?” yujin shouts into your ear and you nod quickly. you definitely aren’t drunk enough—especially for what you guys have planned tonight. phase two.

“i’m gonna go find sungho,” jaehyun manages to say in his already drunken state before disappearing into the crowd, greeting at least 3 people as he makes his way through. you grab yujin’s hand to tug her toward the nearly vacant kitchen. most of the drinks are outside at the beach, but this is all a part of the plan. you rummage around in the fridge hoping to find anything to calm your nerves.

“calm down, y/n. you look like you’re going to explode,” yujin laughs from behind you, leaning against the marble island.

“because i am. i’ve never been alone with him before. what if i say something stupid?” you whine, still searching for anything that isn’t soda or juice.

“...like you always do?” yujin quips back quickly. you pause to give her a tiny glare over your shoulder before you deflate, turning back to the fridge.

“...fair. but still! i really don’t want to mess this up,” you sigh. as if the fridge itself has begun to pity you, you end up finding something tucked away near the back, though you’re freaking out too much to even read the label. with a shrug, you uncap it and drink straight from the bottle.

“you got this. remember, he already likes you. i don’t think he can be saved at this point.”

“you’re right,” you say, looking down at your heels, but once her words fully process in your tipsy mind, your head snaps right back up “wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“it means that all you have to be is yourself. we’re all rooting for you!” yujin rushes over to plant a kiss on your cheek before patting your head. “now, i have an appointment upstairs, so i’ll see you later! keep me updated!”

“wait, yujin!” you call, but she’s already slipped right through your fingers. you huff as she disappears around the corner, her menacing giggles fading into the music like an evil villain. whatever. you have more important things to worry about right now—such as sungho entering the kitchen not even a beat later looking otherworldly.

your fingers nearly slip on the neck of the bottle as your eyes lock onto each other’s. sungho looks good. and by good, you mean you-want-to-jump-his-bones-right-here-right-now good. 

his usually messy hair is pushed back and out of his face, a few strands falling onto his forehead. he’s ditched his glasses and his eyes look even more sharp and enticing like this—as if he’s staring straight into your soul. he’s wearing a cropped black tee with jeans, adorning multiple silver necklaces that shine against his skin. his soft lips are glossy from the drink in his hands, his cheek slightly flushed from the alcohol.

you’ve never seen him look like this before. the cute park sungho you’re so used to is somewhere dead in a ditch right now. god.

you can’t even speak as he shoots you a smile, his eyes softening with familiarity.

“hey,” he says, his gaze flickering to the bottle in your hands. “you alright there?”

you look down at your hands, quickly moving to place the bottle on the counter behind you with a guilty smile.

“yeah—yeah, no, i’m great. perfect, actually.” you find yourself stumbling over your own words. if you thought you weren’t drunk enough to handle this before, now you think you are too drunk to even process the sight in front of you.

“why’re you in here alone? everyone’s heading down to the beach,” sungho says as he rounds the island. 

he has to be drunk, if not for the way he so boldly rakes his eyes over your body without shame. you swallow, blinking up at him. you can see him very obviously checking you out, his eyes running up the expanse of your exposed legs to the hem of your mini dress. he’s not too close, but you can still smell his vanilla-and-something-secret cologne with the proximity. you feel yourself grow weak in the knees, reaching back to hold onto the counter behind you. 

“i could be asking you the same thing,” you shoot back, trying to regain your confidence as you catch his eyes. sungho lets out of a puff of laughter, dropping his gaze for a second before looking back up at you. you feel your heart catch in your throat at the way his eyelashes flutter so beautiful, his tongue swiping across his bottom lip absentmindedly.

“i guess i was looking for you,” he speaks quietly, so sincerely that you aren’t sure if he knows the effect he has on you right now. 

“well, i’m here now,” you mumble back. 

“yeah. you are.”

the silence in between you guys is incredibly heavy, dripping with unsaid words and you can’t seem to find any of them. they all feel stuck in your throat as sungho’s eyes flicker in between yours. for once, he’s not the first one to break eye contact—and you even watch as he takes a few steps closer to you until he’s standing directly in front of you. 

“y/n…” he whispers, leaning down so only you can hear him. his hair tickles your face and you find yourself frozen, unable to move. “can i… can i kiss you?”

okay, he’s definitely drunk. but so are you, so you have nothing to lose.

“yes. please,” you whisper back and he’s on you before you can even blink.

sungho’s lips are as plush and sweet as you imagined them to be. he tastes of the fruity alcohol that sits in his now abandoned cup,your stomach flipping as he gently works his lips against yours. one of his hands comes up to cup your cheek, and you notice his fingers slightly shaking against your skin. even when he’s like this, he’s still so cute, it drives you crazy.

you reach up to wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him closer to you until your bodies are pressed flush against each other. you tangle your fingers into his hair and at your actions, he softly sighs, falling into you even more. you swallow all of his noises as you swipe your tongue across his bottom lip for permission; pliantly, he parts his lips for you, a quiet moan leaving his lips when you slightly tug on his hair.

you feel his strong arm circle around your waist, his fingers splayed out against the fabric of your thin dress. you’re wrapped up in his scent, an all encompassing mantra of sungho, sungho, sungho filling your brain. he handles you gently, but so desperately as he licks into your mouth, his teeth grazing over your lips.

you can’t help the noises leaving your mouth as he subconsciously slips a leg in between yours, holding you impossibly closer to him. you can feel his rapid heart beat through his shirt, and you’re sure your own heart is pounding just as fast. he’s addicting in all sense of the word, your mind growing foggy as you grind up into him. he guides you with his arm, his other hand rubbing soothing circles onto your cheek. it’s everything and more, and when he finally parts for air, you find yourself chasing after his lips desperately. 

“is this—is this okay?” sungho stutters through a whisper, referring to the position the two of you are in. 

you nod quickly, biting your lip as you look up into his eyes. his pupils are fully blown out, his lips bitten red, covered in a thin layer of your saliva. his chest rises and falls quickly as he looks down at you and something akin to pride fills your chest at the sight. you made him like this. he’s so perfect. 

“fuck, you’re gorgeous,” he breathes out before capturing your lips again. he’s a little more feverish this time, moaning against your lips as you grind against his leg. he seems to be getting off on you getting off, and the thought alone is driving you crazy. 

you don’t even think about how you both are still in plain sight, right up against the kitchen counter where anyone could walk in at any time. and the little bubble that the two of you have built comes crashing down as a familiar voice breaks through your muddled haze.

“i’m gonna puke. need water,” jaehyun shouts as he runs into the kitchen before getting dizzy, moving to sit criss cross on the floor with his head in his hands.

“oh my god,” you groan as sungho hesitantly pulls himself away from you. “i’m so sorry, sungho.”

he’s clearly disheveled, his shirt slightly riding up exposing the smooth expanse of his lower stomach. his hair is a mess from your fingers, his lips are bruised, and it’s almost impossible to not notice the obvious bulge in his pants. despite it all, he’s still an angel, offering you a gentle smile.

“i’ll get him water, don’t worry,” sungho says, his face flushed red as he goes to grab a cup. you turn your gaze to the shitfaced jaehyun on the floor—you hold back any and all urges to cuss him out because 1. he’s incredibly drunk so the words won’t hurt him enough and 2. sungho is right there. 

you walk over to crouch down in front of jaehyun, placing a hand on his shoulder. “keep it in, myungjae, or i swear…”

jaehyun mumbles some incomprehensible gibberish and you sigh quietly. as much of a cockblock as he is right now, your friends’ wellbeing always comes first.

“here,” sungho says from above you. you look up to see him holding out a cup of water to you with a tiny, awkward smile on his lips. 

you already want to kiss him again.

“thank you,” you reply softly, returning the smile. “myung, you awake?” you shake jaehyun’s shoulder a few times before he finally slurs out more gibberish. “i’m gonna need words, hun.”

“i think… i think i’m drunk…” he mumbles before groaning again, slumping forward against you. 

“yeah, no shit,” you deadpan. you place the water down next to you so you can lift his head up with both hands. jaehyun’s cheeks squish together like a chipmunk as he sleepy blinks at you. “wake up. where’s yujin?”

“she left with someone… i didn’t see…” he trails off before slumping forward again. “i’m gonna puke.”

“no, you’re not. drink this.” you try your best to help him drink the water, even though most of it spills onto his shirt. whatever. “i’m taking you home.”

jaehyun doesn’t respond other than a hiccup and another incomprehensible mumble.

“do you need some help?”

oh, right. sungho is still right here. you feel half-embarrassed and half-disappointed at the prospect of leaving him high and dry right here, but jaehyun needs your help right now. you wave sungho off with a small laugh and a shake of your head.

“i got him. we’ll call a driver.”

“are you sure? i can go with you guys.”

“it’s okay! enjoy the party.” you insist, trying to get jaehyun to drink more water. sungho nibbles on his lip in thought, watching the scene in from of him.

“i’ll wait outside with you guys at least.”

“you really don’t have to…” but sungho cuts you off with an insistent look and you find yourself giving in all too quickly. “okay. can you help me get him up?”

with much struggle and some extra hands from angel sungho, you guys manage to get jaehyun on his feet. you throw his arm over your shoulders and wrap your own around his waist to hold him up straight. sungho helps you steady him from the other side and you mentally thank him a thousand times over again because you’re sure jaehyun would’ve already crushed you by now if he wasn’t here.

“carry me like a princess,” jaehyun mumbles, lolling his head to the side, his entire body complete jelly.

“i’m not carrying you like a princess, jaehyun,” you speak blankly as you make your way to the front of the beach house.

“sungho, carry me like a princess.” all sungho does it laugh lightly and take more of jaehyun’s weight from you. 

“come on, myungjae. left foot, right foot… there you go. you’re actually walking now, good job.”

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

sungho waits with the both of you on the steps, jaehyun half asleep on your shoulder. what a way to end your night. sungho is eerily quiet as he watches the party-goers in the distance, the fireworks painting the sky in an array of colors and light. it’s beautiful you think, and as you turn your head to gaze at sungho, the lights reflecting in his dark eyes, you think he’s even more beautiful.

“are you… are you sure you’ll be okay?” sungho suddenly asks, turning his head to face you.

“i’m sure. i don’t want to ruin your night,” you reply with a small smile, though sungho frowns at your words.

“you could never ruin my night,” he says so seriously, you think you might’ve misheard for a moment. sungho’s gaze is heavy on you and you’re at a loss for words again, your mouth clamping shut. you feel your stomach do flips at his words, so simple yet so perfect. everything he does makes you fall for him even more.

you don’t speak for a few minutes after that and you don’t need to. the silence is calming this time. of course, there are a million things you want to say to sungho, but now doesn’t feel like the right time. not when jaehyun is a zombie next to you, mumbling in his half-asleep daze. sungho seems to be keeping his words to himself as well, glancing over at you from time to time. 

finally, a black car pulls up in the driveway and you get a notification that your driver is here.

“i—i think that’s our car. thank you for your help, sungho,” you speak as you go to shake jaehyun awake.

“yeah, it’s no problem,” sungho sheepishly smiles, tucking his hands in his pockets. “um, y/n…?”

“hm?” you ask over your shoulder as you help your mumbling best friend to a stand. sungho watches the scene in front of him before shaking his head.

“...nevermind. get back safely, okay?” when you meet his eyes again, they’re sparkling with something unsaid. and somehow, you know exactly what he’s trying to say.

“will do,” you affirm with a small smile before shushing jaehyun as he begins to whine about needing to puke again. “goodnight, sungho!!”

“goodnight, y/n.”

your clingy, drunk best friend drops his head onto your shoulder again as soon as you manage to get into the car, cuddling up to your side like a koala. with a sigh, you gaze out of the window and back toward the house. none of this feels real yet, but you’re sure it’ll all hit you once you’re completely sober.

as you begin to drive off, you notice a figure with black hair softly banging his head against the front wall of the house before regaining his composure, making his way back down to the beach. 

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

12:47 p.m | weather: chilly

dear diary,

we kissed. we actually kissed. but he was drunk, so i don’t know what any of this means. did he mean to kiss me? does he regret it? he hasn’t texted me, or called me. should i text him first? i’ve never been this nervous over anything before. maybe because it all feels too real now. i like him a lot. i don’t want to ruin this.

also jaehyun puked in my dorm last night. great.

PHASE THREE: UH… NOT SURE YET (never let myung jaehyun plan anything)

you usually aren’t one to bed rot, but it’s been two days since riwoo’s party and you’re sure that you are absolutely done for.

you had finally gave in and texted sungho asking if he got home safe that night. he replied with the driest message you’ve ever seen, and left you on delivered after you asked him what his plans were for the week. 

and yes, you called for a best friend night so you could cry and tell you friends everything that happened. yujin had suggested that maybe he just needed some time to process things—it wouldn’t be out of character for him to avoid you in the first place, but you really thought you had made some semblance of progress that night.

jaehyun suggested that maybe he realized you are a bad kisser and never wants to see you again. you chose to flick him on the forehead and proceed to attempt suffocation with a pillow (which did not work. sadly.) 

now you’re laying in your bed hugging a plushie as you sadly scroll through your timeline at 4 p.m on a sunny sunday afternoon. yujin is out probably seeing the world why you are here hoping to disappear from it. you would’ve never thought that being ghosted could hurt you this bad—probably because you have never liked anyone as much as you like sungho. 

your heart physically hurts, but you try your best to not think too negatively. maybe yujin was right. maybe he just needed to sort things out by himself first. jaehyun, on the other hand, can go to hell.

you continue to scroll through funny cat videos until you suddenly get an incoming call from “p.s.h <3”.

the speed that you sit up at could beat lightning, your eyes comically widening as the caller i.d fills the screen. your fingers answer the call before you can even run through the possibilities of delusion and hallucination, pressing the phone to your ear.

“hello?” you speak, trying to sound as normal as possible. there’s a bit of shuffling on the other end of the line before sungho’s voice flows through.

“hey, y/n. are you free right now?” sungho asks, his voice half-unsure and half-hopeful. you bite your lip to suppress the smile creeping onto your face.

“right now…? i guess i have some time,” you exaggerate. what? he ghosted you for two days! you can’t seem too available!

sungho lets out a breath from the other end of the line, shuffling around again. “um, sorry if this is sudden, but can we meet up? i… i need to see you right now.”

you have to physically clutch your blanket in order to stop yourself from jumping with joy. park sungho wants to see you. park sungho wants to see you right now! it seems as if all of your wishes have been granted. fuck you, myung jaehyun!

“yeah, we can meet up. where?”

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

you notice sungho’s messy black hair as soon as you turn the corner to the flower garden situated in the middle of the large park across the street from your campus. he’s wearing a black long sleeve and jeans with a belt, his green satchel resting on the bench next to him. his glasses hang on the edge of the nose and he seems to be sketching something, his brows slightly furrowed as he focuses intently on his page.

those familiar fluttery feelings fill your chest when he looks up at the sound of your footsteps in the grass. his gaze softens when he meets your eyes, closing his sketchbook as you near him.

“hi,” you start with a shy smile. you suddenly feel self-conscious with his heavy gaze on you, looking down at your shoes. you realize that you’re both wearing converses again today. 

“hi,” sungho says before motioning to the empty spot on the bench next to him. “sit, sit.”

you nod once, cautiously taking a seat next to him. your heart pounds in your chest at the close proximity, which is ridiculous considering the fact that you two were much closer just a couple of days ago, but for some reason, everything feels a little different this time. 

late spring flowers bloom around you, pinks and yellows mixing with the green shrubbery. it’s sunny out, but a a cool breeze combats the bright sun rays. it’s a perfect day and sungho looks even more perfect. he’s back to his usual self it seems, unable to meet your eyes as he clears his throat. 

“so, um… i just want to start off by saying that i’m sorry.”

you make a small sound of confusion, tilting your head at him. “sorry about what? you didn’t do anything wrong…”

“no, i did. i haven’t spoken to you since the party and i just… i don’t know. i got stuck in my own head,” sungho explains softly as he peeks up at you. his leg is bouncing slightly with nervousness and you want to reach over and comfort him. “i thought that maybe you only kissed me because we were both drunk. or maybe you felt pressured to… i don’t know. it’s stupid.”

he shakes his head before looking down at his lap, wringing his hands nervously. this time, you actually do reach a hand out, your fingers resting atop his. his hands immediately still as he lifts his head to find your eyes. they’re completely vulnerable, all of his guards lowered around you.

“it’s not stupid. i didn’t feel pressured to do anything. i kissed you because that’s what i’ve wanted to do for a whole year now.”

sungho’s eyes widen at your words, his mouth dropping open a bit in shock. “a whole year?”

“sungho, i have liked you ever since that introductory art class in freshman year. i thought that you didn’t like me,” you finally confess. sungho frowns at your words, his fingers calmly moving to lace with yours. his hands are as soft as his gaze on you and you feel yourself settle at his touch, relaxing a bit as his thumb brushes against the back of your hand.

“i’m sorry that i made you feel that way. i just get really nervous when you’re around, as you can see,” he laughs, looking down at his bouncing leg. “i don’t know why it took me so long to say this, but i’m not going to wait any longer. my friend, taesan, kinda knocked some sense into me yesterday.”

you mentally thank kurt cobain, trying to conceal the sun-shaming smile threatening to appear on your face. sungho looks incredibly nervous as he takes a deep breath, closing his eyes for a second—and when he opens them again, they drip with so much sincerity and affection, you feel all of the air leave your lungs.

“y/n, i like you. i like everything about you, and i’m sorry i’ve been such a coward this whole time. i guess i just never thought that someone like you, someone so beautiful, and talented, and sweet, would like someone like me,” he speaks, laughing a bit at himself at the end. you quickly shake your head, squeezing his hand.

“you’re also beautiful, talented, and sweet, though…” you mutter through a pout because—how could he ever think he was anything but all of the good things in the world! 

“i’m also an idiot for waiting this long,” he adds and okay, that you can agree with, but…

“i guess i am too, then,” you respond through a tiny smile. this moment is all you could’ve asked for. “sungho, can i kiss you?”

the words leave your slips before you can catch them, but sungho gives you no time to back track. with a small smile and a tiny nod, he reaches up to cup the side of your face and you get deja vu as soon as his skin touches yours. 

“please,” he whispers with pleading eyes.

you are so down bad, it’s insane.

this kiss feels like your first some reason; the your heart flutters as he delicately presses his lips to yours. now that you’re fully sober, you’re hyper aware of everything.his fingers tremble with nervousness and you smile into this kiss. there’s no reason to rush as you take him in, all of him, from his vanilla cologne, to his careful hands. 

his entire body melts as you rest a hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat through the pads of your fingertips. you can’t help but giggle a bit as you feel just how fast his heart is beating, somehow even faster than last time. sungho slowly pulls away, looking at you with pink dusted cheeks.

“why are you laughing?” he asks cutely, cocking his head like a curious kitten.

“you’re just so cute. i can’t help it,” you smile before quickly pecking his lips again. sungho’s cheeks brighten at your words, reaching up to cover his face with his hands.

“you can’t just say things like that!”

“oh? i can’t?” you ask teasingly. he drops his hands and shakes his head at you with a pout. “what about if i were your girlfriend? can i say it then?”

“only if i get to be your boyfriend,” sungho says back, a tiny smile climbing onto his lips. you pretend to think for a second, tapping your finger on your chin.

“hm… sounds like a fair deal to me.”

“then a deal it is.”

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

“guys. guys. it was so amazing. we confessed to each other, and then we took a walk together and held hands, and then we got lunch together before his class, and then we…” you ramble on about your day with sungho as you sit with your best friends on a blanket in the field, sighing dreamily as you reminiscence about his soft lips and cute smiles. he’s so perfect, in every single way. you can’t believe you can call yourself his girlfriend now.

“were the flowers pretty?” yujin asks from where she’s laying on her back, looking up at the multi-hued sky. jaehyun chuckles from his spot in between you guys, his arms folded behind his head as his eyes follow a passing bird.

“of course they were! and they even—wait. wait… how did you know i was at the flower garden?” you ask, looking in between the both of them with accusation. they give each other another one of those classic communicating-with-eyes looks before turning to you with knowing smiles. “oh my god. you guys planned this, didn’t you?”

“yup! i perfected it last night,” jaehyun smiles, throwing an arm over your shoulder. "phase three? let nature take its course. i managed to get some help from kurt ‘taesan’ cobain yesterday.”

“you are actually insane,” you speak dumbfoundedly. there’s nothing else you can say though because at the end of the day, sungho is now yours and you are his. albeit, the way you got here was a little iffy.

“myungstein, i’m telling you. the nation’s #1 matchmaker,” jaehyun speaks cockily, folding his hands behind his head as he turns to you with a cheeky smile. 

“nope. still not calling you that.” you roll your eyes at his antics, but you can’t stop the smile from slipping onto your lips as the three of you watch the sunset. you’re content, the soft breeze drifting across your cheeks, the scent of vanilla and blushed cheeks soothing your mind.

｡‧˚🍞⭒₊˚🍎˚ · .

5:51 pm | weather: clear skies

dear diary,

park sungho is my boyfriend now :) <3 yay

reblogs and feedback are greatly appreciated! thank u...<3 x

masterlist

[stylesloveclub]

Prose (part 1)

In which y/n's taking way too many units, and Harry's the graduate assistant for her Literature class.

+++

 It’s a gloomy autumn day, the sun nowhere to be found, the sky cloudy and gray. Y/n stands in front of Dr. Richmond’s door, nervously pulling back her hair and righting the state of her sweater.

The wind outside was not forgiving today, blowing harsh and cold and whipping her hair all over like she was caught in the middle of a god damn tornado. She tucks any stray pieces behind her ears and pats her wind-stung cheeks – oh gosh, she probably looks a mess.

She should’ve worn something more professional, she thinks to herself as she tugs her skirt down. Maybe trousers and a blazer– or at least a pair of jeans. Not this stupid little black skirt that keeps riding up, halfway hidden underneath her cream-colored knitted sweater. It keeps riding up, no matter how firmly she keeps tugging it down, and she’s got a horrible inkling that she might’ve accidentally flashed her bum at the workers in the street while she was walking to campus today. 

She looks down at her shoes, a pair of black mary janes, paired with some lacy white socks to decorate her ankles. They looked super cute when she put them on this morning – but now she’s worried that she looks like a kindergartener. Is she too old to be wearing frilly socks? They’re just so darn cute… but she doubts the sixty-something year old professor that’s on the other side of the door would think the same thing. 

Wiping her sweaty palms on her skirt, she takes a deep breath. It’s now or never. She lifts her hand up to the door, and nervously brings her knuckles down to knock. 

It took all of her confidence to come to Dr. Richmond’s office today. She’s not a huge fan of talking to professors outside of class – drafting emails to them literally sends her into a spiral of stress, and she always feels like she’s gonna shit her pants when she goes to office hours– but she has no choice but to come and directly talk to Dr. Richmond today. She’d sent him two emails already (both of them had taken her over two hours to send because she actually despises writing emails and is always nervous that she’s gonna make a typo, or call the professor the wrong name, or accidentally attach her sex tape ((even though she doesn’t have a sex tape?)), but he hadn’t responded to either of those emails and she needs a response from him ASAP.

The door opens before her knuckles even make contact with wood, a short stout man walking out of the office with his briefcase in hand. He’s balding, with only a thin circle of gray hair lining the back perimeter of his head, and a pair of classes sit on his large, oily nose. Y/n stumbles, her eyes widening as she embarrassingly lowers her knuckles from the door and takes a startled step backwards. 

“Oh– um, Dr. Richmond?” she stammers nervously, her voice at a much higher pitch than usual. She’d love to stick a pore strip on his nose and unclog all those blackheads.

“That’s me,” he grumbles, sighing heavily, not even looking at her. He’s the head of the English Language and Literature department, a busy man surely. Students probably pester him every hour of every day. Still, she wishes that maybe she could’ve gotten a more… enthusiastic response from him. 

“Hi, sir,” she says, swallowing thickly. “I-I was having some issues with enrolling in your English 270 lecture and– um,” she’s starting to lose confidence as Dr. Richmond blatantly ignores her, rummaging through his briefcase for his keys. “I was… wondering if you had a second to, um, discuss it?” Her voice quietly fades towards the end, not sure if Dr. Richmond was even listening at that point– as he’d taken out his phone and started replying to a text while she had still been talking. 

He takes a solid five seconds to type out and send his text before responding to y/n. “Take it up with Harry,” he mumbles, still not looking at her. “M’done for the day.”

“Harry?” she repeats, her voice confused and eyebrows pinching together. But Dr. Richmond’s already walking away from her, halfway down the hall. “Oh,” she mumbles to herself sadly, lips pouting. All that, for nothing. He literally just walked away from her. 

She sighs heavily, ready to turn on her heel and walk back to her apartment from this failed mission – but then a voice sounds from inside the office. "In here!" it calls out.

She peaks her head inside timidly. 

Behind the desk sits a boy, with chocolate brown curls swirled atop his head. “Hello,” he hums, putting the essay he’d been reading down on the desk and looking at her with all his attention. There’s a soft smile on his pretty pink lips, twisted to the side with a dimple poking at his cheek. His eyes are green and glimmer kindly, framed by a pair of dark tortoise shell glasses.  “How can I help you?”

This man is much more attractive than grumpy old (and oily) Dr. Richmond. 

Y/n struggles to find her voice. “Are you… um, are you Harry?” Her eyes flicker all over this attractive young man’s face, trying to figure out if this is a hallucination or if a boy that pretty actually exists in real life. 

“Indeed I am,” he chirps, his chair squeaking as he leans forward. She briefly remembers seeing the name “Harry E. Styles” listed as the graduate teaching assistant, underneath Dr. Richmond’s name on the course website, and is finally connecting the dots. He’s dressed in a white button up, the top few buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up to reveal tattooed forearms and an anchor on his wrist. His fingers tap against the desk rhythmically, and she finds her eyes drawn to the glittery rings decorating them. Her mind goes blank. 

It’s clear that he’s a few years older than herself – but not in a bad way. He just looks taller and broader and… smarter than most of the boys her own age. He has just the slightest bit of stubble on his upper lip, and his eyes just shine with wisdom and intellect.

“Did you have a question?” he asks, voice a little teasing as he jolts her out of her little trance. She tucks her hair behind her ear, embarrassed, and quickly averts her eyes from his hands.

“Yeah, um– Dr. Richmond said you’d be able to help me with my enrollment issues?” 

“Sure,” he crosses one leg over the other (y/n definitely notices the way his meaty thighs bulge) and leans back in his seat, hands folded neatly on his knee, “What’s up?”

“Well, I wanted to enroll in English 270, the Romantic Literature and Society lecture–” Harry nods attentively, “ –but the class is restricted to students in the Department of English Literature… which I’m not.” His eyebrows furrow hesitatingly, and she’s quick to defend herself. “I’ve taken all the prerequisites, though! I did well in all of them, and I emailed the department coordinator and they said that it’s fine for me to enroll in this class. It would just be a manual enrollment instead of the standard enrollment but they’ve done it for me for all the other literature classes I’ve taken that were also major restricted. All I need is a permission code and the professor's approval!” She pauses, taking a breath after her big ramble. “Or your approval, I suppose,” she adds as an afterthought. 

He’s silent for a bit, sitting there with furrowed brows and pursed lips, just staring at her. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, squirming under his intense gaze.

Finally he asks, “What do you study then? If not literature?”

“Um– I’m a psych major.”

“And… why would a psychology major need to take an upper division literature class?” he presses. Not trying to be rude, but just to understand. 

“Oh. I just… really enjoy books,” she says shyly. “It’s not for any credit toward my major. But I promise that I’ll stay on top of the work and participate and all that!”

He leans his forearms on the desk. His eyes are thoughtful, and he takes his time before speaking. “Your name was…?” he trails off.

“Y/n,” she fills in quickly. He nods.

“Miss y/n,” he sits up straighter, and looks her in the eye, “How many other units are you taking this semester?”

“Um…” she counts them off in her head.  “16?”

“So with this class you’d be at 20?” he confirms. 

She nods, nervously chewing on the inside of her cheek. That is a lot of units. The last time she took 20 units she had a mental breakdown so intense that she spent an entire night just crying to her roommate (Iris), incapable of doing any work or studying because she was just so stressed out and overwhelmed. She had to skip classes just to catch up on the work that she’d fallen behind on for her other classes, and found her weekends swamped with essays and studying and missed assignments. She only just barely survived, and as soon as finals week was over, she literally collapsed with exhaustion, her body and brain so burnt out that she was sick for weeks. She’d promised herself that she’d never do it again… and yet here she is not even two semesters later.

She can already imagine how stressful this semester is going to be. 

“You understand, miss y/n, that this is not an easy class?” He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and somehow it’s attractive. “We have weekly readings and essays and discussions, and the final paper is not a matter to be taken lightly. You truly believe you can manage that on top of all your other classes?” 

She gulps nervously, but timidly nods. He can tell that he’s laid it all on a bit harshly. 

“I’m not trying to scare you,” he says softly. “I’m just trying to be… realistic. You seem to be a highly motivated student – and I admire that you’re pursuing topics that truly interest you – but I’d hate to see you burn yourself out.” 

“I think I can handle it,” she says, quiet but confident. “It’s something I enjoy so it’s more like a hobby than a class. And I think it’ll be fun? I saw on the syllabus that we’d be analyzing Frankenstein, which is one of my favorites…” 

His lips twist in a soft, endeared smile. He also loves Frankenstein. 

“Very well then,” he murmurs, his eyes glimmering thoughtfully. “What was it you needed to get enrolled? A permission code? I think if you just give me your student ID number I can get that sorted out…”

+++

The weather today is better. 

It’s still cloudy and gray outside, but the wind is much more forgiving, just a gentle breeze rustling through the trees. Orange and red leaves fall to the ground, crunching underneath y/n’s feet as she walks to class. They match the red sweater that she’s wearing today, soft and knitted with hidden tones of orange and brown woven between the threads. The colors of autumn, her favorite season. 

A pair of wired headphones trail from her back pocket to her ears. She’s listening to her fall playlist, Lana Del Rey’s Season of the Witch setting the tempo of her walk to campus. In one hand she carries her book – The Secret History by Donna Tart – and in the other she carries her iced chai latte. Her fingers are freezing as she holds her iced drink, and a shiver crawls down her spine every time she takes a sip – but she doesn’t regret her drink order at all. She’ll have an iced chai in her hand no matter the weather. 

Wanting to make a good impression on the first day of classes, she got up extra early today to get a head start. She washed her face so that she’d look extra bright and awake, ate a proper breakfast at her dining table instead of her usual banana-on-the-walk-to-class, and put on an outfit that she thought gave… studious. Her autumn sweater, dark blue denim jeans, and white sneakers. She even chose her book to match the academic vibe she was going for today (she was between The Secret History and Happy Place, and Happy Place just felt too summery for such a gloomy day… plus The Secret History has been on her TBR for way too long.).

She arrives at the lecture hall approximately… 20 minutes too early. But it was on purpose! She’s only taken a few classes in the literature building (most of her classes are in the social science buildings) and wanted to have enough time to find the room before class started. How horrible would it be for her to be late on the first day, when she’s desperate to make such a good impression on Harry? And Dr. Richmond, of course– but mostly Harry. 

He was nice. And she wants him to like her. Ballad of a girl who craves academic validation.

The door to the lecture hall is locked, so y/n takes a seat on the floor right next to the door, and cracks her book open. She’s only 15 pages in, but she’s already enthralled. She can’t count how many times this novel has been recommended to her – always in those “best books to read in fall<3” tik toks, or the list of classics recommended by the New York Times – and she gets it. She zones in, her eyes flickering from one page to the next as her headphones softly play Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac. She’s not one to usually listen to music while she reads (she usually finds it to be too distracting), but she’s so engrossed in this world and these characters that she barely remembers that she’s still listening to music. The people walking past her in the hallway fade away, the fluorescent lights transform into the dark library her book characters are currently huddled in, and no sound passes through her wired headphones – not even the heeled boots clicking against the tile floors, getting closer and closer to her. 

She only realizes that she’s not alone when those brown boots stop right in front of her, shining brightly in contrast to her worn out sneakers. She looks up suddenly, yanking her headphones out of her ears. Harry towers over her, key in hand, which he sticks into the lock. A soft smirk twists at his lips, and his green eyes flicker to where she’s looking up at him from the floor. 

“Miss y/n,” he says with a pleasant nod, a hint of amusement in his voice, “You’re here early.”

She folds the corner of the page she’s on and stands up, gently shutting her book. “I didn’t want to be late,” she responds, fussing with her stubborn headphones, which refuse to tuck into her back pocket. “I don’t have many classes in this building… didn’t want to get lost or anything on the first day.” 

He opens the door and lets y/n in first, following in closely behind her. “Punctuality is good.” He props the door open. 

She looks around the lecture hall. It’s not nearly as big as the classrooms she usually sits in for her psychology classes – those classes are huge, usually filled with a bunch of freshmen from all sorts of majors trying to fulfill their lower division GE requirements and whatnot. Those lecture halls could fit up to 400 people. This one probably wouldn’t fit more than 60. 

Not a problem though, considering that this class only had about 40 students enrolled (she checked last night). 

She wonders where she should sit. Too far in the back and she’d make the wrong first impression… but too close to the front and she might be the annoying kid that asks too many questions. Third row is her best bet. 

There’s still about 15 minutes before the class is scheduled to start, and she’s still the only one in the lecture hall apart from Harry. She feels a bit awkward, being the person in the sea of seats, but Harry pays no mind to her, shuffling through papers and logging onto the computer at the front podium. Though her book sits opened on her lap, she can’t help but stare at him.

He’s wearing brown trousers, well fitted around his legs and cutting off perfectly at his ankles as if they were custom tailored for him. Cream colored socks adorn his ankles and those shiny, brown leather boots click against the floor with his every step. Very professional, but also casual with the way his white button up is rolled up at the sleeves and unbuttoned at the top. He’s missing those cute glasses today, though. 

She watches as he struggles to turn the projector on, his eyebrows furrowed as he presses all the buttons on the panel. The lights in the classroom turn on and off again, and the computer audio mutes and unmutes before he finally figures out how to get the screen to roll down and the projector to flicker on. Despite him being only a few years older, he looks like an old man toggling with the buttons and trying to get technology to work in his favor. She bites back a smile, and quickly looks down to her book when Harry’s eyes briefly flicker to hers. From her peripheral vision, she can see him laughing as well and shaking his head at himself. 

She traces her fingers over the pages of the book, clearly well loved and worn out. She got it from the library just last week, after having been on the waitlist for the book for the past month. She can see why it’s so popular though, already so engrossed by the plot. The pages are old and yellow, the edges folded and ripped with years of use, and it has that old book smell that she just adores. How old is this book? It was published in the 90’s, wasn’t it?

Harry’s voice interrupts her thoughts. “Reading something good?” 

She looks up at him with wide eyes. He’s managed to successfully display the course syllabus on the projector screen, and is now walking around the desk with a stack of papers in his hand. He stands in front of the very first row, leaning his weight onto one leg with a hand in his pocket. 

“Oh, um–” she falters, “I actually just started it. I’ve heard it’s supposed to be really good.” She sits up straighter in her seat, “Have you heard of it? The Secret History?”

Harry purses his lips, “Sounds familiar… haven’t read it though. You’ll have to tell me if it’s worth reading, alright?”

She nods, smiling shyly. Call her delusional but… it feels like a bit of an honor for him to trust her with a book recommendation. That takes a lot of trust, doesn’t it? To trust that someone will recommend a good book to you? 

She’s totally making a big deal out of nothing. She does that sometimes. 

“How about you?” she asks, her voice embarrassingly quiet. She’s shy, and nervous, and she’s not that good at small talk, and Harry is looking at her with these intense, green eyes that make her feel like she’s saying the most important thing in the world. She clears her throat, forcing her voice to not come out scared and shaky, “Read anything good lately?”

He grins, and she can tell this is probably his favorite thing to talk about.  “M’reading, like, five books at once,” he admits sheepishly. “Kafka on the Shore, if you’ve heard of it… Notes from Underground, by Dostoevsky for one of m’own classes…” he purses his lips in thought, “Started re-reading Paradise Lost as well. We’re analyzing it in one of the other classes im TA-ing, n’ it’s one of my favorites to teach,” he says with a shrug. His eyes are so thoughtful as he lists off the books that he’s reading, flickering green and gold. He’s just… beautiful.

“I haven’t read any of them,” y/n says regretfully, wishing that she could impress him with some sort of intellectual talk about one of these books. “I’ve had Kafka on the Shore on my list for a while, though.” 

He smiles. “S’a good one.” There’s a dimple in his left cheek that pinches cutely, the glimmer in his eyes a sight to behold. His pretty pink lips purse thoughtfully, his heart shaped cupid's bow twitching as though he has more to say – but then another student walks in. 

Harry’s head whips around. His jawline is sharp, and he nods politely at the new student. “Good morning,” he murmurs to the girl – that same welcoming voice that had made y/n’s heart flutter that first day that she met him. 

He turns back to y/n, and hands her a paper from the stack in his hands. “The syllabus,” he says, his eyes kind and warm.

She swallows thickly as he walks away from her, enamored already. 

+++

“Classes will be Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Dr. Richmond lectures from the front of the class. His voice is croaky and old, so he has a tiny microphone clipped to his shirt pocket to project his voice to the back of the class – despite the small size of the lecture hall. “Thursdays I’ll lead the class,” he drones on, “We’ll analyze the romantic era… how their literature was a reflection of their politics… how they set the foundation of modern day consumerism, capitalism, patriarchy, globalism, imperialism…” he waves his hand passively. “The works.”

 He takes a long sip of water, and his swallow echoes through the class, amplified by his shirt microphone. Y/n cringes at the wet mouth sounds as he smacks his lips together. 

“On Tuesday’s–” his voice booms through the microphone again, “you will come to a class discussion led by Harry. This means that you’ll have the entire weekend to do the readings…” 

Nearly all the eyes in the room flicker to Harry, who’s been standing quietly in the corner with his hands folded behind his back while Dr. Richmond continues to lecture. He gives a small, almost bashful wave to the class at the mention of his name, his eyes scanning the room of unfamiliar faces. Their eyes meet, and his lips twist into a smile. This is the third time she’s caught his eye during the lecture.

He stares at her for a second, eyes glinting as if the two of them have a secret that they’re not sharing with the rest of the class. It makes her heart race in her chest, smiling back at him secretly.

She breaks their eye contact when Dr. Richmond croaks out with the last of his voice, “Any questions?” 

He’s met with silence.

“No? Okay good, class dismissed. See you all on Thursday.” 

The class bustles with life, backpacks zipping and pull out desks squeaking as everyone slowly trickles out of the room. A line forms in front of Dr. Richmond’s podium, with students eagerly introducing themselves and asking questions about the syllabus, only to be redirected to the back of the new line forming in front of Harry’s corner. Harry smiles kindly at every question and speaks with eloquence, strikingly different to Dr. Richmond’s grumbling and groaning. 

It’s glaringly obvious that Harry is going to be a class favorite. 

In the middle of answering a redheaded boy’s question, his gaze wanders over to y/n, watching her as she packs up her things, eyes following her to the door. She tucks her book under her arm and plugs her headphones into her ear, throwing her bag over her shoulder. 

Her drink is finished, just a cup full of melting ice at this point, so she stops at the trash can right at the front of the door. As she throws it away, she manages one final glance back at Harry. He’s already looking at her. He grins when their eyes meet, and gives a small wave goodbye. 

She bites back a smile, then hurries out of the classroom before he gets the chance to see her giddy eyes and heating cheeks. 

+++

Y/n honestly doesn’t love going to office hours. 

It’s hard, because on one hand, she knows that she should go to them and form a relationship with her professors so that they can write her letters of rec in the future… but on the other, they’re so crowded and awkward! Every other student is there for the same reason as her, going into office hours to ask their silly questions and try to butter up the professor. There are usually at least a dozen college students in there, waiting for their one second interaction with the professor before they all get kicked out at the end of the hour. It’s annoying and a waste of her time. Plus, she doubts Dr. Richmond is all that into getting buttered up 

That’s why she chooses to go to TA office hours instead. Usually much more quiet and much more intimate. Not that many people like to go to TA office hours for some reason, which means she usually gets to have one-on-one help. And sometimes (if the TA is really cool) they’ll basically give her the answers to the homework – a good thing, right?

Well… not when the TA is this ridiculously attractive and charming boy with curly brown hair and pretty green eyes that she can’t help but have a teensy little crush on.

 Like… can you blame her? He’s smart and handsome, and so incredibly kind and sweet. His eyes glimmer when he talks about his favorite books and his lips are always curled into a smile that makes her heart bubble. Always so polite and respectful, doing gentlemanly things while his boyish dimples pinch his cheeks. His voice is slow and sultry like smooth honey – and you can just tell that his mind is a beautiful place just from the way he talks. 

He’s just… endearing. Straight out of some romance book– and y/n loves romance!!! She can’t help but have a little bit of a heart flutter when she sees him standing in the corner of the lecture hall, especially when their eyes meet and he smiles at her cutely. 

He’s just being nice – she knows that, and she is well aware that she’s very delusional and that nothing is going to happen… but still, the prospect of going to his office hours and potentially having a one-on-one conversation with him makes her giddy and nervous at the same time. 

She pulls herself together and shakes away all the silly thoughts clouding her brain. Hoisting her bag up her shoulder, she enters the small office, the gold plaque reading Styles, H. shining proudly as she walks through the door. 

Harry doesn’t hear her walk in, his brows furrowed behind his tortoise shell glasses. A red pen is in his hand, brutally attacking a freshman essay. He looks up, a tad bit startled, when she knocks on the door timidly. 

The furrow in his brow immediately softens and turns into that familiar, kind smile. “Miss y/n,” his eyes shine like the nighttime sky filled with stars, “My first student of the day.” 

“Oh,” she checks the time. “I thought office hours started like, thirty minutes ago. Was I wrong? Am I early?” She intentionally wanted to show up a little late, not wanting to seem too eager. 

“No, no – you were right,” he hums, putting his pen down. “Not many students tend to show up to our office hours, is all. Especially not during the first week.”

She bites on the inside of her lip and wonders if she should be embarrassed for being the only one to show up, but Harry is quick to continue,“I wish more people did come, though. Like– if nobody shows up, all I do is sit here and grade for an hour.” His lips purse out cutely, a thoughtful pout, “And I hate grading.” 

“Oh– I’ll probably be here a lot,” y/n says mindlessly. “I always have questions. And Dr. Richmond kinda scares me.”

Harry sputters out a laugh, and y/n’s cheeks heat up. Maybe that was inappropriate to say. But then Harry leans in and whispers, “He scares me too, sometimes.”

It’s these charming little moments that make him so endearing. She tries not to get too distracted by his dimples and how his fingers tap delicately against his thigh, hugged deliciously by another pair of well fitting trousers. 

“Um– if it’s not a bother, I was wondering if I could ask about the first assignment? I was kind of confused about what's expected from us for the free-write thing…”

“M’all yours,” Harry murmurs, gesturing to the seat across from his desk.

+++

Y/n’s fatal flaw is thinking that she can beat a rainstorm.

She actively knew there was an 80% chance of rain today. She saw the rainy streets. She heard the weather forecast. But did she bring an umbrella with herself to campus? 

No.

Somehow she rationalized in her brain that she didn’t need it. It was barely sprinkling when she walked out of her apartment, and the walk to class was only like 15 minutes! She’d make it to campus and then she’d be indoors all day and by the time she needed to go home the rain would probably have died down, and everything would be fine.

Oh how wrong she was. Silly girl. 

The rain is pounding down on her right now. Big fat raindrops soaking through her hoodie and turning her light wash denim jeans into a completely new color. She has many regrets. What had started off as a cute little walk in the rain has turned into her running through a fucking monsoon or something. The slight, gentle drizzle had escalated to pouring rain in a matter of seconds. She had left her apartment with her earbuds playing Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer, romanticizing her little stroll in the rain – but now her wire headphones are barely hanging on as half-speedwalks/ half-runs down the sidewalk with her head down. 

When she gets stuck at a crosswalk on a busy street, she glances frantically to her left and right, trying to find a tree or a building to take shelter under. But the sky is wide and open, no roof or canopy for her to hide under. She stands helplessly, the rain pouring down on her. The only thing she can do is pull her hood up and grip it tightly so that the rain doesn’t get in her face. 

The rain pierces through her clothes, and the wind feels extra cold against her wet jeans. Thank god she at least wore rainboots today, she thinks to herself as she stares down at the ground. This would suck even more if her socks were getting wet. She had thought far ahead enough to anticipate the possibility of puddles – and yet still didn’t imagine the need for an umbrella. The hems of her pants are soaked and feel horrible against her ankles, and she knows for a fact that she’s gonna have to let her hoodie air dry or something during Dr. Richmond’s lecture. Ugh. She hopes the lecture hall is warmer than it is out here.

She readjusts her headphones, pushing the earbuds further into her ear after they nearly fell out whilst she was running here. She likes this song, and it’s kind of romantic to be listening to it in the rain (it would be even more romantic if she wasn’t SOAKED TO THE CORE). If there’s anything y/n will do, it’s romanticize the shit out of any situation. 

Cars are driving past quickly, but she can’t hear them, her music loud enough to drown out their annoying engines. She stares at a nearby puddle, looking at how it ripples as each drop of rain splatters into it. She wonders if mother nature has a personal vendetta against her – if Earth had personally planned to make it rain super hard the minute that she stepped out of her apartment. Why does she always do this? This isn’t the first time she’s caught herself soaked because she was too lazy to bring an umbrella with herself – and it probably isn’t the last time either. She crosses her arms across her chest and hides her hands in her sleeves, hugging herself tightly as a feeble defense against the biting rain. Why won’t the stupid crosswalk turn on? Her slightly damp hair falls into her eyes as she looks back down at her boots, letting out an annoyed huff. 

The shadow of a new person tickles her peripheral vision. They brought an umbrella. She scolds herself once more. 

 It takes her a second to realize that, although she can still see the rain drizzling around her, splattering against the ground and splashing onto her boots… she actually doesn’t feel the gentle patter of raindrops against the top of her head anymore. She looks up. 

Somehow, she is now under the umbrella. And the person holding said umbrella… is Harry. 

He looks gorgeous as usual, dressed in a dark blue trench coat, black trousers, and some sleek black boots with gold buckles on them. Standing to her left, he holds his umbrella up between them in a way that shields both of them from the rain. He stares forward innocently, pretending like everything is normal – like he hadn't just snuck up next to her and shared his umbrella with her. She can see a slight smile tugging on his lips though, and when she stares at him long enough, he peeks over at her with a glint shimmering in his pupils. His pretty pink lips curl into that sideways smile, and he says nothing. 

Y/n can’t help but give a dumbstruck little laugh. Of course it would be Harry. 

He winks at her, ever so charming and mischievous, then turns back to face the road. The crosswalk switches from Stop to Go, and Harry takes a step forward. Y/n follows in his stride.

They say nothing, and walk to their lecture shoulder to shoulder.

+++

“So,” Harry says with a clap, his voice loud and strong, “I hope you all got the chance to do the first chapter of our reading.” Unlike Dr. Richmond, Harry doesn’t need a microphone to project his voice to the back of the class. All eyes are staring at him, ears listening intently. And all the girls are staring at his pretty pink lips, and how they curl over each word (y/n included). 

“I know life gets in the way, so if y’ever don’t get the chance to finish the assigned reading… tha’s okay,” he says with a quirk of his lips. “M’not gonna be mad. I just ask that you don’t let it turn into a habit, and y’don’t pretend like you read it. M’gonna know if you’re bullshitting me… so just don’t even try.” The entire class laughs, and Harry’s dimple pokes his cheek. 

“So– be honest– how many of you guys read the first chapter?” 

All the students raise their hands, and Harry nods approvingly, “Nice… very nice.” He’s a natural at the front of the classroom, entertaining and intellectual at the same time – confident and eloquent. His words are thoughtful and slow, but not one student seems to be bored by his slow drawl. No – instead everyone hangs onto his every word, dripping soft and thick like golden honey. He answers questions easily and plays off of student responses like a pro, and everyone seems keen on impressing him with fancy literature talk.

“You might have seen on our course page that I posted a series of discussion questions… I’ll try to have these up at least a week in advance so that you can have them in the back of your mind whilst you’re reading. I always find it to be particularly stimulating to be reading a novel with a question in mind… dunno, makes me feel sharper while I read. Does anyone else feel that way?” He talks to the class as if they’re all friends, mildly flirtatious in the natural, charming way that he is. 

The group of undergraduates nod back at him, enthralled by his smile and his wit and just everything about him. God, his smile is just so charming. “Okay... how about we get started with the first one? Wait– actually, before that… I’m just wondering, have any of you already read Frankenstein before?”

Two students out of the forty raise their hands – a boy wearing a Bob Dylan t-shirt, and y/n. 

Harry’s eyes meet y/n’s for the first time since they entered the classroom together. They’d walked across campus together in comfortable silence, past the campus Starbucks and the Social Science buildings, and when they got to the Literature department building Harry had held the door open for her, while shaking off the rain droplets from his umbrella. They walked through the halls side by side as well, Harry’s shiny boots clicking in time with the squeak of y/n’s wet sneakers against the tile floors. All he had said to her during the entirety of their walk was “After you,” when he’d opened the door for her. 

Now he looks at her for the first time in what feels like ages, and gives her an approving nod. He already knew that, from that very first day when she’d come to his office, asking for permission codes and what not. She feels her heart fluttering excitedly, just from that single nod. 

“Interesting… so it’s a first read for most of you. Brilliant! We’ll have a good time reading it together, I promise,” he says, his green eyes gleaming. “I love this book – it’s sometimes called the first science fiction book, written at a time where technology was first being introduced, and it’s regarded as one of the most famous novels of the Romantic era. Mary Shelly, the author, was a prominent Romantic era writer who shared the common Romantic appreciation for the natural world and how art can evoke emotions, which we can clearly see in her novel. We’ll take a few different approaches while analyzing it. Most prominently through a Romantic lens – but we’ll also do a feminist reading and religious reading, as well as a biographical approach… which brings us to the first discussion question – ‘Frankenstein is ultimately a novel about creation– a new and terrifying exploration of bringing life into the world. Based on what you read in the introduction, how can we see Mary Shelly’s personal experiences with life, birth, and death in the themes explored in Frankenstein?’” He looks up from the sheet of paper that he just read the question aloud from with bright eyes, “Anyone want to start us off?” 

The class is silent, the crowd of students suddenly much quieter compared to when they’d been going back and forth with playful banter to Harry’s jokes. Everyone’s a little too nervous to be the first one to say anything, and nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Harry holds his breath, and searches for a hand to save them from this awkward bit of silence. This kind of shyness is normal for the first day of classes – in fact, he’d expected it – but it still doesn’t mean it’s any less awkward. His eyes flicker from one side of the class to the other, from the front row to the back.

He almost misses y/n’s hand, timidly raising from her set spot in the third row. Harry’s eyes light up. “Miss y/n,” he murmurs, “go ahead.”

“Well, in the introduction we learn that Mary Shelly had a few failed pregnancies before writing her novel, and that her own mother had passed during childbirth complications. Shelly goes on to depict the cycle of life as destructive… Frankenstein’s monster is this disfigured creature that the creator is running from, which we see right at the beginning. The introduction implies that this “horrifying” birth and the death of the creator at the hands of what it created, might be symbolic of her own experiences.” 

“Excellent. That’s exactly right,” his smiles meet his eyes, and they twinkle, impressed. “The reason we have this as the first discussion question,” Harry turns back to the rest of the class, “is because I want you guys to keep it in mind while reading. Look for the ways Shelly describes birth –  take note of the strained relationship she creates between the creator and his creation. Also, recall how Shelly herself proclaimed this book to be her “hideous progeny” – to use such intense language whilst also calling it her “progeny” holds a lot of implications of what Shelly’s view on Creation is – whether is biologically or creatively. This is something that we’ll discuss further in depth when we get farther into the novel, so I want you all to start thinking about it now.”

All the students in the room nod intently, writing down what Harry said word for word.

“Furthermore, has anyone noticed that we’ve already seen a lot of references to fire? Pretty obvious symbolism, right?” The class nods. “Does anyone know why she chose fire, specifically?”

It’s silent again. Y/n looks around herself to see if anyone else might have the answer, but everyone stares up at Harry blankly.

“Don’t be shy on me now, guys. Promise m’not mean,” Harry smiles, “Just wanna get the discussion flowing.”

Y/n shyly raises her hand again. “It’s a reference to Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods – she even alternatively calls her story The Modern Prometheus.” 

 His eyes glimmer, a shine behind his irises that doesn’t show up when he looks at his other students – just y/n. As hard as he tries not to pick favorites… he can’t help but harbor a little bit of favoritism towards her. “Very good, Miss y/n,” he praises with a soft smile.

Y/n’s cheeks turn hot and she ducks her head down, unable to stop the reciprocating smile from spreading on her face. 

+++

“Miss y/n,” Harry calls out to her as the students file out of the classroom. “A word, please.” 

Y/n hoists her bag over her shoulder and makes her way to the podium where he stands. He’s packing up his own things, his own beat up copy of Frankenstein being placed delicately in his bag, along with a stack of other papers and things that he has to grade. A few other students have approached him, asking questions that they were too shy to ask during class, but with a sly smile he tells them to ask their questions at his office hours (Thursdays at 5 – but y/n already knew that!). Her fingers twist nervously behind her back as she stands awkwardly by his side as the rest of the students ask their questions and trickle out. 

He waits until all the students have left, and it’s just him and y/n standing by the podium, before he says anything to her.

“You were making some excellent points today in class,” he looks up at her briefly with a smirk, “I appreciate your participation. Class is always more difficult to lead when students don’t participate.” 

“Oh,” she blinks. She’s never been thanked for participating in class. “Erm– yeah. I-I’m happy to participate.” She readjusts her bag, tugging it higher up her shoulders, “S’just kinda like a big book club if y’really think about it.” 

“It is, isn’t it?” he agrees with a quirk of his lips. He zips up his bag, and pulls it over his own shoulder, “How are you planning on getting home?”

A strange follow up question, she thinks to herself. But she responds, nonetheless, “Oh, I was just gonna walk.” Harry peers out of the window, then looks back at y/n, his eyebrows raised. She follows his gaze, and realizes that it is still raining like crazy outside. 

A heavy sigh escapes her lips without her permission. Of course. “I guess I’ll just wait it out,” she shrugs, walking towards the door alongside Harry. 

He locks the door behind them, with her lingering closely by, waiting for him. “Do you live far?” 

“No, not really. Just a 15 minute walk.” They walk towards the building exit, and Harry pulls out his umbrella. “Not too bad, as long as there isn’t a monsoon going on outside,” she finishes with a petulant grumble.

Harry chuckles lowly, his dimples shining brightly. “I was just going to offer… y’know, since it’s still raining and you’re umbrella-less…” his eyes twinkle teasingly, “I could drive you home? Wouldn’t want you to get soaked again when you’ve only just dried off.” 

“Oh!” she bubbles, looking at him with wide eyes. “Really? You would do that?” He nods, but she presses, “Are you sure that wouldn’t be a hassle? I mean– like, really I could just stay here and read until the rain dies down–”

“S’not a hassle,” he reassures. “Y’don’t even know when the rain will be gone– could be all night. It’ll be cold, n’dark… it’d make me feel better knowing you got home safe, yeah?”

“Gosh that’s… that’s really nice of you,” she says, almost pouting. 

He just smiles, pushing the door open and opening his umbrella for the two of them to huddle under. His car is parked in the graduate student parking lot, so it’s not too far of a walk (although they’re doing more of a brisk speedwalk, trying to get out of the rain and wind as fast as possible). The rain patters harshly on top of his umbrella, but they manage to stay dry, shoulders brushing together and their warm bodies radiating heat onto each other.

He unlocks his car and opens the passenger's seat for her, making sure that she’s covered from the rain as she slides into her seat. He then runs over to his own side, quickly shutting his umbrella and throwing it into the backseat. His fingers are numb as he turns the car on, and he immediately blasts the heat for the two of them, putting his frozen fingers in front of the warm air. “God, not even three minutes out there n’ I’m already freezing m’bits off,” he mumbles to himself. He turns to her, and smiles when he sees her copying his actions, “Isn’t this so much better that walking home?”

All she can give is a nod, wriggling her fingers in front of his heaters. Her teeth are chattering as she barely manages to chatter out, “S’freezing.”

“Wind would’ve blown you away before you even made it home, I reckon.” He plays with the windshield wipers until they’re on the highest setting, but even then his windshield is blurry from the rain. He makes sure to drive extra slow and cautiously, reversing out at the speed of a snail and turning his high beams on.

It’s only when she’s sitting in the front seat of his car that a somewhat important thought floats to the forefront of her mind – “is this allowed?”

“Is what allowed?” He's half paying attention, half checking both sides of the road before turning left onto the street. 

“Like– I mean you’re sort of my professor, I guess,” she stumbles over her words, “Is it… would you get in trouble? For like… giving me a ride?”

Harry’s eyebrows pinch thoughtfully, “Well, first of all– Dr. Richmond’s your professor, not me. Secondly– I don’t see why it would be against the rules. S’just a car ride,” he shrugs. 

She relaxes in her seat, nodding. She supposes he’s right. It’s just a car ride.

“But– if anything,” he adds on with, turning to her momentarily with a mischievous glint in his eye, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Y/n’s lips curl. “Okay,” she giggles. 

It’ll be their little secret. 

+++

HOPE U GUYS LOVED IT!!!!!! part 2 is up on my patreon already, and will come to tumblr next saturday (oct 14) pleeeeaaaase lmk what u rhink and give her a rb and a comment i love u guys so so much!!! more tarry to come!

Prose (part 2) is already posted on patreon! : In which not many students attend Harry's office hours, and y/n's kind of burnt out

Prose Masterlist

[chiyoso]

“breaking the 4th wall”

h. star rail : jing yuan.

▶CONTENT. insomnia, self conscious doubt, comfort, self aware au, something personal for those who have trouble with loneliness, insomnia and exhaustion, jing yuan is self aware!

▶NOTE. im tired and its 3am, but jing yuan exists so have this comfort fic. also @ainescribe gift for your hardworking ass, ily aine feel better.

Your eyelids grew heavy, laid against the arm rest of the warm sofa, scrolling and tapping away at your phone for anything, any eventful thing that can spark a motivation, an inspiration to you.

It's eating you away. Death scrolling, letting the blue light affect your sleep instead of earning a sleep that your body desperately needs for tomorrow.

Yet, your fingers can't seem to stop moving, as if it had a mind on its own, causing further subconscious guilt and shame, a knowing voice gnawing and belittling behind your state of self, commenting on your disheveled, tired appearance, bags underneath your eyes, your flesh warning you of your stress and lack of self care that you couldn't find the time to do anymore. Shit, and the studying you have to do tomorrow.

All that, but your fingers never leave the glass screen.

3:25 AM Sun, Aug 6 ᯤ [▂] 22%

[Honkai: Star Rail] · PomPom: [Username]! Your trailblaz···

[Tumblr] · 16 new notes · [Your blog] ···

[Tumblr] · hiraethsdesires just posted a post...

[Weather] · 28° in [Place] Feels like 33° · Mostly Cloudy · S...

[Honkai Impact 3rd] · Captain! Your energy has replenishe...

⊗

“Finally.” You said, tapping the first notification.

You sighed, the notif reminding you of your shitty sleep schedule. It had originally updated you at the early mornings, gradually turning into afternoons, then the evening... night... and...

You were brought back to reality from the sound of the lobby theme, the Astral Express, traveling in your sight, wishing you would be reincarnated into such a life, meeting the ones who made this horrible, tedious lifespan bearable.

Once you hit tap, you were greeted with a loading screen that had Jing Yuan's fact along the bottom, earning a faint smile from you as the image of his splash art pops up in your mind.

Jing Yuan: The Divine Foresight, one of the Seven Arbiter-Generals of the Xianzhou Alliance, leads the Cloud Knights of the Xianzhou Luofu. A student of the Luofu's previous Sword Champion, though not known for his martial prowess.

You were greeted by the sight of Jing Yuan's pixels as always, greeting him bubbly and warmly as you spin him around to face you, zooming into his features, especially admiring his beauty mark under his eye.

“Pretty, so damn pretty,” You hum, moving onto other features, before resuming, checking your daily tasks.

Now what were you doing at this time of night?

You wouldn't know, you will never know, but he will always appreciate the way you greet him every day, but this day—being the observant, Arbiter General that he is, he notices your slurred, tired voice, but still coated with affection that he enjoyed quite a lot. He didn't quite like the bags underneath your pretty eyes that he will take glances of every chance he can get. He didn't like how you were feigning ignorance to your bodily needs, on how you were sacrificing sleep to play.

You led him to the cavern of corrosion; Path of the Holy Hymm once again, endlessly grinding the perfect relics for your main dps, wasting all your trailblaze powder for him. Bronya, Tingyun and Luocha snickered to themselves on how much you spoil the Arbiter General, on how much you baby him lovingly despite his commanding, superior status as the Xianzhou Luofu's face, causing his cheeks to grow hot in result of your affectionate words whenever you go to the character screen, setting and upgrading his relics.

“So strong my general...” His breath got caught to his throat upon hearing you, his blush deepening from the sudden suggestive tone in your voice.

The character screen was filled with the various people that you earned, and they were giggling and smirking slyly to your gestures, making his arms full of materials from the endless grind you did, all for him—a bonus as well, he didn't feel any shred of guilt as you do the same towards the others, but he was just your very, very favorite, and he knew all about it from your vocal prowess.

He would find your curses endearing when you get a shitty relic, but he would soon then join your annoyance as this body relic had stats befitting for a damn healer, might as well give it to Bailu since she's the same element, and fortunately a healer. (In which case you did.)

...

You worried him. Once you were done with your tasks and finishing off your remaining trailblaze powder, your eyelids threatened to shut, giving the Arbiter General a feeling that he hadn't felt in awhile, a certain dread, and a strong one at that towards the player who felt strongly about him.

Your consciousness was drifting, your lids weighing down, but the unthinkable happened.

On the top left corner under the map, a red exclamation mark appears on the chat logo, your tired eyes noticing the sudden mark, giving you a burst of little energy.

You blinked a few times, rubbing your lids gently before landing your irises upon the message again.

Was this a new message update?

A new trailblaze mission?

An event leak? Hoyoverse tease...?

You shook your head, regaining focus to check the patch notes in the game, seemingly finding nothing about any update, but your search doesn't stop there, you looked through the official website, hoyolabs, tumblr, youtube, heck even reddit—but none have mentioned a message regarding to this.

Deciding to remain quiet about this ordeal, you went back to the game to find another message, and another, his restlessness growing evident as the moonlight continues to dawn over your world.

3:38 AM Sun, Aug 6 ᯤ [▂] 19%

[Honkai: Star Rail] · 2 new messages from ▉▉▉▉ ▉▉▉▉ ···

[Tumblr] · hiraethsdesires just posted a post...

[Weather] · 28° in [Place] Feels like 33° · Mostly Cloudy · S...

[Honkai Impact 3rd] · Captain! Your energy has replenishe...

⊗

What- What the fuck?

Your throat lumped to the sight of the first notification, its whole box felt out of place from the others, yet you found your thumb nearing the glass towards the notif, accompanied with your growing blush and curiousity.

You were then met with the Hoyoverse screen once again, assessing the situation you were in as you stare into the blackness of the screen.

Was I... Imagining things? Surely not.

Fuck — I'll just... sleep all day tomorro—

...?

You were met with a slightly glitchy screen of the normal sequence of Jing Yuan's back, but he was... already in his phone. The sprite of his pixels, typing away, seeing the red exclamation mark on top of the speech bubble under the map, earning him a slight breathy inhale from you.

You click the link, losing your shit at the messages that fell before your eyes.

“Ha?”

“What the fuck? I-”

I've lost it.

Oh.

I haven't lost it?

You find yourself staring in silence, re-reading repeatedly the words that only instilled a slight fear yet wonder that was visible on your reddening face.

“But I-... How?” You spoke gently, softly. Something the General wished to hear again, and on cue, his sprite in the game chuckled, as if he was truly listening to you.

'I am only fiction to you' it rings through your head, aching your heart slightly.

You were about to speak, but another message popped up, leaving your body with disappointment and longing, gripping your phone as your eyes gloss over the phenomenon.

“W- Wait! Ji-... Jing Yu...”

You gulp down a lump, bringing your phone closer to your face, your eyes glistening, your whole senses overwhelmed with intensifying longing, warmth — yet accompanied with a growing heartache from the fleeting interaction and him excusing himself abruptly in this otherworldly situation.

...Wait.

Everythi—?

“General...” You muttered out softly, your reddening face from the embarrassing memories that flooded you, his words greatly reminding you of the times where you acted with full on eccentricity, degenerative behavior, lustful tendencies and so on. It made you wonder if other characters such as Blade, Welt — or perhaps even the Aeons heard and witnessed you all this time. It made you shiver with embaunable feelings of humiliation and continuous embarassment, making you unable to think clearly, and the way you threw away your phone onto the couch lightly to cover your heated face? Still being witnessed by the General, and a few other silent spectators of course.

Jing Yuan couldn't believe this situation as well.

This was somehow the work of Silverwolf, a wanted enemy of the Xianzhou, Destiny's Slave, but he felt the most warmth and joy since being summoned by you — no, especially this unforseen interaction with the mortal whose been taking care of everything in the universe within your phone, for taking great care of the Xianzhou especially.

... An endearing mortal at that.

The General and the rest of the game couldn't see as you apparently let go of your device, but your wails and silent squeals were still audible, as the General comes to a conclusion that you perhaps needed to calm down, but in reality, he quite enjoyed this spectacle of yours, even by only listening — in which he was once again very greatful for his grand, and sensitive sense of hearing as he listens to you.

After another, final deep breath, your hand reaches to your phone again, before beginning to press your fingers onto your screen in a frantic haze, but the joystick button was... unresponsive, as well as the others—except for the message button in this moment.

BZZT

Another messaged popped up, quickening your heartrate immediately.

“WH—” Your heart only fluttered and dropped at the same time.

He can do that?

It's... It's probably a bluff.

...

He's the Arbiter General, who am I kidding.

With a warm sigh of content, you find yourself smiling at your phone, hugging it onto your chest with the game still open unknowingly.

“...I love you all. You are all my calm and peace.”

You said quietly, sniffling and accompanied with sounds of your light breathing, drifting off your exhaustions away to fulfill your body's needs.

Finally in your slumber, your phone switches off within a few minutes, thus the floating screen on their end disappears, earning a content sigh from the General as he makes his way towards his office in the Exalting Sanctum, each step felt heavy without your sight now that you were aware he can — or his world can access yours in this small, yet impactful way, but his form grows with confidence, determination setting in his soul as his sights land upon the Cloud Knight whom guarded the way to his office.

Jing Yuan sought out to Welt Yang and Silverwolf immediately in secret after his satisfying interactions with you, informing them of what happened in full detail (though he left out the parts where you cosplayed a squealing tomato, sparing you from further humiliation) and the whole ordeal as it was successful. His subtle praises earned him multiple cheeky and cocky remarks from the criminal hacker, along with a few teasing about him being smitten by you (and to Welt as well), but what can he really do to retaliate back? She was a main source of intelligence and control who provided a connection to you in the first place.

Inevitable, but he was willing to cooperate either way, all for this world, for the Xianzhou — for you.

The three continue to dive into their conversations, planning on how he or others who are interested, can continue to interact with you further more without raising suspicion from their creators upon breaking a few bits of code and data. It was no doubt in mind risky, that was apparent, but so was their endearment and affection towards their human, their player.

In all honesty, Welt and Silverwolf also found themselves wanting to interact with you as well from Jing Yuan's stories of the first ever interaction you had to their world, but of course, if they did it consecutively, it would most definitely be noticable if a few more characters began to act on their own accord, threatening the programmed codes as numbers shift and modify suspiciously.

Though unfortunately, only resorting to using the message system for now, but Silverwolf was confident with her abilities, making use of the way she was made, using the descriptions laid for her against her own creators.

After all, Hoyoverse made her annoyingly cunning, intelligent and skilled. A mistake on their part, or rather, an intended choice of character building for players like us to create, indulge and enjoy? We'll never know.

Unless Hoyoverse put out a stream that specifies the matter, until then Silverwolf remains focused and unyielding to her program, heeding Jing Yuan's call if need be and taking Welt Yang's advices about his own knowledge when it came to multiverses and other worlds from his prior experiences. All this planning, the risk, the longing for more interactions with you — it was a motivation to the three, as well as for the others that greatly wished to converse with you.

An aloof and lazy, the general he may be, but he's a living legacy of dreams and determination for a reason.

A wielder of a great glaive with materials dropped from the remants of the Reignbow Arbiter's Lux Arrow — and tonight, as you slept peacefully, this felt like a moment of miracle once again, the fleeting moment of grace that made their world reach a state of serenity, all from the possibility of having to finally, finally interact with you.

reblogs help my audience reach, thank you.

[bruisedboys]

steve blurbs!! yes!! maybe u could do some hurt/ comfort where reader has a very vivid nightmare and steve just tries to calm her down and bring her back to reality?? you’re the best thank u <33

lil baby blurb of protective bf steve!! I love him to bits

gn!reader

Steve is no stranger to nightmares.

Still, he’s surprised when you shake him awake, your fingers an iron grip on his shoulder.

“Steve,” you’re whispering, your voice cloudy with tears. “Steve.”

Steve blinks himself awake fast. He rolls over and sees your silhouette hovering over him.

“Babe, what’s—? Are you okay?” He sits up so fast it makes him dizzy. He ignores his throbbing head and instead takes your wrist in his hand. His fingers push into your pulse point. Your heart’s racing.

You give a great sob, a horrible, awful gasping noise that makes it sound like you can’t breathe. Steve panics, grabs your face in both hands like he can take some of whatever’s hurting you away. He would, if he could. He’d take it all.

It’s dark, he can barely see you, but your cheeks are hot and wet and more tears are coming in fast, dripping down your face and gushing over his fingers.

“Y/N?” Panic rises in Steve’s chest like bile. Any thoughts of sleep have been washed away by your distressed state and his need to make it better. “What’s the matter?”

You sniff, and Steve feels rather than sees you blink hard, another round of hot tears skipping over his hands.

“I … I had a bad dream,” you manage to get out. Your voice is all choppy and raw and it feels like a hot knife to Steve’s chest.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

Steve releases your face and slides his arms around you, encircling you in a hold so tight it’s borderline bone crushing. You don’t mind, rather, you melt into it, your body going lax in his arms, face pressed into one side of his chest. You’re warm and you smell like you. Sweet. Sleepy. Steve rubs your back, hoping to ground you, to help you know that he’s real, and whatever you were dreaming about isn’t.

You’re still crying. Big gasping sobs, each one a punch to Steve’s gut. Your back shudders under his hands and he can feel your hot tears beginning to soak through the fabric his t-shirt.

“It’s okay,” Steve whispers into your hair. He knows you know that, but he thinks you need to hear it out loud. “You’re okay, angel. I’ve got you.”

He doesn’t know how long he holds you, and he doesn’t care. He would hold you all night and more if he had to. Eventually your tears die down. Your breathing slows and your body stills. Steve knows you’re okay when you let out a lovely, long sigh, your chest pressing into his as you finally relax. Steve feels so relieved he could cry. He doesn’t, for your sake.

“D’you want to talk about it?” He asks gently, knowing you’ll probably say no.

You’re quiet as you answer. “No.”

“Okay. That’s okay.” Maybe in the morning.

Steve rubs careful, swooping lines onto your back, your t-shirt rising with his motions. Your bare skin is warm to touch, but still, goosebumps rise in his wake. His fingers push over the bumps of your spine, all the way up and then back down again. He’s pleasantly surprised when your arms push under his and loop around his waist. You pull yourself into him, practically in his lap, your face pushed into his chest.

Steve’s heart goes wild. He’s sure you can feel it. He let’s your t-shirt drop and strokes the back of your head with one hand. “You okay?”

You hum, a tired but pretty noise. Your nose presses into the space between his pecs.

“Should we lie down?”

You sound dead beat when you whisper, “Yeah.”

Steve lays you both down and doesn’t miss a beat in pulling you into him, one arm hooked under you and the other resting over his chest. Your thigh slots between his, half of you on top of half of him. Your head rests on his shoulder, facing him, and he can feel your warm breaths as they wash over his jaw and chin. He takes one of your hands in his, presses his thumb into your palm as the rest of his fingers curl around your wrist. He works his thumb into your palm in the way he knows you like.

“Get some rest, angel,” he tells you gently. “I’ve got you.”

He’s got you. He’s never letting you go.

[enderpearlll]

Yandere!Rick Hedony Headcanons.

numa numa yay, numa numa yay, numa numa numa yay

Gender-neutral reader, but pet names such as Muffin and love are used.

TW/CW: Yandere content, alcohol consumption, mentions of su1c1dal thoughts/mindsets, toxic behaviours, etc…

• Rick was a lonesome man, and after years of being so, he grew accustomed to it. He convinced himself that it was nice to be alone, and that no one would ever think of being with him. Hell, he couldn't even remember the last time he genuinely enjoyed someone else's company. Rick hit rock bottom a long time ago, which only further discouraged him from a relationship with anyone. The least he'll do is go out for a drink or two with his coworkers, and that's the most voluntary social interaction he'll do in a month. That was until he met you.

• Rick can't exactly pinpoint what had peaked his interest in you in the first place, but his infatuation isn't immediate like most other people. (*coughs* bob) It slowly creeps up on him when he doesn't expect it, nor will he realize it until he's absolutely down bad.

• You were a regular customer where he worked and you constantly made an effort to talk to him. Rick could care less but seeing you crestfallen when he only offered one worded responses or a simple nod of his head made him feel guilty. One night, after you've tried to continuously talk to him, Rick realizes that he hasn't felt so bad in literal years. He hasn’t genuinely felt something in forever… You actually made him feel something. And it only peaks his curiosity further. So he slowly began to get to know you more.

• A friendship quickly blossoms between the two of you, and Rick can't help but wonder how you've done it. Usually he'd hate talking to someone for more than an hour but he could spend hours listening to you speak. Rick hated getting up in the mornings but thinking of you showing up and not seeing him there gives him the will to get up. You're like a ray of sunshine on his cloudy days, and he basks in the warmth that you bring to his day.

• You genuinely make him happy, something that no one had been able to accomplish in a long time. It's no wonder Rick ended up falling for you so quickly. He doesn't even realize it until one day you adjusted his disheveled uniform for him, a smile on your face as you pat his shoulder. Rick just internally explodes. If it weren’t for the red flushing over his skin, you’d think he didn’t care at all. This is when it all clicks together in his head. That makes a lot of sense.

• One morning, the doorbell rang when you were asleep. It was fairly early, so you had no reason to be up yet. You're genuinely surprised when Rick shows up with a bouquet of your favourite flowers, his hair well groomed and his work uniform looking tidy. Rick watches as you gape at his appearance, taking the flowers with shaky hands. "I don't know how this stuff works but... I'm free after work." One date had extended to two then onto three, and so on...

• Your relationship is astonishingly great despite Rick being a closed off guy. You feel safe around him, a sense of security filling you whenever he was around. So you had no reason to worry about him doing anything untrustworthy. Rick was unsurprisingly loyal, and made sure to treat you right even when he was mad or upset. So it's only natural that you trust him with your passwords and electronic devices. You just trust him with everything in general.

• Rick isn't one to pry into your private life, but insecurities seep into him the more you talk about it. He's taking advantage of your blind trust, going through your messages and photos. He feels absolutely fucking horrible afterwards, but it soothes his mind in some sick way. He accidentally pushes his insecurities on you when he doesn't mean to at times, guilt tripping you effectively.

"I'm sorry. I don't think I'm a very good boyfriend at times."

"What—? No way, you're an amazing boyfriend Rick!"

• This happens a lot more than you think, with you showering him in affection and love. Rick adores it, and sometimes, just sometimes will "accidentally" guilt trip you a little bit so you don't have to leave him. Trying to go out with friends? Rick hopes you have fun, he'll just be here alone, waiting for you... You always cave in, cancelling plans or even calling in sick from work.

• You two practically live together despite only being together for a few months at this point. Rick is quick to grow accustomed to your company, uncomfortably blank when he has to leave you for long periods of time. Only you can make him feel alive, without you the beat of his heart was only a burdensome reminder of his existence. But just being around you makes him feel like he's worth something. When he gets home from work, Rick greets you with a long chaste kiss and a tight hug.

• Rick has trouble sleeping at night, but when you came into the picture, he can actually sleep a decent amount when you're in bed with him. At first he was completely stiff and was teetering over the edge of the bed to give you space, but now he just wraps himself around you. You like to curl up into his side or flop on top of him and just sleep there, because he's so wonderfully warm and soft. He hates when you're out late because he literally needs you to sleep. If you aren't there he'll toss and turn all night.

• Sometimes he doesn't even want to go to work in the mornings, so when you try to wake him up he'll just grumble angrily and pull you close to him. It's either you try again or just fall back asleep. Rick doesn't like leaving you in the mornings, and will probably call you at work whenever he had a break just to check on you. Rick doesn’t like being away from you for long.

• He's very cuddly even when he doesn't realize it. Watching a movie together? You're sat on his lap on the couch, lying together in a nest of blankets. On a walk? His hand is wrapped tightly around yours, sending anyone that stares at you weirdly a dirty look. Cooking? He's wrapping his arms around your hips and picking at the ingredients.

• Rick isn't one for pet names, but occasionally when he's too distracted or tired, he'll slip up and call you muffin or love. Sometimes you'll be blessed with a sleepy Rick who just crawls on top of you, presses a kiss to your neck and falls asleep. But not before a very quiet "Goodnight, muffin...". If you gave him a pet name, Rick's cheeks would just combust in a hue of red. He's very easy to fluster.

• Brushing all of the soft stuff aside, Rick isn't much of a stalker. Yes, he may be overprotective and possessive at times due to insecurity and fear, but he finds that stalking you is creepy. One thing that differentiates him from other yanderes is the fact that he's completely self-aware AND feels guilty about his unhealthy devotion to you. Does he feel remorse for isolating you from your friends? Yes. But at some point in time Rick deserves something good for himself.

• Rick tells nobody that he has a partner, very much preferring to keep you a secret. Not because he hates you, god no. He just likes having you to himself, that's all. Rick is already a private man anyways, no one would care, right? You're his sunshine, he deserves to have a slice of heaven all to himself. But one night he went out drinking with Radford and his friends, Kevin and Streber.

• Halfway through a wild story told by Radford, his phone blared through the empty bar. Rick paled when he saw the caller ID, lovingly titled "Muffin". The three, nosy and slightly hammered, began bugging him about you immediately. Rick slammed down his shot glass, excusing himself begrudgingly to the washroom so he could call you back. All three of them were genuinely shocked, watching as he walked into the washroom. How the hell did he pull a partner—?

• He can literally not live without you. Rick is suicidal and you are the main reason for his happiness, the reason why he pushes to be a better man. If you ever left him, he'd genuinely lose himself. Rick is not below using that as an excuse to keep you with him, and this time he won't feel guilty at all. He cannot lose you to anyone or anything, not if he can help it. You're the air in his lungs and the blood pumping through his veins, how can he not not to keep you for himself?

[satureja13]

Cloudy sky above Verdantis this morning. Before Greg leaves, he gathered the Boys at the duelling grounds. And since Jack is the Super Soldier (and has a few genetic modifications), he's the perfect sparring partner/training dummy for Vlad, Saiwa and Jeb. Ji Ho and Kiyoshi don't fight today since they are still not in shape. Vlad and Jack started. The classic - Vampire vs Werewolf.

It's not about winning. Jack can defeat anyone, except for Greg and Kiyoshi. But since Kiyoshi isn't Jack's Alpha anymore, Jack should win a fight against Kiyoshi too. So today it's about teaching the others how to fight, should they be in danger.

Next pairing is Saiwa and Jack. Again the classic (+ 1\2 Dark Elf). Saiwa: "Oh - I've been waiting for a chance like this since - forever!" Jeb can't bear Saiwa getting hurt and has to look the other way.

Even though Sai loves Jack dearly, he often wishes he could smack him for his endless nonsense. Usually Jack runs away and Sai could never hit him, but he hopes he can land a few punches before Jack ends the fight ^^' Jack seemed to know that and let him, lol. Poor Jeb was so worried about his Vanië, though.

And then Jack vs Jeb - Werewolf vs Witch. It was Jeb's first fight! Saiwa was about to faint, seeing Jeb fighting. It looks so rough! Is Jeb even able to breathe?

Oh oh, Jeb isn't used to fighting and so he got a bit dizzy from all this tumbling and turning - and stumbled to the ground! Jack: "Omg, Jeb! Are you ok?" Sai: "I'm going to kill you for this, Jack!"

But Jeb almost immediately jumped up again - phew! That was embarrasing o.o' He so wanted to look cool in front of Saiwa - poor Jack didn't even do anything wrong! After the fights, they were discussing what they could do better and how to proceed training without Greg (since none of the professors can remain beyond the Veil for too long). Greg wants to see Noxee as soon as possible to make the most of their time together before she has to pay the old hags the three witches a visit to discuss Jack and Kiyoshi. And when Greg finally left, poor Jack collapsed on one of the loungers. The fights took their toll on him. Jack tried to keep his composure for as long as possible to not have to argue with Greg about the state he's in. His body is still constantly under pain from the last spot and he feels horrible since that lightning struck him. Noxee's potion didn't help at all and of course he didn't go back to her to whine because he doesn't want her to think he's a weakling... (Omg, Jack!) And he's afraid she's going to tell Greg about it ö.Ö' Jack surely doesn't need another talk with Greg. Even though Kiyoshi drifted away again after Ms Coombes forbid them to hang out together, he was immediately at Jack's side to heal him. Jack won all the fights, but none of the others needed a treatment. He'd gone easy on his friends. Which was an achievement for itself. Not many werewolves have that much control over their wolf - in a fight at that.

Saiwa blinked upwards. He has to hold back tears and already regrets that he hit Jack 😭 And Jeb wants to embrace and comfort Sai, but he's not sure if he would allow it...

Eventually Jack woke up and cursed under his breath. He doesn't want to appear weak in front of Kiyoshi either. And he doesn't want Kiyoshi to see him in his wolf... (Which is stupid, since Kiyoshi made very clear that he likes Jack in both of his forms.)

'And then we lie, beneath a shady tree I love her and she's loving me She feels good, she knows she's looking fine I'm so proud to know that she is mine'

Good day sunshine - The Beatles

Outtakes

I built this lot many years ago and had to laugh when I spotted that mannequin I placed behind the divider ^^'

And Ji Ho is curious what these ointments and potions are for :3

From the Beginning 🔱 Underwater Love 🔱 Latest

Current Chapter: 'Here comes the Sun' from the beginning ▶️ here Last Chapter: 'Who killed Jack?' from the beginning ▶️ here

📚 Previous Chapters: Chapters: 1-6 ~ 7-12 ~ 13-16 ~ 23-28

[ladyshadowsblog]

Needed comfort.

A drawn and written story with both rehab Asahi & Midnight Dreamer

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After a loud crash that Midnight heard from Asahi's room after he got back from a meeting. He ran to Asahi's room with the thought that the cultists were trying to take Asahi back, once he opened the door he noticed Asahi was there but not laying in bed asleep. Instead he was sitting on the floor knees to his chest; it seemed he hadn't noticed Midnight. He walked up to Asahi and sat down next to him, he then could hear soft cries only to be heard when close.

He sat there for what felt like minutes till he finally said something, Asahi jumped at the voice of Dreamer being right beside him quickly looking next to him in shock. It's very rare that Dreamer goes into that room of Asahi's, he had betrayed him so it was only right for Dreamer to hate him but yet he took Asahi under his wing.

All Asahi could do was tear up, unable to say a word before Dreamer hugged him "Let it all out Asahi, i know your hurting" Dreamer states as Asahi looked down at his knees vision now blurry from tears. He couldn't understand why Dreamer was so persistent that he would care for him and why he wanted to be around him.

So Asahi cried, he cried as if had lost everything. So many emotions, so many questions he couldn't ask in his current state, so many regrets that no apology would help the fate that Blooming Stars faced all those years ago. As Asahi cried, Dreamer moved his tail around him as a way to comfort him, to make him feel safe.

He hated seeing Asahi cry many years ago and he still does even years later. He started to tear up hearing the sobs his old friend was letting out, he wanted to mend a broken relationship that occurred from betrayal. Dreamer sat there hugging Asahi with his own thoughts, one flooding his mind the most was the fact he absolutely hated what those cultists did to Asahi he hated seeing him being destroyed mentally. He hates seeing him cry like he lost everything, like the day when left those flowers for the people of Blooming Stars; Dreamer visited his home land often it was a way of comfort, but he would see Asahi There sometimes leaving flowers for those who passed during the attack seeing Asahi cry and fall to his knees hurt him more then losing his people did that Horrible Day.

It had been almost two hours when Asahi finally calmed down and fell asleep leaning on Dreamer. Dreamer looked down at the sleeping Kitsuné and signed he moved to put him on the bed so he himself could get some much needed rest, but when he moved to get up he noticed Asahi flinch as if having a nightmare so he stayed and used his arms to drag himself & Asahi to lean on the nearby wall. Dreamer was exhausted from the thoughts and memories of the past so it wasn't long till he too fell asleep after but not before he wrapped part of his clock around Asahi as he drifted off to sleep.

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Bonus! Cloudy Sky's design jumpscare

As Cloud started waking up he very quickly realized Dreamer wasn't in bed with him nor did he come to the bed last night.

He searched the home, looking for his husband who seemed to have just vanished with no warning. He remembered they were taking care of Asahi whilst he recovered and served his time for being part of the attacks and being a cultist as well, so he walked to Asahi's room and quietly opened the door knowing Asahi wasn't up this early in the morning neither was Dreamer hint why he was so alert.

When he opened the door he peaked inside the room and looked around before noticing both Asahi and Dreamer on the floor Dreamer leaning on a wall whilst Asahi lay peacefully sleeping on Dreamer both of them still sleeping peacefully. Cloud smiled, closing the door quietly behind him as he left to his bedroom to catch up on some important paper work whilst the two slept peacefully for the next 3 hours.

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I hope the long awaited Fluff was enjoyed, and you guys got a story out of it so you guys got some good wholesome foor

Dreamer & Cloud belong to me @ladyshadowsblog

Asahi Belongs to the @truelazymaker

Space Riders AU belongs to @onyxonline

[ethanthespookymonth]

The Lorax Creepypasta

Hey guys! What a lovely morning for a Creepypasta, isn't it? This is my Lorax Creepypasta, and I hope you guys enjoy!

“Alright! I’m off to sell my thneeds!” I say as I throw the thneed into the wagon. “Well just remember Oncie,” mom begins to say. “If your creation isn’t a success- Well I wouldn’t be surprised at all!” “Wow, thanks,” I mutter to myself. I leave and begin my adventure to find a place. I end up in a forest full of fluffy trees. They were called the truffula trees. “This is the place! This is it, Melvine!” I say excitedly. Not even halfway through the day, I cut down one of the trees. It starts to get windy and dark out, like a storm was forming. A small creature, the color orange appears before me. He sees the tree that I had just cut down and looks at me. “Did you chop down this tree?” “No!” I say. I drop the ax on a small bear looking creature. “I think he did it.” Then the small creature looks at me in disgust. “I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees. And if you don’t leave before the sun rises tomorrow morning, all forces of nature will haunt you. You have been warned.” But I didn’t know that the warning actually had some very horrible consequences.

I go to bed. “Boy, what a day. That Lorax guy is bad news.” I close my eyes and fall asleep. It’s been a couple hours, and I suddenly feel cold water on my face. I snap awake. “What’s going on?” I look around. I’m in my bed floating in the river heading towards a waterfall. “Oh shit…” The Lorax and some other creatures helped me before PipSqueak drowned. “I just gave you a warning. Please understand the next consequence won't be as easy as this one.” “I swear to never chop another tree down.” The next day I get ready to sell my thneeds. Of course no one appreciates it, and I give up. After a couple days, a large mob of people arrive in the forest asking for more of them. That’s how my factory started up. Let's get going through the story.

The factory had closed down due to there being no trees. It’s dark and super cloudy. Can’t even see the sky or the sun. I look around and see the Lorax. “I told you this would happen,” he says as he puts a rock down that says unless. “Now they all have to go find a new place to stay.” The Lorax then disappears. “What have I done?” I ask myself. I feel ashamed. I feel angry and upset. I feel… sick? I feel something coming up from my stomach. I put my hands up to my mouth and cough up a rose. There’s blood all over my hands, and vines start to cover my body. “WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?!” I scream in pain. This can’t be happening to me! Is this what the Lorax meant by the forces of nature haunting me? Did he curse me to become a plant? I feel another rose coming up and lean against one of the factory's walls. Another rose flying out of my mouth. “HELP ME!!!” I scream as the roses and vines grow onto my body. I can feel my eyes glowing and look in the mirror. My eyes are now glowing a bright green. My skin is bleeding from the thorns, and I fall to the ground. It’s too much… 

I wake up and I go to the town close by. I’m holding my ax. “Where is that bastard…?” I say in a harsh raspy voice. “I’m going to kill him for doing this to me…” It’s early, so the sun is just coming up. People are just starting to wake up and go outside. “Mama that man is hurt!” a  child says and points at me. I look at her and spread a wide grin on my face. “Honey, stay away from him… I don’t like the way he looks…” I grit my teeth. “This was never my fault!” I yell and swing my ax at the woman. It hits her in the neck, decapitating her. The child screams and runs inside. A man comes up behind me with a gun. I turn my head to face him. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you…” I say grinning very widely. “I won’t let you hurt anyone else you crazy son of a bitch!” The man says and puts the gun to my head. I raise my hand as vines grow around the gun breaking it. “H-how is that possible?” The man runs. “Very brave,” I say and follow him. He runs to an ally and I come up behind him. “How bad can I possibly be…?”

[ilanorgratvol]

Rough tempest they will raise - Part 4

Table of contents

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

When Talia returned to the tower, the moon had already lit up the night city for several hours. As much as her alcohol-clouded mind would allow, she tried to reach her room as quietly as possible. She was almost at the door when her attention was caught by the flicker of light coming from the study. She cursed softly under her breath, shook her head, and stepped into the room.

"Gale, I want you to know..." she started, but stumbled halfway. The wizard was quietly snoring, lying on the couch near the dying fireplace. An open book lay on his chest, which he clutched tightly even in sleep. His brows were furrowed, creating small wrinkles on his forehead between them. Tara was curled up by the fireplace on a pillow, also deep in slumber.

Talia quietly approached the couch, leaned over the wizard, and gently freed the book from Gale's grip, carefully avoiding contact with the orb. She was about to place the book on the table when Gale's hand suddenly grabbed hers, pulling her closer. Without opening his eyes, he whispered, "I don't want to hurt anyone."

Talia exhaled softly and smiled slightly, "It won't happen. Sleep, wizard." She gently freed her hand from his, adjusted the blanket over him, and quietly left the room.

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The morning greeted Talia with a dull headache and a horrible taste in her mouth. It wasn’t a new experience for her, but combined with the loud singing of birds outside and the pervasive smell of the sea, it was almost unbearable. Or perhaps the encounter with the sphere had something to do with it. She groaned as she sat up in bed, clutching her head. Slowly cracking her eyes open, trying to adjust to the bright light, she glanced at the bedside table. There was a glass on it, filled with a dark red, slightly cloudy drink. Talia picked up the glass and cautiously sniffed it: tomato juice, celery, spices... It could have been worse. She downed the drink in one big gulp. The cool liquid refreshed her head a bit. Finally finding the strength to start the day, she headed to the kitchen, where the familiar smell of breakfast was already wafting through the air.

“Where did you learn to make stuff like this?” - Talia asked, walking into the kitchen and placing the empty glass in the sink.

Gale smirked without taking his eyes off the stove. “Well, I know I don’t give off that impression, but I can boast of a rather lively past, mostly spent between the Academy and the Yawning Portal.”, - he took the pan of eggs off the heat, plated the food, and placed the plates on the table, - “I’m surprised you stayed after what happened yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful…”

Talia raised a hand, cutting him off: “I didn’t stay because of you, don’t kid yourself. I made a deal with Elminster, and that means I have to fulfill the conditions. It’s not about you.”

“Oh…” - Gale sighed, - “Well, in any case, if it means I get a second opinion on my condition, I suppose I shouldn’t care too much about your motives.”

Talia nodded and began to eat breakfast. Gale followed suit, occasionally casting slightly disappointed glances her way. They ate silently for a while before Gale continued, - “I suppose your method of studying the sphere is now off the table. I could give you access to some potentially interesting works written by my colleagues who studied the Netherese Empire…”

“No,” - Talia interrupted, - “I said I wouldn’t touch that thing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t continue studying it.”

Gale frowned: “But how…”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” - Talia replied with a mischievous grin, - “We’ll run a few experiments.”

“Excuse me! I’m all for the scientific approach, but turning myself into a test subject...”, - Gale raised a finger as if to make a point, but Talia cut him off again.

“Do you want to get rid of this thing, or are you ready to resign yourself to being a walking bomb for the rest of your short life?”

Gale sighed in resignation: “Fair enough.”

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Thus began the long weeks of their now joint seclusion in his tower. Gale buried himself in books and ancient texts, hoping to find any clues, while Talia conducted her experiments. Cold temperatures, hot temperatures, lightning and thunder spells, illusory spells—every known type of magic was tested. But no matter what she tried, the orb only greedily absorbed the energy from the spells, and nothing seemed to alter its state.

Talia was sitting on the couch, resting her head on her hand, frowning deeply. Over the past three weeks, she had tested all her ideas and hypotheses, and her confidence in success had nearly evaporated. She looked up as Gale entered the room, carrying two mugs of coffee.

“What are we doing wrong?” - she asked, taking the mug from him. Gale joined her on the couch.

“Maybe nothing. I’m starting to think that if there was a logical explanation, we would have found it by now. Which means it’s Mystra’s will to continue punishing me for my…”

“Oh, shut up,” - Talia cut him off, waving a hand dismissively, - “Your goddess clearly doesn’t care about you, I won’t argue with that. But I don’t think she’s sitting around just waiting for another chance to teach you a lesson.”

Gale winced slightly, as if in pain, and rubbed his chest near the collarbone.

“Are you alright?” - Talia frowned.

“Fine,” - Gale replied, rotating his shoulder a few times before returning to his coffee.

Talia watched him for a few more seconds, her frown deepening. But once she was convinced he was okay, she returned to the conversation.

“I think we need to take a step back,” - Talia said, taking a sip of coffee, - “I want to visit the place where it all started.”

“Go to Karse? Absolutely not,”, - Gale replied firmly, - “The Shrine of the Undying Heart has become a haven for fanatics and cultists. You have no idea what it took for me to get in there the first time when I was at the peak of my powers. Let alone now…”

“The Chosen of Mystra is afraid of a bunch of cultists?” - Talia smirked.

“It’s not just a bunch of fanatics,” - Gale said, his voice growing more serious, - “it’s a group of necromancers, so deranged that they’ve dedicated their lives to resurrecting Karsus. We won’t get through.”

“Speak for yourself,” - Talia replied dismissively. 

Suddenly, Gale doubled over in pain, clutching his chest where the orb was embedded. But it didn’t hide the bright violet light that began to seep through his fingers.

Talia quickly set down the mugs on the table behind the couch and knelt beside Gale.

“What’s happening? Let me see…” - She instinctively reached out to his chest, trying to move his hand, but Gale roughly pushed her away.

“Don’t you dare! It will pass… I just need to…” - Gale couldn’t finish the sentence, doubling over again in agony, growling through the pain.

An anxious Tara burst into the room: "Mr. Dekarios, what...," - she began, but upon seeing the wizard in his current state, she rushed to his side, - "Gale, you said there was still time..."

"Time?" - Talia looked between the wizard and the tressym in confusion, - "Time for what?!" 

She frantically tried to understand what had gone wrong, and then it hit her. Anger must have flashed across her face because Tara arched her back and backed away, preferring not to intervene.

"You idiot!" - Talia hissed, - "When was the last time you fed the orb?" 

It finally dawned on her that during her entire time in Gale's tower, she hadn't seen anything resembling the orb consuming magical artifacts.

"A month ago..." - Gale gasped, - "Tara tried to find new artifacts, but...", - His words turned into a pained howl, unable to continue.

"Arrogant fool!" - Talia yanked his hand away from his chest, pulling open the collar of his shirt, not caring about the buttons that tore off, - "You're going to destroy half the city!"

She hesitated for a moment before taking a deep breath and placing her hand on the orb. The familiar sensation of suffocation and dizziness enveloped her mind. But this time, she didn't resist. She leaned in closer, allowing the orb to feed on her Weave. Through the haze, the last thing she saw was Gale's terrified expression before she finally slipped into darkness.

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Talia slowly opened her eyes, her view entirely filled by the worried face of the wizard sitting by her bedside, holding her hand. Noticing that she was finally awake, he let out a relieved sigh.

"How are you feeling?" - he asked.

Talia pulled her hand away and tried to conjure a small fireball in her palm. The Weave responded reluctantly, but she still felt the warmth in her hand. "Still me..." - she murmured.

"That’s not an answer to my question," - Gale replied.

"I wasn’t planning to answer your question because the answer is damn obvious!" - she growled, - "What were you thinking?!"

"I was about to ask you the same!" - Gale snapped back, - "You took a risk for me. I didn’t ask you to do that."

"Please! If I hadn’t stepped in, you would’ve blown up the city!" - Talia managed to sit up in bed with some effort.

"I would have found a way," - Gale protested.

"Bullshit!" - Talia couldn’t hold back, - "We’re going to that temple, whether you like it or not."

"You can’t be serious..." - Gale tried to argue.

Talia glared at him, sparks of anger in her eyes. Gale let out a heavy sigh: "You’ll be the death of me..."

"Look who’s talking!" - she retorted, waving her head and opening the door, signaling that she wanted to be alone.

The wizard stood up from the chair and slowly left the room. Talia noticed that he walked steadily, calmly, and that the orb showed no signs of disturbance. Her Weave had worked…

[goremet-chef]

my brain so ridiculously color coded if i told anyone this was a blue song they wouldnt get it!!!!! like its blue you must understand. blue on a cloudy day, early early morning cuz you stayed up all night. as opposed to the OTHER blue songs which are horrible and i burn them not really but i burn the way i remember them. its music its color!! trust me. blue like whales blue like outer space blue like lighthearted sky dancing time, blue like a ghost blue like everything!!!! just for blue, dont get me started on red..............................grin

[seradyn]

A Dream Come True (Chp. 10)

Chapter 10/?: Budding Romance

The dreams have passed, and it’s back to work with you. Although, your little library is visited by someone most unexpected.

Link to work Masterlist

Word Count: 5126

TW: none

Tags: @savage-rhi @ticklemycucumber @miridiums-writing

Lmk if you’d like to get tagged in updates

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When you next awoke, it turned out your day off had been stolen.

It was a bit hard to fathom, when you’d finally had the courage to shake yourself awake, dreading what more the day could bring. You’d double and triple checked the date, confirming that you had, indeed, been asleep for over 24 hours.

You weren’t sure what was more horrifying; the fact that you’d basically suffered a mini coma, or that you’d somehow still awoken in the same way as all those other nights; covered in sweat and exhausted beyond belief. The pattern held true, a nightmare each night, despite whatever efforts you had gone through to stop them. Those whimsies of your unspoken mind were turned raw, leaving corrupt taint in their wake. You were left to pick up the pieces of your broken psyche come the morning, with all the pleasures of existence still demanding attention.

You were growing tired of it all, emotionally and physically.

It stuck with you long after you’d numbly gone through the motions of getting ready and heading off to work, absently doing your duties in numb disinterest. The dreams, those parasites, leeched away your attention for anything but themselves, leaving Gralea to seem just as surreal as any world they could conjure. The streets, the people, they all passed in a blur; a muddy memory of grey cement and brown sweaters.

The real world was starting to feel bland, monotonous compared to all you’d lived during the past week.

It was akin to having a second life, you realized, as your skin soaked up the warm air at your desk.

And much like a second life, you couldn’t tell anyone, lest you be labeled a delusional, sanctimonious fool.

Yet no matter how hard you tried to convince yourself you were being farcical, it was easy to let yourself obsess over every little detail, every little moment you could remember. Each one spawned more questions than answers, sown and reaped long before you had a chance to catch up. It made everything that much more difficult to process, as you struggled to decide what deserved the abundance of your attention.

The dull sting of anxiety prickled your chest for the rest of the day, hovering close to breathe hot steam down your shoulder. You knew you were being paranoid, overthinking things, but rationality had long lost its grip of you.

There was just no way any of this actually meant something. They were just dreams, they had to be.

And even so…

What if something bigger really was going on here? Was some invisible clock ticking down every minute you didn’t act, didn’t do what you were asked, marching towards the horrible fate you’d been shown? Had you doomed humanity with simple skepticism?

You worried a lock of hair between your fingers as the hours crawled by, the end becoming split and frizzy.

Your encounter with Ifrit flashed beneath your eyelids, his cloudy, dead expression and disfigured horn sticking out prominently in your recollection. So vividly, you could see the way his face wrinkled, his lips peeled back in a toothy snarl, as he raised his hand and buried you in fire.

You shuddered at the images of being melted alive, trying to keep yourself from stimming too obviously to calm yourself. While the meeting with The Infernian’s flames hadn’t caused any physical pain themselves, there was naturally something deeply disturbing about being burned out of existence. Every time the thought came to an end, it would rewind and repeat, torturing you by making you relive the trauma.

The rest of your day was filled with similar such strife, the hours at times dragging by at a crawl, and at others with impressive haste while you mused.

You could’ve wept with joy when the clock struck 7, close enough to closing for you to justify leaving the desk to organize the returns.

Anything to get your body moving and mind off the dreams.

Gods, you were exhausted.

You made your rounds with your little rusted trolley, up and down the maze of books, filling the ubiquitous holes where missing texts belonged. The work was tedious, but it required just enough thought to keep your mind occupied, which was what you sorely needed. The cold metal bit into your palms as you pushed your way through each section, firmly grounding you in reality.

At some point through your organization, you found yourself in the non fiction section. Usually you barely paid attention to where you were, but your eye caught on the title of a book in your hand; a journal from a civilian during the bloody imperial takeover of Accordo, and you frowned. Not one of your favorite genres; you’d often found the literature depressing. The crimes of humanity towards their own kind never failed to bring down your mood. There were too many sins that could never be atoned for.

You pushed past those painful thoughts, stopping here and there to file returned books back to their rightful places. A tome on the founding of Altissa to your right, the extinct technologies of Solheim down at your feet. The dance between trolley and shelf was one you’d long perfected, the still quietness of the surrounding books gently easing the tension in your chest as you moved.

So focused on your task, remembering the correct way to place everything, you lost track of the space around you. You were sharply pulled back into awareness when metal jabbed at your hip, sending a wave of books tumbling to the floor with muffled thuds as your cart jostled.

You looked down at the mess and sighed.

This was why you weren’t allowed to be distracted while working.

You stooped down to the floor, the coarse carpet biting through your clothes while you picked up the hard covers and stacked them in your arms. You hoped no pages had been bent from your carelessness, as some were splayed open, facedown on the ground.

The pile tucked up to your chest was considerable, straining your arms by the time you’d gotten most of them. As you reached your hand out to the last one, you became vaguely aware of the thumping of footsteps echoing from somewhere to your left, sounding as close as the next row over. You paid it little mind, assuming it was some straggler who’d yet to notice the library would close soon.

You couldn’t have been more wrong.

You heard the steps abruptly stop, at the end of the aisle you were working in. Still, you ignored it, hardly paying attention.

“Oh my…” the person spoke, much to your surprise. Their contented drawl took you aback, freezing you with your arm still outstretched.

You knew that voice. The forced, almost sickening sweetness in their words. Before even looking up, you felt the rush of blood draining from your face. Your breath caught in your throat, unbelieving, when you craned your neck upwards to meet the stranger’s gaze.

The sight that met you made your heart stop.

Holy fuck he found me again.

There was no mistaking that look.

Ardyn smirked, the wicked grin that permanently stained his face growing smug when your gazes met. He returned your astonishment with a devilish gleam in his eye, that unmistakable satisfaction twisting his features. He stood at the end of the shelves, looking just as he had on the night you’d met, complete with his air of superiority that made your skin crawl with unease.

“What a pleasant surprise…” he purred, smooth, like the lazy dripping of oil. He seemed rather delighted at the sight before him, eyes narrowed as he stared from underneath his wild hair.

At the sound of his voice, a flash of him stole across your mind. The crazed, daemonic look he had when his veins became clogged with miasma. The gut wrenching wail you remembered when his leg was snapped in two. Then what had transpired the night before, that monster…and Ifrit.

You suddenly felt vulnerable on the floor, looking up at his yellow, unblinking eyes, observing you much like a great Zu stalking its next meal. You stood up, perhaps a little too quickly, your last book laying cold and forgotten on the floor.

“C-Chancellor?!” You sputtered in greeting, managing to find your meek voice after a moment of stunned silence.

What on Eos was he doing here?

He laughed, then. A soft sound that rolled from his throat, amused by the startle he gave you. He stepped forward, his frame easily eclipsing the end of the aisle, trapping you there, trapping you with him. He bent down to snatch the book you’d forgotten as he strode, tilting his head to look at you as he approached.

“Please, there’s no need for that,” he said, his voice bordering on a lustful lowness, deep and unrelenting. “You may call me Ardyn.”

He extended the book to you, smiling innocently at your flabbergasted expression.

Like he wasn’t the chancellor, and he hadn’t just helped relieve your clumsiness.

You hesitated, eyes flicking between him and the proffered item, still unsure how to process his presence. It was incredibly surreal, meeting such a powerful man again, after only a day of space between your last encounter. You’d expected to never see him again beyond that night, the disparity in your statuses keeping your paths from crossing.

Yet here he stood before you, being kind, being helpful. Even giving you permission to drop his honorifics.

You tentatively took the book from him, making certain to grab it by a corner, purposely keeping your hands from touching. By the way his nose further wrinkled in a sneer, you knew it didn’t escape his notice, either. You nodded in thanks as its weight was transferred to you, added to the stack pressed against your chest.

“Ardyn, then,” you breathed, testing it on your tongue. You realized it was the first time you’d called him by name in the real world.

He seemed pleased, eyes brightening as it passed your lips.

Once the book was secured, you quickly deposited them back on your cart in a messy pile, some teasing the edge again.

Your muscle memory kicked in, and you made a show of getting back to work, your mind and body needing something, anything else to focus on. Looking at Ardyn, you could see his face crumbling, the dreams rising to the surface like a corrosive concoction. You could see the sorrow, then the anger and bitterness that followed; you could hear the clang of blades meeting, of metal piercing skin.

You prayed to the Gods Ardyn wasn’t privy to the battle you were waging within yourself, to keep those visions at bay. That he couldn’t see the nerves that turned the atmosphere awkward.

You heard the rustling of clothes, of Ardyn shuffling, and you peeked over your shoulder to see him now facing the shelves to your back, browsing them with an amused smile on his face.

Internally, you heaved a sigh of relief, glad his attention was elsewhere while you focused on trying to make sense of the heap you’d made.

The silence that hung in the air was almost painful, a buzzing tension filling the space.

Books loudly thumped against each other as you shoved them aside to make room for the ones that were missing. You were making progress getting it all done, slowly but surely. Though while you worked, you noticed yourself subconsciously stealing quick looks at Ardyn out of your periphery. Watching the way he presented himself, how he carried himself, looking for any overlaps with his fantasy persona.

You knew it wasn’t really fair to compare them, as different as they were, but you needed reassurance. That your dreams really were just feverish delusions.

Ardyn seemed content to simply stew in the silence he’d curated, not a word parting his lips as he carefully looked over your selection. Yet he seemed to be growing irritated, scanning the shelves up and down, a frown darkening his features as his search came up fruitless.

You blinked curiously, watching him with growing interest.

He must be looking for something.

Your lips parted, your first instinct being to help, but you paused, uncertain.

Should you…talk to him?

Would that be bothersome? Intrusive?

Was it not your job though, to help people find the knowledge they sought?

Yet Ardyn was such an enigma…You’d dreamed of him not once, but three times, a man you’d never met or much thought about until that week. Why was he the focal point, why him had your brain chosen to latch onto? Hell, you hadn’t even known it was him those first few nights, when you’d naively believed those fantasies were a one time thing.

Even disregarding that, he’d immediately captured your intrigue with the way he’d acted previously; like a performer on stage ready for their next show. His character, a mystery that just begged to have its locks jostled. His motivations, which may seem obvious, trite, were clearly more than what could be seen on the surface. You barely knew him, this him, and even you could see the chip on his shoulder, the agenda he had all his own, hidden in plain sight. It was clear from the night you’d first bumped into each other, especially when he’d walked you home, speaking like he knew things far beyond your pitiful comprehension.

And here he was, again, acting as if he was any ordinary person. If it weren’t for the getup he wore, he may have even fooled someone, too. Yet you were wiser, realizing how convenient it was that he happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to stumble upon you, despite never being told where you worked. In your 4 years of service, never having seen him grace your halls once, though now he waltzed in like a regular patron.

Just what was his game?

And how did he fit in, with all those nighttime illusions? Why did every one, save for last night’s, come back to him?

You closed your eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of your nose, stamping out those lawless, frantic thoughts.

Those dreams were just distractions.

Ardyn was just as any other man was; he wasn’t special. He was no healer, no brother to the founder king, and certainly no lover of the first Oracle.

To proclaim otherwise was to be delusional.

You turned your head slightly, just enough to properly look at him, his continued frustration.

And here’s your chance to prove it. To distance the real him and the one you made up.

You swallowed.

“Do you need help?” You probed nervously. Your voice barely drifted across the space, quiet and timid.

Part of you hoped maybe he wouldn’t hear you.

No such luck, as Ardyn let out an exasperated, almost dramatic sigh, his head bobbing while he continued to look. “I was under the impression your collection included a tome on the Oracle lineage,” he said woefully. “But alas, it eludes me.”

Upon hearing the subject of his desires, your eyes subconsciously trailed to where you knew such a book to be, just to the left of his far shoulder.

“Look one row down, to your left,” you instructed, turning slightly to gesture at it. You watched his head follow your orders, stopping when his eyes met the spine of his query.

“Ah,” he said in recognition, taking the book out of its place and beginning to look through it. His eyes lit up as a grin replaced his annoyance, obviously having found what he needed. He looked over his shoulder at you, holding up the book in triumph.

“How very astute of you,” he hummed, running his fingertips across the words in much the same way a blind man would. “You possess a sharp mind.”

Heat sparked in your neck at his words, rising to dust your cheeks. You turned back to your work to hide it, and the tiny smile that bloomed at the compliment.

“Comes with the territory,” you protested, allowing your voice to come out a little louder, a little stronger, so he might hear it better. “I’ve worked here for a long time.”

“I don’t believe experience wholly deserves the credit,” he shot back. “Though your humble nature is one to be admired.”

You might’ve scoffed, if you didn’t want to seem rude. You were just doing your job after all. Yet Ardyn seemed to be having a great deal of fun stroking your ego, making you flustered.

“You flatter me,” you said, rubbing the back of your neck, feeling the blush run deep through your skin.

“Only those who deserve it,” he cooed playfully, a self satisfied smirk tugging at the corners of his eyes when he saw a hint of the redness that painted your flesh.

Gods, you’d thought he’d been flirty before, but if this wasn’t downright blatant then you didn’t know what was.

“How sweet,” you murmured shyly, though your smile could be heard in those soft words. Your chest fluttered with warmth, the brush of butterfly wings filling your stomach.

He chuckled, but said nothing more, returning to his current muse without fanfare, and leaving you to relish in his compliments.

A silence descended on the both of you again, and with it brought a tension not unfamiliar. Though it was different this time, not as sharp or suffocating as when he’d first appeared. It was…lighter. Warmer. The task of relieving it didn’t seem so impossible as the times before.

You stole a peek at him over your shoulder, watching him read. As your eyes flicked to the book in his hands, you were struck with inspiration.

“I never took you as someone who liked history,” you said, trying to open him up a little more. There was still much you didn’t know about him, and he seemed amicable enough for conversation.

He hummed in agreement, scanning over the tattered pages, used and held by so many.

“Just catching up on lost time…” He sighed dreamily, not bothering to take his eyes from the words. The faintest hint of longing graced his voice before he trailed off, lost in thought, the gentlest of smiles still present.

You pondered that, turning away as your hands moved of their own volition, sorting and categorizing. The way he spoke told you he wanted to be left to his devices, enjoying the simple pleasure of what he held. You were quite accustomed to the feeling, and the annoyance that came with interruptions, so you decided not to prove him further, not wanting to push him to undesired chit chat. Perhaps you’d kept him too long, a pang of guilt reverberating in your chest.

Behind you, Ardyn paused, subtly glancing at you out of the corner of his eye. He could sense the timidness he’d managed to break down forming again, much to his displeasure.

“Tell me…” He ventured, waiting for you to acknowledge him before continuing. You stopped, resting your hands on the lip of your cart as you turned to meet his eyes.

“Did you find my little remedy helpful at all? I must admit, I was a tad worried about you; you seemed quite ill.”

You froze, the hairs on your arms raising.

Shit.

You had to lie. He’d been rather proud of himself when he’d given you that medicine, claiming it to be the very best to suit your needs. He may find it insulting if you spoke of it in ill light, upturning your nose to his help, calling his judgment into question.

Although…perhaps you could afford to be honest with him. He was being much more gentle with you now, handling you like a lamb that was just separated from its mother. Like he knew how much of an anxious mess you were, and was trying to soothe the pain he knew to be there. Not like that first night, where he was playing a game you didn’t even know the rules to. The Ardyn before you now…he was softer.

And you did so hate having to lie…

“It helped a little,” you said sheepishly, locking eyes with the carpet. After all, it had put you to sleep rather effectively. “But I still had some nightmares. I appreciate you helping me out, though.” You added the last part in a single breath, realizing you might’ve sounded ungrateful.

Ardyn stared at you for a moment, then smirked, turning back to his book. “I’m simply glad it helped you at all,” he said in a pleased hum. “Though I fear these dreams of yours will not be banished so easily. It seems we both had an eventful evening last night.”

You looked up at that, surprised.

“You had nightmares too?”

He nodded stoically, yet the smile that clung to his lips portrayed his amusement. “Incessant thorns in the side, aren’t they?”

You huffed a groan in agreement. “You can say that again.”

Ardyn laughed, entertained by how fed up you sounded. You couldn’t help but chuckle too, that lightweight feeling coming back and lifting you.

“Oh, by the way,” you said suddenly, remembering something you’d wanted to say after your last meeting.

“I wanted to thank you, for that night. It was…nice of you. It made me feel safer.” You smiled at him, thinking back to the way he had led away Jeremy, how he’d walked you home (even if you hadn’t originally wanted him to). Things he hadn’t needed to, things you would’ve assumed he hadn’t the patience for, yet were done despite that, for your sake. The meaning behind those gestures wasn’t lost on you.

Ardyn was full on grinning at this point, but he was quick to close his eyes and shake his head, waving a hand dismissively.

“Oh please, I assure you it was no trouble at all. I am always honored to be of service.”

You scoffed playfully at him, the rest of your fragile shell slipping off. He was being cheeky, you both knew it, perhaps even having fun with this.

“Don’t be modest,” you protested. “It was more than I could ask for. Thank you.”

He chortled at your insistence. “What kind of chancellor would I be, if I allowed such heresy to occur under my guidance?”

You shook your head, knowing that there would be no reasoning with him, shifting back to your work so you could finish up this section. The books were finally all organized and accounted for.

“Really, how did you get him to leave?” You pressed, curious to the details of that night. “I’ve tried talking to him, my friends have tried talking to him. Nothing worked. Then you waltz in and he’s gone in an instant. What’s your secret?”

Ardyn eyed you, raising an incredulous brow. He then brought a hand up, holding one finger before his mouth.

“A magician never reveals his secrets.”

You groaned.

Of course he would use a cop out like that. Why weren’t you surprised?

“It’s not like you performed a trick; you saved me from a stalker. If you found a way to deal with him, I feel I deserve to know.”

“Hmm…” Ardyn considered that, rolling his head from side to side in contemplation. He then snapped his book shut with one hand, hardly looking at it as he shoved it back where he found it. Pivoting on his heel, he strolled right up to you in a few strides, using that same flowing gait you remembered. It made you turn to face him in question, your smile replaced with uncertainty.

“I believe…” he whispered, the deep rumble of his voice coating your ears like butter. He reached a hand underneath his coat, fiddling with a breast pocket. “…herein lies the answer.”

From his clothes he produced a small, white card. Between two fingers, he extended it to you, leaning forward subtly, bringing your faces a ruler's length from each other.

You blinked at the little piece of what looked like cardboard, extremely confused. Though of course, you took it, not wishing to offend him.

Whatever it was, it was most certainly not cardboard, made of unmistakable higher quality. On it, a golden border had been imprinted in a swirling, elegant design, with words of the same color pressed into the middle.

Ardyn Izunia

Chancellor of Niflheim

You squinted at it, incredulous, double checking to make sure that’s all that was inscribed.

“You gave me…a business card?” You looked up at him doubtfully.

Ardyn shared a toothy grin, nodding at the little thing. “Turn it over.”

You did as asked, twirling your wrist to peer at the back. There, you found a string of numbers…

Wait. Not just a string of numbers.

A phone number.

Your eyes widened.

“Y-your phone number?”

You met his eyes with shock to see Ardyn looking very pleased with himself. “My personal cell,” he confirmed. “Should the situation ever arise again, I am but a call away.”

The chancellor of the empire just gave you his number.

Your gaze fell back to the card, unsure how to respond. You held it in both hands, a precious thing you weren’t sure how to accept.

“But…surely you’re too busy to be making house calls. I’d hate to be a bother…”

You looked away, unable to meet his eyes again, your face growing flush. You followed the swooping curves of the inlaid design with your fingers, captured by the way the peaks and valleys met your skin.

There was a pause. Then, you watched as his hand slowly lifted, approaching, brushing his fingertips on the skin beneath your chin, just as he had that other night. Your flesh immediately sparked and ignited, responding to a call that sounded deep in your core. Your gaze was pulled upward, and when you met his gaze, you blinked. The warmth, the affection in it was unexpected.

“Never a bother, my dear.”

The fondness in his voice made your stomach churn, from apprehension or contentment you weren’t sure.

“I may be a busy man, but I can always find the time for you.”

…What were you to say to that, really?

You stared into his eyes, captivated by their color once more. Your cheeks grew hot, and thankfully, Ardyn did not hold your face for ransom this time, allowing you to turn away and conceal those wild emotions. You figured your cheeks now surely rivaled the deepest roses.

The chancellor gave you his number.

“…Ardyn, this is…thank you.” Delicately, you inserted the card into a side pocket, patting it fondly when you knew it was safe.

Ardyn placed a hand over his heart, his body bending in a short, theatrical bow. “Your knight in shining armor,” he proclaimed dramatically. “How I have always adored such dynamics.”

With that, he immediately evaporated the serious atmosphere, released and caged again with the ease of snapping fingers.

You failed to muffle a mild snort, trying to keep a bout of laughter inside. Your heart was beginning to swell, a warm, comforting softness that pulled the corners of your mouth upwards. He was being positively silly, and something about that made you relax. The distant tightness of tensed muscles ebbed away, and you were left feeling comfortable. Accepted.

Perhaps the chancellor isn’t so intimidating after all.

“Are you the man keeping chivalry alive on Eos?” You jabbed, feeling emboldened enough to tease. Since Ardyn had chosen to act as jester, it made your own tentative wit feel courageous enough to show itself.

Ardyn hummed a laugh through closed lips, standing up straight and shaking his head. “A rare art form, in these trying times, is it not?”

You chuckled. “Well, I appreciate you sharing this delicacy with me.”

He nodded, never taking his eyes off you. “Anything for you, my dear.”

Gods, the way he absolutely purred the word ‘dear’ made your knees want to buckle. One hand absentmindedly thumbed the card in your pocket, tracing its outline through your clothes fondly.

“…Although,” Ardyn hummed, barely concealing the way he eyed you. “Perhaps there is…some way for you to repay me.”

Your smile vanished, a sliver of prudence coiling around your ankles, making your heart beat faster.

…What could I possibly…?

“Please, permit me to spoil you with a night on my gil.” He spread his arms in invitation. “I assure you, it will be a most enchanting evening. It would be my pleasure.”

You came up short, your eyes going wide.

He…what?

Was he…asking you out.

Surely not.

“You…want to go out…with me?” You choked incredulously.

Ardyn was grinning rather smugly now. “What can I say?” His arms returned to his sides. “You intrigue me, dear. What an honor it would be to get to know you better.”

You blinked owlishly, slowly turning to look at the books left on your cart when you could no longer hold his gaze.

You’re being asked out.

By a politician no less.

No, not just a politician. A man who was very close to the Emperor.

“Are you…sure?” Your eyes moved up, searching his own for any indication he was being disingenuous. You weren’t privy to all the intricacies of holding an office, but shouldn’t he be worried about being seen with random people in public? A commoner, at that?

He placed a hand on his hip, entertained by your apprehension. “I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t, my dear.”

You supposed he had you there.

Really, though, you knew what you immediately wanted to say. Although, you also knew you weren’t the best at casual conversation, if the last few minutes was anything to go by. You weren’t great around alcohol either, and you figured he’d probably want to get drinks…

…But it was a Friday evening…

The whole weekend stretched before you, their countless possibilities offering a chance to unwind, to have a little bit of fun. A chance to forget the week that came before it.

Possibilities that could include him. Someone that, to be perfectly honest, you did find yourself fancying.

Screw it, you decided, ignoring the anxious part of your brain.

It wasn’t going to ruin this for you.

“Yeah…” you said, smiling timidly, yet fully, at him.

Yes, you wanted this.

“…I’d love to go with you.”

Ardyn absolutely beamed. “Wonderful. I shall bring my car around while you finish up here. I’ll await you outside.” He waved in parting as he turned and strode away, out of sight in a few footfalls.

You shook your head at his back, stifling a laugh. Never a dull moment with him.

The rest of your time in the library was spent with a goofy, excited smile plastered across your face.

———————————————————————

OKAY ITS HAPPENING. EVERYBODY STAY CALM

Wow…it’s been like…2 months since I posted a chapter for this 😩 I’m incredibly sorry to everyone that has been waiting. Writers block + seasonal depression + college is a fun combo. But really, thank you for your patience. I hope it was worth the wait 💕

I just reread this and I’m very happy with it. Credit to @savage-rhi for helping me come up with some ideas for extra movement, and for beta reading. @ticklemycucumber has also been an amazing beta throughout this work, so much love to them as well ❤️

[moseslikellamas]

Ginny Weasley & the Year of Healing

Chapter 7

Pairing: is a mystery

Summary: the long awaited return to hogwarts

Warnings: depictions of anxiety, unreliable narrator

Word count : 5.8k

{sorry this is so outrageously long lmao)

Ginny woke early on the morning of the first of September. The sun had not even crested the horizon when she rose and exited her bed. Silently leaving her room she journeyed up to the roof, to sit and watch the sun rise. It was exceedingly cloudy and she was sure it would rain today. The wind ramped up the longer she sat outside but she was unbothered by the chill in the air. Ginny worked hard to keep her mind still and calm. She had plenty of time to worry about Hogwarts on the train and she didn’t want to waste her last few hours home anxious. Instead she tried to think of ways she could maximize her outdoor time while at Hogwarts. Astronomy and Herbology would offer her some excuse as to why she was outside the castle walls. The cloak Harry gave her was going to be invaluable even if it wasn’t foolproof. 

While sitting there contemplating various excuses, the window opened. Ginny was shocked to see it was Harry instead of George. She had figured Harry would be sleeping in like Ron assuredly was. 

“Hello Harry.” Ginny muttered, her voice still thick from sleep. 

Harry sat beside her and zipped his jacket up. The sun was rising now, barely visible behind the thick cover of clouds. 

“It’s odd to be going back.” Harry’s voice was soft and low but scratchy like he’d been crying all night. Ginny grabbed his hand and laced her fingers through his. 

“Yeah it is. I don’t know how I fit into it anymore.” She admitted. A light mist began to pour around them. Harry squeezed her hand comfortingly. 

“We only have one way to find out unfortunately. Hopefully whoever we are is good at quidditch or I think McGonagall may do away with us.” 

Ginny smiled at his weak attempt to bring some humor into the moment. 

“I dunno how I’m going to do it Harry. Head girl, quidditch captain, seven N.E.W.T.’s. It seems impossible.” 

“You can always just shirk your responsibilities.” Harry shrugged. Ginny rolled her eyes at him. 

“Just hex anyone at prefect meetings who disagrees with you.” 

“Oh I’m sure McGonagall will really love me then.” 

“Nah. I’ll vouch for you, who would disagree with the chosen one?”

Ginny laughed, agreeing. “That’s true, I forgot I can just hang off your coattails.” 

Hand in hand half soaked Ginny and Harry made jokes and invented chaotic scenarios of the year to come. It made her feel young again, or maybe just more her age. She was so glad Harry had decided to attend this year, he could use a little immaturity and mischief. 

“I have a near unlimited supply of stuff Fred and George gave me in my vault. We could really do something horrible.” Harry paused as if just realizing what he had said. But Ginny rushed to assuage whatever guilt had come to mind. 

“Don’t. We should say his name and remember him. And I think the best way we could do that is utilizing those supplies. So tell me how many…”

They schemed on the roof until the rain began pouring down on them and the chances of them slipping off became much too high. They stepped into the hall soaking wet before Harry cast a drying spell on them and the floor. Ginny pulled Harry along, wanting to go to a better spot for planning. 

“Where are we going?”

“Shhh! We’ll be there in a second.”

Ginny led him downstairs past the kitchen into the back of the house. Squinting in the low light she located what she was looking for. Opening a hidden door in the wall she motioned for Harry to follow her. They crawled through the small opening for a moment before entering into a rarely used and forgotten about storage space. 

Stretching up to stand straight Harry gazed around the room. Which was covered in dust but had an old sofa the twins had somehow managed to get in here. 

“How come I’ve never been here before?” Harry asked as they sat on the couch. 

“Because Ron doesn’t know about it and you better not tell him either.”

Ginny smirked at Harry recalling the time she’d caught the twins sneaking in here. There were probably discarded joke shop rejects hiding around the room somewhere. It was how they’d kept Molly off their trail and in exchange for not ratting them out, Ginny got access to the room when they weren’t using it. 

Ginny summoned some parchment and they got to work planning several pranks to rival Harry's own dad’s. Ginny had admired and looked up to Sirius in the short time she knew him. She wanted to cause some mischief that would make him proud. Harry and Ginny reluctantly decided to include George in their plans through owl. Ginny thought it would perk him up in some way but she knew it was just as likely to set him off in the opposite way. 

“I’ll talk to him about it. You need to find a way to distract Hermione because you know she’s going to be onto us.”

“I say we plan one near exam time. Maybe a month before? Hermione will be studying for at least three months before, no way she’ll be focused on us.”

Ginny agreed. She also knew Hermione had her own pet project planned in the form of a slimy snake but she kept that to herself. 

“I think we can bounce off of each other enough we can discredit her suspicions regardless.” Harry stated confidently. “Just remember if I say I was with you, I was doing prank stuff. Let’s just agree to corroborate each other's stories where ‘mione’s concerned. Deal?”

That sounded easy to her. “Deal. Now let's get out of here before we arouse any suspicion.”

After exiting the storage room, Harry and Ginny went their separate ways. Luckily her mother was just coming down the stairs. Harry was in the main room and Ginny busied herself with starting the eggs. 

“Ginny? What are you doing up so early?”

“Morning mum. Just nerves I suppose.”

Her mother eyed her suspiciously before remarking how Harry must also be nervous. Ginny knew what her mother was insinuating but she ignored her. 

“We all are. It’s an odd feeling, going back.”

That turned her mother straight toward pity town and Ginny couldn’t leave the kitchen fast enough. Her mother used to smother her angrily, bossing her around. But now she looked at Ginny like she was a lost little child. It made their interactions exhausting. She made her way back upstairs, pausing at George’s open door. Lightly knocking, she stepped inside.

George was sitting at his desk working on something. It made her heart swell a bit to see him busy. 

“George? I was going to ask you -“

“To help you and Harry pull off a passable prank, I know.”

Ginny gaped at the back of his head, incredulous. She shut his door and walked over to him. 

“Have you been spying on me Georgie? That’s very rude, you know.”

He shrugged. “You think there aren’t spells in the storage room to alert me if someone’s in there?”

“Ughhhh. Whatever, are you going to help us?”

George swiveled his chair around to face Ginny, holding something up for her to examine. “Of course, and I already have the first prank ready.” 

Ginny grinned, grabbing the small contraption, which resembled an ice cube. 

“We’re going to make history.” George began to explain his plan and Ginny’s grin grew broader as he explained. “The trickiest part is going to be on you and Harry avoiding suspicion. Miss the carriages, you need to sneak in under your cloaks for this to work.”

Ginny settled in to listen and when they ironed all the details out, she left to retrieve the purse Hermione had gifted her. This is where she stored all of the prank material. Then she left to go find Harry and update him. She caught a lucky break when Hermione pulled Ron aside. Leaving the two of them alone in the hall. 

“George is in. Meet me on the train after the ride is over, I’ll update you there. Bring your cloak.” She whispered to him before shuffling away and loudly discussing the future quidditch season. 

Hermione and Ron joined them shortly after, both looking frustrated and red in the face. Ignoring whatever was going on between them, Ron stalked off downstairs. Harry threw Ginny a look before following him. She turned to Hermione and raised her brow, silently inquiring. 

“Ron’s an immature git.” She huffed, starting her descent. Ginny snorted. 

“I could have told you that ‘mione. About anything in particular?”

Hermione turned bright red and clammed up. Ginny had a pretty good guess it might involve a certain snake. 

Breakfast was a tirade, Molly was stressed about getting off in time. Even though they still had three hours before they had to leave, she was rushing them all through breakfast. 

“You all need to double check. Yes Ron, you do! Now hurry up and be off! We have a schedule to keep.”

“Bloody schedule. We could apparate there!” Ron grumbled to himself. 

“Ron, you can’t apparate within Hogwarts grounds.” Hermione rolled her eyes at him and pushed him off of his chair. Their bickering followed them up the stairs. 

“Come on Harry. She’ll be after us next.” 

It didn’t take Ginny long to double check that she’d packed everything. She made sure to grab her talking mirror and then donned the autumn cloak she’d gotten earlier in the summer. She opted to wear a pair of brown muggle leggings with it and a thin cream long sleeve under the cloak. The mirror had reluctantly agreed that muggle clothing was quite trendy and could even be classic. The interaction had made Ginny giddy at the thought of reading the book Hermione had gifted her on bewitching the mirror. If everything went well, this mirror could be passed down for generations. She loved the idea of starting her own traditions and creating family heirlooms. She didn’t want to miss out on any more life experiences. Even if she was struggling to find meaning now, she was determined to power through anyway. Her future self would thank her.

The last thing she did was attach her wand holster. It fit slung low over her left hip. It felt odd to wear it again, she’d taken it off after the war ended. Around the house she usually kept it in a pocket or sometimes shoved through her hair before she’d chopped it off. 

Together, Ginny and Hermione levitated their trunks downstairs. Harry and Ron joined them moments later. They still had plenty of time before they left so Ginny decided to reveal a gift she’d planned with her mother. After Ginny had taken Teddy and Harry’s photo the other night at dinner, she’d begun scheming with her mum. Molly always wanted more photos and Ginny was beginning to see the value in having her own scrapbook. It was their last year at Hogwarts, she wanted them to be able to capture every moment. 

“Everyone have a seat please.” Ginny called to a crowd of confused faces. She kept her own face neutral but she was starting to feel excited. Harry, Ron and Hermione sat looking expectantly at her. She looked to Molly who was hovering at the back of the room and nodded. 

“Mum and I have a gift for you all.” As Ginny said this Molly levitated the stack of neatly wrapped gifts over to the trio. Ron looked suspicious, Harry looked slightly uncomfortable and Hermione appeared delighted. 

“Well go on then.” She said when they continued to stare at the wrapped gifts. Hermione started opening first, Harry and Ron followed immediately after. 

“Gin, is this?” Hermione asked, looking awed. 

“Yes, it's a camera. I’ve already got mine packed. There’s an album too for each of you. Mum and I were talking the other night and thought it would be a good idea. It being our last time at Hogwarts and all.” Ginny shrugged, still trying to appear nonchalant. 

“Ginny, this is brilliant. Really Mrs. Weasley, thank you.” Harry turned to thank Molly who was a light shade of pink. 

“Oh it was nothing really. Harry, open yours up.” Molly encouraged turning the attention back on him. 

Harry opened his album, which was a beautiful shade of red with his name embossed on the front in gold. The first page featured the picture Ginny had taken of him and Teddy. It was held in place with gold metal corners. Underneath in Ginny’s script read, 

Harry and Teddy, dinner at the burrow. 27 August ‘99. 

There were a few more photos as well that they’d included. One of Harry at the burrow for Christmas when he was younger. One of Harry, Ron and Hermione all passed out in Ron’s room. Another from the Christmas they’d spent with Sirius. Harry paused at this one, a picture of him and Sirius in front of the Black tapestry. He turned to address Molly. 

“I didn’t know you took this.” 

But she only shook her head and Harry turned to face Ginny, surprised. 

She suddenly felt a bit abashed. “I spent a bit of time with Sirius that summer before you arrived. I got the sense he wished he had more moments with you. I wanted to make sure you got them.” She blushed but knew ultimately she’d been right to pry and capture the moment. 

Ron and Hermione’s albums' first page were also filled like Harry’s. Some of them were older photos that Molly had lying around and some were more recent ones that Ginny had snuck when no one was looking. Ginny’s album had less photos but her mum had captured one of her and George in the late summer sun. It was her favorite photo. Ginny was secretly making one for George but it was painful for her and impossible for her mum. So it was slow going. 

“Thanks Gin.” 

Ginny could tell Harry was struggling in the moment to express his gratitude without falling apart. Luckily Ron and Hermione chimed in to save him. 

“Mum, this is amazing.” Ron said, standing to hug Molly. 

“Oi what about me?” Ginny asked.

Ron turned to glare at her and she laughed out loud. She’d included a picture of their great aunt Muriel in his, captioned: Ronald’s first kiss. 

Molly had forced them all to stand in front of the fireplace for a picture, nearly weeping all the while. “Oh look at all of you! So grown and mature now.”

Ginny had suppressed an eye roll by sheer force, not wanting it immortalized in photography. Molly promised to send them all a copy and with that it was nearly time to depart. 

“The aurors will be here shortly. Now let’s remember to keep a quick pace.” 

Ginny bristled at her mother’s proclamation though she was well aware they’d be receiving a ministry escort. Harry caught Ginny’s eye and she tried to ignore his probing gaze. Hermione’s question drew his attention away. 

“Do we know which aurors?” There was no time for an answer as a light knock on the door resounded. Ginny moved to let them in and was relieved to see her sparring partners, Johnson and Lopez. Striding in Johnson wasted no time. 

“Let’s go. Molly, you first.”

The Aurors took turns apparating them discreetly into King’s cross before leading them through the platform without issue. They departed once more to secure everyone’s trunks before disapparating, presumably back to the ministry. 

Ginny looked around the platform already feeling overwhelmed with the amount of people walking around. The lights seemed too bright for her eyes and she was struggling to orient herself. She hadn’t been around this many people in months. The station felt cramped and she felt stuck in her own skin. Her face prickled uncomfortably. 

“Ginny, let's find a compartment.” Harry's voice was muffled in her ears. She blindly followed him as he lifted their trunks onto the train, she didn’t even say goodbye to her mother. She grabbed the back of Harry’s shirt as he wound through the train. He reached back to grab her hand and squeezed it. She took a couple of deep breaths and before long they were in an empty compartment. Ginny sat still feeling dazed as Harry pulled the blinds closed around them, leaving the one to the outside world open. 

Ginny rested her head in her hands and focused on taking deep slow breaths. Gradually the world stopped spinning and when she looked up she found a concerned Harry looking back at her. 

“How often does that happen?” He asked quietly. 

Ginny shrugged, laying back against the seat, already exhausted. “Often enough.” 

Harry said nothing, sitting thoughtfully. Ginny knew he was trying to figure out a way to worm himself into her problems without incurring her wrath or indifference. Good luck with that. She thought ruefully. Harry opened the compartment door to look for Ron and Hermione. While Ginny pulled her cloak tightly around her and hoped the train ride would pass quickly. She knew she had to go to the prefect compartment at some point and she was already dreading it. The only shining light was the promise that Luna would be there. It was still baffling to her as to why McGongall had picked her. Ginny’s behavior didn’t exactly scream rule abiding. It was something she hoped to discuss with the headmistress soon. 

Hermione and Ron arrived just before the train set off. Neville had already joined them and was telling them about his summer. 

“Gran was so proud of my rebuilding efforts that she gave me this.” 

Neville pulled out a strange lantern that nudged at Ginny’s memory. 

“Neville, is that a guiding light?” The name came to her at last. When she’d toured the Magic Lantern, the shopkeeper had pointed one out to her. 

“It is!” He agreed, overjoyed. 

“Wow, Neville. That’s incredibly handy.” Hermione chimed in. 

Ron sighed exasperated. “Is anyone going to explain what it is or are Harry and I just supposed to pretend we know?” 

“A guiding light works by adjusting itself to whatever brightness the owner needs based on their surroundings.” Hermione intoned, sounding like a textbook. 

“It’s going to be useful when I’m out foraging for roots. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find…” Neville went off into a plant exposé¨ that Ginny didn’t care to listen to. She stared out the window watching the rainy scenery pass by. She couldn’t wait to be in her dorm, alone in bed. 

Before long it was time for Ginny to go to the prefect's compartment. She bidded her friends farewell, eyeing Harry inconspicuously. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod before she left. Ginny had made sure to wear her bag on the train. Her cloak and the material for the prank were safely inside. 

Ginny found Luna as she made her way towards the prefects. 

“Ginny, you have a dark cloud around you.” 

Ginny was inclined to believe this was just regular Luna speak until she noticed the looks she was garnering. Then it dawned on her that it was her shadow spirit. 

“I guess I’m in a stormy mood today Luna.” 

They entered the prefects compartment together, which was already full of students talking amongst themselves. Ginny didn’t recognize many of them. Ernie MacMillian came up to them immediately. 

“Ginny, I hear you're head girl. If you have the time I’ve already arranged a schedule for rounds-“ 

Theodore Nott snatched the list from MacMillian’s hands. “We’ll evaluate it and get back to you MacMillian.” 

Ginny turned to stare at Nott passively, curious if he was actually interested in the schedule or if he just disliked the Hufflepuff. MacMillian glared at Nott but slinked off to sit down. 

“Lovegood, Weasley.” Nott acknowledged them and Ginny felt out of sorts. This was all brand new territory for her and it was hard enough to sort her head out about herself. She didn’t have the brain capacity currently to analyze what kind of motives Nott might have. Luna was no help as she dreamily drifted away, leaving Ginny alone. 

“Any idea what we’re supposed to do?” She asked genuinely clueless. Ginny hadn’t had any interest in the position and had largely spent her time at school proving she wasn’t worthy of it. She hadn’t thought to ask Hermione what usually went on in here and owling Percy would’ve been a whole other can of worms. 

Not bothering to answer her, he addressed the room. Which admittedly miffed Ginny a bit. 

“Alright you lot. We’re going to do introductions. We’ll go around the room, name and house to start. We’ve got all year to get to know each other.” 

The room sat in awkward silence for a moment before Ginny pointed at a random kid and declared they started it. Ginny listened as they all listed their names and houses, the information lost on her as soon as she heard it. It really was a pointless exercise in her opinion. 

“Are you mentally categorizing each name?” She inquired to Nott. He didn’t reply, just subtly knocked into her, throwing her off balance. She scowled at him, for the first time in maybe a year she felt irritated. 

“Real mature.” She hissed before focusing back on the students. After her own turn Ginny announced the first meeting and quickly made to escape the room. Nott caught her arm outside of the compartment. Reflexively she turned, wand already in hand. Her wand pressed against his throat harshly and he dropped his hand instantly. Ginny pulled her arm back, stowing her wand and feeling mortified by her over reaction. 

“What is it Nott?” She crossed her arms but made sure to wipe all of the irritation she felt off of her face. They had to work together all year, better not to get off on the wrong foot on day one. His face was apologetic for half a second before it was completely blank. In a bored voice he said, “Ginerva, McGonagall has arranged for me to tutor you in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Here.” He shoved a piece of parchment at her and stalked off. His tall frame somehow disappeared into the crowd of people. Ginny scowled at his use of her full name but examined the parchment anyway. It was a schedule. She groaned, running her fingers through her hair. She hadn’t even made it to Hogwarts yet and she was already considering banging her head against a stone wall repeatedly. 

Ginny planned to corner Hermione as she walked back to their compartment. She knew she could convince ‘mione to gather all of her schedules into a masterlist and then maybe she had a shot at remembering them. But Ginny wasn’t positive she wouldn’t just blow the schedule off anyway like Harry suggested. 

A compartment opened suddenly as Ginny passed by and a small hand attempted to pull on her cloak. Turning swiftly, she was greeted by a compartment of what appeared to be either second or third years. Not yet having their robes on, she was unsure of their house. Ginny stepped inside quietly and a bit unsure. 

“Hello? Is there an issue you need help with?”

For a moment the five children just sat sullen looking insecure and mutinous at the same time. The one who’d pulled her aside spoke up first. 

“We just wanted to thank you.” The girl blurted it out quickly and then blushed. She brushed her dark hair out of her face and started again. 

“I’m Olivia, last year you helped me when I got sucked into the stone wall after the Carrow’s cursed it.”

Ginny stood there stunned. She could barely remember that night, she’d been out gathering supplies. Trying not to be caught and hoping she could do a little information grab while she was out. Before Harry showed up, Hogwarts had been a dark place. It wasn’t something she liked to linger on. 

Another piped up. “Me too, it was in September before we’d figured out things were really that bad. I got detention and you were overseeing it, let us out early and didn’t hurt us.”

Ginny did remember that one, she’d suffered her own consequences for it. Death Eaters were horrible disciplinarians for school children as one can imagine. They continued to tell their own stories of times Ginny had directly or inadvertently sheltered them from harm. She’d taken a seat after the third confession. So much of that time had felt bitterly unfair to her, like she’d been dropped off in a warzone with no help and no understanding. Sure, they weren’t on the front lines but things had been more than unpleasant. 

So it filled her with a sort of gentle awe to hear about herself through the lens of these younger students, who touted stories like she was a rapscallion in an epic. And not the scared lonely girl she’d felt like at the time. Jack, a third year Hufflepuff, told her there were even more of them who remembered her. And some who had stories of other elder D.A. members, it got Ginny’s brain turning on a number of ideas. But they were fast approaching the castle and she still needed to change. She hurried back to her compartment and found all of her friends ready inside. Ginny quickly changed before joining them. 

“How was the meeting?” Hermione asked once Ginny was seated. 

“It was awfully awkward. I should’ve asked you how it normally goes. Mostly MacMillion was all over me about the schedule.”

Hermione snorted at that. 

“Then Nott snatches the schedule and starts the meeting with introductions.”

Ginny was ignoring Harry, who she knew was staring a hole in the side of her head. For a clueless boy wonder he was getting entirely too perceptive. 

“And just how was Nott? Friendly as ever?” Ginny was convinced Harry said it just to get her to look at him. Instead she rolled her eyes. 

“He was mildly annoying. Nothing new from a snake.”

“I think Theodore is quite nice actually.” Luna said, drawing everyone’s attention to her. Ginny hadn’t noticed she’d joined the group. 

“Yes Luna but you also said that about the brandbucckley or whatever it was and it burned my eyebrows off.” Ron scoffed while rubbing his eyebrows. 

“Honestly Ronald you probably handled it wrong.” 

Ginny almost did a double take when Hermione came to Luna’s defense. 

“Besides, we need to let go of petty rivalries and work toward inter house cooperation.” 

That was Hermione speak for ‘I’m hiding my less than noble intentions behind my noble ones to avoid criticism’. Or, I have a thing for a snake and I don’t want you all to freak out. This year was certainly going to be interesting. Ginny saw an opportunity to get the ball rolling. 

“Actually Hermione, that's a wonderful idea. I was just cornered by several younger years and it got me thinking about a mentoring program. We could pair younger students with an elder from a different house. Everyone wins.”

Ginny could see Hermione was already planning her pitch to McGonagall. Harry, it seemed, was also in the mood to stir things up. 

“I think we should have a mandatory inter house party every three months, seperated in blocks. That way the younger kids aren’t with the older but they still get a chance to interact.”

That honestly sounded like Ginny’s personal nightmare and from the devious smirk on Harry’s face, that appeared to be his desired effect. She would have protested with a myriad of reasons why that was a horrible idea, but the rest of the compartment began to agree. Nevertheless she did try. 

“No way McGonagall’s going to sanction parties. It would be uncouth.”

“If we arrange them with games and activities for them to connect versus the usual drinking, dancing and kissing, I think she will.” Harry retorted. The set of his shoulders said he was willing to make it his personal mission to get McGonagall to agree. Ginny was going to grill him as to why on their walk to the castle. 

“Yes! It could be a low pressure way to introduce muggle culture too. I was owling with McGonagall all summer on ways we could begin to integrate more muggle activities.” 

Ginny groaned in defeat as Hermione chimed in and Harry’s eyes sparkled with triumph. 

The train was beginning the slow process of stopping and the rain was still steadily pouring. She was not looking forward to her very long and wet walk to the castle. 

“I can’t wait to eat, I’m starved.” Ron said, grabbing his trunk from overhead. 

“You’re always starved.” Hermione snipped back. 

Their bickering continued as they all grabbed their trunks and began to move through the train. Harry was behind Ginny and he whispered to her, “Follow my lead.” Ginny pretended she hadn’t heard anything and continued through the train. 

Once they were outside, Ginny was immediately soaked through. They all made the slippery trek to the carriages as Hagrid called out for the first years. As the rest of them climbed into a carriage, Harry pulled Ginny back. 

“Harry come on, let’s go.” Hermione was already dry, having cast some sort of shield over the carriage. 

“Ginny and I promised to sweep the train and help Hagrid with the first years. We’ll catch up with you later.”

If Hermione was suspicious, her want to get to the castle outweighed it. Harry and Ginny quickly hurried back to the train. 

“What if we get caught?” Ginny asked once they’d climbed back inside. Not particularly wanting to get in trouble on day one, even if they were planning a prank. 

Harry grinned, his dark hair splayed across his forehead. “We actually do have to sweep the train, I wasn’t lying on that front.” 

They began walking through, checking the compartments. 

“The ministry can’t spare anyone to come down here right now and well, we’re all that's left of the Order.” 

Harry couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice as he said it. 

“It’s a good thing we’re the best dueling team in town then. What if a spare trunk needs grabbing? Who better to haul and levitate it.”

In the end, they didn’t need to grab anything. The train was cleared and Harry sent a patronus to the castle to confirm it. Before exiting the train Harry cast a perpetual drying spell on them, it was a bit uncomfortable and not as sophisticated as what Hermione could do. But it kept them dry and they both donned their cloaks. In the rain and darkness, Ginny’s cloak worked rather well. 

As they made their trek up to the castle Ginny explained George’s plan. “The cubes are virtually invisible before they enter a drink, so our best bet is to create a dramatic diversion. That way you and I can slip the cubes in everyone’s drinks. We’ll also have to take our seats and remove our cloak before the diversion dies down, so it really all will come down to timing.” 

George had provided her with a clever way to recreate a disturbance that had occurred several years earlier. The same as when the charm in the great hall failed and rain came through the ceiling in her third year. It was surprisingly not that hard to undo the charm and George had figured it out. 

“I imagine we’ll have to lie to Hermione as well.” 

“Well that was always the deal.” She agreed. It would be suspicious timing for them but there was nothing to be done about it. 

“What happens when everyone drinks it?” 

Ginny smiled under her cloak, thinking of what George had told her. 

“I think it’ll be better as a surprise. We’ll have to douse ourselves of course, to avoid suspicion.”

They were nearly at the castle now. 

“Also, Potter. Are you trying to kill me? That party suggestion was a direct shot.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

So that’s how it was going to be. Deciding now wasn’t the best time to get into it, Ginny let it go. Entering the castle doors, they paused while Ginny did the spellwork to break the ceiling. They were so lucky dinner had begun and the door was open. Otherwise this could’ve been a disaster. 

Ginny had handed Harry half of the supply outside and as the screams began they worked quickly. The rain was thick and heavy, everything they could have hoped for. Ginny covered her half of the room swiftly while nearly sprinting towards her table. She was almost there… Ginny ripped her cloak off as soon as she sat beside Dean, stuffing it under her Hogwarts robe. Then the rain stopped and McGonagall was calling the room to order. 

Ginny resisted with every fiber of her being to look at Harry and see if he’d been unnoticed. 

“Rough walk?”

Dean startled Ginny so hard she jumped. Turning to face him she smiled. “Yeah the rain was horrible. That's the last time I agree to help Harry.”

Dean shook his head and turned back to whatever conversation he’d been having before she materialized. Ginny made herself busy with eating, refraining from drinking until she was sure at least half of her table had finished their goblet. Then she tipped hers back and finally allowed herself to look at Harry. He was sitting between Ron and Neville, looking cool as a cucumber. 

That’s when it started. Yells went up from the Hufflepuff table and Ginny resisted the urge to look. She finally understood the wicked giddiness that the twins must have felt. Then her own table began to morph. 

The closest person to her was Padma who now bore the face of a small field mouse. Ginny snorted before covering her face. Beside her was Seamus who appeared to be a giraffe, horns and all. The hall exploded into chaos. Ginny could feel her own face tingling as it shifted into a penguin. McGonagall was a panda, Flitwick had the face of a dragon and Hagrid looked like a hippogriff. Which caused Ginny to laugh so hard she began to cry. 

Glancing over at Harry she saw he was a pygmy puff which started another round of hysterical laughing. Ron was a shark, complete with a fin on his back and Hermione was a pixie. The mix of magical and non magical creatures made it that much funnier to Ginny. The chaos continued as everyone got a look at a different animal face around the room, there were no duplicates. It was so impressive, Ginny made a note to compliment George. 

“Quiet! Quiet! I said, Quiet!!” McGonagall’s voice finally rose above the noise and silence fell over the room. Ginny would’ve shoved her hand in her mouth to stifle her giggles but she now possessed a beak and it was impossible. The thought sent another round of laughter through her and she wasn’t the only one struggling. After another five minutes of this McGonagall gave up and shooed them all off to bed. 

[analytik2]

Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?

The Israeli government insists that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7, 2023. But investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger report on eight months of claim and counter-claim

On a cloudy morning in early spring, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Pramila Patten sat down to deliver her findings on sexual violence during the Hamas-led massacres in Israel.

It had been five months since the October 7 attacks and the ensuing conflict in Gaza was raging, as was the seemingly irreconcilable war of narratives that had characterised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past eight decades.

Perhaps nothing arising from that day had been more contentious than Israel’s assertion that Hamas had not only burned and slaughtered its way through Israeli communities along the Gaza border, killing 1,200 and taking more than 200 hostages, but that it planned and carried out a campaign of mass and systematic rape as a weapon of war.

Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence, knew what she was walking into. Her fact-finding mission to Israel came amid a furious row over whether such allegations should be accepted as fact and accusations that anyone failing to do so was guilty of antisemitic bias against Jewish women.

Litigating sexual violence within a conflict is difficult enough at the best of times, not least on a battlefield of the scale and complexity of October 7, 2023. It becomes even harder without testimony from any survivors, the usual linchpin of such investigations.

What would make the effort over October 7 harder still were the examples of false and misleading information from senior political figures and government-linked civil activists to those in the police and security services tasked with the official investigation. All this in an atmosphere of extreme national fear and trauma.

Lost in all this are the victims themselves, none of whom are definitely known to have survived. The only woman yet to testify about her own sexual abuse is a released hostage, Amit Soussana, who spoke to foreign media about how she was forced to strip and commit a sexual act on her male captor at gunpoint during six weeks in captivity in Gaza.

Those familiar with Soussana said she had decided to speak out following accounts from other hostages about abuse. They hoped it might help those still being held captive who may still be suffering sexual abuse.

“Specific survivors, the only reason they told their story was because they wanted some kind of political pressure on the Israeli government to work harder to release the hostages,” says Dr Sarai Aharoni, an academic at Ben-Gurion University who is helping to compile a historical archive of the events that will be closed for 50 years. “And that is a horrible decision to have to make.”

Relatives of those held hostage have become a powerful political voice in Israel, leading protests against what they see as the government’s failed covenant to protect its citizens and bring hostages home.

A female relative of one woman still held in Gaza tells us that government representatives are no longer even bothering to attend meetings with the families.

Meanwhile, the political establishment has opened a fresh battle with the UN over what the Patten report didn’t say: that sexual violence was beyond reasonable doubt, systematic, widespread and ordered and perpetrated by Hamas. Israeli advocates for the female survivors are now warning that the country’s refusal to co-operate with a full and legal investigation, which the carefully worded report was not, threatens the prospect of ever finding out the full truth about the sexual violence of October 7 and delivering justice for its victims.

FOR JEWISH ISRAELIS, THE SPECTRE OF RAPE was more closely associated historically with the pogroms of eastern Europe, in which thousands of Jews were killed and Jewish women raped by Christian soldiers and antisemitic mobs. That persecution would become one of the driving forces behind modern Zionism and the resettlement of European Jews in the Ottoman province that became British mandate Palestine. These “historical memories”, Aharoni notes, have become a cultural inheritance for the Jewish people, particularly those without a secular education, a fact that would come to play a role in the reporting of what happened on October 7.

The idea of the Arab male as an explicit sexual threat to Jewish women developed in tandem with the movement of Israeli politics to the right.

Months before October 7, national attention was seized by news of the rape of a young Israeli mother by a Bedouin man in southern Israel. The horror was amplified by the fact that the victim had been assaulted in front of her own children. In the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, attention became focused on the Arab ethnicity of the assailant, although police ruled out terror as a motive.

In July 2023, the Knesset passed legislation proposed by lawmakers on the right and far right, quickly dubbed the “sexual terrorism law”, which doubled the penalty for sexual assault or harassment committed with a “nationalistic motive”.

“Clearly it means that Arab or Palestinian men who are accused of rape might be tried according to a totally different procedure from Jewish men who rape,” Aharoni says. She calls the prospect “unthinkable”, pointing out that besides the racial implication, it sought to create “a hierarchy of victimhood” among rape survivors. Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centres (ARCCI) fought the law, unsuccessfully, on the same grounds.

IN THE EARLY MORNING OF OCTOBER 7, thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters poured across the border having breached the special security fence, slaughtering the mostly female Israeli soldiers who monitored the border. The invasion was both minutely planned and chaotic: at least hundreds of civilians streamed into Israel unprompted, along with other militants armed and unarmed as well as Hamas-armed allies such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Their targets were the kibbutzim along the Gaza border. They also found a previously unknown soft target in the shape of the Nova music festival, where about 4,000 young people were dancing in the early morning light.

Hamas’s own live streams from body-worn cameras showed them ruthlessly gunning down men, women and children, torching homes, shooting dogs and hauling off screaming and crying civilians as hostages. When the scale of the carnage became clear, it was described as the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Less commented on is the damage it did to the Zionist dream of an inviolable safe country for the Jewish people, a place where “never again” could become reality after centuries of persecution and expulsions at the hands of European Christians. No event in the history of the modern state of Israel has more brutally demonstrated the logic of its necessity.

Talk of rape began circulating almost before the massacres themselves were over. Much of it came from what Patten would later call “non-professionals” who supplied “inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations” of what they found, creating an instant but flawed narrative about what had taken place.

Among the first responders on October 7 was Zaka, an ultra-orthodox volunteer force. Zaka members are not trained in forensics, nor were they directed to do any more than retrieve remains from what was still an active battle zone. The decision to send them in has come under heavy assault in the Israeli media, including from military officers who believe if they had been deployed, forensics might have been preserved.

Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of ARCCI, notes the volunteers’ lack of familiarity with the women’s bodies they were finding and their tendency to focus on injuries they believed pointed to sexual violence, such as smashed pelvises and gunshot wounds to sex organs, ignoring other injuries that muddied the picture.

“They are all religious guys; most of them are ultra-religious. They never saw a woman except their wife,” Sulitzeanu says. “So to see all these bodies, how did they deal with that?”

Aharoni and others are struck by how closely the Zaka accounts cleaved to stories handed down about the horrors of the pogroms. “The first framing of rape and sexual violence was automatically linked with European histories,” she says, particularly by those with a religious education. “So there is a Zaka volunteer whose main education is religious. He’s read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women. These texts kind of reappear again and again in Jewish stories and they reappear every time there is a major event against Jewish communities.”

Journalists first on the scene of the massacres spotted immediately the echoes of the collective historical trauma of the Jewish people. “You are about to enter Bergen-Belsen,” Richard Hecht, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman, told one of these reporters on October 10 as he ushered in the first group to enter Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Bergen-Belsen was the Nazi concentration camp where British forces found thousands of bodies exposed and unburied when they reached it in 1945.

Yossi, a volunteer from another religious group called United Hatzalah, told the reporters he had seen a “pyramid of bodies”, although no such thing was found. His description seemed to echo a photograph of a mountain of corpses at the crematorium mortuary at Dachau concentration camp. The now debunked story of the pregnant woman and her slaughtered foetus is well known from the pogroms. Many other erroneous tales involved babies — one Zaka figure claimed to have found a baby baked alive in an oven.

But women too made forensic assessments they were far from qualified to make, while others repeated stories after they were proved false. One of them was the legal expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who formed what she called a “civil commission” following the attacks to collect evidence of sexual violence. She was joined by Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a highly respected jurist and specialist in international women’s rights, who marshalled powerful legal assistance.

As time went on, however, Halperin-Kaddari grew increasingly anxious about the conduct and motives of her colleague — a close associate of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu — whose work had included a legal manual on the force-feeding of prisoners. “I realised that I cannot accept the way she’s handling things — talking at some points irresponsibly without checking the credibility of information, repeating questionable accounts,” Halperin-Kaddari said. Among them was the apocryphal story about the pregnant woman and her foetus, which was also repeated by Michal Herzog, the president’s wife, in a still uncorrected Newsweek article. Elkayam-Levy also circulated photographs of murdered female soldiers that turned out to be images of Kurdish fighters in Syria. Halperin-Kaddari and her legal team quit the commission and turned to the UN for help. Elkayam-Levy has nonetheless remained the most prominent public voice on the sexual violence of October 7, winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in April.

Asked to address the allegations she has knowingly circulated false information, Elkayam-Levy’s spokeswoman tells us that she has been “meticulously working to collect information and testimonies that will serve for generations to come for justice and remembrance.

“The contested information reported on behalf of leading experts in the field regarding a pregnant woman tragically killed was, at the time, backed by both a testimony and several other reliable sources. We were all relieved to learn it was not from Israel and immediately ceased referencing it. Above all, this incident exemplifies the trauma and difficulties of giving voice to victims of atrocities.”

Aharoni expresses her concerns about how both political leaders and others linked to the prime minister’s Likud party “have used the feminist agenda in a very opportunistic way for a very specific political narrative associated with the Netanyahu government”, with little concern for the actual victims. “The politicisation of rape by the Israeli government was part of the political agenda of this government,” she warns. “The question of believing the survivors has become a test of your loyalty to the nation.” On November 11, the foreign ministry launched a campaign under the hashtag #BelieveIsraeliWomen. “I did not think that was sensible,” Sulitzeanu says. “They didn’t mean ‘believe Israeli women’. They meant ‘believe Israel’.”

CRITICS ARGUE THAT ISRAELI OFFICIALS have regularly wielded the rape claim as a cudgel to silence critics of their assault on Gaza. On November 11, the same day the hashtag campaign was launched and more than 300,000 people marched in London in support of a ceasefire, the Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy tweeted a photograph, quipping that, “I don’t think London has ever seen such a large demonstration of rape apologists before.” Levy was suspended from his job in March after picking an online fight with David Cameron over the blockade of aid to Gaza.

On November 14, the police held their first press conference for the international media on their investigations into sexual assault. Despite promising new evidence on its systematic nature, none was provided. A short video clip was aired with testimony by “Witness S”, who described in horrific detail witnessing a gang rape and murder while hiding at the festival. To this date, police have not interviewed a single survivor. On December 24, the police issued a decree to hospitals ordering them to hand over accounts of any rape survivor who had sought treatment. On January 4, the police put out a fresh appeal for witnesses, saying they had succeeded in interviewing just three and had been unable to match their accounts with the bodies collected from the massacre site.

On March 4, Pramila Patten sat down before journalists to deliver her findings. There were, she said, “reasonable grounds” to believe there had been rape and sexual assaults on October 7, particularly at the Nova festival ground, and “clear and convincing information” — a higher standard of evidence — of rape and sexual torture of hostages held in Gaza. She warned that sexual violence against hostages could be ongoing, confirming the fears of their families in Israel, who by then had evolved into a powerful political force against Netanyahu, whom they blamed for prioritising the unrealistic destruction of Hamas — and his own political survival — over the lives of their loved ones.

It was not a legal investigation, Patten explained, as Israel had not allowed one: that mandate could only be fulfilled by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which Israel has refused to work with since its inception. She hoped that would change.

Halperin-Kaddari praises the report as “excellent, a solid, serious piece of work” with a “very careful, meticulous analysis of the information.

“I think it’s a game-changer,” she says. “I think that after it, anybody with some degree of ethics and basic morality can no longer simply say it didn’t happen. It’s no longer possible to deny it outright.” What the report did not say was whether sexual violence was part of the battle plan. Nor did it name Hamas, given the chaotic array of actors that day. “I think that just strengthens the credibility of the report,” Halperin-Kaddari adds. The document calls out a number of fabricated and mistaken claims, including those about the discovery of raped young women in Kibbutz Be’eri and the false story about the pregnant woman.

Patten made it clear there was sufficient evidence of acts of sexual violence to merit full and proper investigation and expressed her shock at the brutality of the violence. The report also confirmed Israeli authorities were unable to provide much of the evidence that political leaders had insisted existed. In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.

The report would prove confusing to the Israeli political establishment. On the one hand, it gives substantial and substantiated credence to the sexual assault claims; on the other it does not show them to be systematic and specifically says Israel has been unable to produce evidence it has claimed to possess of Hamas’s written orders to rape. Patten also asked that Israel investigate “credible allegations” of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls gathered by the UN’s legal mandate mission in the Palestinian territories. Israel swiftly rejected Patten’s request, calling it “a derisive and deliberate Palestinian manoeuvre aimed at creating an intolerable equivalence between the horrific crimes that were committed, and continue to be committed, by Hamas and malicious and baseless claims made against Israel and Israelis”.

Patten’s other recommendations included calling for a ceasefire to facilitate the rescue of hostages who she feared were suffering ongoing sexual abuse, and she asked the Israeli government to sign a framework of co-operation with her office so a full legal investigation could take place with international assistance.

Israel refused point blank, turning its ire away from Patten and towards the UN Secretary General, accusing him of trying to suppress the report — which Patten strongly denied — and blocking the naming of Hamas as systematic users of sexual violence even though Patten herself had said such a move would require the full legal investigation. Israel recalled its UN ambassador and the foreign minister, Israel Katz, travelled to New York for a showdown at an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the report.

Patten spoke movingly of her encounters with communities left traumatised by the terror attacks. “I saw the pain in their eyes,” she said. “It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors.” But she also hit back with unusual force against Israel’s refusal to look into the allegations by Palestinian women — to “believe Palestinian women”, in its own cadence — both in the present climate, where detentions have soared, and in the past, over decades, in which such allegations have been raised.

“In this regard I wish to express my disappointment that the immediate reaction to my report by some political actors was not to open inquiries into those alleged incidents but rather to reject them outright via social media,” Patten said.

The Palestinian representative to the UN, where Palestine holds observer status, challenged the Israelis to agree with Patten’s recommendations and allow a full independent investigation into October 7 sexual violence. “Let the facts speak. Let the law decide,” Riyad Mansour said. He noted the same false reports Patten had dismissed in her report, which had fuelled many of the outright denials from pro-Palestinian and far-left commentators. “Shamefully this was never about the Israeli victims. This was about justifying the atrocities that Israel intended to commit against Palestinian victims,” Mansour argued.

WILL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEXUAL VIOLENCE OF OCTOBER 7 EVER FULLY BE KNOWN? Women’s rights advocates in Israel are doubtful. The mistakes that were made, say most, came from the hasty decision to send in Zaka to retrieve the slain rather than the IDF’s Home Front Command or another organisation. “These people deserved better volunteers,” Sulitzeanu says. In her report, Patten said the scale of what happened might never be made clear. But, she added, “I do not have numbers in the report because for me one case is more than enough,” she told reporters. “The first letter that I received from the government of Israel talked about hundreds or thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence perpetrated against men, women and children. I have not found anything like that.”

But Patten also spoke of the grave difficulties of ascertaining the truth in a case where most who suffered sexual violence were probably dead. Soussana’s account, along with that of other hostages, allowed for more certainty about the abuse of hostages; there remain 19 women either dead or still captive whose stories may never be heard unless they are freed alive. After a number of freed hostages spoke about the abuse of others still held, some families urged them to be quiet, fearful it was now too easy to identify them. We are aware of several stories of the abuse of women and children that, if recounted, would rob the victims of their privacy. Families have lobbied the government about their fear, including whether they could send abortion pills into Gaza in case their loved ones fell pregnant by their abuser.

About 10 out of 900 survivors treated by the non-governmental group SafeHeart recounted either hearing or seeing sexual violence, all of which ended in murder. None of them has reported being assaulted themselves. Dr Reut Plonsker, a senior psychologist with SafeHeart, believes the focus on sexual violence has been unhelpful for Nova festival survivors wrestling with their trauma. “I don’t think there were a lot of sexual assaults,” she says. “There was a lot of murder. That’s what happened there. People were hiding and watching very horrible things.” She is sceptical that political leaders have the victims’ interests in mind. “Therapists are interested in the victims and the survivors,” she says. “I think politicians are interested in the image of Israel.”

Halperin-Kaddari now heads Dinah Project 7/10, aimed at collecting evidence to support prosecutions for sexual violence committed that day. Dinah is a tragic figure from the Bible, a daughter of Jacob raped by Shechem, a prince from a rival tribe, setting in motion a chain of events during which Dinah’s brothers massacre the men of Shechem’s tribe and enslave the women and children. In anger, Jacob expels and curses the brothers. Dinah’s voice is never heard.

Halperin-Kaddari hopes to restore a voice to any future survivor who may emerge. “The question of even the estimated scope will probably remain unknown for ever,” she says. “Given how long it typically takes survivors of sexual violence to open up, the possibility that survivors will decide to speak out exists. And it’s really critical that there will be the most appropriately qualified mechanism to engage with them. We are very hopeful that Israeli authorities will understand the importance of further co-operation with the office of the special representatives.”

Patten is less hopeful. “When I discussed it in Israel I did not get any positive feedback,” she explains. “The ball is in the court of the government of Israel.” Angered by its stance, the families of some of those killed and taken hostage on October 7 are taking their complaint to the International Criminal Court, despite Israel’s refusal to engage with that body on a state level. In the meantime, Patten has seen her findings instrumentalised by both sides: the denialists who focus on the evidentiary failings in Israel’s version of events, and those who have used the claims in support of the brutal campaign being visited on Gaza and its civilian population. “On one hand we have the fog of war, and that often silences crimes of sexual violence. But we have also seen in history instances where sexual violence can be weaponised,” she told reporters. “Truth is the only path to peace.”

(source via 12ft.io)

[burningbeautysworld]

Basic Skincare Routine Essential Elements | Ultimate Skin Care Regimen

I had no notion what kind of schedule I should follow when I first started getting into skin care. I didn't really know what my skin required, so I basically bought whatever product I could recognize from advertisements. The reality is that every person's approach to skin care is really unique.

We discuss a wide range of skin care products, but remember that what works for me might not work for you, and what works horribly for me might be your new holy grail. Let's talk about how to establish a skin care regimen, what essentials you'll need to start with, and which products are best for your skin type.

Use the cleanse once

An important part of your skincare routine is cleansing. Initially, you should wash your face in the morning to get rid of any debris or dead skin cells that have formed there while you slept. This guarantees that your skincare products are absorbed more efficiently and helps prime your skin for the next day.

Second, you should make sure that your pores are kept clean. Makeup, oil, and dirt can clog your pores, resulting in breakouts and other problems with your skin. You may avoid these issues and keep your complexion healthy by washing your skin on a regular basis.

Moisturize Your Face, Hands, and Legs

Use a moisturizer to treat your skin. This step may help those with oily, combination, and all skin types.

Choose the Clearing Defense SPF 30 to replenish moisture and protect your skin from the sun's damaging rays during the day. UVA and UVB rays are extremely stealthy and may cause major skin damage, including burning, even though they are undetectable to the human eye. It's essential to remember to use sunscreen every day because of this.

SPF

The final step in your daily skincare routine, and one that is all too often overlooked, is to apply a decent SPF. This holds true even on a cloudy summer day. Your skin is exposed to UV rays whenever you are outside or even near a window. SPF shields your skin from the sun’s rays, keeping it healthy and young!

In summary

If you follow these guidelines every day, you should be well on your way to having a complexion that looks healthy. Consistency is crucial.